Shut Up and Show the Movies!

Few knew who Dwight Macdonald was. Along the winding road to Stevenson College at the University of California in Santa Cruz, a VW stops to pick up a bearded hitchhiker, his woman and a dog. The girl sits in the back with the dog. The boy sits up front, offers, "Hi, man," and the rest of a joint to the driver, who takes a toke and passes it over his head to the girl.

"We're going to Stevenson," the boy directs.

"Going to the film class?" the driver asks.

"Mmmmm," the boy responds. "Who is that cat--you know, the dude they got from back East?"

"Dwight Macdonald."

"Who?"

"Dwight Macdonald."

"Who's he?"

"Famous dude. Writer, film critic for Esquire for maybe ten years."

"Esquire? What's that?"

"A magazine, man. Haven't you ever seen that magazine?"

"We don't read many magazines." The boy looks back at the girl. She smiles, shakes the hair from her face. The dog stares out the window, fogging it with its breath.

• • •

It was to be a film class, the first at Santa Cruz. It would be called The History of the Cinema and would be held evenings in the gigantic, cathedrallike dining hall. Macdonald would be paid some absurd sum, derived from some obscure fund, of which there were many put to more innocuous uses than a course in film. Macdonald would be given a private guest apartment in a grove of redwoods, an office and the general celebrity treatment, including freedom from organization and paperwork. For six weeks he would lecture, show films, stroll among the redwoods, shop at the freak shops and Indian import houses, entertain and be entertained by a wealth of British Academy-style intellectuals recruited from the East and abroad, who were something like socioadministrators, functioning as academic organizers and professional cocktailsmen, secretly seeking a more liberal, with-the-times Eton.

The name Dwight Macdonald, though relatively unknown to students, did have a kind of phonetic ripple to it, a ripple at once attractive and suggestive. Beyond the solid sound of the name was the anticipation of what might be an educational experience above the drudgery of most. Somehow, among all those stuffy literati, somebody had conjured up the vision and the bread to call in an expert from all that abounding expertise of the East, who might let loose some secrets about a medium that had become, for most students, one of the few "relevant" art forms on the American scene.

It was this anticipation that brought a capacity crowd to the dining hall, an anxious but aloof crowd, unfamiliar with the stormy career of Macdonald but much attuned to its own needs. Film was, for most students, the art of the present; without time and touch and circumstance, it moved and made sounds and seemed just like life. At its worst, it reinforced a multitude of abstractions about American life; yet when film was good, really good, it evoked a profound clarity and depth of feeling, for it touched the intellect by way of the senses. In an age when life is clothed in speech and concept, when the spirit and action of man are often invisible within the word, the young respond readily to the fluid, rhythmic reality of the film experience. When that experience was treated as a legitimate art form, appearing miraculously in the college catalog as a course of instruction for credit, anticipation moved to the edge of faith, for there was an implied possibility that the university had begun to make the learning process more relevant to the lives of its students.

So they came. They stuffed the dining hall, put their elbows and notebooks on the bread crumbs and blobs of pudding. Three hundred seeking the relevant. Dwight Macdonald? Sounds cool. Like Miles Davis or Arthur C. Clarke. Has a ring. Must be somebody!

"Which one is he?" said the girl to an older-looking student with barbershop-quartet sideburns.

"The one in the suit."

"Hey! They all have suits."

There was a cluster of pale, elderly men and women, dressed in navy blues, blacks and browns, near the stage. They were self-conscious, full of small talk, hands in pockets or behind backs, as though they were riding an elevator in an office building. The dining hall was rumbling with a steady chatter, broken occasionally by a "Which one is he?" Finally, a tall, white-haired man with white mustache and goatee, gray pleated pants, tie and plaid lightweight jacket, walked with an awkward gait toward the cluster of men and women. There were introductions, faceless smiles. He joined them in putting his hands behind his back, tipping himself up and down on his toes.

"Is that him?"

"Man, that couldn't be him."

"I think it is. It must be him."

"No, man. He wouldn't be dressed like that."

"He looks like Colonel Sanders!"

It was him. The plaid coat he was wearing was the type a Scarsdale high school student would wear to the senior prom. He was to wear this coat throughout his stay. It was buttoned all the way up, Ivy style. Descending from the top button was the peak of a gut--not a rolly-plop beer belly but a long, flowing, dignified gut that ran down symmetrically and cupped the bottom edge of his belt. Below the cup hung the two plaid flaps of the coat, breaking away in a graceful V releasing the long, gray trousers and meticulously shined shoes. He looked not like Colonel Sanders but like the maitre de at the Palm Springs Holiday Inn. He stood next to a somewhat enchanting woman known later to be his wife. She had long, flowing hair, with signs of unmanageability. Her dress was young for her, somewhat hip, but did her well. She had a combination of hope and freshness in her face that worked a gentle line into the more evident carvings of time, intelligence and conflict. She carried that face with the open wisdom of a one-man woman who had been present throughout the long, harsh development of her husband's splendid belly.

After much delay, including the last-minute cleanup of debris by a few frantic bus boys, "The History of the Cinema" got under way. The provost of Adlai E. Stevenson College began a rather long, lighthearted introduction of the man in the plaid coat, ending with a cordial plea to dog owners that they remove the more than 20 dogs sniffing about the dining hall. Then Macdonald stepped up to the microphone, and with an ease of bearing that seems always the private stock of the old, he slid into a brief account of the structure of his course and a few remarks about D.W. Griffith, the Eisenstein vignette, montage, the commercialism of Hollywood and the importance of the wide-angle lens. Then the lights went out and many saw Orson Welles's Citizen Kane for the first time in their filmgoing lives.

There was a degree of excitement following that first night. Though Macdonald was a bit vague on his design for the course, certainly from another, more linear age and obviously less than magnetic in his presence, the audience was willing to believe he knew something about cinema that it didn't. Citizen Kane had been an intense and interesting film and a good place to start. If Macdonald proved to be less interesting than the films, the audience could always form its own impressions where the gaps were, a common procedure in the experience of higher education. And there were always the films themselves; watching them was admittedly one of the more pleasant ways to spend class time.

In the weeks that followed Citizen Kane, the audience was baffled by Cocteau's Blood of a Poet and Fellini's 8-1/2, delighted with the (continued on page 194)Show the Movies!(continued from page 128) camp of Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise, the slap-flap of Keaton's Cops, but became bored with Eisenstein's Ten Days That Shook the World, Donskoi's Childhood of Maxim Gorky--and the figure of Dwight Macdonald himself. Macdonald's lectures were literary, at times technical, very historical, always rigid with opinion, seemingly jammed with too much information to capture an audience that had been dealing with film on a psychic and sensory level. The boredom hid the more energetically loaded emotions of frustration, anger, resentment. There grew a noticeable tendency for the capacity crowd to diminish. Of those who remained, many resigned themselves to a familiar emptiness in the gut that was a common ailment in the duality of the university experience: what the university felt it was doing and the results its efforts actually had. And there was usually a frustrating discrepancy between the two. Too often there had been courses labeled "Mystical Thought" and "Man Against the System" that turned out to be an expert's rendering of Confucius and Robinson Crusoe.

In the case of Macdonald, a more complex reality slowly revealed itself. Macdonald was a mail-order package, out from the East on the wings of a solid reputation, his competence understood, and yet his historical sense of the cinema, his literary approach to the dramatic force of the medium, were not to seduce the interest of students. That he was a man of particulars, lacking in mystique, unable to perform or tease, may have contributed, but the deepest alienation emerged from the privacy of student fear and disappointment, a silent conviction that the forces of chaos in society were wrought in its distance from feeling. The competent conversion of experience to words was viewed as the method of that distance, and Macdonald was received as a professional in that capacity.

Macdonald sensed the tension. During an early session, a very slender girl, her fingers adorned with rings, raised a hand, withdrew it, raised it again. Macdonald nodded to her, drew out an extra-length cigarette and listened attentively.

"Why do we have to get into so much history--I mean, like, most of us thought this was going to be about film."

Macdonald dropped his head slightly, moved it from side to side in the manner of an embarrassed athlete, spoke in an ancient, wood-rasp roll that squeaked and cracked with conviction.

"Look, the course is 'The History of the Cinema,' and that isn't just something for the catalog to print up. When we talk about film, we're really talking about illusion. All art is illusion----"

A wave of grumbling--"Aw, mans"--a rustling of bodies. A boy stood and asked very loudly: "What do you mean by that, 'all art is illusion'?"

The head moved from left to right again. "Well ..." a raspy chuckle. "Well, just what I said. Illusion. In the case of film, you have many still photographs running through a light and lens. They appear to be moving, plastic. It all seems very real on the screen. But it's an illusion created by the process. Look, what I'm trying to say here is that we must try to find some concrete way of discussing what is basically illusion--something that is not particularly concrete."

The boy again, angry: "Like, why don't we forget the process and get to what's happening in film--now--today, what's happening out there!"

Macdonald studied his cigarette, put it out, found the boy and spoke to him: "For many years I reviewer films. Now, the function of the reviewer is to try to express how he thinks the reader will probably respond to the film. He also tries to compare and contrast the work with other works of the current season." ("Current season? Shit, did you hear that, man? Current season!") "The function is a fairly limited one. But the critic's function is to place the work in history, convey the intent of the artist, evaluate, judge, give some sound reasons for his conclusions."

The girl, whining, very annoyed: "So you see yourself as a critic, and we're just here to listen to you be it!"

The raspy chuckle, frustration brewing. "Well, yes. We're all functioning here as critics. We see films, we judge them. If we judge from a historical point of view--or whatever--then we relate to what is basically our function here."

A boy leaned across the table and whispered to a friend: "You know, man--can you dig this--in my parents' day, he was considered radical!"

After the film that evening, Macdonald announced that he would hold office hours from three to five each afternoon for anyone who wished to discuss--"Well--any of the points that were brought up." The following class he announced, with a controlled disgust and evident pain, that he had waited for two hours and no one had come to his office, "So ... I don't know ..." and he showed the film. It was Bergman's The Naked Night, a brutal and compassionate film that left the audience silent, reflective, ashamed, caught in the whirlies of its frustration with the man in the plaid coat.

• • •

He was permanently dubbed The Colonel, and though he made obvious attempts to shorten and simplify his lectures, his product wasn't selling. Macdonald had broken a cardinal rule in the mutable and somewhat egocentric student manifesto: He had brought his trip, one that lacked elasticity, one whose structure brawled continuously with the energies of the audience. At the end of a very rich and involving film, Marcel Carné's Children of Paradise, a two-and-one-half-hour epic of love, ambition and professional passions, and the only picture that firmly held the full emotion of the audience, Macdonald asked them to consider that the movie was made during the German Occupation of France, that it was an escape into the German historical past and that the audience compare the reality presented in the film with that of their own existence. Though these were good, sound critical suggestions, and though they were, in fact, made positively--for Macdonald had expressed his own liking for the film--the audience became alienated by such talk. It had not been the first time. In passing remarks, he had panned Morgan! and The Pawnbroker and had called 2001: A Space Odyssey a boring, overblown light show. Like Children of Paradise, those movies had evoked great feelings, and a critical assessment of them was equated with an attack on those feelings. Macdonald was there to examine the elements of film, and yet the young of his audience, though deeply involved in it, were unable to respond to his intention, for they hoped that he would first establish some connection between their experience and his, between the experience of their lives and the film medium. When he would not and could not, resistance turned to anger.

On the night he was to attempt to reveal his deeper convictions about the long-range meanings of film, he was confronted by that anger. A student politico and rising contender for editor of an awkward radical newssheet had busied himself among the administration and gained permission to prepare and read a short news line at the beginning of each class. The administration had chosen to ignore the tension and the possible mistake of the Macdonald class, and so its general consideration for him went about as far as a chemical corporation executive's concern for an aging janitor. Thus, Macdonald was never consulted about the news line. As he stepped up to the stage, he was confronted by an ambitious, flaunting young revolutionary who commandeered the microphone and rapped for 20 minutes on pig news, drug news, fat-catism and power-structure blues, ending with a Scoreboard list of bombings, demonstrations and various successful suits filed by heads against the state. Surprised, confused and openly discouraged, Macdonald, gaining the microphone, questioned the necessity for such nightly shorts before the main feature. His question was answered with a loud freep and static of "Shhhh-it" and "Aw, man" and "Fuuuuhhhh." Macdonald shook his head, let his posture crumble and, for the first time, spoke to an angry audience with equal anger.

"Look, now! This is information you can get anywhere. [More "Aw, mans" and "Shhhh-its."] You all have access to radio and TV, don't you? ... newspapers? And, while I'm at it, this is pretty much the same with the films here. There have been a lot of complaints about the films. Well, I don't show The Magus or The Pawnbroker because most of you have seen them, or can see them somewhere. What good is it for me to talk about those films? [Freep, static.] You can talk about them yourselves. And it happens to be this man's opinion that you might talk about them better after you've seen the films shown here. As for bombings"--raspy chuckle--"well, I'm sorry, but I don't think I want that on my program here. [Shout: "Your program!" The shout is ignored.] And drugs. Well--they're there for you to take, to find out about. I mean, ah, I've taken LSD and--well--nothing is worth going to jail for, is it?" (Somebody yells out: "Yes!")

There was motion and heated chatter in the audience. Macdonald lit a cigarette and waited for a rebuttal. What he got instead was an ornery "What did you think of acid?" The audience laughed loudly, forcing it--violent ha-has.

Macdonald chuckled, drew himself in: "Well, maybe we should get on with the film."

He did not, however, get on with the film, but with a letter written to him long ago by his now-dead friend James Agee. Considering the times in which it was written, and the fact that Agee was 19 when he wrote it, the letter was a brilliant and prophetic analysis of the power of film. Agee was an intense man in whom opposites trampled like subway crowds. There was no less than a creative animal in him, a hungry monster of random energy that roared for release. With a deep, poetic sense of the ambiguity of his time, of existence itself, he moved the beast through hoops, up on precarious chairs, around the cage to the cracking whip of his incredible prose. When he turned his energies to film, he found an arena equal to his talents. For Agee, the camera was the most fluid art device known to man. He saw film as the great synthesis of art forms, capable of realism beyond the best of literature, poetics of light more visually involving than impressionist painting, and an inner experience as spiritual and unifying as classical music itself. In an age when word was king, he sensed an artistic power as yet untouched, whose possibilities, though often misused, were unlimited. His vision of film was existential, the vision of an artist whose deepest inner motive is the freedom of the individual soul. In a long, perceptive article on director John Huston, he wrote:

Most movies are made in the evident assumption that the audience is passive and wants to remain passive; every effort is made to do all the work--the seeing, the explaining, the understanding, even the feeling.... His pictures are not acts of seduction or of benign enslavement but of liberation, and they require, of anyone who enjoys them, the responsibilities of liberty. They continually open the eye and require it to work vigorously; and through the eye they awaken curiosity and intelligence. That, by any virile standard, is essential to good entertainment. It is unquestionably essential to good art.

The liberating power of film was a point Macdonald attempted to sharpen throughout the course, to no avail. He had spoken of a rhythm in film, a balanced movement of artistic elements that made a film whole and real, that could often change an individual's view of life. How "true to life" a film was, how a film stood up historically, these were the key critical concepts by which Macdonald had formed his film philosophy, a philosophy that had no doubt placed him on the edge of his own generation and had now, ironically, placed him on the edge of this one; for in the present, as in the past, "true to life" was up for grabs. Thus, in his criticism, as much as in his teaching, he attempted to leap the cultural vulnerability of film criticism, to move the viewer toward those "responsibilities of liberty." He sought a conceptual basis from which an awareness of film might grow, and his dignity was that he stood firmly on those concepts, stood through work and risk and, no doubt, anguish. But it was perhaps true that the "film culture" was less a product of artistic sensibilities than of dream and fear, for the promise of film was more often the harvest of illusion than a sense of the medium. Macdonald was aware of this dilemma--he had written a book about it (Against the American Grain)--but in the great dining hall of the present, he faced a new generational additive to the dilemma of the critic. His audience was a generation ready to admit that it had been damaged by the will and fear of its parent generation, that its innate and elusive capacity to feel itself was lost in a world-wide imbalance of word and action. Beneath such a claim was an erratic desperation, one that slipped from distrust to fear, from alienation to anger, one whose center was the bitter premonition that the cautious logic of the critic was not unlike other logics of the age, logics responsible for a great emptiness at the center of human life, logics that could, in due time, be responsible for doom.

Such was the "cautious logic" of the audience, and the inevitable end of that logic was the response to Agee's letter.

Few had heard of Agee and none showed signs of being overly anxious to find out who he was. The letter was received as an uninteresting memento, an echo of an unknown dead man, dead in the sense of useless, out of touch, another example of the distance from which Macdonald viewed his world. He read the letter to a very loud, uninterested audience, with soft, gentle tones and a facial expression more fluid, more graceful than it had been since his arrival. The deeper he penetrated the letter, the more emotional he seemed to become, and the more evident his emotion, the louder the audience became. In a chair near the stage, his wife sat terribly still, a hand placed gently near her lips, her eyes wide and glaring at some pocket of nothingness below her husband's feet. And one knew that something thick and fragile was struggling to caress the rudeness squatting over the room; that more than a great thinker, Agee was a close, perhaps very close friend of Macdonald's, and the years they had shared had certainly awakened in the reading.

Macdonald finished the letter, the lights went out and he and his wife quietly left the dining hall. And a series of films rolled, tumbled, dug into the room, turned the audience inward, forced it down, beneath the thick of its anger. Peter Watkins' The War Game grew innocently into a too-real nightmare; in a group of Nazi propaganda films, Adolf Hitler coughed up the void of eternal darkness while troops goose-stepped into the night of death; Resnais' Night and Fog blew a wailing, poetic note of horror, forgiveness, hope, in the sigh of a silent wind that bent young, delicate green grass to the cold stone of a German gas chamber. And one felt the spirit of Agee drift in on the flurries of light, and knew that these men, the dead one and the one in the funny coat, had been there, while we sucked, peed and shit with abandon, and that if they only knew today from the fog of yesterday, they knew something--something that we didn't. And small bit of information though it may be--small in a time when we can barely contain what we know--it was information to make us more whole than we had been: There was some psychotic connection between Der Führer lusting darkly on the screen and the John Wayne-Doris Day onanism of the last two decades, humping away in the tight, slick goody of American illusion, and it might do us well to discover the monstrous subtleties contained in that connection.

• • •

Macdonald's last night was not without irony. After a weekend pause, the audience had regained its pose of disinterest and anger, and that pose was especially solid on that last night. The audience was involved in loud pockets of discussion, knitting, beadwork, the reading of paperbacks, small dope sales. Macdonald attempted a short lecture, but, unable to gain the slightest attention, he quickly announced the film--Henry King's The Gunfighter, starring Gregory Peck.

A classic film with few gimmicks, The Gunfighter wove the familiar tale of an aging man in black, still the fastest, whose lonely ventures in killing and running had worked him to a higher consciousness, one that, combined with his past, inevitably denied him action. He rides into Cayenne, a stark, dusty town, on the run, there on some mysterious business that overshadows the risk. He swallows two quick whiskeys at the bar of an empty saloon, while the bartender studies him with awe and a keen sense of untold days of property damage. A marshal enters. He is a thick man with a giant mustache, dressed in long coat and ribbon bow tie. It is revealed that he and the gunfighter are old friends, the marshal once his side-kick. There are strained greetings, ending with a classic, "You can't stay here; I want you out of town." The gunfighter agrees but requests a short stay--time enough to see "them." The marshal agrees to bring "them" to the bar.

In the barbershop, a local two-gunned kid hears the gunfighter is in town, knows his reputation and rushes to the bar to challenge it. He walks in and in a loud, defiant voice, orders rye. The drink poured, he accuses the bartender of watering the whiskey and when the bartender protests, he approaches the gunfighter, who sits alone at a corner table, and asks him to settle the matter.

"I want you to settle a little argument...."

"Why should I?"

"You got a reputation for settling arguments."

"Only my own," the gunfighter replies, his hands carefully concealed beneath the table, his eyes fixed on the kid.

"Well, I say the whiskey here is watered; what do you say?"

"Then you're kind of dumb to be drinking here, ain't you?"

Shaken, the kid refuses to back down, to give it up. Finally, when the gunfighter identifies him by name, he asks, "You've heard of me, then?"

"Yeah, I've heard of you. I heard you're a cheap, no-good barroom loafer."

"You're asking for trouble."

"You already got it, partner, because I got a gun pointing smack at your belly."

The boy looks for the gunfighter's hands, hesitates--he's not sure. Frustration, anger, fear. The bartender and customers move away to the end of the bar.

"I'm kind of disappointed in you. They never said nothin' about a gun under the table."

"Older you grow, the more you learn. Now, get on out of here."

The kid backs toward the door, slowly. "I'll be seeing you...."

"All the way out, sonny."

As he scampers out the door, the man in black brings his hands above the table. He is holding a pocketknife and slowly begins to clean his fingernails.

Though the film had a flat, grainy, cinéma vérité quality to it, the audience responded with negative giggles and several walkouts. Their energy was locked into an aloof but strained network of response, at times seeming to be open vengeance for the unresolved hassles of the past. Thus, when an uninterested projectionist rolled the last reel where the second reel should have been, a very removed audience, dense with a burning disgust, didn't sense that anything was amiss. It went on about its indifference and static, while the man in black meets first with a woman (his wife) then a boy (his son). He promises the woman that he will return and that they will have a new life. The marshal cautions him to hurry; whoever is after him must be near. The gunfighter mounts a saddled horse and begins a slow trot away from town. He passes an old barn and the twogunned kid, crouching in wait, leaps from the barn, calls the gunfighter, draws both guns and empties them in his back. The gunfighter plops from the horse, his gun still holstered. Then the film was interrupted.

Macdonald hurried to the stage and momentarily gained the attention of an audience moving with much gusto toward the exit doors. "We've run the last reel where the second reel should have been--so we'll show the second reel now, for anyone who wants to stay and see it." Less than half stayed on. They had seen the entry of the gunfighter and the destruction of the gunfighter, and through a well-developed disinterest made the story work. Those who stayed saw the gunfighter's life, revealed by the dialog with his friend, the marshal. That life was momentum, circumstance, the painful hows and whys of one man in the world who was also a gunfighter, and the snaky substance of a past that slinked and curled about the dreams of the future and the harsh, flat present. Though there was evidence of a romantic twinge of reflection in the soul of the audience, it didn't break its long-developing pose of indifference. There had been too many ups and downs, and the ups were never up enough to score now on an audience elated with the knowledge that in no more than five minutes the course would be over.

When the reel ended, Macdonald mounted the stage and rapped with much feeling to an audience that ignored him and walked out. He had enjoyed his stay. It was a magnificently designed campus and he was especially pleased to see such spirit and questioning among the students. As he concluded, the last knot of indifference squeezed through the exit door, the echo of the last moments of the last reel of The Gunfighter rolled in on the misty night air. The marshal looks on as the gunfighter dies, acknowledges his death with swollen eyes, then finds the kid. He grabs him, locks him inside the barn, busts him several times, draws him gun on him and says, in a fever of anguish and rage:

"Now, you listen to me, yellow belly. You're going to get it exactly like you gave it to him. Because there are a thousand cheap dirty crooked little squirts just like you waiting for a chance to kill the man who killed Jimmy Ringo. But it ain't going to be here, sonny. Not in my territory. So get going. Get killed somewhere else."

• • •

One saw Macdonald during his last few days in Santa Cruz. The class had ended and he was evidently taking some time to visit the area and do some shopping. He and his wife were strolling down Pacific Avenue. He was wearing his plaid coat. She stopped to look at some dresses in a shop window while he moved on to the one next door. The store was a combination craft, import and head shop, and the display in the window was a conglomerate of boots, shawls, hash pipes, Eldridge Cleaver posters, Kama Sutra books, American flag shirts. Macdonald bent himself close to the window and peered attentively. His rough-edged, sagging face was mirrored in the window and as one passed by, it looked part of the new-age wares on display, peering out and in, all at once.