Last year I wrote a piece on the prison of the past. How, given time and retrospection, looking at cultural artifacts of the past, we cannot help but to see them as products of their time. This is true, but there is also the opposite issue, of being a prisoner of the present. In being a prisoner of the present, one gets caught up in trends, fads and the mechanizations of group think and bandwaggoneering. It’s a trap that can have broad implications.
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This mechanization of the herd instinct, instinct to stay within consensus values, to play it safe within the moment, is a sharp product of the cultural industry. Or rather, both shapes and is shaped by, the cultural industry and its factories in information and communication. Judging by the theater of outrage and instant combativeness in social media, the temptation is to allow Twitter, which has become a sewer of rhetorical discourse, to govern not just journalism and gossip rags, but art criticism, which is my focus here. Art criticism, music and film criticism, here becomes trapped, frozen within the contours of the culture wars of the present. The prisoner of the present, the amateur film criticism floating around in blogs and vlogs from armchair philosophers and those who would take to the internet to “explain” art films and so on tend to be trapped – only this time it isn’t the past that is solely frozen amber, but the present.
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It can, at its worst, create a social dissonance between the trends of the social media world and the object of art. A recent example of this was in some of the overcooked backlash piled on to Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The main streams of backlashism coming in some thin, poorly informed, and baseless claims of the auteur’s supposed misogyny – you know, despite Jackie Brown, the Bride, Death Proof, and Shosana Dreyfus. The amateur critics seemed to not have heard of Zoe Bell. The other stream comes from more amateur critics about the caricature of Bruce Lee, saying the martial arts star wasn’t that way at all. I guess they were anticipating a documentary, or expect everything to be literal. To appreciate it, one has to have a deep understanding of not just film history, but the power of the medium itself. One cannot even understand what they are seeing if they don’t have enough understanding of film in the sixties and seventies. If they’ve never seen the movies of Paul Newman or Burt Reynolds, or Steve McQueen, or Sharon Tate or Roman Polanski.
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The fact of the matter is that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood gives its clues to understand it in its title. It’s a fairy tale, and it’s about a place of dreams. The film exists as a fantasy of the filmmaker. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was to Tarantino what 8 ½ was to Fellini, or Roma to Alphonso Cuaron. It’s his most original, most personal, and deepest picture. I think it’s the most profound artistic statement of his film making career. It hinges on his loose use of history and his doubling down on what he did with the alternate history of Inglourious Basterds. The power of that statement is a statement of faith in fiction itself to bring a kind of justice in the realm of the imagination. The realm of film, where the characters, the performances are too trapped in amber, each reel a time machine where the stars of yesterday live forever. It’s in this imaginal space where the filmmaker lives, as he offers his contribution to their lore which lives in him. This is a movie about movies, a fiction about the power of fiction. Probably the best Rosetta Stone film to watch before this one is Robert Altman’s The Player. An amateur film critic caught up in the battlefields of Twitter in 2019 does not have the critical tools to access the significance of what is happening in this film. One cannot comprehend the film, in a sense, from the present, but only from within the filmworld of old where it was created. In the rooms of film stock and retro galleries of the film antiquarian. And really, this is probably how to interpret the entire Tarantino filmography – as lost films of the 1970s.
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I think it was Don Delillo who said somewhere that the artist, in order to not be conventional, to not be taken away by group think, must live out of time. They can’t, in order to maintain their own artistic integrity, be continually plugged into the herd’s babble. The danger of our cultural present perhaps is that there doesn’t seem to be an avant garde any longer. The ubiquity of social media, the omnipresence of the conflict machine surrounding us at every moment, can cripple our own imaginal instincts. It takes a kind of heroic act to tune out and be able to make real art. And real art is provocative, perhaps unsettling, perhaps offensive. It isn’t meant to be universally liked or gather perfect Rotten Tomato scores. It should create polarizing opinions. This is the bulk of the issue with the Hollywood machine – they run test screenings, make decisions in board rooms by studio committees. Netflix runs algorithms to appeal to the desires of targeted audiences. And now there are being promoted apps run by an artificial intelligence for screenwriters to submit to. The app tells the writer ways to improve a story’s appeal for an audience. This machine, in the hands of studios, could potentially banalize and kill all original film stories by keeping them focus-group safe so the groupthink of the present can devour motion pictures.
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Which brings me back to the sixties. For the last decade the top ten movies in the world each year have either been sequels or remakes or superhero movies. In 1969, the year Once Upon a Time in Hollywood takes place, the top films by box office were Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Wild Bunch, Army of Shadows, Midnight Cowboy, Z, Easy Rider, True Grit, They Shoot Horses Don’t They?, Take the Money and Run, and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. How many of these pictures could be made today by a major studio much less lead the box office? How many classics wouldn’t make it to production these days? I’d wager you could not make Lawrence of Arabia, 2001 A Space Odyssey, The Wild Bunch (or any Peckinpah movie for that matter), or Harper or Taxi Driver, or Seconds or Apocalypse Now in today’s studio system. As Mamet said somewhere, everyone thinks that whatever they’re thinking at any moment is correct. It goes to show what we know – that we’re all basically nuts.
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The writer Frederic Raphael was asked by Stanley Kubrick to work on Eyes Wide Shut and he initially refused, thinking that the Freudianism and Victorian sexual morays and male gaze chauvinism in the Arthur Schnitzler novel were outdated in comparison to the 1990’s self-conception of a sexually liberal society. Kubrick didn’t agree. Critics bristled at the film in 1999, and thought Kubrick was a reclusive madman who had lost a grip on society. It took a couple decades, but the critics have returned to his final masterpiece in the light of Trump, Kavanagh, Cosby, Weinstein, MeToo and all the rest. The artistic imagination exists sometimes out of step, out of time. Sometimes the past, sometimes the future, and sometimes to a perennial truth.
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The present is not necessarily any better place to stand. Perhaps a historian or antiquarian has just a valid claim on the present as one who is hip to the trends of the moment. It could be that, as Hegel put it, the wings of the owl of Minerva take flight at dusk. That only retrospection can one see the moment clearly. I have no doubt that future generations will condemn us today as lunatics embroiled in petty squabbles and identity politics as we teeter on the brink of environmental collapse. They of course will think that their thinking is better and superior, at least for a moment. The prison of the present does not allow us to get a grip on where we’ve come from, much less where we’re going.
A Fragile Dignity 