So here’s my 71st birthday post. I have a subject
that’s been bugging me for years. It has to do with knowing things without
knowing how we know them. Like, I’m sure
you can tell the difference between a waltz and a tango, but if you aren’t
musically trained, as I am not, you can’t explain just what that is. You’d be
even harder put to try to explain the difference between a traditional Strauss
waltz like “An Artist’s Life” (which I first heard as a child, when it was the
theme of a TV show where Jon Gnagy gave art lessons):
And a post-Strauss era variation like Aram Khachaturian’s
“Masquerade” waltz:
There’s an element of irony or nostalgia for a more innocent
time, I think, in the latter, but how is that expressed in musical terms? There
seems to be a similar contrast between a classic tango, Gerardo Matos Rodríguez’ “La Cumparsita:”
And Angelo Badalamenti’s “Kiss All Around It” for Jane
Campion’s film Holy Smoke:
It’s a matter of pattern recognition; we can sense the musical patterns of the waltz and the tango, and
variations of them. But it becomes more subtle with some patterns. Consider
Miklos Rozsa, who scored a number of movies like The Thief of Bagdad,
Spellbound and Quo Vadis. From his name, if you know anything about ethnic
names, you know he was Hungarian. That didn’t show up in his movie music, but
it is obvious (to me, at least) in his concert music, like his Violin Concerto,
composed for Jascha Heifetz (Link here doesn't work ditectly, but you can copy the URL to Google and it should play):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TC6kQvRgy4
I hadn’t even known about his classical music until a couple
of years ago. But the thing is, if I’d heard this piece without knowing its
composer, I would have recognized it as Hungarian immediately. That’s because I
had known the music of Zoltan Kodaly and Bela Bartok for decades. Can you sense
the kinship Rozsa’s piece has to Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 3?
Somebody with musical training could explain it all very
easily. It’s only my ignorance that prevents me from doing so. But in other
contexts, there are terms we understand, or seem to understand, without
reference to standard definitions. Take words like “stylish,” “heart” and
“class” as applied to the arts – including film, some examples of which I want
to look at here.
Someone of my acquaintance, just who I can’t remember for
sure, once described one of the short films in a series called The Hire as “stylish.” The Hire was produced by BMW as a showcase for its cars, and
starred Clive Owen as the Driver, a free-lance agent who took on (usually)
dangerous missions. The films were not advertorials or infomercials; they were intense short stories. They’re
still available on YouTube, and below I offer links to four of the best (the
directors’ names are in parentheses) – “Ambush” (John Frankenheimer), “The
Follow” (Wong Kar-wai), “Ticker” (Joe Carnahan), “Hostage” (John Woo):
But what’s “stylish” about these films? Online dictionaries
aren’t much help. Merriam Webster defines the word as “conforming to the
current fashion; modish.” Google has two definitions: “1. Having or displaying
a good sense of style: ‘these are elegant and stylish performances.’ 2.
Fashionably elegant.” These come closer to the meaning my acquaintance had in
mind, and what has long been my own sense of the term. When we admire a woman’s
choice of dress as “stylish,” we surely don’t mean that she is a mere fashion
slave. I find most popular fashions silly, even ugly; and yet once in a while
in a department store I’ll see a gown that has that elusive sense of style –
simple but elegant. And that’s what the BMW films have: a sense of style, or rather senses of style – you can see
how each of the directors has put his own stamps on his work, even working
within the limitations of what seems at first a pure action format. That’s
“stylish” in the best sense.
Chances are that few of you have heard of Ted Kotcheff,
although he is executive producer of the Law and Order franchise. Fewer still
are likely to be familiar with The Winter People, his
1989 romantic drama. And the official trailer, while accurate in the narrow
sense, is misleading in a broader sense.
The Wikipedia entry offers a few more details:
Wayland Jackson, a widower with a young daughter, moves
to a small, impoverished mountain village in North Carolina, circa 1934. They
are taken in by Collie Wright, a single mother, and she and Wayland soon fall
in love.
Wayland is a clockmaker whose ambition is to build one
for the center of town. His life and Collie's, however, are threatened by
family members from the evil Campbell clan, one of whom is the father of
Collie's baby and intent on getting his child back in any way, even if it means
murdering the couple. Cole Campbell is found dead, and his relatives demand
that Wayland and Collie be held responsible and give up the child.
A review by Dawn@Wyoming.com at Amazon.com puts more stress
on the dual nature of the story:
With his clock making skill, Russell's character is able
to bring hope to the town by restoring the clock in the church steeple. The
restoration of the clock, like the relationship that develops between the
Russell and Mc Gillis characters, bring light to an otherwise dark world with
little hope.
Exactly. The Winter People is a movie with heart.
But what is “heart?” It isn’t the kind of sloppy sentimentality some might mean
by it. I think it has to do with the hearts of the characters being true, and
their true hearts guiding their actions. Wayland has a sense of mission, and a
true sense of decency. Collie is no stereotypical “fallen woman,” but one of
the most truly decent women you’ll ever see on screen. As for other inhabitants
of the Appalachian community, another review by Connie of Albany, Georgia,
disputes those who might think their characterization is over the top:
Perhaps when some see the performances as cheesy or over
acted they've never actually met any mountain folk, and thusly are insistent
that the histrionics are over played. If you have been to the mountains and can
feel the spirit of them then I think you will love this picture. It is about
the give and take, the act of forgiveness and of course true love.
Some of Kotcheff’s other work shares that kind of heart.
Although he may still be best known for First Blood, which unleashed Rambo on the world, he had nothing
to do with Sylvester Stallone’s sequel. Instead, he made Uncommon
Valor, which starts with the very same
premise of Americans having been left behind in Vietnam – but instead makes an
intelligent and even moving story out of it. Perhaps even more surprising is
“Weekend Pass,” an episode he did for Red Shoe Diaries – a short-lived series devoted to soft-core erotica
aimed at women’s tastes, or at least what the producers thought were women’s tastes. Kotcheff’s episode, involving a
military woman who finds love on leave, was the only one I ever saw that was
about heart rather than tease.
What was 1965 important for? One thing was Diana Rigg’s
first appearance as Emma Peel on The Avengers. She changed the way millions of men thought about women, and she did
it with class (copying and pasting the link into Google Search still works despite the YouTube ban):
Class? No, we’re not talking Marxism here. And by “class,”
we surely don’t mean the kind of class consciousness the British aristocracy
once prided itself on. Jane Austen wrote a lot about people of that class, and
made it clear that she thought a lot of them didn’t have any.
“Showing stylish excellence” is one of Google’s definitions
of “class” as an adjective; one of Merriam Webster’s definitions of the noun is
“the best of its kind,” but when we use “class” in reference to a phenomenon
like Emma Peel, it’s more like the state
of showing stylish excellence. And it can show itself in unexpected places.
We’ve had a spate of superhero movies in the last few years, and some have been
good, like The Dark Knight. But
superheroine movies have generally been duds – for that very lack of class. One
exception is only a partial one: Scarlett Johansson’s brief turns as The Black
Widow, as in this montage from Iron Man 2:
It’s like Emma Peel reborn. Sure, she’s sexy as all get-out,
but she’s no bimbo, not even a Bond girl. She can kick ass, but she isn’t just
an ass-kicker. She has self-confidence and a sense of her own worth, but she is
never vain or boastful. She’s got class.
It occurs to me that “stylish,” “heart” and “class” as used
here, and as I believe they are understood by a number of you reading this, are
all aspects of authenticity. That’s a
word which has been much abused by cultural critics, or at least
counter-cultural critics, who seem to believe that only anti-social behavior is
“authentic.” We have cults devoted to everything from gangsta rap to writers
like William S. Burroughs. But we have a crying need for genuine authenticity, an expression of authentic human
values, and I think we can find that in some, if far from all (Jersey
Shore? Keeping up with the
Kardashians? Blecch!) popular culture.
One recent example: The Hunger Games, the book and the movie. It’s a story with style and class and
heart. I wish I could find a link to one of the most emotional scenes in Gary
Ross’ film adaptation, faithful to Suzanne Collins’ novel, in which the heroine
Katniss honors a fallen opponent by laying flowers on her body. That has as
much to say as any of the more overt scenes about Katniss’ attitude towards the
inhuman games in which she has been forced to fight by a cynical autocracy that
relies on them as “entertainment” in much the same way that the Roman emperors
used bread and circuses to maintain their power. Collins and Ross know what authentic humanity is about. We
need more of that kind of authenticity in our culture.
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