A few years ago, a jet
on which I was returning to California after a trip to New York was instructed
to delay landing for a half-hour. The plane circled above the San Francisco
area, and spread out under me were the farm where I was born, the little town where
my grandparents were buried, the city where I had gone to school, the cemetery
where my parents were, the homes of my brothers and sisters, Berkeley, where I
had gone to college, and the house where at that moment, while I hovered high
above, my little daughter and my dogs were awaiting my return. It was as though
my whole life were suspended in time—as though no matter where you’d gone, what
you’d done, the past were all still there, present, if you just got up high
enough to attain the proper perspective. Sometimes I get a
comparable sensation when I turn from the news programs or the discussion shows
on television to the old movies. So much of what formed our tastes and shaped
our experience, and so much of the garbage of our youth that we never thought
we’d see again—preserved the same impart or meaning, because they are all
jumbled together, out of his and exposed to eyes and minds that might well want
not to believe that this was an important part of our past. Now these movies
are there for new generations, to whom they cannot possibly have the same
impact or meaning, because they are all jumbled together, out historical
sequence. Even what may deserve an honorable position in movie history is
somehow dishonored by being so available, so meaninglessly present. Everything is
in hopeless disorder, and that is the way new generations experience our movie
past. There are so many
things that we, having lived through them, or passed over them, never want to
think about again. But in movies nothing is cleaned away, sorted out, purposefully
discarded. There’s a kind of hopelessness about it: what does not deserve to
last lasts, and so it all begins to seem one big pile of junk, and some people
say, “Movies never really were any good—except maybe the Bogart’s.” If the same
thing had happened in literature or music or painting—if we were constantly
surrounded by the pile-up inventory of the past—it’s conceivable that modern
man’s notions of culture and civilization would be very different. Movies, most of them
produced as fodder to satisfy the appetite for pleasure and relaxation, turned
out to have magical properties—indeed, to be magical properties. The fodder can
be fed to people over and over again. Yet, not altogether strangely, as the
years were on it doesn’t please their palates, though many will go on
swallowing it, just because nothing tastier is easily accessible. Watching old
movies is like spending an evening with those people next door. They bore us,
and we wouldn’t go out of our way to see them; we drop in on them because they’re
so close. If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out
which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would
still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences
walked out on thirty years ago. Like Lot’s wife, we are tempted to take another
look, attracted not by evil but by something that seems much more shameful—our own
innocence. We don’t try to reread the girls’ and boys’ “series” books of our
adolescence—the very look of them is dismaying. The textbooks we studied in
grammar school are probably more “dated” than the movies we saw then, but we
never look at the old schoolbooks, whereas we keep seeing on TV the movies that
represent the same stage in our lives and played much the same part in them—as things
we learned from and, in spite of, went beyond. |
