Purple State of John

2010-04-10 06:44:49

THE GHOST WRITER: Our Paranormal Cinema (Part 1)

Filed under: Avatar, Clash Of The Titans, Featured, Movies, Shutter Island, The Ghost Writer
Posted by: John

ghost

by JOHN MARKS

Ferry boats appear on the screen, and the movies begin. It’s primal, like the dawn of creation. One boat sails by day, the other by night. The former looks huge and white, like Moby Dick. The latter, backdropped against darkness, is bathed in light. Both come out of the past, not just a past depicted in the movies, but the past of the movies; they are the last breaths of a cinema that is passing away even as it moves before our eyes.

I mean the oddly synchronized beginnings of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer. But I also mean the even more bizarrely synchronized ending of the art of movies as we have known them, and it’s just blind luck (or something more? Only the shadow of Orson Welles knows!) that the most recent works of two of the last great practitioners of that art chose the same image to launch their plots.

American movies as we’ve known them are passing away, but who knows? Maybe they’re already dead, and these two films aren’t a dying breath at all, but reach for us from the other side, where Clark Gable, John Wayne and Gary Cooper never have cancer, where John Belushi is forever in a toga, chasing Marilyn Monroe and Marcello Mastroianni with a broken guitar, and Ingrid Bergman and Machiko Kyo teach Brittany Murphy at last how to act.

Shutter Island and The Ghost Writer feel death-haunted to me. They feel more than elegiac anyway. That’s the word that critics with large circulations once used to describe a certain kind of latter-day movie by older directors, often westerns depicting the end of the frontier. John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn was elegiac. Anthony Mann’s Man Of The West was, too.

Looking back, I feel an insufficiency in the use of that term. It conceals so much. It makes sentimental and banal a transition that was actually quite huge, the passing way of the studio system with its stars and binding contracts and the vanishing from an art form of the last vestiges of the early days of the pictures reduced to the fading glory of a few old men.

Neither Shutter Island nor The Ghost Writer are elegiac in that sense, but I see the cerements of the grave on them nevertheless, wispy filaments of cinematic burial shrouds clinging to the edges of the frame. It’s not the mortality of the careers of two extraordinarily successful directors. It’s not the characters or plots or moods in their movies either, though aspects of these reinforce the melancholy impression. It’s the combination of a sense of presentiment in the filmmakers themselves, and the reality of the changing business around them.

Bear in mind I’m not talking about the end of visual narrative or the end of the most basic forms of the movies. If anything, the art of telling stories through pictures promises to eclipse and outlast all other forms of storytelling. Plenty of YouTube videos show more inventiveness than the vast majority of American movies released in any given year. You can smell freedom, energy and the future in that tiny medium.

It might seem especially ridiculous to talk about the end of the movies in the wake of James Cameron’s Avatar, which now looks like the most successful picture of all time, but Avatar tops my list of reasons for waving good-bye. Avatar is no longer a movie. It’s something else, a work that lies between what we’ve known and what will be. I’ve seen the movie three times now–once in 3D by myself, once in 2D with my wife, and again in 3D with my son– and enjoyed it every time, but I couldn’t bring myself to put it in the top 100 of the last decade for the simple reason that it would have been a category error.

Avatar is not a movie, or not only. It’s not even 3D as we understand the term, or not only. Avatar is the beginning of a new kind of hologrammic and probably interactive entertainment that as yet has no name and may one day aspire to art, though who knows?

No, when I talk about the end, I mean the end of American movies as I have known and loved them, as a panicked and awed viewer in the dark, educated by the writings of Pauline Kael in The New Yorker and David Thomson in his Biographical Dictionary Of Film, scornful of the gimmickry, the gimcrackery of crap like 3D, certain in my knowledge that even if the movies one year stank, another, better crop was coming.

Maybe all this is just my own mortality knocking at the ribcage, but I don’t think so. Last Sunday, when I read A.O. Scott’s essay in the New York Times about the end of an era in movie criticism, driven in part by the changing dynamics of newspaper and newsweekly publishing, driven in part by technology, I wanted a bit more rage.

I wanted a raging against the dying of the light. Instead, Scott waxed philosophical: “So was “At the Movies” — which was also called “Sneak Previews,” “Siskel and Ebert,” “Ebert and Roeper” and other names during its long, storied run — the start of a slippery downward slope or the summit of the critical art? Neither, of course. The circumstances in which the art of criticism is practiced are always changing, but the state of the art is remarkably constant.

Which is to say that, from a certain angle, the future of criticism is always bleak and the present always a riot of ill-informed opinion and boisterous disputation. Some gloomy soul will always wish it otherwise and conjure an idealized picture of decorum and good sense.”

Reading this, I thought to myself of course. He’s not going to get mad, because he’s too smart for that. It’s an idiot who gets mad at the fire at the foot of his bed . If he has any sense at all, today’s employed movie critic just wants to survive to see the next sunrise and its paycheck.

That’s how total, how all-encompassing the change is, and it’s also quick, so there isn’t much time to grieve. Only the old and uncool grieve. Shutter Island and The Ghost Writer are vehicles for grief, though, perhaps just my own, but still. That’s how I understand them, and I’d feel like a fraud if I didn’t register the emotions summoned by these two movies. At the risk of sounding maudlin, I’d like to memorialize for just a moment the things that are most evanescent in the form, the affinities that die so quickly when a medium dies that it feels almost ludicrous to eulogize them.

One last note before I jump in. My grief is not apocalyptic. It’s fairly modest. We’re not at the end of days, just at the end of a medium that consumed many of my days. Music lovers have already been here, and they’ve survived and can still find fantastic music even if the mechanisms that used to accompany the search have almost all vanished: the record stores, the music critics in the glossy magazines, the hipster radio station in almost every town.

That same transition lies around the corner for movie lovers. It will take a different path, and relics of the old way will remain. The Film Forum in Manhattan isn’t going anywhere, and Criterion Collection DVD’s will help to preserve the high points of a particular version of cinema, but these feel increasingly like the blessed isles of yesteryear–the Film Forum has seemed that way for quite some time.

Oh, did I mention that Shutter Island is about a U.S. Marshal who goes to an island in Boston Harbor to find a missing inmate from an insane asylum and The Ghost Writer concerns a writer who gets assigned to wrote the autobiography of a famous and controversial politician with a mysterious past after the previous writer dies under mysterious circumstances?

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