One of the delightful surprises arising from the spate of books celebrating Saul Bellow’s centenary is the discovery that, for a brief while, Bellow was a film critic. He wrote four essays about movies for the bi-monthly magazine Horizon, in 1962-63, and they're featured in “There Is Simply Too Much to Think About,” a new collection of Bellow’s nonfiction, edited by Benjamin Taylor.
The pieces are gathered under the rubric “At the Movies,” and—unsurprisingly—they’re impressive. The first, from September, 1962, is an encomium to the films of Morris Engel and to the very notion of independent filmmaking. The second is devoted to Luis Buñuel and, in particular, to “Viridiana,” and to one film that I’ve never heard of, “Stranger in the Room” (though, from Bellow’s plot description, it’s clear that he’s referring to “Cela s’appelle l’aurore,” which I haven’t seen). In the Buñuel piece, Bellow doesn’t achieve what he did when writing about Engel: he doesn’t quite see Buñuel as a director. The third piece, “The Mass-Produced Insight,” from January, 1963, is the crown jewel of the quartet. It’s a piece in a genre that is, now, a commonplace, the sociological study of American life based on trends in Hollywood films. Bellow decries what he considers the “psychological” tendency in modern movies, Hollywood’s deployment of a “popularized Freudianism” to deliver “a new kind of ‘insight’ ”:
One of Bellow’s prime examples is “Psycho,” in which the medical aspect of Norman Bates’s character intrudes on the “tried and true Grand Guignol”: “Our murderer is the victim of an unhealthy Oedipal love. ... A psychiatrist invites us to view the murderer as a clinical subject; there are no more punishments, only explanations.” The political implications that Bellow sees in considering crime a disease rather than a moral failing extend further, to Hollywood’s very view of America: “Young [Anthony] Perkins is even shown as a wholesome, winsome, sincere-looking American youth—a type that Hollywood has taught us to mistrust. There are no handsome, winsome Johnnies anymore: Their corruption has been exposed to our insight.”
Bellow analyzes the 1961 film of Tennessee Williams’s play “Summer and Smoke,” which he sees as delivering a “lesson”: “that puritanical repression is an evil, that the instincts are not to be mocked, that the body is a sacred object and that sex, properly understood, is a form of holy worship.” He contends that it’s “this, the liberalization of opinion, that has become the dramatic event in the movie house. This liberalization has developed its own sort of piety.”
From a strictly political perspective, Bellow was correct, and, were he looking ahead to the present day, he would still be seeing clearly. Hollywood did, and, today, Hollywood and its independent tributaries do, what Bellow saw it doing. But Bellow, a moviegoer whose devotion to movies comes far behind his main enthusiasms, doesn’t look at the matter from the perspective of the art. Hollywood’s message-mongering came as a result of its own unfathomable success. Thanks to Hollywood movies, movies flooded America. The entire country became a Hollywood company town, and, within the space of a few years, a landscape hitherto dominated by vaudeville became the audiovisual playground that it still is today.
At a certain point, many of us fish became aware of the water—and could detect its flavor. The overt politicization of commercial movies came about when their formerly covert politicization became conspicuous to viewers, who were de-facto media mavens. This may have been, in part, a result of the Second World War, when Hollywood’s role as a producer of propaganda, even if relatively uncontroversial, came to the fore. But it also resulted from the very artfulness of the art of movies coming to the fore, thanks, above all, to the lonely audacity of Orson Welles. And that’s where the other shoe of Bellow’s remarkable article drops.
He builds the article on the shoulders of another giant—the film critic Manny Farber and a 1952 article that he wrote for Commentary, “Movies Aren’t Movies Any More” (reprinted in the collection “Negative Space” as “The Gimp”). Bellow extracts from Farber’s essay the recognition that movies have come to offer “curious and exotic but psychic images ... making you think such thoughts as ‘The hero has a mother complex,’ or ‘He slapped that girl out of ambivalent rage at his father image which he says he carried around in his stomach.’ ”
Bellow’s characterization of Farber’s piece is accurate but incomplete. Farber diagnoses the prevalence of “this new mannerist flicker,” in which “low-key photography, shallow perspectives, screwy pantomime, ominously timed action, hollow-sounding voices”—a wide range of tricks borrowed from the “‘highbrow’” (the scare quotes are Farber’s)—result in “ultraserious movies that express enough discontent with capitalist society to please any progressive.” His complaint is that movies no longer “rested on the assumption that their function was to present some intelligible, structured image of reality—on the simplest level, to tell a story and to entertain, but, more generally, to extend the spectator’s meaningful experience, to offer him a window on the real world.”
Now, Farber writes, movies deliver “’insights’”—the scare quotes his again, and the very word that Bellow picks up on. Farber’s biggest complaint, in a word, is with “symbols,” with movie images that play up their identity as images rather than as representations of reality, and that, as such, no longer use “space” as Hollywood images used to do. But the lede of Farber’s piece is buried—toward the end, he lays the blame:
The insight (no scare quotes needed) is brilliant, and right: “Citizen Kane” changed everything. Farber goes into detail, describing the panoply of novel effects that issued from Welles’s first feature, and suggests that its influence burst forth after the war ended. But, demeaning “Citizen Kane” along the way, Farber laments its influence and regrets the loss of “the old flowing naturalistic film” and the rise of new ones—“a succession of static hieroglyphs in which overtones of meaning have replaced, in interest as well as intent, the old concern with narrative, character, and action for their own sakes. These films must be seen, not literally, but as X-rays of the pluralistic modern mind.”
The brilliance of Farber’s analysis is proven in his choice of Joseph Mankiewicz’s comedy “People Will Talk” as a prime example of this new kind of movie. Farber hates it (calling it “one of the most confusing films of all time”), but he at least distinguishes its extraordinary originality. But Farber, like Bellow, ascribes the aesthetic changes of the New Hollywood (a term it’s delightful to place in the late forties and early fifties, rather than in the seventies) to sociology and politics. The real change was, rather, aesthetic at its core: what Welles put onscreen, above all, was Welles the total creator, director as well as actor. The prominence of movies that subordinated the story to the director’s inventions was due, above all, to the bare fact of directorial self-assertion.
Welles brought the cinematic wizard out from behind the curtain; perhaps the prevalence of wartime propaganda made viewers aware that there were lots of other wizards waiting to step out (or needing to be unmasked). And the practicalities of a changing industry (in particular, the rise of independent producers in the wake of antitrust court decisions) shifted the balance of power away from studio bosses. But for every original artist (such as Hitchcock, Mankiewicz, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk, Otto Preminger, and Vincente Minnelli) who was let free of the most rigid studio strictures to display the range of his ingenuity, there was another, less original filmmaker whose more conspicuous personal imprint marked his film to its detriment. Some filmmakers—which is to say, some films—were harmed by studio interference; others were helped by studio control.
As contemporaries (Bellow was born in 1915, Farber, in 1917), their very template for the art of movies was established by the prewar works of ironclad studio dominion. Farber, with his vast passion for and knowledge of the cinema, found his own path to recognize and celebrate the art of unjustly unheralded Hollywood directors. If Bellow did so as well, it’s not part of his scant quartet of film essays. But, in their surprising and suggestive connection, they reveal the great, overriding drama of the modern cinema—the preëminence of the art of the director, the foregrounding of the visual voice over the narrative content. For Bellow as a novelist, that tension between voice and character is the very essence of his art.
