I am going to see "Crazy Heart," with Jeff Bridges, this afternoon. That the movie finally came to Sierra Vista is in itself a great gift. We seldom get the best movies here and when they come they vanish within a week or so.
"Crazy Heart" promises to be a good movie, one that I think will remind me of "Tender Mercies," but I'll not decide that in advance. Robert Duvall, the star of "Tender Mercies" is in "Crazy Heart," so the connection seems plausible. Movies for me work best when they capture the various way in which I feel lost in America, a sense of displacement and disorientation that I can't quite put my finger on.
I am re-posting this essay because I want to revisit that sense of displacement and disappointment in life in America that I have felt so often before, with race in the South, Vietnam, the blowback against the Great Society, the greatness and the failure of one of America's best presidents, LBJ, the rise of political fundamentalism, the mixed feelings I still have toward Bill Clinton, the "winner take all society that results when a nation worships celebrity more than citizenship, and the general rise of a hyper-patriotism and militarism in our common life that is, to me, so fundamentally alienating.
And then, day by day, our great promise, Barack Obama announces one more retreat from an agenda for a politics that would defend us in a world of institutions everywhere that are "too big too fail." One gets the sense that we, ourselves, have become too big to confess failure and so we lurch on, from one headline to the next. Meanwhile, one of our two inept senators from Arizona, Senator John Kyl, announces that unemployment benefits encourage the unemployed to not seek work. Good grief! I don't think I am alone in feeling like we are still moving backwards in our public life and the Republican Party is dragging the Democrats back with them.
Everyone has a list of their favorite movies. My favorites make some Best Movies list but most don’t. I watch all kinds of movies but the movies that work best for me exploit the sense of displacement and being cast adrift that can be our lives, movies portraying forsaken characters that struggle with being cut loose from a familiar world. Watching a movie in a darkened theater is itself a strange displacing experience as Stanley Cavell observes in The World Viewed. In the darkened theater we seem to be watching ‘reality’ invisibly, as a hidden spectator, displaced or removed from our familiar place in the world. Movies can make displacement and being adrift seem our natural condition and for long stretches, it has been so for me.
I grew up in Texas and two of the movies on my list are movies are set in the bleak landscapes of west Texas, landscapes that can make any viewer feel displaced: “Tender Mercies” with Robert Duvall and “The Last Picture Show” with Ben Jonson. Both movies are about characters that have been cast out from fame or wealth. The quiet ways two fine actors capture life and love when they find themselves in purgatory is absolutely wonderful.
“Nobody’s Fool” with Paul Newman is another movie about being abandoned by fate, this time it is a place that is dispaced, a small, declining town in New York with a small diner on Main Street that is a main character.
In the past, movies about small towns caught the soul of America. Today, movies about small towns capture the beauty and sadness of places left behind by a huge and spreading sameness as we morph into the United States of Generica, and small towns became refuges for enduring displacement together. Bisbee is that refuge for me.
I suppose every list should begin with “Citizen Kane.” I know and recognize it as a great movie but I hate to watch movies simply because of their technical brilliance, or because they top everyone’s list. I like Welles's “Touch of Evil” better. The movie captures the sleaze and the forsaken quality of the border towns in Texas that I knew as a young man. I even liked Charlton Heston in it. You see a different side of him there, as you do in the wonderful anti-western, “Will Penny,” where Heston plays a cowboy in a disappearing West that is pulling the rug out from under his boots.
Speaking of Mexico, “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia,” by Sam Peckinpah with Warren Oates and Isela Vega, is a beautiful, imperfect movie about the sadness of the American marooned in the sleazy belly of Mexico. I have seen it many times. And "Under the Volcano," directed by John Huston, and with Albert Finney is a tour-de-force of the lostness of the American in Mexico, drunk and permanently adrift.
There are no Hitchcock movies on my list; I love most of them (“North by Northwest” and “Vertigo” are my favorites) but few of Hitchcock’s characters seem permanently lost or adrift, at least to me. I'm probably wrong about this; I suspect I have the minority opinion. "Vertigo" comes close but it's really about a psychological crack within a person; I'm more interested in movies that explore the existential crack that is in all of us, that is life itself.
I treasure “Don’t Look Now” directed by Nicolas Roeg, with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, for its meditation on the looming eviction and lostness of death. By the way, the love scene between Sutherland and Christie in the hotel room before going out to dinner is perhaps the most wonderful and affirming depiction of sexual love in modern movies. Mostly, though, sex in movies has become an awful athletic cliché. Instead of being turned on we in the audience sit there wondering, "Can they really do that standing up?"
The recent movie, “In Bruges,” is an elaborate tribute to “Don’t Look Now,” a fine movie about being stranded in the alien land (to the English) of a small city in Belgium. But the ending was hard, way, way over the top in violence. Bernado Bertolucci's “The Sheltering Sky” is about travelers (Deborah Winger and John Malkovich) who are fleeing from their native land, seeking out being adrift in the world as they wander from place to place in North Africa.
And I love Antonioni's "Blowup," because it shows us how close the displacement of death is, and the alienation of the photographer-artist who is its witness. Antonioni's movie, "The Passenger" with Jack Nicholson, was not as successful for me because it was so extravagant in its settings.
Next come a group of movies for those times when many of us in the United States felt lost in America, cast adrift by politics, living as strangers in a strange land: “Apocalypse Now” and “The Deer Hunter” still capture the utter insanity of Vietnam for me, and “Missing,” “Salvador,” and “Under Fire” nail the helplessness and abandonment I feel in the face of American policy toward Latin America.
War is the ultimate displacement: “Paths of Glory,” “Platoon,” and “The Thin Red Line” are hard to take as we see the grunts come to see that war is a production staged for the generals and the politicians. “The Valley of Elah,” which got so-so reviews, was to me a riveting movie about the ruin left by the war in Iraq and the permanent disruption it creates for those back home..
I still haven’t found a movie that captures the reality of segregation in the United States and its sentence of exile for both blacks and whites, an exile I remember all too well growing up in the South: “To Kill a Mockingbird” and the courage of Gregory Peck’s character comes the closest. But so far I haven't found the movie that shows how ruined we all are by racism in America and its heirs.
As our former Secretary of State said, "Slavery was the birth defect of our democracy." The closest I have come to witnessing the ruin of racism is in a movie that shows how deformed the South had been in its isolation: John Huston's "Wise Blood." Among westerns, “The Searchers” is my favorite, one of the most powerful movies ever about the scary, disorienting emptiness of the American west. John Wayne brilliantly plays a bitter, Indian-hating racist. And I cannot watch the movie with recollecting the brilliant novel by Cormac McCarthy, "Blood Meridian."
"Hud" haunts me if only because I have seen it so often when I'm not living in the Southwest or under the west Texas sky. There is a scene where Hud is driving a pickup at dusk across the west Texas plain, and it always produces a great homesickness in me for the big sky.
I am an admirer of "No Country for Old Men," directed by the Coen brothers, but for me, "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," directed by Tommy Lee Jones, is a better movie and, oddly enough, a movie about a man who seems at home in that twilight zone along the U.S.-Mexico border, that region that straddles both countries called la frontera.
Displacement and comedy don’t go together very well a point I seem to remember from the strange Albert Brooks RV movie “Lost in America” about losing a job, losing their money in Las Vegas and being seemingly reduced to the exile of ordinary life in places like Safford, AZ.
My "Lost in America" connecting theme comes up in Walker Percy's novels but none have been made into movies. Actually, I do wonder why Percy's The Moviegoer has never been converted into film.
Finally, I lived and worked in southern California from 1962 to 1965 and I can't remember any movie that captures the counterfeit beauty of that time and its ultimate disappointment as the rest of America was pouring in, turning it into one vast freeway and shopping mall. But "Short Cuts" by Robert Altman comes close.
Altman's "M.A.S.H." has special meaning for me because I was stationed, while in Korea, at Uijeongbu, the place the movie was taking place during the war. (A veteran went down memory lane with this town that had a path to Camp Red Cloud, where I was stationed. ) Oddly, I felt right at home in Korea; at least my displacement was out in the open, had its reasons. The Army made me do it.
I can almost guarantee your reaction to Crazy Heart. Reminded me of Tender Mercies (Duvall is even in it). Jeff Bridges is terrific and who can not love a move with a song with a line "funny how fallin' seems like flyin'...........for a little while".
Bill Beery
Posted by: bill beery | March 02, 2010 at 08:08 AM