Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (79 page)

Writing daily film criticism is a balancing act between the bottom line and the higher reaches, between the answers to the questions (i) Is this movie worth my money? and (2) Does this movie expand or devalue my information about human nature? Critics who write so everybody can understand everything are actually engaging in a kind of ventriloquismworking as their own dummies. They are pretending to know less than they do. But critics who write for other critics are hardly more honest, since they are sending a message to millions that only hundreds will understand. It's a waste of postage.

Writing the Cape Fear review, I had to deal with my own fear that the director who is most important to me seemed to be turning away from the material he was born to film, big-city life in the second half of this century. Scorsese, whose GoodFellas was the best movie of 199o, has for 1991 made a movie that, in the long run, will not be very important to his career. It is a good movie, and he has changed the original story (good vs. evil) to reflect his own vision (guilt vs. evil). But Scorsese's soul was not on the line here.

In taking this director-oriented approach, I went through a sort of selfjustification. I've written at length about every one of Scorsese's movies. I assume some of my readers have followed along, and share my interest. I can't write as if everybody was born yesterday, and doesn't know anything that is not in today's paper. One of the reasons I like the British papers is because they assume you know who "Thatcher" is, even if they don't preface her name with the words "Former British Prime Minister Margaret."

But there are no doubt many readers who couldn't care less about Great American Filmmaker Martin (Raging Bull) Scorsese. To them, I owe the responsibility of writing a review that will be readable-not jargonand will give an accurate notion of the movie they are thinking of going to see. And I need to tell them that Cape Fear stands aside from other current thrillers like Deceived and Ricochet because it is made by a man with an instinctive mastery of the medium.

What I do not owe any reader is simplistic populism. Some newspapers have started using panels of "teen critics" as an adjunct to their staff professionals. These panels seem to be an admission of defeat by the edi tors; they imply that the newspaper has readers who cannot be bothered by the general tone of the editorial product, and must be addressed in selfcongratulatory prose by their peers. A relative lack of experience and background is an asset.

What is happening here seems to be endemic in a lot of American journalism: people read the papers not in the hopes of learning something new, but in the expectation of being told what they already know. This is a form of living death. Its apotheosis is the daily poll in USA Today, which informs "us" what percentage of a small number of unscientifically selected people called a toll number to vote on questions that cannot possibly be responded to with a "yes" or "no."

Back to the movies. What if a poll discovered that less than one in twenty of the people attending Cape Fear know or care who Martin Scorsese is? Would that be a good reason I shouldn't write about him? I ask these questions here because I sometimes ask them of myself. Everybody who works for a mass-circulation publication has to ask them, at one time or another. I guess the answer is halfway between what you want to know and what else I want to tell you. Eventually you'll know more than I do, and then you can have the job.

1995

(Introduction to Roger Ebert's Video Companion, 1996 Edition)

As I now move, graciously, I hope, toward the door marked Exit, it occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies. Naturally, Sex and Art always took precedence over the cinema. Unfortunately, neither ever proved to be as dependable as the filtering of present light through that moving strip of celluloid which projects past images and voices onto a screen.

-Gore Vidal, Screening History

e know more, much more, about Marilyn Monroe and Jack Nicholson than we know about Julius Caesar and Thomas Jefferson. We know what they looked like when they stood up and walked to a window, how they sounded when they were sad, and how they smiled when something struck them as funny. We know because we have seen them in the movies.

Oh, we have a lot of facts about Jefferson-but we don't know what he was like. In the everyday world we base our judgments of people on countless little clues of bearing, voice, and expression; we size them up and render a verdict, based on instinct and experience. That's why people never get hired from resumes, only after interviews, and why people can't really fall in love on the Internet.

The movies allow us to size someone up without ever meeting them. We sit in the dark, privileged voyeurs, watching actors express moments so intimate we rarely experience them in our own lives. If we go to the movies a lot, we can honestly say we've seen Gerard Depardieu or Jessica Lange through more of the critical moments of life than anyone in our own families.

It has been only ioo years since "the cinema" became possible-a century, since the Lumiere brothers in Paris patented the first projector. The invention had been a long time coming, and "moving pictures" were available much earlier in various forms, from flip cards to the spinning Zoetrope to Edison's kinetoscope, but the Lumieres invented the cinema as we know it by combining the three crucial elements: a projector behind, an audience in the middle, and a screen in the front. Their 1895 film of a train arriving at a Paris station caused audiences, so it is said, to dive out of the way.

If the Lumieres invented cinema, another Frenchman, George Melies, invented "the movies," by using the medium to tell stories. He was the producer of Voyage to the Moon (1902), with its famous image of a space ship plunging into the eye of the Man in the Moon.

Although there are all kinds of movies for all kinds of reasons, for most people "the movies" will always mean sitting in a darkened theater with a crowd of strangers, watching imaginary stories on the screen. Francois Truffaut said the most moving sight he ever saw in a theater was when he walked up to the front and turned around, and saw all those eyes lifted up to the screen.

The twentieth century was the first in which we could fly, could send voices and pictures through the air, could peer into the soul of the atom and glimpse the most distant reaches of the universe. But the invention that most profoundly affected us may have been the movies. They allowed us to escape from our box of space and time, and they allowed us to see the past as it was actually happening.

The movies are still too young for the full impact to have settled in. But imagine what it would be like if movies had existed 500 or 2,ooo years ago. If we could see moving, talking pictures of Jesus, how would that affect us? Would it enhance his stature in our imagination, or diminish it? If we could see Shakespeare's plays as they were originally performed, would we be moved, or only confused by strange accents and acting customs? What if we could see our great-great-great grandmother as a little girl?

Movies are pieces of time, Peter Bogdanovich said. Bogart is dead, but he still walks across the floor of Rick's Place and stops in the middle of a sentence when he sees Ilsa sitting next to the piano player. And he still has the power to move us in that moment. Casablanca is an experience that for many of us was as real as anything else that has happened in our lives.

"The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie," Walker Percy wrote in his novel The Moviegoer. "Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship.... I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in `Stagecoach,' and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in `The Third Man."'

Books and plays can provide us with stories. But the movies uniquely create the impression that we have had an experience. The key word is "we." I have seen a lot of movies by myself, but the experience is not the same as seeing a film with a large group of strangers. The greatest moviegoing experiences of my life-the premieres of Apocalypse Now and Do the Right Thing, both at the Cannes Film Festival-were great not just because of the movies but because nowhere else do more people gather in the same theater to see them. Together, we-a cross-section of humanity-had an experience, and because it mirrored our shared humanity, it was somehow spiritual; we were giving witness.

That is what movies can do at their best. At their worst, they can cheapen us, and make us think less of ourselves. Here I'm not talking about subject matter, because subject matter is neutral: it is possible to make a great, uplifting film about the most depressing imaginable subject (Spielberg did it with the Holocaust in Schindler's List) or a demeaning film about the most innocent (this would be true of movies that congratulate the audience on its stupidity).

The best movies are usually made because one person or a small group have a story they believe must be told, because it strikes a chord in their hearts. It can be a comedy, a musical, a drama, a polemic-the important thing is that they feel it.

The worst movies are made out of calculation, to reach a large audience. There is nothing wrong with a large audience, nothing wrong with making money (some of the best films have been the most profitable), but there is something wrong with the calculation. If the magical elements in a movie-story, director, actors-are assembled for magical reasons-to delight, to move, to astound-then something good often results. But when they are assembled simply as a "package," as a formula to suck in the customers, they are good only if a miracle happens.

Today movies are promoted with skillful advertising and marketing campaigns. A herd mentality encourages us to go to the "hits." This is the wrong approach. We have, after all, only so many hours in a lifetime to see movies. When we see one, it enters into our imagination and occupies space there. When we see movies that enlarge and challenge us, our imaginations are enriched. When we see dumb movies, we have left a little of our better selves behind in the theater.

A century ago "the movies" were invented, and allowed us to empathize with other people in a way never before possible. But like all inventions the cinema is neutral, and we decide whether it makes our lives better or worse. As the second century begins, our choices are about the same as they were in the beginning: we can fly to the moon, or duck to get out of the way of that train.