The Big Screen (47 page)

That phrase comes from a book by Erving Goffman, one of two academics in the 1950s, not exactly movie fans, but some of the first scholars or critics to see past the particular movies and wonder, well, what
is
happening with all our study of stories and actors and imagery—what is happening to “reality”? What happens to self once we realize it is something we are presenting?

Erving Goffman and Marshall McLuhan were both Canadian. Goffman was born in Mannville, Alberta, in 1922; McLuhan in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1911. McLuhan went to study in Cambridge and came under the influence of F. R. Leavis and I. A. Richards when the topic of “popular culture” was beginning to be explored there. Goffman graduated from the University of Toronto and was the brother of an actress, Frances Bay, whose many credits include
Blue Velvet
and
Twin Peaks
, both by David Lynch. McLuhan's first book,
The Mechanical Bride
, was published in 1951; Goffman's
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
came out in 1959.

I don't mean to offer the two professors as twins in harness, but the similarity in their area of interest had one other thing in common: their work was not known to the professional and creative classes working in film and television. If there was academic interest in such areas in the 1950s—and there was very little—it was to glory in classic films and sketches of the history. The “theory” behind the media was nonexistent as yet, along with common use of a word such as
media
. But McLuhan, who was handicapped by being an awkward writer, was beginning to examine television advertisements—both men were more attentive to the new rush of television imagery than to the movies. He was working his way toward saying that media were themselves a structure of technological messages more profound or influential than the storied or moral messages programmers thought they were pushing onto the screen.

McLuhan did not become a cultural figure until the 1960s, with books such as
The Gutenberg Galaxy
(1962),
Understanding Media
(1964), and
The Medium Is the Massage
(1967). By 1975 he was “himself” for a moment in a movie theater lobby in Woody Allen's
Annie Hall
(1977). Erving Goffman might have said this was not so much the real Marshall McLuhan as a presentation of him. Goffman's work was beginning to develop a theory—whether naturally or through the steady exposure of so much imagery and acting—that we all of us were learning to play or present ourselves in order to be understood. This dry, academic approach was actually more provocative or instructive than the whole doctrine of the Actors Studio. After all, that was aimed at professionals, whereas Goffman had seen that acting is amateur and universal.

Before sound recording, people had had so much less chance to hear themselves; that addition to film's reality was as much an inducement to self-awareness as photography had been. A sidelight to that was the spreading culture of impersonation, by professionals, and by us, which only pushed actors into exaggerating their own voices. So vocal imitation became an entertainment, along with ventriloquism. Why not, and where's the harm if James Cagney, or Jimmy Stewart, or Bette Davis, were “doing” themselves? Just as we say “good-looking” about some people, so actors had to be “good-sounding.”

This feels like a game, and one the public joined in—we can all do a sort of Cagney (if we remember him), as well as Al Pacino in
Scarface
. But then consider the case of Marlon Brando. So many people who knew him said that if he talked to anyone for half an hour he began to take on their speech and mannerisms. It wasn't usually malice or mockery; it was probably not conscious; and it was a long way from the teaching of the Actors Studio. But it was the helpless need in an actor to become someone else. There's one film—Arthur Penn's
The Missouri Breaks
(1976)—in which Brando displays this chronic versatility in a range of voices and personalities. In life he would often telephone friends in the voice of other people.

This was but a prelude to dubbing and the ease with which film could put someone else's voice in a player's mouth. Industrially, dubbing was a practice to make foreign films more accessible. But there are creative possibilities, too: How often is Marni Nixon dubbing songs in the American musical? How much Debra Winger was there in E.T., and how much Mercedes McCambridge in Regan in
The Exorcist
? Or, at another level, why doesn't Jimmy Stewart hear Kim Novak's voice making sisters out of Madeleine and Judy?

If we go back to Judy Barton in San Francisco, we may gain an extra perspective on
Vertigo.
Judy does a very good job as Madeleine. She doesn't get an Oscar, but Scottie becomes hooked on her and he carries us along too, as watching builds desire. Scottie falls in love with her because he feels the possibility of another Madeleine. Alas, Judy knows her script does not permit this development. It is building toward a crisis where her flight and Scottie's phobia will allow Gavin to toss the body of the real Madeleine (just as blond, just as gray-suited) from the top of the mission tower. So the real Madeline never appears in the movie: she is a corpse, waiting to be disposed of—thus
Vertigo
has an odd link to
Psycho
, where an old dead body is re-presented.

Time passes. Gavin goes away. Scottie is a wreck. But Judy, like an idiot, stays around because she, too, fell in love in the course of her act. She had never been looked at so tenderly before, and it opened up her heart. This is where Kim Novak is so intriguing, for her own hesitation as an actress speaks to Judy's vulnerability. It reminds me of that moment in
Picnic
(1955) when Novak in a mauve dress appears at the water's edge at dusk for a Labor Day picnic and dances (to “Moonglow,” or the theme from
Picnic
) for William Holden's character. As shot by Joshua Logan, it is a brief romantic idyll made heartbreaking by the way Novak, trying very hard, is not ethereal, or bound for Hollywood, but a girl from Kansas hoping to be as smooth as Ginger Rogers, but just a little too slow or shy.

Back in San Francisco, Scottie does see the ghost of Madeleine's face in Judy, though he can't recognize Novak. So he takes Judy in hand and coaxes her back into being the image of Madeleine. Judy cannot resist, yet she knows her real self is being lost or ignored in the makeover. And when at last she is Madeleine again, in a wan green light, the scene is orgasm for Scottie and death for Judy. The actress has lost herself.

This doesn't have to be tragic. I've already quoted Susan Sontag's amused view of the shifting pseudo-reality in
I Love Lucy
, and television was a never-ending celebrity show. I don't just mean that players such as Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, and Burns and Allen became constant variants on themselves, playing with what we thought we knew about them. In addition, so many television shows,
I Love Lucy
included, were loaded up with “guest stars,” celebrity appearances, where it was plainly John Wayne or William Holden or whoever, being himself but presenting himself in simple written sketches. Beyond that, television developed a kind of personage never known before: the “host,” always the same, always appealing, always intriguing, the ringmaster, yet never central or in the story. (That was how Ronald Reagan had hosted
General Electric Theater
.) The acme of this line was Johnny Carson, who took over the
Tonight Show
from Jack Parr in 1962. No one else occupied so many hours of viewing time, or became so familiar and endearing, while remaining enigmatic—and without cracking up. It is a remarkable career, and it offers maybe the most abiding model of manhood: funny, smart, cool. (McLuhan said TV had to be cool because that was the temperature of the medium), completely recognizable yet ultimately unknown.

Just about—Carson kept control of the balance in seeming immaculate but being close to empty. He had something we see in Cary Grant: a photographed ease, an illusion that filled Grant himself with envy. Both men had lives littered with problems, and distress. Was it possible, through television much more than movie, that they and the audience had been habituated and misled by the way stories on-screen seemed to settle problems? It was the way they stood, looked, and smiled—the way Johnny would play an imaginary golf shot, and you knew it landed on the green. Here is Joan Didion, a sharp observer of film's culture and a screenwriter, talking about American politics in that light. This is from an essay of 1968–70 called “Good Citizens”:

That was forty years ago and we may hope that our best films have become looser, more open-ended, less subject to “scenario,” but don't we marvel at the many public events that have been turned into their own scenarios, scripted and available to be “read” by the public? Gesture and pose persist in politics, the more so when the politicians have digested the affect of Henry Fonda. They play themselves because they believe they get elected through their televisual persona. The week I am writing this, in the immediate aftermath of the Tucson shootings (January 2011), one senator has proposed that at the State of the Union address, members of Congress should not sit on their party sides of the House, but loosely, untidily, throughout the chamber, to show “solidarity” and civility.

It is a nice idea, and may make a touching scene on television. Do you wonder if you haven't seen it already, in a Frank Capra picture? It feels like a screen moment, having little to do with the deeper pit of politics—unless you still fall for the efficacy of big scenes and getting it all “sorted out.”

The first troubled studies of performing lives in which real existence might be overshadowed found company in early visions of the “life story” or even the personality as tradable items. In Norman Mailer's Hollywood novel,
The Deer Park
(1955), a handsome but damaged flier, Sergius O'Shaughnessy, comes to Hollywood from the war. He meets stars and directors—an actress on the rise, Lulu Meyers, and a director of quality dragged down by pressure to testify (Charles Eitel; say it out loud)—but the novel turns on the way Sergius may sell his very life story to the movies so that some actor can play him (with amendments, with loss of control, but with great reward). Or should he take the part himself?

Life stories were big in the movies of the 1950s: Jimmy Stewart had few popular successes to match
The Glenn Miller Story
(1954); a baby-faced actor named Audie Murphy played the most decorated American soldier from World War II, also named Audie Murphy, in
To Hell and Back
(1955). These were extensions of the “biopic” genre that had been popular since the 1930s (with Paul Muni playing so many heroes), but the newer films were edging into celebrity with very little self-awareness, and when John F. Kennedy appeared in America, it was suddenly apparent that someone might be a personage and a newsreel figure at the same time (and might get elected on the mixture).

It was that curious Lucy/Lucille syndrome peeping through again, and it was Groucho Marx on
You Bet Your Life
(begun in 1950) behaving just like Groucho Marx. In 1957, Joanne Woodward won the Best Actress Oscar for a film called
The Three Faces of Eve
—more talked about than seen, maybe—playing a woman with three distinct personalities. The film was dark and gloomy and it was said to be a sad portrait of split personality. But it was also a hint about the habit of acting out your moods. Paul Newman put on a tour de force playing Rocky Graziano in
Somebody Up There Likes Me
(1956)—he did his own boxing as well as his own talking and kissing. Wasn't that his own smile? (How much of a role did actors own?) By 1963 one of the uncontrollable forces in American film, Jerry Lewis, played opposite roles in
The Nutty Professor
. It was said to be a new version of Jekyll and Hyde, plus a comedy! But it felt like the confession of a demonic soul made by performing.

Screen presence was being talked about for the first time. That was nothing as intense as acting; it was being there, letting yourself be photographed, or being nearly as helpless as the camera. In Walker Percy's novel
The Moviegoer
, published in 1961, there is a lovely capturing of this state of being. The book's title refers to an unresolved young man who spends too much time watching movies, and Percy sees that as a kind of estrangement from real life. Early on there is a haunting passage in which the young man is observing the streets of New Orleans when “Who should come out of Pirate's Alley half a block ahead of me but William Holden!”

Holden is an instructive figure of the 1950s in his engaging way of being his own unpretentious icon. So long as he didn't act too hard, he was marvelous. We are not quite sure whether the moment in Percy's novel is the real thing (a celebrity sighting), a dream, or a guest spot (where Holden appears as himself without having a part or a script).

But Percy knows his Holden—or should I say ours? “He is an attractive fellow with his ordinary good looks, very suntanned, walking along hands in pockets, raincoat slung over one shoulder.” This is exactly what Holden did so well: be casual, be relaxed, be “on.”