The Spooky Art (30 page)

Maybe America did need it. Brooding over America of the Sixties, that insane expanding America where undercover FBI men were inspiring (wherever they were not committing) the most violent acts of the Left, brooding on that rich and powerful country where puritanism was still as alive as every Baptist, that corporate land with no instinctive response to aesthetics engaged now in the dissemination throughout the world of the worst applied aesthetics in the history of the world, its superhighways the highest form of strip mining, its little office buildings kin to shoeboxes, its big buildings scaled to the module of one cardboard carton set on top of another, the U.S. skyline thereby deserting the high needles of Manhattan for the Kleenex boxes of Dallas; that food-guzzling Republic that froze its food before it would overcook it, and liked to lick ketchup off French fries so soggy they dropped from your fingers like worms—the worst food in the history of the world!—that sex-revolutionary Republic where swinging singles were connecting up with like-units—every other Baptist!—that sadistically revolutionary Republic going into black leather, S-M, and knocking off gooks in rice paddies, defoliating the foliage, digging the hog-resonance of motors between one’s legs, and flame-throwers and comic books, and Haight-Ashbury, hitting golf balls on the moon, yes, that America, full of dread, could certainly use TV—I am here to deaden you, you need it!

Those were legitimate feelings for 1972. One had spent a large fraction of a life by then watching TV, and one had long ago had the education of putting oneself on shows. Back in ’53 and ’54, however, stoned on pot, wafted up and down on Seconal,
jammed with ambition, terror, and the common lust to learn the secrets of the world some easy way, the immersion into TV was profound. By it, one could study the world, and the tricks of the world.

So, for instance, would he examine people as strange to him as Igor Cassini, who had a show in those years for snobs and it was hard as fiberglass. TV proved to be more interesting then, for you could see a genuine article regularly, well-groomed, Republican, rich enough to own horses, sexy enough to marry up, and empty enough to find any topic of conversation amusing provided it was void of content. Those were Igor Cassini’s guests. Mailer would on such occasions peer right into the tube to get a little nearer to the novelistic wealth.

Or: studying the tourist, he learned much about American fellatio. TV was scintillating for that. Next to the oil of Dynaflow and the spiral in the washing machine came the phallic immanence of the microphone. A twinkle would light up in Steve Allen’s eye as he took the mike and cord down the aisle and in and out of impromptu interviews with his audience, snaking the rounded knob right up to the mouth of some starched skinny Middle West matron, lean as whipcord, tense as rectitude, a life of iron disciplines in the vertical wrinkles of the upper lip; the lady would bare her teeth in a snarl and show a shark’s mouth as she brought her jaws around to face and maybe bite off that black dob of a knob so near to touching her tongue.

A high school girl would be next, there with the graduating class on a trip to New York, her folks watching back home. She would swoon before the mike. She could not get her mouth open. She would keep dodging in her seat, and Steve would stay in pursuit, mike extended. Two nights ago she dodged for two hours in the back seat of a car. My God, this was in public. She just wouldn’t take hold of the mike.

A young housewife, liberal, sophisticated, happy to present her congenial point of view, compliments Mr. Allen on the quality of his show. “We watch you regularly, Steve, and like to think we’re not too far behind the times up in Norfolk, Connecticut. That’s right, Norfolk, not Norwalk.” Her mouth, which has regular lips, is held a regular distance from the microphone. She has been ready to accept. She shows no difficulty with it, no more than she would have with a phallus; two fingers and a thumb keep the thing canted right. There can be nothing wrong, after all, in relations between consenting adults. So speaks her calm.

Then there is a big heavy-set man who owns a grain-and-feed store in Ohio. He prides himself on imperturbable phlegm, and some thrift with words. He is not quite aware of the mike. If a man came into his store and proceeded to expose himself, this proprietor would not see it right away. He might, after all, be explaining the merits and demerits of one feed-mix to another; since he chews no gum when he walks, neither does he offer attention to tangentia as he talks. Now, singled out from the audience to be interviewed, he is stiffnecked, and responds only from that side of his mouth adjacent to the cheek on which Steve is asking the questions; he allows, “New York is a good place to visit, but, yessir, I’ll be glad to start up for home,” then, bla-looh! he sees it, black blimp-like little object! he blinks, he swallows, he looks at Steve: “I guess I’ve had my say, Mr. Allen,” he says, and shuts up shop. Later he will tell a pinochle partner about the crazy people in New York. “Yes,” the friend will acknowledge.

“You bet, Steve,” says the next fellow. “I’m awfully glad you selected me. I’ve always wanted to talk to you.” He is fully aware of the mike and what it portends. “Yes, yes, I’m a male secretary, love the work.” “It doesn’t bother you,” asks Steve, “if people say, ‘What is that, a male secretary, isn’t it supposed to be women’s work?’ ” “Oh, Steve, that doesn’t bother me a bit. Here,” he says, reaching for the mike. “Do you mind? I’m much more comfortable when I hold it.”

“Help yourself,” says Steve.

“Oh, I intend to,” says the guest. “Life is a feast, and I think we should all get what we can, don’t you?”

T
he making of my first underground movie probably had a good bit to do with the decision many months later to treat myself as the third-person protagonist of
The Armies of the Night.
When I sat down to write the book, I had already edited
Wild 90
, in which I was the leading character. Since there had been way too much of me in the rushes, I had come to see myself as a piece of yard goods about which one could ask “Where can I cut this?” The habit of looking at myself as if I were someone other than myself—a character ready to be described in the third person—had already been established. Parenthetically, I think it’s also a way of getting your psychiatry on the cheap. I’ve never gone to an analyst—I always felt it was not wise to look for the taproot—but I have certainly been more balanced after the years it took in the editing room to extract one hundred minutes of underground movie film from forty-five hours of sound-on-film—
Maidstone
, my failed cinematic masterpiece!

Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people. Movies are more primitive, or so I would argue. Film delves into deeper states of consciousness. People who can’t read are quite able to reach profound reactions in the dark of a theatre.
I would also say that to the degree film reaches us in a precise way, it’s not very good. Film is best when ambiguous. A truly good film will affect two people profoundly, but often, they will argue for hours over the message. For one, it’s a satire, to the other, a tragedy. That’s as it should be. Film should reach so far inside the psyche that one person will react in horror even as another is laughing his head off. That’s good film. Bad film is when everybody laughs on cue, for then they are being manipulated. They have entered the engines of manipulation of the powertrip institutions.

Time is your money in a film—literally, it’s your money. If you, as the director, don’t finish a scene scheduled to be done by lunch, then you are going to come back after lunch and possibly lose not half an hour or an hour but two hours. So you’re gambling to finish the scene before the break, even if you’re not wholly satisfied with the result. Then you find out in the dailies if your gamble was too costly. The scene brought in before lunch needed one more setup. Making movies, you’re absolutely in the world. You’re a gambler. Whereas in literature, you withdraw from the world in order to perceive it. So movie directing uses another, even opposite, side of yourself from writing. I think you can get closer to your soul in a book, but you come to appreciate the effective or ineffective working of your psyche with a movie. Let me amplify this if I can. In writing a book, there are exceptional moments when you feel as if you’re beaming a flood lamp down into the abyss of your soul. By the light of your intuition, you do, in the course of writing a novel, get out to some astonishing places. But when you are making a film, particularly after you’ve shot it and start editing it, you have to look at the same scene over and over in order to clean out little dead spots. Makes you feel like a surgeon. What it also involves is your taste, and your concentration. Seeing one piece of film over and over, you must still keep your taste alive even as you exercise your ability to concentrate again and again upon the same material. Since I am the one who wrote “Repetition kills the soul,” I thought of that remark more than once while working with the movie editor. Of course, it was not meaningless repetition. Rather, I was altering the given a little each time.

All this is easy. Much too easy. What is more to the point is that you can lose your mind looking for the point. When it comes to understanding film, we can feel with some justice that we are still at the edge of an aesthetic continent all but uncharted.

The piece that follows, taken from an exposition of my motives in trying to make
Maidstone
, is, I believe, as good as anything I’ve done in criticism. If your reaction on reading it comes down to “Why is he making it so complicated? I just want to enjoy movies,” then let us salute each other and part on mutual terms, since I am obviously not the writer for you.

Perhaps a thousand actors and two thousand films can be cited where the movie frame comes alive and there is no dip at the foot of consciousness because something is false at the root. Nonetheless any such appearance of talent was close to magic. The conventional way of making most films usually guaranteed its absence. For there was an element which interfered with motion pictures as much as the blurring of print would hinder the reading of a book, and this flaw derived from the peculiar misapprehension with which the silent film gave way to sound, the supposition that sound-and-film was but an extension of the theatre, even as the theatre was but an extension of literature. It was assumed that movies were there to tell a story. The story might derive from the stage or from the pages of a book or even from an idea for a story, but the film was asked to issue from a detailed plan, which would have lines of dialogue. The making of the movie would be a fulfillment of that script, that literary plan; so each scene would be shaped like a construction unit to build the architecture of the story. It was one of those profoundly false assumptions which seem at the time absolute common sense, yet it was no more natural than to have insisted that a movie was a river and one should always experience, while watching a film, emotions analogous to an afternoon spent on the banks of a stream. That might have been seen instantly as confining, a most confining notion; but to consider the carryover of the story from literature to the film as equally constricting—no, that was not very evident.