The Meaning of Recognition (20 page)

How did
that
happen? Well, tell us, Maria. But let there be no doubt that it was so. Apart from Mae West, who sometimes owned a share of her film properties and always took pride in
writing the lines she spoke (DiBattista is correct to observe that she spoke them too slowly, but that was because the drawling diva never quite grasped that the same audience is quicker on the
uptake in a cinema than in a theatre), the fast-talking dames spoke the lines that were set down for them. On this point, DiBattista inadvertently proves that time given to Charles Baudelaire is
time taken away from finding out how movies are made. There is no reason to be ashamed of that, and it is not necessarily a disqualifying fault even for a film critic. Pauline Kael developed a
tremendous reputation without having very many clues about how films got put together. But even Kael was aware that actors don’t usually write their own dialogue. Sometimes they are so good
at delivering it that you would swear they are making it up, but they aren’t. (As Lord Bragg once found to his discomfort, it is very dangerous to assume that Gene Hackman can be interviewed
for an hour of airtime on the assumption that the actual chap is the same fluent character we see on the big screen.) When talking about the films of Joseph Manciewicz and Preston Sturges, both of
whom she admires – two more testaments to her acumen – DiBattista is obliged to concede in each case that the writer-director is the shaping spirit. But in most other cases you would
swear she believed that the actress was thinking the stuff up.

She can’t
really
believe that, but she carries on as if to submit to the reality would be less fun: as, indeed, it is. There are actors who are deadly bores when not given lines
written by someone else: we would rather think of them as being brilliant, or at any rate interesting. I myself, who have been hanging around show business for most of my life, am apt to talk of
how tough Steve McQueen was in
Bullitt
. Reality says that Steve McQueen never did anything tough in
Bullitt
beyond working his usual shit-heel trick of stealing sixteen pairs of
new trousers from the wardrobe budget. Movies mythologize their stars, and the best reason for wading through the stellar autobiographies, no matter how crudely ghosted, is to remind ourselves
occasionally that the person up there on the screen was born in a bed, not in a bath of light. This admonition particularly applies to our author, who has put herself in the dangerous case of
appearing to suppose that her heroines not only believed what they so fluently said, but might actually have thought of it just before they said it. When dealing with the great tradition of screen
comedy in the thirties, there could be no surer method of reducing a complex cultural event to an uninformative cartoon. In
Ninotchka
, for example, Greta Garbo jokes incandescently with
actors who are refugees from Hitler pretending to be refugees from Stalin. The incarnation of a graceful, all-comprehending vision, a nymph poised between two converging armies of thugs, she
bewitchingly articulates a liberal view of contemporary politics so sophisticated that it amounts to the prophetic. But she didn’t think of any of it. The screenwriter Billy Wilder was
remembering pre-Hitler Europe and the director Ernst Lubitsch was remembering his visits to Moscow. Garbo could barely remember the boat from Sweden, and her idea of a threatening mass movement was
too much fan mail.

But when it comes to the movie stars, keeping your wits about you is hard work, because scrambling your wits is what they are in business to do. It is easier and more fun to talk about the
fictional personae as if they were real, and it is hard not to be grateful when the real personality goes even a short way towards matching up with the fictional one. Carole Lombard was a
scatological delight in real life. Clark Gable adored her foul tongue, and when we dote on one of her studio portraits and imagine that lush mouth saying a dirty word we would need to be saints not
to get excited. But if she had actually been capable of making up the lines she said in front of the film camera she would have been more than a beautiful wildcat, she would have been a genius.
Anita Loos wrote a couple of films for Jean Harlow early in her career. Since the real-life Harlow was revered for her smart talk, this was a rare case of a writer writing what the actress might
have said anyway. Later on, there were very few instances of a woman star speaking even another woman’s mind, let alone her own. What she was speaking was the combined and distilled wisdom of
a male committee, up to and including the head of production.

Occasionally there was a female writer on the writing teams of the screwball comedies, but none of them had a female director. At the time it never happened even once, and with the qualified
exception of Elaine May it would never happen at all until the advent of Nora Ephron, several decades in the future. The fast-talking dames were chosen for the part by men. Among the major film
properties as the war approached, only
The Philadelphia Story
had a female participant in its command structure. Katharine Hepburn had stood beside Philip Barry while he was writing the
play for Broadway; she bought a controlling interest in the finished product; and she would not allow it to be made in Hollywood without herself in the starring role. Without her financial
leverage, she would not have been given the part. (I interviewed her once, and that’s what she told me.) The studios ensured that no woman ever acquired that kind of power over a major
property again, and the same determination still applies even today. Barbra Streisand was an isolated case of a woman calling the shots. Goldie Hawn and Jodie Foster can get small movies made on
their terms occasionally, but big movies never. The stakes are too high. As Meryl Streep proved in
Postcards From the Edge
, she can sing almost as well as she can act. She had all the
qualifications for playing the title role in the film of
Evita
and spent years trying to land it. But the role went to Madonna because the movie needed the audience who bought her records,
and if that audience really cared about singing it would never have bought them.

For the feminist who takes the standard line on male exploitation of the female, the best answer to the thirties film comedy conundrum is probably right there. It was a question of money. The
fast-talking dames were allowed to strut their stuff because the product sold. Give the women what they want, especially if what they want is what they can’t have: give them a dream. As a
conspiracy theory, it checks out, with the usual proviso that conspiracy theories always do, and that’s what’s wrong with them. (There is also the consideration that if the pre-war
ideal of female independence was only a sop to lull the women in the audience rather than a model to inspire them, then the post-war ideal of domesticity might have been similarly devoid of a
reliably measurable effect. If it didn’t convince Susan Sontag, why did it convince all those other women? Because they were helpless?) But this is where it helps to have been around for a
while. I can remember my mother’s memories of Myrna Loy in the
Thin Man
movies: I can remember her memories when they were fresh. In Sydney before the war, my mother and father had
nothing except each other. The Depression forced both of them out of school in their early teens. Their working life was spent on the production lines if they were lucky. But they knew the way they
wanted to sound to each other. They wanted to sound like Nick and Nora Charles, as played on screen by William Powell and Myrna Loy. An industrial product had come all the way across the Pacific to
raise their hopes with its images of freedom, justice and egalitarian elegance. It was cultural imperialism if you like, but to say that the cultural imperialism was without a spiritual component
is to make a very large assumption. You would have to assume that the fast-talking dames said all those witty things without anyone concerned believing any of it for a minute. It seems unlikely.
Not even Goebbels could run a film industry based entirely on cynicism. He tried, but it didn’t work.

The liberal Hollywood that produced the fast-talking dames was closed down after the war, by the red scare and by television. The second threat was as effective as the first. A film studio
system possessing the monopoly of an outlet could afford to test its audience. Fighting for a share, the outlet suddenly found itself in the contrary position: the audience was testing it. No more
high-speed dialogue to flatter those who were bright enough to get it, and flatter them doubly because there were those who didn’t. Everybody had to get everything. It was democracy: or
rather, it was an ideological component within democracy, an egalitarian emphasis made dictatorial. Pre-war film feminism had never been ideological in that sense: it had been concerned with
equality – brilliantly concerned – but not with sameness. The feminine appeal of the fast-talking dames had been multiplied by their brain power, not eroded by it. That might have been
the surest sign that men were dominant in the creative effort: the surest sign and the greatest weakness. When Maria and her students start to brainstorm the subject, they might quickly decide that
the whole dazzling upsurge was a male chauvinist fantasy after all. Sensuality had not been sidelined, just sharpened up so as to race the motors of a smoother class of guy.

Much can be said to negate the achievement, but nothing to undo it. The films got made, and by a miracle they are still there, to remind us that there was once a continuous, sophisticated
cultural effort to ameliorate common experience, week in and week out, all over the world. The comedies were chapters in a book that was all the more instructive for being so delightful. No doubt
their collective message about female independence would have been more pure if Irene Dunne had physically resembled Kate Millett and Carole Lombard had been a ringer for Andrea Dworkin, but the
box-office would have suffered, as it would suffer today if every movie were cast by the Coen brothers. What we need now from Maria DiBattista and her beavering sophomores is an explanation of how an industry in the grip of market forces could have been a force for humanism. Inevitably our intrepid explorers will have
to deal with questions arising, some of them potent with embarrassment. What if there never could have been any successful feminism in the first place without friendly men to further it? Logic
always suggested that this might be so – if men naturally command the physical power to repress women, it is hard to see how they could give it up except voluntarily – but the films of
Hollywood’s first age of eloquence provide something more persuasive than logic: they provide evidence. What if an advanced industrial society is the only kind in which female equality can
even be conceived of? The more we learn from ethnography about the true state of nature, the more it sounds as if it were designed to kill women, and the more we hear about forms of society
putatively commendable for their authenticity, the more the authenticity sounds like a state of nature. And what if liberal democracy is the only political system by which an advanced industrial
society can sustain itself?

It is very hard to convince the proponents of any modern progressive ideology that it would be tolerated only within the context it presumes to oppose. Perhaps, in the case of feminism, the best
way to start would be by trying to argue that it is not an ideology at all, but something better: a demand for justice. Nor were the great film comedies a strict case of cultural imperialism, if
imperialism necessarily entails an imposition by force. An imposition by influence is far more likely to be irreversible. Professor DiBattista could usefully do a whole book just on
The
Philadephia Story
, right through to its latterday transmogrification into
High Society
, a vehicle for the future Princess of Monaco and her two-note singing voice. (The alert reader
will detect that my jealous bile springs from loving admiration: not only would Grace Kelly have been perfect for the thirties, she played her roles in the fifties as if the thirties had never gone
away. No lisping pout for her.) About
The Philadephia Story
, there is a salient fact which the diligent DiBattista is bound to unearth, so let me get in first, with hopes of being credited
in a footnote. When the victorious Japanese paraded through the streets of Singapore, they were right to suppose it meant the end of the British Empire, but wrong to suppose it meant the beginning
of theirs. Above the rows of flashing bayonets there were eloquent billboards to announce that the most luxurious cinema in town had a new American film showing. Guess which one.

Postscript

Even with the deadly interposition of post-war wholesomeness, the tradition of the fast-talking dames was never quite lost. Grace Kelly did plenty of fast talking in
To
Catch a Thief
. What happened was that the heritage was absorbed to the point where it lost its definition. Doris Day’s pillow talk was delivered at high speed, but it was the language of
surrender. The problem now is not that the ideal of female eloquence has been entirely abandoned, but that it has been reduced to a component: something for a
Working Girl
like Melanie
Griffith to do in between bouts of swooning at her own incompetence. Rarely is the woman’s brightness the whole subject. I have already mentioned Anne Heche’s performance in
Wag the
Dog
, but let me mention it again, just to underline the lesson. The lesson is that if the scripts aren’t there, the fast-talking dames won’t be there either. Like Aaron Sorkin with
The West Wing
, David Mamet in his movie scripts has distilled the whole tradition of screwball comedy, giving the women, in particular, a chance to shine that they have not had for half a
century. There is a radiant demonstration in
State and Main
, when Rebecca Pigeon and Philip Seymour Hoffman very believably fall in love with each other’s wit. (His injured finger is
joined to Cary Grant’s in
Bringing Up Baby
, like Adam’s to God’s in the Sistine ceiling.) But really a television series, all other things being equal, is bound to leave
even the most uncompromising movie for dead. In
The West Wing
, Stockard Channing gets the lines that her powers of delivery have always given her a right to. If the movies could have done
that for her, she would have made a couple of unforgettable appearances every year since her Ida Lupino routine in
The Big Bus
. And the movies could never have done anything at all with
Janel Maloney. Those of us who like the comediennes more than the comedians had better realize that television is where it’s at. The movies are a vast conspiracy for ensuring that we will
never get enough of Annette Bening.