I don't have much time to write, and thus you will be spared my analysis of the 1955 classic Night of the Hunter as a gnostic allegory. But I did want to offer a political observation which came to my mind after last night's viewing.
If you don't know the film, it's the only movie directed by Charles Laughton, adapted from a once-popular novel by Davis Grubb. The script was written either by Laughton himself or by James Agee, depending on which source you believe. The cast features Robert Mitchum (playing a psychotic preacher who might have inspired the late Dr. Gene Scott), Shelley Winters and -- giving perhaps the best performance by anyone ever -- Lillian Gish.
It's also my favorite film of all time.
I can't recommend seeing this one in a theater; the deliberately unrealistic tone often causes modern audiences to snicker. But when viewed on tape or disc at home, late at night, the film has always had an inexplicable effect on me. After each viewing, I feel as though I just awoke from an extremely vivid dream -- the kind you experience during fevers, or after you take pain medication.
(How does gnosticism fit in? Jehovah = Mitchum's character; Sophia = Gish's character. The Matrix movies offer similar analogues in the Architect and the Oracle. If you don't know what I'm talking about, read Hoeller's book Gnosticism.)
And the political observation...?
Well, the story takes place during the Depression. Everyone is poor. In the opening, the father has committed murder in order to keep his children fed. We don't blame him.
Yet these people don't seem poor to modern eyes. Look at the houses they live in. If the Harper home were located in Los Angeles, it'd be worth, what, maybe three-quarters of a million bucks.
Today, many four-person families in the San Fernando Valley struggle to afford a one-bedroom apartment.
Yet we do not consider ourselves poor. We do not think we live in a Depression. We would never forgive anyone who commits a crime to help his children.
Is the power of right-wing brainwashing so immense that we can be living in poverty and not know it?
9 comments:
There are a lot of Cassandras out there who have prophesied that a real economic disaster is inevitable...and then the investors will be jumping out the window.
The BushMen, the Cassandras say, have put us in such fiscal peril that the world is going to stop investing in the US. The dollar has already shrunk alarmingly. When we no longer can get loans, when the world no longer wants anything we have, then the depression which is already here will be felt by the rich white guys. I don't know if I buy it...but it's certainly possible.
Joy Tomme (http://ratfuckdiary.blogspot.com)
"Night of the Hunter" was recently restored; if the print comes your way via a museum or cinematheque screening, check it out. The fact that people laugh at anything which doesn't reproduce the cheap ironies of a TV sitcom is another measure (so say I) of the poverty of our mass culture, thanks again to TV. We rather incredibly think they're superior to any non-ironic material which doesn't wink and smirk and simper in the way of sitcoms or post-modern commercials movies, which don't have the courage of their conventions even as they continue to employ them....
As for being poor and not knowing it, the vast majority of Americans describe themselves as middle-class, regardless of their actual position in the food chain -- even if they don't have health insurance, even if they spend 60% of their income on rent, even if they're one unbudgeted event (as little as $10,000) away from bankruptcy, after years of employment.
In Europe, even relatively uneducated people laugh at corporate propaganda and, outside Britain, the state is not altogether married to it. But here we believe it. Is it any coincidence we're talking about whether or not to destroy social security and not about providing universal health care?
Finally, as for investors jumping out the window, keep in mind that if any other country had the U.S. financial stats, it would be bankrupt and in social chaos. What saves us is the status of the dollar as a reserve currency -- we have the rare privilege of being able to print money, knowing foreign governments will buy it. At some point, they'll choose not to buy it.
When mainstream, neoliberal economists like Paul Krugman and Paul Volker are predicting a financial crisis in the near future, where would you place your bet?
I agree with much written above, and would add that our current "invisible" poverty largely derives from the steadily increasing proportion of our incomes that goes to rent or a mortgage. The figure was 25% in my boyhood; today, many are paying 75% or more.
I'm glad to hear from another fan of the film, and I agree that one of its virtues is the lack of irony. "Night of the Hunter" addresses all sorts of hot-button issues -- childhood fears, religious fanaticism, sexual psychosis -- and it does not comfort the audience by distancing itself from the material.
When asked why the hymn "Amazing Grace" continues to have such power, Johnny Cash answered: "Because this song has no guile." The same can be said of this movie.
Alas, last time I saw it with an audience, they guffawed at the elements I like best -- the folk-songs, the ultra-stylized sets, the children's book illustrations come to life, the solliloquies and so forth. They thought the opening image (Lilian Gish in outer space, giving Bible lessons to the Star Children) was hilarious, and this reaction set the tone for the evening. I walked out.
So -- sorry, but I still advise skipping a theatrical screening. The college-town hipsters who attend revival showings are not the company you want when you see this movie
The more I think about this question, the closer the two subjects -- politically benighted Americans, and unsympathetic movie audiences -- seem related.
People these days appear to be deaf to myth and narrative; the transformative power of story-telling has been lost. Literal representations are wanted instead. Only witness Hollywood product, beginning with the Reagan era.
The trouble is, a public with no imagination and no imaginative sympathies is always a sucker for believing what it's told and for the simplest message. Ask people what they like about GWB, and they'll say its his "honesty". Go deeper, and you find out they really mean his folksy manner. In a word, they like GWB because he *sounds* honest. This is literalism to the point of pathology, but that seems to be where we are now. Only look at the evangelical movement.
As for "Night of the Hunter", much of the film seems to be from the point of view of a child: the gothic contrasts; the dream of abandonment; the magical journey; animals as familiar spirits, wisdom achieved after duress and trial. All the primal materials. That people can't or won't forget their notions of adult sophistication (courtesy not of Sophocles, but of Seinfeld) and make the imaginative leap for 90 minutes is truly horrifying. I nearly got into a fist fight at New York's Film Forum (a non-profit), at a screening of "The Magnificent Ambersons", for the same reason. And this was a so-called educated crowd who sought the damned thing out.
In a word, I think that, as a culture, we're finished, dead of soul. Nothing but a mirror offers us comfort, and the image is an ugly one. Thank corporate America.
"Honesty" meaning "folksy" is a usage I've encountered all my life. It causes trouble only because people who evaluate backwards do not just see a folksy man and call him honest; they also understand honesty to mean "truth telling" and see a truth telling man. Our problem, thus, is people who evaluate backwards. This is also why Americans are so susceptible to mythology and even consider "faith" an asset rather than the obvious deficit it represents. To survive we must have empirical knowledge and not mere faith.
I do not think modern American is the problem so much as just antique American. Ours is a nation among the most technically advanced, simultaneously among the more resistant to key kinds of social change. Belief in mythology, for instance, is fading here, but more slowly than in western Europe. This is not a new problem; it's just now catching up with us.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, because of its social inability to adjust to life conditions, I wondered when the other shoe would drop. Maybe it's doing so now.
Stanislav Lem wrote a SF novel--the Futurological Congress, I think it was--about a guy finding himself in an apparent utopia. He subsequently learns that all its citizens are under the influence of drugs that prevent them from noticing how ugly reality is. Eg, they all believe they are driving cars, although they are actually running in the street. As the protagonist blocks the effects of these narcotizing drugs one by one, layers of reality are peeled away one by one. The final scene, where he finally penetrates to the actual physical reality, is the stuff of nightmares. As to your incisive question, thirty million Americans are on anti-depressants. Why, do you suppose?
unirealist asks: "thirty million Americans are on anti-depressants. Why, do you suppose?"
I take a tricyclic antidepressant for migraine, cluster headache, and fibromyalgia. Americans taking antidepressants is not much of a problem. People used to have these same problems without getting treatment. For instance, scroll down to the story of Thomas M. Dougherty (my great grandfather) at http://www.elginarea.org/egs/garobd.html and read this:
"Financial difficulty was the cause given in the letter for his suicide. A portion of the letter follows:
"Calls His Life Failure.
"'I have worked hard for 66 years, but guess that I have made a failure out of life.'"
But later:
"Relatives of Dougherty's stated today that he had given no intimation of suicide. Wednesday evening his mother-in-law visited with him and his wife. He was in unusually good spirits and spoke of his plans for the future. Wednesday afternoon he raked the lawn at his residence, 705 Linden avenue and put on storm doors and windows."
That was in 1911. The First World War had not even happened yet, much less the nuttiness of our own day, and yet here is a man who one day is unusually excited about his future and a few days later is despondent and kills himself. This is bipolar disorder, which, like "regular" depression, today is treatable with drugs.
I'd rather see _more_ Americans taking drugs that would do them good, competently prescribed. Why do Americans tolerate so quietly their _lack_ of access to treatment? How did it get to be that a single-payer, government run system is impossible? How in the world can Americans not only tolerate not having such a system but in fact revile it, never having had it?
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