The Medium and Message of the Movies

As everyone knows by now, words are passe. It’s the image that counts these days, and if the image is moving--as in film or video--so much the better.

That doesn’t keep folks from writing magazine articles, of course. As literal illiteracy rises, more and more words are devoted to the various forms of “visual literacy.” Entertainment Weekly, for instance, devotes its May 10 cover to “cinema literacy.”

Such a title is really too highfalutin for what goes on in this package. The list of “60 Essential Films” is excellent and eclectic, including such brave choices as “Pink Flamingos” and “Mary Poppins,” “Behind the Green Door” and “Viva Las Vegas” along with the standard canon: “Citizen Kane,” “The 400 Blows”. . .

But the accompanying low-brow mini-quizes are fanzine fare. (Example: “Demi Moore asks that you pronounce her first name: a. DEM-ee, b. DEE-my, c. Duh-MY or d. Duh-Mee.”)

In her keystone EW essay, author and critic Molly Haskell treats readers like d. Dummies.

“Moviemaking is all the richer for our being knowledgeable about the stylistic quirks and passions of our filmmakers,” she condescends.

Could it be that the magazine (a surprisingly intelligent one, overall) is embarrassed by the quality of its readers’ letters (“Hooray for your cover story on Knots Landing. . .”) and has decided it’s time to educate the Philistines?

There are a few good lines in all this. For instance, the “Cynic’s Cinema Glossary” offers this definition of screenwriter : “In Los Angeles, anything with opposable thumbs.”

Along similar lines, the June Reason magazine--”Free Minds and Free Markets”--offers a libertarian package on what might be termed “video literacy.”

Reason takes a slightly disdainful approach to those who scrutinize film and television. Richard Marin labels the phenomenon popcultcrit (pop culture critic) and chides its academic vanguard for its pretensions. “It’s obnoxious Berkeley elitism to assume that the only citizens of modern culture capable of not responding in the most Pavlovian way to a Diet Pepsi commercial are tenured professors of communications theory.”

Indeed, in another essay, contributing editor John Hood points out that with the Persian Gulf War, viewers for the first time became “not merely viewers but, in a sense, editors.”

Just six years ago, only 29% of U.S. homes had remote control, he reports. By 1990, 80% did. Confronted with a blitzkrieg of television coverage, viewers used the remote control devices as aggressively as Norman Schwarzkopf used cruise missiles.

If one channel reported a rumor, Hood says, viewers scrambled through the stations looking for confirmation.

In analyzing this sophisticated approach to viewing, Hood’s essay effectively punctures the two big fears of the political right and left: That television is too powerful a medium for mere citizens to handle, as some liberal Luddites assert; or that the public is too gullible to receive uncensored reportage, as some military types contend.

“Modern technology, often maligned as a disruptive or dangerous development, again fulfilled its promise of giving ordinary consumers more and more power over services rendered,” he writes.

And, he adds: “Serving as their own editors, American viewers had to think for themselves and choose among varied and sometimes confusing alternatives. But a free society recognizes no better judge of truth.”

The new popcultcrit literati, on the other hand, want nothing to do with judging values, Marin contends. “True to their structuralist/deconstuctionist pretensions, the TeeVee Intellectuals never stoop to qualitative judgments. . . . Value judgments, to those who accuse TV of gross debasement of values, are apparently irrelevant.”

Oddly, that seems much less true of the film-oriented poplitcrit types.

In the May Washington Monthly, Beth Austin’s “Pretty Worthless: What Happened to Making Movies That Make a Difference?” displays the sort of sermonizing that triggers the smirk reflex in libertarians.

In fact, there is some unctuous stuff here. But Austin also raises some good points about the value vacuum in American films.

What moral values are conveyed in films such as “Home Alone” or “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” come not from the parents but their children, she says.

“The calm, dependable, unbelievably wise and loving parents who once populated Hollywood have been replaced by a passel of unstable neurotics who need a good 12-step program--or a good 12-year-old--to bring them back onto solid family ground.”

At the same time, though, today’s post Me-decade, post Reagan-era, films revere a superficial and materialistic notion of personal relationships and family.

They leave little room for concern about the Greater Good, as explored in such classics as “On the Waterfront” or “Casablanca,” in which the hero, about to sacrifice love for country, remarks: “The problems of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

As a result of this self-fixation, work--even good work like curing cancer and fighting oppression and writing meaningful stories for magazines--is discounted, if not ignored or ridiculed in films these days.

When quality-time-with-family-and-friends becomes the ultimate value, as it appears to be in many films, Austin says, then there’s little room for the sort of heroism that drives a film such as “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

In that film, cinema literate readers will recall, Gregory Peck, as a small-town lawyer, chooses to defend a black man accused of rape, even though it will put his family in harm’s way.

Austin’s Spike Lee-informed point is this: “A vital part of loving your children--of loving anyone--is living a life they will admire, which can mean risking yourself and even your loved ones to do the right thing.”

REQUIRED READING

Along with a lot of other firsts, the Persian Gulf War will be remembered as the first war in history to raise the public’s environmental concern at the same time as its military concern. But it was hardly the first war of environmental terrorism.

“When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, there were no activists to protest as retreating Russians torched land and poisoned wells. During World War II, no one fretted about the fate of the sea turtles on Iwo Jima. . .” Alston Chase writes in the May Outside.

But devastating as the ecological disasters in the Gulf are, he adds, farmers and fishermen had been pushing the region towards calamity for centuries. “Human conflicts,” he says, never determine the ultimate fate of the Earth. Ecological devastation is accomplished not quickly by war, but slowly, by accreting errors of human culture and economy.”