Act One of the media circus

One of the best movie critic-historians we have is J. (for James) Hoberman. He has a syncretic sense of the past and a shrewd sense of the many ways it affects the present. He is an excellent analyst of individual works, with a keen eye for telling details and a thoughtful way of locating them in the overall context of a career or the zeitgeist of their moment. And he writes well -- a clear, sober prose that presents his judgments in a muted, but never muddy, manner.

That said, it must also be said that his new book (the third to bear his byline this year), “The Dream Life,” is for me a deeply depressing work. This has little to do with Hoberman’s skills -- though, as you will shortly see, I do have one quarrel with him -- and everything to do with his topic, which is summed up in his subtitle, “Movies, Media and the Myth of the Sixties.”

To greatly oversimplify his thesis, he holds that in that period the relationship between what we used to call “the press” and what we used to call “current events” changed radically. The instrument of that change was, of course, television, with its premium on imagery, its inability to convey any idea requiring more than a few seconds to explicate.

Simultaneously, as Hoberman says, “recording technology ... rendered reality malleable.” This was more than merely a matter of rearranging that reality by, say, compositing photographs. It was, more subtly, a matter of creating images by which political and quasi-political figures came to stand for ideals (or fears) that were melodramatically and absurdly heightened -- to the point at which these figures detached themselves from fully rational consideration or control. As Hoberman says, “American social reality” became “a media circus arranged for the benefit of an image-gorged audience.”

All right, the tabloids had been doing this sort of thing for years. But it became an imperative, which the other media -- radio, magazines, newspapers -- were incapable of resisting. On the last page of his book, Hoberman presents this arresting portrait of what Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” really looked like: “Elvis blurs with Nixon, JFK and AuH2O [Goldwater] combine. Bonnie and Clyde are dead at the Alamo, but Davy Crockett dances in the dream life with Dirty Harry. Eldridge Cleaver and Patty Hearst will join the Republican Party.”

He could go on and on. He does go on and on in “The Dream Life,” which is not so much a social history of its chosen decade but an all-encompassing history of the ways in which that history was distorted by its media representations. The entire book is based on secondary sources -- it is rich almost to the point of excess in loopy quotations from TV and print sources about the events (and pseudo-events) they both covered and created -- because, come right down to it, there are no primary sources for the story he has to tell.

That’s why Hoberman’s book is so depressing. We can see in the events, now some 40 years past -- in, for example, the almost totally fraudulent youth and black “revolutions” (which existed largely in the minds of their instant “stars,” turning out threatening crowds for the TV cameras and posturing menacingly for the lenses) -- the beginnings of our own reality. These mob scenes were fueled by a gathering paranoia, a sense of repressive conspiracies surrounding “the kids.” This, in turn, created the answering paranoia of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, pursuing their manifestly unjust war, which eventually led to the more sophisticated spin-doctoring of subsequent administrations, which guarantees our passive acceptance now of equally dubious foreign adventures.

There is, I think, a direct line from the “media circus” Hoberman describes to the image of the president hopping out of a fighter jet on a picturesquely situated aircraft carrier, in full “Top Gun” regalia, to announce the end of a war that had not -- has not, in fact -- ended. In short, lying by imagery has now become systemic, the “circus” our only public reality, with the media largely supine participants in their own manipulation, selling the shards of their souls for access to liars.

So far, so good. “The Dream Life” would be worth reading simply for the reflections on image politics it enforces on us. But, oddly enough, given his gifts as a film critic, Hoberman does less well with the movies he writes about. He tries to impose an intentionality, a self-conscious calculation of what might fly with the young audience Hollywood began particularly to pander to in the ‘60s, that is not always persuasive. It is certainly true that in this period movie stars such as Warren Beatty and Robert Redford began to discover that they were brothers under the skin with politicians like Gary Hart. It is also true that movies such as “Easy Rider” and “The Last Movie” reflected, with considerable exactness (and much dramatic and technical crudity), the spirit of their main audience, while a few films, such as “Joe,” summed up, with equal crudeness, the reactionary response to youth culture (which we should really call an anticulture).

But here is a list of the No. 1 domestic box office successes in the years 1960 to 1970: “Ben-Hur,” “The Guns of Navarone,” “Spartacus,” “Cleopatra,” “The Carpetbaggers,” “Mary Poppins,” “Thunderball,” “The Dirty Dozen,” “The Graduate,” “The Love Bug,” “Airport.” Of that dubious lot Hoberman considers in detail only “Spartacus” (because it was written by a former communist and is about a slave revolt) and “The Dirty Dozen” (because it can be read as a nasty metaphor for counterinsurgency in Vietnam).

It is odd, for instance, that he pretty much ignores “The Graduate,” a youth cult movie if ever there was one. It is odd, too, that in his good and lengthy analysis of “Bonnie and Clyde” he ignores the fact that director Arthur Penn has often said that in staging the brutal death of his protagonists -- a sequence that at the time deeply shocked bourgeois sensibilities -- he was self-consciously making a comment on the slaughter in Vietnam.

All right, critics, even good ones, sometimes nod. But I suspect that, as far as the movies are concerned, Hoberman is pursuing a thesis that is too narrow and historically distorting. The book is replete with locutions like this one: “Two days after ‘Major Dundee’ [a Sam Peckinpah bloodbath re-edited by the studio in a failed attempt to give it some coherence] has its preview at the Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles, Lyndon Johnson again orders the retaliatory bombing of North Vietnam.” We are supposed to perceive a connection between the madness of bloodthirsty megapolitics and the madness of a bloodthirsty movie director.

But this connection is coincidental, not logical. Or primarily ideological. In the ‘60s, Hollywood was economically in its worst straits ever, and such critics as Pauline Kael were predicting the imminent demise of the whole studio system. Of course, Hollywood would take a fling at anything it guessed might appeal to the kids, who were its last reliable audience. And sometimes it came up with anomalous hits like “Bonnie and Clyde.” But the real money remained where it had always been: in the mainstream, in pictures like “The Sound of Music.”

Hoberman makes a mistake analogous to that of the media in general as they covered the politics of this period. He confuses imagery -- Peckinpah, flaming out, was always more fun (and more “revolutionary”) to write about than rather plodding professionals such as Robert Wise. And the former undoubtedly has had more influence on the subsequent “artistic” history (if we dare employ such a term) of the medium. But the latter’s influence on the mass audience -- on what it will take to its sentimental heart or reject -- remains supreme. This by no means vitiates the value of Hoberman’s work; his readings of individual films are often as smart and useful as his descriptions of the overall media environment in which they appeared. It does mean, however, that, read purely as movie history, his book must be approached with a certain wariness.