“Irony
ruined everything. I wish my movies could have played at drive-ins, but they
never did, because of irony. Even the best exploitation movies were never meant
to be 'so bad they were good'. They were not made for the intelligentsia. They
were made to be violent for real, or to be sexy for real. But now everybody has
irony. Even horror films now are ironic. Everybody's in on the joke now.
Everybody's hip. Nobody takes anything at face value anymore” – John Waters
It's not
that irony is always without exception a bad thing, it's just that besides
vastly overrated, it can also be really damaging when used indiscriminately.
Without a core of honesty, irony can never mean anything. The longer I've been
living with the films of Douglas Sirk for instance, the more I feel they are in
dire need of rescuing from their ubiquitous ironic image as I start to take
them far more straightforward than most critics will allow. The ironic
distancing is there of course, but over the years critics have so emphasized
this aspect, mostly due to Sirk’s own intervention, it came to overshadow
everything else. The forming of the family at the ending of 'Imitation of Life'
for instance is without a doubt ironic, and is not meant to be believed, but
the irony can only mean anything when it can bounce off an honest core. Most
people who saw it then (and now) will perhaps only see Lana Turner finally
forming the happy family she has been denied the entire picture, and there’s
nothing wrong with that, because it is really there. But those who are attuned
to the deeper layers of Sirk can also see this family union will be an illusion
as nothing fundamental has changed and after this brief moment of familial
bliss chances are everything will go on as dysfunctional as before. Which is to
say, the tear-jerking quality of the moment is not at all destroyed by the
ironic distance, but instead is actually enhanced by it, as irony and honesty
work together instead of against each other – Sirk forces you to believe in one
thing while knowing it’s probably all an illusion.
“Corruption
begins in the lack of relationship; I think that is the root of corruption.
Relationship as we know it now is the continuation of division between
individuals. The root-meaning of that word individual means ‘indivisible’. A
human being who is in himself not divided, not fragmented, is really an
individual. But most of us are not individuals; we think we are, and therefore
there is the opposition of the individual to the community. One has to understand
not only the meaning of that word individuality in the dictionary sense, but in
that deep sense in which there is no fragmentation at all. That means perfect
harmony between the mind, the heart and the physical organism. Only then an
individuality exists.”
So if we
keep our condescending attitude towards eighties movies, how on earth are we
going to prevent the inevitable fragmentary nature of our relationships? How
can we start cultivating a truly honest and open relationship first with
ourselves and consequently with the world around us, when we keep on claiming
to love something because it is so bad? Love is quite simply impossible with
such distancing, it’s at best the illusion of love. Krishnamurti again:
“And
when you say, ‘I love somebody’, is it love? That means, no separation, no
domination, no self-centered activity. To find out what it is, one must deny
all this – deny it in the sense of seeing the falseness of it. When you once
see something as false – which you have accepted as true, as natural, as human
– then you can never go back to it; when you see a dangerous snake, or a
dangerous animal, you never play with it, you never come near it. Similarly,
when you actually see that love is none of these things, feel it, observe it,
chew it, live with it, are totally committed to it, then you will know what
love is, what compassion is – which means passion for everyone”.
If we
can only place ourselves above everything we see, thinking we are better or
more clever than those movies, while at the same time professing we love them,
how can we ever form a true relationship with it? Any relationship that’s based
on such inherent separation is without exception based on an illusion of love,
because you cannot truly love that which you feel superior to. The fact this
has nevertheless become commonplace in our society points to the root of our
emotional and spiritual malaise, and also explains why so many people nowadays
have so much trouble to form any kind of deep relationship with anything or
anyone in the world, preferring a shallow and easy kind of attachment instead.
It's an excruciatingly ugly song, but I can't help but feeling Billy Joel was
right when he sang “honesty is such a lonely word” and we have to reclaim this
honesty. We have to learn to break out of our detachment again and form deep,
honest and loving relationships again with all that’s around us in order to
banish this horrible situation of claiming to love that which we only feel
contempt for. And many of those oft derided eighties movies are as good a place
to start as any.
One type
of movie that was very popular during the decade, was what I shall call now,
for lack of better word, ‘achiever movies’. Of course achievement was insanely
prominent at the time, so it’s only natural it would find its way back into the
popular entertainment of the day. The beauty of these achiever movies is they
were all exactly the same: it’s all about some young kid trying to pursue his
dream by accomplishing something in his chosen profession or passion. Dance
pictures like ‘Flashdance’ or ‘Dirty Dancing’ were prominent obviously, as were
all kinds of sports pictures, with ‘American Anthem’ being one of them. I have
to admit I'm superficial enough to first have seen this picture solely because
of its rather titillating cover art and on this point it surely does not
disappoint: the stimulating body of the stimulatingly named Mitch Gaylord is
also matched by his quite stimulating face. This being a film from the
eighties, most people are not exactly hard to look at, which immediately places
it into the somewhat shallow type of eighties films that's related to the Jane
Fonda workout video. Right from the credits with images of people training and sweating
accompanied by one of those nondescript 80s songs, it's abundantly clear what
kind of picture it's going to be. It's not a perfect picture by any means – in
fact it seems tailor-made for those who like to look down on things, who like
to have a superior chuckle when watching supposedly 'bad' movies as there is
going to be the kind of overblown melodrama most intellectuals frown upon. But
instead of condemning this overflow of emotions, we should celebrate it and let
it work on us. Because all these emotions can only posit a problem for people
who are hopelessly out of touch with their feelings and know only how to
communicate through intellect. So if nothing else, a film like ‘American
Anthem’ could serve as a correction, as it feels like something of a warm bath
of pure emotion. Jump into it, relax and feel the warmness of the experience
flow through your body.
The
beauty of ‘American Anthem’ is that it has almost some kind of transparency,
like it’s an empty vessel with the eighties merely passing through it. Which is
to say, few films could serve so well as a time capsule as it has all the
ingredients that made the decade so memorable. In everything it exudes the
feeling I immediately associate with the eighties, from the look of neon, to
the unmistakable sound of the music to those unforgettable musical interludes
which seem to be the not so distant cousin of the montage sequences that gave
the 30s en 40s their flavor. Jonathan Rosenbaum has once described the style of
Nicholas Ray as if at any moment it could explode into a musical, something
that was also true of the eighties. It often feels directly related to an MTV
music video, but it's all the better for it. By sheer accident I saw the Prince
vehicle 'Purple Rain' (like ‘American Anthem’ also directed by Albert Magnoli)
just before it and judging solely by these two examples, the director seems to
have a definite touch for the sublimely ridiculous – or the ridiculously
sublime.
A theme
that these two Magnoli pictures have in common is that of the dysfunctional
family, which seems to have been everywhere in the eighties. Although the genre
of the family melodrama never really has been away, there seems to have been a
reemergence of it in the 80s which, intriguingly, links it to the fifties melodrama
– with its suffocating air, all happiness and sunshine on the outside, but with
all these anxieties bubbling right underneath the surface. This mood was
brilliantly conveyed in the family melodrama, which with all its complexity of
tone still defines the era and for which the earlier mentioned films of Douglas
Sirk could serve as the ultimate example of the decade. In contrast, the
eighties clearly had the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but there's something
really refreshing about this, as it always laid all its feelings right on the
line. As such, it became something of the exact reverse of the fifties: on the
surface it's all trouble and dysfunction, but underneath it all there was a
deep conformity at work, with people only desperately trying to fit in,
especially in those achiever movies where people are ostensibly following their
individual dreams while mostly really just longing to belong. The dress styles
may have been eccentric in the eighties, as opposed to the conformist clothing
in the fifties, in the end, the decade was mostly about acceptance. The
combination of a surplus of pathos and the stereotypical characters gives these
eighties melodrama force and conviction as they reduce conflicts to their most
archetypal essence. This doesn't mean it's better than the irony and complexity
of the fifties, but at the same time it also isn't the other way around. The
beauty of this world is that both can and should exist next to each other, as
mirror images.
It is
interesting to place 'American Anthem' next to a completely different film from
the fifties, 'The Next Voice You Hear', because they suddenly bring both
decades very much together. 'The Next Voice You Hear' has become something of a
cult item, because of its supposedly backwards attitude. Made at MGM, always
the most family oriented of major film studios, it wasn't made during the reign
of L.B. Mayer, who was famous for his love of sentimentality, but was in fact a
pet project of his successor Dore Schary. Schary, a former screenwriter and
heavily committed to the social problem picture, gave us a film that I
personally deeply love without even the slightest bit of irony, but am actually
afraid of showing to friends. The story is as simple as effective: at one
point, the voice of God breaks in at a radio transmission and starts to
complain about the mess people have made of the world and keeps doing this
until the people are ready to face their problems. All this is done with such
an honesty, it almost makes Frank Capra look ironic. While at outwardly 'The
Next Voice You Hear' couldn't be more different from 'American Anthem', what
unites both films very much is the sheer conviction and openness with which it
confronts its problems. This makes both a very easy target for the kind of
denigrating criticism I spoke of at the beginning of this piece, but this is
precisely what makes both movies so endearing to me. Because what this world
needs is now is not more irony and even more distancing, but really more plain honesty
and straightforwardness. Love or hate these pictures all you will, but please
do it with all your heart.
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