Ray Carney

Ray Carney is Professor of Film and American Studies at Boston University. He is the author of more than 15 books in seven languages—most recently, a book he calls “the autobiography Cassavetes never lived to write”: Cassavetes on Cassavetes (Faber and Faber/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux); a study of Cassavetes’ first film, Shadows (British Film Institute/University of California Press) based on a “Rosebud” conversation with Cassavetes shortly before his death; and The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World (Cambridge University Press), the first extended critical examination of the British moviemaker’s work in any language. He is one of the world’s leading authorities on American film and culture and a popular speaker at film festivals around the world.

He manages a website devoted to independent film and other art at: http://www.Cassavetes.com.

Shelly Friedman (MM): You seem to be a proponent of moviemakers commenting on the political and social landscape, Mike Leigh being an example. Why do you think this is important? Why doesn’t it take place more?

Ray Carney (RC): Hollywood separates personal and social issues because the producers are afraid of alienating anyone. They are salesmen and every salesman knows better than to discuss religion or politics. You might lose a customer if you actually took a stand on anything that mattered. Remember Antonioni’s description of Hollywood? “Being nowhere, saying nothing, about no one.”

But that doesn’t mean that movies like Oliver Stone’s, that puff themselves up with a lot of political and sociological heavy breathing, are any better. Politics can be a form of escapism. Stone’s social critiques let us run away from our own lives, our personal problems, and blame the system. His hell has other people in it. The problems in his movies are always caused by someone else. Not you and me. That can’t be true since the world is made up of yous and mes. There’s no one else.

The greatest movies ask people to examine their own lives, not point their fingers at someone else.

If you want an example of how a movie can be political without blaming the system or victimizing its characters, look at Todd Haynes’ Safe. It never preaches. It never attitudinizes about social problems. But it reveals that the way the world is organized and understood affects the smallest individual act. It makes us think deeply about the connections between society and personal life—about where we live and how, about our felt need for order and clarity and safety, about our fears of what we can’t control. Haynes’ movie shows that the personal is political, and that’s what makes it the most subversive and radical American film of the past 10 years.

“No matter how boring or trite A.I. is, we have to take it seriously since it is freighted with ‘metaphoric significance.’ Give me a break.” says Carney.

MM: Why do you think film critics don’t usually put films within a political or social or even economic context? Would it be helpful for them to do so?

RC: American film reviewing is a form of advertising and advertisements are never political for fear someone might disagree with them. All of the important film reviewers are extensions of the Hollywood publicity machine. If that sounds too harsh, ask yourself why they spend months covering the Academy Awards—which is just a big, self-congratulatory Hollywood company picnic. When was the last time a work of art even got nominated? The reviewers are flacks for the studios. The publicists create phony behind-the-scenes drama for them to report, feed them celebrity gossip in press releases and fly them out to

LA on all-expense-paid interview junkets. No one dares to tell the truth about the system for fear that they will be expelled from the club and denied the next big interview with the next big nobody.

MM: What is your biggest gripe with most film criticism today? Do you see any indications of an alternative critical community evolving to counter what you see in the mainstream press?

RC: As my secretary says, “Don’t get me started!” Since we haven’t got a week, I’ll have to give you a short list of some of the most obvious lunacy:

Let’s begin with the fact that Hollywood movies get reviewed in the first place. You know, only about one book out of 100 that is published ever gets even a single-sentence mention in The New York Times, but every Hollywood movie that plays in Manhattan is guaranteed a review—and often more than that: a review, a feature piece and an interview or two with the star on top of everything else. What does that tell you about the power of the advertising tail to wag the editorial dog?

On the other hand, if the reviewers are going to let the advertisers dictate what they cover, why not at least call a spade a spade? Why don’t they tell the truth? Why don’t they say: “This movie was planned and produced to cash in on a trendy social issue to generate publicity; it features a big name star to suck in viewers and generate media interviews; and it pushes a few non-threatening emotional buttons but leaves everything unchanged in the end, in order to give people a feel-good experience that will encourage them to recommend it to their friends.” Why not call the garbage garbage? When was the last time a movie reviewer wrote what is obvious about 99 out of 100 movies? That they were made for morons.

Then there is the shameless sucking up to celebrities. Are we all still star-struck teenagers? Isn’t it time for an adult reality-check?

Why interview Ron Howard and Steven Spielberg about the art of film, as if they were thinkers and knew anything about the subject? Why do Charlie Rose and James Lipton fawn on Harrison Ford and Julia Roberts, treating them as if they were great actors? Why are movie stars never asked a single hard question by an interviewer—like why they are wasting their lives making junky Hollywood movies?

If you want an example of how a movie can be political without blaming the system or victimizing its characters, look at Todd Haynes’ Safe.

But since I’m a film professor, I’ll give you two academic pet peeves: I’m fed up with professors who try to redeem crummy movies by finding grandiose cultural metaphors and themes in them. You know, the ones that argue that Showgirls is profound because it depicts “the commodification of American life,” or that no matter how boring and trite A.I. is, we have to take it seriously since it is freighted with “metaphoric significance.” Give me a break. They pitch their tents in some Joseph Campbell heaven of symbolic references, 30,000 feet above the actual experience of the work. There is something profoundly wrong with a critic who cares more about archetypal themes than individual feelings and experiences (just as there was something fundamentally wrong about Joseph Campbell’s understanding of life). Orwell put it more simply: “There are some ideas so stupid only a professor could believe them.”

And I’m exasperated with professors who justify their interest in trash with theories about how the works they show in class represent intricate reworkings of genre conventions or are profound expressions of popular culture. They conveniently ignore the fact that movies are not expressions of popular but of corporate culture. They are calculated, manufactured, mass-produced products created by multinational corporations to make as much money as possible. That’s a little different from nineteenth-century patchwork quilts and whaling voyage scrimshaw.

Anyway, something both the reviewers and the professors forget is that Americans over the age of 40 don’t go to the movies, and if they do, they certainly don’t take them seriously as expressions of anything. It’s easy to forget this if you are in the movie biz, but you get a reminder every once in a while when you discover that your aunt and uncle and cousins have never heard of the Coen brothers and have no interest in finding out. The parents of most of my students think they are wasting their time majoring in film. That’s a good corrective when we start waxing poetic about cinema as the twentieth-century art form. Not to these realtor mothers and businessman fathers!

It’s no accident that the demographic for Hollywood movies is so young. They are not made for adults, but for teenagers and others in various states of arrested development, like film reviewers.

As to the formation of an alternative critical community, I just don’t know. The artists are the only critics I really trust. If Caveh Zahedi or John Gianvito or Gordon Eriksen or Jim McKay tells me something is worth seeing, I’ll walk barefoot over broken glass to get to it. I guess my hope is that some of my own students will change the history of film criticism in the next 15 years. But I’ll have to wait and see if that happens.

Most reviewers are hopeless. I heard Stanley Tucci say something about this the other night. He was part of a group discussing the problems that face a film artist in our culture. Everyone else was blaming the publicists, the studios, the distributors, the movie theaters. He said wait a minute. The film reviewers shoulder a good part of the blame because they don’t support artistic work.

I almost fell off my chair. It was the first time I ever heard anyone include journalists as part of the problem. Most actors and directors are afraid to say anything against them for fear of having them retaliate in a subsequent review. Tucci’s point was that we’re not going to have audiences for good films until we have better reviewers.

If you’re an indie, you can get all the distribution you want, but if reviewers don’t review your work and encourage people to see it, only you and your friends will be in the theaters watching it. MM

Shelly Friedman is a NYC-based moviemaker and former student of Ray Carney’s.