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.