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This
week, with a nod to the onrushing holiday, and various freight trains of
dread barreling down the track at us, I want to take a break from the usual
concerns and talk about something else: why Hollywood exemplifies our worst
collective blunder of the historical moment: our techno-narcissism.
I
went to the cineplex at the mall late yesterday
afternoon - also a break, after a month of moving and shlepping
to another house - to see the new Martin Scorcese
movie, Hugo. The story told is a sort of frame for an
homage to one of the pioneers or movie-making, Georges Méliès, a French "illusionist"
(magician) who made over 500 films at the turn of the 20th century, most of
them now lost. He was an innovator, also, of what we now call FX, special
effects, employing stop-motion, puppetry, and many optical tricks borrowed
from his stage magic act in order to portray wild, dream-like fantasies on
the screen. His best-known surviving movie is the Jules Verne-inspired A
Trip To the Moon, in which several Edwardian Age explorers make the
journey in a giant artillery shell fired from a
colossal cannon. The movies of Méliès
possess great child-like charm, consistent with a new art-form in its
infancy: exuberant, surprising, and often self-consciously silly.
Scorcese conveys Méliès's
story through the frame of another story about a boy, the orphaned son of a
watchmaker, who lives in the attic of one of the great Parisian train
stations in the 1920s. Hugo goes about his daily business winding the great
clocks of the station, pinching croissants and bottles of milk from vendors,
and evading the sadistic Station Inspector (Sacha
Baron-Cohen, a.k.a. Borat). Hugo's doings also come
to involve the owner of a toy shop in the station, who turns out to be the
movie-maker Méliès (Ben Kingsley),
now completely disillusioned and forgotten. The boy, of course, becomes the
agent of Méliès's resurrection to
glory and public honor for his pioneering work.
Scorcese, a leading film historian in his own
right, chose to tell this story using the latest movie technology of our day:
3-D and CGI, computer-generated imagery, to wow a contemporary audience.
Here, things get dodgy. It turns out that there is a curious relationship
between movie technology and the art of cinema story-telling, and it can be
expressed in terms of diminishing returns. The more clever
we get at applying computer magic to the movies, the worse our story-telling
abilities. It has gotten to the point where Hollywood is just about incapable
now of telling a story because so many technological tricks are cluttering up
the screen that the nuances of human behavior are sacrificed to them.
In
the case of Hugo, Scorcese's use of 3-D
violates one of the cardinal rules of staged dramatic action in its
insistence on dragging the viewer through what is called "the fourth
wall" in a relentless attempt to induce the illusions of speed and
vertigo. The fourth wall refers to an old convention of the proscenium stage,
in which the audience is presumed to be viewing the action through an open
wall of a sort of magic box. This boundary between "real life" and
the life depicted on stage, or on-screen in our time, allows another
convention to happen: the willing suspension of disbelief, so that we become
emotionally involved in the action beyond the wall. The fourth wall was
respected through the glory days of Hollywood and all of the movie classics
that Scorcese has paid homage to over the years.
Breaking it has impoverished movie-making, a result that was obvious in James
Cameron's ponderous hit, Avatar, which reduced human emotion to a
level below the average cartoon of the 1930s while it piled on the dazzling
computer-generated images. In Hugo, Scorcese's
camera, or "camera" in the case of all the whopping 3-D CGI shoves
the audience through the fourth wall and into the magic box in order to
stimulate (or simulate) a sense of wonder about the proceedings inside it.
But it only has the effect of wearing you down psychologically, and making
you constantly aware of being manipulated.
One
of the ironies of Hugo is that a major sub-plot in the story involves
a mechanical automaton - sort of an early robot, animated like a clock with
gears and escapements - which Hugo's dead father had been working on before
his tragic death in a fire. Automatons were popular devices in the magicians'
parlors of the early industrial age. They were wondrous machines for their
time, but they really couldn't do much more than deal out a few cards or wave
their arms about. The automaton in the movie doesn't really do much, either,
but the story of Hugo hinges on the emotional attachments that the
automaton inspires in him and the other characters. And it does illustrate,
inadvertently I believe, one of the crucial primary relations of the human
project to technology in our time: that the virtual is just not an adequate
substitute for the authentic. This will be a hard lesson for us to learn.
Hugo
worships at the alter of
his father's broken automaton, just as the American public at all levels
worships at the alter of technology, and it is sure
to disappoint us. So great are the comforts and conveniences of our time that
we are terrified by the prospect of losing them and, as the
hyper-complexities around us unravel, we Americans are willing to believe any
preposterous story that promises to keep the cars moving and the lights on. I
call this state of affairs technological narcissism. The leading current
expression of it can be seen in the incessant propaganda from politicians and
the corporations telling the nation that we have "hundreds of years
worth of oil and gas" available in North America and that we can easily
become "energy independent" if we only drill-drill-drill. The
public will at first be disappointed by these lies, and then they will become
murderously enraged. Just watch. How it unfolds will be a story really worth
telling generations from now.
For
the moment, though, Hollywood has forgotten how to do the one thing that made
the American movie industry great: to tell a story. Another irony of the day
is that the biggest critical hit of the holiday release season is a silent
movie, The Artist, made in France by director Michel Hazanavicius, another homage to Hollywood history, made
by outsiders and going back to the basics - just as American life will have
to go back to the basics when reality drags us kicking and screaming out of
the box we've crawled into.
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