Movie break: A director who tried to give therapy to the U.S. gets analyzed himself: Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991)

A sort of “meta” work, this documentary means digging through the penetralia of a quagmire, (1) for Coppola in making the movie (and in understanding the Vietnam War, itself regarded as a quagmire), (2) for the doc’s makers in examining the movie’s production, and (3) for me (and others) coming to terms with this

[What is this—a blog entry with heart, ambition, care, and copious flaws, somewhat-dumped on the marketplace in a desultory August? Sort of like how Apocalypse Now was premiered 33 years ago! This entry derives in part from an article, and additional research, I drew up starting in 2005, and tried to publish but did not. As the draft of this article was, this entry will be in some ways incomplete, but will probably be more than enough for you. My apologies for some end notes not having page references; this has to do, in part, with the amorphous quality of research I did in about 2005. And you say—But I want the next chapter in Greg’s long story on CommonStealth! Edit 8/25/14.]

Perhaps the one film director who can arguably be called a key measure of the baby boomers in terms of how strivingly sublime, and incidentally ridiculous, they could be is Francis Ford Coppola (even though he is slightly older than the baby boomer generation; he was born in 1939). In other words, if you displayed a picture of Coppola to Gen-Xers and younger generations, as a sort of Rorschach test or Thematic Apperception Test, and you asked, “What does this bring to mind?,” they might say all kinds of things ranging from “Ambitious artist, had the courage to make the first major movie about Vietnam, was talented in ways ranging from writing to directing to producing” to “Overly ambitious, pompous, self-promoting; wildly overreached with Apocalypse Now when he could have made a definitive statement; abusive of his actors to the point that Martin Sheen almost died.” I think there’s merit to all these assessments, but I would say I tend to be definitely more favorable toward Coppola than not to be.

Mind you, I like him as an artist. But in writing an attempt at a succinct article on a very complex subject, on which there have been strong negative opinions, acknowledging the negative will sometimes seem as if I share these opinions, which I really do not.

In writing this, though I have a good feeling for what I want to do, it seems this could get much longer than I want it to be, so let’s bite the bullet. He started making movies in the 1960s; he did a horror film for Roger Corman, released in 1963. Some of his earlier films include You’re a Big Boy Now (1966); Finian’s Rainbow (1968), a musical that was the last such film Fred Astaire starred in (it is surprisingly evocative of Coppola’s visual/production flair, though the chirpy musical lyrics and dialogue are, for me, a pain to listen to); and arguably his first notable mature effort, the road film The Rain People (1969), whose stars include Robert Duvall. He also had gone to the film school at UCLA, while other notable directors and the like attended USC (George Lucas, for one); I don’t know enough to say definitive things here about the rivalry between these two schools and its implications for star directors that came out of them in the late 1960s. Still, there are useful things said about this area in an interesting documentary included on the relatively recent (2004) DVD of the George Lucas-directed THX-1138 (1971). (By the way, amid all his late-’60s work, Coppola also was a cowriter, with Edmund North, of the script for the film Patton [1970], for which he won an Academy Award.)

Coppola also wanted to start an independent film studio, American Zoetrope, and it began in 1969 with a slate of projects that were, if I understand the situation right, part of a proposal package made toward anticipating a multi-film partnership with Warner Brothers (which would have mainly been the distributor, I suppose). Then when THX-1138 was finished and Warners didn’t like it (and, more importantly, it didn’t do well at the box office), Warners severed the relationship with Zoetrope. Among the projects that had been on the original Zoetrope/Warners slate was Apocalypse Now, whose script had been written by John Milius, a Zoetrope associate who later would be a director and writer of noted films, and who frequently turns up in DVD commentary in a range of films.

In a sort of groping funk following the Warners cutoff, after having produced THX-1138 (with Lucas directing), Coppola was given an opportunity from Paramount Studios to direct a movie version of the pulp novel The Godfather (1969), in a working relationship with Robert Evans, the noted Paramount executive who not only headed the studio but also produced individual films—including several of the ones (such as Chinatown [1974]) that defined the “Second Golden Age of Hollywood.” Coppola gave the Mafia novel a sumptuous treatment in The Godfather (1972), which went beyond the old-time gangster film and even the conventional notion of a soap opera, which of course, in a sense, the story was. The film, of course, made movie history; it won Oscars, was a big hit, paved the way for using genre works to serve as “literature about America” (more on this later), and put Coppola on the film auteur map.

This movie and its significance are well known. (Also, Coppola’s most innovative directorial style was in place by this time. His cinematographer on the Godfather films, Gordon Willis, remarked sarcastically at some point that Coppola’s style—maybe he was criticizing Coppola’s obliviousness to the cameraman’s needs, and I am roughly paraphrasing here—was, metaphorically, to have an actor cross a set with his shirt on fire, and if everything came out all right, then all was well. This was quoted, I believe, in one of my important sources, Biskind and Cowie, to be referenced in end notes to come [End note 1].)

His next films, the relatively small but gripping story The Conversation (1974) and The Godfather Part II (1974) gave him perhaps the unique distinction of having directed two films, the second a successful sequel to a major hit of two years before, which vied for Best Picture at the Oscars, with The Godfather Part II winning the Best Picture Oscar, while The Conversation won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

By 1975, it seemed he could do no wrong, and this came at a time when the baby boomer generation seemed to appreciate having someone who seemed very much “of them” while making films that not only conformed with genre conventions to some extent but addressed themes related to national distress—Godfather looking at the dual nature of American life in (1) its traditional embrace of family values and yet (2) its hypocritical utilization of violence and/or self-delusion about what we are doing. Meanwhile, The Conversation looked at the paranoid situations we were finding ourselves in while the Watergate scandal was cancerously eating at our trust in the federal government—perhaps all sorts of high-level authority. Today, the idea may seem absurdly pretentious or overly ambitious, but when Coppola turned his attention to a film about Vietnam, with pre-production starting in 1975, a few months after (?) the fall of Saigon, it seemed as if he was the one artist (of popular entertainment that was increasingly achieving high-minded artistic status) who could help us come to terms—as a culture, as a body politic, or whatever—with Vietnam, the soul-traumatizing war.

(By the way, some historical moorings: I am not an expert on the politics—foreign or domestic—behind the Vietnam War. Certainly, conforming rather slavishly with 1970s culture, I felt as a teen that the war was wrong, fundamentally ill-advised; but I was 13 when the fall of Saigon happened in 1975, and certainly could never have felt at risk of being drafted. Meanwhile, I am not antithetical to the military life. My uncle Wesley served in Vietnam, for two tours of duty—about 1964-66 and about 1969-71. During the second tour, in 1970, I believe when he was temporarily on leave because my father had just died, he left me the memento, “clue,” whatever you want to call it, of an Army Corps of Engineers pin—which I guess a relevant soldier wore on his collar; it looked like a little castle. My father and his older brother Charles both served in the military, in the 1950s. One of my cousins has served in the military, too; given his age—he was born in 1975—he served in Iraq and Afghanistan. I am one of the few wimps of the males in the family regarding military service; I did look into possibly enlisting in summer 1987, but decided against it. I engaged in national service in the form of VISTA, in 1986-87—and not for a full term. But my willingness to be serious about the “expectations” of national service led me to sign up with the Selective Service when President Carter reinstated it in response to the Soviets’ invasion of Afghanistan. I remember being scorned by peers at GWU in 1980 for having done this; to me, it was a simple requirement and didn’t entail automatically being drafted, but these peers felt otherwise. Anyway, to our modern eyes—which maybe are all but numbed and half-forgetful about Vietnam, given the wars since 2001 that have made demands on our attention and emotions—there was an interesting little piece in The New York Times on Sunday, August 12—in the “Sunday Review” section, p. 4, “Exploding the Myths About Vietnam,” which includes discussion about commentators using the Vietnam War as a reference point—not quite appropriately, says the writer—for assessing our involvement in Afghanistan as a “quagmire.” It is by a U.S. professor with a Vietnamese name, Lien-Hang Nguyen.)

Apocalypse Now starts to coalesce

On the business level, in 1975, the Apocalypse Now (AN) project was resurrected—after having been considered a project for George Lucas to direct in about 1969—as part of Coppola’s trying to start his own studio American Zoetrope again (this is according to the film being review here, Hearts of Darkness; there are also relevant parts of the story in two books that are among my main sources [2]).

With AN, he was not working for Paramount as he had with the two Godfather films. Now, he started work with the studio United Artists having provided the initial funding when he sold the foreign distribution rights for about $7 million. [3] This meant that UA, as is innocuous and as they couldn’t expect, primed the pump for what would become the remarkably unorthodox way Coppola financed this film (which probably even he couldn’t have foreseen at the start). Subsequent money would be raised from bank loans (the budget would balloon to between $24 million and $30 million) [4]; he himself was personally liable for some or all of these loans, which is why, I think, he says a number of times in Hearts of Darkness that he’d continued with the project as intrepidly as he had because “my money” was behind it. In short, this was a film made almost in an “indie” way, with no one studio or producing company largely behind it; there was a patchwork of funding sources behind it, all “secured” by the linchpin of Coppola as producer. [5] Given the size of the budget, if this sort of thing didn’t seem downright foolish then, it would certainly seem so for anybody to contemplate doing the same sort of thing today.

The film’s principal photography, almost entirely in the Philippines, was from March 20, 1976, to May 21, 1977—238 days of shooting. [6] This was the longest such production period for any movie until that point, I believe. [7] And then post-production—film editing, creation and editing of sound effects, writing and inserting voiceover narration, and musical scoring and recording [8]—went from about mid-1977 until summer 1979. [9] The film still wasn’t entirely finished in spring 1979 when it was displayed at Cannes [10]—and won the Palme d’Or. [11] It later won Oscars for its cinematography and for Best Sound.

At Cannes in 1979, at a press conference shown in Hearts of Darkness, Coppola, seeming thin, tired, and a bit distracted, made his famous comment that this film simply wasn’t about Vietnam, it—or producing it—“was Vietnam. It was crazy. …”

The film is finally delivered (in 1979), to mixed reviews, and Coppola’s star starts to fall

The film was first released in August 1979, but I first saw it at a theater in Manhattan in September 1979. I was a high school senior and fairly simple movie consumer under the impression that noted director Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was being expected as great and couldn’t be missed. When my friend Joe Coles and I left the theater after it was over, I remarked that everyone seemed quiet…and I believe I meant that this reflected that people were awed by a great work, or that that could have been the reaction.

In subsequent years I began to be swayed by the critical views of the film that saw it as not-minorly flawed. Actually, I would find reviews of it—when I wrote a paper on it in 1984 for a film class I took after graduating from college—that (in total) took a critical axe to it for nearly every initiative it took. Here is how I interpreted this situation—using the 1984-compiled quotes but writing from a more sympathetic-to-the-film perspective—for an article I drafted through early 2006:

Time lamented that the movie was a “collection of footage” that was sometimes “breathtaking” visually but was assembled into an “emotionally obtuse and intellectually empty” story. The characters of the movie aren’t well enough developed, the review says, with the result that the movie’s “panoramas of death” lack a “human context.” The voice-over narration was “desperately” inserted to attract the audience to Willard and to clarify plot points. (This latter is one of the more preposterous criticisms, because there was narration in the original script, and when Walter Murch, one chief editor of the film, started to edit it in 1977, he started to record the narration himself—perhaps as a sort of logistical guide for himself in the editorial process—to help put the original rough cut into shape. [12]) Willard’s narration is “alternately sensitive, psychopathic, literary, gung-ho, and anti-war.” (If you carefully consider the narration, it’s hard to understand what of it is actually “gung-ho.” The first recognition of “the Air Cav”? This is said [by Sheen] ironically.)

[The conservative] National Review opined, even though the reviewer was not disappointed with “sizable chunks” of the movie, that the movie suffered from a “dissociation of sensibility.” Ideas and feelings expressed in the film were “crude,” “immature,” and “pretentious” because Coppola failed to feelingly engage himself with his material and represent his engagement. His use of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a story basis for the film is “puerile” and “self-serving,” with the result that sometimes allusions to the novel in the film are “gratuitous.”

[The liberal] The New Republic seems to have been more sympathetic, noting for instance that Apocalypse Now is “at its best in delivering the textures of the first freaked-out, pill-popping, rock-accompanied war.” The reviewer pointed out that Coppola had an “apparent sense that the world is seen more truthfully when it is seen as spectacle” (which could be considered a redundant way to characterize one director’s style in forming movies, because this would seem an essential premise to moviemaking of any kind). But the movie offered a “message” that was “too patent to affect us” and it was politically “empty.” Moreover, as moral allegory, it “fizzles completely.”

The part of the movie that has typically received the most criticism through the years is the last 35 or so minutes, featuring Willard’s dealings with Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando. Time snorted that Brando as the renegade colonel Walter E. Kurtz “does little more than [spout] quotations from Conrad and T.S. Eliot.” National Review said that Kurtz’s horrors shown late in the film are not much more remarkable than the horrors that were shown in Willard’s journey up the river to find him. Kurtz is not portrayed well as broken down due to a “basic human loss of control [or the] fallibility of moral choice.” The New Republic said that the scenes with Kurtz are conspicuously unsuccessful and Kurtz’s literary quotations—he reads from Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” for example—are “glib attempts to enlarge him.”

If you think a lot of these critical remarks are thick-headed or mean, I would agree. They almost suggest critics united in having an agenda to react harshly to the film, perhaps in view of Coppola’s hubris-like long delaying of the finished product. But I would suggest that people were rather perfectionistic about their “meaningful” films in those days: they wanted them to reflect reality with clear eyes and an aim to solid, responsibly derived meaning. Today, of course, we can watch AN and appreciate it for how far it really does go to say something deep about something that troubled us very much in the 1970s, and we can wonder why no one tries to do this, at least in this way, anymore (though we know the reason, given marketing logic and current audience tastes).

Due to the sheer strain of production and the financial liabilities, never mind the critics, Coppola was never the same. His next film, One From the Heart (1982), a sort of odd love story long on visuals and short on story, failed miserably at the box office. He was not again regarded, at least for several years, as having the greatness he was seen to have in the 1970s. Even Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), whose development had begun in the 1970s [13] and which was anticipated as a possible return to form, was disappointing at the box office—it made less than it cost. He did a third installment of The Godfather, released in 1990, which while interesting (I was surprised at how good it was, relatively speaking and all things considered, when I finally saw the whole thing about two years ago), is widely regarded as not as good as either of the first two.

Hearts of Darkness (in 1991) adds journalistic exposure

It was with this background that Hearts of Darkness was made, released in 1991 (shown on cable, Showtime, at first), later available on video from Paramount. This documentary, written and directed by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper (the latter of whom later directed feature films and died in 2010), look at the behind-the-scenes saga of how Apocalypse Now was made. Notably, a lot of this story was already documented; Eleanor Coppola, Francis’ wife, had published her diary of the film’s making in about 1980 [14], and of course the 1979 program conveys, summarily, some of the complexity of the production. In fact, the 1979 program (a smaller one was made for the film’s 2001 re-edit and re-release), along with Eleanor’s diary, seems to support the idea—for his tougher critics—that Coppola was self-indulgent with this film to such an extent that he even had a lavish insider story produced: as if the sensory-overload film wasn’t enough, you needed a fulsome documentary too.

Who knows how history will treat this situation. Now I have seen Apocalypse Now so many times (especially since about 2006) that you would think I’m sick; and while I have varied my viewpoint on it in different directions over about 30 years, I have been fond of it for about the past decade. In all fairness, I think the least that can be said is this:

(1) It was the first film that tried to treat Vietnam both as a phenomenon of human activity and in terms of what, morally, the war meant for the country and as reflecting what man, on a general level, is capable of when in war-fighting mode. (Consider a New York Times article in November 26, 2005, amid ongoing the Iraq war, that notes, obviously sympathetic to soldiers in part: “[F]or returning service members, experts say, the question of whether their difficulties are ultimately diagnosed as mental illness may depend not only on the mental health services available, but also on the politics of military psychiatry itself, the definition of what a normal reaction to combat is and the story the nation tells itself about the purpose and value of soldier’s service” [p. A8; boldface added].) [15]

(2) You can still like the film, and admire how it tries to do this job by using as a story framework Joseph Conrad’s novella “Heart of Darkness,” even while admitting the film’s flaws, both technical and more broadly artistic.

(3) As just suggested, the film has some historical importance, in the movie realm and in American culture more generally. It isn’t simply a baby boomer’s toy. [16]

(4) If you agree with two or all of these points, then Hearts of Darkness will interest you, because it is useful in appreciating AN to understand the pros and cons, revealed during its production, of the ambitious writer/director/producer who made this film, and who indeed was the sine qua non for its happening at all and its being shoved by main force to completion.

I have to say that, having seen this documentary several times, I still like Coppola as a man and an artist; but if the Vietnam War was an instance of the U.S. “coming apart at the seams” in a way not seen since the Civil War, then Coppola was being a sort of national psychotherapist in making the first try at a definitive film of the war—his 1979 program stating “It was my thought that if the American audience could look at the heart of what Vietnam was really like…then they would be only one small step away from putting it behind them”—in effect, a sort of South African-style “Truth and Reconciliation” session for the war-scarred public. [17]

But to produce the means for this, it took Coppola’s inadvertently becoming—I think it’s fair to say this, though he denies ever having seen a psychologist or psychiatrist (New York Times Magazine, December 16, 2007, p. 30)—both manic and depressive, definitely expressive of bipolar disorder, as part of the tortuous process of finishing this film. Evidence? If you watch Hearts and hear Coppola’s own recorded comments, or see a photo, referencing his idea of committing suicide, and compare this with a filmed monologue by him elsewhere in Hearts where he ebulliently talking about the various qualities of AN, and then you know from Biskind that he was prescribed lithium from about 1979 through about 1982, you know, without being a doctor, that he was suffering from bipolar disorder, exacerbated by the tensions of making AN. Again, it’s not something he would have bragged about; but I think it’s fair to allude to in this blog entry, to help explain some of the motivation behind the way the movie was stewarded, with full enough sympathy for him.

But this making a movie while being occasionally manic and occasionally depressive happened within a situation that incidentally incurred the years-long resentment of several of his actors (such as Frederic Forrest and Sam Bottoms, quoted in the 1991 Hearts of Darkness; they sound more forgiving in the 2006 DVD extras). Further, the process entailed the near-death of Martin Sheen in late February 1977—making Sheen the one saint of the whole affair. Today, lawsuits would fly all over like scared sparrows if a similar situation happened with a movie’s production. But in those days, filmmaking baby boomers could seek in a project like this—seeking in the sense of the rock group The Who’s song “The Seeker”—the truth in a jungle, and if they survived the trip, America got a broadly therapeutic film.

Summary of points about Hearts

I didn’t want to go too deeply into this; as you can see, not only have I done considerable research on AN, but the topic is such that, if you’re in for a mil, you’re in for a million—and it rather gets you crazy. The complexity, morally and factually, make it hard not to be about as ambitious as a Coppola project in addressing it. A few salient points:

Hearts of Darkness was hard to find for some time. I bought a videocassette via Amazon several years ago; and when the 2006 “Complete Dossier” DVD of Apocalypse Now Redux came out, the extras did not include Hearts. But I understand that a later, BluRay [?] version of the full set of ANR materials includes Hearts. It’s not hard to understand why; the film makes Coppola look least admirable of all the major players in the AN production saga.

Coppola commented extensively during the production of AN, when he was filmed talking about it and was at other times audio-recorded, the latter not always with his knowledge (according to Hearts). It was apparently with his blessing that Eleanor’s diary was published in about 1980, based partly on these recordings (noted in Hearts, and also in Cowie, I believe). The film Hearts as including some of these recordings was still more than a decade off. Some of Coppola’s comments are astute, showing that he was his own toughest critic as the film was being made, through an agonizingly long process. Example (I may paraphrase a bit): “My greatest fear is to make a pompous, embarrassing, shitty film on an important subject, and I am doing it. I can tell you from the bottom of my heart that the film will not be good.”

With as many ways that the difficulty of making AN have been told, among those in the Coppola camp or sympathetic to him, the most difficult actor was Marlon Brando, who threatened to pull out of the production and keep his $1 million advance if the time he was supposed to be involved was changed. (The story is told in Hearts and also in Cowie.) Apparently Coppola kept to the schedule for Brando, which meant he was filmed in September 1976. But this was midway through principal photography, in fact slightly more within the first half of it. About eight months more of photography was to be done. So Coppola, who had a highly difficult time writing an ending for the movie (which would come out in the wash in how critics viewed the film in 1979), had to settle with what he did with Brando, which involved mainly improvisation, in September 1976.

Yet for some reason, in Hearts, and to some extent in director commentary in the 2006 DVD release, the impression is given that the Brando debacle was at the end of production. Importantly, it was not. Possibly—I’m speculating—Coppola’s self-doubt regarding the film as production went on was based in part on Brando’s lackluster contribution in September 1976. Certainly, everyone agrees that Brando’s role in this film is not among the best of his career [18], and represents a big enough flaw in AN. Notably, Brando never contributed commentary or an interview to Hearts or any other AN packaging. The one deviation from the usual story about Brando’s role in AN is that, while all other stories indicate that Brando caused Coppola to have to sit and have discussions with him, wasting precious production time, Brando in an autobiography or biography of his own claims that Coppola was responsible for this. [19]

Martin Sheen: The almost-martyr of the production

Final comment must be reserved for Martin Sheen. He had been in the Terrence Malick film Badlands (1974), and had been in the earlier, Mike Nichols-directed film of Catch-22 (1970) and the TV movie The Missiles of October (~1974). He was still enough of an up-and-comer when AN was made that he was never given top billing in this film. Both Brando and Robert Duvall were billed above him in the 1979 and 2001 programs. To me, Duvall’s performance, while famous and still entertaining, looks more minor as years go by. But for sheer dedication to the film and for the threat to his health the production unexpectedly posed, in my opinion Sheen should be at top, at least above Brando. [20]

Not only does Sheen appear quite often in the film as a to-be-identified-with “witness to the madness” of the Vietnam War as well as the somewhat opaque Special Forces assassin he is portraying, but, as I said, he had a heart attack in late February 1977 that nearly cost him his life. [21]

Earlier, on August 3, 1976, he was filmed in the hotel scene in which, in the final film, jump-cuts (originally criticized as chaotic, and now looking pretty modern) add texture to him “freaking out” while naked apparently in an episode of R&R prior to being called to a specific assignment again. Hearts shows some of the more extended sequence in which this behavior was captured. For those who were entranced by his son Charlie Sheen’s “Tiger blood” eccentricities in winter/spring 2011, here in 1976 was his father, not simply acting irresponsibly, but delivering arresting acting while both drunk and seeming to experience a nervous breakdown.

Sheen, interviewed for Hearts—and generally seeming the most magnanimous interviewee in the film—said he’d been in a “spiritually chaotic” state. Background facts help us understand: After a typhoon in May 1976, sets had to be rebuilt, and production was shut down for about two months, with participants returning to the U.S. Some people didn’t return; others did. [22]

Sheen came back, but apparently not in the best of morale, when the early-August shooting went on. Coppola coaches him in the August 3 shooting with reminders of his (Sheen’s) wife, home, etc. Sheen seems to cry in acute distress and agony…and eventually virulently curses Coppola. In 1991 Sheen says he pretended he’d forgotten what happened that night, but actually, he “remembered it all.” Sheen here shows himself to be among the most forgiving of the principal actors, while his feelings toward Coppola don’t seem of unalloyed affection.

Then there was his heart attack the next year. A voice recording of Coppola, on the phone, berating a producer for gossip that had been occurring in Hollywood about Sheen’s having had a heart attack may seem chilling to some, and may seem more understandable to others who are familiar with the typical complexities of such projects. Many millions of dollars had been spent on filming, but Coppola was afraid that United Artists would shut down the production and “force me to finish it with what I’ve got” if they found out about Sheen’s illness. “And I don’t have the movie yet,” Coppola argues, almost sulkily.

He adds that he’s really “scared” for the first time on this film; so please, he implores, have it known in Hollywood that any rumor—“what’s going on in trade winds”—about Sheen’s health is “f**king gossip.” (The 1979 program says, with something like discretion, that Sheen was hospitalized for “heat exhaustion.”)

Sheen got treatment (though he was given last rites at one early point, according to Hearts) and took a vacation for a few weeks. Then he was back on the set, looking healthy. In fact, there was still some significant stuff in the film to be made: especially the famous sampan massacre scene, done on April 26, 1977; this is one of the most dignified and structure-giving scenes in the film.

Now you know, today, if a director was so intransigent in pursuing his protracted production of a film (to catch all he wanted to put in it despite all the hurdles), and an actor’s near-fatal heart attack was to be hushed up, well, a lawyer might come flying in in his own version of a Huey, and a whole new torturously protracted process would begin. He might come in a squadron, with the officially painted “scales of justice” symbol in place of the horns of the cavalry, and some joker might have hand-painted “litigation from above” on the noses of the choppers.

“First of the Ninth was an old law firm that had traded in its ethics for shysterism and went tear-assing around the States, looking for the Shit. They’d given some poor old souls a few surprises here. What they were litigating now hadn’t even happened an hour ago.”

End notes

1. Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs, & Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998). Peter Cowie, Coppola (New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1990). Future end notes will be referred to in the text just via bracketed numbers.

2. Ibid.

3. I think this was in Cowie; sorry I don’t have the page number.

4. I strongly believe Cowie details much of this. (I’m not sure where the $24 million figure comes from; perhaps Cowie.) Biskind says the budget was originally outlined to be $12 million, and ballooned to more than $30 million (p. 375). These same figures are noted in the very interesting 1979, multi-page program that was distributed at early showings of the film. (A digital version of it is available, I believe, in the 2006 DVD.)

5. In the film Hearts, under review here, one underling—as does Coppola’s wife Eleanor, in an inference—indicates that Coppola had mortgaged his big California house as part of the financing. By the way, Coppola’s Wikipedia biography indicates he appeared in bankruptcy court multiple times years after he had worked on AN; I don’t know the details of these court involvements.

6. According to the 1979 program.

7. Biskind (p. 361) says there were 250 hours of footage. Coppola in his 2006 DVD commentary points out that, while there was an initial five-hour assemblage—a sort of work print, or first editorial version—knowledge about which among fans would apparently spur rumors or hopes that a much longer AN existed somewhere—this was merely an initial version, which obviously had to be whittled down. Of course, the 1979 version of the movie was about 2:40 in length; the 2001 Redux version was about 3:20.

8. There were many editors for the film—one good litmus test of what a nightmare making the film was. While today, as in the 2006 DVD, Walter Murch gets mentioned as if he was the main editor, he was one of several in 1979, and a lot of his area of responsibility, I believe, was in the sound collage, which he was an expert at (the main credits of AN in the 1979 program list him not as supervising editor but as doing “sound montage and design”)—he did this in George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973). In the 1979 program, there are at least 13 editors who were either film editors or supervising editors (Walter Murch is among those noted with just the simple, rather high-level title “editor”); five sound editors, including a supervisory one; one music editor; three “dialogue editors”; five assistant sound editors; and six “apprentice sound editors.” There were also five “re-recordists,” including Walter Murch. One editor, Gerald Greenberg, is noted by Coppola in the DVD 2006 as having been in charge of just all the film concerning the helicopter charge on the seaside village, which comprised, I believe, most of the work before the May 1976 typhoon that destroyed many of the sets and held up production for a while. There was so much film for this set of scenes, that the volume could have made up one movie just itself (said in the 2006 DVD, I think). The helicopter-attack scenes also represent the film at its most exciting, and most absurdist: a helicopter brigade not only helping a “patrol boat, riverine” (PBR) get into a river where the delta was too shallow, but blasting away at the enemy emplacements there just to make the area safer for Colonel Kilgore’s men to surf—the film’s most bluntly absurdist part.

9. Not only were there many editors, but there were many cameramen. Vittorio Storaro is noted as the expert and award-winning cinematographer, and rightly so; but there were so many subordinate cameramen under him that, in some Hearts scenes, you can hear someone translating what Coppola was saying into Italian for the benefit of these men; and later on, you hear them singing in Italian at a party.

10. Noted in Biskind, I believe; perhaps also in Cowie.

11. Noted in Hearts.

12. I forget where I read this—maybe in Cowie.

13. Noted in Cowie; also noted in the Wikipedia article on the film.

14. Noted in Cowie, I believe. See also Eleanor’s Wikipedia bio.

15. This sort of thing has been addressed in the past by the likes of J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1959/1970). Philosopher Hannah Arendt provides an introduction to this book. Gray, I believe, was a veteran of World War II.

16. For useful humor, there is the Vietnam-movie satire Tropic Thunder (2008), which makes allusions to AN.

17. A biography of Marlon Brando, who played Colonel Kurtz, notes that Coppola, in the planning or early-production stages, considered AN to be his most important film (no big surprise). Peter Manso, Brando: The Biography (New York: Hyperion, 1994), p. 838, 839 (?).

18. A critic is quoted in, I believe, Biskind as saying, after viewing AN (this may paraphrase a bit), “I don’t know, I think they paid him [Brando] by the pound.”

19. Manso and/or an autobiography by Brando (Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me [New York: Random House, 1994]) goes to lengths to claim that it was Coppola who was delaying filming Brando’s parts while the clock was ticking, in violation of the contract. But, as longtime Coppola associate Fred Roos notes in Hearts, and as the Coppola camp contends in general, Brando was the one doing the contract-defying delaying. I think Coppola’s camp is more credible; watch Hearts and judge for yourself.

20. Sheen’s Wikipedia bio is right, I think, on one thing: “He is considered one of the best actors never to be nominated for an Academy Award despite his acclaimed performances.” For AN, he was nominated for the American Movie Award for Best Actor, and for the British BAFTA Award for Best Actor. Strangely, a number of basic facts related to his tenure in this film are in a bit of dispute, between my main references: for instance, as to when he first came to the Philippines to participate, after Harvey Keitel, previously in the Willard role, was fired: the 1979 program says April 26 (reports to set); Biskind, April 24 (p. 348; arrival in the Philippines, not necessarily arrival at the set); Manso, May 1 (arrival in the Philippines; p. 839).

21. When was the heart attack? Cowie: March 5 (p. 125); Hearts: February 28 (Eleanor Coppola quotes a journal entry dated March 1, saying he’d had the MI the night before); Biskind: March 5 (p. __?); and the 1979 program says Sheen was hospitalized March 5. It’s possible Sheen had the MI on February 28 and wasn’t admitted to the hospital until March 5.

22. The May 1976 typhoon was enough of a punctuation point to the production process that Dennis Jakob, an assistant to Coppola, remarked, “The typhoon killed him…. [Concerning the production experience as a whole] I thought Francis was in way over his depth.” Quoted in Manso, pp. 842-43.

Movie break: Awe at “desperadas” in the awe-inspiring West: Thelma & Louise (1991)

Rebels on the road, entry 3 of 3: Feminism grafted onto a seeker/refugee movie

This movie’s been famous for—can it be?—more than 20 years, and though I think I saw at least part of it (not when it came out) in a not-long-ago year before looking at it very recently, it is new to me for purposes of discussing it. It is one of director Ridley Scott’s few movies on American Everyman stories—and, as it happens, on deviant persons (see my July 31 and August 3 entries on Matchstick Men)—but it is interesting for a few reasons that have largely to do with its artistic/technical merits and its philosophical angle.

For one thing, it is visually stylish, and otherwise well-produced (including a sort of “romanticizing” and/or “sweetening” way in which music is used), so that the question of whether it is a case of style over substance arises. It is also not quite original—it fits squarely within the road movie tradition, which is so broad as even to include Bob Hope/Bing Crosby works; Leonard Maltin notes its lack of originality. I was reminded by this film of Steven Spielberg’s early effort, The Sugarland Express (1974), which I haven’t seen for some years, and of the Arthur Penn-directed Bonnie and Clyde (1967). You could toss in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). But I think it’s safe to say that originality is not meant to be a standard by which to judge Thelma & Louise (T&L); we can look past the familiarity (as if it were a necessary coat hanger) to see what is actually new, or “contrarian,” about it, and appreciate it on that basis (love it, and on other points be rather unsettled by it).

The main way it has something new to say is in transplanting a feminist viewpoint—embodied in its two main characters, and amusingly expressed in various vignettes and tiny exchanges through the film—to a subtype of the western, the desperado fleeing, trying to reach sanctuary. Screenwriter Callie Khouri is the star behind this, with Ridley Scott lending its talents in terms of marshaling production features and visual beautification to take us through a tour that makes good use of western vistas and even makes stops at banal motels seem like something out of an evocative dream.

(Scott in during-the-movie commentary alludes to the visual stylization as if it’s to buttress the story’s being a portentous last ride by the women—with the story, as Scott says, being a sort of noir, presumably meaning doom-aimed; I can see his point regarding the style, though my own immediate take was that the visual beauty made the story seem like a weird dream, which is almost the same thing.)

Scott’s instinct for making visual beauty in ways that turn up repeatedly in his films is on display here—particularly, light made decorative in a host of ways: diffused through sprinkler water; glinting off swimming pools; led to make night rain look like a delight; color-radiating through a fish tank; glistening on wet pavement; reflected in mirrors; and making outdoors brilliant (though flat) through a window while an interior shot is more “sullenly” dim—a variety of a standard cinematographic technique (and often inevitable due to conditions), actually. (Scott is probably one of the few major directors who gets elated to hear that local rain is in the forecast during his production schedule.)

Some early scenes with Thelma and Louise at a bar on their way to a vacation seemed very MTV-ish to me—with production styling that includes cinematographer’s smoke in the background diffusing light to give depth and differing emphases in a complex interior shot; and a lot of interior shots with colors balanced across the screen, warm colors (reds, yellows) balanced by cool (blues, greens). Who thought stops at bars and diners in the West could look so much the stuff of high-class magazine shoots?

And of course, his team includes composer Hans Zimmer, supplying a sort of smoothed country-and-western score with slide guitar, harmonica, an occasional bit of synthesizer…when source music—or something like it—isn’t used to thread a mood through a scene.

In fact, I found myself on repeated viewings to be admiring this film, as if it were good for a film school class on production design and such things as editing and soundtrack music, but this beautification glosses a story that is in some ways just sad—women who have become desperados (desperadas would be the correct Spanish spelling) starting with the semi-accidental murder by Louise of a loutish man at a bar who was trying to rape Thelma. Their problems compound as they lose money brought by Louise’s boyfriend, and their grasping at sources of help parallel their increasingly seeming to lose a conscience about what they’re doing. This plus the movie’s often-amusing feminist touches make for a sort of diverting romp, but in the end I wonder whether a feminist philosophy is best supported by this kind of story, and not by one where the heroines come to some resolution, or beginning thereof, where they can pursue their independent-minded lives somehow in coordination with (but not with total love of) stultified and sometimes-enlightened society?

Coming to this movie, as I said, basically for the first time, and really only looking hard at Ridley Scott this year for the first time, I will lay out my further discussion this way: (1) how Ridley Scott works and sees himself as a director, and how he approached this movie; (2) the basic framework of the movie, as a kind of “noir” and using some stock elements, to make its more creative or original points, which are related to feminism; and (3) how well this movie holds up with regard to feminism, or its having any sort of wider cultural significance.

1. Scott’s background, and choice of this movie

When I listened to Scott’s during-the-movie commentary, for about the first half of the movie, it affirmed in some ways, and fleshed out in others, my appreciative understanding of him. His impressively visual style derives, not surprisingly, from his having been trained as a designer, when in art school in England. In this way, he seems to exemplify a sort of European way of artists’ getting set up for careers, which I know a little more distinctly (though secondhand) from the old-time German way, which was in the manner of learning a particular trade, and that could include what we would today call certain kinds of arts. For example, my father’s father learned to be a portrait photographer as a trade in Germany, and practiced it here in the U.S. One of that man’s brothers trained as a chef; and so on.

Early in his career, Scott made a movie or show for the BBC, with technical help on the production from his brother Tony; then he found it hard to break into making movies as a career. So he turned to producing television commercials, which (I knew) was Scott’s forte for years before he started directing. Then he directed the feature film The Duellists (1977), which he seems to have developed on his own and which opened the door for him in Hollywood, but apparently studio execs didn’t know how to market it. Then his big break came when he directed Alien (1979), which has long been cited as what put him on the directing map (and actually is accounted a major landmark horror/sci fi film in its own right).

But the time Scott made the also-widely-esteemed Blade Runner (1982), he was about 45. Born in 1937, he is not really of the baby boomer generation. So, by the time he had hit his stride in directing movies in the 1980s, he was both older and well experienced in making TV commercials (he did thousands, I think he said), as well as having been schooled in production design. The result is that he is largely a visually-oriented, production-oriented director who is also confirmed as a craftsman by long experience. He is not, by these and other measures we can ferret out, the type of director—a writer type—who would seize on a story idea for whatever reason it appealed to him and then, in deliberate preproduction, fuss over every word and concept, the way Stanley Kubrick might have, or shape a story for both its overall craft and its literary potential, the way Francis Ford Coppola could be said to have done with his script for Patton (1970), or his work on the scripts for The Godfather (1972) or Apocalypse Now (1979).

But this is not to say Scott is an illiterate as far as the script side of things goes. As he notes in his T&L commentary, he was interested in branching out into a character-driven story, as opposed to what he had been directing for some years (he didn’t want to be “type-cast” as a director). The T&L script, which had been floating around for some years (within his production company, and perhaps outside it as well), appealed to him, and he had long discussions for its writer, Callie Khouri, to understand it enough so that, as he says, once he was dealing with the actors, he could answer all their questions. The net result was that, while some studio execs dismissed the script as about “two bitches in a car,” Scott was poised, once the movie was slotted to be made, to “support the idea of female opportunity” with this film’s theme (this may paraphrase him).

(Side note: I think Scott is to be valued, leaving aside his British “alienation” from the daily-striving, petty details of American life [which may be to any Brit’s credit], for knowing his virtues and bounds as a director—being art/production-oriented—and also being old enough [and somewhat blue-collarish] to bring a wisdom of age and unpretentious social-level origin to his interpretation of stories, which tends to override whatever lack of “hipness” he has about American behavioral or psychological fashion.)

I admit that the strength of T&L, if you leave aside the cliches and other lack of originality, is in the complexity of its script, which allows for showing how Thelma and Louise demonstrate multiple sides of themselves as circumstances bring about, and even in such comic potential as in Thelma’s first seeing Brad Pitt’s armed-robbery drifter demonstrate how he conducts a hold-up, and then later in the movie Thelma, in defense of her and Louise’s interests, uses almost exactly the same “script” he had. So this, giving a solid, detailed framework for production of the movie, and Scott’s proclivities as a production designer, show how this film has its charms in its slick style and smart details.

Apparently production requirements for the supposed Grand Canyon scenes late in the movie—which were filmed in Utah (most of the film was done in California)—were such that studio execs (I assume he meant) were second-guessing Scott in a torrent of thick-headedness; he says he “became a screamer during this movie” when it came to defending what he wanted to do, which of course he justified based on his methods and ideas developed in his long experience beforehand.

2. The story—serving feminist ends

Geena Davis was apparently cast for Thelma before Susan Sarandon was on board. Scott notes Davis’s intelligence, but she was willing to take on the part, and he has felt she was the best actress for “ditsy” Thelma. Sarandon was settled on in view of her style that would lend itself to Louise’s being, earlier in the film, a “leader” and “mother figure,” as Scott puts it. Both affect Western accents—which, among all the actors in this movie, comprise one thing that somewhat grates on me in terms of the “stock” characteristics the movie takes on as a “familiar” framework from which to make its more original mark.

The two actresses are interesting in a surface way. Both are not strikingly beautiful, say, in the way of a Christie Brinkley or others of the model type. But both are attractive in their way; Davis has a sort of broad face with a cleft chin and full lips, and eyes that seem not quite to match her face but can show her potential to articulate character. Sarandon is unusual—whom, alas, I always think of as Janet from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (because of my many, not-always-relished high school viewings of that movie, as many other people have had; Sarandon also admits the permanent way that Rocky Horror has become the primary anchor of her reputation).

Sarandon usually seems to give a sense of being a strong character, and partly it seems a reflection of her big eyes, which indeed in T&L she can widen as to give a sense of fierce intensity, though after she shoots the rapist, her eyes make her look a little like a Halloween mask. A bit earlier in the film, in starting on their trip, Thelma and Louise are dressed up in almost-matching reddish hair, scarves, and stylish sunglasses; the two women seem like two friends out for “a day out for the girls,” but you presume they are also such as you may not want to underestimate if push came to shove with them. Actually, you won’t see how their characters can be (for better or worse) until misfortune sets in.

Louise is a waitress who has a boyfriend, Jimmy, played by Michael Madsen (whose character Scott points out works as a rock star, which would have been a risky choice for Louise, in view of such people’s assumed lack of reliability, and given her past experience with an apparent rape or the like in Texas). Thelma is her friend, a stay-at-home housewife with a rather loutish husband, Darryl, played by Christopher McDonald. Both live somewhere in Arkansas. The two arrange to have a vacation getaway in Louise’s 1966 Thunderbird convertible. Thelma’s husband doesn’t know exactly where she went.

            Things start to go south—figuratively and literally

The story becomes more of a “noir,” as Scott calls it—or, as we can say, a matter of characters on a downward arc of doom—when Thelma and Louise have stopped at a bar, and Thelma starts to loosen up, downing a fair amount of booze (Louise cuts loose a bit and similarly indulges, but not as much). A flirtatious male picks Thelma up; they dance; eventually they end up in boozy/horny mode out in the parking lot. Then the male starts to try to rape her.

Louise appears on the scene with a handgun that Thelma had originally packed in their bags on the thought that there would be crazies, snakes, and bears to deal with—but Thelma had handled it as if it was a tarantula she could barely touch. Louise wields it well enough to make the male let Thelma go. When the male engages in some sharply daring, contemptuous remarks to the women, Louise pulls the trigger—and kills the male. Out of a night of booze, momentary passion, and (as we don’t know at first) Louise’s character “lessons” from having dealt with a horrifically abusive male in the past, comes this moment that is, we might say, fairly tragic in the “Greek tragedy” or “Shakespearean tragedy” sense. A character misstep, not a matter of a gross lack of character or ridiculous mere circumstance, has set of chain of dramatic trouble in motion.

The women choose to flee. At first, Louise is “trying to think” and “doesn’t want to go to jail” and such: they are in a panic…so a fleeing version of their road trip begins, but relatively innocently at first.

The movie becomes a sort of mixed sojourn/escape story, with the two women embracing the destiny of fugitives—Louise is the one who first determines they will drive to Mexico—while seemingly close on their tail, after picking up their trail surprisingly quickly, is a police investigator, Hal, played by Harvey Keitel (and, as Scott notes, with Keitel playing the most sympathetic male in the movie, somewhat against the usual type Keitel plays). Hal seems genuinely concerned for these women, not in a high-handed male chauvinist way, but because he gives them the benefit of the doubt and/or is charmedly mystified by them, and sees them as possibly victimized in the situation. An FBI man (as Scott seems to identify him), Max, played by Stephen Tobolowsky, has become a sort of ad hoc partner with Hal in tracking the women down. Max is a balding man who seems something of a stony geek, and is less sympathetic; so Hal has to assert his control of the “chase tiller” to give these women a bit of a break, while trying with caring determination to bring them to justice.

            Interludes-of-sorts with significant others

In a rather touching scene, when the women are camped at a motel, Louise phones her boyfriend Jimmy, in order to get him to send her $6,000 to help with her escape, without telling him exactly what is up. Sarandon’s handling of her mixed appeal for the money and her hesitating to explain why, while breaking down a bit with guilt and sadness, is well done and touching. The Glenn Frey song “Part of You, Part of Me” plays lightly in the background (though as a sort of soundtrack embellishment and not “source music,” because the location this is in isn’t clear—it’s heard in both Louise’s motel room and in Jimmy’s home, and turns louder once we are with Thelma by the pool); a sad of regretful sadness is conveyed nicely with this (while the song itself, to me, is almost too trite).

When Louise and Thelma—accompanied by Brad Pitt’s charming armed-robber drifter, J.D.—arrive at another motel, supposedly in Oklahoma City, where Louise expects to pick up the wired money, Jimmy turns out to be there with it. Jimmy wants to talk to her, and with a sort of gentle male initiative, arranges for a second room to be on his tab to accommodate all involved.

In an interesting, braided pair of sequences, Louise has exchanges with Jimmy, while Thelma—more the wildwoman, and who has already told her selfishly boneheaded husband on the phone what to do with himself—now is having a quick fling with J.D. in her own room.

Jimmy, whose similarity to Elvis Presley is even noted by Scott in his commentary (though Scott seems to see it as part and parcel of Jimmy’s sincere enough approach to being a rock star), tries to get to the bottom of what is up with Louise. At first, upset, he throws furniture around; she is ready to leave. Then he breaks out something meant to bring some reconciliation—an engagement ring. His sense of embarrassed irony and mixed emotions as he offhandedly extends to her the ring is one of the more artful touches to the scene—with him probably feeling that despite their current turbulent emotions, its larger meaning should blessedly supervene and bring about some peace. Louise gives a sort of show of embarrassed forbearance…and she begins to point out how he characteristically breaks out the ring when they are in a situation of drifting apart, or such.

This sort of situation can be handled in a crudely feminist way, maybe a la Nine to Five (1980), where the male chauvinist lout is put in his place in almost a sitcom-ish way. But in T&L, the taste and subtlety with which Louise and Jimmy talk out their situation, despite their not being the stuff of Henry Jamesian fiction, I think is laudable. Jimmy may be a bit of a lug of an Elvis-looking male; and Louise, while ostensibly the strong woman who is not going to be merely his “better half,” talks with him in a manner of respecting enough parity. A sort-of-elegiac scene the following morning, where they speak in a restaurant, is very well handled. Louise essentially gets across that she cannot be with him right now; and he is accepting that they cannot be a couple, and he is appreciating what he is losing in her, while he leaves her the ring as a token of affection. Again, music in the background gives a decorative touch to the poignant scene. I think that, in following whatever feminist agenda could be said to be articulated here, this all is handled pretty well. Jimmy may not be the dream male for every woman, but he has some class and good taste (unlike Thelma’s Darryl, who seems to have his comic potential as a world-class boob played up).

It is after this situation, with Louise and Jimmy delicately parting ways, that the story develops in such a way that it ends up in high gear with the women more confirmed than ever as fugitives who might resort to any means to get away, and not caring anymore. When Thelma turns up in the restaurant after Jimmy has left, and she shows the excited-eyed Dionysian aftereffects of a wild night with the armed robber, she seems “liberated” in her own way. But quickly—what about the money in the room? They both scurry back. The money is gone—the armed robber had stolen it. Louise breaks down, in despair now: their last ticket to freedom, gone. But now Thelma will take control; she’ll come up with a resolution.

            The third act settles in

And it is when, back on the road, Thelma holds up a convenience store using the bold tactics her armed-robber friend had showed her.

The rest of the movie is about these women more confirmed as outlaws, seemingly grimly satisfied with that because, as Scott points out in a different context, things are simpler for them once their legal status has turned a certain unambiguous way.

And they can engage in such “wish fulfillment” as, when they finally persuade a sexist truck driver to pull over, bluffing him with the idea he might get himself a fling—he with his mud flaps with a silver female silhouette and his grossly wagging tongue out his truck window—they give him what for: they blow up his truck with a gun, make him feel like he might be next….

I’ve sketched this detailed odyssey-of-sorts in what some may feel is a deficient way, but suffice it to say that, if this sort of thing appeals, it’s a movie to be watched for its details, its visual beauty, its vignettes. You’ll be entertained by plenty of those.

The one nagging question remains—especially in light of what Thelma and Louise’s ultimate destiny is, with Harvey Keitel’s kindly Hal on their tail, near the end in a hovering helicopter, amid scads of trailing police vehicles—what kind of service this story really does to the cause of feminism.

3. What kind of feminist message, overall?

This film won an Oscar for best original screenplay. (Carolyn Ann Khouri, born in 1954, won several awards for this screenplay from different bodies, according to her Wikipedia bio.) Her second produced screenplay, for 1995’s Something to Talk About, did not receive the same accolades. Her directorial debut was with Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002), for which she was writer, director, and producer.

Meanwhile, Sarandon and Davis were both nominated for Oscars for Best Actress, but they lost to Jodie Foster for her work in The Silence of the Lambs.

A very recent blog entry under the aegis of the magazine The Atlantic, from someone who was all of nine when T&L was released, voices praise for the film as the last great feminist film. Can that be?

The famous shot of Thelma and Louise, in their trusty Thunderbird, sailing out into midair in a what-the-hell try at last escape—though, since they are supposedly at the rim of the Grand Canyon, this is truly a last escape for them—is famous, as both an emblem of the film and, one would suppose, a key to its meaning. But are we to take this doom-laden film as giving a positive voice to feminism? Or is it inadvertently a concession to despair?

I had originally started formulating a big set of ideas, and had a constructive wish, to sum things up here, but I will try to keep it relatively simple, because I can maybe better address the “big questions of feminism” somewhere else, if and when I’m ready. For years I never cared to get into the “war of the sexes,” which on a historical level, after heating up from a low simmer as the ’60s went on, first kept a rolling boil in the 1970s. For years my view with respect to women was to be concrete, good-faith, respective of novelty, and cognizant of the rich complexity of human relations. Plus, I think if there’s been any area of life where an ideological approach seems stillborn, it is in male–female relations.

To me today, after having experienced a wealth of different things, in the workplace and otherwise, that could give me copious grounds for making empirically valid conclusions, I would say that a rigorously ideological feminist philosophy is not for me, and moreover seems “objectively” wrongheaded, similar to communism, in the sense that it is a rigid orthodoxy that in some way does not accord with aspects of human nature and tradition that have long nurtured Western society in the past and have continued to do so, despite fashions of behavior and self-awareness in recent decades. I don’t think I am a conservative regarding women—at least not entirely—but I think a kind of stock feminism is something like communism was for me and other Americans in the 1970s, a sort of intellectual chewing gum, something that seemed reasonable at the time (and for a short period), and appealed to our growing minds and willingness to hope and work for greater justice in the world.

Interestingly, one article of feminist thinking that I actually did a college term paper on in 1984, the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI), was a sort of philosophical red herring (or virtual failure) that both gave me some food for thought that developed slowly afterward, and accorded with what I think I already instinctively knew or suspected. The BSRI was developed by social psychologist Sandra Bem and first introduced, I think, in 1974. By the early 1980s, there were many critical studies of it in psychological journals. I picked as my assignment, in an independent-study class where this was one pre-set option of a kind, to do a literature review of available critical studies of the BSRI. (Amusingly, the Wikipedia article on the BSRI, which is very sketchy, describes it in terms of supporting measurement of the two different sex roles. This is a significant retreat from its 1970s angle, which centered on promoting “androgyny” as the ideal sex role.)

Though it’s been years since I last looked at this paper, and maybe I would second-guess bits of it now, I think I remember enough of it to affirm the likely validity of what it said, which really just derived from what the studies it reviewed found. On every measure (or almost every), the BSRI did not measure what it purported to, which was predicated on the postulated idea that an “androgynous” personality type was ideal, or healithiest, combining both male and female traits. Standard female and male personalities no longer were ideal, the test implied; something between them was. The test claimed to measure how much an individual showed an androgynous personality.

But it did this with a checklist, from which the subject checked items off, comprising standard male and female traits. Some kind of built-in calculation derived an “androgyny” score from this. But if I recall rightly, among the test’s numerous flaws, the individual traits didn’t serve the test’s aims well because, on a surface level, some or many really revealed desirable traits, independently of the issue of androgyny. (This sort of thing generally has to do in part with a test’s “face validity.” It may also have to do with people checking off traits in accordance with a bias to appearing more how they wanted to be seen, not how they really were.) Further, not all traits equally correlated statistically with the supposed “ideal” of androgyny. I think there was some statistical problem with how individual traits that were supposedly “male” or “female” correlated with the respective genders looked at as “constructs,” and perhaps how this related to an idea of healthiness.

Some of the specific studies (again, I’m going on memory), and the whole set taken in the aggregate, suggested the BSRI was wrongheaded in abstract conception and highly flawed in execution. It was a failure, if not a simple fraud. It reflected wishful thinking, one might have said, on the part of its feminist designer. There was no such thing as “androgyny” as an ideal sex-role condition—especially if measuring it (and the meaning of it) was derived largely from what were considered “typical” if not “desirable” male and female roles.

Part of what I took away from this term paper was that males and females have fundamentally different roles in our society. Whether you see this as rooted in “natural law” or “religious fundamentals,” or as a matter of long-ingrained habit, or as arising otherwise, the overwhelming evidence, over the long term in recent decades, and even considering history over the centuries and millennia, is that males and females have “inherently” different talents, proclivities, and roles to play. The nurturing role of a mother can be done by certain males who have some talent for it and work to make it happen (though maybe not fully well). But as a general matter, the role is essential not only to human development but is seen in some long-ensconced form in the animal world. And females tend much more often to perform this task, as if they have the natural talent for it (though not all are equally good). The same sort of role defense can be made about males with their action-oriented, work-directed behavior, and their capacities for this. (This strikes me as I edit it as a lot of pompous kind of discussion. I think it’s a natural response to a certain kind of feminist cant that manages to float around….)

As a less definitional matter, I’ve often thought in recent years that whenever women talk as if they wish they had more of men’s freedoms, or what seem to be men’s privileges, they don’t realize that men typically are subject to isolation, alienation, and humiliation—not least from their work lives—that women, especially in their more delineated areas of life, are not subject to. Everyone can try out “the other sex’s” life if they want, but the general divergence between sex roles means each has its pros and cons, and does not mean that one is inherently better, or more genuine, or more blessed with freedom and respect. Life is more complex than that.

And so I would say that when it comes to “the feminist temper,” I think feminist issues and ideals are part of a loose array of trying to work out justice for, or amelioration of, fairly localized problems, and is a sum of not-rigidly totalistic behavior. It is very much in flux, contains experimental aspects, varies widely by different individuals, is subject on a broader level to historical changes, and at very least should give food for honest thought—for members of both sexes. But it should not be considered some “binding social institution that demands that women get all equal X, Y, and Z in our time,” and if there seems to be some sliding backward, “Well, then, won’t things ever change? I thought we’d already made progress,” etc., etc.

Some of the millenarian simple-mindedness of this is shown in something I read recently—in The New York Times, no surprise—where it was wondered who was going to take over for Gloria Steinem as a “leader” for women. Leader? What, are all women one big body of proletariat that needs a Fearless Leader to show the way to march “with bold curiosity for the adventure ahead,” to echo Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s movie? Do all women think the same? The answer is obvious.

All this said, when I consider what end Thelma and Louise come to, I wonder, Are these women such feminist heroines as they seem often to be (if in a sort of experimental, “let’s spit in the eye of The Man”) earlier in the movie? Is their rebellious drive off the cliff supposed to say how strong they are, how devoted to an ideal of freedom? Or does it mean simply despair? That (as the film overall says) “the feminist project” has no way to win satisfaction in this world?

I tend to think it says the latter, which leads me to think that there have to be other feminist movies to rank as “the best” to go in the canon with this one.