Saturday Evening Movie Thread 09-28-2019 [Hosted By: TheJamesMadison]

Interpretation

Some years back I saw the movie Mad Max: Fury Road in theaters. It was a wildly entertaining 2-hour chase scene that miraculously maintained its threadbare plot over its entire running time. I saw some memes afterwards calling it a devastating feminist critique of capitalism. I was gob smacked with utter confusion.

The next time I watched it, I had this interpretation in the back of my head, and I began to laugh. If you are going to write a textual interpretation of the film you have to come away with the idea that women are terrible at literally everything they do and they need men to save them.

Think about it. Furiosa would have died several times without Max while Max got himself out of his own situation. He saved her in the dust storm. He got her out of the bog. He convinced her to go back to Immortan Joe's Citadel instead of driving directly into a flat wasteland. Even the two central civilizations sell this idea. Immortan Joe's Citadel has water, greeneries, and generally functions. The female society let its water turn toxic and, instead of finding a solution, ran away to the dunes before decided to blindly drive off into the wilds.

I then laugh and say, "Nah, it's just a 2-hour chase."

Going Deeper

Some people like to watch movies as just entertainments without any more thought than that. Some people like to place some level of textual analysis that tries to extract deeper meanings from just under the story's surface, but sometimes the people who write and make the movies themselves have ideas about it as well. Taking any of these three levels of interpretation is really a choice on the part of the audience, but I find it interesting when a textual analysis of a film leads to some general theme but the authors intended something very specific. So, I have two movies in mind: High Noon and On the Waterfront.

High Noon

Imagine you encounter some Gary Cooper movie you've never heard of before called High Noon. You know literally nothing about this and you spin it up, providing you fertile ground for a purely textual analysis of the film.

In it, we see Cooper's Will Kane married and then confronted with the news that a murderer he sent to prison five years ago has gotten out (legally) and is coming to the small town. Instead of running away, Kane stands tall but finds that he's alone, trying to rope in people from the town to help him but everyone refuses. Kane successfully fights of Frank Miller and his three cronies before tossing aside his tin star and walking away from the town forever.

Purely textually, the movie's about one man standing with his principles in the face of all manner of adversity. It's about standing firm even when everyone else walks away from the fight.

But, according to Carl Foreman, the screenwriter, the movie's about him and his experience with HUAC. You see, Foreman was blacklisted when he was brought before the House Unamerican Activities Committee (which, oddly enough, didn't include Senator Joe McCarthy) and refused to name names. Hollywood's policy at the time was to refuse to work with anyone who refused cooperation with HUAC, so Foreman was out of work for a while. He channeled the anger he felt into the screenplay that he was working on at the time titled High Noon. He saw himself as Kane, Hollywood as the townspeople who refused to help him, and HUAC as Frank Miller and his gang.

At the time of the movie's release, Foreman's interpretation was obvious to a lot of people. John Wayne and Howard Hawks both hated the film. "It's the most un-American thing I've seen in my whole life," Wayne said. They hated for what they saw as thin anti-Americanism and an unrealistic portrait of frontierspeople who would have spent years fending off Indians but were terrified of four outlaws. Ronald Reagan, though, often cited High Noon as his favorite film for Kane's commitment to law and order.

It feels to me that Wayne and Hawks took author intent into the film while Reagan either didn't know it or chose to ignore it.

On the Waterfront

Made just a few years later, Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront tells a similar story.

Terry Malloy is a nobody ex-boxer who does odd jobs for the local longshoreman's union in New York. He unwittingly has a hand in the death of a man going against the union and decides to stand up against Johnny Friendly, the union boss. Everyone is terrified of Friendly, so Malloy only gets little support in the form of Father Barry and Edie Doyle (similar to the limited support Kane gets from his wife in High Noon). Terry ends up confronting Friendly after Friendly has Terry's brother killed. He fights Friendly hand to hand, losing the fight itself but winning the moral war over the union members.

So, a textual reading of the film shows one man standing up against a corrupt system. It's extraordinarily similar to the textual reading of High Noon.

However, I find the author intent part of this actually pretty funny in part.

Elia Kazan was also brought before HUAC, but he did name names as opposed to Foreman. Kazan found that Hollywood hated him for it and he filtered his experiences into the making of On the Waterfront. Kazan was Terry Malloy and Hollywood was Johnny Friendly.

Now, the funny part has to do with the actors actually involved with the production of the film. Some of the actors had read the script and failed to make the connection between the story and Kazan's personal history. Some even tried to quit the production once they did find out. Textually, they were fine with a story about a man standing up to corruption, but once they found out that that corruption was tied to the Communist Party they balked.

I also think it's interesting that Foreman and Kazan approached the exact same historical event from a first person perspective, are on different sides of the argument, and both feel like they had been left to fight their fight alone. Foreman's movie got made by a Stanley Kramer, an independent Hollywood producer famous for message films and distributed through United Artist, and Kazan got his made by an independent producer Sam Spiegel and distributed through Columbia.

Levels of Interpretation

So what High Noon and On the Waterfront present is an interesting conundrum.

If you don't know anything about the artists and their intent in the films, you can get similar readings from both of them. They're about individuals standing alone in the face of adversity, but once you get to know what the authors were thinking as they wrote it gets interesting.

Again, On the Waterfront is the more interesting story. In Kazan's movie's case you have a film that's universally considered great, and that population includes a bunch of liberals who loathe the Blacklist. They love it for forging a type of American cinema on the world, the low budget independent film that created an authentic and dirty side of New York. Both Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee, native New Yorkers, continue to hail Kazan and On the Waterfront as a great filmmaker and a great film. They gloss over Kazan's intent of the film before talking about the film's setting, performances, and the generalized reading of the story at play.

I'm not here to say that there's really a right or wrong way to look at these films, however I do think discounting Foreman and Kazan's intents is narrowing the audience's ability to appreciate the films overall. Sure, we may not want to praise the work of a man who either hid the Communist conspiracy or turned on his friends, but to watch either High Noon or On the Waterfront without acknowledging the history is really only getting part of the picture.

The Horde Canon Phase 1

Last time I presented a choice to the Horde, listing ten movies and asking them to vote on whether they would be movies that we should consider part of a canon of films that helped to define who we are as a group of people. 60% affirmation as the threshold. You voted over the course of a few days and we have the first seven entries into the canon:

Total Recall
Escape from New York
Team America: World Police
The Road Warrior
Predator
Casablanca
The Blues Brothers

For some reason, you refused Ferngully: The Last Rainforest. It's like I don't even know you people.

I have the list of suggestions, and I'm continuing to compile them. There were a lot of responses.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:
Abominable
Judy

Next in my Netflix Queue:
San Andreas

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:
Avengers: Endgame (Netflix Rating 4/5 | Quality Rating 3/4) Full Review "So, yeah, I loved about two hours of this and tolerated the third." [Redbox]
Captain Marvel (Netflix Rating 2/5 | Quality Rating 1.5/4) Full Review "It's cohesively bad." [Redbox]
Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2 (Netflix Rating 3/5 | Quality Rating 2/4) Full Review "Someone needed to look at this and ask, 'Why don't Yondu and Peter have a scene until page 100?'" [Personal Collection]
War and Peace (Netflix Rating 5/5 | Quality Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "It's a technical achievement of the highest order and a narrative achievement that largely succeeds." [Personal Collection]
High Tension (Netflix Rating 2/5 | Quality Rating 1/4) Full Review "But, the movie up to that point doesn't work anyway, so I don't know why the twist would be some great breaking point." [Amazon Prime]
Mission: Impossible III (Netflix Rating 3/5 | Quality Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "If not for the needless emotional fakeout, I would like this movie a good bit more, but, even with a second viewing under my belt, I cannot let that pass. It's dishonest and makes me want to throw things." [Amazon Prime]
Life of Pi (Netflix Rating 5/5 | Quality Rating 4/4) Full Review "The movie is, of course, a wonder to behold, but it's also wonderful that it's got so much thematic and character driven depth." [Personal Collection]
Mary Poppins Returns (Netflix Rating 2/5 | Quality Rating 1.5/4) Full Review "I liked small pieces of this movie, but too much got cut up in over-active editing and the story feels really mismatched with what kind of movie it wants to be." [Netflix Instant]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.

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I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

posted by OregonMuse at 08:05 PM

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