Lazy Sunday Throw-Away about Movies: "It's yours to right the great wrong done..."

Sunday, cigarette #4

The Housemates and I watched Citizen Kane last night, and, while I could use that as an excuse to write a mash note to yellow journalism, I think my views on that are pretty clear. (Yale Political Union plug: When Katrina vanden Heuvel comes to the YPU, the debate will probably be “Resolved: The press should be partisan.” Your hats, hang on to them.)

Grand Unified Theories of the Press aside, the next time CK’s stock gets reevaluated I’d like to go on the record against giving it top prize, mostly because I have a hard time imagining the kind of person whose life would be changed by watching Citizen Kane. It makes a relatively uncontroversial point aimed at American megalomaniacs, a pretty narrow audience, and it’s fun to look at without being particularly fun to watch. I can say with confidence that all of the jokes are good because there are only three of them.

Three of the five movies I've seen this month would make excellent replacements. (The two that don't make the cut are Time Bandits, which is disqualified for, in Pip's words, "being very 80's, involving time travel, and starring several midgets, because a movie can only get away with two of those things at once," and No Country for Old Men.)

Come Back Little Sheba (1952):
An old, loveless couple takes in a young female boarder that who is a temptation for the husband and a reminder to both husband and wife of the child they could never have. It manages to argue Stay With Your Wife without resorting either to Just Because It's Your Duty or to You Really Are Just As In Love As You Used to Be You Just Don't Know It. I'd hate to have to explain exactly how it does so to someone who'd never seen it, but I think it's something like this: "You two are out of love, but that just means you've transitioned from middle-aged marriage to old people marriage, which is a transition in the same way that blushing honeymooners to middle-aged couple is a transition. If you take the time to explore the genre of marriage you are now performing, you will find that it has its own emotional and spiritual benefits, including, maybe, a few that you can't get any other way."

The Sweet Hereafter (1997):
There are two kinds of forgiveness in the world. One of them is basically Girardian scapegoating of the innocent except the innocent is yourself. The other kind, the kind that Sarah Polley (the girl from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen!) does in this movie, doesn't turn the desire to destroy back in on the self, but doesn't direct it anywhere else, either. The grief just evaporates, but in a strangely satisfying (as opposed to super-frustrating I-was-never-really-mad-in-the-first-place) way. It's weird that this is the only Atom Egoyan film that anyone in America ever watches, because The Adjuster is in a lot of ways much better ("You don't know it yet, but you're in shock")—maybe the bizarre promotional poster was the problem—but The Sweet Hereafter benefits from having less going on.

Johnny Guitar (1954):,
Kitsch, kitsch, and then some. You know how when Michael McKean says "I'm gonna go home and sleep with my wife!" at the end of Clue, it's actually the campiest line ever? That kind of crypto-homosexual ironic vortex of camp, but with Joan Crawford. But if you want to be a female gunslinger, camp is something you're going to have to deal with.