March 4-10, 2004

screen picks

by Sam Adams

The Dream Life (Fri.-Sun., March 5-7, $5-$6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) With 30 seconds to sum up a presidential contender, CNN Headline News chose last weekend to impart this precious nugget: John Kerry proclaimed Old School his favorite movie of 2003. That Kerry's "choice," a transparent attempt to plump up his populism (in the vein of the infamous cheesesteak-with-Swiss incident), is still considered a reliable gauge of his character reveals the extent to which movies and politics have become inextricable. Even the profile's reference to Kerry's military career was captioned with an awkward filmic pun: You Got Served.

Movies have gone hand in hand with politics since the medium's invention, or at least since Woodrow Wilson lent his imprimatur to The Birth of a Nation. But at some point, the relationship shifted. Rather than two industries working to their mutual benefit (and sometimes antagonism), they began to act like two subsidiaries of the same corporation. Or, as J. Hoberman puts it in his new book The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties (New Press), "[m]ovies might be political events, and political events were experienced as movies."

Beginning slightly before its subtitular decade, The Dream Life kicks into high gear with Primary (1960), which also opens a weekend of screenings inspired by the book, capped by Hoberman's Saturday night appearance. Though it's often hailed as the first cinéma vérité documentary, Hoberman writes that Primary "invented the essential televisual rhetoric of American democracy in action." With its "ostentatiously unscripted" chronicle of John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey's battle for the Wisconsin Democratic primary, the film depicts the campaign not as a battle of wills but a battle of images. Humphrey explains agricultural policy to bored-looking farmers, while Kennedy is swarmed by throngs of screaming girls and preaches American ideals, not nuts and bolts. Matters of policy seem beside the point: Humphrey loses because he is square.

Hoberman turns frequently to historian Daniel Boorstin's notion of the "pseudo-event," a synthetic happening which exists only as it is reported by the news media (e.g. John Kerry's preference for rowdy teen comedies, or Howard Dean's "scream"). Though it was, by design, released too late to have any effect on the election, Primary foreshadows the way that movie cameras would turn momentary gestures into issues of state. It recasts a real event (a political primary) as a series of pseudo-events.

Speaking from his office at The Village Voice, Hoberman says he initially planned for The Dream Life to stretch from the end of WWII all the way through the Reagan era, and practical considerations dictated he "just opt for the middle." But the focus on "the Sixties" (which here linger until about 1975) is hardly accidental. Inaugurated by the election of a TV-savvy president whose life would be adapted for the screen while he was still in office, the decade's fate was sealed by his assassination, when, as Hoberman writes, "the imagined community known as America experiences itself viscerally as a collective entity." In other words, an audience.

In one of the book's most delirious passages, Hoberman fuses summer-of-'68 turmoil with its fictional analogue, Wild in the Streets (screening Saturday, after Hoberman's talk). Taking over-30 distrust to parodic extremes, Wild re-imagines the counterculture as a teenage revolution led by a charismatic pop star (James Deaniac Christopher Jones). After lowering the voting age to 14, the "troops" field a candidate for Congress (at 25, the oldest person they know). Switching to the present tense, Hoberman recounts her candidacy in tandem with Robert F. Kennedy's, melding the two until they seem equally true, or equally fictional.

Rather than lapsing into pomo relativism, Hoberman conjures a liminal space where movies and politics not only coexist but effectively merge: "the dream life of the nation." In such a space, The Manchurian Candidate (screening with Primary) can be considered not only "the quintessential Kennedy era thriller" but, in a sense, the era itself: "a movie that materialized mid-Missile Crisis to conflate right-wing demagogues and the international Communist conspiracy, juxtapose mind control and assassination; play with PR and televisual reality."

In the dream life, movies drift free of their makers, and audiences reconstruct them at will. "It was as if movies were speaking to them," Hoberman says. "They were having visions." To understand those visions, he set out to write "a history with dreamlike elements," treating American symbols "as if they were the real things." By cause-and-effect standards, it makes no difference what part of The Wild Bunch was shot on the day of the My Lai massacre, but in the dream life, Sam Peckinpah's Western can be seen as a reaction to events that would not be public knowledge for another two years, like a flash of light that precedes the sound of an explosion.

Tipping his hat to Walter Benjamin and Greil Marcus, Hoberman imagines "the secret agent of history," scurrying through the night to link up overtly unrelated events. Weaving together the strands of history with dazzling synchronicity, The Dream Life gives you the feeling that everything is happening at once, on the same plane. Critics might argue the way Hoberman extrapolates a domino chain from a few scattered tiles, but as he points out, "the universe loves coincidence."

The Dream Life doesn't address the decline in movies' social impact, and Hoberman shies away from generalizing about the art form's diminishing relevance (demonstrated, for example, in the dearth of American movies which address, even distantly, the shape of the world since Sept. 11, 2001). But he does point out how in the 1960s, as at the dawn of the sound era, the movie industry's panicky response to an audience that was changing faster than they could keep up allowed an unusual degree of creative freedom, which in his formulation means less that directors could express themselves than that they could more easily serve as conduits for the Zeitgeist. The crumbling remnants of the studio system still sheltered a movie like Ulzana's Raid, which closes the series on Sunday.

That Ulzana's Raid is set in frontier-era Arizona in no way prevents Robert Aldrich's Western from being among the finest movies ever made about Vietnam. (To drive the point home, International House precedes the film with Joseph Strick's Interviews with My Lai Veterans.) As a group of American soldiers track down a rampaging Apache warrior leading "a force of indeterminate number," their moral certainties slip away, and blood logic replaces the rules of war. In an astonishing sequence, a wagon containing a fleeing settler couple is set upon by Apaches. The soldier protecting them runs for safety as the husband is butchered, then returns, as if to save the woman, only to shoot her through the head. Fleeing again, he falls from his horse, and rather than turn his pistol on his attackers, he kills himself. Later, he's described by seasoned commander Burt Lancaster as "a good man."

Like The Manchurian Candidate (or Invasion of the Body Snatchers), Ulzana's Raid is a movie so thoroughly encapsulating its own time that it contains its own opposite. Is it a cry of anguish at the depths to which men will sink to defend so-called civilization, or an angry protest of the enemy who would force them to respond in kind? Can it be both? The Dream Life understands that, once movies are released into the wild, they never stop shifting, especially true in the years where a movie like Wild in the Streets or Bonnie and Clyde could stay in theaters for a year, waiting for the world to catch up to it. If movies no longer have the same effect, it may be simply because they don't have enough time.

Misc. Picks ReelBlack hosts its first Philadelphia premiere, Brandon Sonnier's experimental hip-hop narrative The Beat (Sun., 7 p.m., Prince Music Theater).