Film Chronicle
THE CLOSE-UP OF LOVE
THE
«oMINous ISOLATION" in which the "Moment of Love" is seen
in our films is noted by Parker Tyler in
The Hollywood Hallucination.
He rebukes Hollywood for the "larger-than-lifeness" it grants the "Single
Instance" of sex; rebukes it for "isolating desire from its crisis in action";
for never evaluating the Single Instance in terms of "its relation to a
total society of acts and thoughts." Mr. Tyler's original observation is a
brilliant one; but the rebuke he delivers could be turned against him.
For he himself fails ever to read the significance of this hallucination in
terms of its relation to any total vision of things, or to read the signifi–
cance of such a total in terms of its relation to the public which so
avidly submits to it. The Single Instance, he says, results from Holly–
wood's withdrawal "from the reality and complexity of human prob–
lems," and this withdrawal results from artistic anarchy. Here he comes
to a stop. His Single Instance gleams for a moment, promising to signify
much, but dims to this.
And yet it need not have dimmed if only he had known how to add
up other observations which gleam fitfully throughout his book. He ob–
serves of Spade, hero of
The Malt ese Falcon,
that he lacks "dynamic rela–
tion to ... society," "cannot socialize his emotions, cannot throw him–
self into the . . . mystery of believing in values and participating in their
crises." Not only Spade but the majority of Hollywood heroes lack a
dynamic relation to society. That is why the Moment of Love has as–
sumed this ominous isolation.
In a recent film,
The Clock,
two young lovers go through the night–
mare of sensing about their marriage that it is empty of a certain meaning
because celebrated in limbo. A couple of uprooted kids-a girl who has
left home three years before to come to New York and get a job as a
secretary, and a small town soldier with two days in New York before
going overseas-meet by accident, fall in love, and decide to get married
immediately. At the marriage bureau the cleaning women have taken
over; turn off their vacuum cleaners briefly for the ceremony-which
cannot be heard anyway, as an El roars by outside. In a cafeteria where
the two go next, under the stare of a stranger at a nearby table, they
inquire of each other are their parents still living, had they better write,
and suddenly the girl begins to sob. When the boy says he guesses she
