GOING TO THE MOVIES
Stephen Koch
THE FATE OF SERIOUSNESS
Ideas have their own patabola of rise and fall. For over a hundred
yeats, first literature, and then film, have been devising formal perspectives
on that alienation which is the modernist literary theme pat excellence-the
diseases and dilemmas of the rootless mass mind, the solipsisms of the uncom–
mitted intellect, the terrors of a social destiny without content, or a private
destiny without love .
It
should be needless to say that the weary world has
grown no less alienated as the literary notions envisioning it have slid through
their history of invention to convention to cliche to worse. But when the
conventions have become, so to speak, part of the alienation problem, sooner
or later the relation between an urgent reality and its dying cliches becomes
explosive. Credence flatly rebels. To be sure, the cliches may retain some of
their lingering cachet as ex-ideas, and of course they ate still' 'true." Most
cliches are self-evidently true. But divested of an authentic thought'S latent
promise of new or renewed perception, they have become truths in which it is
impossible to believe . Last spring, with the almost simultaneous release of
Michelangelo Antonioni's
The Passenger
and John Schlesinger's
The Day
ofthe Locust,
two major mms appeated, trafficking with the dying platitudes
of contemporary seriousness in such vatiously incompetent and cynical ways
that each provoked, despite itself, a small crisis of consciousness. One noticed
that the very ideas on which they ate based have begun to go rotten.
Both films claim to be grand moralized landscapes of the modern spiri–
tual life . Both patticipate in a major category of the modernist natrative
achievement-an
art
oflandscape that includes Nathanael West himself and,
as its preeminent touchstone and example, Kafka. In this att, the moraliza–
tion ofa landscape aspires to an almost visionary energy. Both Schlesinger and
Antonioni lack that energy to the point ofoffensiveness, and the reason seems
to be that the films' ideas ate in an advanced state of intellectual decay . Fairly
or unfairly , one cannot rid oneself of the feeling that these movies offend less
because they ate failures than because they ate falsehoods.
The Passenger
fails on the most elementary level. I, for one, suspend
