As usual, I’m going to start by admitting how much I don’t know or remember and how much I’m neither an historian, a student much of anything nor even a very careful thinker — my work here is to — well, I guess that’s up to you to tell me, really, what I do here or fail to, I don’t have to explain, do I? All I have to say today is: I have this idea that between the the construction of the first full-time motion picture studio in what was then known (fittingly?) as the Edendale district of LA and the shooting there of THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO in 1909 and the opening of the Regent, the first theater built for the showing of motion pictures, in Paterson, N.J. in 1914, the business we think of today as the entertainment industry was born and it mostly moved from its birthplace in New Jersey (a real US state, funnily enough) to LA in order to escape the stranglehold of Mr. Thomas Edison’s “Edison Trust” which used patent law and a variety of other spuriously-implemented mechanisms to control access to the profit-making funhouse moving pictures were. The two best history books about Hollywood I’ve read — and I’m not an exhaustive reader, so I’m making no special claims for these books — are THE WHOLE EQUATION by David Thomson and CITY OF NETS by Otto Friedrich and in them you’ll find the details you might want about this Trail of Fake Tears.
The reason this is on my mind is I read in THE ANKLER, a Substack about “the industry” that’s looking more like a media empire these days than most of the media empires it covers, a headline about Hollywood writers and how they’re all looking for work (and I am) but there was something about the headline and the sub-head that had a general tone of “It’s murder out there!”
And then that got me thinking about the bit part I play in that “murder” and how my own media diet these days is comprised of One Bite Pizza Reviews, the odd episode of I THINK YOU SHOULD LEAVE, a two-volume biography of William Faulkner which if I get through it by the time I’m floating above my body and saying to myself, like all those who die, “I can’t believe I thought I was that person,” I’ll be lucky, and how it’s nothing like what I used to get my entertainment from, although I’ll admit I’d love to see THE FALL GUY as long as I didn’t have to go to a theatre and actually sit through it. Such is life.
Interesting to note that Faulkner’s time in Hollywood — even though it was never really, strictly, time spent exclusively in Hollywood — was also the period during which he published all the books for which he’s not especially remembered and that THE SOUND AND THE FURY, AS I LAY DYING and LIGHT IN AUGUST were all written before he took up the predicament of writing for the pictures, a predicament he fed and fed off of for 22 years. (I think of my friend who once described his sexuality as a skin disease that resulted in the generation of a brown crust he couldn’t stop eating.) And yet, and yet, I myself can’t ignore the links between Faulkner’s use of and uniquely American expansion of the style known as stream-of-consciousness and how it may have related to his very real and persistent fascination with cinema, with the death-defying smear of eternally glamorous nowness it sells and I say “sells,” not “offers,” because cinema is and ever was “a going concern.”
Something was promised in those early days of film, in the way real and yet also simulated — while still being real, because the work of simulating is a real human task in and of itself) — something was promised in the way tiny human moments coded with nuance and titillating implication the apprehension of which was once previously reserved for the actually living were preserved at a price by an industry and could then be rerun, over and over, for a price, thereby linking money to the hope of immortality in a way it had never been linked before, not in that particular arrangement, with the money on top in the sense that it had gravity on its side and, for the first time in that field of existential mathematics, the hope didn’t — something infinite got promised by that industry that took what Joyce and Woolf and Proust (at one remove) had been doing with words on a page and played four-dimensional chess with it in a communal darkness that must have felt more like a rave when it began than we can ever know, must have felt more like being in the Chiesa di Sant’ Ignazio di Loyola in Rome in the 1600’s and listening to this while you looked up at what even then was called “The Fake Dome,” marveling at how much you could feel transported in this cradle of sensation while also knowing it was all a fabrication, that is to say, not a lie, but a construction that was more than the sum of its parts, something got promised and got delivered. Bravo.
(No, not the channel.)
But when cinema verité and then “talk shows” and “reality TV” and then the video camera “made the scene” and then the personal computer and the smartphone or whatever the generic term for it is, somehow we moved past the promise the pictures had made or the promise changed or revealed itself to be something other than we’d always though it was, but here we are — and that ecstatic smear a great movie moment was is now something we make in our own minds, not just because we have cameras but because cameras gave us new “words” for our own status as perceivers and constructors of meaning so now we piece together our own motion pictures in our brains and see our own lives with no help (or residual help, I guess, from creators in Hollywood) as limpid smears of being cool this way and being tragic that way and through our own homemade technicolor, real-time movies we can now see into our insert your own word here for free but not really because we pay a little each month now for all the machines we now use to shoot and edit and colorize these things we call “our lives” (which are just the products we market under our brand or brands, depending on how diversified a media empire we are), and all this is to say, "It’s not murder out there. It’s not unjust. It was business, it always was, and now this is business, too and while Insert Your Own Word Here will always find a way to make beauty out of anything, the time for that kind of art is ending, so the time for that kind of artist is too, full stop.” It’s a small difference if you’re not very smart, how you put things like this, but it’s a huge difference if you are, and by smart, I mean expansively compassionate to all being in all directions, and while I know THE ANKLER, God bless its wee heart, is the equivalent not even of an airline magazine but of a magazine for people in the airline industry (an industry about which, if you read the news about the high mortality rate among Boeing whistleblowers, one COULD say with a straight face, “It’s murder out there”), I can’t help but feel that the tone of that headline and story were low points and that whatever Faulkner sought in writing for the pictures will soon no longer be there to be had. Such is life.
Is it wrong of me to feel so much about such small things? To get so riled up about the way a writer for an industry rag ginned up their crap on a deadline? I am who I am. Like a lot of people, I grew up in a world where adults asked me to believe or pretend to believe a lot of lies, about them, about me, about capitalism — so I grew into someone with a violently reflexive antipathy for bullshit. I have a little voice in my head that’s going all the time that says —
Seriously?
— and sometimes people around me suffer because I see calculation and fraud where sometimes there’s just natural animal weakness and stupidity but I think it has its place, this kind of picayune attention-paying; because in the long run, it all adds up, and certainly I, someone who’s worked in Hollywood, intend to fight for my place in this business as long as I can for reasons that have mostly to do with sparing my children what I (perhaps wrongly) deem to be unconstructive destabilization, but if you ever catch me talking as if I ever thought what we call “Hollywood” or “the entertainment industry” should have lasted forever or that it owes its dues-paying devotees ANYTHING —
— please draw my attention to these words of William Faulkner’s, from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech made in 1950, in which he commissioned the writers of the future to only leave room in their workshops for “the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” And then remind me that there was a time before THE GODFATHER, before Faulkner, Woolf and Joyce, a time before writing, even, and that there will be a time after it and that whatever makes us human is and always was and will be always bigger than anything, that writing is and ever was just one way to point to the eternal in ourselves and everything and thereby codify that crucial correlation — please remind me, if I say or I sound like I’m saying, “It’s murder out there,” that that’s like saying it in a maternity ward or the great hall of Ellis Island, back in the day, or in vaudeville when the first matinee got cancelled because everyone was downtown at the Regent, i.e. nonsensical, unwise in the deepest sense and a little paranoid. Where are the voices that will help us see not just the pain in change but the hope…?
I think about that terrific scene in MULHOLLAND DRIVE where Betty and Rita walk in Club Silencio, get told over and over “NO! HAY"! BANDA!” — “THERE IS NO BAND” — but then sob in shared recognition of the beauty of the singer’s performance either knowing it’s unreal or forgetting. I think of a song by The Waterboys in which Mike Scott sings, “At sea on a ship in a thunderstorm, on the very night that Christ was born, a sailor heard from overheard a might voice cry, ‘Pan is dead! So follow Christ as best you can — PAN IS DEAD! LONG LIVE PAN!” Where are the visionaries in Hollywood, behind the laptops, behind the cameras and behind the desks at the studios, who can stop complaining and instead show us with radical fervor, in new ways, in new media, what the old media was only ever there to show us?
Anyone wasting their time wishing for the restoration of things as they were pre-strike, pre-AI, pre-streaming can have my sympathy but not my respect. The future is close by but elsewhere. There is no band. The dome is fake. In a very real sense, I heartily recommend to all (including me) — get over it!