The Age of Movies by Pauline Kael

Author:Pauline Kael [Kael, Pauline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59853-171-8
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2011-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

:: Killing Time

Clint Eastwood isn’t offensive; he isn’t an actor, so one could hardly call him a bad actor. He’d have to do something before we could consider him bad at it. And acting isn’t required of him in Magnum Force, which takes its name from the giant’s phallus—the long-barreled Magnum .44—that Eastwood flourishes. Acting might even get in the way of what the movie is about—what a big man and a big gun can do. Eastwood’s wooden impassivity makes it possible for the brutality in his pictures to be ordinary, a matter of routine. He may try to save a buddy from getting killed, but when the buddy gets hit no time is wasted on grief; Eastwood couldn’t express grief any more than he could express tenderness. With a Clint Eastwood, the action film can—indeed, must—drop the pretense that human life has any value. At the same time, Eastwood’s lack of reaction makes the whole show of killing seem so unreal that the viewer takes it on a different level from a movie in which the hero responds to suffering. In Magnum Force, killing is dissociated from pain; it’s even dissociated from life. The killing is totally realistic—hideously, graphically so—yet since it’s without emotion it has no impact on us. We feel nothing toward the victims; we have no empathy when they get it, and no memory of them afterward. As soon as one person gets it, we’re ready for the next. The scenes of carnage are big blowouts—parties for the audience to gasp at in surprise and pleasure.

At an action film now, it just doesn’t make much difference whether it’s a good guy or a bad guy who dies, or a radiant young girl or a double-dealing chippie. Although the plots still draw this distinction, the writers and the directors no longer create different emotional tones for the deaths of good and bad characters. The fundamental mechanism of melodrama has broken down, I think: the audience at action pictures reacts to the killing scenes simply as spectacle. A tall, cold cod like Eastwood removes the last pretensions to humane feelings from the action melodrama, making it an impersonal, almost abstract exercise in brutalization. Eastwood isn’t very different from many of the traditional inexpressive, stalwart heroes of Westerns and cops-and-robbers films—actors notoriously devoid of personality—but the change in action films can be seen in its purest form in him. He walks right through the mayhem without being affected by it—and we are not cued to be affected, either. The difference is a matter of degree, but it’s possible that this difference of degree has changed the nature of the beast—or, to put it more accurately, the beast can now run wild. The audiences used to go mainly for the action but also to hate the ruthless villains, sympathize with the helpless victims, and cheer on the protector-of-the-weak heroes. It was the spaghetti Westerns (which made Clint Eastwood a star) that first eliminated the morality-play dimension and turned the Western into pure violent reverie.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.