Where the Movies Affect Life

A Hope That Mr. Menjou's Naughty Behaviour on the Screen Will Be Copied in Real Life

AN ENGLISH CRITIC

THAT the cinema exercises a considerable influence on the lives of those who frequent it is obvious. It would be extraordinary if it did not. Men and women, boys and girls cannot come into almost daily contact with a great imaginatively suggestive force and remain entirely unaffected. To me the surprising thing is that they are not more profoundly and comprehensively influenced than they seem in actual fact to be. For, considering the frequency and the vivid quality of their appeal, the movies seem to exert a comparatively small influence, an influence out of proportion with their mere bulk. Works belonging to other art-forms have, in the past, exercised a relatively much deeper and wider influence.

So far as I can see, the main reason for this state of things consists in the simple fact that, while the works of art which have deeply affected life have been produced by men of outstanding personality, films with very few exceptions are the product of anonymous mediocrity. Innumerable are the novels and the poems that have been written in the course of the last two hundred years; but of those, how few produced the slightest perceptible effect on their contemporaries! Life was affected only by those works which had a striking individual quality. And here we may remark that the effective works have not invariably been identical with the best works. In many cases this has been so. Byron and Balzac both influenced contemporary life. But so did Macpherson, the author of that cloudily romantic, sham-Gaelic poem Ossian, which was the favourite reading of Napoleon and Goethe. Ossian is a preposterous work; but, in its age, it was novel; for its contemporaries, it had a striking individual quality.

MOREOVER, bad or good, the striking and influential novel or poem has always been the work of one man—a single personality with all its idiosyncrasies, all its one-sidedness, all its manias and exaggerations. Films, on the other hand, are rarely the work of a single mind. In any film adapted from a novel or play we have, first of all, the mind of the original author, then that of the adapter and continuity writer, then that of the director and, finally, the minds of the designers of sets, the photographers and the actors and actresses. Acting and reacting together, these various minds tend naturally to cancel out one another's idiosyncrasies. The final result is a work that is neutral, that represents the lowest common measure of average humanity. In practical politics committees are useful precisely because the net result of their labours is to produce something that represents humanity's lowest common measure.

Individual men and women being irreducibly different from one another, it follows that a regulation framed by a number of people is more likely to be acceptable to the whole population than one framed by a single individual according to his own private tastes and ideas.

But art is, in its essence, the work of individual personalities. It is absurd to suppose that one person can like all works of art; he cannot, and if he tells you he can, he is lying either to you or to himself. One can only like the works of art produced by individuals with a mentality, an outlook on the world in some way similar to, or at least harmonious with, one's own. I have always found that the people who professed to like all works of art really cared for none.

THE film, then, is generally a neutral work, produced by a committee. It follows that one can never really like the average film— never care for it passionately, as one cares for other works of art by individual authors. One can be amused by the film, one can be lulled by it into forgetting the outside world, one can find it an agreeable killer of time, an opiate substitute for thought. And it is not merely by accident, as a result of the way they are made, that most films have the neutral quality which I have described. The policy of the film companies is to keep them neutral. Films, in order to pay their way, have to please an audience of millions. An audience of thousands is sufficient to keep the author of a novel. Plays can be run profitably with total audiences of a few hundred thousands. The novelist and the playwright can therefore afford to appeal to a specialized audience of people like themselves. But films will only pay if they are seen by millions—and millions, moreover, selected at random, from town and country, from among all the races and nations of all the continents; millions of children as well as millions of adults; uneducated, halfeducated and highly educated millions. It is impossible in the nature of things that any single individual work of art should please all these people. Hence the necessity for providing a neutral product, expressing no particular personality, but just generically human in quality and just entertaining enough to draw audiences to the picture theatres.

The works of art which have exercised a great influence on the life of their epoch are those in which some particular human tendency is isolated and vividly symbolized. To people who have the same psychological tendencies as those embodied in the work, the symbolic, vivid and exaggerated representation of an aspect of their own characters, a phase of their own thoughts, will come as a liberating revelation. Seeing themselves as they might be, if a part of themselves were developed, they are stimulated to imitate the artistic creation, to try to become that which they feel to be a projection of their own personalities.

Thus, to all the young men who, in the years immediately following the Napoleonic wars, found themselves suffering from disillusionment and boredom, to all who felt that they were great souls misunderstood, who regarded themselves as the victims of society, Lord Byron's poems came as a revelation of what they themselves might become. In Childe Harold and Don Juan they discovered two complementary aspects of the same rebellious Titan—the Titan who lodged, as they suddenly perceived after reading the poems, under their own waistcoats and whom they forthwith tried to externalize in their everyday lives. In the same way the naturally romantic souls, who had pined in the rationalistic atmosphere of the French eighteenth century, discovered in the works of Rousseau the virtuous and greathearted hermit whom they had always obscurely felt themselves to be. For a later generation than Byron's, a generation brought up in the midst of the intense ugliness of newly industrialized England and the unprecedented respectability of the Victorian era, Oscar Wilde was the revealer of a hedonist who lived only for beauty and the sensations of the moment. The artist who, in our own day, has most profoundly influenced life is probably Marcel Proust, whose incredible subtleties of psychological analysis have revealed to the generation that reads him new modes of sensibility, new refinements, new pleasures and agonies in the immemorial art of loving.

AMONG the millions who frequent them, the films have exerted no influence comparable in intensity to that which individual works of art, like those which I have mentioned, have exerted on their devotees. It may be doubted whether they ever will, not only on account of their neutral quality, their lack of individuality, but also because, without words, it is almost impossible to make any but the most rudimentary idea intelligible. Confining ourselves to the examples already cited, we may doubt whether such characters as Byron's world-weary Titan, Rousseau's virtuous misanthrope, Wilde's hedonist (all of them symbols of ideas as well as mere feelings) could be adequately represented on the cinema. The much more complicated characters created by Proust are certainly unrepresentable except by means of an elaborate intellectual analysis using words as its medium.

Having now ascertained what the cinema cannot do, we can go on to discuss what kind of an influence it can and does exert on those who frequent it. The influences most often attributed to the movies are bad ones. Children and adolescents who steal or commit crimes of violence very frequently put the blame for what they have done on the sensational film. The excuse is now a hackneyed one and it may be that the more intelligent boy-burglars and boy-murderers make use of it deliberately; for a crime inspired by external influences is one for which the criminal cannot be held wholly responsible. But when all these cases have been discounted, it remains abundantly proved that films representing murders, holdups, burglaries, swindles and promiscuous shootings, do certainly predispose the more unstable-minded of their adolescent spectators to go and do likewise. To act rapaciously and violently belongs to our nature and young people in whom the self-regarding instincts are strong and insufficiently repressed by education may see in the cinema crook or bandit the liberating revelation of their own potentialities: These criminal influences of the cinema are obvious and relatively uninteresting.

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More interesting (at least to anyone who is not in immediate danger of being robbed or murdered by a screenstruck child) is the influence exercised by the films on the modern conception of what constitutes happiness and a good time. I have written in another article in Vanity Fair about the contemporary mania for dancing, sitting about in cabarets and the lounges of hotels and, in general, participating in the ready-made, commercialized pleasures of modern cities. The cinema is undoubtedly to some extent responsible for the amazing growth in the popularity of these amusements. It is impossible to go to any picture theatre without seeing, some time during the course of the performance, a luscious representation of the modern "good time", complete with cabarets, Champagne, partially unclothed dancers performing under limelight, paper streamers, balloons, the black bottom and other orgies. In the cinema universe these things stand for pleasure, and the only alternative happiness which the screen ever has to offer is that of vegetating in country gardens with grey-haired Mothers and pure young girls.

A little reflection shows that this state of things is inevitable as the cinema is incapable of representing any human activity involving the use of language. Now, the majority of the most refined and genuine pleasures are precisely those in which intelligence, and therefore language, are involved. No cinema hero or heroine has ever known the pleasures of conversation, of philosophic argument, of reading, for the simple reason that none of these things can be represented in dumb show on the screen. Whereever the story demands that the characters shall have a good time, they must have it in some visible way. The cabaret fairly imposes itself; and when fatigue sets in, the rustic garden, Mother and the pure sweetheart are the no less obvious reaction and refuge. It may be enquired why the movies should have popularized the cabaret and not the garden and the grey-haired Mother. The answer is that, while everybody has a greyhaired Mother, the majority either live out of range of cabarets or else, if they inhabit the city, cannot afford to frequet them assiduously. What is unknown or little known is always more attractive than what is known. Moreover, as no human power can possibly increase the number of Mothers belonging to any given individual, it follows that any increase that takes place must be an increase in the numbers of those instruments of happiness which can be multiplied. The process will only cease when there are as many cabarets as there are Mothers.

The films deal almost exclusively with love, but I cannot discover that they have had any influence on the way in which that passion is felt or expressed in real life. The troubadours, the chivalrous ascetics, like Guido Cavalcanti, the platonizing poets of the Renaissance really did exercise an influence on the lives of certain of their contemporaries, who made love in a different way than they would have if these poets had never existed. Conversely the eighteenth-century writers who, like Crebillon the Younger, took the cynical, physiological, unromantic view of love, undoubtedly helped to make the upper-class society of their epoch as sexually promiscuous as in fact it was. The cinema version of love is too banal and unindividualized to exert any influence at all. The chastity of the heroines is presented as something so flat, commonplace and unimpassioned, that nobody, I imagine, can ever have been inspired to imitate it. Indeed, it is a fact worthy of remark that, while the movies have been consistently pure and respectable in tone, the behaviour of the younger generation has became steadily more loose. This cannot be accounted for by any influence exercised by the villains of the films, who are never anything but professional vamps and professional seducers. Neither of these types can have inspired the perfectly ordinary and decent young men and women, of whom we now see so many living in what their elders would have called sin. We must conclude, then, that the movies have had no effect on the making of love in real life.

In some recent films we may observe an entirely novel tendency to exalt as a hero the sophisticated villain, as opposed to the scoundrelly he-man, who has always been held up for admiration. This phenomenon is probably due to the fact that the cinema possesses at this moment an exquisitely accomplished villain of this type in the person of Mr. Menjou. (In this context I may remark parenthetically that the influence exercised by the cinema is largely the influence of individual actors. They provide what the films, as complete works of art, lack—individuality and talent. At the same time they create a certain continuity between films otherwise unrelated to one another, thus imparting to the total production of the studios something of that persistence of personal identity, that uniformity of style characteristic of the complete work of a single author.) Mr. Menjou's films are deservedly popular. Whether they have had much influence on life it is still too early to say. I hope they may. It is time that somebody did something to check the rising tide of feminine domination and explode those preposterous and exaggerated notions of chivalry which result in the wholesale acquittal of female criminals and the framing of marriage laws fantastically biased in favour of the female partner. If Mr. Menjou can achieve something by means of his urbane representations of frigid and calculated caddishness, then he will have done a great service, not only to the male sex, but also, I venture to believe, (such is male vanity and fatuity!) to the cause of civilization and progress.

But of this some other time. Meanwhile, I can only repeat my hope that Mr. Menjou's really horrible behaviour on the screen will be widely copied in real life.