PLAGUE DIARY 38: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

A Face in the Crowd (1957)
Not since Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart has there been such a pathetic attempt by an author to deify himself in his work. In 1952 Elia Kazan betrayed six members of the Group Theatre by identifying them as communists to the House of UnAmerican Activities Committee (the arm of Joe McCarthy, an anti-communist demagogue). This movie centres on a Trump-like demagogue (adequately portrayed by Andy Griffith). But at its centre is the moral dilemma of Patricia Neal, the journalist who discovers him. Griffith is sleeping in an Arkansa jail with his ubiquitous guitar when Neal finds him and turns him into a media celebrity, until — at the height of his fame — he is almost appointed ‘Minister of Morale’ for a right wing, isolationist, anti-communist president. At the end of the film, the luminous Patricia Neal suffers through the requisite torture over her contribution to Griffith’s corrupt success. But that suffering rings hollow — for me — because when Walter Matthew tells her: “You were taken in, like we were all taken in, but you got wise to him,” we realise that Neal is a stand in for Kazan — and he is only forgiving himself.  Apallingly, Kazan received an honorary Oscar in 1999 despite betraying his friends during the red scare. Yet Meryl Streep and Warren Beatty applauded him out of “regard’ for Kazan’s “creativity.” Many other Hollywood stars, to their credit, did not. Kazan’s crime was gigantic and unforgivable, but Kazan’s contemptible cowardice is not what makes this a bad film. The problem with A Face in the Crowd is that it is a polemic, not art. It is merely a passionate, articulate critique of demagoguery; it is an essay. At the end, Andy Griffith, after being exposed by Neal as a fraud who hates his followers, stands and yells, alone in a vast empty hotel room (with only an automatic applause machine for an audience): “They’re mine! I own ‘em! They think like I do, only they’re even more stupid than I am!” Yeah, hey, we get the message. Art that lectures is not art. And anyway, it never succeeds in changing anyone, because it preaches mainly to the gullible or already converted. A Face in the Crowd is propaganda; it appeals to people’s basest instinct; reason. Art, on the other hand, speaks to the heart. The heart does not know the difference between right and wrong, as it is an organ of feeling and instinct; and the home of paradoxical, mysterious, mixed emotions. The heart neither reasons, nor comes to solutions. It simply understands. Kazan’s dead serious A Face in the Crowd— praised as a film of ideas — pales against La Cava's screwball comedy My Man Godfrey. The proof is in Carole Lombard’s face.  A Face in the Crowd wants us to think about love and betrayal, right and wrong. But Carole Lombard’s face —when she looks into William Powell’s eyes — simply is mad love. Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream experiences mad love when she wakes up with an ass. And what exactly is she in love with when she kisses the ass, and cradles him with flowers? Well, first of all, she is in love with —an ass. In other words, that part of the human body that is sometimes hairy and which we expel unused food out of. You can try and deny it. But Shakespeare’s audience certainly knew, and would not have been too uptight to admit it (for chrissakes, the ass’s name is ‘Bottom!’) Titania is also in love with a donkey. And the phrase ‘hung like a donkey’ comes to mind. Ergo, Titania is love with either a human sphincter or a human dildo. Alternatively she is in love with a dumb animal, and an animal is not sentient in the same way a human being is. So ultimately, Titania — even if you reject the idea that she is in love with a someone’s bottom or the penis of a donkey, or even the donkey himself, is, at the very least, in love with a human who it is no way appropriate for her to be in love with. Someone who, if she was thoughtful, and in her right mind, utilising reason, she would not -- and should not -- be in love with. Have you not ever experienced this? (It’s the kind of love we see in Carole Lombard’s eyes when she gazes idiotically at William Powell. And Powell is the perfect recipient of that love, because he is not particularly handsome, especially when he shaves off his beard.) Love is supposed be rational; but it’s not. Shakespeare knew that, which is why he put lovers, madmen and poets in the same poetical soup. When I was 13 I read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Her ‘Objectivist’ creed was that we fall in love because we find our highest value in another person. When I ingested it, I was trying to convince myself that I was heterosexual — that I should fall in love with a good woman — when the only thing that actually turned me on were the parts of men’s bodies I saw in dirty magazines, or their anonymous handsome faces — the faces of men I didn’t know. And now I have been in love for nearly twenty years with someone who I imagine is noble. But I’m not at all sure that it isn’t mad love, and that I really know him at all. Take my father. After my mother divorced him he quickly married a woman much younger than he was, on the rebound. He soon found out she was already pregnant and had the marriage annulled. He promptly married my stepmother who was a homely, small-minded, rather dull woman. When she died, he turned his affections to his ex-wife’s best friend Kathy, who was very pretty and did not love him. I know this because she took most of his money but would not live with him, and rarely saw him. I didn’t care about losing my inheritance (no honestly, I didn’t). But it was hard to watch him sit at the dinner table, at age 85, and tell my sister and I: 'The reason I keep on living, is because of this little woman here’ -- a woman who lived in another country and refused to have him visit her, but nevertheless loved my father’s credit cards enough to wave them around proudly and with a certain elan: “I’ve got his cards!” she would say. It’s not up to me to judge another person’s love. But it seemed to me that my father loved a dream of Kathy, and his dream was that this very pretty, much younger woman, loved him back; and I wasn’t about to disabuse him of it. A drunken friend once said to me that maybe the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. He was saying that my feelings for the man I love have no basis in reality, that it’s a romantic fantasy, and nothing more. My answer is this. Life is a dream. Love is a dream. They are not a polemic, they are not a solution for anything. And there’s nothing to preach here; because there is no answer. Whatever I feel about love is glowing in Carole Lombard’s eyes, in the innocent doglike devotion she offers William Powell. “I want to want you, and I will, no matter what, whether it’s a dream or true.” That’s mad love. Full of puzzles, contradictions, making no sense at all. A revelation like mad love is what art give us; it can’t be quantified, or rationalized. It’s just there. And it will be there, long after didactic lectures from guilty cowards like Elia Kazan are long forgot.