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Al-Ahram Weekly 1 - 7 July 1999 Issue No. 436 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 1 - 7 July 1999 Issue No. 436
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Special Interview Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters The book of cute
By Peter Snowdon
The movies hate TV. Not only that, they hate it for all the right reasons. They hate it because, like happiness, God and the American Way of Life, it is essentially totalitarian (The Truman Show). They hate it because it takes the sacred fabric of human relations and turns it into a commodity to be bought and sold, because it reduces even the profoundest words to the status of a marketing slogan, and because in the process it exploits racial minorities, who fortunately turn out to be big enough in their designer dotis to forgive what it has done to them (Holy Man). They hate it because it is prurient, ruthless and manipulative in pursuit of the bottom line. Above all, they hate it because it prevents Matthew McConaughey from making out with Jenni Ehle on the main screen of the Ramsis Hilton, and obliges him instead to risk his manhood -- and redneck credibility -- on a ridiculously over-polished dining table with well-known Old World tart Elizabeth Hurley (Ed TV).
Tom Hanks helps Meg Ryan cope with economic reality
Of course, the movies have always hated TV. They have always looked down on it as inherently untrustworthy, devoid of any intellectual or aesthetic integrity, in thrall to the cult of immediacy and the power of money. More importantly, they have always seen it as a threat to their own monopoly on both the terms of representation and the profits of the box office. At the same time, however, they have cherished it for the lustre it helped restore, by contrast, to their own rather tawdry claims on virtue. The great anti-TV movies of the past -- Broadcast News, The King of Comedy -- were born out of just this tension.
Watching the new anti-TV movies, however, you realise after a while that their brutal (and often crude) attacks on the enemy are just a cover, a feint, a pretence. These aren't really anti-TV movies at all. Nor are they anti-bad-TV movies -- movies which like PBS and Frasier and Ally McBeal, but can't stand Oprah and Jerry Springer and the Home Shopping Channel. They're movies that hate TV, the way Bill Clinton hates Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic. They use up a whole lot of energy telling anyone who cares to listen how much they loathe the guy, but somewhere, deep down inside, it's not hatred, but love they feel -- a passion whose intensity borders on the obscene, and made all the more intense by the secrecy in which it is shrouded, and by the fact both parties know their affair is destined to culminate in a betrayal.
They love TV because TV does their dirty work. It provides them with the cheap thrills, invasive narratives and unacceptable emotions on which they thrive, while allowing them to keep their hands (apparently) clean. So they can bombard the cable networks with cheap jokes and implausible plot lines from 10,000 metres, claiming a surgical precision that is impossible to prove, while concealing their own far more ambitious -- and insidious -- strategies behind the image of a pure, and conveniently selfless, heroism.
None of these three films -- of which The Truman Show is the most ambitious, Holy Man the sharpest, and Ed TV the funniest -- has a solution to this problem. None of them attempts in any serious way to establish a distance between the pleasures they offer their own viewers, and those they dramatise in order to denounce. Nor does any of them have the minimal honesty required to confront this coincidence of means and ends head on (though the Truman Show does wallow in a kind of diffuse desperation which may pass for consciousness in certain West Coast circles). But then, that's because, for the system which created them, this confusion isn't part of the problem: it's part of the "solution".
Thus each film ends with some sort of victory of the individual over the system -- whether Pyrrhic, implausible, or in bad taste. Yet each of these victories is simply a defeat in disguise -- the eradication of any plausible idea of political action. Faced with a quasi-fascistic system, the best we can hope for is to save our own skin, and forget about the world. From the bought-off zombies of Truman's seaside home, to Ed's viewers coming to his rescue through an improvised phone-in, collective solidarity turns out to be at best a forum for salacious gossip, at worst a paranoid fantasy. Either way, we're better off without it. But then, that's because what this kind of cinema really hates isn't television, but (in the proper sense of the word) democracy.
IF TV-HATRED is one major theme of this year's new releases, product placement is the other. While we wait for the masterpiece of the genre, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, to arrive in Egypt, we can already enjoy Nora Ephron's niche advertising feature, You've Got M@il.
The great mystery here is not how a film whose title is a proprietary trademark could be billed as "the romantic comedy of the summer" -- ("You've Got M@il" is the slogan used by Internet service provider America Online to signal to subscribers that they have new messages waiting to be read) -- but how any film made in the late 1990s could have apparently so little to do with the modern world.
Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan fall in love pseudonymously over the Web, not suspecting that they are engaged in a real-life business feud -- she runs a neighbourhood children's bookstore, until his Fox Books chain moves in and closes her down. E-mail aside, there is nothing in this film that would have seemed out of place in the 1940s. Portable computers serve essentially as pretexts for the most traditional of narrative techniques, the letter read in voice over, and the wired world remains almost entirely irrelevant to the unfolding of the plot, which centres on an object technology may soon make obsolete. As a result, the finished product seems more like an advertisement for late-19th-century Upper West Side real estate than for a cutting-edge network service industry.
But perhaps that is appropriate enough in a movie which is in many ways a pastiche of Ernst Lubitsch's great comedy The Shop Around the Corner starring James Stewart and Margaret Sullivan. The pastiche is, of course, affectionate, even to the point of naming Ryan's bookshop after Lubitsch's film (as if film titles were themselves proprietary trademarks...). Ryan and, particularly, Hanks, demonstrate that they may well be the Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy of the 21st century. However, though witty and well-observed, this remains a slight, and sometimes flimsy vehicle for actors of such calibre, and Ephron is no George Cukor, let alone a Lubitsch or a Howard Hawks.
Ryan's capitulation in the face of the profit motive as personified by Hanks, while understandable in terms of his personal charm, is unjustifiable in terms of the plot. Capitalism, it is implied, does not really threaten the values of the past, which will survive in the children's section of the Fox megastore as securely as they ever did in Ryan's folksy little shop. There is no real conflict, here, nor any of the menace which Lubitsch would have found. Evil simply fades away, and money itself is largely of historical interest, like the Fox fortune (inherited), or the surrogate mother figure who doesn't have to worry about her retirement because she "bought Intel at 6".
It comes as no surprise then that the final resolution, like Hanks' taste in drinks, is much more no-fat milkuccino than bourbon and rye. For 90 minutes, Stewart and Sullivan were the embodiment of a very particular moment in the universal history of sexual tension. Hanks and Ryan are just another chapter in Ephron's book of cute.
For screening details, see Listings.
