Why I'm Not Bored

The two most frequent questions are: "How many films do you see a week?" "Don't you get bored with going to films?" I've been writing about them in TNR since 1958, with one intermission of a year and a half, have heard each of these questions at least once a week in that time, and am always pleased by them. As for the first, the number has varied sharply from none to 12—usually it's about three—but the point is that most weeks it wouldn't have been less even if I weren't a critic. And, grown gray in the ranks, I still get a thrill out of getting in free. I have figured with my wife that, by the money we have saved on tickets, we are now abstractly, if not in the Nelson Rockefeller class, at least up there with William J. Ronan. Once in a great while there have been too many. On two separate occasions there were two days in which I had to see four films each day—no kind of record but sickening to me. After each of those pairs of days it was a week before I could see another picture. But most of the time when I'm asked the question, I can't really remember how many times I've gone in the previous week or two, it all seems so natural. And therefore pleasant.

As to the second and more interesting question, the answer is a firm no. A happy no. To salute the obvious, this doesn't mean that I never see boring films or that I am unborable. On the contrary I'm somewhat more acutely borable—by reason, I tell myself, of professional acuteness—than most of my friends. But the idea of going to films is never boring. The editor of TNR once generously suggested that I also write about television from time to time. The prospect of merely crossing the living room to switch on TV dramas was numbing. But even when I have to leave the house to see the most unpromising of films (and I limit myself to those with at least some promise), there is something beyond the specifics of the film that tingles and attracts.

To begin with there is the elemental kinetic aspect. Like billions of people throughout the world since 1900, the mere physical act of filmgoing is part of the kinesis of my life—the getting up and going out and the feeling of coming home, which is a somewhat different homecoming feeling from anything else except the theater (and which is totally unavailable from TV). When I am not going out, rather frequently, to films (as a New Yorker this is also tme for me of the theater), it's because I'm ill or sore beset with work or isolated somewhere in the country. To have my life unpunctuated by the physical act of filmgoing is almost like walking with a limp, out of my natural rhythm.

Past that there is the community, also known to billions, of being in a group dream, a group reality. This is true of the theater as well, but with films there is a paradox: because of the greater darkness there is, even in the middle of a group, the sense of private ownership of the occasion. That ownership has attachments. No one goes to a film theater—or a press screeningroom— without taking with him all of his filmgoing past, including his initial fear. (For years students have been writing papers for me on their recollections of their very first film experiences, and, more often than not, that first experience included a feeling of fear.) That fear is never quite lost, perhaps, though gradually it is understood, is used to underpin and nourish other responses. No one can go to a film theater without taking with him his parents and small friends and the first grapplings of romance in the balcony. And no one can sit in a film tiieater without acknowledging, however secretly, that this is where some part of his psyche originated. Messenger boy or mogul, peasant or Pope, there can hardly be anyone alive whose secret fantasies, controlled and uncontrolled, have not in some measure been made by film. This has never been so widely true of any other art. guess is that it is not yet tme of TV, may never be true. The size of the film screen in itself plays a part in its sacerdotal function; it ministers down to us while the TV screen paws upward, smaller than we are, vulnerable to dials and switches. (If films ever really become principally available through TV cassettes, as sporadically has been prophesied for years, whole psychic orders will have to be redeployed.)

All this exercise and enjoyment even before we touch matters of art, discrimination, esthetics! Once we get to the question of specific films rather than generic experience, the specter of boredom raises its threat. Some films tum out to be just as boring as feared, though not so many as the fulfilled dreads in the theater and not many more than with new fiction. No one assumes that a literary critic gets bored, yet having worked in both kinds of criticism I know that the rewards of poor films are more savorable, more certain, than those of poor novels.

In Westerns, however rotten, there are horses, the creak of leather, the reach of landscape. In any film there are likely to be attractive women or, if you prefer, attractive men. For myself, heterosexually straitened though I am, I get a kick out of seeing OToole and Newman and Redford, just as I used to with Cooper and Grant and March. Then there are syntactical rewards. Richard Lester's maritime thriller Juggernaut misses the boat, but its editing and photography are in themselves thrilling. Visconti's Ludwig was drear, but the costumes were sumptuous. The music in Once Upon a Time in the West was like a Puccini sauna. I don't suggest that anyone go to see those films for those reasons: I'm just answering the once-a-week question.

There are other, greater things. Direction, for instance. Joseph Sargent, out of TV, has done a really crisp job with The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. I enjoyed the way he used the subway tunnels and the racing through the streets and the compact arena of the hijacked subway car in a picture that, as a whole, was fading before it finished. (I couldn't read the novel.)

And in some dismal pictures one can often find bright spots of acting. A thriller called 11 Harrowhouse is laden with Charles Grodin and Candice Bergen and a finale that was apparently devised by a moron on LSD; but James Mason plays an aging diamond expert, dying of cancer, who revenges himself on his niggardly employers by collaborating with thieves and he creates a whole man, quietly, in the middle of roaring nonsense. Jon Voight has the leading role in a more seriously inane thriller The Odessa File and presents the young German joumalist he is supposed to be, even to a beautifully precise accent. (Following that hilarious convention under which Germans in Germany, speaking English to one another in Englishlanguage films, use German accents.)

It would be easy to put together a large bouquet, a garden, several hothouses of flowers culled from poor pictures. They don't quite compensate for those pictures, not even for the waste of themselves in those pictures, still they are rewards not easily accessible in poor examples of other arts. Theater performances, yes, when they stand out from a bad script and/or a bad company. As for other matters, although the theater's symbolic systems are just as "real" as film's, they are less intensely packed to the square millimeter and, when one is forced away from the foreground by tedium, the theater's supportive symbols are less varied, less continuingly interesting. Boris Aronson's beautiful setting for Company didn't continue to make up for a dullish evening as Tonino delli Colli's cinematography almost did for Pasolini's Decameron.

But that's enough of scrounging, of beggarly gratitude for edible scraps amidst the swill. The chief reason for never being bored with the idea of film is that boredom is incompatible with hope, and hope is more of a constant in film than in virtually any other art in America. Fiction and poetry and dance and theater performance (as against playwriting) are in good estate, with good prospects; but (say the experts I've met) this is not true of painting or sculpture or musical composition or architecture. And no art is more persistently, almost irritatingly pulsing with prospects than the film.