Altman: Hitting the Myth
"I don't mean to suggest that the sixties were a decade without myths--I doubt whether any moment in history is without myths--but I do mean to suggest that the sixties were a decade that made life hard for a lot of old stories, an age that way full of an awareness of ugly, unavoidable realities...It was not that popular films had suddenly become false, for they had always been false. Just that they had become too false, false enough to upset the old, careful truce between wishes and facts." --Michael Wood, America in the Movies
"My films obviously reflect my point of view, but I'm not a propagandist...I'm trying to show things as they are, as I see them." --Robert Altman
IN THE LATE sixties, a novel based on the Korean wartime experiences of its pseudonymous doctor-author, Richard Hooker, had been kicking around Hollywood for several years. Fourteen directors had been offered the property; all turned it down. Director number 15 was Robert Altman, a television refugee with one major picture (That Cold Day in the Park) to his credit. Altman decided to make the film, hired blacklisted writer Ring Lardner, Jr. to do the screenplay, and produced a brilliant black comedy that was a tremendous critical and popular success. M*A*S*H* took the Grand Prize at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival, earned Lardner a screenwriting Oscar, and was nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award.
If the story of Robert Altman's dramatic rise from obscurity seems interesting primarily as an apparent confirmation of the old meritocratic myth--as a demonstration of American society's receptiveness to new, independent ideas and recognition of talent--hindsight suggests the story has a rather different, ironic significance. In retrospect, Altman's decision to make M*A*S*H* can be seen as typical of the approach to American culture that characterizes his film career to date. In making M*A*S*H*, Altman was not confirming the old American mythology at all; he was attacking it.
For M*A*S*H*, made at the height of the Vietnam War, was, although nominally set in Korea, a Vietnam War movie. Prior to M*A*S*H*, Hollywood's only acknowledgment of the war had been the 1968 release The Green Berets. This obscenely chauvinistic, simpleminded film, which starred movie war veteran John Wayne (who also served as co-director), tried to cast Vietnam in the heroic mold of the old World War II movies. It didn't work, of course, because Vietnam simply was not World War II, the Duke's exhortations notwithstanding. Altman recognized this, and M*A*S*H*, with its loose, irreverent style, reflects this new vision. The militaristic, patriotic, aggressive, by-the-book Regular Army types who were virtually deified in traditional American war movies appear in M*A*S*H* as incompetent, cowardly, idiotic hypocrites. The romance and glory of war are gone, replaced by black humor--a psychological defense mechanism for coping with the brutality and insanity of war.
This sense of the falsity, of the absurdity of much of contemporary American culture, and of the myths which engendered and now sustain it, pervades virtually all of the films Altman has made in the eight years since M*A*S*H* was released. Altman's movies are subversive--not because they tell us what to think, but because they make it impossible for us to remain settled in our comfortable old beliefs. They expose the tangled, jury-rigged pulleys and levers that operated behind the quiet, smooth facades of the old Hollywood myth machines. The exposed machines still work, but the illusion of smooth magic has disappeared; their contrivedness is obvious.
Consider, for example, Altman's 1971 film, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. In one scene, a young, rangy, buck-toothed cowboy (Keith Carradine) who has just spent the night in McCabe's frontier whorehouse, starts across a footbridge to purchase supplies for his trip home. He is confronted by a young gunman, one of three sent by a business conglomerate to coerce McCabe into selling out. The gunman, blond, boyish, and innocent-looking, asks Carradine what kind of gun he has. Carradine tells him, sheepishly admitting that he really doesn't know how to use it. "Come on, let me see it," the blond youth insists; as Carradine begins to withdraw the gun, the young gunman shoots him, and watches as his body falls into the stream, cracking the ice and slowly sinking.
This scene lasts only two or three minutes, yet, like the movie as a whole, it fatally undermines the American romantic vision of the frontier West. Carradine's half-drawn gun technically fulfills the requirements of frontier etiquette, but it's a false fulfillment--a fraud. And so, Altman is suggesting, are the conventions of the Western. Justice didn't triumph on the frontier, brutality and greed did, and that's the real story of the growth of America.
If McCabe and Mrs. Miller undermines the modern mythification of the American past, The Long Goodbye (1973) exposes the improbability of a more contemporary American hero: the private eye, as created by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Altman's Philip Marlowe (Elliot Gould) is an anachronism. His stocks in trade--intelligence, independence and integrity--are pitifully inadequate weapons with which to confront modern, large-scale, organized corruption.
When Bogart played Sam Spade in Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1941), he saw through the deceptions of Mary Astor, and turned her over to the police. When he played Marlowe in Chandler's The Big Sleep (1946), he got there first, and Eddie Mars walked out the door to be gunned down by his own henchmen. He had control. Elliot Gould as Marlowe has none. Sure, he has the Bogart style--the self-confident, sarcastic attitude towards the police, the crooks, and even the incompetent gunsel who tails him. But he utterly lacks the substance. When, at the end of the film, Marlowe kills Terry, the friend who has deceived him all along, he's trying desperately to preserve the myth of his existence. But it's too late: Marlowe's dead, if he ever existed at all.
Altman certainly is not the first director to make films that mock the fraudulent elements of his culture. One thinks immediately, for example, of Luis Bunuel, whose films consistently expose the sham and hypocrisy of latin bourgeois culture. Bunuel's attitude towards his subjects is different from Altman's, however, and the difference says something about the directors themselves, and about the societies that have produced them.
Bunuel seems to take a perverse delight in pointing up bourgeois foibles; with a hint of a sneer, he rips away the veils of middle-class civilization and urbanity. His knocking down of social myths proceeds largely along the class lines so clearly defined in modern European consciousness. One gets a sense, watching a Bunuel film, that he's not only shattering myths, he's mounting a vaguely Marxist attack on false consciousness.
Altman's myth-shattering, by contrast, seems almost regretful. He recognizes the populist element inherent in so many American myths--the belief that the determined individual can succeed in the face of opposition by large organizations--and he seems to wish the myths were true, even though he knows they aren't. Latter-day Icarus Brewster McCloud falls to his death in the Houston Astrodome; McCabe is killed by the corporate goons; Philip Marlowe plays the sap; the gamblers in California Split lose. Maybe that's not the way you'd like it, says Altman, but that's the way it is.
If the themes of Altman's movies are at variance with American movies' traditional approach to the American experience, they're reinforced by his structure and technique. Unlike most American films, which proceed in straight narrative fashion, Altman's films evolve out of chaos. Instead of leading the viewer down a single path to an inevitable conclusion, Altman presents him with brief glimpses and seemingly unrelated vignettes--the connections become apparent only gradually as the film progresses. The outcomes of Altman's films aren't obviously preordained; they apparently develop out of the vicissitudes of real life.
This naturalistic quality of Altman's films is enhanced by his unconventional audio and visual techniques. With their overlapping voices and background noise, Altman's soundtracks have the thick texture of real world sound. Typical Hollywood soundtracks, with their neatly interspersed voices and carefully dubbed-in background music, sound contrived in comparison--almost sterile. Similarly, Altman relies heavily on long and medium camera shots, avoiding the manipulative feel of most Hollywood products. Altman's frames include the things he wants you to see, but he doesn't overemphasize them; he lets you observe for yourself.
Altman's naturalistic technique also permits him to parody Hollywood's audio and visual cliches. The imposing shots of the Corelli mansion in A Wedding, and the fanfare that accompanies them, are hilarious precisely because their contrived portentousness contrasts so dramatically with the look and sound of the rest of the film.
But if Altman has rendered ludicrous some overused Hollywood techniques of establishing mood and tone, he has developed and refined others. His use of color is particularly striking. The monochromatic brown shading of McCabe and Mrs. Miller conveys the cold bleakness of the northwestern frontier, and the blue tones of The Long Goodbye are appropriate to the twilight world inhabited by Philip Marlowe. Perhaps Altman's most effective, moving use of color to establish mood is in Thieves Like Us (1974), a beautiful, elegiac story of innocent young love in the Depression-era South. He saturates his images with green and yellow tones, simultaneously evoking both the languor of rural life and the lushness of the surrounding countryside.
Thieves Like Us is an appropriate note on which to end an appreciation of Robert Altman's work; Altman couldn't have made this lucid, subtle film--which altogether ignores American movie myths--without first shattering those myths in films like M*A*S*H*, McCabe and The Long Goodbye. In retrospect, it's clear that Altman has helped American movies move beyond the stifling conventions of the genre to focus on ordinary people whose lives are important in their own right. He's given American movies room to breathe.
The Institute of Contemporary Art continues its retrospective series on Robert Altman this week, showing two of his lesser-known films--California Split and Thieves Like Us.