New York Times Magazine Piece on TCM

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pvitari
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New York Times Magazine Piece on TCM

Post by pvitari »

In today's edition of the New York Times magazine, critic Leon Wieseltier writes that he turns to TCM when he's blue, rather than "pharmacology." I think we know how he feels!

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/magaz ... f=magazine

Letter of Recommendation: Turner Classic Movies

By LEON WIESELTIER FEB. 27, 2015

Some people turn to psychopharmacology when they are blue. I prefer Turner Classic Movies.

When disappointment has brought you low, or sadness has colonized you, or fear has conquered your imagination, you experience a contraction of your horizon. Your sense of possibility is damaged and even abolished. Pain is a monopolist. The most urgent thing, therefore, is to restore a more various understanding of what life holds, of its true abundance, so that the bleakness in which you find yourself is not all you know. The way to break the grip of sorrow and dread is to introduce another claimant on consciousness, to crowd it out with other stimulations from the world. Sadness can never be retired completely, because there is always a basis in reality for it. But you can impede its progress by diversifying your mind.

Nothing performs this charitable expansion of awareness more immediately for me than TCM. Movies are quick corrections for the fact that we exist in only one place at only one time. (Of course there are circumstances in which being only in one place only at one time is a definition of bliss.) I switch on TCM and find swift transit beyond the confines of my position. Alongside my reality there appears another reality — the world out there and not in here. One objective of melancholy is to block the evidence of a more variegated existence, but a film quickly removes the blockage. It sneaks past the feelings that act as walls.

I recall an evening when my mother was ill in bed and very fragile. The room was lit by only the flickering luminosities of a black-and-white movie that TCM was running. All of a sudden my mother recognized, and quickened to, the sound of Eve Arden’s voice. She gently smiled. It was a small cognitive resurrection. Never mind that I myself have little patience for Eve Arden and her compulsive wisecracking, her tedious insistence upon the last word. The sound of that mondaine voice restored my mother to the rich world in which there were Eve Arden movies. For a few moments, her memory successfully challenged the tyranny of her condition. Her horizon was cinematically extended. She was, however inarticulately, delighted.

When I watch the older movies on TCM, I am struck by the beauty of gray, which makes up the bulk of black and white. How can the absence of color be so gorgeous? Black and white is so tonally unified, so tone-poetic. Shadows seem more natural, like structural elements of the composition. The dated look of the films is itself an image of time, like the varnish on old paintings that becomes inextricable from their visual resonance. There is also a special pleasure in having had someone else choose the film. Netflix, with its plenitude of options, asks for a decision, for an accounting of tastes; but TCM unburdens you of choice and asks for only curiosity and an appetite for surprise. The freedom to choose is like the freedom to speak: There is never too much of it, but there is sometimes too much of its consequences. Education proceeds by means of other people’s choices. Otherwise it is just customization, or electronically facilitated narcissism. Let Mr. Osborne decide!

There is something more that draws me to TCM’s old stuff. Those films have an integrity that most of today’s films almost always lack. The integrity is physical; it is owed to the certainty that no computer interfered with anything. We like to refer to the illusion of the movies, but the illusion in those movies was less illusory. The people in them did what they were filmed doing. When the side of the house falls on Buster Keaton and he stands, miraculously, in the empty square of its missing window, the side of the house actually fell on him. (It is said that some people left the set that day because they could not bear to watch.)

If you want to understand the United States, past, present and future, watch TCM. After you say for the hundredth time, why don't they make...

Now they would green-screen him and add the phony danger later. You cannot confidently believe in the spatial or pictorial authenticity of movies anymore because they are digitally fixed and technologically rigged. The slick new resources, which take vividness way beyond verisimilitude, are a boon for entertainment; but when you see the finished product you can smell the green screen, the way you can smell Google in pieces written by people who do not really know their subject. (I once had the strange pleasure of acting — though that is too grand a term for what I turned in — against a green screen. It was extremely disorienting, trying to suggest a narrative context in a setting of total decontextualization.) The old movies owe their power partly to the limited technical resources that were available to the people who made them. Their artifice was truer. Their fictions seemed less fictive. For the most special effects of all are the effects of no effects.

If watching old movies is a form of escapism, it is at least not an escape from the human world. It is, in fact, an escape to the human world. When your own corner of the universe is hard or grim, there is dignity in escape. Yet anything that enhances your sense of reality and renovates your sense of possibility cannot be denigrated as “mere” escapism. We watch movies because life must be faced.
RedRiver
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Re: New York Times Magazine Piece on TCM

Post by RedRiver »

Amen to all this! When technology becomes the point, rather than a means, we're heading down a disappointing path.
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Bronxgirl48
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Re: New York Times Magazine Piece on TCM

Post by Bronxgirl48 »

Love this!
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Rita Hayworth
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Re: New York Times Magazine Piece on TCM

Post by Rita Hayworth »

Beautifully Written Article! :)
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Vienna
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Re: New York Times Magazine Piece on TCM

Post by Vienna »

Great piece except for that Eve Arden put down.
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mrsl
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Re: New York Times Magazine Piece on TCM

Post by mrsl »

Red River: we've been heading down that path you mentioned for the last 15 to 20 years now. Practically every movie uses the green screen now rather than crowd scenes, or even two or three customers in a store in the background. Most actors (and I use the term loosely), hate the green screen. I don't recall who it was, but someone said they get more response talking into a mirror at home than a camera. I have to admit that finally there are a few actors that I recognize from other roles. It's kind of like seeing Cary Grant and saying, "I remember him from that movie with the leopard." However, the reason I recall them is they have paid their dues by appearing in several B and even C movies but . . . perfecting their choice of career. Another thing that bothers me is, if you watch, you will see there are very few full body takes anymore. Most shots are head and shoulders only unless it is a fighting scene. I personally like seeing backgrounds like side streets, busy thoroughfares, and even alleys or parks. When all you see is the actors faces, it gets a little boring.

Vienna: In a complimentary piece like this one, it was weird to find a barb like the one and only pointed at Eve Arden, especially considering that she supposedly made his mother feel better in her sick bed. I would expect him to praise her, if for nothing more than that.

Well, I guess the tweeting bug has absconded with many of our friends here, but hopefully they will eventually find themselves tiring of what their new friends had for breakfast, or the results of last night's dinner, and return to our fold. I am keeping my fingers crossed.
Anne


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moira finnie
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Re: New York Times Magazine Piece on TCM

Post by moira finnie »

Thanks for posting this here, Paula.
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RedRiver
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Re: New York Times Magazine Piece on TCM

Post by RedRiver »

we've been heading down that path you mentioned for the last 15 to 20 years now

Mrs L, in a sense, it's been since STAR WARS. But you're right. The trend has been amplified in the last two decades.
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EP Millstone
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Re: New York Times Magazine Piece on TCM

Post by EP Millstone »

Meh!

I have no problem with the way that Mr. Wieseltier began his screed:
Some people turn to psychopharmacology when they are blue. I prefer Turner Classic Movies.
I have a BIG problem with the way he ended it:
. . . We watch movies because life must be faced.
Oh really? Speak for yourself, Bub! That ain't the reason that I watch movies. I watch movies strictly to escape life and its tedium, challenges, adversities, and cruelties. Movies, for me, are strictly escapist entertainment (even documentaries)! When I want to face life . . . I turn off the Boob Tube.

I also was not thrilled with LW's entirely subjective P.O.V. on "choice":
There is also a special pleasure in having had someone else choose the film. Netflix, with its plenitude of options, asks for a decision, for an accounting of tastes; but TCM unburdens you of choice and asks for only curiosity and an appetite for surprise. The freedom to choose is like the freedom to speak: There is never too much of it, but there is sometimes too much of its consequences. Education proceeds by means of other people’s choices. Otherwise it is just customization, or electronically facilitated narcissism. Let Mr. Osborne decide!
I'm no fan of -- and am no longer a subscriber to -- Netflix. Personally, I never found wading through its vast catalog anymore burdensome than browsing through TCM's schedules and on-demand selections. But then, perhaps I'm in finer fettle than Mr. W, and have more iron in my blood than does he.

More fundamentally, I don't share Leon's subservience to other people . . . whose choices, more often than not, don't interest and appeal to me or are outright antithetical to mine. I don't subscribe to his philosophy of surrendering control. Au contraire! The older I get, the more resistant I am to joining the crowd . . . to stepping outside my "comfort zone" and participating in knitting a "rich tapestry" with the collectivist "We."

Since 2015, there are even more choices for watching movies than there were when Wieseltier's "letter of recommendation" was published. I love TCM, but it is no longer my default, automatic "Go To" channel for movies. Robert Osborne is gone, so he no longer decides what I watch -- indeed, he never did! His successors likewise don't make my movie choices for me. I know what I like and what I don't like. Concerning movies, I don't need to be "educated" by others!

Man, that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live*. I, for one, don't intend to waste one precious, sacred millisecond of my life watching movies chosen for me by other people.

I also don't share Wieseltier's attitude about Eve Arden, whose "compulsive wisecracking" is more to my liking than is LW's tedious, two-bit philosophizin'.



* Man that is born of man OTOH might have more favorable odds and stand a better chance at prolonging his existence. Give it a shot, say I!
"Start every day off with a smile and get it over with." -- W.C. Fields
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