Prime Time

Hot Dogma!

Richard C. Walls

by

THE KING IS WEIRD: And now another two cents worth of emotionally charged rationalization masquerading as objective analysis concerning the Elvis/Goldman controversy. Actually I feel a bit more objective than some since I was too young to care when Elvis first hit and much too cynical to respond by the time of his performing comeback—and though I have no love for Goldman, whose unrestrained loathing for Presley, popular culture, hillbillies and other non-intellectual aspects of Western Civ reveal to him to be a most self-centered and uncompassionate type of beast, still, the Elvis defenders have made me squirm just as much as he. Rock scholars re-enshrining Elvis, coming on like boring old keepers of the flame, saying yes he was a closet twist-o and his talents deteriorated as his hypocrisy grew, but his best transcended all that; unabashed but seemingly sane sentimentalists who were touched by Elvis and don’t want the memory diminished period; nice people who think it’s a sin to defame the dead, specifically dead people who came on like nice guys; religious nuts—none of these people speak for someone who never cared for Elvis but isn’t a sneering bigot (or any other kind), who thinks that most of Elvis’s post-60’s stuff was tripe but doesn’t hate rock ’n’ roll, someone who regrets that Goldman’s book has nourished the remaining few who are still upset about rock usurping Patti Page but who thinks that Goldman, loathsome as he is, has some valid things to say about rabid hero worship and the American passion for blanded-out entertainment. For some of us it’s not an either/or situation—both Goldman and Elvis make some solid points and then retreat into monstrousness.

Which brings us, oddly, to the debut of PBS Late Night, yet another talk show, the format you love to hate. PBSLN, seen nationwide, originates here in Detroit and is of the live part phone-in part straight-interview variety. Host Dennis Wholey is well known around these parts, having hosted a few local talk shows during the past decade. His persona is Soupy Sales as concerned citizen—not that he’s a clown but he shares Soup’s rubber-faced tired expressions, the same raised-eyebrows (“oh yeah?”) takes, the amiability, the sweaters. His guest on the premier show was Goldman and Wholey was wholly, shockingly ineffectual...“Gee,” he said, “Presley was real popular...” Goldman patiently explained that popularity and aesthetic quality are not necessarily related (though some would argue that they are, inversely); “You don’t seem to like Southerners,” W points out. “Of course I do,” sez G earnestly, “I’m from southern Pennsylvania.” W fails to laugh in G’s face; W mentions that the Beatles apparently had something to do with drugs “like ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’. Isn’t that the same thing?” G; “Not at all.” W, missing the point as much as possible:

“Well, at least Elvis kept it to himself in Graceland.”; Of Graceland, it was “the ultimate kitsch” sez G. “Could you explain ‘kitsch’ for those in our viewing audience who—?” asks W. “Well,” sez G obliquely, “a friend of mine described Graceland as the ultimate custom van.” “So,” sez Wholey guilelessly, without rancor, the ghost of Tom Snyder hovering over the scene, “some people like custom vans. So what’s wrong with that?” And so on for the hour (one spent the time supplying the missing dialogue—“Nothing’s .wrong with custom vans,” Goldman should have said, “unless you spend millions of dollars furnishing your mansion to look like one.” “Could it be,” Wholey should have responded, “that your evoking of custom vans in this instance is yet another indication of your deep-rooted pathological loathing and dismissal of popular culture, its artifacts and partakers? Of your misanthropy behind which lurks an abyss of insecurity, self-hatred and, most likely, festering memories of your early, torturous bedwetting experiences?”).

It was a crummy show, Goldman coming across not as a hard case, but just a misunderstood bright guy trying to explain to this rube some of the basic facts of American culture—without anyone to pertinently question his precepts, they just lay there seemingly self-evident (“scum invariably rises to the top; everything is phony.”k Which, of course, they aren’t...

Wholey has done much better since that first show. In fact, he’s done some enjoyable, enlightening segments. He’s been properly admonitory with ex-mad bomber Jane “I did it and I’m glad” Alpert (there was something strangely comic about Wholey trying to get across to the prideful Alpert that blowing up buildings is a no-no), properly sympathetic on a show about religious cults and their victims, asked relevant questions on a show dealing with the draft—but for some reason the Elvis/Goldman thing seemed to have stunned him somewhat, to have made him dull and automatic.

It has that effect on a lot of people.

GAS FOR THE MASSES: While reviewing Leonard Maltin’s 7V Movies 1981 -1982 in the May ’81 CREEM, I accurately described Maltin’s only competition, Steven H. Scheuer’s Movies On TV, as “a pallid and ill-formed work that only the most benighted TV viewers will have anything to do with. ” But recently an ’82-83 edition of Scheuer has been issued and, unlike previous editions, it’s an immensely entertaining, truly zany book...

First of all, Scheuer has tightened up his entries, editing down his gushes about recent movies; then, in a nod to Maltin’s efficiency he’s listed directors and running times, something past editions did only spottily. In fact, he’s taken auteur fever a step further by bringing in critic Myron Meisel (who readers of Kings Of The B’s will remembef for his scholarly dissertations on Joseph H. Lewis and Edgar G. Ulmer, two directors who specialized in the type of movie that mainstream critics dismissed as mindless entertainment but which auteurists see as among the purest expressions of cinematic art) and has had him do some hip revisions to bring the book in line with current auteurist dogma. As a result, tnovies that were previously treated with barely stifled yawns are now praised, usually with at least one incoherent post-auteur encapsulating sentence. Thus, Otto Preminger’s Angel Face (’52), previously given 2lh stars and described as “slow paced...occasionally interesting” is now given 3x/2 stars and this amazing assessment: “It’s so well-measured in minute calibrations of lighting and framing that the essential shallowness of the sexual premise is never overcome by the intensity of the implacable style.” No, I don’t know what it means either though there are times when I can...just...about... grasp it...but no. However, meaning doesn’t matter here—the love which that sentence shows existing between the critic and his every wayward cogitation is of a type so pure and undiluted that it must be admired.

Some more examples: Nick Ray’s Party Girl (’58) has gone from “a faded carbon copy” of classic gangster films and 2 stars to “direction is triumphantly expressive” and 3x/2 stars; Ray’s Bitter Victory (’57) from “interesting” and 2x/2 stars to “uses its CinemaScope frame to establish a spatial correlative to a moral struggle” and 3% stars; Sam Fuller’s I Shot Jesse James (’49) from “above average, well done” and 3 stars to “agonizing, claustrophobic, and a masterpiece” and 3x/2 stars; Fuller’s Verboten (’59) from “some stunning moments, mostly overloaded” and 2 stars to “sweaty, claustrophobic, occasionally frenzied, and often brilliant” and-3 (only 3!?) stars (“Claustrophobic,” it should be noted, along with “ambiguous” are heavy words of praise in the new Scheuer leading one to suspect that an ideal masterpiece would be a movie about coal miners told from an uncertain point of view—yet The Molly McGuires (’69), which certainly fits the bill, only gets 2x/2 stars); Ulmer’s The Naked Dawn (’55) from “not much action” and 2x/2 stars to “knowing, precise direction” and 3x/2 stars; and on and on and on...

The book also has a slight schizophrenic quality, giving the impression that its reconstruction is only partially completed, e.g., in the review of George Romero’s 'Knightriders (’81—3x/2 stars), Romero’s Dawn Of The1 Dead (’79) is referred to as a masterpiece— yet if you look up DOTD you’ll find it judged a one star turn; Rossellini’s Strangers (’54), one of the films he made with Ingrid Bergman, is called “vague, rather cold” and given 2x/2 stars—but when the same movie is critiqued under its alternate title Voyage To Italy, it becomes “Rossellini’s finest fiction film” and given 4 stars...

Ah, strangeness.

It’s not that I don’t agree with some of these revisions—I agree with a lot of them, with their intent if not with their spacey specifics—no, it’s the lunatic idea of making a handy mass-market reference book and then filling it with such shameless esoterica that amuses me, the idea that reading about Preminger’s “minute calibrations” might sway someone trying to decide between flicks at the end of another long and dusty day, the idea that a controversial but cogent critical theory can be chopped up and severed up as so many bite-sized capsule incomprehensibles... it is, as the lately lamented T. Snyder was so fond of remarking, to laugh.