He's baaaaack. And he's miserable.
Michael Tolkin, who wrote the novel and screenplay on which Robert Altman's "The Player" was based, has published a sequel in which studio executive Griffin Mill, now 52, is trying to get out of Hollywood. Tolkin has this to say about the state of movies, in a New York Times interview:
“The movies haven’t been very good the last three or four years, they really haven’t,? he said. “Everybody knows that. At least that, maybe more. And what they were will never return.?What he's talking about, of course, is the ubiquity of screenwriting guru Robert McKee's story structure techniques, satirized in "Adaptation." with Brian Cox playing McKee.The source of all this creative- industrial- complex angst is the death of what he both eulogizes and parodies: the classic journey-of-the-hero story structure, analyzed by Joseph Campbell in the 1940’s, popularized a generation ago by George Lucas through “Star Wars,? spouted and shorthanded by studio executives ever since, and all but trampled to death, Mr. Tolkin said, by nearly every subsequent action movie and thriller that Hollywood has turned out.
Or as Griffin puts it: “Physics cracked the atom, biology cracked the genome and Hollywood cracked the story.?
Tolkin (not Tolkien) says he got the idea for Griffin Mill from watching Elliott Abrams at the Iran-Contra hearings. Abrams was indicted, pled guilty to withholding information from Congress, and was later pardoned by George H.W. Bush, only to serve in W's National Security Council. Tolkin says:
“I was obsessed with the question of how could he sleep at night, because it was obvious that he was lying. I guess I was interested in the modern sociopath: the political sociopath, the bureaucratic sociopath.?The way Tolkin sees it, America's "national myth" is formed and expressed by its movies, and that's why both are ailing:
That heroic story structure also happened, as Mr. Tolkin points out ominously, to suffice for an American national myth — witness Horatio Alger, James Stewart or “just the myth of the American little guy? — the myth of a hero with a sense of duty, honor, courage, righteousness and justice. But that too, he fears, is dead, and he pinpoints its demise on a spring day in 2004 when pictures of United States soldiers humiliating Iraqi prisoners circulated the globe.How depressing. But then, Tolkin ("The Rapture," "The New Age") has never been an uplifting guy. I'm still traumatized by his 1993 airliner-crash novel, "Among the Dead."“I don’t think America’s had a good movie made since Abu Ghraib,? Mr. Tolkin said, before clarifying that he’s talking about big movies, not the minuscule ones that have met the industry’s quotas for unembarrassing award nominees. “I think it showed that a generation that had been raised on those heroic movies was torturing. National myths die, I don’t think they return. And our national myth is finished, except in a kind of belligerent way.?
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"National myths die, I don’t think they return. And our national myth is finished, except in a kind of belligerent way.?
Don't the eternal pronouncements on the latest irrevocable rupture of America's innocence reveal this notion to be a myth itself, a recurring touchstone for saturnine artists looking outside to justify the bile etching away at the back of their throat? I don't mock the practice--everybody sifts the world only to declare the recovered fragments proof of their own clariity--but I don't put great stock in it either.
Besides, didn't this die out in the '50s? Witness Norman Mailer, James Stewart in The Far Country, or the myth of the man in the grey flannel suit.
JE: Yes, "America's innocence" seems to die every few months: no WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Katrina, Haditha massacre, Brad and Jen splitting up... How many times since 1946 or 1963 or 1968 or 1986 have we regained or innocence just so that some pundit can say we've lost it again? Tolkin is obviously overstating to make his point. But that one national myth -- that Americans ARE unequivocably "innocent," "good guys" -- keeps taking hits, but never quite seems to die here at home. The problem is, in most of the world it perished (again) in 2003 and is going to be tough, maybe impossible, to reconstitute. Maybe something more realistic will take its place...
Not to get too academic, but our national myth was crystallized and disseminated mostly through the transcendentalists: Emerson, Thoreau, and and the sort of gnostic Self-Reliance they tried to manifest.
Melville's Ahab down to Fitzgerald's Gatsby. We have the idealist as hero, and his or her morality does not have anything to do with it.
If we follow the theology of Emerson, there really is only purity in action right?
This is Nick Carraway's struggle. It isn't Gatsby's money or resourcefulness that is so seductive, it is Gatsby's idealism that is so fascinating.
Of course, this is just my reading of things.
JE: "Purity in action." It's not an exclusively American ideal, but it's at the crux of our national struggle(s) to define ourselves as Americans these days...
" Julian said: 'Then we have to change the moral will. We have to change people.'
Theo laughed. 'Oh, that's the kind of rebellion you have in mind? Not the system but human hearts and minds. You're the most dangerous revolutionaries of all, or would be if you had the slightest idea how to begin, the slightest chance of succeeding.'"
Taken from 'The Children of Men' by PD James
(please don't call me tacky for using a 'soon to be movie novel')
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