The Keith Schembri movie should end with his stepping down.
Why? Because the implications of his shameful retreat in Court are clear. If Mr Schembri cannot answer questions posed to him in a libel case he himself opened otherwise he incriminates himself, then he is, by his own admission, guilty of something. This makes his current position untenable.
Now that I’ve said what I had to say about politics, I will write about a subject which is close to my heart. I ask you to forgive me; I’ll write as if I’m writing to my Future Self.
Dreams
If I had more than one life, I’d choose to be a film historian.
I’d spend time studying how Italian (so-called spaghetti or Zapata) Westerns recycle silent-film material. For instance, I recently watched the 1926 silent movie The General, starring Buster Keaton, realising that The Five-Man Army (1969, starring Bud Spencer, sound track scored by Ennio Morricone whose birthday was just a few days ago, directed by Don Taylor) copies scenes, almost shot-by-shot, from it. Whereas Sergio Leone found himself in copyright hot water with Akira Kurosawa for copying scenes shot-by-shot, Don Taylor probably got away with it because The General had become public domain in 1954.
Today, we would call that copying, intertextuality, that is to say the post-modern practice of inserting previous literary or artistic material (or even references) into the work at hand without a formal citation. Then again, this is not a 20th century thing. Lucian, the 1st century poet and writer, could be “accused” of intertextuality – he constantly refers to Greek cultural history and literature in his poetry and prose.
Film is the medium par excellence of our times. It articulates our dreams, grants us our wishes, teaches us how to live. As I said, if I had another life, I wouldn’t have enrolled in the law course (and the other courses I followed afterward, like history and history of law, and even historical sociology and management...) and would have enrolled for film studies. Why, if I could go back in time, say 28 years, I would tell my Younger Self to choose that particular path in life.
Who knows how many others my age share this same wish! Of going back 20, 25 even 30 years to tell their Younger Self that, despite all the pompous self-assuredness, experience now teaches them that they should choose otherwise. Well, isn’t this the theme of a movie, starring Will Smith, that was released a few weeks ago: Gemini Man, the story of a man who encounters his 23-year-old clone and tells him not to become a hired assassin like himself but to go to university to study something else?
In a way, it reminds you of the theme of one of Sergio Leone’s immortal movies, one of the best movies ever made: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966), in which two middle-aged men trying to scrape though during the American Civil War, happen to discover a treasure. How many of us don’t dream of finding a hidden treasure that would enable us to escape from the humdrum civil war of everyday life?
Movies are – as an Indian film distribution company says in its name – a Dream Factory. They fulfil our dreams for us. They induce us to suspend disbelief, and to believe – in a child-like fashion – that life is essentially easy. They follow the plotlines devised centuries ago by Aristotle, of where to place the crisis in the plot and how to work the solution to it.
As if each crisis has a solution. That’s probably the most recurrent dream: that all crises have a solution. Giovanni Bonello recently told me, during an email exchange which had nothing to do with movies, that we have been taught to think mathematically, in the sense that we’ve been brainwashed to believe that every problem has a solution, like in mathematics. Real life isn’t like that at all: some problems don’t have solutions.
I think this is best captured in that scene in Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), when the Devil appears to the Christ on the Golgotha in the guise of a small, blonde, female angel and tells Him that God’s message is that there’s no need for Him to die on the cross, He can climb down and go and have a family, like every other regular guy. Had this been in Italian, I would have written, “come ogni altro povero cristo, o povero diavolo”.
Movies peddle the fantasy that for every problem there’s a solution, solutions aren’t difficult to find, and we should follow our desires. In a sense, all movies are pornographic. I’m borrowing this idea from Eli Roth, for whom Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) is “kosher porn”, in the sense that the Jewish viewer gets gratification in the form of vengeance for Nazi atrocities. Mr Roth clearly extended the meaning of “porn”, as none of Mr Tarantino’s movies depict obscene scenes (even if you factor in his somewhat disturbing fixation with toes). They’re pornographic because they offer fantasy-ish gratification. Django Unchained (2012), for instance, is “nigger-violence-porn”. Somebody on The Economist online comments-board wrote, “So let’s be clear: it’s OK to make violence-porn so long as there’s some recondite dialog and pretty mountains in the background? Tarantino represents the worst of Hollywood – an obsession with guns, the glorification of violence, and a ‘there’s-never-any-consequence’ motif.” In this sense, the second part of Grindhouse (Death Proof, 2007) is “feminist-violence-porn”.
Mr Tarantino does it in an artful but in-your-face way. Others are either more subtle or even more callous. Let’s ignore the callous and focus on the subtle, who may be doing it consciously or unconsciously. In the documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012), Slavoj ?i?ek revels in psycho-analysing movies like Cameron’s Titanic (1997) and proposes that movies are dream factories emitting ideology-CO2. In the case of Titanic, the theme is class struggle: the sinking of the ship is necessary to rescue the fantasy of a romance between two lovers hailing from different classes (not just passenger but social) as love can’t live long between the classes.
Family dynamics could be the hidden theme of movies that use extravagant settings, such as interstellar or historical wars. The real issue would be deep-seated parent-child relationship traumas. Star Wars is an obvious example: “I’m your father” is probably the real theme of the entire saga.
The Joker blames a decadent urban (cosmopolitan?) environment and a mother’s psychosis for the protagonist’s criminal behaviour. The lunatic Joker is a criminal because a rotten society and a rotten mother made him so; it ain’t his fault.
Then there are productions in which a family is tightly-knit but its relationship, as a unit, with society is weird: The Addams Family, say. Two interesting things happened to the mid-1960s original TV show. One, it was unexpectedly cancelled, after only two seasons, when ratings were still high. Two, psychiatrists at the time observed that, though the family is bizarre and completely out-of-synch with society, the dynamics between the family’s members are actually close to the ideal everybody should aspire to. Husband and wife are sincerely attracted to one another; the parents watch over the children; a grandmother and a celibate uncle live with the nuclear family, supporting, and being supported by, it. It is indeed all presented in an almost-demented black-humour way, but the family dynamics are enviable. One wonders whether Tolstoy’s opening line for Anna Karenina applies to the Addamses as well, “All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” If the Addamses are a happy family, are all happy families like them?
There’s another tightly-knit, bizarre silver-screen family: the Corleones. Their relationship with society is “unusual”, but we love them. After all, they’re only into prostitution and gambling (somehow reminds you of this country’s present Administration, somehow), and the Godfather clearly says “no” when Virgil Sollozzo offers him to joint venture on a drug deal (I’m not sure what to say here about the present Administration, with its pro-joint-smoking razzmatazz). We share the Godfather’s distress when the machine-guns of the other Mob families riddle his son with bullets, and we cry when he passes away in his tomato garden, as if a great hero has just died before our eyes. We all admire him because he loves his Family and he deals with problems like a Man, with a capital “M”.
The Corleones are a tightly-knit family, sure, but are they happy?
And, are all pro-family people actually... Mafiosi?
That and many other questions I’ll never answer as I’ll neither have a second life nor the chance to have that chat with that starry-eyed 18-year-old boy, my Younger Self. My film-historian or film-critic dream is destined to stay in the drawer, with a few other dreams. Dreary life goes on, taking us all to the inevitable grave. “In the long run,” as my economist friend loves reminding me (quoting his hero Keynes), “we’re all dead”.
The University of Hollywood
And yet, as people who think, we have to look with critical eyes at what Hollywood teaches (or tries to teach) us. Hollywood wants us all to graduate in Neoliberal Studies, to master the ideology of our times, that a woman (and she alone) has the right to “terminate a pregnancy”, that marriage is not only between man and woman, that your gender is for you to choose, and other such concepts.
The ideology is hammered into our heads and those who reject it are labelled Addamses or Corleones or retrogrades or bigots. Those who, puppy-like, absorb the training and, dog-like, respond to the master’s voice, feel superior, invigorated by the self-importance that being a good dog instils in you.
I feel an irresistible urge to quote a Pink Floyd song,
I’ve got a little black book with my poems in
Got a bag with a toothbrush and a comb in
When I'm a good dog, they sometimes throw me a bone in
I got elastic bands keepin’ my shoes on
Got those swollen-hand blues
I got thirteen channels of shit on the T.V. to choose from ...
I’ve got the obligatory Hendrix perm
And the inevitable pinhole burns
All down the front of my favourite satin shirt
I’ve got nicotine stains on my fingers
I’ve got a silver spoon on a chain
Got a grand piano to prop up my mortal remains
I’ve got wild staring eyes
And I’ve got a strong urge to fly
But I got nowhere to fly to
It’s called Nobody Home. After you conform to the dictates of the dominant (Neoliberal, anti-family) ideology, you discover that you do have “a pair of Gohills boots” but you also have “fading roots”. That’s the current ideology: no-roots, no-family (“nobody home”) self-centred existence behind the wall of isolation, surrounded by material possessions and conforming to current fads, and being available to the needs of the Market and of the Powerful Masters who/which pull its strings.
My Personal Library (75)
I would like to suggest, in quick succession, a few books for film aficionados.
Mafia Movies: A Reader, edited by Dana Renga, discusses some of the genre’s best, not just Coppola, Scorsese, and Chase, but also Italians like Placido, Damiani, and Rosi.
For diehard Godfather fans: Jenny Jones’ The Annotated Godfather: The Complete Screenplay and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Trilogy, edited by Nick Browne.
Jon Lewis’ The Godfather gives some background to the film but also some cinematographic history, including the notion that gangster money might have financed the movie and saved Paramount Studios and the rest of Hollywood in the process. The same theme is further developed in a book which, for some reason I forget, I own in French: Tim Adler’s La Mafia à Hollywood – Hollywood survived in the 1970s and ’80s with Mafia money, and in the ’90s Giancarlo Parretti bought MGM with money coming from the Mafia and Crédit Lyonnais.