Who Needs A State Religion When You Have The Never Ending Duty To Worship A Movie

I'm beginning to feel it's turned into an obligation or at least a sort of passionate hobby to prod the mandatory common-received POV as a means of understanding the secular religion that secularism has imposed on modern life.  I find out so much.

Last night the benighted volunteer test dummy of this blog, in a state of  mid-brow high dudgeon over me saying I preferred audio drama to the movies and TV and some of the stage plays I'd seen, came up with a real mixed bag of sacred objects from show biz and some admitted art.  I give you the list because it's kind of hilariously hodgepodged together:

CITIZEN KANE, CHILDREN OF PARADISE, VERTIGO, THE MALTESE FALCON, THE SOPRANOS, BREAKING BAD, THE TWILIGHT ZONE, HAMLET, DEATH OF A SALESMAN, or A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE

It strikes me that there might be some diagnosis contained in that list,  I mean Vertigo and Hamlet?  The Sopranos and A Streetcar Named Desire?

Oh, well.  I'll concentrate briefly on the chief object of mid-brow cineastes' sanctity, Orson Welles Citizen Kane, which I blasphemed by saying it was good, just not as good as the hype around it.

It is a good movie, it is beautifully filmed, beautifully structured, well to greatly acted, very well written and the score is very effective, though I am unaware of anyone excerpting the music to stand on its own.  So much of movie music is so much less without the movie to support it.

The problem isn't the movie as a movie or even as art, which, unlike almost all of movies called "art," it actually is.   The problem is the ridiculous hype which, I'd guess, managed in less than fifty years after its creation, to outdo in ridiculous volume and extravagant claims  all of the hype surrounding Wagner's ring over a longer period.  Though when it comes to the most extravagant of superlatives, it's hard to distinguish among them because the attempt to top that degree of comparison is repetitious and accumulative, not progressive.

That practice reached its ridiculous pinnacle, at least in my reading, when some idiot 19th century anarchist - since they tend to be repetitive, I can't recall which one - proposed demolishing every piece of music before Beethoven's 9th Symphony.  That an anarchist proposed that extravagant act of authoritarian destruction, it shows you the level of intellect that markets in the traffic of coning competitive superlatives.

Orson Welles is someone who I have to say, the more I know about him, the less I like him.  The bitchy interviews he gave over many lunches near the end of his life, when he went from making movies to doing commercials for mid-market wines, are often entertaining and occasionally insightful.   We shared a lot of the same non-enthusiasms for many of the ridiculously over praised people who went on the movies.  But they are a sad way for a great genius to spend their declining years.  He is one of those guys who have enormous talent, who achieve an early peak and never develop from there.  I have to wonder if he hadn't been so taken up with the incredibly complex mechanisms and financial compromises of making movies if maybe he'd have had more to say.

He will almost certainly be known for Citizen Kane, to a lesser extent for the criminally mutilated  Magnificent Ambersons (a lesson in the damage Hollywood is bound to do to the non-commercial aspects of art, as Bernard Herrmann also learned with that movie) and to a lesser extent his other early work.  I think it's because he was making movies that he developed into a lesser instead of greater artist.

Steve Simels, is someone who made a living writing criticism, who is in that market I mention above.  He, as we all know, knows we are duty bound to repeat the common received mandatory POV about IT, the GREATEST OF ALL MOVIES over and over again, nothing but the stream of threadbare superlatives about THE movie are supposed to be repeated about it, IT IS TO BE HELD AS NONPAREIL, to even mention the rules of that unbreakable law of laudation is probably to violate it.

One of the funniest things I read about Donald Trump was his effort to uphold the mandatory praise of Citizen Kane whose problems he seems to hold were a result of him getting the wrong woman.  As some of those who were aghast at Trumps take on Kane admitted, Citizen Kane had an uncomfortable amount in common with Donald Trump, only Kane, due to the salvific results of the conventional sexual morality that the movies did so much to destroy, didn't win election while Trump did.  That's a point I'm making, I haven't read any movie reviewers who seem aware of it.

I am not going to go into just how seemingly daffy Trump's take on the movie - which he ritually claims is the greatest of movies -  is.  But one thing he has that virtually all of us don't as a door into Citizen Kane, Trump's view of the movie is from the rarest of perspectives, of someone who has lived the kind of life Kane would have, if he were real. What does that mean about his view of the movie?  That there is any ambiguity over the meaning of this, officially "greatest of all movies"  shows you just how bad the movies are at giving information, intellectual and moral, unless the viewer is already predisposed to receiving that information.  When you look at movies held to have been influential, they are almost never such on the basis of their teaching their audiences much, but on inspiring them in the predilections and tendencies that were already there.

The most important things I know of about the movies is, first, quality is almost either driven out or swamped by crap.  There is art in some movies, a very few considering the enormous cost of producing them, perhaps that cost is the reason there is so little of art in movies.   It would seem to be a losing battle to fight for art against the studios [op.cit. Magnificent Ambersons].   The second is that other than appeals to the most simplistic of sentimentality as moral force, the movies are far better at harnessing the worst in people.  The KKK was revived by the legendary D. W. Griffith's  Birth of a Nation,* his Intollerance would seem to have left not a ripple in subsequent life.  All of the anti-Nazi German theater and film and art was swamped by Nazi propaganda.  The cherished superstition of liberals and lefties that TV and the movies have had a positive effect in society is disproved by the revival of fascism and Nazism in the period when free-speech, free-press and anything goes in the movies reigns.   Virtually everything said in that regard is media corporation hype and slogans told by the civil liberties industry and lawyers in the pay of big media of the kind that Citizen Kane discussed and warned of.  In all its vaunted greatness, it taught us nothing.  Trump as a politician is 100% a product of movies and TV.

*  Today is the infamous 103rd anniversary of the revival of the then dying KKK.  As I've pointed out before, William Joseph Simmons directly attributed his inspiration in doing so to Birth of a Nation, one of the most useful propaganda tool of white supremacists, racists and our indigenous form of fascism-Nazism in the century after it was made.