MOVIE NATION: Book Review

from WBUR's Arts page: The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, by David Thomson (Knopf)

The title of David Thomson's new history of film employs a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald's THE LAST TYCOON: "You can take Hollywood for granted..., or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don't understand. It can be understood too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not a half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads." Thomson wants us to hear Fitzgerald himself talking in that passage, and throughout his sweeping narrative, as he snakes detail through those ominous words.

Chronicling icons like Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Erich von Stroheim, David Selznick, Louis B. Mayer, and on to the modern era with Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, Thomson spices familiar legends with illuminating digressions, like his thoughts on Edward Hopper's painting "New York Movie" (1939). His first portrayal of how writers (producers, directors, celebrities) don't usually get the "whole equation" uses one of its most respected figures: Robert Towne, who wrote CHINATOWN, and battled famously over its ending with director Roman Polanski. For Thomson, CHINATOWN provides a neat metaphor for all of Hollywood:

...It's sinister, yet tidy. The film was set in 1937, but when audiences first saw it in 1974 they had no difficulty in (or no way out of) seeing its contemporary relevance. The water rhymed with Watergate, and even if the film made the dark plot clear finally, still, there was no way of punishing Noah Cross for raping the land, or his own daughter. He was in charge, and he could fend you off with dreamy philosophizing as to what exactly constituted "rape." ...CHINATOWN is not only tragic and foreboding, not just a parable about the ways in which Los Angeles has relied on exploitation, power, rape, greed, and a sense of the future, but a subtle magical metaphor for Hollywood and filmmaking in which the lone seeker of truth is told to shut up at the end, to go along with being left alive and (probably) paid off, and accept that the system, the business -- "they" -- are always going to survive and endure and run the show.

...All of Thomson's historical detail, however, is a platform for his thoughts on the profound effect the movies have had on America's thinking and behavior, indeed, its very identity. Thomson senses a frenzied interaction that still takes place between darkened audience and the lit screen which nearly subsumes thought. "...Our education is still largely based on what words mean, how they fit together grammatically," Thomson writes. "Against that, how many of us have ever had any education in the nature of moving imagery, its grammar, its laws or lawlessness, or how the naïve viewer is expected to distinguish news from fantasy, art from deception?..."

(click here for entire review...)