Robert Altman’s Flying Machine

Brewster McCloud (1970), Robert Altman’s second feature film, is wildly fluid. Even fans of M*A*S*H (1969) might not be completely tuned in to this movie’s disjointed counterculture lightness. Scenes of episodic, oddball humor, visual shocks and sexual arousal (the movie was originally called Brewster McCloud’s Sexy Flying Machine) butt up against each other like pinballs, and Altman, who heavily rewrote the Doran William Cannon screenplay, is tilting the machine.

In M*A*S*H, the satire was equally manic but a lot clearer; scenes were constructed to puncture bureaucracy and skewer the military officers and aides who peddled it to the American troops. We know what’s going on in Brewster McCloud and we can catch all the often very funny movie references and in-jokes, but we don’t often know what those references are doing there or why a disparate group of Houstonians are being strangled. The movie doesn’t ever tell us why these particular victims were targeted or even who the killer is. It could be the sensual but mothering older woman (Sally Kellerman), the dimwit tour guide (Shelley Duvall, whose eyelashes are painted in Raggedy Ann spikes), or the taciturn Brewster himself (Bud Cort, who played several of his movie roles as if they were on the spectrum). Are the victims Brewster’s persecutors, establishment materialists threatening to derail his desire to fly, or are they only in the wrong place at the wrong time? The victims are all found contorted in grotesque shapes, with bird droppings on their bodies or faces, but if Altman is attempting to make a deeper satirical point and not just a scatological one, that point is lost. The comic visual scatology is everywhere, in fact: bird shit is constantly being dropped (by unseen birds) on important papers, wallets, badges, and windshields. The movie is practically awash in it. The freedom that Altman gives his cast to improvise dialogue saves a lot of the non sequiturs in the script — for example, while the suave detective (Michael Murphy) is examining one of the victims at a zoo, an enormous tortoise lumbers into the frame, nudging the detective’s right elbow, and Murphy, without losing character, says, “Somebody get this turtle out of here.” Moments like that reinforce the improvisational personality without adding to the confusion.

Weirdos. Shelley Duvall, Bud Cort

Most of the earlier scenes — the farcical police investigation, the bonehead car chases, a runaway wheelchair, the whacked-out accidents and close calls — may not be linked logically to the movie’s climax, but they are, miraculously, linked emotionally, and that inevitability is probably the movie’s chief virtue and triumph. Altman is brilliant enough to loosen plot threads and abandon linear dialogue and still fulfill an audience’s emotional needs. Brewster’s exultant flight in the Astrodome is scored to Merry Clayton’s lovely rendition of a John Phillips song about the emotional abandon of spreading one’s wings and letting go. One of the great reprises in American movies of the seventies, the scene is a metaphor of the entire movie and its spasmodic narrative, the oversize contraption flapping its aluminum bones in order to climb dizzyingly higher and higher. But the emotional strength of that uplift is real, and the conclusion is devastating. The boy with the dream is the only one in the movie whose death is treated with tragic irony. The movie destroys him to liberate him. The audience knows it has lost something it can’t quite articulate, and Altman is compassionate enough to give us a final set piece of distancing theatricality — a circus of the stars and a Felliniesque view of life-as-theater (a sign saying “Greatest Show on Earth” hangs across the stadium seats). If that’s Altman’s point, he certainly takes a roundabout way of getting there, but the side roads are richly inventive, like early Fellini. The framing device alone is sophisticatedly, bizarrely witty enough for ten movies: a professor (René Auberjonois) lecturing on ornithology grows progressively more birdlike in his squawky speech and body movements each time the camera cuts back to his classroom. Once you see it as a hip, modern fable, Brewster McCloud may seem the giddiest flight fantasy since Miracle in Milan (1951).

Connections

In an epigraph, Wim Wenders dedicates Wings of Desire (1987) to Yasujiro Ozu, François Truffaut, and Andrzej Wajda, but in its imagery and tone, his movie has more in common with Fellini (Nights of Cabiria, 1957), Tarkovsky (especially Stalker, 1979), and the great Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer, whose incandescent Day of Wrath (1943) and Ordet (1955) and Vampyr (1932) glide through dreamlike landscapes of pain and unfulfillment. Wings of Desire might have been called Wings of Longing — the angel Damiel longs to experience the physical connections of space and time that human beings have, while everywhere the human inhabitants of West Berlin, whose thoughts the angels can hear, long for various connections of their own: to parents or children, to spouses or lovers, to the past, and even to the self.

The angels see this earthly realm in monochrome when they’re most removed from human experiences. But the end of the picture explodes in color as Damiel “crosses over” (in an amusing bit, he sells his angelic breastplate in an antiques store). Damiel is obsessed by his attraction to the trapeze artist and the lusty simplicity a group of children take in a circus performance. He longs to feel what they all feel, and his desire has a childlike naïveté; he doesn’t seem to recognize the unfortunate side of earthbound mortality.

Angelic observer. Bruno Ganz

I think the film has a largely warm-hearted appeal, but its unspooling of interior dialogue (which reminds one of café jazz poetry) is intended to create an atmosphere of sweeping stream-of-consciousness — a sort of Jungian collective language of the Shadow — and I think we’re really not supposed to “interpret” or explicate the arcane prose-poetry. Taken individually, each mental utterance sounds like a bromide, and the overall effect can be deadening if, like Damiel, you’re searching for connections. (Rilke apparently inspired much of Peter Handke’s screenplay.)

In a way, the lack of linguistic coherence works in the movie’s favor. The compression of time in traditional narrative is almost entirely abandoned, and you do feel as if you were floating around Berlin with the angels without a sense of beginning, middle, or end — the rising action, climax, and denouement of dramaturgy. You expect temporal and even spatial constructions that just aren’t there, and you may get caught searching for phantoms. The movie might have made a great impact as a silent classic with few title cards, although you’d miss the eerie, evocative score. When the theorists talk of “pure cinema,” they may have something like this in mind. Fairly early on, Wenders gets you to feel cut adrift, like a buoy, from spatiotemporal anchors (the movie subverts your geographic information system). The camerawork is remarkable — it seems unbound by space the way the pacing seems unbound by time. Did the cinematographer (Henri Alekan) use cranes and a Steadicam (which Kubrick used in The Shining in 1980) for all those marvelous aerial tracking shots? Alekan’s work unifies this model of personal filmmaking — it’s transporting. Irrespective of the otherworldly elements, the movie’s experimental spirit takes you right to the core of some timeless human questions.

European Formalism

John Simon, who died yesterday at age 94, had one of the two or three most unremittingly independent voices in criticism. Advertisers and editors probably tried to control his signature vitriol or his devastating judgments, but it's obvious they failed.

The most striking thing about his body of work (from Acid Test in 1964 and Movies into Film in 1971 to Something to Declare in 1984 and The Sheep from the Goats in 1987) is its autonomy and singularity (in fact, his 1975 anthology of long theater essays—on Peer Gynt, on The Wild Duck—is called Singularities). Aside from Edmund Wilson, there was nobody else in American letters quite like Simon, a critic by innate temperament who combined academic formalism with a journalist’s impulse for influencing the collective taste of educated readers (many of whom undoubtedly didn’t much care for movies anyway). Dwight Macdonald could cut the spindly legs out from under mass culture with equal ease and spirit, but Macdonald had a jokey, teasing quality which Simon completely lacked. Macdonald hated garbage as vehemently as Simon (read Macdonald’s takedown of the Hollywood biblical epics in the 1969 On Movies), but he didn’t give you the impression, despite all his masscult and midcult categorizing, that he himself was an inaccessible, displaced alien of superiority, passing judgment on a hopeless demotic culture, as Simon always did. Maybe that difference was the innate extension of Simon’s Old World pedantry (he was the sort to correct you on your use of polymath when you really meant polyhistor).

An ace polemicist, Simon was praised and reviled just about equally throughout his career. One anecdote should suffice: In 1969–70, Simon was a recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism (voted on by the Cornell, Princeton, and Yale English department faculty), and that same year the New York Drama Critics’ Circle voted to keep him out of that august body.

Simon in interviews encouraged his notoriety as a harsh, nearly unpleasable critic with a mandarin disdain for pop and ersatz in the arts. I always thought this was unfortunate because that reputation ossified around him like a crust until it obscured his clarion voice in print. He was almost always described as the “Count Dracula of film critics” or “the skunk at the party” (not to mention the endless agitated charges of sexism, homophobia, and misanthropy), and his funny descriptions of the physiognomies and various protuberances of Liza Minnelli and Barbra Streisand invariably appeared, way up top, in virtually everything ever written about him. It was his fault: his frequent apologia—that film was a gesamptkunstwerk in which every element, designed or not, played an important part in the viewer’s experience—was never very convincing. He just loved skewering ugliness, whether of a costume, a speaking voice, a set backdrop, or a receding chin.

Compared with his contemporaries—other critics in his league—Simon used a prose style that was indistinguishable from the opinions themselves. The singular force of his judgment was his style, whereas his colleagues—Macdonald, Vernon Young, Robert Bentley, Stanley Kauffmann, and so on—had more idiosyncratic styles with a rhetorical lightness that shaped their opinions. When he wasn’t firing on all cylinders, Simon was a starch-collared, stentorian writer who was inclined to announce that he was about to be witty right before being so (although he was often genuinely so—“As Marge, Frances McDormand verges on the cutesy but manages in the nick of time to pull herself back from the verge”). His other recurring weakness was the stringing out of lengthy tropes until you felt as if you were watching money compound in the bank (“A similar visual fakery has the gifted but often excessive cinematographer Allen Daviau bedizen the movie with every sort of unearned visual opulence as further aid in audience-besotting”). Typically, he lines up his perfectly poised, well-structured phrases in a nagging, anal-retentive way that saps his point of some of its energy: “The trouble with JFK is that whereas it solicits a second seeing to unscramble it, it does not offer enough aesthetic compensation to warrant the effort of reimmersion.” Think of how much pithier Rossini was about Wagner, saying the same thing.

Simon’s voice felt far more authoritative—and inquisitive—when he was writing about European movies and plays. He seemed more at home with European sensibilities. In the introduction to Something to Declare, his anthology of foreign film reviews, Simon admitted that he rejected that view, but it was always true. The art films of early Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman, Ozu, Troell, and the like were his true purview. In writing about them, he delved more deeply and described more acutely than he did with American studio films, whose messiness and market exigencies probably occupied only a fourth of Simon’s analytic ability and his interest. (He almost never discussed seriously or at length a movie’s financial battles or its box office.) It’s his writing on European movies—on their explorations of sexual politics, their intimacy and reflection, their avant garde rhetoric, and their literary symbolism—that will stay in the memory of Simon’s close readers. Let the rest of the world keep their Count Dracula.