Listlessness
The American Film Institute
says that one purpose in creating its list of the 100 greatest American films
was to stimulate discussion. In that, the list has been a success. It has
engendered not merely discussion but objection, accusation, abuse, and
excoriation--nearly all at the AFI's expense. It's an awful list by traditional
standards but no less fascinating for its shortcomings, and no less culturally
legitimate, either.
Take your
pick of things wrong with the list. It fails to recognize acknowledged classic
films (such as Dracula , 1931) and major filmmakers (such as Buster
Keaton) and instead includes many more recent box office successes such as
Jaws (1975) and Tootsie (1982); that makes it a stupid list. It
was culled from a preselected group of 400 titles and voted on by 1,500
"prominent" persons, including celebrities and politicians; that makes it an
arbitrarily conducted test of popularity. It is designed to stimulate video
rentals; that makes it a commercial list. At least one columnist has argued
that in honoring Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind , it is
a racist list. ( Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? the list's only
anti-racist entry--and a mediocre one at that--squeaked in at No. 99.)
For the sake of argument, let's stipulate that the way the
AFI went about filling up its list resulted in an approach to movie "greatness"
that is at best controversial and at worst dumbfounding. But controversy is
likely to follow in the wake of any "best" list. The AFI's effort is a freeze
frame of American movie taste in a moment of sweeping cultural transition.
The AFI's
list of all-time greats downplays the influence of credentialed taste-makers,
cinema scholarship, and educated judgment. It nods to expertise by anointing
Citizen Kane (1941) the greatest American film, then largely abandons
expertise. It thereby marks another stage in the decline of cultural
"gatekeeping"--the control over what is deemed worthy (as opposed to merely
popular) long exerted by critics, educators, repertory programmers, film
historians, and so forth.
There's no shortage of would-be gatekeepers,
but in recent years their influence has been waning. (Compare the influential
movie-ad critic/blurbists of the past with the current proliferation of no-name
"quote whores.") They've been done in by the new technology--VCRs, cable,
satellites, computers--that has provided a wide cultural audience with vastly
more choices than it had a generation ago, and vastly more power as a result.
The VCR revolution of the last 20 years, for example, has completely
transformed access to film's past. The old classic rep houses are now mostly
dark; the new rep houses are on cable, or on your VCR stand.
Enter the
AFI--a gatekeeper that, true to its times, has yielded to more commercial
concerns. Its choices for the top 100 American movies on its list are
explicitly designed to stimulate video rentals (and TV ratings for an
associated TNT series). These are films that, in the AFI's estimation,
Americans are still willing to pay for and sit through. Less commercial
list-makers might have felt the need to pay lip service to, for instance,
Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), an undeniably "great"
film that is not on the AFI list. Flaherty's famous portrait of an Eskimo's
daily struggle to survive was the first attempt to join documentary filmmaking
to personal vision, in Flaherty's case a vision of humankind's struggle to
overcome Nature. Once one of the world's most popular works, today
Nanook is rarely, if ever, seen by a nonspecialist audience.
And yet, even Nanook might have made the AFI list a
generation ago, as might such other silents as Clyde Bruckman and Keaton's
The General (1927), King Vidor's The Crowd (1928), or D.W.
Griffith's Way Down East (1920). Back then, moviegoers in search of
culture were not only closer in time to the silents, they also acknowledged
their stature, and stature mattered to audiences then more than it does now.
(Click to find out why.)
The AFI
compilation reflects more than just technological change and the shifting power
to confer "greatness," however. It also suggests a change in the characters the
American audience enjoys watching and with whom it wants to identify. This is
especially notable in the genre films on the list, the tales of tough guys,
dames, cowboys, spacemen, and gangsters traditionally at the heart of popular
American movie drama.
There are many genre films on the AFI list, but
most of them represent their genre in its late period-- The Godfather
(1972), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), The Wild Bunch (1969), and
so on. These are indeed great films: powerful, handsome, strikingly edited. But
in many ways, they seem just the opposite of the movies from which they
developed. There is a startling difference between the gangster romanticism
portrayed by Marlon Brando and Al Pacino and the gangsterism embodied earlier
in the century by Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney. You could admire
Robinson's and Cagney's toughness, their ability to get their way. But in the
end, you knew they were bad: They broke their mothers' hearts and paid too high
a price for their criminal success.
Bonnie
and Clyde (1967), on the other hand, presents criminality in romantic soft
focus. The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II (1974) are a
daydream of limitless wealth and power available to those (like Brando and
Pacino) clever enough to survive it. The old Warner Bros. gangster morality
tales were always said (by the gatekeepers) to represent the American gangster
film in its glory, but these morality tales are completely absent from the AFI
100.
The same is true of the cowboy and the tough guy. There are
traditional cowboys and tough guys on the list, but the former (as in
Stagecoach , 1939, and The Searchers , 1956) is limited mostly to
John Wayne, and the latter (as in The Maltese Falcon , 1941) to Humphrey
Bogart; and you get the sense these films were chosen more out of nostalgia for
their stars than for their dramatic power. The old western was almost always a
tale of a courageous loner imposing order on lawlessness, as in the Wayne films
and Shane (1953). High Noon (1952), which is on the list, is an
interesting variation. But Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969)
features existentially disillusioned outlaws going out in a montage of bloody
chaos, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) is an outlaw buddy
film, and Dances With Wolves (1990) attempts to revise entirely the
concepts of both "order" and "the west."
Few dames
made the cut. Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944) is a lonely,
worldly wise woman on the list. The tough cities that such women and their
fugitive men once haunted are nowhere to be found. The seductive and corrupting
film noir downtowns featured in so many admired cheap second features might as
well all have been demolished, along with the long-gone Bijous and Palaces
where these films first played.
Perhaps that makes sense. Twentieth century
American culture was largely a downtown experience. It isn't anymore. It is
increasingly an at-home experience, increasingly private, increasingly
personal. The AFI's list, for all its peculiarities, appears to reflect
that.
Obviously, being fairly arbitrary, many of the AFI choices may not lend
themselves to sound cultural interpretation. But there is an upheaval in canon
creation going on throughout American culture, and this list brings that
upheaval to the movies. It's worth trying to understand the AFI 100 for what it
is and isn't. The alternative is sitting in the dark, waiting for a show that's
really over to begin.
If you
missed the link, click to see how the influence of cultural gatekeepers has
waned in the last 50 years.
