January 23, 2004
By D.K. Holm
Aged in Wood
I'm a tad different from most film buffs. I remember the first time I find a coveted volume of movie criticism the way most people remember where and when they saw a favorite movie.
In the case of the book HITCHCOCK'S FILMS, it was fall of 1971. I was in the Portland State University bookstore, in Portland, Oregon, then a massive edifice dedicated to university presses and special interests books, with surprisingly thorough holdings in many fields. After fantasizing in my early years, from age 10 to 16 or so, about a career as either a comic book creator or a movie director, I discovered that I enjoyed reading about films more than I looked forward to the idea of making them — only a special personality type can helm the unwieldy juggernaut of a film crew. It takes no personality at all to read a book about it. And so began to frequent the store always looking for critical texts that would help me understand, or join in celebrating with me, the movies I liked.
As a person prone to collecting, I soon found that once I hit upon a film writer I liked, I became ravenous: I tore his or her articles out of magazines and kept a file of them, and I sought out all the books they had written. Thus from high school on I amassed what amounted to yearly anthologies of reviews by Andrew Sarris, John Lahr, and numerous others, culled from newspapers and magazines, and the start of a small library of now hard-to-find film books.
Naturally, I'd been a long time fan of Hitchcock's films, an affiliation inherited from my mother, who, lore had it, once actually saw Hitchcock in person riding through Los Angeles on a Mo-Ped. I had read Truffaut's interview book with Hitchcock, but no other book about the director. In the early '70s, when the film criticism bug bit me, I decided that reading the secondary literature on Hitchcock was a good thing. On that day in the Portland State University bookstore I pulled a small yellow-hued oddly shaped paperback off the shelf, a book called simply if deceptively HITCHCOCK'S FILMS (it was in fact the second edition of the book). That simple action, the modestly curious retrieval of a volume off a shelf, was to spark an intellectual love affair — not with Hitchcock, but with the book's author, Robin Wood.
Later I was to learn that I was merely one of thousands of film readers who had succumbed to Wood's charms. A cult surrounded him in the manner of the cult around Wood's own mentor, F. R. Leavis, the severe British literary critics, or around George Bernard Shaw or any number of mania-provoking authors. But in my first reading of Wood, later that night, I felt as if I were in the presence of a sensibility that was merely recognizable — my own. I had rarely read a writer whose views, opinions, anger, passion, so resembled what I took to be my own inchoate sensibility.
I was instantly beguiled by Wood's prose style, but also by his initial defense of Hitchcock as an artist at least as great as Shakespeare, something necessary in the '60s and '70s, less so now. And when I got to the chapter on Psycho, I was awed by his psychological acuity and understanding of the characters, the satori-inducing connections he made within the film (such as the bird themes marbled throughout PSYCHO).
Almost over night I became a fanatical collector of Robin Wood's books. I rushed back to PSU the next day and cleaned out the shelf of his volumes (fortunately, he hadn't written all that much yet). I sought out, mostly unsuccessfully, back issues of MOVIE, where much of his writings appeared, and thereby also became a follower of Wood's peers in those pages, such as V. F. Perkins and Raymond Durgnat. Thanks to the resources of the PSU library, I dug up and photocopied a brief run of reviews he wrote for the TIMES EDUCATIONAL SUPPLEMENT, and even an obscure book he co-wrote about French verbs. My admiration for the writer was sealed when he wrote a brilliant analysis of KLUTE for FILM COMMENT. KLUTE was one of my favorite movies at the time (still is), and I soon learned that there was an uncanny similarity between my taste in films and Wood's, the difference being that he could articulate his views (I was once able to ask the film's director, Alan J. Pakula, what he thought of the essay, and Pakula was delighted with it, while denying that any of the meanings that Wood unearthed were intentional).
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Some 15 solo books later, I am still collecting Wood, and was please last year to see a cornucopia of Woodiana. There was an updated version of HITCHCOCK'S FILMS issued by Columbia University Press last year. Officially called HITCHCOCK'S FILMS REVISITED, REVISED EDITION (413 pages, $22.50 0 231 12695 6), this update comprises the original book from the late '60s, and a whole other volume's worth of subsequent essays on the subject of Hitchcock and Wood's interaction with his work, many of them published in the magazine CINEACTION!, which he co-founded with a Canadian collective of film scholars and activists. One of the interesting things about HITCHCOCK'S FILMS REVISITED, REVISED EDITION is that it represents in one easily digestible form the divergent paths of the two halves of Wood's career, for like Wittgenstein's, Wood's career can be neatly divided into two.
Though Wood was and is a master of close reading, he is also a polemicist. The "first," pre-mid-'70s Wood maintained academic tradition with his New Criticism-style, in-depth reading of a given film frame by frame. The post '70s Wood is both much more political and much more personal. The key event in Wood's life is that at a late age he came out as gay. It was an admission with far reaching implications. The "new" Wood frequently drops the academic mask in order to talk personally. Indeed, the new introduction to the revised HITCHCOCK'S FILMS REVISITED contains a frank autobiographical account of his sex life, one that might be viewed as an erotic bildungsroman in a different context. Wood, who, by the way, in this introduction divides his life into four, was born in 1931, from typical middle class English stock. He says that the first film that made an impression on his was TOP HAT. He attended Cambridge (the rest of the MOVIE contributors attended Oxford) and seemed destined for a life as a schoolteacher with hidden Lawrencian tendencies, but for the fact that he had a deep and abiding interest in film. Because he knew French, he was able to place an early version of his PSYCHO chapter in no less than CAHIERS DU CINEMA, which led to his Hitchcock book and to his contributing to MOVIE, the controversial auteurist-oriented journal whose book-publishing arm also issued most of Wood's books, as well. Married and with three kids, Wood moved to Canada to teach, where he seemed to fall into a rather DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN CIVILIZATION sort of academic lifestyle. He tells us that he had his first physical gay encounter, a shattering experience, became closer to his wife, but then broke up with her. He moved back to England to teach, now livingly openly as a homosexual, and was then offered another job back in Canada, where Wood has remained. In the new preface, Wood goes into much detail about his adventures in academia and the gay subculture. Wood was able to clear some time to co-found the magazine CINEACTION!, which is run by a collective of academics and students, and is up to 62 must-read issues.
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In addition to the HITCHCOCK book, Wood also released HOLLYWOOD FROM VIETNAM TO REAGAN … AND BEYOND, another revised version of an earlier book (Columbia University Press, 468 pages, $24.50, ISBN 0 231 12967 X), in which Wood talks about THE CHASE, the "incoherent text," STAR WARS versus BLADE RUNNER, Scorsese and Cimino, and in newer essays added to the book, MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING and a compelling defense of contemporary teen sex comedies (a genre I liked too and was once again stunned to see his tastes so commensurate with mine). It's an excellent anthology and a good introduction to Wood for the uninitiated. The knock on Wood is that he slips into stridency, particularly when he attacks the heteosexist patriarchy, and it's true that in some ways I prefer the "old" Wood, whose high standards and close readings have helped inform my own petty attempts at criticism, to the new. Yet the "new" Wood can still astound. His essay on the beautiful Canadian film LOYALTIES is a model of sensitive probing of difficult issues (reprinted in his book SEXUAL POLITICS AND NARRATIVE FILM, also from the University of Columbia Press). That's probably Wood at his best: seizing on a topic or a film (say, Cimino's films YEAR OF THE DRAGON and HEAVEN'S GATE) and knocking the reader off guard with a sympathetic take on a normally despised topic, his analysis making you see the film in a new light.
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Probably the most famous sentences he ever composed appeared in his book on Bergman, a rather unfashionable director for most of the MOVIE crowd: "It is time to lay one's cards openly on the table [though he didn't really do that until years later]. I can see no purpose in the individual life beyond the complete realization of one's humanity. The most basic urge may be that of self-preservation, but, if one is thinking in terms of the quality of life, the mean and meager instinct to preserve ourselves is insignificant beside the creative urge." Wood's credo is that criticism of art is criticism of life, though he spurns that reductionism. But Wood can also be drolly funny, as in a FILM COMMENT review of the book THE OXFORD COMPANION TO FILM, when he corrects a factual error in a reference to NOTORIOUS: which the book says "has little violence but it culminates in a magnificent final shoot-up in a wine cellar." Adds Wood: "The writers boyish enthusiasm for this entirely imaginary holocaust has a certain charm. Scholarship must insist, however, in its spoilsport way, on the restoration of Hitchcock's boringly nonviolent staircase descent."
My adherence to Wood is compromised only by what I would consider one defect in his aesthetic, which is an adherence to Freudianism. That didn't bother me during the time when I too was unthinkingly accepting of this pseudo science. But now as a Freud hater — no one, I believe, can read Frederick Crews on Freud without coming away with a sickening feeling that the previous century's reliance on Freud as a paragon of insight was a misdirection tantamount to an intellectual holocaust — I have to substitute other nouns to make the passages palatable. The problem is that Wood sees Freud (and his acolytes such as Norman O. Brown) as a liberator rather than an oppressor. Freud was a textbook example of the conservative, hypocritical advocate of repression that we associate with Victorians rather than the angel at the gateway to liberation.
But that's the making of a long argument, and a puff of negativity in what is meant to be a paean to a writer whom this reader has relied on, enjoyed, and admired for three decades.
Now Wood pleases his fans again with a slim volume in the BFI Film Classics series dedicated to RIO BRAVO (88 pages, $12.95, ISBN 0 85170 966 4). Wood has already written extensively on Howard Hawks's western, of course, in his monograph on Hawks (also eventually revised). Here, though, in a copiously illustrated book Wood gives a close reading of the movie with an emphasis on Angie Dickinson's role in the story and Hawks's attitude toward minorities.
Inevitably, Wood begins with an autobiographical send off. He almost died. Wood was rushed to the hospital and just escaped mis-diagnosis (I wonder if he has seen THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS?). Still, the close call with death put him in an existential frame of mind for confronting Hawks's Hemingwayesque attitude toward termination.
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Wood begins the book proper with a discussion of the larger issue of values in criticism and the role or the idea of the author. Fortunately, he comes down decisively on the side of authorship. That's followed by a memoir of once interviewing Hawks, and then a consideration of whether RIO BRAVO is really an "answer" to HIGH NOON. As usual, Hawks himself didn't quite describe his own film accurately, and Wood uses that as a solid springboard. Wood's intriguing conclusion is that in effect HIGH NOON is more contemptuous of the masses or "little people" than RIO BRAVO, and that in its portrayal of evil in the fascistic Burdettes Hawks, intentionally or not, offers up a story that is much more authentically left of center than HIGH NOON. Wood then places the film as part of a loose trilogy that also includes ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS and TO HAVE AND TO HAVE NOT, and then embarks on the close reading itself. Essentially the rest of the book is a dream audio commentary track (would that Wood would do one!), only much more expansive, tangential, and detailed than a real one could possibly be. Wood walks us through the movie, discussing its elements, the role of the stars, the use of Angie Dickinson, the use or non-use of nicknames as indices of being "good enough," the role of self-respect in the film, and what the Burdettes represent.
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The book is cast in Wood's still attractive prose style, which can often be dryly funny. When Wood embarks on that hoary clichè about messages in films and Western Union he immediately follows it with a funny characterization about the line's original enunciator, "an apparently unique moment of unconscious profundity" from Samuel Goldwyn. I suppose that we couldn't not expect Wood to trace the film's homo-erotic content, but he is very good on the film's celebration of male friendship and on what Dickinson represents as a relationship ideal (page 44). He is also very good on how Hawks uses great economy to tell us a lot about his characters (see the excursion into Stumpy's past on pages 59-60).
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I only found a couple of mistakes, or "mistakes," the first consisting of Wood calling Dean Martin's Dude "Duke" on page 52, an understandable gaffe or slip of the fingers given that John Wayne was universally known as The Duke. The second is a little more complicated. It seems to find Wood divided between calling Hawks an apolitical filmmaker yet later deeming RIO BRAVO to be politically acute. Across pages 58 to 59 Wood finds the film a salutary protest against contemporary corporate America (Wood does admit here that Hawks himself resisted political implications) while on pages 14-15 he is making a case that apolitical artists are better than politically motivated directors. This seems contradictory — but then, I've only read the book once. Deeper familiarity might lead to clarity.
Wood's real achievement throughout his career is to insist, by his very practice, that Hollywood movies are worthy, indeed, even demand the kind of attention that other arts enjoy. Thanks to him in large part we can take them seriously. But we can also respond to them as human beings. When Wood, on page 71, describes weeping every time he sees Dude pour the whiskey back into the bottle without spilling a drop, and admits that he has tears in his eyes even while typing the words, he is the living embodiment of Robert Warshow's famous formula that, "A man sits in the movie theater, and the critic must admit that he is that man."
NEXT TIME: Hitchcock, Hollywood in the '90s, and Natalie Portman!
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