flicks:!   W Wfm
Medium Cool
by J.S. W1LLOUGHBY
Today technologies and their consequent environments succeed each other so rapidly that one environment makes us aware of the next. Technologies begin to perform the function of art in making us aware of the psychic and soc/aJ consequences of Technology.
McLuhan
At a cocktail party included in the opening scenes of Medium Cool a TV soundman, played by Peter Bonerz, describes himself as an "extension of a tape-recorder". In the sequence immediately preceding the cocktail party Bonerz and the TV cameraman with whom he works, played by Robert Forster, record audio and vidio coverage of a freeway accident and then drive away from the scene without bothering to aid an injured girl, lying on the cement where she has landed after being thrown from the car. They pause before leaving long enough to radio in a report of the accident, then drive away in their Channel 8 station wagon for a rendezvous with a motorcycle courier who will transport the footage downtown.
One of the "psychic and social consequences" of television is the creation of curious men in whom instincts of compassion and moral engagement are completely repressed. One result of this is the need to create a format for news broadcasts and feature stories that will substitute the appearance of compassion and engagement for the real thing.
Another result is an evident moral shortsightedness about the purposes and intentions of television; exploitation of events is substituted for the objective search for truth. Concern for life, indeed, reality itself, is subordinated to the need
for material to fill up time and continue the ravishing of our senses.
The film explores the possibility that television creates the world it records. It cannot capture the serenity and detachment of grass, nor the enveloping aural presence of rock, but it creates a community of the senses by providing a continuous format for the recording of events.
Cameraman and soundman go out to shoot a follow-up feature on a black cab driver who found an envelope containing ten thousand dollars in his cab and turned it in. They have a format for that kind of story, now, just as they have developed one for assasinations since November, 1963.
The point is, tile format they have developed for this "compassionate" feature story is unreal, or at least irrelevant. The "human interest" story is simply another symptom of television's exploitation of life.
The real story, as the blacks tell their captive audience, is of the temptation the black man feels to commit acts of violence to gain television recognition. Beinp on the tube, man, is status, is life. The real risk, in other words, is that the tube may become the final arbiter of what is life.
In its compulsive attempt to provide in depth involvement of the senses what really counts is the succession of events, the continuous flow of exciting information.
In one sequence in Medium Cool we see national guardsmen staging a mock
confrontation. The mock dissenters are a grotesque and cynical caricature of reality, the guardsmen an ominous forewarning of the mindless police riots at the democratic convention later in the film. But what is really frightening is that from the media point of view the mock dissent is like a dress-rehearsal for a television spectacular.
In a society continuously and instantaneously recording its history through the media, the necessity to distinguish between fact and fiction becomes obscured. The real criteria for success becomes the depth of involvement of our senses, distinct from judging and evaluating. The real danger is that men may be victimized to provide this saturation.
Medium Cool itself is part fact and part fiction, the story of a television cameraman becoming aware of and critical of his own lack of moral commitment set against documentary film of violence of all kinds in summer, 1968. That the line between fact and fiction in this film is frequently unclear is not a danger; writer-director-photographer Haskell Wexler does not use fiction to enhance fact or to exploit it. Unlike the television cameraman he depicts, Wexler's fiction is a compassionate and critical commentary on the world seen in his documentary footage.
The story-line of the film shows the cameraman struggling tentatively towards a position of moral engagement and human understanding. From scenes of sex and self-indulgence set against a backdrop of roller derby violence to enhance the mood of callous decadence, the cameraman grows towards a more humane in-
volvement with life through Harold Blankenship, age 13, and his mother, both migrants from Appalachia.
It is here that a further extension of Wexler's interests becomes evident. His concern for violence goes beyond the exploration of television's role in it. Broadly speaking, he is concerned with the possibility that the urge to violence is a predominate and inherent element in urban life.
More precisely, he is concerned with the effect that may have on the lives of people like Harold and- his mother; they have a kind of naturalness and grace, carefully shown In quiet scenes in Chicago and in flashbacks of their lives in beautiful country scenes in West Virginia, a kind of moral temperateness and quietness to which the violence and shock of Chicago is an antithesis.
Wexler's hope for the survival of the qualities that Harold and his mother represent is not high. For it is a violent society, you see, and in attempting to live a compassionate and humane life one stakes out a claim in that society"a claim that puts one within reach of its violence; to be engaged with life may be to be destroyed by it. The end of the film is an apocalypse of this insight.
The film began with shots of an auto accident and it ends with shots of another one in which Harold's mother is killed and the cameraman, who is driving, is critically injured. A carload of inquisitive faces, curiously unmoved, motors quietly past and a child inside snaps a photo of the burning vehicle; "an inclusive list of media effects opens many unexpected avenues of awareness and investigation".
Easy Rider
by JACK LYNE
Elvis. First time around, 1956.
A sterile foursome dubbing themselves The Crewcuts had just ooo-waaed and oozed their way through a sugar-coated gem called "Sh-boom" when that raucous, caterwauling voice came tearing through my tiny brown plastic radio, shattering the flat gray clouds of the adolescent mind.
Dropping my copy of the latest exploits of my current folk-hero, aptly named Plastic Man, I knocked over two stacks of baseball cards while groveling toward the volume dial to turn up, very far up, That Noise.
With an echo-chambered wail aimed directly at my sex-starved mind, Elvis died a thousand RCA Victor deaths in "Heartbreak Hotel":
"Yeah-uh hotel's alius crowded, desk clerk's dressed in black"been so laung on lone-uh-ly street, well-uh-well-uh-well-hu they'll nevar get back....He-uh's so lonely he could diiiieeee!"
Mid-way through that memorable two and one half minute grease-letting, I began jumping up and down on my bed in one of those too-infrequent bursts of pure, unadulterated joy. It was the end of my flat-top.
Screen star James Dean, for all his brillance, had only smouldered. Presley, a red-neck, pompadoured Memphis truck-driver, was, by the mid-Victorian standards of the time, pathologically ill, which is exactly why we loved him.
"Elvis the Pelvis" (as the era's clever journalists tagged him) was the first mass symbol to overtly and unabashedly kick it all out and, in his own unintentional style, scream defiance.
Thousands of kids heard Presley's phallic frenzy and many of them, from Buddy Holly to Jim Morrison, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, dropped out of Vic Tani body-building courses to learn the basics of guitar playing and hair-growing.
The Presley-inspired trappings of the late fifties, the black leather jacket, and the tire chain, rapidly gave way to the beat ultra-cool gear, complete with sun glasses, bongos, and Allen Ginsberg, though soon this, too, was to pass in favor of moving hair forests, day-glo, and I Ching.
El the Pel was soon lost in the melee as new symbols and leaders came to satisfy new life-modes. Still, throughout all this rustling about one' theme remained constant: An underlying leariness toward the fecund fields of suburbia awaiting new harvesters; a reluctance of these young hostages to fortune to grasp the bourbon-and-water appearance of life
14
and choke it down, despite its hemlocklike taste.
Yet, despite the longevity of the alternate life-styles, their mass media exposure remained minimal. The motion-picture industry, in particular, took little notice of the changing scene, grinding out epics to fit the talents and tastes of such social activists as Walt Disney and John Wayne.
However, over the past several years the sluggish motion-picture industry has been slowly foraging out in new directions, exploring the pervasive dissent present in this nation.
The movie mongols have slowly become more permissive, allowing producers and directors more latitude. Though the industry's main men have been motivated by anything but esthetic and moral values, they have created a climate that could develop "Easy Rider", a motion-picture dealing in depth with contemporary America.
Currently tearing through Kentucky's theatres, "Easy Rider" lashes out with a naked power that is the cinematic equivalent of Presley's mid-fifties pelvic punch.
Produced by Peter Fonda, directed by Dennis Hopper, and written by Fonda, Hopper and Terry Southern (of "Candy" fame. Judge him by the book, not the rather juvenile film), "Easy Rider" survives several early breakdowns and occasional dips into pretentious, pompous moralizing to pull off a mind-crunching tour de force.
"Easy Rider" utilizes a rather simple scenario, following the wanderings of Wyatt (played by Fonda) and Billy (played by Hopper). The two make a rather profitable sale of cocaine in Los Angeles after bringing it up from Mexico (pre-Operation Intercept).
They take their cocaine collateral and buy two motorcycles. Wyatt decorates his cycle with stars and stripes to match his leather jacket and dubs himself "Captain America".
The two set out for Mardi Gras, stopping at a commune, later getting arrested for jovially taking part in a small-town parade. Fortunately, they find as a cellmate a local alcoholic lawyer (played with remarkable precision and skill by Jack Nicholson) who gets the two out with only a light fine (the normal procedure was to shear heads of such vermin).
Nicholson joins them on their voyage toward New Orleans, sar tori ally elegant in his old football helmet, letter jacket and summer suit.
After repeated hassles in small southern towns, they are attacked in the night by a group of local vigilantes. Nicholson is killed in the senseless melee.
Fonda and Hopper continue on in their southern voyage, arriving in New Orleans in time to drag two whores through an acid-saturated tour of Mardi Gras.
Finally, both Fonda and Hopper are gunned down by rednecks in a panel truck as they cycle through the bayou country.
Fonda, as "Captain America", has received a great deal of attention from the press. It does seem this is Fonda's finest thespian moment to date, although that really isn't saying very much.
In fact, if crimes against the cinema are ever tried, Fonda is a shoo-in for execution. He has wandered through such memorable moments as "Tammy and the Doctor" (really, really bad), "The Wild Angles" (really bad) and "The Trip" (bad).
Throughout his celluloid exploits he has performed with a skill seemingly gleaned from a Jayne Mansfield learn-to-act-by-mail course.
However, in "Easy Rider" Fonda seems to have found his niche. He flaunts a clairvoyant cocksureness throughout the flick that seems apropos for the distant, ultra-cool characterization of "Captain America".
For instance, when Nicholson accepts a joint from Fonda, (over the former's protests that he has his own "store-bought ones) he asks, "But won't this lead to harder stuff?" Fonda replies with perhaps the only honest answer: silence. (According to Fonda the marijuana used in the movie is the real object. The acid, though, was "just aspirin".)
Fonda's patrician insouciance does occasionally get out of hand, especially
when he is portrayed as some sort of mystic, introverted Christ-Ghandi-Buddha-Elvis figure.
Hopper, an outcast in the film-making set and reputedly dead broke when hired to produce "Easy Rider", portrays the desperate aimlessness of Billy with tension, skill and believability.
Hopper's direction is equally component, explaining his choice at the Cannes Film Festival as "Best New Director".
The film is not without major faults. As is true of the subculture it describes, the script is terribly cliche-ridden. The characters are forever "getting their thing together, man".
Likewise, the muscle tone of "Easy Rider" is occasionally nonexistent. The early scenes threaten to denigrate into a friendly hippie travelogue, although photographer Lazlo Kovacs' filming and cutting brilliantly shows us the aching vast-ness of this country.
The stop-over at the commune is both unbelievable and offensive. The small group is given the cinematic treatment usually reserved for lost civilizations as Fonda pontificates such plaudits as, "They'll make it, man, they'll make it."
Many of the commune characters look like they have recently come from shooting Villager commercials or Panhellenic meetings. Kovacs' Godard-like 36 0-degree shot of the gathered members is one of the few moments that break the nau-seatingly Utopian treatment of the subject.
However, Wyatt and Billy are at least portrayed throughout as humans, avoiding the all-in-black-bad-straight-people versus the all-in-white-hip-people confron- '
continued on page 15 blue-tail fly