At the beginning of the COVID-19 quarantine, I saw a lot of sites commenting on pandemic films like Outbreak (1995) and Contagion (2011). In general, I would say that I am the kind of person who does not rush to films like these when real life is giving filmmakers notes. I am not knocking the impulse at all, I want to be clear. We all react in different ways at different times, and our film viewing serves different purposes. For instance, not everyone who enjoys horror films seeks them out for the same reasons (forever complicating those periodic essays on “Why Horror?”). Some folks are seeking rollercoaster thrills, some folks are habituating themselves to the idea of death and worst-case scenarios, some folks have an affinity to certain moods or themes or aesthetics that are commonly found in films grouped as horror, and the list of reasons goes on. I am simply not in the camp of people who rush to watch pandemic films in the middle of an actual pandemic.
I have been watching horror films, though, when I can. A lot of these are re-watches, dipping back into classics like Jacob’s Ladder (1990) and In the Mouth of Madness (1994) in order to jump start some thought processes and lubricate some gears, etc. In a lot of ways, these films are part of work, as enjoyable and wonderful and brilliant as they are.
And I guess that brings me to the question of art vs. entertainment. I’m not always interested in catering to that dichotomy. There are plenty of films that we might call artistic that I also find highly entertaining. The categories are certainly not exclusive.
But I think, in general, that my definition of entertainment includes some sense in which the object under discussion is not designed to make me uncomfortable. Laugh, cry, scream, yes. But it is not designed to upset me. Perhaps it is a singularly beautiful or astounding example of a genre, or more likely a tweak of a genre. Something that offers us the opportunity to see life or stories or ourselves in a new way. These examples of art are both beautiful and relatively safe.
But there is also the art that is designed to shake you, art that is made to upset the way you see the world, and it’s not interested in adding in a teaspoon of sugar. This art is challenging, and I’m definitely still up for that kind of challenge. That’s the kind of aesthetic experience that I want to have more of and not less. It’s not what I want all the time–sometimes I just want the popcorn–but I like to have those aesthetic experiences, even when they make me uncomfortable.
In that spirit, a couple of weeks after the quarantine began, Christina agreed that we would finally work our way through the two Criterion Collection boxed sets that we own. One is of Éric Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales,” and the other is “Five Films” by John Cassavetes. When I announced this on Facebook, at least one person jokingly (?) warned us against a married couple watching these films together during such a psychologically stressful situation. I suppose it does have the ring of a clinical experiment about it.
Well, to the best of my knowledge, our marriage has survived this experiment intact. (Christina, feel free to chime in.) Was it difficult? Hell yes, it was difficult. Christina and I were both surprised to remember that we had only ever seen Rohmer’s Ma nuit chez Maud (1969) and Pauline à la plage (1983), the latter not being part of the “Six Moral Tales,” but rather the later “Comedies and Proverbs” series. Maud remains an engaging masterpiece, and we recall Pauline pretty fondly, too.
However, it turns out that the mid-century masculinity on display in the rest of the moral tales is not all that commendable. For those who haven’t seen them, the moral tales each follow a man who enters into or manufactures a situation in which they make a moral choice. That choice almost always has to do with whether or not to be faithful, either to an actual romantic commitment or to the idea of one (or to a related philosophical ideal). These films are intriguing human studies, and it’s also fascinating to watch French films from the 1960s and 1970s in their own right, but some of those humans can be difficult to stomach.
The real challenge came during the two weeks it took us to make it through the “Five Films” set of John Cassavetes’s films. Again, Christina and I had both seen Shadows (1959) before, and we both liked it a lot. It’s a tremendously rough film, but its energy and its milieu and its performances are so extraordinary that those rough edges become an inextricable part of the essence of the film. They don’t detract at all.
After Shadows, the films look ever-more professional, and the stories are more and more gut-wrenching. It’s a litany of trapped people treating other people horribly. Every one of the films is full of fantastic acting. A couple of them have genuinely funny moments (Opening Night in particular). And yet, the recurring motif is human calamity, intimate and domestic. There is no need for war or natural disaster here. Flawed people manage to evoke their very own crises, thank you very much. Individuals let other individuals down, and only very occasionally they don’t.
I think that’s where the line is for me at the moment. I understand how much collective action means right now in the real world. So often in apocalypse films, people band together and help each other until someone does something stupid or selfish, and then it all goes to shit. But these films are about the ways in which we are routinely stupid and selfish and hurtful, even or especially when we are French and know a lot of philosophy. I guess it’s just that this sort of human failure has only local effects, or it seems to (though it is usually also reflective of while also contributing to systemic ills). In the middle of a pandemic, I am forced to think at all times about the ways in which my mistakes and the mistakes of others, willful or otherwise, might have dire consequences. By comparison, Rohmer and Cassavetes seem quaint.