Ho-wood Icon Factories

[perezoso]

"A partner evoked by sophisticated electric brain stimulation could be as real and much more satisfying than the boy or girl next door.... All the stars in Hollywood living or dead are there for your pleasure. Sated with superstars, you can lay Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Isis, Madame Pompadour, or Aphrodite. You can get fucked by Pan, Jesus Christ, Apollo or the Devil himself."

William Burroughs, The Adding Machine (1985).

Our schemas are not entirely constructed from our own decisions or instincts; images are imposed upon us, and imprinted more or less unwillingly, the image enforcers, the icon masters or mistresses being traditionally parents, teachers, sunday school tyrants, mcguffey readers, newpapers, photographs etc. Hollywood also is an image enforcer, both shaper and mocker of dreams as Burroughs well knew, and most of us who grew up in the last 20 to 30 years have been branded, shaped, and molded by Hollywood blockbusters, marketing hype, and large dollops of celebrity-mafiosi spin.

The Ho-wood presentation of famous or infamous historical figures is especially interesting; the biopic being sort of an ersatz replacement for biographical writing. Indeed, the biopic may be Ho-wood's most effective method towards skewing reality. To wit: quickly peruse the well-written essays penned by leftist-journalist John Reed, and then spend an evening with Beatty's biopic Reds. It's nearly good except for Beatty's usual hammy if not rural performance, which seems to turn Reed into the typical irrationalist yankee romantic, and one has to overlook King Jacko's big swing and a miss for O'Neill and Keaton's, well, ineptness; alright it sucked but the idea was promising.


What about more appropriate literary fare such as Tom and Viv? Didn't work either. Some of us most likely kept mistaking TS Eliot for Bobby Perue and that ruined it for me (though I did have some nice memories of Laura Dern's nipples), and I strongly doubt Bill Dafoe could conjugate "poder"; and yes, they sort of mocked the brilliancy of Lord Russell, so that one's out. Not all biopics are as poorly made and skewed as Reds or Tom and Viv: Kingsley as Ghandi is alright if sentimental and ponderous; Crumb, about underground comix legend R.Crumb was not a bad biopic. Malcolm X by the Spike Lee joint was really not such a bad flick, though he tamed down the autobiography. That Ken Russell flick about Lord Byron (at the chateau in Switzerland with the Shelleys)--that was an interesting and amusing film, but Russell's gothic schtick may remind some of us of old rock albums and spectacles that we'd rather forget....his vision is ugly if not sordid.


Oliver Stone, in his "Nixon" ( and Hopkins in a great performance--Anthony Hopkins possibly the finest actor of the last 50 years, or maybe the 20th century), shows Tricky Dick as a paranoid, petty, and obsessive man, though not without some decent qualities. Stone is as close Hollywood comes to a Dreiser or to an Adorno-like realism based on materialist premises, though seeing the tits of the TombRaider gal on the Alexander ads may make some reluctant to shell out the $20+ for tickets and some hotbuttered.

An effective antidote to Ho-wood misreadings of historical truth is Redford's Jeremiah Johnson, a nice movie, or at least nice cinematography, sort of Kurosawa-lite in Big Sky Country, before Country, or maybe just Park City was kool...That movie is to be admired for its simplicity perhaps, the lack of the hollywood noir twist, the lack of nudgy bits, the lack of bimbo T n A. I bet Edward Abbey dug it.

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[perezoso]

No haven't heard that champ. I was, in addition to riffing off of the Burroughs' quote, making a reference to Wittgenstein's picture theory of meaning as outlined in the Tractatus, which has been somewhat confirmed by experiments with humans and primates. Perhaps you might put that one next to the Dali LaLama.

grazi for sharing though

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