Sympathy for the Devil

I’m not going to spend a lot of time here talking about the plot of On the Waterfront. It’s a classic, and frankly, has been written about more than enough in the last fifty odd years. And maybe it’s a bit of a cop out seeing a film at SIFF that I could rent whenever I wanted from Blockbuster. But there was something about viewing it at the Harvard Exit theater last weekend amongst the plush and florid decor that made me think about how life must have been for Elia Kazan.

We forget sometimes, having grown up in the age of the multiplex, the power that a theater has over a viewing experience. We forget about the theater’s power to transport us all, collectively as an audience through time and through space. And being in a theater that is nearly a century old it’s easy to lose yourself in that time, to imagine viewing On the Waterfront on its opening night. The theater becomes communal again.

This was the most enjoyable aspect of SIFF for me. I’ve seen independent films before, and given time plenty of the films I missed will be on Netflix. But the sense that everyone in the theater was there to enjoy a shared experience felt unique. Nobody was there because it was Friday and they were just seeing whatever was released that week. Our collective presence in the theater assured us that we had something in common. It was a humanizing experience.

But as I’ve said, I found myself distracted from the film. Perhaps because I came into it knowing that on a certain level On the Waterfront was a direct message to Kazan’s critics. It is hard to separate that from the film when you’re watching it. And maybe it worked as a piece of propaganda because by the end of the movie I felt more sorry for Kazan than angry at him.

It could be that I am a bit contrarian by nature, that I delight in poking holes in popular opinion but consider, as I did for the entirety of On the Waterfront: how many people does it take to make a movie? Dozens? Hundreds? And how long does it take? Months? Years? And how involved of a process is it? That is, how much attention must be paid to every minute detail?

I think I feel sorry for Kazan because he obviously cares about his craft. Not only does he care about his craft though, but I get the impression that it was the only way he had found to really communicate. It was his essence. Because a film can be a powerful way to send a message, but it is also an incredibly involved way to send a message. Kazan spent an extraordinary amount of time and effort refuting popular condemnation.

This tells us two things: first that Kazan believed, or had convinced himself that he was in the right. Kazan cared so much about casting himself as a hero and not a villain that he created a piece of art to address his critics. In a way he made sure he was bound to have the last word, his film would speak on his behalf even after he died. Second, as I have mentioned above, that Kazan avoided more direct or simpler methods of refutation leads me to believe that he had found very few mediums through which he could communicate. If film was so inextricably linked to him, I find it very hard to place blame on a man who was trying to salvage his life’s work.

Because HUAC would have, or could have ruined him. And it’s easy, given the hindsight of history to assume that were we in his place we would have acted differently, it’s easy to view Kazan as a coward. But a strange thing that we do not address often enough in our society is that there are things worth being a coward for. It was selfish of Kazan maybe, but he had found his love, his calling, and he was willing to be a coward if it meant holding on to it.

I sort of hate that it’s become a conservative, reactionary standpoint to decry how out of touch Hollywood is with the mainstream, because it obscures the fact that Hollywood does, in fact, operate in a weird Twilight Zone reflection of the real world. Los Angeles is populated, more so than any other major city I’ve ever visited, with freakish pseudo-people, who adopt affectations to get noticed or to stand out. The whole studio system is basically founded on and run by imaginary money. I can’t think of a single other industry where investors could gamble hundreds of millions of dollars, lose out (for example, Prince of Persia came out last weekend, and recouped only thirty million of its two hundred million dollar budget) and still be allowed to gamble hundreds of millions of dollars ever again. Let us remember that when Kazan was honored by the Academy, many people chose not to stand for his ovation, or to even applaud at all. Meanwhile Roman Polanski gets a near-universal standing ovation for his Oscar for The Pianist and he literally drugged and raped a thirteen-year-old girl.

Which isn’t to say that Hollywood deserved the blacklist, or that Kazan was a hero for damning his peers before HUAC. I guess what I mean is that we will never, as outsiders, be able to place any meaningful value judgement on his actions because the realm he operated in is divorced from logic or reason. It’s sort of like…OK, remember at the end of Chinatown?

Forget about it, it’s Hollywood.