THE CINEMATOGRAPH

“There’s no place like home.”

The Wizard of Oz (1:41:04)

This famous last line isn’t as simple as it sounds. First of all, Dorothy learns essentially the same lesson as her three companions in Oz. When the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion find their missing pieces, they come to appreciate what they had already possessed. In this sense the words summarize a shared wisdom honed through the hardship of the Great Depression.

It also represents a countercurrent that runs through many of Hollywood’s classics. Since the silent era, popular films had promoted exalted ideals like glamor, heroism, and perpetual excitement, the kind of dream Dorothy seeks over the rainbow. During the depression and the war, however, the big studios felt some social responsibility, and movies like The Wizard of Oz counteracted the trend, reminding viewers of more sustainable values.

Dorothy is not the first character to speak this line. Glinda had fed it to her while Dorothy clicked her ruby slippers. It’s still Dorothy’s invention because Glinda’s in her mind, but the film strongly insinuates that the good witch stands for the girl’s missing mother, so that the line is simultaneously a token of inherited wisdom and a sign of new maturity.

It’s a testament to the power of this line that audiences believe it. The movie’s attractions, after all, are not on Dorothy’s bleak Kansas farm but in the colorful fantasyland of Oz. Still, after all she’s been through, most people can relate to her newfound appreciation of home and family.

“The stuff that dreams are made of.”

The Maltese Falcon (1:39:17)

Another famous closing line whose words tell only part of the story. Sam Spade, a private eye played by Humphrey Bogart, says this to a police detective who’s inquired about the falcon statuette left behind after a seventeen-year international chase. It might sound like a sardonic comment on humanity’s misdirected passions, but we should not be hasty to read cynicism into Spade’s words. He says them after catching a ring of thieves and murderers, but he’s also reeling from his decision to turn in a woman he’s fallen for. Spade’s consistent quality is clear-sightedness, and he’s all too aware of the obstacle that’s come between him and her.

The “dreams” he speaks of include all the grand projects that cause people to abandon their humanity. The Maltese Falcon is an enjoyable mystery, but it also depicts a world where all relationships are broken. The source novel was eleven years old, but it’s no accident that its best adaptation came along at a time when the world was falling apart, largely because of people’s grandiose dreams.

“We’ll always have Paris.”

Casablanca (1:36:58)

The arc of Casablanca can be described various ways. Rick goes from self-absorption to sacrifice. From a more global perspective the story takes us from isolationism (“I stick my neck out for nobody”) to commitment. On a still more universal level, the film contrasts two visions of time. An anonymous refugee speaks the first words in Rick’s saloon: “Waiting, waiting, waiting.” The city of Casablanca is a limbo where people fleeing the war wait endlessly for visas, and Rick’s life is reduced to a similar tedium. Only by the end, having reconciled with Ilsa, does he recapture an alternative vision of time. In this famous line, Paris represents an eternal moment the two lovers can carry forward, sustaining the rest of their lives even though they’ll likely never meet again.

Casablanca‘s signature song “As Time Goes By” is one among countless arrows pointing to Time itself as the movie’s subject: “As honest as the day is long”; “A lot of water under the bridge”; “You have all the time in the world”; “What watch?” “Ten watch”; and so on. The writers of Casablanca knew it was not enough to rally the country around the war effort with slogans, songs, and big emotions. Those are effective up to a point, but they’re quickly forgotten when people leave the cinema. They had to link the great cause, the struggle against fascism, with a vision of time that represented life fully lived in, not the living death of plodding through time. For Ilsa and Rick, their brief relationship in Paris is the substance of life itself, not merely a memory but a piece of time that they can always live up to, and their example would fortify millions of Americans facing their own sacrifices ahead.

“May the Lord have mercy on your soul.” “Why not? After all, it belongs to Him.”

Monsieur Verdoux (2:02:26)

Three times in Monsieur Verdoux, Charlie Chaplin’s character asks “Why not?” …and each time the gravity of his question increases exponentially. First it’s a matter of flattery; the second time it’s about common goodness; and the third time, near the end, it expresses a philosophical faith in a kind of all-encompassing universal grace.

Here Verdoux is addressing a priest who’s come to pray for him before he gives his head to the guillotine. Without being irreverent, the line is a rebuke to traditional religion’s solicitous morality. Like Verdoux himself, the film asks questions about a paradoxical world where familiar moral categories are blurry and inadequate.

“Don’t look into the heart. There’s everything in the heart. Don’t look too deeply into mine, or yours.”

Les parents terribles (1:14:52)

The idea here is easy to recognize, even if it’s rarely expressed. We often imagine that people’s thoughts and feelings are clearly defined, but in the real world, love, fear, annoyance, pity, affection, and so on rarely exist in a pure form. They’re usually mixed with contradictory feelings. Unspeakable thoughts come and go, and our minds and hearts are a big mess if we look too closely. This shouldn’t frighten us or scandalize us. We’re all at the mercy of our organic natures, masses of cells trying to navigate the complexity of life.

Woven throughout Les parents terribles is a dialectic between order and disorder. The family’s home is called “the pigsty”, and the characters’ lives are equally messed up, though there are also forces of order to counter the entropy. Everything seems hopelessly complicated. Any resolution will be messy, and it won’t last, but people can make the best of it.

Aunt Léo speaks these words to her brother-in-law Georges, one of the so-called “terrible parents”. She’s a bastion of order in Les parents terribles, but she understands disorder. Here she speaks of chaos in the heart, while earlier she had made an equivalent point about the mind: “Do we know our own thoughts? It’s Greek to me. Don’t try and understand me.”

“Isn’t life disappointing?”

Tokyo Story (2:05:17)

Any great piece of film dialogue depends on its context, but that goes double for Kyoko’s line near the end of Tokyo Story. It’s not what Kyoko says, but the film’s attitude toward it that’s so extraordinary. Her sister-in-law Noriko reacts with a serene smile that simultaneously agrees while placing Kyoko’s wistful complaint in a broader perspective.

Tokyo Story is full of disappointments. The parents are disappointed in their children and vice-versa, the siblings are disappointed in each other, some are diappointed in their own lives or careers, and the whole trip to Tokyo is not what anyone hoped for. Nevertheless, everything that seems to fall short is situated within a sense of time that makes the disappointments seem trivial. The film is an exercise in showing over telling, a symphony of hidden events, feelings, echoes, and symmetries. All of this conspires to show the richness of our experience of time, making it easier to examine the disappointments of life with a spirit of wonder.

“Scottie, do you believe that someone out of the past, someone dead, can enter and take possession of a living being?”

Vertigo (0:13:20)

Gavin Elster is asking Scottie about supernatural spirits, but that’s not what Hitchcock is talking about here. Everything in Vertigo has a deeper psychological connotation, and it always points to the past. To be precise, it points to early childhood. When Scottie drags Judy “back into the past” at the end, yearning to be “free of the past”, he’s trying to finish a drama that began long before he met Gavin or Midge or Judy. Midge tells him, “You’re a big boy now,” and she means it. He’s a boy in a man’s body. Gavin has invented a story in which Madeleine is obsessed with a female ancestor because it’s a perfect mirror for Scottie, who’s just as obsessed with his mother as Norman Bates will be in Psycho. He rejects Midge for being “too motherly”, but the truth is he sees her as a mockery of a mother figure. She knows he’s looking for a mommy, and she keeps trying, even painting herself into Carlotta’s portrait.

Gavin speaks of “someone out of the past, someone dead,” as if he were initially reluctant to speak of death. Hitchcock knew, however, that the greater taboo is incest. Gavin is a cold-blooded killer, and if he puts death second it’s not because he’s squeamish, it’s because he’s turning the dial down for his reluctant friend.

Vertigo is not some vain exercise in Freudian theory. Hitchcock evidently believed that much of the violence in our world, particularly toward women, is the result of juvenile men who have not outgrown their possessive childhood passions. Psychopaths like Gavin are outliers who can’t be fixed, but without people like Scottie they wouldn’t get away with their crimes.

“Let’s catch up. We shouldn’t be too late.”

The End of Summer (1:41:54)

The End of Summer is a synthesis of Ozu’s Noriko trilogy, which includes three of his most highly regarded films. Ever since Late Spring, the first in that trilogy, Ozu had been making films about time, as most of his titles indicate (Early Summer, Tokyo Twilight, Good Morning, etc.). He was not after some high-minded concept of metaphysical time, but rather asking how to live in a changing world with all of its disappointments. In those years Japan was quickly evolving into an ultra-modern nation, and the loss of traditions put stress on ordinary families.

Taken out of its context, this line is as banal as can be, but viewers who read Ozu’s cinematic language may find a reassuring surprise in Akiko’s words. Here she’s addressing her younger sister Noriko, the name having now passed down to a younger actress. The sisters are more than a decade apart, usually separated by old and new dress styles, but they’re portrayed almost like twins. Together they personify an innate harmony between tradition and modernity that flips the conventional narrative of conflict. Here, at the end of the film, their family is beginning a new chapter, and it’s Akiko, the sister who represents tradition, telling the modern sister to keep up with everyone. If the past can say something like this to the present, then we needn’t be afraid to move forward.

“I have to think that everything that happens to me is my life.”

The Red Desert (1:53:48)

This line is easy to overlook. Spoken in apparent confusion to a Turkish sailor who can’t understand Italian, it sounds like a truism. In fact it’s the moment of clarity Giuliana has been building toward. Most people define their lives selectively, counting up their triumphs, satisfactions, and moments of happiness. Tediums, agonies, humiliations, embarrassments, and failures get left out of our mental autobiographies unless they’re part of a struggle toward success. After a series of traumas, Giuliana comes to recognize that everything she’s been through is part of her, and that none of it diminishes her.

Giuliana’s epiphany follows shortly after a fantastic story she told her little boy about a girl on a pink beach who encounters a phantom ship. Her tale, which had sprung spontaneously from her imagination, describes an attitude of wonder that’s consistent with all of Antonioni’s films. The point is to seek wonder in the ordinary material of life, in “everything that happens”, including pain and disappointments.

“You’ll come by one day, pick an anemone, and think of me. Take it as a word of love that was thought but never spoken.”

Gertrud (1:53:34)

Spoken near the end of Gertrud, this line and the scene it belongs to have a strongly valedictory feeling. The protagonist is suddenly old, and after a series of unhappy romantic attachments she’s now instructing a platonic friend to visit her gravesite someday. What’s less obvious is how the line brings a fitting end to the director’s career as well.

For more than four decades, Carl Theodor Dreyer had shown a growing skepticism toward words. In his silent film Leaves from Satan’s Book words were the Devil’s work. Amid the deceptions and propaganda of World War II, he made a film about witchcraft (Day of Wrath) that showed how rapidly words could destroy, and how hard it was for words to do good. Twelve years later he made a film called The Word (Ordet) that distinguishes between divine words and the powerlessness of human words. Here, in his last film, after words had done so much to ruin the characters’ lives, Gertrud comes to realize that the most fortunate word is an unspoken one.

“Mr. Rusk. You’re not wearing your tie.”

Frenzy (1:54:51)

These seven words wrap up a complicated situation, sparing the audience minutes of exposition. A third man in the room, Dick Blaney, has just been caught in an unimaginably compromised position, but luckily the inspector knows who’s guilty, and the words leave a serial killer speechless.

The line comes across as humorous, but on the face of things it’s not that funny. It punctures a tense situation, but there’s a subliminal factor as well. In 1972 London you wouldn’t quite say that a man was naked without a necktie, but society was more formal than it is today. Although a tie was not de rigeur for a greengrocer like Bob Rusk, it’s a sign of adulthood, and its absence is a symbolic admission that he’s regressed into the mindset of a child – not unlike the way Hitchcock’s more famous villain Norman Bates regressed into his oedipal childhood in Psycho. For viewers aware of Hitchcock’s undying interest in Freudian sexuality, the line hits with extra force. The point of Frenzy, like many of Hitchcock’s films, is to expose the danger that overgrown boys like Rusk pose to society.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

Blade Runner (1:46:21)

No one has ever seen a glittering C-beam or the Tannhäuser Gate that Roy Batty is talking about, but we can imagine those wonders in our own way. The point of the replicant’s dying words is that he’s experienced something tremendous that makes his existence worthwhile, even as it makes the brevity of his life more painful. His exotic experience may be outside of an earthling’s range, but anyone who’s lived well can relate to it because other sorts of wonders validate our lives as well.

At the center of Blade Runner is a contrast between two poles of influence – experience and abstraction. The latter governs Tyrell, a captain of industry who follows the markets even from bed, and it governs Blade Runner‘s capitalist dystopia, but the fact of experience humanizes even a brutal replicant. It’s remarkable how equivalent Roy Batty’s words are to the immortal “We’ll always have Paris” from Casablanca. Both lines find the substance of life in experience, each acknowledging in its way that a held experience can provide a reason to live, long after it’s over. Casablanca speaks of the eternal quality of experience (“always”), whereas Blade Runner speaks of its ephemerality (“lost in time”), but the two don’t necessarily exclude each other. If we choose to value experience, we’ll appreciate both its eternal and its fleeting dimensions.

“Did your hand tremble?” “No.” “Then you are a man, my son.”

Dry Season (1:28:05)

This one has a triple meaning. Everyone gets the first two, which are almost opposite. Atim’s blind grandfather thinks the young man has just completed his revenge, executing the man who slew his father, whereas in fact Atim had held the pistol without trembling because his conscience was clear. Instead of conquering his nervousness, he’s reached a higher understanding, letting his enemy live.

The brilliance of this line is that it elevates what’s already a wonderful fable to the level of psychological revelation, confirming a thread that’s been hiding throughout the film. The third meaning lies in the final sentence. It’s not just that Atim has done the right thing. He’s become a man, or grown up, in the classical sense of psychoanalytic theory, by putting aside his oedipal rivalry. Whereas Vertigo had focused on the mother-son side of the oedipal triangle, Dry Season looks at the son-father relationship, hiding it behind the circumstance that the father figure is the killer of the real father.

The result is far more than a moral lesson. It exposes a major root cause of social ills like the mistreatment of women, intergenerational hatred, and (fitting for a film made in Chad) civil warfare.

“Perhaps you won’t agree, but nothing is crueler than a coward, and the slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining.”

The Counselor (2:13:20)

A dire prediction, certainly, but it shouldn’t provoke despair. On the contrary, it’s a call to action. In 2013 Ridley Scott had his finger on the pulse of a world that was turning crueler, and The Counselor is a cautionary film, to use its own word. The speaker here, Malkina, is one of two psychopaths in The Counselor, but they would be powerless to cause harm without the acquiescence of ordinary cowards who play along with their schemes.

The film’s protagonist is an attorney, a counselor who as it turns out never gives a word of good advice to anyone. The real counselor is the film itself, or, if you wish, Malkina in this line. The point is that the fate of the world depends on ordinary people matching the courage of psychopaths. We must stop fetishizing them, looking up to them, electing them, and yielding power to them, or else we’re headed for unimaginable slaughter.