OPINION | CRITICAL MASS: When memory wants to speak, movies can really make us listen

Gabriel LaBelle, who plays Sammy Fabelman, the alter ego of the teenage Steven Spielberg, receives instruction from the director on the set of Spielberg’s deeply personal “The Fabelmans.”
Gabriel LaBelle, who plays Sammy Fabelman, the alter ego of the teenage Steven Spielberg, receives instruction from the director on the set of Spielberg’s deeply personal “The Fabelmans.”


In his production notes to "The Glass Menagerie," which opened on Broadway in 1945, Tennessee Williams called his work a "memory play," and wrote that as such, it could "be presented with unusual freedom of convention."

Williams wrote that because of the "delicate" and "tenuous" nature of his material, "atmospheric touches and subtleties of direction play a particularly important part." He urged potential directors to make use of all the tools available to them and not to simply present a "straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks."

Williams compared such staid productions to photographs.

"Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

He was saying what every poet knows. There is a kind of truth that is more emotionally resonant and satisfying than facts. To say the sun rises in the east and sets in the west is not literally true — the truth is the Earth revolves, which causes the illusion of the sun rising and setting — but it feels true from our perspective.

Human beings have an array of senses that privilege certain natural phenomena, but our perception of the world is incomplete. Our vision is limited to a relatively narrow band of electromagnetic radiation in the range between 400 and 700 nanometers; our ears detect sounds only in the frequency range from about 20 Hz to 20 kHz. Much of the world is invisible to us, the realm of ghosts and quarks.

What we remember is not what was; we conflate and elide and manufacture details and events that our minds accept as truth. On an emotional level, there is no difference between what we believe happened and what actually happened. For all our attempts at reconstruction, the past no longer exists.

Williams wanted to create what he called "a plastic theater" that took notice of this gap between reality and memory, a new style of drama that involved making precise and intentional choices in all the elements of staging (props, music, sound design, setting, lighting, visual effects) to intensify the action, dialogue and characters presented. He didn't have much use for critics who failed to respect "the extra-verbal or non-literary elements of the theatre ... the purely visual things such as light and movement and color and design, which ... are as much a native part of drama as words and ideas."

PLASTIC EXPLOSIVES

It might be easier for a movie audience to accept surrealist or absurdist elements than a theater crowd; in a play, the actors are right there, trapped in a box with the audience. They are present, 3D and concrete, with no more authority to them than what is granted by the proscenium and stage. Actors in a theater setting are people, doing business before us, carrying on with their imaginary lives.

But the movies explode them, splashing their faces on a wall, far larger than life. A movie is an artificial hallucination, a dream made public. But movies also put us at a remove from the performers.

A movie is not people on a stage, pretending to be oblivious to the watchers in the dark. It is a play of light and shadows and sound confined to a bounded screen. A border exists that doesn't exist in theater, where an audience can impinge upon a play, actors might be distracted or impaired by disturbances in the house. It might also be that a crowd transfers energy to a production, that live theater provides for performer and observer a sense of connection unavailable to a moviegoer or Netflix chiller.

Barring technological problems, a movie plays out the same way every night. When James Holmes opened fire in that Aurora cinema during a midnight showing of "The Dark Knight Rises," Batman stayed right where he was. He didn't hear the screams.

  photo  Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron works with schoolteacher-turned-actor Yalitza Aparicio on the set his his 2018 memory play “Roma.”
 
 
SPEAK, MEMORY

Since Alfonso Cuaron's "Roma" came out in 2018, we've seen a spate of these cinematic memory plays based on the childhood experiences of film directors. A lot of notable filmmakers have plumbed their own pasts. Think of Francois Truffaut's "The 400 Blows," John Boorman's "Hope and Glory," Louis Malle's "Au Revoir les Enfants," George Lucas' "American Graffiti," Woody Allen's "Radio Days," Cameron Crowe's "Almost Famous" and Mike Mills' "20th Century Women."

The filmmaker is presenting us with an impressionistic memoir of experience, building in the now of cinema a vanished but remembered world. The details don't have to be perfect; they just have to feel right. So it doesn't matter that some of the record albums in Crowe's "Almost Famous" weren't released at the time they appear in the film. The reality of the "Almost Famous" universe isn't the same as the actual world.

They exist in the universe that Crowe creates when he imperfectly remembers 1973, in a nostalgic space outside of actual time. He's not going for what Tennessee Williams would call the "photographic" (something a lot of good photographers also try to avoid) but for a poetically true evocation of a time in his life.

In "The Fabelmans," released Nov. 11, Steven Spielberg explores how his upbringing in a devout Jewish family in the 1950s and '60s shaped his interest in filmmaking. In "Armageddon Time," released Oct. 28, auteur James Gray revisits a few months in his sixth-grade year. (In general I like Gray's films a lot. But on this one, I concur with my colleague and wife, Karen, whose succinct review of the film is "it's an edgier 'Leave It to Beaver.'")

Charlotte Wells' directorial debut, "Aftersun," one of the year's best-reviewed films, explores father-daughter dynamics through a collage of memories from the director's childhood vacations with her dad. ("Aftersun," which hasn't opened in Arkansas, is currently unavailable for streaming.) Sam Mendes' soon-to-be released "Empire of Light" had elements of a memory play.

In 2021, we had Kenneth Branagh's "Belfast," Pablo Larrain's "The Hand of God," Paul Thomas Anderson's "Licorice Pizza." In 2020, we had Lee Isaac Chung's poignant "Minari."

Quentin Tarantino's 2019 opus "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" had many elements of the memory play, especially in the way it repurposed the details of Tarantino's Southern California childhood in service of what was essentially a wishful fantasy. (Is it a spoiler to say that in Tarantino's revision, Hollywood vanquished the Manson Family?)

"Hollywood" was especially interesting because, unlike these other films that focused on intimate personal stories or hewed closely to the agreed-upon historical facts, Tarantino took great liberties with what happened while shoring up his fantasy with vivid and specific details, such as the on-air air checks of actual AM disc jockeys Robert W. Morgan and "The Real" Don Steele.

He also used a snippet of the post-modern late-night horror movie host Jerry Vance (better known as Seymour, "the master of the macabre, the epitome of evil"). Tarantino often artfully distorts "history" in his films but his command of the specific details in "Hollywood" — the cars, the colors, the clothes, the music — made for the truest film he has ever made.

NOT DISSIMILAR

It probably speaks to me more than some of these other films because my childhood was not dissimilar to Tarantino's. I've watched movies in the Bruin, the Westwood theater near UCLA where Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate watches herself (the real Sharon Tate) in "The Wrecking Crew," a movie in which Dean Martin plays a James Bond-like character named Matt Helm. (My father was a big Dean Martin fan, and took me to all the Matt Helm movies, even though they mighn't have been age appropriate.)

I know a lot about the Manson Family — my father used to see members of the family hitchhiking here and there around the Inland Empire — and when, in the film, Robbie's Tate plays records by Paul Revere and the Raiders, I understand that the band's lead singer Mark Lindsay was — along with Terry Melcher and Candice Bergen — living in the house she rented with Roman Polanski immediately before they moved in.

Hemingway once said if you know your subject well enough, you don't have to tell your readers as much. They will simply sense your authority. The more you know about the real histories Tarantino plays with in "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood," the more you understand what he's doing, how he's seeking to repair the fractured fairy tale that was the arc of the real Sharon Tate. The more you know, the deeper the film digs, the more it hurts.

On the other hand, Branagh's "Belfast" presents a story set in Northern Ireland in 1969 and 1970, at the onset of that 30-year period the Irish call, in their understated way, "the Troubles." I received the movie mostly in an almost academic way until Tex Ritter started singing "Do not forsake me, oh my darling."

The song is "The Ballad of High Noon," and was written for the 1952 Western "High Noon," which came out when my father was in high school. My dad used to sing that song all the time. It was one of a very few I ever heard him sing.

"But I must face a man who hates me, or lie a coward, a craven coward, or lie a coward in my grave."

It fits in the context of the movie, in which a small actor named Jude Hill plays 9-year-old Buddy, based on Branagh as a boy. As befits a story told from a child's point of view — a memory play — we're given only sketchy context about the Northern Ireland riots that kick the whole thing off. We only know that some Protestants are trying to drive the Catholics out of their homes and businesses. Other Protestants, who have no grievance against their Catholic neighbors, are being forced to choose sides by thuggish militants.

What's important to Buddy — our surrogate — is not the great historical forces at work, but the way those forces impinge upon his family, which is Protestant, boisterous and loving, but not without strife.

Buddy's Pa (Jamie Dornan) insists, "There is no our side and their side in this neighborhood." But this is a dangerous and probably foolish position to take, and the family's security is further compromised by Pa's having to regularly leave the family to work in England.

There are money troubles, and things between his mother and father that Buddy doesn't understand, and talk of moving away from the street where everyone has grown up. Maybe to Sydney or Vancouver. Maybe to London. Might as well be to the moon, little Buddy thinks.

One of the pleasures the family enjoys is a weekly trip to the movies, which take on color otherwise drained from the black-and-white film. The black-and-white "High Noon" is glimpsed on a TV screen; the soon-to-be emptied streets of Hadleyville echo with the barb-wire cordons of the mixed neighborhood in which "Belfast" is set.

Branagh's fictionalized father is the Gary Cooper figure in the piece, a working-class hero glimpsed through the heightened imagination of his 9-year-old son. "Belfast" is not a completely successful film — perhaps Branagh's memory renders things a little too black-and-white — but parts of it rhyme with my experience.

That's often enough.

BRAVER, NEWER WORLDS

Movies are good for more than simply exploring the ways we were and how we remember them; I don't know that there's a better medium for doing that. A filmmaker can get a lot of mileage out of a candy wrapper if it's the right candy wrapper, specific and rooted deeply in a time and place. What might take a novelist a page to explain can be conveyed in a brief close-up shot, the sort of thing no playwright could signal for without risking being called out for gimmickry.

The literal mind is a dull and vulgar instrument, and we ought not expect movies to be anything more or less than fanciful works of the imagination. (Even documentaries should be received as opinion pieces, would-be works of art that employ the procedures and techniques of journalistic inquiry to produce some kind of useful, poetic truth. Not the whole truth and nothing but the truth — an impossible standard given the limits of human observation and expression — but an honest assessment of the problems faced by the living.)

A movie gives the storyteller control over how the audience enters the story; a good director forces our gaze to where it needs to be in the frame. What might feel silly in live theater might be unquestionably accepted in the dream worlds of cinema.

While Tennessee Williams could never achieve his idea of a perfectly plastic theater, that's exactly what the movies offer us: the opportunity to make up new, potentially truer worlds.


Upcoming Events