Kimberly Atkins Stohr

 

How film made us passive — and cleared the way for our Trumpian nightmare

A history of the cinema and of us.

The Globe

David Thomson is a film critic, historian, and author of “A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies.”

How did we become such a passive lot, content to watch the spectacle of Trumpian authoritarianism rather than intervene?

There are many factors, surely. But I’d like to focus on one in particular: the movies.

Or actually, what they have groomed us to do.

Let’s begin with a fable.

You are sitting out in the sun on a fine day in India. Not too hot yet. Thoroughly pleasant. You are in a garden with many flowers and a lawn leading to a density of bushes in the distance. It feels good to be there.

You notice an infant playing on the lawn. He or she? It hardly matters. This is not your child, but since you are alone with him or her you recognize a degree of responsibility. You keep your eye on the infant.

Then something stirs in the bushes. Amid the scarlet and mauve of the blooms, a shape slithers into the light. You put on your spectacles to be sure — yes, it appears to be a cobra (I told you, this is India).

The infant is chattering quietly in that lovable way. He or she has not noticed the snake. But the cobra has seen the child, and it is sliding forward across the lawn. There is no one else in sight. You can’t just sit there.

You stand up. You are afraid, but you have to do this. You step onto the lawn. How does one handle a cobra? You hope to find a stick in the grass. No good. You are going to have to defend that child yourself. You can only try to seize the scales and the surging muscle. Your spectacles fall off. God help us.

There is a battle, for a few seconds. You look into the cobra’s black eye and you squeeze until that eye pops out. You seem to have won.

Take 2: Let’s do it a little differently this time. It is still the garden, but the heat is turned off. You are in an air-conditioned movie theater, watching the scene. There’s the kid; here comes the cobra. You know the script by now. Action! You sit there waiting to see what will happen. Maybe the cobra passes by, maybe it attacks?

Isn’t it fun to watch — to just watch — and find out?

What film taught us

Not so long ago, say 130 years, we sat in our darkness watching the light. We saw things we had only heard about. The pyramids in Egypt, the Grand Canyon, the seething infinity of midocean, or Queen Victoria passing by in a carriage, noticing the camera but unimpressed. What a treat and excitement! When Captain Scott went to the South Pole in 1912 (he got the silver medal, you may recall; Norway took the gold), he had a cinematographer with him, Herbert Ponting, who shot exquisite scenes of the white desolation such as no one had seen.

The fact of it all took our breath away. This was nature, without buying a ticket for the ship and the train, without enduring the heat and the cold and surviving in that enormous midocean. It was tourism, and from a comfortable chair in the safe dark. No need for a passport.

For a while, the movies didn’t want to shake our faith in fact. So Fred Astaire really did that dance — in one shot, full figure, no cuts or stand-ins. And Humphrey Bogart simply walked across a room with a noble, unfussy ordinariness.

Yet something was shifting. Bogart’s character was not, actually, ordinary. He was in a cloud-cuckoo-land where the ridiculous witty toughness of his Philip Marlowe in “The Big Sleep” was honored. This was story. This was spectacle.

Some conventions of “decency” were still observed. That meant not just the elimination of indecency but keeping guardrails on fantasy in the name of taste and decorum. (Hold the orgy, delay the apocalypse — not now, not yet.) But we kept clamoring to see more: like the nakedness of pretty women or the knifework of a murder. So a time came in a movie when a decent young woman (no matter that she had had a momentary impulse and stolen $40,000) would walk into a motel shower and be cut to pieces. And we never got up or went into the screen to save her. We waited to see how it was done.

Oh, don’t be foolish, you are saying — how could we invade that screen, or be expected to? That limitation seems definite. But in the blink of 50 years the movie screen would reveal horrors we never saw or dreamed of — things we had never known. And we would accept them. We would enjoy them. We were no longer tourists. We were spectators.

Our passivity

A few decades after “Psycho,” the cinema made another technological leap, bringing the pterodactyl and other impossible monsters into the theater. Creating whatever the geniuses and minions of c??????????

Look, you protest, this can be art; and it’s a legitimate business for anyone who knows the rules of fact and fantasy. God help me, says God, just think of it as fun — don’t you poor bastards deserve a little of that in these times?

But suppose the most profound effect of movies has been to foster a helplessness or passivity in the body politic. Isn’t that the habit that comes from seeing a cobra and becoming a connoisseur of its tricky appearance rather than insisting that cobras need to be dealt with for the safety of our children?

Today we are anxious; we keep checking our phones. In 18 months, our Constitution and law have become toilet paper. But we wait for something to happen. We feel unable to do it ourselves. Because we have become watchers. Is there a movie that might help us now? Is our world an abyss begging to be filled by those fatuous, tired aliens from “Disclosure Day”? Why didn’t that movie take on Trump, who is so much more than an exhausted ET?

The technology continues to evolve. But the tremor we call AI is only the most up-to-date version of the horror stories we like to be frightened by. Distracted by. That tremor has been here 130 years, slithering toward us like a cobra.