Silver City
Almost 60 years ago, in the essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell made observations about bad writing that have lost none of their relevance. “As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house,” he wrote. “The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier–even quicker, once you have the habit–to say In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think.”
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The problem is worse than ever in Silver City, an election-year special that assaults George W. with the tried-and-true plot turns of a Raymond Chandler mystery. The movie’s being proudly promoted for doing just that, which tells us we’re not going to have our minds broadened or our beliefs challenged–and that Bush has little cause for alarm. “In the tradition of the great film noirs, from The Maltese Falcon to Chinatown,” states the press book, “Danny’s investigation inexorably pulls him deeper and deeper into a complex web of influence and corruption, here involving high stakes lobbyists, media conglomerates, environmental plunderers, and undocumented migrant workers.” The old phrases pile up like henhouse sections. It clearly hasn’t occurred to anyone to try to say something new about these issues; instead we’re reassured that we’re in known territory.
Even if the influence cited were of an environmentalist disciple of Chandler such as Ross Macdonald, the status quo wouldn’t be threatened, because familiarity isn’t the only thing wrong with these prefab notions. “Is there any way to win?” asks Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), archetypal doom-ridden noir heroine in Out of the Past (1947), addressing Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum), archetypal doom-ridden noir hero. He replies, “There’s a way to lose more slowly.” When it comes to politics in art, the mannerist noir style seems to be one of the most attractive ways of losing slowly. It makes doom more voluptuous and artful than success, makes a film’s characters seem “half in love with easeful Death,” as Keats put it. I often wonder if the fondness many leftists have for noir films stems from their being suckers for romantic fatalism–defeatists who wouldn’t know what to do with success if it hit them over the head.
The final images of this movie reveal hundreds of dead fish in the scenic lake seen in the opening, while a voice bellows “America the Beautiful,” and Pilager seems set to clinch the election. But at least O’Brien gets the first girlfriend back, so we’re encouraged to leave the theater with a sense of closure and contentment. The smirky use of “America the Beautiful” all but replicates the use of the “Blue Danube” waltz to accompany a diabetic’s stomach surgery in Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me, and it evokes Michael Moore at his least thoughtful and most demagogic.
The press notes also report that he was disturbed at “how quickly people lost their outrage about the voting irregularities in Florida and accepted it as just the way the system works; the pervasive feeling that there was nothing to do about it.” In Chinatown this sense of defeatism was glamorized in the film’s famous final line: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” But isn’t Sayles sharing that defeatism rather than decrying it by turning to this film as a model? (For a pertinent critique of what’s politically as well as historically bogus about both Chinatown and L.A. Confidential, check out Thom Andersen’s brilliant essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself, showing at the Gene Siskel Film Center the first week in October.) He can’t contribute anything new to the discussion because that’s the last thing he wants.
