My partner is a therapist. She treats people who have suffered sexual assault, torture and other major traumas. I am a movie guy. When we go somewhere, therefore, I am the light relief. She gives me gravitas; I give her a hint of showbiz, a bit of bling. We're a bit like the Sarkozys in reverse.
I'm used to being the bauble. Look at a typical issue of this magazine. My film column, "Widescreen," nestles beside articles on business, politics, medicine, foreign policy and the environment. How can I not feel a bit frou frou against all that?? Science, economics, education, religion, transport, agriculture and philosophy shape how we think and live. (I might not be here if doctors had not treated the jaundice I caught as a child.) In comparison, cinema is a tiddler. It's just 113 years old. It is small, young and disposable. It can't extend our lives or treat pain or build bridges or grow cabbages.
But cinema, at its best, is an art, and art matters. It is also a multibillion dollar business, and money certainly matters. In a fuzzier sense, movies seem to shape aspiration and desire. Some would say that they were 20th-century America's most striking export, an exertion of its soft power. Certainly they seem responsive to national psychology. Movies tell us what we are scared of. I have argued before that they function like Freudian parapraxes.
This all makes me feel less shallow. If what I write about is both an art form and a big business, if it influences how people think and plays a role in the zeitgeist, then it matters. But I'm bored by talking about cinema in these vague terms: as art, as zeitgeist, as aspiration. I'm writing this on a flight from Beijing to Dubai. In the six hours to go, I'm going to try to think a bit more about whether movies matter. I'll start by training a magnifying glass on the role cinema has played in the life of an individual. For convenience's sake, that life will be my own.
I was a nervy little boy. Growing up in Belfast in the 1970s made me more so. The world felt scary—both in general and because of the Troubles. When I went to the movies, just sitting in the auditorium, before the lights went down, I could feel my nervous system ease. Those almost empty, dark movie houses, which would soon light up with projected vistas and faces, made my voltage drop.
This is a feather in cinema's cap, but it doesn't take us very far. The human nervous system has always enjoyed a vicarious thrill and the melting away of fear—whether through reading novels or attending the opera or even, so I'm told, cracking open a tinny to watch Arsenal on the box. Cinema hasn't created radically new psychological experiences—it has just been very good at upgrading old ones. It is often said that we live in an escapist age and that Hollywood and Bollywood are to blame. But Christianity, Hinduism and Islam are story factories too, as were Egyptian cosmology and the Greek deities. (One could argue that post-enlightenment humanity is less escapist than in the past.)
So, cinema hasn't changed human experience in any significant way. But surely the question of how cinema represents real life matters? Hundreds of books and film studies courses worry over the ethics and politics of film. Many of them start with things like fashion. In the jazz age, the Cupid's bow lips of Clara Bow, pillbox hats, pencil skirts and box jackets leapt straight from the screen to the girls on Broadway. Bauhaus-influenced black and white sets, polished floors and nipped-in waists told millions of people what utopia might look like. After seeing Dennis Hopper's Colors (1988) I immediately bought a pair of mirror shades like those sported by Sean Penn. Why? To try to look as good as Penn, I suppose. Such borrowings happen all the time. The most striking example I know of such elision of movies and real life is the way that several generations of Indian men dance at weddings in the manner of Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan.
Sex is but a block away from such things. I'm sure the fact that I watched Kim Novak in Vertigo (1958) and Tippi Hedren in The Birds (1963) while going through puberty fixed some elements of my erotic imagination. At such formative times, of course, many things are grist to the erotic mill, but it was surely the power of film and its direct dial to my brainstem that locked in the sexual buzz of a well-tailored suit and heels. The fact that I was an equal opportunities luster—I wanted to be with Novak and De Niro—triangulated things in heady ways. From talking to friends, I knew that they weren't bisexual (I rued their disadvantage); and, it began to dawn on me, neither was the world in general. Yet cinema, it seemed to me, most definitely was. When Hitchcock photographs Novak in a state of undress, her hair hanging down, in Vertigo, he doesn't invite just the men in the cinema to imagine the moment we have not seen—James Stewart taking her clothes off—but the women too. When De Niro takes his shirt off in Taxi Driver, women and men see his body with equal privilege. It is possible to imagine a film in which the screen splits at moments of erotic appeal, the left half being for people who fancy women, the right for those who fancy men, but I haven't seen this done. For years, film theory talked about how movies coerced viewers into gendered responses to sexual display—Cameron Diaz's slow-motion appearance in The Mask (1994) makes us all lusty guys—but in my early teens I was a boy and a girl in the cinema, and that was great.
Cinema made the world legible to me. If I had had to learn about sexuality from the Ballymena of Ian Paisley and the St Louis nuns who ran my school, I would have been seriously screwed up. Theirs was an impenetrable medieval sexual lexicon, whereas cinema spoke plain erotic English. It was like one of those websites in which you input text in a foreign language and it translates it into your own. And judging by my conversations with directors like Scorsese and Bernardo Bertolucci, and the actress Tilda Swinton, this translation effect worked for them too. Novels could never have unscrambled life for me in the same way.
Which is only to say that it matters to those for whom it matters. And even then only in a vague Chomskyan, "my brain is structured like cinema" kind of way. To get back to something more concrete, how about this for a claim? Cinema stopped me being racist. I grew up in an almost exclusively white area. I could not observe the agency, subjectivity or volition of non-white people. I've read novels by Naguib Mahfouz, Toni Morrison, JM Coetzee and James Baldwin. Frantz Fanon and Edward Said made me stand back from my own whiteness and westernness. And yet none of these writers particularised non-white people for me like the movies of (deep breath) Mambéty, Sembene, Chahine, Cisse, Gerima, Ouedraogo, Faye and Hondo in Africa; Wu, Bo, Fei, Yuan, Xie Fei, Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Tian, Wong, Lou, Hu, Hou, Tsai, Yang, Tang and Hui in the Chinese-speaking world; or Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse, Kurosawa, Oshima, Teshigahara, Ogawa, Imamura, Tsuchimoto, Hara or Kore-eda in Japan. I read back these names and they sound like a song. It's not just that I've got to know the world through these 35 directors. When I started meeting real Ethiopians, for example, I could see, behind them, those passionate, thinking, dreaming people in Haile Gerima's movies.
I take race as my example because it is so visible, but the same applies to other differences. I had spent no time with middle-class people until I went to Scotland when I was 18. I first met openly gay people at the same time. Yet cinema had direct dialled knowledge of both into my adolescent mind as I sat in the dark, or at home watching a movie on BBC2.
So film has had a dodgy effect on my sense of sunglasses and body hair; it has provided a kind of translation of life for me, and kicked Northern Ireland's stupid ideas about sexuality into a hat; and it has made me fall in love with Africa and Iran, Japan and South America. Overall, that's pretty good.
But what happens when we move beyond my life, and ask what movies amount to for broader groups of people or even nations?
Consider Gregory's Girl (1981). Seeing it for the first time was, for me, like looking in a mirror. Gregory's adolescent crush on the girl in the football team was all too familiar—as was the film's setting in Cumbernauld, one of the great experiments in New Town urbanism (I too grew up in a New Town). But when I talked to Scots, it was clear that Gregory was theirs, his stage was theirs, his humour and hairstyle and manner of speaking were theirs. The film's success boosted the confidence of the Scottish film industry. But more than that, the fact that a lad from Cumbernauld was up there on the silver screen, where James Dean and De Niro lived, legitimised diffident, working-class Scottishness. It made it something you boasted about.
Success in football and pop music can reinforce group identities in similar ways, but not to the same degree. The confidence of young English lads is boosted by David Beckham's meritocratic example. But Beckham soared up and away from his background like a rocket. Gregory, being fictional and cinematic, takes his 1980s Scottish world with him when he bursts into life on the big screen.
In a similar fashion, the film Walkabout (1971) reinforced a strain of Australian identity. There had been Aboriginal characters on screen before, but the beautiful, taciturn youth who the two white children meet in the outback not only launched the acting career of the extraordinary David Gulpilil, but took Aboriginalism from a current affairs issue into the realms of recognition and fulfilment. Likewise Gadjo Dilo (1997), made by Tony Gatlif, a French-Algerian director of Romany descent, made Romany people proud and others interested. Gregory, Gulpilil and Gatlif created real people in the symbolic, charmed realm of cinema for three marginalised groups. These examples, and countless others, show what a great witness-bearer cinema can be.
Zoom out further, from groups to whole nations, and cinema's record is more mixed. On the plus side, film can help to establish national identity in a positive way. In Cinema of Unease (1995), a documentary about New Zealand's film history, Sam Neill argued convincingly that success in cinema was central to the country's growing confidence. In Britain, wartime films like In Which We Serve (1942) and Humphrey Jennings's documentaries played a part in the slow erosion of class barriers that was one of the successes of Britain's 20th century. The poetic humanism of Iranian cinema since the mid-1980s has stood in winning counterpoint to the clichés of the country on western television. But alongside such examples stands a depressingly long list of national or ethnic typecasting: Africans in Tarzan movies, Jewish people in Nazi cinema, African-Americans in Hollywood until the 1960s, Chinese people in Japanese film (and vice versa), Mexicans in US cinema until the 1970s. These slurs were not, of course, invented by cinema, but it certainly took to them with alacrity.
Nearly everything I've said so far has been about cinema and identity. One reason that cinema matters is because it is a kind of identity steroid—whether the unit of identity is the individual, the ethnic or social group, or the nation. But what about when it isn't boosting selfhood? Does cinema have an impact on other aspects of social or political life? Yes, but usually, in recent generations at least, as a result of its dissemination by television. In Britain, Ken Loach's Cathy Come Home (1966) is regularly cited for the outrage it generated about homelessness and the fact that it helped create the charity Shelter. I've written before in Prospect about Heshang: The River Elegy (1988), a series of Chinese documentaries that not only benefited from the relative freedom of thought in China in the 1980s, but helped broaden that freedom until the Tiananmen clampdown. In these and many other cases, the language of film told disruptive stories, but it was television's ability to deliver them to mass audiences that created the impact. But some films changed the world without having to rely on television broadcasts—Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine (2002) convinced Wal-Mart to stop selling certain types of bullets, and Marcel Ophul's The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) helped France confront its wartime collaborationism. Japanese activist film in the 1970s was particularly effective in setting up alternative exhibition circuits to challenge the government on issues such as environmental damage and transport.
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There's a final lens, beyond questions of individuals, groups, nations or social change, through which cinema's impact can be assessed: imaginative fidelity. By this I mean the degree to which it has told the truth. Let's start with war. I believe that movies seldom capture the immersive agony of war at its worst. In addition to growing up in Belfast, I was in Sarajevo in 1994, during the siege, and in both cases the feeling was of drowning in war, being in the conflict like a fish is in water. Cinema certainly hasn't shied away from trying to depict war—as either heroic stage or ignoble mess. And yet I can think of only two sequences in the whole of movie history that have given me that fish in water feeling: a celebrated scene in Elem Klimov's Soviet film Come and See (1985), when a boy and girl escaping the Nazis in Byelorussia almost drown in a black bog that sucks at their bodies, and the first Omaha beach flashback sequence in Saving Private Ryan (1998).
Cinema inevitably understates the most intense real experiences. Yes, documentaries about Vietnam introduced a dose of reality into America's national perception of its misadventure there, but they could only do so because Washington and television had painted such a fake picture of the fighting in the first place. Years ago, when I developed photographs I'd taken in India, I realised an obvious fact. Photography doesn't capture smell. My pictures of the slums of Mumbai, the biggest in Asia, did not convey their awfulness, partially because of my limited skills as a photographer, and partly because the medium itself is "optimistic" in the sense that it can't convey just how troubling some things really are. A still or moving image of Mumbai's worst living conditions, even with sound, will always fail to capture their cacophony, their sensory overload. Apply this thought to the question of war in cinema, and words like "glamourise" and "sanitise" seem appropriate.
Which is, of course, to indict the medium I love. But then no art form is really up to war—not Guernica, not War and Peace, not Britten's War Requiem, not Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est," not Sun Tzu's The Art of War. Take other themes, however, and cinema scores more highly. It is very good at travel and wanderlust—think road movies and westerns. It is excellent at psychological flashback, trauma and fear—think movies as diverse as The Pawnbroker, Three Colours: Blue, Sous le Sable and The Blair Witch Project. Like television, it is good not only at making us laugh, but at creating comic situations that live on in real life: the Coen brothers' The Big Lebowski not only pinpointed what is funny about slackers in the real world, but also invented funny things about its central character—the Dude—which real people then incorporated into their personalities.
And consider another theme: loneliness. I think of the films that sit in piles around my desk in my study at home: The Bill Douglas trilogy, Billy Wilder's The Apartment, Satyajit Ray's Devi, Bresson's Pickpocket, Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love, Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light, Ken Loach's Kes, Naruse's Flowing, Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka. Aren't these all in some way about loneliness? Stick an individual up on the big screen, put a frame around them, watch them in the dark, and the experience, as well as whatever else it's about, is often about being alone. War may defeat it, but the art of film is well placed to capture things like fear and loneliness. And this means that it matters.
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I can see Dubai glowing in the distance. Emirates Airlines provides a film jukebox even for economy passengers like me, so I could have watched a classic Egyptian musical, a Hong Kong action movie, or The Philadelphia Story and then its remake High Society. It was watching these last two films back to back many years ago that taught me about the speed of cinema, its economy and rapture.
But instead I wrote this essay, in which I discovered—what? That when it sticks close to questions of self, confidence and eros, of who rather than how, when it's about medium-sized things like aloneness and fear, when it doesn't bite off more than it can chew—when it does these things, film matters.
Barack Obama is on the news in front of me. I heard recently that he is a fan of the films of the American independent director John Sayles and his producer Maggie Renzi. This is no great surprise. No white filmmakers have written, produced and directed a more nuanced range of films about ethnic and social diversity than Sayles and Renzi. Imagine Obama's relationship with those films—Brother from Another Planet, City of Hope, Men with Guns, Passion Fish, Honeydripper. He will have responded to them because they depict worlds he knows. But also, I'd guess, because they describe worlds he has never experienced—small-town Alaska in the case of Limbo, the magic realism of an unnamed Latin American country in Men with Guns. If—a big if—Obama becomes the most powerful person in the world next January, I will be glad the Sayles/Renzi films have directed dialled into his brain. This would be a very specific example of the way in which films matter.
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