Movie Diary

I think it was Eliot who said “we read many books because we cannot know enough people,” and the same rationale applies to movie-going. Why we cannot know enough people is, of course, another matter, and originates, like so many of our ailing symptoms, in our increasing loss of any true community. The truth is, we are exiles in a manner and degree which our elaborate communications systems only superficially tend to conceal. Not able to reach each other in any other way, we settle for newspapers, books and movies, in which we can at least watch faces without feeling shameful or anxious about giving offense, and maybe being punched in the nose as a voyeur.

3/26—The Academy Awards on TV. I have always felt it a pity that some first-rate novelist—say, Isherwood— has never attempted an inside portrait of Hollywood. Not merely a satire, but the sort of complex image Proust made of the Faubourg St. Germain. The Hollywood star is Cocteau’s monstre sacré carried to an nth power. A stage actress, even a Bernhardt, could never have shown herself to more than a couple of thousand people at the same time, and the quality of her exhibitionism was accordingly conditioned. When Miss Kim Novak, with her nearly vertical eyebrows and her tungsten-bright hair consumed over a full minute of nationwide TV time to insinuate herself down the aisle of the Pantages Theater and mount the steps to the stage, fifty million people were watching her. Setting aside her not very original strategies of an epidermically tight dress and a lapsed shoulder strap, her sangfroid was really hair- raising. What such a creature must be like in propria persona was only faintly suggested by the constrained faces of her co-workers as they watched her feeding herself to her public.

RP

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Robert Phelps

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I think it was Eliot who said “we read many books because we cannot know enough people,” and the same rationale applies to movie-going. Why we cannot know enough people is, of course, another matter, and originates, like so many of our ailing symptoms, in our increasing loss of any true community. The truth is, we are exiles in a manner and degree which our elaborate communications systems only superficially tend to conceal. Not able to reach each other in any other way, we settle for newspapers, books and movies, in which we can at least watch faces without feeling shameful or anxious about giving offense, and maybe being punched in the nose as a voyeur.

3/26—The Academy Awards on TV. I have always felt it a pity that some first-rate novelist—say, Isherwood— has never attempted an inside portrait of Hollywood. Not merely a satire, but the sort of complex image Proust made of the Faubourg St. Germain. The Hollywood star is Cocteau’s monstre sacré carried to an nth power. A stage actress, even a Bernhardt, could never have shown herself to more than a couple of thousand people at the same time, and the quality of her exhibitionism was accordingly conditioned. When Miss Kim Novak, with her nearly vertical eyebrows and her tungsten-bright hair consumed over a full minute of nationwide TV time to insinuate herself down the aisle of the Pantages Theater and mount the steps to the stage, fifty million people were watching her. Setting aside her not very original strategies of an epidermically tight dress and a lapsed shoulder strap, her sangfroid was really hair- raising. What such a creature must be like in propria persona was only faintly suggested by the constrained faces of her co-workers as they watched her feeding herself to her public.