Can someone explain to me why a slightly skewed angle can't still amount to a significant alteration of future events?

 

This NYRB article on pre-Code Hollywood cinema suggests some interesting things about narrative rhetoric, things that I think about everyday, every time I return to how much it really matters to me how (idiom, inflection, timing) a thing is said.
 

After the Code…Hollywood movies elaborated something like a parallel world purged of a great many common human situations and motives, a world of such foreordained moral clarity that few endings could surprise.

To make that post-Code world believable required the lavishing of increasingly sophisticated techniques of persuasion, and Hollywood filmmaking marshaled ever more subtly enchanting visual and aural effects to hold the spectator spellbound.  In consequence, the earlier, pre-Code movies can seem antiquated or at least disturbingly irregular to spectators who have internalized the more smoothed-out norms of a later era.

…the longer you look at pre-Code movies the more you become aware of the expertise with which, in later films, spectator response is massaged, microsecond by microsecond.  In some early 1930s movies one comes to appreciate certain moments of relaxation, and the resulting sense of breathing room—even in movies that otherwise models of tense, ferociously clipped storytelling.

Pre-Code movies can be distinguished as much by matters of form as by matters of content. [They’re shorter – no more than seventy-seven minutes in length.]  Into that span they cram enough material for a much longer film, material that may lurch without warning from ribald farce to heart-clutching melodrama, from scenes of brutal domestic violence to frivolous panoramas of sophisticated society.  To anyone brought up on the later products of Hollywood’s so-called golden age, they can seem almost freakishly unpredictable—‘oddly cadenced’ or ‘off-balance’ or ‘structurally flawed’—as if their makers had simply not yet learned the proper way to tell a story or develop a character.

The early talkies revel in a certain baldness of exposition.  At times there is an impression of Brecht’s Alienation Effect arrived at by accident, as in those moments when characters declaim defiant protests or personal credos as if directly addressing the audience.  Pre-Code characters…had freer scope in venting their rages and desires.

The regularizing of morals [demanded by the Production Code] turned out to be inseparable from the regularizing of aesthetics.  In its tidying up of loose ends, the Code encouraged a cookie-cutter approach to structure and character that is with us yet, to which the anarchic unpredictability of the early 1930s offers a bracing corrective.

…the years when the Code ruled were…years when a certain anodyne predictability seeped deep into filmmaking, often masquerading under rubrics like ‘story logic.’

There’s a kind of equation of inauthentic content (moral clarity) with standardized form.  I think the most interesting sentence is: “To make that post-Code world believable required the lavishing of increasingly sophisticated techniques of persuasion.”  Here, O’Brien brings up the use of music and visuals, but he’s also still talking about the structure of the story.  I regret that he doesn’t really give examples or go into detail, but I like thinking about the ways that different rhetorics of storytelling can make the contents of different stories more or less credible. This could amount to only the oft-repeated idea that effective fiction is the creation of “imaginary gardens with real toads,” that the conveyance of made-up or dubious stuff must itself be fabricated of realistic detail.  But O’Brien seems to be talking equally about structure.  In addition to emotionally manipulative musical scores and emphatic shots, how exactly did the sequencing of a story make its inauthentic content believable?  Does it amount to a kind of moralistic symmetry, so that even if the message that stuff like greed and adultery will always be punished and good deeds will be rewarded isn’t realistic, the rhythm, the storytelling physics of equal-and-opposite reaction, feels almost like a natural law?

It also makes me wonder whether these pre-Code movies allow the viewer fewer opportunities for the pleasure of hackneyed dramatic irony (maybe I mean that dramatic irony is only hackneyed when it results from an acknowledgement of predictability).  I’m thinking, here, about the idea that the ending of a story endows if not reframes all that precedes it with a kind of poetic logic, indulging our wish to believe that everything happens for a reason, is a means to a specific end (Hamlet: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends”).  Undoubtedly, that’s an idea that far precedes post-Code Hollywood, but I’m just wondering (and this is almost wholly speculative, because what pre-Code movies have I seen?) whether the “structurally flawed” quality that O’Brien refers to results in more elements that are less easily explained or justified by the ending, or at least with less ease than post-Code logic demands.  I’m wondering if it comes down to the way that, in really good narratives, details are more likely to be organic to the primary preoccupations of their story – whereas the cookie cutter “story logic” that O’Brien decries might call for a predictable outcome that’s still thematically inorganic. 

And, instead of just making wild generalizations, I should totally put some pre-Code movies in my netflix queue.  O’Brien makes Midnight Mary, Frisco Jenny, and lots of Dietrich and Harlow and Shearer movies sound good.

*I also love the part where O’Brien talks about the language in these early talkies of the pre-Code era:
 

All of a sudden movies needed words, lots of them, and they got them wherever they could find them: on the street, on the radio, in comic strips, in pulp detective stories and romance novels, in plays sophisticated or socially conscious in their bent, in the lyrics of jazz songs…in generations of vaudeville bits finally brought to the screen, in the telegraphic argot of Walter Winchell…and the newly frank sexual advice of lonely hearts columnists.  Taken all in all the pre-Code movies constitute an overflowing repository of American speech and vernacular American writing—a sort of literary treasure, actually, largely unnoticed because scarcely transcribed—captured on the run, flung about at will, handled at times with musical fluency.
 

The image of rapid-fire cross-pollination of vernaculars is terrific.
 

Language may have had as much to do with the imposition of the Code as the glorification of vice and the sheer silk negligees of Jean Harlow and Norma Shearer.  It was language that emanated from urban centers—the language overheard by the people who wrote the movies—and some of it was too fast and too modern for audiences in middle America.  “We need more effortless entertainment,’ complained a theater owner in Kansas City, “and less of the type that makes intellectual demand on our patrons…Words are too smart.”  The high-speed repartee of movies like Blessed Event, Five Star Final, and Twentieth Century—language drunk movies whose characters live to talk—may have left many in their original audiences behind.

 

без фанатизма

I wonder why it took so long.

Also, this residue of the Russian language, most of which I barely knew and now have largely forgotten, allows for such a ghostly perception.  I'm trying to remember if it's like that brief stage in childhood, when. although you can sound out words, their meanings remain quite opaque.  As if something were being witheld so that what you're doing is not quite reading, is too mechanical to really qualify as reading.

I suppose it is like that.  It just seems different because I'm different.

без фанатизма, indeed.

Back in Dellacrosse, the dining was divided into “casual,” which meant that you ate it standing up or took it away, and the high end, which was called “sit-down dining.” At the Wie Haus Family Restaurant, where we went for sit-down, the seats were red leatherette and the walls were gemütlich and panelled, decorated with framed deep kitsch—wide-eyed shepherdesses and jesters. The breakfast menus said “Guten Morgen.” Sauces were called “gravy.” And the dinner menu featured cheese-curd meat loaf and steak “cooked to your likeness.” On Fridays, there were fish fries or boils, at which they served “lawyers” (burbot or eelpout), so called because their hearts were in their butts. On Sundays, there was not only marshmallow-and-maraschino-cherry salad and something called Grandma Jell-O but “prime rib with au jus,” a precise knowledge of French—or English or even food coloring—not being the restaurant’s strong suit. “À la carte” meant soup or salad; “dinner” meant soup and salad. The Roquefort on the salad was called by the waitstaff “Rockford dressing.” The house wines—red, white, or pink—bore the requisite bouquets of rose, soap, and graphite, a whiff of hay, a hint of Hooterville, though the menu remained mute about all this, sticking to straightforward declarations of hue. Light ale and dunkel were served. For dessert, there was usually a Glückschmerz pie, with the fluffy look and heft of a small snowbank. After any meal, sleepiness ensued.

 

A poem called "Twin Cities" that leaves me nonplussed

It all makes me remember that period of time, when the years of actually being from the Upper Midwest but not in it began to accumulate, and I felt some kind of obligation to capitalize, in my fiction writing, on the now relative exoticism of my hick background.  I don't think it was anything I ever did very successfully, and I'm trying to think exactly why that was. 

For most of adolescence, my relationship to the entire part of the country where we lived was that of the child who grows up believing that her real parents are much better and shinier than the poor substitutes she's been stuck with.  (Never having lived outside the Midwest, I of course didn't realize how much of the Upper Midwest's trappings had become my own - and remain so.  I think that in the sort of predictable gesture of writing about trying to transcend these trappings, I only succeed in solidifying them.  That is, isn't there something provincial and tired about talking a lot about trying to escape your provincial roots?  But for a long time, I think that was the relationship with these roots of which I was most conscious.  I can remember a pathetic version of myself, home for an Xmas not so long after college, on the basement floor of a high school boyfriend's parents' ranch style home, how the most important thing I needed to ask him was whether I was different from everybody else.  Effectively asking him to confirm that I wasn't really from there.)

But in the stories that I wrote during that time, during that time that I was from but not in, I tried very hard to assume a kind of salt-of-the-earth know-how about the Upper Midwest.  I wrote about the kind of clichés that I assumed phantom readers expected to hear about, decking myself in a coarse Scandinavian heritage that had never belonged to me and studding my prose with colloquialisms I had never actually used.  (All the while, of course, unaware of the subtler provincialisms that inhabited my very syntax, and which I couldn't then write about.)  I was trying to animate a cliché from an enduring position of contempt disguised as pastoralism, and it never sounded much like anything but.  I think this was, in part, because I was suddenly trying to cash in on something that I'd previously rigidly distained or, at least, ignored.  The sorts of Midwest experiences I was trying to write about, that I felt like I was supposed to write about, weren't really the ones I'd ever had.  That much, now, is clear. 

Reading Franzen's and Moore's versions of the Upper Midwest, I'm trying to figure out exactly what sort of experience I did have.  The culture of jello molds and fish fries and hot dishes - the Praire Home Companion version - was something I observed but didn't experience from the vantage of a self-designated out-of-towner who didn't want to soil or tear the ticket out of town she was always clutching.  I don't have any interest in writing about the Praire Home Companion version that was never mine, and of which there's no need at all for more.  Was my version the cliché of white-knuckled resistance to being in instead of from?  Last summer, at my parents', I reread Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People" and, for months afterward, cringed when I could perceive the very provincialism of contempt creeping into my voice, hulking and sullen.  A realization much harder to bear when you're in and not from again. 

 

 

The writer’s and reader’s mutual yearning for each other’s presence becomes the absorbing consolation for the failure to transcend the limits of the text.  If language fails to name or command, it still has the power of what anthropologists call ‘phatic communion,’ the power to create social bonds through meaningless gestures.  The reader must know that the poet has nothing to tell him, but know at the same time that he is communicating with him.  Writing becomes a way of perpetuating the writer’s contact with other lives, and thus preserving his own. (514)

                                      --"John Ashbery and the Idea of the Reader,” Bonnie Costello (Contemporary Literature, 1982)

...even if I don't want to give up on the rhetoric of At-home.