Hollywood Values

Have you ever felt that while you and your friends watched the same movie, you didn’t really see the same movie? Have you ever wondered why so many people see so many different things in movies? A few years ago I had an opportunity to hear Michael Medved, the author of Hollywood vs. America (1992), in person. In the question-and-answer period after his lecture he happened to call Titanic (1997) a corrupt movie because, as he said, it shows that all an old woman remembers late in her life is the fact that when she was young "she got laid in the back seat of a car." At that time I haven’t seen the movie yet, but some instinct told me that there must be more to the story than that. Sure enough, when I did see the movie, I saw something entirely different. I saw an old woman remember, among other things, making love to a young man who not long after that gave up his life that she might live as that fated voyage came to a tragic end. Since "greater love has no man," I didn’t think there was anything corrupt about this, but this is the sort of thoughtlessly negative reaction to Hollywood that has prompted me to write Hollywood Values.

My book presents heart-felt yet accurate interpretations of an adequate sampling of movies made in the last 20 years in four different thematic categories. I deal with movies that show Hollywood going to school, falling in love, fighting for justice, and making a difference. The movies I treat include such wonderful and insightful examples as Dead Poets Society and Patch Adams, or The Age of Innocence and American Beauty, or The Verdict and Erin Brockovich, or The Color Purple and Fargo, to name just a few. I treat each of the movies I cover in the book seriously, giving each a chance to show us what each is all about. The movies treated in my book are chock full of values, including some obviously traditional ones. But we can’t understand them if we can’t enjoy them, and we can’t enjoy them if we don’t watch them with open minds. Movies, like all works of literature (and they are related to both novels and plays), present us with lots of arguments (in the philosophical sense) that throw light, in one way or another, on the endless struggle between good and evil, the hope that springs eternal in the heart of love, the triumph of the spirit over the letter of the law, and the vicissitudes of so much that besets our human condition. Movies can teach us a great deal about the world and about ourselves, provided that we watch them with tender loving care rather than with what I call the "rejective imagination." If you like movies, you are going to love Hollywood Values. And if you don’t like movies (are there people who really don’t like movies?) you might just change your mind after reading this book.

A semi-retired professor of literature, Steven C. Scheer earned a Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University in 1974. He taught for just about 30 years in a liberal arts college as well as in several universities. He wrote many essays and a couple of books (the last is Pious Impostures and Unproven Words, a study of the works of such classic American writers as Hawthorne, Melville, and Mark Twain). He was always popular with his students, partly because of his irrepressible enthusiasm and partly because he invented such "fun" assignments (about which he also published an essay) as "The Fictitious Term Paper."

When the liberal arts college for which he taught for decades went out of business, Steven C. Scheer decided on a new career. When he was young he really wanted to be a writer, so now at the age of 60 he is starting all over again. Hollywood Values is his first offering as a full-time writer. It is an act of love, as it were, based on a lifelong appreciation of good movies, along with plays and novels and poems, of course. He is already at work on his next book (Love & Death & Sex & Marriage), for which the groundwork has been laid years ago in his teaching of certain courses that touch upon the development of romantic love in Europe and America. Wish him luck.

What [Dead Poets Society] teaches us...nay, what it shows us...is that excellence is not always rewarded in our world, that discipline is at times nothing more that the rigid application of misguided and illogical distortions, that honor can be horribly twisted to suit dishonorable ends, and that thus tradition may indeed become its own travesty. When will we ever learn? And why not in school, of all places?

There is something heart-rending about the ending of [The Age of Innocence], which (again) operates on a number of different levels. Why does Newland refuse to go up to Ellen’s Paris apartment? He sits in front of her building on a bench while his son proceeds to go upstairs to meet the "woman" his father once "almost threw everything over for." Newland remains seated on the bench, looking up at Ellen Olenska’s window until the light of the setting sun flares up and the vision changes back to the time when she stood at the end of the pier in the distance with her back turned towards him. This time, however, she suddenly turns around and looks straight into the camera. Newland gets up and slowly walks away, with the aid of a cane.

Again, the question arises: has he done the right thing? Where does a person’s true duty lie? With the "values of the tribe"? Or with the demands of his or her own heart? The human condition is replete with the age-old conflict between the individual and society. Neither the novel nor the movie can give us an adequate answer. All I know is that every time I watch this movie, I always finish it with an uneasy feeling and a poignant regret, a regret so deep that it’s hard to fathom its ultimate import. I am sure I am not the only one who feels that, in spite of everything, Newland shouldn’t have missed out on Ellen. At the same time, the question persists: could he (can any of us) buy happiness at the expense of others? Didn’t May?

The final scene in [Erin Brockovich] is an absolute delight. Erin is sitting in her office, at work on a new case. Ed receives her bonus check and takes it to her, but tells her that the sum is not what they have previously discussed. Ed is full of mischief at the moment, knowing full well how Erin is going to react. Indeed she gives him quite an earful. She accuses Ed of using "big words [he] doesn’t understand," like "trust," and that as a lawyer all he can do is complicate things that aren’t complicated to begin with. She is outraged at the way her work is undervalued "in this firm." In the meantime Ed has handed her the check the figure on which is two million dollars. Once Erin notices the amount, she is struck absolutely speechless, probably for the first time in her life. Mischievous Ed, in a sense, has the last word when he replays for her her own first repartee thrown at him. He asks her whether they "teach beauty queens to apologize," because Erin "suck[s] at it."

[Erin Bockovich is] quite a triumph for the human spirit indeed. What this true story reveals is that nothing is impossible. That even a single person, a divorced mother of three, can accomplish great things and bring about a splendid victory for a just cause. And it is to the real Erin Brockovich-Ellis’s credit that in a statement after the release of the movie she said: "I don’t see [that] this movie is about me. Never have. And it’s not about me. I happen to be a vehicle that’s getting the message out about a much greater story and a much greater issue that impacts all of us." We can learn a great deal from her. Would that we were all capable of taking her lesson to heart: the one time beauty queen’s dream for the "creation of a peaceful earth for every man, woman, and child," which suddenly no longer seems like such an impossibility.

In conclusion let me return to the biblical passage with which I started [this analysis of Fargo]: "For the love of money is the root of all evil." The passage continues with the words: "it is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced their hearts with many pangs." I am sure that the movie has not been deliberately trying to illustrate this very point, but it has certainly done so anyway. And I am not sure why "Fargo" was chosen as the title, but I can’t help feeling that perhaps the question "how far would people go to obtain unearned money?" may have been instrumental in the choice. This question may remind some of the famous story by Tolstoy in which a man is promised as much land as he can encircle by running. His greed makes him run and run and run until he drops down dead.

Since throughout the movie we have been presented with contrasts between the wages of greed and the unassuming and unpretentious rewards of love, perhaps I should end with a few quotations from another of St. Paul’s Epistles (1 Corinthians 13:4-7): "Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at the wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."