Waiting

OMG! news reports that James Franco and Anne Hathaway will host “Hollywood’s
biggest night,” the Oscars. Omg! He played the sidekick in “Spiderman,” I
think, and she was in that movie that gave away the ending to “Lost.” Suggests
we are in a between; a time waiting as Israel waits for David, as Markos
Moulitsas and crew from the Daily Kos wait for the Clinton-era people to go
away — the time described by the Wu Priesthood as “wu chi”; undifferentiated
karma between worlds; imagine there’s no heaven, no country, no religion too.
Imagine there’s no Oprah. Imagine Dr. House finally gets a girlfriend. Imagine
the new generation finally arising, but for big-screen Hollywood, there won’t
be one.

The art has moved on, and so have the artists. There is still occasionally
mastery in the combined big-screen storytelling of Jeremy Renner and director
Kathryn Bigelow like that in “The Hurt Locker,” and flashes of light in the
work of director Catherine Hardwicke. But a glimpse at the Redbox window will
tell you what Blockbuster has recently discovered: That which started in John
Ford’s Arizona desert has been taken down by the tumbleweed.

Today, artists work in TV. For a long time now, TV has been hiding its mastery,
riding beneath the censors as the great Russian writers did in the 19th
century: In “Mad Men,” the protagonist is early on given a talisman by a Jewish
daughter, giving Don’s saga cosmological intent; in “Lost,” the demonic Ben is
marked by a chest wound and given a copy of “The Brothers Karamazov”
identifying him as a Christ figure gone mad at the end of his work, and even as
far back as Chris Carter’s “X Files,” where Fox Mulder is “born again” by
Indian shaman and Scully’s hybrid baby born under the flag of the White
Buffalo, indicating aeon Aquarius rising. Not since John Ford put an apron on
Jimmy Stewart to match him against John Wayne has such subtlety in storytelling
occurred in Hollywood.

And big-screen Hollywood has never seen mastery like that of Tony Sirico,
Paulie “Walnuts” Gaultieri, in “The Sopranos.” (YouTube “Paulie Walnuts — ‘The
3 O’clock thing’ ” for a taste.) What makes “The Sopranos” and “Mad Men” great
is troupe acting. And small-screen economics allow actors, directors and
writers to use their words, and to work together as one. Big screen has long
been dominated by “superstars” — Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Daniel Day-Lewis;
always men — blunderbussing across the screen alone. At the first, Aldous
Huxley hated the big screen and saw it as an instrument of cultural dominance
by Americans; thus perhaps “Ford” the “god” of the autonomous feel-good
totalitarianism in “Brave New World.” I wonder how Huxley would feel about
getting groped by the rubber-glove brigade at the airports today?

But the American “big-screen” era has yielded to small screen, possibly
suggesting our diminishing influence in the world. Even miniscule screens, like
the Droids and iPads my kids carry.

It may have all ended with the parallel journeys of “Star Trek” and “Star
Wars”; the one across the universe and beyond. The other inward. And has anyone
in the “small government” movement noticed that in spite of what Ronald Reagan said
about the Evil Empire, the Star Wars saga seems a textbook treatise against all
mega-states and mega-governments including this one, and a journey back again
to the “natural state” — called “Druidia” in the Mel Brooks spoof
“Spaceballs,” but one that also bears an unmistakable suggestion of Israel in
the very last episodes?

Visit Mr. Quigley’s website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.