On Silhouettes, Torture by Drum Solo, and What Movies Tell Us About Culture: "The Big Combo"
The most treacherous ground in all of criticism may be the attempt to figure out what a work of art "tells us" about the culture that produces it, especially when that culture is our own.
We're comfortable with the notion that the simple, harmonious lines of Greek sculpture reflect a belief in the importance of aesthetics and beauty in life. We're happy to see in the construction of the massive gothic cathedrals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a reflection of the idea that, as E. H. Gombrich puts it in his luminescent The Story of Art, the "faithful who surrendered themselves to the contemplation of all this beauty could feel that they had come nearer to understanding the mysteries of a realm beyond the reach of matter." This makes sense to us as a judgement about the culture of those people.
Closer to home, it now seems obvious to us that the captivity narratives of the first Europeans to settle permanently in America some four hundred years ago – stories about white women being captured by indigenous people, and altered by the experience in sexually and culturally suggestive ways – reflect those Europeans' anxieties about what they saw as a godless wilderness in this new land, and the people who lived there.
But when we move into things like say, the way films reflect the psychological depths (or shallows) of American culture in the last hundred years, the bottom seems to fall away and we find ourselves very quickly wading through quicksand. There in front of us is the lure of glorious treasure, because if we can make some grand pronouncement about the relationship between movies and America – "The success of the Fast and the Furious franchise shows how dumbed-down our culture is, goddamnit!" – then people will think we're smart and we might gain readers and maybe even win a skirmish or two for our side in whatever culture war everyone seems to be fighting at the moment.
But too often, the attempt to make a popular art form like movies into something that is purely representative of the psyche of a nation seems to be to take for granted too many things that should not be taken for granted.
How, for example, does The Fast and the Furious franchise represent something about America? Not just in the abstract, but concretely, in detail? Why do you assume that people who watch it are somehow dumbed-down? And why should we assume that it says more about the people who watch it than the people who make it? Why not see it as a cynical money-making ploy put on by financiers who know they can convince a relatively small proportion of the American public to shell out their cash for a Saturday-night distraction from the difficulties of their regular lives? And what would it even mean for a nation to have a psyche?
On the other hand, it also cannot be the case that movies can tell us nothing about the culture that produces them. This would be as inane as arguing that folks eight hundred years ago built cathedrals just because it was fun.
As in so many things, trying to piece together an argument in this area requires taking small steps, and paying attention to details. It requires, in short, the kind of "close-reading" that was for years encouraged in university departments before the focus of so much academic and popular arts criticism turned to figuring out the best way to fire bombastic grapeshot into the (mostly imaginary) advancing hordes of political know-nothings.
So let's try it. Let's take a movie, say Joseph H. Lewis's gorgeous, inexpensively-made, and tough-minded noir crime picture from 1955, "The Big Combo" and not just revel in its glories, but try to talk about how and where, exactly, it might show us something about the culture from which it arose, and the way that culture might differ from the one we occupy now.
In essence, The Big Combo tells a story that is deeply familiar to audiences of American crime pictures. There's a consortium of bad guys – the mafia basically, although that name is never spoken; they're just the Big Combination of the title – who only deal in cash and thus are almost impossible for the police to catch. They're headed by one Mr. Brown (Richard Conte), who is suave, condescending, and violent.
Trying to catch Mr. Brown is a $96-a-week cop named Lieutenant Diamond (Cornel Wilde) who has not one but two big problems. The first is the impossible-to-bust Mr. Brown whom Diamond has been pursuing for months, at great expense to the taxpayers; the second is that Diamond has fallen in love with Mr. Brown's girl, Susan (Jean Wallace), even though he has his own girlfriend on the side, a burlesque dancer/prostitute named Rita (Helene Stanton). On top of all this, Susan – who used to be a member of high society – is so trapped in her relationship with the insidious Mr. Brown that she's suicidal.
From this foundation, the film spins out a hard-edged tale in the noir tradition. Susan does try to kill herself, by taking pills, but doesn't succeed. In the hospital, she mentions the name of another woman – Alicia – to Diamond. He finds out that this was Mr. Brown's first wife, whom he starts to believe Mr. Brown murdered by tying her to the anchor of a yacht and dropping it into the ocean. Eventually, Diamond falls into the hands of Mr. Brown, who tortures him; a few scenes later, Mr. Brown sends his two henchmen (Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman) to kill Diamond. They mistakenly kill Rita instead.
There's a lot more packed into the script – a Swedish boat captain turned antiques dealer, an ex-mafioso living in a squalid apartment waiting to be killed, the fact that Mr. Brown's wife Alicia is not dead at all, a triple-cross that ends up with Mr. Brown's henchmen finding a bomb in what they thought was their payoff – and all of it is delivered at a breakneck pace. At the end, Diamond takes Brown into custody, and walks into the foggy night with Susan at his side.
The Big Combo is what was known as a B-movie, those low-budget affairs which were intended to be the companion pieces to a higher quality, A-movies, in double features. These films were generally put out quickly: the director Joseph H. Lewis made three films in 1955, and the cinematographer John Alton worked on four (which was nothing for him; he worked on ten in 1947). This meant that the people involved had to work as efficiently as possible, which in turn explains the lack of filler, as there was only time to film the scenes that were absolutely necessary for the plot.
It also means that at least some aspects of the film come from the details of the way it was made – fast and cheap – rather than its relationship with the culture of America in 1955 in which it was embedded. So there is some risk in saying that the film somehow tells us something about that culture, because what it may actually be telling us about is the inexpensive, rapid-fire way that many movies were being produced at the time.
Of course, it's possible to go down the rabbit hole here, because the facts of the film's production – its position as a fast and cheap piece of fleeting entertainment for the masses – are also some of the signal elements the culture in which it is embedded. Think of, for example, the automat restaurants of the 1950s, or the rapid proliferation of mass-produced automobiles and housing (suburbs) at that time, not to mention the emergence of rock and roll – also conveniently dated sometime around 1955 – which, with its repetitive structure and three-minute run times, was nothing if not a fast and cheap form of fleeting entertainment for the masses.
So does The Big Combo tell us more about the people and industry that made it, or about the culture surrounding it? Or both? Or neither? As you can see, with a nod to Ferris Bueller, things in this area get complicated pretty fast, and if you don't stop and look at the details they're going to leave your head in a muddle.
Here, then, are a couple of specific details for us to consider. The first is the scene in which Mr. Brown tortures Diamond, and the second is a dialogue sequence from later in the movie.
In my summary, I noted that Mr. Brown tortures Diamond, and in my rather flippant title to this piece I noted the mode of that torture: a drum solo. This may sound absurd, but fear not, gentle reader: I am neither exaggerating for comedic effect nor about to subject the scene to ridicule, for one of its wonders is how well it works, given its outlandish premise.
The scene revolves around the fact that Mr. Brown's head henchman, a man named Joe McClure (Brian Donlevy) – who will later, much to his regret, try to betray Mr. Brown – is hard of hearing in one ear, and so wears an earpiece connected to a boxy little microphone which magnifies the sounds around him.
This is, incidentally, a really well-conceived trope on the level of character construction, because it gives McClure a physical manifestation of an interior weakness. He used to be above Mr. Brown in the hierarchy of the Big Combination, but Mr. Brown's force and savagery combined with McClure's lack of assertiveness have reversed their positions; and now, when he wants to torment McClure, Mr. Brown is fond of grabbing the microphone box and shouting into it, his voice exploding painfully into McClure's head through the earpiece. The hearing aid becomes, in other words, a stand-in for the power relationship between the two men, which is always a great thing to have in a script.
When Mr. Brown captures Diamond, he has him tied to a chair and then plugs McClure's earpiece into his ear and puts the microphone box next to a radio playing a frenetic big band jazz drum solo. Diamond writhes in agony.
There are at least two things to note about this sequence. The first is the sly, almost cheeky musicological aspect of it. The other music that has been mentioned in the film – and which we see performed – is classical piano. Early on, it's brought to our attention that one of Susan's pastimes before she was corrupted by Mr. Brown was playing and appreciating this kind of music, and later on in the film she even attends a performance of it.
So the rather winking equation the film sets out for us is that classical music represents a kind of old-money refinement, while jazz is the music of the hoodlums, or, more exactly, a kind of cacophony that can be used to torture people. There is no need to work this out more fully to understand that it's an element of the movie that is unique to its moment, and through which we can understand something about the culture of that moment.
If you want a contemporary analogy, think of the scenes from things like Office Space or Attack the Block in which nerdy white guys are shown listening to hard-edged hip-hop. We understand these scenes and everything that is involved in them – the appropriation of the music, or the attraction of it for the kind of people who are far removed from the conditions that are usually being sung about in it – and the fact that we understand all of this means that the scenes are pointing to a comprehensible, interpretable set of elements in our culture. The classical piano/jazz interplay in The Big Combo works in a similar way, giving us an insight into the way those forms of music could be used to speak to an audience in 1955.
But there is another, perhaps more interesting side of the torture sequence. This is that, still, today, it generates a lot of force. In the abstract, the description sounds almost ridiculous: a gangster tortures a cop by making him listen to jazz in one ear really loudly. But my sense is that few contemporary viewers will be tempted to laugh at it when they watch it. But why?
At least one answer is that there is a sadism at work in the scene that makes it unsettling, a kind of emotional rawness that – as does so much of the movie – skates along right at the edge of melodrama. The effectiveness of this sequence, and the way it brings to the fore a kind of submerged sense of dread, of cruelty existing just beneath the surface of ordinary things, of a physical weakness turned into an extension of the power of one human being over another, of a terror somehow imbued into the emerging technological culture of the 1950s:– all of this tells us something about the culture in which it appeared.
Again, one way to understand this is by comparison. In American Psycho, Christian Bale's character famously gives a discourse on the band Huey Lewis and the News, then plays their song "Hip to be Square," while he kills a fellow yuppie with an ax. In Reservoir Dogs, Michael Madsen's character dances around to the Steelers Wheel song "Stuck in the Middle With You" while he cuts off a cop's ear. These sequences clearly read as representative of their moments: the first works as a sort of commentary on the plastic consumerism of the 1980s, and the second stands in for the downbeat retro feel that attended a good deal of cultural life in the 1990s.
The second sequence to think about in The Big Combo is a visual moment towards the end of the film, when McClure tries to convince Mr. Brown's other two henchmen to betray the boss. (I should note here that John Alton's cinematography in many of crime films of the era is often credited with helping to create the look associated with the film noir moment; his work here is a tremendous example of this.)
The shot runs for 1:30, and is composed of a single, long shot broken by two quick close-ups. It starts on the wounded hand of one of the other henchmen, then pulls back to put a lamp in the foreground as they talk. McClure enters, and the less assertive of the henchmen steps over so that his back is to the lamp, while McClure crosses in front of him. Now the shot is framed with the lamp and the man's back in the center, McClure to the right, and the other henchman to the left. We cut to a pair of quick closeups, then return to the original shot as the actors again move, now crowding in around the lamp so it lights their faces.
As I've noted, a part of this construction on the filmmaking level comes from the need to shoot quickly and efficiently. There are only three cuts in a minute and thirty seconds, which means that the camera position and lighting only need to be adjusted three times: the director can set up the scene with the camera behind the lamp, run it a couple of times– making sure the actors hit their marks – then shift the camera to shoot each of the close-ups, and then it's on to the next scene. The average shot length in this sequence is thus about 30 seconds, although each of the closeups only lasts for 2 or 3 seconds, so it's really composed of one shot that's about 85 seconds long, and two shorter ones.
For comparison – and this may or may not be a fair comparison, but I think it works for the point at hand – I pulled up a randomly chosen scene from Michael Bay's Transformers from 2007. In that sequence, there were 36 shots in a minute and a half, for an average shot length of about 2.5 seconds. (This is a pretty standard averaged shot length for a contemporary action flick.)
So does the longer shot length and/or the odd, beautiful composition of the shot put together by Lewis and Alton in The Big Combo tell us anything about the culture in which that film was made, or is the difference only about the fact that Lewis didn't have enough money to make fancy camera moves, while Bay had more than enough money to stuff his film full of SFX-laden shots?
When thinking about this kind of stuff, a lot of people go to ideas about attention spans and/or media understanding. Modern audiences, it will be said, are so inundated with sound and image in their lives that they need a great deal more stimulation to keep them engaged with a film, or they are so practiced at decoding images quickly that they don't have the patience to stare at something for more than a few seconds, because they've already figured it out. In other words, they are more sophisticated viewers than were the viewers of seventy years ago.
You will notice that something like the inverse of this argument also holds, for it could be said that audiences in 1955 is in some sense more sophisticated than those of today, because they were willing – in Lewis's estimation, at least, and he should have known – to give themselves over to stillness, to subtlety, to the creation of suspense in ways that privilege modes other than the brute stimulation of the quick cut and the bombastic assault.
As soon as one starts to work through this, one realizes how poorly the language of better or worse, more or less sophisticated (inasmuch as that implies some sort of greater or lesser capacity, or ability, or advancement) serves us here. The language of difference does much more work: it is enough to note that this sequence – and the image at the center of it – is different than those that tend to appear on our screens.
And what do we make of that difference? Well, look at the image that is the centerpiece of this sequence. The composition is breathtakingly strange. The oval of light from the lamp sits halfway up the screen; everything below it is in essence visually meaningless. And at the top of the screen there is also a thin band of darkness. So the part of the image that we actually look at – and this framing is held for almost thirty seconds – is composed of a narrow strip consisting of two faces, the window shades, and the back of a head.
The lighting here is fascinating. My guess is that there's a light placed above the camera, shining on the actor in the foreground. (The light from the lamp itself would be neither strong enough, nor angled properly, to light him in the way he is.) There is also a light placed behind the other two actors, backlighting their faces; a light to the right, which shows us that actor's face (it's Brian Donlevy playing Joe McClure; he's the driving force in the scene, and so gets the most illumintaion); and a flashing light behind the set, which periodically illuminates the window shades.
The effect is an image comprised of a good deal of shadow (the German expressionist influence in film noir is clear here) in which the main area of brightness – the oval made by the lamp – is entirely meaningless in terms of the action of the scene. This lamp has no purpose; it is not foregrounded in the way that something like a telephone often is before a character answers it, drawing our attention to something that is about to become important. Additionally, one of the character's faces is unseen, and the the faces of the others are compositionally minimized. Thus, the human presence is almost terrifyingly negated, as if these men are operating in, and nearly swallowed by, some sort of overwhelming miasma. One understands why it's called film noir, the latter word meaning "dark" or "black."
Another way of conceiving of the strikingness of this image is to imagine it being blocked in the reverse way, with the lamp lower down and the three men clustered around it but all facing us, in a similar way to how Lewis and Alton end the shot here. (That end is seen in the screenshot above the last one.) In that setup, all three faces would be much more visible. Their human presence would be maximized; the shot would be affecting, certainly, but it would be the lighted faces that were the focus of our attention, the human beings who seem to drive the action.
As it is, though, it is the darkness, the obscurity, that's in control. The human beings are secondary, at its mercy. Which brings us back to our original question. What does this tell us about the culture in which it appeared?
A provisional answer might be that it has to do with a historical moment in which people were both familiar with the feeling of obscurity, and also more subject to the notion that beneath the sunlit existence of their day to day lives there were dark forces threatening to emerge. For Lewis and Alton to be sure that this image would communicate with the people that were watching their movie, they had to believe that those people would respond to the presentation of a world in which human agency could be swallowed up in this way. They had to believe that the culture around them was one in which an image of men plotting a killing in semi-darkness, hatching machinations that would redound to their own destruction – for all three are dead by movie's end – would strike an emotional chord.
One can play this out in any number of ways. One possibility is speculation about America in 1955, and the way Freudian psychology had gained a foothold in the consciousness, making familiar to people the idea of submerged controlling us, or the idea that our country was the a place composed of a newly upwardly-mobile vision (the post-war prosperity that yanked folks out of the Great Depression, etc.) laid on top of a treacherous substructure (the human uneasiness created by the sterility of the new mass culture, the naked cruelty of Jim Crow race relations, etc.). Or one could compare it to our own moment, in which even in our darkest expressions, from the current horror cycle to the gothic expressions of the Batman franchise, there is little belief in the idea that humans (rather than the miasma) are not at the center of the world.
Or one could take this in different directions entirely – it's the freshness and convincingness of these possible directions that makes good criticism. But in any case, it's clear that if we want to make judgements about what art tells us about culture, we should be looking at the specifics before we move on to our grand proclamations.
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