Why Don't They Make Movies Like "Hopscotch" Anymore? a.k.a. Why the Heck Does American Culture Worship Power So Much Right Now?
When I first sat down to start writing about Hopscotch, Ronald Neame's enchanting spy caper from 1980, I thought I was going to begin by offering some words about the caution and care with which one should analyze one's own moment.
I was full of a kind of righteous wisdom. I wrote several paragraphs about how the internet is cluttered with writers popping off about this and that, cranking out sloppy jeremiads about "the way we are now" and half-baked theories about "why movie X says important thing Y about American culture," while what we really need is to be meticulous in analyzing what's happening around us, refraining from large pronouncements and sticking to small, finely-tuned observations, because we're usually too close to contemporary trends in society to be trusted to think about them all that well.
It's only with the hindsight of a few decades, I was ready to opine, that one can really talk about the main currents of a culture, and the significance of the cycles of film that culture produces. This is because being enmeshed in a culture is like being a teenager: everything seems so damn important, and you suspect that what you're feeling has never been felt before in the history of the world, and if anyone doesn't understand you it's because they're stupid and wrong and don't have as much wisdom as you do.
And then, a few years later, you look back and realize, not that all of that fury was meaningless (because it was not) but simply that things look different to you now than they did back then, just as they will ten years in the future, and then again ten years after that, and so on.
My other Hopscotch piece was going to be really sharp and cogent. It was going to make a devastating case for the necessity of sticking to judicious, sober statements about "the now," and for the vitality of careful thought and the avoidance of sweeping statements.
And maybe someday I'll even write something like that.
But when I woke up this morning, I thought: Who the hell are you kidding? One of the whole points of movies is to approach them like a teenager approaches a love affair, and one of the most important reactions you can have to the culture around you is to tangle your hands in your hair (metaphorically speaking, for some of us) and stick your head out the window and scream: "What in god's name is wrong with all of you?!"
As I tend to live very much in the moment (neither the future nor the past has much grip on me, and tomorrow, incidentally, I’ll probably be ready to argue something completely opposite) this new train of thought made me pretty happy.
So I thought I'd just title this piece "Why Don't They Make Movies Like Hopscotch Anymore? a.k.a. Why the Heck Does American Culture Worship Power So Much Right Now?" and let 'er rip.
So, to do the part where I summarize the movie, Hopscotch is wonderful, a nimble and quick-minded comedy, and you should definitely watch it as long as you are a person who likes to be delighted. If you're one of these folks who thinks the John Wick franchise is the highest accomplishment possible in cinema you probably won't like it, nor will you if in your mind anything less serious than late-period Godard is just so much numbing gruel to be fed to the ignorant peasants who wouldn't know a real idea if fell right in their laps while they were watching Hee Haw. (Google it, kids, or just substitute America's Got Talent if that's easier.)
The impeccable, astounding Walter Matthau plays a CIA field agent named Miles Kendig, who operates in the Eastern theater and has as a kind of collegial nemesis the head KGB agent in the area, a Soviet named Yaskov (Herbert Lom). Kendig also has a new boss, the kind of stiff-ass American bureaucrat we all used to be happy to loathe (before they all took jobs in the tech industry and we began idolizing them), a man who is basically cruel and inhuman and mistakes these things for "doing his job" and "doing what's good for the public even if they don’t know it’s good for them." He's named Myerson and played by Ned Beatty, who’s absolutely wonderful in the part.
Myerson doesn't like the way Kendig operates, so he tries to force him into a stultifying desk job; Kendig decides not to accept this humiliation. Instead, he destroys his own CIA file and goes on the run. He also begins writing a "memoir" that is in actuality an account of all of the moronic and destructive operations the CIA has conducted over the years. As he finishes each chapter, he sends a copy to the intelligence agencies of all of the major world powers (including the CIA) along with the insinuation that when he's finished he's going to publish the whole thing.
The CIA decides that this cannot stand. They have to kill him. For their part, the Soviets, led by Kendig's old friend Yaskov, decide that they'd either like to grab Kendig and torture him to make him tell them all about the inside workings of the CIA, or just help the CIA kill him if that's easier.
Unfortunately for these buffoons, Kendig is way ahead of them. With the help of an old flame named Isobel von Schonenberg (Glenda Jackson) who also used to be in the intelligence game, he jaunts around the world listening to Mozart, taunting his old spy pals, and writing his book. And as he does, he comes to realize the depths of the terrible things he's been a party to. What started out as a kind of lark, revenge against Myerson for trying to force him into a desk job, becomes an actual opportunity to bring the idiocy of the intelligence agencies to light. And so in the end he publishes the book, fakes his own death, fooling them all, and drives off to the South of France to live happily ever after with Isobel.
Frequently in our imaginations, and pretty damn often in reality, old people have this habit of shaking their fists at the screen and hollering "Why don't they make 'em like that anymore!" Sometimes, that line of thinking is a load of shit, as "they" either are still making 'em just like that (except better or more diverse) or the thing that's being sainted by the duffer wasn't all that good in the first place.
Having said that, sometimes that line of thinking isn't a load of shit, and so here's a question about Hopscotch: "Why don't they make movies like that anymore?"
Well, comes the response from the peanut gallery, what do you mean by "like that"? How is Hopscotch so different from today's fare?
Okay, how about this: For starters, consider the fact that it's a film that stars an aging and ordinary-looking actor. And not just this, but it uses that actor to present a very dated notion of something we might call "sophistication," for lack of a better word. It is a spy film, after all, and spies are nothing if not sophisticated.
But in Kendig, we're presented with a sophistication – call it a heroism – based not on physical prowess but on possessing a worthy and developed human character. This is a presentation that, in contrast to today's moment, has nothing to do with name-dropping whatever brand of watch it is that the costume designer slaps on Ben Affleck in that godforsaken Batman role to indicate that he's "wealthy," and "sophisticated" and "awesome," and "to be emulated," but instead is a matter of kind of finely-tuned understanding and appreciation of the value of both human beings and the things of the world. Which is to say, today's characters tend to prove they are to be emulated by possessing (or fetishizing) wealth, while Kendig proves it by possessing a richness and depth of personality. He floats above the world not because he's gorgeous and has money, but because of who he is.
Kendig's passion for Mozart provides one small way to think through this. He's a thoroughly middle-class character, but he loves what is usually seen as an effete art form. This idea, that normal people can partake in "sophisticated" things like classical music simply because they love them, is in large part absolutely alien to our contemporary culture. For us, sophisticated pursuits are coincidental with affluence. (This is, I think, one of the many reasons so-called Red State America feels so alienated by Hollywood.)
We tend to believe one becomes sophisticated, that is, by becoming wealthy. And this bleeds over into all the other noble qualities as well: in precisely the same way, we tend to believe one achieves other things like moral standing, authority, and dignity only when one comes into possessions of great, heaping, stinking piles of money. (I should note here that to understand the way this plays out on screen, it's important to think about the kind of inferences, as it were, a film makes in regards to what kind of human qualities we should value and where they come from, rather than just pointing like imbeciles at whatever slogans the writers put in the hero's mouth. The things the movie values and shows us and makes us desire are usually far more significant than the pieces of dialogue the execs told the writers to add in to make sure the populace understands that the movie is woke, or down with the people, or has a "feel good" message, or whatever.)
So the "why" in the question "why don't they make movies like this anymore?" seems to be, at least in part, because we don't really like people like Kendig anymore. We don't respect him because he's middle-aged and ordinary-looking and has the temerity to listen to music that's above his station.
Our spies, our heroes of international action, are different. They too may be in trouble with their own side, like good ol' Jason Bourne, and they too may be emotionally distressed and worn down by the "realities" of the world, like Jessica Chastain's character in Zero Dark Thirty, or gesture vaguely at having immoral pasts like Black Widow, but they're not like Kendig. They are different, as our culture is different than it was forty years ago. The specifics of Kendig's sophistication play a part in this, but I think there's a bigger, more bombastic, argument to be made – since that’s what we’re doing today – that these differences are better understood as a single aspect of a deeper character trait, one that has almost entirely vanished from our culture.
Very simply, Kendig doesn't believe in power.
He certainly believes that it exists, but it is not for him an object of adulation. His is a kind of human insight that allows him to see through the lies of those people who insist that their domination – whether it be through sending young men and women halfway around the world to kill other young men and women, or simply humiliating someone in the workplace – serves the betterment of anyone but themselves. Kendig sees this so clearly because he has participated in it.
He has played the game, and he understands that the real goals and the publicly stated goals of these people are never the same. (Consider the actions of any of the major corporations that are woven so deeply into our lives, from big tech to big oil to big pharma: their stated goals are always, like the platitudes of superheroes, markedly noble: Save the world! Find clean energy! Help people improve their lives! But when push comes to shove, their real goals – and the goals of the people running them – are always reducible to getting more than what they already have, and then protecting it.)
We, in contrast to dear old Kendig, believe in power. We love it. We've been trained to worship it. We want our product endorsements and our Instagram collaborations and our gigs with the Disney Corporation and our hundred thousand followers to shine their white-hot attention on us so that we know we’ve finally become empowered.
When some imbecilic billionaire announces that he's going to be the first person to grow tulips on Mars and then scatter the petals around his stadium-sized bedroom, we line up in droves to ooh and ahh. Won't this just be a magnificent human accomplishment! When a politician who wouldn't last three hours if you forced them to work a real job announces that through all their hard work they've discovered an evil truth about "the other side" and that there's only one remedy: Crush their throats under our boots! we shower them with money and record podcasts tying this lunacy to the founding of the republic or the wisdom of obscure thinkers or The Godfather. They're right! We do have to humiliate and degrade those people until they think like us!
The answer, everywhere, for everyone, is that everything will be fine just as long as you put me and my side in power. Because we're so right and amazing. Because we watched this YouTube video, see, and the guy on there – I can't quite tell if he's broadcasting from some underground cave or if his bedroom just looks like a survival bunker – makes some really cogent points. And he quoted a stat that sounded really convincing. Oh yeah? Well our side has a bunch of folks who have spent the entirety of their adult lives in a tiny, closed-off circle of people who think exactly the way they do and continually tell them how smart they are! And let me tell you, there's nothing like talking to yourself in the mirror for a few decades if you really want to develop a sterling understanding of humanity!
Note that for Kendig, this is not simply a matter of not believing in the people who happen to be in power. He doesn't believe in absolutes either, and for those of you who haven't yet seen where this is going, absolutism is absolutely a form of power worship.
It's not that Kendig buys the lie that the Soviet Union is a worker's paradise; and my guess is that were he to walk up onto the porch with me right now he would admit that he loves the good 'ol U.S. of A. But the lesson learned by so many of the artists who lived through the second half of the Cold War (see LeCarre, John) is precisely that absolutism is absolute. It teaches you that you are right, which means that what you do is right, which means that you can and should do whatever you decide is right, because it's right.
Most five-year-olds can see the problem with this: because life is a complex and difficult thing, and one notably not given to bending itself into absolutes, most people who believe in absolutes will sooner or later end up just doing what they want to do and then calling it right after the fact.
But then again, most five-year-olds are apparently smarter than the average American, because we are absolutely awash in almost petulantly stupid arguments about the horrors of the "them" and the absolute virtues of the "us." I am here, of course, talking about politics – which is at least in some sense the topic of Hopscotch – but also about culture. There are the strange and bitter "culture wars" raging all around us; there is the bizarre rhetorical intensity of the conflict between generations; there is the adamantine certainty of the "vital importance to human life" of some genre of film, or of social media, or of gaming, or clothing, or makeup, or diesel trucks, or assault rifles, or of a thousand other things.
And as a result, all this absolutism seeps down into us and spreads through us, until it’s interwoven into the fine grain of our thought and language. Have you ever thought, for example, about all these articles titled something like "How the Carrot Explains the Rise of Nationalism in America"? The question isn’t whether this explanatory trick ever works, because it never does and these articles are always insipid; the question is what this tiny example – just one in the deluge – might allow us to see.
The "how" in the title of these articles is the key here. It's purely reductionist. It intimates that the phenomenon to be explained (Nationalism) can simply and easily be reduced to whatever quirky item the author has summoned out of their imagination (Carrots). This is absurd, of course. But it is also indicative: the "how" is reflective of a mindset that believes in absolutes, in easy explanations, in binaries, in a world that is as simple as pointing to one thing and saying "good" or "cool" or "right" or "real," and then pointing to another and saying the opposite. It’s all around us; it’s what we believe; it’s the intellectual atmosphere we swim in.
And that, my friends, is the language and mindset of power. Everything is simple and everything is easy and everyone who doesn't agree with me is a moron and put me in charge because I know best.
It's a way of thinking and being, a world and an approach to the world, that Kendig would have hated. So maybe, in the end, the question is wrong. Maybe it's not "Why don't they make movies like that anymore?" but "Why does a character like Kendig refuse on principle to appear in our contemporary movies?" And the answer, perhaps, is that he isn't much interested in throwing himself down into a room full of howling teenagers clobbering each other with their spikey cudgels of moral certainty.
Sheesh. Makes one feel like faking one's own death and trying to figure out how the hell to make it to the South of France…
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