Shakespeare the Illusionist. Neil Forsyth
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SILENT GHOSTS, SPEAKING GHOSTS
Movies about Movies
IN THE 2012 Academy Awards ceremony, the American film industry honored two films about the history of movies, both of which are relevant to the argument of this book. One of them, Hugo, was directed by Martin Scorsese: it featured Ben Kingsley playing Georges Méliès and showed him to be one of the founders of the art of cinema, as well as a conjuror or illusionist. The film won Oscars for best sound editing, best sound mixing, best art direction, best cinematography, and best visual effects. The other film, The Artist, did even better in winning Oscars for best original score, best costume design, best actor (Jean Dujardin), best director (Michel Hazanavicius), and above all, best picture. Both films had been nominated for other awards, although the jury in its wisdom evidently felt other films should get a look-in: Midnight in Paris, The Iron Lady, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But 2012 was unmistakably a year for self-congratulation and for reviewing how movies came to be. Neither film makes anything of Shakespeare, but both may help us, in a preliminary way, to get to know how the world of movies understands itself, especially its fascination with illusion. Since then, other movies about movies have confirmed the continuing popularity of this genre, including Birdman, Hail, Caesar! and La La Land. The techniques on display in these movies are what we shall find when we explore Shakespeare films.
This was by no means the first time the film industry had made movies about itself; Hollywood especially likes to commemorate its own past. Singin’ in the Rain (1952) is a well-known example offering a comic take on the switch to talkies and whether anyone could make the transition smoothly—an important topic later in this book. Unlike The Artist, Singin’ in the Rain portrays the Hollywood ethos as pure dissimulation. When Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) romances Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen), only the silent film cards on which Don declares his love are seen; he is never heard speaking the words. Lina believes the cards—and studio publicity—rather than the film’s “reality,” in which Don cannot stand her. Once we hear her shrill Bronx voice (“What’s wrong with the way I talk? What’s the big idea? Am I dumb or somethin’?”), we realize the problem. Her role needs to be dubbed by Don’s girlfriend, Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds). We see the process being done in a shot of Reynolds matching her dialogue to Hagen’s and synchronizing it while watching a scene from the film; more than once she gets comically out of sync.
In a big scene near the end, Singin’ further exploits the ability of movies to trick audiences. At the premier of the film they are supposedly making, to be called The Dancing Cavalier, the on-screen audience, having heard Lina make a little speech on stage for the first time, demands that she sing for them right there. Don forces Kathy to stand behind the stage curtain and sing for the lip-synching Lina. Then comes the key moment: Don and his buddies pull up the curtain and humiliate Lina. Both ladies run off, but Don urges the audience to stop Kathy and bring her back. The film ends with another metacinematic moment, a romantic kiss between Don and Kathy in front of a billboard for their new picture, Singin’ in the Rain.
Reynolds lip-synched some of her own songs in the film, a case of the dubber dubbed—though the technique is common enough. And although the film revolves around the idea that Kathy has to dub over Lina’s voice, in one scene where Kathy is dubbing a line of Lina’s dialogue (“Our love will last ’til the stars turn cold”), Jean Hagen’s normal voice is used.1 Hagen’s voice was actually warm and lovely, even though she was playing (brilliantly) the Lina whose voice was so harsh that she supposedly could not break into the new world of sound cinema. And there is a further twist to this dubbing mixture, because some of Kathy Selden’s songs are themselves dubs—the inexperienced, nineteen-year-old Debbie Reynolds’s singing voice was dubbed by Betty Noyes in “Would You?” and also for the final duet with Kelly, “You Are My Lucky Star.”2 There are thus layers within layers in the way the codirectors of the film, Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, accept and have fun with the Hollywood system of movie make-believe.
Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) addresses some of the same issues in a less comic way. A faded star of the silent era, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), imagines herself making a comeback in the talkies. One of her lines is the famous “I am big; it’s the pictures that got small.” Both films explore the extent to which illusion was central to the film industry. The rather tragic self-deception of Norma Desmond is parallel to the comic delusions of Lily Lamont, the star whose dialogue has to be dubbed so that the silent film The Duelling Cavalier can, in reaction to the success of The Jazz Singer, be turned into The Dancing Cavalier. In these films, the movies recognized themselves as history.
There is also a mythic dimension beyond Hollywood history that these films explore. In his book Magic and Myth of the Movies, published some two years before Sunset Boulevard, the American surrealist Parker Tyler pointed out that all motion pictures are intrinsically fanciful. In his review of Hugo, J. Hoberman quotes Tyler arguing that “Camera trickery really is camera magic,” because for the spectator, the “cinematic illusion” promotes an atavistic receptivity to ancient beliefs in “ghosts, secret forces, telepathy, etc.”3 Rather extravagantly Tyler compared Hollywood stars to ancient deities and represented movie-going as a form of ritual worship. However seriously we take this notion, it is true that, in Hoberman’s words, “all movies are essentially ghost stories and time machines.” They perform the miracle that is the point of departure in certain Shakespeare films, that of bringing the inert and the dead, as well as the past, back to life. Sunset Boulevard is narrated, as Hoberman says, from beyond the grave; it “evoked cinema’s conjuring trick even as it pondered the medium’s obsolescence.” Hollywood was indeed facing an impending crisis at the time (1950), but the movie never mentions the spectre of television; instead it displaces the crisis back to the technological upheaval of twenty years earlier—the coming of sound.
The device of pulling back the curtain is a common device for exposing illusion. In The Wizard of Oz (1939), for example, Toto, Dorothy’s dog, pulls open a curtain and reveals a normal middle-aged man who has been operating and controlling the image of the supposed Wizard. He is shocked, as are his visitors, but he nonetheless tries to reassert his magical powers: he gives the Scarecrow a diploma, the Lion a medal, and the Tin Man a ticking heart-shaped watch, granting their wishes and convincing them that what they sought has been achieved. After bidding a tearful goodbye to her friends, Dorothy taps her heels together, repeating “There’s no place like home,” and awakens from her dream. Thus, like pulling back the curtain, dream too is a way of insisting, often quite gently, on illusion within the world of film.
The story of The Artist is a variation on the theme of another Hollywood favorite, A Star Is Born: “An older, established star helps a talented young woman on the path to fame, only to see his career decline as she hits the big time.”4 Although A Star Is Born is not about Hollywood history, it is very much about what is needed to succeed there. The various remakes produce a kind of index of how Hollywood developed. The best-known version is probably George Cukor’s of 1954 with Judy Garland and James Mason, and Hollywood anecdotes gather around it. Cukor had directed a 1932 film—originally titled The Truth about Hollywood and eventually What Price Hollywood?—loosely based on real-life Hollywood personalities. At first he refused to direct A Star Is Born, because the plot was close to that of the earlier film, but he relented when he thought about how different it would be to direct a musical, particularly one that was in Technicolor.5
As he set about casting the film, Cukor is said to have offered Marlon Brando the role of Norman Maine during the filming of Wolf Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953). “Why would you come to me?” asked Brando. “I’m in the prime of my life . . . If you’re looking around for some actor to play an alcoholic has-been, he’s sitting right over there”—and he pointed at his costar in the Shakespeare film, James Mason, who indeed got the part.6 Mason and Garland were both nominated for Oscars for A Star Is Born, as had been Janet Gaynor and Fredric March for the 1937 version. None of them won. For Groucho Marx, Judy