One white man's fondness for the films of Sydney Pollack

(NOTE: this piece has been substantially augmented at the end with considerations of two further films, beneath the pic of Jane Fonda and Robert Redford in The Electric Horseman). 

Sure, Sydney Pollack directed some lousy films in his day; his last, The Interpreter, with Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, was, insofar as I remember it, almost unwatchable, and I have no great fondness for Random Hearts, The Firm, Bobby Deerfield, or Havana, no great desire to revisit Tootsie, and no plans to watch The Electric Horseman, ever, thanks (edit: see the end of this blogpiece). When Pollack was good, though - jeez, he sure was great (and I'm not even speaking of his work as an actor, though he certainly brightened up Eyes Wide Shut and Michael Clayton; I'll miss his popping up in such fare - he died in 2008).

I haven't caught all of Pollack's films, but three of them rank among my favourite American films of the 1970's, for their sheer entertainment value: The Yakuza, with Robert Mitchum and Ken Takakura; the Robert Redford "mountain man" vehicle Jeremiah Johnson; and the espionage thriller The Three Days of the Condor (also with Redford and a terrific Max von Sydow). All three films partake in the white American male desire to win the respect of other cultures and races, offering a fantasy remedy to the American inferiority complex and/or "white guilt": in the first, our white male hero wins the respect of traditional, sword-wielding Japanese; in the second, that of Native Americans; and in the third, that of an erudite European hitman (he may be white, too, but he actually comes from a country with culture, unlike the American-all-too-American protagonist). I suppose, since I like these films so much, that these are fantasies I'm not immune to myself - having at times been very conscious that we have nothing much of a culture (besides pop culture) in North America, and not feeling particularly proud of McDonalds, Disney, and drive-by-shootings. Besides, none of Pollack's white/American-redemption fantasies have the odious obviousness of films like Dances With Wolves or Black Rain or The Last Samurai. They're at least somewhat sophisticated, somewhat subtle, somewhat discreet about how they gratify their target audience, and their heroes have to go through at least a little bit of work to earn the respect of the "others" in question (doing unheard of things like learning other languages, for instance...). They validate their heroes (and thus their target audience) without it being entirely obvious that that is the main purpose of their narrative, and they leave room for a bit of heroism for their peripheral (non-white, or non-American) characters, too...

That's not to say that there aren't flies in the ointment with all three films. The truth is, I was unable to watch The Yakuza last time I tried, because it partakes deeply of the romanticization of Japan that so pollutes American versions of that country - plus it has some obvious inaccuracies to boot. The most glaring of these might seem minor, but will shock anyone who has actually spent time in Japan out of the narrative and into a critical monologue: it is simply not possible that its expat character Oliver - who serves nabe to his guests, has a home bedecked with tokens of Japanese culture, and presents as someone who has acclimatized himself to life in Japan - would wear shoes in his home, or allow his guests to. If you're trying at all to fit in, which Oliver obviously is, leaving your shoes at the door ranks up there with the use of chopsticks as one of the first customs you get accustomed to. You might manage to avoid using squat toilets, but unless you want to be perceived as a total savage, you'll get used to taking off your shoes as soon as you enter people's houses, including your own -- so much so that you'll feel weird doing it any other way when you return to your home country. There's also a scene in a public bathhouse that opts for discretion over accuracy, making sure star Robert Mitchum and other bathers are wearing swimtrunks: presumably this stemmed from a desire to protect Mitchum's modesty, without being too obvious about it, because if all the other Japanese bathers were walking around naked and he was the only person in a bathing suit, then his character wouldn't seem as accustomed to life in Japan as he's supposed to be. Perhaps the attitude was that no one would notice, but for someone who frequently partook of public bathing in Japan, this stood out as an obvious error, too...

Worse, the film presents its Yakuza as sword-wielding samurai types, obsessed with giri and duty and so forth, and willing to sacrifice themselves (or their pinkies) to fulfill their obligations to each other. It does this without the slightest effort to question if this romantic vision (Yakuza = Samurai, which it spells out right in the opening titles) is accurate. Mitchum plays an American to whom the main Japanese protagonist (Ken Takakura) owes a debt; as a soldier, he saved someone Takakura loved from a horrible fate during the American occupation, while Takakura was still hiding in the jungles of the South Pacific, years after the war ended. Takakura, on returning, finds his debt to the enemy intolerable, but takes it seriously, making huge sacrifices for the American. We only learn late in the film how big these run. Still, when the American turns up years later to ask a favour, Takakura's character feels obliged to help. Of course, Mitchum proves himself a worthy friend, and the two end up fighting alongside each other as equals in a mutual respect society of two, with sacrifices and obligations going both ways...

There are a few things wrong with the story, to be sure. First, I tend to prefer de-romanticized, critical visions of the Yakuza - if not Minbo No Onna, which is positively disrespectful, then at least Fukasaku Kinji's Battles Without Honour and Humanity (pictured above). Fukasaku's Yakuza movies constantly undercut heroic gestures, strive - like the dramas of Kobayashi Masaki - to show the self-serving, venal reality beneath the big talk and bold posturing of many gangsters; the characters Fukasaku likes most are simply ordinary people striving to survive, not larger-than-life bushi. Compared to the dour, ceremonial pinky-severings in The Yakuza, in Battles Without Honour and Humanity, when one character feels compelled to chop off a finger, comedy ensues, as the finger immediately goes missing, and becomes the object of a puzzled search, which eventually reveals that a chicken made off with it. By contrast, The Yakuza - based on a story by Leonard Schrader, and adapted to the screen by Paul (Mishima) Schrader and Robert Towne - clearly views the titular organization through falsifying, romantic, Orientalist eyes, making its gangsters (or at least the main ones we get to know) emblematic of all sorts of virtues (respect for tradition, loyalty to a purpose, duty and honour among friends) that are lacking in America: imaginary Japanese, the "Far Eastern" kin to the Imaginary Indian. It's an image the Yakuza themselves are partial to, but flattery (even self-flattery) and accuracy are rather different things...

All the same, I have to admit, on finally making it through the film tonight, that it deserves credit for at least TRYING to get things right. Compared to the outlandishly bad Ridley Scott film, Black Rain - which offensively co-opts the title of Shohei Imamura's earlier film about the effects of the bombing of Hiroshima, apparently for no other reason than to bury/ replace Imamura's film with pro-American bullshit, since no black rain of any sort appears in the movie - The Yakuza positively bursts at the seams with evidence of sincere respect for Japan, right down to Robert Mitchum learning to speak some pretty good Japanese. It ends up a gripping piece of storytelling, and is absolutely beautifully filmed - with a climactic swordfight sequence that ranks up there with anything in the oeuvre of Fukasaku (though his Yakuza tend to use guns).

Speaking of the Imaginary Indian, he is no doubt all over Jeremiah Johnson, but not having lived among the Crow, Blackfeet, or Flatheads (AKA Interior Salish), I feel less qualified to criticize the depictions of them in the film than I do with the Japanese. One imagines liberties are taken, that romanticization occurs. The Crow leader, Paints-His-Shirt-Red (above), is apparently played by a Mexican actor, Joaquin Martinez (pictured above), and it has been said online that the Crow dialogue he and others speak appears to have been memorized phonetically, delivered rote by people not fluent in the language. These facts alone show that the filmmakers went to some lengths to be respectful - since it is actually Crow that is spoken - but it also reveals the limits of their respect (it would be much more impressive if actual Crow actors, or at least people fluent in the language, could have been employed). Still, it counts that more than one First Nations language is spoken in the film, and Redford - or rather, his character - not only has to learn how to communicate in other tongues, but to honour other customs, which actually differ depending on which people he is dealing with (!). Plus there's even some subversive irony behind the respect he ends up earning from the Crow and Flatheads in the film, since the majority of it stems from a rather unflattering case of mistaken identity. He may be taken for a hero, but we understand that he isn't, really - at least not the sort believed.

Still, what a fantasy for white audiences to consume - to leave behind civilization, trek off into the mountains, and learn to subsist on trapping and hunting, ultimately doing so so successfully that the glamourized noble savages themselves, fierce and stern and implacable, end up regarding you as a hero! It beats owning the reality of the genocide our ancestors perpetrated, or, say, working in an office. Particularly if you don't actually try it - it's one of those fantasies that is best left a fantasy, or so I've been told by a friend who tried a variation on it...

It's only in light of these two films that The Three Days of the Condor is at all suspicious. The film's story is ostensibly about a conspiracy to invade the Middle East; the Robert Redford character, a lowly CIA analyst, stumbles across the plot, and suddenly finds that everyone in his office has been murdered, which fact other spooks rush to cover up. There are two main subplots to the film - one involving a cynical, mistrustful, lonely woman Redford kidnaps (Faye Dunaway) to help him survive his ordeal, who ends up helping him, and finally loving him; and the other involving a European hitman (von Sydow), who unexpectedly - after shooting most of Redford's friends and trying to kill him for much of the movie - switches teams at a key point. This is not done out of respect or loyalty to Redford, but von Sydow's character clearly feels a bit of both for this man, who has successfully evaded him; the film oddly privileges a scene in which von Sydow offers Redford a ride, after the climactic shoot out ends, which seems like it should be peripheral to the plot, but nonetheless feels like the film's emotional payoff. If we hold as a general principle that the changed relationships in the course of a film reveal something about its inward mechanics, its subtext, its themes, then it's no coincidence that the film moves to win the love and respect for the white American male lead from both an independent, aloof woman and a cultivated, uber-menschy Euro-assassin; in fact, it's the main point of the film - to validate "our man" - and the plot about a conspiracy, prescient as it is, is simply an engine that delivers the desired payoff...

I suspect that there aren't many thrillers that are politically defensible, when you analyze them in this way. Thrillers tend to have a fairly conservative function - to bolster the identity of the people who consume them, to reassure them of their fundamental morality and general rightness, their cultural centrality, their omnipotence, to consolidate the status quo and neutralize any threats to it (consider pretty much any Bruce Willis action movie in this regard, but especially The Last Boy Scout and Die Hard). It's by doing these sorts of things - jerking the audience off, in effect - that the thriller makes us feel good; it's providing the fantasized reward for our daily labours, giving us the validation that we lack in daily life, helping make staying in our place seem easier to do. A thriller that left its target audience, whatever their race, feeling insecure, immoral, marginal, flawed and/or powerless probably wouldn't be perceived as being very thrilling (they do exist, mind you: Brian DePalma's terrific Blow Out springs immediately to mind in this regard -- but it wasn't exactly a smash hit).

All the same - even if my three favourite Sydney Pollack films are ultimately fantasies for white North American men, what can I say? I too, am a white North American man, and as fantasies go, The Yakuza, Jeremiah Johnson, and The Three Days of the Condor are damned fine ones.

Maybe, having written all this, it would actually be interesting to revisit Tootsie again, who knows? Maybe Pollack actually has a thematic consistency running through his films - the hallmark of the auteur - by which his characters are forced to accommodate cultures, genders, languages, and experiences not native to them, in order to succeed? Dustin Hoffman passing in drag is the equivalent of Robert Redford smoking a peace pipe, or Robert Mitchum speaking Japanese... I actually hadn't even considered, when I sat down to write this post, that all three of the films I was considering serve variants on a single function. Which other of Pollack's films do this, I wonder? Hmm...

Edited to add: by chance, I stumbled across The Electric Horseman (1979) for $3 today, and having sworn off seeing it just last night, I had a complex thought process by which I realized that I had seen the film before, when it first came out (when I was 11) at Maple Ridge's long-since-defunct Stardust Theatre. I seemed to recall that I rather liked it, back then. So in keeping with the little Sydney Pollack-fest my Mom and I have been having, I picked it up, and we watched it this evening. It's certainly a passable entertainment - and though there are no strong traces of the thematic thread identified above in it, it has a likable cynicism about capitalism and mass media and advertising and so forth, and certainly shares at least some of Jeremiah Johnson's romantic ideas about going wild. However, the film that it most reminded me of - quite unexpectedly - was Bertrand Tavernier's Death Watch (1980). While unalike in many regards, both films take as one of their main characters a TV person who occupies a conflicted position, having, in pursuit of a story, hooked up with someone of the opposite gender. This person, having previously assented to being involved with corporate media, has gone renegade and run off, and does not, in their flight, wish to be the subject of media scrutiny. In both cases, the media person wins the trust of their subject, then has to apologize for having betrayed them (by continuing to represent corporate media) and atone for themselves by breaking with their employers and helping them reach their goal (of course, the degree of this betrayal and the lengths to which the media person must go to atone differ greatly). Damage to the media person's equipment (in vastly different forms) also takes place - technology must be abandoned en route, as the course of the pair's travels takes them outside civilization (often on foot!). Meanwhile, TV execs and corporate figures follow their progress from afar, and strategize about what to do, while consulting ratings and sales charts and such, since that's all they know to care about...

Adding any more specifics to this framework ruins the parallels, since the two films are dissimilar in all particulars (one is set in a dystopian future, the other in a compromised present; in one case the media person is a man with cameras implanted in his eyes, in the other a perceptive, ambitious female; in Death Watch, the person fleeing is a woman trying to die with dignity, away from the TV cameras, while in the other, the person is a cowboy, trying to release a horse into the wild)... Still, the connections hardly seem coincidental, as one of Death Watch's co-writers, the late David Rayfiel - a very frequent Sydney Pollack collaborator - made uncredited screenplay contributions to The Electric Horseman, just the year before he joined Tavernier to co-author Death Watch (they were working from a novel, but my impression from talking to Tavernier about this last year was that they took some liberty with the source material; I haven't yet read the book). I had not realized Rayfiel was connected to The Electric Horseman when watching it, since his name doesn't appear anywhere in the credits, so I'm even more convinced now that Rayfiel may have, perhaps unwittingly, smuggled elements from one film into the other. (Or perhaps he too has some sort of auteurist thematic consistency to be found running through his films - areas of obsession that he returns to?).

Anyhow, the net result of all this is that I think The Electric Horseman is a keeper, after all. It's kinda like Death Watch with Willie Nelson. And a horse.