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I
always loved going to the movies.
I loved the big screen, the popcorn, the transient, sweet sense
of being in communion with a room full of strangers. I loved the
growing accumulation in my memory of scenes, shots, dialogue and
soundtracks, of heroes and villains and stars. I didn't even mind
waiting in line, or complain about the rising price of popcorn,
as long as I could find a few films worth seeing amidst the glut
of blockbuster eye candy and brain-rot. But then, as the deterioration
of my sight crossed into new realms of dysfunction, the cinema began
fading out of my life.
A
merciless retinal death squad started intercepting images before
they could reach my brain. Actors' faces became unidentifiable silhouettes.
"Hey," I whispered to my friend in surprise, at a screening of Wayne
Wang's Smoke, one of the last movies I tried to see in the theater,
"Is that William Hurt, the guy standing on the left side?" I hadn't
been able to decipher the opening credits, and had just then recognized
the familiar actor's voice with a start.
Critical
bits of business--love scenes in darkened rooms, money changing
hands under tables, the lifted eyebrow--were completely lost. Fast
cutting created not kinetic excitement but the effect of strobe-lit,
senseless Rorschachs. Two hours into the epic-length Schindler's
List, I had to abandon my puzzled date to spend 20 minutes pacing
around the lobby before I could go back inside. I was exhausted,
not by my renewed sorrow and outrage over the Holocaust, but by
the desperate effort just to see Steven Spielberg's grim pageant
clearly and, failing that, not to fall apart. I never saw the little
girl dressed in red, the symbolic spot of color in a black and white
scene that was being heralded as a masterful, painterly stroke.
Soon
after that debacle, I said goodbye to the multiplexes and neighborhood
art houses, and resigned myself to only renting videos. With the
20" RCA three feet from my face and the Brightness and Contrast
controls cranked up radically, I could make a movie look almost
normal again. Whenever my eyes grew tired, I could call an intermission,
and there was always the Rewind function for reviewing anything
I suspected I had missed. So I still had the movies, if not quite
as they were meant to be shown.
Which
is not to say I didn't long for the immersion and spectacle of the
big screen, as well as being part of an audience. I did, very much.
So when a postcard arrived inviting me, as I managed to make out
under my illuminated high-power reading glass, to come to Paramount
Studios for the premier of a process called Theater Vision, demonstrated
with Paramount¹s recent hit Forrest Gump, my curiosity and expectations
were aroused. Perhaps at least some remnant of my movie-theater
past could be salvaged, after all.
At
the door, an attendant hands me my Theater Vision equipment, an
FM receiver no larger than a beeper, and a single earphone. "Just
turn the little wheel until you hear something," he says, ushering
me inside. The Theater Vision commentary, I remember from the invitation,
is broadcast from a tape synchronized with the regular soundtrack,
so as to slip neatly into its silences.
The
house, its lights turned up for the benefit of those of us to whom
illumination levels still matter, is filled nearly to capacity.
I can make out a lot of white canes and a fair number of guide dogs
in the Down position on the floor beside aisle seats. With our blurry
sight, our tunnel vision, with our perception only of light, or
darkness, we have come to watch, or at least sit again in the presence
of, the movies.
In the several years since the passage of the 1991 Americans with
Disabilities Act, the vision-impaired have been regaled with a host
of adaptive modifications to the public environment. There are Braille-encoded
ATM keypads (though, absurdly enough, no alternative way to read
the information on the ATM display screen, yet) and elevator buttons.
There are chirping traffic signals, at least in such benevolent
cities as Santa Monica. And now, there is even a way for the blind
to "access," the movies.
Settling
myself in one of the few remaining seats, I am conscious of a small
but desperate hope that Theater Vision will be a revelation. That
it will be like standing blind on the floor of Yosemite Valley while
the perfect guide--a combination poet, painter, forest ranger and
geologist--causes the hooded visage of Half Dome, the implacable
face of El Capitan, and the skinny, sparkling tumble of Yosemite
Falls all to body forth once more in my visual cortex, as life-like
as virtual reality.
The
program opens with a round of speeches celebrating the promise of
technology, the grit of the blind, and Paramount¹s generous hand
in the development of Theater Vision. A youth chorus performs two
inspirational songs that make the treacly "We Are the World" of
ten years before sound as edgy as heavy metal. Finally, the stage
is cleared the house lights go down, and the curtains are drawn
back.
I
wiggle the button-size earphone into place, turn on the little receiver
and locate the Theater Vision frequency in time to hear our narrator,
sportscaster Vin Scully, read the opening credits, and then intone,
"A feather floats down through the sky over downtown Atlanta." I
can see that‹the feather shot is well lit and held for a long time‹although
I wouldn¹t have known it was Atlanta. Fine. Some sort of interference
keeps breaking up Scully¹s voice. I adjust my receiver, and the
sound improves, marginally.
Forrest
(Tom Hanks), enters and joins a middle-aged black woman on a bus
stop bench. The woman looks weary, perhaps from hard work she is
a little too old to still be doing. But the script forces her to
submit to the story-framing device of Forrest's unsolicited monologue.
Rosa Parks as the Wedding Guest. And the narration goes something
like, "Forrest Gump sits down on a bus bench next to a black woman.
Okay, whatever.
The
plot moves through the travails of Forrest's handicapped boyhood,
his miraculous recovery, the blossoming of the friendship that becomes
his first love, his tour of duty in Viet Nam, his audience with
J.F.K. I have to fiddle continuously with the little unit, trying
to get Vin Scully's voice to come in clearly. And even though the
copy he is reciting is dull, I try to be grateful for at least being
tipped off what to notice. But my patience wears thin. For instance,
there¹s the scene where Forrest's girlfriend is bent on relieving
him of his blessedly oblivious virginity and Forrest doesn't seem
to be getting her seductive drift. So she, young, lovely, and inexplicably
longing for his goofy touch, makes the simple, cunning gesture of
removing her blouse. Her back is to the camera. I can see well enough
to know that we're being shown Forrest's face, the reaction shot.
But I can't see his expression, just his silhouette seated motionless
across from hers. I try to picture his astonishment. I want to hear
something like, "Forrest's jaw drops. His eyes tell us that even
he, slow, simple Forrest, knows this moment will be forever indelible."
But all I get from Theater Vision is something like, "Forrest just
stares."
"Forrest just stares?" Still I keep watching, waiting for the promised
redemption of Theater Vision, doing my valiant best to hold disbelief
suspended.
At
this, I ultimately fail. I can't stop myself thinking about how
thrilled I was when, to underscore Forrest's arrival in Viet Nam,
the dark, slashing opening chords of Jimi Hendrix's version of "All
Along the Watchtower" erupted from Paramount¹s state-of-the-art
audio system and pounded the auditorium like a Rolling Thunder bombing
run, and I realize that this was the first moment of Forrest Gump
I enjoyed, and that the thrill was purely auditory. Eyesight to
the blind? I don¹t think so. This Theater Vision thing hasn't restored
my failing sight with words; that¹s what poetry does. Pablo Neruda
describes waves breaking against the cliffs like spider webs. He
says Death is standing in the harbor, dressed in the uniform of
an Admiral. These images, I can see. "Forrest just stares," I can't.
"There
must be some kind of way out of here," goes Hendrix's opening line.
And so there is. Well before the movie is over, I pluck the bug
out of my ear, brush past a row of bent knees, and make it out to
freedom, dropping my Theater Vision receiver onto one of the damask-covered
tables set up for a post-screening champagne reception before stepping
out into the dark, sprawling Paramount lot to find my way to the
bus stop.
To
be deprived of the movies is not, for me, just to lose a beloved
source of stories that nourish, illumine or at the very least divert.
In Los Angeles, where movies and the business of making them are
widely followed with more ardor and fidelity than the play of world
events, where implication and nuance are subtext and the past a
back story, it also means the loss of common cultural coin. Falling
out of touch with the movies punches a big, leaky hole in the oil
can of social lubrication.
But,
movies for the blind? To paraphrase Clint Eastwood¹s last words
in Magnum Force, you've got to know your limitations. The problem
isn't just narration about as evocative as a stock market wrap-up
or freeway report on drive-time radio. It's something much more
fundamental. From the Lumiere Brothers' sci-fi reels and the nickelodeon
melodramas that astonished turn-of-the twentieth century audiences,
film is first of all and more than anything a fiction of images.
It is an artifice of frames and compositions, brightness and shadow.
It is a pulsing of shots, camera angles and post-production edits,
within which things appear to move and incidents to occur. Sergei
Eisenstein, pioneer of montage, would turn over in his grave, I
think, to see the medium being interpreted this way, as if a movie
were a traffic accident, needing only for its material facts to
be reported. Descriptive narration will not render the sinister,
vertiginous chiaroscuro of The Third Man and Double Indemnity. It
will not paint the vastness of battlefields and the snapping of
vivid war-pennants against the sky in Ran. It will not translate
the impish and dangerous glint in Bruce Lee's eye as he thumbs his
nose in Enter The Dragon or convey the beautiful, heartbreaking
effect of DeNiro's slow-motion boxing-ring ballet in Raging Bull.
A film does not exist apart from itself, does not yield up its essence
to being told. A Bordeaux administered intravenously is simply not
wine. There are things, sometimes, that a person should just give
up.
As
I'm waiting for the bus at the stop outside the studio gate, a shouter
comes up the sidewalk, a skinny white guy who I guess to be in his
40's, wearing an old Army field jacket. Every few steps, he yells
something garbled but unmistakably vicious, out of some arsenal
of useless, pointless rage. Suddenly he clams up and disappears
behind the bus shelter, where I catch a murky glimpse of him, standing
against the wall by the gate, trying to pick the street number,
5555 , off the cement with his fingers. I think about how a computer
deletes a file by just erasing its address. I wonder if he believes
he's working some voodoo like this on Paramount Studios. I think
about how people begin to vanish when you can't see their faces
anymore.
My
bus arrives. The man leaves off picking at the wall, fires a volley
of obscenities at the driver as I mount the steps. Pulling away,
I can still hear his screams through the glass and steel and engine
noise, fading with distance.
Copyright
2001 Joel M. Deutsch.
All rights reserved
Republication or distribution in any medium prohibited without express,
written consent of the author
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