reliable

SID: So Joseph has done – well, just a whole lot of good work for us in the past. Whenever we’ve needed a witness or a third party for, I don’t know – a petition of grievance or alienation of affection —

DEEANNA: And he’s reliable?

JOE: I’m bonded, miss.

SID: Joe is the most reliable human being on the planet, in our experience.

All Eddie Mannix wants is to preserve the audience’s belief in DeeAnna Moran’s “innocence,” so that her pictures will continue to make money. All the pregnant and unmarried DeeAnna Moran wants is a man she can count on. Eddie needs to get her married to somebody. “We’ve offered you some very suitable, clean young men,” Eddie says, reining in his frustration. DeeAnna is scornful: “Pretty boys, saps, and swishes! You think if there was some good steady reliable man I wouldna grabbed him?” Something has to be done — something pretty creative — and soon, because DeeAnna is finding it increasingly difficult to fit into her mermaid costume, or, as she calls it, her “fish ass.”

Eddie and his lawyer Sid concoct a scheme. DeeAnna’s pregnancy will be kept secret, and when her child is born, the surety agent Joe Silverman will become its foster parent. Then DeeAnna, in what Eddie hopes will be a publicity coup, will decide, out of her bountiful and innocent generosity, to adopt the poor little tyke. No one ever need know that it’s her own child she’s adopting.

But as they sign the necessary legal papers, DeeAnna hatches a plan of her own. Remember, all she wants is “some good steady reliable man” — and here she is face to face with “the most reliable human being on the planet.” She looks at him closely, inquiringly. He’s not handsome; he’s not charming; he appears to have no personality whatsoever. But before the night is out Joe and DeeAnna are married, and Eddie Mannix’s big problem is solved.

All this stuff I’ve been saying in recent posts about dramatic spectacle and meaningful narrative arcs? We Americans are so over that kind of thing. All we need is something reliable, something that we can always count on to distract us, to give us a steady drip-feed of mild stimulation. Cat videos. Lip-synced dance moves. Moisturizing tips. TikTok and YouTube are the Joe Silverman of visual media: not exciting, not dramatic, not meaningful — just reliable. Always there, always mildly diverting. And that, for us, seems to be good enough.

In the twentieth century there were, of course, millions of Americans to whom religion meant everything and movies nothing — and vice versa. But movies, in the era of their dominance, touched people in ways that powerfully echo religious experiences. This can be seen with particular clarity in the career of the famous film critic for the New Yorker, Pauline Kael, who was only nominally a reviewer of movies: instead, as Sanford Schwartz has noted, her “body of work … sometimes has the impact of a single long, indirect, and utterly original kind of autobiography.” Look at the titles of her collections of reviews: I Lost It at the Movies, Deeper into Movies, Taking It All In — these are documents of self-forgetful ecstasies. When Schwartz says that for Kael “movies release us from our normal emotional and social guardedness,” he could well be describing what happens to Pentecostal Christians when speaking in tongues, to Roman Catholics at the elevation of the Host in the Mass, to Jews in praying the Amidah — all of which are also experiences as multi-sensory and emotionally involving as the most spectacular movies.

Many Americans — starting with Kael’s generation and continuing until, roughly, my own — could also narrate their lives through the movies that meant the most to them. That era is over, and prestige TV (or for that matter crap TV) has not replaced the role of movies in American self-understanding. For those Americans who are not strongly religious — and in America religiosity has declined in tandem with with the decline of the movies — it turns out that it’s possible to live without illuminating spectacle and narrative coherence. Maybe, when you get down to brass tacks, there’s no self to understand. There’s just another video of a donkey and a dog making friends.