don't know if you happened to catch Martin Scorsese's innocuous bit of propaganda on Turner Classics last month (February, 2000), but it should have fired the first shot across the bow of the literate that the next millennium will undoubtedly see the redefinition of "literacy" - not necessarily for the better.

In the columns that follow, I'll lay out a certain thesis that I won't expound on here: that READING is an exercise that stretches the reader intellectually, while passive watching - while valuable in small ways - deadens the mind. The "world" of ideas is nearly impossible to represent visually, and we abandon literature for cinema at our peril.

Scorsese's paen to film is a case in point. As I watched the long, rambling visual "essay" on the "language" of the "auteur" as characterized by the "director," I was astonished at how little Mr. Scorsese - who purports to "author" films - seems to know about how films are actually made. This madness seemed to crystallize in his devoted worship of some schlub director at RKO who delivered Val Lewton's masterful "The Cat People," and other Lewton classics to the editor.

Scorsese even admits that Lewton's production had so stamped the film in script, crew and technique that the famed RKO producer was rarely on the set. This, to Scorsese is ultimate vindication of the "cult" of the "Auteur," and brings us back 'round by commodius vicus of recirculation to literacy and its environs.

Note that I did not say "mouth muscle and environs." Which calls out an important distinction: spoken language, eloquent as it may be in intonations and subtle phrasings, cannot match written language for ease of expression of complex ideas and concepts. There is a disconnect between written language and spoken language, or, if you prefer, "seen" language and "heard" language.

What Martin Scorsese's "history" of cinema intends to do - whether consciously or not - is to make the case that "film" or "cinema" is a "literature" on a par with written literature, and that filmmakers, as a result, should be valued at an intellectual level roughly equivalent or, perhaps, SUPERIOR to that of authors and writers.

This is a monstrous presumption.

Scorsese - in prototypical rube fashion - buttresses his unspoken argument with as many polysyllabic "five dollar" words as his thesaurus will allow. The professional writer will recognize the tyro's symptomatology.

But literature and literacy is under attack from boobs like Scorsese and the minions of Hollywood on any number of fronts, and beware the ides of the Academy: the Holly-luddites of the life of the mind would substitute "cinema" for "literature" and they have the media weaponry to do so.

Let's go back to Martin Scorsese a moment: his secret agenda is, of course, to make the "director" (i.e. himself) the "author" of a film, and film the equivalent of literature. Thus, the director would move to center stage in the life of the American mind, and would be the "equal" of the author, who has held this position of questionable prestige since before the founding of the republic.

The excessive zeal of this mission can been seen in Scorsese's "Cat People" narrative. The film in question was "done" by producer Val Lewton for RKO in 1942. The genius of Lewton's approach - often referred to in books on cinema - was that Lewton used the special effects department of the IMAGINATION (i.e. what you see in your mind) to make up for a lack of funds for special effects. Steven Spielberg is widely credited with "borrowing" this technique, famously, for "Jaws." But there, I'm doing it.

There are two intriguing points that come from this: first, that I know these things, as Scorsese does, because I READ them in books. If you ever have the chance to read the script of a documentary, or if you ever have a chance to put the script of a newscast next to a newspaper, you will understand how much MORE information is transmitted by the written word than by filming people speaking it, or, hearing spoken language accompanied with a slide show in which many of the slides move (which is, fundamentally, any documentary.)

There is a profound question of epistemology involved: in the relationship between the acquisition of knowledge and the medium involved. And in that question lies the crux of whether we should continue to abandon reading in favor of watching (both visual, both means of learning). For the time being, though, we can set that question aside. 
The point that derives from Scorsese's "explanation" of the "Cat People" technique is his insistence on laying the "authorship" of the film, automatically, at the foot to the credited director, Jacques Tourneur. From the internal logic of Scorsese's explication, it is apparent that the person with control over the production, Lewton, felt no need to even be on the set, because, as Scorsese explains, he had exercised so much control in preproduction that the outcome was fundamentally predetermined.

Scorsese, tellingly, omits the detail that the producer controls postproduction, as well. The ballet of choreographic actors and actors' mouths with the camera comprises neither the majority of time, nor work on any film! This is the reason that the claim of "authorship" by directors is just so much hooey. If a director, as a Kubrick, also controls screenwriting, pre-production, casting, and post-production, THEN, perhaps, the director (who is actually the producer at this point) has a claim on the "authorship" of a film - AS IF THAT WERE OF PARAMOUNT IMPORTANCE. (Or universal interest, for that matter.)

The deadly trap in all of this pretention is that films are equal to books, and that directors are equal to authors, as a class. In its specifics, this would seem rather meaningless, but in point of fact, there is a quiet juggernaut rolling, attempting to redefine some of the basic values of our civilization. And, the fact is, while cinema is an intriguing form of entertainment that comprises all of the prior arts, as a collaborative effort, the authorship is diffused throughout the many, if not hundreds and even thousands who worked on a given film.

But the sad fact remains: film can BARELY cover ideas. Ideas are difficult, if not impossible, to film, and yet, it is IN that world of ideas that nearly every advance in our civilization has come. Where would India be without a rather dry essay that Henry David Thoreau wrote on his refusal to pay a war tax on a war he felt to be criminal, the Mexican-American War of 1846? The essay, "Civil Disobedience" changed the world, and came, full circle, through the example and writings of Gandhi, back to form the central core of the Civil Rights movement under Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The play, "The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail," is an interesting INTRODUCTION to the essay, and director Scorsese might even film the play (and thereby, perhaps,  claim "authorship" of Thoreau's ouvre), BUT in no wise does one leave the theater after the play with the theoretical knowledge sufficient to make "civil disobedience" work in a sit in the following day.
The knowledge is transmissable through language, and most effectively through WRITTEN language. This is the pitfall of abandoning the world of books for the world of cinema.

A sidelight: in the world of literature, I am responsible for this essay. It is my derivation, and I am morally, ethically and legally responsible for it. I am the "author." Were this a film, however, the "responsibility" might be in so many places, so diffused that it would be practically impossible to assign "authorship." The "auteur" theory conveniently takes responsibility for the quality of the acting, the story, the cinematography, even, perhaps, the music and language, without having to be capable of "producing" any of them. It is a glory-by-association that conjures the monstrous egotisms of poseurs like Scorsese. 

Is he a poseur as a director/producer? No. As an intellectual? Yes. As a "well-read" (and therefore, "educated") individual? Absolutely. The entire miniseries seems a plea to accept all the movies Marty has seen as a substitute for all of the books that he hasn't read, and that plea is explicitly rejected.

But let's broaden the equation.

Since the late 1970s, the publishing industry has been, fundamentally, gobbled up by the "entertainment" industry, i.e. television/movies. I regularly receive review copies from Simon & Schuster (the Simon family that produced singer Carly Simon, by the way) and Pocket Books. 

Simon & Schuster - a preeminent name publishing, since it began in 1924 with a book of crossword puzzles, was purchased by Gulf + Western in 1975. Now a wholly-owned subsidiary of VIACOM, Inc., Paramount (another Gulf + Western acquisition, and superior subsidiary to S&S) was purchased with the hard-earned cash from video rentals at Blockbuster Video. Viacom now owns MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount, the UPN network, Simon & Schuster, Pocket Books, Blockbuster Video, and others.

And, increasingly, Simon & Schuster offerings are books that have a high visibility quotient for talk shows, or else books about (or supposedly BY) movie/TV stars, who can "tour" the book to major talk shows.

Martin Scorsese is one of these, and were he to "write" a book, and Simon & Schuster were to publish it, he would make the rounds of the talk shows, etc. But as an "author" and not an "auteur." Still, from the auteur's point of view, it is understandable that being an "author" would not be viewed as any great accomplishment: Nearly all "celebrity" books are ghostwritten, else "edited" so extensively as to have the same effect. 

The effect is to make it seem as though ANYONE can be an author, but only a few, talented, protean geniuses (like Martin Scorcese) can be directors, and, therefore, the authors of films (which are intellectually equivalent to books, you understand).

We witness a cheapening of our intellectual heritage at the hands of the street-educated, of the claque of "juvies" J. Frederick Wertham feared when he excoriated comic books in the 1950s before Senator Estes Kefeuver's Congressional investigation.

I'll leave it as an unsubstantiated assertion that since the 1950s, one can clearly delineate the progression of collective brain-rot by looking at the ever-increasing loss of literacy (and wit, I might add) in screenplays and teleplays written for these "auteurs." As screenwriters became more literate in cinema and less in books, the standard level of the hack dropped abysmally. The bad pulp of  1950s TV seems genius compared to the bad writing of 1990s TV. 

Much the same could be said for the unrelievedly neanderthal subliteracy of 1999 Academy-Award winning 'Best Picture' "Shakespeare In Love" - which is historically utterly at odds with ANY known history of the time. It seems impossibly ironic that the last vestiges of literacy should be sacrificed on the altar of the auteur by a cloddish lampooning of Elizabethan London, perhaps the watershed moment in the literacy of our American/English tradition - certainly in the development of all English literature.

But perhaps Martin Scorsese can make a documentary about that. Naw. Too "high concept."

--30--

Eugene, Oregon
16 March, 2000