Geoffrey O'Brien's The Phantom Empire (1993) is one of the all-time great odes to Hollywood. In gorgeous prose O'Brien adopts the associative logic of a Hollywood dream to address the subject of movies in general and specific movies that illustrate a point or document a lifelong love of the screen. The insights are imaginative and spring off the page. Examples:
"The decades were not successive but simultaneous. . . . Certain individuals developed specialized tastes for particular years: there were self-created 1929 people, 1957 people. 'I've been in the forties for months.' History was the rack from which they picked hats and gloves, witticisms and courtships."
"You could end up adopting a whole life. Young people chose to become dead actors, walking around in borrowed accents and clothes. James Dean went everywhere. . . . It could get out of hand; there was such a thing as caring too much. Some found it necessary to follow Jimmy into his death car, to share Marilyn's pills."
Watching Rene Clair's A Nous liberté (1931) forty or more years after it was made, knowing what happened in the interim, "was like watching, in slow motion, the prelude to a car crash."
"John Ford constructed a scale model containing all he wished to preserve of civilization -- a portable world in which John Wayne and Ward Bond could swap drinks and war stories until the end of time. . . ."
"You wore [the director's] eyes like a pair of trick glasses turning everything you looked at into a military parade (John Ford), a masked ball (Max Ophuls), a series of medieval tableaux (Sergei Eisenstein), a blank-verse melodrama enacted by shadows (Orson Welles), or a fever dream in which you giggled as you watched your worst fears materialize (Luis Bunuel)."
"What you knew of history came off the screens. Periodically you had your memory jogged by a rapid montage of history's greatest hits: clips of the most memorable earthquakes, plane crashes, invasions, assassinations. Each event had its clip, and finally became its clip."
"President Reagan was just another Clint Eastwood fan. Eventually the ceremony would roll around and the awards would be handed out for best century, best war, best achievement in political manipulation."
To anyone who loves (or is just curious about) Dead of Night and The Fallen Idol, The Woman in the Window and The Dark Mirror, The Blue Angel and Stray Dog, La Chienne and The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, I joyously recommend The Phantom Empire -- DL
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