A Decline In The Cultural Level -- Ancient Radio Play vs. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

 

Sydney Greenstreet as Nero Wolfe

     A chance encounter with a 60-year old radio play while driving early yesterday morning turned the rest of my day into a fevered search for a half-remembered literary citation.

     The radio play, entitled The Final Page, was a semi-silly, but highly enjoyable detective mystery featuring Rex Stout’s famous Nero Wolfe character.  It was originally broadcast on the NBC radio network on March 23, 1951 and told the story of Wolfe solving the murder of a writer friend who had “finally met a deadline”.

 

     The famous English actor with the unforgettable voice and elegant (and equally unforgettable) physical presence, Sydney Greenstreet, played Nero Wolfe, described in the show’s spoken introduction as “a chair-borne mass of unpredictable intellect”.

Sydney Greenstreet in his most famous role, Kasper Gutman, in The Maltese Falcon (1941) 

     
     What made The Final Page so terrific was its coherence, its quality of execution and its respect for the audience’s time and intelligence.  The writing was economical, sharp and amusing (which is not to say that it was a literary masterpiece), the acting (lead and character) was uniformly excellent and conveyed the mystery story with vigor and pace through the players’ clear diction and the musicality of their voices, and the show’s creators focused on giving the audience just enough in order to leave them wanting more.   The total harmonious effect was achieved using only dialogue, a simple musical score and very basic sound effects.

Nero Wolfe was an orchid fancier

 Nero Wolfe loved beer.

     I couldn’t help but contrasting the quality of the ancient production, which seems fairly typical of radio plays of all genres I’ve been listening to for the past year on satellite radio, with the great mass of contemporary tv and movie junk I encounter during my personal forays into those media, as well as the shows and films I see with my 13-year old daughter.

     The literary citation I was looking for and eventually found was a line of poetry written by the 20th century American Ezra Pound, taken from his Canto LXXXI.  It reads simply “What counts is the cultural level”.

     I first saw a reference to it in Tom Clark’s Beyond The Pale blog of last August 21^st called Wild Life: WPA Posters, 1936-40, which provided a memorable look at tourism posters created by artists working for the United States government’s WPA program during the Great Depression.

     In a responsive comment to a reader, discussing factors he thought made it unlikely that we would ever see  this poster program’s record of artistic high achievement repeated in our lifetimes, Clark referred to “the decline in what Pound once called ‘the cultural level’”. The comment struck me as true and stuck with me.

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

     First,  I would like to say that you should definitely check out Wild Life by clicking on the link provided above.  The poster artwork selected and displayed is a surprise and a delight.  I had no idea that such powerful, yet essentially lighthearted images formed part of the WPA art heritage.  (Like most people, I think, I tend to associate the program with more portentous, serious fare.)

     What makes Wild Life relevant to me as a point of reference is that when evaluating “the cultural level”, I think you need to look at the middle spectrum of art and entertainment (i.e., the bread and butter fare people seek for their daily amusement and diversion), such as tourism posters of marginal commercial value,  as a barometer, rather than at the supposed “high quality”, more rarefied end of things, such as avant-garde art that is by its nature controversial and whose merits are likely to be debated for a long time after the works in question are created. (A recent example that is important to me are the two Chris Burden pieces, Trans-Fixion and Shoot, from the early 1970s, which I included in this space last week to illustrate a painful personal experience. I had been thinking about Burden’s work since the 1970s without resolving my thoughts and feelings about it.  Only last week did these pieces come into focus for me as communicating a sort of intense “cry of pain/ primitive blues” feeling that I found resonant and thought was applicable to what I was trying to say.  I fully recognize that there will always be people who think these extreme works are repellent and worthless.)

     Accordingly, it seems legitimate to compare the Nero Wolfe show (acting as a stand-in for all classic radio, which I recognize is not entirely legitimate) with the current immensely popular movie, Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, Part 1.

     Our family has seen all of the earlier movies in this series and found them fairly enjoyable, if a little corny, cheesy and ersatz.  (Which is to say that they don’t measure up to Peter Jackson’s work on Lord Of The Rings, but they’re a great deal better than the somnolent, less-than-skin-deep Twilight pictures.)

    However, in terms of the three positive qualities cited above in support of the Nero Wolfe show --  coherence, quality of execution and respect for the audience’s time and intelligence – the Harry Potter film is a piece of junk that signifies a decline in the cultural level.

     I haven’t read any of J.K. Rowling’s original Harry Potter novels, so I cannot say whether the movie is more or less coherent than the source material, but that doesn’t really matter.  It’s an incoherent film from the moment it begins its non-exposition until it reaches its non-conclusion.  Like some other "Better Living Through Chemistry" inventions, it is more like getting on a modern fairground ride (shiny, fast, smooth and ultimately unmemorable) than embarking on a journey you long for, one which calls to you that you hope will take you  to an unknown, unpredictable destination, which is what I usually desire in any work of art.

The slogan "Better Living Through Chemistry" originated at DuPont and was modified and adopted by other companies.

 

     The Deathly Hallows’ quality of execution is fairly poor on all levels.  Variety, the entertainment industry trade paper, awarded it the usual “tech credits excellent” line of praise, a judgement that is fairly meaningless in the contemporary movie world.  The men and women creating the special effects are obviously gifted, but their work is meant to serve the story, rather than serve as the story.   In any event, on the “SFX” score the film is no Matrix or Independence Day and it minimizes the impact of the impressive effects it does use through excessive repetition.

     The script and the quality of acting are mostly execrable, meaning that in addition to the illogical plotting and sequencing  (leading to audience confusion and boredom; the formula is now to insert a chase scene and/or employ a magic wand to blow something up while figuring out where to go next in the story), the lines are uniformly flat and pointless when spoken by any of the three sadly untalented lead actors (whose performances have each sunk to new lows in this film) or, even more unfortunately, by the extremely talented group of British lead and character actors who make up the rest of the cast and are woefully underused. (I believe the always great Alan Rickman appears in two scenes only.)

     A clear and despicable sign of awful film making or fiction writing is when a creator kills off a character the audience has grown to know and like arbitrarily.  Such acts of disposal acknowledge that that the character isn’t real, but only a prop, merely a way of getting from Point A to Point B. This essentially describes the entire trajectory and purpose of this movie, which functions primarily as a transition device to the series’ conclusion in the forthcoming Part 2.

Real world special effect, July 2007, Glasgow, Montana (Sean Heavey)  

     In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the expendable victim is Harry's owl Hedwig.  In prior films, this mysterious and self-possessed creature seemed (as owls generally do) to have authority, her own story and some important role to play in the future.  In The Deathly Hallows, Hedwig is killed off, virtually unnoticed, unremarked on and unlamented during the initial 5-10 minutes in the first of the picture’s many pointless, unexciting chase scenes.

     This event, treating the death of an important character as mere “collateral damage” (at best), is the clearest indication to me of the film’s lack of respect for its audience’s time, intelligence and, finally, its pocketbooks.  It is contemptible and I hope the owls of the world take notice and retaliate. That would be a movie worth seeing.

Real world special effect, July 2007, Glasgow, Montana (Sean Heavey)

     Over the past year I’ve recommended to Jane, who is handy with home recording equipment and an artistic person as well, that she and her friends develop radio plays for school projects and simply for fun.   The Harry Potter films prove again that having a large budget is no substitute for imagination and discipline. Listening to the radio, I can close my eyes and, aided by the writers, actors, musicians and directors, summon up a real world that in turn suggests other real worlds.  If I am ever again forced  to watch a movie actor tap-tapping on a computer keyboard or goonishly staring into a monitor, signifying that fundamental actuating events of  life are occurring, I think I will give up going to the cinema forever. (At today’s ticket and snack prices, that’s probably a very good idea and a might be a blessing in disguise.

Sydney Greenstreet as Nero Wolfe, NBC Radio publicity photo

     You can’t cheat emotion and real audience engagement in this way on radio, of course.  It forces creators to use the virtual colors available to them in different, interesting and unexpected ways.  In some respects, as with beautiful black & white film, the medium's potential is inherent in and proceeds from its limitations.

Stranger than fiction

     I know Armageddon (even worse than a decline in the cultural level) seems to be upon us when we’re subjected daily and repeatedly to those television commercials featuring G. Gordon Liddy selling gold for Rosland Capital.  (What hath God wrought?)

     But I’m hanging on to hope, nonetheless.

Ezra Pound, Vortograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn (1916-17)