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Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘Django Unchained’
I always look forward to reading Ian Jack’s weekly column in the Guardian. I’m not sure why that is – a shared Scottish background, and shared status as senior citizens perhaps – but he and I seem to see the world today from a similar perspective. That he turns out to read the Scottish Review is also reassuring.
But the reason I’m writing about him is because he and I in the recent past shared an identical experience and reacted to it in identical ways. I had considered writing about that experience myself, but decided it was no more than an unfortunate one-off that had no wider significance. I was wrong.
In a recent column Ian Jack described a visit to the cinema to see Quentin Tarantino’s new film ‘Django Unchained’. Early in the piece he vividly evokes the film’s endless tsunami of violence which is of course Tarantino’s trademark as a film-maker. ‘Bullets rip into flesh, which flies out in messy chunks as blood spatters walls and falls like crimson rain on nicely arranged white flowers – on and on it goes, bang-bang-bang, spatter-spatter-spatter, mercilessly, while we, a grey-haired audience on a Wednesday afternoon, break open our foil-wrapped carrot cake and drain the dregs of our cappuccinos.’
I have not seen ‘Django Unchained’, nor do I intend to. I have watched the clips on TV, listened to the views of film critics on the radio, and listened to the director’s unconvincing response when asked on TV a perfectly reasonable question about the possibility of a link between filmic and real-life violence. If I did see it, I’m certain my reaction would be exactly like Ian Jack’s. Like him, I don’t ‘get’ Tarantino. Like him, I’m puzzled by the admiration and respect afforded the film-maker by the Guardian’s own estimable film critics, Peter Bradshaw and Philip French. All this, however, is incidental to what I want to write about here.
What that is emerges from the sentence that Ian Jack writes immediately after the one quoted above. Here it is. ‘From the moment we sat down, we’ve been softened up for these scenes. First came the Pearl and Dean adverts, and then the trailers, all of them an assault on the senses full of dizzying cuts and deafening noises, as if their makers wanted to pull you from your seat, slap you around the head and make you surrender to their juvenile interpretation of the world.’ In a cinema in London I recently had exactly the experience that is described here.
The film we had gone to see was ‘The Hobbit’. But inevitably the adverts and trailers had first to be endured. And ‘endured’ this time carried its full weight of meaning. The sound level was shattering. It really was an assault on the eardrums. More torture than entertainment. Like Ian Jack I felt slapped around the head. To what end? My cynical response was that we were being driven into the foyer in the hope we would buy even more wildly overpriced drinks and popcorn.
More recently still, I went to see Steven Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln’ in Glasgow’s West End cinema. I waited with interest to find out what the Pearl and Dean sound level would be like. It turned out to be not quite at the deafening height of the London cinema, but still many, many decibels above what was necessary. So what is going on here?
A little investigation revealed that there is a long-running issue over the sound level in TV advertising. Rules are in place to try to control this. But the technology is complex and the advertisers are adept at ensuring that their product assails the public ear at the top end of the listening scale. In all of this there is no mention of any kind of regulation of advertising in cinemas. There clearly ought to be. I guess that I and Ian Jack, and cinema audiences in general, are suffering because the latest business manuals have decided that the soft sell no longer works. Ear-splitting loudness rules. For some of us at least, a huge mistake.
So what finally of the films themselves? Near the opening of Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’ the following passage occurs: ‘Old Took’s great-grand-uncle Bullroarer…charged the ranks of the goblins of Mount Gram in the Battle of the Green Fields, and knocked their king Golfimbul’s head clean off with a wooden club. It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment’.
This is an extreme example of the kind of comic whimsy that characterises ‘The Hobbit’ throughout the adventurous tale of ‘there and back again’. Peter Jackson’s film in its opening sequences retains something of this arch humour as the growing band of dwarves assemble and take over Bilbo Baggins’ house. But once the intrepid band set off on their quest to recover their lost treasure, the mock-heroic note is lost. ‘The Hobbit’ simply morphs instead into ‘The Lord of the Rings’ mark two: endless scenes of epic struggles, mighty battles, and heroic endeavour. All well done and certainly entertaining. But to my mind at least, ‘Lord of the Rings’, alongside its epic scale, retains a moving human reality sadly lacking here.
And ‘Lincoln’? ‘Lincoln’ is distinguished by a quite stunning performance by Daniel Day Lewis. It is Lincoln himself, not an actor, we seem to be in the presence of. Lewis has already won the BAFTA award for best actor. He will surely win an Oscar as well. The film’s focus on the closing weeks of the civil war, and the struggle to get the House of Representatives to pass the 13th Amendment with the required majority to abolish slavery in the US, works extremely well. The compromises required, the double-dealing, the lies and deception, and the lost ideals, come across as all too real.
Perhaps Spielberg does provide too positive a gloss to American history. The final, wild celebration of the passing of the amendment as a triumph of American democracy, for example, does not quite tally with the film’s earlier hintings that emancipation and the 13th amendment’s abolition of slavery will in no way resolve the issue of race relations in America. Still ‘Lincoln’ is a film well worth seeing.
Andrew Hook is a former professor of English literature at Glasgow University
