Hello, lovelies. Beau here, finally coming up for air from my last few weeks of undergrad to comment on Alexander Payne's fantastic new feature, Nebraska, and note some uncanny resemblances it has with another particular favorite of mine.
It's not a far stretch to imagine why these two films have been linked to one another so often in various articles and reviews lately. Aside from the obvious aesthetic choices made on the part of the creative team to shoot in black-and-white, the framing of the eerily silent, seemingly deserted locales or the clarity with which both films perceive and study their unique characters, Nebraska and The Last Picture Show both manage to tread a fine line in American cinema of empathizing with their characters without fully submitting to them.
Certain pictures cannot separate themselves from their players. They subjugate themselves to the same pains and whims and joys as their central heroes. The film is in love with them, in love with their journey; romanticizing and cajoling them every step of the way. I think of the way Sean Penn loves Emile Hirsch (or, to be more precise, Christopher McCandless) in Into the Wild. I think of the way Cameron Crowe moves Kate Hudson through Almost Famous, how Bergman watched Liv Ullmann by way of Sven Nyqvist, how Terrence Malick sees... frankly, everything.
Payne and Bogdonavich are not, however, warm filmmakers. Both understand film at its core, and both utilize that extensive knowledge to create worlds and places and times that are pervasive but not precious. Their acute sense of perception is enough to recreate something without fully subscribing to its nature.
What we have with The Last Picture Show is a chronicling of the death of a small town. We watch it as we would the ruins of some place of reverence when the structure begins to fail. But here, we see it happen in moments, in faces. With the way in which each character regards another, and the refraction of that image as the person on the other side makes each desire, each yearning, each fleeting moment of aspiration register with nary a word spoken.
What I've always found particularly brilliant about the film is the decision made on the part of Bogdonavich and Co. to have the life force of the town, Sam the Lion, pass away offscreen. It hurts all the more that his death throe, his last roar is not heard, not registered by anyone in the moment. It's not until later that the reverbarations of his passing are felt. Shops close. Change of Ownership. And finally, the death of the Royal Theatre in town, as Montgomery Clift and John Wayne ride offscreen in Red River and leave us behind. The projector slowly flutters out. The few remaining inhabitants grab their coats and begin to exit. There's talk about how no one wants to come to the pictures anymore. 'You got baseball in the summer, television all the time,' says Miss Mosey, who tried to keep the Royal dream alive. 'If Sam had lived, I guess we would have kept it going, but I just didn't have the know-how.'
If the world of The Last Picture Show is aching to keep breathing, the world of Nebraska has come to terms with its demise. It's the sort of death that hasn't regenerated a new way of life, but also hasn't put an end to the old one. It's the worst kind of purgatory; where the old ways are left to their own devices. The expiration date is set, but there's no push to expedite it. No need to rush along the inevitable. Let it all take care of itself.
Walking along old streets and recognizing old haunts, Woody realizes that he knows these places. He's been here before. He's lived through this before. And as he goes through the motions in an impartial daze, he watches life reenact itself. He was here with these people in this bar once upon a time. He dated that woman. He owned that shop. If The Last Picture Show is a long march towards and through the valley of the shadow, Nebraska is a look back at what that death has brought our protagonist to in the eternal. Like Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, it is a memory play that just happens to exist in a vaccum of space and time, where then and now run parallel to one another. Trains on different tracks have converged alongside one another for a moment, just a moment, where you happen to catch a glimpse of who you were, and who you never hoped to be.
While both films are caked in tenable sadness, it is the achievement of both Bogdonavich and Payne that they are able to exceptionally draw various kinds of decay without allowing themselves to submit to them. To play into the idea that people are incapable of change. If the times are able to, why shouldn't we? Their empathy extends only so far as their clarity will allow for them to look.
Sometimes, I think about where a film would live if it had the choice. What would it be doing if it were living and breathing? What space would it occupy? What would it do to pass the time until it's being watched again?
With these two twins, it's not hard to imagine them sitting on a bench next to one another, surveying the landscape in a perennial sunset, focused not on the the dying of the light, but rather, what they're going to find in the dark.
Golly, look at all those stars.