The Last Picture Show (1971)
In the early 1970s a clutch of films
came out that used mythical American themes of pop culture to ask:
where is America at now?
Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture
Show (1971; 1992 Director's Cut) takes place in small-town Texas in
1951. Shot in black and white, the immediate effect is that this is
a lost classic contemporary to the period, in a similar line to
British films such as Billy Liar or The Loneliness of the Long
Distance Runner that dwell on similar aspects of developing
sexuality, alienation, and conflict. The black and white renders
obsolete a staple of films set in the American West: the blue skies
and ochre deserts are dulled into sharp but flat landscapes. Unlike
films were the landscape of the West are used to suggest vast open
spaces and heights of unclaimed space, the town of the Last Picture
Show is pointy and restricting. Filming in this way also calls back
to the “classic” era of American films, but that isn't quite
right as the films that became most associated with black and white
were noirish, stylish films, fast, hot and fluid. The Last Picture
Show is a slow paceful film, with no flights into fancy nor stylish
editing choices. If an era is being called back to it is an earlier
era of films, of nitrate-silver and rough-looking films like The Man
Who Shot Liberty Vallance, High Noon, or Red River (a film explicitly
acknowledged and shown in the town's cinema, the last Show of the
title).
The Westerns that are an undercurrent
to The Last Picture Show are a part of how the film draws on American
pop culture to show the decline setting into the lives of the
characters and the town.
(Arguably although cowboys are pre-pop
culture as it is normally understood, the explosion of youth-related
consumption just after the Second World War, the mythology of the
West was founded on an impressive distribution of products: news
articles about the cowboy lifestyle, theatre productions of the
exploits of the likes of George Custer, arguably one of the first
celebrities in terms understood today, recollections of battles from
those involved, books, song-sheets, and so on.)
There are several apparent call-outs to
Westerns, such as the already mentioned Red River, and scenes such as
the one in the diner where Sonny confronts Sam the Lion: pure-Liberty
Vallance. Key differences are in the ambiguities the film takes with
this heritage. A film like George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973)
deals in similar territory in use of film motifs and soundtrack, but
is much more straightforward, shifting into referencing and
sentimentalism. For all that they were part of the same wave of New
Hollywood film-makers Lucas's characters not much more developed that
those of the era being referenced, whereas Bogdanovich's in their
uncertainty and indecision transcend the pulp stock characters of
most Westerns. The decision to set American Graffiti over the course
of one night also distinguishes its fantastical elements, the fetish
for resolving all problems in a neatly packaged slot of time (the
Ferris Bueller/24 plot-line); The Last Picture Show spreads out over
an uncertain number of months mostly in daylight, so that unlike the
deeply-shadowed and neon-drenched roads of Lucas's California,
Bogdanovich's Texas is never allowed to appear as anything but a
clear, stark, moonscape where everything is as it appears.
Further comparisons between the best
critically received films of either director are apparent in the
choices made over the uses of music. Lucas constructed a soundscape
of rock n roll hits that obliterated a large chunk the film's budget:
the sales of the soundtrack proved very lucrative, also likely being
one of first big compilations of that era of music to provided a
model for others to follow. The soundtrack of Bogdanovich's film is
made up chiefly of country and western songs of the period 1951-52.
It feels accurately true to life to how the changes and survival of
certain chart songs mark the different periods of the year. Heavily
featured is the music of Hank Williams, who would die from an excess
of drugs and alcohol just after the banded time period when Last
Picture Show was set. A remarkable voice, with a Dennis Potter 'cheap
disposable pop can summon up powerfully resonant meaning, his
revolution was in the deeply emphatic tone of voice and musical
accompaniment, a divergence from the bluff and mediocre country songs
drifting into pop once the dirt had been scrubbed off (Frankie Laine,
Johnnie Ray, also present on the soundtrack). Williams also wrote an
impressive library of mournful songs: even the cheery-sounding
'Jambalaya' has its pitying line “Are you cooking something up for
me?” Williams' music meshes well with Bogdanovich's film: it
suggests the melancholy of the declining west without indulging in
cliches of riding them doggies round slow and such-like. The music is
also all used diagetically, that is it is an actual presence in the
real world of the film, pouring out of jukeboxes or car radios. The
music also suggests one of the only links between the Old West and
the New. The New West is a world where losing a football match is
enough to earn the enmity of a whole town, there is no such thing as
job security as characters drift from place to place, and the
outdoors lifestyle has become compartmentalized into the non-places
of the oilfields (despite many of the characters working there the
fields themselves never feature, only as a place someone has come
from or is going to). Though the characters dress like cowboys and
listen to cowboy music, they are many decades distant from the
lifestyle; Sam the Lion laments the loss of the empty open spaces of
his youth when he came to the country: “I used to own this land”
he declares to Sonny.
There is much that can be said about
the characters in this film, but chiefly the theme of willingness to
perform is emphasised, as a member of society and principally
sexually, as unthinkably for films a few years later this is a film
about impotence. Duane is unable the first-time around to have sex
with Jacy; Jacy's mother Lois and Mrs Popper haunt their family
homes, husbands absent; Mrs Popper's husband the Coach is implied to
be impotent, or infertile; the preacher's son is unable to do
anything more than ask the young girl he has kidnapped to remove her
underwear. The stress and boredom of life in a country without a
purpose drives people to empty frustrating acts. Forcing young people
into prescribed sexual roles leads to destruction. The monogamous
relationships embarked on by Duane and Sonny with Jacy don't work
out, confounded by the pressure on Duane to perform sexually as an
American cowboy (virility, freedom, forceful, phallic in many ways,
such as hat or gun) and Lois's gender and class pressures to
negotiate herself into a secure but maddeningly-dull housewife
existence. Sonny is a different aspect of the cowboy image, a
wanderer on the plains who is forced to turn back home by the police
when he tries to start a new life with Jacy away from Texas in
Oklahoma. Duane and Sonny do make a Western-style trek, but it is a
highly commodified and controlled one, focused on getting tanked up
in Mexico, now standard spring break fare. Duane joins the army and
leaves for the war in Korea. Sonny tries to wander but decides that
the past can't be put back together again, his friend Sam dead, the
pool hall and cinema closed, the disabled Billy thoughtlessly killed
on the road through town by a cattle truck. This realisation comes
with the cowboy-attired townsfolk gathered around Billy's body
discussing his death as if he were a dog. A cattle-truck full of
braying cows summons up images of Red River (also done via a tune at
the Christmas dance) and the callous killing of the mutineering
cattle-herders by John Wayne's Donson. Also a film about
disillusionment, Dunson is twisted to cruelty by the unrequited death
of his beloved in the indifferent cosmic West: Sonny realises this is
what has killed Billy and will kill him to. Seeing that the best he
can do is live a good and meaningful life in the present and not
become trapped in the past, he goes to Mrs Popper's house to make up
for his earlier abandonment of her for Jacy.
By 1971 the Western would be in
terminal decline, to revive at various points, but never again be a
meaningful force in cinema in its own right, closing with 1976's
finality-overtoned The Shootist and continuing in a slightly
zombified manner through the films of Clint Eastwood into the 1980s
and beyond. Uses of the West and the Western would be in evidence in
a few places: outlaw country harking back to the chaotic outlaw
demise of the likes of Hank Williams; country rock becoming the basis for easy listening mid 70s fare like the Eagles; the brutalist western-themed
stories of Cormac McCarthy; several waves of alternative rock drawing
on country stylings; and the somewhat moribund Americana of the 1990s
and 2000s which is unable to escape a certain feeling of stilted
properness. Country and Western the music genre, in the splitting off
of “hillbilly” music in the early 20th century by the recording
industry, has always been deeply commercialized and inorganic: modern
country is now mostly gestures (hats, beards, denims), cliches, and a
formalist approach to pop indifferent to greater meaning.
Not a coming of age story, much less a
film where people “grow up” like American Graffiti, The Last
Picture Show is a film where, in a word, Shit Happens. This feels
much more natural and true to life and is a worthy monument to the
(largely flam) revitalized New Hollywood. The film offers a route
out of he traps of declining America and small-town life, in
refocusing from rebuilding the failed cultural myths, and failed
personal relationships, of the past, to reaching acceptance not with
the present with its stultifying gender and class roles, like
American Graffiti, but finding acceptance and solidarity with each
other.
