The hollow men
Peter A ckroyd
His name was probably given to him by an American immigration official, and there is some doubt about the spelling of Mayer. He was a Russian Jew, but it is not at all clear where or when he was born. He added the 'B' for emphasis.
Roman Polanski's first name is actually Raymond, although he was known as `Romek' in his youth. A Polish Jew, his mother threw him from the truck which was taking them to an extermination camp. At the age of eight he went into hiding; a little later, he became a smuggler on the black market.
Here we have, in embryo, two of the most important figures of the Hollywood 'dream factory'. Mortally wounded by the loss of their identity, having abandoned their native culture or seen it fall in ruins, they moved like sleep-walkers towards the world of film as if within its images they might find peace. Louis B. Mayer worked in film from its beginning; Polanski became involved with it in the years after the Sec- ond World War when the cinema sloughed off one skin only to find that a new, and crueller, one glistened underneath. Both men discovered in the cinema a way of ex- ternalising, and therefore manipulating, their own loss of values by filling the screen with shallow or generalised fantasies. For Mayer they were represented by mother- hood and family; for Polanski by transvestism and violence. The same or- phaned desires are there: only the terms in which they are expressed have changed.
On the face of it, the two men have little else in common. Mayer was the greatest of the studio bosses who worked his way
through the business of leasing and distributing films before he found his forte in production. With MGM he created a studio which included, in its 'stable', Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford and Katharine Hepburn. In the process, he changed the face of film culture by moving away from directors and writers — what might be called the individualistic bias M film-making — towards the diumvirate of stars and studio — what might be called the collectivist spirit of film. In this he represented his period. Mayer had an un- canny instinct for the populist nature of the new art, and he realised at once that it in no sense depended upon genius or individual talent but rather upon the marketing of popular sentiment — if the sentiment was not there, he would create it — and the cult of the 'celebrity'. What emerged from Hollywood, as a result, was the first large- scale attempt of America to define and ex- plain itself — and it chose to do so with 'handsome people, strong story values, atiO a staunch affirmation of traditional values'' And isn't that the America which has or pressed us all these years?
Roman Polanski, on the other hand, has created films that depend neither 0101 studios nor upon stars, but solely upon the fixations of the director himself. He is not interested in handsome people or tradi- tional morality, except to mock or subvert them. He is concerned with obsession, neurosis, voyeurism and sado-masochistic fantasies. And yet despite this he is the true
i heir of Mayer. As his biographer puts it n
this intelligent and literate book, 'Roman Polanski was natural for Hollywood. His interests were right — perverse sex' madness, the bizarre'. And this only a few. years after Mayer threw an actor out of hi, office for belittling the sanctity I motherhood. Yet the identity of their interests goes, deeper than any difference in their morar, values — film is not, after all, a 'moral medium. The curious pleasure and distrust with which we view film has to do with the fact that images, unlike words, have no history and no extractable 'meaning'. They contain no moral codes, and they are not susceptible to the pressures of thought or emotion in the same manner as language' And so film was uniquely able to satisfy the unrooted or displaced fantasies of Mayer or Polanski, to assuage the desires of 'the little boy and his dreams'. But if the cinema Is vehicle for the infantilism of film-makers, I,t is equally so for that of an audience. We 511 back passively in the warm darkness, and,. gape at the images which flicker in front or us. The a-moral, or rather pre-moral, blankness of the screen, like that of the psychotic, can be used to present 'moral' or `immoral' content as the director wishes. That is merely the icing on the cake.
Both of these books touch only lightly on the loss of identity which Mayer and Polar'.
ski suffered, and on the elaborate mechan: isms of self-awareness and conceit wine?, allowed them to conjure fascinating an powerful images out of their own eMP. tiness. But it is in the nature of filmic biographies that they cannot dwell on such matters: instead, they unconsciously ac- quire all of the characteristics of the culture which they profess to examine. The lineaments of each life are here subor- dinated to the concerns of plot and develop- ment; a number of scenes are sketched in, which are more important collectively than individually; quoted conversations resemble dialogue from a finished script — 'Think big,' Louis Mayer is purported to have told an assistant, 'That's the path to the future'. Even the language has changed: Barbara Learning writes of 'the montage' rather than 'the combination'.
But the relation between cinematic art and the life it represents goes deeper than similarities of tone or method. Cinema fashions our perceptions of the world just as, in their own way, Mayer and Polanski fashioned their own lives as if they were 'straight out of the movies'. That peculiar collaboration between the world as it is filmed and the world as it is experienced found its sharpest point in the murder of Polanski's wife, Sharon Tate, and his more recent conviction for unlawful sex: in both cases, reality took the shape which Polanski had already determined for it in his films. As his biographer puts it here, 'His is a Peculiarly modern tale, one possible only in art age of mass media and information. Having set out to create an image for himself ... he became a public effect.' Polanski was forced to inhabit a world which he had anticipated in his art. Give me the Pictures, and I'll give you the war. It is this symbiosis between the cinema and contemporary life which marks the uni- que power of film, in contrast to all other cultural forms. Mayer's close friend (one might say, colleague), William Randolph Hearst, once remarked that 'The public is even more fond of entertainment than it is of information'. He failed to add that, in the age of the 'movie', entertainment and information are not separate functions but Part of the same process. When confronted With images, we do not initiate that process of selection which would allow us to separate the two: when we watch, we do not judge. As the biographies of these men testify on a personal level, we live in a cinematic world which exists beyond judg- ment, half-real, half-imaginary. A film actor becomes President of the United States, and we provoke wars by showing images of fighting. „ Towards the end of Gary Carey's ulography, he recounts the last years of Lon Chaney. Born of deaf-and-dumb parents, he had become a star of the silent screen. He did not want to appear in the new talkies', but was cajoled or blackmailed by Mayer into doing so. After the film was completed, he developed a tumour in his throat and retreated once again into his
nee. He slipped into a coma, and died. He did not want to enter the new reality which beckoned to him: it was over-bright, echoing with a voice which was his own and yet not his own.
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