GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.

JAWS; starring ROY SCHEIDER, ROBERT SHAW, RICHARD DREYFUSS, LORRAINE GRAY, MURRAY HAMILTON; directed by STEVEN SPIELBERG; written by PETER BENCHLEY, CARL GOTTLIEB; studio ZANUCK/BROWN COMPANY/UNIVERSAL PICTURES; 124 minutes. Wikipedia, IMDB, Letterboxd.

I’ve updated my Jaws post a little, mashing it together with the original part two, which is about this film’s direct inspiration: John Huston’s 1956 Moby Dick. Spielberg’s ending is essentially a shot-by-shot remake of Huston’s.

53 minutes into Jaws we encounter the masses. Director Steven Spielberg does something jarring, something that feels out-of-character for this 27 year-old cinéaste-wunderkind. He swings the camera around, away from the tightly-composed, two-, three- and four-person scenes of the first act - small groups of actors acting - and suddenly we meet thousands of strangers, non-performers. People in sunhats and sandals, families, pensioners, a nun - moving purposefully, stopping to chat, milling around - but without the filmmaker’s direction. Holidaymakers are arriving on Amity Island for the first big weekend of the Summer so Spielberg has set up his camera in the real world, in the harbour at Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard, to capture some realistic scenes for his shark movie.

It’s not critical to the story, of course - it’s classic b-roll, the stuff you’d send an assistant director to shoot - but here it’s a big moment - a pivot. And a momentary victory for the real, the spontaneous and the parochial over the imagined, the deliberate and the weird placelessness of the movies. It’s jarring because there’s a conscious switch from the conventional, enclosed mode of address that we know from this kind of scripted cinema to a bigger, more unruly verité style. A tiny slug of documentary filmmaking has been dropped into Mr Spielberg’s artful confection. It’s like somebody pasted in some footage from a Frederick Wiseman doc that would be called ‘The Island’ or ‘Holiday’ or something.

Of course, Spielberg didn’t send an AD to shoot the footage. He’s a pro, he did it himself, so it’s artfully done. People move in and across the frame, there are close-to-camera, out-of-focus figures, set against mid-shot family groups and, beyond them, the mass of the incomers, undifferentiated, filling the decks of the ferry and the roads out of the harbour. It’s actually kind of delirious, a quite joyful 90-second holiday from the structured stuff. If I was teaching film I might use this scene to illustrate something about narrative versus documentary form.

In this sequence it’s more Altman than Spielberg, and we probably have editor Verna Fields - chief storytelling problem-solver to the New Hollywood elite - to thank for the way the verité footage is interleaved with scripted elements here. We switch from reality to scripted two of three times and a big, shark-themed videogame booth on the boardwalk masks the final transition back into the narrative material as brody strides down the beach into the throng - we do not return. It’s slick, kind of thrilling.

There’s an odd moment when, filling the frame, a car coming off the ferry from the mainland turns out to be a very grand Rolls Royce. Is this deliberate? Did Spielberg source this classic, old-world plutocrat ride to tell us something about the social composition of the incomers about to be imperiled here? Is Jaws a class movie?

Of course Jaws isn’t a class movie. In fact class in Jaws is diffuse, not the film’s focus at all. We learn that ocean scientist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) is from money but it’s just to explain his well-equipped boat. Quint is scornful of the pampered dilettantes he has to work with - but it’s just to set him up for his fate. Are there any class movies in Spielberg’s long filmography? No, not one. Spielberg is a kind of suburban Hitchcock and he makes a big effort to drain class from his work, to deny it all together - even where it ought to structure a story. He would tell you that his work is ‘classless’ and that his films are ‘universal stories’. He’s an artist who doesn’t like class. It feels dirty to him (and, anyway, maybe a ferocious predator from prehistory is the ultimate class solvent).

We have to acknowledge that here, as elsewhere in his work, Spielberg reveals himself to be a kind of lightweight. I don’t want to come off like a prigg here but it’s impossible to deny that across his whole career he’s rejected anything that even hints at ‘deep’ or ‘philosophical’ or at any kind of engagement with politics or history or morality.

In the making-of footage you’ll see the young (so young) Steven Spielberg, evidently a confident and imaginative creative leader, striding around studio and workshop, instructing men and women who’ve been in the business longer than he’s been alive, with humanity and insight. And what impresses us is precisely his youth. He’s a prodigy, an adolescent film whizz, an excited kid in the Hollywood toy shop.

He’s never grown-up, never managed to get beyond the story. So, in Schindler’s List, we get the holocaust rendered as melodrama and, in ET, we get contact with alien life as a kind of petting zoo adventure; in Minority Report crime without cause (scan the filmography: can you see a movie there that doesn’t strip out and avoid the deep stuff?). In Jaws the obvious opportunities - to place humanity in the deep time of the Great White and the three hunters into its wildly non-human essence - are refused, so Jaws is frozen in the popular imagination as an impossibly tight adventure yarn: a work of genius packed with shots and sequences and scenes that take our breath away - but not a thoughtful one, not an existential one.

What we’ve forgotten - because of our shrivelled attention spans and our crippling TikTok habits - is that Jaws is Moby Dick. This connection isn’t mine, of course, It’s obvious. Critics at the time noticed it, wondered why Quint wasn’t called Ahab and so on. Although people don’t seem to notice any more - Google more recent criticism of the movie and you’ll see that Moby Dick never comes up at all1

We’ve collectively forgotten that Benchley and Spielberg consciously wove Melville’s strange and dark story - which is a kind of literary edge-case, a wildly unorthodox work of art, one of the least conventional, least suburban novels in the language - into Jaws. But Spielberg (Benchley too, I think it’s safe to say) is no Melville. So where Melville never misses an opportunity to spiral out from the narrative into the theological, the moral, the technological, the etheric, the biological, the sociological, the political - the everything, really - Spielberg keeps tight control and the effect is the opposite of Melville’s wild formal expansion. Jaws has a tightly-wound structure that doesn’t permit any digression, any speculation, any concerns with the wider world at all.

Melville wants to include everything in his whale yarn while Spielberg tries to exclude everything from his shark tale. Of course, a movie isn’t a novel. The first edition of Moby Dick ran to 635 pages2. Melville’s scope is global, both in subject matter and in form. In my own reading I remember paging forward through the many long digressions into religion, economics, race, oceanography - longing to be back at the story. In Jaws we find ourselves longing to know the dark expanse of the ocean the beast comes from or the deeper truth of Quint’s Indianapolis story or what about city cop life could drive a man like Brody out to the island. We don’t get any of it. We get the big rubber shark, the flailing limbs, the whine of fishing line through the reels.

The other Moby Dick movie

Jaws is one of a very small number of movie adaptations of Moby Dick. I’m not surprised. As far as I can tell, there’s only ever been one that carries the name of the book. John Huston made his Moby Dick in 1956. As you’d of expect, it’s a big-hearted, rather direct kind of thing, full of passion for the subject matter. Huston, like Spielberg, doesn’t even try to take on Melville’s big themes, though, and this may be because Melville’s big themes are mostly, well, too big. Things like ‘eternity’, ‘infinity’, ‘damnation’ and so on. Most filmmakers wouldn’t even try. Huston’s big mistake, though, is in the casting. He shot the film in Wales and Ireland (and the seagoing scenes off Madeira) and, presumably for some very sensible commercial/contractual reason, cast only three Americans: Gregory Peck (let’s face it, an entirely inappropriate Ahab); Huston’s friend Orson Welles, who provides an oddball sermon in the harbour church and then is heard from no more and Richard Basehart, who brings an inappropriate heartthrob vibe to Ishmael.

In the wider cast, Huston has chosen for this movie a kind of repertory company of British theatrical actors; and not just any actors. Between them, they already have years at sea (or at least years in military service). And the problem is that that experience is largely in the British army and the British navy. Click around Wikipedia a bit. It’s kind of remarkable:

• James Robertson Justice as Captain Boomer - Royal Naval Reserve, fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, raced cars (quite a character!).

• Harry Andrews as Stubb - Royal Artillery and Liverpool Playhouse; ‘Ice Cold in Alex’.

• Bernard Miles as the Manxman - Pembroke College, Oxford and ‘In Which We Serve’.

• Noel Purcell as Ship’s Carpenter - Gaiety Theatre (probably shouldn’t be on this list, since he’s Irish).

• Mervyn Johns as Peleg - RADA, Royal Air Force and practically every British film of WW2, including ‘Went the Day Well’.

• Joseph Tomelty as Peter Coffin - another Irishman but he was in David Lean’s ‘The Sound Barrier’.

• Tom Clegg as Tashtego - Household Cavalry and professional boxer (and Oddbod in Carry on Screaming obvs).

• (and Friedrich von Ledebur as Queequeg who did serve but, to be honest - as a cavalryman in the Austro-Hungarian army - on the wrong side).

You can see the problem. Nothing about service in the British armed forces, especially in the Navy - the ‘senior service’, the world’s police force for centuries - could possibly fit you to life on a whaler. Especially not to life on Melville’s damned whaler.

The military demeanour of almost the whole cast of Huston’s Moby Dick is all wrong: so many straight backs; so much respect for chain-of-command; so much obvious Naval discipline. Squint a bit and you can see the officer cohort of the Pequod gathered, soaked to the skin, on the bridge of a North Atlantic destroyer, scanning the horizon for u-boats.

Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.

GONE WITH THE WIND, VICTOR FLEMING, SELZNICK INTERNATIONAL PICTURES/METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER, 1939, 238 MINUTES. CLARK GABLE, VIVIEN LEIGH, OLIVIA DE HAVILLAND, LESLIE HOWARD

I’m republishing GROSS/30 because Rhett Butler is Hollywood’s greatest opportunist capitalist. A true pragmatist - amoral, without allegiance or even the slightest involvement with others. He’s an atlanticist, a free-trader, a privateer, a war profiteer. A man for our age.

Gone With The Wind is a big deal1. A vast melodrama (almost four hours), a revisionist history of the civil war, an apologia for slavery and a cause célèbre that still prompts argument and loud calls for a ban every time it’s screened. It’s a Technicolor gem and it might be the last of the great romantic dramas that defined the first decade of the sound era. And at its centre is a character so compelling that he’s getting the whole of this post to himself.

Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) is the hero of this film. He’s a brute and an opportunist. An ambitious Southern entrepreneur who refuses to be held back by his milieu, by the South itself and its antique culture, its suffocating day-long heat and its frozen class structure. He’s a worldly man. In fact, he’s the most worldly man in all of cinema. He’s hard-hearted but he’s always right.

Every single judgement Rhett arrives at, every decision he makes, every cruel or incendiary statement he can’t help himself making in this movie is correct, up to and including his famous, brutal departure (“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”). He’s right about Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh), about Tara - her treasured family estate - about all the women and all the men in the film, including his opposite pole in this morality tale - stupid, noble, backward Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard). He’s right about parenthood and business and government - about property and propriety and love.

He’s right about the civil war and about the fate of the South too. He’s especially right about those. In the present we’d call him a realist. In Ukraine he’d be calling for a land-for-peace deal (while making an obscene fortune from selling artillery shells to both sides).

He’d find the loss of life in the fields of Eastern Ukraine to be a catastrophic waste - not a human tragedy but a stupid, pointless sacrifice in the name of the shallow fiction of nationhood. He’d see right through every pretence of the war - Western respect for Ukrainian sovereignty, the unvarying resolve of the allies, the perfect nobility of the Ukrainian fighters.

Rhett clearly sees the South’s fate. He knows that an agricultural economy, wedged up against a more modern one and cut off from easy access to markets cannot win a war. He knows that an economy dependent on an enslaved workforce and commodity crops cannot thrive in this changing world2, cannot compete with the industrialising North and with the consolidating and modernising European states.

He’s no coward but he reserves his heroism for the very last days of the war, after the defeat, when his involvement will serve only him and not the witless generals who ploughed into the soil the blood of hundreds of thousands of men, knowing all along that they could not win, could not restore the South nor protect its brutally exploitive economic model from extinction. Rhett is set against these cynical and shallow heroes of the Confederacy, honoured even in their defeat, while he walks away to live another life.

Rhett Butler is one of the most famous villains in the movies. We never doubt that he’s this tragedy’s prime mover, the only fully-formed man without sentimentality or illusion or nostalgia for the old South. Without Rhett this melodrama would have been just a nasty hymn to the old ways. With him it’s a complicated argument with the old ways.

Rhett’s a moderniser, a man out of time, an industrial-era capitalist in a backward, semi-feudal land. He’s the only man in the story to have a life and a livelihood beyond the South, links with the modern world. In Paris and London he trades, profits from ocean blockades and tariffs and from his access to embargoed goods and foreign treasures. In a contemporary story he’d be a vulture capitalist or a trader, phone pressed to his ear, striding round his corner office, executing trades and closing deals. An arbitrageur impatient for the next transaction.

Throughout the film, he’s an agent for change, for novelty, for new settings, new arrangements and new markets. He enters and leaves the narrative repeatedly, impatiently, while Scarlett and the others are stuck in the timeline - oscillating in place while Rhett orbits their world. He’s a Promethean hero who leaves it all behind more than once and then, finally, once and for all. He won’t look back3.

Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.

NAPOLEON, ABEL GANCE, GAUMONT, 1927, 330 MINUTES.

To start with, what is this film? It’s obviously a biopic, it’s a love story, it’s pure mythography. It’s not a history. It runs to five-and-a-half hours but stops before we get to fully Continental Napoléon. In fact, he’s 27 when the film ends and still a second-ranking General making a name for himself in Italy. Gance wanted to finish the story but the talkies killed the project (the biggest Hollywood film of the same year was The Jazz Singer). We also wonder how on earth he’d have captured the peaks and troughs of the Emperor’s mighty narrative arc when he’s already given us the most dazzling, 4:1 wide-screen finale yet seen in a cinema.

What else? Continental Napoléon is present - he’s foreshadowed in his ambition and his ardour for the republic. There’s a kind of dream-sequence speech he makes to all the dead revolutionaries in the empty hall of the Convention. Dead Marat asks “what are your plans, Napoléon?” and he replies “…the liberation of oppressed peoples, the fusion of great European interests, the suppression of frontiers… THE UNIVERSAL REPUBLIC!” This is the Napoléon loved by Beethoven and Goethe - but, if we’re honest, we know already that when he says ‘republic’ he means something more like “you know, a kind of Empire with a single, unquestioned Alexander-the-Great-type leader…” We learn also of his dastardly totalising ambitions for a European super-state with the free movement of persons and presumably nice burgundy Napoleonic passports - “Europe will beome a single people, and anyone, wherever he travels, will always find himself in a common father-land.”

Also, he’s lovelorn, passionate, more self-confident than the most self-confident person you’ve ever met. Generals hardened by revolution and women by the Terror crumble before him. Within minutes of his arrival at the chaotic HQ of the Italian campaign (“the Army of Italy, without food, without clothes and without discipline”), all the grizzled Generals who’d made it clear in advance that they wouldn’t let the Corsican wipe their boots are doffing their huge, dusty hats to the new boss. One of them puts it well: “with his piercing eyes, this little stump of a man frightens me.”

Albert Dieudonné, playing the stump of a man, concerns himself with Napoléon’s authority, with his staggering resilience, his imperious, outsider presence but also with his fragility (the child actor chosen for the school scenes, Vladimir Roudenko, somehow musters the same wobbly-lower-lip grandeur - bullied but never bowed - we are already sobbing in the first reel).

History v biopic

And now some historiography. At the time of this film’s release a group of young historians in France was getting ready to turn the whole discipline upside-down. Led by Fernand Braudel, they wanted to find the long-term patterns in the histories they were telling by pulling back (zooming out?) from the stream of events and the personalities to focus on what they called the ‘longue durée’. This approach aimed to put the actions of historic figures into the social, economic and technological context and inevitably reduced the importance of individual actors - essentially the opposite of the ‘great man’ model of history that had dominated until the 20th Century (and that still dominates in more parochial British history writing).

For these historians, mostly direct contemporaries of Gance, all the conditions for a Napoléon to emerge already existed in the late 18th Century and if the coarse kid from Corsica hadn’t come along to fill the role, somebody else would have done. It’s safe to assume that Gance (and Ridley Scott) would not tolerate this very dry understanding and would rather die than demote their lead characters to mere instruments of world history. To be honest, it’s not what we want from our biopics either. This Napoléon must bestride history, colossus-like, not obey its logic.

Get on with it Gance!

Gance’s canvas is vast - he gives himself almost three standard-length features to tell the story of Napoléon’s first 27 years. Consequently, from time to time, the action slows from magisterial to ponderous. The first major battle - the siege of Toulon - where Napoléon overcomes a lazy and decadent French command and a complacent English one to take back the impregnable port, takes almost an hour. We’re given half an hour of continuous moping and adoring from afar as Napoléon develops his bid for the love of Joséphine de Beauharnais, widowed tragically during the Terror but obviously enjoying the single life in revolutionary Paris where, by the look of it, anything goes. Our hero is even trained in the art of courtship by star of the Comédie-Française (and hair innovator) Talma. The party scenes in this section of the film are like something from the Great Gatsby - there’s nudity and drunkenness - a near-orgy. We fall through a flapper wormhole and spend 15 minutes in another Paris.

And the object of Napoléon’s desire is a complicated woman. We’re asked to admire Joséphine’s canny navigation of the post-revolutionary hierarchy, her careful use of the elite men who fall at her feet. She is very much in control of her destiny and in no way a sure thing, even for leading suitor and man-of-the-moment Napoléon Bonaparte. Where another woman of her status - a single mother in her thirties who had only narrowly avoided the guillotine - might have yielded to Napoléon’s advances when he saved Paris from the Royalists in 1795, she holds him off until the following Spring (cue moping and adoring from afar). Hers is a character I’d love to have seen Gance develop in the sequels (Anita Brookner puts it in terms we understand: “Josephine, flirting heavily with her fan, is a vamp.”).

Split-screen destiny

It’s not easy to decompose this movie into the standard three acts of the hero’s journey. And besides, the final act would surely belong to the next film in the sequence - part five - which was never made (and, spoiler alert, it wouldn’t have ended well). But this film’s final act is the most spectacular by far and for audiences at the end of the twenties, who didn’t want for spectacle after all, in the era of De Mille, Chaplin and Griffith, it must have been enormously exciting.

Gance and his cinematographer Jules Kruger lash together three cameras and produce something as grand as Cinemascope - twenty years before it becomes widespread - but also something that in its complexity makes ‘scope look like something primitive - a crude smearing of the image across the visual plane when set against Gance’s profound spectacle of relatedness and contrast.

And once they’ve invented the device (a critic named it Polyvision), they play with it and insert shots to create sliding and rotating tableaux as rich as a work by any contemporary IMAX artist. In one scene, Napoléon, on horseback, is flipped horizontally to provide left- and right-hand bookends to a central shot of dusty soldiers marching to their fate - it’s sophisticated storytelling but also emotionally complex - a tableau not just of events but also, somehow, of juxtaposed, contrasted and reinforcing affect. It’s a disorienting, almost delirious experience soaking up all this action - and on so many levels. In this final section, which is half an hour long, the narrative is set aside almost entirely, in favour of this unarguably new language - of spectacle but also of kaleidoscopic emotional drama - never still. I couldn’t tell you the order of events here, only that I was in awe throughout.

• I’d love to know more about young Bonaparte Vladimir Roudenko. Looks like he never made another film and died in Paris in 1976 but there’s little else online.

• One admiring British historian, of the more orthodox kind, has called Bonaparte ‘the enlightenment on horseback’. Hegel once saw him in person and wrote later "I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.”

• The 335-minute restoration that’s on Amazon Prime and on Blu-Ray is essentially the 1981 Kevin Brownlow restoration, digitised in 2016. If you search the archives you’ll find plenty of reviews of the 1981 release in the smart papers. Brownlow’s extraordinary achievement in locating and then putting together coherently the film’s scattered fragments was recognised. It’s a masterpiece in itself. The best review I’ve read from that cycle is Anita Brookner’s in the LRB.

• I really shouldn’t have left the music out of this review. The 1981 score is by Carl Davis and it’s a work of art too - linking Beethoven’s Eroica in multiple variations and a dozen other mostly French composers of the period with specially-composed material. Davis conducted the score live in the cinema for the restoration’s premiere. I cannot think of a more stressful and exhausting task.

• Jules Kruger, who photographed this extraordinary film, made dozens more and worked for over twenty years in the sound era too, all around the world.

• Here's a list of all the top-grossing films since 1913 and here's my Letterboxd list.

• And here’s another top-grossing list.

“Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power.” - Steve Bannon

GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, historicized.

Another free post. I’m brewing a part two, which will be for paying subscribers and might just focus on Steve Bannon’s Ronald Reagan hagiography In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War in Word and Deed. The film came out in 2004 but, of course, it’s about the period that began in the year of this film’s release.

My first proper job - aged 18 - was as a civil servant at Her Majesty’s Land Registry in Stevenage. This is 1981, so I think you can guess what was involved. I spent my days pushing a trolley around filing branch - a long basement, filled to vanishing point with ceiling-height shelving. I was locating dusty land titles and deeds and plans to be sent out to solicitors and land-owners. About half the time - so goes the iron rule - I’d be putting the same documents back on the shelves.

It wasn’t a high-pressure job and I was surrounded by indulgent colleagues; older women who’d been there a long time and evidently thought it part of their job to provide me with mugs of tea and Blue Riband biscuits1. I quickly learnt some important things. First of all, it didn’t really matter where I put the files. I mean it did matter - strictly speaking these documents belonged in very specific locations - but it didn’t matter to me. I was sure that I’d be long gone before anyone needed these things again, so I felt free to shelve them more-or-less anywhere. This made the putting-away aspect of the job very easy indeed. I’d just shove the files into any available gap (I still feel a flush of shame about this, although I have rationalised it as kind of punk and, of course, I was right in thinking I’d be long gone before anyone noticed).

Second, down in the basement we were very lightly supervised, so when I got bored, I could just wander off. What I’d do is grab an official-looking piece of paper (there were plenty of those down in filing branch) jump in our special, double-sized filing branch lift and go upstairs - light-headed with the freedom of it. I’d walk the floors of this approximately International Style office block (it was built in 1964), consulting my piece of paper, occasionally looking, with feigned curiosity, through doors into other people’s offices, waiting for lifts or actually leaving the building and doing a circuit through the car park and back to the front door. I’d do this until I was bored again, when I’d go back downstairs for a Blue Riband. This could easily consume 45 minutes or an hour of my day.

In all of this wandering, across the year or so that I worked at the Land Registry, I was challenged only once. It was the Area Manager. I didn’t even know we had an Area Manager so the whole thing was a bit of a shock. On being asked to account for myself as I day-dreamed along a sunlit corridor on the management floor, I blustered incoherently. He wasn’t happy. I think he’d intuited my scheme at a glance (I wonder if he’d seen it before - “oh look, another pimply work-dodger”). He walked me briskly back down to filing branch, while I sweated and tried to construct a justification for my absence. I don’t know what this Area Manager was saying to me as we descended. I’d blocked it out in my panic.

It was all fine, though. The ladies took me back in, and smoothly - as if they’d also intuited my scheme and had known what I was up to all along. My filing branch supervisor explained away my need to carry a piece of paper around the building. I practically cried. The Area Manager nodded, grunting with frustration, visibly gave up and then evaporated, backing into the double-sized lift, and that was the last I saw of him. I waited a few weeks before I wandered off again.

What brought this thoroughly unproductive, slightly ridiculous section of my life to mind was Darth Vader’s Area Manager vibe in The Empire Strikes Back. He’s supposed to be the Empire’s most terrifying entity, a fearsome knight, damaged beyond pity (and somehow endowed with extra Force not available to others), a warrior but also evidently no mug - a man smart enough to slink away from the Death Star before the rebels blew it up.

Vader’s current, post-Death Star ride is a vast spaceship imaginatively called the Executor2. The Death Star may be gone but the Empire is back on the front foot. We wonder was the destruction of its super-weapon actually an existential crisis for the Empire or did the rebels really just blow up a pointless, bloated boondoggle, somebody’s vanity project?3 Was the Imperial leadership secretly happy that this stupid, monolithic, over-budget piece of shit was atomised by the hippy retards of the rebellion.

It’s his flagship but we know that Vader's not actually the boss. He walks the decks with that awkward ‘I don’t actually work here but I could cause you pain’ authority. He drops in and throws his weight around. He’s the Area Manager. Near the beginning of this film he literally kills the ship’s commander - an Admiral with the perfectly Star Wars name Kendal Ozzel - for some tactical snafu (of course, the lore tells us that Ozzel is an over-promoted Imperial civil servant who deserved it anyway).

On the ship Vader can do what he wants. He cruises around looking purposeful but obviously not 100% across the layout. He’s allowed to use the double-sized service lift but you can tell he doesn’t really know how to, so someone has to show him. The coffee machine in the staff lounge is beyond him and, although the toilets are in the same place on every deck, he can never find the VIP bathroom.

In more recent Star Wars expressions - guerrilla war drama Andor, for instance - the Empire’s bureaucracy is fleshed out a bit. We learn more about its essentially colonial-extractive economics, we get some detail about policing (George Orwell the colonial police officer would have recognised these methods). At this point, though, two movies into the original sequence, Lucas’s Empire is still incomplete: a non-specific polity vaguely modelled on - what? Leopold’s Belgian Empire? Britain in India? Stalin’s Soviet Union? We know it’s brutal, arbitrary and acquisitive but we don’t get an org chart or a five-year plan.

Vader’s status is essentially that of colonial enforcer. He’s not in charge (that’s the Emperor obvs) and he may not even be on the management committee. Strategy’s not his thing and he’s certainly not a figurehead. He’s important but he’s not a world-historical figure, despite his status in a state that spans a galaxy. Space Hegel would not have swooned and called Vader ‘the world-spirit in a tie fighter’4. What Hegel thought he saw in Napoleon; his will to change everything, to overturn the old order and replace it with pure rationality, is not present here.

And this obviously makes Vader, well, uninteresting. The history of the galaxy does not pass through him, he will not be remembered as anything other than a brute. To the Emperor’s Stalin he is not Trotsky but Beria. I’m no expert but I assume this explains the whole Sith situation - setting up a parallel regime in the shadowy, immaterial realm of The Force - it’s an effort to give Vader a more consequential role - beyond workplace bullying and vaporising the natives.

Movies don’t need world-historical villains, of course. One-dimensional brutes are fine. But when a film aspires to importance, when we feel its creators are telling us something about the world - about power, dominion, class, family and so on - we need to believe that our villains have historical stature, even when they are not real. Kurtz, Lime, Corleone5: all convince us that they sit at a critical juncture or that they will alter the direction of the larger storyline.

It’s harder with science fiction, because there’s no historical context against which to set this villain and their villainy. But it’s not impossible. Bradbury, Herbert, Le Guin; Tarkovsky, Scott, Kubrick, all give us future villains who aspire to alter their timelines, leave a trace, beyond cruelty and domination. Operators who do more than enforce the plan.

You’re going to have to forgive me for being prissy about this big, trashy, treasured entertainment brand but this is ultimately the weakness of The Empire Strikes Back and of the whole Star Wars franchise: this dumb, unmotivated conflict. This Empire: a vast, galaxy-wide enterprise, presumably built across centuries and at unimaginable cost - to those building it and to those who came up against it - apparently cares only about domination. And its necessary antagonist, its antithesis, the rebels, only care about opposing it. Neither apparently owns a positive vision for their world or for their people6.

This happens every now and then. There’s probably a way to figure out why. But I should really just shut up and be grateful. But anyway, here you are (and if you’ve been here for ages, 👋). Welcome to my new subscribers, getting me a little closer to 1,000, a number that feels kind of important (and also, I read somewhere, would put GROSS somewhere in the top 10% of Substack newsletters, so there’s that too).

What you’ll get here is plain-language film reviews with political, cultural and economic context. It’s a history of Hollywood and of its ideologies - tracing the powerful ideas that formed and are formed by Hollywood (and some other parts of the cinematic world too) told through the biggest movies of all time. GROSS is a materialist critique of the immaterial joys of the movies (with gags).

GROSS begins in 1913 and will come right up to the present - I’ve got as far as the 1980s (The Empire Strikes Back is next). I began asking readers to support the project by paying for subscriptions when I got to The Godfather but some posts are still free and the whole archive is available at no charge - so you can dive in and read about more than 60 movies, from silent epics to the New Hollywood. Here’s a selection of six posts to give you a sense of what’s here.

(1913 is the year that the American film industry began to collate national rental data - the income produced by each movie during its life in the picture houses of the nation - and the world. It’s the origin of the term ‘gross’ and of the ‘top-grossing’ movie).

1913 - Traffic in Souls

An organised-crime drama with an ultra-modern remote surveillance storyline.

The first top-grossing film is a useful corrective to any romantic notions about the innocence or the simplicity of early cinema. Traffic in Souls is a sex-trafficking thriller with electronic surveillance, organised crime, money laundering and corrupt civic elites. It’s also a deeply ideological film: the villain is a progressive reformer, the hero is a cop, and the resolution is a police raid. Hollywood is already telling us who the good guys are. Film historian Neil Brand called it a one-off masterpiece and he’s right, but it’s a masterpiece with an agenda. Read the post and tell me what you think about this extraordinary early period of the movies in a comment.

1937 - Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Delerium in the forest.

The Frankfurt School was obsessed with Disney. I think I undestand why. Adorno argued that cartoons were conditioning audiences to accept their own exploitation. Benjamin was more ambivalent but still troubled. Snow White marks the end of the spiky, experimental early period and the arrival of something more controlled, more conservative, more corporate - a film so precious to its owners that they’ve spent decades rewriting intellectual property law around it. Beautiful and sinister in equal measure. Read the post and tell me what you think about the intensely odd main-line of Disney animation in a comment.

1939 - Gone with the Wind

Anti-hero as Promethean capitalist and geopolitical realist.

The most successful film in Hollywood history is more complicated than you think it is. Gone with the Wind is a four-hour apologia for the antebellum South - slavery aestheticised, the Confederacy romanticised - but it’s also a disquisition on the arrival of industrial modernity in the United States and the origin of the American capitalist. I focus on Rhett Butler because he’s the film’s most revealing creation: an operator who knows the whole thing is hollow - one of Hollywood’s most compelling characters and a globalist icon. Read the post and tell me what about the world’s most pragmatic capitalist here in the comments.

1944 - Going My Way

a Catholic hymn to capital from the city of labour.

Set in working-class New York - there were 40,000 factories and 500,000 manufacturing jobs on Manhattan island alone in the year of its release - and yet not a single worker appears in it. The labour has been systematically deleted. This essay is about what Hollywood does when it’s frightened: it makes a Bing Crosby priest film and calls it entertainment. Going My Way is a case study in how the studio system neutralised class politics at precisely the moment when American labour was at its most organised and confident. Read the post and tell me how you vibe with Bing’s holy everyman in a comment.

1959 - Ben-Hur

Stupid, cruel, stupidly cruel.

I used the subtitle “I can only apologise.” I have to watch these movies but, luckily, you don’t have to. By 1959 something has gone badly wrong with Hollywood. The creative energy of the early decades has curdled into bombast - 212 minutes of Charlton Heston in a toga, a chariot race, and a theology of personal redemption that conveniently has nothing to say about society, history or power. The Biblical epic is Hollywood conservatism in its purest form: spectacular, expensive, and ideologically empty. This is the nadir. Read the post and share your revulsion/joy with the mid-century epic form in a comment.

1972 - The Godfather

Turns out Hollywood is tragedy’s final home.

Some kind of peak for the newsletter - and, incidentally, the moment I chose to activate the paywall - so I had to write about The Godfather in three essays: Is The Godfather Shakespearean? Yes. Is it decadent? Obviously. Is it conservative? This is the uncomfortable one - and the most interesting question in the series. Coppola’s film arrives at the moment when New Hollywood is supposed to be tearing everything down, and yet it is a profoundly elegiac film, mourning a patriarchal order and finding it tragic rather than monstrous. It’s a masterpiece. It’s also, I argue, a deeply reactionary one. Read Is The Godfather Shakespearean? (a free read).

The whole archive is here - from 1913 to 1979’s Kramer vs. Kramer. Some new posts are now behind the paywall but everything listed above is free. Subscribe for half price here.

GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.

A post for everyone, intended to encourage you to subscribe (the May sale will get you a year of this stuff for half price!). God knows how a post about the history of divorce could possibly do that, though. I need to go on a marketing course or something. Part one, which is about the film, is here.

Privilege, scandal, spectacle. For most of history, divorce wasn’t a routine legal remedy but a big deal reserved for aristocrats and monarchs - an event so socially destabilising that ordinary people couldn’t possibly be allowed to get involved. In Britain before the 19th century you needed an actual Act of Parliament. Even for Kings and nobles it wasn’t something you did on a whim but it was at least an option - especially if there was some territory or treasure or a throne at stake. Everyone else was just trapped. In this era, marriage was less a personal relationship than a structure. Property, inheritance, legitimacy, social order and all that. If you were married and unhappy there was no question of ‘moving on’ because that would mean disrupting a system much larger than your shitty marriage. Sorry.

Bureaucracy. But then came industrial modernity and a brand new social class - the bourgoisie - with economic clout and feelings about happiness and fulfilment1. The Western nations now had big, restive urban populations and increasingly self-confident bourgoisies - people who couldn’t be told that if their marriage had fallen apart they’d just have to suck it up - for the rest of their lives. “Fuck that,” they’d say - these educated, economically independent folk - in polite Victorian terms. So governing elites adjusted, absorbed divorce into the administrative state, gave it a new status. In Britain there was the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, that moved divorce from Parliament into the civil courts. In America it was a more chaotic, state-by-state thing but the effect was the same and by the middle of the 20th century2 the idea that grown-up couples could separate just because they were unhappy was essentially universal. That’s the shift that made 1979 the peak year for divorce in all of American history - and made Kramer vs. Kramer possible. By this point divorce wasn’t an exceptional political drama any more, but a repeatable legal process. And once divorce became kind of procedural it was thinkable on a larger scale: something people had seen in their friendship groups and neighbourhoods - and it could be absorbed by pop media and the movies as a new social norm: a storyline.

A new kind of lawyer. I feel comfortable saying there are divorce lawyers everywhere (am I wrong? Is there a country on earth where you couldn’t find one?). And in the United States they’re a highly-developed, prestige sub-species and a very lucrative business (and there must be a thousand Hollywood movies in which a divorce lawyer has an important part). Once there was enough divorce to produce repeat business, plus growing technical expertise and standardised negotiation techniques, the business was bound to boom. Kramer vs. Kramer’s divorce lawyer Shaunessy is essentially the archetype. A pit-bull who will stop at nothing to secure a ‘win’ for his party3. This new type of lawyer is now part of the bureaucracy of marriage, an aspect of its democratisation. Once marriage is imagined as an institution that’s the same for everyone, divorce too had to become universal. It’s not liberation or freedom, exactly - more of a management efficiency in a simplified system.

Divorce in cinema. In the early decades of Hollywood, divorce was present but it wasn’t usually the subject matter of the movie. It was comic or scandalous or it stood for something else (like degeneracy or decadence or loss of innocence). As I said in the first Kramer vs. Kramer piece, divorce was the motor of many of the great screwball plots, producing social awkwardness, hilarity or darker cautionary tales.

In this period - the 1930s and 40s in particular - divorce was a kind of nicety of the plot - often taking place before the action begins, or just assumed to have happened - and setting things up for high jinks or for a romantic reunion. But as the 20th century progressed - especially after the second world war - divorce evolved from plot device to a new social norm, a condition of existence. Europeans like Bergman and Rosselini anatomised it, seriously4. Hollywood eventually domesticated it, not as a catastrophe for a family but often as a comic framing - even in kids’ movies5. By the time Kramer vs. Kramer arrives in 1979, divorce is no longer unmentionable but still painful enough to carry dramatic charge. It’s no longer a nasty ending but more of a system to be lived in.

Routine. So Ted and Joanna Kramer are fully of the new kind of divorced couple. They’re not aristocrats, libertines or outcasts: they’re bourgeois professionals passing through a newly normalised institutional machine. Kramer vs. Kramer doesn’t need to treat divorce as either scandal or liberation. In fact it’s obviously neither - everyone is miserable. Instead divorce is administrative modernity colliding with emotional fallibility. Lawyers, custody hearings, evaluations - the structures of a society in which intimate life has become legally negotiable. In Ted’s Madison Avenue day job, he sells the fantasy of the stable nuclear family but, in the movie, the courtroom emerges as the place where its failure is rationalised, written into a contract.

GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.

Part two, which is six paragraphs about the history of divorce and the movies, for you marital breakdown fans, is here.

I was 16 when Kramer vs. Kramer came out. I’d never known anyone get divorced. People we knew didn’t do that sort of thing. It was a decadent habit of the upper classes, celebrities, famous novelists and so on. Also people in Hollywood movies, obviously. Actually, I remember some neighbours of ours had divorced when I was little, in the late sixties. They were both exotics, though: long-haul flight attendants for a prestige airline: hyper-modern, borderless aliens - tall and good-looking. This couple’s lifestyle granted them additional freedoms not available to ordinary folks. So they didn’t count.

It obviously can’t be a coincidence that 1979 is the peak year for divorces in the USA1. I mean the absolute peak: never matched before or since. First-generation boomers feeling their freedom. Or possibly loser hippies feeling their epic self-centredness. From this distance it’s hard not to favour the latter explanation but there’s obviously a neatness to the 30-year gap2 between the absolute peak for marriages and this second peak - the peak in abandonment, giving up, walking out.

In Kramer vs. Kramer you can tell from the poster - and from the film’s legalistic name - that we’re in the post-liberation world, where divorce is not only possible but codified and available as a routine service, without judgement, from specialist providers. Attorneys like Shaunessy (Howard Duff) - who represents Ted Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) - and might even advertise for business as ‘divorce lawyers’ - essentially a branch of contract law that didn’t really exist before about 1969 - promising to ‘win’ cases in the combat zone of the court room.

Around here it was once only possible to secure a divorce via an act of Parliament, truly an elite pursuit (Britain is a protestant country now because a monarch wasn’t allowed to walk away from his marriage). In most of the Western world divorce had become available to some by the late 19th Century. The new urban bourgeoisie, living in new ways, in rows of nice houses, taking the train into town and riding the lift up to their office jobs, shopping and dining out: these moderns needed the freedom to move on, to escape from an abusive or charmless or boring marriage. They couldn’t tolerate the stasis of pre-industrial marriage as a life-long lock - and, more to the point, capital needed them to be free, mobile - unencumbered units of labour. Divorce in this period wasn’t easy: it was expensive and unfair and it required that one party was at fault - there’d be notoriety - but it was possible and in industrial societies it was added to the menu of life choices for free men and women.

The status and value of marriage itself continued to change under these pressures and in the decade that preceded the release of this film marriage was finally fully translated, almost everywhere, from sacrament or institution or instrument of control to ‘relationship’. This is the version of marriage described in Kramer vs. Kramer - a partnership freely entered into and just as easily exited from - on the whim of one party to the contract in the case of the Kramers.

There’s something grimly capricious about that party, Joanna (Meryl Streep), the party who ups and leaves. She caricatures the new language of the era. She’s a young woman who has somehow passed through the revolution of second-wave feminism and acquired only the most selfish of the available motivations, none of the lofty ones. It’s liberation but of the simplest ‘me’ generation kind. I’ve not read the best-selling 1977 novel3 (and you can’t make me) so I can’t tell you if this pretty basic misogyny comes through from the source or was overlaid in the movie. It’s dialed up when Joanna returns, to kick off the final act and to paradoxically assert the ancient, pre-political, pre-social, right of the mother to care for her child.

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GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.

Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.
- Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

The final 15 seconds of Grease are among the strangest in popular cinema - a kind of unfolding progress from the ordinary to the profoundly unreal, grafted onto the end of an otherwise pretty conventional musical.

Scrubbing back and forth through the sequence makes your head spin: a series of camera rotations takes us out, from a small-town high school playing field, high into the sky. So what looks at first like a whimsical, fairytale ending resolves - all of a sudden - into a kind of structured step-by-step withdrawal from the film’s social and visual world. By the very end we’re not just up in the sky above the town, we seem to have reached the edge of space. It’s a rush.

It was this delirious moment that brought the Benjamin quote1 at the top to mind. In the 1930s he’s writing about the way films must be made. He marvels, with the perspective of a curious spectator looking at something that is still new - that can still produce awe - at the way the filmmaker must crowd all of the people and equipment needed to get the shot into an area that is not visible to the audience, creating a startling image of the crew, sound equipment, lighting, makeup, props, catering; the whole behind-the-scenes operation of a movie, attached to the back of the camera.

Figuratively but necessarily this whole apparatus must move with the camera, swinging back and forth as it tracks and cranes and dollies around to capture the action. It’s a vivid, absurd image: the whole studio and everyone in it; the entire studio system and its industrial/cultural apparatus and everyone that works in it, clinging limpet-like to the rear of the camera, staying out of view of the audience: a preposterous appendage - like one of the impossible, uncanny inventions in a Studio Ghibli movie.

This 15-second sequence and its very deliberate, almost clunky progress (nothing elegant or sophisticated about this edit) away from its unspectacular high school setting and out into the unreal, brings to mind this illuminating and alienating idea of cinema as a complicated apparatus that must be kept just out of sight of the audience by the industrial contingencies of the form. What happens in front of the camera is hygienically evacuated of the apparatus of production but could not happen without it - without the chaotic assembly of elements immovably fixed to the other side of it. A stark dialectic.

Before the terminal sequence begins, before Sandy and Danny arrive for their big moment, we’re firmly on the ground, in the thick of a fired-up, sugar-rush fairground crowd. The whole cast is here and the Rydell High kids2 form a huge dance troupe for the big finale. I say ‘troupe’ but it’s really a kind of informally-choreographed meleé. Choreographer Patricia Birch was required to put many of the film’s routines together on the spot, on set, ad-hoc. We can see this: I’m no dance expert but there’s no Gene Kelly precision here (there’s a Gene Kelly in the credits but it’s not that one). It’s organised chaos, there’s a fair amount of flailing; trips and mis-steps, awkward movements, uncoordinated enthusiasm (maybe this is part of the film’s charm - it’s an amateur production).

00:00-00:02 - the car
The film rushes chaotically towards its profoundly odd resolution: Danny and Sandy arrive, in a car of course. It’s Kenickie’s hopped-up Ford, Greased Lightning (we’re never told how this precious car has apparently come into gang leader Danny’s possession - maybe he just took it. He’s the boss after all). The car approaches the camera, head on. The flailing, gyrating pastel-toned crowd parts to allow it through. It’s intense. The kids are hyped-up, reaching out to touch the shiny vehicle. It’s the Beatles rocked in their limo as they escape the hysterical crowd after a concert or it’s JFK cruising through Dallas, roof down, to his Ballardian auto-demise. Jaywalking is an offence in the United States: a famous ‘fuck you’ from Detroit, an assertion of the nation’s most iconic industry’s untouchable ownership of the streets. Here, though, the kids can’t help it - they stretch to press their hands on the kandy-flake spray job like keening mourners, like contestants in one of those ‘touch the truck’ competitions. It’s flesh meets metal, a literalisation of commodity fetishism. The car, of course, is the most lavishly overdetermined commodity of them all: deeply economic, aesthetic, emotional and political. Cars are often central in American movies: they’re not just A-B devices but also locations, weapons, symbols of wealth, transgression, status. Signifying escape but also conformity; excess but also poverty. It’s hard to imagine a more richly symbolic device in all of art.

While we’re here we should consider the car itself: it’s ridiculous. It’s been customised, because the Greasers - who are coded blue collar, unruly and approximately ethnic - belong nominally to the American subculture that reveres cars. American machinery like this 1948 Ford De Luxe Convertible, in particular. But this car wasn’t worked on by any actual hod rodders, not by the working class amateur mechanics who did that sort of thing in the 1950s and since. None of the details are right, it’s completely inauthentic, kind of silly in fact.

The sophisticated design culture of custom cars emerged in the USA, the absolute epicentre of the world car economy and of world car culture in this period, because cars were cheap, stamped out by unionised workers who could afford to buy what they built and modify it. In Europe and Asia in this period a car at the kerb outside your house was still a sign of affluence that would attract a crowd of kids and speculation from the neighbours3. In the USA the custom car was a 100% working class invention. The grammar of chopping, dropping, flaring; tuning, turbocharging and drag-racing emerged from the same economy that produced Hollywood itself. From the huge working population that wasn’t wealthy but had enough disposable income to go to the movies twice a week and buy Holley carburettors and Edelbrock intakes for the project out on the driveway4.

So Greased Lightning is not a hot rod. It’s, let’s face it, a fancy New York set decorator’s fully camp take on a hot rod, on a mid-American aesthetic that he didn’t fully understand (it’s got a transparent hood ffs). It doesn’t matter much - so much of Grease is sketchy and approximate - but the car’s bug-eyed headlamps, perched up on top of the front wings, are the dead giveaway. No self-respecting hot rodder would consider such a cartoonish excrescence. The challenge for Hollywood’s bi-coastal elite of truthfully depicting the lives of the workers who live in between is real, of course, and persists.

00:03-00:05 - the music

But the hot rod is just one element in this crowded frame. We don’t know this yet, of coure, but this is the last moment in which Danny and Sandy are fully within the communal space of their friends: the two gangs (the Greasers and the Pink Ladies) but also the teachers, waiters, coaches, jocks and nerds, parents, janitors and administrators. Grease has the conventional stylised sociality of a musical: the larger-than-life characters, the archetypes and comic stereotypes, the flat, uncomplicated interactions. The elements that put the form closer in its effect to epic theatre than to the vivid social realism that dominated the New Hollywood in this period. The musical is one of cinema’s oldest genres - essentially exactly as old as the technology that added sound (see The Jazz Singer and The Broadway Melody, blockbusters from the 1920s reviewed here) - and continues to be a source of innovation, despite constant challenges to its relevance and the unshakeable snobbery of various cultural elites.

Its peristence is a puzzle but it seems almost to validate Benjamin’s reading of cinema as an especially artificial form - the most artificial in the whole history of art, in fact - basically an industrial-era oddity that necessarily constantly spins out anomalous works that warp and deform the culture. Even Grease does this: innovating, if weakly, by linking the anodine teen movies of a previous era with the self-conscious transgression of the New Hollywood. It’s superficially bubblegum but we’re constantly surprised by themes and language with a harder edge - and many cringey references to sex. The film is a cousin to Saturday Night Fever (via Travolta and producer Robert Stigwood) so we probably shouldn’t be surprised that it carries forward some of that film’s more grown-up, urban tone and raunchy language.

00:06-00:07 - the departure

Wham, a 90-degree cut puts us back in front of the car, facing it directly again and this is where things get weird. The hysterical crowd, approaching a climax, has dropped out of frame. Danny and Sandy are moving towards us, smiling, relaxed, Sandy leaning in to Danny, in the way that only a full-width bench seat can permit5. The vehicle takes off, lifts off the ground steaply like an aeroplane, and they lose their composure. It’s a surprise and there’s an orgasmic vibe. It’s vertiginous, the momentary weightlessness of a fairground ride. Sandy and Danny obviously weren’t expecting this any more than we were but after that initial spasm, they’re calm, as if this kind of thing happens all the time, as if flight was in the plan all along. The spatial logic has shifted too: they’re not moving in and through a social environment any more, they’re moving away from the crowd and away from their on-the-ground lives and selves. It’s striking and feels - in these final seconds - like a different movie: the couple decisively leaving things behind, escaping. But why?

00:08-00:10 - the ascent

The next cut relocates the camera behind the car - a 180° rotation - and now we’re really climbing. The transition from horizontal to vertical movement occurs abruptly but it’s immediately stabilised: the camera (and the whole of Benjamin’s apparatus) is attached to the rear of the car - so we’re flying too. As the shot begins, Sandy turns and waves. It’s important and it’s one of those cinema gestures: it’s for the crowd on the ground and it’s for us. And this is the final reciprocal gesture in the sequence - the last moment in which the couple acknowledge the social setting they’re leaving behind. See ya!

00:11-00:13 - the crowd

Another reverse, and we’re looking back at the fairground and the happy crowd, also waving but now shrinking as we climb. The technical limitation here is the height of a crane. A helicopter (or in the present, a drone) would have provided additional grandeur but the camera has definitively aligned itself with the ascending car. The complicated, chaotic social field of the town and the high school is flattened, left behind. Grease is precipitously altering its own scale, re-arranging its reality in the final seconds of action. The structures of school, friendship, and social hierarchy that have governed the narrative fall away, somehow now irrelevant. The more I think about this the more obsessed I am with it. Grease is a movie that has an essentially static setting: the deterministic space-time of an American suburban community, but suddenly and at the last possible moment, bleeding directly into the credits - it flips the script, goes vertical and exfiltrates its two young heroes to location unknown.

I’m going to compare this unsettling magic realist conclusion to the darker twist at the end of 2024’s The Brutalist, in which, right at the end, in a starkly different context that’s outside the flow of the narrative, we’re given new information that alters our understanding of everything that precedes that final scene (wrote about this here). It’s not an unusual device - more common in literature, though, where the idea of the plot twist is as old as story - but I’m going to assert that it’s a genuine rarity in the teen musical genre.

00:14-00:15 - the clouds

The final edit removes the car entirely. The frame fills with slow-moving cloud, viewed from a very high altitude (I’m going to bet this is library footage or something left over from another project6). We’re flying, of course, in Greased Lightning. It’s not the DeLorean, it’s not Chitty Chitty Bang Bang but it could be the final scene of Blade Runner, where Deckard and Rachael head out, in his flying car, to an uncertain future. The two scenes are connected in the way they fail to resolve their stories and in the awkwardness of their relationship to what precedes them. Both feel grafted on, both depart from the tone and even the meaning of the texts they belong to. Both essentially undermine the films they end.

Everyone’s gone, there’s no human action. Nothing is happening: the camera turns slowly. The story has been paused, suspended. It just hangs there. This final location couldn’t be more different from what precedes it, couldn’t be less social - it’s such an odd place for a musical to end. The sequence (and the film) ends with an image of space emptied of social and narrative content all together. We’re left with questions, of course, as we file out of the cinema: will they marry? Will they set up home in town or move to be close to Sandy’s family in Australia? Will Danny stick to the straight-and-narrow? Will Sandy keep her new look? Have they been abducted by aliens? Are they aliens?

GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.

I’m simplifying the presentation here a bit, trying to reduce the labour involved in producing these pieces - so no forest of links at the top any more. Let me know if you actually like it when I link to the cast and IMDb etc., though. I might be persuaded to add the links back in.

I’ve really been struggling in the seventies. I mean this is the era of Star Wars asnd Rocky and now - two-thirds of the way through the decade that brought you, among other things, neoliberalism, Margaret Thatcher, the many indignities of Richard Nixon, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Abba - we have Grease. I’ve tried a number of approaches to this grim work of art. I considered, for instance, satirically treating it as if it were an adaptation of Wuthering Heights1.

You’ll see what I mean: the film’s greaser gang - the T-Birds - are the residents of Wuthering Heights, Danny (John Travolta) is Heathcliff. The Pink Ladies are the Thrushcroft Grange crowd. Sandy (Olivia Newton-John) is obviously Cathy, Rizzo (Stockard Channing) Isabella. See what I mean? I think I could have made this work. In fact I was having fun assigning members of the two gangs to the novel’s dramatis personae2.

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Beyond the cast I think I could plausibly have connected Brontë’s amorality with the stark cruelty of the Rydell High School community. When Rizzo’s period is late it’s obvious her life could now just unravel overnight (it’s the mid-fifties, abortion won’t be legal for another ten years) but everyone laughs or even mocks her dilemma, it’s Brontë bleak. Like when Heathcliff scorns his own sickly son and we’re left open-mouthed. And from the perspective of 2026, after the coming and going of woke - and the decade of thin, phoney ‘kindness’ in art and culture that we’ve been putting up with - both seem alien; fantastically, gothically nasty.

Actually, the fun part of this comparison would have been in the endings. At the end of Wuthering Heights we’re pretty sure that Brontë’s lovers are going to be reuinted after death. It doesn’t make any sense, but then what does up on the moors? Importantly, this is not spiritual: there’s no grace, no sacrament. It’s got nothing to do with faith. It’s essentially paranormal. Spooky. Wuthering Heights, of course, is a fully gothic work of art. We don’t for a minute think that these two weirdos are going to heaven or even, for that matter, to hell. Where they’re going is sacred to no one. And at the end of Grease, when Sandy and Danny literally drive away into the sky in the Ford (you’d forgotten that bit hadn’t you?), it’s the same. They’re going somewhere magical, somewhere beyond the ordinary life of Rydell High and their hateful small town. It’s unexpected, unexplained but it’s got nothing to do with transcendence. It’s magic realism.

In fairness it might also be a lazy resolution to a tortured and resistant text that honestly needed something. I mean a conventional, ground-based happy ending was obviously an option but, in the final scene of Grease you can almost feel the director (a man who, let’s face it, had already peaked, here in his first feature) grasping for something, anything really, that might lift the ending beyond the grinding nothing that is the rest of the movie.

THE STUDENT PRINCE IN OLD HEIDELBERG, director ERNST LUBITSCH; cast RAMON NOVARRO, NORMA SHEARER; production METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER, 1927, 105 MINUTES. Wikipedia, IMDb, Letterboxd.

The House of Windsor is in crisis - thanks to a prince who is no longer a prince - but the British monarchy has a Hollywood branch office. Will Harry’s House of Sussex seize the opportunity for a relaunch, perhaps a reverse takeover of the firm? Here’s a short piece about Ernst Lubitsch’s vast 1927 Hollywood interpretation of a European aristocratic fable, first published on my Letterboxd…

It’s an old story, a tale lifted from European tradition and given an epic treatment. An aristocratic kid becomes crown prince, he’s sent off to college to acquire some refinement but he falls in love with a commoner, then the old king dies and it’s time for the prince to step up and marry an aristocrat - someone chosen for him. The end. But it has the pace and wit of Hollywood in the 20s. It’s just before sound but the creative-industrial complex in Los Angeles is essentially all in place. It was shot on the largest lot in existence - in Culver City, which became a town in the Palatinate for the 108 days of the shoot: a cast of hundreds in German costume milling around for weeks. It cost a record-breaking $1.25M and the shoot took three times longer than for an ordinary film. All the Hollywood drama and extravagence is already present - a huge amount of footage shot in Heidelberg for realism was never used because it didn’t arrive in time (feel like I need a gag about the bandwith of an ocean liner vs a Dropbox transfer here).

We’re pre-code so the commoner - Norma Shearer as Kathi, a waitress at an inn frequented by Heidelberg’s famously dissolute student population - is allowed to be worldly. When she’s showing the prince his room at the inn she bounces on the bed to illustrate how comfy he’s going to be and it’s so suggestive. He blushes. Crown Prince Karl Heinrich is played by Ramon Novarro, a very modern star (he’d fit right into the Marvel universe). Until this point he’d mostly been playing Latin lover types so audiences might not have believed in his innocence in 1927, though.

The prince’s enabler in his coming of age is his tolerant old tutor, Dr. Jüttner (Jean Hersholt), required to travel with the prince and keep an eye on him. But he’s obviously a modernist: permissive and impatient with the up-tight aristocratic elite that he’s working for and that he knows the prince will have no choice but to rejoin soon enough (Jüttner’s obviously a socialist - there’ll be a Rosa Luxemberg pamphlet tucked into that dusty old book he’s reading - and he looks just like Walter Benjamin. I’m just saying). We’re in Germany at the absolute fin de siècle peak of intellectual and social experimentation. Heidelberg is a party town - but also a centre of humanism and scientific curiousity since the 14th Century. In the story it stands for liberal ideas, loose morals, free thinking. The tutor lets the boy have his fun and mix it up with the rowdy students (presumably taking on all sorts of radical ideas while he’s at it - although it does seem to be mostly about the beer).

The sad ending is a very Hollywood downbeat: an individualist resolution to a European fable about duty and tradition. In older versions of this tale it’s heartbreaking that the lovers are parted but ultimately it’s good news, a re-assertion of the correct authority: the prince’s adolescent adventure is over and he now assumes his glorious throne to the adulation of his people and all that. I suspect a contemporary remake wouldn’t permit any of this. The prince would be allowed to reject the slow-witted princess, chosen for him and shipped in from another kingdom, and the loving couple would elope in a battered old car and go into exile where they’d open a podcasting studio or something.

• I saw the movie at the BFI’s Film on Film festival. Kevin Brownlow, the movie historian who restored Abel Gance’s Napoléon, was present, there was so much love for the man. He gave a great introduction and told us that the allies had avoided bombing Heidelberg during WW2 because someone in authority had seen this movie - but I read that this is an urban myth :-(

• The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg is on YouTube.

GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.

STAR WARS, director GEORGE LUCAS; cast MARK HAMILL, HARRISON FORD, CARRIE FISHER, PETER CUSHING, ALEC GUINNESS; production TWENTIETH CENTURY-FOX, 1977, 121 MINUTES. Wikipedia, IMDb, Letterboxd.

Before you read this one, add these earlier sci-fi posts to your queue: the political economy of the Villeneuve Dune movies; Working in Space: Kubrick’s 2001 vs Bong’s Mickey 17 and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: a disquisition on underwater storytelling. And here’s part one and part two of the Star Wars series.

Star Wars, 1977’s top-grossing movie, landed after Vietnam, late in the era of détente and shuttle diplomacy and what looks from here like the weird hiatus of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Brezhnev, Giscard d’Estaing, Callaghan, Schmidt and that guy who succeeded Mao whose name you’ve forgotten (Hua Guofeng).

Star Wars. Era: anti-colonial struggle. Non-Aligned Movement, PLO as secular nationalists, some Western nations actually supportive of independence struggles (Wind of Change), optimism about independence in Africa, Che Guevara as worldwide icon, Nasser and pan-Arabism, Bolivarist revival…

In Star Wars - which is a throwback to the serials (and to the Mediaeval hero stories), in geopolitical terms we’re in approximately the mid-20th Century, at the end of the colonial era: so much hope, so many actual independence ceremonies (attended by apologetic Western premiers). Considered in this way the Rebellion is obviously an unproblematically good thing.

The fighters in the movie are universally saintly, self-sacrificing and plucky. They’re directly modelled on the acceptable freedom fighters of the period: their weapons are a generation or two behind the Empire’s, so they rely on improvisation, on the exaggerated courage of the oppressed and on something resembling belief (it’s a kind of secular restatement of faith called ‘the Force’ - a religion apparently emptied of church, sacrement and tradition). The only thing that’s missing is any kind of doctrine. Lucas explicitly excludes it. These rag-tag warriors are not evidently nationalists or communists or developmentalists. Just happy freedom-lovers with blasters: people with no apparent ideology fighting people with a one-dimensional ideology of domination1.

Star Trek. Era: rules-based order. The urgency of peace and ‘never again’, a profusion of treaties and agreements, the dawn of the NGO and the UN’s cosmopolitan elite of under-secretaries general, special representatives and consultants. Multinational governance, Security Council resolutions and peacekeeping forces…

Governance in science fiction is always weird and unresolved - I mean it’s always the whole planet, right? Never a nation or a collectivity smaller than that2. So all the pan-galactic bodies in the stories - the alliances and federations - are always vague agglomerations of planets and planetary systems3. In Star Trek the federation starship wanders the galaxy like a giant warp-speed NGO, shows up in a troubled region and makes a finger-wagging, ‘values-based’ intervention, all official-like. The crew of the Enterprise is empowered to make these interventions by a resolution passed in a vast horseshoe council chamber back in the galactic metropole decades or centuries earlier. Hostile, non-compliant, ‘rogue’ peoples who are not signatories (Borg, Romulan, Klingon…) may be vaporised but there’ll be some agonising and hand-wringing beforehand (and, of course, the whole thing is designed to shield absolute American hegemony from scrutiny).

Dark Forest. Era: post-liberal realism. States act exclusively in their own interests. International order overturned, ignored/disdained, rendered irrelevant. Weak polities crushed or marginalised. Reassertion of Mutually Assured Destruction as principle of great state stasis. Revival of legal asymetry: power over-rides legality. Rival hegemons manoeuvre.

Cixin Liu’s novel4 (it’s the second in a trilogy called, in the English translation, Remembrance of Earth’s Past) is an astonishingly bleak account of the universe (the whole universe) figured as an ultra-realist zone of conflict, in which power always ultimately prevails, not unlike our own small corner of the universe. In the Dark Forest universe, periods of peaceful coexistence are permitted but must always end - in violence, destruction and domination. In The Dark Forest, a principle is outlined that’s utterly chilling but would have Mearsheimer and the Realists nodding in approval. The principle is that any civilisation that makes itself visible to others, even for a second, will, out of the dark necessity of existence in this hyper-pragmatic universe, immediately be destroyed by any other civilisation powerful enough to do so. The only survival strategy, consequently, is to take extreme measures - up to and including altering the laws of physics - to conceal your existence - to hide - thus creating the impression of a bleak, unpopulated universe - a dark forest.

Of these three geopolitical scenarios, it’s obvious which is currently dominant, which will shape the coming decades for us all. And we know the dark forest hypothesis to be popular among the accelerationists and the AI advocates.

GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.

STAR WARS, director GEORGE LUCAS; cast MARK HAMILL, HARRISON FORD, CARRIE FISHER, PETER CUSHING, ALEC GUINNESS; production TWENTIETH CENTURY-FOX, 1977, 121 MINUTES. Wikipedia, IMDb, Letterboxd.

Read part one of this post. Allow me to talk about the internet for a bit. You’ll see where I’m going with this. Star Wars must be one of the most discussed works of art in human history. It’s hard to find an angle but, in watching 1977’s top-grossing movie the thing that jumped out at me was that this is a movie about a network…

We once thought the internet - which is now the only network but was once just one of the candidates - would liberate us. We were, of course, wrong. The things that we thought were emancipatory and democratic about it - its transparency, the absence of hierarchy and the way it eliminated distance - would ultimately make it easy for capital to assert control. To take it over and subsume it to its needs. The net, which for many of us in the early days seemed to represent a kind of perfected society - open, horizontal, democratic - turns out to have made our ownership by the corporations and the oligarchs easier and more complete. It’s evident now that it literally became the instrument of our control and domination and a neoliberal fever dream.

Network

Star Wars, by which I mean the original 1977 Star Wars, of course, the one we now know as Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, has a network, one that’s a lot like the internet and was, presumably, inspired by it1. It’s a simple, flat, legible network2. It connects people and devices and makes communication possible. It’s what would have been called a ‘dumb’ network, the naive network of the engineers and scientists. Not the malign network of the accelerationists and data harvesters. Not the hateful, impenetrable network of the dark enlightenment.

You’re a modern kid, you’ve lived through the last thirty years, If you watch Star Wars you’ll see the network. It’ll be obvious to you, in a way it probably wasn’t to us, seeing it for the first time, back then. Lucas’s fairytale takes place in a dense, highly-visible information grid: the kind of network - communication and instantaneous exchange of information - that we so take for granted in the present that each of us has two or three network nodes about our persons at all times (you’re reading this on one).

And all the action in Star Wars takes place in the network. The movie is obsessed with movement, transmission and circulation - in and through the network. It’s striking: from scene to scene - and essentially in every scene - messages are smuggled, bodies shuttle secrets across space; information is chased, lost, recovered and weaponised.

The hero with a thousand faces

In the standard Star Wars literature (of which there is a great deal), the film’s narrative energy is supposed to come from the antique ideology of the mythic hero that Lucas had absorbed from Joseph Campbell, or from the one-dimensional black-and-white tough guys of the space frontier he’d seen in the serials when he was a kid. But in fact it flows from the question of whether something - a droid, a plan, a person - can make it through a hostile system intact.

There are actually two distinct networks in Star Wars. I don’t want to get too nerdy here but this story is really a battle between network architectures. The Empire’s network operates through extreme centralisation: hub-and-spoke command, singular instruments of force and a very rigid hierarchy. Its ultimate expression, the Death Star, is not so much a weapon as a systems design error - a monumental, irreplaceable node whose destruction collapses the whole structure (it’s ridiculously vulnerable, let’s face it: the stupidest weapon in history).

The Rebellion’s network, by contrast, is what the geeks would now call a cellular mesh: loosely-coordinated, redundant and tolerant of loss. Authority exists, but it’s distributed; leadership is real but non-total. So victory, when it comes (a bit too easily really, as I said), comes not from moral superiority or toughness but from exploiting a structural vulnerability - a single point of failure in the Imperial network.

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GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.

STAR WARS, director GEORGE LUCAS; cast MARK HAMILL, HARRISON FORD, CARRIE FISHER, PETER CUSHING, ALEC GUINNESS; production TWENTIETH CENTURY-FOX, 1977, 121 MINUTES. Wikipedia, IMDb, Letterboxd.

I’m developing a response to the first (fourth) Star Wars movie - for part two of this post. I mean it’s hard: is there anything that hasn’t been said? I’m thinking something about the network - distributed and self-organising vs. centralised and monolithic. I might try and work in the anti-human Silicon Valley accelerationists here while I’m at it. What do you think? Can we read this Star Wars as belonging to a kind of edenic, pre-Internet Internet? Before capital, computation, and cybernetics fully converged and arrived at the inhuman conclusion we live with today?

It’s always a struggle to get started when you’re writing about a movie you don’t like much. And I don’t like this one much. In fact, I didn’t like it when it came out. I was 14 and obviously already considered myself to be a bit old for Star Wars (not too cool, though, definitely not too cool). I imagine it must have seemed too much like the various adventure serials I’d seen at the Saturday Morning Pictures over the years (I’m a lifetime member of the ABC Minors). I was frankly scornful. So were my friends. We weren’t film buffs or even very interested in cinema. We just thought Star Wars looked dumb. In fact I don’t know who was going to see this film, back then. Was it you?

David Thomson, in his big book of all the films, calls the 1977 Star Wars (the one we’ve learnt to call Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope) - “…the line in the sand, the disastrous event…” Ouch, right? In fact he wasn’t particularly dismissive of the movie, just kind of resigned to the permanent changes we would see it bring about in cinema. Movies, from here on, he said, would no longer be discrete, grown-up entertainments or works of art that we could all argue about - like novels - but baggy properties, shallow merchandising platforms (in economic terms, the Star Wars story is more about merchandise sales than about rentals and ticket sales). The era of the franchise had begun - from here on it’s all world-building. The dissection of the human soul will continue but only in the arthouse.

Pauline Kael, a famously inconsistent critic, in her New Yorker column, said:

There’s no breather in the picture, no lyricism; the only attempt at beauty is in the double sunset. It’s enjoyable on its own terms, but it’s exhausting, too: like taking a pack of kids to the circus. An hour into it, children say that they’re ready to see it all over again; that’s because it’s an assemblage of spare parts—it has no emotional grip.

She recognises the shift Star Wars represents too: that cinema’s infantile phase is here: “The excitement of those who call it the film of the year goes way past nostalgia to the feeling that now is the time to return to childhood.”

It’s over

Everyone who was alive to cinema in 1977 was in mourning from here on. Thomson and Kael and and all the others could see that the movies were about to take a wrong turn. The tragedy of the next fifty years of American cinema had begun.

• I’m exaggerating, of course, cinema (even Hollywood cinema) would keep us thinking and talking, even as it churned out Indiana Jones and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Take the last year: full of thoughtful movies - Bugonia, Eddington, Weapons, One Battle after Another. Can we think of these challenging movies as some kind of new New Hollywood, triggered by a new social crisis?

• I should say that many who saw Star Wars when it came out didn’t consider for a moment that it might represent the end of cinema or anything so grand and if you’d told them that such a clumsy, badly-told story could possibly do anything of the sort they’d just have laughed at you. Case in point: Terry Curtis Fox’s superb review in Film Comment, under the deathless headline Star Drek.

GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.

ROCKY; starring SYLVESTER STALLONE, TALIA SHIRE, BURT YOUNG, CARL WEATHERS, BURGESS MEREDITH; directed by JOHN G. AVILDSEN; written by SYLVESTER STALLONE; studio CHARTOFF-WINKLER PRODUCTIONS/UNITED ARTISTS; 119 minutes. WIKIPEDIA, IMDB, LETTERBOXD.

Here we go again - another movie I thought I knew, another leading man, another storyline I thought I had down. But no: another surprise, another wildly odd movie that somehow lodged itself in the popular consciousness and fooled us all.

It’s an anachronism

Rocky isn’t the movie you think it is. It’s not a gritty story of triumph over adversity set against post-war urban decay, ignorance and prejudice. It’s a time-travelling melodrama from another era. Rocky is a profoundly awkward creation that lands in the mid-seventies New Hollywood hothouse blinking innocently: an oddball throwback that unaccountably becomes a top-grossing movie right in the middle of the liberated 1970s. It took me a minute to pick up on this but this movie is so old-fashioned it feels like the producers voluntarily complied with the Hays Code, years after its rigid provisions had been dissolved and thrown out. I mean in this movie crime is actually punished; there’s no sex; there’s violence but it’s oddly childish (in one scene Rocky’s loanshark boss berates him for not breaking a deadbeat’s thumb). There isn’t even any swearing.

We’re seven or eight years into the New Hollywood regime. American cinema is supposed to be nervous, ambivalent, ironic, formally restless - sexy and violent. All the important films of the decade so far embody the paranoid style: harassed individuals against obscurely hostile systems, various kinds of defeat and disillusion: bitter creations like The Conversation, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, Nashville. Rocky arrives among them like a weird uncle - in his old-fahioned suit, speaking yesterday’s language, inadequately hip, apparently standing for some very simple and old-fashioned values that everyone now finds laughable.

So this movie sticks out like a sore thumb and would be pretty easy to dismiss on half a dozen counts. As a sports film, Rocky is gauche, silly, technically ridiculous. The boxing scenes are hilariously inauthentic: Stallone flailing in the ring like, well, an actor pretending. He throws punches with the loose, theatrical wind-up of a man who learned the sport from watching the highlights on TV rather than from being clobbered at the gym (have you ever seen Harpo Marx boxing?). It’s mesmerising, the whole thing seems to have been choreographed for amateur dramatics. But none of this seems to matter.

The story is pure postwar schmaltz - from the period when cinemagoing was at its absolute peak and the audience was ready to accept practically anything so long as it was reassuring and uplifting. A working-class nobody gets a shot at dignity through discipline and a big heart, a plot that had been recycled through American culture since before the Depression and had hardened into cliché by the time Eisenhower left office. By the 1970s it was supposed to be dead. But Stallone revives it with such naked sincerity it feels less like a cliché and more like folklore.

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The GROSS reviews are now mostly for paying supporters so I’m going to publish these occasional supplementary pieces for everyone. This one is part two of my Jaws review and starts with a bit more about Moby Dick…

The other Moby Dick movie

Jaws, as we now know, is an adaptation of Moby Dick. In fact it’s one of a very small number of movie adaptations of the novel and, as far as I can tell, there’s only ever been one that carries the name of the book. John Huston made his Moby Dick in 1956. As you’d of expect, it’s a big-hearted, rather direct kind of thing, full of passion for the subject matter. Huston, like Spielberg, doesn’t even try to take on Melville’s big themes, though, and this may be because Melville’s big themes are mostly, well, too big. Things like ‘eternity’, ‘infinity’, ‘damnation’ and so on. A filmmaker in their right mind wouldn’t even try. Huston’s big mistake, though, is in the casting. He shot the film in Wales and Ireland (and the seagoing scenes off Madeira) and, presumably for some very sensible commercial/contractual reason, cast only three Americans: Gregory Peck (let’s face it, an entirely inappropriate Ahab); Huston’s friend Orson Welles, who provides an oddball sermon in the harbour church and then is heard from no more and Richard Basehart, who brings an inappropriate heartthrob vibe to Ishmael.

In the wider cast, Huston has chosen for this movie a kind of repertory company of British theatrical actors; and these are not just any actors. Between them, they already have years at sea (or at least years in military service). And here’s the problem - that experience is largely in the British army and the British navy. Click around Wikipedia a bit. It’s kind of remarkable:

• James Robertson Justice as Captain Boomer - Royal Naval Reserve, fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, raced cars (quite a character!).

• Harry Andrews as Stubb - Royal Artillery and Liverpool Playhouse; ‘Ice Cold in Alex’.

• Bernard Miles as the Manxman - Pembroke College, Oxford and ‘In Which We Serve’.

• Noel Purcell as Ship’s Carpenter - Gaiety Theatre (probably shouldn’t be on this list, since he’s Irish).

• Mervyn Johns as Peleg - RADA, Royal Air Force and practically every British film of WW2, including ‘Went the Day Well’.

• Joseph Tomelty as Peter Coffin - another Irishman but he was in David Lean’s ‘The Sound Barrier’.

• Tom Clegg as Tashtego - Household Cavalry and professional boxer (and Oddbod in Carry on Screaming obvs).

• (and Friedrich von Ledebur as Queequeg who did serve but, to be honest - as a cavalryman in the Austro-Hungarian army - on the wrong side).

You can see the problem. Nothing about service in the British armed forces, especially in the Navy - the ‘senior service’, the world’s police force for centuries - could possibly fit you to life on a whaler. Especially not to life on Melville’s existential whaler.

The military demeanour of almost the whole cast of Huston’s Moby Dick is all wrong: so many straight backs; so much respect for chain-of-command; so much obvious Naval discipline. Squint a bit and you can see the officer cohort of the Pequod gathered, soaked to the skin, on the bridge of a North Atlantic destroyer, scanning the horizon for u-boats.

Walter Benjamin in Moscow 100, years ago this month

I read this in Daniel Mourenza’s Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film. The influential German philosopher and critic (a second-tier member of the Frankfurt School) travelled there to watch Battleship Potemkin, released in the previous year, for a review he’d been commissioned to write for Die Literarische Welt in Berlin. It’s a long story, but he wound up watching three important Soviet films, all in one session:

Benjamin spent five hours in a small screening room in the company of only a translator. The programme consisted of three films: Mother, Battleship Potemkin, and Yakov Protazanov’s detective comedy The Three Million Trial (1926). Benjamin was exhausted, leaving the room before the third film ended. The last film, a comic thriller based on a play by Italian author Umberto Notari, starred Igor Ilyinsky, an actor he had seen a few days prior, in a film he detested. Benjamin, in fact, had attempted to watch Battleship Potemkin weeks earlier, on 16 December. However, when he arrived in the room in which it was being screened, the film was entering the final act. Benjamin did not enjoy watching Potemkin for the second time. In his diary, he recorded that it had been ‘an exhausting, unpleasant day in every respect’, describing it as ‘quite a chore sitting through that many films in succession with no musical accompaniment.

I wonder if I should put on a shared screening of one of those movies - perhaps Mother, which I think I can obtain in decent quality - here on Substack on 24 January, which is the anniversary. What do you think? Would you watch with me?

The other New York socialist - a t-shirt

In non-movie news, I’ve come up with a t-shirt design that uses the original logo of WEVD, a New York radio station founded in 1927 that has the initials of socialist leader, three times US Presidential candidate and founder of the Wobblies, Eugene V. Debs in its callsign. On the front is the station’s 1942 logo and on the back a famous quote from Debs: “While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” The station was bought and sold many times and finally lost its call-sign and disappeared in 1989 (at Zazzle you can, of course, have the design printed on practically anything else, from a bucket hat to a mousemat to a cook’s apron). Also, the version on Redbubble is a bit cheaper but doesn’t have the quote on the back).

• Follow me on Letterboxd.

• More GROSS merch!

GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.

JAWS; starring ROY SCHEIDER, ROBERT SHAW, RICHARD DREYFUSS, LORRAINE GRAY, MURRAY HAMILTON; directed by STEVEN SPIELBERG; written by PETER BENCHLEY, CARL GOTTLIEB; studio ZANUCK/BROWN COMPANY/UNIVERSAL PICTURES; 124 minutes. Wikipedia, IMDB, Letterboxd.

In part two of this post, available to everyone, I pick up this film’s connection with John Huston’s 1956 Moby Dick. Spielberg’s ending is essentially a shot-by-shot remake of Huston’s movie.

53 minutes into Jaws we encounter the masses. Director Steven Spielberg does something jarring, something that feels out-of-character for this 27 year-old cinéaste-wunderkind. He swings the camera around, away from the tightly-composed, two-, three- and four-person scenes of the first act - small groups of actors acting - and suddenly we meet thousands of strangers, non-performers. People in sunhats and sandals, families, pensioners, a nun - moving purposefully, stopping to chat, milling around - but without the filmmaker’s direction. Holidaymakers are arriving on Amity Island for the first big weekend of the Summer so Spielberg has set up his camera in the real world, in the harbour at Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard, to capture some realistic scenes for his shark movie.

It’s not critical to the story, of course - it’s classic b-roll, the stuff you’d send an assistant director to shoot - but here it’s a big moment - a pivot. And a momentary victory for the real, the spontaneous and the parochial over the imagined, the deliberate and the weird placelessness of the movies. It’s jarring because there’s a conscious switch from the conventional, enclosed mode of address that we know from this kind of scripted cinema to a bigger, more unruly verité style. A tiny slug of documentary filmmaking has been dropped into Mr Spielberg’s artful confection. It’s like somebody pasted in some footage from a Frederick Wiseman doc that would be called ‘The Island’ or ‘Holiday’ or something.

Of course, Spielberg didn’t send an AD to shoot the footage. He’s a pro, he did it himself, so it’s artfully done. People move in and across the frame, there are close-to-camera, out-of-focus figures, set against mid-shot family groups and, beyond them, the mass of the incomers, undifferentiated, filling the decks of the ferry and the roads out of the harbour. It’s actually kind of delirious, a quite joyful 90-second holiday from the structured stuff. If I was teaching film I might use this scene to illustrate something about narrative versus documentary form.

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DIE HARD, director JOHN McTIERNAN, screenplay JEB STUART and STEVEN E. De SOUZA, cast BRUCE WILLIS, ALAN RICKMAN, ALEXANDER GODUNOV, BONNIE BEDELIA, REGINALD VELJOHNSON, production GORDON COMPANY/SILVER PICTURES/20th CENTURY FOX, 1988, 132 MINUTES.

When I first published this Die Hard Alphabet (clearly labelled as ‘incomplete’ mind you) there were some complaints because my A-Z seemed to contain only about half the letters. So, for the season that’s in it, here at the end of 2025, I’ve put in the effort, revised the post and added in all the missing letters. There follows over three thousand words and a complete 26-letter alphabet. Free subscribers will get A-M and those of you who support the project will get the whole alphabet. We’ll start with A for…

Assholes. Despicable individuals aren’t necessarily villains. Sometimes they’re thoroughly entertaining. And sometimes they’re just waiting for their fate, set up for a grizzly end. Die Hard has a profusion of assholes - there’s at least one in every level of the police response, one spectacular example in the on-site broadcast media and two or three amongst the violent criminals. The movie’s primary asshole, though, is Harry Ellis (Hart Bochner), the insufferable Nakatomi sales guy who digs his own grave by trying to sell our hero John McClane (Bruce Willis) to the murderous gang. McClane almost gleefully punches Richard Thornburg (William Atherton), the shitty TV reporter, at the end of the movie but if he hadn’t already been shot in the head it would have been Ellis.

Bonds. This is the nub of the operation. Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), the movie’s villain, is after the big stack of bearer bonds in the Nakatomi vault. Wise choice. Bearer bonds are the bitcoin of their day: a security that could be held anonymously and swapped for cash, no questions asked. The last one was issued in the USA in 1982, though, so you might wonder why they’d still be of interest to a gang of Euro-criminals in 1988, but two years after that, a City of London courier was mugged and his briefcase containing £291M of bearer bonds stolen. That’s more than half the value of the Nakatomi heist in a single briefcase, no explosives or guided missiles necessary - the biggest single robbery in modern British history. Issuers were still obliged to redeem these older bonds and they continued to circulate but in 2010 even that stopped. What’s not clear is why a company like Nakatomi Industries - apparently in the global infrastructure business - would need to hold so many anonymous, untraceable paper assets. Fishy, right?

Christmas. Of course it’s a Christmas film. It takes place on Christmas Eve. There’s no virgin birth but there’s a Christ figure; wronged and ultimately redeemed. And he’s God-like, looking down on the events in the tower and in the city around it, laconically dispensing wisdom over his walkie-talkie, protected by his anonymity, until he is revealed and punished - forced to walk barefoot across broken glass, martyred.

Drugs. In Los Angeles at the time the movie is being made, Chief Gates and his hyped-up, showbiz LAPD are in the midst of a huge and divisive gang crackdown aimed at stifling the drug trade in the city. Gates and his proxies have dialed up the hysteria, calling the streets of LA ‘Vietnam’ and comparing the gangs to the ‘murderous militias of Beirut’. Gates is the prototype for subsequent vain and self-serving police chiefs. He turns mass raids into grim TV moments - bringing Nancy Reagan down to watch one. It’s not fancy powdered cocaine they’re trying to suppress, though, it’s the crack variant, prevalent in poorer and black communities. Here in the towers of Century City cocaine use continues. It’s the 1980s. It’s the elite drug of choice - and very popular in the movie business: this may explain the profusion of cocaine movies from the period (and plenty more recent movies that look back on the period nostalgically). I think I count four scenes featuring coke in this film. The cocaine is a convenient shorthand for glamour and hedonism but also for decadence, immorality and vapidity. Gruber’s gang, conspicuously, aren’t using.

Efficiency. Our villain, like a lot of leaders in the movies, is a student of scientific management. What Gruber has assembled, for his mega-heist, is a well-capitalised ad-hoc firm, optimised for a single project and with a rigid division of labour (the explosives guy, the computer guy, the heavies…). What he’s up against, though, is an individual: a freelancer from another era, a cowboy who instinctively understands that he can overcome his preening, optimised foe by bringing the chaos (see also M for Management below).

Fox. Nakatomi Plaza in the exterior shots is actually 20th Century Fox’s brand new Century City headquarters, finished in the previous year on the corner of the studio’s lot. Studios and producers love this kind of in-joke: part of the real-world segment of the Barbie movie is set in Century City and Mattel’s headquarters is moved from El Segundo in the story. By the time of Die Hard all the important Fox properties already belong to News Corp. Your favourite Christmas movie is a Rupert Murdoch production.

Godunov. The cast of Die Hard is full of bold choices, barely tested wannabes. It’s Alan Rickman’s first studio job, Bruce Willis has had one big TV role (he plays a wise-cracking playboy private detective - an unpromising origin for an action hero who walks on broken glass) but this is his first major movie. Most of the criminal gang are here for their height rather than their acting abilities, but one of them is already a star in another business. Karl, Gruber’s second-in-command, is played by Alexander Godunov who looks like a ballet dancer and is, in fact, literally a ballet dancer. And no ordinary ballet dancer. Before his defection from the Soviet Union in 1979 he’d been principal dancer at the Bolshoi Ballet and was an Honored Artist of the RSFSR. He and Baryshnikov were contemporaries and friends. He died a thoroughly Hollywood death before he was forty, though.

Hostages. This is the era of taking hostages. The preferred action of liberation armies and revolutionaries before 9/11, a period that now seems somehow quite innocent. Planes, trains, cruise ships; heirs and heiresses, politicians, church emissaries. All were targets. At its peak hardly a week passed without a plane being hijacked and flown to Cuba or Yemen or wherever. Late eighties audiences would have been quite comfortable with the idea of a mass hostage-taking - a routine device in the politics of the subaltern and the outsider with a grievance.

Improvisation. It’s not strength or dumb courage that secures victory for McClane in the tower. It’s adaptability, a willingness to act in the moment and to improvise. He’s not the first implausibly resourceful action hero - working outside the system, making good use of what he finds - but McClane, cut off from back-up and unable to trust anyone, became the prototype for a whole category.

Jurisdiction. Who’s in charge? Who has authority? Here we have at least four competing candidates: the hyper-organised criminals; incompetent, bureaucratic law enforcement; the ineffectual paternalist capitalism of the Nakatomi Corporation and the insurrectionist improviser who humiliates them all (see also M for Management)

Knowledge. One of Gruber’s flaws is that he’s an intellectual. He claims to have had a classical education. He probably got it at the Free University of Berlin, centre of student radicalism in the sixties and seventies. We know he was active in the fictional Volksfrei Movement (an analogue for the very real and very prolific armed group the Red Army Faction) but suspect that along the way he probably acquired his high-end managerial and finance skills as a post-grad in Mannheim or Cologne - with the rest of the German business and administrative elite. Lieutenant McClane got his education on the streets in small-town New Jersey and on the job in New York City. This is essentially the standard Hollywood clash of epistemologies. In the movies street knowledge always beats book knowledge.

Location. Early on we learn that Nakatomi Plaza is in Century City, a real district marketed by its developers as an alternative to LA’s historic downtown. Ownership of the land under Nakatomi Plaza went from Tom Mix, Western movie star who had a ranch there in the 1920s, via Walt Disney and 20th Century Fox and then to aluminium conglomerate Alcoa. They bought the land in the 1960s and began the (real) speculative redevelopment that made (fictional) Nakatomi Plaza possible. The politics of Century City is as complicated and brutal as you’d expect in LA. The story has all the opportunism and cynicism of Chinatown’s grim water war. Mike Davis covers Century City and the expansion of LA in his definitive book about the city’s politics City of Quartz.

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GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.

THE TOWERING INFERNO; STEVE McQUEEN, PAUL NEWMAN, WILLIAM HOLDEN, FAYE DUNAWAY, FRED ASTAIRE, SUSAN BLAKELY, RICHARD CHAMBERLAIN, JENNIFER JONES, O. J. SIMPSON, ROBERT VAUGHN, ROBERT WAGNER, directed by JOHN GUILLERMIN/IRWIN ALLEN; written by STERLING SILLIPHANT; studio 20th CENTURY-FOX/WARNER BROS.; 165 minutes. Wikipedia, IMDB, Letterboxd.

“...the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished.
But the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire…”
— 2 Peter 3:6–7

The Towering Inferno is a bore, a witless mechanical megaproject. There are videos of producer and ‘Master of Disaster’ Irwin Allen at work on the movie. He’s driving onto the 20th-Century-Fox lot in his Rolls, issuing orders for his secretary into the carphone (it’s comic because he’s presumably going to see her in about five minutes).

Allen was producer but obviously also a classic studio control freak so he directed all of the film’s spectacular action scenes, leaving only the grimly soap-operatic dialogue to nominal director John Guillermin.

Allen’s no Scorsese but we learn that he was a competent manager. In one of the clips Robert Wagner, who plays the building’s corrupt PR man, dispatched early in the conflagration, says “I’ve never worked with anyone who was more prepared.” High praise.

And the movie does feel more like an organisational challenge than an adventure. In one clip from the making-of doc Allen is seen working at a huge, multi-panel whiteboard. He was obviously a scientific management guy. His business book would have been called ‘Keeping it tight: directing movies the Irwin Allen way’.

The Towering Inferno grinds through its oddly-paced sequence of sexy encounters and awful deaths. At one point Susan (Faye Dunaway) shows Doug (Paul Newman) the divan bed she’s had installed in his office while he was out of town. He smirks (Wagner’s PR guy also seems to have a bed in his office). But then we arrive at the movie’s final scene, which takes an unexpected Biblical turn.

The firey deaths continue (Pauline Kael said “each scene of a person horribly in flames is presented as a feat for our delectation”) but the tower’s de-luxe 135th floor Promenade Room becomes a kind of sealed-off, allegorical tableau. What we assume is essentially the whole social elite of San Francisco, present for the building’s dedication ceremony - plus catering staff and the band - is trapped there. To sharpen the symbolism, it’s just the men - all the women have already been evacuated (or thrown to their deaths in the chaos).

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Napoléon, Abel Gance’s vast 1927 historical epic

Originally intended to be the first in a cycle - a plan killed off, let’s face it, by the arrival of sound - it covers only the beginning of Napoléon’s world-historical career: by end of this five-hour movie (you can watch Kevin’s Brownlow’s beautiful 1981 reconstruction on Amazon Prime and there’s a Blu-Ray) he’s barely reached Italy and has just been appointed General.

The first two designs use stills from the mind-blowing three-screen sequence at the end of the movie. The third one features the film’s terrifying and always noble Robespierre, played by Edmond Van Daële, in his signature shades (it looks pretty cool on a coffee mug). You can get all the designs on t-shirts, mugs, stickers and dozens of other products via Redbubble (they manufacture and ship worldwide and seem to be pretty good value).

Napoléon, variant one

Napoléon, variant two

It’s Robespierre!

Meshes of the Afternoon, Maya Deren

I’m pretty sure that if she’d lived, American avant-garde archetype Maya Deren would have directed a whole sequence of brilliant screwball comedies for Warner Brothers and then gone on to found a studio and invent a category of blockbuster movies, like Steven Spielberg or someone. But she died at 44. This design, using the key motif from her best-known film Meshes of the Afternoon, is available printed on, well, practically everything. I included Deren’s collected writings in my post about the movie books I rely on.

The Marx Brothers, Duck Soup, 1933

Groucho, as Rufus T. Firefly, is appointed President of Freedonia (a small nation on the model of Ruritania). The fantasy here is that, when he was in the United States, Firefly would spend his time at the Freedonian consulate in Los Angeles, his favourite, located under the hat at the Brown Derby. I think the design works best on a coffee mug but you can get it on dozens of other items, natch!

In which I try to connect the everday evangelism of a 1970s small-town priest with the will to power of present-day elite Catholics via 1973’s top-grossing Hollywood movie.

GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.

THE EXORCIST, director WILLIAM FRIEDKIN; cast ELLEN BURSTYN, MAX VON SYDOW, LEE J. COBB, LINDA BLAIR; production WARNER BROTHERS, 1980, 122 MINUTES. Wikipedia, IMDb, Letterboxd.

The Exorcist isn’t a horror movie, it’s a strident Catholic evangelical text. A combative sales job for Catholicism from a moment when the faith was terribly fragile and uncertain of itself. Pauline Kael, who hated the film, said it was “the biggest recruiting sergeant for the Catholic Church” since Bing Crosby’s dog-collar pictures (I’ve written about one of those here: Going My Way: a hymn to capital in the city of labour). The film’s muscular priests send the demon packing and heroic Father Karras (Jason Miller), a modern priest who initially doubts the reality of possession, ultimately sacrifices his own life in saving Regan’s (Linda Blair), as a good priest should.

When The Exorcist was released I was ten. My parents weren’t believers but they were from Irish Catholic backgrounds and, consequently, they were never going to be allowed to fully escape the church. Using some kind of baptismal radar the priest from the local church located this nominally Catholic family and, one evening, just showed up on the doorstep wondering why he’d never seen us at St Joseph’s.

This priest became a regular guest. He’d come by on a Friday evening and drink Jamesons and eat my mother’s ham sandwiches for the rest of the night, all the while arguing - loudly but with good humour - with my dad about his atheism.

It wasn’t what you’d call Socratic. I mean my dad hated religion and this priest was a conventional clergyman with not a radical or unorthodox view in his head. But he loved to argue with my dad. He’d pitch God’s love for us all, Christ’s sacrifice and so on. Dad would stick to his approximately Dawkins-level disdain for the irrationality of faith and his suspicion of the church as a backward and corrupt institution.

What I understand now is that our priest must have known there’d be no movement in the old man’s position but he evidently thought there was something worthwhile in the dispute itself, in the honest labour of trying to convert the unconvertible. He was doing his job, fighting the good fight, one non-believer at a time.

The Exorcist’s priests are in the same game. They’re acting on their obligation to save souls, doing their sacrificial duty. One of them actually dies in the saving but this is essentially routine work for a Catholic priest: the most basic gift of the priest to his flock.

The movie was released less than ten years after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council - Vatican II - the multi-year colloquium that was meant to update and future-proof the Church. In the early seventies the Catholic Church is still basically quivering with nerves about its new identity - as a modern, liberalising institution that had just dropped the bulk of its medieval bullshit.

My dad was anti-faith but he was also, as many people radicalised by Communists in the thirties and forties were, anti-clerical. He had a common-sense argument: the priests did the work required of them by the owner class, keeping the working people down, but it was more complicated than that. The Catholic establishment was in the middle of a kind of strategic withdrawal. The Second Vatican Council (1962–65) had redefined Catholicism’s posture toward the modern world.

The old Catholic church claimed jurisdiction over everything - the state, education, sex, art, thought and action. But Vatican II’s reformers wanted dialogue, freedom of conscience, an accommodation with secular democracy. Dignitatis Humanae - one of the 16 declarations of the council - declared that the state mustn’t coerce belief - it should be arrived at by choice, like buying a car or something. Gaudium et Spes - one of the other declarations - suggested the Church might learn from the modern world as well as just preach at it. It was a kind of peace treaty with the liberal hegemony.

To the traditionalists this treaty looked a lot like a surrender, though. Within a decade, they’d claim, the results were obvious: empty seminaries, abandoned convents, folk singers at mass, priests wandering the streets without their dog collars, the collapse of clerical prestige. The Church that had once disciplined kings was now struggling to discipline its own bishops.

It was into this context that The Exorcist, a film about Catholic sacrifice - incidentally made by an agnostic Jew whose most recent film was a thoroughly sacrilegious crime thriller, was released. In the story this ancient belief stuff collides fully with the thoroughly material business of being a movie star and of making a movie - Regan’s mother is a hard-bitten professional, her conversations in the sub-plot about the practicalities of shooting and the stresses of divorce set off the antic business of possession going on upstairs in the girl’s room, where the literal devil is present, are the engine of the thing, its source of tension.

(If you don’t already subscribe, I’d love it if you’d support my project to retell the history of Hollywood in materialist terms by joining as a paid subscriber)

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