Criticizing Criticism Series — Cable TV Edition
They Are Coming For TCM — I Have No Desire to Speak For It
On Mayim Bialik’s first day guest hosting Jeopardy, the Final Jeopardy category was THE BUSINESS OF TELEVISION: “The day it debuted in 1980, this network with an Italian name aired a Carnegie Hall celebration of Aaron Copland’s birthday.” I had a grim satisfaction in knowing the correct response: “What is Bravo?” I admired Bialik’s delivery as she revealed that it “began as an arts-oriented channel, and now it runs a lot of reality shows.” I’m pretty sure most people younger than me would have been surprised to know it ever started out showing arts.
One of the sad parts of Peak TV is that over the course of time many networks that you worship end up — devolving, to put it mildly. I’m sure any cable viewer could give countless examples of this, but I’m going to give two pertinent ones that have hurt the most.
I ended up learning about independent films as an idea and industry through IFC, which when it began in 1996 specialized in independent films. That’s how I ended up first seeing such classics as My Own Private Idaho and The Last Broadcast and such more complicated and controversial movies as Boxing Helena and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. That’s where I first became acquainted with the Independent Spirit awards, heard the triumphant acceptance speeches of Ally Sheedy and Hilary Swank, heard Michael Moore give a more civilized protest speech than he did at the Oscars, and became aware of the brilliant talents of Sarah Silverman and Aubrey Plaza as awards shows hosts.
Now the most independent thing one finds on IFC is Parks & Rec reruns. They didn’t even broadcast the spirits on their network this year.
The Sundance Channel was founded in 2002 with a similar mission statement. It was here I had by first interaction with Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg and saw some truly brilliant foreign films that not even IFC showed. They also did some truly brilliant original programming: two seasons of Inside the Writer’s Room, which gave us a glimpse at such Peak TV gems as Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones and House of Cards, and the incredible original series Rectify a slow-burning classic that stands with some of the best cable dramas of the decade. You might still find some great films occasionally on Sundance — they’ll show Sergio Leone westerns and quite a few modern classics — but these days they’re far more well known for being yet another home for Law and Order reruns on their schedule two days a week.
The devolution of these channels over the last few years has been a huge blow to my creative soul, nearly as great as that Nick at Nite now consider Friends classic TV. So you’d think that the recent news that the new head of Turner Classic Movies has recently fired many of the key archivists and executives that have made this channel one of the critical sources for movies and our Hollywood heritage would be a blow to harsh to bear. Yet I can’t work up any outrage or even feel indifference to as a business. Instead, I look upon this as yet another example of so many in my field’s selective outrage.
Given the state of Hollywood today, you’d think they’d be more upset that a network that was once devoted solely to independent films now devoted entire nights to Two and A Half Men. Or that Sundance TV, which for many years was one of the few places to find recent foreign films, now devotes its late nights to Colombo and its mornings to Andy Griffith. Or that Bravo, which spent decades devoted to art house films like Room With A View, limited series like Pennies From Heaven or classic TV shows like Hill Street Blues and Twin Peaks is now essentially the home of Real Housewives of Orange County. But they barely raised an eyebrow when it happened; have never said anything about it. But now that their particular ox is being gored, it’s the end of civilization. Where will be find the brilliant movies of yesteryear without TCM, they cry? There are actually several places that have been around before this culling, but before I get there, since no one looks at papers to see what’s on anymore, let me share with you what will be playing on TCM for the next 24 hours.
At the moment, the network is in the midst of a marathon celebrating the career of Stewart Granger that will ‘climax’ with King Solomon’s Mines. We then get a string of movies commemorating Katherine Hepburn, the most famous of which is the 1933 version of Little Women. Then comes Charlie Chaplin’s final film: A King in New York, The Naked City, Soylent Green and Grey Gardens. However between them you get such movies as The House on 56TH Street, the film adaptation of Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue (far from his best play) and the 1972 Barbara Streisand movie Up the Sandbox. Later that night, you get Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?… followed by Zee & Co, an Elizabeth Taylor/Michael Caine vehicle and The Big Cube, a movie whose summary involve Lana Turner being slipped LSD so that her family can collect their inheritance faster.
Now I have a fairly deluxe cable package. Here are some of the movies that will be playing over the next twenty-four hours: Alien, Fatal Attraction, Bridge of Spies, The Big Lebowski, Walk the Line, 500 Days of Summer. Brian DePalma’s Carrie, City of God, a movie of Brazilian Underworld that Roger Ebert considered a masterpiece (Fernando Alleles got a Best Director nomination for it) Courage Under Fire and Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women. Not a bad selection and that’s without including Sean Penn’s The Pledge which Ebert also considered one of the greatest film ever made. I saw much of it last night and do think it features one of Jack Nicholson greatest performance.
Now to be sure I’m being slightly unfair to TCM and slightly generous to my cable package at the same time. This weekend on TCM you will be able to see among others, East of Eden, Mr. Roberts, The Palm Beach Story , On the Waterfront and Vertigo. And it’s not like there aren’t some truly horrible films playing around cable even around this: Fifty Shades of Gray, the horrible Robin Williams vehicle Toys and one of cable channels seems to be in the midst of an eternal Friday the 13th marathon. But the larger point is true: not all of TCM’s movies are masterpieces anymore than all of the other networks on the rest of your cable packages are all trash. This has been the case as long as it has been an existence. So why are so many people outraged at the diminishment of a network that shows us as many Andy Hardy and old trailers as it does Sweet Smell of Success and A Face in the Crowd? The answer, unfortunately, speaks to the prejudices of so many film critics and filmmakers — and it’s that what defines a classic.
As long as I’ve been watching TCM — and to be clear, I do so far less than most fans of the network — their major focus has been extensively on much of the period from the silent movies to the 1970s. Movies from the 1980s are rare, movies from the 1990s and later almost non-existent. They are perpetuators of the myth of nostalgia, the idea that all movies were much better back when they were all in black and white, when the studios ran things, before television became a major factor in life — before channels like TCM were allowed to exist. A lot of the space between films is devoted to movie stars of a certain age discussing how much they were influenced and admired stars and directors that were around they were younger. And in case, you haven’t already guessed, most of the people treasure are white males.
The nostalgia machine is one that will never go out, but it’s worth noting that for a network such as TCM, one wonders whether they have any interest in expanding their markets or just the kind of narrative they are pitching with their classics. How many times have they shown marathons of Charlie Chan or Tarzan movies? How many John Ford westerns have they shown without commenting of the attitude towards the Native Americans frequently being slaughter? How many times did they rebroadcast Breakfast at Tiffany’s without thinking how Mickey Rooney’s work might look to audiences in 2010 or 2000? And don’t get me started on Gone With The Wind, a movie that basically celebrates every aspect of slavery but has its central character a woman who lives her entire live stalking another woman’s husbands, but who the movie basically tells us has her greatest sexual experience after her husband rapes her?
TCM has always equated ‘classic’ with ‘old’, something that sadly most of my fellow critics seem to universally argue for without question. Roger Ebert, it’s worth noting, never thought that way. Which is why in his first Great Movies book in 2002, he included the fairly recent Silence of the Lambs, Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, and Fargo along with City Lights, The General and Dracula. He continued that belief until his final book: amongst the classic he ranks in his fourth volume are The 25th Hours, Seven, The Pledge…and The Big Lebowski.
A great film does not have to be in black and white or have subtitles to be a classic: if you still believe that my next witnesses are Ed Wood and Lars Von Trier. The myth that TCM has perpetuated for more than a quarter of a century was that movies were better before. It’s worth noting that as times have changed in the last few years, its become clear that TCM can’t keep perpetuating this myth. The ways they’ve done so, however, have been incredibly ham-handed. Do The Right Thing made its debut on TCM to celebrate Juneteenth. Glad to know you finally acknowledged after thirty years what Roger Ebert knew immediately. They also did a documentary series called Women Make Film a series of hour-long specials narrated by Tilda Swinton showing excerpts from every movies that ever had a female director. I saw three of those episodes: they play like something a film student working on his senior thesis would put together at the last minute. They are incomprehensible, with no real context. IFC did far more interesting documentaries about this same subject nearly a decade ago.
In a remark made in order to support TCM’s continuing of the status quo, Martin Scorsese was quoted that late at night, he liked to unwind by watching Umberto D on TCM. Which I guess is a reason to keep it alive — if your Martin Scorsese or you’re a fan of neo-realism Italian cinema. For the rest of us, it’s just an indication of how film lovers think and the rest of us shouldn’t. For the record, I have seen precious few films of Scorsese or Spielberg or any of the great directors of the last half-century ever air on TCM. But what do you expect from a network that on 30 DAYS Of Oscars thinks that the movie that its audience wants to see is Gandhi instead of ET?
In A New Leaf, a movie by Elaine May that I honestly don’t know has ever aired on TCM (it was made in 1971, so it might have squeaked by) a character says: “You have devoted your existence to preserving a way of life that perished long before you were born.” Roger Ebert was fond of that quote, but I’m pretty sure he was not have entirely been happy with a channel that made it a mission statement. And that is what TCM has been doing for so long. I get them for finding something that works and sticking with it, but it’s not the kind of thing that necessarily going to last much longer as its major fanbase begins to pass away.
And for the records, it’s not like TCM has been the only game in town for the last several years. Fox has a movie channel that spends much of its afternoon hours showing several of the kind of B movies that TCM would usually devote its Saturdays too. Epix just rebranded itself as MGM+. In the past month, I’ve seen such genuine classics as Judgment at Nuremberg, 12 Angry Men and Fiddler on the Roof air on it. Throughout the networks you will find some masterpieces from the 1970s — The Godfather series, Chinatown, Dog Day Afternoon. Even AMC, which long relinquished the movie classics part of its name, will sometimes still show movies such as Shawshank Redemption or Rocky or Pulp Fiction. The real classic movies will be showing somewhere because they’re actually classic. A great movie can transcend its era; it’s not automatically one because it’s got grainy footage and all the characters smoke.
And hell, you can find all of these movies on streaming if you want to look. Marty, if you’re so desperate to see Umberto D late at night, its available on Amazon Prime right now. You want to get up at 4 A.M. and deconstruct it, no one stopping you from buying it. It’s not like you bear a grudge against streaming — Netflix was willing to make The Irishmen.
I get it TCM is important to you, it’s been there for a long time, and now it’s in danger. Well, the business of television is business like everything else. I’m sorry that a basic cable network that took over the job of so many other cable networks whose passing you didn’t notice or mourn is in danger because its under economic threat. Please try to remember that every single movie that was ever made — including the ones on the channel you so revere — was made to make a profit for its investors first and for you to celebrate as a classic, decades later, much further down the list, if at all. In the meantime, do what none of the characters in the movies you revere can do and join the 21st Century.