Thursday, February 25,-l 971
THE MICHIGAN DAILY
Page Seven
Thursday, February 25,1 971 THE MICHIGAN DAiLY Page Sever~,
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cinema
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Love
(Continued from Page 2)
dress it up in mod clothes (or
undress it), but it can't be yank-
Oed out of the Forties, as Oli-
ver demonstrates when he de-
fends his fiancee with, "She's
not some crazy hippie."
Although that sounds more like
Joe than a son of the Crimson,
Segal's surrogate isn't a politi-
cal conservative. He isn't politi-
kcal at all. Except for a casual
remark about exploited workers
and a reference to the arm,
Oliver is conspicuously untouch-
ed by the chaos of the age,
which isn't surprising consider-
ing it was this chaos that pro-
bably made his existence as fan-
tasy-hero possible. His con-
cerns are all personal, and his
battles are all between him and
life, with no mediator. No John-
son. No Nixon. No Bob H o p e .
Life is so grand that his three
grueling years at the Harvard
Law' School - during w h i c h
4 the young marrieds are forced
to scrimp and save - takes
barely fifteen minutes of the
film.
Despite this apoliticism, I'm
not sure Love Story has escaped
the Sixties entirely unscathed
by politics. Admittedly its ro-
.,4 mance is jazzed-up Rockwell
and Whitman Sampler,-but Jen-
ny's death is as closely related
to apocalyptic cinema as to Ca-
mille. It may even be the ro-
mantic equivalent to Strange-
love's mushroom clouds, Bonnie
and Clyde's death ballet, E a s y
Rider's shotgun blasts, Zabrxis-
kie Point's Americana explosion
or Joe's slow-motion murder.
There is in Love Story that same
sense of failure, and though the
film obviously has some house-
wives and teenagers convinced
of the possibility of love, f o r
others it subtly reinforces t h e
impossibility of successful per-
sonal commitment. We mu s t
fail - in love as in politics.
Now this sense of inhospit-
able Fates might have been miti-
gated if Jenny were, say, hit by a
car, not leukemia. It 'doesn't
work out that way since, aesthe-
tically speaking, car accidents
are messy and who ever found
romance in spilled guts anyway?
What's more, leukemia a 11o w s
Jenny to be peppy and bitchy
right up to her last gasps. And
leukemia also. underscores our
own susceptibility. Sooner or lat-
er everyone considers the pos-
sibility of succumbing, to dis-
sease, just as everyone consid-
ers the possibility'of being melt-
ed by the Bomb; the two, in
fact, are part of the same fatal-
istic psychology.
Having said all these things,
I should confess that Love
Story's popularity doesn't hit
me as a psychological mystery.
It probably, all boils down to
capitalism. Love Story got ever
more publicity than Everything
You've Always Wanited to Know
4 About Sex, the year's non-fic-
tion counterpart to Segal's ro-
mance. The professor burst on-
to the glossy pages of Life, Time
and Newsweek. His image w a s
beamed over every talk show in
the country from Dick Cavett to
Virginia Graham. And his novel
became a literary analogue to
Richard Nixon, proving what
most of us had long suspected:
even in the twentieth century
there is a sucker born every
minute. Hucksters can still ped-
dle a used presidential candidate
or a trite tale of pathos as eas-
'4ily as a veg-o-matic. Maybe eas-
ier..
Naturally no one wants to
admit they've been duped by
one of the greatest super-hyp-
es since P. T. Barnum's Egress.
Almost plaintively, people say it
has got to be good. Otherwise
why would so many Americans
have bought it? And since Yale
is part of the mystique, they
find their taste reaffirmed by
Segal's position there. The
book's length becomes a tri-
bute to Segal's economy of
words, its poorly drawn char-
acters Segal's way of letting us
use our imagination. Relativism
triumphs (which may be the
book's worst legacy. Mass cul-
ture meets academe. Americans
settle back and sob on cue.
If that sounds dehumanizing,
it should. Let's face it: L o v e
Story got more tear ducts flow-
ing than all the pictures of na-
palmed Vietnamese and starving
blacks put together. But it's so
damned Pavlovian, such a waste
of emotional energy. Show a
man beating his horse and you
will get a stimulus response with
a minimum of elemental emo-
tion. Show a twenty-five-year-
old girl dying of leukemia and
you'll get the same response. It
isn't emotion; it's a kind oof
auto-masturbation of the eyes.
In the most severe forms of the
sickness, cults are organized to
discuss the fated couple, an d
lovers read the book to o n e
another as an expression of
their affection. These pitiful
people are willing to accept Se-
gal's canned substitute for the
genuine article; unable to ex-
perience real emotion, they are
willing to let Segal and his ca-
pitalism feel for them.
Knee - jerk emotionalism has
its intellectual counterpart in
the dumb acceptance of fantasy
as reality. Lawrence Durrell
said, "We read books to confirm
our intuitions." But we go to
the movies very often to dis-
prove those same intuitions, and
Love Story blasts away with in-
credible megatonnage. Life isn't
nasty. Problems are easily re-
solvable. All you need is love.
And love is no agonizing adjust-
ment to reach a possibly un-
reachable understanding. On
the contrary, as we all know,
love is simply not ever having to
say you're sorry, which is about
as pithy an aphorism as you're
likely to find this side of Little
Richard.
In addition the maxim trans-
lates into holding hands and
necking and being brutally hon-
est as when Oliver finds himself
unmasked, "You mean you love
me even when you see me?" and
Jenny answers, "That's what it's
about, Preppie." It also trans-
lates into playing in the snow,
and since snow is white, and
white is the symbol of purity,
and purity is usually associated
with love, snow becomes a re-
curring motif in the film. Un-
fortunately for the veneer of
romance, these gay treks could
not help but recall a not-so-gay
trek in another love story, Truf-
faut's Mississippi Mermaid. De-
neuve, cloaked in black sable
and ostrich feathers, supports a
half-dead Belmondo as they
trudge through the snow. Very
tender . . . until you remember
that it was Deneuve herself who
poisoned Belmondo or that Bel-
mondo begged her to kill him i
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Rusting on
emotions
that's what she wanted. Love
can be perverse that way.
While I share Truffaut's wi y
cynicism in the affairs of the
heart, I have to admit that for
the first minute of Lave Story I
thought they were going to pull
it off-a High Noon of love pic-
tures. Spare and poetic. That's
the word the critics used. Poetic.
Pare the tear-jerker to its basic
essentials. Boy meets girl. They
fall- in love. They overcome ob-
stacles together. Boy loses girl
. . . to death. It's all so simple.
Oliver Barrett sitting alone in
Bakery fame. Then a hockey
game' and those gambols in the
snow and visits to the parents
(Oliver's cold. Jenny's warm)
before the wedding. And then
those tough three years they'"l
someday look back on with nc-s-
talgia. And then a top New York
law firm. And then leukemia.
Finally, in a departure from
the book, Oliver leaves his be-
loved's death-bed only to find
himself face to face with the
father he despises. "I'm sorry,"
the' old man mubbles. 'Love
means never . . ." Oliver drifts
"mages
level was a naivete that Segal
just doesn't have. UnUke his
predecessors he isn't atistied
with reaching the thirtee-year-
old who lazes within each of us;
he strives for something more
than the quintessential schlock
I had always found to be a
poetry of sorts. Even the title
is a dead giveaway. Love Story.
Simple Truth.
To my mind this kind of self-
consciousness couldn't produce
a serious film, and it's murder
on escapism because it forces
everyone to press, including the
cast. Pretty as she is, which is
almost too pretty for the book's
Jenny, Ali M a c G r a w ambles
through the picture like a rocky
puppy. She smiles slyly and lets
fly a "goddamn" or "smart-ass"
or "bullshit" or "Preppie" (the
film makes that a swear word),
but everything comes out sound-
ing so flat-even her sniffles-
that she couldn't convince me
there was anything under the
polish. Ryan O'Neal is more
credible and goes about as far
as you can go with Oliver's inon-
character. Grizzled John Maley
(any more grizzled and he'd turn
into a hard salami) as Jenny's
dad and Ray Milland as Oliver
Barrett III are veterans who
play it as heavy as if it were
Romeo and Juliet.
It isn't, though Shakespeare's
drama reveals another of the
film's faults. Like the Venetian
teenagers, Segal doesn't know
the difference between infatua-
tion and love. Obviously, he
hasn't yet been shaken by the
rude awakening that )eopte
aren't radio tubes; people can't
be made with a few turns of a
dial to oscillate on the same
frenquency. His picture inight
have hit home if he had eog-
nized that love is a process cf
compromising needs and wants
to arrive at something workable
or maybe only tolerable. It is
almost always arduous, fre-
quently painful and, in the end,
seldom productive.
So had Truffaut been in
charge, Jenny would have died
and Oliver would have let out a
sigh of relief because she didn't
have the time to turn her coy
barbs into real weapons. Or had
Chabrol been in charge, Oliver
would have preserved th status
quo by dispatching Jenny him-
self. That would have shattered
the fantasy, but at the same
time it would have made sense
out of it. Not tears but sense.
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INTRODUCING
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I
a dusky, snow-covered park.
The lone. title: Love Story. Thn
his voice, "What can you say
a b o u t a twenty-five-year-old
girl who died?"
The minute is over. The scene
shifts to the Radcliffe Library
where the lovers first met. "Lis-
ten, I need that goddamn book,"
Oliver snarls. "Wouldja please
watch your profanity, Preppie."
They go off to a coffee shop.
Oliver reveals he's a Barrett of
Barrett Hall fame, and Jenny
reveals she's a Cavilleri of Phil's
over to the snow-covered park
where it began; but this second
time around only reminded me
of the first minute. It was good.
It deserved a better picture.
So where did Segal go wrong?
Well, I don't think it's possible
to sit down consciously trying
to write a distillation of every
love picture ever made, pumping
in some "youth values and
truths" and coming ap vith the
definitive film on lovestruck
youth. What made those old pot-
boilers work on their ,wn weepy
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