Djelloul Marbrook

How much of our seeming natures, do you think, are conflations of what’s inherent with screen characters?

I started asking myself this question when I realized that our president strikes me as a surreal amalgam of B movie western characters, something between Hopalong Cassidy and Lee Van Cleef, depending on whether he’s charming or badgering us.

Once this untoward thought entered my loony head I began asking myself what kind of amalgam I am. After all, I know which movie and television characters endeared themselves to me.

Until wired electricity and electronics forever quickened our world we frequented the opera or theater regularly or on occasion but never with the ease with which we flick on screens or visit movies. And never before have we been deluged with so much drama.

I know that hanging around my mother’s studio left me smelling like paint. I know that living on a sailboat for ten years made me smell like a diesel rag. I know that I think in terms of painting and sailing. So it seems only natural to me that all of us might have conflated our stories, our projections of ourselves, with what we’ve seen on screen. In a sense, we project ourselves onto the screens around us, and so others are inevitably players in our own dramas, and we grade them as we do actors.

Who (if you’re anywhere near as old as I am) hasn’t thought of Robert Walker, one of the Strangers on a Train, popping a kid’s balloon with his cigarette? Who hasn’t thought of Alan Ladd or Gary Cooper or Clint Eastwood gunning down bad guys? Who doesn’t remember Gloria Grahame’s heart-attack amble or the silvern unapproachability of Greta Garbo? Surely all that wealth of gesture and demeanor is inevitably part of our own interior estate, so that every day in some small unobserved way we encounter these actors.

I come at this idea from a literary viewpoint, too. I can’t count the times, encountering wittiness that doesn’t come off, I’ve said to myself, This guy has seen too many George Sanders movies, read too much Evelyn Waugh. And many is the time in bar rooms I could swear I was watching Errol Flynn swashbuckle to the men’s room or Humphrey Bogart make wise over at the corner of my eye. I know perfectly well many a drunk, myself included, has suffered a comic knockdown fancying himself John Garfield or Marlon Brando playing Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront.

Assuming this is the case, that we have become conflations of our filmic heroes and heroines, what are the consequences for the society in which we indulge these roles? What is the consequence of electing leaders who think they’re somebody else? Where do the screen and real worlds intersect and how dangerous is the intersection? Do we lose our lives in it? Are we losing our lives in Iraq because people we trusted fancy themselves as someone else, someone who in fact lived only in cellulose?

I’m sure we become to a large extent what we experience. But the people who become our role models in real life are not following a script. Or, if they are, it’s not available to us, and the special effects are inexpert. For example, a wonderful parent or teacher or military officer is not the same as a film character who has usually less than three hours to change us and millions of dollars’ worth of stagecraft.

Nor is fashioning ourselves after Odysseus in Homer’s The Iliad (Helen of Troy, inset) the same as fashioning ourselves

after Kurt Russell playing Wyatt Earp, because we haven’t studied every gesture by Odysseus, the curl of his lip, the demeanor of his speech. The camera hasn’t studied Homer’s hero. Our material isn’t visual.

And then there are the dramatic situations that have stuck in our minds, the memorable scenes,
James Cagney taking a year and a day to fall after being gunned down, a slow tear in Michele Morgan’s eye, tragic knowledge of vendetta in Richard Conte’s face, impossibly heroic charges against an overwhelming enemy, dignity in the face of certain death. All these scenes inform our lives and play out in our own responses to our own challenges.

—DM