The Disappointment Artist Read Free Page A

and immediately contradicted myself, first insisting that the Indians weren’t important as real presences, only as emblems of Wayne’s psychic torment. The film, I tried to suggest, was a psychological epic, a diagnosis of racism through character and archetype. The Indians served as Wayne’s unheeded mirror. Then, unable to leave my research on the shelf, I cited Ford’s renowned accuracy. Maybe he knew a few things about Comanche battle ethics—
    D. scoffed. For him it was impossible to honor Indians by showing them mowed down in a senseless slaughter (never mind that senseless slaughter was historical fact). He paced away, leaving me in a kind of hot daze, mouth dry, eyes locked on the screen, still grasping at my dream of a sanctified viewing of
The Searchers
, not seeing that it had already slipped away, that I’d again failed to defend the film, this time with an audience of just two.
    D. returned, and now his trembling effort to appear casual had as much to do with the freight between us as with any junkie symptom. Rightly—he knew me well enough to sense what was coming.
    “How can you expect to understand
anything
when you’re too fucking distracted to give it more than a passing glance?”
    “Relax, Jonathan. I only said I thought the movie wasn’t very good—”
    I couldn’t stop. “How do you decide so easily that you’re superior to a work of art? Ever worry that cheap irony won’t carry you through every situation?”
    “I’ve got eyes. It’s a fifties Western.”
    “That’s what’s so pathetic about people our age—” I silenced myself before I’d widened his crimes to cover our whole generation. Still, the damage was done. D. stalked off. I wouldn’t speak with him for five years from that day. Under the astonished eyes of my girlfriend I’d burst the bubble of silence in the apartment. Anger stemmed for months had risen and found a conduit. In D.’s underestimation of the film’s makers I saw his underestimation of his friends, we who weren’t fooled by his dissembling but indulged him, maintaining guilty silence as though we were fooled. D. had been an ambitious and generous soul when I first met him, and a champion of artistic greatness. In his sniping at
The
Searchers
—at the film itself and at my galactic openness to it—I saw the slow-motion embittering of that soul condensed to one sour-grapes snapshot.
    What may have astonished my girlfriend more, and shames me in retrospect, is the Nietzschean chilliness of my actions. As in a priest-and-doctor-in-a-lifeboat puzzle, two things cried for saving and I could save just one. Seeing a friend spiral into desolation I reserved my protective sympathy instead for a work of art, for John Ford and John Wayne, remote, dead, and indifferent though they might be. Again my cards were on the table. Greatness above all.
    But that was in retrospect. At the time my concern was for my relationship with
The Searchers
. How ill-fated, how aggrieved, it had become. What was it with this film? Would I ever get to watch it without yelling at someone?
    Berkeley
    I snuck into the Pacific Film Archive on the heels of a crowd of perhaps fifty students, then sat with them in the theater, waiting—for what I didn’t know. The screening room there is a lot like Bennington’s Tishman, an austere, whisper-absorbing little hall, only built into a large museum in the center of a city instead of standing free in the Vermont woods. It was two years since my argument with D., and I was two years into the first draft of my quasi-Western. A grad-student friend, appraised of my need to refurbish my mind’s eye with a constant stream of imagery, had tipped me off to the existence of an undergraduate course on the Western, mentioning that the professor who taught it had once written about
The Searchers
. So I was there that afternoon to see a screening and hear a lecture, without any clue as to what was on the syllabus.
    The lights dimmed. The Warner Bros.