kiss, all moviegoers know, is just a kiss, and
a sigh, by the same inexorable logic, is just a sigh, but I'm
starting to wonder whether in the age of the DVD a movie -- even one
as indelibly stamped on the collective memory as ''Casablanca'' --
can ever again be just a movie. The DVD's that have been piling up
in the vicinity of my TV seem to be telling me that a movie is not a
movie unless it arrives swaddled in ''extras'': on-set
documentaries, retrospective interviews with cast and crew,
trailers, deleted scenes, storyboards, even alternate endings. These
days, any film for which a studio's marketing department has
sufficiently high commercial expectations is issued on DVD in a
''special'' or ''limited'' or ''collector's'' edition that makes an
Arden Shakespeare look skimpy by comparison. The extras on the new
double-disc Director's Edition of Brett Ratner's ''Red Dragon''
include such indispensable material as hair and wardrobe tests and
one of the auteur's N.Y.U. student films, and take as long to watch
as the movie itself. We all, in our 21st-century paradise of
leisure, have too much time on our hands. But not that much.
Should some scholar of the future be insane enough to take an
interest in ''Red Dragon,'' however, the annotated variorum edition
of this deeply mediocre picture could be useful. And the as-yet
unborn author of ''Unfaithful Cinema: The Art of Adrian Lyne''
(2040) will need to consult the Special Collector's Edition DVD of
''Fatal Attraction,'' which contains the film's original ending as
well as the one moviegoers saw. It also includes the director's own
helplessly revealing comment on the radical difference between the
conclusion he chose and the one he discarded: ''You can make up your
mind which you like better.''
I've always thought it was the artist's job to make that
sort of decision, but as I watched Lyne smugly leaving it up to the
viewer, I realized with a jolt that I had fallen behind the times. I
still think of a film as a unified, self-sufficient artifact that,
by its nature, is not interactive in the way that, say, a video game
is. To my old-media mind, the viewer ''interacts'' with a movie just
as he or she interacts with any other work of art -- by responding
to it emotionally, thinking about it, analyzing it, arguing with it,
but not by altering it fundamentally. When I open my collected Yeats
to read ''Among School Children,'' I don't feel disappointed, or
somehow disempowered, to find its great final line (''How can we
tell the dancer from the dance?'') unchanged, unchanged utterly, and
unencumbered with an ''alternate.'' For all I know, Yeats might have
written ''How can we tell the tailor from the pants?'' and then
thought better of it, but I'm not sure how having the power to
replace the ''dance'' version with the ''pants'' version would
enhance my experience of the poem.
And although ''Among School Children'' is divided into eight
numbered stanzas and therefore provides what DVD's call ''scene
access,'' I tend to read them consecutively, without skipping, on
the theory that the poem's meaning is wholly dependent on this
specific, precise arrangement of words and images. If you read
''Among School Children'' in any other way, would it still be
''Among School Children''? Would it be a poem at all?
The contemporary desire for interactivity in the experience of
art derives, obviously, from the heady sense of control over
information to which we've become accustomed as users of computers.
The problem with applying that model to works of art is that in
order to get anything out of them, you have to accept that the
artist, not you, is in control of this particular package of
''information.'' And that's the paradox of movies on DVD: the
digital format tries to make interactive what is certainly the least
interactive, most controlling art form in human history.
When you're sitting in a movie theater, the film is in absolute,
despotic control of your senses. It tells you where to look and for
how long, imposes its own inarguable and unstoppable rhythm, and
your options for interaction are pretty severely limited. You can
wise off quietly to your companion or loudly at the screen, or, in
extremis, you can walk out, but nothing you can do, short of
storming the projection booth, will affect the movie itself: it
rolls on serenely without you, oblivious as the turning world.
It's that imperious, take-it-or-leave-it quality that, in the
early days of cinema, aroused the suspicions of devotees of the
traditional arts, who would argue that watching a film denied the
audience some of the freedoms available to readers -- who could set
their own pace rather than meekly submit to a rhythm imposed on them
by the creator of the work -- and to theatergoers who were at
liberty to look wherever they wanted to at the action on stage and
whose reactions could actually affect the play's performance.
Eventually, we all learned to stop worrying and love the art form,
but the skeptics and reactionaries had a point: the techniques of
film are unusually coercive, a fact quickly grasped both by the
art's early masters, like D.W. Griffith, Fritz Lang, Sergei
Eisenstein and Alfred Hitchcock, who reveled in their ability to
manipulate the viewer's responses, and by the leaders of
totalitarian states, who recognized cinema's potential as an
instrument of propaganda.
The manipulative power of cinema is neither a good nor a bad
thing; it is what it is, and all movies partake of it in varying
degrees. The films of Jean Renoir, for example, are markedly freer
than those of Hitchcock, but the freedom they offer is relative;
although the long takes, deep focus and improvisatory acting style
of Renoir's ''Rules of the Game'' (1939) allow the viewer's
imagination more room to roam, the director is nonetheless in
complete control of what we see and what we hear. In fact, just
about the only way a film artist can subvert his or her own
authority is by significantly limiting the use of the medium's
expressive resources, as, for example, Andy Warhol did in the
mid-60's. His eight-hour-long ''Empire'' (1964), a single shot of
the Empire State Building, with no cuts, no camera movement and no
sound, is about as uncoercive as a film can be. It's the most
interactive movie ever made.
All I'm saying, really, is that watching a film is, and
should be, an experience different from that of playing Myst or
placing an order on Amazon. I
suspect that many DVD owners use their players exactly as I do, as a
way of recreating as nearly as possible at home the experience of
seeing a film in a theater. The DVD picture is sharp, the sound is
crisp and the film is almost invariably presented in its correct
aspect ratio -- i.e., letterboxed for movies made in wide-screen
process, as all but a few since the mid-50's have been. The DVD
player is, by common consent, the best-selling new device in
consumer-electronics history. It's said that the ''market
penetration'' of DVD players (which were introduced in 1997) into
American homes is progressing at a rate twice that of the VCR. And
the unprecedented ''penetration'' of this format cannot be
attributed solely to the Rohypnol of advertising hype; the DVD is a
distinct improvement over the videocassette, and even over the
extinct laserdisc.
But the DVD is a gift horse that demands to be looked squarely in
the mouth, because it has the potential to change the way we see
movies so profoundly that the art form itself, which I've loved
since I was a kid, is bound to suffer. What does it mean, for
example, when a director recuts or otherwise substantially alters
the theatrical-release version of his or her film for the DVD, as
Peter Jackson did for the four-disc Special Extended Edition of
''The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring''? This cut,
half an hour longer than the film that was shown in theaters and
that sold millions of copies in its first two-disc DVD incarnation
just four months earlier, is obviously the definitive version of
''Fellowship'': clearer, fuller, richer emotionally and kinetically.
Better late than never, I guess, but I still felt a little cheated
at having to watch this grand, epic-scale adventure on the small
screen. And don't the hardy souls who every now and then peel
themselves off their Barcaloungers, trek to the multiplex, stand in
line for $4 sodas and dubious popcorn and then subject themselves to
the indignity of sitting in a room with hundreds of rank strangers
-- don't they deserve the best version of the movie? At least when
Steven Spielberg re-edited and digitally rejiggered his ''E.T.: the Extraterrestrial,'' he
had the decency to give it a brief stopover in movie theaters on the
way to its final destination as a multidisc Limited Collector's
Edition DVD.
It's thoughtful of Spielberg, too, to include in the DVD package,
alongside the spiffy new ''E.T.,'' a disc containing the original
1982 theatrical version of that justly beloved movie, which is not
only the sole extra worth watching in the whole overstuffed grab bag
of goodies -- what viewers, I wonder, are thrilled to discover
therein a two-hour film of John Williams conducting the score at the
Shrine Auditorium? -- but is also a stern warning to filmmakers who
might be tempted to tinker with their past work: in almost every
respect the old version is better. Although the two brief scenes
Spielberg has restored to the picture are nice, you wouldn't miss
them if they weren't there (as the filmmaker evidently didn't when
he left them on the cutting-room floor two decades ago), and the
digital removal of the guns carried by the government agents in the
original's climactic chase just seems silly.
What's most damaging to ''E.T.'' is the way Spielberg has
tampered with the movements and facial expressions of the eponymous
alien itself. A team of computer wizards has labored mightily to
make E.T. cuter -- an undertaking that, as even those of us who
admire the picture would have to agree, has a distinct
coals-to-Newcastle quality.
I'm sure most filmmakers occasionally look at their past movies
and wish they'd done one thing or another differently, but before
the rise of the DVD, they rarely received much encouragement (i.e.,
financing) to roll up their sleeves, get under the hood and
fine-tune or soup up their vintage machines. That state of affairs
changed when the consumer-electronics industry discovered, to its
delight, that many members of its affluent and highly penetrable
market could be induced to buy the same entertainment product, with
variations, over and over again. (One day you wake up to find you
have 17 ways of listening to Elvis's ''Heartbreak Hotel.'') For
movie lovers, a new DVD Director's Cut of ''The Fellowship of the
Ring'' or ''E.T.'' or ''Apocalypse Now'' or even ''X-Men'' can be a
powerful incentive to reach for the wallet yet one more time.
The restoration of older films that were mutilated before their
theatrical release or that have suffered from disfiguring wear and
tear is, of course, welcome. There's every reason to shell out for
the DVD's of David Lean's ''Lawrence of Arabia,'' Hitchcock's
''Vertigo'' and ''Rear Window,'' with their images and sounds, which
had faded badly over the years, now buffed by crack restorers, and
Orson Welles's baroque 1958 noir ''Touch of Evil,'' which replaces
the distributor's release cut with a version that conforms more
closely to the director's own extensive notes on the editing of the
film. (Like the new ''E.T,'' all those restorations played briefly
in theaters.) In each of those cases, the DVD allows us to see the
film as its maker wanted it to be seen.
But most of the current mania for revision appears to be driven
by motives other than a burning desire for aesthetic justice. It's
not that I don't believe Steven Spielberg when he says that his
''perfectionist'' impulses were what spurred him to rework ''E.T.'';
it's that I don't believe that without the financial incentive of
DVD sales he would have given in to those impulses -- or, perhaps,
felt them at all. Although the film's 20th anniversary, last year,
supplied a pretext for revision, nothing in the finished new version
argues very strongly for its necessity. God knows, there are DVD
packages far crasser than the Limited Collector's ''E.T.'' (For an
especially pungent recent example, see ''X-Men 1.5.'') I'm picking
on Spielberg here because he's a great filmmaker and a man who loves
and respects the history of his art; if even he can be seduced into
tampering with his own work, then the innocent-looking little DVD is
rolling us down a very steep slope indeed.
Revisiting past work is almost never a good idea for an artist.
Every work of art is the product of a specific time and a specific
place and, in the case of movies, a specific moment in the
development of film technology. Sure, any movie made before the
digital revolution could be ''improved'' technically, but the fact
is that the choices the director made within the technical
constraints of the time are the movie. It wasn't so long ago, maybe
15 years, that filmmakers took up arms against Ted Turner and his
efforts to ''modernize'' old black-and-white films by
computer-coloring them. Colorization was an easy target, both
because the process was surpassingly ugly and because it was
inflicted on films without the consent of their makers. But would
the principle have been any different if the colorization technology
had been better, or if the directors had somehow been persuaded to
perform the evil act themselves, on their own movies, of their own
apparent free will? If Georges Melies, the wizardly animator of
silent cinema, were alive today, would he boot up his computer and
take another crack at ''A Trip to the Moon''? Would we think more
highly of him if he did?
That's kind of where we are with DVD's today. We're all well past
the point of being shocked at the compromises people make in the
name of commerce, but I still wonder why filmmakers have been so
meekly compliant with the encroaching revisionism and interactivity
of the digital format. For many, I suppose, it's simply a matter of
taking the bad with the good. The huge upside of the DVD, for
filmmakers, is that it makes their work widely available, in a form
that more or less accurately reflects their intentions: they long
ago learned to live with the reality that ultimately more people
would see their films on a small screen than on a large one -- the
directors of Spielberg's generation themselves received a fair
amount of their movie education from television -- and at least on
DVD the movies aren't interrupted by commercials or squashed into a
''full-frame'' presentation. So the filmmakers tell themselves, I
guess, that the more insidious features of the format don't really
matter: that the making-of documentaries don't make them sound like
hucksters and blowhards; that the deleted scenes and alternate
endings don't subtly impinge on the formal unity of the work; that
all the revisions and digital tweaks they agree to don't undermine
the historical integrity of the picture; that voice-over
commentaries don't drown the movie in a torrent of useless
information; that scene access doesn't encourage viewers to
rearrange the film to their own specifications; that the
user-friendly conventions of the format will not steadily erode the
relationship between movies and their audience.
The men and women who make films need to put up more resistance
to the rising tide of interactivity, because, ''Casablanca''
notwithstanding, there's no guarantee that the fundamental things
will continue to apply as time goes by. The more ''interactive'' we
allow our experience of art -- any art -- to become, the less likely
it is that future generations will appreciate the necessity of art
at all. Interactivity is an illusion of control; but understanding a
work of art requires a suspension of that illusion, a provisional
surrender to someone else's vision. To put it as simply as possible:
If you have to be in total control of every experience, art is not
for you. Life probably isn't, either. Hey, where's the alternate
ending?
There's not much point speculating on what the ending will be for
the strange process of DVD-izing cinema. Many suspect that the DVD
is already the tail wagging the weary old dog of the movies. Will
the interactive disc ultimately become the primary medium, with film
itself reduced to the secondary status of raw material for
''sampling''? Maybe; maybe not. The development of digital
technology, along with the vagaries of the marketplace, will
determine the outcome, and neither of those factors is easily
predictable. What's safe to say, I think, is that the DVD -- at
least in its current, extras-choked incarnation -- represents a kind
of self-deconstruction of the art of film, and that the DVD-created
audience, now empowered to take apart and put together these visual
artifacts according to the whim of the individual user, will not
feel the awe I felt in a movie theater when I was young, gazing up
at the big screen as if it were a window on another, better world.
I no longer look at movies with quite that wide-eyed innocence,
of course, but it's always there somewhere in the background: an
expectation of transport, as stubborn as a lapsed Catholic's wary
hope of grace. Perhaps the DVD generation, not raised in that
moviegoer's faith, will manage to generate some kind of art from the
ability to shuffle bits and pieces of information randomly -- the
aleatory delirium of the digital. It just won't be the art of D.W.
Griffith, Jean Renoir, Francois Truffaut, Sam Peckinpah, Andrei
Tarkovsky and Roman Polanski.
Feeling slightly melancholy, I call up David Lynch, who is
not only a director whose works -- ''Blue Velvet,'' ''Mulholland
Drive'' -- demand a pretty high level of surrender on the part of
the viewer, but also one who has in recent years refused to allow
voice-over commentary or scene access on the DVD's of his movies.
''The film is the thing,'' he tells me. ''For me, the world you go
into in a film is so delicate -- it can be broken so easily. It's so
tender. And it's essential to hold that world together, to keep it
safe.'' He says he thinks ''it's crazy to go in and fiddle with the
film,'' considers voice-overs ''theater of the absurd'' and is
concerned that too many DVD extras can ''demystify'' a film. ''Do
not demystify,'' he declares, with ardor. ''When you know too much,
you can never see the film the same way again. It's ruined for you
for good. All the magic leaks out, and it's putrefied.''
He's not opposed to DVD per se. Lynch just finished supervising
the DVD of his first feature, ''Eraserhead'' (1976), which, while
eschewing the usual commentary and chapter stops, will contain a few
extras (the nature of which he declines to reveal). We spend a few
minutes discussing one of his favorite DVD's, the Criterion
Collection's ''Complete Monterey Pop,'' and agree that D.A.
Pennebaker's groundbreaking concert film is the sort of movie the
format serves well; even the scene access is, in this case, mighty
useful. But Lynch says that filmmakers need to be very careful about
the way they present their delicate, tender creations on DVD.
''Don't do anything to hurt the film, and then you're rockin.' ''
I hang up, leaving David Lynch to rock on, and find that I'm
feeling more hopeful that the relationship between movies and their
audience will survive the current onslaught of interactivity -- that
this need not be the beginning of the end of a beautiful friendship.
So I dig out the no-frills DVD of ''Mulholland Drive,'' slide it
into its little tray and pick up the remote. And I tell the machine
to play it.
Terrence Rafferty is critic at large for GQ magazine.