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1.
If Tertullian could ask, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?", surely this year we could ask, "What has Hollywood to do with Washington?" or, perhaps more subtly, "What has the Kodak Theatre to do with the White House?" In a year when the two most talked-about movies were an independent film that won no Academy Awards and garnered only three nominations, and a documentary that was a lock to win none, having no nominations, how much is it worth our while to look at the five Academy Award nominees for best picture, four of them, of course, losers? Add that none of the five nominees were even in the top ten last year in box-office receipts, and the question presses: "How much are these pictures really indicative of where we are now, and where we are likely to go, as a nation?"
As St. Paul might have put it, "Much in every way." Movies dominate our office conversation; our presidents quote them when describing foreign policy; our preachers regularly use them for crucial sermon illustrations. Movies are as significant an art form as we have in America today, and the art of a people is perhaps the best barometer of their character and concerns. In that light, Hollywood has the most significant artists working in America today, and while this presents a rabbit trail down which we could go—discussing whether the greatest film artists are found in independent film circles or in Hollywood—the greatest blend of thoughtful, influential artistry in America is generally to be found in the more mainstream films of Hollywood. If that is so, then Hollywood's self-selected movies may well be, in the long run, the most influential movies made in any one year. The five Academy Award nominees for Best Picture this past year—The Aviator, Finding Neverland, Million Dollar Baby, Ray, and Sideways—certainly add up to a story about ourselves and the state of our souls that is worthy of our investigation.
2.
In The Aviator, Martin Scorsese brings us a film about Howard Hughes, stretching (after a brief, but important, childhood scene) from c. 1928, when Hughes is struggling to make the film Hell's Angels, through the 1940s. This is the period when Hughes was a regular public figure, though it does not contain our most prominent cultural memory of Hughes. That distinction belongs to the sad individual who died, alone, massively rich but totally out of his mind, having lived most of the last 20 years of his life as a recluse in his suite on the top floor of the Desert Inn Hotel in Las Vegas. Many details are known, and even more are conjectured, about Hughes' grotesque last days, but they all point to one thing: we do not remember the dashing figure of the 1930s and 1940s nearly so well, or so often, as we do the crazy hermit of 1976.
In The Aviator, Hughes is portrayed as living wildly successfully, at least according to macho American standards. He risks wildly, and amasses the world's largest fortune. He flies faster than any man had ever flown, crashing twice. He spends lavish amounts of money directing and producing movies, some of which are successful (one was the masterpiece Scarface), and some of which are huge duds. Along the way, he sleeps with many of the most alluring women in Hollywood, living for two years with Katharine Hepburn. In the midst of all this glamour, though, Hughes' phobias of people and bacteria are clearly presented; perhaps the most visually striking sequence in the film is one in which Hughes, played masterfully by Leonardo DiCaprio, locks himself in his screening room to watch films over and over, having food brought in, bottling his own bodily waste, all the while having his only conversations over the phone or through the door. Several milder scenes remind us of what we know to be Hughes' eventual mental and physical state.
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