Ace in the Hole (1951); the circus and the truth

“Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.” 
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

By definition, an “Ace in the Hole” is a hidden, or unfair advantage, kept back until the perfect opportunity presents itself (referring to a face-down Ace in stud poker).  In the 1951 Billy Wilder Film, loosely informed by the true story of Floyd Collins, Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) is a thwarted, ambitious journalist who is unabashedly on the prowl for an opportunity to regain his big city career.  Before he even stumbles upon the story he is able to use toward that end, it has already become relatively evident how he is scheming for events to pan out.

While Chuck Tatum claims that he “doesn’t make things happen, [he] just writes about them,” the film makes it very clear that Tatum’s actions intentionally and unintentionally alter every conceivable course of events in the story of Leo Minosa.  Dewey claimed that “what actually happens (action) is dependent on the presence or absence of perception and communication.”  Tatum appears utterly anomic as his drive to craft a “perfect story” overpowers any morality, honesty, civility or integrity that his character may have had claim to.  He willfully crafts a distorted perception of reality, knowing full-well how it would affect public opinion, all while creating such a loathsome actual reality (at least as perceived by the apparent omniscience of the camera), that his “ace in the hole” devolves into an albatross around his neck.  

As Dewey also purported that “the ultimate harm is that the understanding by man of his own affairs and his ability to direct them are sapped at their root when knowledge of nature is disconnected from its human function.”  Tatum grasps hold of and maximizes that disconnect toward what he believes is his own advantage.  He capitalizes on corrupt individuals, bargaining with them to keep Leo Minosa trapped in a cave longer, thus allowing him to craft a more elaborate, more profitable story.  When Leo ultimately dies of pneumonia, Tatum’s perfect story crumbles beneath him.  He must deal with having murdered a man he had exploited unconscionably, who had genuinely believed in his friendship.  This complicated grief, coupled with a probably punctured spleen, lead to his collapse at the end of the film, as he is finally, frantically, trying to “tell the truth.”

Describing the public’s habit of hero worship, Walter Lippmann pointed out that in times of security “symbols of public opinion are subject to check, comparison, argument…” and that a fluidity of inquiry helps to maintain a certain objectivity of truth.  But that in less certain times (emergencies, wars) there are a greater range of feelings aroused, and that men are more likely to respond emotionally than objectively.   Since, as Lippmann also maintained “men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities,” and fictions are not necessarily equivalent to lies, but “rather a representation of the environment made by man himself.”  It is not surprising that the public and the press ate up Tatum’s constructed story just as he had hoped.  It was based enough in reality to be a fiction, and not a lie.  (As Tatum points out to the newspapermen, he did make sure there was a man trapped down there, even if everything else was altered or constructed).

Around the few concrete facts Tatum did use, he also constructed an elaborate, rather deceptive pseudo-environment.  He mediated for the public their relationship with the reality of Leo Minosa’s situation.  He lied abjectly about the nature of Leo’s relationship with his wife, but had no need to embellish the grief of Leo’s parents.  He artificially painted the sheriff and himself as protagonists, but Leo’s own background as a soldier was factual and easily used to increase “human interest.” The most devastating altering of reality, however, occurs in Tatum manipulating the rescue operation, encouraging blackmail of the contractors to make them choose a longer option for the rescue, in hopes of having time to build his story to a nationwide fever pitch.  Ultimately, is appears that Tatum’s interference altered everything about this “story.”  And as we watch Leo’s bereft father, facing the mountain that held his dead son, with acres of litter from “the public” before him, we are led to infer that everything could and should have transpired much differently without the interference of “journalism.”

Lippmann, admitting to flaws in journalism, listed factors that inhibit access to “facts.”  Several of these are painfully present in Tatum’s interference.  He constructs artificial censorships and limits social contact, primarily through his corrupt pact with the Sheriff and with Lorraine Minosa.  Nobody but Tatum is allowed to speak directly to Leo, and Lorraine is threatened when she speaks to other reporters.  Tatum also takes advantage of the distortion created “when events are compressed into short messages.”  His intense interest in the commercial success of his story not only destroys the integrity of his journalism, but is alters action, choices, and events with varying degrees of devastation for different people.

The treatment of “the public” or the masses in this piece is more in keeping with Lippman’s assertions than with Dewey’s, though the concerns of both writers about how the public deals with misinformation are realized.  The public, especially as embodied by “Mr. and Mrs. America,” the Federbers, are terribly gullible, and their interest and perceived investment in the story of Leo Minosa are easily crafted and led by Tatum.  Despite the artificial nature of their “relationship” with Leo, their grief at his passing is viable, even if it is neither immediate nor over a real relationship or even the "real" Leo.  It appears that this “public” is inevitably led by the crafting of public opinion, and so in keeping with Lippmann’s argument, what is needed is better, more inquisitive journalism by an elect breed of incorruptible journalists.  This type of integrity is represented in the film by Mr. Boot, the owner of the Albuquerque newspaper, with multiple needlepointed “Tell the Truth”s adorning his office.

At some point between when Leo innocently asks Tatum, “You wouldn’t be lying to me now, would you Chuck?” and when Tatum disgustedly proclaims over the loudspeaker to the crowd, “The circus is over.” Tatum appears to have internalized the gravity of what he has done.  Before his character collapses, possibly dead, back in the Albuquerque newspaper office, he has a short-lived new directive of voicing the story of what actually happened, and how a crazed reporter could string so many people along to such a devastating end.  Whether the exposé of this corruption ever surfaced in the reality of the film is unresolved, but the film itself is the actual exposé, and invites viewers to examine the critical thinking that goes into their own news consumption, and to recognize that their relationship with reality is always mediated, and often mediated imperfectly. 

Qiu Ju and the disenchantment of the author/reader dialectic

In 1992, after having directed two striking films (Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern) that set him at odds with the Chinese Government, Zhang Yimou released TheStory of Qiu Ju, an unexpectedly repentant specimen.  The film may have compromised Yimou’s relationship with his viewers, but it also seems to have subversively addressed the compromises that Yimou had to make in order to remain a filmmaker.

The nature of the relationship between an author and the reader or consumer of his work is explored by Jean Paul Sartre in his essay, What is Literature?.  In it, Sartre contends that “literary objects exist only in the concrete act of reading,” and that any meaning tied to any text is actually contained within the individual who is creating or consuming the text, and that the texts on their own are merely black squiggles on a page.  Through shared language, the author entreats the reader to “create meaning” out of the text, thus the author uses their freedom to create a text to entreat to the reader’s freedom to engage with the text and create meaning.

Sartre explains, “The writer appeals to the reader’s freedom to collaborate in the production of his work…. The work of art is a value because it is an appeal.”   The reader, freely choosing to open the text and engage with it is “asserting that the object has its source in human freedom.”  Thus the effective relationship or dialectic between an author and a reader is one of mutual respect and freedom.  Sartre felt that authors who failed to respect the freedom of the reader (citing and criticizing Pierre Drieu la Rochelle) decimated the potential for reader engagement or reader meaning-making.

So how was Zhang Yimou, who was reportedly under pressure to paint authority and government in a more positive light if he wanted to remain in his profession, to avoid becoming an irrelevant sycophant like Drieu la Rochelle?  If he felt, like Sartre, that the meaning in his films was actually constructed by the audience, then perhaps The Story of Qiu Ju is his way of entreating the audience to understand the necessary pitfalls of working within an imperfect system, and even to forgive them in him and his work.  It was, perhaps an extension of the act of faith that Sarte described: “The bad novel aims to please by flattering, whereas the good one is exigence and an act of faith.”

The film centers around the determined Qiu Ju, played by Yimou’s perennially favorite actress Gong Li.  Loosely based on the novella, The Wan Family Lawsuit, by Chen Yuan Bin, the film follows Qiu Ju, a determined country wife, as she doggedly follows every channel legally available to her in order to satisfy her need for justice, which is (to her) an apology from her village chief.  Only, Qiu Ju’s version of justice is impossible to enforce and is not even comprehended by most of the well-meaning government bureaucrats depicted in the film.  Repeatedly the courts rule that the chief must provide pecuniary retribution, which he offers with demeaning vitriol, and which Qiu Ju feels morally compelled to decline.  Ultimately she has pursued vindication to such a length that the chief is imprisoned for his crime even after Qiu Ju has forgiven him and is earnestly seeking his good favor again.  The film regularly depicts the incongruence of Qiu Ju’s enceinte rube amidst the bustle of the modern city.  Her character is clearly as much comedic as tragic, especially for a Chinese audience.  She is in many ways more of a child than an adult.

In view of the Confucian thinking that would underpin a Chinese encounter with the film, the fact that neither Qiu Ju nor the Chief seem interested in restoring harmony renders both of their approaches to the conflict as silly.  When Qiu Ju insists to her husband that she doesn’t care what others in the village think of her, rather than the admiration for integrity that an American Audience might incur, a Chinese audience would have been more likely to see her behavior as needlessly reckless, contributing to her tragicomic end as the siren wails, symbolically asking Qiu Ju, “What have you done?”

What meaning might Yimou have been hoping that his audience might make of this work?  Especially of his ambiguous ending as the film freezes, unresolved, on Qiu Ju’s face as she pursues the vehicle with the arrested chief?  It seems that perhaps Yimou was asking questions with this film about impossible situations and hoping that his audience would recognize that they were unanswerable, as Yimou found himself in an impossible situation, and felt that his work would be compromised or destroyed no matter how he chose to proceed.  Yimou continued to make films in China within the parameters of government pressure, and complied well enough to be given government commissions (including the 2008 Olympic opening ceremony). Though in interviews has consistently tried to distance himself from government influence.

The film itself seems to be a disclosure of the necessity for recognition of limits and for compromise – for working within the constraints of an imperfect system in order to work at all.  The film very mindfully portrayed every individual except Qiu Ju, the chief, and the city taxi driver as gracious and amenable.  The only conflicts that were allowed to surface in the film were between Qiu Ju and the chief (technically this involved Qiu Ju’s husband, but he was prepared to let it rest long before Qiu Ju was), and between Qiu Ju, her sister-in-law Meizi, and the city taxi driver.  The conflict with the taxi driver plays out like the other, larger conflict in miniature.  For his petty misconduct, Meizi chases him into the unknown, subjecting her family (Qiu Ju) to angst, and her efforts prove fruitless – more harm than good is done. 

By representing Qiu Ju’s futile, sometimes bull-headed attempts, Yimou is clearly crafting some meaning.  Whether Qiu Ju’s zeal is intended to be symbolic of Yimou’s own in his past is essentially an opportunity for guided or “directed creation.”  The viewer can finish what Yimou has begun – but whether they draw a line connecting Qiu Ju with Yimou’s earlier films depends on what information the viewer brings with them to their viewing. 

Existing government systems did not allow Qiu Ju to pursue or achieve her definition of justice, and when she worked within those systems, the result was a disappointment, but she was still willing to persist.  Is Yimou asking whether it will prove a similar disappointment if he seeks after artistic freedom in a similarly non-ideal system?  He interestingly asks the question without answering it, allowing the audience their own creation of answer and meaning. 

Sartre claimed that a “literary object has no other substance than the reader’s subjectivity.”  Citing Raskolnikov’s hatred of the police magistrate who questions him in Tolstoy’s Crime and Punishment he claims, “Raskolnikov’s [hatred of the magistrate] is my hatred which has been solicited and wheedled out of my by signs, and the police magistrate himself would not exist without the hatred I have for him via Raskolnikov.  That is what animates him, it is his very flesh.”  We see this authorized existence and fleshing out of the chief morph before our eyes as Qiu Ju experiences a vulnerable crisis and is rescued by the Chief’s efforts.  Prior to that point, the chief is only ever represented (by presence in a scene or by description of other characters) as being stubborn and prideful.  Suddenly his character becomes infinitely more complex by doing something out of character.  Viewers are invited to forgive the chief along with Qiu Ju.  At this point harmony is restored, except for the avalanche Qiu Ju’s previous, rather naïve legal actions set in motion.  The chief is arrested and harmony is obliterated, and Qiu Ju’s “what have I done?” face becomes the film’s signature moment. 

It is possible that this film is an entreaty (to the freedom of the viewer) to consider the complexity and imperfections of the systems under which they and Yimou alike strive to function and create.  The film carefully points no antagonistic fingers.  Everyone is likeable and agreeable (to Qiu Ju) by the end of the film, and what remain are mistakes, not sins.  It may be that Yimou was hoping to invite his viewers to apply a similar compassionate judgment to both his past and future work as he endeavored to change gears and comply with government pressure.

The individual in The Crowd: a lens on mass culture

King Vidor’s 1928 exploration of the common man, The Crowd, proves an interesting contrast to most cinema of its time.  Rather than continuing in the tradition of sharing yet another successful Cinderella-story of an individual rising above the crowd, it elected to turn that ideology on it’s head and deal with the reality that “the crowd” is simply a massive conglomeration of individuals all playing the game of trying to rise above “the crowd.”  Inevitably in such a system most of them fail, and Vidor elected to explore that majority rather than the successful few whose stories seem designed to keep the masses motivated to play the game.

In the film, John Sims’ life and personality begin with ardent idealism.  His late father expected great things from him, and all his bright-eyed self wants is “an opportunity.”  An opportunity to do what exactly?  Not to become a ubiquitous part of the crowds of New York City, but rather to somehow rise above the crowds and become “somebody special.”  Because in the Capitalist consumerist society that Vidor explores, the two are considered mutually exclusive.

But John never actually gets “an opportunity.”  Every semblance of good fortune or talent that befalls him is immediately followed by greater tragedy. Sims is a dreamer, but one without the talent or breaks needed to get ahead. And that’s Vidor’s point: that ambition alone doesn’t cut it. John Sims represents people who have ambition, but less luck, talent, or connections; those who never make it.

As John Sims accumulates these experiences, they change and shape his ideology and perception of reality.  Marx insisted this is how men’s perception of reality is formed, [1] that “the nature of individuals depends on material conditions determining their production.”  Meaning that the economic system and pressures that an individual experienced would be the primary factor in determining their belief system and world view.

The Crowd remains an unusual Hollywood film for its unglamorous portrayal of everyday life.  It incorporated some [German] expressionistic style, but it also crafted a realism not familiar to American Cinema. The first appearance of a toilet in an American narrative film, shown as evidence of John and Mary’s cramped Murphy apartment, was rather scandalous.  The film persisted in a slow, deliberate downward spiral, showing increased weakness, cynicism and dysfunction in the profoundly human protagonist.

Despite John’s initial self-evaluation that he is something special, the film makes repeated vignettes showing that John and Mary Sims, and their family’s story is only one uniform portion of a much larger “crowd” of individuals.  The film actually opens with the first instance, the crowd passing the Sims’ home on the day John was born, oblivious to what is going on inside.   The second instance is shortly thereafter, when a crowd forms upon the arrival of an ambulance at the Sims home, and John is called forth from the crowd and informed of his father’s fate.

The film continues to place John within crowds in distinct and artistic shots throughout the film.  The shot establishing John at his desk in his office is legendary, and comparable establishing shots involving a moving camera are used to show Mary in the maternity ward, and the Sims family on the beach. 

Vidor said of that sequence, “I wanted to pick out one floor of a tall building, and one office, one window, and one desk and one man.  But how do you go up to the 22^nd floor, in those days before zoom lenses and before booms?  We built the building lying down on the stage, and then with a bridgework for the perambulator, [the] camera could go up the building, and then when we tilted it down to that floor, we zoomed close to the window. We then went to a shot that was shot on a big empty stage with 200 desks, and 200 men sitting at the desks. Then [using an overhead rigging originally intended for lighting] we tracked across the room and settled on one man. “[2] The artistic triumph of the film is the perspective afforded by such pioneering shots.

Vidor cast an unknown actor, a movie extra, James Murray, as John Sims.  The symbolism of this decision is apparent and appropriate, as casting one of the minority who have already succeeded to play the guy who never does succeed within the Capitalist system would create a narrative with excess baggage and a conflict of interest.  Though Vidor could not have predicted how prophetic this role would be.  Vidor’s wife, Eleanor Boardman, was cast as John’s wife, Mary Sims.

In the scenes depicting their courtship, they are both clearly sold on the competitive nature of Capitalism.  They are both “snobs” regarding the crowd.  They each see themselves as superior in potential to the swarms of other human beings around them (many of whom show signs of being resigned to their fate.) These two characters  are both too traditional to thoroughly embrace the new morality of the 20’s (John “needs to study” and Mary has faked a bob-haircut), and the title cards depicting their conversation on their date are utterly unimpressive.  They are neither of them especially witty or bright.  Yet the sincerity of their expression is remarkable, and the scene abstains from being parodical.

Vidor’s ability to walk that line, to point out folly without guile, is key to the tone of this film.  He creates a protagonist who is at once absolutely typical and utterly convinced of his own atypicality (which, according to the underlying momentum of the film, is what makes him absolutely typical). John Sims is both victim and beneficiary of the American Dream.  The film consistently puts Sims’ character in his place – by portraying this idea that John Sims’ belief in his own “atypicality” was what “made him typical” – just another face in the crowd.  

This is most poigniantly illustrated by the contrast between John's contempt of the man juggling on the street, dressed as a clown.  As he spots the man, his title card reads, "I bet his father thought he would be President," which is clearly reminiscent of the expectations we saw John's own father express for him.  It becomes a natural arc of maturation and acceptance when John finds himself in those very shoes toward the end of the film. 

The oppression of the metropolitan crowd toward John’s character begins as soon as the first scene showing John working at his desk.   The dominance of intellectualism and reckoning in a city environment, as described by Simmel,[3] becomes an overbearing force of nature as the film progresses.  The more John insists on the atypicality of himself and his family, the more “the crowd”, which he sees as the “other” seems to tyrannize him.  The secret to the film, however, is that the crowd is not the other.  John is a typical member of that crowd, as consistent sweeping, zooming, panning stylized shots remind us.

From his birth, John Sims IS a member of the crowd. That is to say, he’s a participant in the society(and it's ideology and economic system)that he’s born into. It’s in thinking that he is above the crowd that John manifests the particular mass-mind that Vidor disects. 

That “mass-mind” is notably similar to the cosmopolitan tendencies toward antipathy and a blasé attitude that were described by Simmel as the result of sensory overstimulation in urban environments.  John clearly exhibits these traits himself early in the film, (especially on the bus home from Coney Island), but as the film progresses these traits in the crowd around him, and his own inability to maintain them in his grief and struggles, put him irreconcilably out-of-step with the crowd.  John then goes from perceiving himself as atypical from the crowd in a desirable way, to perceiving himself as atypical from the crowd in an undesirable way.  In the tragic scene at the heart of the film, where John's daughter is hit by a car John realizes, just how relentlessly kinetic the crowd can be. The crowd that witnesses the accident is affected by the tragedy, but as a policeman later tells John “the world can’t stop because your baby is sick.” The crowd moves along with its bustle even before the little girl draws her last breath. John is powerless to stop them. 

The death of John’s daughter turns his already tentative ability to function within the competitive parameters of the Capitalistic metropolis on its ear.  There is no room in that rat race for his despair, and John’s grieving is seen as outside the acceptable norm. The intertitle describes this incongruity, “The crowd laughs with you always… but it will cry with you for only a day.”  As John’s grief obliterates his ability to function within professional confines he was already struggling with, the intertitles continue: "We do not know how big the crowd is, and what opposition it is...until we get out of step with it."

Marx proposed that “All change results from the constant conflicts arising from oppositions inherent in ideas, movement, and events.”  Certainly the change in John Sims comes about because of the oppositions inhererent in the Capitalistic American Dream.  If everybody is somebody special, then nobody is.  As John begins to grasp his own utter replaceability, and his true place as a typical face in “the crowd,” he is first desperately depressed (suicidal), and finally consigned.  Vidor worked consistently against the “nagging wife” stereotype by showing Mary’s character to be much more adaptable and able to mature, even as she dealt with John’s nagging, narcissism, and self-doubt.

John’s character fleshes out the need that Simmel described in metropolitan dwellers to stress the particularity, incomparability, and unique identity of their individual selves.  As his ability to perceive himself as needed or irreplaceable evaporates, he is driven to desperate depression.  Vidor very carefully did not save John’s character from suicide by showing him that he was needed, only that he was wanted, and liked (by his son, and ultimately by his wife).  The crux of the film lies in John Sims deciding that this is enough.  That his small, typical, pedantic life is worth living.  

Ultimately John finds solace in becoming a member of the crowd, rather than trying to rise above it(or to the top of it).  He willingly becomes the very thing he shunned earlier in the film, a poor sap in the crowd, a juggling clown.

The ominous final shot, illustrating John Sim’s content resignation to his place as just one typical story among countless others, was foreboding of the stock market crash that came the following year in  October 1929.  As the Great Depression descended, surely countless people found themselves living John Sims’ tragedy.  Unfortunately, one of them was James Murray, the actor who had played John Sims.

Barry Grey elucidates, “Eight years after The Crowd, Murray’s body was found floating in New York’s East River. His career had collapsed – never gained traction, really – and he’d succumbed to alcoholism. Vidor had tried to help. Even hired the down-and-out Murray for Our Daily Bread and told him to clean up. But Murray could not, would not be saved and ultimately jumped to his death in a macabre echo of The Crowd. Sadly, there was no sweet-faced boy to take his hand at the last moment -- a poignant reminder that life doesn’t cooperate when we need it most to imitate art.[4]”

Murray’s death, and the economic crisis that followed so closely on the heels of the film, make it an eerily prophetic look at the “inherent oppositions” within a Capitalist model that values competitive success, and encourages “the crowd” to despise “the crowd.”

---

[1] Karl Marx, “The German Ideology” 1846 (pub. 1932)

[2] http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/243978/King-Vidor-on-The-Crowd-TCM-Original-.html

[3] Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” 1903.

[4] http://suite101.com/a/review-king-vidors-the-crowd-1928-a89479