Irrelevant Details

A couple of nights ago, Lynn and I watched “Marathon Man,” which neither of us had seen for years. Of course, I remembered and expected to enjoy all the classic set pieces, Olivier’s Nazi war criminal as dentist, the wonderfully horrific attack on Dustin Hoffman’s character , Babe, while he’s soaking in the tub. The film is a classic demonstration of the power of the horror that can be derived from everyday experience, particularly everyday pain, everyday vulnerability.

But something else stood out for me this time: the tone and brilliance of the direction and cinematography. John Schlesinger, the director, and Conrad L. Hall, the cinematographer, had the wit to find the surprising, sometimes even obtuse detail or point of view and used them to impart suspense, or heightened reality, sometimes as a result of finding a gritty note of absurdity that is always present in daily life. For example, the plot is set off by an automotive battle between an aged death camp survivor and an old Nazi on the streets of New York. The concept is almost farcical, and there are moments that are played for simple black humor. But often, the camera chooses to find and dwell on the faces of the onlookers, real New Yorkers of various ages who look on the developing incident as it hurtles by them, with amazement, and even horror as the incident moves to its inevitable, catastrophic conclusion.

These days, the final explosion as the two cars collide with a fuel oil truck would be filmed with much more attention to detail and much greater expense, all for a very slight return on investment. But it’s everything that comes before, such as the startled look from an old woman in a faded floral dress as she stares at them from a tenement window, that really counts, that makes the drama compelling.

In part, it was a 1970’s thing. In many current films, the creation of suspense, which sometimes requires giving attention to an apparently irrelevant detail, is often neglected or managed in a very ham-fisted way. Sometimes that lack of apparent subtlety is rationalized as necessary as we now all live in a social networking age of necessarily immediate gratification. We just don’t have time for the clever or the subtle. I don’t believe it, of course, and I think the movie industry’s declining revenues, properly understood and analyzed, support that. The success of the Swedish version of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” which is molded from the clay of modern methods of communication, succeeded in part because of its ability to create suspense, often in very old-fashioned ways.

That use of the subtle detail, and teaching an audience to look for it, is socially healthy. Perspicacity and skepticism were never so useful as they are in a world as hyper-connected as ours is. As I’m writing this, the US House of Representatives and the US Senate are attempting to find a last minute compromise to raise the debt ceiling and avoid possibly catastrophic consequences in the global financial markets. I wonder what are the telling, possibly small, or apparently disconnected details that have brought our government to this pass. One might be that the Bush era tax cuts will expire at the end of the year unless the congress takes action and the Republicans lack the legislative strength to pass such legistlation. Are they not using perfunctory but critical legislation to blackmail the country into passing such ill advised legislation?