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The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the 20th Century

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As a movie lover, I was intrigued with the theme of this book -- how movies have shaped our culture, our thinking -- and was prepared for a heavy, textbook-like reading. As I read, though, I was overwhelmed with O'Briens style, his sterling craftsmanship in describing the feelings and emotions of the movies. I would literally stop after every few lines and shake my head in amazement. As a writer, I am jealous of his skill. As a reader, I am eager to read it again.

Steve Martin said (in L.A. STORY) that "a kiss may not be the truth, but it's what we wish was the truth." I do not know if O'Brien's book is THE truth about movies in the modern mind but, oh, how I hope that it is.

Don't be alarmed, just go to the movies. O'Brien, in this unforgettable, beautifully written book, has come up with an idea and a work so original and startling that it is difficult to describe. Essentially, he sees how movies [and he's seen hundreds of all kinds] have helped create the pyschology of the century. In one chapter, for example, he uses the melodramatic chestnut "The Four Feathers" to show how the movies displayed the customs and manners of a class and society different than ourselves, and thus taught us how to live in certain ways. And that's just scratching the surface of a book that seems to have a new and astonishing idea on every page. Neal Gabler published on this topic recently, but to a much inferior extent. Skip that and buy this. You will never, ever go to the movies the same way again.

Gob's pic on the book-jacket is the grimmest cautionary tale since Truman Capote shook his booty at Studio 54. Let this be a warning to you all. This is what happens when you spend half your life gawking at Barbara Steele & Silvana Mangano: you turn bald and myopic and you have no-one to blame but yourself. My favorite line: "What did they need a script for if they had enough bad mood to poison the atmosphere for a whole planet?"

Every sentence in this book is a masterpiece. Although there's no need to worry about any Serioso High-Art Heavyosity. Gob eschewed any in-depth discussion of Godard & Bergman & Welles & Antonioni in favor of delineating the Cinecitta aesthetic: "As the sword-and-sandal cycle ran its course they grabbed whatever raw material came to hand, Tacitus and Captain Marvel, Sophocles and the Bible and Mandrake the Magician, Tiresias and the Sibyl, vampires and virgins and an endless horde of raucous men-at-arms. The contents of an old cupboard full of irreplaceable artifacts were being briefly held up to the light--for the delectation of uncomprehending inheritors momentarily amused by gold leaf or a bit of fine carving--before being discarded. All periods of history collapsed into one, enabling Hercules and Ulysses to wash up on the Gaza coast and encounter Samson. It was the final garage sale of Thrace and Carthage and Byzantium."

I read a recent profile of Godard. His unfilmed latter-day scripts are (yes, you guessed it) scripts about film directors. Movies about movies. Gob covers that too: "The ultimate film festival would then have to consist of ghost movies: the low-budget risorgimento period piece that Edward G. Robinson almost finished shooting in TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN, Fritz Lang's ODYSSEY, the Crucifixion movie that Orson Welles was directing in Pasolini's LA RICOTTA, and the movie that (in Fellini's TOBY DAMMIT) the alcoholic actor played by Terence Stamp had flown to Cinecitta to star in: the first Catholic western, 'something between Dreyer and Pasolini with a touch of John Ford, of course'."

Gob even risks the charge of psychological projection when he waxes metaphysical: "A profound underlying boredom was the emotional basis of westerns. They were basically about killing time. They were what there was to do in town, in America, year after year."

My only hope is that Pauline Kael is savoring this book in Schlock Heaven.

This is one of the most unique books, on any subject, one can ever read. O'Brien doesn't write about the movies, he writes about going to the movies, how seeing movies has colored the cultural history of the century. Almost evey page brings an astonishing idea, astonishing both in its newness and its intuitive power

I have to be the dissenting opinion based on the other posted reviews. Frankly I felt this book was well written and fairly insightful but in many respects the author was reaching too hard for profundity and some of the connections and reference points he used seemed rather arbitrary to me. In addition there are many films that were overlooked that could have added to the analysis and made the book more meaningful to a wider readership.

This book is the most chillingly relevant commentary on our modern society of the spectacle that I have ever read. Although at times slightly alarmist in its portrayal of the totalitarian tendencies of contemporary cinema in forging the substance of our thoughts, these claims can not be taken lightly. O'Brien is convincing by virtue of the fact that he writes mostly in the second person. "You believed....You were shocked....You this...You that"...making the reader truly believe the shocking reality before him: That the overmind of the cinema is becoming the only reality in the 20th century. His memories are its memories and everyone else's too. O'Brien does a great service to point this out even if its too late to change it.

Geoffrey O'Brien shows us how, after more than a century of motion pictures, we have become an international community personally and culturally inhabited by films. We do not merely view them. Movies are so pervasive that we become them. "The Phantom Empire" (1993) is a collection of philosophical essays that explores in language of sinuous and seductive rhythms our relationship with cinema.

"How did you wander into this maze, anyway, and how would you get out? Do you in fact want to, or would you prefer to sink deeper into it, savoring its manifold ramifications and outlying distortions?" "Mister Memory" locates us in our spectator's position, our minds filled with movie images universally shared. "How often you've wished that memory could be as sharp, solid and mechanical as a movie, that the mind could give way to remembering as effortlessly as the eye submits to the ritual glide of the camera..." If so, then "... the camera would have preserved (our memories) the way people preserve food, for sustenance in time of famine."

"For its education in focus and order the eye was indebted to certain privileged windows: objects whose function was to teach what an object was." "The Garden of Allah" explains how the movies enter our consciousness at first through our senses, then by exposure to and habitation of a world permeated by movie advertising and impact, and peopled by others profoundly affected by scenes, dialog, and visual imagery with a compulsion to share their excitement.

"As a medium in which the dead continued to walk about, movies provided an education in time. Events could be dated by which actors were still alive, or by how many wrinkles they had acquired." "A Short History of Fun" describes how the movies affect our experience of time.

World War II changed the movies. "In the world the war had made, reality was in black-and-white. Color was suitable for candy wrappers, comic books, and Maria Montez vehicles." "Orpheus and His Brothers" identifies the new wave of European directors that emerged in the 1950s who re-evaluated film aesthetics. "There was life in the ruins, a rusted rotting life, menacing and erotic." "Out of the ashes, out of the rubble, something new was being born. It was art. It healed."

"What did people do, anyway, before there were movies?" "Ghost Opera" is a recapitulation of how the movies were invented from an accumulation of entertainment technologies over millennia from campfire shadow shows through the magic lantern to Cinerama and beyond.

"For the first 20 years it was almost enough to show things... The spectator wallowed in the visible like a neighbor perched on a stoop watching the world go by." In "The Author of the Visible" directors learn to personalize their films. "It was a question of narrowing the range of choice, to minimize both the depth and the periphery so that there could be no escape from the enclosed surface."

"The directors who made the most indelible marks on memory... were those who knew best how to exclude all information except the tiny amount required to give their dream narratives minimal coherence." "The Souk of Knowledge and the Wide Open Spaces" ruminates on the meaning of westerns. "The western derived its strength from the reiteration of what was already self-evident." "The western became the genre of genres because it was most obviously the common property of the emerging global communications tribe... Nowhere - not Lapland or Fiji or the remotest estuaries of the Indian Ocean - was Hopalong Cassidy a stranger."

"In the last days of imperial Hollywood, the big show was the spectacle of the show's disappearance." In "The Italian System", the dying Hollywood studios produce bloated, cost-heavy epics. "The trouble in the empire was highlighted by the encounter, in Hollywood's shadow, of another Hollywood, its cheap twin... in Europe it was still possible to work with enough speed and violence and crudity to make movies suited to the world they were being shown in." The Italian studios ransack cinema history. "All the movies ever made constituted a storehouse of images waiting to be appropriated and pasted into place."

"A Ticket To Hell" recounts the development of the horror film. "The taste for danger, a flirtation with evil, hovered around movies from the beginning. Part of the attraction of the medium was that it allowed spectators to sate themselves on horrors without fearing contamination. Whatever had been captured for their gaze was really elsewhere, with no risk of anything escaping from the screen into the audience."

In "The Magic Cockpit", movies reach a point of exhaustion: plot devices, images, story lines - everything had been done. "The opaque icons just accumulated, like non-biodegradable plastic jetsam piling up on Pacific atolls. Marilyn, Bogart, JFK, Garbo, Lugosi, Elvis, Duke Wayne, Judy Garland: all were destined finally to be blank marks stirring not even a flicker of response."

"Just as movies have their dream sequences, dreams have their movie sequences." "Dream Sequence" meditates on the evolution of movies from a capacity in the human brain to form dreams to the effect of dreaming on reality. "After Chuang Tzu dreamed of being a butterfly, he couldn't say for sure that he was not after all a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu." "In a roundabout, absurdly elaborated fashion - requiring special effects laboratories, wagonloads of art directors and prop men, and years of alchemical research - the brain had set about creating an image of itself, with a view toward projecting it into every corner of This Island Earth."

Geoffrey O'Brien is a poet, editor and critic whose work has appeared in the "New York Review of Books", the "Village Voice", and elsewhere. In his Phantom Empire we are besotted subjects who have been beguiled to believe that our rulers, the filmmakers, are fashioning shadows from trapped particles of light for our benefit. We surrender willingly, hostages to Hollywood and all the international avatars of Hollywood that have but one purpose: to make us spectators eager to pay for our enchantment.

Whatever our pleasures be: "King Kong", "The Bank Dick", "Fantasia", "Hellzapoppin'", "Gunga Din", "Mister Hulot's Holiday", "The Third Man", "Northwest Passage", "The African Queen", "A Walk in the Sun", "Forbidden Planet", "A Hard Day's Night", "They Might Be Giants", "Harold and Maude" - the movies are not here to serve us. Like the tall benevolent extraterrestrials in the Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man", they are here to serve themselves.