Within a 12-hour period this summer, I was coerced
into watching both Scenes from a Marriage--a Foriegn Film in all
senses of the term--and Baseketball, a wisely neglected movie about
90 minutes too long.
I won’t bore you with the details of the
foreign flick. All you need to know is that Scenes from a Marriage
was directed by Ingmar Bergman and is more or less incomprehensible to
anyone who hasn’t read Kierkegaard or doesn’t subscribe to Utne Reader.
And Baseketball stars the creators of South Park. While Trey
and Matt’s humor is usually sharply satiric and subversive, in Baseketball
there were only a few moments of total brilliance buried beneath a pile
of Studio Suit dung (to use Kerry Tanner’s assessment of the movie).
But there was the pleasure--worth the price
of the rental--of hearing Ernest Borgnine wheeze “I’m too sexy for my shirt...”
in a singing voice as gravelly as a dirt road (and he stripped, too! Enough
humiliation to last him a lifetime). Worth the price of the rental fee,
yes, but at the end of the film I realized I wanted the last 90 minutes
of my life back. And perhaps the administration should reconsider giving
Dr. Borgnine a mere honorary degree--after that scene, Borgy deserves more.
Seeing high-brow art and low-brow art within
the space of a few hours does something to the mind. It short-circuits
the neurons, perplexes the cerebrum, errodes the subconscious. I was reluctant
to watch both films but was left little choice. At the end of the day,
I felt like Alex in A Clockwork Orange--I’m afraid the next time
I see either subtitles or Ernest Borgnine, I’ll collapse into dry heaves.
Actually, that is a lie contrived for the
punch line, which isn’t even a funny punch line at all. In truth, we are
exposed to high and low art all the time, usually within the space of a
few seconds or simultaneously, without consequences. Our brains don’t collapse
when we see Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream, hocking crappy
compact cars, nor do we lapse into a coma when Beethoven’s 9th Symphony
is used as the opening theme of a Brooke Sheilds sitcom. Most of us know
the bulk of Wagner’s Ring Cycle not from the actual operas but from the
Looney Tunes shorts, just as we are more familliar with T.S. Eliot’s “Old
Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” not as collection of poems, but as the
lyrics to a mercifully closed Broadway musical, Cats.
Cats. Now and Forever, or at least
until this September. But I’m off the subject, which was that high art
and low art are not mutually exclusive.
Going from Bergman to Baseketball
required a paradigm shift along the lines of going from a documentary about
Nazis, on the History Channel, to an episode of The Real World Hawaii,
on Mtv. Fifty years ago, I suspect I would have been unable to make the
switch from one mindset to the other, but because our culture is now a
soppy stew of messages loaded with meaning and messages loaded with crapola,
I am able to withstand the pairing of, say, Einstein and Pepsi Cola. Is
this a good thing? I don’t know. But if it leads to seeing Ernest Borgnine
singing “I’m Too Sexy,” it can’t be all bad. Let’s just hope Gallo wines
never realizes that da Vinci’s Last Supper would make a wonderful
advertisement for their merlot.