The AFI Top 100: #95 The Last Picture Show (1971) (+94, 93, and 92)
Going into The Last Picture Show, I expected a mediocre drama about bored high schoolers. While it is a drama about bored high schoolers, I definitely would not call it mediocre.
On some level, The Last Picture Show is just a melodrama about young love, lack of direction, and 1950s Americana. But what makes it so great is that it takes that framework and does so much more.
It takes 1950s America and analyzes it as a period of repression, before the counter-culture movement came along and changed things. It’s a world where women are defined by the men around them, and men are defined by a vague idea of masculinity.
When you live in a dying ghost town, how do you prove yourself? A form of death seems to surround The Last Picture Show. The ideals the characters hold are dying, their sense of identity is dying, their passion is dying, and their life is dying. The Last Picture Show paints a picture of a world in decay.
The children have no hope for their futures, and the adults that are supposed to give them that hope have mostly already given up.
This film perfectly captures the sad horniness of teens in denial. I liked this one a lot more than I expected to.
Does this deserve to be in the AFI Top 100?
Probably? Less so than some of the others I’ve seen but it still has a case.
Next up is Pulp Fiction. I’ve already seen this one and you probably have too so I’ll keep this brief. Pulp Fiction is really cool and I like how it handles all of its moving parts. It’s an absolute wonder of a script that was made very well. I can’t connect with all the stories, and it has Tarantino’s usual taste of masculinity that I’m not in love with but it’s still a fantastic movie.
It deserves to be in the AFI Top 100.
The next film on the list is The French Connection and…
I’ve seen it.
It’s fine.
Frankly, I don’t understand the contemporary reaction it got. It’s just fine. It’s trying to be a thriller and it’s just okay at it. It does have one really great chase scene though. Overall this just isn’t very interesting.
Does it deserve to be in the AFI Top 100?
I’ll give this one a soft no. It certainly deserves it more than something like Yankee Doodle Dandy, but I don’t think that time has treated this one well.
After that is Sophie’s Choice, which I have not seen, so you’ll have to wait for my thoughts on that.
See ya when I see ya
I too am not the #1 fan, but there is a lot going on in this film at a number of levels. The hermeneutical autobiography aspect is interesting, with Larry McMurtry’s reminiscence of his small town upbringing’s limitations rubbing up against Bogdanovich’s memories of (ethnic) isolation as a barely second generation immigrant growing up and life being cheap (his brother’s death isn’t the same as the kid in the movie, but the reaction is). Not to mention that a good deal of the movie bears very specifically on his romantic life, both leaving his marriage (to an older woman) for one of the actresses in the film (the one who represents the desire to escape) and then repeating something of this pattern for the rest of his life. You see similar echos throughout the high part of his career, including What’s up Doc and Paper Moon. As you note, there’s the restless of adolescence and young adulthood, pushing against an order that you see is rotting around you and not reflecting a sense of your desires an capacities, where the choice is to figure out how to break free versus the symbolic death of accepting pattern and turning off. There’s an interesting spin on the small-town dying idea, where there is a sense of tradition versus a sense of expendability, the fact that small towns or ghettos run on the idea of deep values asynchronous with modernity and the idea that no one outside the bubble cares if you thrive or sink back into the dust. The reaction to the death of the kid is really the heart of the movie. But it also reflects a theme I see in some pretty robust art, or at least art I respond to, of more modern perspectives of the dying of the idea of the American West. This is the kind of thing that runs all through Bruce Springsteen as a songwriter and David Lynch, especially Twin Peaks the Return. One of the reasons why David Lynch playing John Ford in the upcoming Spielberg pseudo autobiography is so interesting is that so much of the undercurrent of the Return is a coming to terms with 100+ years out the themes that Ford was coming to just a generation removed. In the film and these bodies of work, it is not the reality but the idea of the frontier, specifically the idea of motion pictures themselves being part of his last gasp of whatever the west represents, such that western depiction in film becomes a concentration of the idea of the death of the American libido, for good or ill. This is related to, but distinct from, the idea of the western forest. Before the bit with the boats beating on, Fitzgerald in the Great Gatsby says “For a transitory enchanted moment, man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” He was referring to the deep American forest which the 20th century conceptually moved west to Twin Peaks, but the desert and scrub of the southwest was writ on the midcentury American consciousness to a greater degree but in a similar way, with the mystery and hiddenness replaced with an exposure of inner nature. Springsteen - “Oh painted night set free with light/Glows outside the Rainbow Saloon/Matching braces with a Spanish lady/‘Neath a graduation moon/No more colleges, no more coronations/Some punk’s idea of a teenage nation/Has forced Santa Ana to change his station/From soldier to cartoon//And the Giants of Science spend their days and nights/Not with wives, not with lovers, but searchin’ for the lights/They spot it in the desert on their helicopter flights/Just to be lost in the dust and the night” (very TPtR episode 8). I’ll leave the interpretation, but this evokes the other thrumming heart of this movie, the death of Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson). There was a spirit that tamed this land for humans to live there, but in so doing, killed the spirit itself by bringing the need to live and dream to the last place there was to be dreamed of.
Peter Bogdanovich died today. He’s a figure that will be equally famous for what he didn’t achieve as what he did.
The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon are masterpieces and still hold up today fifty years after they were made. But though ‘What’s up Doc’ is interesting and ‘Targets’ ahead of its time, there was nothing else he made in the rest of his career that ever matched up to his early…
