Sure Playing a Mean Pinball

PAULINE KAEL called it "the cattleprod," the theory being that today's audiences are so numb from perennial TV that a movie in a theater needs a long blunt instrument wired with several hundred volts and applied to an armpit, perhaps, or some appropriate erogenous zone, in order to elicit the merest twitch of a response.

Hence the cinema of the extreme, with visual effects and emotions so exaggerated that sheer volume is all that counts. Destroy Los Angeles; film a twelve-year-old girl masturbating with a crucifix: wallow in solitary confinement with Steve McQueen on Devil's Island--ten million dollar's worth of a dark screen. a few cockroaches, and no talking. I remember last summer, caught in a miserable little movie called The Terminal Man (from Michael Crichton, with George Segal), finding myself watching the Man (who has an alien machine brain lobotomized into his skull so that his actions are uncontrollable) chased at the end to a cemetery, the Man Writhing at the bottom of an open deepsunk grave in agony while a helicopter hovers above training high-powered rifles at him helpless in the pit, shooting him full of holes.

Or another miserable little picture called White Dawn,with Timothy Bottoms and Martin Balsam. The idea here was some sort of cultural relativism--19th century sailors shipwrecked in the Arctic, taken in by an Eskimo community. First scene the natives kill their dinner, ripping off seal flesh and tearing it with their teeth, practically drooling blood. We watch it in graphic detail. Later we learn that despite their foreign ways they are gentle people--just different--and that they have free love inside the igloos, also moderately graphic. The dinner is supposed to disgust you; the sex is supposed to titillate you: you move from shock to shock.

THIS NEW sensationalism proceeds out of an assumption of boredom, which is why it is new, and not designed to be a grand old show. It's not just Cecil B. parting the Red Sea anymore--there's television's stamina to beat now--blatant images in a box day after day, 24-hour love, hate, anger and pain in a thousand ways. So you give the audience a strange brain (a devil-possessor)--lobotomize 'em. Or you carry them to a strange environment (perhaps trash the one you've got and see how they run)--show 'em anything can happen. This insertion of the berserk is perceived as brutal realism.

While the subject is run away loose in one of these situations, the object out of control in the other, there's yet a third way to take your audience for a ride. Here the subject and the object are long gone, so that while the pretense of naturalism exits the needlessness of thinking critically about real people in real life lingers on. This method is the Trip. Though hypothetically borrowed from LSD culture, the Trip has little to do with subliminal imagery or altered consciousness--it's a distorted mirrors routine, psychedelic feelings, as though emotions come in bright colors and relationships make loud noises. There's no time except to react, Nothing to say except that it makes you feel good...no, that it makes you feel different...well, that it makes you feel anything at all.

Ken Russell's Tommy is the ultimate trip, the ultimate TV show. Its central metaphor is a deaf, dumb and blind person playing pinball--total sensory overload. Add some drugs (the audience), loud music in five-track Quintaphonic sound, and a camera that socks back and forth like an All rabbit punch, and you have an experiences so full that it cancels itself out. You buck and heave uncontrollably for two hours and waddle out of the theater, hoping that you'll smash the car into a wall on the way home or something because maybe that'll top it. See what it feels like.

Maybe the moviemakers think the audiences like feeling out of control, that they like having the responsibility of thinking wrested from them. The TV grinds on so mechanically that watching is like lying half asleep--mildly diverting but with precious few surprises. Anyone who's seen a lot of television can check out a show for ten minutes and tell you what's going to happen for the rest of the action. They're practiced experts at predicting outcomes because the stuff on the tube has strict boundaries; it flows judiciously in the Nielsen main stream. What sustains a movie, then--because it can aim for a more limited audience--is that sense of whoosh-we're-taking-off-and-this-could-go-anywhere, a sense of being carried away.

"DON'T WORRY, Be Happy, " is the message of Avatar of the Age Meher Baba, and it is in his honor that Peter Townshend wrote the "rock opera," Tommy. For us, this passivity is good advice at the movie's end, after what we've been through: a series of events so brazen and bewildering that judgement or evaluation has no place. After a horrible plane crash kills Tommy's war hero father, his mother (Ann-Margret, with much cleavage and little voice) remarries only to be walked in on late at night by the scarred figure of Husband I, thought dead. Husband II murders him, and little Tommy sees the whole thing. Then director Russell positions us at Tommy's innocent head while father and mother yell "You didn't hear it, you didn't see it" over and over and louder and louder into each ear. Russell's tasteless hand-held camera is thrusting and jabbing, commanding us to feel the child's trauma. So of course we feel very little, which perhaps makes sense because Tommy is struck deaf, dumb and blind by the experience and soon reappears grown up as Roger Daltrey, blank-eyed and looking like the aftermath of a heavy night of smashing guitars in the days when The Who used to wear their coke spoons publicly around their necks, and rumors flew that thousands of dollars worth of the stuff was often consumed in one night.

Anyway, they try everything to cure Tommy. He visits Eric Clapton the faith healer in a Marilyn Monroe worshipping ceremony peopled by a company of badly crippled and visibly retarded hopefuls who Russell must have gone to some trouble to procure for the cinematic effect. Later Tommy is left to devices of the Acid Queen (Tina Turner is a marvelous caricature, snake-tongued and screeching--the best thing in the show), and a 'psychedelic' scene full of neons and visual tricks that experimental filmmakers have been using for years. Soon we watch Tommy tortured by one sadistic relative, then abused by another sex-crazed next of kin. Some of these scenes are stylized (there's no spoken script in the film), but not for distance's sake. Russell continues to shoot close and uncomfortable: bad-breath cinema verite.

This has always been Ken Russell's way, and now he's found the perfect vehicle. Russell is fascinated by Tchaikovsky--he made The Music Lovers about him--and a critic of the composer could level similar charges at the director--he is vulgar, sloppy, with a wild imagination that colors furiously outside the lines. Which is why an actor like Jack Nicholson (who plays the doctor)--an actor of understatement and double meaning--looks totally out of place in Tommy. And a brash swaggerer like Oliver Reed (Tommy's stepfather) is quite at home.

THE TROUBLE with Russell, and with this new sensationalism in general, is that values get lost and confused in the morass of enthusiasm. When Tommy becomes a pinball wizard and a fabulous star. Townshend's opera tries to make some dramatic statements about the plight of the rock personality. Riches don't mean happiness, young boppers get kicked in the face by bodyguards when they rush the stage--that sort of thing. But Russell can't resist playing these scenes for the vicarious turn-on. Tommy smashes a figurative mirror, regains his senses, sings, "I'm Free," and leads the millions in a religious movement dedicated to himself, the abolition of drugs and alchohol, and a rite of plugging the eyes, ears and mouths of the brethren and letting them loose on the pinball machines. The fans turn on him in the end, and Tommy realizes that he must seek spiritual salvation alone, but this final revelation seems incidental the way Russel presents it.

In the earlier crowd scenes the mob swarms around Tommy and the giddy camera fairly swims in it. The real epiphanies happen here: Town-shend's music soars and the emphasis resounds. We are supposed to "get off" on these segments, and the meaning be damned. When you're kicking out the jams on every scene, there's no room left for comparative perspective. And the filmmakers know full well that the kids they portray as papering their faces in wild adulation, the kids submitting gratefully to the opportunity to stop up their senses and give themselves over to the flashing, ringing Gottleibs--that these kids are the same kids who are paying $3.50 a head, lining up in the parking lot, and filling in.