We all know what political correctness is–though the nuances of the term may vary depending on whether you’re inside or outside academia and whether or not you regard it as exclusively the preserve of the left. (Personally, I consider Rush Limbaugh and Andrea Dworkin both charter members of the club.) Commercial correctness in movie ideology, however, has yet to be defined, even though it currently engulfs both the entertainment industry and the audience.
Correct: The more or less successful suppression of Alain Resnais’ 12th feature, I Want to Go Home (1989), scripted by Jules Feiffer and starring songwriter Adolph Green as an American cartoonist on a visit to France and Gerard Depardieu as a French Flaubert scholar in love with American pop culture. To the best of my knowledge, the only U.S. screening this movie ever had was at the Sarasota Film Festival; calls to the New York office of its producer, Marin Karmitz, about the possibility of showing it even in a nontheatrical venue were not returned.
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Incorrect: Back in the 70s, when I was living in Paris, I was naive enough to propose to the Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times a piece about great recent European movies that weren’t being distributed in the United States. I hadn’t yet caught on to the principle that the Times is interested only in goods available in New York. In the same way, when the Academy Awards presented its tribute to Fellini, the show omitted any mention of his last two features, both still undistributed here: better to keep people in ignorance than let them know what they’re missing. (The same applies to the Times Book Review’s annual roundups of the year’s best–which are invariably those books it was perspicacious enough to review in the preceding year, no second thoughts allowed.)
Given this gangbusters approach, one might think that a watchdog/maintenance program like commercial correctness wouldn’t be necessary. But in fact it’s essential to the whole operation: without constant vigilance, some moviegoer somewhere might actually perceive that there are alternatives to mainstream, media-approved cinema. As in Orwell’s 1984, true success is achieved not when all signs declare “Big Brother Is Watching You” but when all citizens decide that they really and truly love Big Brother and no one else.
(3) The final individual to be awarded is the anonymous publicist who once informed me that the reason his studio doesn’t screen some of its pictures for reviewers is that they’re “dogs.” This is commercial correctness raised to sublimity (his bosses must be tickled pink): his remark succinctly and frankly establishes that, contrary to appearances, it’s the publicist who actually reviews the pictures, deciding what to show and not show reviewers, and the reviewer who does the publicity, by faithfully following the publicist’s critical cues.
(3) MGM. It pretends in its press materials–and therefore has many of us believing–that the plot of Six Degrees of Separation, one of the year’s better movies, sprang full-blown from writer John Guare’s head. In fact, the story actually happened, and more than once. The story behind Abbas Kiarostami’s brilliant 1990 Iranian documentary feature Close Up is remarkably similar: a show-biz impostor charms his way into a well-to-do household with the promise of flattering screen appearances for his hosts, then gets arrested and philosophically chewed over at length, meanwhile exposing as well as appealing to diverse forms of middle-class voyeurism in us all.
