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Thursday, October 24, 2019

Lew Jones -------------- Ishtar Film Theory


Lewton Thomas Jones
Graduate Film Theory  
                        ISHTAR THE LAST GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL
The movie Ishtar by Elaine May is a comedy starring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman. The plot went something like this~ Two struggling songwriters meet by circumstance in New York and begin doing their own unpolished songs like ‘Dangerous business,’ ‘Software,’ and Wardrobe of Love’ (We’re Just as good as Paul Simon or Bruce Springsteen) w/their spouses along for a tortuous ride. They get a music agent named Marty Freed (Jack Weston). After getting a bad response from an open-mike Marty tells them he can book them out of the country. Elaine May takes Rogers and Clarke to Morocco and finally to Ishtar. They meet a left-wing agent (May was considered a Commie in the 50’s) named Shirra Assel (Isabelle Adjani) then a CIA agent Jim Harrison (Charles Grodin) never suspecting they are carrying the map that will inflame the middle east. The Emir wants them dead and all they want to do is get booked at a club and cut an album. As comedy Ishtar falls into several genres. The film is May’s attempt at new fetish comedy in that marriage is in the narrative (Gerald Mast 458) despite the obstacles creates a wedding of sorts, even though both of their spouses are gone but the songwriting duo and Shirra Assel are wed metaphorically with their goals. (pg 459)Gerald Mast describes this type of comedy as; “after successfully combating terrible foes, the protagonist earns both life and love as his rewards.” This is the typical plot of melodrama.”
     Ishtar is also a parody /comedy as it was intentionally similar to Romancing The Stone, but as mock-up in its style. The third comedic style you find is The reductio ad absurdum which Gerald Mast describes as; “A simple human mistake or social question is magnified, reducing the action to chaos and the social question to absurdity.” We can see in Ishtar shades of Ionesco-Chairs, Sartre’s No Exit and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are Dead. Not to mention Anton Chekov the father of ‘realistic absurdism.’ Ishtar is didactic  (pg 460) Mast points out; “The typical progression of such a plot rhythmically is from one to infinity. Perfect for revealing the ridiculousness of social or human attitudes, such a plot frequently serves a didactic function.” Elaine May takes the dream of being songwriters to the point of manic obsession. Hoffman and Beatty’s characters are willing to lose everything, their spouses, their homes, their passports and even their lives to get to the vanishing point. Another comedic style we see is called ‘riffing’ or what (462) Mast describes as; ‘goofing’ or ‘miscellaneous bits,” or improvised and anomalous gaggery.” May was an expert in this style; coming from the comedy team Nichols and May. She was a woman intellectual during television in the 1950’s. Mast (462) continues; “The Sennet/paraody riffing films take some initial situation-perhaps a place (Ishtar in this case) and then run off a series of gags that revolve around this central situation.” Woody Allen a peer to May comes to mind regarding this style. The semiotics of a film reveal its nature by introducing us to the characters of the film and we as spectators then identify the scene as comic. We as spectator are ready to follow the genre with this in mind.

The goddess Ishtar is a goddess of fertility, love, war, romance and adventure and is equivalent to Venus, Kali  and Isis. Elaine May’s Ishtar  is a movie that in theory is both mythology and contemporary realism via the use of the apparatus and the jingle of big business.  The Elaine May Ishtar  was a movie of huge proportions  costing 51 million dollars in 1987. It was 23 million over its original budget. Key terms in film theory immediately pop up-‘excess, auteur, feminism and production. When Warren Beatty is thrown in the equation as co-producer we think of ‘perfectionist’ and Hollywood star and womanizer. Add Dustin Hoffman to Ishtar and we have a montage of great interest and possibility in the brew.  The excess began from the beginning; for example, Columbia spent 8 million dollars on advertising, prints, promotion and publicity. (NY Times 87) The question arises; how did a movie that was scheduled to cost 28 million go so wildly over budget?  The Hollywood Reporter called it in 1987; “Colossally dunderheaded.”  The Daily News said; “A half -baked comedy that somehow turned into a runaway ego trip.” The Los Angeles Herald Examiner called it; “a piffle with a 40 million-plus price-tag.” Those who hated it even before it came out probably didn’t like Elaine May anyway. Janet Maslin of the New York Times admitting a lot of monotony in the film said; “The best is funny, sly, cheerful and here and there even genuinely inspired.” The stars of the movie appealed to an older audience. Columbia’s distribution president James Spitz at the time said; “We did very good business in Los Angeles, but it was a disaster of major proportions in Chicago. The cultural semiotics obviously played on the star appreciation in Los Angeles where Chicago didn’t care it would seem.  Spitz went on to say; “When Siskel and Ebert got through with the movie, nobody-and I mean nobody-came to see it.” The inside info was that Warren Beatty proposed the film to Guy McElwaine, Columbia’s chairman. The idea presented was a comedy with Beatty and Hoffman directed by improvisation comedian/auteur Elaine May. It was whispered that Mr. Mc Elwaine purchased Ishtar without a script.”  The Hollywood model for making a movie was activated by Beatty and Hoffman getting 5.5 million each, plus Beatty getting $500,000 for producing. Elaine May got $1.5 million for writing the script and directing. The movie budget  was $14 million without the camera being turned on. A metaphoric apparatus was at play in Ishtar. The trio of equal force have all been dubbed perfectionists. Their differing views almost created a static mise en scene. The word on the street was that each star and the director worked on their own final cuts of the film once during the editing. Plus there were three separate teams of editors working all day getting paid double time, triple time, and the most expensive of all golden time. If that excess wasn’t enough Beatty didn’t approve the poster until a year later –six weeks before it opened. 
     Elaine May was originally with Mike Nichols as a leftist comedy team.  The joke of this movie would be as Deleuze’s notion of political cinema; “If there were a modern political cinema it would be on this basis; the people no longer exist, or not yet.” Elaine May’s profile in society as a woman film maker could be viewed in the feminist dogma as ‘victim.’ Laura Marks argues;“ The element of communal experience that is implicit in Bergson’s theory of perception necessarily informs the process of cinematic spectatorship as well. Perception is never a purely individual act but also an engagement with the social and cultural memory.”  We see cultural semiotics already in post production ie. the level of fiction, organization, of film content . Rutsky regarding film analysis states; “The context in which a film is made determines how it is made. It is therefore a mistake to neglect examining a film’s context or to treat contextual analysis, as merely “extra work” …(which leads to excess). Ishtar was imitating the comedy of life which is its tragic absurdity. It deals with show business, the military Industrial Complex, cultural screwball and the demise of The Great Amercian Novel which Norman  Mailer said couldn’t be wrote anymore, because of our fragmented society. Elaine May in a comedic brushstroke reveals that mediocrity is the gel that holds us together today. The film is prophetic of the Bush Iraq invasion. Rutsky, goes on to say; “The production of a film is the situation when financed and produced. Films financed and produced by major Hollywood studios are, for example, subject to a range of influences and pressures that affect the film’s ultimate form. Financial pressures and creative vision are in many ways, structurally at odds in this process and the negotiation of these conflicts cannot help but define the resulting film. Often this process has been seen in terms of a conflict between the vision of the auteur and the restrictive structures of Hollywood.” No none could have predicted the cult status that Ishtar receives today. Elaine May a known esoteric and no stranger to sarcasm. In her film a NewLeaf she shows how people will react to money and power through Walter Mathau’s character. (who will kill to get his money until love stops him.) The impression of reality takes away the psychosis of false desire. This style could be her signature as director/ auteur.
     The goal of Elaine May’s characters in Ishtar is to become ‘famous’ at least with Lyle and Chuck (Beatty and Hoffman). Chuck is or ‘The Hawk’ is willing to give this dream up temporarily after gazing at Shirra  Assel’s breast (People’s Party in middle East) in the airport in Morocco. The feministic humor is in a soft Marxist way revealed in this scene. The Wikipedia defines the Apparatus theory as; “The cinema is by nature ideological because its mechanics of representation are ideological.” The breast is in fact an ideological and cultural exchange if not mythological and psychoanalytic.
The dominant ideology of the culture within the viewer is in this case the goddess of past and present as revealed by the apparatus.  Ideology is not imposed on cinema however it is part of its nature.  The best joke is that when Lyle touches her breast after he mistakes Shirra Assel for a guy.  The screwball nature of the film is the left breast (Marxist) is gazed by Chuck and the right (Capitalist) breast is not seen but is felt up. This is Elaine May coupling. It is all part of the goddess and the modernistic connection to that which serves the primal functions. The woman is the image and the look, but only in regards to the goals, of the characters. The suspicions are released as Lyle is advised by Shirra Assel to go to the market ask for Mohammed and buy a blind camel. Chuck (Hoffman) is accepting money from the CIA (Grodin) who helped him get his passport back. Perception is May’s way of joining the paralleling of plot and sub plot. We as the spectators know that Lyle and Chuck are hiding in their new roles from each other. It is the shift from New York to Morocco that flips this perspective and why it created detractors. Unlike the Hope Crosby travel movies Elaine May has cast an existential paradox in the montage. This as film theory is‘variety’ -(151 Anatomy of Film) Bernard Dick writes; “A great director need not have a wide repertoire of themes; there is a difference between a varied body of work and a varied number of themes. The same scenes can occur within that body of work, repeated or modified to fit the particular type of film.” The style of Elaine May is repetitive in that she enjoys revealing absurdity in narration and action. She uses language as a sort of contradiction of purpose. In the auctioneer scene Chuck (Hoffman sells guns to the runners as Lyle (Beatty) relays the nonsensical yelling with positive responses. May shows us a parallel to the breast scene how desire can transcend language . When you need water or your life is in danger you will reach out in primal way to simply communicate any way you can. The mise en scene is the reality of whatever culture one is caught up in. It dominates the air with language. Wittgenstein wrote; “Language is the mirror to Society.” Godard would see this as the reflection of reality on itself. Orson Wells once said; “I believe a work is good to the degree that it expresses the man who created it.” In May’s case the woman who created it.  The Hope Crosby road films are a genre that Elaine May modeled Ishtar after. Ishtar fell into Becket’s Waiting For Godot with cinematic humor at play in the desert scene with the blind camel. (the beads didn’t shine like they were told)  The desert’s existential overtones were never intended in the early road movies. This analogy can be seen (text 693) in what Thomas Schatz describes; “Although verbal language systems are essentially neutral and meaningless, film genres are not. As a system English grammer is not meaningful either historically or in socially specific terms. It is manipulated by a speaker to make meaning.”
The inability to speak Arabic but able to communicate is May’s way of injecting the entertainment communication she is versed in, which is comedy of the absurd. Like Anton Chekov ‘The father of realistic absurdism.” May creates a story too real to not evoke laughter. (692 Text) –Schatz states; “Among other things, the commercial film is a communication system- it structures and delivers meaning. Throughout its history, evocative phrases like “the grammar of film” and “the cinematic language system” have suggested that filmic communication is comparable to verbal communication.” Ishtar is a movie about communication whether it be chuck and Lyle singing bad songs in clubs or the CIA cutting deals with Shah. The climax of course is the map that will inflame the Middle East brought by the two messengers. It would seem that to succeed in the arts you need to go to an oil rich Arabian site find something of huge historical value and black mail two cultures in order to get a recording contract. Bordwell (text 775) says; “The classic narrative cinema –paradigmatically, studio feature film making in Hollywood since 1920-rests upon particular assumptions about the narrative structures, cinematic style, and spectorial activity.” In regards to art as a mode of cinema May would agree that a narrative is a way to create art as life.and vice versa. Ishtar is definitely political social satire her trademark since television in the 1950’s. Bordwell goes on to say; “Identifying a mode of production/consumption does not exhaustively characterize the art cinema, since the cinema also consists of formal traits and viewing conventions.” Ishtar was labeled “Hollywood” from the get go so it was placed with less than artistic high art. The spectator understands the communication of the film which commercial. It is in retrospect especially after the invasion of Iraq that the viewer is privy to the information and chaotic intentions that Elaine May put into her script. The spectator is educated by the realism of an historical fact and can now understand the consequence of bad communication.
     A filmmaker’s unconscious mind and the psychological mechanisms effect the viewing process  Baudry asserts. “The union of semiology which is psychoananalytic is concerned with the symbolic science of cinema or semiology of the cinema” according to Metz. In Ishtar Elaine May has similarities to Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser who believed that individuals as ‘subject’ think they are creative agents much like Beatty and Hoffman’s characters (songwriters). They enjoy the very experience that subjugates them. This is even more true when they are being chased by the CIA and the Middle East for mistaken identity. For Baudry this self-mis-recognition is what Lacan called the ‘mirror phase.’ We watch the music careers of Chuck and Lyle as spectators with a sense of power because we identify with the apparatus as voyeur. It is not really us that are so untalented. We watch the film as optic judges which Baudry defines as ; “artificial halluncinatory psychosis of the cinema apparatus.” The dream of being famous is what Freud saw as a biographic psychoanalysis that is using the dream as metaphor. Ishtar as a film about losers and in reality becoming a loser film becomes cult like because reality is in conformity to our inner dreams. It serves as a mirror through which the spectator can identify their self as a coherent and omnipotent ego able to judge what is good and what talent is. People can sit in the theater or watch Ishtar like gods with the camera activity hidden. Elaine May as film maker uses her unconscious mind to reveal the psychological mechanisms in the viewing process or what Baudry calls; “more than real or perspective artificalis, the mystic writing pad, the cave or mimesis.’ Elaine May helps us to understand our past as film stops being special and becomes temporal or as Deleuze says; “It is through the camera that we have to live in a universe that is metacinamatic.” This lets the spectator into all kinds of virtual past and future images which are stored-actual-present images constantly generated with both types mutually influencing one another. In Elaine May’s script we can in this sense come to understand the past, present and future through camera consciousness which has entered our perception. Shapiro states; “experiencing events critically in the present is made possible not by the exercise of a faculty of judgment, that is: to integrate with cognitive function but by a cinematographic apparatus.” The confusion of American culture and Arabic culture in Ishtar is to understand contemporary culture and its parts and futures and necessitates a development of a camera consciousness. Otherwise we are lost in imperialistic voyeurism and blatant dumb down humor to benefit those ignorant to the joke. It is easier for May to use film and editing to jump between layers of time as well as the actual and the virtual, immersion where the past, present and future coexist. Ishtar starts with the mundane lives of two characters who want to be in show business with the song; “telling the truth can be dangerous business, honest and popular don’t go hand in hand, if you admit that you play the accordion, no one will hire you in a rock and roll band, but we can sing our hearts out, and if we are lucky the neighbors won’t complain.” (song Dangerous Business) The scenes are broken up in flash backs and then a geographical jump to a totally foreign culture but they maintain this dream that is like the film/Hollywood. It is in various as well as linearly another world with a transcendental world of difference, like Oz when Dorothy leaves Kansas in a dream.
There is the real and unreal images where only the actual is in the physical present as we follow Chuck and Lyle on their path to stardom and intrigue. This is the l’actuel et le virtuel. As Baudry sees it; “ Every actual image is surrounded by a fog of virtual images.” We can’t see the vision of Chuck and Lyle’s dream in Ishtar but we know it there by their actions and the narrative at play. All our perceptions are like particles that construct and deconstruct themselves from frame to frame as our real object-mirror-object. The screen comes alive with sound that is culturally contemporary and we join in to laugh or judge the movie Ishtar.
   The sound narrative in Ishtar is a musical sound track but it also is a cultural exchange as we see Chuck and Lyle bumbling through the streets of Morocco. Charles Grodin as a CIA agent enters Chuck’s room and says, “Hi I’m an American, I heard you were here too.” He has Chuck give his autograph for his son and tells him to keep the pen which is a bug. Privacy is the issue and the idea that if you are American you will be watched if you go outside the language of one’s reality. Doane sees this as,” the voice in humans” or the fantasmatic in cinema where sound is married to image. Doane feels it is technicians and presence that make sound marketable and closer where the sound seems anchored in space. She sees this as ‘body oppression’ with characters and spectators (with topology) are the server spaces. Chuck is the servant to the CIA in Ishtar in a representational illusion of place or as Doane says; “A disconnected bulb for enunciation mise en scene perpetuating the image of unity.” The CIA in Elaine May’s film is there to give it a controlling tone of oppression but distance for the viewer.
There is a scene in Ishtar where Chuck is negotiating in the customs room to get another passport. He realizes that he made a mistake and jumps up a punches the wall which turns out to be very thin with a stranger looking in. It is slapstick in a sense but it also reveals to the spectator that even in the movie the apparatus or what seems hidden is a prop of sorts. Belton says; “You can’t conceal the artifice, effacement is never totally successful, it reveals itself in a kind of transformed state in the aesthetics and stylish practices that grow out of the work.” Elaine May is a comedian foremost and understands absurdism and existentialism which are in play all over Ishtar. The sound track in Ishtar pervades an almost anthem of mediocrity making a nonsensical connection to the reality of show biz and what we perceive as spectators. Belton sees sound technology; “as transparent or not inevitable revealing its own presence in the form of consciousness that intervenes between one spectator and the original sound…transmit and transform, the cinema remains the phenomenological par excellence, it weds or collapses consciousness with the world.” Ishtar received no Oscar awards but it received three Razzie Awards, ‘Worst Director-Elaine May, Worst Producer-Warren Beatty and Worst Screen Play-Elaine May. In defense Warren Beatty said; “Ishtar is a very good, not very big, comedy, made by a brilliant woman, and I think it’s funny.” Dustin Hoffman commented; ”There’s an underlying message to that movie, you know, that I think made it worth doing, and I would do it again in a second.”  Elaine May in an interview with Mike Nichols said that she has met many people who say they hate Ishtar but never actually saw it. In the New York Times June 1, 1987 (Late City Final Edition) David Chasman, a long time studio executive commented; “The 94 day shooting day shooting schedule was not out of line for a major movie, but it was out of line for a supposedly small comedy.” He went on to say; “The villain is not the unfortunate star but the irresolute, weak, and indecisive executive. Artists aren’t supposed to be responsible. Executives are supposed to make shrewd judgments.” It is possible that post production editing could have make her mirror of reality more palatable, but the slow dance on the killing ground clowing would not existed. The auteur status of Elaine May was left unsullied and film theory has a new icon of contradictions to add to the pile.   
     In regards to Hollywood genres Ishtar was expected to fall into that mold and when it didn’t it was condemned. The comedy that Elaine May is known for is improvisation or free association. When humor is sophisticated as much of it is in Ishtar you need a select audience. A Hollywood audience especially at the time saw no humor in failing songwriters or U.S. dealings in the Middle East. May told Mike Nichols in a recent interview that she modeled the movie around the Iran-Contra, Reagan time.(she missed Trump/Syria/Kurds) The prophetic truth was soon to be revealed with Star Search, George Bush w/ son, all compelled to act out the movie  Ishtar with zest and gusto to a sea of television viewers in the early 90’s and 2004. The Hollywood of 1987 is much different to the one after 911 as well. Thomas Schatz (pg. 691 Text) states; “There is a sense, then in which a film genre is both a static and a dynamic system. On the one hand, it is a familiar formula of interrelated narrative and cinematic components that serves to continually reexamine some basic cultural conflict.” In regards to typecasting a genre as say ‘Hollywood’ Schatz  goes on to say; “ For as one sees more genre films, one tends to negotiate the genre less by its individual films than by its deep structure.” The playfulness in Elaine May’s script was in contrast to what a ‘road movie’ or a Hollywood comedy should be. The language had a different tone in Ishtar and this for May was true to the nature of the comedy. Schatz might agree when he says (Pg693 text), “A film genre, conversely, has come into being because of its cultural significance as a meaningful narrative system.” Elaine May who uses language to go out of genre would lend her prowess to the verbal narrative. Regarding this Schatz says; “Whereas a verbal statement represents a speaker’s organization of neutral components into a meaningful pattern, a genre film represents an effort to reorganize a familiar, meaningful system in an original way.” May’s originality is never in question and her script in Ishtar is all about the female role and the outside inside Godardian dance into the real.
     Feminism was not the driving force with Elaine May because she felt comfortable interacting with men and regarded their burden as universal. We can see this in her empathy for the male characters who follow their art just may did and the repercussions on their relationships. Willa leaves Lyle and Carol leaves Chuck (Hawk). The idea here is dedication to the craft as May sees it creates a different marriage which is show business. When Chuck arrives too save Lyle from his bad versions of Simon and Garfunkle, they highlight the night with a sing a long- There’s No Business Like Show Business.” This is not to say  May’s unaware of the gazing at Shirra Assel by Chuck and Lyle. Shirra Assel is a protagonist for her own country as a left wing agent to unseat the Shah. There is a Jewish spin on the film’s idiom and linguistic stasis concerning cultural repression, but Elaine May lets the action pull the film along till all three get what they want. For Shirra Assel it is equal rights for her people. The only way to secure human dreams however is to get control with a map of antiquity that will inflame the Middle East if the wrong hands get it. This political positioning  according to Stam and Spense (Pg 885 Text) is described as; “Satirical or parodic films, in the same way, may be less concerned with constructing positive images than with challenging the stereotypical expectations an audience may bring to a film.” In response to the Arabic images in Ishtar (pg 887) Stam and Spense write; “Western attitudes toward non-western peoples are also played on here. Hassiba is first seen in traditional Arab costume, her face covered by a veil.” Shirra Assel is veiled and both lyle and Chuck first mistake her for a boy.  Stam and Spense continue (887); “So dressed she is a reminder of Arab women in other films who function as a sign of the exotic.” May gets this joke and uses it to say that women are empowered by their own circumstances and not by western standards. Shirra Assel tells Lyle who says he will see her again soon; “you are such an American, this is a very old culture you are in.” This point of view is addressed by May in many scenes of Ishtar’s contemporary antiquity. The line that chuck wisely proclaims to Lyle in their earlier meetings: ‘That’s because most men choose to live their lives in quiet desperation.” Lyle (Beatty) responds in a Texas drawl; “Boy you can say that again.”The advantage of colonial privilege is apparent in Ishtar and would be suspect by audiences today due to a younger audience with coined diversity tattoos rampant. Elaine May’s humor doesn’t change the fact but it creates a laugh like Chaplin, she has brought empathy into the dark cave of spectatorship. Stam and Spense (Pg 888) write; “The question of the point of view is crucial then, but it is more complex than at first appear. The granting of point-of-view shots to the oppressed does not guarantee a non-colonial perspective.” Elaine May greatest accomplishment in Ishtar was to create a movie that takes reality and through a series of montages deconstructs the deconstruction dogma of the new insecure rules in art. It is better that it failed than succeeded commercially because its biggest trick was to neutralize the idea of war and conflict as being nothing more than people’s need for fame, power and  marriage of cultures.  (Mast 75) Eisenstein in regards to montage and conflict  says that; “ a montage is characterized by collision. By the conflict of two pieces in opposition to each other.” Ishtar is full of this conflict, first personally then culturally. Eisenstein says; “So montage is conflict.” May as auteur was examining her own conflicts in Ishtar either, as a women spectator,entertainer or social political comedian. Her cinematographer language is about the relevance. De Saussure’s project of general semiotics states; “to study the ordering and functioning of the main signifying units used in the filmic message.” (103 Mast)  May used Ishtar as a didactic narrative for the first gulf war. She did this by showing us the American dream and then the Middle East dream. May’s connotation and denotation brought these signs together. The viewer can decide if it’s funny or boring as many did though some didn’t.  Metz writes; “The study of connotation brings us closer to the notion of the cinema as an art (the seventh art). As I have indicated elsewhere in more detail, the art of film is located on the same semiological “plane” as literary art.” May’s script depended on the star power of Beatty and Hoffman. Her cinematographic style was philosophical, humanitarian and ideological in a comedic atmosphere of semiological material. The editing in Ishtar was a big problem as Metz explains; (109  Mast) “ Human intervention, which carries some elements of a proper semiotics, affects only the level of connotation (lighting, camera angle, photographic effects,” and so on.” Sequence needs the apparatus to be in harmony with the creative process and Istar  survived this as a cult DVD but a movie disaster. Metz says; “ (119 Mast) “The filmic “shot” therefore resembles the statement rather than the word. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to say that it is equivalent to the statement.” “For there are still great differences between the shot and the linguistic statement.”
The ideological content of Ishtar was similar to the question (22 Mast) Bazin asks; “What is Cinema?”
He states; “The cinema owes virtually nothing to the scientific spirit.” May would agree, sometimes when its ‘art for art sake’ the apparatus and the rest are along for the ride and the artist takes the abuse at the end. May provided the viewer with a high profile of satire and exposure of dominant ideologies in a very funny way but didn’t have an audience of artists to catch all the symbols on display. (25Mast) Bazin describes it very well : “There are numberless writings, all of them more or less wildly enthusiastic, in which inventors conjure up nothing less than a total cinema that is to provide that complete illusion of life which is still a long way away.” May brought America too close to a reality that we cared little about in Morocco and an American karaoke culture that judges and is hateful of its own reflection. Rochelle O’Gorman (Amazon. Com Editorial Reviews) wrote; “Ishtar torpedoed May’s career as a director plus May’s unwillingness to make nice with Hollywood.” Gorman went on to say; “If this comedy had been made by unknowns, it would have simply faded into the obscurity it deserves, the fuss came about because May squandered much talent and a ridiculously large budget.” Let us go to circa 2008 and see the reality of this CIA/ military Industrial Complex/ The New Show Business (Star Search etc.)/Middle East Oil OPEC world and then judge Ishtar on this criteria. It would seem that May it would seem is a prophet or an artistic visionary who depicted in Ishtar the false mirror of what we call ‘art’ or the ‘profound’ or as Kracauser (Text pg. 153-1960) writes; “If a film is an art at all, it certainly should not be concerned with the established arts.” We now see Ishtar as a ‘cult film’ regarded as ‘film art’ as opposed to traditional art or outside the mock documentary genre. Gorman states; “Ishtar is a parody of Orientalism, American identity, politics and popular culture.” In regards to the Hope/Crosby and Nichols/May duos Gorman writes; “If Abbott and Costello had made this flick it might have worked.” I would disagree because may was on the other side of comedy with a wit that is only found in the brilliant Jewish history of comedy. The fact that May was Jewish made the Middle East closer to the sensibilities of her own world of spectator-ship. What May did with Ishtar was sublimate her own show biz experiences with the politics and psychology towards a world with higher IQ’s. She carries us to a better awareness for the general audience. The failure of Ishtar is the success of writing a nonsensical script. How do you write the Great American Novel in the metaphorical sense? The answer for the spectator is simply to show that what ties us together at this point is ‘mediocrity’ in the arts, in politics, in religion, in contemporary society today. May’s script may very well be the last ‘Great American Novel.’ The art of film is now invisible to the masses but mediocrity holds the show together. We see this when Lyle and Chuck get their recording contract by cutting a deal with the CIA and the Middle East. Parker Tyler( Film Theory #2 pg 45) writes; “If we scrutinize the practice of film criticism, even in superior places, we find the better fiction films frequently reviewed as if they were novels cast in sequences of pictorial and aural illustrations…Naturally, critics don’t always consciously commit themselves to an inevitable parallelism of film with literature and the stage.” (Pg 45 text #2)Tyler goes on to say; “A whole book has been written by a well-meaning and cultivated scholar about the methods by which film converts a novel into its own technical idiom.”  (George Bluestone’s book –Novels into Film, University of California Press, 1961).
In conclusion Elaine May is a transcended feminist auteur of high merit who through language and high comedy wrote a social political psychoanalytic  script that bombed at the box office but accomplished a place in the arts as literature.  Ishtar has become a cliché for failure just as the last administration and their policies and philosophies have become. May was concerned about Bush senior and his Iran-Contra excesses and with this movie she has left an historical film for the gene pool to gag on. I don’t think she was concerned about film theory when she created this celluloid novel but it falls into a place of intellectual discussion anyway. The rejection of Ishtar was the rejection of the mirror that parallels the world of today. Johnathan Rosenbaum (Internet Johnathon Rosebaum.com) writes; “I am willing to concede that Elaine May’s fourth feature (Ishtar) is less strong than the three that preceded it. But because I regard May as a major American writer-director and Ishtar as a movie that in no way betrays her uncommon talents, I would have included this title on my list even if it hadn’t sparked off a lynch-mob frenzy in the media.” May’s integrity is obviously looked on well in the know. In film we do have the message which begins with the press releases. We as spectator are involved in the psychological and social semiotics of the introduction of a film. Rosenbaum continues; “Most of the bile was occasioned by the film’s large budget and its producer and costar Warren Beatty’s handling of the press, both of which are so irrelevant to the film’s  merits that seem beneath discussion.” The expectations and the audience are influenced by the lords of the apparatus god or the corporation. Rosenbaum writes; “If money is a ‘real’ issue, why is much lesser talent like woody Allen given a free ride and everyone’s blessings for shooting his ludicrous September script twice, with larger separate casts?  The female victim wouldn’t appeal to May but she as feminist theory shows is not playing the traditional game as expected by a woman in the film industry. May’s wonderful sense of absurdity is apparent when Rosenbaum describes her at the screening; “A prominent LA publicist told me that she (May) got into trouble with some of her friends simply by laughing at the movie at a press screening.” He goes on; “As I’ve had occasion to argue elsewhere, May strikes me as the closest thing we have to Eric von Stroheim-not merely as an outlaw perfectionist and obsessive truth-teller (telling the truth can be dangerous business,” runs the theme song of Ishtar; “honest and popular don’t go hand in hand’) with the darkest view of the American Dream around, but in the very progression of her work.” (all quotes page 4) Rosenbaum summarizes May’s film as; “a subversion of Hollywood fantasy from within, set in a mythical country.” May is beyond American political correctness and sustainable consumptive up, up with people smoke screens. She is the true radical and has created a cult classic in a genre all to itself. Rosenbaum sums this up; “Perhaps the most subversive thing about Ishtar is not so much failure or mediocrity of her bumpkin heroes (Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, cast against type in Strheim-like fashion), or the havoc created by their Reagonite ignorance in the third world, with politics and show biz turned into mindless equivalents, as the fact that she loves them just the same as with Bertolucci, her simultaneous contempt and affection for the monstrous demands to be read, like her ferocious wit, as intricate auto-critique.” May is the comedian of true empathy Promethean and Chaplin in nature, and, Ishtar is her wonderful Trojan Horse delivered to the dark cubicle of spectatorship. The great surprise is that she wants a laugh rather than a war.






1.      Film Theory and Criticism, Mast and Cohen, New York , Oxford University Press, London 1974, Toronto
2.      Film Theory and Criticism, Marshal Cohen, Leo Baudy, New York, Oxford University Press, 2004
3.      Turning Point in Film History-Andrew J. Rausch, Citadel Press, Kensington Publishing, New York, 2004
4.      The American Film Institute Desk Reference, Dorling Kindersley Publishing Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York 2002
5.      Movie Making Course, Chris Patmore, Quatro Educational Series, 2005
 


Personal Essay by Rick Fordyce in the Seattle Times

3/9/24, 10:22 AM The Seattle Times https://replica.seattletimes.com/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?pubname=&pubid=84d463e0-c035-4...