August 16, 2006
Dog Day Afternoon
Zeitheist
With World Trade Center, 9/11 movies are back in theater, but I've opted to stay at home and watch another film from another decade reenacting another day in New York City history, Sidney Lumet's 1974 Dog Day Afternoon. From what I've read, WTC sticks to a conventional narrative, opting for emotion, or at least what passes for emotion in Hollywood these days. Dog Day has a similar allegiance to straightforward storytelling, but represents a time when directors mixed politics with popcorn without worrying about leaving a bad taste in audiences' mouths.
Like WTC, Dog Day is "based on a true story." On a hot one in August 1972, John Wojtowicz and Sal Naturile entered a Brooklyn bank, made an attempt at a robbery, got cornered by the cops, bunkered down and kept hostages for the next two days while trying to arrange a jet out of the country. Lumet's film follows most of the bare facts, but transforms John into Sonny (Al Pacino), a man thrown into the unfortunate circumstance of keeping eight hostages, negotiating with cops, and navigating his personal life all at the same time.
While a SWAT team would most likely waste Sonny and Sal were they to do what they did today, Dog Day Afternoon suggests that the political atmosphere is what held the police at bay back in the day. A crowd quickly forms around the police barricades outside the bank, which provides Sonny and Sal with a buffer of safety. "Attica! Remember Attica!" Sonny yells, raising the specter of the prison uprising and subsequent massacre of 42 inmates and hostages by the state of New York in 1971. When the media begins reporting that Sonny has undertaken the heist in order to raise funds for his wife Leon, a pre-op transwoman, to receive a sex change, the post-Stonewall gay rights movement joins the crowd with the chant, "Out of the closet and into the streets!"
Yet for all its sloganeering and political daring, Dog Day Afternoon, remains faithfully wedded to conventional narrative. It passes as a good film because Sidney Lumet is a consummate story teller; but like marriage itself, narrative cinema is ultimately a conservative institution. For instance, Lumet is less interested in the crowd outside than he is in the man inside, Sonny, and a series of conversations attempt to explain why Sonny is who he is. One involving Sonny and Leon is incredibly affecting - perhaps the emotional peak of the film - but the other two, between Sonny, his other (heterosexual) wife and his mother, almost suggest that Sonny's problems stem from the simple fact that women in his life just don't listen to him. The revealing of Sonny's sexuality also appears meant to play as a plot twist, and some reviews I've read even fail to mention it, lest they give away a pivotal "spoiler," despite the fact that it is essential to discussing the film with any seriousness.1
It does make me wonder if narrative cinema isn't like the police line keeping back the cheering crowds from Sonny, disconnecting his struggle from larger movements fighting for the same things (like proper health care for trans folks, for example). In the late 1960s and into the 70s, revolutionary politics and cinema yelled to one another, goaded each other on from across the barricade, but with the possible exception of the likes of Haskell Wexler and Emile de Antonio, they remained divided and conquered. Any who's sat through Michelangelo Antonioni's hopelessly out-of-touch Zabriskie Point understands just how badly divided they were.
In this sense, Dog Day Afternoon is more than a failed bank robbery; it's a failed moment in American cinema history. When I think of politics in American cinema, I picture Christine Bergstrom wandering through an actual police riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool. The scene is more than history as it is happening; it is American cinema's political potential passing us by. Medium Cool is like an early Godard gone American: imperfect but playful — and unabashedly political — in all the right places. Medium Cool feels dated only because no one has yet to go anywhere with its ideas; it's a Citizen Kane in waiting — a Comrade Kane, if you must.2 Some aspiring Leftist film studies scholar ought to give it the same contemporary reconsideration Dan Berger gives the Weather Underground in his recent book, Outlaws of America3
From what I understand, American cinema was better in the 1960s and 1970s for a variety of reasons. Financers were more open to director's experimentation, and the likes of the French New Wave were giving American directors fresh ideas about what experiments to undertake.4 And yet I'm willing to bet anyone top stock options at the latest Fortune 500 that it wasn't mere market forces — or a few Frenchies — that pushed American cinema in new directions. The same struggles that bristle at the barricades in Dog Day Afternoon also moved filmmakers to start addressing politics directly — not as something to be hid under the metaphorical mattress, within allegory and subtext, or worse, as vulgar concerns never to be raised at all.
To film critic Christopher Null, Dog Day Afternoon "captures perfectly the zeitgeist of the early 1970s, a time when optimism was scraping rock bottom and John Wojtowicz was as good a hero as we could come up with." I'd agree that Dog Day captures the zeitgeist, but otherwise, I have to question what Null is saying here.5
What heroes does Null think America was missing in the 1970s? Who was missing? Loving, caring, uncorrupt cops (no thanks COINTELPRO)? Unimpeachable presidents (no thanks Nixon)? Innocent Americans (No thanks Vietnam)? We have all these and more in World Trade Center and United 93, and the cinema is no better for it. The very day that politics fatefully interrupted Americans' lives is being purged of every possible political question for the sake of a conventional narrative, a story to tell.
Dog Day Afternoon, thankfully, does not completely succumb to this tendency; if anything it further politicizes Wojtowicz's story. Rather than the total absence of possibility, of hope and optimism, it represents possibilities yet to be realized — to get cinema out of the studio and into the streets.
NOTES:
1I also recall an interview with Lumet I once read in Cineaste, around the release of his recent Vin Diesel vehicle Find Me Guilty, in which Lumet's showed an aversion to discussing politics of any sort — aside from a strange suggestion that wearing white socks was a sign of solidarity with the working class — and emphasized that in his work, storytelling always comes first.
2Sorry for the stupid joke, I couldn't help myself.
3 My review of which is available here.
4 This is what I've gathered from a few friends, mostly. Somebody point me to a book or documentary, please!
5 You wouldn't believe the struggle I went through not to write "I find his opinion Null and void."
