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HOLLYWOOD, THE HADES OF MODERN MAN

This could be recognized in the ancient faces. They were all distinguished from each other as symbols of the inexhaustibility and abundance of God, and they were at the same time all like one another because of the consciousness that all diversity is born from a single Creator. This eternal combination of similarity and difference, both through God, characterizes the ancient faces.

— Max Picard, The Human Face

If I may take but a single example from the vast field of our progress: we are able to speak with each other across thousands of miles, but can we therefore understand one another? Are we speaking the truth to each other simply because we have placed a miracle between us, one that consists of making our voices heard across thousands of miles? And when a friend in Australia speaks to his friend in Colombia, as they say ‘by wireless’, does this ‘technical wonder’ eliminate malice, lies or treachery from their speech? Isn’t it, in fact, easier to lie when the speakers are not face to face? And even if it should become possible for me to see my friend in Cairo while he sees my face in Paris, would we recognize each other more easily that way than when we are standing next to each other in the same room? Shouldn’t it be more difficult to recognize each other? Can a telescope transform the inability of my eye to recognize into an ability to recognize? On the contrary — the telescope, even if it is perfect, merely strengthens the visual acuity of an eye, no matter if the eye sees falsely or correctly, but it cannot change a deceptive, lying eye into a genuine and true eye. And if the false heart of a false friend were to tell me of his affection from a million miles distant, through use of the most powerful loudspeakers, the so-called technical wonder would not have transformed the falseness of his heart into integrity but would only have magnified it. And if we have succeeded in making shadows move on the screen of the cinema as if they were living people and, further still, to speak and sing, their motions, words and songs are by no means honest and genuine; rather, these wonders of the screen signify that the reality that they so remarkably copy wasn’t difficult to recreate for the very reason that it wasn’t real. In fact, the real people, the living ones, had already become so shadowy that the screen shadows were bound to seem real.

When, now and then, I come upon an actor whom I recognize because I have seen him in a film in the theatre, it seems to me that because I have seen him on the screen I am not looking at him but at his shadow, although it is certain (and my intelligence tells me so) that he is the originator of the shadow that I know from the screen. Nevertheless, when I meet the living and breathing man he becomes for me a shadow of his own shadow. If it were plausible — that is to say, if it were truly possible to animate the shadows that we project on to the screen with technology’s assistance — I should certainly see in the living actor something more than just himself, a living being. I should rather see a person who has the power to infuse his shadow with the very breath of life. It is thus a mysterious force that condemns a living person, God’s creation, bestowed with the divine gift of being able to animate his shadow on the screen, to appear as his own shadow. Yes, one could say that he is even less than a shadow of himself, since the shadow is actually his true existence; he is not himself but, as it were, his own doppelgängers — a doppelgänger that has no existence; he is, this actor, the doppelgänger of his own shadow, one that he projects on to the screen daily. A single time he had his own form captured on film. A single time, but for all eternity the most fleeting of all fleeting things of our earthly existence (namely a shadow) will last as a reality. To be one’s own doppelgänger would in itself be a frightful event! But what can we say to the fact that the doppelgängers of their own shadows are among us — living people, walking, living, eating, drinking and loving?

And it gets still more terrible. For even a doppelgänger must die — one day both the original and his doppelgänger will die. And when an ordinary man dies his shadow also disappears. But the actor who plays in the cinema will live for ever on the screen, the only real milieu of his actual life. That is to say, his shadow or, more accurately, his true self (for he is only the doppelgänger of his shadow) is ‘eternal’. That is also to say, certain men have lived not as men but as shadows and therefore cannot die. They cannot die because they have never lived. They are shadows. They have willingly, more or less voluntarily, become shadows. They have sold their shadows for money and said these were not shadows but actually themselves. And they sold not only their lives; they also sold their deaths. Hollywood paid them. In exchange they forfeited their hope of salvation. They were not only shadows for their entire lives; they remained shadows after their deaths. On the screen, for which they had lived when they were still alive, they still had the chance to be alive and remain that way for all eternity. Because during their lifetimes they saw their shadows as themselves and sold them as themselves, and under such circumstances death was not a phenomenon with which they concerned themselves — once they had signed a contract with Hollywood. Perhaps an ordinary man still counts on eternal salvation. But a man who lives by being a shadow while he is alive possesses, as it were, his own eternal salvation. He is convinced — and not without merit — that the screen, for which he has already lived as a physical phenomenon, guarantees him a comprehensible, rationally believable eternity even after he is dead. The inventor of film has offered people the prospect of an immortality that they can understand while they yet live. The ancient world knew of a Hades that was the residence of the dead, those who had crossed into the shadow world.

The world in which we now live knows a Hades of the living — it is the cinema. Hollywood is the modern Hades. There, shadows become immortal during one’s lifetime.