Sharks, Sirens, and Other Hollywood Icons

 

I’m lucky indeed to live in a place where movies are part of the landscape. And I’m doubly lucky because I’m a member of the Motion Picture Academy’s new museum, which takes pride in investigating the culture of movies from every angle. Since its opening in 2021, I’ve been to the Academy Museum multiple times, exploring movies in terms of their artistry, their technological mastery, and their impact upon world culture.

 The Academy Museum hardly ignores the motion pictures that represent foreign lands. I remember an exhibit vividly showing off key clips from the audacious Spanish writer/director Pedro Almodóvar. Currently, there’s a lovely tribute to Hayao Miyazaki’s charming animated Ponyo, as well as an in-depth look at the career of Korean auteur Bong Joon Ho, the brilliant satirist behind Okja and the Oscar-winning Parasite.   

 Still, the museum is fundamentally in and of Hollywood, and so you can rightly expect that many exhibits will focus on the men and women of the Hollywood studio system. (A newish permanent exhibit highlights the building of studio lots in the still-wide-open Southern California landscape, as well as the background of the men—several of them immigrants—who arrived in town with a gleam in their eyes and began to create an industry.) And some of the museum’s most lavish exhibits delve into the making of Hollywood’s greatest hits as well as the careers of Hollywood’s most indelible stars.

 Set to close soon is an appropriately massive  exhibit on the making and marketing of Jaws. (No surprise that this blockbuster is given star treatment, given that its director—Steven Spielberg—has been a generous supporter of the museum since its inception. And the surviving 25-foot fiberglass model of the film’s arch-villain, Bruce the Shark, permanently hangs over the museum’s escalator to give visitors a quick thrill.)  It was fascinating to discover how the timely improvisation of the three central actors helped bring to life Peter Benchley’s novel, but I equally enjoyed my glimpses of the film’s global marketing campaign. It featured  Jaws foreign language posters (the one from Japan, riffing on a hugely famous Hokusai woodblock print, is particularly clever) as well as zany collectors’ items like a shark-shaped souvenir cup with a straw that looks like a hapless swimmer.

 Though Jaws is going bye-bye, there’s a new and extensive salute to Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood Icon. For those who associate Monroe solely with her sexy role in Some Like It Hot or with the gossip surrounding her connection with President John F. Kennedy, it’s refreshing to focus in on other aspects of her talents. Though she certainly nourished her siren image, the off-screen Monroe was a serious reader who worked hard to polish her dramatic skills. The exhibit includes, along with some fabulous spangled gowns, the casual streetwear she preferred when she was not in front of the cameras. By happenstance, I’d just re-watched The Seven Year Itch, the (slightly toned-down) film version of a naughty Broadway hit about a middle-aged husband—home alone for the summer—who fantasizes abut the sexy young woman living upstairs. Tom Ewell, a terrifically average-looking comic actor, was the male lead on both stage and screen. In the film version, the dream girl was played by Monroe, as a charming though slightly dizzy blonde languishing in the heat of her top-floor digs. This is the film in which her flouncy white dress billows up when she stands over a subway grate. But the museum also displays the modest pink pjs she wears when invited downstairs for a nightcap, thus crushing Ewell’s erotic expectations.

 

Japanese "woodblock" ad for "Jaws"

Marilyn's PJs in "The Seven Year Itch"  

 

M is for Miyazaki, Manga Master

The Japanese written language isn’t really built on an alphabet like ours. So when I say that names starting with the letter M seem to play a prominent role in Japanese pop culture, I’m speaking strictly from an American perspective. Still, it’s a curious fact that one of today’s most significant authors and one of the world’s top contemporary artists are both surnamed Murakami. Haruki Murakami, born in 1949, has won many literary prizes for such eerily prescient novels as 1Q84. Takashi Murakami, now enjoying a major exhibition at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, blurs art and commerce in his colorful and often outrageous paintings. There’s also at least one more celebrated Murakami, the novelist and filmmaker Ryū. No relation: there seems to be a certain shortage of family names in Japan. (Purists will notice I’m using the western custom of putting each man’s given name ahead of his surname, the reverse of the traditional Japanese name order. Because, of course, I’m a westerner.) 

 Anyway, I want to focus on yet another M name: Hayao Miyazaki, the brilliant manga artist and maker of animated films, who began directing features back in 1979. So dominant an influence is he on the worldwide film industry that when L.A.’s Academy Museum opened last year, an entire floor of exhibition space was dedicated to his career. I was inspired by that beautifully mounted exhibit to watch 2004’s Howl’s Moving Castle, which—thanks to its gorgeous hand-drawn graphics and enchanting plot—remains my favorite Miyazaki film. But the most honored of his works is doubtless Spirited Away, from 2001.

 Miyazaki’s mature works are hardly blithe comedies. Jolly Disney-style uplift is not for him. (In Spirted Away, the lead character’s parents are suddenly metamorphosed, over lunch, into pigs.) His films reflect his somewhat sardonic nature, his commitment to environmentalism, his belief in strong female characters, and his awareness that violence is always lurking. His sense of the omnipresence of war is strongly felt in his latest film, The Boy and the Heron. It is just coming into theatres now, a holiday gift for fans who were once dismayed that he’d called 2013’s The Wind Rises his final film before moving into a well-earned retirement.

 I’ve discovered that the opening scenes of The Boy and the Heron are drawn to some extent from his own life-experience.  Miyazaki was born in 1941 into an affluent family.  His father, the head of an aircraft company, manufactured parts for World War II fighter planes. When Hayao was three years old, the family evacuated from Tokyo to semi-rural Utsunomiya.  Two years later, after Utsunomiya itself was bombed by Allied forces, they moved once again. The horrific sight of a bombed-out city marks the opening of this film. Young Mahito loses his mother in a firestorm; his father (a maker of aircraft parts) remarries, and he finds himself in a mysterious country home presided over by tiny, wizened “grandmothers” and talking birds. As always in Miyazaki, life remains unstable: characters radically change their size and identity, and the boy has to sort out—with great difficulty—his allies and his foes. This degree of dark-hued whimsy can be hard on the viewer. It’s difficult, in a film over two hours long, to keep track of all the connections and transformations. Why, for instance, all those evil parakeets?

 Did I like The Boy and the Heron? I’m still not quite sure. One thing I did unequivocally love: those gorgeous painterly backdrops, which seem so much more solid and “real” than the fantastic and sometimes grotesque characters who move through them.