A GOOD YEAR FOR RIPPING DOWN WALLS: Last week I listed my favorite films of 1999, a great year for movies. Today I'll list my favorite films of 1989, which was not a great year for movies but still produced enough good films to fill a list.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1989, it gave its Best Picture award to the plodding and patronizing Driving Miss Daisy. You won't find that one here:
1. Drugstore Cowboy Directed by Gus Van Sant Written by Van Sant, Daniel Yost, and William S. Burroughs, from a novel by James Fogle
An old junky priest prophecizes in that gravelly Bill Burroughs voice: "In the near future right-wingers will use drug hysteria as a pretext to set up an international police apparatus."
2. Motel Directed by Christian Blackwood
A movie about three American motels. It is -- no lie -- one of the greatest documentaries ever made.
3. Santa Sangre Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky Written by Jodorowsky, Roberto Leoni, and Claudio Argento
I never cottoned to the cult around Jodorowsky's most famous feature, El Topo, but I love this wild and disturbing phantasmagoria that he made 19 years later.
4. Do the Right Thing Written and directed by Spike Lee
Back in the day, there was a big debate over which was the better movie about race relations, Do the Right Thing or Driving Miss Daisy. Is anyone still willing to take Daisy's side of the argument? Spike Lee's angry yet ambiguous film was the sort of thoughtful picture that people like Stanley Kramer wanted to make back in the '50s and '60s but didn't have the talent to pull off. Twenty years after the fact, it is still the high point of Lee's career.
5. Monsieur Hire Directed by Patrice Leconte Written by Leconte and Patrick Dewolf, from a novel by Georges Simenon
A crime film whose mysteries are more about its characters than the murder in their midst.
6. Life and Nothing But Directed by Bertrand Tavernier Written by Tavernier and Jean Cosmos
Some of the best war movies take place after the war is over.
7. Crimes and Misdemeanors Written and directed by Woody Allen
Alan Alda proves the Fred MacMurray rule: It's more fun to watch a man play a villain when you've spent your life thinking of him as a goody-two-shoes.
8. Kiki's Delivery Service Directed by Hayao Miyazaki Written by Miyazaki, from a novel by Eiko Kadono
"You'd think they'd never seen a girl and a cat on a broom before."
9. Say Anything... Written and directed by Cameron Crowe
One of the best teen movies of the '80s. Much of the credit for that goes to the cast, especially John Mahoney, but it's also a solid directorial debut for Crowe, who wouldn't surpass this until he made Almost Famous 11 years later.
10. Mystery Train Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch
Part of a brief spate of flicks in the late '80s and early '90s that feature cameos by the ghost of Elvis. OK, it's just this one and True Romance.
Honorable mentions:
11. Creature Comforts (Nick Park) 12. Isle of Flowers (Jorge Furtado) 13. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (Peter Greenaway) 14. Jesus of Montreal (Denys Arcand) 15. Darkness, Light, Darkness (Jan Svankmajer) 16. Leningrad Cowboys Go America (Aki Kaurismäki) 17. Kitchen Sink (Alison Maclean) 18. The Hill Farm (Mark Baker) 19. Sweetie (Jane Campion) 20. The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (Alan Wareing)
Of the films of 1989 that I haven't seen, the one that interests me the most is Frederick Wiseman's epic documentary Near Death.
At one point that last piece discusses the mixed legacy of the therapists of the 1940s and '50s, contrasting the coercive psychiatrists "who offered modern, secular, supposedly rational reasons to mutilate gay patients' brains" with the exponents of humanist psychology ("an individualist and egalitarian approach" run by "analysts seeing voluntary clients, not asylum keepers administering snake pits"). I didn't have room to discuss it, but just as the liberal Protestant churches tended to be receptive to the humanists' views, the humanists' ideas, in turn, owed a lot to the liberal Protestant tradition, with important similarities to the doctrines of Quakers, Unitarians, and similar denominations. For Petigny, "the common thread running through situation ethics, Rogerian therapy, and religiously robust notions of the Holy Spirit is the optimistic belief that the answers to life's most important questions are to be discovered by looking internally and accessing a mysterious but wonderful power at the center of our very beings."
Petigny doesn't get into it in his book, but such ideas were prominent in another period of cultural and countercultural ferment: the Second Great Awakening that erupted in the early 19th century and fed the reform movements of the antebellum era. If it's hard to disentangle the liberating and authoritarian effects of psychology in the postwar period, it's even harder to perform such an operation on the "perfectionist" religious doctrines of a century earlier. In the words of Eric Foner, their worldview "emphasized both the ability of men to save themselves by an act of will, and the necessity on the part of the saved to attack the sins of others." This outlook led some believers to "challenge all existing institutions as illegitimate exercises of authority over the free will of the individual," but it also contained a "tendency toward social control," represented in different ways by the temperance movement, the anti-Catholic crusade, a push to prevent prostitution, and a drive to design intrusive new institutions: the prison, the poorhouse, the insane asylum, the compulsory common school.
Tellingly, the most coercive elements of the antebellum reform movements were often advocated with liberatory language. Temperance was aimed at freeing the drunkard from the tyranny of demon rum, for example, while nativists declared they were fighting the mental slavery of the papist church. Something similar recurs in the postwar period Petigny describes. Quoting my review:
At one point Petigny argues that the rise of the disease model of addiction reflected the rise of permissiveness, since the perspective's proponents "viewed the self as essentially innocent, the victim of a disease process beyond its own control and causation." But the idea also suggests a loss of personal responsibility, and a government's right to forcibly liberate its subjects from the habits that enslave them.