Five years ago, this film would have been considered incomprehensible to the general movie audience. Now it's going into a big first-run house, and you don't hear the Loop exhibitors talking so scornfully about "art films" anymore. So what's going on when an experimental, radical film like "Medium Cool" can get this sort of exposure?
What's happened, I think, is that moviemakers have at last figured out how bright the average moviegoer is. By that I don't mean they're making more "intelligent" pictures. I mean they understand how quickly we can catch onto things.
Even five years ago, most Hollywood movies insisted on stopping at B on their way from A to C. Directors were driven by a fierce compulsion to explain how the characters got out of that train and up to the top of the mountain. And so, their movies crept along slowly, and we spent so much time climbing the mountain that we didn't give a damn what happened when we finally got there.
But a movie named "The Graduate" didn't bother with that. For years, underground and experimental films had stopped using the in-between steps. But now, here was one of the biggest commercial movies of all time, and when Benjamin plunged onto the prone form of Mrs. Robinson, there was a cut in mid-action to Benjamin landing belly-down on a rubber raft in a swimming pool. And no one had to explain why Mrs. Robinson turned into a raft, or how Benjamin got into the pool.
Most of us are so conditioned by the quick-cutting and free association of ideas in TV commercials that we think faster than feature-length movies can move. We understand cinematic shorthand. And we like movies that give us credit for our wit. We didn't like "Shoes of the Fisherman," no matter how noble its intentions, because it insisted on explaining everything. We liked "Bullitt" because it moved at our speed.
And "Bullitt," to grab a recent example, did something else. In all movies, from Bogart to James Bond, symbols meant what they were. Bogart got into a souped-up Buick Special and Bond got into an Aston-Martin, and it was the car's prestige that was important. But in fact, the cars mostly sat there being Buicks and Aston-Martins.
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