You might not have ever heard the term “intertextuality,” but it informs just about everything I write — and most of your viewing experiences, I’d imagine.
Don’t let this big academic word scare you off! At its core, this concept just means that the meaning of a text (in this case, a film) is informed by more than just the work itself. We bring our knowledge of every work of art we’ve ever experienced — or just absorbed via osmosis — to decode what it means.
And, as I learned on the first day of my Film Theory and Criticism class a decade ago, it also applies to our own lived experiences. A film means what we bring to it from our own lives. It’s why movies can feel so radically different when we return to them after some time. They haven’t changed, but we have.
I can thank Wake Forest’s Dr. Mary Dalton for making this lesson both enjoyable and durable through the classic 1971 film The Last Picture Show, a fitting bookend to the semester. I greatly appreciated this look at intergenerational malaise in post-war America when I first watched it in my early twenties, but even then, I sensed that I had only scratched the surface of this masterwork. With the film arriving on a new Criterion Collection Blu-ray edition this month, I thought this was a good an occasion as any to revisit the film — and to chat up Mary once more.
She and I have stayed in touch throughout the years and have shared many emails — and a meal or two — but this is our first of a more structured conversation. I’m grateful that she was willing to give of her time for a talk that’s as much about one specific film as it is about art and life in general. You can rent The Last Picture Show on various digital platforms if you haven’t seen it. Nonetheless, I think you can still find a lot of value here in the broad strokes of the conversation even if certain details might mean little to you.
For the people who have not had the pleasure of taking your film theory class, do you remember the first time you saw The Last Picture Show and what you thought of it then?
I was probably 22 or 23. I don't think I was married yet, but it was [with] my first husband, who was somewhat older than I was. He may have seen it, but he really wanted me to see it. It was one of the compared to comparatively few films we actually agreed about. I thought it was remarkable from the first time I saw it. And then, some years later when I started teaching, media theory and criticism (then film theory and criticism), it was the film that I always used as the final film in the course and always has been. Do the Right Thing, The Piano, Platoon, and Hiroshima Mon Amour are other films that I have kept all the way through. Any class I teach, [I ask] which texts are still working well, what do I need to sort of move on from. I have students watch The Last Picture Show and Picture This, the documentary about the making of Texasville [a sequel made decades later] that looks back. The frame for that, other than thinking about the film, is intertextuality.
Have you felt that the student responses to The Last Picture Show have stayed fairly similar over the years?
I think I've probably always told students you need to look at it again when you're 30.
Which I just did, and we'll get there!
I watched it last night again myself! I do find, in general, that students are a little different post-COVID than they were before. Students are changing a bit. Driving to work the other day, I heard an NPR story about how young people don't like movies with sex in them. They want these platonic friendships in movies; they're not comfortable with sex. I started thinking about all the movies that I show in class because we watched Cuties1 [through the lens of] postcolonialism and the hypersexualization of young girls. I'm not sure how to answer that question. I do think there has always been a little bit of a hurdle for students because of the nostalgia. I think to really understand that you may need to be a little older.
With any text, you grow in understanding of it over time. But especially with something like this, you need to have enough distance from an experience that you remember the textures of so well to be able to have the nostalgia in the first place.
But I think there are layers of [nostalgia] in the film. You have Sam the Lion and Lois, their nostalgia for each other's great love story. And then the way of life, the picture show, nobody comes to the movies anymore because they're all watching TV. What is it she says? "There's baseball in the summer, and then there's TV all year." But the funny thing here, too, is you have that barren landscape and desolate town. There's not much promise there at all, and yet there's still a nostalgia for a way of life. I think that's what the movies give us anyway when we think about Westerns, and there are arguably some elements of the Western that pop up in this film. It's nostalgia for a way of life that never really existed. That's an important piece of it. You're from Texas...
Not that part of Texas! But there is something about how both those myths and the landscape itself can imprint themselves on people. Especially this time around, I really started to see the way in which that's reflected in the relationships and the way that people deal with each other.
Thinking about Texas again, in one of the interviews Peter Bogdanovich talks about choosing Red River as the last picture as opposed to the book where it was some minor, forgettable Western film. He was saying because Larry [McMurtry] didn't like movies, and of course, Peter Bogdanovich is "MOVIES!", he wanted to evoke something about how Texas was bigger and grander in the past than it is in the present. What I think is so funny about that is how large Texas looms on the national stage, not in ways I particularly like. But it's a different kind of presence than it was.
Have you taught The Last Picture Show since COVID?
I did teach it last spring. I do think students are kind of flummoxed by it, Marshall, honestly, because it's just so different from their experience.
The film is such a yearning for connection and community. This idea that these methods that we have to achieve it are oftentimes failing or fading away, and technology and the way that we consume culture and experiences is something that's becoming so atomized and individualized. Even the difference between movies to TV as kind of symbolic of that journey away from the collective experience to the individual experience, a part of me would hope that even if it is very different from the kinds of experiences or the culture that they've had, that yearning is something that can still break through and connect.
Well, that gives me a really good frame for talking about it in class that hadn't actually occurred to me, this idea of isolation. They've come through this period of isolation in a really formative time for them, and now they are back in the swing of things with all of these opportunities to connect. I don't think that they may be connecting as easily as they did before COVID. I'm not sure of all the reasons why. It'll take a long time to tease that out, and that's not my research expertise! For some students, I think they're struggling in different ways than students used to. Not all of them, obviously, but some.
How has your response to the film changed over time the more that you've seen it? Both in terms of the number of times that you've seen it and taught it, and then just the normal lived experience of being a person who watches something, returns to it, and sees something different ... because you've changed, not the movie.
I've always identified most with Lois, personally. But also that Ruth Popper character, I can't think of a better supporting actor performance because the character is so richly drawn everything you need there.
Have you read the book?
I have not read the book. I probably should.
I listened to it unabridged some years ago, and I think it's like adaptations of some other big books. I think they really honed in on the most important characters and the emotional truths. In this day, I think it might be a limited series, it might not be a two-hour film. There were times when I was single for many years and not really happy about that but had other things going on in my life. That's how it was. I personally could just latch right into that yearning, the feeling of possibility and the naivete of the younger characters. With Duane and Sonny, we see their trajectory. We don't know much about Jacy except that she's gone to Dallas. We can imagine what might what might happen with her, but we don't really know. When I was a much younger person, [I asked]: How do you put these things in motion? How do you make decisions? How much control do we actually have over any of this stuff, and how much of it is just happening to us?
I used to say about myself, Marshall, you may have heard it, that I was an incurable romantic who cultivated a veneer of cynicism. Watching the film, I really felt the power of Lois' commentary about only encountering one person who she says knows your worth. But what I heard her saying was [one person] who really sees you, to have that connection that you can't really articulate logically. I think there was a huge wistfulness that I approached the film with, and I'm in a different place now. I still am quite interested in the verisimilitude of it, these great truths that these characters express that have been so meaningful for me. While I paid attention to aesthetic choices and directorial approaches before, I think more about some of those things, too, instead of how the themes that we were talking about are also expressed visually in the film.
I found my old final exam that I wrote about the film, and it was very interesting to have a literal snapshot of what I thought about the film 10 years ago. I feel like I've had the opposite trajectory. I look at this piece that I wrote, and it is so clinical and hyper-focused on the aesthetic choices. I watched it again this week, and I was just so swept up in the characters and the emotions. I'm still noticing those choices, obviously, but they felt secondary to me in terms of the way in which I felt the film.
The other thing, too, is that my parents grew up on farms in rural North Carolina. The landscapes from my early childhood, it was hillier, but the little houses and all of these other elements of rural life, I have a personal connection to that. It does create nostalgia in an even different way for me about those sorts of personal things. And now that I'm in this happy five-year relationship and now marriage where I've had that kind of connection that I really had never had before, it doesn't dampen my feelings about the film at all. Maybe the way to do it is to think intertextually. Here's this film that I saw at a time when I wasn't too much older the first time than some of these characters. I think the first time I saw it, I did relate it very much to my childhood farm experience visiting my relatives. Maybe that's what I'm doing, coming back to some of these elements. But then there's teaching it, there's all of the student responses. There's this Writers Conference and inviting Polly Platt because I wanted to meet her. The power of the film is really hard to put into words.
What else did you say, though? I want to know more about your essay!
When I read it, I thought about the 20-year-old at the time whose primary connection to it would have been through film and not necessarily having quite the emotional resilience of bringing who I was and the things that existed away from a screen and away from a theater to it. I'm finding a richer experience by having that distance and having more life lived. At the time, I had compartmentalized a little bit more the aesthetic analysis of the film and emotional reading of it as if the two don't overlap and intermingle. The two things are intricately woven together.
When you're a young man in countering the film, your only frame of reference to work with is Sonny and Duane. I'm not at the age of some of the women in the film that you point out as the core, which I definitely saw more of this time, but I'm halfway between them. To some extent, I see Sunny, Duane, and Jacy as the past and a little bit of Lois and Ruth as the future that I can't necessarily put my finger on. But I'm starting to feel the emotions that they go through and those forces that make them the way that they are.
And Genevieve, too! She could have been Lois if things had worked out differently in her circumstances. There's a lot of social class stuff in the film. I think my students are probably more attuned to it than students were when I first started teaching the film. That happens at an elite private university. Those differences become much more apparent.
Even in the last 10 years since I took your class, I can imagine the frameworks of those things have become so much more popularized, especially among university students.
Oh yeah. What I've tried to do now is to ask certain questions of every film that we watch. We still talk about aesthetics, narrative, and those elements. Not that I wasn't before, but [we talk about] ideology and how it plays out as a way of uncovering what's there and helping them dig, explore, and challenge their own preconceptions about things. Sometimes I just run through those categories as a way of framing and getting into the discussion.
I was thinking about it though, this morning, all the ways this film could have gone wrong. If Bogdanovich had not been able to shoot black-and-white, and several places he talks about how there was resistance to that. He had discussed it with Orson Welles, and he wanted to have that magnificent depth of field to be able to give us that sense of realism. You couldn't get that with color. But he also was thinking about [how] color romanticizes in a way that this stark black-and-white wouldn't. Finally, the selling point he used was, "It evokes the time period!" Can you imagine this film if it were in color? We wouldn't be talking about it. As it relates to that, Texasville is just really flat. It just doesn't work very well. I'll have to look at it again to figure out what it is, but I hadn't given it much of a thought since I saw it until now.
I'd love to talk about Lois because that was a character that I think I used to let brush past me a little bit. This time, she felt very indicative of where I am watching the film right now: someone who's smart enough to know better but not mature enough to do better.
I think she says it all when she's talking to Sonny. He's talking about how nothing's been the same since Sam the Lion died, and he figures out that she's the love of Sam's life. She says at some point, "Well, we'll have to figure something else out for you because what I've been trying hasn't been working." But she basically explains her behavior [to Sonny] as she's been looking far and wide to recapture what she felt with Sam and never has. There's a pragmatism to her. In a way, she does see who she is. She says [to Jacy] don't marry Duane, you'll be bored. She says scared [her husband] into getting rich, and we can see that she probably was the driving force to do that.
This is what I love about this film: all the pieces are there. We do have to puzzle and play with them. But when she makes the the comment, we know that she was married when she had her affair was Sam, they were poor. And when that falls apart, that's when she's looking for something else. That's when she starts pushing for wealth and status. You can't just replace one thing with another, it doesn't work like that. And that's where the maturity comes in: to realize that things are always changing. We have some choices to make but not always a lot of control.
Especially this time around, it stuck out to me that they're they're all still children to some extent. You get older, but you don't necessarily grow up. All these people are stilted and stunted in their own way. The difference is just having the awareness that you are this way as opposed to just assuming that it's something that will pass.
Well, I think Sam really does reflect a desire to create a respect for human dignity. He tries to do the right thing, and he knows more than he's able to say sometimes. And I think with Genevieve, too, she really is the character who's really constrained. Her husband's out of work, she's flipping burgers, and she's really trying to be this maternal figure for the town. Each of the three women that we've talked about responds in different ways to this.
With Genevieve, she's part of the community, observing and trying to hold things together. Ruth Popper is closeted — well, I chose that word, that's interesting. It's heavily coded in the film that her husband's gay, and that's why he's never there. She herself doesn't even necessarily understand all of the reasons their marriage is so horrible, so she's sequestered in her house. And then you've got Lois, who's out trying to recapture something because she's bored and unfulfilled.
I think that those three characters are expressing a midlife crisis for women but in these different ways. They're sorting it out and, for them, it doesn't really get sorted out. And that's the tragedy of it. I mean, I don't think the tragedy is so much thinking about Sonny or Duane. Don't you think it's maybe like most people's lives? Not identity issues that we're talking about so much, it's a homogeneous group, but this town really is a lot of the issues people have to face in microcosm.
At least for the youth, there's some hope that they still have some runway where they can turn things around. All the women are stuck to some extent.
Part of that's the '50s, too. as you think about it. Thinking about that, in 20 years when these young people are the same age as the older people, we're into the 70s. We've seen the emergence of the second wave of the women's movement. Granted, it might take longer to reach Archer, Texas. But these things are happening. Vietnam will change everything. The Civil Rights Movement hasn't really kicked off. All of these things are going to change the world, and — I think — create a sense of possibility. But I'm the eternal optimist, Marshall.
What did you think watching it this week?
There are a handful of films I have seen so many times that I just know them in a deep way. I love it as much as ever. There are a handful of films that I want to keep watching, and this is one of them. It just feels to me like the pacing gets better and better, and that's the marker for me. There's nothing for me really left that I want to pick apart. The intimacy of it, and the way that it has this tension between being very small and personal and telling this larger story about American life that we can interpret in a lot of different ways, is part of the signature achievement. I don't really like to talk about "universal" themes because that's such a Western concept. Yet I do think there is something about this story that translates. I can't say whether it would translate as well for people who don't have some connection to it, whether it's some kind of rural experience or family situation, but it hits so many touch points for me that its power is still there.
You talked in class about how whenever you write about something, it does demystify it and you never get that back.
I've never written about this film! But that is true. Now, I can't ever experience this film the way I did the very first time I saw it when I was more focused on the young characters. I was in my early twenties! A little later, my late twenties maybe, when I had this veil pulled from my eyes and was like, "Oh my gosh, the real heart of this story is these three older women!" Of course, that's what you're talking about, I was becoming an older woman myself and, at some point along the way, a single one.
There's nothing like watching a film the second time. One of the more recent films where I had this experience was Moonlight. You watch a film for the first time, and you know you're watching something special but you're still so tied into what is happening that you're not able yet to quite think about the "how" and the "why." The second time you see a film ... the second time I saw Barbie, I realized that things I thought might have been pacing problems the first time I saw it didn't bother me at all! They were great. There's something about the second time.
On a personal note, watching it last night was the first time I watched it with [my husband] Dave. He had seen it before, but not with me. It was a completely different experience because when Lois is talking about someone to know your worth, someone to really see you and have that connection, I was in my fifties before I really managed that in a way. And, better than for Lois and Sam, in a way that sustained. It is true the pathos of it was not quite as present for me watching it last night because I've changed, but my appreciation for it has not dimmed.
It's always interesting to watch a favorite movie with somebody. It is a way of saying: “I need you to see this movie, but I also need you to see me in it." It's a uniquely vulnerable experience.
Oh, and it's so lovely. For people like you and me, how much more intimate does it get? That's what stories do for us. They tell us who we are and help us tell other people who we are and how we fit together.
And now a special treat for subscribers — you can read the full essay I wrote about The Last Picture Show in 2013! I hope you can perceive the growth and maturity I felt upon revisiting the film (as well as my previous thoughts on it). I’ll brag a little bit: this did get an A, so it’s worth a read even if I’ve since evolved and changed.
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall
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