But (and it's a very small but, springing, perhaps, from no more than a wayward romantic impulse) it still seems sad to see the studios die. Making myths, developing dreams, they became mythic themselves, 'forming the tangible, actually existing center of a new dream: the dream of Hollywood, of stardom, of a tacky but imaginatively potent 'glamour. The reality on which that dream was based may often have been cheap and false, but sometimes it was not. Like a popular song, like a mass-printed poem, like a B-movie, it at least provided something to dream about; in regard to dreams, something is always better than nothing. We will remember and miss the studios in the same way we do all of our lost dreams: ruefully, a little shame-faced, but with a bittersweet, nostalgic affection.
IV
NIGHT is the best time to say goodbye. Faces are gentled by dusk; shadows of bitterness or of that can only be cast by the hard light of day merge and fade away in the wash of darkness. To bid goodbye in a dream: surely this gentle going is better than the harsh, hard-edged parting in broad day, better than a Scarlet-Stained. Passion-Heavy sunset farewell. Deep blue night; the hush; a cool, whispering touch--and footsteps echoing away, ever more distant in the dark. Delicate, right, no danger of disintegration, of seeing what we've loved shattered, bursting into bitter dust in the light. Enveloped in that dusky atmosphere of dream, the dream remains whole; it touches us once more before it goes, and it is by that last touch that we remember it.
At night, the Twentieth Century-Fox lot lies deep in a well of darkness: high above, at the far distant end of the dark tunnel, a circle of sky sheds a faintly luminous, neon-fogged light. In the woolly silence, thoughts emerge slowly, but with a perfect weighty clarity, like globes of blown glass. Right away, you notice that the gritty daytime haze of dust has disappeared, to be replaced by night, and it is like being on the ocean floor, so slow is it and silent, so dimly blue.
This is where that relentless pursuit has finally led: straight over the cliff and into a sea where dream and reality merge with haunting fluidity. The most fantastic appearances are lent an ceric reality by celluloid and by the night. At night and on film, the huge painted sky shadowing Twentieth's "Western Town" (a sky which, by day, seems absurdly naive in its patent fakery) loses its hard edges and seems to soar up into the "real" sky. Its splashes of white cloud float free, lit by a moon whose own reality you cannot feel sure of.
MOST OF THE TWENTIETH lot is gone now, gradually sold off in chunks to real estate developers so as to raise money for further production. The small remaining piece of land is jammed with old sets and mock-ups haphazardly clumped together, waiting mutely for a last chance to burst into life on film. The short studio roads flow together soundlessly, and it is easy to become disoriented, moving with only a few steps from a brownstone-lined street in little old New York to the quaint cobbled "place" of a French provincial village to the log-fenced parade ground of some frontier outpost. But somehow, out of this bizarre juxtaposition of different times and styles and places comes a strange imaginative unity. In the night and the silence, all the startling, various images are bound together by their common status as dreams.
The studios provided us with a locus for dreams. Ultimately, though, when the real implications of that vision began to come home to us, the studios and their dream became superfluous. The movies did away with the illusion that life was somehow "real", solid, its events explainable, united by some coherent logic. Whatever their story, the technique of the movies has given us the full picture: fragmentation, flux, appearances changing twenty-four times a second. Movies (ironically the product of those self-deceived studios) tell the truth: they are the show-and-tell of absurdity, the perfect expression of the flickering, shifting surface of our lives. They tell us that life and the dream are one and the same--inexplicable, exhilerating, never quite within our grasp. And finally, they give the lie to the studios, who thought they had a patent on unreality. A locus for dreams? What's the point, when all the world's a Hollywood