Seeing Through Movies.

• Author: Cornfield, Michael

Seeing Through Movies Seeing Through Movies. Mark Crispin Miller, ed. Pantheon Books, $24.95. This collection lashes out at the corporate state, whose single-motive mentality and interlocking registry of white-bread names has, according to the theorists gathered here, straitened American film for 70 years, except during the late 1960s and the 1970s, "that chaotic interregnum between the demise of the old studio system and the onset of the new monopoly." George Lucas and Steven Spielberg receive lots of blame for ushering in the Second Dark Age. Essayist Peter Biskind sees Vietnam in every frame of their blockbusters; he even mistakes Yoda, the Samurai doll in The Empire Strikes Back, for Mao Tse-Tsung and Ho Chi Minh, and claims the title sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark reminded him of the fall of Saigon. Stuart Kalwins opens his confused essay on colorization by comparing it to cross-burnings. "Why is it, when I hear people call the process an abonimation, that I remember my former neighbors talking about keeping the colored out?" Perhaps it's because Kalwins needs to borrow the moral glow of the civil rights movement to quiet his discomfort at finding himself on the same side as Ted Turner. The facts show, as Kalwins painfully admits at the end of his essay, that Turner was not only thr rightful owner of the films that directors and actors banged their spoons over, but that he has also been a better friend to the cause of film preservation than either said luminaries or the government. Ted Turner, in short, is a specimen of the public-spirited capitalist whose existence confounds dialectical theories of political evolution.

Still, there's no gainsaying the narrowness of vision and style that corporate control has imposed on movies. When the Pantheon critics concentrate on what they find in batches of films instead of what they think the films mean, their work shines with insight.

Mark Crispin Miller excels at detailing the pernicious effects advertising divisions have had on entertainment divisions. He cites example after example of films with feel-good cues (Ghostbusters), happy-ending revisions of familiar stories (Rocky I-V), and, most egregiously, the propagandistic display of product labels. In Coca-Cola/Columbia's Missing, for example, Jack Lemmon's heroic character "takes rare (and noticeable) solace in a bottle of Coke, where the [Chilean] army does its torturing and murdering, there stands a mammoth Pepsi machine. . . ." It's...