Alex in Wonderland (1970) and the New Hollywood Paradox

Alex in Wonderland (Paul Mazursky, 1970)
Coming to audiences near the beginning of the New Hollywood era (1967-1979), Alex in Wonderland is both an appreciation of the artistic freedom afforded to directors by producers/studios during that time and a unique representation of the paradoxes and paralysis facing the New Hollywood filmmaker in light of that freedom.  It is bold and audacious and brilliant, written and directed by Paul Mazursky, one of the forgotten dual talents of that era.
Alex is a film director who has just finished cutting his first feature for MGM.  Premiered but not yet released, Alex’s film is already garnering him attention as an up-and-coming auteur.  Beginning to believe the hype of the preview screenings, Alex and his wife begin to look for a new house where their family of four can live a little more luxuriously.  But Alex isn't happy.  He is troubled by his own political interests, by his own cinematic influences, by his own desire to be appreciated, and by his own fear of making the wrong next step.  He cannot decide what he will make next, where he will put his creative focus. 

The most obvious correlation is with 8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963), but this is not a Hollywood riff on the Italian classic.  It is a co-opting of the imaginative framework of that film to express the reductive tendencies of Alex.  Does he truly love Fellini's films or love the acclaim Fellini's films have garnered?  Beyond the question of influence is the real tension between liberal guilt and the obligations of artistic freedom.  Alex wants to be respected, he wants to be innovative but he can’t move beyond shallow notions of politics and cinema.  He feels an obligation now he had not felt previously to create a film that shocks its audience out of political complacency.  The problem is, Alex is politically complacent.  He can talk a good talk about the oppression of African-Americans and about the tragedy of war, but that doesn’t motivate him in any way beyond feeling guilty not to miss his chance to speak to these platitudes. 

Alex is downright giddy when he stumbles into an editing room at an Italian movie studio and finds Fellini at work on a new film.  But Alex's fanboy film director is clearly an inconvenience to the old master.  "If this were a bar, maybe..." Fellini says, "...but I am working."

He also cannot shake his desire to follow in the footsteps of the films that inspire him, notably Federico Fellini (who shows up in the film as himself) and the French New Wave (represented by Jeanne Moreau browsing an L.A. bookshop).  Fellini is in many ways an apolitical filmmaker and this further adds to Alex’s tension.  He imagines grand scenarios where the smog of Los Angeles engulfs a flock of people outside the airport and in a direct invoking of the opening of 8 ½ he and his wife run through it and are eventually laid upon a luggage conveyor belt.  In another scene, we get a Godardian representation of warfare as cinema as warfare, with “Hooray for Hollywood” playing over the soundtrack while troops invade Hollywood Boulevard, pushing aside and shooting bystanders as tap dancers dance atop a burning car.  Alex, in the midst of it all, sees his family laid in the middle of the street in body bags while a camera cranes up to get the full grand spectacle.  I took these scenes as direct representations of cinematic sequences Alex concocts in his mind but can’t find a way to integrate within the various conventional narratives with social overtones that he tells to his friends when they ask him what he’s doing next.

The "Hooray for Hollywood" portion begins during a ride home from Mexico, where the family car is stuck behind a truck full of GI's in training.  The segue into dreamworld is seen outside the passenger window.

Cinema as warfare as cinema.  A Godardian interlude is the most grandiose of Alex's cinematic daydreams, a subversive expression of the reification of militaristic acceptance through the lens of the Hollywood movie camera.

Artistry and commerce are two things that, according to the conventional narrative of American film history, came together beautifully in the New Hollywood era.  Paul Mazursky isn't so sure.  There is an overwhelming paralysis of choice.  The countercultural artist must position himself against commerce but he is using the most commercial of mediums.  He believe that movies must be important, not trivial.  They must deal with important social issues and offer critique of the culture at large.  They must motivate political action.  These are the manifold tensions facing the New Hollywood, according to Mazursky, and they have not been alleviated in our day.  Can a film simply be for entertainment or is that too light an aim?  Critics have set up their camps and it is part of why the New Hollywood is revered.  It put important social concerns in films during a time when there was a broad audience acceptance of those themes so they easily found the financial backing of the studios because the studios were out of touch with the youth market.  Does that make the New Hollywood films more honest or more subtly exploitative?

A large part of the film takes place in Alex’s home, charting the slowly straining relationships with his wife (Ellen Burstyn) and two daughters.  There is a life and charisma in these scenes, the emotional cues and some of the dialogue feeling very spontaneous.  Mazursky has put the responsibility for the strain fully on the shoulders of Alex, whose coldness towards his wife and his passive acceptance of her conventional role in the home proves the shallowness of his political convictions.  Alex is the one who really wants a new house but he carefully couches it in something close to the subtly sexist rhetoric of a 1950’s advertisement for home ownership.  He wants the bigger house.  He wants the more spacious yard.  He wants the pool out back.  But he pretends as if these are her desires given to him through her nagging. 

Burstyn's wife is admirable in her willingness to put up with the mood swings of her achingly countercultural husband, who is turning out to be far more conservative than he would care to admit.

Because of his calm and unassuming demeanor, it is easy to forget just how good Donald Sutherland is as an actor and how many unconventional roles he took on (particularly in the 70's).  This is one of his finest performances, finding the intensely focused director bordering on obsessive who ostensibly breaks down in front of his idols and bristles with contempt when his wife only half listens to his story ideas.  It is complex and dynamic, connecting the audience to a character who is essentially a passive wanderer, but still daring us to judge him as an object of satire.

It is interesting how Mazursky keeps certain seemingly essential information out of the narrative.  I don’t remember ever learning the name of Alex’s movie or meeting anyone who worked on it along with him.  I don’t remember ever hearing that it had, in fact, been released.  These things are left ambiguous, almost as if Alex’s whole world of the film is a dream.  Did he invent the film?  Did he invent the acclaim?  Did he envision a meeting with a studio executive who is open to anything Alex wants to do next?  Is the only thing real his strained life at home, with kids who are slowly being alienated by their father and a wife who is starting to find her husband uncaring and unloving?  Is this the real travesty of the America Dream?

Mazursky, in the final sequence, gives Alex his house.  It remains ambiguous if it has been purchased or simply being looked through again, but the implication is that Alex finally gets his house, even if he is now alone.  He walks through every room, mumbling to himself, making fun of the realtor’s descriptions of the house’s charms, all while embracing the sun-soaked emptiness of this heaven waiting to be filled by his stuff.  It is a striking scene that leaves us outside by the pool as Alex looks at the large tree in the backyard as if he has just now attained some sort of zen. 

An Antonioni-esque positioning within architecture, Alex's apotheosis is a bland suburban paradise where he gains a house but loses his home.