Norman Lebrecht discovers DVDs

Hark! Hark! It is the sound of Norman Lebrecht hitting nails on their heads, but also his fingers and thumbs, leaving blood everywhere:

Film has become fact on DVD. It has left the cinema and joined us for drinks, an emancipatory moment for the last of the great western art forms. Books and music have always furnished our rooms, but to have film as a point of home reference, like Oxford English Dictionary and the complete works of Shakespeare, signals a revolution in cultural reception and, inevitably, creation.

It will, for instance, make it that much harder for Hollywood to remake its own milestones when half the world has the originals to hand for instant comparison. The Manchurian Candidate (1962), with its dream cast of Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Janet Leigh was unlikely to be bettered by Jonathan Demme’s 2004 reshoot with Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber and Meryl Streep. But if anyone had foreseen that the original DVD would be around in the public hands, Demme’s studio would never have raised the finance, let alone the enthusiasm, for an otiose update.

Lebrecht is right about DVDs having been a big change. As usual he has a nose for a big story. Read the whole thing, as we bloggers say. But the original Manchurian Candidate has been out for years on DVD. I owned it on DVD ages before the Denzel Washington remake emerged.

One of Lebrecht’s several follies here is to imagine that all generations are like his generation, and that all generations will thrill to Bergman and Godard just as his version of his generation did. It is hard for old crusties like him, or like me, to imagine a world in which a whole generation has grown up neither knowing nor caring about The Manchurian Candidate, the original one, the proper one, with that woman who now does Murder She Wrote on the telly playing the Evil Witch Queen, but there it is, such a generation now exists, and there is business to be done. Curious oldies who want to see the remake or own the DVD of it, just to check it out and to be able to sneer at the new version having actually seen it, will add a few thousand bums on seats and a few hundred thousand in DVD sales. Meanwhile the plot is a proven entity, Denzel Washington is a proven star, and Meryl Streep, who brings an older following with her, fancies doing a turn as the Evil Witch Queen, knowing she won’t come near the Murder She Wrote woman, but hypnotically drawn to the part nevertheless. So, the project can go ahead.

And millions of Young People These Days will actually prefer it to the original! It is, for starters, in colour instead of black and white. And Laurence Harvey? He was not everyone’s Anglo-American cup of tea even the first time round, I can assure you. I remember the same kind of moans about the Charlton Heston Ben Hur when that first came out, when I were a lad. An expensive and inferior rehash of the Roman Novarro original, said the culturati. I think it was Roman Novarro, but I really do not care and have yet to see that jerky, black and white, silent, and utterly absurd relic of a bygone age, which is what I assume it to be. What could possibly compare with Heston and Stephen Boyd going at it wheel to wheel, in grand technicolour panawidescreeneramavision, covered in orange blood?

Generations. They come. And they go.

I wondered if Lebrecht would mention computers. He does at the end, presumably when it occurs to him that some might imagine computers to have some kind of big future, with possible consequences for DVDs. Better answer that objection:

The DVD won’t replace the printed book which has withstood more serious threats in the past half-millennium. But it will accelerate the obsolescence of the audio-only disc, which cannot compete much longer in an image-centred culture. The internet, the I-pod and other new-tech marvels will challenge for precedence as entertainment carriers, but none can rival DVD for instant access and archival use. DVD has got the movies bang to rights and gives them equal status with music and printed arts. It is the medium of the Noughties, the remaking of our memories.

Oh dear. The DVD will hurt the audio-only disc? How? It has not done that so far, because they do different things.

The internet will challenge for precedence? “None can rival the DVD for instant access”? When they put me into an old people’s home, will I have to listen to people saying things like that?

Lebrecht, you poor old thing. You seem to have just about heard of the computer, and presumably you even use one, to thrash out your half baked but often tasty notions. You could not possibly thrash out so much stuff with a mere typewriter. But do you have any inkling of what else computers can already do, let alone what they will soon be capable of?

We of the Lebrecht/Micklethwait generation love CDs and DVDs because they are so much better than 78s, LPs, cassettes, video tapes, etc., which even we could tell were technically imperfect and able to be improved upon. But the idea that future generations will amass vast collections of such pre-manufactured plastic discs, at many pounds or dollars a go, with each disc only containing one separate hour of music or one movie, and with each separate one-hour-of-music or one-movie disc encased in its separate (and in the case of DVDs absurdly vast) plastic casement . . . well, it is just daft, completely daft. Pre-recorded DVDs in boxes will in due course become about as bang up to date as silent movies are to me.

When I did amateur dramatics at university, I was in a play called A Resounding Tinkle, by someone called N. F. Simpson, an absurdist playwright in the Spike Milligan mould. Two of the characters in it were called The First Comedian and The Second Comedian. These two gents wandered about together in and out of the action, having pointless arguments with each other, being send-ups of Conservative and Labour politicians. (I played “Bro Paradock”, who was a Whig, I kid you not. At one point he went out cavassing for them.)

Anyway, the First Comedian, the Conservative Comedian, was especially funny, I thought. His stock in trade was being crazily just or totally behind the times, madly enthusiastic about trends which to everyone else had been clear for quite a while, grabbing hold of every shiny new stick in sight, too late, and often at the wrong end completely. Some things never change.

At one point the First Comedian announced with feverish excitement that he believed the world to be, not flat, as most argued, but round, and that given a decent sailing ship he believed he could prove it, by circumnavigating the world!!

“Hasn’t all this been gone into before?” muttered the Second Comedian.

I love to read Norman Lebrecht, because I share his fascination with the ongoing saga of classical music about which he often tells great stories and provides superb gossip, about mad conductors, greedy soloists, etc. But he does often remind me of that First Comedian. Which, or course, I also enjoy a lot.