WHY HOLLYWOOD LOVES THE A-WORD
Theword must sit in the lumber room of every cinema, a set of marquee letters permanently joined up and ready to be re-winched into place. There it stands each time, gigantic by day, neon-glowing by night. Like other perennials in movie titles – “Love” and “Blood” and “Heaven” and “Murder” (as in a hundred killer thrillers) and “Return” (as in a thousand sequels) – “American” has become one of those recurring words in the language of box-office buttonholing.
Long ago it streaked ahead of other adjectives of nationality. Forget “French”, don't bother to think about “British”, “Chinese” or “Australian”. A recent browse through a large well-known film concordance yielded 45 results for “American” as the featured adjective in titles, compared with six for “French”, one for “English” (that movie about Ralph Fiennes dating Kristin Scott Thomas in the desert) and none for most other nationalities.
Now here we go again. American Gangster is Ridley Scott's artfully titled new crime drama: artful because “American” has accreted a unique, uncanny resonance over the years. From American Graffiti to American Splendor via American History X, it colours, amplifies, enriches or ironises – like few other epithets and no other capitalised one – a movie's notional theme.
It isn't confined to film titles. Other monikers in other media have made us hip to this lexical motherlode. Its use began at least as long ago as Theodore Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy (1925). It set itself in paint in Grant Wood's “American Gothic”. It set itself to music in Don McLean's “American Pie”. Where would we be today, in US fiction on page or stage, without Philip Roth's American Pastoral or David Mamet's American Buffalo?
Off screen, it is the only nation-word rich and resonant enough to have coined its negative. “Un-American” came into being, in the last century, as if “American” was so proud a boast, so powerful a declaration of intent and idealism, that it had to spawn its opposite, in the same way that God's existence mandates that of the devil.
More than an honoured standby, in recent times the word seems to have become a selling point. American Pie, American Psycho, American Beauty, American Sweethearts, American Splendor. Barely damaged by an age in which its proprietor country has dragged the national dog-tags through setback and infamy, “American” is still a strong currency on the movie marquee.
Why? Because it is more than an adjective, more than a label. It is at once an assertion, a defiant self-advertisement and a subtle, nearly subliminal cluster of ideas – probably unarticulated even in the heads of its users – about will, wish, purpose and aspiration.
We surely hear the phrase “American dream” behind every title in which this A-word features. Thirty years ago George Lucas's American Graffiti presented the scrawlings of hope and youth in small-town California, at a time when innocence and pop culture strove to hold off the coming American nightmare of Vietnam. The title of American Gigolo, in the same decade, gave us a sex story made special, even surreal, by the theme of Horatio Alger-ish self-betterment. This was not a European or Oriental tale of toyboy-meets-woman – where desire is a timeless verity and love the oldest game in town – but a tale of ambition in the sex trade, a film upbeat in its visuals though duly ironised, and eventually darkened, by Europhile filmmaker Paul Schrader.
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The American dream, like the word “American”, comes with a variety of facets. Turned one way to the light it is about callowness and over-optimism; about a puppy-dog innocence verging on vacuity, prey to vulgarity and vacuum-packed with egotism. American Beauty took the romantic dreams of Kevin Spacey's midlife suburbanite and exposed them to the glare of reality. He is “taken” in all senses by a knowing nymphet. American Psycho, its satirical edge sharper on screen than in Bret Easton Ellis's novel, presents its homicidal hero as a bushy-tailed Wall Street broker, for whom murder is an extension of occupational dandyism. His victims are like a sadist's executive toys, nice to push off the edge of the desk and break into tiny screaming pieces. Patrick Bateman is a tainted grown-up with the innocence of a child, or more exactly with the bland, chilly automatism of an animated mannequin.
Knowing and unknowing have become the salient opposites in the way Hollywood hands out the A-word. There isn't a trace of detectable irony in the title American Pie, just a slap-happy affirmation of the eternal quest of US youth to glut its appetite for food, drink or sex. At the opposite pole American Splendor is a title fully weaponised with cynicism. What could be less splendid, we are provoked to ask by Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman's meld of drama and documentary, than the tale of a misery-boots cartoonist and graphic novelist, the real-life Harvey Pekar, whose life was a succession of seemingly un-American setbacks, disappointments and tragedies?
The answer may be in the title (which originated, of course, as the title of Pekar's own comic book series). The phrase “American splendor” was surely lifted from F. Scott Fitzgerald. On page 113 of my edition of Tender is the Night I find these words: “The post-war months in France, and the lavish liquidations taking place under the aegis of American splendor ...” Fitzgerald, a writer obsessed with the good-or-ill specialness of being American (as in “There are no second acts in American lives”), saw splendour as his nation's inexhaustible, ineluctable bequest to the world. It carries on even amid ruin and deprivation. Like Pulcini and Berman, Fitzgerald is in part ironic, poking fun at America's determination to remain the biggest kid on the block even in an age of downgraded vision or beggared patrimony. But his words, like the movie American Splendor, also have a grudging admiration for the New World's never-say-die spirit, its determination to keep punching above its weight. American splendour just will go on, blind, bounteous, reckless and often – God knows today – wrongheaded.
So size is part of it. “American” suggests breadth, width and heft: a bigger, more panoramic vision. Composer and crossword geek Stephen Sondheim once noted, brilliantly, that “Cinerama” is an anagram of “American”. Like the C-word, the A-word is sizeist. And of course it is a manifestation of Hollywood trumpet-blowing and national flag-waving. But that doesn't explain everything. (We don't see “Indian” cropping up all the time in Bollywood titles.)
So we look forward to American Gangster. Will the adjective this time be grudging or admiring, cynical or affirmative, upwardly mythopoeic or downwardly Mammonite? Or will it be all at the same time? One thing the use of “American” will not be is a simple signifier of nationality.
“美国”一词成好莱坞卖点
这
个字眼肯定被放在所有影院的储藏室里，一组大号字永久性的连在一起，准备重新组合。它每次都会出现，白天它巨大无比，夜里则霓虹闪烁。与电影片名中的其它永恒主题“爱情”、“鲜血”、“天堂”、“谋杀”（就像一百部杀手恐怖电影那样）以及“归来”（就像一千部系列剧那样））一样，“美国”这个字眼已成为票房卖座语言中连续出现的字眼之一。
“美国”招牌充斥媒体
很长时间以前，它领先于其它国别形容词。忘了“法国”吧，不要考虑“英国”、“中国”或“澳大利亚”了。浏览一下最近大型知名影片，有45部电影片名中含有“美国”这个形容词，“法国”为6部，一部为“英国”（这部电影讲的是拉尔夫•法因斯(Ralph Fiennes)与克里斯廷•斯科特•托马斯(Kristin Scott Thomas)在沙漠中相会的故事），其它国别一个也没有。
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现在这种情景重现。《美国黑帮》（American Gangster）是里德利•斯科特（Ridley Scott）巧妙命名的新犯罪影片：说它巧妙是因为多年来，“美国”这个形容词产生了独特离奇的反响。从《美国风情画》（American Graffiti）、《美国X档案》（American History X）到《美国荣耀》（American Splendor），与其它为数不多的片名一样，与任何一个大写的字眼不同，“美国”这个字眼歪曲、夸大、丰富或讽刺了电影的名义主题。
这并不局限于电影片名。其它媒体的其它称号让我们为这个词根喝彩。这个词根的使用至少始于西奥多•德莱塞（Theodore Dreiser）的小说《美国悲剧》（An American Tragedy，1925年出版）。在格兰特•伍德（Grant Wood）的American Gothic中，这个字眼走进了绘画。在丹•麦克莱恩（Don McLean）的《美国派》（American Pie）中，它又进入了音乐世界。如果没有菲利普•罗思（Philip Roth）的《美国牧歌》（American Pastoral）或大卫•马梅（David Mamet）的《美国野牛》（American Buffalo），在美国关于专栏的小说方面，我们今天会如何？
在银幕之外，这是唯一一个具有丰富国别特征且引起共鸣、足以创造出其否定词的词汇。上个世纪，“非美国”出现了，就像“美国”是一个意图和理想主义的自豪而有力的宣言，从而引发了其相对词汇一样，就像上帝的存在带来了撒旦的存在一样。
除了一个闪着荣誉光芒的备用词汇以外，这个词最近似乎已成为一个卖点。《美国派》、《美国狂魔》（American Psycho）、《美国丽人》（American Beauty）、《美国甜心》（American Sweethearts）、《美国荣耀》。“美国”一词的所属国曾让这一招牌遭遇挫折并背负骂名，但这几乎没有让它遭到破坏，在电影史上，这个形容词仍然是一个强势货币。
“A字头”背后的“美国梦”
原因何在？因为它不仅仅是一个形容词、一个标志。同时，它是一个声明、一个挑战性的自我广告，一个微妙、几乎潜意识、关于意愿、愿望、目的和梦想的思想的聚合，但那些使用者们可能不会想到这点。
我们肯定听到在每个片名背后都隐藏着“美国梦想”，这些片名包含“美国”字眼的电影都表达了这点。30年前，乔治•卢卡斯（George Lucas）的《美国风情画》描写了加州小城中的愿望和年轻，当时，纯洁和通俗文化努力阻止了美国即将到来的越南噩梦。同一个10年期间，《美国舞男》（American Gigolo）的片名为我们带来了一个关于性的故事，霍雷肖•阿尔杰（Horatio Alger）式的自我完善的主题让这个故事变得特别，甚至有些超现实主义。这不是xxx遇见女人的欧洲或东方故事——在这类故事里，欲望是永恒的真实，爱情是最古老的游戏——而是关于性行业中的梦想的故事。从视觉上来看，这部影片是积极的，尽管有些讽刺，结局有些黯淡。导演是欧洲电影导演保罗•施雷德（Paul Schrader）。
像“美国”这个词一样，美国梦也有多个层面。从一个角度讲，它是缺乏经验和过于乐观；是近乎愚蠢的小狗般的无知，是充满自高自大的粗鲁和空虚行为的猎物。《美国丽人》就采纳了凯文•斯佩西（Kevin Spacey）这个中年郊区居民的浪漫美梦，并将它们暴露于现实之中。他完全被一个聪颖的早熟女孩“迷住了”。《美国狂魔》中嗜杀成性的主人公是华尔街一位著名经纪人，对他而言谋杀就是时髦职业的一种延伸。影片在荧幕上表现的讽刺，比布莱特•伊斯顿•埃利斯（Bret Easton Ellis）小说中呈现的更为尖锐。他手中的遇害者就像虐待狂的发泄工具，轻而易举就被推到桌边，然后被摔得粉碎。片中的帕特里克•贝特曼（Patrick Bateman）是个堕落的成年人，他拥有孩童般的无知，更确切地讲，有一种活生生的服装模型般的冷漠、恐怖的机械性。
精明和无知已成为好莱坞（Hollywood）诠释“A字头”字眼（指美国）两种截然相反的手法。在《美国派》这个名字中觉察不到丝毫的讽刺迹象，只是糊里糊涂地证实了美国年轻人对食物、酒或性的永恒追求。相反，《美国荣耀》则是个充满着冷嘲热讽的名字。受到罗伯特•普希尼（Robert Pulcini）和沙里•斯普林格•伯曼（Shari Springer Berman）共同导演的这部兼具戏剧与纪录片风格影片的激发，我们不禁要问，什么能不比（编剧）哈维•佩卡尔（Harvey Pekar）的真实故事辉煌呢？佩卡尔是个地下漫画家和漫画小说家，他的生活充满了一连串非美国式的挫折、失望和悲剧。
答案可能就在名字之中（当然，这个名字源自佩卡尔自己的系列漫画书）。“美国荣耀”这个短语无疑取自弗•斯科特•菲茨杰拉德（F. Scott Fitzgerald）。在我这版《夜色温柔》（Tender is the Night）中的第113页，我找到了这些话：“在法国战后的岁月，慷慨的清算都发生在美国荣耀的庇护之下……”菲茨杰拉德沉迷于描写作为美国人的或好或坏的特征（正如“在美国人生命中没有第二种行动”），他将荣耀看成自己国家给世界留下的无穷无尽、不可避免的遗产。即便是在毁灭和剥夺中，这种遗产也会传承下去。像普希尼和贝特曼一样，菲茨杰拉德在一定程度上是颇具讽刺性的，嘲笑美国打算继续作为街区孩子王（即便在低迷时期）的决心。但就像在在电影《美国荣耀》中讲的那样，他的台词对于新世界永远不说死亡的精神，不愿表达崇敬之情。美国荣耀将继续下去，盲目地、丰富地、不计后果地、而且（上帝现在知道）往往是错误地进行下去。
因此规模是其中一部分。“美国”意味着宽度、广度和分量：一种更大、更为全景式的景象。作曲家、字谜狂人斯蒂芬•桑德海姆（Stephen Sondheim）曾经漂亮的指出“全息电影系统”是一种“美国”造字法。与C字头一样，A字头代表一种歧视。当然，它是在展示好莱坞吹响号角、挥舞国旗的景象。但这不能解释一切。（我们看不到“印度”总在宝莱坞(Bollywood)电影标题中出现。）
因此我们期待着《美国黑帮》（American Gangster）。这回这个形容词是在表达勉强还是崇敬？是讽刺还是肯定？是高尚的神话还是低俗的贪婪？或者同时全包括了？使用“美国”这个词将不再只是影射国别。
译者/何黎 Success depends only on the strength of our will.
Train yourself every day!
Reflect every day!
Inspire yourself every day!
Mentally reinforce yourself every day!
Improve yourself every day!
We cannot afford to waste our lives!
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