I have seen the Misfits probably more than ten times over the past 40 years, and tonight, while eating a supper of chili and cornbread I realized how depressed the movie was making me. I wondered why - after I shut it off - and the first thing that struck me was how warped Arthur Miller's perception of people was. He makes the people of the Great Basin look like losers, alcoholics, and lechers. We used to make fun of the people of Nevada - called them "Goat-ropers" - thought them real rubes compared to us sophisticates from the Bay Area. But we never saw them as depraved as Miller depicts them. I get the impression Miller basically did not like people. I suspect that Miller was projecting his own depravity onto his "subject". (Really his "object". Miller was a hack in the Culture Industry. His world a dead realm of shapes and words.) I'll bet the reason MM killed herself was because Miller made her feel like chopped liver on a Ritz cracker. Miller's movie (and John Huston's movie - Huston also made some reprehensible films for anyone with a heart, like the one about the wacko-evangelical who rips his eyes out at the end - I forget the title) affects me the way Pier Pasolini's Salo does, it makes me want to damn them for having gratuitously diminished humanity for the sake of screen effect. Watch this movie, if you must, but it is far from an essential film if you want to master the canon. It is, in the final analysis, paralytically depressing. I say paralytically because it took me 40 years to finally recognize it for what it is. Watch something else.
Review of The Misfits
