“It's nothing but a tissue of lies. . . . Tell me what matters. Nothing. . . . I can't breathe anymore because of all the guilt. . . . What we all found was incontrovertible evidence that everything means zero. . . . Don't touch me. I hate any sort of contact. . . . Exactly what do you want? Exactly nothing. . . . Nothing, no one can help me. . . . We've both been out there. Where nothing is. . . . Can you imagine how someone can live with all the hate I have to bear? . . . Nothing applies.”

Some of the lines above are from Frank Perry's Play It As It Lays and some from Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers, and perhaps you can tell which are from where because I'm no longer sure I can. One knows it's in Cries and Whispers that a minister eulogizes, “Pray for us who are left here on the dark, dirty earth under an empty and cruel heaven. . . . Ask Him to free us at last from our anxiety . . . and our deep doubt. Ask Him for a meaning to our lives,” because there are no ministers in the world of Play It As It Lays. And one knows it's in Play It As It Lays, because of Cries and Whispers' period setting, that one character replies to another's mention of children, “I used to have one. She totaled my Chevy.” But is it in Cries and Whispers or Play It As It Lays that an aborted fetus is tossed away with some trash, or a character performs an act of self-mutilation by inserting a fragment of broken glass into her vagina? Yes, it's true that the unalleviated despair of one film is associated with a particularly American dolce vita, and that of the other with the human condition; the difference seems to me small. And despite all the meticulous artistry of the Bergman film, and the fact of its being a few rungs up on the cultural ladder, the distinctions which might be made between either of the two films and posturing rubbish seem to me so small as to verge on the hairsplitting.

Midway through The Passion of Anna, the first half of which seems to me as good as anything Bergman has done and enormously impressive, we suddenly become aware (in the course of a conversation between the two principal male characters) of a gap in our information, a lacuna in the action during which one of the men and one of the two principal women have started living together. From then on, all of the director's familiar preoccupations seem no longer to emerge organically from the materials of the film but to be imposed on them, and unfortunately it's the second and not the first half of The Passion of Anna which most of Bergman's later work resembles. I once heard it said of Bresson's dreadful Une Femme Douce that the chief problem plaguing the marriage of the film's two main characters is that they have Bresson for a director, a comment which might be extended to both Play It As It Lays and Cries and Whispers. My objection to the despair of these films has nothing to do with its correspondence or non -correspondence with my view of the world, but to the fact of its being wholly uncreated, just insisted upon; it's not a matter in a Cries and Whispers (or a Persona) of our not understanding the precise nature of the despair, or even of our not understanding exactly what is happening; the failure isn't one of making us understand, but of compelling our belief. Early on in the scenario of Cries and Whispers, the director enumerates the various lighting conditions the film will strive for: “soft firelight . . . the gentle radiance from an oil lamp. The torment of a bright, sunny autumn day” (emphasis mine). There are, of course, writers in whose work such emotional coloration could be achieved and made convincing; in Bergman's, it has the effect of a nervous tic.

In a recent article, Joan Didion makes an attempt to discredit all film criticism on grounds of the insoluble problems of authorship, of knowing of any given film who really did what. But though Miss Didion (who co-authored the screenplay of Play It As It Lays from her own novel, and received as faithful an adaptation of a novel into film as any author might wish for) has good reason to hope to see the film of Play It As It Lays attributed to someone—anyone—else, attribution remains a problem less of film criticism than of scholarship; the proper subject of film criticism isn't authors, but works: not who did it, but what was done. The trouble with both Play It As It Lays and Cries and Whispers is that they aren't works, just the asserted sensibilities of their authors. It is their authors who are “tormenting” the autumn day, and everything else, “Maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?” the heroine of Play It As It Lays asks at one point; later, at the film's conclusion, she declares, “I know what nothing is, and keep on playing” and, when asked why, replies with an enigmatic smile, “Why not?” I think you can be pretty sure that, when your aces are such frivolously “deep” answers as that one, the game is loaded questions, and someone is dealing from a stacked deck.

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From the moment Harry Stoner wakes up in his palatial house, and, via his remote controls, turns on his television set to hear, in rapid succession, news of Vietnam, of a freeway accident (or was it a building collapse?), the smog report, and a dog food commercial, you know it's going to be another bad day in Los Angeles, America. As it happens, this will be the day (give or take a few hours) in which Harry will decide to commit arson on one of his factories (because declaring bankruptcy of his ladies' sportswear business would reveal that the previous year he'd done “a ballet with the books”), and veer further toward a nervous breakdown and complete withdrawal into some simpler past. Along the way, he'll pimp for a buyer, visit a porno theater, sleep with a hippie, and generally wonder what this country is coming to.

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Spiritually, in Save the Tiger, we are in Arthur Miller country, from the sludgelike prose and sledgehammer subtlety to the pulpy abstractions and earnest tone of high moral seriousness. The telltale signs abound. Despite his big house and remote controls, Harry is unhappy; he has built his life on the evanescent standards of commercial enterprise, while the old-world cutter in his shop, though poor, remains happy because he “has his craft.” Attempting to overcome his partner's objections to the act of arson, Harry speaks of a country in which “there are no rules any more, only referees,” and declares, “If we were making missiles and flat on our back, we'd get a certified check from Congress in the morning.” (Well, yes, one may assent, but the man who will commit arson to cover up his previous juggling of his books will find his rationalization for doing so, another if not that one.) No point is made that's not italicized and underlined. In one scene, with a hint at nuances of perverted pleasures beyond human ken, a prostitute unpacks her wares, among them a variety of oils including baby oil, olive oil, and just about every other kind of oil except banana oil, which nevertheless is elsewhere to be found in profusion throughout the film.

And yet, while I have no doubt that Save the Tiger is a bad movie (though Jack Lemmon, after a shaky start and despite a few impossible scenes, does manage to break out of the comic marionette mold he's adopted for so many years), its disaffection does finally generate a crude power far beyond that of the ritzy nihilism of Play It As It Lays, or the metaphysical anguish of Cries and Whispers. As in Death of a Salesman, though the superstructure of social criticism (the we-are-all-salesmen metaphor, the business about being “well-liked”) may totter, beneath is is some kind of bedrock (the failures we've all experienced between fathers and sons); so, too, is Save the Tiger propped up by an idea which, however bad, is surprisingly forceful. A few years ago, I was addicted to Rod Serling's television series, The Twilight Zone, and noticed in it the recurrence of a theme which, whether developed by Serling or one of the program's other writers, was always treated with an intensity of feeling far in excess of the series' norm: the appeal of a simpler past, of a lost innocence. In one of the shows, a man embroiled in the rat race of modern-day toy designing returns to his childhood neighborhood to find it has remained unchanged and its inhabitants haven't aged; in another, an actor, harried by the clamorous importunings of agents and his alimony-hungry ex-wife, literally escapes into the happy family life depicted in the movie in which he's acting; in yet another, an ulcerous advertising executive, dozing on his commuter run to Connecticut, continually dreams of the train stopping at an idyllic, turn-of-the-century small town, redolent of county-fair Americana, and one day he actually disembarks there.

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In Save the Tiger, as the accumulating complexities of his present life urgently press in on him, Harry Stoner increasingly turns toward thoughts of a happier time in a happier land: when everyone was united in the desire to defeat Hitler, baseball was played on dirt rather than plastic, one could listen to Benny Goodman instead of rock, and everywhere there was “craft,” quality, and people doing what was honest and right. What is wrong with this idea, so dear to television and movie writers and producers (and the writer of Save the Tiger is its producer), is not that it has no validity, but that its focus is so self-indulgently misplaced. One responds to the idea, and I do: the feeling of a loss of innocence is an experience vaguely shared by everyone, and, even if one knows better, it's easy to sentimentalize old times. But it's not the times, or a country, that are any more or less corrupt; the innocence lost is not America's but one's own. Harry Stoner dreams of years gone by in a better America when he wouldn't have to set fire to his factory. But this year Harry Stoner burns down a factory, because last year he did a ballet with his books.

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Just when the Jewish mother (and her embryonic incarnation in her marriage-obsessed daughter) became stock comic figures in our popular culture would be hard to say, though clearly Portnoy's Complaint solemnized and made literarily respectable the occasion. As early as in Odets's Awake and Sing, one sees a Jewish mother as semi-monster, but, though Awake and Sing; aims at a universalization of a particular experience, it respects the contours of Bessie Berger as an individual, ultimately pitiable person, and never relinquishes her to caricature and stereotype. And if Awake and Sing can be bitter, it is, even at its bitterest, free of that most salient trait of the new depiction of the Jewish mother: self-hatred.

Just why this phenomenon should surface now, and be put so publicly on view, is something I can only guess at, but my guess would be that it is at the least intimately connected with the recent surfacing of anti-Semitism among blacks and the political Left generally, and the ensuing loss of privileged status felt by the Jew within the liberal community. “You are your mother,” Noel Airman tells Marjorie Morningstar (at least in the film, though the sense if not the words is in the book) when she attempts to apologize for her mother's behavior, which seems fair comment, except that Marjorie misses a trick in not replying to Noel (née Saul Ehrmann), “But you, too, are your mother.” Which, given how much the content of the Judaism of my own college-in-the-50's generation of lapsed Jews consists of a sentimentality about Jewish food, may only be a variant of the adage, “You are what you eat.” In any case, the Jew's preemption of the anti-Semitic caricature of the Jewish mother seems at once an apology once removed for our failings, and an act of revenge on those who left their mark on us.

For a considerable portion of its length, The Heartbreak Kid seems merely to be another mining of this lode of Jewish self-hatred. On brief acquaintance, Lenny Cantrow marries Lila Kolodny, and, almost as soon as she's been sexually demystified (she'd been making Lenny wait until the honeymoon), she is revealed to him as the proto-Jewish mother in all her gross vulgarity. Loud and inescapable, virtuoso of nonstop talking and eating undeterred even by sex (“Is it as good as you thought it would be?” she asks as they make love, and whips out a candy bar immediately after), her character, whatever one may think of the creation, is a creation. And anything the actress, Jeannie Berlin, fails to suggest of the character's insistently smothering presence, the film fills in by its sense of her encroachment on its space, from the narrow squeeze down the aisle at the opening wedding through her crowding in the car on the honeymoon trip to the hotel room where, laid up by a sunburn, she waits to pounce on Lenny each time he enters. Yet even as one admires the deftness with which all this is done, one is repelled by its cruelty; rather like Madeline Kahn's fiancée in What's Up, Doc?, a character seems drawn for no other purpose than to humiliate her, and, unappealing as the character may be, the film's treatment of her seems less appealing still. It isn't enough that, broiled red by the sun, she must smear herself thickly with what looks like Crisco; she must also be seen eating, with egg salad over her face. And as though she weren't graceless enough awake, we have to watch her, from the point of view of her new husband as he sits fully clothed at her bedside, while she tosses fitfully in her sleep.

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Lenny and Lila honeymoon in Miami Beach (largely, one feels, so they can see replicas of how they'll look in the “forty or fifty years” that Lila senselessly harps on their spending together) where, his wife confined to their hotel room from the first day because of the sunburn, Lenny meets a flirtatious Fitzgeraldian golden girl from Minnesota, Kelly Corcoran, with whom he is so instantly smitten as to determine to rid himself of his new bride even before the honeymoon is over. He does, and lights out for a frigid reception in the Midwest; and, for a while, it looks like the film, after spending its first half humiliating Lila, will spend its second humiliating Lenny, a CCNY shmuck vainly aspiring to conquer an all-American campus queen.

Up until the point in the film at which Lila is dumped, The Heartbreak Kid seemed to me (apart from Charles Grodin's expert comic performance as Lenny, and Cybill Shepherd's silky embodiment of the object of his desire) neither particularly distinguished nor particularly likable; what one sees in it soon after, however, is something I tend, given the formula-ridden character of most movies, to value highly: the capacity of a film to shift gears, and surprise us. For just as one fears that Lenny is going to have his head handed to him by one of the bull-necked jocks by whom Kelly is constantly surrounded, the worm turns with Bilko-like aplomb, and the film itself suddenly changes direction. And one sees that Lenny's talents as a manic liar, revealed earlier when he invents excuses to leave Lila alone in their hotel room, are born not merely of nervousness but of nerve, and bespeak real resources of daring and cunning.

From then on, the film becomes a much funnier one about Lenny's hustling triumph over the adamant objections of Kelly's father to Lenny's pursuit of her (“Now here's my deal,” Lenny approaches him); but the movie still has another twist in store. At the wedding reception which closes the film, we watch Lenny move from one cluster of guests to the next, discussing his business prospects, hustling them all (though his attitude remains indistinguishable from sincerity even, one feels, to himself) with glib talk on topics ranging from “ecology” to tear gas (“there's a lot of money in tear gas”) as the situations dictate. And much as in the final shot of The Graduate (a film The Heartbreak Kid in several ways resembles), where the expressionless faces of the couple on the bus widen the perspective to suggest that the young lovers, in attaining young love, may not have attained everything, so, too, does the mood of The Heartbreak Kid in this last sequence change from one of ebullience to something akin to emptiness, the perspective widening but to embrace . . . what?

It's easier to say what it is not: it isn't any Room at the Top sentimentality about the emptiness of the “good life” to which Lenny has gained entry. Despite the change in faith and social setting, the two wedding ceremonies which open and close the film are virtually interchangeable (at both there is small talk, and a band playing “Close to You”); and Kelly, though there is a clear indication that having her is of somewhat less importance to Lenny than wanting and acquiring her, remains, whatever her shallowness, infinitely more attractive and desirable than Lila. The Heartbreak Kid was adapted from a story by Bruce Jay Friedman which is characteristically nothing more than a joke moving toward its punchline, and scripted by Neil Simon whose contribution seems largely to have been that of fleshing out the main joke with a number of subsidiary gags; and the closing mood of the film seems beyond either of them. Maybe I'm wrong in what I attribute to whom; it seems to me, however, of no little significance that a film consisting of the elements of this one was in fact directed by a Jewish mother, Elaine May, with her actual daughter in the role of the scorned Lila (whose big scene is played while she stifles her urge to vomit a lobster dinner with which Lenny has stuffed her before he breaks the news he is leaving).

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The emptiness one feels at the end of The Heartbreak Kid seems to come not from the milieu, but rather from within Lenny himself, the gifted hustler suddenly revealed to be operating on nothing but hustle. At the end, Lenny, having gone through everyone else at the wedding reception, sits with a group of restless children, and incongruously hustles them with his standard line of patter; when Lenny asks their age, one of them says he is ten years old, and, a vacant look passing over his face, Lenny muses, “I was ten.” It is an epitome of how fast and far the film has moved from Neil Simon's humor that the standard “I-was-ten-once” gag is skirted, and what one is left with instead is Lenny's incredulous contemplation of the distance he has traveled from being ten to being at that moment there, a journey on which he's shed all baggage. But what baggage has been shed, besides Lila? (At neither wedding ceremony or anywhere else in the film is there a sign of one of Lenny's relations, except for the lawyer—a cousin or uncle, I forget which—whom he consults briefly in divesting himself of Lila.) This is a film in which, for all that one feels it couldn't be other than by and about Jews, the word “Jew” is not, to my recollection, spoken once; even Kelly's father's obdurate resistance to Lenny as a prospective son-in-law seems curiously without discernible anti-Semitic content. Yet though there is no sense that Kelly's Waspishness is in itself what Lenny desires in her, there is little doubt it is the condition which makes possible those qualities in her he finds desirable; she is, as even the best of all possible Lilas could never be, the all-American dream girl. It would be horrible to think of Lila as the sole content of Lenny's cultural heritage, the residue of his tradition; and yet the hollow sensation one is left with at the end feels like just that. It feels like deracination.