TUCKER
A film review by Ed Nilges
Copyright 1988 Ed Nilges
I saw TUCKER: THE MAN AND HIS DREAM today in New York.
This movie dealt with a desperately sad subject in a way that avoided moral complexities and so much of the sadness. Coppola's formula seems to have started in THE GODFATHER. This is to present characters with moral ambiguity... mobsters and, in the case of Tucker, entrepreneurs, as completely good people. Note that I don't think that Don Corleone, or Preston Tucker, were evil people. I think, however, that Coppola ignores the evil things they may have (almost unavoidably) done as members of out-groups in his anxiety to portray them as heroes.
Tucker was winging it in asking a postwar government (still under almost Socialistic controls) for a factory to produce his car. Many things could have gone wrong; for example, the labor issue is ignored. Tucker may not have been able to get enough workers in what was expected to be a labor glut as the vets returned from the war, but what turned out to be a shortage. Tucker was taking a calculated risk. This could have been interpreted as dishonesty.
By the end of the Second World War, you needed major bucks to produce cars. The era of producing cars in garages had ended. The government's case could have rested on the charge that Tucker was dishonest, not as an out and out con man, but as someone who fooled himself in thinking that a startup would work in the postwar economy. The possible validity of such a charge is not addressed in the movie, for it would confuse audiences. Tucker is not shown either agonizing, Hamlet-like, over this possibility, or deliberately ignoring reality.
But it is manipulative to make a movie of an American innocent who is destroyed by those big bad car companies. It is manipulative because Coppola is himself part of another big bad system for producing products for mass consumption...Hollywood. Interestingly, Coppola likes to think of himself as a Tucker, with a loyal staff of retainers (each of whom knows his or her role and never steps outside of it) dedicated to *his* goals...a few years ago, Esquire published a rather dictatorial memo, from Coppola, in which he stated that the whole purpose of his studio was to support *him*. However, his operations dovetail quite nicely, I'm sure, with the Hollywood system, for otherwise his films would not be distributed. In short, Coppola's Zoetrope is really a part of the system Coppola criticizes.
There is something unavoidable about this, for it is impossible to make movies (or cars) without a certain highly-organized and, let's admit it, dictatorial system. But that does not reduce the manipulativeness of the process in the slightest. When Francis makes a movie and we pay money to see it, and he presents us with gosh all fish-hooks American innocence, it is, I believe, incumbent on us to maintain a certain ironic distance. Tucker was like any man, a compound of good and evil...and like any entrepreneur perhaps a bit of an operator. I don't know. I do know that he seems, in the movie itself, to have bit off more than he could chew and to have wasted a lot of people's valuable time.
Actually, gosh-all-fish-hooks American innocence is getting to be just a bit of a geopolitical problem. We ignore the Palestinians for lo these many years, we overthrow democracy hither and yon, then we get all flustered when people hit back and hit back hard. Boyish grins (a la Reagan and Tucker) eventually wear thin. I'm reading a biography of Margaret Thatcher and (although I am no fan of either), I am saddened by the contrast between Ron and The Thatch. Ron dithered in Beirut, and lost 260 Marines; Thatcher made it crystal clear what the result of Argentine conduct would be in the Falklands nonsense, and backed up her words with deeds. She lost only 100 more British soldiers over a much longer period, and each man who fought knew what the hell was going on. The difference is the difference between childhood and adulthood.
I am especially saddened that many would-be computer entrepreneurs will see TUCKER, for the computer industry is currently in somewhat the same phase of consolidation as was underwent by the auto industry. Software is reaching a state of complexity where it may be impossible to go back to the garage to produce good systems (which is not to say that good systems will be produced by big companies). I hope that I am wrong; I hope that the computer industry will not be dominated by a big three.
Good cars, cars with seat belts, engines in the back, disk brakes, were eventually produced, not by entrepreneurs in garages, but by Japanese and Germans in labor unions in great big factories. Actually, this is finally starting to happen in the USA. In 1981, Ford and the AFL/CIO agreed that Quality is Job 1, and I now own an 85 Escort that runs great, gives good gas mileage, didn't cost an arm and a leg, and (gasp) doesn't have a spot of rust without being Rusty Joned. This happened because management and the unions finally got off their butts, under the lash of Japanese competition. Of course, I now understand that the Taurus has a lot of bugs...my Escort is an el Strippo, and the Taurus is a return to the car with a lot of (high profit) extras, and Rome wasn't built inna day. Point is, Tucker (and deLorean) had nothing to do with this. Management and (gasp) labor unions did it.
Manipulating the hopes of the little man (to become a big man to his family), ignoring moral complexity and depth, is what Fascism is all about. I like watching Coppola's films, but I am disturbed by what they've always said about life; that real men prevaricate and kill to protect their families. Maybe they do, but the function of art is to try to purge us of the Beast through laughter and terror. Coppola, like Dostoeyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, seems to want to saddle and mount the beast (and raise the cup on which the word MYSTERY is written?).
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