I see dead people. I hear dead people

David Sherman

I see dead people. I’m not alone. Actor Haley Joel Osment made a career out of that line in the 1999 film The Sixth Sense. 

His age was in single digits when the film was shot but he was nominated for an Oscar for admitting his peculiarity to Bruce Willis, who, if memory serves me well, was playing a dead person. The perfect Hollywood couple.

Willis’s critics may say he looked dead in several of his shoot-anything-that-moves movies but he was a likeable homicidal maniac. He has a form of dementia now, but, through cinematic and digital magic, we can still see a roguish, cocky, smiling Willis dispatching bad guys with a big handgun and his trademark “Yippee-ki-yay, Motherfucker.”

Bruce is always going to be smiling.

We all see dead people all the time. Listen to them, too. They live forever in the binary world. Watched a Cary Grant-Katharine Hepburn film the other night and realized it was 85 years old.

The cast, crew kissed their last Oscars generations ago but they live on. 

Like Bogart and Tracy and Newman and, and, and … 

I have watched The African Queen and Casablanca almost as many times as the people who edited it, but it still stops time when Ingrid Bergman says: “Play it, Sam.” And he does.

I enjoy Brad Pitt, a smart, good-looking actor and producer, but he’s no Paul Newman. Maybe Newman wasn’t Newman, either, but he seems so on the wide screen. I remember more about him being hustled by Jackie Gleason as Minnesota Fats in The Hustler than I do my bar mitzvah.

And they haven’t found anyone who can steal a scene like Katharine Hepburn – sculpted looks, confident stride, feminist before the word was common currency. 

And, no one can pull John Prine, Jesse Winchester, The Band, Frank Sinatra, B. B. King, Bonnie Raitt or Aretha off my playlist. No one commands respect like Ms Franklin.

Boomer culture is a walk through the cemetery of great artists, talents frozen forever in a digital age where there’s never enough content to fill the multitude of competing networks and streaming services diving for dollars and negotiable clicks. The greats never sleep. The greats never die.

Watching the digitally enhanced images of the post-war years, films were mostly fixated on the trivial dilemmas of the über wealthy. And maybe their homicidal secrets. Many had fleets of docile stereotypes of Black domestics working in homes the size of the White House. 

“Yes’m Ma’am, I surely will.”

Money problems not only didn’t exist, money wasn’t mentioned. Nor were the poor or unemployed or unhoused. 

As Neil Gabler wrote in his 1988 book, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, the film industry, in large part, earned its stripes by painting, polishing and sandblasting reality to what European immigrant studio heads, who had fled the continent of their birth and then Edison’s monopoly on the East Coast of the U.S., thought the ideal American life should be. Integrated, prosperous, harmonious, a Trumpian nightmare.

Luxury and riches after the real-life ravages of war were what audiences craved. Now, the excesses can be stomach-turning or campy, but the stars’ magic overcomes the absurdity.

Though there’s nothing absurd about Fred Astaire dancing between exploding fireworks or Donald O’Conner climbing walls and executing pratfalls in Singing in the Rain.

“Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em laugh.” He did. And does.

Music, of course, has also changed. Beats, generated by computers, spectacle over musicianship, sell tickets. Concerts have become an all-immersive semi-naked experience the way modern films have become amusement park rides, as director Martin Scorsese has complained.

We cling to dead people because we can. Why flush generations of talent and artwork from a time when real American music was migrating from the Jim Crow south to Chicago, New York, Detroit and character actors like Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre were as big a treat as the marquee stars?

And, perhaps, somewhere in our little room of impossible dreams, we believe if they’re still seducing us long past their expiry dates, we too remain vibrant and captivating and, yes, young. 

For 90 minutes of screen time or the length of a 45 record -- about two-and-half minutes -- with fast fingers, those musical minutes add up to real time travel, to when Tom Petty and George Harrison and Roy Orbison were Wilburys travelling joyfully, Charlie Parker was mesmerizing with bebop, Sinatra was putting big bands out of business, ushering in the age of crooners and screaming teenage adoration. He did it his way.

There are more than a few who think it’s all been done, the music has been played, the stories have been told, the special effects so specialized they’re no longer special. Or credible. No, Tom Cruise cannot jump from one jetliner and soar like Superman to land on the wing of another, unless one is on serious pharmaceuticals.

The men and women that play on a summer night in the clubs on main street of the town nearest us perform to people talking and laughing, enjoying the evening. And ignoring the music. Maybe it’s because the music is often augmented by a computerized drum and bass track, lifeless by definition, with the sweating front man or woman desperate to provide the humanity his accompanists lack.

Or people don’t give a shit. They have more dead peoples' music than they need on their mobile microchip devices.

The big screens have been lit for generations by people wrestling with problems familiar and incredible, curious and tragic. 

Redundancy dictated stories had to be jacked up with more and more ultra-violence or ultra-ridiculousness. Youngsters, not overly interested in the reality of a world in flames, embrace it -- not unlike post-war audiences who had overdosed on life. Reality is not “in.”

Now, cinemas are on the ropes and whether they’ll recover no one knows. How many Marvel comic movies can the world endure? How many larcenous buckets of over-salted popcorn can people stomach?

But, the question is moot if you can settle down and blissfully flick a switch or find a repertory cinema and watch or listen to dead people come back to life.

Because, after all, they’ll be here long after our own best-before dates.

So, play it, Sam.