Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

It would be silly to call William Wyler underrated — he was one of the most acclaimed and commercially successful movie directors in American history. A staple in every American film canon, he was my favorite director long before I knew his name. Growing up I watched Dodsworth, The Little Foxes, The Heiress, and Jezebel dozens of times without noticing that four of my favorite movies were directed by the same person. His legacy is really remarkable: the same person who directed these close and complex dramas, and who was Lilian Helman’s favorite collaborator, also made movies such as Funny Girl, Ben Hur, and Roman Holiday. The man whom we have to thank for the stardoms of Audrey Hepburn and Barbra Streisand also taught Bette Davis how to act and Laurence Olivier how not to overact. And yet he does not inspire the kind of cultish attachment that other directors do. Perhaps that is because his style is almost imperceptibly subtle. It is not clear whether there is such a thing as a “Wyler touch.” We love Wyler movies, but we don’t love Wyler. Wyler famously quipped that although he was not an auteur, he was one of the only American directors who could pronounce the word correctly. Critics said that Wyler had an “invisible style.” Andre Bazin, in Cahiers du Cinema, called him the “Jansenist of mise-en-scène,” meaning that Wyler was controlled and even self-denying in his visual style, in contrast to the personal and easily identifiable signatures of John Ford, Fritz Lang, and Alfred Hitchcock. Yet there is nothing austere about Wyler. He was no shrinking violet as a director, sacrificing his own artistic individuality for the good of the picture. No, the Wylerian style is not a particular visual brand. It is a special kind of attention. As he himself explained, “I have never been as interested in the externals of presenting a scene as I have been in the inner workings of the people the scene is about.” Wyler films are not iconic. They do not dazzle us with specular images that stand on their own, that can be borrowed and parodied. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie can “quote” Kubrick, aping the imagery from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove for a gag — images so powerful that they transcend tone, context, and even the stupidity of a movie like Barbie. Wyler, by contrast, cannot be quoted. His genius is quiet, specific, unspectacular, and intimate. If Kubrick’s movies are operatic, Wyler’s are novelistic. Films like Kubrick’s are spectacles suspended in time. The composer of an opera manipulates the audience by controlling the music. Viewers are transported into the pace and mood dictated by the composer; they are held steady, made to wait, and then finally allowed the relief of climax: the aria. Just as an aria can be excerpted from an opera and still retain its power, the images from a Kubrick movie can be stolen, mimicked, and interpreted while still recalling the original. Not so Wyler’s.  Wyler’s films have the bounded and internally elaborated intimacy of a novel. Characters are shaped supremely in relation to one another. Wyler’s delicate details — slight movements of flesh, diffusions of light, fluid camera motions — reveal the inner worlds of each character. His greatest stylistic flourishes work on the viewer almost imperceptibly. They are meant to be discovered. Picking one up feels like eyeing a stranger on the street — say, watching as they grapple with some inconvenience. You recognize a slight shadow of annoyance cross their face, and for an instant you feel that you know exactly what they are thinking. The ephemeral intuition of other minds is so powerful precisely because it is so gentle and because it reveals our collective interest and investment in each other. Wyler is always counting on our capacity for close attention. Put simply, the “Wyler touch” is a prodigious gift for people, for understanding and conveying on film the truthful appearance of inner experience. He makes real the distances between people, the way they bounce off each other and retreat into themselves, the way they work at themselves and forge each other. In this regard he is one of cinema’s supreme