Songs of Cinephilic Life: Peter Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed and The Thing Called Love

I always felt that picture [They All Laughed] would never really work until everyone in the picture was dead, and then it would sort of become neutral again.

—Peter Bogdanovich (quoted in Simon 155)

as a major figure in the New Hollywood cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s, Peter Bogdanovich distinguished himself as one of the sharpest eyes in a new generation of American filmmakers. During this period, Bogdanovich secured a reputation as a knowledgeable cinephile, not only through making films that reinvested in classical Hollywood genres, but also through the publication of book-length interviews with film directors (Allan Dwan, John Ford, and Fritz Lang) and a 1974 volume of film writings, Pieces of Time: Peter Bogdanovich on the Movies. As Girish Shambu points out in an appreciation of the director’s breakthrough film, The Last Picture Show (1971), Bogdanovich was the rare example of an American film critic who eventually turned to directing, a phenomenon more familiar in France, with the Cahiers du cinéma critics, whose first attempts at cinema were preceded by criticism praising the auteurs of the classical Hollywood era.

Unfortunately, Bogdanovich’s writings on films and his films themselves, both products of his intense love for movies, have not received similarly affectionate attention from scholars working on the topic of cinephilia. Scholarship on the director is mostly limited to an early critical study that covers Bogdanovich’s films up to 1988 (Harris) and a handful of essays—most of which focus on landmark Bogdanovich works such as The Last Picture Show (see Giddings) or his approach to film adaptation in the 1974 film Daisy Miller (see Birdsall).¹ Whereas the films of his 1970s New Hollywood colleagues such as Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg are explored in recent and thoroughgoing academic monographs and anthologies (see Danks, Baker, and Morris), Bogdanovich’s cinema has not roused comparable or similarly appreciative academic conversation.

In this essay, I seek to partially redress this oversight through a discussion of two of Bogdanovich’s deeply cinephilic films, They All Laughed (1981) and The Thing Called Love (1993). Before proceeding to an analysis of these two particular works and the parallels I see between them, I first want to speculate further on why Bogdanovich has not attracted much discussion in contemporary film studies. One reason for this lack of cinephilic scholarship on Bogdanovich is, arguably, the largesse of extra-filmic commentary the director himself has provided on his work. In addition to the numerous commentary tracks he has recorded for DVD releases of his films, he also has been

Figure 1.

Samantha Mathis (with Anthony Clark and Dermot Mulroney) as Miranda Presley in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Thing Called Love (1993).

the subject of many interviews over the last fifty years.² Such commentary perhaps leaves the impression that Bogdanovich alone is the authority, if not over the “final” meaning of his films, then at least over the ways in which a love for cinema might inform discourse about them. Peter Tonguette’s recent collection of interviews with Bogdanovich is emblematic of the director’s thoughtful discourse on his films (and those of his classical Hollywood mentors), with a wide-ranging selection of engaging conversations dating from 1968 (the period of his first feature, Targets) and extending to interviews published shortly after the 2001 release of The Cat’s Meow.

A second possible explanation for the relative dearth of scholarship on Bogdanovich is the fact that much scholarly criticism written on and through cinephilia—work driven by the same love of cinema held by Bogdanovich—does not very often set the era of New Hollywood from which he emerged within its purview. Groundbreaking academic volumes on cinephilia such as Christian Keathley’s Cinephilia and History, or the Wind in the Trees, Robert B. Ray’s The ABCs of Hollywood, and Rashna Wadia Richards’s Cinematic Flashes: Cinephilia and Classical Hollywood take as their subject mainly the same classical Hollywood films Bogdanovich himself loves, only rarely straying to discussions of...