One of my goals in doing this is to see if watching all these films together leads me to fresh ideas and new things to talk about. So I’m going to grapple a bit now with the greatest of Wiseman cliches and see if can avoid the obvious. I’m trying to go one film at a time, and as we’re already fifteen films and about fifteen years along, I don’t think we want to be too rigid in characterizing his interests or his methods. But let’s wrestle with the big one - Wiseman is a chronicler of institutions. That he has often been interested in institutions is obvious. But what does that mean? How does it help us think about his films?
While his films are often on the prowl for big ideas, what they never do is argue for anything being typical or representative. So it’s a mistake, I think, to ever say that he’s arguing for this institution or that one being a good or bad example of something, or that he’s critical of, say, the welfare system or high schools, and that he approves of hospitals. It’s just not the right way to approach his work or to think about what any one film contributes. It’s not even a “there are good things and bad things in these places” type of consideration. Just push out of your mind that he’s looking for judgements about places or governmental or commercial structures. Set yourself free from that limited viewpoint.
What is an institution in his films anyway? The titles of some films seem to suggest their importance, but ironies and double meanings abound even there which lead them in other directions. Not taking things at a simple face value is a good place to start. I’ve mentioned that Primate as a title might be thought of more than one way, but we could say the same about others. Meat can mean us too, and Basic Training is both literal and referencing training beyond just how to be a soldier. Consider lots of the titles that might be taken as institutional and see if they go any further. They often do. I guess we can see the “simple” institutional cases when we’re in one place that seems to have a single role in society - a hospital, a high school, a welfare office. Start with a shot outside and maybe a sign on the door, end with a shot outside. Especially when they are public institutions, we might think we know what he’s up to. As I hope we’re already seeing, even these films set in such places are not strictly “about” that type of institution. They are places where Wiseman thought interesting and provocative things might be going on, and when he shot there for awhile, he went back to his editing room and set about to make films from that footage. So none of his films are really “about” (sorry to keep using those quotes) institutions. Institutions are sort of their starting points and their settings, certainly not their sole interest.
And let’s note already too that not all the films have these “simple” institutional brandings. We’ve seen some already that we can say are “about” the military, but is there really an institution in say, Sinai Field Mission? It’s set in one place that’s very difficult to generalize from, and the film rarely attempts to. And we’re not yet to the films with town names, where we think we can try to say they still have an interest in institutions but it’s a number of them which we skip between as we travel around. Canal Zone would already be one like that, and we’ve got a bunch still to come. So calling him a chronicler of institutions is a gross simplification and worse, a too easy excuse to think of his films in a limited way. I’ve aleady suggested versions of this already, but I needed to come out and make my view on this clear, and I’ll try not to flog this one too hard from here on out.
The Store has an interesting way to lightly ridicule the idea of institutions. First, it’s set in what could be called an institution, as in fact is said right at the outset. Neiman Marcus is an institution in the sense that it’s a well-known example of this type of business, of department stores, famous enough that it ends with a fancy dinner celebrating its 75 year anniversary. At the first of our many employee meetings, the executive in charge comes straight out and says about their store that “It's an institution created to make sales” after conveniently listing some other occupations with locales having specific goals - doctors, undertakers, car mechanics. In case that’s not assertive enough, he adds "Neiman Marcus is a selling institution" using that Wiseman label a second time, and driving this home with "that's the only purpose we have in life”. But because he might claim this as his only purpose doesn’t mean that a film set in a department store will only be about that purpose. Selling will certainly be shown and be of interest, but the point for us once again is that we can be interested in that stuff and not stop there, as Wiseman never stops at the borders of what an institution claims to be concerned with. The guy is also twisting the notion that Nieman Marcus is an institution of a renowned sort into his own version that it’s institution only from a sales standpoint. Everybody can have their own idea of what is an institution and what it represents.
One difference I really felt this time in The Store is that it moves so quickly. Maybe because it’s Christmas time, nobody seems to slow down. I’ve never counted, but I would bet that there are more shots per minute in The Store than in any of his other films, at least up to here. The film is fully of really short episodes and is loaded with sight gags and running jokes and things shown so quickly we risk missing them. I’d call it experimental in this sense. I’ve marveled earlier at the many times in Wiseman films when episodes play out and get more complicated. Here, it feels often like that could happen, but never does. Even though two hours long, I can’t think of a single extended sequence. (Perhaps the bizarre Singing Birthday Chicken who turns into a stripper might qualify. I hate to give away such a big plot point if you haven’t yet seen the film. I should have offered a spoiler alert.) Instead, maybe tapestry is more like the structure - threads that keep reappearing. It’s like Wiseman is deliberately setting a constraint, tying one hand behind his back (the hand that can allow scenes to go on at length), to see what he can pull off.
Maybe I better offer some examples of what I’m talking about. Let’s go with some sight gags. My favorite I’ll call Elf Man. I should say that The Store is very firmly set at Christmas, clearly appropriate because it’s the big sales period. (Let’s recall how nicely Model fit with Halloween too.) So Christmas stuff is all over the place - decorations, choral groups, and lots of employees in costumes. Elf Man appears to be an older fellow paid by management to wear ridiculous elf shoes and a hat as part of his funny outfit. I think he shows up in the film three times, for just a few seconds each. First he’s minding the line for a few waiting to get portraits taken. You see him just a few seconds, just long enough to register the weird sight of a guy in an elf suit. Maybe twenty minutes later, we get another shot of Elf Man, a single shot as he’s now walking with a silly little wreath basket too. And then later for his last appearance, he’s walking out of the beauty shop we’re on our way into. What he would have been doing in there is anybody’s guess. Each of his appearances are so quick and so funny. and it wouldn’t surprise me if he was in there a time or two more and I just didn’t catch him. That’s my best sight gag example but there are others - a clown silently riding an escalator, a two second one where a dress falls off a mannequin leaving it bare, a great one of a small chorale singing “Joy to the World” and then we cut to a long shot to show how they’re singing with absolutely no audience listening to them. This is a funny film, for lots of reasons.
Coming from Model, we don’t have to be surprised by all the fashion connections. I realized and mentioned right at the end of talking about Model how odd it was to discover that we never saw there any actual fashion shows, runways, or even much trying on of clothes. The Store more than fills in that gap. We have models walking around the store pitching their outfits, interrupting diners in the store’s restaurant for the same reason, displaying outfits to groups of employees, modelling all over the place. Customers trying stuff on is of course a big activity too, usually coaxed by salespeople into believing how great they look, although Wiseman is on the prowl for the occasional salesperson who will speak critically of what the customer says she likes. (Women trying on dresses is what goes on here. No man tries on a suit, and we’d barely know there is a men’s department. I guess the dresses are more expensive and the salespeople there more interesting.)
An obvious Model connection, and a scene I’m shocked that I’ve never seen discussed, takes place in the portrait studio. At first we feel right at home, again seeing a photographer instructing a young woman in how to pose for the camera: "Chin more, turn to me a bit. Come back, just follow my finger this way . . . Turn the other way, your body, yeah, and let's do the opposite.” These familiarly ambiguous instructions are followed by the woman photographer saying to her subject as she’s about to take the picture: “You know what would be really cool, if you had no clothes on, just your hair. I'm not kidding." It’s a more sexually suggestive remark than anything in Model. When the portraits are finished, the young woman in them even offers to leave one with the photographer for a couple of weeks, somehow acknowledging the woman’s brief display of obsession. It’s awkward and weird. A second quick visit to the portrait studio later in the film yields a touching and poetic speech by the woman then being photographed, which starts ironically given this previous scene with the woman photographer suggesting her subject might put on a jacket. Her complete answer in declining to do so is "It looks so business. I don't want to look business right now. I want a soft feminine. I'm not a career lady. I want to look soft. I stay home all day. I play cards." It’s a brief wistful self-assessment that wouldn’t be out of place in say, an Albee play.
For running gags, if we can call it that, Wiseman keeps returning to a sable coat salesman so often it feels like the entire film has been a document of his effort. Part of our education here is to learn of the difference between wild and ranched sable, and the wild, in December 1982 dollars costs the unbelievable $45,000. At first this discussion goes on between the salesman and the man who will presumably be doing the buying. In his second appearance sometime later, the guy is first examining a single sable coat alone on a hanger. The salesman pops in again with another one, saying "this is ranched, but the very best of the ranch. It's considered as fine, it's simply a matter of do I want more silver in it." As often in the film, salespeople seem very ready to contradict themselves if making the sale requires that shift, as here he’s going against his earlier touting of wild over ranched. We also learn the crazy fact that the woman this is being purchased for already has another sable coat, so this one needs to be a different color. Keeping this going, in a third scene later the woman herself finally makes an appearance, trying on the sable in front of a mirror. Our same salesman won’t quit, as he now explains about “guard hairs” from the pieces of wild sable in the jacket. He actually makes the incredible claim that a sable jacket is “very practical”. Her answer is a great statement that only a rich person could make: “After a while, you quit being practical.” That comment would more than justify our interest in sable, but a couple of further payoffs are still to come. Towards the end of the film, we get a look into a back room, as happens occasionally in the film, where we generally see minority workers laboring at things like sewing and repairing. Here we see gift boxes being assembled and wrapped, and we get to see an expensive sable coat, likely this same one, being carefully put into a box and tied with a ribbon. It feels like we’re back at the end of the conveyor belt assembly line in Meat, seeing furs and jewelry ready to ship instead of steaks and ground beef. We’re still not quite done with fur coats though, as the last big scene in the film is a fancy-dress dinner in a hotel for that anniversary dinner, where Stanley Marcus himself, head of the company, is being honored, sitting next to, no less, Lady Bird Johnson (this is Texas, after all) and receiving an introduction by Art Buchwald, the then famous humorist and journalist. His last line of introduction to Marcus is "the only thing you really need is a good fur coat”, a nice acknowledgement of how much money the store must make selling those things, as evidenced by the many on display at the dinner. Consumption is certainly on the conspicuous side. (Marcus, by the way, in his short speech, mostly chooses to do a spoken/sung version of “My Way”. Perhaps not easily noticed is his rewrite of the lyrics, which now includes “I don't disclaim the family name”. As well he wouldn’t.)
I was surprised to see that The Store is Wiseman’s first color film, as I had thought the changeover from black and white didn’t happen until later. It’s still a kind of 16mm film color, not as distinct as later digital color will look. What’s funny, though, is how often color gets referred to in the film, as if Wiseman is noting its difference. The first line we hear in the film is a saleswoman remarking that some makeup is “too orangy”, and jewels are often admired for their deep colors. Clothes, of course, are a colorful commodity, and we hear discussions as to what matches what and what color blouse should be ordered to go with some expensive skirt purchase. And a short silent scene is awash with color - another back room where in this one an artist is painting pictures of jewelry, dabbing watercolors from a close-up palette of colors. Also, Christmas comes in handy for color, as red is all over the place, including lots of fingernails getting done up in the store. These color bursts of various sorts comprise a little bit more playing with the medium as Wiseman moves with the technology.
Since we’ve looked at furs, brief mention of jewelry seems necessary too, given the staggering sums these things go for, and also Wiseman’s creativity in giving them some attention. We get a look at what we’re told is a $45,000 “matching bracelet” in a funny scene where two salesmen are going over their wares and accidentally confuse this one with a $42,000 bracelet on their counter too. We hear that the bracelet has 1,284 diamonds in it, to which the other guy correctly says “Amazing”. More amazing still is his salesman-like reply that it’s ”almost understated in its elegance”. No way is it understated! Like that “practical” sable jacket, he actually claims "You could pass it off as something other than diamonds if you wanted to”. No. Jewels, fur coats, and clothes are definitely Texas-size around here, gaudy and over the top.
With all this expensive stuff, what gets interesting is the selling language, one set of jargon that keeps coming up in the multiple meetings of employees throughout the film and another set of patter for the customers. Wiseman always has a great ear for language, especially for the vocabulary and terminology that typifies the place we’re visiting. He knows a bizarre way to express things when he hears it, and a great pleasure in these films is hearing statements you can’t quite believe you’ve heard. He’s especially drawn to paradoxes and contradictions, and to statements that can be taken on much broader levels than perhaps the speaker intended. I seem to keep noting a theatrical quality as well - monologs and scenes between two characters full of interesting exchanges. Rather than just get into a “here are some of my favorite lines” thing, let’s try to deal first with a little of the executive talk. There are indeed meetings galore here, although each is still shown fairly briefly, unlike our lengthy meetings to come in later films as Wiseman becomes much more expansive regarding how long and how many scenes of groups together talking might make up a film. What’s funny about the meetings in The Store is that most of the time it’s just the boss of the meeting speaking. Though a room might have twenty people, the most we're likely to get from about nineteen of them are affirmative nods of the head and hands raised when asked. The executive-speak is a mix of motivational and semi-marketing patois - the guy I like best at this starts out explaining that the “emotional environment isn't going to change very much in '83”, whatever that means. For him it's the start of an explanation that they want to be "a regular priced specialty store”, meaning one that doesn’t offer discounts. He talks down their competitors who do, but within another minute he’s advocating for special holiday pricing, saying that for holidays like Washington’s Birthday "maybe we take a 35% markup" for four days. Starting one place in their analyses and winding up in opposite-land just isn’t a problem for these guys. Another fellow speaking to a bunch of salespeople starts offering his aesthetic notions: "style is the perfection of a point of view" and then even though he’s answered this already, gets even more philosophical: "What is style?" And just as every military operation in Manoeuvre had a crazy name, the same might be said about panty hose. As explained to the sales staff: "This one''s called Key Largo. It's fish. We have Rosebuds, Eclipse, we've got polka dots, this one's called Dinette.” The group appears to nod approvingly, if quizzically.
A big meeting about advertising also merits a mention because one N-M exec is very on the ball about his TV commercials. Now that we have YouTube I can steer you to the one he discusses, which he calls the Chanel piano keys spot and correctly identifies as being directed by Ridley Scott and even cites a cost of $195.000. (Not that many sables.). I think this is better known as the Chanel commercial using the song "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire", which is indeed a Ridley Scott commercial and has piano keys in it, and is viewable on YouTube. (They were sued because they had no permission to use the Ink Spots song.) This same meeting also yields the strange repeated (over and over) idea about planning for a “seminar on eyes” which the suggester envisions warranting attention on the 10 o’clock news. When Stanley Marcus himself leads a meeting (if we don’t recognize who he is, eventually we’ll see the dinner in his honor) he’s the most straight-talking of the bunch, although the one with the most grudges. For some reason he’s got it in for retail buyers, but at least speaks plainly: "retail buyers are unethical, unfair, and deserve the worst kind of treatment and response because they don't play honest with their manufacturers”. Such straight talk is in short supply around here. We won’t even get to the guy who claims that memories of eating in the Zodiac Room as a child are as vivid as recollections of the Kennedy assassination. (As this is Dallas, you could have experienced both the same day.) And we’ll skip too the plans for a food shop, which an exec worries could skew too Jewish if they’re not careful. (His ominous warning: "Once it happens to you, you begin to develop a different audience." Maybe Jewish Stanley Marcus might feel otherwise.)
When customers are being serviced, the talk changes. "It's much too important a skirt not to have the right top" is actually spoken with a straight face. Persuasive tactics can change on a dime (or maybe we should say on a thousand-dollar bill). Our sable seller, whose technique I’ve already marveled at, can go from "sable is a great Texas coat" (huh?) to claiming "I can see this with jeans" and a moment later it’s "I can see this with the most elegant evening gown" (obviously) on to "lunch, cocktails, dinner" to finally in a catch-all generic desperation "just a true work of art”. The sellers of luxury items try to push a likely semi-pseudo expertise - expounding upon Chinese rug weaving techniques, precious stone qualities, or dress lining finishes with equal aplomb. The jewelry guys seem the best at this. In case you didn’t know: "A lot of semi-precious stones won't hold the light. The ruby really attracts it and holds it in." That kind of talk is an art form for sure. At other times there can be serious designer name dropping, more than in Model, and usually by first name only, so it’s Oscar and Bill and claims they can call anyone and get a special custom order done, which may well be true. One last non-sensical observation comes from a perfume lady, describing a new product that "darker ladies" are "falling in love with", she says it's "heavy for a blonde, but for a brunette, it's wonderful, and for winter it's very nice.” So if you’re a brunette and it’s winter, it’s especially the choice? Beats me, but it’s interesting to attempt to parse.
I eventually better have more to say about some visual aspects of these films, but as this is the third in a row where his cinematographer is John Davey. who will be around for a considerable number to come, it’s time already to marvel how suited to Wiseman he is - completely steady and never moving in to make fun of anything or give it a special zoom in for editorial significance. There are times when the camera is so unmoving that I’m sure there’s a tripod, but if you look carefully, you can still detect the slightest movement. His steadiness also makes possible the nearly abstract moments or the sense of repetition we sometimes get. There are great overhead shots of people on escalators, looking themselves like product moving along a belt, and elevators get a good amount of attention too, the carefully repeated openings and closings of doors make us feel like we’re in a no exit labyrinth - there’s always another floor. Turning cinema verite into modernist abstract sci fi patterns is an art form in itself, and Davey’s contributions appear to be considerable. And let’s not forget that Christmas 1982 was the season of the E.T. doll, and they are to be commended for only including a one second shot of the toy so popular even Nieman Marcus had to condescend to stock it.
If The Store is an institutional film, I guess it belongs with those other institutions we might already feel we’re familiar with: high schools, maybe hospitals, not too many others. Later we’ll have libraries, more schools both high school and college level, zoos and ballet and night clubs. These seem of a considerable order different from a monastery or a missile control room or any of the others that are a lot further off the beaten path. The ones we might think we know, like here with a department store, might more plainly bear the mark of their creator, turning the familiar into the distinctly Wiseman way of looking at these things. The places we might think we know don’t become films we could have predicted.