"The money shot" is that convention of the pornographic film which the punters pay to see, the moment of climax. Fascinated by words, Mills appropriates the term to refer to all those moments that made her reiterate her vows to the movies. But if her title's raciness seems calculated to grab the gaze, her book amounts to a tribute to the ineffability of film.
Academic and filmmaker Mills' diagnosis of what's wrong with Australian film and her rehearsal of who said what during '90s censorship wrangles is less interesting than the light this throws upon film culture generally. Growing up in leafy Surrey and made to see The Dam Busters (1954) but discouraged from beastly US or European fare, as Mills points out, censorship disputes are really disputes over aesthetics. Those who withheld or cut Dead Man (1995) or Romance (1999) simply don't like these films and seek to impose their preferences on us. They don't like them because these films are 'difficult', their specific aesthetic sensibilities excluding mainstream taste. The emergence of 'unofficial' pleasures from The Kiss (1896) to Crash (1996) is as much a history of exclusionary aesthetics as one of aberrant films. When Mills refers to the furore over the Australian independent film My Cunt (1996), which includes scenes of women examining their vaginas, you are reminded of Kathy Bates and Jessica Tandy's appalled response to similar suggestions in the very conventional Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café (1991).
For Mills, critics too promote mainstream taste, colluding in the creation of canons that favour the conventional over the outre, narrative over image. Read Mills on the first moment we see Gilda (Rita Hayworth) in Gilda (1946) for an example of that breathtaking marriage of image and narrative which can make a movie so thrilling. Gilda itself may not be much of a film, but in amongst the commercial rhetoric of so much contemporary film writing there should be more unabashed affection for the cinematic frisson. Like all literary projects, the film-critical landscape is rich and strange. But Mills' onslaught against critics does rather smack of one elbowing her way into film writing without adequately surveying the contemporary scene. Applauding the contributions of women in Hollywood, she quotes screenwriter Eleanor Perry's "Writers are the women of Hollywood"; underpaid, undervalued, exploited, seldom listened to. A few more years freelancing on film and Mills may appreciate how true this is for reviewers as well as screenwriters. Collapsing her feminist sympathies with her critical rancour, Mills seems to see film writers as invariably male. Did all critics in the '40s and '50s look down their noses at 'womens' pictures'? What about women critics? Rightly evangelical about universal cineliteracy, nevertheless film writing is "often seriously dreary".
She may be hard on critics, but Hollywood domination of the multiplex and the fortunes of literary adaptations at the BAFTAS certainly bear out British perceptions that images are culturally subservient to narratives. The Money Shot is a plea for the overhaul of those binarisms - Good vs Bad films, Art vs Commerce, Lumiere vs Melies - with which a certain idea of film culture has been justified. In a brilliant weave of autobiography, etymology, mythology, and downright demotic, Mills admits narrative - South Pacific (1958) - and image - The Man with the Movie Camera (1929) - to a broad church conception of cinema. Cannily polemical, anyone who sees the myth of Pandora as a metaphor for cinematic realism is difficult to put down.
Reviewed by Richard Armstrong
