Keith Gordon and his ugly movie.

True cinema has the simplest prohibition: If you can’t make a good image, you can’t make a good movie. ("Astonish me!" Jean Cocteau commanded modern artists–a credo Orson Welles dutifully reiterated.) Directors Eytan Fox, Michael Winterbottom and Peter Hedges approach movies as amateurs and barbarians; they’re among today’s trendy video brigade who have helped sway the visual art of cinema away from movies and toward craven career-moves. Unconcerned with capturing and interpreting the world, they’re after the prestige of filmmaking–even though the aforementioned films lack what Andre Bazin described as "an objective social reality which in turn moves into the background of the moral and psychological drama which could of itself justify the film." Instead, most video-makers who pose as filmmakers have shown the world to be a literally decrepit, ugly place.

The problem may be that they lack technique, but what comes across is the lack of a humane vision. Yossi & Jagger exploits a queer agenda while avoiding the ethnic politics of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Pieces of April turns the burgeoning sub-genre of family Thanksgiving melodramas (The Daytrippers, Home for the Holidays, What’s Cooking?) into smug, hipster-pandering cliches. In This World completely perverts concern with global displacement–as well as Bazin’s good old-fashioned neorealism–by rendering the experience of Iranian immigrants visually incomprehensible.

Because In This World is the most serious of these digital movies, it is also, in some ways, the worst. Winterbottom’s dubious armchair-liberal politics blithely switch p.o.v. from harrowing to pitying. Exactly whose experience is being shown–whether the effete director’s or the tormented non-professional actors reliving their plight–is never clear. It’s just always questionable. (A sensible viewer might ask, "How did a camera get smuggled in with the stowed-away refugees?" or "If we’re meant to trust that the documentary-style photography is recording truth, why isn’t Winterbottom helping his dispossessed cast find food and lodging?") The ease of video-filmmaking has allowed directors to get away with inept, unconscientious work while posing as au courant and politically committed. Unfortunate moviegoers are charged 10 bucks for the insult.

All this pertains to the affront of The Singing Detective. Though not shot on digital-video, it is one of the worst-looking movies of the year. Its exhibition in legitimate movie houses is proof that esthetic standards have been demolished in today’s film culture.

What an ironic disaster. Dennis Potter’s 1980s BBC series The Singing Detective was nothing if not an esthetic conceit, bringing the formal appreciation of pop culture into the mass media. Potter’s postmodern tv show about Dan Dark, a pulp-fiction writer who languishes with a near-leprous skin disease, provides the base for what should be director Keith Gordon’s own formal conceit (he uses the screenplay adaptation Potter wrote before dying in 1994). Dark’s splenetic rants ("I believe in vomit, puke, the technicolor yawn"), delivered with sorrowful edge by Robert Downey Jr., are meant to indict the shallowness of pop culture. Dark’s musical-comedy fantasies (song-and-dance numbers and nightclub performances) are interlaced with scenes in which he vents frustration upon his wife and his hospital attendants.

Potter’s idea was to play anger against shabbiness, suffering against cheap relief. He wanted emotional contrasts you could see and feel. As a skin-disease sufferer himself, Potter revealed his own psychic torment through Dark’s deranged hallucinations (so absurd they zap the zing out of pulp fiction and pop music). Potter braved his pitiable illness, producing a number of acrid texts, but today his cynicism seems facile. Terence Davies’ impassioned, redemptive reading of pop culture in The Long Day Closes and Distant Voices, Still Lives has exposed Potter’s small-minded malignity. His horniness and bitterness about life, sex and pleasure deliberately traduced pop culture. (No wonder the BBC and American Anglophiles fell for it as highbrow and postmodern.)

It would take an extraordinary esthetic sense to replay Potter’s conceit and make it watchable. Keith Gordon not only lacks cynicism (the 50s pop tunes are conveyed in lackluster fashion, without satire), he also lacks facility. Dark’s fantasies look threadbare, like low-rent tv production numbers–pop that doesn’t pop. Gordon simplifies Potter to a contrast between musical trivia and ugly reality. (Dark’s suspicions about his wife’s infidelity and his dreams of sexual potency are imagined in the tired codes of old Bogart movies.) Trash culture is implicitly as much of an affliction as a skin disease–a snotty perspective in a low-fi film.

When Herbert Ross directed the 1981 film version of Potter’s similarly misanthropic BBC series Pennies from Heaven, a miraculous thing happened: Potter’s shoddy postmodernism was transcended by Ross’ palpable love of showbiz style and iconography. Ross didn’t just refer to the pop past, he reanimated it. And working with cinematographer Gordon, Willis blessed Ross to reimagine 30s movie musicals in full-color splendor. He contrasted Potter’s mundane story of a craven sheet-music salesman to the imaginative power of the Hollywood movie apparatus–an esthetically underrated fount to which Ross and company gave the precision, nuance and persuasive flair of modern art. (Pennies linked pop tunes to Edward Hopper, Reginald Marsh, Raymond Chandler, Bertolt Brecht.) The series vivified Depression-era consciousness to demonstrate how people always negotiate between real-life struggle and pop dreams.

Pennies from Heaven was one of contemporary cinema’s great achievements. Ross’ showbiz instinct was probing and rapturous–never cynical. Unlike Rob Marshall in Chicago and unlike Gordon here, Ross gave a tactile dimension to musical fantasies (an adulterous trio harmonized against a turquoise infinity, a grimy schoolroom turned into a buoyant band box, a greasy roadside diner gave way to a bum’s exultant dance in a shower of gold coins). Elevating pop culture to a joyous expression of the psyche, Ross trumped Potter’s pessimism. What Potter/Dan Dark condemned as the trifling product of sweat and human striving, Ross celebrated. His brilliant, elegant vision came from an esthetically based sensitivity. That’s what’s missing from today’s digital-video movies, and the same lack deadens The Singing Detective.

Although Keith Gordon began his film career as an actor in a couple Brian De Palma flicks, The Singing Detective looks like it was directed by someone who had never seen a movie. Is it possible that Gordon, coming from an indie-infatuated generation, doesn’t even know the splendid Pennies from Heaven? Gordon fails to create a fantasy-based tone. He blandly directs and edits dialogue, not emotions. Downey provides some feeling when Dark warbles "It’s All in the Game" to a grumpy nurse, and his eyes reveal pools of sadness. But the fantasy scenes lack the buoyancy of Downey’s performance in Heart and Souls. And the shrink-and-patient rapport between Dark and his doctor (Mel Gibson doing a startling Robin Williams impersonation) suggests a parody duet that doesn’t sing.

Potter conceived The Singing Detective to refute the idea of beauty in popular culture. Gordon might as well have shot it in digital-video.