In Ordinary People, the Judith Guest best-seller with which Robert Redford has made his debut as a director, there is a boy named Conrad (Tim Hutton) who reminds me of someone I knew in college. The boy I knew was also from an affluent Chicago suburb, and our freshman year he too tried to kill himself. Apparently the pressure he felt from his parents to be a model student drove him to it. In the metal file drawer he had brought from home, he filed a suicide note under "S." Almost as soon as this incident occurred, it began to recede in my mind as an historical moment. The year was 1959. In Massachusetts, where the college was, people were already aware that Jack Kennedy was going to run for president. The 1950s were over, and that suicide attempt felt like the last, desperate gesture they were going to make. It wasn't that none of us would ever try to commit suicide again, but the time for filing the notes under "S" had passed. 

Conrad in Ordinary People doesn't try to take his life for the same reason as the boy I knew; yet this film also gives me the impression of a temps perdu. It makes me wonder whether Guest's novel isn't, for Redford, a kind of meditation on a lost opportunity. It's a film in which an ordinary person, who also happens to be a movie star, worries about whether both his ordinariness and his stardom might not be out of date. 

From Keaton, and even Chaplin, to Bogart to James Dean, movie stardom was based on a certain inexpressiveness. The ideal hero was someone who could keep his feelings to himself. He was somebody who didn't let anything touch him too closely to begin with. Chaplin was able to shrug off defeat cheerfully and waddle down the road undaunted. That's the ending to all the tramp's films, and at heart it's not so different from the way The Maltese Falcon ended, when Bogart turned over Mary Astor to the cops and walked down the stairs alone. Both stars' heroism lay in not letting life's disappointments get to them. Theirs was the ability to say, like Gable at the end of Gone with the Wind, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." No matter how romantic a hero was, he still needed that knack of walking away from disaster. He had to be able to go off into the night when things didn't work out, the way Rhett left Scarlett, in order to start over again somewhere else, to go back to living by his wits alone. 

The emotional center of gravity here was the cowboy, the pioneer. His was the ethos with which American audiences identified because they too thought of America as a place where people were trying to build something, where they had nothing yet and everything could be lost at any moment. This was a world of constant cataclysm, the kind in which Keaton and Chaplin both found themselves, a world where hurricane, flood, war, and social upheaval occurred every other minute. One needed to be stoical, to have a carry-on mentality, in order to survive. The object lesson of Gone with the Wind, released on the knife edge between the Depression and World War II, was that however high you had risen, you still might have to start over again from scratch. The old virtues of stoicism and impassivity were still necessary.

But sometime in the 1950s it began to seem as if the strong, silent type weren't so necessary any more, or even very helpful. He had become the tight-lipped private eye of the late forties, the tough guy, and now he decayed further into a sullen and surly "rebel without a cause." In the 1955 James Dean classic of that title, the problem was not survival, but excessive security. This is why the old moral code, which used to insure survival, now encouraged rebellion. The world here was so stable, so unthreatened by the earth-shattering disasters which Keaton, Chaplin, Bogart, and Gable had to cope with, that the values they needed became self-destructive. This is the world we visit once again in Ordinary People. 

How topsy-turvy it has become can be seen from some of the role reversals which occur in the new film. The strength and silence which used to be thought of as self-restraint, a virtue among men, are here displayed by a woman, who is thought contemptible because of them. When her eldest son dies in a boating accident, the imperturbability shown by Beth (Mary Tyler Moore) doesn't help her family get through the crisis. It worsens it. It is what drives Conrad, her other son, to his suicide attempt. Only the father, Cal (Donald Sutherland), is able to be a bit unguarded in his feelings. Openness like his used to be the one characteristic that women were permitted, though even in them it was regarded as a weakness. 

In this society of ordinary people, the private eye has been replaced by the psychiatrist. Private eyes were in demand in the past because some member of the upper-middle class was forever misplacing a string of diamonds or a wife. Now such people seem to take their possessions for granted. We can hardly imagine their noticing if something should disappear, and even their lives, except in the event of a freak accident like that boating mishap, seem safe from all harm. What's missing now are people's feelings. This turn of events has forced Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe to vacate their cramped little offices in a seedy, downtown building. Ordinary People's Dr. Burger (Judd Hirsch) has taken over their lease. 

We recognize the premises as those formerly occupied by private eyes because a neon sign outside blinks off and on at night, throwing an eery, familiar light into Burger's consultation room. Closed-mouthed as he is, in accordance with the stereotype of both the gumshoe and the shrink, Burger is still the only character good at repartee. His therapy sessions with Conrad are all back-chat, like a scene between Bogart and Bacall. You hire Burger to help you recover a little equilibrium, the way one might have hired Bogart to get back the diamonds (no questions asked), and Burger does just what Bogart always did. He implicates everybody in your family in some much more heinous crime. 

That crime is, of course, not showing your feelings. That is what Beth is guilty of, so hopelessly guilty that at the end of the movie she is banished to Houston. She is no longer welcome at home in Lake Forest with Conrad and Cal because there the old culture of stoicism has been supplanted by the new culture of narcissism. In the old days, when life was full of catastrophes, it went without question that people were full of feelings they had to control. But now catastrophe is so rare, and the middle class so numb from prosperity, that not showing your feelings raises suspicions you haven't got any. In Lake Forest today, the residents are coming to the conclusion that a person like Beth is an empty shell. Her family sloughs her off the way a spring beetle struggles from its husk. Lake Forest is a bad place to be geographically. It's caught in the middle between New England and southern California. 

I suspect that for Robert Redford, Beth's inadequacies are a special source of anxiety. They touch a nerve. Redford not only works in southern California, but hails from there originally. Yet he has tried to live most of his adult life, figuratively, in Lake Forest. He has shunned celebrity, lived in rural Utah (which is a movie-star suburb), stayed married to the same woman for twenty years, and shown his feelings in public only where traditionalist liberal causes like conservation and the environment were concerned. When he sees Cai and Beth's home break up in Ordinary People, he must feel as if his own is threatened. More important than that, though, he must feel as if his stardom is in jeopardy. He is not John Travolta, after all. Beth and Cal are his audience. There is one inconsequential scene in Ordinary People that must give him quite a twinge, for in it Beth and Cal decide on the way to the same old party with the same old friends that they'll go to a movie instead. But then, when they drive up to the party anyway, we see that the very idea of going to a movie was a joke, something each knew the other would never take seriously. 

The attraction that Ordinary People has for Redford lies in Beth. He identifies with her rather than Cal, who, he revealed in a recent interview, "was not a character that interested me." He never considered playing the role of Cal himself. Of Beth he said, "You can... say she's terrible, but I didn't want to do that." He wanted to "see her as somewhat admirable." In a way her dilemma as a person is also his as a movie star. As I said before, the inexpressive heroes in our movies have required inexpressive stars. Redford has always pursued the traditional role. From Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to Three Days of the Condor to The Sting and Brubaker, he has played the hero who maintains his equanimity every time the bottom falls out of his world. He has played the person who remains ordinary against all odds. 

But now the middle-class culture in which he lives and on which his stardom relies is doing a flip-flop. Heroics no longer depend on concealing your emotions, but on acting them out. Stars like Redford have had an inferiority complex about acting anyway. Acting is supposed to be showing your feelings, but stardom has required the opposite, and has therefore made stars doubt whether they were capable of acting at all. Now Beth comes along, with her implication that inexpressiveness is inadequate to life, and she makes Robert Redford wonder whether it might not be inadequate to movies as well.