Prolific Psychotronic

Taken from Michael J. Weldon's Psychotronic Video Guide:

"These are some directors who made the most psychotronic movies (not necessarily the best).  All of them have their fans (believe it or not).  The list does not include Italians or serial directors.

1. Jesus Franco (Spain)
2. Fred Olen Ray
3. Cirio H. Santiago (Philippines)
4. Al Adamson (murdered in 1995)
5. William Beaudine (last in 1962)
6. Sam Newfield (last in 1958)
7. Terence Fisher (UK; last in 1973)
8. Fred Sears (last in 1958)
9. Jim Wynorski
10. David DeCoteau"

Workers, Potters (Interlude)

A problem with rah-rah popular culture criticism is the exaggeration of all discussion into "likes" and "dislikes," thumbs up and thumbs down.  This diminishes and perhaps neuters real critique - as Andrew O'Hehir points out right away in his review of The Avengers.  In this paradigm people are encouraged not to have dialogues or to hold complex and nuanced opinions, but instead to sublimate their sense of selves to the enumeration of "likes" and "dislikes." 

O'Hehir, in the comments: "But rest assured that most of the reviews of "Avengers" will be way more positive than mine. And in fairness I'm really not bashing the film."

Douglas Moran: "[laughter] No, you're bashing the genre."

What is this "[laughter]"?  And what has led the expression of so many opinions through the conjectural filter of a public posture?  Another curious speech behavior one might note, especially in the likes of Twitterworld, is the construction of sentences about TV shows or whatever as if one is buffeted about by the dictates of a profoundly impersonal, disassociated rational choice.  For instance: "I can't get behind X" or "I can't support Y."  Or, echoing a lot of sports talk, prefacing one's opinion about an outcome or an elective choice with "I gotta go with..." even when no logical argumentation appears before or after the choice.  It's how this active, speaking subject erases itself in speech that intrigues me.  Such speakers rhetorically dissolve their own agency the endorsement of one "stance" (often product) or another.

Pop Goes Precarity

I have unspecific recollections that other people I've listened to have said this before, but ... for purely commercial cinema, 2010's Morning Glory is shockingly decent.  Not "subversive"; nothing "smuggled": it's simply a product with narrative content that is honest and expressive in contrast to most Hollywood releases: there's a faint trace of 1930s-40s classical Hollywood in this movie.  (Perhaps it's because it depicts a world of busy invention and constant improvisation, not unlike the production plants of classical Hollywood themselves.)  Rachel McAdams plays a 28-year-old morning show producer, Becky Fuller, who loses her job in New Jersey.  She gets a shot at a low-rated morning show in New York at the station IBS.  There, she is soon expected to raise flagging ratings considerably if she wants to keep her job and to keep the show on air.

The apartment she moves into in New York, while nice-looking, does not seem spacious in the way that commercial fantasies about "life in New York" often do; nor - if I recall - are there any guarantees that she even lives in Manhattan.  (Imagine a happy professional woman living in - gasp! - an outer borough!  One of the many execrable things about, say, Julie & Julia is how its contemporary scenes present Queens as a hellhole.  For a movie about the magic of cooking, one would hope against hope that a movie would recognize the culinary miracle Queens represents.  But I digress...)  There's a tough scene in Morning Glory between Becky and her mother where the latter explains that this dream of "making it" in broadcasting was adorable at age ten, inspiring at age eighteen, and embarrassing at age twenty-eight.  "Stop before it becomes heartbreaking."

This is a common gesture in recent cinema and television.  The arrested hero or heroine confronts "maturity" through some task or job, a direction in life.  This sense of direction seems to be everything.  Or maybe we can say it seems to be everything in this Hollywood material that is not exactly about precarity, but is in fact profoundly informed by it in its premises and in its assumptions.  This is, after all, a movie about an adult woman - still youngish - who loses her job abruptly, and feels lucky to get a chance at another measly job, for lower pay, at a struggling organization.  This is not "political cinema," yet it is nevertheless a movie speaking directly to a public that knows what it is like to never get a lunch break or to see highers-up freeze pay raises and cut benefits.

A quick note on a name: Becky Fuller.  "Becky" is plucky, it is forceful yet informal.  In the 1930s, RKO adapted Vanity Fair under the name of Thackeray's heroine, Becky Sharp ('35).  Fuller connotes plenitude, but also echoes a certain economic pluck (e.g., Lucille Ball in 1950's The Fuller-Brush Girl).  Plenitude is what Becky Fuller is after, but the movie dramatizes this not as economic fantasy but rather the richness of community.  If we can pay the bills, and eat all right, how many of us would not be happy - simply - with a workplace of labor from which we do not feel alienated?

Whether or not Becky's labor, and IBS's mission, is alienated in the Marxist sense is beside the point insofar as we're trying to figure out what the film does or says.  (I certainly don't claim it's anti-capitalist, or anti-hegemonic.)  But I think it is meaningful that the film designates as its goal a workplace where the feeling of community is important.

And it does something else interesting: it pictorializes the same relation to audiovisual content that I would imagine its audience also has.  Well into the film, Becky Fuller pushes the segments at IBS's show toward the ridiculous, the attention-grabbing, the viral.  We are treated to several shots of laughing Becky reacting to these clips, readymade for YouTube.  (Matt Malloy plays a correspondent who gets pushed into segments on rollercoasters, skydiving, etc.)  Harrison Ford plays a semi-retired serious evening news anchor who reluctantly takes on the role of morning show co-host; his character and Becky at a few points debate explicitly the merits of addressing what we might call the "public sphere" of old-school news discourse, versus the all-consuming and pre-emptive need to get ratings up by grabbing and keeping attention.  Becky, in fact, must satisfy the demands of ratings in order for her and her co-workers to earn a paycheck, and therefore lack the material circumstances even to consider the cultivation of a serious, grave, and ethical journalistic culture.  The movie does little to contextualize or question Becky's position, but what's interesting are the inferences we can draw from how it's all structured.

Savage

Frankenheimer's early film The Young Savages ('61), not without its merits, exemplifies one of the weird problems of the period's social problem cinema.  A lot of directors coming into commercial filmmaking during this period cut their teeth in television (in some cases live television), and when some of them wanted to utilize the space available in the wider, larger film screen, there is still a mannered patina to otherwise realist or naturalistic blocking and performance.  (Which is why some pockets of cinephiles still poke Frankenheimer, Lumet, et al., for a stagey or televisual aesthetic.  Can't say I always disagree.)  What seems incongruous in The Young Savages is how its concern for "social problems" on the streets of New York nevertheless give way to eloquent, monologue-like cathartic expressions of self: from the era of Morris Engel and John Cassavetes, such a hybrid of realism and performative conventions seems full of holes ... one wonders where the sincerity of pauses, stutters, and silence has gone?  Hollywood cinema in the 1930s, compared to the 1950s, seems to have a much better pictorial and sonic range of effects for expressing the "problem" class, the underclasses, etc.  Just a feeling ...

Workers, Potters (Part III)

It may tempt one to think, as Serge Daney once put it in perspective, that "if there is something missing on the formal level there must be something missing on the political level."  One keeps one's hands clean if one can point to a chosen pantheon, or constellation, of filmmakers and say, Look!  These are praiseworthy figures.  These are artists fit for the heroic narrative.  From there, it may tempt one, to give not a thought to the structure or continued existence of that very heroic narrative.  The cinephile who thinks he is politically enlightened may have simply supplanted Hollywood's Martin Scorsese with the subproletariat's Pedro Costa ... as though the work of politics proceeds from the private pleasures of taste.  What a profoundly antimaterialist way of going about things, though! 

Still, let's remind ourselves that we are tracing through a complex and balanced situation.  The politics of taste do matter - what I am saying is that they are not however ultimately determinant of the politics of cinema/art/aesthetics.  The aesthetic domain cannot do all the work, and I suspect the amount of work it can do is often overestimated.  Another facet of what I am saying is that our tastes are not themselves free from determinants and conditions ... not even when they appear most evolved, or anyway most divorced from the dictates of the culture industry.  One is not necessarily free of anything simply because one has left behind the sweep of JK Rowling, LMFAO, Avengers, Lost, The Sopranos, Gaga, and Bieber.  Aesthetic tastes and predilections are never simply natural (i.e., physiological or predestined) but are forged.  Even what Bourdieu referred to as a kind of naive, natural taste emerges from the crucible of society.

"We must remind people that behind the auteur and his rich subjectivity there is always, in the last analysis, a class which is speaking."  (Daney, "The Critical Function")

(The word "auteur" would be better dropped in English most of the time; and people would be better suited to use the word "author."  If that sounds weird in a given context, then perhaps "auteur" was not the right word in the first place.)

*

"No one knows what it means, but it's provocative.  Gets the people goin'!"  (Will Farrell in Blades of Glory)

There's no need to dwell on creating a new classification system for "types" of cinema or media (e.g., the famed Cahiers categories).  What, if any, plan of political action comes from supporting one of the two major veins of popular political cinema (as I see it), meaning, (a) films which clearly demonstrate , as with Ken Loach's work, or (b) pop films that harness a particular message, as Step Up: Revolution is primed to do?

Arguments that either, or both, of these categories are simply subsumed back into the culture industry - that this is a weak "critique" acting merely as a way for capitalist hegemony to innoculate against real critique - may be true.  But they miss a crucial point, which is that audiences never consume these works in a vacuum.  This is sometimes referred to as the "hypodermic needle" model of mass culture, wherein the mindless unwashed simply take in whatever bad shit the corporations sell them - McDonald's, Two and a Half Men, and so on.  To put it another way, critics of mass culture from this viewpoint presumptively project onto the lumpen masses a condition of pure and uninhibited spectatorship, ... i.e., recreating in fact the very modernist ideal of the immersive, mainlined gaze seen in something like Anthology Film Archives' Invisible Cinema.  But whereas something like the Invisible Cinema was an elective practice for society's aesthetes, the hypodermic needle funhouse is a prison.  Recto or verso, what "haunts" these conceptions of media consumption is the fantasy of erasure of the viewing-listening subject, and the elaboration of this same subject as answerable to the mediated mechanics of ideology (as in cybernetics, another field of inquiry whose heyday was roughly contemporaneous with the height of avant-garde Western cinema as well as hypodermic needle masscult theory).  The subject becomes, indeed, subject-to.

To extend more fully - films may contain politics subject to interpretation.  For instance, we can state without controversy that The Birth of a Nation is a racist film.  But these are not necessarily the first nor final word on the politics of those films; in any event they are never, ever the only word.  This is why we can have something like DJ Spooky's Rebirth of a Nation - which I haven't seen, admittedly, but which by all accounts seems to be exemplify in its production/distribution exactly what is overlooked in the spectatorial theories of the previous paragraph: i.e., the act of reception (which entails the possibility of critique and the inevitable context of the social body).  And it is around the act of reception that the more cultivated tastes of more cultivated observers may, in fact, veil a profound insensitivity to sentiment.  More on this to follow.

Workers, Potters (Part II)

One thing we should want to take away from the quagmire of cultural politics is that we're doomed if we look to the textual qualities of objects themselves to defeat their placement in cultural commerce.  Context can make films politically radical in some sense - I'm thinking of the profligacy of a work like Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie, or the anti-colonialist "missiles" by the likes of Rene Vautier (pace Nicole Brenez), or Debord's famous Howls in Favor of Sade screening (or Isou's Venom and Eternity), or even the solid and principled liberalism of a filmmaker like Bertrand Tavernier.  There are a number of ways that cultural objects are political - often these ways overlap, and can even contradict each other.  And often an "activist" version of cinema - a la Michael Moore (or, let's say, the Kony 2012 folks) - presumes that a political cinema is one that causes its audience to leave the theater and act in some way.  Indeed this is what Eisenstein sought when he tried to devise a cinema which could play upon the spectator's sensorium in such a way as to help foment revolution.  (On this, see Jonathan Beller's terrific book The Cinematic Mode of Production, whose praises I've sung many times here over the years.)  But I do admire political gestures that aren't simply the instrumentalist consequences of "effective" political filmmaking.  I harbor a certain romanticized liking for big, expensive movies that fail to turn a profit - and this regardless of whether I think the film is secretly good or not.  I admire the Straubs and Pedro Costa, and in his own way Pasolini, whose films' very production have often sought a political and economic order alien to the hostile, dominant paradigm: i.e., matters of payment, and of closeness to the working class, the underclass, and their environments.

But films can't opt out of the money economy simply by virtue of their message.  The domain of art is neither divorced from politics, nor does it - can it - offer a satisfactory trump card before politics.  There are aesthetes who simply ignore politics; there are aesthetes who hope against hope that aesthetics will overcome politics.  (I suppose what I'd strive for is to have the qualities of an aesthete who follows neither path.)

At the same time, we first world commentators on movies, books, and the like, risk irrelevance - at least in some circumstances - if we adopt what we might characterize as the "Adorno approach."  Like with Pierre Bourdieu, Theodor Adorno's massive body of work is now relegated to a placeholder status for the puritanical position that "culture industries are always bad, no matter how revolutionary they appear."  And the implied shorthand addendum to this position is that Adorno was wrong, because he "didn't like jazz," and as we know, jazz is the great American artform.  Ergo, one must at all costs avoid being an Adorno - this can be a serious offense in the high court of internet intelligentsia.  It causes more vitriol, at times, than the aerial bombing of hospitals and civilian neighborhoods...

Let me impress, once more, that my quarrel is not with mass culture but with a certain way of characterizing and defending it.

Quoting the great AvW/LCC (I've already in fact quoted this exact post of hers once on this blog):

"Realism (and its children in 'literary fiction') was and is largely a formal and political reaction to the vigour of the 'genre' (avant la lettre) habits/tropes/imaginative power of the long 18th century - their revolutionary verve and critical capacity - rather than, as it advertises itself, and as it has been assumed by the major theorists and historians of the novel, from Auerbach to Watt, the result of a direct adaptation of and attention to social and individual reality, naturally arising in the context of the bourgeois individual emancipation narrative."

...the blogger then writing as Alphonse van Worden characterizes a tension between mimesis and metaphor in literature that comes to a head in 1848 ...

"To 1848 the proletarian challenge, to expropriate the bourgeois revolution and universalize it, make it look both backward to commoning and forward to civil liberties, is building, as it adapts certain ideas generated in the course of bourgeois emancipation. 


"To 1848 the 'fantastic' and what later becomes 'genre' generally is gaining force and intensity as it adapts certain techniques of realism and mimesis.


"After 1848, realism - the canon - and genre are separated and hierarchised.  Realism takes power and achieves hegemony and legitimacy; genre is degraded, becomes the formal prison in which the radically imaginative is both 'confined' and 'reformed' under the surveillance and despotism of bourgeois liberalism."

...

"The history of the mimetic in the bourgeois novel can be written as the history of two tropes for property, that is, the love story of I and Mine: The Umbrella and The Camera.  (The seamstress/sewing machine is important too.)


"(Genres on the other hand whirl around the vehicle and the weapon.)"

In other words, we might trace what NYTimes-style discourse characterizes in terms of split between a serious (artistic, adult) and a frivolous (mass, juvenile) approach to cultural production.  In the former category, keep an eye out for how often critics feel obliged to justify the play & whimsy that can sometimes creep into these works.  'Such-and-such isn't a genre film, but rather a meditation on genre.'  'The author simply uses genre tropes.'  Characterizations like these may often be true.  But it is the fact of the separation that intrigues me.  Defenders make great claims about the likes of Harry Potter or Lost, sometimes quite extravagant claims - but rare is the recourse to realist or modernist justification.  Nobody (or almost nobody) says that the oeuvres of Rowling, J.J. Abrams, the entire Batman franchise, or Joss Whedon are really something other than genre.  Instead, the achievements of mass culture are surplus to genre, or built off it.  In a sense, then, what serious culture performs, when it uses genre, is in fact a representation of it - a mimesis of or toward metaphor, if you will.

I haven't gotten to sentiment today, but that will come ...

Workers, Potters (Part I)

A familiar cultural script, perennially contested by two "wings" of the 21st century NYTimes-style hegemon.  Exhibit A: Joel Stein's less-than-thoughtful defense of Adult Culture, contra Hunger Games, Harry Potter, Twilight, Pixar, etc., etc., a few weeks ago.  Exhibit B, following script: Julian Sanchez in a more thoughtful response to Stein, nevertheless bringing out a tired, tiresome trope: "It’s hard to resist poking fun at the pretentious undergrad lugging some William Gaddis doorstop to the local café so everyone can see what they’re reading."  You see, because when people read things that are difficult, they do so primarily for reasons of social climbing. 

(But in a world where the proverbial everyone reads and secretly prefers stuff like The Hunger Games, who is the pretentious undergrad actually likely to impress?  Poor hypothetical fellow.)

The ease of this trope stems from the fact that cultural discourse in or around The New York Times tends to assume at least a faint familiarity with the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, a major theorist of taste whose many, many pages of work tend to get reduced to the principle that people's economic privilege determines or at least conditions their cultural tastes.  Bourdieu comes to stand in as a shorthand argument stored in the backs of everybody's minds who has the cultural capital to have at least a general sense of what Bourdieu argued when it came to having cultural capital.  (You see a circular, or at least spiraling, structure forming here?)  Thus, the mere invocation of Bourdieu - even when he's not actually named, but stands phantasmatic over "his" argument - is a ready weapon for when the cultural conservators attack, muggle-like, the fortresses of YA lit, cartoons, etc.  Another way of tracing through Script B: enjoying Harry Potter (for example) is a function of its ease and its fun, and who are you to insist we read serious literature when the dirty secret is that we only like it in small doses - or not at all?  (And people who like the really serious literature are clearly pompous, full of youthful hubris ready to be deflated - "the pretentious undergrad lugging some William Gaddis" for everyone to see.)

The problems I have with these scripts are somewhat oblique to the back-and-forth shape they take on in such venues as the Times or popular literary blogs.  One reservation I'll venture is with the idea that these low and/or youthful forms are always compulsively easy to digest because they're just so enjoyable.  For everyone.  Neutrally and equally. 

I'm not so sure.  Though the prose may go fast, "keeping up" with one of these mega-franchises often requires a significant investment of time, money, and mental energy (both cognitive and emotional).  And if one really keeps up with the gossip, the behind-the-scenes production of film adaptations, the peripheral merchandising, etc., this actually involves a great deal of effort.  It is work that may be enjoyable, but it is still work.  And if one doesn't like Harry Potter to begin with, having to read through all of Rowling's titles would absolutely be equivalent to, errr, what Dan Kois unfortunately discussed as "cultural vegetables."  This "good for you" logic can work in multiple directions though; it needn't refer only to Gaddis or Jafar Panahi.  Easy, leisurely cultural objects - if indeed they are leisure - should not require effort unless that effort is fun for people.  Yet a real coup for the makers of Harry Potter, Lost, Hunger Games, comic book movie franchises, and so on, is to capture that labor of looking amongst a willing audience.  The scholarly field of fan studies, especially when it is industry-centric, might celebrate this win-win synergy but I think a healthy infusion of Marxist political economy is always called for when considering the overdetermined cultural life of such objects.

Think, very quickly, about dancing (popular, folk, or street forms of dancing).  This is a leisure activity that also requires a substantial measure of effort and time.  In some circumstances, it can be highly politicized.  But it can also be commodified, or not commodofied.  I'll be seeing Step Up: Revolution when it comes out - a dance film harnessing a "protest" message which, however sincere or sophisticated it might even turn out be, nevertheless also serves to sell tickets to mass youth audiences in order to make money for companies that would otherwise be occupied.  (Adorno's rolling over in his grave...)

What I would want to add to this scripted, recurrent debate is a reconsideration of the merits of the low, the mass, or the popular.  The script on both sides presumes that serious or adult culture entails work and that the low, the mass, or the popular doesn't.  The Joel Steins of the NYTimes-world presume this work to be ultimately beneficial, while the Dan Koises undermine such self-improvement framings to celebrate the pleasures of unstressed, unforced leisure.  A capitalist work ethic underlies this entire conceptualization.  The Stein approach wants to build cultural capital (and a path of self-improvement) which tends to rely upon a foundation of economic privilege - leisure produces not things but the minds and practices that could be devoted to higher ideals.  This, Aristotle saw as a goal to which to aspire, and which the likes of Marx and Gramsci pointed out was the material basis for ruling class ideology before communism was to overthrow it.  The Kois approach inverts this logic, however, snickering a bit like Paul Lafargue about the right to be lazy, maybe even arguing (like Steven Johnson) that it's counter-intuitively "good for us," and yet also (often mindlessly) volunteering labor for the attention economy - so that one doesn't think about Harry Potter as "cultural vegetables" (its social utility designated mainly as fodder for chit-chat), and yet one's spectatorial investment in Harry Potter, etc., produces a great deal of profit for the companies that put out these "leisure" products.  We're toiling in the fields and factories of the attention economy.

Seen this way, might you not agree with me about the distinct lack of appeal these options present?  Official culture fails us.  In the next part of this post - coming in the near future - I'll try to talk about genre and sentiment, among other things, and see what useful through-lines we can find when it comes to talking about the high and the low, the serious and the frivolous, in culture ...

Quote of the Day

“I was out to show that there are more meanings in ordinary meanings — of the shallow type required for entertainment — than usually spotted by critics, who imagine that only important art can involve people and make poetic and ideological points. I’m looking at movies which are run-of-the-mill yet saturated with something too shallow really to be myth (in the full sense), but too ambivalent to be merely cliché. I’m trying a kind of micro-criticism, more concerned with the molecules of a film’s meaning than the implications of its meaning.” (Raymond Durgnat, talking about his work on This Island Earth)