Procedure

(The Rage, Sidney J. Furie, 1997)

I think of how often police procedurals and cinematic/televisual fiction which otherwise involved offices or bureaucracies have had to include 1+ characters whose sole existence seems to be the gleeful blockage of protagonists' operations, investigations, quests, and so forth. Not always villains per se - or sometimes only revealed to be complicit as villains late in the narrative - these managers and officers and bosses are there just to "bust chops," as people used to say. This figure evinces the cold, unimaginative, sadistic spirit of Lumberg (from Office Space) as dispersed throughout an entirely different generic body.

Bogdanovich/Lynch

I wondered recently if early Bogdanovich might have been an influence on David Lynch. Having never been a fully-steeped Lynchian, and thus a bit impoverished on the literature, I don't know if this is well-trod material. (Cursory googling doesn't seem to yield any fruit, though.) But if you think about the dynamic juxtaposition of surreally suburban Americana with violent macabre fantasies in Targets ('68), which also presents an underbelly portrait of Hollywood stardom and up-close glamor (Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire) ... or the capricious blonde-goddess type of Cybill Shephard's Jacy in The Last Picture Show (evoked in my mind by Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway, although it must be said that Bogdanovich hardly invented this figure) ... a few things start to overlap more than I ever would have guessed.l These were/are two filmmakers I've otherwise always thought of as highly different kinds of postclassical narrative directors. But hell, "Blue Velvet" even plays on the soundtrack in The Last Picture Show. I haven't mulled this over much, so I can't put my finger on it any more precisely. It's probably all just a few evanescent coincidences that amount to nothing. But still ... what else is this blog for?

A Matter of Conquest

"The idea of the American West was always more a matter of solitude and space and the balance between individualism and community than a matter of conquest." (Kent Jones)

It seems almost every cinephile I know has endorsed Jones' response to Quentin Tarantino's comments about John Ford. It's a well-written piece, and as a critical refutation of QT it's marvelous. But for me there was also a sticking point, and this problem is crystallized particularly in the above sentence. You can perhaps say that "the idea of the American West" indeed concerned solitude, etc. because you are concerned only with the stated ideology of white American men going West, of The Virginian and of the Rough Riders. But to relegate the issue of conquest to the sidelines seems a huge and wilful mistake. Try these on for size:

"The idea of the Spanish Inquisition was always more about the purification of the Catholic faith than a matter of social and religious oppression."

or

"The idea of Jim Crow laws were always more about respecting tradition and local proprieties than a matter of enforcing specifically racialized inequalities among the population." 

It's crucial not to ignore the link between "solitude and space and the balance between individualism and community" and the "matter of conquest." Jones addresses this, at least enough to indicate why he's bracketed off the conquest. "That the idea was built on the backs of indigenous Americans who were, in Ford’s own words, “cheated and robbed, killed, murdered, massacred and everything else,” was not exactly hidden from view, but relegated to the background of the story that the culture was telling itself through paintings and dime novels and traveling shows and, finally, movies—albeit never quite as comfortably as is now imagined." But my point isn't really to attack Kent Jones or to criticize his "implicit" politics or anything like that; I've no beef with him! I just want to tease out a thread in that sentence I've picked out to use as an epigraph. Because the ideas of solitude, space, individual/community, wide open spaces, new beginnings, and frontiers that the West connotes are difficult to separate from the conquest - including the massive labor of laying of railroad tracks across the country (the train was a major part of inaugurating a modern national space-time), but especially the destruction of many native civilizations, the mere husks of whose former selves were what white American settlers encountered in their Westward expansion.

What strikes me about John Ford's cinema is always how fragile and contingent "civilization" is, as if he doesn't even really believe in it outside the porch steps, the kitchen, the campfire (sites also of hospitality) ... and because of this I have felt that Ford (a man and filmmaker of his time with plenty of concomitant prejudices) nevertheless granted the same ontological basis for non-Europeans (or "people without history") as to the white settlers of America, whose manifest destiny - when mainlined - drove them insane, twisted them up, tore them also into husks of their former selves. This ontological basis for all people and cultures does not however translate into a political equality, as if Ford were trying to convey the message that all people suffer the same ways in the same amounts, as if to rationalize away native populations' decimation. The living's deeply felt memories of the dead commingle in the face of uncertain futures, without any destiny or guarantee. Just generations turning over, one to the next. And often whatever is built up is built upon lies.

 

 

 

 

 

* * * 

"Dead Man is one of the few westerns to see through the cheesy mythology that white people were the first North American settlers, but its approach is casual and poetic rather than preachy; the warm, comic friendship between Nobody and Blake, neither of whom entirely understands the other, is central to the film." (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

Gun Nuts

America: whatta week, huh?

In 1990's Tremors, where a tiny Nevada community fights off a handful of giant subterrannean predator worms, Michael Gross and Reba McEntire play a pair of desert survivalists with a huge home arsenal. (They're not the film's protagonists, though.) Burt and Heather are a bit paranoid and kooky (at least this is how the others see them), but they're also essentially decent people. Another character references their "lifestyle" in a teasing manner, but it's neither intended nor perceived as a kind of eternal semiotic warfare against one's neighbors who happen to think differently. That is to say, Burt and Heather are capable of sitting around a table and having a conversation with their fellow citizens. And even the character who does talk about their lifestyle is Fred Ward's Earl: a beer-drinkin', shit-kickin' laborer who would in 21st century parlance be labeled "red state" through and through. But not when this film was made - a character like Earl could actually poke fun of a gun nut like Burt without there being some hugely divisive cultural enmity felt on either side. At a few points in the film, Burt and Heather's weapons are very useful for the whole group in battling the graboids. But they're never more necessary than other characters' tools or ingenuity. That is, the community is greater than the sum of its parts, and no particular part assumes synecdoche-like sovereignty. We can't "decode" a political endorsement from the role the gun nuts play.

I could not imagine a 2013 version of Tremors that did the same thing. Instead I can only envision some variation in which Burt and Heather's Second Amendment shrine ultimately guarantees the safety of the community (the conservative version) or instead fails and allows a platform for some force unrelated to firearms to prevail (the liberal version). Either way, the gun and the gun nut are figures to be "politicized" in a way that openly invites some kind of ethical-political-moral interpretation. (Cf. past rumblings on this blog about reversible or diffuse cinema.) It would be the kind of thing that would allow Slavoj Zizek to publish "think pieces" about how "the Left" needs to embrace more fully such ideas as powerful leadership, discipline, and purity.

* * *

... Believe it or not, I've actually seen all four Tremors films, and a significant chunk of the USA television series. But it's been a while, and I can't speak from memory as to how later developments with the character of Burt in the sequels end up anticipating (or not) 21st century gun control debates and the cultural politics thereof.

Spring Breeeeeak

"You dudes be talkin' so street / And that talk be soundin' tough / Until you gotta talk to me." (King Fantastic's "The Lost Art of Killing": not a song included in the film, sadly)

This post traces out a convoluted line of thought regarding Spring Breakers and middle grounds. As with so much on EL, it's public but it's written at least as much to help me work through things as it is to communicate ideas clearly. So follow through it at your own risk, but don't say you weren't warned!

Amy Klein writes, "I don’t buy this idea that Spring Breakers is good art simply because it holds a mirror up to the world we live in." I don't buy it either, but surely this isn't the only argument put forward by advocates of the film ... is it?

Here's another idea I don't buy, which is that every film, text, object (et cetera) has a single interpretation at its truest, depest core. I mean that idea that we can find and fix a meaning to the object by reading (into) it and finding its proper, ironclad, trans-historical significance. Perhaps some objects are designed to work in this way, and it is true that some reception contexts encourage analyzing texts this way. But I'm unconvinced this is the set which encompasses all cultural objects. Even the ones that are meant to work like this are positively helpless before the sweep of human history.

If we think that cultural objects, discussions about the politics of art very quickly lead nowhere. Let's say we have two people of roughly similar temperaments. One absolutely loves Spring Breakers and insists its bold, neon-sexy-thanatological trip takes us into a Bataillean inferno of excess. The other focuses primarily on the brute fact that the camera fixates on young female bodies, and attaches this exhilaration of excess to a story of these bikini-clad Disney princesses as a few of them slowly lead up to a triumphant showdown-massacre of black drug dealers. Too often, people fail to envision that both views might actually co-exist. There are deep puritanical forces that a Bataille-Reich "liberation" might do some good (I do not say an infallible good) in addressing. But at the same time the terms of such "liberation" are open to question. However, it is also possible that in transgressing, other features of cultural power imbalances often position these "transgressions" in ways that are also sexist, even misogynistic, or are at least more than capable of being interpreted that way.

And though I'm not the most inductive/empirical sort of thinker, you might figure when it comes to the politics of feminism or antiracism, for example, my general take is that we don't look to the intrinsic "core meaning" of the text to determine if something is racist or sexist, but instead we look to how its operating in the cultural sphere: are there, in actual fact, feminist or antiracist grievances being lodged against the object in question? Who benefits concretely from the dissemination of a particular object or a particular framing of that object?  (For instance, does an aesthete's l'art pour l'art defense make a film look "pure & true"? This is sort of what I poked at in parts of my Tree of Life commentary a while back, because I was unconvinced there was a stable, true patriarchal/sexist reading to the nature-grace dichotomy, but as much as I love Tree of Life I concede its very romantic modernism itself is an issue.) So instead what I think is worth examining, when it comes to the politics of an object, is the cluster of uses to which the object is put. In other words, Spring Breakers isn't necessarily anything in the final analysis, but we can discern trends in the ways it is received. On what grounds do its detractors or defenders insist the discussion be held?

So in this sense I may have some deeper philosophical disagreement with the perspective Amy Klein mobilizes, but I'm very much in accord with her skepticism toward a defense of Spring Breakers that would subordinate any political question to a depoliticized appreciation of the "rawness," the "exhilaration," the "weirdness" of Korine's vision. And the reason for this, of course, is because appreciation of vision itself depends upon politics. This is a tricky philosophical problem I'm still working out for myself, but while aesthetics and politics may be discrete conceptual spheres, in actual practice politics always grounds the conditions in which a particular kind of aesthetics - such as the appreciation of a genius vision or powerful experience - operates.

An object's meanings, then, arise contingently. They are often contradictory. They can co-exist. Walt Whitman wasn't the only entity in this world to contradict himself and contain multitudes, you see.

I think that Spring Breakers is a fascinating experience, and makes for a great unofficial Florida youth trilogy with Trans (Julian Goldberger) and Bully (Larry Clark). I would also say, however, that feminist objections with this film strike me as more or less on the mark. This is a heteronormative pornographic film; its pornography is both the root of its most brilliant formal strategies and its most obvious "structuring structure" yet it more than warrants feminist interrogation. The camera lens focuses upon supine forms, slow-motion gyrating women, a plethora of fluids (sweat, booze, blood, poolwater). I wouldn't call the film erotic, by which I mean that it doesn't work on an arousal-payoff dynamic [though it is sensuous] ... or rather, its formal arousal-payoff dynamic simply passes over the whole issue of sex [though image and dialogue-wise the film is saturated with the promise of sex] and moves directly toward death: the danger of death, the specter of punishment.

This disembodied floating neon-lit gaze is, critics have already noted, in fact not disembodied at all but representative of a straight male subjectivity which sees women as objects. The fact that the women who star in Spring Breakers "reclaim" some of this objectivity is not trivial, but it also isn't a trump card. We can't simply step outside of an entire world of unequal power relations through a localized process of seeing a few women (objects) "take up" their own objecthood. There can be empowerment in abjection and submission; one can feel empowered, emboldened, enlightened through taking on the object status. But this emancipatory operation is not the same as form or style invigorating the viewer (particularly if the viewer may be a liberal straight guy getting his kicks from bikini-clad women but also enjoying the "detachment" as sociopolitical alibi). It also isn't exactly the same as the kind of phenomenological liberation triggered by such beautiful, weird, lush, multi-textured experience as Spring Breakers might provide.

* * * 

So here are a few kinds of liberation at hand.

• Liberation through abjection, submission, or objecthood. The Disney princesses "own" their status as objectified Others; they inhabit and embody it consciously.
• Liberation through form or style: the phenomenological register.
• Liberation (or abdication) of puritanical moralism.

But at the same time, the film isn't liberated from everything. This negative premise is the "ground" from which the feminist criticisms of the movie proceed.

* * *

Contrary to the edicts of almost all official culture, it is possible for us to hold more than one idea in our head at once, and to see things from multiple angles. I can appreciate the convulsive, very generally druglike immersion in colors-beats-bodies . This is not simply a matter of "form versus content," however, because the form itself is part of what is called into question ...

Old Days

A dissonance of a premise and its treatment: a group of abolitionists in the 1850s, including roles by Van Heflin and Ward Bond, square off against Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan in Santa Fe Trail ('40). Unfortunately, Warner Brothers conspired to make it that the abolitionists were the villains, particularly Raymond Massey's looney zealot portrayal of John Brown. Flynn and Reagan play the heroes (lame). How fantastic it would be if one could remix this material to make John Brown and his supporters the protagonists ...

(Santa Fe Trail's nocturnal prophecy scene, however, is strikingly great: firelight flickers on a group of young officers as they laugh uneasily when a native woman tells them - through translator Olivia de Havilland - that they will soon be bitter enemies in a war that has already started. They just don't know it.)

(Forty Guns, Samuel Fuller, 1957)

Lately I've been revisiting some classic Hollywood work - things I haven't seen in years, or in a few cases just films I've never seen. Some expressive qualities seem to never grow old. Forty Guns seems now like such an obvious and direct antecedent to Jarmusch's Dead Man: Biroc's stark, clear cinematography like a model for Robby Müller's; a nice motley mix of characters; a tightrope walk between different versions of masculine behavior and the expectations of violence and loyalty these carry. (But where Fuller's film is fluid, quick, giving a crucially peopled version of the West, Jarmusch's is deliberate, meditative, and grounded upon a less anthropic view of landscape. Both are great movies in my opinion.)

(The Blue Angel, Josef von Sternberg, 1930)

Scarlet Shake

Slightly Scarlet (Allan Dwan, 1956)

Functional/Parasitic Secrecy

"An example of ... function secrecy, was the British utilization of the intelligence gathered by cryptanalysts during World War II (Project Ultra). Since one of the most valuable assets in the war was the access to German communications made possible by cracking their ciphers, it was of extreme importance that the Nazis not know their code had been penetrated. To insure this, all information derived from Ultra intercepts was "discovered" - that is, overtly confirmed - by other means. If Ultra had located an important target for a bombing raid, for instance, the military made sure some reconnaissance planes would be sent there first to hide from the Germans the true source of the information.

"An instance of ... parasitic secrecy, may be found in the same war. The British espionage agency SIS, was, despite its legendary status, a largely inefficient organization mistrusted by the military. In order to guarantee their own survival, they monopolized access to the Ultra operation (conducted by GCCS, the Government Code and Cipher School) and presented the Ultra triumphs as their own successes. In the process of concealing this parasitism they squandered some of the Ultra material, created suspicions at GCCS against politicians and in general decreased the functionality of communications-interception and code-breaking as a whole."

(Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, pp. 186-187)

Semblance

 

"Nudity does not reveal the hidden; it is its absence" (Reassemblage, Trinh T. Minh-ha)

Film History, Bro 2: Historicize Harder

A well-meaning Netflix user offered this measured defense of an "old" movie: "One cannot review a 26 years old movie using today's standards." (The movie was Clint Eastwood's quite entertaining Eiger Sanction; guess it was written when Netflix was new.) Reviewing old art through contemporary standards? There are a few ways we can think our way through this question. In one sense, we are required to encounter old or culturally remote objects through the resistance of this timespace distance. But liking something (a painting, a movie) is never a "natural" thing either, as if innate and unalloyed, because people themselves are fundamentally always social and cultural. So yes: if you're a kid who's grown up with the media of the past 10-20 years, you might need to be initiated into the codes of a studio-era Hollywood movie or old TV or old books. (Sometimes you might not; as a child I needed little prompting to enjoy I Love Lucy or The Three Stooges.) It's fine sometimes to say: "We mustn't judge these other, new-old things by the same standards we are used to. There are other standards, and you might want to approach these things less judgmentally than you are at first inclined."

But then again one balks at this awful posture of charity. The appreciation of Welles, Ford, Renoir, Ozu, M, The Thin Man, Mae West, or Chaplin should take no qualifications - should it? We shouldn't be straitjacketed into saying, "Well it was good for its time," should we?

For its time ...

Perhaps it's best to avoid quasi-historicist special pleading where everything is judged by some standard of its time (the standard itself being always at least partly a presentist fiction). For one thing, it takes a fair bit of knowledge about another time or place even to intelligently address the issue of an object's achievement within that context. Instead, these qualifications are perhaps best as an ongoing heuristic operation. In the face of something we simply don't understand, we might posit a negative force - say to ourselves, "This is different, this pinches, ruffles, and crunches against my prior convictions. The actor does not move his body in a way consonant with filmic conventions I'm used to; the staging of these actors is artificial; the dialogue is too obvious or it takes too long for me to figure out what the damn point is; there isn't even any dialogue in this stupid art movie, why not?; and so on." We can say, "for its time" as a kind of place-holder for our own ignorance. Far be it from me to sound too much like an evangelical, but really many of us could do with a vow of intellectual humility on occasion.

To do this, of course, the spectator in question has to be open-minded, inquisitive, and curious.* This is what bothers me about the recent spate of presentist philistinism about old movies that we see on display here, here, and in parts here. It isn't, I don't think, because I worship the past at the expense of what's ahead. I even believe philistinism has its uses in politics and in rhetoric. But there's something uncritical about this criticality sometimes - bisecting two different senses of the word. Anyone can "be critical," dismiss an object, say it's not impressive, and write negative things. However, it's taxing to analyze, trace out some thoughts, and share what you've found.

(*This pokes at another issue, of course, The Spectator. The Spectator doesn't exist. There are only spectators and instances of spectatorship.)

Let's remember a dialogue exchange in Metropolitan. Tom denigrates Mansfield Park without having read it: "The context of the novel, and nearly everything that Jane Austen wrote looks ridiculous from today’s perspective."

Audrey's famous rejoinder: "Has it ever occurred to you that today looked at from Jane Austen's perspective would look even worse?" 

Because of Metropolitan's politics, this argument can be easily enlisted as a traditionalist backhand. Not wrongly, either. But things can be taken all manner of ways. I'd like to step back a pace and situate the comment as a matter of missing the forest and the trees. Myopia involving one's own comfort zone can be a crippling bias; under these circumstances people can think of objects from other times & places as intrusions. To put it another way, rebelling against classics can potentially miss the corporate-hegemony forest for cultural-vegetable trees. The operative word is potentially. Sometimes it's great to shake the canon up, to disregard it, to take aim at it in its institutionalized forms. But I don't always see this justified in every snarky, "emancipatory" dismissal of a canonical object. Sometimes it's one's own nostalgia that one is blindly advocating against a merely older and recognized nostalgia.

And I get it. I understand moods that might dissuade one from an art film, or from particular conventions in older movies. I also identify with certain Gen X/Y modes of consumption and discussion of movies. But at the same time, these are moods and modes - not permanent, not absolute, not universal. They're embodied in me, and have resulted from a lifetime of behaviors, as they are with everyone else. But isn't this a huge part of why culture is interesting? The argument isn't that everyone needs to copy my taste profile of nobrow eclecticism. The point is that all of us, if we're curious and honest people, forge more complex mental landscapes of something like "cinema" than any one picture of cinema can account for. Our criticism should try to respect that fact, and attend to it, and push us still out of all manners of complacency.

Film History, Bro

This is just some warm-up rambling to get the writerly neurons firing for my day's real work: feel free to disregard. On the topic of film history and film criticism ... here's one way to do it:

"But the idea of what a movie is didn’t really happen until about 1975.  Jaws is sort of the first movie.  And not just because it’s the first blockbuster. (We could go on and on about whether that ruined everything or whatever, but who cares.)  Jaws is sort of the first movie because it’s one of the first times a movie feels like a movie, like where things are happening and you care about them and it’s executed in an interesting and effective way.  The only two examples of this before 1975 are 12 Angry Men and Inherit the Wind, with Citizen Kane as an honorable mention.  Everything else before ‘75 pretty much sucks."

The author of those lines seems unwilling really to entertain what, to me, appears an obvious notion: this is an argument about nostalgia, his nostalgia, and his own personal configuration of what "a real movie" is. People like this invariably have very narrow ideas about what film/movies/cinema should be, and thank the gods the world is a more complex and pluralist place than their own imaginations.

I've seen plenty of movies "where things are happening and you care about them and it’s executed in an interesting and effective way" from before 1975. No need to dwell on this, however, as people who think like the author are not likely to have their minds changed by me; nor will I learn a single thing from them.

But allow me to make a mischievous connection, which is that a similar kind of narrowminded nostalgia sometimes haunts a classical cinephilia wherein the constitution of an interesting mise-en-scene becomes the sine qua non of good cinema. It is what makes it possible to smirk and say that The Tree of Life is a mess (or perhaps that Redacted isn't even worth considering because it's self-evidently unpolished), but that the late films of someone like Herbert Ross evince a beautiful and underrated classical sensibility. There is a satisfying provocation one can get with this attitude; I know well the little thrill you get when you shock an "art film" person by saying, meaning, and knowing that you are willing to back-up an opinion that some piece of Hollywood genre termite art is vastly superior to a disjointedly modernist masterpiece. "You think those obvious, sub-Godardian editing strategies can hold a candle to the subtle beauties of Irving Lerner's composition in space? Well you've got another thing coming ..."

Yet cinema also should surprise us in some ways, and not always in ways that we expect. That sounds redundant, but unfortunately it isn't - because some people are quite insistent about the terms on which they're willing to let themselves be surprised.

Ultimately, however, I would get very lonely if I were resigned to watching forever only a string of blockbuster movie-movies, or even if all I ever had to watch was films made in classical Hollywood continuity style. (The latter would last me much longer, of course.) So "the movies" (like Greg DeLiso wants them to be) or the worlds of contained mise-en-scene would sooner or later bore me into submission. I need experiences like Kentucker Audley's or Giuseppe Andrew's, like the Raoul Walsh pre-Codes, like the less-loved work of Zulawski, like the material of John or James Whitney, like Travis Wilkerson's An Injury to One, like Carmelo Bene's, like Jarman's, like Nina Menkes', like late Godard, like Kluge, like Andy Sidaris' goofily violent and sexist T&A-fests, like the Cinema of Transgression (even though I truthfully don't like it), like Chytilova's, like Zazie dans le metro (and so much Malle) but also A Thousand Clowns (a film I would have dismissed haughtily, aged 20), things that cause me to reconsider things and in the process make something new, deep, or simple ... I need all these things and more still that I don't even know because I want the cinema to match, reflect, expand, and condense the whole wide world.