Time is running out. I can feel it. The romance of Armageddon is being replaced by the spectre of inevitable destruction, albeit on a smaller scale. Piece by piece, city by city, landmark by landmark, the delicate balance of post-World War II nuclear politics has given way to a new war, in which atomic bombs, capable of decimating an entire metropolis in just one blast, fit in suitcases. The global apocalypse of Dr. Strangelove now seems simultaneously remote and yet infinitely more tangible. The twenty-first century will be defined not by wars, but by terrorist incursions. In much the same way, film itself has become a twentieth-century artifact, rendered obsolete by the technical advances of twenty-first-century digital imaging. In 1960, Jean Cocteau declared, “I’m giving up making films since technological progress means anyone can do it” (in Virilio, Vision Machine 51). But the technology of the cinema has now abandoned us, leaving the viewer in a world composed of pixels and plot points via computer-generated imagery (CGI). Looking for substance in the legitimate theater? Guess again—Clear Channel has extended its reach past the airwaves and onto Broadway, working along the same lines as the Disney organization, which has similar plans for theatergoers. Disney’s latest project is a Broadway version of The Little Mermaid, for which they’ve hired Matthew Bourne, who staged Swan Lake in 1996. Clearly, they have big plans for The Little Mermaid, and that’s only the start of an aggressive merchandising campaign to embrace all of Disney’s past properties, says critic Peter Marks. As always, Disney is interested in the “big idea,” the way in which it can reach the maximum number of potential patrons while extending its marketing empire:
“We all get in the room and look at the outline that we’ve put up on the board, and I say, ‘Matt, let’s go through it,’” said Thomas Schumacher, president of Disney Theatrical Productions. “It’s how we say, ‘Here’s the big idea.’” These days, Disney has a lot of big ideas. Tarzan, as conceived by the Tony Award-winning designer Bob Crowley. When You Wish, a compilation show based on dozens of songs from Disney movies. Hoopz, the story of the Harlem Globetrotters set to music, with book and lyrics by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. Pinocchio directed by Julie Taymor. Mary Poppins in a potential collaboration with Cameron Mackintosh. (20)
Although Disney’s minions are thus occupied, Clear Channel has entered the Broadway arena through its purchase of SFX, an entertainment conglomerate that had itself swallowed up by Pace Theatrical Group and Livent, a production entity founded by Garth Drabinsky (Marks 20). Clear Channel currently has no fewer than eight shows on Broadway as investor or producer, including Mel Brooks’s The Producers, of which Clear Channel owns 25% (Marks 20). Other projects include Hairspray, the musical based on John Waters’s 1988 movie of the same name, and Movin’ Out, a musical with songs by Billy Joel and choreography by Twyla Tharp (Marks 20). Clear Channel is also an investor in the musical version of Thoroughly Modern Millie, designed expressly for its Broadway afterlife, as cheap road-show companies tour the Midwest, presenting “an old-style song-and-dance” showcase for family values (Marks 20). Disney scored an enormous success with The Lion King, but had less luck with Aida, the Elton John version of the Verdi classic. “Any other producer would have closed it long ago” noted one highly regarded artistic director, speaking “on condition of anonymity” (Marks 20), but Disney is clearly unfazed by the criticism, as is Clear Channel. Both know that a Broadway launch is merely the prelude to the lucrative world of touring companies, as endless road-show units wring every last dollar out of each new property. In such an atmosphere, how can genuinely innovative work find an audience? The answer is simple: it cannot. As with motion picture production, the cost of mounting a Broadway play or musical has risen to the point that $100 matinee tickets are not uncommon, forcing producers to cut costs whenever possible. Thus, projects such as Christopher Plummer in Barrymore are more likely to reach the stage because they are essentially solo performances. The more experimental, challenging work has moved to off-off-Broadway, where numerous theater companies cling to life from production to production, remaining afloat financially by the slimmest of margins. For the most part, Broadway has become a wilderness of carefully calculated revivals, adaptations, and modestly produced, star-driven “limited runs,” in which costs can be kept to a minimum. As always, finance drives all other concerns, with the mass audience serving as the ultimate arbiter of taste. And if one can find a presold commodity, such as The Lion King or The Producers, so much the better. Above all, risk must be avoided, or at the very least, minimized.
This extends to reviews as well. As hyperconglomerates continues to buy up new companies, the work of one “unit” is crossplugged in the pages of another “unit.” Dissenting views are relentlessly marginalized. When Connie Chung of CNN suggested at the beginning of an interview with George Lucas that Star Wars: Episode One—The Phantom Menace (1999) was “to most, a disappointment,” noting that “for all its special effects, critics complained about stereotyping, stale plot lines, even racism” (citing the controversial Jar Jar Binks character), Lucas retaliated by denying Chung and CNN access to the Star Wars: Episode Two—Attack of the Clones press junket the next day at Lucas’s Skywalker ranch (Greppi). Industry insiders insisted that CNN’s crew was actually “tossed off the ranch, but CNN says that’s an exaggeration, that there was ‘no physical removal’ of anyone, that there was a ‘conversation’ and that as conversations like that go, it was fairly cordial” (Greppi). As for CNN’s opinion of the affair, their “stance is that Mr. Lucas expected a one-hour love letter and a wet kiss in return for the access that CNN was allowed and didn’t feel he got that” (Greppi). So much for freedom of critical discourse; with $140 million at stake (the approximate budget of Attack of the Clones), who has time for dissent?
When Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections was a surprise critical and commercial hit, talk-show host Oprah Winfrey wanted to get him on her program as part of the Oprah’s Book Club segment. But the more Franzen became involved in the project, the more suspicious he became of the entire process of being, as he put it, “an Oprah author” (Franzen 74). When Franzen was first approached by Winfrey’s staff, they told the author that The Corrections “is a difficult book for us” (Franzen 71), which is not surprising, considering that, in the words of critic Jonathan Yardley, Oprah’s “average selection [for her book club] was a few Steps up from a Harlequin penny dreadful” (20). Yardley argues that although some of Oprah’s choices are noteworthy (such as Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying, Toni Morrison’s Sula, and Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune), on the whole, “Oprah is big on whatever domestic distress happens to be Flavor of the Month—spousal abuse, incest, recovered memory—and she tended to choose titles in which such matters were addressed, one step behind the headlines” (20). No wonder that Franzen’s book was “difficult” for Oprah’s Book Club, and no wonder, too, that he was not in tune with Winfrey’s method of publicizing his work. As Franzen admits, “one of the reasons I’m a writer is that I have uneasy relations with authority” (71), and Oprah’s minions immediately rubbed Franzen the wrong way by insisting that the segment focus on his old Midwestern neighborhood rather than his current life in Manhattan. But Franzen understood how the medium of television worked: it “is propelled by images, the simpler and more vivid the better. If the producers wanted me to be Midwestern, I would try to be Midwestern” (71). But Franzen’s “homecoming” is difficult, and he finds his old neighborhood changed beyond recognition, a place he can no longer relate to. Delivering stand-up homilies on his youth, strolling through the landscape of his childhood, Franzen realizes how the whole thing will “play on TV; as schmaltz” (74). Disgusted with the charade he is being forced to participate in, Franzen suddenly snaps.
“This is so fundamentally bogus!” he declares, to no one in particular, and is surprised when the cameraman “raises his face from his eyepiece and laughs and nods vigorously. ‘You’re right!’ His voice is loud with merriment and something close to anger. ‘You’re right, it is totally bogus!’” (74). Needless to say, Oprah’s producer is not especially pleased with this outburst, wrapping up the filming shortly thereafter, commenting, “I guess I’ll find some way to make it work” (74). But worse is to come. At a book signing in Chicago the day after the shoot, Franzen makes the mistake of trying to please all the many customers standing in line, agreeing with those who say, “I like your book, and I think it’s wonderful that Oprah picked it,” and with those who solicitously murmur, “I like your book, and I’m so sorry that Oprah picked it” (Franzen 74). As Franzen states somewhat laconically, “I’ll get in trouble for this” (75), and indeed he does. Winfrey uninvites him from her show with the accurate yet dismissive statement that Franzen “is seemingly uncomfortable and conflicted about being chosen” (Yardley 20), as indeed he is. What disturbed Franzen the most, apparently, was the Oprah sticker stamped on his book as “‘a logo of corporate ownership’” (qtd. in Yardley 20), and in the resulting flap, he will be
reviled from coast to coast by outraged populists. I’ll be called a “motherfucker” by an anonymous source in New York, a “pompous prick” in Newsweek, an “ego-blinded snob” in the Boston Globe, and a “spoiled, whiny little brat” in The Chicago Tribune. (Franzen 75)
But this is not the end of the affair. Shortly after the Franzen/Winfrey incident, Winfrey decided to abandon the book club segment altogether, for reasons that still remain, at least to this writer, somewhat mysterious. In six years, Oprah had touted more than four dozen books, most of them rather bland commercial fare. Publishers Weekly noted that “between 1996 and 2000, Oprah selections enjoyed average sales of well over a million [copies] each, and that Warner Books alone, even at conservative estimates, raked in $50 million in Oprah dividends” (qtd. in Yardley 20). When one considers that a print run of 25,000 hardcover copies of an average “best seller” is quite respectable by ordinary standards (out of a possible 290 million readers in the United States alone), this is an astonishing figure (Yardley). No surprise, then, that Random House took out a full page ad in the New York Times thanking Oprah for her “unique and magnificent work over the past six years on behalf of books, authors and readers everywhere” (Yardley 20). It also didn’t hurt that out of the 48 or so books that Oprah recommended, 20 were Random House books (Yardley 20). But the problem goes deeper than all of this—beyond the pique of one author, or the fact that, despite the appearance of Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Isabel Allende, most of Oprah’s choices were resolutely unchallenging pop books, designed to appeal (just like television) to the widest possible consumer base. The real issue is that the many readers in Oprah’s Book Club read only the books that Oprah recommended, as Yardley comments:
Oprah is the Queen of Self-Esteem, so no one should be surprised that her reading tastes incline toward self-improvement and pop psychology. That’s O.K.—you’re O.K., too—and folks who like that sort of stuff are constitutionally entitled to read as much of it as they can stomach. Just please don’t tell Oprah she’s “unique and magnificent” because she’s trying to pass it off as literature, and don’t give her credit where credit hasn’t been earned. She may have led people to read who might otherwise have found other forms of diversion and enrichment, but check some of her selections at Amazon.com and you’ll see that people who buy Oprah books are mostly buying other Oprah books.
All of which is to say that reading Angelou and Lamb and Quindlen does not necessarily lead to reading Edna O’Brien and Ian McEwan and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Yes indeed, thank you, Oprah, for what you’ve done—in particular, thanks for enlarging the readership for black-American writers—but that wasn’t exactly a Great Books discussion you were conducting, and it was about a country mile short of “unique and magnificent.” (20)
Oprah’s Book Club, then, is more a reflection of one person’s taste and an indication of that public figure’s commercial clout, than it is a dialogue about literature. The fact that it benefited certain large publishing houses does not really seem to me to be all that sinister; there are increasingly fewer publishers in the marketplace anyway, most of them hyperconglomerates that have survived by purchasing smaller, competing companies. The real problem is that by valorizing certain texts and marginalizing others, Oprah created a culture of false consensus centering on the production of literary texts. If Oprah liked a book and featured it on her show, her millions of loyal viewers followed her suggestion, and purchased the book, convinced that they were participating in a dialogue centering around the writer and her or his work. In fact, Oprah’s strategy essentially “dumbed-down” the literary landscape in the United States even further, in a marketplace already dominated by the likes of Danielle Steele, Stephen King, Tom Clancy, and other commercial novelists. In early 2003, Winfrey announced plans to reactivate her book club, but this time concentrating only on “classics.” What this portends remains to be seen.
Oprah is also making noises about giving up her talk show and concentrating on her projects, one of which must undoubtedly be O, The Oprah Magazine, available at newsstands throughout the world. What is peculiar about O is that every cover features a picture of Oprah as a sort of perpetual celebrity, a cultural arbiter whose dominion cannot be denied. Talk-show host Rosie O’Donnell was hired to jack up the circulation of the ailing McCall’s magazine, reincarnated as Rosie, but the project ended in commercial disaster and a flurry of law suits when O’Donnell demanded complete editorial control. Rosie has since ceased publication. Martha Stewart gazes serenely at the viewer each month from the cover of Martha Stewart Living magazine, but her image, too, has been tarnished by allegations of insider stock trading. Oprah’s Book Club, just like Rosie O’Donnell’s well-known affection for Broadway shows (which did a great deal to increase the box-office returns on musicals such as Seussical, which was otherwise dismissed by the critics) and Martha Stewart’s fantasyland of domestic tranquility, offer the viewer a place to inhabit that transcends and replaces the realities of their own daily existence. Personal problems can be solved, books are showcased, casseroles prepared, and kitchens decorated, all to create a comfortable world of domesticity devoid of care or want. That this is beyond the economic reach of most viewers is beside the point, or perhaps it is the central consideration. If one cannot experience this life firsthand, at least one can live it on a daily basis, vicariously, through the agency of another.
Cosmopolitan also brands itself as the purveyor of a salable commodity to American women, that of the “fun, fearless female” (Carr 1). With the US market declining and production costs rising, Cosmopolitan is aggressively pushing its brand of female “empowerment” worldwide. Although 2.8 million women read Cosmopolitan in the United States (Carr 1), that is nothing compared to the possibilities afforded by the exploitation of the Cosmopolitan formula on an international scale. As David Carr comments:
With a formula almost as closely guarded as Coca-Cola’s—there is a secret 50-page instruction manual—Cosmopolitan, Hearst’s naughty girlfriend of a magazine, has increased its circulation to 8.2 million worldwide, even extending its brand to places where readers have to hide the magazine from their husbands. After adding nine editions in the past two years, Cosmo will soon publish in 50 countries, including the recently opened Latvian edition and a Kazakhstan Cosmo that makes its debut in September. The magazine now flirts with newsstand shoppers on six continents and produces hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for Hearst, suggesting that deep cleavage and thinner thighs have global legs.
“Things American are not viewed as negatively as we might read about,” said George Green, president of Hearst Magazines International. “There’s a huge appetite for these magazines out there.” (1, 9)
Indeed. As Grazyna Olbrych, editor of the Polish version of Cosmopolitan puts it, “Cosmo is not about culture. When you are young, you want to have a young man who loves you and have great sex with him” (Carr 9). Despite national idiosyncrasies, Cosmopolitan’s message is flourishing around the world. The Chinese version cannot even mention sex because government censors forbid it; nevertheless, there is still plenty of room for makeup and wardrobe tips for the young Chinese female consumer (Carr 9). In Sweden, sex is not discussed for a different reason; everyone knows about it, thanks to a progressive and enlightened sex-education program, so the Swedish version of Cosmopolitan also concentrates on improving one’s appearance (Carr 9). In France, readers are so bored with sex that the editor of the French version of Cosmopolitan, Anne Chabrol, “responded by running a contest asking, ‘Does He Cheat On You?’ with the winner being awarded the services of a private detective to find out for sure” (Carr 9). Singapore bans Cosmopolitan outright, but allows the publication of the rival Hearst publication Harper’s Bazaar (Carr 9). In each case, the worldwide versions of Cosmopolitan flourish by presenting the same vision of unfettered sexuality and consumerist “freedom” tailored to meet the needs and desires of local consumers. Thus, American values are again exported throughout the world not for ideological reasons, but rather commercial considerations, which dictate that Cosmopolitan must increase its international presence if it hopes to hold on to its share of the marketplace. The new colonialism is driven by the incentive of economic gain, just as the physical colonization of countries in preceding centuries served the interests of Great Britain, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium by providing cheap goods and labor for ready export. In the 21st century, the colonialism of ideas and images has replaced the need for physical annexation; the market is there, so who needs to bother about the local government? By increasing the United States’ imagistic hold on European and Third World countries, while at the same time seemingly “respecting” or paying obeisance to local cultural customs, the US megaconglomerate publishing and entertainment companies can literally conquer the world, replacing indigenous culture with their own copyrighted, brand-conscious regime.
As filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard remarked in the aftermath of September 11, “Progress is ambiguous, isn’t it?” (qtd. in Osborne 53). He went on to note that “the Americans are everywhere,” a theme he develops in his film In Praise of Love (2001; original title Éloge de l’Amour, 2001), which was screened at the New York Film Festival on October 14, 2001, but which has yet to find a US distributor. Godard’s In Praise of Love is a typically idiosyncratic film from the director who initially stunned the world with Breathless (1961; original title À bout de souffle, 1960) and went on in the 1960s to create a series of deeply personal and disturbing films dealing with rampant commercialization, loss of human identity, the effects of megacorporate culture on society and the individual, and the evils of war and colonialist exploitation. In films such as My Life to Live (1962; original title Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux, 1962), which documents several days in the life of a Parisian prostitute; Alphaville, a Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution (1965; original title Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution, 1965), a dystopian vision of a future civilization run by a giant computer; and Weekend, which depicts the total collapse of global society in a holocaust of murder, cannibalism, war, and rapacious selfishness, Godard painted a vision of the world as a hostile, cold, unforgiving zone of rampant consumerism and cultural nullity. Godard’s early films, made on budgets of $100,000 each in black-and-white 35mm, still managed to recoup their modest cost through international theatrical distribution. By the time of Weekend, his budgets were slightly larger, and he had shifted to color to pacify his investors, but his vision was still his own. In the late 1960s, Godard retired from commercial filmmaking to form the Dziga Vertov group with Jean-Pierre Gorin, producing a series of violently political films in 16mm format on minuscule budgets, such as British Sounds (1969), Wind from the East (1969; original title Le vent d’est, 1969), and Letter to Jane (1972), but eventually abandoned agitprop cinema as an artistic and personal dead end. Beginning with Numéro Deux (1975), Godard has staged something of a return to the commercial cinema with films such as his bizarre adaptation of King Lear (1987), Hail Mary (1985; original title Je vous salue, Marie, 1985), and Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (1991; original title Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro, 1991), this last film being a continuation of both the themes and characters of his earlier film Alphaville. In the 1990s, Godard increasingly turned to work in small format video as his preferred medium of expression, creating a series of videotapes entitled Histoire(s) du cinéma (1989-1994 and perhaps still ongoing), meditating on the history of the cinema, its effect on viewers, and the impact of the US cinema on global film production (see Dixon, Godard, for more on the filmmaker’s long and distinguished career). In In Praise of Love, according to critic Lawrence Osborne, Godard delivers
a loose, brooding rumination on globalist discontents, shot mostly in black and white. Although the film is nominally about the four stages of love—meeting, sexual passion, separation and rediscovery—it turns anxiously around larger themes: rampant commercialization, the preponderance of Hollywood and TV, the end of authenticity, the poor, the old, the disappearance of adulthood. (53)
As always, Godard is uneasy about the invasion of technology and false memory created by the media to replicate or explicate the past. As he argues, “I suppose that’s a feeling that many people in the world have today—a kind of incoherent rage against all things technocratic. It comes from being powerless. Of course, that doesn’t diminish the tragedy of what happened in New York” (53). In one of In Praise of Love’s most contentious subplots, “the representatives of Steven Spielberg try to buy the rights to the memories of a Jewish couple who were French Resistance fighters” (Osborne 53). Godard’s dislike for Spielberg is well known and in itself perhaps explains why In Praise of Love is unlikely to receive widespread distribution in the United States, even on DVD or cable television, the new (and only) market for contemporary foreign films. But, as Osborne states, in the 1960s Godard’s films had an air of insouciance and cheerfully nihilistic graveyard humor, as in Alphaville, where the central character, Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine), inserts a one franc coin in a vending machine, only to receive a plastic card with the word “merci” engraved on it. In his current work, such as Oh, Woe Is Me (1993; original title, Hélas pour moi, 1993), For Ever Mozart (1996), and In Praise of Love, Godard is an altogether different figure as he contemplates the ruins of civilization. It is no longer a matter for joking as in Weekend; the ruin of our shared international cultural heritage is an accomplished fact, and Godard mourns the passing of visual and artistic literacy with deep and unremitting intensity. As Godard comments, “I suppose old men always feel some sort of nostalgia for the past [and for] the loss of cultural memory. I wonder if Americans feel that loss too. I don’t think so. But then I think you’re just more nomadic and rootless by nature. For me, such a loss is catastrophic” (qtd. in Osborne 53). He complains that, “actors today just imitate other actors. They all want to be Gérard Depardieu or Julia Roberts” (Osborne 53). Godard’s small-scale Swiss production company, Sonimage, which he operates with his “partner and collaborator Anne-Marie Miéville” (Osborne 53), gives him the kind of freedom he needs to make films that would never be welcomed by the commercial establishment precisely because his films seek to destabilize it. For Godard, “failure” is as important as the ephemerality of success because it gives one the freedom to act without the constraints of commercial film production. As he puts it, “I’ve known both success and failure equally, I’m glad to say. It’s important to experience failure. Frankly, even being famous ultimately wasn’t all it was cracked up to be” (qtd. in Osborne 53), which is why, unlike so many of his contemporaries, including the late François Truffaut, and the still active auteurs Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Agnès Varda, Godard has withdrawn almost completely from the mainstream cinema marketplace. Whatever films he makes are his own entirely; their inherent lack of commercial appeal is of absolutely no concern. Fortunately for Godard, numerous patrons, both private and public, still admire his work to such a degree that they remain willing to finance his projects, even though they realize that the chances of recouping their investment is literally nonexistent. Godard could not work any other way. Having dispersed with narrative, the star system, and conventional editorial strategies, his contemporary films are an avalanche of images, texts, and scraps of music, combining to create an intensely personal vision that concedes nothing to the viewer. Godard’s films are thus mysterious and resistant, precisely the opposite of what the dominant cinema aims for.
Simultaneously, a new group of feminist filmmakers is refiguring the French commercial cinema, even as a competing group of more calculating directors has pursued a new French-American hybrid, the “teen movie” of 21st century France, as is the case with Stéphane Kazandjian’s Sexy Boys (2001). Produced on a budget of roughly $3 million, Sexy Boys, a sort of vulgar combination of American Pie (1999) and the teleseries Friends, has thus far been responsible for 500,000 theatrical admissions in France, not a bad showing in a country where US films traditionally dominate the box office. Although some critics and viewers are alarmed by the trend, claiming that it desecrates the illustrious past of French cinema, first-time director Kazandjian is unrepentant. As he told Kristin Hohenadel:
I think there’s a kind of “snobbisme” in France. […] To make a film for an adolescent audience is considered vulgar, idiotic—because we are so much more intelligent than the Americans—and if we make a film for young people, it has to really raise the debate. All of the films I’ve seen in France about adolescents are made by 40-year-olds recalling adolescence as a troubled, tormented period. (21)
Citing Porky’s (1981), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), and Clerks (1994) as the major influences on Sexy Boys, Kazandjian first tried his hand in the United States, working as an intern on a Hollywood sitcom and writing two unproduced scripts for generic crime thrillers (Hohenadel 21). But nothing clicked, and so Kazandjian decided not only to return to France, but also to import the values of the Hollywood cinema with him. Predictably, the establishment French press savaged Sexy Boys on its initial release. Le Monde suggested that perhaps it should not mention the names of the actors out of “charity,” while Libération noted that the film represented “a total Americanization of behaviors and settings” (Hohenadel 21). Despite near universal critical disdain, Sexy Boys became a substantial hit, something that was predicted by the film’s sole favorable notice, by Lisa Nesselson, in Weekly Variety. Wrote Nesselson, “shot and edited with straightforward efficiency, [the] film has guts and energy as well as grossout ideas to spare” (qtd. in Hohenadel 21). And, of course, with an eye to the international market, Sexy Boys is shot in English, rather than French. This proves no barrier to contemporary Parisian youth. Indeed, Kazandjian is dismissive of the French cinema on a much larger scale, calling its supposed cultural superiority an illusion fostered by critics. Argues Kazandjian:
There is a real French culture and a real American culture and between the two there is “un melting pot” with many references that everyone has in common. […] Everyone is nourished by the things they grew up with, and my generation saw Spielberg in the same way that Scorsese saw Godard’s Breathless and started making little films in black and white. I’m interested in this space between “la culture trash” and respectable culture. In France we really have this cult of the auteur, as if he’s a kind of genius. But I don’t really think there are more masterpieces in the French cinema than there are in the American cinema. (qtd. in Hohenadel 21)
Currently basking in the success of Sexy Boys, Kazandjian comments that “American films have a real energy that is missing in a lot of French films” (Hohenadel 21), and he is at work on a new, highly commercial project. Bloody Mallory (2002), “a sort of Buffy [the Vampire Slayer (1992)] française, an action comedy based on Roger Corman-style B movies,” which will also be shot in English (Hohenadel 21). His favorite directors are the Coen brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Steven Soderbergh, and after Bloody Mallory, he hopes to film a “trés Hollywoodienne” romantic comedy, combining elements of “Woody Allen and Billy Wilder” (Hohenadel 21).
In a sense, Stéphane Kazandjian, Luc Besson, and other current practitioners of what has been dubbed “le cinéma du look” are the logical consequence of a culture that has been systematically destroyed by US imports. American films do indeed move faster and have “more energy” than many of their Gallic counterparts; this is called introspection and character development. The new wave of “le teen movie” directors does not want to be considered auteurs, and they do not really want to make a personal statement, something that even Roger Corman aspired to in his early films such as The Intruder (1961), in which a young William Shatner plays a virulent racist out to inflame racial tensions in a sleepy Southern town. All that drives Kazandjian and his cohorts is commercial return through the importation of American cultural and social values to replace indigenous ones. Even the language is disposable; French-language films have such a limited market—let’s shoot it in English! Surface slickness and calculated manipulation have replaced insight and an individual vision; the marketplace is the final arbiter of quality. Kazandjian is thus an example of the completely colonized individual, bereft of anything other than a phantasmal vision of Hollywood success. It’s all very well to evoke the names of Billy Wilder and Woody Allen as mentors, until one remembers that both filmmakers often created resolutely noncommercial projects in which they expressed their own views of society without regard for the eventual box-office reception. Woody Allen may bemoan the fact that his newer films, particularly the brutally savage Deconstructing Harry (1997), itself a loose remake of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1959; original title Smultronstället, 1957), reap little return in their theatrical runs, but his films remain a reflection of his unique and increasingly bitter view of the human condition, right up through Hollywood Ending (2002). Allen, Wilder, the Coen brothers, Anderson, and Soderbergh are filmmakers possessing a unique and original vision that informed the creation of all their work; they possess a center. Borrowing from this and that, like so many condiments on a fast-food service bar, Besson and Kazandjian have nothing at the center. Cut off from their own heritage and inundated with hyperedited, presold, mass-marketed images from a monopolistic corporate construct that is effectively leveling alternative civilizations just as American and European loggers relentlessly level the Amazon rain forest, the “Franglais” filmmaker belongs to no true culture—except the discipline of all-consuming capitalism.
In contrast, the new French feminist filmmakers offer a vision that is far more intense and disturbing. Inspired by the early example of Agnès Varda, directors such as Brigitte Roüan, Catherine Breillat, Tonie Marshall, Agnès Jaoui, and Nicole Garcia have created a new cinema that reflects more accurately the passions and ambitions of their female protagonists with results that often shock mainstream audiences and critics. Rape Me (2001; original title Baise-Moi, 2000), directed by Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, tells the tale of two young women who go on a cross-country killing spree, much in the same vein as Natural Born Killers (1994) and the fatally compromised Thelma & Louise (1991). However, Rape Me depicts its protagonists as flawed yet impassioned heroines, fighting back against a male-dominated society that subjugates them through a regime of forced gender roles, domesticity, and rape. Unlike other films that have dealt with rape in the past, even Ida Lupino’s groundbreaking Outrage (1950), rape in Rape Me is presented with graphic directness and no obfuscation. It is a brutal act motivated by power rather than sexual desire, and by depicting the rape of the two young women with documentary intensity; Despentes and Trinh Thi demonstrate the need for their full-scale rebellion. When Natural Born Killers was released, it received saturation booking throughout the world and although momentarily controversial for its often gratuitous violence, the R-rated film was eventually accepted as mainstream cinema to be discussed and dissected by critics and viewers alike. When Rape Me opened, it played in a few major US cities before disappearing to DVD, and the reviews were for the most part dismissive or directly hostile. Where director Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers presented Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis as an updated, often parodic 1990s version of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), complete with Rodney Dangerfield and Robert Downey Jr. for comic relief, Rape Me is unadorned and straightforward, offering two porn actresses, Raffadla Anderson and Karen Bach, in the leading roles. Based on Virginie Despentes’s novel of the same name (Baise-Moi), which was a success du scandale when first printed in France, Rape Me is shot on digital video rather than film, which gives the completed work a bare bones, stripped-down quality, a look favored by many New Wave feminist directors. In contrast, Oliver Stone switches camera stocks from color to black and white, intercuts video with film, projects slides onto the bodies of his protagonists, even artificially scratches and cuts the film, all to keep the visuals moving at a hyperedited pace, to disguise the fact that the film is, at its center, essentially empty. The other factor to consider is that Rape Me, while staged to conform to a fictive narrative, has a greater command on our attention because of the raw verisimilitude of its sexual discourse; in contrast, everything in Natural Born Killers is synthetic. Everything in Stone’s film is told from the point of view of the male viewer; Rape Me sides completely with its feminist protagonists, operating entirely on their level, without artifice or adornment.
Other films from French New Wave feminist directors include Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl (2001; original title À ma soeur!, 2001), a harrowing tale of a 13-year-old girl’s coming of age as her 15-year-old sister embarks on a series of sexual relationships. With explicit sexual scenes and a brutal narrative structure, Fat Girl has already been banned in Ontario, Canada, and severely restricted to adult audiences only throughout the rest of the world. Breillat’s earlier film Romance (1999) is similarly graphic, exploring the life of a young woman who engages in a series of romantic trysts, one involving sadomasochist bondage, when her putative boyfriend fails to satisfy her emotional and physical needs. In Brigitte Roüan’s After Sex (1997; original title Post coitum animal triste, 1997), a woman in her 40s, played by Roüan herself, loses everything she has when an extramarital affair ends badly. Agnès Jaoui’s The Taste of Others (2001; original title Le goût des autres, 1999) is a rather elegant and restrained romantic comedy; Danièle Thompson’s Season’s Beatings (1999; original title La Bûche, 1999) is a domestic comedy drama set during the Christmas holiday season; Nicole Garcia’s Place Vendôme (1998) is a stylish thriller starring Catherine Deneuve; and Tonie Marshall’s Venus Beauty Institute (2000; original title Vénus beauté [institut], 1999) is a sort of Grand Hotel (1932) drama centering on the lives and loves of a group of women who operate a Parisian fashion shop.
Taken together, these films comprise a feminine revolution in the cinema. As Agnès Varda commented, “I was a lone woman director in the French New Wave[;] now there are 50 women making feature films. The evolution has been earth-shattering” (James, “Femmes Directors” A4). Catherine Breillat agrees, noting that her films deal precisely with that subject matter that other directors have avoided in the past. Says Breillat, “I am passionate about looking at things that are taboo. I film what other people hide” (James, “Femmes Directors” A4). In addition, this new wave of feminist cinema has provided work for many actors who otherwise would have remained idle. Agnès Jaoui flatly states that, “for every two roles for women, there are 12 for men. I got fed up waiting for acting parts [and] started writing between jobs” (James, “Femme Directors” A4). Working with her partner and co-scenarist Jean-Pierre Bacri, Jaoui now finds herself in demand as a director with the immense commercial and critical success of The Taste of Others, which won four Césars (the French equivalent of the Academy Award). This is all the more remarkable because of the fact that The Taste of Others was Jaoui’s debut as a director (James, “Femme Directors” A4).
But while their films reflect more of the woman’s point of view, most of the members of the New Wave of French feminist cinema do not think of themselves as provocateurs—with the exceptions of Roüan and Breillat. Rather, they seek to open their films to the entire spectrum of human experience. Says Danièle Thompson, “Although I support some specific women’s issues, I wouldn’t call myself a ‘feminist,’ because being a woman isn’t an obstacle to success. The attitude to women in the French film industry is extremely open” (James, “Femme Directors” A4). Agnès Jaoui agrees, saying that, “I don’t think my films have a ‘woman’s point of view,’ I wouldn’t want that and, anyway, I write them with a man. But if I can insert a good female role into the plot, well of course I do” (James, “Femme Directors” A4).
Thus, what is really happening here is a leveling of the playing field, a respite from the days of the first New Wave when Chabrol, Godard, Truffaut, Resnais, Rohmer, and other young men from the Cahiers du Cinéma school dominated cinema practice. In France, at least, the cinema has become reasonably democratic, and despite the influx of the new teen movies, the country seems able to incorporate the past of cinema into the present, creating works that are simultaneously commercial and thoughtful. This will not continue if US global cinematic dominance finally prevails. A US studio would never even produce any of the films mentioned here because American audiences have become numbed by a succession of violent spectacles and imbecilic comedies to the point where originality is suspect, almost outside the realm of US viewers’ limited experience. Creating scenarios for contemporary mainstream films is much like writing for television in the 1950s: avoid controversy at all costs. In 1953 Rod Serling observed that, “because TV is a mass medium, you have to be governed by mass medium taboos. Easy on sex. Easy on violence. Nix on religion. Gently does it on the controversial themes” (qtd. in Friend 46). Mainstream films have the appearance of genuine engagement, yet in fact they are carefully contrived to reach, but not challenge, their target audiences. Although community standards have changed considerably in the United States since the 1950s, I argue that we are now living in one of the most deeply repressive and conservative eras since Joseph McCarthy first entered the public consciousness. What we have learned in the intervening years is the symbolic value of token tolerance; the gesture that suggests unity and social consensus. The “news” is now more stage managed than it was in the Eisenhower era; even the most cursory viewing of the BBC World Service news versus the three nightly US network news broadcasts (ABC, CBS, and NBC) reveals a complete myopia when it comes to world affairs, particularly when reports of famine or disaster do not directly affect US interests. This is not to suggest that the BBC, or Agence France-Presse, or Reuters, or any other news organization is free from chauvinist bias. But for sheer insularity, the mainstream US news outlets mimic the mainstream film, television, and cable outlets. Everything is homogenized; everything is the same. Dissenting voices are filtered out. American audiences want their “news,” as well as their entertainment, predigested to avoid surprises and to be centered solely on their own personal and financial interests.
In an era when fading action superstar Arnold Schwarzenegger can command $30 million up front for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), what we have been trained to expect is the expected. As Dave Kehr declares:
If movies become a medium in which anything that can be imagined can be presented in photo-realist terms, the consequences will probably be a shrinking of the sense of fantasy and escape, because nothing will seem extraordinary anymore. As shocking as they were, even the images of the attack on the World Trade Center seemed weirdly familiar, accustomed as we are to seeing New York blasted by aliens (Independence Day) and flattened by tidal waves (Armageddon). (“Cyberstar” 1)
This is even more true when one considers that movies in Hollywood are no longer made by individuals, but rather committees, focus groups, and ancillary advertising interests so that the concept of a film “directed by” anyone in the dominant cinema is so hopelessly mediated by commercial manipulation that it is altogether meaningless. Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 (2000), the John Travolta/L. Ron Hubbard vehicle that zoomed through theaters on its way to pay-cable limbo, had its roots in a financial deal that was advantageous to the film’s producer, Franchise Pictures, if not ultimately to the film’s star, Travolta, who actually invested $5 million of his personal fortune to finance the film. Travolta had been trying to get the project off the ground for 15 years, but even with a string of box-office hits, no one would touch it. Travolta is well known as a member of the Church of Scientology, and Battlefield Earth was written by Hubbard, the group’s founder and author of the controversial book Dianetics. Although no studio specifically mentioned this connection as a stumbling block, the project went from MGM to Fox to Warner Brothers without any firm offers, despite Travolta’s star status. One studio executive who passed on Battlefield Earth noted that, “It was risky. On any film there are 10 variables that can kill you. On this film there was an 11th: Scientology. It just wasn’t something anyone really wanted to get involved with” (Hirschberg 49).
But Elie Samaha, the head of Franchise Pictures, had a formula that ultimately made the film possible. As Hirschberg describes it, the process works in five easy steps:
1. Find a script that nobody in Hollywood wants. Nobody, that is, except one eager movie star. 2. Buy the script for cheap—and skip the rewrites. 3. Save a lot of money by shooting in Canada. 4. Pay your star a fraction of his usual rate. (It is his pet project, after all.) 5. Rake in the profits. (46)
As long as Samaha followed these rules, he was ready to bankroll Battlefield Earth.
Nevertheless, Battlefield Earth was massacred by the critics and became a running joke on American late-night television variety shows. Samaha has used this same five-step process to create several more aesthetically successful projects, such as The Big Kahuna (2000) starring Kevin Spacey; The Pledge (2001), a “sleeper” detective thriller starring Jack Nicholson and directed by Sean Penn; Get Carter (2000), a remake of the 1971 Michael Caine/Mike Hodges film, starring Sylvester Stallone; and The Whole Nine Yards (2000), a Bruce Willis comedy that breaks the mold of his usual high-octane action persona (Hirschberg 48). Some of these projects made more money than others, and The Whole Nine Yards was a modest hit. Most important, however, none of the films lost money because Samaha keeps his overhead down through draconian cost consciousness.
With Battlefield Earth, Samaha cut the film’s original budget from $90 million to $65 million, and then raised 70% of the budget by selling overseas rights to the film, territory by territory (Hirschberg 49). Selling the film was easy: Samaha simply ignored the Scientology connection. “I would yell at everyone, ‘This is a science-fiction film starring John Travolta!’ again and again,” he told Lynn Hirschberg (49), and in the end even got Intertainment AG, a German company notoriously suspicious of projects with possible controversy attached, to commit to a major stake in the production. In many ways, although the projects Samaha produces are frankly commercial affairs, the company is one of the last bastions for individual creative input. Unlike Miramax Films and other “boutique” production companies, Samaha is interested only in the packaging and merchandising of a project. Once a star has signed on and the budget is set, Samaha cedes all creative decisions “to on-set personnel” (Hirschberg 49). This approach, of course, can have its pitfalls because “no one [other than the film’s stars, writers, and/or directors] seems to care whether or not the film has any artistic merit” (Hirschberg 49). It doesn’t matter; the film is presold, and in all probability will at least break even. And by leaving his stars and directors alone, Samaha affords them that rarest of all luxuries in an increasingly micromanaged industry: creative freedom.
In contrast, films such as Artificial Intelligence: A.I. (2001), the Steven Spielberg film that the director “inherited” from Stanley Kubrick, are good examples of committee-made movies. As Lloyd Kaufman, the head of Troma Pictures, producers of intentionally awful films such as Surf Nazis Must Die (1987), Tromeo and Juliet (1996), and Teenage Catgirls in Heat (1997), observes, A.I. represents a kind of “emotional pornography […] a soulless prefab blockbuster that wasn’t so much written or directed as assembled by a committee intent on creating a product impervious to criticism of any type” (qtd. in Lidz and Rushin 30). Yet films such as A.I., Patch Adams (1998), Grand Canyon (1991), Pay It Forward (2000), and numerous others garner awards and critical acclaim because they insist on their importance, cloaking their emptiness in period costumes or myriad computer-generated special effects. They fill the screen with scenery and guest stars (Around the World in Eighty Days, 1956), they present us with sympathetic Nazis in period drag (The English Patient, 1996), they suffocate us with period splendor and the purloined pedigree of their source texts (Howards End, 1992). But as Kaufman ruefully exclaims, “pointing out the flaws in A.I. is like saying you hate love or children or teddy bears” (Lidz and Rushin 30). These are films designed to deflect all criticism, films that announce their scope and ambition through the use of sweeping music cues, supposedly daring themes, and meticulous (if uninspired) technical execution. These films are deliberately flawless, without a doubt. They are also devoid of humanity, insight, or anything approaching a personal vision. Troma’s films, like AIP’s films of the 1950s, are honest exploitational “trash,” and they acquire resonance as they age, becoming authentic totems of their era and cultural origins.
In contrast, the paint-by-numbers movies of the majors sell quickly and then burn out, becoming texts without a function. The more bloated the spectacle, the more divorced it is from the culture that created it and the less it has to offer us as scholars and historians. The Mouthpiece (1932) tells the story of an overzealous prosecutor, Vincent Day (Warren William), who fights to get a conviction in a murder case and is resoundingly successful. However, just as the defendant is being executed, another man confesses to the crime—the real killer. Plagued by grief and self-doubt, Day quits his government job and becomes the defense council for a string of gangsters, pimps, bootleggers, and triggermen. This narrative, told in unadorned long takes with minimal settings, tells us more about the Depression era than any conventional historical document ever will. The palpable air of desperation that surrounds Day’s activities, his attempts to drown his guilt in bootleg liquor, his unsatisfying dalliances—all are presented to the viewer in near documentary fashion without the support of extradiegetic music. The Mouthpiece is a raw slice of Depression era life as observed by an omniscient camera that grinds on mercilessly, as in the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman or in the cold, clinical films of Andy Warhol.
King Kong overwhelmes us with spectacle; Gone with the Wind (1939) takes a popular novel and turns it into an equally popular commercial success; The Wizard of Oz (1939) has a claim on our memory because of the enduring icons of Dorothy’s red slippers, the yellow brick road, and the wicked witch of the West. Yet all are escapist fantasies, although they perpetually appear on “most beloved” film lists year after year and tell us little about the social and political forces that led to their creation. The Great Depression was at its height when King Kong was produced; who would have known it from the film itself, which whisked willing audiences to Skull Island to witness Kong battle for survival against an unending procession of natural enemies? Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz were made on the eve of World War II; where are the traces of the coming conflict apparent in these fictive narratives? All three films are primarily escapist entertainments. All are films with multiple directors, numerous camera operators, and sprawling schedules that taxed the studio system to the limit, making each an expensive gamble for their producers. Yet in She Had to Say Yes (1933), in which stenographer Loretta Young has to chose between date rapist Lyle Talbot or Regis Toomey as a suitable husband, or Skyscraper Souls (1932), in which Warren William portrays the corrupt builder of a huge skyscraper, ruthless in his transactions in commerce and personal relationships, there is more to be seen and experienced about the human condition than in any of the conventional canonical classics.
In the same fashion, Citizen Ruth (1996) and Election (1999), both by director Alexander Payne, are the most authentic exemplars of life in the Great Plains, just as Sinclair Lewis’s novels Babbitt, Main Street, and Elmer Gantry crystallized the narrow-mindedness of Midwestern culture for all time. In Citizen Ruth, Laura Dern plays a glue-sniffing mother-to-be who haunts the alleyways of Omaha, Nebraska, and gets caught up in a brutally satirical battle between pro-choice and pro-life forces; in Election, Reese Witherspoon portrays the class perfectionist who will use any means to get ahead in high school, much to the chagrin of her teacher, Matthew Broderick. Citizen Ruth and Election were marginal hits, allowing Payne to continue working the contemporary cinematic marketplace. But with About Schmidt (2002), Payne has crossed over into much more conventional territory, essentially draping the film around star Jack Nicholson as the film’s central attraction, settling for easy laughs rather than the searing penetration of the his first two works. In About Schmidt, Nicholson plays an insurance actuary whose wife has died, leaving him adrift in a landscape of meaningless family obligations, even as he converges daily on the emptiness of his existence. Yet the film is little more than a running joke, hollow at the center, something like Harold Ramis’ Analyze That (2002). Payne is, at length, giving in to the demands of the contemporary commercial cinema marketplace. As with so many other promision talents, it’s sad to see finances win out over individual vision and creative autonomy. Reese Witherspoon, so perfectly cast in Election, disappointed many when she essentially reprised her role in Legally Blonde (2001), a poorly scripted legal comedy that nevertheless handily outperformed Election at the box office. She wants to be a star; can one really blame her? Time is short, and the list of stars who can “open” a film is shorter still. Better to get what you can now and appeal to the largest possible audience.
This sense of instant disposability and planned obsolescence dominates the discourse of all of popular culture, from the cinema, to video games, to cell phones and other props of the twenty-first-century teen fantasy zone. Films, pop music, and consumer goods are driven primarily by teen audiences. Friends is being kept on the air for a ninth, and hopefully final, season at an astronomical cost of $150 million for 24 half-hour shows, a rough cost of $6.5 million per episode (Adalian 1). Cutting out commercials, main titles, bumpers, and promos, the running time of each episode will be slightly more than 20 minutes. The stars of the show—Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer, Courteney Cox Arquette, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and Jennifer Aniston—will all receive substantial pay raises, making Friends the “most expensive half-hour program in TV history” (Adalian 1), but worth it if it can hold on to teen audiences. Celebrities, not only in the United States, but also around the world, constitute the new instant royalty with purses to match their ephemeral status. Russell Crowe earned $15 million for his work in 2001; Tracey Ullman took home $7.25 million from a variety of projects. Gérard Depardieu’s 2001 pay packet is estimated at $11.6 million, with Daniel Auteuil ($3.3 million), Juliette Binoche ($2.2 million), and Catherine Deneuve ($1.7 million) also comfortably in the seven-figure bracket. Jackie Chan earns $15 million a picture, whereas his frequent costar Michelle Yeoh is not far behind with $13 million for her 2001 salary.
In India, Aamir Khan averages $4.1 million per year in salary, making roughly $700,000 per film. In the United States the star salaries are the most inflated, led by Tom Cruise, who banked $70 million for his work in 2001. Jim Carrey, Chris Tucker, Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks, Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis, Julia Roberts, and Cameron Diaz all charge roughly $20 million per film; Nicolas Cage, Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Gwyneth Paltrow, Helen Hunt, and Will Smith are not far behind. Compare these figures to what the stars of the 1940s received during their peak earning years. In 1930, Humphrey Bogart earned roughly $39,000 a year, or $418,725 in today’s currency. In 1941, Spencer Tracy took home $233,460, or $2.75 million today (all salary figures, Granier-Deferre 17). And what sort of projects do these stars produce for contemporary audiences? According to Robert Altman:
Things certainly have to change. “Hollywood” has become an archaic term, even though the center of the business is there. It’s actually only the toy factory; the art galleries are elsewhere. All the Hollywood money is being spent to make films for kids between the ages of 11 and 14—everything. What kills me is that the actors, directors and producers responsible for such junk stand up with great pride, as if they’ve done something artistic, when all they’ve done is to get the attention of preteens. Everyone else seems to be shut out. No one even draws attention to more sophisticated films other than film festivals and certain small groups in America. People call what I make “art films,” as if it were something shameful. Can you imagine that? (qtd. in Spitz 42-43)
But a certain perverse logic is inherent in the derogatory label “art film,” as veteran screenwriter Larry Gross points out. Art films, of course, are synonymous with “indie” films, narratives designed to appeal to a niche audience and nothing more. With salaries as high as they now are, why should anyone take a chance on a film that is not designed to be profitable? As Gross argues, indie films
are not profitable. The studios are still unsure of what they should make, but they now have a self-evident indicator of what they shouldn’t make. Indie films consistently perform too poorly at the box-office to make anyone at the studios anything but terrified or contemptuous of following their lead. And there is little that is intelligent or interesting in the aspirations of studio directors that does not in some dangerous way overlap with observable characteristics of indie films.
Indie films supply a road map of what to avoid, what mistakes not to make. Everything unconventional in technique and possibly marginal in content, anything not made with a palpable design on every demographic, now exists in a visible and intelligible framework that defines what it makes absolutely no sense to try. […] The idiosyncratic story, the story with the less-than-sympathetic hero, the film connected to too specific a region or group, gets damned with more than just, “I don’t see how we can sell it.” An alarm bell goes off in the executive’s head. Ding: “That sounds like an indie. That’s not the business we’re in.” That’s the other business, the one with the people who aren’t concerned with and hence don’t make money—the loser’s business.
No one in Hollywood ever holds it against you when you make a good film. What people hold against you is not being serious about putting profits first. And the problem with indie films is that they created a tangible way of identifying that heresy, that sin. (13)
In such a landscape, how can anything even faintly original or subversive get made without a star who is willing to accept a massive salary cut, a producer who is willing to gamble on a risky project, and most important, a distributor who will find a way to get the film into theaters so that it can at least return its investment? And furthermore, if your film is not a mainstream project, what chance do you have of getting it reviewed in the press? Daily Variety, the show business newspaper that used to review every feature film (and often shot film) that was being theatrically released, has cut back sharply on its press coverage of “noncommercial” films in the past few years. And without a positive review in Daily Variety, a small film’s commercial chances are severely limited. As veteran Daily Variety film critic David Rooney admits:
Yeah, more and more now there is the push now to limit commercially marginal films to a couple of paragraphs. […] There’s a certain responsibility also in shaping a film’s commercial potential and its commercial prospects, because for better or worse (and I’m not saying this is accurate and I’m not saying it’s fair) but a lot of people use Variety as their guideline. A lot of buyers will say, “Well, maybe it’s worth checking it out” (or maybe it’s not) based on a Variety review. So there is a real responsibility and there’s certain amount of pressure involved with that too, especially when there is so little time to think about it at Cannes. (qtd. in Simon 23-24)
And what, precisely, defines a “commercially marginal” film? It is a film with no distribution behind it. Think of all the alternative voices that are being silenced—and that would have been silenced—if there were not at one time a level playing field on which all films competed solely for theatrical exploitation. Films such as Men Must Fight (1933), a pacifist film that predicts with eerie accuracy the outbreak of war in 1940, was a small-scale project for MGM in the 1930s, but the constant need for theatrical programming ensured that it would find an audience, either at the top or the bottom of a double bill. Watching Men Must Fight is an eerie experience because the film details the effects of a massive air attack on New York City, complete with the collapse of the Brooklyn Bridge and the destruction of the then newly erected Empire State Building. Men are seen as unreasoning aggressors by reason of their gender alone; in the film’s final moments, an elderly matriarch speculates that the world would be much better if governed by women with men serving as “ornaments.” At 72 minutes, the film is densely packed with incident and characterization, and the capable cast, including Diana Wynyard, Lewis Stone, May Robson, and a very youthful Robert Young, give depth and reality to their respective characters. At the film’s conclusion, we are left to wonder whether war, in a male-dominated society, is indeed inevitable. When the final attack comes, it is not a gloriously “thrilling” spectacle, but rather a menacing series of depressing images graphically illustrating the doom of civilization. The film leaves it to the viewer to draw the final conclusions; would such a film be possible today?
Robert L. Lippert, a cost-conscious producer who was active from 1946 until 1965, churned out a remarkable series of low-budget films in a wide variety of genres, including The Murder Game (1965), The Earth Dies Screaming (1964), Night Train to Paris (1964), Witchcraft (1964), Lost Continent (1951), The Steel Helmet (1951), The Baron of Arizona (1950), Arson, Inc. (1949), and I Shot Jesse James (1949), for a total of 58 films during his long career. Along the way, Lippert gave opportunities to gifted filmmakers such as Terence Fisher, Samuel Fuller, Don Sharp, and many others who learned their trade on Lippert’s six-day feature films. Unlike contemporary television series, which conform to a rigid format and a continuing set of characters, or music videos, which traffic in recycled imagery from 1960s experimental films intercut with conventional pop iconography, small-budget films offered freedom to their directors, actors, and scenarists as long as they stayed on time and under budget. Producer Val Lewton’s remarkable series of 1940s fantasy films, such as I Walked with a Zombie (1943), were designed by RKO Pictures to conform to strict budget and scheduling requirements with a heavily presold and sensationalistic title attached. But once Lewton accepted the assignment, RKO pretty much left him alone because the cost of his films was comparatively minuscule. We recognize The Seventh Victim (1943), Cat People (1942), and The Body Snatcher (1945) as classics of the macabre and a significant departure from the Universal “monster rally” films of the same era, such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944), and House of Dracula (1945). But their genesis was made possible only by the fact they were low-budget, no-risk investments for their producer and distributors, as well as by the fact that the major studios all owned their own chains of theaters, which were perpetually hungry for new product. Deluge (1933) is another apocalyptic film in which New York is destroyed by a giant tidal wave; again, it is a modestly budgeted film, considered no more than a sound commercial investment at the time. Nevertheless, as with Men Must Fight, the film raises a number of serious issues regarding mankind’s delicate balance with the forces of nature, and for most of the film, dramatic exposition takes precedence over special effects. How different is the strategy of Invasion U.S.A. (1985), which bears no relationship to the 1952 film of the same name? Invasion U.S.A. is merely an excuse for action star Chuck Norris to load up on weaponry and wage a one-man war against invading foreign forces. The thoughtfulness of films such as Atomic Attack (1950), in which a family living on the outskirts of Manhattan are forced to flee when an A bomb wipes out the city, is entirely absent from contemporary apocalypse dramas. All that matters is destruction, with a continual wave of fresh victims as scenery.
Nor is this absence of characterization confined to the contemporary cinema alone. Video games, which have rapidly become a hotter rental commodity throughout the world than conventional DVDs of noninteractive films, are notorious for their reliance on violence and weaponry at the expense of any human element. Doom III, created by id Software, is the latest version of the popular single-player “point-and-shoot” video game that first appeared in 1993. It exemplifies this new trend toward creating an “adrenaline-crazed shooting experience that celebrates violence, blood and gore” (Markoff E5). Indeed, Doom III “virtually erase[s] the line between video game and animated Hollywood movie […using] ear-bending Dolby 5.1 sound” (Markoff E5) and state-of-the-art special effects to make the brutally dystopian world of Doom III come to life. As Markoff reports:
The newest Doom is set on Mars in 2145. In the beginning the camera pans in to the vast Union Aerospace Corporation, where a scientist sitting inside at a computer terminal is nervously entering commands.
Moments later an explosion unleashes some kind of transformed human monster. What follows is designed to scare the daylights out of the game player. (E5)
The game, which John Carmack designed, uses new graphic rendering techniques that give the look and feel of the game a greater tactile presence. All that is missing is a narrative—or character motivation. But for Carmack, Doom III is “all about the realism of the graphics” (Markoff E5), not the story. The technical sophistication of Doom III intrigues Carmack, rather than its content, which is essentially a kill-or-be-killed race through an endless series of skilfully rendered labyrinthine tunnels:
“We’ve been able to do things that for years have basically been watercooler talk among programmers,” Mr. Carmack said of the newest Doom. […] In Doom III, “the world just works,” he said. “I like the elegance.” Of course one person’s elegance might be another’s painfully detailed hyperviolence. Asked about a violent scene played out in an industrial bathroom with gleaming stainless steel urinals in which a doglike monster eats the entrails of one of Doom’s omnipresent zombies, id’s chief executive, Todd Hollenshead, maintained that the game was really not about violence. “The demo raises eyebrows,” he said. “But we’re going for a scary game over violence.” Then, seemingly as an afterthought, he added, “It’s not a game for small kids.” (Markoff E5)
Nor is Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which allows players to relive (or experience at secondhand for the first time) the violent battles of World War II. Players can choose to be Allied soldiers or members of the Axis forces; unlike Doom III and its predecessors, Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a game for multiple players (Kay 1). Day of Defeat, another video game, traffics more openly in its embrace of Nazi iconography, showing “battlefields decorated with swastikas and Nazi posters [which] attracts many players with an enthusiasm for neo-Nazi role playing [as it] recreates specific World War II battles” (Kay 1). id Software produces these games, too, and id CEO Todd Hollenshead is quick to point out that, as far as he is concerned, they merely reflect the current social and political environment.
The trend you’re seeing with new games is, to some extent, a reflection of what’s going in the culture. […] For instance, you’ve now got games with terrorists and counterterrorists. And World War II games such as Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Day of Defeat reflect what you see in popular movies. (Kay 1)
Perhaps, but as Kay describes it, the chat rooms associated with Day of Defeat bristle with neo-Nazi sentiments, as Axis players with “noms de guerre like Mein Kampf, Hitler Youth and Zyklon B” discuss their strategy for future campaigns (1). Although this disturbs many observers, the game players themselves insist that the entire game is played in the spirit of innocent fun and that no one really gets hurt. Besides, it is great preparation for the real thing. As Matthew Lane, age 17, a Day of Defeat player from North Carolina enthuses:
There’s nothing like traveling back more than half a century to put yourself in the boots of a World War II soldier storming the beaches at Normandy. […] As kids, many of us have dreamt what our grandfathers and fathers suffered through, and fought for, more than 50 years ago. Day of Defeat just brings these things to reality. (Kay 7)
This is something the US Army has certainly noticed as it discovers that new recruits are more interested in video games than in actual mock combat. To this end, the Army has created a series of specially modified games based on actual commercial video games to introduce would-be soldiers to the excitement and intensity of actual combat. As Alex Pham comments:
One of the video games is a sanitized version of Unreal Tournament, a classic first-person shooting game known for its graphic, nonstop killing. Another is a take on The Sims, a popular game said to mimic life itself. But instead of dismembering mutants or pursuing romance, players can work on their organizational skills, free hostages and rise to the rank of first sergeant. The games are part of the Army of One marketing campaign, which stresses professionalism and the importance of the individual, themes that marketers say resonate with youths. (14)
The Army spent $5 million to develop these games, which have the deceptively generic names of Soldiers, Operations, and the like (Pham 14). In Soldiers, potential recruits are taken through the initial phases of life in the military, whereas Operations deals with elements of actual combat. As Pham comments, “the games show mostly action, leaving out the boring parts. […P]layers going through sniper training in the more action-oriented Operations game do not have to camp out for hours waiting for terrorists to show up” (14). It is also great training for the experience of actual “video combat,” in which soldiers involved in real military campaigns—such as the war in Afghanistan in early 2002—are forced to fight with video drones looking over their shoulders, sending a continual video feedback to headquarters, so that their commanding officers can critique their behavior under fire (Ricks 1). Not surprisingly, the soldiers themselves take a dim view of this invasion of privacy, complaining that their superiors display a tendency to treat them as mere pawns in an all-too-real video “game.” The video surveillance system, known as Predator, is so much of a distraction to the soldiers that even some of the commanders find it less than useful. Colonel Kevin Wilkerson, a 10th Mountain Division brigade commander, commented that, “tactically, I don’t think it affected what I did on the ground. To be honest with you, I didn’t watch it a lot [because] Predator can be mesmerizing—like watching TV” (qtd. in Ricks 4). And like television, you keep watching in the hope that something exciting will happen—or else you turn it off.
Teens have a notoriously short attention span, and you have to grab them with something that piques their interest immediately or you’ve lost them as consumers. This is the guiding principle behind the creation of movie trailers, both classical and contemporary. Show the audience what you’ve got, but give them only a taste of it to whet their appetite for the entire experience. And with teenagers comprising the bulk of the modern cinema audience, the viewers you want to reach most are the 13-18 set, who spend on average $104 per week (in the United States), almost all of it on leisure items that strike their momentary fancy (Lee E6). Working with Teenage Research Unlimited, a long-established company that tracks teen spending and socializing habits, merchandisers have “boiled down teenage experience into a Venn diagram with three circles: entertainment, relationships and fashion” (Lee E6). But at the same time, contemporary teens want individuality without effort and prefer preprogrammed games and electronic devices that make most of the decisions for them. In creating software for the new generation, it’s important not to put “too much pressure on kids to be artists. They don’t want to be artists. They don’t want to be completely unique,” as one business executive flatly states (Lee E6). Furthermore, as Michael Wood, a vice president at Teenage Research Unlimited discovered, “While adults adopt new technologies for convenience, teenagers adopt new technologies largely for socializing,” such as instant messaging (Lee E6). But the potential for social engagement has been drastically reduced also through the use of newly emerging technologies. We’ve routinely come to expect that, when we pick up the phone and dial a number, we will no longer hear a human voice on the other end. Even Jane Barbe, whose voice is used throughout the United States on numerous telephone systems to read prompts and deliver instructions, laments the current depersonalized state of affairs, noting that:
It’s a shame that we’ve come to this, that our lives are so busy that we can’t even speak to a real person. So I try not to be a computerized voice, [but] to make it feel like you’re really having a conversation with a person, rather than a recording. (qtd. in Leland 3)
But it is a recording, and it has come to this, and yet we are forced to continue on. The current US administration seems intent on upping the ante with each new pronouncement, even as tension spots in India and Pakistan, the Middle East, Africa, and Northern Ireland continue to simmer, even after decades of conflict. In a speech at the US Military Academy at West Point (USMA) on June 1, 2002, George W. Bush declared that “preemptive” military strikes may be necessary to “confront the worst threats before they emerge,” thereby creating a scenario in which attack becomes defense. Said Bush to a crowd of some 25,000 in USMA’s Michie Stadium, including 958 members of the class of 2002:
The war on terror will not be won on the defensive. […] We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt its plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. […] This government and the American people are on watch. We are ready, because we know the terrorists have more money and more men and more plans.
The gravest danger to freedom lies at the perilous crossroads of radicalism and technology. When the spread of chemical and biological and nuclear weapons, along with ballistic missile technology, when that occurs, even weak states and small groups could attain a catastrophic power to strike at great nations. (qtd. in Lindlaw)
This policy of perpetual alarmism, it seems to me, creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, just as violent action thrillers and video games inspire those who become addicted to them to take the “games” to the next step: real weapons, real victims. Not everyone who plays Doom III will become a mass murderer, but even a casual glance at the social landscape of contemporary America reveals that it has become a nation marked by outbursts of senseless violence, as Michael Moore so brilliantly documented in his film Bowling for Columbine (2002). The culture of guns, of death, of “kill or be killed” must inevitably lead to violence; is that not its message?