If the mothers ruled the world there would be no goddamn wars in the first place.—Sally Field
In a deleted scene from Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt (2002), Warren Schmidt (Nicholson) sits in a restaurant and orders “a plain omelet, no potatoes, tomatoes instead, a cup of coffee, and wheat toast.” When the waitress responds, “No substitutions,” Schmidt simply says, “Oh, fine. I’ll just have the potatoes.” Commenting on this homage to Five Easy Pieces, Payne indicates a trend of conformity in American society that began in the middle of the 1970s:
We dared this reference to Five Easy Pieces for more than just gag value. Since that famous scene so perfectly and succinctly distills the feeling of the times in which it was made, Jim Taylor (the co-screenwriter) and I thought revisiting it with the same iconic actor would provide a commentary on how much we’ve lost since then and how conformist our current times are, a conformism that, among its many insidious effects, helps to produce empty, lost lives like Schmidt’s.[1]
Following a tumultuous period of questioning authority, American culture returned to a complacent acceptance of received ideologies.
The resisters and reflecters of the 1970s once again switched places in the 1980s, as the majority of films reasserted the dominant ideology of the Reagan years and reflected both society’s reactionary return to traditional markers for identity and Americans’ unquestioning acceptance of cultural myths. This reassertion began as early as the late 1970s and early 1980s, when “Hollywood provided feel-good movies about the American Dream (Rocky), and revisionist historical memories that turned even the war in Vietnam into a successful rescue mission (Rambo).”[2] Along with reinforcing the dominant ideology, the films of the post-Jaws period predominately “return to the dominant formal style of Hollywood, underscoring all-important narrative components via lighting, camera placement, sound, and editing. These movies present a Manichean world in which good and evil, dangers and safety are always clear, and whatever moral or ethical ambiguities exist are ultimately sorted out.”[3] Keathley agrees with Andrew Britton’s labeling of this cycle as “Reaganite entertainment” and defines it as “a reactionary, conservative cycle of films whose primary functions are repression and reassurance.”[4] In short, the films of the 1980s not only carried the dominant ideology of the Reagan years but forcefully reasserted that ideology, thus reflecting society’s return to “normalcy.”
Nicholson’s persona also returned somewhat to ideological normalcy. As his popularity at the box-office dwindled after One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—The Missouri Breaks (Penn, 1976), Goin’ South (Nicholson, 1978), The Postman Always Rings Twice (Rafelson, 1981), and The Border (Richardson, 1982) all failed financially—Nicholson searched for a role that would once again make him a bankable star. Since audiences began to reject Nicholson’s experimental techniques, the actor returned to a naturalistic style of acting to restore his fraught image.[5] In Terms of Endearment (Brooks, 1983), for example, Nicholson returns to “codes of realism and humanism the mainstream knows how to read.”[6] Rather than questioning hegemonic masculinity, this naturalistic style reaffirms ideological confidence in autonomous manhood. As Nicholson moves further into this style of presentation, he “shifts his persona from one that parodies and challenges white middle-aged masculinity to one that reassures it.”[7] Bingham summarily notes the dominant ideology’s absorption of Nicholson’s persona:
His career since 1983 has demonstrated how stars who begin with internal criticism of the dominant order are eventually disciplined and contained by ideology, by the soothing balms of money and success. Nicholson himself, rich and productive, continues to talk in interviews about the power of the actor to shake things up. He appears unconscious of his participation in his own silencing. Like one of the sassy, unaware characters in his films, he doesn’t know what’s hit him.[8]
Despite this claim that Nicholson is unaware of his absorption into the dominant ideology, the deleted scene in About Schmidt indicates that Nicholson indeed realizes his transformation from a rebellious countercultural figure to a fully absorbed member of the establishment, further underscoring America’s restoration of confidence in hegemonic masculinity. Recalling Nicholson’s self-conscious smirk around the campfire in Easy Rider, the deleted scene ironically comments on contemporary American society by creating a distance between Schmidt the character and Nicholson the actor. By complacently submitting to the waitress’s refusal to serve him what he wants, Schmidt inverts Dupea’s persona in Five Easy Pieces. The scene clearly evokes all the rebelliousness associated with Nicholson’s persona but self-consciously undermines that rebelliousness and reflects contemporary American men’s complacency.
The scene also epitomizes Nicholson’s abstracted persona. It requires viewers to call forth the abstraction and the interpretive framework it brings with it. Without the knowledge of Nicholson’s scene in Five Easy Pieces, viewers cannot possibly ascertain the scene’s true import. For the scene to work, audiences must integrate this new “Jack Nicholson” persona with the composite “Jack Nicholson” of the 1970s and recognize the inconsistency, thus realizing the scene’s ironic significance. Payne’s deleted scene might not have worked within the film because many viewers were not aware of the Nicholson persona of the 1970s but instead were accustomed to the co-opted “Nicholson” of the 1980s and 1990s. By signifying Nicholson’s self-conscious awareness of Schmidt’s (and his own) complacency, the scene works only for viewers of Nicholson’s earlier work.
Lauded as Nicholson’s return to the critical heights of his 1970s work, About Schmidt calls on the audience’s abstraction of “Jack Nicholson” much in the same way as The Passenger and The Last Detail. Just as Antonioni’s and Ashby’s films invited audiences to draw connections to Bobby Dupea (Five Easy Pieces) and Jonathan Fuerst (Carnal Knowledge) respectively, Payne’s film invokes “Nicholson” of Carnal Knowledge, The Last Detail, Chinatown, and The Shining—the “Nicholson” who firmly entrenched himself within the dominant ideology to expose it for what it was worth. About Schmidt depicts a successful patriarchal figure who retires from a long career at a large corporation only to find his life empty—the American Dream has failed him. Despite his sizeable nest-egg and his honorable service to the company, Schmidt finds himself all but forgotten by the corporation he has given his life to and totally bereft of any meaningful connections to his life outside his job. After his wife unexpectedly dies of a heart attack, Schmidt embarks on a journey of self-discovery resembling George Hanson’s and Bobby Dupea’s expeditions. The film thus exposes patriarchy as an unfulfilling duty placed on the shoulders of American men, who—under the influence of the white man’s burden—submit themselves to large-scale corporations that sap them of energy and distract them from meaningful personal relationships. Not since The Shining had Nicholson’s work achieved this level of criticism toward the dominant patriarchal order.
About Schmidt asks its audiences to reflect on Nicholson’s established 1970s persona in its criticism of hegemony. Nicholson self-consciously invokes this earlier persona even as he constructs Warren Schmidt, who becomes the logical extension of the rebellious white male of the 1970s who inevitably fell victim to the dominant ideology’s conforming influence. By summoning this persona, the film critiques the trajectory of American society (and film as its reflecter) from the iconoclasm of the 1970s (men’s liberation and feminist movements) to the return to conservatism in the 1980s through the present (family values, capitalist individualism). As American films were swallowed up by mass market capitalism (beginning especially with Star Wars), which linked motion pictures with fast food chains and department stores through merchandizing deals and promotional gimmicks, they reiterated the dominant ideology more strongly than ever before. This ideology reaffirmed the myth of rugged individualism, the cornerstone of the capitalist economy. Rugged individualism had transformed, however, from the self-made man of the nineteenth century to the self-made consumer of contemporary society. Since men could no longer assert their individuality through owning and operating small businesses or conquering and taming the frontier, the dominant order fabricated new means of “self-expression” that in reality subsumed the individual within hegemonic culture. While men felt they could articulate themselves through consumer choices, they in fact were buying in to marketing schemes of manipulation that usurped their autonomy. In a 2012 documentary celebrating Roger Corman’s 86th birthday, Nicholson expresses disdain for the current proliferation of CGI-ridden “circuses” that consistently make headlines and attract moviegoers with their explosions and special effects.[9] By posing Warren Schmidt as the logical extension of “Jack Nicholson” of the 1970s, the film illuminates and critiques the American male’s course away from resistance and into blind submission to the dominant ideology as well as contemporary American cinema’s sacrifice of substance for the bells and whistles of CGI.
If white male hegemony continues to assert itself over Western culture (and mass forms of art are persistently denied the means to criticize it), the end result could be devastating to human societies. Along with the perpetuation of the racist and sexist structures that still permeate American society, the white man’s burden has sprouted modern forms of imperialism that harken back to turn-of-the-century extenuations of manifest destiny. Citing John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” and puritanical notions of divine mission as justifications for American global expansion, political leaders of the last few decades have usurped military power like never before in American history and have alienated the rest of the world in the process. These developments persist because white males maintain their hegemony despite cultural signifiers that attempt to prove otherwise. Social institutions such as affirmative action and welfare only serve to heighten the separation between the dominant race and others, thus perpetuating the patriarchal order. Wood notes the inevitable trajectory of patriarchal society:
The logical end result of the construction of masculinity (in terms of domination, aggression, and competition) is nuclear war. The more immediate result—in the sense of being already a reality, not just a threat—is the extreme difficulty, for men whose femininity has been systematically repressed, of identifying with a female position, of bridging a gulf between the sexes that is itself ascribable to social construction rather than to nature. The phenomenon, discernible all around us and analyzable at virtually every point in contemporary mainstream cinema, is both the overall catastrophe of our civilization and the cause of innumerable personal tragedies.[10]
Nicholson’s 1970s persona depicted masculinity as a historical, cultural construction rather than as an intrinsic essence. By demystifying masculinity and the myths associated with it, such as rugged individualism and personal autonomy, Nicholson challenged the white man’s burden in ways that surpassed his contemporaries. This persona, abstracted by the audience from a range of works, reflected a nation’s loss of confidence in authority and in the prevailing myths that carried on its dominance. While the majority of cinema before and after the 1970s (and a great deal during that period) simply carried (and sometimes forcefully reasserted) the dominant ideology, Nicholson’s films worked inside and outside the culture’s hegemonic forms of representation to subvert the overriding order. Beginning with Easy Rider and continually restructuring itself through Five Easy Pieces, Carnal Knowledge, The Last Detail, The Passenger, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and The Shining, Nicholson’s persona carried on a continuous debate with mainstream culture. Taken as a whole, this persona represents the level of subversion that art can aspire to when it becomes conscious of its place within the ideology and sets itself to exposing its culture’s myths. As the dominant order continues to move the human race toward extinction, and as Hollywood continues to churn out meaningless blockbuster after meaningless blockbuster, the role of art as an agent of subversion is perhaps needed now more than ever before.
1. Alexander Payne, dir., “Director’s Commentary,” About Schmidt, DVD (New Line Home Entertainment, 2003).
2. Thomas Elsaesser, “American Auteur Cinema: The Last—or First—Great Picture Show,” in The Last Great American Picture Show, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, and Noel King, Film Culture in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 61.
3. Christian Keathley, “Trapped in the Affection Image: Hollywood’s Post-Traumatic Cycle (1970–1976),” in The Last Great American Picture Show, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, and Noel King, Film Culture in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 305.
4. Keathley, “Trapped in the Affection Image,” 305.
5. Dennis Bingham, Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 156.
6. Bingham, Acting Male, 149.
7. Bingham, Acting Male, 152.
8. Bingham, Acting Male, 159.
9. Peter Bogdanovich, “‘Everybody Thinks They’re an Auteur’: Peter Bogdanovich Reflects on the Golden Age of Film,” interview by Vince Cosgrove, New York Daily News, March 27, 2012, accessed May 27, 2012, Daily News Blogs.
10. Robin Wood, Hollywood: From Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 199.