Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics

The ethos of 1970s filmmakers of many stripes is that films show us our world, a faith that was believed to carry real-world consequences. More elaborate special effects technology meant that filmmakers could also provide us with alternate world possibilities. The expanded blockbuster took different forms but were united under the idealistic ethos that by presenting us with different worlds, the films could spur change by prompting moviegoers to think about our world’s own transformation or alteration. This attitude is of course an important connection the later 1970s special effects films had to the earlier wave of socially conscious films we more reflexively think of when discussing “political” 1970s films such as The Parallax View (Pakula, 1974) or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Forman, 1975).

Recent critics’ oft-stated dislike for excessive CGI in “over-animated” live-action films suggests the extent to which the original, somewhat idealistic context in which optical animation was conceived has been largely forgotten. The explicit impulse to draw upon special effects technology in service of a “change the world” optimism (however we may judge that impulse’s efficacy or motivation) seems to have been short-lived. Instead, many filmmakers quickly (and largely unironically) used much the same technology to convey the opposite side of the coin, the negative potential for over-technologization to express pessimism and dystopia (e.g., Blade Runner, The Terminator). As the world-building impulse wove its way through the Hollywood marketplace, it also underwent a rapid transition in critical opinion to exemplify the empty soulless technologized spectacle.2 Indeed, within the thematic use of special effects technology in the broader industry through the 1980s and 1990s, any transformative instinct (where technology is imagined as more potentially positive than negative), spurred by the example of Star Wars and Close Encounters, is an underground theme at best in later effects-driven films (such as Zemeckis’s Back to the Future in 1985, and Tron in 1982). Likewise, it is often argued, as it has been for Star Wars, that if there is an explicit polemic to the world-building on display in films like 300 and the Transformers films (2007/2009/2011), it can only be described as conservative at best, and dangerously retrogressive at worse.³

However, I suggest an alternate way to consider the importance of the aesthetics of recent digital Hollywood filmmaking. Like Bazin’s suggestion that deep-focus techniques reveal the cinema’s important role in how we represent our world, I suggest that the aesthetics of visual effects-heavy, post–Star Wars filmmaking can carry a similar rhetorical weight and epistemological import. In part, this importance derives from exploring the possibilities of what movies can do and the role of visual illusion. Likewise, visual effects technology allows us to think about how these represent the world, and what effect such representations have on visual culture more broadly. Moving beyond representation as a series of narrative codes, understanding visual effects technology and the related digital imaging systems that have grown out of them help us understand the roots of cinematic production at the level of the drawing board, so to speak.

Indeed, 1970s special effects technology has certainly become more elaborate and intensified in the last several decades. While photorealistic techniques historically derived by ILM from Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back tend to dominate, one can nevertheless discern a marked divergence in special effects approaches. This is especially clear when one compares films like 300’s aggressively animated look with the more photorealistic but scarcely less manipulated Zodiac.4 Such a split in approaches, albeit in subtler form, was already in evidence even in 1977. Trumbull himself recognizes the lost opportunity in the streamlining of special effects aesthetics. Remarking in 1996 upon the continual emphasis on photorealism, he laments: “Instead of making things look more fantastic, we became involved with making fantastic things fit in seamlessly.”⁵ As Trumbull noticed, very quickly, the expanded blockbuster’s “shared experience” shifted its emphasis away from Trumbull’s dreamlike, minimally narrative environments or even Star Wars’ kinetic heterogeneity. Instead, as we saw in the examples of Ghostbusters in chapter 8, the expanded cinema ideal of “collectivity” was quickly reabsorbed into the traditional Hollywood paradigm to build an overall narrative diegetic world. Unlike 2001 or even to a degree Trumbull’s Brainstorm, the special effects have again largely been subordinated, naturalized, and diegetically motivated, however spectacular they appear.

Throughout this study, I have avoided drawing too hard a line between 1970s effects tendencies, arguing instead Lucas/ILM and Trumbull/Future General had much in common in technology and aesthetic lineage. Likewise, I have resisted contrasting too strongly my two main film examples, Star Wars and Close Encounters. In the 1970s, the major differences between the films lay not in the technology, but in the aesthetic and the thematics toward which they were used. At this point, I would like to change tack and, instead of emphasizing the similarities between Star Wars and Close Encounters, I will more forcefully contrast the Trumbull aesthetic against the ILM aesthetic, as a way of demonstrating the polemical implications of choosing one way of viewing and constructing a cinematic world over another.

In part, this split in aesthetics was due to diverging polemic approaches to designing the diegetic world depicted on screen. Since 1977, ILM artists have been encouraged to shape the images on the screen and the film frame like an artist in front of a canvas. As Lucas put it:

I’m very much more comfortable working in the medium the way a painter or a sculptor or somebody would. You don’t start in one corner and just work down to the bottom of the page. You basically put on a layer, and then put on another layer, then you step back and look at it and put on another layer. And that’s what we’ve been doing in the filmmaking process.”⁶

Trumbull, by contrast, in his various company iterations (Future General, EEG) also carefully designed the film frame but with a softer, more expansive and permeable approach to the limits of the frame. Like Spock exploring the V’Ger in the climax of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, characters and spectators move through or gape at a vast, ungraspable, limitless environment, which becomes less knowable rather than more so. Effects objects and patterns extend well beyond the limits of the frame or, as in Close Encounters, are too big to be contained by the frame.7 The spectator feels as though the effects are washing over him or her as they seem to spontaneously explore a phenomenon from many angles. Like the ideal of deep-space compositions, the spectator’s attention is free to wander and encounter extraneous thoughts and sensations. Of course these sequences appear in narratively motivated contexts in Spielberg’s and Ridley Scott’s films, for example. However, in the long stretches in which these sequences are on screen, the spectator feels, as Scott Bukatman has suggested, a certain release from the causal structures of conventional cinematic narrative.⁸

I argue that although divergent, the ILM/Trumbull approaches are different steps toward reconfiguring cinematic space, with “visual filmmaking” in mind. If, as suggested in the much-quoted observation by Alfred Hitchcock about Steven Spielberg (“[Spielberg is] the first of us who doesn’t see the proscenium arch”), then it is equally true that Lucas and his team also are not composing for theatrical dramatic impact (i.e., character and scenery centered).9 Instead, the graphic, specifically mobile graphic dynamism, takes precedent. Trumbull, always forward-thinking, seems to be designing for the ever-expandable virtual environment.

The consequence of these aesthetic differences in approach, which began as a reflection of the rather personal aesthetics of the filmmakers involved, within a specific visual culture historical context, has been profound for cinematic aesthetics. In the years since the success of Star Wars and Close Encounters in 1977, these tendencies have mixed and reconfigured over the years.¹⁰ Nevertheless, a meaningful rift remains. We might characterize the split, with apologies to Bazin, as those who put their faith in the optical and those who put their faith in animation.¹¹

It is important to note that I am not making an expected division between kinds of subject matter: the more “invisible” or “imperceptible” effects work in more reality-based films (such as Zodiac) versus more fantasy and fantastic-based films (such as 300). Rather, I want to suggest an aesthetic and socially inflected approach to the effects material which may be more fantasy or “real-world” based, and which has a basis in polemical attitudes toward filmmaking’s potential for a real-world intervention that was especially prevalent in the 1970s. Stated more simply (albeit schematically), does the world need a total redesign and an entirely new paradigm (Close Encounters), or do we find the good in what is already there, rearranging or reconfiguring it (Star Wars)?

In the 1970s, filmmakers often explicitly understood the consequences of their aesthetic choices and were expected to defend them within activist, almost political modernist terms. For example, Lucas has claimed the political motivation behind all his 1970s films as “wanting to change the world and trying to say, ‘Look, we’ve got to change the way we live,’” and that THX-1138 (1971), American Graffiti(1973), and Star Wars had the “same message” in a “different guise.”12 Trumbull takes a different stance. Rather than characterizing his movies (especially those he directed) as thematic expressions of his worldview, Trumbull instead clearly considers movies and cinematic technology as a worldview. In the spirit of Gene Youngblood and Marshall McLuhan, he believes “It’s important to visualize the future for people,” in order to cushion the blow of the information overload people experience every day.¹³ Further, Trumbull expanded on his claim that “Film was always and is still about shared public experience,” by developing imaging technologies that he felt encouraged the sensation of a shared public experience.¹⁴ In other words, the cinema and entertainment more broadly finds its power through encouraging mediated communal contact rather than sparking individual insight.

In the films themselves, most simply, the faith in the optical and the faith in animation could also be characterized as the difference between a “traditional” movie world where strange or amazing things happen, and a seemingly infinitely mutable movie world. For those who put their faith in the optical, championed most consistently by the ILM tendency, the photorealistic aesthetic takes precedent. Therefore, the giant transforming robots of Transformers are colored, shaded, and animated with reference to how like objects in the “real” world look when photographed—in this case, like metallic trucks or cars. These physical characteristics are then mapped onto an anthropomorphic human-like character. Another, less obvious kind of taking the known world as one’s primary model is the case of John Dykstra’s effects work for Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2. The production filmed photographic background plates on location in Chicago with a swinging camera (the purpose-built, so-called “Spydercam”), which were then digitized as the basis for the highly kinetic “swooping through skyscraper canyons” effect. Despite considerable manipulation of the photographic raw material to conform to the aesthetics of cinematographic movement, standards of photorealistic aesthetics hold sway: what would the weight of a real body look like under those circumstances? Or, what “real-life” animal has a movement most appropriate to the way we imagine a Doc Ock’s tentacles would move? All have the goal of making the digital animation look as much like live-action photographic aesthetics as possible. Furthermore, this approach tends to hold for the films in the Marvel superhero universe, for example in The Avengers (2012), whose style director Joss Whedon described as “insanity grounded in reality.”¹⁵

Your “friendly neighborhood Spiderman” is an idealized super human while, by contrast, Superman is an idealized, human-like alien from another, ostensibly better, world. Those who put their faith in animation approach the world of the movie as more flexible and designable (which is often reflected in the utopian or dystopian narratives in which they appear, such as The Matrix). The art direction, sets, costumes, and so on approach the fanciful look of the effects, fashioning a more stylized world. For example, in The Matrix and Mission Impossible II (Woo, 2000), one of course set in a fully futuristic fantasy world, the other in an ostensibly recognizable “real” world), the action freezes in midair while the camera swirls around the actors, bullets flying all the while. In films in the “faith in animation” mode, including much of the filmography of David Fincher before The Social Network (2008), it is less of a priority to replicate the effect of a real-life camera operator filming the action. Instead, effects objects are presented from camera angles with no possible human perspective, and “cameras” move through impossible spaces, such as out of the gullet of Edward Norton in the beginning of Fight Club (Fincher, 1999).16 Also, as in King Kong (Jackson, 2005), 300 (Snyder, 2006), Green Lantern (Campbell, 2011), Cloud Atlas (Wachowski and Wachowski, 2012), The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Jackson, 2012), the bulk or entirety of the live action can be shot against wholly blue-screen-clad sound stages, allowing the entire set to be digitally filled in later with any imagined backdrop. It should also be noted that I am stressing a matter of emphasis rather than the exclusion of one tendency over the other. However, by and large, most contemporary effects-driven films can fit fairly comfortably into one tendency or the other. Again, the optical and animation aesthetics are not determined by the digital technology, only facilitated and exaggerated by it.

The more critically progressive stance would seem to be to laud films that imagine the possibility of an infinitely mutable world. However, for the time being, the anecdotal evidence of critical opinion suggests that although we desire to be wowed by more spectacular special effects and action sequences, in ostensibly live-action films we seem to still strongly put our faith in the optical. Perhaps the continued faith in the optical demonstrates that despite the many claims to the contrary, the photochemical look has not yet been exhausted as an aesthetic. Another possibility is that we as filmgoers and critics still have not totally accepted the overwhelming evidence that photographic imagery, which used to be fairly difficult to manipulate, has now become exceedingly simple to mutate to whatever aesthetic or imagery we desire. Or else we do not like it made so apparent.

Twenty years after Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park, why do critics still employ such rhetorical overkill in condemning CGI aesthetics? Commentary like Harris’s is certainly a reaction to the sometimes rushed drive to heap more and more effects shots in less time and for less money. Conversely, it is certainly an implicit uneasiness with digital manipulation that is achieved all too seamlessly and undetectably. There is also a long-standing conception that CGI is somehow achieved too easily, that a technician need only “press the dinosaur button” and a photoreal dinosaur appears. However, critics rarely recognize this apprehension as such, and as a result they tend to attack its more visible manifestations in films like 300 (Snyder, 2006).

Critic Mark Harris’s commentary is one of many examples of the digital-phobic rhetoric so common in recent journalistic and academic criticism of computer-generated images, which posit we have “lost” something essential, and essentially real, about the cinema in the shift to digital production.18 This is yet another example of a commentator’s fear that too perfect digital imaging removes “humanity” from filmmaking and, by extension, the human experience cinema is “supposed” to reflect. Predictably, Harris names 1970s auteurs like Robert Altman and Sidney Lumet as more “humanist” filmmakers who traffic in chance and spontaneity that these airless films could learn from. However, after citing more contemporary auteurs as Darren Aronofsky’s, Christopher Nolan’s, and David Fincher’s mania for perfectionism, Harris goes on to blame a rather surprising and inspired culprit: Stanley Kubrick. Harris’s insight is canny. Kubrick’s example of the intellectual popular film, which was reworked by 1970s and early 1980s filmmakers as the expanded blockbuster largely within the science fiction, fantasy, and action genres, still resonates as an ideal for many filmmakers today.¹⁹ The seemingly limitless control that CGI provides to the modern self-styled auteur, however, may be the more substantial consequence of Kubrick’s legacy.

Harris’s lament on CGI’s ability to control all aspects of the filmmaking process can be seen within a larger recent trend for lauding the 1970s for its greater “authenticity,” and devising productions that specifically hearken back to that time of filmmaking history, such as Zodiac (Fincher), Death Proof (Tarantino), or American Gangster (Scott), and There Will Be Blood (Anderson) (all 2007), as well as Super 8 (Abrams, 2011), and Argo (Affleck, 2012). Perhaps needless to say, many of these elaborate homages to the 1970s require nearly as much CGI as the average action film to re-create their “authentic” 1970s environments. Even 1970s optical special effects, once dismissed as cheesy and fakey, are looked back at nostalgically as the real thing, meaning more visibly substantial than CGI. Notice, for example, the cult status of films previously dismissed for their “bad” special effects, such as Dune and Tron. Also, the oeuvre of Michel Gondry has made much out of staging purposefully “inept” or what might be called “naïve” special effects in films such as Be Kind, Rewind (2008) and The Science of Sleep (2006).

Specifically, it is the expressly photographic look of 1970s special effects, when the effects objects had “weight, dimension, density,” that is admired.²⁰ An example of the recent fetishization for the photographic look can be seen in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, which contractually stipulated a photochemical finish (as well as The Master [Anderson, 2012], which was shot in 70mm). Additionally, we can consider Spielberg’s tributes to John Ford—War Horse (2011) and Lincoln (2012)—which seem to memorizalize the end of the explicitly 35mm photographic-captured movie by heightening their photochemical aesthetic qualities, especially those associated with Old Hollywood prestige genres, war films, and biographies.²¹ Ironically, what critics and some filmgoers seem not to like about contemporary CGI is precisely that it is the culmination of Kubrick’s, Lucas’s, and Spielberg’s drive toward greater control of all the elements of filmmaking that this study has been delineating. In fact, today’s CGI filmmaking, which is flexible enough to handle the diverse aesthetics of outrageous fantasy in addition to gritty photorealism, can be seen as the apotheosis of cinema’s total “animate-ability,” with nearly all styles possible.

However, as the rhetoric of critics like Harris suggests, paradoxically it seems that many of us still prefer our illusions to strive for the rather narrow parameters of 1970s photorealism, and that the novelty of physics-defying CGI multitudes and busy clutter as a spectacle in and of itself has begun to wear out. Rhetorically understood as a correction back toward “greater realism,” the visible marks of photographic elements of 1970s cinematography are now studied by recent filmmakers such as Star Trek’s J. J. Abrams to extract the most expressive of the photorealism practiced in films not only like Star Wars but also in other hallmarks of 1970s filmmaking by auteurs such as Altman or Hellman.22 However, framing, lighting, camera, and textural effects that initially were marks of drawing attention to cinematic technique (and therefore laying bare the apparatus), have become so associated with realism that they now are read by the viewer as visual integrity, misleadingly suggesting the lack of CGI by cuing the 1970s.

When confronted with a 3D extravaganza like 2009’s Avatar, many popular press commentators, such as the New York Times’ David Kehr, cannot resist comparing the film to The Jazz Singer (Crosland, 1927)—the film that in cinema legend kick-started the transition from silent cinema to sound.²³ The assumption is, of course, that Avatar is to 3D as The Jazz Singer was to sound. In the rush to historically contextualize an overwhelming popular success like Avatar, commentators conveniently forget a number of important factors and reinforce many historical misconceptions (e.g., The Jazz Singer was not the first sound film or even the most popular early sound film).²⁴ The most important misconception, however, is that technological and aesthetic transformations (reinforced by the relatively swift transition to sound) happen in a very short period of time, due to the impetus of one strong film.

In this book, I have made an argument that over the course of several decades, cinema worldwide has undergone a transition in production methodology and aesthetics that the development of special effects first helped instigate and then facilitated. Its slow but incremental evolution has made the phenomenon less obvious than that of sound. There can be little doubt that feature film production overall has gradually shifted to a postproduction model necessitated initially by elaborate special effects work but eventually broadened to include digital manipulation across nearly all production categories. In this transition, single films such as Star Wars, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jurassic Park, The Matrix, and Avatar have played important roles in marking visible signposts and providing convenient rhetorical shorthand.

Avatar may be the Jazz Singer, or Star Wars, of 3D. More likely, I argue that it will serve as the apex of the 1970s-inflected special effects film,25 much like Sunrise (Muranu, 1927) can be understood as an almost nostalgic last gasp for the silent film in its perfect embodiment and culmination of its aesthetics (while at the same time introducing new Movietone sound on film technology). Perhaps Avatar sums up all that special effects filmmaking since Star Wars has realized (fig. C.1). The Avatar filmmakers seek to foreground absorption, sensation, and kinesis in its aesthetic, while at the same time thematizing those properties in the narrative. The composite mise-en-scène highlights, intensifies, and outlines elements of its fantastic environment in phosphorescent and pulsating lighting effects. The diegesis provides both the viewer and the onscreen protagonists virtual bodies through which to explore a synthetic fantasy world full of exhilarating activities in order to push that body to its (safely observed) limits. Avatar also presents a stock narrative (although effectively edited for propulsive forward momentum) re-prioritized as an environment to experience, not primarily a causal chain to follow along and pursue. In other words, Avatar is the ultimate expanded blockbuster, updated with the latest cinematic imaging tools to become the synthesis of technology, visual cinema, and narrative developments, not to mention self-consciousness, over the last thirty years or so.