This book is not a survey: it does not pretend to cover every trend, every genre, every cycle—let alone every film—in the period (roughly 1970–1984) with which it is concerned. It is not, in the usual sense, a history, though the ordering of the chapters is generally chronological, with occasional flashbacks: the reader will find little of the factual information of which our histories are typically composed. It is not exactly a thesis (though it contains one): the argument is not clearly linear, starting from “This is what I shall prove” and progressing to “This is what has been proven.” But neither is it a collection of miscellaneous, unconnected essays, though each chapter is more or less self-sufficient: the cross-references are intricate (often, more so than I realized while writing it), so that, in the last resort, everything relates to everything. It is my hope that the openness of the structure, the refusal of a step-by-step linearity of argument, will allow the reader a sense of her/his own space and the possibility of making other connections and developing ideas in other directions. The book contains a number of embryonic books, each with its own potential thesis: studies of Scorsese, Cimino, De Palma; a book on the relationship (part rupture, part continuity) between “Classical” and “modern” Hollywood; a book on the “incoherent texts” of the 70s; a book on the attempted recuperations of the 80s (but that would be very tedious both to write and to read); a book on the Hollywood cinema’s response (or lack of it) to feminism; above all, perhaps, a book on the traces, both manifest and hidden, within our popular cinema, of that innate bisexuality the repression of which Freud saw as necessary for the construction of “socialized” men and women in our culture. But what interests me is the interconnectedness of these phenomena, and it is this that I have tried to catch. I have also wanted to make more accessible some of the major concerns of contemporary film theory: perhaps, in attempting to clarify, I have simplified and falsified, but the risk seems to me worth taking.
The book’s unifying principle is the attempt to grasp, in all its complexity, a decisive “moment,” an ideological shift, in Hollywood cinema and (by implication) in American culture. The degree of decisiveness can only be judged from some future vantage point, and what happens in the cinema will clearly depend upon what happens in American society and politics. Side by side with this is the attempt to examine and evaluate some of the work that has been produced, distinguishing between different kinds and different levels of significance and achievement. These two impulses do not seem to me cleanly separable. On the one hand, I have never felt great interest in an approach to cinema that was merely sociological, that reduced films to so many examples of this or that tendency; on the other, I have become increasingly aware of the importance of seeing works in the context of their culture, as living ideological entities, rather than as sanctified exhibits floating in the void of an invisible museum. The true distinction of a great film lies in its relation to its time, the relation being frequently (today, necessarily) one of opposition. Paradoxically perhaps, the works that prove to have lasting significance are usually those most intricately and complexly involved in the cultural moment that produced them, but of which they are not mere products.
Sociological criticism is often vitiated by an over-reliance on “reflection theory”: the overall movement of cinema reflects the overall movement of society. So long as one stresses the word “overall,” I see no reason to quarrel with this, and a reflection of this kind will be acknowledged in this book. As soon as one gets down to specifics, however, it proves far too simple: cinema is never monolithic, within the overall movement there appear cracks, disruptions, countercurrents. From the viewpoint of this book the works that embody these oppositional tendencies (opposing to the dominant tendencies not so much a coherent radical position as a stubbornly obsessional and intuitive refusal of submission to ideological norms) are of greater interest (and infinitely greater artistic significance) than those that merely reflect—hence what will seem to many the disproportionate space devoted to De Palma, Cimino, and Scorsese as against, say, Lucas and Spielberg (though the latter have no cause to feel neglected).
Although I never intended to cover everything, I am aware of certain glaring omissions. Among individual filmmakers, the most obvious is Francis Ford Coppola. I must admit to finding it very difficult to make any meaningful contact with Coppola’s work. On the level of intention and ambition it obviously looms large within this period, yet I find most of the films (the Godfather movies being partial, but only partial, exceptions) compounded of a daunting mixture of the pretentious and the banal, in roughly equal measure. A chapter on Coppola would approximately parallel the essay on Altman, taking up similar themes: the self-consciousness of the self-proclaimed auteur, the desire to produce the equivalent of the European “art” movie within the alien environment of the Hollywood industry, the gulf between ambition and achievement, the sense that the interest of the films is primarily symptomatic, exemplifying certain problems of “the artist” in contemporary Hollywood.
My ambition in writing this book can be put negatively, in a phrase that will sound more modest than it is: to avoid triviality. Most contemporary film criticism, and virtually all journalist criticism, seems to me trivial (which is why I read less and less, and more and more selectively). Another way of saying this is that, while this book is concerned with the analysis of films, I wish it nevertheless to be political, in a sense at once wide and precise. To be political is today the only way to avoid the trivial. The cogency of this should be obvious enough, on various levels. For a start, we face the possibility of imminent extinction: the end of our civilization, the end of the human race. In such a situation, to quibble over which film is better acted, better photographed, or more entertaining, which director is the more skillful technician, and whether a or b has the better special effects, seems trivial indeed, though the exercise—the distraction—is still practiced all around us, and not just in the daily newspapers. Beyond that level, even if you believe that “everything will be all right” (if you “don’t look,” like the American protagonists of Raiders of the Lost Ark), there is the inescapable, enormous, and pervasive disturbance in the everyday realm of human relationships, especially male-female relationships—the realm to which, since the “naturalness” of the relative positions of men and women began to be challenged, we have given the name “sexual politics.” Beyond that, again, is the steadily growing force of the gay liberation movement, no longer content with a plea for the tolerance of homosexuals, but (in close alliance with radical feminism) calling into question the very construction of sexuality within our culture. Though superficially they may appear quite distinct, these levels finally all come together and cohere: it is because of the way in which our civilization has constructed “masculinity” upon the repression of constitutional bisexuality (the masculinity on the possession of which the director of Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn so proudly congratulates himself, making manifest its direct connection to Fascism) that all our lives are in jeopardy today.
To write politically about film means, basically, to write from an awareness of how individual films dramatize, as they inevitably must, the conflicts that characterize our culture: conflicts centered on class/wealth, gender, race, sexual orientation. For me, it is to commit oneself to the struggle for liberation that arises from those conflicts, the winning of which (that is, the victory of socialism and feminism) will be the only possible guarantee of our survival. The urgency of the situation—the need for every individual, working in whatever sphere, to decide what side he/she is on—was suggested by Norman O. Brown in a book published in 1959: Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. Brown’s thesis is that the history of the human race is the history of the struggle between repression and liberation, and that in our own century that struggle has entered its climactic phase: we have to choose, quite simply, between the creation of a liberated society and the extinction of the human race. I quote from his concluding chapter:
The path of sublimation, which mankind has religiously followed at least since the foundation of the first cities, is no way out of the human neurosis, but, on the contrary, leads to its aggravation. Psychoanalytical theory and the bitter facts of contemporary history suggest that mankind is reaching the end of this road. Psychoanalytical theory declares that the end of the road is the dominion of death-in-life. History has brought mankind to that pinnacle on which the total obliteration of mankind is at last a practical possibility. At this moment of history the friends of the life instinct must warn that the victory of death is by no means impossible; the malignant death instinct can unleash those hydrogen bombs. For if we discard our fond illusion that the human race has a privileged or providential status in the life of the universe, it seems plain that the malignant death instinct is a built-in guarantee that the human experiment, if it fails to attain its possible perfection, will cancel itself out, as the dinosaur experiment canceled itself out. But jeremiads are useless unless we can point to a better way. Therefore the question confronting mankind is the abolition of repression. (p. 269)
The urgency has scarcely lessened in the twenty-five years since the book’s publication: indeed, our newspapers confirm daily the validity of Brown’s thesis and the necessity, for those who believe in life, to commit themselves to opposing, on every front and every level, the dominant movement of our culture.
In relation to the ambition I have defined, I must here frankly admit to certain limitations. I have never systematically studied political science; though I try to think and feel film politically, I cannot claim to be a political thinker outside my chosen field, and certainly not an original one. Although my work has aligned itself with Marxist approaches to art, increasingly throughout the last decade, I still hesitate to call myself a Marxist. If I must have a label, I would prefer a less specific designation such as “free-lance radical”: with the proviso that any form of radicalism that wishes to have any substance or force must necessarily, given the available choices, gravitate toward Marxism (but which Marxism?—there are today as many Marxes as there are Freuds). The reluctance to commit myself less equivocally is motivated less by doubt than by an awareness of the insufficiency of my knowledge, together with a suspicion that many Marxists might resent my adoption of that title. I would like to think that Marxists will find my work sympathetic and, in its attempts to define a radical approach to mainstream cinema, not incompatible with their own more precisely defined commitments. I do not, however, write primarily for Marxists: they already know more than I do. I would like to reach as wide and disparate an audience as possible. As a gay, I want to talk to heterosexuals; as a feminist, to those who have not given too much thought to the question of gender roles and the oppression of women; as a free-lance radical, to those who may feel, for a multitude of reasons, debarred from giving the Marxist position serious consideration.
It seems important to confront, directly and at the outset, the problem suggested in that last statement. Most people in our society would presumably concede that Marxism is the most formidable, and perhaps the only, alternative to capitalism. For most, however, it is automatically, axiomatically, not an acceptable alternative; it doesn’t need to be seriously considered, can indeed be rejected without any careful inquiry into what, in fact, it might amount to. I am alluding here to the widespread suppression—in a culture that calls itself democratic and advertises itself as based on principles of freedom of thought, freedom of speech—not only of Marxist theory but of all coherent radical positions. The chief means of this suppression is simple but efficient: it consists of the assumption that Marxism is either identical with, or inevitably results in, Stalinism—which is rather like blaming Christ for the Spanish Inquisition. Within my own experience, one form this has taken, on several occasions when I have expressed Marxist interests, is the question (either incredulously serious or, more often, satirical-ironic), “Do you mean you’d rather be living in Russia?” Of Stalin’s many heinous crimes perhaps the worst—because the most far-reaching in its consequences—has been to provide the West with a ready-made myth of Marxism which it can use as an automatic bogeyman.
The other common response has more semblance of plausibility: the objection that, to date, no Marxist or quasi-Marxist revolution has succeeded in developing the liberated society that most modern Marxists postulate as Marxism’s true aim. The answer is twofold. First, every Marxist revolution to date has taken place in countries where theoretical principles have come to take second place to the most pressing economic needs: the struggle against starvation, poverty, illiteracy. This by no means excuses the failure (the Stalinist argument); it merely explains why it has become so easy for the ever-present forces of reaction to become dominant and distort or actually reverse the less directly material revolutionary impulses. It is common knowledge that the Russian Revolution in its early phase made ideological and legislative advances (the liberation of women, the repeal of laws against homosexuality, the displacement of the family as central social value) that still leave the Western democracies far behind—all of which Stalinism reversed. Second, every Marxist revolution to date has been too simple in its premises: Marx alone is not enough. It should be understood here that the term “Marx,” like the term “Freud,” refers to a body of theory that is in no way final or sacrosanct (dogma) but, on the contrary, is in need of constant modification, development, and reinterpretation in the light of cultural/historical experience. “Marx” offers no adequate account of sexuality, of the construction of the subject in ideology, or of the oppression of women. Every Marxist revolution so far has had to function within circumstances (economic, ideological) that have encouraged reaction and compromise in areas it has been ill equipped to deal with: in Cuba, for example, the strong tradition of machismo has proved stubbornly resistant to feminist overthrow, and the persecution of gays is an entirely logical corollary of this. The formidable nature of “the enemy” is only now becoming widely recognized: not just capitalism, but patriarchy.
This view is confirmed most eloquently by Varda Burstyn—one of the great Marxist-feminist thinkers of our time—in a characteristically lucid and forceful article, “Masculine Dominance and the State”:
The path to socialism can only travel through gender relations as well as economic relations, if social relations really are to lose their character as matrices of domination.
But, and this is why so many feminists are engaged in this debate with Marxist men, Marxism is also the most radical of the world views to come out of the male-dominated epoch of human history, and many of us still think it carries within it the possibility for the correction of its internal omissions and distortions, and the practical transcendence of its internal weaknesses. The commitment to a human society free from domination and the implacable opposition to ideological mystification put Marxism as a theory and a movement in a qualitatively different position vis-à-vis feminism than any other male-stream social theories.
(The Socialist Register, 1983, p. 81)
The article concludes on a note one may indeed call inspirational (no one more than Burstyn is able to communicate the sense that the struggle of “Life against Death” is still worth fighting, despite the discouraging conditions within which we all live):
And insofar as Marxist theory per se has a useful role to play in the longer and larger process of social transformation, Marxist men must begin to engage as seriously with feminist political theory as feminists have done with Marxist political theory. If we really do want to constitute forms of public coordination and cooperation which maximise the creative potential in both individuals and collectivities, Marxist men really must engage with feminism at all levels, to see what can be learned and changed, so that we can go forward together towards human liberation.
When we have a Marxist revolution that is also, equally, a feminist revolution, and is built upon those theories of the cultural construction of sexual difference developed within the Freudian tradition by thinkers such as Marcuse and Gad Horowitz—then we shall see. Until then, the verdict must remain open.
Meanwhile The “Marxist-Freudian synthesis” (the subtitle of Michael Schneider’s valuable book Neurosis and Civilization) is obviously the most hopeful, positive and vital development in contemporary thinking about culture, and, indeed, about the future of the human race. It has provided us all, if we care to use them, with the theories for an understanding of our culture and the tools with which to dismantle and rebuild it. If the present book emphasizes the Freudian side of that synthesis above the Marxist, that is partly because I feel more comfortable with it and partly because the Hollywood cinema has always been more accessible to analysis—more candidly profuse in its proliferation of material—on the level of sexual politics than on that of class politics. The explanation of this phenomenon is obvious: on the level of sexual politics, there has been no defined alternative to the status quo that can be presented as a bogeyman; consequently the taboo on deviant or subversive thought, while still very potent, has not been institutionalized and is much easier to evade. It is difficult to imagine, within the Hollywood system, the equivalent of a Hitchcock or a Sternberg operating on the level of class politics: both those directors, of course, repeatedly touch on it, but it is the level of sexual politics that is foregrounded and dominant.
It is necessary to confront at this point the standard opposition between the “free world” and the world of totalitarianism; an opposition usually centered on the notion of freedom of speech. Yes, of course there is a difference. Doubtless, if I lived in Russia it would be impossible for me to publish the equivalent of this book (since it expresses strong antagonism to the existing social system and the entire structure of our cultural organization); if it were published, it could not be distributed; if it were distributed, the author, the publishers, and the distributors would all be subject to terrible penalties. Yes, I am grateful that I live and work in the free world. Ungratefully, however, I want here to consider the limits of that freedom: for the “free world” of capitalism has its own methods of coercion and suppression, so that it does not yet have to resort to direct state intervention (that it is always ready to do so is obvious from the ease with which advanced capitalism has repeatedly escalated into Fascism).
The chief method is a complicated process of marginalization: the exclusion of radical positions from the popular media and their relegation to universities and precarious and generally short-lived counterculture periodicals. The operation has two functions: to prove that our culture permits freedom of speech, including dissident speech; to ensure that dissident speech remains ineffectual. The formidable challenge should clearly come from the universities, but they are being systematically eroded both from without and within, converted into career-training institutions. One watches the gulf between F. R. Leavis’ formulation of what the university should be (the “creative center of civilization”) and the actuality widening daily. The media have their own way of marginalizing academics—most typically, simply by applying that term. To be labeled an academic in the popular press is almost as automatically discrediting as to be labeled a Marxist: the connotations are less sinister, of course, suggesting irrelevance rather than menace. The term also offers a convenient alibi for the dismissal of any serious attempts to argue a radical position: the attempt is not dismissed because of the radical position (we have, after all, “freedom of speech”), but because it is written in an “academic style.” It is certainly valid on occasion to use the term “academic” in a pejorative sense: the universities are not lacking in academics teaching courses that are totally out of touch with the exigencies of contemporary reality. In the press, however, the phrase “academic style” has come to cover any attempt to discuss serious and complex issues seriously and complexly, so that what is being (effectively) suppressed is, ultimately, seriousness and complexity. When we are told that something is written in an academic style, what we are really being told in the great majority of cases is “You will find this difficult, and neither reassuring nor entertaining. Why worry?”
(It will be noted that I have annexed, in a manner that may seem surreptitious, “seriousness” to “radicalism.” I have to admit that for me the two are becoming increasingly inseparable. I suppose there is such a thing as an intelligent and defensible conservative position, though I haven’t encountered one, and wonder what it will look like when, if we are unfortunate enough to survive the nuclear holocaust, we sit dying amid the ruins of everything we have striven to build.)
The media have a further alibi, the really foolproof one: their function is to give people what they want, and radicalism isn’t popular. Or, to put it more bluntly, radicalism doesn’t sell. The media have created a vicious circle: they teach people what to want, then thrive on supplying it, carefully nurturing the desire for more (since what is given never really satisfies, merely fosters the illusion of satisfaction, leaving intact the desire for the next illusion, Indiana Jones Part 3: “Trust him,” as the advertisements exhort with a knowing cynicism in which the public is assumed to be knowingly complicit). Thus capitalism has its own methods, apparently spontaneous and “natural,” of suppressing undesirable positions without needing to resort to state intervention—at least, so long as radical ideas remain unpopular and uncommercial, and can be kept that way by the media’s steady barrage of distractions, flatteries, commodities, entertainments. If your life is unsatisfying, there’s always a new shampoo to try, a new Spielberg movie to see, the next installment of a TV sit-com, the chance of winning a lottery.
Our educationalists, politicians, authorities, ecclesiastics, and parents are often heard helplessly bemoaning the fact that young people today are so cynical, disillusioned, apathetic or negatively anti-social. What else are they supposed to be, given that they believe they are going to die soon in a variety of horrible ways, and that the educational establishment, together with the entire social/ideological structure that sustains it, systematically deprives them of the only possible means by which they might develop hope for the future?—the notion that it is within the bounds of the human imagination radically to transform and restructure our culture. Conceal that notion, or hold it up to ridicule, or brush it aside as hopelessly utopian, and what can you expect, given the contemporary realities, but cynicism, disillusionment, apathy? Our young are being destroyed by the very people that set themselves up as their protectors, and the protection is the means of destruction.
This book is for students of all ages.