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FILM COMMENT
Sept/Oct 1996
the summer of our malcontent
by Kent Jones
photo: Independence Day
SUMMER '96 WAS GOOD SPORT for cinephiles, who get a lot of mileage out of trashing the season's blockbusters: we enjoy doing it amongst ourselves, but get a special charge out of throwing wet blankets of intellectual expertise on the enthusiasms of the unenlightened ("You liked that?"). The complaints are so uniform and constant that they've become a litany: there are no characters, there's no story, there's no reality, there's no movie, etc. Every film has its own priceless brand of cheesiness that is jawed over endlessly. My preferred target this summer was the scene in Mission: Impossible where computer whiz Ving Rhames successfully jams Vanessa Redgrave's modem (from about four feet away), which we in the audience glean from a message on his laptop that reads JAMMING SIGNAL BEING SENT in big fat letters. And I'll always cherish the memory of President Bill Pullman ("During the Gulf War we knew what we stood for"). Pullman, on his most confident day, looks like he might make a good Junior Vice-President of Customer Relations at the southside Wal-Mart in Knoxville, Tennessee.
After awhile, though, this kind of fun wears away. Faulting Independence Day, the cinematic equivalent of a barca-lounger, for its deficiencies as a movie is like sitting around a dinnertable and "solving the world's problems," or those conversations that go: "So I told him to fuck off." "You told him that?" "No, but I wanted to." Like most avoidance techniques, the feeling is momentarily energizing and ultimately empty. Which begs the question: what are we avoiding? There have been reams of copy devoted to the idea that Independence Day is a failed piece of sci-fi, or that Mission: Impossible is a failed thriller, which is in turn based on the dubious proposition that everyone in Hollywood has recently lost their marbles and forgotten how to tell "coherent" narratives or how to make "real" movies. (Based on my limited experience of Hollywood and Hollywood types, my impression is that it's a town filled not with fools but rather with intelligent people who think it is a good idea to conduct themselves as fools, in order to put themselves in closer touch with the buying public.) To deal with what Independence Day is as opposed to what it isn't is a sobering and difficult prospect for cinephiles, because it falls so far outside of what we would define as cinema. The central fact of such a film is more frightening than failure: it does precisely what it sets out to do, and it's a raving success on its own narrowly defined terms. Those terms are set by corporations and accepted by paying customers who are so humbled, bored, or bewildered by a pounding, torrential media culture that there doesn't even seem to be an opportunity to establish terms of their own or see themselves as anything other than consumers. This is where the current I-Know-It's-A-Piece-Of-Crap-But-I-Liked-It-Anyway school of critical thought originated: consumer fatigue.
ID4 (which sounds like exactly what it is: a nickname cooked up by a marketing department) and its ilk expend enormous amounts of time and energy on submerging any trace of individuality, not unlike a health-and-fitness nut trying to rid his or her body of all impurities. One could argue that this has always been the goal of Hollywood, but in fact Hollywood built itself into an empire by harnessing individuality even as it pampered away its rough edges and milked it dry. With the summer '96 blockbusters, however, we have "evolved" to a new stage in which each actor/technician/writer/director is flattened out and smoothed down to a Formica-like nothingness (the only escapee: the wily Vanessa Redgrave in Mission: Impossible) --the strategy being to make the film as easily recognizable and singular as, for instance, the Golden Arches. If you want to take Independence Day seriously, good. If you want to laugh at it, great. If you want to fall asleep for awhile, cool. It's Democratic. It's Republican. It's "sophisticated," providing ample opportunities for anyone interested in spotting "cinematic references." It's "stupid," and functions as its own built-in "MST 3000." It's global. It's isolationist. It even manages to throw in Pat Buchanan's campaign slogan for good measure. And unlike the government-penned love songs sung by the washerwoman in 1984, it signals the fact that it's a counterfeit on a semi-regular basis. The idea is to adhere to the principles of interior decoration: know your customer and don't do anything that clashes.
Which is why the old critical tactic of marking cultural flashpoints or divining metaphors for or embodiments of widespread cultural fears doesn't wash with such a perfect, easily adaptable thing. The most striking aspect of ID4 is the strangely disembodied manner in which it finally meets its audience: it's close to the poignant effect William Gibson gets in Neuromancer when the dead character "preserved" in a computer chip glitches and repeats a sentence. There's an unavoidable freakishness to all the calculation involved in this simulation of a movie, a subtle but marked stuttering effect to the storytelling, as if this action was a micro-step ahead of the army of people supposedly in control of it. I had the odd feeling when I saw both Independence Day and Mission: Impossible that a lot of audience members didn't really like them but worked up a reasonable state of excitement anyway. One guy in front of me kept getting up and walking out, then coming back and cheering. Out of...what? Obligation? Memories of better films? The desire to participate in an event?
For the last twelve years or so, corporate culture has embedded itself so deeply within American life that a kind of contract has been written between the suppliers and the demanders, a spontaneous prohibition against reality in movies: to break the contract would upset the precarious balance that currently exists. Reality in American movies has virtually disappeared from the screen and shifted to the realtionship between the film and a viewing public that is erotically familiar with images, and for whom each movie is a matter of ticking off dull variations on rock-solid formulae. The complete lack of a human center in ID4 is the double negative high sign to the audience that their part of the contract is being respected: if we give you our hearts, you'll do us the service of not representing us onscreen, either. In fact, the only onscreen reality in Independence Day is kinetic, geological, technical, coloristic. Aside from that, it's strippers living in middle-class neighborhoods, Old Jewish Guys dispensing wisdom to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a perfectly controlled presentation of action/character/typage that is as inhumanly clean as a sine wave.
All of which sounds deeply depressing, as though the long-prophesied death of cinema was upon us at last. "...[S]o, finally, in entertainment we see ourselves, the audience, clamoring for a repeal of the laws of dramaturgy and a reversion to entertainment as pure titillation," writes David Mamet in an essay of typically burnished elegance and burrowed-in conservatism. The common wisdom is that commercial culture has nudged the dormant masses over the edge and into some primordial state from which there's no going back. It's as if the aggressive reporter riding down French art cinema in Olivier Assayas's giddy, frightening Irma Vep ("It is only to please yourself, not for the public. But now it's over, it's finished...I hope") was a true prophet warning us to start counting the hours.
I'm not totally unsympathetic to Mamet's dour formulation of the thinning out of entertainment, but the unavoidable reality of corporate capitalism is that, given its speed and efficiency, you must adapt to it as you reject it. It is so pervasive and reaches into so many corners of existence that you have to respect its integrity as a force, as something that exists within reality rather than something outside of it, at the same time that you're trying to get beneath its structure. Whenever people start warning that the end is near, I know that the beginning is close at hand. Who really believes that the idea of art is so flimsy that it can be squashed like a bug under the heel of commerce? Hasn't the rhythm of the 20th century been the blossoming of an artistic movement followed by its cooption by big business followed by despair followed by a new movement that builds off the then-current reality? The problem with doomsday/death-of-cinema thinking is that it leaves no possibility for new spaces to emerge, because it only works from paradigms and, out of some puritanical reflex, it ignores the sometimes fruitful result of art cooked up under the pressure of business. It's as though there was no world outside of the cinema, and nothing for it to build from but itself.
THINK OF THE IDENTICAL AESTHETIC/BUSINESS STRATEGIES of an Independence Day and a Fargo, an alleged art film that is just as canny as the blockbuster about offering itself up in a perfectly rehearsed, glad-handing spirit that allows the viewer to take it any way he or she wants. It's just that in the case of Fargo the target audience is smaller and has supposedly more refined tastes. In the blockbusters the action is so disconnected from reality that it's impossible to imagine anyone doing anything offscreen, but there's an echo of that tendency in many American films, even the good ones. There are some good, stinging contemporary moments in Heat (most of them in longshot, or thanks to Diane Venora, Val Kilmer, or Ashley Judd), but the film for the most part feels like L.A. crossed with Melville's already mythic Paris. Nobody's Fool films bedraggled, economically devastated small-town America on the outskirts of its story, but when the characters start interacting it's a nice, mellow variation on the early Thirties, complete with friendly card games between enemies in the back of the bar. That odd, postmodern timelessness figures prominently in Lars Von Trier's Breaking the Waves, with its curious amalgamation of saintly/retarded na•f heroine, Dreyer-esque townsfolk, Seventies music and Fifties melodrama, laced with the director's compulsive collegiate satire. Von Trier makes something moving out of his bizarre pop object, which has next to nothing to do with "questions of faith," "the power of love," or martyrdom, but which transmits itself on an intersubjective wavelength, at least for people of a certain generation: with its heady visual scheme (shot in handheld Panavision, transferred to video for color correction, and transferred back to film), it feels as if it's happening in the head of someone who grew up watching movies on TV and listening to the poignantly acerbic strains of Seventies British rock late at night. As a near-perfect embodiment of the abstract feelings produced by all that movie-watching and record-listening, Breaking the Waves gently partakes of what Independence Day so ruthlessly exploits.
On a more complex level, the insistence on a decentered approach to the very idea of character, on a coreless, floating vision of modern identity, is common to both blockbusters and a lot of current serious work. The "people" who parade through ID4 are deliberately flimsy, almost ghostlike --which is oddly congruent with a nonconsumerist movie like AndrŽ TŽchinŽ's remarkable new Les Voleurs, in which the director's Hitchcockian, almost strident clarity offsets the pull of the narrative away from any sense of control for the pure creatures of impulse onscreen. This suspension of a solid foundation on which character can form can also be found in the eerie equalization of heaviness and weightlessness in Atom Egoyan's work; or the blend of time and vision into a kaleidoscopic swirl that threatens to become ecstatic, but which the director always nudges into melancholy, in Wong Kar-wai. Perhaps it's fair to say that what ID4 embodies these films are trying to represent, but the squarishly American blockbuster and the tough, serious films of Wong, Egoyan, Assayas, Edward Yang, and Hou Hsiao-hsien all meet their audiences on the same field. They share the same unconscious. They find common ground in the reality of speed and omnipresent forces moving people out of control. They are all creatures of corporate capitalism, but whereas ID4 is its creation, the other films have either built themselves from its leavings or quietly manufactured materials of their own devising in its shadow.
The point is, they occupy the same moment in history. ID4 is not "over there" somewhere, infecting the purity of cinema like an evil virus. The reality of blockbuster movies is a decidedly alienating, noncinematic affair, and an unpleasant historical development for cinephiles who would prefer to retreat into the comfort of ahistorical essentialism: "Leave the masses to their tawdry entertainments --we know what real cinema is." As someone who's been watching movies steadily since I was 8, I know how tempting it is to escape to the kingdom of abstract movie appreciation, to scour the current landscape for pale, nostalgic echoes of the films that one grew up watching, or to just give up the ghost and spend one's days studying videotapes of Wagon Master and His Girl Friday. And there's something especially galling to cinephiles about Blockbuster Cinema, because we pride ourselves on the fact that we've traditionally been so democratic in our embrace of high and low culture; now we are in a position where we come out looking as reactionary as John Simon --which does no one any good at all. I hated every second of Independence Day, but I can't fault the people who enjoyed it, or consider them "dupes" of "the system." They're responding to their own desire for a shared response, and if they're not as picky as I am about the event that they choose to respond to, then so much the worse for me. "I'm looking for the traces of feeling in men," said Antonioni as a way of describing his art. The fact is that, beneath all the layers of irony, corporate safety measures, commercial alienation, and coats of protective shellac that formed the event that was Independence Day, there's still the beating heart of its audience.
Kent Jones wrote about Hal Hartley in our previous issue.
© 1996 by Kent Jones
