Bibliography:

• Richard Maltby, "Hollywood Cinema", (Blackwell 1995) pp 395 - 404, 421 - 440

• Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Antony Easthope (ed.), "Contemporary Film Theory" (Longman, 1993)

• Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’, in Antony Easthope (ed.), "Contemporary Film Theory" (Longman, 1993)

• Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama’, in Christine Gladhill (ed), "Home is Where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film." (BFI, 1987)

• Vivian Sobchack. ‘Lounge Time’, in "Refiguring American Film Genres" ed. Nick Brown (University of California Press. 1998)

• Richard Maltby, ‘A Brief Romantic Interlude’: Dick and Jane go to 3 ½ seconds of the Classic Hollywood Cinema', in "Post-Theory", ed. David Bordwell & Noel Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).

• Slavoj Zizek, 'The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway' (Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, University of Washington, Seattle. 2000)

Introduction - Historical Context

After the 1960s, a politicised reading of film texts explored the possibility that hidden agendas lay behind the mainstream modalities of narrative film. The guiding question asked, "Who possessed the gaze of the apparatus, other than the middle-class white male American?" Mainstream texts of the past were re-examined for evidence by a number of leading academics, resulting in a flurry of attempts to offer a new alternative Theory of film.

• October 1969. Cahiers du Cinema "Cinema/Ideology/Criticism" – Comolli & Narboni argue for new approach to film criticism that took up Althusser’s notion of cinema as an ideological state apparatus: "the tools and techniques of filmmaking are a part of ‘reality’ themselves, and furthermore ‘reality’ is nothing but an expression of the prevailing ideology … What the camera in fact records is the vague, unformulated, untheorised, unthought-out world of the dominant ideology." (see Maltby p.396)

Comolli & Narboni formulated 4 categories of fiction film:

1. The vast majority of films, whose form and content both carry and endorse the dominant ideology unthinkingly.
2. A small number of films which attempt to subvert the dominant ideology through both their content and formal strategies that breach the conventions of ‘realist’ cinema.
3. Movies whose content is not explicitly political, but whose formal radicalism renders them subversive.
4. The reverse of category c): movies whose explicitly political content is contained within the realm of dominant ideology by their conventional form.

 

Saw categories b) & c) as essential subjects of criticism. Then they created a fifth, potentially most interesting category:

5. Films which seem at first sight to belong firmly within the ideological and to be completely under its sway, but which turn out to be so only in an ambiguous manner …. (Films which) throw up obstacles in the way of the ideology, causing it to swerve and get off course. (Maltby p. 397)

Elsaesser (1972. Reprinted in Gledhill) takes up these ideas. Opens his discussion quoting Douglas Sirk:

"Almost throughout the picture (Written on the Wind) I used deep-focus lenses which have the effect of giving a harshness to the objects and a kind of enamelled, hard surface to the colours. I wanted this to bring out the inner violence, the energy of the characters which is all inside them and can’t break through."

Sirk specialised in melodrama, but as a German ex-pat, used his outsider’s view to render the genre a cynical expose of American dominant ideology.

"Depending on whether the emphasis fell on the odyssey of suffering or the happy ending … melodrama would appear to function either subversively or as escapism – categories which are always relative to the given historical and social context." (Elsaesser in Gledhill p.47)

This defines melodrama in terms compatible with Comolli’s and Narboni’s category e).

Melodrama can thus shift political themes into the personal realm.

Clearly a substantial element of the approach suggested by Comolli & Narboni was dependent on reception strategies available to the spectator - which opened the way for a further strand of Theory to be developed, concerned with the place and conception of the (ideal) spectator that Hollywood film purportedly constructs, encouraging the alert spectator to ask,

"Who does this film think I am?" (ie in terms of age, race, class gender.)

The last of these discourses (gender) was effectively articulated by Mulvey in mid-seventies, employing Lacanian theory to articulate a gendered cinematic apparatus.

No genre has offered more opportunities for psychoanalytical approaches than:

Film Noir

Film Noir - retrospectively applied label, coined in 1947 by post-WWII French critics, who:

• Noticed homogeneous elements in American movies, which they had been unable to see during World War II.

• Concluded that cynicism, darkness and pessimism creeping into the jollier tendency of American films of the 1930’s.

Analytical Approaches

1. Reflective - film as a reflection of dominant ideology; themes exploring social conditions, political concerns & anxieties.

2. Aesthetic - stylistic & visual elements as expression of post war disillusionment.

3. Psychoanalytic - both of above contribute to expression of universal truths of inner reality.

1. Reflective Approaches (all radical psychoanalytical implications):

• Women - represented outside domestic settings, reflecting their move to factories while men away. Seen as danger by:

• Male Anxiety - of returning soldiers reflected in unstable identities of drifters, unable to settle & at mercy of:

• Fate - reflecting a loss of power & control over events. Investigated through:

• Flashbacks - reflect an attempt by America to understand how it had moved from a non-interventionist position to World Power with:

• Responsibility - plots reflected debate over legitimacy & who had power and authority. Explored relationship between:

• Law vs Individuality - reflected in plots which explored underworld protagonists, private detectives, or just ordinary guys caught up in the moral ambiguities of:

• Contradiction - of post-war America.

In sum - these elements added up to a new realism for Hollywood film, an expression of psychological disillusionment in their STYLE.

2. Aesthetic Approaches

• Mise-en-scene - darkness and shadow defined everything; if outside sets were not simply lit for night-time scenes, then gangsters sat with drawn shades at midday.

• Urban Location - linked to consideration of mise-en-scene, this element reveals the origins of this style of film as the European expressionist project, which locates the dark side of humanity in the concentration of humanity that occurs in the city. This element provides a bridge between the 3 approaches outlined here.

3.  Psychoanalytical Approaches

• Location as mindset - "Thus, in noir, homes are given to us only in glimpses - as something lost or something fragile and threatened." [Vivian Sobchack. ‘Lounge Time’, in "Refiguring American Film Genres" ed. Nick Brown. University of California Press. 1998]

• Urban spaces are masculine spaces, defined by the absence of domestic (female) spaces.

• Anxiety and Paranoia - operating as both male and [split?] female identity crises. How can she get back to domestic safety? How does he restore authority & stability?

• Oedipal Dynamic - the struggle between the monstrous id, the good and bad mother figures as the main engines of the plot.

Lost Highway (with much thanks from Slavoj Zizek)

Critical responses:

1. Cold postmodern exercise in regression, deconstructing scenes of primal anxieties contained in imagery of noir – "just another movie about movies."
2. Ironic intertextual exploration of Jungian subconscious – using noir elements to address enigma of postmodernity itself

Recent cognitivist approach rejects Lacanian theory – Maltby’s essay on Casablanca focuses on the scene where Ilsa comes to Rick’s room to try to obtain letters of transit – they embrace – dissolve to 3 ½ second shot of airport tower – then back to room and conversation continues. What happened?

Malty: exemplary case of how Hollywood offers "distinct and alternative sources of pleasure to two people sitting next to each other in the same cinema … could play to both ‘innocent’ and ‘sophisticated’ audiences alike."

Zizek: because you know that you are covered or absolved from guilty impulses by the official story line (the big Other, the symbolic order, patriarchal authority), you are allowed to indulge in dirty fantasies - which do not count in the eyes of society (the big Other). Thus Maltby goes too far: no need to consider TWO spectators – one and the same spectator can split into two!

So: Rick and Ilsa did not do it for the big Other; but they did do it for our dirty fantasmatic imagination.

Zizek: Hollywood needs BOTH levels in order to function.

The author of the text can always claim innocence. The symbolic Law is only interested in keeping up appearances – but the Law itself also needs its obscene supplement. Maltby is right to emphasise that Hollywood Production Code of 30s & 40s was not simply a negative. Foucault would call it productive also, generating the very excess of the material it directly suppressed.

So what happens after the dissolution of the Hayes Production Code?

Today’s inherent transgression is not manifest in encoded motifs but in a joyful immersion into non-PC, racist/sexist excess

Femme Fatale

In a film like As Good As It Gets we have a reversal of the logic of the femme fatale – she used to be a source of pleasure because we knew that in the end she would pay the price for her transgression (i.e. the undermining of patriarchy). So here Jack Nicholson’s character will in the end be redeemed.

But in neo noir (i.e. Last Seduction) she is characterised by direct, outspoken, sexual aggression, direct self-commodification, self-manipulation. In classic noir she is punished at the level of explicit narrative: although she is destroyed (or domesticated) her image lives on – survives her physical destruction to become emblematic beyond the confines of the text.

Thus classic noir belies and subverts its explicit narrative (just as in Casablanca). Neo noir at level of explicit narrative allows femme fatale to triumph – not as spectral ‘undead’, but physically, as social reality, rich & alone over his dead body.

So … is she no longer subversive? Does she lose her mystique – is she reduced to just a vulgar, cold, manipulative bitch? Have we lost the sublime result of her empirical destruction – the price to be paid for spectral omnipotence?

If we re-examine classic noir: The classic femme fatale functions as inherent transgression – integral part of the text - the male masochistic paranoiac fantasy, who simultaneously dominates the male and enjoys her suffering. In fact the threat of the femme fatale can be seen as a false one: a fantasmatic support – a figure of the enemy constructed by patriarchy itself solely for destruction. It can only be evoked on condition that she is punished.

In Foucauldian terms: just as the discourse on sexuality - containing its repression & regulation - creates sex as mysterious, furtive, a force to be conquered; so the patriarchal discourse creates the femme fatale as the inherent threat against which male identity can successfully pit itself.  The conventionalit of the text assures the (male) spectator that she is a 'safe' fantasy, an unsuccessful threat.

Neo-noir’s achievement makes this (retrospectively) explicit for us; new femme fatale accepts the challenge of the game, beats male at his own game & becomes a more effective threat than the spectral classic femme.

She is, of course, no less hallucinatory (being a mere character in a fiction) but she subverts male fantasy by directly & brutally realising it – she knows what men fantasise about and by directly giving them their fantasy she most effectively undermines their domination (at least of the text). In Last Seduction she sadistically deprives the sexual act of its human & emotional warmth – to a cold physical exercise. By acting it out, she thwarts the efficiency of male fantasy as a support to desire.

Lost Highway functions as a kind of meta-commentary on the opposition between classic & postmodern femme fatale. Noir universe of corrupt women & obscene fathers is made more comprehensible when confronted by a more unsettling, horrific, alienating, suburban married life.

Unity of experience of reality disintegrates & decomposes in face of a sublimated drabness of daily life.

Important that we risk taking Eddy seriously – desperately trying to maintain a minimum of order, enforce some elementary fucking rules in a crazy universe. Lynch’s films are full of these excessive, exuberant authority figures, ridiculously trying to respect fundaments of socio-symbolic Law.

Compare Benigni’s protective father in Life is Beautiful;

" … Benigni’s protective father nonetheless accomplishes the work of symbolic castration: he effectively separates the son from his mother, introduces him to the dialectic al identification with the Other’s (his peer’s) desire, and thus accustoms him to the cruel reality of life outside the family ... [he] provides the symbolic fiction that renders this reality bearable." [Zizek p.29]

The process of becoming mature for the son involves a displacement of the father’s shield of protective fiction - to a more abstract level. Thus Benigni’s benevolently protective father is also a version of excessive self-denial … an eradication of his own desire in the interests of the (impossible?) safety of the son, who must eventually break through his safety net. Lynch’s father figures stand in opposition to this impossible safty - are comically horrific expressions of their own excessive enjoyment.

They disintegrate into uncannily ritualised behaviour … outbursts of raw, brutal, sublimated energy. If classic noir presents the femme fatale as the inherent transgression (the male masochistic paranoiac fantasy, which simultaneously dominates the male and enjoys her suffering) then the very structure of Lost Highway punctures the logic of inherent transgression – lays bare and disipates the necessity of this function/process: second part of Lost Highway is the fantasmatic inherent transgression of drab, everyday life of the first part. Explodes the consistency of classic Hollywood’s construction. Ambiguity is no longer the guiding principle we see articulated in Casablanca.

Are Renee and Alice onse and the same woman? Is the inserted story just Fred’s hallucination? Or is it a kind of flashback? Does this intersected noir element provide the rationale for the murder? Or is this flashback itself imagined to provide an excuse for hurt male pride (impotency)?

These questions become an articulation of the ambiguity & inconsistency underlying the engine of the Hollywood paradigm.

END