Lecture 1: Hollywood: The Emotion Picture Machine. |
Is this film a bio-pic? A tragedy? A Hollywood expose? An adaptation (from a novel)?
What does this film say about James Whale in particular? Can we trust its details as historically and personally accurate? Do you think it explains anything about the work of this director – anything that Whale himself would have endorsed? How can we tell? How can we find out? Is this relevant?
What does this film say in general terms about the relationship of the film text to the director? As far as cinematic adaptation goes, we only need consider how far removed the text of Frankenstein films are from Mary Shelly’s original novel. In the original the monster is articulate, philosophical even. Whale made him simple, confused and pathetic. But the monster, as played by Karloff under his tutelage, at least remains sympathetic and arguably became an icon of the 20th century.
For years these films were categorised as horror movies, but McKellan’s Whale admits he intended them to be funny. As Brendan Fraser’s character watches the TV broadcast of Bride of Frankenstein with his bar flies, they too are confused. They view these old texts as corny. Of course there is an issue here about the ageing process of texts. But this moment questions the very notion of genre and how it is understood; it also points to the importance of available reception strategies in the making of meaning at the moment of reception.
In general terms, can we say that the work of art articulates its creator’s interests and personality? Or does the creator, in the assembling of the text, articulate something else? Something relating to the social context of production; to ideology; to culture; to the human condition?
To what extent should the creator gain privilege over the work?
Another tension thus informs this text: on the one hand it celebrates the work of the [auteur?] director, James Whale; but it also shows him to be merely a cipher for other historical, ideological and psychological concerns. Whale, for example, does not value his work in the way ‘we’ [the public] do – "But it’s for your monsters that you will be remembered." No I prefer Showboat. He is not self aware, is not the controller of our understanding, is merely a cog in the machine of the entertainment engine of the twentieth century.
The body of his work is skewed by this text to emphasise the Frankenstein films. The reason for this is that this text strives to make the body of the monster analogous to the body of Whale’s film work. The monster, patched together as it is by Dr F, is made to stand for film production itself – the director’s cut, perhaps. This phrase effectively conveys the excitement of fiction filmmaking (or perhaps of filmmaking in general); of splicing together separate shots and fragments - the process of editing, which endeavour intends to re-fashion another version of wholeness out of disparate shreds! Just as Dr. Frankensyein did with his body parts.
This is not a new idea. Of course Eliot despairingly identifies it as a feature of the new century in his 1922 poem, "The Wasteland":
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images …. lines 19-22
And in his closing, self-referential lines, he sees his work as:
These fragments I have shored against my ruins l. 430
Here Eliot points to the limitations of poetry and Art itself and his poem uses several disparate styles as a consequence. Brannagh does something similar in his version of Frankenstein by using jump cuts in the birthing sequence.
Clayton [whom McKellan’s Whale has tried to control from the outset and who has refused to participate in a mercy killing] does finally become the monster of Whale’s death dream, laying the director to rest in the no-man’s-land of the trenches beside the body of his first lover. The body of his dead lover had hung on the wire for so long that he had effectively been resurrected in the conversation of the troops. In becoming the monster, Clayton, like the son who inherits the father’s estate therefore, assumes the identity of the creator’s – the director’s – body of work. In the final moments of the film, that body of work [as embodied by Clayton] takes over and over-shadows its creator. In so doing the work leaves behind its author and strides back to the living world. The closing shot shows Clayton, having put to bed his own son, striding in mock monster fashion through the rain of a modern townscape in homage to his ‘father’ figure.
But who is Clayton? He is not a filmmaker – or anything to do with the film industry. In what sense can he be a ‘son’? He is nothing more than a gardener - an average Joe who, for a while [as he sits for a portrait], is privileged to become the direct object of the director’s scrutiny. Clearly, this situation is analogous to the actor’s position under the camera’s eye. But because he is an average movie spectator, Clayton can function, in effect, as our surrogate in the text. In the machine of this film text, his relatively empty, normalising POV provides a point of access for us as spectators.
And – also because he is an average movie spectator – Clayton’s character is allowed to work a certain alchemy on Whale, the filmmaker – an ironic reversal of gazes can take place, in which the artifice of the screen is dissolved and director is brought face-to-face with his audience. Under Clayton’s returned heterosexual gaze, Whale is moved to confessional recall. Through Clayton we witness the mechanisms of this man’s creative process. Finally we come to understand why he seeks absolution and annihilation from the monster he has spent his life alternatively fleeing and pursuing.
So we have conceptual alignments set up:
Cinematic text = Body = Apparatus = Mechanism = Art = Techne
In creating a cinematic text, the body – or at least the consciousness – of the artist is initially meshed with [merges with?] the technology of the apparatus. The production thus takes on the characteristics of the creator(s) [resemblance, in the case of the actor] and the result relatively quickly takes on a life of its own. Have we not all experienced the small thrill of control that video tape offers in the knowledge that we can re-play that moment with a finger on the remote control? And the loss of control we can experience on realising that we are watching a terrestrial broadcast. For this reason alone the proposed TiVo system is destined to succeed.
There is nothing fantastic in the notion of the work floating separate from its creator (although it has acquired an urgent political dimension now that new technology makes copyright difficult to enforce). Nevertheless conceptually, it is pointing out the bleeding obvious to a Shakespeare scholar! Shakespeare’s canon stands alone, quite separate from its creator – who remains a mystery because of this. But in the case of the bard, centuries have separated creator and text(s). It is, however, that merging of person with text in the act of creation that we find endlessly fascinating in the case of the moving image. We want to see (as the extra features provided on DVDs demonstrate) the director’s cut or the different takes of the actors, to hear directors or actors talking about the act of making a film, more so than the creativity of novelists, scriptwriters or playwrights.
We want this because the cinematic text ‘lives’ so easily – and quickly – independently. Indeed we imagine that we are seeing things coming into being as we watch the images of a film ‘happen’ before our very eyes. This constitutes one of the ‘special’ – almost mythical – qualities of the actor and director. In the 1920’s Lon Chaney, the actor known as "the man of a thousand faces", was rumoured in fan magazines to actually drink celluloid, such was the plasticity of his performance skills.
Finally we want this because the cinematic text offers us a democratic, collective dream – a dream which defies the vicissitudes of copyright law. Like the rich man’s guest, who gains as much pleasure as his host from looking at his jewels, we can thank the owners for ‘giving’ us the treasure once we have seen it. We possess the cinematic dream perhaps more than its makers (who relinquish their ownership on its completion). Perhaps this is why so many actors and directors do not bother to look at their work again. Actors and directors die, studios go bust or are bought up, but the cinematic text lives on.
Furthermore the cinematic text ‘lives’ in a more profound sense than a simple maintenance of currency in a cultural milieu. Despite the apparent static nature of possessing something, the psychological aspects of the text have the potential to ‘grow’ in us, rather like a virus. How many of us are tempted, having been moved by the text of Gods and Monsters, to go back to the Frankenstein texts and re-experience them, re-examine them? For we know that while the cinematic text remains the same, ‘we’ have changed and our understanding of the text will have grown with that change. This moment of realisation is embedded in Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys as Bruce Willis’s character watches James Stewart examines the concentric rings of a redwood in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In this way we sense in the cinematic text a fantasmatic chance to beat death itself.
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