Poseidon and Politics

Upon the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 commentators have argued that American popular cultural has not changed significantly since the day that supposedly “changed everything.” A significant cultural change, however, occurred around 1980: the ascendancy of Reagan and the exhaustion of the 1960s counter-culture. The effects of this change are still with us and have not been affected by 9-11. A good way to gauge this development is to compare The Poseidon Adventure (1972, directed by Ronald Neame) with its 2006 remake, Poseidon, directed by Wolfgang Petersen.

J. Hoberman describes seventies disaster films--including The Poseidon Adventure--as politically retrograde artifacts in which “the sixties didn’t happen.” But on the S.S. Poseidon, a luxury liner on its final voyage from New York City to Athens, sixties rebelliousness has become the norm. In the first scene a child passenger, Robin Shelby, (Eric Shea) sneaks onto the bridge and is lightly scolded by Captain Harrison (Leslie Nielsen). This bit of business is a sentimentalized version of the youth-adult conflicts that roiled the protest era. Back then, young people were invading and occupying all manner of adult spaces. More rebelliousness follows. An irate passenger questions the ship’s doctor’s judgment. Robin disobeys his older sister. A people’s priest argues with the ship’s Chaplain. The Captain argues with a businessman more concerned with money than the ship’s safety. The ship’s Purser jokes that the Captain doesn’t actually run the ship, which will become a reality shortly. The Poseidon needs something much less potent than a tidal wave to turn it upside down.

Mild dissidence becomes near-mutiny after a tidal wave capsizes the ship on New Year’s Eve. Reverend Frank Scott (Gene Hackman) disobeys the Purser and leads a group of survivors out of the main ballroom to journey upwards through the ship to attempt an escape through the upturned hull. Scott and his party ignore authority again when they decline to join a group of survivors lead by the ship’s doctor, which is heading towards the bridge in the hope that the Captain is still alive and can help them.

Poseidon also begins with youthful rebellion. Robert Ramsey (Kurt Russell) enters his stateroom aboard the New York-bound S.S. Poseidon to find his daughter Jennifer (Emmy Rossum) snuggling with her boyfriend Christian (Mike Vogel). Ramsey politely scolds his daughter for what he sees inappropriate behavior. But rather than take it in stride Jennifer becomes enraged and storms out of the room, rejecting his discipline as patronizing. But her rebellion is short-lived. After the ship is capsized by a gigantic wave Ramsey and Jennifer must slide across a firehose suspended across the ship’s devastated lobby to continue their ascent to the ship’s hull. To psyche themselves up for this risky venture they pretend to reconstitute an earlier father-daughter relationship. Ramsey affectionately reminds Jennifer of her childhood propensity for getting lost and asks her if she is too big for a piggyback ride. “Not today,” she says. After their successful crossing Jennifer doesn’t challenge her father again. Ramsey’s reassertion of control over his daughter, her willingness to return to dependency, to be infantilized, tempers her drive for independence and shows that established authority cannot be pushed aside easily. Father knows best.

The 1972 film is no less interested in strong male leadership, but it is more populist-pluralist, which is demonstrated in the creation of the group’s escape plan. James Martin (Red Buttons) correctly observes that any rescue attempt will have to come from the hull above them. Robin provides the useful factoid that the ship’s hull is thinnest at the propeller shaft at the stern, making it the most likely spot to escape the ship. Scott quickly agrees with Martin and Robin and sets his dissident group in motion. By contrast, Poseidon’s rescue plan develops from the top down. Dylan Johns (Josh Lucas) starts to leave the ballroom on his own and others beg him to take them along. The pluralist-teamwork theme is also present: Ramsey establishes himself as a co-leader by combining his desire to find Jennifer with John’s escape plan.

Although Scott’s rescue effort has a communal inception, internal conflict plagues the group’s journey. Scott is constantly challenged by the boisterous Detective Lt. Mike Rogo (Ernest Borgnine). At one point Rogo mutinies against Scott’s leadership and demands that Scott personally reconnoiter the engine room (the goal of their journey) to see if it is passable. The Poseidon Adventure, reflecting the “crisis of confidence” of the period, devotes more time to leadership struggles than any other disaster film. Unlike the Scott-Rogo relationship, Ramsey never disputes or undermines Johns. They quickly become a well-matched, effective team. Lucky Larry (Kevin Dillon), however, does challenge Ramsey’s authority, much like Rogo challenged Scott. But unlike Jennifer, who gave up her rebelliousness and survives, Larry remains an unrepentant Ramsey-basher and is quickly punished: he dies crossing the ship’s lobby. Rebel against authority at your own peril.

Within Scott’s group the distinction between leaders and followers does not stay fixed, at least not for very long. The heroic role may even pass from men to women. When Scott becomes trapped in a flooded corridor a heavy-set grandmother, Belle Rosen, (Shelley Winters) dives in and rescues him. After Belle dies of a coronary, Rogo praises her; “You had a lotta guts, lady. A lotta guts.” In Poseidon no one woman gets to show a lot of guts, but there is a greater overall involvement by women.

A nod towards gender equality occurs soon after the ship capsizes. Jennifer and Maggie James (Jacinda Barrett) struggle unsuccessfully to free Christian from collapsed scaffolding in the ship’s nightclub. Lucky Larry intervenes and demonstrates the proper way to use leverage. But despite using a better technique the scaffolding won’t budge and Larry hesitates. Jennifer however, won’t give up. Like any good disaster film heroine she inspires others to persevere and they eventually lift the debris off Christian. Thus in standard pluralist fashion male mechanical aptitude and female devotion and constancy combine to get the job done. Later, Elena Gonzalez (Mia Maestro) successfully dislodges a stuck survivor in a tense air duct scene, but it’s not nearly as surprising and dramatic as Belle’s rescue of Scott.

The closest equivalents to the Belle-Scott rescue scene in Poseidon, however, reorder age and genders roles backwards. Late in the journey Maggie becomes separated by a wire mesh from her young son Conor (Jimmy Bennett) as the space around them fills with water. But instead of a woman rescuing a man, a man (Johns) rescues the boy while the woman looks on. Rather than showing “guts”, Maggie is immobilized with grief and fear while a man gets the job done for her. Finally, John’s crazily brave high dive into the flooded lobby can be read as a response to Belle’s dive. John’s dive is far more impressive. The spectacular stunt function belongs to men now.

Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner note that The Poseidon Adventure was “the first disaster film to sympathetically incorporate young people.” The youngest character, Robin, provides crucial plot information, while the next youngest character, his sister Susan (Pamela Sue Martin), provides crucial sex appeal. The ever-skeptical Rogo, however, dismisses Robin’s input, essentially telling the boy to let the grown-ups handle this. But Robin is ultimately proved right. In Poseidon, however, the proper relationship of the generations that Rogo desires has been achieved. This time, the propeller shaft idea comes from an adult; Johns. And in a complete reversal of the 1972 film an adult has to explain to a skeptical child why this is a good plan. Conor can be an annoyance by wandering off alone and becoming trapped as well as a savior by using his small fingers to open a sealed grate confining the protagonists. But unlike his 1972 counterpart Conor lacks youth culture impudence or any escape ideas of his own.

Near the end of the film, Christian volunteers for a dangerous underwater mission in place of Ramsey (threatening to expand the category of natural leaders to younger adults). But Ramsey sneaks off and undertakes the mission before Christian can get going. Ramsey nobly sacrifices his life for others but also preserves the exclusive leadership class of experienced males. Between the two films one can sense the fading of the sixties glamorization of youth and the rise of the ideology of Reagan-Bush-Bush: grown-ups are in charge again.

There is an instructive parallel between Red Buttons’ lonely haberdasher in 1972 and Richard Dreyfuss’ heartbroken gay architect in 2006. James Martin (Buttons), laments the lack of romance in his busy life. Richard Nelson (Dreyfuss) laments his recent abandonment by his longtime companion. Both men have polished manners, stylish attire and are physically unimposing. They are outside the norms of movie physical heroism. Martin even jokes about not having virility. Despite their similarities, Nelson’s story is Martin’s story turned inside out. While Martin is accorded twee nobility, Nelson is merely pathetic. While the optimistic Martin has the crucial insight that they can be rescued through the hull, and near the end of the film provokes a despondent Rogo into action, the defeatist Nelson merely chimes in unhelpfully that, as an architect, he knows that ships are designed to float right side up, not upside down.

As their journey begins, Martin bonds with the younger Nonnie Parry (Carol Lynley), a delicate flower child/singer in go-go boots and hot pants grieving over the death of her brother. Martin dedicates himself to making sure Nonnie keeps up with the others and survives. Nelson also takes a protective interest in a younger woman (Elena). But unlike Nonnie, Elena dies. Whereas Martin could play the heroic male and help Nonnie through submerged passages, Nelson becomes stuck in an airshaft, trapping others below, requiring Elena has to dislodge him. Although Nelson does help ably when the group crosses an elevator shaft, the incident concludes badly. In order to escape the shaft, Nelson must shake off a man hanging onto his legs (Nelson does this at Johns’ prompting). The man falls to a painful death.

Disaster films rarely pose “lifeboat ethics” dilemmas this brutally. But according to the movie’s logic of natural leadership, better that Nelson do this than Ramsey or Johns, whose heroic statuses must remain untainted for the group to survive. Nelson is offered no opportunity to redeem himself and for the rest of the film he fades into the background as one of the rescued. The lesson? In 1972 a meek haberdasher can contribute to a group effort and try on the mantle of heroism. In 2006 a middle-aged gay architect can expect much less and less can be expected of him. The meek merely get in the way.

If children and “wimps” come off worse in 2006, officialdom comes off better. The Poseidon’s 1972 crew bears much responsibility for the tragedy. The crew gets plenty of advanced warning in the form of radio messages and radar signals, but only takes action when they see the wave with their own eyes (an allegory of incompetent American leadership in the seventies is suggested here as well). The 1972 film also features a businessman villain; Linarcos (Fred Sadoff), a representative of the ship’s owners. He countermands the Captain’s order to take on ballast and maintain slow speed because doing so would slow the ship’s progress to its final destination: disassembly and the scrap heap. In American cinema it is always a bad thing when a politician or businessman in a suit exerts power over a man in uniform--think of the mayor and business leaders in Jaws (1975) countermanding Chief Brody. Although Linarcos is not responsible for the tidal wave, disordered leadership is part of what makes the Poseidon vulnerable to disaster.

By contrast the 2006 Poseidon crew is completely blindsided and blameless for the disaster. A “rogue wave” sounds a lot like a “rogue state,” something totally unpredictable, completely beyond American responsibility and control. There is no nasty businessman pulling rank on the Captain. There is no advanced radar signal for the Captain to ignore. In fact, Chief Officer Reynolds (Kirk B.R. Woller) senses something wrong in the sea before the wave appears. He is the equivalent of the government agents who investigated the 9-11 perpetrators but were unable to prevent the actual attacks. And while only one rescue helicopter reached the upturned Poseidon in 1972, the final shot of the 2006 film is an aerial panorama of an ocean buzzing with rescue vehicles. Average citizens in distress can count on a swift government response (another 9-11 reference).

The leader-protagonists of each film also have roots in officialdom. Both Scott and Ramsey represent institutional authority and public service. Scott is an ordained minister. Ramsey is an ex-firefighter and an ex-Mayor of New York City. But it’s been a rocky road for both men. Scott was stripped of most of his clerical powers and Ramsey was turned out of office and abandoned by his wife. Thus they are simultaneously insiders and rejected outsiders. But Scott’s rebelliousness goes to the heart of his character. Proudly defiant, Scott’s anti-pietism sounds like atheism and his advocacy of poor people hypothetically setting fire to buildings to keep warm sounds like an endorsement of the Watts Riots. Scott even chastises God when things look bleak.

If Scott evokes a dissident leader like anti-war Senator George McGovern, Ramsey combines memories of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the heroic New York City firefighters of 9-11. Ramsey’s unflustered exercise of authority demonstrates that leadership requires neither Scott’s impassioned unorthodoxy nor a non-conformist pose (the old Reagan ethos). Since society is less disordered, and institutional authority more trustworthy, a less rebellious leadership style is required.


Whereas Ramsey is a centrist by nature, Johns—the de facto rescue leader--undergoes a centrist transformation. Johns evolves from a gambler who preys on the weak to a hero who rescues the weak. At first, Johns intends to rescue only himself. He declares, “Look, man, I work better on my own,” the basic rugged individualist credo. But Johns (who also happens to be a Navy veteran) quickly adjusts to group activity, becoming the leader of a rescue party.

Hollywood films are often sprinkled with expressions of pluralism (“political correctness” in conservative parlance) that counterbalance conservative elements. Poseidon is no exception. The captain of the ship is African-American, two of the protagonists are Latino, and a gay man is among the survivors. Reflexive sexism is criticized when Ramsey thanks Christian for saving Jennifer when in fact Jennifer saved Christian. But unlike blockbusters such as The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Revenge of the Sith (2005), and War of the Worlds (2005), which took veiled and not-so-veiled swipes at the Bush Administration, Poseidon allegorizes Bush-Cheney’s favored image of itself: a cohesive team of responsible leaders protecting the public in the wake of catastrophe. Indeed, Lucky Larry’s disrespectful attitude towards Ramsey resembles Blue State “Bush-bashing." Just as liberals “unfairly” criticize Bush, who is only trying to defend us (so he claims), Larry pointlessly excoriates Ramsey, who is trying to rescue him.

Vietnam Era disaster films often conclude with images of ruin and despair. The final image of Tora Tora Tora (1970), a military-historical disaster film, is a panorama of burning and capsized American warships in Pearl Harbor. The Poseidon Adventure concludes with a shot the ship’s keel facing the sky, like a dead animal on its back. The hero is washed down a drainage tunnel in Earthquake (1974), while the surrounding city of Los Angeles looks like the ruins of Dresden. Steve McQueen glances sadly at the covered bodies of dead firefighters near the end of The Towering Inferno (1974).

Millennial disaster films, by contrast, are more optimistic and conclude with images of rejuvenation. The Force 5 tornado in Twister (1996) conveniently punishes the villains, serves to romantically reunite the heroes and morphs into an expression of the Spielbergian Sublime. After lava floes turn Hancock Park into Jurassic Park, Volcano (1997) concludes with a post-Rodney King parable of racial harmony. The deaths of 1500 people in Titanic (1997) serve to liberate Rose Bukater (Kate Winslet) from the constraints of the British class system and Victorian chauvinism. The film concludes with a glowing fantasy restoration of the sunken ship, with Rose reunited with her dead lover. The instant ice age that blankets North America in The Day After Tomorrow causes tornadoes and tidal waves, but ultimately cleanses the earth’s atmosphere of pollution and the American government of arrogance. Both the hyper-kinetic Armageddon (1998) and the sober, fact-based World Trade Center (2006) feature hellish landscapes of destruction but conclude reassuringly with jubilant celebrations. United 93 (2006), a disaster-docudrama based on the disrupted 9-11 airline hijacking, is one of the few recent films of the genre that lacks a reassuring coda. At the moment of greatest tragedy the screen simply cuts to black.

The differences in plot and imagery suggest that the seventies were, to use the cliché, “uncertain times”—much more so than our time. The Poseidon Adventure, as much as any film, reflects the mood of the seventies. Just as the Poseidon is struck by a tidal wave soon after surviving a gale, America—having endured racial discord, assassinations, counter-cultural turmoil, and civil disturbances in the sixties--was slammed by inflation, unemployment, an “energy crisis,” a Presidential resignation, defeat in Vietnam, and a hostage crisis in the seventies. Majorities believed America was on the wrong course and that the future would be worse than the past. Millennial disaster films don’t express this level of pessimism, suggesting that an equivalent level of pessimism doesn’t exist in society at large, even after 9-11.

Despite unjustified fears of the Y2K social breakdown (a disaster film that never happened) and justified post-9-11 fears of terrorism, recent American disaster films have been geared towards redemption and renewal. Granted, it’s hard to find something positive in a capsized ocean liner or in the rubble of national monuments, but American optimism insists on it. And Hollywood films, despite what is often alleged, have been serving us this optimism for decades.

George Bush: Western Hero?

President George W. Bush does resemble characters from classic American Western films, but not the characters Victor Davis Hanson cites in his August 7, 2006 National Review essay. In the 1960s, when the Axis of Evil was Moscow-Beijing-Hanoi, Bush was no Will Kane (Gary Copper in High Noon). He was closer to Billy Irvine (John Hurt) in Heaven’s Gate. Both went to elite schools, both had drinking problems. Because of their clan affiliations (Wyoming Stock Growers Association and Texas Republicanism, respectively) Irvine and Bush were expected to participate in a “limited war,” while their privilege allowed them to avoid carrying a rifle in the front lines.

In his relationship to his father (historical rather than familial), Bush resembles the intemperate epigoni of post-war cinema: Emperor Commodus (Christopher Plummer) in The Fall of the Roman Empire, Jere Torrey (Brandon DeWilde) in In Harm’s Way, Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack) in Written on the Wind, George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) in A Place in the Sun. Through a mixture of rebellion and failure, these troubled men reject and/or fall short of the legacies of their heroic empire-builder fathers. These pre-youth culture characterizations express the Greatest Generation’s doubts that the Next Generation was worthy of taking the reins.

Bush particularly resembles Dave Waggoman (Alex Nicol) in Anthony Mann’s The Man From Laramie. Alec Waggoman (Donald Crisp) is part of a greatest generation who forged vast estates in the Wild West, just as George H.W. Bush was part of the Greatest Generation that won World War II and established the American Century. Alec, also like Bush Sr., prefers détente and realpolitik with neighboring Indian tribes. Alec fought Indians to get his land, but he came to learn to live with them. But young Dave wants to expand the empire and he recklessly provokes conflict with Indians to do so. Likewise, Bush wants to end tyranny in the world (which should be translated as “forced Westernization”) and has dragged America into an endless war in Iraq. Dave’s secret, renegade arming of Indians is an apt allegory of the Bush clan’s longtime business alliance with Wahabist Arabs in Saudi Arabia and support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War (the Michael Moore thesis).

Bush has been no Will Kane in the War on Terror, either. Just as the people of Hadleyville downplayed the threat of the Miller Gang in High Noon, the Bush Administration downplayed the threat of Al Qaeda in favor of a non-existent missile threat from North Korea. In 2000, Richard Clarke, George Tenet and Sandy Berger played the “alarmist” Will Kane role, not Bush. On September 11 Bush wasn’t John Wayne, but Jim Averill (Kris Kristofferson) in Heaven’s Gate. Just as Averill gets sufficient intelligence but fails to prevent a mercenary attack on Johnson County, Wyoming, the Bush Justice Department had the terrorists in their sights but failed to act. When Averill is informed of the actual attack, he dithers, taking time to shave, dress, and pack while the common folk of Johnson County say “let’s roll” and meet the invaders head on. Obviously, we don’t expect a President to personally fight terrorists, but when Bush was informed of the attacks he rather overdid it and played school marm. He sat immobile, staring ahead blankly like the somnambulant gunmen in the opening sequence of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.

In his management of the Iraq War, Bush is starting to resemble Lt. Col. Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda) in Fort Apache. Bush, like Thursday, runs a tight ship and has an impressive pedigree but lacks sufficient practical knowledge of the enemy and, puffed up with righteousness, leads his troops into ambush and massacre. Director John Ford, however, believed that the need for sustaining myth transcends historical fact. Col. York (John Wayne) says of Thursday; “No one died with more honor or courage.” Here, The National Review plays the John Wayne role, showering Bush with unearned praise. The National Review and other conservatives (save Pat Buchanan) adhere to the famous stricture articulated by the journalist in The Man Who Shot Liberty Vance; “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Bush’s continued assertion that the Iraq War has sometime to do with terrorism (in his view, decreasing it) is becoming less credible by the day. We can hear America, paraphrasing Walter Brennan in Red River, saying “You wuz wrong, Mister Bush, You wuz wrong.” Bush sounds increasingly like a man brainwashed by his own propaganda—willfully blind, defensive. He is starting to sound like the pompous Frank Canton (Sam Waterston) in Heaven’s Gate.

Bush’s use of stock Western phrases in discussing war has been widely noted, but a more subtly and interesting reliance on Western movie conventions can be detected in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In 2004 Rumsfeld described the battle of Fallouja in terms of a Western showdown. “Success in Fallouja will deal a blow to the terrorists in the country, and should move Iraq further from a future of violence to one of freedom and opportunity for the Iraqi people.” Rumsfeld’s use of the word “should” is crucial here. Just as the deaths of the villains in Shane or The Magnificent Seven “should" open the way for a better life for humble homesteaders (the films ends before this transformation is fully realized--we don’t need to see it and safely assume it) defeating the insurgents in Fallouja “should” lead to better lives for Iraqis.

At best Bush resembles Jeff Webster (Jimmy Stewart) in Mann’s The Far Country. Webster is a taciturn frontier prospector who continually avoids getting involved in community problems. Webster anticipates our contemporary conservatism which seeks to starve the public realm and shrink community down to the size of the individual. Just as Bush promised during his first Presidential campaigned to pursue a more humble and realistic foreign policy in contrast to Clinton’s costly humanitarian interventions (such as the failed Somali mission), Webster wants to stay out of other’s conflicts and take care of himself.

But after Webster is beaten by the minions of a corrupt frontier sheriff and Webster’s sidekick is murdered (his own, personal 9-11), Webster is shaken out of his isolationism and decides to take on the evil-doers. Webster also gets a boost from the bravery of others. A roused and armed citizenry (the type of citizen-militia the National Rifle Association constantly evokes) rush to Webster’s aid at the last minute (the equivalent of post-9-11 patriotism and Presidential approval). Even with his bravery, though, Webster is no Will Kane, Ethan Edwards, or Tom Doniphon. Webster acts the hero when circumstances force him to. But act he does. Similarly, you may fault Bush for invading Iraq and instituting state torture--like many disillusioned Democrat hawks--but you can't accuse him of dragging his feet on punishing the Taliban and pursuing terrorist networks.

Rumsfeld describes the finale of The Far Country exactly when he makes predictions regarding Iraq; “Over time you’ll find that the process of tipping will take place, that more and more of the Iraqis will be angry about the fact that innocent people are being killed by the extremists…And they’ll want elections, and the more they see the extremists acting against that possibility of elections, I think they’ll turn on those people.” This is the equivalent of the townspeople rising up and joining Webster to oppose the evil sheriff. In actuality, as the war has dragged on military leaders have turned against Rumsfeld and the American people have turned against Bush.

But the western film sequence that most resembles Bush’s America in the Age of Iraq Unwinnable is the climax of McCabe and Mrs. Miller. John McCabe (Warren Beatty), a gambler and incompetent businessman, has finally discovered the seriousness of purpose that American commentators were moaning about in the late 1990s: he defends himself from corporate assassins seeking to take over his holdings in the frontier town of Presbyterian Church. He is forced to live up to his phony, legendary status as some sort of killer. Like many American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, however, McCabe fights and dies in a remote, inhospitable setting, unnoticed by the community he is serving (McCabe’s body is ignominiously covered by a snowdrift, Bush prevents public view of returning war dead). A fire in the town church, like the 9-11 attacks, has stirred and united a previously self-interested collection of individuals into a community with purpose.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Miller (Julie Christy), a successful madam and partner of McCabe’s, lies in bed in an opium-induced daze. She stares, fascinated, at a glazed ceramic egg, as if it were the most interesting thing in the world. In the final shot of the film this cheap, unimportant bauble fills the screen, like one of the planets in 2001: A Space Odyssey. While the townspeople outside have said, “Let’s roll,” Mrs. Miller has followed Bush’s advice to keep shopping. The War on Terror should not break our rhythm of constant consumption. Shopping is Freedom. For Mrs. Miller, like the American public today, inert spectatorship has become our most practiced skill and unacknowledged vice. The vast and trivial offerings of the mass media have blocked out the snow and the fire and the violence just outside our windows.

Conformity in the Post-War United States

The immediate post-war era in the United States is popularly considered to be an era of conformity. Think of how often “the Fifties” are identified by a photograph of rows of identical suburban houses or identically dressed commuter businessmen. In fact, conformity and adjustment were hotly debated topics at the time.

Many commentators did indeed consider the fifties to be an era of conformity and were greatly disturbed by it. According to Erich Fromm, “It is hardly necessary to demonstrate to the reader the degree which this submission to anonymous authority by conformity has reached.” (154) “Whereas in the nineteenth century, tradition governed American life, now the keynote is conformity,” wrote Frederick Meyer. (35) Robert Lindner was nearly hysterical about the subject: “Adjustment, that synonym for conformity…is the theme of our swan song, the piper’s tune to which we dance on the brink of the abyss, the siren’s melody that destroys our senses and paralyzes our wills.” (167)

For centrists, conformity, rather than unifying society, was laying the foundation for its dissolution. Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. thought ideological conformity could be used to keep fellow travelers of communism and fascism out of government service but posed dangers to the rest of us. “Popular ignorance about civil liberties…is threatening to turn us all into frightened conformists; and conformity can only lead to stagnation.” (208) He also feared that anti-communist feeling, “will boil over into a vicious and unconstitutional attack on nonconformists in general and thereby endanger the sources of our democratic strength.” (210)

According to George B. Leonard, Jr., “…when you teach a child undue conformity to the group, when you take away his respect for the unique characteristics that make him different from all other human beings, then you create an automaton, ideal fodder for a juvenile gang—or, later, a totalitarian mass movement.” (40-41) William H. Whyte worried, “In further institutionalizing the great power of the majority, we are making the individual come to distrust himself. We are giving him a rationalization for the unconscious urging to find an authority that would resolve the burden of free choice.” (59)

Moving further to the left, noxious conformity was not intrusive, but inherent to the American Way. For Betty Friedan, “adjustment” was one of the keynotes of defenders of Feminine Mystique, the general social ideology which confined women to the wife-mother-homemaker role. “So, in the name of adjustment to the cultural definition of femininity [sociologist Mira Komarovsky] ends up virtually endorsing the continued infantilization of American woman…” (133) Paul Goodman scolded the nation thusly; “Our society cannot have it both ways: to maintain a conformist and ignoble system and to have skillful and spirited men to man that system with.” (182)

A more radical perspective held that contemporary American society was not worth conforming to. For Norman Mailer, “One is Hip or one is Square…one is a rebel or one conforms…one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American nightlife, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian issues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.” (155).

Conservatives attacked conformity from a different angle. William F. Buckley, Jr. saw conformity as a defining tendency of then-dominant New Deal Liberalism; “In actual practice, the choices, under applied Liberalism, are limited by the pressures of an overarching and highly repressive conformity.” (155) He implied that the real problem was a lack of conformity to the right ideas; “I think she [America] is in danger of losing her identity—not on account of some orthodoxy that we are being told in some quarters threatens to suffocate us; but for failure to nourish any orthodoxy at all.” (xiii)

John A. Stormer warned that the battle against Communism will be lost, “…not when freedom of speech is finally taken away, but when Americans become so “adjusted” or “conditioned” to “getting along with the group” that when they finally see the threat, they say, “I can’t afford to be controversial.”” (228)

Conformity and adjustment were not dirty words to the psychologically oriented. Rather than undermining society, David Riesman saw conformity as necessary and inevitable. “[T]he link between character and society…is to be found in the way in which society ensures some degree of conformity from the individuals who make it up…However, while societies and individuals may live well enough—if rather boringly--without creativity, it is not likely that they can live without some form of conformity…” (5-6) Dr. Benjamin Spock observed, “When asked what we want for our children we are apt to fall back on such general aims as happiness or good adjustment…” (290)

A few claimed that conformity was actually on the decline. Dr. Spock observed that college students of the fifties were less conformist than those of the twenties. (282) Similarly, Daniel Bell argued that “…in historical perspective, there is probably less conformity to an over-all mode of conduct today than at any time in the last half century in America.” (34) Bell even defended much-abused suburbia: “Americans…in building the postwar suburbs sought to create fraternity, communality, togetherness, only to find themselves accused of conformity.” (36)

Sources

Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press: 1960, 2000)

William F. Buckley, Up From Liberalism (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959)

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York, London: W.W Norton & Co., 1963)

Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1955)

Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (1960) in Nicolaus Mills, editor, Legacy of Dissent; 40 Years of Writing from Dissent Magazine (New York: Touchstone, Simon & Schuster, 1994)

George B. Leonard, Jr “Why is He Afraid To Be Different?” in The Decline of the American Male (New York: Random House, 1958)

Robert Linder, Must You Conform? (New York and Toronto: Rinehart & Company, Inc., 1956)

Norman Mailer, The White Negro, Superficial Reflections on the Hipster (1957) in Nicolaus Mills, editor, Legacy of Dissent; 40 Years of Writing from Dissent Magazine (New York:Touchstone, Simon & Schuster, 1994)

Frederick Meyer, Our Troubled Youth: Education Against Delinquency (New York: Bantam Books, 1960)

J. Robert Moskin, “Why Do Women Dominate Him?” in The Decline of the American Male (New York: Random House, 1958)

David Riesman with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1961)

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949, 1962)

Benjamin Spock, M.D, Problems of Parents (Greenwich: Crest/Fawcett Publications, 1955) quoted in Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1978)

John A. Stormer, None Dare Call it Treason (Florissant, Missouri: Liberty Bell Press, 1964)

William H. Wyte, The Organization Man (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956, 2002)

Bela Tarr's "Satantango" Dark Age Cinema

Bela Tarr’s Satantango (1994), a seven-and-one-quarter hour film, depicts a rain-sodden, isolated rural village whose joyless inhabitants move about in a kind of stupor. Like all of Tarr’s communities—the manor in Autumn Almanac, the towns in Damnation and Werckmeister Harmonies—Satantango’s village is cut off from the productive life of the surrounding world. All of Tarr’s movies seem to take place within The Zone of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. No one seems to work, yet no one is starving. People just exist.

After the death of a girl whose suicide-by-poison is mistaken for death-by-exposure, a group of villagers fall under the sway of Irimias, a bearded, slightly dapper, innocent-looking villager who offers an impromptu eulogy and a moral judgment of the village. Irimias persuades the villagers to hand over their life savings and relocate to a country manor to start a collective farm sanctioned by the state. But instead of the Apostles failing Christ, Christ fails his Apostles: the manor is as barren as any other setting in the film and Irmias directs the villagers to disperse themselves around the country, dissolving what little community they have. Irimias is also a government spy whose reports reveal contempt for his flock.

Ambitiously and expertly crafted, the film has a stark Tarkovskian vision of muddy fields and vast plains punctuated by dark, spindly trees, extremely long, mobile takes in the tradition of fellow Hungarian Micklos Jansco, and a bitter Bunuelesque desecration of the Christ-Apostles story. A post-Soviet political allegory is also suggested, with Irmias as the self-appointed leader of an isolated “republic,” whose spying activity suggests that a Stasi-style police state apparatus is now a permanent feature of Eastern European states, communism or no.

The style of the film is characterized by mobile shots of characters moving through space, an ensemble cast, intertitles, mysterious music, one-sided dialogue scenes, off-screen conversations, and the repetition of certain scenes which are visualized from another angle, reflecting a different character’s perspective on an event we have already seen. The long takes are both interminable (a two minute zoom on an owl perched outside a window at night) and incredible. In one scene, the camera circles around the interior of a government office as two men talk, transcribe reports, smoke, and pause to have lunch. The camera constantly circles around them, and pans back and forth between the characters in an uninterrupted 10 minute take (note that the camera is on a dolly, not hand-held, while all the lighting must be attached to the ceiling). This is as arduous and ambitious a long take as has ever been attempted. Hungary must have the best trained actors and dolly grips in the world.

The film has the gloom, pessimism, and overall un-ingratiating tone of an artifact made in the wake of a disorientating social cataclysm: Dada and Surrealism after World War I; film noir after World War II, American paranoia-conspiracy films after Vietnam and Watergate. The image of a static, depopulated world recall Soviet films from the Era of Stagnation. The film is an inverted passion play (each intertitle is a station of the cross) in which physical endurance is not rewarded (the villagers as a lost tribe of Isreal who never reach a Promised Land), and faith is misplaced and betrayed by an unworthy leader.

In Tarkovsky’s films, rain is associated with the power of nature, rebirth, and cleansing—think of the sun shower which bathes horses on a riverbank at the end of Andrei Rublev. The mud and muck of Tarkovsky’s films is the growth medium for a rebirth of nature, (think of the tendrils of undulating algae in shallow streams in most of his films, or the rippling surface of the planet Solaris) which signal a rebirth of the human spirit, which together comprise Tarkovsky’s major theme. The rain in Tarr’s films is simply God or nature’s punishment of humanity. No rebirth or renewal of the land ever occurs. The constant deluge doesn’t even rise to the level of a Deluge, a righteous flood which in the DeMille/disaster film fashion could be an opportunity for spectacle and the dramatics of survival. The rain seems designed to wear humanity down, which seems to have already submitted.

The ambience of the film may be damp, but Tarr’s tone is exceedingly dry. He offers no clues to his exact intentions. During the eulogy scene Irimias could be a Christ-like messiah, millenarian cult leader, utopian socialist, or greedy huckster. Nothing in the actor’s performance or the way the scene is shot tells the viewer that Irmias should be seen as either sincere or fraudulent, impassioned or deluded (which is how most unworthy leaders seem at first). The film constantly throws the responsibility for interpretation onto the viewer. The narrator describes the thoughts of a character in a way that describes how we might approach the film, “She felt that these events aren’t connected by accident, but there is an indescribably beautiful meaning bridging them.” Note that she merely feels this. She doesn’t know it. Even the films sublimity is shrouded in doubt.

Rather than liberating the viewer’s judgment, as Brechtian theory would have it, Tarr makes us uncomfortable and weary of the demands placed on us. Tarr takes the principles of the long take and composition in depth to such extremes that Bazinian humanism is turned inside out into something like anti-humanism. We long for a cinematic guide just as the villagers seem to desire a deliverer. Perhaps political freedom, like interpretative freedom, is not all its cracked up to be, something revered in theory but not in practice.

The film’s pessimism is utterly un-romanticized. The film is too long, slow and devitalized for melodrama. The characters lack the hubris and passion for tragedy. The film is too straight-faced for satire. The depiction of the village is too uniform and believable for absurdism—treating the unreal as if it were real. The images are too tactile and the overall style too literal-minded for surrealism. Irony implies the audience being aware of a moral or other disparity that the characters within the fiction do not. But the characters’ actions—such as they are—seem so un-motivated that there is no clear moral position to take towards them from which an ironic stance could develop.

The images are unfailingly sharp, detailed, and deep, and held for many minutes for prolonged viewer inspection, a fulfillment of Bazanian principles of the long take and composition in depth. Yet the inspection doesn’t reveal a full world, but a one-note, endless world of mud, isolation, and enervation. The further into the distance we look the more we perceive vastness and sameness. And the images are held for so long we exhaust their meaning, grow impatient with them, and experience sheer duration rather than “real time.” Because certain scenes are repeated—viewed from a different angle—we have endurance doubled. The use of non-professional actors and a rural setting recall various neorealisms. But the villagers are not ennobled and the village is not favorably contrasted with the city. Thus Satantango flirts with a number of modern cinema aesthetics but fulfills none of them.

Instead of dramatizing anomie, the film seems perversely designed to inflict it on the viewer. Film viewership and human existence itself are Sisyphisian labors inflicted on the audience and characters by a capricious deity who offers neither closure nor redemption, whose ultimate motivation is never revealed. Irimias defines himself in a way that seems to sum up Tarr’s intentions: “Don’t take me to be a liberator. Regard me as a sad researcher who investigates why everything is as terrible as it is.” Naturally, Irmias never discovers this “why” and Tarr is similarly mute on the subject.

The anti-humanism implicit in all this is leavened somewhat by the one bright spot in the film, an island within the texture of the narrative: an impromptu dance party in the town’s dinghy pub. The drunken dancers cavort, prance, tussle, and embrace exuberantly—endlessly—while a villager plays a repetitive tune on an accordion, like a needle skipping on a record. It is a fluorescent-lit, chaotic version of a Dutch joie d’ vivre/genre painting, a Fordian communal dance as mosh-pit bacchanal. This is the only note of sentiment in the film, albeit a well-earned one: the ability of people to find community and pleasure within even the bleakest environment using simple means; their bodies and an accordion.

Tarr wrests additional poignancy from the scene because this is the last human activity Estike, the girl who commits suicide, witnesses. The first time we view the dance is from outside the pub, looking in through a window, the dancing visually compressed and distant. A reverse angle from inside the pub shows Estike looking in, her eyes open in a sleepy wonderment. Or is she crying? Does this scene represent to her a joy that she will never share, thus hastening her suicide? Does this humane vision actually give her the peace of mind to conclude her life on “happy note”? Although ambiguity reigns again, Tarr gives us just enough information to make an interpretation that can lead to an emotional insight and response. The one ray of hope in the film—literally—is a change in the weather. The rain abates at the end of the movie. Sunlight warms the town square and, for once, the streets are dry. Years of movie viewing has conditioned us for an upbeat ending.

But the film takes a final turn for the worse. The last shot of the film depicts a man—Doc—boarding up the window through which he, and the audience looking over his shoulder, have observed people coming and going within the village. Distant, tolling bells on the soundtrack (shades of Bergman), which will continue over the end titles, could be mournful or celebratory, signifying either a funeral or a strange sort of transcendence.

As each board is nailed across the window the room, which has no other illumination, becomes darker, until Doc has sealed himself and the viewer in total darkness. Both Doc’s window on the world and our window (the cinema screen) have been neutralized. Everything, it seems, will stay as terrible or perhaps even get worse.

Among the villagers Doc was the least inclined to socialize or go outside. He has retreated back to his room and by sealing the window is retreating even further. The viewer is trapped in the darkened room with Doc. We are offered no more freedom, no wider perspective, any more light or hope than he is. We are lost and alone together. As punishing as the elements and untrustworthy as people can be, individuals create their own traps and art need not offer any respite from the gathering gloom. The film seems to be admitting to its own inability or unwillingness to provide a “window on the world” for the viewer. Vision reveals nothing and might as well be ended. This is an anti-cinema, anti-art gesture, denying the efficacy of cinema itself.

The tolling bell at the end of Andrei Rublev signaled the end of the dark ages, both for the tormented protagonist and the long-suffering Russian nation. But in Satantango, after more than seven hours of stasis and frustrated movement, the final shot suggests the beginning of a new dark ages—or the very extinction of humanity itself, the pulse of human civilization having slowed and stopped. Much more than the conclusion of Godard’s Weekend, the end of Satantango is a truly definitive and chilling “end of movie/end of cinema.”

King Kong: Original Myths and Digital Imagery

Almost from the moment of its invention, the “realism” of photography was violated by its most talented practitioners. Gustav Le Grey created spectacular seascapes by combining the top half of one photograph (the sky) with the bottom half of another (the sea). Since the two exposures were joined at the horizon, the viewer may not realize that she is viewing a composite image. Photographers such as Henry Peach Robinson and Oscar Gustav Rejlander used multiple negatives to create compositions which mimicked the conventions of Victorian painting. For his historical-moralistic panorama The Two Ways of Life (1875) Rejlander used 32 wet collodion negatives—an impressive, laborious feat that anticipates the methods of digital image-making by more than a century.

As with photography, the manipulation and fabrication of the cinematic image to create a more compelling illusion of reality—or pure fantasy--began early. In 1895 W.K.L Dickson, who developed the kinteograph with Thomas Edison, used double exposures (running a piece of film through the camera twice while altering the composition of each pass) to make himself appear headless, two-headed, and make his bodyless head appear to rest on a plate.

Georges Melies placed actors before painted backdrops in A Trip to the Moon (1902). Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) used a matte effect to add a moving background to the static set of a boxcar’s interior. King Kong (1933) used stop-motion animation to make miniature apes and dinosaurs move, and—much like Le Grey—combined different shots (tiny humans in the foreground, Kong in the background)—to make the miniature ape appear to tower menacingly over real humans. In Citizen Kane director Orson Welles and cinematographer Greg Toland used double exposures (the lens focused on a different plane of action during each pass), wipes, and other techniques to create shots which for decades viewers have taken to be single-take, deep focus shots, just as Le Grey’s seascapes can still fool us.

Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of King Kong updates this tradition of image manipulation with the use of CGI (computer-generated imagery). Now, Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) is photographed against a green screen instead of a rear projection screen. King Kong is digitally animated pixels instead of a hand-animated metal armature covered in fur. The compositing of separate image elements is now accomplished on a computer rather than within the camera or with an optical printer. Whereas earlier films started as raw film stock in a camera, became workprint in a moviola, and finished as a release print in a projector, in Kong all audio and video elements are loaded into digital editing programs and the final digital version of the film is transferred to film for theater projection.

At the level of form and content, however, not much has changed since 1933. The 2005 King Kong strives to provide the same elements as the original film: wonder, suspense, horror, romance, spectacle, tragedy. It strives no less to attract a ticket-buying audience and realize a profit for the producers. Although the technology has changed, the elements of so-called Classical Hollywood Cinema (the star system, continuity editing, psychological realism, narrative closure) have not.

Indeed, the typical product of Millennial Hollywood, of which Jackson’s King Kong is an example, is an old-fashioned film tricked out with the newest sound and picture technology. Films such as Jurassic Park (1993), Independence Day (1996), Titanic (1997), Godzilla (1998), Gladiator (2000), Pearl Harbor (2001), Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), Troy (2004), Van Helsing (2004) and War of the Worlds (2005) are digital remakes of older films and/or revivals of classic genres. They are technologically innovative but stylistically and thematically conservative and traditional. But beyond this generic familiarity, is something essential about the moving image lost when digital media supplements or replaces film?

Today many film scholars and critics are complaining that cinema is drifting too far from its photographic roots—from it’s cinematic roots as well. Some critics fear that fin-de-siecle cinema would a fin du cinema. A 2001 collection of essays was entitled The End of Cinema as We Know It.

Although discussing a very different group of films, in 1983 Baudrillard described the type of cinema critics are complaining about today:

“A whole generation of films is appearing which will be to those we have known what the android is to man: marvelous, flawless artifacts, dazzling simulacra which lack only an imaginary and that particular hallucination which makes cinema what it is.”

One critic offered King Kong as part of this “end of cinema” thesis. In a mixed review of the film, Scott Foundas complained that, “…there were too many moments during King Kong when I felt I was witnessing the end of cinema, the final obfuscation between movies made by men and those made by machines.”

Wheeler Winston Dixon complains that the synthetic images of blockbusters like Titanic (1997) and The Matrix (1999) prove that the Lumieres’ tradition of realism has lost out to Melies’ tradition of spectacle”

“Mundanely perfect, these computer-engineered images conjure up the mechanical perfection of Maxfield Parrish illustrations, while simultaneously banishing the real to a phantom zone of nonexistence. And yet, as one eye-popping scene of spectacle and destruction after another fills the screen…audiences are bored, unsatisfied…The veracity of the moving image has been hopelessly compromised; the demarcation line between the real and the engineered (both aurally and visually) has been obliterated. All is construction and fabulation. All is predetermined; nothing natural remains.”

The success of the digital image—or any other new media--can attributed to the process Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call “remediation”: the adoption of the conventions of an old medium by a new one. Robinson and Rejlander “remediated” the older conventions of painting in the new art of photography. Today, CGI hides its artificiality by adopting the familiar and acceptable pictorial conventions of the photograph:

“To achieve photorealism, the synthetic digital image adopts the criteria of the photograph. It offers a single station point, a monocular point of view, and a photographic sense of appropriate composition…The photograph erases the human subject through the mechanics and chemistry of lens, shutter, and film. Digital graphics erases the subject algorithmically through the mathematics of perspective and shading embodied in a program.”

Remediation resembles Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph.” Likewise, the “content” of CGI is, in part, film.

John David Ebert, however, complains that CGI remediation of painting is not thorough enough. According to him, the problem with current CGI is that it ignores older pictorial conventions such as sfumato; the use of haze to indicate distance:

“With CGI-painted images…as they stand now, there is no such distinction between foreground and background, for the two are in exactly the same focus and show no differences of color perspective. The shots, consequently, look nowhere near as realistic as they are touted to be, but instead have caused film to look more and more like video games.”

For Ebert, digital films are unintentionally remediating the wrong media: video games instead of painting. He suggests that, “ visual technonerds should be required to take courses in art history.”

Digital technology can also effect the overall balance of elements of a film. Robert Kolker observes that the computer, because it more readily enables the creation of imaginary worlds, is

“…allowing filmmakers a wider scope of expression or, on the negative side, an opportunity to allow all creativity to flow to the design, while narrative and editing remain as banal as usual.”

Jackson’s King Kong realizes both the negative and positive opportunities of digital filmmaking. Jackson and his team can create a vaster and more fantastic Skull Island, and a more fluid and expressive Kong than the 1933 or 1976 versions of the film. But the film’s characterizations are familiar and the dialogue scenes are constructed out of conventional medium and close shots.

King Kong is technologically more complex but aesthetically simpler than Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994). The complex shifts in time and point of view, the stark contrast of youthful innocence and homicidal impulse, the troubling identification with murderers, and the charged, expressionistic performances of that film have no equivalent in King Kong—except perhaps the performance of Kong (created by actor Andy Sirkis). To a large extent Jackson has indeed allowed creativity to flow to the digital design of the film and has allowed narrative and editing to become banal.

Consequently, a digital ape is more expressive than any of the flesh-and-blood humans. Kong’s digital fur is more believable than Watt’s blonde wig. During the final battle atop the Empire State Building one can easily be distracted by the amazing digital recreation of 1933 Manhattan, your eye drifting from the foreground action (whose outcome you know) to the background.

Baudrillard was as critical of the content of movies as the form:

“Cinema plagiarizes and copies itself, remakes its classics, retroactivates its original myths, remakes silent films more perfectly than the originals, etc…”

Baudrillard could be describing King Kong. But he gives filmmakers too little credit. Like many contemporary films, Kong is aware of its history. In the postmodern fashion it is nostalgic and self-conscious at the same time. Just as George Lucas packed Star Wars (1977) with allusions to the classic films that have influenced him, Jackson doesn’t allow us to forget the original King Kong. Jackson’s film begins with Art Deco titles which resemble the titles of a 1930s RKO film (just as Star Wars begins with a text crawl which recalls the serials of the 1930s). The original Kong’s score is performed in the musical spectacle that accompanies Kong’s theatrical appearance.

The story and imagery of Jackson’s King Kong retroactivates cinema’s original myth that the cinematographer-explorer-scientist will bring images of raw nature to civilized society. In 1895 W.K.L. Dickson and Antonia Dickson (who worked for Thomas Edison) wrote one of the earliest histories of cinema and enthusiastically described the micro-cinematic observation of tiny insects, “Monsters close upon each other in a blind and indiscriminate attack, limbs are dismembered, gory globules are tapped, whole battalions disappear from view.” This sounds like the scenes of creature combat in King Kong and an earlier digital effects film, Starship Troopers (1998).

Baudrillard goes further and argues that movies tendency towards self-consciousness, nostalgia, and retro-styling is another instance of a postmodern loss of reality:

“Simultaneous with this attempt at absolute coincidence with the real, cinema also approaches coincidence with itself... Cinema is fascinated by itself as a lost object just as it (and we) are fascinated by the real as a referential in perdition.” (italics in original).

Today, cinema does seem fascinated with its own processes. Formal self-consciousness (what Bolter and Grusin call “hypermediacy”) has become a standard element of illusionistic Hollywood films. Blow Out (1981), Broadcast News (1987), Ed Wood (1994), Quiz Show (1994), Topsy-Turvy (1999), The Majestic (2001), The Aviator (2004), Ray (2004), Finding Neverland (2004), Being Julia (2004), Capote (2005) and Walk the Line (2005) include behind-the-scenes stories of movie, television, literary, theatrical, and musical productions.

There is even a subgenre of “lost object” films about the creation of spectacle using quaintly archaic technologies. In Chaplin (1992) silent movies are edited by hand measurement of film. Boogie Nights (1997) laments the transition of the adult film industry from film production to videotape production. In Almost Famous (2000) a magazine editor marvels at a primitive fax machine which is laughably slow by contemporary standards. In Good Night and Good Luck (2005) producer Fred Friendly (George Clooney) cues broadcaster Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) not via earpiece—headsets were too bulky for on-camera talent to wear—but by tapping him on the leg with a pen.

Self-reflexivity has always been an element of King Kong. The plot of Kong Kong is set in motion by the desire to make a movie. Kong is the spectacle that draws customers to a New York theater and ourselves to our local theater. Jackson’s King Kong is the most media-centric of the three versions. Much more time is devoted to the travails of producers, writers, and performers. The opening montage suggests the importance of entertainment to Depression-era New York City. The police shut down street crime and shut down bankrupt theaters. Denham’s (Jack Black) exertions as a scheming producer are almost as shocking as Kong’s rampages. Denham has a loyal, risk-taking cameraman in this version. Ann “tames” Kong with the same performing skills she used to beguile vaudeville audiences. We see Denham’s dream of a cinematic coup dissolve when a roll of film depicting the dinosaur stampede is accidentally ruined. The film also dwells on the strategic dishonesty of the film business when Denham’s lead actor (initially) proves to be a coward and is later publicly, falsely credited for rescuing Ann.

For Carina Chocano King Kong is “A movie about the movies, and specifically an exploitation picture about exploitation pictures…a bazillion-dollar spectacle that reserves the right to question the morality of spectacles…Kong is the last gasp of the great, natural world, reduced to consumerist spectacle.”

Read differently, King Kong is about how a recording of reality may be better than reality itself. When Denham’s footage is ruined, capturing Kong alive and bringing him before paying customers is the only way Denham can make money. Instead of images of Kong, he presents an audience with the real Kong. Images can be controlled. Animals cannot. Hence the death and destruction that follows. Rather than a “last gasp of the great, natural world, reduced to consumerist spectacle,” Kong proves that the natural world is reluctant to be reduced to spectacle. Kong would rather die than submit to such exploitation. Filmmakers may be better off with an imitation.

There is one “lost object” King Kong speaks to with unintentional irony. Carl Denham’s film expedition is a very ambitious location production. The entire crew travels to the other side of the world. The logistical challenge compounds the usual challenges of making a movie. There is an historical basis for this style of production, which began with the documentaries of Robert Flaherty and reached its zenith in the fiction films of 1960-1980.

In films such as Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Deliverance (1972), Sorcerer (1977) The Deer Hunter (1978), Days of Heaven (1978) Apocalypse Now (1979), Heaven’s Gate (1980) and Fitzcarraldo (1982) filmmakers took location production to an extreme—taking casts and crews to distant, inhospitable climates, removing themselves as far as possible from centers of film production. Filmmaking became a heroic adventure in itself, with the filmmakers battling storms, floods, illness, and political instability. Immersion in distant locales would provide for images that would immerse audiences in the texture and atmosphere of specific places, not studio backlots.

But King Kong is made in a style that renders the possibility of its own story less likely. Jackson, Lucas, Spielberg, Robert Rodriguez and other filmmakers are creating a green-screen aesthetic that negates the need for location shooting. This constitutes a return to the studio style in which actors never sacrificed the comforts of home and performed their roles on a soundstage against background footage of foreign locales shot by second unit crews. The final look of a film is, again, not dependent on uncontrollable locations but on the capabilities of filmmaker-controlled special effects.

King Kong’s digital Skull Island has a storybook grandeur but none of the dampness, dirt, and darkness of the jungle locations of, say, Aguirre, The Wrath of God, Sorcerer, or Apocalypse Now. Real jungle color and textures have been, in Dixon’s phrase, banished to “a phantom zone of nonexistence”.

In this context the use of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to add thematic weight to King Kong backfires. Writers such as Twain, Melville, and Conrad wrote adventure stories based on their own real-life travels and adventures. Filmmakers like Peter Jackson make adventure films based on their experience of other films.

For Hollywood, though, the ontology of the film image—the status of the profilmic event—is less important than the economy of entertainment. Audiences enter a theater with a predisposition to believe. The digital image will seem “real” as long as the movie around it is believable to an audience. And if audiences believe what they see, enjoy it, and keep paying to see it, filmmakers will give them more of the same. Despite what Dixon asserts, audiences are neither bored nor dissatisfied with digital imagery. If they were, films like King Kong would flop.

When audiences start laughing at digital “synthespians,” get bored with remakes, become dissatisfied with digital backgrounds, tire of the fantasy-action-adventure genres (all elements of Kong), or otherwise demand that movies “get real,” the photographic image may make a comeback. “Shot on film” might someday become the badge of honor and marketing ploy “A Cast of Thousands” or “In Technicolor and Cinemascope” were in an earlier era.

Sources
Gordon Baldwin, Looking at Photographs: A Guide to Technical Terms (1991)
Jean Baudrillard The Evil Demon of Images (1983)
Jay David Bolter and David Grusin Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999)
Carina Chocano “Tall, dark…” Los Angeles Times December 12, 2005
W.K.L Dickson and Antonia Dickson History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope and Kinetophonograph (1895)
Wheeler Winston Dixon “Twenty-five Reasons Why It’s All Over” (2001)
John David Ebert Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society (2005)
Scott Foundas, “The Return of the Kong” LA Weekly December 12, 2005
Robert Kolker A Cinema of Loneliness Third Edition (2000)
Robert Kolker Film, Form & Culture Third Edition (2002)
n.a. The Photography Book (1997)

The Exegesis of Emily Rose

Dear Geoffrey,

I enjoyed The Exorcism of Emily Rose but not nearly as much as you did. The film certainly gave more work to the actors than most contemporary films with a supernatural element. It was enjoyable, though conventional and predictable. As you said, it didn't try to outdo The Exorcist but there are many strong similarities.

In both films the possessed person is not the figure of moral contestation, an observer is. In The Exorcist, the disillusioned priest Damian Karras (Jason Miller) is the character whose faith is weak and who is redeemed through combat with the demon.

In Emily Rose, it is Erin Bruner (Laura Linney) who moves from agnosticism to (possible) belief in the course of defending Father Moore (Tom Wilkinson). Both films stage a debate between science and faith. The doctors and scientists in both films are somewhat smug and discredited by events within the film.

In The Exorcist, suspense is generated by the uncertainty of whether Regan and those around her will survive the possession. In Emily Rose the possessed girl is already dead, so the suspense is more philosophical: will the spiritual or scientific explanation for the woman's death prevail?

Emily Rose adds a new element to the debate by including testimony from a researcher (Shohreh Aghdashloo) who argues for a scientific basis for possession. She offers a middle ground between faith and science. But she seems too privileged to be a proper witness. She also seems as smug as the doctor who preceded her. Plus, the actress is obviously dubbed and her performance is weak. The film simply drops her and her line of argument, although Bruner mentions her theories in her summation.

As for the predictable aspects, when Bruner says "I'm not a believer" early in the film I know it was her faith which would be tested, that she is the Karras figure. Also, the film sets up an obvious contrast between career-driven, amoral lawyering (which resulted in the acquittal of a man who later commits a double homicide) and principle-based lawyering more focused on her client.

When Bruner's boss (Colm Feore) essentially offers her a partnership in exchange for not allowing Father Moore to testify it's obvious Bruner will have to righteously rebel against her boss and "do the right thing" by letting the priest tell his story. No Hollywood film seems complete these days without some rebellion against authority figures.

Long before Bruner says it, it is clear that Emily Rose is aiming for the basic supernatural horror film theme: acceptance of the spirit world as a reality equal to the physical plane. Fair enough.

Hollywood films being a visual entertainment form, they pose abstract arguments in visual terms. This makes spiritual themes a tricky matter. Many supernatural films reduce this tricky matter to the problem of visual trickery: God (or the devil) is real if the special effects seem real. Hence, Hollywood's abiding interest in depicting miracles; God's CGI. Emily Rose, no less than The Exorcist, makes use of visual effects to convince us of an essentially spiritual question.

Although the comparison is unfair, Carl Dreyer's The Trial of Joan of Arc addresses the problem of faith more convincingly. Like Emily Rose, Joan is structured around a trial. Officials try to shake the accused of her belief of divine inspiration, much like the prosecutor (Campbell Scott) in Emily Rose tries to refute Father Moore's story of demonic possession. Joan's glowering prosecutors--raving in low-angle shots designed to make them seem more menacing--are much more over-the-top than the prosecutor in Emily Rose.

But since Joan is completely free of supernatural imagery (the film is austere in the extreme), the film does not affirm the truth or falsehood of Joan's claims by means of spectacle. We have to take them, well, on faith. Joan's refusal to renounce her divine purpose is as pure an act of faith as it is possible to dramatize. We are moved by authenticity and integrity of character rather than the power of visual spectacle.

Emilt Rose's deployment of the faith-vs-science theme has interesting resonances with contemporary history. The ongoing Creationism vs Evolution debate is an obvious one. As Skeptic Magazine publisher Michael Shermer wrote:

"You can believe in God and evolution as long as you keep the two in separate, logic-tight compartments. Belief in God depends on religious faith. Belief in evolution depends on empirical evidence."
("Why God's in a class by himself," Los Angeles Times, August 7, 2005, M5)

Emily Rose dramatizes a conflict between faith and empirical evidence. More interestingly, it depicts how Bruner tries to breach these two "logic-tight compartments" and use faith to counter empirical evidence.

But here is where deeper, more disturbing resonances can be found. The assertion that scientific facts can be ignored if a larger faith-related principle is involved sounds like the Bush Administration in action. As many critics have observed, Bush's administration is, to use the President's term, "faith-based" rather than reality-based.

In fact, according to journalist Ron Suskind, at least one Bush administration official believes it too. An unnamed official claims that while journalists are in the "reality-based community," and "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality" Bush/Cheney is not. "...That's not the way the world works anymore...We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."
(quoted in The State We're In; Bush/Cheney and the Specter of Theocracy by Mark Crispin Miller,Amazon Shorts, 1)

Bruner argues that a possibility should be given the same weight as a fact. Medical opinion argues that Emily Rose had a complex medical condition. But it's possible that she was demonically possessed, argues Bruner, so decide as if they possibility outweighed medical opinion. "Reality-based" decision-making is too limiting for Bruner, just as it is for Bush/Cheney.

Bruner also says that Emily and Father Moore's "sincere belief" in possession motivated them--as if sincerity absolves one of the need to be right (I call this the Argument From Personal Authenticity). Similarly, President Bush repeatedly asserts the sincerity of his earlier belief that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction--as if his sincerity absolves him of having been wrong, with costly results.

Similarly, the film leads us to believe that in her summation Bruner is acting in good faith and not just evoking the possibility of supernatural power to win her case and get her promotion. Likewise, Bush/Cheney is constantly telling us that it is acting in good faith and is not pushing an unstated political or other agenda beneficial to itself and its constituencies. Bruner is more convincing.

Bruner complains that "facts don't allow for possibilities" (which is probably the Bush/Cheney mantra). But that's what facts are for: to close off some possibilities and create others; establish a modicum of certainty, and provide a basis for effective action.

You may find new facts to disprove older facts, but negating factuality itself is not the same thing. Bruner cleverly reconfigures the established legal concept of "reasonable doubt" with fantasy speculation. This is the crucial intellectual confusion Bruner employs,

This philosophical bait-and-switch is a recurring theme of Bush/Cheney. North Korea does not have nuclear-tipped ICBMs but they might some day so lets spend billions on anti-missile missiles based in Alaska. These missiles fail their tests. But they might work, so let's deploy them anyway.

The vast majority of climatologists believe global warming is affected by industrialism. But they might be wrong so lets not sign the Kyoto Accords.

There is no proof that that Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11. But it's a possibility, so let's talk about him as if he was and act on that.

There is also no proof that Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. But it's a possibility, so lets go to war anyway.

There is no medical evidence that Terry Schiavo has any consciousness. But a miracle may happen some day so let's intervene in a legal family decision that's already been made.

We don't know if a German of Lebanese descent is connected to terrorism. But it's possible so let's kidnap and torture him anyway.

There is no scientific basis for Intelligent Design but let's treat it as if it is equal to science anyway.

So what if a majority of FDA officials deem a morning-after pill to be safe. It might not be, so let higher-level appointees reverse the decision of the staff scientists.

The President's Constitutional role of Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces does not explicitly allow the Executive to conduct warrentless wiretaps of Americans. But it might, so let's act as if it does (Bush's defense, again, is to claim a good-faith effort to protect national security).

Thomas says in his summation, "In here, facts are what must matter." I agree with him, and worry that Bruner--and the film--are legitimizing "archaic superstition" in the courtroom. "Facts are what must matter" is the mantra of every group challenging Bush/Cheney.

Emily Rose works to makes us question the validity of scientific/medical facts. Bush/Cheney, like all powerful propagandists, want to do the same: create an environment in which facts don't matter anymore, where emotional persuasion buttressed by religiosity can trump argument.

The film seems aware of the dilemma it has created and cleverly splits the difference so that both sides of the faith-science argument can claim vindication: Father Moore is found guilty but receives no further punishment.

The closing epigraphs also affirm both faith and science. Emily's gravesite becomes a shrine and Bruner turns over her case files to an "expert in medical research and anthropology." In true Hollywood fashion, Emily Rose tries to reconcile opposed values and leave no audience outside the film's embrace.