A World in Chaos: Social Crisis and the Rise of Postmodern Cinema

332 Pages·2003·18.594 MB·English

by  Carl Boggs, Thomas Pollard

A WORLD IN
Social Crisis
and the
Rise of
Postmodern
Cinema
CARl TOM
BOGGS POLLARD
and
ROWMAN & LITTLE FIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Lanham • Boulder' New York' Oxford
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Boggs, Carl.
A world in chaos: social crisis and the rise of postmodern cinema I Carl Boggs and
Tom Pollard.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7425-3288-7 (hardcover: alk. paper)-ISBN 0-7425-3289-5 (pbk.: alk.
paper)
l. Motion pictures-Social aspects-United States. I. Pollard, Tom, 1947- n. Title.
PNI995.9.S6B642003
302.23'43'0973-dc21 2003004675
Printed in the United States of America
QTM
~ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
For Cynthia Boresoff
-CB
For Sue Dickey
-TP
iii

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PREFACE
T his book is an exploration of several powerful trends in Hollywood
filmmaking that we refer to as "postmodern cinema"-trends we be
lieve both reflect and influence the larger sociohistorical environment within
which movies are produced, distributed, viewed, and critically assessed. We
do not argue that such trends are necessarily predominant (much less mono
lithic), but they do carry forward some of the most creative and influential
artistic forms of our period, going back to the 1960s. Nor do we insist that
"postmodernism," in film or any other realm, amounts to anything resem
bling a pure, undistilled cultural expression; the very diffuse and multifac
eted nature of the postmodern shift militates against such homogeneity. On
the contrary, we find in present-day filmmaking-as in the mass media and
popular culture-a rich, complex, indeterminate mixture of elements incor
porating both "modern" and "postmodern," although we do argue that the
latter is clearly ascendant within parameters of the film industry. In ap
proaching the study of cinema in this fashion, we embarked on this project
less as an exercise in conventional academic "film studies" than as an explo
ration of the complex developmental interaction between film and its
broader environment, between art and society. From this standpoint, we look
to critically investigate American film culture along many dimensions: as an
aesthetic form, a mode of entertainment, a vital component of the mass me
dia, and a crucial and highly profitable industry with an increasingly global
ized setting. Our excursion into postmodern cinema does not privilege any
of these elements.
The interpretation of Hollywood filmmaking we develop here, with em
phasis on the period from the late 1960s to the beginning of the twenty-first
VII
PREFACE
century, revolves around a fundamental shift in the material and ideological
life of the country, bringing to the fore drastically altered images of social re
ality, new film making techniques, and a whole panorama of changing sensi
bilities around the family, sexuality, personal relationships, work, politics,
and so forth. We do not insist that there is anything smooth, uniform, or
necessarily predictable about this shift-indeed, such a premise would fly in
the face of what postmodern culture has come to represent within the ma
trix of historical conditions. Our interpretation of postm odern cinema calls
into question certain stereotypes of the Hollywood film industry, above all
the notion that it merely perpetuates conservative or hegemonic values in
the service of corporate domination. There is of course more than a kernel
of truth to this, but a more comprehensive look at movies produced over the
past three decades shows a richer, more complex, and indeed a more con
flicted legacy that runs counter to such facile generalizations. We argue that
the propaganda model or "inculcation thesis" so often applied to media cul
ture simply fails to hold up to close scrutiny. What we find instead are
strong countervailing trends that include, among other things, something of
a revolt against long-standing Hollywood methods, formulas, and themes.
Without doubt, the corporate structure, now more powerful and globalized
than ever, sets limits to the cinematic enterprise, but this structure imposes
no more rigorous limits on filmmaking than it does on book publishing or
popular music (where an extremely wide range of products is available).
Our goal in this study is to investigate the different, often conflicted and
contradictory currents at work in a film industry that long ago departed
from the ritualized practices and norms of the classical studio system.
We suggest that postmodern culture embellishes a strong pull toward di
versity, critique, marginality, and even rebelliousness as it is reproduced
largely within confines of the mainstream culture industry. This is one of the
great paradoxes of Hollywood filmmaking today, which helps account for its
peculiar aesthetic and political idiosyncrasies. It is within such a culture, ori
ented toward power, profits, mass audiences, and market standing, that films
of such maverick directors as Oliver Stone, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese,
Robert Altman,John Sayles, the Coen brothers, Tim Burton, and John Wa
ters have been regularly produced and distributed since the 1970s. While
this stratum of directors (and affiliated producers, writers, and editors) might
properly be described as a cultural elite, it is a stratum nonetheless keenly re
sponsive to conditions of everyday life in post-Fordist, globalizing, socially
atomized capitalist society. This is a society and culture, moreover, where el
ements of modernity (crisis ridden as they are) and postmodernity coexist
within a tense and uneasy equilibrium.
"111
PREFACE
We trace the evolution of postmodern cinema through its multiple and
overlapping expressions: films that fit the blockbuster-spectacle mode be
ginning in the mid-1970s (Star Wars and Titanic), the theme of existential
angst and despair (the movies of Woody AlIen), the narrative of American
historical decline and "loss of innocence" (Oliver Stone's JFK), the celebra
tion of social mayhem and violence (Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction), and
a "ludic" preoccupation with farce and playfulness (John Waters's Serial
Mom). What postmodern films share in common is an irreverence for au
thority and convention-a rebellious spirit, dystopic views of the future, cyn
ical attitudes toward the family and romance, images of alienated sexuality,
narrative structures deprecating the role of old-fashioned heroes, and per
haps above all, the sense of a world filled with chaos. These features are of
ten combined with a romantic turn toward nostalgia, a longing for the past
that encapsulates so much postmodern culture, along with a harshly critical,
even nihilistic attitude toward politics, reflected in such 1990s films as Bob
Roberts, JFK, Enemy of the State, Wag the Dog, Falling Down, Primary Col
ors, and Bulworth. Not surprisingly, films produced within the postmodern
arc rarely embrace any coherent politics; their often well-developed cultural
radicalism scarcely enters the realm of political radicalism. From such per
spectives we conclude that an understanding of American film culture must
incorporate yet go beyond scholarly discourses such as film studies, post
structural cultural criticism, neo-Marxism, critical theory, and those main
stream texts that strive to isolate the study of cinema from its sociohistorical
context. Such methodologies, useful to a point, present film as a separate cul
tural medium with its own esoteric aesthetic and technical characteristics, or
they reduce what is a complex and diverse cinematic enterprise to the work
ings of a monolithic culture industry
To investigate the historical and social meanings of postmodern cinema,
we have chosen to incorporate but also supplement the fields of academic
film studies and cultural criticism, bringing in discourses associated with so
ciology, history, economics, and literature as well as communications and
popular culture. A complex, mediated phenomenon like film requires a crit
ical, multidisciplinary approach engaging the dialectical interplay of cinema
and larger trends at work in a rapidly changing, post-Fordist, globalized so
ciety. Strict attention to specific "texts," "codes," and "discourses" divorced
from their totality can never be adequate to this task. Further, to understand
the dynamics of film culture, we need awareness of developments within the
general culture (and on the edge of that culture)-in contrast to the familiar
film studies emphasis on artistically elevated but marginal works quite dis
tant from the world of mass audiences and broad societal concerns. By fixing
IX