New Brutality Film: Race and Affect in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema

222 Pages·2005·2.04 MB·English

by  Paul Gormley

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The 1990s saw the emergence of a new kind of American G Paul Gormley
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cinema, which this book calls the ‘new-brutality film.’ Violence
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and race have been at the heart of Hollywood cinema since its
birth, but the new-brutality film was the first kind of popular le
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American cinema to begin making this relationship explicit. The
rise of this cinema coincided with the rebirth of a long-neglected
strand of film theory, which seeks to unravel the complex
relations of affect between the screen and the viewer. This
The New-Brutality Film
book analyses and connects both of these developments,
arguing that films like Falling Down, Reservoir Dogs, Se7enand
Strange Dayssought to reanimate the affective impact of white
Hollywood cinema by miming the power of African-American
Race and Affect in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema
and particularly hip-hop culture. The book uses several films as
case-studies to chart these developments:
• Falling Downboth appropriates of the political black rage
of the ‘hood film and is a transition point between the
Paul Gormley is Senior
white postmodern blockbuster and the new-brutality film.
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• Gangsta films like Boyz N the Hood and Menace II Society
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provided the inspiration for much of the new-brutality film’s School of Cultural and
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mimesis of African-American culture. Innovation Studies at the e
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University of East London.
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• The films of Quentin Tarantino (including Reservoir Dogsand He has published articles on B
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Pulp Fiction) are new-brutality films that attempt to reanimate contemporary Hollywood u
the affective power of Hollywood cinema. cinema in several places ta
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including Angelakiand t
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• Se7en, Strange Days, Fight Cluband The Matrixtrilogy signify
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both the development & the demise of the new-brutality film.
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This book charts and analyses an important period of Hollywood
cinema as well as engaging with key contemporary thinkers
(Deleuze, Jameson, Zizek and Benjamin) in a strikingly innova-
tive fashion. The work will appeal to dedicated film scholars,
critical theorists and readers with a general interest in film.
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ISBN 1-84150-119-0
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intellect e
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PO Box 862 l
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Bristol BS99 1DE c
United Kingdom t intellect
www.intellectbooks.com 9 781841 501192
gormley.qrk 19/7/05 10:33 am Page 1
The New-Brutality Film
Race and Affect in Contemporary Hollywood
Cinema
Paul Gormley
intellect™
Bristol, UK
Portland, OR, USA
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First Published in the UK in 2005 by
Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK
First Published in the USA in 2005 by
Intellect Books, ISBS, 920 NE 58th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, Oregon 97213-3786, USA
Copyright ©2005 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Electronic ISBN 1-84150-926-4 / ISBN 1-84150-119-0
Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons
Copy Editor: Julie Strudwick
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd.
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Contents
5 Acknowledgments
7 Introduction
Torturous Cinema:
Questions of Affect, Mimesis and Race in The New-Brutality Film
43 Chapter One
Naïve Imitations:
Falling Down, the Crisis of the Action-Image and Cynical Realism
73 Chapter Two
Gangsters and Gangstas:
Boyz N the Hood, and the Dangerous Black Body
99 Chapter Three
Gangsters and Gangstas Part Two:
Menace II Society and the Cinema of Rage
137 Chapter Four
Miming Blackness:
Reservoir Dogs and ‘American Africanism’
159 Chapter Five
Trashing Whiteness:
Pulp Fiction, Se7en, Strange Days and Articulating Affect
183 Conclusion
195 Bibliography
203 Filmography
207 Index
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Acknowledgements
Although there are always too many people to thank in a project of this size, the
following people deserve particular mention for their intellectual stimulus, and
other support over the various stages of completion: John Beasley-Murray, The
School of Cultural and Media Studies and Social Sciences and my Urban Film
students at the University of East London, Haim Bresheeth, Jessica Edwards,
Natalia Garcia, Jane Gaines and the Literature Programme at Duke University,
Jeremy Gilbert, Andrew and Jessica Grierson, Laura Mulvey, Mica Nava, Luciana
Parisi, Elaine Pennicott, Greg Santori, Ashwani Sharma, Mark Shiel, Sophy Smith
and her family, Andrew Sneddon, Tiziana Terranova, Carol Watts, Paul Whelan,
Nick Wilson - and my family.
This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Eileen Gormley (1947-1982).
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Introduction
Torturous Cinema:
Questions of Affect, Mimesis and Race in The New-
Brutality Film
One of the most striking scenes in 1990s’ US cinema is filmed in ten minutes of
real time and centres on a gangster’s apparently meaningless mutilation of a cop in
a disused warehouse. The infamous torture scene in Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino
1991) begins with a fixed shot of the gangster, Mr Blonde, sat on an abandoned
hearse, and the cop tied to a chair in the centre of the room. From the cop’s point
of view, we see Blonde jump from his perch, with the sinister enunciation, ‘alone at
last’. As Blonde advances towards the cop, the shots start switching vigorously
between both points of view, and we know that some sort of sadistic violence is
about to ensue. After some verbal taunting, and the restless circular movement of
the camera, the violence begins with a sudden slap to the cop’s already swollen
face. This blow is made more unsettling for the viewer, by a sudden switch in the
camera’s point of view which gives the effect of Blonde’s outstretched hand coming
towards the audience. The film then cuts to another shot of the gangster, standing
behind the cop’s head and gagging him with some sticky masking tape. As he
silences the cop, Blonde makes the horrifying comment, ‘I don’t give a good fuck
what you know or don’t know, but I’m going to torture you anyway’. The gangster
then pulls out his gun on a horrified cop, vainly struggling to escape the line of fire,
and we know that knowledge or reason has no power to save the cop from the
impending violence. This is echoed in the viewer’s relationship to the scene. The
bout of violence has no real narrative logic beyond the fact that we have been told
by another member of the gang that Blonde is a ‘fucking madman’, and this lack of
narrative cause and effect leaves the viewer without a clue as to what happens next.
The camera cuts to a close-up of Blonde’s boot as he lifts it on to a table to pull out
a razor, asking the bizarre question, ‘Ever listen to K. Billy’s Super Sounds of the
Seventies?’ The film then zooms in on the cop’s beaten and anguished face, before
it cuts back to Blonde dancing around him. Suddenly, Blonde lunges at the cop and
the viewer with the razor. The changes in point of view become more frenetic, as
the gangster sits on the cop’s knee, and begins to slice his ear off with the razor.
The camera then pans away, leaving the actual disembodiment unseen - although
the acousmatic sounds of the cop’s muffled cries of pain leave us with the
impression of being visually present throughout the mutilation. Blonde then moves
back into the frame, and while considering the organ, he alludes to the self- In
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reflexive, sadistic and masochistic overtones of the scene with the question, ‘Was d
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that as good for you as it was for me?’1 ctio
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After this torturous sequence, the viewer might reasonably expect some period of
respite, with a cut away to another scene, but the film stays with Blonde, following
him to his car. This escape outside of the claustrophobic confines of the warehouse
is only temporary as the camera tracks the gangster, petrol container in hand, back
into the building. In a slow tracking shot, he dances his way around the cop, to the
sounds of Stealers Wheel’s ‘Stuck in the Middle with You.’ The cuts between shots
suddenly increase their pace, as Blonde begins to drench the cop with gasoline.
The liquid also splatters the camera, threatening to splash through the boundary
between screen and viewer. Finally the gangster pulls out a Zippo lighter, to torch
the cop alive, when suddenly his chest explodes in a mass of red, with the sound of
gunshots puncturing the soundtrack. The shot then cuts to the source of this
gunfire, another, previously unconscious member of the gang, firing at Blonde,
until the camera circles slowly around to Blonde as he slowly falls to the floor.
This particular scene contains a number of the features which mark the
emergence of a new strand of Hollywood cinema in the 1990s, which I call in this
book, the ‘new-brutality’ film. These films all signified a change in aesthetic - a
new aesthetic direction in Hollywood film. Reservoir Dogs, Falling Down
(Schumacher 1992), Pulp Fiction (Tarantino 1994), Strange Days (Bigelow 1995),
Se7en (Fincher 1995) are all new-brutality films, and the one feature that they all
share in common is their attempt to renegotiate and reanimate the immediacy and
affective qualities of the cinematic experience within commercial Hollywood.
There are other films we might include in this list but it is through these particular
examples that I shall be exploring what we might mean by the notion of cinematic
immediacy and affect in the context of the 1990s. All these films attempt to assault
the body of the viewer and make the body act involuntarily in the sense that they all,
as Linda Williams puts it, attempt to ‘make the body do things’.2Most importantly,
these films all make the viewer’s body act in such a way that it imitates and mimics
the actions of the cinematic body, or the bodies that the viewer experiences on the
screen. They all contain images which cause a reaction based on immediacy and
bodily affect which subordinates critical consciousness and awareness of the world
or knowledge outside the image to its initial impact. Moreover the use of images of
blackness and African American popular culture as a means by which to create a
new cinematic affect and immediacy is a common strategy of all the new-brutality
films of this book. It is also important to realise that African-American culture has
historically been situated as a site of the ‘new’ in many of the important shifts in
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Fil the economics and aesthetics of US cinema. Michael Rogin notes that ‘each
y transformative moment in the history of American film has founded itself on the
utalit surplus symbolic value of blacks, the power to make African Americans stand for
Br something besides themselves’.3 This book will argue that the new-brutality film
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e is another of these transformative moments and it is ‘new’ because of the particular
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e ways in which contemporary black culture is used to produce affect. At the same
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time, the use of African-American culture to signal a new aesthetic direction in
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1990s’ Hollywood cinema also links this genre to wider questions of the
construction of white American cultural identity.
These are sweeping claims and questions of affect are not readily associated with
Hollywood-style cinema, caught up as it was in years of a narrative-centred
tradition. They are also statements that depend on the notion of a viewer
unsupported by empirical research and a ‘balanced’ reading. Nevertheless, these
assertions are intended to raise some complex issues within the study of film
theory and history, particularly concerning the ways in which meaning is made in
the consumption of images.
Affect and Cultural Knowledge
One of the most important questions for contemporary film theory is the
resonance between the bodily impact of the image and responses elicited by the
cultural meaning or signification of images. Gilles Deleuze opens up this question
in Cinema 2when he argues that ‘the most pressing problem’ in cinema is ‘that of
the relations between cinema and language’.4 Deleuze’s ‘recapitulation of images
and signs’ explores the degree to which semiotic or what we might call a linguistic-
based film theory has sought to reduce film to a series of signifiers and signifieds
without taking into account that film does not fit exclusively into a language system.
Steven Shaviro takes a broadly Deleuzian approach in his polemic, The Cinematic
Body, arguing that the dominant paradigms of semiotic and psychoanalytic film
theory is reductive and disavows the power of the connection between the
cinematic image and viewer. Shaviro argues that the cinematic experience is
primarily tactile and visceral, rendering the conscious and unconscious processes
of signification to secondary level:
In film...perception becomes a kind of physical affliction, an intensification and disar-
ticulation of bodily sensation rather than a process either of naïve (ideological or
imaginary) belief or of detached, attentive consideration.5
Barbara Kennedy’s book Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation also
seeks to explore cinema as a medium which is primarily an experience of non-
cognitive senses. Kennedy’s work is also part of a growing collection of research in
contemporary film and cultural theory that seeks to explore the political and
aesthetic qualities of the cinema through its affective powers. The New-Brutality
Filmis conceptually situated within the (false) binary of thinking about cinema as
a mass of signs and meanings, and film as a primarily sensory and affective
medium that signifies as a secondary process. Ultimately the book explores the
resonations between affect and meaning, and argues that the politics and aesthetics In
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of race in contemporary American cinema are too complex to be thought through d
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in terms of either the signifying systems of cultural history or affect. The work of tio
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