From: egnilges@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Edward G. Nilges)
Subject: Re: Coppola's DRACULA
Originator: news@nimaster
Organization: Princeton University
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 1993 14:00:31 GMT

In article <1993Jan19.203626.1048@sco.com> jondr@sco.COM (Karen Silkwood's car) writes:

>
>I'm going to put this in terms as simple, clear and unambiguous as possible
>so that hopefully it will penetrate all three inches of your skull, Ed.
>
>1. I agree that *all* media have the power to "program" our minds.
>2. I agree that we should critically examine the messages being broadcast at
>   us in pop culture works.
>3. I do NOT agree that there are any harmful/dangerous messages in Coppola's
>   Dracula.  All the "bad vibes" you have listed seem like the work of an
>   overactive imagination.

Since you admit that the process is at work in the Lethal Weapon series,
I think at this point you are just trying to win an argument, even at
the sacrifice of your deeper principles.

And if you'll refer to the original post, you'll find that the sexism of
Dracula is not my suggestion, but that of Lydia Sargent in Dec 1992 Z.
I added to Sargent's charge the charge of anti-Muslim racism.  And much
of my critique, far from being the product of "an overactive imagination",
was derived from writings on TV and the movies by Mark Miller, who I
cited.  You flatter me to say that this is original criticism.  I
challenge you to find a study that gives Coppola a Good Housekeeping
seal of multi-cultural approval such that his movies have been found
to encourage intercultural understanding; I'd say that it's the reverse;
the Godfather, for example, sets stereotypes of Italians back years.
>
>yeah, and what happens in sitcoms and horror movies?  the good guys win.

Not always, and often they win by a sort of deus ex machina in which
patriarchal authority is used in a pinch.  

>beaver always gets on the team after the initial rejection, 

Only AFTER he accedes to the superior wisdom of his older brother and
father, which the show's episodes were repeatedly concerned with 
reinforcing.

>and after a few
>setbacks, the good guys *do* manage to drive the stake into the heart of the
>vampire.  

Only after they accede to the superior wisdom of Anthony Hopkins.

>movies with unhappy endings are fought tooth and nail by the
>studios!  my favorite movie of all time is terry gilliam's _brazil_, and the
>story of how universal tried to change the ending (and indeed the entire
>message of the film) is well documented.

I think you've lost the thread, since I was saying, not that studios
favor movies with happy versus unhappy endings (the very dichotomy
comes from the primitive aesthetics of childhood and is inadequate to
an adult film criticism), or vice-versa.  I was saying that movies
undercut human agency.  In your self-induced confusion, you've ended
up arguing my thesis; I'm obliged to you; for while BRAZIL shows the
protagonist as a hero, it UNDERCUTS his agency by dooming him at the
end.  Brazil is a satire on its idealistic protagonist (whose
idealism is lost on American audiences, drawn as it is from John
Bunyan and the Arthurian legends, where Gilliam seems to get much of
his (unconscious?) inspiration.)  It's a putdown of idealism...of human
agency.

Your confusion, which ends up stating the opposite of what it sets out 
to say, is endemic to people with vaguely Leftish sentiments in the
media.  Thus, Matt Groening, who started out doing rather creative
work on dysfunctional families, is now making millions while South
Korean animators do his dog work on The Simpsons; and his current 
cartoon in this week's Village Voice (and similar rags) lists as one 
of the "forbidden words of 1993", "question authority."  The stance 
of universal parody, so loved by the vague Left, in abandoning a fixed 
location from which the parody is meaningful, ends up not parodying 
the texts it would deride, but repeating them; just as some Saturday 
Night Live episodes are quite simply racist, Groening's use of his 
authority to forbid the canaille to "question authority" can be read 
as a serious statement by a man whose "authority" has secured his livelihood.

>
>I *want* to agree with you, Ed, but you are completely wrong.  It is only
>Coppola's obssession with Christianity that led to the blatantly Christian
>ending of Dracula.  In 9 out of 10 horror movies, there are no super-human
>agencies saving mankind.  The humans eventually get clever enough to deduce
>the monster's fatal flaw and do it in.  Good triumphs over evil.  Hollywood
>wouldn't have it any other way.  

Think harder, please.  In The Fly, Jeff Goldblum's entrepreneural
creativity becomes crazed obsession; perhaps we are being told by
corporations to be less experimental in technology and life.  

There is no one message.  Sometimes, authority in movies is explicitly
patriarchal; Billie Crystal's glum steadfastness is shown to be the
cure for Meg Ryan's "feminine" wavering, wise old millionaires
intervene in Crocodile Dundee.  Othertimes, the patriarchal signifier
escapes a carrier (in somewhat the same way monarchical authority in
Britain is wielded by Parliament in the absence of a written 
Constitution, but no longer "carried" by the Queen.)   In many movies,
it migrates to a little child WITHOUT losing its patriarchal quality;
in many movies and situation comedies, the children reflect the (real)
need children have for some sort of family by espousing conservatively
patriarchal messages, while their parents indulge themselves in
escapes from patriarchy; the baby in Dinosaur continually must correct
his father, not when the father exercises patriarchal authority, but
when the father tries to escape it (as, in a recent episode, by eating
the "happy plant.")

It's less a positive unitary message such as was sent by Fifties sitcoms
than a continually moving binary opposition which continually secures
the upper ground in that opposition.  Even in the most "left" moment in
recent television history, when Dan Quayle questioned the decision of
the (fictional) Murphy Brown to have a child out of wedlock, the televised
opposition was clearcut (hip Candace Bergen versus the original Hoosier
lightweight) and sides were chosen up without any reflection.  There was
no discussion of the possible merits of Dan's charges from the standpoint
that poor women may be ill-advised to follow Murphy Brown's example when
they don't have her resources, or from the standpoint that working class
men feel completely shut out, and used as ATMs and emotional punching
bags, after divorce.  There was no discussion of how the economy degrades
real fathers by continually undercutting their economic viability by
substituting jobs paying mininum wage for jobs paying a family wage.  
Instead, one was expected to secure the hipper higher ground in the debate.

When I first saw the current group of "feminist" sitcoms, featuring
"strong" women like "Kate and Allie" and Murphy Brown, I was less
struck by any representation of strength than a continual whining and
a barely concealed murderous rage.  This, and (with the exception of
early editions of Roseanne) sets whose real-life counterpart cannot
be afforded anymore by real families.

This continual substitution of binary opposition for reflection is, as
Anne Wilson Schaef has written, a hallmark of an extremely dysfunctional
and addictive society.  The way it is implemented always changes and it
is always simpleminded to say that Hollywood implements it in ONE
particular good guys/bad guys way.  It even fools Mark Crispin Miller,
the guy I've cited, for he claims that it always leaves the corporation
and the product above criticism.  This is not so; in its continual
quest for novelty, the media will select a pattern of consumption or
a corporation and make that pattern or corporation "it" (in the style
of the dysfunctional family), a scapegoat to bear the ills of the entire
system.  IBM is being destroyed by Wall Street because IBM is now "it"
and must bear ALL the blame for the widespread incompetence (shading
into functional illiteracy and innumeracy) and machine-worship of the
ENTIRE computer industry.  People who buy GM cars are "it" in the
auto industry.

It's rather more complicated than you put it, and there isn't an
explicit conspiracy to make good triumph over evil.  Instead,
films reinforce corporatist values (teamwork over individualism,
together with a paradoxical exaltation of the individual which
is manufactured schizophrenia) by the simple mechanism of being
producible ONLY by a large corporation.  

Before ALL movies had to be color (or colorized), and ALL movies
had to go through several layers of review, Martin Scorsese was
able to make two films which, only ten short years COULD NOT BE
MADE.  These films are (1) Taxi Driver and (2) Raging Bull.  Travis
Bickle is too morally ambiguous to be acceptable postReagan, and
Raging Bull, which ends with a punch drunk fighter reciting poetry,
is "too complicated", eg., it doesn't insult the viewer's intelligence
like Peggy Sue Got Married (didn't Coppola make that piece of idiotic
fluff?)

>Did you see _The Player_?  I believe that
>it makes the ultimate statement on this theme.

No, I wanna see it but it's disappeared.  When it's released in video,
I am sure I will have prolix opinions on it for posting to this
forum.  And I yam convinced that I have made the ultimate statement on
this theme :-).

>
>yeah, so what's your point?  labor unions may at one time have been an
>unsullied force for good, championing the cause of the "powerless" worker,
>but at this time, many of them are just other rapacious coporations.

...whose rapacity en masse is manufactured by the cynicism in detail
of their members.  Everybody in the game expects the absolute worst
from everyone else; labor expects to be screwed by management, management
expects to be screwed by labor, union stewards expect the rank and file
to be interested in doing less work for more pay, and the rank and
file (from whose ranks come both labor, and on occasion, management)
expect the union to increase dues and managers to speed up the line.
Note that the overarching theme is one of cynicism and pessimism and
that this manufactures the very results it predicts.

Albert O. Hirschman of the Institute for Advanced Study, in an essay
called "Against Parsimony", has taken issue with the oversimplified
view of human nature, that denies altruism and idealism, and that is
endemic to economics and "libertarianism", and to which ordinary people
in America increasingly subscribe.  Hirschman shows how the very view
manufactures conditions that reinforce its truth, but also that
policies based on the "parsimonious" economics view of human nature
as self-interested, period, tend to work well only when there is a
large "commons" and a large reservoir of altruism and idealism on
which to draw.  Unions were founded as expressions of solidarity, a
form of altruism, but of course if one denies the reality of altruism
one will regard one's union, should one belong, only as a way of
furthering one's ends.


>
>>Your attitude is one essentially of self-hatred, since you
>>went to see Dracula while feeling it was "brainless", WITHOUT watching
>>it critically and discovering why it was both brainless AND sexist.
>
>yeah, i do hate myself Ed.  i hate everything i stand for.  but i hate
>everything *you* stand for even more.  my friend graham has given up
>everything - a cushy job, a great apartment in a nice area of san francisco,
>- to fly to the lovely little war-torn nation of angola where he is building
>a school for orphans.  i respect his sacrifice more than anything.  i write
>him letters where i tell him how important i think his work is, and how he
>shouldn't give up, no matter how hard it seems.  what are you doing to
>better this world?  you could be using your apparently substantial intellect
>for some beneficent purpose, but instead you sit around composing
>self-congratulatory bullshit about movies like _Dracula_, which doesn't
>deserve one tenth of the effort we've given it.  you say, "i'm fighting the
>demons like jon drukman, who want us to turn off our minds."  you do me a
>great disservice by twisting my attitude around - all i want is for people
>to recognize *when* it's appropriate to turn off their minds.

Sooner or later this comes out..."why are you shooting your mouth off,
whyncha go to the Third World and do some Real Work instead of just
talking?"  To which I reply:


     *  Parts of America are in far worse shape than the Third
        World, precisely because people don't talk and reflect about
        the real conditions of their lives.  It is Fascist to deny
        that talk is one important form of political action.  Although
        I happen to believe that one of the ends of life is critical
        reflection, if we must in a corporate state refer all questions
        to an economic decision process, MDC Inc., a think tank in
        Chapel Hill NC has warned that "a shortage of people who can
        read, write and THINK CRITICALLY [my emphasis] has left the
        South [along with the Bronx the closest candidate in the USA
        for the next part of the Third World] in the jaws of a new
        economic trap."

     *  This business of going off to the Third World contains some
        element of neocolonialist patronizing.  It is always possible
        that your good will may be used for bad ends, whether by
        Evangelical Christian groups who want to "convert the heathen",
        or the CIA.  It is possible to do much good; but please don't
        expect me to be awed into silence by your friend's idealism,
        and your attempt to puncture my vanity (I'm the biggest idealist
        on the block so don't mess wif me) is a misstep, since I am
        concerned here and now with defending a thesis, not protecting
        a reputation.

     *  Your friend has done something which is religious in nature;
        it retires from a field of struggle.  That's good, but if we
        applied Kant's test to his act, the world would be filled with
        interfering busybodies.  I think a lot of real damage is being
        done at the local cineplex by corporations making movies, and
        netnews is one place where I can publicize a message that
        questions their agenda.  It would serve Coppola's ends for me
        to retire to Angola, or a monastery, and I have no plans to
        so make his (or your) life any easier.
>
>watch closer.  the women he bites are released from his curse when he dies.
>it's standard vampire lore.

Only Mina.



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