Film Cool:
Towards a New Film Aesthetic
Bruce Isaacs
A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
University of Sydney.
2006.

© Copyright by Bruce Isaacs, 2006. All rights reserved.

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Acknowledgements.
This thesis was undertaken as a defence of a love of film.
The indulgence of completing this work was supported by my excellent supervisor, Axel
Kruse. I’ve heard that a PhD candidature can be arduous, even a trial. Axel ensured that mine
was always a pleasure. Miraculously, and in spite of the freedom Axel afforded me at every
stage of this project, it’s actually come to an end.
For encouragement and support throughout my life, I thank my family. I thank my twin
brother, Herschel Isaacs, in particular, for shared interests and understanding beyond
reckoning.
I don’t know how to thank Rebecca Goldsworthy, my partner, for what she has brought tothis work, and to my life. So I’ll leave it at that.
For companionship during a crucial seven week writing period in 2005, I thank Nordberg.

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Abstract
The influential theorist, David Bordwell, talks about various modes of watching film: theintellectual, the casual, or the obsessive interaction with cinema practiced by the film-buff.
This thesis is an attempt to come to terms with film and film culture in a number of ways. It
is first an attempt at reinscribing a notion of aesthetics into film studies. This is not an easytask. I argue that film theory is not adequately equipped to discuss film in affective terms, andthat instead, it emphasises ways of thinking about film and culture quite removed from the actof film ‘spectating’ – individually, or perhaps even more crucially, collectively. To my mind,
film theory increasingly needs to ask: are theorists and the various subjectivities about whomthey theorise watching the same films, and in the same way?
My experience of film is, as Tara Brabazon writes about her own experience offilm, a profoundly emotional one. Film is a stream of quotation in my own life. It is
inextricably wrapped up inside memory (and what Hutcheon calls postmodern nostalgia).
Film is experience. I would not know how to communicate what Sergio Leone ‘means’ or
The Godfather ‘represents’ without engaging what Barbara Kennedy calls the ‘aesthetic
impulse.’ In this thesis, I extrapolate from what film means to me to what it might mean to an
abstract notion of culture. For this reason, Chapters Three and Four are necessarily abstract
and tentatively bring together an analysis of The Matrix franchise and Quentin Tarantino’s
brand of metacinema. I focus on an aesthetics of cinema rather than its politics or ideologicalfabric. This is not to marginalise such studies (which, in any case, this thesis could not do)
but to make space for another perspective, another way of considering film, a new way ofrecuperating affect.

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Contents
1. A Notion of Film Aesthetics

7

1.1 Engaging the Aesthetic Impulse
1.2 Realism: Foundations
1.3 Bazin and the Myth of Total Cinema
1.4 Depth of Field and Focus
1.5 Citizen Kane: A Cinematographic Revolution?
1.6 A Note on the Mechanics of Style
1.7 Auteurism and the Artifice of the Cinematic Image
1.8 Focus and Signification
1.9 A Brief Defence of Bazin
1.10 The Transcendence of the Image
1.11
2. Towards a Theory of Popular Culture

8
15
23
27
31
33
35
42
45
46
53
54

2.1 Culture as Functionality
2.2 Culture as Commodity
2.3 Culture as Industry
2.4 Authenticity and Spectacle

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64
73
90

3. Text and Spectacle in The Matrix Franchise98

3.1
3.2 Further Musings on Authenticity and the Spectacle
3.3 A Brief Note on (Mis)Reading Cinema
3.4 Spectacle and Technology
3.5 The Matrix Phenomenon
3.6 Towards a Notion of Textual Discursivity
3.7 Intertextuality and Discursivity
3.8 Myth and Text in The Matrix Franchise: Gorging on the Sacred Past
3.9 Cinema and the Contemporary Mythology
3.10 Conceptualising the Hypermyth
3.11 Baudrillard and a Simulated Mythology
3.12 Screening the Hypermyth
3.13 The Discursivity of the One
3.14 The Visibility of Style: Image Strategies in Contemporary Cinema
3.15 24: Real-Time Narrative
3.16 The Ontology of Bullet-Time

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106
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110
113
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124
129
130
135
137
142
148
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4. The Cinematic Real: Image, Text, Culture
4.1 The Spectacle Aesthetic, Or the Cinematic Real
4.2 The Metacinematic Lens
4.3 Character Acting
4.4 Foregrounding Genericity: the Limitations of Classical Film Genre
4.5 Genre and Contemporary Cinematic Forms
4.6 Genericity: Beyond Genre
4.7 Performing Genericity
4.8 The Metacinematic Aesthetic: Tarantino – Leone – Eastwood
4.9 Metacinema and Postmodern Narrative: The New Auteurism
4.10 Conclusion

156
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196

Bibliography

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Filmography

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1. A Notion of Film Aesthetics

71.1 Engaging the Aesthetic Impulse
Contemporary cultural formations have been theorised through postmodern ideas offragmentation, distillation, and a ‘politics of difference’ which has questioned fixed notionsof identity and subjectivity. How do we begin to understand and account for the popularity,
the desires and pleasures of contemporary cinema outside of these notions?1
It is important to acknowledge that a shift has occurred – at least within an importantswathe of contemporary visual culture – towards an aesthetic that foregrounds thedimension of appearance, form and sensation. And we must take this shift seriously at theaesthetic level… A rush into interpretation before the aesthetic has been more clearlyapprehended may follow an all too easy dismissal of such a spectacle aesthetic on grounds
that it is facile, already transparent or really about something else.2
Post-media aesthetics needs categories that can describe how a cultural object organizes
data and structures users’ experiences of this data.3

The notion of an ‘aesthetics of sensation,’ which seems to have fallen out of favour withliterary and cultural theorists, is necessary to make sense of the myriad of ways in which acontemporary popular culture interacts with cinema. According to Barbara Kennedy, one of
the shortcomings of film theory is a failure to engage with what might be called an ‘aesthetic
impulse.’ And while such an impulse celebrates affectivity, or what Andrew Darley calls“questions of a sensual and perceptual character,”4 it does not compromise the analysis offilm as ideological or cultural artefact. I do not wish to disengage with the seemingly
inexhaustible body of critical theory that privileges the structural or psychoanalytic approachto cinema, or the broadly Marxist project that charts in painstaking detail the formation ofselves and others in a discursive system of studios, cultures, subcultures and artistic
commodities. Yet this body of work cannot account for what I perceive to be thecontemporary obsession with film as an affective medium, nor the cinematic text as anaesthetically engaged product operating within a Western, or as some theorists have argued,
global marketplace.5 The nearest critical theory comes to this phenomenon is the relatively

1

Barbara Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2000), 4.
2
Andrew Darley, Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres (London:
Routledge, 2000), 6.
3
Lev Manovich, “Post-media Aesthetics.” In (dis)locations (DVD ROM) (Karlsruhe: ZKM Centre for Art andMedia, 2001), 2.
4
Darley, 6.
5
For an analysis of the interconnectedness of various national cinemas, see Tom O’ Reagan, “A National
Cinema.” In The Film Cultures Reader, ed. Graeme Turner (London: Routledge, 2002), 141.

8

recent interest in fandom,6 and even this field seems unfortunately to privilege the ‘cult’ textor ‘alternative’ voice, and is thus destined to repeat the exclusion of a text based on its
popularity, or rather, the absence of a requisite degree of alterity. It is unfortunate precisely
because film franchises such as The Matrix and Star Wars draw the crowds at the box officethat an engagement with this art is so necessary. Film writing (scholarly and other modes) has
always been suspicious of the blockbuster, distinguishing between an art cinema thatfunctions as an autonomous creative work, and the pop culture entertainment spectacle that
services a capitalist market ethos and the wish-fulfilment fantasies of a majority of the filmgoing populace. In this way, the film theorist is able to differentiate between, for example,
Antonioni’s Blow-Up and L’Avventura (The Adventure), and Spielberg’s Jaws and Raiders of
the Lost Ark. Antonioni requires a spectator actively engaged in making meaning of thenarrative, and indeed, the visual contours of the shot (L’Avventura’s striking use of deep
focus in almost every shot is an example of the unconventional visuality of the art film
aesthetic). Both L’Avventura and Blow-Up present metaphysical conundrums that challenge
the conventional separation of truth and deception, or orthodox narrative continuity and ajarring discontinuity. Spielberg’s output in the late 1970s and early to mid 1980s is a selfacknowledged sequence of ‘high concepts’ structured into cinematic spectacles: a twenty-fivewords or less pitch of the kind satirised in Robert Altman’s The Player.7 The high concept
entertainment spectacle is a business enterprise; the art film is an artistic endeavour founded
upon a singularly creative impulse.
In spite of the token disclaimer that high and low culture distinctions have beeneffaced in the postmodern milieu (apparently opening popular cinema to a veritable
smorgasbord of analytic processes), film theory has in the main recuperated the distinction.
While undertaking analyses of contemporary popular cinema (The Matrix, Star Wars, Back to
the Future, Jaws, The Lord of the Rings, The Silence of the Lambs, Forrest Gump and Scream
have each received a significant amount of attention from film and cultural theorists), theory
relegates an examination of popular cinema as far from a conventional aesthetic approach toart as it possibly can. The Silence of the Lambs is less an aesthetic work than a system of

6

For an analysis of fandom and its complex textual and cultural strategies, see Will Brooker, “Internet Fandom
and the Continuing Narratives of Star Wars, Blade Runner and Alien.” In Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science
Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (London: Verso, 1999), 50-72.
7
For an example of an influential exponent of this form of criticism, see David Thomson, The Whole Equation(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 339-343.

9

ideological significations charting late capitalist, feminist or queer subjectivity.8 The Matrix
services an examination of race and/or gender issues in contemporary America.9 Jaws enacts
a liminal space in which deviant female sexuality is imagined as an unrelenting predator.10
The Star Wars franchise instantiates a return to the Manichean opposition of good and evil
and allegorises a neo-imperialistic ideological bent in late capitalist Western societies.11
This kind of analysis, which has provided film theory with its remarkableadvancements into the academy between the 1970s and the late 1990s, is not confined to theblockbuster or popular film. Work on film noir undertakes a similar task, with often striking
and provocative conclusions. Examinations of the horror and slasher genre that burgeoned
with the low budget independents of the 1970s (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974),
Halloween, The Howling) service a similar analytical bent. Laura Mulvey’s landmark turn tofilm theory with “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is, as she states at the opening of
the piece, to appropriate “Psychoanalytic theory…as a political weapon, demonstrating theway the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.”12 Equally, the aestheticof the film (Mulvey’s analysis implies that visual narrative is founded in its entirety on thepatriarchal prejudices of society) is appropriated and reconfigured as structural or
instrumental analysis of subjectivity and social conditioning. The image of Woman in
Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Vertigo is “as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze ofman [which] takes the argument a step further into the structure of representation, adding afurther layer demanded by the ideology of the patriarchal order as it is worked out in its
favourite cinematic form – illusionistic narrative form.”13 Illusion masks only patriarchal
hegemonic practices and chained female subjectivities. I do not wish to take issue with
Mulvey’s seminal analysis except to suggest that illusion in cinematic spectacle (and8See, for example, Annalee Newitz, “Serial Killers, True Crime, and Economic Performance Anxiety.” In
Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media, ed. Christopher Sharrett (Michigan: Wayne State University
Press, 1999), 66.
9
See C. Richard King and David J. Leonard, “Is Neo White? Reading Race, Watching the Trilogy.” In Jacking
in to The Matrix Franchise: Cultural Reception and Interpretation, ed. Matthew Kapell and William G. Doty
(New York: Continuum, 2004), 32-47.
10
Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, The American Monomyth (New York: Anchor Press/Double Day,
1977), 148-164.
11
For the most lucid account of this widely held view, see Dan Rubey, “Not So Long Ago, Not So Far Away.”
Jump Cut 41 (1997). See also Koenraad Kuiper, “Star Wars: An Imperial Myth.” Journal of Popular Culture 21,
no. 4 (1988), 77-86.
12Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality,
ed. Screen (London: Routledge, 1992), 22.
13
Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 32.

10certainly in the work of Hitchcock) is a purveyor of far more than patriarchy and it is thiskind of failure to engage with an alternative aesthetic practice in film that has marginalised
film aesthetics altogether.
What I perceive as a very real shortcoming in film theory is the lack of an analysis offilm as aesthetically charged, or functioning affectively on the spectator. Manovich describes
this ‘waning of affect’ in relation to the demand for new modes of affectivity in computer
culture and digital media:
Affect has been neglected in cultural theory since the late 1950s when, influenced by themathematic theory of communication, Roman Jakobson, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland
Barthes and others began treating cultural communication solely as a matter of encoding
and decoding messages… By approaching any cultural object/situation/process as ‘text’ thatis ‘read’ by audiences and/or critics, cultural criticism privileges the informational andcognitive dimensions of culture over affective, emotional, performative and experiential
aspects. Other influential approaches of recent decades similarly neglect these dimensions.14

The orthodox treatment of the affective in film writing relies on the assumption of spectator
passivity in the popular film, but the nature of the cinematic spectacle is rarely conceptualised
in more conventional analyses that emphasise the study of film ‘cultures,’ or morefashionably, ‘film subjectivities.’ At the risk of sounding parochial, spectators are interested
in the look and sound of film as a profoundly aesthetic engagement with the senses. Spectacleis rarely (and certainly not entirely) a matter of image absorption or spectator inculcation into
an ideologised medium. Visual cinema (which I will distinguish from narrative cinema – ofcourse, most cinema relies on narrative structure, but a visual cinema responds to theaffective engagement with the visual impact of the image, shot or sequence on screen) is acomplex dynamic of camera movement, angles, positions, mise en scene, innovations insound and image technologies. In this film aesthetic, I contend that the spectator rises above
the passivity conceptualised by Adorno, Jameson and others.
Distinctions between passive and active viewing in contemporary, or more
specifically, postmodern cinema, are incompatible with ways of seeing, or spectating, that
contemporary culture employs. On one level, the activity of intellectually or emotively
responding to L’Avventura is vastly removed from a response to a multi-million dollar film
franchise in which a complex engagement with the film text requires immersion in its
14

Manovich, “Post-media Aesthetics,” 5-6.

11

performance as product in the market: soundtracks, computer games, action figures, clothing
and various other marketing strategies employed by most sections of the marketplace. Filmtheory must re-engage with the complexities of how a film is read, or viewed, and thisanalysis (if it is to be a qualitative analysis of popular culture) must begin with an analysis of
its film aesthetics. In relation to what I will freely acknowledge is a consumerist popular
culture, I reject Adorno’s notion of a kind of industrialisation that spawns only passivity,
conformity and the blandness of cinematic entertainment. In this formulation, mass culture(though distinctions between mass and other cultural bodies are vague) is a culture which“proclaims: you shall conform, without instruction as to what; conform to that which exists
anyway, and to that which everyone thinks anyway as a reflex of its power andomnipresence.” “The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has
replaced consciousness.”15 Although I will explore this in some detail, I will say here that
Adorno’s piece was historically and culturally specific, and could not have foreseen the riseof a kind of mass culture (I distinguish between Noël Carroll’s notion of mass art as occurringwith the printing press16 and the phenomenon of Titanic as a billion dollar-plus cultural andartistic industry) as a complex and diversely articulated movement.17
In his monologue at the 2005 Academy Awards, American comedian Chris Rock satirised theAcademy of Motion Pictures by interviewing audiences at a South Central Los Angeles
multiplex. Rock’s claim was that relatively few Americans had seen the films nominated forbest picture that year. While the Academy and Hollywood celebrated its filmic ascendancewith Eastwood’s social realist fable, Million Dollar Baby, Scorsese’s lavish biopic, The
Aviator, and the nostalgic Americana, Sideways, Rock’s contention was that these films were
establishment honorific symbols. What signified the Hollywood product in 2005, among
other things, was the Wayans’ Brothers screwball comedy, White Chicks, in which two blackmen disguise themselves as white women to bring a white-collar criminal to justice. The
reference to Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot (albeit a reference that was vague amidst a

15

Theodor Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered.” In The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass
Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 90.
16Noël Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 172.
17
For a discussion of the influence of the Frankfurt School, and particularly Horkheimer and Adorno’s‘pessimism,’ see Joanne Hollows, “Mass Culture Theory and Political Economy.” In Approaches to Popular
Film, ed. Joanne Hollows and Mark Jancovich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 18-20.

12plethora of derivative scenes) was lost on this multiplex audience, but the Wayans did notneed Wilder to stamp their film with an establishment honour.
Rock’s monologue was perceived as the Hollywood establishment ‘not taking itself
too seriously.’ Yet while his investigation of mainstream American film interests
demonstrates less than a scholarly approach, the implicit distinction Rock makes between a‘serious’ cinema and a cinema of the multiplex is provocative. Consider the following
selection of films:
Citizen Kane (1941), The Third Man (1949), Sunset Boulevard (1950), L’Avventura (1960),
Peeping Tom (1960), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Don’t Look Now (1973), Eraserhead(1977), Apocalypse Now (1979), Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1983), Paris,
Texas (1984), Akira (1988), Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989), Clerks (1994), Chong Qing
Sen Lin (Chungking Express, 1994), Strange Days (1995), Boogie Nights (1997), Todo
Sobre Mi Madre (All About my Mother, 1999), Adaptation (2002).

It must be significant that the majority of the film going populace has not seen these films. I
selected these in particular because many of them have been central to the formation of a
corpus of film (and associated cultural, aesthetic and philosophical) theory; others are
exemplary of the contemporary scholarship of postmodernism, feminism and the gaze,
psychoanalysis, structuralism, cultural theory and subcultures, and art-house/alternative
cinema. Each one of these films merits serious analytical attention, but accepted analyticalstrategies have rendered a great deal of writing on film insular, self-reflective, obtuse, and inits worst incarnation, elitist. Theoretical abstraction in film studies marginalizes the voice ofthe casual filmgoer, reviewer and fan, who, in Graham McCann’s analysis, watch ‘movies,’while theorists view ‘films.’ In a caustic piece reflecting on recent trends in psychoanalytic
theory, McCann writes:
For all their demotic pretensions, film theorists continue to handle popular culture with illdisguised distaste. The popular has to be transformed into the unpopular before it can be
discussed without embarrassment…The transformation may occur throughrepackaging…accompanied by reassuring Guardian encomia and precious labels like
‘Connoisseur Video’ and ‘The Elite Collection’…In this new form, the movie can bethought of as a film.18

He proceeds to discuss Žižek’s use of Lacan in his writing on Hitchcock, implying that theabstraction of the film into theory fails to address its status as a popular culture artefact,
18

Graham McCann, “The Movie Killers.” Modern Review 1, no. 9 (1993), 33.

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‘movie’ more than ‘film.’ Robin Wood explores similar territory in his influential analysis of
Hitchcock as a filmmaker:
The cinema – especially the Hollywood cinema – is a commercial medium. Hitchcock’s
films are – usually – popular: indeed, some of his best films (Rear Window, Psycho) areamong his most popular. From this arises a widespread assumption that, however “clever,”“technically brilliant,” “amusing,” “gripping,” etc., they may be, they can’t be taken
seriously as we take, say, the films of Bergman and Antonioni seriously. They must be, if
not absolutely bad, at least fatally flawed from a serious standpoint.19

In response to François Truffaut’s suggestion that Psycho is an experimental film, Hitchcock
replies:Possibly. My main satisfaction is that the film had an effect on the audiences, and I consider
that very important. I don’t care about the subject matter; I don’t care about the acting; but I
do care about the pieces of film and the photography and the sound-track and all thetechnical ingredients that made the audience scream. I feel it’s tremendously satisfying for
us to be able to use the cinematic art to achieve something of a mass emotion. It wasn’t amessage that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance or their enjoyment of thenovel. They were aroused by pure film.20

Both McCann and Wood allude to the need for a film aesthetic that takes account of theaffective parameters of the cinematic text. Implicit in this is an acknowledgement that theaffective response is fundamentally attached to the way film is viewed in mainstream society,or the way in which popular cinema engages with a wider audience. Of course, we cannot
dismiss the material conditions in which the product enters the marketplace, subject to what
Wood calls the “dominant ideology.” But neither is popular cinema a blank slate upon which
to work nefarious ideological conspiracies upon the passive consumer. The oeuvres of Lucasand Spielberg have little in common with either Bergman’s or Antonioni’s. But in what sense
should this result in the evaluation of Lucas or Spielberg as lesser filmmakers, or as the
detritus of a once aesthetically engaged medium? If movies and MTV have taught us
anything, it is that theorists must employ the age-old Leavisite/Arnold distinction of theclassical aesthetic and culture with caution.
Film studies must concurrently engage with the material reality of the film industry
and the qualitative features of what Adorno considered the industrialisation of culture. Carroll
19

Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 57. Originalemphasis.
20
François Truffaut, Hitchcock (London: Granada, 1969), 349.

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suggests that mass or popular forms of culture and art are ultimately attached to notions ofcommonality and community: “A taste for easily accessible art will not evaporate soon, norwill the pleasure to be had from sharing artworks with large numbers of our fellow citizens.
For people like to have commerce with the same artworks that their neighbours – far andwide – do… It is an important element of possessing a common culture.”21 Adorno’s
industrialisation of culture is also, in a literal sense, a process in which culture is madeavailable to a wider audience. Such processes operate within what writers (predominantly
Marxist) have analysed as a ubiquitous capitalistic marketplace. Rather than taking issue withthe existence (or ubiquity) of this market, I attempt to reorganise the relation of the massculture subject to the market.
It is indisputable that film is not only the dominant form of entertainment and art incontemporary Western cultures, but for many of these cultures, the only one. This is a
simplification only insofar as film is hardly singularly mass or popular. And yet the majorityof filmgoers are surely oblivious to Antonioni or Tarkovsky. For a sense of cultural andaesthetic identity, I argue that cultures revert to a popular form of cinema, its ways of making
meaning, and its affective impact on the self. This centrality of an art form to personal
experience and subjectivity requires returning to an aesthetic inquiry, if only to forge a
critical space for the Matrix-like franchises that dominate the box-office and the individualand collective fantasies of a mass culture.
1.2 Realism: Foundations
A new cinematic aesthetic must necessarily describe and engage a body of films and criticaltheory that traces a diversion from cinematic realism. Realism, in this context, has a two-folddefinition. Traditional pictorial realism refers to the degree of verisimilitude of the
reproduction of the real object. A photograph of a building façade is, in one sense, the perfectimage reproduction of that façade. The advance in image making technologies (traditional art
forms (painting, sculpture, wood block print, etc.), photography, moving images, digital
cinema, virtual imaging) allows a more perfect reproduction, an image more faithful to theobject than that permitted by an earlier technology. More generally, I use the term realism torefer to a broader ‘realist’ aesthetic that has informed artistic traditions and analysis. This
aesthetic refers to a degree of verisimilitude in the attitude of the text to the object it
21

Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art, 13.

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represents, but it also indicates a sense of the reproduction as striving for a realistic
representation of the tangible object. Of course, it must be said here that the two definitions,or contexts, are interconnected. The verisimilitude of the reproduction functions as a template
for the verisimilitude of a more general ‘truth’ – for example, a truth manifested in theuniversal nature, or the Platonic ideal. Ultimately, discussions about nature or essentialisms
in literary or cinematic characters stress the fidelity to the way that nature exists in a ‘real’
world, or a world that antecedes the representation, the aesthetic object.
A new film aesthetic must simultaneously acknowledge the centrality of the realist
aesthetic to contemporary film and film theory, and recognise the innovation toward
spectacle cinema, virtual realism, genericity, and the transformation in the ontology of thespectator/theorist. Theorising beyond the Real requires an appreciation of the ontology of therealist image. A theory of hyperrealism (in which Baudrillard’s Real consists of a “generation
by models of a real without origin or reality”22) or Neorealism (consider, for example, theinfluential Italian Neo-realist cinema of the 1940s23) must acknowledge the residue of aclassical realist aesthetics in its performance on the screen, or on the isolated subjectivity of
the cinematic spectator. The realist aesthetic insinuates itself into critical theses on cinematicstyle as well as the dominant modes of qualitative cultural analyses.
I argue that critical theory esteems an essentialist notion of realism in which realism isa mimetic art, or a ‘reality myth,’ to paraphrase André Bazin. Cinema promises thepossibility of the perfection of representative art: the revelation of truth and a profoundly
humanist capacity for the illumination of nature and an essential reality. Kracauer offers aseminal formulation of this approach to cinema:
All these creative efforts [of the filmmaker] are in keeping with the cinematic approach as
long as they benefit, in some way or other, the medium’s substantive concern with ourvisible world. As in photography, everything depends on the “right” balance between therealistic tendency and the formative tendency; and the two tendencies are well balanced if
the latter does not try to overwhelm the former but eventually follows its lead.24

22

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Detroit: University of Michigan
Press, 1994), 1.
23
Roberto Rossellini’s Roma, Città Aperta [Open City, 1945], Paisà [Paisan, 1946] and Vittorio de Sica’s
Ladri Di Biciclette [The Bicycle Thief, 1948] are generally considered exemplary of this tradition. For a
discussion of the legacy of Neo-realism, see Jay McRoy, “Italian Neo-Realist Influences.” In New Punk Cinema,ed. Nicholas Rombes. (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2005), 40.
24
Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (London and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1960), 39.

16

Andrew summarises the pursuit of realism as a founding principle of cinema: “The history ofcinema is usually measured as the progressive ad-equation of the rules of cinematicorganisation to the habitual ways by which we organize our life in our culture.”25 Cinema
thus presents the capacity to reveal the Real in its fullest sense, in its image and process,which I would argue is the culmination of a humanist pursuit of the ideal in representative
form. While this chapter focuses on Bazin’s ‘ontology of the Real’ (particularly as heformulates it in relation to Orson Welles), I hope to foreground the necessity for discussing
the various cultures that receive cinematic texts, and that continue to view, collect, reflect
upon and indelibly re-conform them. In Chapter Two, I consider the major aesthetic models
brought to bear on our accepted analyses of cinema, including Frederic Jameson’s ‘waning ofaffect,’ and to a lesser extent, the Marxist frame of critical and cultural analysis. In thefollowing discussion, I touch briefly on these legacies, but more for their descriptive andapplicative value in the criticism of cinematic style than in a meaningful discussion of theircultural (for my purposes, specifically popular cultural) impact.
This chapter will also comprise an extended introduction to the second part of thisthesis, in which I attempt to conceptualise a contemporary filmic subjectivity (the performerof the ‘hypermyth,’ Neo) necessary for comprehending the ontological space carved out bycontemporary cinematic practices. Christian Metz distinguishes between the ‘filmic’ and the‘cinematic,’26 in which ‘filmic’ connotes elements external to the film and ‘cinematic’elements internal to it: narrative structure, characterisation, theme, as well as mise en scene
and mis en shot. This is a distinction I will uphold. The filmic, in a Metzian sense,
incorporates the processes of production and the act of consumption of the cinematic. Metz’s
distinction is useful because it allows a critical trajectory aimed equally at a stylistics of film
and the instruments of its production and reception, producers and consumers, an approachthat incorporates an analysis of the filmic and the cinematic. In my usage, consumers arepartakers communally in the proffering of a product; filmmaking and film viewing are
essentially consumptive practices.
***25

Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 47.
Christian Metz, Language and Cinema. Trans. Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok (The Hague: Mouton, 1974),
55-61.
26

17

Foregrounding the reality aspect of film is often perceived as a necessary component ofcriticism, particularly in popular media. The greater part of film reviews (to distinguish thisfrom the scholarly, and academically published, analysis of film) consider film’s relation to apre-existing and eminently discoverable reality for a sense of its aesthetic or cinematic worth.
Thus, Mike Leigh or John Sayles are praised for their unique brand of social realism. Leigh’s
cinematic philosophy esteems realism over spectacle, the Real over the generic artifice.
Discussing Vera Drake, Leigh asserts that his characters are “specific and idiosyncratic.”27 Of
his artistic philosophy, Leigh suggests that “primarily, my films are a response to the way
people are, the way things are as I experience them.”28 The implication here is that a notionof the indissoluble Real pours forth the artistic representation as near to verisimilitude as themedium will allow.
Moreover, the triumph of the Real finds form (or at least credibility) in the departurefrom the non-Real. Secrets and Lies employs naturalistic acting styles (that veer perilously
close to melodrama, particularly in the early exchanges between Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn)and Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), and camera angles to ground the image in theparameters of an external social reality. The naturalistic cinematography of Matewan orLonestar compliments Sayles’s political project that engages with material working
conditions and a contemporary class-consciousness.
Even more significantly, genre animation such as The Incredibles is valued for what it
might say about the ‘real world,’ and by extension, real lived experiences and even a sense of
the communal self. Lisa Schwarzbaum, writing in Entertainment Weekly, suggests thatthe family’s escapades in the field are indeed stupendous, an homage to the exploits ofclassic comic-book masters of the universe. But the true heroism in this spectacular movie –as worthy of a best picture nomination as any made with fleshly stars – shines brightest inthat suburban house, where Bob, with his midlife bulge and his thinning hair, pines
nostalgically for the old days, and Helen marches anxiously forward, bending to herfamily’s needs.29

The value of the digitally animated image is discovered by Schwarzbaum in character, theme
and narrative rather than image, shot, sequence, or a broader notion of spectacle. The
27

Quoted in Sean O’Hagan, “’I’m allowed to do what I want – that amazes me!’” Interview. The Observer, Dec.
5, 2004.
28
Quoted in Michael Coveney, The World According to Mike Leigh (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 5.
[Originally International Herald Tribune, Feb. 2, 1994.]
29
Lisa Schwarzbaum, “The Incredibles.” Entertainment Weekly, 15 Sep. 2005.

18

Incredibles is spectacular, but for the most unspectacular reasons. The genre film is subjected
to critical scrutiny based on a conventional realist approach to cinema. Genre must ascribe its
own ‘reality apparatus,’ to which the generic product must adhere or yet again stretch thesacrosanct bounds of filmed reality. Steve Neale uses the term ‘verisimilitude’ to describe theway genre cinema conforms to particular types and cinematic styles. Neale suggests that agenre film must have a degree of verisimilitude to the generic form, whether western, musicalor gangster film.30 We could equally extend this verisimilitude to the realist aesthetic, inwhich the Real is engaged less obviously with a ‘real world’ than with its reproduced andultimately generic aestheticisation; Jim Collins refers to this mode as ‘genericity’, which I
will explore in some detail in chapter four.
Genre cinema is less than ‘reality,’ but it functions for mainstream film reviewers inmuch the same way, evidenced by Schwarzbaum’s approach to The Incredibles. The
orthodox response to David Fincher’s Se7en must address the film as conforming to theprecepts of the thriller or film noir before it can embark on a project of generic commentary
to embody a “spirit of innovation.”31 Classical genre cinema of the 1930s and 40s did a very
similar thing, transposing an essentially classical realism for its contemporary audience.
Consider, for example, the invisible editing of the Hollywood studio film of the 1930s and1940s. Finding its business in the genre film (in which even the most naturalistic depiction(The Grapes of Wrath, The Lost Weekend) was a generic form and eminently reproducible),the studio aesthetic employed an editing process that diminished the degree of artifice in plot
and characterisation. The perfection of the film noir in Double Indemnity offers a depiction ofa harsher reality of post-Depression America (servicing the traditional realist aesthetic) amid
the stylised dialogue and acting.
The pervasiveness of the mode of classical realism infects even the casual filmgoer,such that she feels beholden to address the cinematic image in relation to an ideal measure of
reality. The image on screen must be, a priori, a thing of itself, and what it was always
intended to be: irreducible, a perfect reproduction of the external reality from which it isdrawn, yet simultaneously reproduced only once. In this sense, it is posited as an ‘authentic’reproduction, something to which Walter Benjamin moves in his essay, The Work of Art in30

Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London: Routledge, 2000), 31.
Jim Hillier, “Introduction.” In American Independent Cinema: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. Jim Hillier(London: British Film Institute, 2001), 16.
31

19

the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.32 The literal transposition of the Real into thereproduced image recalls Adorno in a similar context: “For no authentic work of art and notrue philosophy, according to their very meaning, has ever exhausted itself in itself alone, in
its being-in-itself.”33 In his essay, Adorno argues for a dialectic in which the artwork is
autonomous yet simultaneously engaged with the external conditions into which it is placedfor exhibition or consumption. The necessity for an ‘autonomously engaged’ art can beapplied to the autonomy of the image on a cinematic screen as an organising factor in theviewing criteria of classical Hollywood cinema. The screen image was posited as distinct
from reality (it was, in a very literal sense, a form of escapism from an external world), but it
prompted the spectator to address the screen image as a faithful reproduction of the realworld. The image was autonomous, yet engaged with the reality it sought to reproduce.
Cinema as an art form was thus founded on a realist aesthetic even as Hollywood prospered
through its stories of heroes, villains, and damsels in distress. Ironically, Hollywood’s
enduring ‘classicism’ of the studio era was always simultaneously an enduring form of
realism.34
The contemplation of film as reality invites a consideration of the limits to which realism canbe stretched as a meaningful aesthetic measure. In positioning the spectator in a relation to
the Real, film is able to foreground this inherent limitation. Viewing a trailer of Michel
Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a two minute montage, I was transfixed only
by a single sequence, a three second shot of Joel Barish (Jim Carey), dishevelled with
unrequited love, as the clip played the major theme over his shuddering (from theexpurgation of grief) image. The chaotic complexities of the film dissolved into somethingvague and formless, yet its essentiality remained. It cohered beautifully and elegantly (to mymind, uncorrupted) as a three second sequence, and would no doubt have done as well in asingle image, in the way that the lines of streaming data on a computer screen can recall theexperience of engaging with a film franchise, The Matrix. What struck me as significant in
Joel Barish’s image was the ease – and remarkable acuity - with which I substituted it for an
32

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In The Norton Anthology ofTheory and Criticism, ed. Peter Simon (New York: W. W. Norton: 2001), 1166-1186.
33
Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society.” In Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber (London:
Neville Spearman, 1967), 23.
34
See E. Ann Kaplan, “Classical Hollywood Film and Melodrama.” In American Cinema and Hollywood:
Critical Approaches, ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 46-48.

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entire film experience. I rented the film, watched it again, and lived the experience of the firstviewing a year before, and the profundity of that second viewing, the three second sequence.
What I am getting at here is the spectator’s ability to substitute the signifier for the signified
in the cinematic image, the reproduced segment for the original whole, and yet to maintainthe veracity and incorruptibility of its authenticity. A contemporary film ontology is in thissense founded upon an artifice. In reducing the whole to a montage, the spectator substitutes
the component part for the full composition. The substitution of the once irreducible whole
into an infinitely variable composition of images, shots, montage sequences, etc., shares
something with Nicholas Rombes’s analysis of the component structure of the DVD:
What if we think of the supplementary features on DVDs not as just simply bonus material,
but as new forms of cinema? Experimental cinema? For instance, the Blue Velvet DVD
includes a bizarre feature that’s sort of a “deleted scenes,” but not quite. Supposedly, thefootage that didn’t make it into David Lynch’s Blue Velvet was lost, but
production/publicity stills survived, and the deleted scenes are composed of these still
images, set to music, and edited together to suggest movement.35

I would only add that the division of the cinematic whole into chapters and various
alternatives to the ‘original’ text (alternate endings are an obvious example) inscribes the
DVD as a kind of cinema ontologically removed from a classical cinema and its viewing
practices. The fact that DVD enables chapter viewing, still shots without the stretching ofvideotape, a capacity to reduce the image to slow-motion controlled by the spectator – must
fundamentally reorganise the relationship between the spectator (particularly thespectator/fan or spectator/theorist, distinctions I will further explore) and the unalterable‘classic’. It is now fascinating to read Robin Wood’s analysis of Rear Window in the firstedition of Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. Wood confesses that his analysis is based on a “threeyear old memory and a few scribbled notes in the cinema.”36 Contrast this with Žižek’s
analysis of a single (panning) shot on Vertigo’s DVD:
After seeing the entrance to Ernie’s from the outside, there is a cut to Scottie sitting at thebar counter in the front of the restaurant and looking through a partition into the large roomwith tables and guests. A long panning shot (without a cut) then takes us back and to theleft, giving an overview of the entire crowded room, the soundtrack reproducing the chatter
35

Nicholas Rombes, “A New Film Genre?” Digital Poetics. Blog. 15 Apr. 2005.
<http://professordvd.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/04/index.html>. Accessed 16 Jul. 2005.
36
Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, 100.

21

and clatter of a busy restaurant. We should bear in mind that this, clearly, is not Scottie’s
point of view.37

The DVD is, if not revolutionary in its reproductive capacity, certainly an alteration in theway ‘cinema’ (which is of course now vaguely anachronistic) is viewed, reviewed, analysed,
and in the advent of the innovation of digital cinema, made.
The spectator’s response to contemporary cinema (and to classical cinema madecontemporary upon DVD release) is also anchored in a cinematicality, an awareness of thetext as partaking of a filmic history, context and aesthetic register. The image of the love-lorn
Carey is inserted into what Eco calls the encyclopaedia of the “collective imagination.”38 The
montage imbues the sequence extracted from the whole with what Collins calls a “cultural
charge,”39 an affective stimulus based on a complex cinematic and cultural awareness.
Attending an opening-weekend screening of Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, I
was astonished to hear a collective round of applause at the presentation of the gigantic
STAR WARS title screen. The still image was imbued with the fullness of a filmic franchise,as Joel Barish’s face had been imbued with the fullness of Eternal Sunshine. An exchange
between image and spectator had taken place in the opening shot, rendering the image
attentive to its own status as metonym, as signification of an entire mythic, cultural andaesthetic reality. What is significant here is the transition of the cinematic shot/image, theindivisible component (in lieu of the fullness of the text) into a continuum of subjective
aesthetic values. This formulation shares something with Deleuze, if in a slightly different
context. Deleuze suggests that the cinematic image after the Second World War is a
conflation of “floating images, these anonymous clichés which circulate in the external
world, but which also penetrate each one of us and constitute his internal world so thateveryone possesses only psychic clichés by which he thinks and feels, is thought and is felt,
being himself a cliché among the others in the world which surrounds him.”40 While I am notdrawing concretely on Deleuze’s formulation of an alternative to the action-image, I share his
scepticism of the cinematic image to engage with the fullness of a traditional (Real) textual
activity.
37

Slavoj Žižek, “Vertigo: The Drama of a Deceived Platonist.” Hitchcock Annual (2003-2004), 68-69.
Umberto Eco, “Innovation and Repetition.” Daedalus 114, no. 4 (1985), 170.
39
Jim Collins, “Genericity in the Nineties: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity.” In Film Theory Goes to theMovies, ed. Jim Collins, Hillary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins (New York: Routledge, 1993), 256.
40
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Trans Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London:
Athlone Press, 1986), 208-209.
38

22

Engaging with the Real in a classical realist sense requires engaging with an
idealisation of the Real. Beneath my aesthetic engagement with Eternal Sunshine is thenotion of an ideal text. Any post-structuralist cautionary word in light of the recuperation of
the Real meets only images and sound bites that stand in for perfected texts, and whollycohesive, contained film experiences. The Real need not be a tangible point of ‘reality’ (as,say, the socio-economic plight of youths in Brooklyn is in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing). I
recalled the basic narrative structure of Eternal Sunshine, but it was not narrative to which I
turned for its aesthetic impact. In fact, it occurred to me, the less reality involved, the more
Real the cinematic mind makes of the image. In this way authenticity can be a subjective
experience, that is, if reality is substituted by an idealised vision that informs the subjective
point of view, albeit only a three second clip.
What I hope to illustrate is the tenuousness of the relationship of the cinematic image
to the Real; in Eternal Sunshine’s case, this applies to the notion of an essential and holistic
film experience. We simply do not experience films this way in contemporary Western filmgoing societies, if indeed we ever have. Films are no more texts on a screen for passive
consumption than they are traditional interpretive phenomena in the service of a better
cultural appreciation. I hope to reconstruct an aesthetic mode of looking at film (I use ‘mode’insofar as it connotes a less than comprehensive or uniform approach), an aesthetic notdivorced from an appreciation of art as ideology, or art as social reflection (or even cultural
engineer), but certainly one that returns critical theory to its rightful place, equallycommentary and complimentarity rather than a thing in and of itself.
1.3 Bazin and the Myth of Total Cinema
André Bazin’s writings on cinema might appear an odd choice with which to level an attack
on realism. Among other things, Bazin’s work has been critiqued and developed in several
forums and in several inventive ways. One influential analysis of Bazin’s realism myth canbe found in Deleuze’s Cinema 2 in which he considers depth of field in relation to Bazin’s
theory of the reality of the depth of field image. However, in my discussion, I am interested
more in the legacy of realism in cinema than a detailed structural analysis of the shot andsequence, which Deleuze undertakes.41
41

For example, see Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image. Trans Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam(London: Athlone Press, 1989), 105-109.

23

Bazin offers a vital point of origin of cinema as a predominantly realist medium. But
rather than value his functional ‘ontology of the Real,’ I contend that his notion of reality isanchored in a historical privilege accorded to the representative or mimetic art form. Robert
Ray suggests that “the American Cinema’s apparently natural subjection of style to narrativein fact depended on a historical accident: the movies’ origins lay in the late nineteenth
century whose predominant popular arts were the novel or the theatre…it adopted the basic
tactic and goal of the realistic novel.”42 Classical Hollywood cinema was thus connected to arealist aesthetic that achieved its zenith in the nineteenth century realist novel and drama.
Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and Intolerance are essentially social historical dramas that findan ancestor in American realism and naturalism of the late nineteenth century. I am notarguing here that all cinema was indebted to a realist aesthetic. Murnau’s Nosferatu or Lang’s
Metropolis are striking for their unique departures from a classical realism and theirdeliberate incorporation of Expressionist and Surrealist art traditions. But the cinema that was
taken up by the Hollywood studios was indelibly inscribed with the mark of the Real,
whether this was Wilder’s uncompromisingly realistic portrayal of alcoholism in Lost
Weekend, or the genre cinema of Hawks’s Scarface: The Shame of a Nation and The Big
Sleep.43
Classical cinema adopted the classical realist aesthetic in its attempt to perfect the
reproduction of the image. The High Renaissance is deemed ‘high,’ among other things, fordevising the complexity of perspective in painting and sculpture, and achieving a heightened
realism in its depiction of the life form (Michelangelo’s David is often mentioned in thiscontext).44 Film was very early considered an image medium (thus the formative andinfluential work of Sergei Eisenstein on the montage) rather than a field of free movement; itis this distinction that foregrounds Deleuze’s influential books on film. Early cinema
foregrounds the image and the cut rather than the sequence. This emphasis on the still
representation (in photography, the perfect realisation of the physical form) can be traced to42

Robert Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1985), 34.
43
For an influential analysis of Hawks’s contribution to studio cinema, and particularly for his brand of ‘noble
realism,’ see Jacques Rivette, “The Genius of Howard Hawks.” In Cahiers Du Cinéma: The 1950s, ed. Jim
Hillier (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985), 130.
44
See André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” In What is Cinema, Volume 1, trans. Hugh
Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 12-13. For an assessment of Bazin’s
theory, see David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1977),
70-71.

24

classical realist aesthetics, distinguishable from modernist successors. Modern art movementsof the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found their modernity in the departurefrom the representative image, whether a figure or a field of flowers. It is precisely for thisreason that Adorno esteems Picasso’s Guernica in its being “wholly incompatible with
criteria of realism, gaining expression through inhuman construction.” For Adorno, Guernica
achieves a critical distance from realist aesthetics, which paradoxically allows it to engineer aframe of “social protest.”45
Art that foregrounds its politics or ideological bent is impotent because, in Adorno’s
estimation, it prevents a heightened aesthetic and social interaction with the artwork. On thecontrary, Bazin recuperates the ethos of classical realism as the aspiration of a new kind ofimage in the cinema: “Painting was forced, as it turned out, to offer us illusion and thisillusion was reckoned sufficient unto art. Photography and the cinema on the other hand are
discoveries that satisfy, once and for all, and in its very essence, our obsession withrealism.”46 He is correct to begin with the assumption of realism as an obsession, a necessity
to contort what is fundamentally artificial (in this case, the cinematic image) into the shape ofwhat it is said to indelibly represent. The criteria of contemporary film viewing conditions isbased on the importance of the realist aesthetic. A mass audience views films in a darkened
room, insulated from an external reality, as audiences once did in the presentation of silent
cinema or at the advent of sound, to sustain disbelief that it is viewing a world fundamentally
divorced from its own, a world based upon a technological and textual construct. But rather
than address the ontology of realism as a representative standard (that is, the Real as
aestheticised reality), Bazin addresses the technological evolution toward the perfectrealisation of the Real. In his work on the photograph, he explores the ‘ontology of thephotographic image,’ in which he suggests a profound ontological shift from the earlier, andinherently flawed, realism of the master painter. “No matter how skilful the painter, his work
was always in fee to an inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a human hand intervened cast ashadow of doubt over the image.”47 However, in the ascendance of the photograph over the
representative painting, “for the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction

45

Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory. Trans. C Lenhardt, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 337.
46
Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 12.
47
Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 12.

25

there intervenes only the instrumentality of a non-living agent” [the camera lens].48 For
Bazin, the photographic image is empowered with the greatest ontology yet to “lay bare therealities.”49
In fact, the driving ‘myth’ of cinema is toward the Real. Thus, even before thetechnological components of image-making had been realised, the mythic foundation ofrepresentative art was to reproduce the Real without the impingement of the subjectivity of
the artist or the shortcomings of a primitive technology: the crudity of an artist’s tools, theunreliability of the human faculties to reproduce perfectly what they perceived. Bazinsummarises this in the following passage: “Any account of the cinema that was drawn merely
from the technical inventions that made it possible would be a poor one indeed. On thecontrary, an approximate and complicated visualisation of an idea invariably precedes theindustrial discovery which alone can open the way for its practical use.”50 In realising thismyth, cinema achieves what it had been destined for, an art laying bare the world in “all its
cruelty and ugliness.”51 This was an image that was pure in relation to its object, an art of theReal and a new artistic realism.
In his much discussed essay, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” Bazin
imbues the cinematic image with the power he attributes to photographic realism. In so doing,
he realises a benchmark in film theory in which realism achieved its perfection in thecinematic image. Crucially, Bazin was a co-founder of the influential French journal, Cahiersdu Cinema, which proved a fermenting ground for the philosophical aesthetics of the French
New Wave auteurs, particularly Jean Luc Godard and François Truffaut; it proved afermenting ground also for Bazin’s realist aesthetics. According to Bazin, the inherent
realism of the cinema is revealed in the stripping back of the complex (though ‘invisible’)editing techniques of classical Hollywood cinema and the montage of Russian cinema
explored in the films and writing of Sergei Eisenstein. In the 1940s and 1950s, Bazin looks to
Welles, William Wyler, early Renoir, and traces residues of the perfection of realism in thesilent films of Murnau (Nosferatu [1922], Sunrise [1927]) and Eric Von Stroheim (Greed[1924]).
48

Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 13.
Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 15.
50
André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema.” In What is Cinema, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1967), 18.
51
André Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema.” In What is Cinema, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 27.
49

26

It is interesting to note here that Godard and Truffaut shared very little cinematically with
Bazin’s theories, particularly in his reification of realism. Both foreground cinematic styleand the inherent artifice of the cinematic image. Godard’s A Bout De Souffle (Breathless) is
exemplary of what I will refer to as the metacinematic aesthetic. Michel (Jean Paul
Belmonde) plays a protagonist on the lam who embodies a Humphrey Bogart persona while
addressing the camera, and finds his narrative continuity hampered by Godard’s incessant useof the jump cut. Truffaut’s concluding shot in Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows) (inwhich the loss of innocence of the protagonist is conveyed in a camera rush on his striking
features, followed by an unorthodox use of freeze-frame), merges the realist aesthetic withthe cinematic flamboyance of the first of the New Wave auteurs. Truffaut’s next film was theovertly ‘artificial’ Tires Sur Le Pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player). And indeed the French
New Wave quickly came to embody the cool artifice of the cinematic medium, confronting
and then succeeding the demands of a cinema that had exhausted, in Deleuzian terms, thepossibilities of the action image.
1.4 Depth of Field and Focus
In Bazin’s work, cinema is essentially a narrative art form. He discusses Robert Flaherty’s
documentary Nanook of the North in the same critical vein in which he discusses Orson
Welles’s use of deep focus in Citizen Kane; in both films, the structure of the cinematic text
is based on the telling of a story. The measure of the cinematic image is its capacity toconvey the reality of life stories, characters and ideals. For Bazin, the origins of an‘intellectual cinema,’ postulated in the montage of Sergei Eisenstein, are less an exposition
than a perversion of the Real. The intellectualism of the cinema, for Eisenstein, could betraced to the quality of the montage, “an essential method and device in any cinematographic
exposition. And, in a condensed and purified form, it is the starting-point for ‘intellectual
cinema,’ a cinema that seeks the maximum laconicism in the visual exposition of abstract
concepts.”52 The intellectualism of cinema is thus initially a matter of form that organises thenature of the content; the montage functioned as a comprehensive philosophical and aesthetic
language.

52

Sergei Eisenstein, “Beyond the Shot [The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram].” In Film Theory andCriticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 14-15.

27

Eisenstein’s intellectual montage is particularly relevant to this discussion of Bazin,
for while Bazin does not use the term ‘intellectual cinema,’ he more readily discusses thework of a Murnau or Dreyer than Hollywood’s Cecil B. DeMille. Interestingly, Welles,
Wyler and Ford emerged in the U.S. from within a studio aesthetic and an industrialised film
production. Hitchcock is perhaps the most interesting case insofar as his auteuristic impulse
was attuned equally to the artistic as the commercial.53 The notion of an intellectual cinemathat developed separately from a commercial cinema is increasingly problematic after the
1930s, but it is a distinction that Bazin at least implicitly upholds.
Bazin locates the realisation of the myth of total cinema after 1940, particularly inWelles’s Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). It is his contention
that Welles’s use of ‘deep focus’ and ‘depth of field’ challenges the ontology of the montage
as the cinematic purveyor of reality. Deep focus is a cinematographic device in which thefocus of a single shot is broadened to encompass more than a central figure or a single pointof reference. The dominant style of classical Hollywood cinema (1930s and 40s) was a ‘shotreverse shot’ sequence in which the spectator is presented with a shot and a subsequent
reverse shot contextualising the arrangement. A shot would therefore have a focal point(commonly centre-screen), a high contrast with a background that remained out of focus, anda subsequent cut to a reverse shot to give the focal arrangement a point of reference. Robert
Ray suggests that the shot-reverse shot was integral to the maintenance of the ‘invisibility ofstyle’ in classical Hollywood: “The shot-reverse shot figure, therefore, played a crucial rolein a formal paradigm whose basic tactic was the concealment of the necessity of choice.”54 In
contriving the invisibility of style editing process in its major, primarily genre films, theHollywood studio system presented the cinematic image as unadorned, servicing only the
structural requirements of the narrative. The shot-reverse shot drew the spectator into theaction, collapsing the screen that ordinarily functioned as a point of demarcation between
cinematic text and spectator. The screen was dissolved, arriving almost paradoxically at theperfection of the realist aesthetic through the immersion of the spectator in the story,
characterisation, thematic, and by extension, the Hollywood studio system. The spectator,
relinquished of the necessity to choose (or forge her subjective interpretation on the sequenceof images), assumes that the reality on screen is identical to the one it represents.
53
54

See Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, 57-64.
Ray, 39.

28

In response to various strategies of montage, Bazin celebrates the cinematic image’s
potential to reproduce the Real, and thus to reject the inherent artificiality of ‘visible’ editing,exemplified in the work of Eisenstein. If montage is a “collision of two factors which gives
rise to an idea,”55 Bazin considers the process of arrangement, or the ordering of single shots,
an intrusion into the visual reality: “It is simply a question of respect for the spatial unity ofan event at the moment when to split it up would change it from something real into
something imaginary.”56 The montage is essentially a putting together of two or moreotherwise unrelated shots into an ordered system, forming a narrative component. Thisordered system does not permit the spectator to partake in the realisation of the image on thescreen because the order of the image sequence is determined wholly by the filmmaker.
The crucial distinction between Eisenstein’s and Bazin’s philosophy of the cinematic
image can be found in the notion of ‘spatial unity.’ Whereas Eisenstein attempts to trace a
genealogy of the montage through Japanese symbols and hieroglyphs:
For example: the representation of water and of an eye signifies “to weep”,
the representation of an ear next to a drawing of a door means “to listen”,
a dog and a mouth mean “to bark”…
But – this is montage!!57,

Bazin conceptualises a transcendental Real, an a priori ‘spatial unity’ that pre-exists thecinematic representation, the reproduced image. Bazin’s ‘language of cinema’ is essentially alanguage with which to reproduce the inherent “continuum of reality.”58 For Eisenstein,cinema is a system of production: “Cinema is: so many firms, so much working capital, suchand such a ‘star’, so many dramas./ Cinema is, first and foremost, montage.”59 For Bazin, it isa system of reproduction. Eisenstein creates something out of montage; Bazin perceives a
revealing of the Real “in which the image is evaluated not according to what it adds to reality
but what it reveals of it.”60
This revelation occurs in the ontology of the deep focus and depth of field shot (inwhich the ‘field’ of the shot is longer than a façade or a standard set-up). While deep focus
55

Eisenstein, 19.
André Bazin, “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage.” In What is Cinema, trans. Hugh Grey (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 50.
57
Eisenstein, 14.
58
Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema”, 37. Original emphasis.
59
Eisenstein, 13.
60
Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” 28.
56

29

holds more of the shot in focus simultaneously, depth of field is able to visually contrive the‘centrality’ of an out of focus object. The two cinematographic strategies are complementary.
David Bordwell offers an excellent discussion of the use of depth of field in contemporarycinema in which he claims that what was once unique in Welles has been taken on board by
the majority of mainstream filmmakers after the 1980s:
Most postwar directors, modernist or mainstream, cannot be distinguished by theircommitment to a distinctive aesthetic of depth…Neither [can] most of the younger
generation, including the various New Waves in Europe and the Third World. Virtually allof the Cahiers’ canonised ‘modern’ directors shot with deep focus in the 1940s and 1950s
and shifted to telephoto lenses and zooms during the 1960s and 1970s. They quickly
adapted the new techniques to their aims of more self-consciously realistic, reflexive andambiguous storytelling.61

Contemporary filmmakers employ conventional focus for the majority of shots, thoughfrequently revert to deep focus for a single shot, and even occasionally an extended sequence.
The scene in which Delilah (Anna Levine) offers William Munny (Clint Eastwood) a “freeone” in Unforgiven is shot almost entirely in deep focus, achieving a naturalism in therelationship between the isolated figures ostracised from their respective societies, and thedesolate beauty of the American West. Antonioni’s L’Avventura is shot almost exclusively indeep focus; the composition of the shots on the ocean and particularly on the island on which
Anna (Lea Massari) disappears is striking.
While the majority of shots in contemporary cinema use shallow or medium focus, deep
focus is still utilised, and often to striking and provocative effect. Bazin’s notion of the deep
focus as rendering the cinematic image ‘ambiguous,’ or at least subject to multiple
interpretations, is illustrated, for example, in Scorsese’s Casino. Ginger (Sharon Stone)
speaks to Sam (Robert De Niro) on a payphone while Lester Diamond (James Woods)‘chastises’ their daughter in the background. The spectator’s gaze is divided between theseparate shot segments (and thus separate dramas) that merge in a medium focus shot. In aclassical montage, the separate dramas would be rendered through a series of cuts that direct
the spectators gaze and, according to Bazin, code the meaning of the scene.

61

Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, 253.

30

1.5 Citizen Kane: A Cinematographic Revolution?
Citizen Kane remains the most influential film produced in the Hollywood studio system, andperhaps the most influential film ever produced in the United States. After more than fifty
years, it is still regarded as the greatest film ever made by the influential Sight and Sound
poll.62 Of course, measuring degrees of influence is largely subjective and the reader ought tobear in mind Chris Rock’s visit to a multiplex in South Central L.A. In any case, film theory
attests to Kane’s centrality in its stylistic innovation rather than in the originality of the story.
Reviewers, critics and theorists return to Kane’s unique cinematography to find its
distinction. Bazin discusses in particular the function of depth of field and focus, whichallows the camera to maintain the spatial unity of the shot, or to reproduce it in its ‘true’
form. Welles certainly did experiment with the conventions of editing in Citizen Kane and
The Magnificent Ambersons, primarily in lengthening the takes and deepening the focus of
the shot to include characters and objects on the periphery. The famous four minute opening
sequence of Touch of Evil was captured in a single take (and remains perhaps the mostdistinguished single take on film). However, I would argue that the ontology of the long take
had altered significantly since 1941, or, for that matter, 1947, the year Hitchcock shot Rope ina ‘single’ take.63
The use of the long take in Kane permits the action to unfold according to a natural
spatial and temporal dimension. The extended take is favoured over the cut, approximating
the movement of the actor to real life, and offering the spectator the depiction of movement
as it would appear off-screen. Bordwell and Thompson offer a detailed reading of a sequence
early in Kane in which the camera unobtrusively moves from a long exterior shot to aninterior conversation involving characters positioned in various depths of shot.64 The scene isimbued with a sense of intimacy, and yet there is a fluidity of movement from exterior tointerior shot. The depth of focus emphasises the inherent continuity of the shot – backgroundto foreground becomes a space that remains in focus. The immersion of the image in focus
functions literally as a resistance to the cut. While the camera holds on Charles’s aunt and62“Sight and Sound Top Ten Poll.” British Film Institute. <http://bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten/> Accessed
Jul. 16 2005.
63
Rope is in fact shot over at least nine takes, with several rehearsals and attempts at each. A reel in 1947 could
not shoot more than ten minutes of film. Hitchcock attempts to disguise the cuts, but a close viewing of the film
reveals the process to be less than subtle, and in the context of the conventional narrative structure, unnecessary.
See “Rope Unleashed.” Documentary. Rope (The Hitchcock Collection). DVD. Universal, 2001.
64
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (Reading: Addison-Wesley Publishing,1980), 223-227.

31

uncle inside the house, Charles is never ‘out of focus’ in the exterior, but merely off-screen.
This is precisely the revolutionary component of deep focus that several critics have failed toappreciate. Deep focus and the long take equates to an inherent continuity of the image inwhich action and movement are in a sense always occurring. For Bazin, this offers the nearest
approximation of an external reality in which, if a person turns her head from one direction toanother, what lies behind her back continues its own progression into the future while sheremains oblivious. Space and time are in a state of perpetual movement in relation to thespectator gaze.
In contrast, the cut is for Bazin connected to an earlier fascination with the still-life
image captured by an earlier form of reproductive technology:
Orson Welles restored to cinematographic illusion a fundamental quality of reality – its
continuity. Classical editing, deriving from Griffith, separated reality into successive shots
which were just a series of either logical or subjective points of view of an event…The
construction thus introduces an obviously abstract element into reality. Because we are soused to such abstractions, we no longer sense them.65

One could contrast Welles’s ‘continuous’ shot with Kubrick’s use of the cut as an organisingprinciple of space and time in the last chapter of 2001: A Space Odyssey. For Welles, deep
focus maintains continuity in the represented image. For Kubrick, the cut literally erases a
figure from the shot. After exiting the wormhole, the first shot depicts Bowman (Keir Dullea)
from outside the spaceship. The first cut fractures the causality of the conventional shot
reverse-shot. Now the spectator sees Bowman positioned outside the spaceship, but the pointof view shot positions the spectator inside the spaceship. The prior incarnation of Bowman(who materialised in the spaceship after exiting the wormhole) is now occupied subjectively
by the spectator. The cut installs the spectator into Bowman’s subjectivity that has
simultaneously been displaced to the exterior of the ship. This occurs three more times as a
hard cut erases Bowman’s presence from the scene. The cut is used throughout thisextraordinary sequence to dissociate the new Bowman (the precursor to the Star Child) froma natural cause-effect determinism. In this case, the erasure is literally achieved through thecut, which alters the point of view of the sequence, transforming the (subjective) reality of the

65

André Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality: Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of Liberation.” In What is
Cinema, Volume II, trans. Hugh Grey (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 28.

32

shot. This is Kubrick’s remarkable visualisation of a quantum space and time throughcinematographic principles.
While Bazin in a sense acknowledges and even celebrates the aestheticisation of reality,
deep focus in Kane transcends this, exacting an affinity with the Real which maintains “anawareness of the reality itself”66 apart from the abstraction into artifice.
1.6 A Note on the Mechanics of Style
For the discussion that follows on Citizen Kane, I am indebted to Roger Ebert’s astonishingly
detailed commentary on the film.67 Ebert’s ‘insider knowledge’ in this respect is very useful,and indicates yet again that film-buffs and historians have access to source material beyond
the reach or interests of the traditional film scholar. Only Bordwell to my mind has offered ananalysis of film style that approaches the professionalism of the language of a filmmaker.68
One need only contrast Scorsese’s description of a shot in Taxi Driver or Raging Bull69 with
my own rudimentary terminology of shots and sequences in Citizen Kane. Ultimately, I
would argue that film scholarship does not have an adequate knowledge of the filmmaking
process. The advantage of such knowledge is two-fold. The recuperation of any measure ofauteurism (which I would argue is necessary in a study of contemporary cinema) requires aknowledge of the way the film is put together. Wood offers a reading of a sequence inMarnie, first as a literal exegesis of the action as it would appear in the script and then as aseries of shots.70 For Wood, the essential innovation of cinema (and particularly Hitchcockian
cinema) is the uniqueness of the visual technique to the individual filmmaker, as well as aheightened affectivity of the visual image over the written word: “A novelist could give us
some kind of equivalent for this, could make us react along the same general lines; but hecouldn’t make us react in this direct, immediate way, as image succeeds image – he couldn’t
control our actions so precisely in time.”71 An analysis of the cinematic stylistics ofindividual filmmakers is not misplaced in a study of film, nor easily negated by investigations
66

Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality,” 27.
Roger Ebert, “Commentary.” Citizen Kane. DVD: Two Disc Special Edition. Warner Bros.
68
See, for example, Bordwell, On the History of Film Style. Of course, filmmakers have frequently waxed
lyrical on the complexities of film technique. For the most influential work in this respect, see Truffaut.
69
Scorsese presents a fascinating account of the ‘cinematicality’ of his films in Scorsese on Scorsese, ed. David
Thompson and Ian Christie (London: Faber and Faber, 1989). See especially the section on Goodfellas (153163).
70
Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, 55-56.
71
Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, 56.
67

33

of spectator subjectivities in psychoanalytic theory or analyses of hegemonies, cultures, or byextension, selves.
Secondly, a knowledge of the filmmaking process is required to establish a measure ofintent in the cinematic image, and this is equally necessary to an analysis of cinema. To takea very simple example, it is crucial in the narrative structure of Psycho that Hitchcock
maintains the deception of the Norman/Mother duality until the final scene in which Norman
is literally unveiled. According to screenwriter, Joseph Stefano, the most complex deception
took place in the scene in which Norman carries Mother (against her will) into the fruit
cellar.72 According to the shooting script, Norman would have a brief argument with Mother,which would take place inside the bedroom, off camera. The camera would be positioned at
the top of the staircase. As Norman leaves the bedroom, coming into shot in the original setup of the camera, Hitchcock would cut the scene and show Norman and Mother from thedoorway of the bedroom as they descend the stairs. Stefano’s objection was that the spectator
would sense something amiss and the deception would be compromised, perhaps evenrevealed. The cut from medium front shot on the staircase to a medium back shot from the
bedroom doorway would be too conspicuous, and too obviously deceptive. Stefano suggestedbuilding a mechanism with which to capture an overhead shot, thus filming the exit ofNorman and Mother from the bedroom, the passage through the landing, and the descent on
the staircase, in a single take. Hitchcock objected on the morning of the shooting due to thecost of the set-up but changed his mind when it became clear that Stefano was right.
The point here is that the deception is maintained through the composition of the shotbased on a visual strategy employed by the filmmaker (in this case, Stefano/Hitchcock). I
would contend that the theorist who seeks to conceptualise the impact of the shot on the
spectator must have a knowledge of the way the shot is composed. The composition is
ultimately co-ordinated by a mechanistic process involving the camera and various
contraptions that allow the camera to move. The innovation of digital cinematography is totranscend the physicality of the mechanised process, but I will have more to say about this in
Chapter Three.
Conventional film theory has devoted little space to analysing what David Sterritt has
called the “physicality” of cinematic narrative, that is, the way in which the physical objects
72

See Stefano’s account in Stephen Rebello, “The Inception.” In Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho: A Casebook, ed.
Robert Kolker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 52-53.

34

and bodies are arranged to give a sequence a systematic composition. Of Hitchcock, Sterritt
suggests that “even close analyses of Hitchcock’s films tend to race past the visceral impactof physical events that pass across the screen.”73 It is not only the physicality of the cinematic
shot but the mechanised processes involved in its composition that must surely be returned toany meaningful analysis of film. Without such an analysis, film theory is limited in its scopeto spectator response, which accounts for its emphasis on subjectivity and the relationship of
the subject to the cinematic screen.74 While such analyses are central to an understanding of
the way film functions on the spectator, I would argue also that a study of film as a uniquely
visual text (incorporating the moving image) is just as crucial.

1.7 Auteurism and the Artifice of the Cinematic Image
I have thus far engaged with Bazin’s theory of cinematic realism. Central as Bazin was to the
Cahiers group, and central as auteur theory remains to film audiences (who invariably referto a film as the singular possession of its director), I have also argued that Bazin’s realism is acomponent of a broader realist aesthetics that pervades contemporary theories of cinema.
Bazin was there first, so to speak, and his tenacious engagement with an ontology of the Realremains impressive in light of subsequent film theories and movements.
A critique of Bazin is necessarily formulated around two divergent arguments: theoveremphasis on the auteur aspect of Welles after 1940 (particularly in the focus on Kane and
The Magnificent Ambersons) and the challenge to the ontology of the image in poststructuralist semiotics – I draw on Barthes’s work in this respect.
The notion of the auteur (or creative genius) was in its conception a retrospective
theorising and engagement with the presentation of content, that is, the auteur’s unique wayof formalising the content of the story. In spite of an attack levelled by post-structuralist andmaterialist critics in the decades subsequent to the French New Wave, Andrew Sarris, theinfluential American film writer, reverts to the notion of the auteur as a meaningful criteriawith which to measure the value of a film.75 Sarris’s “The Auteur Theory Revisited” isparticularly interesting insofar as it offers a response to the attack levelled by Gore Vidal and73

David Sterritt, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 17. Originalemphasis.
74
See Christian Metz, “Some Points in the Semiotics of the Cinema.” In Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo
Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 65-72.
75
Andrew Sarris, “The Auteur Theory Revisited.” In Film and Authorship, ed. Virginia Wright Wexman (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 26.

35

others. I am somewhat sympathetic to theories of the auteur, in spite of Thomas Schatz’s
dismissive analysis of the theory as “adolescent romanticism.”76 While one ought to besuspicious of auteur theory in its mid-1950s incarnation, especially in relation tocontemporary cinema produced within the Hollywood system, it seems facile to reject thepossibility of a discernible ‘vision,’ albeit a vision constructed within a highly complex andfluid dynamic. Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive seem to me
quintessential Lynch as much as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas are quintessential
Scorsese. A large portion of the work of Lynch and Scorsese is focused on a similar thematicand stylistic project. One could argue, as Roger Ebert does pejoratively, that Lynch has been
trying to make the same film his entire career and finally succeeds with Mulholland Drive. 77
Scorsese’s ‘New York’ films (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy,
Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, the forthcoming The Departed) examine similar characters,
stories and themes while exploring a stylistics of cinema that can be traced throughout his
work. The slow-motion entry of the protagonist as flaneur (who is more often than not also
one of the film’s narrators) is a shot that occurs in Mean Streets, Taxi Driver (in which theenclosed urban space of the city substitutes for the social setting of a bar or restaurant),
Goodfellas and Casino.
The retroactive declaration of Welles as an auteur in the tradition of Hitchcock or Fordseems premature in light of his career after Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. Auteur
theory credited a uniformity or continuity of style, including a continuity of the visual aspectattributed to certain directors. There is a near uncanny uniformity in the way Hitchcock
approaches his subject matter as a director. While he never looked through a viewing lens(leaving that to the cinematographer, whom he at times called a ‘cameraman’), the use ofcamera angles, movement, staging of the scene, etc., has a degree of congruence in each of
his films. Rebello discusses Hitchcock’s obsession with subjective (or point of view) shots in
Psycho that became almost synonymous with the director’s work – Rear Window, Vertigo
and Psycho are obvious cases in point.78
Bazin’s conception of Welles as auteur focuses instead on a unique cinematographic
strategy as an auteuristic impulse and thus as a purveyor of a perfect cinematic realism. What76

Thomas Schatz, “The Whole Equation of Pictures.” In Film and Authorship, ed. Virginia Wright Wexman(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 91.
77
Roger Ebert, “Mulholland Drive.” Chicago Sun-Times, 12 Oct. 2001.
78
Rebello, 49.

36

Bazin seems to argue for is the notion of the auteur as philosopher as well as creative genius;
Welles’s career is notable for what it says about ‘Film’ rather than the films themselves.
Bazin has relatively little to say about the narrative or thematic continuity of Welles’s films
from Citizen Kane onward. While the freedom offered by depth of field cinematography wasconsidered a remarkable and controversial aesthetic innovation in Hollywood cinema in the
1940s, 79 it surely does not constitute the essence of Welles’s filmmaking. Most film
audiences (those niche audiences privileged enough to have seen Citizen Kane) remain
oblivious to the concept of deep focus cinematography.
Welles’s turbulent years in the Hollywood studio system inevitably fashioned
something auteuristic in his work, and perhaps even more significantly, in his persona as a
Hollywood rebel. He is particularly interesting for his involvement with and ultimate
exclusion from the studio system. Citizen Kane had been made through RKO Pictures, one of
the major studios in 1940. He made only The Magnificent Ambersons two years later with
RKO, which the studio considered such a disappointment that it altered the film’s downbeat
ending. Following Ambersons, Welles existed on the fringe of the studios. He made The
Stranger, a less than noteworthy genre film which was marginally successful. The Lady From
Shanghai appeared in 1948, though next to Kane and Ambersons, this is mediocre film noir,
remarkable only for a tense, well-conceived first act and a wildly surreal concluding scene ina hall of mirrors.80 He appeared briefly in The Third Man (1949), though his creative input isquestionable. Touch of Evil (1955), now regarded as a classic and the progenitor of the neonoir, was received poorly by American critics and audiences: “While the New York critics
were honoring Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones, the Cahiers critics were cheering Orson
Welles’s Touch of Evil. Obviously their eyes were quicker than our ears.”81 Thus, it is only
Kane (that did not win a Best Picture or Best Director Oscar) and Ambersons that supports
Bazin’s thesis, and in relation to the peripheral nature of Welles’s career after Ambersons, I
would suggest this is presumptuous. Bogdanovich describes this general response to Welles
as a filmmaker toward the end of his career: “If Welles did have fears, he came by them
79

Mikel J. Koven, “Citizen Kane.” In 1001 Movies to See Before You Die, ed. Steven J. Schneider (London:
Quintet, 2003), 172.
80
Deleuze mentions The Lady From Shanghai several times in Cinema 2. However, his discussion relates
specifically to Welles narrative (and image) structure in which past, present and future coalesce as frames ofmeaning (See Deleuze, Cinema 2, 112-115). Deleuze’s books on film are perhaps more akin to filmic
philosophy (equating to nothing less than a comprehensive theory of the moving image) than conventional film
theory.
81
Sarris, 26.

37

honestly: since Orson’s earliest theatre and radio successes, after Citizen Kane, his U.S.
notices were mixed to negative. “What else has he done since Citizen Kane?” was a popular
refrain long before Welles died.”82
Perhaps this criticism is not entirely fair to Bazin, who does not purport to describe hisbrand of realism as central to the Hollywood studio system. Along with Truffaut, hechampioned Welles as one of the great auteurs in the midst of an industry practising aclassical aesthetics: shot-reverse shot, theatrical sets, naturalistic focus, quick edits, etc. But
the legacy of Welles as an intellectual filmmaker, to recall Eisenstein’s term, attributable as it
is to Bazin and others, is questionable in this regard. And this must subsequently bring into
question the significance of deep focus and depth of field cinematography to subsequentfilmic traditions. Welles’s legacy will always revolve around the legacy of Citizen Kane toclassic and contemporary Hollywood cinema, but one wonders how much that legacy has to
do with cinematographic strategies or realist principles. An abiding legacy of Kane must also
be located in the Academy, most notably, among the theorists who turned to classical
Hollywood in support of their theses. One such writer is Laura Mulvey, whose volume on
Citizen Kane appropriates the film for an extended analysis of various theoretical legacies.83
Mulvey concedes that her contribution to the legacy of Kaneis an experiment in method. I am applying the film theory and criticism of my generation toa film that has been taken through the mill by each generation since it appeared fifty years
ago. As the main influences on my thought have been psychoanalytic theory and feminism,
both have strongly inflected my analysis of Citizen Kane, not just in terms of content – how
the film depicts women and uses Freud – but as a film that challenges conventional
relations between screen and spectator and constructs a language of cinema that mesheswith the language of the psyche.84

In this sense, Kane’s legacy will always manage to be reconstituted as the textual fabric of a
new visual (or cinematic) consciousness.
A meaningful critique of Bazin’s realism must also engage with his theory of the ontology of
the cinematic image. We must begin with his notion of a possible cinematic realism that isrealised in opposition to the montage. If the montage is a strategic connecting of unrelated82

Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), xxi.
Laura Mulvey, Citizen Kane (London: The British Film Institute, 1992).
84
Mulvey, Citizen Kane, 16.
8338

images to form a narrative segment (the montage itself), deep focus allows the shot tomaintain an inherent spatial unity by erasing the edit, the join, and by allowing a free flow of
the temporal and spatial reproduction of the Real. Deep focus and depth of field allow thecamera to photograph reality as it is. To address this, let us return to a scene in Kane. Charles
Foster Kane sits in an office signing away his great fortune. Welles characteristically places
this scene a third of the way through the narrative and returns to Kane’s youth in the scenethat immediately follows. The sequence in which Kane stands from the desk and walks to arectangular window, pauses and then returns to sign the document is striking for a number ofreasons.85 The single take is held in deep focus. The spectator perceives the contours of thedesk, Mr Thatcher, Mr Leland at the right of shot, as well as the rectangular windows in the
background. Kane stands and moves towards the windows while the shot holds in deep focus.
As Kane approaches the window, the spectator realises that the depth of field of this shot isalso a trick of perspective. The windows on the set are six feet above the ground. The critic,
Roger Ebert, describes this as an ‘optical illusion,’86 which of course it is. The spectator isdeceived into thinking the windows are conventionally proportioned for an office building.
Instead, the spatial dimensions of the shot are incongruent with an external reality whileemphasising the ‘reality’ of the scene through long takes, deep focus, and depth of field.
Thus, while the scene is exemplary of deep focus as a cinematographic device, it is also an
example of Welles’s ingenious use of deep focus to deliberately encode the Real with an
inherent artificiality.
This illusion of realism is employed several times in Kane. The famous opening on
Xanadu, Kane’s pleasure palace, is a seamless blend of a constructed set and a matte drawingof Xanadu’s façade; both set and drawing are held in the shot in deep focus. Rather thanrevealing the reality of the shot, deep focus positions a cinematic gaze that is subject to an
inherent illusion: Xanadu, constructed in the spatial reality of the shot, does not exist. The
trick of perspective is used a number of times in Kane to symbolise the rise and fall of a
‘great man.’ As Ebert suggests, it works as a “visual pun,”87 but it works also as acinematographic technique that signifies meaning in more than one way.

85

Citizen Kane. DVD Two Disc Special Edition (Warner Bros. 2001): 27-28 minutes.
Ebert, “Commentary.”
87
Ebert, “Commentary.”
86

39

Welles employs a similar visual pun in the shot in which Kane walks toward a gigantic
fireplace in Xanadu’s great hall, exemplifying what Wood has called “the most artificial kindof cinema.”88 According to Ebert, Kane is “filled with special effects. When you look at themovie for the first time, you just see a political rally [Ebert is referring to a shot of Boss Jim
Getty and Kane exiting a civic hall]. You don’t think of it as a special effects shot, but it’s as
contrived as anything in Star Wars…it’s made out of thin air.”89 Deep focus and depth offield are striking innovations in the technical aspect of Kane, yet they are essentiallycinematographic strategies employed to aestheticise a narrative in a visual medium. Welles
employed depth of field precisely to foreground the contrivance of the cinematic shot (asGodard and Truffaut would do two decades later, inspiring a wave of innovative auteurs).
Cinema fractured as a mimetic form in the years after Welles, and Kane must surely becredited as a landmark film in this aesthetic revolution. Consider the famous opening of Billy
Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard in which a body lies floating in a pool. The shot was captured byplacing a mirror on the pool floor and shooting from above the water. We thus see a corpse ofa traditional noir protagonist floating from beneath the surface, who promptly begins tonarrate the film. The set-up is obviously not a conventional mise en scene or point of viewshot.
The Hollywood auteurs (Wilder among them) explored the cinematic frontiers of theimage. Hitchcock’s oeuvre is a testament to film as a visual medium distinct from traditional
textual practices, and to the shot as a site of innovation and variation on traditional realist
aesthetics. How else can one account for the centrality of an ostensibly genre filmmaker tofilm theory after the 1950s? Broadly speaking, Hitchcock was never a ‘serious’ filmmaker inthe sense of a Spielberg, who started with the high concept film in the 1970s (Duel, Jaws,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind) but has attempted to transform himself into a director
with artistic credibility with films such as The Color Purple, Schindler’s List, Saving Private
Ryan and Munich. Hitchcock appealed equally to mainstream audiences and film theorists. I
can only hypothesise that his centrality to film since the 1950s lies in his fascination withcinema as a unique form of spectacle divorced from prior art forms.

88

Robin Wood, “The Trouble With Marnie.” Marnie (The Hitchcock Collection). DVD. Universal, 2001. While
Wood refers to Hitchcock’s “virtuosity” with the stylistics of the shot and sequence, this artificiality might
equally apply to Welles’s manipulation of field and focus in the manufacture of non-reality cinema.
89
Ebert, ‘Commentary.”40

Mimesis was ultimately subsumed by the cinematic possibilities to contrive variations
on the Real. In the work of Welles, Hitchcock, Godard and others, the cinematic and the Realwere absorbed into each other. The classic shower scene in Psycho is constructed out of forty
separate shots in a sequence lasting less than a minute.90 The cinematicality is foregroundedin the very deliberate arrangement of the sequence. In this scene, Hitchcock reveals only that
the Real was extinguished when the cameras started to roll. It was already cinematic.
Bazin is relevant to any study of film aesthetics (and certainly any consideration ofcinematic realism) simply because his concept of the film image is well defined and holds
itself up to scrutiny. But why should depth of focus have anything at all to do with a morefaithful reproduction of an external reality? He formulated his myth of cinema in response towhat he saw as a transformation in signification practices, though he might have conceived ofthis transformation quite apart from the structuralist apparatus of Christian Metz and others.91
But exactly what is transformed in Welles’s Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons?
Kane’s cinematography does not allow a richer interpretation of the character. If anything,what I’ve argued is the essential artifice of depth of field and focus that mirrors theinconclusiveness of the narrative. Kane’s story is subject to perpetual revision; a quasifictional account illuminates the ephemeral nature of identity and the discontinuities inherent
in a narrative history. Formally, the film plays out as an expressionistic portrayal of anarrative conceit – the figure of Kane – visible intermittently through looming shadows,
fractured accounts and knowing subversions of narrative truth. Kane is equally a construct ofnews reports, personal anecdotes and fragmented memories, and an overarching narrative
trajectory that frames this collage. The narrative structure of Kane is perhaps most interestingin the context of the later European art films (Hiroshima Mon Amour, L’Année Dernière ÀMarienbad (Last Year at Marienbad)) that employed non-linear narrative structures toforeground the notion of artifice in narrative composition.

90

See Truffaut, 348-352.
Metz, “Some Points in the Semiotics of Cinema.” Here Metz draws on the semiotic structure of connotationand denotation conceptualised in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. For a useful summary of the contributionof the structuralists to film semiotics, see Warren Buckland, “Film Semiotics.” In A Companion to Film Theory,
ed. Toby Miller and Robert Stam (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 84-104.
91

41

1.8 Focus and Signification
The ontology of depth of focus and field realism fares poorly in the light of post-structuralist
theories of the image and the perpetual displacement of signification. Roland Barthes
addresses the ontology of the photograph in a way that challenges Bazin’s model. He concurs
initially with Bazin’s ontology in his essay, The Photographic Message:
The photograph professing to be a mechanical analogue of reality, its first-order message insome sort completely fills its substance and leaves no place for the development of asecond-order message. Of all the structures of information, the photograph appears as the
only one that is exclusively constituted and occupied by a ‘denoted’ message, a message
which totally exhausts its mode of existence.92

Here the denoted comprises a first order signification, the unmediated relation of the signifierto the signified, the photographic image to its representation, an external reality. As does
Bazin, Barthes contrasts the fullness of photographic reality with the mediation of the Real in
traditional representative arts: “In short, all these ‘imitative’ arts comprise two messages: adenoted message, which is the analogon itself, and a connoted message, which is the mannerin which the society to a certain extent communicates what it thinks of it.”93 Yet Barthes very
quickly re-organises the ontology of the photographic image according to a characteristicallyBarthesian scepticism of the ‘unmediatedness’ of the Real: “The photographic paradox canthen be seen as the co-existence of two messages, the one without a code (the photographic
analogue), the other with a code (the ‘art’ of the treatment, or the ‘writing’, or the rhetoric, of
the photograph).”94
Barthes’s system of denotation and connotation can be applied to Welles’s use of deep
focus. On the level of denotation, the depth of focus in the sequence in Kane in which theyoung Charles Foster Kane is removed from his home opens up the temporal and spatial
dimensions of the shot: young Charles playing in the snow, the intrusion of his mother’s head
into the right of shot, the long track back through the window to rest on a high angle shot of atable in which Charles will be signed over to Mr Thatcher (this scene has a remarkable
congruence, stylistically and thematically, to the scene in which Charles signs away his
beloved paper in Mr Thatcher’s office). The cinematic reality is denotationally faithful to the92

Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message.” In Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana,1977), 18.
93
Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” 17.
94
Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” 20.

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dimensions of the scene external to the shot. But the second-order meanings, the connoted‘treatment’ (to use Barthes’s term) only proliferate with the use of deep focus. Deep focus
results in an explosion of connotative meanings. This is precisely what Barthes has in mind
with the paradox of the photographic message: “It is that here the connoted (or coded)
message develops on the basis of a message without a code.”95 Deep focus lays bare the lackof a coding (or compositional arrangement): a scene literally without a code with which toview it.
The unconventionality (and invisibility) of the cinematography foregrounds the camera
as a significatory mechanism. This invisibility is perfectly contrasted with the ‘invisibility ofstyle’ of Classical Hollywood cinema. Hollywood achieved a classical realism through,paradoxically, a complex and highly structured editing style. In Kane, rather than ‘laying barethe realities,’ the gaze of the deep focus camera, untethered from the edited cell and themontage, reorganises the spatial and temporal sense of the shot. The depth of focus lays bare
only the visibility of the contrivance in which the deep focus shot is an intrusion into anassumed invisibility of style. The focal depth (in Bazin’s notion of the continuity of theimage, it is an infinite focal depth) provides the perfect canvas with which to explore theartifice of shot composition (as Welles did throughout his career, most deliberately in Touchof Evil). Kane’s visual sensibility is based on this duality: a freeing of the conventions ofclassical Hollywood editing to explore the boundaries of what Hitchcock called ‘pure
cinema.’ The purity of the image achieves its resonance as a photographed (and thus
reproduced) reality; deep focus allows the photograph to draw the entirety of the Real into its
construction.
Consider the obverse to the deep focus shot in a striking sequence in Wong Kar Wai’s
Chungking Express. After a short sequence in which a man and woman converse across afood counter for the first time (the spectator is informed that she will fall in love with him insix hours), the man leans forward and summons the woman to him with a gesture. The scene
cuts to a close-up profile of the two faces that now fill the shot.96 The man’s face, nearest thecamera, is in macro zoom and perfectly in focus; the woman’s face, according to the spatial
unity of the scene, should be positioned slightly behind his and marginally out of focus, if at

95
96

Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” 19. Original emphasis.
Chungking Express. DVD. Rolling Thunder Pictures: 42:30 minutes.

43

all. However, her image is luridly out of focus. She has been positioned some distance behindthe man to capture the extreme shallow focus of the shot.
If Welles’s deep focus is striking for its unconventionality, Wai’s shallow focus isequally provocative. Yet neither arrests a sense of an external reality. Both techniques
foreground the artifice of the shot. In terms of Barthes’s connotative reading, Waicomplements the jarring shallow focus with the anachronistic music accompaniment,
California Dreaming (The Mamas and The Papas) and a cool existentialism that recalls
Godard’s Breathless. Chungking Express (and Wong Kar Wai’s impressive oeuvre)
foregrounds its cinematic precocity. Shortly after this first meeting, a medium shot holds the
man at left screen and the woman at right. The depth of field of the shot is visually striking
and noticeably unconventional. Wai has the actors move in super-slow motion and speeds up
the film. Thus, the passers-by move at twice the normal speed while the man and woman
appear to inhabit a spatial and temporal frame in isolation.
Deep focus and depth of field are cinematographic performance spaces that express
only an ontology of the constructed image. Cinema is and always has been about contorting acrude reality to the aesthetic elegance of the cinematic image. How can the spectator respondaffectively to cinematic physicality (to use Sterritt’s terminology) without an awareness of its
status as constructed artifice? Welles and Wai explore a film aesthetics in contrast to what
had preceded it. Welles’s deep focus stands out only in an era in which the Hollywood studio
had encoded in its major pictures an invisibility of style. Welles, always a precocious talent,celebrated his pioneering of a technical innovation that has since become legendary totheorists and historians of film, if not mainstream film audiences. Rather than revealing areality beneath the artifice of Hollywood, Welles exploded the connotative possibilities of thecinematic image, and Hitchcock, Godard, Scorsese, Tarantino and Wai only followed suit.

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1.9 A Brief Defence of Bazin
It would be remiss to overlook a genuinely revolutionary philosophy of the cinematic image,attributable to Bazin’s “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema.” As well as suggestingthat deep focus “brings the spectator into a relation with the image close to that which heenjoys with reality,”97 he also alludes to a “more active mental attitude on the part of thespectator and a more positive contribution on his part to the action in progress.”98 Thus, in the
deep focus shot, the ‘reality’ or ‘spatial unity’ provides an avenue for the spectator to
critically engage with the content of the image:
While analytical montage only calls for him [the spectator] to follow his guide, to let his
attention follow along smoothly with that of the director who will choose what he shouldsee, here he will be called upon to exercise at least a minimum of personal choice. It is fromhis attention and his will that the meaning of the image in part derives.99

While I have critiqued the notion of an inherent congruence of the Real and a deep focus
reproduction, I agree with Bazin that the spectator’s subjectivity enters the frame of meaningof the image. Indeed, my argument departs from Bazin only insofar as deep focus performs averitable explosion of significatory mechanisms within the composition of the shot. Within
the frame of the deep focus shot, the image seems less attuned to what is externally Real thaninternally presented (or photographed). But beyond this, I share Bazin’s fascination with thecomplexity of the relationship between the cinematic image and spectator subjectivity. In
critiquing Adorno’s dialectic of the artwork and the culture industry commodity, as well asJameson’s ‘waning of affect’ and passivity of the postmodern spectator, I return to Bazin andthis critical juncture in the formulation of the cinematic subject.

97

Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” 35.
Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” 35-36.
99
Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” 36.
98

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1.10 The Transcendence of the Image
Reality, as it was visually experienced, became a staged, social production. Real, everyday
experiences, soon came to be judged against their staged cinematic, video-counterpart.100
You’re even better than the Real Thing.101

In spite of the critique of Bazin, his theories of cinema have a special place in the corpus offilm studies. The majority of attacks of Bazin subvert his attempt to inscribe a realism myth
into the cinematic apparatus. Comolli and Narboni introduce the ‘ideological’ argument of
the cinematic image: “Clearly, the cinema ‘reproduces’ reality: this is what a camera and film
stock are for – so says the ideology. But the tools and techniques of filmmaking are a part of‘reality’ themselves, and furthermore ‘reality’ is nothing but an expression of the prevailing
ideology.”102 I have spent the greater part of my discussion in a conceptual engagement withhis ontology of the Real and reproduced, the external reality and a cinematically reproduced
image. This discussion has been specific to Bazin’s model and may appear less thanprovocative in light of theories of cinema that have since prevailed. However, I havemaintained that realism masks the essential artificiality of the cinematic image, and thatwithout a confrontation between cinema’s inherent artifice and the spectator, an engagementwith the aesthetics of contemporary film will be lacking. The greater part of recent film
studies is a catalogue of ways in which to use cinema. Consider, for example, Teshoma
Gabriel’s cinema of resistance, a politics and poetics of a cinema of the Third World.103 The
epistemological status of such a cinema is equated with a means to an end; the nature of thatend is something I address in Chapter Two.
The legacy of cinematic realism is such that the spectator assumes a degree of passivity.
Realism, essentialised as it has been in the work of Bazin and others, or the adoption of thestudio’s ‘invisibility of style’ of the 1930s and 40s, the spectator is encouraged to insert
herself into the image or, paradoxically, remove herself from it. A knowing engagement withthe dimensions of the spatial and temporal disunity – what I have referred to as the inherent
100

Norman Denzin, The Cinematic Society: The Voyeur’s Gaze (London: Sage, 1995), 32.
U2, “Even Better Than the Real Thing.” Achtung Baby. Island Records, 1991.
102
Jean-Luc Comolli, and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism.” In Film Theory and Criticism, eds. Leo
Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 814-815.
103
Teshoma Gabriel, “Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Cinema.” In Film and Theory: An Anthology,
eds. Robert Stam and Toby Miller (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 298-316.
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artifice of the cinematic image – is forbidden. Consider, for example, Graeme Turner’s
conception of the point of view shot.104 Turner’s book is a detailed work on cinema as a‘social practice,’ and to this end he attempts to establish the potency of the camera as a toolof signification. In discussing the sequence in Citizen Kane in which Kane stands over Susan
Alexander (the sequence shot in Xanadu’s great hall, discussed above), Turner writes: “Inthis sequence, the manipulation of camera angles is the major means by which the audience isinformed about the changing relationship between the two characters.”105 That is, Kane
looming over Susan Alexander conveys Kane’s largeness and Susan Alexander’s smallness.
In this schematic, a high-angled shot connotes a relationship of superiority/inferiority (ordominant/submissive), the low-angled shot the reverse. However, Turner fails to address theinadequacy of the shot as a (mimetic) significatory unit. The cinematic shot exists in a systemof relations of various modes of signification: music, lighting, props, mise en scene, thephysical presence of the actors, etc. Kane’s point of view is challenged by subsequent shotsof his diminishment in front of the gigantic fireplace or the wildly disproportionate interiorsof the film. The point of view is less a physical space or the interior of a character’s
subjectivity than a cinematic reconfiguration of these physical (and psychical) dimensions.
There is no point at which the shot – long, zoom, high angle, low angle, point of view – is apurely mimetic mechanism.
Turner goes on to address a sequence in Spielberg’s Jaws in which the spectator
apparently inheres in the shark’s point of view:
In Jaws, we are given numerous shots of the victims from the underwater point of view ofthe shark. The confusion caused by our discomfort with this alignment, and our privilegedknowledge of the shark’s proximity to the victim, exacerbates the tension and theimpression of impotence felt by the audience and enhances our sense of the vulnerability ofthe victims.106

Jaws has two striking sequences in which the camera constructs a relationship between the
shark and the spectator through the camera’s point of view. The justly famous opening showsa young woman swim from shore, leaving her friend on the beach. After a long shot in which
the woman is seen back-stroking through the calm sea, the camera cuts to a close-up of thestill water, ruptured from beneath by the woman. The idyllic quality of the scene is104

Graeme Turner, Film as Social Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 52.
Turner, Film as Social Practice, 52.
106
Turner, Film as Social Practice, 53.
105

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maintained as the woman turns from camera towards the last sunlight and the shore,heightening the stillness and her isolation from the party. The scene then cuts to the firstunderwater shot. At this point, the spectator cannot inhere in the shark’s point of view simply
because the denotative message, to return to Barthes, has provided only the enchantment of
the still water, a socially transgressive skinny-dip and the body of a naked woman treading
water. The camera begins a slow movement toward the woman from beneath the water, andonly then is the accompanying John Williams theme heard. The spectator is transported into acinematic ‘space’ through the rising theme and the slow zoom.
It is not only the intrusion of the shark into the idyllic setting that sustains the suspense.
Prior to the zoom, the underwater shot positions the spectator in a realm of cinematicotherness, a voyeuristic distance. She does not vicariously share in the power and brutality ofthe shark, or the weakness and defilement of the young woman. The spectator enters thecinematic image and fractures the mimetic, and conventional, functionality of shot
signification. The fracture occurs only at the commencement of the slow zoom and theme,
anticipated with silence and a long pause. I agree with Turner about the “confusion caused byour discomfort.”107 I cannot agree however that Spielberg’s camera is subject to theconventional parameters of mimesis. The point of view shot in this case (and several times inJaws) is less than reliable as an indication, or initiation, of the spectator’s subjectivity into thefictional subjectivity (of the shark) on screen.
Žižek offers a similar reading of a much discussed sequence in Vertigo in which
Hitchcock corrupts the conventional shot-reverse shot as a signification of point of view.
Scotty (James Stewart) enters Ernie’s restaurant for the first time. The sequence in which thetwo ‘interact’108 has been subject to several analyses, which Žižek accuses of overlooking thecentral panning shot in which the spectator is removed from Scotty’s subjectivity. Žižek
draws on a notion of the Lacanian Real that intrudes, or extrudes, from the alignment ofspectator and conventional point of view. This Lacanian otherness (at least in terms of thespectator) shares something with the depth of the underwater shot in the opening sequence of107

Turner, Film as Social Practice, 53.
This must surely rank as one of Hitchcock’s greatest scenes. If the spectator considers that both Scotty andMadeline are ‘performing’ their invisibility, the astonishing detail of the shot and scene resonate in which eachis knowingly unaware of the other. It is a motif that recurs throughout Hitchcock, but never more complexly
structured than in this sequence.
108

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Jaws, which is broken at the commencement of the slow zoom.109 Raymond Durgnat
suggests something similar for several so-called point of view shots in Psycho. It is Durgnat’s
contention that too much has been made of the point of view (or subjective) shot in
Hitchcock’s work to identify either the filmmaker or the spectator with his films’ deviant
psychologies: L.B. Jeffries (Rear Window), Scotty Ferguson (Vertigo), Norman Bates(Psycho), Mark Rutland (Marnie). Durgnat has two objections to this analysis:
one, that in fictions like Psycho, camera and diegesis are logically incompatible, so thatdiegetic space and camera space read as a non-continuum, and, two, that most spectators
overlook camera POV, much as they disregard cuts, which, if taken literally, would jump
them about in space, like performing fleas. The reasons are well known in visual art theory
and in scientific psychology.110

While Durgnat does not take up the issue of the content of the camera space, as opposed tothe diegetic space, it is significant that he recognises a distinction between the two.
This abstract, though vital point can be illustrated more simply in another sequence inJaws in which the spectator is positioned in the shark’s point of view. My contention is
simply that the spectator’s subjectivity is at best imperfectly related to the cinematic image. I
reject the notion of a perfect congruence between the spectator and Charles Foster Kane in
the point of view shot. The spectator embodies the temporal and spatial unity of Kane’s
presence in the great hall, in which Turner perceives a “controlling [aspect] of the audience’s
identification with the characters,”111 but there is not the sense of a literal transferral of thespectator’s subjectivity into Kane. The spectator unconsciously appreciates and aestheticises
the inherent, cinematic distance – the construction of the shot. In the sequence in Jaws inwhich Brody (Roy Scheider) sits on the beach keeping a lookout during the 4th of July
weekend, the gradual intrusion of the shark into an idyllic setting is played out in much thesame way as in the opening sequence. The attack occurs suddenly and the viewer is inserted
into Brody’s point of view. However, rather than a conventional point of view shot from
Brody’s perspective, Spielberg uses what is referred to as the ‘push-pull.’ The camera fastzooms on Brody’s face while the focal length of the shot decreases dramatically. The effect iswholly unconventional and disorienting for the spectator because there is no recourse to the109

See Žižek, “Vertigo: The Drama of a Deceived Platonist,” 70. The eye of the camera functions for Žižek as
the “organ without a body.”
110
Raymond Durgnat, A Long Hard Look at ‘Psycho’ (London: British Film Institute, 2002), 4.
111
Turner, Film as Social Practice, 53.

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focal conventions of human vision. The shot is essentially a cinematic contrivance, amanipulation of the spatial and temporal reality (focal length and speed) into the artifice ofthe shot. The spectator, rather than being aligned with either of the primary characters –Brody, his wife, the boy who is attacked, or the shark – inhabits a contained, and contrived,
cinematic space in which her subjectivity actively engages with the image. The quality of thisengagement cannot be a literal and seamless transference of spectator/character subjectivity.
It is interesting to compare Spielberg’s use of the push-pull in Jaws to Hitchcock’s
similar use of tracking and focus to achieve the famous ‘vertigo’ shot. Hitchcock employs thepush-pull (or at least a variation of the device Spielberg uses) precisely to identify thespectator with Scotty; the disorientation of the shot perspective conveys what Scotty feels
when he looks over an abyss. In Hitchcock’s usage, the push-pull inserts the spectator (tosome degree) into Stewart’s character. In Spielberg’s usage, a similar cinematographic trick
inserts a space between spectator and character subjectivity. The use of the push-pull in Jaws
disrupts the neat transference of the cinematic message. In fact, in light of the cinematic-ness(or the hyper-cinematic aesthetic) of the contemporary film, the relation between theimage/shot/sequence and the reality it purports to represent is increasingly ephemeral, even as
it attempts to correlate spectator and character subjectivity.
While it is necessary to appreciate the tangible relations between the Real and thecinematic reproduction (the subjective transference in the literal point of view shot, forexample, which occurs frequently in Hitchcock, particularly Rear Window, Vertigo andPsycho), it is equally necessary to appreciate the shortcomings of such a conceptual
framework. Point of view shots are rarely an insular, wholly contained point of view. The
notion of the ‘voyeuristic distance’ of the cinematic image (which I’ve used above)
compromises a perfect transference of the spectator/character subjectivity. However, thisdistance has little to do with Denzin’s gendered gaze: “Always a gendered production,
usually male, but not necessarily, the voyeur exposes the erotic, political sides of everyday
life. In doing so, this figure shows how the gaze is inevitably gendered and structured by thelaws of patriarchy.”112 In Denzin’s analysis, the voyeur is an ideologised, and indeed,
politicised position. Without rejecting the ideological voyeur, central as it is to contemporary
theories of gender and power in film, the place from which the spectator views the cinematic
image on a screen is dissociated from the space that appears on that screen, or the space that112

Denzin, 58.

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comprises the reality external to the movie theatre. In regard to Denzin’s notion of acinematic distance as ideologised, I remain sceptical. In my opinion, cinematic voyeurism isontologically connected to the cinema. Hitchcock’s Rear Window is still the best example ofthe ‘romanticisation’ of the cinematic voyeur. Consider an early shot in which Grace Kelly is‘presented’ to the spectator. The camera offers a close-up of her features (she issimultaneously Lisa Freemont and Grace Kelly, a film icon, and the camera’s adoration is
directed toward both) as she advances toward the spectator. The spectator does not inhere in
Jeff’s (James Stewart) point of view. Rather, the interaction is with a cinematic image and afilm icon. The shot cuts to their ‘first kiss,’ a languorous slow motion sequence, and a rarityfor Hitchcock. While I concur with writers like Laura Mulvey113 and Tania Modleski114 thatthe cinematic voyeur and the average Peeping Tom have something in common, I would also
argue that too much has been made of the sameness of these two (very different) ways ofseeing.
Theories of the ‘society of the spectacle,’ a phrase I take from Guy Debord’s famous work,115
vacillate between a grudging acceptance of the centrality of the image to contemporary
culture to an extreme, almost religious embracing of the image as ontologically transcendent
over the object. One need look no further than Jean Baudrillard’s fashionable simulacrum ofimages, signs and mediated ephemera for the location of this phenomenon: “Today
abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is
no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models
of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.”116 Baudrillard has since found his way into
the conceptual framework of The Matrix franchise (Morpheus’s “desert of the Real” echoes
Baudrillard; indeed, in the shooting script of the first film, he explicitly references
Baudrillard in explaining the relationship of the Matrix to the Real) and Fight Club, in which
the disenfranchised narrator experiences postmodern America as “a copy of a copy of acopy.”117 Mass culture of the 21st century, it seems, has been taught to think in terms of the113

See Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”
Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much (New York: Methuen, 1988), 73-85. However, it should
be noted that Modleski’s reading of Rear Window is a response to what she considers Mulvey’s oversimplified
account. Modleski finds room for greater female agency in Hitchcock than does Mulvey.
115
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994).
116
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1.
117Fight Club (film). Dir. David Fincher.
114

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language of the simulacrum. Theorists like Baudrillard and writers like Don DeLillo (whoseems to practice a ‘poetics’ of the simulacra: consider DeLillo’s notion of the Zapruder filmof the JFK assassination as the simulacral expression of the Real (Underworld]), a theme
central to his earlier Libra) reflect on an apparent loss of the Real, a disgruntled sense of the
fickleness of personal and social relations. Perhaps Bono, interviewed on the tele-visual set ofU2’s 1991 Zoo-TV tour, presents a way forward: “we saw all this information, all thisbullshit… and wanted to surf it.” Metaphors of surface and depth have proliferated since theannouncement of the dominance of the Postmodern Condition by Lyotard,118 yet depth
unfortunately connotes the diverse, nuanced, subtle, complex, contextualised, historicised,
reactionary Real, and surface the contemporarily transparent, superficial, sophomoric,
simplistic, and ultimately valueless reproduction. Thus I reject such metaphors of cultural andaesthetic phenomena as inadequate to describe my own interaction with – and within –popular culture and its myriad of signs, texts and experiences. What does it mean to suggestthat a cultural production – art, work, commodity - is depthless?

118

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi.
(Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1984). See especially the Introduction for a summary of Lyotard’s
argument.

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1.11
It used to be that only movies were on film; now the whole world is. More than ever, visualtechnologies seem intent on striving for what Kracauer called “the status of total record.”
And not only does it seem at the start of the new century that everything is on film orvideo…but thanks first to video and then the Internet, scenes that were never shown before– from natural disasters and human atrocities to sexual intimacies and ecstasies – are now
public spectacles that are instantly shown everywhere.119

Can the world be cinematic? And what would be implied in the dawning of a meta-cinematic
aesthetic in which the external reality itself must submit to the ontology of theimage/shot/sequence? Does the fact that the world (in whatever sense Black intends this) is
captured on film alter the relationship of an external reality to its reproduced image? Of
course it does. This chapter has attempted to theorise just such an alteration in the ontology of
the Real. A classical realist aesthetics is incompatible with the cinematic medium; anengagement with a meaningful film aesthetics must confront a new ontology of the cinematic
Real.

119

Joel Black, The Reality Effect: Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative (New York and London: Routledge,
2002), 4.

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2. Towards a Theory of Popular Culture2.1 Culture as Functionality
If we are asked to believe that all literature is ‘ideology,’ in the crude sense that its
dominant intention (and then our only response) is the communication or imposition of‘social’ or ‘political’ meanings and values, we can only, in the end, turn away. If we areasked to believe that all literature is ‘aesthetic,’ in the crude sense that its dominant
intention (and then our only response) is the beauty of language or form, we may stay alittle longer but will still in the end turn away.1

In titling this chapter ‘Towards a Theory of Popular Culture,’ I aim at something less grandthan a unified theory of popular culture (or any culture, for that matter) in the way thatphysicists have aimed at a single theory of the physical world. If investigations into the natureof cultural institutions, narratives and, broadly speaking, ideologies have told us anything, itis that culture is complex, always heterogenous, and elusive. Culture cannot be explained
holistically precisely because of its heterogeneity. It is a network of sources, texts, signs,
symbols and the paraphernalia of meaning that is always, in a sense, beyond the grasp of thetheorist. In this respect, I take Frederic Jameson’s point: “The dilemma of the student of massculture therefore lies in the structural absence, or the repetitive volatilisation, of the ‘primarytexts.’”2 I would only add that the problem lies equally with the texts (primary and secondary
insofar as theory is implicated in these structures of meaning) and the individual
subjectivities that receive them. In investigating culture through its texts, in this caseprimarily cinematic, I begin with the assumption that it is transmitted through a variety ofsignificatory mechanisms that incorporate values, ideologies and politics, and that thesesystems of meaning are rarely conveyed unproblematically.
This second chapter functions as a correlative to the first. To conceptualise analternative cinematic aesthetic, it is necessary to investigate the ‘content’ of the form (thestylistics of the image), which I have done under the mantle of ‘cinematic realism.’ But it isequally important to consider historically the formation of the culture in which various texts
are received. I have stated in Chapter One that I am interested in the style of cinema notmerely for its controlled aestheticism, but for its impact, or what I have called affectivity, on
the spectator. I share the view of NoëI Carroll that mass or popular culture is a historicalphenomenon.3 I also agree with Jameson that there is at least the perception of a distinction
1

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 155.
Frederic Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” Social Text no. 1 (Winter 1979), 138.
3
Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art, 3-4.
255

between high and low culture, which is subject to an effacement: “The second feature of thislist of postmodernisms is the effacement of some key boundaries or separations, most notably
the erosion of the older distinction between high and so-called mass or popular culture.”4 I
use the term ‘perception’ simply because the distinction has more veracity and currency as an
imaginary standard or status symbol than an actual aesthetic tool. In relation to thiseffacement, which Jameson suggests is tantamount to an aesthetic revolution, an analysis offilm must concurrently be an analysis of a culture that has made film its dominant textual
form. Contemporary cinema demands a new kind of aesthetic system. Contemporary popular
culture, it seems to me, requires a notion of culture that reflects what Anne Friedberg calls“media fusion’ or ‘convergence’ or the pluralist inclusiveness of ‘multimedia’”5 For Patricia
Pisters, this is a new “mobile self [that] is individual but related, traversed by multiplicities,changing in time and informed by a camera consciousness.”6
The collapse of a distinction between high and low culture, or popular and elite art
forms (that comprise the art work itself, but also its site of reception) is perhaps nowheremore apparent than in contemporary cinema. How can one distinguish between, for example,
Pedro Almodóvar’s La Mala Educación (Bad Education) and Christopher Nolan’s Batman
Begins in terms of high and low art? Both, I would argue, are commentaries on priorcinematic and textual traditions. Bad Education, rather than settling for the neo-noir, selfconsciously reworks Wilder’s Double Indemnity; the spectator might classify it as a‘homosexualised’ film noir. Nolan’s adaptation draws on a pulp/mass culture tradition, yet isimbued with a cinematic realism that is unconventional in comic book adaptations; it seems adeliberate recuperation of the Real after Tim Burton’s hyper-stylisation in Batman andBatman Returns. Both films are a commentary on cinematic traditions, and equally on the
distinction between high and low culture. Both perform a hybridity or genericity in whichforms of the genre film “represent contradictory perspectives on ‘media culture,’ an ironiceclecticism” and “articulate a profound ambivalence that reflects the lack of any sort ofunitary mass consciousness.”7 Collins locates a textual and cultural heterogeneity in the4Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” In The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the
Postmodern 1983-1998 (London: Verso, 1998), 2.
5
Anne Friedberg, “The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change.” In Reinventing Film Studies,
ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold, 2000), 439.
6
Patricia Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 224.
7
Collins, 262.

56

phenomenon of mass culture, which is a crucial advancement on Adorno’s ‘consciousness asconformity’ of the (mass) culture industry.8
Jameson appreciates the ephemeral and highly subjective (and thus ideological) natureof the distinction between high and low culture: “They [the “newer postmodernisms”] nolonger ‘quote’ such ‘texts’ as a Joyce might have done, or a Mahler; they incorporate them tothe point where the line between high art and commercial forms seems increasingly difficult
to draw.”9 What is unclear is if ‘effacement’ performs an eradication of the older distinction.
If this is the contention, I would argue that it is premature. In spite of the deluge ofintellectual work on cultures and subcultures, predominantly through its art and texts, thisacademic mode (observing and indeed practicing the effacement of high and low art) operates
primarily as a social science. Consider, for example, Graeme Turner’s introduction to The
Film Cultures Reader, a massive compendium of film writings that span the period from theadvent of cinema to psychoanalytic perspectives on the horror genre, in which he writes:“These essays are not interested in establishing the artistic credentials of the texts in question.
Rather, they are interested in establishing a more complex and nuanced understanding of thecompeting forces which frame the individual experience of popular culture in general, andpopular film in particular.”10 Turner’s comment is less an apology for the lack ofconsideration of popular art than an acknowledgement that recent film theory is simply notinterested in considering popular film in aesthetic terms, as an earlier body of theory might
have done of a Joyce or a Mahler. Equally, he does not claim that these films are less than art(or low art). This is perfectly understandable insofar as popular art offers a means of analysisof the culture that brings it to fruition – producers, consumers, institutions, social and cultural
relations. For Turner, this is popular cinema’s redeeming use-value. He merely affirms theacceptability of this position, and closes off the avenue to an exploration of popular film as
aesthetically motivated and received.
While I would argue that viewing a film is fundamentally an aesthetic experience, thisprocess is predominantly theorised through a rubric of its functionality – that is, the way in
8

For a lucid account of the Horkheimer/Adorno dialectic of the culture industry, see Douglas Kellner, “Theodor
W. Adorno and the Dialectics of Mass Culture.” In Adorno: A Critical Reader, ed. Nigel Gibson and Andrew
Rubin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 86-109. Kellner offers the very useful notion of the culture industry as“administered culture, imposed from above, as instruments of indoctrination and social control” (94). Mass
culture, in Adorno’s model, is essentially industrialised, externally ‘produced,’ administered, and commodified.
9Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” 2.
10
Graeme Turner, “Introduction.” In The Film Cultures Reader, ed. Graeme Turner (London: Routledge, 2002),
5.

57

which it impacts ideologically on the audience. Walsh suggests that “a lot of film theory andcriticism has developed an eclectic mix of literary theory, Marxism, psychoanalysis, andother things. Generally the aim of such work is to show how films either cause or exemplify
some wider social phenomena.”11 Implicit in such analyses is a notion of a popular audience,or at least an imaginary demographic upon which film makes its impression and inscribes its
culture. But the notion of a popular audience is itself problematic. The theoretical model
imposed on studies of audience is conventionally weighted one way or the other, on audienceor text. Work that focuses on the formal characteristics of texts seems less interested in thereception of such texts by its audience; work that focuses on the demographics of audience,or the nature of spectator response seems less interested in the formal qualities of thecinematic text. In this way, Jancovich is able to critique one of the major exponents of genre
theory, Rick Altman: “despite his discussion of pragmatics and of the necessary
indeterminacy of genre definitions, Altman shows little interest in the consumption of genres,compared with his interest in their production and mediation.”12 For Jancovich, genre theory
has traditionally expended its analytic energies on understanding the formal parameters ofgenre: genre is a way of understanding form. However, he suggests that this mode of analysis
is limited as a description of the aesthetic response of mainstream audiences: “The audiencethat he [Altman] constructs for himself in order to understand genre is, if not homogenous, atleast quite placid.”13 Jancovich’s piece is intended to “call attention to some important
methodological issues” in formulating a theory of genre as it applies to horror;14 I would
argue that such a consideration is necessary when addressing contemporary film genres
per se.
Considering that genre theory is founded on a collation and analysis of textual types,
and apart from what I would consider the occasional analysis of the aestheticisation of genre
in Tarantino or Lynch, genre studies (and more broadly, film studies) functions as a way of
revealing something of the historical, ideological and political life of the spectator. While

11

Michael Walsh, “’Jameson and ‘Global Aesthetics.’” In Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David
Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 481.
12Mark Jancovich, “A Real Shocker.” In The Film Cultures Reader, ed. Graeme Turner (London: Routledge,
2002), 470.
13
Jancovich, “A Real Shocker,” 471.
14
Jancovich, “A Real Shocker,” 477.

58

Paul Schrader has defined film noir as a specific mood or tone,15 recent theory explores thesustained marginalisation and subjugation of women in noir.16 Similarly, while Amy Taubin
offers a nuanced reading of masculinity in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, the film is for her
initially and predominantly a site at which to consider masculinity (negatively) and abject
femininity.17
My point here is that theory privileges a means-end functionality of the relationshipbetween popular cinema and its audience. Films such as The Silence of the Lambs and De
Palma’s Carrie are useful vehicles for exploring the masculine gaze. Scorsese’s Goodfellasor Taxi Driver, or Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing become snapshots of a ‘kind of’ urban
America. The film, in theory, is always already a continuum of ideologised images. Carroll
draws a similar distinction between the scholarly obsession with ‘interpretation’ (that is, amode of analysis in which the text services a hypothesis external to it) and the popular modeof analysis, which he terms ‘evaluation,’ “an aspect of film-going to which recent film
scholarship pays little attention.”18
Of course, readings that inscribe an ideology into the film text are not in any way
perverse. The opening shower sequence in Carrie in which an otherwise ordinary locker
room becomes the site of a hyper-sexualised encounter between the prepubescent girl and the
dollying camera offers the manifestation of a repressed masculine desire. De Palma’s camera
leaves little to the imagination. Similarly, Scorsese and Lee are useful chroniclers of a period
and vision of New York City. Scorsese’s masterpieces – Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging
Bull - are equally explorations of an urban myth and a reality that is vibrant, cinematic andhistoricized. Scorsese’s variations on the flaneur (Charlie Cappa [Harvey Keitel, Mean
Streets], Travis Bickle [Robert De Niro, Taxi Driver], Jake La Motta [Robert De Niro,
Raging Bull]) are voices of a kind of masculinity and a kind of urban subjectivity of postVietnam America. Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing, as Manthia Diawara suggests, “situate[s]spectators from the perspective of a Black “once upon a time.”19 For Diawara, Spike Lee,

15

Paul Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir.” In Film Noir Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York:
Limelight Editions, 1998), 53.
16See, for example, Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 29.
17
Amy Taubin, “The Critics Commentaries.” Reservoir Dogs DVD. Collector’s Edition 2 Disc Set.
18Noël Carroll, “Introducing Film Evaluation.” In Reinventing Film Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda
Williams (Oxford: Arnold, 2000), 266.
19
Manthia Diawara, “Black American Cinema: The New Realism.”. In Film and Theory: An Anthology, ed.
Robert Stam and Toby Miller (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 244.

59

John Singleton and the New Black Cinema are addressed as a race cinema because it is,ostensibly, a cinema about race relations “once upon a time” in America.
However, what is explicitly or implicitly a political or ideologically engaged cinema
should not preclude the analysis of an aesthetic experience (which in any case it cannot, sincefilm theory does not mediate the film experience for the majority of film-goers, as it must
inevitably for the theorist), nor the establishment of a body of work devoted to collating andanalysing a stylistics of film and its affectivity on the spectator. While this project ofideologising the text is imbued with good intentions and sound methodology, it marginalizes
the aesthetic response. Furthermore, its predisposition to read ideology in the image, shot andsequence of the film renders its analytical ‘gaze’ somewhat obtuse. Consider the reading ofJohn Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett of the Star Wars franchise, in which they perceive
an “American monomyth” tantamount to a brand of neo-fascism.20 I do not wish to take issue
with this reading except to suggest that cinematic ideology and an ideology of an external
reality can simply not be freely exchanged. Of the conclusion to Star Wars, Episode IV: A
New Hope, Lawrence and Jewett write:
We were quite startled by the final awards ceremony for Luke, Han, and Chewbacca in A
New Hope, an image reprised at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back. It seemed to‘quote’ the most famous of the Nazi propaganda films, Triumph of the Will (Triumph desWillens, 1935), which was made by Leni Riefenstahl as a celebration of the Nuremberg
Nazi party rallies of 1934.21

The writers proceed to offer a detailed analysis of A New Hope as merely the most accessible
and iconic performance in a long history of textual performances of the American monomyth.
In Lawrence and Jewett’s reading, this myth is equally connected to Leslie Fiedler’s classic
formulation of the plight of the protagonist of the American novel to flee society22 and Joseph
Campbell’s “hero with a thousand faces”23 who must flee society as part of the maturation
process. Lawrence and Jewett examine the Star Wars franchise as a set of discursive textual
and cultural practices that ultimately revert to a form of fascism, suggesting that “[a]lthough
American superheroes consistently strive to redeem corrupt republics, the definitions of their
20

John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett, The Myth of the American Superhero (Grand
Rapids, Mich: W. B. Erdmans, 2002), 268.
21
Lawrence and Jewett, 275.
22
Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Stein and Day, 1967), 25-31.
23
Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (New York: World, 1956), 30-36.

60roles and the means of their triumphs reflect fascist values that ultimately undermine
democratic processes and hollow out the religious faith of the enchanted.”24 They do not
return to Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) but rather assume that theideological content of Riefenstahl’s propagandist Nazi film is transposed unproblematically
onto Lucas’s studio produced mass culture entertainment. The intertextuality of Riefenstahl’s
film is thus a reflection of the text and subtext of Star Wars. Intertextuality, in Lawrence andJewett’s conception, has an outmoded ontological foundation insofar as the one text
(Riefenstahl) literally informs the other. There is no consideration of intertextuality as anaesthetic conceit or broader textual strategy. The writers gloss over the fact that “Lucas’[s]Entertainment Company’s encyclopaedic ‘Insider’s Guide to Star Wars’ frankly
acknowledges it in its scene commentary: ‘The final ceremony scene emulates, almost shotfor-shot, a similar segment in Triumph des Willens (1934).’”25 The acknowledgement is frank
precisely because Triumph of the Will is ‘quoted’ self-consciously, deliberately andcinematically (in much the same way that the conclusion to Return of the Jedi re-enacts asequence in Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, an “objectively racist film”26). The shot-for-shotfetishising (which is precisely what it is) of the earlier sequence is essentially an aesthetic
practice. We can say the same thing of Gus Van Sant’s shot for shot remake of Psycho, whichis the perfect aestheticisation (and fetishisation) of Hitchcock’s masterpiece. One suspects
that Van Sant’s fetishistic reproduction of the original is something of a commentary on
Hitchcock’s own obsession with this theme in his films, most notably Rebecca and Vertigo.
Lawrence and Jewett’s willingness to install a detailed and discursive analysis offascism in Star Wars on the apparent ideological reverberation of a film sequence does nottake account of the hermetic cinematic image explored in Chapter One. The image in thiscase resonates as intertextual quote, but less in the sense of a literal transposition ofideological intent than as an aesthetically imbued textual practice. Lucas, Coppola, Scorsese
and others were of the generation that attended film school in Los Angeles and New York,versed in American and international cinema, and willing to demonstrate the intertextual
nature of film as an art form. Lucas quotes Triumph of the Will because there is an inherent

24

Lawrence and Jewett, 282.
Lawrence and Jewett, 275.
26
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 178.
25

61

artistic value in the cinematic utterance that is simultaneously quotation.27 Furthermore, thefact that the quotation is made of a Nazi propaganda film confers an element ofsubversiveness on what is otherwise conservative family entertainment for a mass audience.
It is significant also that the reception of the Star Wars franchise has rarely crystallised into a
consensus over fascism, neo-Imperialism, neo-Liberalism or any other broad political orideological rubric. Of a Star Wars poll conducted in 1986, Peter Kramer writes: “When asked
whether ‘the movie is in favor of the conservative idea of “peace through military strength,”’conservative respondents overwhelmingly said ‘yes,’ whereas the majority of moderate andliberal respondents said ‘no’. This poll suggests that Star Wars allowed everyone to extractfrom it precisely the political meaning they were most comfortable with.”28
Lawrence’s piece on Star Wars is obviously not exemplary of an entire tradition of film
and cultural analyses that seeks to transpose cinema and ideology seamlessly. But I would
argue that film has generally been drawn on too hastily in the service of an ideologicalproject. Film (and art, for that matter) coheres only in its reception and interpretation by its
audience, and while ideology theory unveils the hegemonic practices of film production andconsumption, its willingness to foreground the ideological reading over the aesthetic installs a
new mode of appreciation divorced from the performance of the cinematic spectacle. It is forthis reason that I find analyses of cinematic violence for the most part unconvincing and lessthan actively engaged with the cinematic image. This is exemplified in Jane Caputi’s readingof Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers: “Natural Born Killers feels just like a prayer. It is nota critique, nor even a reflection of the ‘demon’. It is a paean, an outburst of worshipful andexultant praise, a ceremony not of exorcism but of invocation [to violence].”29 Caputi’s
reading of the film is founded on an interpretation of the motivations and actions ofcharacters. She also draws on a comment made by Oliver Stone (who, of any filmmaker,
should not substitute as an authoritative voice): “There was in me, I feel, a huge violence
when I was born.”30 But little is made of the way violence is captured on film or the way it ismanifested visually, which must surely inform any analysis of the impact of violence on aspectator or mass audience. Caputi’s reading would benefit from a detailed shot and sequence27

Copeland recognises this use of intertextuality as central to popular film as early as 1977. See Roger
Copeland, “When Films ‘Quote’ Films, They Create a New Mythology.” New York Times, 25 Sep. 1977.
28
Peter Kramer, “Star Wars.” History Today 49, no. 3 (1999), 46.
29Jane Caputi, “Small Ceremonies.” In Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media, ed. Christopher Sharrett(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 155.
30
Caputi, 155.

62

analysis of parts of the film which would offer a more nuanced reading of the way violence istransposed from character action to spectator participation. Ultimately, I reject theperformance of Natural Born Killers on the spectator as an ‘invocation to violence,’ a notion
I will consider in more detail in Chapter Four.
While I acknowledge the important – indeed, invaluable – contribution of cultural studies(and its predecessors, psychoanalytic theory and Marxism) to film theory, I contend that theemphasis on the text as ideological/political/personal footprint does not engage with thepracticalities of film production or reception. It cannot record or qualitatively evaluate theaesthetic reverberations of a Star Wars logo or a blue filter on a camera lens in Michael
Mann’s Heat. It is even less successful in assessing the qualitative relations between an
actor’s performance and the film’s aesthetic and cultural resonance. Consider Al Pacino,wielding a mini-gun in the last scene in De Palma’s Scarface - “Say hello to my little
friends.” How does the film theorist evaluate the cultural and aesthetic discursivity of thisfilmic utterance? Perhaps it can be weighed in terms of an ethnicity, the immigrant taking
what is held from him: He loved the American Dream – With a vengeance.31 In The
Sopranos, in the scene in which Christopher Moltisanti says, “This ain’t negotiation time.
This is Scarface, the final scene, fuckin’ bazookas under each arm, ‘say hello to my little
friends,’”32 and the statement is re-uttered, how does the theorist manage the shifting
ontology of cinematic quotation? In what sense is the original utterance reorganised inrelation to its subsequent quotation?
I do not wish to suggest that the aesthetic is purely an appreciation of beauty or form inan essentialist way (as in the Raymond Williams excerpt above) but rather a complex andhighly developed system of cinematic ‘reading,’ interpretation and ultimately consumption.
Carroll correctly suggests that “there is a great deal of audience activity involved in the
response to mass art.”33 Aesthetically engaging with contemporary cinema requires
something quite removed from a ‘heightened’ though non-specific appreciation of film; thenature of its distinction needs to be conceptualised in terms of the film itself and the context
in which it is received. This context extends to its formulaicness, or generic foundations, its

31This appeared as a catch phrase on advertising posters when the film was released in 1982.
Sopranos, The. Season One, Episode Four: “Meadowlands.”
33
Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art, 83.
32

63

reflection on a discursive set of mythologies, and ultimately with its self-aware and selfacknowledged status as art. Traditional theories of art and aesthetics that privilege anessentialist notion of truth, beauty and expression are incommensurate with the ontology of
the cinematic image and quotation. Carroll suggests that “most art, maybe all art, is formulaic
to some degree. All artists use some conventions, formulas, rules of thumb, traditional forms,
donnees and so on.”34 The shift to an ontology of art as inherently formulaic is nowhere more
apparent than in contemporary cinema. An aesthetics of popular cinema is founded in part onan aesthetics of the formulaic. In this sense, one can in fact embrace Adorno’s ‘consciousness
as conformity’ (though of course Adorno intends it quite a different way), if conformity isevaluated in the context of the textual heteroglossia that gives it meaning.
2.2 Culture as Commodity
The creature who emerges from postmodern thought is centreless, hedonistic, self
inventing, ceaselessly adaptive. He thus fares splendidly in the disco or supermarket,
though not quite so well in the school, courtroom or chapel. He sounds more like a Los
Angeles media executive than an Indonesian fisherman.35
So jeans can bear meanings of both community and individualism, of unisexuality andmasculinity or femininity. This semiotic richness of jeans means that they cannot have asingle defined meaning, but that they are a resource bank of potential meanings.36

It is difficult, if not impossible, to theorise contemporary culture without observing what
Lyotard, Jameson and other writers address as the dominant aesthetic of postmodernity. As
Eagleton indicates above, the postmodern condition is founded on a lack of centre or origin,and the consequential discursive expression of the self and culture. Broadly speaking, thepostmodern is an aesthetic founded upon lack while earlier aesthetic forms strive toward
completion or fulfilment. Brian Singer’s The Usual Suspects offers a remarkable transition ofan earlier narratively focused cinematic aesthetic. It is an aesthetic innovation in which thefilm functions narratively on a narrative lack. Verbal’s (Kevin Spacey) account of events on
the Santa Monica pier is an inscription of a fictitious story onto the cinematic narrative. The
demands on the spectator reorganise the relationship of spectator to film such that the
spectator takes her place alongside Inspector Kooyong (Chaz Palminteri), fumbling over the34

Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art, 68.
Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 190.
36
John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (Winchester, Mass: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 5.
35

64

narrative ‘truth’ which is erased in the telling of the story. Similar narrative inversions, orwhat I will call ‘entropic narratives’ inform some of Lynch’s work (Lost Highway is perhaps
the best example) and David Fincher’s Fight Club.
The postmodern also refashions the earlier modern or classical subjectivity into a site ofabjectivity, or the absence of an innate sense of self. The contemporary subject resides within
this postmodernity divorced from an essentialist notion of truth, right and existential
purpose.37 I do not share Eagleton’s assessment of the merits of the postmodern subject,
though the notion of adaptability or reinvention is useful. Discursivity in my usage connotes asense of perpetual displacement of the subjective consciousness (or the space in whichmeaning is finally established). Fiske puts this nicely when he suggests that “making sense ofanything involves making sense of the person who is the agent in the process.”38 It is
important here to stress the nature of culture as processional, or in flux. This is not to say that
culture eludes meaning but merely that part of that meaning is located in the sense of its
perpetual movement or change. But the notion of a cultural process in Fiske’s analysis isproblematic because he does not indicate precisely what he means by “making sense.” The
cultural theorist is hampered by the project of having to make sense of the subject in acomplex discursive cultural system. Must a film ‘theorist’ be a ‘spectator’ to make sense of
the “person who is the agent” in contemporary cinema? What is the nature of that agency?
The problem arises in the necessity of having to make sense because this implies in thesubject a status of having an inherent sense, or static sensibility, and this must undermine thedefinition of culture as process. But Fiske’s theoretical eye that is attuned to the cultural agent
is a necessary starting point in any cultural analysis.
Fiske focuses on the ideology of the subject and cultural system in which the observer’s(or agent’s) consciousness is necessarily already ideological. I will begin here, using his
paradigmatic analysis of popular culture as a point of departure.
Fiske discusses the semiotic potentiality of jeans in a contemporary university in which jeans
are accorded the special power of making meaning out of cultural commodities and revealing
the importance of the semiotic system within the economics of production and consumption.

37

For an excellent introduction and overview of the topic, see Thomas Docherty, “Introduction.” In
Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. Thomas Docherty (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 1-31.
38
John Fiske, Reading the Popular (Winchester, Mass: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 1.

65

In this way, he formulates a mode of resistance to the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism,’ to use
Jameson’s famous phrase. “At the simplest level, this is an example of a user not simply
consuming a commodity but reworking it, treating it not as a completed object to be accepted
passively, but as a cultural resource to be used.”39 Fiske’s efforts on behalf of a popular
culture that engages semiotically with the market are to rescue popular culture from an“economic system which determines mass production and mass consumption… [in which] a
commodity is ideology made material.”40 The commodity is not so much the perfect
expression of the ideology that gives it life in the marketplace, but its ideology is all that it is.
The ideology is not writ large on the product and its packaging as a unique and specificideological statement; rather it is an all-informing, all-pervasive, ubiquitous system thatincorporates the product and its consumer.
The problem I have with this notion of a cultural commodity is that while a productmight be ideology made material, it is surely only ‘the ideology’ in the broadest sense. Thatis, the act of consumption, less an expression of cultural passivity, is an intervention in theprocess of the commodity from ideology to production to promotion to consumption. The
franchise aesthetic in contemporary cinema reflects this process of the subject (usually a fan
as opposed to the casual filmgoer) intervening in the system through the act of consumption
in the marketplace. Purchase, possession, ownership, synthesis of product and self to form
something new (for example, in the case of a fan donning the Matrix ‘mirrorshades’ to alter
her self) – are very real interventions in the process that connects ideology and commodity. In
this sense, consumption is in its purest form an aesthetic intervention, and the commodity ismuch more than a materialised ideology.
Fiske reads popular culture as implicated within a semiotic and economic system, aculture that must ultimately accede to the market if all it does it consume and reinsert
commodities into the system. He conceives the notion of cultural ‘excorporation,’ whereby“the subordinate make their own culture out of the resources and commodities provided by
the dominant system,”41 which may lead incrementally to “structural changes at the level ofthe system itself, in whatever domain… [which] occur only after the system has been eroded
39

Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 11.
Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 14. Fiske is perhaps also drawing on a classic formulation of
Althusser’s ‘ideology as unconsciousness.’ See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.”
In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York and London: Monthly Review
Press, 1971), 127-134 and 141-148.
41
Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 15.
4066and weakened by the tactics of everyday life.”42 For Fiske, this act of making culture,refashioning the commodity so that it encapsulates and is encapsulated by a new field of
meaning, is thus a significant step forward in the assessment of popular culture, which has
commonly been one of passivity and aimless, ‘ceaselessly adaptive’ conformity.
However, the model of the excorporation of the commodity has profound limitations.
On the one hand, Fiske fails to acknowledge that culture must be ‘made’ within the market,
drawing on the market’s semiotic system, as well as of the market’s materials. I take on board
his Marxist formulation of late capitalism, share his acknowledgement of its pervasiveness,
yet reject the transparent relation between its ideology and its manifestation, the commodity.
Disregarding this is tantamount to rejecting the ubiquity of the market, which I am perfectly
willing to do. But this must constitute an obstacle to Fiske’s excorporation as a tool of a‘culture of resistance.’ After all, the individual must resist something, if only an ephemeral
system of economic and cultural relations. In excorporation, Fiske offers what appears to be avehicle to extricate the commodity from the dominant ideological agenda. But if thecommodity is read within the marketplace, as it inevitably must, the emancipatory
possibilities of excorporation are diminished.
Consider a young Aboriginal boy seated in the back of a public bus, wearing a twopiece Eminem tracksuit. How would the cultural theorist, particularly one intent on charting
the excorporation of the commodity, read such a confluence of cultural signs? On the one
hand, the boy is aligned with (and aligns himself to) a minority disenfranchised culture,
Aboriginal society in Sydney – he chooses to sit at the back of the bus, which is a well known
gesture of resistance to orthodoxy. The Eminem tracksuit expresses his resistance to thehegemonic system, in this case a convergence of a conservative Liberal Australian
government and the capitalist market. Conservatism is contrasted with the perceived poverty
and oppression of black American culture represented in a ‘culture of rap.’ Rap has
maintained its ethos of resistance to the dominant White society in spite of the dilution of rap
resistance with Hip-Hop in the music of Destiny’s Child or Snoop Doggy Dog. The coding of
the commodification (Aboriginality/Rap/Eminem) explicitly offers a message of resistance toa culture that is located as Other – White/conservative/wealthy/enfranchised.
Fiske establishes a dialectic of incorporation and excorporation in the process in whicha dominant ideology is made material in the market. He suggests that42

Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 20.

67

popular culture is organized around various forms of the oppositional relationship between
the people and the power-bloc. This opposition always has the potential to be progressive,
and in practice it generally is. Insofar as the popular forces are attempting to evade or resist
the disciplinary, controlling forces of the power-bloc, they are working to open up spaces
within which progressiveness can work.43

There is a sense here that culture is either a site of resistance to hegemony or part of its
mechanics – a solution or perpetuation of the problem. But in my opinion, the image of the
Aboriginal boy in an Eminem suit lays bare the profound limitations inherent in this mode ofanalysis. How would the theorist distinguish between incorporation and excorporation? The‘Aboriginality’ of the boy in the suit is itself incorporated into the hegemonic ideology
insofar as the purchase of the Eminem tracksuit implicates the boy in the market (and thus
maintains the status quo, rather than forming a site of resistance); the ownership of the suitchallenges the abject poverty and oppression of the Aboriginal and Aborigine. Fiske
addresses the ‘residual’ ideology in the purchasing act:
So how much of a resistance to this is wearing torn jeans? In the economic sphere there is a
trace of resistance in that for jeans to become naturally ragged they need to be worn longpast the time when they would normally be considered worn out and thus need replacingwith another pair. Reducing one’s purchase of commodities can be a tiny gesture against ahigh-consumption society... One possible display of meanings here is of a display ofpoverty.44

The only way the tracksuit functions as excorporation (or display of poverty) is if it is stolen.
And in any case, torn jeans are merely a commodification of poverty as romanticised image
rather than an expression of resistance to a widely manifested social poverty. The act of theftmight offer an expression of resistance to the conventions of production and consumption in
the marketplace, but its ideology is made material as purchased object when worn,
representative of the semiotic and economic relations of the marketplace. The suit functions
as an expression of the market – brands, types, etc., and associated Eminem paraphernalia.
The site of meaning is configured only as commodity.
As an expression of cultural resistance, Eminem is commodified in the production andconsumption – exchange of goods for money – in the market. It is difficult to conceptualise
just what the semiotic relation is between the young Aboriginal boy and Eminem, and by
43
44

Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 163.
Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 14.

68extension a suit bearing the Eminem brand name. If we consider a lyric like “I don’t makeblack music, I don’t make white music,/ I make fight music,”45 how would we locate
Aboriginality in this context? How would we address the commodification of Eminem – assongwriter, rapper, brand name, movie star, icon, a plethora of pop-cultural images? I simply
cannot perceive a way in which to insert the Aboriginal boy in his Eminem suit into a culturalmodel of passivity (Adorno) or resistance/excorporation (Fiske). I would perhaps side with
Adorno only insofar as the suit as cultural commodity has nothing at all to do with resistancein a Utopian sense. Fiske’s notion that torn jeans are a symbol of poverty is dubious. Thatsuch a symbol offers an incremental challenge to an ‘imagined’ market (it is in fact animaginary, or Utopian, vision, insofar as the wearer of the jeans is not engaging with theideology of the market except to reflect it back upon itself) is equally optimistic; poor is‘cool,’ and ‘cool’ is commodified through consumption. However, ultimately, Adorno’s
model falls equally short of describing the empowerment of the Eminem suit and a genuinely
discursive aesthetic of resistance, which I will address later in the chapter.
What is missing from this analysis is a meaningful way of addressing the subjectivity ofthe boy in the suit. If cultural discursivity is predicated on the proliferation of texts, myths,
signs, symbols and the various significatory mechanisms that are put together to formulate
concrete meanings, the boy is implicated in this discursive process. Ultimately, the mostcomplex and meaningful system of analysis of this ‘performance’ of a commodity must be
aesthetic. The consumption and expression of the commodity (and if we are to follow Fiske,
ideology made manifest) is founded on an aesthetic value accorded to the suit that occurs
within the market system. The suit functions as a symbolic system of value, divorced from its
ideological expression insofar as that ideology is incorporated in a discursive culturalprocess. Ideology no longer coheres in pure form at the site of representation in thecommodity. Consumption alters the ideological fabric of the message, reconstituting the
product at least in part as autonomous from the ideology of the prevailing system. The
engagement with a product at the point of consumption is more than an ideologicaltransposition.
There is something profoundly stimulating in the act of consumption because it is anintervention in an otherwise impersonal itinerary of the commodity. This is precisely theengagement with the consumption aesthetic that simultaneously reflects on and recuperates
45

Eminem, “Who Knew.” The Marshall Mathers LP (Interscope Records, 2000).

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market ideology, and yet expresses the discursivity of the ideological symbol. The semiotic
system in which the Eminem suit coheres is less the literal transposition of a hegemonic
agenda than a discursive performance of meaning and, ultimately, subjective value.46
Perhaps this is better illustrated with a more concrete example. The image that opens
each instalment of The Matrix franchise is the classic Warner Bros. logo that heads the studioand signals the film’s status as a major production and distribution enterprise. However,while the logo is ordinarily coloured yellow, the Wachowski Brothers colour it with the green
tinge that colours the entire film. The reasoning behind this is explained by John Gaeta,
Special Effects Supervisor on the three films:
The opening of the movie was important in that we wanted to alter the logo of the studios
because we felt that they were an evil empire bent on breaking the creative juices of theaverage director or writer. So we felt that desecrating the studio symbols was an importantmessage for the audience that we reject the system.47

Unfortunately, as Gaeta speaks, Carrie-Ann Moss (‘Trinity’ in the film) can be heard
laughing in the background. This renders Gaeta’s intention in making the comment unclear.
However, opting for the less than cynical approach, I will assume that Gaeta is entirely
serious and that the Wachowski Brothers are indeed making a statement (or ‘excorporating
the commodity’) by altering the Warner Bros. logo. What is the impact of this on the studiosystem (which, though it might be crudely generalised, will be accorded the status of
ubiquitous ‘system,’ as Fiske accords to the market)? What is the impact on the film itself?
What is the impact on the spectator? And ultimately, what is the nature of the symbol as
performance in the cultural sphere?
On one level, the symbol of resistance is an expression of the dominant (Warner Bros.
and studio system) ideology. After all, the alteration to the logo has presumably been
permitted by the studio executives. Yet it is, as Gaeta suggests, a perversion of the original
and a challenge to its status in the system. When placed alongside Neo’s exit from a phone
46

For a fascinating discussion of the artwork as aesthetically removed from the object, see Steven Rubio,“Inventing Culture.” In The Aesthetic of Cultural Studies, ed. Michael Bérubé (Malden, Ma.: Blackwell
Publishers, 2005), 181. Rubio discusses Benjamin’s notion of the aura as no longer located in the object incontemporary culture: “To be in the presence of great art mattered more than the art itself. The aura had takenover from its source.” He also alludes to the importance of personal experience and nostalgia in an aesthetic
notion of popular art.
47
John Gaeta, “Commentary.” The Matrix DVD. Warner Bros. For one of the best satires on the ‘evils’ of thestudio system, see Robert Altman’s The Player, in which a studio executive hears a pitch for, among otherthings, “Ghost meets The Manchurian Candidate” and The Graduate, Part II.

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booth to Rage Against the Machine’s Wake Up!,48 it appears that the film functions from first
frame to last as an expression of resistance to a ‘system’ - in the film, The Matrix, in the
spectator’s external reality, the market and the Hollywood studio system. The fact that thelogo appears ‘inside’ the Matrix supports this reading. The logo is severed from its originalideological (and semiotic) intention; it is literally re-presented, and thus re-intentioned, in thefilm. And yet this alteration has been permitted by the system that has previously ideologised
the message.
In this case, I would argue that the performance of the logo in the cultural sphere isdiscursive. It is a process that coheres and is ultimately signified only through networks of
mediation. Resistance is aestheticised for the spectator, who simultaneously reconfigures thelogo and yet affirms the residual ideology of the original. The reconfigured logo bears theaesthetic of individual heroic resistance to the system on behalf of the disenfranchised masses(in the film, humanity is a slave to Machine intelligence). But equally, it bears the aesthetic of
The Matrix, a simulacral realm in which ‘residual self-image’ transforms the desert of theReal into the hyper-aestheticised imaginary of The Matrix. Immersion in the Real and the
Matrix is thus founded upon an acknowledgement of the aesthetic value of the act ofconsumption (in this case, the logo is consumed in symbolic form at the ticket counter andonscreen). Fiske would no doubt suggest that the logo (or brand name) is merely theexpression of the hegemony of the studio system, which it is: “Jeans are no longer, if they
ever were, a generic denim garment. Like all commodities, they are given brand names thatcompete among each other for specific segments of the market.”49 But it is equally, andsimultaneously, an expression of resistance to that system, an expression and strategy ofresistance that will always be aestheticised (and thus severed from the initial ideologicalutterance) at the point of consumption – which is to say the point of inception of thehegemonic ideology.50
Perhaps this reading of Gaeta’s comment moves perilously close to a rejection of thepossibility of cultural resistance, particularly in the notion of the consumption aesthetic. Thisis certainly not my intention. Individual and collective expression is after all a kind ofresistance that impacts on real individuals and real cultures:
48

Rage Against the Machine, “Wake Up!” Rage Against the Machine (Album) (1992).
Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 6.
50
For a discussion of the ‘commodification [and aestheticization] of dissent,’ see Thomas Frank and Scott
Weiland, Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos From The Baffler (New York: Norton, 1997).
49

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By repositioning and recontextualising commodities, by subverting their conventional uses
and inventing new ones, the subcultural stylist gives the lie to what Althusser has called‘false obviousness of everyday practice’ (Althusser and Balibar, 1968), and opens up theworld of objects to new and covertly oppositional readings.51

I merely argue here that this reality has rarely been theorised from its initial point of contact
with the culture it addresses. Cultural meanings do not cohere neatly between producers andconsumers of meaning. Commodities do not negate cultural meaning or aesthetic value to theconsumer.
One can see such a conflation of means and end with simplistic analyses of the
Hollywood studio system. The system is in a narrow sense a business that seeks to maximise
profits; cultures and individuals are incorporated in market strategies; demographics carry
more weight than individual opinions; the system is more carefully attuned to the mainstream
than unconventional cinematic forms – and this is all in part a business interest. But
Hollywood is also a site at which creative impulses are manifested in commodity form formainstream consumption. The system is involved in engineering creativity, regardless of theform this creativity takes. Apocalypse Now and Jaws are both major studio films; Apocalypse
now is perceived as an artistic endeavour while Jaws is considered a mass marketing
phenomenon.
The cultural coding of the commodity is difficult, if not impossible, to stabilise.
Commodity consumption is a cultural investment, and it is this aspect of contemporary
popular culture that has been too easily overlooked or disregarded. The aesthetic value ofconsumption is literally devalued or rejected out of hand beneath a Utopian vision of socialand cultural resistance that may begin incrementally, but is projected as proceedingexponentially. I cannot see the value in this negation of a genuine aesthetic engagement of acommodity in the market. The painstaking investigation of an incremental excorporation of aconsumerist culture does not engage with the reality of that culture, which seeks resistancefor its commodity value within, and in relation to, the market system.
Theorising a resistance that must inevitably augment the object of that resistance (I refer
specifically to the nature of consumption, or a ‘consumption aesthetic’ - I am not speaking ofresistance per se) is fraught with complexity and abstract systems of meaning. Jameson
51

Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 102.

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acknowledges this: “The hypothesis is that works of mass culture cannot be ideologicalwithout one and the same time being implicitly or explicitly Utopian as well.”52 In this sense,
he defends his project, which is essentially Utopian; resistance must be aimed at a particular,
and highly specific, end. But he also acknowledges that “until the omnipresence of culture inthis society is even dimly sensed, realistic conceptions of the nature and function of politicalpraxis today can scarcely be framed.”53 In this stage of the omnipresence of late capitalism,
theory has less than adequately analysed the discursive nature of culture and its components
in which resistance is concurrently radical and conservative. “No society, indeed, has everbeen saturated with signs and messages like this one.”54 I would add that the discursivity ofthese signs and messages compromises the integrity of an ideologically-organised system(hegemony) and at least raises the issue of a hegemonic practice (market production andconsumption) that is divorced from the institutions that originally provided its meaning.
2.3 Culture as Industry
The problem of postmodernism – how its fundamental characteristics are to be described,
whether it even exists in the first place, whether the very concept is of any use, or is, on thecontrary, a mystification – this problem is at one and the same time an aesthetic and apolitical one.55
Guy Debord’s powerful slogan is even now more apt for the ‘prehistory’ bereft of all
historicity, whose own putative past is little more than a set of dusty spectacles. In faithful
conformity to poststructuralist linguistic theory, the past as ‘referent’ finds itself gradually
bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts.56

Frederic Jameson’s writings on postmodernism are seminal works insofar as they attempt toformulate an aesthetics of the postmodern, drawing on various theoretical models, including
Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and the Culture Industry. Rita Felski iscorrect to suggest that “Jameson does not do Cultural Studies. His work is closer in spirit to
Marxist aesthetic theory, especially the Frankfurt school and its gloomy vision of popular

52

Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” 144.
Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” 139.
54
Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” 139.
55
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1992), 55.
56
Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 18.
5373

culture as a form of capitalist domination.”57 While cultural theorists have examined the
production and reception of popular culture, Jameson and Adorno, among others, are engaged
in a project of evaluating culture in an aesthetic sense, in which the autonomy or semiautonomy of art is connected to subjective consciousness. Each project is founded upon acomparison between an authentic art as socially generative, and a false art spawning a false
consciousness. For Jameson, the false consciousness58 is less a matter of cultural signification
than the relations between a dominant mode of capitalism (‘late capitalism’) and social life,59
which transforms “reality into images” and “fragment[s] of time into a series of perpetualpresents.”60 By his own admission, the conceptual paradigm in which he has mapped
postmodernism is totalising rather than founded on post-structuralism’s staple methodologyof heterogeneous signs, proliferating subjectivities, and an infinitude of meaning.61 This
totalising approach permits (and requires) broad claims about history and art, for which hehas received criticism for a lack of specificity in both.62 He proceeds to defend the totalising
approach on the grounds of a ‘level of abstraction.’ In this section, I apply Jameson’s theoriesof postmodernism and its dominant aesthetic to my own conception of contemporary culture.
To conclude, I discuss Adorno’s broad-based conception of the Culture Industry and consider
its significance in contemporary theories of popular culture and cinema.
Lyotard’s classic formulation in which he expresses an “incredulity toward the grandnarratives,”63 including the Enlightenment rationalist project, Christianity and Marxism, iscentral to analyses of the ‘cultural turn,’ to use the title of a collection of Jameson’s writingson postmodernism. It is expressed in the theoretical trajectories of post-structuralism as wellas the mandate of Cultural Studies to remain “open-ended.”64 Jameson’s writing on
postmodernity constructs a set of grand narratives that describe the nature of the postmodern
57

Rita Felski, “The Role of Aesthetics in Cultural Studies.” In The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies, ed. Michael
Bérubé (Malden, Ma.: Blackwell, 2005), 30.
58
Jameson does not conceptualise false consciousness in the same fashion as Adorno but he does describe apostmodern aesthetic in relation to a prior, authentic, art and culture.
59
Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” 20.
60
Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” 20.
61
Frederic Jameson, “Afterword – Marxism and Postmodernism.” In Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique, ed.
Douglas Kellner (Washington D.C.: Maisonneuve Press, 1989), 371.
62
See Walsh, 489: “There are also difficulties of internal consistency in the applications of Jameson’s
periodization.” Walsh is suspicious of periodisation as a methodology for its inherent lack of specificity. He
offers an excellent analysis of Jameson’s very broad and, to his mind, incorrect claims about popular film: “Tosay that genres were repudiated by the mainstream cinema, as Jameson does, is demonstrably not true” (494).
63
See Lyotard, xxiii-xxv.
64
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies.” In Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grosberg, Cary
Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 278.

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moment. In the following section, I attempt to formulate an ‘authenticity’ of contemporary
popular culture and film, focusing on Jameson, Baudrillard, Teshome Gabriel’s “Towards a
Critical Theory of Third World Films,” and Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Ageof Mechanical Reproduction.”Jameson’s conception of history, insofar as it is coherent in postmodernity, reflects on theorigins of a Marxist project that is equally totalising and Utopian. This project isfundamentally attached to art as resistance and authentic expression, which “is dependant for
its existence on authentic collective life, on the vitality of the ‘organic’ social group inwhatever form.”65 It is Jameson’s claim that “capitalism systematically dissolves the fabric of
all cohesive social groups without exception, including its own ruling class.”66 Thisdissolution of the collective group and subject (the realisation of the postmodern moment iscommensurate with the ‘death of the subject’) signals the emergence of a new self (though
selves and others are also anachronistic terms in postmodernism):
Yes, once upon a time, in the classic age of competitive capitalism, in the heyday of thenuclear family and the emergence of the bourgeoisie as the hegemonic social class, there
was such a thing as individualism, as individual subjects. But today, in the age of corporate
capitalism, of the so-called organization man…today, that older bourgeois individual
subject no longer exists.67

In this way, late capitalism and its semiotic realisation perform a de-authentification of its
own standards and of historical systems of meaning and value, cultural and aesthetic.
Both of these modes [high modernism and popular art] have attained an admirable level oftechnical virtuosity; but it is a daydream to expect that either of these semiotic structures
could be retransformed, by fiat, miracle, or sheer talent, into what could be called, in its
strong form, political art, or in a more general way, that living and authentic culture ofwhich we have virtually lost the memory.68

65Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” 140.
Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” 140.
67
Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” 6. Jameson categorises the ‘new’ subjectivity as adeterioration of the old, and of the loss of an essential self.
68
Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” 140.
66

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Postmodernism is a self-creating and self-administering system in which authentic art ispractised only in “marginal pockets of the social life of the world system.”69 These pockets
have forged a critical space within, and in opposition to, the market. In Jameson’s
formulation, art produced within the market is always already commodified and thus
inauthentic. The collective production and consumption of commodities cannot be equatedwith an authentic expression that is in some vague sense a form of cultural resistance to themarket, and which is emancipatory for the subjective consciousness. While Jameson rejects
Adorno’s notion of the culture industry, at least within the parameters of the culture Adorno
conceptualises, his dialectic of a culture of authentic resistance and the postmodern veers
close to Adorno’s model. While Adorno requires an autonomy of the artwork, Jameson’s
critique of this autonomy is less an argument about aesthetics against postmodern art than adevaluing of the culture that constitutes postmodern society. Adorno’s parameters of theculture industry, while reconfigured in Jameson within an elaborate economic and cultural
analysis, are ultimately maintained.70
For Jameson, resistance and authenticity are meaningless in a culture that issystematically ahistorical. Signs and symbols are merely expressions of the market, imbued
with meaning only in commodity form, valued only as a mechanism of exchange: “There issome agreement that the older modernism functioned against its society in ways which arevariously described as critical, negative, contestatory, subversive, oppositional, and the like.
Can anything of the sort be affirmed about postmodernism and its social moment?”71 In thisgesture, Jameson negates the possibility of ‘art’ in the postmodern creative space, and renders
the postmodern subject politically impotent, unaware and unconcerned. In the reflective glassof the Bonaventure hotel, a “total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city,”72
postmodernism’s inculcation of depth into so much surface area is perfectly realised. The city
as historical space is here ahistorical, a textual trope or fluid motif, as in the postmodern cityof Blade Runner or The Matrix,73 doomed to exist in a perpetual present, reflecting only on its
insularity from an external reality. Ahistoricism equates to a spatial dispersion into
69

Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” 140.
For Jameson’s challenge to the Frankfurt’s School’s art as autonomous, see “Reification and Utopia in Mass
Culture,” 133.
71
Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” 20. Consider this also in light of his criticism of Adorno(see previous note), which does not stand up as well in this context.
72
Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” 12.
73
The hotel in which The Matrix begins and ends is called “The Heart Of The City Hotel.”
70

76

nothingness, and all that is maintained is the imaginary of a simulacrum. “For Jean
Baudrillard,forexample,therepetitive

structure

of

what

he

calls

the

simulacrum…characterises the commodity production of capitalism and marks our object
world with an unreality and a free-floating absence of ‘the referent’.”74 Equating commodity
production in the postmodern era with the hyperreality of Baudrillard’s simulacrum divorces
postmodern expression from any possibility of authenticity.
The postmodern subject (I speak as a writer not on the fringe of the market, but
immersed in it), who must forge into being some semblance of herself, and some space forindividual expression and aesthetic value, must reject each of Jameson’s claims. I haveargued thus far that film (and art) is fundamentally aesthetic, and thus experiential. I
concurred with Barbara Kennedy that what is required in the realm of popular culture toconceptualise its value is an affective theory,75 in which “a new aesthetic theory, which
accounts for how the affective is formulated through color, sound, movement, force,
intensity”76 holds sway with the plethora of theories of ideology. What is disappointing inJameson’s writing is the willingness to reject all postmodern art (and thus all popular art,
insofar as the phenomenon of popular art arises only with monopolistic capitalism, the second
stage of Mandel’s model77) as inauthentic within the parameters of a totalising and Utopian
project of personal, cultural, political and social emancipation. In this model, art is again
functional, exemplary of this or that phase of human history, demonstrative of a social andcultural practice (or in the case or postmodernism, a lack thereof), ideologised into
obsolescence,78 aestheticised only as reflection, or collage, or the emptiness of an endless andpointless proliferation of postmodern expressions. Forbidden the authenticity of art, thepostmodern subject is doomed to endless repetition, and in this way is implicated in theperformance of the market and its dominant aesthetic. “The distorted and unreflexive
attempts of newer cultural production to explore and to express this new space must then74

Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” 135.
Kennedy, 4.
76
Kennedy, 5.
77Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 35.
78Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” 139. Jameson suggests that “even ideology has in oursociety lost its clarity as prejudice, false consciousness, readily identifiable opinion.” Here he has found an
inventive innovation beyond Adorno: false consciousness has reached a degree of falseness such that it nolonger recognises itself as false.
75

77

also, in their own fashion, be considered as so many approaches to the representation of (anew) reality (to use a more antiquated language).”79
Unfortunately, even beneath the guise of a possible creative agency of the postmodern
subject, ‘distortion’ and ‘unreflexivity’ amount to working within the simulacra, or merely
affirming the parameters of the prison-house. But surely the postmodern subject,
unemancipated for the meantime, must reconceptualize postmodernity without recourse to arealm of inauthenticity. This is essentially where Jameson and I part in our approaches to an
analysis of postmodernism or culture.
Teshome Gabriel offers a more pragmatic approach to emancipate the subject from themarketplace, focusing on recent cinema and the methodology of film theory. Gabriel draws
on the existing methodology of structuralism and the emphasis in cultural theory onhegemony to engage with what he calls “the struggle for freedom from oppression [that] hasbeen waged by the Third World masses, who in their maintenance of a deep cultural identity
have made history come alive.”80 It is significant that both Gabriel and Jameson locate
authenticity in the “recognition of ‘consciousness of oneself’”81 that is possible only in
dialectical opposition to a unifying and totalising system: for Jameson, the third and final
phase of capitalism, for Gabriel the “Western Hollywood film industry.”82 Both look tocontained pockets on the fringe of, or external to, the unifying system for cultural andaesthetic authenticity. Both initiate these cultural spaces as sites of resistance. Both idealise
the oppositional agency in the authentic subjectivity, though for Jameson this idealisation isjustified as a “level of abstraction” and is in fact a defence against the systematic destructionof dialectical and critical distance in the postmodern sphere: “A system that constitutively
produces differences remains a system, nor is the idea of such a system supposed to be inkind ‘like’ the object it tries to theorise.”83 Against criticisms of a lack of specificity in his
analyses of postmodernism, he attempts to write from within the system while maintaining a
subjective critical distance from the object of his writing. The system, if it is functional as a
descriptor of economic and social differences, is necessary to conceptualise the “sheer

79

Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 49.
Gabriel, 298.
81
Gabriel, 299.
82
Gabriel, 299.
83
Jameson, “Afterword,” 373.
80

78

heteronomy and the emergence of unrelated subsystems.”84 In this way, the Utopian aspect of
the Marxist project is maintained and is in fact the radical aspect of the analysis.
Both Jameson and Gabriel are equally committed to an authentic aesthetics and anauthentic cultural practice. In fact, the two spheres of society are intimately connected(perhaps in much the same way that Adorno perceives the ‘autonomy of art’ as the criterionof an art of resistance – art inherently possesses a social meaning). For Gabriel, the Third
World film ‘matures’ from its first, originating phase of an “unqualified assimilation” into thesystem, to a “remembrance phase,” and finally the “combative phase,” in which is born acinema of mass participation, one enacted by members of communities speaking indigenous
language, one that espouses Julio Garcia Espinosa’s polemic of ‘An Imperfect Cinema,’that in a developing world, technical and artistic perfection in the production of a film
cannot be aims in themselves.85

The imperfect cinema is contrasted with the apparent drive to perfection of the Hollywood
film, exemplified in the genre films of the studio period. While I will expand on this later inthe chapter, I will say here that the notion of an ‘imperfect cinema’ that is unique to the Third
World is simplistic. Consider, for example, imperfection as a cinematic aesthetic. The French
New Wave, as well as the Hollywood ‘auteurs’ of the seventies, experimented with quality offilm, minimalism in sets and performances, stark realism. Godard’s jump cut edit was a direct
challenge to the seamless ‘perfection’ of the traditional cinematic image.86
Gabriel and Jameson share a distinctly Marxist trajectory in their train of thought,
particularly in the willingness to reject historical specificity in favour of an instrumental
periodisation. Both paradigms are founded on a structural and functional appraisal of art andthe culture that receives it. Jameson’s postmodernity is summed up by a crumbling of the‘centre,’ at which point earlier models of history and society are simply not applicable. He
perceives this lack as pervasive, that is, as having infected every sphere of the postmodernpresent – personal, ideological and political. A critique of these models must begin byreinstalling a mechanistic historicity in postmodern society, a connection between the subject

84

Jameson, “Afterword,” 373.
Gabriel, 299-302.
86
For a reading of Godard’s oeuvre as a reaction to traditional cinema, see Peter Wollen, “Godard and CounterCinema: Vent D’Est.” Afterimage (Fall, 1972).
85

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and her history, culture, art, agency, and sense of belonging. This is achieved by, among
other things, employing an empiricist approach to the realities of postmodern culture.
Discussing his own brand of postmodernity, Jean Baudrillard relies on a wholly non-specificapproach to a critique of contemporary society. Baudrillard writes:
Above all, it is the referential principle of images which must be doubted, this strategy bymeans of which they always appear to refer to a real world, to real objects, and to reproduce
something which is logically and chronologically anterior to themselves. None of this istrue. As simulacra, images precede the real to the extent that they invert the causal andlogical order of the real and its reproduction.87

It is essential to recognise here that Baudrillard theorises not only a simulacrum of the Real,the imaginary and real space in which the reproduced consumes the Real, but its precession,
its anteriority to the ontological truth of the real object. Baudrillard adds: “Benjamin, in his
essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ already pointed out
strongly this modern revolution in the order of production (of reality, of meaning) by theprecession, the anticipation of its reproduction.”88 Benjamin does indeed conceptualise theontology of art in the age of mechanical reproduction precisely in its reproducibility: “To anever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for
reproducibility.”89 But in what sense is this compatible with a precession of a simulacra inwhich the Iconoclasts (makers of religious icons) reveal only “that deep down God neverexisted, that only the simulacrum ever existed, even that God himself was never anything but
his own simulacrum.”90 Baudrillard is pronouncing a final effacement of the Real in which
the postmodern individual inhabits a simulacrum of images divorced from an anterior
ontologically sound reality. Benjamin is pronouncing a cultural and economic system inwhich art is transformed from the authentic (possessing an ‘aura’) to the reproduced, whichenables a qualified measure of social resistance, and in which “the public is an examiner, but
an absent-minded one.”91 Indeed, conceptualising the mechanised society and its profound
impact on popular art requires returning to Benjamin’s analysis of mass culture and the87

Jean Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images. Trans. Paul Patton, Paul Floss (Sydney: The Power Institute ofFine Arts, 1987), 13.
88
Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images, 13.
89
Benjamin, 1172.
90
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 4.
91
Benjamin, 1184.

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institutions responsible for mass art, such as film studios and the star system. I cannot see that
Benjamin envelops all in an already existing simulacrum. In Baudrillard’s simulacrum, war isrealised only in a perfectly mediated form, through an infinite regression of images andsigns.92 Thus we are to believe that the anteriority of the image (CNN or Fox News, or
Coppola’s Apocalypse Now) to the object effaces the object, or erases its ontological corefrom existence. Baudrillard is quite explicit on this point:
The War in Vietnam ‘in itself’ perhaps in fact never happened, it is a dream, a baroque
dream of napalm and of the tropics, a psychotropic dream that had the goal neither of a
victory nor of a policy at stake, but, rather, the sacrificial, excessive deployment of a power
already filming itself as it unfolded, perhaps waiting for nothing but consecration by a93
superfilm, which completes the mass-spectacle effect of this war.

If we contrast this reading of the Vietnam War as simulacral procession with Coppola’s
assessment of Apocalypse Now – “This film isn’t about Vietnam; it is Vietnam”94 – we havesome sense of how far Baudrillard departs from Coppola’s objective to achieve the realism of
war as a surrealist composition.
Theories of reproductions and repetitions are, as Jameson acknowledges, part and parcelof the dominant discourse of postmodernism: “At this point, I will merely note one further
such theme, which has seemed to me to be of the greatest significance in specifying theantithetical formal reactions of modernism and mass culture to their common social situation,and that is the notion of repetition.”95 He sees this as originating with Kierkegarde andfinding fruition in Baudrillard. I would add that Baudrillard’s simulacrum only makes sense
after the ‘crisis of signification’ posited by the major post-structuralists. In fact, thesimulacrum shares something with Barthes’s or Derrida’s deferment of meaning: “Text, on
the contrary, practices the infinite deferment of the significant” that “accomplishes theplurality of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely acceptable) plural.”96 If anything, theBarthesian ‘plurality’ is a simulacrum, though it was Baudrillard that gave the term somecurrency in post-structuralist parlance.
92

See Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1995).
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 59.
94
Francis Ford Coppola, Press Conference (Cannes Film Festival, 1979). Recorded in Hearts of Darkness: A
Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. Dir. Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper. 1991.
95
Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” 135. Original emphasis.
96
Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text.” In Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977),
158-159.
93

81

In Jameson and Baudrillard, one perceives a common trajectory charting the
subjectivity of the postmodern subject in terms of her immersion in that which was always
already reproduced, in what is essentially inauthentic and fake. Gabriel theorises somethingquite similar in his conception of Western cinema: “The Western experience of film viewing– dominance of the big screen and the sitting situation – has naturalized a spectator
conditioning so that any communication of a film plays on such values as exhibition andreception.”97 But what are ‘such values as exhibition and reception’? In what way are they
conceptualised? Is ‘exhibition’ equated with immersion in the spectacle, and thus of the illsof what Debord calls a ‘society of the spectacle’? And in what way is an alternative to thespectacle compatible with an alternative “film-making as a public service institution?”98
Public-service cinema presumably engages with a collective culture and in the service of that
culture; its political project must thus be founded on a social reality rather than a spectacle.
But Gabriel’s resistance cinema falters in much the same way as Jameson’s sombre
assessment of postmodern culture, in a lack of detail and specificity. In fact, it is precisely inthis area that Gabriel reveals his reliance on the ‘passivity’ of the Western Hollywoodinculcated spectator. Whereas the ‘performance effect’ of the folk or oral art form “expects
viewer participation, therefore arouses activity and prepares for and allows participation,” the‘print or literate art form’ (and by association, the cinematic art form) “discourages viewer
participation. Puts an end to activity. Inhibits participation.”99 This is merely one comparison
Gabriel makes between an enlightened, resistant, authentic art, and its Western counterpart
founded on hegemonic practices over its own culture and, in an imperialist sense, over thecultures of a marginalised Third World.
I would argue that the richness of the Hollywood cinematic tradition attests to a diverse
range of aesthetic practices. Hitchcock’s Vertigo surely encourages the spectator’s
participation in the viewing of the spectacle, as well as in interpretation. David Lynch’s Lost
Highway demands repeated viewings to make sense of its non-linear, self-destructive
narrative. If participation is literally to interact with the text, I would argue that cinema (andthe ‘print or literate art form’) is an inherently participatory art. I revert here to Barthes’s“playing the text,” in which

97

Gabriel, 306.
Gabriel, 301.
99
Gabriel, 309.
98

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the generation of the perpetual signifier…in the field of the text (better, of which the text isthe field) is realized not according to an organic process of maturation or a hermeneuticcourse of deepening investigation, but, rather, according to a serial movement of
disconnections, overlappings, variations.100

Recent experiments in digital cinema, non-linear and real-time narrative and cinematic‘quotation’ surely have their origins in an innovative spirit that one can trace to Welles,
Hitchcock and, later, Resnais, Truffaut and Godard. Mike Figgis’s Time Code or Tom
Tykwer’s Run Lola Run require the audience’s interpretation and organisation of a dominantnarrative (though ultimately both films maintain a field of resistance to the linear
narrative).101 Singer’s The Usual Suspects and Nolan’s Memento are neo-noir, but they are
equally narrative experiments that require the participation of the spectator in formulating a
coherent narrative structure. The Usual Suspects presents the most interesting narrative
experiment in recent genre cinema, particularly in its lack of a sound narrative ‘ontology’.
Verbal’s (Kevin Spacey) account of the events on the pier are simultaneously a constructionof the film’s narrative; thus the narrative trajectory is not the instigation of an objective‘storyteller’ but guided by a component of that narrative. Italo Calvino’s ‘reader as writer’102
translates seamlessly to film.
Theories of simulacra and late capitalism are abstracted from the specificity of reality –of real, lived, social conditions – as well as the reality of textual participation incontemporary culture. Aesthetic experience that is incompatible with a Marxist aesthetic
model or a nascent Third World filmic revolution is devalued, declared empty, or in the worst
sense, inauthentic for its commodification of that which once was socially and culturally
generative. Both Jameson and Gabriel contrive the aesthetic and cultural authenticity of ananti-popular art. That is, authenticity is realised only in opposition to - and ultimately in
extrication from - the system. But neither Jameson nor Gabriel investigates popular art in any
detail. Gabriel suggests that Third World films “see a concentration of long takes andrepetition of images and scenes. In the Third World films, the slow, leisurely pacing

100

Barthes, “From Work to Text,” 158.
For a discussion of these trends in recent cinema, see Bruno Lessard, “Digital Technologies and the Politics
of Performance.” In New Punk Cinema, ed. Nicholas Rombes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004),
102-112. Lessard considers the innovation of contemporary cinema in relation to a history of the image, tracing
its origins to Bazin.
102
See Italo Calvino, If On a Winter’s Night, A Traveller (London: Vintage, 1998).
101

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approximates the viewer’s sense of time and rhythm of life.”103 I have two objections to thisclaim. First, filmmakers have used the long take since the 1940s, most famously in Citizen
Kane, Rope and Touch of Evil. It can then not be employed as a symbolic or ‘Third World’cinematic tool of resistance; it falters at the second phase of maturation, the ‘assimilation’phase. Second, the notion that “leisurely pacing approximates the viewer’s sense of time andrhythm of life” requires that these times and rhythms are shared by all spectators, which isclearly not the case. Joseph Natoli offers an interesting discussion about the viewing
sensibilities of two generations separated by a proficiency in the reception of analogue(outmoded) and digital (the new cinematic aesthetic) images: “human consciousness andperception are undergoing a revolutionary change: the young are not only processing
everything faster but they are not analogizing; they have no need to fill in the connect
between word and world as a book reading generation is shaped to.”104 I would argue alsothat leisurely pacing, prevalent in avant garde cinema since the late fifties (consider John
Cassavetes’s Shadows), is less an attempt to depict images in ‘real time’ than a very obvious
contrast to the rigid editing and fast cuts of genre cinema (though even this is too generalised
if we consider something like Welles’s Touch of Evil). The long take and leisurely pacing has
been a staple of David Lynch’s work since Eraserhead (1977), but neither device functions
as an approximation of real time or ‘real life.’
Jameson’s conclusions of the postmodern moment are often founded on textual readingsthat are generalised or superficially engaged with the text. Walsh suggests that Jameson reads
texts as ‘symptomatic’ of a social or cultural reality.105 While Jameson has defended himself
in this respect, I consider the notion of a text as ‘symptomatic’ of a cultural condition dubious- for one, it fails to take account of the post-structuralist notion of the discursive andperpetually displaced textual signifier. Consider, for example, his notion of ‘pastiche’ and its
perfect expression in the ‘nostalgia mode.’106 One of the inaugural films of what Jamesonrefers to as a ‘new genre’ (though he hastens to add, “if that’s what it is”) is Lucas’s major
success in 1973, American Graffiti, which
103

Gabriel, 310.
Joseph Natoli, Memory’s Orbit: Film and Culture 1999-2000 (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2003), 32.
105
Walsh, 486: “As Jameson argues at length in The Political Unconscious, the critic should read texts
symptomatically, looking for the repressed expression of his historical moment out of which they have been
generated.”
106
Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” 7-10.
10484

set out to recapture all the atmosphere and stylistic peculiarities of the 1950s UnitedStates… Polanski’s great film Chinatown (1974) does something similar for the 1930s, as
does Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1969) for the Italian and European context of the same
period.107

Jameson employs these films to signal the arrival of a new genre, the film of nostalgia, which
will fit into his assessment of postmodern subjectivity which lives in a “perpetual present”
and is thus perpetually reflecting on a lost (idealised) past. Yet anybody who has seen
American Graffiti, Chinatown and Il Conformista (The Conformist) must be suspicious of the‘similarities’ between these films. The profound dissimilarities in plot, character, narrative
structure, production and distribution must bring Jameson’s model into question. I willconcede that Lucas’s film is a nostalgia piece in the mode of Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me(which appeared in the mid-1980s). I will also concede that the ‘nostalgia mode,’ for lack ofan adequately defined genre, finds its seminal film in American Graffiti. But in what sense is
Polanski’s Chinatown exemplary of the nostalgia mode apart from the obviousness of its
period setting? It can hardly function as a pop-culture barometer alongside films such as Jaws
and Star Wars, which would be released shortly after Chinatown and credited withestablishing the ‘blockbuster’ phenomenon.108
Jameson places Star Wars in the nostalgia mode, but even so I cannot perceive a similar
nostalgia in Polanski’s and Lucas’s sensibility. Of Star Wars, he writes: “Unlike American
Graffiti, it does not reinvent a picture of the past in its lived totality; rather, by reinventing thefeel and shape of characteristic art objects of an older period (the serials), it seeks toreawaken a sense of the past associated with these objects.”109 I disagree that Star Wars
functions for a popular audience even remotely in the fashion Jameson describes. Merely on alevel of textuality, the franchise is far broader and discursive than its aesthetic veneer of
1930s and 40s serials. Certainly Lucas had conceived of a classic serial as a feature film, as
he had with his story outline of Raiders of the Lost Ark. But I cannot perceive that this serial
aesthetic is transferred as pastiche to a popular audience (the majority of which engage withthe film through numerous viewings and a wide knowledge of cinematic traditions) in the
categorical way described in Jameson’s model.
107

Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” 7-8.
See David Thomson, “Who Killed the Movies.” Esquire 126, no. 6 (1996), 56-57.
109
Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” 8.
10885

Lucas has characterised Star Wars as “the fairy tale or the myth. It is a children’s story
in history and you go back to The Odyssey…the myths which existed in high adventure, andan exotic far-off land…”110 He recalls here a system of mythology Fiedler describes ascentral to the American novel, which is certainly in keeping with the mythic structure ofserials such as Flash Gordon. Chinatown, if anything, declares its contemporaneity with its
critique of American capitalism and the rise of conspicuous consumption in middle class
America. Gittes’s (Jack Nicholson) classic lines uttered to Noah Cross (John Huston)
exemplify this as a subtext in the film: “How much better can you eat? What can you buy thatyou can’t already afford?” Jameson says very little about the film apart from: “as witness thestylistic recuperation of the American and Italian 1930s, in Polanski’s Chinatown andBertolucci’s Il Conformista respectively.”111 Why ‘recuperation’ and not ‘representation,’
which would at least grant the film a sense of historical realism? Recuperation is literally themode of pastiche, “the allusive and elusive plagiarism of older plots,”112 and thus denies asense of aesthetic authenticity that is the privilege of art prior to its commodification in themarket.
If American Graffiti “set out to recapture…the henceforth mesmerizing lost reality of
the Eisenhower era,”113 I would argue that Chinatown was a decidedly contemporary film in
1974, in which an entanglement in a convoluted plot in traditional film noir transforms into a
profoundly existential crisis for the anti-hero. Robert Towne’s screenplay is ultimately an
exploration of the deterioration of American ‘certainties.’ The overtones of conspiracy reflect
the American fascination with conspiracy that began in the mid-seventies and found its mostaccessible expression in The X-Files in the late 1980s.
If Chinatown is a nostalgia film in which “generational periods open up for aestheticcolonization,”114 then surely The Godfather, Parts I and II are equally nostalgia (which iscommodified reflection, or reflection detached from historicity), equally condemned to repeat
the performance of the expressionless gesture, the “imitation of dead styles.”115 De Palma’s
The Untouchables must be counted among these, particularly in the echo of De Niro’s Jake
La Motta (Raging Bull) in his performance as Al Capone. Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally
110

Cited in Rubey, 5.
Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 19.
112Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” 9.
113Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 19.
114
Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 19.
115Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 18.
111

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must be a re-enactment of the relationship comedies of Ernst Lubitsch or George Cukor’s The
Philadelphia Story; Sally’s (Meg Ryan) faked orgasm is merely the vulgar expression ofearlier symbolic representations of sex (a train entering a tunnel in Hitchcock’s North by
Northwest, or a searching spotlight in Casablanca),116 doomed to repeat prior performances.
Jameson’s reading of Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat is particularly nuanced, yet always
circumscribed by a desire to find pastiche “in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces‘real’ history.”117 Viewing Body Heat as pastiche celebrates it merely as the culmination of
the postmodern aesthetic, exemplifying not only the requisite lack of historicity, butachieving a unique aptitude for revelling in the condition.
In these postmodern paradigms – Jameson, Baudrillard and Gabriel – postmodernism
requires a lack of specificity; without the symptomatic (and to my mind, superficial) readingof the text, the totalising aspect of the model is brought into question. The nostalgia mode isone model in which the cultural theorist might approach American Graffiti, Chinatown and Il
Conformista, and an idiosyncratic one at that. The narrative strategies and characterisations ofthese films have very little in common. The claim that they demonstrate a common mode is
specious without a far more rigorous and detailed textual analysis. The notion that camera
angle in Western cinema is “mostly governed by eye-level perspective which approximates toour natural position in the world”118 conflates a traditional cinematic style with a perceived
lack of political intent. Film noir is often shot from low angles or overhead. Overtly politicalfilms like Warren Beatty’s Bulworth or John Sayles’s Matewan use traditional film stylistics
as well as the more flamboyant innovations used by David Fincher or Quentin Tarantino.
Jameson’s aesthetics of the postmodern is intimately connected to Baudrillard’s theoryof the simulacrum, though Baudrillard does not explicitly mention the connection between
the simulacral precession and the dawning of late capitalism; in fact he seems to suggest thatthe simulacrum is the only true ontological Real, and that it has always been this way. Bothare totalising visions from which nothing can escape. Presumably Jameson theorises fromwithin the postmodern stranglehold over linguistics and modes of expression, and is doomed

116

For a fascinating analysis of what occurs between Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) in
exchange for the missing transit visas, see Slavoj Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime (Seattle: Walter
Chapin Simpson Centre for the Humanities, 2000), 4-8.
117
Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 20.
118
Gabriel, 312.

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to conceptualise only ‘new realities’ that are in actuality new mimetic, and thus, unreal,
forms.
The totality of these visions allows for the inclusion of all texts into the dominantaesthetic (apart from those that oppose it from the cultural fringe). The ontology of thispostmodern, or dominant Western art, is precisely as dead, as recuperative or re-performative,
as having manufactured a dominant mode of expression in postmodernity: “Nostalgia films
restructure the whole issue of pastiche and project it onto a collective and social level, where
the desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past is now refracted through the iron law offashion change and the emergent ideology of the generation.”119 The postmodern subject ishopelessly immersed, and, it seems, entranced. If I have argued for a reconsideration ofcinema as affective, Jameson installs into the fabric of the postmodern (culture and subject) apervasive ‘waning of affect,’ which signals “the end of the bourgeois ego or monad.”120 It
signals also the end of ‘style,’ “the distinctive individual brushstroke.”121 I can only attempt
to refute these claims with a consideration of the complexities of contemporary cinema andthe culture that interacts with it.
Is popular cinema unable to engage with an authentic subjectivity and culture? In what sense
is it unable to provide an aesthetic experience that is personal and distinctive? Is the spectator
truly no longer attuned to the text or actively engaged in interpretation? Is cinema no longer
involved in its historical milieu and a perceived hegemonic structure that it can resist?
The triumph of capitalism in its third manifestation (and the consequent
commodification of creativity) precludes the possibility of aesthetic and cultural authenticity.
I do not wish to argue that Jameson’s assessment of the ‘omnipresence’ of the market (to use
his term) is misguided or inadequately researched. However, if authenticity is
incommensurate with popular art, it would benefit the cultural theorist to investigate thereality of postmodern aesthetics from within the marketplace and thereby address what I
would consider a point of origin: the subjective experience of film viewing and the diversityof cinematic texts. Duvall is correct to suggest that “one of the great ironies of Jameson’s
Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is that even “as he announces the

119Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 19.
Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 15.
121Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 15.
120

88death of modernism [and a stillborn postmodernism], and hence of its critical distance andemancipatory hopes, he reinscribes those same modernist hopes in his own writing
practice.”122 Ultimately, Jameson’s model of a postmodern society is reflective. The Utopian
schema of a system of thought arresting a cultural deterioration for the emancipation of that
culture must reflect on a point of origin, an ideal (and idealised) imaginary in which the
Utopia was once realised. For Jameson, it is the realist phase of capitalism, equating with therise of the bourgeoisie and a predominantly realist aesthetic. I have argued thus far that it isprecisely this realist aesthetic that must cease to function as a nostalgic point of reflection. It
is not the irreducibility of the realist aesthetic that has been recuperated in pastiche, but
pastiche itself that reveals the nostalgia of a Marxist hermeneutics that seeks only torecuperate old forms.
Indeed, there is a kind of return of the repressed in Diamond Dust Shoes, a strange
compensatory decorative exhilaration, explicitly designated by the title itself althoughperhaps more difficult to observe in the reproduction. This is the glitter of gold dust, thespangling of gilt sand, which seals the surface of the painting and yet continues to glint at
us. Think, however, of Rimbaud’s magical flowers “that look back at you,” or the augustpremonitory eye-flashes of Rilke’s archaic Greek torso which warn the bourgeois subject tochange his life.123

The comparison between Warhol’s Diamond Dust shoes and Van Gogh’s ‘original,’ orMarilyn Monroe’s commodification in pop-iconomania with the reality of her person (that iseffaced at the point of commodification) reveals only the detachment of a profoundly
modernist aesthetics of emancipation from contemporary popular culture. As Hutcheon has
convincingly argued, the reproduction is historically empowered precisely through therecuperative gesture.124 She is equally critical of Jameson’s apparent obsession to recover an
old aesthetics: “what interests me is that, when he [Jameson] finds something nostalgic – be itin the theorizing of the Frankfurt School or the novels of J. G. Ballard – nostalgia is meant tobe taken negatively as ‘regressive.’ Yet his own rhetoric and position can themselves at times
sound strangely nostalgic.”125 Contemporary culture (and its theorists) must stake a claim for
122

John H. Duvall, “Troping History.” In Productive Postmodernism: Consuming Histories and Cultural
Studies, ed. John H. Duvall (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 7.
123Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 10.
124
See Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York and London:
Routledge, 1988), 26-27.
125
See Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern.” Original emphasis.
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html, 6. Accessed 3 Aug. 2005.

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its own innovative aesthetics (and at the very forefront of this aesthetic revolution is pastiche)
without looking over its shoulder at what once was and could still be.
2.4 Authenticity and Spectacle
A canon – a shared understanding of what literature is worth preserving – takes shapethrough a troubled historical process.126
The fact, however, is that when one speaks today of the aesthetics of seriality, one alludes
to something more radical, that is, to a notion of aesthetic value that wholly escapes the‘modern’ idea of art and literature.127

To celebrate the status of popular art in contemporary society – that is, an art of the masses
and an art dialectically opposed to the masses, but which is still a commodity in themarketplace – is to acknowledge that authenticity is contextual, as Ohmann argues
convincingly of the canon of literature. Authenticity can thus equally be anchored in thecontemporary – in the ontology of the art and culture that must sustain the eye of the critic,
theorist and consumer. To look outside popular culture for its authenticity (taking Jameson’sand Adorno’s lead, to look for this authenticity in some earlier point in history) is merely toaffirm tired distinctions inscribed into the history of art and theory that privilege certain
cultures and groups, and one epoch over another.
But what does it mean to apply these standards to what Debord calls a ‘society of thespectacle’? Presumably for Debord, this society is founded on a shared history, a sharedspatial and temporal reality, a shared sense of its interconnectedness. We that are immersed in
the spectacle are immersed together, companions in our collective passivity. But while
Debord is explicit in his attack on this society, I maintain that the immersion in the spectacleis necessary for affectivity; it is paradoxically this awareness of and immersion in the
spectacle that recuperates affect, the essential aesthetic response that Jameson contends has‘waned’ in postmodernity.
Spectacle is not merely the visual, that is, the singularly visual aspect of art (in this case,and in my analysis, the art of contemporary cinema), although this is a vital aspect of thegrowth of the spectacle aesthetic. It is more fundamentally a transformation of the traditional

126
127

Richard Ohmann, Politics and Letters (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 91.
Eco, “Innovation and Repetition,” 179.

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interpretative mode in which realism functioned as a standard of excellence.128 For
Manovich, new forms of representation are “precisely a code [used] to communicate all typesof data and experience”:
new media transforms all culture and cultural theory into an “open source.” This opening up
of cultural techniques, conventions, forms, and concepts is ultimately the most promisingcultural effect of computerization – an opportunity to see the world and the human being
anew, in ways that were not available to “a man with a movie camera.”129

I concur with Carroll when he says that “the realist approach to film theory, either as an
ontological thesis, or in its more contemporary psychologised variations, is a dead end.”130 In
this piece, Carroll attempts to conceptualise the reasons for the “intensity” of experience
provided by the “movies” – what he describes as “popular mass media films, the products ofwhat might be called Hollywood International.”131 It is this intensity, he claims, that cannot
have its foundation in a traditional realist aesthetic.
Spectacle comments on this mode of realism and in so doing refashions it into thealready textual, or the ‘spectacle’ of that which was once authentic. It is my endeavour tounderstand this new ‘authenticity’ anchored in the spectacle that I have argued is endemic tocontemporary popular culture and its aesthetic mode. Eco discusses the ‘seriality’ of the art ofmass culture, though he acknowledges “that we still know very little about the role ofrepetition in the universe of art and in the universe of mass media.”132 This seriality, in which
the spectator is accustomed to the series, that is, the inherently connected and reproduced,
rather than the authenticity of an original – is no doubt another crucial aspect of the society ofthe spectacle. It is possible in this sense to talk about the tendentiously ‘lowbrow’ cinema of a
Michael Bay (Armageddon, Bad Boys) or a Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, The Day
After Tomorrow) as exemplary of the spectacle aesthetic in which seriality, repetition and thevisual foreground its attachment to, and reproduction of, prior forms of cinema and art. Thus,
while the miraculous first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan (that seemingly carried the128

The spectacle is a field of representation; the engagement with this field engenders a form of consciousness
discussed by numerous writers since the interest in new media studies. See, for example, Lev Manovich, The
Language of New Media (Cambridge, Ma.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001), 27-55; for a
discussion of a new media culture indebted to Debord, see Douglas Kellner, “Media Culture and the Triumph of
the Spectacle.” In The Spectacle of the Real, ed. Geoff King (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2005), 23-36.
129
Manovich, The Language of New Media, 333.
130Noël Carroll, “The Power of Movies.” Daedalus 114, no. 4 (1985), 80.
131
Carroll, “The Power of the Movies.” 81.
132
Eco, “Innovation and Repetition,” 184.

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film in critical and box-office circles) was lauded for its unprecedented realism, it is theacknowledgement of this ‘presentation’ of the Real that inaugurates the set piece as spectacle.
At best, Spielberg’s storming the beaches of Normandy is an unprecedented cinematic
realism.
The spectacle of cinematic realism, to my mind, has been rarely acknowledged, yet its
departure from the real is very obvious. Consider, for example, the stylistics of Ryan’s
opening set piece. The colour has been drained from the image to resemble black and whitephotography of the stock film footage of World War II. The spectator is positioned in
explicitly cinematic spaces, underwater (recalling Jaws), extreme close-up, medium-overhead
shot. The cacophony of the maelstrom, less than an indistinct barrage, maintains a cinematic
clarity: the spectator is allowed an intimate audience with the dying, particularly those
suffering brutal or cinematically visceral deaths. The sequence is painfully distended – anumber of critics noted favourably the length of the set piece. These are cinematic tropes that
conjure a reality on celluloid. Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down or even Terrence Malick’s
The Thin Red Line offer similar cinematic images of war that poeticise the Real into thespectacle. Is Spielberg’s stylistics of cinematic realism any different from Lynch’s
hyperrealism in Blue Velvet? Spielberg drains the colour from his opening set piece, Lynch
saturates the images with colours and light/dark contrasts. Both spectacles are a form ofhyperreality. The spectacle is ontologically far removed from the realism of European cinemaof the 1950s that Bazin cherishes, which was motivated by the theatricality of its film
predecessors. The first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan, installed as cinematic
spectacle, divorced from the reality of carnage and brutality, is also perhaps the mostbeautiful war sequence on film.
Darley locates a new affectivity in an analysis of a diverse range of media practices andconcludes that “we must resist the temptation to essentialize: the aesthetic dimension of latemodern culture is not homogenous. On the contrary, it is highly sedimented with amultiplicity of image forms and corresponding kinds of spectator experience.”133 Rather thanassume the starting point at an imaginary and wholly ahistorical paradigm of artistic
authenticity, he locates the authenticity of a society of the spectacle precisely in its immersion
within and manipulation of the mechanism of the spectacle: in his case, a new media poeticsof “cinemas, special venues, amusement arcades, television, video players, game consoles
133

Darley, 190.

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and personal computers.”134 Perhaps this is merely to say that at some point the aesthetic of asociety of the spectacle and its varied forums must begin to interest – and impress – thecultural theorist.
But there is something else at stake here. Popular audiences are increasingly willing tochallenge the supremacy of the canon by theorising and conceptualising their own art forms.
Contemporary writing on film is simply not aware of the gulf that separates it from theculture it purports to describe. Consider the following passage that, while not exemplary offilm theory, is indicative of what happens when mainstream film criticism addresses the
popular cinema aesthetic:
Just look at our top Oscar contenders. Gump was well made and had a certain sweetness, if
you like that sort of thing, but it’s still a lot closer to Beaches than The Bridge on the River
Kwai. Pulp Fiction was lively and clever, but at bottom it’s just an MTV version of old
Hollywood themes, with all the boring parts left out. Quiz Show and Nobody’s Fool get
points for trying, but they don’t exactly rank with The Third Man or Annie Hall or The
Godfather. They’re closer to good efforts than good movies.135

In this statement, Richardson falls back on the imaginary of the authentic work of art andthereby effaces the possibility of authenticity from the contemporary and the popular. “Pulp
Fiction was lively and clever, but at bottom…” The quest for a bottomness, the eternalwellspring of authenticity, occludes the authentic from the contemporary. Authenticity isanchored only in the past, manifested in reflection, and is in this sense reactionary.
Discussing Susan Stewart’s study of nostalgia as a social disease, Hutcheon writes: “nostalgia
makes the idealized (and therefore always absent) past into the site of immediacy, presence
and authenticity…nostalgia is, in this way, ‘prelapsarian’ and indeed utopian.”136 This crucial
aspect of Utopianism as nostalgia has been little acknowledged.
But for Richardson, exiling authenticity from the present is never enough. It must be
relocated to the essence of a particular cultural entity/discourse that is historical, contextual
and the aesthetic dominant, traditionally the polar opposite of what has been perceived to be
popular or of the masses: a high or elite culture.

134

Darley, 179.
John H. Richardson, “Dumb and Dumber.” The New Republic, 10 Apr. 1995, 20.
136
Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia and the Postmodern,” 4.
135

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After that, the bottom drops off dramatically: the dreary sameness of all the erotic thrillers
and buddy-o-matic action epics, the dispiritingly endless stream of sequels and remakes andDisney comedies. So many movies feel cobbled-together these days – action films like True
Lies and Patriot Games are so distended by their set piece action sequences that the rest of
the movie feels like filler, and comedies from Wayne’s World to The Adam’s Family are so
perfunctory about their stories that they make the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby road movies
seem downright sophisticated.”137

At bottom here is Richardson’s failure to appreciate the spectacle aesthetic, and even thewillingness to investigate what it might be. This arises from the implicit rejection of thepossibility of authenticity from the contemporary and popular at the point of its inception in a
nostalgic and idyllic past. To argue that True Lies and Patriot Games have distended action
sequences fails to appreciate the cinematic literacy of the contemporary spectator, for whom
action set pieces are deliberately distended into performative spectacles.138 In fact, I would
argue that the aestheticisation of the spectacle occurs only in the distended sequences inwhich movement and contrast is foregrounded, and narrative, thematic and character
continuity de-emphasised. For the lack of characterisation that Richardson perceives in True
Lies, the film compensates in a fabric of intertextual references. When Tasker (Arnold
Schwarzenegger) removes his wet suit to reveal an uncreased tuxedo beneath, the spectator
recalls an almost identical sequence in Goldfinger – Tasker is equally an original
characterisation, inhabiting a textual present, and a reflection on Sean Connery’s James
Bond. The extended (and distended) chase sequence in which Tasker pursues a terrorist on
horseback is a marvellous set piece in which the pursuit begins gradually but gains
momentum exponentially, accompanied by increasingly complex visual compositions and arising music theme. The chase sequence in The Matrix Reloaded is unprecedented as a set
piece of movement and rhythm incorporating visual and aural stimuli.
Contemporary cinema has achieved a virtuosity of the spectacle unparalleled in thehistory of visual media. It is essential to distinguish between classical representation and akinetic cinematic sequence that arrests its audience’s attention while simultaneously deemphasising the narrative. The sequence in which “Bohemian Rhapsody” or “Foxy” isperformed in Wayne’s World functions as a spectacle within the narrative. Once the film isconcluded, these spectacle elements have a residual impact on the spectator that surpasses
137

Richardson, 21.
For a discussion of the importance of the action spectacle to contemporary popular audiences, see José
Arroyo, “Introduction.” In Action/Spectacle Cinema: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. José Arroyo (London:
British Film Institute, 2000), xiv.
138

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that of the film’s narrative, which Richardson rightly calls “perfunctory.” Darley appreciates
the transcendence of the spectacle in contemporary narrative cinema: “As the corpus of films
attached to this rejuvenation of special effects has developed and expanded – from Star Wars
to the likes of True Lies and Titanic – so has the narrative element of such films distinctly
receded in favour of the stimulation, impact and astonishment that can be produced by new
and revamped techniques of image-capture and fabrication.”139 Set pieces in spectacle cinema
are at once visually iconic and transposed into a consumer market, there substituted for new
aesthetic experiences (in the way that the STAR WARS title screen achieves an autonomy
from the narrative – or indeed, from what some have called the ‘mythology’ of the franchise).
But these set pieces are also amenable to a series of repetitions. Thus, the “Bohemian
Rhapsody” sequence is Wayne’s World was endlessly repeated on television, music videos
and the advertising media, forming a ‘series’ (Eco) that filtered into pockets of popular
culture dissociated from the originality (and authenticity) of the film. The perfunctory story isnecessary for the performance of this spectacle in cinema. The CGI sequence in The Matrix
Revolutions in which a horde of Armoured Personnel Units (APUs) take up arms is striking
because of its status as spectacle, divorced from the Real, achieving the realisation of its
reproductive perfection in computer imaging. In relation to the spectacle of contemporary
popular cinema (and here I include Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Lucas’s Star Wars
franchise), all ‘stories’ are perfunctory. The ‘good stories’ are told in ages in which authentic
artworks and the aura of the real maintain their powerful statuses. How else is one toappreciate Tarantino as one of the most significant filmmakers of the last decade but as adirector with a new kind of (meta)cinematic impulse – which is to say, immersion in cinema
as spectacle?
This spectacality is perhaps the realisation of what Benjamin had in mind with hisclassic formulation of the mechanically reproduced work of art. In the age in whichmechanical reproduction has consumed all prior artistic modes (which is to say our age inwhich cinema dominates the other art forms as mass culture entertainment), the spectacle
impulse subsumes the narrative and thematic. And this ontology of the spectacle, that I haveargued must form the kernel of any analysis of contemporary popular cinema, is preciselythat which has reconciled itself to its status as reproduction. The spectacle acknowledges its
inauthenticity, and it is this that renders it vital and affective to its audience. In celebrating its
139

Darley, 52.

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pure spectacle, its pure textuality, its status as already reproduced, cinema relieves itself ofthe burden of a humanist and/or Marxist aesthetic impulse towards authentic art and its
failing aura.
Aylish Wood’s excellent reading of the opening of The Matrix appreciates the centralityof the spectacle aesthetic in the composition of that franchise. “The photography of thissequence gives the impression of time appearing to be both slowed down and speeded
up…The subsequent chase scene over the rooftops is captured in a series of shots that
accentuate movement, an effect that adds to the vibrancy of the opening sequence.”140 One
suspects that Richardson might value The Matrix over True Lies or Patriot Games, but on thebasis of the ingenuity of its story, or its finely wrought intertextual fabric (though he fails toappreciate this in True Lies or Wayne’s World, both significant examples of what Collins
refers to as the ‘genericity of the nineties’) rather than the merits of its ground-breaking
action sequences and innovative special effects. Warner Bros. provided the hundred million
dollar plus budget for the film after the Wachowski Brothers had shot the opening action
piece, demonstrating their remarkable camera innovation, “bullet-time,” and the expertise toconvey their complex storyboards on film.141 By their own acknowledgement, the executivesof Warner Bros. could not make sense of the story. It seems that the corporate element of thefilmic process better understands the aesthetic of a society of the spectacle (or at least its
market value to a contemporary audience) than the cultural theorists who struggle over the
mythic or religious foundations of the franchise. I return to a detailed discussion of The
Matrix Franchise in Chapter Three.
Contemporary spectacle cinema presents a challenge to traditional theoreticalparadigms. Ultimately, the spectacle is authentic expression, and this is something that
cultural theory and Marxist hermeneutics has had trouble reconciling with its emancipatory
projects. Even I acknowledge that it would be perverse to argue that all cinema is equallyworthy of attention, but the nature of this worth cannot be located in traditional aesthetics
practiced in outmoded discourses of cultural and artistic elitism, nor in contemporary
paradigms in which theorists describe cinema and its various ideologies that are divorced
from an experience of film or an acknowledgement of its profound affectivity on the140

Aylish Wood, “The Collapse of Reality and Illusion in The Matrix.” In Action and Adventure Cinema, ed.
Yvonne Tasker (New York: Routledge, 2004), 121.
141
For principle storyboard art (Steve Skroce and Tani Kunitake) and conceptual art (Geoff Darrow) for The
Matrix, see Spenser Lamm (ed.), The Art of The Matrix (London: Titan Books, 2000).

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spectator. And what a theorist like Jameson fails to appreciate is that ultimately his rejectionof mass art is as resounding an expression of its authenticity as its acceptance by the masses.

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3. Text and Spectacle in The Matrix Franchise3.1
Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the outcome and the goal of the dominantmode of production. It is not something added to the real world – not a decorative element,
so to speak. On the contrary, it is the very heart of society’s real unreality. In all its specificmanifestations – news or propaganda, advertising or the actual consumption ofentertainment – the spectacle epitomizes the prevailing mode of social life.1
Some of my favorite films are made entirely of clichés: Casablanca, Every Which Way but
Loose, The Prisoner of Zenda. They’re clichés, yes, but they have broken free of thatproblem, because the clichés slide through the narrative at refreshing orthogonal
angles…The Matrix is a postmodern philosophical movie in which fragments of philosophy
do this Casablanca cliché dance.2
I think that in order to transform a work into a cult object, one must be able to break,dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original
relationship with the whole.3

For Eco, cult status and cultural authenticity are not mutually exclusive, or in some sense
contradictory. Cult cinema (and its impact on what he calls the “cult culture”) indicates thegreat journey culture has undertaken to recuperate some notion of its so-called lost
authenticity. For Benjamin, “the uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being
imbedded in the fabric of tradition” which finds its “expression in the cult.”4 This chapter is
an attempt to draw on Eco’s aesthetics of a cult culture to develop the notion of the spectacle
as dominant in contemporary popular cinema. Eco speaks more directly and urgently to a
popular sensibility in which the authenticity of the traditional cult expression (aura) is
appropriated into a plethora of intertextual quotations – a functional meta-textuality.
Chapters One and Two theorised a departure from a conventional cinematic realism,
and the corollary transformations in the cultural sphere. Chapters Three and Four present thevarious manifestations of the intertextual, hyperreal, discursive, hypermythological andmetacinematic – in short, the triumph of the spectacle aesthetic.
Rather than a purely visual sensibility, the spectacle aesthetic is founded on what I
have introduced and will develop in this chapter as textual and cultural ‘discursivity’; a1Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 13.
Bruce Sterling, “Every Other Movie is the Blue Pill.” In Exploring The Matrix: Visions of the Cyber Present,
ed. Karen Haber (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003), 23.
3
Umberto Eco, “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage.” In Modern Criticism and Theory, ed.
David Lodge (London and New York: Longman, 1988), 447. This quote indicates the great distance we haveshifted in our ideas of popular culture since Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of MechanicalReproduction” and the prevailing aura of authenticity.
4
Benjamin, 1171.
2

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cultural predisposition that ‘sifts’ the spectacle from story, plot, character and theme. The
spectacle is ultimately the only means of establishing authenticity in postmodern cinema.
While traditional elements of the text are maintained, and are indeed crucial to any receptionof mainstream film, the dominance of the spectacle has reorganised the relation between
realism and its representation on the screen. I suggest also that the triumph of the spectacle
aesthetic requires a transformation in the ontology of the traditional film or cultural theorist, a
notion I will explore at some length. I focus primarily on a reading of several mythologicalstructures in The Matrix Franchise. However, I conclude the chapter with a discussion ofvarious alternatives to Bazin’s realist image strategies of classical cinema, drawing on theadvent of digital cinema, and more specifically, what I term the ‘ontology of bullet-time.’
3.2 Further Musings on Authenticity and the Spectacle
Contemporary theory presents a challenge to textual analysis; the endeavour to analyse text inthe traditional way, as Barthes has argued, is anachronistic.5 Rather, in a standard poststructuralist substitution for interpretation, one ‘plays’ the text. But even playing an openended text is not perfectly satisfactory, fraught as it is with open-ended meanings and poststructuralism’s perpetual displacement of signifiers. The open-ended text is useful indemystifying the traditional bourgeois subject, and thus the author, the affirmation of which“is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”6 But
without authors and conclusive meanings, the reader (and spectator) is dissociated from themeaning-making process. In being fully liberated, born anew as the reader,7 the subject
realises that perfect liberation is akin to perfect stagnation. This is the kind of stagnation
Shohat and Stam perceive in post-structuralist discourse: “Post-structuralist theory reminds
us that we live and dwell within language and representation, and have no direct access to the‘real.’ But the constructed, coded nature of artistic discourse hardly precludes all reference to
a common social life.”8 In Chapter Two, my analysis of Jameson’s position was founded on
his recuperation of the authorial and evaluative eye (a nostalgia for a lost realism and, though
at times he argues to the contrary, modernism), and the reinstatement of critical distance. The

5

Barthes, “From Work to Text,” especially 159-160.
Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text.” In Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977),
147.
7
Barthes, “Death of the Author,” 148.
8
Shohat and Stam, 179.
6100

cloying paradox for Jameson lies in his pronouncement of the dissolution of critical distance
while accepting that this pronouncement is made from beyond the same critical distance hehas dissolved.
I suggest that popular culture requires a transformation in the theorist’s sensibility (orontology, which is nearer to the nature of the transformation that is required). It has always
been perfectly acceptable to address Shakespeare’s works as a benchmark in humanist art,and equally as representing the inception of a ‘modern’ aesthetic.9 The same can be said forthe literary canon, though this distinction has more recently been shown to be problematic.10 I
argue that a problem endemic to critical theory is not only how to read popular culture (thatis, privileging the ideological/structural over the affective/aesthetic), but even more critically,
locating the cultural co-ordinates in which the theorist must position herself. In a superb
piece, Tara Brabazon, writing about the youth response to George Lucas’s Star Wars,
Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, describes this deficiency in the influential Birmingham
School of cultural studies:
Cultural studies theorists carry the baggage of the Birmingham Centre into any history ofyouth culture. The taken-for-granted ‘youth as resistance’ mantra, embodied in ResistanceThrough Rituals (Hall & Jefferson, 1976) and Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Hebdige,1979), transformed young people into the ventriloquist’s puppet of cultural studies.11

While Brabazon does not explicitly address the position of the theorist in relation to the‘culture of resistance,’ her argument is founded on this perceived lack of communication, or
disparity, between the theorist and the individual (and collective) subjectivity of popular
culture. For example, Hebdige considers the aesthetics of punk, among other things, as aritualised, though strategic, resistance to hegemony, suggesting that to classify subcultural
production as ‘high art’ is to miss the point: “Subcultures are not ‘cultural’ in this sense, andthe styles with which they are identified cannot be adequately or usefully described as ‘art of9

I refer here to Harold Bloom’s massive study of Shakespeare and modern thought, Shakespeare: The Inventionof the Human (New York: Penguin and Putnam, 1998). Bloom’s contention is that Shakespeare’s characters
inform the prevailing sense of ‘humanity’ or the essence of being human. In Bloom’s universe, and in a modern
parlance, this ‘personality’ of the modern human is “a Shakespearean invention, and is not only Shakespeare’s
greatest originality but also the authentic cause of his perpetual pervasiveness. Insofar as we ourselves value,and deplore, our own personalities, we are the heirs of Falstaff and of Hamlet, and of all the other persons whothrong Shakespeare’s theatre of what might be called the colors of the spirit” (4).
10
Ohmann, 68-69.
11
Tara Brabazon, “Well Always Have Tatooine.” Australian Journal of Communication 26, no. 2 (1999), 4. Fora similar sentiment regarding Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style, see Jonathan Sterne, “The Burden of
Culture.” In The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies, ed. Michael Bérubé (Malden, Ma.: Blackwell, 2005), 89.

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a high degree.’ Rather, they manifest culture in the broader sense.”12 Hall perceives
something very similar for the project of popular culture: “Popular culture is one of the sites
where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged…It is not a sphere
where socialism, a socialist culture – already fully formed – might be simply expressed. But
it is one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why popular culture
matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn about it.”13
But to whom does popular culture matter in this way? If Hebdige can be accorded
some latitude is constructing an aesthetics of punk as resistance to hegemony (which, in any
case, is limited), Hall’s popular culture as a mechanism for socialist change misses the point
entirely. Most popular culture is not practised in service of an emancipation project
conceived by intellectual theory. In this sense, I concur with Felski that “the problem withliterature departments…is not that they study literature, but that they often see themselves as
having a monopoly on what counts as aesthetic experience.”14 For Hebdige and Hall, theaesthetic of high culture is exchanged for a social and political theory of the popular. For
aesthetic beauty and truth, literary and cultural theorists rarely look to popular art forms.
Brabazon suggests that “to discuss a Lucasfilm’s conspiracy of slick marketing is tocompletely misread the event. The uncomfortable recognition that too many journalists seemunable to grasp is that millions of men and women possess an emotional investment in thisfilm.”15 I would argue that Brabazon’s journalists and the majority of film theorists could beclassified in much the same way. The contemporary film theorist struggles not only to makesense of what popular cinema means to its audience, but how this product makes its meaning.
Recall Lawrence and Jewett’s reading of a ‘quotation’ of Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will in
the last scene of Star Wars. The authors suggest this quote reflects the film’s fascist
tendencies. I argue that this is a categorical misreading based on a failure to appreciate theway popular cinema is composed of prior myths and texts, and the way it addresses its
spectator. Even if the authors wish to argue that Lucas is a closet fascist, the Riefenstahl
quotation is not satisfactory textual evidence.

12

Hebdige, 129.
Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular.” In People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael
Samuel (Boston: Routledge, 1981), 239.
14
Felski, 34.
15
Brabazon, 8.
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Conceptualising this disparity in affective (and indeed, critical) distance between thetheorist and the popular culture spectator is increasingly difficult because of what I havedescribed as the inherent discursivity of popular culture. Redressing this disparity must be
done in a series of tentative gestures. One such gesture that reverberates within popular
culture is Brabazon’s confession that popular cinema has a powerful personal appeal and acurrency that demands critical attention. The anecdotal (and confessional) opening to herpiece is disarmingly real:
A few Saturdays ago, my 71-year-old father tried to convince me of imminent
responsibilities. As I am considering the purchase of a house, there are mortgages, bankfees, and years of misery to endure. Unfortunately, I am not an effective Big Picture Person.
The lure of the light sabre is almost too great. For 30 year old Generation-Xers like myself,
it is more than a cultural object. It is a textual anchor, and a necessary component to any
future history of the present.16

While The Phantom Menace does not have quite the same appeal for me, I confess that I havea thousand such “textual anchors” to popular culture, and few are founded on a personal orcollective project of resistance to a hegemony. Following Brabazon’s lead, then, I willapproach popular cinema as a subject immersed in its textual, mythological and cultural
strategies, acknowledging that this culture exists as a system of meanings of which I am an
integral part. I am not privileged with the critical distance of Jameson to assess the relativeadvantages or disadvantages of this position. I accept that culture is suffused with a plethoraof ideological positions actively engaged with my own response as theorist, spectator andconsumer. But though I may locate myself in opposition to these ideologies, I am in much thesame position as John Gaeta, who claims (futilely) that the desecration of a Warner Bros.
logo enacts a rejection of the studio system by the creative and artistic minds under theircontrol. As I have argued, the transposition of this symbol as ideology is mediated by several
strata of cultural meanings, and conceivably affirms the pervasiveness of the studio system. It
is what Fiske might call the incorporation rather than the excorporation of the symbolic logo,
ultimately leaving the hands (and corporate minds) of the studio executive, destined to return
to its ideological point of inception after a circuitous textual route. The fact that Tom Cruise
can demand twenty-five million dollars in a 150 million dollar studio production because heconstitutes a product for consumption in the marketplace (and is thus deserving of the fee –16

Brabazon, 1.

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economic rationalism has always been the cornerstone of the Hollywood star system) seems
absurd. And yet as a spectator I am immersed in the performance of the star system, which isonly one corollary of the studio system that has dominated Hollywood since the 1930s.
Popular audiences are emotionally and psychically invested in the ‘spectacle’ persona of a
Tom Cruise or Angelina Jolie. The spectacle aesthetic requires iconic stars to function
affectively; iconicity requires consumptive leverage in the marketplace. How else can one
explain the fascination with ‘Hollywood’s Hundred Richest’ lists but to attach the icon to its
consumptive value? This is to say simply that Tom Cruise is not Tom Cruise without theeight-figure salary freely available as information (merely another means of consumption) to
the interested consumer. Butler is correct to suggest that
The star’s image dominates movie posters and appears on dozens of magazine covers; it isclearly one of the principle commodities that is used to market a film to an audience – equalin importance, in the minds of film producers and film viewers alike, to a compelling story
or majestic scenery or a trendy director.17

But while trendy directors occasionally have an art house hit that pleases the studio(Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino), Sex, Lies and Videotape (Soderberg), Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind (Gondry/Kaufman)), Leonardo Di Caprio can bolster what is in my opinion aturgid romantic melodrama (Titanic) into a billion-dollar economic franchise.
Gabriel’s celebration of the political aesthetic of Third World Cinema and his critiqueof mainstream Hollywood, in these terms in which “consumption can be its own aesthetic
reward,”18 is absurd. I cannot fathom a way in which Third World Cinema offers analternative yet viable aesthetic in the cultural arena without altering the economic and social
fabric of that culture. Of course, for Gabriel (as for Jameson, Hall and Hebdige), such analteration is precisely what is required to find something of aesthetic worth, and such an
approach will always be profoundly limited, even self-defeating. I do not wish to reject theideological nature of the arena in which this affectivity is expressed, but to suggest that
ideological analyses divorced from the affective are conceptually simplistic and generalised.

17

Jeremy G. Butler, “The Star System and Hollywood.” In American Cinema and Hollywood: Critical
Approaches, ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 116. My
emphasis.
18
See Bruce Isaacs and Theodore Louis Trost, “Story, Product, Franchise.” In Jacking in to The Matrix
Franchise: Cultural Reception and Interpretation, ed. Mathew Kapell and William G. Doty (New York andLondon: Continuum, 2004), 73.

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This kind of analysis often results in theory prescribing the analysis of texts, which occurs
frequently in psychoanalytic readings of popular cinema19 or so-called scientific studies of
the impact of cinematic violence on the spectator.20
3.3 A Brief Note on (Mis)Reading Cinema
What I am suggesting is a return to the screen as a spectator (whether a television, movie
theatre, computer monitor, or some other site of representation) as the initial point of contact
between film and theory. In a piece devoted to the study of the serial killer sub-genre, Barry
Keith Grant suggests that “the structural repetitions inherent in the act of serial killing seemto echo the repetition compulsion in our own intensive consumption of narratives about it.”21
Preceding this paragraph, Grant opens his piece with the claim that “Jonathan Demme’s
Silence of the Lambs won several academy awards and brought serial killing squarely into themainstream. In short, as Martin Rubin has noted, fin-de-siècle America seems especiallyobsessed with the figure of the modern multiple murderer.””22 The implication is that Silenceof the Lambs constitutes a phenomenon in the serial killer sub-genre, conforming to a general
narrative structure (a killer stalking and then killing women) as well as the more recent“repetition compulsion” of popular society. But if Grant looked closely at Silence of theLambs, he would notice that all the female victims are killed before the film begins (they are
literally back-story – Catherine Martin is abducted but rescued by Clarice Starling (Jodie
Foster)), violence is implied rather than overt (the act of violence is almost never shown;rather the film seems interested in the image of the consequence of graphic violence) and that
serial killer films such as Michael Mann’s Manhunter, Demme’s Silence of the Lambs or
19

See Slavoj Žižek, “The Matrix: Or, the Two Sides of Perversion.” In The Matrix and Philosophy, ed. William
Irwin (Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 2002), 240-266. The article’s title works as an in-joke withJameson’s “Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” – the two together offer a veritableprison-house of theory. Žižek’s conclusion is formulated on a crucial misreading of the scene in which Neoexits the telephone booth as the reborn One. “At the same time, Neo addresses people still caught in the Matrix
as the Savior who will teach them how to liberate themselves from the constraints of the Matrix” (263). But Neo
does not address people caught in the Matrix. Rather, he addresses the Machines: “I’m not here to tell you how
this will end. I’m here to tell you how it will begin.” And as Morpheus says, those imprisoned in the Matrix
must ultimately “free themselves,” attested by the fact that at the conclusion of The Matrix Revolutions themachines will free only those who want to be freed. The film’s conclusion is thus not an inconsistency in theway that fits with Žižek’s theoretical bent.
20
For an extensive and detailed analysis of the ‘misreadings’ of film and television violence, see Ill Effects: The
Media/Violence Debate, ed. Martin Barker and Julian Petley (Routledge: London and New York, 2001). Of
particular interest is Martin Barker’s chapter, “The Newson Report: a case study in ‘common sense’” (27-46).
21
Barry Keith Grant, “American Psycho/sis: The Pure Products of America go Crazy.” In Mythologies ofViolence in Postmodern Media, ed. Christopher Sharrett (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999). 23-24.
22
Grant, 23.

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even Powell’s earlier Peeping Tom do not instantiate a new approach to violence that ispervasive, or even broad-based.
It is astonishing that Grant can make a claim such as: “The scene in Pulp Fiction(1994) where two hapless hit men must deal with the splattered blood and brains of their deadhostage Marvin demonstrates that we are more likely to laugh at blood on the upholstery thanto be shocked.”23 Surely this oft-discussed scene demonstrates nothing of the kind. On one
level, we can say simply that violent acts take their ‘meaning’ from the context in which theviolence appears on screen. Marvin’s death is funny not because we (for whoever ‘we’ are in
Grant’s analysis) are desensitised to violence per se, but because the situation involving
Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel Jackson) is patently absurd. The humour iscreated not because the spectator can’t appreciate the horrible ‘reality’ of physical violencebut because the situation constructed by the narrative is overtly humorous. Marvin’s death isa brilliant example of postmodern absurdism (less in the sense of an existential absurdism as
endemic to modern life) divorced from the Real. If we contrast Marvin’s death with a similar
unintentional shooting in Reservoir Dogs, 24 it becomes clear that the coding of the violent act
on screen is contingent on its narrative context. We can also say that a Jules/Vincent
situational absurdism was certainly not the norm in mainstream cinema in 1994 any morethan it is in 2006.
3.4 Spectacle and Technology
Investigating the spectacle aesthetic requires an alteration in the ontology of the theorist.
Grant’s position on Silence of the Lambs is exemplary of a criticism that employs popular art
in the service of an ideological agenda without a close analysis of that art. But moresignificantly, if a response to cinema is indeed fundamentally affective (as I have argued), theanalysis must begin precisely with collapsing the critical distance treasured by traditional
theory rather than constructing some ideological project at the outset. Rejecting the utopian(and equally nostalgic) impulse, as Hutcheon does, makes some headway towards this new
ontology. Hutcheon’s notion of nostalgia, or in a broader sense, history, in the postmodern
world is radical in light of Jameson who rejects a postmodern historicism. To this, Hutcheon
23

Grant, 33.
I am thinking here of the scene in which Mr Orange (Tim Roth) is shot by a female driver while escaping thescene of the robbery. He is then forced to shoot her at close range, killing her, and this allows Mr White (Harvey
Keitel) to engineer their escape.
24106retorts: “The view that postmodernism relegates history to ‘the dustbin of an absoluteepisteme, arguing gleefully that history does not exist except as text’ (Huyssen 1981, 35), is
simply wrong. History is not made obsolete; it is however being rethought – as a humanconstruct.”25
Accepting also that the plethora of new technologies is a meaningful contribution –and thus substantial alteration – to the way cinema is viewed and the impact it has on popularaudiences, is also a crucial step in the process. I disagree with John Belton that digital cinema
is a “false revolution” because it cannot do more than “elmina[te] jitter, weave, dirt, andscratches from the projected image.”26 Rather, the gradual acceptance of digital cinema hascome only after a lengthy trial period in the use of special effects, which has only affirmed
the centrality of spectacle cinema to popular culture. In adapting the graphic novels of Dennis
Miller, Robert Rodriguez’s ‘digital aesthetic’ in Sin City is compatible with the hyperrealityof the comic strip. Rodriguez could have shot Sin City on 35mm but the use of digitaltechnology offers a new kind of cinematic realism.
While Belton is correct to say that digital films do not look substantially different to
35mm, he fails to appreciate the significance of the phenomenon of digital technology as aninnovation on, and departure from, the traditions of cinema that preceded it. Discussing theinfluential U.S. critic, Roger Ebert, Belton writes that he is “one of the few people speaking
out against digital cinema. Ebert’s chief objection is that digital projection cannot duplicate
the experience of 35mm film. In this respect his argument is much subtler than my own.”27
But their respective arguments are less a question of subtlety than conception. For Ebert, thedistinction between 35mm and the digitally filmed image is fundamental; Ebert
acknowledges a profound disparity between the product of a digital camera and 35mm film
stock. One might speak of the ‘glorious Technicolor’ of Gone With the Wind as an innovation
towards realism in the early use of colour in the Hollywood studio film (though I would
argue that the colour saturations of David Lynch and those of Gone With the Wind have a

25

Linda Hutcheon, “Representing the Postmodern.” In A Postmodern Reader, ed. Joseph Natoli and Linda
Hutcheon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 256.
26
John Belton, “Digital Cinema: A False Revolution.” October 100 (2002), 107-108.
27
Belton, 114. The Australian critic David Stratton has said the same thing of digital cinema, rejecting theinnovations of the Dogma ’95 Group; Stratton seems to cherish Bazin’s ‘myth of total cinema.’ Ironically, theDogma group championed digital technology to distance itself from the emphasis on spectacle and special
effects cinema of the Hollywood mainstream (see Lessard).

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great deal in common), and the washed surfaces of Sin City as a deliberate aestheticisation of
the film image.
3.5 The Matrix Phenomenon
Before proceeding, let me say a brief word in defence of The Matrix franchise, which isperhaps necessary in light of the reviews of The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix
Revolutions.28 I argue simply that the discursivity of popular culture is reflected, in‘orthogonal angles’ (to use Sterling’s interesting phrase describing the use of cliché incinema) in The Matrix Franchise. The heteroglossic utterance of a young Aboriginal boy
wearing an Eminem tracksuit finds some form of expression in a popular film that traverses
Plato, Descartes, Baudrillard, Marxism, late capitalism, the poetics of postmodernism and a
new and interactive media. The additional interpretative frame in which the film (or trilogy)
is received by popular culture as a franchise is equally significant. The performance of thetext does not end when the credits roll. Rather, The Matrix finds expression in corporate
advertising and product placement (Samsung mobile phones, Energizer batteries), action
figures, leather jackets and boots, DVD box sets with additional features, tie-in comic books
that delve into the ‘Zion Archives’ (and thus also the textual archive of the franchise), filmsoundtracks, sound bites on T.V. advertisements, the console game Enter The Matrix(available on PC, Sony Playstation and X-Box), the interactive website and associated blogs,
the star system (Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Lawrence Fishburn) and its culture ofcelebrity, the recuperation of Rage Against the Machine as resistance not to social hegemonyin the United States or contemporary late capitalism, but to the Matrix. The Matrix franchiseis less a cinematic text than a popular culture entity as Star Wars once was and is again in theyear of Revenge of the Sith. On a narrative level, the franchise is incomplete, subject always
to revolution: at the end of The Matrix Revolutions, the shot immediately after Neo’s ‘death’shows the Matrix rebooting, the simulation reforming, its dialectic opposition to the Realreconstituted. This is what Eco means by repetition, which equates not only to the repeat
performances of the serial or soap opera, but the sophisticated recycling of the product in the28

For two mainstream reviews exemplary of the film’s critical reception in the U.S., see Todd McCarthy, “The
Matrix Revolutions.” Variety, 2 Nov. 2003; and A. O. Scott, “The Game Concludes With Light and Noise.” The
New York Times, 5 Nov. 2003.

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cultural arena, and the complementary coming to awareness of the cult status of popular
culture:The required expertise is not only intercinematic, it is intermedia, in the sense that theaddressee must know not only other movies but all the mass media gossip about movies.
This third example presupposes a ‘Casablanca universe’ in which cult has become thenormal way of enjoying movies. Thus in this case [the case of Casablanca] we witness an
instance of metacult, or cult about cult – a Cult Culture.29

What is also remarkable about The Matrix franchise is its reception in academic andliterary (referring to an arena in which literature is discussed, rather than the self-conscious
literariness of the New Yorker or McSweeney’s) circles. In addition to its acknowledged status
as film and pop cultural phenomenon, “in 2002 no fewer than six full-length scholarly books
were published with The Matrix as its primary subject matter.”30 Several more have been
published since. Cyberpunk aficionados Bruce Sterling and William Gibson have praised thefilm’s technical and thematic richness.31 Baudrillard, who perceives in The Matrix and The
Matrix Reloaded a conflation of the Platonic illusion and the simulation, has felt the need toforge his own position in relation to the franchise.32 Esteemed film and literature scholar,
Slavoj Žižek, has published a piece postulating the Matrix as “the big Other.”33 Chris Seay
has written an entire book describing the essence of The Matrix as “belief”: “The Matrix
films call us to a spiritual life beyond simple cause and effect, beyond what can be measured
by our senses, sometimes even beyond what makes sense.”34 Andrew Gordon suggests that
“The Matrix, like the Star Wars and the Star Trek series, has spawned dozens of articles andeven a few college courses exploring its philosophical, religious and scientific dimensions. A
science-fiction film like The Terminator, with similar action and complex themes, did nosuch thing.”35
29

Eco, “Casablanca: Cult movies and Intertextual Collage,” 454.
Bruce Isaacs, “Popular Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of The Matrix.” New Media Poetics (2003), 1.
31
William Gibson, “Afterword.” In The Art of the Matrix, ed. Spenser Lamm (London: Titan Books, 2000),
451; see also Sterling, “Every Other Movie is the Blue Pill.”
32
Aude Lancelin, “Baudrillard Decodes Matrix.” Le Nouvel Observateur, trans. anon, no. 2015 (19 Jun. 2003);
posted in trans. 8 Nov. 2003.
http://www.teaser.fr/~lcolombet/empyree/divers/Matrix-Baudrillard_english.html. Accessed 24 Nov. 2003.
33
Žižek, “The Matrix: Or, the Two Sides of Perversion,” 244-250.
34
Chris Seay, The Gospel Reloaded: Finding Spirituality and Faith in The Matrix (Colorado Springs: Piñon
Press, 2003), 158.
35
Andrew Gordon, “The Matrix: Paradigm of Postmodernism? Part II.” In Taking the Red Pill: Science,
Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix, ed. Glenn Yeffeth (Dallas: Benballa Books, 2003), 96. I would suggestthat Star Wars has not had as significant a response from the academic community. There are indeed dozens of30

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I employ The Matrix franchise in this chapter as the nearest approximation to theperformance of the spectacle aesthetic. The text of the franchise functions as a self-aware
exploration of the postmodern consciousness, schizophrenic and fragmentary, vacillating
between political and social conservatism and romantic radicalism, realist authenticity andsimulacral reproduction – in short, a variation on what Baudrillard has called the hyperreality,
or Collins the “hyperconsciousness” of the postmodern spectator.
3.6 Towards a Notion of Textual Discursivity
I argue that the notion of discursivity to which I alluded in Chapter Two is necessary to
traverse the gulf that separates theory about popular culture and the consumption experienceof partaking of that culture. Partaking of culture is, as Brabazon says, “an emotional
investment.”36 Culture is constituted by a process in which texts affect the spectator; it is lessa system of signs that cohere as meaning than a site of interaction, or engagement, with thetext. Simply put, what films, books, or comic strips mean is only one component of the way
they are consumed.
To experience the text, I argue that the spectator must appreciate it as a reproduction,or simulation, of prior textual forms. This is perhaps the most crucial aspect of the spectacle
aesthetic, and it is what makes discursivity central to any notion of contemporary cinematic
culture. Whereas Barthes’s distinction between the Text and Work offers something very
similar about the incompletion of the Text and the finitude of its production in the Work,37
Barthes was not writing about a filmic franchise that acknowledges its status as ‘alreadyreproduced,’ or what I have referred to as non-authentic. In a very real sense, The Matrix is afilm about the perpetual displacement of textual authenticity. ‘What is Real?’ in the franchise
reverb is just as easily ‘What is the Real interpretation?’ for the spectator. The franchiseoffers an investigation of how the postmodern spectator might discover an aesthetic value ina text that practices a revision of such values. Ultimately, what The Matrix franchise means iscontingent on how the spectacle aesthetic makes meaning.

articles and the occasional college course, but the academic material brought to bear on The Matrix franchise isof a scholarly register that cannot be found in other popular franchises. While films such as Scott’s Blade
Runner and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey have received significant scholarly attention, their relative impact
on popular culture at large has been minimal - I can only draw on box office receipts and personal experience tomake this judgement.
36
Brabazon, 8.
37Barthes, “From Work to Text.”

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The spectacle aesthetic appreciates textual meaning as ‘displaced,’ or perhaps more correctly,
it appreciates text as a site of ‘displaced meaning.’ The spectator experiences what Baumancalls “ambivalence” to the text.38 While several theorists have posited a traditional ‘grandnarrative’ of The Matrix franchise,39 I argue that the franchise embodies an aesthetic in which
various grand narratives are reconstituted as simulacral tropes, or cinematic quotations. This
aesthetic is necessarily one in which the text is reconstituted through spectator engagementwith it as a commodity in the market. I have termed this notion of engagement‘consumption.’
Discursivity is essentially a cultural aesthetic. This formulation is indebted to Jameson’s
notion of postmodernism as a cultural aesthetic. Postmodernism is for Jameson more than asystem of ideas, or an adjunct to post-structuralist discourse. It is rather a sense of individualand collective cultural ‘being,’ incorporating art, values and ideals that are coherent only inthe late capitalistic market. Discursivity, in my usage, connotes something similar, a cultural
aesthetic rather than a singular practice or process, but without the pejorative slant. The
necessary abstraction of discursivity is something akin to Barthes’s distinction between the
Text and a work in which the Text decants the work. For Barthes, the Text is discursive andunfinished, the work its tactile expression, perhaps a volume in a library: “the Text is
experienced only in an activity of production. It follows that the Text cannot stop (forexample on a library shelf); its constitutive movement is that of cutting across (in particular,
it can cut across the work, several works).”40 For Barthes, the Text is engaged in a process ofdisplacement; it cannot be read because it is engaged in an open-ended itinerary.
Hall says something similar about the ‘textuality’ of cultural theory. This is why thecultural theorist cannot posit a ‘theory’ without having an awareness of its immersion in“theoretical legacies,”41 and without being suspicious of its veracity in relation to a real,living culture. Theory is equally commentary and an inscription of something altogether new.
38

Zygmunt Bauman, “Postmodernity, Or Living With Ambivalence.” In A Postmodern Reader, ed. Joseph
Natoli and Linda Hutcheon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 21-24.
39See, for example, Laura Bartlett and Thomas B. Byers. “Back to the Future: the Humanist Matrix.” Cultural
Critique 53 (2003), 28-46; see also Seay. For a similarly orthodox narrative reading of the Star Wars franchise,see Lawrence.
40
Barthes, “From Work to Text,” 157. Original emphasis.
41
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies.”111

For Hall, theory is implicated in the pluralism of the Text, being itself subject to plurality andopen-ended meanings; thus, negotiating the plurality of the Text and the politics of cultural
theory is a very real and necessary tension.
A notion of Barthes’s Text is necessary to conceptualise the work. It is possible in thissense to say that a discursive culture decants its subjective expression. The Text decants a
closed interpretation, but its discursivity remains intact. For Barthes, this is a textual reality, averitable life of the Text. I argue that The Matrix franchise performs this abstract relationshipbetween the Barthesian Text and Work.
It should be said here that the distinction between the Text and the work is hardly new; it isperhaps the foundation of post-structuralism. Culture, in fashionable theoretical models, is asite in which “science, for all one knows and can know, is one story among many.”42 For
Barthes, the distinction is crucial precisely because it recuperates some notion of theauthenticity in the contemporary work: “In particular, the tendency must be avoided to saythat the work is classic, the text avant-garde; it is not a question of drawing up a crude
honours list in the name of modernity and declaring certain literary productions ‘in’ andothers ‘out’ by virtue of their chronological situation.”43 For Barthes, the work that isdecanted from the Text is an authentic cultural artefact.
However, acknowledging a relationship between textual discursivity and a subjective
interpretation does not assist in understanding how the textuality of a film franchise impacts
on the spectator. Knowing that a story is merely one story seems inadequate as a way ofunderstanding how postmodern culture, or a new aesthetics of spectacle cinema, might work.
Knowing the limitations of the discursive text in abstract theoretical terms is perfectly
feasible. We can agree that Text is ‘open,’ or that it ‘cuts across’ the work, laying bare aplethora of interpretive positions. But how do spectators continue to engage with a spectacle
cinema that is no longer an authentic (or classic) art form? In the Barthesian model, whatstands in for authenticity?

42
43

Bauman, 22.
Barthes, “From Work to Text,” 156.

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3.7 Intertextuality and Discursivity
In response to the challenge of the pervasiveness of intertextuality in popular culture, Ecosuggests that popular cinema must compensate for the consumer that cannot recognise thecinematic quotation.44 If one criteria of Eco’s cult cinema is intertextuality, the spectator
oblivious to the cinematic quotation must find some other aesthetic charge. But between the
spectator that recognises the quotation and the spectator who remains ignorant, there is surely
a vast array of interpretive positions. Compensation for the ‘ignorant spectator’ does notequate with an understanding of the way cinematic quotations impact on an audience. Eco
merely assumes that some will ‘get the message’ while others will miss it. He assumes alsothat there is a single message to get, which it seems to me is not the case.
How can the theorist be sure that the discursive textuality of The Matrix franchise isappreciated, or even dimly recognised, by the spectator? To some spectators a first viewingof The Matrix might ‘give up’ its intertextual debts to Sergio Leone or James Cameron’s The
Terminator and Aliens. But it is left to the theorist to speculate about the reverberation ofthese quotations on a culture at large. This is where the analysis invariably suffers, becauseintertextuality, contrary to Jameson’s belief that “it seems at best to designate a problem
rather than a solution”45 (and can therefore be disregarded altogether) is perhaps the mostfundamental component of the spectacle aesthetic. Film theorists must appreciate how
popular texts function as Text in a discursive culture; how the Text is read, and by whom.
Popular cinema audiences are resistant (or oblivious) to theory and the intellectualising of
popular art. In the popular culture sphere, theory is hardly necessary for the majority ofspectators to engage with mainstream cinema. I would also argue that theorists are in themain oblivious to the mainstream response to popular cinema. To my knowledge, very little
work has been done to actively investigate the impact of intertextuality on film audiences,
particularly at cinema multiplexes where the box office takings first register. This is precisely
why Chris Rock’s interviews conducted at a multiplex in Los Angeles are something truly
innovative and increasingly necessary.
To speculate on the relationship between the discursive culture and the response to theintertextuality of a film franchise, the theorist must attempt, first and foremost, to speak forherself as incorporating (in the Fiskian sense of the incorporation of the commodity) this44
45

Eco, “Innovation and Repetition,” 177.
Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” 134.

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cultural discursivity, embodying all modes of thought, all ideological utterances, and acomprehensive version of what Eco calls the ‘encyclopaedia’ of the spectator.46 (Of course,
the imaginary encyclopaedia can never be comprehensive, but the belief in its
comprehensiveness is necessary for an appreciation of the intertextual utterance.) The theorist
must address the text with an inherent ‘full’ awareness of its strategies and impact on theaudience. While this is in one sense perfectly obvious, this approach serves to shrink thecritical and affective distance between the theorist and the imaginary spectator. The theorist
is thus implicated in the non-authentic culture, simultaneously theorist, spectator andconsumer; there must be a sense in which the theorist and the consumer share a ‘collective
consciousness.’
What is crucial in this “speaking for oneself” is the positioning of the theorist within
popular culture. The theorist is simultaneously aware of the text as ideological utterance andincorporated commodity. This is essentially what Eco means by the Cult Culture, which ismaintained only through the collapse of the distinction between high and low culture, andmore specifically in this argument, theory and spectacle. Eco’s formulation is a significant
advance on Jameson’s notion of a postmodern culture described in Chapter Two. For
Jameson, such a transformation is a diminishment of an earlier aesthetic system. While hedescribes postmodernism as having collapsed this critical distance through the convergenceof high and low art, the inherent nostalgia of his position reinscribes the critical distance into
his paradigm. While he argues for the loss of critical distance, his mode and strategy ofargumentation is founded precisely on this critical distance he claims has vanished. In thismodel, the theorist is doomed to observe (and abstractly theorise) culture from beyond its
borders – from a perceived cultural fringe that resists commodification. This is precisely theapproach to culture and cinema that must cease to function as having a monopoly on
authenticity.
Eco distinguishes between two forms of quotation in popular cinema, one of which“the author is aware but that should remain ungraspable by the consumer,” and the other“when the quotation is explicit and recognizable, as happens in literature or post-modern art,
which blatantly and ironically play on intertextuality.”47 The deliberate intertextual text for
Eco is something akin to Kevin Williamson’s Scream in which the film’s narrative functions
46
47

Eco, “Innovation and Repetition,” 170.
Eco, “Innovation and Repetition,” 170.

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as a commentary on the horror, or more specifically, the slasher film genre. The intertextual
quotation is foregrounded and explicit. The conventions of the genre dictate – and indeed
construct - the course of the narrative: “only virgins survive horror films” dictates that the
chaste and morally worthy Sidney (Neve Campbell) will survive the film, while the flirtatious(and, we assume, promiscuous) Casey (Drew Barrymore) is disembowelled in the opening set
piece. In another scene, a janitor (played by Wes Craven, director of both Scream and A
Nightmare on Elm Street) clad in Freddy Kruger’s tattered clothes, mops a bathroom floor.
Eco argues that this form of intertextuality is typical of postmodern textual practices,and he is no doubt correct. He suggests, for example, that the scene in Spielberg’s Raiders of
the Lost Ark in which Indiana Jones is confronted with a “giant Arab” engages with an“original topoi. In the case of the giant, it is a situation typical of the genre.”48 “In both cases
the topoi are recorded by the ‘encyclopaedia’ of the spectator; they make up part of thecollective imagination and as such they come to be called upon.”49 What we should bear inmind here is the intriguing notion of a collective rather than a single imagination, which is
intrinsic to the performance of intertextuality in cinema.
What interests Eco less is “stylistic quotation, in those cases in which a text quotes, ina more or less explicit way, a stylistic feature, a way of narrating typical of another author.”50
However, in so doing, I feel that Eco underestimates the pervasiveness of intertextuality inpopular film. I would argue that stylistic quotation is often no less intended, nor less explicitin contemporary cinema. One could consider Scott’s Blade Runner as a stylistic cinematic
quotation from beginning to end, visually and aurally recuperating film noir, cyberpunk andEuropean existentialism. The stylistic quotation becomes literal, for example, in the use of
the Millennium Falcon set (of Star Wars) in several interior shots of Blade Runner. Fincher’sSe7en establishes its lineage to classical film noir in a number of stylistic tropes: wet streets,
low lighting, low camera angles. It is not as explicit as Jean Paul Belmondo’s (Breathless)fidgeting with his earlobe to recall Bogart’s Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, but the issue
48

Eco, “Innovation and Repetition,” 170. Eco’s discussion here is detailed and fascinating. He goes on tosuggest that “the topos in Raiders is quoted in order to contradict it (what we expect to happen, based on our
experience, will not)” (170). Interestingly, Spielberg had intended to follow through precisely in accordancewith Eco’s topos, that is, an elaborate set piece in which Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) battles the giant. But
Ford, suffering from food poisoning in Tunisia, was unable to complete the sequence. Removing the sequence
entirely, Indiana Jones, in perhaps the most iconic moment in the franchise, casually dispatches the Giant with asingle bullet.
49
Eco, “Innovation and Repetition,” 170.
50
Eco, “Innovation and Repetition,” 170.

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of the relation between an intertextual stylistics of cinema seems to me as vital, if not morevital, than a traditional (literally inscribed) intertextuality that Eco has so thoroughly
explored.51 It is this stylistic intertextuality that is most obviously compatible with thespectacle aesthetic and finds unique expression in The Matrix Franchise. The opening
sequence of The Matrix establishes an intertextual reference frame to classical film noir, yet
the green colour tinge over the image recalls the hard chromatic visuals of a cyberpunkworld. The stylised dress (notably Trinity’s black leather outfit and pale features) establishesa broader stylistic (and intertextual mise en scene) of neo-gothicism and cyborg androgyny.
These ‘quotations’ are in every sense stylistic rather than literal. It is this stylistic intertext
that establishes the cinematic text as a quotation drawing on Eco’s encyclopaedia ofreferences.
In assessing the impact of intertextuality in the consumption of film, whether it is in
the form of subtle stylistic quotation (Se7en) or an explicit textual reference (Scream52), it isnecessary to distinguish between the ‘potentialities’ and the ‘actualities’ of spectator
response. In coming to terms with popular cinema franchises and the spectacle aesthetic,
surely the most pressing question must be: exactly how is a discursive text received by its
audience?
Although I will return to a close analysis of the film, for the moment let us consider
the sequence in The Matrix in which Neo is reborn. Recall that the Matrix is a cyberspacemodelled on our contemporary world that can be entered, negotiated and lived within. The
human mind ‘jacks’ into the Matrix (the subjective consciousness is literally downloaded into51

See also Eco, “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage.”
A number of critics have viewed Scream as exemplary of the postmodern incorporation of art as commodity,
and the centrality of pastiche to postmodern aesthetics. In such criticism, there is a sense of this mode as
redundant. See, for example, David Sanjek, “Same as it Ever Was: Innovation and Exhaustion in the Horror andScience Fiction Films of the 1990s.” In Film Genre 2000, ed. Wheeler Winston Dixon (New York: State
University of New York, 2000), 113-114: “neither Williamson (Scream) nor very many of his contemporaries
appear to be interested in critiquing or subverting those [genre] parameters. Instead, they merely call attention tothem in the most blunt and obvious fashion. As a result, and unlike the work of those aforementioned directors
and scriptwriters, the ideological dimension of much if not most of the horror and science-fiction narratives of
the 1990s is paltry or pacified.” Sanjek makes the obligatory mention of George Romero (Night of the Living
Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead). Where I object to his reading of Scream is in its comparison of thelack of ideological intent in Scream with Romero’s ideologically suffused films. While on one level the
distinction is obvious (Romero’s Night of the Living Dead works as a neat metaphor for the paranoia of the 60s
and Dawn of the Dead is a vague critique of 1970s American capitalism), it must also be said that Romero was a
B-grade horror director who started out with midnight screenings of his film. Scream was a studio production
directed by Wes Craven. A more apt comparison would perhaps be Romero’s Dawn of the Dead with theindependent Canadian production, Cube, or the Japanese cult film, Ring. This is to say that Scream and Night of
the Living Dead do not operate on audiences in the same way, or for that matter, on the same audiences at all.
52

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the computer-generated simulation), leaving the body behind, docile, ineffectual andobsolete. For those of humanity (indeed, the multitude imprisoned in “fields of pods”) living
inside the Matrix, “the Matrix is [literally] everywhere…You can see it out your window or
on your television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to church or pay your taxes.” Prior
to Neo’s death and rebirth, the Neo of the Real is seated in a chair on board the
Nebuchadnezzar, jacked in to the Matrix; the Neo of the Matrix, clad in black coat andleather boots, is killed by Agent Smith in the Heart Of the City Hotel. These two actions takeplace simultaneously. Death in the Matrix is contiguous with death in the Real. In assessing
potential and actual responses to the film’s intertextual fabric, I want to consider the impetus
for Neo’s resurrection. Precisely what brings him back to life?
According to Eco’s model, this sequence fits into the “explicit and recognisable”
quotation.53 A number of intertextualities imbue Neo’s death and resurrection with an
extratextual knowledge.54 The sequence is connected to an encyclopaedia of cinematicreferences that have accrued up to this point in the film: Vertigo (the medium shot of Trinity
pursued over a rooftop), The Terminator (the image of an agent landing on a rooftop in thesame pose as the Terminator when he materialises in the present), a face-off in a subway
station reminiscent of Leone’s Fistful of Dollars or Woo’s Bullet in the Head, film noir
(stylistic), classical Hollywood melodrama (stylistic), cyberpunk and postmodern
apocalyptism (stylistic). While Eco argues of Raiders of the Lost Ark that “there remainplenty of possibilities for the naïve spectator, who at least can always enjoy the fact that thehero gets the best of his adversary,” this sequence in The Matrix requires the spectator toappreciate the network of textual references (or at least a healthy proportion of them) to makesense of a critical moment in its plot: the resurrection of the hero. The narrative cannot
explain the resurrection of the One without recourse to a stream of textual quotation.
The resurrection partakes of the narrative of the death and resurrection of Christ. The
textual precursor (the Christian narrative) is a license to transgress what the audience expects.
Reality (even the ‘reality’ of the Matrix) dictates that Neo is dead, destroyed finally by hisnemesis, Smith. While the Matrix is a simulation, it is still subject to the rules of an external
reality. Nothing in the film thus far has permitted the resurrection of Neo. Morpheus is
explicit on the point that death in the Matrix is contiguous with death of the mind and the
53
54

Eco, “Innovation and Repetition,” 170.
Eco, “Innovation and Repetition,” 176.

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material body. Therefore, the quotation of the resurrection of Christ is necessary to transgress
the cinematic boundaries of a conventional cinematic realism. Rather than an explicit
quotation, the Christian mythical frame functions as a separate strata of meaning altogether.
After Neo’s death, Trinity leans over Neo’s lifeless corpse and murmurs: “Neo, I’m
not afraid anymore. The Oracle told me that I would fall in love, and that that man, the man I
loved, would be the One. So you see, you can’t be dead. You can’t be…because I love you.
You hear me…I love you.” She kisses him as the sparks from the acetylene torches of thesentinels rain over the ship in an ethereal fireworks display. A romantic theme rises as Trinity
says: “Now get up.” Neo’s life returns with the sound of a heartbeat on a monitor. The scene
cuts to the Matrix as Neo is ‘reborn,’ then cuts back to the Real as Morpheus (in close-up)
says: “He is the One.” There is a final cut to the Real, where a generic religious score rises
and Neo confronts Agent Smith in a corridor of the Heart Of The City Hotel.
The significance of the two pieces of music is crucial as an indication of two separate
intertextual streams that permit the resurrection of the One. The Christian narrative comprises
one stream, the classic Hollywood romance comprises the other. The spectator/theorist issomething of an intertextual ‘spotter.’ The kiss of life is no doubt immediately recognised bysome spectators as a recuperation of the Sleeping Beauty story. In this case, the gender roles
are reversed. Neo is rescued from an archaic form of religious martyrdom and brought backto life; Trinity is the agent of this rescue operation. (Of course, in the broader scheme of thenarrative, the male ultimately rescues the female (insofar as Neo rescues all of humanity),
and Neo does in fact bring Trinity to life at the end of The Matrix Reloaded.55) Unlike thespecifically intended quotation, these two levels of intertextual meaning are as central to thenarrative as the storyline: Neo needs to be Christ for the resurrection to take. The superhero,
alienated youth, anonymous monomythic quester, must make room for the Christianreferential frame. But he must simultaneously take his position as the sleeping ‘Prince,’
awakened by the kiss of a knight in shining armour (who wears Spartan clothes in the Realand black leather in the Matrix), Trinity. The One is thus resurrected through two separate
though simultaneously functioning referential frames. Within the levels of meaning are55

For a sample of the wealth of material discussing The Matrix franchise as gender-conservative, or more
broadly ideologically conservative, see Martina Lipp, “Welcome to the Sexual Spectacle: The Female Heroes in
the Franchise.” In Jacking in to The Matrix Franchise, ed. Mathew Kapell
and William G. Doty (New York and London: Continuum, 2004), 65-79; see also John Shelton Lawrence,“Fascist Redemption or Democratic Hope?” In Jacking in to The Matrix Franchise, ed. Mathew Kapell andWilliam G. Doty (New York and London: Continuum, 2004), 80-96.

118specific intertextual quotations that inform the whole. Thus, the sparks from the sentinel’sacetylene torches constructs on one level a generic romance scene in which love is confessed
and requited.56 On another level, the ethereal light shower recalls specific cinematicromances back-dropped by fireworks, such as the scene in which Grace Kelly and Cary Grant
kiss in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief. I am not suggesting here that the Wachowski Brothers
contemplated this sequence as a quotation of Hitchcock’s film (though this may very well be
the case). Rather, it is born of a wellspring of cinematic references, Eco’s collective
encyclopaedia. Similarly, at the film’s conclusion, I cannot say that the newspaper thatflutters across the deserted train station like tumbleweed recalls Leone’s theatrical precursor
to a duel in Once Upon a Time in the West, yet the ‘quotation,’ less than explicit on screen, is
no less potent as textual performance.
The potential responses to this sequence can surely not equate with the dominant
subjective response in mainstream popular culture. How much of this sophisticatedintertextual network is consumed by the spectator? I perceive three potentialities. Perhaps the‘naïve spectator’ does not appreciate either of the intertextual levels of meaning: Neo as theresurrected Christ or Neo/Trinity as Sleeping Beauty/knight in shining armour (and thecorollary Neo/Trinity as Hollywood romance). This spectator does not pause to reflect on theconspicuous use of an extreme close-up on Trinity’s face during her speech. The close-up andextreme shallow focus give the fireworks a benignly ethereal quality (the spectator thus holds
two separate symbolic images simultaneously: hostile acetylene torches, ethereal shower
prefiguring the ‘consummation’ of love). It appears as if the sparks are descending to thefloor in a dream-like slow motion, but it is merely a contrivance of the close-up and focal
length. In this case, what is not central to the shot is indeed as crucial to its meaning as what
is. This spectator does not immediately connect the resurrection of Neo with the resurrectionof Christ, nor the kiss of life. Perhaps for this spectator, it is merely enough that Morpheus’s
unfailing belief in the One and his incredulous murmur, “It can’t be,” are enough to authorise
the resurrection.
56

Consider a similar iconic scene in The Empire Strikes Back in which Princess Leia finally confesses her love
to Han Solo before he is frozen in carbon, perhaps never to return:Leia: I love you.
Han Solo: I know.
The exchange works very much in the way Eco suggests of the Indiana Jones/Arab Giant confrontation insofar
as the viewer expects Han Solo to reply, “I love you, too,” ‘consummating’ their love in a generic exchange.
Solo’s alteration is all the more intertextually innovative for its recuperation of, and departure from, the generic
form.

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Another spectator perhaps recognises the intertextual quotation, both in specific form
and in the broader textual scheme: Christian death and resurrection, Sleeping Beauty broughtback to life. The quotation is aesthetically charged and permits the spectator to reflect on her
own awareness of its textual sophistication. The quotation also permits the resurrection andthus furnishes a credible conclusion to the narrative. For this spectator, the resurrection is not
only permitted, but a sophisticated method of advancing the narrative and bringing the story
to a point of closure (the two sequels were not originally intended).
A third spectator recognises the quotation, the two levels of meaning that furnish thenarrative with a conclusion, but also an inherent intertextuality of the sequence as narrative,
image, trope, motif and symbol – a meta-textuality. This spectator considers the implicationof the sequence as ‘pure’ intertext, and its inherent discursivity: that is, as drawing upon anencyclopaedia of textual references of which her own set is merely a component. This
spectator appreciates that an intertextual stylistics is operating alongside Eco’s explicit
quotations - for example, the filter that provides a green tinge to the sequences in the Matrix
recalls the use of a yellow filter in Polanski’s Chinatown (which in turn recalls thesepia/nostalgised colour tones of a ‘cinematic’ representation of the 1930s) – which in turnoperates in accordance with plot, character and theme. Intertextual quotation operates uponthe ‘interior’ coherence of the work.57
I am not suggesting that The Matrix is beyond any concrete interpretation because of
its intertextuality. I am not arguing for a reversion to infinite pluralism and theuninterpretability of all texts. Popular culture texts (and certainly The Matrix franchise) areprofoundly engaging; the spectator is involved in forging a meaning out of its intertextuality.
But an awareness of the possibilities of its intertextual frames of meaning reveals its inherent
discursivity. There is no ‘authentic’ (or literal) reading of Neo’s resurrection; the literature
published on the franchise has certainly not arrived at such a consensus.
Theory, in applying a methodology to an investigation of popular culture, must
engage with the phenomenon of intertextuality and its challenge to traditional modes of
57

For an oft-cited attack on the insularity of external and internal frames of text, see Paul de Man, “Semiology
and Rhetoric.” Diacritics 3, no. 3 (1973): “The development of intrinsic, formalist criticism in the twentiethcentury has changed this model [literary ‘form’ as superficial]: form is now a solipsistic category of selfreflection, and the referential meaning is said to be extrinsic. The polarities of inside and outside have been
reversed, but they are still the same polarities at play: internal meaning has become outside reference and theouter form has become the intrinsic structure” (27-28). De Man wishes to negate this divide between the insideand outside of the text.

120interpretation. This is equally a strategy of abstract theorising and an empirical study ofaudience response to popular culture, which is only now being seriously investigated as acomponent of cultural theory and/or film studies.58 I have not attempted here to provide atheoretical model that provides a solution to the challenge of intertextuality that is, asJameson acknowledges, a very real problem to current and future investigations of popular
culture. As Eco suggests, the contemporary spectator (or better still, theorist/spectator) draws
on a wealth of cinematic references and simultaneously, and as significantly, on a range ofmass (and other) media that commentates on cinema and culture. The spectator/theorist isthus immersed in a spectacle that recycles prior textual modes (but in which cinema is
indisputably the dominant), forming its own discursivity while aware of (or naïve to) the
inherent discursivity of popular cinema. Yet I concur with Eco that the textual ‘awareness’ of
audiences, and the consequent challenge to traditional hermeneutics, is ever more apparent:“It will be a sad day when a too smart audience will read Casablanca as conceived byMichael Curtiz after having read Calvino and Barthes. But that day will come. Perhaps wehave been able to discover here, for the last time, the Truth.”59
The discursivity of text is manifested in The Matrix Franchise as a meta-textuality.
The Matrix is about the performance of the Text; but it is equally a performance of this vital
new aesthetic. The franchise foregrounds its immersion in prior texts, prior cinematic mise en
scene, realising a spectacle that comprises a popular ‘consciousness’ rather than aninterpretive ‘mind.’ For contemporary popular culture, perhaps Calvino and Barthes are only
vaguely felt, if at all – If On a Winter’s Night, a Traveller is hardly the same publishingphenomenon as Harry Potter. But perhaps J. K. Rowling’s intertextual universe cansubstitute just as easily for Calvino’s, albeit without the degree of authorial awareness of thetheoretical implications of intertextuality. Equally, one does not need Roland Barthes toappreciate that the integrity of ‘The Real’ is being challenged in The Matrix.

58

For an interesting analysis of audience-oriented theory, see Will Brooker and Deborah Jermyn,“Introduction.” In The Audience Studies Reader, ed. Will Brooker and Deborah Jermyn (London: Routledge,
2003), 1-4. See also Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis, “Enlightened Racism. The Cosby Show, Audiences and theMyth of the American Dream.” In The Audience Studies Reader, ed. Will Brooker and Deborah Jermyn(London: Routledge, 2003), 279-286; and Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz, “The Export of Meaning: Crosscultural Readings of Dallas.” In The Audience Studies Reader, ed. Will Brooker and Deborah Jermyn (London:
Routledge, 2003), 287-304. It is worth noting here the degree to which the authors rely on empirical research inthe service of cultural theory.
59
Eco, “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage,” 455.

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3.8 Myth and Text in The Matrix Franchise: Gorging on the Sacred Past
But, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good
appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be theuniversal author of all things beautiful and right…and the immediate source of reason andtruth in the intellectual.60
However it be defined, contemporary literary interest in myth indicates an emphasis upon
content in addition to literary form, quite in contrast to the Aristotelian mythos, whichreferred essentially to the formal sequence of thematic units (topoi) or to what subsequently
was called plot.61

Doty defines the primary organisation of myth as two-fold: content and form. He suggests
furthermore that literary theory emphasises the importance of the content of the myth rather
than its mode of organisation (a system of themes or ideas). In contrast to this dialectical
approach, Bruce Sterling refers to the presentation of myth in The Matrix as “brain salad,”62
suggesting that it is both intellectual food for the brain and an eclectic array of myths, texts
and pop culture clichés tossed together like a mixed salad. He is blasé about the ‘value’ ofsuch a textual (or franchise) strategy - “True, it veers perilously close to another [H. G.]
Wells problem: ‘If anything is possible, nothing is interesting’,”63 – but concludes that “youget all the intellectually sexy head-trip kicks of philosophizing without any of the boringhassles of consistency of rigor.”64
Between Doty’s functionality of myth and Sterling’s “brain salad,” a profoundtransformation has occurred in the way popular culture approaches textual mythology. The
conclusion of The Matrix, which I have discussed in terms of the resurrection of the One, issimultaneously a thinly veiled performance of the coming to full consciousness in Plato’s
Allegory of the Cave. The film’s narrative establishes a dialectical opposition between theReal and the illusion, its inauthentic reproduction. The individual is ‘woken up’ (indeed, thefilm’s concluding shot in which the One ascends into the heavens of the Matrix isaccompanied by Rage Against the Machine’s “Wake Up”65) from the ‘prison for the mind’and springs alive to enlightenment and full awareness of the controls of the Matrix. Neo reads
60

Plato, “Republic.” In Dialogues of Plato, ed. and trans. J. D. Kaplan (Pocket Books, 1950), 361-362.
William G. Doty, Mythography (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1986), 174.
62
Sterling, “Every Other Movie is the Blue Pill,” 23.
63
Sterling, “Every Other Movie is the Blue Pill,” 25.
64
Sterling, “Every Other Movie is the Blue Pill,” 24-25.
65
Rage Against the Machine.
61

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the simulation as the coded artifice or simulation of the Real66 as Plato’s prisoner realises thedisparity between the illusion and the Real.
I argue that the purity or authenticity of Plato’s allegory is challenged by the mode inwhich it is performed in the conclusion of The Matrix. Neo’s coming to full consciousness isindeed a performance of the allegory, but setting it alongside the redemption of The One
based upon faith (which is to say, drawing on the Christian frame of reference discussed
earlier) renders the allegory as merely one fragment in a sprawling collage. Analysing theplay of mythic representation in The Matrix, Sterling suggests that “small wonder that Neoruns back into the fantasy. He’s living in the pixels [of the digitised collage], stepping out ofa phone booth, and flying. That is his victory, limited and illusory though it is. The cybermessiah didn’t change a thing, not really; when it came to the crunch, it was all smoke andmirrors.”67 For Sterling, The Matrix is indeed a place to hide from the Real, experiencing
rather than understanding the simulation.
Doty’s distinction between a classical (Aristotelian) mythos (a formal mythic pattern)
and content cannot be applied to the performance of myth in The Matrix. On one level, thespectator responds to the Allegory of the Cave and simultaneously what is, at least on aphilosophical level, the dialectically opposed allegory of the resurrection of Christ. On
another level, the spectator appreciates the confrontation between – and/or synthesis of – thetwo. An analysis of The Matrix franchise must consider the relationship between the
reproduction (the text and its performance as franchise in the cultural sphere) and the original- or, to use its own terminology, between the simulation and the Real. Both the Christian and
Platonic mythic frames are revisions of an original utterance that now finds itself played in
the discursive textual arena of the franchise. Such an analysis is invariably implicated inconcerns of authenticity, textual value, ideological function, and the impact of the
reproduction on a society that has lost its memory of the original utterance. A traditional
literary theorist like Harold Bloom would consider the bricolage of the reproduction as
66

See Aylish Wood, “The Collapse of Reality and Illusion in The Matrix,” 120. I concur with Wood that “The
Matrix, whilst very different to eXistenZ, is as full of gaps and uncertainties, and that these gaps anduncertainties lead to a mistrust of the reality status of both the Matrix and the Real World. In The Matrix, theextent of the illusion, or the depth of the rabbit-hole, is not the only thing in doubt; so too is the question ofwhere it begins and ends.” The second and third instalments of the trilogy further compromise the dialectic
between Real and illusion, though I will say more about this in due course.
67
Sterling, “Every Other Movie is the Blue Pill,” 28. For a provocative reading of religious pluralism and its
self-defeating philosophy in The Matrix, see Gregory Bassham, “Religion in The Matrix and Problems of
Pluralism.” In The Matrix and Philosophy, ed. William Irwin (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2002), 111125.

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another phase in the “shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life.”68 It is thus theduty of the spectator/theorist to conceptualise the way classical myth works in a whollyanachronistic film medium.
3.9 Cinema and the Contemporary Mythology
The Matrix franchise offers neatly formed parcels of traditional mythology, accessible andeminently recognisable to a contemporary popular culture audience. When Morpheus
declares, “Now do you believe?” and the aphoristic, “He is the One,” this audience silently
cheers at a performance of a popular, age-old confluence of narratives of destiny andindividuality. We recall the plight of the young Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, the boy from abackwater town who saves the galaxy; his twin sister Leia may stem from a royal upbringing
and noble patronage, but it is crucial for the monomythic presentation of the One that he arise
from obscurity and ascend to a position of centrality (of the village, town, city, country or
universe). Campbell describes the monomyth as central to western cultural myths;69 Jewett
and Lawrence trace in detail its recuperation by Hollywood and popular culture.70 While I
would argue that the particularities of the myth are crucial in differentiating one text or
franchise from another (the monomyth performed through the maturation process of Luke
Skywalker is not identical to the process of maturation for Neo, which is something Jewett
and Lawrence overlook), there is a resemblance in the narrative structure of the major
popular film franchises that conforms schematically to the monomyth: Star Wars, 71 Indiana
Jones, The Terminator, Alien/s, Back to the Future, The Matrix, Harry Potter, Independence
Day. The narrative/thematic structure as monomyth is connected to cinema as a popular
culture phenomenon. A recognisable mythic foundation requires a paring down of plot andcharacter, and a sophisticated development of the visual aspect of cinema. It is thus
significant that each of the franchises mentioned above are stylistically innovative andtechnologically pioneering; Indiana Jones could perhaps be considered an anomaly, but theemphasis on visual and aural spectacle is everywhere apparent.

68

Harold Bloom, “Dumbing Down American Readers.” Los Angeles Times, 24 Sep. 2003. My emphasis.
Campbell, 30-32.
70
Jewett and Lawrence, The American Monomyth, 169-197.
71
For a detailed and thorough analysis of the mythic structure of Star Wars, see Andrew Gordon, “Star Wars: A
Myth For Our Time.” Literature/Film Quarterly 6, no. 4 (1978): 314-326.
69

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The Matrix locates itself in this lineage of film franchises. It presents a clear Christian
mythological foundation – the One is killed and resurrected, only to be killed again at theconclusion to The Matrix Revolutions. Yet even this death is not final as the Oracle suggeststhat Neo will indeed return –the One is resurrected a second time, though the nature of thisresurrection is withheld. Larry Wachowski suggests that “we’re [The Wachowski Brothers]interested in mythology, theology and, to a certain extent, higher-level mathematics. All
human beings try to answer bigger questions, as well as The Big Question.”72 The narrative isattuned to the staple mythic and textual elements of contemporary popular culture, yet it ishardly the stuff of esoteric intellectualism.73 The shooting script of The Matrix includes ascene in which Morpheus explicitly references Baudrillard when explaining the Matrix to
Neo, but this sequence was omitted from the film.
The characters that enter the mythological structure are archetypal, though not
caricature – a mythic resonance invests the characters with a quasi-profundity. Morpheus, a
god of dreams in a Greek mythological structure, foregrounds the mythical aspect of his
character at the end of The Matrix Reloaded: “I have dreamed a dream, and now that dreamfor me is gone.” Adopting the Greek mythological structure is merely an interim position,
perhaps what Stuart Hall would refer to as an arbitrary closure on the ever-expanding
bricolage of the text.74 Morpheus simultaneously partakes of the Christian mythical structure
as a refashioned John the Baptist, of whom it is prophesied that he will find the One. Leatherclad, wearing rimless mirror shades (an old cyberpunk trope75), Morpheus speaks in thehighly clichéd, stilted dialogue of a Master Yoda or Obi Wan Kenobi: “Neo, I can only show
you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.” Or consider the exchange:
Neo: I know what you’re trying to do.
Morpheus: I’m trying to free your mind.

The archetypal and clichéd resonates because it is contrived and recognisable to the spectator.
Familiarity breeds a pop accessibility.
72

Cited in Richard Corliss, “Popular Metaphysics.” Time, 19 Apr. 1999.
See Roger Ebert, “The Matrix Reloaded.” Chicago Sun-Times, 14 May 2003. Ebert writes that “it [TheMatrix Reloaded] plays like a collaboration involving a geek, a comic book artist and the smartest kid in
Philosophy 101.”
74
Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” 278-279.
75
For an interesting discussion of the significance of mirror shades in cyberpunk fiction, see Bruce Sterling,“Introduction.” In Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, ed. Bruce Sterling (London: HarperCollins, 1994).
73

125While Neo sees (no doubt through a glass darkly) the path of the One, a separate
strata of mythologies is gradually set on his shoulders, reconfiguring the prevailing mythic
structure. The Matrix opens outside the Heart of the City Hotel, connoting a centrality of thecontemporary postmodern space, a realm of similar textual and cultural legacy that spawned
the dystopias of Blade Runner, Se7en, The Terminator and Akira. The notion of a ‘heart’ or
essentiality of the postmodern is rejected; the postmodern centre is ultimately an imaginary
construct in the Heart of the City Hotel, cohering spatially and temporally only in thesimulacrum. ‘Viewed’ from the perspective of the Real, the city exists in a perpetual present,
subject to re-simulation, or rebooting. Hugo Weaving’s first appearance as Agent Smith
outside the hotel recalls the hard-boiled, stylised dialogue of Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe orHammet’s Sam Spade. The conspicuous use of high contrast recalls classical film noir; therecuperation of the noir city in the simulacrum is thus a literal reproduction that antecedes theReal.76
The spectator is introduced to Thomas Anderson in a studio apartment “overgrownwith technology” in which “weed-like cables [coil] everywhere, duct-taped into thickets thatwind up and around the legs of several desks.”77 Anderson is recognisable as thecontemporary alienated man, (recalling Chuck Palahniuk’s nameless narrator in his cultnovel, Fight Club78), a cyborg in his relationship to a technology of which he is a part, thecreator and construct. He inhabits a body dislocated from the digital realm of cyberspace. It isthe body that is alien, the mind splintered by the absurdity of physical effort. Donna Haraway
discusses the literary (and cinematic) cyborg as “resolutely committed to partiality, irony,
intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.”79
The cyborg is a textual trope that is a confluence of intertextual subjectivities. Interestingly,
Haraway’s attempt to mould a cyborg identity that transgresses a Western patriarchal
subjectivity does not at all accord with Thomas Anderson/Neo as cyborg. Indeed, Haraway
would perhaps view Neo less as radical political agent than reactionary, an agent of the76

The ingenious contrivance of the narrative is that for the spectator in the movie theatre, who is assumed
herself to inhabit the Matrix, external reality and its historicity is a construct, a simulation of a prior (but nolonger extant and recoverable) Real. Thus, film noir as a cinematic tradition exists only in the Matrix. The Realis severed from history in the city of Zion, a post-apocalyptic limbo beneath the surface of the earth.
77
Larry Wachowski and Andy Wachowski, “The Matrix: Shooting Script.” In The Art of The Matrix, ed.
Spenser Lamm (London: Titan Books, 2000), 280.
78
Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (New York: Norton, 1996).
79
Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991),
151.

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political hegemony of the times even while superficially engaged in resistance. The
conclusion of The Matrix Revolutions suggests that Neo is a synthesis of human and machine,
issued of a ‘Source,’ which is of course also absent from Haraway’s postmodern-inclined
cyborg world.
Existential alienation meets the collective in millennial angst, apocalyptism,
eschatology. In the Matrix, it is 1999, “the peak of human civilisation.” In the Real, “it iscloser to 2199.” Both epochs are at the turn of the century, both demand revolution. The
conclusion to The Matrix Revolutions recalls a fascination with pyrotechnics in a pointed
homage to Akira: archetypal good and evil collide, producing a mushroom cloud that
resembles the catastrophic birth of Neo-Tokyo in Akira. Theology, contemporary
existentialism and apocalyptism are commingled with healthy doses of Hollywood
blockbuster populism – hyperbolic action, stylised depictions of violence, clichéd romantic
melodrama. In The Matrix Revolutions, Neo finds himself stranded in a Mobil station, a lessthan subtle anagram of Limbo, installing a Buddhist mythological structure that was vaguely
apparent in the first two films.80
The challenge to the theorist/spectator is to assess the various ways in which these
mythic structures resonate within the franchise and within the discursive culture that actively
engages with these mythic structures. The task is thus two-fold. First, to consider the way inwhich mythic structures are incorporated in the text (the formal arrangement, or what Doty
refers to as the classical mythos). Such an analysis would consider the structural coherence of
the whole – a ‘mythical narrative’ that informs the text – as well as its accessibility to a wider
audience. Second, to assess the impact of the ‘original’ mythic utterance on a contemporary
spectator and culture (content). Doty offers a broad definition of mythology as “narrative
fictions whose plots read first at the level of their own stories and then as projections ofimminent transcendent meanings. Such plots mirror human potentialities, experiences withnatural and cultural phenomena, and recognition of regular interactions between them.”81 In
these terms, the function of myth is essentially communicative at the literal, or intratextual,level. Myth enables the spectator to incorporate the original content, or initial utterance, into80

For two excellent analyses of Buddhism in The Matrix, see James L. Ford, “Buddhism, Mythology and The
Matrix.” In Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix, ed. Glenn Yeffeth (Dallas:
Benballa Books, 2003), 125-144; and Michael Brannigan, “There is no spoon: A Buddhist Mirror.” In The
Matrix and Philosophy, ed. William Irwin (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2002), 101-110.
81
Doty, 16.

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the reproduction. Thus, the spectator draws on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in its essentiality,that is, in its embryonic mythic form. Neo is substituted for the prisoner in shackles who is
freed and comes to full consciousness in the light of goodness and truth. He is equally
substituted for Christ in death and resurrection, and must believe he is the One before he canrealise it. He is also Sleeping Beauty on board the Nebuchadnezzar. These mythologicalnarratives are transposed on a literal, explicitly communicative level.
However, the limitation of Doty’s paradigm becomes apparent when assessing the
mythological structure holistically. If on a literal level, the mythic content of the franchise is
at least problematic (if not incoherent), the prevailing mythic structure of the narrative is asite of contestation rather than a literal transposition of myth to spectator. The originalutterance is reconfigured by its association with – and position in relation to – separate
mythic structures. A mythic (or textual) utterance is aestheticised when reproduced andsimultaneously severed from an original mythic form. Myth is reconfigured as spectacle, theeclecticism of mythical narratives are invigorated with life and meaning in popular cultural
practices. This is to say that the ontology of myth is fundamentally altered in the spectaclepresentation. Popular culture does not receive mythic narratives in a traditional unmediated,
and thus uncontaminated, form. The discursivity of culture finds expression in, and indeed isreliant upon, the discursive formation of mythic and textual narrative. Eco’s tentative
conclusions towards a ‘cult culture’ are indeed prescient: “Thus in this case we witness an
instance of metacult, or of cult about cult.”82 However, what is more significant than a ‘cult
about cult’ is a cult that is always already cult. Popular culture cannot dissociate itself fromthe myth as cult text. In fact the desire to reflect on idealistic mythic messages has well andtruly expired. Film theory requires that cult cinema be about the status of cinema as
reproduction. But this form of creative self-awareness, so fashionable in the work of Calvino,
Borges, Eco (The Name of the Rose is a particularly fine example of the text as poststructuralist labyrinth83), Paul Auster and others, has less currency in the pop culture arena inwhich myths have residual or spectacle resonance without the required sophistication of
postmodern pastiche.84 Pastiche operates in popular cinema as a form of commentary on prior

82

Eco, “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage,” 455.
For a fascinating ‘reading’ of his novel, see Umberto Eco, Reflections on The Name of the Rose (London:
Secker and Warburg, 1985).
84
I use ‘pastiche’ here in the sense of being an empty reproduction. This is a definition of the term I do notshare with Jameson and others. I argue essentially that pastiche is intrinsic to the spectacle aesthetic.
83

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myths, narratives and textual forms, and this without a necessary recourse to theories of irony
and nostalgia that has informed a great deal of writing on the topic. This is ultimately what
Jameson fails to appreciate in his reductive assessment of postmodernity: that pastiche is not
an aesthetic destruction but rather a profoundly new and vital creative impulse.
3.10 Conceptualising the Hypermyth
The performance of myth and text in a media savvy culture is divorced from traditional
myths and their importance to the individual. I have suggested that myth is divorced from its
first order, or denotative, message – a literally transposed idea drawn from a mythic structure.
I have also argued that myth is divorced from what would be conventionally considered its
second order, or connotative, message – a myth reworked into a contemporary context but
maintaining the veracity of its original utterance, its indissoluble and unaltered ‘truth.’ In thisway, myth is often considered a timeless part of the maturation process for the individual andculture – this orthodoxy is assumed to persist for contemporary cultural receptions of myths
and texts. For example, consider Anne Lancashire’s reading of the Star Wars franchise inwhich “the overall message of the Star Wars trilogy – that life’s ordeals, and even death itself
as fearful, can be overcome through human growth towards mature and compassionate loveand self-sacrifice…is in part the message of some of the world’s most successful religions.”85
While Lancashire’s reading of the narrative of the Star Wars franchise as a traditional
mythic/religious structure is persuasive, the analysis does not take into account theperformance aspect of the mythic structure, that is, the way in which it is reconfigured at the
point of expression (on the cinematic screen) and reception (by the mass culture spectator in amovie theatre). Myth recuperated as spectacle initiates a third order, or discursive, message.86
I designate this alteration the transition from myth to hypermyth, an ontological position in

85

Anne Lancashire, “The Phantom Menace: Repetition, Variation, Integration.” Film Criticism 24, no. 3(2000), 24.
86
Timothy Druckrey, “Fugitive Realities, Situated Realities, ‘Situational Realities,’ and or Future Cinema(s)Past.” In Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film, ed. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (Cambridge,
Mass: MIT Press, 2003), 60. Discussing the traditions of cinematic apparatus, Druckrey suggests “three‘regimes’ of ‘presence,’ ‘representation,’ and ‘simulation.’ This conforms roughly to the ‘regimes’ ofsignification I have discussed – denotative, connotative, discursive. Druckrey focuses on the image-apparatus of
the cinema in which his argument has something in common with Deleuze’s distinction between the action
image and the time image. For Druckrey, a contemporary immersive art is predicated on an aesthetic of
simulation.

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which “a viewer is no longer referred to a world outside the image” but a “crystalline
representation [that] refers only to itself.”87
3.11 Baudrillard and a Simulated Mythology
Rather than disorientation, these strategies of rearticulation that reflect a hyperconsciousness about the impact of images on social categorization are a process offundamental reorientation conducted on and through that double referentiality.88

An early scene in The Matrix depicts Thomas Anderson (Neo) awaking from sleep to amessage on his computer screen: “Wake up Neo…The Matrix has you.” A knock sounds atthe door and Anderson exchanges illicit software for money. He removes the software from ahollowed-out copy of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. The copy appears to conformto Baudrillard’s book, displaying chapter 11, “On Nihilism.” The book is closed and returnedto the shelf. Morpheus, when attempting to explain the Matrix to Neo, returns to a
Baudrillardian model of the simulation of the ‘desert of the Real’; the simulation, once
functional, destroys the oasis of the Real and installs a wasteland in its place.
The relation of the copy of Simulacra and Simulation stored on a shelf in the Matrix
to the one currently resting on a desk before me mirrors the relation between the Real and thesimulation in the narrative of the film. What is the status of the ‘real’ object inside thesimulacrum? And of greater interest is the ontological status of Baudrillard’s book wheninserted into the Matrix. I distinguish here between a work and the Text, drawing again on
Barthes. The infinitely discursive Text remains an abstract theoretical consideration that
implicates the Matrix in its performance; indeed the polysemal Text knows no boundaries.
But the work is sanctioned off, subject to ‘arbitrary closure’ and a reading/moulding of its
contents into a semblance of form. What would a reading of a work (rather than Text) within
the Matrix produce?
Baudrillard suggests that the Wachowski Brothers conflate simulacrum with illusionin the narrative structure of The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded.89 According to Baudrillard,
87

Barbara Filser, “Gilles Deleuze and a Future Cinema: Cinema 1, Cinema 2 – and Cinema 3?” In Future
Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film, ed. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, Mass: MIT
Press, 2003), 214. Filser draws on Deleuze here in a conceptual of the fragmentation of the ‘action-image’:“Description stops presupposing a reality and narration stops referring to a form of the true at one and the sametime” (Deleuze, Cinema 2, 135).
88
Collins, 255. Original emphasis.

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Neo represents the prisoner in shackles in the Allegory of the Cave, who comes toenlightenment and a discovery of the essential Truth above and beyond the perversion of thesimulation. This is ultimately the meta-narrative of the franchise: that the One is destined to
discover the inherent artifice of the simulation, rendering it obsolete and the Real eminently
visible. The Wachowski Brothers thus bear recourse to a Platonic philosophical paradigm inwhich the Real and its simulation are distinct and dialectically opposed.
Conversely, Baudrillard says, his theory of the simulation (as opposed to illusion) is a
performance of a once indissoluble truth that simultaneously erases that truth through its
performative aspect. Accepting the performance reveals the absence of the Real; there
remains only the apparition, the phantasm. Whereas in The Matrix the Real and thesimulation are contiguous and dialectically opposed, the inception of the simulacrum in
Baudrillard’s conception severs the connection with the Real and destroys memory (history
and time) and geography (space). The crucial distinction lies in the resultant precession of thesimulacra: the simulation of the Real erases the Real and installs the simulation as the only
point of origin. In this reading of The Matrix, Baudrillard seems to concur with Bartlett andByers’s claim that The Matrix is “Pomophobic,” or avoidant of postmodern tenets, attaining
only a neo-conservative dichotomy that esteems transcendental truth over a system ofauthoritarian-controlled lies.90 Radical postmodern polemic, in Baudrillard’s estimation, ismerely a façade in the film for a run-of-the-mill blockbuster action film.
I disagree with Baudrillard’s reading of The Matrix. I will argue this point only tosuggest that the status of the object in the simulation is irretrievably simulated. This is a
crucial point because the effacement of the dialectic between Real and simulation isnecessary for the performance of the hypermyth. The Wachowski Brothers are aware of
Baudrillard’s reputation as a radical post-structuralist. Norris describes Baudrillard as a “cultfigure on the current ‘postmodernist’ scene,”91 whose ideas are “picked up from the latest
fashionable sources.” “And so it has come about that a thinker like Baudrillard can proffer his
ridiculous ‘theses’ on the Gulf War with every confidence that they will gain wide attention
among watchers of the postmodern cultural scene.”92 In the context of the film, we are not89

Lancelin.
Bartlett and Byers, 30.
91
Christopher Norris, Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (London: Lawrence
and Wishart, 1992), 11.
92
Norris, 31.
90131

dealing with a matrix, but the Matrix. The copy of Simulacra and Simulation that appears
briefly in the film constitutes a manual for reading the Matrix. But, crucially, its status asalready simulacral strips the work of its political and ideological agency, as well as its
descriptive power. Appearing inside the simulation effaces its status as Real object.
Suggesting that the Matrix is ultimately subservient to the Real in the first two films,
Baudrillard fails to appreciate the simulation as a postmodern condition rather than a textual‘reality.’ The simulation contaminates the Real, compromising its integrity, eradicating its
authenticity, decanting a once indissoluble Real into a stratum of residual mythic and textual
images. The appearance of Simulacra and Simulation in the Matrix of the film affirms
ultimately that the Real (including subversive theories of the simulation postulated by
Baudrillard in his book) is always already simulated. The manual that the spectator/theorist
draws on to “lay bare” the reality of the simulation is itself trapped within the simulation. The
work is thus hollow, bereft of content. The conclusion to The Matrix Revolutions is less an
ending than a reversion to the start, a cycle in which the narrative and mythic structure iseternally returned.
Accepting the contamination of the Real by the simulation does not however equate
with a rejection of the Real. This is a crucial point on which Baudrillard and I disagree. The
notion that the simulation literally precedes the Real borders on the nonsensical. Baudrillard
suggests that the subject “require[s] a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth oforigin, which reassures us about our end. Because finally we have never believed in them.” 93
But wouldn’t the opposite be the case? That we require a visible past to affirm the reality ofour belief over and above its simulation? I find it difficult to make sense of myself without avisible past (which I acknowledge is subject to its simulated form, but yet maintains astriking resemblance (and relation) to the Real). Baudrillard acknowledges this resemblance –“Everywhere we live in a universe strangely similar to the original – things are doubled bytheir own scenario”94 – but seems to view the simulation as inherently sinister and adeterioration of the ideal Real. He does not explore the possibilities of self in the simulation
as much as revel in the decadence of the destroyed Real.
For Baudrillard, the ‘awareness’ of the precession of the simulacra is commensuratewith the effacement of the subject as theorist and spectator. This is clearly premature. The
93
94

Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 10.
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 11.

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Matrix, after all, functions according to “rules that are no different from the rules of acomputer system. Some of them can be bent. Others can be broken.” I have argued that
popular culture offers a site of engagement with its mythic and textual legacies. This
engagement, to my mind, requires at least the semblance of subjectivity, and such asemblance precludes the precession of the simulacra. The nature of the work within thesimulation presents a point of mediation between the simulacral precession and the Platonic
ascent to truth. I have designated this a realm of the hypermyth, in which myths aretransposed from their origin into a simulated form. The relation of myth to hypermythcorresponds to Baudrillard’s abstract relation between the Real and the hyperreal, in which
the simulation is more than the Real. ‘Hyper’ connotes an increase or energising of the object
exhausted of its potential as concrete referential. The Real in Baudrillard’s conception is atired form, stripped of its capacity to describe a contemporary culture founded on its erasure.
The subject no longer engages with the Real object, but its simulated reflection. I wish to
employ Baudrillard’s theory of the precession of the simulacra as a defence of the spectaclein popular cinema. The attachment of ‘hyper’ to ‘real’ in the simulacrum implies atransformation of the Real. But what precisely is Baudrillard suggesting has become of theReal once the simulation has taken hold and become the dominant aesthetic?
The hypermyth reflects a cultural and subjective discursivity, a capacity to engage
with what Barthes calls the infinitude of Text while permitting the arbitrary closure Hall
demands of contemporary cultural and aesthetic practices. If the Real is contaminated into
obsolescence, Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum comprises merely another abstractreflection on the lost authenticity of the Real; it is merely another form of nostalgia disguised
as radical nihilism. Ultimately it is the latest incursion into the dominance of the popular (thatis perceived as a deterioration of aesthetic value) as well as a plea for the usefulness of thetheorist after the collapse of critical distance. This mode of nostalgia is thus equally a strategy
of self-preservation. Castigating the contemporary for its aesthetic fall from grace affirms
tradition and forms commensurate with an earlier age. Vanquishing the Real enacts thecoming into being of the sinister simulation, the omnipresence of a Disneyland space andtime of images.
Rejecting the contamination of the Real altogether is an act of denial in the face ofevidence of the pervasiveness of the mediated image. Real connotes the uninterrupted means
and ends of contemplation, a transposition of the message without mediation by the carrier.

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This is clearly not the way meaning is disseminated in the cultural sphere, which would be
acknowledged by even the most tenaciously political theorist. Culture is a mediated field.
Mediation is fraught with epistemological and ethical problems illuminated by Marshall
McCluhan in the 1960s and tacitly accepted ever since.95 Post-structuralism offered aparadigm in which to explode the act of mediation in such a way that it constituted thecentrality of textual theory. Thus, post-structuralism privileges form over content, which is tosay, content as form. This is surely only a single step to Baudrillard’s precession of thesimulacra. Norris, one of the sternest critics of Baudrillard’s radical epistemology, concedesthat the Gulf War[was] indeed in some sense a ‘postmodern’ war, an exercise in mass-manipulative rhetoricand ‘hyperreal’ suasive techniques, which does undoubtedly confirm some of Baudrillard’s
more canny diagnostic observations. How else could one explain the extraordinary inverse
relationship between extent of coverage and level of informed public grasp.96

The contemporary cultural theorist does not so much set her sights on the radiance of truthand beauty as merely the most perfect semblance of it. Classical Platonic forms are less thanfashionable in cultural studies. For Lyotard, this analytical strategy has profound limitations:
The fact is that the Platonic discourse that inaugurates science is not scientific, precisely tothe extent that it attempts to legitimate science. Scientific knowledge cannot know andmake known that it is the true knowledge without resorting to the other, narrative, kind ofknowledge, which from its point of view is no knowledge at all.97

There is no recourse to a knowledge that does not compromise its own status as scientific.
Baudrillard’s simulation bears much the same resemblance to the imaginary Real. Yet, if as
for Norris the mediation of images does not prevent the capacity for “argued criticalresistance,”98 equally, the awareness and acceptance of the simulation as a dominant aesthetic
form does not render the Real unintelligible. Rather it incorporates the reflection of the Real
into the simulacral image, the vestige of reality into the hyperreal representation.
95

For a now classic formulation, see Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage (New York: Bantam
Books, 1967), 26: “All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political,
economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us,
untouched, unaffected, unaltered.”96
Norris, 25.
97
Lyotard, 29.
98
Norris, 27.

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Hypermythology connotes a reorganisation of the original mythic utterance, and atransformation in the ontological status of myth such that the Real is merely a template forthe ‘residual mythic image’99 performed within the simulation. The hypermythologising ofmyth is necessary to function affectively as a discursive aesthetic in which myth is merely
textual quotation. Without recourse to an abiding Truth or reality, the spectator must findaesthetic worth in the recuperation of myth into new forms.
What coheres ultimately in the internal logic of The Matrix franchise is a panorama of
residual mythic images. The tools required to decode these images (a component of which is
Eco’s encyclopaedia of film references) are a part of contemporary postmodern consumption
practices as much as traditional textual interpretation. The spectator/theorist is aware of theparameters of the construct/simulation in which the text is played. There is thus a necessary
ambivalence in aesthetically responding to the simulated myth as artificial. A hope lingers topartake of the original, the true One whose replication is that which Plato considered a‘familiar,’ merely the paltry reflection of an ideal and radiant form. It is this ambivalence that
forms the emotional core of the discursive subjectivity. The hypermyth, divorced from an
originary mythic truth, enables the simultaneous performance of separate and contradictory
mythic structures that resonate for a subjectivity immersed in the simulation.
3.12 Screening the HypermythHypermythology finds expression as performance. It is the performative aspect that revises
the prior mythic form (a mythic Real) into a simulated textual utterance. To demonstrate thisperformance, consider the following textual itinerary of the grand finale of The Matrix
franchise.
The romantic hero (Keanu Reeves is a useful combination of tough guy and effete male)departs from his destined Love in an excruciating and wonderfully sentimental exchange,demonstrating what Jewett and Lawrence call the “sexual segmentation” of the monomythic
hero.100 This segmentation is necessary to establish the plight of the One as heroicindividualist. Physically blinded, he confronts a heavenly simulacrum, a realm of “white on

99

Morpheus describes the image of the self in the Matrix as “residual self image.” The simulated self is literally
a residual component of the self that originates in the Real.
100
Jewett and Lawrence, 59.

135white,”101 or in this case, light on light. Heaven is a construct, a mechanically functioning
simulation. The artifice is maintained in the quasi-God figured Deux Ex Machina, a constructof component sentinel parts.
Upon jacking into the Matrix, the hero dons the cinematic ethos of the anti-hero in asecond re-presentation of a Sergio Leone Western showdown (the first takes place in a
subway station in The Matrix). The Wachowski Brothers tip their hats to Leone’s films,
acknowledging their presence on screen and their revised performance within the Matrix.
Neo’s flowing coat is as suitably a religious cassock as the dust jacket of the Cheyenne
romantic bandit in Once Upon a Time in the West.
The anti-hero is further inscribed by the mirror-shades. The Wachowski Brothers use
the motif of images reflected in mirrorshades several times in the franchise. The reflection
draws attention to the image as refracted in a cyberpunk trope; the spectator perceives theimage in the simulated Matrix through a lens. The camera that rests on Neo’s black boots(that are configured elsewhere in the series as sexual fetish) and ascends his body recalls
Cameron’s The Terminator, a film that looms gargantuan over this franchise. The opening
shot of the confrontation between Smith and Neo replicates the entrance of Schwarzenegger
in The Terminator and is the crucial indication that the spectator is watching a performanceof a prior cinematic piece.
Performance as an aesthetic value permeates this sequence. Indeed, Reeves as actor
steps aside to admit Neo as actor. The sentimentalism of the contemporary leading man(“Trin, you can’t die!) is refigured into stoic, transcendental heroism. “It ends tonight”
functions as a depthless (to be sure, hollow, as in Baudrillard’s bible of the simulacrum, andinfinitely regressing, as in Barthes’s inexhaustibility of the Text) reverberation of every line
prefiguring a confrontation. The archetypal Good versus Evil confrontation is reconfigured asa stylised homage to Hong Kong kung fu cinema of the 1970s. The spectator recalls Neo’s
impersonation of Bruce Lee in a sparring duel with Morpheus in a simulated dojo. The
silhouetted shot of the fighters in an abandoned warehouse (that seems miraculously toappear within the simulation) is a familiar trope of classic Hong Kong cinema and,incidentally, is used to astonishing effect in Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Volume 1.
Three other cinematic references are significant and operate to construct a discursive,
performative frame of reference. The mid-air tussle between Neo and Smith is reminiscent of
101

Palahniuk, 201.

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the climactic duel between Superman and General Zod in Superman II; the Christ figure
partakes of the Marvel Comics heroic tradition. The second, and more obvious homage is thecircular energy field that explodes from the confrontation between Neo and Smith, replicating
the shot of a nuclear explosion in Akira that leads to the formation of the futuristic dystopia
of Neo-Tokyo. More distantly, the general visual style recalls Dragonball Z, a cult animé
series popular both in Japan and the U.S.
This reading of a sequence in The Matrix Revolutions offers a conception of the franchise asa cinematic simulacrum – a discursively performed metacinema – that inscribes Neo
simultaneously as the apotheosis of the monomythic figure and its redundancy. The arisen
Christ is equally a superhero inhabiting a textual realm drawn from classical mythology,
comics, animation and popular cinema. The franchise functions as mythology in flux,
simultaneously locating and then displacing textual utterances. As spectacle, the franchiseconsumes its textual precursors, gorging on a sacred past, so to speak, but without the
disparaging and debilitating recourse to Jameson’s cinematic pastiche. Instead, theredundancy of the monomyth takes place at an acceptance of the text as discursive andconstructed – a simulacrum functioning onscreen and off.
3.13 The Discursivity of the One
Morpheus
Residual Self Image: it is the mental projection of your digital self.102
Neo
I believe that the Matrix can remain our cage or it can become our chrysalis, that’s what
you helped me to understand. That to be free, truly free, you cannot change your cage. You
have to change yourself.103

The Matrix as chrysalis suggests a space of transformation of the consciousness that has
profound implications for the conception of the Matrix in the franchise. Rather than
Baudrillard’s sinister simulacrum, the Matrix presents a possibility for the subject to evolve
beyond the parameters of the Real: authenticity, truth, right, purpose. Remarkably, this
102
103

The Matrix.
Wachowski and Wachowski, 393.

137

passage in the shooting script was omitted because preview audiences did not know themeaning of the word ‘chrysalis.’ Instead, Neo informs the machines that humanity wishes toreclaim its freedom outside of the Matrix. At least this is the implication with the omission of‘chrysalis’: “where we go from here is up to you.” The inclusion of chrysalis in the passage
implies that freedom is ultimately attainable only in relation to the Matrix, that is, after
understanding the contours of the simulation in relation to the Real. This notion is borne outin The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. Neo is a cyborg, a machine/humansynthesis issued from the ‘Source,’ an original mythical point that draws equally on
Christian, Buddhist, Agnostic, Manichean, technological, cyberpunk, pop culture narrative
structures. However, cyborg in The Matrix franchise implies more than a machine/humancombination that allowed Arnold Schwarzenegger to resist bullets and yet express a humanemotion through tears in Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The cyborg in The Matrix universe isa conduit between the Real and the simulation, a native to each imaginary plane. The Matrix
shows Neo’s gradual control over the rules of the Matrix; The Matrix Reloaded extends thiscontrol to include a control over the Real. At the conclusion to The Matrix Revolutions,
Morpheus’s rhetorical final question, “Is it real?”, uttered while gazing upward at a heavenly
glow, subverts the project to recuperate the Real through the destruction of the Matrix. The
question resonates as a repetition of Schwarzenegger’s final line in Verhoeven’s Total Recall.
Standing beneath a Mars sunrise that recalls an image from a Hollywood Technicolour
production, he murmurs, “What if I’m dreaming?”, to which his love replies, “Then kiss me
before I wake up.” The Sleeping Beauty/Prince tale is reworked here to dazzling effect.
Morpheus’s recuperation of the sequence in Total Recall is thus an incursion into the internal
logic of The Matrix narrative. The textual fabric that touches The Matrix franchise and Total
Recall draws also on the classic metaphysical conundrums of Philip K. Dick, upon whose We
Can Remember It For You Wholesale104 Total Recall was loosely based. Dick’s open-ended,
often self-effacing metaphysics105 pervade the textual play of The Matrix franchise.
Morpheus’s suggestion that an awareness of the Matrix (or the ability to recognise its
parameters) allows a heightened appreciation of the nature of the Real is thus misguided.
Rather, the ‘residual self image’ of the One, initiated within the Matrix, offers a “consensual
104

Philip K. Dick, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.” In Preserving Machine and Other Stories(London: Victor Gollancz, 1971), 129-149.
105
See, for example, Philip K. Dick, Ubik (New York: Doubleday, 1969); and Philip K. Dick, The Three
Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (St. Albans: Triad, 1978).

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hallucination,” to quote William Gibson in a very similar context. 106 The subjective
consciousness evolves, immersed within the simulation, partaking of the Real as residual
mythic image in which Real self and simulated Other are conjoined in a symbiotic
relationship. Neo, simultaneously of the Real and the post-historical, a functioning
recuperation of the original mythic form as simulated spectacle, is a ‘child of the Real.’ He is“irrevocably human,” to quote the Architect in The Matrix Reloaded, but equally the progenyof the virtual.
Motifs of fractured identity (machine/human, male/female, real/virtual) appear
throughout the franchise. In the scene in The Matrix in which Neo and Trinity enter agovernment building to rescue Morpheus, the two forms are androgynous reflections, almost
identical in clothing, make-up and movement. Reeves and Moss look uncannily alike. In her
reading of the first film, Martina Lipp does not appreciate the significance of theandrogynous sexuality of the One, preferring instead a masculinization of the ‘female
hero.’107 The neo-fascist motif of leather boots functions as a symbol of deviant sexuality,sado-masochism and neo-gothic grunge culture. After the destruction of the building inperhaps the franchise’s most impressive visual sequence, the camera offers a close-up of
Trinity’s leather boots (emphasised with a squeak on the floor tile), installing the simulated
Trinity as masculinized hero, feminine sidekick, and cultural deviant.
The image in the machine city of a flesh-like organic tube attached to amechanical/organic womb is an explicit quotation of the confrontation between Ripley(Sigourney Weaver) and the Queen alien in Cameron’s Aliens. In Alien: Resurrection, Ripley
is reborn as an alien-human hybrid, which resembles Neo’s symbiotic form of human andmachine, real and virtual, at the conclusion of The Matrix Revolutions. In terms of the
franchise’s convoluted metaphysical position, agency is equally a matter of free will
originating in the Real and mechanical determinism that functions as the metaphysical core of
the machines. The synthesis of Real and simulation compromises the integrity of both
systems of metaphysics. The Oracle’s “you cannot see beyond the choices you don’t
understand” is superficially impressive but less than philosophically conclusive.
The most obvious intrusion of the simulated form into the Real occurs in theaffectivity of the One. The Matrix is a perversion of the Real, a trance-like hallucinogenic
106
107

William Gibson, Neuromancer (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1993), 12.
Lipp, 29.

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state in which sensuality is divorced from the physical body. The spectacle offers thetransformation of the banality of the Real into the hyperkinetic visuality of the simulation.
Residual self image is the only image-form of the One. The Matrix offers the uninhibited
expression of the repressed self (or a self imprisoned within the cave of the Real, yetperceiving the possibilities of a simulated ‘self-image’). The capacity for transformation is
infinite, subject only to the parameters of the imagination that reflects on the limited form of
the Real. In peril on a rooftop, with escape only possible in a military helicopter, Neo asks of
Trinity: “Can you fly that thing?” She replies, “Not yet.” The ability to fly the helicopter isliterally realised through a download into the imaginary, and infinitely discursive,
consciousness. A number of theorists have commented on the disparity between the subtext
of the franchise as anti-technological while revelling in the possibility of technology to makethe self ‘more than real.’ I will not labour the point except to say that the hypermythological(which connotes also the simultaneous awareness and appreciation of contradictory mythic
utterances) functions as an aestheticisation of the Real, which is to say, a license for rejecting
technology while revelling in technical innovation on film. Lucas did something very similar
with the Star Wars franchise.
The transformation of Thomas Anderson into the One constitutes the initiation of theanalogue self – the corporeal, tactile body of the Real – into the digital coding of thesimulated Matrix. The Matrix Revolutions offers a death in the simulacrum as the original
offered a birth. The One is resurrected within the Matrix – the virtual consciousness awakes
to the kiss of life while the inert, inactive body remains asleep. The quasi-religious
enlightenment is not to “read through” the Matrix, as Trost suggests,108 but to read and write
it. The evolution in the consciousness of the One (the Matrix as chrysalis) is not theextrication of the subject from the simulation but the immersion in the residual mythic
recuperation of the original utterance. When the One exits the phone booth, reborn in thesimulation, he ascends into a simulated heaven with simulated mythical wings (or equally, asimulated mythical cape). He wears simulated mirror shades. Immersed in the simulated
spectacle, the One reads, writes and consumes the code that constructs its discursivity. The
critical transformation occurs at the point of resurrection in which the One no longer sees the108

Theodore Trost, “My Own Personal Jesus Christ: the Curiously Christian Worldview in The Matrix.” Paper
delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Religion in Nashville, Tennessee. 2000.

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Platonic object, but the digital code – streams of data as semblance of form – that constructsit.
The image of Neo as a re-presentation of Christ on the cross (at which point the Deux
ex Machina utters, “It is done”109) performs an absence rather than a presence of the Christian
mythic structure. Neo is Christlike, but he is not Christ. He is not an avatar, descended (orarisen) into a fallen world to save humanity from its sins. It only appears this way from amonomythic perspective. The dominant aesthetic of spectacle cinema is image-consumption
in which original mythic utterances are reorganised as commodities in a simulacrum. The
residually Real functions as a commodity, alterable, in flux, re-readable, rewriteable. The
spectator, divorced from the sacred origin, consumes and simultaneously aestheticises thecommodity as replacement. The potentiality of the cinematic spectacle offers the discursive
text as fractured reflection of the Real, aware of its constructedness, its component parts, its
inherent artifice, its inauthenticity. Rather than seeking a newly arisen Christ, it seeks a new
Christ image, subject to an eternal return, but also an eternal transformation (consider alsothat Neo is the sixth One, a return of the previous five but equally a transformation of theprior form). The newness of the One, the essential ‘Neo,’ is an incarnation of an original
mythic form that has been recuperated into obsolescence. Neo is only Christ insofar as hecoheres in a simulated Matrix “with a set of quotation marks that hover above [him] like anironic halo.”110
The play of myth and text in the simulacrum is not Jameson’s pastiche. This kind of
pastiche functions not merely as recuperation, but as a strategy of deterioration – its
performance results in a lessening of the original utterance, or a loss of an essential meaning.
In this postmodern aesthetic, Plato is always less than Plato when re-presented. But equally,
the hypermyth is not necessarily a consequence of what Hutcheon has called the irony ofpostmodern textual strategies. 111 Rather it is a consumption of the modalities of the Real; theReal is not effaced, but merely perpetually transformed. This consumption does not require
the spectator/theorist’s awareness of its status as reproduction. In fact, I would argue thatvery little so-called postmodern cinematic reception is founded on irony. I disagree that irony
is a useful strategy for cultural resistance to a hegemonic social structure. Such strategies

109

Gospel of John 19.30.
Collins, 256.
111
Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” 5.
110

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need development and mobilisation, and irony, as Hutcheon acknowledges, is profoundly
subjective.112 Rather, the performance of the hypermyth presents the Real for consumption: ahistory that is rewritten, remythologised, and commodified as the One sees fit.
3.14 The Visibility of Style: Image Strategies in Contemporary Cinema
Digital Code…has radically altered the epistemology and ontology of the moving image.113
What remains of Breathless today, what speaks to a contemporary, young audience – whenjump cuts figure in every second TV commercial?114

Deleuze locates the great transformation of modern cinema after the Second World War, atwhich point the action-image was exhausted of its capacity to provide a meaningful aesthetic
in cinema. The image loses its credibility as an ‘account’ of movement and time after
suffering a brief crisis “defined by a number of characteristics: the form of the trip/ballad, themultiplication of clichés, the events that hardly concern those they happen to, in short theslackening of the sensory-motor connections.” These conditions “made possible, but did notconstitute, the new image.”115 According to Deleuze, after the war, films increasingly
demonstrate a conformity to the time-image, a condition in which cinema is a “purely opticaland sound situation.”116 Filser concludes that the time-image constitutes a cinematic language
in which “the real and the imaginary, which in organic narration are discrete, opposed, areoccluded. Real and virtual become indistinguishable.”117 The future of the time-image, andthus the ontology of a future cinema, in Filser’s estimation, would equate with an “audiovisual image in its most complex form, permanently interrogating information as to its source
and its addressee. Perhaps this future cinema à la Deleuze may be defined as follows: thatwhich forces information to think and us to think information.”118

112

Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” 5: “Irony is not something in an object that you either“get” or fail to “get”: irony “happens” for you (or, better, you make it “happen”) when two meanings, one said
and the other unsaid, come together, usually with a certain critical edge.”
113
Gene Youngblood, “Cinema and the Code.” In Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film, ed.
Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2003), 156.
114
Adrian Martin, “A Bout de Souffle (Breathless).” In 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, ed. Steven
Jay Schneider (London: Quintet, 2003), 370.
115
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 3.
116
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 3.
117
Filser, 214.
118
Filser, 217.

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An interesting body of work has found a foothold in film theory over the last decade.
This work is neither traditional literary/cultural theory, nor contemporary film theory but asynthesis of ‘apparatus’ theory119 (in which the significance of the medium is emphasised asa site of meaning) and visual arts theory (specifically, contemporary design and an aesthetics
of new media).120 While there are obviously dissimilarities within the body of work (thenotion of a synthesis is a generalisation, but a useful one), these authors attempt to theorise analteration in the ontology of the visual image, as Deleuze did in his books on cinema. Thisnew ontology permits an approach to cinema vastly removed from the instrumentalist theoryof culture, which I have argued is founded on a traditional realist aesthetic. It permits also an
exploration of the aesthetic mode, or cinematic stylistics, that suffers in traditional film
theory. Simply put, it offers a conceptual framework within which the spectator/theorist may
ask: what are the implications of a visual/aural stylistics of cinema?
In this chapter, I have discussed various departures from traditional cinematic
practices in terms of intertextual quotation and the recuperation of myth. The following
section is an account of the stylistic innovations of contemporary cinema, focusing on ‘bullettime’ in The Matrix franchise, and various image-strategies that are increasingly apparent inmainstream cinema. I contrast my own version of the spectacle of contemporary cinema withtheories of new media and art, and its conceptual of the immersion of the spectator in theimage in avant garde digital art.
In the 1940s, the Hollywood studio film conveyed to the spectator a seamless realitythat functioned self-evidently on relations of cause and effect in the pursuit of historical truth(the quest for a narrative truth offered a cinematic substitute). Thus, a remarkable number ofstudio films depict protagonists who attempt to solve a mystery using a prescribed set ofclues that amount to a comprehensive back-story, the plot (what was actually depicted) andprobable future developments (the causal consequences). Narrative closure was presumed (inspite of increasingly convoluted storylines) and rarely challenged. The spectator was
subjected to a ‘realist’ performance of the image conveyed in a seamless reproduction ofwhat she took to be a reality shared by herself and other spectators. This subjection was
accomplished through the invisibility of style (visual and aural components synthesized in a
119

See Teresa De Laurentis and Stephen Heath (ed)., The Cinematic Apparatus (London: Macmillan, 1980).
See, for example, Darley; Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (ed.), Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary
After Film (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2003); and O.M.A., Rem Koolhaus and Bruce Mau, SMLX (NewYork: Monacelli Press, 1995).
120

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way that deflected the gaze from the inherent constructedness of the image) and the emphasison narrative and plot development. The image functioned as a conduit to narrative solution,
and was thus merely a means to an end. In this sense, realism and genre (invisible stylistics
and familiar narrative patterns) were fundamentally attached, forming a dominant cinematic
aesthetic. This aesthetic has prevailed ever since, albeit it in a somewhat altered form.121
A second feature to which Bordwell alludes122 and on which Ray significantly
expands123 is a hermetically sealed frame of representation. In the studio film, action depicted
was required to cohere within the sacrosanct boundaries of the film narrative. Formal
cinematic technique was predetermined by the story, of which narrative was merely anecessary and unobtrusive function. Cinematic narrative was an enclosed, insular plane thatfunctioned without intrusion of an extraneous agency, whether creative or administrative. The
studio film narrative presented the story according to the dictates of a ‘real world’ that waspresumed by the spectator to inform the cinematic world holistically. Indeed, directors suchas Frank Capra and John Ford were esteemed in American film culture because of a fidelity
to the Real. Ford’s long shots of Monument Valley in The Searchers are an elegy for thatwhich makes the American frontier what it is in the collective (and reflective) imagination.
Paradoxically, the hermetically sealed world of the studio narrative ensured the lasting
influence of realism in American mainstream cinema.
The ‘new’ cinematic image, divested of the burden of the Real, draws attention toitself as a component of a manufactured media. But it also declares its rejection of the once
glorified ontological status of the image as reproduced reality (Bazin). Codognet offers thefollowing assessment of the status of the new image:An important characteristic of virtual environments is the possibility for the spectator tointeractively move within such spaces and perceive the virtual world as through a
subjective camera… But with virtual worlds we are moving away from the metaphor of the
map to that of the path, from the third-person point of view (God’s eye”) to the first-person
point of view…We are thus leaving, in the virtual experience and exploration of an
unknown artificial world, the Cartesian paradigm of the Euclidean, homogenous andobjective space in which points could be described in an allocentric manner by triple (x, y,

121

For a discussion of the transformation of genre in recent cinema, see Wheeler Winston Dixon,“Introduction.” In Film Genre 2000, ed. Wheeler Winston Dixon (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2000), 1-12.
122
See David Bordwell, “Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures.” In Narrative,
Apparatus, Ideology, ed. P. Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 17-34.
123
Ray, 32-55.

144z) co-ordinates for a new paradigm of a more constructive, egocentric, and indeed
subjective space.124

He shares the fascination of theorists of new media and art with the possibility of thespectator to engage with the image, to wrestle it to a unique and wholly subjective form. In
Deleuzian terms, the spectator is able to unburden herself of the itinerary of the action-image
and explore the convolutions of spatial and temporal (and thus virtual) time-images. This isperhaps what Courchesne has in mind in his conception of a reformed cinema and the‘immersion’ of the spectator: “Cinema and television are good storytelling devices, but will
always fall short of providing a believable interactive experience. In my opinion, cinema
couldn’t become immersive without a deep transformation of its content’s structure anddevelopment, and if it did it would have to be called something else.”125 In this model, toembrace the possibilities of a new media that reorganises the relationship between the screen
and the spectator, cinema would need to be reconstituted entirely.
But perhaps an ontological transformation of the image on this scale is not entirely
necessary. To what extent has Deleuze’s time-image, or the ontology of the image in various
interactive media, intruded into mainstream or art cinema? While it is clear that themainstream film image partakes of elements of the time-image, the limitation of theories of
new media lies precisely in its specificity as a medium and its relative obscurity to popular
culture. While I would agree that mainstream cinema offers the spectator a site ofengagement with the product (the cinematic text), immersion in interactive art forms presents
something else entirely. Courchesne suggests that the immersion aesthetic of installation art
has intruded on some mainstream cinematic practices that extends to the origins of cinema:“This [immersion] is exemplified…by Abel Gance’s multiple-screen feature film, Napoléon
in 1926, or by Waller’s Cinerama in the 1950s and today’s IMAX and OMNIMAX
technologies.”126 The notion of IMAX as immersion is particularly interesting insofar as it
has gradually expanded from the purely visual and documented (Discovery Channel
documentaries) to the narrative (the recent Polar Express is a good example). But even so,
the narrative structure of mainstream cinema and its emphasis on “telling stories” is a

124

Philippe Codognet, “Artificial Nature and Natural Artifice.” In Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary
After Film, ed. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2003), 463. Original emphasis.
125
Luc Courchesne, “The Construction of Experience: Turning Spectators into Visitors.” In New Screen Media,
ed. Martin Reiser and Andrea Zapp (London: British Film Institute, 2002), 265.
126
Courchesne, 256.

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limitation on the visual image as a site of spectator immersion. IMAX is not a regular
screening forum for a Hollywood blockbuster, and in any case its technology and capacity for
immersion would not be commensurate with the narrative (and specifically genre) form.
Mainstream cinema requires a viewing perspective from which the spectator can address theimage holistically. The image is addressed as a single entity rather than a splicing together of
separate and distinct visual components. In the immersion of the spectator in the interactive
work, “immersion is cognitive before being perceptive. The ‘reality’ of immersive work is
distinctly invented and recreated by the viewer – and not just perceived and undergone.”127
However, seated anonymously in the darkened movie theatre, the spectator inheres in an
imaginary centrality in relation to the image. Regardless of her location in the room, thespectator assumes a position shared by every other spectator. Equally, the spectator locatesherself in a viewing relation to the image that is guided by the shot and spatial co-ordinates of
the image: point of view, overhead, low angle, long, medium, close-up, zoom, etc. The
spatial dimension of the shot steers the spectator’s gaze in a particular direction. This is often
accomplished through a shift in focus – an image that moves out of focus recedes from thespectator’s gaze.
Spectator immersion or viewer interactivity in Courchesne’s model connotes a fluid
relation between spectator and image, a multiplicity of viewing points and ‘screens’ uponwhich the image is presented, and an open-ended text that is located only in relation to theorganising subjective gaze (the traditional cinematic gaze is reconfigured as viewing
presence). The ‘real’ of the spectator’s presence is literally immersed (and dissolved) within
the total virtuality of the representation. For the immersion to be complete, narrative must
submit to the free play of visual and aural freely associated stimuli. As Courchesne suggests,“it is not appropriate to speak of narrativity in relation to the construction and experience ofan interactive work. The way I see it, the only narrative, if it materialises, will originate fromthe visitor after she or he experiences the work and not from the work itself, which isconstructed as a context for experience.”128 This establishes a functioning continuum between
artwork and spectator that moves towards Filser’s reading of Deleuze’s time-image “which
forces information to think and us to think information.”129

127

Codognet, 464.
Courchesne, 266.
129
Filser, 217.
128

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The implications of such an art and media are difficult to conceptualise. I would
suggest that the reorganisation of the relation between spectator and artwork founded upon adestruction of the narrative form130 is incompatible with current mainstream cinematic
practices. While Courchesne mentions this incompatibility in passing, for me it is crucial, andindeed, central to the debate. Popular culture is engaged in the construction anddeconstruction of its sacred narratives, which I have attempted to show through a reading of
The Matrix franchise. But immersion in Courchesne’s model is surely relegated to a fringe
cultural aesthetic, practiced by the few trained in its traditions (that are in any case distinctly
avant-garde and incompatible with the mainstream aesthetic). I cannot perceive this form of
immersion at work in contemporary cinema. While Courchesne is optimistic about the impactof the immersion aesthetic in popular culture, I cannot fathom how such a transformation in
the aesthetic sensibility of the mainstream would be achieved. Courchesne suggests that“media artists who are currently doing installation work are in the forefront of thoseinventing a medium, a medium whose impact in the future will be comparable to that ofcinema in the not so distant past.”131 However, my conception of the spectacle aesthetic isvastly removed from the immersion of interactive art. I conceive of the spectacle as asimulation of narrative forms (hypermythology), Courchesne privileges the non-narrative art
work and the Barthesian textual explorer that moulds the text to form and is simultaneously
moulded by it. In this model, I can only perceive endlessly proliferating images andsubjectivities in flux, which is of course precisely the philosophical trajectory of immersion
art and theory.
The site of interaction between spectator and the mainstream cinematic image has notsubstantially changed since the rise of the studio film and the dominance of cinema as asocial activity. The visit to the movie theatre is a form of social ritual and a site of culturalinteraction and consumption. Spectators do not visit film galleries in the way art enthusiasts
visit art galleries. Spectators visit consumer spaces that house multiplexes and retail storesthat form a chain in the production-consumption process. Inside these malls, the spectator
finds easy access to the fast food industry via a ‘food court.’ Fast food complements the130

I have argued that the spectacle in contemporary mainstream cinema has de-emphasized the narrative in film.
However, this de-emphasis does not equate with a destruction of the ontological status of the narrative form.
Wayne’s World and True Lies, while de-emphasizing narrative to some extent, are overtly narrative films. In
fact, the spectacle in contemporary cinema could be considered a simulation of the traditional narrative foundedon originality and creative genius into generic textual quotation.
131
Courchesne, 257.

147

saturation screening of the latest blockbuster, particularly if the spectator purchases the tie-in
drinking cup at the McDonald’s counter. The cinema is a narrative site of social interaction inwhich the social ritual is a form of storytelling that interacts with the film. An aesthetic
response to the film product is synthetically conjoined to the ritualised practices of the visit to
the theatre, lining up at the box office, buying popcorn and coke, viewing the advertisements(that are as stylistically innovative as the feature film), viewing the previews, purchasing tiein memorabilia. The immersion in the spectacle is an immersion in a series of ritualised
consumptive practices. For the spectator of mainstream cinema, immersion represents anengagement with (rather than a departure from) a narrative text that extends from screen to an
external reality. Mainstream cinematic practice “offers only an ‘interior,’ a pervasive metacinema (or a cinematic society in which the screen intrudes on an external reality) that has
drawn the exterior ‘reality’ into itself at its point of inception.”132
3.15 24: Real-Time Narrative
24 is perhaps the most stylistically innovative series to appear on mainstream network
television for some time. The narrative of each series depicts the actions of a number ofcharacters over the space of twenty-four hours. The twenty-four part series screens in one
hour episodes. This serialisation of the narrative requires each episode to end in a ‘cliffhanger,’ a moment of great drama leaving the viewer to anticipate the events of the following
week’s episode. The structure of the series foregrounds the passage of time. A digital display
appears intermittently on screen to remind the viewer of the time that has passed and toindicate the narrative relations between the characters at any point in the story.
Advertisements are inscribed into the real-time narrative. Thus, at the end of a commercial
break, the digital read-out indicates that approximately four minutes have elapsed. Thispermits the forty-five minute episode to comprise an hour long segment in the viewing
schedule while maintaining its real-time narrative structure.
Experiments with real-time narrative have traditionally been relegated to the art-house
fringe (Sukorov’s Russian Ark, shot in real-time, is more remarkable for its single elaboratetake than its simple narrative structure; Figgis’s Time Code, while a unique cinematic
experiment, fared poorly at the box-office) or suffers a commercial and critical failure
132

Bruce Isaacs, “Non-Linear Narrative.” In New Punk Cinema, ed. Nicholas Rombes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2004), 138.

148

(Badham’s Nick of Time). 24 offers a convoluted, multi-focused genre narrative. The genericcharacterisation and post-9/11 thematic is a major factor in the success of the series; thedexterity of its plotting is genuinely innovative. Its willingness to use split-screen shots, toreject slow motion and other time-altering strategies, and yet to emphasise fast cuts and‘forced framing’ (in which the framing of a shot does not conform to a realist relation ofspectator to image) foregrounds its innovative stylistics that complement a streamlined genre
story. It is stylistically unorthodox and yet recognisable as a genre piece. The narrative ofeach episode is structured around segments of time. Season Four, Episode 1 inserted an
extra-narrative indication to the spectator that “everything is going to change in less than ten
minutes.” All plot elements are constructed around time constraints. For example, a bomb
will detonate in thirty minutes, a virus will be released within the hour (thus forming atemporal structure to the episode). The screening of Season Four in Australia included an
audience promotion: solve the 24 code within the hour to win a prize.
Real-time, functioning as a narrative frame, constitutes a striking departure fromtraditional realism. The long take and deep focus, according to Bazin, achieves an ‘imagestructure’ “[that] is more realistic.”133 24 foregrounds the temporal and spatial presence of thecut, often splicing an image into multiple frames (a number of filmmakers have used thisdevice (De Palma and Tarantino come to mind) but it is rare in commercial television).
Furthermore, the cut is established as a moment in virtual real-time. The spectator is aware of
the spatial and temporal location of the cut within the narrative. A multiple frame shot is
accompanied by the digital read-out that co-ordinates the narrative into a sequence ofartificially constructed time segments. Rather than achieving the perfection of the realist
image in Bazinian terms, paradoxically, the real-time narrative structure imposes a virtuality
on the action-image. The narrative is subjected to the process of simulated time that
“inscribes [the viewer] into the scene, in the first instance by perspective and in the second,
into the temporality or action by the narrative.”134 The Real recedes only to bring the realtime generated spectacle into greater relief.
Traditional formal narrative structures such as the flashback and frame (Double
Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard) are prohibited in the real-time image. In this sense, the relation

133

Bazin, “Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” 35.
Malcolm Le Grice, “Virtual Reality – Tautological Oxymoron.” In New Screen Media, ed. Martin Reiser andAndrea Zapp (London: British Film Institute, 2002), 232.
134

149

between ‘reality’ and the real-time narrative conforms to Baudrillard’s conception of therelation between the Real and hyperreal. The real-time image effaces the Bazinian
essentiality of the visual image, foregrounding the cut, montage, and the hyper-stylised
relations of the visual (cinematic) form. The real-time image finds form only in spatial andtemporal segments rather than a fluid and uncontaminated realism. The genericity of theplotline complements the constructedness of the time-sequence. Jack Bauer (Kiefer
Sutherland) may just as well be Jack Ryan (Tom Clancy’s intrepid patriotic hero played by
Alec Baldwin in The Hunt for Red October and Harrison Ford in Patriot Games and Clear
and Present Danger). CTU is merely the latest manifestation of the generic U.S. intelligenceagency. The fact that Bauer works in the Counter-Terrorist Unit provides a post-9/11 intrigue
in international terrorism and the U.S.-Allied insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Season
Four focuses on a terrorist plot organised by a professional Middle-Eastern terrorist cellstationed in Los Angeles.
Time segments are organised visually through a network of imaging and audio
devices: satellite surveillance, infra-red, subway system surveillance cameras, telescopic
sights, night-vision goggles, phone taps, tracking devices, microscopic cameras. Apart fromthe fetish appeal, the surveillance technology employed by CTU personnel constructs aspatial and temporal simulation of the Real: environments are mediated through image
reproduction. There is a tremendous vicarious thrill in the spectator’s perception of thehostile character through a technologically mediated form. The spectator pursues a digital
representation of the hostile rather than the Real figure. Ridley Scott was able to achieve asimilar effect in Alien through the ingenious contrivance of the motion detector. Baudrillard’s
simulacrum is realised: 24 presents the thrill of the digital representation of the self (a figure
on a screen) when the appeal of the Real form (the Platonic shape) has been aestheticallyexhausted.

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3.16 The Ontology of Bullet-Time
One obvious problem with digital cinema is that it has no novelty value, at least not for film
audiences. This being the case, what will drive its future development?135
We’re talking about cameras that are now broken from the subject matter, that are virtual.
That’s the next phase. That’s what computers have introduced into cinematography.136

Each instalment of The Matrix franchise opens on a digitised representation of the Matrix: thecode of the simulation seen through the eyes of the One. The spectator assumes the One’s
point of view as the Matrix materialises into the form of the simulation: irreducible
component into whole. The One reads the code but is simultaneously inscribed by it into thesimulation. This motif is literally a deconstruction of the digitised image. The simulation isdeconstructed into its component parts, digitised ones and zeros that form the simulation. The
motif also functions as a framing device of the narrative that is installed into the simulation.
The digital coding of the Matrix is thus a revelation of the inherent constructedness of theimage out of its component parts. I suggest that this motif applies equally to the narrative,
thematic content and cinematography of the franchise, exemplified in the cinematographic
innovation of ‘bullet-time.’
I recall seeing the opening action sequence of The Matrix137 in 1999 and being
astonished at the visual incongruity of the images in terms of their relation to the sequence asa whole. As perhaps with viewing Citizen Kane in 1941, the spectator senses sometransformation in the constitution of shot, sound and movement, but cannot conceptualise thedeparture from the conventional mode. Joel Silver suggests that Warner Bros. agreed to thefilm’s 100 million dollar budget only after seeing a previously shot version of thissequence.138 In my opinion, it is a virtuoso performance of the virtual (spectacle) aesthetic incontemporary popular cinema.
The scene begins after a brief exchange between Cypher and Trinity over a phoneline. The uniformed policemen enter the darkened room, lit only by their flashlights. The highcontrasts and low angled shots are a quotation of classical film noir. Repeated viewings ofthis sequence indicate a hyper-stylised aesthetic; the Wachowski Brothers are cinematic
135

Belton, 114.
John Gaeta, “Bullet-Time.” The Matrix. DVD: Special Features (Warner Bros. 2001).
137
This is the scene in which Trinity is confronted by three uniformed police in the Heart Of The City Hotel,
and the ensuing chase over the rooftops of the surrounding buildings.
138
Joel Silver, “Making The Matrix.” The Matrix. DVD: Special Features (Warner Bros. 2001).
136

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stylists. This is perhaps not unusual when one considers a Scorsese or De Palma, but neither
were willing to sacrifice narrative integrity to the visual hyper-stylisation of a sequence. (DePalma approaches this aesthetic in Carrie and Dressed to Kill but does not achieve the fullpotential of the stylised sequence as cinematic quotation.)In this sequence, shots quote prior cinematic shots, lighting and set-ups quote aparticular tradition or generic form. Characters are textual tropes: policemen inhabit a hardboiled world that recurs eternally within the simulation. Trinity is configured as a sadomasochist gothic; the shot of the handcuffs over her wrists confirms this textualconfiguration. The hyper-stylisation of the scene is apparent in the visual composition. The
first shot after the policemen enter is a close-up of the handcuffs fastened to the leadpoliceman’s belt. Trinity is in the background, out of focus. What is significant here is that
her shadow is held in focus. The outline looks like a sketch in a graphic comic strip. The shot
reverses (conventional shot-reverse shot) to a close-up of Trinity with her hands held behind
her head, waiting for the policeman to fasten the handcuffs over her wrists. The first
noticeably incongruent image appears. The camera, positioned above Trinity’s right shoulder,holds both Trinity’s face and the policeman in the background of the shot, perfectly in focus.
The deep focal length is held as the policeman advances. Rather than a deliberate and heavyhanded shot innovation, the Wachowski Brothers initiate the sequence by reverting to a
traditional stylistic innovation in which deep focus stands in opposition to orthodox focal
lengths. Deep focus is often used in mainstream cinema, but its appearance in this sequencein The Matrix is less a strategy of representation than a distinct cinematic quotation. It is lessan innovation here than a quotation of a once innovative aesthetic impulse.
The policeman slaps the handcuffs onto Trinity’s wrist. The exaggerated sound (asharp metallic grate) functions as a coda on the first movement of the sequence. The scenethen devolves into a series of fast cuts and kinetic movements. Trinity spins, twists thepoliceman’s arm, breaks it, and slams her hand into his face. The scene cuts to an overhead
shot to capture the recoil of the policeman’s head from Trinity’s hand. The scene cuts to a
medium shot of Trinity as she leaps into the air - and freezes. The camera rotates (it appears
to dolly) on a 180 degree arc from Trinity’s left to right. The shot is held in freeze frame as
the camera completes this movement. Reset on the opposite side of the room, the sequence is
set in motion and Trinity completes the kick that sends the policeman crashing spectacularly152into a wall. The point at which the scene freezes, allowing the camera to dolly to the opposite
side of the room, is the first instance of bullet-time in The Matrix franchise.
Bullet-time is less a shot in the conventional sense than a time-segment divorced fromthe narrative. The narrative literally pauses (Trinity is held suspended in freeze-frame) toallow the camera to reposition itself, and resumes after the camera has been repositioned on
the opposite side of the room. Bullet-time achieves the effect of a sequence of cuts in which
the camera is repositioned without the cut occurring in the film. The movement of the camera(which is in fact only a simulated movement - the movement of the camera in bullet-time iscaptured through photographing separate visual frames and splicing the sequence together
digitally) occurs external to the operation of the narrative, and offers an intrusion of a virtual
space that spontaneously comes into being within the narrative. The bullet-time segment
inserts a virtual frame into the narrative reality and achieves what Baudrillard conceptualises
in his simulacra: “that the real is no longer real.”139 Equally, the intrusion of the virtual into
the Real contaminates the purity of the realist image. Narrative reality is subject to the spatial
and temporal dimensions of the virtual (computer-generated) simulation.
The ontology of the image in bullet-time is reconstituted within a simulated or virtual
representative plane. In the realist mode, the image is subjected to a narrative itinerary. The
narrative functions literally as a control on the spatial and temporal ordering of a sequence.
This is precisely why Bazin valued Welles’s deep focus: it resisted the montage as a guiding
cinematographic ‘voice’ and revealed the Real in its unmediated purity. The narrative
sequence in traditional realism is subject to causal determinism: action on film should
conform to its physical attributes and dimensions in the external reality. The dimensions of ashot, camera position and mise en scene in classical cinema follows deterministic patterns.
If cinema after Bazin has exemplified a departure from the Real, bullet-time achieves
an advance beyond the spatial and temporal cinematographic strategies of earlier movements.
It represents an incursion of virtual reality into an art form dominated by a realist aesthetic.
Gaeta suggests that bullet-time is merely one manifestation of the possibilities of digitally
produced imagery: “We’re talking about cameras that are now broken from their subject
matter, that are virtual. That’s the next phase. That’s what computers have introduced intocinematography.”140 It is also what earlier cinematic traditions did not have access to: the139
140

Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 13.
See note 136.

153

ability to map the image on screen according to a computer generated simulation. “Today
abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept…It is thegeneration by models of a real without origin or reality.”141 Digital imagery is the perfectrealisation of the simulacrum: the reality of the image on screen functions only as areproduction of the simulated form. If Godard’s work is exemplary of the departure from
Deleuze’s action-image, digital cinema installs a simulated image completely severed from aself-organising deterministic reality. It is what Patricia Pisters, working through Deleuze,
suggests is a “metacinematic universe that calls for an imminent conception of audiovisuality,
and in which a new camera consciousness has entered our perception.”142
The jump-cut (Godard, Breathless), freeze frame (Truffaut, The 400 Blows), slowmotion/fast motion montage (Peckinpah, The Wild Bunch) are each subject to the narrative
frame. Godard claimed that he had used the jump-cut to shorten the running time ofBreathless. Even if we were to take him at his word, the jump-cut offers a profoundtransformation of the ontology of the image. Subject to the jump-cut, the temporal and spatial
dimensions in which the narrative coheres is essentially reorganised. Causal determinism isaffected by the capacity to leap time segments. The jump-cut is not entirely disorienting in
Breathless (the sequence rarely skips more than a few frames), though Godard’s
experimentation with fractured narratives in later films (primarily through editing) revealed
the capacity to shift the ontology of the image in modern cinema, and a willingness on thepart of the spectator to accept this new relationship between the image and an external
reality.143 Yet in each of these cinematographic strategies (the jump-cut is surely the mostambitious), the narrative is maintained as a hermetically sealed frame of representation. The
jump-cut intrudes upon and alters the cause-effect functioning of the narrative, but cannot
sever the image from its location within a narrative form.
According to Gaeta, bullet-time cinematography was “conceived specifically for The
Matrix…as a stylistic way of showing that you’re in a constructed reality.”144 The technology
allows the image to “go forward in motion and forward in time with the event.”145

141

Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1.
Pisters, 16.
143
For a discussion of Godard’s ‘revision’ of cinema, see Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 164-165.
144
Gaeta, “Bullet-Time.”
145
Gaeta, “Bullet-Time.”
142

154

I can also choose to stop the camera abruptly and start moving backwards while the action
continues to move forward. I can shoot the move coming away from both sides at the sametime, crisscrossing over, and ending. I can shoot in waves…cycles of film.146

The Real no longer dictates the direction of the shot or the spatial and temporal dimensions of
the image. The cinematographic eye is no longer constricted by the physical presence of thecamera. While The Matrix is ostensibly a genre action film with an interest in speculative
science fiction, Gaeta is correct to suggest that the technology of virtual cinematographyoffers a new potentiality of the cinematic image that is only tentatively explored in The
Matrix. The ‘burly brawl’147 in The Matrix Reloaded offers a bullet-time shot in which Keanu
Reeves has been replaced by a virtual figure; the action film partakes of the computer game(virtual) aesthetic.
I have argued that the synthesis of the Real and simulation in the narrative is athematic that informs the visual aesthetic of the film, particularly its cinematography. With
virtual cinema, this synthesis is realised in the visual aspect of the film. The ontology of theimage in bullet-time (and Gaeta alludes to the fact that bullet-time is merely one innovationin virtual cinematography) is fundamentally altered, divorced at last from its cherished realist
origins. For Purse, bullet-time realises the most “heightened moments of hypermediacy…[inwhich] the spectator is drawn fully into the diegetic space, disrupting the conventional spatial
relationship between the spectator, the screen, and the filmic world.”148 In this formulation,
Purse approaches something resembling Filser’s notion of a shared information between
subject and text, or immersion.149 I would not want to discuss bullet-time as a form of‘immersion art.’ And yet, it achieves something equally radical in its acknowledgement of thepossibilities of the digital (or virtual image) to transcend the classical montage, deep focus, or
any manifestation of a perceived reality on film.

146

Gaeta, “Bullet-Time.”
This is the sequence in which Neo confronts an endlessly replicating Agent Smith.
148
Lisa Purse, “The New Spatial Dynamics of the Bullet-Time Effect.” In The Spectacle of the Real: From
Hollywood to Reality TV and Beyond, ed. Geoff King (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2005), 157.
149
Filser, 217.
147

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4. The Cinematic Real: Image, Text, Culture

4.1 The Spectacle Aesthetic, Or the Cinematic RealIn talking about cinema, I have been talking about life as well; however, I do not want tomake too many claims. I am not arguing that this perspective offers in some sense a betterview of the world (there is no hierarchy). I simply want to indicate that some mutations aretaking place, both in the image and in the world. Developments in science, art andphilosophy all indicate changes in perception and changes in our relation to the world. It
may be that this involves a generational shift…Ultimately, we have no choice but tochange.1

This chapter presents an analysis of recent popular cinema, focusing on filmmakers, films
and cinematic trends that I believe represent a profound intrusion into a prior dominant realist
aesthetic. I argue that within a complex filmic arena in which the blockbuster and the socalled alternative aesthetic are often produced by the same studio, 2 these cinematic trends not
only reflect but increasingly express a new ontology of the cinematic image and text.
Equally, these traditions express a transformation in the ontology of the spectator, whichmust instantiate a similar transformation in the ontology of the film theorist.
The chapter also functions as a conclusion to this thesis in its attempt to chart thephenomenon of a new film aesthetic. The spectacle aesthetic is simultaneously about what
contemporary film is and how it is consumed. Consumption, as I have argued, is a profoundly
aesthetic engagement with the product at the level of textuality and ideology. Mass culture
cinema is market oriented. Its aesthetic system, which I have attempted to recuperate, isimmersed in the market system. I am increasingly astonished at what constitutes mainstream
cinema in what is a dynamic and increasingly discursive filmic arena. The 2006 Best Picture
Oscar for Crash is a case in point. Reports immediately after the victory described Crash as
the lowest money earner to win an academy award in a decade. The film seemed to come andgo at the U.S. (and Australian) box office with hardly a whimper. Yet subsequent to theOscar, Crash was re-released in the U.S. to cash in on the Oscar win, demonstrating once
again that a small, relatively independent production is able to integrate into a discursive U.S.
filmic environment. It matters little what Crash is in a traditional aesthetic sense; rather, whatmatters is how it performs, and is performed, for a discursive popular film culture.
1

Pisters, 223.
For an analysis of the convergence of major studio productions and smaller ‘art film’ enterprises, see Timothy
Corrigan, “Auteurs and the New Hollywood.” In The New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis (Durham andLondon: Duke University Press, 1998), 43-52. Mike Moore’s recent Fahrenheit 911 is an example of theconvergence of the studio film distribution chain and the art film aesthetic (radical political documentary). In
this case, distribution was undertaken by Miramax, a subsidiary of Disney.
2157

An attempt to identify the performance of the spectacle aesthetic is necessarily
discursive in its point of origin and summation. I have traced the formation of a classicalrealist aesthetic in the studio era, drawing on the films and theorists I consider to haveinfluenced the development of filmic traditions. In this chapter, I consider a number ofcinematic transformations manifested in recent cinema: a new status of the film image, a newontology of postmodern cinematic narrative, a new notion of genre. I offer a transformation
on classical, or ‘pure’ genre theories, drawing more concretely on Collins’s notion of‘genericity,’ which I will develop as intrinsic to the performance of metacinema incontemporary film. The staple film form – genre – is reconstituted as a new system of text, a
discursive formality manifested in the films of Sergio Leone, Quentin Tarantino, Clint
Eastwood, Robert Zemekis and, to a lesser degree, John Carpenter.
The chapter will return to a more conventional approach to text in which the analysis
is grounded in a comparative overview of several films and filmmakers. This approach is toreveal a film aesthetic that is anchored in the activity of film viewing, film reflection and film
‘discussion.’ Discussion connotes an aesthetic engagement with film in a communal forum inwhich meaning is derived not in some traditional unravelling of the text, but rather something
approaching Barthes’s ‘playing’ of the post-structuralist text. This is fundamentally acollective and, increasingly in film aesthetics, communal experience. The spectacle aesthetic
is implicated in questions of a new authenticity, a new cinematic Real, and ultimately a‘performance cinema’ that renders the demarcation between text and spectator obsolete.3 I
will argue also that this aesthetic is intrinsic to a cinematic subjectivity, for which everythingis in a sense performed onscreen.
In concluding this thesis, I return to a point at which it began: engaging the aesthetic
impulse. I am convinced by McCann’s assessment of what needs to be done to make film
theory meaningful for a contemporary culture that knows its films in ways far removed fromtraditional theorists:
Film theory needs to think less of itself and more of the movies. It must spend less timeseeking to ingratiate itself with academic grandees and more time trying to appeal to movie
3

See Purse, 157, in which she offers a similar conclusion in her analysis of bullet-time in The Matrix: aconvergence of the spatial frame occupied by cinematic text and spectator. See also Collins. However, I would
argue that such formulations, now passé in contemporary theories of film, are indebted to the classical wave of
post-structuralist theory. In my own experience of this movement, Barthes is a voice to which I invariably
return.

158

audiences. It has come to respect the film, but it has still to love the movie. If film theory is
to be for something really worthwhile, it had better be for people other than theorists.4

I am not aligning myself with each of McCann’s claims; my project is at least in partindebted to a rich legacy of film theory and analysis. Yet I share his view that film theory
stops well short of ‘loving’ the movies, and until such a transformation in the ontology of thetheorist takes place, film theory resides in an opposing camp to the object of its theory, andthis will always be a profound limitation.
4.2 The Metacinematic Lens
Broadly speaking, I perceive three forms of the metacinematic aesthetic that will form afoundation to the argument that follows: the performance of genre (‘genericity’), various
image strategies in recent cinema, and the inception of postmodern narrative devices. In thesection on postmodern narrative, I trace a departure from the classical narrative frame thatfunctioned as a staple of studio era cinema. Singin’ in the Rain and Double Indemnity are two
noteworthy examples of the conventional use of the frame in which the action departs fromand then returns to a point of origin. In Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Fincher’s Fight
Club, I will argue that the narrative frame is collapsed, and that the distinction between
diegetic and non-diegetic utterance is blurred.
The aesthetic I attempt to chart is founded upon a rejection of classical realism. But
whereas Citizen Kane and classical noir cinema are merely retroactively ‘metacinematic,’ thecinema of Sergio Leone and Quentin Tarantino embraces this aesthetic as the point of artistic
inception. In this new aesthetic sensibility, cinema is ultimately a cinema of style and an
aestheticisation of prior cinematic representations. This is all to say that Leone and Tarantino(or the less well known John Carpenter and Brian De Palma) approach the aesthetics ofcinema in a very different way to their much idealised predecessors of the Hollywood studioera or the European art-cinema scene of the 60s and 70s. Leone and Tarantino think
differently about film: the way it is ‘created,’ the way in which it functions on an audience –essentially what it is. I contend that their audiences are required to do the same.
The innovation towards metacinema – and more specifically, the departure fromclassical realism – occurs earlier than Tarantino and his postmodern coterie. But whereas

4

McCann, 33.

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something like Michelangelo Antonioni’s masterpiece about the irresolution of the cinematic
image – Blow-Up – clearly establishes a dialectic between meaning and a lack of meaning,
Tarantino’s cinema embraces only a unique form of cinematic meaning in which thetraditional dialectic is rendered obsolete. Tarantino’s cinema ‘means’ only through cinematic
topoi (to recall Eco’s very useful term). Antonioni’s great modernist defeat of meaning – one
recalls the photographer’s (David Hemmings) eyes as they traverse the path of an imaginary
tennis ball in the concluding scene in Blow-Up – seems a quaint intellectualism whenmeasured alongside Tarantino’s cinematic ‘caricatures,’ or the character ephemera of pastcinema, television, pulp novels, tabloid magazines, and mainstream film iconomania. For
Tarantino, the cinematic imaginary is indeed ‘even better than the real thing.’ As thephotographer vanishes from a once resolute and wholly integral realism of the image in
Antonioni’s film, so the classical modernist auteur of the 60s, viewed retrospectively fromthe 90s, becomes a thing of the past. Antonioni’s meditation on the ephemeral image is tragic
and yet triumphant in its expression of a dialectic of truth/reality, constructed images and thepsychological imaginary. Tarantino’s cinematic simulacra have little of this pathos or
profundity. I should however stress that, in my argument, such a lack in Tarantino’s cinema(or Leone’s) is not regarded as debasement of an earlier modernist aesthetic mode.
4.3 Character Acting
In Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, an undercover policeman, Mr Orange (Tim Roth), must
insinuate his way into a party of criminals who are planning to rob a bank. The film is not aconventional heist film; the heist is conspicuously missing from the final cut apart from a
momentary flashback of the aftermath. Reservoir Dogs might be considered an
unconventional character study, although this would surely not take account of the generic
aspects of the characters and storyline. The anonymity of the characters (and theirdesignation by colour) is a familiar trope of this kind of genre crime story. Paul Auster uses asimilar device in Ghosts, a novella in New York Trilogy.5 The device in Auster’s novel
functions as a neat realisation of the ubiquity of types in generic fiction. I want to make asimilar claim of Tarantino’s films that Auster seems to make of the novel: that the
representation of an object (whether cinematic or novelistic), or an ‘objective reality,’ draws
5

Paul Auster, New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room (London: Faber and Faber, 1987),
133-196160

that object field into its mimetic construct. This chapter is in part an attempt to conceptualise
and ultimately come to terms with this kind of textual awareness as it is performed inmainstream cinema.
The challenge posed by Reservoir Dogs seems to be a self-aware mediation between
the serious character film (“I don’t believe in tipping” as social commentary, “you’re fuckinBaretta” as a pop culture (and all the more serious) take on contemporary mainstream
masculinity) and the generic escapism of crime capers such as The Hot Rock or Topkapi. The
viewer must negotiate these separate aesthetics modes, a verisimilitude to a traditional formof realism, and equally a verisimilitude to a traditional form of generic realism. Before Mr
Orange (Tim Roth) can meet his crew, he must literally assume his character. He must
materialise within the script in which Mr Orange plays the lead role; in a sense, the action
involving Mr Orange in Reservoir Dogs is always already a script within a script. Tarantino
does the same for Jules (Samuel Jackson) and Vincent (John Travolta) in Pulp Fiction.
Arriving early to collect Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase, they “hang back” to discuss theincident involving Tony Rocky Horror. Here the duo assumes the mantle of new age sensitive(hit)men who debate a broad range of issues. When Vincent suggests a foot massage isinherently more than Platonic, Jules says, “It’s an interesting point.” The measured remark
functions as a coda to one of several inventive dialogue set pieces.
The discussion is left behind as Jules says, “let’s get into character,” and the two
assume the mantle of generic hitmen, leaving behind the less than conventional hitmen they
were out on the landing. The hitmen of the landing resemble their counterparts in Reservoir
Dogs. The opening sequence of Reservoir Dogs is an elaborate introduction to the ‘band ofoutsiders’ in which they discuss the subtext of Madonna’s Like a Virgin and debate the meritsof tipping at a coffee shop. In Pulp Fiction, Jules and Vincent, shortly before assuming theconventional hitmen mantle, discuss the contemporary mores of dating. The transition fromone kind of hitman/robber into the generic role is an act of “getting into character” for the
personas that inhabit Tarantino’s metacinematic universe. The implication of this textual
strategy is that all characters are merely imitating prior textual roles – in Tarantino’s case,almost exclusively cinematic. In the shooting script of Kill Bill, Volume 1, Tarantino
designates a fast zoom as “a quick Shaw-Brothers-style Zoom into her [the Bride’s] eyes.”6

6

Quentin Tarantino, Kill Bill, Volumes 1 and 2 – Shooting Script. “Chapter 2.”

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The next sequence, a flashback, is designated in the script as “Flashback – Spaghetti Western
Style.”7 The set piece in the church that concludes with the massacre is almost a reproductionof two sequences in Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West: the arrival of Jill McBain(Claudia Cardinale) in Sweetwater and the confrontation between Frank (Henry Fonda) andHarmonica (Charles Bronson). The Bride is of course the generic Woman With No Name. For
Tarantino, even the cinematic shot (set-up, cropping, cut) is a composition of prior filmic
references. Leone did the same thing in each of his films. While a great deal has been written
about allusionism, pastiche, blank irony, quotation (and it has been explored at some length
in this thesis), I am not convinced that current theories of postmodern cinema appreciate thisaesthetic mode for what it is.
“Bad acting is bullshit in this job.”
Mr Orange receives instruction from his partner to use a “humorous anecdote” forauthenticity. From the rooftop in which Roth is instructed to play a part as undercover cop (inthe same sense in which all Tarantino characters are undercover players), the scene cuts to
Mr Orange’s apartment in which he is preparing to go downstairs to meet Nice Guy Eddie(Chris Penn). The sequence is a Tarantinoesque ritual in which a film character must “getinto” a generic character.8 Mr Orange wanders through the apartment to a song thatapparently plays on a radio. The country-western tune is less evocative of a real time andplace than of a cinematic past; Tarantino no doubt recalls the road film and its plethora ofdiner and road stop scenes in which jukeboxes are perpetually playing the same-sounding
tunes. Mr Orange says his spiel in front of a mirror (in which he transforms into “fucking
Baretta,” who is “super-cool”). The medium shot is held in a deeper focus to bring into relief
a poster Mr Orange has on his bedroom wall: Silver Surfer. Silver Surfer is a comic strip
character that identifies Jim McBride’s remake of Godard’s Breathless.9 Significant here (andexemplary of Tarantino’s cinema) is his acknowledgement on film (a cinematic selfawareness) of a lineage of films that are generic performances. Both Godard’s and McBride’s<http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Kill-Bill-Volume-1-&2.html> Internet Moviescript Database. Accessed 10 Oct.
2005.
7
Tarantino.
8
For an excellent reading of this sequence, see Peter Travis, “The Critics Commentary.” Reservoir Dogs DVD:
Collector’s Edition.
9
Travis, “The Critics Commentary.”

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Breathless are cut in this mould; perhaps Tarantino prefers McBride’s version because it is
all the more explicit as a commentary on cinema, and specifically, genre cinema.
Tarantino’s films make unique demands of its audiences. I have never considered
Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction or even Kill Bills, Volumes 1 and 2 as revolutionary as somecritics in its use of unconventional plotlines, characters, dialogue, dramatic situations, settingsor music. Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross has wittier dialogue; Lynch’s Mulholland Drive ismore interesting narratively and thematically; Scorsese’s Goodfellas or Casino (or anything
by Leone) is surely more innovative (and inventive) stylistically (and more specifically,
photographically) than anything in Tarantino’s oeuvre. But I do contend that Tarantino’s
cinema inaugurated a new wave as influential and potentially transforming as the Italian NeoRealism of the 40s or the French New Wave of the 60s. The initial transformation did notoccur at the site of a new media culture or pop culture sensibility, but at the point of atransformation in the ontology of the cinematic story itself, which relies increasingly in thelast two decades on reality’s immersion in cinematic texts, and on the ascendance of film as
the dominant art form. I argue that Tarantino is the first real film auteur because his cinematic
texts know no boundaries other than those that are already cinematic. In this respect, I regard
Godard’s Breathless as a genuine precursor to the new aesthetic. But for Godard, cinema wasalways a site of contestation. It was always necessarily a political art form, if not ‘merely
political.’ Tarantino’s brand of auteurism is a convergence of spectator/filmmaker/theoristthat expresses a new cinematic culture divorced from prior aesthetic modes. Tarantino
vacillates between an auteuristic self creating such diverse works as Reservoir Dogs andFrom Dusk Till Dawn, while appearing on American Idol as a guest judge. Apparently,
Tarantino is a fan of several Reality Television shows. I cannot imagine Godard or any of the
New Wave auteurs doing the equivalent in 1960s European popular culture forums.
Shortly after the release of Pulp Fiction, film and literature courses found space intheir syllabuses for Tarantino. Film scholars wanted to write about Tarantino now – as if to
do so in retrospect would be to lose the essence of his cinema, or to shed the vitality of thiscinematic moment that was quintessentially ‘postmodern.’ One of my formative experiences
as a film scholar was studying postmodernism through the rubric of Tarantino and Lynch;
Lynch was ‘serious’ postmodernism, Tarantino was ‘playful’ postmodernism. Vincent’s
utterance in Jack Rabbit Slim’s – “That’s a fuckin good milkshake. I don’t know if it’s five
dollars, but it’s pretty fuckin good” – seemed to offer something altogether new, yet analyses

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of Tarantino fell back on the wholly conventional. Tarantino “did good dialogue” orTarantino responded to the fascination and repulsion toward violence in contemporarycinema.10 Perhaps the nearest claim to what I would consider is genuinely revolutionary in
Tarantino’s cinema is that he infuses his characters and storylines with a plethora of pop
terminology and iconography, past and present, a functioning “wax museum with a pulse.”
Yet even this observation does not take account of the impact of the imbrication of such an
aesthetic sensibility. Jameson might call it pastiche, the limitations of which I discussed in
Chapters Two and Three. Other critics have called it a form of blank irony, which isinvariably substituted for pastiche at some point. But in what sense is this cinematic
performance – genericity – creative, and more crucially, impacting aesthetically on amainstream audience?
Simply put, what accounts for the almost universal designation of the 90s as thedecade of Tarantino, as perhaps the 70s was the decade of Scorsese, Coppola and Altman?
How does one conceptualise Tarantino’s legacy and a legacy of cinema that defines anaesthetic of what Jim Collins calls ‘genericity’? I use the term legacy pointedly here: I am
arguing that what is now quaintly ‘Tarantinoesque’ or ‘postmodern chic’ was manifested in
the cinema of this period and self-consciously in the films of Tarantino. If Scorsese, Coppolaand Altman were seriously minded filmmakers (rather than artists), Tarantino was theequivalent for the 90s – but without the ‘critical distance,’ to use Adorno/Jameson parlance.
If Scorsese, Coppola and Altman wanted to ‘say something,’ Tarantino wanted to ‘makemovies.’ I recently saw an interview with Tarantino in which he lamented the end of themission/war film hybrid that gained popularity in the 60s; he mentioned Where Eagles Darein this context. It was his contention that the serious war film of the 70s – Apocalypse Now,
The Deer Hunter – rendered the action/adventure/war film hybrid obsolete. His next project,
he claimed, was an epic scale war film that was going to be fun.
In attempting to trace this cinematic legacy prior to Tarantino, I draw on Sergio
Leone’s Dollars Trilogy11 and Once Upon a Time in the West, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven,and to a lesser extent, the impact of Robert Zemekis and John Carpenter on mainstream and
10

See, for example, Grant; for an analysis of sequences in Pulp Fiction as “orchestrated violence” (andTarantino’s use thereof to explore conventions of cinematic violence), see Marsha Kinder, “Violence American
Style: the Narrative Orchestrations of Violent Attractions.” In Violence and American Cinema, ed. J. David
Slocum (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 81-84.
11
Per Un Pugno di Dollari (A Fistful of Dollars); Per Qualche Dollaro in Più (For a Few Dollars More);
Buono, Il Bruttto, Il Cattivo, Il (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly).

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B-grade Hollywood cinema. It is more than merely noteworthy that a character in Carpenter’sAssault on Precinct 13 says: “I have something to do with death,” quoting a line of dialogue
from Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. It is also significant that the line is quoted as aseminal cinematic quotation, a statement that has become synonymous with Leone’s films
and the Spaghetti Western in general. Carpenter’s quotation is exemplary of a film aesthetic
that is an essential part of contemporary cinema and mainstream viewing practices. It is
fascinating to observe a cinematic ‘conversation’ between several filmmakers through asingle cinematic sequence.12 In Kill Bill, Volume 1, Copperhead (Daryl Hannah) is set on
finally executing The Bride (Uma Thurman). Tarantino has suggested that Hannah’s
character is drawn loosely from a figure in an obscure Swedish action/revenge film, but thesequence in which Hannah walks down a corridor is a stylistic quotation of several sequencesin Brian De Palma’s films. The use of split-screen, that seems so outmoded in contemporarycinema, moulds perfectly into Tarantino’s metacinematic commentary. The spectator recalls
De Palma’s Carrie or Dressed To Kill and his almost obsessive use of the split-screen. And
yet Tarantino’s quotation is merely a ‘reply’ to De Palma’s quotation of Hitchcock in Carrie,Sisters or Obsession. Thus, Tarantino’s invocation of De Palma’s split-screen quotation of
Hitchcock is simultaneously an invocation of the stylistics of Hitchcock. Tarantino and De
Palma are performing cinema rather than representing a non-cinematic Real. The several
quotations function as a stream of metacinematic dialogue.
I am not arguing that contemporary popular cinema is dominated by themetacinematic text. Instead, I argue that conventional textual realism has always been andcurrently is the dominant aesthetic mode. Cinema continues to be classified as the nearest
approximation of an external reality; a cinema that no longer engages mimetically with thisexternal reality is aberrant. However, the most significant, innovative, and potentially
impactful challenge to cinematic realism lies in ‘metacinema,’ and for this reason it is crucial
to any theory of a new film aesthetic.

12

See Gerald Peary (ed.), Quentin Tarantino Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1998), 28:“When I was 18 or 19, I was going to write a book on genre filmmakers – John Flynn, Joe Dante, John Milius,Richard Franklin – and engage them in a conversation about movies.” Implicit in Tarantino’s comment is thenotion that films are connected in a way that filmmakers and films recognise.

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4.4 Foregrounding Genericity: the Limitations of Classical Film Genre[There are] two aspects that define the text as an utterance: its plan (intention) and therealization of this plan. The dynamic interrelations of these aspects, their struggle,
determine the nature of the text. Their divergence can reveal a great deal.13

My discussion of genre in this section focuses less on a broad-based analysis of genre than on
the generic film as it was produced by the major Hollywood studios. Taking Neale’s cue, I
focus on Hollywood’s genre cinema, and particularly on the notion of genre cinema as a partof popular culture from the 1930s. Drawing on the concept of ‘genericity’ in recent cinema, I
focus on the recuperation of several classical genre forms in films such as Blade Runner andSe7en. I consider in more detail Tarantino’s revisions of classical film noir and heist films,
and Leone’s and Eastwood’s revisions of the Western.
Studies of genre have been at the forefront of cinema since its inception in the late
Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) is anearly example of the Western and a precursor to the heist film, a hybrid genre form thatdeveloped in subsequent decades (Rififi is noteworthy is this respect). The Wizard of Oz canbe seen as a fantasy adventure story. Samson and Delilah is a biblical epic of the kind that
was a Hollywood staple in the 1940s and 50s. Even Citizen Kane offers a generic plotline inits conventional mystery story and investigation of the meaning of Rosebud. In fact, later in
his career, Welles conceded that the Rosebud solution was more a gimmick for audiences
craving an answer to Kane’s inherent mystery.14 Rosebud was the narrative trope the film
needed to transform a conventional biography into a generic entertainment. Kane might be
the greatest film ever made, but one wonders if the accolades would have been forthcoming
for a Hollywood product with a genuinely non-realistic thematic/narrative/character conceit.
Genre is a form of classification, a retrospective moulding together of qualities thatdefine the genre film, or a film genre, a distinction Schatz upholds.15 The distinction forms a
problematic in the conceptual framework of genre theory. On the one hand, a genre film
conforms to setting, character traits and recognisable themes: Ford’s Stagecoach and The
13

M. M. Bakhtin, “The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology and the Human Sciences: An Experimentin Philosophical Analysis.” In M. M. Bakhtin: Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson andMichael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 104.
14
Welles and Bogdanovich, 53.
15
Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (Austin: McGraw-Hill,1981), 16.

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Searchers reconstruct a vision of the American West as frontier territory inhabited bycharacter types. Both films engage with the uniquely American symbolism of the frontier as a
New World, a conduit between an older form of civilisation and a new modernity. The
Searchers is particularly interesting in this respect. Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) is a man
returned from the Civil War in which a system of older values has been eradicated. Ford’s
humanistic vision stands in opposition to later visions of the loss of self and a traditional
morality. Sergio Leone, whom Baudrillard considers the first postmodern filmmaker,16
perfects the generic typing of setting and character in his Dollars Trilogy, in which the antihero is a meta-generic ‘Man With No Name.’ Leone reprised the Man With No Name type in
the character of Harmonica (Charles Bronson) in Once Upon a Time in the West.
The genre film is problematic insofar as it intrudes into the neatly (andretrospectively) formed film genre. The problem arises in the definition of genre itself, forwhich we can revert to Bakhtin. The film genre component of Schatz’s paradigm works with
Bakhtin’s text as formal system, the “dynamic interrelations” of the text’s intention and modeof realisation. Thomson describes (negatively) a traditional formalist approach to genre as“an abstract construct that is situated at a higher level than the individual literary work.
Missing from what is essentially a hierarchical and classificatory scheme is an account of
how we move from specific text to generic type.”17 Bakhtin offers an advance on this rigid
hierarchical model: “as an utterance (or part of an utterance) no one sentence, even if it has
only one word, can ever be repeated: it is always a new utterance (even if it is a quotation).”18
In this sense, the genre film, while conforming to type, offers a reorganisation of the contoursof the film genre. The necessity for Schatz’s distinction – and the veracity of Bakhtin’s
theory – is certainly played out in the Spaghetti Western of the 1960s. Leone’s films are acommentary on the genre form, yet they are simultaneously generic. Few spectators would
argue that the Dollars trilogy is something other than Westerns, yet it very deliberately offers
a departure from the classical Western of Ford (Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, The
Searchers) or Hawks (Red River, Rio Bravo). A film such as The Good, The Bad, and The
Ugly bears the intent (Bakhtin) of the filmmaker to create a system of generic types while

16

Cited in Christopher Frayling, “Commentary.” Once Upon a Time in the West DVD. Two Disc Special
Edition.
17
Clive Thomson, “Bakhtin’s ‘Theory’ of Genre.” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 9, no. 1 (1984). 30.
18
Bakhtin, 108.

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concurrently reorganising and altering the generic form, semantically and syntactically.19
Leone explicitly quotes Ford’s long shots of Monument Valley (Once Upon a Time in theWest) or the inventive camera shot beneath a running locomotive20 that features in Ford’sStagecoach. Yet the storyline of Once Upon a Time in the West – a generic plot in which the
Old West makes way for the New Frontier – is handled with a sincerity and absence of irony
that recalls The Searchers, or the stoicism of George Stevens’s Shane. The exchange between
Harmonica and Frank (Henry Fonda) about the loss of the traditional hero is a moving
account of what Leone’s films embody: a passing of a kind of Western, and indeed, a kind ofcinema. The passing of the Old West in Leone is equally a passing of the Old Western, and assuch maintains a duality as genre form and generic quotation. The elaborate civil war battlein The Good, The Bad and The Ugly achieves a similar effect, combining the (original)
generic utterance and the generic utterance as quotation. Eastwood cares for a fatallywounded soldier in perhaps the most tender moment in Leone’s work, only to don the antiheroic mantle that must lead inexorably to the meta-cinematic Western shootout between theGood and the Bad (Leone inserts the fool, Tico (Eli Wallach), who is ultimately spared).
Underwood’s City Slickers achieves a more recent synergy of original utterance and genericquotation. The protagonist (Billy Crystal) is cast as a man suffering a mid-life crisis in the
midst of a cattle-drive weekend vacation. The vacation is a literal transposition of theWestern setting and character into a contemporary simulation. The frontier of the New Worldis reconfigured as a theme park Wild West (Baudrillard’s reading of Disneyland is interestingin this respect21) but maintains the value system of 1990s middle America. The presence ofJack Palance functions as an explicit quotation of his character in Shane, though Palance isrecast here as a sanguine reflection of the unremittingly evil villain. The protagonist learns to‘be a man’ through steering cattle through a storm and partaking of the wild Western ways ofthe traditional (and generic) American cowboy. Billy Crystal’s ‘everyman’ is a 1990s
incarnation of Tom Dunson (John Wayne) in Hawk’s Red River. The stirring Yeehaaahhh!
that initiates the cattle drive sequence in City Slickers is a quotation of its forebear in Red
19

See Rick Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.” Cinema Journal 23, no. 3 (1984), 10:“the semantic approach stresses the genre’s building blocks, while the syntactic view privileges the structures
into which they are arranged.” Altman argues that the explanatory power of genre criticism has been weakened
by its privileging of the semantic or syntactic approach to genre cinema.
20
Frayling describes this shot as a reproduction of a similar shot in Stagecoach. While Leone has notcommented on this relationship, the two shots are remarkably similar. See Frayling.
21
Jean Baudrillard, America. Trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 1988), 1: “Vanishing Point.”

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River. (Slim Pickens rides an atomic bomb after the same exclamation in Kubrick’s Dr.
Strangelove.)
If the genre film is an intrusion into the formalism of the film genre, in what way isgenre maintained as a classificatory and ordering system, and in what way are genre films
able to maintain their ‘genericity’? If, as Altman suggests, early genre theory follows aneither/or methodological approach to the semantic and syntactic components of film genre,22
what might a fuller account of film genres and genre films constitute? And what accounts forthe resilience of genre theory in the broader discipline of film studies?
First, genre foregrounds and ultimately privileges the formal organisation of texts,
and this is particularly true of popular cinema. As Eco suggests, “A popular song, a TVcommercial, a comic strip, a detective novel, a Western movie were seen as more or lesssuccessful tokens of a given model or type. As such, they were judged as pleasurable but
non-artistic.”23 The ‘organisational aesthetic’ (repetition, innovation, quotation) is thus
connected to the value of art as entertainment.24 The genre film is easy to follow; it has afamiliar storyline and a foreseeable outcome; it provides types and forms we recognise andfeel comfortable with; it assures us that conflict is necessary but resolvable, that distinctions
between good and bad exist (if they are not always distinct from each other) and that they are
maintained by a value system external to the plot. The genre film is accessible to a massculture because this culture has internalised its conventions and functionality. In this culture,
genre is the dominant cinematic form. It was the staple of the Hollywood studio system of the
30s, 40s and 50s, and has remained so in the era of blockbuster cinema and the film
franchise.
The visual structure of genre emphasises what Carroll calls the “pictorial
representation”:
These images [single shots – a close-up or long shot] are, for the most part,
representational, but, more important, they are pictorial representations. They refer to their
22

Altman, 10-11. As a response, Altman proposes that a study of “these two categories is complimentary, thatthey can be combined, and in fact that some of the most important questions of genre study can be asked only
when they are combined” (11).
23Eco, “Innovation and Repetition,” 162.
24
See Hollywood Blockbusters: The Top Grossing Films of All Time, introduction: “Movies are about fun,entertainment, sharing, and above all, sheer escapism.” Of course, the ideological theory of the Cahiers duCinema group, particularly the seminal essay by Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni,“Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” views the escapist/entertainment aesthetic as diversion and repression strategies
by an industrialised Hollywood machine.

169referents by way of picturing, by displaying or manifesting a delimited range ofresemblances to their referents. By recognizing these similarities, the spectator comes toknow what the picture depicts, whether a man, a horse, a house, and so on.25

Carroll accounts for the popularity of mainstream cinema as “pictorial representations [that]differ radically from linguistic representations. The speed with which the former is masteredsuggests that it does not require special learning…Rather, the capacity to recognize what a
picture depicts emerges in tandem with the capacity to recognize the kind of object thatserves as the model of the picture.”26 Carroll’s contention seems to be that popular cinema
functions through an inherent familiarity; the pictorial offers the accessibility of arecognisable form. While I feel this is an oversimplification of the appeal of popular cinema,
I agree that the popularity of mainstream cinema is related (if not proportional) to its degreeof accessibility. The Silence of the Lambs is a rich and complex genre hybrid, yet was one of
the box office hits of 1991 and can be credited with establishing the commercial viability ofthe serial killer genre as divorced from the staple and tested ‘crime film.’ Generic oversimplicity perhaps accounts for recent box-office flops such as Catwoman and Daredevil, or
the tawdry crime films Double Jeopardy (the reference to Double Indemnity is misleading;the film achieves nothing of Double Indemnity’s virtuosity as noir) and The Bone Collector.
The acceptability of genre by mass culture (the crucial legitimation that is withheld
from the art film) derives from its status as a popular form. Genre is equally ‘of the people,’ apopular form constructed and conventionalised for the masses, but authorised and legitimatedby its popularity. One of the more obvious contrasts between the genre film of classical
Hollywood cinema and the art film of the 1960s and 1970s27 produced within the Hollywood
system is the linear structure of its narrative and the emphasis on resolution and narrative
closure. There are remarkably few films that could be considered mainstream successes thatdepart from conventional narrative forms. Similarly, one could contrast Jim Carey’s Joel
Barish (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) with his embodiment of the generic everyman
in Truman Burbank (The Truman Show). Barish exemplifies an art film whimsy anddissociation from a conventional (generic) external reality, Truman is the epitome of thatgeneric role; Carey’s often hyperbolic performance even lends itself to caricature.
25

Carroll, “The Power of Movies,” 82.
Carroll, “The Power of Movies,” 83.
27
Consider Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971), Malick’s Badlands (1973), Scorsese’s Mean Streets(1973) or even Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), which is clearly not classical noir in the spirit of The Maltese
Falcon (1941) or The Big Sleep (1946).
26

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Jancovich, discussing the work of James Naremore and Andrew Tudor, suggests thatapproaches to the study of genre, while dissimilar structurally,
illustrate the point that genre definitions are not simply of academic interest, but have far
greater currency and significance. Both also emphasise that genre definitions are produced
more by the ways in which films are understood by those who produce, mediate andconsume them, than they are by the internal properties of the films themselves.28

The currency stems from the notion that generic properties are in some sense a reflection of acultural reality; genre is an indicator of the kinds of stories, characters and ideas that piquethe enthusiasm of mainstream audiences and mainstream cultures. This is no doubt the case.
Genre cinema is connected to the structure of an external reality as formulaic, or alreadyfamiliar. Perhaps there is also a sense of the generic role or story as partaking of a collective
mythic store and reconfiguring that myth as textual trope. However, the shortcoming of
Jancovich’s approach lies in the less thorough treatment of the internal properties of genre
films, a shortcoming that is all the more apparent when one considers the stylistic andthematic of the work of Leone, Tarantino, Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson and Christopher
Nolan as genred properties. In this field of postmodern cinema, or New Punk cinema, orsome other designation of contemporary innovative film practices, the integrity of genre
matters.
4.5 Genre and Contemporary Cinematic Forms
It is clear that the centrality of genre films in popular culture demands a strategy for assessing
the formal characteristics of generic forms, as well as their impact on audiences and cultures.
“What can be said about genre? It seems universally true that escapism rules when it comesto blockbusters.”29 I would add that escapism functions on a textual familiarity. The recent
increase in the number of remakes or sequels in Hollywood reflects the essential
conservatism in the studio production ethic. Genre cinema forms are bankable.
The pervasiveness of formal genre principles in the dominant mode of contemporarycinema (the franchise or blockbuster film) is a crucial aspect of any study of mainstream
28

Mark Jancovich, “Genre and the Audience: Genre Classifications and Cultural Distinctions in the Mediationof The Silence of the Lambs.” In Horror: The Film Reader, ed. Mark Jancovich (London: Routledge, 2002),
152.
29
For an analysis of the highest grossing films, see Hollywood Blockbusters: The Top Grossing Films of All
Time, 8-9.

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cinema. If the dominance of cinema in popular culture is contingent on an element ofescapism, genre is central to the development of this trend from classical Hollywood to thepresent. Braudy suggests thatthe typical genre situation is a contrast between form and content. With the expectations ofstock characters, situations, or narrative rhythms, the director can choose areas of freeaesthetic play within. In genre films the most obvious focus of interest is neither complex
characterization nor intricate visual style, but pure story. Think about the novel we can’t put
down. That rare experience in literature is the common experience in film.30‘Pure story,’ I would argue, relies on a sense of storied patterns, familiar narratives, stock
character types and settings – in short, the elements of genre. Braudy is correct to suggest thatgenre offers a realm of aesthetic play, but it is a realm that is constrained by genericprinciples. The parameters of genre are an aesthetic point of impact. The boundaries of thegenre story or characterisation, to use Braudy’s fields of inquiry, invigorate the familiar
patterns into something immediate, vital and authentic. Citing Ian Eng, Jancovich suggeststhat “it is not the fact of differences [of tastes in popular culture] but ‘the meaning ofdifferences that matter.’”31 One could equally argue that the boundaries of genre respond to aset of prescribed tastes that are different in specific ways and that reflect the differences ingeneric plots and characters. The internal properties of genre matter as sites of cultural
meaning when consumed by the spectator. Thus, even familiar plotlines or characters are insome sense invigorating. This is not to conflate invigoration as a response to a mode ofcreativity with a more traditional sense of ‘originality’; I am not arguing that genre cinema
aspires to a classical aesthetic of originality.
While genre studies presents a number of shortcomings as a cinematic meta-theory,32
cinema is increasingly reliant on generic forms to be commercially viable. But of evengreater significance is the pervasiveness of generic tendencies in even the most selfconscious art film. Bordwell contends that “the art film defines itself explicitly against the30

Leo Braudy, “Genre: The Conventions of Connection.” In Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy andMarshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 668.
31
Jancovich, “Genre and the Audience,” 152.
32
See David Bordwell, “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice.” Film Criticism 4, no. 1 (1979), 56-60.
Bordwell suggests that there are clear distinctions between the classical narrative and what he calls the “artfilm.” In this case, a theory privileging the study of genre in cinema must neglect Antonioni’s L’Avventura,
Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Coppola’s The Conversation. However, I am persuaded by Eco that genre is morepervasive than contemporary literary theory acknowledges – see Eco, “Innovation and Repetition,” 174.

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classical narrative mode, and especially against the cause-effect linkage of events.”33 But thenature of the distinction between art film and commercial genre product is increasingly
difficult to locate. I appreciate Bordwell’s detailed analysis of the distinction between genre
films and art films, but a complication arises if we revert to Schatz’s distinction between thegenre film and film genre, which might equally (and even more pronouncedly) apply to the
distinction between the art film and ‘film art.’ While Bordwell draws on a hefty body of workfrom the 50s, 60s and 70s in service of the art film aesthetic (Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman,
Godard, Truffaut), the obvious thematic and, particularly, formal disparities between, forexample, Blow-Up (1966) and In the Heat of the Night (1967) are not as clear in 2005.34
While art house cinemas have continued to operate in spite of the assault on cinema-goingpractices by the multiplex, art films have greatly changed. Who could fill the oversized,
auteur-empowered shoes of an Antonioni, Fellini or Kurosawa, particularly as auteur theory
has suffered a galvanising attack by Schatz and other genre theorists? David Thomson’slament for an auteurist cinema of the past privileges the director with too much control of thecinematic product and conflates film with a more individualist creative art. For Thomson,“Robert Bresson, Bergman, Kurosawa, Antonioni” constitute the great auteurs. “But there is
not an American filmmaker working today, or even alive, who is unmistakably of the first
rank.”35 For Thomson, no living filmmaker is good enough simply because the material andaesthetic conditions for the production of the ‘art film’ no longer exist.
The emphasis on the art film as inherently a kind of film art that is divorced fromgenre is increasingly obtuse when measured alongside the films produced each year by the
major studios. To some extent, it may be said that Fellini, Antonioni and Bergman draw theirformal inspiration from a mode of European modernism and the avant garde. For thesefilmmakers, cinema was an art form. The production aesthetic of this form of cinema wasmore concretely established as an auteuristic impulse or a traditional form of creativity. Film
production – even production of a genre cinema in Hollywood’s 40s and 50s – was equally
art if it was artful. This was particularly the case of the French New Wave revisionist
assessment of the Hollywood auteurs, Welles, Ford and Hitchcock. In contrast to what
33

Bordwell, “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,” 57.
Worth noting is De Palma’s fascinating remake of Blow-Up, Blow-Out (1981). De Palma, as he has done on
several occasions, reworks the art film aesthetic as genre piece. Consider also the quotation of the Odessa Steps
sequence in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, reconfigured in De Palma’s The Untouchables as an operaticshoot-out in Chicago’s own version of Grand Central Station.
35
David Thomson, “Who Killed the Movies,” 62.
34

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Thomson considers the golden age of cinematic invention in the 70s, contemporary cinematic
practices (from production to consumption) have effectively divorced the product from therealm of artistic authenticity. It is increasingly difficult to talk about any form ofcontemporary cinema (art film or genre film) as film art – increasingly, and belatedly, thefilm theorist no longer feels the invocation to do so.
Cinema is simply no longer a traditional art form that conforms to the hierarchicalgradations of high art, mediocre art and trash. Rather, the once vital art film aesthetic finds
dilution in major production and distribution deals, but more significantly, in selfacknowledged generic or formulaic stories. Teaching a class recently on what I considered a
range of ‘essential films,’ I was astonished to discover that James Cameron’s Aliens waseffortlessly dispatched by the majority as mainstream trash, or generic junk. Even moreinteresting was the corollary notion that while a film might be ‘essential’ to a particular
spectator (or theoretical discourse), it might also be of little artistic merit and thus unworthyof the kind of spectating demanded by the previous week’s essential films, Apocalypse Now
and Taxi Driver. Aliens was exemplary of a time and place – a “cultural logic,” to use
Jameson’s terminology – divorced from any meaningful criteria of artistic value. It became
apparent that for the majority of this class, a sustained viewing of the film was commensuratewith a lessening of the integrity of the spectator as theorist or critic. Aliens was thus anaberration on acceptable viewing practices.
The limitation of this form of artistic evaluation is that, on the one hand, Aliens isincreasingly considered a benchmark in contemporary film aesthetics; it thus demands
investigation. And secondly, Cameron’s form of blockbuster cinema with a B-Grade
Hollywood aesthetic traverses the spectrum of traditional hierarchical value usually reservedfor high culture art forms. Jancovich suggests that a traditional notion of artistic value isincreasingly difficult to apply to recent cinema; he refers to Alien and Aliens in support ofthis contention.36 But even more provocative is something like Almodóvar’s Bad Education,
which is magnificent as film noir, or neo noir, while simultaneously drawing on the genericbrand of the art film. Bad Education conforms to the aesthetic of ‘genericity,’ which is to say,the purest and yet most corrupt form of genre cinema. Art films in contemporary cinema
include I Heart Huckabees, The Triplets of Belleville, 2046 and Sin City, none of which

36

Jancovich, “Genre and Audience,” 152.

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conform to the great auteurist/art cinema Thomson describes. In each of these cinematic
works, the art film is less an innovative piece than a kind of generic film art.
The emergence of genre cinema and genre theory is connected to the emergence of
popular culture as the dominant cultural entity. This is nowhere more apparent, andprofessionally co-ordinated, than in television and its corollary interests (news media,
corporate advertising, Reality Television). The police procedural drama (Law and Order,
NYPD Blue) offers hybrid generic configurations of the 80s crime stories and popular
mysteries. Chris Carter describes The X-Files as a reworking of the television late night
horror shows of the 1970s, including Kolchak: The Night Stalker.37 Perhaps the best series toappear on television since Lynch’s Twin Peaks, The Sopranos offers the most complex formof genericity (the series in fact foregrounds this genericity in its numerous quotations ofgangster films and reality (Tony is compared to John Gotti on several occasions)). I discussed
the remarkable innovation of 24 and stress here only its genre hybridity (rather than
genericity, a distinction on which I will elaborate shortly). The phenomenon of Reality
Television functions as generic reality for prime-time audiences. Survivor draws on Robinson
Crusoe’s shipwrecked everyman and the communalisation of The Swiss Family Robinson(the hit series, Lost, ties into these generic topoi but engages with a Stephen King brand of
the popular macabre, an intriguing metaphysical structure completely unrecognisable inmainstream television, and a Survivor-type challenge of the human spirit). Big Brother isperhaps the most interesting example of Reality Television in its generic depiction (and yet
hyper-stylisation) of the banality of ‘real’ life. These banal existences are only palatable (andintriguing) when moulded to generic form through a complex editing strategy. Nondescript
individuals gradually germinate into recognisable generic types.
The following analysis of new genre strategies in cinema attempts to employ what
Jim Collins and others (Rick Altman among them) have described as “genericity.” In
Collins’s work, I take this to mean more than a conformity to genre or generic types incinema. Rather, for Collins genericity is a complex cinematic aesthetic evident in such films
as Blue Velvet, Back to the Future, Part III, and Thelma and Louise. What distinguishes
genericity from the genre film is

37

See Axel Kruse, “The X-Files: Entries on Meaning.” Sydney Studies in English 23 (1997-8), 110-111.

175

the recognition that the features of conventional genre films that are subjugated to suchintensive rearticulation are not the mere detritus of exhausted cultures past: those icons,
scenarios, visual conventions continue to carry with them some sort of cultural “charge” orresonance that must be reworked according to the exigencies of the present.38

While I will address this in some detail, we can begin here by assuming that genericity only
has meaning in relation to former generic strategies, and that it presents a qualitativetransformation of those strategies. I argue that genericity represents a vital transformation of
the generic text. Schatz, Neale, Altman, Braudy and others have examined the semantic andsyntactic features of genre. Genre theory has focused on the Western, the Musical, theAdventure Film and the Biblical Epic as staple generic styles in the classical Hollywood era.
Genericity offers a new approach that reconfigures genre and genre studies, and permits
finally a means by which to approach genre cinema as aestheticised patterns and textual
structures, an invigoration of formulaic art and a reinvention of pastiche as a profoundly
creative aesthetic strategy.
The three phases of genre – the classical (or ‘pure’) genre film, the genre hybrid, andgenericity (that is notable in the work of Leone in the 1960s) – are not chronological, andcertainly not uniform in their appearance and development. I am not offering a historicalaccount of the way in which genericity developed, except to say that it appears to haveemerged as a textual strategy in the 1960s, but has gained credibility in the mainstream onlyin the 1990s. While it is true that film noir as a category of story is more obviously
discernible in The Big Sleep or Double Indemnity (though the two are as interesting for their
dissimilarities as for their generic commonality), departures from the ‘pure’ generic form
occurred in the classical era as well as in later films.39 It should be stressed that genre is atheoretical tool, often servicing broad generalisations about film and culture. It is simple toclassify a film as fitting a particular genre after the genre has been well established in film
theory and practice. But it is also clear that genre films of the last two decades haveundergone a profound transformation that was not clearly apparent or overtly manifested in
the studio film of the classical era. Tarantino’s version of the heist film in Reservoir Dogs
does not mirror Dassin’s version in Rififi. Almodóvar’s ‘femme fatale’ in Bad Education
offers a gender reconfiguration of Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. And while Back to
38

Collins, 256.
Consider the femme fatale of Clouzot’s Les Diabolique (1954) as a variation of Stanwyck in Double
Indemnity, though the femme fatale is maintained as generic topoi.
39

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the Future, Part III is in some sense a Western, simply put, something else is going on that
dissociates its genericness from the traditions of genre cinema.
The ‘pure’ genre is a necessary conceptual tool in formulating a theory of genericity.
Film genre has never been pure, even in its formative period in the classical Hollywood
system. Generic ‘purity’ in my usage equates to a recognisable generic structure that
informed the classical genre film, rather than a body of films that exemplify the generic form;
this is a useful schematic for organising film history even though it is also a generalisation.
Ryan conceives of classical genre cinema as existing only in relation to the elements of its
generic form:
A return to the individual film and its analysis enables us to find an appropriate role for thesystem-building, the taxonomic and inventory-oriented activity that characterizes genre
criticism. Instead of asking the question, ‘To what genre does Mildred Pierce belong?’, it isnecessary to probe the consequences of positioning the film in relation to the various genres
to which it has a family resemblance.40

In this sense, genre is also a reinvention of the generic plotline or character in which the film
exists in relation to other films of its kind. Ryan situates genre studies within the very broad
rubric of classical genre films, and this strategy will be useful to maintain as we proceed.
Even a classic genre film such as Double Indemnity is not ‘pure’ or self-contained genre-fare.
Classical genre cinema, particularly film noir, was based upon a formula, but it was rarely
formulaic in the current pejorative sense.41 As Bakhtin suggests, the diversion from the formor system offers a dynamic way in which the text makes meaning. The ‘pure’ genre film isperhaps best thought of as a blueprint of film types that demonstrate a conformity to a single
generic structure. The Maltese Falcon may partake of a number of film types, but it is clearlyan early example of film noir (though noir was itself a development of earlier crime genres
and a European aesthetic sensibility, particularly German Expressionism). Stagecoach is anearly John Ford Western and has a very clear resemblance to his 1955 film, The Searchers,though The Searchers is thematically more complex and filmed in colour. Genre theory has
rarely settled on a conceptual framework that describes the similarities and differences infilms that form various genres. Neale suggests that “aside from film noir and40

See Tom Ryall, “Genre and Hollywood.” In American Cinema and Hollywood: Critical Approaches, ed. John
Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 110.
41
For an analysis of the criticism of popular art as formula, see Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art, 49-67.

177melodrama…genre critics and theorists have identified around a dozen major genres.”42 For
the purposes of this conceptual paradigm – pure genre, genre hybrid, genericity – I designate
Neale’s dozen genres ‘pure genre’ forms.
The genre hybrid may describe a particular film or film type. Hitchcock’s To Catch a
Thief is a combination of action-adventure, mystery and romantic comedy. Psycho is amystery, suspense thriller (a genre almost synonymous with Hitchcock) and perhaps theearliest example of the horror/slasher film. Sunset Boulevard is a variation on film noir but it
is also an early entry in a genre form that would develop in the sixties and seventies, ‘films
about Hollywood.’43 One could equally discuss Sunset Boulevard as partaking of theaesthetic of genericity; Gloria Swanson’s casting in the role of Norma Desmond (and her
attempt at a ‘return’ in a Cecil B. DeMille film) establishes a ‘cinematicality’ to thisnarrative.
However, the genre hybrid can also refer to a combination of ‘pure’ genres. Scott’s
Alien offers a hybrid form of the horror and science fiction genres while Cameron’s sequel,
Aliens, introduces the war film and adventure film into the original hybrid form. The hybrid
is less a rigid splicing of separate generic forms than a synthesis. Occasionally a film
foregrounds its generic hybridity (From Dusk Till Dawn - action thriller becomesvampire/slasher film) but I would argue that this is a manifestation of genericity rather than a
traditional genre hybrid. Eastwood’s Unforgiven (which I will discuss in some detail shortly)is a similar case in point in its awareness of its generic structure as well as the genre traditionof which it is a part. Neale argues that “many Hollywood films – and many Hollywood
genres – are hybrid and multi-generic. This is as true of the feature film as it is of an obvious
hybrid like musical comedy.”44 The hybrid then is less an innovation or commentary on puregenre forms than a textual structure that was concurrently employed by the major studios.45
The genre hybrid can be regarded as a form of genre unto itself.

42

Neale, 51.
For an overview of the development of this genre, see Christopher Ames, Movies About the Movies(Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1997), 3. Notable entries in the genre include Lumet’s Network andAltman’s The Player (apart from Wilder’s landmark Sunset Boulevard).
44
Neale, 51.
45
Neale, 5.
43178

4.6 Genericity: Beyond Genre
Genericity implies a performance of genre and a stylisation of the generic form. If the puregenre and genre hybrid were classical narrative forms that developed under the auspices ofthe studio system,46 genericity is a textual strategy that developed within the postmodern
aesthetic of reflexivity and textual self-awareness. The genericity film foregrounds its
construction out of generic (and often genre-clichéd) components. But unlike the pure genre
and hybrid, genericity is a cinematic aesthetic, a creative strategy that actively comments
upon and reconstitutes earlier generic types and texts. The pure genre and hybrid merely
serviced a storyline. As Braudy suggests, the classical genre form is “pure story.”47 The
contemporary spectator did not address Double Indemnity as a generic system that manifested
its constructedness. Recent film theory has addressed classical noir cinema as generic, but theclassical narrative did not practice an aesthetic in which generic composition was
instrumental. Rather, its genericness was merely a consequence of the commercial viabilityof genre forms and their acceptance by a mass audience. Genre was a form of escapism into
broad character types and recognisable story patterns.
The genericity film demonstrates two significant transformations on the pure genre
and genre hybrid forms. Collins alludes to genericity as a textual strategy: “I use the term
“genericity” here because I want to address not just specific genre films, but genre as acategory of film production and film viewing.”48 In the studio era, genre films were crucial to
the success of the studio. Studios invested in a number of genre films each year to guarantee
a return on their investment. The studio genre film was considered a product for the masses
that guaranteed the financial prosperity of the industry. “Maintaining certain formulas thatwould stabilize audience expectations and, by extension, stabilize those audiences, wasobviously in Hollywood’s best interests.”49 The genre film compensated for the experimental
projects, Citizen Kane and The Lost Weekend (though a studio could still bank on Billy
Wilder to carry some weight as director). The genre film was thus associated with the cultural
masses and the hegemony of the studio system, while dissociated from the art film and46

For a seminal analysis, see Bordwell, “Classical Hollywood: Narrational Principles and Procedures,” 17-34.
Braudy, 668.
48
Collins, 243.
49
Collins, 243.
47

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independently produced film (which was relatively rare). Genre cinema was commodity
cinema, the art film was individualised, creative and authored, rather than produced.50
In contrast to the bankable genre film that developed in a society for which cinema
was a relatively new art form, genericity took place in the era of a cinematic society that
Collins describes as a “media culture” manifesting a “profound ambivalence [to traditionalfilm genres] that reflects the lack of any sort of unitary mass consciousness.”51 Even morecrucially, Collins recognises the contemporary film spectator as attuned to a new “cinematic
literacy” that recognises the “entertainment value that the ironic manipulation of the stored
information [exemplifying the genericity aesthetic] now provides.”52 Genericity functions as
a viable cinematic aesthetic only in a postmodern culture in which audiences are familiar
with a plethora of recyclable cinematic narratives. There is an element of what Collins calls“cinematic literacy”53 in contemporary mainstream film viewing that I would argue was not apart of mainstream viewing practices in the classical era of cinema.
A second facet of genericity is the self-awareness of the genre text, a knowing andacknowledged textual artifice. While the pure genre is a hermetically sealed frame ofrepresentation that encapsulates story, character and theme, the generic performancenecessarily foregrounds its generic component structure, re-presenting what was once anoriginal textual utterance. Collins offers a detailed reading of Back to the Future, Part III as
an articulation of the Western.54 In Zemekis’s trilogy, film is itself subject to quotation; it is a
spoken (or written) utterance that is “always already so highly mediated.”55 In Back to the
Future, Part II, Hill Valley of 2015 is a vibrant stream of cinematic tropes. Marty is thecinematic flaneur who traverses a pop culture arena incorporating a Café 80s (in which
Michael Jackson, Ronald Reagan and the Ayatollah Khomeini contest for cultural
supremacy) and a holographic billboard of Jaws 19 (in which “the shark still looks fake”).
Crossing a street and almost run over by a car, Marty McFly Jr. calls out, “Hey, watch it! I’m
walking here, I’m walking here,” speaking the words of Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) in
Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy. Back to the Future is a deliberate and explicit quotation of

50

Schatz, “The Whole Equation of Pictures,” 92-93.
Collins, 262.
52
Collins, 249.
53
Collins, 249.
54
Collins, 242-243 and 248-249.
55
Collins, 247. My emphasis.
51

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the Americana of the 1950s that developed on film.56 In fact, the cinematic 1950s in Back to
the Future intrudes into the reality of the 1950s as recorded history. Thus, Marty McFly(Michael J. Fox) is overhead singing Johnny B. Good by Marvin Berry, the cousin of Chuck
Berry: “Chuck! It’s Marvin…Marvin Berry. You know that sound you’ve been looking for?
Well, listen to this.” A Chuck Berry that exists in the imaginary realm of the cinematic 1950s
inaugurates rock ‘n roll by quoting a performance of Johnny B. Good by a 1980s American
every-teenager (!). Zemekis manages to rewrite history on film in a similar way in Forrest
Gump.
In each of these cases, but most explicitly in Back to the Future, Part III, the film
demonstrates an awareness of its own immersion in ‘generic legacies.’ What makes Collins’s
reading of Back to the Future, Part III all the more compelling and provocative is the notionthat this self-awareness and exhibition of generic components provides a ‘cultural charge’ tothe spectator that is indeed a new way of experiencing mass entertainment.
4.7 Performing Genericity
Contemporary film criticism has been utterly unable to come to terms with these very
profound changes in the nature of entertainment because this hyperconscious eclecticism ismeasured against nineteenth-century notions of classical narrative and realist
representation.57

Drawing on Todorov’s work on the notion of verisimilitude in relation to “the fantastic,”
Steve Neale suggests that “Negotiating the balance between different regimes ofverisimilitude plays a key role in the relations established between spectators, genres andindividual films. In markedly non-verisimilitudinous genres these relations can beparticularly complex – and particularly fragile.”58 He concludes by suggesting that theemphasis on realism as an ideology in cinema (and more generally, art) “is to refuse toacknowledge the generic status of realism itself.”59 Presumably, verisimilitude forms thebasis of aesthetic and other forms of artistic engagement. Neale’s claim regarding non56

For an assessment of this form of 1980s Americana as ‘Reaganite Cinema,’ see Andrew Britton. “Blissing
Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment.” Movie 31/32 (1986), 13-15. Britton considers this form ofhegemonic cinema as exemplary of the inculcation of the Frankfurt’s School’s culture industry.’ See also Robin
Wood, “Papering the Cracks: Fantasy and Ideology in the Reagan Era.” In Movies and Mass Culture, ed. John
Belton (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 203-228.
57
Collins, 250.
58
Neale, 35.
59
Neale, 35.

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verisimilitudinous genres such as science-fiction, musicals and horror films is that, at somelevel, the generic representation must bear some relation to an object – that which it
represents. To disavow this relation is to negate the status of the representation. Perhaps one
might discuss abstract art as a move toward this negation of the object, though even this has
limitations; abstract impressionism bears some relation to a prior objective point of reference,
impressionism. Neale’s study of genre is a defence of the importance of generic forms –plotlines, characters and themes – to contemporary cinema and culture. For Neale, theverisimilitude inherent in generic representation on screen is a verisimilitude that matters.
At this point, it is instructive to set Neale’s verisimilitude in opposition to
Baudrillard’s notion of the reproduction without an antecedent object discussed in Chapter
Three. I drew on the simulacrum – the Matrix – as a useful metaphor to traverse the gap
between Baudrillard’s seemingly absurd claim regarding origins and points of reference andthe necessity of observing the very real challenge to traditional verisimilitude, or classicalrealism. The Matrix is a reproduction of the Real that bears the “residual image” of its
antecedent object. Rather than an image that is a literal reflection or reflective representationof the object, the relation between the Real and the simulacral representation lies in the statusof the residual image. The residual image, partaking of the original but transformed by theperformance of the simulation, operates as a discursive (rather than denotative or
connotative) system of meaning. The cinematic image is a hermetically enclosed frame of
meaning, drawing on its own origins that are self-reflective, forming its own cinematic
language. Metacinema in the current usage refers to a cinema that is about cinema. In myusage, the connotation is nearer to a cinema that is always already of cinema.
Tarantino’s brand of metacinema imbues the cinematic image with a life that isderived from an antecedent object located in a cinematic universe. The performance of
quotation, generic utterance, and ultimately, genericity, reinscribes the original utterance (theveracity of which is now redundant) into a cinematic simulacrum. Tarantino’s cinematic
images bear the verisimilitude of a cinematic simulation. In Pulp Fiction, Butch (Bruce
Willis), fleeing the scene of the fight he has ‘fixed,’ sits in the rear seat of a cab driven by
Esmeralda Villalobos (Angela Jones). When Esmeralda asks the meaning of his name, Butch
replies: “This is America. Our names don’t mean shit.” This is an American pop culture andpop cinema is which names are inscribed as cinematic tropes. Much of the extended sequence(which was trimmed in the final cut from a very lengthy (and laboured dialogue) is shot from182

the front of the taxi, with Esmeralda and Butch in focus. Tarantino uses a screen to shoot theexterior backdrop which displays a winding road as the cab makes its passage along a
dimply-lit road. The use of the screen in this case is particularly significant. Tarantino
simulates a shot that would have been used in a studio film of the 40s or 50s. The backdrop is
noticeably contrived, deliberately artificial. The quotation of a generic car interior (the yellow
cab synonymous with New York City (though almost all ‘New York’ exteriors of theclassical studio films were shot on Hollywood backlots)) and the backdrop that shifts in andout of a deliberately contrived focus recalls scenes out of Wilder’s film noir or Hitchcock’s
suspense thrillers. But whereas Wilder and Hitchcock were attempting the purest form of
realism that technology provided (the most perfect verisimilitude at hand), Tarantino
encapsulates the shot in a wholly anachronistic cinematic time and space. The result is adisorienting shot from the exterior of the cab of a classical studio vista in a 90s film.
Tarantino’s characters inhabit a world bordered only by cinema itself and the yellow cab
traverses a winding road that exists only onscreen.
I argued in Chapter Three that The Matrix required a sophisticated awareness of its
intertextual strategies to make sense of its storyline – specifically, to authorise Neo’s
resurrection at the conclusion of the film. I argue something similar in the case of Tarantino.
Tarantino’s films require an awareness of its intertextual (but more crucially, metacinematic)
strategies to appreciate its aesthetic possibilities. Collins describes this aesthetic engagement
as a “cultural charge.” This is no doubt the case. But there is something more than culture atstake. There is also the inscription of a new aesthetic value founded on the play of thecinematic text within the language of cinema. I am suggesting that Tarantino’s cinema
demands a transformation in the ontology of the spectator/theorist, and this transformation(that is equally a transformation in the ontology of the artist-filmmaker) is something as
profound and creative as the early challenges to classical realism posed by auteurs such as
Antonioni and Godard. Tarantino’s films are hermetically enclosed cinematic quotations thatproliferate into a diversely articulated popular culture as quotation themselves, generating
new cinematic trends and a new reality of metacinematic awareness. The attempt to create a
new form of cinema out of the detritus of a past cinema is hardly original to Tarantino, but
Tarantino’s auteurism is new in its embrace of the corruption of the ideal, or really real, or
authentic. Creativity here lies in an illegitimate authenticity that stems from a love of cinema(or better still, a love of ‘movies’) rather than a love of ‘art.’

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At the same time that Tarantino was being accused of a vacuousness apparently
endemic to the MTV generation, or generation X, or the ‘Me Culture,’ he was also accused ofa kind of cinema that is non-serious, superficial and, in its worst incarnation, irresponsible. It
is a cinema that represents, according to Christopher Sharrett, “an inhumane vision, aworldview that prefers the cynicism and self-absorbed death-fantasies that have always been
the hallmark of capitalist civilization.”60 In short, Tarantino’s films are themselves a waste
depot, a detritus of junk parts synthesised into a product without meaning or value. In
addition to this, as Tarantino refuses to take his screen images seriously (the argument goes),
he divorces himself ethically from the consequences of his images on the culture that views
his films. Tarantino is part of a contemporary culture that experiences violence, gender andrace only as a cinematic representation, desensitised to real acts and real consequences. But
he is more insidious than this. His films scrape away at a system of cherished and provenartistic values, revelling in the kind of chaotic referentiality that exemplifies a debased
culture. How can the serious critic validate the pop culture references, particularly when
Tarantino appears to offer little distinction between pop culture, pop capitalism (monologues
about McDonalds, for example, or the merits of a certain kind of fast food over another), pop
racism (“you’re my nigger”) and pop urban violence (“We gonna go to work on my homes
here with a blowtorch and pair of pliers…we gonna get medieval on his ass?”)? Tarantinooffers it all in a kaleidoscope of pop iconomania, lovingly depicted in the kind of detail andauthenticity that is the hallmark of a ‘seriously-minded’ artist.
This kind of criticism of Tarantino (which can be designated the ‘argument of nonseriousness’) is inevitably ideologically motivated. What is perceived as non-seriousness in
Tarantino’s films is instead the apparent lack of a distinct kind of seriousness evident incinema prior to the advent of Tarantino’s “allusionism and bankruptcy of codes.”61 Thomsonreflects on Coppola and Scorsese as America’s halcyon days, or Bergman and Fellini as theequivalent in Europe.62 For Sharrett, Tarantino’s brand of cinema that savours a “pop culture
detritus” is a consequence of the ubiquitous market, late capitalistic production, conspicuous
consumption, and the industrialisation of filmic processes.63 Crucially for Sharrett, and60

Christopher Sharrett, “End of Story: The Collapse of Myth in Postmodern Narrative Film.” In The End of
Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis (New York and London: New York University Press, 2001), 330.
61
Sharrett, 328.
62
Thomson, “Who Killed the Movies,” 62.
63
Sharrett, 328-330.

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exemplary of this form of criticism of the so-called postmodern aesthetic, is the lack of“worth or concern outside the realm of cheap commercial representation.”64 One assumes that
Tarantino’s allusionism has little in common with Joyce or Eliot. Rather, this allusionism has
nothing to sustain its performance or support its aesthetic ambitions. It is merely a dispersalof meanings into an overcharged, chaotic, ultimately valueless arena in which pop culture
holds tenuously to its transparent meanings.
My argument is that the film theorist must come to terms with the ontology of thecinematic text as discursive. Inherent in this discursivity is the performance of cinema as
cinematic trope, or a sophisticated system of pop culture allusionism. The theorist cannot
search for value in the ruins of a classical aesthetics. Such an aesthetic pursuit is futile in a
postmodern cinema in which a traditional classical aesthetic system is meaningless. Sharrett
might question the value of a new aesthetics in which myths of urban alienation anddisenfranchisement are mediated by the street philosophy of Eminem and Dr Dre; these same
street philosophers chart the abjectivity of the contemporary self through the itinerary ofmega-corporate entities such as IPod or Limewire. I argue that such questions can only bemeaningfully explored if the initial point of contact between theorist and object is a mutual
experience rather than abstract criticism. Metacinema is a performance, and as such, issubject to an aesthetic appreciation.
For Neo, the Matrix provided access to a “residual self image” that synthesised andultimately made redundant the really real self. I argue that the self that coheres in what Lisa
Purse calls a “hypermediate”65 culture is derived through a textual performance that
implicates the subject in its textual itinerary. This is not the claim that audiences revel inallusion-spotting in The Simpsons, Seinfeld or a Tarantino film. Rather, what I perceive inwhat Sharrett implies is a culture of allusionism is a sense of collective self (and ultimately
community) that materialises in the textual system – the allusive fabric. For those engaged inthis culture, and this experiential process, I suspect it is a very real collusion between artist,
text and subject.

64
65

Sharrett, 328.
Purse, 157.

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4.8 The Metacinematic Aesthetic: Tarantino – Leone – Eastwood
In one of the iconic film sequences of the last two decades, Ringo (Tim Roth) and Honey
Bunny (Amanda Plummer) hold up a coffee shop (“Why not?”) in Pulp Fiction. Rather thana conventional hold-up – suspense, violence, the separation of criminal and victim – this set
piece presents a sophisticated reworking of the generic hold-up. Amid the absurdity of thesituation (the fact that Jules and Vincent end up in the same coffee shop as Ringo and Honey
Bunny is an ingenious and unpredictable development), Tarantino locates the scene within aframe of reference that extends from cinema/television’s origins to its present. The coffee
shop is an imaginary space that partakes of a lineage of generic themes: transformation,
revitalisation, violence, beginnings and endings. The characters that enter this coffee shop
inhabit its cinematic space and time; they are well versed in Green Acres, Happy Days andKung Fu. This is a time and space in which popular culture is performed, and in which thescreen and the object it seeks to represent are no longer distinct. Collins describes a similar
synthesizing of the screen and object in relation to Back to the Future, Part III. Marty McFly(Michael J Fox) must travel back to 1885 to rescue Doc Brown from the Old West. In thesequence in which Marty time travels, he speeds the Delorean up to 88 miles per hour,driving directly into a drive-in movie screen displaying a marquee-type representation ofIndians. Collins suggests thatwhen the characters travel back in time to the Old West, their trip is actually a voyage into
the Old Western…his avenue to the past is a film screen, a metaphor literalized by his
driving a time machine through a drive-in movie screen in order to reach the past. The
screen, then, is a portal to a nineteenth century that can exist only in the form of images, inthe form of cinematic reconstructions, and their very materiality is overtly foregrounded by
the text, a point made especially explicit by the fact that the drive-in happens to be locatedwithin Monument Valley.66

After entering Hill Valley of 1885, Marty assumes the role of the Man With No Name
(though in an inventive twist, he assumes the name of Clint Eastwood), the banter of Doc
Brown and Marty recall Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Mad Dog Tannen is a
caricature of the Western villain (perhaps Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) in Ford’s The Man
Who Shot Liberty Valance; both characters, Liberty Valance and Mad Dog Tannen
66

Collins, 248. My emphasis. Monument Valley is significant because it is the location of several John Ford
Western sequences, notably The Searchers; for Zemekis, Monument Valley is also the site of Leone’s homage
to Ford and his own cinematic quotation that Zemekis is reproducing here.

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conspicuously refer to their nemesis as “dude”), and Hill Valley itself represents the buildingof a new town in Western cinematic mythology, recalling Leone’s Once Upon a Time in theWest. In Back to the Future, Part III, there is also an unfinished railroad that will materialisein the future, at which point the old railroad as new frontier (traversed by steam engines) isusurped by electric trains and Deloreans! The culmination of Western cinematic mythology
in Once Upon a Time in the West (and perhaps the realisation of all that Leone had wanted tosay on the topic) materialises at the point at which Jill McBain (Claudio Cardinale) provides
water to the men who build the station house in Sweetwater. A train whistle is heard, thesteam engine moves in and out of shot, and Harmonica (Charles Bronson) rides off into the
distance, a Western hero erased by the coming of the New West and the New Western.
Remarkable in Tarantino’s cinema is the imbrication of this metacinematic aesthetic
without a textual indicator. Zemekis provides the screen that functions as a metaphor of thetransition between cinema and an external reality. Back to the Future, Part III presents a
cinematic Western, a Western that not only finds the Old West on film but inscribes itself aspart of cinematic legacy. Tarantino’s cinematic universe seems to materialise with the firstsounds and images of the film. Reservoir Dogs opens with the muted discussion of Like a
Virgin that incorporates several other pop culture references. Pulp Fiction begins in the dinerand moves into the “royale with cheese” discussion. Tarantino does not explicitly indicate theparameters of this cinematic universe (as Zemekis does through Back to the Future, Part III).
Jack Rabbit Slims, a “wax museum with a pulse,” is a microcosm of the wax museum that
encapsulates each frame of Tarantino’s cinema.
Kill Bill, Volumes 1 and 2 achieve perhaps the most perfect realisation of metacinema.
The cinematic space is explicitly constructed from the opening shot, including Tarantino’s
novelistic chapter structure. Characters inhabit the screen ephemera of their cinematic
precursors. The Bride (Uma Thurman) is a gender transition on Eastwood’s Man With No
Name of Leone’s Dollars Trilogy. The opening shot on the Bride’s bloodied face functions
on several levels as metacinematic performance. Bill’s (David Carradine) disembodied voicereincarnates the figure of Kane (David Carradine) in the cult T.V. show Kung Fu – in Pulp
Fiction, Jules (Samuel Jackson) says to Vincent (John Travolta): “I’ll just walk the Earth –like Kane in Kung Fu.” In Kill Bill, Volume 1, Kane rematerialises in an old Church in someanonymous town in the Old West. The opening in the Church (which is replayed from several
perspectives in the film) functions as a performance of two earlier film sequences. The initial187performance appears in Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West in the sequence in which Jill
McBain (Claudia Cardinale) arrives in Sweetwater. Frayling describes a single tracking shotin this sequence as the most complex shot Leone had attempted up to that point in his
career.67 The camera begins on Cardinale as she moves from the locomotive toward thestation-house (this is the same station-house seen in the first sequence of the film, which is amajestic set piece that seamlessly quotes Zinneman’s High Noon). The tracking shot holds
Cardinale as she moves onto the station house platform and enters through the door, shiftingout of shot. Now the camera tracks upward (on a crane) and above the station-house roof tosurvey the magnificent vista of the generic Western town, Sweetwater, which moves with thefrenzied activity of a town with a newly established railroad. The camera pause at the top of
the pan is accompanied by Ennio Morricone’s powerful theme.
This sequence is reproduced with remarkable acuity in Zemekis’s Back to the Future,
Part III. Instead of the widow entering a new town, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) enters Hill
Valley of 1885. The town is a motif for Zemekis’s Americana trilogy as it is for Leone, orJohn Ford, to whom Leone is obviously indebted for several sequences in Once Upon a Timein the West. Zemekis’s camera replicates the complex camera track, surveying a newly built
Hill Valley with its functioning railroad. Alan Silvestri’s score replicates the movement (ifnot the melody) of Morricone’s. In this sequence, Zemekis is offering an explicit, self-aware
quotation of Leone’s sequence. As Marty McFly passes through the makeshift entrance to the
new Western township of Hill Valley, the camera rises on a crane (reproducing Leone’s
camera move) and survey’s the majesty of Hill Valley for the first time from above the town
entrance (if not a station-house). Zemekis’s shot is in fact a repetition of several similar shotsof Hill Valley of 1985 (Back to the Future), 1955 (Back to the Future), 2015 (Back to the
Future, Part II) and 1885 (Back to the Future, Part III).
Tarantino offers a stylistic quotation of the same sequence, relocating the town
entrance to the entrance of the Church, where the Bride is killed. Instead of the track frombelow to above the station-house in Leone and Zemekis, Tarantino uses an equally complex
pan and tracking manoeuvre to shift from the interior to the exterior of the Church, again
rising from the ground to a position above the Church. It is significant that this cinematic
space (setting) in Kill Bill, Volumes 1 and 2 is visited several times, and from several
different perspectives.
67

Frayling.

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From the opening sequence in the Church, the film moves to The Bride, who lies
comatose in a hospital bed. The interior will comprise the space of Tarantino’s ‘De Palma’
set piece. Her passage from the hospital to the final showdown with Bill is a re-enactment of
Bruce Lee’s passage in Game of Death to confront his final opponent. In the miraculous set
piece in the House of Blue Leaves, The Bride is clad in a tracksuit identical to Lee’s in Gameof Death. Prior to the confrontation, The Bride rides a motorcycle through the streets of acinematic Tokyo in which aeroplane passengers carry samurai swords on their person. The
confrontation between the Bride and O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) recalls a discursive performanceof prior cinematic encounters, in which the sole figure must find her passage to her nemesis.
Prior to Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, the notion of metacinema (or metafiction, for thatmatter) referred to a cinema about cinema.68 As I have indicated, my usage of metacinema
refers to a cinematic spectacle that is always already of cinema. In this performance of a newcinematic aesthetic, Sharrett’s grievances concerning a detritus of allusive fragments seems
obtuse. The new aesthetic is not merely intrinsic to a very significant part of recent cinema,
but it is necessary for an aesthetic engagement with a kind of cinematic text. I would argue
that the new cinematic subjectivity is increasingly receptive to this mode of experiencing its
art forms.
Eastwood’s Unforgiven is perhaps the most elegant metacinematic representation of theWestern since Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. Frayling’s authoritative commentaryon Once Upon a Time in the West (available on the DVD) illuminates the degree to which
Leone’s film is a simulation of prior iconic Western moments. Locations, props, even the
choice of actor in many cases is merely a cinematic trope installing into the film a prior frameof reference. Unforgiven, however, attains a degree of self awareness by installing Eastwoodas character, actor, filmmaker, and mythic figure into the universe of the film. In fact,
Eastwood as actor forms the basis of a major strand of Western cinematic mythology since
the early 60s. Had Leone and Eastwood not parted after The Good, The Bad and The Ugly,
one could well imagine Eastwood reprising his persona in Once Upon a Time in the West(though what would that film be without Charles Bronson!).

68

See Ames for this common usage. My notion of a cinema of cinema shares something with Pisters’s readingof Deleuze in which she formulates the “Universe as Metacinema” (chapter one). Pisters traces this notion
through Hitchcock and Deleuze.

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The Man With No Name is often described as an anti-hero despite embodying certain
overtly heroic tendencies. At the end of A Fistful of Dollars, the Man With No Name rescues
a boy and his mother from Escobar (Gian Maria Volonté), the villain of the piece. The child,named Jesus, establishes the Man With No Name as “the good,” a moral/ethical status he will
reprise in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. While Leone’s Man With No Name is far
removed from the basic incorruptibility of Gary Cooper in High Noon or Alan Ladd in Shane,
he manages to reflect the unremitting evil of Lee Van Cleef’s turns as the bad in For a Few
Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, or the organised villainy of Escobar in
A Fistful of Dollars. Zemekis’s reflection of the Man With No Name in the every-teenager
Marty McFly is particularly inventive. Marty is a rogue with a heart of gold, but he is notbeyond a little opportunism (which comprises the storyline of Back to the Future, Part II, in
which Marty purchases a sports almanac in 2015 to take with him to 1985). Zemekis
prefigures the coding of the Man With No Name in Marty’s character in Back to the Future,
Part II. Marty confronts Biff with his knowledge of the almanac as Biff watches the ending
to A Fistful of Dollars. In the showdown in Back to the Future, Part III, Marty places a metal
plate beneath his poncho (that inscribes him as the Man With No Name, Eastwood) before
facing Mad Dog Tannen. The fact that Marty pulls out of the showdown merely functions asa knowing transformation of an earlier Western topoi.
Unforgiven finds the Man With No Name in his later life, widowed with two young
children, working a small farm. The casting of Eastwood in the role (and the fact that
Eastwood as director establishes a lineage to his The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and Leone’s
Westerns of the 60s) inscribes Unforgiven as a metacinematic presentation of a Westerncinematic mythology. The opening credits situate this story in a tradition of Westerns;
cinematic tropes in this form of metacinema establish familiarity rather than originality ofstory, character and theme. William Munny’s (Eastwood) ‘character arc’ knowingly engages
with the topoi of the Man With No Name, and more specifically, the incarnation of the Man
With No Name in the physical presence of Eastwood. The topoi of the classical Westernformat find a new expression in Unforgiven that reflects on an original presentation. Munnymust rediscover the essence of his cinematic self – literally a self inscribed on film. Rather
than a debunking of the Western myth, Unforgiven is also a celebration of a cinematic
mythology that has been re-presented for a cinematic audience aware of its origins. Munnyrecalls Bronson’s Harmonica, who rides off into the sunset, indelibly inscribed with a sense190

of passing. In Cheyenne’s (Jason Robards) words, “men like that have something inside.
Something to do with death.” Eastwood’s Munny brings new life to a cinematic myth, and amythical being, but it is less a myth reflected on an American West than an American
Western. Unforgiven is in this sense a functioning simulacrum of a cinematic form, divorced
from origins, reflecting only on its prior cinematic performances. It is for Eastwood what
Once Upon a Time in the West was for Leone: an expression of the form through thelanguage of the Western genre. Mainstream criticism approached Unforgiven as a critique ofthe mythology of the American and Spaghetti Western.69 I do not wish to reject suchinterpretations out of hand. However, Munny’s final stand, configured as a quotation of thegeneric Western confrontation70 is equally a transformation of the original Western myth (arevision of a familiar topoi) in which Munny descends into a violent past; and a romanticisingof that generic past in which the Man With No Name remains incarnate in Munny’s presence.
Eastwood could have killed off the Man With No Name at the end of Unforgiven, but hechooses not to.
4.9 Metacinema and Postmodern Narrative: The New Auteurism
Kill Bill, Volumes 1 and 2 permits the discussion of Tarantino’s oeuvre in terms of genre, andmore specifically for this discussion, the strategy of genericity that I have argued forms thebasis of a metacinematic aesthetic. The fact that Baudrillard has written similarly about
Sergio Leone, an obvious precursor to Tarantino, suggests that such a discussion is not
merely a welcome addition to studies of Tarantino, but a necessary critical trajectory incoming to terms with his legacy as a filmmaker. While narrative has received little attention
from critics of Tarantino’s work,71 in the following section I attempt to discuss narrative inPulp Fiction in formal terms, reflecting on the characteristics of ‘postmodern narrative’described by Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition. Lyotard’s contention is that the basic
aesthetic of postmodern narrative is founded upon instability, or the process of fragmentation,
which he attributes to the ubiquity of “language games”:
69

See Richard Corliss, “The Last Roundup.” Time, 10 Aug. 1992; see also Michael Sragow, The New Yorker,
10 Aug, 1992, 70.
70
See Isaacs and Trost, “Story, Product, Franchise,” 74.
71
Most writing on Tarantino focuses on a new aesthetic of cinema, emphasising the pop culture references or ablasé approach to violence. Yet I would argue that a close examination of the narrative structure of his films israrely undertaken. Tarantino is thus easily reduced to a celluloid figure himself rather than sharing in the‘anonymity’ of Hollywood’s great auteurs, Scorsese, Lynch, or more recently, somebody like Paul Thomas
Anderson.

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It is useful to make the following three observations about language games. The first is that
their rules do not carry within themselves their own legitimation, but are the object of acontract, explicit or not, between players…The second is that if there are no rules, there is
no game…The third remark is suggested by what has been said: every utterance should bethought of as a “move” in a game.72

Lyotard’s contention is that the presence of language games within narrative renders thenarrative form subject to extraneous “moves,” and ultimately an inherent instability.
Furthermore, the notion that an utterance constitutes a move in the game implicates external
and internal players in the performance of the narrative. I wish to illustrate this principle bydiscussing two narrative frames in recent films. To recall the degree of Tarantino’s
innovation on classical narrative, I want to focus on a narrative device in Pulp Fiction that, atleast to my knowledge, has gone largely unnoticed.
The film opens on Ringo (Tim Roth) and Honey-Bunny (Amanda Plummer) in thequintessential American diner scene with a twist. Deciding that restaurants are safer to holdup than gas stations, Amanda Plummer (on crowd control) leaps onto a table and says: “Anyof you fucking pricks move and I’ll execute every motherfucking last one of you.” Thecamera freezes and we move to credits. In the film’s final set piece, we discover (from adifferent point of view) that Ringo’s and Honey-Bunny’s hold-up forms a frame to thisunwieldy narrative. Linear narrative has been dispensed with: Vincent (John Travolta) sits ona toilet though he was shot by Butch (Bruce Willis) in an earlier scene. Vincent’s brief
confrontation with Butch in a dimly lit bar takes place shortly after the “Bonnie Situation.” In
the final sequence of the film, returned once again to the diner, we shift from Vincent andJules for the moment it takes Ringo and Honey-Bunny to announce the hold-up. We watch
again as Plummer leaps to the table for her (now) anticipated line: ‘Any of you fucking pricks
move and I’ll execute every one of you motherfuckers!’
On a first viewing, or perhaps even on several cursory viewings, the line functions as
a neat installation of a traditional narrative frame. However, rather than maintaining the linear
sequence in which cause must eventuate in effect, Tarantino fractures the frame, the one
coherent and wholly conventional narrative device. The narrative frame recalls an entire
cinematic tradition, encompassing Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity [1944] and Sunset
Boulevard [1950], seminal American noir films made within the studio system and72

Lyotard, 10.

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emblematic of its great achievement. The narrative frame extends to the realist novel of thenineteenth century, particularly Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, and is predicated on aconventional causality. Cause and effect must operate to return the beginning of the narrative
to its natural end.
In this sequence, the frame is fractured by Honey Bunny when ‘revising’ her earlier
exclamation. “Any of you fucking pricks move and I’ll execute every motherfucking last oneof you” becomes “Any of you fucking pricks move and I’ll execute every one of you
motherfuckers.” Though not overtly a narrative self-awareness, it is a narrative reflexivity thatreflects the growing acceptance of non-realist narrative devices, and more specifically, theintrusion of alterior narrative frames into a master narrative. Plummer’s revised line makes
literal what was only metaphorical in classical Hollywood, and notably, Citizen Kane: thatstory is ultimately and resoundingly the contrivance of its narrative framing, subject torevision, reversion or, in the case of David Lynch’s best work, dissolution. Tarantino’s
cinema is ultimately a language game in which a conventional narrative structure and a realist
aesthetic metamorphoses into the metacinematic ‘frame.’David Fincher’s Fight Club offers a similar intrusion of the non-diegetic space into
the diegetic, which I would argue is a profound transformation of realist cinematic practices.
The film charts a presentation of a postmodern odyssey into destruction, oblivion and,ultimately, the recuperation of the self – in this it diverts from Palahniuk’s novel which, in its
conclusion, is unremittingly bleak: the protagonist ends up in a mental institution when his
explosive charge malfunctions and history is relegated to a perpetual present.73 The film’s
narrative appears to function conventionally, again with the use of the traditional framing
device. In the opening scene, the nameless narrator (Edward Norton) and Tyler Durden (BradPitt) share a conversation, which digresses into a depiction of the events that culminate in thatconversation. When the viewer returns to the scene, Tyler is unveiled as a destructive (and,paradoxically, regenerative) split personality, a degree of sensationalism that weighs upon thefilm’s magnificently rendered (and very fashionable) anti-sensationalism.
One of the film’s motifs involves depicting a scene in reversion. The title sequence
inverts the conventional cinematic gaze: we begin inside the narrator’s mind and exit througha point between his eyes to view the barrel of a gun held by Tyler. Fincher’s preponderanceof experimental cinematic devices – jump cuts, fades, a reduced colour ratio – convey the73

Palahniuk, 206-207.

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constructedness of the narrative. Tyler’s splicing of porn images into family entertainment
parallels Fincher’s control of the film narrative, de-framed by Norton’s fractured self. The
Tyler persona intrudes initially in Norton’s narration in fleeting still shots, mirroring Tyler’s
splicing of frames of film into a master narrative; it is worth watching the first twenty
minutes of the film very closely to observe this bold and yet remarkably subtle intrusion into
the linear, cause-effect narrative. The nearer we come to Tyler’s entrance into the film, themore frequent the spliced frames of Tyler’s figure.
Unlike Tarantino’s frame that collapses without the impetus of a character, Fincher
places the narrative in the control of the characters framed within it. The narrative is written
and rewritten at the whim of the characters that are traditionally its components. An exampleof the reflexive narrative frame (Plummer’s line in Pulp Fiction) expanding to the self-aware,ironic placement of characters as creative agents occurs when we return to the frame in the
final scene of Fight Club. The shot materialises on Norton sitting on a stool with a gun in his
mouth. The opening credit sequence – a shot reverting from a central point (Norton’s
psychosis) to the exterior reality – recurs with Norton’s voiceover: “I think this is about
where we came in.” The two alternate versions of the conversation (the narrative frame) are
reproduced below.
The Opening
Tyler: Three minutes. This is it. Ground Zero. Would you like to say a few words to markthe occasion?
Narrator: I can’t think of anything.
The Closing
Tyler: Three minutes. This is it. The beginning. Ground Zero. [The narrator’s voiceover:This is about where we came in.] Would you like to say a few words to mark the occasion?
Narrator: I still can’t think of anything.
Tyler: Hmm…flashback humor.

A Tarantino-like alteration occurs with Tyler’s insert “The beginning,” which does notappear in the original conversation. However, Tyler’s acknowledgement of the narrator’s“flashback humor” reflects a radical narrative self-awareness. And beneath that is Fincher’sironic appreciation of the essential constructedness and contrivance of the traditional
narrative form. On one level, the “flashback humor” is presented as functioning within the
narrator’s psychosis – that is, it makes sense because it is only to be expected of an irrational
mind fumbling over an otherwise accepted sequential narrative. On another level, a narrative

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origin (cause) is unrecoverable because it is reflected upon by an internal presence. The
narrator is also a narrative trickster insofar as he is able to alter a narrative sequence(conversation 1) required to perform its repetition (conversation 2). Tyler’s and the narrator’ssimultaneous awareness of the narrative revision fractures what began as whole and must
thereafter regress to a point of entropy. This is not to say that the narrative fractures into nonsense, but merely a radically indeterminate kind of sense.
Linearity and causality, Fincher seems to declare, are merely select ways of telling astory subject to the intrusion of an indeterminate narrative voice that is aware of its presence
within a hermetic structure. It is a textual conceit that ultimately has very little to do with an
external reality. Various narrative realities converge, each an indeterminate construct of theother, each compromised in its integrity by the existence and performance of the other.
I would argue that narrative self-awareness is merely one element of a broader ironic
relationship that exists between the mainstream cinematic text and a contemporary audience.
The implications of this shift in aesthetic sensibilities are difficult to evaluate and, indeed,
conceptualise. If cinematic narrative reflects an increasing uncertainty in narrative truth,
ideological right and existential purpose, these contemporary auteurs, rather than shying
away from the disturbing implications, seem to have embraced the aesthetic possibilities.
Aesthetic innovation, insofar as it is able to establish a ‘wave,’ requires a sensibility andmindset willing to receive it. Contemporary mainstream audiences are aware of cinematic
traditions less as incarnations of an inherent and external Real than as a cinematic mythology.
The hermetically sealed frame of representation, in contemporary cinema, has been inverted:
accessing this cinema requires a profound and complex knowledge of cinematic traditions, tovarying degrees of esotericism. To what extent does an aesthetic appreciation of Tarantino’s
Kill Bill rely on a prior knowledge of Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West? To what
extent is contemporary cinema merely a cinematic performance of prior texts and past
traditions?
One characteristic of the films of the so-called postmodern generation is the hyperrevisionism of its content, aesthetically and thematically. The cinematic image is acommentary on film, and by extension, a running commentary on itself. The film-savvy
culture of the milieu permits and embraces a radical new kind of mainstream cinematic
appreciation that seems to explore (if not embrace) an alternative aesthetics – narrative195

experimentation, self-awareness, and the artistic frame as simulation or metacinema –marketed by major studio subsidiaries for mass audiences. The implication of this hyperrevisionism is the loss of an essential and literal realism that was once so pervasive in the
Hollywood studio film. Tarantino and Fincher reflect obsessively on a cinematic past, acinematic mythology that informs the narrative frame of their films. Their protagonists are
not only able to stand outside of the mimetic construct, they are able to locate themselves
within a prior cinematic tradition.
The new auteurism of Tarantino and Fincher (that is a profound transformation on theauteurism of the French New Wave or the Hollywood auteurs of the 70s) lays bare theinherent cinematicality of the image. Narrative takes its place alongside other textual tropes
in a performance space. Bazin’s ‘reality myth,’ in this context, has been reconfigured for acinematic culture practicing a new film aesthetics. Perhaps we might adopt a position similar
to the residual self-image of the simulacral Matrix, in which a screened reality offers itself
merely as a vestige of the Real.
4.10 Conclusion
I am first and foremost a film fanatic. I’ve always wanted to make movies, to be part of thatworld. My most important experiences as a viewer are amazingly varied: they go from
Nicholas Ray to Brian De Palma, from Terry Gilliam to Sergio Leone, from Mario Brava toJean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Melville, and even include Eric Rohmer.74

Auteurism in an age in which the classical auteur has been well and truly killed off (ifBarthes, Foucault and other post-structuralists were not entirely successful in the realm offilm, writers like Schatz very effectively described a cinematic text that had little use of asingle genius75) finds a new form in the era of metacinema. I agree with Thomson that
Godard, Antonioni and Fellini are no longer reproducible. The cinematic culture has lost thematerial conditions required to produce ‘film art.’ Auteur filmmakers are no longer aesthetes
but pop culture flaneurs traversing the boundaries of a new cinema inscribed by a very realcultural agency. And perhaps even more crucially, the new auteur’s expression ofauthenticity resides in an awareness of film, film references and the cultural detritus of somany scenes, set pieces and throw away lines of dialogue. This is the cultural screen in which
74
75

Peary, 7.
See Schatz, “The Whole Equation of Pictures,” 93-94.

196

film means. To ask what ‘allusionism’ means is to impose an aesthetic sensibility wholly
incompatible with the process of cinematic meaning in the contemporary mainstream scene.
Rather, the spectator (and the theorist) should ask how it is performed.
This is a kind of cinema that has drawn the Real into itself, making it cinematic,
offering a series of tropes and topoi (that Eco discusses in relation to Casablanca or Raidersof the Lost Ark) that bounce off of the spectator immersed in the cinematic spectacle. Thiskind of cinema is necessarily hyper-stylistic. It is fundamentally experiential. It is exhibitedin all of Tarantino’s films, but perhaps most elegantly in Pulp Fiction in which a yellow taxicab, superimposed on an artificial background, maintains its position in movie stasis while
the backdrop recedes into the distance of a cinematic simulacrum.

197

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Adventure, The. Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni. 1960.
Akira. Dir. Katsuhiro Ôtomo. 1988.
Alien. Dir. Ridley Scott. 1979.
Alien Resurrection. Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet. 1997.
Aliens. Dir. James Cameron. 1986.
All About my Mother. Dir. Pedro Almodóvar. 1999.
American Graffiti. Dir. George Lucas. 1973.
Année Dernière À Marienbad, L’ [Last Year at Marienbad]. Dir. Alain Resnais. 1961.
Apocalypse Now. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. 1979.
Armageddon. Dir. Michael Bay. 1998.
Assault on Precinct 13. Dir. John Carpenter. 1976.
Aviator, The. Dir. Martin Scorsese. 2005.
Avventura, L’ [The Adventure]. Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni. 1960.
Back to the Future. Dir. Robert Zemekis. 1985.
Back to the Future, Part II. Dir. Robert Zemekis. 1989.
Back to the Future. Part III. Dir. Robert Zemekis. 1990.
Bad Boys. Dir. Michael Bay. 1995.
Bad Education. Dir. Pedro Almodóvar. 2004.
Batman. Dir. Tim Burton. 1989.
Batman Returns. Dir. Tim Burton. 1992.
Batman Begins. Dir. Christopher Nolan. 2005.
Battleship Potemkin. Dir. Grigori Aleksandrov, Sergei Eisenstein. 1925.
Big Sleep, The. Dir. Howard Hawks. 1946.
Birth of a Nation. Dir. D.W. Griffith. 1915.
Black Hawk Down. Dir. Ridley Scott. 2001.
Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott. 1982. Director’s Cut: 1991.
Blow-Up. Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni. 1966.
Blue Velvet. Dir. David Lynch. 1986.
Body Heat. Dir. Lawrence Kasdan. 1981.
Bone Collector, The. Dir. Phillip Noyce. 1999.

Boogie Nights. Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson. 1997.
Bout De Souffle, A [Breathless]. Dir. Jean Luc Godard. 1959.
Breathless. Dir. Jean Luc Godard. 1959.
Breathless. Jim McBride. 1983.
Bronenosets Potyomkin [Battleship Potemkin].
Dir. Grigori Aleksandrov, Sergei Eisenstein. 1925.
Bullet in the Head. Dir. John Woo. 1990
Bulworth. Dir. Warren Beatty. 1998.
Buono, Il Bruttto, Il Cattivo, Il [The Good, The Bad and The Ugly].
Dir. Sergio Leone. 1967.
Bicycle Thief, The. Dir. Vittorio de Sica. 1948.
Carrie. Dir. Brian De Palma. 1976.
Casablanca. Dir. Michael Curtiz. 1942.
Casino. Dir. Martin Scorsese. 1995.
Catwoman. Dir. Pitoff. 2004.
C’era Una Volta Il West [Once Upon a Time in the West]. Dir. Sergio Leone. 1968.
Chinatown. Dir. Roman Polanski. 1974.
Chong Qing Sen Lin [Chungking Express]. Dir. Wong Kar Wai. 1994.
Chungking Express. Dir. Wong Kar Wai. 1994.
Citizen Kane. Dir. Orson Welles. 1941.
City Slickers. Dir. Ron Underwood. 1991.
Clear and Present Danger. Dir. Phillip Noyce. 1994.
Clerks. Dir. Kevin Smith. 1994.
Clockwork Orange, A. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. 1971.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Dir. Steven Spielberg. 1977.
Color Purple, The. Dir. Steven Spielberg. 1985.
Conformist, The. Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci. 1969.
Conformista, Il [Conformist, The]. Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci. 1969.
Crash. Dir. Paul Haggis. 2004.
Cube. Dir. Vincenzo Natali. 1997.
Daredevil. Dir. Mark Steven Johnson. 2003.
Dawn of the Dead. Dir. George A. Romero. 1979.

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Day of the Dead. George A. Romero. 1985.
Deer Hunter, The. Dir. Michael Cimino. 1978.
Defiant Ones, The. Dir. Stanley Kramer. 1958.
Departed, The. Dir. Martin Scorsese. 2006.
Diabolique, Les. Dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot. 1954.
Die Xue Jie Tou [Bullet in the Head]. Dir. John Woo. 1990.
Don’t Look Now. Dir. Nicholas Roeg. 1973.
Do The Right Thing. Dir. Spike Lee. 1989.
Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Dir. Stanley Kubrick. 1964.
Double Indemnity. Dir. Billy Wilder. 1944.
Double Jeopardy. Dir. Bruce Beresford. 1999.
Dressed to Kill. Dir. Brian De Palma. 1980.
Duel. Dir. Steven Spielberg. 1971.
Eraserhead. Dir. David Lynch. 1977.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Dir. Michel Gondry. 2004.
Fahrenheit 911. Dir. Mike Moore. 2004.
Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. 1999.
Fistful of Dollars, A. Dir. Sergio Leone. 1964.
For a Few Dollars More. Dir. Sergio Leone. 1965.
Forrest Gump. Dir. Robert Zemekis. 1994.
400 Blows, The. Dir. François Truffaut. 1959.
From Dusk Till Dawn. Dir. Robert Rodriguez. 1996.
Game of Death. Dir. Robert Clouse. 1979.
Gangs of New York. Dir. Martin Scorsese. 2002.
Glengarry Glen Ross. Dir. James Foley. 1992.
Godfather, The. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. 1972.
Godfather, Part II, The. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. 1974.
Goldfinger. Dir. Guy Hamilton. 1964.
Gone With the Wind. Dir. Victor Fleming. 1939.
Good, The Bad and The Ugly, The. Dir. Sergio Leone. 1967.

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Grapes of Wrath, The. Dir. John Ford. 1940.
Great Train Robbery, The. Dir. Edwin S. Porter. 1903.
Greed. Dir. Erich Von Stroheim. 1924.
Halloween. Dir. John Carpenter. 1978.
Heat. Dir. Michael Mann. 1995.
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.
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High Noon. Dir. Fred Zinnermann. 1952.
Hiroshima Mon Amour. Dir. Alain Resnais. 1959.
Hot Rock, The. Dir. Peter Yates. 1972.
Howling, The. Dir. Joe Dante. 1981.
Hunt for Red October, The. Dir. John McTiernan. 1990.
I Heart Huckabees. Dir. David O. Russell. 2004.
Incredibles, The. Dir. Brad Bird. 2004.
Independence Day. Dir. Roland Emmerich. 1996.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Dir. Steven Spielberg. 1984.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Dir. Steven Spielberg. 1989.
In the Heat of the Night. Dir. Norman Jewison. 1967.
Intolerance. Dir. D.W. Griffith. 1916.
Jaws. Dir. Steven Spielberg. 1975
Kill Bill, Volume I. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. 2003.
Kill Bill, Volume II. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. 2003.
King of Comedy, The. Dir. Martin Scorsese. 1983.
La Mala Educación [Bad Education]. Dir. Pedro Almodóvar. 2004.
Ladri Di Biciclette [The Bicycle Thief]. Dir. Vittorio de Sica. 1948.
Lady From Shanghai, The. Dir. Orson Welles. 1948.
Last Year at Marienbad, The. Dir. Alain Resnais. 1961.
Lona Rennt [Run Lola Run]. Dir. Tom Tykwer. 1998.
Lone Star. Dir. John Sayles. 1996.
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Lost Highway. Dir. David Lynch. 1996.
Lost Weekend, The. Dir. Billy Wilder. 1945.
Magnificent Ambersons, The. Dir. Orson Welles. 1942.
Maltese Falcon, The. Dir. John Huston. 1941.
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The. Dir. John Ford. 1962.
Manhunter. Dir. Michael Mann. 1986.
Marnie. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. 1964.
Matewan. Dir. John Sayles. 1987.
Matrix, The. Dir. The Wachowski Bothers. 1999.
Matrix Reloaded, The. Dir. The Wachowski Bothers. 2003.
Matrix Revolutions, The. Dir. The Wachowski Bothers. 2003.
Mean Streets. Dir. Martin Scorsese. 1973.
Memento. Dir. Christopher Nolan. 2000.
Metropolis. Dir. Fritz Lang. 1927.
Midnight Cowboy. Dir. John Schlesinger. 1969.
Million Dollar Baby. Dir. Clint Eastwood. 2005.
Mulholland Drive. Dir. David Lynch. 2001.
Munich. Dir. Steven Spielberg. 2005.
My Darling Clementine. Dir. John Ford. 1946.
Nanook of the North. Dir. Robert Flaherty. 1922.
Napoléon. Dir. Abel Gance. 1927.
Network. Dir. Sidney Lumet. 1976.
Nick of Time. Dir. John Badham. 1995.
North by Northwest. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. 1959.
Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie Des Grauens [Nosferatu, a Symphony of Terror].
Dir. F.W. Murnau. 1922.
Natural Born Killers. Dir. Oliver Stone. 1994.
Night of the Living Dead. Dir. George A. Romero. 1968.
Obsession. Dir. Brian De Palma. 1976.
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Open City. Dir. Roberto Rossellini. 1945.

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Paisà [Paisan]. Dir. Roberto Rossellini. 1946.
Paisan. Dir. Roberto Rossellini. 1946
Paris, Texas. Dir. Wim Wenders. 1984.
Patriot Games. Dir. Phillip Noyce. 1992.
Peeping Tom. Dir. Michael Powell. 1960.
Per Qualche Dollaro in Più [For a Few Dollars More]. Dir. Sergio Leone. 1965.
Per Un Pugno di Dollari [A Fistful of Dollars]. Dir. Sergio Leone. 1964.
Philadelphia Story, The. Dir. George Cukor. 1940.
Player, The. Dir. Robert Altman. 1992.
Polar Express. Dir. Robert Zemekis. 2004.
Psycho. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. 1960.
Pulp Fiction. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. 1994.
Quatre Cents Coups, Les [The 400 Blows]. Dir. François Truffaut. 1959.
Raging Bull. Dir. Martin Scorsese. 1980.
Raiders of the Lost Ark. Dir. Steven Spielberg. 1981.
Rear Window. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. 1954.
Rebecca. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. 1940.
Red River. Dir. Howard Hawks. 1948.
Reservoir Dogs. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. 1992.
Rififi. Dir. Jules Dassin. 1955.
Ring. Dir. Hideo Nakata. 1998.
Rio Bravo. Dir. Howard Hawks. 1959.
Roma, Città Aperta [Open City]. Dir. Roberto Rossellini. 1945.
Rope. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. 1948.
Run Lola Run. Dir. Tom Tykwer. 1998.
Russian Ark. Dir. Aleksandr Sokurov. 2002.
Russkij Kovcheg [Russian Ark]. Dir. Aleksandr Sokurov. 2002.
Samson and Delilah. Dir. Cecil B. DeMille. 1949.
Saving Private Ryan. Dir. Steven Spielberg. 1998.
Scarface. Dir. Brian De Palma. 1983.
Scarface: The Shame of a Nation. Dir. Howard Hawks. 1932.

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Schindler’s List. Dir. Steven Spielberg. 1993.
Scream. Dir. Wes Craven. 1996.
Searchers, The. Dir. John Ford. 1956.
Secrets and Lies. Dir. Mike Leigh. 1996.
Se7en. Dir. David Fincher. 1995.
Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Dir. Steven Soderberg. 1989.
Shane. Dir. George Stevens. 1953.
Shoot the Piano Player. Dir. François Truffaut. 1962.
Sideways. Dir. Alexander Payne. 2004.
Silence of the Lambs, The. Dir. Jonathan Demme. 1991.
Sin City. Dir. Robert Rodriguez. 2005.
Singin’ in the Rain. Dir. Stanley Donen. 1952.
Some Like it Hot. Dir. Billy Wilder. 1959.
Stagecoach. Dir. John Ford. 1939.
Stand By Me. Dir. Rob Reiner. 1986.
Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope. Dir. George Lucas. 1977.
Star Wars, Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. Dir. George Lucas. 1980.
Star Wars, Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Dir. George Lucas. 1983.
Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Dir. George Lucas. 1999.
Star Wars, Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Dir. George Lucas. 2002.
Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Dir. George Lucas. 2005.
Strange Days. Dir. Kathryn Bigelow. 1995.
Stranger, The. Dir. Orson Welles. 1946.
Sunrise. Dir. F.W. Murnau. 1927.
Sunset Boulevard. Dir. Billy Wilder. 1950.
Superman II. Dir. Richard Lester. 1980.
Taxi Driver. Dir. Martin Scorsese. 1976.
Terminator, The. Dir. James Cameron. 1984.
Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Dir. James Cameron. 1991.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The. Dir. Tobe Hooper. 1974.
Thelma and Louise. Dir. Ridley Scott. 1991.
Thin Red Line, The. Dir. Terrence Malick. 1998.

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Time Code. Dir. Mike Figgis. 2000.
Tires Sur Le Pianiste [Shoot the Piano Player]. Dir. François Truffaut. 1962.
Titanic. Dir. James Cameron. 1997.
To Catch a Thief. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. 1955.
Todo Sobre Mi Madre [All About my Mother]. Dir. Pedro Almodóvar. 1999.
Topkapi. Dir. Jules Dassin. 1964.
Total Recall. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. 1990.
Touch of Evil. Dir. Orson Welles. 1955.
Triplets of Belleville, The. Dir. Sylvain Chomet. 2003.
Triplettes de Belleville, Les [The Triplets of Belleville]. Dir. Sylvain Chomet. 2003.
Triumph des Willens [Triumph of the Will]. Dir. Leni Riefenstahl. 1934.
Triumph of the Will. Dir. Leni Riefenstahl. 1934.
True Lies. Dir. James Cameron. 1994.
Truman Show, The. Dir. Peter Weir. 1998.
2046. Dir. Wong Kar Wai. 2004.
2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. 1968.
Unforgiven. Dir. Clint Eastwood. 1992.
Untouchables, The. Dir. Brian De Palma. 1987.
Usual Suspects, The. Dir. Brian Singer. 1995.
Vera Drake. Dir. Mike Leigh. 2004.
Vertigo. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. 1958.
Wayne’s World. Dir. Penelope Spheeris. 1992.
When Harry Met Sally. Dir. Rob Reiner. 1989.
Where Eagles Dare. Dir. Brian G. Hutton. 1969.
White Chicks. Dir. Keenan Ivory Wayans. 2004.
Wild Bunch, The. Dir. Sam Peckinpah. 1969.
Wizard of Oz, The. Dir. Victor Fleming. 1939.

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Television/Serials
American Idol: The Search For a Superstar. Created by Simon Fuller. 2002-.
Big Brother. Created by Simon Hepworth and Helen Downing. 1999-.
Dragonball Z. Created by Daisuke Nishio. 1989-2003.
Flash Gordon. Universal. 1936-1940.
Green Acres. Created by Jay Somers. 1965-1971.
Happy Days. Created by Garry Marshall. 1974-1984.
Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Created by Jeffrey Grant Rice. 1974-1975.
Kung Fu. Created by Alex Beaton and Robert Butler. 1972-1975.
Law and Order. Created by Dick Wolf. 1990-.
Lost. Created by J.J. Abrams. 2004-.
NYPD Blue. Created by Steven Bochco and David Milch. 1993-2005.
Seinfeld. Created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld. 1990-1998.
Simpsons, The. Created by Matt Groening. 1989-.
Sopranos, The. Created by David Chase. 1999-.
Survivor. Created by Mark Burnett.
24. Created by Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran. 2001-.
Twin Peaks. Created by David Lynch and Mark Frost. 1990-1991.
X-Files, The. Created by Chris Carter. 1993-2002.

Music
Mamas and the Papas, The. “California Dreaming.” Dunhill Records. 1965.
Madonna. “Like a Virgin.” Like A Virgin (Album). Sire/Warner Bros., 1984.
Rage Against the Machine. “Wake Up!” Rage Against The Machine (Album).
Epic Records, 1992.
U2. “Even Better than the Real Thing.” Achtung Baby (Album). Island Records, 1991.

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