Allegories of post-Fordism in 1970s New Hollywood: Countercultural combat films, conspiracy
   thrillers as genre-recycling

   

   Drehli Robnik

   

   in: Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, Noel King (Hg.): The Last Great American Picture
   Show. New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s. Amsterdam University Press 2004

   

   This essay deals with some aspects of the New Hollywood cinema of the late 1960s and early
   1970s, focusing on non-canonized works among the war movies and conspiracy thrillers of that
   period, and on some related diagnostic, critical and historiographic discourses. One concern
   of this is how such accounts of New Hollywood, in the historically narrow sense of the term,
   can be related to our present media-cultural experience, and what meanings the films in
   question can be made to reveal in a retrospective, allegorizing approach – in short: how to
   remember New Hollywood circa 1970. The retrospective frameworks employed here are (fragments
   of) a genealogy of subjectivities and temporalities characteristic of post-Fordist social
   production (which is where issues of "flexibility" and "recycling" and arguments made by
   Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri will come in), and the pre-history of today´s
   blockbuster-oriented American cinema – the one which we know as New Hollywood in a larger
   sense.

   

   Hollywood´s crisis and the countercultural pressure: redefining purposeful action

   

   In 1971, monogram film magazine published a dossier on contemporary Hollywood in which the
   latter's overproduction crisis was interpreted as a crisis of its cultural, ethical and
   aesthetic presuppositions – of the conceptions of narrative orientation and meaningful action
   underlying its products. Peter Lloyd saw Hollywood as being in "crisis and transition" and as
   blindly grasping at trends in the youth market, largely due to "the gradual collapse of the
   efficacy of the heroic individual in the American cinema".[1] And Thomas Elsaesser pointed to
   massive differences between classical Hollywood´s "central protagonist with a cause, a goal, a
   purpose – in short, a motivation for action", and the "unmotivated hero" in recent films like
   Easy Rider (1969).[2] The "crisis of motivation" became a key term in Elsaesser's 1975
   diagnosis of the "pathos of failure" in American cinema during its contemporary transition
   from an "affirmative-consequential" conception of narrative action to an as yet undetermined
   mode. Referring mainly to New Hollywood's youth and road movies like Easy Rider and Two-Lane
   Blacktop (1971), Elsaesser wrote: "What the heroes bring to such films is the almost physical
   sense of inconsequential action, of pointlessness and uselessness, a radical scepticism, in
   short, about the American virtues of ambition, vision, drive."[3]

   

   New Hollywood´s blocking of narrative goal-orientation was later summarised under the
   headlines negativity and nihilism by Chris Hugo. In his 1986 polemic retrospective view, Easy
   Rider again serves as the chief example for "the fashion for the supposed 'New Hollywood
   Cinema'" and its "beautiful loser" protagonists "who became, for a short period, the chief
   youth picture audience identification figures. They were the opposite to those characters in
   classic Hollywood pictures who found themselves able to take positive action in the world,
   because they showed a belief in the essential correctness of the dominant values that classic
   Hollywood cinema embraced." – "In general, the most frequent narrative strategy in Easy Rider
   could be summarised in terms of simply reversing the conventions of classic Hollywood from
   positive to negative. The central characters are passive, anti-social and goal-less."[4]

   

   From a different perspective, Gilles Deleuze came to similar conclusions about 1970s New
   Hollywood (which he oddly subsumed under "post-war American cinema, outside Hollywood"). In
   1983, he emphasized the failure of Hollywood´s action-oriented cinema to extricate itself
   other than negatively from its classical tradition. In Deleuze´s genea-logics of modern
   cinema, New Hollywood appeared as a dead end: to him, Altman´s "dispersive situations", the
   weak linkages between actions, perceptions and affects for instance in Scorsese, Easy Rider´s
   voyage form, detached from active and affective structures, or the no-win stories and loser
   heroes of Penn´s and Peckinpah´s neo-westerns were characteristic of a fundamental "crisis of
   the action-image" which coincided with the crisis of the "American Dream".[5]

   

   In Deleuze´s latter formulation, a larger historical context in which to situate New Hollywood
   is invoked rather passingly. Elsaesser´s version of what one could call the "failure argument"
   indicates more specifically how to frame this critical moment of American cinema culturally
   and politically: to Elsaesser, the pathos of failure, as the predominant narrative stance of
   New Hollywood´s youth movies, reflects "the moral and emotional gestures of a defeated
   generation" and "the experience of a rebellion whose impulse towards change aborted".[6] In
   the mid-1970s, New Hollywood´s inability to offer a narratively and ethically efficient
   substitute for the goal-oriented narratives and heroic subjectivities it had broken with could
   be read as a symptom of the defeat of the 1960s countercultures. But in the same period, a
   less pessimistic picture of this relationship was also possible: In an article on "New
   Hollywood Cinema" which in parts responded to Elsaesser´s critique of the pathos of failure,
   Steve Neale rated the impact of "the youth and students movement" and of "countercultures and
   ideologies generally" on Hollywood in more positive terms: "The very pressure of these groups
   and ideologies meant that the media had to 'give' at some point (even if this largely resulted
   in recuperation): Hollywood, certainly by the mid-1960´s, was the weakest point."[7] While
   differing in their evaluations, both Elsaesser´s and Neale´s views imply that with Hollywood´s
   short-lived orientation towards the (broadly) countercultural value-system of educated urban
   youth audiences, there is more at stake than just the marketing task of finding entertainment
   formulas for a preferred target group.

   

   I want to address the question of social pragmatics and subjectivities underlying New
   Hollywood´s images and narratives, i.e., the conception of purposeful action that gives
   cultural meaning to these movies and allows them to be placed in a larger historical
   framework. I suggest that by taking New Hollywood´s countercultural dimension, commodified as
   it may be, seriously and by slightly shifting the film references to less canonized
   productions, the familiar "failure narrative" about New Hollywood can be reworked into a
   historical success story. To put it less teleologically, I attempt to revisit the crisis of
   Hollywood´s action-image circa 1970 and to identify symptoms of the emergence of a new
   conceptualization of purposeful, productive action. What distinguishes American industrial
   cinema circa 1970 from earlier versions of a "new" or "post-classical" Hollywood[8] is, to a
   large extent, its youth- and countercultural orientation. The latter´s negative gestures of
   refusal – a refusal (or inability) to perpetuate classical Hollywood´s
   affirmative-consequential narrative, generic and ethical norms of action, or a nihilism that
   "simply revers[es] the conventions of classic Hollywood practice from positive to negative",
   as Hugo put it[9] – can be seen as preconditions of a positive, innovative moment.

   

   Some concepts and perspectives suited to this kind of re-evaluation can be found in the
   genealogy of post-Fordism contained in Michael Hardt´s and Antonio Negri´s political theory of
   Empire. Hardt and Negri highlight a historical success of the 1960s youth and countercultures,
   in that these movements´ creativity in inventing new social subjectivities and standards of
   purposeful, productive action has been the driving force of capitalism´s shift away from
   Fordist discipline: "[...T]he 'merely cultural' experimentation had very profound political
   and economic effects. [...] The youth who refused the deadening repetition of the
   factory-society invented new forms of mobility and flexibility, new styles of living. [...]
   [T]he indexes of the value of the movements – mobility, flexibility, knowledge, communication,
   cooperation, the affective – would define the transformation of capitalist production in the
   subsequent decades."[10]

   

   What follows is neither an attempt to annex New Hollywood to a history of anti-disciplinary
   resistance nor a contribution to a theory of countercultures.[11] Rather, I will first of all
   employ flexibility and affectivity as key terms to highlight American cinema´s role in an
   overall culture-driven redefinition of capitalist production – of what counts as purposeful
   active behavior productive of meaning and value, as well as of the social production of
   subjectivity in Hardt´s and Negri´s sense. My notion of a New Hollywood that explores these
   pragmatics and ethics is connected to the Benjaminian understanding of the cinema as a
   mass-cultural "rehearsal" of modernization, and to Jonathan Beller´s provocative equation of
   cinema and capital as modes of producing and organising experience. As  Beller claims in his
   Benjamin- and Deleuze-inflected argument, "cinema may be taken as a model for the many
   technologies which in effect take the machine off the assembly line and bring it to the body
   in order to mine it for labor power (value)." Cinema thus "functions as a kind of discipline
   and control akin to previous methods of socialization by either civil society or the labor
   process (e.g., Taylorization)"; it is "the potential cutting and splicing of all aspects of
   the world to meet the exigencies of flexible accumulation and to develop new affects."[12] The
   formation of Empire´s post-Fordist regime of production – in which distinctions between
   economy and culture as well as between productive and unproductive labor become contingent[13]
   – emphasizes cinema´s explorative role in processes of socialization as mediatization and
   capitalization. In Beller, "capital cinema" performs a "tapping of energies", a globalization
   of capital which is "less a geographical project and more a matter of capturing the
   interstitial activities and times between the already commodified endeavors of bodies. Every
   movement and every gesture is potentially productive of value."[14]

   

   The first half of this chapter suggests a (retrospective) look at New Hollywood´s part in this
   redefinition and re-evaluation of productive action: along with the crisis and failures of
   motivated, goal-oriented and purposeful action, I demonstrate that the American cinema circa
   1970 also reveals lines of flight pointing from disciplined pragmatics and subjectivities to
   flexible and affective ones. My examples come from a genre which usually makes one think of
   rigid discipline rather than of New Hollywood: the American war movie – rendered flexible in
   its encounter with the countercultures.

   

   Hippies at war: explorations of flexibility in M*A*S*H, The Dirty Dozen and Kelly´s Heroes

   

   There is one American war movie which is generally considered to be a New Hollywood classic.
   Anticipating the noisy dispersiveness of situations and the crumbling of linear narratives in
   Robert Altman´s later work, M*A*S*H (1969) seems to plainly confirm the failure argument put
   forward by Elsaesser, Hugo or Deleuze. However, it is only from the vantage point of
   disciplined storytelling and behavior that the narrative stuttering and idle motion in
   M*A*S*H, its protagonists´ digressive escapades and extravagant self-fashioning appear as
   symptoms of nihilism or collapse. Pauline Kael´s review of the film offered a different
   interpretation, in terms that seem to echo and reverse some of the later New Hollywood
   criticism in advance: "The movie isn´t naive, but it isn´t nihilistic, either." – "[I]t´s hip
   but it isn´t hopeless."[15] The soldier protagonists´ "[a]dolescent pride in skills and games
   – in mixing a Martini or in devising a fishing lure or in golfing", all those micro-actions
   which would be written off as meaningless, disturbing or at best ornamental within a classical
   narrative economy of the genre, were seen by Kael as manifesting a new pragmatic orientation:
   "[P]eople who are loose and profane and have some empathy – people who can joke about anything
   – can function, and maybe even do something useful, in what may appear to be insane
   circumstances."[16] In M*A*S*H, the possibility of useful, productive action and of a socially
   functioning sense of self depends on the protagonist´s playful culturalization of work routine
   and undisciplined communication under conditions of industrialized warfare. Sight and Sound´s
   reviewer of M*A*S*H also hinted at the very usefulness of integrating jocularity and profanity
   into the military labor process and drew from the film a lesson in flexibilization: "[..I]f
   there´s one moral that can safely be drawn from the succession of gags and incidents which
   provide the film´s sprawling narrative structure, it´s that inflexible attitudes to war
   (chauvinistic, religious, bureaucratic or heroic) lead straight to the strait-jacket."[17]

   

   Following Jeanine Basinger´s historical "anatomy" of the American "World War II combat film",
   one can place M*A*S*H (a "service comedy" set in the Korean War rather than an outright combat
   film) at the culmination point of the narrative abstractions, revisions and sometimes parodic
   inversions which Hollywood´s war movie genre underwent in the late 1960s. Two of the films
   which Basinger subsumes under that period´s revisonist "dirty group movies" warrant a closer
   look in the context of my flexibilization argument in relation to New Hollywood. Seen from
   Basinger´s genre-formalist point of view, Robert Aldrich´s The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Brian G.
   Hutton´s Kelly´s Heroes (1970), the former a major box-office success, exemplify the
   popularity during the 1960s of the war movie´s "commando raid" variant which highlights attack
   missions carried out by small, specialized "maverick units" in World War II.[18]

   

   In The Dirty Dozen, a US Army major (Lee Marvin) is ordered to train twelve soldiers, who have
   been sentenced to death or long prison terms as criminals, for a special mission: in exchange
   for suspension of their sentences, they are to raid a chateau used as a brothel by the German
   military and kill as many generals as they can. Basinger emphasizes the "dirtiness" of these
   skilled combat workers and interprets their training process and the tricks they play on the
   US military establishment in terms which reflect, at the level of genre, the notion of
   Hollywood´s action-image in crisis. Pointing to the negativity of the film´s goal-orientation
   in contrast to traditional combat film ethics, she reads The Dirty Dozen  as being about
   criminal tendencies put to work inside the system, about fudging its rules and "playing
   dirty".[19] Sight and Sound´s reviewer of The Dirty Dozen saw the film as displaying many
   "surface elements of more honest war films, but without the accompanying moral justification.
   The effect is arguably less a broadening of scope for the entertainment film than a
   devaluation of useful currency."[20] These accounts are versions of the failure argument: they
   invoke the "devaluation" of genre´s meaning-making capacities, or at best a "subversion" of
   the genre, which Basinger links to anti-Vietnam war sentiments strong among Hollywood´s youth
   audiences, thus acknowledging the countercultural impact on late 1960s American cinema.

   

   The Dirty Dozen´s disruption of the moral and disciplinary norms underlying the narrative
   motivation and orientation of action in classical war movies might, however, be seen as
   negative preconditions for an exploration of new use values with respect to purposeful,
   productive action. Such a perspective brings to the fore a creative (as opposed to merely
   "subversive") dimension of the film´s address to – broadly defined – countercultural and
   anti-establishment audience positions. If, to quote once more from Sight and Sound´s review,
   in The Dirty Dozen "no effort is spared in establishing this assortment of recalcitrants,
   morons and psychopaths as a bunch of likeable characters, and the more they work as a team the
   more likeable they become", then the important point about this "unholy teamwork" (as Basinger
   puts it) is just that it is teamwork.[21]

   

   Much of the narrative goal-orientation of Aldrich´s film as well as of its humourous and
   spectacular appeal is derived from the broadly displayed training process, especially its
   tactics of forging a team-identity alternative to the strategies of the military
   establishment.[22] The unusual training methods of Lee Marvin´s character explore and mine the
   usefulness of subjectivities, energies and types of behavior which would be wasted by the
   rationality of the Army´s disciplinary labor regime. With its stress on unconventional (not
   just duty-based) motivation for the trainees and on their special, highly flexible skills at
   "project-oriented work", the concept of purposeful action underlying the film points towards a
   new, post-Fordist economy with its normalization of flexible social subjectivities.[23] What
   we can see anticipated in the film is the cohesive team-spirit and self-management of
   "professional subcultures" in performing non-routine tasks (to use the language of the
   "cultural turn" in post-1970 management theories), a system of production based on the "social
   capital" of affective labor, tacit knowledge and undisciplined communication (to put it in
   terms of recent Marxist work on post-Fordism).[24]

   

   Understood as an index of a new productivity and sociality, the very dirtyness of the dozen is
   an aspect of the culturalization of team labor as well as of the film´s address to
   anti-establishment sensibilities within its audience. The key moment in the trainees´ self and
   collective team differentiation is when they proudly refuse to wash and shave with cold water
   and prefer to remain dirty and grow beards instead. When one of Marvin´s superiors threatens
   to have the dirty dozen bathed and shaved against their will, the scene is reminiscent of a
   late 1960s cliché (referenced, for instance, in Easy Rider) about the way representatives of
   hegemonic culture and social discipline would want to treat hairy, filthy hippies if given the
   chance. With its display of the soldiers´ rock-band type looks as a trademark of the film´s
   spectacle-values, this scene is one of the moments which might situate The Dirty Dozen in a
   closer connection to New Hollywood´s early youth movies than its generic affiliation would
   seem to warrant.[25] While Ed Guerrero perceives a certain "black power" sentiment expressed
   by a scene during the commando raid, in which African-American football-star turned actor Jim
   Brown scores high in throwing hand grenades into ventilator shafts to blow up German
   officers[26], I think that The Dirty Dozen addressed countercultural attitudes and aesthetic
   preferences mainly in rather general terms of an undisciplined pop lifestyle. This is also
   shown by the film´s featurette Operation Dirty Dozen (1967), in which – according to
   descriptions on the Internet Movie Database – Aldrich´s cast goes on another special mission,
   visiting Swinging London´s pubs and dance clubs during a break in the film´s shooting. "So we
   have this advertisement which emphasizes the mod scene of London", commented an IMDB user in
   2001, "But this is most strange: essentially the Beatles and the new drug culture (strictly
   anti-war) are being used to promote a pro-war film!" Already in 1967, the Sight and Sound
   reviewer of The Dirty Dozen had been astonished by the fact that this war film "can appeal to
   hawks and doves alike".[27]

   

   The latter formulation relies on what obviously was a trope widely used in critics´
   descriptions of the hybrid audience appeal of some New Hollywood war movies. Contemporary
   reviews of Franklin J. Schaffner´s war movie-biopic Patton – Lust for Glory, a big box-office
   hit in 1970, describe the film as "a far-out movie passing as square", aimed at "hawks" and
   "doves" alike by a "Hollywood now firmly entreched behind the youth barricades".[28] Seen in
   this perspective, countercultural influences render a mass-market genre product flexible –
   instead of subverting it. And while Lloyd cited Patton as one of the films in which "insanity"
   had replaced heroism in cinematic constructions of individual agency[29], Hollywood´s
   promotional discourse preferred to have such post-heroic insanity interpreted as a positive
   force of social innovation: "Patton was a rebel. Long before it became fashionable. He
   rebelled against the biggest. Eisenhower. Marshall. Montgomery. Against the establishment –
   and its ideas of warfare." To Robert B. Ray, this movie tagline exemplified a "free exchange
   of plots and motifs" between an ideologically conservative "Right cycle" and a
   counterculturally appealing "Left cycle" within what he retrospectively called the "'New'
   American Cinema" of the late 1960s and early 1970s.[30]

   

   In 1970, the flexible management of countercultural elements within the war film´s generic
   framework allowed the ostentatious integration of hippie lifestyle into the narrative and
   spectacle-values of a World War II combat film. Set in France in 1944, Kelly´s Heroes centers
   its overtly anachronistic toying with drop-out fashion and rhetorics on Oddball, the
   long-haired, bearded commander of a US Army tank unit, played by Donald Sutherland (who also
   featured among the Dirty Dozen and the socially skilled jokers of M*A*S*H). The film stresses
   Oddball´s penchant for taking things easy, his habit of calling disturbances "negative waves"
   and his comrades "maaan" or "baby", his unit´s love for Oriental music, their commune
   life-style and souped up tanks. In carnivalizing the US war machine, Kelly´s Heroes also draws
   on contemporary pop styles other than hippie: the Hell´s Angels look which Oddball´s men
   display wearing captured SS uniform parts at the end, or the spinning of a would-be pop hit by
   Lalo Schifrin (performed by The Mike Curb Congregation) in several versions throughout the
   film. Compared to a canonized counterculturally oriented film like Easy Rider, these elements
   correspond to a rather broad, mainstream understanding of hippie and drop-out aesthetics:
   thus, ridiculing the long-haired in the eyes of the short-haired seems to be part of Kelly´s
   Heroes´audience address as much as is winking at the youth market. More importantly, the
   integration of countercultural elements into a combat film functions not just as a distraction
   from its narrative trajectory or as a subversion of the genre, but rather highlights the
   usefulness of playful creativity to the goal-orientation of its action. For instance,
   Oddball´s unit achieves a triumphant victory by staging a surprise tank attack as a
   near-psychedelic multi-media performance, with loud country music and custom-made shells
   containing pink (instead of Jimi Hendrix´s purple) haze fired at the Germans; the scene seems
   to anticipate the figuration of high-tech warfare as aesthetic spectacle in Apocalypse Now
   (1979) – though with a reversed evaluation, stressing success by innovation rather than the
   insanity of war.[31]

   

   A similar point can be made with respect to Kelly´s Heroes´ relation to European genre (or
   rather: formula-based) cinema. In the context of New Hollywood´s often noted susceptibility to
   influences from European cinema of the 1960s, The Wild Bunch (1969) has become the standard
   example for the impact of the Italian western on American movies. Whereas Peckinpah´s western
   is usually held to intensify the violence and cynicism of Spaghetti westerns to the point of
   insanity and self-destruction, Kelly´s Heroes feeds its even more overt stylistic and
   narrative borrowings from Sergio Leone into a success story. With its more or less dirty group
   of GIs going AWOL and advancing into enemy territory to steal a gold treasure from the Germans
   for personal gain, the film transfers the plot-motif of treasure-hunting between the
   front-lines from the Civil War setting of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) to World War
   II. While Kelly´s Heroes´ heist-plot can be regarded as a generic hybrid of combat and caper
   movie, the film quite explicitly acknowledges its debts to Leone: the scene in which the
   central gold-seeker trio Sutherland, Savalas and Clint Eastwood march to their confrontation
   with a German tank is a coarse allusion to the showdown (and to Ennio Morricone´s main-title
   theme) of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly – the film which had propelled Eastwood to worldwide
   stardom four years before.

   

   Beyond Gung Ho! – war movies as allegories of post-Fordist production

   

   The extent to which New Hollywood´s war movies explore new pragmatics and subjectivities can
   be underscored by picking up a comparison suggested by Basinger as well as by Thomas Doherty
   in his study of Hollywood´s relationship to World War II. Both authors consider the combat
   film Gung Ho! (Ray Enright, 1943) to be the model for the late 1960s "dirty group" movies.
   Doherty writes: "However much the ante is upped in criminality, brutality, and irreverence,
   the rogues and rascals of The Dirty Dozen (1967), The Devil´s Brigade (1968) and Kelly´s
   Heroes (1970) are blood brothers to the misfits of Gung Ho! (1943)."[32] These accounts
   emphasize how in Hollywood films, the war machine makes use of destructive energies – the kind
   of rampage which is freqently referred to as cinematic "violence Gung Ho!-style". However, by
   positing a continuous link and family resemblance between Gung Ho! and New Hollywood´s combat
   movies, they overlook important differences in the films´ respective conceptions of violence
   as purposeful action and of its modes of socialization. With the US Marines accepting
   fanatics, a frustrated ex-boxer, a cut-throat and some aggressive "no-good kids" from broken
   homes as volunteers for a special mission in the Pacific, Gung Ho! at first sight appears as
   innovative (and cynical) about productive teamwork as The Dirty Dozen. But Gung Ho!´s novel
   approach to combat efficiency – celebrated by numerous officers´ speeches and by a
   "semi-documentary" training sequence with propagandistic voice-over commentary – still adheres
   to a logic of duty-based teamwork and thus amounts to a mere intensification of Taylorist
   discipline: it´s all about "men fighting together with the precision of a machine", as the
   unit´s commander (Randolph Scott) phrases it, before he goes on to explain his unit´s training
   motto, which is also the film´s title. According to Scott, "Gung Ho!" – a phrase nowadays
   synonymous with rampant bloodshed – is "Chinese" for "work in harmony".

   

   In the relentless speeches to the soldiers and to its audience, Gung Ho! invokes the task of
   winning the war in the name of freedom and equality and, most of all, the notion of the combat
   team as informed by the self-image of the USA as social and ethnic melting pot. The
   meaning-making framework of the melting pot is typical of classical Hollywood´s World War II
   (and Korean War) combat movies, and of the American action-image in general – or, to be exact,
   of its "large form" in Deleuze´s sense.[33] Gung Ho!s underlying concepts of purposeful action
   and social subjectivity can also be considered in light of Deleuze´s concept of the
   action-image´s "small form". In this perspective, the notion of functionally defined, no
   longer organically founded groups (as Deleuze detects them in Howard Hawks´ westerns) becomes
   relevant.[34] Apart from its melting pot ideology, Gung Ho!´s "harmoniously working machine"
   draws on the technology-based functionalism of many wartime combat films for which Hawks´ Air
   Force (1943) estasblished the paradigm. Instead of a people and its leaders (as in the films
   of the large form) these films show crews consisting of disciplined component parts and
   highlight the role of technology in forming them (social technologies such as the standardized
   division of labor; material technologies such as the submarine engulfing the Marines in Gung
   Ho! and the bomber plane in Air Force).[35]

   

   In any case, Gung Ho! defines its pragmatics of violent action within horizons of meaning very
   different from New Hollywood´s war movies. The geopolitical mission of American democracy, the
   US Army as national melting pot, technology-based Fordist functionalism – all these
   encompassing meta-narratives are absent from the ethics and pragmatics of The Dirty Dozen and
   Kelly´s Heroes.[36] And yet, these films´ action-images of war are far from flirting with
   meaninglessness. In both films, the goal-orientation of the action-image depends not on fusing
   differences or reducing them to presupposed standards of efficiency, but on mining them for
   their use-values as potential productive forces. They are not about making misfits fit, but
   about misfits refitting and retooling the machinery. When in The Dirty Dozen the Army
   psychologist supervising the training process describes Lee Marvin´s team as "just about the
   most twisted anti-social bunch of psychopathic deformities I´ve ever run into", Marvin replies
   "Well, I can´t think of a better way to fight a war." The cynicism that one might sense in
   this statement is merely the guise and the precondition of a positive conception of
   productivity capable of integrating, valuing and unfolding those potentials which a
   disciplinary rationality excluded as deviant. In the totality of post-Fordist social
   production, "it is thus no longer possible to identify a sign, a subject, a value, or a
   practice that is 'outside'", as Hardt and Negri write.[37] Similarly, when in Kelly´s Heroes
   the Telly Savalas character faces Oddball´s hippie soldiers and shouts "That ain´t an army,
   it´s a circus!", this exclamation summarises the film´s celebration of a "diversity
   management" of labor which is indeed closer to a circus than to Taylorist or military
   discipline. Or rather, the becoming-circus of the army-factory resembles the "increasing
   indistinguishability of economic and cultural phenomena" which Hardt and Negri see as an
   effect of the countercultural "attack on the disciplinary regime" of the "factory-society",
   driving the transition to the post-Fordist productive paradigm of cultural experimentation,
   affective labor, flexible communication and non-standardized knowledge.[38]

   

   Finally, an affirmation of post-Fordist productivity becomes manifest in these two war movies
   if one reads them as "allegories of production" in the way in which David E. James interprets
   Easy Rider. Exploring the metaphorical relation of Easy Rider´s plot to its production context
   (i.e., Hollywood´s overproduction crisis and negotiation with youth audiences), James´s
   version of the failure argument in relation to New Hollywood highlights how Dennis Hopper´s
   "35mm ersatz underground film" is unable to remain loyal to and even "denigrat[es] the social
   alternatives represented by the counterculture that gives it market value."[39] According to
   James´s critique, the film handles images of hippie-communal agrarianism or elements of
   avantgarde and psychedelic style as mere episodes and thus fails to present them as viable
   alternatives to technologized, capitalized cultural practices: "[...W]e may read Captain
   America´s remark 'We blew it' as an allegory of the film, of the failure of Hopper and Fonda
   to make a film adequate to the ideals of the counterculture [...]."[40] A clear case of
   "pathos of failure", to use Elsaesser´s term. In contrast to this, the "professional
   subcultures" in The Dirty Dozen and Kelly´s Heroes confront us with an overall "pathos of
   success". In order to read this stance as an allegory of production, one has to drop James´
   somewhat Platonic concern for the film industry´s fidelity to countercultural ideals (or its
   lack thereof). Rather, the production context reflected in a self-congratulatory manner in The
   Dirty Dozen and Kelly´s Heroes is the post-Fordization of American filmmaking – Hollywood´s
   shift from the studio-based mass production of films to marketing fewer, more specialized
   films made independently and within transitory labor arrangements. This is the shift described
   as the adoption of the "package-unit system" of production after the mid-1950s by Janet
   Staiger.[41] Hollywood´s embracing of post-Fordist flexibility also involves a change in the
   consumer-cultural role of the industry´s products, gradually replacing films´ affiliations to
   the pre-established standards and genre disciplines of a studio´s factory-system with the now
   familiar conception of big-budget films as singular events, multi-generic textures, and
   consumer-driven industries in and of themselves. The film conceived as a special mission and
   norm-defying event, carried out by a package-team of maverick experts with non-standardized
   skills and no institutional ties – this is the logic of flexible production that is
   allegorized by the successes of the undisciplined in New Hollywood´s war movies.[42]

   

   Mutation, adaptation, decline? The two New Hollywoods – and how they might be related

   

   In my argument that New Hollywood explored a new pragmatic within the failure of an old one, I
   have so far emphasized its relationship to the earlier, classical period of American cinema.
   In the second half of this essay, I will focus on what followed the New Hollywood of the late
   1960s and early 1970s. Murray Smith claims that "the sheer number of 'New Hollywoods' that one
   finds posited over the course of film history" recommends a careful attention to Hollywood´s
   constant "process of adjustment and adaptation to new circumstances [...]".[43] This
   "adaptation argument", as I would call it, is one way to resolve the inherent ambiguity of the
   term New Hollywood which becomes most urgent with respect to the question of how the American
   cinema of circa 1970 relates to that of today. In Smith´s words: "The notion of the New
   Hollywood [...] underwent a strange mutation, ending up designating either something
   diametrically opposed to the American art film, or something inclusive of but much larger than
   it."[44]

   

   We can see the latter, extended definition at work in Thomas Schatz´s history of the New
   Hollywood, in which the term refers to the post-1945 genealogy of the blockbuster. According
   to Schatz, the "blockbuster hits are, for better or for worse, what the New Hollywood is
   about", and the establishment of this type of film, with its intermedia marketing potentials,
   as Hollywood´s key product after 1975 marked "the studios´ eventual coming-to-terms with an
   increasingly fragmented entertainment industry – with its demographics and target audiences,
   its diversified 'multi-media conglomerates, its global(ized) markets and new delivery
   systems".[45] To some degree, my rewriting of the failure argument into a success story of
   flexibilization is in line with Schatz´s account, in that The Dirty Dozen and Kelly´s Heroes
   can be situated among the many precursors of today´s blockbusters; as such, they testify to
   the gradual reconceptualisation of Hollywood´s main product in terms of a special event that
   replaces genre discipline with a playful, flexible, intertextual openness to a variety of
   cultural dynamics and viewing positions. However, in defining New Hollywood as a successful
   process of adaptation, Schatz downplays the creative, innovative aspect of Hollywood´s
   flirtation with the countercultures: in his view, "[...] Hollywood´s cultivation of the youth
   market and penchant for innovation in the late 1960s and early 1970s" mainly "reflected the
   studios´ uncertainty and growing desperation."[46] The adaptation argument, which understands
   New Hollywood in a broad sense (the rise of the blockbuster), and the failure argument, which
   refers to New Hollywood in a narrow sense (centered on youth and road movies made around 1970)
   share the negative terms of disorientation and crisis in which they describe cinema´s opening
   onto youth and countercultural value systems.

   

   The other view which Smith hints at – New Hollywood turning from "American art film" into its
   opposite – gives an emphatically positive judgement on Hollywood circa 1970 and ascribes to it
   some of the virtues usually associated with notions of "art cinema". In placing Hollywood´s
   "second golden age" in contrast to the industry´s prevailing blockbuster orientation after
   1975, this "decline argument" reveals a certain cinephile melancholia, as for instance in an
   article by J. Hoberman from 1985: "The cultural upheavals of the late sixties spawned a cinema
   of genre criticism and directorial nonconformity; the retrenchment of the mid-seventies
   brought the waning days and ultimate reversal of the Bonnie and Clyde-Easy Rider,
   small-and-weird-can-be-beautiful revolution. The past decade marked the decline and fall of
   the maverick genre revisionists (Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah, Arthur Penn) [...]."[47] David
   A. Cook describes the decline of what he calls the "American auteur cinema" and its
   transformation into the blockbuster mode in particularly pessimist terms: "From the cinema of
   rebellion represented by films like Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, and Medium Cool, America´s
   youth transferred its allegiance to the 'personal' cinema of the seventies´ auteurs without
   realizing how corporatist and impersonal it had become. And the auteurs themselves were
   transformed from cinéastes into high-rolling celebrity directors (many of them) with their own
   chauffeurs, Lear jets, and bodyguards [...] and recast their films as branded merchandise to
   be consumed along with T-shirts, action figures, Happy Meals [...]"[48]

   

   A less moralizing thesis on the relationship of the two New Hollywoods was proposed in 1986 by
   Andrew Britton whose version of the decline argument is ideology-critical rather than
   cinephile. According to Britton, the "conservative reassurance in the contemporary Hollywood"
   has resulted in the "almost exclusive predominance of a type of film-making which, during the
   `seventies, did not rule out the possibility of more interesting, contradictory and disturbing
   work. [...I]t would have been difficult to feel certain in 1974 that The Towering Inferno, for
   all its phenomenal success, was about to become the main tradition. At the time, the disaster
   cycle seemed to be reactionary in a relatively simple sense: it was a desperate attempt [...]
   showing up a value-system which was obviously in ruins. What was less apparent was a potential
   cultural vitality. [...] In 1974, The Towering Inferno looked merely exhausted."[49]

   

   The 1970s disaster movies are one point at which the discourses on New Hollywood part ways.
   From the viewpoint of adaptation, films like The Towering Inferno appear as
   (proto-)blockbusters and thus as examples of the larger New Hollywood; but, as Smith suggests,
   they can also be seen "in dialectical tension" with a New Hollywood which is either criticized
   for its pathos of failure or valued as "interesting, contradictory and disturbing".[50] If we
   are cinephile enough to regard New Hollywood as The Last Great American Picture Show, then The
   Towering Inferno is probably not a part of this Last GAPS, but rather represents the last
   gasps of the Old Hollywood – of "a value-system which was obviously in ruins", as Britton put
   it. But since there have been so many movies after the last one[51] – among them many more
   American disaster films in the late 1990s –, what interests me is Britton´s notion of an
   "exhausted" cinema becoming the mainstream. The problem requires a look at Hollywood´s
   changing ways of dealing with its past, using 1970s New Hollywood as a point of departure.

   

   Westworld, Coma and the "biopolitics of recycling": from New Hollywood´s conspiracies to the
   control society´s blockbusters

   

   While the early period of New Hollywood in the narrow sense – from the commercial success of
   Bonnie and Clyde (1967) to the box-office failure of Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) – is marked by
   the film industry´s relationship with countercultural values and audience positions, one trend
   discernible in the American cinema of the mid- and late 1970s is a cycle of conspiracy
   thrillers. These films (which have their equivalents in the Western European cinema of that
   period) approach the ruptures within American society from a different angle. Instead of
   exploring the new cultural visibility of what might lie outside the established order, they
   show attempts at investigating the order´s hidden inside, emphasizing its systemic character,
   obstinacy and near invisibility. In some 1970s conspiracy thrillers, the young rebel
   protagonist of the earlier countercultural cycle seems to be displaced into the figure of the
   liberal investigator (often a not-so-young, but long-haired journalist) who either falls
   victim to the secret politics of surveillance and state power, like Warren Beatty in The
   Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974), or achieves a narrow victory, like Robert Redford in
   Three Days of the Condor (Sidney Pollack, 1975), Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford in All the
   President´s Men (Pakula, 1976), or Peter Fonda in Futureworld (Richard T. Heffron, 1976). In
   the latter film, a SciFi version of the trend, the Easy Rider turned journalist exposes a plot
   aimed at replacing politicians with remote-controlled cyborg doubles during their stay at a
   high-tech amusement park where humanoid robots serve the visitors´ pleasure. Looking back on
   the 1970s conspiracy thriller, Futureworld is of interest because it fuses elements of two
   better known films made by writer-director Michael Crichton. In his "techno-thriller"
   Westworld (1973), to which Futureworld is the low-budget sequel, the service robots of the
   same amusement park run out of control and attack the visitors of the Wild West, Ancient Rome
   and Middle Ages themed "worlds". And in Crichton´s Coma (1978), the conspiracy that turns
   living people into technologically controlled bodies is transfered to a hospital where
   patients are secretly sent into coma and kept alive in a computer-controlled storage space to
   provide organ transplants for sale on an international market.

   

   Coma´s terrifying images of technologically reified life almost literalize some points of
   Fredric Jameson´s interpretation of the conspiracy motif as an allegorical figuration of
   contemporary capitalism´s invisible, systemic totality. In Jameson, the "hermeneutic content"
   of Pakula´s and other 1970s conspiracy thrillers – the promise of a "deeper inside view" into
   society´s "hidden abode of production" – points towards the "new world system" of capitalism
   "whose study is now our true ontology".[52] The bizarre clinic in Coma, both life support
   system and stock exchange, offers a paranoid, ontological, allegorical glimpse into existence
   pervaded by capital; or rather, existence immersed in a mode of capital power to which Hardt´s
   and Negri´s concept of "biopolitical production" or "biopower" (derived from Foucault)
   applies: "Biopower is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following
   it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it. [...] The highest function of this
   power is to invest life through and through, [...] the production and reproduction of life
   itself."[53] What the hermeneutics of New Hollywood´s conspiracy thrillers aim at is the new
   world system of capital´s globalization – globalization not just in the sense of transnational
   markets, but rather as the "real subsumption" of social life under capital: the intensive,
   biopolitical "working through" of an already formally subsumed social terrain, up to the point
   at which "[c]apital has become a world."[54]

   

   In "Westworld", "Roman World" and "Medieval World" it is the accumulated symbolic capital of
   classical Hollywood genres that has become a world. In Crichton´s theme park, the western and
   two versions of the historical epic have been cybernetically reworked into experiential
   environments, spectacles to be travelled and lived in by tourists. The conspiracy motif
   implicit in Westworld – or rather, its suggestion of two conspiracies: that of the park´s
   invisible control system, and that of the robotic gunslingers, knights and gladiators who
   suddenly massacre the visitors – exemplifies the critical "consciousness of clichés" and the
   "condemnation of the plot", two of Deleuze´s characteristics of the American action-image in
   its crisis. In Deleuze, the plot which New Hollywood critically confronts is ultimately a
   global conspiracy of omnipresent media clichés which penetrate public spheres and minds. "But
   how can the cinema attack the dark organisation of clichés", Deleuze asks, "when it
   participates in their fabrication and propagation, as much as magazines or television?"[55] In
   some moments of the 1970s conspiracy cycle, the critical orientation of the action-image in
   crisis becomes self-reflexive: it shows the conspiracy as cinema, as in the psycho-killer test
   screening in The Parallax View, and the cinema as conspiracy – the conspiracy of outdated
   Hollywood genres whose clichés become dangerously alive in Westworld.

   

   The horror of a Westworld fully subsumed under the capital of generic recognition value; the
   paranoia in Pakula´s thrillers, caused by the persistence of the system and by the infinity of
   secret state power; and also Britton´s critical dismay over the cultural vitality of a
   seemingly exhausted cinema, over the blockbusters that grew out of the ruins of The Towering
   Inferno: certain images and definitions of 1970s New Hollywood converge in an "epistemology of
   uneasiness" about the fact that something which should be dead is – still, again, or in as yet
   unknown ways – alive.[56] In these accounts of how the past, the already known, continues to
   rule over the present, the conspiracy metaphor figures prominently. According to Britton´s
   critique of Hollywood after 1975, the self-referentiality of cinema´s clichés turns
   entertainment into a solipsistic totality of knowingness, and the community-building role of
   genres is replaced by "a cosy conspiracy of self-congratulation and spurious familiarity".[57]
   Deleuze on the other hand, in his critique of American cinema´s inescapable entanglement in
   its own tradition, employs metaphors which become literalized in disaster and horror movie
   images: Hollywood´s genres "collapse and yet maintain their empty frame", he writes, and:
   "maltreated, mutilated, destroyed, a cliché is not slow to be reborn from its ashes."[58]
   Along these lines, Crichton´s two films can be read as allegories of a cinema unable to rid
   itself of its past. The movie clichés – the ones which New Hollywood´s shifting, critical
   revision, and occasional mutilation of genres rather innovated and perpetuated than destroyed
   – literally stalk their audience in the form of Yul Brynner´s robot-gunslinger. In Westworld´s
   history-land of Hollywood´s past, the stereotype is a zombie who refuses to acknowledge his
   death and stubbornly walks on; in Coma, it is a stiff body kept alive, serving as a reservoir
   for spare parts, and the film´s clinic presents itself as showroom for spectacular lighting
   effects and as storage space for frozen lives, in short: as a cinema.

   

   Such an interpretation, however, can only make sense within the discourse on New Hollywood in
   the narrow, 1970s sense. Placed, however, in the context of a larger New Hollywood – the one
   which gravitates towards the blockbuster and today defines the framework of mass-cultural
   encounters with the movies on a global scale –, the allegories of Westworld and Coma point to
   a different relationship of Hollywood with its past. The terms of this relationship have
   shifted from a negative conception – the cinema as conspiracy of the exhausted, as comatose
   body and empty frame – to an affirmative, biopolitical working through of cinema´s history, a
   rearticulation of its "standing reserve" and recycling of its past. This is Hollywood´s
   rebirth from its ashes which Deleuze mentions only in passing; the action-image´s phoenix-like
   (technology-based) revival in the blockbuster mode is not the concern of his cinema books. But
   it clearly is Crichton´s, or rather: the name Crichton is now one of the brand-names
   associated with Hollywood´s vitality and its embracing of the high-tech theme park. The films
   in question are the three Jurassic Park blockbusters (1993, 1997, 2001).[59]

   

   In his review, Peter Wollen called the first of these films a hybrid of Westworld and Jaws
   (the Spielberg film whose 1975 success is usually regarded as a watershed in the genealogy of
   the contemporary blockbuster); and he described Jurassic Park in terms reminiscent of
   Crichton´s theme park movie made twenty years earlier: "[..T]he monsters have not just run out
   of control, they have come back from the dead [...]."[60] Unlike Westworld, however, the
   all-encompassing reach of Jurassic Park is not a paranoid fantasy, but a positive
   consumer-cultural reality. What would be unimaginable with the former´s topography and
   monsters was key to the latter´s mass-cultural impact – the existence of a real Jurassic Park
   ride and of a great variety of dinosaur toys (famously displayed in the film itself), of
   servicves and commodities for consumers participating in one of those intermediatized
   long-term events known as blockbusters. As a history-land of genre cinema´s revived past (King
   Kong, The Lost World and other monster movies), Jurassic Park actualizes the virtuality of
   Westworld, i.e., a new conception of the theme park as inhabitable biotope and life-world to
   the cinema, and a temporality in which coming back from the dead is part of Hollywood´s
   biopolitical production.[61] Rising from the ashes applies to a cinematic life-cycle which is
   mirrored in the cultural-economic cycle of each big film – in the "multimedia reincarnation"
   of the blockbuster, of a "cultural commodity that might be regenerated in any number of media
   forms", as Schatz writes in his New Hollywood success story.[62] The near inexhaustibility of
   haunting clichés, which the New Hollywood of the 1970s glimpsed allegorically in images of
   conspiracy and horror, is fully explored as a life-affirming, future-oriented potential in the
   larger New Hollywood which thrives on the vitality of the blockbuster.

   

   Steven Spielberg – whose career began within the New Hollywood of youth and road movies – is
   an even more famous brand-name for the larger New Hollywood´s vitality and productivity. The
   latter are based on recycling. The distant pasts of one´s own childhood, of genre cinema
   history and of traumatic modernity, and also the near pasts of theatrical viewing experiences
   are "worked through" – re-told in rescue narratives, re-membered in rides and merchandise.
   "Something has survived!" is the tagline of Spielberg´s therapeutic realism of real
   subsumption: time, history, and what is lost to them – The Lost World – are re-appropriated,
   re-interpreted, really subsumed under the self-revitalizing "capital cinema" of the
   blockbuster.[63] Hollywood´s biopolitical vitalism seems capable of bringing everything,
   including its generic past, back from the dead. "Life finds a way", as a geneticist in
   Jurassic Park puts it, and: "Bio-technology, like the cinema, makes it possible for us to
   engage in a kind of time travel", as Wollen writes about that film.[64] Generally, today´s
   blockbusters act as media-cultural "time machines"; this is Elsaesser´s name for the temporal
   logic of a Hollywood whose newness his recent articles frame as post-classical.[65] While
   Wollen compares Spielberg´s dinosaurs which haunt the present to vampires, Elsaesser makes the
   vampire into a full-blown allegory of cinema´s post-classical afterlife. "The very theme of
   the undead lies at the heart of the cinema´s power and cultural presence", he writes;
   Hollywood affirmatively folds around its die-hard clichés, exerting its vampirist powers of
   infection-through-fascination, metamorphosis and revitalization.[66] Reading Fantasy Island
   (1978-1984), a TV series reminiscent of Chrichton´s Hollywood genres turned into worlds, as an
   allegory of its production, Elsaesser conceptualizes cinema´s position in today´s
   media-cultural temporality in terms of biopower – in terms of cinema´s "self-referentiality,
   repetition, revamping of genres, reiteration of formulas" as a "natural cycle", of movie
   history as a "natural history" to be rearticulated by television and the digital media.[67]

   

   Hollywood´s self-transmuting life-cycle and some other aspects of the above discussion can,
   finally, be grasped with a concept proposed by Deleuze. The term "control society" appears not
   in Deleuze´s cinema books, but in his essays on contemporary media and modes of social power
   (with conceptual links to his logics of film that remain implicit, virtual). Historically, the
   control society is the vanishing point of capitalism´s move from the rigid standards of
   Fordist discipline to a logic of flexible and dispersed power. Exploring this concept, Hardt
   and Negri see the formation of control societies as an outcome of the anti-disciplinary
   resistance and creativity of 1960s countercultures: with the production of hybrid social
   subjectivities, with institutions continually redefined according to the movements and
   temporal rhythms of the "multitude", capital power adapts to, integrates, normalizes and
   profits from the new pragmatic of flexibility and affective labor.[68] While disciplinary
   society´s "confinements" acted as social "molds", Deleuze writes, "controls are a modulation,
   like a self-transmuting molding continually changing from one moment to the next [...]."[69]
   In this definition, Deleuze falls back upon the terms of his description of the cinematic
   "movement-image" as it captures the ever changing duration of the material world: the
   film-image is a "modulation" which "constantly modifies the mold, constitutes a variable,
   continuous, temporal mold."[70] When controls modulate society like film modulates reality,
   "the world itself 'turns to film'", as Deleuze remarks on the pervasiveness of television as a
   technology of control.[71] The world turns to film as capital becomes a world, to the extent
   that "capital cinema" – cinema as a rehearsal ground and agent of socialization – is itself
   rendered flexible, entirely mediatized, pervaded by electronic technologies. Giving
   film-images unprecedented global reach, connectivity and cultural penetration, the
   contemporary blockbuster best warrants Beller´s notion of "capital cinema" and its place "at
   the heart of the society of control", as Patricia Pisters puts it.[72] In its blockbuster
   mode, cinema is deeply immersed in and at the same time rehearses the temporal logic of
   control societies, in which, according to Deleuze, "you never finish anything".[73] Life-long
   learning and continuous self-control, the flexible redefinition and working through of
   identities – these ethics and subjectivities are turned into consumer-cultural experiences by
   the cinema of the blockbuster, which is cinema as time machine and hardly ever finished event.
   Blockbusters exceed the molds of genre and narrative closure; they rework (movie) history and
   consumer biographies, and modulate between markets and media, anticipations and memories,
   trailers and DVDs, novelty and nostalgia.[74]

   

   The formation process of the control society offers a framework for reconsidering the
   genealogy of New Hollywood and some ambiguities surrounding the term. In this perspective, the
   relationship between the New Hollywood of disciplinary crisis and countercultural
   experimentation, and the New Hollywood of the blockbuster is less one of opposition, but
   rather one of virtualities that are actualized. In other words, The Dirty Dozen and Kelly´s
   Heroes, Westworld and Coma become meaningful as symptoms and anticipations of media-cultural,
   hence social, experiences which are flexible, affective, undisciplined – and controlled.
   Hollywood has displaced and reworked the Westworld  into the Jurassic Park, and one can also
   see a kind of legacy of The Dirty Dozen in contemporary blockbusters: from the obvious example
   of Armageddon (1998) – with its rock band-like team of misfits and jokers on a special NASA
   mission, and with the Dirty Dozen-comparison circulated by promotional discourses and reviews
   of the film[75] – to Twister (1996) or xXx (2002), which contrast the productivity of
   affective labor and subcultural "tacit knowledge" with the failures of disciplined action.

   

   But of course, the (virtual) flexibility explored in the American cinema circa 1970 and the
   (actual) flexibility rehearsed in today´s cinema of the blockbuster are not one and the same
   thing. A genealogical approach to our present global media culture probably has to consider
   processes of re-evaluation which have gradually turned flexibility and affectivity from
   indices of anti-disciplinary resistance into driving forces of today´s creative industries,
   lifestyle economies and experience cultures. This point (which demands further inquiry) can be
   illustrated by a last visit to a theme park running on movie software, with a detour through
   the contemporary diagnostics of late 1960s New Hollywood. In 1971, Elsaesser contrasted
   classical Hollywood´s motivation and goal-orientation of action with recent films like The
   Wild Bunchwhose emotionally dislocated heroes "laugh uncontrollably for no apparent reason,
   only suddenly to break into outbursts of unmotivated and wholly irrational violence".[76] In
   2002, Warner Bros. Movie World at Bottrop, Germany, opened – next to the Lethal Weapon, Eraser
   and Wild Wild West rollercoasters, the Batman flight simulator, "Rick’s Café Américain" and
   Dirty Harry´s BBQ diner – a "free-fall ride" tower named after Peckinpah´s western to end all
   westerns.[77] Advertised by the Movie World management as the worthy namesake of a "brutal and
   immoral" western´s "anti-heroes", and with the subtitle of the film´s German dubbed version
   added to its name, The Wild Bunch – Sie kannten kein Gesetz (literally They Knew No Law) now
   shoots up (or rather down) lawless theme park consumers who laugh uncontrollably under
   technologically controlled outbursts of violence. One New Hollywood´s crisis of motivation has
   become the name of another´s experience culture.

   

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   Movies. Boston, Toronto: Little Brown & Co. 1973, pp. 92-102

   

   Peter Kramer: "Post-classical Hollywood", in: John Hill, Pamela Church Gibson (eds.): The
   Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Oxford: Oxford UP 1998, pp. 289-309

   

   Peter Lloyd: "The American Cinema: An Outlook", monogram 1, 1971, pp. 11-13

   

   Steve Neale: "'New Hollywood Cinema'", Screen 17, 2, 1976, pp. 117-122

   

   Patricia Pisters: "Glamour and Glycerine: Surplus and Residual of the Network Society: from
   Glamorama to Fight Club", in: Pisters (ed.): Micropolitics of Media Culture. Reading the
   Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP 2001, pp. 125-141

   

   Robert B. Ray: A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema 1930-1980. Princeton: Princeton UP
   1985

   

   Andy Richards: review of Armageddon, Sight & Sound 9, 1998, pp. 38f

   

   Thomas Schatz: "The New Hollywood", in: Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, Ava Preacher Collins
   (eds.): Film Theory Goes to the Movies. New York, London: Routledge 1993, pp. 8-36

   

   Paul Smith: Clint Eastwood. A Cultural Production. London: University College Press 1993

   

   Murray Smith: "Theses on the philosophy of Hollywood history", in: Steve Neale, Murray Smith
   (eds.): Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. London, New York: Routledge 1998, pp. 3-20

   

   Janet Staiger: "The package-unit system: unit management after 1955", in: David Bordwell,
   Janet Staiger, Kristin Thompson: The Classical Hollywood Cinema. Film Style and Mode of
   Production to 1960. New York 1985, pp. 330-337

   

   David Wilson: review of Patton – Lust for Glory, Sight and Sound 39, 3, 1970, pp. 160f

   

   Peter Wollen: "Theme Park and Variations", Sight and Sound 7, 1993, pp. 7-10

   

   

   

   -------------------------------

   [1]  Peter Lloyd: "The American Cinema: An Outlook", monogram 1, 1971, p. 12

   [2] Thomas Elsaesser: "The American Cinema: Why Hollywood", monogram 1, 1971, p. 9f

   [3] Thomas Elsaesser: "The Pathos of Failure", monogram 6, 1975, (p.15) in this volume p. ?

   [4] Chris Hugo: "Easy Rider and Hollywood in the '70s", Movie 31/32, 1986, p. 67, 69, 71

   [5] Gilles Deleuze: The Movement-Image. Cinema 1. [1983] Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P 1986,
   pp. 167f, 207-210

   [6]  Elsaesser: "The Pathos of Failure" (p. 17f), in this volume p. ?

   [7]  Steve Neale: "'New Hollywood Cinema'", Screen 17, 2, 1976, p. 119

   [8] On historical usages and different meanings of the terms "New Hollywood" and
   "post-classical Hollywood" see Peter Kramer: "Post-classical Hollywood", in: John Hill, Pamela
   Church Gibson (eds.): The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Oxford: Oxford UP 1998

   [9] Hugo: "Easy Rider and Hollywood in the '70s", p. 71

   [10]  Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri: Empire. Cambridge, London: Harvard UP 2000, pp. 274f

   [11] My rather loose usage of this latter term aims to interpret film-industrial practices and
   images at a historical conjuncture when, in the West, youth-culture and counter-culture are
   congruent to a higher degree than ever before or since. Regrettably, my approach here does not
   take feminist and African-American struggles within this counter-cultural context into
   account.

   [12]  Jonathan L. Beller: "Cinema, Capital of the Twentieth Century", Postmodern Culture 4, 3,
   1994; 

   web publication: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.594/beller.594, paragraphs
   10, 7, 59

   [13] cf Hardt, Negri: Empire, pp. 275, 402

   [14] Beller: "Cinema, Capital of the Twentieth Century", paragraph 6

   [15] Pauline Kael: "Blessed Profanity" [1970], in: Deeper into Movies. Boston, Toronto: Little
   Brown & Co. 1973, pp. 93, 95

   [16] Ibid., p. 94

   [17]  Jan Dawson: review of M*A*S*H, Sight and Sound 39, 3, 1970, p. 161

   [18] Jeanine Basinger: The World War II Combat Film. Anatomy of a Genre. New York: Columbia UP
   1986, pp. 202f

   [19] Ibid., pp. 205ff, 201

   [20] Philip French: review of The Dirty Dozen, Sight and Sound 36, 4, 1967, p. 201

   [21] Ibid.

   [22] Thus, one can see the film´s self-positioning as a war movie-novelty – opening up an old
   genre to young audiences – as being allegorically reflected in its narrative stressing of
   innovation and inventiveness.

   [23] Interestingly, among the few non-road movies to which Elsaesser referred in his "Pathos
   of Failure" essay is another Robert Aldrich film, The Mean Machine a.k.a. The Longest Yard
   (1974), with a prison plot focusing on the Burt Reynolds hero "turning anti-social convicts
   into loyal team-mates" at football. Elsaesser´s remarks on this film ("The Pathos of Failure",
   p. 16, in this volume p. ?) emphasize its narrative disintegration and cognitive
   unreliability, exposing its "motivational predicament: if characters have no moral history
   that can plausibly explain their behaviour, action is the spectacle of gratuitousness."
   Generally, the frequency (and obtrusiveness) of narratives of male bonding in Aldrich´s work
   might be of interest to a more auteurist approach.

   [24] cf Hardt, Negri: Empire, pp. 273-276, 290-292; see also Michael Hardt: "Affective labor",
   Boundary 2, 26(2), 1999, pp. 89-100; web publication:
   http://www.aleph-arts.org/io_lavoro/textos/Hardt.doc, and Ronald E. Day: "Totality and
   Representation: A History of Knowledge Management Through European Documentation, Critical
   Modernity, and Post-Fordism", Journal of the American Society for Information Science and
   Technology, 52, 9, 2001, pp. 724-735. web publication:
   http://www.lisp.wayne.edu/~ai2398/kmasis.htm. It should be noted that while my approach to the
   pragmatics of some combat movies of New Hollywood circa 1970 stresses the notion of teamwork,
   Hardt´s and Negri´s analysis of today´s "digital capitalism" gives much more prominence to the
   concept of network production.

   [25] Latin-folk pop singer Trini Lopez played a minor character among the Dirty Dozen;
   admittedly, he was not a prototypical rebel-idol of late 1960s youth culture.

   [26] Ed Guerrero: "Black Violence as Cinema: From Cheap Thrills to Historical Agonies", in: J.
   David Slocum: Violence and American Cinema. New York, London: Routledge 2001, pp. 213f

   [27] French: review of The Dirty Dozen, p. 201

   [28] Kael: "The Man Who Loved War" [1970], in: Deeper into Movies, p. 99; David Wilson: review
   of Patton – Lust for Glory, Sight and Sound 39, 3, 1970, p.160

   [29] Lloyd: "The American Cinema: An Outlook", p. 12

   [30]  Robert B. Ray: A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema 1930-1980. Princeton:
   Princeton UP 1985, pp. 314f

   [31] Of course, there are New Hollywood war movies contemporary to Kelly´s Heroes which
   strongly emphasize a notion of the insanity of war; one could mention the crumbling of
   action-trajectories and the Easy Rider-style editing of Sidney Pollack´s World War II combat
   film Castle Keep (1969), or Mike Nichols´ Catch-22 (1970), a rather dark and nihilistic World
   War II military satire in the wake of M*A*S*H´s success.

   [32] Basinger: The World War II Combat Film, pp. 203f; Thomas Doherty: Projections of War.
   Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II. New York: Columbia UP 1993, p. 296.
   Interestingly, the focus on the violence of the actions in The Dirty Dozen – rather than on
   their cooperative and productive aspects – seems to allow for a smooth integration of
   Aldrich´s film within the established canon of New Hollywood classics. As Michael Hammond
   writes: "The Robert Aldrich film is notable for its violence and brutality at the moment when
   the new rating system replaced the old Production Code. The film acts as an important
   precursor to Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and later The Wild Bunch, of the new, violent tone the
   new system would foster." Michael Hammond: "Some Smothering Dreams: The Combat Film in
   Contemporary Hollywood", in: Steve Neale (ed.): Genre and Contemporary Hollywood. London:
   British Film Institute 2002, p. 64

   [33] cf Deleuze: The Movement-Image, pp. 144, 148

   [34] Ibid., pp. 164ff

   [35] On disciplined co-operation and functionalism in wartime combat movies, especially in Air
   Force, see Doherty: Projections of War, pp.103ff, 110ff

   [36] This also goes for the historical greatness of military missions celebrated in several
   all-star war epics from the early 1960s to the mid 1970s.

   [37] Hardt, Negri: Empire, p. 385

   [38] Ibid., p. 273, 275

   [39] David E. James: Allegories of Cinema. American Film in the Sixties. Princeton: Princeton
   UP 1989, p. 14f

   [40] Ibid., p. 17

   [41] Janet Staiger: "The package-unit system: unit management after 1955", in: David Bordwell,
   Janet Staiger, Kristin Thompson: The Classical Hollywood Cinema. Film Style and Mode of
   Production to 1960. New York 1985

   [42] The complete detachment of a professional subculture of treasure-hunters from the
   system´s overall effort  in Kelly´s Heroes – "We´re just a private enterprise operation", as
   Eastwood explains his unit´s mission – is interpreted as an allegory of independent film
   production by Paul Smith. The author points to Clint Eastwood´s increased reliance on his
   Malpaso company (founded in 1968) after his dissatisfaction with a major studio´s production
   of Kelly´s Heroes, a film "whose central contradiction is that its servicemen do not actually
   serve, even though they are heroic entrepreneurs". Paul Smith: Clint Eastwood. A Cultural
   Production. London: University College Press 1993, p. 198

   [43] Murray Smith: "Theses on the philosophy of Hollywood history", in: Steve Neale, Murray
   Smith (eds.): Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. London, New York: Routledge 1998, p. 14

   [44] Ibid., p. 11. Along with Janet Staiger, Murray Smith would probably object to a 
   conceptual connection of classical Hollywood´s production logic with Fordist discipline.
   However, Staiger´s remark that "[m]aking a film [in the classical studio system, D.R.] was not
   working on a Ford moving assembly-line" (in: "The package-unit system: unit management after
   1955", p. 336), and Smith´s points on classical Hollywood´s ""'non-Fordist' peculiarities"
   (in: "Theses on the philosophy of Hollywood history", p. 8) do, in my view, not radically
   invalidate that comparison.

   [45] Thomas Schatz: "The New Hollywood", in: Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, Ava Preacher Collins
   (eds.): Film Theory Goes to the Movies. New York, London: Routledge 1993, pp. 9ff

   [46] Ibid., p. 15

   [47] J. Hoberman: "Ten years that shook the world", American Film 10, June 1985, p.  34

   [48] David A. Cook: "Auteur Cinema and the 'Film Generation' in 1970s Hollywood", in: Jon
   Lewis (ed.): The New American Cinema. Durham & London: Duke UP 1998, p. 35

   [49] Andrew Britton: "Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment", movie 31/32,
   1986, p. 2

   [50] Smith: "Theses on the philosophy of Hollywood history", p. 10. In "The Pathos of Failure"
   (p. 14; in this volume), Elsaesser suggested a Hollywood landscape divided between the
   emotional involvement and spectacle offered by cop thrillers and disaster movies on one hand,
   and "emotional anti-stances" catered for by road movies with rebel heroes on the other.

   [51] The Last Movie was a commercially unsuccesful, self-reflexive road-movie essay on
   Hollywood film-making, directed by Dennis Hopper in 1971 in the wake of Easy Rider´s success.

   [52] Fredric Jameson: "Totality as Conspiracy", in: The Geopolitical Aesthetic. Cinema and
   Space in the World System. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana UP 1992, pp. 15, 82

   [53] Hardt, Negri: Empire, pp. 23f

   [54] Ibid., p. 386; on real subsumption see also Ibid., pp. 255, 272

   [55] Deleuze: The Movement-Image, p. 210

   [56] In a closer look at the amusement park as an allegorical location in mid-1970s "uneasy"
   Hollywood, one would encounter Rollercoaster (1975), a hybrid of disaster film and cop
   thriller, set in various amusement parks. As a companion film to Westworld´s and Futureworld´s
   horror of Hollywood genres cybernetically revived as virtual realities, one could mention
   Welcome to Blood City (1976): this British-Canadian co-production stars Jack Palance and
   2001´s Keir Dullea in an artificial Wild West environment remote-controlled  for training
   purposes by a conspiratory secret service.

   [57] Britton: "Blissing Out", p. 5

   [58] Deleuze: The Movement-Image, p. 211

   [59] Crichton contributed the novel and screenplay to Jurassic Park and the novel to The Lost
   World – Jurassic Park; Jurassic Park III uses characters created by Crichton. From an
   auteurist point of view, one could highlight this writer-director´s ongoing fascination with
   technologically controlled, isolated spaces and with "imitations of life" – from his novel
   filmed as The Andromeda Strain (1971), through his SciFi thriller Looker (1981) to the TV
   series ER he created in 1994.

   [60] Peter Wollen: "Theme Park and Variations", Sight and Sound 7, 1993, p. 8

   [61] Observations on the relations between cinematic and theme park temporalities and
   experiential modes can be found for instance in Scott Bukatman "There's Always Tomorrowland:
   Disney and the Hypercinematic Experience ", October, no.57, Summer 1991, and (with regard to
   Jurassic Park in the light of post-Fordist production and consumption) in Constance Balides:
   "Jurassic post-Fordism: tall tales of economics in the theme park", Screen 41, 2, 2000.

   [62] Schatz: "The New Hollywood", pp. 31, 29

   [63] "Something has survived!" was a promotional slogan of the second Jurassic Park film,
   entitled The Lost World.

   [64] Wollen: "Theme Park and Variations", p. 7

   [65] see Elsaesser: "Specularity and engulfment: Francis Ford Coppola and Bram Stoker´s
   Dracula", in: Steve Neale, Murray Smith (eds.): Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, p. 199, and
   "The Blockbuster. Everything Connects, but Not Everything Goes", in: Jon Lewis (ed.): The End
   of Cinema as we know it. American Film in the Nineties. New York: New York UP 2001, p. 21f

   [66] Wollen: "Theme Park and Variations", p. 8; Elsaesser: "Specularity and engulfment", pp.
   197f

   [67] Elsaesser: "Fantasy Island: Dream Logic as Production Logic", in: Thomas Elsaesser, Kay
   Hoffmann (eds.): Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age.
   Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP 1998, pp. 154f

   [68] see Hardt, Negri: Empire, pp. 268ff, 318, 331

   [69] Deleuze: "Postscript on Control Societies" [1990], in: Negotiations 1972-1990. [1990],
   New York: Columbia UP 1995, pp. 178f. On control societies in Deleuze, see also his
   conversation with Negri, "Control and Becoming" [1990], also in the Negotiations volume.

   [70] Deleuze: The Movement-Image, p. 24. Deleuze derives his distinction between photographic
   mold and cinematographic modulation from André Bazin.

   [71] Deleuze: "Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel" [1986], in:
   Negotiations 1972-1990, p. 76

   [72] Patricia Pisters: "Glamour and Glycerine: Surplus and Residual of the Network Society:
   from Glamorama to Fight Club", in: Pisters (ed.): Micropolitics of Media Culture. Reading the
   Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP 2001, p.140

   [73] Deleuze: "Postscript on Control Societies", p. 179

   [74] see Elsaesser: "The Blockbuster", p. 21f

   [75] For instance in Andy Richards´ review in Sight & Sound 9, 1998, p. 39.

   [76] Elsaesser: "The American Cinema: Why Hollywood", p. 10

   [77] see for instance the German website http://www.germancoaster.de/
   features-2002-03-warnerpressekonferenz.html