Hollywood Baroque: The Steadicam Years
If I could just create the kind of world I’d really like to live in . . . I
wouldn’t be there.
—Robert Creeley1
Illusion, Delusion, Collusion
More and more it seems possible to descry a lynchpin moment of new American
cinema in Purple Rain. Not only does Prince’s film bring the nightmare
Oedipal dialectic of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep to the entertainment
media; not only does it render the incoherent, fractured narrative of Haile
Gerima’s Harvest 3000 in popular form; but it gathers the forces of film
about its moments of spectacle, subordinating an already picaresque narrative
to the sudden coherence of sound and image in sublime moments of
performance, to recreate as pure decoration the melodrama of its most obvious
thematic model, in terms of production history, stardom, narration,
and camp, the Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born.
The film exists as a series of alternating surfaces: the show, the fetish,
the spectacle, the soundtrack album, the star, the performance, the auteur—
and most of all the triumphant coincidence of all of them in the production
numbers. The articulation of sound and image across the shot-reverse-shot
cutting, so unnecessarily obvious, constructs the relation between star persona
and audience as antagonistic, or at best agonistic, deferring the utopian
moment of the performer’s ecstatic integration with the crowd, the crowd’s
with the performer, into the invisible realm of the score. Already a nostalgic
reconstruction of the Minneapolis scene of the late 1970s, Purple Rain, that
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narcissistic exploration of an already fantastic world, is an early monument
of the Hollywood baroque.
Purple Rain sold 205,000 soundtrack albums on its day of release (Prince
2000: 135). The Wagnerian ambition for cinema to become a Gesamtkunstwerk,
a total multimedia experience, has not been lost: it has been dispersed.
The film offers only one part of an experience, the second part of which is
provided by the soundtrack, promoted as a discrete item. Prince of course
also provided the score for the 1980s’ third-biggest grossing film: Batman
(fig. 9.1), stylistically and in terms of cross-media promotion the typical
baroque movie. The vistas of backpacks, fast-food, and breakfast cereal tieins
opened up by Star Wars at the end of the 1970s reached a finely honed
plateau in the marketing of the Tim Burton/Anton Furst adaptation of
Frank Miller’s Dark Knight. DC Comics, a Warner product line, had taken
a market lead in the conversion of the comic book into the graphic novel,
signposted by the 1986 publication of Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen. Carrying the juvenile market of
the comics into the “mature” zone of gothic imagery, enigmatic narrative,
and vivid graphic language, the graphic novels of the early ’80s brought a
new sensibility to ’70s’ attempts to capitalize on figures like Superman.
Camp and irony met with the future-noir established as a newly characteristic
form of science fiction by John Carpenter’s dirty, cluttered, cheapo starship
Dark Star and canonized in Lawrence G. Paull’s production design for
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (Bukatman 1997; Bruno 1987; Sammon 1996).
At the same time, the success of horror films in the wake of The Exorcist
brought an admixture of sadism and an attraction to the gruesome, centered
on previously marginal terrains of the Batman mythos like Arkham Asylum.
The new comics not only restored Batman to credibility, they freed the
masked avenger from the economic and psychic limitations of a single actor
(as already flagged in the “mobile signifier” James Bond identified by Bennett
and Woollacott 1987). Moreover, as the first baroque moved from
feudal personification to the more abstract geography of El Dorado or Paradise,
so the neobaroque moves away from the promotion of fantasy anchored
in the star persona to situate it in the diegetic universe from which
it springs—Gotham City—and which it further promotes and develops.
Hollywood’s promotion of diegetic worlds like Star Trek’s Federation Space
not only reconfigured the production of fantasy, it enabled and encouraged
immersion in the myth delinked from the specific film text. Toys, computer
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games, fan fiction and Web sites, novelizations, comics, soundtrack and
concept albums, fashion accessories, and collectibles, many of them manufactured
by wings of the same horizontally integrated corporation, extended
the reach of the event film while reducing the cinema premiere to the status
of product launch for a raft of brands on a synchronized lifestyle marketing
strategy (Meehan 1991).
Purple Rain not only opened the door to African American cinema for
African American audiences: it refocused Hollywood on its lost black audience.
Prince, at the height of his creative and popular bent, could bring
with him the African American and gay audiences, and at the same time reconfigure
Batman’s Furst-designed body armor as the latest incarnation of
Brando’s leather jacket in The Wild One: the concretized wish of the white
urban youth who formed Hollywood’s core audience, to inhabit, as literally
as possible, a black skin. This is only one of dozens of ways that Hollywood
undertook to create a fantastic setting in which the apartheid nature of the
North American nation-state could be resolved. The multiracial deck of the
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| Figure 9.1 |
Batman: Anton Furst’s designs for Gotham city stay in the mind long after the plot is forgotten.
Courtesy BFI Stills, Posters, and Designs.
starship Enterprise showed the potential for harnessing popular utopianism
to the manufacture of profit. A specific task of the Hollywood baroque is to
bring wholeness, a healed and healing world that runs against the acknowledgment
of difference.
At the same time, as Biskind notes, “Like The Godfather, The Exorcist
looked ahead to the coming Manichean revolution of the right, to Regan
nattering about the godless Evil Empire” (Biskind 1999: 223). The enemy
of neobaroque unity is not so much plurality as the metaphysical evil that
most clearly emerges in the mainstream horror film after The Exorcist but
also, as Barry Keith Grant observes, in the yuppie nightmare cycle of the
1980s and ’90s (Grant 1998: 280), distinguishing them from the screwball
comedy that inspired so many of them. This binary opposition of Good and
Evil leads toward both the pursuit of sublimity and the profusion of motifs.
The neobaroque is enmeshed in intrigue, passions, grotesques, a fascination
with primal forces of water and electricity, an unstable, even violent rush to
eclecticism, a shotgun marriage of reason and irrationality, a rage for freedom
in a period of domination. More turbid than turbulent, that era extends
back into the 1970s, when the movie brats began their assimilation into the
reformed Hollywood system. In the first years of the twenty-first century,
we have not yet moved beyond that tortured effervescence. The idea of
the baroque has connotations of excess, decadence, a falling off from overripeness.
Though it moves between fetor and ecstasy, its roiling, yearning
activity should indicate that these qualities are not ends in themselves, nor
things to be aspired to, but moments of a more central dialectic between
wholeness and proliferating differences, totality and emergence, global
power and the micropolitics that escape it.
Thomas Elsaesser summarizes the attributes of the “New Hollywood”
under four headings: a new generation of directors, new marketing strategies,
new media ownership and management styles, and new technologies
of sound and image reproduction (Elsaesser 1998b: 191). Of these latter,
none is so immediately revealing for this enquiry as the steadicam. The
twenty-minute process shot that opens Brian de Palma’s Snake Eyes (1998)
(fig. 9.2) contains everything we need to know about the film that limps after
it. The central structure is already clear from the way in which the camera
is restricted to the point of view of Nicolas Cage: he is being lied to, and,
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ing a reel-long take (though equally clearly the product of digital editing) is
not entirely without purpose. Throughout the movie we will flash back to
this sequence, unraveling its tricks, its illusions, its red herrings. A decorative
flourish becomes the structural principle of the film itself.
It takes chutzpah to open with a shot like this after Altman’s stunning
parody of the mobile crane shot in the opening sequence of The Player. Since
Altman’s film the knowing audience is party to the tricks, which depend on
that knowingness for their spectacular functions. Now that the audience
grants de Palma a postmodern and ironic permission, the gratuitousness of
this elaborate maneuver becomes the rationale not only for the shot itself
but for the whole film. Our job, as viewers, is to be witnesses to the elaboration
of spectacle. Contemporary cinema, for reasons both commercial
and ideological, offers itself to a double audience, one that succumbs to the
spectacle and one that appreciates it. The bulk of any given audience will
enter the film with this double vision in place, pleased to be connoisseurs of
effects and their generation, but equally delighted to be suckers for the
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| Figure 9.2 |
Snake Eyes: Describing space by navigation, not analysis, de Palma’s Steadicam roves between omniscience
and point of view, lying and lying to itself. Courtesy BFI Stills, Posters, and Designs.
duration, enjoying both spectacular technique and the spectacle itself, illusion
and the machinery of illusion.
Cleverly providing himself with an Aristotelian unity of place and time
(the boxing stadium in Atlantic City, the ticking clock), de Palma sets himself
the problem of delivering all necessary back-story in audiovisual terms
that can be naturalized in the diegesis. The hypervisible, hyperaudible protagonist
bedeviled with delusions is the willing victim of a charade, a massive
event designed for the sole purpose of deceiving him. The theme has
occupied de Palma over a large part of his career (Blow Out and Body Double
spring instantly to mind). Nor of course is de Palma alone here: the intricate,
obsessive, and if necessary total manipulation of reality to secure an
illusion, the willingness of its victims, and often enough the tragic consequences
of piercing it, form the single most popular topic of the Hollywood
baroque, from Sex, Lies, and Videotape to Schwarzenegger’s The Last Action
Hero, Total Recall, and True Lies, from House of Games to The Truman Show.
Our double role as integrated onlookers is enshrined in the complexity of
the shot, in which we shift fluidly from panorama to point of view, between
sharing and observing the illusory nature of his experience. In fact, the protagonist
is alone in failing to perceive the construction of his world: to
everyone else, including the other actors whose unnecessarily camp performances
ought to give the game away, the artifice is not only transparent but
heavily signaled at every turn.
Illusion, then, is not only a spectacle: the spectacular collusion in its
construction, and the spectacular innocence of protagonists who cannot
perceive its artificiality combine in an entirely artificial diegesis. Truisms of
the contemporary well-made script—there should be no exposition that
cannot be accommodated into the diegesis, and no loose ends—have become
sufficient qualities for a baroque film since William Goldman’s script
for The Sting. Here the qualities of vraisemblance and probability are suspended
in favor of the construction of a transparently artificial script of algorithmic
elegance.
Classically, the story is a ritual construction in time that works through
the conflictual structures of reality and finds for them a magical resolution.
But the baroque story in its purest form is a purely abstract construction of
time. In this new mode, stories seek not to control but to imitate nature.
This imitation needs to be understood not as nineteenth-century realism
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but as sixteenth-century Imitatio, a concept Rosamund Tuve characterizes
as possessing three levels. At the first level,
the artifact was designed to please on grounds of its formal excellence rather than
by its likeness to the stuff of life. . . . On [the] second level images must assist in
Imitation conceived as involving the artist’s ordering of Nature, and his interpretation
must have coherence . . . on a third level: Imitation as truth-stating, as
didactically concerned with the conveying of concepts—not simply orderly patterns
but what we should commonly call “ideas” and “values.” (Tuve 1947: 25)
The blockbuster movie does indeed, in its elaboration of “right artificiality,”
produce just such ritual incantations of unexceptionable truisms: do right,
don’t mess with nature, look after your own. These truths are open to ideological
analysis, but such analysis can scarcely deliver more interesting results
than that many of our most successful movies have themes as banal as
the vade mecums of the sixteenth century. But such Eisensteinian images are
not the point of the film, any more than the desultory narratives over which
they are stretched, for example, in Jan van Bont’s Twister. The point is that
such ideological motifs, such clichés, provide the basis for the intricate
weaving of spectacle and narration into a braided web on whose embroidery,
abstract as a Bach fugue, the audience will sit in final arbitration. As we reach
the end of a film like Snake Eyes, we should survey the whole plot as if it were
a knot garden, a spatial orchestration of events whose specific attraction is
its elaboration of narrative premise into pattern, its reorganization of time
as space.
The intrinsically decorative structuring of narrative, the extrusion of
elaborations and fugal variations from basic premises, form part of the fundamental
spatializing project of the Hollywood baroque. In the opening sequence
of Snake Eyes, camera mobility and plotting are synonymous, both
contrapuntally constructing elaborations on the motif of spectacle (boxing,
policing, life) as illusion. In Strange Days, a film only slightly more elaborate
than Snake Eyes, there are few shots in which the image is not at least reframed,
and far more frequently caught in the pirouettes and rotations of
Matthew F. Leonetti’s hallmark steadicam cinematography. The characteristic
establishing shot of Bigelow’s millennium movie, as in films as various
as Super Mario Bros. and Fatal Attraction, not only features fluid camera
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movement but flamboyantly crowded mise-en-scènes packed with more incident
than any single viewing could take in, held in extravagantly deep focus.
The effect is in some ways like that described by Dai Vaughan in the
Lumières early films: “The unpredictable has not only emerged from the
background to occupy the greater portion of the frame; it has also taken
sway over the principles” (Vaughan 1990: 65). But the difference is that,
where the Lumières and all subsequent realists leave space in frame for the
contingent, the Hollywood baroque orchestrates the entire fabric of the
film. In Fatal Attraction’s nightclubs, like the enriched cityscapes of the remastered
Star Wars trilogy, it no longer matters whether the protagonists
are ciphers like Luke Skywalker or tormented personae like Michael Douglas:
the diegesis has engulfed them in its own dynamic. Both narrative and stylistics
have been subordinated to the exploration of the world of the film. If
classical cinema operates in time, as a linear construct whose narration and
stylistics focus on the exposure of the story, the baroque takes time as its raw
material.
In the Hollywood baroque, film is no longer a time-based medium (a
function now occupied by television) but the medium of movement. Spatialization
takes over from narrative the job of managing the film’s dynamics.
Movement here is sculptural, architectural, or geographical rather than
temporal, and space itself is malleable. Classical decoupage—establishing
shot, two-shot, shot-reverse shot—no longer governs because, with one
swooping sequence-shot, we can establish the diegetic space without stabilizing
it according to the 180° rule. The entrances into the nightclubs in Pulp
Fiction and GoodFellas mobilize the diegetic space itself, much as Gotham
City is mobilized in Tim Burton’s Batman. Where the destabilization of
space once was restricted to the generic construction of the nightmare in
horror films and such cognate scenes as the grand finale of High Plains
Drifter, the Hollywood baroque needs no subjective alibis to explain its lack
of equilibrium.
So fundamental to the Hollywood baroque is this motion that the occasional
descent into more formally classical structures, such as the shotreverse-shot
dialogue scenes that punctuate Snake Eyes, seem flat, talky, and
crude. The regression to classical cutting appears symptomatic of uncertainty
rather than austerity, lack of vision rather than clarity, indeterminacy
rather than symmetry. Some similar feeling obviously dogs Bigelow
in Strange Days, a film whose shot-reverse-shot dialogue scenes are always
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framed against mobile back projections and crowd scenes, frequently constructed
by inserting cutaways into what would otherwise be fluid camera
movement through diegetic space.
Immobility now strikes us as false because it belongs to an emphatically
narrative cinema. Though narrative resurfaces in the baroque, like shotreverse-shot
structures, it appears as borrowings, residues, homages, reflexes,
regressions, alibis, and quotations. The baroque’s central tendency
derives from a parallel genealogy in realist cinema. Coppola’s and Scorsese’s
investigations of Italian American culture and Spike Lee’s explorations of
African American neighborhood life draw on and extend the realist paradigm,
not least because they diminish the role of narrative in favor of exploring
the diegesis. These films emphasize the spatial in residual narrative
structures, especially in Scorsese’s typically deranged and humbled salvation
scenes. Nonetheless, the point of films like Do the Right Thing and The
Godfather is not how their protagonists acquire the values of their communities,
but how those communities reproduce themselves. Even Raging Bull
and GoodFellas have less to do with the shock of enforced innocence with
which the heroes gaze back at the world in the final shot than with the mesmerized
gaze into alien worlds that the films evoke in their spectators.2
Vagueness
This spatialization process is carried through into the design of stereophony
and multitracking in contemporary Hollywood. This needs to be carefully
distinguished both from the “deep-focus sound” Rick Altman (1994) finds
in Citizen Kane’s appropriation of radio drama techniques, and from Robert
Altman’s realist use of multiple microphones in the ensemble-cast movies of
the 1970s (Schreger 1985). In the baroque cinema, it is not simply a question
of multitrack recording, but of a process in which the initial cacophony
is reconstructed in such a way as to guide the auditor’s attention from level
to level—as for example in the extraordinarily engineered synchronizations
of voice-over, dialogue, wild-track, and skillfully remastered pop theme in
the scene in GoodFellas in which Ray Liotta’s wife first meets the mafia wives.
Altman’s soundtracks for Nashville, A Wedding, and M*A*S*H belong to a realist
aesthetic of synchronized location recording. Tom Fleischman’s sound
designs for Scorsese, Lee, Demme, and Sayles, by contrast, produce their
effects by creating not so much a soundscape to explore as a guided tour
through the diegesis (Fleischman 1994). Here the mobilization of the ear is
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accomplished, as it is in the use of deep-focus crane shots through crowded
mise-en-scènes, by the strict subordination of apparent excess to the overall
trajectory of the film, frequently through the use of hyperamplified motifs
like David Lynch’s fans, drips, and hissings. Where the realist aesthetic engages
us as arbiters, the baroque recruits us as collaborators. The sequence
shot with its characteristic combination of structured multitracking, staging
in depth, deep focus, and mobile camera is the central device of this
recruitment.
There is a sequence in Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado in which the Mariachi,
having wiped out Brucho’s men in the bar, staggers out into the street
followed by the last survivor of the carnage. The sequence, lasting 2 minutes
and 3 seconds, is composed of 47 shots. Since the first shot lasts 20 seconds,
the average shot length for the remainder of the sequence is 2.2
seconds, with some important variation in the rhythms of the shots and their
relation to the beat and the lyrics of the Los Lobos song (“Don’t look back,
into the strange face of love”) on the soundtrack. The sequence opens with
the camera zooming in to the door of the bar as it opens and the Mariachi
walks out; dollying out, racking focus, and panning left to follow him out of
frame before dollying in and panning slightly further left to pick up his pursuer;
dollying out, panning left again, and racking focus to follow him out
of frame. The shot is accompanied by the jangling spurs of the Mariachi,
synchronized throughout the sequence to his movements, and the duller
thud of his pursuer’s footsteps, which, unlike the spurs, will be drowned out
in the rest of the sequence by the score. Throughout the process shot backgrounds
are kept in focus. The next twelve shots are composed in depth
along the axis of the sidewalk, save one shot, which crosses the line to establish
the urgency of the scene as a build-up to action, and adding that
slight edge of vertigo which helps both engage the audience and establish
the half-mystical 360° perception of the Mariachi.
At this juncture, we move out of the axis of the sidewalk: only the continuity
of the score keeps us alert to the contiguity of the spaces. Carolina is
crossing the road, causing two cars to ram into one another, with a jump cut
along the axis of vision adding to the sense of impact. The score drops in volume
during an instrumental passage to allow the soundtrack to focus on the
crash, then powers up with the vocal line as we move to a profile shot of
Carolina that brings us back into the sidewalk axis, then her view of the
Mariachi, then his of her. A micronarrative of reaction shots establishes a
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relationship, while the major plotline, the pursuit, heads to climax. Here the
cutting is faster, and includes the zoom shot, while the score drowns out
diegetic sound until the climactic gunfire. The sequence ends with six shots
taken from below of the Mariachi’s reaction to the death of the pursuer, with
Carolina holding, helping, and taking him away in cross-faded jump cuts
concluding with an empty sky and fast fade to black.
Desperado does not need uninterrupted process shots to establish the
mobility of space that so obsesses the Hollywood baroque. We are guided
here as so often in our explorations of diegesis by the centrality of a specific
consciousness that is not entirely embodied in the protagonist but tends to
gather in the space around them. In the opening shot, for example, we are
granted a look into the eyes of the Mariachi, and we simultaneously see that
he is being followed. In classical composition, that knowledge would connote
omniscient narration. But when the Mariachi reacts to the presence of
Carolina, we realize, with gathering momentum, that this omniscience belongs
to the Mariachi. In this way, the Hollywood baroque uses the conventions
of establishing shots and intercutting not to establish an external view,
but to create an ambivalent space in which we may or may not share consciousness
with a protagonist. This doubleness is a dialectical structure, in
which, once again, we are both participants and spectators, internal and external
to the action, while the space of the action itself becomes doubled as
on the one hand the objective reality of omniscient narration and on the
other the subjective and therefore potentially illusory space of the protagonist’s
consciousness (a possibility pursued to extreme effect in Memento).
This dialectical construction of fluid spaces and mobile interactions between
characters and audiences is a “narcissistic” space, since its characteristic
is, as with the centering of the soundtrack on the sound effect of
synchronized spurs, to organize the space, both auditory and eventually visual,
around the natural vision but also the peripheral awareness, the omnidirectional
sensitivity, ultimately the global consciousness of the hero. That
sense of mystical union with the environment is of course a strategic element
in the construction of the noble savage, and an important element in
contemporary New Age orientalism.
The lyrics to the score of Desperado add a further ambiguity in a clash of
subjectivity and address—who is speaking, and to whom, or are we eavesdropping
on an internal monologue? This is one of the characteristically
unclosed elements typical of the neobaroque’s love of movement, and one
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that leads to further loss of equilibrium. One of the most significant difficulties
lies in resolving spatialized narratives, leading to the ambiguous
and ambivalent endings of so many contemporary films. Cynically, one can
always read these as ways of keeping open the diegetic possibility for a sequel.
But this is only part of the crisis management of a cinema that must,
commercially, come to an ending. Not only do films fade out rather than
conclude, or rely on entirely formal negotiations of completion, as in the
knot-garden model of script-based baroque cinema; certain narrative forms
that have never really addressed themselves as linear frequently reveal, as in
the closing sequence of Desperado, what seems to be one pass of a cyclical history
in which the same or similar narratives will cycle forever—implicitly in
Sal and Mookie’s final scene in Do the Right Thing, explicitly in the Godfather
series. At one extreme, this will provide the universe of Star Wars, with its
serially unresolved New Age binarism of the Force and the Dark Side, while
at the other it brings the perpetually asymmetric Möbius strip of Lost Highway
(Elsaesser and Buckland 2002: 186).
Some classical films, among them Sunset Boulevard, The Cobweb, Sullivan’s
Travels, Dodsworth, It’s a Wonderful Life, and most obviously Citizen
Kane, appear to work on similar models of depth and surface. The classical,
however, depends on a planar construction, in which each layer of depth is
distinct from the others, as in the famous sequence of Kane in which the boy
Kane and his sled, his father, and his mother and Thatcher occupy three
meticulously separated zones of the image. In a typical neobaroque shot,
mobile camerawork (and digital compositing) eliminates the cut between
layers to promote a vectoral movement totalized in the bounded world inside
the spatial image. Then, like the deluded protagonists of Three Kings,
the audience is in place to savor the ingenuity of the artifice in which they
have been caged. Inhabiting the here and now becomes problematic, as we
confront the foregrounded recordedness of the illusion to which we are invited
to submit. Classical spectacle deployed a closed system of linear narrative
to shut down the future: the baroque marks out the limits to our
habitation of the present.
The 1999 blockbuster effects movie The Matrix came impregnated with
the figures of the baroque. Its camerawork is for the most part less strident
than Strange Days, although the climactic chase through the apartment block
in steadicam, despite sporting more edits than Bigelow’s equivalent scenes,
functions in precisely the same way as her steadicam sequences in Strange
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Days, Point Break, and Blue Steel. In The Matrix, constant if less flamboyant
reframing characterizes even dialogue scenes and delivers pyrotechnic
steadicam and process shots, including a hallmark lightning zoom (derived
from the Hong Kong action cinema) on the God-shot (from the ceiling or
sky into the floor or roof). The film resolves its story-telling dilemma in expositional
shot-reverse-shot sequences by using constantly mobile backprojections,
notably in a sequence in a car on the way to visit the Oracle,
where acid video colors throw the reality of the city—disembodied by the
lack of street sound—into question. The multilayered soundtrack again
uses a hyperamplified motif—the ringing of telephones signaling connection
to and escape from the computer simulation of the title—to guide the
auditor through the spatialization of the diegesis as soundscape. Other motifs,
like the sound of wipers on the office window during the firing scene
early on, similarly oversignal their function, flagging the later possibility of
escape via the window-cleaners’ cradle in the following scene.
This oversignaling clearly refers us to the film’s referential structure,
less to the cyberspace of internet than to that of computer games, constantly
evoked in the use of mobile phones to guide protagonists through the mazes
of the city. This relation between the operator and the protagonist also
informs the relation between God-shots and point-of-view shots, notably
again in the early sequence that culminates in a composite of a cell-phone
tumbling down the canyon between skyscraper facades. Editing forms a
crux in the baroque: how and where is it possible to cut a sequence shot
whose motivation lies in its subjectivity? With the addition of an operator,
the double motivation becomes clearer than it was in the example from
Desperado: it belongs with the double-vision of the player. Here the dialectical
relation of fetishist and voyeur is no longer at the core of the film,
having been superseded by the position of the narcissist. The dialectical
relation between the sucker and the connoisseur is itself doubled in that
relation between the protagonist in the game and their controller, the gameplayer.
Hence the possibility exploited thrice in the film of mapping Godshots
into points of view.
The use of mobile camera has the recessional sensibility of a Vermeer
raised on The Maltese Falcon. The opening sequence, Neo’s first meeting
with Morpheus and the scene of Morpheus’s torture feature strongly foregrounded
blocks of shade or color—the backs of chairs, coats, telephones—
forcing awareness of the depth of the image. Balanced against these
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compositional devices, the parallax enhances continuities between gradations
of depth rather than, as in the more obvious use of diopters, their independence
from one another. The motif of fluid instability—the liquid
flame that pours out from the elevator shaft during the raid to rescue Morpheus,
the rippling glass wall of the skyscraper as the helicopter plunges into
it—establish the link between mobility and illusion. The moment in which
Neo, having realized his powers, flexes the walls around him after assimilating
Agent Smith echoes the abstract presentation of the Matrix as the space
between letters and pixels on the computer screen (a motif that picks up
from Blade Runner’s endlessly enlargeable photograph a dream of the artifact
as complex as reality). Though the narrative wants us to puncture the illusion,
it is illusion we came to witness. The film’s liquid instability enacts
that contradiction.
Even those who are not science fiction buffs find the lengthy exposition
of The Matrix patronizing: Hollywood has no faith in its audience. We are
entering a period of vagueness of which The Matrix is only an early symptom.
The visual regime of the indecipherable has been coming for some
time. Blockbuster releases since the summer of 1998—the season of Armageddon
and Lost in Space—feature major scenes in which the geography of
the diegesis is radically unclear. In The Matrix this is neatly tied into the peripeteias
of the plotting and the diegetic theme of illusion to form a reasonably
convincing aesthetic rationale for the ambiguity of many of the spaces.
The baroque tends toward the cloudy and disorienting, its tendency to remain
unclosed resulting in a preference for questions to be left unanswered,
identities to be guessed at. The normative cinemas found beauty in clarity—the
glistening surface of spectacle, the hard edge of referential reality,
the adamant certainty of the image. Now we move toward an appreciation
of the indeterminate.
In the movement from plane to recession, we parse in a new form that
transition from tactile to visual, from the metaphysics of being to the culture
of change, isolated by Wölfflin in his Principles of Art History as the dividing
line between classical and baroque culture: “movement is attained
only when visual appearance supplants concrete reality” (1950: 65; see also
Wölfflin 1966). Hollywood enters a new territory of vagueness inaugurated
by doubling, encoded as illusion, and confronted as crisis: the space between
material and immaterial, turbulence and the end of history.
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Ecstasy, Totality, and the Grotesque
Kant’s beauty is always dependent on a shared taste; a materialist’s on the
synthesis of conflicting evolutions. The sublime, by contrast, speaks from
some space beyond the common sense of communicative communities. The
authoritative domain of the turbulent baroque is irrational, visionary, internal,
asocial, and individual. It poses itself as the final resolution of the dialectic.
The beauty of the normative cinema is ultimately communicative:
realism speaks through the social formation of individuality, total film from
the triumph of the state. Classicism’s superficiality is the product of the
spectacular commodity’s dominance of communication. The neobaroque,
however, turns inward to some unfixed and infeasible textual transcendent
within the surface. One avatar of this transcendence is the undecidably
vague, a misty configuration of valueless differences. Another is the completion
that only awaits discovery. The neobaroque is in love with destiny.
Whereas in the classical the context determines the individual will, in
the neobaroque individual destiny conquers context. Not only is the baroque
protagonist individual and illusory, he (sadly, the baroque seems no
less sexist than its predecessor) is also fated. From Phenomenon to Little Man
Tate, biology as destiny returns with a vengeance—the call to become what
you already are, a genetic transcendence that depends only on recognizing
the mystery of “potential” that will allow the hero to escape both the sublunary
material world of his social class (Good Will Hunting) and the ideological
constraints of an illusory external control (The Matrix).
In the literature that has grown up around the parallels between the late
twentieth and seventeenth centuries (e.g., Benjamin 1977; Beverley 1993;
Buci-Glucksmann 1994; Calabrese 1992; Deleuze 1993; Maravall 1986;
Ndalianis 1998), Benjamin is alone in defending the value of the term “allegory.”
Allegory in the contemporary baroque is that mode in which the particular
is surrendered to the general and universal in the interests of a final
anagogical principle in which all specificities are demolished in the universality
of the transcendent (see Hermeren 1969; Mitchell 1986; Panofsky
1962; Steiner 1981). Such is the closure of The Matrix as allegory of struggle
against the externality of social mores. The alternative is, in the predestined
yet voluntaristic miasma of the neobaroque, unthinkable.
Neo’s ecstatic revelation of his powers in The Matrix is celebrated in a
shot in which the world dissolves into fluid numbers: mere digits, revealing
the poverty of the mechanical world. Transcendence in the film Pi also takes,
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in the first instance, the form of the parallel and remote universe of number,
but now it is a sacred technology of mathesis to which Max, the protagonist,
devotes himself in solipsistic studies, remote from both the Galilean “universal
language” of natural mathematics and from the universal currency of
information in the global economy. This transcendence of absolute number
is also associated with a visual language that assimilates the cinematographic
to animation in step-motion sequences that, like the slow-motion of Desperado
and the animation of digital stills in The Matrix, dematerializes with
a mixture of dread and exhilaration, a combination that, in Pi, comes as
a premonition of an epileptic fugue. As sickness and unconsciousness, but
also as extreme life, filmic technique both describes and risks actualizing
what it shows: the viewer’s act of viewing is undertaken in the knowledge
that the flicker of projection might instigate the epilepsy it recounts.
Eliding the description of extreme states with the possibility of evoking
them, like the transports of Charles Borromeo before images of the crucified
Christ, leads us to the baroque’s ecstasy, its assimilation, without
will, into the transcendence of art. For Pi this enactment of ecstasis is at
its most intense in the transitional scenes that take us from climactic epileptic
bliss (white, silent) to recovery (black, ringing phone).
Part of Pi’s mathematical narrative premise concerns a Jewish sect for
whom the Pythagorean mysticism of the Golden Section has been assimilated
to the numerology of the Kabbalah, repository of the most arcane rabbinical
traditions including belief in the numerical encoding of the Bible.
Cut to Fibonacci rhythms, which it also depicts in the form of snail shells,
Golden Sections, Leonardo’s humanist torso, overlaid spirals, formulas, and
numerical series, Pi offers, to the point of incomprehensibility, to enact
mathematics as total allegorical explication of existence. But it is precisely
that totality which brings about the crisis of representation. As Max, the
protagonist, approaches the realization of the mystical unification of pure
maths, natural numbers, and the chaotic systems of the stock market, his
epilepsy becomes more and more violent, and the film veers more and more
cruelly and abruptly toward surreal, wide-angle sequences of paranoia and
self-mutilation, or alternatively through sequences of cascading edit patterns
toward the white light of the epileptic fugue. Pi cleverly orchestrates
the decorative function of its mathematical motifs in the construction of
a baroque architectonic structure in the same moment that it reveals the
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superficiality and emptiness at its heart, marked with the sign of epileptic
absence.
At the same time, like its big-budget brothers, Pi is a profoundly narcissistic
film. Recruiting popular histories of number (Cubitt 2000a) and
popular mysticism concerning epileptic fugue, it works up the image of destiny—genetic
genius—as prison to justify harrowing scenes of intimate
self-doctoring for pain, the experience that will take Max to the threshold of
an escape to the cathartic beyond. By picturing the community of seekers as
either self-interested profiteers or uncanny zealots, the baroque Pi shows all
community as false—false as the rabbi’s attempt to inveigle Max into a bogus
Cohen family—and so restricts communication to self-communing
face to face with the unmediated cosmos. Thus Pi can function as the transcendental
descriptor of a prison that erects its own walls in the act of describing
them, while depicting a world of leaking intimacies (the sensual
sounds seeping through Max’s walls), in which the falsely normative heterosexual
family can become the family of destiny and self-mutilation is the
sole escape from a too dangerous because too ecstatic biological destiny.
“You’re not a mathematician: you’re a numerologist”: Max’s old professor,
guardian of the absolute purity of pure math, voices a certain disgust
with the loss of classical purity. As memento mori, disgust works on the central
taboo of contemporary society, justifying the display of putrefaction
through its association with redemption, notably here in the probing of the
fetid brain with a ballpoint pen and the final cure, excising the equated mind
and brain with a power drill. Like tonguing the anal recess and its spinal interface
in ExistenZ, dependent on the effect of sound (the pre-echoed blurping
fish of Pi), disgust proposes itself as the opposite of the self-sustaining
clarity of the classical, but equally clearly proposes that the two elements
must be understood in a single thought: there is no absolute division between
the mental and physical worlds, just as there can be no divorce between
desire and intelligence, materiality and transcendence.
Baroque cultures are fundamentally allegorical. Their field is not description
of the real but its ordering in free-standing semantic structures
whose reference is to other semantic structures, including those that would
have been held in dialectical opposition by classicism, like the indecorous
irruption of disgust into the space of the transcendent. Such are the rustic
jokes, satyrs and priapi of the Tivoli Gardens, monument to the triumph of
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artifice in the ordering of nature. In this sense, baroque allegory is rhetorical,
the audiovisualization of the ars bene dicendi, asking to be judged not on
its verisimilitude but the elegance of its structure and the eloquence with
which it voices “what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.” Films like
The Matrix, Desperado, Strange Days, and Pi share with others like Twelve
Monkeys an allegorical structure of this kind, symptomatized in the hyperdetailing
that, in a curious inversion of Bazinian realism, dematerializes the
image in its excess of signifiers and functions as an allegorical fugue on
themes of hyperreality, illusion, and the Code. At this juncture, narrative
conclusions become almost impossible because of the allegorical burdens
they have to bear. Hence the implicit tragedy of the closing lines of dialogue
in The Matrix and The Truman Show: there is no exterior to the fiction except,
perhaps, another stage set.
Baroque cultures arise as dialectical expressions of a crisis of absolute
power. The Church Triumphant of the Counter-Reformation (see Blunt
1940) and the capitalism triumphant of the end of communism both face the
crisis of the end of history. The seventeenth-century Baroque is legible as
the expression of an absolute state confronted with the crisis of its own
mode of signification. The Catholic Church, until then the central force
toward modernization in Italy, was driven by self-preservation (after the
collapse of the Mediterranean economy following the Turkish capture of
Istanbul) into the arms of Spain, whose monarchy and especially whose systems
of taxation belonged to the dying feudal order, but which would be
buoyed up for a hundred and fifty years by its American gold. Caught between
these forces, the Church opted for a denial of “pagan” classicism in
favor of a return to authority and discipline, sweetening the pill by abandoning
humanist rationalism for the swooning ecstasies of Bernini and
Pozzo. And yet, as John Beverley observes, the Spanish baroque “was, like
postmodernism today, at once a technique of power of a dominant class in a
period of reaction and a figuration of the limits of that power” (Beverley
1993: 64). Both turn toward ultimate things in their pursuit of a resolution
to the crisis: toward transcendence and the sublime. Both face both ways,
toward the transcendental and toward the grotesque (see Wind 1998). Yet
both fail in their refusal of dialectics, their insistence on one side alone possessing
the right.
The classical paradigm in its heyday stands in opposition to but in close
relation with the realist paradigm: the greatest achievements of the period—
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Stroheim, Keaton, Renoir, Mizoguchi—swing between the symmetries of
the classical and the openness to contingency of the realist. But even here
another lineage of modernity is apparent, the subterranean strand of the
grotesque, the surreal, the irrational that emerges, indeed, in exactly these
directors. For many, this Bataillean disorder is the emergent form of a new
and radically postmodern cultural poetics: Buci-Glucksmann calls it the
baroque. But for Benjamin, on whom she bases her argument so forcefully,
the optical unconscious reveals the verso of a normality that remains radically
unchallenged by it, since this is precisely its necessary other. When the
Mariachi moves his choreographed way through the charnel house of Desperado,
when the bullets or kickboxers stand in empty air in The Matrix, we
are treated to the interior of the classical surface. In some films, this effect
opens up the spectacle of the spectacular, introducing a near-Zen metaphysics
built on the emptiness of the commodity, a spatialization bootstrapped
out of its ephemerality as in a number of Ridley Scott’s films,
notably Gladiator. In others, like The Matrix, Casino, and Apocalypse Now, the
invitation is to navigate those nebulous internal spaces where the powers
that support the bubble of style twist in meaningless flux.
The transcendence of the Hollywood baroque belongs to a society of
power in which colonial and imperial expansion has not ended but undergone
a novel reorganization. As the seventeenth century was the epoch of
the map, the archive, and double-entry bookkeeping, the spatial media par
excellence of the new Atlantic imperium, so is the neobaroque of databases,
spreadsheets, and geographical information systems. Information technologies
are not qualitatively different from the instruments of imperial bureaucracy.
Steadicam navigation of indeterminate space is the spatial art of
globalization as the carved fountain was of imperialism. The neobaroque is
the stylistic turn of capitalism in the moment of its uneasy triumph, confronted
with the completion of its historical destiny without achieving the
justice, peace, and commonwealth it was intended to bring.
In the magical ascensions painted onto ornate domed ceilings by the
great Jesuit artist Pozzo, the world is gathered around the adoration of
splendor. Even truth surrenders to trompe-l’oeuil. The neobaroque learns
from the older not just the richness of décor, not just the instability of matter
that at any time can lose its crystalline hardness and tumble into the informe
(as in the Trevi fountains), but also how to engineer the spectacle
about the fixed void on whose foundation alone its splendor coheres. It is the
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price of baroque coherence that the subject become abject and that the abject
evaporate, for coherence is the spectacle’s only true product. Once that
single leap of self-abasement and self-abnegation is made, the world orchestrates
itself as spectacle, and spectacle articulates itself into a single
unity. In cinematic terms, the infinite is first totalized so that it can then be
unified, at which point the subject is rendered as the zero of utter emptiness.
Of its geometry, Marina Benjamin comments “The all-pervasive fractal,
twisted and inward-looking, is so utterly self-referential it replicates itself
on resolution and, since it has no frame of reference outside itself, it is incapable
of transformation” (Benjamin 1999: 13).
This is the playfulness of the new Hollywood blockbuster movie: an appeal
to self-loss in the modeling of a coherent spectacle, whose offer is of
a coherence that is impossible in the contemporary world, and whose cost
is that the diegetic world can cohere only if the spectator surrenders to abjection
and volatilization. For the neobaroque sublime to conquer, it must
sublimate the sense of self. The familiar abstraction of mind and body, of
observer from observed, of subject from object, here reaches a new formation:
everything will be relinquished in favor of coherence. The new world
needs to be utterly absorbing: this is why special effects are so central to the
new Hollywood, and also why the neobaroque is so unafraid of displays of
mawkish emotionalism. To quote Spielberg, “The equivalent of the mothership
landing in Close Encounters is, in E.T., perhaps a tear out of Henry
Thomas’s eye. That was my equivalent of a super-colossal special effect”
(cited in McBride 1997: 330). Affect, thrill, shock displace themselves from
the audience to the spectacle. The vanishing point is no longer in the image
but in the rapt attention of the viewer.
Database Narrative and the Montage of Affects
Earlier avant-garde techniques for alienation concentrated on breaking up
identification with characters. The neobaroque responds by inviting identification
with fictional worlds. Here the stakes are higher, in the sense that
the existence of the fictive world depends on the abnegation of the viewer.
Of course, this also means moving away from the knots of ethical distancings
that were available to the classical cinema and its identifications. So, for
example, Peeping Tom was a viable if gruesome critique of the powers of
identification; Strange Days (fig. 9.3), effectively a remake of the story if not
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of the film, is no such thing. We can only empathize with its protagonists,
not identify with them. And Bigelow’s world yields no truth, only emulations
and betrayals.
A new tactic emerged in the advance of minimalism in the 1960s and
’70s. Artists like Donald Judd and Carl André and musicians like Philip
Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley developed a modular construction of
works from simpler primitives, run in series with minor variations. The attempt
there was to strip the human out of art. “The idea becomes a machine
that makes the art,” in conceptual artist Sol Lewitt’s phrase (1992: 834), allowing
the materials to generate their own higher levels of organization according
to structural logics established as the sole creative act of the artist.
This is not to claim a patrilineal descent for neobaroque Hollywood, which
in any case appears to have derived its new structures equally from the
emerging digital workplace and from whatever social and cultural tendencies
likewise informed the minimalists. Rather, it indicates a felt need for a
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| Figure 9.3 |
Strange Days: empathizing rather than identifying, Bigelow’s Steadicam yields no truth, only emulations
and betrayals. Courtesy BFI Stills, Posters, and Designs.
cultural form that excluded subjectivity, and that placed truth outside the
human, in closed, rule-governed worlds.
The modular structuration of these worlds has a further impact in neobaroque
cinema. The coherence that passes for truth exists only in modular
events, segments of the film that stand alone as discrete units, most of all
the effects sequences. Recent films like Star Wars, Episode Two: Attack of the
Clones move from set piece to set piece along only the slenderest thread of
narrative, like washing on a line. Each set piece sequence acts to trigger a
rush of emotion: putting a clock on the action, staging the spin-off computer
game as sport, escaping from ghoulish caverns. The scream, the laugh, the
tear, the white knuckles, the racing pulse: the stimuli are clichés because the
emotions they elicit and that audiences seek are clichés. Market research ensures,
as far as anything can, that expectations will be met. Of course, such
expectations derive from the past, never from the future, and so the hectic
overproduction of affects is only ever repetitive of old emotions. The
clothes-line model of effects sequences held up by a perfunctory narrative
builds on Hollywood wisdom (“Don’t tell me: show me!”). Structured in accordance
with the most trusted modes of narrative, each set-piece sequence
miniaturizes the older classical plot into a few minutes of film, condensing
as it simplifies the emotional content, delivering the intensified segment as
an event in itself, and building, from the succession of events, a montage of
affects that together establish the visceral goal of neobaroque entertainment.
The diegesis of the neobaroque is not only self-enclosed but selfreferential.
The repetitive nature of the montage of affects is a theme for a
number of neobaroque movies, Groundhog Day being the most egregious example.
More significant still is the phenomenon of spatialized narrative. Lev
Manovich notes the importance of the database as an alternative source of
narrative in digital media computer games and digital installations (Manovich
2001: 225–228). Daughter of the filing cabinet, the database is a device
for the ordering of materials, as such intrinsic to Hollywood market
research, scriptwriting, and editing. Lévi-Strauss’s (1972) vision of narrative
as an assemblage of narratemes, each of which functions by analogy as a
card-index, was a predigital adumbration of the narrative possibilities of this
extranarrative form. Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, and The
Usual Suspects only appear to be narrative. In fact they are the result of one
of many possible rifles through a database of narrative events whose coincidence
is more structural or even architectural than temporal. Beyond the
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modernist opposition of narrative and nonnarrative, the structuring of such
films depends on the satisfaction to be had from realizing the pattern underlying
the events, in Manovich’s terms “discovering the algorithm.” For this
to work, every loose thread must be picked up, every action matched with
another, and the submerged symmetry of the classical narrative tradition
brought to the surface to be displayed.
In this way the narration, too, becomes spectacular, as we wait for the
moment in which the various unraveled lines are knitted into a satisfying
coherence. In the process, narrative reveals the coincidences, the flukes of
chance that give us this specific version of the story, making play of the casuistry
that allows the manipulation of narratemes to pretend to some sort
of causality. We are not taken in by these stories. Rather the pleasure derives
from the craft with which they are put together. Like the washing-line of the
montage of affects, the construction of the database narrative is modular,
encouraging games with flashback (Memento), time travel (Twelve Monkeys),
and temporal dislocation (Pulp Fiction) to demonstrate with even more brilliance
the command over events enjoyed by the pattern-making impulse.
The effect is to make the narrative, like the diegesis, spatial. Deprived
of causal chains of anything more than pure luck, good or bad, the protagonists
have only to understand, as the audience must, their position in the
web of events to realize their goal. That goal, however, already exists as the
resolution of the riddle of the world they inhabit. Personal destiny coincides
with the destiny of a Hegelian world, whose task is to understand itself.
This shared ideology in turn explains an oddity in the neobaroque
that distinguishes it from the “trajectories” (Deleuze 1989: 64) of Keaton.
Keaton’s world is animated, in the sense that any object can be full of anima,
of soul, of its own will and whims: the playfully retreating girl revealed as—
exactly—a horse’s ass in Our Hospitality, the effervescent transformations of
Sherlock Junior. The neobaroque world is capable only of disappearing, as in
Dark City and The Thirteenth Floor. It may promote illusion (and thereby be
capable of revealing the truth behind the illusion), but it is incapable of betrayal,
or any willed action, as once it was in the days of Keaton, Chaplin,
and Lloyd. Their artistry arose from the happy fault of cinematography—
its readiness to believe in appearances, and most of all, in its unappeasable
appetite for movement, its gullibility with respect to the self-governing
activity of its world. The world of Groundhog Day has no will of its own:
it exists only to force its protagonist to discover how to live in it. Even
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its denizens are manipulable objects in the hero’s quest. Like the solitaire
player, the film moves its pieces to create an orderly pattern in which the absurdity
of the premise—a shuffle of the deck, a throw of the dice—abolishes
chance and clears the way for destiny.
For the fictive world to present itself as coherent, it must eradicate subjectivity
as the potential source of novelty. The cleanest cut is to deprive
the characters of futurity by endowing them instead with a fate: a foregone
conclusion that empties the future of its difference from the present. Once
it is clear that biology is destiny—as it is in different ways for the heroes
of Phenomenon and The Sixth Sense—the details of the story fall into their
patterns, and the purpose of subjectivity is fulfilled at the moment in which
it is absorbed entirely into the pattern of the world. With destiny, there is
no need for anything more than the sketchiest story.
Self-doubt, for example, is no longer sufficient motivation for a narrative:
it is simply an obstacle to be overcome as the pattern hurtles toward
completion. Even doubt will be explained as the necessary corollary of a certain
task required. The neobaroque’s spatialized narratives, with their array
of actions and consequences plotted as on a map, take the picaresque structure
of the road movie to the extreme. Where a film like Vanishing Point
(“The Car. The Road. The Girl. The Shack. The End”) leaves us in no doubt
that the hero will die, it is more existentialist than nihilistic: what the character
does matters. In Groundhog Day, it doesn’t. The end is already appointed.
All the character needs to do is come to it. The coincidence of
personal fulfillment and absorption into the world reduces the future from
a process of hope to an object of faith. Externalizing the inward struggles
of Neo, his shipmates aboard the Nebuchadnezzar are distinguishable only
by the quality of their beliefs. What narrative there is devolves upon that
single, efficient distinction.
Locking into a pattern at its conclusion, the database narrative reveals
its gestalt. The task of the protagonists is to realize themselves as elements
of an infinitely repeatable, enclosed horizon of rule-governed patterning.
The neobaroque hero inhabits his environment with utter omniscience like
Desperado’s Mariachi (fig. 9.4), like Brandon Lee’s character in The Crow.
The diegesis is a knowledge base, its secrets resources to be picked up and
used, like the energy and weapons in computer shoot-’em-ups. Samantha/
Charly in Renny Harlin’s The Long Kiss Goodnight is alert to the secret power
struggles of her world even though she has had her memory erased: her
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body already remembers what her conscious mind eventually recalls, that
the banal world dissimulated a double lie. Paranoia films, from the grit of
Conspiracy Theory to the wilder reaches of X-Files: The Movie and the parody
of Men in Black, similarly have the world reveal its capacity for truth by first
shattering the illusions of the neophyte, and then requiring him to assimilate
the new world revealed at the subliminal level of instinctive knowledge
and instinctual action. The only act of will required is the statement of belief.
After that, the environment (the Force) takes over. The world can realize
itself in the assimilation of the heroic subject.
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| Figure 9.4 |
Desperado: The hero as center of a world’s consciousness; a world realizes itself in the assimilation of the
hero. Courtesy BFI Stills, Posters, and Designs.
The neobaroque is a Hegelian cinema, in the sense that its goal is not
narrative closure but the revelation of truth as destiny: “that the actual world
is as it ought to be, that the truly good, the universal divine Reason is the
power capable of actualizing itself” (Hegel 1953: 47). Perhaps it is a cinema
out of Leibniz, for whom humans’ true love of their creator
makes the wise and virtuous work for whatever seems to conform with the presumptive
or antecedent will of God, and yet leaves them satisfied with what God
in fact causes to happen by his secret will . . . recognising as they do that if we
could sufficiently understand the order of the universe, we should find that it
surpasses all the desires of the most wise, and that it is impossible to make it better
than it is, not only for the whole in general, but for ourselves in particular.
(Leibniz 1973: para. 90, 194)
Contemporary cinema is more ambitious than contemporary philosophy,
but neither undertakes to understand the universe any longer. Instead,
the neobaroque builds experimental worlds in which the honest actor must
discover that “preemptive or antecedent will” that animates her world in
order to subjugate herself to it. The film world is a windowless monad, a
simple structure unafflicted by connections to the rest of the world, entirely
inward.3
Where this universe distinguishes itself from Leibniz’s and Hegel’s
is in its relentless secularism. For Hegel, “World history in general is the development
of Spirit in Time, just as nature is the development of the Idea in
Space” (1953: 87). Hollywood deals in the multiple histories of multiple
worlds, and with the particular rather than the general. In its secular pluralism,
the ambition for evolution of the Spirit has been cast aside, for it demands
a future that the premise of eternal repetition cannot sustain. At
the same time, the notion of an Idea that seeks to fulfill itself in the physical
world is too cold and abstract to motivate an audience. Hollywood’s
achievement in the neobaroque is to have produced a series of worlds in
which Spirit develops in space. Hence the worlds thus created are subject to
human will and structured according to the rational-irrational binary that
shapes contemporary pop psychology.
There is infinity in these enclosed monads, albeit only the infinity of the
inside of a sphere. The film world seeks an audience that will realize it by
uncovering its secret algorithm, but which will also by that act dissolve its
separate identity into the unity of the new world. Neobaroque films are not
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simply total cinema, though many exhibit characteristics of totalitarianism.
They are, as Justin Wyatt (1994) argues, extremely visual, lavishing light
on strikingly graphical compositions. Spatializing narrative as database fits
with this attention to the illumination of the screen as pure style, a style that
moreover is as likely to motivate the storyline as to be motivated by it.
As image becomes composition, narrative becomes pattern, and the whole
comes to a moment of gestalt coherence. This goes counter to Kristin
Thompson’s description of cinematic “excess,” which she defines as stylistic
innovations that are motivated neither by the narrative, in the classical manner,
or by artistry, in the manner of the art-house film (Thompson 1986:
132–134). Thompson’s excess works against the grain of the narrative, establishing
a conflict between story and an environment strongly marked by
design and composition. But such stylistic traits appear excessive only when
viewed from the grounds of a cinema presumed to be normative. In fact,
quite the opposite process is in train. In creating a world rather than a narrative,
the neobaroque seeks instead a circumscribed perfection removed
from history and thence from dialectical process. Of the classical cinema,
Adorno wrote, “In its attempts to manipulate the ideology of the masses the
ideology of the culture industry itself becomes as internally antagonistic as
the very society which it aims to control. The ideology of the culture industry
contains the antidote to its own lie. No other plea could be made for
its defence” (Adorno 1991: 157).
Today that plea can no longer be entered. Certainly there are films that
in various ways conform to Comolli and Narboni’s (1977) “category ‘e,’” the
film that tries to present the dominant ideology but does so in a contradictory
way that reveals the workings of ideology itself. The most successful
films, however, succeed because they have nothing to say: no roots in the
social or the material world, alternatives to reality, neither antidotes nor
commentaries.
We might seek forebears in the European artistic and political avantgardes,
in Jancso’s Red Psalm, with its formal, elegant epithaliamium for land
and people in revolt, in Resnais’s L’Année Dernière à Marienbad, folding its
players in layers of time. Or we might choose Welles’s Mr. Arkadin, whose
eponymous villain feigns amnesia and hires an investigator to unearth his
past so he can murder all its witnesses. Arkadin, writes Deleuze, “makes out
that he is recouping all the splits in himself into a grandiose, paranoid unity
which would know nothing but a present without a memory, true amnesia
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at last” (Deleuze 1989: 113). Deleuze places the crisis of cinema history at
the end of World War II, in the European reconstruction.
The equivalent moment for the United States came later, between the
Vietnam War years that periodize U.S. cinema for so many commentators
(e.g., Wood 1986; Corrigan 1991; Cook 2000) and Reaganomics. Welles,
Resnais, Jancso, even Buñuel, that most lapsed of lapsed Catholics, explore
the persistence of the past in the present. In the windowless monads of the
neobaroque, the past has disintegrated, no more than a comforting repetition
of the governing pattern—the comfort of the final scene in What
Dreams May Come. Where Leibniz and Hegel sought an end to history in
the reunion of humankind and nature, Hollywood offered an escape from
history by the subjection of hyperindividuals to artificial worlds, narcissistic
mirrors in which the unwilling subjects of modernity may unravel the
knot of self and disappear into the arabesques of spectacular coincidence, illuminated
by flashes of visual, aural, and physiological shock.
Neobaroque Hollywood film is not dialectical because it eschews time.
In place of change it seeks truth, the unique, permanent, and perfect truth
of secret worlds hidden from history. Out of the milling equilibrium states
of the spectacular, the neobaroque produces pattern. For those tired of the
endless, chaotic trudge through daily life, it brings the sense of completion.
For those for whom all hope is lost and who therefore can only believe in
miracles, it produces unity out of nothingness while it annihilates the overburdened
self.
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Chapter9|