the transmedia reconstruction of Song of the South

While “convergence” has become an increasingly commonplace description for various forms of media distribution and reception in the contemporary moment of new media and horizontal integration, the practices themselves have longer roots in the history of 20th Century American media. At its core, Disney’s phenomenal success is due less to artistic genius and more to the repetition, recirculation and alteration of content that migrated across multi-media platforms--reaching as far back as the 1940s and 1950s, with its collaboration with Western Publishing (Golden Books), the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), Capitol Records, and others, and culminating with the later production of their own ancillary companies, such as Disneyland Records. Moreover, this had sometimes profound effects of its particular theatrical texts.

In 1946, Song of the South was critically panned and financially underwhelming at the box office. Critics dismissed its lame live-action melodrama, while activists lamented its Uncle Tom representations. Both were valid criticisms. Meanwhile, the film barely recouped Disney's considerable investment. The film had been the company's big Post-War hope for another Snow White-sized hit, but within a few years it was largely forgotten.

The film reappeared in 1956. This was less because it was in demand per se, and more because--as early as the 1950s--Disney had figured out that its biggest profits often came from releasing the same material to a new generation of children and, most importantly, parents. Song of the South was no different in that regard. Yet still the film underwhelmed again. Moreover, the film's racial politics made it even less worth the trouble.

As late as 1970, Disney had announced in Variety that Song of the South would never be released again because of racial insensitivity. This despite, curiously, the fact that Song of the South, they now claimed, was the "most requested title" in the Disney Vault. One theatre owner, Jeff Begun, was even quoted as calling the film, quite inexplicably, a "classic."

Not surprisingly, then, within another two years, Disney finally re-released the film again and this time, it proved to be the biggest re-release in the company history--despite never having been successful before, and even briefing "banned." This begs the question--why was Song of the South suddenly so popular?

One key factor was a white backlash in the late 1960s and 1970s against the Civil Rights movement--this made for a reassuring climate in which to release a reactionary text like Song of the South, a film which seemed in many ways even more reactionary in 1972. But, I would also argue, another context was the emergence of Disney as a media giant in an early iteration of convergence.

Even while the full-length, theatrical version of Song of the South struggled and momentarily faded, Disney remained everywhere. Decades before the emergence of the Hollywood “blockbuster,” the home video market, and widespread use of the internet, Disney understood the value in distributing its intellectual property across as many ancillary markets as possible.

Such gradual but continuous cultural ubiquity in the long run was crucial to developing and solidifying Disney’s popular emergence as the standard bearer for “family entertainment” and its socially-constructed acceptance as an everyday part of American life. Within this history, intimately tied into the context of a re-branded corporate legacy, Song of the South would prove to be much more resilient.

Moreover, Song of the South, in dispersed form, very much existed throughout this convergence universe, even if the film itself did not re-appear in theatres for sixteen years. While Disney stopped releasing the film between 1956 and 1972, Song of the South was never really gone.

Many generations were dependent more on the books and records than on the sporadic re-releases of the film in the pre-home-video age. Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, and in particular the story of the “Tar Baby,” were regular fixtures in children’s texts produced by Golden Books and Disney itself. Thanks to Disneyland records, meanwhile, Uncle Remus’s voice continued to materialize on numerous records which compiled both his stories and his singing. Likewise, segments of Song of the South re-appeared on Disneyland and, later, The Wonderful World of Disney.

It is often tempting to think of these pieces of memorabilia as ephemeral or fleeting—the nostalgic fragment of a past time. But we should not be so quick to dismiss their durability—how they can remain in circulation for years, passed from friend to friend, family member to family member, and how their impact can last just as long, if not longer, as the “primary” texts they sought to compliment and promote.

As Earl Hutchinson wrote as recently as 2007:

down through the years [Song of the South] spawned a genre of popular kids songs that generations of school children (including this writer) hummed and whistled, and delighted in the antics of folk icons Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and Brer Bear.

By the time Song of the South finally reappeared theatrically in 1972, many audiences might not have seen the entire film, but they had literally and symbolically grown up with Disney’s version of Brer Rabbit and Uncle Remus in their living rooms, bedrooms, classrooms, church youth groups, and so forth.

This helped perpetuate the socially-constructed perception that the film itself had always been a part of their lives, even while sometimes they had never seen the film at all. Just as importantly, this ubiquitous transmedia presence eventually altered perceptions of Song of the South’s politics, to the point where some wondered whether the film was ever offensive.

These strategies of convergence weren’t just an effective, even trailblazing, business model—they were also a highly successful, if unintended, bit of cultural politics. The repetition and strategic remediation of Song of the South in Disney’s early transmedia universe not only rewrote the most offensive elements out of its repurposed texts (often literally), but also played a crucial role in naturalizing the Disney films’ arbitrary and even offensive ideologies of race, class, and gender for which the company has often been rightly criticize.

Begun’s assumption that the film was not offensive but rather a “classic,” despite two underwhelming theatrical releases over the course of three decades, was no doubt partly the result of Disney’s successful diversification strategies. These considerable fragments lingered in circulation for over five, ten, and twenty years, creating conditions for the theatrical film’s eventual success, and for its altered perception as a popular Disney title.

Disney’s strategies of convergence, in a sense, premediated Song of the South. The continued circulation of these texts, republished and reproduced, but also handed down and re-used, through the years accumulatively set different conditions of possibility for audiences during Song of the South’s eventual re-releases in the 1970s and 1980s. People who grew up with Disney’s Uncle Remus, who grew up symbolically as Johnny, were more receptive than 1940s audiences had been when first experiencing a jarringly anachronistic “Uncle Tom”-ish Southern melodrama in the more racially-enlightened era of post-WWII America.

Brer Rabbit with a Switchblade

Here's the description of my proposed SCMS panel, on which I have the pleasure of working with Michael Gillespie, Jason LaRiviere and Roopali Mukherjee:

'Brer Rabbit with a Switchblade': 35 Years with (and without) Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin

2010 marks the 35th anniversary of Ralph Bakshi’s notorious film, Coonskin (1975). A hybrid of live-action and animation, filled with grotesque images of race, sex and violence, it was originally conceived as a satire of both Disney’s equally infamous Song of the South (1946) and the subgenre of “Blaxploitation” films, which were quickly waning in popularity by the time Bakshi’s film was finally released. Coonskin is the story of “Brer Rabbit” and his companions as they travel from the US South to Harlem, to fight everyone from Italian gangsters, to racist white sheriffs, to crooked black politicians. The story, meanwhile, appeared through a series of fantastic, but often difficult, colors, sounds, live footage and hand-drawn animation, as Bakshi pushed the imagery to deliberately grotesque extremes. At that point in his career, he had defined himself through “adult” X-rated cartoons, with titles such as Heavy Traffic (1973) and, most famously, Fritz the Cat (1972). However, none of his other films, despite being similar in their shocking style and tone, would incite as much antagonism as this film. Not surprisingly, given its title and its difficult content, Coonskin quickly came under attack by the “Congress for Racial Equality” (CORE) as being racist. CORE’s campaign, which included disrupting a preview of the film at the Museum of Modern Art in late `74, successfully got Paramount Studios to drop it from their slate of planned releases. Instead, a small “exploitation” company, Bryanston, picked up the distribution rights a year later, finally releasing the film to a brief theatrical run. When audiences finally did see the film for themselves, their reactions ran from powerfully moved, to angrily offended, to stunned indifference. And, in all that, the film quickly faded away. But what became of it? The film never received further theatrical releases, and was decades later retitled Street Fight, and dumped onto cheap VHS tapes in the home video market. Yet, Coonskin remains a fascinatingly under-considered film that speaks to a wide range of discourses: critical race theory, animation, gender studies, 70s “New” Hollywood, censorship and Disney. In just the last couple of years, several scholars have rediscovered this film from a wide range of perspectives and critical interests. This renewed attention, and its anniversary, serves as the occasion for this proposed panel. What is (was) Coonskin? What did it try to show? What are its legacies?

A description of my own proposed paper, meanwhile, is below:

"A Period of Acute Racial Sensitivity: Coonskin, Disney’s Song of the South and White Flights of Fancy"

In the early `70s, Disney’s Song of the South was rereleased to its biggest box office yet, despite being nearly thirty years old, and having been out of circulation for half that time. There was something about the old Southern pastoral vision that largely white audiences found reassuring in an age of white flight. Most famous today for the Oscar-winning song, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” South is the musical story of a white child, Johnny, who goes to visit his grandma on a Georgia plantation, and befriends a worker named “Uncle Remus” (James Baskett). Their friendship develops as Remus tells him life parables realized visually through animated sequences of Brer Rabbit. Even for its time, the film was anachronistic and an offensive vision of race relations in the post-WWII era. The film didn’t receive considerable box office success until `72—its third theatrical appearance. Meanwhile, seemingly unrelated to the re-emergence of Disney’s plantation musical, was the emergent popularity of “blaxploitation,” with films such as Shaft (1972) and Sweet Sweetback (1971). Yet ironically, both South and blaxploitation appealed to audiences’ racist attitudes about how hopelessly chaotic American inner-cities had become. While films like Shaft ambivalently glorified this vision of urban space, South offered a nostalgic diversion from it entirely, while also presenting a vision of racial hierarchy that reassured suburban audiences at the end of the “Black Power” movement. No film better drew out the affinities between these seemingly opposed styles than Bakshi’s Coonskin, which was literally a satirical “blaxploitation” version of Disney’s film, using a similar “frame” narrative that put Brer Rabbit in Harlem, and mixed live-action with animation in an affective sea of sounds and colors. Yet, benefitting its schizophrenic origins, Coonskin found little support. Its only passionate response was justified condemnation for its racist imagery. In its own way, it was no less offensive than South—two thoroughly cinematic, and white, visions of the African-American experience. My paper will argue that Coonskin was one of the most interesting responses to the sudden popularity of Song of the South in the 1970s, but also—importantly—that the intense controversy around Coonskin was later appropriated by Disney sympathizers to show what they saw as South’s innocuousness. This in turn helped set new conditions of possibility for its continued success in the conservative Reagan `80s.

the after-lives of transmedia fragments, or Song of the South after 1986

In her 2004 study of “polycentric” texts in contemporary media, Angela Ndalianis looked closely at the convergence worlds of such franchises as Star Wars (1977), Jurassic Park (1993) and The Matrix (1999), and inverted the connotations usually associated with transmedia texts:

Like ruins, which contain within them the memory of a past existence, [. . .] the meaning of the fragment functions as nostalgic remnant or emblem of the past, but it also reinvents itself as a unique whole that belongs to its own time.

Often times, when films become remediated through a variety of ancillary texts—television shows, video games, theme park rides and so forth—the temptation is to see the other texts as pale imitations, interesting but insufficient, copies of the “original” film which spawned countless remediations. Indeed, that has often been the argument—and with good reason—about the wide range of media produced by the Walt Disney Corporation.

Yet, Ndalianis argues, each of the other texts is no less significant than the film created its demand. A particular theme park ride not only expands the diegetic universe of its cinematic cousin, but also initiates a reception history all its own. In the 1980s, as Song of the South began to slowly but (so far) permanently fade from public consciousness and from Disney’s itinerary, and other “fragments” of the film took its place, this emphasis on the “unique whole” gains added importance.

Despite continued theatrical success during this decade, which saw two re-releases, the 1980s symbolically marked the end of the feature-length Song of the South’s visibility in different, but interrelated, ways. Carrying over from the 1970s, the film continued to appear on a kind of distributive auto-pilot, as part of Disney’s continued practice of re-releasing “classic” films out of the Disney vault every several years. In this regard, the film was fairly unremarkable.

Meanwhile, aspects of the film, most notably, the Oscar-winning song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” reappeared in other media forms throughout the decade, such as films like National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), Splash (1984) and Fletch Lives (1989). This presence reaffirmed the film’s quiet but definite ubiquity after forty years of recirculation and remediation.

Yet in spite of the revenue and modest cultural acceptance it had acquired, the film was in many ways quickly outliving its usefulness to the Disney Corporation. To say Song of the South disappeared from theatres after 1986 because of its controversial status as a racist text is accurate, but also incomplete. By the end of the 1980s, almost all old Disney titles began disappearing from theatres, as the company shifted its focus to the emergent VHS market for new, more lucrative forms of distribution. To that degree, Song of the South was not singled out. Moreover, Disney kept the old Uncle Remus film in circulation—but in radically different forms, which meant that Uncle Remus himself was largely left behind.

Disney was changing too. The old `70s post-Walt era of simply repeating over and over what had always worked—focusing on theme parks, releasing the same old movies every 6-8 years—was over. While much of that business model certainly remained, a new era of leadership, headed by Michael Eisner, Frank Wells and Jeffrey Katzenberg, took over the company after the old leadership had nearly run the company into a hostile corporate takeover.

One of their key innovations was to both restore, and heavily promote, the Disney “brand” of family values, wholesome entertainment and nostalgia for simpler times, and move the company into a new era of 1980s global capitalism, a new age of horizontal integration, which demanded that Disney spread its media reach as far as possible.

For a long time in the late 1960s and 1970s, Disney ran from the “Uncle Walt” brand after the co-founder’s death in 1966, because it feared the perception that it was both stuck in the past, and leaderless. This, however, was something that Eisner and company instead embraced, though with the aid of enough time’s passing to ensure that such a celebration of Walt’s legacy in the 1980s was reassuringly nostalgic and not alienatingly directionless or needy (as it would have appeared just a decade or two earlier).

Moreover, the new team understood that the Disney brand would be a powerful weapon for dominating new venues of ancillary markets, and creating a new generation of cultural ubiquity unparalleled since the emergence of Disneyland, park and show, in the mid-1950s.

While Disney was shrewd enough to create one of the earliest transmedia empires then, by the 1980s it had started to slip behind the curve again. But with the proper attention, Disney’s influence would easy match its earlier impact, in a new age of global capitalism and media convergence.

But where did this all leave Song of the South? On the one hand, it would seem to benefit from such a nostalgic celebration of the Old Disney. But appeals to “Uncle Walt” were just a marketing ploy, a brilliant means to reinvent the company without changing its core image, and to capitalize on fifty years’, and multiple generations’ worth, of deep-seated, consumer-infested nostalgia—and the new team was more future-oriented than its predecessor. It understood the long-term implications of its intellectual property.

There would be a place for Song of the South, as with every film and television show locked up in the Disney Vault that retained the slightest bit of value. But Song of the South would be carefully mined for what potential financial profit it still possessed, and those excavated fragments would be exploited from greatest use while the other parts would be quietly left behind.

As such, Song of the South indeed remained (and still remains to this day) in various polycentric sites such as the theme park attraction, Splash Mountain, and in sing-along home video tapes. These were versions of the film which by and large focused on and maximized its affective potential—songs and colors. And these fragments would take on a reception history all their own.

Film and Literature syllabus

Here's a copy of the syllabus for my LIT 112 – Film and Literature course for the fall. It is very much designed as a "Film & Lit" course in a transmedia savvy academic culture.

Course Texts:

Casino Royale, Ian Fleming

Father of Frankenstein, Christopher Bram

The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson

The Quiet American, Graham Greene

(optional, but strongly recommended):

Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore

Course design:

When we hear or read “Film & Lit,” it is fair to first think about famous books (from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind up to J.K. Rowling’s wildly popular Harry Potter series), and then consider how “faithful” or not the subsequent movie was. Yet, beyond these interesting questions, there remains a wider field of possibility.

Film and literature are two fundamentally different media, and thus the relationship between them is not always as simple as it may first appear. People adapt novels into films (and vice versa) through a mixture of different techniques, in a range of different historical periods, and with a combination of different motivations (aesthetics, finances, political ideologies, and so forth). Likewise, audiences and readers interpret them, and the process of adaptation, in different ways.

The literature selected for this course were picked for particular reasons: for one, they are not texts usually featured in a literature course (i.e., Shakespeare, Joyce, etc.) and not necessarily considered to be “high art”, but rather excellent if non-traditional titles designed to help us rethink the relationship and hierarchies between film and literature. Moreover, they’re all texts that have been adapted more than once, often in different eras, and/or relate to more than one visual text. In other words, they’re representative introductions into larger questions of adaptation (though, of course, I also find them all interesting in different ways).

As such, the course is designed around case studies which are not meant to be definitive accounts of the relationship between film and literature, but rather opportunities to discuss specific issues which all adaptations can potentially raise. For each case study, we will closely read the literary text first, then look at some or all of its various adaptations, and then discuss some of the larger aesthetic, cultural and/or industrial issues raised.

To consider, and move beyond, the question of fidelity, our introductory exploration into the relationship between film and literature is structured around four general thematic areas, “In/Fidelity,” “Histories of Adaptation,” “Transmedia Storytelling,” and “Politics of Representation.” Each is structured on a particular case study that gives our discussion representative specificity:

“In/Fidelity”: In this section of the course, we will focus on Shirley Jackson’s book, The Haunting of Hill House and its two very different adaptations to explore closely the question of “fidelity.” This includes not only how faithful or not a film may be to the original literary source, but also how the medium of film attempts to capture literary elements on the screen.

“Histories of Adaptation”: Adaptation is a process, not an event. One single person doesn’t just decide to make a film out of a book and then do it. Adaptation can take a long time, involving many different people with various types and levels of interest. Looking at Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, its long intellectual property history and several adaptations, this section explores the often extensive process in adapting literature, while also considering the question of whether an adaptation is ever finished.

“Transmedia Storytelling”: In many ways, the relationship between film and literature is part of a longer history of media. Each medium (literature, television, radio, film, new media, and so forth) has long drawn on content and ideas from other media. Sometimes, it’s simply to retell or remake an existing story (or part of a story); however, other times it’s about expanding the narrative, building upon it, in unexpected directions. This section traces the ideas and stories of Dr. Frankenstein and the “Monster” (themselves, of course, literary creations from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley) from the movie Bride of Frankenstein, to Christopher Bram’s novel, Father of Frankenstein, to the latter novel’s own cinematic adaptation, Gods and Monsters. Each is a powerful adaptation of the former, which builds towards a larger story world.

“Politics of Adaptation”: No attempt to take a novel and turn it into a movie (and vice versa) is ever ideologically neutral. Filmmakers bring a wealth of pre-existing beliefs and agendas to the act of adaptation. Subsequently, the adaptation always reflects these biases and motives in sometimes profound ways. Moreover, audiences can and do read those agendas into the movie, fairly or otherwise, as a result. This final section will focus mostly on Graham Greene’s novel, The Quiet American, its very different adaptations respectively in the 1950s and the early 21^st Century, and the controversies around those films.

Course Schedule Fall 2009

Wed., August 26^th: Introductions, syllabus, authorship, “medium specificity,” Review of basic film and literature analysis terminology

In/Fidelity

Wed., Sept. 2^nd: “What is ‘Adaptation?’”; Movie (in-class): Jonze, Adaptation (2002), READINGS DUE: Orlean, “Orchard Thief” (Handout); Supplementary Material: Naremore, “Film and the Reign of Adaptation” (1-15)

Wed., Sept. 9^th: Book discussion, READING DUE: Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (Chps. 1-4)

Wed., Sept. 16^th: in-class screening: The Haunting (1961); READING DUE: Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (cont.) (Chps. 5-9)

Wed., Sept. 23^rd: textual analysis; Supplementary Material: Bazin, “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest” (19-27)

Histories of Adaptation

Wed., Sept. 30^th: lecture, book discussion, READING DUE: Fleming, Casino Royale (Chps. 1-13)

Wed., Oct. 7^th: book discussion (cont.), excerpts: “CBS: Mystery” and Casino Royale (1967); READING DUE: Fleming, Casino Royale (Chps. 14-27)

Wed., Oct. 14^th: film: Casino Royale (2006) READING DUE: Scheibel, “The History of Casino Royale on (and off) the Screen” (Handout)

Wed., Oct. 21^st: MIDTERM

Transmedia Storytelling

Wed., Oct. 28^th: “Remediation”, “Convergence”; in-class screening: Bride of Frankenstein (1933); READING DUE: Bram, Father of Frankenstein (Chps. 1-10), Bolter and Grusin, “Remediation” (Handout)

Wed., Nov. 4^th: Book discussion, READING DUE: Bram, Father of Frankenstein (cont.) (Chps. 11-19); Supplementary Material: Stam, “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation” (190-205)

Wed., Nov. 11^th: NO CLASS, VETERANS DAY

Wed., Nov. 18^th: in-class screening: Gods and Monsters (1998); READING DUE: “Afterword,” Father of Frankenstein

The ‘Politics’ of Adaptation

Wed., Nov. 25^th: lecture/book discussion; READING DUE: Greene, The Quiet American (“Part 1”-“Part 2, Chp. 2”)

Wed., Dec. 2^nd: excerpts, The Quiet American (1955); READING DUE: Greene, The Quiet American (“Part 2, Chp. 3”- “Part 4”); Supplementary Material: Sadlier, “The Politics of Adaptation” (190-205)

Wed., Dec. 9^th: in-class screening: The Quiet American (2002); FINAL ESSAY DUE; Final Exam review

FINAL TIME (also last day to turn in blog post revisions): Wednesday, December 16^th, 1:45pm to 3:30pm

iPod Cinephilia

an anecdote from the cinephiliac practice of everyday life

One late night in the fall of 2007, as I was riding the city bus home from the IU campus, wandering through the streets of Bloomington, my iPod's shuffle stumbled upon a particularly stunning coincidence. While sitting in the back of the bus, I suddenly heard Nick Drake's "Fly" playing in my ears. Of course, I immediately thought of The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), as the film uses this song as non-diegetic music for the scene where Richie Tenenbaum (Luke Wilson) "checks [him]self out" from a mental hospital shortly after his failed suicide attempt and rides the public transportation back home.

Various friends and I have talked once or twice about hearing music, literally or figuratively in our heads, while going through the daily routine of life. It is an instance of a certain moment of aesthetic excess inhabiting our practices of everyday life. The convenience of the iPod seems to intensify these possibilities . . . 'an iPod cinephilia.'

And of course imagining ourselves in a film is more than a little cinephiliac, another instance in which we never stop being cinephiles . . . and in a way that involves neither writing about nor making films.

The spontaneity in walking, in literal and symbolic wandering, and the ideas generated therein, are a significant part of my working theories on the "cinephiliac practice of everyday life"--to see (and hear) films everywhere.

The use of Drake's music is particularly powerful here, of course, because Drake the artist eventually killed himself with an overdose of anti-depressants in 1974. It was one of many instances where Royal Tenenbaums does a particularly effective job of using music to connote meaning (and I use it in Intro to Film courses to demonstrate as much).

But the "scene" here on the bus in 2007, co-present with my memories of the "scene" from Royal Tenenbaums registered with me on a deeper level as well--because there was another memory at work. The film itself was a very powerful experience for me when I saw it in theatres in the fall of 2001 partly--but not only--because I had attempted suicide myself a year and a half earlier and the memories were still fresh within me.

I also use the montage sequence of the suicide attempt itself in Intro courses itself because its a powerful demonstration of the Post-Classical Hollywood style, of the Hollywood form of montage--using jump cuts to create energy, but also to compress space and time.

In the scene itself, Richie trims his beard down to a stubble, then a clean shave . . .

Part of the power of this scene (now, of course) is that it's also accompanied by Elliot Smith's equally haunting "Needle in the Hay." Two years after Royal Tenenbaums came out, Smith died in what is believed to have also been a suicide.

"You say you know what he did / But you idiot kid / You don't have a clue"

Then he takes the blade and cuts his own wrists . . .

At the moment of insertion, the film cuts to a montage of his life passing before him.

His hawk, Mordecai . . . . . .

. . . his fondest childhood memory (staying in the museum with Margot) . . .

Mordecai, again, set free (or returning home?)

Seeing Margot again . . .

Back to the site of his attempt . . .

Recently, Girish made a reference on facebook to Robin Wood's preface to his BFI book on Rio Bravo:

"About a year ago I nearly died. I woke up one morning gasping, terrified, unable to breathe. A remarkably swift and efficient ambulance arrived, an oxygen mask was pushed over my face, and I was carted off to hospital where I was diagnosed (inaccurately, as it turned out) with a 'perforated intestine' and told I might not survive the necessary ... Read Moreoperation. I was by this time fully conscious, and able to sign the waiver that absolved the surgeons of responsibility, and was wheeled off toward the operating theatre thinking, 'Well then, I suppose this is it.' But what immediately came into my mind was the work of Howard Hawks and specifically the way his heroes confront death (actually, in ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS, and potentially in RIO BRAVO, where only one minor sympathetic character gets killed)."

It got me thinking about this personal iPod memory of mine and of Royal Tenenbaums. It got me thinking about cinephilia and death . . . not cinema's well-known relationship to death, to the (projected) presence of something passed (cinema itself is the living dead). But rather the relationship between the cinephile and the exact moment of death.

Its powerful, poignant, and telling, how cinephiles even experience death as though it were a movie. And the particular power of this scene, even to this day, is that in some ways every time I see it I imagine my own death. Better yet, perhaps, I re-live my own brush with death.

But Richie survives, and like Mordecai, is set free:

Richie's now ghostly presence, a truly cinematic rebirth: "He doesn't look half-bad for a suicide."

"Please give me a second grace. Please give me a second face."

"For now I must know how fine you are in your way."

Death itself, its unrealized potential, finally liberates Richie to say, to be, what he wants.

He meets Margot again and tells her the ambivalent truth:

"Why'd you do it? Because of me?"

Yeah, but its not your fault.

"You're not going to do it again, are you?"

I doubt it.

A powerful use of the Rolling Stones then, too:

"Yesterday don't matter if its gone . . . "

a haunted cinephiliac anecdote; or what temporal affects mean

There is an eerie, even disturbing, vision that appears towards the end of Steven Spielberg’s AI, originally released in the summer of 2001. Taking place in the future and concerning the melting of ice caps, the preservation of human resources, and the concurrent evolution of artificial intelligence, AI ends its primary narrative in a flooded Manhattan, now largely abandoned. As Gigolo Joe (played by Jude Law) and David (Haley Joel Osment) head over the vast oceans in an “amphibicopter,” towards the flooded city and its canyons of skyscrapers, one takes only a second to notice the faint outline (literally) of something truly painful to see today—the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

They appear over the crashing oceans for a few seconds, before the narrative moves beyond. They are the same towers we know even now are no longer there. And yet such an image burns a permanent mark somewhere onto our senses.

AI narratively concludes several thousand years into the future—after humans have died out—and “Mechas” (pure artificial beings) have taken over the world. After the ice caps melted, the water at some point refroze in a subsequent ice age. As a group of Mechas hover back to what’s left of Manhattan, the snow drifts obscure their line of vision, until finally we see off into the distance the faint outline of New York.

Somehow, over the course of thousands of years, those towers still stand in AI. Of course, we know this particular image of the WTC, whatever else happens to the ice caps and the oceans, will never—in real life—come to be. But there they sit in the world of the film, peacefully, even mournfully, half covered in frozen ice, and ravaged by the effects of time.

Though there are many issues at work in that film’s final moments, I am mostly interested in this one image of the towers, to which the narrative returns not once, but twice. When I first saw AI in theatres the weekend of its initial release (July 2001), that image—while still perhaps visually breath-taking as a sci-fi spectacle—did very little for me. Dystopic futures, by themselves, are nothing new, even for Manhattan (just watch the now equally haunting Escape from New York).

When I saw AI again in theatres just several months later (October), I was not expecting that image, having forgotten it the first time; I could barely come to terms with the pain it evoked. After 9/11, something about that cinematic text changed forever.

Of course, the image did not change, but its affect certainly did. When the film was released a few months later on DVD, Spielberg decided to keep that image in the film, rather than digitally remove it (remarkable given the weight of the sensitive mood then). He too seemed to understand, on some level, AI’s place in and of time, its place in a particular historical moment now passed, and its relation to particular monuments in the past.

Suddenly, the snow drifts no longer hid a barren future towards which we were always already approaching, but instead seemed to conceal a past to which we knowingly could not return. The scars on the towers in the film no longer mark the harsh winds of a particular millennium, but instead mark the trauma of a particular day.

Rather than pointing to an imagined future, the film points back to a past future which will now never come to pass. For being a film in some way about the future, AI did not ironically provoke a sense of time until after the events of September 11th. Narratively, AI looks ahead; affectively, it may forever generate the past.

There is a crucial distinction to be made here—one too often overlooked in film studies—between narrative and affect. Something generated in this image escapes representation. What is so powerful about AI here is not that we see the towers again, but rather that we know all too well they are not there, and will still not be there in another 2,000 years—whether or not humans continue exist or (as that film suggests) we do not.

These computer-generated images are not a representation of the now-absent World Trade Center towers so much as they enable, they activate, the perpetually present ghosts of 9/11 which disturb the film and its viewers. The actual towers, lost to history, remain not in that image, but in our senses—how and what past feelings are provoked in the present by that uncanny image of those buildings.

Certainly, AI (beyond its own control) is a text forever haunted by itself, by the weight of an affect of time it can barely sustain. But we, too, as an audience and as the mediated survivors of that day, are the ones really haunted, for that film forever contains the ability to affect something within us.

Moreover, one look at the final image of Spielberg’s more recent film, the underratedMunich (2005), reminds us that 9/11 still haunts his cinema as well, in this case literally. The affective power of that image in AI and in Munich is not in how we see those towers again, but in our present recognition that they are actually forever lost to the past. Regardless of what is shown, we know deep down that the towers are not really there, except as simulation (which is to say, they are not really there at all).

The Stewardship of Ideas

One of the most difficult concepts I teach in the composition classroom is a deceptively simple one: we are not our essays, we are not our own reflections. Every essay is its own document, which takes on its an autonomous life once we finish writing and set it free.

A crucial moment in every young writer’s career comes not when she/he sees their words in print for the first time, or—even more specifically—when she/he sees someone else reference their work. Both moments are, of course, deeply rewarding. But those aren’t the times when we really become aware of our place as writers. It comes when we first realize that that presence as writers has been, in some meaningful way, tied to something else, beyond our control, whether we like it or not.

But more than that, too, we begin to see that, by writing on that topic in visible ways, we have taken on the responsibility of those ideas; we are not the owners, but the caretakers, of the subject matter, concepts, etc., we have chosen to dedicate ourselves to, even long after we’ve stopped writing. That’s because our words and ideas take on a life of their own in circulation—that we are bound to, and the stewards of. We cannot control, but are nonetheless responsible for, the actions of our discursive children.

I was reminded of this when I saw Catherine Grant’s thorough and generous list of the excellent free resources on the topic of “cinephilia,” which included (far too) many of my own musings on the topic as well as a humbling plug for the collection. I have never considered cinephilia a primary concern of mine, but rather a secondary, side-hobby at best. This is largely because academia frowns upon it, and because I’ve never felt like I had that much to say about it. But I see now that my work has carved out its own niche in spite of my (often) careless inattention to it.

Scott (my frequent collaborator) and I have become responsible for that topic—we are (along with many others) the stewards for cinephilia. I do not “own” cinephilia, not even my own often half-thought and ephemeral discussions on them, but I am responsible for it, for helping to shape what it has, what it will and what it will not become. For the rest of my life, my scholarship will in part be defined by that. This is turns gives me greater motivation—or should I say, acknowledged obligation—to finish and publish my perpetually shifting Cinephiliac Practice of Everyday Life, primarily because I feel the need to more fully develop my thoughts on a topic already prescribed to me, to fill in a void discursive landscape that has already been excavated in my name.

I have long felt that way about Kubrick for several years now, someone I get linked to in spite of my resistance to it. I have not written anything about him for over two years, and I have not given him significantly undivided attention for much longer than that. I have never taught a Kubrick film. I do not particularly like my book on him. I am proud of the accomplishment—but that’s a very different matter. And yet I am constantly linked to him all the same—in seminar rooms, in job interviews, in casual chats, as well as in formal print. But I simply have, right now, little interest in Stanley Kubrick.

And yet--despite my own ambivalence towards the Kubrick book, and towards my ever seriously revising any of it--I take the stewardship of Kubrick seriously. I take seriously my connections and friendships with other Kubrick scholars as stewards. I am responsible when someone cites me on him. I care what is said about him and his films. I care that people remember him and respect his craft. I take criticism of “authorship” seriously. I take criticism of my own work on him and of others’ work on him seriously. And it’s less because I am proud of my own work and more because I am deeply invested - by others as much as myself - in the films of Stanley Kubrick. I am aware, and take on without reservation, how I will always be partially responsible as the caretaker of this scholarly legacy, and for my own limited impact on it.

On Trek

So, I have seen the new Star Trek, and here’s my (spoiler-free, I hope) review/analysis. I was one of the lucky ones to win passes to last Thursday’s Ain’t It Cool screening in downtown Chicago. The short version is that I found the movie entertaining and satisfying enough on initial viewing, but rather empty the more I thought about it. My reasoning for this, I came to believe, was because this newest iteration, by itself, cannot possibly sustain the weight of such a monumental franchise—no matter the strength of the story (functional, but utilitarian and a little uninspired) or the skills and chemistry of the cast (quite impressive and promising).

It is not only a matter of my lacking a connection to this new pastiche of a film (they are, after all, not the actors nor even quite the exact same characters I grew up loving); in the end, this film can only be judged according to the (new) franchise it does . . . or does not . . . spawn. If a whole new world is generated, if new storylines and themes that reach across multiple films are constructed, if truly interesting and original (by cinematic standards) philosophical concepts are unpacked, with the depth that only the narrative canvas of a true franchise can provide, if . . .—then this first initial film may yet be a considered a classic. But it could just as likely not be.

The question I have to Abrams, Orci, Kurtzman & Co.—is everyone here, currently basking in the glory of one event film achievement (itself possibly short-lived, depending upon next weekend’s box office), really in it for the long haul? And in that question, I do not just mean whether or not Paramount will milk this franchise for 5 or 6 more cookie-cutter summer popcorn flicks—that seems a given, though probably only as long as production costs are kept down and the base isn’t completely alienated. What I am asking about is whether or not the filmmakers behind this newest version are committed to telling a story whose multiple plot threads and themes will be unpacked across an entire franchise, which will in turn give this first film the depth it currently lacks.

Wrath of Khan is not only a great science-fiction film on its own, and not only important because it remains the greatest Trek movie and the one that saved the franchise after The Motion Picture. It’s particularly powerful because its sets in motion stories and themes that take two, three or even four sequels to address. One of my favorite moments in Star Trek VI (nine years later), for instance, is when Kirk finally comes to peace with the death of his son from III, who was himself first introduced in II—a plot line which gives Kirk in VI (and even frankly, in the hated V) much added emotional significance. “Other men have families, Bones," he says in The Final Frontier (1989), ". . . not us.”

There are moments in the new Trek, to be sure, which reference other films and episodes from the franchise—but they never seem to rise above homage and in-jokes (The Kobayashi Maru; the “I’m giving you all she’s got, Captain”), which are superficially, momentarily, satisfying, but which are fundamentally different from building any new narrative and thematic arches which can be sustained beyond itself. Yes, you’ve watched the whole franchise which before, but can you now create your own?

In short, this new film by itself is not enough—and the real work, the real challenge, for the cast and crew (pun intended) of Star Trek has yet to begin. Will this be a start of another Five-Year Mission, or the last spectacular tribute to a journey now long since passed? It may seem unfair to compare one isolated film to a whole multi-media, multi-textual, decades-long franchise, but that is the challenging paradox—the risk and the reward—that any film version of Star Trek (or other reboot) takes on today. And to not take that challenge seriously, to think that one can just start over with its own ideas, is to be doomed to fail.

There are more specific reasons to say that the new Star Trek is not enough—for one, there is no way around the fact that this is just not a very clever story (interesting, perhaps, but by default as it charts a chapter in Trek hitherto largely unrepresented), nor does it contain a single particularly provocative idea, and being the long philosophically-oriented Star Trek, this is not a matter to take lightly. The story, as advertised (and feared), is a fairly lazy attempt to retell the original stories without being bound to anything that happened before. I am not one of those Trekkies who demands a strict adherence to canon (a lot of obscure canon violations--like how many levels there are on the Enterprise--I probably wouldn't even notice if they sat on my face), but the writers could have challenged themselves a little bit to be creative.

There was no reason this film, as with the franchise-tinkering of Khan, couldn’t have been told in such a way that would fit within the gaps of the original chronology, and thus been mutually gratifying. If anything, the bulk of the time-travel plot is not only uncreative but a huge waste of running time, as it detracts from what is ultimately this newest film's most important function--building familiarity and comfort with the new cast. Having Nimoy back is important for diegetic and for meta-textual reasons (and was by far my favorite part of the film), but this elaborate of a plot was not necessary to accomplish that.

And there are other serious problems with the plot beyond the laziness of time-travel—in particular, the convenient placement and meeting of not two, but three, separate important characters on the same random ice planet is so logically impossible to believe that it not only strains credibility, but just about ruined the entire film for me. It’s almost like the writers had a beginning and an ending to the story, but not a middle to bridge the gap, and took the laziest possible route to get from point A to point B.

And JJ Abrams’s continuously nasty tendency, carried over from the dreadful MI:III (2006), to shoot a big-screen film like it’s a television show, with close-ups and shaky-cam cinema-verite, is not just visually irritating, and makes the movie feel like Blair Witch in Space (seriously, Hollywood—that style DOES NOT make a film look more “realistic.” Please stop!). It’s also, more frustratingly, a waste of the beautiful sets and spectacular visual canvas that lies wasted in the background, struggling to break through JJ’s claustrophobic frame, which might work for a tense, intimate drama like Das Boot, but not for a sci-fi, action-adventure epic on this scale (although there is not a particularly memorable action sequence in the entire film anyway).

So, why did I enjoy the film experience initially overall? From the standpoint of a summer blockbuster, the film carefully and successfully balances action, drama, humor and suspense, which can, under certain circumstances, also be a bit of a backhanded compliment by coming dangerously close to be code-word for “entertainingly generic,” which is also probably partly why the film felt a little hollow to me. However, the film’s pacing, as well as its clear knowledge and affection for Trek, gives the film a sense of depth that sets it apart from other standard Hollywood fare of this kind.

Most importantly, the cast without exception is excellent. Chris Pine’s performance is hard to describe, but he absolutely nails the good-humored arrogance of Kirk, without ever once feeling like warmed-over Shatner. He may quite honestly prove, in time, to be the best Star Trek captain ever—the playful command and confidence without the ham. All performed admirably, Uhura and Chekov have been interestingly reimagined as characters, while Scotty manages to walk a tightrope as essentially comic relief without being an excessive distraction—Sulu’s role, meanwhile, remains a little less defined still. Karl Urban's version of McCoy is pitch perfect, though the character himself feels under-used.

Zachary Quinto’s Spock, too, was surprisingly convincing. The first clip I saw of him as Spock originally troubled me, as his voice seems to lack Nimoy’s pacing and gravitas, and I feared he was cast solely on his uncanny appearance. However, I was wrong: Quinto’s an admirable Spock. Unlike Pine, though, he’s more clearly trying to emulate the performance, and affect, of Nimoy—which may be an impossible task for any actor, given the perfect storm of actor and character which Nimoy/Spock is.

And of course Nimoy’s return here is deeply gratifying, and makes the whole film worth it—though I must say that his performance is “most curious” in the new Trek. Namely, Nimoy’s playing it way more laid back than he ever did before—in his one scene with Quinto, his voice and tone really do sound very un-Spock at times, almost like Nimoy as actor offering casual elderly advice to his successor. It will be very interesting to see what, if anything, they do with the elder Spock in the sequel, as his character’s arc does not end where I thought it would--his odd sense of placelessness at the film's conclusion feels strangely perfect, but also tantalizing mysterious in its narrative possibilities.

In short, the outstanding cast of this newest Trek is under-served by the screenplay. Or maybe I’m still so invested in the original characters that even a pedestrian screenplay and a talented but disorienting cast can’t bring me to quit them just yet. Star Trek’s value ultimately will be dictated by whether, in 20 years, it is seen as the promising start of the next generation of Trek (as well it could still be), or whether it will be seen as a final, loving tribute to the first generation.

When the crew of the Enterprise is finally united at the end of this film, heading off for its new five-year mission, I got excited, and optimistic—and the voice-over there (without giving too much away) is a particularly touching addition. But I got excited not because I’m sold on the newest Star Trek crew—but because the real journey, the real challenge, is just beginning, in ways the franchise itself may not yet fully realize, or appreciate.

js

All of this has happened before . . .

. . . . but after tomorrow night, it won't happen again.

That's a reoccurring theme in Ron Moore's reimagined series, Battlestar Galactica--a series quite unlike the `70s original (for which I have no childhood nostalgia). Both detail the near-annihilation of the human race by the "Cylons", a machine race, and the subsequent fleeing of the remaining survivors across the galaxy for safety. Working on a much wider narrative canvas than its predecessor, the remake has developed a deeper, more complicated story, and resonating themes about commitment, faith, loyalty, compassion, prejudices and self-preservation.

The saying is meant in part to explain the cycles of destruction and rebirth that the show has been working through and towards, and which will no doubt explain in large measure whatever happens tomorrow night. But it is also a nifty description for the show's dedication to serial storytelling, with multiple, overlapping storylines across several episodes and even seasons and weekly cliffhangers.

Its difficult to "explain" Battlestar Galactica's story to a newbie, or its appeal--not because its too smart or complicated per se, but because its narrative scope is so immense. Its something--a narrative affect, a deep sense more so than an idea--that has accumulated over the span of four seasons, which defines its appeal to me. If you haven't watched from the very beginning, it is absolutely impossible to appreciate the series finale tomorrow night.

That is what seriality is to me--an affect, that which is generated through the differences in repetition. We are invested in the stories and the characters, of course, but when we sit down to watch a new installment, or rewatch an old one, it is always as much about the ritual of viewing as it is about specific knowledge, and our commitment is provoked by a deep affective bond we've formed through that ritual with the sum total experience of the show.

Does it really matter how the show ends? I'm more inclined to suggest that what really matters tomorrow is that it is ending.

This is my last night of anticipation.

But of course I'm also curious about what will actually happen. (GEEK ALERT) I remain convinced that Gaius Baltar's journey is the core of the show, that he is the embodiment of humanity's strengths, weaknesses and contradictions on BSG, and so he will somehow play a very central, pivotal role in the very ending, despite his (typical) act of cowardice last week. I do not think Kara's mystery will be fully explained. I think the "opera house" dreams refer not to Kobol but to the "Colony," the ship where Hera is being held captive, the place built by the final five, and which they are coming to find her. I think the vision of Baltar and the 6 coming to take her away might be a reference to the Head Baltar and Head 6, not the actual characters. They are quite likely the faces of God. I think that BSG is describing our own pre-history. And I think it is quite likely that everyone will die. . . but not in an apocalyptic sort of way which marked the show's beginning. Everything is pointing towards a rebirth, led by Kara (end GEEK ALERT).

So, I care about the story itself. Its just that it, whatever it ends up being, tomorrow night won't change my commitment to the show. And I look forward to tomorrow night not to finally "know the truth," but because I will never be able to look forward to any new BSG episodes again, and so this is it.

It might be ironic to know that this time last year I had never seen a single episode of the show, even though I can remember as far back as the fall of 2003--living in Oklahoma--and seeing the mini-series hyped on TV. It was only around early April of 2008 that I finally decided to rent the mini-series from a local video store because I was burned out on old Star Trek episodes, and so many different people had been raving about this show for a long time (its hard to believe now, but I was once actually offended when a friend suggested to me that I might like the show. With the exception of Trek, I do not see myself as a "Sci-Fi" fan at all, and BSG looked to me like another Babylon 5 or Stargate Atlantis.

I was hooked by the end of those three hours. And thanks to my department's media library, I was able to check out the box sets and plow through the first three seasons of the show is a little over a month. Then with the help of new episodes of season four on "Sci-Fi Rewind," I was completely caught with the show before the first half of season 4 had even concluded . . . less than two months after watching my first episode.

There is something profound about how DVD and the internet is fundamentally changing not simply the transmission of television, but also its very aesthetic--a new age of seriality, and of narrative ambition. Freed from a sole dependence on the fragmentation of syndication, thereby necessitating that each episode be a self-contained whole, television series can now tell larger, more complicated stories, one hour at a time, because DVD and the internet make it so much easier to follow along, or to get caught up to speed. Or to experience the entire journey, for the first time, all at once.

Until a month ago, I had never watched a "live" episode of BSG, and yet I knew the whole story by heart.

That's something the cinema cannot provide. Secretly I have been far more enamored by television in the last five years than film. The experience of an epic television journey (on DVD), be it BSG, Mad Men, Deadwood, The Office, or what have you, has each been a more rewarding experience than any two hours I've spent in the multiplex during that time.

There Will Be Blood: a Photo Essay

part of the 2000s American Films Project

I don't have too much else to say for the moment on PT Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007)--#13 on my list of the Best American films of the 2000s. I have already said much elsewhere, namely here and here. And as I begin to move into the publication phase of the project, I am reluctant to put too much else here on the blog.

So, instead I am going to experiment with using screen captures, which is something I've been thinking about for awhile, and which I hope to use extensively in the forthcoming project on PT. I propose instead a photo essay on There Will Be Blood, perhaps more along the informal approach one would take in teaching the film in an undergraduate course.

All of PT's films are about loneliness. About loneliness is the Western American Desert. But its never so acute as it is in the film's opening moments, though Plainview's crouching here echoes that of John C. Reilly's in the opening frame of Hard Eight.

PT's fond of the wondering steadicam. Above, it strolls casually out of the desert and into our first image of one of Plainview's derricks. His steadicam work is less intensely focused than Kubrick's. It tends to wander off and back again. Its beholden to no particular character, almost ever. A couple years ago, before There Will Be Blood came out, Andre Crous said that the subjectless steadicam shot was PT's defining auteurist shot.

PT's children are marked by the sins of the father. Here the child is marked by the first obtaining of oil. Children are also marked by fathers as a commodity-think of Stanley or Donnie's purpose in Magnolia.

PT's characters, especially his stars, are almost always salesmen. And they are almost always at their best socially in the midst of a sales pitch to a listening audience (notice, Mr. Show's Paul F. Tompkins in the background. Several actors known for comedy play serious parts in this film). Plainview's first two speaking scenes are sales pitches.

Family and commodity are often intertwined in his films. Children are often defined through their use-value. Plainview depends upon his adopted son as part of his pitch.

Plainview is an intensely misanthropic man, but he's quite comfortable performing for the crowd (just like Mackey in Magnolia).

PT's films are often explicitly about American highway culture. Notice here the car in the far right background, coming in to foreground. The automobile is coming to replace the train in the 20th Century--right as oil is emerging as the most important commodity.

PT's wandering camera leaves the tracks and follows the car. This is a movie about the ways in which oil and cars will change the landscape of California.

Geography's crucial. Plainview's always looking at maps, or imagining them in his head, as he hikes across the land. Notice, too, the casting of SNL's Jim Downey here as the realtor.

The wandering camera again. The camera is its own character in There Will Be Blood. It floats effortlessly through the desert for its own sake, before finally settling on men leaving camp and heading for the oil derrick.

A particularly striking such shot. The camera heads on its own to the farm. . . .

. . . and through the building. . . .

. . . before finally spotting the oil derrick, at which point, Eli's flock slowly start marching into the right side of the frame.

Heads are constantly under seige in the films of PT Anderson. In Boogie Nights, Magnolia and There Will be Blood, men are shot in the head. In Hard Eight, Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood, men are beaten savagely in the head. And in this latest film, not one, but two, men are killed brutally when oil machinery falls directly on their heads (like above).

Eli finally spots the roving camera, and casts it out of his church. But he's ambivalent about technology--later, he will discover the power and possibilities of "radio."

Another meta-reference to the cinema's presence. Plainview talks silently to his now deaf son. We cannot hear his voice--its a silent movie. And that, plus Plainview's positioning in the light, backdropped by the darkness, mimics a brief clip that might have been shot in Edison's "Black Maria."

Plainview's a dark soul, but he's always in the sunlight. He's always in "plain view," and one looks for something deeper at their peril.

Another "head shot."

Plainview in one of the film's more amusing moments, taunting the competition from underneath a napkin. The symbolism is perfect, though--Plainview really is that blank of a man.

A rare slip from the noted perfectionist? Here, Day-Lewis seems to crack himself up, but for only a moment, while he drunkenly attempts to intimidate a business rival. Maybe that's a cinephiliac moment?

Always in the sunlight. Plainview, even in the end, is exactly as he seems to be.

Once again, as with Boogie Nights and Magnolia, the son returns home to the father. But this time, the father turns him away. Yes, Plainview really is that empty.

Another mutilated head. Another image of Plainview in plain view, and completely alone.

Election

part of the 1999 Blogging Project

‘Every successful politician, at her/his heart, is a ‘Tracy Flick’, but not only a Tracy Flick.’

That was the revelation that finally made this blog entry fall into place for me. The start of my year-long blogging project (1999 Films’ ten-year anniversary), did not flow as easily as I had hoped. For the month of January, I picked Alexander Payne’s Election, mainly because I remember seeing it in the earlier part of 1999.

But I couldn’t get started on it at first, and there may not ultimately be that much to this, but I am documenting the anniversary all the same to stay on track. The first week of the month I was trying to finally finish up the PT essay, but it wasn’t going so well. Then I had to transition into spending a week or so to put together my several different syllabi for the spring semester. Then, I turned back to the PT essay for the last week and a half because the deadline I was working towards is coming up, asap. Thankfully, that’s finally done with, as of last night. That said, blogging projects (Bond, PTA) have been much easier once I get into the routine, than when I start.

Somewhere in all that writer’s block, I did actually sit down and rewatch Election again in its entirety, probably for the first time in 6-7 years. I liked it about as much as I ever had, though I had forgotten how much I already knew every second by heart, and as such, there were few surprises or revelations in watching it again. In short, I was blank. I could not think about a single thing to say.

Election is the story of a high school election for class president, featuring a showdown between the career over-achiever, Tracy Flick (a then-little known Reese Witherspoon), the popular jock athlete, Paul Metzler (a pre-American Pie Chris Klein), and his anarchist sister, Tammy (Jessica Campbell). However, the film is as much about civics teacher, Mr. McAllister, played by Matthew Broderick (in very un-Bueller form), who oversees and tries to meddle with the outcome, while his own personal life slowly crumbles.

Ironically, about 5 years ago, I was revising an essay about the defamiliarizing possibilities of the voice-over narration, and was planning to use larger chunks of Election as an effective recent example. But I never followed up on that, primarily because the larger project just wasn’t working and so I moved on. It’s interesting that I’ve now officially been an academic long enough to look back objectively on my failed scholarly projects without much regret.

As I said, I didn’t come away with much of an impression from the re-viewing, but eventually it did dawn on me that the film had impacted me--it had actually profoundly depressed me (although I’ve kind of been severely depressed for the last couple of months anyway).

In one sense, it was personal—I feel more affinity for McAllister now than I did ten years ago, getting older but also getting to that phase, as Tracy discusses in the film, where it might seem depressing to teach the same thing over and over and over again to different students, year after year after year. Teaching composition this spring for the eleventh time now is starting to give me that vibe, though the unique student populations and classroom dynamics semester to semester make it far more rewarding than the film lets on.

But still there is that circular feeling (and a lot of it is probably tied up into how pathetic and self-delusional McAllister himself is—cue the defamiliarizing voice-over!)—McAllister is a man whose incapable of moving behind his pettiness, whose life opportunities have passed him by, and who compensates by trying to make everyone else as miserable as he is. In a way, every character in Election is equally self-delusional—but there’s a particular sadness in MacAllister’s case because the opportunities of youth have only passed him by.

But the other depressing part of re-watching the movie was its political cynicism, which feels even truer today. There are a lot of “funny” things in Election that are less funny as the years go by. It should not be surprising that I first started to get ideas about writing on the film while watching the Obama inauguration coverage last week.

When I taught C121—Introduction to Public Speaking at Indiana University (yes, I have taught a lot for someone who hasn’t even finished graduate school just yet), I always, as many 121 instructors do, showed the scene in Election where each candidate gives her/his speech to the general assembly in support of their respective candidacy. It is a brilliant way to teach public speaking, because they are each so distinctive and so common to real-life speeches.

Flick’s speech of course is perfect, because she’s always super-motivated and super-prepared. But that’s exactly its flaw. Its too rehearsed, too mechanical, and thus too cold and distant, so it fails to generate any response. Paul’s speech, meanwhile, is a textbook bad speech—he reads right off his prepared remarks, never once looks up, or even change his voice inflection to generate any sort of emotion or engaging speech pattern.

Tammy, meanwhile, gives the best speech; it does two things that neither Tracy nor Paul accomplish—it both feels spontaneous and unrehearsed, and actually reaches out to attempt and address the exigencies of its audience—“who cares about this stupid election?” So despite being by far the least popular student of the three, she ends up actually impacting the audience and generating most enthusiastic response.

I used this with C121 students to identify the “Tracy” speeches (over-rehearsed), the “Paul” speeches (too much flat reading, no attempt at emotional performance) and the “Tammy” speeches (speaking to your audience’s expectations). To a certain degree, I began—while watching Obama—to see how a similar litmus test could be applied to our politicians.

Initially, the analogy was too perfect—Hillary Clinton was the “Tracy,” the career politician whose transparent calculations carried her only so far, but ultimately turned off too many voters (and yes, I do still believe that, in part because her long-time run as a centrist, hawkish moderate—namely, supporting the Iraq War and refusing to recant because she was overly worried about being painted as weak, instead of standing on principle—is what cost her the nomination. A similar over-cautiousness was what cost John Kerry the presidency in 2004).

Bush was, of course, the “Paul,” as I believe some already noted back in the early days of his administration. Bush was the clueless idiot who succeeded time and time again because he seemed harmless, and was so likeable and his dad was so well-off.

Obama, I thought, was the “Tammy”—the perceived outsider, the one with real ideals and principles, the one who wanted to buck the system, and was the first one to tell the audience what they really wanted to hear (that the Iraq War was morally wrong). And thus, despite the long odds, ended up having the biggest impact.

But of course, eventually I remembered that all successful politicians were—like all successful Hollywood movies—not a unified ideal, but a mess of contradictions, masked by a unified persona, and that Clinton, Bush and Obama were no exceptions.

They are all, at their core, “Tracys.” All three are nakedly ambitious people who spent their whole political lives gunning for the presidency, calculating at every turn and pouncing on every opening presented. But Bush and Obama were elected because they masked their Tracy-ness in other personas. Bush was a Tracy who masqueraded as a “Paul” to convince the people that he was just a harmless good old boy that you’d want to have a beer with.

Obama on the other hand is a Tracy who performed the “Tammy” because that’s what the Democratic Party, and the nation, craved—somebody fresh, an outsider, who ran on a platform of disrupting the status quo. But neither Bush nor Obama ever abandoned their inner Tracy, carefully plotting and staging every step of the journey.

Yeah, so anyway, Election. You should check it out. Very funny, even ten years later, and certainly no less true.

Disneyland Dream

Wow. This 1956 home movie was just added to the National Registry. And, wouldn't you know it, it only took a minute and a half to have a Brer Rabbit sighting! 1956 was the year of Song of the South's second theatrical release. Talk about renewed conditions of possibility.

The film slows down the blog, so I've posted the link instead.

Star Trek , Canon, and the Myth of Mass Appeal

Happy new year, though--as with many things in life--my first post of 2009 looks a lot like the last ones of 2008. Namely, my fascination with the evolution of franchise box office numbers continues. On the other hand, this first post of the new year clearly implies a shift in attention from one franchise to another.

With the Bond franchise momentarily dwindling into the background for the next year or so (although I will probably blog at some point in the new year about what the next film should do), I've begun turning my attention to the franchise installment I'm most excited about for 2009--Star Trek, which is due in the beginning of May. I have blogged about the film before, and many more of my posts in the new year will undoubtedly focus on this film.

I've spent the winter break reading autobiographies from Nimoy and Shatner, and so that (plus the media blitz surrounding the new film) has got me looking ahead. Here's a glimpse at the other Trek films, ranked 1-10, and adjusted for box-office inflation. Again, as with Bond, I used box office numbers and ticket inflation numbers from Box Office Mojo to deduce the adjusted totals and rankings.



Not really any big surprises here, though I was not expecting the first two TNG films to have each out-grossed the last two TOS films. On the other hand, it is amazing to me that for all the grief it takes, the first one--Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)--remains by far the box office champ. This is, mind you, a movie that Paramount hated so much it pretty much fired everybody involved behind the camera and started from scratch. This is a movie so hated that even no less a legend than director Robert Wise was not invited back. He and fellow legend Gene Roddenberry were essentially shelved for an unknown TV producer (Harve Bennett) and a largely untested writer-director (Nicholas Meyer)-both smart moves, though. Pretty harsh response to a film that grossed, in today's dollars, $231 Million!

But, of course, that's the rub. $231 Million really isn't that much money relative to other blockbusters and blockbuster franchises, especially as the highest-grossing entry. Let me put that in perspective--take this past year's box office champs. TMP's total would do no better than #4 on the list, behind The Dark Knight, Iron Man, and Indiana Jones--each of which made considerably more. TMP would finish barely ahead of Hancock!

The great "cross-over" hit, Voyage Home, meanwhile, made the equivalent of $209 million, which would only place it seventh in 2008 alone. That one didn't make much more than Wrath of Khan ($190m), which isn't considered a cross-over hit.

I only point this out not to disrespect my beloved franchise, but because there appears to be a myth evolving around the newest entry that there is this large, mainstream, audience "out there" to be grabbed--much larger than the core of Trekkies--and that said audience must be appealed to in order for the franchise to be revived. But, as the numbers show, it was never a matter of reaching a huge mainstream audience, but in consistently satisfying the existing die-hards.


As should be apparent by now, I am a little ambivalent about the new film. While I am excited about any attempt to revive the franchise (and I believe the TNG films were a dead-end--those characters were far more interesting when spread across an entire season of tv, and there was never an attempt to tell a larger story across several films, ala the TOS films), I am concerned about the fact that the new filmmakers haven't yet made a decent feature-length film (most notably, MI:III was a mess, and I was a fan of that franchise, too). And, yes, I am concerned about "canon"--the faithful adherence to the narratives and events that came before in other ST films and television episodes.

I swear I was never a fan of canon before this newest Star Trek film began building buzz. I've watched the original episodes once, maybe twice incidentally, never read a single fictional book about ST's world, and hardly followed any of the other series, though as a kid I did watch TNG a lot during its initial run. My devotion to ST stems from the single fact that I love the TOS films, but I have always embraced II through VI as much as its own (Harve Bennett/Nic Meyer-influenced) internalized diegetic world, than as a part of a larger multi-media story.

But there was something about the newest Trek film that suddenly concerns me regarding canon. Its less to do with whether a line in the new film, or a plot development, completely contradicts some obscure line from a 60s TOS broadcast (as is the case, for example, with the fact that Kirk only once very briefly met Pike, the Enterprise's first captain, and yet the two now have a detailed relationship in the film). Its not about nitpicking details. Its more about knowing and respecting your audience, and how those details may or may not speak to a careful, healthy, attention to a new thoughtful script in the here and now.

To be honest, the first full theatrical trailer is basically one big "FU" to the die-hards (which is not the same thing as saying it will be a bad movie, mind you--it may well be). In the first minute, the trailer goes out of its way to show its audience several blatant violations of canon. That's not a smart way to sell a movie--and, check the records, it was never "cross-over" fans that made the films a reliable franchise (even the success of I and IV were not that much more than the others, relatively-speaking). So throwing the fans under the bus--as the director has done during preview screenings--in favor of some mythical larger audience seems misguided, at best.

A better approach for the trailer would have been to start before the flashbacks (as the actual film does) and then work its way back to the big pay-off--a new version of the old crew. And a better approach for the franchise would be to re-build the shaky connection with its once faithful cult following (whom abandoned Nemesis), and then try to build from there. The assumption seems to be that the die-hards will show up no matter what (and I am sure most will), but that last TNG film is a reminder that nothing's a given.

Let me rephrase, I do not care about how faithful the new film is to the old stories in and of itself. One of my all-time favorite Bond films (Casino Royale) completely contradicts the basic premises of the earlier films. And my favorite TV show still on (Battlestar Galactica) took the story of the old version that I used to watch as a child, and started over entirely . . . for the better. I have no problem with significant change.

But I do care about the perception that the new filmmakers are, or are not, being very thorough or thoughtful in their own storytelling. And the "we will cover it all up with time travel" trick (gag), is not a sufficiently interesting nor creative measure. To me, it would be much more of a challenge for the new film to make a good faith effort to adhere to the existing lore of Kirk, Spock, etc.'s upbringing, than (as it appears to the die-hard Trekkie outsider) to just throw in a convenient deux ex machina that allows the filmmakers to create their own story from scratch. There is a fine line between creativity and laziness, and the latter rarely produces a memorable story.

Again, I obviously haven't seen the film, and I am excited to do so. Its entirely possible that the new film will have an internal narrative logic that not only makes sense, but more importantly, produces a Enterprise crew worth following further.

But I cannot emphasize enough that a successful new film has to go through the fans. The fans brought the franchise in the 1970s back from the dead, and it was the fans and their repeat business that sustained the franchise through nine films and several television series, long after the novelty of Trek had worn off.

There were only two times, prior to this newest one, that a Trek film was tinkered with to attract so-called "mass appeal"--the awkward humor of Final Frontier and the heightened emphasis on action in Nemesis. Those were the two lowest-grossing films in the franchise--how ironic (and not a coincidence). The humor in Voyage Home was more about taking a break from the darkness of the deadly serious previous two installments, than about finding a new audience--which was just a happy by-product of the shift in tone.

I wish the new film the best. It hasn't gotten off to a good start for me, but there's no point in rooting against my own self-interests. Yet there's still something to be said about the old (albeit sexist) truism--"dance with the girl who brought you."

The (13) Best American Films of the Decade

Part Two of the 2009 Blogging Project

Continuing with my other 2009 blogging project, which will document the 10th anniversary of all the great films from 1999, will be a monthly post dedicated to what my choices are for the top American films of the past decade.

2009 will mark a close to the first decade of the 21st Century--a century when, as Scott noted in a comment to the previous entry, the idea of "cinema" may become if not irrelevant, than at the very least heavily re-defined. There were many great films in the last 10 years (2000-2009), and so I will dedicate the last year to taking a final look back.

My list is unapologetically subjective. Some of the choices are obvious; others are perhaps entirely questionable. But they are all films that I am passionate about, and wish to celebrate on the blog.

The list is flexible and of course comes with caveats, beyond just the whims of my own personal tastes. The list is biased towards the first half of the decade--I suspect because I seemed to have had more time on my hands to see films. I used to see more films back then than I do now (and, yes, this is also an admission that I do not claim to have seen every possible eligible film in that time).

As I get older, as I spend more time as an academic, writing about films, the theatre-going side of my cinephilia has waned (that, plus the secret confession on which I will soon blog--in the last three years, I've been more captivated by new TV shows than by new movies).

As with the other series on 1999 films, I will be blogging on one film each month during 2009. I will be blogging in the opposite order of the ranking, working all year towards #1. The "13th" slot will be posted sometime in January of 2010, and will be left open for my choice for the (future) best film of 2009, leaving open a spot for the reality that the list will evolve.

The list invariably reflects my writing and scholarly interests, and vice versa. My cinephilia dictates that I write about the films I love, and that I love the films which compel me to write.

Okay, so here's my top 13 American films for the present decade (2000-2009), with a brief description/preview/rationale:

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2004 (Dec.): a blissfully perfect match of form and content, of narrative and disruption; a love story that moves at once in opposite directions, on several levels.

2. Punch-Drunk Love, 2002 (Nov.): Pure cinematic affect; a cinephiliac blend of sounds, colors, frames, movement . . . and, oh yes, one of the decade's most interesting characters, bolstered by one of the decade's finest performances--Sandler's persona achieves its perfection by nothing more than being itself.

3. Mulholland Drive, 2001 (Oct.): a film so fucking good that, seven years later, I still cannot put it into words. Reducing its wonders to psychoanalysis is just insulting.

4. American Splendor, 2003 (Sept.): the best narrative autobiography of the decade, and the last great, old-fashioned postmodern film where the simulacrum still meant something.

5. Ghost World, 2001 (Aug.): a magical little film about how commodity, racial transgressions, and history weigh on America's (literal and metaphorical) youth.

6. Lost in Translation, 2003 (July): I see its condescension more clearly five years later, but its story and its atmosphere remain heart-breakingly simple.

7. Casino Royale, 2006 (June): Yes, regular readers should have seen this one coming, but it is my personal favorite film of the last five years. Besides, there should be at least one franchise film on the list. It would be intellectually dishonest, not to mention how terribly un-cinephiliac of me, to overlook the film just because its "only" a Bond film.

8. No Country for Old Men, 2007 (May): The one Best Picture this decade that the Academy got right (though they didn't do too badly with The Departed a year earlier). A true genre thriller in the best sense of the word, in an age when that genre seems over-exploited and dead, and yet such a label also misses the many layers and narrative contradictions of the film.

9. The Royal Tennenbaums, 2001 (April): a purely sentimental favorite; a moving story, seamlessly blending tragedy and comedy, and featuring career performances.

10. Memento, 2000 (March): I suspect the novelty of Nolan's groundbreaking noir might not hold up well over the years--I haven't re-watched it since 2003--but it remains a substantial technical and narratological achievement.

11. Be Kind Rewind, 2008 (Feb.): yes, Be Kind Rewind. It may seem surprising, but there was no other film this year I saw that was so intriguing, provocative, and moving that I had to write about it--I can offer a film no greater compliment than that. If you think this film is a "comedy," you completely missed what does. One day (soon), I will develop more thoroughly my ideas on the film's relationship with issues of ritual/affect, urban studies, whiteness, and of course cinephilia in the age of digital reproduction.

12. There Will Be Blood, 2007 (Jan.): Like 2007's other masterpiece, No Country for Old Men, this film is deceptively simple. And, more so that 2006's The Departed, its a rhetorical sucker-punch that proves more rewarding on repeated viewings--the logical end of its stark thematic development.

13. ??????????????, 2009 (Jan., 2010)

Here are seven more, in no particular order, to round off my top 20 list (I will have undoubtedly forgotten one or two, but I've spent the last week formulating my list, so it should be pretty representative): Adaptation (2002); History of Violence (2005); Brokeback Mountain (2005); The Man Who Wasn't There (2001); Munich (2005); Sideways (2004); Capote (2005).

Finally, an apology--I said in the previous post that 1999 was the last great year for American films. But 2001 comes pretty damn close.

2009 Blog Projects, Part One: 1999 films

2009 marks a couple of interesting film milestones for me. One is the fairly obvious end of the decade. Another is the tenth anniversary of 1999, which I still maintain was the best year for American movies in my lifetime.

Next year, I will begin two blogging projects here simultaneously--each will consist of one post every month in celebration of these milestones. For now, I've come up with my 1999 list. Later this week or next, I will list my 2000s Top 12. I don't know what exactly I will say about the films, but I will rewatch them (some of which I haven't seen in 5-7 years) and go from there. Some may not hold up for me, and that too is part of the attraction.

My 1999 list is completely subjective. At first, I was trying to compose a list that combined my personal favorites with ones that were landmark films of the year for one reason or another. But the list quickly got too long, and so I simply narrowed it down to the 12 that I wanted to watch again, and/or write about.

So, here they are:

January: Election
February: The Talented Mr. Ripley
March: The Blair Witch Project
April: Fight Club
May: Bringing Out the Dead
June: The End of the Affair
July: Magnolia
August: The Limey
September: The Matrix
October: The Insider
Nov.: Eyes Wide Shut
Dec.: Being John Malkovich

Let me add that I really, really wanted to blog about Rushmore and Thin Red Line as well, which are technically listed as 1998 films, but which were not released until in most places until 1999 (and I know I did not see them until spring of that year). But limited space forced me to cut them. Maybe I will sneak them in somewhere.

Other notables I did not include (in no particular order): Existenz, Go, Sixth Sense, American Beauty, Office Space, Beuna Vista Social Club, South Park, Boys Don't Cry, The Green Mile, and others.

Finally, this is not a blogathon at all, but others are certainly welcome to piggy-back off the idea if a particular film strikes them.

Bond All-Time Box Office

So, this is what happens on a lazy Sunday. Throughout the Bond blogathon, I was also thinking in the back of my mind about how the Bond films stacked up against each other box office-wise (in US box office, that is), once inflation was taken into account (and yes, my reservations about counting inflation remain--its a much more complicated matter than just comparing tix prices--but its still a useful and harmless academic exercise). It continues my recent fascination with how the dynamics of brand media texts fluctuate over time.

Once I typed in the information from Box Office Mojo into an excel sheet, and figured out the same basic formula using changing tix prices since 1962, it didn't take too long to get the results.



Initial Thoughts?

#1? Thunderball, not Goldfinger--though the latter's huge success probably laid the conditions for the former's even more phenonomenal performance (440 Million!--both Thunderball and Goldfinger each made more than Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace combined, and Craig's box office has been stellar).

Quantum of Solace will probably gain another ten million or so before it leaves theatres, but that would only move it up a slot or two at best, and not into the top ten.

I was not surprised to see that Craig's two recent films really didn't stand out relative to others, even though technically they are, as of this weekend, the two highest-grossing Bond films when looking at the raw data. Technically, Casino Royale has made more money than any others, but counting inflation, it barely cracks the top ten.

I was surprised to see that Brosnan's films ended up ranking so high. I had no idea just how much the tix prices had jumped in just ten years.

I knew Connery's films were far and away the standard-bearers, but never had the data to back it up. However, I was surprised to see that Dr. No didn't make more than it did (yes, it was first, but it also benefited from several re-releases in the 1960s). And I was also surprised to see that Moonraker nearly held its own against those films (along with Die Another Day).

If there's any doubt why Bond filmmakers keep occasionally making really stupid films, one needn't look any further than the fact that Moonraker, Die Another Day and You Only Live Twice represent half of the highest six grossers ever (and I'm tempted to throw Thunderball in that category as well).

I was surprised to see how poorly Moore's Bond films in the beginning (namely, Man with a Golden Gun). Moore's box-office performance actually seemed to gain steam over time, even if (in my opinion) the quality of his films steadily dwindled.

The performance of Bond films in the late 1960s and earlier 1970s was nearly as bad as in the late 1980s, and I am surprised that the franchise didn't fold. I never realized before how The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker (where I felt the franchise started to get a little overblown, silly and lame) actually helped save the franchise. Then again, all the numbers were strong relative to other non-Bond films then, just not other Bond films.

Finally, I was surprised to see Living Daylights so low. I had heard several times that Dalton's first performance was a strong hit, but relatively speaking, it really wasn't.

Only three of the top 10 Bond films (Goldfinger, From Russia with Love, Casino Royale) would be on my list of the Top 10. Meanwhile, four of my personal favorites fill the bottom five (all but A View to a Kill). How did I end up being such a Bond fan with those contradictory tastes?

Ideology, Reception and Conditions of Possibility

How does ideology work in a classic Hollywood film, even a deeply problematic one? Sometimes its not that audiences see a film's (racial, sexual) offenses more "clearly" over time as they become more enlightened or sensitive--a neoliberal myth of progress. Sometimes, it's the exact opposite--audiences can become even less progressive than generations which came before.

The reception history of Walt Disney's Song of the South is not a single, linear story of proving how racist the film was or is (and it is), and then simply documenting the tussle between progressive and reactionary behavior of audiences—it requires a much more complicated space for various conditions of ideological, technological, affective and historiographic possibility.

Conditions of possibility refer to the co-existence of competing ideologies within Song of the South—that, while trending conservative overall (as all Hollywood films do), the film is just ambiguous enough, at a basic textual level, to lend itself to different cultural and political readings. Moreover, such readings are then complicated by other historical, affective and interpretative factors.

I also intend the notion of “conditions of possibility” to similarly speak to, if not account for, larger historical trends—the possible shifts of ideologies and cultural conditions, the alternating accumulation and evaporation of possibilities, across years and even decades. Ideology is never directly “transmitted,” of course—one film, or group of films, does not affect single-handedly the ideological disposition of a particular person or a group of people, who bring to the cinema a seemingly bottomless well of pre-existing dispositions which influences their reaction to a film more than the film itself does.

But ideology is not irrelevant either, nor without its effects. And it is not to suggest that films cannot activate those pre-existing dispositions, in complicated ways. As with pedagogical practices, possibilities for ideological transmission accumulate, if at all, through differences in repetition and redundancy—a pattern which is, not insignificantly, the reception history of Song of the South.

Overall, the film was quite uneventful upon its first release, and yet somehow the film and its ideologies gained a considerable presence in American popular culture over time, to the point where today its seamless offenses remain “natural” or “invisible” to some.

Conditions of possibility are both contemporary reading strategies—what was available to people (fans, writers, producers) in their time—and simultaneously the media scholar’s potential options for charting multiple, irreducible histories of both that moment, and the thematic and discursive trajectories which may extend from that same moment.

Ideologically, media operate as particular events through conditions which rest on certain assumptions:
that new ideological responses rely not on what’s transmitted, but on the activation of pre-existing conditions established not through originality but redundancy
that past historiographic possibilities create future (pedagogical) possibilities, the latter of which is also dependent upon repetition
that such responses always create new possibilities; that responses never just react to one pre-existing condition, and never point towards one isolated ideology or condition of possibility
that contradictory ideologies always co-exist as potential; and that such conditions work through the fundamental notion of ideological irreducibility.

Song of the South was roundly criticized upon its first release as historically inaccurate, as offensive to African-Americans, and as aesthetically uninspired. The conditions among adult audiences post-World War II was amendable neither to mythic depictions of the American South nor to reactionary depictions of African-Americans (although children with fathers away—like Johnny—during the conflict, as Jonathan Rosenbaum suggested years later, was another story).

But through the decades, those various readings were slowly replaced with alternate conditions—the film’s own dispersal through diversification, which even in Song of the South’s absence raises the film’s visibility and subsequently creates a more amendable environment for its re-release; different historical periods (white flight in the 1970s, Reaganism) where such imaginary representations would find greater receptivity; the dissipation of the film’s historical distortions and racial inequalities over the decades; a legacy of Disney which increasingly morphs from a desperate small Hollywood independent, into a sacred American institution; an intensified appeal to its affective qualities; and a considerably heightened awareness of the nostalgia it can and often does generate.

Some of these conditions can only occur through repetition and redundancy. For example, nostalgia for the film itself today is a significant part of the film’s appeal, and yet such was not possible in 1946, or even perhaps in 1956. Nostalgia was to become a condition of possibility through both the film’s re-circulation, and through Disney’s consistent promotion of the film across several decades and media platforms.

All the perceived qualities that Disney initially promoted about the film—a heartwarming, fun, musical spectacle—did eventually stick to it for some, just not right away. On the contrary, Song of the South was a critical and commercial disappointment in 1946, and then largely forgotten for another decade. And yet the conditions for its eventual success increased throughout the years, in part because of Disney’s distribution persistence.

Song of the South was not only not a product of its time, the film was most harshly consistently criticized in the 1940s—whereas subsequent re-releases also saw the emergence of a rabid base of followers, the film had interestingly few (at least vocal) supporters at that time, and again in 1956. Although difficult to document from materials of the time, we may also see here unexpectedly the first seeds of childhood nostalgia for Song of the South being planted.

Adults were generally underwhelmed by the film. However, the children who were watching the film with them for the first time, but were themselves too young yet to write in to The Post or The Times, may have been developing different responses that would eventually materialize discursively twenty, thirty, or even forty years later.

Robert Ray argues that “Hollywood’s power (and need) to produce a steady flow of variations provided the [American] myth with the repetitive elaborations that it required to become convincing.” The artificiality and arbitrariness of the classic Hollywood narrative structure came to appear seamless and invisible through continual deployment, recurrence and even superfluousness. Moreover, as Ray also later notes, “by helping to create desires, by reinforcing ideological proclivities, by encouraging certain forms of action (or inaction), the movies worked to create the very same reality they then ‘reflected.’”

I would argue that something similar happened with the reception history of Song of the South—through the repetition and redundancy of its various forms of recirculation, the film’s barely implicit mythology of white privilege and institutional racism became less questioned and criticized over the years, because Song of the South became its own reflected “reality.”

Just as importantly, nostalgia injects itself into that very same process which it also helps to sustain. Despite its inherent textual flimsiness, the reception history of Song of the South is centered first and foremost on “the repetitive elaborations that it required to become convincing.”

On the whole, many audiences in the 1970s, 1980s and today did not, and still do not, see the problems of racial representations that so many in the 1940s, white and black, saw more self-evidently then. Thomas Cripps' “thermidor,” which described the post-war racial attitudes in the late 1940s, was of a different time, no longer a condition of possibility when looking at Song of the South today—other than for a historian trying to excavate the past.

Song of the South and New Media

The age of new media presents contradictory openings to the lingering presence of old Hollywood texts online. A few years prior to the "Disney Vault" sketch, Saturday Night Live did another spoof of the film and of Uncle Remus with the mock testimonial commercial, “Uncle Jemima’s Liquor.” In this skit, Tracey Morgan played “Uncle Jemima,” the husband of Aunt Jemima, who is trying to sell his own brand of moonshine.

Although the Disney film is never directly referenced, Uncle Jemima is clearly a reference to Uncle Remus, down to the same bald head with sides of grey hair. Moreover, an unseen chorus sings a carefully generic pastiche of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” with lyrics that reference a “wonderful day,” and the skit is filled with animated bluebirds flying around the colorful mise-en-scene.

The creatures, meanwhile, are eventually implied to be not the product of a fun, fanciful world, but rather Jemima’s drunken hallucinations. One of the implicit critiques of Song of the South here is that Uncle Remus—always happy, always hiding in his cabin behind the mansion—is close to the old racist stereotype of the “Coon,” which puts forth a white perception of blacks as lazy drunks. Indeed, film historian Donald Bogle has argued that Uncle Remus as a stereotype is closer to the “Coon” than an “Uncle Tom,” because he is not a tragic figure, but rather a source of amusement for whites.

While SNL’s “The Disney Vault” and “Uncle Jemima” circulate on the internet as explicit and implicit critiques of the Disney style, Song of the South, and the racist assumptions which come with it, private individuals have also posted critiques of the film and of Disney’s long-tradition of racism as well.

However, most of the work online is of fans who post videos in defense of the film. On the internet site, “YouTube,” a considerable range of short videos have been made which resist Song of the South’s racist connotations. In addition to several postings of all the film’s animated sequences here and there, one particular user in June of 2008 posted the entire film in ten separate, several-minute segments, fragments which had still not been pulled off the site over three months later. The user described the clips only as a “Study of pre-Civil War South good race relations [sp]” (reinforcing the perception not only that the film promotes positive race relations in some people’s minds, but more importantly the idea that even some of the film’s fans view it as a pre-Civil War film).

Another fan posted a particularly emotional section from the film of Johnny and Uncle Remus discussing a dog, their friendship and the stories they share; another posted the “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” sequence (clearly lifted from the VHS sing-along version) ; meanwhile, an older white man posted a video of himself reading the “Wonderful Tar Baby Story,” complete with his attempt at an Uncle Remus accent.

This user also promotes the importance of “books” in the new media age, believing that various versions of the story have been distorted through years of remediation (though it’s unclear if he’s referring to the Disney version or the original Harris stories as being distorted, since the story he reads is more or less identical to the “Tar Baby” sequence in Song of the South).

More directly addressing the political debates around the film, yet another fan posted a clip entitled “Is this racist? Song of the South clip.” This two-minute excerpt from the larger film showcases only a portion of the “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” sequence, followed by Remus talking briefly with Brer Rabbit. The implicit assumption in the title appears to be that the film is not racist, because there’s nothing offensive in the section isolated.

But of course this is just another moment in a long line of remediations which selectively excerpt the most superficially innocuous moments of the film. Many of the advocate clips isolate Song of the South’s most powerful affective moments, reiterating not only the moments that potentially struck them the most when they first saw it, but also positing the film’s emotional appeals as overriding any criticism of racism.

These clips clearly violate Disney’s copyright—not to mention re-foreground its most notorious eyesore on a popular public forum. However, interesting is the company did not make YouTube pull most of them, despite the fact that, in some times, many were posted for over a year.

big, bright, shining stars

Email me if you wish to see the post. I welcome and encourage regular visitors--even from Texas--to contact me with feedback.

A Christmas Story of Ritual and Repetition (Ideology?)

How does ideology work in media? The single tightest high-wire act I walk when I teach media is to negotiate the distinction between the fact that films, television shows, etc., are deeply ideological, and the seemingly opposed beliefs that these ideologies often work in contradictory ways and that such ideologies aren't really "transmitted" anyway.

At the risk of contradicting my other work on cinephilia, so little actually happens ideologically at the "inception" of a media text--when it is first made, when it is first experienced. At best, what happens is that the conditions for ideology may begin to shift, the potential that later on new ideological possibilities will begin to develop as much around a text as within the text itself (even while a text's contradictions feed and perpetuate those possibilities).

An unthinking (not mindless, just unthinking) repetition seems to be the key.

Bob Clark's A Christmas Story was a financial disappointment when it was first released to theatres 25 years ago. I know I didn't see it in theatres. It opened prior to Thanksgiving, and had largely passed by the time, ironically, Christmas came a month later in winter 1983.

But that wasn't the end of the Story. The eventual success of A Christmas Story isn't the tale of a film's theatrical life. Its a thoroughly televisual journey. My earliest memories of the film were of an obscure family film that I watched on cable as a child, probably only a couple years after it first appeared in theatres. I enjoyed it, because I got (some of) its humor, and I could empathize with the need for the one special toy.

But I also watched it over and over because it was always on. Then I watched again the following year, and then the next. Then after a few years, I was watching it several times during the same holiday season because it was broadcast several times during the season. The repetition culminated to the point of its greatest intensity--24 hour marathons on TBS.

For a while I had no interest in owning it, because I was only interested in watching it during the holidays, and I knew it would always be on TV anyway--that's when I would see it. The ritual of watching it was completely inseparable for me from the holiday itself, and vice versa.A Christmas Story became a classic not because it is a very good film--the content, the initial experience, is not irrelevant, but secondary. It became a classic because it became a part of a ritual larger than itself.

My own experience was hardly the exception to those among its emergent fandom. I watched it probably a dozen times over the span of 7-8 years before anyone came along and called it a "classic." By then, I accepted the statement as is--"of course, its a classic." Not because I had ever thought about its status before, not because it was socially-agreed upon, but because it had always been there on my television.

There is a certain kind of socially-constructed aura around the film now. Its a holiday classic now, because its always been. Its on TV not because its the holidays, but because its always been on TV. I get excited when I hear it will be on again less because its my favorite holiday movie and more because I always do get excited.

What is its ideology? What explains its appeal? Well, nostalgia, of course. But what about it? The film itself is a nostalgic look at a (illusory) white, middle class, Midwestern 20th Century life. No doubt that nostalgia (representational nostalgia) appeals to many who imagine having lived that childhood. But its also an insightful deconstruction of that nostalgia--Dad's a pervert, Christmas dinner is ruined, Ralphie's quite the potty-mouth, Santa's a creep, kids suffer through endless embarrassment, bullying, humiliation, etc. The film appeals to contradictory audiences which may embrace, and reject, nostalgia for a period that never existed.

But there is also the nostalgia I personally feel for the past--not for the 1940s as simulacrum, but for the 1980s. My childhood. That co-exists with the film's own critique of nostalgia. I never question that, nor what the film is "about." At some point, ideology begins to "naturalize," no matter how illusory it was to begin with. And when it reappears, we are ready for it. Its past success is its own justification, even if the film was rejected theatrically in the beginning. Now, its self-generating. Now it just is.