The Oscar montage reel is a genre on its own. It’s transparently demonstrative of the overall function of the Academy Awards. These montage reels summarize and make explicit what the annual ceremony attempts to accomplish writ large: to create and solidify a canon of important American films, along with a delimited understanding of their importance. Yes, the Oscars have occasionally given a voice to the indie underdog and rush through their obligatory movies-with-subtitles category, but besides the occasional screenplay nomination for a truly innovative film and the rare foreign language film that broaches through the marginal categories, the Oscars are by and large a celebration of American cinema, specifically Hollywood cinema.

During the 2006 ceremony, a moment occurred that has been seared into my memory. I haven’t been able to find a clip of it online since it aired six years ago, so I hope this isn’t wishful or inaccurate. The 2006 ceremony consisted of a spate of overtly political films, as Crash, Brokeback Mountain, Munich, Good Night and Good Luck competed for top honors, and Syriana was in the running for other awards. In likely hopes of gaining cultural capital from celebrating mainstream cinema’s rarely explored but ever-present political function, the Academy aired a self-congratulatory reel of past Oscar-nominated films that have addressed other topical social problems, from In the Heat of the Night to Philadelphia. When the lights came back and the audience applauded with anticipated decorum, host Jon Stewart then graced the stage and stated, in a perfect move of dry deflation, “…And none of those were ever problems again.”

Point taken, Mr. Stewart. In celebrating the “tackling” of social issues of Oscars’ past, the institution by association situates itself as actively involved in progressive social change rather than merely reflective of it. And in manufacturing dominant histories of Hollywood cinema through the montage reel and the canonizing function of the statue, the Oscars draw a false equivalence between “Hollywood” and “movies,” suggesting that the Academy Awards have not only recognized the most topical and socially relevant films contemporaneously with their release, but that such films come largely from the studio system. As I’ve stated elsewhere, there’s a reason you’ll see In the Heat of the Night and Brokeback Mountain in montages that celebrate narratives of racial equality and LGBTQ representation rather than John Cassavetes’s Shadows or Todd Haynes’s Poison.

But the problem of Oscar canonization is greater than the annihilation of other, marginalized but equally important works of cinema. The Oscar ceremony, and the Oscar montage in particular, creates a dominant history that limits our interpretation of and historical inquiry into Hollywood itself. Not only do the Oscars celebrate Hollywood almost exclusively, but also purport a limited interpretation of the significance of that institution.

Which brings me to the anomaly that is the first Best Picture winner, William A. Wellman’s silent film Wings (1927). Besides being a damn good film, it’s notable (as the comprehensive near-documentary The Celluloid Closet points out) for having one of the first same-sex kisses onscreen. While it’s difficult to say how the film played for audiences in 1927, Wings’s gay subtext hardly even reads subtextually now. The film follows a love triangle with two best friends fighting over Clara Bow’s character, but as Kevin Sessums summarized on his facebook page last week when linking to this post (in which the film’s nudity is also mentioned), “Neither of them shows as much love for her, however, than they do for each other.”

Wings provides a lens into the fascinating era of pre-Code Hollywood, where films were permitted to engage in subject matter that they would be barred from exploring for several decades. Pre-Code Hollywood remains an unending treat to cinephiles because it forces us to ponder what an unregulated Hollywood would have had in store for us had the Hays Code never exercised the hegemony over representation that it did. How would Hollywood history look different? And, by association, how would the films that are venerated by institutions like the Academy Awards have looked different? Would Brokeback Mountain have seemed like such a belated landmark, or simply run of the mill in this alternative Hollywood? Wings demonstrates that, even amongst the films that the Academy Awards have honored, there are still important aspects about them which are rarely acknowledged by dominant history.

You likely won’t see Wings’s same-sex kiss on any Oscar montage. By even suggesting that the first ever Oscars honored films which potentially explored more progressive content than in the decades since, this violates the dominant narrative manufactured by Hollywood/The Oscars, which purports an easily comprehendible and perfectly linear understanding of the progress of motion pictures. But the history of American movies is anything but. What other stories of film history, from Hollywood and elsewhere, are being elided by the work of the Oscar montage?

Perhaps more so than any year, 2012′s slate is inundated with films about the past. The Help reinforces Hollywood’s feel-good, whitewashed Civil Rights story. War Horse takes us back to the good old days of WWI and sweeping John Williams scores. The Tree of Life and Midnight in Paris explore the nostalgic conflict between past and present. There are even two films (Moneyball and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close) that tell stories of the very recent past. But two films, The Artist and Hugo, are about how we understand the past through film. They serve as reminders that, over 120 years after its invention, we are still a culture whose understanding of itself is rendered largely through the moving image. And when film history is made into something accessible, simple, and quick, what histories are being left out, and what false assumptions are maintained?

Common wisdom suggests that with the progression of linear time, we experience progressive change. Technologies – and thus, quality of life – improves; unjust laws are eventually taken down in favor of a push toward equality; we become more knowledgeable as there is more to know. Basically, we assume that people of the past are not as enlightened as those privileged to live in the present. By association, we assume that movies address progressive topics in a linear fashion. But the real history of motion pictures is far more complex than this, and it doesn’t fit into the dominant, accepted narrative that persists through Oscar montages. The very first Best Picture winner should throw the history manufactured by the Oscars into deep question. What if talkies had never been invented? What if the Hays Code had never dominated over film content for the better part of Classical Hollywood history? Why do we automatically assume that audiences aren’t “ready” for certain material when a history of Hollywood on the margins suggests otherwise?

The common reaction to the Oscars is twofold: either that it’s a waste of time, or a silly but fun ritual. Either way, after years of falling ratings, it’s become acceptable to deem the Oscars inconsequential. Yet this is still a powerful institution invested in maintaining its authority. And by existing as the major awards ceremony for American films, its library of statues compels on popular culture a dominant history of the medium that follows a simplistic narrative – in other words, a history that can fit into a short montage.

The Academy Awards do not simply reflect on or preserve history. They write it, and even sometimes erase it. It’s always important, then, for multiple histories to be heard.

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A week and a half ago, Anthony Hemingway’s Red Tails was released. On the surface, the film breathes Hollywood oxygen through-and-through. It’s a WWII era action film that uses its setting for broad family-friendly cheese-banter and CGI-heavy eye candy rather than an opportunity for a sober interrogation of history. Red Tails looks and feels like any Hollywood film geared toward as mass an audience as possible. But the studio that’s distributing it – 20^th Century Fox – didn’t pay a dime to produce it. The reported $58 million cost to make Red Tails came solely out of the pocket of producer George Lucas, who had been attempting to get a film about the Tuskegee Airmen made since the early 1990s. He was continually met with resistance from a studio system that saw anything less than the biggest guaranteed appeal to the largest possible audience as a “risk,” including a heroic true story about African-American airmen.

The ideology that closed the doors on George Lucas of all people reflects the same business mentality that inspired Jeffrey Katzenberg’s lengthy warning to other studios in a memo written during the same years that Lucas was first trying to get Red Tails financed.  In the memo, Katzenberg warned studios regarding their practice of exponentially centralizing all their resources in a few very expensive projects, resulting in high risk, little room for experimentation, and an increasing reliance on that coveted monolith known as the “mass audience” (which, to make things even more complicated, now includes a dependance on gangbuster international business). In order to break even, studios need to constantly break records. Twenty years after Katzenberg’s memo, this and this were what “disappointment” looked like.

In an article I posted last week about 1977 as the year Hollywood shifted to the blockbuster mentality, I argued that films like Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind could be more appropriately deemed “New Hollywood” than movies like Five Easy Pieces or Midnight Cowboy because these blockbusters signal Hollywood’s return to gearing their product for a mass audience after the studio system’s countercultural (but historically beloved) hiccup. I still stand by this point, but New Hollywood’s (in my appropriation of the term) understanding of “quantity” is quite different than Old Hollywood.

Old Hollywood was incredibly prolific in its manufacturing of films with assembly line-efficiency, and Hollywood’s predictable output danced a thin line between similarity and difference (each year, Warner Bros. released a handful of gangster films, MGM a handful of musicals, etc.). Now, the studio mentality is inverted: spend an incredible amount of money on a select few films in the hopes of franchising. The result, of course, is something that makes Hollywood of the 60s and 70s seem ever more exceptional: a studio system which takes no risks in the face of a mass audience imagined to be – to put it bluntly – stupid, intolerant, and easily confused.

This last point was made quite clear by George Clooney in The Daily Beast’s roundtable interview of the year’s great performers. To paraphrase Clooney, a studio head will say, “I get it, but the audience won’t.” Who exactly this studio head is imagining (A middle-aged Tea Partier? A cranky grandmother? An easily perturbed child? A teenager with their face glued to a cell phone screen?) is unclear, but the high-risk investments of studios have resulted in a handle-your-audience-with-kid-gloves multiplex culture. At some point, playing to the lowest common denominator becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If all that a given multiplex has available are these filtered down, endlessly test-screened and focus-grouped ideas of what a movie is, then for audiences the notion that these options are all that movies can and should be becomes standardized.

The culture of American independent film, which has brought to screens some of the most fascinating and risk-taking of the nation’s films from the time of Eraserhead and Killer of Sheep up to the early-mid 90s, has provided a necessary counterbalance to studio hegemony. The line since has, of course, become increasingly blurred. Former independent filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino are now crowned creative saviors of an otherwise vacant studio system. Meanwhile, most of the higher-profile domestic movies released by Sony Pictures Classics, Fox Searchlight, and Focus Features don’t so much represent groundbreaking and progressive institution for uniquely American cinematic expression, but simply consist of movies defined as “risky” by alterity alone, in opposition to the studios’ strict no-risk model.

The ghettoization of otherwise accessible films into limited release patterns (i.e., smaller-scale movies that only move to multiplexes after passing the “test” of metropolitan film markets) only reinforces Hollywood’s routine perpetuation of the idea that only films catered toward mass appeal are worthy of wide release. Studio heads work under the assumption that they’re giving audiences what they want, rather than acknowledging their essential role in creating frameworks of “want.” After all, when you go to a 16-screen movie theater and half the screens are dominated by three movies while over 100 movies are tracked at the box office each weekend, it’s difficult to say that theatrical moviegoing operates through an ideal free market ethos.

Of course, actual independent filmmaking still exists, thanks largely to digital filmmaking and alternative avenues of distribution. And while a few films do break the mold every now and again on movie screens, that grassroots independent filmmaking seems to be slowly moving toward a total abandonment of theatrical distribution is yet another symptom of Hollywood’s dominance. “Mainstream” movies may not have a vertical distribution model of production to exhibition like Classical Hollywood did until 1948, but they might as well.

While the uber-consolidated model of safe and expensive studio filmmaking seems unsustainable (where Hollywood battled television in the 1950s with widescreen epics, they now battle the Internet with 3D), the dominance of no-risk business practices since (roughly) the early eighties has proliferated the industry irreparably. After all, the blockbuster mentality, stretching back to 1977, has eclipsed the time period conventionally known as “New Hollywood” many times over. This mentality has had more control, for a longer amount of time, than past content-determining institutions like the Hays Code ever did.

Which brings us back to George Lucas. Brian Curtis’s profile of the behemoth writer/director/producer/pompadour enthusiast is a fascinating character portrait of a man who, beyond his maddeningly mass-appeal and kid-friendly approach to the medium, is still a rebel with a camera at heart. Lucas, after all, started off in USC film school as an aggressive experimenter in form with a political edge that fit better alongside Jack Nicholson and Hal Ashby than Harrison Ford. His short, Freiheit (1966), for instance, is clearly a reactionary critique of the Vietnam War, specifically the contradictory notion of “freedom” informing the logic of duty and unquestioning servitude in arms.

It’s not without a tinge of poetic irony, then, that a man so singlehandedly complicit in creating the blockbuster mentality would ultimately have doors slammed in his face because of it.

The Hollywood mentality seems to have arrived at something of a breaking point the past few weeks. Along with justified frustration over finally getting a Hollywood-sleek movie made about African American fighter pilots in WWII in the 21^st century, James McBride displayed frustration over what The Help’s Oscar nominations represents for the future of African-American talent. And in the previously mentioned interview, Viola Davis is (to Charlize Theron’s dismay) incredibly frank about the lack of representation of middle-aged black women in Hollywood. Had The Help not had Emma Stone alongside Viola Davis, would it have incurred as much trouble as Red Tails in getting made? And these are not challenging, risk-taking films, but are as mainstream as films can be. Not every accessible (or even outright bad) Hollywood-style movie that doesn’t fit perfectly in the studio model for mass appeal has a zillionaire like George Lucas to singlehandedly save it. We are being denied so many stories.

This year, two of the biggest movie stars of Hollywood are nominated for Best Actor. Each of their films (George Clooney in The Descendants, Brad Pitt in Moneyball) were modest successes and a far cry from blockbuster (which now regrettably seems to be the only definition of “success”). Some would say that star capital is less meaningful today (as I have said before). But it’s not like Clooney and Pitt can’t act in, or aren’t offered, the latest tentpole production. They simply choose to do smaller projects instead. At the risk of making their stardom less valuable, instead move their cache to provide riskier films (a cynical view of political gamesmanship in Clooney’s Ides of March, an elliptical art film in Pitt’s collaboration with Terrence Malick) more of a voice than they might have otherwise. The passion of select superstars (Clooney, Pitt, even Lucas) might be the only hope against the monotony of the blockbuster that has dominated the studio system since 1977.

It is possible, then, for risky and even personal films to make it to wide release, but you only have to be insanely rich and unimaginably successful first.

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As much as I admire the incomparable films made during the era, New Hollywood (the term referring to innovative, risk-taking films made funded by studios from the mid-60s to the mid-70s) is a title that I find a bit problematic. The words “New Hollywood” better characterize the era that came after what the moniker traditionally refers to. Think about it: if “Old” or “Classical” Hollywood refers to the time period that stretches roughly from 1930 to 1960 when the studios as an industry maintained such an organized and regimented domination over and erasure of any other potential conception over what a film playing in any normal movie theater could be, then if we refer to the time period from roughly 1977 to now “New Hollywood,” the term then appropriately signifies a new manifestation of the old: regimentation, predictability, and limitation of expression. Where Old Hollywood studios would produce dozens of films of the same genre, New Hollywood (as I’m appropriating the term) could acutely describe the studios’ comparably stratified output of sequels, remakes, etc.

What we traditionally understand to be New Hollywood was not so much its own monolithic era in Hollywood’s legacy, but a brief, strange, and wonderful lapse between two modes of Hollywood filmmaking that have dominated the industry’s history.

The much-celebrated years that gave us The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Five Easy Pieces, and Petulia do not constitute an “era,” but a lapse between eras which itself afforded incredible opportunities for visionary filmmakers and the type of unprecedented low-scale/high-risk filmmaking that will most certainly never happen again on an institutional level. I don’t have a name to describe what happened during that decade in the place of New Hollywood, but perhaps it’s better for the era to exist without a categorizing term, for it’s not an era characterized so much by what it uniformly was as what it most certainly wasn’t. This brief and anomalous window found filmmakers seizing on Hollywood’s identity crisis. It’s an era that was defined then and has been canonized since by alterity, not through the unity and consolidation Hollywood is otherwise known for.

With the occasional exception of a certified hit like The Godfather or The French Connection, in the for-profit ethos of Hollywood, the late sixties and early seventies constituted a hiccup and a drunken night of sleep experienced after a long series of regrettable mistakes and rare good fortune. Welcome sobriety came to the studios bearing the names of Spielberg and Lucas. Post-1977 “New Hollywood” simply proves the rule by rendering mid-60s-mid-70s films ever more exceptional with each passing, uninspiring year as we hurtle inevitably toward Transformers 4 – Angrier, Louder Toys.

Hollywood’s switch from risk and innovation to re-regimentation was not a uniform one. It took several years, and the fumes of what we traditionally understand as New Hollywood certainly wafted through the early 80s. But the year in which the era of Hal Ashby and Robert Altman’s first phase ended is comfortably situated as 1977, the year of two major releases from a pair of behemoths of the new studio aristocracy: Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and, of course, Lucas’s Star Wars. Sure, of Spielberg’s 70s output, Jaws has a lot more to do with the current summer-blockbuster model of studio hyper-investment than the rather poetic and beautiful Close Encounters did, but the film solidified Spielberg’s reputation as a new kind of auteur: one who promised more premium entertainment and less insight into the state of the ashes of the American Dream. And as fun (though certainly not ageless) as the first two Star Wars entries remain, what the Lucas-logic wrought (franchise-think, privileging technological spectacle over storytelling, characters as stand-ins for cross-promotional merchandise) set foot for the worst habits of big studio filmmaking to come.

1976 was the year of Taxi Driver, Network, and All the President’s Men – some of the greatest films made during the era to be sure, but these films were not without a powerful stench of pessimism and defeat. Like Howard Beale, the voice of a frustrated counterculture would soon be abruptly silenced. (Still, it’s fun and strange to think that, in 1976, science-fiction meant Michael York running through a campy future or David Bowie falling to Earth, not Han Solo or Boba Fett.) Three years later, Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (following the weary trail of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Scorsese’s New York, New York) would definitively knock down the altar to the auteur that the previous thirteen-or-so years had built. But 1977 involved some serious pre-decimation damage.

But if one looks a bit closer, it seems that unique, untraditional voices who longed to express themselves through the art of cinema had already developed a Plan B. Perhaps it’s useful to think of 1977 not as (or, at least not only as) the year of Star Wars and Close Encounters, but the year of David Lynch’s Eraserhead and Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. While independent cinema certainly existed at the margins of American filmmaking long before 1977, often in somewhat rickety association with the American avant-garde (in 1977, American indie pioneer John Cassavetes released the last great entry of his short-lived filmography, Opening Night), Eraserhead and Killer of Sheep were two black-and-white anomalies whose legacies run as deep for the American independent filmmaking era that followed as Close Encounters and Star Wars do for the American blockbuster that would continue its dominance.

Killer of Sheep made (early) good on the growing accessibility of the increasingly economically-friendly filmmaking materials that would continue to provide more and more opportunities for filmmakers which each new technological change. Made for $10,000, the film showed that you don’t have to have a theme song by Isaac Hayes to deal directly with issues pertaining to black American identity. The film’s pseudo-documentary, neo-realist slice-of-life feel makes it not only one of the most enduringly poignant and authentic representations of African-American life ever caught on film, but its preference of patiently depicting the everyday over conventional plotting made way for a similar approach to film structure exercised by an incredible variety of American independent filmmakers, from Jim Jarmusch to Richard Linklater to the so-called mumblecore aesthetic.

Eraserhead, as J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum made notably clear, was the seminal midnight movie. Just as Hollywood franchises and blockbusters would seek to find as massive a mass audience as possible, Eraserhead proved that there’s a niche audience enduringly hungry for the unconventional. In the era of James Cameron and Robert Zemeckis, David Lynch’s career by any stretch of institutional logic should not have happened. The cult of Eraserhead had great implications for the future of American cinema that followed, for it proved that the traditional mass-market theatrical model of film promotion and distribution was not the only way for a film to find its audience – and in fact, imaginative and risk-taking films could benefit by taking routes to find their audiences that are as untraditional as the films themselves. Star Wars was the stuff of movie theaters and toy shops; Eraserhead was the stuff of roadshow screenings, compelling conversations, and, eventually, home video.

So while 1977 might be the accepted signpost of Hollywood’s stark transition from the gritty and the innovative to the accessible and the populist, two underground entries of that year portended the alternative routes to creative expression that have acted as the necessary route of escape from big fat new Hollywood’s structures of redundancy.

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One major misconception about Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy is that the films were originally and uniquely conceived as French films, reflecting the color of the nation’s flag through the color scheme of each film and embodying themes which based upon the motto of the French Republic: liberty (Blue), equality (White), and fraternity (Red). But Kieslowski was insistent upon the fact that the stories would have remained the same no matter the national context. The framing of these films through thematics and aesthetics tied to the French flag, the director states, arose as a matter of the trilogy’s source of funding. Thus, the thread which defines the trilogy was a creative accommodation to the circumstances of the film’s production. Kieslowski’s vision for these films, then, was firm, but not rigid – the particular details of this trilogy were not predestined or set in stone.

This fact frees the viewer from seeing the themes explored in the Three Colors trilogy as predominately or uniformly based within a national and cultural context. Yes, there are aspects of the brilliant Blue (1993) that are indisputably French, or at least Western European (it’s hard to imagine Americans mourning a contemporary classical composer as a national treasure), but the rather arbitrary circumstances in which the film’s production reflective in the trilogy’s connective framework allows for these themes to permeate well beyond the borders of France itself.

“Liberty” is an interesting theme, and inspires certain questions while viewing Blue that may not otherwise occur to the viewer. While Blue is hardly an overtly political film, viewing a film ostensibly about liberty in the American political climate of 2012 is food for thought indeed. The most recent incarnation of pseudo-libertarianism in mainstream conservative politics has situated the ideal of liberty as a given: it’s meaning is assumed to be transparent even though the desire for it is often articulated in lofty and abstract terms, and liberty is inferred to be a value that is both desirable and possible. As a result, many important questions about liberty are never asked. Liberty for whom, and are some people shackled at the expense of the liberation of others? What is more important: freedom to do something, or the ability to be free from something? What does a life of liberty even look like? Is liberty possible given the fact that we interact with and thus have a responsibility to others whether we want to or not?

Blue answers this final question with a resounding and definitive No. Juliette Binoche’s widow, Julie, desperately seeks human isolation after her composer husband and young daughter die in a car crash. Much of the middle section of the film is devoted to Julie’s futile attempts to establish some sort of solitary order away from the life she had formerly invested in. What’s remarkable about this film a chronicles one of the greatest personal human tragedies imaginable is that it depicts the horrors of not being allowed to be lonely. Human isolation becomes a foreign and unattainable ideal. Julie cannot sleep without the phone ringing. She cannot clean her house without the invasion of small creatures into her theoretically “private” space.

When a neighbor visits Julie to sign a petition to kick out another neighbor whom others in the building suspect to be a “loose woman,” Julie simply responds with, “It’s none of my business.” Here she implements the ideal she wishes others would enact upon her own life. She wants to be left to her own business – whether that’s mourning, denial, etc. she’s never really allowed to fully find out – but finds the notion of “solitude” in a world where other humans exist to be a few miles short of a possible reality. Julie, by circumstance, has become a libertarian of the interpersonal, but in adopting this ideal she only realizes time and again how impossible it is to live a life without the influence of others. (Liberty, then, is a strange, contradictory “virtue” for a government entity to adopt and for a nationally co-identified collective to value – not because governments cannot liberate, but because liberty as freedom from the influence of others seems that it can only be articulated on the individual, not the broad, scale. However, this contradiction only further points to the elusiveness of liberty itself as an ideal.)

But Julie’s failed search for liberty goes far deeper. One of Kieslowski’s most masterful directorial touches in this film is the persistent presence of the music of Julie’s late husband, which comes to stand for his memory and her grief. It becomes evident that Julie’s desire to escape will become difficult when, early on in the film, she throws some of her husband’s sheet music into a garbage dumpster and watches it crumble within the vehicle’s destructive mechanics. The music soars and then suddenly quiets and eventually stops as the sheets become torn and lost amongst the rubble. However, notation is not “the music itself,” but a representation of it. The music persists through Julie’s memory, and comes back whether she wills it or not. The camera fades to black as the film is overwhelmed by the late husband’s music – not to signal a scene alteration, but to show the blinding potential of emotional memory during grief.

Thus, even if Julie were to miraculously find the solitude she seeks, even if she were to finally be alone, memory and the fact of a life lived renders true isolation impossible. She may have the freedom to go where she pleases, but she does not have the freedom to forget. Julie may have the ability to leave her own life behind, but it is impossible for her to live a life outside of context. Because we are human, we can never really be free to be alone.

Julie only finds liberty when she gives up looking for it. Other people will continue to exist around her, but she has the freedom to embrace, or continue to fight with futility against, the lives of others. Once she accepts her role as a human in a complex web of interdependant connection with humanity, the film moves between glimpses of the lives with whom she’s shared her own. If there can be no solitude, then Blue is not really a movie about one woman’s journey.

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Ambiguity is no stranger to the arthouse film. Over fifty years after a group of daytrippers never found their lost shipmate in Antonioni’s L’Avventura, the ambiguous ending still retains the power to frustrate, confuse, anger, and challenge viewers. Continued controversies over ambiguity in narrative films point to Hollywood’s enduring dominance over the notion that films must be coherent and contain closure. However, the convention of closure can be a maddening limitation for filmmakers who intend to ask questions with no easy answers, or pose problems with no clear solutions (assuming that such answers or solutions exist in the first place).

But ambiguity can take on a variety of forms, and with different degrees of effectiveness. Sometimes a film’s ambiguous hole can be more fulfilling and thought-provoking than any convention of linear causality in its place, but at other points ambiguity can become a handicap, or a gap that simply feels like a gap. Here are a few films from the past year that engage in several modes of intended ambiguity.

Good Ambiguity

Effective ambiguity inspires provocative questions framed by the narrative. Films that use effective ambiguity inspire the thought processes of their audience – not only “making room for interpretation,” but providing several possibilities where interpretations can be directed without endorsing one specific answer. One of the best films of last year was Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy. The film chronicles a day spent between two people who may have only recently met, may have had a dense history together, or may in fact be an active long-term couple. The two characters’ engagement in seemingly playful performances of “couplehood” quickly morph into serious and heavily emotional acts of unpacking baggage. What histories are these characters bringing in to engage in such raw emotion – the history of the person sitting across from them, or someone else from their respective pasts? This answer is elided from us, but it’s not the answering of the question, but the posing of it, that’s important.

Certified Copy, after all, is not a dramatic mystery to be solved (is one interpretation of the couples’ status more significant than the other?). Instead, the film’s thematic connection is deeply intertwined into the question itself, which is posed during a lecture provided by the character of James (William Shimell) at the film’s opening: what is the difference in emotional value between the copy and the real if the copy feels real?

Certified Copy was one of the biggest conversation-starters during last year’s arthouse circuit. It seemed everyone who saw it had a different take on it, each choosing specific lines of dialogue or detailed moments in order to substantiate and defend their interpretation. That such ambiguity can provoke this type of conversation is only a testament to the film’s delicate strength. But what Certified Copy ultimately poses is that the answer doesn’t ultimately matter. There is no emotional difference between the supposedly real and the imitation of the real. It’s the ambiguity itself that provides the film’s meaning.

Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff engages with ambiguity in a different sense. Dramas chronicling the expansion of the West on a small, intimate scale carry with them the inevitable implication of the arrival at the destination as the film’s natural conclusive point – the end of the characters’ journey should also be the end for the audience’s. However, the audience in this case is not provided such satisfaction. Our traveling 19^th century troupe only encounters a small victory – one that promises salvation but does not guarantee it.

This ending, however, is thematically appropriate for a film heavily preoccupied with various types of uncertainty: the group is uncertain about the intents of their tall-tale-telling guide Meek; the group is prevented from understanding the Native American they encounter on the trail, and they are wary of his intents; and finally, the characters are uncertain, at any given moment, as to where they are and where they are going. Each mountain and hill and distant visage carries with it potential promise and devastating disappointment. A turn one direction could lead to water, city, or endless miles of more desert. A film about the most uncertain of American journeys could only end with such ambiguity.

Bad Ambiguity

I don’t want to blanketly characterize the following ambiguities as bad, for both of these films are associated with talent (Steve McQueen and Michael Fassbender; Tilda Swinton) that I otherwise admire and have faith in. However, the ambiguity present in these recent, critically lauded films for me reduced their potential power rather than providing thematic depth or opportunities for audiences to explore and intuit further.

The problems of ambiguity in McQueen’s Shame and Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin are deeply intertwined, as both involve the issue of motive and biography. Shame’s Brandon Sullivan is a sex addict seemingly without a past. While a character of his past, his sister, does visit him without warning, her presence gives no answers as to where he came from or how he became the conflicted and broken man he is. It’s strange that we as audiences are privileged to Brandon’s secret debilitating addiction, humiliations and all, but we are as shielded from everything pertaining to his life anytime before the opening of the film just as many of the other characters are. All that is left is intuition and inference for this compelling (because of Fassbender’s performance) but otherwise empty cipher. He’s simply a privileged man with a privileged addiction.

In We Need to Talk About Kevin, the motive problem is more pronounced – not the motive for the school massacre per se, for that seems strangely in step with what little we are given about the character – but the motive for why the titular character existed from birth as an enduring psychopath with an uncanny ability to create manipulative schemes well beyond his age. The book Ramsay adapted is told from the first-person perspective of the Kevin’s mother through her diaries after the incident. Through this literary device, the mother’s memory of Kevin inferentially changes because of the incident itself, creating a seed whose personality makes the incident seem causal, yet he seems bereft of any “original” causality (i.e., what made him evil in the first place).

But where such a device may work for literature, it doesn’t translate readily to film, where even a character’s flashback is, intentionally or not, rendered into a more multi-perspectival than specifically subjective space because of a camera that can occupy more than one subject position. Kevin then becomes a character without humanity whose caricature prevents any means of dealing seriously with the horror of his actions. A film that attacks the audience with formalized irony and posturing distance, We Need to Talk About Kevin fails to address two compelling themes necessitate a proximity between character and audience: the theme (largely unaddressed in cinema) of parents who don’t love their children, and the multivalent ramifications of meaningless large-scale violence.

I hesitate to denounce wholly the ineffective ambiguity of either of these films. Both Shame and We Need to Talk About Kevin deal with themes that films rarely have or will. Each of these films refuses the reductiveness of causality – they would have been worse, not better, had their characters been conveniently pathologized in the most traditional of Hollywood fashions. But in each of these cases, the films remove causality and fail to put something else in its place, alienating viewers through ambiguity rather than engaging them.

Ambiguity is a delicate device that can open up a film to limitless interpretive and meaningful possibilities or seal certain elements of a film shut, denying an audience access to exploration, much less actual answers.

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In a recent article from The Atlantic, business journalist Derek Thompson poses several compelling questions about the business model of contemporary theatrical distribution. Why, he asks, must we pay the same for Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol as we do for Young Adult at our local multiplex? Wouldn’t it make more sense if the comparably underperforming film, Young Adult, were distributed with lower ticket prices in order to cultivate greater competition against wintertime blockbusters, and thereby (perhaps) gain a slightly greater audience for a film whose appeal is limited by comparison? After all, movie studios don’t so much “give audiences what they want” as much as they calculate degrees success (if you don’t believe me, go ask your local AMC to bring A Separation or Carnage to your theater), so why don’t ticket prices reflect this already-transcribed fate?

It’s an interesting scenario to imagine, but one that becomes more difficult to envision once one parses through the details. As the author points out in his #4 reason why we have “uniform pricing,” varied pricing would likely create an unwarranted stigma against less expensive films, much like straight-to-DVD films have. That said, two other assumptions informing Thompson’s provocative question warrant further exploration: 1) we as consumers already have varied pricing, and we have developed patterns of determining a film’s “worth” in our choosing of where and in what conditions we see a film, and 2) movies would largely benefit if the perceived value of the opening weekend lessened significantly.

The Post-Theatrical

The uniquely American capitalist-democratic notion that we all “vote with our dollar” in our freedom to choose amongst a competing variety of options is simply not the case when it comes to the average local movie screen. On the sixteen or so screens offered at your typical multiplex, a small fraction of the 100-plus movies in current theatrical distribution are actually made available, and most of these are the biggest of studio films. The top-20 performing films at the box office each weekend, then, debut with the stench of pre-determination.

Fortunately, the movie theater isn’t the only place to go to see a movie. On December 28, the start of the weekend before Thompson’s analysis, the most-watched movie of the day from the titles available via Netflix’s Instant Streaming library was Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, a movie whose widest release was a mere 57 theaters. A film’s weekly theatrical performance may provide the most visible means of understanding a movie’s competition and performance, but it’s only the first chapter in an ongoing story of that film’s exhibition. Streaming options and home video delivery systems have actually given consumers a freedom of choice largely independent of their regional locale, or a chain theater’s pre-determination of what’s most profitable.

I’d say we now vote with our dollar through such alternatives, but that dollar is incredibly variant: less than two dollars on Redbox, $3.99 or so to rent on iTunes, and monthly fees on Netflix and other services. With all of these post-theatrical options, and with audiences’ continued preference to them since the end of the last decade, why do we still hold theatrical box office as the ultimate signpost of a film’s worth? Well, because it’s the most visible indicator, one that studios have poised as the stock exchange of Hollywood (there’s no Box Office Mojo for streaming, or pirating for that matter). But to apply so much worth to the weekend box office so unquestioningly is to falsely assume that movies die once they’re out of theaters.

Furthermore, Thompson’s analysis largely ignores or overlooks the fact that audiences have developed skills, rituals, and routines in which they apply different dollars to different films based on their assumed worth. That is to say, theatrical moviegoing doesn’t exactly involve uniform pricing as is. Thompson mentions matinees and parenthetically references “added value” screening modes like 3D – and, as his main object of study is MI4, I would add IMAX – but these viewing patterns are essential in not only predetermining a movie’s performance (you can’t pay $14 to see Young Adult in IMAX 3D), but also provide consumers several more ways of deciding how much to spend on a movie besides $12 for this or $12 for that. Even before the large web of post-theatrical exhibition developed, whether to see a movie at night or during the day, at a smaller theater a few weeks later, renting it from a local video store, or deciding which movie to use that coupon on was motivated by the worth assumed in association with a film that one had not yet seen.

Venue matters, and non-uniform pricing does exist. It’s one of the theatrical movie customer’s few avenues of choice.

Beyond the Opening Weekend

One of the great mistakes in placing undue importance on a movie’s box office is the assumption that this is the central, or primary means to determine a movie’s worth or success. The relationship between films and individual consumers is as close of a return to the solitary, pre-theatrical experience of the nickelodeon as a post-theatrical cinematic landscape can be. And even since the initial consolidation of film studios and established prominence of the theatrical experience since the nickelodeon, going to a movie theater in America has hardly been a uniform experience throughout 20^th century history. It wasn’t until 1960, with Alfred Hitchcock’s desire to not spoil the first-act surprise death in Psycho, that a standard developed requiring patrons to actually enter a movie theater when it starts and leave when it ends. That means, within the parameters of the program chosen by the theater, until 1960 it was up to consumers to decide the exact worth of their dollar based on the time they decided to spend between an array of cartoons, newsreels, and occasional second bills.

Thompson cites the release of The Godfather as the moment in which uniform prices were dictated, thus creating a common, “fair” ground by which a film’s financial performance can be compared and judged. Yet The Godfather, not unlike a certain Han Solo-starring late-70s feature that would come to define the modern blockbuster, was a word-of-mouth success. Today, one might even call it a “sleeper” hit. It was a film that the studio felt, at best, uncertain about. It was not a movie whose success could be predicted by its opening weekend.

Thompson states his #2 reason theaters and studios don’t switch from uniform pricing thusly:

“You can’t consistently cut prices after a successful opening weekend. If people knew that ticket prices would fall after a big opening, many more would wait until the second or third weekend to see it, which would, ironically, destroy the meaning of opening weekends.”

Thompson’s right. Non-uniform pricing would completely mess up the way we evaluate a movie’s initial performance. Young Adult would no doubt still make less money than Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol if non-uniform pricing existed, but, if the proposed benefit of non-uniform pricing actually worked, their attendance numbers would be closer together. The assumed relationship between enthusiasm, attendance, and monetary performance would be broken.

That is, if such an assumption weren’t false in the first place.

One of the examples for comparison Thompson uses is The Iron Lady, a film that, as of the author’s writing, played on 4 screens in opposition to, say, MI4’s 3,448. That weekend, The Iron Lady’s per-screen average was $86,074, while MI4’s was $13,521 the same weekend. How can Thompson say that The Iron Lady should be the “cheaper” option when it receives such an exclusive platform release? Uniform pricing would never work, then, because there is no uniform term for a film’s success. The same currency is used, but it means radically different things for different films. And it’s in the realm of the per screen average (where the totals don’t matter as much, and where context is essential) in which the presumed ultimate arbiter of a film’s fate, the opening weekend, is having its only significant battle.

Thompson historically situates 1972 as somehow irreparably forming what we understand today as the weekend-by-weekend box-office battle. But the alleged importance of the opening weekend is actually a pretty recent phenomena. Look at any weekend-by-weekend charts of the early 1990s, and you’ll see more-consistent week-to-week grosses and a competitive field in which various films can make their way up and down on the chart, rather than predominantly “trickling down” after the last weekend. The studios’ placement of such immense importance on the opening weekend is, historically-speaking, a post-home-video phenomenon. It’s hardly something set in stone, or essential to the theatrical distribution model. Around the time of The Godfather (and before and for a short time after), seeing a movie in theaters was the only way to see it – thus, films had a longer theatrical lifespan. Now, as Certified Copy shows, many movies have a longer total lifespan.

It’s ironic that, in an information era in which the movie theater only represents the first chapter in a long life of exhibition and distribution, the furthest into the future that studios can see for their films numbers no more than three days. If non-uniform pricing would destroy the false importance placed on the opening weekend (and theatrical box-office in general), then bring it on – that is, if non-uniform pricing didn’t already exist.

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Luis Buñuel

Viridiana revisits several of Buñuels’ thematic preoccupations from his Surrealist years in France and his pseudo-social-realist films in Mexico, specifically in terms of the infamous atheist’s routine subversion of religious iconography. The now-iconic scene where a group of vagrants sit around a grand dinner table, positioned in a way reminiscent of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1495-98), proved to be a heretical image for one audience and a brilliant and beautiful inversion for another (By the way, why did nobody in the Catholic community say that critiquing Renaissance art isn’t heretical? Is Da Vinci Jesus?).

Diary of a Chambermaid structurally resembles Viridiana in its first act with its portrayal of an attempted sexual attack from a sexually deviant patriarch. But unlike Silvia Pinal’s relatively submissive and virginal protagonist (the Mary connotations are not without weight), Jeanne Moreau’s enigmatic chambermaid is a self-assured “new woman,” free of coherent ideology and open to taking advantage of men just as she is taken advantage of by them. Moreau had certainly developed a star persona as a strong, autonomous, and enduringly mysterious woman, having helped usher in the New Wave with Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1957) and Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962). While Spain retained its stringent class and religious structures, the France Buñuel returned to in the mid-1960s possessed little in common with the country he left in the mid-1930s. It’s meta-appropriate that Diary of a Chambermaid takes place during the first step of the decisive historical transition that determined the second stage (from France to Mexico) of Buñuel’s career, but was made during a time that would characterize his last (his return to Europe).

The French Spaniard

Diary of a Chambermaid arguably begins the “French period” that would define the remainder of Buñuel’s lengthy filmography and bring forth some of his most celebrated later films (e.g., The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), his swan song That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)). While religious themes would certainly surmise during these years, they do not hold a central place in films made for a France (or, at least, a Paris) that valued religion less and less in its cukture. For instance, by the time Buñuel released The Milky Way (1969), a pseudo-sequel to his Surrealist anti-religious satire L’Âge d’Or (1930), its critique of organized religion already seemed irrelevant to a France that had experienced the modernist revolutions of May 1968.

Even the director’s brief return to Mexico in the meantime still brought forth a “European” approach to his work. Buñuel himself admits that his Discreet Charm-resembling Mexican film The Exterminating Angel (1962, made in between Chambermaid and Viridiana) takes place in a Mexico that does not, in fact exist, as the bourgeois class depicted and critiqued in this film greater resembled that of his native Spain and his precious France than possessing any direct correlation with the class structures of 1960s Mexican society. The Exterminating Angel (and his incomplete, final return to Mexico that followed Chambermaid, Simon of the Desert (1965)) marked a distinct break from the social-realist style Buñuel imbued throughout his Mexican period in films like Los Olvidados (1950) and Nazarín (1959, though many of these films have isolated surrealist moments or sequences). Even in the brief epilogue of his Mexican career, Buñuel was firmly entrenched in his Late European period and preoccupied with European culture and themes from Viridiana, and Chambermaid, onward.

France, 1930

1930 was an important year for Buñuel. His 1928, Salvador Dalí-co-directed short Un Chien andalou was, to Dalí and Buñuel’s measured disappointment, a lauded success in Paris upon its release. These pioneering Surrealists hoped the film would prove controversial and garner catcalls and riots, but in the celebrated avant-garde of 1920s Paris (the one depicted in last year’s Midnight in Paris, complete with actors portraying Dalí and Buñuel), nearly anything went and anything received. This was not without potent irony considering that the bourgeois class obliquely criticized in the film also financed and celebrated it.

But Bunuel’s next film, L’Âge d’Or (which was co-credited to but had less involvement from Dalí), would prove to find the violent reaction the filmmaker was hoping for with Un Chien anadalou. The hour-long film is a more involved and thorough critique of bourgeois culture and religious symbology (and a superior film in this author’s opinion). During a screening held on December 3, 1930, the anti-Semitic and pseudo-fascist organization The League of Patriots organized an in-house protest of the film, complete – in perhaps the dumbest and most futile attempt at “destroying” a film on historical record – with throwing black ink at the screen onto which the film was projected. The moment that motivated their ire was the juxtaposition of a Catholic monstrance next to a woman’s bare legs as she is let out of a town car for a social soiree. The joint critique of class and religious institution is abundantly clear. If only the rioters had stuck around long enough to see Jesus Christ portray the Marquis de Sade in the film’s last act.

The 1930 riot predicted a rise in far-right politics that would lead to the Catholic Church’s complicity in (through lack of condemnation of) the rise of European fascism in the following decade. A challenging Surrealist film in the more conservative 1930 proved a great deal more threatening than one exhibited a mere two years earlier. Buñuel, though not Jewish, became an ex-pat like so many great artists of the time as he entered his Mexican Period. The terrifying, portending ending of Diary of a Chambermaid is not without incredible significance to Buñuel’s own career, as it illustrates an ascent towards Fascism and a rise in anti-Semitism amongst the French in the exact year that one of Buñuel’s most notorious works was protested against and eventually banned. The jarring lightning strike and jump cuts that accompany the “1930” title card even resemble the deliberately haphazard assemblage of sound and image in L’Âge d’Or, which marks a stylistic break from Chambermaid’s relatively classical style leading up to this point. Buñuel’s return to France with Chambermaid, and the great entries on his ouvre that followed, signals that it only took three harsh decades for France to catch up with Buñuel.

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Warning: This article contains spoilers for Young Adult, Shame, and The Descendants.

2011’s holiday movie season ended the year with a barrage of relatively conventional heroes. From Ethan Hunt saving the world from yet another MacGuffin to Sherlock Holmes solving an additional mystery to a cyberpunk and a journalist battling wealthy Swedish career-misogynist neo-Nazis, December was packed with varied iterations of good triumphing over its clearly delineated evil opposition.

In contrast, the holiday season’s slate of smaller-scale filmmaking brought forth several protagonists who function in strict contrast to your conventional hero. These protagonists are (decidedly) so toxic, broken, unheroic, and even unlikeable that they can’t even be deemed antiheroes. These characters (to varying degrees of success) challenge the assumed connection that filmic convention makes between the “main character” and the “film itself” by presenting protagonists who don’t triumph over adversity, who don’t fight or win a “good” battle, and who frankly don’t warrant an act of rooting.

These protagonists trip up an oft-unquestioned notion conditioned by cinematic tradition: that films should serve as a means of rooting for a clearly demarcated, pre-telegraphed, unassailable idea of goodness. These are three protagonists that we aren’t often asked to spend ninety minutes with.

Mavis Gary in Young Adult

Charlize Theron’s Mavis is an enduringly superficial grown-up adolescent whose delusional sense of self-importance seems to have arisen entirely from a myth she’s constructed around herself in her hometown of Mercury, MN as a success story living a life of luxury, celebrity, and big-city knowhow in the “Mini-Apple.” Young Adult follows a narrative familiar to many who have left their own small town for somewhere bigger and, by arbitrary association, “better” (a connection guided by the idea that population has a more direct intrinsic relationship with being “part” of “something”).

It’s appropriate that Young Adult received a holiday release, for that means many migrants in their 20s and 30s will see the film in their own Mercury. What Young Adult accomplishes quite devastatingly is pulling the veil away from Mavis’s (and her archetype’s) sense of entitlement and cultural distinction that her prodigal status ostensibly warrants. She finds out that the people of her hometown do not necessarily envy her life, but pity her, and her ignorance of this is part of the same delusion that allowed her to think she could steal her high school sweetheart away from his wife and daughter simply through her big city will.

I struggled with the ending of Young Adult for awhile, thinking it gestured toward a slight and convenient attempt at redemption for a character who needs a lot more help in order to change, but upon reflection it’s become clear that her “return to the Mini-Apple” and her act of leaving Mercury one last time fully situates Mavis back where we began with her. Even if a neighborhood party full of Mercureans tell her how sorry they feel for her single, childless, unfulfilled life, it only takes is one misguided soul who tells her how pretty she is for Mavis to return full-force to her self-destructive delusion. But perhaps most cynically of all, Young Adult never offers a third option between Mercury and the Mini-Apple.

Brandon Sullivan in Shame

Michael Fassbender’s Brandon Sullivan is something of a cipher. As a full-time sex addict, he simply seems to exist without context or history. Sure, it would have been cheap for the film to simplistically justify his sex addiction through, say, an abuse story, but that we don’t even know his history with his own sister, who plays a massive role in the film, gives Shame a minimalist approach to character tied with its quiet approach to style (both of these aspects stand in sharp contrast to Steve McQueen’s dynamic and historically specific first film Hunger).

Like Mavis, Brandon has two-sided life: the visible, “outside” life he has constructed for himself, and a sad private life, this one being sex addiction taken to eleven. The very attractive Fassbender is well chosen here, for (as in the sexual dynamic of Fish Tank), his looks make his conduct not seem as creepy or troubling at first. Take the first subway scene with the married woman for example, which begins as a quiet but enthralling exchange of looks, but then quickly morphs into something a bit more sinister as Brandon exits the train. His quick morph from flirtation to stalking complicates what may or may not have actually been happening. Though Shame is a decidedly un-sexy film, Fassbender is seductive enough on the surface to sell a truly unlikeable human being. Would anybody see Shame if the protagonist were ugly?

Similarly to Young Adult, Shame plants seeds of suggested redemption that are not followed up on for what is essentially an unredeemable character. The prospect of a real relationship quickly ends when feelings mix with sex, so our protagonist sinks to what is aesthetically presented as “the bottom,” from which convention tells us there is only one way left to go. That the climactic descent for Brandon consists of gay oral sex followed by an orgy at a brothel is a strange distinction – on Shame’s moral compass, how is this “worse” than sex depicted earlier with a classy, straight, solitary prostitute? The only valuable answer I can surmise is that no distinction exists. The notion that he has hit rock bottom is a false one – he’s only continuing a cycle that ostensibly existed well before the film’s timeline began. The film’s “ambiguous” ending insinuates that there are several things that can happen with the woman on the train. However, only one option makes sense.

Matt King in The Descendants

The Descendants represents the closest that these three films get to a conventional narrative arc of a broken character’s redemption, and is arguably Alexander Payne’s most traditional and predictable character arc to date. What characterizes Payne’s best work is his ability to make us empathize with antiheroes who we are given critical distance to through his incisive and modest-yet-quirky film style. George Clooney‘s Matt King seems oddly disparate in this respect. From the film’s opening narration, he’s surprisingly aware that he’s not a good father or husband, and he demonstrates this aspect in full force: he repeatedly fails to achieve parental authority with his daughters or their friends, he can’t communicate (much less empathize) with a confused younger daughter, and he constantly has to recruit the older daughter to do the actual parenting even as he takes them both on a hubristic, pseudo-revenge mission.

Matt’s anticipated confrontation with his dying wife’s mister was a surprisingly restrained and calculated moment for what was laid out as the film’s dramatic locus, but if we are as aware as Matt is about his status as a bad father (and thus not “distanced” critically any more than our self-critiquing subject), then are we meant to feel as satisfied and redeemed as he does afterward? Matt technically does “the good thing” by not selling his family’s land (has anything in a Payne film been as predictable as this?), but he’s (once again) so self-conscious about it that it he seems to be asking us directly to take his character’s transformation at his word. The final shot of The Descendants suggests a family recovered, but there is little that denotes Matt’s actual redemption beyond his own repeated insistence on it. More than any of these films, The Descendants confounds the assumed relationship between character and film.

Final Thoughts

It’s interesting that, during a tumultuous moment in American culture when honest and good people are routinely taken advantage of by the unchecked power of the few, we get a crop of small-scale films that ask audiences to spend several hours with “bad,” unheroic, unredeemable protagonists. I’m not quite sure what the answer to “why now” may be (if there is a cogent answer to be found), but these films collectively challenge the convention that filmic protagonists must be “worthy” ones, warranting an audience’s respect and energy from the get-go, rather than one of many potential lenses through which we can see America, whether that be a Minnesota small town, New York City, or the Hawaiian Islands. Most people aren’t heroes, so why should everyone on our movie screens be?

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But 2011 is different. As Scott Tobias pointed out, while “quiet,” this was a surprisingly strong year for interesting and risk-taking films. What’s most interesting has been the variety: barely anything has emerged as a leading contender that tops either critics’ lists or dominates awards buzz. Quite honestly, at the end of 2010 I struggled to find compelling topics, trends, and events to define the year in cinema. The final days of 2011 brought a quite opposite struggle, for this year’s surprising glut of interesting and disparate films spoke to one another in a way that makes it difficult to isolate any of the year’s significant works. Arguments in the critical community actually led to insightful points as they addressed essential questions of what it means to be a filmgoer and a cinephile. Mainstream Hollywood machine-work and limited release arthouse fare defied expectations in several directions. New stars arose. Tired Hollywood rituals and ostensibly reliable technologies both met new breaking points.

“2011” hangs over this year in cinema, and the interaction between the films – and the events and conversations that surrounded them – makes this year’s offerings particular to their time and subject to their context. This is what I took away from this surprising year:

11. The Best and Worst Awards Shows

Depending on what you look for in awards shows, this was probably the best or worst year for you on record (perhaps both). In January, cringe-comic Ricky Gervais eviscerated the pompous privilege of the Golden Globes ceremony and its celebrity constituents through his confrontational and discomfiting style of comedy, while all the action in James Franco’s co-hosting gig at the Academy Awards this past February mostly occurred on his twitter feed while he slept through the slog of events onstage.

Both were praised and condemned for their work, but one thing’s for certain: Gervais and (to a lesser extent) Franco have stuck a fork in the road of awards show hosting which will determine what it means to emcee mammoth, lavish, and utterly meaningless ceremonies like these in the future.

10. The End of the World as We Know It

We’re used to seeing effects-laden science-fiction and apocalyptic narratives from big Hollywood studios, but 2011 framed the relationship between humanity and the cosmos on an intimate and personal scale with indie and arthouse fare like Jeff Nichols’s Southern gothic rapture narrative Take Shelter, Mike Cahill’s competing planets as a proscenium for existential pondering in Another Earth, Lars von Trier’s frank portrayal of the indifference of the universe in Melancholia, and Terrence Malick’s beautiful-but-flawed Tree of Life, which portrays the beginning of creation as a graceful symphony, its middle as postwar human life in Waco, Texas, and the celestial end as a Louis Vuitton ad.

These films were as disparate in their themes and interpretations of our existence as they were in their stylistic approaches to their subjects, but they collectively bring together the compelling case that life outside human existence is better explored through a few individuals rather than a bombastic Roland Emmerich-style mosaic.

9. Sports Movies For People Who Don’t Like Sports Movies (aka Me)

If 2010’s The Fighter showed that clichés, when done right, can work to a film’s advantage even in the most contrived and predictable of genres, 2011 both made good on that promise and showed that there’s more than one way to skin a sports movie. Bennett Miller’s Moneyball made the numbers came exciting, and created an unlikely sports movie underdog (redundant, I know) out of Jonah Hill; Gavin O’Connor made good on The Fighter’s promise by staging Mixed Martial Arts as a compelling family drama in Warrior; Tom McCarthy’s Win Win took the Emilio Estevez archetype and stripped away its simplistic morality and tidy endings; and Asif Kapadia’s firecracker of a documentary Senna will, to say the very least, prevent you from ever confusing NASCAR and Formula One again. I can barely sit through the full duration of any actual sports event, but the quality of these varied approaches to the genre will more than transcend anyone’s given interest in the game itself.

8. Rise of the Fassbender and the Gosling

The talented and handsome Michael Fassbender and Ryan Gosling are in no way “new” to the consciousness of many a filmgoer, but this year these two rising stars dominated movie culture in ways that few stars have. Usually a star’s overexposure is detrimental to their worth (i.e., Ben Stiller and Jude Law in 2003-04), but it seems that we couldn’t get enough of these two throughout 2011. Fassbender made a credible Hollywood transition as the standout performance in Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class, did literary costume drama right in Cary Fukunaga’s adaptation of Jane Eyre, and gave an uncanny awards season one-two punch with dual sexual frustration pics: Steve McQueen’s Shame and David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method.

After receiving critical raves to the wide expansion of Blue Valentine, Gosling was all over the map in a good way with Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s summertime romantic comedy Crazy, Stupid, Love (not a great movie in my opinion, but if Gosling’s character had been played by anybody else he’d be hard to tolerate), gave us one of the greatest zen loner action heroes in a long time with Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, and embodied a descent into political corruption with George Clooney’s The Ides of March. Fassbender comes out the winner in terms of consistent quality movies (sorry Crazy and Ides), but between hilarious memes and Drive’s impressive fan culture, Gosling was on our radar one way or another.

7. The Great Docu-Biopic

Documentaries have often proven to be a useful means of exploring the life of an important individual. The non-fiction biopic can give us a closer connection to the real person (living or dead) than any famous actor caked in makeup and accompanied with an imitating voice (for example, see Eastwood’s J. Edgar – or better yet, don’t). But 2011 gave a smorgasbord of great documentaries that dove into the lives of fascinating individuals who might not have otherwise made the history books.

Cindy Meehl’s Buck captured the incredible story of a horse-training professional who spoke to horses after humans failed him at an early age. Richard Press’s Bill Cunningham: New York examined the annals of the city’s fashion history as it’s been lensed by a charming and enigmatic elderly man for decades, and in the process slyly says more about the newspaper industry than Page One and more about fashion than The September Issue.

Errol Morris approached reality as absurdist comedy by reviving the unbelievable true story of Joyce McKinney in Tabloid. 2011 in non-fiction stands as empirical proof that fascinating people can be found almost anywhere.

6. The One Percent

Several movies in 2010 tried to make sense of the 2008 financial crisis: The Other Guys (didactic), Wall Street 2 (incomprehensible), and Inside Job (near perfect). But with the rise of Occupy Wall Street and the newfound ubiquity of terms like “1 perfect,” “99 percent,” “income inequality,” and “Cornel West” in our lexicon, mainstream movies like Brett Ratner’s Tower Heist (which features the middle class stealing from their rich autocrat) and Seth Gordon’s Horrible Bosses (the characters explicitly justify killing their bosses because they can’t quit their jobs in this economy) made it clear that Hollywood is at least echoing – if not co-opting and profiting off of – the economic distress that motivated such protests.

OWS also prompted an interesting discussion of who within Hollywood constitutes the one percent. And no year could have been a better time to release J. C. Chandor’s still-underrated Margin Call (which, alongside Horrible Bosses, makes Kevin Spacey 2011’s one percent personified), a wonderfully sober film that makes disturbingly perfect sense of systematic senselessness.

…Oh, and Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 came out.

Insignificance (1985) is a strange film about a strange time. Based on the play by Terry Johnson, Insignificance stages an impossible meeting between iconoclastic minds as the likenesses of Marilyn Monroe (Roeg’s then-wife Teresa Russell), Albert Einstein (Michael Emil), Joe DiMaggio (Gary Busey), and Sen. Joe McCarthy (Tony Curtis) move in an out of a hotel room as they share a variety of 50s-topical dramatic scenarios.

Beyond the obvious thematic connection with the film’s title, it’s fitting that Insignificance would have faded into obscurity as it is a film about obscurity, an exploration of what isn’t publicly known about public figures. This isn’t to say that Insignificance is a biopic or even remotely based on a true story. No, Insignificance even rejects this convention as a means of getting to know the “reality” behind the artifice and construction of popular culture and its figures. Insignificance is at its core an exercise in the concepts explored by Richard Dyer in his book Heavenly Bodies, which poses the star image not as a person but a text heavy determined by the discursive elements enacted through a culture’s preoccupation with the star. The star persona is the dominant impression of the star, but then there is public fascination with the manufacturing of the star myth – in other words, the notion of who the “real” person is lying beyond the star her/himself. However, the notion of the “really” also has a constructed political economy to it that’s promoted and explored through biographies, interviews, etc. That’s why there’s an endless fascination with several stars: the notion that no matter how much we know, we never really “know” them.

Insignificance now resembles something like Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There (2007) in its exploration of the star image. Unlike many movies about public figures which stage their private life as an “unveiling” of “the real” in opposition to the readily and publicly “known,” Insignificance relents that such an exercise is fruitless to begin with, not to mention no less “real” than the dominant image of the real person. Demystification can be a form of myth-making in of itself. By staging an impossible meeting between four iconic minds, Insignificance in effect does exactly what its title promises: it de-signifies the star image, taking it from its anticipated context and subverting it.

We may be introduced to Monroe in a staging of the famous upskirt moment from The Seven Year Itch (1957), but this moment is de-authenticated and deconstructed as we’re shown the complex process of staging a deliberately career-defining moment. Later, Monroe explicates the Theory of Relativity to Einstein using some balloons, flashlights, and model trains. Insignificance poses that neither of these manifestations of Monroe are more “authentic” than the other. That the film also co-stars Curtis – who famously co-starred with Monroe in Some Like It Hot (1959) and whose character attempted to comically seduce Monroe’s – acting here as McCarthy trying to seduce Monroe further confounds the line between the authentic and the artificial in the construction of the star image.

In creating a fantastic scenario based on these star icons, Insignificance makes the case that the ubiquitous image of the public figure does not belong to the person who embodies them, but to the public, for by entering the public and articulating a constructed persona, the star has already entered the realm of fiction. It’s interesting then that the playwright of Insignificance chose four characters who have four very different roles in American culture as the story’s central star icons. The star does not only exist in the realm of sports and entertainment, but also politics and the academy. All play important roles in shaping culture and employing social rituals, but all are also celebrities in their own right, with their own constructed personae. Celebrity is not exclusive to the world of glamour and fame, but pertains to any individual with a public face. The public face creates an asymmetrical impression of social knowledge, or the notion that we “know” somebody who does not know us in return. Insignificance is based on what we “know” about public figures, and is consistent with the accepted public knowledge of these figures in this respect, but the mere fact that this is a work of fiction that is consistent with this public knowledge points to the degree that the public figure belongs to the collective imagination rather than to the individual her/himself. This isn’t a film in part about Marilyn Monroe, but “Marilyn Monroe.”

Finally, a rumination on the constructed nature of the star as it persists within various fields is a fitting entry for Roeg’s post-70s career. With Performance (1970), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Bad Timing (1980), the height of Roeg’s career was framed by and centered with films featuring pop stars in their starring roles (Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and Art Garfunkel respectively).

Roeg’s own career has proven the elasticity and transmutability of the star image by de- and re-contextualizing it. Jagger, Bowie, and Garfunkel are all cinematic versions of their musical selves, but these personae are not directly constant with their musical ones (unlike previous trends in music-film crossovers, Bowie and Garfunkel never sing in these films). The star icon, then, is never tied to one context, but can move between various media in their status as property of the public sphere and the public imagination.

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Having just recently seen Melancholia and in reflecting back on Tree of Life, I noticed that these two films interact as two piercing sides of the same vast coin which make them, perhaps more than any other roundly acclaimed and contentiously fought-over pair of films this year, speak to each other about the worth of human existence in a way that renders them inseparable.

Tree of Life

Tree of Life memorably frames its narrative about growing up in Waco, Texas during the postwar years with a gorgeous montage depicting the creation of the universe.  As somebody who, like Malick, grew up in a religious household in Waco, the notion of a deliberate cosmic design leading one purposely to a life they’ve been destined to live rang more personally more immediate for me than it may have for some viewers who didn’t bounce in their seats when they caught Brad Pitt’s patriarch reading a mid-century version of their hometown newspaper.

One thing I found particularly remarkable about Tree of Life (which, for the record, I found to be the most uneven of Malick’s impressive oeuvre) was his way of capturing the subjectivity of childhood. His camera rarely looks down at children from an adult’s privileged purview, but meets children on their level from infancy to adolescence. Trees are bigger. Adults are more daunting and authoritative. The universe is an expansive, exciting mystery waiting to be figured out as your knowledge grows with each new experience. During childhood, your family and your neighborhood are the center of the universe. While there remains an expanding world around you waiting to be found, the delimited perspective that you’re locked into during your first decade-and-a-half-or-so of life is one that seems logical, coherent, and linear, especially when your major (sole) access to a grander universal understanding outside of your own household is through Western religion.

However, framing what is essentially an autobiography within a story of the universe’s creation risks essentialism. I identified rather strongly with Tree of Life’s fragmented and lyrical story of boyhood because I am a white male who grew up in a religious context in the same exact hometown of the film’s director. However, this is hardly the only experience of human adolescence that is worth a glance within the long history of the universe. A sense of arbitrary particularism arises when the viewer ponders why it’s this story that the history of the universe leads to. I do not mean to suggest that I think Malick is stating that the specific boyhood experience depicted is the essential experience of adolescence, nor am I suggesting that as viewers we only strictly identify with characters whose histories most strongly resemble our own, but beyond the stance of the author here working from what he knows, there arises no thread connecting one component of the story (the universe) to another (“boyhood”).

While I think Tree of Life is a beautiful film throughout, could the creation sequence not been directly attached to any story of childhood? Particularism aside, Tree of Life has stayed with me months after seeing it because of its remarkable ability to capture a sense of the universe as logical and whole in the broadest and narrowest of ways.

Melancholia

Melancholia, however, provides an atheist counterpoint to the intelligent-design logic informing Tree of Life’s spiritualism. If Tree of Life is about the universe’s graceful narrative leading to the emergence of the shared emotional life of the developed human being, Melancholia is about universal indifference to the arbitrary and happenstance of the fact of human existence. The same question emerges during Melancholia as does Tree of Life: why, when telling a story about an event involving the entirety of the human race, does this film focus specifically on these people? Like Tree of Life, Melancholia does not pose a clear answer to this question, but in doing so in a story of the destruction of the earth rather than its long historical creation, Melancholia by contrast doesn’t assume that that narrative humanity has arrived at is inherently, or at all, meaningful.

That the film takes place at a wedding – a human invented, culturally particular, and historically variant ritual – permits an exploration of the value carefully placed on and conditioned through such events, in opposition to their assumed “inherent” value (Kirsten Dunst’s Justine doesn’t act how she’s “supposed to” act as a bride, suggesting rituals such as these are a performance for all involved). Thus, we experience the world’s end with “these people” and not somebody else because their lives and experiences are just as vacant of essential (as opposed to applied) meaning as anybody else’s. In other words, who else would we see that would make any more sense?

Melancholia also brings children into its narrative, but not childhood logic and subjectivity. The film’s frank dystopian realism (in attitude, not form) is a result of its unrelentingly adult outlook on life. There are no more mysteries to be found for the lives of these characters. The drama of the wedding demonstrates a dearth of romanticism, the constancy of compromise, and the elusiveness of contentment. And this story of the end of the world is hardly conclusive. Unlike the celestial beach reunion that closes Tree of Life’s cycle of mourning, the end of human life as depicted in Melancholia does not entail closure, as shown by Justine’s father’s abandonment of her after the wedding. Leo, the film’s sole child character, is shielded from this adult world, sleeping while the adults’ awkward party continues and indulging in blissful ignorance (the kind of which only pancakes can offer) one morning while his mom uncovers a terrifying truth.

The impression of absence connoted by a cut to black before credits has never been more powerful and, oddly enough, meaningful than in this movie about the profound indifference of the universe. Melancholia addresses one of humanity’s guiding fears, the notion that conscious life itself is a small and significant aberration in the grand scheme-lessness of things, and the film greets this notion (surprisingly, for Von Trier) with grace, ease, and patience. Tree of Life sees human life as a flawed, but meaningful and purposeful, part of the succession in a grand story whose scope we may never know or understand, but in which we play an important role. Both of these films are beautiful and ambitious, and elegantly address concepts which would, under anybody else’s direction, lay far beyond the scope of a typical narrative film. Rarely have two diametrically opposed understandings of the world produced comparably compelling pieces of art in the same year.

Other things that are beautiful and ambitious? Why, the rest of Culture Warrior

The third category is less common, but perhaps the most interesting. There has been a recent influx of films that don’t use past films to construct present narratives or engage in Brecht-light humor, but have as their central narrative concern the broad developmental history of the medium itself, from practices of filmgoing to particularities of projection, and anything in between. Bertolucci’s The Dreamers is a good example of this mode of meta-filmmaking, but more high-profile films have begin to make this turn, specifically by directors who formerly operated in the first (and perhaps most common) category, like Tarantino with Inglourious Basterds two years ago. Now Martin Scorsese has followed suit with the 3D love letter to early cinema and film preservation that is Hugo.

As strong of a film as Hugo may be, it’s certainly a bit odd in the context of major Holiday releases from Hollywood studios. While many critics see the work as the closest we’ll come to a veiled autobiography of Scorsese’s childhood as Mean Streets (1973) was formed from his young adulthood (Slate’s Dana Stevens even goes so far as to say Hugo is his Fanny and Alexander), we mustn’t forget that it’s also a loyal adaptation to an award-winning children’s book by Brian Selznick. Now, I’ve never read the book, but upon speaking to a few people who have, I’m surprised to learn that it’s a rather direct adaptation. If Hugo is in some ways an unlikely Hollywood product, that’s because it’s source material is a successful and highly regarded children’s book about early cinema of all things! It’s difficult but fascinating to imagine that, for some children, somewhere, George Méliès is a Gepetto-style figure within their imaginative folklore. It’s hard to picture Hugo’s story told in any medium but the moving image.

Hugo’s weekend box office performance is promising considering its strong word-of-mouth, but its intake was modest, especially considering Scorsese’s recent financial success. I only say this because it feels to me like the film has limited appeal to its alleged target audience, children, simply because of the comparable level of patience it requires in the face of recent 3D competitors like dancing penguins and shiny talking cars. However, I genuinely hope I’m proven wrong. If Hugo, against all odds, becomes a sleeper hit, I (and I say this in total self-awareness and with all sincerity) hope it inspires at least one kid out there to add “film historian” to their undoubtedly long list of potential future occupations. I’m not saying it should rank as high as “astronaut” or “cowboy,” but in the more realistic realm alphabetically situated between “famous person” and “firefighter.”

Hugo’s combination of rekindling initial childhood wonder of a magical medium and its work as a polemic for film preservation is potent for cinephiles. In many ways, this big, shiny, studio-sleek and confidently crafted ode to cinema’s long history could not have come at a better time. Panavision and other companies recently announced that they will cease production of celluloid film, and apparently several major film studios have ceased distributing their repertory of 35mm prints. We are now experiencing the time that has been portended for the last decade or so: the death of celluloid, and the full integration into cinema as a digital form.

But the real movement away from celluloid and towards digital filmmaking, exhibition, and even distribution has often been hyperbolically equated in some critical circles to the death of cinema itself. Such a rhetorical strategy is misleading, especially when taking into account that cinema, in the eyes of critics, filmmakers, and fans, has suffered many “deaths” with new technological changes that vastly reshape the medium. In the 1920s, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and a group of other Soviet filmmakers bemoaned the arrival of sound filmmaking as the death of what they deemed a “purely” visual medium. Ten years later, Eisenstein himself would make his first sound films, all as visually compelling as his silent work. Over half a century ago, television posed the next big threat to cinema’s hegemony, but cinema in response (or, at least, Hollywood cinema) became something different to establish its unique, then-inimitable theatrical experience with the advents of CinemaScope, new color processes, and experiments like 3D.

Throughout all these changes, what we’ve come to know and understand to be “movies” – what they look like, what they sound like, where we see them – has changed drastically, but through it all cinema remains and will continue to. “Film” may no longer exist one day, but you don’t need celluloid to make “films.”

Hugo (and, by extension, Scorsese) seems to me to be rather unconcerned with the final days of celluloid in the film production sector. Auteurs like Scorsese may continue to use film throughout their directing careers, but this shift in media material does not necessarily portend the ruins of a form. Watching the pristine quality of Hugo digitally projected (in a small-ish town theater no less, signaling digital projection’s growing ubiquity) and accompanied by state-of-the-art 3D, Hugo certainly doesn’t confuse the value of preserving history with a well-meaning but purely nostalgic effort to continue it. Like Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Hugo uses new means of visual storytelling to depict old means of visual storytelling (and as a result, both of these are the only two films I’ve seen so far where 3D is substantially justified through content and not merely spectacle). By literally recreating Méliès’s work with 21^st century technology, Scorsese renders the old new again.

Scorsese, as demonstrated by this film and his own restoration work, understands the vulnerable tactility of film stock, and the tremendous loss film history has endured from being a product ascribed with little cultural regard in its initial years. As Hugo’s declaration of the recovery of 80 of Meilies’s 500+ films indicates, the history of early cinema that we’ve managed to retain doesn’t even tell half the story of early film history (in fact, we only have somewhere around 25% of early films). While cinema as a concept will inevitably change its form as an object, the inevitability of such change renders the preservation of film (as with any history) a moral and cultural imperative.

As whimsical, wonderful, and emotionally engaging as Hugo is, its thesis (in juxtaposing the old and the new) is surprisingly realist in its maintenance of the urgency of preservation. While Scorsese himself may choose to continue utilizing film stock his entire career (he is certainly one of an increasing few who has the privilege of making such a choice), he’s likely more concerned about the fact that studios are not renting out their film prints than by the fact that Panavision is changing their business model. Each technological shift cinema has experienced has only proved the impermanence of movies. If studios converted all their existing prints to digital files, that will not render them any more immortal than they are now in 35mm. Decades (and certainly centuries) from now, with technological changes we can’t even envision, new crises in preservation will emerge. As cinema creeps toward its 125^th year of existence, the ability to continue making available its many means of making moving images appear onscreen from both then and now must be possible. We cannot understand cinema only by its content, but its means of image-production as well: the digital projector should not warrant the complete extinction of the hand-crank projector.

This is not romantic nostalgia of cinematic years long past, but the preservation of reality – not a reality depicted, of course, but the reality that, to borrow the terms of Ben Kingsley’s Méliès, brought “dreams” to life by a hughly specialized means of running thousands of individual pictures quickly through metallic reels. Hugo does not reluctantly resign itself to the fact that new will be new (the characters enjoy the brothers Lumière as much as they do Harold Lloyd, as we look on through our 3D glasses) but celebrates it. However, at the same time the film exhibits an adamant refusal to live in a world where both old and new can’t simultaneously exist (either through changing studio business practices or the stigma of obsolescence), for this is to relegate Méliès once again outside of the glass studio and back into the tiny toy shop.

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It’s difficult for me to reflect on filmmaker Ken Russell’s career without recounting my own personal relationship to his work. When I was a junior in college, an uncensored 35mm print of his mad and magnificent The Devils (1971) was screened on my university campus. The film is unavailable in the US in its original widescreen, X-rated form in any home video format, so that experience for me remains one of the singular theatrical viewings of my life. Since then, I’ve been hooked on his work.

Perhaps more than any director, I’ve felt a habitual need to share Russell’s work with friends. Sometimes they reject his challenging and decidedly non-subtle, often hyperkinetic visions, but it’s always rewarding when I show one of his films to somebody who confirms that I’m not crazy – that there is a brilliant method underlying the batshit madness of the work helmed by this eccentric British director. I recently hosted a Halloween screening of his enduringly fascinating 1980 sci-fi film Altered States (1980) genuinely afraid that the audience would respond negatively to the film’s abject body transformation narrative and overall tonal strangeness, but the end credits were met with a warm round of applause. Russell was certainly one of the most bizarre directors that Britain has ever housed, but he was hardly only that.

Russell’s career spanned more than a half-century, beginning and ending in British television. He was incredibly prolific, with over 70 directorial titles to his name including TV episodes, TV movies, film segments, music videos, direct-to-video titles and, of course, his feature film work which (arguably) reached its zenith in the 1970s.

Russell was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for Women in Love (1969), an adaptation of the D. H. Lawrence’s novel about a battle of the sexes whose adaptation includes a rather memorable (and unprecedented) nude wrestling scene between the film’s two male stars, Oliver Reed and Alan Bates. Sexuality was an exhaustively revisited subject of Russell’s, ad he challenged the UK’s (and the world’s in distribution of his films abroad) censorial parameters by depicting in blunt detail what we might instinctively term “aberrant” sexuality – however, Russell’s films were brilliant in collectively forming an argument that no form of sexuality is, in articulated practice, “normal.” The Devils’ notorious battle with British censors (which rivaled that of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, released the same year) is perhaps the definitive case summarizing Russell’s controversial role, career, and legacy in the British film industry.

Russell’s work exhibited a fascination with many types of music, as evidenced by his both famous and obscure odes to popular and classical styles: The Who’s Tommy (1975), the Tchaikovsky biopic The Music Lovers (1970), and, of course, Lisztomania (1975), which can only be somewhat accurately described as schizophrenic historical fiction featuring Ringo Starr as The Pope. Russell’s 1980s career is best-characterized by his full immersion into genre fare like the highly entertaining horror film Lair of the White Worm (1988) and, of course, Altered States, which predicted the body transformation sci-horror subgenre that would dominate the 1980s in films like Carpenter’s The Thing, Landis’s An American Werewolf in London, and Cronenberg’s Videodrome and The Fly. Russell’s most frequent partner-in-crime was actor Oliver Reed, who once stated that his lead role in The Devils was the best of his acting career. Russell was a man well aware of his notoriety, and certainly perpetuated his idiosyncratic and occasionally confrontational persona (to no doubt his own delight) by appearing in strange cameo roles in films like Color Me Kubrick and (of all things) the UK’s Celebrity Big Brother.

While Russell’s films largely retained a recognizable, distinct style of a visionary obsessed with excess in every possible form, his work can’t be easily categorized. He worked in a variety of genres and through many mediums. Most importantly, he was an anomaly in the film industry, as his films never fit into what Graham Fuller deems “Misery” (social-realist genres like kitchen sink films) or “Heritage” (literary costume dramas) films in Britain’s cinematic tradition. Russell possessed no concern for realism, and while he made many costume dramas he had little reverence for the heritage informing its tradition. Even at the ripe old age of 84, Russell remained British cinema’s enfant terrible, and we’re all the better for it.

Russell died Sunday at age 84 after suffering multiple strokes.

But when you look at the movie culture that came after Tenenbaums, the film’s age begins to take on its inevitable weight. Tenenbaums was Anderson’s first (and arguably only) real financial success. Previously, Anderson was perceived as an overlooked critical darling following Rushmore, a promising director that a great deal of Hollywood talent wanted to work with (which explains Tenenbaums’ excellent cast and, probably, its corresponding financial success). With this degree of mass exposure, other filmmakers followed suit, establishing what has since been known as the “Wes Anderson style,” which permeated critical and casual assessment of mainstream indies for the following decade and established a visual approach that’s been echoed in anything from Napoleon Dynamite to Garden State to less direct connections in indies like Wild Tigers I Have Known. The Royal Tenenbaums may not feel like it’s ten years old, but its influence certainly does.

“Why would a review make the point of saying someone’s “not” a genius? Do you especially think I’m not a genius? …You didn’t even have to think about it, did you?”

Had Anderson released Tenenbaums today, it would probably be seen as the ultimate Anderson cliché. The wonderful “Hey Jude”-accompanied, Alec Baldwin-led prologue would read as the simple rattling off of a series of quirks rather than the establishment of characteristics between family members that would either be referenced later of prove consequential in the film’s narrative. By the time the comparably massive Life Aquatic was released three years later, Anderson’s would be regarded as having mostly peaked, his films falling victim to their own stylistic eccentricities (though this is a common criticism of the filmmaker’s career trajectory that I don’t necessarily agree with, as I consider his fifth feature, The Darjeeling Limited, to be one of his best works).

It’s interesting, then, both in hindsight and in consideration of Anderson’s post-Rushmore career moment, that the filmmaker chose to make his highly anticipated third effort about the conditional and fleeting myth of genius. Anderson’s narrative and stylistic influences – ranging from the likes of Orson Welles, J.D. Salinger, mid-sixties Godard, Charles M. Schulz, and Mike Nichols – might benefit from retroactively adding the ideas behind Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers to its cinematic stew. Tenenbaums is not a film about talent wasted or potential unrealized, or about the tragedy that can result from young fame and privilege, but rather it is a film about the tenuous conditions of success when it is superficially defined. Nearly all the Tenenbaums and those who interact with them are published or have been published about, yet only Eli Cash (co-screenwriter Owen Wilson) has found adult success through the written word – not through the “quality” of his writing (he is not afforded the term “genius,” unlike the prodigious younger Tenenbaums) – but because of an inexplicable mass appeal. And isn’t that how “significant” work typically permeates in culture – by way of random, arbitrary recognition rather than creating genuine works of brilliance or somehow forging a clear connection with mass culture?

While Anderson’s star has certainly not fallen to the degree of the adult Tenenbaums, one can take The Royal Tenenbaums as predictive of Anderson’s career (though he remains a promising director far more talented than his imitators, who may be able to copy his visual style but can’t reproduce his unique wit). The filmmaker’s early praise was often credited in relation to his relative youth, and he quickly moved in the early-mid 2000s from rising star to once-was-promising. Yet as Tenenbaums shows, such a narrative is far too simplified, as makes the mistake of seeing success and realization of talent as totally conditional on the ability of the person themselves to continue an unmitigated manifestation of ‘genius’ within a vacuum that cancels out any notion of causality and conditionality. Tenenbaums reveals the genius myth to be incompatible with the complexity of understanding what it means to be human. Jealousy, hatred, apathy, depression, and grudges didn’t “ruin” the potential of the three Tenenbaum children. They simply grew up.

“Where’s my javelina?”

One oft-mimicked stylistic trope inherited from Anderson’s work is the repeated employment of an anachronistic style, especially coming-of-age films like (most recently) Richard Ayoade’s Submarine. The style, which has in many ways become a cliché, can easily be dismissed as superficial postmodern nostalgia. However, the style was certainly quite original in Anderson’s initial employments of it, and in Tenenbaums anachronism remains quite charming and appropriate, perhaps the major stylistic contribution the film’s aura of timelessness.

Tenenbaums presents a New York City that seems to exist somewhere between the early 2000s and the mid-1970s (and since its trelease followed three months after September 2001, an indiscernably “old” New York was probably comforting for many audiences). Henry Sherman (Danny Glover) at one point refers to the hospital that Royal (Gene Hackman) claims to get care through as having closed in 1974, but other than that, no specific date is ever referenced. While Anderson depicts the tragedies of growing up and, along the way, inevitably not living up to what one’s perfect life should be, the film’s nostalgia is rather warm and appealing without ever being cheap. Anderson’s world is one where laptops don’t exist, where people relax by reading old hardbound books, where its not unusual for hospitals to provide at-home care, and where all the important information of the world can be surmised through print resources, as the film’s expository inserts often remind us.

The film’s entire anachronistic approach is reflective of the house where the family resides, which itself exists in a vague space between past and present. Baldwin’s voiceover at the film’s opening doesn’t simply serve as a survey of quirky incidents incurred by the Tenenbaum family, but makes space for the accumulation of details that ultimately shape every aspect of the Tenenbaums’ lives. Their house is a survey of their past through objects, and the interaction that each particular Tenenbaum has with it provides the means by which they navigate meaning for their lives as lived through, and beyond, their residence in the house. The Royal Tenenbaums is ultimately a rumination on nostalgia without ever becoming emotionally manipulated by nostalgia’s potential fictions. It literalizes the nostalgic experience, positing a world that exists between decades but never comfortably or definitively in any one, but along the way deals quite frankly with the harsh disappointments of the present that motivate a nostalgic experience. Home may be a rich and meaningful place, but you really can’t ever go back.

For more from Criterion’s vault, there’s always Criterion Files.

Twilight seems to encapsulate the drastic changes that have taken place in big-budget event filmmaking in the last thirty years. Rather than a film made with the intent of mass appeal (like franchises ranging from Indiana Jones to Jason Bourne), the Twilight films play almost exclusively to a specific – but dedicated – demographic. Of course, one could make this argument about many film franchises. Everything from Star Trek to The Dark Knight certainly have rabid fanbases at their core, but the audiences for these films seem to be “filled in” with a significant amount of casual fans. For example, I once viewed the Harry Potter films similarly to the way I now approach Twilight – not in terms of filmmaking quality, mind you, but in terms of being a cult phenomenon surrounding a fictional narrative that I was not a part of – but my curiosity eventually turned into true fandom and genuine appreciation of the adaptations.

But the dominant stereotype for the Twilight fan is that there is, and can be, no casual approach. These adaptations seem to be made exclusively for an already existing loyal fanbase. There are no converts to Twilight, only onlookers who peer closely and try to understand, but can’t. To borrow a TV term, Twilight’s success represents the event/franchise-picture-gone-narrowcast. Rather than bank off as much mass appeal as possible, these films succeed precisely because of their delimited appeal to a specific and reliable niche audience.

I’m used to the uber-fans. Having seen midnight shows of entries within several franchises including The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Abrams’s Star Trek, and Nolan’s Batman films, I was ready to see at least a few costumes in line. If I was going to see a midnight showing of a Twilight movie, I wanted the full experience. I wanted to hear people screaming at the first sight of Robert Pattinson so that the strange lull after his introduction in New Moon made sense in a context outside of home video. I wanted to share a theater with audience members covered head to toe in Hot Topic, with their respective werewolf or vampire-beholden teams already delineated and in active social rivalry. What I got with Breaking Dawn – Part I was something I didn’t quite expect.

I was disappointed, at first, to see nobody dressed in any specific, fan-obsessed way for Twilight. But upon watching the film, it quickly became clear that Twilight is not an exterior experience of fandom in the way that dressing as Gandalf for The Return of the King is. Just as Twilight is unique in its massive appeal to an incredibly specific audience, it also inspires a filmgoing experience that is particularly embodied. The fans in my screening didn’t interact with the film through sartorial roleplay, but through a range of expressions, gestures, and noises. Seeing a Twilight movie in a theater is a strangely heightened, affective experience, and one that I can say with certainty that I’ve never had in a theater before.

It started with the trailers. The two-minute spot for the Danielle Radcliffe-starring Woman in Black came up, and the audience reacted demonstrably to the simple creepiness of the tone, gasping with each cut between expository inanimate objects, regardless of the fact that there were no explicit scares being depicted. This was followed by gasps and laughter with the recognition of Radcliffe, and this reaction carried with it a strange sense of consternation and betrayal in opposition to his choice to star in something so horrifying. I turned to my friends, who also saw themselves as fellow anthropologists buried deep within a foreign culture, and we met each other with a knowing nod of approval, betraying our agreement that this was probably the best audience to see such a film with.

The audience’s reaction to the film itself (or, 5/6 of the film, but I’ll get to that other stuff in a minute) was a strange, oscillating mixture of shared devotion to and irreverence toward the material. The audience was certainly aware of Taylor Lautner’s tortured delivery of basic dialogue, and the near self-parody of the fact that he took his shirt off less than a minute into the film. But at the same time, Bella and Edward’s wedding was met with “awws” and genuine laughter alongside the film’s attempts at humor. When Kristen Stewart’s Bella reveals her baby’s girl name to be “Renesmee,” or when Pattinson’s Edward suddenly speaks fluent Portugese (which he must’ve learned during The Civil War), the audience was far enough removed from the film to appreciate Breaking Dawn as high camp. However, the audience became re-captivated (and yes, the same people had both reactions) every time a “genuine” moment incurred between Bella and Edward. In their free and unpredictable oscillation between sincerity and irony, this audience displayed the most complex and strangest pseudo-camp experience I’ve ever seen.

But Breaking Dawn is not just a normal Twilight film. This is a Twilight film with mutant vampire birth, blood slurpees, and strange baby love (what the hell is “imprinting,” anyway – is it like a horcrux?). I really appreciated how the movie, despite the sudden revelation of the most foreboding pregnancy since Mia Farrow had short hair, built up the batshit crazy C-section scene with the disturbing slow-reveals of a bruised baby belly, an increasingly emaciated Stewart, and vampire soft drinks. During Bella’s first sip of the Styrofoam-contained concoction, my audience’s disgust slowly escalated perfectly alongside the rising dark blood visible through a clear straw, like the straw itself was both measuring and dictating audience engagement. Gasps, screams, hyperbolic exclamations (“This is the most disturbing movie I’ve ever seen!”), laughter emanating from discomfort, and an all around sense of exhaustive emotional engagement filled the space between the screen and the dedicated midnight audience occupying the chairs in front of it. Everyone was free to express exactly how they felt at any given moment.

And then there were those incredible final minutes.

I don’t specifically recall the audience’s reaction at this point, for I, for the first time, joined them in their exclamatory visceral reaction to what was going on onscreen. It was as if the reel had suddenly changed to the final twenty minutes of a late-1970s David Cronenberg film. For a few uncanny moments, my cynical, condescending pseudo-anthropologist friends and myself sat dumbfounded and disturbed, in literal disbelief of what we were seeing. As the Twilight audience had inculcated us, there needed to be no cognitive space between our feelings and our voice, and we became free to join in cries of “Jesus Christ!” or “Please God, make it stop” and to utter unanswerable questions like “Why did he just eat her abdomen?” or “Why is nobody cleaning up that disgusting baby?”

Film scholar Linda Williams refers to film genres like horror, melodrama, and pornography “body genres” because their worth lies in their ability to elicit a specific physiological response: respectfully screaming, crying and…well, you know. Twilight: Breaking Dawn: Part 1 seems not only to be of a body genre that inspires a particularly hyper-performative type of ritual theatrical experience, but stands as a combination of nearly every body genre: the series is motivated to appeal to a particular type of adolescent sexuality, but it also attempts to make its audience cry, (arguably unintentionally) laugh, and ultimately initiates an incredible range of emotional interaction with its audience, culminating (at least in this entry) in total abject horror.

I left my first theatrical screening of Twilight feeling drained, emotionally confused, politically annoyed, viscerally disturbed, and somehow cheerfully grateful to have had the experience. I think “Renesmee” is the only non-word that can adequately describe such a contradictory occurrence.

In short, I fucking loved it.

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Modern American design and its history have become major preoccupations within contemporary cosmopolitan circles. Gary Hustwit recently finished his third documentary on the subject, Mad Men makes us nostalgically long for clean copy and clear utility, and the death of Steve Jobs brought forth considerations of the important connections between user-friendliness, sleek aesthetics, and the construction of products around human intuition. Making the case that we have still yet to exhaust what continually proves to be a fascinating and increasingly relevant subject, Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey’s historical documentary Eames: The Architect and The Painter traverses the fascinating life of a couple whose contributions broadly determined what modern postwar American life looked and felt like.

As narrator James Franco romantically points towards the beginning of the film, Charles Eames was an architect who never got his license, and Ray Eames was a painter who rarely painted. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of their influential lives was that they rarely operated within the confinements of either of these titles. They couldn’t be pigeonholed as architects, marketers, filmmakers, etc,. And as such, their work reflected an impending new world of convergence where art, commerce, and visual culture all became deeply related during the second half of the twentieth century. The many lives they influenced can be evidenced by the occupational variety of well-regarded professional people who lend their sound bites to the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Eames including filmmaker Paul Schrader, TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, and architect Kevin Roche.

While Eames does go into some biographical detail regarding the lives of its subjects (specifically the gender divide in the public perception of Charles and Ray, and Charles’s infidelity), Charles himself was (thankfully) a rather inarticulate man, so Cohn and Jersey employ the smart approach of mostly letting the incredible work of the Eames office speak for its founders. What happens as a result is far more than an engaging dialogue on design, but a history of American visual culture from the 1950s to the 1970s, as their influence stretches everywhere from the ergonomics of an office chair to films for classroom use, all carrying their signature flare of confident fashion and impeccable polish. Eames intricately depicts a moment when modern art moved from the walls of the museum to where you sit your butt down at a board meeting, a moment that solidified the ongoing relationship between commerce and progressive aesthetics.

As any good documentary about design should, Eames is executed with as much constructive assembly and well-honed care as anything that came out of the Eames office. The film moves at a brisk pace, providing an engaging and entertaining experience, even for somebody lacking the most basic awareness of its subjects (myself included). Sincere and expertly crafted, Eames gives you plenty of reason to share the enthusiasm and interest in the work of its subjects with filmmakers. It’s a fascinating and damned good-looking history lesson to behold.

The Good Side: A very pretty and very good documentary about two people who have likely influenced your lives in ways that you’ve never known.

The Bad Side: Eames is at its best when it lets the work speak for the people who made it. The film’s explorations of Charles and Ray’s personal lives reads as tonally divergent.

On the Side: For such a cinematically pleasing documentary, I was surprised to learn that neither of the filmmakers have had a career in design or feature non-fiction filmmaking, but instead have had a long career in television documentaries.

Check out the trailer:

The supplementary title for Werner Herzog’s new documentary about capital punishment is “A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life.” These clauses are placed in a perplexing order that seems, at first, to run in reverse. However, when viewing the film, it becomes abundantly clear why life is not necessarily a linear trajectory that ends in death, with all the mutual exclusivity implied in the assumed separation of these categories. Instead, Into the Abyss argues that death is something one perpetually lives with, especially the certain knowledge of impending death in the case of state-run execution or in the memory of death when one’s loved one has been murdered. The certainty and harsh reality of death not only plagues the prisoner and the victim’s kin, but also profoundly effects a large array of individuals involved directly or indirectly with every heinous crime and execution.

The timing of the release of Into the Abyss is worth noting. In September, Troy Davis was executed in the face of massive public protest and significant lingering doubts as to the fairness of his trial. Many anti-death penalty advocates saw the case as a potentially fatal blow for state-run execution, as it illuminated flaws within the system which in turn troubled capital punishment’s logic of justice. A mere two months later, the Troy Davis case has been almost completely forgotten in the public sphere as the news cycle has turned its lenses to Occupy movements and the ongoing reality show known as GOP debates. The divisive underlying issue, however, lingers, and will certainly crop up again.

Admittedly, despite the tragedy of how far an unfair trial can take a citizen in the Davis case, it’s rather easy for someone who is against the death penalty (myself included, in full disclosure) to point to such a case to make their point. The true challenge is in maintaining that stance against capital punishment in the face of a horrendous crime with a clear perpetrator.

Herzog’s film meets such a case, face-to-face-to-face-to-face…

In 2001, teenagers Michael Perry and Jason Burkett were involved in a triple homicide in a gated neighborhood in Conroe, Texas that took place over the theft of a sports car (the dark poetics of costing three human lives in the name of a car is not lost on Herzog or many of those he interviews). Burkett received a life sentence, and Perry was executed in July of last year. The film’s most recent interviews with Perry took place as close as a week before his execution.

Herzog states early on in the film that he doesn’t endorse the death penalty, but (while I don’t believe there is such a thing as “documentary objectivity”) the filmmaker seems completely uninterested in using the medium to convince audiences of his point-of-view. Herzog instead lends his camera to the many individuals directly or tangentially involved in the crime that resulted in a triple homicide, victims’ families, the criminals’ family members and their attorneys, and employees of Texas execution chambers. For a filmmaker whose personality is so thoroughly present in his work, it’s fascinating to see Herzog largely relegate himself to the backseat as he mines through the experiences of others. Along the way we hear from distressed siblings of victims who seek catharsis in execution, a woman who married Burkett after his conviction, an employee of the execution wing of the Texas prison system who has trouble dealing with his grief, police involved with the investigation, a protestant preacher who delivers last rites and, of course, the testimonials of Perry and Burnett. The audience is given a variety of perspectives, none of them easy to accept or reject outright, and Herzog boldly asks us to wrestle with what we learn on our own.

Into the Abyss feels like a stylistic and narrative departure for Herzog, but at the same time somehow fits neatly into his wheelhouse. Herzog has never been a political documentarian in the conventional sense of the term, but Into the Abyss ultimately isn’t a political movie, but a tale of living with death amidst the harsh realities of senseless crimes and controversial punishments. As Herzog rarely interjects with his voice-over non sequiturs that rendered previous nonfiction works like Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Encounters at the End of the World as much paintings of a filmmaker’s unique personality as they are insights into the equally compelling worlds depicted, Into the Abyss more closely resembles Grizzly Man in its serious tone and (relative) stylistic restraint. Yet the world-traversing Herzog approaches this subject as he does most of his non-fiction work: as an earnest outsider longing to know more.

In terms of the trajectory of Herzog’s work, Into the Abyss feels like a hybrid of Grizzly Man Herzog and early Errol Morris. The film marks a perfectly stark counterpoint to the dreamscapes of his wonderful 3D caves documentary. However, as a movie about the death penalty, the film is revelatory, blunt, unintrusive, sober, and sometimes devastating. Admittedly, there are several issues the film could have touched further upon rather than exhaustively covering the crime in what is sometimes arduous albeit mostly compelling detail (i.e., class determinations of criminal behavior are touched upon, which are especially profound considering that the crime occurred in a gated community, but never really explored). That said, Into the Abyss is likely the best documentary there is on the subject, and Herzog proves a formidable guide through several controversial conditions of American life: notably crime and punishment, and living with death.

The Good Side: Yet another strong documentary by Herzog, Into the Abyss approaches its controversial subject without pretense, but likewise without feeling a need to be too delicate as well.

The Bad Side: Other related issues are left underexplored, and occasionally the investigative aspect of the documentary feels more exhaustive than compelling.

On the Side: This film started as a project on various death row inmates in Florida and Texas, but after meeting Perry, Herzog decided to focus exclusively on his case.

Warning: This post contains spoilers about J. Edgar.

For the past few years, I haven’t been much of a fan of Clint Eastwood’s work. While he no doubt possesses storytelling skills as a director and certainly maintains an incredible presence as a movie star, I’ve found that critics who constantly praise his work often overlook its general lack of finesse, tired and sometimes visionless formal approach, and habitual ham-fistedness. When watching Eastwood’s work, I get the impression, supported by stories of his uniquely economic method of filmmaking, that he thinks of himself as something of a Woody Allen for the prestige studio drama, able to get difficult stories right in one take. The end product, for me, says otherwise. While I was a fan of the strong but still imperfect Mystic River (2003) and Letters From Iwo Jima (2006), the moment that I stopped trusting Eastwood came around the time the song “Colorblind” appeared in Invictus two years ago, throwing any prospect of nuance and panache out the window.

Eastwood, despite having helmed several notable cinematic successes, has recently been coasting on a reputation that doesn’t match the work. He is, in short, proof of the auteur problem: that we as critics forgive from him transgressions that would never be deemed acceptable with a “lesser” director.

As you can likely tell, my expectations were to the ground in seeking out the critically-divided J. Edgar. I was prepared, in entering the theater to watch Eastwood’s newest, to write an article about what the admittedly talented Eastwood needs to do to prevent his flaws from overshadowing the depth which is otherwise tangible, if underexplored, in his work. Perhaps my surprise was a result of my low expectations or, more likely, that Eastwood worked here for the first time with Milk’s Dustin Lance Black, a far better screenwriter than past Eastwood collaborators like J. Michael Straczynski and Paul Haggis. But J. Edgar, while far from a great movie, surprised me not only by being a pretty good one, but by actually doing something new, interesting, and critical with the otherwise tired genre that is the biopic.

Criticism and the Auteur

In a recent post on the New Yorker blog, Richard Brody takes umbrage with critics who he feels are making a disproportionate or inappropriate attack on what they see as lacking in Eastwood’s work:

“These writers’ presumption to expertise in matters of technique and form actually reveals the opposite of the magisterial objectivity to which they lay claim: they’re thinking about their reactions to a movie rather than thinking about the movie. There’s no such thing as “bad acting” or “sloppy blocking” or “bad lines”; none of these aspects of a film exist apart from the ideas and emotions, the world view, of the filmmaker.”

I respectfully disagree with this component of Brody’s auteurist critique-of-critique. While it’s true that there are no essential standards of quality in film – such things are always historically, socio-culturally, contextually, and industrially constructed – this doesn’t mean Eastwood himself should be engaged with as separate from that context. While only a few of Eastwood’s 21^st century films (and this is, with certainty, the era in which his reputation as a director has skyrocketed) can only occasionally be considered box-office draws, his work is within a distinct, prestige mode of Hollywood filmmaking, which engenders specific expectations based not only on this frame of viewing, but because of previous entries within Eastwood’s career.

Brody’s mistaken assumption here lies in thinking such criticisms are directed at an Eastwood whose entire career behind the camera is criticized as overrated or flawed, when instead the more common case is the lingering sense of value unrealized by sloppy technique (in other words, the Eastwood of Invictus makes us long for the Eastwood of Unforgiven). It’s impossible then, to think “about the movie” instead of focusing on one’s “reactions to a movie” when a director’s technique prevents us from getting lost in that movie in the first place.

However, I do agree with a point Brody makes in another post about J. Edgar: that Eastwood is a uniquely political filmmaker. Brody compellingly traverses Eastwood’s career, focusing on the ways in which each entry in the filmmaker’s recent and prolific work explores varying relationships between the democracy and the individual.

Thematics and technique are separate issues when critiquing films, and I don’t think Brody would argue otherwise. Where I see Eastwood’s technique as lacking, the ideas that he presents are admittedly interesting, whether in demystifying a historic icon in Flags of Our Fathers (2006), depicting relentless cycles of violence and blurring the lines of justice in Mystic River, or exploring sport as both a symbol for social change and embodying social change itself in Invictus. Eastwood’s films are not political in the sense of being easily delineated as liberal or conservative, or shilling for one side of an oversimplified and falsely framed ideological perspective. Where Eastwood’s presentation is often blunt to a fault, his themes are nuanced. And when examining his work as a whole, it’s fascinating that a Hollywood director associated (mistakenly) with a patently conservative image has been able to deliver narratives which, time and again, explore profound questions of American political reality with a significant lack of closure.

J. Edgar and the Biopic

Through his creation and commandeering of public records and his contributions to forensic science, J. Edgar Hoover blurred distinctions between public and private lives, between the persona and the person (i.e., he can be largely credited for public persona of JFK the President and the private persona of JFK the Mafia-affiliated playboy). His life, strangely enough, is more important than ever in an information era where are our private identities and activities are for sale to the new corporations of Web 2.0.

The traditional Hollywood biopic has had a history of difficulty in separating these two aspects of their subjects’ lives, oscillating between the accepted better-known record of the famous subjects’ public persona and the disputable myth of their private persona. The fatal flaw to Hoover’s own reputation, of course, was in never quite realizing that every public face has a private life and, depending on the politics of a given time, everyone has “skeletons in their closet.”

In maintaining his control over the FBI by hovering the threat of “the file” over each successive mid-century President, Hoover failed to realize his own complicity in the complex and fragile processes of reputation-forming that he wielded over his superiors. Hoover’s repressed homosexuality, more than making him realize that he is as vulnerable as the powerful men he dealt with, should have signaled for him the fact that privacy is a valued commodity for all, and its revelations can be a weapon used against anybody more often because of social mores than actual criminal activity. As his “power,” according to the film, largely derives from knowledge about the sexual lives of powerful men and women, he should have understood in reflecting on his own life and hidden desires that there really is no such thing as aberrant sexuality between consenting adults – in the distinctions between spheres public and private, it’s sexuality itself that becomes the weapon.

Black, then, is an interesting choice for adapting this story. His Milk was largely a traditional biopic in form, but a rather good one aided (unfortunately) by the short time frame of his subject’s life. Hoover’s life is much longer and more unwieldy, stretching through tumultuous and transitional decades in American history. But the biopic traditionally, in a strange way, positions itself as “the last word” on its subject’s life, as the final negotiation between the public and private persona – despite the fact that all these things are further abstracted and confused through the embodiment of relevant figures by famous actors (it’s difficult sometimes to see DiCaprio not as DiCaprio).

But an important scene at the film’s end reveals that several events we previously witnessed aren’t exactly what they seemed to be – not in the surprise mode of A Beautiful Mind, but in a way that is uniquely fitting for a man who constantly reworked the public personae of himself and others despite the conditions of reality, and arguably later failed to distinguish the spheres of public and private, reality and myth. This fascinating scene draws the question, “Whose biopic is this?” J. Edgar instructively explores the notion that there is no definitive story of any public figure, that the negotiation between public and private reputation is continually negotiated and mythicized over time. Even as Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) mourns over the still-warm corpse of Hoover, we are prevented from seeing this final encounter by a partition in Hoover’s bedroom. In understanding any figure of history, there are always aspects that are amplified, stories we are shielded from, and things we will never know.

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The answer, of course, can only be one thing: an association with mass popularity is, for hair bands, only a reality for the privileged few, but for the rest it’s a fabrication that’s all part of the musical aesthetic – it’s what makes this subgenre of rock that’s reliant on spectacle so spectacular. It’s fitting, then, that one of the landmark mockumentaries of American filmmaking chose as its subject a genre that itself relies on manufacturing carefully represented patterns of fabrication.

For years I thought Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap (1984) was a deftly hilarious film that acts as little more than a riff on the easily mockable target that is arena-style 80s hair bands. Authenticity, after all, is an important thing for rock n’ roll, and something that hair bands wanted little to do with: their costumes, elaborate sets, and genre-defining giant hair were all the implicit results of a type of delusional hubris met only by the overblown, almost self-parodying spectacle of the music itself, a genre that communicated strictly through mandatory guitar solos and generic lyrics about love or rocking or both.

For audiences who wanted nothing to do with 80s pop, New Wave, or the emerging genre of alternative college rock could find in hair bands a safe haven for aggressively heterosexual music for audiences too young to listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd. Hair bands also stood in direct opposition to 60s and 70s rock n’ roll bands from The Rolling Stones to the Monterey Pop-era to Led Zepplin, whose cultural currency relied so much on certain tropes of rock authenticity, whether that be devotion to musical history (the Stones and the blues), using rock as the medium for a creed or ideology (Woodstock-era), or centralizing one’s focus on the “music itself” as the primary subject (Zep’s minimal sets vs. hair rock’s maximal sets).

But Spinal Tap‘s true genius is in not throwing ham-fisted darts at an admittedly easy target. If Twisted Sister is any indication, hair rock, after all, reveled in its lack of authenticity (hair rock’s love of artifice makes it, oddly enough and despite its constantly reaffirmed uber-masculinity, historically more aligned with glam/glitter rock than any other preceding historical incarnation). After all, Spinal Tap did emerge after this movie as a touring band often playing for audiences who didn’t quite get the joke (and those that did). So what good, then, is poking fun at the fakeness of a music culture that already knows it’s fake, or at least doesn’t care about the difference? Sure, some great gags come from these gestures – the fake cucumber in Derek Smalls’s (Harry Shearer) pants for instance – but I think Spinal Tap is doing a little more.

What I’ve often forgotten watching this film is, unlike many real-life hairbands at the time it was made, Spinal Tap’s musicians didn’t first emerge in the arena rock era. As mock-doc footage of the band on British television indicates more than once in the film, the three central members of Spinal Tap have been playing music together in some form or another for nearly two decades. The first clip shows the band wearing mop-tops and dressing Mod in clean suits and ties, resembling Hard Day’s Night Era-Beatles and singing music that’s just as poppy, radio-friendly, and non-threatening (in other words, a long way away from “Sex Farm”). The second clip pictures the band two years later, having changed into a Sgt. Pepper/Haight-Ashbury mode, wearing psychedelic garb and playing alongside the sound of a sitar that is heard but not seen (a nice visual gag, as if the pot-infused Summer of Love atmosphere itself automatically brings forth this cliché ). Also, when David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) and Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) discuss the first song they wrote together, out comes some strange Carl Perkins/Woody Guthrie hybrid. And then, of course, there’s the long lost Simon and Garfunkel-style hit they despondently listen to together on the radio.

The long history of the band is hinted at but never fully explained. And it doesn’t come across as a convenient history in which the musician has lived through all musical eras Forrest Gump-style à la Dewey Cox. Instead, what’s suggested here is that Spinal Tap has simply imitated whatever the latest musical trend may be throughout postwar pop music history. They’re not unsuccessful because they’re bad musicians; Nigel’s quaint D-minor piano performance of “Lick My Love Pump” proves this not to be the case. One can’t imitate such a grand variety of 20^th century musical genres and still be a hack. What Spinal Tap does with remarkable nuance is not only to point out the obvious artifice of arena rock, but to make the case that all rock genres are to an extent artificial when they become so involved in the economics of what it means to sustain a life and image as a successful musician.

All music is to some degree an act of appropriation. Elvis imitated Chuck Berry; The Beatles imitated Buddy Holly at one point and The Beach Boys at another; The Rolling Stones imitated various blues artists; and Spinal Tap simply imitated everybody. Thus, the authenticating codes that so many rock genres live by are simply absurd (how “authentic” is so much late-60s rock that can only be “performed” through the studio production and never recreated live, for instance?). What arena rock does is permit space for musicians to be free from ever having to worry about authenticity.

The central irony of This is Spinal Tap, then, is that the band fails so spectacularly at mimicking what is already so inauthentic.

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This last point I think is one that has continued to be the least considered when such straw man critiques are drawn, because Hollywood here is equated only with its most visible figures who overshadow its intricate but also not-so-shrouded political economy. It’s no mistake that despite the fluctuating numbers of major and minor Hollywood studios in the past 100 years, the most powerful studios, like the biggest banks in the nation, have been referred to as “The Big Five.”

And indeed, to the surprise of no one, both Big Fives have had and are continuing a lucrative relationship with one another. Hollywood’s agenda, of course, has always been profit, and the representatives of this ideology are not George Clooney and Matt Damon, but Michael Lynton and Amy Pascal (Chairman/CEO & Co-Chairman, Sony/Columbia), Stephen Blairson (CEO, 20^th Century Fox), Brad Grey (Chairman/CEO, Paramount), Ronald Meyer (President/CEO, Universal), Robert A. Iger (President/CEO, Walt Disney), and Barry Meyer (Charman/CEO, Warner Bros.).

The 2%

According to Marketplace, Individuals working in sports and entertainment make up roughly 2% of the 1% wealthiest Americans. When considering the many facets of industry that may be referred to as “entertainment,” what constitutes such a number can be quite confusing. For instance, do uber-wealthy people who become reality stars count as part of this bracket? What about individuals like Steve Jobs or Mark Cuban, whose work has maneuvered quite liberally between industries? As Cole Abaius argued in his two-part examination of product placement in movies, a line demarcating where entertainment ends and other forms of industry begin doesn’t really exist.

But even taking into account the strictest and most evident definitions of sports and entertainment (e.g., athletes and actors), this number seems staggeringly low. But we only understand wealth through celebrity largely because the only wealthy people we know of are celebrities. Johnny Depp and Michael Bay may be part of the 2% of the 1%, but they take up a far greater percentage of the public imagination when it comes to who and what we think of when we think of wealth. The truth is, if one is going to look for a Hollywood equivalent to serve as a comparison to the 1%, the names listed at the end of the third paragraph provide a far more fitting analogy than your average movie star.

The Populist Rage Dollar

That Hollywood can profit from populist anger isn’t anything new. New Hollywood, after all, likely would never have happened had studio heads not seen a lucrative outcome in making films that appealed to, or even exploited, the youth movement. After all, crowd-pleasing and populism aren’t mutually exclusive sentiments. But contemporary Hollywood filmmaking must negotiate an appeal between particular and general audiences. In Hollywood’s logic, appealing into a political moment must be shrewd, but never exclusionary. Brett Ratner’s Tower Heist was almost certainly greenlit with the vague intent to appeal to a post-2008 world in mind, despite that there’s no way those involved could have predicted its release coinciding with Occupy Wall Street. And it’s not the first. Last summer, The Other Guys replaced the traditional villain of the macho action-cop movies, the drug dealer, with a white-collar corporate criminal, and last fall Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps brought Gordon Gekko back to reflect on a post-2008 America.

But where The Other Guys ranged from surprisingly inventive to a bit didactic and the Wall Street sequel never bothered to actually say much, Tower Heist surprised me in several ways. With the film’s titular location as a fitting metaphor for the fantasy of vertical social mobility, Tower Heist not only addresses the income gap between the middle-class (Ben Stiller) and the uber-wealthy (Alan Alda), but also the gradations in middle-class-to-working-class-to-poor life as well by including a maid (Gabourey Sidibe), a burger-flipper-turned-elevator-operator (Michael Peña), a petty thief (Eddie Murphy), and a former one-percenter (Matthew Broderick).

In Slate’s “Spoiler Special” podcast review of the film, Dana Stevens points out that Eddie Murphy’s thief, unlike the other characters involved in the heist, never even had a pension that was at stake as a non-employee of the building. Thus, the fact that the major cast of characters work in an environment wherein social mobility is even visible says something about the wealth disparity and invisible classes in American society. And (spoiler alert) the image of a car made of gold being haphazardly dangled down a skyscraper is perhaps one of the most fitting visual critiques of the logic of “trickle down” economics that was never intended.

Profit and Appropriation

But films like these, entertaining as they may be, can really only be understood as reflections of social discord to the extent of being an attempt to profit from it rather than any real expression of progressive politics or attempt at social change. This is an obvious point, but it’s one that’s often forgotten when any unifying ideology outside of corporate profiteering is argued to inform Hollywood’s decision-making. The institution certainly likes to pat itself on the back for being on the cusp of social change, but how “risk-taking” is it really to make a movie like In the Heat of the Night in 1967 or Brokeback Mountain in 2005? These may be good movies, but their existence more accurately signifies the recognition of a potential appeal to certain audiences rather than being harbingers for social change. The next time AMPAS produces a montage congratulating itself for its own supposed progressivism, somebody should splice in clips from John Cassavetes’s Shadows or Todd Haynes’s Poison.

But the reason Hollywood can never actually be a progressive institution is intrinsic. A for-profit corporate entity, Hollywood repackages standardized products. Thus, in a film like Tower Heist, our working-class heroes must defeat the wealthy ogre (a scenario as unlikely as the heist itself) and the problem that must be overcome resides in the individual villain (the justice met with Alda’s character, like Bernie Madoff’s conviction, creates an illusory sense of a problem solved). Institutionalized Hollywood narrative structures have almost never allowed mainstream cinema to adequately address systemic problems, which is why most movies about contemporary racism reduce themselves to ham-fisted lines of dialogue, and movies like Tower Heist locate unmitigated greed within the individual and not the system.

Hollywood can’t be occupied from the inside. Actual attempts at progressive social change through Hollywood, like Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore’s 2007 announcement that the Oscars are “going green” in the energy black hole that is the Kodak Theater of all places (I’m sure everyone rode bikes to the red carpet that year), tinges with hypocrisy. And while there’s certainly no rule about where celebrities lend their microphone, celebrity presence at events like Occupy Wall Street are suspect and frankly unhelpful for a movement pursuing the needs of the collective over the individual (even if you’re a populist, albeit one-percenter, hero like Batman). Hollywood’s public faces, even if they aren’t accurately representative of Hollywood as a complex commercial institution, are the faces of individuals with accumulated wealth and power. And that’s the major reason Hollywood can never really be an active, progressive component in political moments like this one: because of its economic role, Hollywood’s relationship to any form of grassroots political action can only be one of appropriation.

However, Hollywood can be occupied from the outside, and in several ways already has been. While Hollywood often appropriates social change, the reverse is possible as well. Icons and symbols of Hollywood narratives can be utilized for political ends, aided by the recognizability and encoded meaning of anything manifested through Hollywood. Anonymous’s use of the Guy Fawkes mask from the 2006 adaptation of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta is a pervasive example of a meaningful utilization of a Hollywood image with political intent. Think of it as reverse-appropriation.

Popular culture can shape the iconography of protest, and vice versa. Appropriation and exploitation by an institution like Hollywood is inevitable, but the buck never has to stop with them.

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