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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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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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.

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.

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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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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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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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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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A human being selling out is one thing, but there’s something especially heinous about a character being used to market a product because it’s an element of art forced into a square hole of commercialism. Oftentimes its done without the creator’s consent (or consent is contractually taken away from the starting block). In most cases, the original actor doesn’t even have to be involved (for better or worse), especially if there’s a costume involved. In its rawest form, it’s the uglification of something we love.

This list is light-years away from being complete, but it hopefully shows a well-rounded view of different types of movie characters in commercials throughout a few different time periods.

There’s one more distinction to be made, though, and that’s between movie tie-ins and products completely divorced from the story or character being used to promote them. You’ll see both on this list, but it seems fair to say that there’s more transparent shame to the latter. Having Harry Potter help sell “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Video Game” has an obviousness to it, but having B.A. Baracus sell tampons (for example) doesn’t – and the result might be a pathetic attempt at using an empty vase of recognizability to stir up interest where the recognizable figure is completely arbitrary.

But enough about most Hollywood remakes, let’s get to the list.

7. Iron Man Drops His LG Phone

As good a place to start as any, cell phones have almost nothing to do within the Iron Man universe, beyond people, you know, using them like we all do. However, it makes more sense than Tony Stark desperately wanting a Burger King hamburger after being held hostage by terrorists and almost dying, because the implication here is a simple one: Iron Man uses LG. A fictional character from comic books that’s been brought successfully to the world of movies has a favorite brand. It’s a celebrity endorsement using a fake celebrity.

This is a solid example of cross-promotion not because of cell phones specifically, but because Iron Man as a character is known for technology. He’s a highly powerful tech industrialist and a genius inventor, so it’s no wonder LG wanted their brand associated with him (even though he could probably invent a much better phone himself using his face as the logo). Essentially, this is crass, but at least there’s a connection.

6. The Marx Brothers Selling Prom Shampoo

There’s perhaps a thin line between celebrity endorsement and movie character endorsement here, but Harpo and Chico Marx weren’t actually like this in real life. They’re clearly playing the characters they made wildly famous in movies like Duck Soup and Animal Crackers in order to sell shampoo. The stretch they had to make is pretty apparent in the writing, too. Harpo Marx as an expert on hair care? Sure. Why the hell not?

More than anything else, this stands as proof that the phenomenon isn’t a new one, even though the widespread use of it certainly is. After all, Barney Fife even shilled for Grapenuts Cereal.

5. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Cereal

Speaking of which, movie and television characters are often a part of this balanced breakfast with promotional (read: cheap) cereal that’s been poorly branded with their imagery. I chose this commercial for Bill and Ted’s Excellent Cereal because it’s hilarious, but there are hundreds more where it came from (read: the 80s). Food, especially sugary crap made for children, is an easy target for tie-ins, and apparently you can make a lot of money having Slimer from Ghostbusters endorse food-coloring and water.

If anyone actually ate this product and survived, please let us know.

4. RoboCop Turns Japanese

In a way it seems unfair to go overseas, but the truth is that the use of figures like this is a global trend. Since the film industry in the US exports 38 metric tons of culture to the rest of the world every year, it’s easy to see why there would be a demand to see a cyborg pulling chopsticks from where his gun should be and eating noodles.

While people in inflatable costumes row an imaginary boat.

3. Mini-Darth Vader Force-Starts a Volkswagen

This is the kind of whip-smart, adorable advertising that makes me regret using the word “shameless” in the title. We shouldn’t forget that it’s a cinematic icon transposed into the world of marketing, but Volkswagen (and more specially, Deutsch LA, the company that made the spot) finds a psychological loophole by not using Darth Vader himself, but still using his image. The result is incredibly potent. By knowing there’s a child under the costume (one that could be a boy or girl), and by placing ourselves in the same position, it recaptures the magic of youth, and the magic of Star Wars all at the same time.

It’s a vivid, imaginative way of tying an iconic movie figure into a product (especially something like a car that wouldn’t even have existed a long, long time ago when Vader was force-choking everyone all over the place). Plus, it also reminds us that Darth Vader Halloween costumes are always for sale.

2. DirecTV Slips on Some Daisy Dukes

Although it’s also creative, this commercial featuring Jessica Simpson as Daisy Duke from The Dukes of Hazard is hilariously conspicuous with its use of every sleazy ad trick in the book (even going so far as to directly ask why we’re not drooling over Simpson’s sexy assets in high definition). On the other hand, it scores points for using the movie character from inside the movie itself in order to sell the product. There was a series of these commercials which varied in cleverness, but they reached a nasty, somber pitch when the late Chris Farley’s image was used so that David Spade could revisit his Tommy Boy character to cram channel packages down people’s throats.

This is a good idea with fluctuating execution, but at the heart of it all, it seems totally clear that the creators of these characters weren’t consulted unless they still held copyright. DirecTV negotiated rights from parent companies and studios in order to put words in the mouths of fictional characters.

As a side note, it’s also interesting to look at these commercials as a hybrid of character and celebrity endorsement. We’re so acutely aware that it’s Jessica Simpson in tiny shorts playing Daisy Duke that it becomes a blurry world where she can represent both herself and the movie/television character at the same time. That’s especially true when considering that DirecTV didn’t always use the most notable characters.

1. Sherlock Holmes Solves the Case of the Disgusting Convenience Store Bathroom

It all started with Robert Downey, Jr., and it ends with Robert Downey, Jr. Of course, it really doesn’t involve him at all. It involves Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes.

These ads for 7-Eleven may be the worst offenders in modern memory. They don’t even try to make sense (much like mixing numbers and letters in your brand name). Maybe the idea was to make the imagery on the posters so discordant that people would go insane, rush into the store, and order thousands of Go Go Taquitos. Shoving Holmes and Watson’s smirking faces together with processed beef by-product, the price tag, and a vague slogan is so baffling that the only way to understand what’s going on is to cover yourself in nicotine patches and run through the streets of London in a panic.

Then again, how the hell do you sell gas station food using Arthur Conan Doyle’s enigmatic detective? It’s a ridiculously hard assignment, but so was “How do you sell a car using Darth Vader?” and that team figured it out. As a direct counter-point, The Simpsons Movie nailed the cross-promotion with 7-Eleven when they converted several of the stores into Kwik-E-Marts. Both cases point out how disastrous ads can be when the product and promoter don’t match, and how wondrous they can be when there’s clever common ground.

The companion ad for the Holmes tie-in is one that exclaims “Mystery Solved” hanging in large letters over “7-Eleven has great coffee,” which brings to mind an image of Holmes banging his head against the wall in month 17 of trying to solve The Great Coffee Quality Question. “Is it great coffee or not?! Damn that Moriarty for posing the question while selling pot to teenagers outside the place where they sell those fantastic taquitos!”

Hopefully this has been an illuminating, if not complete, study in how famous fictional figures can be used as experts to sell us things we don’t necessarily need or want. The examples here vary in style, quality, effect, and age, but they all share that root element of using (or even perverting) art to promote commerce.

Now the real mystery is whether it’s worse to take a celebrity’s word that their product is the best or a character that doesn’t exist in real life’s word for it.

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Where that line is drawn is up to each person. One person might see a kid reading “National Geographic” in It’s a Wonderful Life and think it’s quaintly appropriate while another person might find it craven and conspicuous. To the same extent, different film productions have delivered brands with means ranging from the slyness of near-imperceptibility to almost Doritos-Scorchin’-Habanero-Flavor levels of obviousness.

It’s far from new, and even though sold items have sneaked their way into movies for almost one hundred years, there’s been an explosion in recent decades, seeing a new revenue stream for studios and a new annoyance for film fans.

One of the first examples was the integration of Red Crown Gasoline into the 1919 Fatty Arbuckle-starring silent film The Garage – a move that was criticized heavily by motion picture journal Harrison’s Reports (yes, people have been complaining about product placement for as long as it’s been around). It’s also not a sole example of the bygone era. Best Picture winner Wings (1927) featured a Hershey’s Chocolate Bar, there’s a banner ad for Wrigley’s Gum in Fritz Lang’s M, The Marx Brothers built jokes around Life Savers Candy and the Mobil Logo, and then of course there’s the Wonderful Life/National Geographic tie-in. The point is that the practice had its early seeds in motion picture infancy, but those marketers and filmmakers couldn’t have even imagined the levels it would get to.

Like the level it got to in 1995 when sales for the BMW Z3 soared after James Bond drove one in GoldenEye. The result of that success? The marketer who put it together, Karen Sortito, created a $100m campaign for Tomorrow Never Dies which saw Bond mingling with all sorts of products (from L’Oreal make-up to Heineken beer). It was around that time that the new era of product placement that we know and tolerate really took off.

However, there was a Golden Age even before that. Unsurprisingly, this bastion of all things commercial took place during the 1980s, and it’s there that some of the best questions about how and why in-movie marketing works or doesn’t. Listing all the examples would take a much longer column and an intestinal fortitude only offered by eating a diet solely consisting of Doritos for four months straight, but the more blatant offenders are perhaps the best to shine a light on.

One of the worst of the bunch might be Back to the Future, a movie so viewed through nostalgia glasses that even the advertising in it seems kitschy and harmless now. The Pepsi partnership is over-the-top to the point that Marty McFly actually orders a Pepsi Free (something no one has ever drunk). It even jumped into the sequel when Marty goes to a Cafe 80s in the year 2015 and needs a $50 bill to buy a Pepsi. There’s also the Pizza Hut pizza they just add water to, the shoes, and maybe the most shining, silent product – the DeLorean itself. Documentarian Morgan Spurlock claimed that his Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold was inspired by a scene in an episode of Heroes where Hayden Panettiere’s character squeals at getting a Nissan Rogue (even calling it out not just by name, but by maker), but the DeLorean went beyond product placement to become an integral icon of the film as a major character. Maybe it’s because of that heavy-use status that we don’t think of it as advertising, or maybe it’s the quality and staying power of the film that gives it a pass.

Or maybe we can appreciate product placement when it’s utilized while being mocked:

Because, on the other side of things, there are movies that blow Back to the Future out of the water, but they are so blatant that they seem criminal. Chief among them is the McDonald’s sponsored Mac & Me, a horrible movie that features an E.T.-like alien who loves McDonald’s. He loves the stuff more than Reese’s Pieces. From studying these films, it seems clear that to get away with product placement 1) your movie has to be good if not downright brilliant 2) the product can be cloaked by hiding it in plain sight or beyond several other products (like the DeLorean hiding behind Pepsi) and 3) the product has to make some kind of logical sense in the universe that’s created by the movie.

Take for example, The Wizard. The entire film is a giant advertisement for Nintendo that succeeded in making a slogan about the Power Glove the most quotable line. In one way, it’s pure marketing, but in another, it’s a movie about youth culture with a mainstay of that culture front and center. The advertising of The Wizard makes sense specifically because of how embedded it already was as entertainment, and because of the connection between Nintendo as a video game console company and the plot concept of a video game competition.

On its face, an alien that loves fast food hamburgers is sort of mentally challenged, and audiences responded with hostility. However, two stoners who love White Castle are totally kosher as a plot/advertising device.

With the farcical levels of product placement in movies like I, Robot; Transformers; Minority Report; You’ve Got Mail (AOL is its DeLorean); The Island and more, it would appear as if we as film fans are either fine with advertising in our narratives or that we have no choice but to roll our eyes at it. The most recent film to suck at the teat of paid advertising even looked like it might be going for the record. Even in the future, the arena in Real Steel is sponsored by Bing, X-Box has created the 720, and every soda ever is still going strong. It’s both the latest in the trend, and an example of it turned up to 11.

I worked (for an entire day) on the set of Iron Man, and what I remember most from the production trailer set out in a pile of sand outside Culver City was a wall of folders, clearly labeled for each department’s use. The folder for product placement was fat with paper, and I finally understood why when I saw Tony Stark eating from a Burger King wrapper. This stuff is everywhere now, and some filmmakers are better at hiding it than others, but with studios struggling to find new revenue streams in the face of lower audience turn out, we’ll most likely be seeing silver screen heroes using Apple computers, driving BMWs, and eating shitty hamburgers.

And why am I so curious about embedded advertising? Because I’m hungry too:

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Warning: Some of the links included in this article depict disturbing real-life violence against animals.

When we talk about movies, we often talk about representation. And when we talk about representation, we’re most likely talking about people. How does this character’s personality fit in with my understanding of people in my daily life? What are the roles that men and women of different races, sexualities, and ethnic backgrounds play in a given narrative? What does an old film tell me about people during a different era? Who are the people that made a given film possible, and how did they contribute creatively? Simply put, cinema is a medium made by people, about people, and for people. But we often represent and depict other living beings through our narratives as well. We may be human, but we often identify with things that aren’t.

This weekend I co-hosted a repertory screening of F. W. Murnau’s silent American classic Sunrise (1927). One of the film’s most memorable scenes features George O’Brien chasing after a precocious circus pig. The pig stumbles into a quiet kitchen and, through a series of screwball antics, causes a cook to drop a glass of wine onto the ground. It shatters, and the pig drinks the wine. What follows is a brilliant close-up of the pig, its eyes slowly drooping and its snout out-of-focus, which rather effectively conveys the animal’s state of inebriation. Through an intuitive implementation of form, the human audience is permitted to identify with the subjectivity of another species. As this moment arrives during a rather whimsical sequence in this emotionally enrapturing film, the audience (myself included) were predictably smitten by this drunken pig. A lengthy shot follows in which the pig begins to stumble before its inevitable capture by O’Brien, which was met with similar, if slightly more reserved, laughter.

After the screening, I felt myself conflicted with my reaction to the drunken pig. After all, Sunrise was made long before the establishment of the American Humane Association’s film and television unit, an organization famous for their disclaimer, “No animals were harmed during the making of this movie” that finds itself attached to all Hollywood productions in which an animal is featured.

The pig in Sunrise is clearly seen drinking some sort of substance resembling red wine, and then stumbling. Given the lack of laws regarding the use of animals in film, the pig very well could have been made inebriated for the purposes of the film. To do such a thing is certainly not conducive to an action of morality regarding the way we treat our furry friends, especially when considering that the effect of the alcohol was probably disproportionately strong for a tiny piglet. To enjoy this sequence, of course, is not an endorsement of getting small animals unwittingly drunk – one can arguably appreciate the role of the drunken pig as part of the narrative alone without condoning the probable activities which made such a scene possible.

But this is the major problem one encounters when considering the relationship between the animal (character) represented and the real activities involving the animal used to make that representation manifest: while there exists voluminous information about the behind-the-scenes activities of humans in film, the essential histories of animal contributions to cinema is shrouded. Ultimately, one can never really know (though some means seem evidently likelier than others) in cases like this exactly how this pig was made to act the ways it does. The political economy of the living animal as part of the production process is an aspect of production history made mostly unavailable when it comes to older cinema.

That is, until 1940. The emergence of the AHA’s film division forced the treatment of animals in the name of filmmaking to be transparent and accountable following a consistent set of rules regarding what living beings should and should not be expected to do in the name of filmmaking. It makes sense after all, that no living thing should be intently or negligibly hurt in the name of entertainment.

That such a distinct historical break exists where, suddenly, this shrouded history of animals behind the scenes becomes documented and organized only further mystifies the pre-AHA history of animals in American cinema, where no rules were forced and actual practice remains uncertain. The AHA was obviously formed in reaction to a given industrial need – it was apparent, perhaps merely by the representation of animals in finished products, that neglect, abuse, or misuse was occurring unjustifiably to create intended filmic representations. So before 1940 there are many American films in which animals are represented in ways they haven’t since been able to. For instance, there’s the 1930s Dogville shorts, where canines are dressed in costumes, made to walk continuously on their hind legs and enact scene’s familiar to anybody who has seen a 1930s genre films. Controversy surrounds the means by which these animals were made to “talk,” but predictably, any direct abuses are difficult to surmise as there is little transparency surrounding these films’ means of production.

While some pre-AHA work is indisputably reprehensible, I react to films like the Dogville series and the drunken pig more ambivalently: enjoyment of its end result met with speculation about the potential abuses that made it possible (something wrong seems to doubtlessly be occurring with the Dogville films). But while Sunrise is a masterpiece of cinema, the Dogville shorts are curious historical anomalies (they certainly don’t follow the coding of cuteness that many of today’s cinematic canines do). The bizarre, uncanny (un-canine) nature of these films manifest a distance between them and the viewer, and entertainment value can additionally be found in simple act of being aghast at the film’s final product and questionable means of production. Like a racist grandmother, these films are both offensive and approachable entertainment by simply having existed before a moment of distinct social change. In other words, that drunken pig and these talking dogs were made to drink and talk regardless of whether or not I watch them, so I may as well enjoy what was ultimately produced and be happy that things have changed since.

But on the other hand, clearly even worse things have happened and continue to happen to pigs and dogs on a regular basis. The difference is, they aren’t filmed. (And even outside traditional categories of abuse, animals are killed as part of the process of many facets of industrial production, but not the production of films.) And that’s the strangest component of the AHA film division when one takes into account the vast scope of unchecked animal mistreatment that occurs on a regular basis: it’s not the larger patterns of animal abuse that are being policed, but the representation of animals themselves. These animals, of course, are only observed while on set, which makes up a fraction of the life of even the professional animal performer. The rather limited powers of AHA became shockingly apparent this last spring when video revealed that the elephants employed for Water for Elephants were abused by their trainers prior to filming (an instance of tragic irony, considering that a major aspect of the film’s narrative centers around elephant abuse at the hands of an evil circus owner).

Without CGI, specialized stunts, and/or shrewd camera trickery, it’s difficult to portray animals in a wide variety of compromising scenarios convincingly. This may explain why harm executed upon an animal (real or staged) is often more affecting for audiences than violence between people. Pre-AHA films notably provide a greater range of representation than animals depicted today, but this only means that since the AHA’s emergence as part of the production process, it’s become easier to spot when actual harm may have occurred. We’ve become keen to violations of animal representation simply by the lack of their overall range of representation. The ritual slaughtering of the bull during the climax of Apocalypse Now, the slicing of a cow’s eyeball in Un Chien anadalou, the beating of a rabbit in the documentary Roger & Me, and the depictions of slaughter in Strike and The Blood of the Beasts are all especially disturbing because they possess the mark of the indisputably real: what we’re seeing represented is exactly what occurred. These are not sights that are convincingly reproducible without having some direct relationship with harsh reality.

Because of the strange history of production practice with respect to animals, humans are strangely capable of identifying with nonhuman characters with a great deal of complexity and intuition.

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Edison, like Jobs, was an industrialist: part inventor, mostly capitalist. But specific to his own life, Edison spent most of his career securing patents and making improvements to existing technologies rather than building something from scratch. Edison’s reputation associates him with a great deal more invention than he was actually involved in. I’m not trying to be cynical about Jobs. Far from it. In fact, I’ve been more than a little annoyed with the backlash to consumer mourning about Jobs than any initial hyperbole associated with Jobs’s death in the first place. I don’t give a flying shit about executives in pretty much any industry, but saying “he’s just a CEO” does not negate the great intellectual worth and cultural interest of Jobs himself.

Jobs, like Edison, developed a cult of personality that extended well beyond the person.

As a non-techie, I’m (in all earnestness) not sure exactly what Jobs accomplished, but I do know that he’s the only person in my life who died that has his stuff all over my apartment. The smart phone, for instance, seems to exist to a degree independently of him, but through the popularity of the iPhone, it is associated predominantly with him in the cultural imagination. Jobs’s massive reputation exceeds any potential limitations that an inquiry into historical detail can surmise. Those decrying/policing the disproportionate or even unjust mass reaction to Jobs’s death, or those making the case that the myth was different from the man himself, are forgetting the one essential thing that makes Jobs like Edison but unlike most successful industrialists: he was a celebrity.

In being an inventor first and capitalist second, Jobs embodied what is most romanticized about American history since the dawn of the twentieth century. While the slimy suits of Wall Street may now be answering for their decades of unchecked power, exploitation of the middle class, and exchange of money with Capitol Hill, Steve Jobs continued in the tradition of the Industrial Revolution and the postwar era (the times that arguably first emboldened the notion of American exceptionalism) by actually, you know, making stuff that people wanted.

This is perhaps centralized and best understood in Jobs’s contribution to the creation of the personal computer, a device that has now become so ubiquitous that it hardly seems remarkable. But until the 1980s, “personal computer” seemed a contradiction in terms. That such a device said “hello” when turned on rather than giving us a series of ones and zeroes gave way to a sea change in a our relationship with technology that has only accelerated since. Following Rachel Maddow’s tribute, the emergence of a personal computer meant we were no longer alienated from computing technology, but instead open to have an interpersonal relationship with devices that we slowly let infiltrate our daily lives.

What exactly does this have to do with the movies? In the habit of venerating filmmakers as the biggest influence on cinematic products, the roots of cinema’s creation often become blurred. Cinema owes its inception to industrialists and inventors, including the Lumiere brothers and William Dickson, but most publicly, Thomas Edison. Edison, of course, was one of our first filmmakers, and through his kinetoscope experiments he had his role in dictating, at least for a little while, exactly what this new invention could be and should do. Cinema was a technology whose content was determined by scientists and inventors, not artists. Yes, there was spectacle and entertainment to be found, but art was out of the question. Yet even in Edison’s hands, the medium couldn’t resist artistry simply by how inherently compelling the moving image can be, even if he was capturing something as quotidian as a sneeze, as dumbfounding as boxing cats, or as horrifying as an elephant electrocution (which Edison used as propaganda to discredit a competitor’s alternating current). In capturing anything from the everyday to the surreal to the atrocious, Edison’s films exhibited the nascent medium’s potential for a range of expression.

Edison tried to contain access to this technology by creating the Motion Picture Patents Company, or the Edison Trust, which controlled who had access to the materials and rights to make films. In an overreach of power, Edison tried to exact control onto an entire medium that had yet to realize its potential in a move that could have prevented further exploration. Potential filmmakers rebelled, fleeing to the West Coast where their activities couldn’t be easily enforced under patent law, and a storytelling industry was born.

The inventor has had an admittedly different role in late 20^th-early 21^st century society. Jobs’s public persona is far more positive than Edison’s has been, and his role in cinema, while significant, is less linear and hard to pin down. Cole Abaius did an excellent job explaining Jobs’s influence on filmmaking this August in terms of, amongst other things, the unprecedented utility his computers have provided for independent filmmakers. And then, of course, there’s the enduring cultural behemoth that is Pixar. However, despite Jobs’s sole but quite significant executive producer credit, his most apparent influence resides in the opportunity he’s credited for providing in the digital construction of films. This is consistent with his reputation as an essential figure in bringing to life the notion of the personal computer: manufacturing access where there previously was none is a populist, ennobling move, and the centralization of this mentality with the persona of Jobs himself basically mandated his massive role within our culture.

Sure, there is something to be said of the actual limitations in the devices that allegedly provide so much opportunity (seriously, still no Flash, iPhone?), but as with the persona of any celebrity, we’re dealing here with the murky mix of myth and reality. The major difference between the respective personae of Edison and Jobs is restriction vs. opportunity. Edison was exclusive in a way that cut creativity short; Jobs’s technologies were designed for inclusiveness, which is why design has been so important to Apple’s success (artist, meet inventor).

Jobs’s company might own the copyright of the editing and special effects programs used to make Daybreakers (2010), or the computer I’m using to write this article, but that same company doesn’t own the work ultimately produced. Unlike Edison who saw everything that arose from the medium as belonging to him, Jobs  is credited for realizing, perhaps by cinema’s example, that the most adaptable, socially pervasive inventions are those whose possibilities may not be initially realized by the inventor.

The relationships between cinema and technology are incredibly complex. Technology provides both restrictions and opportunities for cinematic expression, but almost always alters what we perceive movies to be. But one thing that shouldn’t be overlooked is the representation of technology in film. While technology certainly shapes the way our films look, sound, and where they’re seen, the role of technology in our narratives highlights the pervasiveness of technological evolution and at the same time gives us a means of understanding how we perceive the world through these deliberately constructed perceptions of the world.

One of the earliest films, the Lumieres’ Photograph (1895-96), simply consists of footage of a man having a photograph taken. If films are supposed to represent experience, than this film points remarkably to how importantly it has been from the beginning of cinema to represent the role of technology itself as part of our experience. There are simply stories that can no longer be told the same way in the wake of innovation. What would Elevator to the Gallows (1957) be like if it was made in the era of the smart phone? I’d answer that question now, but my Louie Malle collection is still syncing onto my iPod.

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While Shoah has, then and now, been lauded as an incredible achievement in cinema, its running time has contributed to an understanding of the film as primarily a project of historical documentation. In using no archival footage and only capturing the contemporary lives of Holocaust survivors, historians, scholars, and the occasional aging Nazi functionary complicit in evil’s banality, all juxtaposed with extensive footage of the ruins and landscapes of the Polish grounds where these crimes against humanity took place, Shoah is typically understood to be an important means of making permanent the words of those involved long after their lifetime.

Shoah is certainly a service to the preservation of history, and watching it twenty-six years after its original release (add a decade or less to the time when many of its subjects were originally filmed), I couldn’t help but wonder how many of these individuals have since passed on, which makes me thankful that Lanzmann made these efforts in the first place. Shoah’s contribution to history is an essential one that should never be underestimated, but this shouldn’t prevent us from examining and appreciating Shoah as an incredible cinematic achievement as well.

Central to Shoah is the question of representation. How, precisely, should the unfathomable horrors of the Holocaust be remembered, recounted, and even reenacted on film? Judging by the incredible legacy of Holocaust cinema since, the answer is as multifaceted as it is uncertain. Where is the dividing line between honest representation of trauma, and exploitation of it? Can the narrative demands of conventional cinema ever permit a representation of these events that isn’t, at its core, simply false?

While much of Hollywood cinema (especially since the 1980s) seems rarely concerned with exploring this as an ethical dilemma either in process or self-reflexively in the films themselves, disproportionately preferring the rare tale of unlikely hope over the harsh reality of the fates of many Jews which have no hero or closure swooping in at the end, Shoah struggles to realize the means to articulate a representation of these events as it simultaneously weighs the absolute necessity that these stories be told and preserved. What results is an incredible omnibus of detailed individual accounts of events, procedures, and terrible memories at various concentration camps. Any one of these stories could be a movie on their own.

Initially, the notion of such a lengthy documentary told without archival footage is just as daunting as the movie itself. How could one sit through such a documentary without variance in content? How could one comprehend the horrors of the stories being told without seeing some representation of the events themselves? Lanzmann assumes that archival images of the Holocaust have become ubiquitous to twentieth-century visual culture, and he’s absolutely right. One of the most horrific truths one encounters when trying to understand the Holocaust is accepting that it’s a result of decades of industrial production, in which the end product is efficiently manufactured death rather than, say, an automobile. After all, the train, which changed humanity’s relationship to time and space and indoctrinated a new era of social and economic relations between people, was the iconic harbinger of murder. That the Holocaust itself was such a thoroughly documented historical moment makes sense when considering the fact that film itself was also one of the characteristic achievements of an innovative, industrial age. Perhaps the Third Reich was the first in the Western World to realize and take seriously cinema’s potential as a tool for persuasion and social engineering. How then could one use a device that was in many ways complicit in the path towards genocide to investigate, recount, and critique that genocide?

It is in this way that Lanzmann’s film is a much-needed attempt to answer similar questions of representation that arose in Alain Resnais’s 30-minute Holocaust documentary Night and Fog (1955; the incredibly similar ends that each of these films achieve in their vastly different running times is uncanny). Perhaps it was Resnais who first realized the importance of contextualization in juxtaposing the recent past with the incomprehensible present. That way, those unforgettable black-and-white images of living bodies in decay and corpses in mass graves would never become abstracted into “past-ness.” Auschwitz, while empty, is still standing. History in this case means the essential directive to remember, not the decay in relevance for the present.

Thirty years later, Lanzmann no longer needs the black-and-white images of Resnais’s film. Those have since been understood by culture to represent “the Holocaust.” Lanzmann doesn’t make the past present as much as he finds the notion of presence itself important. This is not history in the past tense. Lanzmann’s film is remarkable in never shying away from being just as much about the late 1970s and early 1980s as it is about the early 1940s.

As in the color sequences of Resnais’s film, one of the first thing I noticed about Shoah is the beauty of the Polish landscapes captured by its lush photography: the green grass dancing with the wind, sunlight peeking through the trees. Rather than inducing the typical nauseating effect of seeing bodies pile on bodies in black-and-white, these color segments force audiences to confront the contradiction of the present with what they understand the past to be from its representations, and the result is even more deeply unsettling when foreboding trains cross this landscape or the bricks of a concentration camp penetrate the grass. As difficult as it is to admit in connection with its content, the film itself is stunning in its beauty.

It is both difficult and not difficult to watch Shoah in a single sitting. Each story is as engaging as the one before, and going outside the boundaries of traditional cinematic time permits opportunities for certain interactions to progress in real time and in great detail, like the prolonged conversation outside the Polish Catholic church. What one comes away with might be particular for a given viewer. For me, it was the devastating story of a barber attending to a client in New York City, talking about cutting women’s hair before they went to the gas chamber and refusing to tell them what their unavoidable fate would be because it would “do them no good,” or the interview with a journalist who visited a Jewish ghetto and has still yet to come to terms with what he’s seen.

In the final two hours of the film, when my ability to endure finally started to wane, the structure of Shoah seemed to break down. While certainly not a linear historical account of the Holocaust, the film seems to embody some sort of lucid structure in connecting stories and themes between individuals. Then the seams begin to show. Momentum is slowed. New contributors are introduced who barely speak. Previously unexplored topics are broached. Suddenly, the film simply ends and the train keeps moving.

As frustrating as this experience initially was, eventually it began to make sense. What other ending could a film like this have instead of one that was formless and inconclusive?

Despite its incredible running time, Shoah by its final hours never puts itself in the position of being a comprehensive overview of the Holocaust, or even an exhaustive historical document, but rather an exercise of the essential contradiction continually encountered in the question of responding to such an event through cinematic means: the moral imperative of preserving history through representation vs. the impossibility of representing the Holocaust in all its confounding layers of meaning, implication, and unbelievable trauma. If Shoah were primarily a historical document, why then was its 350 hours of footage cut down to the arbitrary number of nine?

To experience Shoah is to endure and confront cinema’s incredible capacity to reveal as well as its inability to provide clear answers to impossible but persistent questions.

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The month of September is typically regarded as one of the least exciting and least eventful in the calendar year. It’s something of an interval month, a strange in-between phase sandwiched in the middle of summer Hollywood blockbusters and the “quality” flicks and holiday programming of the fall. In strictly monetary terms, it’s the most underperforming month of the year, and has even been beaten by the desolate burial ground that is January in terms of event-style opening weekends.

But this may ultimately be a good thing.

In fact, if future Septembers continue to exhibit the same patterns as this month, the time of the year in which schools go back in session and you can no longer wear all-white may prove to be one of the most interesting and exciting months on the wide-release calendar.

Common wisdom says that September is still unchecked ground for film releases, the time of the year in which box-office receipts quickly put on the brakes, moviegoers engage in other pressing priorities for the fall, and the local multiplex is filled with either late summer holdovers or new movies that are simply dumped in September because there isn’t enough good faith for them to perform well any other time of the year.

In a sense, September 2011 is no different. Late-summer mainstays like Rise of the Planet of the Apes and The Help are still drawing in audiences, while DOA studio flicks like Abduction, I Don’t Know How She Does It, Bucky Larson and Apollo 18 are dumped by studios who might (at least, in the case of the latter two) just rather you forget they existed and sit tight until October when you instead have the option to see several 80s remakes, another Paranormal Activity film, the obligatory Clooney awards season tease, a non-pirate/non-Tim Burton Johnny Depp movie, or the new Almodovar film and latest Sundance hit if you live in a big city. And then comes the holiday season, the alleged best time of the cinematic calendar year where it’s nothing but turkey, Oscar bait, and Robert Downey, Jr. with a British accent.

But this September hasn’t exactly been the non-event month it’s alleged to be. In fact, for three weeks in a row, significantly better-than-average films have opened.

Steven Soderbergh’s star-studded Contagion gave us the anti-Roland Emmerich and anti-Outbreak by telling a story about the life of a devastating virus that is presented so efficiently and precisely one comes away feeling like it could actually happen just like this. What’s remarkable about Contagionis its critical distance – which, yes, often feels cold, but at the same time it never allows the film to be reduced to the ham-fisted sensationalism or a spectacle of devastating humanity that such films are typically known for. Soderbergh delivers a familiar cinematic cautionary tale with an unfamiliar approach, lending audiences a mosaic narrative that’s digitally delivered and references specifically 21^stcentury concerns and events. Despite Matt Damon and Gwenyth Paltrow occupying its center as the film’s obligatory “everyperson” middle-American couple (we, interestingly enough, never see them totally as a family), Soderbergh’s take on the disaster flick feels decidedly un-Hollywood.

It’s rare for a major Cannes winner to debut in September, and in wide release no less, but that’s exactly what Nicolas Winding Refn’s gangster/vigilante/car chase art film Drive did last weekend (the film won the top award for directing in May). More Le Samourai than To Live and die in L.A., the film’s unique approach to the car chase action film is established off the bat during its cold open, when we’re presented possibly the quietest car “chase” scene ever portrayed on film – and it’s the film’s restraint, rather than any bloated set-pieces, through which its genuine suspense emerges. But Drive is hardly just another exercise in genre. Refn’s signature technique is on full display, with a minimalist pace of storytelling, heavily stylized sequences of action, and an untraditionally foregrounded soundtrack that somehow works. It’s perhaps one of the strangest films to open wide in quite some time.

And finally, we get to this past weekend. Sure, a movie about baseball starring Brad Pitt isn’t exactly an unlikely hit, but Moneyball proved to be so much more than that. Already drawing comparisons to The Social Network (Aaron Sorkin had a hand in writing both), the Bennett Miller-helmed film is about the shaking up of an institution through discovery of an unorthodox approach (and both films also, I might add, feature Ivy League-educated boy wonders). I’m no fan of baseball, and math was my mortal enemy in high school, yet I found Moneyball to be incredibly compelling – maybe because it really isn’t a baseball movie, but yet another film about taking risks in changing times and leaving the old dinosaurs behind.

Despite being a sports movie with a major star in the lead (though admittedly, Pitt has recently become known for his unconventional choices), there is a refreshing aura of intricate filmmaking here, especially in the film’s quiet moments, its fly-on-the-office-wall feel, and its character-driven narrative (by contrast, favorites of the genre like Field of Dreams and Bull Durham often assume the weight of an audience’s profound love of baseball, a pretense that isn’t present in Moneyball, making it more accessible for people like me). After all, in what other baseball movie can you envision a supporting role for Philip Seymour Hoffman or a cameo by Spike Jonze?

Quality filmmaking isn’t exclusive to this September in particular. Focus Features seems to have paved a way for demonstrating advantages to releasing A-grade filmmaking in September, either in wide or in limited–>widening release, with critical favorites like Lost in Translation (2003) and The Constant Gardener (2005), fan favorite Shaun of the Dead (2004; released through then-Focus-owned Rogue and perhaps a more “conventional” September release), or unlikely “hits” like Burn After Reading (2008) and The American (2010). This year, The Debt was Focus’ almost-obligatory September entry. Likewise, other studios have released critical darlings like A History of Violence (2005) and The Town (2010) in September.

If the above titles led to a realization of the potential market for quality and/or not-exactly-mainstream films in September, then 2011 has reaped the benefits for it, releasing a surprising number of good films in successive weeks. And 50/50 still hasn’t come out yet.

The interesting thing about these three films is that they’re neither your arthouse-exclusive limited release nor your focus-group’d-into-mass-appeal Hollywood blockbuster. All of these films work in familiar paradigms that have proven to be commercially accessible to audiences, but they each provide unique twists to the formula in their respective implementations of style and narrative approach, making them not quite what they initially seem to be. These are risky films, but not an exercise in experimentation. They have wide appeal, but to a certain point. They may challenge some filmgoers, but only those who have become comfortable with monotony. And the low stakes of September may make it the perfect time of the year for standout films like these to actually stand out.

These films also come with modest budgets and have recouped (modestly) on their investments. Not that box office is ever an indicator of quality, but it gives me hope that studios realize there are discerning adult audiences out there who appreciate well-constructed films like these. It’s refreshing to see something artistically executed entrusted with a wide, intelligent audience. I’m not pretending there’s a love for these films that is transcendent, assumed, or universal (it’s true that some audiences scoffed at Drive while others cheered at Straw Dogs), and I’m not saying Contagion will be on any top ten lists or will be nominated for a basket of awards at year’s end (though Drive might do the former and Moneyball the latter). But these three better-than-average films represent a welcome relief from the robot toys, cowboys fighting aliens, and talking animals offered at multiplexes in the summer months. Next year I won’t be looking for what’s offered in June or December, but September.

Masculinity

Refn’s thematic and narrative preoccupation with masculinity has produced three fascinating portraits in as many years. The temporal and social contexts of Bronson, Valhalla Rising, and Drive couldn’t be more disparate, but between them he’s produced an unofficial trilogy of sorts connected not only through his deliberate pacing and striking, almost invasive visual style, but more importantly through their shared concerns as portrayals of three aggressive men who wander their respective environments in solitude.

Bronson (2008)

One major tenet connecting the various ‘Refn Men’ is the director’s refusal to give his characters simplistic movie psychologies that explain-away (and deflate) their behavior. Tom Hardy’s breakthrough role as Britain’s most notorious career-prisoner Michael Petersen/Charles Bronson provides us perhaps the most we’ve ever known about a given character’s life in a Refn film (Bronson briskly and schizophrenically moves between the many stages of the protagonist’s life), but there are no ‘answers’ provided by Refn’s structure, or by the film’s occasional peek into his childhood. There is no inciting incident for Petersen’s propensity for violence and mayhem. To do so would ultimate cheapen the value of an incredibly enigmatic character.

In fact, while we are invited into nearly every aspect of the titular protagonist’s life, we are always at a distance from him emotionally, psychologically, and in terms of any easily comprehensible motive. This distance is manifested quite explicitly through Bronson’s central framing device: staging the narration guiding the entire film as a theatrical performance. This is clearly not an event in the film’s narrative, and it’s more of a Brechtian move than a suggestion of the character’s deep inner desire. But through this device it’s made clear why we don’t have access to Petersen/Bronson’s psychology even as we are (arguably) experiencing his subjectivity: Bronson has constructed his life through playing the role of the manic criminal, with the world and all the attention and intermittent fame it gives him as his stage.

Through Refn’s strangely offbeat pacing, we see Bronson’s performance of masculinity at play. The moment where he first meets Paul (Matt King) in prison, he sustains his fists for such a long time that his supposedly tough stance is revealed as an empty gesture. The pettiest of criminals, his wreaking of havoc within the prison, while a joy to watch, brings a chaos that is never without a clear sense of calculation and premeditation. These performances of masculinity take on new resonance when Bronson is suggested to be sexually inadequate, emotionally vulnerable, combined with the film’s aura of homoeroticism. He even takes his name (via Paul’s suggestion) from an uber-masculine movie star, suggesting that his entire life is developed through a carefully orchestrated performance of both a certain type of masculinity and the expectations of madness by a character all too aware of what he’s doing. Bronson is exceptional and unique, but the last shot tells us where that leads a man who so extravagantly and so publicly tries to buck the system.

Valhalla Rising (2009)

Mads Mikkelsen, whose career began with Refn’s first Pusher film, stars here as One-Eye, a former prisoner of a Norse chieftan (we understand every thing we need to know about this character during his bloody slaying of his masters) who joins with a group of Christian Vikings on a strange journey to a Holy Land that turns out to be not so promising. Mikkelsen here does something masterful, giving a compelling performance without uttering a single word and with (you guessed it) only one eye available to him. Here Refn nearly takes his methodical pacing to a screeching halt, hypnotizing us with the slow tempo of life 1,000 years ago in between instances of incredible bloodshed. Unlike Bronson, violence here, while possibly requiring skill and calculation, is not a performance but a way of life and a means of survival. It is, in the lives of these men, wholly unspectacular. After all, there are rarely any spectators left to marvel at One-Eye’s fighting skills.

While Bronson does give us character history, Petersen/Bronson is for all intents and purposes a man without a past or history, an unreliable narrator whose life and personality is what he makes of it. Valhalla Rising falls to the other end of the pendulum, but still stays in a realm that is identifiably Refn. Not only is One-Eye a man without a history (the Vikings speculate that he is more than human), but a man without any real ‘present’ as well, never speaking his mind in any circumstance (his supposed inner monologue is articulated by a boy slave) and simply moving from one form of captivity or service to the next. The Vikings, in a sense, are his spectators, left to speculate what his next move may be.

One-Eye is undeniably powerful and menacing, but largely without agency. There is no explanation for his behavior, or his missing eye and voice, other than the apparent fact that he has become skillful at succeeding through the unwritten laws of the land. Valhalla Rising gives us an ugly and merciless ancient world run by men. More than an exceptional warrior, One-Eye is the logical extent of the values placed in conquer and survival.

Drive (2011)

Ryan Gosling’s quiet, reserved, and unnamed Driver is perhaps the end result of a millennia-long evolution of people like One-Eye. Like One-Eye, he has no history, and like Bronson, there’s no psychology or narrative shorthand to adequately explain his behavior. Where Bronson’s code is self-aggrandizement through acts of lunacy and One-Eye’s is survival through unfettered brutality, Driver lives by an unstated code so familiar to a history of cinema full of powerful but quiet men, like Sergio Leone’s roles for Clint Eastwood, Jean-Pierre Melville’s roles for Alain Delon, and Akira Kurosawa’s roles for Toshiro Mifune. Driver has a code of honor and justice that must be enacted by any means possible, with efficiency, and without hesitation.

Driver is a man with a code in an underworld of people who similarly play by their own rules. The rules of the mob are respect for the hierarchy, increased capital, no overhead, and self-preservation. The rule for an opportunist like Shannon (Bryan Cranston) is to take what money you can whenever you can. The rule for Driver is for you and him to stay out of each other’s business. But when he lets somebody into his life, their business becomes his own (in this context it’s interesting that Drive is the only of these three films where a positive female character exists in a meaningful way).

Of the three men discussed here, Driver seems to be the one who lusts least for blood or the sport of the chase. He certainly loves being behind the wheel, but his cool-headedness throughout suggests that he gets no adrenaline rush worth feeding. Only twice do we arguably see him coming anywhere close to an increased pulse: when he speaks to Nino (Ron Perlman) on a cell phone at a strip club after having attacked one of his goons with a hammer and his sweat drips profusely onto the floor, and in the already famous scene where he kicks a henchman’s face in during a particularly eventful elevator ride. These scenes suggest something else going on with Driver, something unarticulated in his long, quiet glances and low-decibel, economically worded conversations. But Refn isn’t interested in telling us what that is, nor is he interested in knowing it himself. As shown with One-Eye in ancient Europe, and as shown with Bronson in 1970s-80s England, unique, violent, exceptionally masculine men like Driver simply exist. And it’s what they do, not why they do it, that makes Refn’s films perpetually compelling.

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The overwhelming conclusion that most of these observations end with is, rather appropriately and naturally, “I don’t know, but here are some thoughts.” Besides those works of audiovisual media that were directly inspired by, intentionally referenced, or somehow directly related to 9/11, it’s difficult to say exactly what a post-9/11 film is unless one allows for literally every film made afterward to potentially enter such a category.

But perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question.

When it is asked what a post-9/11 film is, the answer typically veers off from texts directly dealing with the event to narratives resembling the event in feeling through their explorations of a culture of fear, and in turn the nominated event and date “9/11” encapsulates a broader understanding of what the event has directly or indirectly wrought, or at least has possessed in its shadow, throughout the decade since. It seems then, that instead of “what does ‘post-9/11 cinema’ look like,” we’re really asking, “what is 21^st century cinema”?

It’s easy to argue, after all, that ten years and two days ago was, historically speaking, the beginning of this century as the event itself has maintained its status as the context in which we live in the United States, symbolically and practically. After all, cataclysmic events have often defined in one way or another the ‘era’ that proceeded them: WWI laid ground for industrial and chemical warfare which would define conflict throughout the twentieth century, and the end of World War II paved way for an era of American Exceptionalism. And to each event, its own cinema. Filmmaking, like warfare, became an industry in the early twentieth century, and America’s superpower status from the middle of the century onward was reflected in its cultural imperialism: the widescreen Technicolor vistas of Hollywood dominated screens around the world, even as Hollywood struggled against the competition of television, pop music, and other forms of middle class leisure.

Perhaps it was informed by the fact that I saw it on the tenth anniversary of Sept. 11, but the notion of a post-trauma cinema marked also as a century-defining cinema lingered in my mind as I watched Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion – not because Contagion is some sort of astoundingly great piece of filmmaking (it’s merely quite good) or something altogether exceptional in form or concept (its premise and narrative mode are deceivingly familiar), but merely because of a simple, and perhaps timely, conflagration of factors that strongly suggest this is what uniquely  21^st century cinema looks like.

We’ve seen Contagion’s mosaic narrative before. Popularized by films like Soberbergh’s own Traffic, Paul Haggis’s Crash, Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana, and the films of Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu, fractured mosaic narratives have been the preferred mode of addressing the ripples of international and interpersonal conflict. But on the more mainstream front, this narrative mode has been closely tied to the disaster/pseudo-apocalyptic genre in a style popularized by Roland Emmerich in anything from Independence Day to 2012. One could hesitatingly refer to some of these films as ‘global narratives,’ reflecting the interconnectedness of an ever-shrinking world in the 21^st century. But that’s the central flaw of much of these films: they too conveniently reduce the many implications and profound interconnectedness that globalization has brought, threading its characters instead through superficial coincidence, narrative shorthand, or (most frequently) the overbearing thematics of the film’s ‘message’ (be it on the drug war, the war on terror, racism, etc.). That these are the characters we ultimately follow is not without an air of arbitrarity hiding under the assumed logic of the mosaic narrative.

With Contagion, however, the clean-cut efficiency of the film’s narrative permits only the inclusion of characters directly effected by or related to the event. Like the streamlined organization of a given Wikipedia entry, the effects of a global epidemic are reduced here only to those players most essentially involved. It is with this precision that the film’s globalized narrative moves forward with an ease and naturalness that avoids much of the overblown, wandering pretense of the typical mosaic narrative. These characters aren’t connected because they predictably brush by one another, nor do they even directly effect one another. It is their actions that are essential to the story at hand.

It is no coincidence as well that a film narrative depicting the exponentially growing live of a virus features social media as part of its narrative as well. While Jude Law’s evil snaggletooth’d blogger (after all, not all of us have dental insurance) does get his comeuppance in the face of an accountable government, his earlier pronouncement that print is going the way of Gwenyth Paltrow’s character (I admit, I’m paraphrasing here) rings demonstrably true, especially in the ways we have responded to anything from groundbreaking news or potential catastrope in the years since.

That the proliferation of information characteristic of the 21th century thus far has carried the metaphor “going viral” with it is no act of hyperbole. In a recent interview of Marketplace with Fred Cale, law professor at Indiana University (holler!), the “privacy guru” proclaimed, in summary:

“…After 9/11, two independent trends dovetailed and reinforced each other. The federal government was investing hundreds of millions in surveillance technology and research to try and keep us safer. And companies like Google and Facebook were remaking the digital landscape. There was a data-collecting revolution.”

Many cultural commentators have seen the rise of social media as uniquely separate and/or more significant than 9/11, speculating only on what the day itself would have looked like had that technology been around then or suggesting ways the technology itself should be used as a means for remembrance. Cale, however, argues that there’s a causation here that we take for granted, and thus the notion of what we can directly consider to be ‘post-9/11’ media expands. Wikileaks and Twitter define the 21^st century just as much as (and in direct relation to) the War on Terror and the Patriot Act.

While Contagion is indeed an effective thriller, there’s not exactly much mystery to it. The virus’s cure is the major concern of the characters, not its cause. Framed almost entirely by medium shots, information is delivered speedily and the narrative moves forward with ease, which perhaps gives the film the cold, clinical tone several critics have pointed out. But where is there room for emotion when we can’t stand, or have no time for, ambiguity? To fill in any gaps, a random newscast unconnected to any visible diegetic source expediently provides us any information we might need while we watch characters interact using words we can’t – and don’t need to – hear. Even the familiar faces of its all-star cast act as signposts to easily mine the film’s otherwise potentially overwhelming database of information. Globalization in Contagion does not provide some forced comment on our profound connections in a world dictated by the chaos theory, but instead acts as a simple reality of the ways twenty-first century technology and commerce are the means by which we understand and interact within an overpopulated world.

The prolific Soderbergh is something of an anti-auteur – a ‘pure formalist’ who, despite placing his hand in nearly every aspect of production, imposes little distinct stylistic personality connecting his films, preferring instead to choose one particular approach toward any given project. Unlike past experimenters with form, Soderbergh arguably possesses no ideology in his filmmaking. Even when his films are overtly political in content he prefers a calculated distance. Nor does Soderbergh, unlike many an academic, see ideology as implicit within the medium itself. He is no more prone to making a third Ocean’s movie than he is to minimalist no-budget filmmaking.

For Soderbergh, it’s largely the subject matter that leads to the approach, with filmmaker as mere channeler of the best technique. The digital Soderbergh is also, unlike the apparatus of filmmaking by and large, incredibly efficient, which pushes against the notion that the arduous and time-sucking task of making films is socially impotent in an era of immediate information-delivery. He is, in so many ways, the perfect filmmaker for a time overloaded with media but drained of cohesive messages. His contested retirement after a Liberace biopic (as appropriately arbitrary as any film he could end on) might mean an early departure for the only overt, high-profile 21^st century filmmaker, but I sense that cinema by and large will be ever-more responsive to the mandates, characteristics, and values of the new century it’s found itself in.

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