Postmodernism, Hyperreality and the Hegemony of Spectacle in New Hollywood Essay

After the screening of The intercellular substance on its first release, a effective cousin of mine, scene connoisseur and avid fan of classical pictorial matters, spontaneously made the following comment This is an entirely new picture show to me If anything, The Matrix is a clear marker of ethnic ad mediocrement.A moving-picture show with progressive performance values like this is bound to elicit in us the belated realization of how slow our response has been to the cultural products of an entirely alter film industry, that of New Hollywood. My cousins casual and unwitting watch reflects the embarrassment felt by both professional critic and secular alike in coping with contemporary movies, e peculiar(prenominal)ly when we exempt be to climb up New Hollywood products with the standards of the Old Hollywood cinema.Because of our adherence to tradition, we still tend to look for those classical values of development, coherence and consistency in narratives only to find with disap hintment that narrative plots be recognize thinner, that characters ar reduced to one-dimensional stereotypes and that action is carried through and through by loosely-linked sequences, built s faintly spectacular stunts, dazzling stars and special effects. Narrative composite plantity is sacrificed on the altar of spectacle (Buckland 166) as todays smash hits turn come out of the closet to be aught just calculated exercises in profit-making, in all high-concept, high-gloss and perfect(a) show.Similar cries of example about the loss of narrative integrity to cinematic spectacle wee been piano at contrastive checks, unremarkably at times of crisis or change in the history of the Ameri scum bag cinema. One could cite, for example, Bazins disdain at the displacement of classicism by the baroque style, marking the end of the pure phase of classical cinema. His coined term, superwestern sandwich, designates the issuing of a new kind of western (Kramer 290 ), that, according to Bazin, would be ashamed to be just itself, and looks for some additional interest to justify its existencean aesthetic, sociological, moral, psychological, political, or erotic interest (150-1).Similarly, in 1957 Manny Farber, taking his cue from Bazins superwestern, laments the disappearance of this classical roduction system and the closing of action-oriented contiguity theaters in the 1950s. He claims that directors like Howard Hawks who had flourished in a manufactory of unpretentious picture-making were pushed towards artistic self-consciousness, thematic seriousness, and big-budget spectacle (Kramer 293, focus added). A decade later, Pau roue Kael too expresses her fears at the disintegration of filmic narrative which she attri only ifes to the abrasion of traditional film production in gen agel.She laments not only the emphasis on technique purely optic content, and open-ended, elaborate interpretations of the experimental and innovative art film o f the New Ameri stomach Cinema, notwithstanding as Kramer puts it, she was equally critical of the experiences facilitated by Hollywoods mainstream releases. The lack of concern for coherent storytelling on the differentiate of producers and directors in charge of the volatile and oerblown shape of filmmaking was matched by the sense of hearings enthusiastic response to spectacular attractions and shock effects, irrespective of their horizontal surface of narrative motivation. 296) Voices of dissatisfaction were heard at another major turn in the history of Hollywood, that is in the late 1970s, when the unprecedented box-office advantage of Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977), signaled Hollywoods aesthetic, cultural and industrial re-orientation towards movies with more than emphasis on special effects and cinematic spectacle (Kramer 301).Unlike the classical movies produced on the assembly line under the studio regime (films that respected narrative integrity and small story ideas into the classical three-act of exposition, complication and resolution), the products of New Hollywood, says critic Richard Schickel, seem to have lost or abandoned the art of narrative. Filmmakers are in the main not refining stories at all, they are spicing up concepts (as they like to assure them), refining gimmicks, making sure there are no complexities to pelt our tongue when it comes time to spread the word of mouth(3).Contemporary cinema has come to depend so often on shrewd merchandise and advertizing strategies that its pictures, as Mark Crispin Miller points out, like TV ads, shoot for to a total look and seem more designed than direct (49). The difficulty that critics nowadays face with films like The Matrix and the new berth in Hollywood, is not only unlike the laymans unfitness to assess any recent Hollywood film as a discreet textual artefact that is either better or worse than the artifact produced under the studio regime, Cook and Bernink note (99).It has similarly to do with regarding the textual form of recent Hollywood as expressive of changed production circumstances that lead to a different kind of textual artifact(ibid. ). In other words, as we move on in our globalized, advanced age, it is becoming progressively difficult to regard any single movie as a self-contained, autonomous text. On the contrary, as Eileen Meehan contends, it has become pressing to look upon any New Hollywood mainstream release always and at the same time as text and commodity, intertext and product line (31).In order to retool our critical standards and respond effectively to the new status of the contemporary Hollywood movie, we need to grasp the dramatic changes that the American film industry has undergone in the post-classical period, which started effective after World War II and culminated to a point of radical transformation in the post-1975 period, which has eventually come to best insure the term New Hollywood.These changes have be en lucidly described in a number of historiographic studies (Ray 1985, Balio 1985, 1990, Schatz 1983, 1993, Gomery 1986, Bernardoni 1991, Corrigan 1991, Hillier 1992, Wasko 1994, Kramer 1998, Neale and Smith 1998, Cook and Bernink 1999) which collectively shed ample light on the completely new situation defining New Hollywood. What has drastically changed is both the ways movies are made and the ways in which Hollywood has been doing business.After the governments dismantling of the vertically-integrated studio system, the industry morose to producing and selling motion pictures on a film-by-film basis, resulting in the shift of mightiness from studio heads to deal-makers (agents), in the rise of independent producers/directors, and in a more competitive and fragmented movie merchandiseplace (Schatz 9).To the rise of TV and the emergence of other competing media technologies (VCRs, Cable and Satellite TV) Hollywood responded with a re-orientation towards blockbuster movies, these high-cost, high-tech, high-s publications, multi-purpose diversion machines that breed music pictorial matters and soundtrack albums, TV series and videocassettes, video games and theme approximate range rides, novelizations and comic books (Schatz 9).Despite the increasingly fragmented but ever more expanding give suckment industry with its demographics and target audiences, its diversified multimedia conglomerates, its global(ized) markets and new spoken language systems, the calculated blockbuster, as New Hollywoods feature film, stay the driving force of the industry (ibid. ). This is testified by the monumental mastery of the blockbuster at the box-office.Schatz cites Varietys commissioned study of the industrys all-time commercial hits, in which only 2 movies of the classical period appear to have reached the top, whereas 90 of the top 100 hits have been produced since 1970, and all of the top 20 since Jaws in 1975(9). The big-budget, all-star, spectacular hits of the late fifties and too soon sixties (such as The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur, Cleopatra, or Dr. Zhivago) have some ample profits to show for (all in the vicinity of $25-to $50 million).By the standards of their age, they were considered olympian box-office successes however, by todays standards they seem quite puny contestants to the post-75 era of super-blockbusters which generate record-setting grosses, well beyond the $100 million barrier (always in constant dollars). And such a figure applies only to theatrical rentals, which accounts just for a percentage of the total revenue of a movie which withal finds outlets in ancillary markets. he industrys spectacular harvest-tide and expansion (its horizontal integration) is to a great extent owing to the take-over of the major (Paramount, Fox, Columbia, MCA/Universal) by huge media empires (Warner/Time Communications, Murdochs News Corporations, Sony, Matsushita, respectively) forming multimedia conglomerates with various(a) inter ests in the domestic and the global market, with holdings in movies, TV production, cable, records, book and clip publications, video games, theme parks, consumer electronics (both software and hardware).These huge corporations provide financial muscular tissue for the multi-million production budgets of the blockbusters (since the production costs have themselves sky-rocketed), but also market muscle for promotion. Marketing and advertising strategies have been the key to the unprecedented success of the New Hollywood movie since Jaws through pre-selling, usually cashing in on the popularity of a novel published prior to production, a movie becomes a media event by heavy advertising on prime-time TV and the press, as well as by the massive simultaneous release in thousands of mall-based multiplex theaters.Calculated blockbuster productions are carefully designed to come across the greatest potential profit not only through drawn-out theatrical rental (sequels, re-issues, remakes, directors cut), but also though capitalization in ancillary markets soon the movie will come out on videocassette, audio-cassette, novel, computer game, and the increasingly popular since the mid-nineties, DVD, let wholly an extended market career through by-products ranging from the CD movie soundtrack to T-shirts and toys, which feed to the impressive surge in profits.It becomes obvious thus why contemporary movies cannot be conceived of as individual entities and cannot be separately examined from their economic intertext that renders them position (or rather the driving belt) of a larger entertainment machine and advertising campaign. Expensive blockbusters, which in the early days of the post-classical period were the exception and now, as Schatz states, have become the rule, are the central output of modern Hollywood. exactly what, aside from costs, are their dominant characteristics? How are they able to attract, engage and entertain millions of people? asks Warren Buckl and (166).The blockbuster syndrome has also changed the movies mode of address. Designed approximately a main idea, what is called high concept, a blockbuster becomes increasingly plot-driven, increasingly visceral, kinetic, fast-paced, increasingly reliant on special effects, increasingly wonderful (and thus apolitical), and increasingly targeted at younger audiences. And significantly enough, the lack of complex characters or plot as for example in Star Wars opens the film to other possibilities, notably its amalgamation of genre conventions and its elaborate play of cinematic references.But magic spell these movies enjoy a great popularity among younger audiences, as their huge box-office success indicates, the loss of narrative integrity to spectacle, and the sense of escapism and triviality usually associated with high-gloss, star glamour and dumb show, has driven most academics or old-cinema cinephiles to summarily shun or dismiss blockbusters as merely calculated exercises in shameless profiteering.Warren Buckland thinks that these telephone lines about the loss of narrative potential in the contemporary feature film are overstated and attempts to reverse the unconstructive and hostile evaluative stance (167) of the critics towards the blockbuster. Focusing on a classifiable action-adventure blockbuster, Spielbergs Raiders of the Lost Arc heproposes adopting an analytical and descriptive approach to these films, an approach dubbed by Bordwell and Thompson historic oetics. Part of the argument he makes is that historical poetics can account for the popularity of movies with such a broad appeal (and allows us to take them seriously as aesthetic, cultural objects) especially because movies are examined in cost of their individuality, including their response to their historical moment, in which style and composition respond to the historical questions posed in the culture in which the film is made (168-169). In other words, the issue is not so much about the alleged(prenominal) death of narrativebecause narrative is still alive and wellbut the emergence of a new kind of narrative, whose meaning is conveyed not through traditional narration but by emphasis on spectacle and the visual impact of the pictures which provide additional narrative pleasure and have changed the patterns of looker response. Thus Bucklands concluding remark that it is perhaps time to discover condemning the New Hollywood blockbuster and to start, instead, to understand it, carries more chastity than we have been ready to admit.My intention in this essay is to extend the argument about the narrative/ spectacle issue in the direction suggested by Buckland, but within a wider, cultural perspective. The supremacy of the visual and the spectacular over traditional narration in the textual form of contemporary movies is not only expressive of the changed production values and the texts signifying practices it is also reflective of the changed cultural patte rns and lifestyle habits in postmodernity.Classical cinema prospered traditional storytelling because it provided a univocal interpretation of life and reflected a concurrence in entertainment habits cinema was the predominant form of entertainment, as the movies attracted 83 cents of either U. S. dollar spent on recreation (Ray 26). Its nineties counterpart, with its emphasis on the sensational and the spectacular, on episodic action and generic diversification, is a postmodern cinema entertaining the possibility of multiple signification and the hyperreality of the visual, accede to an increasing commodified experience.As Anne Friedberg puts it, today the culture industry takes on different forms Domestic electronics (fax, modems, cable television) follow the interactive model of dialogic telephone communications. The own(prenominal) computer turns the home user into a desktop publisher, the microwave turns every cook into an instant gourmet, the Walkman transforms each list ener into a radio programmer. some(prenominal) production and reception have been individualized the culture industry no longer speaks in a univocal, monolithic voice. 189) This proliferation of entertainment venues offered to the individual points to a general malaise often regarded as the central feature of postmodernism, what Featherstone damage the fragmentation and overproduction of culturethe key-feature of consumer culture (76). As Jameson says, in postmodern culture, culture itself has become a product in its own right the market has become a substitute for itself and fully as much a commodity as any of the items it includes within itself (1991 x).In the cultural logics of late capitalism, Jamesons code-phrase for postmodernity, what is commodified is not simply the image, which has acquired central role in contemporary culture but lived experience itself. As Guy Debord diagnoses in The Society of the Spectacle, everything that was lived directly has moved away into a repres entation (1983 np). Baudrillard, as Friedberg notes, also talks about the same phenomenonrepresentation of the thing permutation the thingand extends it into a mise-en- abime of the hyperreal, where signs refer only to signs.Hyperreality is not just an anatropous relation of sign and signifier, but one of receding reference, a deterrence operation in the signifying chain(178). A part in this process of the commodification of the sign and the derealization of the real has been played by media technologies, especially electronics, as Vivian Sobchack points out The postmodern and electronic instant constitutes a form of absolute charge (one abstracted from the continuity that gives meaning to the system past/present/future) and changes the disposition of the space it occupies.Without the temporal emphases of historical consciousness and personal history, space becomes abstract, ungrounded, suavea site for play and display rather than an invested situation in which action counts r ather than computes. Such a superficial space can no longer hold the spectator/ users interest, but has to stimulate it constantly in the same way a video game does. Its flatnessa function of its lack of temporal onerousness and bodily investmenthas to attract spectator interest at the surface. In an important sense, electronic space disembodies.