However, before addressing possibilities for activism and resistance, it should be clear that these are at stake in postmodern theory. Certainly, nihilism and indifference are often conflated in criticism of postmodern theorists, whose existentialism is often construed as resolute cynicism. Baudrillard rejects this categorization outright: “I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.”[1] Mulvey, for her part, addresses the need to move from descriptive binary theories towards a new social model, “from creative confrontation to creativity.”[2] Jameson, meanwhile, suggests that every text of popular culture has valuable potential in as much as it evokes – if only momentarily – our deepest and most utopic desires.[3] Wood, in his extensive film criticism, confesses the appeals of defeatism: “Despair is perhaps today our most dangerous enemy, and the most difficult to combat.” [4] He outlines something of a manifesto which he concludes by underlining the importance of awareness: “The first aim is to persuade people of the desperateness of our situation, without which no solution is even thinkable.”[5] Each writer’s work, then, posits a need for change and some agenda whereby that change may come about.
For Baudrillard this change must occur through violence – real or represented – that can force a re-emergence of the symbolic into our contemporary hyperreality. He characterizes Western society as one in which power and value are long-dead, though their emptied representations continue to exert an extremely violent hegemony of deterrence.[6] He continues, “[t]his supreme ruse of the system, that of the simulacrum of its own death, through which it maintains us in life by having liquidated through absorption all possible negativity, only a superior ruse can stop.”[7] It is unclear what form this ruse might take, whether it ought to be stylized, realistic, violent or parodic, or all of these. Certainly, hybridity and parody are important elements of postmodern art, and thereby the concept of a ruse as a politically subversive performance seems feasible in the current cinema.
An apt example of such a ruse emerges from Baudrillard’s thoughts on animals, and two scenes in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup.[8] Baudrillard writes: “In a world bent on doing nothing but making one speak, in a world assembled under the hegemony of signs and discourse, their [animals’] silence weighs more and more heavily on our organization of meaning.”[9] Take, in light of these words, the mime troupe of the opening and closing of Blowup. Their renouncement of language – always yelling unintelligibly or being completely silent – makes ascribing meaning or causality to their actions all but impossible. They are a parody of the military – subverting one of the most repressive, hierarchical and patriarchal power structures in contemporary society – dressed in mock uniforms and arriving in the film piled into and onto an army vehicle. This first appearance is a parodic invasion. The mimes lay claim to an empty office plaza then take to a land-invasion of the streets. They assault people with the very unintelligibility of their presence: their speech is incomprehensible, their movements unpredictable, their reasoning unclear at best, more likely non-existent. Their ruse is the violent presentation of the arbitrary assembly of language and meaning to people – in the street or in the movie audience – whose entire life is rooted in a hyperreal chain of signification.
The mime troupe’s second appearance goes further in this direction. A mimed tennis match is performed for the benefit of the troupe’s members, but also for the film audience and its unnamed protagonist (David Hemmings). Symbolically, this scene is certainly one of “mockery and defiance,” operating “as a model of decomposition to the whole of society, a contagious model of disaffection of a whole social structure.”[10] The tennis match has no real consequences, does not even have the potential for real consequences: no equipment is being used, no score is being kept. There is no opposition being played out, it is a hyperreal duel with no actual opponents and no actual stakes, only an audience that awaits the outcome of a tennis match that will have none. What better analogy for Baudrillard’s concept of atomic deterrence, whose real principle is never the actual possibility of mutual destruction, but “the eternal deferral of the atomic clash.” He goes on to explain that “[t]he atom and the nuclear are made to be disseminated for deterrent ends, the power of catastrophe must, instead of stupidly exploding, be disseminated in homeopathic, molecular doses, in the continuous reservoirs of information.”[11] The mimed tennis match, in which victory or defeat are impossible, corresponds exactly to this deferred atomic clash that keeps its audience controlled in anticipation of a conclusion that will never occur. By dramatizing the empty significance of the oppositions by which we structure meaning, the mime tennis match confronts viewers with the decomposition of the current mode of social organization.
The most subversive elements of a film like Blowup, meanwhile, for Jameson and Mulvey, are bolstered by its lack of a firm ending. For both writers, there is a fundamentally revolutionary potential in the change of social structures that characterizes the middle-section of most linear cinematic narratives, and to extend this section by foregoing a firm ending adds to a film’s subversive capacity. Jameson elaborates from an analysis of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws the inherent “Utopian or transcendent potential” of any mass cultural text.[12] He argues that in order to finally reinforce the prevailing social order, “even the most degraded type of mass culture… cannot manipulate unless they offer some genuine shred of content as a fantasy bribe to the public about to be so manipulated.”[13] Similarly, Mulvey finds the middle sections of narrative films marked “by extraordinary events in which the rules and expectations of ordinary existence are left in suspense.”[14] The disruption of the social order and subsequent story action offer critical distance from everyday reality and the possibility of alternative situations, or at least modified relations. This principle of disruption of the dominant order is where Jameson and Mulvey locate the fundamental Utopian possibilities of commercial narrative cinema.
Alex Proyas’s film Dark City provides an example of Jameson and Mulvey’s similar narrative theories, in that it offers nearly unlimited Utopian potential in its climactic moments.[15] After John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) dispatches the Strangers, he stands in a Dark City street with the entire tuning machinery at his disposal, capable of re-making the city as he sees fit. A moment such as this echoes Jameson’s appraisal that “all contemporary works of art… have as their underlying impulse… our deepest fantasies about the nature of social life, both as we live it now, and as we feel in our bones it ought rather to be lived.”[16] The city Murdoch begins to create before the film ends, however, severely limits the Utopian potential opened by the defeat of the Strangers. It is still a city based on deception: Murdoch does not reveal its mechanics to its inhabitants but rather improves on the illusion created by the Strangers.
Another step is needed, then, for commercial narrative films to help actualize some revolutionary alternative, or at least train viewers to a level of critical awareness from which revolutionary work can commence. Jameson only hints at this next step, but Mulvey and Wood discuss at length the merits of a liminal or oppositional cinema. For Wood, the critic’s role is to promote “an awareness of how individual films dramatize, as they inevitably must, the conflicts that characterize our culture: conflicts centered on class/wealth, gender, race, sexual orientation.”[18] For Wood, films in an era of intense social repression such as ours are structured by a fundamental dualism: “the urge to reaffirm and justify that repression, and the urge of rebellion, the desire to subvert, combat, overthrow.”[19] The most important films, by these criteria, are those that express discontent with the dominant social order, and preferably posit some viable alternative or a model for revolutionary action. Wood refers to such films as “oppositional cinema.”[20]
For her part, Mulvey builds on the potential for change she identified in the middle passages of parabolic narratives. In these periods of transition, she explains, “it is the possibility of change that is celebrated, and the alteration of status implies movement on a linear model, rather than opposition on a polar model.”[21] What she advocates in the end is a meeting of the principles of commercial narrative film with those of avant-garde cinema. If a cinema borne from these two traditions “can be conceived around ending that is not closure, and the state of liminality as politically significant, it can question the symbolic, and enable myth and symbols to be constantly revalued.”[22] Like Wood, therefore, Mulvey locates hope in the possibility for a modified version of today’s
What this cinema resembles is inevitably unclear. Furthermore, there are elements of it – though few – already present in today’s cinema. The recently-completed Jason Bourne trilogy is a good example.[23] In the series Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), a CIA super-agent who failed a mission and supposedly died, plays cat and mouse with his angry superiors who would rather kill him – and the damaging secrets he doesn’t quite know he knows – than help him understand his past. Throughout the series Bourne is referred to in terms of how much money the CIA invested in him, to what extent he has been engineered and tweaked. In these moments he is more akin to a fighter jet than a human being, and elicits the audience’s sympathy for being so manipulated. However, these moments mask a fundamental similarity between the audience and Bourne: what are we but barely rational fragmented entities, invested with capital and prodded into behaving in a certain manner when given the appropriate cues? This becomes explicit in the third film when, after fighting off another super-agent sent to kill him, Bourne asks “Do you even know why you’re supposed to kill me? Look at us. Look at what they make you give.” Addressed to a programmed super-agent within the film, the question has even deeper implications for the programmed super-consumers in the audience. In a way, then, the liberation of Bourne over the three films is simultaneously our own.
In another respect, however, the Bourne series falls short of the revolutionary potential it raises, following Jameson’s concept of Utopian possibility. The series cultivates a distrust of the CIA that becomes a general distrust of government. From the first film’s opening scenes, the CIA comes across as an agency fraught with power dynamics and self-serving bureaucrats for whom national security can be manipulated to ensure personal security. These men become more aggressive with the introduction in the second film of a female agent of some status, Pamela Landy (Joan Allen). Landy is as appalled as viewers by the ego-centrism of CIA higher-ups, and in many ways she steals the final chapter from Bourne. The Utopian possibility suggested is that Bourne, with Landy’s assistance, might bring down the CIA, and through a ripple effect, the entire U.S. government. This possibility, of course, is never openly articulated, much less realized. In the end, Landy and Bourne bring the old boys’ club to justice: the series ends with several CIA villains on trial for various conspiracies. This closure, however, is too strong a re-affirmation of the status-quo, and Mulvey would undoubtedly find the Bourne series’ conclusion lacking in liminality. What Robin Wood writes of the message communicated by All the President’s Men applies seamlessly to the Bourne trilogy’s conclusion: “the System may be liable to corruption but will always right itself.”[24] In this case, Landy’s success in bringing corrupt CIA officials to justice masks the larger corruption, which is the entire organization of contemporary society.
Beyond the issue of what it might look like, another question faces the concept of oppositional or liminal cinema: what would be its real impact on the consciousness of movie-going publics? For Mulvey[25] and Wood,[26] this is a task to be taken up my filmmakers and critics alike, to produce more subversive films and to encourage intellectual engagement with those films. Jameson, though never so explicitly, suggests a position similar to those adopted by Mulvey and Wood. [27] Baudrillard, meanwhile, is less concerned with readership practices, but places some faith in the revolutionary potential of media such as film. After explaining that there is no longer a distinction between the real and the medium,[28] he suggests how this blurring of registers might be put to revolutionary uses: “if every strategy today is that of mental terror and of deterrence tied to the suspension and eternal simulation of catastrophe, then the only means of mitigating this scenario would be to make the catastrophe arrive, to produce or to reproduce a real catastrophe.”[29] Thus, to produce the collapse of capitalist Western society in mediated form, because there is no distinction between the mediated and the hyperreal, might lead to the actual collapse of capitalist Western society. This scenario, however, goes far beyond the possibilities of a liminal or oppositional cinema, demanding some sort of hyperreal disastrous media event.
Though not always similar, these four theorists posit solutions to the current impasse in critical and revolutionary thought. Their arguments, building on principles of postmodern theory, prescribe possible avenues for action and change. Furthermore, their three groups of theories can be reconciled into a revolutionary vision for contemporary cinema. Baudrillard’s call for violence, ruse and the representation of catastrophe suggests a cycle of epic disaster movies in which the audience basks in the spectacular destruction of society. The notion of disaster complements the concept of Utopian possibilities elaborated by Jameson and found also in Mulvey’s writings on the disruption of the dominant social order in narrative films. The destruction of contemporary society, as in a disaster film, creates a narrative possibility for rebuilding, but also for transformation. Finally, invoking Mulvey and Wood’s calls for liminal or oppositional cinema, this Utopian disaster cycle’s impact would be more effective employing certain avant-garde aesthetics and narrative structures in order to convey the upheaval of a collapsing society. Furthermore, it should also display an extreme hybridity, drawing from the various European and Asian New Waves, and particularly fruitful periods in Hollywood cinema, such as the late Western cycle of the 1950s and 60s, and the American Renaissance of the 60s and 70s. In so doing, this liminal Utopian disaster cycle, through its narrative and aesthetic conventions, would raise awareness in contemporary audiences of the revolutionary dimension of film, and also cue them to the conventions of earlier subversive film cycles.
Note: This paper was written for Prof. Royal Brown's Postmodern Film Theory class at the New School in the Fall of 2007.[1] Baudrillard, Jean. “On Nihilism.” In Simulacra and Simulation. 1981. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser.
[2] Mulvey, Laura. “Changes: Thoughts on Myth, Narrative and Historical Experience.” In Narrative and Other Pleasures.
[3] Jameson, Frederic. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” In Signatures of the Visible.
[4] Wood, Robin.
[5] Ibid., xxix.
[6] Baudrillard, 152.
[7] Ibid., 153-4.
[8] Blowup. Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni. Perf. David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, John Castle, Peter Bowles. Bridge Films, 1966.
[9] Baudrillard, 137.
[10] Ibid., 150.
[11] Ibid., 57.
[12] Jameson, 39.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Mulvey, 171.
[15]
[16] Jameson, 46.
[17] Mulvey, 171.
[18] Wood, 3.
[19] Ibid., 42.
[20] Ibid., 333.
[21] Mulvey, 171.
[22] Ibid., 175.
[23] Bourne Identity, The. Dir. Doug Liman. Perf. Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Chris Cooper, Clive Owen, Brian Cox, Julia Stiles. Universal Pictures, 2002.
Bourne Supremacy, The. Dir. Paul Greengrass. Perf. Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Brian Cox, Joan Allen, Julia Stiles. Universal Pictures, 2004.
Bourne Ultimatum, The. Dir. Paul Greengrass. Perf. Matt Damon, Julia Stiles, Joan Allen, Albert Finney, Scott Glenn, David Strathairn. Universal Pictures, 2007.
[24] Wood, 96.
[25] Mulvey, 172.
[26] Wood, 3-8.
[27] Jameson, 46.
[28] Ibid., 83.
[29] Ibid., 57.
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