The Reality Effect

Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative

Joel Black

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415937207
• eBook ISBN: 9781135354398
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

It used to be only movies were on film; now the whole world is. The most intimate and most banal moments of our lives are constantly recorded for public consumption. In The Reality Effect, Joel Black argues that the desire to make visible every aspect of our lives is an impulse derived from cinema- one that has made life both more graphic and less "real." He approaches film as a documentary medium that has obscured-if not obliterated- the line between reality and fiction. To illustrate this effect, Black traces the uncanny interplay between movies and real-life events through a series of comparative analyses-from Lolita and the murder of JonBenét Ramsey to Wag the Dog and the Clinton scandal to Crash and Princess Diana's violent death.

part One
film culture

one
Pornographic Science

Missing Scenes: Coover's Casablanca

The unconscious is that chapter of my history which is marked by a blank ...: it is the censored chapter.

—Jacques Lacan

Sexuality in literature is a language in which what is not said is more important than what is.

—Italo Calvino

The fact that everything seems to end up, sooner or later, in the graphic medium of film doesn't mean that movies show "everything," let alone that what they show is "real." Even by today's relatively permissive standards, the Motion Picture Association of America's rating system determines which commercial pictures can be shown to whom, based on the type of content they depict. In order to avoid the dreaded NC-17 rating, commercial filmmakers cannot present actual sex acts, and even simulated sex scenes must be carefully edited. Nevertheless, such scenes are far more graphic today than they were before the 1960s, when they were virtually nonexistent. Clearly the trend is toward greater explicitness.

Take the great love scene in Casablanca. While her husband, Victor Laszlo, is at an underground meeting of resistance fighters, Ilsa returns to Rick's apartment above the Café Américain to plead with her former lover to give her the letters of transit that would allow her to leave the Nazi-controlled territory with her husband. When the embittered Rick fails to be moved by Ilsa's entreaties and by her reference to their affair in Paris on the eve of the war ("I wouldn't bring up Paris if I were you. It's poor salesmanship"), she draws a gun on him in desperation. Rick calls her bluff ("Go ahead and shoot. You'll be doing me a favor"); Ilsa drops the gun and surrenders to his embrace, saying, "The day you left Paris ... if you knew how much I missed you. If you knew how much I loved you ... how much I still love you." Discreetly, the scene fades out to show the airport beacon across from the cafe, its light beam sweeping the city. We next see the camera fade in on Rick, who is watching the beacon—at once a beckoning symbol of escape and a premonition of loss—from his balcony. Turning to Ilsa, who is sitting on a sofa, he asks, "And then ...?," urging her to continue the story she has apparently been telling him about her relationship with Victor and about her failure to show up at the train station and to flee Paris with him when the Germans occupied the city.

Schooled in the cinematic conventions that governed Hollywood movie production in the 1940s, most viewers have no trouble grasping that the fade-out to the beacon after the lovers' embrace signals an unseen scene of lovemaking.¹ But what if director Michael Curtiz had followed a set of conventions from a later era—say, the 1980s or '90s? Or what if today's viewers interpreted the film according to the conventions of an age of R, NC-17, and X ratings, filling in the discreet gap after the fade-out? This is exactly what Robert Coover did in his 1987 collection of cinematically inspired short fictions entitled A Night at the Movies. In the volume's concluding piece, entitled "You Must Remember This," Coover depicts an imaginary scenario of the intimate details of Rick and Ilsa's rekindled love affair during their night together in the Moroccan city. After transcribing Ilsa's nighttime visit as it is presented in the film, the story continues to describe the scene between the fadeout and the fade-in in a twenty-page pornographic description of orgiastic lovemaking, punctuated by Ilsa's comment "It was the best fokk I effer haff."²

Coover's story brilliantly illustrates Peter Lehman's observation that "hardcore pornography is devoted to virtually nothing but the fade of the classical cinema; it is a form which shows in explicit detail what was unthinkable under the Hays Code, and still is forbidden in Hollywood cinema."³ Readers of "You Must Remember This" are jolted into an awareness of what the classic Hollywood movie doesn't, and indeed can't, show. Given the prevailing conventions of the time, sexual intimacy cannot be graphically depicted without appearing obscene. It may be, as the film's signature song "As Time Goes By" affirms, that the "fundamental things apply," but it is only through the organized forgetting and repression of those fundamental things that a film such as Casablanca achieves an enduring reputation as an artistic, rather than pornographic, classic. In entitling his piece "You Must Remember This," Coover would perversely have his readers "remember" those fundamental things that good taste and aesthetic decorum customarily cause them to "forget." By reworking the film's tactful presentation of the rekindled love affair enacted by Bogart and Bergman as an explicit sexual encounter, Coover uses the nonvisual medium of literature to overthrow well-established cinematic conventions and to mix and adulterate genres that have been kept rigorously separate. In short, he transforms this classic film into a porn flick.

Despite the disingenuous remark that opens A Night at the Movies—"Ladies and Gentlemen May safely visit this Theatre as no Offensive Films are ever Shown Here"—Coover's pornographic piece seems calculated to offend traditionalist film buffs who bemoan the tendency toward explicitness. Michael Medved, one of the most vocal of such critics, has blasted the Hollywood film industry of the 1980s and '90s, claiming that

few observers would suggest that the overall quality of motion pictures has improved since the removal of the [Hays] Production Code [in 1966], Considering all of the films of the '80s and '90s, for instance, and comparing them to the Hollywood product of the '30s and '40s, it is difficult to imagine that anyone could claim that the increased latitude for filmmakers has brought about a more distinguished body of work.⁴

In fact, one can easily imagine any number of today's directors disputing this claim and taking Martin Amis's view that if "cinema is just mass entertainment, then Medved is an eloquent awakener. If cinema is art, then Medved is just a noisy philistine."⁵ But many of those same directors might well find themselves agreeing with Medved's claim in the case of recognized masterworks, agreeing that the original Casablanca would be infinitely preferable to a steamy modern remake. Such major filmmakers as Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese have lobbied for the protection of classic films from studios that seek to sell the rights for commercial purposes. Their concern stems from the fact that while the consecrated status of movies such as Casablanca and Gone with the Wind has so far deterred even the most ambitious filmmakers from doing a remake, that may be about to change. Literary sequels of Casablanca and Gone with the Wind have already appeared; the GWTW sequel has been filmed, and Warner Bros., which produced Casablanca, has the option of turning Michael Walsh's sequel, As Time Goes By, into a feature film or a miniseries. One special effects company, Virtual Celebrity, which acquired the "digital rights" to a number of deceased film actors, even considered making a prequel to Casablanca starring a digitally resuscitated Marlene Dietrich, ("I always said it would have been great to see Dietrich win her first Academy Award," said the company's owner, Jeff Lotman.⁶) Even as the GWTW sequel was in production, Steven Spielberg warned that "we're only a couple of years away from being able to remake Gone With the Wind with other actors as Rhett and Scarlett. The icons of the 1930s, '40s, '50s and '60s are the pop culture of the 21st century, and I don't think that's right."⁷

The canonization of Casablanca in American cinema, and the threat posed by a modern cinematic remake to that film's artistic integrity and cultural authority, makes Coover's pornographic treatment of the film's love scene seem all the more scandalous, even in its literary guise. (Spiel-berg's anxiety about the possibility of someone remaking Gone with the Wind "with other actors as Rhett and Scarlett" would be all the greater had he considered the prospect of a hard-core remake of Casablanca featuring digital facsimiles of Bogey and Bergman.) The scene of Rick and Ilsa's orgy is bound to strike Casablanca devotees as having no place in the film and as being nothing but Coover's own fantasy—mediated, to be sure, by the literary and cinematic pornographic products of his time, nearly half a century after the original film was made.

Consider, however, the response to Casablanca of a non-American critic who is not awed by the movie, and who judges it to be, "by any strict critical standards, ... a very mediocre film," especially when compared to a "masterpiece" such as Stagecoach. For Umberto Eco, the secret of Casablanca's undeserved success is its archetypal allusiveness: it "brings with it, like a trail of perfume, other situations that the viewer brings to bear on it quite readily, taking them without realizing it from films that only appeared later."⁸ So while the Casablanca enthusiast may deplore Coover's revision for anachronistically introducing cliches from pornographic books and films of the 1980s, Eco makes a similar case against Casablanca as a film that invites modern viewers to read in cinematic cliches from a later era. The cliches Eco refers to are softcore, romantic references that attach themselves to Casablanca "like a trail of perfume"; Coover has simply substituted hard-core, pornographic cliches "from films that only appeared later." And those familiar soft-core cliches are every bit as much fantasies as Coover's sexually explicit cliches. In fact, Coover's pornographic cliches are arguably more authentic than the romantic conventions customarily associated with the film because they are explicit rather than allusive. In any case, Coover can't be faulted for introducing extraneous elements into what Eco describes as a fundamentally allusive film. All Coover has done is to alter—to subvert rather than pervert—the expected allusions.

While mainstream film critics may be appalled by Coover's hardcore literary revision of Casablanca's love scene, especially since it anticipates a sexually explicit cinematic remake, literary critics have generally been impressed by what they consider Coover's "spoof." Edmund White praised Coover for having "made literary art out of a total immersion in the movies" and for "enlarging his literary technique by forcing it to assimilate cinematic conventions and to approximate filmic style" in a work that is "vivacious," "entertaining," and "one hundred percent American."⁹ The New York Times credited Coover for inverting the conventions of Hollywood films, thereby "mak[ing] us question our most fundamental social and cultural preoccupations."¹⁰ And the Chicago Tribune's reviewer found Coover's "wickedly inventive and sacrilegious sendup" of Casablanca to be easily the best of the pieces in A Night at the Movies.¹¹ Far from censuring Coover for producing a travesty of a great film, these reviewers praised him for unmasking the inauthenticity of Hollywood's icons. Do these reviews represent a positive critical response to verbal, literary pornography as opposed to a negative critical response to visual, cinematic pornography? Or do they represent the New York- and Chicago-based literary establishment's revenge on Hollywood for turning great novels into tawdry movies? Hadn't Coover succeeded, after all, in reversing the usual process whereby "a scene that is sexy in [a] novel becomes pornographic by transposition to the screen"?¹² Movies based on literary texts are generally not intended to be parodies; nevertheless, the above critics all read Coover's piece as a literary parody of a cinematic work. And it is as a parody, rather than as pornography, that his piece is praised.¹³

One wonders what these critics would say about videos such as Satin and Lace II, Hollywood Undercover, Penthouse magazine's 1993 production that features "look-alike pets" imitating famous actresses in soft-core versions of bedroom scenes from classic Hollywood films— Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop, Liz Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. The same critics who approved of Coover's literary parody of Casablanca are likely to dismiss the Penthouse video's re-creations of Hollywood bedroom scenes on the grounds that they are primarily (if not exclusively) pornographic, and only secondarily (if at all) parodic—parody in hard-core films usually being limited to a tasteless play on the titles of popular commercial movies. But then what would these same critics say about the 1977 Casablanca spoof Disco Dolls in Hot Skin, a 3-D porn film currently being revived on college campuses? Odds are they would rave about it as parody and as a cult classic—that is, if they deigned to write about it at all. In contrast, Penthouse, with its commercial fetishizing of the female body, makes an easy target for highbrow and politically correct critics; its lascivious re-creations of classic cinematic scenes provide yet another occasion to express critical superiority and disdain.

Is there a double standard here, a tacit critical rating code that gives a thumbs-up to parody and a thumbs-down to pornography, or that is more likely to justify verbal rather than visual pornography as parody? Readers of literature certainly aren't less inhibited or repressed than viewers of film, but most critics seem to be more comfortable with verbal rather than visual depictions of sexually graphic scenes; it's easier to rationalize (as parody, for example) what you don't have to visualize. Also, literature is different from film in that it has a long—one might almost say distinguished—pornographic tradition: readers are accustomed to the idea of "forbidden" classics, from Justine to Lolita, and literary masterworks have even been criticized for being too tame. "Why can't they make a War and Peace with fucking in it?," the artist R. B. Kitaj has complained, presumably referring to the novel rather than the film.¹⁴ And although a few filmmakers, such as Bernardo Bertolucci in Last Tango in Pans and Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut, have attempted to realize Boris Adrian's dream in Terry Southern's 1970 novel Blue Movie of making a big-budget sex film starring Hollywood actors, the gap between commercial and adult film has proven virtually impenetrable.¹⁵ In the nonvisual medium of literature, pornography—and pornographic revisions of nonpornographic works—are now a good deal more acceptable than they are in the visual medium of film. Visual images are simply more potent, seductive, and "in your face" than verbal constructions—espe-cially in the case of sexual representations.

One factor that may keep readers from appreciating Coover's revision is that its verbal description of Rick and Ilsa's lovemaking is so graphic that it could conceivably create an indelible visual impression in the reader's mind, making it impossible to ever have an "innocent" viewing of the film again. The issue here is that Coover's text not only is a parody of Casablanca, but also can be read as an actual script for an X-rated version of the film. It would be one thing if Coover had offered a behind-the-scenes peek at the real-life relationships of the actors and other personnel involved in the making of Casablanca, as a number of cineastes have done; instead, he explores the hidden sex life of the film's characters, which is the stuff of fantasy.¹⁶ Again, Coover would have given no grounds for offense if he had simply found artistic inspiration in the film and used it as an intertext for the creation of an "original" work of art, as Woody Allen did in Play It Again, Sam.¹⁷ Instead, he inserted his own pornographic intertext into Casablanca itself, infecting it like a virus and undercutting its effect as an artistic work that mediates some profound meaning or that embodies some transcendent truth. Viewers who have been emotionally moved by the movie's love scene may feel unable to enjoy the film again after reading Coover's gross depiction of sexual intimacy.

Maybe such disillusionment is inevitable fifty years after the movie was made, and maybe it's not such a bad thing. As much as Coover subverts Casablanca's ideal of romantic love, he also exposes the sexu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• introduction The Filmed Century
• part one film culture
• part two filmic events
• part three film dreams
• afterword on the afterlife
• notes
• name and title index
• subject index