Transactions with the World

Ecocriticism and the Environmental Sensibility of New Hollywood

Adam O'Brien

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785330018
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

In their bold experimentation and bracing engagement with culture and politics, the "New Hollywood" films of the late 1960s and early 1970s are justly celebrated contributions to American cinematic history. Relatively unexplored, however, has been the profound environmental sensibility that characterized movies such as The Wild Bunch, Chinatown, and Nashville. This brisk and engaging study explores how many hallmarks of New Hollywood filmmaking, such as the increased reliance on location shooting and the rejection of American self-mythologizing, made the era such a vividly "grounded" cinematic moment. Synthesizing a range of narrative, aesthetic, and ecocritical theories, it offers a genuinely fresh perspective on one of the most studied periods in film history.

CHAPTER ONE
Four Faces of New Hollywood

What matters most about films of the seventies – what makes people remember them and return to them – is…

Todd Berliner, Hollywood Incoherent

New Hollywood has been well served by film historians, and the explanations offered for the acute distinctiveness of that period are varied and broadly complementary. Summarizing many of these studies, Murray Smith (1998) describes mutations in the use of ‘New Hollywood’ and related terms, but is able to establish a broad coherence across these. Whether one chooses to emphasize industrial upheaval, the politicization of the American youth market (particularly in terms of Vietnam), the challenge of television’s rise and rise, technical innovations (such as zoom lenses and more mobile cameras), feminism, post-hippie disillusionment or the ‘academization’ of film appreciation and film history, there is little need to refute or challenge any competing explanations. This is because, in many ways, they do not seem to really compete, and in fact even sustain one another. For example, technical innovations were often adopted from television practice (Cook 2000: 361), and the adoption was to some extent a defensive response on the part of an embattled and confused industry (Ray 1985: 269). Looked at from a different but complementary angle, these innovations came to the fore thanks to a new generation of reflexive movie enthusiasts (Kolker 1988: 9–10). In this sense, New Hollywood is complex to the extent that it seems to reward so many explanatory approaches, but quite comprehensible because of the harmonious relationship between these approaches.

The notion that New Hollywood’s distinctiveness can be understood in environmental terms is, at this early stage, a somewhat abstract one, so it is important to demonstrate how such a hypothesis builds upon existing work in the field. Accordingly, I will in this chapter introduce four different characterizations of New Hollywood – as socio-political rhetoric, as a departure from classicism, as a ‘down to earth’ aesthetic and as an industrial phenomenon – and suggest how closer attention to questions of environmentality can enhance our understanding of each. In doing so, I will build on the key features I identified in Gilberto Perez’s writing on Jean Renoir’s Partie de campagne – materiality, particularity, scale and filmmaking presence – and sketch out how each of these ecocritical concerns can add a new dimension to our understanding of New Hollywood.

The Socio-Political New Hollywood

The late 1960s and early 1970s could be described as a traumatic time for US nationhood, to such an extent that it would be difficult to fathom the prospect of American cinema not reacting in one way or another to the huge social and cultural upheavals of the time. The checklist is a familiar one – Vietnam, Watergate, racial tensions, assassinations – yet still pertinent. According to many writers on New Hollywood, this is its all-important backdrop, and one which to a greater or lesser extent informs the particular character of many of its films.

Peter Lev’s American Films of the Seventies: Conflicting Visions (2000) encapsulates this approach. At the very beginning of his preface, Lev announces his intention to argue ‘that the films of the period constitute a dialogue or debate about the nature and the prospects of American society’ (2000: xi). Although the chapters move between broad social themes (such as ‘The Hippie Generation’ and ‘The End of the Sixties’) and particular tropes which regularly appear in the films (such as ‘Vigilantes and Cops’), there is an underlying assumption that film content was essentially reactive. Thus, the ‘Disaster and Conspiracy’ chapter moves towards a discussion of Airport, Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) and The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974) from a consideration of the Vietnam War, the OPEC oil crisis and the Watergate scandal. In A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema (1985), Robert B. Ray presents an image of New Hollywood which is at once both more abstract and more nuanced than Lev’s. Ray takes on board broad historiographical debates about the uses and abuses of Turner’s ‘frontier thesis’, the significance of counterculture fashions and styles, the impact of television scheduling and the mutations of the Hollywood film star. He covers many ‘angles’, but ultimately identifies the ruptures and contradictions in America’s Left/Right divide as the generative force behind New Hollywood’s particular character. He sees the divide as becoming somewhat undermined during the 1960s, as the Left adopted traditional Right motifs (individualism, distrust of the law) and vice versa. Ostensibly polarized but essentially indistinguishable, the muddle of US political ideals could be seen most acutely in variations on the theme of a closing frontier:

The counterculture’s most visible members imprisoned themselves in the very mythology they attacked. Thus, despite their insistence that the frontier’s closing had rendered traditional lifestyles and institutions obsolete, their ideals were blatantly mythical: a passive dropping out that resembled the wandering outlaw life, and the small communal farms that seemed parodies of the yeoman husbandry that Jefferson himself had declared outmoded as a basis for American life. (Ray 1985: 255)

In these terms, the uncertain atmosphere of a film such as Five Easy Pieces is not so much an eloquent articulation of the characters’ (or the country’s) traumatic self-doubt, but an unhappy compromise; an inevitable result of the American Left’s inability to forge a new language and new images through which to register its anger and discontent.

If Lev and Ray understand New Hollywood films as refractions of socio-political issues, William J. Palmer sees them as uncomplicated reflections. In The Films of the Seventies: A Social History (1987), Palmer takes on the challenge of arguing for Hollywood’s ability to offer relevant commentary on contemporary events. And he sees the 1970s as a perfect example of American cinema’s alertness to the cultural and political climate:

The events which created the major social issues of the seventies (the Vietnam War, Watergate, etc.) also planted submerged social attitudes within national societies […] as well as within the film industry itself. These submerged attitudes – guilt for Vietnam, embarrassment over Watergate, helplessness in the face of corporate power, confusion to the very nature of reality – in turn inspired, shaped, even dictated the subject matter of the films being made. (Palmer 1987: 18)

Not only does each social issue prompt an easily identifiable ‘attitude’, but these attitudes are expressed directly in the films. This excerpt perhaps crystallizes what it means to see New Hollywood as a socio-political phenomenon. As an approach to film history in general, it inevitably lends itself to some periods more readily than others, and the early 1970s is possibly an ideal case – after all, political intrigue, assassinations and disastrous warfare are all brimming with themes and images that transfer quite smoothly into popular American cinema. How might ecocriticism respond to or develop this characterization?

Initially, it can do so through its emphasis on a text’s strong link to its material referents. Ecocriticism is especially conducive to a kind of textual analysis which resists searching for a metaphorical design and instead prioritizes art’s mimetic impulse, its ability (and responsibility?) to represent and point us back to worldly details. Writing about his gradual turn in the 1970s away from literary theory towards matters of ecology, William Rueckert describes his new – ecocritical – sphere of interest as ‘the remorseless inevitableness of things’ (1996: 113). Sometimes this resistance to abstraction can take the form of a rather simplistic rebuttal of postmodern or poststructuralist discourse, as when Paul Shepard complains that ‘Lyotard and his fellows have about them no glimmer of earth, of leaves or soil’ (1995: 20). However, Shepard’s concerns that ‘reality has dissolved in a connoisseurship of structural principles’ and that ‘a twentieth-century doubt has interposed itself between us and the world’ (1995: 20) are not easy to dismiss. Their implicit call for a mode of (eco)criticism which pays due deference to the idea that representations refer to the material world – and not only our ideas and fears about it – reflects not only trends in contemporary ecocriticism, but also the film theory of Siegfried Kracauer. Adapted to New Hollywood, this approach would avoid assuming that its films are meditations on socio-cultural malaise (for example), and strive to understand them as works of and about particular things, people and places. Chapter Two explores such an approach.

The Un-classical New Hollywood

While not necessarily denying the significance of America’s turbulent cultural atmosphere in the late 1960s and early 1970s, some writers instead choose to emphasize the peculiar nature of the films’ formal execution. For although many New Hollywood films were built on certain predictable tenets of popular American cinema (genre, stardom, goal-oriented narratives), they had a tendency to disrupt or frustrate these features, drawing attention to their fragility without wholeheartedly disowning them. This compromise, or contradiction, between (dramatic) radicalism and conservatism is thought by many to have prompted a kind of essential friction or contradiction at the heart of New Hollywood films, manifesting itself as hypocrisy, ambiguity or incoherence – or all three simultaneously. The unity and smoothness which have often been celebrated as hallmarks of classical Hollywood were, so this approach goes, fundamentally compromised, and the manner in which Hollywood ‘pitched’ its stories changed considerably.

Robin Wood (2003), while clearly sensitive to the political climate (‘from Vietnam to Reagan’ is not an arbitrary periodization), focuses on narrative incoherence as the quintessential feature of Hollywood cinema during this period. Wood’s chapter, ‘The Incoherent Text: Narrative in the 70s’, may introduce ‘the impingement of Vietnam on the national consciousness’ (Wood 2003: 49) as a key influencing factor on Hollywood during this time, but his careful textual analyses go well beyond cultural determinism. Instead, after characterizing classical Hollywood as ‘the most extraordinary tension between the Classical and the Romantic that can be imagined’ (2003: 48), he dissects Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) as a quintessential 1970s film in its failure to master its own contradictory urges. By paying close attention to the diverging instincts of Scorsese and Paul Schrader (the screenwriter), Wood characterizes Taxi Driver as a bundle of irresolvable tensions, and – importantly – implies that the film’s drama generates uncertainty rather than simply reflects it. What is more, by contextualizing Taxi Driver in terms of film history, Wood further complicates the notion that New Hollywood’s distinctive tone was simply a product or reflection of external social forces. He does this mainly through a revealing comparison with John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), but the following description is also telling:

Taxi Driver represents the culmination of the obsession with dirt / cleanliness that recurs throughout the history of the American cinema – together, of course, with its metaphorical derivatives, corruption / purity, animalism / spirituality, sexuality / repression. In the vision of Travis Bickle […] the filth kept at bay through so many generations of movies by the traditional values of monogamy / family / home has risen up and flooded the entire city. (Wood 2003: 52)

The ‘keeping at bay’ chimes with Wood’s other comments in this chapter regarding Hollywood’s default (classical) mode of repression. So the ‘rising up’ evident in Taxi Driver is first and foremost a notable feature within the context of American cinema. That it has important correlations with changes in a wider social context is probably beyond question for Wood, but narrative incoherence ultimately comes across as a primarily textual phenomenon.

While Robin Wood attempts to understand New Hollywood’s incoherence without passing judgement on it per se (he instead critiques or praises particular manifestations of it), other writers on the un-classical New Hollywood have been more sweepingly critical. James Bernardoni’s The New Hollywood: What the Movies Did with the New Freedoms of the Seventies (1991) posits that filmmakers of the period suffered from a series of ‘fallacies’. As the auteur theory planted delusional notions of grandeur in the minds of directors, the happy equilibrium of classical Hollywood was betrayed, and in their desperate attempts to ape television and literature, Hitchcockian formal perfection and Hawksian ‘fun’, New Hollywood films were led astray from their essential obligation – to create meaningful entertainment. Filmmakers of the time were, according to Bernardoni, torn in too many diverging directions, and this confusion sowed the seeds of artistic failure. A comparison of Howard Hawks and Robert Altman crystallizes this position. The film under scrutiny is M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970), and Altman’s comedy is doubly damned for both aspiring to the heights of a Hawksian comedy of camaraderie and refusing to pay heed to the careful craftsmanship which Hawks exemplified. ‘Altman’s seeming indifference to what he includes in his compositions’, writes Bernardoni, ‘becomes a major weakness in M*A*S*H; for, as Hawks well understood, one of the primary sources of true film comedy is the establishment and exploitation of the tension between the photographic objects, human and inanimate, that are forced to interact within the boundaries of the frame’ (1991: 119). M*A*S*H wants to continue the glorious tradition of a classic Hollywood genre, but Altman contaminates it with his ‘glib-cruel humour’ (Bernadoni 1991: 124) and ‘his fondness for zoom shots and jump cuts’ (ibid.: 126). In Bernardoni’s analysis, the film comes across as a grab bag of cynical effects, symptomatic of New Hollywood’s inability to define what it wanted to achieve and how it wanted to achieve it.

Bernardoni’s study has about it the sense of passionate disappointment. In contrast, Todd Berliner’s Hollywood Incoherent (2010) is an attempt to grapple with New Hollywood’s formal peculiarities through a systematic analysis of storytelling strategies. It is an overtly normative study, and although Berliner is keen to stress that his comparisons to the model of classical Hollywood are not value driven and that his use of terms such as ‘perverse’, ‘superfluous’ and ‘relevant’ is not judgemental (2010: 9), New Hollywood is inevitably characterized as a kind of freakish aberration. Films of the period, Berliner argues, were invariably marked by ‘narrative perversities’ such as ‘ideological incongruities, logical and characterlogical inconsistencies, distracting and stylistic ornamentation and discordances, irresolutions, ambiguities and other impediments to straightforwardness in a film’s narration’ (2010: 10). At some junctures Berliner emphasizes the disruptive influence of European cinema, a point which chimes with Robin Wood’s appraisal of Altman: the ‘richness of Altman’s best films, as well as the meretriciousness of his worst, derives partly from his cultural schizophrenia: obsessed with America and being American, he casts continual longing looks to Europe’ (Wood 2003: 29). Berliner is also concerned with genre, and provides a taxonomy of the ‘genre benders’ and ‘genre breakers’ which dominated cinema of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In fact, the question of genre is perhaps the clearest encapsulation of what concerns these writers on the un-classical New Hollywood, positing a common and identifiable filmmaking heritage which is then undermined and compromised by new patterns and techniques. Ecocriticism can help train our attention on the particular strategies through which films disrupt and critique genres. ‘What undermines generic idealization’, write Ryan and Kellner (1990: 78), ‘is the reduction of the metaphor to its literal components, the framing of the metaphor so that it ceases to be universal and becomes citable’. Does The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973) trouble its own generic definition because certain components (the protagonist’s unchanging suit, the theme tune) are too incongruously present? Another way of putting this would be to ask whether genre can cope with a filmmaking sensibility (or an interpretive mode) that emphasizes the particularity of people and things assembling at particular places, at particular moments? Altman’s style ensures that we watch The Long Goodbye at least in part as an ethnographic film, registering certain social phenomena (modernist architecture, casual nudity, round-the-clock consumerism) that are traceable to a time and place. Indeed, the anachronistic qualities of the protagonist and his generic characteristics (loyalty, self-destruction, romanticism) pit him against his environment; genre revisionism becomes a question of modifying the relationship between characters and the world within which their stories take on meaning.

In Chapter Three, this approach will be developed with particular reference to the ‘Vietnamized westerns’ of the 1960s and 1970s, wherein the conventionally loose metaphors of the genre become strained under the pressure of a direct contemporary corollary – and one in which destruction of the material environment plays a crucial role. I will also take the opportunity to take stock of a genre, the fugitive film, which was consolidated (rather than critiqued) at this time. Unlike film noir and the western, this was not a genre being undermined through its literal components; it warrants attention in other respects, not only because of its centrality to New Hollywood, but because of the curious ways in which it constructs meaningful oppositions between different ways of envisioning, experiencing and engaging with physical surroundings.

The Down-to-Earth New Hollywood

At one point early on in Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1977), an amateur nurse clumsily dislodges a patient’s urine bag; Gilbert Adair describes this moment as ‘the kind of realistically squalid grace note that wouldn’t have been possible before the ’70s’ (1981: 103), and his aside is symptomatic of broadly held ideas about the ‘grittiness’ of New Hollywood. American cinema is thought to have lost some of its escapist tendencies in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and become suffused by a sort of all-encompassing realism. In Hollywood Film: 1963–1976 (2011) Drew Casper summarizes some key features of this quality:

In stringing scenes together, a casual not contiguous use of space, continuous use of...