American Eccentric Cinema

Kim Wilkins

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781501368110
• eBook ISBN: 9781501336928
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Since the late 1990s a new language has emerged in film scholarship and criticism in response to the popularity of American directors such as Wes Anderson, Charlie Kaufman, and David O. Russell. Increasingly, adjectives like 'quirky', 'cute', and 'smart' are used to describe these American films, with a focus on their ironic (and sometimes deliberately comical) stories, character situations and tones. Kim Wilkins argues that, beyond the seemingly superficial descriptions, 'American eccentric cinema' presents a formal and thematic eccentricity that is distinct to the American context. She distinguishes these films from mainstream Hollywood cinema as they exhibit irregularities in characterization, tone, and setting, and deviate from established generic conventions. Each chapter builds a case for this position through detailed film analyses and comparisons to earlier American traditions, such as the New Hollywood cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. American Eccentric Cinema promises to challenge the notion of irony in American contemporary cinema, and questions the relationship of irony to a complex national and individual identity.

1

Defining American Eccentricity

The term “American eccentricity” prompts some assumptions as to the formal and thematic strategies employed by films in this mode—first, that films in this category are either made in the United States or are thematically or narratively concerned with something essentially “American,” and secondly, that these films deviate from the “norms” established by mainstream, or conventional, American cinema. Indeed, numerous works have identified the shift in tone and ideology of American cinema in the late 1990s, including Jeffrey Sconce’s and Claire Perkins’s work on “smart” cinema, Michael Newman’s “indie,” and Derek Hill’s “(New) American New Wave.” Other works have sought to broadly categorize large sections of cinematic (and broader cultural) discourse, or formulate new cultural movements, such as James MacDowell’s “quirky” and Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s “metamodernism,” which can be conceptualized as “part of a broader post-ironic turn” associated with “a move toward a ‘New Sincerity’” in which irony and sincerity are enmeshed and entangled.¹ I do not propose that categorizing a film as an American eccentric work is a classification to the exclusion of all others, as the mode certainly intersects and overlaps with aspects of these existing formulations. Thus, American eccentricity should be considered in relation to these concepts and categories, in terms of both similarity and difference. In this chapter, I identify and examine four pivotal concepts that underpin American eccentricity; institutional location and “indie” modes of production, definitions of irony and anxiety, and the distinctly “American” nature of this eccentricity. These four locating and delineating features provide the foundation for understanding American eccentricity as a textual mode in which irony is used to mediate a felt ahistoricity and perceived inauthenticity of existential crises, in spite of the historical context that underpins it.

Indie and eccentricity

In order to be considered “eccentric,” it is reasonable to assume that films in this mode depart from mainstream conventions. Although vague, these basic assumptions indicate that American eccentric cinema is located outside, or on the margins of, the mainstream in terms of production, textual attributes, and audience targeting. The term “mainstream,” as Geoff King suggests, is used as shorthand for a set of historically and institutionally predicated conventions that serve as a reference point “against which other practices can be measured”² or defined. The mainstream is often seen as the narrative style synonymous with the dominant output of the major Hollywood studios, which are designed to appeal to broad audience bases. While in recent decades the focus on franchise films and transmedia storytelling has drawn into question the continuity of some long-standing Hollywood conventions (particularly in terms of narrative resolution and spectacle), audience expectation and textual norms remain overwhelmingly associated with adherence to the classical Hollywood style most comprehensively theorized by David Bordwell. The classical Hollywood style facilitates a mode of spectatorship that privileges narrative comprehension and character alignment over the recognition of a film’s formal strategies. Mainstream narrative conventions include goal-oriented, psychologically motivated characters who act as causal agents that propel the film’s action; logical patterns of cause and effect that adhere to narrative cohesion; an equilibrium-disequilibrium-new equilibrium structure; and a strong focus on narrative closure.

The aesthetic strategies of mainstream cinema follow Bordwell’s notion of the invisible style: a form of editing and cinematography that serves to further audience engagement with the narrative and as such does not draw attention to itself. Thus, mainstream cinema largely adheres to the principles of continuity editing (matches on action, 180-degree rule, eye line matches, parallel editing, etc.) that are designed to maintain temporal and spatial continuity and ensure the clear positioning of the spectator in relation to the narrative.³ In addition to these fundamental elements of film form, the Hollywood mainstream is also widely considered on the basis of genre classification, their industrial positions, and target audiences.⁴ While the focus of this book is primarily the delineation of American eccentricity as a mode identifiable through textual elements and sociocultural concerns, the institutional and industrial location of the films discussed cannot be ignored. Indeed, I argue that the institutional and industrial imperatives of production within a neoliberal context have shaped the corpus of (largely canonized) “indiewood” films under consideration in this book as the creative output of an overwhelmingly homogeneous group of white, male filmmakers, and as such directly informs the politics of the American eccentric mode.

In order to demarcate a mode of cinema as exhibiting “eccentricity” it must be examined in relation to mainstream conventions. As will be argued throughout this book, American eccentric films do not offer the kind of radical departures from the mainstream that may be found in the avant-garde or far reaches of arthouse cinema. Films in the American eccentric mode are concerned with genre, universal themes centering on human connection (particularly the familial), affective narrative trajectories, and promote audience alignment with central characters. As such, American eccentricity is a mode of cinema that employs the conventions and strategies of the dominant Hollywood norm in concert with intertextual allusion, quotation, and ironic expression at various moments in order to subvert audience expectation, which results in an “offbeat” tone or aesthetic. Thus, while the term “eccentric” necessarily describes a deviation from the norm, this deviation is not, and indeed cannot be, completely oppositional. Indeed, the films discussed in this book can all be located within the spectrum of “indie” cinema, and many within the “indiewood” sector, identified by Geoff King as a hybrid form of cinema that emerged in the 1990s where films occupy the blurred space between Hollywood and independent categorization, in terms of both modes of production and aesthetic and conventional tendencies.⁵

As American eccentricity is aesthetically and formally characterized by its use of unconventional strategies while remaining in close relationship to the mainstream, the mode can be located more broadly within the American indie sector as conceptualized by scholars such as Geoff King, Michael Z. Newman, Janet Staiger, and Yannis Tzioumakis. Although these scholars differ in their delineations, their overall formulations of indie cinema rethink traditional or perhaps purist definitions of independence that focus on modes of production where finance and distribution occur away from mainstream Hollywood studios. Invoking purist demarcations of independence would necessitate that no industrial or institutional base for American eccentric cinema can be located, as might be gleaned in the disparity between two American eccentric productions, Hal Hartley’s Meanwhile (2011) and P. T. Anderson’s Inherent Vice (2014).

Hartley’s film was crowdfunded through the website Kickstarter and so could be considered, even by purist definitions, to be independent. Donations of $25 entitled individuals to a limited-edition DVD version of the film, while those who donated $1000 (or more) were to be credited as co-producers.⁶ Anderson’s film, on the other hand, resides in funding terms within the Hollywood model; produced and distributed by Warner Bros studios in conjunction with IAC Films and Ghoulardi Film Company, and with an estimated budget of $20 million. Yet these films both deviate from the mainstream in terms of aesthetic and form, and can be identified as having a niche target audience rather than the broad appeal of studio blockbusters.

At the level of production, most of the films discussed in this book reside in the Indiewood subcategory that King writes is more clearly defined at the institutional level, where films are made in partnership with the Hollywood studios, predominantly (though notably, not exclusively) through specialty divisions that were formed in the 1990s, such as Fox Searchlight or Miramax (or, more currently, the Weinstein Company). Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, Charlie Kaufman, and P.T. Anderson, for instance, have largely created films within this institutional milieu. If indie cinema occupies a wide spectrum that ranges from low-budget “art” cinema through to films that are relatively similar to mainstream Hollywood output, Indiewood may be located in the region of the hybrid spectrum that “leans relatively towards the Hollywood end of a wider compass that stretches from the edges of Hollywood to the less commercially viable margins.”⁷ Thus, Indiewood films, generally speaking, receive more extensive promotion, circulation, and distribution than those residing toward the more “independent” end of the hybrid spectrum.⁸ These industrial factors undoubtedly impact the critical attention Indiewood films receive, as well as their place in the popular cultural imaginary, particularly in the creation of a brand of “Indiewood auteurs,” such as Wes Anderson or Sofia Coppola. The prominence of this sort of discourse, which is facilitated by these institutional contexts, certainly privileges Indiewood films as readily accessible exemplars of the movements and tendencies that emerged in the late 1990s, and my account of American eccentricity is no exception. While American eccentricity is not an auteurist phenomenon, the prominence of works by celebrated “indie auteurs” speaks to what Claire Molloy has described as the intersection of “the neoliberal commodification of creative labor” and indie discourse.⁹ Molloy claims that 1980s and 1990s independent cinema challenged the homogeny of mainstream Hollywood. She rightly cites the release of films that went against the dominance of white heteronormative experience by focusing on marginalized and underrepresented demographics through the personal and political cinema of filmmakers such as Spike Lee (She’s Gotta Have It [1986], Do The Right Thing [1989]), Gregg Araki (The Living End [1992]), Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging [1992], Mi Vida Loca [1994]) and Gus Van Sant (Mala Noche [1986], My Own Private Idaho [1991]), as signaling the critiques around disenfranchisement and exclusion that production away from the Hollywood studios made possible.¹⁰ At the same time, media industries saw

the emergence of niche markets across the various sectors … [that] reflected the notion of increased consumer choice and demand, positioning independent film as a product that was responding to the fragmentation of a newly competitive marketplace, the availability of markets beyond the United States and the development of new channels of distribution buoyed by technological changes. Despite the idea that hegemony relies on consensus, cultural fragmentation and the rise of niche markets is not at odds with the concept of neoliberal hegemony. As … “Hegemony is often conceptualized as a condition of consensus, yet today one of the most important bases is the cultural fragmentation that issues from advanced capitalism as a way of life, particularly in the Global North” (Carroll and Greeno 2013). The corporate cultivation and exploration of niche markets is … a process of ideological diversification that “prevents subjugated groups from understanding one another and undertaking the difficult work of constructing solidarities”: effectively a “divide and conquer” formulation of “consent without consensus.” (Carroll and Greeno 2013)¹¹

While it is not the case that Indiewood has subsumed or absorbed all previous forms of political independent production, or homogenized independent cinema, its development throughout the 1990s, and subsequent impact, can be analyzed with reference to neoliberal imperatives. Molloy argues that within a neoliberal framework indie sensibility operates at both a textual level—as “a form of political dislocation that masquerades as immersive pleasure” and as a “logic of reception economics in which the currency of ambiguity is sustained through neoliberal notions of choice and consumption”—and an extra-textual level—where indie auteurs “are part of the hypermobile creative class of independent, autonomous artisans whose labor has been in demand by the mainstream sector.”¹² Thus, figures like Wes Anderson, P.T. Anderson, and Spike Jonze are celebrated as idealized neoliberal elites who, as artists, have successfully commodified their creative labor. Often, studios promote these filmmakers as autonomous “indie auteurs,” and in doing so actively downplay the role of the corporate structures and realities behind their production within critical and popular discourse and so perpetuate an ongoing distinction between “indie” and “mainstream” or “commercial” fare, to “retain the value of the indie auteur’s labor in the marketplace.”¹³ The location of the auteurist indie films on the margins of the mainstream—in terms of both content and style—notably diverges from the politics of disenfranchisement that Molloy identifies in the 1980s and 1990s, not toward complete depoliticization, but rather through the funding, promotion, and subsequent success of less overtly political films. It is unsurprising that the “indie” filmmakers whose work was most readily taken up by studios involved in the indiewood sector largely...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Defining American Eccentricity
• 2. Road Films and National Identity
• 3. Overtly Cinematic Characterization
• 4. Hyper-Dialogue and the Eccentric Manner
• 5. Eccentric Worlds
• Conclusion: Beyond Eccentricity
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint