The City in American Cinema

Film and Postindustrial Culture

Johan Andersson, Lawrence Webb, Johan Andersson, Lawrence Webb

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350115620
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

How has American cinema engaged with the rapid transformation of cities and urban culture since the 1960s? And what role have films and film industries played in shaping and mediating the "postindustrial" city? This collection argues that cinema and cities have become increasingly intertwined in the era of neoliberalism, urban branding, and accelerated gentrification. Examining a wide range of films from Hollywood
blockbusters to indie cinema, it considers the complex, evolving relationship between moving image cultures and the spaces, policies, and politics of US cities from New York, Los Angeles, and Boston to Detroit, Oakland, and Baltimore. The contributors address questions of narrative, genre, and style alongside the urban contexts of production, exhibition, and reception, discussing films including The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973),
Cruising (1980), Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), King of New York (1990), Inception (2010), Frances Ha (2012), Fruitvale Station (2013), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), and Doctor Strange (2016).

Part One

Film Production and the Postindustrial Turn

1

Daniel Bell, Post-Industrial Society, and Los Angeles Cinema circa 1967–72

Mark Shiel

Varieties of the “post-industrial”

Since the 1960s, the adjective “post-industrial” has been widely used as a broad category to describe the economy and society of various countries, primarily in North America, Western Europe, and Asia. For a long time its use in film and media studies was sporadic, but it has gained currency in the early twenty-first century and is now widespread: for example, Liam Kennedy has examined “the postindustrial ghetto” as “a highly visible signifier of urban decline” in American independent films about race, such as Boyz N the Hood (John Singleton, 1991) and Falling Down (Joel Schumacher, 1993); Laura Rascaroli and Ewa Mazierska have explored “postindustrial economy and landscape” in European city films such as Kika (Pedro Almodóvar, 1993) and Teatro di guerra (Mario Martone, 1998), set in Madrid and Naples, respectively; and Michael Witt has argued for the perceptiveness of Jean-Luc Godard’s “radically new post-industrial kaleidoscopic form of vision.”¹ These books use the term profitably, but they deploy it briefly, and mostly without considering its critical history or etymology, although a few others have used it at greater length. For example, Hamid Naficy valorizes the “artisanal” qualities of “exilic and diasporic filmmaking” in contemporary Iran and Turkey over and against “American post-industrial cinema”—that is, the New Hollywood, which Naficy associates with “globalization, privatization, diversification, deregulation, digitization, convergence, and consolidation” as well as “centralization of the global economic and media powers in fewer and fewer hands.”²

Two important books of sociology—by Margaret Rose and Krishan Kumar—have analyzed the “postindustrial” at great length and in relation to the “postmodern”, which is often considered the cultural expression of the postindustrial.³ Both provide valuable investigations of the term and some commentary on media, with reference to Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard, but almost exclusively in relation to television and with no attempt at textual analysis.⁴ Perhaps the most well-known use of the “postindustrial” category in film analysis, therefore, remains Giuliana Bruno’s examination of the futuristic and dystopian sci-fi film Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). In that essay, published in 1987, Bruno influentially argued that the film’s postmodern style was an expression of the “postindustrial” configuration of the economy and society of Los Angeles as the film imagined it would be in 2019.⁵ The city was “postindustrial” in its “polyvalent” and “hybrid” architecture, its rampant consumerism, its “society of the spectacle,” and juxtaposition of high technology and garbage: “It is not an orderly layout of skyscrapers and ultra-comfortable, hyper-mechanized interiors. Rather, it creates an aesthetic of decay, exposing the dark side of technology, the process of disintegration.”⁶

It is notable, however, that the most important source on the “postindustrial” cited by Bruno is Paolo Portoghesi’s Postmodern: The Architecture of the Postindustrial Society (1983) in which Portoghesi proposes postmodern architecture as a promising response to the challenges posed by the contemporary “crisis of the city”—that is, economic bankruptcy, organizational breakdown, traffic, waste, the “blind alley” of the Modern Movement and “the myth of infinite development […] hypothesized in the sixties.”⁷ Portoghesi proposes optimistically that the “postindustrial city” will be able to correct for these ills by incremental change, including careful decentralization, mixed-use and medium density development, allowing for the citizen’s “right to the city,” respect for urban history, creativity and the arts, and a “culture of complexity” in architectural design.⁸ So Bruno is indebted to Portoghesi, but there is a difference between his relatively hopeful use of the term “postindustrial” to point to a better future and her use of it to describe an urban dystopia in which the idea of a better future has come to nothing.

This leads us to the important observation that there have been optimistic and pessimistic uses of the term and that it is important not only to have a precise sense of the economic and social characteristics typically enumerated under the “postindustrial” heading but also to understand the temporal and geographical context, as well as the tone in which the term is being used. For example, perceptive recent analyses by Stanley Corkin and Lawrence Webb have used the term extensively to highlight representation of the seemingly perpetual and deeply stubborn inequality and injustice of the “postindustrial” city in crime films, melodramas, and comedies. In his book Starring New York (2010), Corkin highlights films of the 1970s, such as Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977) and Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979), which were centered on a “new class” of well-to-do people working in “information industries,” such as entertainment, media, and finance, who express themselves through cosmopolitan lifestyles and consumer choice but struggle emotionally in their intimate relationships with family and lovers.⁹ The latter are associated with the romance and sentimentality of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century architecture (the 59th St Bridge, Upper East Side lofts, the Museum of Modern Art), which provides a nostalgic counterpoint to the traumatic “postindustrial” restructuring of New York from its legendary bankruptcy in 1975 to its reconfiguration as a leading center in global capitalism in the Reagan era.

Lawrence Webb, in The Cinema of Urban Crisis (2014), extends this theme in relation to an international variety of cities, including San Francisco in The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974) and Paris in Peur sur la ville (Henri Verneuil, 1975), which he interprets as “deeply divided cities, with images of poverty and urban blight thrown into relief by a more characteristically postindustrial, commodified cityscape, … the corporate architecture of the central business district and the omnipresence of advertising, television and the media.”¹⁰ Like Corkin, Webb is careful to see the postindustrial city as a function of “emerging neoliberal approaches to urban governance” and to insist that, although widespread, its emergence is highly uneven.¹¹ Corkin makes this especially clear in his most recent book, a close study of the acclaimed television crime series The Wire (HBO, 2002–8), which he characterizes as “a highly articulate vision of life among the underclass—poor African Americans, struggling working-class whites, the homeless—in a city, Baltimore, that is pictured as having seen better days.”¹² He then traces into the twenty-first century the expansion of the American “rust belt” as a function of deindustrialization and globalization and the aggressive shrinking of government expenditures, especially on public housing, in favor of private sector speculation and greed.

Notably, both Corkin and Webb take inspiration from the Marxist geographer David Harvey, who uses the term frequently but cautiously—for example, in The Condition of Postmodernity, when reviewing what he sees as the “new round of ‘time-space compression’ in the organization of capitalism” which began in the 1970s, but which he sees more as “shifts in [the] surface appearance” of capitalism rather than “some entirely new … postindustrial society.”¹³ Indeed, it is important to note that several geographers and urban planners have consciously refrained from using the term “postindustrial.” For example, many of those who work on Los Angeles argue that while the city experienced a profound and highly influential restructuring of its economy and culture in the 1970s–’90s, it remained essentially industrial.¹⁴ Michael Storper has overtly declared his dislike of the term “post-industrial,” arguing that in the “flexible specialization” of its economy since the 1960s, Los Angeles has not been driven by “a post-industrial economy, but a different kind of industrialism from that which had propelled the development of such cities as Detroit or Chicago.”¹⁵ Allen J. Scott has questioned the value of the “post-industrial” as “a meaningful category of analysis” too, preferring the term “post-Fordist” because it entails much of what is usually meant by “post-industrial” but implies that the economy continues to be industrial despite mutations in industry’s forms and distribution.¹⁶ Edward Soja detected influential new trends in the society and built environment of Orange County, which he described as an “exopolis” in which the city is turned “inside-out and outside-in at the same time,” but he also resisted calling it “post-industrial,” just as he resisted calling it “suburban,” because he saw it as industrial and urban in new ways—that is, characterized by rapid economic and physical growth, deep social and economic segmentation, resurgent political conservatism, technocracy, and high-tech, defense, and media industries manifest in a series of “breathtaking industrial-cum-commercial-cum-cultural landscapes.”¹⁷ Indeed, Soja directly referred to the “post-industrial” as a “myth.”¹⁸

Notably, one of the earliest uses of the term “post-industrial” in close film analysis was Fredric Jameson’s essay on “Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film” (1977), in which Jameson also dismissed “post-industrialism” as a myth:

One of the most persistent leitmotivs in liberalism’s ideological arsenal, one of the most effective anti-Marxist arguments developed by the rhetoric of liberalism and anticommunism, is the notion of the disappearance of class. The argument is generally conveyed in the form of an empirical observation, but can take a number of different forms, the most important ones for us being either the appeal to the unique development of social life in the United States, or the notion of a qualitative break, a quantum leap, between the older industrial systems and what now gets to be called post-industrial society.¹⁹

Indeed, in his later famous essay on “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984), Jameson was even more direct, arguing that what should really be called “multinational capitalism” is often “wrongly called post-industrial.”²⁰

A book chapter like this one cannot possibly hope to resolve all of the complexities, nor the tensions, that inevitably accompany such a variety of uses, but it is important to note the variation, and sometimes the crankiness, of the term “postindustrial,” rather than to restrict its use, and to balance the need to understand it in general terms with an attentiveness to the discrete contexts in time and place in which the term has come to prominence. In the rest of this essay, learning from Raymond Williams’s example in Keywords—his compendium of historically important ideas in literary criticism—I want to propose that it is useful to return to first principles by examining the concept and the articulation of “post-industrial society” as it was originally set out in the 1960s.²¹ Especially in the work of the sociologist Daniel Bell, who was then based at Columbia University, that era was the point of origin of the term and of its normalization and widespread use. Reflecting on it suggests that there have been two waves of usage of the term “post-industrial”—the first, from the late 1950s through the early 1970s having been primarily optimistic and futuristic in tone, and the second, since the late 1970s, using the term primarily as a sign of dejection, if not apocalypse (as Bruno, Corkin, Webb, and Harvey have done).²² The first wave was formative but a lot shorter because hyperbole was quickly overtaken by reality.

Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973)

In The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, Bell sets out his thesis largely without reference to geographical variation, as a description of the United States as “a singular unit of illustration.”²³ Where the Industrial Revolution had entailed a shift from the “primarily extractive” labor of agrarian times to “primarily fabricating” activities, the late twentieth century witnessed a further shift in emphasis in the economy from the manufacture of goods to the provision of services, or from fabrication to “processing,” from “machine technology” to “intellectual technology,” and from “capital and labor” to “information and knowledge.”²⁴ These shifts entailed a displacement of previous concerns with scarcities of raw materials by new “scarcities of information and of time,” and a shift from physical transportation and utilities to “digital information technologies” as the most important means of communication.²⁵ These economic and technological changes brought with them social change too, especially “a change in the character of work,” which was no longer “a game against nature” or a game against machines but was now primarily a series of transactions between persons in a relatively flexible meritocracy. In this meritocracy, age-old class antagonisms were replaced by four “statuses” (the professional class, technicians, clerical and sales workers, craftsmen, and semi-skilled workers) and four more or less equal “estates” (scientific, technological, administrative, and cultural), among which the most important feature was the “spread of a knowledge class.”²⁶ These developments entailed some limited risk of greater bureaucracy and militarization, of “communications overload” by “the greatest bombardment...