Popular Cinema as Political Theory

Idealism and Realism in Epics, Noirs, and Satires

J. Nelson

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137373861
• Categoría: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoría: Políticas europeas

The book presents cinematic case studies in political realism versus political idealism, demonstrating methods of viewing popular cinema as political theory. The book appreciates political myth-making in popular genres as especially practical and accessible theorizing about politics.

CHAPTER 1

An Epic Comeback? Postwestern Politics in Film and Theory

(Featuring Alexander, King Arthur, and The Lord of the Rings)

The Homeric journey, grounded in the wish to return home, is at once the most venerable of all narrative templates and, as The Way Back demonstrates, one of the trickiest to dramatize. Anthony Minghella hit the same problem in Cold Mountain: an odyssey, when you get down to it, is just one damn thing after another.¹

—Anthony Lane

In the beginning, epic is not a popular genre as much as epic is the whole of popular, orally based literature.² When is “the beginning?” Different in historical times for distinct peoples, it comes when a community can recognize itself. Usually this occurs in looking back on its origins, although not all early epics are origin myths in the strictest senses.³ For ancient Greeks, the epic period happened more than two-and-a-half millennia ago; for current Finns, it transpired less than two centuries ago. By contrast, no popular genres start to take shape as conventional families of dramas and narratives until the eve of electronic times. Horror, thriller, romance, science fiction, and the rest typically sprawl across mass-disseminated literature plus electronic media such as cinema and television. In consequence, it is not surprising that epic long remained an impulse across many other genres more than a popular form in its own right for electronic cultures. Still epic has been consolidating itself as a specific genre for the better part of a century now, even as it functions also as something of an Ur genre to inspirit most of our other popular forms.

Early epics in literature show a strong elective affinity for “warrior politics.” These are the politics of warlords, from barbarian hordes and nomadic tribes to territorial clans and urban gangs. By accounts since the ancient Greeks, warrior politics persist where people lack the settled places and special languages for politics in a specifically Western sense.⁴ (From the perspective of the republican-rhetorical tradition of politics in Western civilization, “warrior politics” are arguably oxymoronic, because they are “violent politics” rather than peaceful politics as speech-in-action-in-public.⁵) Warrior politics usually come with cultures of honor and anger.⁶ Across diverse settings and sizable swaths of historical time, early epics participate in the generic interest of epics in community identity and direction. They address such political questions as who we are, what time it is, who will lead us, where, how, and why.

As a popular genre in our times, especially in cinema, epic conventionally stands out for its story structure and vast scale. Most epics are episodic, with each of the movie’s scenes, acts, or other dramatic elements relating to the others less as historically or chronologically progressive times than as emblems of the whole tale, the whole hero, or the whole community. This need not chase out historical drama or chronological narrative, but it often results in moments that step aside from any modern march of time. Places in the Heart might seem to provide a line of causes and effects for a small town in the Great Depression. But then it culminates in surveying a service in the local church to show a full and “timeless” array of the drama’s community members, living and dead. Throughout, the movie shows all its people and episodes as enduring “places in the heart.” Thus it mimics how early epics stitch together loose patchworks of lore and legend into sequences of moments that depart in many ways from chronological norms of consistency and historical connections of cause-and-effect. As the mythos of Arthur, the Arthuriad is a collection of tales that share characters, settings, and sometimes even deeds that can reach from The Death of Arthur to The Once and Future King.⁷ Similarly The Song of Roland and the mythos of Robin Hood each repeat their characters and supplement their motifs rather than follow a strictly linear chronology.

These emblematic moments—with their featured characters, deeds, scenes, and codes of conduct—evoke the enduring, somewhat “timeless” ideals of the community. They are how the popular genre of epic becomes one of our preeminent forms for dramas of political idealism. The offshoot genres of action-adventure and thriller often constrict the epic array of a community’s characters to a hero, a love, and a villain. They spike adrenaline rather than explore endurance. They pursue mystery and suspense rather than review community commitments. Each courts an intense personal connection with a viewpoint character rather than surveying a vast trajectory of events and company of characters to show how their ideals—our ideals—cohere and prevail.

Often in an epic, the cast (“of thousands”) is immense. The times traversed in the story and in the screening are extraordinarily long. Epic spaces are enormous, whether measured in settings spanned, vistas grand, or the cinema’s scope. Moreover the politics characteristically are earthshaking or world-making in importance. Accordingly epic cinema has become the premier genre for spectacle.⁸ Likewise epic continues to concern the qualities, heroes, and ideals that define particular communities. And perhaps less clearly, but no less significantly, epic features politics of liberation—or at least resistance—most often in reaction against specifically imperial powers, whether at home or abroad. These are the main claims about epic politics advanced in these pages.

Generic Politics

Before we explore epic politics and their implications further, though, we do well to clarify further what it can mean to analyze the politics of a popular genre. We borrow from French to refer to persistent forms of popular culture as genres.⁹ These are durable networks of conventions. Across media such as cinema, literature, radio, and video, specific works cluster into popular genres by family resemblance.¹⁰ Their stock settings, scenes, and characters cohere mostly by elective affinity rather than any stronger necessity. Thus they stay familiar to us even as we inflect them through further versions. Most politics in popular movies take shape less in officially political settings or overtly political events than in the quiet symbolism of subtexts. In turn, subtexts arise in important part from particular uses of conventions from popular genres.¹¹ Hence specific genres (or subgenres) often display conventional, elective affinities for distinctive kinds of politics. These political implications are not simple curiosities or accidental facts; instead our popular genres weave their politics deeply, pervasively into their myths and aesthetics. Still we are talking about Hollywood, and therefore American politics; so specifically socialist and conservative politics familiar from Europe stay few and far between in America’s genre movies.

In a ramshackle network of studies, I’ve been exploring politics of popular movies across many genres. To draw on some of the wider analysis to date can be to provide a useful context for individuating epic as a popular genre as well as appreciating the politics implied by its conventions. For example, epic is not alone in its affinities for warrior and especially republican politics. Yet epic is the popular genre that concentrates most clearly on how these politics tend to generate empires even as they also try to resist them. Other kinds of politics occasionally surface in particular epics, yet these alternatives are more conventional for genres that contrast with epic.

No single convention can guarantee the overall operation of any genre that it helps to characterize. Thus length alone is not enough to make a film epic. Ready examples include such long, long documentaries as The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) or most Ken Burns contributions to PBS, for these are documentaries rather than epics in genre—even though great length is not conventional for the documentary as a genre. Could extraordinary length or any other epic convention help make The Sorry and the Pity or The War (2007) an epic documentary? Yes, sometimes, depending on what networks of conventions the movie includes and how. Much of our popular experience is generic, and we make meanings generically from the ways particular conventions appear and implicate others in their culturally sustained families.¹²

As a family of conventions, a popular genre accommodates some politics more readily than others. Thrillers feature republican politics of heroism. To take a specific example, conspiracy thrillers pit such heroism against authoritarian systems.¹³ Pausing on occasion for spectacular moments of environmental politics, westerns insistently compare republican to liberal politics.¹⁴ Vengeance movies, too, are mainly republican and liberal.¹⁵ Martial arts movies typically feed republican virtues into perfectionist action: “Just Do It,” as the Nike slogan says after the fashion of Friedrich Nietzsche.¹⁶ War movies show generically that war is hell; and since the Vietnam War, they make the martial standards of warrior and republican politics into arguments for lessons to be drawn from particular wars that they dramatize.¹⁷ Yet fantasies favor the versions of republicanism associated with (European) feudalism, even as they challenge the modern priority for political and other branches of realism.¹⁸

The dark fantasies of horror, however, are existentialist (ghosts, mummies, zombies) or perfectionist (vampires, werewolves, witches).¹⁹ When it comes to morality, especially, science fiction sustains a generic interest in the politics of perspectivism; whereas detective fiction and horror would deliver us from sharply defined evils.²⁰ As the fourth chapter details, neo-noir movies pursue the existentialist politics of awakening to resistance of corrupt systems; and those systems often present incipiently totalitarian versions of perfectionist politics as their dangers—from fascist or Marxist ideologies, from celebrity cultures, from Ayn Rand capitalists, from powers of surpassingly beautiful or wealthy people, even from consumer societies. Neo noir (roughly 1980 onward) also shows strong interest in idealist criticisms of realist politics. Classical noir (1941–1958) is misogynist, its continuations (1959–1979) and neo noir remain at least masculinist, yet neo noir has been developing an effectively feminist subgenre. From Batman (1989) forward, an additional subgenre of neo noir overlaps with superhero movies, sharing their fascination with perfectionist politics. To these we could add the possibility of an emerging genre of “fractal films.” These films are beginning to probe the politics of nonlinear systems that arguably dominate our increasingly globalized era.²¹

To discern distinctive politics in a popular genre is to contrast the genre and its typical politics to others. It is not to say that every work in the genre must manifest politics standard for that popular form. Nor is it to say that the genre’s distinctive politics never appear in other genres, at times, or even that these politics may not prove similarly prominent in some other genres. It is rather to explore how a form of popular culture coheres, distinguishing itself from many others, and how it helps people experience the dynamics of its characteristic politics. A surge in epic films from Hollywood idealistically calls into question the recent disposition toward imperial politics evident in America’s assertive state, economy, and culture.

Epic Movies

Why say that epic has been making a comeback lately as a popular form of American movies? By my count, Hollywood issued several epic films a year in the 1960s and into the 1970s. Then, by consensual account, the success of Star Wars blew away the old Hollywood. The ensuing saga is itself something of an epic or two (or six, with more to come) depending on which boundaries make most sense for a specific analysis: the Star Wars movies feature every major convention of epic cinema. Yet the first of these films taught Hollywood to turn its would-be blockbusters into thrillers or action-adventure movies more than epics. Thus this “oldest” genre slid into a cinematic eclipse that lasted until the new century.

Only with the end of the twentieth century did individual epics rev back to a high pace of production. The analysis at hand arises from attention to nearly a hundred epic movies—individual films or three-film arcs—from 1950 through 2008. Unsystematic as it remains, their enumeration suggests a recent acceleration in the appearance of epics from Hollywood. Some of these films have more than one version, explaining their two different running times listed below. Later influence urges that two earlier, especially famous epics deserve mention—The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind—although they do not figure in any of the counting (table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Recent Hollywood epics

Arguably it is only with Gladiator in 2000 that epic movies have resumed their rapid rate of production from the 1960s. Throughout the last half-century, even so, epics continued to be for Hollywood the prestige pictures. Of the 69 longest epics in Hollywood cinema between 1950 and 2013, only nine gained no Academy Award nominations. Each running 135 minutes or more, these long films are the fullest-fledged epics; and all are stand-alone films: we’re not counting any Star Wars sets here. From the 69, 12 won Academy Awards for Best Picture or Best Foreign-Language Film, and another 21 received one of these two crowning nominations. Together the 69 epics won an astounding 141 Oscars along with an additional 214 nominations: a mean of more than five nomination...