FATAL VISIBILITY 2
[From my book, ‘Fatal Visibility’, which is being progressively presented in this space]
Letter 2
Public domain image of Susan Baptist, film projectionist. (Screenshot by author)
[ Early experience in the cinema; seeing ‘Star Wars’ in 1977 and its indications of a visual culture; relating the experience of images to my own life/trauma; cultural crisis and the image; problem of New Hollywood]
I sometimes stupidly go back through the different years of my life chronologically. Whilst I am reading, every couple of pages, I move to another year and pretend I am reading the present book at that time. I'm not certain what this is supposed to accomplish but it is a vehicle for placing personal things in an historical context. Something that often happens is that I remember something at a keenly emotional level that haunts or upsets me, or suggests to me something about myself. Reading intensifies things for me.
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1977 stands out to me in terms of my early interest in the cinema, although I first went in 1976. 1977 was of course, amongst other things, the year of the very first ‘Star Wars’. At first, I remember being not particularly interested in seeing it before I capitulated; thence, it became the first movie I could say I formed a relationship with. Now, I have mentioned already in a previous letter that the paradoxical safety in darkness and in fact of the spectacle offered by the cinema were related to my developing habit; but ‘Star Wars’ was also an early culmination of precisely the properties of the medium I found seductive, those having to do with light, colour, co-ordination of movement within the frame, etc. Particularities of light refracted from metal, of set design, of photography of architecture, of detailed information in different parts of the frames, unexpected intrusions of sound, visual sweeps, etc. I was four years old at the time. There is probably little question had I been born ten years earlier or ten years later, I might have responded to it very differently, but in 1977, at that age, it was an introduction to a radical rectangularisation of light, a composite realisation of elements of the visual world inside a cage of artifice. However, there is a brief instance in the middle of the film where the main characters enter a prison space in the Death Star, disguised as stormtroopers to rescue Princess Leia and soon begin shooting lasers at people. At a certain point, the music reaches a particular crescendo expressing heroism- it is totally unambiguous and reductive, it is a couple of notes one would easily identify as an expression of or accompaniment to a simply heroic act. How I hated the film at that moment, just at that moment; how I hated the Cinema, how I hated (at least Western) culture as I, at the time, knew it. The feeling was very briefly experienced but extremely poignant. It was as though everything to be resented (and there’s a lot) were concentrated in those audiovisual frames. It was not even using the force and qualities of the medium to emphasise a surface; it was not returning to ground zero; it was indicating that an objective can transcend politics. The musical ‘sting’ suggested this moment was a culmination of those characters’ correct existence, where all necessary discussion was lost in the overwhelming, cosmic correctness of their direct action. A ‘hero’ in this sort of fiction is someone who is carried by a sense of purpose which is circularly justified by the mechanics of the fiction, so that, in a sense, it is Fiction itself which, precisely as such, emerges as the hero. It is the seductiveness of Purpose expressed in terms of reductive audiovisuality which disinherits History and offers reassurance nothing is so important as the present moment of heroic accomplishment. Possibly, what disturbed me more than anything else was the facile sense of definiteness, the way such a forcibly reductive position could be expressed so compactedly, the way an audiovisual medium could channel this reductive force so efficiently. In fact, now that I think of it, there is another moment later in the film which also bothered me, a couple of moments rather, in the same sequence. At the end of the film, Luke, Han and Chewbacca are walking down a ceremonial aisle to receive medals. During their walk, there is a close-up of Chewbacca turning to the audience (of the ceremony) and making one of his generic howls. I remember the way this embarrassed me because again, it was such an unadulterated forcing of a character’s persona into one thoughtless gesture. Having been given their medals, R2-D2 becomes excited and moves about a bit, making sounds, following which we see close-ups of other characters enjoying R2’s excitement. This was clearly done to wrap things up with schtick, to emphasise that the world can be reduced to gesture. In a conflicted situation, one can always rely upon a gesture to clarify things. I think one of the reasons this disturbed me was that it seemed so consistent with the devices of that dangerous person who took me to the movie, that his attempts to deflect from the complexities of things were enshrined in these Hollywood stereotypes.
In some ways, the first movie one becomes obsessed with is a bit of an anomaly in the history of one’s film viewing. Leos Carax observed that one’s first film (ie. the first one makes) is the only one prepared for for twenty years or more. Likewise, the first film one becomes obsessed with as a viewer is the only one that is so difficult to contextualise in terms of what one has encountered before. I know that I was fascinated by the light, the colour, the co-ordination of movement within the frame. I know that I was fascinated by various design elements and the interaction of sound and image. I had seen a few films already that I had really liked but it was ‘Star Wars’ which really emphasised for me how the world could be harnessed in and by an image. It was the first film to truly make me realise that images are ghosts who believe sound and fury will resurrect their physical bodies and indeed, that they are at their most powerful when they are disembodied. It was in seeing ‘Star Wars’ that I came to understand something of the colourfulness of a prison that houses images. The cinema could only have developed in a world of prsions, a world where our basic perception of audiovisual space is artificially regulated. There was something about the display of a world imprisoned by its own representation, disabled in its own hyperbole of movement that I believe I found relatable and compelling. Of course I don’t pretend I would have described any of this in the present terms at the time but it was certainly clear to me that any representation is a kind of death. I think that it also made me feel, correctly or incorrectly, that only an image could truly live, hence only an image could truly die. The rest of us were somehow trapped in an alienated shopping mall of freedom where we would take a vicarious pleasure in watching the possibility of death which images offered us as spectacle. Every seductive colour or light or reflection appearing on the cinema screen was at once an objectified freedom and a consul of alienation. There is a common piece of dubious wisdom according to which the Hollywood cinema of the seventies represented the greatest height of creative exuberance in Western culture since the Renaissance before ‘Star Wars’ single-handedly ruined everything; ironically, exactly the kind of logic Luke Skywalker might employ. According to this narrative, the previous restrictions had fallen and a new generation were able to take advantage of a temporary freedom both in the larger culture and the film industry, more specifically, resulting in some of the most ambitious and relatively unclassifiable works the medium had seen at least since the silent era. The world of filmmaking had effectively returned to point zero and was engaging in a burst of unprecedented experimentation with the resources, financially and technically, of major Hollywood studios. Thus, after a significant number of certifiable card-carrying masterpieces had appeared virtually on top of each other, a little juvenile ‘Flash Gordon’-inspired movie for which nobody held any hopes appeared and became the most commercially successful film released up to that time. This movie effectively transformed the industry and gradually ushered in the era of mindless superhero-obsessed entertaimment; genuinely great filmmakers were now no longer able to work with the same creative freedom, etc; and the culture, particularly popular culture, became progressively stupider. The 1980s were dominated largely by Spielberg and John Hughes, signifying a mass infantilising of the medium. Now, whilst this often-repeated, virtually fetishised (and fetishistic?) account is certainly not completely devoid of truth or relevance, it does rather indicate certain cultural and political illusions and even a certain hypocrisy. ‘Star Wars’ is not nearly so atypical of New Hollywood as some of its movie-brat auteurist critics would suggest. It is a film about a male protagonist, struggling to come to terms with the complexities of the larger society, uncertain of the way ahead, feeling a need to project himself into a socially transcendent, heroic project, afraid of failure, guarded about his sexuality but fascinated by the implications of such guardedness, mired in popular cultural iconography of the recent past and not least of all, he’s appearing in a de-facto American western, a, if not the, cornerstone of mainstream American filmmaking virtually from the outset. Danny Peary’s assertion that ‘you can’t be a film fanatic without loving the Western’ is resplendent with specific pop-cultural psychopathology. What differentiates Luke from Travis Bickle in ‘Taxi Driver’ or the Jack Nicholson character in ‘Five Easy Pieces’ (whatever his name was) is that Luke is consistently (not even ultimately) redeemed by the genre’s nostalgic worth. Lucas’ film is a number of things. For one, it is the 1960s reconfigured in ‘Flash Gordon’ serial-style terms. Perversely, Lucas transforms the Viet Cong into a bunch of white Americans who successfully take on the Man, the Death Star, the Empire, whatever. Whereas in, for instance, ‘The Parallax View’ or ‘Medium Cool’, the threat is effectively faceless and ambiguous, in ‘Star Wars’, the threat is very visibilised bur ideologically vague. The ‘Empire’ want to dominate the universe but to what end? What are their politics, etc? What unites these films is the iconographic ambiguation of Power. It is not presented as multivalent or strategically diverse in its elaboration, so much as impressionistically pervasive. ‘The Parallax View’ is ‘paranoid’ in so far as it presents a society where not only the parameters but also the motives of Power are effectively unknowable. One is a victim of a phantom. But unlike in Kafka, there is not the sense of a bureaucracy which has become confused of its meaning through the process of expansion and accumulation; rather, we are given to sense that Power knows itself and its motives which are not revealed to the characters of this particular fiction for dramatic reasons. In ‘Star Wars’, the agenda of the Empire is equally unclear but they are given a personality. The uncertainty of their actual politics becomes ostensibly unimportant because we identify with the dynamic conflict between they and their corresponding stereotypes. In ‘Taxi Driver’, Travis is no more projective than Luke, but Luke is rescued from an image of psychopathy by the fantasised fascism of his opponents. None of this, of course, is to say that there are not differences in artistic quality or intellectual sophistication between these different films. Rather, I am suggesting that ‘Star Wars’ is a logical alternative to a number of its darker contemporaries and direct predecessors. It is grounded in the same essential logic as so many of the ‘masterpieces’ of New Hollywood but offers a fantasy of salvation more directly grounded in the imagery of Old Hollywood. Star Wars does not draw upon Old Hollywood to any greater extent than any number of more ‘serious’ New Hollywood films. In fact, if you wanted to, you could make a case that at least ‘Star Wars’ admits it is a fantasy whereas ‘The Last Picture Show’ laments the passing of another fantasised era which is posited as an unapproachable historical reality. Bogdanovich’s film is no less a fantasy than Lucas’ except that Lucas grounds his in the cinematic fictions that appealed to audiences of that earlier time whereas Bogdanovich grounds his in the nostalgic fictionalising that appeals to audiences of the film’s present. There is no question that ‘Taxi Driver’, for instance, is objectively a much better and more ambitious film than ‘Star Wars’, but they are both informed by the same need to bridge cinema and reality as corresponding gatekeepers of revelation; they are both actings-out of a frustrated coming-to-terms with reality as failed cinema and cinema as failed reality. A similar problem can be identified in more than a little of the Nouvelle Vague as well as the New German Cinema. ‘Star Wars’ is ultimately less a betrayal of the New Hollywood than it is an accumulation of all its more self-therapeutic elements to the point of externalised wish fulfilment. It openly represents all the fantasies the characters of the other movies know better than to admit they have.
It is often difficult to be certain what some of the male New Hollywood directors think about different things, how they identify women, queer figures, etc, for instance, because so much is determined to follow the generic guidelines of Old Hollywood whilst intending to come to terms with what that legacy means in the present. This is to say, it is often difficult to distinguish between the confusion of people raised on Hollywood movies in a supposedly post-Hollywood culture and the persistence of an Old Hollywood ideology as interpreted by a generation who have styled themselves as its critical mediators. With ‘Star Wars’, the shortly lived New Hollywood expanded its fetishism of the image to merchandising. After ten years or so of an auteurist-oriented wave, where there was a revelation to be found in the image, things turned outwards so that the image was defensible through associated consumer objects. This merchandising culture and the phenomenalisation of ‘Star Wars’ have probably made it difficult for people who weren’t born at the time to appreciate what it was like to see the movie in 1977 when, everything else notwithstanding, it was still first and foremost, a movie. Since then, the movie itself has become a motor for a larger series of commercial practices, so that it became ambiguous where ‘Star Wars’ itself actually began and ended. The beginning of the end of New Hollywood? I don’t really think so. What is referred to as New Hollywood was always tenuous. Lucas took all the elements from his contemporaries’ films and put them to work in constructing a post-fairytale. ‘Star Wars’ didn’t brainwash anybody. Its massive commercial popularity needs to be understood in other ways. It managed to impose an ostensibly optimistic reading of the ‘failure’ of the sixties. In ‘Medium Cool’, there is a scene where, watching the televised funeral of Robert Kennedy, the Robert Forster character ‘explains’ the times to us. ‘The media has a script now’, he observes. There is also a scene where, having been fired for integrity, he runs aimlessly down empty corridors unable to find any one authority who is responsible. ‘The world’ has become something confusing and alienating in the face of the contemporary media and corporatism. Subsequent New Hollywood movies of the seventies (‘The Parallax View’, ‘The Conversation’, ‘Taxi Driver’, the 1978 version of ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, ‘Chinatown’, ‘All the President’s Men’, ‘Klute’, etc, etc) endlessly depicted characters alienated from/by their immediate physical environment, trying to come to terms with existential ambiguities it was beyond their power to address articulately, a trope familiar already from the American Western. If mainstream (in the broadest sense) American cinema has traditionally been obsessed with anything, it has been the relationship to physical environment (which often means alienation from it) and class conflict (which sometimes means a strategic denial of it). ‘Star Wars’ depicts characters fighting for their piece of the universe against a grandiose, ideologically vague Enemy. The traumatic American sixties experience, which includes the Vietnam war, becomes codifiable in terms of Hollywood genre. In fact, this was the ‘genius’ of Lucas, who was able to turn the failure of a revolutionary project and the discontent of a generation into the stuff of legend. At the end of the movie, there is every indication the Empire in some form still exists even though the Death Star has been destroyed; but we have had the spectacle of that destruction. Political reality fades behind colourful explosions- ‘Star Wars’ follows the development of television news where viewers were able to ‘watch’ the Vietnam war unfold and the gruesome evidence of its consequences. Lucas cynically transforms precisely that spectacle into a reassurance that the spectacular image and its ecstasies are more relevant than history. Precisely what is seductive about ‘Star Wars’ lies in the idea that nothing means anything, that it is the code itself which carries importance. Luke, etc are the good guys because they are shown with medals, smiling at the audience at the end of the movie. Political or historical ambiguity, probing of the facts, understanding of different perspectives, all of this is unnecessary. What is important is the iconology of presence - the last standing are the just. Justice lies in visible continuation. If ‘Star Wars’ ‘changed’ the landscape of cinema and popular culture, it wasn’t merely because it was taken as a vastly enjoyable piece of fantastic fiction. Far more crucially, it established a connection between Power and the uncontrollably visible. Politics and history are laserblasts. A scene in ‘Star Wars’ which is fundamentally demonstrative of its ideology involves a Rebel leader taking all but minutes to lecture the Rebel fighters on how to destroy the Death Star by targeting a weak point of its architectural engineering. The strategy is merely a needed plot point which is passed over quickly. It is the will of the Rebels that is far more relevant than any strategic ability or understanding of the situation. ‘Star Wars’ has been more important in its popularity than in itself, as it were. It did not appear from nowhere but in its reception, it was, effectively, the beginning of a visual culture where the energy derives from the unquestionability of Presence. Politics and history dissolve into the spectacle of their own unimportance. ‘Star Wars’ was the beginning of the excitement of emptiness. It is bizarrely the ultimate lack of consequence that serves as the point of elation. This is radical escapism where the inconsequentiality of things becomes itself a victory. If previous New Hollywood movies presented a spectacle of politics, alienation and the vicissitudes of social and sexual existence, ‘Star Wars’ spectacularised the proposition that none of these things matter. There are very clear differences between Lucas’ film and those of most of his movie brat contemporaries but ‘Star Wars’ does not radically break with the 70s Hollywood ethos so much as it domesticates into a validation of its origins, taking all of the motifs of the other directors’ work having to do with social and sexual alienation, the weight of history, conflicted intergenerational relationships and relationships with Power, etc and celebrating their reducibility to a generic mythology only too familiar from the cinema of the past. Rather than being the callous undermining of New Hollywood, ‘Star Wars’ is its bad conscience, an open delineation of all its neuroses and their attempted sublimation in the sound and fury of a popular Art with nowhere to ultimately go but the marketplace. A movie about the traumas of the sixties as though the sixties never happened, ‘Star Wars’ expressed the cynicism of nostalgia as it became the nostalgia for cynicism. Politics without optimism, replaced by optimism without politics. In the midst of a culture where history was already mediated by images, ‘Star Wars’ proposed a future where images would place history out of action, where all one needed to do was see, where the fact of visibility would become inseparable from the visibility of fact. ‘Star Wars’ proposed to replace liberation with general unimportance. Instead of revolution, instead of challenging Power, the difference between oppression and freedom was resolved in the light and colour of a fantastic mythology. Lucas was truly a protagonist of the mantra, ‘If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’; but Lucas joined them by offering a spectacle of beating them.
The personal reasons I gravitated towards ‘Star Wars’ had to do with various early impressions of sound and image but also, as I have said, with utilising a cinema screening as an escape from the abuses of that person. I think the larger culture gravitated towards it significantly as an escape from what was felt as the torment of history. There appeared to be safety in the darkness of the cinema but another darkness was growing outside. In ‘Star Wars’, we are impressed by the sounds of spaces, the facility of light and energy, the malleability of architectural space by movement and our own position of viewing. The conflict represented in the film is expressed as reducible to the audiovisual Moment. The popularity of ‘Star Wars’ is grounded in the film’s offering of Occasion as a substitute for History. After the failure of revolution, the bureaucracy of sensation assumes power. ‘Star Wars’ is the Stalinism of the cinema; and as such, it has its historical fascination precisely as the fascinated denial of history.
Films referenced:
‘Star Wars’ (George Lucas, 1977) ; ‘Medium Cool’ (Haskell Wexler, 1969); ‘Five Easy Pieces’ (Bob Rafelson, 1970); ‘The Last Picture Show’ (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971); ‘Klute’ (Alan J Pakula, 1971), ‘The Parallax View’ (Alan J Pakula, 1974); ‘The Conversation’ (Francis Coppola, 1974); ‘Taxi Driver’ (Martin Scorsese, 1976); ‘All the President’s Men’ (Alan J Pakula, 1976); ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ (Philip Kaufman, 1978)
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