Marxist Moments

A Marxist at the Movies (4):

 

QUESTIONS OF MOVIES SPECTACLE

 

          Jon Boorstin’s The Hollywood Eye discusses the role and significance of ‘spectacle’ in Hollywood movies. Spectacle (such as large crowd scenes) is meant to impress the viewer with sheer size as well as create the overall context for the stories of the individual characters. And so we have, for example, the lengthy Italian-Mafia wedding which opens The Godfather, providing a ‘respectable’ social panorama as the setting for the unfolding gangland drama. Or scenes in which Los Angeles is being destroyed by volcano or alien invasion (a city that has probably been ‘destroyed’ more often than most), battle scenes, the Roman Triumph and Colosseum, a towering inferno etc. For Boorstin it is important not to allow the panoramic spectacle to take over the movie: it is at best a means of (relatively briefly) putting the main characters within the worlds they inhabit without showing us ‘the world’ the whole time.

          Spectacle is very much a Voyeur thing (see 2 in this series), satisfying the viewer’s curiosity and amazement about the world and aspects of it.

          This may be being seen as keeping the spectacular and the intimate apart (which is indeed how they are respectively shot in most practice) but Hollywood films with various spectacles are nonetheless required to relate them to the individual dramas being played out here. (Did I really hear the line: ‘I love you but that’s not important right now’ in The Towering Inferno? Something like that, spoken straight, and if I did hear it there it was a bathetic attempt by the scriptwriter to link the inferno with the love-interest as fast as the licking flames would allow.)

          Indeed the spectacle – including potential or actual airplane or shipping disasters – invariably serves as a medium for reconciliation when things turn out okay for the survivors. Father and warring daughter are reconciled; formerly quarrelling passengers embrace each other in tears; a boy learns to become ‘a man’ or a young woman realises empowerment.

          The 1950s film From Here to Eternity (starring, amongst others, Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr) seems to me to have flaws that stem from the original novel. The ‘spectacle’ in this case is going to be the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the setting for the film. But its central motif is the illicit love-affair between the US sergeant, Lancaster, and the genteel sex-starved wife of a superior officer, Kerr, culminating in the in-those-days-steamy moment on the beach when they are bathed in waves as they make love – parodied deliciously by Airplane! of 1980 when they are tangled up in kelp as well. There is some power in this slow-burning story of passion, and in other strands as well, for it is also amongst other things a boxing movie. The problem is that absolutely none of this has anything to do with what the dastardly Japanese are planning in faraway Tokyo. It is an ‘alien’ disaster that overtakes them all but it has little connection with the emotional gravity of the movie.  Viewers who knew that the bombing was coming (a well-known event to American audiences in the early 1950s) will have been counting time, as it were, against the big moment whatever Lancaster, Kerr, Montgomery Clift or Frank Sinatra were going through. The same might be said for the majority of classic and not-so-classic sci-fi movies involving either earthquakes, aliens or malevolent asteroids in which the ‘human interest’ or ‘love-interest’ is only rather tenuously or dubiously linked to the big happening. Or vice-versa: there is the Warren Beatty picture Reds – I owe this instance to Slavoj Zisek in his 2008 book In Defense of Lost Causes – about the true-life radical American reporter John Reed whose account of the Russian Revolution Ten Days That Sho0k the World is a key eye-witness one as well as a championing of the Bolshevik cause. Arguably, as Zizek says, ‘the most traumatic historical event of the twentieth century’, but:

How, exactly, is the October Revolution depicted in the film? The couple of John Reed and Louise Bryant are in a deep emotional crisis: their love is reignited when Louise watches John on a platform delivering an impassioned revolutionary speech. What then follows is their love-making, intersected with archetypal  scenes from the revolution, some of which reverberate in an all too patent manner with the love-making, say, when John penetrates Louise, there is a cut to a street where a dark crowd of demonstrating people envelops and stops a penetrating “phallic” tramway… all this against the background of the singing of “The Internationale” … Even the October Revolution is acceptable [‘acceptable’, so Zizek implies, to an American audience] if it serves the reconstitution of a couple.

In such manner, then, is spectacle provided to serve as mere background (or metaphor) for the all-important love-interest between a particular twosome. The effect is overblown bathos, but it is fully in line with how Boorstin would regard the proper use of spectacle in Hollywood feature films. (To be fair, Boorstin himself does not refer to this film.) That is, ordinary individuals come first: history must be portrayed to fit around them. We might well expect this to come from the Hollywood eye with its tacit embrace of liberal-conservative individualist values.

          For we might contrast Reds with two literary examples of the bringing together of the individual with the socio-political: Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. Both these (fortuitously Russian) authors move easily between the doings of various featured individuals and the mass without any sense of an imposition of the individual over the mass. Rather, both are human exemplars of one overall crucial event: the fall-out from Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in the one instance and the lead-up to and outbreak of the October Revolution in the other. Both events swamped the lives of everyone high and low. War and revolution are humanity itself engaged in action in the mass even as individuals go about their own business, which is never only their own business at the time. As from the top to the bottom of British society during the Blitz of 1940-44.

          Consider (in terms of individuals-mass movement spectacle) such Soviet films as Battleship Potemkin, October, Mother etc. which match in celluloid what Trotsky achieved in historical ‘epic’ literature: masses as individual, individuals in themselves containing masses. Or, from another revolutionary perspective, Gance’s Napoleon. Hollywood’s depiction of the Blitz was – Mrs Miniver. A comedown in bourgoisified America from the more collectivist age of the silent era with its European immigrant audiences – and a significant number of immigrant directors, who made silent films the epitome of the integrated spectacle, that is, in the hands of Chaplin, von Stroheim, von Sternberg, Murnau, Mamoulian – together with the native-born Americans Griffith, King Vidor, Buster (The General) Keaton, de Mille etc.

          By contrast, no modern techno-CGI spectacle can save the bathos of Bill being reunited with Jean through the instrumentation of an asteroid. An American middle-class domestic drama played out like this renders the spectacle ultimately boring if indeed it does go on too long – while the spectacle does the same thing to the doings of Bill and Jean, because they can’t match it for spectacle and spectacle as such is not underpinned dramatically by – on their own – them. The Perfect Storm with George Clooney is a much better example of integrated spectacle-individual, tragic and universally relevant. But even Spielberg - of other films - never quite overcomes this problem.

          Thus does Boorstin’s belief in keeping a lid on spectacle say something about the fragility of an individualism whose ideology is threatened by mass happening and action, and in this position is (ironically enough) impoverished. In reality, the individual is the social being, not side-by-side ‘society.’