Declarations of independence: film and the American mythology

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DECLARATIONS OF INDEPENDENCE:

FILM AND THE AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

by

Chris Cooling
____________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMA-TELEVISION (CRITICAL STUDIES))

May 2007

Copyright 2007 Chris Cooling

ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract

iii
Introduction

1
Chapter 1: The Desire to Declare: Sundance, Robert Redford, and
Independence Discourses 7
Chapter 2: Functions of the Independent Auteur (Thesis: Jim Jarmusch) 80
Chapter 3: Functions of the Independent Auteur (Antithesis: Quentin
Tarantino)

147
Chapter 4: Functions of the Independent Auteur (Synthesis: Stephen
Soderbergh)

201
Chapter 5: Filmic Independence Through the Lens of American Studies

239
Chapter 6: The Morphing Text and the Virtual Frontier: Independence and
the Mythologies of New Media Technologies

324
Bibliography 368

iii
ABSTRACT

In this dissertation, the author investigates the American Independent Film,
specifically its recent flourish from 1980 to the present. The argument is made that
the narratives told about the Independent film of this era – by the popular press, by
academia, as well as by the films’ makers – are often more meaningful than the
content of the films themselves. The author suggests that what makes this historical
phase of Independent American filmmaking different from previous movements is
an increased public awareness of these narratives as familiar and formulaic. The
promotion of these films is increasingly apparent as a mythology – a set of narratives
America tells itself about itself. As a result, emphasis is placed on the cultural
awareness of this mythology as a set of constructed narratives told to the public by a
culture industry that profits from them. To begin, a series of case studies are
analyzed. First, representations of the Sundance film festival are examined, with
emphasis placed on the figure of its founder, Robert Redford. Next, three directors
thought to embody the American Independent film at various points over the last
twenty-five years are studied: Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino and Steven
Soderbergh. Following these case studies, the methodology of American Studies is
applied to the discourse of Independent film. The field’s two simultaneous emphases
– on the interpretation of national self-mythologizing and the meta-critical awareness
of its own impact as an academic field for the generation of such knowledge – are
used to consider the extent to which media promotion of Independent cinema has
become a form of cultural authority that usurps traditional academic knowledge.

iv
Finally, the author considers new media technologies – digital cinema, video games
– as the most recent manifestation of these narratives. Video games are considered as
a location for preserving American myths of the frontier within a virtual space, and
digital filmmaking is analyzed as a means through which Independent and
Hollywood filmmaking tropes are fluidly combined. The conclusion is thus drawn
that such technologies offer a meaningful moment of synthesis that represents an end
point for this movement of independence.

1
INTRODUCTION

“Large Dependent Film Tops Weekend Box Office,” ran the headline in
satirical weekly newspaper The Onion’s ‘News in Brief’ section on October 2, 2002.
The entire story read as follows:
HOLLYWOOD – In what is being hailed as a triumph for dependent
cinema, Sony Pictures’ A Perfect Alibi, a $90 million Mel Gibson-
Cameron Diaz thriller, topped the weekend box office with an
impressive $39 million take. “This just shows what can be
accomplished when you’ve got a major studio’s backing and
distribution,” executive producer Don Murray said Monday.
“Contrary to what some in the movie business would have you
believe, there is a place for big, non-character-driven pictures.”
Murray said he hopes the film’s success serves as an inspiration to
established, bankable actors and directors.
1

The joke is a simple juxtaposition, in which the language and conventions of press
coverage for successful independent movies are applied to the supposedly
antithetical discourse of generic Hollywood movies. In order for the joke to succeed,
however, the writers at The Onion are assuming that their readers have seen so many
articles touting the openings of small, independent, character-driven films that they
will be able to recognize the conventions when parodied in a new context. The story
is not inherently special as a piece of comedy writing, but it does speak to a popular
cultural awareness of the independent film’s status in recent years. On some level,
the joke speaks to a certain sense of exhaustion: hasn’t this story been done to death
already? Aren’t we starting to get a bit sick of hearing the same formula being
repeated in newspapers and on television?

1
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/31175. Issue 38-36, October 2, 2002.

2
When I told friends and colleagues that I was writing a dissertation on the
American Independent film, specifically one that explored the recent era of Miramax
and the Sundance film festival, I was often asked, “So what is your definition of an
‘independent film’?” I have never had one; instead, I am interested in the recent burst
of popular writing that does claim to answer this question. Why is there such
fascination with the concept of American films that are somehow different? For
many, this difference is financial: we love the story of a lone filmmaker scraping
together a film’s budget on his own, beating the studios at their own game by making
large profits on cheap entertainments. For others, the shape of the film industry is
itself paramount (if you will forgive the pun): while the Hollywood studio system
threatens to collapse under its own weight, those who work outside of it are
unencumbered by focus groups, test screening audiences, the conservative tendencies
of share-holders, or the need to appeal to the largest possible audience. There are
also many whose stomachs churn at this obsession with money and business, to the
point of suggesting that such obsessions are themselves the root cause of more
qualitative erosion to be seen throughout the last decades of Hollywood production;
in this case, independent cinema is to be celebrated for its nurturing of artistic
bravery and aesthetic creativity.
Rather than passionately choosing sides, what interested me is instead the
recognition of such claims as themselves formulaic narratives. As many have noted,
the ‘independent film’ has been in existence for over a century: indeed, when
Thomas Edison and the other members of the Motion Picture Patents Company

3

refused to let such men as Carl Laemmle join their trust through a combination of
greed, paranoia, and anti-semitism, the first network of independent filmmakers was
born. They fled the MPPC’s often violent stranglehold on the East Coast and headed
for Southern California. Laemmle founded Universal Pictures when he arrived;
Warner Bros. was itself another such independent company. Once these Hollywood
studios put the MPPC out of business, they formed what the United States
government would later call a ‘de facto monopoly’; upon breaking this monopoly
after WWII, the studio system found itself accommodating a new wave of
independent films, both made and funded by producers, directors and actors eager to
experiment now that they were released from constricting, multi-year contracts in
which they had little say over which films they made, let alone how.
We are currently at the tail-end of another set of narratives about independent
American cinema, a moment identifiable as an ending both because the narratives are
now subject for parody
2
, as well as the fact that the aforementioned definitions of the
independent film no longer reflect reality. Today, many Hollywood studios make
films through their ‘independent’ arms; art-house cinemas offer features awash in
what are now seen as dull, ‘indie’ clichés; and the quality of the mainstream movie
has been greatly enhanced, often by poaching from the field of such alternative

2
Soon after the Onion article, 2005 saw the release of My Big Fat Independent Movie, a Zucker-
Brothers-style of send-up, mocking such films as Pulp Fiction (1994), Swingers (1996) and My Big
Fat Greek Wedding (2002).

4
cinemas.
3
Is there anything that makes this recent, post-Sundance narrative of
independence different from those that preceded it?
I would say so; throughout this dissertation I will argue that the significance
of the recent narratives around independent filmmaking lies, somewhat
paradoxically, in the recognition of those narratives as themselves familiar and
formulaic. Or: this recent version of mythology surrounding the independent
American film is special precisely because The Onion can now confidently make
jokes about it. We are increasingly aware of this mythology as a mythology, a set of
stories America tells itself about itself; significantly, the ‘we’ to which I am referring
here is not limited to those reading an academic text, but instead a larger American
public savvy to the surprising success of such films as El Mariachi (1992), Clerks
(1994), Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2005), Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and The
Passion of the Christ (2004). This savvy is itself worth recognizing: keep in mind
that the aforementioned Onion article requires not only a reader’s awareness of
independent filmmaking successes but, as with all of its jokes, a larger awareness of
news media conventions as well.
What are these narratives, what do they mean, and finally, what is the impact
of our increasing awareness of them as constructed narratives being told to us by a
culture industry that profits from them? If the reader detects a note of conspiratorial
paranoia creeping into my tone, be aware that said tone is intentional, and that such

3
I am writing these words, for example, at a college library within earshot of two undergraduates
watching the noisy summer blockbuster Armageddon (1998), the cast of which includes Ben Affleck
(Chasing Amy, 1997), Owen Wilson (Bottle Rocket, 1996), Billy Bob Thornton (Sling Blade, 1996),
and Steve Buscemi (Fargo, 1996).

5
paranoia is not mine alone. A current special edition of The New Yorker, self-
labelled “The Media Issue,” includes not only an article about media baron Rupert
Murdoch’s potential influence upon the 2008 presidential race, but an exploration of
the foothold that 9/11 conspiracy theories have attained throughout the mainstream
press.
4
Rather than deny its existence, I instead prefer the route of self-disclosure: I
feel that the current moment is one of what might be called conspiracy fatigue, in
which we are somewhat resigned to operations of cultural power as containing bias,
spin, self-interest. By way of compensation, I hope that my work here reflects an
admirable trend seen throughout the discipline of American Studies, in which the
ideological goals of that discipline at any given moment are made visible, and read
alongside the cultural texts analyzed by its members.
Though I stress the specifics of the contemporary moment as key to
understanding the recent celebration of the American independent film, they are
nevertheless inseparable from the fact of this celebration as one with prior historical
precedent. Indeed, the initial idea that began this project was a curiosity about the
relationship between this present, intense adulation over the independent film and the
larger American self-definition represented by its historic Declaration of
Independence. Was this anything more than a coincidence, a pun? The Sundance
film festival, for example, is accompanied both by the celebration of cinema as well
as the iconography of the American West. The independent directors who help to
define this movement, such as Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino and Steven

4
“Murdoch’s Game: A Mogul’s Unpredictable Politics,” and “Paranoid Style: Conspiracy-Theory
Journalism Since 9/11,” respectively. October 16, 2006.

6
Soderbergh, have become celebrities through narratives that depict them as
rebellious, self-made men. I begin with chapters devoted to the mythologies of the
festival itself, and then to these three directors as crucial case studies.
Next, I consider in more detail the theoretical implications of the recent
independent discourse as one that lays bare the operations of cultural power. Again, I
am interested in doing so with as much transparency as possible: this evocation of
current American Studies tenets is important not merely for its own sake, but as a
reminder of academic production as itself occupying an uneasy, contested
relationship with the cultural authority presented by Hollywood studios, mainstream
critics, and independent film companies. Chapter Five thus considers both the use of
American Studies as a paradigm with which to read, to master the discourse of
independent film as well as its status as a self-interested form of cultural authority,
attempting, perhaps, to reclaim academic power in what are currently referred to as
the Culture Wars. Finally, I consider what this set of narratives now threatens to
morph into; namely, an interest in the role of new technologies as the latest definition
one can use to celebrate challenging American film art as progressively ‘other’ to its
more mainstream counterpart. Much of the recent exploration of video games
throughout the academy emphasizes their ability to reconfigure conceptions of
narrative itself: how does this discourse of independence maintain its historical value
while also receiving this upgrade?

7
CHAPTER ONE
THE DESIRE TO DECLARE: SUNDANCE, ROBERT REDFORD, AND
INDEPENDENCE DISCOURSES

“Other people have analysis. I have Utah ... I often feel like I’ll just opt out of this
Rat Race and buy another hunk of Utah.”
-- Robert Redford, in the 1970s

“Maybe it’s time to say, ‘Are we making a mistake using the word ‘independent’
quite so much?’ Should we not just say ‘film is film’?”
-- Robert Redford, in the 1990s

I have never been to the Sundance film festival, and it is likely that I never
will go; it’s only slightly less likely that the average reader of these words has never
attended the festival either. Yet it is an event that nevertheless maintains a high
degree of popular fascination as well as a multiplicity of resultant cultural meanings.
Why is this? Does the festival simply hold the same cult-of-celebrity appeal as do,
say, the Academy Awards, or can its meanings be read more significantly, more
specifically than this? Clearly, the meanings of the Sundance film festival are not as
closely linked to the Hollywood industry as are those of the Oscars; the comparison,
however, is meant to stress the inaccessibility, the heavily mediated nature of the
event. I suggest that in the festival one can locate a useful and revealing case study
through which a larger American cultural mythology can be discerned and
interpreted, that of the desire for ‘independence.’ For the most part, the resonance of
this word has not been lost on those who would seek to champion what has come to
be known as, arguably, a movement of independent film in recent American cinema.
Not long ago, for example, the Independent Film Channel asked viewers to ‘declare
their independence’ by watching a marathon of recent low-budget, non-studio

8
productions over the July 4th weekend.
5
Similarly, in her introduction to the latest
edition of Videohound’s Independent Film Guide, editor Monica Sullivan refers to
Louis B. Mayer as one of the “founding fathers,” joking that such expressions evoke
both Hollywood history as well as that of the United States.
6
But what does this really mean – what are such examples actually telling us?
Are the centuries-old political writings of the United States in any way relevant to
the discourse around present-day film, or is this little more than a semantic
coincidence, a pun? In this chapter I attempt a preliminary investigation of such
matters, significantly not through textual analysis of recent ‘indie’ films themselves
7
,
but instead through a consideration of the way such films are placed within a specific
cultural context by popular representations of the Sundance film festival, and the
larger concept of “Sundance” that accompanies and modifies it. This in itself proves
to be a surprisingly rich and varied discourse; enough has been said about the festival
over the course of the last fifteen years
8
that it is worth considering in a number of
different ways, according to a variety of critical perspectives.
At the outset, I explore its festival status: Bakhtin’s notions of the
carnivalesque, as well as his writings on popular festival forms, have inspired a great
deal of thought on the significance of such ritualized public gatherings. Can the

5
From the IFC website: “Declare your independence with an IFC tv, uncut jaunty chapeau! And by
jaunty chapeau we mean baseball cap. Me and You and Everyone We Know are doing it. Wear it
Sideways to Camp and you'll look like a World Traveler.”
http://www.ifctv.com/ifc/what?CAT1=6686&AID=14449&CLR=black&BCLR=000000 Sep. 18,
2006.
6
Sullivan, xvii.
7
More of this will be seen throughout the auteur chapters to come.
8
The festival is typically thought to achieve mainstream familiarity in 1989 upon the success of sex,
lies and videotape.

9
Sundance film festival accurately be depicted as one of these, and if so, to what end?
What is the applicability of such an approach to this event, given that Bakhtin views
festive gatherings as avenues by which the masses can express themselves in
opposition to dominant culture, which the predominantly wealthy, bourgeois
Sundance audience is often thought to unanimously typify? Second, I explore the
nature of our mediated access to Sundance: is the event itself ultimately less useful
and significant than the ways in which has been discussed? A great deal has been
recently published about independent film in general and the Sundance film festival
in particular. How does such writing itself convey cultural meaning? It is my belief
that specifically within this discourse one can identify a substantial dependence on
images and conventions of familiar American mythologies. In this section I rely
primarily on Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral
Ideal in America to suggest that, even at the level of the popular press, the Sundance
film festival can be explored as a complex and contested cultural symbol, a site of
multiple and conflicting meanings.
Third, I consider in detail the role of nostalgia in our current understanding of
the festival. Naturally, such consideration is an extension of the festival’s
engagement with the mythology of independence; however, it is sufficiently
problematic to be worth specifically addressing in some detail. What does the
festival generate nostalgia for, and by extension, how does our own nostalgia help to
construct an understanding of the festival’s meaning? It is ironic that the festival was
originally called the United States film festival before becoming the Sundance film

10
festival in 1984, when it was absorbed into Robert Redford’s eponymous institute.
Ultimately, one finds that the event is nostalgic not for any actual American history
but instead for a fertile period of creative American filmmaking in the 1960s and
70s. In this section I view the Sundance phenomenon through the lens of postmodern
nostalgia as expressed in the writings of Fredric Jameson, Marita Sturken and
Jacques Derrida.
As Redford’s renaming of the event forever links it to his eponymous star-
making role in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), it is prudent to explore
the extent to which the festival is, fourthly, a star discourse. In the same way that we
have no real access to the festival, so too are we deprived of any direct engagement
with its ‘founder,’ yet a striking majority of newspaper and magazine articles on
Sundance literally frame their reporting with comments on Redford himself. What
does Robert Redford symbolize, then, and how has this symbol been manipulated in
order to structure the public’s perception of the event?
Many journalists portray each year’s production of the festival as the latest
chapter in an ongoing Redford-narrative; given that so much of this discourse
concerns Redford’s ability to control and exploit his own star persona, or to engage
with his own commodity status, I will briefly consider the actor from the perspective
of a branch of Cultural Studies that has devoted itself to an exhaustive analysis of
Madonna. If ‘Madonna studies’ are about the singer’s ability to expose young fans to
the constructed nature of (female) gender roles, can it be said that Redford’s iconic
relationship with the Sundance festival reduces a discourse that purports to celebrate

11
difference and innovation to one that is about familiar, conservative notions of white
male masculinity? Or, does Redford’s long association with liberal politics instead
reinforce our understanding of Sundance as an institution distrustful of authority,
unwilling to accept the corrupting influence of the Hollywood industry?
Finally, I attempt to demonstrate the extent to which an objective reality can
be shown to be at stake in the discourse around Sundance and its relationship with
Park City, Utah, via Samuel R. Delaney’s work on the social implications of
transforming public space in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.

Sundance as Ciné-Carnival
“But perhaps all these images are nothing but a dead and crippling tradition?”
-- Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World.

A great many representations of the Sundance film festival depict it as an
enormous party. An extreme example has appeared on E!, the television
entertainment network, in which the Sundance festival was covered as part of its
Wild On... series, a recurring program that travels to exotic locations and drains them
of any unique local characteristics they might have by focusing instead on American
tourists drinking and fornicating in them. More down to earth is John Anderson’s
recent account of the 1999 festival, Sundancing. The book is composed almost
entirely of interview fragments, excerpted from conversations with actors, directors
and executives, as well as Park City locals, volunteers, shopkeepers, etc. In part, one
can cynically attribute this to the publishing industry’s desire to put the book in print

12
as quickly as possible; similarly, the majority of books written about Sundance and
the ‘indie’ film movement seem hastily written, conceived to capitalize upon the
surprising successes of such films as The Blair Witch Project (1999).
Nevertheless, the effect of Anderson’s book is to portray the festival not
simply as an event for the wealthy Hollywood elite, but as one in which that elite is
forced to interact with, literally, a different class of people. Despite this sense of
interaction, however, it is difficult to reconcile present narratives of Sundance with
Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on popular festive forms and the carnivalesque. For Bakhtin,
such tropes are meaningful counter-histories, popular narratives in which the people
are momentarily empowered to represent themselves. Bakhtin’s work has inspired a
rich vein of thought, notably in the writings of Natalie Zemon Davis and Robert
Darnton, which investigate the existence of implicit satiric critique in the
‘misbehavior’ often found in popular festivities. A notable criticism of this sort of
work is that it is too often heavily reliant on a simple binary of high and low culture,
and that furthermore, it is not sufficiently critical of its own implicit high cultural
status by the very fact of its academic investigative nature.
Does Sundance represent an opportunity to conceive of festive forms more
fluidly, or should the event be dismissed as a ‘bourgeois carnival’ that merely
replicates dominant culture? There is a very real sense in which the festival’s value
lies instead in its ability to provide a public forum through which such questions can
be asked at all; throughout this dissertation I will offer several examples that suggest
that this contemporary discourse of Independent Film is one that brings academic

13
work, particularly recent self-investigative tendencies within American Studies, into
public view. Many have suggested that ‘indie’ films are significant for allegorizing
their own making; I would extend this to suggest that they also more productively
allegorize the academic endeavors which contribute to processes of cultural meaning.
The aforementioned authors typically stress themes of play and ambiguity in
considering such popular festivities; what seems most significant about Sundance,
then, is that its use of ambiguity allows it to achieve a unique status that effectively
can be described as the inverse of the Bakhtinian argument. If popular festive forms
are those in which the masses appropriate, exaggerate and parody the conventions of
bourgeois living in order to (at least temporarily) disempower those conventions,
then Sundance can be seen as an example of those parodies re-appropriated back into
the service of dominant cultures. For Bakhtin, one of the most essential images of
such popular-festive forms is the act of uncrowning; as he observes, a substantial
amount of carnivalesque activity can be identified as either literal enactment
(temporarily stripping state officials of their power) or symbolic performance
(lowering bells from atop the church steeple) of such role reversals. At the Sundance
film festival, however, those in power put temporary crowns on members of the
ostensible masses by supporting their films, while holding on to true power
themselves.
The suggestion of Sundance as an inversion of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque,
however, ultimately reaffirms the concept’s validity here, albeit paradoxically; more
integral to this discourse than uncrowning is a pervasive sense of ambiguity and

14
ambivalence. All crowning, furthermore, is always an act of simultaneous
uncrowning, and vice versa; such is the nature of power, as well as the ambivalence
Bakhtin locates within forms of carnivalesque expression. Sundance, moreover,
offers us both latent and unconscious images of crowning and uncrowning. While
obvious examples of crowning can be found in the various acts of bestowing awards
and titles upon filmmakers, journalists covering the event tend to represent the event
via greater interpretive leaps. A New York Times reporter, for example, notes that
visiting Robert Redford (easily, the festival’s symbolic king) in the actual Sundance
institute, outside Park City’s festival proper, has the character of an ascent when it is
in fact a descent: “Sundance itself, where Mr. Redford was host to a lunch of
filmmakers on Saturday, seems like Shangri-La ... Never mind that Sundance is
south of Park City and lower in altitude; going there conveys the sense of trekking up
the mountains to find some cinematic shaman.”
9
Another Bakhtinian paradox is thus
invoked: as with the pre-modern carnivalesque, it is the popular symbolism of such
events that has the most social meaning in reality, especially since it is only through
mediation that we are presently able to encounter them -- be it the mediation of
Rabelais, or of the New York Times.
The crowned filmmakers themselves are also notable mediators of
Sundance’s carnivalesque significance. Consider, for example the words of Kevin
Smith, whose sudden success with Clerks (1994) led to a lengthy interview
throughout John Pierson’s chronicle of recent independent film, Spike, Mike,

9
Caryn James, quoted in Pierson, 292.

15
Slackers and Dykes: “I’m a student of American independent cinema, and I’m not
the best student in the world, but I was good enough to do what I eventually did. I
don’t feel that I have to go back and view European or other foreign films because I
feel like [Jim Jarmusch et al] have already done it for me, and I’m getting filtered
through them. That ethic works for me.”
10
This quote is important in a number of
ways: not only does it evoke one of Bakhtin’s concepts, it also, more importantly,
presents an implicit defense against those who might argue that notions of pre-
modern carnivalesque folk culture are often too easily applied to what they feel is a
fundamentally incompatible postmodern mass culture. First, on the face of it,
Smith’s comments remind us that his crowning comes at a cost: the rise of his
popularity as an independent filmmaker is tied to the declining relevance of those
directors who embrace a contemplative, non-narrative (read: ‘foreign’) influence in
their work. By extension, one is then further reminded of the constant equivalent
crowning and uncrowning that permeates all histories of cinematic independence.
Scorsese, for example, was influenced by Cassavettes (among others, of course);
those who blindly imitate Scorsese have lost true historical knowledge of
Cassavettes. Similarly, those who now desperately evoke Tarantino’s work have
rarely heard of Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973); again, the truth of an older
filmmaker’s work is ‘lost.’
But what meaning is there to be found if we follow this argument, with its
seemingly endless string of crownings and uncrownings, to its logical end? Kevin

10
Quoted in Pierson, 32.

16

Smith’s words directly refer to the present-day marginalization of a director
(Jarmusch) who was himself crowned during the 1980s; I then followed this by
invoking a ‘70s auteur whose crowning in turn led to a marginalization of the 1960s
‘king’ of American independent film, John Cassavettes. Just how far back into
history can this process extend? I would suggest that such operations are ultimately a
conceptual means to identifying the peculiar (and, yes, paradoxical) significance of
the carnivalesque to American mythologies. I do not claim, of course, that I am the
first to apply Bakhtin’s work to specific instances of popular American festivals
(George Lipsitz has already done so extensively in his writing on the meanings of
Mardi Gras); instead, I am suggesting that there is an important clue to be found in
Kevin Smith’s willing act of ‘forgetting’ European cinemas at the expense of his
beloved American ‘indies.’
There is an ambiguity here that is worthy, finally, of Alexis de Tocqueville,
in its incessant return to images of a New World turning its back on, even declaring
itself independent from, a corrupt Old World. These acts of crowning and
uncrowning, for Bakhtin, ultimately have little to do with simple exchanges of power
and a great deal to do with our embrace of historical progress. Throughout his
analysis of Rabelais, Bakhtin repeatedly invokes “time, which is the true hero of
every feast, uncrowning the old and crowning the new.”
11
Consider his interpretation
of a notably ambiguous uncrowning image: “By cutting off and discarding the old
dying body, the umbilical cord of the new youthful world is simultaneously broken

11
Bakhtin, 219.

17

... Every blow dealt to the old helps the new to be born.”
12
For all the pre-modern,
European significance of such passages, to other ears they may sound ‘inherently’
American, with their implications of constant youth
13
and suggestion that the
carnivalesque is itself inherently democratic. By extension, America thus can be
portrayed as an on-going festive response to European decadence. The act of staging
such a festivity, as Bakhtin describes it, has a familiar, particularly declarative
character: “The carnivalesque crowd in the marketplace or on the streets is not
merely a crowd. It is the people as a whole, but organized in their own way, the way
of the people. It is outside of and contrary to all existing forms of the coercive
socioeconomic and political organization, which is suspended for the time of the
festivity.”
14

The peculiarly American paradox, of course, is that of the nation’s desire to
represent its own hegemonic coercive force as the festivity itself, through a constant
assertion of its own youth, and (now alarmingly global) independence. Herein lies
the simultaneous revulsion and fascination the United States is able to inspire for so
many throughout the rest of the world, teenagers and intellectuals alike: here is the
party that has not yet ended, in which the people refuse to relinquish control to those
who expected only a symbolic loss of the crown. The resulting social experiment
forces us to consider the potential, paradoxical tyranny of democracy as anticipated

12
Bakhtin, 206.
13
This eternal sense of youth found only its most recent expression in the media’s response to the
events of 9/11. If we ‘lost our innocence’ when the terrorists attacked us in 2001, one might
reasonably wonder how we were able to retain it during the events of Watergate, the Vietnam war, the
Civil War, or after dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, etc.
14
Bakhtin, 255 (his emphasis).

18

by de Tocqueville: when the carnival becomes the standard operating mode of the
power structure, how are the people to mobilize any resistance to it, symbolic or not?
How can we resolve this paradox of the constant carnival? We must look to the work
of those who respond to Bakhtin in order to arrive at a potential response to this
query.
A modern variation on the meaning of popular festivities, however those
festivities may be made manifest, is explored in Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s
article “Bourgeois Hysteria and the Carnivalesque.” Stallybrass and White suggest
that, though dominant culture has largely succeeded in erasing such forms of
expression by the twentieth century, such erasure has only occurred at the level of
the explicitly visible landscape. Through inspecting transcripts of Freudian analysis,
the authors conclude that the intense bourgeois fear of, and even disgust with, the
images of the carnivalesque force its numbers to repress such images, both socially
and psychically, so profoundly that they are doomed to reappear within the bourgeois
unconscious. Subjects of high culture, then, attempt “to mediate their own terrors by
enacting private, made-up carnivals. In the absence of social forms they attempt to
produce their own by pastiche and parody in an effort to embody semiotically their
own distress.”
15
Moreover, it is important to note that the “modernization of Europe
led [to this repression of the carnivalesque] ... it was simply one of the many
casualties in the movement towards an urban, industrial society.”
16
Stallybrass and
White would likely identify Sundance, then, as a purely “sentimental spectacle”

15
Stallybrass, 384.
16
Stallybrass, 386.

19

through which the upper-middle class engages with their base natures in ways that
are only “momentary, fleeting and partial”
17
; the paradoxical nature of the American
character, however, reveals that Sundance is not an expression of bourgeois nostalgia
for pre-modern jouissance, but in fact the opposite. The forewarned tyranny of the
masses has effectively reversed the terms, crowning one as the other is uncrowned.
James B. Twitchell has suggested that the dominant, mass expression of the culture,
with its mindless, abrasive TV programs and derivative, bloated feature films is now
a ‘Carnival Culture’, in his book of the same name. Now, the assumption of aesthetic
quality encased within the celebrations of the Sundance film festival leads to ‘the
masses’ (represented by those who define them, the purveyors of Hollywood mass
culture) enjoying the annual experience for its fleeting, utopic simulation of what it
might be like to have bourgeois tastes in art.
One must not forget, finally, that this event is not so much a mere carnival as
it is a ciné-carnival: the specificities of any film festival are such that the festivities
are on some level about their own mediation, or about the conflict between the
various forms of expression on and off the theater screens. As Bakhtin depicts it, no
such conflict should be necessary: true carnivalesque festivity is meant to fully
integrate ritualized stage-play with the unruly hum of street-life: “this utopia is
enacted without footlights; it is presented within life itself... [there is] no separation
of participants and spectators. Everybody participates ... the absence of clearly
established footlights is characteristic of all popular-festive forms. The utopian truth

17
Stallybrass, 388.

20

is enacted in life itself.”
18
Sundance, conversely, is a festival in which the bourgeois
attendees celebrate their own engagement with, and support for, popular expression
as embodied by the independent films they watch (and attempt to purchase).
If Bakhtin’s popular festive forms were about publics assembling and
expressing themselves in opposition to the codes of dominant culture, then in
Sundance we can see present-day dominant culture now performing a crypto-
nostalgic and counter-parodic version of those previous public gatherings, in which
one can recognize both a longing for pre-modern forms of expression (as represented
by the festivity itself as well as the films shown, collectively defined by their
resistance to industry) and a compulsive desire to repeatedly return to a site of such
festivity in order to defeat it, to repress it once more (by acquiring the films for
attempted integration into dominant systems of exhibition, distribution and
marketing). By this I mean that the festival is not necessarily successful in
attempting to sublimate popular expression, either by acquiring its films and
absorbing the codes of independent filmmaking into the Hollywood mainstream, or
by masquerading as a popular festive form while in actuality serving the interests of
established hegemony; this is only part of the discourse. Instead, it is a cultural space
in which such contestation is made visible and public, in which the class-war subtext
inherent to popular festive forms is now made manifest and explicit. Even if, at the
end of the day, the operations of the festival are effectively the same as those of the
Hollywood industry, they serve a unique function in that they make such operations

18
Bakhtin, 265.

21
visible. This is not merely a postmodern symptom in which, for example, we are now
more interested in business than textual content, or are in love with self-reflexive
media in-jokes. More importantly, it is a means by which the public is able to
recognize its own specific acts of film attendance as active engagement in joining the
ranks of the taste-makers. The trade-off, however, is that the footlights, indicating
the boundaries of this drama’s proscenium, are now more visible than Bakhtin would
want; this Sundance-utopia is indeed visible, but it is no longer directly enacted
within the lives of the people, and their participation is heavily contingent upon the
whim of those who have yet to be uncrowned.
This theoretical passage of this chapter has made little use of the specificities
of the event, of its actual details. In the next section I will investigate the
representation of the festival in the popular press, exploring the meanings of the
ways in which it is depicted and historicized. What kind of a symbol is Sundance?
What kind of a narrative is it? In the same way that the event’s festive status
demonstrates an implicit, if complex, nostalgia for pre-modern living, so too do
current representations of the festival engage with a mythology that is as old and as
contested as the United States itself. Now, however, the contestation is dual: it is at
once a debate over the meanings of American mythology as well as one over the
proper forum for that debate. By inherently aligning itself with conceptions of taste,
and by announcing its own cultural authority, Sundance locates what was once
purely academic work in the hands of the masses; much of the discourse’s
significance thus lies in academic ambivalence around such an occurrence.

22

Sundance and the Pastoral
It is important to consider that the phrase “the Sundance film festival” bears
the trace not only of its original incarnation, the United States film festival, but of the
Sundance institute as well. That is, it is a concept that is equally communicative of
both ‘film-festival-ness’ and ‘Sundance-ness.’ I call attention to this so that one can
recognize why the press is able to photographically represent Sundance not simply as
a snow-bound, freezing January festival, but as a verdant, tranquil summer utopia as
well. Indeed, since the annual festival is merely a temporary manifestation of the
institute’s ongoing work year-round, a striking number of mainstream articles about
Sundance choose to depict it as an ode to nature in full bloom. A story in American
Film devoted to one of the institute’s first workshop experiments in the early 1980s
represents it not by identifying any of its buildings, or even its workers, but instead
with an extreme long shot of unidentifiable figures dwarfed by the trees lining the
field in which they stand, a path behind them leading up into the mountains while a
brook babbles in the extreme foreground. Peter Biskind’s story for Premiere
magazine, “Promised Land,” is accompanied by a large photo of one of the
institute’s cabins, next to a small wooden bridge one must cross in order to reach it;
the bridge sits over a mountain stream beside which can be seen a hand-carved
Native American figure. When people are shown, they are invariably outside, in
casual dress, grouped either around a picnic table or merely sitting cross-legged in a
circle on the grass.

23
The text accompanying such photographs, unsurprisingly, is quite similar. On
the treatment of struggling young filmmakers attending a summer workshop, a
reporter for Time notes,
the staff recruits the best talent, pumps fresh mountain air into their
brains and hopes they are never tempted ... to make The Return of
Howard the Duck ... the morning sound and smell of creek water
under a wooden footbridge, the afternoon light on lush summer grass,
the green-walled canyons climbing the evening sky – anyone who
can’t draw creative inspiration from this place should probably be
shooting weddings and bar mitzvahs.
19

What a closer inspection of such texts reveals is that they are not simply about the
romanticization of nature, or even of the simple likening of the creative spirit to
nature. They are about an America, and an American culture, that has lost its way.
This is already apparent in the above excerpt from Time magazine (in which artists
need to reinvigorate themselves in the countryside lest they be tempted by a life
devoted to hollow sequel-making); however, the larger implications of Sundance are
not present only in those stories devoted to its artistic commitments. Strikingly, one
is also able to consider those texts that attempt to promote what can collectively be
called “Sundance-ness” as a way of life.
Far from simply being a mere film festival or filmmaking institute, Sundance
is also a ski resort, a clothing catalogue, a small community. Here is a passage from
the “Sundance History” page on the Sundance catalogue web-site:

In the canyon now called Sundance, Native Americans once honored
the spirit of the earth. The land has changed little since then. From

19
Lopez, 75.

24
Ute Indian hunting ground, to a Scottish family’s sheep pasture,
Sundance has become an arts and recreational community on 6,000
acres of protected and cherished wilderness. Robert Redford
conceived of Sundance in 1969 as an experiment in environmental
stewardship and artistic expression. A place where the ideas would
change, but the land would not.
20

This passage is advertising copy, pure and simple. Though the text makes passing
mention of the artistic endeavors Sundance has to offer, for the most part its goal is
to depict the location as one of untouched land, ideally to be contrasted in the
reader’s mind with the implied landscape in which he or she is likely to sit: spoiled,
polluted, noisy, over-developed. This is the type of pastoralism that Leo Marx would
call simple; it is a more complex version of pastoralism that he primarily investigates
in The Machine in the Garden. Marx would likely dismiss the catalogue’s copy as
proving nothing more than the success of a “strategy, validated by marketing
research, [that assumes] Americans are most likely to buy the cigarettes, beer, and
automobiles they can associate with a rustic setting.”
21
Though the passage from the
catalogue could certainly be said to engage with an American cultural mythology, it
does so to such a simplistic, one-sided degree that it is devoid of meaning. There is
nothing to analyze here; Marx’s seminal study, however, finds what he calls the most
significant issue of American culture dramatized within those more complex
moments (be they literary, commercial, social, or political) in which images of the
pastoral and the industrial contradict and conflict with one another. For Marx, these
contradictions are not necessarily to be resolved; instead they are to be historically

20
www.sundancecatalogue.com
21
Marx, 6.

25
situated and interpreted as crucial sites of meaning in and of themselves. To consider
Sundance as a meaningfully American symbol, then, it is imperative not merely to
read it as a pastoral utopia, but instead as what Foucault calls an “heterotopia” in
which the pastoral and the industrial can be shown to operate upon one another.
The vast majority of writing about the Sundance phenomenon takes this
conflict as its central theme. Consider the extent to which the following passage from
a New York Times interview is about the harmonious integration of nature and
technology, celebrity and obscurity:
the trip to Redford’s mountainside home is like driving to the Bat
Cave. We pass through a series of roadblocking security screens that
move aside when Redford pushes a button on a remote-control unit.
He points out a meadow where elk gather each evening ... we come
to a perfectly green expanse of lawn. Redford’s solar-heated home is
a marvel of eco-architecture; a modern dwelling built of native stone,
it’s so thoroughly fused with the land around it that it takes me a
moment or two to see it.
22

It is a central thesis of mine that such mythologizing transcends the content of any
individual independent film shown at the Sundance festival; by linking the
promotion of such modes of filmmaking to this larger discourse of lifestyle choice,
the entire film movement becomes at some level essentially about this internal
American conflict. A great deal of writers struggle to define a precise distinction
between the ‘indie’ film and that which is made by Hollywood; what seems more
interesting to me is the extent to which the resultant debate itself becomes a
meaningful popular American discourse. Redford’s home is an absurdly optimistic

22
Kirn, 85.

26
example; a significant number of recent depictions of Sundance, however, emplot the
narrative of the festival in ways that Hayden White would call decidedly tragic. Lory
Smith’s Party in a Box: The Story of the Sundance Film Festival is told from the
perspective of a programmer for the original “United States” incarnation of the
event; the book details the cost of the festival’s acquisition by Redford’s Sundance
institute, reinforcing popular notions of the present Sundance in which pretentious
Hollywood vultures descend upon a town too small to accommodate them while they
pick apart the flesh of innocent, struggling young filmmakers. Smith coins a
neologism to describe the act of replacing an original, dedicated US festival staffer
with a fresh face from the Sundance institute (such as Redford’s brother-in-law
Sterling VonWagenen): to suffer such a fate is to be “Sundanced.” A typically
irreverent episode of South Park recently went so far as to depict Redford himself as
a form of cultural parasite (that would likely have made Adorno and Horkheimer
proud); the megalomaniacal star is shown to be plotting the transformation of all
small American towns into new Los Angeleses.
23
For the creators of South Park,
Sundance has become its antithesis: Hollywood. The episode cannily satirizes the
label of independence as merely an advertising category the industry can co-opt (via
Marx’s simple pastoralism) to dupe the general public into continuing to enjoy its
ever-familiar product.

23
The story is in many ways more reminiscent of an LA Weekly article devoted to Bruce Willis’
failed business ventures in Hailey, Idaho that left many locals heavily in debt, “Hailey’s Comet: How
Bruce Willis Romanced and then Jilted a Small Idaho Town.” The narrative offers a failed microcosm
of Reaganite trickle-down economics (excitement over a wealthy star’s fleeting investment, a
transformation of Hailey’s stagnant economy); as I suggest, the satire of South Park is often reductive,
even reactionary, in its politics.

27
Though the episode is certainly satisfying, climaxing in an explosion of the
sewer system, brought on by the sudden population boom in South Park, that results
in the Sundance folk fleeing the town while covered in shit, its counter-extremity
suggests its own kind of simple pastoralism. It seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to
attitudes present in the aforementioned “Sundance Catalogue” quote, in which a love
of nature is directly linked to commodified jackets and sweaters. The episode tells us
little more than to cherish the pastoral town in opposition to encroaching but ill-
defined urban industry. In many ways, however, the satire of the episode is even
more satisfying for its surprising embrace of the carnivalesque, effectively (and
memorably) critiquing this decadent ciné-carnival through a renewed energization of
pre-modern festive forms. We have all heard, surely, descriptions of Sundance that
liken the event to an enormous banquet, feast or even a ‘smorgasbord’; the selections
are meant as an alternative to the ‘steady diet’ of escapism offered by Hollywood.
South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone echo the words of Bakhtin during this
moment, in their willing depiction of the symbiotic, even restorative relationship
between consumption and defecation. Here we have yet another example of the
ambiguities and ambivalences that are so prevalent throughout the author’s
conception of carnivalesque social commentary. Specifically, Bakhtin refers to a
passage in Rabelais’ work that compares servings of animal intestines to the human
counterparts that digest them: “the limits between the devouring and the devoured
body are erased ... animal and human organs are interwoven into one dissoluble

28

grotesque whole.”
24
Though it is easy to dismiss the episode’s explosive climax as a
simple display of the recent renaissance of gross-out comedy initiated by the Farrelly
Brothers’ films, to do so would be to ignore the vital tradition of fecal matter as a
meaningful symbol. Again, Bakhtin puts it best: “it is necessary to turn away from
the limited and reduced aesthetic stereotypes of modern times.... In grotesque realism
... excrement was conceived as an essential element in the life of the body and of the
earth in the struggle against death. It was part of man’s vivid awareness of his
materiality, of his bodily nature, closely related to the life of the earth.”
25
A further result of the episode is that Sundance itself becomes a cultural
forum around which these debates can accumulate, allowing the public to judge the
success of what the institute’s members tend to describe as an experiment in
hybridity. As one board member commented in 1981, “Sundance’s excitement is in
the cross-fertilization [between Hollywood and independents] ... For Sundance to
work, knowledge can’t just pass one way.”
26
A more recent interview with
programmer Geoff Gilmore explicitly links such hybridity to the festival’s distinctly
American character: “There has to be a realm, not entirely outside commercial
determination but not directly commodified ... an in-between space ... I don’t think
it’s a simplistic ideological vision, partly because I think ideology in the US is so
confused ... independent film is not a reducible term. It’s diversity, by definition.”
27

If the current Sundance discourse is essentially a debate about the meaning of

24
Bakhtin, 223.
25
Bakhtin, 224.
26
Perry, 49.
27
Aufderheide, 44-45.

29
American ideology, then by definition it must engage with a certain amount of
nostalgia, interrogating the country’s self-definition by contrasting what it currently
means against that which it has always meant. But is this actually a nostalgia for the
American past, a nostalgia for previous modes of American filmmaking, or is it
instead a kind of postmodern nostalgia for nostalgia itself, drained of any meaning
beyond the loss of meaning so many theorists find endemic to our current cultural
climate?

The Nostalgias of Sundance
“One would have to be a moral imbecile to be in any way nostalgic for this
situation.”
-- Samuel R. Delaney, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

In his comprehensive survey, Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American
Independent Film, Emmanuel Levy writes, “If there was a stereotypical indie in the
1980s, it could be described as a ‘sensitive’ coming-of-age story about a Midwestern
farm girl ... in the 1990s, the images are almost entirely urban and multi-racial,
suffused with violence and dark humor.”
28
Again, it can be seen that Sundance and
filmic independence serve as a site of meaningful cultural debate: while Levy
celebrates the diversity to be found within the current trend of ‘indie’ filmmaking,
Lory Smith’s history is one that is now nostalgic for the original version of the

28
Levy, 41. The gendered binary to which Levy here refers will later be explored through the lens of
new technologies. Henry Jenkins’ “Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Play
Spaces” refers, for example, to a similar binary in the designs of games aimed specifically at boys and
girls. If recent independent cinema engages with video game technologies to erect a ‘virtual frontier’
for viewers to explore, it is worth recalling that the gendering of this frontier predates its slippage
from real to virtual realms.

30

festival, a kind of now-and-forever-bespoiled ‘virgin land’. Smith’s position
represents a substantial side of the debate that suggests the current trend of
postmodern crime films (Tarantino’s fusion of Kubrick’s The Killing, 1956, with
Hong Kong cinema in Reservoir Dogs, 1992, is a definitive example) reveals the
festival to be little more than a forum for young directors to display hip, “calling-
card” movies in order to gain access into Hollywood, as opposed to an outlet for
truly different modes of filmmaking. It is intriguing to consider that, despite the
complex pastoralism often represented by Sundance, the nostalgia generated here is
not so much for a time when America was better as it is for a time when American
movies were better. The festival’s name change, from “United States” to
“Sundance,” suggests a Jamesonian kind of nostalgia not for the reality of the
country but for its glossy cinematic representations.
Consider Jameson’s description of Body Heat (1981) in “Postmodernism and
Consumer Society”: “the small town setting has a crucial strategic function: it allows
the film to do without most of the signals and references we might associate with the
contemporary world, with consumer society.”
29
For Jameson, such a trend suggests
an inability to face either the present or the actuality of the past; what is striking
about the “Sundance” label, and its use of small town iconography, is its nostalgia
for a time when the American nostalgia film was able to meaningfully address its
present context. It is important to consider that the name Sundance links the
phenomenon specifically to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and by

29
Jameson, 117.

31

extension to experimentation within the Hollywood system during the 1960s and
1970s. It is easy to dismiss the label as merely indicating that moment at which
Redford achieved enough power to begin the gradual construction of his ‘empire.’
30

To do so, however, is to miss the extent to which the film represents a period when
the Hollywood western was able to mobilize past American iconography in order to
engage viewers with complex commentary on such contemporary issues as the
Vietnam War.
If the reader can only recall George Roy Hill’s film for its curious use of
“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head,” then perhaps a brief refresher is in order
(and the song is a perfect place to start). One of the film’s most memorable
sequences is the lyrical musical interlude in which Paul Newman and Katherine
Ross’ characters cavort joyously on a bicycle while being lovingly photographed
amidst their natural environment. If anything, the sequence is a perfect cinematic
embodiment of Marx’s title: a machine in the garden, indeed (in one shot they even
indulge in the temptation to snatch apples from a tree while gliding by it). What is
perhaps less memorable about this sequence is its fleeting, elegiac function in the
larger structure of the film. The bicycle itself has earlier been introduced by a barker
who announces to a crowd, “this little machine will change your lives ... the horse is
dead!” Later, when the heroes are forced to retreat to Bolivia, Newman’s character

30
If the frontier has ultimately been rendered virtual, then so too are the empires that are built from it;
as we shall see, Ronald Reagan’s invocation of the Star Wars trilogy’s “evil empire” to denounce the
Soviet Union suggests a decisive shift from the real to the virtual throughout the discourse.

32

heaves off the machine into a small pond, shouting after it in disgust, “the future’s all
yours, you lousy bicycle!”
Considered in isolation, one is tempted to dismiss Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid as simply an odd, idiosyncratic film (which it certainly is); however,
its social functions become easier to recognize upon noting that a great deal of
popular film criticism in 1969 was devoted to comparing the film with that year’s
similarly elegiac western, The Wild Bunch. Both films are set not in the 1860s, but at
the turn of the century; both depict the displacement of traditional western outlaw-
heroes by modern technology, as represented by an automobile and a Gatling gun in
Peckinpah’s film; and both films end with their main characters ripped to shreds by a
hail of bullets from overwhelmingly large opposing forces. This last detail has often
been noted as a reference to Bonnie and Clyde (1967), in which the absurd degree of
violence is typically interpreted as a denouncement of the equivalent carnage (shown
to Americans via television coverage) of the Vietnam War.
The result is that this Sundance-nostalgia becomes harder to dismiss as a
simple postmodern erasure of historical significance; instead, the use of “Sundance”
evokes Marita Sturken’s work on the multiplicity of meanings derived from the
Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. For Sturken, the wall embodies “not a
singular statement but [is instead] a site of mediation, a site of conflicting voices and
opposing agendas ... [Representing] a struggle between narratives, it has spawned ...
very different kinds of remembrance.”
31
Tellingly, Sturken also notes that media

31
Sturken, 83-84.

33
coverage of the wall’s reception moves between dealing directly with the Vietnam
War and its own collective sense of purpose in representing that war; this is not
merely a remembrance of conflict but of the media’s significance in engaging the
American public with interpretations of that conflict. Similarly, the Sundance
discourse is one that not only engages with the myth of American independence but
also is nostalgic for media representations of this mythology, specifically the 1960s-
70s “New Hollywood” declaring itself, on some level, aesthetically independent
from an increasingly ineffectual studio system. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
and The Wild Bunch symbolize at once a collective desire to engage with American
historical mythology and, at the same time, disillusionment with prior U.S. cinema’s
monolithic engagement with that mythology. As a result the discourse effectively
conflates the desire for a greater sophistication in film with a desire for a greater
complexity to American self-interrogation; similarly, this dissertation will
necessarily move from the specifics of the independent film discourse to the self-
interrogating academic discipline of American Studies itself.
What exactly, then, is the significance of the independence myth? If this truly
is a complex nostalgia, it must be gazing back towards something more meaningful
than a vague, distant past – what is it that keeps this myth alive in the present? A
great deal of philosophical enquiry has been devoted to attempting to answer this
question. By temporarily laying aside the matter of historical specificity, Jacques
Derrida approaches the heart of the matter in a brief address regarding the
implications of signing any such document, aptly entitled “Declarations of

34
Independence.” Though the speech would seem to be a simple matter, perhaps even
predictable in its own way, Derrida’s remarks begin with an expression of tension
and insecurity. On the occasion of America’s bicentennial celebrations, the
philosopher finds himself giving a public lecture at the University of Virginia, in
Charlottesville; his host has suggested that the unique combination of speaker and
event could result in only one possible topic – a Deconstructive reading of the
Declaration of Independence. Almost certainly pressured unwillingly in such a
direction, Derrida’s ultimate first words should not come as a surprise: “It is better
that you know right away; I am not going to keep my promise. I beg your pardon, but
it will be impossible for me to speak to you this afternoon, even in indirect style,
about what I was engaged to deal with.”
32
Derrida quickly proves to be less
interested in a conventional textual analysis of the document than he is in proposing
an answer to the question, “Who signs, and with what so-called proper name, the
declarative act which founds an institution?”
33

Derrida is ultimately referring here to the paradox of political imitation that is
also at the center of Ronald Schmidt’s recent study, This is the City: Making Model
Citizens in Los Angeles. Invoking a similar question – “[H]ow does one imitate the
radical excellence of a founding?” – Schmidt recalls “the paradoxical demand that
the good citizen simultaneously innovate and imitate has been a central fixture of the
politics of the United States since the eighteenth century.”
34
Such a paradox is easily

32
Derrida, 7.
33
Derrida, 8
34
Schmidt, xvi-xvii.

35

extended to the aesthetic realm of independent film that engages with such
mythologies – how can such films ever coalesce into a meaningful, sustained
discourse when they are defined through their very innovation, through decisive
change? Schmidt’s book is also useful, however, for stressing the inevitability of a
move from the real to the virtual as a means to resolve such paradoxes:
[H]ow does one imitate radical innovation? By crafting superior
personae; those who are best at pretending to be completely genuine
are thus able to maintain political authority by being able to bar others
from their legitimate place in the political realm. In short, from
Cooper’s fictional Natty Bumppo to the film-star cowboy president of
the 1980s, the master artificers of innovative spontaneity dominated
the authorized public world of the American Republic.
35

As a result it is easy to suggest that the alternatives to Hollywood proposed by
Sundance and the cinema it represents are themselves largely virtual; I will later
suggest that a contrast between the film-star cowboy president of the United States
and the film-star cowboy president of the film festival that champions authenticity is
itself an illusory choice between persuasive, mediated personae. The discourse of
Independent Film threatens to render virtual the processes of academic work in much
the same way that Schmidt’s popular personae themselves inhibit public access to
the political process.
36

35
Schmidt, xviii.
36
Many contemporary American Studies scholars stress the need for self-awareness in their academic
work, a result of substantial inquiry as to the impacts of the 1950s and the 1970s as historical contexts
for the discipline’s earlier analysis. Accordingly, it is worth noting that this dissertation was written
during a political moment in which intense polarity of opinion threatens to drown out the voice of
measured academic analysis; the most recent of many examples is the publication of David
Horowitz’s The ProFessors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, in which a figure such
as Fredric Jameson is attacked simply for suggesting the concept of a political unconscious that might
enable one to read past the surface artifice of current political discourse.

36
Though I will return to Derrida’s remarks momentarily, an analysis more
representative of what was likely expected from him can be found in Carl L.
Becker’s book, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political
Ideas. Becker explores various drafts of the document, interpreting specific elements
of its wording while attempting to historically account for various decisions that
were made in settling on the version that is now considered ‘official.’ Amongst his
more notable conclusions, however, is that the text was heavily edited so as to
downplay its own inherent hypocrisies and paradoxes, such as the assertion that ‘we
are all created equal’ having come from a group of rich, white men, many of whom
fully intended to continue employing slaves for as long as they wanted. As Becker
puts it,
The most notable instance [of revision] was the deletion of Jefferson’s
famous ‘philippic’ against the slave trade. Jefferson himself thought
this long paragraph one of the best parts of the Declaration; and
certainly nothing could have been more relevant in an argument based
on the natural rights of man than some reference to slavery -- that
‘cruel war against human nature itself.’ But Congress struck it out.
37

It is not difficult to imagine such conclusions weighing heavily upon Derrida’s
decision to focus instead upon the inherent performative paradox inscribed in the
document’s signature, rather than the moral paradox within its ideology.
Here, too, however, Derrida has been anticipated by Becker’s analysis. “If the
Declaration has not been forgotten,” Becker suggests, “... no doubt one essential
reason is that it was an event, [as well as] the chief symbol of an event of surpassing
historical importance, as well as a literary document which set forth in classic form a

37
Becker, xiii.

37

particular philosophy of politics.”
38
Here we can see the parallels between the
meanings embodied by the document and those Marita Sturken locates in examining
the Vietnam memorial; once again, another multiplicity of meanings is produced,
rather than a singular statement. In a sense, for both men the proper code with which
to read the Declaration is Bazinian; the document is not so much significant for what
it says as text, but for the extent to which it ‘embalms’ a crucial historical moment,
rendering it forever present and contemporary. The Declaration thus becomes an
attempt at a unique reconciliation of an imitative political paradox that dates back to
the Roman Empire.
Becker, for example, seems almost moved by the extent to which his own
painstaking reconstruction brings Jefferson back to life, finding the man’s presence
haunting the words, filling them with life much as a good public speaker does to
entertain his audience. Consider the following tribute, presented in the form of an
apology:
Like many men who write with felicity, Jefferson was no orator... It
might seem that a man who can write effectively should be able to
speak effectively. It sometimes happens. But one whose ear is
sensitive to the subtler, elusive harmonies of expression, one who in
imagination hears the pitch and cadence and rhythm of the thing he
wishes to say before he says it, often makes a sad business of public
speaking because, painfully aware of the imperfect felicity of what
has been uttered, he forgets what he ought to say next. He
instinctively wishes to cross out what he has just said, and say it over
again in a different way – and this is what he often does, to the
confusion of his audience. In writing he can cross out and rewrite at
leisure, as often as he likes, until the sound and the sense are perfectly
suited – until the thing composes.
39

38
Becker, 225.
39
Becker, 195 (his emphasis).

38

The seeming over-length of this passage is crucial: what for one reader would be a
seemingly minor point, relatively easy to express succinctly, becomes for Becker a
near confession (one wonders if he is speaking in defense of his own struggles to
speak in public) that again evokes Sturken’s conclusions. Like the Vietnam
Memorial Wall, the Declaration also invites us to ‘visit’ and revisit it, to reflect upon
our own selves, our own definitions of the nation, and finally to actively re-engage
ourselves as good citizens, rather than passive followers.
For Derrida, then, what fascinates is the signature, as well as the according
act which produced it. “But just whose signature exactly? Who is the actual signer of
such acts?” Derrida asks.
40
If we are inclined to answer ‘Thomas Jefferson’, we must
accept that the words merely denote the man; what they connote, however, is a
trickier matter altogether. Just as ‘Jefferson’ ultimately signifies ‘the
representatives’, so too do they ultimately stand in for ‘the people.’ But how can the
act of drafting and signing the Declaration of Independence have any legitimate
meaning, when the very reason for its existence is that ‘the people’ have already
granted themselves the rights it outlines by demanding that the document be drafted?
“One cannot decide,” answers Derrida, “whether independence is stated or produced
by this utterance ... This obscurity, this undecidability between, let’s say, a
performative structure and a constantive structure, is required in order to produce the

40
Derrida, 8

39

sought-after effect.”
41
It is possible, initially, to interpret Derrida’s tone as vaguely
pessimistic, as if to suggest that the words are irrelevant; or one might conclude the
act of declaration is akin to a Nietzschean will-to-power, in which one can only be
independent by having the brute force necessary to declare and keep said
independence. In this formulation, the true ‘declaration’ would be the Revolutionary
War, an interpretation reinforced by Derrida’s repeated use of the word ‘coup’ to
describe the Declaration.
42

Derrida’s ultimate reading of the signature’s significance, however, is aligned
with a decidedly more benign conception of morality. In order to truly retain
independence, “an institution ... has to render itself independent of the empirical
individuals who have taken part in its production ... it turns out, precisely by reason
of the structure of instituting language, that the founding act of an institution – the
act as archive as well as performance – has to maintain within itself the signature.”
43

Here we can identify an eternal tension between a sense of permanence evoked by
the concept of independence as well as a constant engagement with the present, as
embodied by this contrast between archive and performance. The ‘coup of writing’
undertaken by Jefferson et al thus can be seen as not so much a will-to-power, in
which ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are terms defined solely by those with the power to maintain
the definitions, but instead a humble will-to-transcendence, forever merging a
specific moment of the historical past with a constant presence.

41
Derrida, 9 (his emphasis).
42
“The self surges up here … in a single coup of force, which is also a coup of writing, as the right to
writing.” Derrida, 10 (his emphasis).
43
Derrida, 8 (his emphasis).

40

Derrida’s tentative conclusion is that the act represents our collective desire
for meaning; our belief that such a declaration will take effect in the long run is also
our belief in a “last instance,”
44
in which the ultimate implied signer of any such
document is a moral and just God. This myth of independence, and our continued
cultural engagement with the term, is thus one of our most primal philosophical
enquiries: is this a universe that means, and do I have free will within it? With
Sundance we simultaneously face an institution as well as one of Schmidt’s public
personae in the figure of Robert Redford; indeed, as a discourse Sundance is all too
successful at rendering its acclaimed directors into similar personae themselves
(Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino, etc). Derrida’s most significant conception of
American independence, then, is that which renders the American institution
independent of American founding fathers – if America is to succeed as the great
social experiment it claims to be, it must be an experiment whose results can be
duplicated by others in order to validate it. If not, American democracy becomes
simultaneously symbolic and one more system of control.
An intriguing implication of Derrida’s, however, is that it is not so much the
institution founded that bears cultural meaning but rather the act of declaration itself.
Ultimately, it is this act that we are nostalgic for, and thus it seems especially
significant that the Sundance discourse is one in which we see represented not a
stable institution but an ongoing process, a series of repeated acts of declaration: the
Sundance Resort is independent of our modern world, which relies on automobiles

44
Derrida, 12.

41

for transportation; the Sundance Institute workshops are independent of traditional
Hollywood-apprenticeship film schools; the Sundance Festival is devoted to films
that are independent of the Hollywood mainstream; the Sundance Channel is
independent of commercialized cable television; and the Sundance Catalogue is
independent of modern shopping malls. An institution merely governs, represents a
set of rules; a founding declaration, however, suggests a present-day ability for
citizens to live up to their founding fathers’ ideals. However, as Mary Fuller notes in
her dialogue with Henry Jenkins, “Nintendo and New World Travel Writing,” such a
suggestion is itself typically illusory: “Cultures endlessly repeat the narratives of
their founding as a way of justifying their occupation of space … [discourses such as
video games] allow us to enact through play an older narrative that can no longer be
enacted in reality.”
45
The history of cinema is full of forms of independent filmmaking as well as
narratives of oppositional filmmaking strategies re-appropriated into the Hollywood
system once more so that new independences can reappear in a cyclical fashion. It is
possible that Sundance has captured the public imagination so vividly simply
because it plays out this cycle on such a grand scale. Or, perhaps, this Sundance
discourse will succeed in revealing this cycle to be over-naturalized, that this binary
between independent and Hollywood films is a false one that must be deconstructed
before it can be resolved, before true progress can be made. Perhaps it is simply not

45
Jenkins and Fuller, 69.

42

in the nation’s character to do so: as Leo Marx notes, “American writers seldom, if
ever, have designed satisfactory resolutions for their pastoral fables.”
46

Redford-as-Whore?
I mentioned in my introduction that Sundance is worth recognizing as a star-
auteur discourse, at least in part. Consider the following headlines: “Redford:
Content king, even in high-tech world”; “Redford hates the buzz, loves the pics”;
“The Two Hollywoods; Robert Redford has this problem”; “Eight wannabe directors
spend a month with Redford and other pros to sharpen their craft.” It seems self-
evident that this discourse is one that engages with the star’s persona, but why does it
do so, and what meaning does this engagement convey? On one level the Redford
discourse is another manifestation of simple pastoralism: many of the stories that
cover the festival end by reporting on the status of Redford’s latest production. The
result is to link the festival, and “Sundance” by extension, with the sentimental films
Redford typically directs; such titles as A River Runs Through It (1992), The Horse
Whisperer (1998) and The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000) come to mind. This
recent filmography links Redford with a pastoral impulse; at the same time, however,
a film such as Quiz Show (1994) can depict a more cynical Redford, distrustful of the
media.
Somewhat more complex and intriguing, on the other hand, is a trend within
the Sundance discourse to portray Robert Redford as a figure who is required to

46
Marx, 364.

43
‘play’ himself, or to manipulate his star persona, in order to achieve his goals.
Schmidt refers to the distinction between the passive ‘imitation’ of our forefathers,
which allows citizens to behave with good obedience, and a more active ‘emulation’
of them, which includes an attempt to exceed them, to continue their radical acts.
Redford thus simultaneously becomes the artificial persona that cannot be emulated,
used in the control of a pliant populace, as well as himself an actual citizen
attempting this very act of impossible self-emulation. This aspect of the discourse
necessarily interrogates the extent to which our collective memory of Redford’s
persona, particularly in the 1970s, contributes to our interpretation of Sundance.
Peter Biskind’s aforementioned article “Promised Land,” for example, cannot help
but depict the mismanagement amongst the various branches of Sundance as a
conspiracy reminiscent of All the President’s Men (1976), or Redford’s elusive role
throughout the proceedings as evocative of the Senatorial nominee, untrustful of
associates’ use of his image, from The Candidate (1972).
It would be unfair and, more importantly, inaccurate to accuse Biskind of
being singularly predisposed to blurring the line between Redford’s on- and off-
screen activities; one might assume for example, that the ongoing war in Iraq, itself
difficult at times to separate from a post 9/11 ‘War on Terrorism’, would lead to a
greater sobriety on the part of journalists, even when merely dealing with
Hollywood. Yet, as Redford’s name began to appear in major American newspapers
throughout the fall of 2002, it became readily apparent that the distinction between
Redford-the-political-participant and Redford-the-political-symbol, or icon to be

44
invoked by others (including Redford himself) was hopelessly, inescapably vague. A
recent example began with an editorial Redford wrote for the Los Angeles Times,
entitled, “The Highest Patriotism Lies in Weaning U.S. From Fossil Fuels.” In it,
Redford simultaneously attacks the policies of the Bush government as well as a
news media establishment that reports on such policy to the exclusion of more
relevant concerns:
The Bush White House talks tough on military matters in the Middle
East while remaining virtually silent about the long-term problem
posed by U.S. dependence on fossil fuels. Failing to rein in our
dependence on imported oil gives leverage to undemocratic and
unstable regimes ... American rooftops can be the Persian Gulf of
solar energy ... If we want energy security, then we have to reduce our
appetite for fossil fuels. There’s no other way. Other issues may
crowd the headlines, but this is our fundamental challenge.
47

In this brief article, Redford combines explicit critique of Bush’s pro-war stance
(given authority by referring to his own “involvement with solar power issues [since]
the mid-1970s and ... [support] of the San Francisco-based Vote Solar
organization”
48
) with an implicit sense that Redford is especially well-suited to
exposing the sensationalist bias of most mainstream media, himself having such a
long-standing, uneasy relationship with it.
More pronounced, however, was a New York Times interview with Redford
that followed this editorial about a week later, in which the line of questioning shifts
from a reiteration of the editorial’s argument, to Redford’s own status as aging

47
Redford. http://www.commondreams.org/views02/1202-03.htm Originally Published on Monday,
December 2, 2002 by the Los Angeles Times.
48
Ibid.

45
celebrity figure and concurrent solidification as icon of the American West.
Intriguingly, this brief article is entitled “The Outsider.” Nowhere within the text
does this assessment receive elaboration; the suggestion would seem to be that
Redford’s ‘independent’ nature is by now so established that one’s own assumptions
as to the meaning of this independence are most likely correct, whatever they may
happen to be. The very brevity of the piece should make its sudden transitions of
subject matter all the more glaring; however, the sense of Redford as a shorthand
signifier serves to conversely naturalize the article’s blurred boundaries as
commonly accepted aspects of the discourse, while making Sundance a symbol
through which many discourses are reductively condensed into one. In the same way,
for example, that Redford at once represents Hollywood and an independent cinema
that purports to oppose it, just as he is simultaneously a near-mythic emblem of the
established American West, and a counter-cultural political figure, so too is it
equally natural for a New York Times piece criticizing Presidential politics to appear
in the ‘Movies’ section. In the interview, Redford cites ‘apathy’ as a primary reason
for the lack of dissent in the current national climate, sizable but short-lived anti-war
protests notwithstanding; tellingly, he identifies this apathy as dual, straddling both
political and cinematic spheres.
Such fluctuation is at times implicit – when Redford complains that “the
Bush administration is making it virtually impossible for the smaller groups to have a
say,”
49
he could be paraphrasing his own reasons for the importance of the Sundance

49
Griscom, www.latimes.com.

46
film festival – as well as surprisingly explicit. The lack of motivation for political
dissent is also the inability to read textual products, to interpret, at the level of both
the news media and more unambiguously entertainment-based variations. When an
‘apathetic’ citizen skims, as Redford puts it, “right past all news about the ozone hole
and the wetlands being drained and junked by developers and the Glacier National
Park in Montana that could have no glaciers by mid-century,”
50
their decision to do
so is not only political but aesthetic as well. Again there is a sense of nostalgic loss:
Redford is no longer a popular actor who is able to convey, as the Sundance kid, that
modern America is failing to learn from the simple ‘purity’ of its own past. He is
also, now, an element of that past, struggling to make his own history present for a
younger demographic. Asked, “Is it hard for you to communicate to the MTV
generation?”, Redford replies, “Entertainment is a double-edged sword, quite
frankly, and it’s kind of weird to be saying this because it’s my day job. But I’m a
little critical of how completely oppressive it’s getting. Newspapers now have box
office scores on the front page. The front page should be left for major issues that
really affect us. And top ten this, top ten that -- it’s always changing. It’s about as
shallow and transitory as you can get.”
51
Though one might argue that Biskind’s invocation of Redford’s signature
film roles in his article on the Sundance institute is more a function of Premiere
magazine’s style than a Baudrillard-worthy confusion of signifier and signified, it is
nevertheless uncanny that in this current example one cannot help but recognize the

50
Griscom, www.latimes.com.
51
Griscom, www.latimes.com.

47
actor effectively replaying his role from The Electric Horseman (1979) in real life.
Though the film was one of the top ten box office hits of the year, it is likely not as
well remembered as some of Redford’s more critical successes, and thus is worth
briefly recounting here. Redford plays Sonny Steele, a rodeo champion whose career
is shown to both rise and fall during an opening credits montage. In a series of
newspaper headlines, Steele is revealed to have signed, while still popular, a contract
to promote products for the ominous ‘Ampco Corporation.’ The name might evoke
an oil company; a particularly likely interpretation, given the fuel shortage crisis of
the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. The film, however, is deliberately vague about its
specifics, preferring to depict Ampco instead as a megaconglomerate with diversified
holdings “in industry, in energy, in development, in research, entertainment, in
nutrition, recreation and in science,” as one of its television commercials proudly
announces. Steele is hired specifically to appear as a spokesman for ‘Ranch
Breakfast’ cereal. When one of the montage’s headlines reads, “Ampco adds
Cowboy to its stable of Corporate Symbols,” the significance is doubly loaded: not
only does it evoke the sense of Western independence reined in by corporate control,
it also announces that the film will be, on some level, about signification itself -- the
reduction of real people to semiotic commodities.
A running joke throughout The Electric Horseman is that Steele is an
embarrassingly awkward media performer, prone to freezing up when in front of
cameras; he is almost immediately disillusioned, moreover, about both Ampco, and
himself for having signed with them. An early scene in which Steele promotes Ranch

48
Breakfast in a grocery makes this painfully clear, as he struggles to recite the
product’s generic copy: “For all you hard-workin’, hard-playin’ little folks, whose
bodies are growing every day, you remember Ranch Breakfast, uh, is the cereal that
builds champions. It’s exploding with the kind of energy that’s, that’s got more stuff
in it, uh, than toast and bacon, eggs ... and toast and bacon, and uh, uh, meat loaf and
olives ... nuts ... It’s just got more good stuff in it” [dissolve to next scene]. To be
sure, the joke depends in part upon our awareness of Redford’s own ‘natural’ charm;
however, the moment pokes more fun at the empty monotony of consumer culture
than it does the cult of celebrity.
If the real Steele is unable to perform as well as Ampco would like, no
problem: he is promptly reduced to a costume that can be worn by others, becoming
a hollowed-out signified who watches from the sidelines as a flashy signifier
(literally: the rodeo outfit lights up to evoke the film’s eponymous figure) is dutifully
trotted out to amuse pliant rodeo audiences. When Steele complains, “That’s not
me,” he is told, “They don’t know the difference,” furthering the film’s suggestion
that authenticity is now irrelevant to media consumers. It is a sentiment that is easy
to take for granted today, especially by an academic audience willing to accept that
‘The Gulf War Did Not Take Place’; however, it is both surprising and, in retrospect,
revealing that such sentiments should be uttered so explicitly in a Hollywood film of
1979. Certainly, Hollywood has engaged in a long tradition of self-reflexive media
mockery: Frank Tashlin is just one of many directors, for example, who found
success with Madison Ave. advertising satires during the 1950s and ‘60s; countless

49

figures of TV comedy have looked directly into the camera to suddenly disrupt the
narrative to undercut their own sponsors; and, in terms of concurrent context, the
industry had a notable success three years earlier, with the acclaimed dark satire
Network (1976). Though some of The Electric Horseman’s points had thus already
been made, perhaps even more successfully in the hands of others, it is nevertheless
notable for locating its satire within a framework that would become increasingly
relevant during the two decades in which this most recent celebration of independent
film has occurred.
From one perspective, the film is important merely for having been
conveniently released during the bridge between two decades, allowing it to appear
as a final statement from the Hollywood that produced challenging product
throughout the 1970s, before giving way to the producer-driven blockbusters that
would define ‘80s cinema (and which continue to overwhelm the industry today).
Moreover, the film seems to signal a decisive rupture in Redford’s career, between
the defiant, often directly political roles of American cinema’s ‘Second Golden Age,’
and the more intermittent, charisma-driven work he took in the 1980s, such as The
Natural (1984), Out of Africa (1985), and Legal Eagles (1986). As Stephen Prince
has noted, “instead of performing with some regularity, Redford turned his attention
to the causes of Western environmental conservation and the creation and promotion
of his Sundance Film Institute.”
52
To be sure, The Electric Horseman is a Hollywood
Media satire that is particularly concerned with conservationist issues: Sonny

52
Prince, 182.

50

Steele’s response to the oppressive power of Ampco is to steal the company’s latest
mascot, a thoroughbred horse named Rising Star, so that he can return it to the
pastoral harmony of Utah. Steele abducts the horse during a Las Vegas show Ampco
is staging as a public relations stunt, to celebrate its merger with the similarly
ominous corporate entity, ‘Omnibank.’
53
Having arranged a TV interview, initiated
by a tenacious reporter, Hallie (Jane Fonda, herself one of Hollywood’s most
politically loaded celebrity figures), Steele complains about Ampco’s earlier
treatment of the animal: “They got him all tanked up on tranquilizers and ‘bute –
they’re sticking him full of needles! Look at this tendon! It’s all filled up. He’s shot
full of steroids, and it’s just for looks. Makes the horse sterile. So even if they – God,
this is so damn funny! Even if they wanted to breed him, even if they wanted to pass
on some of those fine qualities, they couldn’t.”
The film’s engagement with both conservation issues and the fading
relevance of Western American iconography also extended, in a rather ironic
fashion, to its promotion. The Electric Horseman was advertised on the Sunset Strip
in Los Angeles via the ‘world’s first solar-powered internally lighted billboard.’
Oddly enough, the film’s full title was not displayed on the ad, merely a close-up of
the stars embracing under the single word ‘Electric.’ According to the industry trade
papers, “When asked why, Robert Friedman, senior VP Columbia Pictures said, ‘We
felt the word “Horseman” might turn off many people, particularly in the East and

53
For a consideration of Steven Soderbergh’s metaphoric depiction of Las Vegas as a coporate
entertainment industry that does not provide room for the stylistic flourishes only an individual artist
can create, in his remake of Ocean’s Eleven (2001), see the chapter on the director in this volume.

51
other big cities. “Electric” best describes what generates on the screen between
Fonda and Redford, so, that will be the thrust of the ad campaign from now on.”
54
It
is interesting that this strategy ultimately backfired; the trades would later report that
audiences erroneously assumed the film was about an energy crisis, similar to
Fonda’s then-recent appearance in The China Syndrome (1979). This partially
accounted for The Electric Horseman’s performance as a gradual, word-of-mouth hit
rather than an immediate box office smash. On the one hand, one could celebrate the
public’s rejection of this Hollywood marketing ploy, which sought to downplay
traditions of the West in favor of simulated ‘modern’ sophistication. On the other
hand, reaction to the campaign seems more likely to suggest that the masses were
wary of the stars’ personae signifying ideologically charged, complex storytelling,
such as All the President’s Men (1976) or Klute (1971); once word spread that the
film was a fairly light Romantic Comedy, it became an embraceable hit for the early
months of 1980.
Critics also sensed that The Electric Horseman was implicitly about the
controversy and relevance being drained from the stars’ images. Newsweek’s review
of the film, moreover, itself seemed to unconsciously evoke Schmidt’s issues of
political imitation and emulation:

Since these stars are celebrated mavericks, supposedly resistant to
movie-biz stereotyping, it’s interesting that they seem to see
themselves as behavioral models, icons of righteousness pointing the
way toward proper conduct in a corrupting world. Righteousness
blends with their grace and beauty ... if you’ll only agree with them

54
Field, (clipping file – no page number given).

52
on whatever it is – the Vietnam War, nuclear energy, the environment
– you too can have the golden flair and ethical sexiness of Fonda and
Redford.
55

Andrew Sarris went so far as to suggest that The Electric Horseman is a kind of
formal farewell, by Redford, to his own career’s previous significance,
foreshadowing his shifting priorities of the coming years. Sarris, ultimately,
reanimates a lost Redford within this film in much the same way that Carl Becker
has with Thomas Jefferson in the lines of The Declaration of Independence:
“Redford and Fonda are actually involved in a weird sort of Bazinian epiphany by
traversing the wide open spaces of Utah itself. Fonda, both on-screen and off, must
move on, of course, but Redford will stay in this idyllic wilderness of his liberal
imagination.”
56

The film’s relevance to the coming decades is not simply one of
environmentalist awareness, however; more importantly, it also prefigures the
confusion of real and reel life that would soon be embodied by Ronald Reagan’s
presidency. The Electric Horseman is ultimately about the desire for – and declining
potency of – [celebrity spokespersons of] the political left. Hallie is only able to
capture Sonny’s passionate rant about Rising Star by not telling him that the cameras
are on; when ready to perform, all Steele is able to say about the creature is that
“he’s one of the best. He’s one of the greatest animals in the ... history of ...
animals.” As the country finds itself within an increasingly conservative political

55
Kroll (clipping file, no page number given; my emphasis).
56
Sarris (clipping file – no page number given). It had been widely reported that the film would shoot
many of its exteriors in Arizona, until Redford signed on with the stipulation that location work be
moved closer to his home and interests.

53
climate once more, best embodied by George W. Bush’s seeming desire to replay the
defining moments of his Father’s presidency
57
, many have publicly wondered why
there is no viable popular figure who accomplishes for the Democrats what Rush
Limbaugh, for example, is able to achieve for Republicans. The Electric Horseman’s
depiction of Redford as a dashing liberal hero who nevertheless fails consistently in
his attempts to spread a message through mainstream media both suggests that there
is no longer any place for such ideas in a conglomerated entertainment apparatus
while simultaneously establishing the actor as Ronald Reagan’s most significant
opponent, symbolic or otherwise, in American political discourse of the 1980s.
Though Reagan would not be sworn in as President until 1981, his years
spent as Governor of California and his previous attempts to receive the Republican
presidential nomination (in 1968 and 1976) had already given him substantial
visibility as a notable actor-turned-politician. It is telling that a pulpy
58
biography,
Robert Redford: The Superstar Nobody Knows, already made a casual, yet revealing
comparison between the two figures, well before The Electric Horseman was
released. The book opens with Redford lobbying for pro-environment legislation at
the premiere party for one of his own movies; the author, David Hanna, feels
compelled to apologize somewhat for the actor’s desire to do so. “There remains
considerable spillover from the McCarthy era. Producers still take a dim view of

57
Many have suggested that Bush Jr. replayed not merely a military action against Saddam Hussein,
but a confusion of war and Hollywood as well. This sentiment is best demonstrated by the parody
movie poster, widely circulated via the internet, that turns George Lucas’ Star Wars: Episode II into
George Bush’s Gulf War: Episode II (Coming Soon!).
58
Indeed, the short book is so dubious that its credits page does not even list its own date of
publication! As The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) is the most recent film to which it makes reference,
one must infer the book appeared shortly afterwards.

54

activist actors,” Hanna argues.
59
The McCarthy reference suggests a perceived
equating of leftist politics and Communism that will become more explicit as Hanna
goes on to deliberately contrast Redford’s politics with those of the notorious ‘Red-
baiter.’ Note the implied binary of authenticity and simulation separating Redford
and Reagan, respectively, in Hanna’s assessment:

The articulate actor still has a hard row to hoe unless he is ... a smooth
product of public relations and big business like Ronald Reagan ...
Reagan is protected by old friends who picked his attitudes and wrote
his position papers on all their cherished repressions – welfare, health
insurance, government housing, free education, etc. ... [instead, at the
premiere, the] impression of Redford ... was of a man governed by
sincere motives and deep dedication to a cause. No one felt tempted to
label him a phony – and that counts as an accomplishment.
60

It is not much of a stretch, then, to see an ‘80s-era Redford as himself an overly
domesticated horse, rescued from the empty showmanship of Vegas/Hollywood/the
Political Right and deposited in the comforting pasture of Utah/Sundance/the Left;
beyond any surface sentiment about the depletion of natural resources, The Electric
Horseman depicts a leftist retreat in the face of Republican political dominance
within the media’s arena.
Michael Rogin’s seminal essay on the relationship of American politics and
the Hollywood industry is almost immediately encapsulated in its own title: “Ronald
Reagan, The Movie.” Though Rogin does not mention Redford directly in this
article, written in 1981, his discussion of ‘independence’ as a crucial mythology for

59
Hanna, 16.
60
Hanna, 17-19

55

Reagan, alongside a scathing critique of the former actor’s heavily mediated
presidency, demands consideration here; at the same time, Rogin reminds us of the
discourse’s fluid movement between the political and filmic spheres throughout the
decade. One does not have to cast one’s mind back very far, for example, to recall
how consistently Ronald Reagan was able to align his recovery of the country with
the reinvigoration of the Hollywood blockbuster: the Strategic Defense Initiative was
nicknamed Star Wars, the film that still symbolizes, for many, a decisive rupture
between American cinema of the ‘60s and ‘70s and that of the last twenty-five years;
he used the words “Go ahead – make my day!” to show his resistance to proposed
tax increases, invoking Clint Eastwood’s then-recent ‘Dirty Harry’ hit, Sudden
Impact (1983); and, after the 1985 release of thirty-nine hostages in Lebanon,
Reagan joked that the same year’s Rambo: First Blood Part II would provide a
useful template for dealing with such scenarios in the future.
61
Consider the simultaneous trajectories of this period: as Reagan rises to
power, using such references to effectively ‘cinematize’ politics, Redford is
conversely retreating from his pedestal, making fewer films in order to emphasize his
Sundance work, which, ideally, offers a means to (re-)politicize American cinema, if
not at the level of explicit content, then at least at the level of popular discourse.
62

While Reagan is applauded as a consistently and especially charming politician, a
result of both his aforementioned quips and his former status as a Hollywood ‘movie

61
Rogin, 7.
62
Later, we’ll see similar inverse narratives at work throughout both of George Lucas’s Star Wars
trilogies.

56

star’ (though many have debated that label), Redford is instead considered to be
increasingly media-shy and an awkward public speaker, best embodied by Sonny
Steele’s repeated stumbling when the cameras are on him. Furthermore, each man is
not only identified with a signature role but is also able to directly exploit that
identification for his own ends: Redford’s institute and festival are indebted to Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, just as Knute Rockne, All American (1940) provided
Reagan with the role of football halfback George Gipp. As Rogin notes, “Win those
races for the Gipper!” was how Reagan urged crowds to vote the straight Republican
ticket during the fall campaign.
63

Both figures also notably invoke nostalgia for a previous ‘golden age’ of
Hollywood filmmaking. While Redford wishes the industry was still able to generate
the challenging movies through which he achieved stardom in the 1960s and ‘70s,
Reagan’s autobiography similarly indulges in what Rogin calls “an elegy for a
vanished Hollywood.”
64
It is most likely not surprising, however, that Reagan’s
tastes are decidedly different from Redford’s; the former president instead longs for
a return to, predictably, the more formulaic films of a vertically integrated studio
system, not yet besieged by anti-trust suits and Communist infiltration. Rogin calls
“Reagan’s enlightenment about Communism in postwar Hollywood ... the founding
moment of the politics in which we now live”
65
; the moment, however, is equally

63
Rogin, 15.
64
Rogin, 38.
65
Rogin, 29.

57

significant for its prediction of the uneasy relationship between Hollywood and
independent filmmaking that flourished in the 1980s and still survives to this day.
As Rogin goes on to note, paraphrasing Reagan’s autobiography, “the
Communists failed to capture Hollywood ... but they initiated a series of costly
studio strikes that caused the decline of Hollywood as the entertainment capital of
the world.”
66
The bottom line of such an assessment is to locate the roots of what is
now so comfortably, so colloquially known as ‘indie’ filmmaking within an ‘evil’
conspiracy that threatened American safety and its cultural identity in the 1950s; an
especially ironic assessment in light of criticism directed at Reagan’s postmodern
‘forgetting’ of reality in favor of reel life, since so much of said conspiracy was a
phantasmic illusion, generated by right-wing hysteria, that never really existed. A
similar narrative that will be explored in chapters to come is that of the debates
between 1950s methodologies and those of the 1970s-80s throughout American
Studies scholarship; given the polarized nature of the political moment as I write
this, it is worth examining these as, effectively, a debate within the academy over a
familiar binary of ‘50s conservatism versus ‘70s liberalism.
Consider the developments of the Hollywood industry, and American film
content, in the immediate post-war period: as the monopoly crumbled, independent
producers were free to develop and expand their material to an unprecedented extent,
primarily led by the rejuvenation of United Artists by Arthur B. Krim and Robert S.
Benjamin in 1951. Over the course of the decade, Krim and Benjamin signed scores

66
Rogin, 37.

58
of independent producers to make films with newfound creative autonomy. Stars
such as Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas were now able to make such cynical,
downbeat films as Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and Detective Story (1951),
respectively; directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder and Blake Edwards
produced their own material through United Artists; and, elsewhere in the industry,
now lauded ‘indie’ pioneers such as Sam Fuller and Nicholas Ray were beginning to
develop their best work. Such experimentation continues into the 1960s, as Redford
began to appear in movies; flourishes during the era of Civil Rights, Vietnam and
Watergate; and finally comes to symbolize the sort of content that many American
independent filmmakers now say they wish to evoke. As Reagan would have it, such
innovation is the ‘fault’ of a post-war Communist presence in Hollywood; the garden
to which he suggests his American Adam must return is populated by John Rambo,
‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan and Luke Skywalker.
Questions I have not seen directly asked of Redford in any interviews about
Sundance include: “Why have you not appeared in any of the films to have been
developed by the institute, or to have premiered at the festival? For all the praise you
lavish on such material, why haven’t these films offered you one role that you’ve
wanted to play?” Or, “Why hasn’t there been an independent film to which you’ve
lent your star power as an actor simply because it would not have been made
otherwise?” The answer would most likely reflect other statements Redford has
made about his limited visibility at the festival itself: that to commit himself in such
ways would be to ‘overwhelm’ works that should not be corrupted by the influence

59

of celebrity status. The effect of such a position is also, of course, to solidify the
public’s perception of Redford as ‘reclusive’; however, such a stance also serves as
an ironic, implicit critique of Reagan’s abusing his own celebrity status to similarly
overwhelm real political issues by casting them in simple-minded, cinematic terms.
To ensure that Sundance films remain meaningfully independent, Redford must
ensure that they are not merely independent of Hollywood, but independent of
himself as well
67
. The result is a definition of independence that excludes the
mythologies generated by such mass cultural texts as those in which he has appeared;
this is another notable comparison point between Redford and Reagan, whose use of
independence, as depicted in Rogin’s writing, is startlingly different.
Rogin notes Reagan’s desire to return the country “to a time before
Americans were ‘robbed of their independence’”,
68
while suggesting that the
President literally embodies the inability to do so in a time of late consumer
capitalism. Reagan’s ‘independence’ refers to a nation that once sustained itself
through the production of goods and services; instead, his America continues to
sustain itself through the proliferation of media images that offer only a model for
how to consume, an instruction manual that tells consumers how and what to buy –
with Reagan himself a prominent construction of such media. Reagan attempts to
lead by example, removing himself from the world of make-believe. By embracing

67
Though the first draft of this chapter was written before Redford took starring roles in such ‘indie’
films as The Clearing (2004) and An Unfinished Life (2005), one could argue that the wait was in
itself revealing – by now, Sundance, and the independent feature film it seeks to celebrate, have
become so inseparable from the Hollywood system, that the two films’ releasing companies are
directly owned by 20
th
Century Fox and Disney, respectively.
68
Rogin, 9.

60

the frontier mythology of the Hollywood western, however, equating Communist
‘Reds’ with the Indian ‘Redskins’ he had previously hunted down on screen, Reagan
reveals that this independence remains a fantasy generated by precisely the same
culture industry out of which he could never fully escape.
69
By the time of his
presidency, espousing independence while himself an ‘agent’ fully under corporate
control, Reagan had “realized the dream of the American male, to be taken care of in
the name of independence, to be supported while playing the man in charge.”
70
If Reagan’s cinematized politics present an illusory independence, stable only
in the extent to which it is a consistently generated Hollywood fantasy, then Redford,
by way of contrast, offers an independence from that fantasy, from the ubiquitous
simulation of an American nation and American values offered by an increasingly
sensational film industry. As Redford tells it, the independence offered by Sundance
is meant to resist conglomeration, to reject the simple-minded messages of a
Hollywood monolith dually: both through this resistance, suggesting that the
meaning of this independence lies within its very inability to be defined, as well as
its financial limitations, which ensure such films will not descend to Hollywood
(largely right-wing) propaganda, simply because they cannot afford the special
effects that would allow them to do so. Like the ecological elements Redford hopes
to preserve through his acquisition of Utah land, so too does film become one more
vital renewable resource that must be appreciated anew, before we become

69
Rogin, 30.
70
Rogin, 34.

61

addictively dependent on the disposable synthetic substitutes generated by industrial
apparati.
Redford’s remarks in interviews about Sundance consistently make these
points: “I get a little bit nervous labeling independent film too strictly, because film
is film. But the usual traits of independent film are that it tends to be lower budget,
without stars, and it tends to be auteur-driven: a lot of writer-directors. The
trademark of an independent film was a certain rough-edged look that mainstream
films didn’t have because [independents] didn’t have the money to do all the
refinements.”
71
Redford’s reference to authorship is, of course, not to be ignored
here: from our current perspective, one could argue that one of Sundance’s few
substantial achievements is the (re-)discovery of the politique des auteurs, as
embodied by such young white men as Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, and to a
lesser extent, Steven Soderbergh. Tarantino in particular is repeatedly championed
for having returned the lost art of written dialogue to cinema.
Moreover, it is not to be forgotten that this independence is its own
mythology, depicting the potential for self-determination of the artist at a time when
corporate control of the film industry repeatedly sought to stifle such expression. As
Redford continues:
I just had a belief in independent film’s future. I could see that my
own industry was beginning to narrow down to being highly
centralized and very expensive. You could see the handwriting on the
wall: there were going to be fewer and fewer chances for diversity
and for real writing and real screenplays. The films that I’ve made in

71
Tray, www.wga.org./WrittenBy/1996/0196/redford.htm.

62
my career that I had any control over were really independent films
made within the studio system.
72

Here once again is Redford as Sonny Steele, now rescuing both celebrity status
(Sundance is a place where the auteur has independent control over his work) as well
as representation itself (Hollywood films are collectively assembled by script
doctors, while Sundance produces ‘real’ screenplays, developed not by committee
but instead a pseudo-kibbutz of retreating fellow artists). Both are rescued by
Redford from a network of modern conglomerates that reduce all they acquire to
corporate symbols, devoid of tangible value or presence. But a crucial question
remains: if the reach of America’s culture industry is infinitely broad, all-
encompassing, is it possible for Redford, himself such a widely embraced product of
that industry, to truly escape it? If so, how?
P. David Marshall directly addresses such concerns in his study Celebrity and
Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. For Marshall, virtually all celebrities
generated by the machinery of the mass media are inherently constructs of
modernity; they are all effectively ‘American’ phenomena, due to their literal
embodiment of the ideological paradoxes, identified by Derrida and Schmidt, that
simultaneously celebrate mass democracy and individual independence; and they are
all ultimately political agents, working to shape and control public opinion. Much of
Marshall’s book would seem to suggest that neither Redford nor any individual
celebrity is able to resist such operations of power; for all the ways in which the
public associates Robert Redford with ‘independence’, the association is ultimately

72
Tray (my emphasis), www.wga.org./WrittenBy/1996/0196/redford.htm.

63

moot, for this independence is merely the same illusory fantasy repeatedly sold to us
by all of our favorite stars. According to Marshall, “the film star has [always]
operated as a symbol of the independent individual in modern society. This crucial
symbolic value has demonstrated and reinforced the ideology of potential that is
housed in all members of capitalist culture to supersede the constraints of institutions
for the true expression of personal freedom.”
73

For all the effort, then, that has just been expended into binarizing the
relationship of Robert Redford and Ronald Reagan into one that, respectively,
opposes independence of expression with media hegemony, in Marshall’s
formulation, both figures exist within the same politicized celebrity discourse. Once
again, the postmodern theorizing of Jean Baudrillard seems appropriate: just as the
excessive simulacra displayed by Walt Disney World et al constitute a mere
smokescreen that tricks us into thinking the rest of the world still exists in (or
contains any) reality, so too does Reagan’s consistent contempt for the real dupe us
into accepting Redford’s embrace of independence via ‘real’ writing and ‘real’
movies as a possible alternative. This despite the fact that the political acts he
inspires add up to little more than a different kind of movie attendance.
In Marshall’s hands, celebrities exist to acknowledge and control our own
desires for independence to an extent that recalls Foucauldian depictions of prison
and the treatment of madness as institutions that enable us to internalize the
operations of our own oppression:

73
Marshall, 82.

64

the celebrity, like [Foucault’s work on] sexuality, allows for the
configuration, positioning, and proliferation of certain discourses
about the individual and individuality in contemporary culture. The
celebrity offers a discursive focus for the discussion of realms that are
considered outside the bounds of public debate in the most public
fashion ... a way in which the sphere of the irrational, emotional,
personal and affective is contained and negotiated in contemporary
culture.
74

Marshall is not quite a pessimist – he notes that “what cannot be overlooked is that
celebrities are attempts to control the masses,”
75
but he is particularly astute in
noting that the celebration of stars as stars allows for their hold over audiences to
transcend the temporary, specific meanings offered by any of their individual film
texts.
76
Tom Cruise, for example, might make a film that criticizes excessive
materialism, such as Risky Business (1983), or even one that suggests his own star
persona was itself complicit in the celebration of such materialism during the 1980s
(Jerry Maguire, 1996, and Magnolia, 1999, come to mind); however, because Tom
Cruise is still himself a product we buy when we go to the movies, because we know
how much he gets paid per picture, and because his divorce is presented to us not as
a private crisis but as an opportunity to exchange attractive co-stars within his public
textuality, ‘Tom Cruise’ will continue to signify the American dream of wealth and
power that we wish to believe ourselves, all of ourselves, capable of attaining.
Marshall is not directly interested in Robert Redford, invoking him only to
suggest that, “in the tradition of Newman and Redford, Cruise embodies American-

74
Marshall, 72.
75
Marshall, 243 (his emphasis).
76
Marshall, 242-3.

65

ness as opposed to some other or ethnicity.”
77
One can easily conceive of Marshall,
however, suggesting that Redford’s association with Sundance represents nothing
more than a hyper-independence – an extreme form of the self-determination that all
such celebrities possess when they use their wealth and power in ways that the
masses erroneously believe are potentially available to them. Indeed, Redford’s
interests in ecological conservation thus become easily comparable to the charity
efforts of many celebrities, such as Paul Newman’s line of food products or Roger
Moore’s support of UNICEF after leaving the James Bond series. Such efforts, in
Marshall’s view, are more likely to enhance our appreciation of the star – and by
extension our support of the star system – then they are to effect real political
change; as he puts it, “the agency of the celebrity is more often reduced to a
privatized, psychological representation of activity and transformation – it rarely
moves into a clear social movement.”
78
I would argue that the ‘exceptional’ nature of
Robert Redford as an American film celebrity is that he has been able to achieve
exactly that: he has manipulated his celebrity agency not merely to create meaning
on the level of a single film text or the larger discourse of his own star persona as a
locus of public discourse. Instead, with Sundance, we are shown an attempt to
manipulate media itself (rather than its textual units), to build, if you will, a counter-
hegemony. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, if the medium truly is the message,
then the meaning of independent film is to be found outside the boundaries of its

77
Marshall, 48.
78
Marshall, 244.

66
own textuality, and instead within the operating systems of its own production,
distribution and exhibition networks, as well as its discursive cultural status.
In reviewing Marshall’s book for American Literary History, Michael
Newbury also invokes Jean Baudrillard’s writings: “it would be possible to
understand any given celebrity as one of Baudrillard’s simulacra, as existing in an
inescapable system that facilitates the pleasures of consumption, but we would still
want to understand how and to what ends consumers and audiences negotiated the
commercially produced ‘realities’ around them.”
79
Newbury also notes, quite rightly,
that without paying such attention to the actual consumer use of celebrity icons, the
analysis of stars as pure simulacra “operates as a kind of endgame.” Newbury
expands upon Marshall’s conditional optimism (celebrities as mere attempts to
control mass consumership) by suggesting a renewed relevance for Stuart Hall’s
Cultural Studies work. Here again, the discourse seems to argue for the value of New
Americanist trends in American Studies, about which more later: here is a
phenomenon without inherent textuality, only able to achieve meaning through an
interactive network of films, stars, fans, and the systems of cultural authority that
bind them.
Though the hyper-artifice of all celebrities always already connotes a dearth
of reality that obscures the mere denotation of left/right political binaries offered by
Redford and Reagan, their plastic accessibility ensures that mega-stars are also
crucial elements in the utterances of disempowered audiences. Indeed, the

79
Newbury, 278.

67
aforementioned episode of South Park literalizes such negotiations through its
formal emphasis on (bri)collage: here Robert Redford is reduced to an easily
manipulated construction-paper-doll that the show’s ‘underground’ creators can
themselves manipulate in order to expose the potential transparency of celebrity
altruism. The paradox, however, returns precariously close to the ‘endgame’
Newbury warns against: the most visible, progressive, satirical, disempowering and
creative appropriations of Redford’s image are themselves depicted via yet another
media text, rather than through public activism. Despite South Park’s embrace of
controversy, notable attacks on media censorship, and low-budget appearance on a
little-watched basic cable network, the show is nevertheless subject to the realities of
the marketplace, selling multiple soundtrack albums, DVD sets, and plush toys of its
‘cuddly’ characters. Ironically, by leaving Hollywood for a substantial period of the
1980s, Redford himself became, paraphrasing Newbury’s prescription, the most
significant subordinate audience to make over this cultural object (‘Robert Redford’)
to suit his own reality.
In establishing Sundance, Redford-the-real-agent not only participated in
developing an infrastructure for this new group of movies, he also engaged in a
historically significant media performance of textual self-poaching. If the
enterprising Star Trek fan, for example, is to be celebrated for re-appropriating video
footage of the show to generate his or her own slash fiction, exposing sexual subtexts
not recognized by controlling producers, then Redford’s manipulation of his own
symbolic value should be read as equally, if not more emancipatory. By shunning the

68

industry that would have required a consistent output of charming lead
performances, at the decisive turning point of having played the shy, stammering
Sonny Steele, Redford began to create a media narrative that cast himself as an
American Adam of sorts, removed from the Edenic pleasures of Hollywood stardom
and thrust into the thorny brambles of punishing toil: self-financing. The irony is one
that Marshall would surely appreciate. Redford, the Hollywood celebrity we most
closely associate with the beloved American mythology of independence, effectively
has to reject the consumer-independence granted to him as such a celebrity in order
to embody it for his nation. For Marshall, “the celebrity is the independent individual
par excellence; he or she represents the meaning of freedom and accessibility in a
culture ... [He] accentuates the possibility and potential for individuals to shape
themselves unfettered by the constraints of a hierarchical society.”
80
In this
formulation, of course, the independence is illusory, of the simulated sort that
inspires Marshall’s readers to invoke Baudrillard: it is not so much necessary for a
celebrity to actually have independence as it is for said celebrity to represent or
signify ‘independence’ for media audiences. Marshall crucially reminds us that
celebrities are beloved (both by their fans, and by the media conglomerates that
‘represent’ them, in every sense of the word) for embodying ‘possibility’ and
‘potential.’
Celebrities are rarely expected to act upon such possibility; typically they
(mis)-behave in familiar, predictable, even generic ways. If they acted otherwise,

80
Marshall, 246.

69
capitalizing on the potential their wealth brings them in ways other than lavish
acquisition and consumption, studios would not know how to sell them, and
audiences would not know if they liked them anymore. Redford, conversely,
constructs narratives of himself as newly humbled and dependent while investing in
endeavors that promise true independence from such culture industry formulae.
Sundance, ideally, disrupts and counters not only Hollywood’s filmic narratives, but
its extra-textual promotion mythologies as well. A revealing anecdote, for example,
depicts Redford as forced to use his star charisma in order to raise funds for his
festival:
Once, in the early 80s, he visited Martin Davis, then head of
Twentieth Century Fox, to hit him up for a gift. Davis was watching
football and seemed more interested in the game than in Redford. “He
said, ‘Hey, look, I’m going to give you the money, because you cared
enough to come see me,” recalls Redford, smiling. “He was very
generous. Then he says, ‘There’s a few ladies out in the pool. Why
don’t you go jump in?’ What’s really bad is I did. But we needed all
the help we could get in those days.
81

There is an undeniable entertainment value to this story; however, it is also
significant as a depiction of Redford coming uncomfortably close to literally
whoring himself (while a mafioso-esque studio head watches!) in order to get what
he wants. I use the word ‘whore’ deliberately to evoke a celebrity figure who has
been associated with the term somewhat more often, namely, Madonna. As Robert
Miklitsch notes in From Hegel to Madonna, the “issue of prostitution ... has
historically functioned as one of the most powerful and pervasive metaphors of the ...

81
Biskind, 92.

70

relation between capitalism and sexuality ... [it is] a classic instance of the
commodity-body.”
82
The branch of academic inquiry currently known as ‘Madonna Studies’
investigates the post-structural intersection of stardom, semiotics, economic capital,
and (representations of) the body. Due to her many high-profile self reinventions,
Madonna transcends the fascination of a mere movie star, leading to her earning a
disciplinary status all her own. Even more so than Redford, she is a figure who
struggles to emulate, in Schmidt’s sense, her own image as an innovator, a founder
of radical trends. Often, such writings focus on the status of cultural agency, both of
Madonna herself, as well as that of her teenage, typically female fans. In much the
same way that I have argued about Redford and Sundance, Madonna Studies sees the
star as not representing a fixed meaning but rather an ongoing cultural process
around which issues of performativity tend to accumulate; in the case of Madonna,
such performativity is typically linked to gender. In Miklitsch’s words, the
“Madonna commodity-body-sign is not simply ... a commodity fetish but a figure, ...
a symptom. Indeed, it is in this overdetermined sense that one can speak of Madonna
as an hypericon, a dialectical image that is not merely a ‘particular sign for
something’ (say, reification), but a figure that symbolizes the process of figuration
itself.”
83

Why shouldn’t our increasing cultural awareness of Madonna as an ongoing
performance-of-the-self enable us, by extension, to read other celebrities in this

82
Miklitsch, 132.
83
Miklitsch, 126.

71
manner? I ask this question because the current discourse around independent film is
alarmingly white and masculinist; a particularly cruel irony, given the term’s
ostensible associations with difference, and resistance to dominant hegemonic
norms. The vast majority of recent books on the subject (such as Cinema of
Outsiders, and Stranger Than Paradise) devote substantial enquiry, if not entire
chapters, to the films of Tarantino, Soderbergh and Jarmusch, while engaging in a
kind of academic tokenism by including a scanty summary of female and non-white
directors (the latter work patronizingly lumps both into a brief chapter entitled “New
Kids on the Block”). Perhaps a future avenue to explore when considering the
Sundance discourse is one that is comparable to Richard Dyer’s work on whiteness,
which explores the media’s construction of an ethnicity too long accepted as a
naturalized norm in opposition to those ethnicities portrayed by film and television in
highly circumscribed ways. Similarly, Madonna studies may prove to be a useful
paradigm to apply to the Sundance discourse in order to expose it as one around
which the performative nature of masculinity, and its role in capitalist exchange, is
shown to be at stake in Redford’s ongoing self-performance.
84

The Fate of Park City
“Reason does not rule this world, and it will not necessarily rule here.”
-- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

84
Though in some ways it might be argued that the issues of gender performativity raised by this
discourse might be most profitably considered from the perspective of Judith Butler’s recent work, I
stress Madonna Studies because of its ability to combine such an approach with issues of celebrity,
commodification, etc.

72
Finally, it seems important to recall that, for all the preceding abstraction
about celebrities, cultural debate, and independence, Park City, Utah remains a very
real, very small place. As such, it represents a unique potential for investigation into
the deployment of non-urban (rural?) space, following from present work that
analyzes the transformations and uses of urban space, typically in major centers such
as New York and Los Angeles. Though a comprehensive investigation of this sort
would require both time and practical methodologies (of urban planning and land
use) that exceed my current framework, it remains fruitful to consider how other
work in urban studies can be applied to Park City as a unique discursive realm. It
seems particularly significant, for example, that in his passionate defense of New
York City’s red light district, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Samuel R.
Delaney often invokes a potential binary between big cities and small towns in order
to make his points. For Delaney, this binary is not so much one comparing actual
spaces as it is one that proposes alternate modes of perceiving space; at the heart of
this matter can be found, in Delaney’s argument, an essentially discursive debate. As
Delaney suggests, when developers exaggerate the potential for violent street crime
in order to justify their overhaul of Times Square, what they employ is neither their
own perspective nor that of a typical New Yorker. Instead, what allows them to
succeed in such manipulation is “the small-town fear of urban violence. Since the
tourist to the big city is seen as someone from a small town, the promotion of tourism

73
is a matter of promoting the image of the world – and of the city – that the small
town holds.”
85

Indeed, much academic writing on the meanings of cities locates within them
a compelling intersection of the real and the fictive; “imageability,” for example, is
Kevin Lynch’s term for a physical site’s potential to create an image beyond its mere
physicality within the mind of its observer.
86
Both Lynch and Delaney are
influenced, in varying degrees, by Jane Jacobs’ seminal work, The Death and Life of
Great American Cities, which argues, amongst other things, for increased awareness
of the destructive power inherent within American pastoral nostalgia. One can
recognize Jacobs’ impact on Delaney when reading her passages on the misplaced
blurring of urban and rural boundaries: “I hope no reader will try to transfer my
observations into guides as to what goes on in towns, or little cities, or in suburbs
which still are suburban. Towns, suburbs and even little cities are totally different
organisms from great cities ... To try to understand towns in terms of big cities will
only compound confusion.”
87
The cultural stereotype, for example, of cell-phone
addicted agents crushing such a modest environment, as seen on South Park, can be
seen as proof that this is precisely what has already happened to Park City. Though
Jacobs is only interested in The Major American Metropolis, as Delaney is primarily
concerned with New York, the inverse of each writer’s argument is rarely far from
its surface: just as the city will cease to function smoothly when a small town model

85
Delaney, 153 (his emphasis).
86
Lynch, 9.
87
Jacobs, 16.

74

is applied to it, so too are small towns ill-equipped to support the diversity big cities
offer, especially when such diversity is forced upon them. As with Leo Marx, Jacobs
considers a prevalence of one-dimensional, ‘simple’ pastoralism to be a primary
culprit in such transgression:
Owing to the mediation of cities, it became popularly possible to
regard ‘nature’ as benign, ennobling and pure, and by extension to
regard ‘natural man’ ... as so too. Opposed to all this fictionalized
purity, nobility and beneficence, cities, not being fictions, could be
considered as seats of malignancy and – obviously – the enemies of
nature... There are dangers in sentimentalizing nature... It is no
accident that we Americans, probably the world’s champion
sentimentalizers about nature, are at one and the same time probably
the world’s most voracious and disrespectful destroyers of wild and
rural countryside.
88

I have deliberately emphasized Jacobs’ use of fiction as a dominant mode for our
engagement with each type of space. As with Redford’s aforementioned claim for
those who don’t read newspapers closely enough, such urban reading is also
meaningfully aesthetic: at some level, the abuse and decay of both American towns
and cities can be seen to have been caused by an over-reliance on the cliché, or the
outmoded stereotype. The substantial, powerful impact of Delaney’s work,
moreover, cannot by separated from his remarkable candor as a storyteller: much
89

of his defense of Times Square consists of his ability to narrativize the place to a
degree that is surely antithetical to the stories ‘we’ (non-New Yorkers?
heterosexuals? conservatives?) have typically heard about the area and its various

88
Jacobs 444-5 (my emphasis).
89
More than fifty percent, effectively: Times Square Red, Times Square Blue is structured as two
essays, roughly equal in length. The first (Red), is a detailed memoir, recounting Delaney’s
relationship to (and relationships in) the area, while the second (Blue) formulates a more traditional
academic argument.

75

pornographic movie theaters. It is likely, furthermore, that ‘our’ stories are often
fictions themselves, generated by Hollywood crime films of the conservative 1980s
(of which the quintessential example will always be William Friedkin’s notorious
film, Cruising, 1980).
Delaney, for one, has never come across a deranged, psychopathic serial
killer in his years of visiting the neighborhood, seeking forms of contact that are not
necessarily sexual. He has, however, used this milieu to meet: “a twenty-six-year-old
lapsed Jesuit priest – for whom I shortly secured a job at a paperback publishing
house,”; “a man who became my lover for eight years”; as well as, over the
preceding quarter century, “playwrights, carpenters, opera singers, telephone repair
men, stockbrokers, guys on welfare, guys with trust funds, guys on crutches, on
walkers, in wheelchairs, teachers, warehouse workers, male nurses, fancy chefs, guys
who worked at Dunkin Donuts, guys who gave out flyers on street corners, guys who
drove garbage trucks, and guys who washed windows on the Empire State
Building.”
90
In Delaney’s formulation, such instances of random but surprisingly
productive contact are to be contrasted with more rigid, circumscribed modes of
networking. As with his use of cities and small towns, if ‘contact’/‘networking’
presents itself as a potential binary heuristic, it should be read as one that arrives pre-
deconstructed. Both types of social interaction are essential to Delaney; however, the
developers’ ‘cleansing’ of Times Square threatens to erase the multi-class mingling

90
Delaney, 124, 16, 15 (respectively).

76

of contact, leaving only the class stratification that is inherently inscribed within
instances of networking.
This distinction between ‘contact’ and ‘networking’ is particularly suggestive
when applied to Park City during the Sundance Festival’s run. If “networking tends
to be professional and motive-driven ... and can look – especially from the outside –
quite glamorous,”
91
while “contact is the conversation that starts in the line at the
grocery counter,”
92
(or perhaps the line to get into a screening of the latest Hal
Hartley film?), then Sundance becomes significant as a location at which the former
is consistently portrayed within the generic codes of the latter. Recall the words with
which I began this chapter: though few have actually been to Sundance, many have a
consistent sense of it, because stories are consistently told about it in newspapers,
magazines and on television. Consequently, Park City has become a largely virtual
space, which we are now able to navigate through imageability alone, removed from
any tangible source. Try to think of the most generic Sundance Festival narrative
possible: for example, one producer overhears a rival’s men’s room cell-phone call
with Miramax executives, subsequently using that information to make a successful
bid of his own for a film the other had wanted. As a result, a struggling young
filmmaker suddenly receives a great deal of financial power, both to promote the
film in question, as well as to develop future productions with much larger
budgets.
93

91
Delaney, 129.
92
Delaney, 123.
93
One of many notable examples of this narrative trope centered around a prolonged bidding war for
a modest coming-of-age drama, The Spitfire Grill (1996). The escalating, self-perpetuating

77

Such a tale hinges on the qualities of contact as described by Delaney –
coincidence, chance meetings, unlikely settings, inter-class movement, youthful
social climbing – but is, effectively, a tale of networking in its most cutthroat form.
Many have suggested, furthermore, that it is no longer the perceived quality of the
films in competition that instigates the events which lead to such story-telling, but
the reverse: the accumulation of such stories around a given film in itself now
generates the ‘buzz’ which allows us to perceive it as ‘good.’ Once again, the decline
of actual social space and that of cinematic aesthetic quality are linked not merely in
terms of relative correlation, but those of outright causation instead. Sundance,
originally removed from the core of Los Angeles networking to promote the
potential for truly democratic contact (between established 'urban' talent and
developing regional filmmakers), has been manipulated by industrial developers who
are able to maintain only the sentimentalized appearance of the latter in order to
profit the most fully from their (re-)introduction of the former.
One of Delaney's conclusions is that such an erasure of contact is not merely
an unfortunate byproduct of 'progress' but, ultimately, a substantial encroachment
upon democracy itself: “Interclass contact conducted in a mode of good will is the
locus of democracy as visible social drama, a drama that must be supported and
sustained by political, educational, medical, job, and cultural equality of opportunity
if democracy is to mean to most people any more than an annual or quatra-annual

networking activity translated into substantial pre-release buzz that quickly dissipated when critics
and audiences saw the film for what it was: a familiar, albeit earnest character study, unlikely to be
remembered.

78
visit to a voting booth.”
94
At times, Delaney's words echo the Depression-era
rhetoric of FDR, suggesting the importance of attempting new projects in order to
potentially shock the nation out of its stagnation: “we'd best try cutting up the world
in different ways socially and reorganizing it so that we may benefit from the
resultant social relationships.”
95
My invocation of Roosevelt here is far from
arbitrary or coincidental: a great deal of his popularity resulted just as much from his
active ability to try new things as it did from his reflective ability to recognize when
such measures were unsuccessful and to adjust or discard them with pragmatic
confidence. Furthermore, as chronicled in Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front, the
era of New Deal politics continues to represent, for many, a crucial moment in the
evolution of oppositional, meaningfully left-wing American art.
Others have already arrived at the seemingly inescapable conclusion that the
Sundance film festival no longer has the same social function it had during the 1980s
or even the early 1990s; it has, however, inspired a number of smaller contiguous
festivals which seem more likely to foster Delaney's vision of contact. As with New
York and Sundance's Park City, they too are typically encountered via narratives:
here, however, the stories are usually ones of networking already thwarted. Unable to
arouse a producer's interest, or perhaps even to have their work accepted at Sundance
altogether, the people behind Slamdance, No Dance, et al instead operate outside the
established superstructure (necessarily, having been rejected by it), via clandestine,
self-promoted film screenings in hotel rooms and coffee houses.

94
Delaney, 198.
95
Delaney, 193.

79

Delaney suggests the only way to ensure the existence of healthy democratic
contact is through a 'constant renovation' of the concept of discourse itself;
96
much as
Derrida suggested that independence is a quality meant to be kept alive through a
repeated declaration, rather than a one-time historical event. Similarly, Schmidt
concludes by calling for a “continued attempt to understand, challenge and even
enact the unstable, dangerous, promising and problematic tradition of political
imitation.”
97
In these examples of alternate festival foundation we can see such work
currently in progress, led not only by artists whose evolution explores style and
theme but by social forces that engage with industry and economics as well. If
Sundance has finally 'gone Hollywood', one's optimism may nevertheless be braced
by the appearance of such constant Park City renovation.

96
Delaney, 121.
97
Schmidt, 114.

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CHAPTER TWO
FUNCTIONS OF THE INDEPENDENT AUTEUR
(THESIS: JIM JARMUSCH)

A particularly ironic by-product of the American independent film’s
increased visibility and acclaim over the past two decades is the largely familiar,
even traditional manner in which said output is generally discussed. As a movement,
these independent films are celebrated as ostensibly novel, consistently challenging
and rewriting the static rules, conventions, settings, casting choices and, inevitably,
meanings of their Hollywood counterparts. Specifically, however, the discourse
around ‘indie’ films is disproportionately auteurist, to a somewhat alarming extent.
For all the ways in which Pulp Fiction (1994), for example, is both an aesthetically
and historically significant cultural text, discussion of the film is almost inseparable
from our on-going cult-of-personality debate regarding its director, Quentin
Tarantino.
What is at stake in this occurrence? Why has such a (now) conventional
heuristic paradigm been used to confine, rather than unlock, these allegedly ‘pure’
cinematic expressions of freedom, of novelty, of independent spirit? What historical
events have led to this development? Finally, what elements of cultural power are
being served by this substitution of celebrity adulation for genuine cultural/aesthetic
discourse? These are the questions that drive this next set of chapters, in which I will
explore the ongoing relationship of the auteur theory to recent American independent
cinema. In doing so, I propose also to consider the careers of three specific
celebrated filmmakers -- Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, and Stephen Soderbergh

81
– both to reveal their consistencies with the traditional form of the auteur theory as
well as to suggest the ways in which one can discern the concept’s evolution as a
partial result of the contemporary ‘indie’ film phenomenon.
A set of tropes that cannot be ignored in attempting to address this issue are,
of course, the transitions within both filmmaking and American culture during the
late 1970s and early 1980s; indeed, this is a moment often invoked by figures within
the current ‘indie’ movement and one to which I will repeatedly return throughout
this dissertation. A shorthand interpretation of this historical and cultural shift might
easily conclude that the field of independent filmmaking either grew to be, or was
deliberately founded as, a means to protect ‘the auteur’ as a form of endangered
species, suddenly threatened by the selfish greed and short-sightedness of ever-
conglomerating corporate structures.
This perspective has been popularized by writers such as Steven Bach, Jon
Lewis and Peter Biskind, in works such as Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the
Making of Heaven’s Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists, Whom God Wishes to
Destroy: Francis Coppola and the New Hollywood, and Easy Riders, Raging Bulls:
How the Sex-Drugs-And-Rock’N’Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, respectively.
Collectively, each book engages with the ‘second Golden Age’ view of Hollywood,
in which the industry’s attempts to adapt to, and/or engage with, the burgeoning
countercultural/youth audience are resolved by the appearance of ‘movie brat’
directors. Often youthful themselves, these figures, such as Francis Coppola,
Michael Cimino or William Friedkin, made films that were celebrated both for their

82
ability to address topical (read: countercultural) concerns as well as their ability to
turn a substantial profit while doing so. Here already can be seen the aforementioned
irony that permeates our current discussion of filmic ‘independence’;
historiographically, the writing on such movie brats is heavily romanticized.
Consider the full titles of each text mentioned above: while Lewis’ conveys a
mythic, Icarus-quality to Coppola’s career, both Bach and Biskind hyperbolically
suggest their tales are ones of Hollywood studios either ‘saved’ or (nearly)
destroyed. Though their films may have been challenging and new, the celebration of
these movie brats as a discourse was – and continues to be – an oversimplified, if not
regressive, set of “Great Man” histories.
By the appearance of the 1980s, and the rise of an acclaimed American
independent film movement, the movie brat discourse had begun to display a
decidedly tragic emplotment. In the last years of the 70s, a number of these
particularly visible auteurs made films [e.g. Heaven’s Gate (1980), Apocalypse Now
(1979)] that required legendarily extended schedules as well as accordingly
exorbitant budgets. At the same time, other young directors found meteoric,
seemingly overnight success with blockbuster films [e.g. Jaws, Star Wars] that made
a great deal of money, and, more importantly, did so very quickly. One can attribute
this success partially to the fact that said films were given heretofore unheard-of
saturation releases, which allow movies to open on so many screens that the resultant
attention to opening weekend scores has by now come to resemble something of an
arms race, or pseudo-stock market, particularly during the summer months.

83

However, another potent reason for the success of these blockbusters is their
decidedly populist, apersonal nature. Though George Lucas, for example, directed
the first Star Wars installment, he achieved equivalent success with the series’ next
two episodes even though he only produced them; fans of the trilogy either did not
miss his ‘authorial signature’ or (if they in fact cared at all) now perceived that
signature in ways that have little to do with our understanding of a director as
responsible for a film’s expressive formal elements.
As with Lucas, so too with Steven Spielberg: though he achieved astounding
success as a director in the 1980s, Spielberg was equally successful as a producer. As
with Lucas, Spielberg’s ‘signature’ seemed less like that of a personal artist and
more like that of a corporate brand; this concept of ‘branding’ is perhaps best
embodied by the use of an iconic image from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) – a
child bicycling through the night sky, silhouetted against the moon – as the corporate
logo for Spielberg’s own production company, Amblin. Here, an authorial flourish
from what many would call Spielberg’s best work as a director is literally reduced to
a symbol for the postmodern Hollywood mode of business. Many have suggested
that several of Amblin’s productions, such as Poltergeist (1982) and Who Framed
Roger Rabbit? (1989) feel as if they were directed by Spielberg even though they
were not.
98

In a sense, the romanticization of auteurs at the expense of their work
contributed to a surprising effect as the ‘70s ended: successful young directors

98
Indeed, many have suggested that Poltergeist was largely directed by official producer Spielberg,
taking over from hired director Tobe Hooper.

84

continued to be championed as the quality of their work was absorbed into the very
industry against which they had once been thought to rebel. More importantly, these
figures were celebrated more as producers – that is, agents in a primarily economic
process – than as directors who could be said to embody a unique artistic vision. By
the time George Lucas was heard to declare himself a fully ‘independent’ filmmaker,
on the basis of the regional nature (Northern, as opposed to Southern California) of
his production company, Lucasfilm, as well as his ability to generate funding
‘outside’ the Hollywood studio system (by making large scale escapist
entertainments), the irony of this new type of auteur was hard to avoid. Unlike that of
their predecessors, this rebellion against the powers that be took the form of
internalizing studio influence and in turn reproducing their structures of cultural
power within new studios of their own, such as Lucasfilm or Dreamworks.
99
For
these auteurs, the only way to claim independence was to destroy it
100
, at least in
terms of the movement’s cultural meaning in the 80s and 90s.
In the years following their early successes, both Spielberg and Lucas would
go on to be thought of as auteurs, whose thematic interests and formal signatures
were visibly manifested throughout their work; however, their relationship to their
own content became inescapably linked to a growing understanding of the
Hollywood industry as a factory for postmodern culture. The presence of authorship

99
Peter Biskind’s latest book, Down and Dirty Pictures, charts a similar trajectory for Harvey
Weinstein’s Miramax pictures. The company once defined by small, challenging ‘‘indie’’ films now
seems set on beating the studios at their own game, producing expensive, multi-Oscar-nominated
spectacles such as Chicago (2002), Cold Mountain (2003) and Gangs of New York (2002).
100
The phrase itself is, of course, deliberately loaded with evocations of Vietnam; one more irony of
this period, given that the movie brat auteurs were consistently seen as reacting to the War’s violent
absurdities.

85
within their work could now be seen as more symptomatic than determined by
creative agency: popular knowledge of both Lucas and Spielberg depicts them as,
importantly, members of the ‘TV generation’, doomed to an understanding of the
world filtered through the media texts they received in their youth, and only
expressible through the homages and citations that have come to define
postmodernism as a cultural mode. Notably, these producer-directors are vaguely
infantilized by their own reputations as 1980s auteurs. Each, permanently marked by
the horror films, TV Westerns, and adventure serials they viewed as children,
undertakes a career path that seems designed primarily to resurrect and even redeem
such texts for new youthful viewers. Instead of displaying a vigorous maturity that
challenges the Hollywood system, by means of their talent, tenacity and a desperate
conviction to expose inequities within the status quo, the most visibly celebrated
auteurs of the Hollywood 1980s typically earned their names for an ability to service
the system that, in a sense, gave them their lives – in the form of both adult
productivity and, more importantly, their own beloved childhood memories. Even
the most generous of auteur analyses regarding these directors considers them in
terms not of relevant social critique, but of their fantastic, mythic, even universal
‘fairy tale’ appeal.
Though Thomas Elsaesser stresses that “its analysis is open to different kinds
of exploration,” his article ‘American Auteur Cinema’ provides a notable example of
this new perspective on authorship. For Elsaesser, the films made by these

86

postmodern auteurs were often literally infantilized themselves, and in this
infantilization
more was at stake than the prolonged adolescence of one or two
directors ... The films that were to come to dominate the 1980s and
1990s, such as the many fairy tale or adventure stories even outside
the Disney orbit featuring young boys, show a marked tendency to
endow them with a deeper knowledge than the adults. They are also
entrusted with cosmic missions and communicate with non-human
powers, as if they were being groomed for ‘inheriting’ the universe,
albeit that of fantasy and self-enclosed worlds.
101

For Elsaesser, the extent to which any of these Hollywood spectacles can be said to
engage with social reality of any kind is that of a faint, but nevertheless identifiable
‘redemptive’ allegory: a key example is that of the boyish rebel Luke Skywalker
replaying the American Revolution by leading an attack on Imperial Forces (tellingly
cast by Lucas as uniformly British actors) aboard the Death Star in Star Wars. If
these films engage in any kind of dialogue with a real America, they do so by turning
back the clock to ‘A long time ago (in a galaxy far far away)’, that is, to America’s
own childhood innocence. In Elsaesser’s formulation, then, the shift from 1970s to
1980s Hollywood cinema is a transposition of revealing allegorical modes: the ‘80s
cinema not only sought to assuage cultural tensions by depicting idealized youth
restoring order to the ‘American’ universe, it also did this, significantly, by
supplanting the previous allegories of ‘70s cinema, in which frustrated adult heroes
rail flailingly against corrupt forces beyond their control. As he puts it, “many of

101
Elsaesser, 64 (my emphasis). The quote also reinforces the gendered nature of these fantasies;
more will be said on this in the chapter on Independence and new technologies, engaging with Henry
Jenkins’ “Complete Freedom of Movement: Videogames as Gendered Play Spaces.”

87
[these celebrated ‘70s films] now seem surprisingly legible as allegories of the very
‘modernization’ processes and ‘flexible’ psychopathologies of which the movie
community appears to have been both agent and victim.”
102
If a crucial criticism of this infantilized postmodern American cinema is that
of its retrograde nostalgia’s ability to preclude engagement with contemporary social
discourse, as occurred so readily during the ‘New Hollywood,’ then a fundamental
question that must be asked of recent American independent film is whether its
equivalent nostalgia for that New Hollywood is itself an allegorical mode that
obscures, rather than illuminates the realities of our present moment. One triumph of
late ‘60s - early ‘70s Hollywood was that the immediate social concerns of the ‘60s
and ‘70s were its great subject; to what extent should the ‘indie’ movement be
celebrated if its own great subject remains “the ‘60s and the ‘70s” (and at that, more
often the films of the era rather than its social realities)?
What is ultimately at stake in this question, I believe, is an engagement with
American historiographies: to inquire as to the value of this recent ‘‘indie’’
phenomenon is often predicated on one’s own assumptions and beliefs regarding the
progress, or lack thereof, within American history. As David W. Noble has
demonstrated in Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of
Exceptionalism, many scholars of American history find themselves confronted with
conflicting models of that history. Noble succinctly outlines this situation as
formulated by the historian Charles Beard: “There is first, the philosophy that history

102
Elsaesser, 68.

88

has no meaning, but no one can possibly write history who holds to this view of
history as chaos. Second, [Beard] asserted, one can believe that history is marked by
cycles and man is doomed to the endless repetition of the past. And finally, he
declared, one can believe in history as progress.”
103
In proposing this project to my
advisers, a question was put to me that echoes Beard’s second option above: why
choose this recent period of independent film?
From this question, many others followed: Why not explore the independent
productions of Ida Lupino, Walter Wanger et al in the 1940s? Why not consider the
rebel cinema of 1950s mavericks Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray (both of whom
have heavily influenced Jim Jarmusch)? What about the numerous directors who
made independent films for Roger Corman in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Monte
Hellman, Jonathan Demme, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and James
Cameron? Surely, any of these are equally or even more significant examples of
independent American filmmaking worth studying than the era you suggest. In short,
has there not always been a tension in American film culture between the perceived
innocence of dependent studio filmmaking and the assumed maturity of their
independent counterparts? And has American history not itself been an endless cycle
of innocence lost in the face of national traumas (the Civil War, the Depression,
World War II, Vietnam, the War on Terror), only to be regained just in time to be
lost again during the next? Or are these opposing tensions ever identifiable as a
dialectic from which one can identify genuine progress and resolution?

103
Noble, 32.

89

Noble’s work is quick to remind us that such answers are up to the historian’s
own choices, rather than the self-evident truths of history itself; revealingly, in his
essay ‘Auteur Desire,’ Dana Polan has suggested that something similar is at work in
auteurist film analysis itself. The very fact of its object of study – a director’s body
of work over several years – means that auteurism is itself inherently the act of
writing history on some level. As Polan puts it, “the auteurist wants to create
meaning by an imposition of will.”
104
He further notes that “it might not be too
extreme to suggest that in the auteur theory, the real auteurs turn out to be the
auteurists rather than the directors they study.”
105
If we are thus left with the
impression that it is the academy that determines the meaning of American history,
or the meaning of an auteur’s oeuvre, then I will propose that it becomes necessary
to simultaneously consider the current subject alongside the modes that have been
used to interpret that subject, in order for progress to be made from a cyclical to a
dialectical view, and for the meaning of this discourse to be revealed.
In this vein, Polan concludes, “The point, then, wouldn’t be to no longer do
auteurism, but to imagine ways to do it differently. Perhaps auteurism needs more ...
self-reflexivity. ... We could, for example, imagine auteurism as itself a historical
activity – arising in particular social and cultural situations as a way of responding to
them.”
106
From this, one is also reminded that, in the best traditions of contemporary
American Studies, as well as Polan’s formulation for future auteurism, this text

104
Polan, 10.
105
Polan, 13.
106
Polan, 15.

90
before you should similarly be a self-aware dissertation. Indeed, this is inevitable,
given that the discourse of independent film is one that forces us to confront the role
of the academy in assigning value and meaning to cultural texts. The legacy of the
‘70s Second Golden Age should furthermore be seen as itself inseparable from the
college film classes many of its movie brat directors attended; not only were they
exposed to classic and international movies, but evolving theoretical approaches for
their analysis as well. The aforementioned shift from a cyclical to a dialectical view
of history mirrors a shift from the myth-image-symbol school of post-war American
Studies (in which classic works were made to reflect a Cold War context) towards a
New Americanist approach (which, by embracing Cultural Studies, became aware of
its own pressure to read texts historically and attempted to simultaneously analyze
this trend alongside the texts in question).
Occurring concurrently with this shift in mainstream Hollywood filmmaking,
then, was an equivalent development in academic modes for interpreting dominant
mass culture. If the text lacked sufficient content for textual analysis, several
alternative models became increasingly prevalent: Cultural Studies theorists would
instead explore how specific, localized audiences were able to use such texts;
Psychoanalytic thinkers, aligned with Feminist theory, would now emphasize the
unconscious desires that drive cinematic narratives, as well as their viewers; and an
increasingly post-structural academy would pervasively argue for a multiplicity of
reading strategies, rather than a contest among monolithic, determining interpretive
modes. Throughout this era, the multiplex viewer’s loss became the film professor’s

91
gain, for as mainstream films themselves depreciated in visibly recognizable
aesthetic values, it became increasingly evident that the primary means to account
for the medium’s continued fascination and power was to acknowledge the existence
of invisible operations that could only be known through the perspectives of theory.
To put it another way, the old guard of academia once saw itself as, above all,
an absolute authority of taste values. In the 1980s, cinema studies, still a relatively
young and devalued academic field, confronted the fact that ‘good’ movies were
especially rare, and that ‘quality’ was a limiting approach to reading them; new
theoretical paradigms, with their lack of interest in simple aesthetics, effectively
rendered this matter moot. Why stress this interpretive background alongside the
history of the texts themselves? I do so in order to emphasize the curious present day
disconnect between the rise of the independent film, with its symbolic connotations
of the ‘highbrow’ aesthetic values (the ‘art film’), and the current interests of
academic media studies. A substantial amount has been written about the last two
decades of American independent film; there has been, however, surprisingly little
scholarship on the subject.
Is this simply a function of the academy’s increasing disinterest in its own
power as an aesthetic cultural barometer? If independent film is defined largely by its
perceived increase in an ill-defined ‘quality’ over the typical studio film, then it
should come as no surprise that it is a category almost fully marginalized within
academic film discourse. Contemporary media studies are, despite the protests of
many old-guard academics, more productively interested in canon formation as a

92
subject worthy of deconstructive interrogation than as a project worthy of its ongoing
efforts.
107
Nevertheless, one recognizes a return to roots within the analysis of this
movement, that is, at worst, wearily redundant (most evident in books such as
Cinema of Outsiders and Stranger than Paradise) and, at best, intriguingly
progressive. This latter tendency within current studies of the ‘indie’ film
phenomenon re-energizes the debate by illuminating it through a self-aware prism of
contemporary authorship.
An intriguing alternate theoretical paradigm worth applying to the
independent cinema of this period would be one that explores the concurrent rise of
post-structural theory alongside the films’ own collective move from modernism to
postmodernism. Elsaesser notes that this beloved ‘second Golden Age’ period is
notable as the only one that could briefly sustain the conspiracy thriller, with its now
almost comforting us-them depiction of the workings of political oppression. His
aforementioned article identifies a certain vanity within the simplicity of this model:
“vain, perhaps, because power, if we follow Foucault and Deleuze, does not manifest
itself in the form of top-down hierarchies or conspiracies, capable of being pictured
as concentrically organized around an inner core ... Instead, power, is dispersed,
transversal, interstitial.”
108

One could make the case, then, that this vanity is itself a key reason for the
ongoing romanticization of 70s American filmmaking; it portrayed the last time in

107
Though relevant to issues of auteurism, these debates will be explored at length in the chapter on
American Studies itself.
108
Elsaesser, 66.

93

which the sources of power were visible, and the protagonists had a sense of how to
resist that power (their inevitable on-screen failures, ideally, spurring viewers to take
off-screen action). The critics themselves also had been flattered by this vanity in
that they knew they were supporting the correct (i.e. important, politically
progressive) films, be they conspiracy thrillers or otherwise. Today, academic critics
are themselves either implicated or directly engaged in what might be called a post-
conspiracy moment, forced to confront their own status as interested bearers of
power.
There is a similar self-investigation made manifest through the predominantly
ironic tone of so much contemporary postmodern cinema, as typically voiced
through the words of a disaffected youth seen at the center of so many ‘indie’ films
(particularly, as we will see, in the work of Jarmusch). Said tone reflects this post-
structural shift in the theorization of power simply because we now no longer know
on whom the joke is being played. Is this free-floating irony a hipster’s rejection of
cultural power by the mere refusal to play the game? Or is it instead ultimately a joke
on the (failures of the) protagonists of the previous decade’s conspiracy thrillers,
proposing passive acceptance over committed engagement?
109
Similarly, the films of
the 60s and 70s engage with the cultural history of the 60s and 70s because that was
their immediate social context: is ‘indie’ cinema’s postmodern fetishization of the
same cultural history meant to inspire viewers into the same anger as had previously
been identified? Or is it simply instead a comforting nostalgic move, emphasizing

109
In many ways, the status of such films as Slacker (1991) and Clerks (1994) as definitive ‘‘indie’’
films further emphasizes such tropes of failure and inactivity as essential to the movement’s identity.

94
the textual surfaces of a bygone era so that we will remain undisturbed by the
equivalent socio-political pitfalls of the present? I will consider these questions
throughout the case studies to be featured in this chapter and the two that follow it;
there is an optimistic sense in which the best auteurist approaches to these
independent directors are those that are able to hybridize the methods of classical
auteur theory with the goals of such post-structural conceptions of power as
theorized throughout the 1970s.
One can locate the forceful foundation for such work within the writings of
Timothy Corrigan and Dudley Andrew, in which phrases such as ‘the auteur-text’
and ‘the unauthorized auteur today’, respectively, speak to a curious reclamation of
the discourse around directors that posits an emerging (need for) renewal of faith in
what one might call the ‘indexicality’ of the author. Once again, the importance of
nostalgia, the ever present sense of loss makes itself felt within this discourse;
indeed, there is even a sense in which academia has itself suffered an almost Oedipal
guilt over its successful enactment of the ‘death of the author’ and now must
resurrect this important, guiding paternal figure within its endeavors, by articulating
his cultural significance in ways that are no longer literal (as in the form of French
New Wave auteurs who made films that freed cinema from the shackles of stately
literary adaptations) but are instead often explicitly religious, a cry for the return of a
textuality that is worthy of (literary?) interpretation.
But is this rebirth itself just one more ‘80s-era Conservative reclamation over
the Liberal gains that were made in the ‘60s and ‘70s? The immediate equation of

95
religion with conservatism is politically dangerous, even potentially
counterproductive. In his book, Dude, Where’s My Country?, Michael Moore
identifies a knee-jerk dismissal of religion as a crucial weakness of the left: “Too
many of us [liberals] have a hoity-toity view of religion and think the religious are
superstitious fifteenth-century ignoramuses. We’re wrong, and they have as much a
right to their religion as those among us who have no religion. This arrogance is a
big reason the lower classes will always side with the Republicans.”
110
Such issues
are not absent in academic work; there is an extent to which the resurrection of the
auteur may ultimately be a means for academia to sustain the approaches of the pre-
theory, pre-Cultural-Studies moment, while avoiding labels of conservatism. The
references Andrew makes to God, for example, are not automatically ‘reactionary’
signifiers. As I have stressed, it is unavoidable that academic writing is itself
historically determined: one must view present auteurism through a current moment
in which religion is itself unfortunately politicized (fears of Jihad, George W. Bush’s
reference to “a higher father” in invading Iraq, debates over the ethics of Stem Cell
research) as well as one in which politics appear distressingly polarized. As a result,
academic work is itself under attack – Horowitz’s The ProFessors, and Prof. Ward
Churchill’s views on 9/11 come to mind – thus emphasizing more than ever a need
for academic self-interrogation.
It is important to recall, for example, the extent to which Roland Barthes’
“The Death of the Author,” written in 1968, based its progress – a free play of

110
Moore, 192.

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multiple readings in direct opposition to an established canon of accepted textual
interpretations – upon a firm rejection of the religious aspect of auteur-worship. As
he noted, “a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the
‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of
writings, none of them original, blend and clash.”
111
Barthes subsequently
champions an “anti-theological [reading practice], an activity that is truly
revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is to refuse God and his hypostases –
reason, science, law.”
112
Is it fair, tempting as it may be, to replace ‘theology’ with
‘patriarchy’ throughout this discourse and suggest that the recent reappearance of the
auteur within film analysis is a sure sign that the revolution to which Barthes refers
has ultimately failed? Revealingly, in Timothy Corrigan’s words, “it is the text and
not its author that now may be dead.”
113
There is much that brings André Bazin to mind in this discourse: now,
however, it is not merely the photographed subject that is embalmed but also the
filmmaker himself. Bazin’s writing originally applied a post-war perspective upon
cinema’s turn-of-the-century appearance; it is almost redundant to note here the
extent to which the memory of the second World War’s atrocities shaped his
redemptive, even sermonizing approach to questions explored decades earlier by
such figures as Hugo Munsterberg and Rudolph Arnheim. As with the post-war
Bazin, in stressing the self-aware, historically determined nature of this piece (as

111
Barthes, 146.
112
Barthes, 147.
113
Corrigan, 43.

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much as possible given inherent difficulties in historical reading of the present), I
would suggest that my work ideally aims to use recent trends in American Studies to
present academic work as itself a set of determined narratives, rather than pure
objective truths. This is inescapably a piece of post-9/11 writing, from an author
ambivalent about the value, or even the existence of, what are referred to as the
Culture Wars. Moreover, I am, as are many, subject to seductive myths of the auteur,
as well as the academic authority that gives me status as a ‘tastemaker.’ Thus, I leave
present in the text my own subjective, evaluative remarks regarding the films
discussed herein, but do so as a reminder to the reader that such subjectivity is on
some level inescapable.
Bazin writes in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” that, “for the first
time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention
of man ... [thus there is an] irrational power of the photography to bear away our
faith.”
114
For Bazin, it is the removal of man’s direct intervention that enables
cinema to bring its viewers closer to their gods; by the time of Andrew’s article,
however, it is the evidence of a ‘human stain’ upon a now irrevocably postmodern
machine that presents the possibility of transcendence through cinema. For Andrew,
our current moment is “a struggle of faith in an atheist world, for the author is surely
an analogue of God, the creator and source of the world ... despite Nietzsche and the

114
Bazin, 13-14.

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freeplay he ushered in, the word ‘auteur’ ... can thicken a text with duration, with the
past of its coming into being and with the future of our being with it.”
115

When such contemporary auteurists as Andrew, then, attempt to redeem the
author as an indexical signifier, in contrast to what might be called the ‘virtual
authorship’ of Spielberg, Lucas, James Cameron et al, one can see that they are
railing against what they recognize as our present complacency. It is a complacency
that allows us to accept, all too readily, a cultural field of cinema that is over-reliant
on a dichotomy of product that, in either direction, offers little more than an
increasing sense of familiar brand identity. In the decades following the ‘deaths’ of
various auteurs such as Coppola and Friedkin, we have been told to enjoy, and even
identify with, either small-scale independent fables or the sensational postmodern
attractions of ‘epic’ studio production; it has become almost unthinkable, however,
that we might find work that is able to combine the best of both fields, and
paradoxically unite audiences by offering a variety of different experiences. Indeed,
if a film were able to do so within our present filmmaking context, it would surely be
viewed as nothing short of a ‘miraculous’ event.
Many have suggested that the American independent film, as we have come
to understand and celebrate it during the Sundance era, is now effectively dead; a
further step to have been proposed is that it is now able to contentedly rest in peace
because its life’s work has been completed – the aforementioned miracle has, in fact,
occurred. Specifically, my selection of Jarmusch, Tarantino and Soderbergh as the

115
Andrew, 27.

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independent auteurs to be considered here as case studies, has more to do with their
embodiment of a dialectical progression within the movement than it does with their
notoriety alone. Furthermore, the chronology of their selection is no accident:
considered in order of their acclaim (at its most intense), one is able to recognize
within these figures a decisive shift in how each is considered to literally embody the
notion of the American independent film, as well as the ways in which such a mode
of filmmaking might be expected to challenge the product of Hollywood studios.
Certainly, Quentin Tarantino has consistently been celebrated as an
antithesis, acclaimed equally for the early-Sundance independent cinema
conventions rejected by his films as for the new ones they defiantly assert. It is
especially noteworthy that his status as this antithesis positions him as less of a
challenge to Hollywood dominance as he is to a perceived complacence within the
rarefied, almost genteel mode of ‘‘indie’’ film that preceded him. Jarmusch’s
multiple allusions to modernist and, importantly, global art cinema, particularly the
tranquil surfaces found in the films of Yashuziro Ozu, helped to establish him as the
thesis of the ‘indie’ phenomenon as it began to develop in the early 1980s. To
celebrate, however, the dynamic, violent work of Tarantino at the expense of
Jarmusch’s increasingly marginalized, decreasingly successful films came at a price.
Seemingly as quickly as he appeared, a notable backlash began to develop against
Tarantino and his celebrity status. Though this well-publicized backlash is
multifaceted in its causes and significance, the recognition of Tarantino as
potentially a postmodern auteur of roughly equivalent status as Lucas and Spielberg

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is a crucial moment that necessarily prefigures the appearance of Soderbergh as a
synthesis to the dialectic of recent Hollywood and Independent American cinema.
In some ways, the selection of Jim Jarmusch as the first post-70s independent
American auteur to be considered here is purely a matter of serendipitous timing. As
Elsaesser’s chronology suggests, “If the political event that inaugurated the protest
movement was the Vietnam war ... there is general agreement that it was the election
of Ronald Reagan as president in November 1980 that brought the New Hollywood
along with the counter-culture to a close.”
116
Jarmusch’s first feature film,
Permanent Vacation, was released in December 1980, a convenient and compelling
coincidence, as well as a reason to consider him of significance on some level as
simply continuing the trends initiated by the celebrated Hollywood filmmakers that
preceded him. Alexander Horwath’s essay on the New Hollywood, “A Walking
Contradiction (Partly Truth and Partly Fiction)”, from the same collection as
Elsaesser’s article, offers a thorough assessment of the period’s qualities. It is worth
citing here in full for the extent to which Jarmusch’s films seem both to embody and
respond to its essential characteristics. For Horwath, the New Hollywood of the late
60s and 70s is significant for its
films about cynical drifters and alienated social misfits who are forced
to or choose to remain in a state of constant motion because ‘staying
at home’ smacks of corruption. Films with a loose, undramatic pace
and open endings – because no alternative destination or ‘home’ can
be found. Films that rediscover the wide open spaces, the street and
everyday life, in search of a new realism and an open-ended
production process, substituting the conventions of genre with more
authentic means of experiencing time and space. And, lastly, films

116
Elsaesser, 59.

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which allegorize their own limitations through their protagonists –
independent-dependent (studio) productions about independent-
dependent men who reject an oppressive system of rules without
being able to even entertain the (political) notion of a less
constraining system beyond the current one.
117

All four of Horwath’s qualities are visible in Permanent Vacation, and in many ways
the romanticization of Jarmusch as an auteur suggests he is seen by many as a
nostalgic throwback to the strengths of the New Hollywood period, and worth
championing in part because he represents a rare persistence of this mode during the
harsher filmmaking climate of the 1980s. Already in his first feature, however, one
can recognize the ironic tone, the potential parody and the sly sense of humor
(throughout many reviews of Jarmusch’s first features, he is identified not as a
‘dramatic’ director but as a new comedic talent) that will mark his break from, and
even interpretation of, the pieties of the earlier period’s films. In many ways,
Jarmusch is thus the progenitor of the current school of ironic American ‘smart
cinema’ identified by Jeffrey Sconce, and discussed extensively in future chapters.
As outlined in Horwath’s model, the protagonist of Permanent Vacation is
indeed a cynical drifter, Aloysious ‘Allie’ Parker; as he is introduced wandering
throughout the deserted alleyways and crumbling buildings of lower Manhattan, his
voice-over narration directly addresses his compulsive need to keep moving:
That’s how things work out for me. I go from this place, this person,
to that place, or that person. And, you know, it doesn’t really make
that much difference. I’ve known all different kinds of people, hung
out with them, lived with them ... to me, those people are like a series
of rooms. Just like all the places where I’ve spent time. You walk in

117
Horwath, 95.

102
for the first time, curious about this new room – lamp, TV, whatever –
and then after a while, the newness is gone. Completely. And then
there’s this kind of dread ... after a while something tells you, some
voice speaks to you, and that’s it: time to split ... this thing tells you,
and you have to start the drift.

As this monologue progresses, an accompanying montage of static empty rooms
literalizes this notion of other people, and other places, as essentially one and the
same: a pool hall, a lavish dining room, a bar, a fancy living room set, a jail cell, a
studio apartment. As in Horwath’s formulation, much of Permanent Vacation is
devoted to exploring the authenticities of lower Manhattan streets, and, similarly, the
film also evokes his identification of open-ended narratives as a necessary element of
this filmic mode. In the same opening monologue, Allie calls attention to the
decidedly ‘undramatic,’ non-narrative qualities of the events that are about to unfold:
“What’s a story anyway except one of those connect-the-dots drawings that in the
end forms a picture of something? ... A story, this part of the story, well, is how I got
from there to here, or maybe I should say from here to here.”
Finally, Allie explicitly identifies himself as rejecting a capitalist system of
consumption and property ownership, but reveals through his actions (as well as the
lethargic performance of the actor, Christopher Parker) that he is unable to conceive
of any viable opposition to this system. At the film’s close, Allie has decided to take
a cruise to France, having suddenly seized an opportunity to steal a car and sell it for
the boat fare; once again, his voice-over outlines his marginal relationship to society
as most of us know it. “How can you explain something like this [sudden departure]
to someone? I’m just not the kind of person who ever settles into anything. I don’t

103
think I ever will be ... I don’t want a job or a house or taxes. I wouldn’t mind a car,
but I don’t know. Now that I’m away I wish I were back [in New York], more than
even when I was there.”
Given that he has left behind a girlfriend, Allie’s seemingly pointless,
arbitrary decision to run away somewhere, anywhere, at the film’s conclusion is in
many ways reminiscent of the devastating finale to Five Easy Pieces, in which Jack
Nicholson’s Bobby Dupea also deserts a (pregnant) girlfriend opportunistically
without apparent motivation. But Allie’s fleeting desire for a car, cited above, gets a
laugh in its suggestion that this drifter may not be particularly committed even to his
own non-conformity. This gently comic moment explodes into outright absurdity a
moment later, as Allie meets what amounts to his French doppelganger arriving,
literally, ‘fresh off the boat’ in New York just as he is preparing to leave it. The two
men share notable surface similarities – each sports the jeans, checkered shirt, white
socks, black shoes and gelled hair that signify Beat culture of the 1950s – but more
importantly the two men are linked by their restlessness. Jarmusch’s status as an
artist of the 1980s engaging with the history and iconography of the 1950s,
particularly through a self-aware mode of ironic celebration and interrogation is
notable for evoking similar debates within the present field of American Studies;
here we begin to see the cultural work of academia being performed by the texts it
previously claimed to master.
After a brief casual exchange in which the twins reveal that each sports a
similar tattoo, the Frenchman tells Allie that he is arriving for reasons that are nearly

104
identical to the American’s reasons for leaving. It is tempting to read this conclusion
as an optimistic incarnation of the notion of a French cultural exchange, in which
communication between the two nations and, more importantly, two national
cinemas, will enhance each’s understanding of the other as well as facilitate cultural
growth. Given that Jarmusch is often identified as a director whose filmic influences
are substantially more global than those of his contemporaries in American
independent cinema, an auteurist reader is all the more likely tempted towards this
optimism. But the Frenchman is equally vacuous and disaffected, offering as little to
Allie as the New York drifter is able to offer him. Permanent Vacation does indeed
display the influence of European cinematic modes, but it does so in a nostalgic key,
suggesting irruption, rather than progression of history. As the 70s give way to the
80s, as Reagan has been president-elect for less than a month, it becomes
retrospectively damning for this film to end by suggesting the contemporary
fruitlessness of communication between these two cultures. The comic irony,
however, predicts a filmic trend which playfully mocks the debate itself over the
years to come.
To end the film on such a shaggy-dog punchline also suggests an almost
parodic relationship to Five Easy Pieces and similar films of Horwath’s model; the
fact that the main character presents himself as an embodiment of 50s iconography
further implies that something more complex is occurring in Permanent Vacation. In
addition to his costume’s similarity to the Neal Cassady-Jack Kerouac photo that
adorns the Penguin edition cover of On the Road, Allie announces in voice-over that,

105
as his last name is Parker, he will name a son Charles as an homage to the legendary
be-bop saxophone player (the display of any enthusiasm at all for a potential
offspring is itself a decisive break from Five Easy Pieces, in that the girlfriend left
stranded at the truckstop by Nicholson’s character is carrying his child). Allie is later
seen at a movie theater screening Nicholas Ray’s The Savage Innocents (1959), a
moment easily read as an underlined auteurist signature, as much early publicity
about Jarmusch noted that he worked as an assistant to Ray while the director taught
at NYU. Given, however, that this particular film is largely devoted to Inuit culture’s
awkward relationship to the capitalism of white Christians, the reference is also a
reminder of non-conformism and filmic independence visibly predating the ‘60s
New Hollywood model. The film is able to mock Allie’s generic fetishization of
1950s symbolic markers while promoting awareness of the era’s lesser known
cinema – the suggestion being that alternate modes of viewing history are being
proposed.
There is also a suggestion, however, that the film’s engagement with tropes
of ‘50s and ‘60s filmmaking in the United States will not bear close scrutiny beyond
a level of surface play; what is most compelling about Permanent Vacation is the
consistent, almost surreal extent to which it problematizes any reductive attempts to
read it as a film ‘about’ any specific moment of American history. If the film makes
literal comedy of our attempts to categorize it alongside similar films of the previous
decade, then it will also render absurd its own evocation of post-war American
cinema. If the film is mocking the notion of a French-American cinematic dialogue

106
(or any cultural exchange); if it is parodying the predominantly left-wing, counter-
cultural pretensions of the beloved ‘60s-’70s New Hollywood; if it is furthermore
displaying a consistent fetishization of 1950s era clothes, films, and attitudes
alongside this satire, and more importantly, doing this during the Reagan 80s; then
one is forced to confront the possibility that this film is on some level a conservative,
reactionary work.
Elsaesser cites the 80s as a period that saw the industry develop new generic
models to respond to profound cultural change: a notable example he offers is that of
the ‘time travel nostalgia film.’ To be sure, films such as Peggy Sue Got Married
(1986) and the Back to the Future series (1985, 1989, 1990) are only the most
explicit examples of a trend throughout 80s Hollywood cinema that valorizes the
relative ‘innocence’ of the Eisenhower years
118
as a tantalizing corrective to the
apparent excesses of the ‘60s and ‘70s, literalizing a latent desire to turn back the
clock. Permanent Vacation, by way of contrast, compels viewers to recognize the
fetishization, mocking it just as playfully as it does the drifter portraits of Horwath’s
formulation. The historicity of the film, as previously mentioned, is surreal: by
retaining the non-narrative aspects of the prior decade’s work, one is unable to
receive facile comfort from its attitudes towards the country’s cultural past. Instead,
Allie evokes Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, who finds in the novel Slaughterhouse
Five that he has somehow come “unstuck in time.”

118
Again, an ‘innocence’ able to exist despite the Cold War, Korean War, Hiroshima/Nagasaki guilt,
Civil Rights awareness, Communist witch-hunts, etc, etc…

107
The most notable example of this approach to history is set in motion by
Allie’s sudden announcement that he will today visit his Mother at the mental
institution to which she has been committed; by whom, and for what cause, are never
directly revealed (the general nature of her dysfunction itself suggesting the potential
for national allegory). Instead, Allie’s behavior immediately following this
declaration seems designed to emphasize his inability to face any sort of traumatic
past, that of his own family or otherwise. Before visiting his Mother, Allie tells his
girlfriend, “first I’m gonna go back to where I was born, the building that my Mother
and Father lived in.” The aforementioned laid-back style of delivery that
characterizes Parker’s performance becomes increasingly soporific, seemingly
narcotized, as he continues: “It was blown up during the war. I’m gonna walk
through the rubble there. And just look at it one more time.” By now, the dialogue is
a mantra to be intoned: “Look at how the building is all bombed out. Walk through
the rubble of the building where I was born.” Confused, his girlfriend attempts to
snap Allie out of this daze: “What are you talking about? What war?” Allie: “The
building was blown up during the war.” Girlfriend: “Blown up by who?” Allie: “The
Chinese.”
From here, the film cuts to Allie walking through abandoned, hollowed-out
buildings along the New York waterfront while exploding bombs, air raid sirens and
airplane propellers can be heard distantly on the soundtrack. The sequence seems
both weighted with significance and, at the same time, unable to bear this burden: the
images of a ‘war-ravaged’ urban environment suggest an homage to Italian neo-

108

realism (a perspective later encouraged by Allie’s happening upon an anguished,
mysteriously wailing woman wearing only a slip, a cross around her neck, and a red
smear of lipstick), while the Manhattan setting confirms that Allie is
misremembering, supplanting one trauma with another that has not necessarily
occurred. The moment becomes triply loaded when Allie’s lonely drift is interrupted
by the sudden appearance of a potential playmate: an apparently homeless man who,
as if conjured forth by Allie’s imagination, can also hear the soundtrack’s non-
diegetic warfare. Allie shares a smoke with the man, as well as offering comfort
through a now-semi-diegetic awareness of the aural cacophony: “Take it easy.
They’re not even planes. They’re choppers. The ‘Cong don’t have choppers. You
see? These are American.”
This misunderstanding of ethnicity (confusing Chinese and Vietnamese),
setting (confusing Vietnam and New York), and history (‘enacting’ the Vietnam war
in the early 1980s), now suggests a child’s improvisatory play,
119
using the materials
at hand to act out a scene based on a shallow understanding of old war movies and
TV shows. Just as this tangled historicity evokes Elsaesser’s 1980s time-travel
nostalgia film, so too does it bring to mind the decade’s glut of naive child-heroes,
turning away from the adult conflicts of the New Hollywood era and renewing an
innate American innocence. This passage of the picture now enables us to see
Permanent Vacation as occupying a liminal place in American film history. On the

119
Again, we shall see this sense of a child’s play explored and expanded in the subsequent chapter on
new technologies – Henry Jenkins has written extensively on video games as a means for children to
engage with a virtual frontier, to regenerate that which has been lost, etc.

109
one hand, despite featuring many components of the New Hollywood’s
confrontational movies about angry young men, it seems to display them solely in
order to be depicted as agents of an absurd attempt at meaning, as opposed to its
predecessors’ comparatively noble depiction of a moral response to an absurd world.
On the other hand, its infantilized protagonist, its nostalgia for the 1950s as a way to
avoid presently visible trauma, and, most importantly, its ironic, mocking parody of
the earlier ‘drifter film’ conventions locates Permanent Vacation much closer in
spirit to the post-’77 mainstream blockbuster trend than one might expect. The result
is a film that is “Not ‘80s Hollywood” due to its small budget, alternative funding,
and non-spectacle-driven narrative, but simultaneously “Not ‘70s Hollywood” due to
its postmodern citation of that cinema’s surfaces. Thus, Permanent Vacation
becomes perhaps the earliest example of the recurring elements and tensions that will
ultimately coalesce into a visible definition of the American independent film, as
well as iconicizing Jim Jarmusch into a figurehead for the movement, throughout the
years following its release.
But how fair is it to over-simplify ‘indie’ cinema with such a reductive
formulation as “All the low budget Euro-modernism, now with none of the difficult
politics,” or, “Our drifters are now merely ironic/sarcastic”? Once again, Permanent
Vacation becomes instructive; its engagement with history seems prescient. Another
article in The Last Great American Picture Show, Christian Keathley’s “Trapped in
the Affection Image” invokes both Gilles Deleuze and Hayden White to frame the
New Hollywood cinema as a troubled response to overwhelming historical traumas:

110

centrally the Vietnam war, but extended also to include the era’s assassinations,
political protests, and corruption-in-Washington scandals. Keathley cites Deleuze’s
schema of perception-image, affection-image and action-image as particularly
relevant to the era’s filmic attempts to grapple with history; his brief summary of
how this schema operates is worth citing here: “Though it is perhaps something of an
oversimplification, one can understand these three components as roughly analogous
to the shot sequence in Kuleshovian montage: 1) we see a person looking; 2) we see
what he or she is looking at (perception-image); 3) we see his or her reaction
(affection-image); and this reaction leads him or her to take some action (action-
image).”
120
Keathley refers to Deleuze’s recognition of a post-war ‘crisis of the
action-image’, particularly within the early works of Italian neo-realism; confronted
by perception-images that are unbearably intense (such as the seemingly infinite
disarray of a war-torn city), the protagonists of such films often find themselves in
the eponymous stasis to which Keathley’s title refers.
Unable to perform the narrative-driving action required so intensely by
Classical modes of cinema, such protagonists necessarily become “characters who
lack clearly defined goals and thus slide passively from one situation to another; [the
films in which they appear feature] a cause-and-effect narrative structure whose
looseness opens space for digressions into ‘contingent daily reality’ or the
‘subjective reality’ of the film’s complex characters.”
121
Keathley’s article goes on to
propose the New Hollywood cinema of the ‘60s and ‘70s as a brief, peculiar moment

120
Keathley, 294.
121
Keathley, 295.

111
in which this dominant mode of filmmaking, ostensibly antithetical to international
art cinema, was also notably characterized by filmic experimentation as a response to
intense, national historical trauma of its own. Keathley is quick to point out that this
cycle appears to have run its course by the 1980s, during which time a new cycle of
blockbuster spectacles emphasized their heroes’ redemption through a renewed
embrace of hyperbolically cartoonish action-images.
Permanent Vacation, then, becomes particularly significant in its alternative
depiction of a character similarly caught between perception and action. Allie
observes the rubble about him, idly wanders through a series of episodic encounters,
and only at the film’s close is capable of any action whatsoever. Now, however, the
trauma faced by the protagonist is not possible to identify: Permanent Vacation
instead appears to tease us with both the Italian neo-realist setting (bombed
buildings, wailing woman) and the Vietnam era context (“the ‘Cong don’t have
choppers”) as potential sources of this trauma, only to reinforce each as
fundamentally untrue. (Even the potentially ‘Italian neo-realist’ character in the film
is explicitly named ‘Latina woman’ in the credits.) Here, the fundamental historical
trauma at the heart of this crisis seems to be the hero’s disconnection from history
itself. An invisible trauma of some sort has interrupted Deleuze’s model, so that the
perception-image is now itself not to be trusted, as when Allie misreads the New
York buildings as those of a post-war, even Vietnamese, environment or mishears
bombers flying overhead on the soundtrack.

112

In addition to Deleuze, Keathley cites Hayden White’s essay, “The Modernist
Event,” as a means to characterize the sudden appearance of art cinema’s formal
flourishes and irruption within the typically hermetic Hollywood mode. Keathley’s
reading of White is that “such traumatic historical events demand a modernist style
of representation, for the formal strategies of fragmentation, discontinuity, chance
and incoherence that are common to modernism are also the characteristics that mark
one’s experience of a traumatic event.”
122
In White’s own words, modernism is a
discourse that is fundamentally ‘about’ historiography on some level: “it is [difficult]
to conceive of a modernist fiction that did not in some way or on some level make
claims about the nature and meaning of history.”
123
It is intriguing that both Keathley
and White are only marginally interested in postmodernism: Keathley refers in
passing to the post-’77 blockbuster entertainments as working through prior traumas
largely through a repressive denial of them, while White makes brief mention of
postmodern literature as collapsing “the distinction between the real and the
imaginary.”
124
Given that the dominant interpretation of the split between 60s-70s
Hollywood and that of the 80s-90s is often one that pits the interrogative challenges
of modernism against soothing postmodern spectacles, one is left to ask, what would
a ‘postmodern event’ be? And, following from this, to what extent does this
postmodern engagement with history characterize the films of this post-‘70s,
postmodern American independent cinema?

122
Keathley, 302.
123
White, 21.
124
White, 19.

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There is a sense in which Permanent Vacation already provides us with some
potential answers. Allie is aware that a trauma of some sort has taken place, but he is
distanced from it both by time and his interpretive skills. This separation is partly
generational – we are not told why his Mother has been committed to an asylum;
however, upon visiting her it is revealed that she too has experienced a similar break
from past history. As the soundtrack reintroduces the sounds of combat, she moans,
“I can hear the planes sometimes. I haven’t heard them since the war, when we were
bombed.” Is Allie simply exculpating himself from the (crypto-Vietnam-era) sins of
his Fathers? Perhaps, but this sense of a conscious youth rebellion has already
characterized the vigor of the New Hollywood, in which, for example, the Roger
Corman ‘biker film’ genre was able to mature into the dissent offered by Easy Rider
(1969). Allie also rebels against capitalist values, but he does so as part of a near-
total rejection of reality itself: his wardrobe is a ‘50s pastiche, he hangs out in movie
theaters, and he turns his engagement with the traumatic evidence of crumbling
cityscapes into a child’s playful enactment of TV images.
An implicit question asked by Permanent Vacation is, if not a ‘war’ with ‘the
Chinese’, what did cause such destruction in this part of New York City? The only
answer conceivable is one of invisibility: that is, the hidden operations of global
capitalist economy. Rather than making invisible the traumas of the postmodern
present, as occurs in the reactionary nostalgia of so many big budget entertainments,
Permanent Vacation materializes this invisibility into itself a crucial element of its
design. Therefore, if the foundational traumas of WWII and Vietnam came to define,

114
or haunt, post-war Europe and New Hollywood cinemas, respectively, then the
defining trauma of the postmodern equivalent becomes a pervasive, vaporous sense
that cultural power has severed our ties to our own historical knowledge of that
trauma. Modernism is no longer the appropriate formal analogue for events so
overwhelming they seem to deny or preclude the possibility of meaning; instead,
postmodernism is a perfect contemporary expression for our state of cynical
skepticism about meaning. I call this “conspiracy fatigue.” Exhausted by our
awareness of past conspiracies, clinging desperately to optimism, we find little
solace in either. We want to flatter ourselves with the appearance of having
knowledge, our access to information more immediate (satellite dashboard maps, the
Internet, cell phones) than ever before; yet our dimming memories of “the ‘60s” nag
at us – how much agency do we really have? Is this an illusion of control, of choice?
Now, the crisis is not to determine the meaning of a fundamental trauma, but to
determine the reality-status of such an event, to be sure of whether it has even
occurred.
This is the context in which Jean Baudrillard can write The Gulf War Did
Not Take Place: despite a hyper-abundance of media technology with which to
represent this (seemingly modernist) event, all that can be finally determined about
it, suggests Baudrillard, is that representation of it occurred. Or, our only trustworthy
knowledge of the war is that there was media coverage of it. Permanent Vacation,
then, evokes Susan Hayward’s identification of a marked split between mainstream
and oppositional postmodern culture: the former works to reinforce such operations

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of power, through a distracting intensity of self-reflexive formal-textual play, while
the latter employs the same techniques in order to highlight the conditions that have
led to their codification.
125
The first group is a series of texts that are merely
symptoms of our postmodern moment (Godzilla, Wild Wild West etc.) while the
second comprises those works that are instead on some level about it (Blade Runner,
The Player, Pulp Fiction, etc). Though a tempting conclusion, it is not my intention
to argue here that we can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that the American
independent film flourished in the postmodern era as a necessary, corrective
oppositional postmodernism in response to Hollywood’s mainstream mode. Rather,
it is my suggestion that this is itself a deliberate fiction that drives the present
discourse around independence. Our coming to grips with this fiction and our
varying degrees of accepting or denying it as ‘truth’ constitute the primary meaning
of this discourse, as well as the specificity of its appearance during this period of
postmodernity. Along with White and Deleuze, Keathley also cites Claude Levi-
Strauss, noting the famed anthropologist’s conclusions regarding a culture’s use of
myths to resolve its own traumas and ideological ruptures.
126
For Keathley, the
significance of Hollywood’s modernist output is its consistent refusal to provide the
resolutions to which Levi-Strauss refers; I would suggest that the equivalent
significance of postmodern American cinema is its extra-textual enactment of such
myths. The most relevant cultural conflicts are not expressed any longer through the
film texts themselves, but instead through the spectator’s cultural awareness of those

125
in “Postmodernism”, Key Concepts in Cinema Studies.
126
Keathley, 298.

116
texts as operating within a discourse of an entertainment industry, of global capital –
of money.
If we could look to the 1960s and identify, for example, The Graduate (1967)
as a film whose central character undergoes a narrative journey that reflects
contemporary cultural concerns about tensions in generational relationships, then I
would suggest that the films of the subsequent period do not offer such relevance
through their narrativity. The Benjamin Braddocks of our age are instead Jim
Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh themselves (and I would not be
the first to suggest that Tarantino has made himself a wealthy man by indeed
choosing to go into ‘plastics’). The generational conflict they presently face is not
one of literal parents and children but instead one between past film influences,
current sources of financing and present-day audiences: a key issue they struggle to
resolve is whether the hyper-textuality they employ allows us to better understand
our present through the cultural crises of the past or, conversely, utilizes past images
to aid in obscuring or even ignoring our knowledge of the present.
If the conflict between mainstream and oppositional postmodernism only
conforms to the distinction between Hollywood and independent film in an illusory
way, then a more productive conflict that reflects this distinction is indeed one of
authorship. This is a period in which Timothy Corrigan can propose, in A Cinema
Without Walls, a binary opposition between directors who are ‘commercial auteurs’
and those who are instead ‘auteurs of commerce.’
127
The former are those

127
Corrigan, 107.

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filmmakers of such celebrity status that “their agency produces and promotes texts
that invariably exceed the movie itself, both before and after its release.”
128
As one
might expect, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are the first names mentioned on
Corrigan’s list.
Lucas in particular is able to generate a rather fluid textuality for his Star
Wars series, for example, reworking earlier episodes’ special effects so they have a
palimpsestic relationship to their former selves. This act seems deliberately
calculated to inspire religious fervor amongst a devoted cult of fans, poring over
slight deviations from one version to another as scholars might debate the finer
points of the Talmud, or the Old and New Testaments; it seems almost cruelly
relevant to point out that such analysis seems insular to the point of irrelevance. Such
fan debates, many occurring while ritualistically dressed in the flowing robes of an
on-screen ‘Jedi’, camping outside a theater for days to buy tickets, have yet to
demonstrate a compelling new interpretation of the movies themselves. Instead they
exist primarily as media images through which the films can be promoted: cruelly
relevant, as I said, because the ultimate function of these images is to convince the
public that the release of a new Star Wars episode is, literally, ‘an event.’
Think of how many teaser posters for Hollywood’s summer spectacles
consist solely of an emblematic image (Batman’s insignia, Darth Vader’s helmet)
and a date, concretizing the historical validity of the films’ appearances. If the
postmodern event would be one whose significance lies in our very struggle to

128
Corrigan, 107.

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identify it as an event, then the postmodern Hollywood film will attempt to assuage
this anxiety by simulating ‘event’ status for the releases of its significant products.
Here is a compelling instance, within this discourse, of our current disconnection
from our own sense of history being complicated by the entertainment industry’s
attempts to usurp that history; this is the context in which Corrigan can write that “it
is the text and not its author that now may be dead.”
129
Here is another example of
media industries capitalizing, literally, on fractures within the academy, of
Hollywood usurping its role as taste-maker as Cultural Studies scholars debate the
value of that status.
Corrigan expresses the result of this conflict in linguistic terms, thus himself
engaging with Foucauldian, theoretical, post-structural academic work. As he puts it,
“the mechanisms for identifying with a speaking subject, usually a director, have
become as important to communication in film culture today as the so-called textual
statement of a movie itself or the different ways it is received by different audiences:
the commercial drama of a movie’s source can say as much today as the drama of the
movie and the disposition of its viewers.”
130
American independent cinema, then,
defined as it is by its ostensible rejection of Hollywood’s promotional apparatus,
becomes doubly bound within this formulation of Corrigan’s: by using the armature
of media promotion to inform audiences that its pictures exist outside this
promotional drama, the makers and distributors of independent films ensure
simultaneously that their films will be read through this drama (are they truly able to

129
Corrigan, 43 (quoted in Lewis).
130
Corrigan, 118.

119
exist outside of the Hollywood system?) as well as, crucially, against it (can they
exist as a source of independent textual meaning? do they have something ‘real’ to
‘say’ in contrast to their better-funded counterparts?). As they say, herein lies the
game: when we buy a ticket to a film that has been advertised to us as on some level
a meaningfully independent film, we convince ourselves that we will be particularly
likely to derive textual meaning from that film, while facing the knowledge that we
are ourselves acting out roles in an extra-textual drama of film promotion: how
‘independent’ can a film be if it was produced, for example, by Disney subsidiary
Miramax with such stars as Bruce Willis and John Travolta?
A further question worth exploring in some detail is this: if the ticket buyer
for an ‘indie’ film him or herself becomes a participant in the extra-textual drama of
that film, simply as a result of buying a ticket and standing in line for it (effectively,
enacting an extra-textual drama whose conflict is the struggle of the film in question
to contain valid textual meaning), then what, precisely, is this ticket buyer’s
difference from his geeky counterpart in line for the next Star Wars episode? How
can one determine which one is the dupe and which one is the discerning consumer?
The simplest answer is that of predetermined demographics: the art-house consumers
of the independent film are statistically likely to be older, better-educated and more
informed about their position in relationship to the Culture Industry that has
generated the product they are about to watch (indeed, they might even pride
themselves on having read Adorno and Horkheimer’s writing on that industry while
in college).

120
A more complex answer is that the independent film is also likely to be a
better movie than the latest Star Wars prequel: educated or not, the ticket holder in
line for You Can Count On Me (2000) is usually correct to expect a ‘real’ movie,
with rich characters, an identifiable setting and the intricate morality recognizable in
one’s own life. This argument suggests the Star Wars fan is the dupe simply because
he or she has been made willing to accept a collection of action scenes set against
computer generated backdrops as a substitute for ‘actual’ narrative. Similarly,
narratives of highbrow independent cinema set against the lowbrow blockbuster have
been thoroughly dismantled by the work of New Americanists, Cultural Studies
theorists, et al. Notwithstanding the Henry Jenkins-influenced fan studies, and other
Cultural Studies approaches that depict such fans as having more agency in this
exchange than the previous account would allow, one should also consider the literal,
textual sense in which these two types of ticket holder find themselves on common
ground. The question is asked: why does the industry bother with such smaller films?
When a studio subsidiary, Paramount Classics, makes roughly $10 million in profit
from You Can Count on Me while blockbuster films can potentially earn one hundred
times that amount at the global box office (as Paramount’s own Titanic proved in
1997), it is worth asking why the studio’s ‘indie’ subsidiary remains in business. The
ultimate answer is that the industry as a whole seeks to resolve this extra-textual
drama of film production: if there is a conflict between these two types of films
(Hollywood blockbuster and low-budget independent), as well as these two types of
audience (infantilized teenage fans and educated adults), then Hollywood will

121
inevitably seek to maximize audience appeal, and thus profits, by integrating the
strengths of each mode into a single product. The independent discourse here
narrativizes a ‘farm team’ developing talent for the major leagues, and the extra-
textual narrative becomes one of Hollywood learning how to reconcile filmic
oppositions when creating new texts.
Take the case of Gangs of New York (2002), a film whose 21
st
century
significance in part appears to claim that this extra-textual narrative has reached its
climax: the film is just as meaningfully an ‘independent’ film as it is a
quintessentially Hollywood production. On the one hand, it was made by Miramax;
on the other, Disney’s funding of Miramax saw the film’s budget reach well over
$100 million, expensive even by studio standards. As with the George Lucas film,
part of the appeal of Gangs of New York is its display of spectacle: it is advertised
around the massive ‘New York’ set built at Italy’s Cinecitta, as well as a series of
prolonged, ‘epic’ battle scenes that feature hundreds of extras (and can be enjoyed as
discrete action sequences). Gangs of New York is also presented, however, as a
‘quality’ film – a period reconstruction evoking, perhaps, a Merchant-Ivory
production – that will appeal to those with rarefied tastes: its screenplay, for
example, was co-written by Kenneth Lonergan (writer-director of You Can Count on
Me, previously); it is the product of several years of meticulous research on its
subject matter, from Herbert Asbury’s original book to Martin Scorsese and
screenwriter Jay Cocks’ additional efforts; and, in an intriguing parallel to the Star
Wars prequel episodes, it was made by a director for whom audiences have nostalgic

122

associations with the (better) movies he made in the ‘New Hollywood’ era of
innovation and creativity.
I propose Jim Jarmusch, then, as the thesis component of this recent dialectic
within contemporary American filmmaking in large part because he has never ‘gone
Hollywood.’ Though the films he makes are opposed to their 60s and 70s-era
counterparts by their engagement with postmodernism, this engagement remains
meaningful in accordance with Hayward’s conception of oppositional postmodernity.
Consider Jarmusch’s own, oft-quoted description of his second film, Stranger than
Paradise (1984): it is “a semi-neorealist black comedy in the style of an imaginary
Eastern-European film director obsessed with Ozu, and familiar with the 1950s
American television show The Honeymooners.”
131
This quote suggests that the
experience of watching Stranger than Paradise will involve little more than catching
a series of references to other media texts; it also displays, however, a postmodern
ironist’s fascination for juxtaposing high (the Japanese art cinema of Yashuziro Ozu)
and low (early American sitcoms) cultural texts.
The quote also alludes to a slippage between the real and the imaginary that
is often invoked in discussions of postmodernity: one might imagine, for example,
that Stranger than Paradise’s mix of ‘real’ and ‘simulated’ textual influences has
resulted in what Baudrillard would call a hyper-real text, in which an author’s
originating purity is lost. Indeed, much of the critical debate around Jarmusch’s work
is founded on these tensions to the point of forming an extra-textual narrative about

131
Hertzberg, vii.

123

the status of the subject in the postmodern age, ultimately offering an implicit
conclusion about authorship that invokes Corrigan and Andrew. Reading reviews of
Jim Jarmusch films, one can observe a struggle amongst critics to decide whether the
films present a mere list of the director’s artistic influences, offered for our fleeting
amusement, or Jarmusch is instead able to transcend such simple quoting and present
a style of his own in his work. They generally choose the latter; faith in the
reappearance and existence of an auteur behind the scenes, ordering and assembling
his pop culture citations into a single, unified text becomes the means by which
critics are able to tell themselves that ‘meaning’ is in their presence.
Jarmusch himself has contributed to this narrative in interviews. Asked if he
is influenced by, for example, the films of Wim Wenders, Jarmusch bristles:

Well, I’ve been influenced by anyone whose films I’ve liked; by
Godard, Antonioni, Wenders, Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Of course, I’m
influenced by things that move me, but when people say that my work
is imitative of his, I think, it’s just the idiots in the press that have to
relate everything to something else. They can’t see anything in its
own right. It’s got to be influenced by this or that, and that comes
from the whole way that movies are thought of in the United States.
Everything refers back to something else. I got a script, after Stranger
was successful, from Hollywood they wanted me to direct, and they
said they’d pay me a quarter of a million dollars to make a teenage
sex comedy. The letter said, ‘We know that this script reads a little
like Risky Business, but, take our word for it, after the re-write it will
read much more like The Graduate.’ ... They always have to refer to
something else. Nothing stands on its own.
132

Much of the Jarmusch discourse is contained within this lengthy excerpt. Firstly, it
reminds us that he is steadfast in his refusal to ‘sell out’: many interviews suggest

132
Hertzberg, 52.

124
that, after early successes, Jarmusch was repeatedly offered jobs to direct films in the
Porky’s series (and their ilk). Secondly, it suggests that the industry is here
attempting to locate Jarmusch within a discourse of ‘youth culture’ consistent with
the mode of Roger Corman’s AIP output during the 1960s.
Thirdly, this passage invokes an ‘indies vs. the studios’ binary: Jarmusch
implicitly draws a connection here between mainstream and oppositional
postmodernism, and, respectively, Hollywood and independent film. Though he may
be influenced by Ozu and Antonioni, in Jarmusch’s case these are genuine aesthetic
influences (themselves made by genuine artists) that remain subservient to authorial
control precisely because he does not work within the Hollywood system; were he to
do so, Jarmusch would inevitably become a cog in a machine, filming God-only-
knows which draft of a screenplay whose content only has meaning in terms of the
earlier Hollywood films it references.
Fourth, it is significant that Jarmusch identifies this postmodern hyper-
referentiality as a problem with the ‘way that movies are thought of in the United
States.’ It is my suggestion that the ‘American-ness’ of the American independent
film comes not from a monolithic sense of nationality, in which ‘indies’ are the ‘true’
national cinema, while Hollywood makes global blockbusters; instead, this discourse
consistently portrays an America divided against itself. Here, the American
independent auteur is able to identify the errors of his nation and work to correct
them; crucially, he is able to do so because he has renewed himself in a
fundamentally American way. Like Henry David Thoreau, Jarmusch has chosen to

125

march to the beat of his own drummer, setting an example for the rest of us by
rediscovering the foundational notions of independence and indeed recharging those
notions by illuminating their contemporary relevance. As Thoreau’s stay at Walden
Pond was (partially) a protest against the hypocrisies of slave ownership, so too does
Jarmusch’s work constitute an implicit rejection of an increasing American cultural
isolationism throughout the last two decades: he is an American independent auteur,
but the strength of his work, and his engagement with the idea of ‘America,’ comes
from an embracing of the interdependent diversity amongst his multicultural,
multinational sources.
133
By comparing Jarmusch to Thoreau, I hope to offer the
figure of the independent director as one of Schmidt’s good citizens one may hope to
emulate, himself offering a productive emulation of a notable American before him;
the result being that we ourselves are inspired to be more engaged and active citizens
ourselves in response.
Another Jarmusch quote reinforces this notion of the independent filmmaker
looking back to a ‘truer’ sense of America in the face of a present-day nation that has
lost its way: asked if he sees the country ‘through the eyes of a foreigner’ because of
the diverse influences and characters that drive his films, Jarmusch responds:

133
There is a great deal of writing within the field of American Studies on the subject of the
‘cosmopolitan’ American world traveler that evokes the figure of Jarmusch. John Carlos Rowe, for
example, in “Edward Said and American Studies,” notes that “Said never connected this
cosmopolitanism with Americanness or even with modernism, but it has very strong roots both in the
myth of American selfhood criticized effectively by American myth critics and in American
expatriates’ careful cultivation of their ‘otherness’ abroad.” (40) Such matters, particularly as they
relate to his study of Native Americans, Dead Man, and his participation in the
documentary/ethnography, Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made, will be addressed at length in my
chapter on American Studies.

126

America is made up of foreigners. There are indigenous people that
lived here for thousands of years, but then white Europeans tried to
commit genocide against them all. I’m a mongrel, I have Irish blood,
bohemian blood, some German blood. All of America is a cultural
mixture, and although America is very much in denial of this, that’s
really what America is.
134

Here the presence of Jarmusch as auteur works to correct against a failure of
American memory; a seeming contradiction with the status of the auteur within the
postmodern Hollywood economy, in which authorship is but one more means to
advertise a product that is essentially of the present, immediate, ahistorical. (Despite
the large dates on those posters, struggling to convince us that the release of each
Hollywood blockbuster is an ‘event,’ these films rarely achieve such historical
weight; it is unlikely that one is able to remember such films, if at all, in terms of
precisely what day they were released.) Jarmusch’s statement seems to echo Dudley
Andrew’s conclusions about authorship, worth repeating once more: “the word
‘auteur’ … can thicken a text with duration, with the past of its coming into being
and with the future of our being with it.”
135
The extra-textual presence of Jarmusch
becomes the weight that critics have been known to find lacking in his ‘slight’,
‘minimalist’ film narratives.
And yet it must be noted that there is a lingering sense of academic heresy
that attends such citations of Jarmusch: the act of invoking the director’s own words
in a study of his work is seen as the gesture of a student all too willing to ignore the
intentional fallacy – in which the author’s assessment of the meaning of his work is

134
Hertzberg, 193.
135
Andrew, 27.

127
too hurriedly taken as the final word on that meaning – as well as a progressive
understanding of filmmakers as multiply determined by social and economic factors.
The texts an auteur creates are shaped by far more than his or her own authorial
intentions; however, recent reconceptions of auteurism, in which the status of the
auteur is examined both through his or her texts as well as extra-textual media
performances of ‘him/herself’, seem designed to redeem both the auteur and our own
desire, as analytical writers, to cite his or her words as significant. The excerpts I’ve
taken from Jim Jarmusch interviews throughout the last few pages are not
necessarily useful in understanding any of his films directly; they are, however,
crucial to the understanding of Jarmusch’s own significance as an evolving cultural
discourse.
As I’ve been suggesting, as an independent auteur, Jarmusch is also on some
level a media-constructed framework for the work of myth-image-symbol American
Studies criticism within a public forum. It is revealing, for example, that many of
Jarmusch’s comments in interviews do more to illuminate Walden than they do his
own films; both Jarmusch and Thoreau repeatedly articulate a fundamental
incompatibility between the American desire for personal wealth and the American
love for ideas, and ideals, of independence. Take, for example, the following
passages from Walden:

And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but
the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him.
136

136
Thoreau, 76.

128

I respect not his labors, his farm where every thing has its price; who
would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he
could get anything for him ... whose fruits are not ripe for him till they
are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.
137

It looks the poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find
faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is ... The town’s poor
seem to me to live the most independent lives of any.
138

Now consider Thoreau’s words alongside the following excerpts from interviews
with Jarmusch:

I love America as a country itself and the landscapes, and, for the
most part, people that I meet just out on the road somewhere. But as
far as the government and the recent attitudes of the American public,
I find them appalling. I really love a lot of things about America, but
at the same time I feel like I’m a stranger in terms of general sense of
economic and political direction that people even my age have in
America – that’s really disturbing to me ... [I’m talking about]
Yuppies and the fact that, you know, if someone had told me ten years
ago that Ronald Reagan would be our president I would have fallen
on the floor laughing.
139

In America, there’s such a concern with ambition. We’re so fed up
with it, this idea about ambition and success. Sure it’s everywhere,
but especially in the U.S. It’s something I’m not interested in,
something I don’t like, that all my life I’ve been taught that I have to
achieve a certain stage on some economic scale.
140

I don’t like the idea of fashioning your life around money, or lifestyle
... There are so many other ways of living. There are people who
aren’t aspiring to be fashion photographers. I’ve been getting scripts
from Hollywood that I’ve been reading just out of curiosity. Some
I’ve refused by their descriptions on the phone. But I’ve read maybe
ten of them and every single script is concerned with ambition and

137
Thoreau, 244.
138
Thoreau, 376.
139
Hertzberg, 42-43.
140
Hertzberg, 79.

129

rise. If there is any class consciousness in the stories, it’s always
someone rising to the top.
141

Throughout these passages, one can recognize a developing sense of Jarmusch’s
career consistency as a form of protest against a corrupt government, much as
Thoreau refused to pay taxes to a slave-owning state as the foundational act of civil
disobedience. Both Jarmusch and Thoreau, furthermore, use historical definitions of
the nation in order to criticize the contemporary inequalities of their own America;
again, there is a sense in which each man is significant for his attempts to renew,
refresh and reinvigorate an America that has lost touch with its initiating ideals. It is
also worth noting that the extent to which the discourse around American
independent film has evolved over the past two decades can be seen by reading
Jarmusch’s words against the Steven Soderbergh film Erin Brockovich (2000), which
may as well have been one of the ambition-fueled scripts the earlier auteur discarded.
Here, the Julia Roberts character’s climactic receipt of a new SUV and a steady job
at a law firm allegorize Soderbergh’s own acceptance as an A-list commercial
director of Hollywood movies. Soderbergh will be seen to grapple with such matters,
and the significance of Brockovich and Ocean’s Eleven (2001) being his two biggest
hits, in the pages to come.
But what of Jarmusch’s textual significance? Current academic debates hinge
on the possibility of throwing the baby out with the bathwater; though Corrigan
suggests that the ‘text may now be dead’, he is quick to add that a film’s extra-

141
Hertzberg, 15.

130

textual meaning is just as potentially a complement to filmic meaning as it is a
replacement of it.
142
A large part of our ability to discern a meaningful auteur
discourse around Jarmusch comes from the fact that his films are sufficiently similar
in form and content to sustain that discourse. There is a sense in which, as the
proposed dialectic of the history of recent American independent film progresses,
Jarmusch’s films are those that are most directly applicable to their accompanying
extra-textual discourses. By the time of Tarantino and Soderbergh’s ascendance,
such popular auteurism is more consistently a means to avoid textual engagement
with their films and instead market the romanticization of the auteur himself. If there
remains significance to be derived from the fact that interviews with Jarmusch
engage with notions of nationality and American class structure, part of this
significance comes from the fact that the content of his films still leads to such
questions being asked of him. Thus, by interpreting them according to these earlier
models of American Studies work, his films are revealed to be very much concerned
with the same progressive conceptual issues as those of the New Americanists.
Broadly speaking, Jim Jarmusch films tend to deal with issues of nationality,
ethnicity, and difference, often expressing conflicts of identity through the use and
abuse of language; at the same time, as alluded to regarding Permanent Vacation,
Jarmusch’s films express meaning as a direct result of their postmodernity. Though
one can identify the influences of, and direct references to, other American,

142
Indeed, in A Cinema Without Walls, Corrigan, after re-envisioning auteurism in this manner, goes
on at length to perform textual analyses of films by Francis Coppola, Alexander Kluge and Raoul
Ruiz.

131
European and Asian filmmakers throughout Jarmusch’s work, such citations are
rarely an alternative to textual meaning; instead, they consistently enhance that
meaning by allegorizing the central culture clashes that repeatedly drive his films’
narratives. Such are the tensions that haunt this filmography: will the American
slacker learn anything from his French counterpart in Permanent Vacation?; will the
Hungarian cousin connect with her American family in Stranger than Paradise?;
will the Italian prisoner abet the escape of his American cellmates in Down by Law
(1986)?; will the Japanese tourists’ encounters with Memphis locals enhance their
appreciation of American rock music in Mystery Train (1989)?; and, perhaps most
significantly, will the white man come to any spiritual growth as a result of traveling
with a Native American guide in the western Dead Man (1995)?
Often, what is at stake throughout these films is a potentially mindless
cultural assimilation; the ironic wit of the films is typically derived from the
characters’ gradual recognition of, or ultimate failure to recognize, that which has
been evident all along to an implicitly savvier audience member. Again, what we are
seeing here is not merely the films’ allegorizing of their own making, but also the
primary shift in American Studies thought – the films themselves argue for a new
means of knowing, a multiplicity of theoretical paradigms. Those stuck in the past
are not able to make productive sense of the world. When Allie meets the Frenchman
at the climax of Permanent Vacation, the humor comes from our awareness that he
doesn’t see the futility of his escape attempt. In Stranger than Paradise, similarly,
the film’s characters repeatedly take journeys – from Budapest to New York, from

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New York to Ohio, from Ohio to Florida, and finally back to Budapest – only to find
an essential sameness to each location. In this film Jarmusch seems to undercut the
significance of the ‘American’ aspects of American independent film; the
redundancy and even blankness of the landscapes visited (tellingly, the black and
white photography over-exposes a snow-covered Lake Erie to the point that it is
literally invisible when our heroes go to see it) suggests that the country is now no
longer one of identifiable regional diversity but, instead, an all-consuming
monotony. There is a relationship, however, between the tensions within the diegesis
of Stranger than Paradise and our extra-textual knowledge of it; though the
characters are repeatedly confronted with (and confounded by) the annihilating
sameness of the American landscape, the film’s viewers are able to receive it as an
exhilarating instance of novelty and innovation.
Stranger than Paradise’s success, as with that of Permanent Vacation, is thus
contingent upon its status as a rare evocation of New Hollywood’s ‘drifter films’,
alongside the repressive aesthetic of 1980s producers’ Hollywood, that
simultaneously utilizes the period’s increasing engagement with postmodernism to
adjust the manner in which such a drifter film is able to convey meaning. Where
films such as Five Easy Pieces aggressively court reading protocols that engage with
their Vietnam contexts, Jarmusch’s work instead forces viewers to confront a dead-
pan irony that for many is the quintessence of postmodernism. In the earlier period,
such American films conveyed meaning through their angry, insistent relevance:

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they communicated, as their champions have repeatedly told us, an immediacy that
indicated they were nothing if not ‘of the present.’
By the time of Jarmusch’s career, this urgency – of a film’s central character,
of an American counterculture, of contemporary film criticism – has dissipated,
replaced by an ennui that suggests we should be happy for those films that are able to
convey any meaning whatsoever. The postmodern ‘blankness’ of the texts now
suggests the impotence of traditional academic paradigms to read meaning into them.
This apparent absence of meaning forces the viewer to embrace new theoretical
perspectives in order to understand that which is apparently invisible.
At stake in Jarmusch’s career has been a potential embrace of ironic distance
for its own sake, devoid of critical content. Recall the words of Clerks director Kevin
Smith, in Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes: “I’m a student of American independent
cinema. ... I don’t feel that I have to go back and view European or other foreign
films because I feel like these guys [such filmmakers as Jarmusch] have already done
it for me, and I’m getting filtered through them. That ethic works for me.”
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The
implicit suggestion here is that of an American film movement that no longer viably
engages with a reality-crisis, but instead addresses one that is purely meta-cinematic:
the American independent film is that which usurps the nationality of other
countries’ cinemas while erasing a history in which previous generations of young
people sought out and savored such foreign films. Here, the young independent
American filmmaker Kevin Smith sees Jarmusch’s films as, effectively, so culturally

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Pierson, 32.

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and historically distant that they might as well be forty-year-old documents of the
French New Wave, fading in their relevance to the essence of popular ‘‘indie’’s
today. Such is the discourse in which Jarmusch’s films exist: they are the last gasps
of an American independent cinema struggling to reach meaningful engagement with
a context of their global influences. At the same time, they are both embodiments
and, finally, victims of this slippage of meaning in a postmodern period.
Naturally, by presenting Jim Jarmusch as this starting point of a historical
dialectic, I suggest that part of his significance must be to go away, to die out or be
replaced by other sets of terms offered by subsequent popular auteurs.
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Though
Jarmusch and his films represent a significant moment in the development of reading
practices regarding American independent film, nowhere can this symbolic
resonance of the historical ‘past-ness’ of that ‘indie’ movement be seen so clearly as
in his recent film, the deceptively simple Coffee and Cigarettes (2004). At first
glance, the film might appear destined for irrelevance, appearing as a mere footnote
in such academic projects as this one: it is comprised of eleven short films Jarmusch
periodically shot, in between and at times during his feature work, since the mid-
1980s. Each of the films can be described as a conversation between two or three
characters as they indulge in the eponymous legal stimulants.
As with the ill-fated Four Rooms (1995), in which Allison Anders, Alexandre
Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino each contributed a short film to

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Such is the very subject of Dead Man, both on-screen, and in the extra-textual story of Miramax’s
poor handling of it. Disillusioned with Harvey Weinstein’s aggressive tactics, Jarmusch made a
temporary retreat from filmmaking for some time afterward.

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commemorate their near-simultaneous appearance as ‘‘indie’’ directors (the self-
described ‘Sundance class of ‘92’), Coffee and Cigarettes can simultaneously be
read as both a nostalgic homage to such episodic European films of the 1960s as
RoGoPaG (1963) and Boccaccio ‘70 (1962), as well as an attempt to create an
historic document of the American independent movement from within. Given that
Jarmusch’s shorts were made from 1986 to the present, the sense of Coffee and
Cigarettes’ significance as a time capsule of sorts is especially strong. Though the
films were originally meant to stand alone and are certainly entertaining as such –
the first, in which laconic comedian Steven Wright is contrasted with always-already
hyper-caffeinated Roberto Benigni, was originally made for Saturday Night Live
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–
seen together, they have a cumulative impact that is essentially a reflection upon the
entire period of ‘‘indie’’ film under discussion here.
When watching Coffee and Cigarettes, one is confronted with a similar
narrative trajectory that does not exist within the diegesis of any of the individual
shorts. Instead, one becomes gradually aware of their ongoing indexical evidence of
Jarmusch’s own filmography: the Benigni short was likely made when actor and
director were together for Down by Law; the next, featuring Cinqué Lee and Steve
Buscemi, reminds us that both were in Mystery Train together; we recall one of
Night on Earth’s (1991) five cab drivers when Isaach de Bankolé’s short is featured;

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Even the present evocation of Saturday Night Live here suggests an important historical shift: from
a defiantly independent media forum, able to nurture and encourage its primary cast as well as such
occasionally contributing talents as Albert Brooks, Andy Kaufman and Jarmusch, to a commodified
exchange in which the show’s creator-producer, Lorne Michaels, now retains the rights to characters
created by the cast in order to develop them into consistently unsuccessful movie vehicles for his self-
named production company.

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if one wonders why British comedian Steve Coogan is involved, one imagines the
connection to his scene-mate Alfred Molina, who also appeared in Dead Man; and
Bill Murray’s exchange with two members of the Wu-Tang Clan reminds viewers
that a member of the group wrote the score for Jarmusch’s previous feature, Ghost
Dog: the Way of the Samurai (1999).
It is tempting to suggest that the aesthetic failure of Four Rooms and the
equivalent success of Coffee and Cigarettes have more than a little to do with issues
of authorship: where the former film is unable to make a statement about this
movement of independent cinema (except to suggest that its directors are so
divergent in style and tone that to put their work together is foolhardy), Jarmusch’s
film succeeds in part because it is so consistently Jarmusch’s. Coffee and Cigarettes
is inherently a celebration of an auteur’s longevity: it is a potentially thin text that
Jarmusch has thickened, as Dudley Andrew would say, with the fact of his own
duration. The dissonance offered throughout Four Rooms results in both an empty
film and empty statement regarding the American ‘indie’: here, the movement is
ultimately less than the sum of its parts, since it combines directors of such
inconsistency that no coherence as a movement can flourish.
In Coffee and Cigarettes, conversely, the film gradually develops a startling
cumulative impact. In its own way, the film is structured around the same sort of
dialectic I’m proposing here as representative of the recent history of American
‘‘indie’’ cinema. As the title suggests, much of the film is devoted to provocative
juxtapositions: if caffeine and nicotine, with their compelling contrast of thick black

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liquid and evanescent white smoke, seem to naturally complement each other, what
other disparate elements can be synthesized in this way? Most of the shorts present
characters who are somehow opposite, either in terms of their typical personae (the
quiet Wright and hyper Benigni) or due to a rivalry established by the narrative
conflict of the short (musicians Tom Waits and Iggy Pop, playing themselves,
attempt a neutral chat but can’t help turning it into a bitter argument). By repeating
the formula so many times within the same feature, this conflictual strategy itself
becomes a kind of narrative: what will be the next combination? who will ‘win’?
The more recently made installments, furthermore, begin to refer back to the
early shorts (by presenting them in the chronological order of their making, this
sense of a documentary historical statement is emphasized): the Wu-Tang Clan’s
RZA, for example, mimics a humorous claim by Waits, asserting that he has
substantial medical training (“I inhabit the space where music and medicine
intersect,” both announce in their shorts). Furthermore, the Wu-Tang episode, in
which a white waiter (Bill Murray) interrupts a conversation between two black
characters, mimics Steve Buscemi’s own earlier harassment of Spike Lee’s siblings
Cinqé and Joie Lee. The pleasures of the film’s self-reflexivity – many actors play
themselves; they are often combined in deliberately jarring ways (Bill Murray
improvising with rap stars, for example); repeated dialogue and motifs – make us
aware that Jarmusch himself is ultimately the great synthesizer of its multiple
elements. Through the redemptive presence of an auteur, they become more than a
list of influences, or references to catch, but a definitive summary statement: the

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American ‘‘indie’’ is already the subject of our nostalgia, a moment of past history.
Though each of the segments features a conflict of some sort, it is typically
expressed as a matter of casual inconsequence: these are slacker snapshots of little
more than sitting around and doing nothing and, as such, they recall the inactive,
lethargic characters that populated so much of early Jarmusch, such as Permanent
Vacation and Stranger than Paradise. The final episode of Coffee and Cigarettes
concerns itself most fully with the wistful awareness of time’s passing: its players,
Bill Rice and Taylor Mead, are both elderly men who discuss their (real) work in
avant-garde theatrical productions. Imagining their cups of coffee to be champagne
flutes, they toast ‘Paris in the ‘20s’ as a source of inspiration and artistic vitality for
their ongoing work on the stage. But this toast is not sufficient: they also raise their
Styrofoam ‘glasses’ to ‘New York in to ‘70s’ (recalling the linking of France and
Manhattan at the close of Permanent Vacation), citing it as an equivalent period of
innovation and creativity.
The power of this moment, emphasized by its final placement in Coffee and
Cigarettes, is linked to our fluid reading of it: on the one hand, it is a generous
gesture, granting a segment of American culture the worldly sophistication thought
to be so effortlessly found in a European counterpart. On the other hand, the
historical comparison emphasizes our present-day distance from both periods:
though the punk music scene, underground film screenings and Warhol Factory
events of the city during the era toasted were important influences upon the then-
embryonic auteur, they are currently as forgotten to the average viewer (or to

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independent director Kevin Smith) as are ‘jazz age bohemians.’ As Coffee and
Cigarettes ends, one is left to reflect upon the fact that independent films just don’t
look like this anymore: grainy black and white film stock has been largely replaced
by the ubiquity of digital video as a formal signifier of low budget production
circumstances, and the prospect of watching nothing more than characters sit around
and talk seems like a comic punchline about the pretensions of the movement (for
example, a character ‘furiously’ playing the My Dinner With André video game at an
arcade on The Simpsons).
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I’ve repeatedly stressed the word ‘statement’ in my description of Coffee and
Cigarettes to suggest that, both in the specific film and consistently throughout
Jarmusch’s contribution to the discursive field of recent independent film, the
manner in which meaning is conveyed – addressing authorship, for example, while
refusing to clearly adhere to its primary tenets – closely follows Michel Foucault’s
depiction of an enunciative field enabling statements to be spoken in The
Archaeology of Knowledge (and the Discourse on Language). Again: the films’
content suggests New Americanist traditions of academic debate, while
paradoxically being shown to offer such meaning through the classical prism of
auteurism. Throughout much of Foucault’s writing, the operations of cultural
exchange are never as linear as we have led ourselves to believe. As previously
alluded to, post-structural theorizations such as those of Foucault are particularly

146
The opening of Quentin Tarantino’s first film, Reservoir Dogs (1992), could be said to open with a
direct homage to this tradition, with its principal characters enjoying a spirited chat around a diner’s
breakfast table; here, however, it is an ‘‘indie’’ convention to be ‘shot down’ in more ways than one
over the course of the film. More on this later.

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applicable to postmodern cinema: indeed, it may be here that the latent relationship
between post-structuralist thought and postmodern visual culture may be the
strongest.
In its restless, compulsive need to display traces of multiple influences, on an
overt textual level, the postmodern art work challenges conventional notions of
meaning: if a statement is being made by, for example, Blade Runner, the
multiplicity of the text itself tells us not to look to Ridley Scott’s authorship as the
source of that statement. Instead, the film’s meaning is to be found in the context that
unites a commodity-exchange director (originally from TV commercials) with an
aesthetic discourse that combines: Frankensteinian science-fiction tropes; the
femmes fatale, wounded men and art deco styles of film noir; antebellum escaped
slave literature; and a narrative device that directly engages with contemporary
concepts of memory as artifice. Though the flourishes of postmodernism suggest an
awareness of Culture Industry operations – it often seems that a primary pleasure of
postmodern cinema is our laughing at the audacity of the latest juxtapositions and
recombinations that are being used to make us spend money on the industry’s
products – power nevertheless remains firmly in place. A destabilized text such as
Starship Troopers (1997) may raise uncomfortable ideological questions about the
relationship of warfare and the media, 1930s fascism and the present, but its special
effects, ironic distance and fast pace ensure that its primary statement continues to be
that of our love for expensive studio movies; similarly, the first lesson children are
taught by the ostensibly benign Sesame Street program, with its barrage of mixed

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media clips, is to love the experience of channel surfing the vast wave of television
itself.
The paradox of Jarmusch’s importance, then, has to do with his very presence
as an auteur enabling his readers to make more self-aware conclusions about the
industrial sources of statements; his roots in the modernism of the New Hollywood
era ensures that Jarmusch’s films retain the appearance of auteur-driven meaning,
while simultaneously stressing the impossibility of such statements being made at a
textual level. Again and again, his movies play out encounters between characters of
differing language and/or nationality, in which communication fails (and often fails
so spectacularly that the viewer can’t help but laugh). A beloved example can be
found in Down by Law: as the three men languish in their jail cell, Benigni’s
character draws a crude window frame on the wall and imagines what it might
enable him to see, the better to pass the time. “Which do you say,” he asks the others,
“I look out the window, or I look at the window?” Wearily, one responds,
“Unfortunately, in this case, you look at the window”; we do not see him explain the
point any further to the Italian, and so the joke remains solely for the benefit of the
audience and the on-screen Americans.
Jarmusch himself has joked in interviews that he has deliberately led astray
Benigni’s actual attempts to learn English by mistranslating key words and inventing
bizarre colloquialisms that do not exist; though this makes for amusing international
press conferences, it also suggests an authorial signature when such moments appear
in Jarmusch’s films. In Stranger Than Paradise, such an exchange occurs as Eva

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helpfully offers to vacuum her cousin’s apartment, to which he responds by
‘helpfully’ teaching her that the common American slang expression for doing so is
the pseudo-masturbatory ‘choking the alligator.’ Indeed, throughout Jarmusch’s
work there is a seemingly analogous relationship between the minimalism of his
formal style and the minimal amount of genuine communication that is exchanged
amongst his characters. In addition to the vacuum gag, for example, are scenes in
which: Willie gives up, almost immediately, in his attempts to explain the rules of
American football to his cousin; his friend Eddie tries repeatedly to tell Eva a joke
involving untied shoelaces, but cannot recall all of it; and Willie unconvicingly
explains to Eva that TV dinners are all that are ever eaten in the homes of the United
States.
If Jarmsuch’s films are thus not merely texts that can be productively applied
to post-structural analytical concepts, but are also significantly postmodern texts that
themselves reflect such post-structural ideas in their very construction, then one
could argue that the mise-en-scène of this author’s oeuvre is itself meaningfully
discursive. Throughout The Archaeology of Knowledge, for example, what is
significant to Foucault about statements is their rarity; as he bluntly puts it,
“relatively few things are said.”
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As a result, the few statements that do find
themselves uttered are easily confused with, and consumed by, the act of
interpretation:
To interpret is a way of reacting to enunciative poverty, and to
compensate for it by a multiplication of meaning ... to analyze a

147
Foucault, 119.

143

discursive formation ... is [in one sense] to weigh the ‘value’ of
statements. A value that is not defined by their truth, that is not
gauged by the presence of a secret content; but which characterizes
their place, their capacity for circulation and exchange, their
possibility of transformation, not only in the economy of discourse,
but, more generally, in the administration of scarce resources.
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I would suggest that Jarmusch’s films are themselves largely set within a milieu as
much notable for its ‘enunciative poverty’ as for its economic poverty; both for
Jarmusch and Foucault, the economies of discourse appear to be substantially related
to economies of capital resources. The result suggests a level of truth beyond that
classic cliché of mainstream film criticism, “this film is important for what its
characters don’t say as much as for what they do,” with its suggestion of a
pretentious cinéaste’s ability to perceive great significance where others are merely
bored. In Jarmusch’s work, the inarticulate nature of his characters is indeed
significant; however, rather than merely suggesting viewers pay greater attention in
order to ‘read’ his films textually, this lack of dialogue instead directs our attention
to read the American independent movement itself as a fertile discursive field.
Consider Foucault’s assessment of our ultimate ability to read the statements
we encounter: “To describe a formulation qua statement does not consist in
analyzing the relations between the author and what he says (or wanted to say, or
said without wanting to); but in determining what position can and must be occupied
by any individual if he is to be the subject of it.”
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Here one can begin to recognize
the evolution of auteurism’s utility in engaging with this recent period of

148
Foucault, 120.
149
Foucault, 95-96.

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independent film: rather than rely solely on the auteur theory as a pure,
decontextualized-dehistoricized source of meaning, instead one must acknowledge
the fact that the author himself is but one more means by which power and/or textual
meaning can operate.
Our attempts to read Jarmusch’s films, then, despite their teasing insistence
on their own enunciative poverty, lead us to read our own auteurist analyses of
Jarmusch themselves as a defining methodology for engaging with such ‘indies’ as
somehow special, textually richer than their corporate kin. Recall once more the
elliptical nature of Permanent Vacation: we are confronted with this enunciative
poverty both through the lower Manhattan setting and the words of the main
character. Moreover, any attempts by the text to present a thesis for such poverty are
explicitly mocked as dead ends, literal jokes on the act of interpretation itself (the
falsity of a mysterious ‘war’ with ‘the Chinese’ taking place in New York). Given
Foucault’s emphasis on the multiplicities of cultural history as offering more weight
than the comparatively simplistic top-down conception of authorial meaning, it is
notable that here is an instance in which we observe Allie making statements for
which we cannot access the traumas that have caused him to speak them; Permanent
Vacation places us in the presence of an ‘author’ who half-heartedly narrates the
events of his life, while firmly denying the reliability of that narrator-author as a
means to productively interpret those events. Instead, we are left to study the mode
of cinema that has presented us with this interpretive enigma: why has this authorial
force become impotent at this time? Why are our standard reading practices,

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previously applicable to so many other youthful rebel/drifter films, failing us in this
instance?
To ask these questions at all speaks to an increasing acceptance of such post-
structural thinkers as Foucault and Roland Barthes; to answer them, however,
requires us to recognize the appearance of postmodern films that themselves depict
this textual instability. Indeed, such a parallel relationship of theory and textuality is
only possible through post-structural paradigms that blur even the previously
unassailable distinction between the text to be studied and the methodology with
which one studies it. As I have suggested elsewhere, Foucault offers his readers not
merely rigorous thought but intricate textual pleasures; the density of his sentences
are a notable style, allowing us to recognize the play between the force of his ideas
and his playful unwillingness ever to be completely pinned down by the finality of
their utterance. One would be unlikely to imagine Claude Lévi-Strauss or Tzvetan
Todorov claiming that the cultural myths they have unearthed offer a potential
reading protocol for their own efforts in structuralism; nevertheless, in the present
moment, the textual reconceptions offered by Foucault inevitably suggest that our
chosen texts of analysis can at times themselves be infinitely diverse manuals for
reading. Or, to put it simply, the potential, the possibility of each film is to offer us a
new and unique way of watching. They remind us that previous modes of knowing
are themselves historically determined narratives, rather than the purely objective
academic science they might otherwise claim to be.

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Throughout Jarmusch’s work, repeated encounters between foreigners who
mutually fail at communication dramatize the gaps between the subject of a
statement and the statement being uttered at the level of both textuality and auteurist
analysis. The Archaeology of Knowledge is useful here: “So if the subject of the
statement should not be regarded as identical with the author of the formulation –
either in substance, or in function. He is ... a particular, vacant place that may in fact
be filled by different individuals; but, instead of being defined once and for all, and
maintaining itself as such throughout a text, a book, or an oeuvre, this place
varies.”
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Jarmusch initially offers us the appearance of a modernist auteur
conveying meaning, but instead replaces such a direct transaction of meaning with a
post-national, cosmopolitan manifestation of postmodern polyvocality.
What is the implication, then, of Quentin Tarantino being promoted as a
defiant antithesis to this?

150
Foucault, 95.

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CHAPTER THREE
FUNCTIONS OF THE INDEPENDENT AUTEUR
(ANTITHESIS: QUENTIN TARANTINO)

Jonathan Rosenbaum, the Chicago Reader film critic who has long been a
primary champion of Jim Jarmusch, is not the only figure to suggest that his films
are antithetical to those of Quentin Tarantino; he does, however, do so more
forcefully and directly than any writer I have encountered. In his provocative
collection, Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We
Can See, Rosenbaum summarizes the relationship between the two figures of ‘indie’
discourse thusly:

My idea of an independent filmmaker is someone who has final
control over his or her work, and Tarantino has never enjoyed this
freedom. Jim Jarmusch ... who [has] final cut on all [his] own features
and even own[s] all [his] negatives, obviously qualifies, but in recent
years it has been Tarantino and not [Jarmusch] who has been
celebrated as an American independent – a gross misperception that
will continue to prevail as long as the studio’s shell-game persists.
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The ‘shell game’ to which Rosenbaum is referring here may also remind the reader
of a major conglomerate, Disney, by definition a producer of largely ‘dependent’
films, owning a company, Miramax, that is culturally symbolic of independent
filmmaking, and which seems to employ (and endlessly promote) Quentin Tarantino
as its house director. Rosenbaum’s words are significant in a number of ways. As
always, one can recognize the fluidity of filmic independence as a concept:
Rosenbaum is gracious enough to define what he means by the term, but in doing so

151
Rosenbaum, 12.

148
is just as quick to remind readers, implicitly, that the majority of his peers do not do
so themselves because in their hands the word is effectively meaningless.
Elsewhere in Movie Wars, Rosenbaum suggests that there is presently no
useful distinction between film criticism and film promotion; by stressing the value
of a such a distinction, he makes a compelling defense for film canons and respect
for opinions on cinema held by those who have closely studied the medium.
(Another of his books is entitled Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film
Canons.) It is in this spirit that I have retained my subjective, evaluative remarks
throughout this text – rather than pretend that I do not have any such opinions, I
openly acknowledge this fact and leave it to the reader to determine the extent to
which they affect my more objective historical argument. I call attention to this
blurring now because Tarantino is himself a celebrity whose appeal lies in this dual
work – on the one hand he is a creative artist, making films that speak his voice,
while at the same time he is a lover of a cinema, making interpretive value
judgements and pronouncements about the movies that fascinate him.
Tellingly, Rosenbaum refers once again to Miramax as a facilitator of this
blurring between criticism and promotion – by stressing their own bravery in
acquiring the controversial Kids (1995), the company ensured that media coverage of
its actions “became, in effect, a critical reading of the film.”
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Again we can see the
media impact upon interpretation – if this dissertation is ultimately a conspiracy
narrative, to what extent is academia exempt from it? Is academic work to be valued

152
Rosenbaum, 148.

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at least for making such operation not only visible but often the subject of study
itself? At the heart of Rosenbaum’s contribution to this discourse seems to be the
suggestion that something real has been lost, both at the level of film criticism as
well as that of aesthetics and content. For Rosenbaum, the loss of the former has
caused that of the latter. Throughout these pages, I’ll attempt to draw parallels
between this loss of film criticism and the currently contested ‘loss’ of earlier models
of American Studies work, with its emphasis on traditional interpretation, valuing of
aesthetic judgments, etc.
Though Rosenbaum identifies Tarantino as a less important director than
Jarmusch (Pulp Fiction is a film that displays “at best a ravenous hunger for media
that constitutes most of [its] surprise as well as [its] ‘courage’”
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), he also suggests
that the explanation for the recent romanticization of one at the other’s expense lies
in the extent to which film critics now allow themselves to be agents of the
industry’s power. In the same way that critics are too quick to substitute ‘covering’
the controversy around Kids for a genuine critical analysis of it, so too does the
figure of Tarantino, as suggested earlier, prevent the act of reading his films, instead
of facilitating it.
In many ways, the discourses around Tarantino and Jarmusch have a great
deal in common: both men are depicted as ‘cool’ by the media – Jarmusch as laconic
artist, Tarantino as ultimate film connoisseur – and both make films that are often
read primarily in terms of the references they make to other films. Though both men

153
Rosenbaum, 30.

150

are easily applicable to the larger category of ‘hip indie director’, Quentin
Tarantino’s status as antithesis to Jarmusch has a great deal to do with the films to
which he makes reference in his own work. When his Pulp Fiction won the Palme
d’Or at the Cannes film festival in 1994, the embrace of French film culture
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seemed in part to be a reciprocal response to Tarantino’s love of it: his production
company, ‘A Band Apart,’ makes homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s portrait of
rebellious youth, Bande à Part (1964), while in interviews the director would often
explain Pulp Fiction’s alinear structure by citing Godard’s maxim, “A film should
have a beginning, a middle, and an end, just not necessarily in that order.”
The excitement around Pulp Fiction initially seemed meaningfully global: an
American crime film reinterpreting and engaging with the French New Wave films
that themselves reworked American crime films of the 1940s. On closer inspection,
however, such connections quickly dissipate. In Jarmusch, high cult global art film
elements blend with ‘low-life’ American characters and settings to dramatize a
specific historical engagement with the conservative isolationism of 1980s
America(n cinema). Conversely, Tarantino’s work appears largely interested in its
display of predominantly American cultural texts that suggest, ultimately, not only
that there is no ‘real’ content at the heart of his work but that there is little ‘reality’
about Tarantino himself – now, the auteur himself is the fictional text, constructed
out of the earlier elements to which he makes reference.

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Of course, even the ‘French-ness’ of the Cannes festival is illusory, given that it is an international
event and that Clint Eastwood presided over the jury in 1994. Nevertheless, the moment was one of
global ‘high’ culture embracing a text, ostensibly, for only appearing to wallow in the low, while in
fact qualifying as valuable art.

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It is revealing that Tarantino himself could easily be a character in one of the
youth comedy screenplays that Jarmusch was earlier referred to as rejecting for their
blatant depictions of class aspirations and social climbing: the Tarantino myth
repeatedly stresses his years spent toiling at a video store before suddenly winning
the lottery of instant celebrity status. When Rosenbaum is upset that Tarantino is
being celebrated as an independent director at the expense of Jarmusch, he is
effectively expressing disdain for the implication that Tarantino has somehow
‘rescued’ the American independent film from a state of lethargy and irrelevance.
The sudden, intense success of Tarantino would prove to be as much curse as
blessing: on the one hand, his films reveal that such independent productions can
compete directly with those of Hollywood, while on the other, they profoundly alter
the discourse of independence by suggesting that this is the best to which such
producers can aspire.
Similarly, the master narrative that Peter Biskind depicts in Down and Dirty
Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film, is one of the
movement falling victim to its own success, a success increasingly defined by the
standards of a dominant industry it once had tried to resist. By the time of
Tarantino’s meteoric rise to fame, Jarmusch’s work was increasingly difficult to
separate from clichéd, reductive notions of what defined the American ‘indie.’
Biskind refers to such codification in this way: “Later, in the 1980s, the kind of salt-
of-the-earth regionalism these films celebrated would degenerate into mindless

152
boosterism for barnyards and square dancing, Garrison Keillor-style”
155
; recall also
Emmanuel Levy’s more direct assessment, in Cinema of Outsiders: “if there was a
stereotypical ‘indie’ in the 1980s, it could be described as a ‘sensitive’ coming-of-
age story about a Midwestern farm girl.”
156
This is the period in which much that
became championed at the Sundance festival was referred to as ‘granola film’:
regional, earnest, these films were probably good for you but not especially
appetizing. Indeed, health food is a recurring signifier of ‘indie’ discourse: the
Village Voice’s J. Hoberman, for example, has referred to In the Bedroom (2001) – a
film with many markers of the ‘quality’ American independent cinema – as “the
granola Death Wish.” One could go so far as to suggest that Tarantino’s apparent
obsession with junk food (diners, breakfast cereals, fast food joints such as Pulp
Fiction’s ‘Big Kahuna Burger’) is part of a desire to break with this prior culinary
model of independent cinema.
Though Jarmusch’s films are not completely applicable to this ‘granola’
category, they do reflect the extent to which the originating myths of this ‘indie’
movement had to do with the realities of expressed place: to contrast the Hollywood
product that consistently glamorized Los Angeles or New York, these independent
films would prove their value simply for their indexical display of an alternate, ‘real’
America that does not define itself by its influence upon cultural power. Though
Jarmusch’s first features use New York as a setting, it is significant that they
emphasize the marginal lives of lower Manhattan residents. Increasingly, Jarmusch’s

155
Biskind, 16.
156
Levy, 41.

153
subsequent features have been more directly interested in this regionalism, exploring
the Louisiana bayou and Memphis backwaters; in Dead Man, moreover, the untamed
West is itself the film’s primary subject.
Conversely, much of Tarantino’s work seems to shun reality: the heavily
anticipated Kill Bill volumes (2003, 2004), for example, were promoted around
Tarantino’s adamant desire to shoot them in Japan and China, and yet the display of
location shooting in each film is negligible. For Tarantino, runaway production was
necessary so that he could work with the original cast and crew members of the
beloved genre films to which his opus was making reference; furthermore,
promotional materials often stressed that a given sequence of Kill Bill was shot on
the same soundstage as an earlier favorite of the director’s. Here, then, the
‘authenticity’ to be displayed by shooting on another continent has to do with an
indexical relationship to artifice itself: the pleasures of the films often derive from
Tarantino’s preservation of such actors as Sonny Chiba and Gordon Liu, as well as
his embrace of Yuen Wo-Ping’s ‘wire fu’ approach to fight choreography.
Predating Kill Bill’s display of authentic simulacra is Dana Polan’s dissection
of Pulp Fiction as a theme park in his BFI Reader on the film. As might be expected,
such a comparison is made as part of a larger consideration of the film’s
postmodernity:

If Pulp Fiction and Disneyland are constructions of imaginary
universes that in postmodern style make manifest their artificial
nature, we might even directly compare the experience of watching
Pulp Fiction to visiting a theme park ... Pulp Fiction moves the
spectator from one set piece to the next, creating a roller-coaster

154

experience made of lulls and high sensations ... and on this narrative
ride, the primary goal for the spectator is not to look for meanings
(one doesn’t interpret Disney so much as live it) but to have an
experience, to luxuriate in sensations.
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As a result, one might compare Tarantino’s ‘Jack Rabbit Slim’s’ (the Pulp Fiction
restaurant that immerses patrons into a world of memorabilia, projected film clips
and 1950s-era celebrity look-alike waiters) with Steven Spielberg’s ‘Jurassic Park’ –
both are critical locations in postmodern films that directly engage with their own
acts of simulation, effectively simulating the already hyper-real qualities of a theme
park visit itself. One would be hard pressed to find critics who would describe either
example as meaningfully oppositional postmodernism: given that the Spielberg film
is about the horrors of exploiting advanced technology simply in order to create a
lucrative tourist enterprise, The Globe and Mail’s late film critic Jay Scott aptly
noted in 1993 that “Jurassic Park is ‘Jurassic Park.’”
158

Critics are somewhat more generous in ascribing a certain display of wit to
the Tarantino example, to the extent that they see Pulp Fiction as postmodern
commentary on the state of our present pop culture; but just as many suggest that
interpretation of the film is not encouraged by the film, and that it is instead simply a
dazzling spectacle of ‘cool.’ Indeed, such are the last words Polan gives to Pulp
Fiction: “Two hip guys who can maintain cool (even with inappropriate dress). Style
winning out over substance. This is how the film ends. More than any explicit

157
Polan, 76-77.
158
Scott, 344.

155

message, this is the point of Pulp Fiction. This is why it is a phenomenon.”
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The
similarities to a theme park ride and the endless display of spectacular surfaces also
lead Polan to compare Pulp Fiction to the work of George Lucas and Steven
Spielberg: “There is in these directors a concern for building magical kingdoms
which characters react to with amazement and into which they adventure ... on a
journey that leaves ordinary cares behind.”
160

In and of themselves, however, such details are not necessarily significant:
one could cite any number of films that evoke theme park rides, exist almost purely
on a surface level, and owe a debt to the work of Spielberg and Lucas.
161
What
makes such details worth pointing out in the case of Pulp Fiction is its status as an
independent film, ostensibly meant to oppose all of the preceding qualities with their
suggestion of Hollywood artifice and polish. Effectively, part of what constitutes the
legend of Pulp Fiction is not just the textuality it displays, but the promise it
represents as well: the film’s timing suggested it would not only redeem the dreary,
‘granola’ mode of independent filmmaking, but the tired, mainstream postmodernism
of Hollywood product as well. As with the old quip about Fred Astaire and Ginger
Rogers – that he ‘gave her class’ and she ‘gave him sex (appeal)’ – so too with
Tarantino bridging the gap at this time between the two fields of film production. If

159
Polan, 86.
160
Polan, 76.
161
One could conceivably argue, moreover, that 20th Century Fox’s Andrew Dice Clay vehicle The
Adventures of Ford Fairlane (1990) already had many of Pulp Fiction’s qualities – a playful, semi-
parodic relationship to hardboiled crime fiction; characters who continue to be ‘cool’ even in absurd
circumstances; a fetishization of musical and automotive signifiers of the 1950s; an excessive display
of style, to a self-reflexive extent; otherwise sympathetic characters comfortably using politically
incorrect language to describe women and African Americans as ‘chicks’ and ‘niggers’, respectively –
all except, of course, quality itself.

156
‘indie’ films in the early 1990s were popularly dismissed as moribund for their dry
preoccupation with ‘adult’ concerns, then Tarantino would alter the discourse by
depicting a cartoonish formal world with infantilized characters (endlessly putting
food in their mouths; Polan even cites a book on Tarantino that asks, “what else is
Butch [Bruce Willis] but a big baby?”). At the same time, however, the director
brings a dark, adult character to the mode of cinema defined by the children’s
fantasies of Spielberg and Lucas: here, characters use heroin, kill one another, and
appear to get away with their crimes.
The excitement – and ultimate curse – of Tarantino, then, has been his
tantalizing suggestion that the independent film could now compete with and even
beat Hollywood at its own game, in terms of both aesthetic value and box office
performance (at $200 million globally, Pulp Fiction is a blockbuster by any
standard). As Gavin Smith suggested in a Film Comment interview with the director,
such boundary blurring was evident from the outset of his career: “Tarantino’s 1992
debut, Reservoir Dogs will, I think, prove pivotal in the history of the American
independent film, for legitimizing its relationship to Hollywood genre.”
162

Reviewing Pulp Fiction in the Village Voice, J. Hoberman depicts a similar
shift in a far more colorful manner: “Just as Un Chien Andalou travestied the poetic
avant-garde of the 1920s, so the independently produced Reservoir Dogs single-
handedly shifted the Sundance film festival diet from granola and skim milk to
french fries smothered in ketchup, after its world premiere there.” Hoberman

162
Smith, 32.

157

cements the shift by comparing Tarantino’s work to that of the previous symbol of
vital American independent film: “Every character has a rap or a riff, if not a full-
fledged theory of life (at times, Pulp Fiction suggests a two-fisted Jarmusch
film).”
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Hoberman’s analogy implies that the fast food properties of Tarantino’s
films will necessarily prevent them from offering nutritional substance; one can
recognize the pattern of a sudden intense high followed by a hard depressive crash,
both in one’s response to excessive fast food as well as the media’s depiction of ‘Too
Much Tarantino.’
Though many cite his ubiquitous self-promotion as the primary reason for a
backlash against Tarantino in the wake of Pulp Fiction’s success, there is also a
sense in which the public resisted the near immediate branding of the director by
others: when Miramax is repeatedly referred to in the press as ‘the House that
Quentin built’, it is not difficult to, by extension, consider Tarantino its Mickey
Mouse, simultaneously spokesman and logo. What is interesting about this backlash
is that it assumed the virulence commonly reserved for an artist who has ‘sold out’
by making a populist piece of entertainment that discards the intricacy and integrity
of their earlier work; in Tarantino’s case, however, Pulp Fiction is uniquely both at
the same time. With Tarantino, one simultaneously applauds his genuine talent as a
writer-director (the former skill in particular reinforcing his status as an auteur) while
deriding the speed with which he is celebrated as such, having made so few movies.
If the Tarantino discourse is about the loss of reality, the vacuum of meaning offered

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Pulp Fiction DVD supplement.

158

by the rise of postmodernism, then it is particularly significant that reality is now
under attack both at the level of text and author – as we shall see, the intensity of his
legend suggests that there is something unreal about Tarantino himself.
Consider again his relationship to Spielberg-Lucas models of filmmaking:
often in Tarantino’s work, there is the suggestion of a complete ‘world’ of his
design, not particular to any individual film but instead connecting them all.
Characters from one connect to another. For example, there is the suggestion that
Michael Madsen’s Reservoir Dogs character and John Travolta’s in Pulp Fiction
(respectively, Vic and Vincent Vega) are brothers, a reading encouraged by
Tarantino’s professed desire to one day make a ‘Vega Brothers’ movie with the two
actors
164
. Again there is a sense of conflict: Tarantino is simultaneously a creative
artist and a skilled orchestrator of his own one-man film franchise. Though Pulp
Fiction is a sufficiently dense text to encourage fan obsession over it, this obsession
has quickly been maximized as a source of potential profit. Tarantino’s ‘two’ recent
films, the volumes that comprise his Kill Bill epic, were ostensibly separated due to
the extreme length of the complete work; yet there is also a sense in which the
volumes resemble episodes of the Star Wars series, ending on a familial cliffhanger
revelation equivalent to Darth Vader’s fathering of Luke Skywalker.
However, even the mixture of infantilized cartoon style and R-rated adult
subject matter is not exclusive to Tarantino. Though the director has been compared
by Polan to Spielberg and Lucas, and repeatedly by many others to Martin Scorsese

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http://everythingtarantino.com/data/2003/0521-200931.shtml

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(specifically his modernist gangster films, with their flourishes of pure style and
jarring juxtapositions of comedy and violence), one auteur’s name for the most part
absent, surprisingly so, from the Quentin Tarantino discourse is that of Brian De
Palma. Tarantino has often cited John Travolta’s performance in De Palma’s Blow
Out as a favorite example of screen acting, and has elsewhere named De Palma one
of the auteurs whose films he obsessively watches more than once the day they are
released
165
; few, however, have made detailed reference to De Palma’s films in their
writing on Tarantino. Given that it has been suggested that Pulp Fiction’s Jack
Rabbit Slim’s sequence is something of a mise-en-abyme, both for the film itself as
well as the entirety of the contemporary postmodern film viewing experience, it is
worth comparing to a similar set piece, made for a major studio a decade earlier, at
the center of the De Palma thriller Body Double (1984).
The sequence in question depicts the hero, Jake Scully (Craig Wasson)
entering the world of pornographic films (represented by a decadent nightclub) in
order to meet Holly Body (Melanie Griffith), whose involvement he suspects in a
murder that, in one of De Palma’s frequent references to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958),
he has recently failed to prevent. As with the Jack Rabbit Slim’s sequence, this
passage of Body Double depicts a somewhat passive hero (Travolta’s character so
rendered both by his recent heroin use as well as his boss’ strict orders to behave
himself with the boss’ wife) overwhelmed by a hyper-cinematic space, teeming with
film references and a self-reflexive approach to musical performance. Just as the

165
MacFarquhar, 152.

160
Pulp Fiction twist contest directly cues viewers to recall Travolta’s frequent dance
numbers in Grease (1978) and Saturday Night Fever (1977), so too does Body
Double rupture its own diegesis by designing this sequence as a discrete music video
(indeed, in his analysis of this passage in High Concept, Justin Wyatt notes that De
Palma had intended the sequence also to be played on MTV to promote the film, set
as it is to Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s suggestive hit, “Relax”). Jack Rabbit Slim’s
is populated by doubles of such stars as Marilyn Monroe and Buddy Holly; Body
Double’s club prominently features a model dressed to resemble Gloria Swanson as
Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. (1950), and Jake is led through the club by Holly
Johnson, lead singer of the band whose song is playing.
Jake ultimately meets Holly Body in the club’s bathroom – a site of repeated
vulnerability throughout Pulp Fiction – and their simulated sex, as with the Travolta-
Uma Thurman number, is simultaneously a climactic moment of performance within
the sequence as well as a notable film quote. Their embrace is shot with a 360 degree
pan, complete with swelling orchestral music and a noticeably subjective use of blue-
screen backdrop, cross cut with Jake’s earlier kissing of the murdered woman, that
deliberately recalls James Stewart’s ‘recreation’ of the second Kim Novak character
in Vertigo. It is revealing that the sequence in the purely Hollywood director’s film is
the more conceptually sophisticated: here, postmodernism makes explicit the sexual
content of looking – and thus, cinema itself – previously implicit within the earlier
thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock. Whereas Vertigo’s Scotty Ferguson is only coded as a
‘filmmaker’ in his control over Madeline/Judy’s hairstyle, costume and even

161

lighting, Body Double’s Jake must explicitly enter the realm of filmmaking in order
to meet the woman of his fantasies: at the precise moment he penetrates the ladies’
room, intending to do the same to Holly, its mirrored portal swings to reflect the
porno crew just off-screen. Though the Jack Rabbit Slim’s sequence is also that of an
infantilized male led into the sexualized pleasures of film itself, represented by the
performance of a musical number with an alluring femme fatale, it is difficult to
interpret beyond its suggestion of an independent filmmaker defiantly asserting that
Hollywood films are ‘cool’. Once again, Tarantino’s postmodernism is mainstream
where it could potentially be oppositional. De Palma’s film satirizes such implied
male viewers; Tarantino’s proudly announces the director as himself one of them.
There is, of course, another crucial difference between the sequence in the
Hollywood film and that of the independent Pulp Fiction: the Jack Rabbit Slim’s
sequence is predicated less on formal matters and instead emphasizes ‘content’ in the
form of dialogue. We are reminded here, ultimately, that Pulp Fiction, despite its
energetic allure, remains a low-budget ‘indie’ (as Polan notes, much of the film’s
budget was spent on constructing the Jack Rabbit Slim’s set
166
) whose only ‘special’
effect, as is the cliché, must necessarily be that which its characters say to each other.
Much of the fifteen minutes spent at Jack Rabbit Slim’s is a dinner conversation
between Vincent Vega and Mia Wallace that would not be out of place in a film such
as Coffee and Cigarettes.

166
Polan, 69.

162
Tarantino’s film, however, complicates this binary relationship – of
Hollywood special effects and independent film dialogue – through the characters’
repeated reference to their conversation itself. The sequence not only gives us
compelling dialogue to appreciate, but also features dialogue that calls viewer
attention to just how good the dialogue is: Mia’s description of her Fox Force Five
TV pilot creates suspense as to whether she will presently tell Vincent the joke it
featured; after a conversational lull, Mia wonders aloud, “Why do we feel it’s
necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable?”; and finally, after
instructing Vincent to think of something to say while she goes to the ladies’ room,
Mia responds to his efforts with “Ooh! This doesn’t sound like the usual mindless,
boring gettin’-to-know-you chitchat. That sounds like you actually have something
to say.” Indeed, suspense is built once more here, now around whether Vincent will
in fact say what is on his mind, given its potentially offensive content; on the
suggestion that the topic would be better left forgotten, Mia declares, “Trying to
forget anything as intriguing as this would be an exercise in futility.” Here, dialogue
actually serves the same function as the special effects of a big Hollywood movie:
this matter is not to be interpreted, it is simply meant to be enjoyed for its purely
formal pleasures.
The most generous interpretations of Pulp Fiction would defend the apparent
emptiness of the Jack Rabbit Slim’s sequence by suggesting that the film’s very
structure presents a decisive shift from mainstream to oppositional postmodernism
(and that this is why Pulp Fiction is achronologically ordered to present the

163
Hawthorne Grill confrontation between Tim Roth’s and Samuel L. Jackson’s
characters as a climax). If the Jack Rabbit Slim’s sequence contained the interpretive
complexity of its Body Double equivalent, the impact of this finale would be
lessened. As with so many exchanges in Pulp Fiction, the dialogue between Mia and
Vincent includes discussion of a pop culture text (in this case, the hypothetical
Charlie’s Angels clone Fox Force Five), however, the only act of genuine textual
interpretation – of reading – occurs at Pulp Fiction’s climax.
Forcing Ringo (Roth) to stare coolly down the barrel of his gun, Jules
(Jackson) tells of his penchant for quoting the Bible to people before killing them:

I been sayin’ that shit for years. And if you heard it, that meant your
ass. I never gave much thought to what it meant. I just thought it was
some cold-blooded shit to say to a motherfucker before I popped a
cap in his ass. But ... now I’m thinkin’ maybe it means you’re the evil
man and I’m the righteous man, and Mr. Nine Millimeter here, he’s
the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the Valley of Darkness ...
But that shit ain’t the truth. The truth is, you’re the weak and I am the
tyranny of evil men. But I’m tryin’, Ringo. I’m tryin’ real hard to be
the shepherd.

In a film so full of ‘hollow’ celebrations of low cultural texts, it seems significant
that Jules’ escape from its diegesis, walking out of the restaurant alongside the
doomed Travolta character (an escape which is itself nevertheless likened to the TV
show Kung Fu) can occur only after he is able to perform a close textual reading of
the ultimate example of ‘high’ culture. Kill Bill ends similarly, with the Bride’s
daughter watching an old Tex Avery cartoon on a motel’s television set; here, a
magpie (like Tarantino, a species known for constructing a home from a collage of

164

glittering refuse it has collected) asserts his finer qualities, announcing, “the magpie
is your friend. The magpie deserves your respect.” In both films a last-minute case is
made for the ‘redemption’ of all that has gone on before. The viewer is directly
asked to take matters more seriously than might previously have been indicated.
Effectively, Tarantino ends Pulp Fiction by looking forward, evoking Roland
Barthes in doing so: “we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to
overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the
Author.”
167
For many critics of the film, this last minute attempt at (a ‘conversion’
to) content is likely insufficient, or, too little too late; indeed, Polan suggests “we
might want to note how much of the Jules-redemption plot is rendered as a curiosity,
one more part of the weird turn of events in a film given over to detours and
unpredictability ... for all the avowed announcement of a conversion on his part,
Jules is still caught up until the last moment in the flirtation with the unexpected.”
168

Such reactions to this moment in the film seem related to a certainty that the film and
this character are not capable of being meaningfully religious: such other signifiers
as the briefcase whose mysterious glowing contents can be reached only through the
666 combination lock are seen more as jokes than as substance. Jules’ final scene is
more convincing, however, when placed in a context of being meaningfully
interpretive rather than religious: a good Christian or no, Jules is shown to have
reflected upon a number of alternative readings before settling upon that which feels
like ‘the truth.’ Part of the meaning of this moment, I would suggest, is derived from

167
Barthes, 148.
168
Polan, 82-83.

165
its apparently autobiographical nature: here we have a seemingly indexical
relationship to Tarantino himself.
To use another formulation of Barthes’, it is worth recalling his distinction
between studium and punctum in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. If the
studium refers to an immediately accessible level of signification, the punctum is
instead “this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and
pierces me ... the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes
even speckled with these sensitive points ... A photograph’s punctum is that accident
which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”
169
It is easy to imagine an
immediate outcry over my invocation of Barthes’ punctum in this case: how can this
term, with its emphasis on extreme viewer subjectivity in catching, or being caught
by, accidental details, possibly be relevant to a scene that is so clearly underlined for
all in the audience as Pulp Fiction’s climactic turning point?
I would suggest that the term is applicable here because in this moment we
are presented not with Quentin Tarantino as auteur but as auteurist, asserting the
presence of meaning in a given director’s body of work. That is to say, the author in
this case is not making a meaningful ‘statement’ about religious faith through
cinema; however, a crucial element in the Tarantino discourse is the suggestion that
he himself has such a faith in cinema. Despite all of the artifice on display in his
films, despite their attention to surfaces and self-reflexivity, these films do confront
us with ‘the real’ – in the form of Tarantino himself. Indeed, such moments

169
Barthes, 26-27.

166
throughout Tarantino’s films do serve as ‘puncta’ that shatter their surface ‘studia’.
Moreover, to read such moments in this manner – as puncta rather than postmodern
self-reflexivity that breaks the fourth wall only for the sake of doing so – is to locate
the essence of the director’s significance as a filmmaker in the public eye. This is the
subtext of the Tarantino mythology; this is the manner in which his postmodernity is
revealed to display the critical edge of Hollywood’s oppositional mode.
I would argue that there are three dominant types of punctum to be found
throughout Tarantino’s work: his sensationalistic use of violence (and the word
‘nigger’); his repeated emphasis on the act of storytelling, as performed by his
characters; and, most importantly, his films’ own display of the typically auteurist
work of collecting film references in order to strengthen their arguments. Using each
of these techniques throughout his films, Tarantino is able to ensure that their
textuality is inseparable from his autobiography, and thus that their subtexts are
themselves expressions of his own status as simultaneous auteur and auteurist. As a
result, in Tarantino’s oeuvre one can indeed find a meaningful statement about the
loss of the canon as a relevant academic guide to this field.
Recall my earlier statement about the ‘virtual auteur’: if the meaning of the
auteur has shifted in this period of contemporary filmmaking, so that the structures
of film promotion threaten to render a director’s function synthetic, simulated or
virtual, then it remains for the ‘real’ auteur to subsequently participate in the
ostensibly academic task of auteurism, rendering it, too, ‘virtual’ by means of its
inaccessible, commodified nature. As we shall see, Tarantino represents an

167

infuriating development for Jonathan Rosenbaum not simply because the ‘unreality’
of his films displaces the meaningful content to be found in Jim Jarmusch’s work,
but also because Tarantino represents the utter collapse of official and/or academic
structures of taste. Later, I will explore the impact of this development upon our
reading of independent film as what Pierre Bourdieu would call a cultural field; for
now, it is worth taking a moment to consider in turn each of the ways in which
Tarantino is able to effect this collapse.
The first, as mentioned earlier, has to do with Tarantino’s apparent desire “to
create meaning by an imposition of will.”
170
The phrase is Dana Polan’s. Polan is
referring here, in his article ‘Auteur Desire’, to the imposition of will that underlines
an auteurist’s desire to compete with his fellow auteurists by displaying the most
complete and convincing knowledge of his subject. As I will demonstrate in a
moment, Tarantino is himself revealingly guilty of this; here, however, I am
invoking Polan’s phrase out of context to characterize the manner in which
Tarantino’s approach to controversial material is also about a display of, or an
exertion of, his own will. Consider Polan’s description of the director’s use of the
word ‘nigger’, in his BFI reader: “One senses that above all Tarantino fills his films
with outrageous behavior (including racial attitude) because he can do so, because no
one will stop him. Indeed, an oft-repeated story about Tarantino’s visit to the
National Film Theater recounts how a black man in the audience angrily said that the

170
Polan, 10.

168

director couldn’t get away with using ‘nigger’, to which Tarantino calmly replied, ‘I
do.’”
171

A substantial portion of the discourse around Quentin Tarantino has to do
with his sudden acquisition of (cultural) power and the willing ease with which he
readily exerts it. Appearing on the Criterion Collection laserdisc release of Pulp
Fiction (and replicated on the recent Miramax special edition DVD), Tarantino’s
introduction to scenes deleted from the film is quick to point out that such material
would not comprise a so-called ‘Director’s Cut’ of the film: he announces, smugly
(there is no other word for it), “I made the movie I wanted to make the first time.” As
Polan points out, Tarantino is brazen about more than his use of a single word; he is
consistently defiant about his own use of violence. Consider the following interview
excerpts:

I love violence in movies, and if you don’t, it’s like you don’t like
tapdancing, or slapstick, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be shown.
My mom doesn’t like Abbott and Costello or Laurel and Hardy, but
that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have been making movies.
172

It comes down to what some people like and don’t like ... I’m not
afraid of showing violence. I think it’s very cinematic. I like Godard’s
quote in Pierrot le Fou: ‘There is no blood in Pierrot le Fou. There is
only the color red.’
173

As many have noted, a unilateral, self-serving display of will is itself an
example of the American character, particularly as it applies to the nation’s

171
Polan, 59 (emphasis mine).
172
Peary, 33.
173
Peary, 64.

169
conservative role in international affairs – ignoring the Kyoto treaty on protecting the
environment, or the United Nations in pursuing another war with Iraq – and so it is
perhaps not surprising that such posture on the part of Tarantino has led a number of
critics to claim that Pulp Fiction, and by extension ‘the Tarantino film’, is inherently
right-leaning, ideologically. (One could certainly argue that Tarantino’s lack of
concern about how others react to his use of the word ‘nigger’ is meaningfully
isolationist and that such isolationism is ultimately the true ‘independence’ of
Tarantino’s work: a resistance to the global, interdependent network of cinema at
play in the Jarmusch oeuvre.) The suggestion seems to be that, ultimately, all
Tarantino has accomplished is another evolution of the Hollywood action-crime
film: just as Die Hard (1988), for example, emphasized the sensitized, fallible nature
of its protagonist, the better to protect its latent Republicanism from being too
closely identified with the monolithic (in every sense of the word) performances of
Stallone and Schwarzenegger, so too has Pulp Fiction created a newly energized
cinematic context for the genre’s conservatism.
As argued in Cineaste, Tarantino appears to have accomplished what Mike
Davis has called ‘political transvestism’
174
: where Davis was referring, however, to
John Carpenter’s apparently right-wing vigilante film They Live (1988) actually
containing a left-wing anti-capitalist critique, Cineaste’s position is that Tarantino’s
role as an ‘indie’ director has allowed him to accomplish the reverse. As Pat Dowell
put it, “Quentin Tarantino, the genius of the moment embraced by so many who

174
Davis, 344.

170
would never vote Republican, is the hip version of the angry white guy who
does.”
175
This ‘transvestism’ is enabled both by Tarantino’s insistent denial that his
films are political (the word ‘nigger’ isn’t loaded because I say so; I include violence
in my films just because I like it), as well as the apparently inherent ‘left-ness’ of
independent film as a field. Consider Tarantino’s recent defense of, and explanation
for, the violence in Kill Bill: during a lengthy New Yorker interview, the director
suggested that such moments are, in fact, part of what make him a meaningfully
international director. As the profile notes:

Because of the violence, Tarantino has made two different versions of
Kill Bill, one for America and Europe, one for Asia. (Tarantino does
not consider himself an American filmmaker. ‘America is just another
country for me,’ he says.) ... [In Japan], audiences are used to gorier
and more brutal scenes than anything a ratings board would permit in
the US, and they take violence as he wants them to – as an especially
thrilling and intricate form of choreography.
176

If part of Tarantino’s impact on contemporary cinema is the extension of the 1980s
crime film’s conservative tendencies, then it is important to note that the results are
now inescapably complex. This is not the laughable propaganda of Rocky draping
himself, literally, in the American flag after defeating his Soviet foe, or even Holly
Gennaro introducing herself proudly as ‘Holly McClane’ after her husband rescues
her from German terrorists and Japanese businessmen in Die Hard. Instead, we are
returned here to, naturally, the muddy ambiguities of the 1970s New Hollywood
period; the conservatism on display throughout the recent Tarantino discourse recalls

175
Dowell, 4.
176
MacFarquhar, 154.

171
that of the liberal architect played by Charles Bronson in Death Wish (1974), or the
sensitive Jon Voight in Deliverance (1972).
In these examples, right-wing ideology is the ‘repressed’ that always
threatens to return with a vengeance, all the more potent for the extent to which
liberal white males have struggled to keep it in check: the potency of such men in
crisis lies in their very ambivalence. Unlike the subsequent ‘80s cartoon heroes, here
was the uncomfortable suggestion that ‘we’ should all like to smuggle a gun on the
subway and ‘blow away’ all those who threaten us. In the postmodern ‘90s,
Tarantino is able to play with elements of both 70s and 80s American cinema: the
cartoon-archetype characters are on display, while at the same time, their very
stylization is itself abstracted – through their violence, though their use of ‘nigger’
and ‘bitch’ – so that the conflicted white male with which we are presented is now
the author himself. As the same Cineaste article puts it, “Pulp Fiction has an agenda;
it’s actually a very political film. In fact, it is precisely the film’s play on classic film
noir, blaxpoitation, and kung fu films, among other action genres, that leads one
directly to the core of its politics: masculinity and the anxiety of the male hero.”
177

The author in this case is referring to the film as a single text, arguing that its
use of genre conventions is directly, textually relevant to the characters on display.
But the quote is also very revealing in its use of the word ‘play’ – what gives the
game away, as it were, in the question of politics is the suggestion that the teasingly
naughty qualities of sensationalism in Tarantino’s films are themselves the puncta

177
Dowell, 6.

172
that bring viewers in direct contact with the auteur. Tarantino’s own playful
insistence that such elements are apolitical, present in his films only because he likes
them, is precisely what communicates best the notion of masculine anxiety in this
moment. The sudden appeal of Quentin Tarantino has everything to do with the
suggestion that he himself is the repressed conservative springing forth from within
the soul of the genteel liberal/’’indie’’ auteur (or, it is his hand that erupts from the
placid surface of water during the final frames of Deliverance).
Both Jarmusch and Tarantino depict characters who loaf, who endlessly
converse, who sit there and reflect. The energy – the shock value – that so many
celebrate in the latter’s work, however, is the unpredictable, violent rupture of
‘Hollywood’ into this placid discourse of independent film. The suggestion is that
Tarantino does what Jarmusch is afraid to do, or that all men who identify
themselves as left-leaning secretly long for the unabashed, unilateral displays of
power that have come to characterize the right.
178
Moreover, if Tarantino is accused
of representing the ‘worst’ of the American character (both in terms of embracing its
lowest cultural texts and their isolationist, exceptionalist role in global politics), he is
able to ultimately transcend the debate by declaring himself to be, as he did in the
previous New Yorker excerpt, ‘post-American.’ (‘If you find my films too violent,
that’s because you are an American who is unable to process the international
qualities of my work.’) As Cineaste suggests, “There is in Pulp Fiction ... a kind of

178
One might contrast here the pointed use of the word ‘interdependent’ to describe America’s global
position by both Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton at the 2004 Democratic National Convention with
Rudy Giuliani’s emphatic rejection of Europe for its passive handling of WWII-era ‘terrorism’ at the
Republican counterpart.

173

post-civil rights bravado ... [and] the movie’s attitudes towards gender follow a
similar pattern of displaying stereotypes under the guise of postfeminist
sensibility.”
179

The cumulative impact of such puncta, the ultimate result of his use of such
politically loaded signifiers as violence and ‘nigger’, is the sense of Tarantino
himself struggling to reset the terms of the debate (‘Aren’t we past this?’). The
question that remains is whether or not Tarantino represents the potential of actually
taking cinema someplace new, genuinely moving past exhausted conflicts, or instead
offers a regressive, reactionary move back to persistent stereotypes and power
relations. The answer cannot simply be found in this punctum alone, however; our
direct access to Tarantino is also to be found through his repeated depiction of the
writerly act.
Characters in Tarantino films are constantly telling each other stories,
performing parts, even “turning life into narrative,”
180
as Polan suggests. Here too
we are in the potential presence of Tarantino as a substitute for ‘genuine’ textual
engagement: what is going on here? What is the significance of this? A number of
sources, including the director himself, have suggested that there is a case to be made
for Tarantino as a significant literary figure, as much as, if not more than a cinematic
one. Tarantino has called Reservoir Dogs, for example, “the pulp novel I’ll never
write”
181
; many have commented on his films’ structural play with flashbacks,

179
Dowell, 5.
180
Polan, 79.
181
Polan, 16.

174
chronology, chapter headings, etc. as essentially novelistic; and his key influences
are often themselves printed rather than celluloid-based. Indeed, the opening frames
of Pulp Fiction present a dictionary quote celebrating, in part, the medium of paper
itself. Part of what is happening here appears to be a conscious effort to remove
Tarantino from one canon (“American independent director, 1980-present”) and
cement his place in another (“Writer of American Crime Fiction, undervalued in his
own time but now celebrated as creator of highbrow works”).
The tenth anniversary DVD edition of Reservoir Dogs, for example, includes
an elaborate special feature entitled ‘the film noir web’, which attempts to emulate
the hypertextuality of the internet in order to cross-reference noir films with
recurring noir characters, familiar noir actors, classic noir novels and films, as well
as the great noir auteurs. The latter group, significantly, is presented as both ‘Writers
and Directors’; here, such figures as Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald and
Charles Willeford are to be found alongside Robert Aldrich, Mike Hodges and John
Woo. On the same DVD, however, is a feature entitled ‘Class of ‘92’, exploring the
film’s debut at the Sundance film festival alongside films from many of the fellow
directors with whom Tarantino would later collaborate on Four Rooms. This feature
seems designed to emphasize Tarantino’s exclusion from this ‘Class’, recounting the
experiences of the director alongside recollections from a number of his peers. Part
of its footage includes Tarantino’s memory of the explanation he received from the
judges upon Reservoir Dogs’ failure to win any of the festival’s prizes: “‘Well,
Quentin, you didn’t need our award. You’re set. Your career is set. Your talent was

175
there, Hollywood’s knocking down your door; you don’t need us.’ What the fuck
does that have to do with anything?”
182
The director’s blunt words are immediately
legitimized by Amy Taubin, then a film critic for the New York Times: “If you
follow that logic, it turns the prizes and the juries into a kind of charity event. ‘We’ll
give it to some dull-but-worthy, needy film.’”
183
The Tarantino discourse, then, is
about more than simply re-energizing the flaccid Sundance film festival and by
extension the American independent film; it is about proposing and celebrating an
alternate canon of its own. Equally, it is about the promotion of Tarantino as himself
an authority with the power to establish such a canon; thus the lines between the
official academic and the artist are blurred once more as Tarantino becomes
simultaneously a producer of texts that belong in a film canon as well as a primary
guardian of that canon.
Like Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs includes a notable example of
authoritative textual interpretation; here, however, it is featured not as a climax but
instead more of an underlined prologue (indeed, the first line of dialogue is “Let me
tell you what ‘Like a Virgin’ is about”). The resulting scene is memorable for
Tarantino’s diner monologue about the song’s sexual subtext; however, it also
includes another character’s acknowledgment that an oldies radio station has recently
enabled him to newly appreciate ‘The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia’. “This
is the first time I ever realized that the girl singing the song is the one who shot
Andy!” he announces triumphantly. “I must have zoned out during that part before.”

182
Reservoir Dogs DVD.
183
Reservoir Dogs DVD.

176
So, simultaneously, Tarantino’s first film presents us with a character enjoying a
previously forgotten bit of pop culture from the 1970s and emphasizing the
importance of close textual analysis in order to enjoy it fully. (The detail also acts as
a particularly sly bit of foreshadowing, regarding the film’s own ambiguities about
who shoots whom during the memorable Mexican stand-off finale.) It would appear
to be just as important to Tarantino that his viewers do not ‘zone out’ themselves
when engaging in the textual nostalgia of his films; here, memory and attention are
equally valued.
Nowhere in Tarantino’s films is the need for such attention made more
explicit than in a brilliantly sustained ‘chapter’ of Reservoir Dogs devoted to Mr.
Orange (Tim Roth), the undercover cop amongst the thieves. A fellow detective has
instructed him to learn ‘an amusing anecdote about a drug deal’, in order to cement
his cover with the other criminals; when Orange balks at the effort required, he is
told, “Just think about it like it’s a joke, all right? You memorize what’s important,
the rest you make your own ... Now the things you gotta remember are the details.
It’s the details that sell your story. This particular story takes place in a men’s room,
so you gotta know all the details about that men’s room.” The sequence then
becomes a montage devoted to Mr. Orange’s increasingly confident telling of the
story: scenes of the cop practicing at home, beginning to perform it for his partner,
and eventually telling it to the gang of thieves are cut together both to compress time
and to present the viewer with a single, complete enunciation of the narrative.

177
Remarkably, as Orange’s tale reaches its climax, in which he finds himself
stuck in the men’s room with four police officers and their drug-sniffing dog, the
montage builds to a spectacular flourish of its own: cross-cut with his relating the
incident to the crooks is Mr. Orange himself in the fictitious men’s room, performing
the story in front of the cops, as if they are his audience. Orange has succeeded at
creating this narrative world so well that the police now become semi-autonomous
agents within it, one telling the others a story about a foolhardy driver nearly getting
shot while reaching for the registration in his glove compartment. At this point, the
scene has become so vivid that it does in fact generate suspense; despite knowing of
the incident’s fabrication, one is nevertheless sympathetic towards Mr. Orange as he
struggles nervously to finish urinating while the narrating officer loudly recounts his
yelling at the frightened driver. Orange’s story builds, in fact, to a pleasing irony as
the cop concludes, “Stupid fucking citizen doesn’t know how close he came to
getting blown away!”; this detail is amusingly contrasted with Orange’s knowledge
of his own close call, as well as the cops’ stupidity in letting a drug-carrying thug
slip past them in the men’s room.
To be sure, the sequence, lasting a full ten minutes (of a ninety-nine minute
film) is easily read as a self-reflexive tribute to storytelling itself, suggesting that the
joy of Tarantino’s work, for both director and viewer, lies in the power of narrative
to bring vitality to tired genre clichés (cop perfects voice, costume before going
undercover). In its own way, however, the sequence is also a tribute of sorts to the
benefits of the Sundance institute, at whose labs Reservoir Dogs spent some time

178
being ‘workshopped’; in fact, some of this footage is also included on the recent
DVD release. In the same way that Orange is seen working with a mentor to practice
and develop his material before the polished end result is displayed, so too does the
DVD’s footage present Tarantino and Steve Buscemi acting out scenes from the film
in isolated rustic cabins. Orange’s story seems incongruous as performed in his cozy
apartment, just as Tarantino and Buscemi seem literally ‘out of place’ confronting
each other in the Rocky Mountains. Despite the film’s gangster genre context, then,
there is nevertheless the suggestion that its independent nature is the partial source of
its creativity and quality. The “Mr. Orange” chapter of Reservoir Dogs could in fact
stand alone as a short film depicting an experiment in which the ‘indie’ mode of
production is applied to the discourse of Hollywood crime film, with positive results.
The field of independent film is shown here to be the source of quality, as well as,
significantly, itself a primary signifier of that quality.
Simultaneously, it is notable that Tarantino here is performing the ostensible
work of a (film) professor, instructing his students to read the text closely in order to
fully appreciate the details it has to offer. In this respect, the second and third
‘puncta’ that express the indexical presence of Tarantino himself through his films
are closely related. Consider the following words of Tarantino’s, excerpted from the
DVD commentary for True Romance (1993). The passage in question occurs late in
the film, as the director’s geeky alter ego, Clarence (Christian Slater), is conning a
movie producer into buying the cocaine he has inadvertently acquired; while

179

watching the sequence, Tarantino seems struck by the power offered by knowledge
of the Hollywood industry when dealing with its various ‘agents’:

One of the things about being a movie geek, and it was one of the
biggest things that I noticed when I actually got to Hollywood ... [is
that] the movie geek has two things in his corner: [one,] he probably
knows a hell of a lot more about movies than most of the people, not
the filmmakers, but the people who make movies. He probably has
more of a history of what he likes and what he doesn’t like in the
history of movies. And it’s not based on box office dollars, it’s based
on what [the geek] responds to. A lot of people in Hollywood – the
agents, the executives and everything – they don’t have strong
opinions ... They’re guided by information and they’re guided by
conventional wisdom. A movie geek will dedicate their entire life to
cinema, not because they’re making any money from it – most movie
geeks never make any money from their passions and obsessions. Not
for money, not for position, not for anything other than just the sheer
love of it. And the only thing they have to show for this 100%
devotion to an art form is their opinion. Their finely crafted, highly
tuned opinion. And they’ll fight for that to the death ... Having a
strong opinion in Hollywood is like a superpower, because a lot of
people don’t. There’s an old adage... the way it works in Hollywood
is, when you go into a meeting, the one with the strongest opinion in
the room wins. Well, I normally have the strongest opinion in the
room, so that stuff kind of went okay [for me].
184

Part of what is initially impactful about this quote is the sheer volume of it, through
which it simultaneously conveys Tarantino’s passion and the potentially
overwhelming manner in which he performs the presentation of his opinions. It is
more important, however, as Tarantino’s tribute to the attentive viewer of film; here
is a romantic view not of the auteur but of the reader, of the auteurist.
To clarify: Tarantino is not here evoking auteurism specifically in the sense
of a cinephile who structures his or her analysis around the figure of the director;

184
True Romance DVD commentary.

180
however, he is capturing the competitive sense of the auteurist as one attempting to
achieve the most complete collection, as suggested by Polan’s ‘Auteur Desire.’ As
Polan points out:

there are many copies of [Andrew Sarris’] The American Cinema like
mine with its pencil lines crossing out the films viewed, offering
thereby a veritable score card of viewing accomplishments and future
screening goals ... auteurists [find themselves] caught up in a feverish
agon to see more films, accumulate more listings ... there is frequently
competition among collectors, a will to accumulate more examples
and to master them better than others have.
185

The obvious distinction between Polan’s auteurist and Tarantino is that the former
lives in the shadow of “Sarris’ hierarchies of value”
186
; the legacy of auteurism is in
its implicit – and often explicit – declarations of quality, ranking auteurs against one
another, as well as auteur films against those made by mere ‘metteurs-en-scene’.
Tarantino, conversely, takes great joy in celebrating works that are so low in terms of
genre and quality that their directors would never have been noticed by Sarris.
Both through interviews and by re-releasing films through his company,
Rolling Thunder (itself named for a somewhat obscure ‘70s genre film), Tarantino
has publicly declared his admiration of: the many forms of Corman-produced
exploitation directed by Jack Hill, including sexploitation (The Swinging
Cheerleaders, 1974), blaxploitation (Coffy, 1973), and biker film (Switchblade
Sisters, 1975); the forgotten Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Corbucci (Django, 1966;
The Long Silence, 1968); and the colorfully gory ‘splatter’ horror films of Italy’s

185
Polan, 10.
186
Polan, 10.

181
Lucio Fulci (The Beyond, 1981; Zombie, 1979). Concurrently, however, Tarantino
has also expressed his love of the films of more visibly celebrated auteurs, such as
Brian De Palma, Douglas Sirk and Howard Hawks; as the recent New Yorker tribute
put it, “it’s hard to pin down Tarantino’s taste because he likes nearly everything.”
187

The article, intriguingly, makes the case that Tarantino’s intense celebrity
enables him, implicitly, to present through his films an alternative canon to the
one(s) enforced by established criticism: “whereas most critics are interested only in
the difference between good movies and great movies, Tarantino finds the other end
of the scale equally fascinating. He is interested in the phenomenon of what might be
called the good-enough movie: the movie is basically terrible, but just good enough
... to make you care.”
188
Here is Tarantino as impetuous graduate student – the ‘good
enough movie’ could be a particularly cheeky title for a conference panel on B films
– expressing his interest in an area of cinema and accumulating as much data as
possible about that area before presenting his findings.
By emphasizing the extent to which Tarantino finds equal fascination in texts
both high and low, I mean to point out the peculiarity of the director’s position as an
auteurist: here is the collector against whom it is impossible to compete. Whereas the
academic auteurist is forced to specialize in order to survive, the field of cinema to
which Tarantino devotes himself is quite simply the cinema itself. As the New
Yorker article puts it: “When Tarantino’s detractors rage, then, about his asserting
the influence of revered figures such as Godard and Howard Hawks as though he

187
MacFahrquhar, 155.
188
MacFahrquhar, 157 (emphasis mine).

182

were claiming membership in an elite canon, they are missing the point. It was not
Tarantino but his fans who anointed him a canonical figure in that sense. Tarantino’s
own canon is so vast, so generous – indeed, so very nearly all-inclusive – that to
claim membership in it amounts to little more than claiming to have finished a
movie.”
189

Such auteurism on Tarantino’s part not only takes place at the level of
interviews, re-releases, or even the small annual film festival the director annually
programs in Austin, it is on display in Tarantino’s films as well. In many ways,
Tarantino films are themselves fully stocked collections – of film references, of stock
characters, of generic narrative tropes – offered in a context that seeks to display
their worth simply by the fact of their mere existence as cinema, their inherent
historical status as having existed, having occurred. One suspects that this inclusive
attitude is precisely what polarizes opinions about Tarantino: on the one hand, he
validates and legitimizes those who also adore the obscure, the low and the
dismissed, while on the other hand he seems to negate the very concept of quality
itself. Here we are in the presence of not merely virtual authorship but simulated
auteurism as well, in which the surface adulation and close textual analysis are
almost inescapably visible, but the analytic subtexts of the discourse are nowhere to
be found. Tarantino’s sole ‘thesis’ appears to be: “[the forgotten films I cherish] may
not be the best movies ... but they are movies and, as such, are worthy of respect.”
190

189
MacFahrquhar, 157.
190
MacFahrquhar, 157.

183
Inherent within the Tarantino discourse, then, is a debate about the value and
meaning of auteurism as an endeavor, co-existing uneasily alongside consideration
of the individual value of his own films. Just as Tarantino’s consistently self-
reflexive approach to narrative (through the endlessly emphasized moments of literal
storytelling and interpretation amongst his characters) evokes a strict professor
urging students towards sustained textual analysis, so too is Tarantino here usurping
the project of canon building through auteurism long dismissed by the academy as a
hopelessly retrograde enterprise. In many ways, then, the significance of Tarantino
has much to do with his status as post-film school auteur: while Spielberg and Lucas’
exposure to Kubrick, Kurosawa and John Ford informs their films, Tarantino proudly
cites instead the texts of his formative ‘grindhouse’ experiences. As he has often put
it in interviews, “People ask me if I went to film school ... and I tell them, ‘No, I
went to films.’”
191

The ensuing debate hinges on the political significance of this popular
auteurism: what is the meaning of its existence outside, even instead of, the
academy? Rosenbaum would argue that the impact is a decline in global film culture,
particularly as viewed from within the United States, and that Tarantino’s entire
career is an extreme manifestation of Kevin Smith’s aforementioned quote about
foreign films being safely filtered through American directors. To celebrate
Tarantino (and even Jarmusch) in this manner becomes, in effect, a celebration of a
middle-brow ‘Book of the Month Club’/Reader’s Digest approach to cinema. By

191
Peary, 127.

184
‘subscribing’ to Tarantino’s career, one is effectively encouraging him to seek out
the little-known cult films of the past and re-present them without the boring parts
for friendlier audience consumption, much as Shakespeare’s plays were popularly
truncated and Bowdlerized throughout the 19th century American west. Herein lies
the unpleasant result of the peculiar burden popularly placed on Tarantino’s
emergent career: by expecting him to energize and redeem both the independent and
Hollywood modes of cinema, he instead combines high and low into a defanged
middlebrow. The narrative of Tarantino has become one of a promise that could not
possibly be fulfilled, resulting in an auteurism without purpose, context, ideas.
Dana Polan cites Susan Stewart’s On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature,
the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection to suggest there is an innate tendency
within any form of auteurism to disregard history in favor of the interpretive will
displayed by the auteurist. Once again, the similarities between the autuerist’s work
and a Tarantino film are evident in both Stewart’s and Polan’s depiction of such texts
as collections. As Stewart puts it, “the past is at the service of the collection ... The
collection replaces history with classification, with order beyond the realm of
temporality”
192
; Polan reinforces the point by noting that “Whatever these objects
might have meant in their original context matters less than the new meaning that
can be created for them in the act of collection.”
193
The optimism of his conclusion,
moreover, is a direct rejection of this ahistorical tendency: “We could, for instance,

192
Quoted in Polan, 10.
193
Polan, 11.

185

imagine auteurism as itself a historical activity – arising in particular social and
cultural situations as a way of responding to them.”
194
For all the citation and celebration of 1970s pop culture that is to be found in
Tarantino’s work, there is surprisingly little meditation on why such films and TV
shows were popular in their original context, or indeed how they might be made
newly meaningful in the present (with Jackie Brown a notable exception, as will be
shown in a moment). Instead, Tarantino offers the pleasures of a simplified
auteurism, where the reader is newly empowered to do little more than please him or
herself through obsessively attentive readings, from which only the Culture Industry
itself is guaranteed to profit (via ticket and DVD sales). Polan’s book on Pulp
Fiction notes the numerous internet websites devoted to fan-worship of Tarantino;
though the subject deserves a study of its own, it seems more than coincidental that
Tarantino’s celebrity status occurred simultaneously with the rise of such websites as
Aint-it-cool-news. Here, and on sites like it, the promise of film debate as itself akin
to fast food is made manifest: all the precision and intensity of academic work is on
display, but without the healthy ‘granola’ of history, politics or ideology.
Indeed, the Tarantino discourse strives to be as apolitical as it is ahistorical;
asked about his leanings in an interview with J. Hoberman, Tarantino evasively
replies, “[Silence.] I guess I’m a liberal. Definitely not a conservative – I’m
definitely not a Republican. Most people, [however] when they’re on one side or the
other, don’t paint with a small brush, they paint with a f---in’ roller and wipe

194
Polan, 15.

186
everybody into pansy liberals or dictator fascists.”
195
Though a salient point is being
made here about the polarized nature of contemporary political debate that is
probably even more relevant today than when first uttered in 1996, the quote is also
intriguing as an apparent attempt on the director’s part to maintain his own ‘tough
guy’ status. Here is an instance of Tarantino appearing to take his medicine by
choosing the ‘correct’ side of the culture wars, while nevertheless immediately
rejecting the potential suggestion that he is rendered somehow unmanly as a result of
any left-leaning tendencies.
Moments such as this one present a fundamental rupture between the two
halves of the Tarantino persona: on the one hand, he gleefully embraces violence as a
two-fisted crime film auteur, scoffing at those who would deny his right to do so. On
the other hand, he is also a somewhat infantilized figure by virtue of his wearing the
crown of ultimate film geek: by being so closely aligned with the receptive love of
cinema, rather than the active, virile role of creating cinema, Tarantino becomes a
curious public figure whose ‘real’ biography is difficult to discern from either
extreme. For every tale of Tarantino the film brat – punching Don Murphy, producer
of the disavowed Natural Born Killers (1994), outside a Melrose Ave. restaurant, for
example – there are many more that emphasize Tarantino as a hopelessly passive
film addict.
In a recent Vanity Fair profile, for example, Peter Biskind refers to this side
of the director in a manner that evokes the character of Norma Desmond, the former

195
Peary, 163.

187
Hollywood icon haunting a Gothic mansion for much of Sunset Blvd. (1950). During
the six year break between the release of Jackie Brown and the two volumes of Kill
Bill, the director moved “into a grand home in the Hollywood Hills near Universal,
which some of his friends derisively referred to as ‘the castle’. Recalls [his friend,
Robert] Rodriguez, ‘Quentin spent most of a year designing and building this home
theater. He said, “All my friends made a movie this year. I made a theater.” ’ ”
196

The cinephilia that was to occur here, however, appears to have been in control of
Tarantino, rather than vice versa:

[he] went through periods of withdrawal. He’d hole up in his new
home, stay up all night watching movies and smoking pot. ‘This was
not Martin Scorsese watching Michael Powell’s movies, where
there’s a reason to get excited about it,’ says an acquaintance who
occasionally joined him. ‘I’m not even talking about something that’s
kitschy or trashy – an A.I.P. picture. These were lousy made-for-TV
movies. Flat, one-dimensional. And still his eyes would be glued to
the tube. After a while, I realized you could literally be showing him
anything – a white screen, even – and he’d be watching it like a kid
with a pacifier, a lonely little boy in his living room, where he was
safe. It was sad and beautiful at the same time.
197

By the time of Kill Bill, even the making of a film represented a potentially
submissive state for Tarantino; the cover of Rolling Stone recently promised to go
‘Inside Quentin’s obsession with Uma,’ while the title of the article itself, ‘A
Magnificent Obsession,’ similarly depicted the director as analogous to the lead
character in classic female melodramas.

196
Biskind, 313.
197
Biskind, 313.

188
Tarantino’s consummate, consuming love for cinema here becomes a desire
that can never totally be fulfilled; he is eternally in the shoes of Barbara Stanwyck at
the close of Stella Dallas (1937), desperately watching her daughter’s domestic bliss
through a wrought-iron fence before a patriarchal cop pushes her back into the real
world. In Stella Dallas, however, the cinephilia is merely metaphorical, the on-
screen maternal love affirming the implied female audience’s desire for fleeting
catharsis through the film-going experience. This depiction of Tarantino, conversely,
suggests that a movie geek’s love is as powerful and fulfilling as that of a mother.
The Rolling Stone profile, for example, suggests that his ‘obsession’ with Thurman,
despite its apparently transcendent ability to stun him into momentary silence, is
ultimately a desire for an obsession worthy of film history:

He found himself stumped when it came to talking about Uma ... and
the question of how it is that she operates as his muse, which is what
he calls her ... ‘I don’t know ... I mean, von Sternberg has Marlene
Dietrich, Hitchcock had Ingrid Bergman, André Techiné has
Catherine Deneuve. It’s a special bond that I’m proud to have, and
hopefully, one day, people will reference me and Uma like they do
the others. But the thing about it is, it just kind of is, and there are
certain things I don’t really want to understand subtexturally (sic).
198

Cumulatively, there is the suggestion here that Tarantino himself is the innocent boy
figure being led through Jack Rabbit Slim’s (or the porno club/set from Body
Double), experiencing cinema itself through youthful eyes that, crucially, represent
the best potential to refresh and even redeem the medium at the same time.

198
Hedegaard, 42.

189
One feature film of Tarantino’s not yet discussed here is Jackie Brown; it is
significant that much of the praise this film received was for its maturity, both in
terms of its primary characters as well as its approach to film style. Both it and Pulp
Fiction run approximately two and a half hours; here, however, the film’s length is
not related to an episodic attempt to combine multiple narratives into a single text.
Instead, much of Jackie Brown is devoted to the leisurely delineation of characters.
Though promoted around a central caper, the better to present it as a genre exercise
consistent with Tarantino’s other films, Jackie Brown is predominantly about the
fifty-something title character’s attempt at a dignified retirement, as well as her
developing romance with a middle-aged bail bondsman, Max Cherry (Robert
Forster).
Critical response to the film was not unanimous – many felt that its relaxed
pace signified an inability to equal the energy of Pulp Fiction – but those who
celebrated Jackie Brown did so by declaring it to be a meaningful step forward for
the young director: towards maturity, towards greater dramatic coherence, towards
reality. The apparent realism of Jackie Brown is inseparable from its engagement
with maturity – the dramatic intensity that attends Jackie’s attempt to rob her corrupt
employer while cementing her relationship with the bail bondsman meant to be
watching her, is directly connected to her age and, with it, the suggestion that her life
will end in prison if she fails. Pulp Fiction’s moments of dramatic intensity,
conversely, are derived from the audacity of their narrative invention (now he has to

190

stab a needle into her heart! now there is a torture chamber in the shop’s basement!)
as opposed to character complexity.
The qualified success of Jackie Brown, then, suggests there is a potential
maturity of talent within Tarantino that is not yet fulfilled, in which his ability to
render complete, multifaceted people evokes the extent to which such dramatists as
Tennessee Williams were renowned for emphasizing character over plot. This
dialectic of quality through characterization and excessive plotting as juvenile
distraction, is perfectly encapsulated in Roger Ebert’s Jackie Brown review: “A lot
of crime films play like they were written by crossword puzzle fans who fill in the
easy words and then call the hotline for the solution. (The solution is always:
Abandon the characters and end with a chase or a shoot out.) Tarantino leaves the
hardest questions for last, hides his moves ... and gives his characters dialogue that is
alive.”
199
As much as Jackie Brown was seen as a step forward for the director’s ability
to depict character, it was also praised for what many viewed as implicit political
progress. Though many of the film’s characters continue to casually use the word
‘nigger’, the fact of Jackie’s blackness, and her potential inter-racial romance with
Max, are not sensationalized, deployed for shock value or laughter. Indeed,
Tarantino’s tradition of self-reflexivity through casting here contributed to the film’s
status as oppositional postmodernism: by using Pam Grier in the title role, the film is
able to emphasize its distance from the exploitation films in which she made her

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Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com.

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name throughout the 1970s. Though occasional flourishes of music and dialogue
remind viewers of this legacy, such moments are not mere nostalgia: they instead
conversely demonstrate the level of Jackie Brown’s quality. Here, finally, is
postmodern citation as historically self-aware interpretive work.
In this film, Pam Grier’s shirt is not ripped off (before a women’s-prison cat-
fight); she does not lose her temper and yell a self-righteous tirade against her male
oppressors; indeed, she is barely required to raise her voice. This is pointedly
resistant to the fantasies of superhero avengers that are so pervasive throughout
blaxploitation cinema; instead, the dearth of options available to Jackie due to her
age and race are simply, elegantly equated with the similar vacuum that has faced
and continues to face Pam Grier herself for the same reasons (and despite her
considerable talent). By affirming its title character’s dignity, Jackie Brown also
reinforces that of its star; here, then, postmodernism enables us to pay closer
retroactive attention to the exploitation films of Grier’s past, despite their implicit
suggestion that we ‘zone out’ and receive their simpler pleasures. This is the myth-
shattering that Barthes is encouraging when he writes of the need for the birth of
better readers in ‘The Death of the Author.’
But what of the Tarantino myth? The aforementioned Vanity Fair profile
suggests that the mixed reaction to Jackie Brown is what drove him to inhabit his
castle as a recluse. Here, the mythology of the director as a character locates him in
an American literary tradition that is far more extensive than the crime film contexts
in which he’s typically placed. Consider the assessment of R.W.B. Lewis, in The

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American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century: “We
may suppose that there has been a kind of resistance in America to the painful
process of growing up, something mirrored and perhaps buttressed by our own
writers, expressing itself in repeated efforts to revert to a lost childhood and a
vanished Eden, and issuing repeatedly in a series of outcries at the freshly discovered
capacity of the world to injure.”
200
Lewis’ subject is the deployment of what he calls
‘Adamism’ throughout American literature; it is particularly revealing that the
media’s depiction of Tarantino locates him, effectively, not within the canon of great
American writers, but instead as himself a fictive character within an extensive
national tendency of fiction.
As depicted in Biskind’s profile, Tarantino is a figure who excels at playful
artistic creativity within the world whose borders are defined by the extent of his
own film knowledge. Upon attempting to set foot outside this world with Jackie
Brown (indeed, its leisurely pace, oppositional postmodernism and talkative slackers
evoke the style of Jim Jarmusch more than what is commonly thought to be
Tarantino’s) and, in so doing, embrace reality, Tarantino came uncomfortably close
to failure, racing back to the formalism offered by Kill Bill. As Biskind put it:
[Jackie Brown is] a more mature work than Reservoir Dogs or Pulp
Fiction. It is also quieter and gentler; thanks to Grier and Forster,
Tarantino gets more deeply into his characters ... [however,] he seems
to feel he let his fans down ... The same anxieties that some say made
for the lengthy stretch between Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown
followed ... In some ways, [Kill Bill] is the anti-Jackie Brown,
splashy, with no more than a smattering of the signature Tarantino
dialogue, and no middle aged actors save for [David] Carradine ... As

200
Lewis, 129.

193

one friend put it, ‘Quentin has always felt that his core audience is
adolescents, geeky boys. He wanted to give one to his fans, something
with tons of action, motorcycles and sexy chicks.’ The director
himself sees Kill Bill as his true follow-up to Pulp Fiction.
201

In the figure of Tarantino, then, one can recognize a conflict of American
master narratives. On the one hand, he defies the conventional understanding of
Sundance and the mode of independent film promoted there, in that Jackie Brown,
made at a moment of extreme stability as a ‘house director’ for Miramax, most
closely embodies the institute’s defining values. That is, Sundance is meant to be the
type of place to which one flees upon (or ideally, before) tiring of a career making
violent Pulp Fictions for Hollywood; the natural environment is equated with the
genteel pace and placidity of character-driven films that resist heavy plotting. On the
other hand, Tarantino’s career suggests a desire to run from the filmmaking mode
that takes credit for having given birth to him; this desire to run in itself is part of
what defines him as a meaningfully American figure. Consider Lewis’ assessment of
the “noble but illusory myth of the American as Adam,” in light of Biskind’s
description of Tarantino’s response to Jackie Brown:

What some novelists were to discover was that the story implicit in
American experience had to do with an Adamic person, springing
from nowhere, outside time, at home only in the presence of nature
and God, who is thrust by circumstances into an actual world and an
actual age. American fiction grew out of the attempt to chart the
impacts which ensued, both upon Adam and the world he is thrust
into.
202

201
Biskind, 314-315.
202
Lewis, 89.

194
The realism and maturity of Jackie Brown seem very much like the ‘actual world and
actual age’ with which the Adamic Tarantino has struggled; by replacing Lewis’
reference to ‘nature and God’ with Tarantino’s oft-professed worship at the altar of
The Church of Cinema, the parallels are striking.
Lewis, as with many of his contemporaries, would likely suggest that
Tarantino’s significance as a key figure of our present discourse on independent film
will not lie in his future ability to resolve such a conflict; rather, it is already defined
by his very embodiment of that conflict. (Indeed, such a constant, essential tension
between playful, creative freedom and controlled aesthetic rigor, between the modes
of Hollywood and independence is more consistently visible within the recent career
of Steven Soderbergh, as we shall see.) Leslie Fiedler is one such figure of American
Studies who would likely find greater significance in Jackie Brown itself than would
Lewis, whose work is instead largely applicable to Tarantino as himself an American
character. Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel paints a portrait of
national literature that consistently dramatizes flights such as Tarantino’s, from the
subjects of age, race and mature love, in favor of violent escapism directed at ‘geeky
male adolescents’ (or, in Fiedler’s phrase, “our classic literature is a literature of
horror for boys”
203
); moreover, Fiedler is better able to articulate the relationship
between the appeal of youth within the text and the aura of youth around it.
Fiedler’s American literature is one that consistently celebrates the new, the
innovative, the vigorous in order to reaffirm the equivalent qualities of the nation

203
Fiedler, 29.

195

that produced it: “between the novel and America there are peculiar and intimate
connections. A new literary form and a new society, their beginnings coincide with
the beginnings of the modern era and, indeed, help to define it.”
204
By equating the
nation and its fiction so closely, Fiedler is also able to suggest that the avoidance of
history characteristic of the latter is also notably endemic throughout the former: as
he puts it, “the American writer ... is forever beginning, saying for the first time
(without real tradition there can never be a second time) what it is like to stand alone
before nature, or in a city as appallingly lonely as any virgin forest.”
205
This repeated
emphasis on the new and the youthful seems inherently related to an American
identity that repeatedly declares its own ‘loss of innocence’ (after September 11th,
Vietnam, World War II, The Civil War, etc.) in order to suggest, partly, that it has
always been there to lose.
The present day effects of such historical ignorance are almost painfully clear
as I write this: a current debate over the potential significance of gay marriage
appears to rest on the immutable definition of the word, conveniently forgetting that
the nation has already redefined the term on a number of occasions. The literally
‘inhuman’ attitude to black people (first as slaves, then as free citizens who might
want to marry whites) exempted them from legal marriage until the 1960s; current
attempts to block homosexuals from marrying on the basis of an attempt to retain the
institution’s own innocent purity now appear as darkly ironic hypocrisy.

204
Fiedler, 23.
205
Fiedler, 24.

196
The suppressions of liberty contained within our current Patriot Act are not
without precedent, either; Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States
reminds us, for example, that “the Sedition Act of 1798 ... made it a crime to say or
write anything ‘false, scandalous and malicious’ against the government, Congress,
or the President, with intent to defame them, bring them into disrepute or excite
popular hatreds against them.”
206
Nevertheless, the primary justification for the
extreme measures of the Patriot Act is consistently cited as the new kind of enemy to
be found in the new kind of war we are fighting.
If one’s response to all this is to exclaim, ‘Why do we have to go through this
all over again?’, a large part of the answer has to be the extent to which American
culture retains an ideology of the endless present. The sudden appearance of Quentin
Tarantino and with him his own ‘rebirth of cinema’ suggests his significance as an
auteur is but the latest manifestation of this ongoing national conflict. Now, one
debates as to his engagement with the older texts to which his movies refer: is this an
actual engagement with history, or instead an attempt to block, rewrite, suppress it?
So too with the inherent Adamism of independent film in the Sundance era: the cable
channel makes the occasional concession to history by programming a Samuel Fuller
film from the 1950s, but otherwise this is largely a forward-looking discourse. As
Peter Biskind writes in Down and Dirty Pictures, “indie cinema is almost exclusively
a cinema of first films,”
207
indicting the discourse’s ultimate inversion of its own
romantic ideals: by constantly watching for the birth of a new savior who will bring

206
Zinn, 100.
207
Biskind, 474.

197

redemption to the world of film, recently celebrated directors are conveniently
discarded as they attempt to build a substantial body of work – that which was
formerly the key element required of its subjects by the auteur theory.
As Fiedler has suggested, ‘Without real tradition, there can never be a second
time.’ It is for this reason that one is able to imagine Fiedler’s championing of Jackie
Brown for its greater honesty in dealing with the past, and the effects of that past
upon the present. For Fiedler, the American author’s relentless drive to begin is,
implicitly, sexist – within the romanitcization of the Edenic natural world as a place
of male adventure and rebirth there is also a rejection of the essentially maternal
component of creation. In his words, “Our great novelists ... tend to avoid treating
the passionate encounter of a man and woman ... Indeed, they shy rather away from
permitting in their fictions the presence of any full-fledged, mature women, giving us
instead monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of
sexuality.”
208
If Jackie Brown does embody the type of three-dimensional female
character to which Fiedler is referring here, then it is worth considering the extent to
which she represents an evolution in Tarantino’s talents by comparing her to
equivalent figures throughout Pulp Fiction.
In many ways, Pulp Fiction is a film surprisingly full of romance, largely in
the form of several devoted couples amidst the myriad outrageous narrative
developments. The film opens with ‘Pumpkin’ and ‘Honey Bunny’ sweetly declaring
their love for one another before threatening to ‘execute’ all of their fellow diner

208
Fiedler, 24.

198
patrons; Mia Wallace is simultaneously shown to be devoted to her husband
Marcellus while also relatively demure in her flirtation with Vincent (after his phallic
penetration of her by hypodermic needle, she offers him a shy acknowledgment of
their earlier date during Butch’s boxing story); Butch himself is particularly sensitive
to his girlfriend Fabienne, remembering to ask if she found some pie while he has
been off retrieving his watch; and even minor characters are shown to have love in
their lives (Eric Stoltz’ drug dealer lives with multiply pierced Rosanna Arquette,
Harvey Keitel’s ‘Wolf’ makes time to playfully tease his girlfriend Julia Sweeny
after rescuing Jules and Vincent, and Jules refers to a ‘vegetarian girlfriend’ while
debating the merits of pork).
Significantly, however, none of these details is addressed thoroughly; they
are simply the signifiers of a complete universe extending beyond the borders of the
frame. Much of Pulp Fiction’s appeal lies in the verisimilitude of its fully developed
‘world’, which fans can repeatedly visit. When allusions to romance appear
throughout the film, they tend to be coy, patronizing, adolescent: Mia and Vincent
have a ‘first date’, Butch infantilizes Fabienne with his baby-talk, and Pumpkin
similarly reduces herself through her panic at seeing her boyfriend threatened by
Jules, her attempted bravado of “Don’t you hurt him!” quickly followed by “I have
to pee!” Many have pointed out the derivative influence of the sitcom upon the
sequence in which Jules and Vincent accidentally blow a friend’s head off in their
car and must clean up the mess before an authority figure (here, a friend’s wife)
catches them – a reliable formula of children getting into trouble upon parental

199
absence, left to desperately fix things before their return. Much of the film’s
depiction of romance is similarly at the level of the crush, the first date, the chaste
exchange of banter.
Jackie Brown is scarcely more explicit in its treatment of sexuality; however,
its progress is nevertheless felt at the level of self-awareness regarding fear of that
sexuality as a primary subject. Jackie’s competence and self-assurance at both her
deception and her pursuit of Max are shown to scare the passive bail bondsman:
before inviting him to join her on a celebratory vacation she asks, “Are you afraid of
me, Max?” His confirmation of this fact then stands as his primary reason for
remaining alone, or at least with no one but his muscular African-American
bodyguard for companionship in the pursuit of bail jumpers. Fiedler’s thesis
throughout much of Love and Death in the American Novel is derived from an
earlier article entitled “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey,” which suggested
a bond between infantilized black and white men as consistent substitute for
depicting true heterosexual union; similarly, Max’s resignation to life on the fringes
of crime at the close of this film echoes Jules and Vincent’s boyish exit (complete
with T-shirts and short pants) at the close of Pulp Fiction. Even Reservoir Dogs ends
with an instance of ‘male marriage’, as Roth’s Mr. Orange confesses his identity to
Keitel’s Mr. White despite his imminent rescue.
At the final observation, then, Tarantino’s cinema may be considered to offer
progress for such American archetypes through its implicit rejection of the virginal
wilderness as offered by the Sundance selections that preceded it; it is nevertheless a

200
filmography that speaks to a deeper national tradition than is readily apparent. Here,
postmodern self-reflexivity equates the formal play of the director’s citations with
the adolescent play of his characters’ criminal games, resulting in a cumulative fear
of reality and of female sexuality, as well as a naively optimistic belief in a progress
for American history. The question remains as to whether the career of Steven
Soderbergh offers a visible alternative to this trend, whether he embodies nothing
beyond a more tasteful manifestation of precisely the same concerns, or is at last a
figure through whom the film industry is able to offer only virtual progress, a choice
that is in fact no choice at all.

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CHAPTER FOUR
FUNCTIONS OF THE INDEPENDENT AUTEUR
(SYNTHESIS: STEVEN SODERBERGH)

The recent excitement around Kill Bill notwithstanding, it is the renaissance
of Steven Soderbergh’s career as a director that has dominated mainstream coverage
of the American independent film; since his return to critical favor upon the release
of Out of Sight in 1998, his narrative has largely usurped Tarantino’s. That it was the
comedically violent Elmore Leonard adaptation Out of Sight that appeared to
accomplish this is an important irony worth addressing later. For the moment, it is
worth reviewing the Soderbergh-narrative as it is commonly told by the press. The
story consistently begins in 1989, with a twenty-six year old director making a
shocking success at both the Sundance (then still the United States Film Festival) and
Cannes film festivals with his first feature, sex, lies and videotape. A certain amount
of controversy was generated when Soderbergh’s film received the Palme d’Or at
Cannes, much of it directly generated by fellow competitor Spike Lee, whose Do the
Right Thing had lost. Many have since suggested that Soderbergh’s receipt of the top
prize was intended to reward the young American director for his evocation of
French cinema traditions; Eric Rohmer is but one of many such filmmakers
suggested as a potential inspiration for the sexual candor, character emphasis and
stylistic understatement of Soderbergh’s film. sex, lies and videotape would go on to
a profitable release that summer amongst such Hollywood blockbusters as Batman
and Lethal Weapon 2, and its critical status would be cemented by an Academy
Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

202

For several years after this initial success, Soderbergh was increasingly
viewed as a director failing to live up to his substantial early promise: his subsequent
Kafka (1991), King of the Hill (1993) and Underneath (1995) were consistent box
office failures and generally met with critical apathy. Soderbergh’s considerable
talents were consistently visible within the films; however, they were equally
consistent at being difficult to fully embrace – the intelligence behind the films
rendered them, for most critics, odd and off-putting. Soderbergh himself later spoke
of his own lack of personal engagement during the making of Underneath, a ‘neo-
noir’ remake of Criss Cross (1949) for Universal Studios. What happened at this
point is now the stuff of legend for those interested in ‘indie’ films: Soderbergh
wrote, directed, photographed and starred in Schizopolis (1997), a microbudgeted
film whose status as ‘personal’ was compounded by the casting of his ex-wife, Betsy
Brantley, as the increasingly distant spouse of Soderbergh’s own character. Casting
himself in the lead also reinforced the notion of Schizopolis as especially personal to
the director. The budget of Schizopolis was “a mere $250,000 – about one-fourth the
budget of sex, lies and videotape,”
209
as one journalist noted; indeed, much of the
film’s significance would eventually be discussed in terms of its lack of immediate
impact.
Schizopolis was not a box-office success; it barely received a theatrical
release. When promoted at the Cannes festival as a ‘mysterious’ new film from the
director once championed there, it was met with further critical indifference. Nor

209
Kaufman, 89.

203
was it particularly well-reviewed back home; for many critics, it was yet another
mark of the director’s on-going creative descent. The New York Times suggested
that Soderbergh had “evolved from the much-admired director of sex, lies and
videotape into the perpetrator of a goofy, ineffectual prank ... [his] offbeat
intelligence is tantalizingly evident even as he sinks the film with shallow tricks.”
210

Todd McCarthy’s Variety review seemed more prescient, calling Schizopolis “as
mangy, indecipherable and from-the-hip as his previous films are precise, literate and
meticulously calibrated ... Ultimately, it is less interesting to try to discern what the
film is about than it is to imagine what drove Soderbergh ... to make such a cranky,
disgruntled effort.”
211
McCarthy’s remarks are particularly significant here. Firstly, he positions any
potential discourse around the film in the shadow of the discourse around
Soderbergh himself; following Corrigan’s formulation, this is not an auteurist
reading of a film but instead a direct admission that the auteur is himself the more
meaningful text. Second, McCarthy here predicts what has since become the popular
myth around the film, namely, that it is an expression of Soderbergh’s ‘cranky’ and
‘disgruntled’ status. Schizopolis, upon its release, was not so much a quintessential
auteur’s film in that it represented the familiar thematic and formal obsessions of a
single originating artist, instead, it encouraged and effectively pre-validated such
responses as McCarthy’s by making the auteur its explicit subject; here was a film

210
Maslin, B1.
211
McCarthy,
http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117905314.html?categoryid=31&cs=1&query=Schizopolis

204
that was about nothing if not the relationships, interests and enthusiasms of Steven
Soderbergh. Frustrated by the creative rut in which he found himself, despite having
already achieved the power to make ‘quirky’ personal projects such as King of the
Hill and Underneath at a major Hollywood studio, Soderbergh embarked upon a
Thoreauvian retreat into the creative garden of fully independent filmmaking.
Having renewed his artistic energies thusly, Soderbergh was then able to mount an
impressive ‘comeback’ with Out of Sight, one of the best reviewed films of its year.
What followed was an equally impressive body of work, in which
Soderbergh was able to attain what for many is almost a cliché of a major American
filmmaker’s dream career: alternating between small independent features (i.e.
personal ones) and larger studio productions (made primarily to maintain financial
viability in the business). The Limey (1999) was followed by Erin Brockovich
(2000); next, Traffic (2000) followed by Ocean’s Eleven (2001); and finally, Full
Frontal (2002) by Solaris (2002). By the time of these most recent features, it was
increasingly difficult to identify what made some of these choices personal and
others populist: Full Frontal was aggressively promoted by Miramax as a long
anticipated ‘sequel’ to the prior hit sex, lies and videotape, whereas 20th Century
Fox’s expensive science-fiction Thanksgiving release Solaris was a quiet remake of
a little-seen Russian film adapted from a Polish novel. Similarly, Soderbergh’s dual
Oscar nominations for best director (an accomplishment not achieved since Michael
Curtiz did it in 1938) were often interpreted as validation of his now bifurcated
talents: with Erin Brockovich, he took a potentially empty Julia Roberts ‘feel-good’

205
vehicle and invested it with character and realism, while with Traffic he conversely
elevated a potentially didactic instance of political prose by energizing it with genre
pleasures and Hollywood star power.
If Jarmusch represents a coolly distant intelligence, and Tarantino instead
suggests the passionate play of a hot-headed child, then for many Soderbergh can
now signify a satisfying completion to the narrative of post-Sundance independent
film through his ability to synthesize the best of both directors. What is perhaps even
more impressive, and particularly relevant to our present purposes, is that
Soderbergh appears to have utilized the discourse’s fixation on the auteur in order to
negotiate for himself a career in which he is not meaningfully required to be an
auteur. How Soderbergh was able to achieve this and the significance of this
achievement are the focus of the remainder of this chapter.
Consider that the differences between sex, lies and videotape and Out of Sight
on the surface suggest not so much a figure of synthesis but instead a savvy
businessman attempting to follow and emulate important market trends.
Soderbergh’s first film in many ways embodies the quintessential traits of the
‘granola indie’ film championed at Sundance throughout the 1980s: its aesthetic
values are based primarily in the literary qualities of script and performance and its
Baton Rouge setting emphasizes a region of the country not commonly depicted in
Hollywood film. By the time of Out of Sight, nine years later, Soderbergh was now
working with Jersey Films, a production company that had funded both Pulp Fiction
as well as the subsequent hit Get Shorty (1995), adapted from yet another Elmore

206

Leonard novel.
212
It might appear as if Soderbergh is simply able to emulate the
styles and subjects of Jarmusch and Tarantino, when each is in favor, in order to
leverage his own success, and there is little reason to suggest this is inaccurate.
It is not, however, the full story; the recent success of Soderbergh is
ultimately far more revealing about the film industry’s self-regulation than it is about
the agency of any single figure within it. In many ways, this is precisely the problem
with any retroactive engagement with sex, lies and videotape: it conveys little more
than the smooth running of a healthy American film culture, able to locate and
nurture small, talent-bearing films alongside opposing corporate products. Upon
revisiting the film, one is likely to find oneself wondering what the fuss was all
about; such is the power of the ‘indie’ discourse that sex, lies and videotape might be
considered shocking and revolutionary upon its release when it is ultimately
conservative, comforting and reminiscent of other ‘great works.’ In some ways this
is suggested by the film’s title alone, with the particular combination of quality,
controversy and (potential) nudity that has inspired curious Americans to visit art
house theaters since the 1950s.
Others have suggested that the film’s connection to the post-war era is far
more substantial than this, identifying sex, lies and videotape as a descendant of
topical taboo-challenging melodramas ranging from Picnic (1955) to Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Woolf? (1966). The cultural critic Greil Marcus, for example, noted the
early presence of synthesis in Soderbergh’s work when he wrote that “ultimately,

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James Mottram offers a lengthy comparative analysis of Out of Sight and Jackie Brown in his
study, The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood (pp. 229-238)

207
sex, lies and videotape is very ‘50s – therapist, adultery, justice done, Beat refusal of
capital letters in the title – and very ‘80s – thirtysomething without production
values.”
213
That the film is able to meaningfully evoke 1950s American cinema at all
is a crucial part of what allowed it to stand out during a period in which many
independent films were deliberately attempting to evoke (and perhaps even on some
level restore) the more visibly daring successes of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Certainly, sex,
lies and videotape has also been compared to many of these films, especially those
that fit into the aforementioned ‘drifter-rebel’ category: Five Easy Pieces, Carnal
Knowledge (1971), The Graduate, etc. In Soderbergh’s first feature, however, one
can recognize already an attempt to reconcile or synthesize the two periods through
character conflict.
Peter Biskind asserts in Down and Dirty Pictures that the film’s success is
directly attributable to its “diagrammatic, audience-flattering Manichaeism”, which
clearly set a Reagan-era evil yuppie, John (Peter Gallagher) against a sensitive,
creative soul, Graham (James Spader), clearly meant to represent Soderbergh.
214
To
read the film as so directly autobiographical, however, is just as clearly problematic:
one could more persuasively argue that both men represent sides of the director since
he is simultaneously a gentle, artistic figure as well as a successful white male who
possesses the power and influence to get a movie made. In this sense, the conflict
between the two men is already evocative of the contrast between the idealized yet
isolated world of independent film and that of a studio system interested in profit

213
Marcus, 31.
214
Biskind, 41.

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above all else. Soderbergh has himself suggested in interviews that all of the film’s
characters cumulatively represent “himself cut into quarters”
215
, and that his own
habits in relationships evoked Gallagher’s character before he chose a period of
compensatory withdrawal that mirrors that of Spader’s Graham (as well as prefigures
the ‘withdrawal’ symbolized by making Schizopolis).
If the film’s potential autobiography is bifurcated, then so too is its
engagement with history about a conflict between periods; sex, lies and videotape
here becomes a means to synthesize the ‘50s-era melodramas of repression with the
urgency and controversy of their counterparts in the following decades. Consider:
John’s vanity, avarice and display of male entitlement as justification for an affair
evokes Fred MacMurray’s charming cad in The Apartment (1960); Andie
McDowell’s stifled housewife, Ann, struggles to express her sexuality as do so many
women in such Douglas Sirk films as All That Heaven Allows (1955); even the
Thoreau-quoting gardener played by Rock Hudson in that film anticipates Graham,
with direct reference to Walden replaced by a monologue in which Spader’s
character extols the virtues of only possessing one key.
Both figures suggest a desire to ‘drop out’ of the rat race and return to a
simpler (and therefore implicitly more noble) way of life; as Graham tells Ann at
dinner, “I like having just the one key. It’s clean.” This complexity of references
throughout sex, lies and videotape, however, is expressed in the fact that the only key
Graham owns is for his car: when John and Ann suggest that he find an apartment in

215
Kaufman, 9.

209
Baton Rouge, he bristles visibly at the idea. John charges that Graham has a desire to
retain the option of driving away from somewhere as quickly as possible, and
Graham’s only response is the feebly optimistic “Or to somewhere.” Here is the
suggestion of Jack Nicholson’s Bobby Dupea thawing himself after a self-imposed
Alaskan exile at the climax of Five Easy Pieces. Ultimately, then, the success of sex,
lies and videotape is largely ideological; here is a significant American film of the
1980s that, like Blue Velvet (1986) and Back to the Future (or even, as Marcus noted,
TV’s thirtysomething) defines its own era through an ambiguous relationship to the
cultural conservatism of the Eisenhower era as well as the perceived excesses of the
‘Vietnam’ years. Such allusive engagement with the past, and synthesis of disparate
elements will later be seen in such post-Schizopolis Soderbergh films as The Limey
and Ocean’s Eleven, leading one to wonder how valid the prevalent ‘two-act’
depictions of his career truly are.
sex, lies and videotape is considered by many the quintessence of a ‘zeitgeist’
film, more notable for its relationship to a specific historical context than its innate
aesthetic qualities. Soderbergh’s sudden, intense celebrity status, combined with the
hint at autobiographical context throughout his first feature, easily resulted in what
might be called ‘auteur pressure.’ As his subsequent films failed to please audiences
or critics, however, the label ‘auteur’ became increasingly difficult for many writers
to use when referring to Soderbergh. For example, Geoff Andrew’s Stranger than
Paradise: Maverick Filmmakers in Recent American Cinema, first published in 1998,
is forced to describe the director in this way: “with no discernibly consistent style or

210
thematic preoccupations, it is hard to make convincing claims that he is an auteur
while his recent decision to withdraw from commercial filmmaking into more
experimental, low-budget work has ensured, somewhat ironically, that he is no
longer regarded as a significant player on the American independent scene.”
216

The speed with which Andrew’s words became outdated (recall that Out of
Sight was also released in 1998) is perhaps the most potent indicator of the shift in
attitudes towards film auteurs in publishing today. Compare the near-immediate
obsolescence of Andrew’s assessment of Soderbergh to the original publication of
Hitchcock/Truffaut in 1967. At this time, the book’s subject had been working in
film for roughly forty-five years and had made fifty-six features; when it was revised
in the early 1980s, after Hitchcock’s death, the final tallies had expanded to represent
a career of fifty-nine features spanning six decades. Truffaut’s work was already
seen as authoritative in the late 1960s, fifteen years before an update rendered it
decisively comprehensive. What has happened between the release of Truffaut and
Andrew’s books?
The answer lies in a combination of the Hollywood industry’s promotion of
auteurs as texts, as well as the publishing industry’s attempts to capitalize, as quickly
as possible, on this trend. Andrew’s chapter on Soderbergh seems not so much
unable as unwilling to attempt an auteurist analysis of his immediate films after sex,
lies and videotape; the suggestion seems to be that they are not of worth because
they do not contribute to the master narrative of Soderbergh’s ascension as a

216
Andrew, 257-258 (his emphasis).

211
‘significant player on the American independent scene.’ For Andrew, Kafka and
King of the Hill are trees that fell soundlessly in forests; when he suggests that it is
difficult to build a case for the director as an auteur, my response is to suggest that he
is simply not interested in doing so, nor were his publishers inclined to encourage
this.
One year after the publication of Stranger than Paradise, it was well-known
that Soderbergh’s decision to renew himself with Schizopolis had led to the visible
success of Out of Sight; indeed, 1999 saw the publication of Getting Away With It:
Or The Further Adventures of the Luckiest Bastard You Ever Saw, in which the
director’s journal entries of 1996-1997 are interspersed with a long-form interview
between Soderbergh and his declared inspiration for this renewal, Richard Lester. It
does not seem accidental that Getting Away With It itself represents an attempt to
synthesize the two aforementioned approaches to publishing on auteurism. On the
one hand, it might conceivably be subtitled “Lester/Soderbergh”: a substantial
portion of the text is a career-spanning analysis in which Lester is encouraged by
Soderbergh to discuss the influences upon and motifs recurrent throughout his
filmography. On the other hand, the book is tellingly labeled “A Faber & Faber
production, Starring Steven Soderbergh”; indeed, this ‘credit’ is literally ‘above the
title’ on the book’s cover, followed by a large photograph of the director from his
Schizopolis performance.
217
Though the book is in fact a reading of Lester’s career,

217
Getting Away With It is also comedically self-deconstructive to a degree that deliberately echoes
the style of humor to be found throughout Schizopolis, suggesting it is meant to satisfy those fans who
cannot get enough of the director. An ‘introductory note from the author,’ for example, echoes scenes
from Soderbergh’s film in which characters speak entirely in categorical labels without specific

212

there is nevertheless a persuasive sense that the reason it was published at all was out
of a perceived interest in Soderbergh’s renewed status as a viable contemporary
director.
The lack of interest in early works such as Kafka, then, is not because they
are lacking as auteurist works, but because they are lacking as films that propelled
Soderbergh’s career forward. Indeed, an irony to add to those already suggested by
Geoff Andrew is that one can productively recognize Soderbergh’s pre-Schizopolis
films as meaningful auteur texts, as suggested earlier. One can fruitfully propose, for
example, that Soderbergh is interested in the cultural and technological mediation of
memory, a concern often articulated by a playful engagement with postmodern
tendencies towards hyper-textual citations. sex, lies and videotape, for example, is
not merely about historical conflicts between post-war and Vietnam era American
films. It is also self-reflexive in its depiction of the camcorder as a technological
barrier to human relationships; though it is meant as a tool of diaristic self-
expression, here the device is ultimately a reminder of the film we are watching and,
by extension, a reminder of the American filmmaking trends that preceded it.
Kafka itself is an underrated hybrid of artistic biography, fantasy and German
Expressionist film noir that also skillfully raises questions of documentation: how
best to portray the celebrated writer through a single film? Narrativize his life?
Faithfully adapt one or more of his stories? Evoke the mood and atmosphere that

content: “Brief, desultory discussion of forthcoming manuscript’s inception, purpose and potential
audience. Self-deprecating remark. Amusing anecdote with slightly serious undertone. Awesome
display of ego disguised as humility; joke about same.” [Soderbergh, viii.]

213

characterized his work? By ambitiously attempting to combine all three approaches
as one, the film was destined to court a certain amount of disappointment amongst
purists (indeed, for many critics, this is all the film did accomplish). As with sex, lies
and videotape, there is a concern with film and filmic technologies. For many,
Kafka’s most memorable moment occurs at its climax, during which a startling shift
to color from monochrome film stock itself suggests the whimsical innocence of The
Wizard of Oz (1939); the sequence in question depicts the author’s escape from an
imposing castle by scrambling across a massive glass screen filled with the image of
an enormous, panoptic eye. The attempt to simultaneously present an artist’s
biography while evoking his various styles of work can itself be read as something of
a reference to the evolving sequences that comprise Vincente Minnelli’s Van Gogh
biography, Lust for Life (1956). Even at the level of Soderbergh’s own
autobiography, there is significance to be derived from Kafka: as Jeremy Irons
suggested when interviewed about his role in the lead, “it’s interesting that he was
attracted to a picture about a man who doesn’t really know where he is or what he
should be doing.”
218
Kafka’s life blurs with his art just as Soderbergh’s film texts are
potentially read as interchangeable with the ongoing Soderbergh-text presented on
television, in books and popular magazines.
Not only is the lack of interest in Soderbergh’s early work revealing, so too is
the recurring emphasis on such work as substantially, meaningfully different from
the films that have followed his creative rebirth. In many ways there are auteurist

218
Hoberman, 51.

214
consistencies and similarities that seem to be deliberately ignored. The dilemma of
Fletcher Munson, for example, the office drone played by Soderbergh in Schizopolis,
seems profoundly Kafka-esque: he is an insignificant clerk in a larger corporation
whose means and methods are baffling. When a fellow employee, ‘Lester Richards’
(a fairly direct invocation of the film’s inspiration), dies suddenly, Munson is asked
to write a speech to which Richards had been previously assigned. The specifics of
the request also suggest Kafka’s writing:

Here’s what I need: It should be lengthy enough to seem substantial,
yet concise enough to feel breezy. It should be serious, but with a
slight wink. It should lay out a new course of action, but one that can
change direction at any moment. If you must mention facts and
figures, don’t do so directly. The general thrust should remain
embedded in one’s mind forever, but specific words should be
forgotten the moment they are heard. It should contain nothing that
can’t be confirmed or denied. It should be on my desk Friday
morning.

Furthermore, when one considers that, according to interviews, much of this
dialogue is derived from Soderbergh’s own meetings with studio executives, his
autobiographical connections to Kafka are strengthened. Simultaneously, Munson’s
actual life is increasingly difficult to distinguish from its fantastic parallels, in which
Soderbergh also plays Munson’s doppelganger, a dentist whose trysts with Munson’s
spouse lead him to exclaim: “My God! I’m having an affair with my own wife!”
Consistent throughout both ‘acts’ of Soderbergh’s career to date are an
ongoing interest in film history and formally innovative expressions of subjectivity
and media manipulation. Ultimately, the most meaningful and revealing

215
development in Soderbergh’s career upon entering this second act is not so much an
idealized reinvigoration of pure talent as it is instead a self-conscious awareness of
the act of authorship, and by extension himself, as a primary subject. Following from
this, one is led to conclude that this distinction is the essential bait-and-switch
operating within the discourse of the American independent film: a suggestion of
creative talent emerging from the purity of the landscape is offered as a marketable
justification for the ever familiar celebration of postmodern, film-citing white male
directors.
It is worth considering how Getting Away With It itself depicts Soderbergh
as learning the lessons of Lester’s own career; as the elder director tells him, “if you
produce my career as two acts ... almost everything [in Act II] became either
unrealistic fantasies like Superman, or films from the twelfth to the seventeenth ...
century. No contemporary material ... By and large they were pieces of observation
where current character and political thinking was not the engine that was forcing the
film forward.”
219
Here, Lester’s career is presented as something of a cautionary tale
for Soderbergh, in which a director is unable to come to terms with the external
industry pressures that are brought to bear on his talent. The suggestion is that Lester
has too passively remained merely an artist, leading to diminishing returns and
decreased creative control throughout the second half of his career; if Soderbergh is
to escape such a fate, he will have to establish himself as occupying a more active

219
Soderbergh, 100.

216

role in relationship to the industry’s demands. As their interview progresses, Lester
effectively tells Soderbergh as much after viewing Schizopolis:

It would be interesting next to take the technique and apply it to
something which has a more conventional thread. A story with a
ticking clock, for example ... Then you’ve got your career going as
long as people give you whatever you need to do ... if [making
Schizopolis] was cathartic in terms of your work process, what you’ve
got to do now is make something where you give the audience a little
more help ... Because then you’ve produced a lifetime of
independence.
220

Here, independence is defined in terms not of romance but of practicality: though
Lester is indeed implicitly identifying Soderbergh as a figure of synthesis, he is also,
finally, advocating little more than the classic auteurist move of ‘sneaking’ personal
ideas and flourishes into inevitably formulaic studio projects.
Upon recognizing the reappearance of this familiar trope from auteur theory,
one is forced to ask if there is any meaningful difference between the career of
Soderbergh and that of such ‘definitive,’ classic auteurs as Ford, Hawks or
Hitchcock. The answer lies in the visibility of Soderbergh’s acts of authorship: as
Corrigan et al have stressed, the postmodern industry is a forum in which the auteur
has supplanted the text. As a result, one can finally identify the shift between the two
acts of Soderbergh’s career as a move from making purely ‘auteur films’ (i.e. derived
from their director’s interests and formal strategies) towards making films that are
now also (if not ‘instead’) able to foreground the gestures with which Soderbergh
was able to get them made. There are autuerist consistencies across the two acts,

220
Soderbergh, 194.

217
certainly, but only in the second are we so inescapably presented with films that are
‘Allegories of Soderbergh.’ Now Soderbergh is himself one of his own thematic
preoccupations, and within each film one is able to hear echoes of the
aforementioned exchanges with Richard Lester. This ‘visibility’ of Soderbergh’s
auteurism is meaningfully similar to the visibility of current debates around the role
of academia – the debate is not simply whether to promote a canon of great works or
read texts for the various politics of ‘otherness’ they speak, but also to what extent
this debate should be public. Should public intellectuals and ratings-hungry, overtly
biased commentators such as Bill O’Reilly have a say in this debate?
Out of Sight is an almost perfect embodiment of the synthesis to which Lester
referred: elliptical editing, harsh contrasts of film stock, and a chronology that
suggests the subjectivity of memory are used to enhance a violent crime film whose
comic interruptions seem to consistently reinforce its own disposable nature. As with
much of Quentin Tarantino’s work, to which Out of Sight was inevitably compared,
the film’s self-reflexivity suggests a winking awareness of its own ‘fast food’ nature.
Upon the release of this film, the synthesis was itself the story, as far as the
mainstream media was concerned: the direction of Soderbergh elevated the material
to the status of art, and a new set of markers for official cinematic quality had been
firmly established.
By the time of The Limey, Soderbergh had begun publicly announcing his
new films as attempts on his part to synthesize previous films or modes of
filmmaking. “The best way I can describe this [film] ... is for you to imagine Alain

218
Resnais making Get Carter,”
221
Soderbergh declares on the last page of Getting
Away With It, and similar comparisons have attended many of his subsequent
releases. Traffic, for example, would represent a combination of Nashville (1975)
and The French Connection (1971), whereas Solaris was intended to cross-pollinate
Last Tango in Paris (1973) with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). These repeated
declarations are striking in a number of ways. First and most obvious is the sense in
which they evoke what is commonly thought to be the worst creative instincts of the
Hollywood industry, in which agents and studio executives express their artistic
bankruptcy by conceiving of new projects solely in terms of hybridizing prior
successes (‘It’s Die Hard meets Pretty Woman!’). Here, Soderbergh seems to
directly embrace the Hollywood game; one is struck by the number of his films that
are either direct remakes (Traffic from the British miniseries, Underneath from Criss
Cross, Ocean’s Eleven, Solaris) or instead closely follow the models of specific
predecessors (Erin Brockovich from Norma Rae or Alice Doesn’t Live Here
Anymore, The Limey from Get Carter or Death Wish). The primary difference now is
that Soderbergh is typically remaking or revisiting films that are not likely to be
thought of as models for box office success – few today would attempt a remake of
either Last Tango in Paris or 2001, let alone a film that somehow combines both.
This leads to the second way in which these declarations are revealing: they
allow Soderbergh to publicly embrace his own pretensions as an artist. Consider his
recent self-assessment regarding his original aspirations for Underneath: “there

221
Soderbergh, 215-216.

219

ought to be a world-wide cultural taskforce that just stops you when you have ideas
like combining The Red Desert (sic) with an armored car heist movie.”
222
Isn’t
casting George Clooney as the lead in a James Cameron-produced remake of Solaris
just as likely to place such a taskforce on high alert? What is the difference? Again,
the answer relates to this shift in the stages of Soderbergh’s career: today, we are
aware of Solaris as a high-profile attempt to adapt such elitist material into a popular
product, and the film can additionally be marketed around the suspense as to whether
Soderbergh will be able to pull it off.
Underneath, for example, is surprisingly similar to The Limey, especially so
when one considers their status as appearing on opposite sides of the director’s
conversion experience, Schizopolis. If the earlier film combined the ‘60s art cinema
alienation of Michelangelo Antonioni with the Hollywood pleasures of a well-
choreographed heist, then so too does the latter purport to mix the enigmas of Last
Year at Marienbad with the monomaniacal certainty of a gangster revenge plot. Both
Underneath and The Limey are formally distinguished by spare music scores,
aggressive use of color filters, and a vaguely lethargic affectation to their central
performances. The Limey, however, directly announces its engagement with
American films of the 1960s as one of its central subjects; not only does the film
feature such icons as Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda (as well as Vanishing Point’s
Barry Newman and Warhol associate Joe Dallesandro in supporting roles), but it
repeatedly calls attention to its own having done so, particularly in ways that can be

222
Kaufman, 30.

220
publicized. Most obvious is the film’s use of footage from Poor Cow (1967), a Ken
Loach feature in which Stamp starred; similarly, The Limey includes a lengthy shot
of a huge American Express billboard on which Fonda is featured, announcing that
he has been a “member since 1964”.
Though Out of Sight was the film that generated repeated comparisons to the
films of Quentin Tarantino, The Limey nevertheless reinforces this sense of
Soderbergh’s artistic rebirth as essentially a ‘waking up’ to the reality of market
forces, thus crucially depicting his ‘character’ as mature adult rather than solipsistic
adolescent: specifically, the ultimate great subject for ‘indie’ filmmakers in 1990s
Hollywood is the creative garden of American filmmaking in the ‘60s and ‘70s. At
this point, it is all too easy to reconceive Soderbergh’s moment of creative rebirth as
simultaneously an awareness of a somewhat grim, self-imposed ultimatum: if he is to
survive, Soderbergh must inevitably find a way to combine his personal interests (the
subjectivity of memory, the crises of a creative figure, etc.) with a newfound
embrace of and interest in a nostalgia for our shared cultural past. The dark irony in
this development is that Soderbergh had been making works of actual individualism
before Schizopolis; they were simply not being seen by mass audiences.
On the rare occasions when this earlier mode of American film is not an
explicit subject in Soderbergh’s films, this absence is filled with the auteur-text of
Soderbergh’s evolving talent. Both Erin Brockovich and Ocean’s Eleven, for
example, were repeatedly dismissed by critics as comparatively ‘empty’ films,
especially so considering the director’s talent and intelligence. If the films had value

221
beyond their surface pleasures as simple Hollywood entertainments, such value
existed at the level of Soderbergh’s own ability to adapt his career in order to make
them. Consider Manohla Dargis’ LA Weekly review of Ocean’s Eleven: “One of the
more fascinating things about this director is how uninhibited he is about his own
learning curve – you can actually see Soderbergh teaching himself something
different with each new film, and you never get the sense that he’s embarrassed
about you watching him learn.”
223
Both Dargis and Andrews’ accounts of the
director speak to a compelling phenomenon suggested by Polan’s title ‘Auteur
Desire’: the participatory desire of the critic to practice auteurism in progress, rather
than at a career’s twilight.
The crisis of attempting to do so in the case of Steven Soderbergh, however,
is that his recent success is predicated on his ability to move away from fully
personal projects and embrace films that are sufficiently diverse in size and subject
matter to defy the auteur theory, leaving the critics instead to narrativize and
mythologize his career movements in order to justify themselves, to provide
themselves with a subject. Interview’s Graham Fuller makes this explicit when he
concludes that “critically speaking, Steven Soderbergh remains one of the toughest
filmmakers to nail – he’s a strong, persuasive director who unwittingly excels in
confounding those who’d like to label him. ‘Soderberghian’ is an adjective never to
be coined, judging from the tonal diversity of the films he’s made since exploding on

223
Dargis, 59.

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the indie scene.”
224
Such a development can quickly progress, however, to a
paradoxical state: if Soderbergh has resisted the authorial impulse throughout this
second career act, and become defined by his resulting success in the Hollywood
system, then what has become the meaning of his status as an icon for independent
film? Is this any different from the inevitable criticism of a beloved artist ‘selling
out’, and if it is different, how?
One answer is that, effectively, Andrew Sarris’ canon in The American
Cinema has been replaced by Premiere magazine’s annual ranking of the 100 most
powerful figures in Hollywood; aesthetic values now find themselves brushed aside
in order to simply celebrate a director’s control over the extent to which he or she
could hypothetically deploy such values. The success of Soderbergh thus lies finally
in his ability to resist the word ‘Soderberghian’: though he is consistently able to
operate within the present day studio system, he is not obliged to do so within the
confines of specific genres or budgets. Instead, he has established a definition for
‘Soderberghian’ that means little more than ‘quality’; his success as a figure of
independence has finally led to the redemption of the Hollywood industry. Again:
the crux here is this issue of visibility – we seem more interested in the operations of
cultural power than we are in culture itself. If Soderbergh redeems Hollywood
quality films, does he also redeem the work of the older Americanists?
One potential cost of this redemption, however, is a lack of genuine
engagement with said industry’s films themselves; in the case of both Erin

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Fuller, 60.

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Brockovich and Ocean’s Eleven, their status as opportunities for the director to make
‘big’ films led to a perception that neither film could mean anything beyond that
status. This is particularly surprising in the former case: the extent to which Erin
Brockovich’s narrative of a lone figure sticking to her beliefs while standing up to
major industries (here, both legal and utility power systems), only to be rewarded
with a high-paying job within such an industry, seems very much to suggest an
allegory of Soderbergh. Few critics referred to this; a rare exception was offered in
the independent LA Weekly, which noted that “saving the underdog is far from
Erin’s only motivation. Her crusade is also a career starter ... No wonder Soderbergh
was attracted to her story. In the shark-infested waters of movieland, he’s done
exactly the same thing.”
225
The comic remake of Ocean’s Eleven, moreover, a film whose legends of ‘rat
pack’ members casually sleeping through their performances in between Vegas
performance resulted in an oxymoronic reputation of notorious inconsequence,
particularly baffled critics. Elvis Mitchell’s New York Times review called it “an
odd choice for Mr. Soderbergh, who is perhaps the ne plus ultra director of films
about people living on the margins.”
226
Though less overt an allegory than that to be
found in Erin Brockovich, Ocean’s Eleven is nevertheless easy to read as depicting a
crisis around independent production; given the current media fascination with
Soderbergh as subject, it is somewhat surprising that such a reading was not more

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Taylor, 61.
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Mitchell,
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visibly offered. Even Mitchell’s suggestion that the film’s protagonist is not ‘on the
margins’ seems misguided: the film opens with the eponymous Danny Ocean being
released from prison and assembling a team of similarly isolated con artists and heist
specialists in order to attempt the seemingly impossible robbery of a vault containing
the funds of three Vegas casinos. At every turn, the heroes’ skill at creative,
improvisatory showmanship is contrasted against the lugubrious corporate behemoth
that is present-day Las Vegas. (Even here, then, can be recognized Soderbergh’s
ongoing fascination with cultural icons of the 1960s: though the original version of
Ocean’s Eleven may not be a film of value, it nevertheless signifies a rebellious spirit
that is absent from contemporary entertainment products.)
The villainy of the film’s antagonist, Terry Benedict, the casino owner in a
relationship with Ocean’s ex-wife, Tess, is correspondingly expressed through a
brief scene in which he is revealed to be unable to appreciate art beyond its status as
a monetary commodity. Tess, the curator of an elite art gallery within Benedict’s
casino, has just brokered the purchase of a new Picasso, “Woman with Guitar”, and
is gazing upon it in reverent awe of his latest acquisition. Benedict appears by her
side. “Do you like it?” she asks him. “I like that you like it,” is his only reply; the
character’s callousness is then underscored as he refuses to let Tess kiss him
goodbye, preferring to preserve propriety for the benefit of his ubiquitous security
cameras. Moreover Benedict has a notorious reputation for destroying the history of
‘rat pack’-era Vegas monuments; Ocean is able to enlist the financial support of a
former casino owner, Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould, himself a signifier of New

225
Hollywood iconoclasm), because Benedict “torpedoed my casino – muscled me out.
Now he’s going to blow it up next month to make way for some gaudy monstrosity!”
An argument can be seen here for those academics who retain a desire to protect the
work of canon formation: the villainous character is the one without interest in
quality, in aesthetics. The ultimate suggestion is for a synthesis of appreciating good
cultural texts as good, while also critically reading them as products of political
contexts and representations of otherness.
Much of Ocean’s Eleven allegorizes a moment in Hollywood history that has
already been endlessly invoked both in these pages as well as many other articles on
this recent period of independence: namely, the shift within the film industry that
occurred in the late ‘70s. It is easy to read the large casinos as equivalent to such
conglomerate entities as the Transamerica corporation, which purchased United
Artists in 1967, or the present owners of 20
th
Century Fox, News Corp.; indeed, one
of the casinos that relies on Benedict’s vault is the MGM Grand, itself an indicator of
the ongoing climate in which vague notions of ‘synergy’ have diluted formerly pure
notions of film craft. Many historians have characterized this era as one in which
incoming studio executives, ‘the young turks,’ dismissed notions of films as special
products, instead preferring to treat them as any other potential source of revenue
within their diversified empires. Though the studio heads of the classic studio era
were savvy businessmen and promoters, they were also typically considered to be
men who both possessed an innate understanding of films, as well as a sense of taste
that gave value to their suggestions about how such films should be produced.

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With the coming of conglomeration, however, the new owners often found
themselves at a loss as to how to attract audiences, fueled in part by the radical shifts
within those audiences caused by social protest movements, Vietnam
disillusionment, and mistrust of government. Large-scale roadshow musicals such as
Hello, Dolly! (1969) and Lost Horizon (1974), previously shown to be immensely
profitable investments as recently as The Sound of Music (1965), consistently
flopped. Instead, small-scale ‘youth’ pictures such as Easy Rider appeared to be
ready to supplant such spectacles, leading to studio executives greenlighting ideas
they didn’t understand and struggling to promote finished products they hated, such
as The Last Movie (1971) and Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). These films proudly
displayed all the hallmarks that influenced the classic ‘‘indie’’ films of the Sundance
era, but were able to exist within the studio system. In short, much like Soderbergh’s
Danny Ocean, the young creative types could get away with murder at the expense of
the studio executives who were either too slow or too devoid of taste to know what
was happening right under their noses.
Every step of the elaborate heist that comprises much of Ocean’s Eleven is
thus depicted as an element of specialized, stylized performance: the precise nature
of the security systems in place around the vault itself requires a team member of
such cat-like agility that he is recruited at a gymnastic circus performance; access to
the vault requires Carl Reiner’s character to, effectively, become himself a method
actor, repeatedly practicing the accent and inhabiting the persona of Lyman Zerga, a
German billionaire who needs to store valuables in it; and the robbery itself requires

227
the construction of an elaborate set, upon which the heroes both rehearse their moves
as well as film a sustained scene to be played on the true vault’s security monitors.
At times, Ocean’s team is even required to perform for one another: when a young
pickpocket is called upon to play a nervous state inspector, Ocean and his partner/co-
director Rusty (Brad Pitt) stage an apparently personal falling out for his unknowing
benefit, becoming, in effect, savvy directors able to elicit the fidgety, unconfident
characterization they seek. At the heist’s conclusion, Soderbergh also is gracious
enough to grant his characters a symbolic standing ovation: as all of the eponymous
teammates assemble in a row, the fountains at the Bellagio repeatedly rise in a series
of crescendos, as if to celebrate them. In return, our heroes gaze back at the display
in a collective state of wordless wonder, a harsh contrast from their antagonist’s
previous aesthetic anhedonia.
Certainly, Ocean’s Eleven falls into the ‘con artist’ sub-genre of crime films,
in which the operative word is ‘artist’: there is always a self-reflexive, theatrical
pleasure in witnessing talented actors playing talented actors, or enjoying the
simulation of improvisatory play that appears whenever a job does not proceed
exactly as planned. So much of Soderbergh’s film, however, returns to thematic
material around the appreciation of individual craft and disdain for the apersonal
nature of the product offered by the Vegas/Studio conglomerates, that it remains a
curiosity such allegorizing went largely unnoticed. The conclusion to be made here
suggests that the auteur discourse is now supplanting engagement with content, or
the actual reading of films; ultimately, Soderbergh himself remains the text, and the

228
story of Ocean’s Eleven is thus merely a celebration of his chamelionlike ability to
create disposable light entertainment as successfully as he does such meaningful
political work as Traffic. We find ourselves, finally, in the face of a conflict that
cannot be meaningfully resolved; instead, it is perhaps better that it be recognized as
a defining condition of our present postmodernity. Ocean’s Eleven depicts a
celebration of performance – or that which is fake – as a signifier of the ‘real’, the
‘authentic’; we delight in the indexical impact of Clooney et al charming us through
skills and talents we normally perceive as ‘unreal’ or ‘simulated’ in most
entertainments produced by Hollywood conglomerates. If we do not interpret this
film as an allegory of such a conflict, it is nevertheless a display of Soderbergh’s
own indexicality. Ocean’s Eleven, for many critics and (presumably) viewers, was
itself little more than a Vegas casino visit – a pleasurably noisy and colorful way to
dispose of one’s money; even in this case, however, Soderbergh remains a marker of
textuality that invests the film with an aura of reality simply through the virtue of his
being the auteur who made it.
Is this an end or a beginning? Think of the recent ‘Dogma ‘95’ movement,
begun when Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg drew up a
manifesto that declared their adherence to filmic ‘purity’ in the face of so much
‘superficial’ content on display in Hollywood and elsewhere. The manifesto required
its members to forsake a series of glossy production elements that, for its drafters,
symbolized artifice and indulgence. Only available light and location shooting were
permitted. No post-production sound effects were to be added. Even the somewhat

229
vaporous concept of ‘superficial actions’ such as car chases or shootouts were
officially regarded as forbidden. Almost immediately upon inception, however, the
movement was criticized as little more than a self-aggrandizing publicity stunt.
Numerous examples were found in which the group’s films could be seen to break
their own rules and, in particular, much attention was drawn to the paradoxical
impossibility of their public demand that ‘the director must not be credited.’
The suggestion was similar to that mentioned earlier – that auteurism is a
false methodology that displaces the content it claims to study – and yet the
declaration itself immediately became one more means to publicize the very auteurs
who proclaimed their modesty in drafting it. Again, this is fundamentally an
impossible question to answer – is Lars von Trier a sincere artist, or a manipulative
prankster? – in part because it relies on a fundamentally outdated set of terms. The
drama of studying such moments of filmic independence (be they American or
international), their very subject matter, is contained within their struggles to be
born, to exist. One is effectively forced to adopt the methods of a prankster in order
to get films made at all under such production circumstances. However one views
the sincerity of the Dogma ‘95 movement, or the impish, trickster persona adopted
by von Trier when promoting his films, one cannot deny the extent of the
movement’s impact and influence.
For example, Soderbergh himself experimented with such self-imposed
restrictions when following Ocean’s Eleven with Full Frontal, a film that received
early publicity during production for the equivalent rules of purity the director

230
distributed to his cast: actors in the film would be responsible for their own
costumes, hair, and makeup; would not enjoy the privacy of trailers on set; and
would be subjected to unscripted interviews, in character, that could potentially make
their way into the finished film. As one might expect at this point, reviews of the
film heavily emphasized these atypical production circumstances. Variety’s Todd
McCarthy in particular seemed to have cribbed from an earlier critique of
Schizopolis: “It’s as if Steven Soderbergh has willfully decided to bring his
extraordinary winning streak to an end. [Full Frontal is] arid, self-consciously arty
and emotionally uninvolving ... unfortunately, the artistic intent and production
methods are far more interesting than what ends up on screen.”
227
Once again, the
auteur-text obscures the film text; an auteurist reading of the film is not to be found
here. McCarthy, however, does note that Soderbergh “mapped out his own set of
dogma,” suggesting this transnational connection as perhaps a more meaningful
perspective from which the film might be productively viewed.
Unlike either Jim Jarmusch or Quentin Tarantino, Soderbergh has not been
required to develop his career by establishing an auteurist public identity for himself;
though his films are read through the heuristic offered by his celebrity status and can
be promoted around such directorial flourishes as creating Dogma rules, using
existing film footage of his stars’ previous roles, or even allegorizing his own
autobiography, Soderbergh’s authorial signature could ultimately be said to be a
consistent attempt to locate the meanings of his films in contexts that exclude

227
McCarthy, http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117918279.html?categoryid=31&cs=1&p=0.

231
authorship. So too with the Dogma movement: here is an attempt not only to achieve
publicity, or to make different films, but also to change the discourse around a group
of films, to affect and influence the ways in which they are read. The films of von
Trier and Vinterberg, for example, are rarely considered meaningful as ‘Danish’
cultural products; as much as the Dogma framers might deny the auteur theory, they
are also rejecting the nationalistic foreign film paradigms that require such exports
to, above all else, ‘speak’ or ‘perform’ their respective cultural identities.
If such Dogma productions as The Celebration (1998) and The Idiots (1998)
resist their traditionally assigned roles as ‘foreign films’, then so too does
Soderbergh’s output challenge the meaningfully ‘American’ nature of the
‘independent spirit’ that is said to consistently fuel them. As Dave Kehr noted in
covering Out of Sight for Film Comment:

if there is any rebelliousness in [the film], it lies in some strange
second degree: here is an independent filmmaker rebelling against
independent filmmaking. At a time when artistic integrity is measured
by how ‘personal’ – how confessional, how stylistically eccentric – a
movie is, Soderbergh has chosen to take refuge in the impersonal
formulas and passed-along fictions of Hollywood’s past ... here is
something that seems of crucial benefit to an American film industry
divided by the self-indulgence of the ‘‘indie’’s on the one hand and
the willed emptiness of studio films on the other.
228

What Soderbergh and the Dogma filmmakers have in common, then, is an
essential interest in positioning their work in opposition to a dominant mode of
filmmaking, be it literally Hollywood, or merely a ‘superficial’ attempt to imitate its

228
Kehr, 44.

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styles and conventions (so often found in the successful foreign films released by
Miramax, such as the sentimental comedy Life is Beautiful, 1997). When we read a
Soderbergh film as a Soderbergh film, then, the act of doing so is no longer
auteurism in the conventional sense, but instead a recognition of cultural markers of
quality, innovation and experimentation that are largely absent from more traditional
studio films. However, Soderbergh is also rejecting the label of independence, as
Kehr’s account suggests. Indeed, when interviewed for a separate Film Comment
profile, the director provocatively remarked that “when a film like Chris Nolan’s
Memento cannot get picked up [it struggled to find a distributor for years after being
made], to me independent film is over. It’s dead.”
229
The success now lies in
confounding the familiar terms of critical debate – independence is dead, long live
textual analysis, Cultural Studies, and so on.
To accomplish all of this, Soderbergh has expanded upon the notions of the
director as himself an active auteurist, rather than simply an auteur, that have been
earlier identified as integral to Quentin Tarantino’s success. Much as Tarantino has
made part of the pleasure to be found in his work an engagement with auteurist
readings of his own favorite filmmakers, so too was Soderbergh’s career rebirth
predicated upon an extended auteurist study of Richard Lester’s career. Part of what
is occurring in this shift is an apparent reclamation of the auteur theory by the
auteurs themselves. Again – a public, visible performance of that which was
formerly ivory tower academic work. It is important to recall, for example, that as

229
Smith, 31.

233
originally conceived the auteur theory was not proposed by an academic elite
standing at a distant remove from film practice; rather, it was an expression of the
New Wave directors who also wrote for Cahiers du Cinema. The study of cinema has
always been defined by this uneasy co-existence with the ‘proper’ work of serious
literary/historical academia – on the one hand, wanting to be seen as worthy, while
on the other, able to productively energize its subject’s inherent hybridity to engage
with a plethora of theoretical approaches.
230
If the initial moment of the authorship discourse was one in which French
filmmakers of the 1960s read their own modernist theoretical perspectives into the
classical film texts of Hawks and Hitchcock, perhaps the present moment of
authorship is one that encourages filmmakers to rail against the commodification of
filmic meaning in a post-national, postmodern industry by reinscribing their work
with the modernism utilized by the earlier era’s directors. This return to modes of
auteurist thought on the part of present day auteurs is not necessarily a regressive
move; instead, it is a useful way to negotiate the shifting cultural status of film texts
over the past decades. In his survey of American avant-garde film movements of the
1960s, Allegories of Cinema, David James puts the matter in perspective by
suggesting that “the most convenient point of entry into these alternative cinemas is
through the concept of authorship.”
231
This reduction of the concept of authorship to

230
Jonathan Auerbach’s essay “American Studies and Film: Blindness and Insight” offers a useful
depiction of the field’s deliberate ignorance of the medium during its formative years, citing film’s
pop cultural status as counter-productive to its grasp for acknowledgment within the academy. Now,
with film as a medium well-suited to New Americanist and Cultural Studies work, it threatens to
undermine the field’s earlier traditions.
231
James, 28.

234
merely a ‘convenient point of entry’ suggests the means by which filmmakers such
as Tarantino and Soderbergh are able to utilize such a traditional theoretical
framework in order to ensure that their films are read in ways that reject the
traditional perspectives of their immediate context. For James, what is perhaps most
characteristic of the films he calls alternative is their own resistance to such
classifications; as he puts it, “the ideals of the sixties were always tempered by their
opposites ... if the alternative cinemas were typically powered by obsessions with
authenticity, they were as often stereotyped by the perspectives allowed by the rear-
view mirror of irony.”
232

Such conflict between irony and authenticity, between the self-reflexive film
reference and the desire for ‘real’ content, between the auteur as a mediated
construct of marketing and a genuine source of creative work continues to inform the
work of Jarmusch, Tarantino, and Soderbergh; clearly, however, the nineties are not
the sixties. At the conclusion of Allegories of Cinema, James decisively underlines
the “termination of film’s social agency” by the end of the decade.
233
At stake in the
current moment, then, is the possibility of any meaning at all, as opposed to
meanings that call for any specific political action. When Soderbergh calls for the
death of ‘independence’ as a label, the gesture is simultaneously valid as well as a
reminder of his own power as a participant in the inscription of that label with
meaning, of his presence as one who is not merely a producer of texts, but also able
to write film history from within. If the Hollywood industry is defined by the

232
James, 28.
233
James, 348.

235
constant process of absorbing the opposition personified by independent directors
into its fields of production, then the real work for what remains of ‘independence’
becomes a parallel, palimpsestic process of reinscription, in which the category’s
meaning is cast as a more fluid concept than simply a film’s source of funding.
It has been stressed on numerous occasions throughout these pages that there
is an increasing sense in which ‘independent’ now simply means ‘good’; the term is
taken to represent a collective expression of the current markers of ‘quality’ to be
found in Hollywood films. Here, independence is always destined to exist as
something that finally serves an ‘other’ against which it had previously been defined,
much as Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States repeatedly depicts labor and
social movements throughout American history as ultimately achieving little more
than slight adjustments to an enduring two-party system of social control. From this
perspective, one does not have to look far to find Hollywood products that display
elements of recent Soderbergh films to achieve what might be called a new ‘style of
quality’: the recent Veronica Guerin (2003), for example, in which Cate Blanchett
plays an aggressive journalist who disarms a largely male establishment with her
down-to-earth candor while investigating a drug story, is in many ways a hybrid of
both Erin Brockovich and Traffic. In addition to its narrative similarity to the former,
Veronica Guerin’s visual design is, much like the latter, aggressively color-coded:
dour and gray to depict urban slums, yet with bursts of pure red, to characterize
Guerin via her clothes and flashy sportscar.

236
By visibly setting such trends for others to follow, such directors as
Soderbergh and Tarantino find that their agency within the film industry rests on
their performativity as auteurs; their ability to then achieve a further function as
auteurists, that is, figures who themselves participate in what remains the most
visible mode of writing film history, suggests an attempt at independence from the
industry at the level of discourse itself. Or, if Soderbergh and Tarantino are no longer
meaningfully ‘independent’ artists in terms of their films’ funding or content, then
perhaps their independence is best measured in their use of studio power to support
other directors and films of their own choice. For example, Soderbergh’s Getting
Away With It both promotes Schizopolis and shows us how to read it: through the
career of Richard Lester, through Monty Python, through a period of creative activity
that appeared in the late 1960s. I have earlier suggested that it is in many ways
similar to Soderbergh’s own earlier film Kafka; Soderbergh’s agency, then, moves us
away from interpreting the auteur’s work and instead in the direction of following
the director’s own auteurist analysis. Similarly, Tarantino’s ‘Rolling Thunder’ both
releases obscure, forgotten exploitation films and reminds us to read the director’s
own films through the perspective of remembering such prior filmic artifacts.
Though in each case the director is able to exert discursive influence over the reading
of his films, it is notable that such acts are always simultaneously instances of self-
marketing. The current climate is one in which the ostensibly pure act of critical
auteurism and the inherently economic act of promotion are now hopelessly
interdependent. Given the post-9/11 furor over Ward Churchill and the popularity of

237
books such as The ProFessors, one must ask: how different is the role of the
contemporary academic? To what extent should we be more honest about our career
path’s requirement that we ‘perform’ ourselves? In a way, this is a question
implicitly asked by Polan’s ‘Auteur Desire’: if the work is about the academic’s will,
how much agency does an academic truly have?
Jonathan Rosenbaum remarks provocatively on this state of affairs in Movie
Wars: “I’d like to suggest that the passive behavior of this country’s critical
community inside both academia and the mainstream press has paved the way for an
unblocked proliferation of marketing schemes by an industry that only knows what it
has to sell.”
234
Rosenbaum reminds us here that any auteurist position is on some
level also an act of canon formation, in which certain figures are inevitably selected
at the expense of others. If ‘independent’ has now come to signify nothing so much
as quality, then those directors labeled as such by definition become part of a new
cinematic canon. The significance of academic ambivalence over the act of canon
formation, particularly as currently debated within the discipline of American
Studies, will be the focus of the next chapter. What is the meaning of a formerly
academic act now being publicly performed through the discourses of advertising,
marketing and promotion? Can this be anything but regressive? Whose progress is
potentially being made here? Equally a rich area for study as the figure of the auteur
is the nature of independence as a contemporary discourse through which America
engages with its own construction of taste values, struggling to reconcile its popular

234
Rosenbaum, 16.

238
mass culture and its highbrow, ‘elitist’ counterparts. The resolution of the dialectic
offered in this pages, and thus the ultimate nature of Soderbergh’s synthesis,
combining as it does the auteur and the auteurist, academic canon formation and
Hollywood film marketing, cannot fully be assessed without a direct consideration of
this parallel discourse.

239
CHAPTER FIVE
FILMIC INDEPENDENCE THROUGH THE LENS OF AMERICAN
STUDIES

In his passionate and inspiring collection of essays, From Walden Pond to
Jurassic Park: Activism, Culture and American Studies, Paul Lauter trenchantly
proposes that,
where once from hour to hour the academy did ripe and ripe, now, as
the squalor of most campuses signifies, it rots and rots … [there are
those] for whom universities meant little more than a stamp on one’s
life passport … for whom the flickering screen, the boom box, the
Boss and the Dead … defined the shape of culture … There arose, to
be brief and academic, alternative sources of cultural authority from
the entertainment industry and the media more generally. Their
endorsement by the young found a significant echo within the
academy particularly … among those practicing what is now called
‘Cultural Studies.’
235

This relationship between sources of cultural authority suggests that the line between
the academy and the entertainment industry has now been hopelessly blurred –
indeed, this is now itself a visible debate, seen in numerous newspaper articles
inquring as to how the high-tech, internet generation should be kept engaged in the
classroom.
236
Given this blur between media systems and academia, what is the
present stability of ‘America’ as a concept? Is this boundary blurring itself
responsible for a decay in the meaning of the term? Or is the blur simply an
inevitable result of globalism, interdependence, and multinational conglomerates?

235
Lauter, 186 (his emphasis).
236
For example, Scott Carlson’s “The Net Generation Goes To College,” The Chronicle of Higher
Education. Volume 52, Issue 7, Page A34 http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i07/07a03401.htm. Issues of
new technology and their relationship to academic discourses will be addressed at length in the next
chapter.

240
Finally, does the loss of academic cultural authority itself lead to an ironic, cynical
engagement with formerly pure, idealized concepts? Many independent films will
use ironic modes of address to depict disempowered, ‘othered’ citizens, questioning
their own authority – even ability – to do so: Native Americans, the disabled, those
of little economic means, as we shall observe in such films as Gummo and Tigrero:
A Film That Was Never Made. Does the crisis in academic authority extend to a
crisis in the real? Such are the questions I will explore in this chapter.
Lauter’s assessment allows one to contextualize the primary distinction
between the field of contemporary ‘indie’ cinema emphasized in these pages and
those features made (semi-)independently of the Hollywood system during the ‘pre-
Sundance’ decades. That is to say, the body of independent films collectively
celebrated through the 1980s and 1990s represent a substantial effort to create and
promote a canon of important and meaningfully American art works – indeed, a new
cinematic American Renaissance – by an institutional body that is in no way
connected to discourses of academic power. Concurrent with this act of canon
formation by an alternative source of cultural authority appeared a still-raging debate
within the traditional sources of such authority, the academy itself. In this chapter I
will directly examine the evolving meaning of the discourse of American
Independent Film as it relates to, is determined by, and at times proposes even to
replace, the internecine conflicts within the field of American Studies during the
post-Vietnam, postmodern, post-Sundance era.

241
I propose that the two events are closely related – as the academy’s cultural
power fades, the esteem of the American independent film intensifies. As American
studies struggles to reconcile its conservative and humanist trends, the ‘indie’ film
increasingly promotes itself as a cultural forum that freely synthesizes both trends, at
times showcasing simple pastoralism, while at others ironically deconstructing it,
and prefacing its artifice. How does the question of an independent American cinema
embody and complicate Lauter’s vision of the contemporary media landscape?
Any attempt to do so must first recognize, of course, that neither
‘Independent Film’ nor ‘American Studies’ is a stable, monolithic signifier; indeed,
each is a hotly contested term, both by their observers as well as their practitioners.
Just as the independent status of such films is variously determined by issues of
funding, final cut, or vague notions of ‘quality’, so too is American Studies internally
divided. At the most basic level it is a field that is split along a currently familiar and
to some even tiresome ‘Red State-Blue State’ schism, the former represented by
conservative thinkers who seek to preserve an essentially American body of
literature, the latter by those struggling to define the precise parameters of the
country’s exceptional nature while reconciling that nature with its role in an
increasingly globalised, migratory and interdependent world. The result of such
internal debate is a fascinating body of meta-critical academic work; as Lauter notes,
“the central concerns of American studies promote a kind of intense self-scrutiny

242
among its practitioners, an effort to situate one’s own practice and assumptions
within American institutional life.”
237
A crucial example of this self-scrutiny, as well as a narrativizing of this
schism’s appearance, are deliberately visible throughout William Spanos’ The Errant
Art of Moby Dick: The Canon, The Cold War, and the Struggle for American
Studies. Here, Spanos argues against the discipline’s dominant interpretation of
Melville’s novel throughout its ‘New Americanist’
238
period, during and after the
second World War. Spanos skillfully reveals the ease with which such New
Americanists were able to transform a difficult, ambiguous novel into one that
clearly, definitively embodied a timely conflict between youthful American
Democracy (in the form of its narrator, Ishmael), and the Old World Totalitarianism
of Hitler and Stalin (via an obsessively violent Ahab). Spanos’ book is
simultaneously a (counter-)reading of Moby Dick and an investigation of the role
academia can play in supporting a nation’s ideological goals while claiming for itself
an idealistic, exempt status. Spanos opens himself up to potential criticism, however,
when he asserts that his own interpretation of the novel reveals it to anticipate not
World War II but Vietnam, as well as the effort during subsequent Republican
administrations to overcome the nation’s insecurity (i.e. the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’
that would go on to be ‘cured’ by two Gulf Wars): “it is Moby Dick, more clearly

237
Lauter, 15.
238
Debate rages within American Studies as to the very definition of this ‘New Americanist’
approach. Writers such as Spanos, Lauter and Guillory may vary in their precise use of terms, but
each is ultimately interested in a dialectical synthesis of the best offered by opposing approaches
within the discipline.

243
than any other text in the American literary tradition, that speaks the awful truth of
the American intervention in Vietnam.”
239

How is Spanos able to justify this, given his withering attacks on the New
Americanists’ use of the novel to address their own historical contexts and political
goals? His primary defense is the intensity of his own self-scrutiny: “The recent
history of Melville criticism … [is] a history reflecting, not, as it is assumed,
impartial debate over the aesthetic greatness of Melville’s fiction, but a struggle to
appropriate it for present ideological purposes. And my text is no exception,
although what distinguishes [it] … is its interestedness: my recognition that my
reading is an imaginary.”
240
The strength, and historical significance, of The Errant
Art of Moby Dick lies, then, in its dual pull, textually: Spanos is equally engaged
with proposing his own reading of the novel, as did F.O. Mathiessen and R.W.B.
Lewis before him, as he is with historicizing and even defending his use of high
theorists such as Heidegger, Nietzsche and Foucault in doing so. Indeed, one can
easily be challenged by the book’s dense, allusive style and assumption of extensive
prior awareness of multiple fields. By the time of Spanos’ work, however, theory
itself is at stake; The Errant Art of Moby Dick represents an almost defiant defense of
such approaches from attack by a “campaign that has culminated in the identification
of theory at large with ‘political correctness’ by such politically conservative
intellectuals as Roger Kimball and Dinesh D’Souza.”
241

239
Spanos, 183.
240
Spanos, 251.
241
Spanos, 4.

244

Such writers as Spanos and Lauter, then, position themselves as counter to a
reactionary trend
242
that seeks to reset the terms of American literary criticism to
those which were dominant during the Cold War era – terms which first appeared
after WWII and lost favor after the Vietnam War. I specify such seemingly self-
evident parameters here to emphasize the distinguishing feature of American history
during this ‘80s-‘90s era of both ‘indie’ Film Renaissance and internal American
Studies debate – it is simultaneously a post-Vietnam period as well as a renewed
Cold War. The fundamental fact of this context helps to differentiate the independent
cinema of, for example, Jarmusch and Tarantino from that of Fuller and Ray. When
the latter made their independent pictures, the film industry had not yet fully
established itself as an alternative source of cultural authority. (Indeed, Lauter quotes
a former professor of his who swiftly articulated the difference between kitsch and
culture at a lecture in the early 1950s by referring to “the differences between
Columbia Pictures and Columbia University.”
243
) By the time of Spanos’ passionate
defense of theory, the Sundance festival had established itself as both a source of
cultural authority and a source of movies that could primarily be promoted by that
newfound cultural authority.
Let Spanos have his theory, the ‘indie’ producers and distributors implicitly
posited: American culture shall still have its Myth-Image-Symbol school of textual
analysis, and classes are regularly held at your local art house theatre. Or, to be more

242
Spanos specifically cites in this regard a ‘recuperative initiative’ at Harvard in 1978 to emphasize
tradition over theory, as well as the approach taken by such political forces as the National
Endowment for the Humanities during the Reagan presidency (Spanos, 28).
243
Lauter, 100.

245
precise, this process is seen in the mainstream media reviews of those films,
interviews with their filmmakers, and depiction of the Sundance festival. The films
of the post-Vietnam, post-New Hollywood moment are pleasingly diverse; more
importantly, the most engaging and significant of such texts reflect a playful
postmodernity that evokes the crucial interestedness that Spanos uses to defend his
reading of Melville. The importance of the 1980s as simultaneously a post-Vietnam
and a renewed Cold War period can easily be seen, for example, in Jarmusch’s first
feature, Permanent Vacation; many of the film’s narrative and visual signifiers seem
calculated to reflect an irresoluble tension between such cultural and political
perspectives. The ‘protagonist’, Parker, appears to have retreated into 1950s Beatnik
culture to reflect rebelliousness, for example, but at the same time suffers from the
trauma of repressed memories as he refers vaguely to losing his home in a past war
“with the Chinese.”
One can easily imagine Permanent Vacation being read as passionately, and
as multiply, as Moby Dick has been; to some, the film might appear to satirize its
apparent hero’s rebellion against ‘conformity’, suggesting a conservative rejection of
an ineffectual 60s counterculture. To others, Parker’s faulty memory might be an
incisive condemnation of the already visible forgetting of the nation’s errancy in
Vietnam. A third option, of course, is to suggest that the film is on some level
acknowledging the complexity of such a cultural debate, perhaps even anticipating
and urgently encouraging such a debate within visible culture. Again, Spanos’
reading of Moby Dick is useful here:

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[the novel] renders Ishmael’s narrative neither a story that internalizes
and reconciles oppositional forces (as in tragedy or romance) nor a
story about individual salvation in the face of an utterly indifferent
universe, but a social text that resonates, however unevenly
actualized, all across the indissoluble continuum of being … As a
social text, it anticipates the difficult post-humanist search for a
collective sociopolitical counter hegemonic project.
244

Spanos’ conception of the novel as ‘social text’ emphasizes the importance of
viewing works of art as active participants in the work of culture, rather than objects
that wait passively for empowered critics to invest them with official meaning. At
the same time, it is a conveniently self-serving interpretation of a classic text to
conform to the will of the critic, to support his theoretical, social, and academic
goals. Nevertheless, one is able to recognize Permanent Vacation as both a useful
example of one such social text, struggling to force systems of cultural authority
beyond their present terms of debate, as well as a ‘lost’ film, one that was barely
seen, released, or discussed by contemporaneous film critics. It is significant that
both Moby Dick and Permanent Vacation are works that were almost completely
ignored upon their initial appearance; the former was granted permission to ‘mean’
by the arbiters of cultural authority when it suited their ideological requirements,
while the latter remains, effectively, lost today. The missing status of Jarmusch’s
first feature (a quality emphasized by his next film, Stranger Than Paradise, winning
the Camera d’Or – the award for best first film – at the Cannes film festival) itself
suggests that it was marginalized by a critical community not quite able to read it

244
Spanos, 148 (my emphasis)

247
according to its own interests: too self-satirizing of its own challenges to hegemony,
too counter culturally nostalgic during the rise of a Yuppie era.
Though it is heretical to some, and admittedly extreme, to compare Melville’s
masterpiece to an early Jarmusch work, the relationship between the two texts
reveals a great deal about the current operations of cultural power, both inside and
outside the academy.
245
Moby Dick and Permanent Vacation alike are at first
potentially confusing works, and thus easy to dismiss; next, they are revealed to be
works of complex binary oppositions, exploring and resolving fundamental
American cultural conflicts; finally, they are works that are able to transcend such
reductive binaries, expressing the plenitude of the paradoxical American character by
finding a simultaneous truth within opposite values and concepts. In the case of
Moby Dick, all these stages are well chronicled by Spanos; with that of Permanent
Vacation, however, the second and third stages themselves occur presently, within
the pages of this dissertation.
The explanation for such indifference toward the film lies in the relationship
between the Hollywood film industry and the academic field of Cinema Studies, with
their contemporary distinctions echoing those that currently define internal American
Studies debates. As Cinema Studies increasingly finds itself drawn to methodologies
that are traditionally considered humane, progressive and leftist, Hollywood’s

245
For example, consider my use of the word ‘one’ throughout this text when I really mean ‘I’ (“one
is able to recognize Permanent Vacation as…”). My thesis here requires me to produce work that is
equally self-aware as Spanos’; it is in that spirit that I acknowledge the possibility that I am forcing
Permanent Vacation here to conform to my ideas, as an extension of my critical will. If the reader
would prefer the film speak for itself, he or she is of course always able to put down this dissertation
and simply go watch it.

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promotional machinery (including that which promotes American independent film)
finds itself left to occupy the equivalent of a conservative American Studies,
categorizing works as great artistic achievements, canonizing the auteurs that made
them, and establishing official records of their value and meaning. This source of
alternate cultural power reduces all textual value to the demands of the marketplace,
evoking Jonathan Rosenbaum’s incisive comment on the tautology of contemporary
‘film critics’: they are simply those who get paid to write film criticism, regardless of
background or training.
246
A revealing example of film marketing’s disregard for the previous standards
of distinction met by the academy’s arbiters of cultural capital appeared in the Los
Angeles Times on July 3, 1999. Sony Pictures Classics, a subsidiary of the Japanese
technology conglomerate Sony Corporation, published a large advertisement in the
Calendar section, designed to resemble a faded parchment scroll. A headline at the
top of the scroll read, “The Declaration of Independent Film,” and was followed by
this brief text: “When in the course of motion picture history, it becomes necessary
for all people to attend quality movies, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that
Sony Pictures Classics films are endowed by their creators with certain inalienable
ideas, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Appearing
on the ‘parchment’ below this preamble are separate ads for two contemporaneous
Sony releases. One was David Mamet’s adaptation of The Winslow Boy (1999); the
other, German director Tom Tykwer’s cult hit Run Lola Run (1999).

246
Rosenbaum, 57.

249
An immediately apparent irony presents itself in the latter case, given the
film’s obviously ‘foreign’ language and stars; however, even Mamet’s film leaves
the reader to question its inclusion on the parchment. Adapted from a play by the
English dramatist Terence Rattigan, Mamet’s film is also a remake of a prior British
version, filmed in 1948. Moreover, much of the self-contained Winslow Boy ad
seems to sell the picture around its familiar presence as an example of what is often
called English ‘Heritage’ Cinema, a tradition of quality that relies on canonized
literary sources, a setting of British class conflict, acclaimed actors such as Nigel
Hawthorne and Jeremy Northam, and, of course, the previous successes of many
Merchant Ivory productions. The result is an advertisement that seems designed
primarily to incite American patriotism, playfully evoking Jefferson’s words in the
original Declaration of Independence, while simultaneously reducing films of
complex national origin to expressions of an essentially American culture (Mamet is
a hardboiled man of American letters, while Run Lola Run could easily be said to
owe a heavy debt to 1980s and ‘90s U.S. Action cinema). At the same time, one may
also laugh at the thought of such patriotism being yoked to three of the country’s
most notable historical foes: no one alive is likely to care about an ‘English’ film
being promoted in an advertisement that evokes ‘memories’ of the Revolutionary
War, but it is conceivable that some readers bristled at two former Axis powers,
Germany and Japan, being substantially represented here on July 4
th
weekend.
What to make of all this? At the most optimistic level there is the possibility
that one might read the ad as playful satire, emphasizing the lack of connection

250

between these two conceptions of American ‘independence’; from such a position, a
reader might go on to take pleasure in the joke of representing as ‘meaningfully
American’ two films that seem unlikely to fit the definition. On the other hand, it is
also possible to read the ad as an expansion of an American cultural imperialism, one
which raids the works of other nations and presents their acquired treasures as its
own. This is the reading that would suggest Run Lola Run is indeed an ‘American’
film, given its emphasis upon youthful characters playing out a video-game-like
action scenario
247
; here is the sort of international cinema that is acceptable within
mainstream American culture. Rather than support films that convey the specificity
of their local and historical national contexts, this Declaration of Independence
instead protects those that confirm for Americans what they believe they already
know and seemingly want to hear – that Western capitalism is a natural cultural end
point and that other countries are simply engaged in a lengthy process of catching up.
Finally, a fully pessimistic reading of the advertisement would note that American
independence has itself now become a tool for a transnational network of global
capital (the ad was run, after all, by a division of the Japanese conglomerate Sony);
any attempt to explore culture according to categories of nationality here becomes a
kind of naïve nostalgia.
Herein lies the American studies dilemma in the face of this present field of
filmic independence: how to define its goals in a climate that has already moved past

247
Though even this is hotly contested: Henry Jenkins makes the point of Japanese videogame
production as a political colonizer of US consciousness in “Ninetendo and New World Travel
Writing: A Dialogue.”

251
them, and how to instruct its students to read culture when such alternate modes of
cultural authority already present themselves as multiply determined, available for
any number of potentially valid readings? How to realistically acknowledge the
presence of a postmodernism that so destabilizes the work of academia, while also
attempting to preserve a field of study that itself often seems to be an endangered
national resource?
I presented this ‘Declaration of Independent Film’ as an indicator of the split
between the Hollywood film industry and the academic field of cinema studies, itself
roughly analogous to conservative and progressive trends within the field of
American Studies: though there are certainly postmodern ironies to be read in the ad,
it is also a simple expression of cultural authority, instructing its reader to accept its
wares as ‘good’ because it has definitively placed them within the canon of
American independent films. If there is some ambiguity as to the meaning of this
category, the power remains in the hands of the studio’s marketing department to
manipulate this meaning as needed; similarly, the only apparent potential forum for
an against-the-grain reading of the ad remains within such pages as this (obscure,
marginalized) piece of academic analysis.
Indeed, one can easily imagine a practitioner of more recent humanist work
in American Studies acknowledging a present debt to Cultural Studies when
exploring the meanings within the ad: ultimately, despite my own list of possible
positions from which to view it, the only way to get a true sense of how it was
understood by Los Angeles Times readers would be to conduct a research study in

252
which as many of their responses as possible are quantified. Of course, there is a
conflict to be found even here: much as I have presented my own list of straight and
ironic responses to this ‘Declaration’ from the position of academic authority, so too
does that authority speak for the hypothetical survey respondents, interpreting their
reactions according to a methodology that, effectively, pre-screens their words.
Be they located within academic schools of Americanist thought or varying
modes of film appreciation, there is a disparity between the two modes of cultural
authority. In each case one can recognize both the top-down model, in which
professors/marketers instruct the masses as to the cultural worth of texts, and the
bottom-up model, in which Cultural Studies/ticket sales are hailed as neutral,
democratic barometers of ‘the people’s will.’ Furthermore, in all cases there is what
Spanos would call an inescapable ‘interestedness.’ One can easily imagine, for
example, the president of Sony Pictures Classics arguing that their approach leaves
the final arbitration in the hands of consumers, who are free to attend any film they
wish; it is their inherently democratic form of box office ‘voting’ that ultimately
determines the worth of a motion picture, leaving the industry to merely react to the
judgments of the marketplace, and then fund and advertise future product
accordingly. Here is a system, quite simply, that works. Such statements are
themselves echoed within reactionary works of American Studies (albeit with a
notable inversion): it is the role of the academy to determine and disseminate the
aesthetic value of its object of study, and it is the subsequent role of the student to

253
place their faith in the experience of their trained professors, read what they have
been given, and thus achieve a standardized cultural literacy.
Though one system presents itself as motivated entirely by the freedom of
consumer choice, and the other by the finality of academic authority, the end result is
strikingly similar: a closed system of canon formation in which valuable objects that
somehow elude the rigid terms of the system are easily excluded and dismissed as
valueless. In the case of independent film promotion, such excluded texts are either
those that are not currently making money at the box office or those that do not
appear as if they will make money at the box office. Here we see a potential for what
de Tocqueville called the ‘tyranny of the majority’, in which the tastes of the masses
can result in a constricting conformity, all the more when applied to such a diffuse
and intimidating field as the interpretation of complex works of art.
In the case of the academy, conversely, the potential is always present for the
tyranny of the professors: the implication here being that the preservation of the
system which maintains their power is a goal that always precedes any interest they
have in the study of literature. To admit to their canon works which potentially
challenge the parameters of that canon is to threaten the very apparatus that granted
their power in the first place. If one were to assign, for example, Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness in an American Literature class, however much it might have to
say about the sources and progenitors of United States imperialism or a novel by an
obscure African-American novelist that itself bears the marks of that imperialism,

254
one would potentially present an over-riding challenge to the meaning of, perhaps
even the possibility for a true existence of, a purely ‘American’ literature.
Again, one may be compelled to point out that the Sony ‘Declaration of
Independent Film’ is enacting the opposite maneuver, destabilizing the terms of an
American body of work, empowering readers to articulate their own definitions of
the ‘Americanness’ of Run Lola Run or The Winslow Boy, or even to determine the
relative worth of American Independent Film as an aesthetic category. One might
further argue that the films offered here for consumption by Sony Pictures
themselves represent an impressive step towards diversity, in which films that to
some might appear foreign are presented as equally accessible to audiences as any
crowd-pleasing Hollywood product. As with the ad’s many potential ironies,
however, so too with the variable means with which one approaches viewing the two
films: ultimately, one’s position taking in either case is rendered largely symbolic by
the financial bottom line of the ‘indie’ film marketing. One may appreciate or ignore
the irony of patriotically attending Run Lola Run on July 4
th
; the ticket price, in
either case, remains the same.
A similar point can be found in John Guillory’s essay “Canon, Syllabus, List:
A Note on the Pedagogic Imaginary.” Guillory, a figure often cited by Jonathan
Rosenbaum when defending the need for film canons and authoritative film
criticism, attempts a form of reconciliation between the goals of traditional American
studies and the politics of its more humanist contemporary practitioners. “I am
offering a criticism from the left,” he writes,

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of a liberal consensus whose name is ‘pluralism’ and whose
pedagogic agenda has been exhausted in the gesture of opening the
canon. We can indicate briefly what is at stake in the difference
between a Left critique and a liberal critique by insisting upon the
incommensurability of the terms race, class and gender … It is by no
means apparent that the representation of blacks in the literary canon
has quite the same social effects as the representation of women,
precisely because the representation of blacks in the university is not
commensurable with the representation of women.
248

Guillory succinctly articulates here the difficult ideological position of one who
desires to simultaneously preserve his empowered position as an arbiter of cultural
tastes while also reflecting the ideals of the political left, and his conclusion reflects a
pragmatism that is all the more revealing for its rarity. Too often, his article suggests,
we confuse the real social world with the symbolic cultural world, expecting, to mix
political metaphors terribly, that shifts in the latter’s superstructure will somehow
‘trickle down’ to the former’s base.
Guillory’s argument thus comes to represent a leftist perspective that
distances itself from an alarmist political correctness, unfairly and deliberately
associated with the left, that attains media attention for a perceived hysteria but
achieves few actual social gains. As he puts it, “What is excluded from the syllabus
is not excluded in the same way that an individual is excluded as the member of a
social minority, socially disenfranchised.”
249
Moreover: “The ‘open’ canon can lay
claim to representational validity in the experience not of ‘women’ or ‘blacks’ but of
women or blacks in the university – which is not itself a representative place.”
250

248
Guillory, 162 (his emphasis).
249
Guillory, 172 (his emphasis)
250
Guillory, 176 (his emphasis)

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Throughout the essay, one can recognize a sense of exhaustion from the cultural
misapplication of anger towards a symbolic realm at the expense of any interest in
more obvious, tangible targets. Guillory concludes that it would be better to study
not an abstract canon, or even a specific syllabus for a university class, but rather the
admissions and hiring policies of the university itself.
As much as Guillory may find himself frustrated at a public discourse that
seeks a gender- and ethnically-balanced canon without considering the potentially
counter-productive effects of doing so (e.g. a misguided sense in which books
‘represent’ ethnic groups, a decline in the valuing of quality and art over a vague
diversity), he is also concerned with the role of theory within the academy. Guillory
refers to a similar tradition as that referred to by Spanos in The Errant Art of Moby
Dick, in which European post-structural writers interrogate the value of the author as
a perspective from which to study literature. Guillory specifically cites two men in
particular:
The criticism of such notions [of the author as pure source of textual
‘greatness’] by Barthes, Foucault and others was in fact the theoretical
requisite for rejecting the category of the ‘classics’ as obsolete. The
author returns in the later critique of the canon, not as the genius but
as the representative of a social identity, an identity that explains, just
as genius did, why the texts the author produces are, or are not,
canonical.
251

The differences between Spanos and Guillory, however, are clear: Guillory lays the
blame for this state of affairs at theory’s doorstep, while Spanos seeks to redeem

251
Guillory, 160-1 (his emphasis)

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theory and integrate it within a humanist, politically progressive, and crucially, self-
interrogating argument.
Thus, it is easy to predict that Guillory would reflexively attack the Sony
‘Declaration of Independent Film’ advertisement as itself encouraging a lazy
acceptance of declining notions of tradition: if Run Lola Run and The Winslow Boy
are read as American, his essay implies, then they are not only being misread but the
very concept of American Independent cinema is being drained of meaning.
Moreover, it is a lapse of academic interest in protecting the concept of the canon,
and of inherent textual quality, that allows the media to assume the role of an
alternate source of cultural authority in the first place, appearing to bring academic
work to the masses (by flattering them with notions of high art and cultural
respectability) without any interest in traditions or disciplines whatsoever. Or: the
academic work it brings to the masses is hopelessly out-dated and over-simplified.
Spanos is just as aware as Guillory of the role theory has played in the
delegitimization of canon formation; however, his work argues for an integration of
the two so that a renewed sense of the canon’s value is not lost to a conservative
Americanist school that has recently come to power. Guillory seeks to dismiss
notions of this debate as one of any immediate political significance, while Spanos’
‘redemption’ of theory is inextricable from his arguing for the social importance of
the debate. Both writers would recognize the Sony ‘Declaration’ as part of an
ongoing erosion of the academy’s cultural authority; it is only Spanos, however, who
provides a potential means to theorize the ad as simultaneously the historical result

258

of post-Vietnam cultural shifts and a postmodern signifier within our present media
society.
Though the Sony spot is especially revealing in its many meanings and
ironies, a more publicly visible instance of the blurred boundary between film
promotion and ‘real’ political debate is perhaps more immediately useful: 2004’s
pointed election year contrast, throughout the mainstream media, between Mel
Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Through
their repeated invocation by political columnists both in print and on major cable
networks, each film was gradually reduced to an ideological touchstone, an almost
synechdochic signifier of the red or blue state politics they were interpreted as
representing. The narrative of each film’s surprising box office success quickly
became one in which the Hollywood industry had been unable to cater to audience
tastes; instead, it was the field of independent American cinema that had enabled
each filmmaker to speak directly to the populace.
Indeed, each film was notable for the extent to which it should have been able
to attract the studios’ interest: Gibson has long been one of the industry’s most
popular male actors
252
and was a previous Academy Award-winning director for
Braveheart (1995). Similarly, Moore had won the Best Documentary Oscar for
Bowling for Columbine (2002), thus apparently ensuring heightened bidding for his
next film; however, Fahrenheit 9/11 became entangled within a highly public
dispute between the Weinstein brothers at Miramax (who had funded the film) and

252
Or had been until his recent trouble with the law…

259

top Disney executives (who were then Miramax’s financial backers). In both cases,
the studio system was exposed as a location of disinterest in topicality or urgent
American issues,
253
instead allowing the independent arena to usurp this role. These
stories were not only significant in terms of Mel Gibson’s and Michael Moore’s
abilities to get their unlikely films made and then to see those films go on to achieve
unprecedented financial success.
Crucially, they were political success stories as well. For months leading up
to the 2004 U.S. election, pundits and op-ed writers frequently mused aloud as to
whether or not Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 would be the first film to ‘unseat a
President’, given its impassioned depiction of President Bush as an ineffective
buffoon, caught in a conspiratorial relationship between the United States
government and Arab oil concerns. Though Bush was, of course, re-elected, the
result was an appearance of the American independent film movement as one that
was able to respond to, perhaps even predict, the timely issues facing the nation:
however one may have voted, this cine-narrative, at least, had a happy ending, one in
which ‘‘indie’’ film is alive and well, more relevant than ever before.
But is this story accurate, and what is the level of truth behind it? The
contrast between The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11 was typically

253
This point of view was emphasized by the big studio summer release that year, of the Manchurian
Candidate remake, which seemed designed to capitalize on the season’s political conventions; one
could go so far as to suggest that all three films in question are conspiracy narratives to some degree,
and that it is notable that Hollywood’s conspiracy remake was the one that least connected with the
public at the box office. Fredric Jameson’s The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the
World System argues at length for the link between the conspiracy film and the postmodern
relationship between cinema, global power and our ability to engage with each as a totalizing
discourse.

260
represented as symptomatic of an extreme political and cultural divide across the
nation, with the former appealing primarily to conservative Christians throughout the
heartland, and the latter targeting an educated liberal elite that resides in large urban
centers along the coasts. What if this divide did not exist? What would the success of
these two films represent then? If it were indeed the case that no such divide existed,
one could feasibly conclude that each film was instead granted meaning by a
pervasive media discourse that placed them within a familiar narrative trope, and that
ultimately, despite their apparent ‘radicalism’, they became disempowered texts. The
familiar narrative trope of the independent auteur, simultaneously artist and
entrepreneur, betting on a personal long shot against incredible odds, is in many
ways the quintessence of the American Dream, and was consistently visible
throughout the promotion of each film. Ultimately, in the absence of a genuine
culture war, each film would thus become ‘about’ little more than their own
phenomenal success.
To ask such a question, about the veracity of a current American culture war,
is in some ways inherently to threaten sources of cultural power, both academic and
media-based. This is due in part to the fact that, in order to effectively answer such a
question, one is forced to embrace the sorts of long-range statistical studies that are
so common to practitioners of Cultural Studies and so threatening to those who
instead engage in more traditional forms of reactionary scholarship. Also, to attempt
to consider the question of the culture war’s status is to itself engage in the current
trend within an increasingly interdisciplinary American Studies to investigate the

261
political meanings of United States cultures from simultaneously textual and
sociological positions. The implication of such work is that the existing power
structures of cultural authority have previously informed the public of the cultural
‘truths’ they have chosen to disseminate (based on little more than the tautology of
their proclamations’ self-worth), rather than actually listening to the democracy at
their door and responding to the actuality of its citizens’ cultural choices. Finally,
one must acknowledge the extent to which, in its attempts to investigate the
relationship between mass culture and its political contexts, the culture war has
attained a genuine, ‘real’ status within the academy, but is consistently mis-
represented, dumbed-down, and rendered in hysterical, ‘fantastic’ fashion by public
media accounts of it.
Morris P. Fiorina, in his study Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized
America, combines extensive statistical research with insightful media analysis to
suggest that the apparent divide which gives meaning to the successes of The
Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11 is indeed largely illusory. Though he is
not directly interested in the role of academia in this state of affairs, Fiorina speaks
passionately about the lapsed responsibilities of the mainstream press in representing
such political material to the American public:
Despite pious pronouncements about the role of the media as the
guardian of democracy, the media consist largely of profit-sector
enterprises that will continue to behave as such. That means an
emphasis on differences among Americans rather than commonalities.
The commercial success of the newspapers and news shows depends
on good story lines, and conflict is a good story line. ‘Americans
agree on core values’ is not a good lead for the evening news. A red
and blue battleground over which the Democrats and Republicans

262

wage war is a news frame that fits the selection principles of the news
industry.
254

In many ways, the value of Spanos’ and Guillory’s work lies in their desire to expose
similar operations within the academic world and, in the process, resolve them; each
offers a productively centrist attempt to reconcile progressive humanist academic
work (often reductively identified with ‘the left’) with the concept of cultural value
(evoking the moral certainty typically invoked by ‘the right’). Earlier, I drew a
parallel between the elite academic work of American Studies and the more public
discourse of auteur celebration by comparing the words of Thoreau to those of
Jarmusch, respectively. The similarity between the two sets of quotations reminds
one of what is currently at stake – not merely the meaning of the American
Independent film(maker) but the role of academia itself in having power to shape
that meaning.
Similarly, it is ironic that both Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Passion of the Christ
were both reduced to elements within a familiar political narrative, given that each is
in many ways more directly a conspiracy film about the evil machinations of hidden
power networks. Though Gibson’s film seems in many ways meant to appeal to
those seeking out timeless Biblical values, and thus was not likely read by many as
directly commenting on contemporary politics (beyond, perhaps, a potential threat of
increased anti-Semitism), Moore’s is quite often an explicit conspiracy narrative,
worth considering in ways that extend beyond red state vs. blue state paradigms. For
example, a lengthy passage of Fahrenheit 9/11 is devoted to mocking the media’s

254
Fiorina, 105.

263

own craven encouragement of public fear, even hysteria, in order to keep viewers’
eyes glued to the cable news networks for advice on how to cope: the montage in
question includes footage of citizens stocking up on duct tape, to protect homes from
biological attack, and trying on personal parachutes, the better to survive future plane
crashes into office towers.
More powerful is the film’s invocation of George Orwell at its conclusion,
suggesting that the current state of affairs transcends the easy answer of George W.
Bush as a political scapegoat, but instead is the end result of unacknowledged power
relations contained within a Western capitalist class system:
It is not a matter of whether the war is not real or if it is. Victory is not
possible. The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be
continuous. A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of
poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different
past can ever have existed. In principle, the war effort is always
planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged
by the ruling group against its own subjects. And its object is not the
victory over Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of
society intact.
255

Despite being made to speak their immediate historical contexts, each of these films
makes striking gestures towards transcending them: Moore’s by giving the ultimate
word to an indictment of broader economic and political structures, and Gibson’s by
emphasizing the violent persecution of Christ to the point of non-narrative, almost
avant-garde abstraction. (In many ways, the canniest box office strategy of The
Passion of the Christ was its unwillingness to have a point, the better to enable it to
be co-opted by a variety of other speakers.)

255
George Orwell, 1984, as quoted in Fahrenheit 9/11.

264

Though the ultimate conclusion to be drawn from Orwell’s words is extreme,
it is worth considering here: the present United States culture war serves an
essentially similar purpose to that of both the contemporary war on terror and a more
general history of American imperial violence. Fiorina’s statistical survey of recent
election returns and voter responses itself goes so far as to conclude that the present
cultural polarization is essentially an Orwellian fiction, constructed by the media:
“The simple truth is that there is no culture war in the United States.”
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Instead, by
carefully analyzing data and voting patterns from a cross-section of citizens,
Fiorina’s researchers were forced to conclude that no statistically significant
difference could be found between most Democratic and Republican supporters on
such apparently vital election issues as abortion, gay marriage and the relationship
between church and state. What is going on here? The narrative through which
American culture attempted to make sense of the 2004 election itself appears to be
false, a construction of the media. Moreover, the narrative of the success of two
small American independent films, in which the mainstream media is depicted as out
of touch with the general public and an alternative, grass-roots sphere of
independence is shown conversely to be vital, is itself but another fiction, created by
the same media sources that the narrative seems designed to fundamentally
challenge.
The most obvious immediate answer to this is to remember that, of course,
‘the media’ is not itself a monolith, occupying a fixed political position and directly

256
Fiorinia, 5.

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disseminating approved opinions to a willing public. In many ways, it shares with
American democracy an important ongoing sense of itself as a fluid, present-tense
experiment, ever adapting and shifting to external historical and cultural factors. If
the successes of Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Passion of the Christ implicate a
mainstream corporate media that has effectively disenfranchised vast sections of the
American public by making vacuous films that entertain at the expense of content,
then the narrative of those successes will in turn fuel a reciprocal windfall for
another branch of the very same media system: namely, talk radio, newspaper
editorial columns, and cable news networks’ current events debate panels. Just as
there is an immediately obvious quality to such a conclusion, so too is it natural to
recall that such a state of affairs is nothing new, though it may be in the interest of
the contemporary media oligopoly to suggest otherwise.
There are many practitioners of what I have been calling a reactionary,
conservative trend within American Studies, who argue for the contemporary state of
affairs as an ‘end of history,’ to use Francis Fukuyama’s phrase. Similarly, it is too
easy to resort to Baudrillard-esque proclamations about ‘The Gulf War Not Taking
Place’, or announcing a similarly inescapable ‘end of meaning.’ Indeed, Spanos
locates such a school of thought as one of his primary targets, emphasizing this by
ending his book with the line “I offer Moby Dick not as alternative but contribution
to a New Americanist mode that will counter this insidious ‘end of history’
discourse.”
257
Such work is in part a response to the recognition that post-structural

257
Spanos, 278.

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modes of thought and postmodern operations of cultural power have rendered
academia sufficiently public, visible, politicized, and subject to the polarities of the
media’s culture wars, that the image of attempting to ‘unmake’ an omelet comes to
mind. Is such a blurring of boundaries now inescapable?
Spanos and Guillory are at least thinking dialectically: each is attempting to
progress past the deadlock of seemingly irreconcilable arguments (hence the
former’s ambivalence over New Americanist approaches). The implications of the
paradigms to which they respond are indeed dire: to suggest that present historical
circumstances are somehow inherently exceptional is also on some level to ignore
history in attempting to account for them and, instead, blindly invest one’s faith in
the apocalyptic fervor with which they are invoked by reigning arbiters of cultural
power. The almost inevitable hysteria reflected within such a discourse makes it
particularly easy to recognize the ways in which both academic and media-based
systems of contemporary cultural power are able to presently sustain an almost
synergistic system of interdependent symbiosis.
At the most fundamental level, one can simply remark that the very notion of
an immediate end of history in sight is in itself a ‘good news story’: if American
culture is presently engaged within the gravest possible struggle for the survival of
its ideals, its nation and its citizens, then an increased number of those citizens will
display an intensified interest in the ongoing progress of that struggle. Such a state of
affairs, however accurate, is good for business; for example, though there are many
perspectives from which the events of September 11
th
, 2001 might be viewed as a

267
decisive end point (a climactic reaction to years of politically motivated and selective
intervention, aid and violence committed by the United States), throughout the
mainstream media 9/11 is typically depicted to be a date of new birth, of awakening
to a changed world and an unfamiliar conflict, devoid of meaningful roots or a valid
past. Sadly, this is merely the most recent instance of a postmodern collusion
between academic and populist systems of cultural power.
One may choose to embrace the tempting sanity of Morris Fiorina’s level-
headed, statistical research, and thus announce that, as with Baudrillard’s first Gulf
War, the Culture War did not take place; however, such a conclusion may be
premature and, finally, not fully accurate. The Culture War does indeed wage on, and
it cannot be reduced to a pure fiction invented by media sources interested only in
the revenue generated by higher ratings. Instead, it is crucial to recognize that it
wages on within both the halls of academe and throughout the many acquired
networks, newspapers, publishing houses and movie studios that now comprise
contemporary entertainment conglomerates. The question is not one of whether the
war is taking place, but for whom? What roles does this war play in the lives of a
general public; does it exist for any function beyond a sense of urgently important
news-entertainment?
In attempting to propose a way to extricate ourselves from the current media
culture war, Fiorina suggests a greater sobriety on the part of the systems
representing that war: “the media could … cease its unconsidered use of the neutral

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term ‘activist’ and use terms that are often more accurate – exhibitionist, crackpot,
blowhard.”
258
He is responding here to a system which conveniently forgets that:
because purists hold their views more intensely than ordinary people
do, their operating style differs from that of most people. They are
completely certain of their views: they are right and their opponents
are wrong. Moreover, their opponents are not just misguided or
misinformed, but corrupt, stupid, evil, or all three. There can be no
compromise because truth does not compromise with error. Their
issues are too serious to permit any levity to enter the discussion.
Angry attacks substitute for reasoned discussion.
259

Most striking about Fiorina’s conclusions is the way they evoke the George Orwell
quotation that Michael Moore reads at the close of Fahrenheit 9/11, suggesting that
the Culture War is itself not meant ever to be won, but is instead simply meant to be
continuous; from this perspective, the implication that systems of media might
willingly choose to end it are ludicrous, given that they are the ones most directly
profiting from it. Indeed, one might be inclined to suggest that it is conversely the
responsibility of academia to respond with a measured, less alarmist corrective, in
which actual debate replaces the spectacular simulations of same that are most
commonly represented on TV.
Unfortunately, however, many of the very same ‘crackpots’ and
‘exhibitionists’ to whom Fiorina is referring in his study are themselves
representatives of academic power; the debates which currently grip American
Studies are all too easily reduced to a battle over the value and meaning of political
correctness. This state of affairs can be traced back to the late 1970s and the

258
Fiorina, 105.
259
Fiorina, 102.

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emergence of an American culture struggling to reconcile the simultaneous status of
its place within a post-Vietnam and re-energized Cold War climate. It is worth
recalling that, despite the approaches of many in American Studies who devalued the
study of film, by the time of the New Hollywood, one could already begin to see this
blur between academia and the work of the culture industry take hold. The college-
educated movie brat directors were inevitably exposed to new theoretical ideas,
while the academy would use their films, featuring repeated challenges to classical
modes of filmmaking, to further their own support for those theoretical approaches.
Moreover, Donald Pease, in his article “New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions
into the Canon,” makes a case for this boundary blurring as a primary legacy of the
countercultural era:
[S]tudents … voiced their refusal to acknowledge the difference
between the cultural and the public realm … a political realm that had
become for them indistinguishable from a utopian romance … When
students demanded from their public world what American characters
had demanded in romance, they denied the imaginary separation,
predicated by the Liberal Imagination, between the cultural and the
political. Consequently, their politics literalized, in the public world,
the imaginary of the American Romance.
260

And, as suggested earlier, these are the roots of the present moment of
American Independent film that serve to distinguish it from the modes of
independence visible during the post-war crisis of the studio system. First, it is a
period of aggressive conglomeration throughout the culture industries, both on the
level of the film industry’s connection to global financial networks, as well as a
renewed system of studio monopolies. The post-war mode of independence could

260
Pease, 26.

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not have been possible without the successful conclusion of the U.S. government’s
set of anti-trust lawsuits which allowed theatre owners a greater flexibility in
booking product for their screens. By the 1980s, the industry had solidified a new
system of ancillary horizontal integration that has become a de facto vertical
integration, with the previous product of ‘film’ now replaced by the post-Fordist,
postmodern conception of an ‘entertainment property’ or ‘concept’ fueling the
system. During this period, the Reagan administration also overturned the ruling of
the earlier anti-trust decision, allowing studios to return to owning theatre chains; the
thinking behind this decision itself seeming to reflect a way to maintain the
appearance of rejecting monopolies, while ultimately enabling a new era of corporate
dominance.
That is to say, because the studios were no longer functioning as they did in
the classic studio era – a perfect vertical system of production, distribution and
exhibition – they could no longer achieve a monopolistic hold over film product and
thus should be free to return to the business of exhibiting film. The effect, however,
was to allow movie studios to redefine themselves as entertainment conglomerates,
sole entities with total, unrestrained access to any potential medium for conveying
any given entertainment product-commodity-text. Witness here a shift from the
concrete operation of producing film to the invisible machinations of enabling
package concepts to adapt to various media molds: a novel, a television show, a film,
a theme park ride, a videogame, a series of action figures.

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Secondly, concurrent with these media industry developments, one can
witness an equivalent shift in terms of cultural debate, again consistently away from
the real and instead towards the symbolic. I am thinking here primarily of the sense
of palpable exasperation throughout John Guillory’s essay on current debates around
expanding the canon, in which he repeatedly stresses the distinction between the
exclusion of blacks and other minorities from white social privilege, and the
exclusion of black-authored novels from a predominantly white-authored canon.
Again, such debates are exacerbated during the 1980s and 1990s by the type of
hysterical, alarmist media representation attacked by Fiorina – a renewed interest in
tabloid journalism on television represented by the almost parodic excesses of Hard
Copy and A Current Affair (themselves now arguably morphed into the minimally
more respectable Fox News Network), as well as the always potentially violent
discussions on talk shows hosted by Geraldo Rivera and Jerry Springer. Again,
particularly with The Jerry Springer Show, there is the sense of a satiric mode at
work which allows viewers to engage with the program at the level of parody;
indeed, there continues to be a sufficiently wide array of subjects and guests on the
program that would easily support arguments for the show’s Bakhtinian,
Carnivalesque, even subversive status.
Perhaps as a response to such vaguely coded expressions of news-
entertainment as an inherently self-parodying concept, in recent years many have
identified a trend in which many young people get their news from explicitly parodic
sources: the Weekend Update segment of Saturday Night Live, the on-line weekly

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The Onion, and, most notably, Comedy Central’s award-winning
261
The Daily Show
with Jon Stewart. This latter program has increasingly found itself directly engaged
with contemporary debates about the value and reliability of mainstream news
reporting in the media, most notably during a heated exchange between former
stand-up comedian Stewart and the hosts of CNN’s ostensibly more serious and
respectable Crossfire, October 15, 2004, in which it was suggested that the official
news source ultimately delivers only content-free entertainment, while the
acknowledged news report committed to irony and satire offered consistently more
thoughtful and open-minded exchanges with guests representing a greater degree of
the contemporary political spectrum.
There is a sense in which the present-day atmosphere, in which such a
program as The Daily Show can become a consistently award-winning source of
genuine news and current events information, could only have arisen as a response to
the perceived ‘absurdities’ and excesses of the 1980s, developments themselves
linked to a more general conservative backlash against perceived liberal,
countercultural ‘damage’ during the Vietnam era. This is not to suggest that issues of
identity politics or attempts to achieve equality and social justice through greater
attention to politically correct language are themselves inherently flawed or even
misguided; on the contrary, it is my suggestion that they were instead systematically
misrepresented as such by media systems that sought simultaneously to, first,
generate profit, by allowing ‘crackpots’ and ‘extremists’ to represent what should

261
The show has won both Emmys (for its status as quality television) and Peabody Awards (for
excellence as journalism).

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have been a sober-minded academic discourse, thus attracting a viewership interested
in the sensationalism of their viewpoints, and, second, to support a conservative
agenda during a time of media deregulation, consolidation and ‘vertical’ horizontal
integration. To accomplish this was also to defeat the perceived Vietnam syndrome
affecting American culture throughout the 1980s (only after the first Gulf War in the
early 1990s is this syndrome thought to have been ‘cured’ by the first President
Bush); political correctness thus became a means to valorize weakness and attack
national traditions, in the form of challenges to established canons of officially
acceptable, ‘classic’ art works.
From this perspective, one can recognize the trend away from the auteur-
driven works that fueled Hollywood throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and towards a
more producer-driven product in the Spielberg-Lucas era, as meaningfully related to
the controversies and cutbacks that beset the National Endowment for the Arts
during the Reagan era. In a harsh and revealing contrast from the modes and sources
of public art supported by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration –
the socialist murals of Diego Rivera, the attacks on capitalism throughout the
musical The Cradle Will Rock – the treatment of the Endowment during the Reagan
era seemed unfortunately ignorant of the implications of supporting art that would
not be produced otherwise. That is to say, the uplifting populism of E.T. and the Star
Wars trilogy are self-sustaining; their optimistic entertainment value allowed them to
receive studio funding, extensive marketing, and an almost built-in sense of
inevitable public support.

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By way of contrast, government subsidizing of art thus bears a responsibility
to support materials, topics, and artists whose value is not immediately commercial;
it is notable, for example, that the WPA did not see fit to fund the production of
Hollywood films during the Depression
262
, though many have credited the studios
for helping ‘get the country through those years.’ By the time of Robert
Mapplethorpe’s graphically homoerotic photography, pointedly explicit during a
time of public silence, ambivalence and embarrassment around the AIDS epidemic,
the perception of the NEA had now shifted to reflect a perceived desire for a cultural,
as well as political, response to the national Vietnam syndrome. The NEA was thus
left to fund modes of art sufficiently comforting to not require NEA funding.
The ideological, political uncertainties of the era, then, suggesting a divided
nation, seeking on the one hand to ‘progress’ beyond an extended period of leftist
dissent, while at the same time struggling to continue to hold its government
accountable for extreme social disparities of wealth and power, are at this time
particularly aligned with debates over the meaning and value of art; struggles to
attain political consensus are now especially analogous to struggles over the status of
popular mass entertainment. To this end, it is especially enlightening to recall the
work of Pierre Bourdieu, relying as it does on concepts of power both explicitly
economic and culturally symbolic. Bourdieu, for example, presents a means to recall
that the operations of academic power at this time are easily deployed in support of

262
There were many films during the depression, such as the Marx. Bros’ Duck Soup (1933), that
displayed the National Recovery Administration’s ‘Blue Eagle’ logo to announce their support of
New Deal policies.

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the Reagan administration’s political goals, while agents of economic power that
oppose such goals are themselves just as easily manipulated, or ‘spun.’
As David Swartz notes in his work on Bourdieu, “[he] sees intellectual
pursuits as all fundamentally interested pursuits despite their symbolic character – [to
this end, he deploys] a conceptual strategy designed to expose what [he] perceives to
be one of the most vital but unacknowledged interests of intellectuals: their ‘interest
in disinterestedness.’”
263
If Swartz is revealing here that all academic work is
fundamentally tied to the dominant economic and political interests of the state, then
why is it worth considering the operations of the academy during the era of the
Vietnam Syndrome to be meaningfully different? I would suggest that the answer to
this question can be found in the very exposure at this time of academia as itself an
interested discourse, a stratagem handily pre-disempowering unpopular viewpoints
as dismissible for their ‘obvious’ bias. Again, such pitfalls present themselves as
pitiable coefficients of the postmodern equation, given its ostensibly optimistic
reactions to an ossifying divide between an uncritical low culture and an intellectual
high culture represented by modernism. Now, instead of enabling criticism of
modernism to reach mass audiences, postmodern culture instead threatens to negate
such criticism by reducing it to the same commodity status as all other entertainment
texts. Thus, the crackpots and extremists Fiorina bemoans observing on Crossfire
and their ilk ultimately convey little more than a sense of the academy as a location
in which the remaining liberal loonies of the Vietnam era do cultural battle with

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Swartz, 72-73.

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those who would protect the important traditions of an American canon, whilst
deploying the latter to assuage a nation caught in the feverish grip of the dreaded
Vietnam syndrome.
Swartz’ reading of Pierre Bourdieu is again enlightening here; his article
identifies three operations performed by symbolic systems of capital – cognition,
communication, and social differentiation. The conflicts expressed during the 1980s
between academic and media-based systems of cultural authority emphasize the
latter process in action. Swartz notes that Bourdieu’s emphasis is on this concept of
differentiation when he writes:
symbolic systems not only provide cognitive and integrative functions
but also serve as instruments of domination. Dominant symbolic
systems provide integration for dominant groups, distinction and
hierarchies for ranking groups, and legitimation of social ranking by
encouraging the dominated to accept the existing hierarchies of social
distinction. They therefore fulfill a political function.
264

In considering such concepts of Bourdieu’s, Swartz utilizes a particularly apt
example for present purposes: explaining the process by which cultural capital can
be used to support the ongoing relations of economic capital, Swartz suggests
wealthy individuals or corporations can easily attain ‘symbolic legitimation’ through
their philanthropic support of American Public Broadcasting networks. There is
much to suggest that this is the ultimate reason for Hollywood studios’ investment in
independent films and, now, independent divisions of their own companies; by
developing this talent and then integrating it into their own, more commercial work,

264
Swartz, 83 (his emphasis)

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that work is on some level made culturally legitimate, valuable beyond mere
entertainment status.
To consider the processes of this integration, one must return to a direct
engagement with the style and content of the American independent film during this
historical moment; often, when referring to the early years of the Sundance film
festival, a number of critics, particularly when it was still ‘the United States Film
Festival’, typically referred to its product as a kind of earnest ‘granola’ cinema. As
discussed in previous chapters, many such films tended to suggest an inherent
conservatism in their rural, low-budget responses to the perceived excesses, be they
of violence, sexuality, or language, throughout Hollywood cinema. Films such as
1918 (1985), On Valentine’s Day (1986) and Desert Bloom (1986), would easily be
championed by the National Endowment for the Arts as a more respectable,
legitimate, canon-worthy form of American art; indeed, given the low-budget, non-
Hollywood status of such works, they would even seem worthy of government
funding, the better to give them an opportunity to be made. By the time of the
festival’s takeover by Robert Redford’s Sundance institute, an intriguing potential
for a tragic emplotment occurs: the authenticity of the ‘United States’ label is
replaced with the character name closely linked to a famous Hollywood celebrity;
the increased presence of Hollywood producers and agents means the talent at the
festival will now be absorbed into the very system they are meant to oppose; and,
with the emergence of Quentin Tarantino in the early 1990s, the sincere regionalism
of the American Independent film is quickly replaced by an easily marketable, hip

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urban irony. Authenticity is replaced by defiant artifice, and the filmmakers who
embrace this shift are the ones who receive publicity and financial support.
There has been an intriguing parallel trend, however, of films that seek to
address this very emplotment of ‘indie’ regionalism threatened by self-reflexive
formal play, fundamentally questioning the meaning of this discourse around the
American independent cinema. What is its obligation to address American traditions,
to react against a dominant Hollywood cinema, to display a documentary influence
in depicting neglected settings and social classes, to acknowledge a postmodern
cultural mode that rightly mistrusts any claims to absolute authenticity as suspect for
their hidden ‘interestedness’ (to use both Bourdieu’s and Spanos’ term)? I am
thinking here of a series of films, from Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider follow-up, The
Last Movie (1971), Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984) and Mika Kaurismaki’s
Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made to such more recent examples as Gummo,
Dead Man, Box of Moonlight (1996) and Gerry (2002), that consistently engage
with, and at times even directly hybridize these two apparently opposed filmic
modes. This is not simply an opposition of crowd-pleasing Hollywood elements and
more esoteric high-brow appeal (through many of them also do this); instead, each of
these films combines an interest in what Leo Marx would call, in The Machine in the
Garden, a ‘simple pastoralism’ with a simultaneous engagement in self-mocking,
perhaps even deconstructive play.
In this mode of independent American cinema, the category itself is
questioned (especially given that Wenders and Kaurismaki’s films are coded by their

279
backgrounds in European Art cinema), as well as the ability of that category to
convey any degree of cultural meaning. If the pre-Tarantino, pre-Sundance output at
the United States Film Festival suggested a conservative American heartland
responding to Hollywood’s cultural elitism and decadence and the post-Tarantino
Sundance film wallowed in the absence of moral value that, we are told, has now
finally led to a second term in office for George W. Bush, then this subset of films
will take precisely these contrasts as their primary subject, to the point of proposing
that such a narrative is itself an interested fiction and that cultural truths lie
elsewhere. Like Guillory and Spanos, such trends of filmmaking will attempt to
move past simple cultural binaries; as with Pease’s formulation, they will suggest a
refusal to acknowledge a difference between cultural work and academic inquiry.
The depiction of the American landscape, be it the representation of
breathtaking, natural vistas or a hard-working middle class heartland, has notably
and meaningfully evolved over the quarter-century since the appearance of this post-
Sundance movement of independent cinema. What began as an iconography of
sincerity and authenticity has been replaced with discourses of simulacra and irony;
indeed, the American independent film now displays a chronic, tenuous synthesis of
previously disparate modes represented by the aforementioned ‘granola’ tradition
and postmodern, post-Tarantino self-reflexivity and violence. The ‘granola’
tendencies of the movement’s early years represented an attempt to define what
might be called an official national cinema, defined as much by a film’s intrinsic
characteristics as it was by the modes of art it starkly opposed: on the one hand, such

280
films were not Hollywood productions, given their lack of star power and production
polish, while, on the other, they were also not controversial, as perhaps most
strikingly represented by the infamous photography of Robert Mapplethorpe.
Mapplethorpe’s explicit, black and white depictions of boundary-pushing
homosexual acts, often featuring genitalia in decontextualized close-up, helped to
ignite an outcry over the context of work supported by the National Endowment for
the Arts (indeed, such skirmishes in the Culture Wars can still be seen today, as in
the recent case of Andres Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ’ photograph in New York City). The
independent cinema that was originally featured at the United States Film Festival,
before it received the notoriety generated by Robert Redford’s Sundance branding
and Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape, was often funded by American
public television and applauded more for its politically correct status as an indication
of a healthy and diverse culture, than for any inherent aesthetic merit. These were
films more likely to please Republican commentators bemoaning the state of the
national character than they would any critical establishment likely to cover them.
Indeed, the circumstances could be productively compared to the ‘quota
quickie’ phenomenon that appeared throughout Europe after the second World War,
in which American producers enabled indigenous filmmaking talent to create movies
that ostensibly reflected their own cultures so that Hollywood could export product
to them without extinguishing the possibility of indigenous national cinemas. Now,
however, it is American national culture itself under perceived threat from
Hollywood; nevertheless, the metaphor of cultural colonization is both fruitful and

281
entirely apt. Many national cinemas seek simultaneously to record and preserve their
own cultures while also making product on low budgets that is meaningfully
different from their opposition in Hollywood: the result is often an initial trend
toward documentary approaches, perhaps most obviously recognizable in the post-
war Italian Neo-Realist movement. Only by the time Italian cinema had successfully
sustained itself could it enter into a lengthy period of baroque modernism, ranging
from the grotesques populating Fellini’s circuses to the minimalism of Antonioni’s
urban alienation.
So too with the American independent film’s embrace of America as its own
subject: in response to the countercultural warfare at home during the 1960s and
1970s, an ‘official’ American national cinema arises, notably reactionary in tone. As
the American Independent film establishes its own self-sufficiency in the 1990s,
such documentary preservation itself is free to become stylized. The narrative of this
development within the discourse of the ‘indie’ – from PBS Playhouse production to
the surrealism of Gummo, Gerry, Dead Man and their kin – is largely one of a
movement away from simple definitions of ‘the real’, as expressed filmically, and
towards an examination of the nation’s landscape that cannot avoid acknowledging
the role of simulation and irony as influences upon both its reception and
construction. Indeed, if the function of the films produced at the outset of this
independent movement is largely one of reassurance – to offer comfort, to represent
tradition, to guard against change – then this more recent tendency within such films
depicting the landscape is to exoticize and to make unfamiliar. Extending the

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metaphor of cultural colonization a step further, it becomes necessary to ask: to what
extent is the American Independent film engaged at this time in a project of
Orientalizing both itself and the American landscape? To what end?
Edward W. Said is of course most immediately associated with concepts of
Orientalism both in the eponymous work of literary criticism, and its successor,
Culture and Imperialism. A primary thesis recurrent throughout both works is the
fundamental understanding that works of art – primarily, in Spanos’ view, the novel
– are far more effective at enabling and enacting the subjugation of a colonized force
through their very naturalism, than explicit exertion of physical violence or restraint.
Because they are read primarily in terms of narrative satisfaction, novels are able to
more subtly naturalize their depiction of foreign people and places as lesser, ‘other’,
primitive, or purely emotive through elements of description and tone. Obviously,
given his choice of title, Said’s primary interest is the interaction of Western and
Eastern cultures: by depicting the inhabitants of Africa, the Middle East and others
as fundamentally strange, mysterious exotics, the novels of civilized Europe (and,
later, the United States) are able to, effectively, condition those at home to accept
their rulers’ colonization and enslavement of distant peoples.
It thus becomes instructive to examine the nature of the American
Independent film’s project of ‘Orientalizing the West’ through the recent trend of
cinema that self-consciously exoticizes, defamiliarizes, and generally makes foreign
that which has been previously viewed as the source of a familiar, easily recognized
national soul. Perhaps Said’s most basic point in Orientalism is his portrayal of the

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concept as fundamentally an economic discourse, while acknowledging the pre-
existence of purely ‘academic’ and more generalized ‘imaginative’ forms of the
process. “Orientalism,” he writes, “can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate
institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about
it, authorizing views of it, describing it, teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short,
Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority
over the Orient.”
265
It is notable that Said’s Orientalism is itself a development out of
earlier, more benign modes with which to view and to know the East. As with the
recent American ‘indie,’ a narrative is presented: one of objective means of knowing
a landscape giving way to those that are decidedly subjective, as a direct result of the
potential for profit.
The narrative described by Said is one in which Western culture is employed
by the peoples of Europe to facilitate and even perform the work of colonialism as
required. In order for the West to justify and perpetuate its control over its interests
throughout Asia and Africa, it must utilize its poets and novelists to perpetuate
stereotypes of the conquered lands and their peoples as less rational, less prone to
self-governing, less intelligent, less articulate, less civilized, and finally, less than
human. Instead of this potential for equivalency, the ‘Orientals’ are instead
inherently exotic, mysterious, unknowable, ‘othered,’ and are thus in desperate need
of Western control, for their own good.

265
Said, 3.

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There are striking parallels between this now-familiar narrative of Said’s, and
the less overt narrative of the recent American independent film’s trend towards
exoticizing the American landscape. As with Said, for example, the ostensibly
objective-realist mode of the PBS-funded (or at least ‘PBS-style’) American
independent cinema quickly gives way to irony and otherness when the potential for
substantial profit is made manifest in the late 1980s. From this perspective, such
‘indie-ism’ becomes an industry-derived mode of self-Orientalism in which the non-
Hollywood films, funded by an increasingly studio-based apparatus of talent agents,
cross-over stars, and conglomerate-owned ‘classics’ divisions such as Fox
Searchlight or Warner Independent Pictures, become increasingly reliant on
depictions of the American landscapes as an ‘other’, a mysterious, surreal zone of
colorful eccentrics and inexpressible knowledge. Perhaps the most significant
example of this mode of independence is Jim Jarmusch’s western, Dead Man,
notable for its simultaneous depiction of this trend in comic lunacy (a traditional
genre made unfamiliar with cannibalistic, cross-dressing bounty hunters) and, more
importantly, its engagement with the figure of the American Indian as himself a
genuinely, historically Orientalized figure. Jarmusch’s film has a special significance
for its dual position as a film that both embodies this trend and comments upon its
historicity by directly depicting an American legacy of Orientalism during its years
of genocide towards the continent’s natives.
Before examining this progression in close detail by first considering works
of attempted sincerity regarding such American signifiers, such as Box of Moonlight,

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and then moving to subsequent examples of Orientalizing those same signifiers, in
films such as Gummo, Gerry, Slacker, Paris, Texas, Tigrero and Dead Man, it is
worth recalling Said’s own evaluation of the American role in the ongoing Western
project of Orientalism, the better to understand the nation’s fundamental paradoxes
and contradictions in engaging with it. One cannot escape the fact, for example, that
the American character has its roots in a self-definition that defiantly contrasts itself
with the Old World of Europe; the fundamentally European legacy of Orientalism
thus would naturally be included in the characteristics to be avoided in the new
social experiment undertaken by the founding fathers. Said even notes,
provocatively, that “there was no deeply invested tradition of Orientalism
[throughout the early United States] … the American Transcendentalists saw
affinities between Indian thought and their own.”
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America is thus always already
caught within the double bind of seeing itself as a defining Western power and itself
an ‘other’ to be defined in conscious opposition to prior oppressive traditions. The
nation’s genius of expressing ideology through cultural means is handily
summarized by this seemingly impossible duality: on the one hand, America is a
nation of powerful White Men, depicting the ‘Indian-infested’ Western frontier as an
Orient of its own to be tamed and controlled, while on the other, the nation remains a
stirring example of the colony that rejected its European rule and was able to achieve
meaningful self-definition. This paradox will be explored as a key structuring device
throughout such films as Dead Man, with its ability to simultaneously valorize and

266
Said, 290.

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satirize the West through images of beauty and violence juxtaposed. For the moment,
it is worth considering the circumstances surrounding America’s eventual
assumption of its status as primary global Orientalizer, concurrent with its
emergence as the defining superpower of the West.
As Said notes, this process does not occur fully until the aftermath of World
War II, which saw a series of former European empires crumbling economically
while the United States was able to enjoy a financial boom from its own industrial
war machine, a machine used decisively to end the war with an horrific exertion of
power over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In order to preserve such a global position,
argues Said, it became necessary for the United States to pick up where Europe left
off, assuming the project of Orientalism by studying the East, culturally and
academically, in order to establish and protect its military and material interests
throughout the region. The project of American Orientalism, then, is inextricably
linked to the legacy of both the Cold War and Vietnam.
Such a legacy, however, fundamentally links the political, economic and
academic components of American self-definition: just as the Cold War era
represents the country’s assumption of the dominant role in global affairs and
commerce, so too does it mark the moment at which American universities begin to
contribute to and interrogate such affairs in earnest. This is the moment at which the
practitioners of American Studies can demonstrate that Melville’s whale anticipated
the climate of the Cold War; in so doing, they are able to suggest that the United

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States was thus predestined both to face such a conflict and to be defined by the side
it would inevitably take in that conflict.
The inescapable paradox of this American assumption of an Orientalist
position, given the nation’s explicit rejection of Old World tropes and internal
ambivalence towards potentially imperialist projects, is well chronicled throughout
Christina Klein’s Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-
1961. Klein is adept at enumerating and interrogating the numerous complexities
inherent in an American extension of the European legacy depicted throughout
Said’s work: as she explains at the outset of her study, for example, “This [post-war]
expansion of U.S. power did not occur in a smooth and uncontested fashion … It
coincided – and existed in tension with – the revolutionary process of
decolonization.”
267
Much as Paul Lauter championed the self-scrutiny of most work
in American Studies, or as Spanos emphasized his own interestedness as a defense
against repeating the mistakes of his predecessors, so too does Klein reiterate the
unique, even ‘exceptional’ American engagement with Orientalism after World War
II. Not only did this process occur during a time of decolonization, itself
necessitating the superpower that would assume Britain’s role of influence to
concoct an ‘Orientalism-that-was-not-Orientalism’, but it also took place during a
time of public desire for isolationism, a return of sorts to the pre-war context.
Klein cites the scholarship of several peers who, as a result of these
conditions, have suggested that, for example “post-World War II American culture is

267
Klein, 5.

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better understood via a model of … post-Orientalism. In scholar Melani McAlister’s
analysis of the relationship between expanding U.S. interests in the Middle East and
popular media representations, she discovered that the meanings the Middle East has
carried for Americans over the past fifty years have been ‘far more mobile, flexible,
and rich than the Orientalism binary would allow.’”
268
Klein is herself more directly
interested in the Far East and its depictions throughout mainstream culture – in such
magazines as Reader’s Digest and the Saturday Evening Post, as well as Hollywood
spectacles The King and I (1956), South Pacific (1958), Sayonara (1957) and the
like. Her historical placement of such texts crucially emphasizes a public awareness
of America’s potential hypocrisy in such international diplomacy during a time of
intense racial unrest at home, as well as a growing body of post-war scholarship that
“explored how the geographical extension of American power was enabled by the
myth of the frontier, by popular narratives of savage war and Indian hating, and by
domestic narratives that imagined expansion as a process of expelling racial
Otherness from an ever-expanding nation figured as home.”
269
Just as the ‘post-Sundance’ mode of American independent cinema is a
meaningful evolution from the post-war independent productions facilitated by the
anti-trust suit resolution, so too does the contemporary ‘‘indie’’ discourse of
‘Orientalizing the West’ bear traces of a similar historical equivalent. The civil rights
legacy, combined with a new scholarly awareness of America’s own legacies of
Orientalism, suggests that this American imperialism will inevitably be defined, at

268
Klein, 15.
269
Klein, 10.

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least in part, by an acknowledgment of its own internal segregations, subjugations
and conquests. And, as with the distinction between the independence of Fuller and
Ray and that of Soderbergh and Jarmusch, the crucial question for our present
purposes becomes: What is the difference between this American Orientalism as
discovered throughout the 1950s and that which I call ‘Orientalizing the West’,
visible throughout a postmodern, heavily ironic post-Sundance era?
The question of irony appears to relate fundamentally to such issues, working
in tandem with the collective “post”-ness of recent American independent film. The
mode of cinema under consideration here is inescapably postmodern: it will
frequently be seen to combine the intelligence of elitist modernism with the
mainstream pleasures that are anything but high art. It is also a post-structural
cinema: one rarely encounters independent films that easily allow themselves to be
reduced to binary oppositions. Given that Orientalism at its most basic concept is
predicated on assumed differences between East and West, it will be necessary to
acknowledge the slippery signifiers and fluid positions of spectatorship offered
throughout the films in question. Indeed, a large part of the appeal of the American
‘indie’ is based on assumptions of education and sophistication on the part of
audience members; thus, a film so schematic as to rely on such simple binaries
would likely not arouse much interest. Were a film to do so, it would inevitably be
read through an ironic framework, regardless of its sincerity, given the dominant
spectator position frequently adopted throughout the Independent cinema of the
1990s.

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An immediate example of this was seen with the release of David Lynch’s
The Straight Story (1999), a charming and, to all evidence, sincere film about an
elderly man whose poor eyesight forces him to ride a tractor across state lines to visit
an estranged brother. The film was released by the Disney studio, and no element of
its content sets it apart from the earnest family fare the company released during the
1950s and 60s, such as Old Yeller (1957), Polyanna (1960), etc. Given Lynch’s
strong associations with surreal, hallucinatory filmmaking, and the prevalence of
dead-pan irony throughout his television series Twin Peaks – a program devoted to
celebrating, and even exaggerating, the eccentricities of mundane small-town
Americans – the publicity around the release of The Straight Story was inevitably
complicated. Simply put: the marketing department was placed in the awkward
position of appealing simultaneously to the director’s devoted audiences, likely to
expect a joke, as well as to those in search of simple family entertainment.
270
Though
based on the true story of a man named Alvin Straight, even the film’s title was seen
as a sly suggestion of ironic self-knowingness: here, the joke is that there is no joke,
and thus is to be appreciated on a ‘meta’ level.
Such is the post-Sundance conundrum of irony as no longer a literary device,
in which an author comments on the vagaries of fate or renders a character’s poetic
justice, but instead as a viewing strategy, a position of spectatorship. The mode
became so common throughout both independent and, subsequently, Hollywood

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As Jeffrey Sconce put it, “where does one place a film like The Straight Story, a profoundly sincere
story made ‘ironic’ solely by the inter- and extratextual reputation of its director?” in his article
“Irony, Nihilism and the New American ‘Smart’ Film.” (Sconce, 351.)

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modes of filmmaking in the decades since the ‘New American Cinema’ that
Bourdieu would likely have called it a habitus. One could feasibly propose that the
narrative of independent film’s growing public visibility throughout the 1980s, and
explosion in the mid 1990s, is largely a story of the public’s increasing acceptance of
the sense of humor visible in early Jim Jarmusch pictures, culminating in the
academy’s embrace of Fargo in 1996. It is indeed an acquired taste, and one could
devote an entire study to the evolution of its mainstream embrace; for the moment,
however, it is worth likening to Tzvetan Todorov’s conceptions of the Fantastic. If
the reader of a fantastic tale derives pleasure from not knowing whether its story
events are transpiring in a recognizably real or clearly supernatural content, then the
viewer of an ironic independent film from this era will enjoy the not dissimilar
discomfort of laughing without the comforts of comedic signifiers. (Is Fargo a
drama? A comedy? Or a third type of film whose pleasure lies in its unstable
relationship between the two?) Even as of this writing, TV continues to struggle with
the aging mode of situation comedy: its conventions and clichés are inescapably
growing stale, while the audience embrace of shows that lack a laugh track remains
largely limited to cable networks.
It is significant that this mode of irony has shifted from its literary origins to a
status that is at once audience-oriented and commodity-based, given the call to arms
raised by Paul Lauter I invoked at the outset of this chapter. Irony has now become a
challenge to forms of cultural authority, and it is all the more potent as such for
having previously been held by those same authoritative sources. Given the now

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largely extra-textual manifestation of irony as a viewing position from which to
engage independent film, a primary effect is to destabilize the position of the author,
or auteur, as primary source of textual meaning. (It is no accident that academics
who are concerned about the status of their institutional authority tend also to reclaim
the figure of the author as a viable means of textual engagement.) The fact of
audiences poaching irony from its textual status and adopting it as a viewership
position to be identified through the prism of Cultural Studies serves as a reminder of
contemporary independent cinema’s other forms of “post”-ness: it is a post-Vietnam,
post-Watergate, post-countercultural, post-conspiracy mode. As such it is inherently
defined by its rejection of cultural authority while simultaneously complicated by its
political fluidity: is this a left-wing rejection of a conservative 1980s Hollywood? A
right-wing expression of derision towards the disempowered misfits being laughed
at? Or a nihilist rejection of the binary itself as having any remaining relevance
whatsoever?
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Though this ironic mode is necessarily contested and porous, at worst always
ready to be appropriated by advertising (think of how many television commercials
derive humor from mocking the conventions of television commercials), at best it is
a public, cultural equivalent to the interestedness that Spanos uses as a defense, or

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To once again refer to the realm of TV comedy, it seems significant that the most durable comic
text throughout this era is The Simpsons. Over its nearly two decades on the air, the show has been
variously attacked for its status as a crude, reactionary Fox network comedy a la Married With
Children, as well as its evidence of the dreaded Hollywood ‘liberal media bias’. The show’s most
fundamental point of view, however, has been expressed by Matt Groening as a belief simply that
“your moral authorities don't always have your best interests in mind.”
http://www.motherjones.com/arts/qa/1999/03/groening.html Sep 17, 2006

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the intense self-scrutiny that Lauter champions in the best American Studies work.
As such, it serves to contextualize this post-Sundance moment of Orientalizing the
West: a mode of cultural imperialism has now been turned in on itself, subject to
precisely this kind of scrutiny. At the same time, it helps to explain the gradual
erosion of the simple pastoral binaries that initially marked the American
independent film in the early 1980s; now, the simplicity – and segregation – offered
by such binaries is seen as inherently suspect, and if viewers are apparently
presented with them, as seemed to be the case with The Straight Story, then they will
be extra-textually deconstructed as a result of this ironic mode.
In the case of Lynch’s film, such binary oppositions are largely implicit. The
film is set almost entirely in Iowa; there are, for example, no contrasting big city
scenes or characters to emphasize the fundamental decency and goodness of such
heartland figures as Straight. Indeed, the fact of these absences – and by extenstion
the film’s utter simplicity – starts to become a focal point for ironic pleasures: is this
an ‘art’ film? Is this a celebration of Iowa as Antonioni would depict it? Are the
characters so simple that they have become ‘blank’ pop art canvases for canny
viewers to fill in? The best example of the outdated nature of such pastoral binaries
is probably Tom DiCillo’s Box of Moonlight, in which John Turturro plays Al
Fountain, a reserved, officious engineer overseeing the construction of a windshield
wiper factory. The factory in question is shown, via an opening montage of traveling
helicopter shots, to be a jarring encroachment of modernity and civilization upon a
beautiful expanse of lakes, grassy hills and forest. Al is himself repeatedly

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characterized as the literal embodiment of that orderly, constricting modernity: he
regularly phones his family (back in ‘the city’) to make sure his son is studying
massive flash cards of multiplication tables; he breaks up his workers’ attempts to
enjoy an impromptu game of baseball (that most pastoral and nostalgic of American
sports), literally tapping a large clock to remind them it is not yet quitting time; and
he is later described by one of those workers as one who “goes through life like a
robot, like a damn machine on automatic pilot.”
Embodying modernity has taken its toll on Al, however: he is distraught to
notice his first grey hairs; he is unnerved to look out his hotel window, while
unbuttoning his white-collar shirt, and notice an elderly man across from him
precisely mirroring the same gesture in the same shirt; and, most troublingly, he has
begun to notice brief hallucinations of time traveling in reverse, such as coffee
pouring back up into the pot, or a boy riding his bike backwards. When the
construction job is abruptly cancelled, Al is initially excited that he will be able to
return home to be with his family for the imminent July 4
th
holiday (though he tells
his son, “No fireworks – they’re illegal”). Instead of returning directly home,
however, Al follows an odd impulse – to find a waterslide park he’d visited in the
area while passing through as a child. By now it should not be difficult to predict
how the rest of the film will unfold (though it is surprising to see just how schematic
and literal-minded it will be in resolving these binaries). Al proceeds to be loosened
up, renewed and reinvigorated by his encounters with the common folk he meets
during his sentimental journey, the most compelling of whom is a young man (Sam

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Rockwell), barely out of his teens, who sports a deerskin outfit, wears a Davy
Crockett coonskin cap, and asks to be called “Bucky, The Kid, or just Kid.”
If Al embodies the constraints of civilization, then The Kid is precisely the
opposite: a walking signifier for the freedoms that derive from a direct communion
with nature. The Kid describes himself as living “off the grid” – he dwells in a small
trailer, one wall open to the air, adorned with strings of Christmas lights, second-
hand furniture, and kitschy lawn ornaments. Though he is currently stealing power
for his lights and telephone, The Kid plans to go “totally self-sufficient – windmill,
generate my own electricity.” It does not take long for Al to recognize The Kid as the
best approximation of the childhood theme park for which he had been searching
(indeed, upon finding the waterslide park in an earlier scene, he is told by locals that
the pond is now far too polluted to allow any swimming). The two men soon embark
on a series of Tom-and-Huck pranks that enable Al to rediscover some measure of
his youth: The Kid’s version of breakfast consists of milk poured over a bowl of
Hydrox cookies; Al is introduced to the pleasures of eating fresh tomatoes directly
from a farmer’s vine, as well as the exhilaration of escaping from the dim-witted
policemen who catch them doing so; and finally, on Independence Day, Al is not in
fact back with his family but instead enjoying a double-date with The Kid, two local
women, and several illegal M-80 firecrackers.
While Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn exposed the hypocrisies and
racism of the adult world, The Kid is consistently shown to have little of this
wisdom, even inadvertently; one can be forgiven for dismissing him as a character

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who exists, as with so many ‘Oriental’ characters in literature, solely as a device for
the purposes of enlightening the stuffy civilized man. Indeed, a representative review
of Box of Moonlight found it “more than a little bit condescending towards its sub-
white-collar workers, who, free from the burdens of education and responsibility, are
able to enjoy the simple life and all those predictable, unrealistic clichés, et
cetera.”
272
Al is able to return to his family a wiser man, stronger and more
considerate in his roles as father and husband, but The Kid remains an infantilized
cartoon, spouting empty platitudes about the joys of living off the land but doomed
by his innocence and ignorance of reality. His passions blur all too quickly into
paranoid conspiracy ravings, cementing The Kid’s status as one who might be able
to be of some use to the civilized man, but is in no way capable of taking care of
himself. “This country’s being taken over by smart people with no common sense!
That’s why I’m out here – just me, my instincts and nature. That’s all you need.
Look at that moon! In the city, you’d never be able to see that!” Stumbling across
Al’s aborted windshield wiper factory, The Kid is certain of it as a CIA installation:
“They’re making nerve gas to use in the war against their own people!”
Such ramblings drain Box of Moonlight of suspense, or indeed of any
dramatic conflict – Al is not going to renounce his family, his job, or his society.
Instead, he will return home the better for his travels, while the film’s depiction of
The Kid leaves the viewer not with the sense of a noble way of life tragically lost by
our own hand, but instead a pleasant fantasy, a vacation we might like to take one

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The Onion: http://www.avclub.com/content/node/745, April 11, 2002.

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day for ourselves. Again, the resolution of this binary is far from difficult, and it
evokes a variety of Orientalist narratives in which enlightened Western men travel to
exotic Eastern nations, finding both that they might profit from their exotic novelties,
goods and traditions, while also feeling justified, even obliged, by their imperial
inclinations: repeatedly, these heroes encounter those who are shown to be unable to
take care of themselves and thus would profit from Western guidance. Complicating
this formulation in Box of Moonlight, however, is the film’s extensive depiction of
Christianity itself as one more indicator of the backwards nature that typifies its
uncivilized characters. It is here that one is forced to come to terms with the
paradoxical nature of independent film’s tendency to ‘Orientalize the West.’ The
film offers a running subplot in which the observance of Christianity is shown to be,
at best, absurd and at worst, corrupt and even murderous: a long line of people is
shown to gaze reverently at a faded burger-stand billboard, its proprietor having
recently ‘noticed’ the appearance of Christ’s image in it; the middle-aged couple
who inform Al that his beloved childhood pond is toxic offend him when they next
ask if he has yet ‘found Jesus’; and a local news report later reveals that a pastor who
snapped and embarked upon a triple homicide spree was in fact part of the same
kindly couple Al had just met.
Just as Al is put off by the couple’s inquiry as to his relationship with Christ,
so too is The Kid outraged by the violent news report. The Kid’s spiritual life is,
predictably, founded instead in his awareness of ‘Indian’ traditions, which he happily
quotes at length to Al whenever they might seem appropriate: while exploring, he

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tells Al that the “Crow’s Feet Indians lived in this valley … They were the first to
tame the wild dog, I’ve been studying all about that”; the moon gazed upon by The
Kid is clarified with “The Indians call it a ‘creamy corn moon’”; and The Kid
comforts Al about his temporal hallucinations by claiming that “The Indians saw shit
all the time – they had visions twenty-four hours a day!”
Al’s presence as a figure for audience identification means that his
experiences throughout the narrative of Box of Moonlight are compellingly similar to
an audience member’s typical experience of going to see such a film as Box of
Moonlight: because it is a small, art-house, American independent film, its likely
viewers, given that such films rarely receive theatrical releases outside of major
urban centers, will be those in circumstances equivalent to those of Al – busy, urban,
professional, in need of a short break and a temporary visit to a laid-back, rural
milieu. Often, the experience of attending an ‘‘indie’’ film will offer pleasures of this
sort: a brief trip away from the city, towards a picturesque natural setting peopled by
quirky characters whose primary concerns are the antithesis of traditional yuppie
status symbols. In addition to Box of Moonlight, films such as Garden State (2004),
The Station Agent (2003), The Spitfire Grill (1996), Transamerica (2005) and
Junebug (2005) come to mind.
Both modes of irony previously invoked here are in operation during the
viewing of films in the Box of Moonlight mold; on the one hand, there is an authorial
irony, predicated upon the depiction of Al as an Adamic American bewildered by his
foray into the New (to him) World. In this formulation, the unfamiliar rituals and

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beliefs of the indigenous peoples have been replaced, in more ways than one, with
the absurd, fervent devotion of practicing Christians. On the other hand, Box of
Moonlight can easily be read according to an ironic viewing perspective that pre-
deconstructs the film’s binaries and recognizes the entire enterprise as a trite fantasy
of yuppie wish-fulfillment.
If such films as Box of Moonlight are too overtly schematic, too easy to
dismiss through an ironic perspective that identifies the essentially hollow nature of
the binaries being constructed, then the arena of American independent film will also
be shown to sustain a new mode of cinema whose goal seems to challenge viewers to
retain the comfort of ironic distance from the images being viewed. Almost
inevitably, such cinema will be accused of courting controversy for controversy’s
sake, for wallowing in the depths of exploitation cinema, or for abusing the
fundamental morality that one typically associates with documentary filmmaking
traditions (if not all three at once). Much of this cinema relies heavily on acts of
provocation, ideally to force a viewer to consider their own responses to the films.
Much of Danish director Lars von Trier’s work uses such methods, including his
recent American-set tales, Dancer in the Dark (2000), Dogville (2003) and
Manderlay (2005); such experimentation can also be seen in the collaborations
between Larry Clark and Harmony Korine, such as Kids (1995), Gummo (1997),
Bully (2001), Ken Park (2002) and Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), with their ongoing
debt to the experimentative documentary approaches found throughout Werner
Herzog’s films.

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Korine’s Gummo is perhaps the most relevant of the group, provocative and
intriguing, all the more so for its notorious reputation as repellent and misanthropic.
(Janet Maslin’s New York Times review echoed the feelings of many when she
called it both “pretentious” and “the worst film of the year.”
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) Indeed, if the
pleasant Box of Moonlight represents what might be called the ‘indie genre’, then
Gummo is a film that might easily be labeled displeasurable for its status as one such
film that refuses viewers the genre’s most comforting pleasures. As with Box of
Moonlight, the viewer of Gummo will explore a rural American environment,
meeting characters who differ in terms of race, class, age, gender, physical
development, mental growth, and, yes, ironic self-awareness. Unlike Box of
Moonlight, however, Gummo will resist the familiarity of a linear narrative
framework; perhaps even more off-putting will be the absence of an easily
designated audience identification figure to contextualize viewer responses.
Korine himself, a celebrity of sorts due to his appearance on David
Letterman’s talk show in the wake of Kids’ infamous release, notably makes a cameo
appearance in Gummo that seems designed to reject this status. Effectively, the
impact of Korine’s performance in Gummo is to suggest an auteur that has “gone
native” on some level and is no longer an objective observer of documentary events.
The sequence in question is an uncomfortably long encounter on a sofa shared by
Korine and an encephalitic African-American dwarf. We do not learn the characters’

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Maslin,
http://movies2.nytimes.com/mem/movies/review.html?_r=1&title1=&title2=Gummo%20%28Movie
%29%20%20&reviewer=Janet%20Maslin&pdate=19971017&v_id=158664&oref=slogin.

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names, and no context is given for their meeting; in their place, Korine’s character
improvises dialogue in an attempt to receive some sort of contact, physical or
emotional, from the other man. While guzzling from a can of beer, Korine’s
character becomes increasingly depressed and desperate for empathy: he speaks of
having been born to a “lesbian midwife”, tells of “being beaten, being abused,” and,
finally, pours the beer over his own head. Failing to interest the other man in a sexual
encounter, Korine is left to plead, “just hug me,” to which the dwarf complies.
The sense of provocation, the disquieting indeterminacy of the scene’s
documentary nature, and the matter-of-fact presentation of the little person as
character within the scene all contribute to an evocation of the cinema of Werner
Herzog, in which the drama featured on screen is often inseparable from the extra-
textual drama of Herzog’s trials in capturing those images. One is reminded here not
simply of Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) but such collaborations between Herzog
and Klaus Kinski as Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Aguirre: the Wrath of God (1972).
Fitzcarraldo, for example, relies very much on the tension between the ethics of
Kinski’s character and those of Herzog himself: the film depicts the Herculean
attempts of a cultured European man to bring the transcendence of live Opera to the
jungles of South America. The mythic absurdity of the attempt is indelibly expressed
through a terrifying sequence in which Kinski’s character commands a group of the
region’s indigenous people to haul his steamboat over a mountain in order to
expedite the mission. As with Fitzcarraldo, so too with Herzog: the suspense and
spectacle of the resulting sequence are entirely reliant on the obvious absence of

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special effects: a German director did indeed travel to South America, and, for the
purposes of High Culture (here, art cinema in place of Opera), orchestrated a local
crew’s near-Sisyphean toil in hoisting the boat over the mountain.
There are many for whom the politics of such an aesthetic act are inherently
cruel, manipulative and even Orientalist, reminiscent, perhaps, of the Chinese labor
that worked on the American railways that were eventually to close the frontier
during the 19
th
century. As with Lauter and Spanos, however, Herzog’s defense is his
inherent self-interestedness, and the viewers of Fitzcarraldo cannot help but
recognize the same through the director’s engagement of irony: namely, that the
filmic endeavor may be every bit as maniacal and wrongheaded as the fictional
equivalent it seeks to depict.
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Herzog has himself become a champion of Korine’s
work in the wake of Gummo, appearing as an actor in Korine’s next film as director,
Julien Donkey-Boy, and it is this connection to the celebrated German filmmaker’s
oeuvre that goes a long way to understanding a film that was so widely dismissed at
the time of its release.
Both Gummo and Box of Moonlight present varying degrees of this American
tendency towards self-Orientalism; moreover, both films encourage ironic viewing
positions on the part of audiences. The many differences between the two films,
however, speak volumes as to the fluidity and potency of these Orientalist signifiers
and practices throughout the contemporary American independent film. In DiCillo’s
film, for example, the structures and processes of Orientalism are so apparent as to

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Indeed, the documentary Burden of Dreams (1982), which chronicles the making of Fitzcarraldo,
hinges on this very absurdity.

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become pre-disempowered; the film’s clichés and schematic binary conflicts render
the power relationships between the characters transparent. Indeed, if one is to have
any emotional reaction at all to Box of Moonlight, it is likely to be a sadness for the
impossibility of such simple myth-making or a nostalgia for a concept of the past
that never truthfully existed. As with The Wizard of Oz, one is ultimately given
comfort by the formalist pleasures of cinema fantasies, with their artifices that
seductively appear to be so much better than the crushing monotony of our real lives
outside the theatre. By the time of DiCillo’s film, no longer a classical but a
postmodern text, not a children’s film but geared for a savvy adult audience, the
effect is to lay bare the structural operations that enable the political process of
Orientalism in the first place. As Said writes:

The Orient that appears in Orientalism, then, is a system of
representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the
Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later,
Western empire. If this definition of Orientalism seems more political
than not, that is simply because I think Orientalism was itself a
product of certain political forces and activities. Orientalism is a
school of interpretation whose material happens to be the Orient, its
civilizations, peoples and localities. Its objective discourses … are
and always have been conditioned by the fact that its truths, like any
truths delivered by language, are embodied in language.
275

Quoting Nietzsche, Said then reminds us that “truths are illusions about which one
has forgotten that this is what they are.”
276
Thus the suggestion is made that, through
this misremembering, we can now effectively perform the operations of Orientalism
without the Orient itself. Through the paradox of postmodern irony, it is the utter

275
Said, 203 (my emphasis).
276
Ibid.

304

simplicity of Box of Moonlight that reveals truths to be illusions; the film’s sincerity
is so dead-pan that it becomes a joke about itself and, by extension, the antiquated,
politically incorrect system of Orientalism. Crucially, Said recognizes the process as
one that is not singular to a given historical period, but instead fluid and readily
transferable to receptive contexts; as a result, it is easy to recognize Turturro’s Al
Fountain as an Orientalist. The quirky characters and colorful incidents do not exist
until Fountain is there to see them; they are fantastic surfaces not granted true lives
of their own. One can recognize here Said’s interest in the manipulation of language
on the part of he who has the power to speak it:
my concern with authority does not entail analysis of what lies hidden
in the Orientalist text, but analysis rather of the text’s surface, its
exteriority to what it describes. I do not think that this idea can be
overemphasized. Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on
the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak,
describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the west.
He is never concerned with the Orient except as the first cause of
what he says.
277

Al, similarly, is only interested in the rural America he discovers insofar as it is a
potential cure for his psychic unease; he is there only to exploit it for personal gain.
Even a brief affair with a local woman (Catherine Keener) is depicted not as any
kind of human connection but instead as a means to thaw Fountain out so that he
might return with more warmth to offer his patient wife back home. The experience
of watching Box of Moonlight, then, places the viewer in a position of ironic
awareness towards their own potential status as Orientalists; the act of attending the

277
Said, 20-21 (my emphasis).

305

film is akin to Fountain’s journey within the film, and it is only the sheer
obviousness of its signifiers (July 4
th
, Davy Crockett cap, swimming holes, and the
like) that accentuates the illusions, rather than any truths, that are being spoken.
Here, irony becomes the means to a carnivalesque celebration over that
which might otherwise incur feelings of guilt.
278
Educated, upper-middle class
viewers can easily identify with Al’s ennui and, through attending Box of Moonlight
(or Fargo, The Station Agent, The Spitfire Grill, etc.), exorcise their discomfort over
submitting and even contributing to a modernized America that displaces indigenous
peoples and economically marginalizes the salt-of-the-earth characters its elitist art
cinema romanticizes. In Box of Moonlight, a combination of irony and nostalgia –
the incongruity of the character wearing the Davy Crockett gear that suggests the
kitsch of 1950s television just as much as it does any ‘actual’ American history –
transform one’s attendance of the film into a Mardi Gras visit. One acknowledges
one’s role in an America that has over-developed its own frontier and rendered
invisible its indigenous peoples, but is left with the odd perception that the ironic
awareness of this is sufficient, that the film is devoid of contemporary relevance, and
that, like Al Fountain, we should simply get back to our traditional white-collar roles
in the global economy.
By way of sharp contrast, Gummo defiantly denies its viewers the comfort of
such a familiar figure of identification, with the closest example the director’s own

278
As a schoolteacher tells her class at the start of summer break in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and
Confused (1993), “when you’re being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth of July
brouhaha, don’t forget what you’re celebrating, and that’s the fact that a bunch of slave-owning,
aristocratic white males didn’t want to pay their taxes!”

306

cameo as himself a fellow victim. Once again, Hollywood’s quintessential
transcendent fantasy, The Wizard of Oz, is notably evoked; though nearly plotless,
the many vignettes that comprise Gummo are shown to occur in the aftermath of a
devastating tornado that virtually destroyed the town of Xenia, Ohio.
279
As Gummo
unfolds, one gradually becomes aware that they are observing a world that seems
devoid of adults – or at least, adult authority figures in the sense that Al Fountain
represents. Instead, there is the haunting suggestion that the disaster has either killed
only the town’s parents or somehow physically displaced the remainder of its
populace into a lower-class purgatory drained of recognizable contexts. Gummo will
consistently toy with viewers’ preconceived notions of film narrative, realism, and
documentary: though much of its shooting style could be described as hand-held
verite (and indeed features a great deal of camcorder footage), it denies us the anchor
of an educated narrator from whom we might receive clear insights. On the contrary,
when the film does utilize voice-over, it is that of a whispering child, enveloping the
proceedings with the quality of a fable, or dream. Crucially, it is not the voice of an
external, adult narrator, telling audiences how to feel about the film’s characters by
placing them in some sort of social or economic context. In short, Gummo’s raison
d’être seems to be to place its viewers in the damning position of being made to
watch the traditional subjects of their prior Orientalism represent themselves. With
the conventional structure of language, or knowledge, turned on its head, the effect

279
One could also make the case that the inclusion of a little person amongst Gummo’s cast of
characters is to evoke the original classic’s “munchkins”.

307

on the viewer is the antithesis of the carnivalesque comforts offered by an easy
identification with Al Fountain.
Is Gummo to be taken seriously? Is it an ironic joke, mocking those who
might read it as ‘real’, as a sincere ethnography of economically marginalized
American lives? And crucially: what are the ethics of doing so without explicitly
announcing itself as such, while allowing viewers the potential to receive its gallery
of ‘freaks’ as just so many shocking, aestheticized tableaux? Deborah Gewertz and
Frederick Errington shed some light on this conundrum in their essay “We Think,
Therefore They Are? On Occidentalizing the World.” Though the authors are
primarily anthropologists, interested here in examining the theoretical blind spots to
be found in the assumptions of figures such as Margaret Mead, their conclusions are
nevertheless illuminating in the present context. The eponymous Occidentalization to
which they refer, for example, is derived from James Carrier’s observations that
anthropological conclusions about ‘othered’ figures of the East are inescapably
linked to the observer’s own pre-existing definitions of what it means to be a subject
of the West. Citing his work, Gewertz and Errington point out that an inevitable
byproduct of such perspectives is that “both the West and the other become
‘understood in reified, essentialist terms, and each is defined by its difference from
the other element of the opposed pair.’”
280

The authors’ research suggests that the contemporary legacy of Orientalism
as it continues to be deployed in our conceptions of primitive cultures is to contribute

280
Gewertz and Errington, 637.

308
to the ever-slippery task of stably defining the Occident in a postmodern world. The
figures represented in the recent studies of New Guinea, for example, lead lives that
are limited, univalent and pre-determined according to stratified social worlds; by
contrast, those of us lucky enough to live in the modernized First World are almost
embarrassed by a hyper-abundance of choices and options. We may consume from
amongst a seemingly infinite array of goods, services, and entertainment media; we
may develop and improve ourselves through access to abundant quality schools and
universities; and we even have the priveledge of ‘redefining’ ourselves in the
workplace due to economic trends that suggest few will face the ‘monotony’ of a
single, stable career for the majority of their lives.
The facetiousness of this last point is deliberate, and is deliberately chosen to
evoke the conclusions drawn by Gewertz and Errington in rationalizing the durability
of Orient-Occident discursive binarizing. The purpose of the binary is now to
emphasize the incommensurability of the two terms, rather than the interdependent
forces of global power that enable them to ‘mean’ in the first place. The
aforementioned hypothetical enlightened citizen of the Western world has the
‘freedom’ to redefine him or herself during a lifetime of multiple careers precisely
because he/she is increasingly likely to be downsized at some point in their lives,
their jobs exported to those very same ‘primitives’ who are thought not to know any
better than to suggest they may be underpaid. A key word used throughout “We
Think, Therefore They Are?” is denial: “we structure ourselves in opposition to a
primitive, non-Western, frequently ubiquitous ‘other’ primarily in order to deny the

309

realities of our contingency in a postmodern world – a world we no longer
experience as ordered by the imposition of clearly defined, largely patriarchal, moral
and scientific principles.”
281
Again, there is the suggestion of this sub-set of ‘‘indie’’
cinema as a genre, devoted to giving comfort through the satisfactory resolution of
binaries: Al Fountain is able to recognize The Kid’s illusion of freedom as a doomed,
infantile fantasy, returning to his responsibilities with the wisdom of their inherent
value. “We Think, Therefore They Are?”, however, would criticize Box of Moonlight
for portraying Al and The Kid so sharply as opposites, rather than both as characters
whose “agency is sharply circumscribed by a world system in which power is
unequally distributed and the economic interests of some sharply constrain, at least
in broad outline, the destinies of others.”
282
The allegorical options of Box of
Moonlight are clear: the film’s narrative is one in which a wealthy First World
yuppie enjoys a brief vacation in the presence of a liberating, free-spirited primitive
of the Third World, returning to his proper place with a greater sense of how best to
appreciate and fully utilize the many opportunities his life affords him.
283
Gewertz
and Errington note at their conclusion that “the irony, of course, is that our world is
one in which our political and economic interests have increasingly constrained those
from whom we now wish to learn to be free.”
284

281
Gewertz and Errington, 636.
282
Gewertz and Errington, 648.
283
One might even go so far as to consider here the extent to which so many of the James Bond films
are essentially filmic “dream vacations” in which a western patriarchal figure is variously assisted in
scuba diving, downhill skiing, and generous amounts of sexual tourism by exoticized locals of color
or ‘othered’ ethnicity.
284
Gewertz and Errington, 651.

310
It is entirely appropriate that the essay ends on a note of increased awareness
of the ironies that inevitably result from the global media economy; upon attempting
to legitimately reconcile the binaries offered by this genre, we currently find
ourselves in a morass of ironies upon ironies. The most apparent is the one that I
have been trying to stress through this concept of Orientalizing the West: by the time
of Box of Moonlight, the Third World primitive character device who exists for the
Westerner’s benefit is now not only ostensibly American but a parody of American-
ness. Now it is this very mythology of independence, thought so much to be the
element worth nurturing and celebrating throughout this mode of meaningfully
American art cinema, against which an enlightened West must now increasingly
learn to (be forced to) define itself. The resultant cognitive dissonance that inevitably
accompanies attempts to process such ironies while remaining an ethical thinker is
well chronicled in Jeffrey Sconce’s essay “Irony, Nihilism and the New American
‘Smart’ Film.”
The pseudo-genre chronicled by Sconce in this paper has much in common
with Steven Johnson’s ‘mindbender’, discussed later in this dissertation – a cinema
in which the apparent futility of political position taking is either expressed or elided
(or both) through each film’s complexities and ambiguities of narrative structure and
tone. Sconce attentively details the extent to which irony came to be equated with a
postmodern moral vacuousness in such recent semi-independent films as Fight Club
(1999), Ghost World (2001) and Being John Malkovich (1999). As he points out, for
example, when “the code word ‘irony’ took shape in the 1990s (describing much

311

more than these films, obviously), it came to be defined in opposition to ‘honesty’
and as synonymous with ‘apathy.’”
285
Rejecting the notion of irony as a concept so
easily reducible to such polarized thinking, Sconce instead defends it, and by
extension its recent cinematic application, as “politics conducted on a new terrain …
a transition rather than an abnegation of political cinema … From within the prism of
irony … many of these films suggest the futility of pure politics or absolute morality
concentrating instead on the prison-house of [Bourdieu’s] habitus and the politics of
postmodern paralysis.”
286
Sconce’s passionate argument is framed by conservative cultural attacks on
such apparently empty or even nihilist fare as Happiness (1998), Very Bad Things
(1998) and the ‘cruel’ cinema of Neil LaBute. Given his interest in such texts, then,
it is surprising that the essay does not consider Gummo. This is not entirely correct:
the film is in fact briefly evoked in passing reference to the “radically unironic work
of Lars von Trier or the Werner Herzog-inspired films of Harmony Korine.”
287
For
our present purposes, it is worth attempting to unpack just what is meant by
“radically unironic”, and the extent to which texts that belong in this category may
nevertheless be productively added to the present discourse. As already suggested by
my citations of Sconce’s article, he is profoundly influenced by the theories of Pierre
Bourdieu, specifically the cultural process of position-taking that is intrinsic to the
establishment of habitus. As he puts it, “for ‘smart’ cinema to exist, after all,

285
Sconce, 366-367.
286
Sconce, 367-368.
287
Sconce, 351 (his emphasis).

312

someone or something must be perceived and portrayed as ‘stupid’, a demarcation
that can understandably lead to conflict.”
288
Sconce is referring here, of course, to
the explosion-driven blockbuster aesthetic of Hollywood producers such as Jerry
Bruckheimer and Joel Silver, whose populist dumbness enables the independent
sphere to develop, by way of counter-programming, intelligent films that ask viewers
to negotiate both textual and extra-textual ironies. But he might just as well be
referring to the ‘stupid’ characters that populate the “radically unironic” cinema to
which he refers: von Trier, for example, repeatedly depicts seemingly ‘simple’
women at the heart of Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark and Dogville; his
film The Idiots depicts the attempted therapeutic excesses of a cult devoted to public
imitations of the mentally challenged; and Korine’s Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy
prominently feature characters with, respectively, Down syndrome and
schizophrenia. Does the mode of radical unirony represented by such films suggest
an attempt to transcend the political and orientalist binary traps into which so many
other films cannot help but fall?
First it must be said that the category distinction is not as precise as one
might like it to be: the ‘radical unirony’ of these films can easily become so radical
that some viewers are bound to view them as ironic commentary on our current
embrace of, for example, irony itself. Moreover, though I have been using Box of
Moonlight and Korine’s Gummo to suggest diametrically opposed filmic modes,
there are nevertheless formal and thematic consistencies between them. A prime

288
Sconce, 353.

313
example of this can be found through the representation of professional wrestling, a
‘sport’ whose very status as sport while simultaneously a recognizably professional
performance, makes it a convenient crystallization of the inescapable ironies of our
present (no matter how radically unironic one’s film may wish to be). Box of
Moonlight’s Kid, for example, delivers his most impassioned rant about the flaws of
American culture while excitedly watching a caricature of televised professional
wresting featuring the cartoonish characters “Uncle Samson” and “Saddam Insane.”
(Despite the latter’s attempts to cut his hair during the match, Samson is predictably
victorious.) Any value one might find in the Kid’s suggestions that Fountain (and, by
extension the film’s average viewer) has “too much common sense” is thus undercut
by his inability to perceive the artifice of the contest being performed. The Kid’s
function may be to enable the progress of the white-collar Fountain, but his purity as
an Adamic symbol of American innocence is tainted by his status as one who is
easily duped by infantilizing television.
The spectre of wrestling is used with more depth and provocation throughout
both Korine’s Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy. In the latter, for example, a lengthy
scene pointedly pits the two forms of the sport against one another: Julien, sporting
only briefs, his sister’s bra, and a samurai headband, has decided to challenge his
brother Chris to a wrestling match. By way of contrast, Chris, a promising athelete
who wrestles competitively at school, is clad in the sport’s appropriate, official gear.
The mentally ill Julien excitedly dances about the family living room, proclaiming
himself repeatedly to be “Julien the Jammin’ Jabber!” Acting as a makeshift

314
announcer/referee, Julien’s sister (Chloe Sevigny) asks Chris to join in: “Chris,
what’s your name, what’s your wrestling name?”
“Chris.”
“No, we have to have a name, you know, like a costume and a name.”
“My name’s Chris – it’s real wrestling.”
Over before it can really begin, the match is promptly vetoed by Julien’s father
(Werner Herzog) observing from the couch: “Disqualified for bad behavior … Get
serious … I want him to wrestle for real.” Asked for his opinion of the match
afterwards, he can only say, “I found it – I found it to be very shitty.”
Again, the distinction between irony and radical unirony is shown to be very
porous: is Herzog, the director known for a legendary obsession with authenticity, as
well as the blurring of boundaries between fiction and documentary, simply playing
a part within Korine’s narrative? Is he also passing judgment on the lazy irony of
American professional wrestling, with its open secret of absolute artifice the
diametric opposition to his own artistic goals? Or is he aesthetically critiquing
Korine’s own pastiche of his elder’s filmmaking methods; that is to say, does Herzog
feel that Korine has done a ‘shitty’ job of enabling an authentic moment to unroll in
front of his cameras? No easy answer is forthcoming, from either the film itself or
the dissertation in your hands; however, the fact of the sustained potentiality of these
various options speaks to the current significance of a cinema that is able to sustain
such a balance between documentary truth and disaffected ironic distance.

315
Gummo’s engagement with wrestling, for example, seems in many ways
much simpler than the aforementioned sequence from Julien Donkey-Boy. Here, the
filmmaker seems content to allow non-actors to attack either each other or the
furniture in their homes. An early sequence depicts two skinheaded brothers at home
in their kitchen as the child’s whispered voice-over suggests that they may have
murdered their parents. The teens then proceed to playfully slap and hit one another
until the violence escalates into a prolonged fist fight, with substantial damage done
to the kitchen itself. Later, a group of drunken adults amuse themselves in another
home by watching one engage in a bizarre ‘wrestling match’ with a kitchen chair,
ultimately ripping it apart after slamming it against the floor. Such moments offer
themselves as the antithesis to professional wrestling: here are ‘real’ people engaging
in ‘real’ fights in their actual homes. The effect is deeply unsettling: is the suggestion
that the staged violence of TV wrestling has spilled over into the realities of these
lower-class lives? As with Julien Donkey-Boy, one is left with the sense that the
film’s ability to provoke questions is perhaps more valuable than the facile, even
patronizing answers suggested by so many Box(es) of Moonlight. In a special review
for the Chicago Reader, proclaiming the film to be “a masterpiece,” Lisa Alspecter
asserts that “Gummo makes viewers ask hard questions about what exploitation is,
about why it might be intriguing, disturbing or ethically questionable to display or to
look at people who seem more vulnerable than professional actors … The movie
doesn’t answer these questions; they’re unanswerable.”
289

289
Alspecter, http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/archives/1998/0498/04108a.html.

316

Indeed, the many negative reviews of Gummo should come as no surprise
given how little of the film is conventionally pleasurable; instead, the experience of
watching the film is one of being made to interrogate the pleasures one has derived
in the past from watching other, self-Orientalizing ‘‘indie’’ movies deemed critically
acceptable by contemporary forces of cultural authority. As suggested earlier,
Gummo seems to deliberately evoke the sense of ‘freaks’ taking over the asylum
familiar to viewers of Herzog’s Even Dwarfs Started Small; now, however, the
question is raised of the possibility for the filmic self-regulation. The adults of
Gummo are few and far between: many act just as recklessly as the film’s children,
as in the drunken man wrestling a chair in the kitchen; one character’s mother bathes
her son in filthy grey water while watching him eat a soap-smothered chocolate bar;
and the film’s most familiarly middle-class white-male authority figure makes a
show of helping girls drive around in search of a missing pet cat only to attempt their
sexual molestation in an abandoned parking lot.
In a sense, then, Gummo’s characters seem deliberately calculated to defy the
formulations of Gewertz and Errington in “We Think, Therefore They Are?”: they
are at once the children of the West and rendered ‘other’ by their dismal
surroundings. In an interview on the film’s DVD release, Korine refers to shooting
the film in Nashville, despite its ostensible Ohio setting, and refers to his French
cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier’s lack of experience with the place: “He’d
never seen anything like Nashville … it was like a third-world country to him.”
290

290
Gummo DVD release, New Line Cinema.

317
Watching the film, one feels grateful for a life of comparative privilege, observing
the characters’ few options (killing stray cats and selling them to cheap restaurants
only to get money for momentary highs sniffing glue); at the same time, however,
the film will appear to ‘break’ these parameters and grant its characters the
opportunity, and ability, to make complex moral choices. For example, as the two
main characters, two boys of sixteen and thirteen, roughly, visit a local prostitute, the
younger boy’s encounter with her is oddly tender, at odds with the inherently
exploitative nature of the scenario. The woman is heavy-set, heavily made-up, and
mentally disabled; rather than engaging in sex or physical contact, the boy is instead
gentle and flattering in his treatment of her, assuring her of her beauty.
Later, the boys will sneak into the basement of a rival cat-killer to discover
his elderly, comatose grandmother left on unattended life support. Tummler, the
older of the two, is haunted by her specter in the room with them, telling the younger
Solly, “Her life is over. Go over and shoot her in the foot. Try and wake her up.” The
young boy takes aim with his BB gun, complies, and the camera subsequently lingers
on the small, silver pellet wedged under her toe. Convinced of his assessment,
Tummler continues, “She’s always been dead. She’s been gone a long time,” before
turning off the life support equipment and allowing the woman to pass into death.
Again, regardless of one’s own political position on euthanasia, the scene cannot be
described as a joke, a prank, or ironic; Sconce’s phrase ‘radically unironic’ seems
completely apt here. The boys have made their decision thoughtfully, conscious of
the possibility for dignity within their world, for better or for worse.

318

I began this chapter by evoking Paul Lauter’s complaint that the academy
continues its route of gradual decline in terms of visible cultural authority; his was a
voice echoed by others who feared for the loss of traditional technical analysis and
seemed to decry the limitations and potential degradations of academic work offered
by forms of Cultural Studies. At the other end of the debate is the work of such
anthropologists as Gewertz and Errington: “we are worried that the textual focus [of
so many] has the political implication of rendering virtually irrelevant to us the lives
that actual – non-generic – others in fact lead … we fear that a textual Orientalizing,
like Orientalizing itself, may curtail our understanding of more fundamental
processes.”
291
They propose instead a model that seeks “to explore sufficiently the
relationship – the connection – between them and us that this process of constructing
the other not only establishes, but masks.”
292

Despite Sconce’s thorough defense of irony as a means to political position-
taking, it nevertheless constantly threatens to be made over into a conceptual blind
spot, if not an utter dead end. Irony thrives not on connection but on incongruity, on
the ever-widening gulf between subjects. If there is a way to resolve this tension
between Lauter’s camp and that of “We Think, Therefore They Are?” – that is to
say, a desire for interpretive textual analysis and a demand for legitimate, real-world
contextual awareness – then I would suggest that such a resolution must be found in
the unstable fluctuation between positions of irony and those of Sconce’s radical lack

291
Gewertz and Errington, 636-637 (their emphasis).
292
Gewertz and Errington, 637 (their emphasis).

319
of irony; in short, the destabilization of the comfort offered by Bourdieu’s position-
taking itself.
Certainly, I am neither the first nor alone in attempting to theorize new
conceptions of film analysis that are equal to the aesthetic and political tasks
currently demanded: in their recent study Global Hollywood, authors Toby Miller et
al express doubt as to “whether the contemporary state of screen studies equips us to
address such issues … [given that] mainstream screen studies is a blend of textual
analysis, the psy-complexes and bourgeois business history. These tendencies have
not enabled us to contribute significantly to public cultural debate.”
293
By way of
response, the authors go on to suggest that
the most significant innovation that we need … comes from critical
political economy and Cultural Studies. These areas have witnessed a
radical historicization of context, such that the analysis of textual
properties and spectatorial processes must now be supplemented by
an account of occasionality that details the conditions under which a
text is made, circulated, received, interpreted and criticized.
294

Such arguments are admirable, but hardly seem likely to satisfy the likes of Spanos
and Lauter, or academics who have devoted their lives to conceptions of aesthetic
excellence in textuality, or even lovers of great literature. Ideally, then, this mode of
cinema that embraces the contradictions of irony and radical unirony, that utilizes
American mythologies while simultaneously dissecting the power such mythologies
continue to hold over us, would act as a potential bridge between those who call for a
return to absolutes of textual, academic authority, and those who stress matters of

293
Miller et al, 9.
294
Miller et al, 13 (their emphasis).

320
relativism: Cultural Studies, specific audiences, historical contexts. If there is the
potential for films that themselves engage with these very issues, it may be possible
for this last crucial binary to be resolved.
Emphasis on context reminds us that cinema, like literature, can be
profoundly dialogic: not merely determined by the When and the Where of its
making, but placed as itself in a meaningful conversation with the films that
surround it. Though one may find Gummo indefensibly off-putting, a film devoid of
pleasure, it nevertheless forces one to re-view and re-interpret in a new way such
comfortingly familiar independent fables as Box of Moonlight, The Station Agent,
Garden State et al in a new light – we are made aware of our basic desire to retreat
into such fantasies as a retreat. Finally, if Gummo is indeed too pretentious, too
slippery in its gestures towards meaning, then one’s tastes may turn instead to the
comparatively prosaic Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made, for its more explicit
and literal-minded exploration of the boundaries between independent filmmaking
and anthropology.
Tigrero is the depiction of an intersecting network of legends, some purely
filmic, others more traditionally adventurous and exploratory. On one level, the film
is a documentary, detailing Sam Fuller’s return, accompanied by Jim Jarmusch, to
the remote Brazilian village where he researched and shot footage for a proposed 20
th

Century Fox adventure film to star John Wayne, Ava Gardner and Tyrone Power.
Though the insurance company’s trepidation meant the film would not go on to be
produced, the discarded footage would be redeemed somewhat by its inclusion in the

321
two filmmakers’ decades-later journey to the location of its shooting. Rather than
exist as part of an expensive studio production,
295
the footage is instead re-presented
to the descendants of the Karaja tribe originally featured in it. Tigrero: A Film That
Was Never Made, then, depicts two emblematically independent directors,
themselves members of a group that struggles to survive, to pass on its traditions
from one generation to the next, in the act of returning footage shot for a proposed
studio picture to the Indians who might presumably have been exploited in its
production. The parallels were felt both by critics reviewing the film and by its
director, Mika Kaurismaki, during its making. As Tigrero’s production notes state:
“Today the cinema struggles for its existence as one small part of a gigantic field of
audiovisual communication. Similarly, the Indians [as the Karaja are referred to
throughout the film] are struggling for their life and for their ever decreasing
territory.”
296
Manohla Dargis, in her LA Weekly review, felt the film “becomes
heart-breakingly symbolic, a case of a member of one nearly extinct tribe exchanging
memories with members of another tribe almost lost.”
297
Here we see the productive
combination of irony and documentary: the independent feature reflects its tenuous
grip on the real by equating the cultural status of filmmaking with the real
displacement of the Karaja natives.
If the suggestion is made that the originally conceived Tigrero somehow
evokes the pathos of the Karaja by being too precious and fragile to exist at all, then

295
It is one of the film’s many ironies that, given the cast, had Fuller’s original Tigrero actually been
made, it would have severely challenged his reputation as a defiant outsider of the Hollywood studio
system.
296
Tigrero production notes.
297
Dargis, CITE

322
it is inspiring to consider that its potential excesses of sentiment are balanced by
Jarmusch’s dead-pan irony (itself arguably the very element that ignited this post-
Sundance independent movement in the first place) throughout. Kaurismaki’s
Tigrero casually attempts to structure itself as an adventure narrative, with Fuller
‘spontaneously’ inspiring his fellow director to join him on a mad journey while
enjoying the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. “We’ve got to take a crack at it!”, he barks at
Jarmusch, who can only respond with the laconic drawl, “Sam, I think you’re on
crack, man.”
To compete the structure of self-puncturing documentary, Fuller is unable to
get Jarmusch to return with him to civilization at the climax of Tigrero. While
receiving the Karaja’s traditional face paint, Jarmusch says, “This time I’ve got a
surprise for you. I’m not leaving. I’m gonna stay here for a while. Come back and
pick me up in about forty years.” If the comparison between the indigenous peoples
and the moment of Fuller’s independent American cinema is so didactic as to be
potentially offensive, then Tigrero is able to acknowledge this with what can only be
termed a generous, gentle use of irony: Fuller and Jarmusch make time to mock the
Orientalist conventions of their ‘White-Men-In-Jungle’ narrative, thus enhancing
truths through the very obviousness of their artifice. The casual manner with which
Jarmusch accepts Fuller’s challenge, and the equally passive way in which he throws
off the shackles of civilization as an effortless afterthought, devoid of anything that
could conceivably be called ‘drama’, is a truly productive engagement of irony. It
squarely places Tigrero in a context of colonial narratives and leaves the viewers to

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perform the work of ‘occasionality’ that is championed by Global Hollywood –
while doing so completely within the realm of textual analysis.
On that note, let us give the last words to the displaced auteur, Fuller himself,
calling for an engagement with the real in his autobiography A Third Face:
No need to make any sweeping statements comparing our society to
theirs. Except how could the Karaja’s simple well-being not make you
think about the excesses of our world, our government’s wrong-
headed, aggressive policies, not to mention the general decline in
decency and good will as Judeo-Christian-Muslim civilizations have
accrued military might and economic power? … As much as I’ve
been obsessed with my own country’s history and development, I
better understand America from having seen how other people live in
faraway lands, feasting on their charms and plunging into their
cultures … You young people sitting around watching the goddamned
television! Get off your asses and go see the world! Throw yourselves
into different cultures! You will always be wealthy if you count your
riches as I do, in adventures, full of life- changing experiences.
298

298
Fuller, 554-555.

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CHAPTER SIX
THE MORPHING TEXT AND THE VIRTUAL FRONTIER:
INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTHOLOGIES OF NEW MEDIA
TECHNOLOGIES

An obstacle in concluding any work of historical writing that ends at a
contemporary moment is that the present is inherently difficult to historicize. Given
that much of my perspective on the recent American independent film has explored a
cultural engagement with narrative as it pertains to the mythologizing of this
discourse, I shall propose, by way of conclusion, to consider the possibilities of
closure that have been made manifest in the past few years, as well as the potential
for new narratives to replace those that are now too familiar, out of date, or simply
inappropriate.
In many ways, the counter-narratives that now present themselves
consistently engage with issues of technology: if the human film directors behind
independent cinema are inevitably corrupted by money, then true innovation will be
on some level defined by an evolution in the medium itself. More and more, for
example, one is met with a barrage of press clippings about filmmakers using digital
video cameras to create personal features for miniscule budgets.
299
The Sundance
film festival turns hundreds of these films away every year while simultaneously
adding to their expanding mythology by celebrating such examples as Jonathan

299
In many ways, this shift is encapsulated by Francis Coppola’s prediction that “some little fat girl in
Ohio is going to make a beautiful movie with her Father’s camcorder.” Given that Coppola’s quote
was uttered in Hearts of Darkness, the documentary devoted to the making of Apocalypse Now, the
reference is loaded with significance – when such a camcorder film is made, it will be a marked
contrast to such bloated Hollywood spectacles as his. Given Coppola’s own daughter’s successes as a
director more than two decades later, the reference is doubly significant: the accessible, low-budget
work of the ‘little girl’ perhaps redeeming the modernist elitism of her father’s own excesses.

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Caouette’s autobiographical Tarnation (2003), in which his own video diaries over
nearly three decades were edited into an acclaimed compilation. The pages of such
magazines as Filmmaker: A Journal of Independent Film and such websites as
youtube.com also attest to the faddish embrace of digital video as a new idol
suddenly to be worshipped; in its recurrent references to absurdly low budgets and
high profits, the discourse repeatedly resembles get-rich-quick schemes and fantasies
of winning the lottery.
The race is also on to get books published on the subject, as best displayed by
Shari Roman’s collection of interviews and articles, Digital Babylon: Hollywood,
Indiewood and Dogme 95. Roman’s credentials attest to the relative rigor of her
insights: she writes for such popular magazines as Entertainment Weekly, The Face,
and Flaunt, suggesting a desire to perpetuate a fad for the sake of inflating a niche
market about which she can be amongst the first to get published. The hyperbolic
(yet vague) style of her introduction to Digital Babylon contains a number of notable
excesses to support this conclusion. She begins, for example, by proclaiming:
We live in a Digital Babylon, in a world saturated by hard data and new
technologies, insatiable for the pleasure of fresh images of our universe and
of ourselves. … A persuasive image can be perceived as truth, and therefore a
reality, but even pre-cinematic visionaries as varied as Buddha,
Scheherezade, the Marquis de Sade, Neitzsche (sic) and Shakespeare would
all undoubtedly agree, that absolute truth is a concept with uncountable
human variables … For the people who love film, it is still all about that
ineffable something. Storytellers wielding the camera, even in this gizmo-
delirious Age of Technopia, stand as part of an age-old, mythological
inheritance.
300

300
Roman, vi-vii.

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Roman’s writing here casts such a wide net that the impression is left that one could
feasibly say anything about anything (without, of course, actually saying anything);
one is reminded of desperate public speakers or undergraduate writers who nervously
avoid their subject matter by turning to their bookshelves in search of filler (“The
Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘independent’ as…”).
Though Roman’s book may seem an unfairly easy target, its slapdash nature
is worth noting here, both for the aforementioned issues of historicizing the present,
as well as the inherent limitations of celebrating new technologies for their own sake.
Does this fetishistic embrace of new technology paradoxically serve to obscure the
fact that film is itself always already a technology, thus suggesting a calculated
avoidance of history? How have auteur-based narratives of independent film
morphed into a technology-based equivalent, and where do such narratives overlap?
Furthermore, what are the potential pitfalls of emphasizing technology in the
independent arena when so much of Hollywood cinema is dismissed as little more
than elaborate displays of expensive special effects technologies?
Many have suggested, as we have seen, that the present moment is one in
which the distinction between the Hollywood and independent modes of filmmaking
is inescapably vague. I would suggest that this distinction meaningfully extends to
the discourse around new technologies: the democratic and emancipatory qualities of
personal, autobiographical films can quickly be absorbed by Hollywood films in
search of ‘authenticity’ and, conversely, the sense of blockbuster movies resembling
spectacular video games encourages us to view the narrative complexity of art-house

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fare such as Memento as itself a kind of intelligent game play. Now, dominant and
oppositional forms of cinema can morph into one another just as easily as the new
technologies around which they are promoted can transcend classification. Just as a
studio film may choose to resemble the authentic grit of the ‘indie’ world, so too can
the independent arena produce Far From Heaven (2002), whose gloss deliberately
resembles expensive studio product, and whose intertextual references to earlier
Douglas Sirk films encourage audience participation as a form of game play. Even
conceptions of categories that ‘morph’ into one another suggest an engagement with
technology as a meaningful expression of the present, postmodern condition.
To conclude, then, I shall examine the contemporary status of the
independent film as a site for the examination of how such forces interact and
interconnect. Today, debates around ‘indie’ cinema facilitate discussion not only of
how Hollywood reacts to parallel modes of filmmaking, but of how a simple,
humanist mode of art can coexist with rapid, complex technological advancement. I
shall consider the varying ways with which Hollywood and independent cinema
engage with technologies of morphing, of video game play, and of digital
filmmaking, while acknowledging that they do so during a moment of profound
overlap between the two modes of film. As with my chapters on the figure of the
independent auteur, I will proceed dialectically: first, we shall consider an example
of empty Hollywood interactivity; then, notable instances of more intelligent
applications of interactivity within the independent arena; and finally, we shall

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optimistically note the existence of cinema that meaningfully synthesizes each
approach.
“Fasten your seatbelt for an interactive DVD experience like no other!” So
boasts a press release for the home video version of Final Destination 3 (2006), the
latest in the popular horror series detailing the attempts of young people to change
their fate after avoiding death in such accidents as a plane crash, a freeway pile-up,
or, in the third installment, a roller-coaster disaster. Though the ‘message’ of the
films appears to involve powerlessness in the face of mortality, the latest sequel
teases fans with a compelling DVD alternative: “CHOOSE THEIR FATE! You’re in
Control – cheat death by changing the destiny of the characters. WOULD YOU save
innocent strangers from their Final Destination?”
Reading this, it is no accident that one is reminded of a carnival barker
encouraging fools to part with their money by ‘playing’ rigged games that offer no
real choice but to lose. The hyperbolic prose simultaneously evokes the film’s
carnival setting

as well as huckster advertising copy that promises much and delivers
little. Such exaggeration is particularly common to horror films; one is reminded of
producer William Castle’s declaration that House on Haunted Hill (1959) was made
in the new process of ‘Emergo’ – a ‘technology’ that was nothing more than a plastic
skeleton dangling from a rope, laughably cranked out from behind the screen during
the film’s climax.
For one interested in the evolving relationship of cinema to the new
technologies of videogames, it comes as a disappointment, if not a surprise, to learn

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that Final Destination 3’s “Choose Their Fate” viewing option suggests little has
changed in the half-century separating it from Castle’s output. The trumpeted DVD
interactivity, celebrated as a ‘first’ for a major studio release, reveals itself to be little
more than a collection of alternate death scenes, offering varying amounts of blood
and gore but precious little opportunity to meaningfully alter the text.
301
Though the studio’s ad copy might be accused of shamelessly exploiting new
media technology, such a practice in itself is nothing new. If Final Destination 3 is
likely to offend, then, it is more likely to do so through its jarring reference to 9/11,
in which an unpleasant reminder of the real interrupts the largely artificial pleasures
of the series. Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has discovered that photographs of
the roller coaster crash contain clues that foreshadow the survivors’ subsequent
deaths. In attempting to convince a fellow survivor that such foreshadowing is
possible, Wendy uses the last photograph taken of President Lincoln; a crack in the
plate drawing a line through his head “right where he was shot.” Her next photo
needs no explanation, and is held on the screen without dialogue: the World Trade
Center with a plane’s shadow falling on one of the towers.
302
I begin with this anecdote to highlight the vast gulf that persists between the
discourses of film and interactive new media – not only does the mainstream
Hollywood text described here offer an illusory interactivity (only one life to actually
‘save’), but the ‘interactivity’ on offer occurs during a film that seems to flaunt its

301
Of the seven spectacular death sequences that appear in the film, only one can be altered on DVD
to spare a character’s life.
302
As enough of a horror fan to be present at a packed screening of the film on its opening weekend, I
can personally attest to the image causing the otherwise noisily verbal audience to be stunned into
momentary silence.

330
own insensitivity to disaster and tragedy, at a time when debates continue to rage, in
public and academic spheres, about the connections between videogame and real-
world violence. On DVD, Final Destination 3 proves itself to be an exploitation film
in more ways than one – both our desire to interact with the text and to understand
historic tragedy are reduced simply to a means by which media conglomerates may
profit.
Though debates over the value of videogames and related technologies have
been visible within academic spheres for more than a decade, notably so in the work
of Henry Jenkins and Scott Bukatman, it has taken considerably longer for the public
intellectual sphere to catch up. In this chapter, I consider the extent to which this
discussion has been productively expanded as a result of the American independent
sphere, specifically using Gus Van Sant’s Gerry (2002) and Elephant (2003). These
texts engage substantially with issues of interactivity, in ways both explicit and
implicit; moreover, in its direct engagement with the violence at Columbine high
school, the latter raises the question of such interactivity’s ability to engage with play
for more than its own sake. To what extent does the discourse around film and
videogames raise ethical questions, and what are Elephant’s preliminary answers?
In his recent book, Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Pop
Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter, Steven Johnson identifies an increasingly
popular pseudo-genre:
Films built around fiendishly complex plots, demanding intense audience
focus and analysis just to figure out what’s happening on the screen. … The
mind-bender … designed specifically to disorient you, to mess with your
head. The list includes Being John Malkovich, Pulp Fiction, L.A.

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Confidential, The Usual Suspects, Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless
Mind, Run Lola Run, Twelve Monkeys, Adaptation, Magnolia and Big
Fish.
303

Johnson presents a preliminary, often playful rebuke to media narratives about the
dumbing-down of popular culture. Instead, the author suggests “even the crap has
improved”
304
; pop culture is consistently getting smarter. Johnson also considers
videogames, citing the monotony of ‘Pac-Man’ and ‘Pong’ in contrast to the
popularity of such contemporary problem-solving networks as ‘Myst’, ‘Sim City’
and the infamous ‘Grand Theft Auto.’
In a post-9/11, post-Columbine era of media alarmism and hysteria, texts
such as ‘Grand Theft Auto’ are easily made into sites for the politicizing of
aesthetics; a process by which the intensity of popular opinion, and popular (read:
increasingly Christian fundamentalist) morality can all too easily trump the rational
conclusions of scientific research. Nevertheless, Everything Bad is Good For You
makes a purely biological claim for the value of the media it investigates: we use
only a small percentage of our brains; when we ‘zone out’ in front of a videogame or
TV show, we feel guilty for allowing those brains to atrophy in a vacuum; however,
we are, surprisingly, engaged with the cognitive demands made by our pop culture;
therefore, we should admire said culture for making us ‘smarter.’ Here then, are the
terms of the popular debate: are those who celebrate technologies for their own sake

303
Johnson, 129.
304
Johnson, 91.

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in danger of being labeled ‘Dr. Frankenstein’ by the conservative right, uninterested
in the ethical implications of their pure scientific research?
Johnson also offers a narrative in which our current understanding of
postmodernism is refined and perhaps even redeemed. Consider his description of
techniques deployed throughout the Mindbender:
Some of these films challenge the mind by creating a thick network of
intersecting plot lines; some challenge by withholding crucial information
from the audience; some by inventing new temporal schemes that invert
traditional relationships of cause and effect; some by deliberately blurring the
line between fact and fiction. (All of these are classic techniques of the old
cinematic avant-garde, by the way.)
305

So much is said through his casual ‘by the way’; it is as if Johnson is conscious that
this new ‘genre’ does have meaning, but is not willing to interpret it. Nevertheless,
the point is made that popular cultural texts are now embracing the challenging
techniques of modernism within mainstream production – for many, an optimistic
sign of postmodernism responding to modernist elitism.
The mainstream acceptance of avant-garde techniques and the blurring of
previously solid conceptual boundaries are heady stuff indeed for a videogame
culture so commonly and easily dismissed as symbolizing everything that is wrong
with postmodernism. But is there a thematics, an ethics here? Johnson seems to
ignore such a possibility: his final verdict amounts to ‘everything in moderation’,
balancing cognitive, problem-solving lessons learnt while gaming with moral,
philosophical lessons absorbed while engaging works of high art, literary and
otherwise. Does the newfound complexity of our contemporary popular narratives

305
Johnson, 129-130 (my emphasis).

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signify any meaning in and of itself? How might this complexity challenge the loss
of meaning so common to the Postmodern ‘Blockbuster’ era?
To answer these questions, one must recall the extent to which the pleasures
of Johnson’s Mindbenders are derived from the advances of the American
independent movement. In its self-representation as a vibrant American art cinema,
the ‘indie’ discourse positions itself as a site that preserves the intellectual demands
and sophistication of European post-war Modernism
306
: the cryptic mystery of Blow-
Up; the enigmatic recollections of Last Year at Marienbad; the collapsing layers of
dream, cinema and reality in 8½. In the same way that the ability to engage with such
texts revealed an artistic fluency that could easily be translated into forms of cultural
capital, so too does the contemporary independent film learn to assume, reward and
at times simply imply intelligence on the part of its viewers.
307

One might conclude that such narrative play is perhaps best suited to those
films which employ a self-reflexivity to their storytelling ‘purely’ for the purposes of
postmodern irony – to call attention to their status as product, to remind viewers of
their artifice. In short: to exist as little more than ‘play.’ Many have suggested that
such approaches to narrative are a way to encourage either repeated trips to theatres,
or even an investment in the DVD, the better to spend time unlocking hidden
mysteries. Here, cognitive development becomes a human desire potentially
exploitable by independent producers who lack budgets for Hollywood-level

306
For a thorough consideration of how the films position themselves, see Geoff King’s “Following in
the Footsteps: Gus Van Sant’s Gerry and Elephant in the American independent field of cultural
production.” New Review of Film and Television Studies Vol. 4, No. 2, August 2006, pp. 75-92.
307
Dana Polan’s study of Pulp Fiction, for example, refers to his epiphany-like “Aha!” moment upon
figuring out precisely when and how the film’s narrative chronology had doubled back on itself (32).

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spectacle. Johnson himself makes this point, suggesting that conglomerates produce
such films because dedicated fans will buy the DVDs, even in multiple versions, in
order to master them through repetition, thus justifying initial outlay on box office
underperformers.
308
This trend of narrative density combines the populism of contemporary
videogames with the aesthetic/thematic potential offered by independent film,
leading to an enhanced model of spectatorship in which one no longer passively
receives a linear narrative, nor simply engages in a cognitive workout. Rather, one
‘plays’ such films as a pseudo-gamer, by exploring them spatially, investigating
which elements can be interacted with productively, and taking turns ‘entering’ the
subjectivity of multiple characters in order to play from varied perspectives.
Johnson cites such attributes as fundamental to the appeal of the average
video game today: importantly, such pleasures are consistent across a broad
spectrum of popular games, from the elegant problems in the fantasy world of
‘Myst’, to the pragmatic, crude encounters within the grim cityscape of ‘Grand Theft
Auto.’ This series is often invoked as self-evident proof of the (still unproved) link
between excessive gaming and adolescent violence. Given that one plays a character
with the ability to steal cars, run over pedestrians and murder prostitutes, it is
understandable that one may feel no amount of cognitive development could justify
the textual-thematic experience of identifying with such a rogue.

308
Johnson, 163.

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This outrage is derived, however, from a misapplication of traditional forms
of narrative film spectatorship within the profoundly more interactive, blank and
ambivalent arena of modern game-playing. Though ‘Grand Theft Auto’ appeals
more to the player inclined to derive vicarious thrills from dangerous high-speed
driving, while ‘Myst’ is more for a player who appreciates allusions to fantasy
writers such as Carroll and Tolkein, each offers fundamentally similar pleasures that
are all the more resonant for their sustained appearance in such divergent genres. We
might call these the pleasures of sutured interactivity: the player is presented in both
cases with a detailed, elaborate world. To maximize their knowledge of these worlds,
players must combine an attempt to pursue the goals explicitly offered (acquire
assigned objects, talk to characters, reach ‘the end’) as well as non-narrative goals
that are on some level set by the player him or herself (to test the limits of the game’s
world, to learn which rules are enforced flexibly, to seek out that which is hidden
purely for the joy of discovery). In a moment I will show that Gerry, a film whose
plot could be summarized as ‘two men go on a hike and get lost,’ offers the latter
pleasures in place of the former.
Despite their differences of surface textuality, both ‘Myst’ and ‘Grand Theft
Auto’ imply a fundamental appeal within the medium that activates a dormant
engagement with that which has been lost. As Henry Jenkins and Mary Fuller note in
their essay “Nintendo and New World Travel Writing: A Dialogue,” such game-play
positions the user as a virtual explorer, taming a digital frontier no longer present in

336

the real.
309
The joys of such games are closely linked to a basic desire to explore
one’s space, to learn, to make choices and mistakes, to build, to accomplish. To link
such experience to the textuality of the narrative feature film represents a potential
whose significance is only beginning to be known.
If the legacy of the postmodern blockbuster is the demonizing of videogames,
then that of the American independent film presently lies in its redemption of game-
based spectatorship. The sense of play offered by summer spectacles reduces gaming
to a sensory, kinetic appeal; cognitive development, however, is able to attain a
moral and thematic complexity that suggests a renewed ‘indie’ engagement with the
exploration narratives of American Studies discourses. Jenkins has repeatedly
referred to videogames’ capacity for narratives of spatial exploration
310
; however, it
is only in dialogue with American Studies’ interdisciplinary combination of literary
and historical analysis that a moral context is substantially addressed. It is Fuller who
claims “the drive behind the rhetoric of virtual reality as a New World or new
frontier is the desire to recreate the Renaissance encounter with America without
guilt … [one must consider] the ethics and consequences of such a historical
revision.”
311
Many pleasures of pure gamesmanship are to be found throughout Gerry:
each character bears the eponymous name, for example, potentially leading viewers

309
Jenkins and Fuller, 58-59: “Virtual reality opens new spaces for exploration, colonization, and
exploitation, returning to a mythic time when there were worlds without limits and resources beyond
imagining.”
310
See his “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” and “‘Complete Freedom of Movement’: Video
Games as Gendered Play Spaces.”
311
Jenkins and Fuller, 59.

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to hypothesize that they are in fact somehow the same person.
312
The identity of the
film’s location is also presented as a potential mystery to solve. As the two Gerries
(Matt Damon and Casey Affleck) begin to hike, the location shooting would appear
to evoke California deserts; however, as the film progresses, the hikers are shown to
cross the salt flats of Utah, and eventually, increasingly unfamiliar landscapes.
313

The film’s games are thus inseparable from thematic issues of frontier exploration.
While sitting by a campfire, Gerry-Affleck tells Gerry-Damon a lengthy videogame
narrative (though even this detail is itself, tellingly, never made explicit):
I had all the sanctuaries built … I already had all these docks … I was
trading with twelve cities … I had a really good army. [But] I
couldn’t grow the wheat to feed the horses … I couldn’t trade because
the river had flooded … I couldn’t train any horses because I didn’t
have the wheat … You can only send [the army] out if you have
twelve trained horses, and I only had eleven. I was one horse shy of
almost saving my city.

From this brief excerpt, it is clear that Gerry’s report is strikingly similar to
the intricate networks of problems present in so many popular videogames. One
might interpret the film, then, as making a judgment about the effect of gaming on
contemporary youth: for all of Gerry’s virtual accomplishments in building
simulated civilizations he in no way demonstrates the skills required to find his way
back to real civilization (indeed, of the two, it is this Gerry who does not survive the
adventure). Such a position allows one to interpret Gerry as condemning
videogames, and, by extension, to attack Johnson’s optimism from a Culture

312
This ‘split self’ is itself now a common motif of contemporary postmodern cinema, appearing in
such films as Fight Club and Adaptation (2002).
313
Gerry’s end credits reveal that these were in fact shot in South America.

338
Industry perspective: the only value of proficiency at video games is proficiency at
video games. The only result of a culture of increasingly complex narratives is a
facility with, and increased profit for, complex narratives.
A more productive reading of the fireside scene accepts and interrogates its
fundamental duality – thus exploring a potential union of interactive formal qualities
and modernist thematic confrontation. Certainly, the foolhardy, albeit computer-
savvy duo are being mocked; at the same time, however, the moment resonates as
equivalent to a monologue from any number of classic Westerns. During this speech,
Gerry not only refrains from naming the game, he refrains from acknowledging that
he’d been playing one at all. The result is that his recounting of crippling floods,
starving horses and trading difficulties fleetingly evokes American mythologies of
settling the West, in a meaningful instance of independent films aligning themselves
with elements of national mythology.
It is worth noting that, in order to reach such a point – to physically inhabit
the space of Western expansion while celebrating one’s own achievements in virtual
expansion – the Gerries have been required to choose against reliance upon passive
linearity, deciding instead to forge a trail of their own. After noticing too many
tourists with them on the marked trail, they first follow their own route to the end
point, and then finally dispense with the concept of an end point altogether. “Fuck
the thing! It’s just going to be a fucking thing at the end of the trail,” Gerry-Damon
declares. The goal at the end of the trail is never identified, suggesting a decisive
break from conventional approaches to narrative.

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The divergence from the path is equivalent to the digressions Gerry makes
from classical narrative storytelling; and so, when the film allows the playing of a
video game to ‘morph’ into the pathos of a suffering rancher, it seems that a larger
point is being made about the relationship between games and movies, between
interactivity and narrative, between cognitive strength and emotive wisdom. The
categories are typically kept separate by what amounts to another form of cultural
canon formation
314
; such films as Gerry are able to both blur the boundaries between
these categories as well as to implicitly challenge the cultural operations by which
such boundaries are maintained.
The experience of watching Gerry, formally, is strikingly similar to the
experience of playing such exploratory mystery games as ‘Myst’: each is a relatively
quiet text, with little music or dialogue; each is physically minimalist, depicting
apparently simple surfaces that yield meaning only upon closer inspection; and each
offers the simple, yet considerable pleasures of virtual movement through a vivid,
seemingly non-narrated environment. The viewers of Gerry, however, are placed in a
dual position of spectatorship, both interpreting the text as a conventionally thematic
narrative film as well as acquiring new skills and language in order to adjust to an
enigmatic interpretive space.
Such dualism is particularly intense during a lengthy sequence in which
Gerry-Damon convinces Gerry-Affleck to jump from a perilously high rock when it

314
Such academic ‘turf wars’ appear frequently throughout writings on videogames. Jenkins begins
“Game Design and Narrative Architecture” by referring to a “blood feud [that] threatened to erupt
between the self-proclaimed Luddologists, who wanted to see the focus shift onto the mechanics of
game play, and the Narratologists, who were interested in studying games alongside other storytelling
media”(1).

340
appears there is no other way down. Though their lives are apparently at stake,
especially given that Gerry-Affleck’s jump could cause a fatally progress-impeding
injury, the men render the dilemma comically abstract through their casual nature,
consistently laughing at each other and themselves as they attempt to puzzle out a
solution. Seemingly untroubled by the danger, the Gerries instead delight in devising
names, not just for elements of the world around them, but for their creative
experiments upon that world as well: by manipulating this dirt, I can make a “dirt-
mattress”; by holding my shirt just so, it becomes a “shirt-basket.”
In addition to actions and dialogue, even costume design marks the characters
as gamers. Gerry-Damon’s blue shirt, for example, ‘morphs’ from turban, to tool,
and back to clothing, suggesting its status as ‘playable’ object to be manipulated.
Gerry-Affleck, on the other hand, wears a black T-shirt with an iconic gold star; the
simplicity of the design helps mark him as an avatar onto which a viewer-player can
project himself. This trope is developed exponentially throughout Elephant, as
various high school students are similarly ‘marked’ for easy differentiation: a black
bull on bright yellow, a white cross on a red field. None becomes a full character in
dramatic terms; instead, they are empty vessels to be occupied, just as one hops into
whatever vehicle is handy in many videogames.
The contemporary culture of videogames emphasizes an increased ability to
play as a variety of selves, to assume different roles within the game’s narrative
universe. Often, a game will exploit this technological promise for the means of
blurring the Manichean lines that separate the good and evil characters on display;

341

one might, for example, enjoy a military simulation that grants one the perspective of
both potential sides of a famous historical battle, or to brandish a lightsaber while
dueling as either Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker. But the ability to do this is
typically contained and explained away by Culture Industry models of interpretation:
what one might theorize to be an idealistic manifestation of democratic choice in a
virtual sphere becomes precisely that – virtual, or merely one more novelty by which
media conglomerates can add to their profits. Moreover, academics often
hypothesize optimistically about the possibilities contained within such technologies
while bemoaning their regressive, even reactionary deployment in popular media.
In “Taking Shape: Morphing and the Performance of Self,” for example,
Scott Bukatman considers the mutability of digital images. Though morphing offers
a potential to transcend bodily limits and traditional chronology, he ultimately finds
cause for pessimism:
There is something symptomatic in my simultaneous desire to embrace and
reject morphing … in its most familiar versions, in countless sci-fi movies
and TV commercials, the hollowness of morphing … offers surprisingly
scant room for fantasy. Morphing is an inadequate, overly literal gesture
towards change without pain, without consequence, without meaning. There
is something comforting, perhaps, about the stability of unstable identity, but
morphing holds out empty arms.
315

Just as movie critics use videogames as common short-hand for belittling summer
movies, so too does Bukatman take Hollywood to task for squandering a vast digital
opportunity.

315
Bukatman, 156 (my emphasis).

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I propose a narrative in which one looks to such American independent films
as Gerry and Elephant for the moral energizing of such ill-used Hollywood toys. By
emphasizing Bukatman’s description of morphing as a device only seen in its ‘most
familiar versions’ and used in an ‘overly literal way,’ I mean to effectively make
manifest his implicit criticism of the dominant media industries that are inevitably
the ones with the capital to first engage in such technological experimentation. By
contrast, it is the work of a cinema that opposes such industrial modes to both
defamiliarize such increasingly common spectacular tropes, and to present them in
metaphorical, rather than literal ways. Bukatman would likely refer to Final
Destination 3 as an example of familiar interactivity, hollowed of meaning by
Hollywood; the value of Van Sant’s films lies precisely in their ability to energize
interactivity through distancing, unfamiliar means.
If Gerry suggests an embryonic attempt to integrate narrative and game-
based filmic modes, then Elephant represents progress in explicitly connecting such
experimentation to an urgent, visible subject. A documentary-style depiction of an
average high school’s collective day before a Columbine-like tragedy, Elephant has
a greater claim to topicality and importance than its predecessor. Such expectations
appear to be part of the film’s design, in that they are consistently raised only to be
thoroughly challenged, subverted, or answered with a deafening silence.
Elephant is ultimately more an interrogation of (our desire for) narrative as a
means to make sense of or deal with tragic events than it is any one such narrative
that might provide answers or comfort. Instead, Elephant places its viewer within a

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compelling, enigmatic space that recalls the gamesmanship of Gerry. As with the
prior film, Elephant relies heavily on a passive mode of narration: much of the film
consists of extremely long takes in which a steadicam floats behind a character as he
or she roams cavernous, gleaming high school halls. This passive narrativity engages
with interactivity, however, through the gradual revelation of Elephant’s
achronology. Though we are denied access to the students’ subjectivity, the film
nevertheless repeats a scene in which three of them cross paths, once from each
perspective. Rather than confront viewers with a specific cause for the tragedy of
high school gun violence, Elephant instead challenges the viewer to consider the
means with which it is depicted. Though the film is a discrete textual event,
unfolding the same way on each viewing, the suggestion is made that it would be
productive to ‘play’ out the day as several different students, the better to approach
an omniscient perspective.
If Gerry evokes such haunting, enigmatic videogames as ‘Myst’, then
Elephant forces one to confront the excessive violence in such controversial games
as ‘Grand Theft Auto’, or the first-person shooters
316
‘Doom’ and ‘Resident Evil.’
This connection is made visually explicit through camerawork which echoes slasher
films
317
, where viewers assume the perspective of a psychopath stalking sexually
active teenagers. Such references are not merely to be ‘caught’ by a savvy viewer,
but read as clues for a participatory player who comes to the film seeking an answer

316
The first shot after Elephant’s credits is a ‘first person driver’ angle, echoing the ‘Grand Theft
Auto’ series, on a car wildly, recklessly smashing into parked cars and sending their mirrors flying.
317
Many reviews of Elephant evoked The Shining (1980) in this regard.

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to the enigma of Columbine’s cause: have children been numbed by the violence
they see in movies?
318
As the two killers relax in their bedrooms, one grabs a laptop and idly plays a
first-person shooter. The game seems bland, even abstract, in comparison to its real-
world equivalents.
319
A point-of-view shot of a flat, grey wasteland is shown, in
which the player calmly walks up behind virtual people, points a gun at their heads,
and pulls the trigger. Thus, another ‘answer’: the boys have become violent because
they spend too much time playing video games! This interpretation is encouraged by
the use of this first-person perspective during Elephant’s climactic murders, with
faceless digital people replaced with the specific, real students the viewer has
literally followed over the course of the film.
Reading the film as a game, however, suggests interaction with a virtual
space in which all possible explanations for Columbine exist to be uncovered, with
only the player left to choose when the puzzle has indeed been ‘solved.’ Alongside
the horror film and the violent videogame hypotheses, Elephant includes such
familiar rationales for the killers’ motivations as: their closeted homosexuality

318
The debate, for example, around the effects of the so-called “video nasty” in the United Kingdom
has raised the direct possibility that such exploitative horror fare has led to horrific acts of violence
perpetrated by unthinkably young children, as well as the withdrawal of another provocatively violent
Kubrick film, A Clockwork Orange (1971).
319
The game in question is named ‘Gerry Count’, and its victims are digitized Gerries, a connection
made clear by Van Sant’s iconic use of costume design. Here we see another moment of
provocatively blurred boundaries: a moment of modernist intertextuality is also a reference to the use
of hidden ‘Warp Zones’ in videogames. Only the eagle-eyed viewer will notice the reference (it took
me several viewings of Elephant to spot it) and, upon doing so, will be able to access/read Gerry as
now having increased status as a film engaging with interactive media, as well as the weightier subject
matter of the later film. As Jenkins notes, “knowledge about warp zones, passwords, and other game
secrets are key items of social exchange between game players.” (“Nintendo”, 67) Here, the act of
reading a modernist text is encouraged to merit a group-networking status.

345
(before heading off to the massacre, they kiss in the shower); their obsession with
Nazis (the boys watch Triumph of the Will); absent and/or inattentive parents (the
weaving car is driven by an alcoholic Father, the killers are often in homes devoid of
adults); bullying at school (Alex is pelted with spit balls during a science class); the
ease with which new technologies can be irresponsibly manipulated (the killers
purchase assault weapons from the website ‘Guns USA’); and, finally, the
meaningless banality of high school existence (the film’s blank affect and passive
following of students as they move through space).
None of these possible answers is given authority by a subjective narrator;
whereas a more traditional form of narration might be expected to conclude with a
dramatic summation of its various answers (for example, the comforting morals at
the end of television After School Specials), Elephant ends on a notably contrary
note. Having arbitrarily killed his partner a moment earlier, Alex now finds he has
trapped two schoolmates in the cafeteria. As the couple pleads for their lives, Alex
points his gun calmly, alternating between them while reciting “Eeny, Meeny,
Miney, Moe.” The film ends here, its teenage killer suspended at a moment of
choice.
Is this simply a modernist rejection of the cinema’s ability to provide
answers? Or is it an interrogation of filmic narrative’s presumption to provide social
answers? My inclination is to argue for the latter possibility; I believe doing so
underlines the significance of the American independent film alongside a Hollywood

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industry commonly defined by its empty postmodernism, absorbing videogame
technologies into horizontally-integrated profit engines.
To watch Elephant is to enjoy the virtual sensation of self-narration; it is as if
one browses, or channel-surfs amongst the students on display, without any concern
for the spatial and thematic limitations of conventional narrative. Just as Elephant’s
viewers may designate their own hero or main character, so too are they free to select
their own ‘moral’ at the end of the text, from the many on display. It is important to
be clear, however: Elephant’s meaning is inseparable from the fact that such
sensations are virtual. The film’s value is not its ability to leave one feeling as if they
‘actually were there’, having enjoyed a simulation-ride through Columbine. Elephant
cannot avoid subjectivity: at best, it can only offer a hybrid of cinema and video
game experiences. The hybridity, however, is itself the meaning: in Elephant we are
witness to a true synthesis of the seemingly antithetical experiences of playing
interactive games and watching narrative films.
Elephant not only engages us to ‘play’ the film as if it were a videogame, it
enables us to consider the porous nature of boundaries between media, between
academic disciplines. Though much ink has been spilled in debates around the merits
and/or pitfalls of comparing videogames to narratives
320
; film, with its vast history of
synthesizing available technologies
321
, is inherently resistant to such essentialism. As
a single text, Elephant is able to: briefly ‘morph’ into the experience of viewing

320
In addition to Jenkins, see Gonzalo Frasca’s “Ludology Meets Narratology: Similitude and
Difference between Videogames and Narrative.” www.ludology.org.
321
We can add morphing, DVD branching and ‘Emergo’ to a list that includes 3-D, Vitaphone, CGI,
Technicolor, Cinerama, ad infinitum.

347
Gerry; integrate familiar modes of interpretation with interactive play; activate its
status as American independent film, fulfilling what Bukatman would call the
‘empty’ promises of Final Destination 3 and the like; and, in so doing, locate the
new frontier of spatial narratives within a centuries-old drama of human exploration.
The events of Columbine remind us that real lives are at stake in the discourse of this
exciting virtual realm; as with the fluid chronology of Elephant, so too must we
avoid merely looking forward. The only way to know our subject is to play from all
possible directions.
The specters of new technology have also impacted upon film industry
narratives of ‘70s-era auteurs themselves morphing into today’s independent
directors. Bukatman would likely remind us to read this figure of the contemporary
auteur, able to fluidly morph from studio director to independent artist, with as much
historical self-awareness and specificity as possible. As a result, it seems prudent to
return to the case of self-proclaimed ‘independent filmmaker’ George Lucas. A
compelling historical irony developed in May of 2005, with the release of Lucas’
final installment in his legendary Star Wars series, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.
The film was the concluding episode of both his “prequel trilogy”, a set of summer
blockbusters utilizing the latest in computer generated imagery and digital special
effects, as well as the last, as of this writing, of any feature films Lucas intends to
make as part of this franchise he began in 1977. As a result, Revenge of the Sith is
automatically a film that leads its audience to approach it with a greater complexity
of reading strategies than is commonly expected from Hollywood’s summer movies:

348
at the most literal level, one must make sense of it as a serial element within an
ongoing narrative that has been deliberately told out of chronological order; on a
personal level, one may reflect nostalgically upon one’s own maturation since
viewing the original trilogy; and, finally, as a part of film history, one is inevitably
led to muse about the various degrees of progress or regression within global cinema
culture that are a direct result of Lucas’ creation. That is to say, the film is
simultaneously an installment within a specific set of film narratives as well as an
element of a larger popular narrative about cinema, and perhaps more meaningful as
the latter.
By way of review, it is worth recalling for our purposes the position of the
original trilogy within American film history: that is, as a defining shift between the
mature, critical, auteur-driven cinema of the late 1960s and early 70s, and the
infantilized, reactionary, producer-driven blockbusters of the 1980s and beyond. For
many, the ‘childish’ appeal of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the
Jedi – the toys, breakfast cereals and comic books developed out of the franchise; the
formal embrace and even exaggeration of 1930s-era serial cliffhangers; the basic
narrative of an innocent youth redeeming a fallen, corrupt father – represented a
direct assault upon the strengths and idealism of a period often referred to as
Hollywood’s ‘second golden age.’ As already outlined in my analysis of the auteur
figure, Lucas, alongside Steven Spielberg, came to personify the shift from the
auteur film director to the producer- auteur figure so prevalent during an era of
postmodern blockbusters, all too often substituting a synthetic childlike wonder at

349
fantastic special effects in place of an intelligent, realistic engagement with the
contemporary world. Several critics and commentators have gone on to compare
Lucas not with the original trilogy’s ostensible hero, the young Luke Skywalker, but
with the villainous Darth Vader, ruler of a vast empire that crushes all those
independent citizens who attempt to rebel against it. If the filmic narrative of the
1977-1983 trilogy is one of an idealistic youth saving a corrupt, dictatorial Father,
the extra-textual narrative that accompanied it was one of Lucas becoming that very
dictator: utilizing his financial leverage to create his own empire, via Industrial Light
& Magic and Lucasfilm Ltd., all within his sizable Northern California estate, the
‘Skywalker Ranch.’
Particularly galling for many critics, academics and cinephiles alike is Lucas’
dogged determination to view himself as a wholly benevolent figure within the
industry; his inability to acknowledge what would seem to be self-evident side
effects of the Star Wars phenomenon comes to seem like a postmodern rejection of
reality in itself. In the years following the release of his original trilogy, for example,
Lucas has gone to great lengths to represent himself in such varying roles as: a
scholar, whose extensive research into cultural mythology and the writings of Joseph
Campbell enriches his films immeasurably; a peer of the acclaimed 1970s auteurs,
making films that combine populism and personal aesthetic expression, just as did
such figures as Coppola, De Palma and Cimino; and perhaps most laughably of all,
an independent director, whose own financial stability enables him to work without
answering to the demands of studio executives.

350
I intend to argue that the compelling historical irony referred to at the outset
of this conclusion is that the completion of Lucas’ prequel trilogy has in fact proved
the man right on at least two of these counts. If the irony of the first three Star Wars
films lay in its contrast between Luke Skywalker’s redemption of Darth Vader and
the fall of George Lucas into imperial decadence, then the irony of the recent trilogy
is expressed in its simultaneous filmic and extra-filmic inversion of both narratives:
now, it is the films themselves which depict a young man’s descent into corruption,
and the filmmaker behind them who attains a late measure of redemption from the
child he has created. A hyperbolic, even melodramatic claim, to be sure, and worth
placing at this point in a larger context: by way of conclusion, I wish to offer the
evidence of synthesis between the progress of the American independent film
throughout the post-Star Wars era and the advances of the global blockbuster during
the same period. Ideally, by demonstrating the existence of such synthesis – that is,
by making a case for an emergent mode of cinema that is able to combine elements
of expensive spectacle with a depth of content and artistic complexity typically
associated with art-house product – I hope to suggest that the promise of the
independent film movement under consideration here is capable of surviving its
integration with the marketplace for popular mass entertainment, and in fact gains in
strength every day.
In a sense, the narrative of this synthesis is also that of the promise of
postmodernism fulfilled. Throughout the 1990s, it became increasingly easy to
conceive of the concept in largely pejorative terms, particularly when viewing

351
mainstream Hollywood entertainment. As already suggested elsewhere in these
pages, the contrast between the studio production and the ‘indie’ film was often one
of a vacuous, ironic, self-referential postmodernity contrasted with either an embrace
of classical sincerity or an extension of the critical modernism that characterized
many beloved films of the 1970s. When the American independent film did embrace
postmodernism, with the success of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp
Fiction, the timing was tellingly concurrent with the ‘Disneyfication’ of the
independent film: such are the transgressions of postmodernism that Tarantino’s
films could now evoke the visceral theme-park-ride experiences of the Lucas-
Spielberg mold of cinema while also retaining the high art qualities that set
independent film apart from it. Tarantino’s style became notoriously imitated,
throughout mainstream and independent cinema alike; Tarantino himself
increasingly seemed to evoke the infantilized, media-obsessed youth said to have
been created by a postmodern age; and the Culture Industry appeared to once again
have quickly and easily absorbed new formal innovation into its ever-hungry maw.
But the element of modernism contained within conceptions of the
postmodern has proved to be strikingly resilient, and in recent years it has
increasingly seemed as if the popular American cinema might successfully be able to
bring modernism’s complex intelligence, its angry urgency and its predominant
interest in the real world to the multiplexes. Postmodernism remains an inherently
flawed, fractious discourse, but not one without a certain optimism in this regard:
finding the progress of modernism too slow, too much an elitist enterprise preaching

352
only to an already-converted intelligentsia, the promise of postmodernism would be
for the reach of global media conglomerates to facilitate the dissemination of truly
revolutionary modes of art. This sense of impatient urgency has only heightened, of
course, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks: almost immediately after the tragedy
occurred, media analysts hypothesized an imminent end to what suddenly seemed an
embarrassingly indulgent ‘Age of Irony.’ The symbolic horror of the events was
inseparable from the collective understanding that such spectacles – plane crashes,
collapsing skyscrapers, hordes of panicked onlookers desperately fleeing on foot –
were the creation of, and on some level the rightful property of, the Hollywood film
industry. When the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen later proclaimed the
attack to be, in part, a monumental, and monumentally effective, work of art, the
inevitable outcry in the American press nevertheless, even if only inadvertently, gave
voice to perhaps the most perverse question of all: would, could the beloved summer
blockbuster ever be the same again?
Given that part of the ongoing appeal of Hollywood’s product during its
‘second golden age’ had to do with its countercultural content during a time of
intense public turmoil, shaped by anger over an ill-defined American military
intervention, and cynicism for a corrupt U.S. government, it is perhaps inevitable
that one might ask: when, and how, will American media culture respond to such
equivalent present-day events? Is it possible that a return to such modes of
filmmaking will result from such ongoing unrest? Such attitudes could easily be
heard in 2004, with the release of Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11;

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indeed, the film continues to be so potent a signifier in the public consciousness that
it was invoked by a Reuters report on the release of Revenge of the Sith. Most likely
motivated by each film’s heavily publicized early screenings at the Cannes film
festival, a Reuters reporter’s article, “Star Wars Exerts Force in Earthly Politics”
begins thusly:
A year after Michael Moore weighed into the 2004 presidential campaign
with Fahrenheit 9/11, both sides of America’s partisan divide are debating
the political messages of a far different movie – Star Wars. Even before it
opened in theatres last week, some observers were drawing unflattering
parallels between the story of interplanetary treachery in Star Wars: Episode
III – Revenge of the Sith and the Bush administration’s war on terror and its
decision to invade Iraq.
322

The report goes on to note that many political columnists and critics found a number
of resonant, timely passages in the film’s dialogue, referring to “Anakin Skywalker,
the troubled young Jedi falling under the influence of the ‘dark side’ warn[ing] his
mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, ‘If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy’ – reminding
many of [George W.] Bush’s post-Sept. 11 declaration: ‘Either you are with us, or
you are with the terrorists.”
323
The same press services also tended to note a
character’s reflection on the ease with which fear is manipulated by politicians into
repression: “So this is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause.”
324
Clearly, given both the film’s thirty-year gestation period and, more
significantly, the hyperbolic and divisive nature of contemporary politics (especially

322
Gorman,
http://story.news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050524/film_nm/leisure_starwars_politics_dc&printer=1

323
Ibid.
324
Ibid.

354
as represented by the mainstream media), it is easily possible to feel self-conscious
finding too much meaning in these examples. Indeed, the report as presented by the
Agence France Presse includes a quote from Leo Braudy, offering a cautioning
reminder that “any film can be interpreted this way, especially when films deal with
conflicts … Some academics in the future will look at films of today and how the
political events are reflected in fiction and find parallels with Star Wars, but also
Kingdom of Heaven or Troy.”
325
If Revenge of the Sith seems especially meaningful,
he suggests, it is primarily due to its being “the most visible film” in the public eye.
Similarly, Lucas himself is described widely throughout the reports as stressing,
predictably, the more universal and timeless elements of the Star Wars series. For
example: “When I wrote [a story outline for the series], Iraq didn’t exist.”
326

Such denials are certainly in keeping with the infantilizing blockbuster
phenomenon so commonly credited to Lucas and Spielberg throughout the 1980s.
When the independent American cinema was celebrated at the expense of this mode
of filmmaking, it was lauded for its complex engagement with the real world and its
difficult truths; conversely, the comforting narrative of an idealistic youth enabling a
corrupt patriarch’s redemption is now easily interpreted as part of a pervasive,
reactionary cultural trend in which mythic Stallone and Schwarzenegger characters
replay the Vietnam war, win it, and in the process ‘correct’ the unhealthy cultural
advances of previous decades. As The New Yorker contemptuously observed in

325
Agence France Press,
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20050522/ts_alt_afp/afpentertainmentfilm_050522202005.
326
Ibid.

355

reviewing this most recent Star Wars episode, “we get the films we deserve.”
327

From this attitude one can recognize a weary disgust at the excesses of a postmodern
culture, willfully ignorant of recognizable human behavior, or the complexities of the
real world. The review in question, however, was written in 2005, as part of Anthony
Lane’s review of Revenge of the Sith. Is it fair of Lane to suggest that nothing has
changed in thirty years? Or is something less immediately visible in the process of
unfolding?
Certainly, if one were to look at the majority of reviews for the first two
installments of Lucas’ prequel trilogy – The Phantom Menace (1999), Attack of the
Clones (2002) – it would be easy to quickly conclude that the decades since the
original Star Wars’ release have seen a clear descent in the quality of expensive
Hollywood product. Indeed, it often seems that when one is talking about the Star
Wars series, and the legion of imitators it has spawned, one is inevitably forced on
some level to address questions of our own technological process as it relates to the
condition of being human. Many writers drew a direct correlation, for example,
between the increase in the recent films’ special effects budgets, and the decrease in
their pleasurable aesthetic qualities. What the prequels had lost, then, was a
compelling human factor. In its place were: an omnipresence of spectacular, even
painterly, sets and landscapes, nearly all of which were entirely created ‘by’
328

computers; an uneasy sense that the stars’ performances are drained of all vitality by

327
Lane, http://www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/050523crci_cinema.
328
So often is the concept of computer-generated effects dismissed in mainstream film criticism, one
can easily forget that there remain human artists at the controls of the technology used to render such
images.

356
the knowledge (theirs and ours) that all their lines have been uttered in front of a
green screen; and, such ill-conceived ‘virtual’ characters as Jar Jar Binks, whose
artifice is compounded by his apparent embodiment of offensive racial stereotypes.
The result of such prevalent assessments of The Phantom Menace and Attack
of the Clones was that a great deal of writing about George Lucas and his Star Wars
series became devoted to hypothesizing about the cause of this aesthetic decline from
one trilogy to the next. Were chickens coming home to roost? Was Lucas inevitably
tainted by the huge financial success of his earlier films? Was his entrepreneurial
spirit so extreme as to become symptomatic of a retreat from reality? Lucas’
Skywalker Ranch came to symbolize a number of depressing notions about celebrity,
wealth and popular culture in America: perhaps Lucas had inevitably become a
control freak, attempting to impose a single dictatorial will upon as many acres of
Northern California as he could afford to buy. Perhaps he had inevitably gone insane,
unable to separate reality from the elaborate fantasies he had created, becoming a
Howard Hughes-like eccentric recluse, or a Michael Jackson presiding over
Neverland next to David Merrick’s remains. George Lucas quickly became himself
an important and meaningful cultural symbol as he not only made his prequel trilogy,
but revisited his original series as well, adding CGI effects to ‘enhance’ them, a
move which many saw as nothing short of rewriting canonical works. Perhaps
you’ve seen it on a T-shirt, or heard a student, a friend, or even yourself complain:
“George Lucas stole my childhood.”

357
Given the intensity of such scrutiny from so many devoted fans, it was of
course impossible for the prequel trilogy not to disappoint the public to an almost
elemental degree: as they always say, ‘you can’t go home again.’ As a result, the
meaning of the Star Wars prequel trilogy is inseparable from its status as the
definitive contemporary cultural symbol of our inability to return to the comforting
womb of our mindless blockbusters. Is the prequel trilogy emblematic of the type of
film that our culture deserves, in its inability to become adult? Is this what Lane
meant in his New Yorker review? Have we collectively turned to the well of
inspiration for spectacular films so often that it has run dry, now leaving us with
nowhere to turn but towards the embracing relief of art? To answer yes to such
questions is to passively accept a narrative of popular film history that is all too easy
to register as truth; indeed, to propose, as I have been hinting at throughout this
conclusion, that this final Star Wars film represents a meaningful synthesis of the
two primary American filmic tropes in use since the release of the first Star Wars
film amounts, in some quarters, to a form of heresy. And yet, Revenge of the Sith,
both as an individual film and as a segment of the recent trilogy, is worth defending
in a manner that is neither a rebuke to those critics who dismiss it nor an attempt to
ignore such warnings as Leo Braudy’s about academic over-interpretation. The irony
of this film’s release, to which I earlier referred, is that of a compelling inversion
between the filmic and auteurist narratives represented from one trilogy to the next.
If the original trilogy presented a narrative of a pure youth redeeming his Father
through innocent idealism, while simultaneously representing George Lucas’

358
decisive split from his peer group of 1970s auteurs, then the prequel trilogy is all the
more powerful for its status as the exact opposite in both cases. In the late 1990s and
early 21
st
century, our popular summer cinema has instead become a tragic narrative
of an innocent blond child doomed to become a corrupt, murderous dictator; and if
there is a figure redeemed by this, it is Lucas himself.
Consider for a moment the relationships of George Lucas and Francis
Coppola, particularly in light of accounts of the latter that read much of his cinema
as fundamentally autobiographical: Jon Lewis’ Whom God Wishes to Destroy is
merely the best known example of many. Apocalypse Now, for example, suggests (at
least) two possible Coppola figures in its narrative: at first, the director is a Willard
figure, hesitantly optimistic about his assignation in the jungle; by the end of the
film’s protracted shooting, however, Coppola has become an obese, megalomaniacal
cult leader more reminiscent of Brando’s Colonel Kurtz. Some have even read Bram
Stoker’s Dracula as equating the eponymous Count with Coppola, interpreting the
film, with its many striking references to pre-classical film techniques, as a tragic
narrative of the director’s inability to keep pace with a modernizing cinema culture.
Most familiar of all, of course, is the perspective that views Coppola as
Michael Corleone. Even Coppola himself has said as much when discussing the
Godfather trilogy: in fact, the director has gone so far as to equate the critical attacks
on his daughter Sofia’s performance in Part III (1990) with the same film’s climax,
in which her character is gunned down by a bullet intended for her father.
329
Indeed,

329
The Godfather Part III DVD Commentary.

359
the oft-quoted line of dialogue from the trilogy’s final chapter almost speaks more to
Coppola’s career-spanning attempts to transcend the limitations of his role in the
commercial film industry than it does to Corleone’s angst: “Just when I thought I
was out, they pull me back in!”
Like Lucas, then, Francis Coppola is forever linked to a hugely successful
film trilogy begun in the 1970s; each is a director whose attempts to represent
himself as an important film artist are forever tainted by his moments of seemingly
effortless skill at commercial showmanship. It is worth remembering that, for all of
the critical praise lavished upon the first two Godfather films, they are also an
accomplishment of blockbuster populism: full of violence, melodrama and
reengagement with a genre that had not been economically viable for decades.
With this prequel trilogy’s fated narrative of young Anakin Skywalker
morphing into the familiar figure of Darth Vader, Lucas has become himself a
Michael Corleone. The consideration of specific details are in order: especially
memorable from Coppola’s first Godfather film is a climactic montage which cross-
cuts between a series of executions Michael has ordered and the baptism of his son.
The aesthetic triumph of the sequence is derived from the complexity of feelings it
arouses in the viewer: though one enjoys the triumph of formerly meek, ineffectual
Michael now becoming every bit the man his father was, one is also unable to
engage with this enjoyment purely. Through editing, one is forced to realize the
powerful irony of the moment: Michael’s moment of ascension is also,

360
simultaneously, a descent into Hell. The sanctity of his son’s baptism is tainted by
the blood on the father’s hands, just as it had occurred a generation before.
Such sophistication on the part of Coppola’s film is commonly celebrated
both in terms of the director’s cinematic mastery (Look at this pure deployment of
editing that is worthy of Sergei Eisenstein!) as well as his engagement with the
contemporary cultural climate (Look at the corruption of those in power whom we’d
previously idealized! How can we help but think of Vietnam and Watergate?).
Indeed, moments such as this passage have been crucial to The Godfather’s canonic
status, or its transcendence of the middle-brow. While such complexity is largely
absent from the Manichean universe of Lucas’ original Star Wars trilogy, I would
argue that it is indeed present throughout the prequels and comes to its fullest
fruition in Revenge of the Sith. Much of Sith’s rejection of this Manichean simplicity
is derived from the inevitable intertextual play it offers viewers, given that it directly
asks one to read it against a film from 1977. For example, in his DVD commentary
for the film, Lucas refers to Sith’s climactic cross-cutting, between the birth of
Anakin’s twin children and his own damning incarceration within the suit that
identifies him as Darth Vader, as a conscious homage to The Godfather’s memorable
climax. Again, there is a suggestion of an attempt at last minute redemption for
Lucas here, by repenting technological spectacle and embracing a purer cinema of
his fellow ‘70s auteurs.
Intertextual echoes of The Godfather throughout Sith also extend to a lengthy
sequence half-way through the film, in which the villainous future emperor

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commands, “Execute order Sixty-Six.” The order is for the simultaneous
assassination of all his enemies, each of them a valorous Jedi knight. The resulting
sequence recalls Coppola’s series of executions, but again replaces postmodern
pastiche with meaningful intertextuality: if the Star Wars series is on some level
autobiographical, then the series of killings in Sith suggests the beloved auteurs who
fell so that the Lucas-Spielberg empire could flourish in the 1980s. As the Jedi are
killed, one may liken them to forgotten directors, such as Friedkin, Bogdanovich,
Ashby, even Coppola himself; it is as if a repetition compulsion of some sort has led
the director to, effectively, atone for his prior crimes.
Sith’s narrative density is, of course, not purely intertextual. By centering this
prequel trilogy around a character audiences know is destined to become a figure of
ultimate evil, Lucas is able to problematize the dichotomies of the original trilogy,
and to place viewers into an uncomfortable position regarding character
identification – an accomplishment that should be all the more laudable for occurring
within the context of the summer blockbuster, a mode of cinema typically dismissed
as aesthetically bankrupt. Indeed, there are a surprising number of ways in which the
most common critical complaints about the Star Wars prequel trilogy ironically
reveal the extent of the endeavor’s ambitions.
For example: the films’ plots are attacked for their obscure complexity,
detailing the intricacies of dull political machinations while denying the familiar,
swashbuckling pleasures of the original films. Also: the casting of the central role in
all three films is considered flawed. Jake Lloyd, playing Anakin as a child and

362
Hayden Christensen, playing him as a young man, are both annoying, unpleasant
screen presences who lack the charm of Harrison Ford’s Han Solo or the earnest
innocence of Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker. Finally: the dialogue! Good lord, it is
terrible, they say – wooden, awkward, artificial, constantly calling attention to itself.
Sentiments such as these are easy to find. They are peppered, at times quite liberally,
throughout the mainstream reviews of the prequels (Lane, mocking the cryptic
grammar of Yoda in his New Yorker pan of Sith, cries, “Break me a fucking
give”
330
). They can be found throughout internet fan discussions of the new films
(where the pained cries of “George Lucas stole my childhood” are almost audible).
They even manifest themselves in forms of popular parody, such as a Simpsons
episode in which a parallel set of films is mocked for its torpor, and their bearded,
flannel-wearing creator, Randall Curtis, is directly berated for his inattention to what
made his original films ‘great’ in the first place.
In short: the Star Wars prequels are almost universally acknowledged as bad
films; those who attempt to defend them are fools; and so, let us simply try to top
one another’s catty insults and bitchy satires. Case closed.
But what if one turns this narrative on its head? What if the worth of the
prequels is directly linked to their withholding of pleasure, both in terms of their lack
of narrative transparency and their refusal to indulge in earlier, familiar pleasures?
Can these films be defended as an attempt to return to the combined populism and
complexity for which Coppola’s first two Godfather films were so universally

330
Lane, http://www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/050523crci_cinema.

363

acclaimed? And, perhaps even more importantly, does the Star Wars prequel trilogy
represent a return to aesthetic engagement with the real, contemporary world?
Responding to the many reporters at the Cannes festival who, upon exiting the early
screenings for Episode III, saw parallels between the film’s narrative and George W.
Bush’s support of the Patriot Act’s repressions, Lucas was quick to point out that his
saga’s roots extended to a far earlier historic context. As one report noted, “Lucas
has insisted that his themes of corrupted democracy and the rise of a fear-mongering
tyrant were outlined decades ago, informed by Watergate and the Vietnam era, as
well as Hitler’s rise to power.”
331
Another takes this idea even further, claiming the
“original 1977 Star Wars movie was a parable about the U.S. war in Vietnam and the
scandal surrounding the resignation of disgraced U.S. president Richard Nixon”
332
(!)
It is a shame the reporter in question chose not to explore this argument further, as it
is something of an allegorical stretch without examples to support the theory.
Nevertheless, the comment does reveal a sense in which the prequel trilogy is the
child of the original films, retroactively redeeming them (or at least inspiring viewers
to redeem them) by investing them with a contemporary critical eye that had largely
gone unnoticed until the present moment.
Again, think of the monumental, historical extra-textual irony: the recent
films redeem their parents (and their infantilized fantasy narrative of a child
redeeming its parent) through the very qualities which prevent them from being as

331
Gorman,
http://story.news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050524/film_nm/leisure_starwars_politics_dc&printer=1
332
Agence France Presse,
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20050522/ts_alt_afp/afpentertainmentfilm_050522202005

364
immediately satisfying as a fable about a child redeeming a corrupt parent. To
accomplish this, Lucas has returned to an aesthetic palate that strongly invokes the
beloved hallmarks of the very moment his first trilogy is thought to have destroyed,
almost single-handedly: namely, the difficult reflexivity of 1970s Modernist
filmmaking. Recall the prior aesthetic flaws outlined a moment ago, each
consistently labeled as so self-evident that they become indefensible. Firstly, the
narrative density: in the New Hollywood era, this was not only a common pleasure to
be found in such popular foreign films as Rashomon and Last Year at Marienbad,
but, by the time of such American conspiracy thrillers as Chinatown and The
Parallax View, it had become something of a selling point. Next, the casting, with its
resistance of clear heroes and figures for immediate audience identification: one is
similarly reminded of the complex male figures at the center of Deliverance, The
French Connection or Dirty Harry, about whom one cannot help but feel ambivalent.
Finally there is the self-conscious dialogue, consistently denying viewers’ desires to
forget the stark proscenium of the movie screen and lose oneself completely within
Lucas’ extensively detailed fantasy worlds: such rejection of traditional pleasures in
favor of the exertion required by thought and contemplation is a fundamental tenet of
all Modernist art. By the time one watches Revenge of the Sith, often having viewed
the original trilogy decades earlier and then finally engaging with the last piece of
the prequels (indeed, of the entire series), one has been forced to face both the pain
of one’s own maturation over that time, as well as the ever more complex and

365
intricate pleasure offered by the more recent films’ interrogation of those earlier,
simple pleasures.
Again, think of Anthony Lane’s words: “we get the films we deserve.” From
the pen of a New Yorker critic, this is meant as a withering insult, a testament to a
general cultural decline being met with a film series devoid of value. At the other
end of the critical spectrum, there are reporters whose political biases are almost
embarrassingly influential over their reading of the final episode: it is an ‘obvious’
anti-Bush allegory, every bit the work of leftist propaganda that the Palme d’Or-
winning Fahrenheit 9/11 had been one summer earlier. Both positions are extremist,
and neither is able nor, apparently, willing to account for the range and intensity of
responses that a viewer is likely to have while watching the film. Moreover, an
unpopular opinion does not find itself commonly articulated: that the earlier
prequels’ rejection of simple satisfactions has indeed always been part of the design
that contributes to the weight of the final piece.
Watching Attack of the Clones and The Phantom Menace, viewers bristled at
their own distance from the central character of Anakin Skywalker; we wanted, and
were adamantly denied, a clear hero. Anakin is indeed the prequel trilogy’s
protagonist, so much so that one wrings as much vicarious pleasure as possible out of
his vigorous light-saber duels and extravagant last-second rescues. By the time of
Revenge of the Sith, however, he murders several children as well as, indirectly, his
own wife. In many ways, given that this episode’s narrative is effectively
preordained by its position in the whole of the Star Wars series, it would seem that

366
the only apparent purpose for this film is the eliciting of surrogate emotion, via a
populist tragic narrative that inspires either genuine pity or some reasonable
facsimile thereof. More is occurring, however. As a direct result of the film’s
multiple narrativity (simultaneously the narrative climax of one trilogy and part of an
elaborate ‘flashback’ that expands viewer knowledge of the other), one is forced into
a position of responding to many things at once; the film is both an aesthetic
achievement and a rewarding cognitive exercise. The fact that Lucas is able to
contain both qualities within a massive summer blockbuster, furthermore, speaks to
an integration of the American independent and mainstream cinemas to a degree far
more significant than the director’s own claims that his self-funding ‘means’ he is
inherently a maker of ‘indie’ cinema.
He is not alone in this optimism. As we have seen throughout these pages, it
fills the contemporary discourse around independent film. What unites this
optimism, however, is the superficial quality to much of it. Writing for mass
publication, such figures as Shari Roman and Steven Johnson are permitted to rush
their judgments. It is worth recalling, by way of contrast, Scott Bukatman’s
concluding pessimism about technologies of morphing; here, the evidence of such
optimism quickly revealed itself to be an embrace of arms that offered nothing to be
held, nothing to behold.
As I noted at the start of this conclusion, and as Johnson, Roman and
Bukatman collectively demonstrate, it is inherently difficult to historicize the present
moment. I am left somewhat adrift between the realistic pessimism of academic

367
theory and the attractive optimism of self-promoting public intellectuals, fully aware
of the banality offered by a proposal that ‘the truth is somewhere in between.’ But
whereas Johnson and Roman propose new technologies for their own sake,
uncritically suggesting that they are somehow inherently good and democratic,
Bukatman remains interested in content, in textuality, in history. Only now are we
beginning to find the films themselves responding to this call: from the massive
production of a Star Wars blockbuster to the miniscule art films of Gus van Sant, one
can recognize a visible engagement with the hardware of new technologies – their
structure, their spectacle, their sense of play – as well as their status as software, as
tools to be manipulated by their user for the purposes of expressing that user’s
creative ideas.
Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘Frontier Thesis’ once suggested that the space of
the expanding west was an inherent cause of a nation’s turn to democracy; since its
writing, American Studies scholars have engaged in profound and committed debate
about the merits of this thesis. Now, such figures as Henry Jenkins, as well as such
films as Gerry and Elephant refer to the space of the video game diegesis as a virtual
frontier, enabling players and programmers to participate in a democratic narrative
art. The debate over the ultimate value of this frontier’s virtuality will be played out
over the coming decades, occurring as much in the writings of the Academy as it will
in the media texts of American mythology.

368
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05

The Onion (no author credited). “Large Dependent Film Tops Weekend Box Office.”
Issue 38-36. Oct. 2, 2002. http://www.theonion.com/content/node/31175.

Abstract (if available)

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