CHAPTER 10
MERE ANARCHY: THE CINEMA OF DISINTEGRATION
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PACKAGING CONCEPTS
The fragmentation of production coincided with the merger of the major distribution companies with larger corprate groupings. The period from 1966, when Gulf and Western took over Paramount, to 1969, when Kinney National Services merged with Warner-Seven Arts, saw an upheaval in company ownership more substantial even that that of the early 1930s. The majors diversified, predominantly into other media, or were absorbed into conglomerates attracted
by their undervalued stock, their film libraries and their real estate. However, the reorganization of the industry that followed diversification was a less fundamental change than that provoked by the Paramount decrees. By and large, it extended the effects of divorcement. The merger with other media concerns, particularly the record industry, was in a sense only an extrapolation of the majors' post-
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Paramount commitment to a power-base in distribution rather than production, and the growth of independent production completed a process begun in the early 1950s.
Hollywood's acquisition by conglomerates has, to a degree, merely been the swapping of one set of distant masters for another. The new landlords of the Dream Factory, like their predecessors, have pursued the primary motivation of profit; on occasion obtained by slum clearance projects like Kirk Kerkorian's sale of M. G. M. assets to build a Las Vegas hotel, or the urban renewal program of Century City on the back lot of the Fox studios. But if Hollywood has shrunk physically under corporate ownership, with its volume of production declining from 196 features in 1969 to 106 in 1978, its business remains much the same, and in one respect only have the new patterns of ownership made a significant difference to the way it conducts that business. The role of the mogul has been abolished: Hollywood's recent studio executives are men under different influences from those of Warner or Cohn. They share a trait common
among corporate management, of frequent mobility of employment. Where Mayer ruled M. G. M. from 1924 to 1951, the studio saw six different studio heads in the years between 1968 and 1979. Only Warner Brothers and Universal had the same management team throughout the decade, while career structures like that of David Picker are increasingly the norm. Picker became President of United
Artists in 1969, left to go into independent production in 1973, became head of production at Paramount in 1975, and returned to independent production for Lorimar in 1977.
This pattern of short tenure in senior management helped to remove the last vestiges of any identifiable studio styles. By the mid-1970s the post-Paramount attitude of regarding each production as a one-off event had reached a point where none of the majors any longer possessed a recognizable identity either in its personnel or its product.
The corporate acquisitions and the economic crises of the late 1960s occasioned the removal of the old guard. Box-office failures combined with the spectacles of the counter-culture (Haight-Ashbury, Chicago, Woodstock) to offer further evidence that Hollywood's liberal consensus was no longer adequate to the demands of a more youthful and volatile audience. The accepted explanation was that the industry had lost contact with its audience because there were too many old men with too much control over production to encourage the right material. In response,
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Hollywood engaged in an unparalleled wave of parricide. Its most conspicuous victims were the last surviving moguls. Jack Warner sold his interest in the studio in 1967 to embark on a notably unsuccessful career in independent production. Darryl Zanuck lost the last in a series of proxy fights at Fox, and retired in 1971. Between 1966 and 1973 all the majors acquired new, much younger production heads, drawn as often as not from outside the immediate confines of Hollywood.
The more public search for the kid genius director concealed a more enduring palace revolution giving power to a younger generation of executives whose previous careers were most likely to have been in television, talent agencies or "creative management."* If the personnel changed, the professional ethos remained the same. Heads of production continued to insist on their ability to gauge an unstable public taste, and to argue that the nature of the industry militated against predictable profit margins.
In other areas of its financial operations, the new Hollywood was more susceptible to corporate influence. The long-term response to the financial crisis of the late 1960s was for the majors to withdraw further from direct involvement in production, concentrate on financing and distribution, and find more ways of hedging their bets over investment. Tax shelter finance became an important source of production funding in the early 1970s when bank capital was more cautious about investment in films, and it probably saved Columbia from collapse. Occasionally two companies would jointly finance a large-scale production, sharing distribution rights. Of greater significance was the practice of pre-selling films to exhibitors by demanding non-refundable guarantees in advance of screenings, passing the loss on unsuccessful blockbusters like A Bridge Too Far (1977) and 1941 (1979) onto the owners of the empty theatres. In mid-decade the majors began to recognize and capitalize on the value of ancillary markets to the point where television
sales in particular were commonly negotiated in advance of production, and their revenues taken into account in calculating budgets. Such mechanisms of distributor protection
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*e.g., James Aubrey, former head of CBS-TV, who became President of MGM in 1969; Ted Ashley, former agent at William Morris and founder of the Ashley Famous Agency, who took over production at Warner Bros in 1977; David Begelman, co-founder with Freddie Fields of Creative Management Associates, who became Columbia's production chief in 1973.
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meant that, at least for them, a film might show profit without drawing audiences. Their regular distribution fee, of 30 per cent of rentals, guaranteed them healthy windfall profits on "supergrossers," while also delaying the point at which every film was deemed to have broken even, after which the distributor would have to pay the film's producers a percen-
tage of the profits.
Distributors negotiated from a position of strength to ensure their own stability, if necessary at the expense of exhibitors and producers alike.
Theatre owners and television companies might have to carry the can for occasional unexpected box-office failures, but producers were more consistently penalized by overhead charges, punitive deductions for going over budget and interest charges while the film was recouping its costs. Although the commonly accepted notional figure for a film breaking even is 2.5 times its negative cost, on occasion distributor manipulation of figures prevented a film declaring profit up to a point well in excess of its notional break-even level.
In December 1979 Fox declared that Alien, with a negative cost of $11m, had so far earned $48m in worldwide rentals and was still $2.5m in deficit. The net result of these distributor practices has been a pattern of broadly stable and increasing profitability for all the majors during the decade. By 1980, Ned Tanen, President of Universal Theatrical Pictures, was confident enough in both the certainty of profit and the uncertainty as to how it would be earned to declare,
the business projections we make for each year usually end up correct within one or two percentage points. We end up where we thought we were going to be, but we never, ever get there the way we thought we were going to get there.
Stabilized distribution economics and a mobile corporate bureaucracy are the real legacies of the crisis of the late 1960s, not, whatever Francis Ford Coppola's good intentions, greater freedom for the individual filmmaker.
The dominance of the major distributors suggests that the influence of the smaller production or production-distribution companies has been exaggerated by writers in pursuit of critical genealogies rather than economics. In itself, the Hollywood Renaissance of 1969-71 was an inconsequential event: in search of the profitable youth film and uncertain where to find it, the studios floated independent
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production companies with radical intentions (in particular BBS and Pressman-Williams) by agreeing to distribute their product, and themselves backed a few small-budget first features by young directors. After Easy Rider, these
were almost uniformly unsuccessful: the few "anti-Establishment" successes at the turn of the decade were either large-budget productions such as Little Big Man or Carnal Knowledge, or, like Midnight Cowboy and M*A*S*H, were made by older and more established directors.
The illusion of the Hollywood Renaissance has, on the other hand, been of more consequence in formulating the received history of the 1970s, largely because of the allegedly crucial influence of one man, Roger Corman, in sponsoring the first efforts of the majority of directors who attained critical prominence in the rest of the decade. Michael Pye and Linda Myles, in particular, have promoted Corman's centrality to the American cinema of the 1970s, in their book The Movie Brats. His record of success is not to be denied: Bogdanovich, Coppola, Scorsese, Kershner, Nicholson and Wexler all got their breaks via Corman, while his company, New World, was the prototype for Coppola's American Zeotrope, which itself sponsored Lucas. But Corman is (in almost any terms, but particularly economically) a peripheral figure in the film industry. Whatever claims to critical attention he may have, the nature of Corman's low-budget operation inevitably places it outside the orbit of the major companies, on whose omissions and miscalculations it is to a large degree dependent. Like his
mentors Sam Arkoff and James B. Nicholson of American International Pictures, Corman's stock-in trade has been the exploitation of otherwise unrequited demand, whether that be as producer of biker movies or as American distributor of Cries and Whispers.
His reasons for employing young talent have equally always been economic.
Untried directors, actors and crew eager to make their first film are cheaper than seasoned and unionized professionals. AIP, New World and their imitators have largely taken over the function of B-features as the training-ground for talent the majors will later absorb.
Corman's historical importance stems from his commercial success in the period of the majors' greatest insecurity. But his working procedures were not a solution to Hollywood's economic problems, because they did not provide the majors with substantial enough product. In the early 1970s they were prepared to employ anyone, even Russ
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Meyer, who might provide a clue to audience taste. By mid-decade, they had abandoned their scruples and committed themselves to producing and distributing the kind of overtly sensationalist material they had previously avoided, and independents like Corman could not compete in production values with the likes of The Omen and Carrie (both Fox, 1976). With the decline of low-budget production, Corman's critical cultism and his commercial reputation began to ebb.
It may be that the most significant legacy of the brief rise of the exploitation movie in the Hollywood Renaissance was the majors' adoption of exhibition patterns that independents like AIP had been pioneering earlier in the decade. Saturation booking, the simultaneous release of a film into a large number of theatres at the same time, was a standard practice among exploitation filmmakers, whose economics required the rapid recoupment of investment. The majors began experimenting with it in the late 1960s, shortly before they started to use national television advertising. Strategies of this kind greatly increased distribution costs by expanding publicity budgets and print costs.
Where in 1960 a maximum of 350 prints of a film might be made, by the late '70s a movie given blockbuster treatment might require as many as 1000 prints. Expenditure on publicity now regularly exceeds a film's negative costs (Fox spent $10. 8 million making Alien, and $15. 7 million advertising it).
Such marketing mechanisms, available only to a limited number of films at a time, inevitably reinforce the distributors' blockbuster mentality. The new economics revealed themselves clearly enough in 1971, when the year's top-grossing film, Love Story, earned more money in domestic rentals than the next three highest-grossers combined.
As James Monaco has pointed out, what is notable about this economic strategy is that it is an essentially conservative response to a situation of limited audiences. The increased expenditure on publicity, with its tacit acknowledgment that it is possible to sell a film to the public, provides a further mechanism of distributor control. A low-budget production like American Graffiti may produce phenomenal profits when measured by the ratio of rental income to negative cost (in this case of 5000 per cent). But the decision to sell the film vigorously enough to make such earnings possible lies with the distributors, whose preference remains for the reliable investment. American Graffiti's success bought George Lucas a fourteen-fold increase in budget for his next film, Star Wars, the most remunerative movie in Hollywood
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history. By comparison to American Graffiti, it yielded a mere 1855 per cent profit on investment. But it was a product more satisfactorily geared to the logic of a corporate economics seeking market stability than the much less
predictable earnings of Lucas' earlier film.
Despite the enormous cash-flow figures of individual films, the blockbuster approach to marketing is, like all distributor mechanisms, designed to guarantee commercial stability rather than maximize profits. In this respect, it is in the grand tradition of Hollywood economics, where a superficial extravagance conceals a fundamental conservatism.
In contrast to the calamities of 1969-71, relatively few blockbusters have failed to cover their negative costs in the later 1970s, given the protection for the distributor provided by exhibitors' advance guarantees. On the other hand, blockbuster economics have a peculiar and apparently cyclical habit of getting out of control. At the outset of the cycle, unexpectedly large profits accrue to one or more films, provoking a wave of imitations formulaically repeating the successful film's attractive "elements." Production and marketing budgets expand in the attempt to produce more of the same, to a point where investment in production exceeds any possibility of recoupment, and companies suffer heavy losses as a result of overproduction. Retrenchment, in the form of limitations on budgets and a drop in the number of films produced, follows until the cycle repeats itself with another spectacular financial success provoking imitation. From the crash of Cleopatra in 1963 the cycle has repeated itself twice, reaching its critical stage in 1969-71 and 1980-
81. The most recent crisis, involving films such as Hurricane (1979), Raise the Titanic (1980), and most notoriously Heaven's Gate (1981) has not, however, been nearly so severe as the previous decade's, because the major distributors have maintained a firmer grip over expenditure, on occasion simply deciding to write off a $22 million investment in the production of Sorcerer (1977) rather than plough an equivalent amount
into its promotion. The losses on individual films in 1980-81 were, in any case, occurring in a broadly buoyant market. The crisis was provoked rather by a degree of laxity in the supervision of a number of substantial projects and the box-office failure of a cycle of disaster movies, rather than the complete breakdown of producers' ability to predict public taste. The conservative blockbuster approach, with its commitment to marketing rather than production, remains fundamentally sound.
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To some extent, the differences between the production methods of exploitation movies and the packaging of blockbusters is merely a question of scale. In 1955 AIP was pioneering a process of commodity packaging by constructing a film around a title and an advertising campaign. The Beast from 10,000 Leagues has mutated into American Gigolo, initially constructed around a title and John Travolta (replaced, with a drastic cut in the budget, by Richard Gere). The essential change has been the mutation of the
idea ("You bring me an idea, " said Jack Berners. "Things are tight. We can't put a man on salary unless he's got an idea.") into the concept ("That notion of the gigolo as a metaphor for the man who can't receive pleasure hit me and from that moment I had a metaphor that was uniquely representative of that problem.") The heavy emphasis on marketing strategies, combined with the absorption of distribution companies into multimedia conglomerates, has elevated the
concept
to a central place in contemporary Hollywood construction. Movies no longer exist as autonomous industrial products, but are increasingly manufactured as one item in a
multi-media
package. Star Wars, with its toys, games and bubble-gum spin-offs, is only the extreme version of the conventional packaging of a concept as film, record, "novelization," and so on.
The use of pre-sold source material, in novel or play form, was hardly new in Hollywood, but producer Robert Evans set a precedent when he persuaded
the publishers of Love Story to print 25,000 copies of the book by offering $25,000 for its promotion. Integrated and jointly financed promotion campaigns became increasingly the norm in the late 1970s, by which time the hype had become almost an art-form in its own right. The carefully orchestrated publicity campaign for Jaws ensured that the film's release just happened to coincide with widespread reporting of shark sightings around the American coast. Timing in such complex campaigns could be crucial in other areas, too. The disaster for Star Wars had nothing to do with the film.
It was in not having the children's toys in the stores in time for Christmas.
This process of multi-media packaging has effectively substituted for the studio in the placement of an individual film. Instead of being part of a balanced cluster of films produced out of the same studio, it has become one of a group of products occupying different places in the media web.
Likely to be the most profitable individual element, the status of the movie has nevertheless been diminished by a need for formal compromise with the demands of other
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products.
In its construction, its producers have been obliged to consider the possibilities for its exploitation as a series of linked but separate commodites, and to compile their package accordingly.
As Hollywood terminology the package has a more specific meaning relating to the assembly of a production. Stars, script (or concept), and less frequently a director or producer, are "packaged" by a talent agency or an independent producer, and this package is then offered to one of the majors for financial backing or a distribution deal. Apart from its tendency to de-emphasize narrative, such an assembly procedure is no more novel than the pre-sold source, but it is another function formerly performed by the studios and now dispersed among a more amorphous body. Packages can be initiated by a wide variety of sources, and it is contemporary Hollywood folk wisdom that more time and effort is spent in the arrangement of the packages than in the resulting film, the process being made more complicated than previous systems of production by the competing interest of the various individuals involved.
As Joan Didion put it in her essay "In Hollywood,"
... to understand whose picture it is one needs to look not particularly at the script but at the deal memo.
She provides an acute analysis of the aesthetics of the deal:
The action itself is the art form, and is described in aesthetic terms: "A very imaginative deal," they say, or, "He writes the most creative deals in the business." ... The action is everything, ... the picture itself is in many ways only the action's by-product.
The deal mentality is the result of uncertainty; many more films obtain money for development costs than go into production, and each individual, to stay in reasonably frequent work, needs to be involved in several projects at the same time in the expectation that one of them will come to fruition. This is particularly true for independent producers, whose income generally comes from profits rather than project development money, and who must therefore gamble
on as many deals as he or she can keep going. Deal psychology has also facilitated--as well as in part being caused
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by--the predominance of agents in contemporary production. The speculative and negotiating skills needed by the producer as deal-maker have much more in common with those of the talent agent than they do with the organizational and financial abilities required by a studio producer. Since the deal was inaugurated by Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin of United Artists in 1951, the dividing line between agent and producer has become ever thinner, and the occasions on which the agent has become the producer more common. The most
grandiose version of this occurred in 1962, when MCA was forced by the Department of Justice to abandon its talent agency activities and took over Universal, but the list of former agents who have become producers or heads of production is almost endless, and it is these figures who supply and maintain the deal mentality, and the insecurity it breeds.
While Didion's recognition of the substantial irrelevance of the final product to the processes of its packaging is further evidence of the New Hollywood's narcissism and incoherence, it should not in itself be seen as evidence of a decline.
Packaging is no more detrimental to film production than the modes of organization it has replaced; those, like James Monaco and Pauline Kael, who insist on seeing it as such have essentially failed to recognize that Hollywood never existed to make films, but rather to make people go to the movies. Like the studio system, the goal of packaging is the production of entertainment; like the studio system, packaging functions as an arrangement for reducing emphasis on the role of the content in what is being sold. The logic of media conglomeration has widened the marketplace in which the product is sold. It is now as tangibly on offer in book- and toy-stores as it is in movie theatres. In the process, its nature has changed.
The aesthetics of the deal have combined curiously with the critical enhancement of the director's status to produce, in the work of Spielberg, Lucas, De Palma and Milius, films which at the same time demonstrate a "personal cinema" through their mannerisms and operate the mechanistic structures that James Monaco has aptly identified as those of an "entertainment machine," much less concerned than earlier movies with telling their audience a story.
Repeated assertions that the story is seldom a central element in deal-making indicate the extent to which narrative has been dethroned.
Steven Spielberg suggests,
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What interests me more than anything else is the idea. If a person can tell me the idea in twenty-five words or less, it's going to make a pretty good movie.
But it is unlikely to be a film in which narrative reaches any great level of complexity, something which is clearly true of all Spielberg's films, which comprise situations allowing for plenty of spectacle but little plot development.
The speed with which narrative declined as a force in the movies in the 1970s may be indicated by looking at the decade's one contribution to Hollywood's repertoire of genres, the disaster film. Disaster movies are contemporary, debased epics, but more importantly they represent the archetypal package vehicle, the instrument the majors found for spending their money on predictably appealing spectacle. As a genre, they share neither an iconographic nor a narrative consistency, but rather an assembly of elements: stars in emotional conflict, sustained in crisis by a physically restricting situation.
Airport, the first success of the disaster cycle, established a conventional pattern by which the audience is attached to the narrative by its concern for individual characters. Later variants overtly dislocated the competing elements that Airport successfully held in tension. Airport and its sequels maintain a linear (if circular) narrative: the survival of its characters is attached to the fate of the aircraft. All of them survive or perish together, however big or small their billing. The Poseidon Adventure (1973) is much more selective. Not only does its situation manage to dispose of all the minor characters (they are drowned en masse minutes into the film), but it also permits spectacle to be detached from any plot obligation. Random incident determines the fate of individual characters:
Shelley Winters has a heart attack, Stella Stevens falls into a burning oil slick. Since the plot itself cannot develop--either some or all of these characters will survive or they won't--relations between characters are required to fill in the gaps between the film's spectacular occurrences. Because the situation supplies them with so little to sustain dialogue ("how do we get out of here?", "Where do we go next?") and the need to make the right choice to stay in the movie, they have to talk about something else. Hence the amount of time given over to discussing how fat Winters is, and the unprovoked belligerent exchanges between Gene Hackman and Ernest Borgnine.
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The result is an overt and unintegrated application of sentiment, most apparent in Winters when for no good reason she remarks to her husband, Jack Albertson,
"Manny, how long is it since we told each other I love you?" At her death
she repeats the same function with a more explicitly symbolic purpose, as she gives Hackman the Jewish sign for Life she has brought for her grandson. Separable incidents such as these provide an arbitrary and imposed meaning for the action, which otherwise remains spectacularly independent of significance.
Irwin Allen's next production, The Towering Inferno (1974, Fox and Warner Bros, a package assembled by Creative Management Associates), carries the process further, eliminating narrative altogether and substituting a game pattern of random incident and problem-solving for its characters. The film's introduction establishes a number of potentally complex character relationships with a thematic issue, mainly revolving around the complicity of William Holden and Richard Chamberlain in the breaching of safety codes. These are hastily abandoned once the fire breaks out, and are used instead to confirm characters' positions. Chamberlain becomes the film's bad guy, Holden's moral ambiguity is simply forgotten in the confusion. Where in The Alamo the survivors represent the hope of the future, the best Holden can offer by way of moral summary at the end of The Towering Inferno is, "All I can do is pray to God that I can stop this from ever happening again." The film operates the mechanisms of earlier narrative forms--Jennifer Jones' cat becomes a sentimental object embodying loss when O. J. Simpson gives it to Fred Astaire at the end--but operates them detached from a continuous narrative. The film is a series of disconnected exchanges between characters interrupted by the spectacle of the fire. Its packaging revolves round its situation and its consortium of stars.
Characters are paired off in the introduction, offering a multiplicity of separate stories which the film may or may not choose to develop. The quantity on offer permits the film to dispose of some of them at random: Robert Wagner's clandestine affair with Susan Flannery ends abruptly when they become the first victims of the fire; Jennifer Jones arbitrarily falls to her death. Any character or story is available for sacrifice without disrupting the spectacle, and the only guarantee for survival is star status. By the same token, individual
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scenes operate as separate and complete units in themselves, unconnected to the rest of the film. Paul Newman, Jones and two children spent ten minutes negotiating a demolished staircase, an incident quite detached from events occurring elsewhere and getting them, literally, nowhere. Immediately after wards they discover their route down is barred, and have to climb up again.
The film revolves around creating incidents engineered by an arbitrary chance, such as the cement which blocks the door into the party room. No adequate explanation is offered for its presence, no justification required except that it provides grounds for another scene. Its placement is as fortuitous as that of the wall-light which Newman uses as a foothold to climb up to the pipeshaft in the same scene. Instead of seeking narrative continuity, the film is constructed like a set, with each group of characters isolated in their own area. What provides its coherence is not any sense of continuity or character development (the characters actually get simpler as the film progresses, and moral status is finally reduced to how well each character behaves when he or she stands in line for the bosun's chair, but the performances of its stars. Richard Dyer has commented on the importance of the stable camera and the stars' charisma in making the audience secure as they witness a disaster, but the stars' performances have another function as well. They--particularly
Newman and McQueen, but also Holden--are the only sources of coherence in a film whose content is concerned with collapse, destruction, and deconstruction.
Against this, the stars fulfillment of their industrial, commercial function
directs the film away from a concern with loss, death, pain and money to a celebration of its performers, whose presence is necessary to justify and explain away everything else in the film. The audience witness performance as they witness spectacle, and since neither proposes causal relationships between consecutive events, they must accept arbitrariness in the film's plot progression.
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The impression of arbitrariness in the reporting of disaster reinforces the arbitrary quality of experience itself, and the absence of continuity in the
coverage of events, as today's crisis yields to a new and unrelated crisis tomorrow, adds to the sense of historical discontinuity--the sense of living in a world in which the past holds out no guidance to the present and the future has become completely unpredictable.
Although Christopher Lasch's remarks are primarily directed against the news media, they apply equally to the narrative structures of packaged blockbusters.
A variety of psycho-sociological explanations for the disaster movie phenomenon have been offered, and they can readily enough be identified as part of a larger conglomeration of films (including the science fiction packages which replaced them and horror films) which explore the bourgeois American hero's confrontation with the Unknown. This general emphasis seems at first sight almost too easy to identify as a significant cinematic response to the circumstances of the 1970s. Specifying what provokes such heroic insecurity is, however, rather more difficult, particularly in a critical climate dominated by
psychosexual interpretations (the shark in Jaws as both phallus and vagina dentata). What has been less frequently pointed out is the aptness of the disaster movie as a metaphor for the film industry's own situation. Faced, at the beginning of the decade, with economic catastrophe and un- certainty about audience demand, Hollywood responded by abandoning the structures of narrative continuity that had previously served it so well, and inaugurating a cycle of speculative investments in disaster in which the only security, for audience and industry alike, came from star performances. The Unknown in these films is not merely contained in their content, but also in the way they are put together out of separable elements. Later variants of the
package took the phenomenon to even greater extremes. Close Encounters of the Third Kind makes no attempt to connect its scenes or explain itself.
As a narrative it is incomprehensible, as a story it spends two-and-a-half hours getting to the point at which a 1950s science fiction movie would begin.
The Unknown in the American cinema of the 1970s is, more than anything else, a matter of narrative structure, a question of what commercial cinema should do
if it is not to tell stories. Both the initial problem and its apparent solution came from the new instrument of consensus, television.
[357] American Graffiti might more conventionally be described as nostalgic, but nostalgia is only a form of fantasy. Nostalgia consists in a particular relation to history, in which objects are displaced from their material context in time and relocated in another framework detached from their
original position.
American Graffiti is no more set in 1962 than Star Wars is set "In a distant galaxy long long ago and far far away." It is set in 1973, fixed there by the style of its images and performances, and creates a fantastic version of Modesto, California by its nostalgic consumption of objects loosely belonging to the period it claims to represent.
Nostalgia collapses into sentiment in the film's last shot, when it arbitrarily attempts to revise itself by entering history with a deterministic account of its characters' subsequent lives. The nature of the film is suddenly and drastically changed. Instead of remaining within the safe space of the fantasy movie, where privileged characters can produce non-causal performances, it suddenly claims that this night has been a formative experience, a dramaturgy which will lead to change in the external world. Curt escapes the closed
world which will kill John and stifle Steve (Ron Howard) by going to college and becoming a writer in Canada, presumably to escape the draft. In a vestige of the liberal tradition, Terry the Toad (Charlie Martin Smith) is killed in
Vietnam because he is physically inept with a motor scooter.
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Nostalgia has pervaded the American cinema of the 1970s as a leitmotif of narrative uncertainty. In the films of Dick Richards, for example, it seems as if the authenticity of the costumes and the labels on the tin cans is used
as a substitute for coherent story development. The Culpepper Cattle Company (1972) resolves itself by a familiar device in films which make some initial attempt to reconsider the presuppositions of their genre. It collapses into generic conventionality, with the bad guys developing consciences and saving the wagon train. The same strategy of collapse can
be found in Coma's (1978; dir. Michael Crighton) abandonment of its assertive heroine (Genevieve Bujold) and in the gradual conversion of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974; dir. Martin Scorsese) from a film about Ellen Burstyn's independence into a "woman's picture." At the beginning of the
film, she and her neighbor fantasize about Robert Redford. At the end, she gets Kris Kristofferson.
Another of Richards' contributions to the decade's generic nostalgia, Farewell My Lovely (1975), offers an alternative response in employing the insecurities of film noir. The investigative narrative and its archetypal heroes, the private eye and the journalist, emerged in 1974 as figures for post-Watergate fictions. Their heroic status was compromised by their inability to bring their narratives to a successful resolution (Chinatown, The Parallax View); instead, the films beguiled their audiences with the notion that the
central characters were as confused about the plot as they were. The employment of noir fixtures was a self-conscious justification for narrative confusion.
The audience was presented with a recognizable terrain inhabited by objects and
lighting codes remembered from earlier films, and this evocation of displaced objects directed attention away from plot to the image and the central performances of bewilderment and uncertainty.
The resort to nostalgic conventions and the unconvinced re-enactment of generic patterns is indicative of the more general collapse of temporal coherence in films of the 1970s. Wherever else in American culture the sense of historical continuity has come under attack, Hollywood has measured its deterioration in the growing failure to construct coherent linear narratives. Temporal connection, the primary tool of narrative causality, has been increasingly abandoned in favor of structures that declare their incoherence. Dog Soldiers (1978; dir. Karel Reisz) is in many respects (its presentation of space for example) notable for the old-
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fashioned conventionality of its construction. But it makes no attempt to place its characters in time, either historically (the film might be set in 1971 like the book on which it is based, or it might not), or in their movements from scene to scene. Instead, there is an assumption of simultaneity: the audience is forced to assume that the disparate events affecting the two principal characters occur at more or less the same time if it is to construct a comprehensible narrative sequence--a task which the film passively declares is
not its responsibility. As it progresses, Dog Soldiers degenerates into a chase movie and its central conception of splitting the post-Vietnam American hero into two individually inadequate and mutually dependent characters collapses. By the climax both have become capable of heroic action, the motivation for which remains inaccessible to the audience, since neither character has previously offered a rationale for his actions. Ray (Nick Nolte) declares at one point, "I don't always have to have a reason for the shit I do," and the unmodulated performances of both Nolte and Michael Moriarty provide the spectator with no evidence of their motivations.
Where the American cinema of the consensus developed its mechanisms of construction around a requirement to produce narratives that were rigid in their linear determinism, the cinema of disintegration has commonly abandoned the attempts to tell stories at all, providing rather a sequence of events arbitrarily connected by the fact of their being edited together. From this the audience may construct as much of a story as they feel capable of. This loss of confidence in the ability to construct a sequential narrative time reveals itself most clearly in a reluctance to provide an ending. Star Wars does not just announce that it is not set in the conventionally remote future of science fiction but in the distant past. At its end it declares that it is the fourth episode in a series of nine.
More normally, Hollywood's recent products have refused to provide a sense of resolution in their conclusion, and have abandoned their central protagonists to an ambiguous fate. Gene Hackman seems particularly prone to this discomfiture. In Night Moves (1975; dir. Arthur Penn), he is left wounded in a disabled boat which describes circles in an otherwise empty ocean.
The Conversation (1974; dir. francis Ford Coppola) closes with him playing the saxophone in the apartment he has just demolished. While the conclusion of Penn's film is clearly open to metaphorical interpre-
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tation, the end of The Conversation is merely ambiguous, available to signify anything. Coppola is notorious for the difficulty he has in ending his films, Apocalypse Now (1979) being merely the most spectacular and extravagant example. But the reluctance of Hollywood's contemporary self-conscious auteurs to provide endings which locate the meaning of their films is remarkably consistent.
One might argue that the ambiguity of the final "God Bless America" sequence of Michael Cimino's The Deerhunter (1978) is an economic necessity, since a film which refuses to declare its attitude to
American involvement in Vietnam is a safer box-office bet than one which does.
One might argue that it allows the audience a choice of interpretation, or that it reflects the ambivalence of American response to the war. What it undoubtedly does do is to leave the film open as a text for an endless critical game-playing over its ideological implications, which may well guarantee Cimino's dubious status as an auteur simply by the weight of paper devoted to him.
As part of a more general tendency, the contemporary emphasis on an aesthetics of performance would suggest that, since "Robert De Niro is The Deerhunter," whatever Robert De Niro does has the support of the film.
The privileging of performance which is so consistent a feature of the Hollywood product in itself disrupts the temporal continuity of a causal narrative.
In performance structures, what a performer does at the end of his or her routine is no more significant than what he or she has done at any other point. The openness of Altman's (or, to a lesser extent, Coppola's) films to almost infinite restructuring is evidence of this, and endorses the argument that a fixity of meaning simply is not present in these inherently incomplete texts. By not telling a story (but rather offering several incomplete stories for the spectator to choose from), such films cannot be said to occupy narrative time.
It is, then, hardly surprising that so little of the American cinema of the 1970s has concerned itself with an investigation of temporal structure, preferring instead to abandon time as a fictive concern either by the resort to nostalgia or by making narrative construction entirely the responsibility of the audience.
One of the few consistent exceptions to this general practice has been Sam Peckinpah's reassessment of the primary cinematic myths of America. Peckinpah's critical neglect during the decade has been curious: dismissed for his apparent political conservatism and misogyny and condemned for his depiction of violence, Peckinpah has never-
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theless conducted the most complex revision of cinematic temporal structures since Welles (or perhaps Griffith), and provided a functioning solution to the problem of joining inside and outside while operating firmly within the new post-television aesthetic. Peckinpah's films, however pessimistic their thematic conclusions might be, present some of the few coherent discussions of the pervasive phenomenon of incoherence in the contemporary American cinema and, contrary to most critical assumption, reconsider the problematic nature
of heroism in a universe where morality can no longer be straightforwardly attached to physical decorum.
His early films (up to The Getaway, 1972) play on the extent to which their central characters exist as heroic outsiders because of their opposition to temporal progress. One advertising slogan for The Wild Bunch (1969) was, "The land had changed. They hadn't." It was equally applicable to the two gunfighters in Ride the High Country, Tyreen in Major Dundee, Cable Hogue and Junior and Ace Bonner. Usually aging men running out of space in which to act because time (progress) has made them redundant, Peckinpah's early heroes engage in some futile, romantic, and usually fatal gesture of rebellion, a sub-Hemingway stance which has clung as firmly to Peckinpah's public persona as it once did to John Huston's.
His later films, however, have questioned the traditional mechanisms of heroism. His central characters lack moral certainty, and they are also deprived of the guarantee of heroic status their performances might bring them elsewhere. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) does not concern itself primarily with Billy, whose mythic status is secure before the film begins, and who has nothing to achieve except its confirmation by his death. Instead Peckinpah concentrates attention on Garrett, who falls victim to the moral incompatibility of his desire to survive to be "rich, old and grey" and his need for individual independence. As a mythic force, Billy remains immune from narrative pressure, a situation reinforced by the industrial status of Kristofferson's performance. His physical movement is unaffected by the
events of the film, and he relaxes into a separable activity of role-playing which represents both Billy the Kid and Kris Kristofferson, country-rock star.
By contrast, James Coburn demonstrates his entrapment within the narrative, and
his vulnerability to historical processes by becoming stiffer and more pained in his movements as the film progresses. Garrett's tragedy lies in his gradual discovery that a pro-
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fessional commitment to a linear course of action guarantees neither the loyalty and respect of his corporate employers nor the moral endorsement of the film and its spectators.
Peckinpah's subsequent films all assume the moral vacuum Garrett discovers. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), The Killer Elite (1975) and Cross of Iron (1977) occupy an anarchic terrain in which betrayal is endemic and heroism is inevitably compromised. Their central characters all function within a framework which assumes that their personal objectives will prove incompatible with those of the larger external forces which have determined the circumstances the film presents. For the protagonists, any action is permissible in the quest for survival, from the mutilation of a corpse to the murder of a child, but such figures can no longer hope for the sympathy of their audience. Nor, increasingly, do they seek it; Steiner (James Coburn) has no attachments to anything outside his platoon, and no rationale for his behavior except survival in what he describes to the Russian boy they take prisoner as No Man's Land. None of the characters in Cross of Iron enact positions which the audience can endorse, since the conventional yardsticks of morality by which they might be judged are not contained within the film. Steiner's brutal laughter, which closes the film over images of dead children, is an acceptance of the arbitrariness of the war the film depicts, and of the film's depiction of it.
Peckinpah's films match their deconstruction of moral certainty with an equally deliberate deconstruction of the spatial and temporal certainties within which such a moral certainty might exist. The films realize the condition of arbitrariness rather than merely depicting it, and force the audience to experience the condition of their characters by paralleling the characters' moral situation with the physical, perceptual situation of the audience. At its broadest, this process is signalled by Garcia's beginning and ending on a frozen frame: cinematic time is displayed as an arbitrary construct, which the film is free to play with as it wishes, and which the audience must simply endure acceptingly. Where, in his earlier films, Peckinpah employed slow motion to render ambiguous the spectator's response to a brutal action by revealing its grace, his later films employ it to reveal the arbitrariness with which the film travels through the gate of the projector. Slow motion ceases to indicate a significant event, as it did in The Wild Bunch, but rather to divert the audience's attention to incidental
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physical trajectories, such as the arc described by the spent shells ejected from a sub-machine gun. Peckinpah repeatedly demonstrates the moral incompatibility of cause and effect; Cross of Iron returns again and again to intercut shots of explosions and artillery shells being ejected.
This is a description of process, established by a kind of angle-reverse
angle cutting, but one which is only made possible by the recognition that the cinema constructs its space according to unique laws which enforce a relation between two consecutive images.
As juxtaposition constructs significant space, it also enforces temporal progression. The tank battle in Cross of Iron enacts in microcosm the narrative process of Garcia. The sequence begins with a series of static shots of the Russian tanks, cut together in an accelerating montage which animates the tanks themselves into movement. The film constructs not only its own moral landscape, but also its own momentum, which arbitrarily obliges or interrupts the movement of its characters. Peckinpah's aesthetic is constructed around the acknowledgment that the American cinema of the 1970s can place any two shots together and create an arbitrary meaning through the creation of an arbitrary space and time. It is an aesthetic that makes no concessions to the audience, who are offered fewer and fewer positions they may comfortably adopt, either spatially, temporally, or ethically. In Cross of Iron, the spectator becomes a redundant witness to a process completely out of his or
her control.
In Peckinpah's films, the audience's only recourse is to a morality external to the film itself. In this deliberate anarchy is the most coherent statement of the endemic incoherence of contemporary American cinema.
The collapse of consensual structures has led the American film into an apparently unavoidable oppositional stance to the primary source of consensus, television.
The best hope it has offered has been the suggestion that it is possible to survive a disaster movie, but the heroic status of survivors, from Travis Bickle to Rolf Steiner, is uncertain to say the least. Even the most closely argued of these films oblige the audience to keep a distance from the screen which threatens them. The juvenile attempts at consensus via a conservative engagement in fantasy have merely produced a reactionary cinema of escapism that re-enacts Hollywood's simplest generic and heroic archetypes without the context that once gave them meaning. The more complex articulations of Coppola or Altman limit them
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selves by their exclusion of the audience, and their refusal to offer a fixed meaning. The nihilism of this response achieves its most deliberate formulation in the anarchy of Peckinpah's world
