Geek Media Tropes: Spielberg, Dreyfuss, and Melodrama

[Note: What follows is adapted from a talk I gave at the University of Oregon in October 2008.  I was introducing a screening of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind.]

Mainstreaming the Geek:
Steven Spielberg, Roy Neary, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind

I had thought to subtitle my talk this evening “Pinocchio in Space,” for in a 1980 interview, Steven Spielberg revealed that he had originally intended to conclude Close Encounters of the Third Kind, his personal yet epic film about a suburban white man meeting alien life, with the song “When You Wish Upon A Star” as recorded by Jiminy Cricket for Disney’s Pinocchio, released in 1940. Indeed, Pinocchio seems to have been a central preoccupation of Spielberg’s while writing and directing Close Encounters, which he has described as emerging from his own inspirations and which still stands as one of his most “personal” projects, alongside E.T. and Schindler’s List. We learn early in Close Encounters that its protagonist, Roy Neary, has a childlike obsession with train sets and owns a music box that plays “When You Wish Upon a Star.” If these weren’t enough to peg him as a toy-obsessed geek, certainly his experiences in the course of the film—becoming a believer in UFOs and abandoning his responsibilities as a father in order to pursue them—set him apart from many traditional male film protagonists. Indeed, there is a childlike yet alienated quality about Roy Neary that makes the parallel between himself and Pinocchio resonate deeply for me. A wooden puppet who longs to be a real boy, who longs for acceptance. . .this image has strong resonances with the stereotype of the geek. A comprehensive definition of the geek / nerd stereotype would exceed the scope of this talk, but as nerd scholar David Anderegg notes, geeks and nerds are creative, hard-working types who are particularly invested in technology, math, science, computers, science fiction, and perhaps most importantly, certain types of fantasy, like role-playing games, that have an intense initial investment (Anderegg 145). Geeks like forms of fantasy that contain lots of esoteric knowledge and rules as the price of entry.

These qualities also apply to the writer and director of Close Encounters, Steven Spielberg. Spielberg (like his equally geeky pal George Lucas) always felt like an outsider to his generation of filmmakers due to his obsession with television and matinee serials (rather than film), and his self-perception as a nerd who just wasn’t hip enough to relate to his often brash and iconoclastic New Hollywood contemporaries like Brian DePalma, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola.

Margot Kidder, a close friend of DePalma’s and Spielberg’s in the early 70s, says that “[Steven] was more innocent of spirit and less complicated than Brian or Marty, and that’s obviously reflected in his movies.” Biskind puts a finer point on it, writing that the young Spielberg “had no sense of style, [and] was just desperate to be cool like everyone else, but didn’t know how” (260). Yet like his contemporaries and perhaps more so than most, Spielberg was impassioned to master the techniques of commercial film-making, even if it meant working in television to acquire those skills. Further, by his own admission, Spielberg loves video games and computers, a passion that may help explain his penchant for directing digital effects-laden action pictures like Jurassic Park, The Lost World, and War of the Worlds, as opposed to the grittier fare of his generational cohorts.

Spielberg and Lucas are, in short, Boomer nerds. They were part of the first generation of American directors to go to film school, earning themselves the moniker of “movie brats” or what we might now call film geeks. Indeed, right in line with his orientation toward technology, Spielberg admits that he prefers the editing room to the set (Steven Spielberg Interviews 103), much as Lucas, a true innovator of film special effects, notoriously cannot direct actors. Both Spielberg and Lucas love computers and Spielberg in particular is a self-proclaimed video game “freak” who speaks lovingly of “marrying” his computer via phone line to George Lucas’—in 1982, long before this was a common practice (Steven Spielberg Interviews 100, 104). Spielberg’s geekiness arises from his childhood: he describes his younger self as “a wimp in a world of jocks” (Steven Spielberg Interviews 109).

In terms of how Spielberg’s geekiness translates onto the movie screen, actor Richard Dreyfuss serves as a key figure, especially in his early works like Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Like Spielberg, Dreyfuss is Jewish, a bit nerdy and cerebral, and tend to play characters who are obsessed with traditionally geeky pursuits like model trains, UFOs, science, and the like. [See also Murray Pomerance on "Man-Boys of Steven Spielberg."] Drefuss serves as an onscreen proxy for Spielberg and Lucas, playing the geek hero of Lucas’ American Graffitti (1973), Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and the film we will see tonight, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

In Jaws, Spielberg diverges from the Peter Benchley novel, making Matt Hooper a short Jewish nerd rather than the more traditionally handsome WASP figure of the novel. Says Spielberg of this casting, “The book [Jaws] suggested somebody like Robert Redford to play Matt Hooper, but I felt there would be more sympathy for the character [. . .] if someone like Richard Dreyfuss played him” (Steven Spielberg Interviews 63-4). Spielberg also spares Hooper’s life (he dies in the novel) and erases a Hooper-Mrs. Brody affair from the film version. Indeed, in Spielberg’s Jaws, we like and identify with Hooper’s snarkily humorous take on events in provincial Amity, and we are impressed by his efficient analysis of the fictional island’s shark problem. Our identification with Hooper is increased when he is positioned as the nemesis to crusty (and somewhat mentally imbalanced) fisherman Quint, another switch from the novel, where the cuckolded Chief Brody is kept as the outsider of the shark-hunting trio due to his fear of the water. Spielberg centralizes the Hooper character, making him Brody’s buddy, and Spielberg even inserts himself into the narrative via Dreyfuss: the styrofoam cup scene is taken from a gag of Spielberg's (1978 interview, in Interviews 44).

In Close Encounters, Richard Dreyfuss is even more central, playing a geeky suburban dad from the mid-west. I will return to the specifics of Close Encounters and Dreyfuss’ role in it in a moment, but first let me say a few words about the long-range impact of Spielberg’s (and Lucas’) work in the late 1970s, which includes the aforementioned Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and another little film you may have heard of that was released the same year as Close Encounters, Star Wars.  Film historian Peter Biskind writes in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls that Lucas and Spielberg are both “child[ren] of television” who “returned the ‘70s audience, grown sophisticated on a diet of European and New Hollywood films, to the simplicities of the pre-‘60s Golden Age of movies” (317, 343). Biskind compares the two geeks to their more subversive counterparts, claiming, “whereas the most sophisticated directors of the ‘70s, like Altman, Penn, Scorsese, and Hopper, were deconstructing genre, Lucas, like Spielberg, was doing the reverse, gentrifying discredited genres of the past” (342). Biskind accuses Lucas and Spielberg of “obliterating irony, aesthetic self-consciousness, and critical reflection” and concludes that “such was Spielberg’s (and Lucas’s) influence, that every studio movie became a B movie” (278).

Through these widely appealing, B-movie vehicles, Boomer Geeks like Lucas and Spielberg valorized nerdy, man-boy figures like Matt Hooper, Roy Neary, and Luke Skywalker in the 1970s and 80s, serving as some of the period’s most influential, popular, and economically successful culture producers and laying the groundwork for the rise of later geek heroes we see abundantly in the films of Generation X: note Kevin Smith, Judd Apatow, Edward Norton as the protagonist in Fight Club, even Keanu Reeves in The Matrix who is framed as a somewhat feminized computer programmer.  For example, teen-film scholar Timothy Shary writes of Boomer nerd John Hughes’ seminal Breakfast Club (1985) that “Unlike most nerd characters in school films, [The Breakfast Club’s] Brian ultimately appears to accept his nerd labeling, and his peers eventually show some sincere appreciation for the difference he represents [. . .]. [. . .] Brian may be alone unlike the others, but he has thus ironically maintained a certain independence that is not afforded to them” (Shary Generation Multiplex 35). Thus Boomer geeks like Hughes and Spielberg made the heroes of their 1980s films the newly sympathetic young nerds of Gen X, and the Gen X nerds, then in their childhood or adolescence, watched, identified with, and built upon these depictions. For example, Gen X filmmaker Kevin Smith openly acknowledges the impact / influence of Spielberg, Lucas, and Hughes in his early life and subsequent cinematic work.

For sheer popularity if nothing else, Star Wars' Luke Skywalker is the key melodramatic geek figure in late 1970s and early 1980s cinema. Luke is an awkward geek hero who suffers melodramatically at the hands of his family, [“Noooo! That’s impossible!”] saves his evil father from ultimate ruin / perdition, and, along with his mostly male buddies (and a defanged, re-feminized Leia), takes over leadership of the galaxy. He is in these respects similar to Roy Neary in Close Encounters, who is magically guided away from the provincial American Midwest—farm country, just like Tatooine—toward a meeting with extraterrestrial aliens who understand and accept him even when no one on earth, least of all his wife and family, can.

This leads us to melodrama. I argue that we should read Close Encounters of the Third Kind, at least in part, as a domestic melodrama that unfolds in the Neary family home. As film scholar Linda Williams states:

If emotional and moral registers are sounded, if a work invites us to feel sympathy for the virtues of beset victims, if the narrative trajectory is ultimately more concerned with a retrieval and staging of innocence than with the psychological causes of motives and action, then the operative mode is melodrama. (42)

Indeed, Roy Neary is a victim to his inexplicable feelings, feelings that more or less amount to an obsession with what he has seen and a seeming depression or largesse that prevents him from participating in the typical routines of his family and work life. The UFO encounter brings this on; the aliens are to blame, and Neary and his fellow UFO-obsessed compatriots are in this sense innocents, enslaved to forces beyond their control. Yet by the end of the film—or maybe even by the time of young Barry Guiler’s abduction—we know that the aliens are benign if inscrutable, and indeed it is Neary’s family, especially his wife Ronnie, who are made out to be the narrow-minded “bad guys” of the film’s narrative. Mind you, the film does not construct them as villains from the outset, and may never outright vilify them, but through its melodramatic centering of Roy’s perspective and feelings, it causes us to side with him (against his family) in an emotional register—the register of melodrama. In a moment I will show you a cut scene from the Director’s Cut (formerly the “Collectors Edition”) that demonstrates this emotional polarization between Neary and his family, but first a few more words about melodrama as a genre and mode.

As Linda Williams argues, melodrama is best understood as an American cinematic mode rather than a genre, since its conventions can be found in nearly every genre of American film:

The supposed excess [of melodrama] is much more often the mainstream, though it is often not acknowledged as such because melodrama consistently decks itself out in the trappings of realism and the modern [. . .]. [The] basic vernacular of American moving pictures consists of a story that generates sympathy for a hero who is also a victim and that leads to a climax that permits the audience, and usually other characters, to recognize that character’s moral value. (58)

I am framing Close Encounters as a melodrama, rather than as an action-adventure, in order to foreground what is usually ignored by lay audiences and many critics: that this film, as virtually all of Spielberg’s films, relies heavily upon melodramatic conventions and tropes in order to work on audiences emotionally. This is one of Spielberg’s great talents and while, as Williams argues, melodrama is really everywhere in American culture, Spielberg deploys these strategies exceptionally well, deftly blending melodramatic appeals to emotion and sentiment with the narrative structures of B-movie genres like the monster film (Jaws, Duel, Jurassic Park), A-movie genres like the period drama (Schindler’s List, Amistad, The Color Purple), and his personal favorite, science fiction (Close Encounters, E.T., A.I., War of the Worlds).

In a holistic sense Close Encounters must be seen as a generic hybrid, a science fiction action-adventure combined with a domestic melodrama. But Close Encounters also inhabits a specific subgenre of melodrama: the male-centered melodrama which victimizes and thus elicits sympathy for the male protagonist and wherein, according to Thomas Schatz, “the central conflict involves passing the role of middle-American ‘Dad’ from one generation to the next” (162). Indeed, Close Encounters deals with exactly this issue, as Neary increasingly embraces his new UFO experience and slips away from occupying the role of “Dad,” despite his onscreen claim to the contrary in the dinner table scene. (In a moment I will show you a clip that emphasizes this same point, that Close Encounters is a domestic male melodrama emphasizing the collapse of the power of the father.) Indeed, by the end of the film, the Neary children will be left literally fatherless, left to be raised by their mother like Barry Guiler and Spielberg himself. Spielbergs’ parents weren’t divorced, but his father, an electronics worker, was something of a workoholic and “was usually absent” (Biskind 256). Indeed, Spielberg reports in a 1982 interview that he was “raised in a world of women,” having a mother and three younger sisters, and worlds of women is a phrase that would come to characterize some of his early screen families like the Nearys and Guilers of Close Encounters, and Elliot’s family in E.T. The Extraterrestrial (1982) (Steven Spielberg Interviews 108). [also mention the aptly named David Mann’s wife in Duel (1971, TV) and Lou Jean Poplin corralling her jailbird husband Clovis in The Sugarland Express (1974).]

[SHOW “CRYBABY!” CLIP HERE: Close Encounters Collector's Edition DVD Ch. 12, after dinner and outdoor scene, 1:05:06, ends with son closing door, 1:07:47]

Note difference between Theatrical and Special Editions -- See Warren Buckland, Directed By Steven Spielberg 120.

Two more points on Close Encounters as geek melodrama before I conclude. First: One key melodramatic convention prevalent in Close Encounters is the displacement of strong emotions onto objects, props, and mise-en-scéne, which film theorist Thomas Elsaesser calls the “conscious use of style-as-meaning” that characterizes melodrama ("Tales of Sound and Fury" anthologized in Imitations of Life [ed. Landy] 77). Perhaps the best example of this in Close Encounters is when Roy Neary literally constructs a huge sculpture of the Devil’s Tower in his own living room—you can hardly have a more over-determined piece of mise-en-scene than that, a physical manifestation of Neary’s inward condition that overwhelms the domestic space of his home, displacing the family who used to live there.

And of course the melos of melodrama is music, and Close Encounters marks the second of many collaborations between Spielberg and film composer John Williams. And as in Jaws, where that two-note bass motif becomes the audio signature of the lurking shark, Close Encounters once again presents an inexplicable force whose primary presence in the first half of the film is musical, except instead of impending bloody death, this time the aliens’ five-note song is posited as a means of communication between humankind and the alien species, a joyous heralding of the peaceful meeting that concludes the film. In fact, all we really ever know of the aliens are their brief physical appearance and that song: they never speak in any other form of language (except maybe sign). Truly this must be melodrama to have music feature so centrally into the symbolic meaning of the film’s narrative and spectacular climax.

Which brings us back to the 1940 recording of “When You Wish Upon A Star” and Spielberg’s ultimate decision not to use the Disney version (sung by Jiminy Cricket actor Cliff Edwards) as the closing credits theme for Close Encounters (Interviews 96-7). (You can still hear an homage to that song’s melody in the Williams score near the end of the film.) On the basis of test screenings, Spielberg discovered that audiences preferred not to have that song play because it took them out of the “reality” of the film, revealing it to be a fantasy or a fairy tale. This kind of response is a tribute to Spielberg’s power to get audiences to believe in his fictions through creating deep emotional investments—and that is precisely the function of melodrama. In true melodramatic fashion, and like Disney’s Pinocchio, Spielberg’s Roy Neary begins his story as a wooden, lifeless, mechanistic being—a geek?—longing for something more, and like Pinocchio’s blue fairy, extraterrestrial aliens arrive to make the bewildered Roy’s dreams come true. And Spielberg’s as well, since with the success of both Jaws and Close Encounters, he had successfully launched the image of the geeky social outsider, embodied so well in both films by Richard Dreyfuss, firmly into the cinematic mainstream.

Cthulhu (2007) - Best DVD Commentary Ever

A friend just lent me a DVD of Cthulhu (2007), a not-so-great low-budget ($1 million) horror film whose main claims to fame are that Tori Spelling plays a small but tantalizing role in it, and that it features possibly THE BEST DVD COMMENTARY TRACK EVER!

While many director's DVD commentaries are all but useless, consisting primarily of self-congratulatory chatter and vapid anecdotes about what happened to a certain prop or costume AFTER the film wrapped, Cthulhu's commentary, featuring Director Dan Gildark and Screenwriter/Executive Producer Grant Cogswell, is a rich collection of technical making-of insights accompanied by hindsightful ruminations about why the project failed.  And while this may sound silly at first -- listening to a commentary track for a bad movie, wherein that commentary only confirms that the movie I'm watching is indeed bad -- it has been, in fact, one of the most instructional and gripping 100 minutes I've spent in a long time.  First-time filmmakers Gildark and Cogswell are extremely frank about what went wrong on Cthulhu, and speak in detailed fashion about what could have been done to improve the end product and make their lives easier during production.  For example, screenwriter Cogswell (who reveals that he sunk a staggering $175,000 of his own money into the project!!) states early on that his biggest mistake was writing way too many locations into the film, and that that factor cut into their budget and their time (what with extensive travel between locations all up and down the West Coast) in disastrous ways.  Both he and Gildark emphatically urge other first-time filmmakers to begin their projects with solid scripts set in relatively few locations -- a single location if possible (e.g., Tape, Clerks).  This is crucial advice from people who, sadly, had to learn it the hard way. 

Cogswell and Gildark both stress the importance of having a very good script, noting that Tori Spelling came on board the Cthulhu project on the basis of its script.  All actors, even famous ones, are on the lookout for meaty roles in good scripts, so the quality of a film's script is all-important to attracting stars, as well as ensuring a smooth production process.  Further, a script can limit or even to some extent dictate the pacing of the finished film, so revising the screenplay for pacing is key: Gildark states that Act One of Cthulhu (introducing the characters and the film's main narrative conflict) does not end until the 49-minute mark, awfully late in a film for the juicy heightened conflicts, juicy narrative twists, and increased pacing of Act Two to get underway.  Another hard lesson learned, after it was too late to significantly change the film, even in editing.  The filmmakers attempted rewrites and post-production re-shoots to tighten the first act, but to no avail: the film is just really slow for almost the entirety of its first hour.  Beautifully shot in many scenes, and well-acted throughout, but draggingly slow nevertheless.

Cthulhu screenwriter Cogswell is fairly unforgiving of his own mistakes, and while he may be correct in his assessment that the Cthulhu script was too ambitious for its budget, at least in terms of locations, I had the feeling listening to the commentary and watching the film that these two guys set out to make a horror movie that was true to the spirit of its source material (Lovecraft's novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth) while incorporating thought-provoking new ideas, including a homosexual main character.  This is bold stuff, and is the kind of risky territory that low-budget, independently produced cinema can and should venture into as frequently as possible, since the studios won't go near it.  As the Cthulhu commentary progressed, I found myself really admiring these two geeks who set off to make a potentially audacious, meaningful, smart horror film, yet who lacked the skill and experience to pull it off even to their own satisfaction (let alone the critics' or audiences').

But their DVD commentary may be Gildark and Cogswell's actual magnum opus.  Alongside the Hooper-Pearl-Hansen commentary on the original 1974 Texas Chainsaw Massacre DVD (which the Cthulhu filmmakers specifically mention during their commentary!), Gildark and Cogswell's feature-length commentary on Cthulhu is one of the most informative commentaries I have ever heard, offering insight into how to make low-budget films correctly precisely via the candor with which it reveals how to do it incorrectly.  Only the Alien 3 special features or the documentary film Lost In La Mancha even come close to Cthulhu's commentary track in terms of accurately documenting a cinematic disaster with such admirable honesty.  I am planning to buy the Cthulhu DVD expressly for its commentary; I will make it assigned listening for future students of low-budget filmmaking practices and production.

CFP: "Geek Media and its Tropes" at SCMS New Orleans

The Society for Cinema and Media Studies announces its call for proposals for the 2011 Conference in New Orleans, to be held March 10-13th at the historic Ritz Carlton Hotel on the edge of the French Quarter.

"Geek Media and Its Tropes" Pre-constituted Panel Proposal

This panel welcomes papers on any aspect of "geek media": visual media produced by, for, and/or about geeks. This may include film, television, video games, web programs, podcasts, or online comics. While the panel seeks to particularly emphasize the analysis of geek-centered texts by and about members of Generation X (defined as those persons born between 1960 and 1981), papers analyzing the figure of the geek, its history, and its related visual media tropes from any period are welcome.

Send individual topics & summaries to Panel Chair Carter Soles: csoles1@uoregon.edu
Deadline: August 12, 2010

The Importance of the Term "Digital Native" and Ethical Ethnography

The recent Frontline documentary Digital Nation brings back the term "Digital Native" to describe technology users who were born into a world in which personal digital technologies already existed and were in proximity to them. Marc Prensky coined the term and his article "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants" introduced it to academic parlance in 2001.

Now that academic disciplines and approaches in the digital humanities are increasingly overlapping, the importance of the term Digital Native needs to be reemphasized. One way the term can make an intervention is that it offers a clearer application of ethical ethnography onto analyses of participants in the digital age. For example, scholars and researchers have long avoided disdainfully turning up their noses at unfamiliar cultural practices simply because of their foreignness. In those cases, the researcher is often an "outsider" and the subjects are often "natives" of some sort. Further, when the researcher presents her/his research to other scholars, the same rules of behavior apply. The researcher's peers and colleagues also do not turn their noses up at something just because it's foreign. This has not always been the case, but it began to be ever since academics who employ anthropological, ethnographic, and folkloric approaches started conscientiously grappling with the colonial and cultural imperialist undertones of their disciplines.

You can probably see where I'm going with this. Unlike in the case of studying unfamiliar cultures, when engaging with emerging digital practices, scholars in the humanities very often proudly display disgust at new developments, regardless of if those developments have anything morally, or ethically wrong with them, or are just alien or unpopular with Luddites. Here is where the term digital native bears remembering. Most academics would never want to be associated with the ex-pat or tourist who smugly and ignorantly sits in judgment of natives without being able to speak their language, while ironically expressing disdain at the natives' accented or broken English.

Still, the situation is not as dire as that of the tourist I describe above. In many ways, most scholars are still cultural insiders to the digital cultures they critique regardless of their use of them because of shared nationality, economic status, etc. with the digital natives. However, I paint that stark image so that it will give pause to any who might be too ready to automatically occupy that comfortably technologically disdainful position out of habit and without a second thought.

I am also not trying to shut down reflective critiques of technology. Here is a good example from the University of Richmond Writing Center’s blog of an approach that is neither blindly celebratory of technology nor automatically wary of it.

Finally, I am not unsympathetic to academics who are suspicious of technology. I too was skeptical when reading of the overly technologically celebratory take many writers had in response to a study which demonstrated that using Google engages more brain cells than reading a bound book. The study's findings made sense in that Google activates both the reading and the decision making parts of your brain, while reading a book does not usually activate decision making processes. However, I do not think that should have any bearing on whether or not one activity is better for your brain. I was glad when Gary Small, the doctor who performed the study, was interviewed in Digital Nation by media scholar Douglas Rushkoff and made clear that no such conclusions could be drawn from it (image of Small and Rushkoff above).

Apple's Battle Against DIY

If you are in humanities academia, you likely notice a strong preference for Mac computing among your colleagues. Driving this phenomenon is at least in part the desire for the identity of a Mac user vs the identity of a PC user. Through advertising and branding, a Mac is perceived as a subversive rebel in the face of "the man," or in academic terms, "the dominant ideology," the PC. Counting all computer users, Mac users are truly in the minority. Still, I have sometimes found this configuration of PC vs. Mac in the popular imagination ironic because of the DIY possibilities available for modifying a PC, most of which are much more difficult, or impossible, to apply to a Mac. To me, DIY-ness adds subversiveness.

A new Slate article by Tim Wu elucidates this topic and sheds light on how Apple has traveled the spectrum from its first and extremely DIY-friendly computer to the Ipad, an antithesis to DIY computing.

Still, I'm sure folks have already begun to mod the Ipad.

And, let me not fail to note that if you are a non-Mac user but you use Linux, you are awarded double street-cred points within the academic milieu.

Tvtropes.org and What New Fan Scholarship Has to Offer

In today's Washington Post, an article discusses how world news reporting will henceforth have to rely at least in part on more amateur writers as US newspapers cut back their foreign bureaus. This made me think about how much I rely on fans, fan/scholars, and scholar/fans, to stay current in studying New Media.

Part of the importance of these other "non-academic" sources of knowledge is the sheer mass of media streaming forth. But like the Post article, I sense that the online work is seriously evolving. Further, I want to state that it is not that fan discourse needs to evolve into academic discourse, but that fan discourse is on a separate (if overlapping) trajectory and is becoming important and powerful in ways unavailable to academic discourse (just as the converse is true).

One perfect example of this type of non-academic (or fan-academic?) discourse is tvtropes.org. This wiki uniquely and exhaustively documents tropes that occur on virtually all of television, film, literature, video games, professional wrestling, etc. -- the list of media types is pretty all-inclusive. Because of its volume, this work could not be achieved in a purely academic environment, but its existence as well as the information it catalogs must be important to fans, scholars, and all combinations of the two.

Best Film Review Ever: Transformers 2

This brilliant analysis of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen by Charlie Jane Anders is a bit behind the times but is so brilliant that I felt it should be immortalized here.  Furthermore, this will help give you an idea of the kind of thing I find amusing -- and spot-on true.  Enjoy!

Very Interesting "Avatar" Article

I was recently sent a link to this interesting article by James Bowman.  It is a bit theoretical, but makes intelligent points about what Avatar and the rumored 3-D revolution really does (and doesn't) represent.

"The Dark Knight" as Neoconservative War Propaganda

All last week I was out of town at an academic film studies conference, at which I gave a talk concerning Christopher Nolan's 2008 blockbuster The Dark Knight, arguing that it constitutes a form of mass-media pro-"War on Terror" propaganda, particularly in its deployment of the tropes of melodrama to move audiences to sympathize with its titular vigilante hero.  Since this was given as a live talk, some of what follows is a bit rough, prose-wise, but the ideas are there and I welcome comments and questions.

Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) as Neoconservative War Propaganda

Christopher Nolan’s hugely successful blockbuster The Dark Knight (2008) deploys the imagery and rhetoric of the War on Terror melodramatically in order to emotionally justify the actions and ideologies of the Bush Administration post-9/11.  As Linda Williams argues, melodrama is best understood as an American cinematic mode rather than a genre, since its conventions can be found in nearly every genre of American film and in American public discourse writ large: “[The] basic vernacular of American moving pictures [and culture] consists of a story that generates sympathy for a hero who is also a victim and that leads to a climax that permits the audience, and usually other characters, to recognize that character’s moral value” (58).  The Dark Knight is a melodrama dressed up as a superhero action film, communicating the moral value of its titular hero through his prolonged status as a victim. 

Batman is well-suited to this task, since his back story is itself couched in family melodrama -- innocent parents killed by a cold-blooded criminal, traumatized orphan son left to fend for himself -- which, according to melodramatic logic, justifies his adult vigilantism: as Jonathan Lethem has put it, "Batman’s losing his parents to violent crime forever renews his revenger’s passport" (2).  Further, as Will Brooker has documented, Batman is a shifting cultural signifier that takes on different meanings at different historical moments: a fighter of Nazis during WWII, a pop art/camp icon in the 1960s, a dark vigilante since the late 1980s.  The Dark Knight obviously plays upon this latter iteration of the character, emphasizing Batman's angst-ridden suffering as Gotham's protector and thereby valorizing his existence and deeds, which include unethical anti-terrorist practices such as lack of public accountability, violent torture, and widespread surveillance of U.S. citizens.  As I will demonstrate, by concluding with and melodramatically emphasizing scenes of Batman’s unjust persecution as a criminal by an ignorant yet morally indignant public, The Dark Knight ultimately apologizes for the deeds of George W. Bush, downplaying the importance of public dissent and generating viewer sympathy for the pain and struggles of a right-wing vigilante who gets the job done at all costs.  Despite a few key scenes in which Batman’s morality is briefly called into question, and its strong suggestion that Batman and the Joker are far more alike than they are different, the film ultimately undermines legitimate critiques of the War on Terror by foregrounding that, in the face of “agents of chaos” like the disturbingly apoliticized Joker and the easily corruptible Harvey Dent, we need “silent protectors” like Batman who will save us even when we may feel uneasy about their tactics. 

Many critics and academics agree that The Dark Knight has strong neoconservative themes, depicting torture, vigilantism, and violation of international law as the price Batman pays for bringing justice to Gotham city, but few commentators  agree on the exact implications of how those timely themes play out in the film.  Was the film a critique of those ideas, a neutral meditation on them, or, as I felt in my gut each time I walked out of the theater, an endorsement of them?

            Of all the published responses to The Dark Knight I read, the most clarifying was a September 2008 Op-Ed piece in the New York Times by fiction writer Jonathan Lethem.  Lethem comments that " a morbid incoherence was the movie’s real takeaway, chaotic form its ultimate content" (1).  Lethem sees the film as having no particular argument or cohesive "endorsement" at all, but rather as a "cognitively dissonant milkshake of rage, fear and, finally, absolving confusion" (2).  The fact that Lethem uses terms like these -- rage, fear, absolving confusion -- to pinpoint the nature of the film's lasting impact reminds us that this film, like all mainstream blockbusters and the majority of American public discourse, is first and foremost a melodrama, intent upon activating viewer emotions regardless of the logic or illogic of its narrative claims.  Lethem's "absolving confusion" refers to the excessive, victimized catharsis of melodrama.  Reading Lethem's piece I became convinced that trying to make sense of Nolan's film made no sense -- unless I approached it from the point of view of analyzing its emotional impact on audiences, highlighting its use of melodramatic tropes to generate viewer sympathy for its suffering protagonists and their causes. 

            Film scholar Linda Williams’ explanation of the melodramatic mode is crucial to analyzing the cultural logic of melodrama and its ubiquity in American popular and public culture.  As Williams argues in "Melodrama Revised," melodrama is best understood as a mode or loose collection of tropes rather than a specific literary or filmic genre, though it has strong historical ties to sentimental fiction like Uncle Tom's Cabin and women's films (or "weepies") like Stella Dallas (1925, 1937) and Terms of Endearment (1983).  As Williams explains, “the mode of melodrama [. . .]  [moves] us to pathos for protagonists beset by forces more powerful than they and who are perceived as victims” (42).  The set of structures -- heightened pathos, clear oppositions between good and evil by which we are made to identify and empathize with a suffering victim, and thus to yearn for narrative closure via the defeat of the victim's oppressor(s), is common to all genres of American film and, as Williams argues, to American popular narratives writ large.  As she states, “melodrama has always mattered and continues to matter in American culture [. . .]  the sexual, racial, and gender problems of American history have found their most powerful expression in melodrama” (82). 

            One has only to give a cursory look at the post-9/11 rhetoric of the Bush Administration to see these principles at work.  The televised footage of the attacks and their aftermath showed the American public images of suffering families of World Trade Center victims, aided by heroic (and also suffering) New York firemen, all beset by faceless, evil terrorists whose motives were seemingly incomprehensible to us.  Since melodrama activates the emotions as a means to arouse moral indignation over the plight of its suffering victims, in the case of 9/11, the heightened feelings of righteous victimhood generated by the melodramatic narratives peddled by the mainstream news and the Bush Administration were used to foment acceptance of the Iraq War and to foreclose nuanced analysis of the root causes of the actions and political views of the real-life "terrorists."

We can see a similar deployment of melodramatic tropes in The Dark Knight, particularly in two key montage sequences that strive for maximum emotional impact via juxtaposition of music, image, and pathos-laden speeches delivered in voice-over.  Note that the montage has long been used to express emotional states and arouse emotional responses: e.g., the "falling in love" montage or the "preparing for climactic battle or contest" montage.  Music is the melos of melodrama and plays a significant role in influencing viewer sympathies, as we shall see.  Through close analysis of these short montage sequences, I will demonstrate how The Dark Knight uses melodramatic conventions to arouse viewer emotions at key moments in its story, which is ultimately structured as a domestic melodrama centered upon the suffering Gordon family and their need for protection against unquestionably evil "terrorists" like the Joker and Two-Face.  I argue that the film's emotional focus and final sequence attempt to respond to the question: What kind of hero or protector does Jim Gordon's family need?  The answer, of course, is Batman.

The first sequence I want to analyze, just to lay the groundwork for my melodramatic interpretation of the film's ending, is  Note that this sequence is preceded by a quintessentially melodramatic sequence, wherein the Joker places two victims in two separate locales with two separate ticking time bombs - a variant on the classic damsel in distress setup germane to the earliest theatrical and cinematic melodramas. 

CLIP: "BURNED DOWN" SEQUENCE (Ch 25, 1:36:48 - 1:37:54)

The death of Rachel and fall of Dent = unconsummated love, the "too little too late" of melodrama, the bombs scene even includes a (classically melodramatic) last-minute confession of love from Rachel.  This was the "proper" marriage that could have symbolically restored order to Gotham -- its "white knight" fulfilling his domestic / romantic goals. 

Of course, this same theme of suffering over lost opportunities applies to Bruce Wayne / Batman, and even more so, since he not only loved Rachel but could literally have done something to stop Rachel's death, but failed.  In the "Burned Down" montage sequence, Batman's failure to stop the bombs in time is rendered in extremely personal terms -- he loved Rachel and is getting a classic "Dear Bruce" rejection letter, and also considered the now-disfigured Harvey his friend.   Yet Bruce/Batman's personal suffering and grief are powerfully linked to the destruction of the building itself and the public efforts of the firefighters -- an obvious echo of post-9/11 images of the area around the WTC.  Batman's grief is not just over his personal relations but his failure to protect Gotham city, and the deep bass drone of the music, suggestive of a dirge, accompanied by the late Rachel's voice reading the letter, connotes tragic loss, and heightens viewer sympathy for Batman, who suffers horribly (note his bowed posture in the montage) for his perceived failure to thwart the Joker's plans.  

Now to move to the film's concluding montage, which unfolds to a voice over by Jim Gordon, recently returned from the "dead" after faking his death in order not to "risk my family's safety."  [Note that Gordon's wife has two lines in whole film but we see her weep plenty.]  Indeed it is Gordon's family that takes center stage in the final act of The Dark Knight.  The now homicidally insane Harvey Dent takes his revenge on Gordon's family, kidnapping and threatening to kill James Gordon Jr. (Nathan Gamble).  Like Rachel, Gordon (and his family) directly suffers at the hands of a madman -- until luckily Batman shows up in time to save Gordon's son and defeat Dent.  Immediately following this rescue, Gordon delivers the film's final soliloquy, which is framed as an explanation to his now-safe son about why Batman is necessary. 

CLIP: "DARK KNIGHT" SEQUENCE (Ch 38, 2:22:23 - 2:23:24)

Whatever questions the film may fleetingly raise about the morality of Batman's actions are swept away -- at least in the emotional register -- by the tenor of this closing sequence.  Viewers like me, who are used to maintaining a certain critical distance even when we are to some extent being swept in by the film's emotional siren song, may still feel uneasiness at a moment like this.  We may not respond in the exact way the film seems to want us to.  Nevertheless, at the formal level, the last few minutes of The dark knight are a rousing battle cry to forgive and forget the specifics of what Batman has done, and to feel deep sympathy for this noble, suffering loner who agrees to be persecuted in order to maintain the facade that Harvey Dent was a good man.  He and Gordon conspire to lie to the public to keep them safe, and this closing sequence diverts our attention from the political implications of these deeds and instead frames the issue in terms of lone white heroes doing what must be done to keep our children and families safe.  That is melodrama: The Dark Knight’s conclusion celebrates Batman’s actions and melodramatically restores him to a place of heroism via his internal suffering and public victimhood. 

It is on these grounds that I conclude that The Dark Knight is indeed neoconservative war propaganda, for like all the most effective propaganda, its most potent sequences directly trigger the emotions without necessarily arousing too much critical thought -- perhaps even confounding some forms of critical analysis due to their seemingly deliberate obtuseness.  As Lethem concludes, "In its narrative gaps, its false depths leading nowhere in particular, its bogus grief over stakeless destruction and faked death, “The Dark Knight” echoes a civil discourse strained to helplessness by panic, overreaction and cultivated grievance" (2).  Like me, Lethem fears the power of melodramatic tropes to overwhelm viewer emotions at the expense of critical analysis and further discussion.  He fears the "helplessness" of a public used to being swayed by gut feelings, used to knowing who the good guys and bad guys are, and used to accepting melodramatic self-sacrifice as a barometer of moral value.  I too fear these things and that is why I fear the overwhelming popularity of blockbusters like The Dark Knight, for it only affirms Slavoj Zizek's contention that "we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.  [. . .]  [All] the main terms we use to designate the present conflict -- 'war on terrorism', 'democracy and freedom', 'human rights', and so on -- are false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it" (2).  Think it, no.  But feel it, yes. 

Sources:

Williams, Linda.  “Melodrama Revised.”  Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory.  Ed. Nick Browne.  Berkeley: UC P, 1998.  42-88.

Lethem, Jonathan.  "Art of Darkness."  New York Times online.  Published September 20, 2008. 

Zizek, Slavoj.  Welcome to the Desert of the Real!  Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates.  London: Verso, 2002.

Brooker, Will.  Batman Unmasked: Analysing a Cultural Icon.  London: Continuum, 2000.