The Story of Film

by Mark Cousins

27. George Lucas, ibid., p. 318.

  28. Paul Schrader, ibid., p. 316.

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  Challenging images of masculinity and nationhood in Derek Jarman’s avant-garde film The Last of England. UK, 1988.

  MEGA-ENTERTAINMENTS AND PHILOSOPHY (1979–90)

  The extremes of world cinema

  9

  By the end of the 70s, the New Wave directors had been routed by Darth Vader and the multiplexes, and also by a shift in the country’s self-image. A right-wing former actor, Ronald Reagan, was inaugurated as President in January 1980. His message that America had indulged in enough self-criticism, that the country was noble and that the 1960s generation had been mistaken, was an explicit rejection of their troubled conception of modern American life. America wanted to think of itself as heroic once more and along came Reagan to say that it was.

  1970s American cinema had certainly been skewed in the direction of downbeat male themes. Of the US films detailed in the last chapter, only Cabaret (1972) was substantially about a woman. The anti-heroism, open-endedness, ambiguity, abstraction, irony and self-doubt of New American directors like Scorsese and Coppola were hung around male characters and even the traditionalist Sam Peckinpah had pictured his violent men – James Coburn in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Warren Oates in Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), Coburn again in Cross of Iron (UK–Germany, 1977) – as if they were caught in a slow-motion cycle of pessimism and self-destruction. This bleak view of masculinity died in Ronald Reagan’s triumphant consensus. Instead, the number-one films at the world box office for each of the years of the new optimistic decade of the 1980s were: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Return of the Jedi (1983), Ghostbusters (1984), Back to the Future (1985), Top Gun (1986), Three Men and a Baby (1987), Rain Man (1988), Batman (1989) and Home Alone (1990). With the exception of Rain Man, all were about fantasy and adventure, the fun of regressing to boyhood or the adrenalin rush of masculine power.

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  An auspicious start to the 1980s: Martin Scorsese mixed expressionist use of spaceand documentary

  INITIAL PROMISE IN 1980S AMERICAN CINEMA

  The counterrevolution that this involved did not happen all at once. In fact, the beginning of the 1980s was a great time for complexity in US cinema. In the first year of the decade alone Raging Bull, American Gigolo, The Elephant Man, The Shining, Heaven’s Gate, and Return of the Secaucus 7 seemed to promise a maturity in US cinema. But the uncertainty and pessimism of these films would soon become untenable in the bright light of the new era. Even The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980) was an improvement on its prequel Star Wars. Its lighting style was noticeably lower key, its trainee Jedi knight Luke Skywalker was having doubts about his ability to use the Force, his band of coalition friends were facing defeat, he discovered that the evil Darth Vader was in fact his father. Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull was his most painful story yet about spiritual fall and redemption. The asthmatic, artistic, physically delicate Scorsese perhaps surprisingly found a metaphor for himself in the bullish, inarticulate boxer Jake La Motta. There were little psychic connections between the two men, like both being somewhat embarrassed by the fact that they had small hands. Such details allowed the author to read himself into the fictional character. Jake could take a beating but many thought he was worth nothing on any higher level, a point that La Motta finally realized when, abject and imprisoned, he punches the cell walls moaning, “I am not an animal, I am not an animal.” Scorsese knew everything about this rage. It was hyper-real for him and, in the boxing scenes in the film, he showed what it felt like, how it floated through space, how it went mute, then snapped into fear again (288). Crane shots captured the disorientation of a beaten body, switches between slow-motion and speeded-up filming caught the lurches in La Motta’s mental state. The meticulous sound-track layered organic noises as if they were recoded inside a reeling head. This was magic filming, as good as Méliès, Cocteau or Welles. But after such moments the director would nail his camera to the floor. To capture Jake’s home life – arguing with his wife (289), trying to fix the TV – Scorsese filmed in the kind of tableau scenes he’d used when he made the documentary about his parents, Italianamerican (1974). No one had combined expressionism and non-fiction shooting styles in this way.

  Although, Raging Bull is sometimes called the best film of the 1980s, it had nothing to do with that decade. Its screenwriter Paul Schrader was the first to capture the tinny narcissism of 1980s masculinity in his third film as director. American Gigolo (USA, 1980) was about a prostitute – a very New Wave subject – except this one was a man, an appropriate inversion to launch a decade of cinematic male-worship. Played by Richard Gere, he enjoys being both the seller and the commodity and delights in the shallow pop music, designer clothes and fast cars that were the 1980s’ symbols of power and success. Like the decade itself, Schrader seemed to be saying, this man has no inner life or, rather, no spiritual life. His sex scene with Lauren Hutton is a series of abstract body parts, an almost shot-for-shot replica of one in Jean-Luc Godard’s Une Femme mariée/A Married Woman (France, 1959). Directly copying Bresson’s ending in Pickpocket (France, 1959) he imprisons his main character, then, through the visit of a woman, has him finally break out of his emotional isolation (see pages 251–53). Schrader’s exploration of bodies and surface, combined with his interest in the transcendence of bodily experience, make him one of the most ambiguous figures in modern American cinema.

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  in one of America’s greatest post-war films, Raging Bull. USA, 1980.

  290

  John Sayles ‘novelistic portrait of the social and political connections in a medium-sized town went against the simplifying trend in eighties cinema. City of Hope. USA, 1991.

  The critic in Schrader was able to articulate the intellectual and formal achievement of his films, as was another writer-turned-director, the prolific John Sayles. After starting with Roger Corman, working on small budgets and going against the Reaganite drift of his times, Sayles soon became America’s State-of-the-Nation filmmaker and one of the key independents of his day. Rather than make movies about himself, as Martin Scorsese, David Lynch and Woody Allen did, Sayles’ subjects were marginal and complex communities. His first film, The Return of the Secaucus 7 (1979), was a timely look at a group of 1960s political protesters, twenty years on. City of Hope (1991) was the greatest anti-Reagan film of the decade. About the compromises of small-city business and politics, it featured a mesh of no less than fifty-two speaking parts with characters from one storyline walking into the ending of another, which Sayles in the screenplay called “trading” (290). The complex interaction between characters and story points was difficult to follow at first but slowly the references to developments and deals made sense.

  The period’s other radical director, Spike Lee, was less of a sociologist. His feature debut She’s Gotta Have It (USA, 1986) turned on its head the sexual bravado of films like Melvin Van Peebles Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) by telling the story of a young black woman’s erotic successes. Like Martin Scorsese, Lee studied at New York University and, although his budgets were as low as Sayles’, his imagery – photographed by the outstanding Ernest Dickerson – was considerably more stylised. His Do the Right Thing (1989) was a great advance in this regard. Set on a single, sweltering day in Brooklyn, New York, its tensions between local blacks and Latinos are sparked by events at a pizzeria. Like City of Hope, it features a cross-section of characters. The intensity of Dickerson’s colours match the film’s boiling themes (291). Lee used the tilted camera angles of one of his favourite films The Third Man (UK, 1949, see page 204) to render everything off kilter. He himself played the character Mookie who eventually throws a trash can through the window of the pizzeria, shouting “Howard Beach”, a reference to a real white-on-black racist attack, as he does so. At the end Lee paired a quotation from Martin Luther King deno
uncing violence with one from Malcolm X advocating it in self-defence. It was this that enraged some critics. One New York magazine wrote, “The end of the film is a shambles, and if some audiences go wild, [Lee] is partly responsible.”1

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  Spike Lee as pizza delivery man Mookie in his brilliant disquisition on inter-ethnic violence in New York, Do the Right Thing. USA, 1989.

  David Lynch, another serious American filmmaker of the period, came from the opposite end of the political spectrum. He was the most original director in 1980s cinema, its only surrealist. He studied painting in, amongst other places, Philadelphia, a city he hated so much that monstrous versions of it would recur throughout his work. His nightmarish debut feature, Eraserhead (1977), drew its expressionism from the city, but layered it with numerous intangible fears – of fatherhood, dark corners of rooms, the unknown at the edge of everyday experience. These manifested themselves as grub-like animals, fleeced infant creatures and extended hairdos. Lynch’s follow up The Elephant Man (1980) was again about deformity and the fear of cities but he added an unexpected tenderness to its central character, the disfigured John Merrick who lived in Victorian London. The scene where a sympathetic doctor finally comes across Merrick hidden away in the shadowy underworld of the city is intensely moving – Lynch tracks in just as a tear falls down the doctor’s cheek, yet the originality of Lynch’s schema prevents the film ever becoming a conventional one. In his mind the director connected the bulbous growths on Merrick’s skull (292), for example, to both the explosions of smoke from a recently erupted volcano, Mount St. Helens, and to the cloud-like forms which paint makes when it is poured into water.2

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  Deformity and tenderness in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man. USA, 1980.

  This intuitively abstract approach to the imagery of a film found its greatest outlet in Lynch’s astonishing Blue Velvet (1986). This was a fable about a teenager who grows up in a small town like the young Lynch, hides in a mysterious woman’s wardrobe and spies on her as Lynch had dreamt of doing, then gets drawn into the nightmarish world of the brutal Frank who exercises a sinister control over her. What initially disturbed audiences was the tonal range of the film. It combined the innocent wonder of a children’s Disney film with the snarling evil of The Exorcist (1973). Lynch derived some of the former from illustrated books he knew as a child yet had Dennis Hopper, who played Frank, use the blue velvet dressing gown of the woman – Isabella Rossellini – to rape her (293). The director – who was once characterized by a journalist as Jimmy Stewart from Mars – was interested in both wondrous and rabid states of mind. He used slow motion at the beginning of the film because he felt that stories are something that should be “floated” into. He had his own words for the compositional busyness of a frame – he awarded marks out of ten to a room according to its visual clutter and felt that people, and especially mobile things like fire, could substantially add to that clutter – and used the phrase “the eye of the duck” to refer to the compositionally central scene in his film because, as he put it, “when you look at a duck, the eye is always in the right place”.3

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  As the eighties progressed, the full extent of Lynch‘s surreal, innocent vision became clear: everyday Americana (above) and its monstrous, dreamlike underbelly (below) in his Blue Velvet. USA, 1986.

  No other filmmaker talks like this, but these strange formulations do help explain Lynch’s uniqueness. All his films have a cosmic element, for example, and once it is understood that for him gazing up at the stars is a compositionally pure thing to do – a zero on the clutter scale – then it can be seen how such moments balance those of heightened fear. Always, there is this fluidity of ideas. They, again in Lynch’s words, “pop” from the ether. For instance, in Lynch’s underrated Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) the Frank-like monster Bob came about by accident. Lynch’s prop man Frank Silva was in a bedroom moving a chest of drawers. As Lynch tells it, “Someone behind me said, ‘Don’t block yourself in there, Frank’, and my mind pictured Frank blocked in the room.”4 This was enough to suggest to the director that a new character played by Silva should be introduced into the dreamlike narrative. The surrealism of the film was extended in strange conceptual sequences in a red room (294) where people hang in mid-air, monkeys eat corn and Frank and other characters act backwards as they had done in Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un poète/The Blood of a Poet (France, 1930).

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  Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me was derided on its first release but its use of symbolic rooms, of reverse action, of elements of theatre and magic called to mind the work of Georges Méliès and Jean Cocteau. USA, 1992.

  Stylistically, Lynch had more in common with the films of Cocteau and Buñuel than those of his contemporaries, but in one important way Blue Velvet and the rest were as much of their time as American Gigolo, making Lynch a quintessentially American director. The psychological safe zones in his films are mostly archetypal small towns and comforting Americana. More, perhaps, than Ronald Reagan – whom he is said to have visited in the White House – he had an almost abstract fear of the outside world, of people and things he did not understand. Lynch believed that as people get older, their window on the world closes. This, as it turned out, is what was happening to his country and its cinema.

  THE REACTION AGAINST SERIOUSNESS AND THE RISE OF THE MEGA-ENTERTAINMENT

  Scorsese, Schrader, Sayles, Lee and Lynch were continuing the aesthetic and social ambitions of filmmakers of the 1960s and early 1970s, but the trend in American cinema in the 1980s was in the opposite direction. At an industry level, the new political climate allowed the Hollywood studios to lobby for the relaxation of the so-called Paramount Decision of 1948 which forbade them to show as well as make films. They did so successfully and by the end of the decade, for the first time in forty years, audiences saw films on screens owned by the people who made those films. Paramount and Universal, for example, entered into a joint venture to distribute their films oversea via the company Universal International Pictures (UIP), and screen them in their new co-owned multiplex chain United Cinema International (UCI).

  At the same time, other dynamic forms of visual culture came on-stream. A new television channel Music Television (MTV), broadcast its first music video (for pop group The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star”) in 1981. Its twenty-four-hour-a-day screenings created a huge market for young video-directors, who were not only trying out jazzy new techniques but getting ahead only according to how new their approach to editing and imagery could be. Two years after its launch, MTV premiered a fourteen-minute mini-feature for Michael Jackson’s song “Thriller” directed by John Landis; the worlds of film and pop music began to intertwine. Eventually the station would be shown in forty-one countries to 150 million households, in seventeen languages. The best of its work enlarged the schemas of cinema, which borrowed its techniques. Much of it was dross.

  The sister world of advertising was also expanding massively. It contained ambitious men like Ridley and Tony Scott and Adrian Lyne, who wanted to extend their work beyond thirty-second promotional films. The pressure in their television commercials to capture audiences’ attentions instantly and startle or divert led them to change camera angle more frequently than big screen filmmakers, to shoot with several cameras and sometimes operate one themselves, to keep everything moving, to use coloured lights to create more visual impact, and to create soundtracks of great range and impact. They were British but their work was noticed by American producers like Jerry Bruckheimer, who oversaw Schrader’s American Gigolo, and Don Simpson, who had started in advertising and then produced youth pictures at Warner Bros. He created what came to be called the “high-concept” movie, a film that could be captured – and therefore sold – in one simple phrase. Bruckheimer and Simpson set up company together and began making a series of films – Flashdance (Adrian Lyne, USA, 1983), Top Gun (Tony Scott, USA, 1986), Days of Thunder (Tony Scott, USA, 1990) – which celebrated
the sensation-seeking, unfettered, masculine, consumerist values of the time.

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  One of the many new visual trends in eighties American cinema was the use of coloured light, as here in Joe Dante’s Gremlins, which was shot by John Hora. USA, 1984.

  Directly through the influence of Bruckheimer, Simpson, Lyne and the Scotts, and indirectly through other filmmakers becoming excited by the new techniques of advertising and MTV, mainstream American cinema changed. The average shot length dropped an astonishing 40 per cent, from 10 seconds to 6. Films like One from the Heart (Francis Coppola, USA, 1982, shot by Vittorio Storaro) and Gremlins (Joe Dante, USA, 1984, shot by John Hora), used blue and pink gels over their lights (295). Around 1984, feature films also started to borrow the editing techniques of promos and adverts, transferring film to video, copying the identification numbers over to the tape, then editing on computers. IBM had launched the first personal computers in 1981 and by 1984, professional ones had become powerful enough to contain whole films in their memory. The effect of video editing was that moving scenes, pieces of action or tiny moments around the film took seconds rather than minutes. Far more edits could be made in a given editing period than under the more cumbersome system of physically handling film. The inertia had been removed from the editing process and, for a while at least, editors revelled in the faster methods.

  These new filmic techniques and the new mood of optimism of the country’s wealthy citizens were a marriage made in heaven. In Top Gun, they found a singular fusion. This chequered story of a cocky aircraft pilot called Maverick (Tom Cruise) starts like an MTV promo. Maverick goes to flying school, takes to the air and falls for a girl, but his recklessness causes the death of his flying partner. As this is a study in power rather than character, however, the human elements are invested with little of the time and effort given to the soaring flying scenes. The shooting and editing of these intend to blast us out of our seat. They are the new sublime, 1980s style. To emphasize the grace of the planes and of Cruise, director Tony Scott sometimes filmed at twenty-eight frames per second, using a subtle slow motion to make his imagery more sensual. The film made Cruise a superstar. It celebrated his masculinity and patriotism (296) as Leni Riefenstahl had done with her characters. Maverick was a strong, untroubled man whose lust for life was expressed in his desire for women but also, at the end of the film, in the way he shoots down Soviet MIG aircraft.