The Relations of Film/Cultural/Critical Affect

There's been sort of a critical scuffle over at Jason Sperb's blog in the past few days about certain opinions of There Will Be Blood. It started with Cynthia Rockwell writing over at Wild Sound that

After seeing There Will Be Blood, and thinking about it a bit, I said that Paul Thomas Anderson was the false prophet Eli Sunday and those raving about his film are Eli’s sheep. It’s certainly a gorgeous film, an epic one, a mammothly forceful and visceral one, I’ll give him that. But ultimately is anything being said? I see nothing more than was said in Citizen Kane ages ago, or Chinatown, or 2001, all of which the film heavily borrows from visually. I’ve seen it said many times that this film is doing something new, but can anyone explain to me what exactly that is? I see a film student’s orgasm of references and allusion, but little else, and ultimately an empty core.

It's not exactly a new opinion about the film. Virtually every negative review of the film I've seen has lodged the same complaints: gorgeous and visceral, but hollow and stagey. What struck Jason most about the post was the amount of vitriol sent out to fans of the film:

What frustrates me about the post in question is the utter condescension displayed towards people like me who actually think There Will Be Blood is a twisted masterpiece, and that PT is a legitimate, even thought-provoking, auteur (and I say that as someone who sees Magnolia and, to lesser extent, Boogie Nights, as at times excessive and over-the-top).

He offers up as a rebuttal a similarly familiar argument that the film's entire point is its theatrical staging of emptiness.

What I find interesting about these posts (and the many comments on them) is that it replicates something that seems to happen again and again in critical discussions of this film. Both writers seem to agree on the interpretation of the film (that the film is to some extent about how people "go on with their orgy of trying to pry some meaning out of his films," as Rockwell writes, when emptiness seems to reside at the heart of them), and yet they differ radically in terms of how they actually relate to it. My favorite example of how this dynamic works is the pair of dueling reviews of There Will Be Blood over at Slant Magazine: Ed Gonzalez calls it "another film-school-in-a-box by Paul Thomas Anderson" and Nick Schager praises how the film "immediately establish[es] a mood of dread pitched somewhere between the frightening awe felt by the apes upon discovering the monolith in 2001 and the empty malevolence of the Overlook Hotel's hallways in The Shining." Am I the only one who sees these as essentially the same comments (both about the allusive structure that defines Anderson's work), differing only in the author's tone toward the object? In fact, such a parallel persists throughout both of the reviews: every performance, every shot, every scene, every sound cue is read in exactly the same way, and yet both come away with very different feelings toward the film.

This particular blog discussion, however, is fascinating to me because it not only lays bare this constant doubling in critical opinion about the film for all to see, but because both writers seem to be aware that this is precisely what the film hinges on. In her original post, Rockwell writes,

[M]any critics who say they love this film say they are speechless, dumbfounded, don’t know what to say…implying that it’s because the film’s so powerful, but in my opinion, it’s because there’s just nothing to say. There’s nothing to be wrung from the film.

I think she may have unintentionally hit upon something crucial here, even if it is precisely what she is reacting against. This film has (as Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love seem to have done before this one) somehow managed to hit upon a curious kind of affective chord in which no justification is going to be powerful enough, ever, to convince someone who feels differently about the film. After all, many critics have offered plenty of evidence to support their claims about why the film is either wonderful or terrible, but in the end, because this evidence is always drawn from the very same pool, this is always reduced to a completely unjustified opinion supported only by the "speechless" feeling that one either loves it or hates it.

But this is about more than a single film which breaks down all of our best critical faculties. An instructive comparison would be the other critical darling of last year, No Country for Old Men, a film that shares with Anderson's the themes of emptiness and greed, gorgeous shots of wide desert vistas, and an interrogating camera that peers at its characters as if they were subjects of a nature documentary on the Discovery Channel. The Coen brothers crafted a film which inspired probably the most critical debate in years (I've linked to some of that discussion in the past), but no one seems to really write about the film with any real passion in either direction. It has its fans and its detractors, but something about the film (I would argue, irreducible to its text) seems to inspire measured, classical criticism from a variety of different vantage points (strictly formalist seem the most common, but I've read metaphysical, marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic critiques, etc.). On the contrary, something about There Will Be Blood (also irreducible to the text itself) inspires the kind of "speechless" review in which evidence to support claims (the classical mode of textual analysis) becomes superfluous, in which any critic is reduced to a singular affective response.

In this sense, while the Coens have given us an important film culturally because of the kinds of critical discourse it inspired, I think that Anderson's is an equally important film because it reminds us that such initial affective engagements in many ways form the very basis of all of our social engagements. At its very base, when an individual confronts an object or a person for the first time, the reaction that emerges from that relation is something beyond discourse, and while many scholars have attempted to examine this kind of response, such affect breaks down rational critique and obfuscates exactly the kinds of evidence that could be used to describe it. Cultural theorists such as Lawrence Grossberg, Stuart Hall, Brian Massumi, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have attempted for decades to come to grips with this affective basis which serves as the foundation for all social interaction, and therefore for all politics. These are, of course, precisely those critics who have acted as a kind of counter-tradition to that legacy of the Enlightenment that privileges rational argumentation over an initial anti-rational response.

I think the coin toss metaphor posed by No Country offers us a way of reading these two dueling critical strands (the rational discourse offered in support of the Coens, the affective love-it/hate-it intuition offered in relation to Anderson) against one another as something of a parable for how we are supposed to think and feel as critics. The coin toss represents that contingency and probability of meaninglessness that pervades the cultural objects we encounter in daily life, and yet our responses to those objects are really two sides of the same coin. Without rationalist (one could even say liberal humanist) discourses available, critics will have no vocabulary through which to speak about the encounters of the everyday, no method through which to investigate the political consequences of those interactions, and no avenues through which to stage necessary interventions into current affairs. But without that other side of the coin, that affective, anti-rationalist side (that side so often forgotten by some writers), we would have no sensibility, no empathy or sympathy through which to understand why it is we would even want to engage in such critical, rational discourses in the first place. This affect reminds us of the "human" in such liberal humanist discourses, and it lays the groundwork for the ethics of all of our human relations. In other words, critics need to have a good heaping portion of both in order to remain effective, responsible, and ethical in their work. If only we had more films like these, we wouldn't need the reminder....

Nostalgia and the Task of the Critic

I attended a colloquium given by my colleague Jason Sperb yesterday on images of Detroit and the kinds of nostalgia that articulate a really complicated racial politics (as a point of reference, he posted the first few pages of the argument here a few days earlier). It was an incredibly smart paper, well deserving of the awards it has received, and it left me with a few scattered thoughts about nostalgia and critical methodology.

The first thing that came to mind as he concluded the paper is the manner in which his view of nostalgia is radically different than that of many people who study it. He embedded those critical views of nostalgia and its discontents that circulate in the academy into his argument, but his tone was much more personal, and, as a result, he was more willing to concede the point (so often ignored by other scholars) that, much as we want to critique the implications of nostalgia, it isn't going to go away simply because we're critiquing it. Such an argument would be the equivalent of Laura Mulvey's notorious claims from the 1970s that we as critics should actively work toward the destruction of cinematic pleasure. Not gonna happen. And, even if it could, that wouldn't be productive of any alternative affect that could take its place.

No, Jason highlighted for me (and, in the Q&A it became clear that I may be the only person to come away with this message, so he'll have to correct me if I've just radically misinterpreted his work) the ways in which nostalgia is an affect that actively produces things. It produces a complicated and potentially harmful racial politics, to be sure. But it also can be productive of a certain "humility," as he describes it, a humility to the power of the affect itself and to all that it represents on a purely non-linguistic level. Most importantly, he suggests (by his own example in this paper) that nostalgia can ideally be productive of its own critique. There is thus a productive capacity here (not in the standard marxist sense; I mean the term in the more Deleuzian sense of a kind of imaginative creation that is not really produced by anything other than pure affect itself) that often goes ignored in the academy.

This is especially important to realize since nostalgia (almost by definition) implies the fond remembrance of something that never actually existed. Nostalgia only ever refers to an idealized past, one that intrudes affectively into the present and thus determines present and future politics from a non-existent ground. (Brief aside: For an example of how this is even working in the election right now, compare Clinton to Obama in their appeals to the history of American politics. Clinton seems to promise a return to form before Bush, in other words a return to the Clinton years: Clinton, Part Deux, if you will. Obama uses the complicated networks of history to promote a change into the future. The politics of a productive nostalgia versus that of a presentist historian. What I find so interesting is that so few people have stopped to ask themselves, "What was so great about the 90s? Was that our Golden Age?!" This is nostalgia actively producing a movement into the future that is also a movement into a non-existent past. What we need to do is to allow nostalgia to produce its own critique, in the manner that Obama uses it fairly frequently.) But if we allow nostalgia to produce its own critique even as we are affected by it, we can use this nostalgia in an oppositional manner to produce a new ideal in the future. In some ways, this coalesces with how I discussed the Hitchcock images that only exist for the sake of nostalgia for a past that literally never existed (it is a past of Hollywood fictions): not a desire to produce something that moves forward, but to produce a fake past within the present. And this again provides another contrast with the Lohan/Monroe images: these are a brand of nostalgia that produces a criticism of its own nostalgic affect. It's something that requires more investigation in all kinds of facets of our collective nostalgic experiences, in any case.

The second thing that struck me was the personal tone of his paper. Not a minute passed in which he didn't use the personal pronoun "I" in order to define his own position in relation to the material. As a result, not only the tone but also the structure of the argument shifted: it was occasionally meandering into personal asides that became crucial to the overall argument a few moments later, an recursively worked backward at times to mimic the kinds of nostalgia he discussed. It resembled nothing so much as a blog (I mean this in the most affectionate way possible--I find I read much less "real" criticism ever since I set up my RSS feeds). What was so great about this is that it tended to foreground not only the mediating role of the critic in relaying this argument to an audience: it also foregrounded the contingency of that mediation. This argument could not have been delivered in the same way had Jason not given it; had he not lived in Detroit to get his MA; had he not randomly decided to indulge his nostalgia one day to watch a 46-second clip on YouTube. The same could certainly be said about all of us and what we do as critics, but we so rarely acknowledge that our understanding of culture and the politically-inflected arguments we construct around it are defined entirely by how we are affected by pure contingency. It's a lesson that should provide the scholar with some humility...

Conferences and Professionalization

It seems that everyone is writing about conference experiences recently (see here, here, and here, for just a few examples). I missed the SCMS bandwagon, but I did help to organize a grad conference here at IU a couple of weekends ago... It's sort of a rest-stop in the road to professionalization: while it's not a "real" conference, it still performed many of the same functions as one, and then some. After all, this conference kept in mind its demographic at all times, and, as a result, it was something of an ideological apparatus which consciously attempted to interpellate us and legitimate our academic careers (sorry for the jargon--but it seemed especially appropriate for a conference about the political uses of knowledge). In other words,it offered me an interesting insider's perspective on what works/doesn't work in this process. From this perspective, I just want to offer a few (very scattered) notes about the kinds of work that conferences do to young scholars and some of the valuable advice I picked up:

• Especially from the perspective of someone on the committee, co-organizing it from a logistical standpoint, it really introduced me to the kinds of economies in which academics participate on a regular basis. This was an incredibly small conference (13 panels of 3 or 4 speakers each, with a keynote and a closing speaker, a closing creative reading, and a performance by a departmental improv comedy troupe), and yet the actual financial considerations to take into account were still considerable. There are many strange alleys through which we must travel in order to find these funds, departmental and other university channels. Another major conference was held exactly one week later than ours and it charged a considerable fee for admission to the conference as well. And I haven't even been incorporated into the system of outside grants and funds that could be used for these kinds of events. What is especially strange about the entire process was how self-cannabalizing these financial matters actually were: we ended up requesting a sizable amount of money from a student union board, only to repay it to the Indiana Memorial Union (which had originally given the board its funds in the first place) in order to pay massive fees for A/V equipment. It's an economy all its own, and it's small enough that it becomes increasingly clear how absurd this circulation of funds actually is.... It's 100% a capitalist microcosm, and any elder scholars who maintain the illusion that the work they do promotes a different kind of political-economy have clearly disavowed a great deal of what defines the profession as a whole (think of this as a kind of academic plausible deniability).
  
• While the committee argues every year about exactly how inter-disciplinary we want to make the conference become, I still maintain that it's a good thing. This year, more than any other, I saw panels with three different people from three different disciplines working on similar ideas through completely different frameworks. This gave a really exciting feeling to some panels that might have been dull in terms of content otherwise. The real contingency of inter-disciplinarity characterized the best panels that I saw, while others that were more traditional or "safe" were, well, traditional and safe. I know that my own paper (an elaboration of this post on guilty pleasures, although from the perspective that "guilty pleasures" are an experience that can only be characteristic of the kind of transitional consumer culture we exist in at the moment) didn't seem like something that controversial when I wrote it (from very much a cultural studies perspective): it took Victorianists in the English Department and a folklorist from another university to add more depth to my claims about different kinds of experiences of consumerism.
• Narrowing the scope to papers themselves, I can now definitively say that I don't mind hearing close readings during conferences. This used to drive me crazy, especially since it's pretty much the opposite of my own preferred methodology, which values context and broad strokes. The key is that the close reading has to be very smart and stay on point. There is nothing more boring than someone who does a close reading that relies entirely on clever puns about theoretical abstractions. It's a masturbatory pursuit second only to those scholars who rely on a single lens through which to analyze a single object: if I want a summary of an important book, I can look elsewhere, or, even better, read the original text itself. Close readings can be smart and relevant, especially when positioned next to other papers that offer interestingly different perspectives on the same issues.
• The most memorable papers (to me at least) are those that don't ignore that the primary purpose of our academic pursuits is to replicate an art of the provocateur. The papers I remember most, that have most inspired me in the past few weeks to investigate my own perspectives, were often those papers which at the time I found to be completely misguided. They were entertaining, but more importantly, while I found the arguments to be off track, they were still conceptually dense enough to evoke a disagreement that provoked more potential viewpoints. (By contrast, a boring lens reading of a single source inspired me to say to myself, "No, s/he's just wrong in that interpretation of the work" or "That reading doesn't really add anything to that object for me"...) The buzzword is that academic conferences are about networking with other scholars, but this simply isn't possible without a little showmanship: no one wants to talk to someone who delivered a boring/pretentious paper. Even someone who delivers a bad argument (but one that can be built upon) can be the life of the academic party.

This last bit is especially important to me. The goal of being provocative speaks in many ways to how I understand the purpose of our profession as cultural critics. Obviously, writing about Shakespeare and youth culture won't change the world in any real way (yes, the delusion that such academic pursuits are that valuable is still shared among a surprising number of my young colleagues), but it can hopefully generate a certain amount of discussion and critical reflection about the culture in which we live. At its best, this "whimsical f-bomb" brand of criticism can even hope to reach beyond the sanctioned academic borders of our professional conferences and journals. It's a goal I'd like to achieve on some level in my own writing at some point (hence the title and purpose of this blog--unsuccessful so far, obviously). But I can--and I think I succeed in this to some degree--encourage this kind of attitude in the venue of the classroom. The point is not to indoctrinate students toward the left (it should be clear from this post that I'm not the most liberal of academics ever, even if I'm really liberal by "normal people" standards). The point is to generate a real discussion, to get people to make real arguments, even those that I find misguided. It's a spirit I find in a lot of my colleagues as we discuss pedagogy, and it gives me hope that we're not totally useless in these changing times.

Open Secrets: Knowing and Unknowing

The conference this year focused on the theme of knowing, and it is no surprise that the resulting papers we received all either examined or themselves embodied allegories of epistemology. The projects this year all attempted to tackle issues of how knowledge is learned, how it is constructed, how it is retained, how it is mythologized, how it is kept away from people deemed undeserving, how it is kept secret even in open spaces? In our program for the event, we usually have a small blurb which tries in some way to add some sense of cohesion to the chaos of the conference. This year such a blurb was especially important since the topic encouraged papers from a variety of disciplines to wrestle with their own methodologies, their own theoretical assumptions, their own deployment of the knowledge they create. And, despite the disciplinary variety here (or perhaps because of it), our creative director Mica Hilson’s blurb (usually a shot in the dark that only hits some of the tone of the conference) really encapsulated many of the major ideas explored during that weekend:

The term “Open Secret” has always fascinated me – in part, because the meaning of the term is itself something of an “open secret.” An “open secret” could be the “elephant in the room” – an obvious piece of information which gets willfully ignored. Or an “open secret” could be more like Henry James’ “Figure in the Carpet” – something obviously coded, but frustratingly difficult to decode. The academic papers and creative presentations at this conference tangle with both meanings of the “open secret,” and many also raise provocative questions about the relationship between knowledge and power: How are some forms of knowledge (or some secrets) privileged over others? How is knowledge – and, for that matter, how is ignorance – disseminated and deployed? Who wants to know? Who doesn’t?

Written before the event itself, this does a remarkable job of capturing the main concerns of many of the papers and presentations. What he could not have predicted, perhaps, is how these concerns were often directed back at the kinds of knowledge produced by academic discourse. So many of the papers presented pointed out the kinds of impersonations and improvisations of power that we take on methodologically as we engender new knowledge’s or revise old ones.

Some of the standout papers in this regard – that spirit of methodological self-reflexivity – included, perhaps appropriately, an entire panel devoted to “History and Timelessness.” Andrew Fiss of IU’s Department of the History and Philosophy of Science, encapsulated all of the concerns of the entire conference in his examination of the term “situated knowledges”: those knowledges which are entirely situated in a particular space and time and to which we can never have access. In other words, it will eventually become something of a paradigm of how we see all knowledge, locked in sites which are privileged only to some. Maureen Hattrup offered a historical allegory of how (dis)avowal of knowledge’s situatedness becomes performed by historians. In her unpacking of Carlyle’s use of the “open secret” as a matrix through which all knowledge gets distributed with diminishing returns through different social classes, she provided an important example of the kind of powerful position we as critics place ourselves in, impersonating/performing knowledge in a way that actively produces further social stratification. Meanwhile, perhaps at the opposite end of the spectrum of how these concerns operate, Laura Ivins-Hulley explored what could be described as the apotheosis of situated knowledge in her examination of the dreamwork and “inner speech” in the Quay Brothers’ short films.

Underlying all three of those papers was the will to question exactly how situated knowledges get performed as a kind of methodological impersonation by historians (like Carlyle as Hattrup examines him, or Judith Butler as Fiss describes) or performed by oneself and for oneself through dream or film. Clearly the performance of mysterious power that these folks analyze hasn’t disappeared from our academic discourse, and a panel on “Documentary Evidence and Activism” earlier that same day examine and embody this kind of performance within the disciplinary narratives that we form even more explicitly. Kyle Denison Martin of Michigan State offered a brilliant examination of the different narratives (epidemiological, illness, etc.) that characterizes the response to the historical trajectory of AIDS in Haiti and its effects on the phenomenological, social, and political bodies of the people involved. In his examination of the forms of evidence used to biographize Laurent Clerc, Pierre Schmidt (a visiting scholar at Purdue originally from Marc Bloch University) examined ho biography can transform into mythology in ways that are both productive and damaging for the people for whom this narrative purportedly speaks.

In other words, the panel attempted to grapple with the ways in which our methodology in constructing narratives of the culture around us have material ramifications for the bodies we tend to appropriate while “forging” them. Forgery is the appropriate word here, because I think it captures the obsession during this conference with the manner in which our non-fiction cultural narratives and analyses are still fictions to a large extent. Not a new idea by any stretch of the imagination, but both of the above panels demonstrate a new awareness of how our academic narratives (previously thought to be safe within the walls of the ivory tower) are actually having real effects as they permeate everyday social reality. As Martin noted, it was in fact university scientists and sociologists who constructed the narratives that have damaging effects on the social policy toward how we treat AIDS in Haiti.

It’s no surprise then that two papers (not in the same panel) actually performed this kind of narratological anxiety in complementary ways. Fredericka Schmadel of the IU Folklore department examined “The Six Publics of Hugo Chavez” by acting as a mediator who could speak from these six different perspectives “in their words.” The result was a literal impersonation of several different figures with different narrative vantage points of how they see Hugo Chavez from the realm of everyday life. From a vantage point traditionally diametrically opposed to such anthropological detail, Elizabeth Hoover, an MFA in the IU English Department, also recreated the perspectives of a cultural event through the voices of those who participated. In this case, the event was a lynching at the close of the nineteenth century, and her poetry captured the voices of those who performed the lynching. While the two methods of narrativization seem to be wholly opposed from one another, this conference revealed that they are in some ways inverse methods of performing exactly the same concerns. When asked why she chose to craft dramatic monologues from the voices of lynchers, Hoover responded that constructing the master narrative of the lynching from an “objective” perspective (the first poem in her series) was the easy part: it also engages in the spectatorial pleasures of the lynching without really critiquing it or revealing anything new. Schmadel had similar things to say about her own mediation of these “real” voices: the goal was to critique the very process of mediation which so easily crafts a master narrative while ignoring the voices that compose it in the first place.

Between the methodologies of knowledge production and the end narratives that have socio-political ramifications, the conference also obsessively examined how bodies either could or could not speak for themselves, how bodies are co-opted to stand in for some knowledge narrative or are rendered unspeakable. Thus, we had Courtney Wennerstrom and Jeff Sartain’s examination of Chuck Palahniuk’s “Guts”; Laura Bivona’s analysis of the Body Worlds exhibition; Elizabeth Melly’s examination of how Lavinia’s body stood in as poetic knowledge in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus; Emily Houlik-Ritchey’s look at female dismemberment in Spanish sonnets; Chris Harvey’s look at the dismembered female bodies of Susanna Moore’s novel In the Cut; and Mica Hilson’s provocative look at depictions of straight men in gay porn.

(Incidentally, I haven’t had a chance to discuss how these issues get translated into projects on a grander scale, having unfortunately missed the panels devoted to national and global issues.)

This is just the work done by grad students: I haven’t mentioned the exciting work discussed by our keynote speaker, Melissa Littlefield of the University of Illinois. Her keynote lecture was titled, “Guilty Knowledge: Unlocking the Suspect Brain through fMRI and Brain Fingerprinting,” and it nicely mapped the trajectory of the entire conference that I’ve traced, from a critique of metholodologies of knowledge production to the narratives those methodologies produce, mediated in turn by a body thought to be readable by “experts” and “professionals.” Part of her larger project (a cultural history of lie detection), Littlefield sees the use of fMRI mapping and brain fingerprinting in a post-9/11 climate as yet another way of shifting an ideologically loaded understanding of “guilt” onto a biological entity (falsely) perceived to be beyond ideology. Scientists who develop this technology ignore that their methodology entails the construction of a “biological mind” and assumes the existence of a literal “nature of Truth” that can be decoded with the proper equipment. Nevertheless, such narratives constructed out of such seemingly academic assumptions have widespread ramifications on the politics of detainment and justice in this environment.

In some ways, her paper taps into what I feel is actually the dominant theme of the entire conference, in that her investigation into this scientific method reveals the desire to produce a kind of plausible deniability in how certain types of discursive and bodily knowledges are read and deployed on a larger social level. Plausible deniability seems to be a missing element in how we conceive of the power/knowledge nexus: not merely disavowal of particular knowledge, but the construction of an entire knowledge system to make such disavowal seem justified under public scrutiny. Certainly this is what Carlyle was constructing when he refused to reveal the open secret of history except to privileged audiences; certainly the kinds of situated knowledge that characterized the performative impersonations in much of the work here was trying to react against that plausible deniability. This conference was an invigorating attempt to allow us to peel away at our own disciplinary assumptions about how knowledge is deployed, and it hopefully bodes well for the future of these fields that we’re becoming ever more self-reflexive about how knowledge is kept secret even out in the open.

Prestige, Affect, and Forgotten Films: Another Manifesto for the Cinematic Experience

If you check out Salon.com's recent article "Oscar, Are You Listening?," you're bound to find some really interesting comments (my personal favorite is Farhad Manjoo's assertion, "The thing about [There Will Be Blood] is that every encounter ends up on the lonely side of loony; you're led to think these folks are merely eccentric, and then, across several pivotal scenes, it turns out, no, they're actually far, far further gone than you ever suspected.") But at the end of the article, IFC News host Matt Singer raises an interesting dilemma about our current cinematic taste culture by pointing out that Once and Music and Lyrics are "practically the same movie and they're both quite good," but that the latter "has already been forgotten, another Hollywood product destined for the discount bin of movie history."

It's a strange reversal of how we normally discuss value in the popular imagination: usually it's the big-budget Hollywood film that is destined to be remembered (at the very least through constant replaying on cable movie networks), while the small independent non-American film tends to get lost in the dustbin of history. But it also raises an interesting point about the ephemera of cinema that should always be obvious to us but is rarely discussed. We talk semi-frequently about "lost" films (it's a burgeoning field of scholarship, and I know someone in my department who does excellent work with them), but that category is suggestive of films that are absent but still somehow remembered, often fondly and with the vain hope of recovering it once again.

But Singer raises the specter of forgotten films, those films which we once experienced fondly but which are somehow lost affectively rather than materially. The film as an object still exists, but our culture as a whole has not generated the kind of affect for it (either loved or hated) that sustains its life in the public imagination. It's an incredibly common thing: hundreds of films are released every year, and, if I recall correctly, the average American movie-goer visits the cinematic temple around seven times a year. How many of the films that get made just drift away in this manner? Check out any random year in the IMDB to see how many of the hundreds of films released that year you actually saw. How many of them have you even heard of? How many of them could actually be raised in conversation and given even a spark of recognition?

Most interestingly, this article connects the ratio of forgotten-ness among films to the amount of prestige the picture was awarded (most critics would probably point to box office returns and DVD sales). Ted Pigeon also just raised a similar point about the manner in which great films are forgotten because Oscar discussion limits the field of inquiry. And they have a point: new film buffs (such as myself back in the day) frequently turn to past award winners/nominees and films appearing in any number of best-of lists as a guide of how to expand cinematic knowledge. Films with no award nominations and limited box office like Music and Lyrics don't make it on to these lists, and they are thus ignored ("written out" would be too active a phrase) when cinema history is recorded for the public. Realizations like this one remind us that canons are built upon a process of active exclusion, rather than inclusion: the attempt to bolster the best that has been thought in the world (to paraphrase Matthew Arnold) is really only the side effect of years of culturally whittling away our collective memories so that we only have a select few memories from which to choose. It is a process of effacing the multiplicity of media experience to bolster the singular aesthetic experiences of a singular few. [NOTE: In point of fact, I haven't seen Music and Lyrics either, and I hadn't intended to do so until reading this article. Now I'll have to add it to my Blockbuster queue right above Once, which was already on the list.]

It's a sad state of affairs, really. Time, effort, and money is dumped in to every feature made, and only the most disrespectful of film-goers would have the temerity to suggest otherwise. It's one reason why I try to find something--a character, a scene, a musical cue, a single image--that makes even the worst movies I see worthwhile. When confronted with the ephemera that is the cinematic experience, we have to realize that our personal affective responses are precisely what contributes to the manner in which prestige is accorded and thus to the manner in which films are remembered for posterity. The cinema needs some of that old time religion, in which people genuinely arrive in the theatre to experience a kind of communion with something outside themselves (a character, a scene, a musical cue, a single image, a critical understanding of the culture surrounding us, a self-awareness of why we would engage in the absurd activity of sitting in a darkened room with strangers only to watch lights flicker across a screen). These are the things that can restore our belief in the cinema, and allow us to question whether a belief in this kind of media is really even necessary. And it is this kind of communion with the cinematic experience that we must carry into our daily lives. This would be better for the films which are better off remembered for something and for the people who watch and care about them in some way.

Belief in the Everyday on the Blogosphere

People may have stumbled upon the 90DayJane blog in the past couple of weeks, in which an anonymous young woman claimed that she would commit suicide online in 90 days. The blog was something of a phenomenon, with people immediately jumping into the comments boards with many different kinds of reactions, from empathy to encouragement that she do the deed.

Unsurprisingly, the whole thing turned out to be untrue, and she’s now taken the site down. Reactions to the fact that the site was a lie have been interesting: Kim Voyner at Cinematical reports parenthetically of the “personal art project,” “that’s ‘hoax’ to you and me,” and the Defamer piece that initially broke the story is filed under “Webtards.”

More provocatively and productively, Voyner frames the entire incident as an example of the manner in which mediated versions of the “everyday” have penetrated into how we actually live in the everyday:

Jane certainly isn't the first person to document her troubles, real or imagined, on the internet. I remember several years ago, back when the word "blog" was not yet a buzzword, happening across the website of a young man purporting to be documenting his sucky life, which largely consisted of being poor and miserable (but not too poor to afford a computer and internet access, apparently) and popping his mean, bitchy grandfather's boils and carbuncles. Thankfully, he was not documenting that experience on video for the world to see. Point is, between Google Video, YouTube, and blogs that make it easier than ever for the average Joe -- or Jane -- to put videos out there, anyone can become a documentarian of his or her own life, however exciting, mundane, depressing or asinine it may be.

The claim here is the somewhat familiar one that the public forum constructed through the internet and convergence video technology have encouraged an unprecedented interest in the workings of everyday life. While popping boils was not on the menu for this particular site, the implication is that people still would have tuned in to see it. This thankfully isn’t the standard argument about the lack of privacy that this encourages, but instead poses the interesting suggestion that the glut of the everyday seems to eliminate its overall impact, that we are no longer able to use mediated narratives of the everyday as a legitimate investigation of its functions.

Henry Jenkins recently returned from the DYI Video Conference at USC in which precisely these kinds of issues about the mediation of the everyday were posed. Not surprisingly,

I find myself taking a different perspective, drawing on the old feminist claim that "the personal is political" and thus that many of the films about "everyday" matters might still speak within a larger political framework. A case in point might be a disturbing video shown during the youth media session (which was curated by young people from Open Youth Networks and Mindy Farber): a young man had been filming in a school cafeteria when a teacher demands that he stops; when he refuses, she leads him to the principal's office, berating him every step along the way, and then the two of them threaten to confiscate his camera, all the time unaware that it is continuing to film what they are saying. The young man distributed the video via YouTube, thus exposing what took place behind closed doors to greater scrutiny by a larger public. Read on one level, this is a trivial matter -- a misbehaving youth gets punished, rightly or wrongly. But on another level, the video speaks powerfully about what it is like to be a student subjected to manditory education and the strategies by which adult authorites seek to isolate the boy from any base of support he might have in the larger community of students and feels free to say and do what they want behind closed doors.

For Jenkins, even the most mundane documentations of the everyday can become an overtly political act, even if he’s still wary about the individualized focus of these forays. But it may be instructive to think of other media at the moment which offered new potential for a collective (re)experience of the everyday and which threaten constantly to disengage the individual from the collective, thereby taking the critique out of the documentation of the mundane. For instance, for decades now, critics have opined how movies had started out as a collective experience with genuine potential for social change and has increasingly become individualized and alienating (a process increased by the rise of home entertainment and digital formats for distribution). But if we stop our nostalgia for a moment and examine the medium itself (and, in turn, the internet as well), we can still find a productive power that is immanent in the kinds of networks it creates. In Cinema II: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze writes of the invention of new worlds through the documentation of the everyday: “[I]t is because the world is intolerable that it can no longer think a world or think itself. The intolerable is no longer a serious injustice, but the permanent state of a daily banality. Man is not himself a world other than the one in which he experiences the intolerable and feels himself trapped” (170). In this manner, for Deleuze (and this is implied in Jenkins as well), the purpose of art is to construct an idea of “the people” in which we can believe:

Art, and especially cinematographic art, must take part in this task: not that of addressing a people, which is presupposed already there, but of contributing to the invention of a people. The moment of the master, or the colonizer, proclaims ‘There have never been people here’, the missing people are a becoming, they invent themselves, in shanty towns and camps, or in ghettos, in new conditions of struggle to which a necessarily political art must contribute. (217)

It is the purpose of all art, of all media, whether film or the internet or the new digital convergence of the two, to play not toward a preconceived understanding of the masses, but to invent an idea of how people should live in the world. It’s idealistic as hell, an ardent plea for a genuinely productive power that can have the power to create new networks of people in which to live and die together.

At least superficially, Jane claims that the goal of her blog was to create this kind of network, to create a “people” in which her death would leave a void. In her final farewell (for the blog, not her life), she writes,

I thought this mirror might reflect the isolation everyday people feel and the lack of true human connection on the internet.

It is my feeling that the internet is the best and worst example of human interaction. This was painfully proven to me by reading every comment and every email. I believe I owed that to everyone. I know we all saw the dark side of the reactions in the blog comments. There was so much hate, immaturity and apathy. But, I truly wish everyone could see the beauty and honesty in the emails; many people feel like Jane (me). People have been more real and heartfelt than I thought was possible. I owe them a debt of gratitude for showing me the difference between people's reactions and their true feelings. I understand.

She frames the site as a kind of artistic investigation of the effects of a media formation’s impact on how people relate to one another, on how they’re “networked,” if we’re using the language of the medium itself. But the results of her own “art project” are kind of unsurprising: people can be hateful, people can be helpful. This is really where I feel that she falls short and where the label “webtard” may be fitting: it fails to dig deeper beyond the purely superficial. She scratches our collective skin but refuses to dig her nails under it, to penetrate the everyday and to produce the everyday as a kind of allegory in the manner that Deleuze envisions: Jane’s journey is cut short artificially once it gets too “real” and, rather than allowing the blog to persist as a forum through which a “people” could genuinely emerge, the forum is closed down with a kind of smug self-satisfaction that borders on an exploitation of those who genuinely either believe in the power of art to produce or in the tragic deaths that can be a real result of our hyper-mediated age.

To close this media sermon, I’ll let Deleuze have the last word, both because (unlike Jane) he saw a real glimmer of hope in how we interact with media art and because, like so many people, he was also so overwhelmed with his pain in the world (from lung cancer) that he actually took his own life. He wrote:

Belief is no longer addressed to a different or transformed world. Man is in the world as if in a pure optical and sound situation. The reaction of which man has been dispossessed can be replaced only by belief. Only belief in the world can reconnect man to what he sees and hears. The cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only link. . . . Restoring our belief in the world—this is the power of modern cinema (when it stops being bad). . . . . Because the point is to discover and restore belief in the world, before or beyond words . . . . It is only, it is simply believing in the body. It is giving discourse to the body, and, for this purpose, reaching the body before discourses, before words, before things are named: the ‘first name’, and even before the first name. (171-2)

The necessary question to pose here is, when we’re mired in the insincere, sensationalistic, exploitative world of “artists” like 90DayJane, in our current transition into a new kind of convergence technology, what kind of a belief do we have the ability to produce? What kind of people will we create to populate our brave new world? What kinds of bodies will we construct, and what names will we eventually give them?

Let us hope that they are not given the name "webtard".

Boyl-ing It All Down: A Manifesto on the Purpose of Film (and other awful puns)

I've written before about some problems in Danny Boyle's films. But I finally got around to seeing Sunshine the other day, and it's becoming increasingly clear that his films aren't reductive to a fault out of his love for striking images that might seem to prevent any real point. After all, the list of filmmakers who compose genuinely moving images (going back to the original spirit that seemed to haunt the "movies") while loading them with genuinely disturbing social or political or philosophical or spiritual content is too enormous to list here (although, it could possibly be the subject of another post in the future).

No, at this point I have to admit that Boyle's endearingly stupid films are really the symptom of a genuinely consistent philosophy of film. One that he seems to genuinely believe in whole-heartedly. One which, as should by now be obvious, leaves me with serious reservations.

In 28 days later... Boyle crafted a patchwork film out of genre fare. Nearly every element from the most iconic zombie films were there. Even the plot itself, while re-tooling the basic premise by turning the "living dead" into the "infected," borrowed the first act from The Omega Man and the final two from Day of the Dead. One could call the film an "experiment" in digital filmmaking, but the entire piece was often breathtakingly and terrifyingly beautiful, borrowing the most iconic images from those previously iconic films and refreshing them with a pixelized, high-contrast sheen. Such a gloss seemed to permeate the entire narrative as well, as the film rolled along through the greatest hits of 1970s and 80s zombie cinema to give something like a striking Power Point presentation of the different kinds of violence humans can inflict on one another.

"Gloss" turns out to be the perfect word to describe the film, both in cinematic and narrative terms. "Gloss" not only in the sense of the sleekness of its chilly photography, but also in the sense that the film ultimately feels like a paraphrase of those previous films that ultimately seems to misinterpret the social point that they were attempting in the first place. After all, what impact can the image of a lone survivor of disaster wandering through the lonely streets of an empty metropolis have when it's divorced from the context in which that image first emerged, that is, the insanely reactionary, gun-toting Messianic image of Charlton Heston navigating the malaise of a society torn between "quiet Americans" like Heston and the radicals sick of Vietnam? And how is a viewer to understand the escape of a chained-up zombie who leads a violent revolt against a military compound when divorced from the image of Bub leading a very different group of "quiet Americans" in a violent protest against Reagan's militarism?

These aren't reinventions of those moments, replacing the politics of previously-loaded images with differently-loaded images. In the interviews with him that I've read, he seems to be fairly clear on the fact that the film isn't meant to be a palimpsestic adaptation of those sources: it is supposed to be an attempt to evacuate those sources of political valences that he may have felt were too specific on a particular moment. Those two moments, after all, have conflicting political projects in their original manifestations, but they are used here for the same political message. It was a deliberate casting away from the particular in favor of what he perceives as the "universal", a kind of idealistic humanism which is most concerned with what kinds of good and bad the individual is capable of performing. A philosophy of man on screen which forces "man" to confront "his" basest nature and conquer it by turning the violence of the individual against itself.

And so we now have Sunshine, which gives us virtually an identical message (Alex Garland scripted both, and I suspect that if I were to revisit The Beach I would find exactly the same message posed in exactly the same universalizing terms). And this time Boyle cannibalizes some of the greatest sci-fi films of all time, evacuating each and every one of them of their larger philosophical and socio-political implications in favor of a message that "Boyles" down to: "Some people have the capacity to kill humanity, while others have the strength to save it." Present are unimaginatively gorgeous and thrilling formal renderings of classic sci-fi images: a circular space station creating an eclipse with the sun; a group of astronauts floating through the vacuum of space in an attempt to re-enter a wounded ship; and a killer obscured by the properties of space vowing to bring an end to all life. Gone, however, are Solaris's post-WWII ruminations on how our collective memories become a material reality that we sometimes have to kill; 2001's obsessive fear of our own ingenuity turning against us; and even Alien's horror at how the biological imperative to kill could be exploited by global corporations.

The problem is not that the films were released outside of the "original" contexts of those films. The problem is that Boyle's aesthetics is precisely an "aesthetics" in the late-19th-century connotations of that term: a terrifying "sublime" under which any material social concerns at all are sublimated. The films have a political thesis, but that thesis is in a very real sense a metaphor with no referent, nothing grounding the loaded images in the very loaded contexts of how these concerns about violence operate today. This philosophy about the function of film has the same problems of which cultural critics of all kinds (popular and academic) are often accused: a disengagement with the real world in favor of masturbatory pursuits.

Personally, I find such vain pursuits at getting to the core of "humanity" counter-productive, misguided, and downright insulting when critics attempt it, and I find it no less of a problem when such pursuits fall under the purview of "art." Film is meant to engage us on a social level somehow, not on a personal level (no one really started talking about the "individual" experience of film until the 1960s or 70s, when psychoanalysis, with its own attempts to universalize the audience perversely by looking at individual film experience, took its hold in film criticism and hasn't let go. We can see this kind of criticism persist all the time popularly, most often with the "thumbs up" mentality that seems to dictate how we approach media nowadays). Some of the most sophisticated and explosive theory about film has been about its relationship to a collective audience, and I think that this is where film should still aim, even in the age of Netflix and iTunes. Film is meant to engage us collectively on an affective level, to drive us into some kind of action, even if it is simply to see something in a literally different way. The Boyle style of filmmaking shows us only things that we have already seen and says only things that have no real value to how we live in this very material world. He Boyles it down to essentials that are no longer essential for our survival, and I'm a little offended by it....

The Politics of "Guilty" Pleasures

On the first day of class yesterday, I asked my students as an icebreaker (as I've been doing for years) what their guilty pleasures were: movies, songs, bands, television shows, any mediated object they are embarassed to admit that they love. Sad to say, but this is really the first time in which I've actually contemplated the implications of precisely what a "guilty pleasure" actually is.

Pleasure and affect are hot topics right now in media theory after a long period in which criticism misguidedly (but understandably in terms of the political climate) attempted to construct a politics of media that is divorced from questions of pleasure and affect. But the social "guilt" we commonly associate with our fondest pleasures doesn't, to my knowledge, get investigated all that often (the MLA online database only notes 17 entries which use the term, and they all seem to do so uncritically--this is, however, a very cursory search). But this seems to be a defining aspect of our taste culture in general and how we define "pleasure" through questions of quality and social expectations. "Guilt" necessarily implies a kind of law that is imposed on pleasure from the outside of our discourse about pleasure itself: these laws are determined to a large extent by popular criticism of these media artifacts and by the kinds of expectations that we as a culture impose for certain kinds of objects and certain kinds of audiences. The guilty pleasure seems to be something of a missing link in that all-too-present question of how our critical discourse and vocabulary (popular and academic) in part define and to an even larger extent reinforce what and how people enjoy the things that they do. (It is especially disconcerting that the question has not really arisen that forcefully in fan studies, in which the types of objects audience choose to invest in affectively are under scrutiny.)

The examples provided by my students seem instructive here (and, incidentally, this is just a reminder that we should always be ready to learn from our students). Some of the examples and the responses provoked by the rest of the class were explicit references to questions of the quality of the object (perceived trash television like A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, for instance, or another student's love for the film Elizabethtown, a movie he noted was hated by critics), while others clearly were directed to questions of their investment as the "right" type of audience, based on age ("Disney movies" as a category came up in both classes), maturity (the Spice Girls and late '90s boy bands came up in both classes), gender (a male in each class cited favorite movie The Notebook, while another cited Ever After), and race (some white students emphasized this aspect when they referred to "thug" music or "hardcore gangster rap"--an especially odd "guilty" pleasure since white suburban kids are statistically the most likely consumers of hip-hop culture). In some ways, the instances of the latter pleasure are a kind of performed drag, in which people who totally own their own pleasure performatively disavow how they impersonate the "proper" audience for these objects. But the drag in still something of a defensive posture to take against social forces (including my own authority as instructor) which label their pleasures as "bad."

We see this happen in reverse all the time, as well. In my own studies of Shakespearean fandom, for instance, I see something like the exact opposite of what we find in the narratives these students have constructed around their guilty pleasures. The opposite of "guilty," but not exactly synonymous with "proper" either. Many self-professed Shakespeare fans, for instance, are invoking an object that could not be more acceptable as an object for their pleasure. And yet, they continually announce themselves as alienated from their peers (a common thread being, "I thought I was the only one who got it"), noting the effects of their affect in a manner similar to those who discuss guilty pleasures. Shakespeare is an acceptable object, but it is precisely their performance of themselves that makes it seem as though they are taking pleasure in something that is outside the norm. While those who invoke their guilty pleasures are implicitly appealing to the alienating effects of a law governed by a variety of social circumstances, those who are Shakespeare fans seem to be performing the law themselves and, in doing so, constructing it altogether. In this sense, the kind of "class drag" these Shakespeare fans perform through is in some sense a defensive pose against the perceived lack of social/cultural laws governing the quality of Shakespeare as an object. In any case, it's all very strange and needs a great deal of further elaboration.

Best Films of 2007 #5: The Bourne Ultimatum

Difficult to contemplate how good Paul Greengrass's spy movie is until you compare it to another heavily politicized action movie released this year, Peter Berg's The Kingdom. A movie that exploits children for cheap identification with characters killed in the opening terrorist sequence, this is the kind of rancorous stuff that has so many people annoyed with the way Hollywood attempts to comment on current affairs. The film asks us to be annoyed on behalf of our American heroes for an hour and a half as their illegal micro-invasion of Saudi Arabia is justifiably caught up in red tape, then promptly begs us to cheer along as they kill every Arab in sight with the slight evidence they were able to uncover from what Jamie Foxx brazenly and incorrectly identifies as the worst crime in the country's history (why, because so many Americans were killed in this instance?!). Then it expects us to think it's subversive since it pays two minutes of lip service at the end to the parallel desire to kill the "bad" guys held by Americans and Saudis. Problem is, we've been led for two hours to believe that we're simply right for wanting to kill those bad guys! I don't object on principle (like some critics do) to turning our current world climate into an action movie: I object to turning it into this action movie.

The Bourne Ultimatum, on the other hand, has a message that makes sense, and, more to the point, it hits the pulse of the current world climate in a way that I appreciate, personally. Yes, it's partisan politics thrown into the realm of cinema, but who are we fooling here by trying to suggest that they aren't the same anyway? Greengrass gives us some of the very best action scenes of the year, and it uses them to create an allegory about how we need to remember how to be good as a nation after a voluntary fall and an amnesiac plunge into a world in which the rules no longer make sense. In other words, it exploits our affect as any action film does, but it does so for the purpose of questioning how our desire for "action" translates into international suffering. This renunciation of the action film was the trend in general for the best action movies of the year (see also Live Free or Die Hard, Shoot 'em Up, Exiled, 3:10 to Yuma, and even, in its glorious parody of the action heroes who don't actually kill anyone, Hot Fuzz).

Best Films of 2007 #6: No Country for Old Men

This is probably the most discussed film of the year. I'm still not sure where I fall on this film or how I read it exactly, but this is perhaps the point. The film itself is a detached series of actions with no real commentary offered by the camera as to how we should sympathize with these alien creatures. And yet the film so frequently shows its characters in ways with which we automatically, against our better judgments, seem to empathize: it all seems like a curious commentary on how we generally filter out the actions we see in the world and randomly decide to invest affectively in certain people. Because of this curious commentary on how we see and invest in the world around us, the Coen brothers have offered up the most experientially bleak cinematic experience of the year. I'm not sure that makes it the best.

All the discussion about the film, making this weirdness so comprehensible, sometimes makes it difficult for me to determine whether the film is actually as great as everyone seems to assert or whether it is simply important in the context of the function of film criticism. The film is undoubtedly important, especially in how critics have used it to tease out ideas about what film in general is supposed to do, a goal so clearly apparent in writing these "best of" lists in the first place.

In this sense, I'm not sure that I can add anything to the current discourse that's out there right now, but No Country for Old Men is the rare and important film that causes a public debate as to what film is supposed to accomplish on a personal and social level. It's an essential film for that reason, whether all of the discourse results from the aesthetics of the film or from the vagaries of the critical establishment.

For a much better and more eloquent idea of what I feel like I'm articulating unclearly here, check out Jim Emerson's blog, in which he catalogues many critics' opinions of what the film is doing, his own response to Jonathan Rosenbaum's critique that the film is trying to be too "ideological." Emerson also participated recently in a phone conversation with other critics that has been turned into a podcast. And, really, this is only the tip of the critical iceberg. It's all pretty overwhelming, really, since this doesn't happen too often.

"Americanization" and the Function of Critical Vocabulary

I got into a fairly heated debate with my brother earlier about the term "Americanization" when we were talking about national cuisines. During the conversation, I had casually mentioned that I hated the term (a passion which is, I suppose, never really that casual), and I was inexplicably unable to defend my reasons for this. Part of the reason, it turns out, is that I often have my own difficulties justifying the need for a more complicated critical discourse than the ones which are already popularly in place: in other words, the difficulty was defending the role of a cultural critic (particularly an academic one), something which I was apparently unprepared to do in regular conversation.

After thinking about it more, I can say that the term "Americanization" does (at least) three things that are potentially damaging to the ways in which individuals identify themselves in relation to other cultures and their own: it tries to stabilize two particular identities while suggesting a monolithic appropriation of one of them.

An example to bring this into significantly less abstract terms: I study Shakespeare and the uses of his works in contemporary American youth culture. It would only be too easy for me to suggest a model in which "Americanization" would be a key term (to say, for instance, that Baz Luhrman's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet is an Americanized version of the play). But to suggest that youth culture is Americanizing Shakespeare would be misleading in three ways:

1) It suggests that there is a universal "American" identity which simply doesn't exist,
2) It suggests that there is a stable idea of what "Shakespeare" is that can be Americanized, and most insidiously,
3) It suggests that this stable American identity entirely co-opts or appropriates this stable Shakespearean identity fully, that there is no Shakespeare left in American youth culture that is not Americanized.

All three propositions are incorrect. All three can have dangerous consequences. When I stare blankly and stupidly at my brother's suggestion that the average person doesn't need a more complicated understanding of this process, I'm really staring at my own inability to bridge that seemingly unbridgable chasm that exists between the academy and what he calls the "average Joe" in the popular sensibility.

"The critical categories that we have work," he says. "They describe a cultural process in a way that is important and which does reveal something about the way that other cultures are economically exploited by the U.S." Brief pause. "And try talking about how this process is more complicated to jihadists who have a genuine reason to hate America as a whole because of this process of Americanization!"

But such an example merely demonstrates how deadly such a binary logic can be: it is precisely a response this slippage between "Americanization" as a critical discourse and the perception of "Americanization" as a social process that results in such a reductive, violent attack on a national culture. My brother is correct in asserting that the distribution of a critical vocabulary doesn't materially affect our social relations: but we can certainly feel the material, often-violent reverberations when that critical vocabulary is misapplied in pragmatic situations, reducing enormously complicated histories into either/or propositions.

We constantly see how American pundits' discussions can turn just as ugly when they discuss their perceptions of how other cultures are appropriating American culture: such reductive assumptions about how cultures relate to one another are at the heart of our worst public debates about issues such as immigration laws and the "need" to officially set English as the national language. It's all reactionary bullshit that trades on the worst assumptions that any cultural hybridity poisons the "authenticity" of our culture. (Not incidentally, "authenticity" is another term that needs to be discarded from public discussion altogether.)

Innumerable academic cultural critics have posed alternative ways of understanding how cultures interact that pushes us beyond the paradigm of cultural imperialism or Americanization (Stuart Hall, Lawrence Grossberg, Arjun Appadurai, Hardt and Negri, and Iwabuchi all come immediately to mind, not to mention the many others I can't think of off the top of my head), but I think that the Shakespearean scholar Bryan Reynolds offers an interesting, immediately recognizable model for how these interactions can occur. Reynolds suggests that these "transversal encounters" (his jargony term to denote hybridity) are similar in structure to how empathy works on an interpersonal level. If I empathize with someone, I obviously do not fully become or appropriate the other person's emotions or identity as I do so. But I am also not fully myself, either. I am something different, and, if the affect is strong enough, I am forever changed. So it happens in empathy, so it goes in inter-cultural relations: nothing is ever fully appropriated so much as it becomes a hyrbrid that somehow manages to change both cultures. Sometimes these changes happen for the worse (the kinds of economic exploitation traditionally associated with Americanization, for instance), but they often transform the public sphere in valuable ways that allow individuals to negotiate how they relate with others (with Google's unforgivable deal with China, we see the genuine fear that international means of information distribution can cause as it relates to the political public sphere). More consciousness of these complexities--complexities that the "average Joe" already understands so intuitively in inner emotional life--within our public critical discourses is necessary for developing a more peaceful interaction between cultures in an increasingly complicated globalized setting. I'm not necessarily suggesting that a higher public profile for cultural critics is the answer, but it's certainly one avenue of routing our cultural pedagogy.

10 Best Films of 2007: Overview

It's that time of year, when critics professional and amateur (or, as in this case, professional critics of a different stripe) chime in with passionate pleas for an "objective" look at the very best that cinema had to offer in the past year. Beyond a kind of preview of the awards season chaos to ensue shortly (if they aren't challenged by the writer's strike, that is), this is a strange effort to create a canon based on a quality that ultimately gets tallied and statistically weighed to give added weight to what are fundamentally subjective portraits of what represents a film of "quality." Just as many critics weigh in with half-hearted critiques of the ideology behind these lists each year as critics who weigh in with half-hearted attempts to justify that ideology on its own terms. Others, like Ted Pigeon, will comment on the social value that this kind of public forum on the nature of taste holds for us, and I tend to agree. Top ten lists aren't merely an effort at canonizing the "great films" of any given year: they are an effort to examine precisely those values that we label as canonical in any given year, and this is a politics of contemporary concerns that is too important to wave off in an ill-fated attempt to subvert the authority of the critical establishment.

Thus, in that spirit, I've cooked up a list in twelve volumes that will hopefully speak to those conerns that go into determining what we value and what we devalue this year. To start it off, I've provided a brief overview of those concerns below, an analysis of what critics at one time called the zeitgeist of our cinema before the term became passe for its univeralizing tendencies. I can only say that this analysis is far from comprehensive: these are just some trends that I've noticed in the movies I admired personally this year. The next eleven volumes will count down will count down what I felt were the most important and personally affecting movies this year, starting with a short list of great movies that don't fall within the traditional ten, and then moving up to the "best." In each individual review, I'll try to point out where I think the film fits (or doesn't fit) into the general political mood that cinema established this past year, hopefully giving the list the kind of complexity and attention to difference that tends to characterize some of the more interesting lists out there. So, without further ado:

The best (American, mostly--due more to my own viewing habits than to the films themselves) movies of 2007 were generally characterized by the kind of quiet, resigned melancholy that also characterized some of the best American cinema of the 1970s. Beyond a similarity in tone, the films from that decade have come back to us as some kind of cinematic return of the repressed: how else to explain why Andrew Dominik would mimic Once Upon a Time in the West, why Billy Ray and David Fincher would riff on All the President’s Men, Ben Affleck Chinatown, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo Dawn of the Dead, James Mangold The Wild Bunch, Paul Greengrass Three Days of the Condor, and even, in Judd Apatow’s aesthetic trade-off of drug-addled slackerism for yuppified neurosis, Annie Hall. That many of the actors in those classics have moved on to crap like Lions for Lambs, Scoop, and The Bucket List (while the rest are, sadly, dead) only shows how irrevocably lost that cinematic past is in today’s world even as we try to mine its paradoxically cynical hope once again.

The parallel with '70s cinema makes sense, though, when one considers how eerily familiar and yet completely alien are the socio-political climates in which the movies of today and those of yesteryear arose. Trapped in an unpopular war which has spawned protests at home and abroad and stuck with an unpopular president unwilling to lead us to some, any resolution, we’re once again struggling to find some form of comfort or answer to our problems, one that just doesn’t seem to be available to us through the standard political means. Filmmakers from the left have started to take notice, producing films like Rendition which at least appear so misguidedly reductive and self-satisfied that they only serve to remind everyone why the new New Left is failing to strike a popular chord in middle America today. In this context, with all of this public angst bubbling to a frustrated and disillusioned surface, it’s no surprise that some of the biggest popcorn entertainments of the year have either parodied the kinds of heroes we wish we could still appeal to in earnest (Ratatouille, Hot Fuzz, Stardust’s deliberate queering of heroism, Beowulf’s unintentional version of the same) or have posed some of the toughest ethical quandaries on film in recent memory (the latest Die Hard film, the latest Bourne movie, the latest Harry Potter, the latest zombie film, etc.). Perhaps this is also because they often resurrect characters or tropes born of different cinematic environments and place them in today’s screwed up world. And perhaps not coincidentally, it’s the task of the one non-English film on this list to literalize all of the thorny metaphors that articulate issues of power and control (that politics of the personal) to the dreamscape of the cinema, vividly imagining how the constant terrorist onslaught on our collective imaginary results in a very tangible hole at the center of our political life.

In this sense, astute observers may remember 2007’s cinema as a kind of hopeful postmortem of our murdered culture (notice how all of the top six films are actually about the failed investigations of some kind of crime). Filmmakers have echoed their own political situation and their own anxiety about the place of filmmaking in today’s world (with the ever-increasing rise of convergence technologies, the sudden awareness that the home market really determines the kinds of films that are made, and the ubiquity of the kind of pastiche-beyond-irony which characterizes the YouTube generation) both by going back to the well of great American cinema of the past and by turning their heroes into characters who are trapped by the past (not necessarily their own, either) and unable or unwilling to move into the kind of future that is forming before their eyes. The situation for these characters seems to be getting played out endlessly in our political discourse as well, in a coming election year whose only promise seems to be that we’re inevitably going to blow our chance for a fresh start once again. Our heroes this year (in politics as well as in characters like Ed Tom Bell in No Country, Patrick Kenzie in Gone Baby Gone, Robert Graysmith in Zodiac), in other words, are the latest version of what Nixon had termed “the silent majority,” mad as hell about the world but not mad enough not to take it anymore. Perhaps this is because, while the political scenarios abroad are so familiar, the wars taking place back home are no longer against poverty and institutionalized racism, but are, apparently, against abortion rights, gay marriage, and health care reform. The cultural landscape is vastly different, and, as a result, even some of our youngest heroes seem haggard and world-weary. At least we have Harry Potter (and, with any luck, at least a small percentage of his millions of young readers worldwide) growing into a genuine man of action.