Picturing the Hollywood Past(iche)

You may have seen the recent spread in Vanity Fair in which current Hollywood stars pose in iconic moments from Hitchcock films. You may also have seen Lindsay Lohan's recent spread in New York Magazine, in which photographer Bert Stone replicates the even-more-iconic final photo shoot he had with Marilyn Monroe before he death.

It seems no coincidence to me that two such photo shoots would be released within a week of each other, and I think it's somehow emblematic of a particular vision of the Hollywood past that we are trying to refract through a current Hollywood lens. One could call it a kind of palimpsest, in which a more recent representation overcodes and denies the impact of an "original" (the term is originally a reference to artists who would paint over their older works with newer ones). And, it would be tempting also to suggest that such re-presentations of these images merely reinforce the superiority of the "original" images. Nevertheless, I feel that both interpretations of this kind of re-shoot would miss out on the kind of tension that exists between the two existing representations, as each vie for a prized place in the individual viewer's memory of that image. It would be absurd to suggest that any remake could completely remove the effects of an original, and I've always found the idea of automatically privileging an "original" version of any media artifact to be somewhat silly. As Linda Hutcheon has argued in A Theory of Adaptation, there is a significantly more complicated interaction here between adaptations and the works that are being adapted. That the images being adapted have the status of genuine Hollywood iconography (a status that seems destined to be conferred upon these re-visions as well, at the very least through association with the originals) complicates even more how viewers actually look at the images and how it may change our perceptions of the Hollywood past it literally re-presents for us.

Take the Hitchcock photos, for instance. The Vanity Fair photos all strive for the polish and sheen of a classic Hollywood film, most likely using various camera filters and digital processes to replicate the claustrophobic chiaroscuro and the eye-popping vastness of Hitchcock's black-and-white and Technicolor compositions, respectively. Each image painstakingly seems to recreate the kind of gloss one would associate with the slick self-promotion of an old movie press kit. Such a recreation of the original context of the use of these images as stills from the films also competes with residual memories of how we've seen such stills circulated on the internet for other purposes. And yet, here they are now, appearing as high art in one of the most elitist American magazines available today.

More importantly, the choice of actors to "stand in" for the original actors presents an interesting dynamic of how we see the images. All of the images necessarily present themselves as iconic, but in terms of the actors "playing" each role, our reaction depends most dramatically upon whether we're familiar with the images from their original cinematic contexts. In this sense, the most "successful" photos (if we're judging their success in terms of whether the actors in these re-shoots completely "own" these roles) are probably those images from films that many of the magazine's readers likely haven't seen. In terms of the sheer images alone (divorced from the original parts they're supposed to play), I would completely buy Naomi Watts as Marnie had I not seen the film; likewise Charlize Theron in her role as the would-be murder victim in Dial M for Murder or the "heroic" crew of the Lifeboat (having seen the films, however, these poses obviously compete sometimes ironically with how I understand the overall films themselves). However, from the discussion I've seen on message boards, no one seems to buy Seth Rogan as a stand-in for Cary Grant, and it's almost impossible not to see Ironman when Robert Downey, Jr. stands in for the same in To Catch a Thief.

What's really fascinating about all of these examples is how obsessively these actors attempt to strike the pose that most easily fits into our preconceptions of what old Hollywood looked like. Oftentimes, the specific content/context of the film is completely eschewed in favor of a pose which represents not a character, but nostalgia itself. The actors seem to be posing as a simulacrum of fond memories of a master at work, and thus, rather than using the opportunity to "act" in roles that they had previously had no opportunity to play, the actors are really engaging in a different kind of make-believe, a game of "dress-up." This is an opportunity for Scarlet Johansson to become Grace Kelly: she's not believable here as a character entranced by the possible devious games her beau has ensnared her in, but she looks awfully pretty, like a soon-to-be princess dignitary. As someone has kindly pointed out in conversation with me, this is precisely why we don't buy Seth Rogan: there is no pretense that he could possibly be Cary Grant, which is precisely what is wrong with image to so many people. It's a gross violation of the audience's expectations, and it thus fails to provide the affect of nostalgia so necessary in this particular kind of photo shoot.

Such a dynamic is even more vexed in the Lohan/Monroe pictorial. As reported by Cinematical, representatives at New York Magazine discuss the value of the original iconic Monroe photos: "But the pictures are also remarkable for the raw truths they seem to reveal. In them, we see an actress whose comedic talents were overshadowed by her sex appeal, a woman who is cannily aware of her pinup status, yet is also beginning to show her 36 years. In many shots, she is obviously drunk. This was an unhappy time for Monroe." The magazine deliberately attempts to foreground the context of the original shoot in order to shut down the possibilities of a nostalgia for a Hollywood past: these photos represent in some ways the manner in which Hollywood could destroy the very icons they prop up in the first place. And, it seems, such an interpretation of classic photos attached to such a troubled contemporary actress seems to imply not a nostalgia for values that have disappeared, but rather a cautionary tale regarding the destructive values that still seem to prevail even today. Such a replication this time around doesn't empty out the content of the original photos into a simulacrum by foregrounding a break with the past, but rather enhances them to advance a particularly vicious argument about the continuities with the past, that every re-presentation is still very much present as an indicator of larger cultural forces that constantly batter at us.

***UPDATE***: Just to add more to the pot, Jessica Alba did a shoot for Latina Magazine, in which she replicates famous shots from horror movies (she even takes on Psycho, as Marion Cotillard had already done (better), and The Birds, as Jodie Foster had already done (counter-intuitively) in the Vanity Fair shoots). The Alba shoot is interesting because she's such a notoriously bad actress and because it thus emphasizes the kind of nostalgic posturing going on here.

Even weirder, Annie Leibovitz recently shot some famous stills from animated Disney films with famous actors. This one adds a whole new dimension in terms of the relationship between animation and live film: the actors aren't cartoons, but they try their best. I also wonder if it's a veiled commentary on the manner in which animated projects in the past decade or so have required major celebrity talent to succeed, something that you don't really see in the older Disney films as much.

Groundhog Day Revisited, Yet Again

It's the winter holiday season, so, naturally, I turned to Groundhog Day. There was the usual déjà vu in the realization that this is one of the very best romantic comedies ever, but the machinery of those generic expectations in the viewing experience work so well that I had never noticed until now how very odd the romance actually is.

About a third of the way through the film, when Phil (Bill Murray) says to Rita (Andie MacDowell) that what he "really want[s] is someone like you," I was struck this time how out of the blue the statement actually felt. I'm apparently not the only one: Bill Chambers notes how Phil's enactment of his godhood "entails wooing Rita (mostly because Andie MacDowell is second-billed)." There's a slight look of bemusement when Phil first sets eyes on her playing with her disappearing torso in front of the weatherman's blue screen, but it certainly couldn't be mistaken for a gaze of desire of any kind. And Phil makes the requisite dirty jokes to her early on about how much she was missing by sleeping alone, but we get the feeling that this is just Phil being Phil (easily mistaken for Bill Murray being Bill Murray). No sense of real need for her at all ... until he randomly decides in the middle of a diner that she is what he really wants out of life.

But the randomness of the decision is precisely what makes it so important: at a narrative level, the film easily would have ground to a dead halt at exactly that moment unless he had made the decision that would bring his day--and thus the film--to its climax. Only by making the absurd decision to latch onto something and to apply such meaning to it could he actually work toward forging (both in the sense of "creating" and in the sense of "faking") a narrative of himself that he could actually work with into the future. The manner in which he had previously identified himself had brought him nowhere in life, and the film's great conceit is that it literalizes this narrative dead end by forcing him to relive the moment in which he derailed over and over again. The movie is charged through with religious contemplation: sure, his suggestion that he's a god is played for laughs, but after a half an hour of existential questioning over the nature of our actions when they have no social consequences and after a morbidly hilarious montage of suicide attempts, the statement seems to take on a little more gravitas. In this context, it wouldn't be entirely out of place to suggest that the random choice to love Rita until the day he dies is the rom-com equivalent of Pascal's wager: it was the moment in which he earnestly decided to believe his own bullshit, and he eventually awoke (this kind of religious "awakening" is especially significant after the enormous amount of effort directed toward achieving that belief) to find that it was empirically true.

But beyond the abstract metaphysics of the film's philosophy, the decision works even more effectively as a kind of pragmatic meta-cinema. A scene can be shot any number of ways, a film can be edited any number of ways, a narrative can turn any number of ways unless choices are made to direct the film toward ends prescribed by the expectations viewers hold about the film's genre. Groundhog Day works both as an example of how this generic effect can work successfully and as a critical examination of its inner workings during film production. The entire premise seems to rely on the fact that Phil is the only person "on set" who actually realizes that he's in a film, that his actions can reverberate differently depending upon how he performs himself to his fellow actors. In this context, Phil is given multiple "takes" and we see Phil the method actor searching for his motivation (the weird choice to believe that he loves someone as bland as Rita) and researching the role in order to perform it in a way that meets everyone's expectations. This is a surprisingly slow process for him: Phil is kind of a dunce as an actor, first assuming that he's in a horror film, then in a raucous sex comedy (his seduction of Nancy and his John Belushi imitation as he eats a table full of cakes), then in an Ingmar Bergman film (his angsty suicides), then in a film of social awareness (his attempts to save the old homeless man). Only then does he finally settle on the romantic comedy genre, and it's still quite a feat to pull off the performance properly.

But even as Phil navigates his own attempt to revise his character's narrative according to his viewers' expectations, the film itself does something radical by allowing us to see this actually happen. After all, strip away the other elements and leave only the bits that genuinely fit into this genre, and you're left with only his final experience of Groundhog Day, which would be completely dull if not for the narrative chaos--that difference in the constant repetitions--that had ensued before it. In its subtle reveal of how film production works when it plays to audience expectations, the final version of Groundhog Day that Phil experiences becomes for us the version of Groundhog Day that could have ended up on the DVD I was watching. In other words, the film is highly critical of the ways that films give audiences what they think they want out of a genre film. This film reaches out for a higher purpose: to make the audience believe in those expectations as limits within which to improvise something more affirmative. And this is the Groundhog Day that really makes me believe in the kind of power that film has on a larger scale.