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BOOK REVIEW: American Cinema in the Eighties Roger Simon First appearing in 1980, Robert Phillip Kolker’s A Cinema of Loneliness (first edition) is a study of the films of five American directors: Arthur Penn, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese,and Robert Altman. Kolker’sanalyses attempt to show both the values and the limita- tions of some of the most interesting films of the seventies, films which he describes as being “made in isolation and, with few exceptions, about isolation.”! Published at the same time as several other books on some of the same filmmakers, these studies seem to be a summa- tion of American cinemaof the seventies. Albert LaValley, in his review of Kolker’s book, notes that they suggested “the urge even (to antedate} the closing of the seventies.”? Kolker’s book is, by far, the most incisive of all, employing close analysesof textsas wellas an autcurist approach, and encompassing problems and issues of ideol- ogy in its approach. Kolker has now sought to deal with and understand the American cinema of the eighties. by updating and expanding his book with a second edition. In his own words, his ambitions. are the following: to examine the brief modernist move- ment in commercial American cin- ema...; to investigate the ways in which cinematic images intersect with, be- come charged by, and represent the culture; and, at the same time, to inves- tigate the work of certain individual filmmakers who are at one time special intheirstyleand representative of larger cinematic movements. * Thus, this new edition is an attempt not only to historicize the cinema of the seventies, but also contemporary films and, in general, the cinema of the eighties. Reviewers of the firsteditionof A Cinemaof Loneliness were sensitive to the book's values and to its faults and since Kolker himself admits that with one major exception, “the structure of the original book remains the same” (second edition, pg. xiii), I urge readers to look into reviews of the first edition for excellent analyses of Kolker's writing (much of which remains the same in the second edition). What I would like to do in these pages is to specifically address some of the ways in which Kolker has under- stood the American cinema of the eighties and the problems which this understanding entails, The best place to begin is with the biggest change in the second edition. Here Kolker has dropped his chapter on Coppola and instead substituted one on the films of Steven Spielberg. His reasoning for the omission of the former is, that Coppola . + has, il seems to me, proven a much less important filmmaker over the course of time. His cinematic imagina- tion, along with his attempts to remain independent, to operate his own studio, produce or distribute other people's films, has failed. In retrospect, his films seem not to bear the amount of analysis first given them, and certainly the work he has produced since the second God- father. . . has lacked the insight and careful attention to form that marked the earlier material. (second edition, pg. xii) Now, mostcritics would certainly agree that Coppola's career has gone into decline over the last several years, but with the exception of Stanley Kubrick, virtually all of the filmmakers Kolker discusses in his first edition have had problems in their artistic careers in recent times. Yet, standing out far more than any of the others in this respect is not Coppola, but Penn. Central to American film in the sixties, Kolker even noted in his first edition that “as a filmmaker, Penn has just barely survived into the seventies” (first edition, pg. 6) and by now his recent work has become negligible, both in subject matter and attention to form. Kolker himself states that hismostrecentfilms, Targetand Dead ofWinter, can be read“, . .as signs of the forced or chosen demise of inquisitive filmmaking intelligence.” (second edition, pg. 77). In contrast, it could be easily argued that Coppolahas, ifanything, given left, To Live and Die in L.A. n Fall 1988 Rumblefish too muchattention to form, his technical virtuos- ity (spurred on by such advances as the Stead- icam and the increasing sophistication of video technology) often outweighing the stories them- selves in such interesting but ultimately unsuc- cessful films as One From The Heart, Rumble- fish, and Peggy Sue Got Married. Thus, Kolker could at least have used Coppola as a spring- board for constructively discussing some of the limitations of contemporary cinema, The inclu- sion of Penn and the exclusion of Coppola only accentuates further, into the eighties, what La Valley saw as Kolker’s "yearning with vague nostalgia for the sixties."* Next, and even more central to Kolker’s limited understanding of the eighties, is his chap- ter on Spielberg. At the outset, we might ask, why include Spielberg ina book called A Cinema cof Loneliness? Though Spielberg's films are, of course, an important aspect of American cinema in the eighties, they are, on the contrary, in ideological opposition to those which deal with what Marion Weiss calls “such themes as lone- liness, hopelessness, and lack of control. . .”7 It is here that Kolker’s conception of his book’s historical significance beginsto break down even New York, New York further; for in writing on Spielberg, he seems to want to be writing a more general history of the American cinema of the eighties (as he had done with European cinema of the seventies in The Altering Eye), but he still clings to the “auteur/ loneliness” approach of his first edition. With this addition, the two tendencies of the book become at odds with one another, and his state- ‘ment that his director-oriented approach hopes “to challenge {the] homogeneity of form and substance that threatens to leave American film undifferentiated and uninteresting” (second edi- tion, pg. xiii) does little to recoup the “loneli- ness” thematic thathe has keptin the book, since Spielberg certainly cannot be said to fit into this, category. Though, in fact, is may be possible to write a history of contemporary cinema using both an auteur methodology and aconcentration on the topic of isolation, Kolker’s facile inclu- sion of Spielberg does little to push this project forward and instead raises more questions (pri- marily about the book itself) than it answers, Along similarlinesis Kolker’ limited view of contemporary American cinema in general. To best understand this view, we might go back to two earlier pieces which Kolker published Spectator nR several years prior to the second edition of his book. In a short article entitled “The Eighties” and published in 1982, he found then-recent ‘American cinema to have “only the atrophy of desire and the paralysis of intellect.” Seeing Scorsese’s Raging Bull as one of the few interest- ing films to have emerged, he noted that unlike the experimentation with genre thattook place in the seventies, the current use of genre by many filmmakers was for far more retrogressive pur- poses. As he says, “George Lucas and Steven Spielberg use fantasy and action genres as modes of repetition, as a replacement for ideas rather than as a way to advance them.” ° He then goes on to say that the revival of film noir, used by many filmmakers of the seventies and having ‘now resulted in the film Body Heat, “indicates both a recognition of anda yearning for a period of creativity that is now largely over.”"" However, in an article written two years later which was intended to be a short introduc- tory essay to a number of other critical essays, Kolker himself seems to be yearning fora period that is now largely over, that of the modernist movement.’? Both of these views seem to have fused in the second edition of his book, in which he uses solely as his source Fredric Jameson's pessimistic view of postmodern culture and says that “postmodern American film has done its best to erase the traces of sixties and seventies experimentation... ,returning witha vengeance to a linear, illusionist style. ‘That style in turn creates, or re-creates, the ready acceptance of conventional expression.” (second edition, pg. xi). Though he himself wars the reader (in the endnotes) that “if there was little agreement on a definition of modernism, there is even less on postmodernism” (second edition, pg. 383, note 1), Kolker himself seems content to let itrest on the grounds that postmodernism is a conserva- tive movement in direct opposition to the prac- tice of modernist experimentation. And indeed, if Spielberg, Lucas, etc. are the only expressions wehaveof contemporary cinema, then postmod- ernism would seem to be ata dead end. That, however, is only part of the picture. For itis here that Kolker displays toa fault what Don Ranvaurd found to be a problem with the first edition of the book, “a sometimes infuri- atingly convenient gesturing at generalities.” To backtrack a bit, in his earlier piece on eighties cinema, Kolker assumed that the return to film noir which had been taking place implied a dearth ofcreativity, and that this wasparticularly embodied in Body Heat. This view illustrates what James Collins finds to be one of the most. problematic beliefs of modernism, “a fascina- tion with the then still operative category of ‘personal expression’, which is now seemingly lost forever.”* From the modernist standpoint, any return to earlier forms entails what Jameson calls "a deep. . and, .. nostalgic desire to return to thatolder period and toliveits strange old aes- thetic artifacts through once again.” But, while there is little doubt about the return of film noir (even more apparentiin the last few years), the generalizing of this tonostalgiain any case blocks off any consideration of the way inwhich specificfilms use the form. To giveonly one example, also writing about Body Heat just prior to Kolker, film reviewer Michael Sragow, in comparing it to Michael Mann’s Thief (re- leased the same year), found the notion of noir- as-nostalgia to be only one possibility. He wrote that [a] movie like Body Heat... is sentimental about sadism, it yearns to reactivate the cruel femme fatale and the doomed desperate lover of Forties film noir. ... Body Heat is wax museum movie-making, an attempt to pour vin- tage 1981 paraffin into an established film noircasting. ... A darker, more in- cendiary film, Thief . . . vitalized the film noir themes of existential choice and revolt by rediscovering them in a ferocious, vividly rendered present-day gangster-milieu ..."° And similarly, the views on postmodernism held by many other theorists than Jameson are far different, seeing in it many possibilities, as well asbetter understanding therelationship between it and modernism as not simply one of polar opposites, butin the mostinteresting works of art 2B Fall 1988 as both a disruption and an affinity; as Charles. Jencks describes it, postmodemism is “the con- tinuation of modernism and its transcendence.”"” ‘These works continue a self-conscious explora- tion of our culture, but not from the elitist stance which modernism entails. As Collins states, Rather than a mere expression of nos- talgia, postmodernism may be seen as an attempt to recover the morphologi- cal continuity of specific culture. The use of the past styles in this case is motivated not by a simple escapism, butby desire to understand our culture and ourselves as products of previous codings. * But Kolker, in his second edition, seeing only the opposition between the two, reduces American postmodern cinema to Spielberg and “the politics of recuperation” and to the decline of several key directors of the seventies. This. grossly simplified view omits some of the most interesting filmmaking in America today, such filmmakers as Michael Cimino, Jonathan Demme, Brian DePalma, William Friedkin, David Lynch, Michael Mann, Alan Rudolph, and Paul Schrader, many of whom have been un- critically attacked and/orignored by anumber of American critics.” Like the auteurs Kolker writes on, the work of these directors in the eighties shows an inclination toward loneliness. and a despair toward contemporary society (of- ten in conjunction with the use of morbid, black humor), and stylistically presentsamanipulation of form and genre that is at the opposite extreme of the “linear, illusionist style” of Lucas, Spielberg, Kasdan, et. al. (whose films may be better described not as “postmodern”, but as merely some of the effects of postmodemity in general), while at the same time representing some of the most fascinating manifestations of postmodern art currently underway. Like Scors- ese, Altman, et.al. in the seventies, many of the films of these directors have not been popular successes (unlike Spielberg, Lucas, etc.). And though sometimes ideologically problematic (what Robin Wood calls an “incoherence” of the text), in their dark and disturbing visions of society, they at least have presented an alterna- tive to much of the conservative mainstream cinema that is undoubtledly a part of American culture in the eighties. ‘Itmay then be that, in order to better under- stand contemporary American cinema, we must not lament over the decline of a number of directors whose work flourished in the seventies, but instead shift our sights over to a number of new directors and new films, films which still formally and thematically challenge the culture within which they are made, though ina different manner from the films of the seventies which Kolker analyzes. Though his book provides excellent analyses of these particular films and insightful renderings into the thematic obses- sions of certain directors (as the firstedition did), the more far-reaching conclusions about mod- ernism, postmodernism, and American cinema Spectator 4 in the eighties which lie atthe heart of the second edition of A Cinema of Loneliness are far from satisfying, and so leave a great deal of critical work still to be done. * Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese,Aliman(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 9. All further references to this edition are noted in the text and are referred to as “first edition”. 2 See also Diane Jacobs, Hollywood Renaissance (New York: A.S. Bames, 1979), James Monaco, ‘American Film Now (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), and Michael Pye and Linda Myles, The ‘Movie Brats (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 8& Winston, 1979). 2 Albert J. LaValley, “Loneliness: the Search for a Centerin Recent American Film” in Quarterly Review of Film Studies 6, no. 2 (Spring 1981), p. 229. “ Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 9. All further references to this edition are noted in the text and are referred to as “second edition”. 5 See reviews of the first edition by Dan Ranvaud in Framework, no. 12. (1980), pp. 45-46, Wayne J. Douglasin Film CriticismIV,No.2(1980),pp.41-44, Marion Weiss in Journal ofthe University Film Asso- ciation 33, no. 3 (Summer 1981), pp. 41-43, and the aforementioned review by Albert LaValley in Quar- terly Review of Film Studies, pp. 229-236. * Quarterly Review of Film Studies, p. 234. 7 Journal of the University Film Association, p. 42. * Robert Phillip Kolker, The Altering Eye (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). * Robert Phillip Kolker, “The Eighties” in Post Script 1, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 1982), p. 30. © Ibid., p. 31. " bid, p. 32. ® Rober Phillip Kolker, “Modemism: An Introduc- tion” in Post Script 3, no. 2 (Winter 1984), pp. 2-4. » Framework, p. 45. ™ James Collins, “Postmodernism and Cultural Prac tice” in Screen 28, no. 2 (Spring 1987), p. 16. Along similar lines, sce also Rosalind Krauss, "The Original- ity of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodem Repetition” in Brian Wallis (ed.), Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation Boston: David. Godine, Publisher, Inc., 1984), pp. 13-29. 'S Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic (Bay Press, Port Townsend, Washington 1983), pp. 116. See also Jameson's lengthier piece, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” inNew Left Review, no. 146 (Suly-Aug. 1984), pp. 53-92. It is worth noting that both Kolker and Jameson mention a number of the same films (e.g.,Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Body Heat) either directly or by implication as being “postmodern”. 6 Michael Sragow, “The Year in Movies: They Shoot ‘Movies, Don’t They” in Rolling Stone, nos. 359/360 (Dec. 24, 1981-Jan. 7, 1982), p. 110. * Charles Jencks, What is Past-Modernism? (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), p. 7. For other arguments about postmodernism whichcontradict the pessimistic stance of Jameson and Kolker (though not all are in complete agreement with one another), see, among others, Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction. (New York: Methuen, Inc., 1987), Umberto Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide Bloomington: Indiana Univer- sity Press, 1986), and Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1988). ™ Screen, p. 22. With few exceptions, most of the only interesting work done on these filmmakers has been by anumber of Canadian film critics such as Robin Wood, Richard Lippe, etc. in such journalsas the iregularly published Movie and the more consistent Cineaction! See also Wood's book, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) for a survey which covers much of the same films and filmmakers as Kolker’s book, but with a better blend- ingof auteurism and amore general history, as well as a far more convincing understanding of mainstream cinema in the eighties. % See not only Robin Wood, “The Incoherent Text: Narrative in the 70s” in Hollywood From Vietnam 10 Reagan, but also a number of other articles published by Wood andothers on films of theeighties, published variously in Movie and Cineaction!, which implicitly useas akey concept thenotion of “incoherence”. This concept is somewhat similar to Kolker’s idea that although their films sometimes carry on anideological debate with the culture that breeds them, they never confrontthatculture with another ideology, with other ways of seeing itself, with social and political possi- bilities that arenew or challenging (second edition, p. 10) butis inherently more optimistic inits stance and implies anexamination and understanding ofthe films 2 which opens them up to more possibilities, rather than sealing them off with a political label. Fall 1988

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