The Future of Allusion: Hollywood in the Seventies (And beyond) Noel Carroll October, Vol. 20. (Spring, 1982), pp. 51-81. Stable URL http: flinks.jstor-org/siisici=0162-2870% 28198221% 292% 3C51%3 ATFO AHI%3E2.0,CO%3B2-6 October is currently published by The MIT Press, Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hup:/www,jstororglabout/terms.hml. ISTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at hupslwww.jstor.orgijourals'mitpress.html ch copy of any part of'a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission, ISTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @ jstor.org. hupulwww jstor.org/ Mon Jul 3 11:22:34 2006The Future of Allusion: Hollywood in the Seventies (and Beyond)* NOEL CARROLL. One rootless man, driven by an illicit passion for another man’s wife; a murderous bargain with the siren; fateful destruction. It's an old story. Or, to bbe more exact, it’s an old movie—shades of The Postman Always Rings Twice (46) and Double Indemnity (44). And yet, of course, itis also a new movie — Body Heat (81), directed by Lawrence Kasdan, coauthor of such other historical pastiches as The Empire Strikes Back ('80) and Raiders of the Lost Ark ('81).* Nor does Body ‘Heat merely rework an old plot. It tries to evoke the old films, films of the for- ties, that the plot was a part of. Body Heat's costumes are contemporary, but of a nostalgic variety that lets us—no, asks us~ to see the film as a shifting figure, shifting between past and present. The lighting extensively apes the film noir style of the forties, thereby enhancing its mood of pessimism-cum-destiny by citing the approved cinematic iconography for fear, lust, and loathing. We understand Body Hea’s plot complications because we know its sources—in fact, because, through its heavy-handed allusions, we've been told its sources. Without this knowledge, without these references, would Body Heat make much sense? Even its eroticism requires our explicit association of the female lead with certain movie myths —for example, the woman-as-devil/temptress arche- type—in order to be really forceful. jough recent commercial film is too diverse to capture in a single for- mula, there is a tendency, of which Body Heat is an exampe, that distinguishes the seventies and ei from every other decade in Hollywood's past—viz., allusion. Indeed, this tendency is so pervasive that it has already trickled down to TV advertising. There is an ad for women’s blue jeans in which a long- legged, long-haired model strikes a pose of James Dean's (in a convertible, against a prairie mansion) that is a straight imitation of a shot from Giant ('56). * The author wishes to express his gratitude to Paul Ahur, David Bordwell, Annette Michelson, and Michael Nagelback for their careful readings of and comments on this article 1. “Tf Kasdan's work on Cantina Divide 81) seems less derivative than the films named here, ‘one must still remember the degree to which its simply an updating of the classic Hollywood DatleoFthe-sexes mot52 OCTOBER Of course, allusionism as it is practiced in the new Hollywood is generally more motivated than it is in this ad. Allusion, specifically allusion to film history, has become a major expressive device, that is, a means that directors use to make comments on the fictional worlds of their films. Allusion, as I am using it, is an umbrella term covering a mixed lot of practices including quotations, the memorialization of past genres, the reworking of past genres, homages, and the recreation of “classic” scenes, shots, plot motifs, lines of dialogue, themes, ges- tures, and so forth from film history, especially as that history was crystallized and codified in the sixties and early seventies. During that period, a canon of films and filmmakers was forged. An ag- gressive polemic of film criticism, often called auteurism, correlated attitudes, moods, viewpoints, and expressive qualities with items in the putative canon ‘These associations became available to contemporary filmmakers, who were able to lay claim to them by alluding to the original films, filmmakers, styles, and genres to which certain associations or assignments were affixed in the ‘emerging discourse about film history. Thus Body Heat, a film based on references to film history, a film that tells us that for this very reason it is to be regarded as intelligent and knowing, a film that demands that the associations which accrued to its referents be attributed to it and that it be treated with the same degree of seriousness as they were. ‘The strategies for making allusions are various. They include the outright imitation of film-historical referents; the insertion of classic clips into new films; the mention of illustrious and coyly nonillustrious films and filmmakers in dialogue; the arch play of titles on marquees, television screens, posters, and bookshelves in the background of shots; the retreading of archaic styles; and the mobilization of conventional, transparently remodeled characters, stereo- types, moods, and plots. [am grouping all these practices and strategies under the rubric of “allusion to film history” because the new films in question are structured by pertinent strategies and practices in such a way that (1) informed viewers are meant to recall past films (filmmakers, genres, shots, and so on) while watching the new films, and that (2) informed viewers are not supposed to take this as evidence of plagiarism or uninspired derivativeness in the new film—as they might have in the works of another decade— but as part of the ex- pressive design of the new films. The force of supposed to in this formulation is conventional; it is a rule of seventies film viewing, for example, that a similari- ty between a new film and an old film generally can count as a reference to the old film. 2. By this I mean that in interpreting recent fms, the appearance of correspondence be- tween a new film and an old fi is used ass cesterion or ground for asserting thatthe new Slim taking a comment of some srt. That asks us to apply what we know ofthe od Bln tothe tiew Blms point of view on its materials. To sce how this operates, consider Iterary, non