Capturing Digital Media: Perfection and Imperfection in Contemporary Film and Television 9781501345869, 9781501345890, 9781501345876

Citation preview

CAPTURING DIGITAL MEDIA

CAPTURING DIGITAL MEDIA

Perfection and Imperfection in Contemporary Film and Television

Thomas J. Connelly

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Thomas J. Connelly, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Film, Children of Men (2006) © Collection Christophel / ArenaPal All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4586-9 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4587-6 eBook: 978-1-5013-4588-3 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Vivek

vi

CONTENTS Acknowledgments

viii

INTRODUCTION: ANALOG AND DIGITAL FORMS AND STAR WARS1 Chapter 1 PERFECTING THE IMPERFECT: CHILDREN OF MEN AND WAR OF THE WORLDS17 Chapter 2 TIME-LOOPING NARRATIVE: SOURCE CODE, LOOPER, AND EDGE OF TOMORROW31 Chapter 3 THE DATABASE, GAMING, AND FIRST-PERSON SHOOTER PERSPECTIVE IN GUS VAN SANT’S ELEPHANT51 Chapter 4 SUBJECTIVE VISION AND THE INTIMATE SPECTACLE: CLOVERFIELD69 Chapter 5 MAKING SENSE OF MUMBLECORE85 Chapter 6 THE POLITICS OF HOMEMADE FILMMAKING: Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN AND END OF WATCH101 Chapter 7 TIME-SHIFTING, DREAMS, AND UNCERTAINTY IN THE SOPRANOS 

117

Chapter 8 PLEASE SET YOUR BELIEF TO 16:9135 CONCLUSION151 Notes Index

159 175

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Portions of Chapter 8 contain material from “Mapping Aspect Ratios in the Age of High Definition Television,” published in Popular Communications in August 2014. Tremendous thanks to Katie Gallof at Bloomsbury for supporting this project. Thank you to Erin Duffy at Bloomsbury for her assistance in preparing the manuscript. Thank you to Leeladevi Ulaganathan for your guidance in preparing the book for production. Thank you to Henry Krips, Dana Polan, and James Morrison who read earlier parts of this manuscript. Thank you to the faculty and staff at Claremont Graduate University for their support and guidance. Much thanks to Annalisa Zox-Weaver for her comments and suggestions of an earlier draft of the manuscript. I am extremely grateful to Todd McGowan at the University of Vermont for his theoretical insights that informed the premise of this project. Thank you to my family and friends for all of their love and support. I want to thank my dog Beatrice for doing her best not to bark loudly. This manuscript could have not been finished without the supporting love of my spouse and best friend Katie Connelly. Finally, this book is dedicated to my friend and mentor Vivek Adarkar at Long Island University who is no longer with us. His guidance and wisdom during our independent study in 1995 has forever shaped my thinking on screenwriting and cinema.

INTRODUCTION: ANALOG AND DIGITAL FORMS AND STAR WARS

The sale of George Lucas’s Star Wars franchise to Disney in 2013 came with the announcement of three new films to be set chronologically following Return of the Jedi (1983), with J. J. Abrams to direct the first installment. Abrams announced that Star Wars: The Force Awakens would be shot on 35 mm, stating, “We are working really hard to make a movie that feels as emotional and authentic and exciting as possible.” Abrams added, “I remember . . . reading someone wrote about just wanting [The Force Awakens] to feel real; to feel authentic. I remember I felt that way when I was 11 years old when I saw the first one [Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)]. As much of a fairy tale as it was, it felt real. And to me, that is exactly right.”1 It should be of no surprise that many devoted fans of the franchise welcomed the news that The Force Awakens would be shot on celluloid. After all, one of the many disapproving comments about the Star Wars prequels (1999, 2002, and 2005) was Lucas’s overuse of digital effects, as conveyed in the documentary The People vs. George Lucas (Alexandre O. Philippe, 2010). But what does Abrams’s desire to capture the feelings and experiences of the original world of Star Wars suggest about the relationship between digital and celluloid? Has celluloid become a novelty format? If so, how did this change occur in the entertainment industry? Abrams’s choice to film The Force Awakens on celluloid raises a number of points regarding cinematic realism, practices of digitization, and the state of the analog format. The heightened realism of digital effects, as Nicholas Rombes explains, produces “strange side effects . . . it creates nostalgia for the ‘less realistic’ special effects and stunts of analog of cinema.”2 As in the case of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s double feature film Grindhouse (2007), both films (Planet Terror and Death Proof) attempt to recapture the experience of analog movies of the 1970s by intentionally putting effects of time and human errors into the physicality of the film, such as print scratches, disruptive sounds, and unplanned jump cuts. Rombes interprets Rodriguez and Tarantino’s

2

Capturing Digital Media

intentional errors and degraded images in Grindhouse as reflections of Raymond Williams’s notion of residual culture: the lived, practiced, and shared experiences, meanings and values shaped in the past, but are “still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present.”3 Indeed, Abrams’s decision to film The Force Awakens on celluloid attempts not only to aesthetically depict the film with a “real” and “authentic” look, but also to recreate the cultural values and meanings associated with the original Star Wars universe that impressed him as a young viewer. Consider, for example, Lucas’s use of model special effects, stop motion photography, the flash frames inserted during the light saber fight with Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness), and nascent computer-generated effects of the early 1980s—much of these older effects Lucas updated in the rerelease of the original Star Wars movies. Yet as conveyed in The People vs. George Lucas, many fans cherish the imperfection of Star Wars’s older special effects. It is interesting to add that Lucas’s vision of the original Star Wars film involved creating a dirty space aesthetic. Will Brooker observes that a key aesthetic of Star Wars is its polar opposites of “dirty versus clean”4 in the film’s production design, such as the worn down and earthly look that reflects Luke’s (Mark Hamill) farm life on Tatooine, and Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Chewbacca’s (Peter Mayhew) “rough edged” smuggler space ship the Millennium Falcon that happened to float away “with the rest of the garbage” before escaping to Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980). Lucas described this aesthetic as a “used universe” that contrasted with the ordered, formal, and technological world of the Empire. For Rombes, the tendency of digital cinema to insert flaws, mistakes, and purposely degraded images is primarily because digital texts neither deteriorate nor leave a trace of the original. A digital file can be shared from user to user without the loss of sound and/or visual quality. The analog image or sound, however, is vulnerable to time and can deteriorate from copy to copy. As such, the analog image’s fragility, as Rombes points out, is akin to what is human and organic and thus, imperfect.5 Certainly intentional mistakes and “realist” styles of filmmaking can be problematic, as in Abrams’s excessive use of the lens flare in Star Trek (2009).6 For this reason, Abrams explains that his desire to depict The Force Awakens with a “real” or “authentic” look should not be interpreted as synonymous with “gritty.” Rather, as he states, “it’s real in that the Star Wars world feels like a real place, and I think that’s why the property has endured.”7 Abrams’s choice to

Introduction

3

film The Force Awakens on 35  mm, arguably, is not only to recreate the experiences of the original Star Wars movies as a form of residual culture, but also to incorporate the organic and imperfect so as to balance out the sterility and perfection of digital in the same manner that Lucas created a dirty space aesthetic to contrast the formal and pristine world of the Empire.8 Certainly this approach is not meant to suggest that advances in digital technologies do not play a role in viewers’ movie-going experiences, or that viewers and filmmakers are rejecting digital visual effects (VFX).9 Part of this project is to not only track aesthetic expressions of imperfection of the moving image, but also consider the role of digital in recent cinema spectatorship. Audiences continue to be astounded and dazzled by the progression and precision of VFX, ranging from the life-like dinosaurs in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) and the futurist bullet time sequence in The Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999), to the sublime 3-D effects of James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011), and Scott Derrickson’s Doctor Strange (2016). Alongside larger-than-life VFX, filmmakers are combining liveaction and computer-generated imagery (CGI) to create transparent and flawless moving images that increasingly challenge the viewer’s ability to detect the mediation of digital effects. Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) illustrates how CGI can transform spaces seamlessly, such as a hangar siding digitally transformed into the waterways of Venice, a Brownstone turned into a whitewashed London flat, or a lion walking through a business office, with the lion’s trainer digitally removed.10 Part of this experience is balancing the simulation codes of computerized digital effects and live-action photography—a process known as photorealism. The goal of photorealism is to produce a synthetic digital image that appears seamless and “natural,” and corresponds accordingly within the 3-D space of the film’s story world. Indeed, mapping the intersection of the analog and digital formats is not simply about nostalgic consumption, as in the recreation of the grind house experience of Planet Terror and Death Proof. Practices of digital imaging, as Lisa Purse explains, also serve “narrative cinema’s longstanding illusionist project, joining continuity editing, set facades, trick photography and physical special effects (among others) in the creation of fictional spaces and events.”11 A tenet of classical Hollywood realism is unifying the film’s narrative through causality, continuity, and motivation. Here photorealism’s blending of live action and digitization follows the classical Hollywood’s seamless and transparent narrative style. As such, photorealism preserves Hollywood’s tradition

4

Capturing Digital Media

of subordinating the mediation of the moving image to the unifying effect of narrative causality. Yet a scene such as the bullet time sequence in The Matrix temporally derails the narrative as a VFX digression, where realism and the avantgarde momentarily lose their distinction. This is most noticeable in viewing a 3-D movie outside of 3-D theatre exhibition. The “flying fish” 3-D sequence in Ang Lee’s Life of Pi (2012) is a case in point. The film briefly digresses to emphasize its 3-D effect, as fish cannon-ball out of the ocean. Watching this sequence without 3-D glasses on cable television is an act of visual experimentation—one that complicates the firm boundary between realism and avant-garde that traditionally defined the classical Hollywood narration system. More so, viewing Life of Pi’s flying fish 3-D sequence outside theatrical exhibition not only illustrates an instance of imperfection (unintentionally) that briefly derails narrative fluidity, but reveals how digital has attributed to the blurring of cinema’s and television’s medium-based specificities.12 These forms of perfection and imperfection do not mean that tensions cannot emerge in the assignment of meanings and values of a cultural artifact. A popular text such as Star Wars has become an arena of tension over its meaning in both its consumption and production. A notable example is fans’ outrage at Lucas’s digitally changing the look of scenes and character actions of the original Star Wars films, such as altering the famous showdown at the Cantina bar in Mos Eisley, where Greedo shoots first instead of Han Solo. Or consider Lucas not releasing the original Star Wars versions on DVD. When Lucas did release the original films on DVD, he did not enhance them for 16:9 high-definition television (HDTV), stirring indignation among many fans. On the one hand, Lucas’s use of digital effects in order to manipulate scenes of the original Star Wars films raises concerns of ownership of the text. In this case, fans want to preserve the cultural values and meanings associated with the “imperfect” look of the original trilogy. On the other hand, fans seek a perfect presentation of the original Star Wars films (with all of its flaws and imperfections) as a digital format such as DVD or Blu-ray. Here it is important to stress that imperfection and perfection should not be read exclusively as binaries. The interrelation of imperfection and perfection can cause disruptions, evoke sites of tensions, and blur boundaries in how meanings are assigned to moving-image texts. Joss Whedon, for instance, expressed frustration with Fox’s broadcasting of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) in widescreen for HDTV, a show that was photographed in the standard 4:3 aspect ratio. Whedon stated that

Introduction

5

adding space to the sides simply for the sake of trying to look more cinematic would betray the very exact mise-en-scène I was trying to create. I am a purist, and this is the purest way to watch Buffy. I have resisted the effort to letterbox Buffy from the start and always will, because that is not the show we shot.13

Fox’s attempt to make Buffy appear cinematic exemplifies digital’s contributing to the blurring of cinema and television’s medium-based specificities. More so, Whedon’s use of the term “purist” to describe his frustration with Fox altering Buffy’s native aspect ratio speaks directly to the ideal of the perfection of digital and the promises it offers in terms of exhibiting a movie and/or television series’ native aspect ratio. The transmission of high-definition content to one’s living room, laptop, or mobile device not only involves industrial decisions such as the cost to remaster television and film texts and syndication rights to wide-screen titles, but also includes industrial assumptions made about the aesthetic tastes of audiences. These decisions can compromise digital’s potential to exhibit the perfected product, a topic explored in Chapter 8. Indeed, these aforementioned examples illustrate how digital media has impacted the production, consumption, and exhibition of movingimage texts. But we cannot interpret these developments of digital purely from a technological standpoint. We must also consider the psychical activity in our engagement with technology, specifically in regard to experiences of time and space. Jacques Lacan’s concepts of desire and drive provide a basis in understanding the temporal and spatial dimension of digital technology. For Lacan, the logic of desire is energized by the object cause of desire, or what he terms objet petit a.14 Capturing the object cause of desire is the ultimate satisfaction, the zenith of wholeness. Since the object cause of desire is primordially “lost,” it cannot be recovered, resulting in desire as a force of perpetual lack for the subject.15 As Slavoj Žižek states, “Desire stands for the economy in which whatever object we get hold of is ‘never it.’ ”16 The object cause of desire identifies an absence that arouses the subject’s desire. As such, the logic of desire functions on the necessity of lack. Paradoxically, it is the unattainable object cause of desire that becomes the subject’s source of enjoyment in the pursuit to capture it. The DVDs I purchase, the coffee I drink, or books that I buy are never enough to stand in for the “lost object.” Yet I derive enjoyment searching for books online or traveling to DVD stores. I look forward to drinking coffee in the morning. As such, desire does not operate on

6

Capturing Digital Media

plenitude, but on the absence of the object cause of desire. It is this very absence that fuels desire. Whereas desire seeks the impossible “lost object” as the acme of enjoyment, drive manifests enjoyment in not obtaining the object cause of desire, but in repeating loss. The circularity of the drive finds enjoyment in the movement for the sake of movement rather than locating the lost object. As Žižek explains, drive “resists being enmeshed in a dialectical movement; it circulates around its object, fixed upon the point around which it pulsates.”17 Desire moves from object to object in a dialectical manner as it seeks the privileged lost object. The logic of desire imagines a possibility in capturing the object cause of desire to overcome the subject’s loss, whereas the logic of drive as a force of repetition registers loss which is constitutive of subjectivity.18 The psychical forces of desire and drive illuminate how digital technology has altered experiences of time and space. The measurement of time through clocks, schedules, and timetables is a way for the subject to spatialize and order the contingency of time. As Todd McGowan explains, “The clock is nothing but an objective correlative of the desire to spatialize time. Once the spatial model intrudes, it dominates the experience of temporality, leaving the subject unable to consider time in terms other than spatial ones.”19 Networks and broadcasters, for example, organize and schedule a plethora of television content. Appointment television requires that viewers be available for the airing of a show or sporting event at a scheduled time determined by the network or broadcaster. Digital media such as DVR (digital video recorder) and online streaming, however, have changed our orientation to time in accessing television and film content. If the temporal gap between the subject and object of desire provides a barrier for the subject to overcome, digital collapses this limit and dramatically changes our experience of time. As McGowan observes, “Through the use of digital technology, every temporal limit disappears into a spatial one.”20 As such, digital media’s ability to completely spatialize time creates a “perpetual present.”21 This is most notable in using a streaming service to watch a movie or television series. One of the allures of digital streaming services is instant access to movies or television series either in one’s home or on the go. Digital technologies have such a strong appeal because they can eradicate temporal limits where wait time is greatly diminished or completely eradicated. Digital technology opens up the possibility of what McGowan terms “atemporality” because of its collapsing of temporal barriers. For McGowan, the “contemporary atemporal mode is the product of the

Introduction

7

digital era and its complete spatialization of time.”22 By contrast, analog is akin to the logic of desire as an effect of the degradation of time. Whereas the circularity of the drive realizes the subject’s fundamental loss, desire seeks to overcome the trauma of loss by regulating and measuring time in a linear order. Yet analog’s vulnerability to decay and disintegrate is a marker of time passing. Consider, for example, the digital format of MP3 and the promise of high-fidelity listening. Analog, however, signals imperfections, such as hiss and pop sounds of a phonograph, communicating the passing of time.23 Yet digital can potentially fix the loss of analog. Many celluloid-based movies have been saved, preserved, and restored with the help of digital technology, such as the rescuing of Satyajit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy (1955, 1956, and 1959).24 At the same time, digital can purposely add errors to the digital image, a paradox that Chapter 1 explores via the imperfection of the long take. As such, analog’s decay is closely related to the organic. Perhaps one of the most striking developments of digital technology in relation to the human subject is the use of CGI to recreate a deceased actor’s face, as in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Gareth Edwards, 2016). Two faces were digitally recreated from Star Wars: A New Hope: Peter Cushing, who died in 1994, known for playing Grand Moff Tarkin and Princess Leia, played by Carrie Fisher, who passed away at the time of Rogue One’s theatrical release. Guy Henry, who resembled Grand Tarkin, was filmed using performance capture equipment attached to his head. In postproduction, the animators approximated Peter Cushing’s real performance while digitally replacing Guy Henry’s face. This laborious process involved facial motion capture technologies that could detect subtleties in Cushing’s face to prevent what is referred to as the uncanny valley. Here we are reminded of Béla Balázs’s description of the “microphysiognomic” and the “spiritual” quality of the close-up in cinema.25 Digitally capturing and mapping the subtleties and nuances of human expressions is an instance of imperfecting the perfect, not so much as a process of photorealism in rendering cinematic reality that approximates the celluloid format, but rather a blending of the organic and digital as a form of facial communication to prevent uncanny effects. The uncanny valley realizes an unwelcomed effect of the digital. This is because digital’s overcoming of temporal limits can potentially confront us with uncertainty. Here we can experience too much of the digital, such as the overload of CGI in cinema. The excesses of CGI speak to the closing of the gap between the subject and its object of desire, and the strange and uncanny effects it can produce. Hugh Manon argues that “the innate repletion of the digital does not provide

8

Capturing Digital Media

opportunities for desire.” For Manon, the overuse of digital effects in cinema produces “a subjective state in which lack itself is lacking.”26 Anxiety emerges when one gets too close to the object of desire. The overload of digital visual effects in movies, according to Manon, reveals the necessity of the gap that separates one from his/her object of desire. If one claims that a movie has too many digital effects, then one can argue that the film lacked desire. This returns us to Abrams’s decision to film The Force Awakens on celluloid. Abrams’s preference for analog not only helps build the film’s universe as “authentic” and “real,” but also makes the rebooting of the Star Wars franchise desirable by avoiding the overuse of CGI. If digital has the capacity to diminish the sublime status of the object, or to create a subject that lacks lack due to the collapsing of temporal barriers, I argue that Abrams’s approach to The Force Awakens enlists our desire by creating a story world that feels and looks organic. Abrams’s stylistic decision to make The Force Awakens “real” and “authentic” demonstrates that the source of our enjoyment of the film is not accessing the privileged lost object, but the obstacle to it. At the same time, Abrams does not entirely abandon the digital in building a cinematic world. As such, digital’s perfection is not wholeness. Rather, perfection is getting too close to the object of desire. The recourse is to wound or injure the digital in order to make it desirable. Certainly Abrams’s aesthetic choice in building the story world of The Force Awakens incites our feelings of the original Star Wars trilogy. Here, we can see the allure of nostalgia and its correlation to desire. Nostalgia suggests that we can supposedly reclaim the feelings and experiences of a previous time or era. Instead of recognizing loss as the source of our enjoyment, nostalgia offers us a pathway to the lost object—the place of mythical enjoyment. As McGowan explains, “The false image of enjoyment that nostalgia portrays is the source of its widespread appeal.”27 Recently, we have seen the rebooting of older television shows and movies to incite nostalgic feelings as in the case of Abrams describing his experience of first seeing Star Wars: A New Hope. Yet nostalgia can frustrate those who feel that the rebooting of a franchise threatens its sublime status. This site of tension among fans demonstrates that the lost object can never be obtained. Indeed, the original Star Wars trilogy has a sublime status for many fans. As explained above, a number of fans were upset at Lucas for making alterations to Star Wars: A New Hope for the 1997 special edition of the film. But the original Star Wars trilogy was never the privileged object from the start. If that was the case, there would be no Star Wars

Introduction

9

fandom. Fan communities are held together because of a shared loss. As such, media fandom thrives on desire and lack, not wholeness and plenitude. As explained, the logic of desire operates on the impossibility of locating the lost object. The subject moves from object to object as it seeks the privileged object. Paradoxically, the dissatisfaction of not locating the lost object is the source of the subject’s enjoyment. As much as Abrams attempts to capture the spirit of the original Star Wars trilogy as a form of residual culture, The Force Awakens cannot reclaim the lost object. Rather, we should view Abrams’s artistic decisions to make the film feel more realistic by directing us toward the requisite of inscribing loss to fuel our enjoyment of Star Wars. Nicholas Rombes claims that, “haunted by the spectre of perfection, there is a tendency in digital media—and cinema especially—to reassert imperfection, flaws, an aura of human mistakes to counterbalance the logic of perfection that pervades the digital.”28 Lev Manovich argues that “once computer-generated images are combined with film [celluloid] images, additional tricks are used to diminish their perfection.”29 A central claim of this book is that offsetting the perfection of digital not only involves techniques and tricks of imperfection, but also considers the psychical importance in the relationship between perfection and imperfection. I argue that imperfection is, technologically and psychically, a necessary barrier against the perfection of the digital. Imperfection is where we locate the subject of desire and lack within the binary logic of the digital. Imperfection establishes distance between the subject and the object of desire. Yet there is a strong allure of digital and the promise it offers in our engagement with media texts, such as state-of-the art-sound, spectacular digital effects, and high-definition images. From this perspective, the forces of drive and desire not only help us to understand the interrelation of media forms of imperfection and the perfection of digital’s binary code, but identify an essential tension in the development of digitization in relation to the human subject. It seems that we cannot have one without the other. Desire is what entices us to see a movie, to own the latest iPhone, or to purchase the newest gaming console. Paradoxically, these media forms rely on technologies that offer something new and better, such as speed, convenience, and ease of use. This “something new” speaks to the attraction of the unattainability of the object cause of desire.30 As such, imperfection is the source of our enjoyment of film and television because it identifies the necessary lack at the heart of subjectivity. The focus of Capturing Digital Media is to map these shifts and developments in the interfacing of digital in recent cinema and television. My approach offers a variety or kaleidoscope of cases that

10

Capturing Digital Media

reflect the interrelated and converging ways in which media texts are produced, exhibited, and consumed. It considers how digital is orienting new expressions of narrative time and space, such as database narrative, speed ramping, time-looping, and gaming aesthetic. It examines the formations of artist publics in relation to the blurring of amateur and professional modes of filmmaking. It also considers new tensions, such as digital’s disruption of the subject’s alignment with desire, enjoyment, and meaning-making, as well as new paradoxes that can potentially emerge in the blurring of mediums for mass entertainment.

Chapter overview Chapter 1 examines the impact of digital media on the aesthetics of the long take in recent cinema. Under the classical Hollywood mode of production, the long take was discouraged as a technique of filmmaking because it risked drawing attention to the film’s narrative system of time and space, potentially taking viewers out of a film’s narrative thread. Of course, many classical filmmakers creatively employed long takes in their works without disrupting the film’s narrative flow despite the guidelines of the Hollywood mode of production. A commonality I have traced in the variant uses of the long take in the classical narrative system is perfecting its staging and movement in order to not draw attention to the camera. Recently, however, there has been a turn toward the imperfection of the long take. This is most notable in shaky camera work and the degradation of the film image. I have identified that the imperfection of the long take is intimately connected to both everyday uses of digital media and the desire to introduce mistakes to offset the perfection of the digital. Focusing primarily on Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) and Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005), Chapter 1 argues that the velocity of the long take can sustain the illusion of transparency of the moving image without destabilizing narrative time and space. These films place emphasis on mistakes and imperfection in the use of handheld and jumpy camera work, or amateur-looking aesthetics to underscore the presence of the human. Yet both filmmakers paradoxically utilize digital technologies to create a spectatorship of imperfection and uncertainty in creating elaborate and hyperkinetic long takes. Chapter 2 examines the time-looping narratives of Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011), Looper (Rian Johnson, 2012), and Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman, 2014), and their relationship to the digital and

Introduction

11

organic. I argue that the time-looping narrative in these films has a close correlation to the perfection of the digital. Time-looping narratives symbolize digital’s ability to clone copies of copies with no degradation. The goal of these films is to close the loop and restore the linear forward flow of time. From a psychoanalytic standpoint, narrative repetition has a close correlation to the circularity of the drive, where enjoyment is located in the movement for the sake of movement, and where the means is privileged over the ends. In the logic of the drive, enjoyment is repetition itself. In order to shut off the loop, the characters in all three movies must resort to the logic of desire—where the goal is to satisfy the ends by projecting a future timeline. As such, the allure of desire is providing a respite from the incessant repetition of the drive. To transfer the film from drive to desire (the turn from repetition to the linear-forward moving of time), the characters must rely upon memory production and paradoxically death itself. Chapters 3 and 4 trace how the cultural forms of video gaming, the database, and computerized navigable space inform the look and design of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003) and Matt Reeve’s Cloverfield (2008). Loosely based on the Columbine High School massacre, Elephant considers the theme of violent media and youth aggression in its presentation of cinematic space and nonchronological narrative. Whereas Chapter 1 examined how purposely inserted mistakes diminish the perfection of digital images, Elephant hauntingly depicts a pristine and orderly aesthetic that visually approximates the digital forms of computerized and video gaming space. At the same time, these cultural forms are undermined by the film’s ambiguous stance toward violent media and youth acts of violence. Elephant’s approximation of database and gaming aesthetics puts emphasis on viewers to unravel the film’s heterogeneous information. Instead of arriving at a point where viewers can understand the motivation behind Elephant’s fictional shootings, they reach a place where primary meanings associated with violent entertainment and public shootings are called into question. In the case of the found footage film Cloverfield, I examine the subjective shot and vertical movements of the characters. The handheld subjective camcorder vision evokes a highly interactive spectatorship as it documents a monster’s attack on New York City. At the same time, the film’s purposely constructed amateur videography invites contemplation in uses of everyday communication media that can capture and transmit public events instantaneously. Part of watching Cloverfield is assigning meaning to its fake “evidential mode.” Although the film follows traditions of disaster cinema, its “homemade” and imperfect images of

12

Capturing Digital Media

destruction entail references to amateur visual documentation of the attacks on New York on 9/11. I argue that the film’s subjective vision of heights and vertical movement elicit a spectatorship of attraction and threat pertaining to concerns of terrorism and the threat of invasion. Furthermore, I explain that the film’s subjective vision lays a trap for our traumatic encounter with what Jacques Lacan terms the gaze: a blind spot within the field of vision. Chapter 5 explores the role of digital media in the formation of artistic publics, focusing on a small underground film development called “Mumblecore” that emerged in 2005 at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival. Mumblecore is a contested label for both its filmmakers, who are uneasy about being categorized, as well as for critics who have debated whether these filmmakers constituted a new film movement. Despite these tensions, Mumblecore has found an audience, albeit a small one, due to the help of online streaming platforms and film festivals. This is one of the allures of the digital form. The immediacy of digital media has helped to sustain Mumblecore’s network of artists and fans. Online streaming sites, for instance, not only provide access to hard-to-find movies, but also help Mumblecore promote and distribute its films to a wider audience. At the same time, Mumblecore films still rely upon traditional avenues of exhibition and marketing that emerged out of analog cinema, such as film festivals and reviews from newspaper and magazine critics, demonstrating the interrelation and overlapping of what I call material and online publics. But considering both the decline of analog production and video store marketplace, the criticism aimed at Mumblecore suggests something deeper. I argue that these intimate and highly personal films identify the complexity of what constitutes “indie” in American Independent cinema, and how the convergence of digital media is changing our understanding of media ownership, artistic publics, and connectivity. Building off Chapter 5’s analysis on Mumblecore, Chapter 6 examines amateur and professional modes of filmmaking. I argue that both Alfonso Cuarón Y Tu Mamá También (2001) and David Ayer’s End of Watch (2012) appropriate stylistic traits of amateur filmmaking in order to create an intimate, spontaneous, and visceral spectatorship. Although both films intentionally employ an amateur and “mistakist” aesthetic, they do not entirely abandon the professional codes and conventions of filmmaking. My claim is that both films generate their political and social meanings through their stylistic experimentations in working in both the mass/professional

Introduction

13

and home/amateur modes of filmmaking. The first section of the chapter examines Y Tu Mamá También and how the film’s interrupting narrator provides backstory on the film’s historical, political, and economic background of Mexico at the turn of the millennium. I argue that the combination of the interrupting narrator and amateur style photography is characteristic of an intimate homemade travelogue of Mexico that competes with the film’s main narrative. The second section examines End of Watch and its incorporation of high production images and amateur digital videography. End of Watch’s mixing of different video formats not only blurs traditional markers of amateur and professional modes of filmmaking but shares a commonality with Elephant and Cloverfield by articulating space that is akin to video gaming. Here, End of Watch registers its social and political meanings in creating a 360-degree film coverage of space that draws attention to the problem of gang activity and the controlling of territory in the Southland. At the same time, the film’s use of amateur videography offers an up close and personal account of police officers Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Michael Peña) as viewers learn about their lives and personal struggles. It is the amateur mode that provides audience with an organic and authentic account of Brian and Mike as they patrol the violent streets of the Southland. Chapter 7 explores the connection between dream sequences and spectatorship in David Chase’s The Sopranos (1999–2007). The Sopranos often deviated from the traditions of the gangster genre by using meandering plotlines, temporal interludes, and narrative enigmas. Similar to the time-loop narratives of Chapter 2, dream sequences in The Sopranos adhere to the logic of the drive—where enjoyment is located in the means rather than the ends. Whereas the goal in the time-loop narrative is to shut off the loop and restore the film to the logic of desire, The Sopranos’s atemporal dream sequences offer no solution to the questions it poses, as in the case of Tony Soprano’s (James Gandolfini) twenty-three minute “test dream” in season five. Although dreams offer little explanation in The Sopranos, I argue that they provide a pathway for characters to overcome obstacles that they are faced within their everyday lives. That is to say, the discourse of the dream (the way it is told) is more important than its content. From this perspective, dreams in The Sopranos oscillate between de-accelerating the unfolding of time and space and manifesting unspoken or surreal deductions that oddly progress narrative action. At the same time, The Sopranos’s formal experimentations and anticlimactic moments

14

Capturing Digital Media

can become a source of contention among fans who are looking for narrative closure and meaning. On the one hand, practices of digital technology are a product of nonlinear cinema as explored in Chapters 2 and 3. On the other, The Sopranos works against the allure of the digital by emphasizing a spectatorship of uncertainty, loss, and absence. Chapter 8 explores the relationship between images and digital screens. It specifically examines the exhibition of film and television content for HDTV and concerns regarding presenting and preserving wide-screen content. I argue that, although digital technologies offer new experiences of watching moving-image content, whether in the home or on the go with a mobile device, tensions still exist in protecting a film or television’s native aspect ratio. From this perspective, cinephiles and home theatre enthusiasts not only seek to “master” and “tame” their home viewing technologies, but desire that the moving image be presented in its original or native aspect ratio as the perfect exhibition. But the promise of perfectly transmitted digital moving images for HDTV and digital screens can be compromised as the media industry attempts to reach a middle ground between the aesthetic tastes of cinephiles and home theatre enthusiasts and the general viewing audience. I argue that what is at stake in modified images is not one’s knowledge of the framing and composing of moving images, but belief and duplicity. Today, it is almost impossible to think of celluloid not interfaced by digital media—as when filmmakers in the 1980s began using digital editing tools, as opposed to physically editing celluloid on a flatbed movieola. We use digital devices to screen analog-based movies and television shows. For these reasons, this project does not suggest that digital and analog are mutually exclusive formats, nor does it view digital as the enemy of analog, or pit culture against technology. As a trained practitioner and scholar of moving images, I mourn the decline of celluloid production and projection. Having learned to photograph 16 mm and edit on movieola editing suites, I have experience handling the physicality of celluloid. Growing up watching analog-based cinema, I enjoy the warm feel of celluloid that Abrams speaks of in his choice to film The Force Awakens on 35  mm. But I also embrace the possibilities of digital media, not only in terms of the technological advances made within the field, but also for its affordability and ease of access to underground artists and new cultures that can emerge, as I will discuss in the case of Mumblecore in Chapter 5. Digital has provided more flexibility to shoot and edit movies. Digital has changed the workflow in production, allowing the director and cinematographer

Introduction

15

to see the image in real time. Of course, certain aspects of the slow time of celluloid, arguably, make for a more rigorous and precise approach to filmmaking. This study comes from a scholarly and practitioner’s perspective, a split subject viewpoint, so to speak, of digital and celluloid that informs my analysis of the allure and threat of the perfection of digital and the moving image.

16

CChapter 1 PERFECTING THE IMPERFECT: CHILDREN OF MEN AND WAR OF THE WORLDS

The climactic “uprising” long take in Alfonso Cuarón’s sci-fi political thriller Children of Men has been recognized for its complex and detailed orchestration in establishing character and environment. Shot handheld, the sequence follows Theo (Clare Owen) as he navigates the gun battle between the refugees and the British. Theo is in search of Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) and her “miracle” baby. He has been hired to bring Kee to a group of scientists called the “Human Project” who are trying to find the cause of the worldwide plague of infertility. The uprising sequence is one of a number of long takes Cuarón employs in Children of Men as a means to create a “real time” effect. Visual effect supervisor Frazer Churchill stated that both Cuarón and his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki likened the style of Children of Men to Gillo Pontecorvo’s political film The Battle of Algiers (1966).1 Certainly Children of Men’s documentary style long takes remind us of André Bazin’s championing of cinematic realism. For Bazin, aesthetics such as the long take and depth of focus photography add “ambiguity into the structure of the image,” evoking an exploratory and heightened spectatorship without the intrusion of the cut.2 The uprising sequence offers a point-and-shoot perspective, emphasizing a “continuity of dramatic space”3 and shot duration that elevates viewers’ spectatorship as if they are literally dodging bullets alongside Theo. Yet the uprising long take was filmed in a number of sequences using digital compositing and invisible transitions to give the illusion of one continuous shot. Cuarón’s long-take spectacle raises a number of discussion points pertaining to digital imagery and cinematic realism. The long take, traditionally, has not been a part of Hollywood’s mode of filmmaking because of its association with a pensive style of cinema often referred to as “slow cinema” and its emphasis on the passing of time. Although many filmmakers, such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Abbas Kiarostami, and Michael Haneke, have effectively utilized the long take as part of a

18

Capturing Digital Media

shooting style that evokes a meditative and contemplative spectatorship, nothing is intrinsically slow about the long take. As such, the long take is open to other assigned meanings such as speed and acceleration as in the case of Children of Men. Cuarón’s use of the long take in the uprising sequence subordinates its construction of time and space in the same way an invisible style of editing attempts to elide viewers’ sense of mediation associated with classical Hollywood narration. At the same time, Cuarón’s documentary style and washed-out look imagines the science-fiction landscape, where the raw and imperfect are brought to the surface to create an immediate and realist effect. The uprising sequence illustrates the ways in which digital media can assist filmmakers in achieving their vision as well as correcting mistakes in postproduction. As reported by Churchill, during one of the sequences, an explosion of fake human blood splatters onto the camera lens. But within moments, the blood on the lens gradually disappears through the use of digital animation. The blood squib was detonated prematurely, and Cuarón was unable to stop the take because so many elements in the sequence were happening at once. The “squib” incident clearly illustrates one of the challenges of containing contingencies and accidents in the elaborate production of the long take. But Cuarón decided to keep the mistake, which required two tasks for Churchill and his special effects team: they had to add more blood digitally to mask the transition in order to enjoin the next sequence—and then digitally remove the blood from the entire image before it became a distraction.4 The blood on the frame in Children of Men, in this respect, literally brings the presence of death to the frame as an overwhelming threat that must then be reduced to sustain viewers’ interest in the action unfolding in the narrative. The uprising sequence and squib incident in Children of Men demonstrate what I describe as perfecting the imperfect. The erasure of mediation and the emphasis on the human presence behind the camera are two central features of the recent development of the long take. The production of the mobile long take historically has a strong correlation to the development of new film technologies to better stage and move the camera through cinematic space. This progress can be traced from early advents of camera supports to current uses of digital technologies and robotics. In certain cases, practitioners of cinema can impact technological advances in the moment of production. Recently, however, there has been a turn toward the imperfection of the long take, drawing attention to the camera’s presence and the degradation of the film image. The imperfection of the long take can be located in



1. Perfecting the Imperfect

19

filmmakers’ purposeful insertion of mistakes, handheld photography, and degraded images. This “mistakist” style of filmmaking has certain tendencies of realist cinema in the desire to add the human and organic. At the same time, filmmakers such as Cuarón have paradoxically utilized digital technologies to create a spectatorship of imperfection and uncertainty in creating elaborate and hyperkinetic long takes. Part of understanding the interrelation of these two forces is the development of moving-image technologies in relation to Hollywood classic narration.

Perfecting the long-take and technological advances Although quick cutting practices are the predominant style of most movies, the long take continues to fascinate filmmakers, whether it is used to establish character and space, such as the Copacabana nightclub scene in GoodFellas (1990) where the camera follows Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) and his girlfriend, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), from behind as they move through the labyrinth of the back entrance, the crowded kitchen area, and finally into the open space of the dining hall, or the pensive and haunting stillness of the long take of a Paris residence that opens Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005). But the long take has also been a concern for Hollywood’s mode of production in subordinating the construction of narrative time and space. The long take traditionally has not been a part of Hollywood’s classic narrative because of its potential to reveal the construction of filmic time and space. To create the illusion of a seamless and transparent narrative, many movies, particularly Hollywood cinema, organize shots in a manner that aesthetically diminishes gaps and ambiguities. As David Bordwell explains in his study of the classical Hollywood style, the handling of narrative temporality and spatiality “gears our expectations toward the resolution of suspense,” which is evident, for example, in the deadline or appointment narrative.5 Speed has an intimate relationship to the invisible editing model because it immediately removes the presence of mediation for the purposes of narrative immersion. Narrative time and space are constructed through the mode of practices generated by the classical narrator system, and these modes must be compressed or remain absent from the story to create the illusion of a unified and transparent system of storytelling. Therefore, shot length becomes crucial in terms of compressing gaps and avoiding lingering dead time. By emphasizing dead time within a

20

Capturing Digital Media

film’s narrative, or by dwelling longer on ambivalently motivated images, the system of mediation can potentially reveal itself to viewers. Instead of punctuating narrative causality, the film begins to question (or enter into dialogue with) the construction of time and space itself. For this reason, once the story is broken down and divided into shots, long takes, according to Bordwell, are usually discouraged in the classical Hollywood mode of production, because they can draw attention to the film’s mediation of time and space. I do share Bordwell’s account that many films follow the mode of classical Hollywood narrative in avoiding ambiguities and unmotivated dead time. But there are numerous examples of the long take that attempt to heighten viewers’ spectatorship without drawing significant attention to a film’s mediating process. As long as we do not interpret the long take as always emphasizing duration that halts the narrative flow, long continuous shots are capable of producing the same effect of invisible editing that Bordwell sees as essential to classical Hollywood narrative. Consider the long take in the Hampton robbery scene in Joseph H. Lewis’s crime drama Gun Crazy (1950). The sequence involves a bank heist, which transpires from the point of view of outlaws Bart and Annie, played by John Dall and Peggy Cummins. According to Lewis, the scene was four-pages long and scheduled for eleven camera shots, but he decided to film the scene in one long take. At the time, there were no camera support technologies available to Lewis for him to pull off this spectacular long take on location. Lewis used a stretch Cadillac and removed all of the seats to fit in the camera operator and a bare bones production crew. Eschewing the script, Lewis had actors Dall and Cummins improvise their dialogue to enhance the suspense and realism of the scene.6 Here the “real time” effect in the bank robbery scene rouses a high level of suspense and anticipation without drawing significant attention to the film’s construction of time and space as a distraction. It is also important to stress that narrative films are rarely composed purely of long takes. We must consider that the long takes are part of a film style. Intra-sequence cuts, as well as editing patterns within a scene, can impact the expression of the long take in relation to the film as a whole. As Brian Henderson points out, “The long take is not in itself a principle of construction (in them), but is a part of a shooting style, or characteristic way of shooting and building sequences.”7 Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), for example, opens with fastpaced editing as a way of capturing the jubilant and affluent life of the Ambersons. But with the invention of the automobile, things gradually fall apart for the Ambersons. Welles represents this transformation



1. Perfecting the Imperfect

21

through deliberate long takes that conspicuously slow the pacing of the film. In this regard, the film’s cutting pattern in relation to the long take plays an important role in both representing the decay of time and expressing the family’s tragic descent. The commonality of the above examples is what I describe as the perfection of the long take. In them, the long take may speed up or slow down the pace and flow of information, but the staging and movement of the camera perpetuates a tradition of not drawing significant attention to its mediating presence, such as an intrusive camera bump or camera shake. Part of understanding this aspect of the long take is exploring how technological advancements of the camera have aided filmmakers in achieving their vision. It is worth highlighting a few of these achievements as a way to transition into today’s film technologies.8 German filmmaker F. W. Murnau’s camera style made a strong impression on Hollywood and camera support technologies of the 1920s. In Lutz Bacher’s detailed research on the mobile long take, he explains that technological developments of the motion picture camera during the last years of the silent period are a result of Murnau’s influence.9 Almost all film cameras at the time were hand-cranked by the camera operator; however, Murnau’s cinematographer, Karl Freund, used a Stachow camera, which was much lighter and had a springmotor cranking mechanism.10 These small but effective new advances in camera technology helped Murnau and Freund focus specifically on sophisticated camera movements in order to further serve the narrative, such as the “unchained camera” in The Last Laugh (1924) that tracks backward and forward, up and down, and side to side as a means to express character interiority. During the 1940s, more filmmakers such as Otto Preminger and Vincent Minnelli employed longer takes that involved intricate camera movement. This required new types of camera support to meet filmmakers’ aesthetic demands. A significant invention that emerged during this period was the crab dolly, a camera support that allowed more flexibility of movement. During the making of Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (1947), cinematographer Lee Garmes and his camera crew had to solve the problem of filming a complex traveling long take. They came up with a four-wheeled dolly, which permitted the camera operator to move forward and turn sideways at a 90-degree angle—a method of steering termed “crabbing.” According to Garmes, the crab dolly “offered for the first time the means of shooting a continuous take and at the same time afforded all the variety of viewpoints that ordinarily would be achieved in a succession of takes made with the camera in

22

Capturing Digital Media

different set ups at different angles.”11 The crab dolly proved fruitful in Hitchcock’s experiment with extreme long takes in Rope (1948), because the camera operator could follow the characters through space without jerky or obtrusive movements. The technology of dollying also helped Hitchcock solve the set problem of moving the camera from room to room. He placed the walls and furniture on wheels, so they could be easily and quietly pushed aside as the camera and characters moved in tandem. To Hitchcock, the success of Rope’s experimentation by necessity subordinates the presence of the moving camera with the help of the crab dolly and movable walls. Perhaps more significant is the combination of camera and electronic supports that aid the moving camera. The video assist, for example, is a system which diverts light from the camera’s viewfinder into a video monitor for the camera operator and director to view and track the subject’s movements in space. The video assist could also be used for instant playback. But more importantly, the interfacing of the video monitor allowed more sets of eyes to work in tandem with the perspective of the camera operator, allowing better precision in filming complex takes—as with the intricate Steadicam movements through the corridors of the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). The Steadicam photography in The Shining not only exemplifies Kubrick’s penchant for long takes and the moving camera, but also shows significant technical achievements in the production of the moving image. The Shining offers another example of new film technologies and camera supports being created in the moment of production. Kubrick was not satisfied with the quality of images being fed from the Steadicam to the video monitor, so he helped to design wireless transmitters that were hidden in the set so the camera could move freely. Garrett Brown, under the direction of Mick Mason and Harold Payne, also designed custom mounts on the Steadicam so it could be put on wheels. However, they needed a movable camera support or dolly that could closely and precisely follow Danny (Danny Lloyd) on his Big Wheel as he navigated the corridors of the hotel. Both Kubrick and Brown used the Ron Ford wheelchair prototype as the solution. But it was not just moving the camera through the maze of the Overlook Hotel that interested Kubrick. He also employed the Steadicam for stationary shots. As Vincent LoBrutto explains, “With Kubrick’s technical acumen, he quickly learned that the Steadicam was in fact so steady that it could be employed in hard-to-get-to places and could be used for a take that required the camera to be stationary.”12 Kubrick’s various uses of the Steadicam and his new technical designs



1. Perfecting the Imperfect

23

for moving the camera fluidly and precisely through cinematic space illustrate the possibilities of the new expressions in the production of the long take. The different technologies involved in the production of the long take clearly show Kubrick’s precision and technical acumen as a practitioner of cinema in terms of managing contingencies on the set. Of course, as James Morrison observes, Kubrick’s calculated filmmaking also reflects the regimented and systematized worlds (past, present, and future) depicted in his films.13 At the same time, within these stringent environments, the long takes help to build dramatic tension without drawing significant attention to the construction of narrative time. For instance, the speed of the long take of Danny traversing the corridors on his Big Wheel bike has a video gaming perspective, immersing viewers into the self-contained world of the Overlook Hotel, a topic I will return to in Chapter 3. The movement through the labyrinthine spaces builds anticipation and suspense about what lies ahead and lurks around the corner—as with Danny’s terrifying encounter with the ghosts of the Grady twins. As such, The Shining illustrates significant advances in camera support technologies and camera movement. The Steadicam is an example of not only how new camera supports help capture innovative and dynamic expressions of filmic time and space, but also how video wave optics began to interface with the production and aesthetics of filmmaking, gesturing toward the emerging world of digital technologies and computer-generated images.

Digitization and the imperfection of the long take Today’s digital technologies allow even more precision and movement through space in the velocity of the long take. The combination of film and digital media offers filmmakers a variety of new forms of temporal and spatial framing. Lev Manovich highlights the use of digital compositing and its ability to render various images into a fluid, seamless, and continuous shot—which is not to suggest that early filmmakers did not experiment with techniques such as “matting” to create transparent images. A number of the deep focus shots in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), for example, incorporated the process of matting and keying such as Kane’s (Orson Welles) campaign speech scene. But with state-of-the-art simulation technologies, films can blend many layers within the frame, such as virtual actors, crowd sequences, and matted paintings with live-action recording. As Manovich explains, “Digital compositing does represent a qualitatively new step in the

24

Capturing Digital Media

history of visual simulation because it allows the creation of moving images of nonexistent worlds.”14 New digital technologies not only assist in creating imaginative virtual worlds, but also allow mobility within those specific dimensions. Digital effects become so life-like that filming a scene not only gives it a sense of urgency and speed, but also shows how the long take (along with camera support technologies) enhances narrative immersion. Consider the twelve-minute long-take armed gang ambush car sequence in Children of Men. As in Gun Crazy, almost the entire scene unfolds inside the car, as if viewers are following alongside the characters. Using a furnished car made specifically for this complex “claustrophobic” long take, Cuarón’s cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki and his crew laid “PowerSlides,” tracks on the roof of the car so the camera could fluidly slide back and forth. Attached to the camera was newly developed technology called the “Sparrow head.” Controlled by a joystick, the Sparrow head allowed precise camera movements, affording full-range vision of what was occurring inside and outside the car. Similar to the improvisation by Dahl and Cummins in Gun Crazy, the scene’s actors did not know when the camera would be filming them, which gave their performances spontaneity—and enhanced the suspense and speed of the long take. Like “the uprising” sequence noted above, the long take was shot in six sections, joined through digital compositing and invisible transitions. The use of invisible transitions in the long take offers viewers the illusion of an eyewitness perspective, as if events are unfolding in real time. The long take continues to be a central feature of Cuarón’s work, notably the seventeen-minute elaborate long take that opens Gravity (2013). The film begins with a shot of earth from space as faint chattering is heard. A spec of light is slowly revealed to be a space station being repaired by two astronauts, Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney). Stone and Kowalski receive word from Houston that Russia has destroyed one of their satellites with a missile and to abort the mission. Shortly after, a cascading storm of debris crashes into their space station, sending Stone spinning into space—all in one sweeping long take. Cuarón and his production team attempted in a number of ways to achieve a weightlessness effect in Gravity, such as flying in a reduced gravity aircraft known as the “vomit comet,” a production method used in Apollo 13 (Ron Howard, 1995). They also filmed actors flying around on a sound stage held by wires. But neither of these methods achieved Cuarón’s vision of weightless space—especially for long



1. Perfecting the Imperfect

25

continuous shots. Instead of shooting live-action footage, Cuarón employed reverse engineering by first creating the film’s 3-D visual effect, or what is known as pre-visualization: visualizing the storyboard before live-action filming. Actors had to match the preexisting digital world during live-action photography. As Gravity’s executive producer Chris DeFaria explains, “We didn’t create the virtual world and let the live action drive what was ultimately going to be the shot. We actually created the shot and then made the live action work within it.”15 All components of filmmaking, lighting, props, and even the movement of the actor’s eyes had to be converging at the right distance point. The next step in achieving the film’s weightlessness effect was using “creative robots” made by a robotic company called Bot & Dolly. The robots were attached with cameras and light sources that moved in synchrony, achieving fluid and very precise camera movements controlled by a robotic camera platform called IRIS.16 A custom computer interfaced with the robots, translating the pre-visualization footage into physical camera movements captured on set. The actors were then placed in a “light box” paneled with LED video screens that projected footage of the earth, sun, and stars so they could see the scene that surrounded them. The light box allowed Cuarón and cinematographer Lubezki to orchestrate a ballet of light as the creative robots captured Clooney and Bullock’s performances. The ambush car sequence in Children of Men and the opening sequence of Gravity demonstrate a significant and high level of perfection of the long take in its deployment of digital media, camera support technologies, and robotics. However, a new iteration of the long take has emerged: an emphasis on the imperfect. Certainly, filmmakers have used the mobile frame of handheld shots to create a “reality effect.” But a number of recent films have employed long takes with intentional shaky camerawork, emphasizing a cinema of mistakes and imperfection rather than one of precision. Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds (2005), for example, combined both live action and CGI to create a realistic and documentary-like effect. This look manifests in the long, sweeping take of Ray Ferrier’s (Tom Cruise) escape from New Jersey with his family in a speeding van while the “tripod-like” Martians attack with their heat-ray weapons. Spielberg originally envisioned shooting the three-minute scene in many cuts, but then decided to film the escape in one long-take sequence shot. The combination of optically live (celluloid) recorded action and CGI used during this sequence demonstrates the complexity of achieving realism and narrative immersion. Lev Manovich explains that

26

Capturing Digital Media

achieving synthetic realism means attaining two goals: “The simulation of the codes of traditional cinematography and the simulation of the perceptual properties of real life objects and environments.”17 For the first goal, like traditional photography, computer codes simulate a virtual camera that has lenses, depth of field, and lighting. For the second goal, however, the simulation of “real scenes” becomes more complex, because the images are constructed from scratch, making the illusion of photorealism harder to achieve. A challenge in achieving photorealism involves producing a digital generated image that is indistinguishable from a photochemical image. Manovich explains that, paradoxically, synthetic photographs are more “realistic” than traditional photographs, because “the synthetic image is free of the limitations of both human and camera vision. It can have unlimited resolution and an unlimited level of detail.”18 In this sense, the synthetic image is “too real” or hyperreal. To make the synthetic image appear more like traditional film photography, the resolution of a computer-generated image has to diminish its perfection by adding grain or diluting the color of the image to match or simulate the details of a photochemical image. War of the Worlds’s employment of CGI during Ray Ferrier’s long-take escape sequence renders a “real time” effect not only through the process of photorealism, but also using shaky camera movement that both “imperfects” the synthetic image and creates a sense of immediacy and suspense. But the documentary style of the long take in War of the Worlds is also part of the new landscape of science-fiction cinema that stresses the imperfection of the image rather than the precision of it. This calculation is notable in the degraded images and handheld camerawork in films such as District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009), Star Trek, Terminator Salvation (McG, 2009), and Edge of Tomorrow. Part of this development of long-take aesthetics can be contributed to the perfection of CGI. From this perspective, the long take in War of the Worlds carries a double logic with regard to narrative immersion and the emphasis on the imperfect. On the one hand, simulation technologies render Ray Ferrier’s escape from the Martians “real,” in spite of not having been filmed on a real interstate but rather staged using blue screen technology. On the other, the handheld camerawork aesthetically registers the artist or human as maker of the image. In this respect, the path to transparency in the long take oscillates between building artificial images through synthetic 3-D images in order to achieve synthetic realism and regulating the presence of “mistakes” that places emphasis on the human subject.



1. Perfecting the Imperfect

27

It is not only recent science fiction that utilizes a “mistakist” aesthetic. Musicals, too, have emphasized the organic to create a realist effect, such as the long-take opening of the freeway traffic jam musical, “Another Day of Sunshine” in Damien Chazelle’s musical La La Land (2016). La La Land depicts Los Angeles as a place of dreams and reallife struggles, spotlighting jazz musician Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) and actress Mia (Emma Stone). Here, La La Land’s opening long take vacillates between the organic and the fantastic as in the performance of “Another Day of Sunshine.” The long take glides in and out of cars as characters sing and dance on top of vehicles. One is certainly reminded of the dream/traffic jam sequence that opens Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963), a sequence that also informed Joel Schumacher’s opening traffic jam long take in Falling Down (1993). But like the long takes in Children of Men, Chazelle explains that “Another Day of Sunshine” is “three shots stitched together to look like one shot.”19 Yet the approach to the long take, according to Chazelle, was analog influenced: “We wanted to shoot in lyrical long takes, with a flowing camera and heightened color. We were always trying to solve things in-camera, like the colors; we didn’t want to rely on CG or manipulated color correction.”20 Chazelle’s choice to photograph La La Land on 35 mm celluloid corresponds to his desire to create a musical within a real-world setting without relying heavily on digital effects. At the same time, the film’s choreography and musical numbers are reminiscent of the MGM musicals of the 1950s. Not unlike J. J. Abrams’s choice to shoot The Force Awakens on celluloid, the style and look of La La Land is both aesthetically and nostalgically motivated.

Foreground and background Damien Chazelle stated that Jean-Luc Godard’s traffic jam long take in Weekend (1967) informed the opening number of La La Land.21 Here it is worth noting that the long take can generate a politics of the image in its uses of digital effects, such as Children of Men’s creative composition of background and foreground planes. Bazin argues that the aesthetics of realism bring “the spectator into a relation with the image closer to that which he enjoys with reality.”22 Depth of focus and long-take cinematography encourage a more active viewership in exploring the ambiguity of the image. In particular, depth of focus, for Bazin, spurs a “more active mental attitude on the part of the spectator and a more

28

Capturing Digital Media

positive contribution on his part to the action in progress.”23 By way of contrast, writing on Godard’s employment of the long tracking take in Weekend, Brian Henderson observes that the composition space in terms of foreground and background planes must be seen as “dialectically” flattening. Godard’s tracking long takes have little or no depth and often move lateral and parallel to the 180-degree axis line. The lack of depth in much of Godard’s tracking shots, according to Henderson, has a critical and political dimension, repudiating “the individualist conception of the bourgeois hero.”24 Godard collapsing the depth of field is an “assault on the bourgeois world view and self-image.”25 Godard’s tracking long takes demand a single perspective, as opposed to a comprehensible and transparent “bourgeois” space. But in the case of the deep focus long takes in Children of Men, Cuarón allows viewers to fix their gaze within the shot, purposely evoking a tension between the action unfolding in both the foreground and background. The dynamic between these two visual planes plays an important function in the positioning of objects and their thematic meaning within the film’s dystopia world, for instance, in the scene where Theo meets his cousin, Nigel (Danny Houston), who runs the ministry of the arts. As Theo enters Nigel’s home, a large sculpture of Michelangelo’s David is seen in the background. The statue of David, as Slavoj Žižek explains, is bereft of meanings, because it is “deprived of a world.”26 The same holds true for the image of Pink Floyds’ pigs floating in the sky seen through Nigel’s window in the distance. Indeed, the film sees immigrants and refugees in this same manner as they are deprived of a world as well. This is depicted in the action unfolding in the background rather than the foreground. The long takes in Children of Men rely upon digital imaging in order to build the spatial environment of the film’s futuristic setting. Unlike Godard’s dialectical flattening of space, the events unfolding in the background of Children of Men compete with Theo’s narrative trajectory. Franz Churchill echoes this, stating, “Alfonso wanted to catch what he called ‘moments of truthfulness’ where the camera panned past characters to wander off exploring the environment. . . . It was a visual motif that used wide-angle lenses, which made every frame say something about the protagonists in their world.”27 On the one hand, the long take evokes ambiguity within the shot as an aesthetic of realism that Bazin celebrates. On the other, the long take invites us to critically compare and evaluate foreground and background planes. From this perspective, Children of Men invites viewers to explore and navigate these worlds. Here the competing background and foreground modes at work in



1. Perfecting the Imperfect

29

Children of Men offer social and political critique. Children of Men primarily assumes viewers will draw upon their knowledge in order to contextualize the events occurring within the film’s background, such as recognizing Pink Floyd’s Animals album cover or identifying social concerns of invasion and biological threats post 9/11. The competing background and foreground planes demonstrate how practices of digital media not only inform the look and production of the long take, but the social and political meanings they may generate. Imperfection in Children of Men is depicted not only aesthetically (via the long take and washed-out look that reacts to the binary logic of digital code), but also symbolically in the film’s engagement with the biological. The binary code of digital can reproduce images, texts, and audio without degradation, but it is the reproduction of the human that is under threat in Children of Men’s futuristic world. The development of the long take in recent cinema not only demonstrates that the duration of the shot can be both pensive and immersive but can also speak to current technological conditions. The long take, once thought of as primarily slowing down the narrative, can be articulated as an attraction of shock and wonderment.28 At the same time, the progress of camera support technologies and digital technologies have contributed to the ease of moving the camera through space in creating spectacular long-take sequences. Moreover, the examples of the long take explored in War of the Worlds and Children of Men exemplify the relationship between drive and desire in balancing the perfection of digital and the organic. The logic of desire operates on lack and absence caused by the lost object. By contrast, the logic of the drive locates enjoyment by repeating loss. From this perspective, digital’s perfection realizes the repetitive nature of the drive. But perfection is not the drive itself, nor is it the object cause of desire. Rather our encounter with perfection realizes our fundamental lack. Perfection underscores that the object cause of desire can never be found. Yet the subject’s inability to locate the lost object is the source of his/her enjoyment. The long takes in Children of Men and War of the Worlds not only illustrate how far film technologies have developed, but also underscore a psychical component in our spectatorship. Here the perfection of the digital is dressed up with mistakes, shaky camera work, and degraded images. As such, it is the wounding of the digital that inscribes desire into these elaborate long takes. But in some cases, there are films that emphasize the repetition of drive so we experience the presence of time directly, specifically the time-looping narrative, a development considered in the following chapter.

30

CChapter 2 TIME-LOOPING NARRATIVE: SOURCE CODE, LOOPER, AND EDGE OF TOMORROW

War of The Worlds and Children of Men exemplify how new technologies such as robotics, camera support apparatuses, and digital visual effects can enhance the speed of the long take. As explained, both filmmakers purposely inserted mistakes, such as shaky camera work, and degraded images not only to offer viewers a documentary and “real-time” effect of the long take, but also to counteract the perfection of the digital. Digital technologies have also shaped the parceling and ordering of narrative information. Since the 1990s, a surge in nonlinear narratives in US cinema has emerged. Films such as Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993), Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), 21 Grams (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2003), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004) all forgo chronological storytelling. Scholars have attributed this increase in nonlinear narratives to everyday practices of digital media, such as surfing the internet, interactive video gaming, and time-shifting media.1 Certainly chronological narratives continue to be the dominant mode of cinematic storytelling. But digital technologies are forging new conditions for plotting events and in the amount of story information imparted to viewers, particularly through connections between repetition and memory in the time-looping narrative. Consider the climax of Scott Derrickson’s Doctor Strange, when Dr. Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor) arrive in Hong Kong to battle Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen) and his zealots, only to discover that the city is in ruins. Kaecilius destroyed the Hong Kong sanctum, one of three sanctums that protect Earth from other dimensions. With the sanctum unable to protect Hong Kong, the dark dimension begins to collapse the city. Strange and Mordo learn that Kaecilius has called upon Dormammu, lord of the dark dimension, to take over Earth, creating a world that Kaecilius describes as “beyond time, beyond death.” Mordo believes that nothing

32

Capturing Digital Media

can stop the dark dimension. Strange, however, has a plan. He enters into the dark dimension and traps himself with Dormammu in a place where time does not exist. Casting a spell from the Eye of Agamotto, Strange manipulates time in order to bargain with Dormammu to leave Earth. Strange enters into a time-loop in which Dormammu repeatedly kills him. By losing “again, and, again and again,” as Strange states, he paradoxically wins the game by making Dormammu his prisoner. The monotony of Strange’s death forces Dormammu to accept his bargain, thus ending the time-loop. Strange returns to Earth and reverses time, restoring Hong Kong back to its state before Kaecilius’s attack. Time-looping narratives have a close correlation to digital’s ability to clone copies of copies with no degradation. Nicholas Rombes explains that “the loop has become an indicator for the way information is stored, reproduced and recirculated with no generation loss.”2 Lev Manovich asks the following: “Can the loop be a new narrative form appropriate for the computer age?”3 Indeed, the repetition of Strange’s death is akin to digital’s atemporality. Dormammu has no sense of time. Yet the repetition of Strange’s death forces Dormammu to face the incessant reoccurrence of time itself. Accepting Strange’s bargain ends the nightmarish “death” loop for Dormammu. What follows is an examination of films that involve a time-looping narrative: Source Code, Looper, and Edge of Tomorrow. The goal of these films is to shut down the loop in order to restore the forward flow of time. Time-looping narratives approximate the logic of the drive, where enjoyment is located in movement for the sake of movement, and where the means is privileged over the ends. In order to shut off the loop, the characters in all three movies must resort to the logic of desire—where the goal is to satisfy the ends by projecting a future timeline. As such, in all three films, desire provides a respite from the ceaseless, nightmarish repetition of the drive. To transfer the film from drive to desire (the turn from repetition to linear forward-moving time), the characters must rely upon human memory production and, paradoxically, death itself.

Drive and desire and atemporal cinema Although Doctor Strange utilizes a time-loop narrative device to defeat Dormammu, the narrative flow of the film is primarily told linearly. Given the film’s fantastic, mind-bending digital effects with which city streets and buildings contort and twist while characters jump



2. Time-Looping Narrative

33

through portals into other dimensions, Doctor Strange still follows the traditions of classical narration by presenting a majority of its story in chronological order. Here, it is important to distinguish films that break with temporal linearity and films that defy chronology outright. The latter are films that do not adhere to the forward thrust of time; they are, what Todd McGowan terms, “atemporal cinema.” Atemporal cinema is a formal distortion of forward-moving time. As McGowan further explains, “The distortion of time [in atemporal cinema] takes place in the filmic discourse.”4 It is not the story itself that is atemporal, but rather the way the story is told. For example, Citizen Kane (1941) uses flashback to tell the story of Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles). Welles’s movement from past to present is guided for the spectator, such as the use of the dissolve to signify the change in time. Citizen Kane is an example of a film that breaks with temporal linearity, but always prompts the viewer when the story transitions into the past or present. Indeed, cinema often employs flashbacks to guide the viewer through the film’s changes in time, such as Walter Neff ’s (Fred MacMurray) voice-over in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944). Even though the film begins at the end, the flashbacks clearly demarcate the present and the past, moving back and forth from the insurance office where Walter narrates his story into the Dictaphone, to the events of the past that led him to being shot. Films such as 21 Grams and Fernando Ferreira Meirelles’s The Constant Gardener (2005), however, do not alert the spectator to a change in time. These films offer a different experience of temporality in cinema because they undermine linear narrative movement.5 As McGowan explains, “Time in these films doesn’t bring about a different future but instead an incessant repetition.”6 For McGowan, atemporal cinema characterizes the distinction between desire and drive. Jacques Lacan explains that the subject’s emergence into the symbolic order (the systems and networks of communication, culture, laws and unwritten laws) is the sacrifice of enjoyment. The basis of the symbolic order is loss. For Lacan, enjoyment does not mean the same as pleasure. Enjoyment is what Lacan refers to as jouissance—what is beyond the pleasure principle. The paradox for Lacan is that this “mythic” enjoyment never existed from the start. The prohibition of enjoyment binds a society and sustains and regulates the social order. At the same time, the subject continues to seek “the lost object” of plenitude—the place of mythic enjoyment. As McGowan observes, “The subject searches for the object that might return it to this mythic time.”7 The logic of desire is based on the belief that one can reclaim the “lost object” and be united

34

Capturing Digital Media

with enjoyment. But the object cause of the desire can never be found because it is primordially lost. Yet, keeping the object cause of desire at a distance sustains its allure. As Adrian Johnston explains, “In order for jouissance to retain its attractive allure, it mustn’t come too close. If one really gets what one thinks is wanted, the thing obtained is no longer ‘it.’”8 For the “thing” to maintain its sublime status, it must remain at a distance.9 From this perspective, the barrier toward the object cause of desire is the source of the subject’s enjoyment. Drive, on the other hand, locates enjoyment in the repetition of loss. Whereas desire searches for the ends, a possible future with the lost object, drive is only concerned with the means. As McGowan puts it, “Drive locates enjoyment in the movement of return itself—the repetition of the loss, rather than in what might be recovered,” as in the case of desire.10 Drive derives enjoyment in repetition rather than in reaching its destination. According to McGowan, drive has an intimate relationship to films that deny forward-moving time. Atemporal films such as 21 Grams and Memento do not seek a future ending. Drive resists future change because its only concern is continual repetition, as in Groundhog Day, where Phil (Bill Murray) repeats the same day over and over. By contrast, desire seeks a future possibility; it wants to find the lost object in order to obtain the ultimate satisfaction. Linear narrative films fit with the logic of desire because they position viewers toward the future— particularly the time-honored happy ending or romantic reunion. In John McTiernan’s Die Hard (1988), we are positioned alongside John McClane (Bruce Willis) as he tries to defeat Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) and his crew who have taken over the Nakatomi building to steal millions of dollars in bonds. McClane is constantly backed into a corner, continuously prompting viewers to ask: How will he get out of this situation? Each obstacle (presented chronologically) becomes harder and harder for McClane to overcome. Our spectatorship is consistently directed toward the future, with McClane’s defeat of Gruber as the ultimate goal. Whereas desire moves in a chronological fashion, drive operates on repetition. Time-loop narratives follow the logic of the drive whereby characters are faced with repeating events posing as obstacles that must be defeated. The challenge and pleasure of time-loop narrative films is discovering how characters will undo the repetition of the event or day and restore time as forward-moving. In Source Code, Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) has eight minutes to locate the bomber on a virtual train called the “source code.” After eight minutes, the train explodes, returning him to a capsule in the real world, only to repeat the



2. Time-Looping Narrative

35

same event again and again. In Looper, Joe Simmons (Joseph GordonLevitt) is part of a group of specialized assassins called loopers. Joe’s job is to kill his target sent from an employer that exists thirty years in the future. Eventually, his future self will appear from the future as a target whom he must assassinate, known as “closing your loop.” Once Joe assassinates his future self (which is signaled by gold bars tied to the person’s back), his loop is closed, and he has only thirty years left to live. In Edge of Tomorrow, Major William Cage (Tom Cruise) must find a way to track the queen Omega alien that has the ability to reset the day. After a Mimic kills Cage on the battlefield, the alien’s blood seeps into Cage’s body, granting him the ability to repeat the same day over and over. Killing the queen Omega not only destroys all the aliens connected to her, but also ends Cage’s ability to time-loop, thus restoring the film to forward-moving time. In all three films, the goal is to shut down the loop and restore the film’s temporality to the logic of desire. If the repeating narrative event/day correlates to digital’s perfection, then closing the loop has an intimate connection to the subject of desire and lack. In all three cases, death is the only option to bring about linear time.

Where is everybody? The first broadcast episode of The Twilight Zone’s “Where Is Everybody?” (1959) involves Mike Ferris (Earl Holliman), an Air Force pilot, who finds himself walking through the deserted town of Oakwood. Mike does not remember who he is or how he found himself in Oakwood. One thing is for sure: Mike wishes he could wake up from his nightmare. While exploring the town center, Mike hears a phone ringing in a phone booth; he encounters a freshly lit cigar burning in an ash tray in the town’s abandoned police station; he enters an empty movie theatre screening Douglas Sirk’s Battle Hymm (1957), which happens to be about a U S Air Force pilot played by Rock Hudson. Of course, no one is running the picture in the projection booth. At the end of the episode, we learn that Mike’s imagination is, in fact, running the pictures. Mike has been confined to an isolation room within an airplane hangar for 484 hours and 36 minutes. Under the watchful eye of military men, Mike’s vitals are monitored and measured to see if he can handle the stress of loneliness as a candidate to fly to the moon. The town of Oakwood was nothing other than Mike’s hallucination. The existential questions posed in the episode are the following: Can

36

Capturing Digital Media

we live without companionship? Are objects such as phone booths, movie theatres, diners, and jukeboxes only meaningful within the social context of human connection? In a similar way, Source Code explores the confinement of the subject, but through virtual reality. Whereas the military in “Where Is Everybody?” calculates and measures Mike’s ability to withstand isolation, in Source Code, the military seeks new methods to fight terrorism in the twenty-first century by interfacing the human brain with the digital. The former focuses on conquering space travel and loneliness. The latter involves a technological experiment that attempts to undermine terrorist cells through a simulated environment by harvesting the last eight minutes of the dead. If we thought Mike was in some sort of purgatory state in “Where Is Everybody?,” Captain Colter Stevens of Source Code is truly living an existential “virtual” nightmare. Source Code tells the story of Colter, who is sent into a computerized reality to find a terrorist who blew up a train earlier that morning in Chicago. Not unlike in “Where Is Everybody?,” viewers are thrust into a setting without a narrative cue that they are, in fact, seeing a digitally constructed environment. Source Code begins with aerial shots of the Chicago cityscape, crosscutting with a commuter train on its way to the city. Like Mike strolling through the barren courtyard square of Oakwood, Colter awakens on a train unaware of his surroundings. Across from him is another passenger, Christina (Michelle Monaghan), who thanks him for giving her advice to dump her boyfriend. Confused, Colter is bombarded with details, such as a woman spilling coffee on his feet, and the train porter checking passengers’ tickets. Colter observes the unfamiliar images that pass by his window. At one point, he is taken aback to see that he is not the owner of the face reflected in the train’s window. He quickly enters the bathroom and sees that his face belongs to a stranger named Sean Fentress. Before Colter can begin to organize his thoughts, the train explodes, killing him instantly. The image cuts to Colter awakening in what appears to be a capsule. Here, we are introduced to Captain Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga), who speaks to Colter through a video screen. She asks if he saw the bomber on the train. We learn that the train’s setting was harvested from the brain of Sean Fentress, a victim who died in a terrorist bombing in Chicago that morning. Scientist Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright) explains to Colter that the human brain is able to retain eight minutes of memory after death. What Colter (and viewers) is experiencing on the train is Sean’s final memories before the explosion, which has been digitally constructed as



2. Time-Looping Narrative

37

“source code.” The mission for Colter is to locate the bomber and report the name to Goodwin, with the goal of preventing another terrorist attack in Chicago. Whereas time is organized in a linear mode in “Where Is Everybody?,” the narrative discourse of Source Code is atemporal— repeating the same event over and over. Time does not move forward for Colter, nor can he project a future timeline because, as Rutledge explains to him, he is dead. The capsule functions as a manifestation of his mind. Indeed, like Mike in “Where Is Everybody?” Colter is faced with an existential crisis as he lives between two deaths (one physical and the other virtual). Rutledge explains to Colter that he died during a battle in Afghanistan, and the remains of his body are connected to life support in order to keep his neural sensors active. Rutledge planted Colter’s consciousness into Fentress’s so he can experience Fentress’s final eight minutes on the train. All of the passengers on the train Colter has seen in source code died, including Christina, whom he is romantically attracted to. These passengers cannot exist outside of eight minutes. As Rutledge puts it, finding the bomber is the mission, everything else is irrelevant. Colter’s mission aligns Source Code with the detective narrative. Quite simply, the long-established detective figure begins with no knowledge and moves toward knowledge by solving the case. The detective starts with something missing; this propels him on his journey. The viewer identifies with Colter; he is our surrogate and we most likely know as much as he does. Like Colter, we begin with lack, and progress toward knowledge and understanding within the world of source code. As such, solving the case brings order to disorder. As Michael Eaton puts it, “The detective was created to restore some semblance of temporary order to the unintelligible chaos of life.”11 Certainly Colter is not like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe of The Big Sleep and other novels, or Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974)—detectives, as Eaton states, that “can negotiate the maze that is the city and crack its codes.”12 Rather, Colter’s mapping and interpreting virtual “codes” is closely affiliated with gaming. Colter has a short window of time to deduce information and form patterns. It is only through the repetition and the practice of playing the game that Colter moves toward the path of knowledge. Beating the game involves Colter mapping the movements, routines, and behaviors of the passengers. Not unlike the practices of the detective, Colter must bring order to chaos, to set time on its forwarding-moving path, albeit in the virtual dimension. The mystery must be solved for the military and for the greater good. Rutledge explains that they believe more

38

Capturing Digital Media

attacks are planned in Chicago. In this way, Colter’s mission to find the bomber not only ends the film’s atemporal mode (restoring it to the logic of desire) but also brings resolution and order for the military to undermine terrorism. There is also the mystery of Colter himself, as he figures out what happened to him in Afghanistan. When Colter is sent back into source code, he begins to investigate himself, asking Christina to search for a man named Colter Stevens on the internet, saying that he was a friend of his in the military. Colter shockingly learns that he was, in fact, killed in action in Afghanistan. A series of brief images show Colter after the battle and how Dr. Rutledge prepared him for the source code program. Returning to the capsule, Colter asks Goodwin to terminate him, as he refuses to finish the mission. But Goodwin plays a recorded message from Colter’s father. The message reveals that Colter and his father had an argument before he departed for Afghanistan. Colter has tremendous guilt for not apologizing to his father. Here, Colter decides to complete the mission, but with the stipulation that he is taken off of life support after he finds the bomber. The traumatic event for Colter is not only learning that he had died in military action, but also the regret of leaving his father without reconciliation. Colter’s culpability speaks directly to the death drive. The death drive is not in the subject’s wanting to die. Rather, as Slavoj Žižek explains, “it is a name for the ‘undead’ eternal life itself, for the horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain.”13 On the one hand, to undo the film’s timeloop is to find the bomber and prevent another attack in Chicago. On the other, to communicate with his father ameliorates their estranged relationship. In both cases, solving the case and familial reconciliation restore time to its forward-moving course. After Colter finds the bomber, he asks Goodwin to send him to source code one more time (before he is taken off of life support). In his last dive into source code, Colter, pretending to be Sean, calls his father and resolves their differences. He then uses his final insertion into source code to rescue everyone on the train. However, saving the passengers is not for the military or the greater good, but for Colter himself. Moreover, he believes that he can live out his life with Christina in an alternative timeline in source code. After saving the passengers, Colter has a romantic reunion with Christina that ends with them observing Chicago’s “Cloud Gate” sculpture which, ironically, is located in the “loop” of Chicago’s central business district.



2. Time-Looping Narrative

39

Rutledge’s source code proves fruitful in undermining terrorism. Colter is the first case to test the validity of its virtual combativeness. Source code’s success suggests that fighting terrorists on the ground (or in the physical world) might not be an effective tool in the early twentyfirst century. Here, the allure of source code is that the digital domain may prove more essential than physical combat to undermining terrorist organizations. At the same time, source code is only effective with the help of the dead. Of course, this is why Dr. Rutledge wants to keep Colter “alive.” Not only is he proof that source code works, but he is also a good detective. As Rutledge says to him, “Saving people is what you do best.” Yet we are reminded of the horror of war when we finally see Colter’s “real” body toward the end of the film, which is just a torso interfaced by the digital. Indeed, Colter’s identifying the bomber, his reconciliation with his father, and his romantic reunion with Christina as an alternative reality in source code all point toward the appeal of the digital. First, the military recognizes the potential of virtualized spaces as a means of preventing terrorism. Second, in the virtual Colter verifies not only his death, but also the space in which he amends his relationship with his father. Finally, Colter’s romantic reunion with Christina, as Sean, demonstrates a better life outside of the everyday. Hilary Neroni explains that the romantic union often depicted in Hollywood cinema alleviates the antagonism of the symbolic order. She writes, “The love relationship makes each feel whole, which is to say, free from alienation and complete.”14 For Neroni, ideology depends on the force of “complementarity” to coat over the antagonism of the symbolic order. This is played out in Source Code’s uplifting sequence where the passengers no longer recognize themselves as atomized and fragmented. From this perspective, digital has an ideological dimension in this scene, suggesting a relationship within the virtual that is more effective than the reality itself. The digital domain of source code elides the antagonism of the symbolic order not only for Colter, but for all the passengers. Ironically, this fantasized alternate reality comes about only through Colter and Fentress’s deaths.

The beginning is the end Source Code employs an atemporal mode to reflect the film’s time-loop at a microlevel, repeating the same event on the train every eight minutes. The time-loop narrative of Rian Johnson’s Looper, however, operates at

40

Capturing Digital Media

a macro level. As I will explain, it is not until roughly a half hour or so into the narrative that we encounter the atemporal structure of the film. The complexity of the narrative is not only its discourse (the way the story is told), but also characters’ relationship with time travel— particularly the existential dilemma of “closing your loop.” In 2044, Joe Simmons is a “looper” hired by a crime syndicate, an organization that exists thirty years in the future. The crime syndicate in the future uses time travel (which is outlawed in the present) to dispose of its enemies. The crime syndicate “zaps” its victims into the past (2044) at a set time and place, and the looper kills them with a “blunderbuss” gun. When the victim arrives, his head is cloaked in a burlap sack to avoid any eye contact with the looper. Attached to the back of the victim are silver bars to pay the looper. But, if the victim has gold bars, it means that the looper killed its future self, an act known as “closing your loop.” After the loop is closed, the looper has thirty years left to live. As Joe states, “This is a job for non-forward-thinking people.” In thirty years, after Joe closes his loop, he will be sent to the past to be killed by his past self. Whereas Source Code borrows from the tradition of the detective narrative, Looper’s futuristic world is predominantly shaped by the qualities of film noir. Joe’s voice-over, the seedy setting of the La Belle Amore night club, and the grittiness of the city encompass the film’s neo-noir dystopia in Kansas, 2044. In particular, film noir’s questions of fate and existentialism are most concerned with the character of Joe. Joe has no attachments; he is a lonely figure. Joe’s loneliness is portrayed in a series of routines that involve him blasting his victim near a cane field, repeating trips to a diner where he teaches himself French, exchanging his silver bars for cash, taking drugs, partying at La Belle, and sleeping with a prostitute. Indeed, the repetition of these events speaks closely to the logic of the drive. For Joe, pleasure occurs within the repetition of work and play. His only importance is saving his silver bars and closing his loop so he can live the rest of his life (albeit only thirty years) in France. However, Joe’s loyalty to himself is tested when another looper and friend Seth (Paul Dano) seeks his help. Seth is unable to close his loop— known as “letting your loop run,” which is extremely dangerous. Seth and his older self are now occupying the same timeline, circumstances that can have serious consequences for the future. Although Joe is reluctant to get involved, he hides Seth in a floor safe in his apartment. Kid Blue (Noah Segan) and other “Gat Men” arrive, looking for Seth. They bring Joe to Abe Mitchell (Jeff Daniels), a man sent from the future to manage the loopers. Abe warns Joe that if he does not tell



2. Time-Looping Narrative

41

them where Seth is hiding, they will take half of his silver bars. Joe gives up Seth because his silver bars are more important to him than human attachments. Joe’s self-loyalty and drive-like repetition of work and play do not mean that he completely lacks desire. His goal of living in France with his gold bars after closing his loop follows the logic of desire to imagine a possible future life. Abe tells Joe that he is going to live in Shanghai, which Joe eventually does. Yet because Joe knows he will die in thirty years, his destiny, in fact, does not end in the future in Shanghai, but in the past in Kansas. Joe’s fate is confirmed when his future self (played by Bruce Willis) arrives in the cane field. Here I will refer to Joe’s future self as “Older Joe.” Unexpectedly, Older Joe emerges uncloaked, causing Younger Joe to hesitate as he makes eye contact with his future self. As Younger Joe prepares to fire his blunderbuss, Older Joe spins around and uses the gold bars tied to his back to shield the gun’s blast. As Younger Joe reloads his blunderbuss, Older Joe knocks out Younger Joe and steals his truck. Younger Joe awakens hours later and finds a note written by Older Joe telling him to hop a train and run out of town. Younger Joe knows that Abe’s Gat Men will be looking for him because he let his looper run. Younger Joe returns to his apartment, which has been torn apart by Abe’s men. As he grabs a gun, he sees his floor safe door open. On top of his silver bars, which were taken out of the safe, he sees a burning cigarette. Kid Blue emerges. Younger Joe tackles him and traps him in the floor safe. Younger Joe tells Kid Blue to let Abe know that he is going to fix the situation. Another Gat Man arrives, as Younger Joe crashes through the apartment window. Hanging onto the fire escape ladder outside the building, Younger Joes loses his grip and falls backward. The film cuts to black. Here the film makes a radical change in narrative discourse. The film’s second time line begins as we see Younger Joe in the cane field waiting for his victim to be sent from the future. When the victim arrives, it is Younger Joe’s older self. It is as if the movie starts over. However, Younger Joe kills his older self—thus, closing his loop. The film quickly shows the passing of thirty years in Joe’s life in Shanghai. As Joe grows older, the actor switches to Bruce Willis. Older Joe in the future becomes involved in crime and drugs but is eventually saved by a woman whom he marries. Older Joe knows that he will be sent back to the past in Kansas to be executed. So, when the time comes to be zapped into the past, he overpowers his captors, enters the time machine, and arrives in 2044 in Kansas to see his younger self, whom he knocks out. Indeed, two timelines are presented to the viewer side by side: one of Younger Joe, who lets his loop run, and a younger Joe who does close

42

Capturing Digital Media

his loop and moves through time in thirty years in Shanghai. These two timelines form a circle. In this respect, Looper adheres to an atemporal mode of narration. Whereas Colter’s time-loop involves eight minutes before his death, Joe cannot go beyond thirty years of his life because he will be sent to the past in Kansas 2044 to be executed by his younger self. As such, Looper complicates chronological progression, forcing viewers to compare the storylines of Joe simultaneously. On the one hand, the film corresponds to the logic of desire, because both timelines progress in a linear path (only to come together as a circle). On the other, they are representative of the drive, for they show that the future does not hold the solution to the problem. Older Joe has to return to the past in Kansas in order to correct the course of events in the future in Shanghai. When meeting his wife in Shanghai, Older Joe forms an attachment and begins to clean up his life. The only way for Older Joe to live beyond the thirty-year mark is to alter the events of the past in Kansas. Older Joe’s mission is to find three young boys—one of them who will grow up to be “The Rainmaker,” a person with powerful telekinesis who will eventually overthrow all of the major crime bosses. The Rainmaker is responsible for sending Older Joe to the past to be killed by his younger self. Older Joe has birth numbers and medical records and knows where each child lives. If Older Joe succeeds in his mission, he will disappear and return to his wife in the future. Older Joe sees a future beyond his thirty years with his wife. But Younger Joe has no attachments. Younger Joe’s only goal is to do his job, take drugs, and party. Younger Joe does not see the future as the solution, because he knows that he will die in thirty years. Outside of Younger Joe’s apartment, Older Joe learns that Younger Joe did not follow his instructions to leave town. Here, we see the same event, in which Younger Joe returns to his apartment shown earlier, but now from Older Joe’s perspective. He sees Younger Joe enter the apartment’s building, not knowing that Kid Blue is waiting for him. Moments later, Older Joe sees Younger Joe crash through his apartment window as he hangs onto the fire escape ladder. Older Joe watches Younger Joe fall and crash onto the hood of a car. Older Joe checks Younger Joe’s pulse to make sure he is still alive. He grabs Younger Joe, and then leaves him at the train station. When Younger Joe awakens, he carves the word “Beatrix” into his wrist. At a library, Older Joe pulls up a record of the three boys he is searching for, and a map of their locations. Suddenly, a scar emerges on Older Joe’s wrist that reads “Beatrix.” Older Joe knows that Beatrix is the waitress who works at the diner that Younger Joe routinely visits.



2. Time-Looping Narrative

43

The next day, Older Joe and Younger Joe meet at the diner (see Figure 2.1). Younger Joe learns that his future self has time travelled from the future to kill the three young boys to end The Rainmaker’s reign of power. Older Joe explains to Younger Joe that his life is going to change in the next thirty years. But Younger Joe does not care because he only thinks of himself. Kid Blue and his Gat Men arrive at the diner, and a shootout ensues. Older Joe escapes. But Younger Joe has stolen one of the three potential locations of the child from Older Joe, leading him to a cane farm located outside the city. But Younger Joe cannot make his presence known on the farm because that memory will be transplanted to Older Joe. At the farm, Younger Joe begins to have symptoms of withdrawal because he is a junkie. Here, he meets Sara (Emily Blunt) who runs the farm. Younger Joe and Sara fall for each other. Younger Joe learns that Sara’s son, Cid (Pierce Gagnon), is The Rainmaker. This new memory is transmitted to Older Joe, who travels to the farm to kill Cid. At the climax of the film, Older Joe is about to kill Sara and Cid. But Younger Joe realizes that in order to protect Cid and Sara, his only choice is suicide. Joe arrives at this conclusion by projecting a future timeline where all narratives converge. As he says: “Then I saw it. I saw a mom who would die for her son. A man who would kill for his wife. A boy, angry and alone. Laid out in front of him, the bad path. I saw it. And the path was a circle, round and round. So, I changed it.” Once Younger Joe compiles all the memories of the film’s timelines, he points the blunderbuss to his chest and kills himself, erasing his future self, and thus closing the time-loop. By committing suicide, Younger Joe saves Cid and Sara. And, because Sara is not killed, Cid takes the good path and does not become The Rainmaker. In the same way that Strange uses the repetition of death to defeat Dormammu in Doctor

Figure 2.1  Looper. Older Joe (left) and Younger Joe (right) meet face to face.

44

Capturing Digital Media

Strange, Younger Joe kills himself to close the loop and set the paths of Sara and Cid on a new course of time. In this sense, Joe sees suicide as the solution to the problem of the future. Similar to Source Code, love is what causes Joe to surrender his enjoyment as the logic of the drive. But unlike Source Code, there is no romantic reunion for Joe and Sara. We are left in a state of antagonism rather than wholeness, which is attributed to the film’s temporal restoration of desire.

Progression through repetition Whereas Source Code demonstrates the effectiveness of virtual reality on the war on terrorism, the military/sci-fi film Edge of Tomorrow relies on the interfacing of the human with the machine and digital to physically battle aliens called the Mimics, who have invaded Earth with the ability to reset time. If an Alpha alien is killed, the Omega alien can turn back time. The Omega’s ability to control time allows the Alpha to remember what is going to happen before it actually happens, giving it an advantage on the battlefield. Major William Cage, a media public relations officer, is sent to Britain to meet with General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson). Brigham requests that Cage cover an upcoming major invasion in France. Cage, who has no combat experience, objects to Brigham’s orders and threatens to blackmail him by blaming him for the invasion if it should fail. Brigham orders the arrest of Cage. When Cage attempts to flee, he is tasered as the image cuts to black. Cage awakens handcuffed at Heathrow Airport. He learns that he has been demoted from major to private and accused of being a deserter. The next morning, Cage is forced to fight during the invasion. As explored in Chapter 1, the long take in Children of Men’s uprising sequence offers a real-time effect of the battle between the refugees and the British soldiers. Similarly, Edge of Tomorrow’s invasion sequence employs a documentary style to create a sense of immediacy and spontaneity. Not unlike Children of Men, the cinematography of Edge of Tomorrow offsets the perfection of the digital by utilizing handheld camerawork and muted colors. At the same time, the film relies on digital effects to create a spectacular battle sequence. But whereas Children of Men’s long take enables us to follow Theo as he traverses the space of the uprising sequence, Edge of Tomorrow’s quick editing and handheld photography prevents us from gaining mastery of space during the invasion on the beach. This fragmented and shattered ordering of space corresponds to Cage’s inexperience in combat as he stumbles along the



2. Time-Looping Narrative

45

beach. Confused by the chaos around him, Cage removes his helmet and sees Rita (Emily Blunt), a famous sergeant known as the “Angel of Verdun,” killed by a Mimic. Rita’s image sticks with Cage because he remembers seeing a military advertisement that featured her as “Full Metal Bitch.” Cage moves blindly and clumsily through the invasion, as he is unable to work his battle suit, which is equipped with machine guns and rocket launchers. At one point, Cage and the soldiers are overpowered by the Mimics. One of the soldiers figures out that the invasion is a trap. Suddenly, Cage and a group of men are surrounded by a large Mimic. Cage finally manages to operate his battle suit and kills the Mimic. Shortly after, Cage is unexpectedly killed by an Omega alien. Some of the alien’s blood seeps into Cage’s body as he dies. Cage awakens at Heathrow and discovers it is the same day before the battle. He realizes that the Omega’s blood gave him the ability to “reset the day.” Each time Cage dies, he returns to the operating base at Heathrow and restarts the same day. As Cage repeats the same day over and over, he warns Sgt. Farell (Bill Paxton) and his squad at Heathrow that the invasion is a trap. Of course, no one believes him. Cage continues to die on the battlefield. But as he repeatedly dies, he becomes more and more skilled in combat, detecting patterns, and remembering when and where the Mimics will attack. At one point during his combat with the Mimics, Cage saves Rita, telling her that he needs her help to get off the beach. Rita recognizes something unusual about his combat skills. Cage knows exactly when a Mimic is about to attack him before it even happens. Right before Rita dies, she tells him to find her after he wakes up. Rita also had the power to reset the day, but eventually lost it. Meeting Dr. Carter (Noah Taylor), Cage discovers that the source of the Mimics’ ability to time-shift is the queen Omega, who is undetectable. Cage learns that the Mimics are “a perfectly evolved world-conquering organism.” In fact, the Mimics’ power to time-loop is a threat to humanity. As Dr. Carter says to Cage, “An enemy that knows the future can’t lose.” Indeed, the aliens’ ability to time-shift recalls the perfection of the digital. As Nicholas Rombes explains, “Symbolically, the pristine, perfect, one-to-one replication promised by the digital haunts movies from the digital era.”15 Here, Edge of Tomorrow’s time-loop narrative is analogous to digital’s ability to clone copies of copies with no degradation. Like Dr. Strange trapping Dormammu in a time-loop, it is the repetition of death itself that can overcome the Omega. The only way to defeat the Mimics is for Cage to find and kill the queen Omega. The queen Omega will search for Cage because of his ability to time-loop, but as she comes close to finding

46

Capturing Digital Media

him, he begins to have visions of her location. The “organism’s only vulnerability,” as Dr. Carter states, is “humanity” itself. Cage not only has to keep dying until he locates the queen Omega but also must rely on his memory production. After Cage has a vision of the queen Omega, who is hiding in a dam in Germany, Cage and Rita must discover a way to escape the beach during the invasion without being killed. Like Colter in Source Code, the only way for Cage and Rita to make it off the beach is through practice and repetition. Not unlike Source Code, Edge of Tomorrow takes on a gaming aspect in terms of mapping the moves of the Mimics and traversing the space of the invasion. Similar to Colter falling for Christina in Source Code, Cage finds himself attracted to Rita. Not unlike Younger Joe and Sara’s relationship in Looper, forming an attachment to Rita is a dilemma for Cage. Each time Cage repeats the event, Rita does not know who Cage is. However, Cage learns more about Rita through the repetition of the same day. His loyalty to the mission, however, is tested when he and Rita make it off the beach and find a helicopter at a farm house. Rita wants to find the keys for the helicopter so they can fly to the dam to kill the queen Omega. Cage lies about the location of the keys because he knows that the farm house is where Rita dies. “This is how far you go,” he tells her. But Rita does not relinquish her desire to complete the mission. Like Older Joe in Looper, Cage knows what occurs in the future and is torn about giving Rita the keys. For Cage to go forward and kill the queen Omega, and thus end the time-loop, he must let Rita die. But to do this, he must sacrifice his emotional attachment to her. Instead, Cage chooses death and repeats the day once again. Cage eventually flies to the dam and learns that the queen Omega is not there. The vision transmitted from the queen Omega was a trap. Cage and Rita’s final option to kill the Omega is to convince General Brigham to give them Dr. Carter’s transponder. The transponder is a device that Dr. Carter built to locate the queen Omega. Brigham did not believe Dr. Carter that Mimics can time-shift and was placed under psychiatric evaluation. But Brigham kept Dr. Carter’s transponder, which is located in a safe in his office. Cage and Rita repeatedly meet with Brigham in an effort to persuade him to give them the device. Once Brigham gives them the transponder, Cage sticks it into his leg and learns that the queen Omega is at the Louvre Museum in Paris. Driving to the Louvre, Cage and Rita are attacked by Brigham’s men. Cage is seriously hurt and loses his power to reset the day. He now has only one opportunity to kill the queen Omega. Yet killing the queen Omega



2. Time-Looping Narrative

47

will presumably result in Cage’s irreversible death. But when Cage finally destroys the queen Omega at the Louvre, some of the Omega’s blood seeps into him before he dies. Cage awakens on a helicopter. It is the same day and time that began the movie. Cage lands at the UK Ministry of Defense as he learns that the Mimics have retreated. Like Colter saving the passengers in his final run into source code, Cage’s final death resets the day for everyone, thus shutting down the timeloop and restoring time’s linear course. Cage visits Rita, who is working out. She sees him and does not know who he is. Through the repetition of dying, Cage has accumulated knowledge about Rita. Yet neither he (nor the film itself) has ever gone past the time of the invasion on the beach. Although Cage’s feelings for Rita have not waned, the irony is that Rita has no memory of him. He is a stranger to her as the films ends. As with the ending of Looper, we are left with antagonism rather than unification. Both Rita’s odd reaction to Cage’s appearance at the end of the film and the conversation Older and Younger Joe have at the diner in Looper resemble The Twilight Zone episode (1960) “Nightmare as a Child,” which involves a teacher, Helen Foley (Janice Rule), who finds a young girl named Markie (Terry Burnham) sitting on the steps outside of her apartment door (see Figure 2.2). Markie oddly knows everything about Helen, even knowing about a scar below her elbow. Markie asks Helen if she remembers how she got the scar. Helen forcefully responds, “Of course, I remember.” Markie asks: “Then how did it happen?” Helen

Figure 2.2  The Twilight Zone. Helen (left) encounters Markie (right), herself as a child.

48

Capturing Digital Media

says, “Well, actually, I don’t remember how it happened.” Helen adds that something did happen to her when she was a child, but she can’t remember. Markie asks, “Do people look familiar to you sometimes?” Here Markie begins to ask Helen about a man that she saw on her way home from work that day. The man was in a car at a stoplight and had made eye contact with Helen. Although Helen does not know who the man is, he looked very familiar and made her feel frightened. Shortly after, a door shuts outside of Helen’s apartment. Frightened, Markie exits through a backdoor, for she believes the person whom Helen saw earlier at the stoplight is outside of Helen’s apartment. A knock is heard on the door. Helen opens the door and meets Peter Selden (Shepperd Strudwick). Peter knew Helen when she was a child. He had worked for her mother before she was murdered. Helen had seen her mother’s murderer, but the trauma caused her to repress the memory. After Peter leaves, Helen lies down on the couch and closes her eyes. We see Helen’s memories of the night when her mother was killed. Helen awakens and hears Markie singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” outsider her apartment door. Here we learn that Markie is, in fact, Helen as a young child. Unbeknownst to Helen, the driver she had seen earlier is Peter Selden, the man who killed Helen’s mother when she was a child. Filmed in a close-up of Helen, Markie proceeds to tell Helen what happened the night her mother was murdered. Helen finally remembers that it was Peter who killed her mother. Frighteningly, Helen turns around and gasps to see Peter standing in her apartment. As Peter attacks Helen, she escapes. Helen knocks on a neighbor’s door for help, but Peter catches her. Helen pushes Peter down the stairs outside her apartment, killing him instantly. Although Markie is a manifestation of Helen’s mind, the episode’s collapsing of past and present enacts the time-loop narrative. Ending the time-loop and restoring the film to forward-moving time involves the production of memory. Unlike the perfection of digital copies of copies, human memory is akin to analog and loss, and thus can potentially disintegrate and fade away. The repetitive use of analog, such as tape or vinyl, is what makes its materiality susceptible to deterioration and, ultimately, absence. Ironically, the repetition of the same event, as in the cases of Cage in Edge of Tomorrow and Colter in Source Code, not only strengthens their memory, but also results in their attachments and attraction to Rita and Christina respectively. Similar to Markie in “Nightmare as a Child,” Older Joe explains to Younger Joe that he will meet a beautiful woman in the future who will save his life. But Younger Joe knows that if Older Joe shows him a picture of his wife he



2. Time-Looping Narrative

49

can change the future. As he says to Older Joe, “Show me the picture. As soon as I see her, I walk away. I’ll fucking marry someone else. . . . When I see that picture, the fog inside your brain should just swallow up all the memories.” By changing the course of the past, Older Joe may potentially lose his wife in the future. Whereas Markie shows Helen a picture of herself as a child in order to jog her memory, Older Joe must prevent Younger Joe from seeing a picture of his wife in order to protect his future timeline. Older Joe knows that if Younger Joe sees his future wife, he may not form an attachment to her. This would radically change the future and undermine Older Joe’s entire plan to kill The Rainmaker and thus prevent his wife’s death. Nicholas Rombes poses the question that, despite our best efforts, is it not true that in the digital era “we cannot escape the overbearing past?”16 Todd McGowan suggests that the digital era leaves “subjects adrift in the experience of an eternal present.”17 Indeed, the perfection of digital has contributed to the flattening of time and space as we wrestle with an abundance of data in the digital age. At the same time, database offers a way to build narratives out of disparate information and thereby reinforce memory production. Source Code and Edge of Tomorrow incorporate a gaming component as their protagonists fight to return time to its normal course. But what are the social and political implications of a database culture? How does gaming factor in database culture in constructing cinematic time and space?

50

CChapter 3 THE DATABASE, GAMING, AND FIRSTPERSON SHOOTER PERSPECTIVE IN GUS VAN SANT’S ELEPHANT

The manipulability of digital media has intrigued filmmakers in the possibilities of visual presentation of space, particularly in depicting computerized space. We can look back to Steven Lisberger’s Tron (1982) as an early example of a film that visualizes traveling through the mainframe of a computer. Or consider the hyperkinetic fight scenes in Zack Synder’s Watchmen (2009), Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass (2010), and Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) that closely resemble a gaming environment. Not only do the cultural forms of computerized navigable space and gaming inform the style and miseen-scène of these films, but how filmmakers can now re-penetrate filmic space in ways that were almost unachievable during the classical period of cinema. Although the depiction of computerized and gaming environments can suggest a departure from the everyday world, many films use virtuality to explore current social and political concerns. Kathryn Bigelow’s science-fiction thriller Strange Days (1995), for example, illustrates how computerized subjective vision can become a political apparatus that addresses current events. The opening of the film follows a group of criminals that rob a Chinese restaurant, seen from a robber’s subjective point of view. The subjective shot is designed purposely with an amateur look to authenticate its “real-time” depiction of the robbery. Viewers experience the sensations of the robber as he is chased by the police and then falls to his death from a building—all in one frantic long take. However, what viewers are seeing is a SQUID recording that Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) is watching through a technology called “the wire,” a device that records and plays back the user’s memories and physical sensations. Lenny, an ex LAPD officer, sells bootleg SQUID recordings on the black market. Later in the film, Lenny becomes caught up in the LAPD’s cover-up murder of a famous rap star, Jeriko One

52

Capturing Digital Media

(Glenn Plummer), when coming into possession of a SQUID recording that captured the event. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin describe “the wire” in Strange Days as projecting our own cultural moment at the turn of the millennium in its attempt to completely remove the presence of mediation. Strange Days, as they put it, “offers us a world fascinated by the power and ubiquity of media technologies.”1 Here the amateur videography of the virtual SQUID recording technology takes on a social and political dimension, engaging with police brutality as Jeriko One’s death is reminiscent of the beating of Rodney King in 1991, which was caught publicly on video. Strange Days assigns its dystopia not to technology, but to the oppressive social systems depicted in its futuristic world. Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, a film loosely based on the Columbine High School massacre, considers the theme of violent media and youth aggression in its presentation of cinematic space and nonchronological narrative. Whereas Chapter 1 examined how purposely inserted mistakes diminish the perfection of digital synthetic images, Elephant hauntingly depicts a pristine and orderly aesthetic that visually approximates the digital forms of computerized and video gaming space. At the same time, these cultural forms are undermined by the film’s ambiguous stance toward violent media and youth acts of violence. Elephant’s approximation of database and gaming aesthetics puts emphasis on viewers to unravel the film’s heterogeneous information. Elephant’s nonchronological ordering of events is closely related to the timelooping narrative as reflecting the repetition of the drive. But unlike the goal of restoring the time-loop narrative to linear time as explored in the previous chapter, Elephant’s gaming and database depiction of events challenges the viewer by confronting them with the trauma of loss. Instead of arriving at a point where viewers can understand the motivation behind Elephant’s fictional shootings, they reach a place where primary meanings associated with violent entertainment and public shootings are called into question.

Database narrative and contextualization Elephant captures the everyday routines and events of several high school students shortly before a shooting rampage occurs. Presented nonchronologically, using mostly mobile long takes, the film follows the crisscrossing of characters John (John McFarland), a troubled teen who manages an alcoholic father; Elias (Elias McConnell), a



3. The Database, Gaming, and First-Person Shooter Perspective 53

photography student and friend of John; Nathan (Nathan Tyson), a popular jock and lifeguard; Carrie (Carrie Finklea), Nathan’s girlfriend; Michelle (Kristen Hicks), a teen who is highly self-conscious of her body; Brittany (Brittany Mountain), Jordan (Jordan Taylor), and Nicole (Nicole George), three bulimic teens; and the two students who plan and execute the attack on the school, Alex (Alex Frost), a pianist and sketch artist, and his friend Eric (Eric Deulen).2 As explored in the previous chapter, the recent surge in experimenting with cinematic time is closely informed by new computing practices at the turn of the millennium. New narrative settings spawned by digital media explore the ability to display concurrent actions in a variety of ways. In movies and television, simultaneous action is rendered by managing parallel and crosscutting techniques that compress narrative action and anticipate future events. But the computer, as Janet Murray observes, presents “all the simultaneous actions in one grid and then allow the interactor to navigate among them.”3 Exploring a web page, for example, requires users to organize the disparate data by clicking hyperlinks, opening multiple windows, and scrolling through data. Just as a filmmaker must assemble and edit raw film footage into a narrative, computer users must interact with and put to work the webpage’s simultaneous and mosaic organization of data in order to turn it into meaningful information. Filtering, retrieving, and storing information are the features that define a digital database. Elephant’s nonlinear presentation of events is characteristic of a computer’s database form, or what Marsha Kinder terms “database narrative”: “Narratives whose structure exposes or thematizes the dual processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories and that are crucial to language: the selection of particular data (characters, images, sounds, events) from a series of databases or paradigms, which are then combined to generate specific tales.”4 A tenet of classic narrative is presenting visual information that emphasizes unity and linear order with a beginning, middle, and end. Even when the narration digresses or departs from its forward flow, it must be done so that it is motivated, such as a flashback to depict a character’s memory. Databases, however, do not adhere to the logic of narrative, nor do they have beginnings, middles, or ends. Instead, databases invite users/viewers to organize and narrate a constellation of items, such as scrolling through a list of apps on an internet-ready television or exploring bonus features of a DVD. Whereas continuity editing synthesizes and subordinates narrative time to a linear and chronological order, database narratives manifest their structure to

54

Capturing Digital Media

underscore the processes of selection and combination. Database narratives elicit a highly interactive spectatorship by inviting viewers to organize, compare, explore, and navigate its disparate pieces, acts that can lead to multiple outcomes of meaning. It is important to add that linear and chronological narratives continue to be the dominant mode of many films. But it can be suggested that the popularity of films such as Pulp Fiction, Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, demonstrate that viewers have become accustomed to nonchronological narrative structures.5 Certainly database aesthetics are not exclusive to cinema in the digital age. The nonlinear and nonchronological order of events in films such as Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961) are characteristic of database logic. There are also films that embed a database aesthetic within a chronological ordering of time, as in the uses of split and multiscreen projection of simultaneous information in films, such as Richard Fleischer’s The Boston Strangler (1968) and Brian De Palma’s Sisters (1973). Although Elephant’s database aesthetic lends itself to a number of interpretations, my interest lies in the question of contextualization and the political meanings it can potentially generate for viewers in relation to violent entertainment. Because databases do not comply with the logic of narrative, they lack context within digital culture.6 Databases provide a list or collection of individualized units which must then be ordered and put to work by the user. A major part of viewers’ contribution to watching Elephant is their knowledge and memories of Columbine and the debates around violent entertainment in which they embed within the film’s text. As Van Sant states, “It’s handing over a lot to the viewer because of there being a lot [of prior knowledge of the event] inside the viewer, I think, that can contribute to the activity of watching the film.”7 Given that violent entertainment is so often debated in the political arena as a catalyst of adolescent violence, Elephant’s database, puzzlelike structure assumes a political dimension. While following the Columbine tragedy, Congress held hearings on youth marketing of violent entertainment, putting political pressure on the entertainment industry to regulate media content. Elephant’s long takes and database aesthetics, however, complicate debates about the effects of violent entertainment by presenting information that at once lacks teleology and proffers narrative context. Rather than presenting insights into or possible motives for the film’s fictional shootings, Elephant’s nonlinear structure transmits conflicting information, questioning



3. The Database, Gaming, and First-Person Shooter Perspective 55

the link between violent entertainment and teen violence altogether. The film invites viewers to map out and generate meaning from the film’s nonlinear and database presentation of events. But, assembling and making sense of Elephant’s discrete events must be done without narrative contextualization as to why Eric and Alex decide to unleash their maniacal plan. Therefore, to make sense of Elephant’s database narrative, viewers must import information from the extra-diegetic world, a mandate that suggests the impossibility of representing a traumatic event through one master narrative that compels viewers to compare and contrast a number of small narratives.8 At the same time, Elephant’s real-time duration of the long take undermines the nonhierarchical features of the database by simultaneously juxtaposing conflicting narrative information. Take, for instance, the early scene in which a long take follows the MercedesBenz of John’s drunken father as he carelessly drives his son (who happens to be late) to school (see Figure 3.1). John’s father strikingly sideswipes a parked car and then comes close to running over a teenager riding a bike. After his father almost drives off the road a second time, John decides to take over at the wheel. Affluence is often a point of tension portrayed in the cinema of teen dramas. The Mercedes-Benz clearly signifies upper class and wealth. But Elephant thwarts viewers’ expectation of the Hollywood teenage drama by depicting John’s father as the figure of drunkenness and uncertainty rather than the teenager. At the same time, the precision of the long take fosters a climate of instability, effectively depicting John’s father as a reckless adult. Here

Figure 3.1  Elephant. John’s drunken father as the figure of uncertainty.

56

Capturing Digital Media

the real-time effect of the long take is not so much meant to represent the structures of reality, as in André Bazin’s interpretation of cinematic realism. Rather, the long take’s lurking perspective and uncanny wideangle centered framing evokes foreboding and a sense of unforeseen danger, thus alluding to the film’s horrific ending. The long take is characteristic of the database in presenting information—absent the meaning-making of hierarchy—allowing events to unfold in real time, inviting viewers to uncover the text’s possible meanings. Yet the scene undermines the logic of the database and real-time effect of the long take by calling into question the very knowledge viewers bring to decode and contextualize the text.

Subculture and violent entertainment Certainly the database does not eradicate desire for context and meaning, especially in a film such as Elephant, which so explicitly draws upon memories of national tragedies such as Columbine. It should be of no surprise that the need for causes and explanations after events such as Columbine often become political issues. Weeks after Columbine, the US Senate held hearings on youth marketing of violent entertainment, fueling an atmosphere of paranoia and moral panic. At the opening of the Senate hearings, Republican senator Sam Brownback stated, “We are not here to point fingers but to identify the causes of cultural pollution and seek solutions.”9 Brownback referenced metal and Goth bands such as Cannibal Corpse and Marilyn Manson as possible factors and causes of the Columbine shootings—primarily because Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were considered Goth teens, calling themselves: “The Trench Coat Mafia.” Although the goal of this chapter is not to investigate possible sociological causes of the Columbine shootings, it is important to point out that these Senate hearings not only failed to recognize how culture produces meaning from popular forms of entertainment—such as video gaming and metal and Goth music—but also revealed how the ruling party attempts to manufacture consent by fomenting fear and moral anxiety in its discussion of mass entertainment and popular culture. As Henry Jenkins explains, Congress was not out to create federal policies to regulate media content post-Columbine; instead, “they counted on public pressure to intimidate the entertainment industry into voluntarily withdrawing controversial works from circulation.”10 Debates about violent entertainment also reveal tensions between broader social systems and subcultures. Subcultures are defined in



3. The Database, Gaming, and First-Person Shooter Perspective 57

terms of their relationship to society at large, often represented as nonnormative and/or located on the fringes of larger-based social systems. More importantly, as Ken Gelder explains, narratives of subculture are not only written by insiders, but also by those outside of a subculture. “Narratives by or about a subculture come into being and produce a set of effects (or affects) and reactions: fascination, envy, anxiety, disdain, revulsion, legislation, social reform, etc. They are never neutral.”11 Responses to subcultures often classify them as nonconformist, different, dissenting, and deviant, as evident in the Senate hearings after Columbine. For this reason, as Jenkins notes, “many schools took away web and net access. Many kids were placed into therapy based on their subcultural identifications or interests in computer games or certain kinds of music.”12 Elephant confounds debates around media effects and deviant subculture narratives by deploying continuous moving shots precisely to thwart viewers’ expectations in and ability to assign context and meaning to the text. Consider the “mixed signal” scene in which Alex plays two Beethoven compositions on the piano in his basement bedroom while Eric plays a first-person shooter video game called “Gerry,” a game based on Van Sant’s previous film. The scene begins with Alex playing “Für Elise” while the camera pans 360 degrees around his bedroom. Here viewers see different pieces of art on Alex’s bedroom wall, including a sketch of an elephant—the very image used for the film’s poster. Playing “Moonlight Sonata” by Beethoven, the image holds on Alex as he performs this somber composition. But on the last note, he abruptly bangs the piano keys violently and then gives the sheet music the finger. The camera then pans with Alex as he sits on the couch next to Eric, who now reads a book. Alex grabs the laptop and navigates the internet to order firearms, the weapons they will use to unleash their pitiless brutalities. As explained, debates over media effects and teen violence often cite metal and Goth music and violent video games as potential factors. But Elephant complicates debates about violent media by using long takes to present conflicting simultaneous information (see Figures 3.2 and 3.3). For example, the circling camera undermines distinctions between high art and popular culture by presenting classical music and video gaming without hierarchy—characteristic of the database. The shot of Eric reading a book as Alex orders guns on the internet also sends mixed signals for decoding the scene. Just as viewers would not anticipate Eric reading a book, but continuing to play the video game, they do not expect Alex to search the internet for firearms directly after performing the Beethoven compositions.

58

Capturing Digital Media

Figure 3.2  Elephant. Alex plays Beethoven compositions.

Figure 3.3  Elephant. Eric plays a first-person shooter video game.

The sketch image of the elephant on Alex’s wall further complicates contextualization and the assignment of meaning. Given that the film is called “Elephant” and uses Alex’s sketch as its definitive visual representation, one would expect the image to provide a significant clue or guidance about Alex and Eric’s motivation for perpetrating violence on the high school. But the meaning of the elephant is neither offered nor placed into context. The sketch impedes viewers’ already futile search for contextualization and narrative meaning. The panning long take simply captures the image of the elephant on the wall—without



3. The Database, Gaming, and First-Person Shooter Perspective 59

Figure 3.4  Elephant. The connection between the sketch of the elephant and the film’s title remains ambiguous.

granting it any importance or hierarchy among the other pieces of art or objects in Alex’s room, thus reinforcing the message of database forms of communication. In this sense, the relevance of the elephant to the film’s title remains unknowable (see Figure 3.4). The precision of the circling long take in the “mixed scene” approximates the cultural form of the database where all objects are uniformly rendered as impartial and nonhierarchal. As explored in Chapter 2, the circular movement of the camera is akin to the circularity and repetition of the drive in emphasizing loss. At the same time, the orderly aesthetic of this sequence hauntingly reflects the cold calculation of Alex and Eric’s plan to attack the school with firearms. As such, the “mixed scene” evokes a spectatorship of lack by denying the meaning of the film’s title, nor providing exposition into the characters’ motivation to commit mass killings. The simultaneous presentation of character information conspires to send disconnected information that both disturbs viewers’ ability to decode this scene and disrupts their identification with Alex and Eric. Filmmakers often use the panning shot to reveal information dramatically, but here, the panning shot presents visual information only to deny insight or reasoning about Alex and Eric’s ruthless plan. Whereas the scene with John’s drunken father plays with viewers’ knowledge of teen dramas, the panning shots during Alex and Eric’s home activities complicate the assigning of causal connections between high art and popular culture and teen violence. The long tracking take and camera pan in these scenes

60

Capturing Digital Media

embodies an unreliable narrator problematizing viewers’ search for narrative meaning as a spectatorship of uncertainty. Although the camera pan in the “mixed signal” scene draws attention to debates about violent entertainment, other scenes in Elephant can potentially overshadow the film’s narrative and aesthetic experimentation in terms of contextualization and narrative meaning. In particular, two scenes that have arguably attracted the most attention are Alex and Eric watching a Nazi documentary, and their taking a shower together before attacking the school. Todd McCarthy’s review in Variety notes, “And while it is clearly not Van Sant’s intent to offer a facile explanation for why two teenage boys marched into their high school with assault weapons with the aim of picking off as many of their fellow students as possible he reveals the killers to be gay-inclined Nazis!”13 In an interview with Film Comment, Van Sant debated whether or not to remove the shower scene, stating the following: I asked almost everyone I could think of about removing the kiss scene. . . . For me, the scene was my projection of the way that boys are when they are locked up in a basement for a year. That they may not be having sex, but they are communicating with each other in a sexual way, all the time. Because boys do that . . . . I didn’t want to take it [the kiss scene] out for the wrong reasons, and the reason people gave were all wrong ones.14

Van Sant’s choice to keep the shower scene illustrates that when narrative ambiguities are not promptly enlisted into to causal motivation or provided contextualization, they can provoke significant consternation in decoding efforts. In one sense, the lack of context in the shower scene may have drawn far more attention to itself than Van Sant intended. Elephant invites viewers into the everyday life of teenagers as they navigate the high school setting. But the film sternly resists providing viewers information that causally explains its tragic ending. Elephant’s presentation of simultaneous conflicting information is one way of locating the film’s political dimension. At the same time, the film’s computer aesthetic experimentation does not set out to alienate or distance spectators from emotional involvement and identification with the characters. Van Sant explains that he wanted to create a “poetic impression rather than dictating an answer.” Part of this process for Van Sant was including the “audience’s thoughts.”15 Elephant’s visual cues and its complex relationship to digital technologies and debates about violent entertainment are evident in the film’s use of both speed



3. The Database, Gaming, and First-Person Shooter Perspective 61

ramping and video gaming aesthetics. Both techniques not only are informed by computing practices associated with the database, but also create a highly exploratory spectatorship. At the same time, these features invite critical efforts to understand the motivations leading up to the film’s horrific ending.

Speed ramping and the body Elephant’s nonchronological positioning of character timelines create an exploratory form of spectatorship traced to database logic. The technique of speed ramping, in which the frame rate of the film is increased in order to slow down the image within the shot, resembles the interactivity of the database, creating dramatic tension through the simultaneous presentation of narrative information. One of the first films to popularize speed ramping is Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980). During the film’s fight sequences, the camera was “overcranked” in order to elongate the duration of the moving image as a way of framing Jake Lamotta’s (Robert De Niro) distorted sense of time and space. Today, digital editing programs such as After Effects can remap and change the duration of the image without under- or over-cranking frames within the camera during production. A shot photographed at the normal filming rate can be altered in postproduction, thus manipulating narrative time itself. For example, cutting to a close shot can give viewers a sense of character psychology as well as dramatizing the unfolding of events. Speed ramping can achieve this same effect by slowing down the speed of the image and drawing viewers to a specific action. Rather than using conventional editing models to achieve psychological tension, speed ramping can create conflict and tension within the same frame. In Elephant, speed ramping intensifies viewers’ spectatorship by punctuating specific moments in the story for dramatic effect. This effect is most evident when characters’ trajectories intersect with each other. For example, Michelle’s introduction into the film occurs during her gym class. A static shot of the field shows Michelle entering the frame on the school’s playing field. In the background, Nathan and his friends are playing football. In the same shot, Michelle glances up at the sky with a look of amazement. Suddenly, Nathan and his friends in the background move in slow motion as a speed ramping effect. The image then returns to normal speed as Michelle exits the frame. The image continues to hold on the open field as we see Michelle reenter the

62

Capturing Digital Media

frame in the far background, now out of focus, joining the rest of the gym class. Within the same shot, Nathan enters the frame as he puts on his lifeguard sweatshirt. The image then tracks behind him as he walks to the school’s entrance to meet his girlfriend, Carrie. The zigzagging effect of Nathan and Michelle’s movements on the playing field (as they shift from foreground to background), combined with the technique of speed ramping, captures character consciousness while generating narrative tension and viewer curiosity. The combination of audio and speed ramping also produces conflict and character interiority without the emphasis of editing. Shortly after Nathan enters the school, the image tracks him from behind as he moves through a corridor and up a stairway. Exiting the building, he then crosses an overpass that connects to another section of the school. As Nathan enters the second-level section, he passes Brittany, Jordan, and Nicole, catching their gaze. Brittany watches Nathan intensely as he walks by. But instead of staying on Nathan’s back, the camera focuses on the three teens as the speed of the image slows down. Brittany looks directly to the camera and says: “so cute,” which is directed at Nathan. As Nathan continues walking (still in slow motion) loud sounds of a baby are heard as the corridor noises are lowered in the film’s sound mix. As the baby sounds fade, the image returns to normal speed with the ambient sounds of the hallway now increasing. Nathan then meets Carrie as they walk to the administrative office to sign out of school. Their path crosses with that of John, who has just finished speaking with the principal about his chronic tardiness. Here viewers discover that Nathan may have gotten Carrie pregnant. Indeed, speed ramping, camera movement, and audio cross-fading of baby noise and ambient sounds of the hallway manifest Nathan’s inner conflict. Narrative drama is punctuated within the mobile long take through sound and speed ramping simultaneously (without the use of traditional editing techniques), prompting viewers to critically reflect upon the out-of-sequence events. One of the most dramatic instances of speed ramping occurs when John leaves the school and encounters Alex and Eric, who are about to execute their lethal plot. As noted earlier, Elephant’s minimalist presentation of narrative information assumes that viewers will bring prior knowledge and memories of the Columbine event to deciphering the film’s text. When Alex and Eric are introduced into the story, they usher in a sense of anxiety and uncertainty, registered by the use of speed ramping. Just before John crosses their path, he is greeted by a dog, Boomer, on the school’s entry walkway. John calls to the dog, while in the background Alex and Eric approach with bags full of guns



3. The Database, Gaming, and First-Person Shooter Perspective 63

and explosives. Boomer runs to John and jumps up as the image slows down. The image returns to normal speed as John asks Alex and Eric what they are up to (see Figures 3.5 and 3.6 ). Alex warningly tells him, “Just get the fuck out of here and don’t come back.” Of great significance is how the effect of speed ramping in these three sequences highlights the body’s movement. As already noted, Michelle is highly self-conscious about her body when her gym teacher

Figure 3.5  Elephant. Alex and Eric seen approaching from the right corner of the frame in the background with firearms.

Figure 3.6  Elephant. Boomer and John in slow motion, an aesthetic of speed ramping.

64

Capturing Digital Media

tells her that she has to wear the proper clothes for class. A similar speed ramping effect occurs with Brittany and her attraction to Nathan’s body, and also when she and her two friends retch in the bathroom after eating lunch, signaling their anorexic tendencies. Lastly, John’s encounter with Boomer brings full attention to the threat of the body itself as Alex and Eric approach in the distance, ready to attack the school. The elements of uncertainty and foreboding (and the vulnerability of the body) are transmitted by slowing down the image. These features of speed ramping are representative of the database, not only because they present simultaneous information without the emphasis on editing, but also because they invite viewers to piece together the film’s heterogeneous components in order to assign meaning to the film’s ambiguous text. The permeability of the digital image allows Van Sant to create a speed ramping effect that approximates a computerized aesthetic. Yet the emphasis on slowing down the image’s frame rate uncomfortably underscores the vulnerability of the human body within the film’s database depiction of a high school shooting.

Video gaming and first-person shooter perspective Speed ramping reveals the manipulability of digital media as well as exploring the prevalence of database logic in the digital age. In certain ways, speed ramping has commonalities with gaming technologies, in which the action’s cinematic time is slowed or sped up to create a vision of virtuality and immersion. In reference to bullet time in The Matrix, Alexander Galloway characterizes this spectacularization of the visual as “gamic cinema, a brief moment where the aesthetic of gaming moves in and takes over the film, only to disappear seconds later.”16 Although Elephant does not use digital visual effects to re-penetrate film space to create spectacular sequence such as the bullet time scene in The Matrix, the affective motion of video gaming does underlies Van Sant’s use of the traveling long take.17 In an interview, Van Sant discussed how the long-following shots in Gerry connect to the first-person perspective taken by certain video games: The way the camera works in [the game] Tomb Raider, . . . is that it sort of swings and swims around, always keeping the central figure somewhere in the middle of the frame . . . . It would be really great if our camera could do exactly what this camera does. . . . In some ways, Gerry is Béla Tarr fused with Tomb Raider!18



3. The Database, Gaming, and First-Person Shooter Perspective 65

Referring to Hungarian director Béla Tarr, a filmmaker known for his use of the long take, Van Sant’s comment demonstrates how the navigability of 3-D computer space informs the aesthetics of the moving camera in Elephant. In particular, the traveling shots that follow behind the subject embody strong associations with the subjective perspective of video gaming. Games such as Doom, Myst, and Tomb Raider rely on the player’s ability to traverse and explore the game’s landscape. The building of sets and use of exterior locations in cinematic filmmaking precludes forming the total landscape found in the virtual world of computer games. Of course, filmmakers consider many factors when planning and constructing a film’s spatial environment. For example, shooting a film on-location requires a state or city permit and spatial and visual contingencies within the mise-en-scène must be taken into consideration. But gaming technologies afford the gamer a totally actionable space uninhibited by techniques of editing and montage. The spatial environment of video gaming appealed to Van Sant because of its ability to complexly track the central characters of the film. Although Van Sant could not replicate the intricate movements of a “Tomb Raider point of view,” video gaming clearly informs the cinematography of Elephant, evident in the use of the long-following shot that lurks behind the actors as they travel the corridors of the high school (Figures 3.7 and 3.8 ). The camera’s movement in following the actors from behind mimics the video gaming perspective of exploring and navigating. Similar to

Figures 3.7  Elephant. The long-following shot of John offers a video gaming and lurking perspective.

66

Capturing Digital Media

Figures 3.8  Elephant. The long-following shot of Michelle offers a video gaming and lurking perspective.

Stanley Kubrick’s Steadicam photography in the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, the tracking long take in Elephant captures the logic of gaming as if one were navigating a maze. As explained in Chapter 1, the long take was not part of classical Hollywood’s mode of production because it risked revealing a film’s mediation of time and space, potentially distracting viewers from the film’s narrative. In Elephant, by contrast, the long take attempts to fully immerse viewers by creating an interactive environment that affords the pleasure of movement associated with spatial journeys through gaming environments. Certainly viewers are not like video game players who control a character’s movement through space. Rather the viewer is more akin to a “lurker,” an internet term that describes, for example, someone who watches online gaming, but does not play, or one who reads online forum postings, but does not post messages.19 Here we are reminded of Van Sant’s comment, “It’s not that I don’t want you involved in the characters, but I want you involved by watching them.” In the context of this remark, we can interpret the long take in Elephant as a means of engaging viewers’ curiosity through a “real-time” effect that approximates the qualities of navigating computer space in gaming worlds; that is, viewers experience the unfolding of events in tandem with the characters. In fact, the tracking shots produce a viewership that reflects a game-like perspective as well as the affective dimension characteristic of the non-playing watcher. More so, as the camera follows and tracks these characters, it arouses not only a sense of curiosity



3. The Database, Gaming, and First-Person Shooter Perspective 67

in exploring the social space of the high school, but also a feeling of anticipation—an intuitive knowledge that future danger resides within the banal corridors of the school. Elephant’s achronological and repetitive narrative vectors are characteristic of database narratives, inviting viewers to explore and build narrative trajectories out of disparate pieces in a manner that recalls the opportunity to make meaning in the navigable space of gaming. At the same time, the film seeks to engage viewers both emotionally and critically. These competing narratives situated within a video gaming aesthetic suggest the difficulty of representing a traumatic event through one point of view or one all-explaining narrative. Elephant’s video gaming aesthetic negotiates with modes of conventional cinema and database logic that closely align with everyday practices of digital media. At the same time, Elephant firmly sustains its enigma of unknowable causes that lead to the film’s massacre. Yet the film deploys these characteristics of the digital as a revolting style toward hegemonic readings of mass entertainment and public mass shootings. Van Sant’s experiment with form and nonlinear chronology in Elephant puts viewers at the center of the action by eliciting their memories and knowledge of Columbine in trying to understand this national tragedy. Elephant’s opposition to manufacturing consent pertaining to both the causes of Columbine and debates on violent entertainment constitutes its counter-hegemonic political moment. Its effect is achieved by presenting simultaneous and conflicting information without hierarchy—a characteristic of the database. Elephant preserves an undefined zone between artist and spectators by refusing to offer solutions or to assign explicit meaning to Alex and Eric’s maniacal plan. As Van Sant states, “You just watch and make the associations for yourself, as opposed to having the film-makers impose ideas on you. Here the causes have already happened and I don’t think there’s a clear answer as to why. So we’re not showing the causes, just the criss-crossing network of the last two days.”20 At the same time, Elephant complicates viewers’ assignment of meaning by simultaneously presenting conflicting narrative information as illustrated in the “mixed signal” and shower scene with Eric and Alex. The tracking shots not only capture the everyday routine of these students in “real time,” but also call into question the knowledge viewers bring to the text in understanding and contextualizing Alex and Eric’s violent attack upon their high school. In this regard, Elephant identifies a tension between viewers’ desire for contextualization and narrative, and the meanings offered by

68

Capturing Digital Media

digital media. Here the film’s lack of narrative contextualization locates unresolved anxieties about the regulation of violent entertainment and the precariousness of subcultures, illustrating the film’s video gaming and the database aesthetics as evoking a spectatorship of uncertainty. At the same time, Elephant depicts a perfectly rendered computerized and gaming space that invites viewers to reflect upon on their memories and knowledge of Columbine.

CChapter 4 SUBJECTIVE VISION AND THE INTIMATE SPECTACLE: CLOVERFIELD

Elephant’s approximating a first-person shooter and lurking perspective demonstrates how the cultural forms of navigable computer space and gaming environments are influencing the aesthetics of cinema. Gaming and cinema historically have drawn from each other’s medium in creating their virtual environment, particularly the subjective shot or subjective vision. As Alexander Galloway explains, first-shooter perspective is informed by the subjective shot, a technique marginalized in cinema but a key aesthetic of gaming. A subjective shot often occurs for a brief moment as it explores the mental subjectivity of a character, where the look of the camera and body merge. In certain cases, subjective vision can be employed for an entire film, such as Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947), photographed exclusively from Philip Marlowe’s (Robert Montgomery) perspective. Though an interesting experiment, the novelty of Lady in the Lake’s subjective vision wears off quickly. As Galloway observes, Lady in the Lake fails because it “doesn’t get it [subjective vision] wrong enough.”1 But what does get it right, according to Galloway, is when the subjective shot fuses the computer and a character such as Robocop and the Terminator’s computerized vision. Found footage horror expands upon the technique of subjective vision, creating a unique mode of spectatorship in its fusion of character and technology. Films such as Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999) not only create suspense by way of viewer identification with what a character sees through the camera, but by creating the feeling that viewers are just as vulnerable as the camera operator. According to Caetlin Benson-Allott, “Faux footage horror movies invite their spectators to become—or rather to acknowledge that they are—part of a precarious and defenseless mechanical apparatus.”2 As in the case of The Blair Witch Project, the identification that viewers form with the vulnerable character/camera makes them also a part of the Blair Witch curse. In the film’s climatic basement sequence,

70

Capturing Digital Media

something hits Heather (Heather Donahue) from behind. As BensonAllott observes, when Heather and the camera violently drop to the floor, viewers are confronted with their mortality. In certain cases, it is not only viewers’ identification with the vulnerable character/camera that builds suspense in found footage horror, but can be shaped by its current social conditions, as in the case of Cloverfield, a film about a group of five New Yorkers during one night when a gigantic monster descends upon the city. This chapter examines the film’s employment of subjective vision to elicit a spectatorship of threat and attraction pertaining to concerns of terrorism and invasion post 9/11. Following Galloway, I argue that the film’s fusion of human and computer attracts our desire to see and follow the characters as they horizontally and vertically traverse the city. I add that the film’s subjective vision sets a trap for our traumatic encounter with what Jacques Lacan terms the gaze: the point at which we traumatically realize how our desire distorts the visual field.

Subjective vision and the evidential mode Whereas Elephant explores the following and lurking shots that closely resemble computer gaming, Cloverfield involves a frantic style of filmmaking, in which viewers experience the moving image entirely from the perspective of a personal camcorder. Cloverfield not only follows what Galloway describes as the successful fusion of the human and computer in its video game perspective, but is also shaped by the impact of viral videos and social media, or what J.  J. Abrams, the film’s producer, has referred to as “YouTube-ification.”3 An attempt to digitally create an illusion of a “homemade catastrophe,” the amateur quality of the subjective vision in Cloverfield is an instance of how popular cultural forms can inform the look and design of a film. For example, smartphones, mobile screens, and small digital cameras allow for the instantaneous recording of events, which can be quickly uploaded to the internet and shared with friends and family members through texting, email, and social networking sites. Many of these images have a homemade or amateur quality. The presence of technological mediation—which has become more predominant in practices of filmmaking—is, in part, informed by everyday uses of personal technology. Of course, the presence of mediation can also be distracting—as we saw in the “squib” incident in Children of Men in Chapter 1. But how Cloverfield’s story world articulates the presence



4. Subjective Vision and the Intimate Spectacle

71

of technological mediation is an important factor. This dynamic is exemplified in the point-and-shoot perspective in Cloverfield, which creates a spontaneous and unpredictable style of photography, positioning viewers as witnesses to the event that is informed by the amateur visual documentation of 9/11. And, like Elephant, the connections between the film’s story world and 9/11 are not directly motivated. While Elephant depicts a precise and clean aesthetic in its appropriation of computerized and video gaming space, Cloverfield’s amateur subjective vision emphasizes mistakes and imperfections to elicit a spectatorship of uncertainty in the identification with the vulnerable camera and camera operator. At the same time, Cloverfield’s “low-fi” approach toward its material produces high-quality results, what can be described as an intimate spectacle.4 Viewers experience Cloverfield entirely from the perspective of a personal video camera, operated mainly by Hud (T. J. Miller). The camera documents the group’s attempt to survive the monster’s fury as the group moves through the city in an effort to rescue Rob’s (Michael Stahl-David) ex-girlfriend, Beth (Odette Annable), who is trapped in a collapsed building. Similar to War of the Worlds as described in Chapter 1, the film’s depiction of billowing smoke from collapsed buildings and throngs of people crossing the Brooklyn Bridge evokes the anxieties of terrorism post 9/11.5 Cloverfield’s illusion of amateur videography represents a new culture of smart phones, where public incidents can be randomly and instantaneously captured and circulated. This improvisational element is evident in the film’s emphasis on the pointand-shoot perspective, where zooms and fast pans elicit a sense of urgency, immediacy, and vulnerability. Shortly after the monster attacks the city, for example, everyone at Rob’s apartment huddles around the television to watch the news, which offers an instant feed of images. Unexpectedly, the building begins to quake, and Hud and his friends flee Rob’s apartment and join others on a crowded and chaotic street. Filmed in one long, frantic take, the camera turns up the avenue and, suddenly, in the distance, the Statue of Liberty’s head bounces off a building and crashes nearby. Immediately, a group of people descend upon the statue’s head, documenting it with their smart phones. Following after the decapitation of the Statue of Liberty, smoke surges down the avenue from a collapsed building, and a crowd of people run for cover. The point of view of the camera bounces up and down as Hud and his friends run across the street and hide in a bodega, where a blast of smoke and debris rocks the building. As Hud and others cough from the smoke, the camera falls sideways onto the floor as black fills

72

Capturing Digital Media

most of the screen. Certainly the film’s images of dust and smoke allude to the traumas associated with the collapse of the Twin Towers during 9/11. As Laura Frost explains, the amateur videography of Cloverfield attempts to depict the disorientation and horror that occurred on 9/11. Frost observes, “The effect is achieved both through the imagery and the camera work, which cannot be thought about apart from the amateur films of 9/11, the amateur photographs that were featured in nationwide exhibitions such as Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs (2001), and the [Jules and Gédéon] Naudet’s [2002] documentary [9/11].”6 But Cloverfield’s horror and disorientation can also be attributed to its “fake” evidential perspective and the narrative’s lack of supplementary information. Amateur nonfiction films are effective sources of historical visual evidence for archivist and social historians. Amateur footage of buildings or parks can be compared to how the landscape of those places has changed throughout time. As Ryan Shand explains, in order to understand amateur footage as historical evidence, it must be supplied by “supplementary material.” Shand states, “Without knowledgeable commentaries from people who can interpret the images, the film in itself can become relatively meaningless.”7 Here Cloverfield’s amateur videography draws its energy and suspense not only in viewers’ identification with Hud as the vulnerable character/camera operator, but also from the lack of extra material and unexplained monster invasion. A theme often explored in science-fiction cinema is memory production, exemplified in films such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm (1983), Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990), Joel Schumacher’s Flatliners (1990), Strange Days (1995), and Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010). Cloverfield’s cyborg-like fusion of subjective vision and technology performs an interesting variation on memory production in order to make sense of the monsters’ unmotivated attack on New York City. Similar to Elephant’s database narrative and computerized and gaming aesthetic that relies on viewers’ knowledge and memories of Columbine to interpret the film’s ambiguous narrative, Cloverfield requires audiences to have a knowledge base of historical evidence and memories to decode the film, such as the amateur videography and photographs of the events that occurred on 9/11.8 At the same time, throughout the documentation of the attack on the city, “evidential footage” of Rob and Beth’s prior trip to Coney Island intermittently intrudes into the film’s narrative as a competing narrative. This is because Hud, who is operating the camcorder, is recording over



4. Subjective Vision and the Intimate Spectacle

73

Rob’s original recording of the trip to Coney Island. For this reason, edits in Cloverfield are abrupt and spontaneous in order to mirror the turning on and off of the camera. Since Hud, as the amateur videographer, is unsure of how to properly use the camcorder, he occasionally causes the footage of Rob and Beth’s original recording to surface as a sort of technical glitch—a glitch that acts as a lens into another time and place. As such, Rob and Beth’s relationship serves as the film’s subplot, which is manifested by an amateur mistake, rather than through practices of professional editing. But more importantly, the documentation of the disaster and the unprompted jump cuts between Rob and Beth’s trip to Coney Island act as two competing worlds: the attack on the city recorded by Hud, and Rob and Beth’s personal recording. In this sense, two planes of time and memory unfold for viewers: one of an evidential mode (the “fake” documentation of the event) and the other of a home mode (the trip to Coney Island). Cloverfield’s two worlds of time interrupt and compete with each other throughout the film as a homemade disaster film.

Heights and vertical movement Whereas Elephant’s uses of speed ramping produce narrative tension and character consciousness, a central attraction of Cloverfield is its engagement with heights and vertical movement and the social signification it offers. Certainly, expressions of vertical movement is not new territory in cinema and can be traced in numerous films, such as King Kong’s dramatic fall from the top of the Empire State Building, or Hans Gruber falling to his death from the Nakatomi building at the end of Die Hard. Digital visual effects, however, have contributed to greater aesthetic possibilities in characters achieving upward and downward movement, such as Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002), Jon Favreau’s Iron Man (2008), and Scott Derrickson’s Doctor Strange (2016). Kristen Whissel identifies characters defying forces of gravity not only as a visualization of power, but also as a signification of overcoming historical forces. For example, Whissel explains that a character’s horizontal movement can connote linear and “historical continuity,” whereas verticality initiates a “threshold” and intersection for characters to defeat conflicting forces.9 These special effects sequences are not simply used to halt the forward flow of the narrative, but to rather communicate thematic narrative meanings. As Lisa Purse observes there are many instances that digital imaging is “relevant to

74

Capturing Digital Media

the task of interpretation.”10 The deployment of fantastic digital effects both engrosses us into its spectacle and invites us to decode its potential connotative and thematic meanings. In Cloverfield, upward and downward movement oscillates as thematic modes of attraction and danger. These modes not only visually produce dramatic tension but invite viewers to contemplate and interpret the film’s images of destruction in regard to invasion and terrorism associated with 9/11 iconography. The first scene of the film follows Rob’s camcorder vision as he enters Beth’s penthouse, which gorgeously looks out upon a rainy day in Central Park. Certainly, the spectacular view of the city signifies Beth’s wealthy status. But the windows also physically function both as transparent and a barrier, providing amazing views while protecting observers from exterior elements such as cold, wind, and rain (see Figure 4.1). Writing on the history of windows, Anne Friedberg explains that “plate glass performed this separation of the senses, one which also contributes to the virtuality of experience.”11 For Friedberg, glass has two simultaneous operations as surface and space: “Glass makes the building itself transparent; on the other, glass is a surface for framing a view.”12 This sense of virtuality and space of viewing is destroyed when Rob later rescues Beth at her collapsed penthouse. Mirroring the opening scene, he kicks open the door as a wind gusts through the corridor. As the camera follows behind Rob, viewers discover that the penthouse’s sheets of glass have been shattered from the monster’s attack, exposing the living room to dangerous heights.

Figure 4.1 Cloverfield. The view of the city from Beth’s penthouse as a transparent barrier.



4. Subjective Vision and the Intimate Spectacle

75

Rob finds Beth on the floor, impaled by a rebar. Freeing Beth, Rob cautiously helps transport her across the building’s rooftop which is slanted against the neighboring building. Slowly descending the sloped rooftop, Rob says to Beth: “Don’t look down.” Beth responds: “I can’t help it.” Beth’s desire to look down at the city street mirrors viewers’ desire to look as a form of attraction and disaster. While the penthouse windows of upper Manhattan represent wealth and safety, where one can observe heights without risk, Beth’s slanted building, shattered windows, and exposed rebar connote decay and vulnerability as a form of destruction and danger. The “real time” effect of the camcorder vision in Rob, Hud, and Lilly’s rescuing of Beth from her faltering building offers viewers the illusion of witnessing a real disaster unfold in front of them. At the same time, the combination of amateur videography with state-of-theart digital special effects summons the memories and heroisms of 9/11. Part of Cloverfield’s horror is the distorting of images of iconic places, such as the Statue of Liberty decapitation scene. A tourist attraction in New York City is accessing the crown of the Statue of Liberty in order to experience the spectacular view it offers of the Hudson River and cityscape. This national monument reminds us of films that have used it for climatic sequences such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942) and Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2001). Seeing the descent of the statue’s head fascinates and disturbs viewers’ sense of spectatorship, as the pedestrians come within a few feet of the eyes of lady liberty, an attraction that would clearly not be available for a tourist (see Figure 4.2). Paradoxically, the onlookers in this scene achieve a sense of vertical movement through their close proximity to the statue at ground level. Here the sideway

Figure 4.2  Cloverfield. Disturbingly up close and personal with the eyes of the Statue of Liberty at ground level.

76

Capturing Digital Media

position of lady liberty’s head hauntingly foreshadows the death of Hud later in the film when the camera falls sideways on the grass. As I will explain, both cases are demonstrative of Jacques Lacan’s concept of the gaze. That is, when the subject is made to realize how their desire distorts the visual field. More so, the river and city that surrounds the statue is a familiar site for many Americans. Similar to the ending of Franklin J. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (1968), seeing the statue’s head out of its visual context has fascinating and haunting effects. Whereas the destruction of the windows in Beth’s penthouse dematerializes its virtual barrier of the city as a form of attraction, the decapitation of the Statue of Liberty, as its head lays crooked in the street, offers the pedestrian an impossible attraction that is both parodic of B-film monster movies and disturbing in its association with terrorism and invasion. When the city is initially invaded, viewers are only provided glimpses or quick sightings of the monster at ground level. This is captured in the film’s subjective point-and-shoot perspective and panicked camera style that elicits a sense of urgency, constantly undercutting viewers’ looking. Yet this persistent disruption of the look sustains viewers’ engagement, by piquing their desire to know why and what led to the invasion of the city. The limitation of seeing not only increases Cloverfield’s suspense and intensity, but adds authenticity to the look of the film, which is connected directly to the vulnerable camera operator. Toward the end of the film, Rob, Hud, Beth, and Lily (Jessica Lucas) are rescued by military helicopters. Flying high above the city, Hud films the military attack on the monster. Here the vertical movement of the helicopter is not only a transport out of danger, but a window that finally offers characters and viewers a clear and full vision of the monster from a high-level position—albeit briefly. Just as the monster collapses from the military’s bomb attack, its tentacle swings upward and clips the helicopter, forcing it to rapidly spin and plunge into Central Park. As Hud gains consciousness, through the camcorder vision, the monster is seen in full view from the perspective of looking upward. Hud is then killed by the monster, seen from the camcorder’s perspective as he is tossed upward and then thrown to the ground. The camera lands sideways facing him in the grass. Shortly after, Rob grabs the camera and continues filming. Rob and Beth then find shelter in a Central Park tunnel notably at ground level during an air raid. They speak to the camera as their last testimony before they are buried in rubble from military bombs attacking the monster as the image cuts to black. The final survivor is the camera’s footage.



4. Subjective Vision and the Intimate Spectacle

77

The gaze, fantasy frame, reality, and the real Caetlin Benson-Allott explains that two levels of identification are at work in “faux footage horror”: the first is the primary level, audience’s identification with the camera, and the second is the vulnerable camera operator.13 In Cloverfield, viewers not only identify with the character operating the camera, but are made, as Benson-Allott argues, to acknowledge that they are tethered to a defenseless camera operator.14 This is clearly demonstrated after Hud is killed by the monster. The camera falls sideways onto the ground as the autofocus shifts back and forth on blades of grass. Here we are not only cut off from our identification with Hud but we become conscious of our own looking. When the camera drops onto the ground, it not only signifies Hud’s death (and that we are part of a vulnerable camera operator and have invested our identification with him), but also demonstrates how our viewership is included within the image. This rupturing effect of our spectatorship has a psychical dimension; it is what Jacques Lacan terms the gaze: a blind spot in our looking. The encounter with the gaze realizes how our desire to see distorts the visual field of vision. This collapse in our looking manifests an encounter with the real. For Lacan, the real is nonsense or non-meaning. It is a thing that disrupts the functioning of the symbolic order—the realm of language and systems of meanings. If the symbolic provides the basis of expressing and structuring ourselves and the world around us, then the real is a point where those systems collapse. The gaze is a visual manifestation of the real. The gaze is a collapse of our looking within the visual field of perception. To encounter the gaze realizes the viewer’s desire to look within the image. In other words, to encounter the gaze one must already be invested in looking within the visual field of representation, otherwise the gaze would have little impact on the subject. Lacan’s concept of the gaze demonstrates, first, that the visual field that filmmakers construct is not neutral. Second, the encounter with the gaze underscores that the observer is not positioned outside the picture as an “all-seeing” spectator, but rather included within the picture itself as a subject of desire and lack.15 In Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), for example, Jefferies (James Stewart) uses his rear window and binoculars to spy into neighboring apartments across the courtyard. The window acts as a filter for Jeffries while peeping on his neighbors. But in the last act of the film when Thorwald (Raymond Burr), the man who Jefferies believes is a murderer, shockingly makes eye contact with him from across the courtyard, the window’s transparent boundary

78

Capturing Digital Media

collapses as Jefferies becomes conscious of his own looking.16 In this regard, the camera and the vulnerable camera operator of found footage horror can both evoke a sense of mastery in the field of vision and transform into an apparatus of self-scrutiny where the observer’s looking folds back upon itself. Indeed, disturbing and uncomfortable finales in found footage horror, such as Heather dropping the camera after she is attacked at the end of The Blair Witch Project, or the abrupt cut to black after Rob and Beth die in Cloverfield, derive from investing our desire to look into the film. Our spectatorship is constantly at stake in found footage cinema and this is what arguably makes these movies exciting to watch. As such, the gaze realizes that our viewership is not based on the mastery of seeing, but in what we cannot see and know. As director Matt Reeves states in regard to offscreen space in Cloverfield: “There’s something scary about what you can’t see. You’re in there with Hud, and there’s no reverse angle showing you what he’s not seeing. . . . Every moment becomes charged, because you know that, just offframe, there might be something horrible happening.”17 Limiting our perspective exclusively to the vulnerable camera operator intensifies the film’s overall suspense. This brings us back to Alexander Galloway’s observation of the fusion of the computer and a character subjective vision in cinema. Galloway argues that the combination of the two produces a subjective shot more palatable to the viewer over a long stretch of cinematic time. As noted at the start of the chapter, the merging of the camera and a real human body in trying to mimic the first-person narrative of Marlowe in Lady in the Lake proves unsuccessful.18 Here we can see how Lacan’s concept of the gaze explains why, according to Galloway, the subjective vision of Lady of the Lake “does not get it wrong enough.” As Slavoj Žižek observes, Lady in the Lady denies the viewer an objective shot. As he puts it, “It is as if we had found ourselves in a psychotic universe without symbolic openness.”19 Certainly the subjective vision in Cloverfield evokes a similar “claustrophobic closure” as in Lady in the Lake. But what distinguishes Cloverfield’s subjective camera work from Lady in the Lake is that computerization (in combination with the character as the vulnerable camera operator) creates a fantasy screen for the spectator. In other words, the computer filters “reality,” creating a sense of symbolic openness for the viewer. Galloway states, “The first-person subjective position must be instigated by a character who is already mediated through some type of informatic artifice.”20 The camera is not only a lens that captures the events through the character’s perspective, but also a protective screen that puts the “real” at a distance. When



4. Subjective Vision and the Intimate Spectacle

79

Hud dies and the apparatus falls to the ground, it unsettles our mastery of looking as we are confronted with the real of our own desire—a blind spot in our spectatorship that emerges in the form of the gaze. The dropping of the camera signals not only the death of Hud and our identification with him, but also a collapse of the fantasy screen, where the barrier between reality and the real falters. This is why Žižek argues that fantasy is on the side of reality. As he states, “When the phantasmic frame disintegrates, the subject undergoes a ‘loss of reality’ and starts to perceive reality as an ‘irreal’ nightmarish universe with no firm ontological foundation; this nightmarish universe is not ‘pure fantasy’ but, on the contrary, that which remains of reality after reality is deprived of its support in fantasy.”21 If the presence of the organic is to mediate the digital in order to make it desirable, we have the reverse effect in Cloverfield: the human has to be diminished (or at least mediated) by the presence of the digital camera in order for the subjective vision to be effective and desirable for a long stretch of time. The traumatic impact of the gaze not only illustrates our investment in the film but also realizes the intimacy and attachment we have formed with the characters. Matt Reeves stated that what intrigued him about making Cloverfield was “the idea of taking something that has such as huge scale but filming it on an intimate level.”22 The amateur and “mistakist” videography underscores the importance of the human within the digital spectacle, or what I describe as an intimate spectacle. The first twenty minutes of the film begin with our learning about the relationship these characters have with one another. Once the monster attacks the city, we have a grounding of what’s at stake and what is important for them. Indeed, Rob and Beth’s adventure to Coney Island, seen through the camcorder’s technical glitch taken a month before the attack in New York, serves an important role in our connection with the characters.

Shock, attractions, and the city The film’s last image of Beth and Rob riding Deno’s Wonder Wheel high above Coney Island seems fitting in terms of its architectural and social significance (see Figure 4.3).23 The emergence of cinema and that of the amusement park are closely related, appearing at the same time between 1894 and 1896. These recreational attractions, according to Lauren Rabinovitz, “represented new kinds of energized relaxation that also functioned to calm fears about new technologies and living

80

Capturing Digital Media

Figure 4.3  Cloverfield. Beth ironically “had a great day” with Rob as she enjoys the views offered by Coney Island’s Wonder Wheel.

conditions of an industrialized society.”24 The speed and excitement of the amusement park offered a way of channeling energy from the “excesses of urban stimulation.”25 Deno’s Wonder Wheel’s website reinforces these pleasures, citing an article in Science and Invention that described the ride “as a thrill like you have probably never had before— at least not at this great height!”26 Amusement parks and cinema at the turn of the twentieth century were intimately connected to the contingencies of the city and modern life.27 The spectacular and amazing views from Deno’s Wonder Wheel remind us of the exhibitionist qualities of what Tom Gunning coined (borrowing from Sergei Eisenstein) the “cinema of attractions.” The cinema of attractions, Gunning writes, “envisioned cinema as a series of shocks” that supply pleasure and elicit visual curiosity, such as the Lumière Brothers’ Arrival of a Train at the Station (1895).28 For Gunning, the cinema of attractions and the shock of modernity are intimately related. Drawing on Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer’s writings on urban life and the moving image, Gunning explains that the transformation of modern experience is replaced “by a culture of distraction.”29 Like the amusement parks of the early twentieth century, the visual thrills of the cinema of attractions have a close correlation to modernity in terms of channeling excess stimulation. Gunning writes, “Shock becomes not only a mode of modern experience, but a strategy of a modern aesthetic of astonishment. Hence the exploitation of new technological thrills that flirt with disaster.”30 Similarly, the popularity of the “actuality” films, as Mary Ann Doane explains, was not only due to the shock and thrill it provided viewers, but also due to the



4. Subjective Vision and the Intimate Spectacle

81

camera’s ability to render the raw materials of daily life, transferring and structuring the contingency of time into an event and a durable record, such as the demolition of a building or the aftermath of a natural disaster.31 Cloverfield’s homemade frantic film style follows these visual pleasures of fear and excitement associated with the metropolis, amusement park, and cinema’s early “actualities” and the cinema of attractions. Cloverfield’s horizontal, upward, and downward movement takes viewers on a vertiginous journey through New York City seen through the lens of the vulnerable camera operator. At the same time, the film’s use of digital effects assists in creating the images of urban destruction as modes of attraction and danger. As such, Cloverfield’s “mistakist” aesthetic and its portrayal of catastrophe and disaster are rooted in the attractions of early cinema, vaudeville, and amusement parks. Cloverfield’s dazzling sequences of characters ascending frail buildings and fleeing flesh-eating monsters also underscore Gunning’s observation that the exhibitionist qualities of the cinema of attractions did not disappear with the emergence of narrative and voyeuristic cinema. Indeed, the features of the cinema of attractions serve an important function in our current movie-going experience. In particular, many of these sequences of attraction draw from gaming aesthetics. Alexander Galloway terms fully rendered actionable cinematic space as “gamic vision.”32 Digitally rendered spaces can be re-penetrated, offering viewers a scene from all angles. As Galloway explains, “That in gamic vision time and space are mutable within the diegesis in ways unavailable before.”33 A notable example is the extreme slow-motion Pentagon kitchen scene in Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) where Quicksilver (Evan Peters) repositions gun, bullets, knives, plates, and food in the air over the sounds of Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle.” Although the distortion of time and space is motivated so that viewers experience Quicksilver’s lighting speed perspective, the scene draws attention to its technological mediation as a spectacular visual digression. Writing on remediation and cinema, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin observe that “Gunning’s cinema of attractions illustrates how the logic of hypermediacy can assert itself within the logic of immediacy.”34 For Bolter and Grusin, hypermediacy is our recognition of the technology’s mediation (looking at); whereas immediacy is to erase the presence of mediation (looking through). Spectacular scenes, such as X-Men: Days of Future Past’s slow-motion kitchen scene or Cloverfield’s vertiginous helicopter crash into Central Park, evoke a dual spectatorship, shifting back and forth between

82

Capturing Digital Media

hypermediacy and immediacy, marveling at its visual feast while desiring media immersion. Perhaps the shock and thrill of Cloverfield and other found footage films remind us of our familiarity with Hollywood disaster cinema. Writing on the panic of Orson Welles’s radio broadcasting of War of the Worlds in 1938, Jeffrey Sconce explains that the broadcast drew attention to how “the web” of chain broadcasting became incorporated into the routines of American’s daily life. For Sconce, War of the Worlds illustrated audiences’ “understanding of the technical practices, routine operation, and social authority of the networks.”35 Listeners understood and “internalized” the routines of broadcast radio. As Sconce observes, audiences had put their “faith” in broadcasting, “a social investment in radio as a system of belief.”36 Not unlike found footage cinema, Welles incorporated forms and conventions of radio in order to shock and scare audiences, such as the breaking news bulletin that many listeners were accustomed to hearing on the radio. At one point during the broadcast, one of the reporters on the ground in Princeton, New Jersey, Carl Phillips, is killed by an alien attack, as the microphone abruptly dies. Welles held the pause of silence for an unusual period of time in order to create discomfort for the listener. Not unlike the deaths of Heather in The Blair Witch Project and Hud in Cloverfield and their dropping the camera onto the ground, the long pause of dead air in War of the Worlds draws attention to the apparatus as the listener becomes conscious of their own listening. By employing an amateur and imperfect aesthetic to play with the illusion of reality and fantasy, Cloverfield challenges audiences’ formal expectations of the natural disaster and monster genre. Like the War of the Worlds broadcast, the shock, thrill, and horror of Cloverfield depends upon audiences’ understanding of both Hollywood disaster cinema and amateur videos that pervade the internet. Just as radio listeners were familiar with breaking news bulletins, film goers are familiar with amateur videos that circulate on YouTube and other social media sites. Cloverfield’s aesthetics of amateur videography not only disentangle viewers from traditional practices of Hollywood spectacles, but also entice audiences’ fascination with death, terror, and catastrophe. As both Doane and Gunning explain, an attraction of early cinema is the camera’s ability to render and tame the contingent and the shock of modernity. As such, Cloverfield exploits audiences’ fascination with natural disasters by denaturalizing the traditional Hollywood mode of production through amateur videography and emphasizing the vulnerable human camera operator. On the making of Cloverfield, director Matt Reeves stated,



4. Subjective Vision and the Intimate Spectacle

83

“We had to take a lot of things that were really well-rehearsed and find a way to make them seem accidental.”37 Reeves’s comment about “wellrehearsed” scenes made to “seem accidental” not only demonstrates what I characterized as perfecting the imperfect in Chapter 1, but also describes how the film’s look is informed by cultural forms, such as viral videos and social media. The success of Cloverfield’s subjective shots and amateur videography can be attributed to the astonishing digital effects which, paradoxically, are intensified by amateur and “mistakist” videography. The film’s frantic camera style makes for a hyper-mediated spectatorship that both undoes and follows traditions of monster and disaster movies. At the same time, Cloverfield’s creative use of subjective vision and amateur style of filmmaking elicit our memories and knowledge of 9/11. This feature is attributed to the film’s evidential mode and its uses of digital effects to create an intimate spectacle.

84

CChapter 5 MAKING SENSE OF MUMBLECORE

The previous chapters explored temporal and spatial aesthetics in relation to the digital form. But the allure of the digital is not exclusive to narrative, style, and technique. The transition from analog to digital has also shaped our understanding of artistic publics at the turn of the millennium, particularly for independent and DIY (do-it-yourself) filmmakers. Historically, the analog format is intimately connected to the blossoming of American Independent cinema in the 1980s. This was particularly felt in the emergence of the rental video market. The popularity of renting movies created a need for more products, resulting in a surge in the production and distribution of independent films. From 1983 to 1987, as Stephen Prince notes, “independent productions distributed by the majors remained relatively constant, fluctuating between 49 and 64 pictures per year. By contrast, pictures distributed independently of the majors rose from 125 in 1983 to 242 in 1986 and 203 in 1987.”1 These numbers indicate that even in the midst of mergers and acquisitions, the decentralization of the major film studios, and big blockbuster films of the 1980s, new conditions and opportunities were emerging for independent filmmakers to seize upon. At the same time, access to archives of movies on video inspired future independent filmmakers to shape their knowledge of film and cinematic expression. Consider Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary as employees of the famous—and now closed—rental store, Video Archives, located in Manhattan Beach, California. It has been well documented that Tarantino and Avary were part of a group of friends and other video store employees who were trying to break into the film industry in the 1980s and early 1990s. The “Video Archives gang” was a small group whose members shared a passion and knowledge of film and a desire to make movies that reflected their love of Hollywood and international cinema. In a 1994 interview, Avary stated, “There’s a fresh generation of filmmakers, and they’re coming out of the video stores. All of us have the advantage of a data base of thousands of movies.”2

86

Capturing Digital Media

Tarantino and Avary became close friends and would help each other with their stories and screenplays, eventually writing Pulp Fiction. Both directors were labeled video generation filmmakers, what Variety termed “rebels with a pause.”3 A similar story is unfolding today for a new generation of filmmakers, not so much about accessing databases of film and television content to study, but regarding how digital tools of filmmaking—such as desktop editing and more affordable portable high-definition video cameras—are more readily available for DIY productions. Many independent and amateur filmmakers are using these technologies to produce and circulate their films. In some cases, digital films made on shoestring budgets with a small group of friends can lead to work within Hollywood. An early example is Kevin Rubio’s popular short film Troops (1997), a parody of Star Wars that focuses on storm troopers on the planet Tatooine in a Cops-like fashion. George Lucas’s admiration of Rubio’s fan film resulted in Rubio writing for the Star Wars comic books.4 More recently, YouTube has become a platform for Hollywood to find talent. Director Fede Alvarez’s short film Ataque de Pánico! (Panic Attack!), released on YouTube in 2009, has had more than seven million hits. Alvarez stated in 2009: “I uploaded (Panic Attack!) on a Thursday and on Monday my inbox was totally full of e-mails from Hollywood studios.”5 Alvarez would go onto direct Evil Dead (2013), produced by Sam Raimi. Today, one can shoot featurelength films using their iPhones, as in Sean Baker’s Tangerine (2015), which had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Indeed, digital lends more opportunities for independent and DIY artists to produce and share their work. Of course, this does not change the complexity and challenges filmmakers face in the competitive marketplace. As Chuck Tryon explains, access to affordable and cheaper tools has greatly helped independent filmmakers to produce media content outside the traditional channels of the entertainment industry, but there is still difficulty in standing out in the sea of online information and an “incredibly crowded marketplace.”6 Nevertheless, the allure of the digital offers new possibilities for independent filmmakers to seize upon.7 Yet as new independent filmmaker embrace these new digital technologies, they continue to follow past independent filmmakers in the emphasis on the personal narrative. A development in American Independent cinema that gained attention during the transition to digital was a group of filmmakers dubbed “Mumblecore.” These filmmakers emerged from the 2005 South by Southwest Film Festival (SXSW). During the festival, Eric Masunaga,



5. Making Sense of Mumblecore

87

the sound mixer of film director Andrew Bujalski, was asked to describe a new mini movement of low-budget films screening at the event— films that included Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation, Joe Swanberg’s Kissing on the Mouth, Mark and Jay Duplass’s The Puffy Chair, and Susan Buice and Arin Crumley’s Four Eyed Monsters. As the story goes, Masunaga jokingly coined the term “Mumblecore” as a way to describe the naturalistic dialogue that sounded like characters “mumbling” to each other. The term gained currency in August 2005, when during an interview with IndieWire, Bujalski referred to Mumblecore as a potential cinematic movement.8 When these filmmakers were featured in the magazine Filmmaker Magazine in the spring of 2007,9 The New York Times in the August of 2007,10 and a New Yorker in 2009,11 the term entered cinematic discourse. But Mumblecore is a term that lacks fixity. It is a contested label for both its filmmakers, who are uneasy about being categorized, and for critics who have debated whether these filmmakers, in fact, constitute a film movement. Amy Taubin, for example, observes Mumblecore as “the indie movement that was never more than a flurry of festival hype and blogosphere branding.”12 The negative reactions to Mumblecore demonstrate that narratives of a subculture, as explored in Chapter 3, are not only written from within, but by those who stand outside of a subculture. What further complicates making sense of Mumblecore is that many of these filmmakers reject this moniker. As Greta Gerwig plainly puts it, “I hate the word. I hate the word ‘Mumblecore.’ . . . It didn’t feel like a compliment to be the ‘Meryl Streep of Mumblecore.’”13 Despite these concerns and criticisms, Mumblecore found an audience, albeit a small one, due to the help of online streaming platforms and film festivals. But considering both the decline of analog production and video store marketplace, the attacks aimed at Mumblecore suggest something deeper. In tracing media forms of analog and digital, these intimate and highly personal films identify the complexity of what constitutes “indie” in American Independent cinema, and how the convergence of digital forms are changing our understanding of temporality and the formation of artistic publics. As I will explain, the emergence of Mumblecore does not demonstrate a divide between older and newer media, but rather the interrelation of the two. Perhaps more importantly, the debate over naming these films and filmmakers as Mumblecore demonstrates a necessary tension in the development of American Independent cinema. As explained in the previous chapters, the logic of desire operates on the loss of the privileged object (objet petit a). Since no empirical object can substitute

88

Capturing Digital Media

the lost “sublime” object, desire continues to desire by moving from object to object. Each object the subject encounters fails to provide a sense of wholeness by proclaiming “this is not it.” At the same time, there is something beneficial in the loss of the privileged object: namely, it sets the stage for the possibility of the new. Although critics and filmmakers have debated whether or not Mumblecore constitutes a cinematic movement, or questioned whether or not these films rank as amateur or professional, it is this very antagonism that energizes the spirit and vibrancy of indieness. Not unlike the development of a genre over time, American Independent cinema changes and grows because as a film system, so to speak, it contains a built-in disruption. In other words, what fertilizes the growth of independent and DIY cinema is not wholeness but loss itself. We can begin to trace this tension by briefly examining the complexity of defining “indie.”

American independent cinema and the emergence of mumblecore Defining what constitutes “indie” in American Independent cinema is not a straight forward path. Although it is easy to classify “indie” as films that are not mainstream and not screened at a megaplex, this is certainly not the case for all independent films, such as Miramax’s award-winning and box office hits The English Patient (Anthony Minghella, 1996) and Dreamworks’ American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999). Yet terms such as “status quo” and “mainstream” continue to inform viewers in defining what determines indie or alternative cinema. As Michael Z. Newman explains, “‘mainstream’ is always a product of collective judgment no less than ‘indie’ is.”14 Films such as Pulp Fiction and Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003) can both have wider appeal and maintain their independent cultural currency. From an economic lens, retaining outsider currency in the return of commercial awards is significant in the emergence of minimajors in the 1990s and 2000s. The increasing exposure of American Independent cinema during this period signaled a structural and industrial shift toward Hollywood. Award-winning and financially successful films such as Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992), and Pulp Fiction proved that revenue can be generated in the independent film market and sustain indie credibility. Beginning with Disney purchasing Miramax in 1993, Hollywood began to form art-house divisions and mini-majors



5. Making Sense of Mumblecore

89

such as Fox Searchlight, Paramount Vantage (formerly Paramount Classics), Focus Features, and Warner Independent. As Emanuel Levy observes, “The concept that best describes independents in the 1990s is that of institutionalization. Indies now form an industry that runs not so much against Hollywood as parallel to Hollywood.”15 The films of 1999—American Beauty, Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry, Alexander Payne’s Election, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, David Lynch’s The Straight Story, David O. Russell’s Three Kings, and James Mangold’s Girl, Interrupted—exemplify a bridging between Hollywood and independent cinema, a middle zone and mixture of “praise and controversy” often referred to as “Indiewood.”16 From this perspective, defining American Independent cinema involves a number of overlapping interpretive “viewing strategies” as Newman puts it, such as aesthetic and narrative expressions, the institutions associated with these films, and audiences’ interpretation of what constitutes “indieness.”17 Opposition and resistance toward Hollywood is often the fuel for independent cinema. But we must also consider the role that technologies and production practices perform in alternative expressions toward mainstream cinema, as in the development of the indie digital feature in the mid-to-late 1990s. Starting with Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme 95 manifesto, followed by the worldwide success of The Blair Witch Project, the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the millennium saw a surge in digital features. The inexpensive production costs of digital filmmaking spawned small film production companies such as Blow Up Pictures, Next Wave Films, and InDigEnt (Independent Digital Entertainment). The combination of inexpensive production costs and the raw, grassroots style of Dogme 95 and The Blair Witch Project not only helped create new avenues for independent cinema, but also opened the doors to digital cinema as a legitimate force of filmmaking. Mumblecore differs and shares in the overlapping aspects of American indies. Many of the techniques and aesthetic expressions employed by Mumblecore, such as long takes and emphasis on character (over plot), are not unlike independent cinema. But one trait of Mumblecore that has drawn much attention is their highly personal and self-reflective stories. In this context, independent filmmaker John Cassavetes is often cited in discussions of Mumblecore. Cassavetes was known for his personal, raw style of filmmaking. He self-financed and self-distributed many of his films. Similar to Mumblecore filmmakers, Cassavetes worked with roughly the same troupe of actors, casting Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, Seymour Cassel, and his wife, Gena Rowlands,

90

Capturing Digital Media

in different roles. Even his friends and family members became part of the process in the production of his films. As Ray Carney explains, Cassavetes’s “vision was of film as a personal exploration of the meaning of his life and the lives of people around him.”18 Cassavetes’s process of filmmaking, in particular, provides a pathway to understanding differences and similarities between his work and Mumblecore. Rather than sticking to a strict hierarchical mode of production, Cassavetes involved almost everyone in the filmmaking process.19 Carney explains that the social interaction and intimacy of a Cassavetes’s film set is paramount in terms of excavating the deep desires and emotions of his actors. More so, the intimacy and collaborative style of filmmaking in Cassavetes’s films worked against the standardized mode of filmmaking, which, as Carney notes, makes it more difficult to draw out the emotions of performers. This, in turn, allowed Cassavetes to build an intimate relationship on the set with his actors for “expressive possibilities.”20 This closeness is evident in his characters, who are often unpredictable, spontaneous, and—ultimately—bursting with emotions. Critics and writers have noted comparable features in Cassavetes’s collaborative process and Mumblecore’s methodology of filmmaking. But there are also important differences namely, Mumblecore’s intimate relationship to technological conditions at the turn of the millennium. Mumblecore’s filmmakers have benefited from digital technologies, enabling immediate communication and content sharing via the internet and video streaming platforms. In 2005, Chicago DIY filmmaker Joe Swanberg released his first feature film, Kissing on the Mouth, made for $1,200. Because the film contained explicit sex and nudity, Swanberg did not think the film would be picked up by a distributor. He decided to post ten minutes of the film on the message board of director Roger Avary’s website, where it was discovered by Matt Dentler, the director of the SXSW film festival.21 Dentler emailed Swanberg and invited him to show Kissing on the Mouth at that year’s festival, where the film would have its premier alongside Mutual Appreciation, The Puffy Chair, and Four Eyed Monsters. Dentler’s discovery of Swanberg’s film offers an instance in which digital media and social networking proved to be an important platform for screening work outside of conventional exhibition avenues. Consider, for example, brothers Jay and Mark Duplass’s This Is John, an eight-minute short film featuring a person trying to perfect his answering machine message. This is John was selected for the Sundance Film Festival in 2004. That same year, the Duplass brothers began working on an idea for a feature film to be shot on digital video.



5. Making Sense of Mumblecore

91

The story, which would become The Puffy Chair, is about two brothers traveling to see their father for his birthday in Atlanta. On their way to Atlanta, they pick up a chair they won on eBay and deliver it to their father as a birthday present. Although the film was being praised and even winning awards at film festivals, no company would distribute the film. This all changed when Ted Sarandos, chief content officer of Netflix (Red Envelope Entertainment), acquired The Puffy Chair for distribution on its web rental site. Netflix not only made the film available to its subscribers, but also helped the Duplass brothers get a nonexclusive DVD distribution deal so that the film could be offered at other rental stores.22 When the film became available on DVD, Netflix sent an email notification to its subscribers, which resulted in more than 100,000 customers adding The Puffy Chair to their DVD queue. The film garnered further viewer exposure by being rated on Netflix’s “suggestion for you.”23 It is important to note that, although digital technologies proved to be powerful tools for independent filmmakers, the limited use of the internet as a method of delivery for digital streaming and distribution was initially a barrier at the turn of the millennium. At the time, sites for short films were becoming very popular on the web. As Barbara Klinger notes, “In 2000, observers estimated that more than three hundred thousand film shorts were made each year, and almost one hundred short film Web sites already existed.”24 But in 2001, asked whether the internet could be a digital delivery system for a featurelength film, Thomas Vinterberg stated that the internet is “too slow, and sitting down for hours and hours actually bores me a little bit.”25 Around that same time, New Wave Films President Peter Broderick stated that he was not convinced that the internet could be a usable distribution system stating, “The quality is still crappy. If you want to watch three minutes of a high concept short, maybe, but we’ve really got to come up with a whole new level of delivery.”26 The increase in broadband services and the development of video streaming sites such as YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon have met these challenges, now allowing quick streaming of video content. Alongside access to faster internet service, there is a significant increase in mobile and portable screens, such as tablet computers, smartphones, and laptops, on which one can instantly retrieve video content. When greater access to film and television titles is factored in—particularly online streaming—we begin to see a connection to the emergence of Mumblecore. Such advances in digitization not only enable the intensification of decentralized time and space, but also serve to build a network of underground filmmakers

92

Capturing Digital Media

and a communal ethos. Aymar Jean Christian adds, “Mumblecore must be read as a product of a specific cultural moment; its efforts to depict the real in a digital age potentially reimagines how the cinematic experience is received.”27 The narratives of Mumblecore films often, as Christian points out, explore what cinematic connection and intimacy looks like in the digital age. In certain ways, the confessional mode of Mumblecore films can be described as a diary aesthetic, addressing how digital media have helped to blur the classic markers of amateur and professional. Part of understanding this change is exploring how digital is redefining our understanding of temporality and the public sphere.

Material and online publics The Blair Witch Project is often cited as an early example of the benefits of personal digital media for DIY filmmakers, as well as an innovator for its uses of the internet as a vehicle for promoting and marketing the film’s release in the summer of 1999.28 More importantly, The Blair Witch Project’s experimentation with digital video illustrates the blurring divide between the amateur and professional filmmaker in relation to the public and private spheres, such as the scene when the filmmakers stumble upon a group of humanoid stick figures hung in the trees. Heather (Heather Donahue), the director of the project, is carrying a portable high 8  mm video camera to record their journey in making the documentary. The stick figures are first presented to viewers through the lens of video (Heather’s perspective). Excited about her discovery as possible evidence of the Blair Witch, Heather calls to her crew to grab the CP 16  mm camera to document their findings. In this respect, the found evidence must be legitimized through the medium of celluloid. Thus, what is at stake here are the mediums of video as “amateur” and celluloid (16 mm and 35 mm) as “professional.” Heather’s need to photograph the stick figures in celluloid implies video’s relegation to amateur home movies (or, in this case, Heather’s personal and private video of her experience making the Blair Witch documentary). The amateur quality associated with the private and domestic spheres informs the design of the film in an era when digital video was not a part of Hollywood’s standard mode of production for feature filmmaking. At the same time, the video quality and grainy look of the film is stylistically motivated precisely to establish its credentials as an “authentic” found footage film.



5. Making Sense of Mumblecore

93

Today’s social media platforms continue to blur the boundaries of the amateur and professional, transforming the private sphere of the amateur “home movie” into a work for public exhibition. This is particularly felt in the world of fan culture. Henry Jenkins observes that the development of fans’ uses of digital have seen the “re-emergence of grassroots creativity” associated with the folk-art tradition. Folk art had been “displaced” by mass media in the twentieth century, as production centers in radio, film, and magazines developed into the culture industry. For Jenkins, consumers in the twenty-first century are using tools of digital media for creating popular culture, which reflects the forms associated with folk culture.29 Certainly “grassroot” fan communities were getting together at conventions and sharing fan fiction before the advent of digital media—but digital technologies have certainly enhanced this development of fan culture. Although the development of Mumblecore is not considered fan culture, it does encompass some characteristics of grassroots creativity in filmmakers’ uses of digital media to produce, promote, and circulate their works. And given that these films have found an audience, questions are raised about temporality, digital forms of communication, and the changing formation of publics. According to Michael Warner, a public involves three senses of the term: first, the public as a “social totality” (a nation, the city, or state) that would (or, at least is supposed to) include everyone.30 The second sense is a concrete public (a sporting event, a concert, or a protest), “a crowd witnessing itself in visible space.”31 Combining these two senses, a public is organized by discourse itself. The openness of a public renders it vulnerable to appropriation, but this appropriation is countered by the reflexivity of its participants in constituting themselves as a public. The circularity of a public both contains its audience and its selfawareness as an audience. For example, a television viewer watching a program knows he/she is part of a television public without interacting with other viewers. A third sense of a public is temporality. Publics are sustained through the constant circulation of texts, as in the weekly or monthly press of magazines, or seasonal runs of television shows “punctuated by daily rhythms” through time. That is, the public is constituted by what Warner describes as the “regular flow of discourse in and out.”32 Certainly media sources come and go. But what binds the “on-going life” of a public is its self-awareness as a public and openness to strangers, as well as its continuous circulation of texts.33

94

Capturing Digital Media

Because temporality is a key force in sustaining the circulation of a public, Warner indicates uncertainty about how web discourse will affect the “temporal framework” of the public sphere, particularly how the requirement of punctuality relates to the internet. This is because the “24/7 access” of the internet is not structured temporally (i.e., it is not always unfolding through time), and it is not “centrally indexed” as in the traditional publishing of newspapers or magazines, nor does the internet have the “punctual rhythm” of broadcast media such as television or radio. The question of temporality and the internet raises a point discussed in Chapter 3 regarding the cultural form of the database. A development of digital environments is that users must interface, formulate, and structure the data in order to generate narrative paths or “trajectories” out of its catalogue of information, such as clicking hyperlinks or scrolling through web pages. For these same reasons, Warner is unsure if the internet possesses the punctuality and regular unfolding of time found in publics.34 To understand the changing relationship between temporality and public involves distinguishing publics organized exclusively by traditional dated forms of text from digitally virtual publics that are exclusively organized by decentralized participation in “instantaneous” texts of the internet. For purposes of clarity, the former can be referred to as material publics and the latter as online publics. Material publics are publics structured and linked by a text’s regulated temporality, such as the weekly release of a film, the monthly printing of a magazine, and the seasonal run of a television show. The constant circulation of such texts is required to sustain a public and what Warner calls its “social imaginary.” Without the constant dissemination of such texts, there is no interaction and reflexivity to generate and maintain the binding of a public. Online publics, by way of contrast, are decentralized and not regulated and organized through the linear/serial unfolding of texts through time. Of course, many websites and blogs list dates on their web page. YouTube, for example, enables one to sort through uploaded videos by time frames such as “today,” “this week,” or “this month.” Many websites have also successfully migrated their materials into serial web form, but their basic temporality is not punctual. This is primarily because users must interface with these new media objects, putting them to work to generate meaning. For this reason, Warner speculates that “it remains unclear to what extent the changing technology [of the Web] will be assimilable to the temporal framework of public discourse.”35 Warner’s speculation is similar to Matt Hills’s



5. Making Sense of Mumblecore

95

examination of fan culture and online media, and the importance of textual gaps in helping to sustain fan culture. Hills explains that this practice of media fandom becomes “enmeshed within the rhythm and temporalities of broadcasting, so that fans now go online to discuss new episodes immediately after the episode’s transmission time—or even during ad-breaks—perhaps in order to demonstrate the ‘timeliness’ and responsiveness of their devotion.”36 Fans’ production of meanings of a television text is entangled with the speed of transmission in its reception by way of online media.37 The “timeliness” of online media diminishes the reception of the text’s “time-lag” and textual gaps (the reading and writing of the show after its initial airing). At the same time, “just-in-time fandom” increases fans’ speed of consumption and gathering of narrative content. Whereas Hills’ “just-in-time fandom” considers the loss of lag time in the reception and decoding of the text in fans’ uses of online media, Warner questions the public sphere’s necessity of the text’s punctual rhythm in online public discourse. The temporal component of online and material publics closely follows the logic of desire and drive. Material publics that unfold chronologically correlate to desire and the measurement of time spatially, such as the monthly pressing of a magazine or the scheduling of a television series by a broadcast network. Here material publics operate on the clock’s chronological measurement of time. As Todd McGowan explains, the linear measurement of time “dominates the experience of temporality,” to the point that it is hard to conceive the depiction of time other than as spatialized.38 By contrast, online publics are nonchronological and work against linear measurement of time. They are akin to the logic of the drive as “atemporal,” such as realtime postings of events and videos on the web. As explained in the Introduction, a notable example of online publics is accessing television content via digital streaming platforms. In the traditional model of broadcasting, one is beholden to appointment television, where one must schedule their time to watch a program at its initial airing. Digital streaming, however, is not exclusively restricted by appointment, as we can access archives of television content at our leisure time.39 The allure of digital time-shifting media is that time ceases to operate as an authority over the subject. This is because digital can eradicate temporal barriers or wait time. Indeed, temporality operates differently for material and online publics. But they should not be read as separate spheres. Rather, I suggest that publics organizing through the internet are neither purely material nor purely online, but rather are organized through the interaction and

96

Capturing Digital Media

interfacing of digital and traditional forms of communication. As such, online publics can produce material effects and vice versa. For example, online platforms have helped Mumblecore filmmakers create their own social space as a network of artists. As Chuck Tryon points out, digital distribution has spawned new avenues for independent and DIY filmmakers to share their works. Mumblecore has certainly benefited from digital tools and digital platforms to circulate their films, especially reaching locations outside of cities and college towns as Tyron notes.40 But Mumblecore filmmakers not only use the web to promote their films online, they also showcase their work at film festivals, such as SXSW and “The New Talkies: Generation D.I.Y.” that the IFC Center put on in 2007 to promote Mumblecore. From this perspective, what has helped to organize Mumblecore as an artistic public is not only the “timeliness” of digital communication technologies (the internet, digital tools of filmmaking, and mobile screens), but also traditional communication forms of technologies in material forms, such as posters, films, photos, and so forth, circulating at film festivals, independent theatres, colleges, and cafés. These forms of media associated with material publics certainly align Mumblecore with the institutional practices of American Independent cinema. Yet Mumblecore’s emphasis on highly personal filmmaking raises questions of the amateur and professional in the reception of these films as an indie culture.

Authenticity or too close for comfort? Although many of these filmmakers have resisted the Mumblecore moniker, they entail a communitarian spirit. Consider the collaboration of filmmakers such as Andrew Bujalski, the Duplass brothers, Aaron Katz, Greta Gerwig, and Joe Swanberg, who share and pull from each other’s resources by acting in each other’s films and/or assisting with each other’s productions, as evident in the group production of Hannah Takes the Stairs (Joe Swanberg, 2007), or Susan Buice and Arin Crumley’s Four Eyed Monsters, which incorporates audience’s stories of their own relationships into the film through video podcasts. Even Gerwig, who is dismissive of the term “Mumblecore,” states, “What was wonderful about it [Mumblecore] was, it allowed me to understand how films are built, because we were doing everything. Everybody was doing everything.”41 These films also demonstrate the self-transformation of the personal lives of these filmmakers in the process of making these films. As Joe



5. Making Sense of Mumblecore

97

Swanberg states, “It’s about taking aspects of yourself that you like the least and amplifying them. In making the movies, we really try to expose all our issues, whatever is hardest to deal with.”42 Discussing how he and his brother wrote and directed The Puffy Chair, Jay Duplass explains it was a complete accident, “It came out of a process of seeing that the accidents were what we had to offer. It wasn’t until we tapped into the private, weird stuff that the script started to soar.”43 But it is also this personal aspect of Mumblecore that writers have criticized these filmmakers for in their desire for authenticity. As explained in the case of The Blair Witch Project, the video format, at first, was relegated to the amateur format, where 16 mm connotes the professional medium. Mumblecore cinema conjures a similar tension, in which the amateur is linked to the highly personal narrative. Here we see a dispute among critics in trying to make sense of Mumblecore’s production practices of digital media to create personal films. Although Mumblecore arrived at a time when more filmmakers were adopting the digital format, many writers and critics criticized these films as self-indulgent, insular, and narcissistic. As Dennis Lim puts it, “For potential haters, mumblecore offers plenty of ammunition. The films are modest in scope, but their concentration on daily banalities can register as narcissism. Despite the movement’s communitarian ethos, from the outside it can seem incestuous and insular.”44 Take, for instance, Aaron Katz’s Quiet City (2007), which focuses on Charlie (Cris Lankenau), a musician living in New York City (recently recovering from the break up with his girlfriend), who unexpectedly meets a stranger on a subway platform, Jamie (Erin Fisher), a woman traveling from Atlanta to meet a friend with whom she cannot get in touch. Charlie invites Jamie to his apartment, and a quiet and cerebral romance loosely evolves over a twenty-four hour time span. Or consider Azazel Jacobs’s Momma’s Man (2008), which focuses on Mickey (Matt Boren), a thirty-somethingyear-old man who visits his parents in New York City, but then decides to delay returning home to his wife and newborn baby in Los Angeles in order to rummage through his childhood and adolescent mementos. Both films are intimate portrayals of characters working through personal situations (such as recovering from a relationship) or caught up in an interlude or moment of transition (such as Mickey, who is torn about becoming a father and detaching from his childhood home). Highly personal filmmaking often becomes a target for critics, as Alicia Van Couvering and Joe Swanberg explain: “Highly personal art is a huge gamble—it’s easy for a critic to dismiss it as narcissistic or indulgent.”45 In an interview with IFC, actor John C. Reilly similarly expresses that

98

Capturing Digital Media

“there’s a sophistication to what they [Mumblecore filmmakers] want out of storytelling, and there’s a drive to be honest with their audience about what life is really like.”46 Mumblecore’s uses of digital media to create highly personal narratives return us to the difficulty and necessary tension in defining what constitutes American Independent cinema. It addresses what Michael Z. Newman explains as shared “viewing strategies for thinking about and engaging with texts.” These viewing strategies, according to Newman, are “products of indie community networks.”47 For Newman, indieness is not bounded by a film’s textual features but also “the product of a judgment that we make about the film.”48 In other words, some viewers may experience a movie by knowing something about the contested category of independent cinema; others may not. As Newman offers the example of Alexander Payne’s Sideways (2004), one can certainly identify markers of indieness in terms of the film’s content and storytelling, as well as Payne’s background in directing indie films such as Citizen Ruth (1996) and Election. But for some, the film’s sixteen million budget might exclude it from the indie category. We can certainly see how making sense of Mumblecore’s highly personal narrative might also raise debates of what constitutes indieness. As explained, Mumblecore films share many commonalities with the independent ethos, specifically the emphasis on personal filmmaking. But they also differ in the new avenues of production, distribution, and exhibition afforded by digital for filmmakers working outside of Hollywood. As filmmaker Aaron Katz explains, “This is the first time, mostly because of technology, that someone like me can go out and make a film with no money and no connections.”49 This is not to suggest that Mumblecore filmmakers are declining projects to have their works produced and distributed by studios and networks. The Duplass brothers’ short-lived HBO television series Togetherness (2015–16), for example, exhibits a highly personalized style of filmmaking, focusing on everyday issues of marriage and work. Joe Swanberg continues to make intimate films, such as Drinking Buddies (2013) and Happy Christmas (2014). Both films were distributed by Magnolia Pictures, and starred big name actors such as Jon Livingston, Anna Kendrick, and Olivia Wilde. At the same time, both films continue Mumblecore’s ethos and desire for authenticity. Perhaps one of the most significant works that has emerged out of the Mumblecore development is Greta Gerwig’s Ladybird (2017). Although Gerwig has distanced herself from the Mumblecore label, the film clearly captures the highly personal ethos of Mumblecore cinema



5. Making Sense of Mumblecore

99

as it traces Christine’s “Lady Bird” (Saoirse Ronan) senior year at a Catholic high school in Sacramento, California. The immediacy of digital media has helped to sustain Mumblecore’s network of artists and fans. Online streaming sites not only provide access to hard-to-find movies, but also help Mumblecore promote and distribute its films to a wider audience. Although the digital format has a strong appeal for DIY filmmakers, forms of the analog era continue to serve an important role for the American indie film community. Mumblecore films still rely upon traditional avenues of exhibition and marketing, such as film festivals and reviews from newspaper and magazine critics, demonstrating the interrelation and overlapping of material and online publics. Independent filmmakers’ uses of digital technologies have opened new avenues of showing one’s work outside of the home environment. Mumblecore specifically demonstrates that the digital format is a strong source of technology in which DIY filmmakers can organize and work outside of the walls of Hollywood. At the same time, it is important not to make grandiose claims on behalf of digital technologies. Indeed, the “timeliness” of digital media is reshaping the formation of publics. But Mumblecore is not exclusively defined by its uses of digital media. Traditional institutions, such as critics and national media sources, have a vital function in promoting these films, enabling them to stand out in the crowd of DIY filmmakers. Mumblecore films not only illustrate the interrelation of material and online publics, but their highly personal narratives raise debates regarding amateur and professional media practices in the uses of digital media. Considering these developments, the spirit of these filmmakers underscores the continued complexity in defining American independent cinema. Yet antagonism is a necessary force that fuels the spirit and energy of indieness.

100

CChapter 6 THE POLITICS OF HOMEMADE FILMMAKING: Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN AND END OF WATCH

As explored in the previous chapter, desire and drive are intimately connected to the interrelation of material and online publics. Material publics function on producing texts that correspond to linear and chronological measurement of time. By contrast, online publics are decentralized and do not exclusively rely on chronologically timebased texts. Mumblecore demonstrates that material and online public are not mutually exclusive, as evident in these filmmakers using both digital and analog resources to circulate and promote their works to the public. At the same time, Mumblecore’s personal and intimate narratives reveal a tension between the amateur and professional in defining American Independent cinema as an artistic public. Here amateur and professional modes of filmmaking share commonalities with competing forms of imperfection and perfection in relation to digital media. Personal media tools (such as home video, editing software, and high-quality and portable digital video camcorders) alongside web platforms and computer practices (such as online streaming and social networking sites) are opening up new avenues for artists to present their work in a public forum as in the case of Mumblecore. As explained, The Blair Witch Project is often cited as an early example of the benefits of personal digital media for DIY filmmakers. Blair Witch’s mixing of high 8 mm found footage and 16 mm documentary style illustrates not only the creative uses of digital and analog formats, but also the different modes of spectatorship it elicits. As Caetlin Benson-Allott observes, Blair Witch’s 16 mm is based on authenticity, whereas the behind-the-scenes videography entails “a second representational strategy” that instructs viewers “when to fear found footage.”1 Indeed, Blair Witch’s employment of amateur videography calls into question traditional categories of amateur and professional. The film demonstrates that digital video can unshed its primary meanings linked to the amateur artist and private

102

Capturing Digital Media

sphere. At the same time, the film’s homemade aesthetic illustrates how amateur practices can influence the professional mode of production, as in the popularization of the found footage horror genre that emerged with films such as Cloverfield, Chronicle (Josh Trank, 2012), and Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007). Certainly the emergence of YouTube cannot be ignored in audiences’ acceptance of amateur techniques in found footage horror. As Alexandra Heller-Nicholas explains, “Found Footage horror responded with a dramatic spike that reflected this growth in the acceptance of amateur filmmaking.”2 The frenetic aesthetic of The Blair Witch Project, as well as its use of both digital video and film (along with the popularization of YouTube), addresses technological and stylistic changes within the Hollywood mode of production. David Bordwell and Janet Staiger identify three benefits with regard to new technologies and their impact on the economic practices of the studio system. First, production efficiency saves the studio costs and solves production problems. Second, new technology can potentially distinguish one studio’s product from a competing studio’s project. And, third, advances in new products continue Hollywood’s tradition of striving toward standards of quality.3 They add that product differentiation and technological innovations “must not destroy stylistic standardization.”4 For example, most often when new special effects are employed in Hollywood, they are enlisted to “complement” the film’s story world. In this sense, the system must be able to incorporate technological changes with little or no disruption of the system. New technologies such as sync sound or 3-D must be integrated into the realist classical narrative form that minimizes viewers from becoming conscious of the apparatus that creates the film’s virtual setting. But, as explained in the Introduction and Chapter 4, digital visual effects may be so stunning, they can call attention to themselves as a narrative digression or “cinema of attractions,” such as the bullet time photography in The Matrix, or Quicksilver’s kitchen fight sequence in X-Men: Days of Future Past. Importantly, however, Hollywood’s incorporation of such new technologies follows not only an economic model, but also the studio’s history of utilizing classical realism to create transparent story worlds. But what are the social and political implications when technologies are not used within the boundaries of Hollywood’s mode of production? Dogme 95’s “The Vows of Chastity,” for instance, is an attack on pristine and precise cinema. Dogme 95’s embrace of digital video and camcorders for amateurs not only broke with the traditional methods of filmmaking but was also a direct response to the narrative and



6. The Politics of Homemade Filmmaking

103

aesthetic precision of Hollywood. In certain respects, the DIY ethos of Dogme 95 is reminiscent of punk rock’s direct and basic sound, and its appeal of “intentional or lack of expertise.”5 The manifesto of Dogme 95 demonstrates that personal media devices and practices of amateur videography can become both political and personal expressions to resist and oppose the hegemonic mode of filmmaking. Writing on the history of the amateur filmmaker, Patricia Zimmermann explains that amateurism “as a social and historical phenomenon, work and free time are not locked into simple binary oppositions; rather, the absence of one defines and imbricates the other.”6 Like the private and public spheres, the amateur and professional are interrelated. The professional and amateur cannot exist without each other. More so, the interrelation of amateur and professional are not always harmonious. As Heller-Nicholas notes, “Definitions of amateur and professional rely on each other often in disparaging ways, where celebrating one requires a necessary denigration of the other.”7 What follows is an examination of amateur and professional strategies and codes at work in Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También and David Ayer’s End of Watch. The imperfection of amateurism, such as play, creativity, and spontaneity, is akin to not only what is human and organic but can be in opposition to the professional and hegemonic mode of filmmaking, as in the development of Dogme 95. The style of avant-garde cinema, as Zimmermann explains, “unleashes a contradiction between the ideology of the dominant professional codes of narrative and classical, pictorial composition and the contingencies of amateur production.”8 Both Y Tu Mamá También and End of Watch appropriate stylistic traits of an amateur production in order to create an intimate, spontaneous, and visceral spectatorship. Although both films intentionally employ an amateur aesthetic, they do not entirely abandon the professional codes of filmmaking. As I will argue, the political currency of both films emerged through the competing forms of the mass/professional mode and home/amateur mode of filmmaking. Lastly, in discussing amateur and professional modes of filmmaking, it is important to note that the dominant group does not itself abide by its own hegemonic imperative. On the contrary, it takes as its prerogative incorporating or “nominating” subcultural styles into the status quo. Dick Hebdige describes this phenomenon as the cycling of subculture resistance: “Each subculture moves through a cycle of resistance and defusion[,] and . . . this cycle is situated within the large cultural and commercial matrices.”9 As explained in Chapter 1, the incorporation of shaky handheld camera work is intentionally used to aesthetically

104

Capturing Digital Media

represent the look of imperfection in War of the Worlds and Children of Men. The imperfection of the long take and its uses of digital effects is one development of Hollywood’s incorporation of the long take—a technique that was often discouraged under the classical era’s mode of production. The long take is typically associated with duration and slowness. But the long take can also articulate speed and immediacy that complements that classical mode of narration. Even as the status quo appropriates the subcultural style at will, it also perpetuates the processes and terms of its own hegemony. As Hebdige points out, hegemony is not “universal and ‘given,’” but has to “be won, reproduced, sustained.”10 Media texts such as film and television are always open to negotiation and oppositional reading practices; meanings will vary from person to person based on experiences and frames of knowledge, demonstrating that nonconformist styles can be incorporated into the status quo, elucidating the dialectical nature of hegemony.

Amateur videography and the competing home/mass modes Dogme 95’s intentional amateurism as a form of oppositional filmmaking can be traced to early experimental cinema. The writings of experimental filmmakers Maya Deren and Jonas Mekas, for instance, embraced amateur practices for their potential to disrupt and undermine traditional modes of filmmaking under the classical Hollywood system. In “Amateur versus Professional,” Deren associates the artistic freedom of the amateur as a “great advantage which all professionals envy.”11 This freedom comes in the form of not sacrificing “visual drama” and “beauty to a stream of words,” as well as not expecting significant profits for investors within the entertainment industry.12 As Ryan Shand explains, Deren’s view of mainstream culture compromises artistic practices, whereas amateur filmmaking is free from stylistic constraints, and can supply a “voice to areas of concern” usually kept in check by practices of the status quo.13 Writing on the style of New American Cinema filmmakers, Mekas notes, “If we study the modern film poetry, we find that even the mistakes, the out-of-focus shots, the shaky shots, the unsure steps, the hesitant movements, the over-exposed, the underexposed bits, have become a part of the new cinema vocabulary.”14 For Mekas, the poetic mistakes of the amateur not only counter the dominant mode of production, but can become a new language of filmmaking, such as the styles and techniques of the French New Wave. As often noted, the French New Wave significantly influenced New American Cinema



6. The Politics of Homemade Filmmaking

105

directors, such as Dennis Hopper, Martin Scorsese, and Arthur Penn. François Truffaut’s and Jean-Luc Godard’s personal cinema of handheld photography, jump cuts, and long takes in The 400 Blows (1959) and Breathless (1960) embodies the spirit, freedom, and visual poetry of the amateur that Mekas and Deren champion. At the same time, the style of both films counters the traditions of the classical Hollywood mode of production. Shooting Breathless, Godard’s cinematographer Raoul Coutard explains that “little by little we discovered a need to escape from convention and even run counter to the rules of ‘cinematographic grammar.’”15 Certainly the oppositional ethos of the French New Wave continues to influence alternative cinema developments, such as Dogme 95 and its manifesto against the spectacle and special effects of Hollywood cinema in the 1990s. As Nicholas Rombes puts it, “The general tendency of the Dogme 95 movement . . . has been to return cinematic representation to the realm of the real.”16 A pathway taken by Dogme 95 toward representing the real is not only through amateur techniques, but by also using technologies for amateur artists. Lars von Trier, for example, describes that the The Idiots (1998) “was made in five weeks and I’ve shot about 90 per cent of it myself, with a small handheld camcorder for amateurs.”17 Analysis of amateur filmmaking is often discussed in relation to professional processes. But these categories are not mutually exclusive. Richard Chalfen describes amateur and professional styles as falling into two categories: “the mass mode” (feature films screened on television and movie theatres) and “the home mode” (home movies and travel films).18 These concepts also have limitations, as Ryan Shand explains, “when confronted with amateur films that do not fit into either category.”19 Shand draws upon “cine-club” filmmaking to explain what he terms the “community mode,” which “addresses and acknowledges the limited public exhibition enjoyed by these filmmakers, without implying that they are simply moviemakers, or attempting entry into the mass mode.”20 Indeed, amateur practices of filmmaking often complicate the classification of the home and mass modes. In many cases, amateur traits such as shaky camera work, jumpy editing, and out-of-focus shots are intentionally designed to oppose the dominant practices of filmmaking, such as Dogme 95’s intentional amateur videography. But amateur styles and techniques can be incorporated at the professional level of production. What was once oppositional can become dominant, illustrating the cycling of subculture resistance. More so, amateur and professional forms of filmmaking can be in competition with each other. These modes of filmmaking, what I describe as a competing mode,

106

Capturing Digital Media

operate in both the mass and home modes, and still carry oppositional and political currency as in the intentional amateur videography style of Y Tu Mamá También. Y Tu Mamá También tells the story of two teenage boys, Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael García Bernal), who embark on a road trip with an older woman, Luisa (Maribel Verdú), the wife of Tenoch’s cousin. After learning of her husband’s infidelity, Luisa accepts the boys’ invitation to travel to “Heaven’s Mouth,” a made-up place the boys use to entice her to come along for the trip. Unbeknownst to the boys, Luisa is dying of cancer. Throughout the film, an omniscient voice-over narrator interrupts the protagonist’s storyline to provide backstory on the film’s characters and the historical, political, and economic background of Mexico. The voice-over narrator interruptions are often accompanied by wandering shaky camera style long takes. Not unlike Mumblecore as explored in the previous chapter, the visual style of Y Tu Mamá También has a journal or diary aesthetic that intimately provides information on Mexico’s changing landscape at the turn of the millennium. At the same time, the narrator’s interruptions occupy a political and social dimension in that they illustrate what Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz refers to as a “counter-epic” toward myths depicted in the golden age of Mexican cinema of 1930 to 1950.21 Acevedo-Muñoz explains that Y Tu Mamá También addresses an “identity crisis” in Mexico’s political and economic status after the end of the PRI rule (The Institutional Revolutionary Party), NAFTA, and the US financial bailout.22 AcevedoMuñoz notes that Y Tu Mamá También “explores the construction of national identity in Mexican cinema by appropriating and cannibalizing names, character types, and narrative strategies generally associated with the conservative classical cinema.”23 For example, when Tenoch and Julio leave Julio’s apartment to depart on their road trip, the image lingers in his small apartment, showing viewers his lower-middle class environment. The narrator states that Julio’s mother is employed as a secretary for a multinational corporation. The camera’s probing of Julio’s living space contrasts with Tenoch’s affluent lifestyle. Later in the film, the narrator states that Tenoch and Julio shared partial truths in regard to their socioeconomic status, explaining that Julio lit matches to hide the smell after using the bathroom at Tenoch’s house, and Tenoch used his foot to lift the toilet seat at Julio’s home. Although these details are not essential to the film’s narrative, they nevertheless demonstrate, as Acevedo-Muñoz explains, that “Julio and Tenoch’s friendship is still mediated by a profound awareness of their class differences.”24 The interrupting narrator and wandering camera



6. The Politics of Homemade Filmmaking

107

complicate a straightforward narrative (in the classical sense). At the same time, the narrator brings to the film’s surface points of the story that are “marginalized by the main narrative.”25 For example, when Tenoch and Julio are caught in a traffic jam early in the film, Julio obnoxiously honks the car horn and complains that it is probably the result of another demonstration that his sister is involved with. As the boys slowly approach what they believe to be a demonstration, the narrator interrupts, stating the following: That same day, three protests were held in different parts of the city. However, the traffic jam had been caused by a pedestrian who had been run over. Marcelino Escutia, a bricklayer from Michoacán. Marcelino was hit by a speeding taxi. He never used the closest pedestrian bridge because its bad location made him walk an extra 1.5 miles to the construction site where he worked. He was picked up by the Green Cross and taken, without I.D., to the corner. It took four days for his body to be claimed.

The narrator alludes to the problems with the infrastructure of pedestrian traffic in Mexico City. The narrator also subtly suggests that Marcelino could not be identified because his wallet was stolen, possibly indicating police corruption. Here the interrupting narrator fills in additional information for viewers that is left out of the main storyline. But it is not only information regarding Mexico’s social/ political dimension that the narrator supplies, but also backstory on the characters. The theme of corruption, for example, continues to be explored by the narrator when he informs viewers that Tenoch’s father, a Harvard educated sub Secretary of State, is linked to a scandal involving the sale of contaminated corn to the poor. The narrator explains that Tenoch and his family had to move to Vancouver for eight months. Tenoch never inquired with his father why they had to move. Although these points are not addressed by the film’s characters, Acevedo-Muñoz explains that the importance of the narrator is to create “a counterpoint” to the main storyline. Perhaps one of the most poignant criticisms of Mexico’s changing economy occurs toward the end of the film when the boys and Luisa return to the beach from a boating trip with Chuy (Silverio Palacios), a fisherman and his family. The narrator states that Chuy and his family will have to leave their home when the construction of an exclusive hotel begins: “Chuy will try to provide boat services to tourists, but he’ll be stopped by a group of union boat workers . . . who are preferred by the

108

Capturing Digital Media

local tourist board.” Two years later Chuy ends up working as a janitor at the hotel. Shortly after the narrator’s interruption, the boys and Luisa’ campsite is ransacked by a pack of pigs that escaped from a nearby ranch. Captured in a shaky style long take as the pigs march off the beach, the narrator informs the viewers that fourteen of the pigs would be sacrificed. Three of the pigs are infected with bladder worms and would be consumed at a festival. The combination of Chuy’s backstory and the stray pack of pigs suggests a foreign invasion, as Acevedo-Muñoz notes, a “type of destruction [that] comes as a byproduct of tourism.”26 The pigs not only invade the beauty and tranquilly of the beach sequence but suggest an outsider threat in the form of big business. For AcevedoMuñoz, the narrator interruptions constitute Y Tu Mamá También as a “postmodern counter-epic” toward the mythmaking and conservative processes of the golden age of Mexican cinema. At the same time, Y Tu Mamá También does not abandon the classic realist style of storytelling. Cuarón invites us to form identification with the film’s three protagonists, even as the omniscient narrator and wandering camera interrupt our spectatorship as a “counterpoint” to the main storyline. A dominant position held in film theory is aligning the classic narrative realist text as supporting the stranglehold of ideology that deceives the spectator. But as Jennifer Friedlander explains, realism in cinema is the pathway toward capturing the truth. As she notes, “Deception functions not as an obstacle to truth, but rather as a necessary lure for snaring the truth.”27 Here, Y Tu Mamá También problematizes what is commonly known as the “alienation effect,” a technique that raises awareness to the film’s mechanism of storytelling. It is a device that is often used in experimental or radically driven cinema for viewers to consider the film’s political messages. The wandering camera and interrupting omniscient narrator in Y Tu Mamá También certainly invite the spectator to critically consider multiple narrative perspectives as opposed to one homogenized truth as Acevedo-Muñoz point out. Yet the film also allows for narrative immersion and multiple character identification. Rather than simply unclothing the film’s means of labor in order to create critical viewers of the text, the film critiques ideology by rupturing the narrative’s system from within. This effect is achieved by the competing home and mass modes of filmmaking. On the one hand, the film’s homemade or amateur aesthetic underscores the film’s examination of Mexico’s changing landscape at the turn of the millennium. Here the imperfection of the camera movement and interrupting narrator work together to antagonize the film’s narrative flow in order to provide information



6. The Politics of Homemade Filmmaking

109

not supplied by the characters. On the other hand, the mass mode or professional mode is aligned with narrative absorption and character identification. The mass/professional mode allows us to engage and form identification with the characters and their struggles. At the same time, because our desire is invested in the film’s outcome, the disruption of the narrator permits us to see how the film’s mechanisms of illusion operate from within the film. This is why Slavoj Žižek argues that the cynic does not undermine symbolic authority. The cynic thinks they can step outside of ideology because they recognize the fiction of the ruling order. For Žižek, however, “cynical reason” only reinforces ideology’s stranglehold upon the subject. One who thinks they have stepped outside of ideology is only entangled more within the tentacles of ideology. What the cynic does not recognize is the structuring forces of ideology. As Žižek notes, “The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself.”28 Cuarón’s film invites that we take up an anti-cynical position in order for us to recognize how our desire is incorporated into the film. As explained in Chapter 4, to encounter the shocking effects of the gaze realizes how our desire distorts the visual field. The gaze is the collapse of the fantasy frame, that which puts the real at a distance. If we felt disturbed by the dropping of the camera after Hud’s death in Cloverfield, it is because we invested our desire to look into the film so that we can encounter the trauma of the gaze. Y Tu Mamá También operates under a similar mode as Cloverfield. It is a film that elicits our desire to look within the film and to form identification with the main characters. But it also shows us how our desire distorts the visual field by having outside forces (the interrupting narrator and wandering camera) invade the film’s story world. As such, it is the narrator’s eruption within the narrative and wandering camera (the competing home mode and mass mode) that generates the film’s encounter with the political. Certainly the interrupting narrator produces an alienation effect because he stops the flow of the film’s narrative. The narrator is reminiscence of the voice-over in Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders (1964), specifically the film’s infamous dance sequence. As the characters dance, the music completely cuts out. Suddenly, we hear voice-over from an unidentified narrator while the characters kept dancing. This is an instance of voice-over that does not provide meaning, as it does in Y Tu Mamá También. The information supplied by the voice-over in Band of Outsiders has little value in enriching the narrative. As such, Godard’s random interruption of voice-over and the halting of the music is

110

Capturing Digital Media

employed to critique voice-over itself as an alienation effect.29 Todd McGowan explains that the alienation effect “leaves spectators secure within their conscious reflection.”30 But Cuarón is not unmasking the mechanisms of storytelling simply for ideological purpose as often associated with radical and experimental cinema. Nor is Cuarón denying us narrative pleasure. Rather Cuarón counteracts cynicism (the one who knows all) by showing us that non-knowledge is what engages our desire.31 Yet by letting the viewer become absorbed into the narrative, the interrupting narrator (as a competing force) “qualifies” information as Acevedo-Muñoz notes, “that is neither always pertinent nor essential to the main narrative.”32 As such, the interrupting narrator’s voiceover in Y Tu Mamá También is on the side of making sense, whether it pertains to the backstory of the characters or the social backdrop of Mexico. Certainly the interrupting narrator evokes the alienation effect. But the pathway toward “conscious reflection” is first by submitting ourselves to the film’s fiction. It is the “not-knowing” that initially elicits our desire so that we can encounter the film’s political moments.

Navigating work, leisure, and space in the southland In Noel Murray’s review of Y Tu Mamá También, he notes that both Alfonso Cuarón and his brother and cowriter Carlos Cuarón describe the film as “the movie they would’ve made if they’d never gone to film school, and that amateurishness extends to its refusal to glamorize.”33 Similarly, Richard Chalfen explains in his interviews with amateur filmmakers that they are often conflicted over filmmaking manuals because they take away “the ideal spontaneity and the good intention of planning a movie.”34 Planning a home movie, such as a backyard birthday or graduation party or even a vacation movie, could be interpreted as “work” instead of “play.” As Ryan Shand further observes, this conflict between play and planning can include “a naive belief that editing manipulates a filmic record unnecessarily, when home moviemakers set out to ‘reproduce a reality’ in real time.”35 The notion of “play” here strongly connects to Deren’s and Mekas’s celebration of the freedom of the amateur, which continues to inform films such as David Ayer’s police thriller End of Watch. End of Watch follows the daily lives of two police officers Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Michael Peña) in South Central, Los Angeles. End of Watch is often described as a found footage film, because it incorporates Brian’s video footage of his daily patrols (a



6. The Politics of Homemade Filmmaking

111

project for his college film course) into the film’s diegesis. Ayer, however, breaks with the found footage mode by including high production footage alongside other source materials, such as dash-cam footage of Brian and Mike’s patrol cruiser, body-worn cameras, and Big Evil’s (Maurice Compte) gang’s video footage of their criminal activities. Ayer also thwarts a tradition of the found footage film by not indicating to viewers that the footage has been found, as in the case of The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield. Instead, End of Watch begins with the title card: “Once upon a time in South Central” to position viewers within the classic mode of film narration. End of Watch’s uses of both high production images and amateur videography is another instance of the competing home and mass modes. But unlike Y Tu Mamá También’s interrupting narrator and wandering camera that competes with the character’s main storyline as a force that invades the film’s diegetic world, End of Watch’s combination of home and mass mode filmmaking styles is fully integrated to immerse viewers within the film’s story world, albeit in an intimate manner. By appropriating stylistic traits of found footage cinema, Brian and Mike’s daily patrols are both presented intimately and viscerally in order to give audiences an “authentic” depiction of police enforcement. More so, the film’s amateur mode offers viewers an up close and personal account of Brian and Mike’s private lives stretched over time, such as attending Brian and Janet’s (Anna Kendrick) wedding and Mike’s niece’s quinceañera. End of Watch’s personal depiction of law enforcement, however, does not exclude a social and political reading in its appropriation of amateur styles and codes. Brian’s documenting of his daily patrols complicates the realms of work and play, distinctions that often defined the amateur filmmaker. As Zimmermann explains, “The role of amateur film in economic, social, and political life diminished as leisure time expanded.”36 For Zimmermann, amateur film discourse “marginalized amateur filmmaking as a hobby to fill up leisure time and as a retreat from social and political participation.”37 As explained, avant-garde filmmakers have incorporated amateur styles and codes into their works in order to oppose Hollywood’s professional mode of filmmaking, as in the case of Dogme 95. Similarly, Ayer’s stylistic approach in End of Watch upends traditional techniques of filmmaking, drawing on found footage cinema and the visceral sense of amateur videography in order to present viewers with a personal and authentic account of Brian and Mike’s daily patrols of South Central. Yet, as Brian documents his job, he runs up against veteran police officer Van Hauser (David Harbour) who

112

Capturing Digital Media

strongly objects to his video project. “Having fun?” is the first line of dialogue Van Hauser delivers in the film, which is directed at Brian who jokes around with Mike as he videotapes his police equipment in the locker room. Later in the film, Sarge (Frank Grillo), the commanding officer for Brian and Mike, consults Brian, stressing not to videotape Van Hauser. Indeed, Brian’s college video project disrupts the rules of work because of its association with fun, leisure, and amusement. As Zimmermann explains, “While wage labor conforms to the demands of the market, artistic labor depends on freedom, creativity, and spontaneity—values challenging standardized rules.”38 Van Hauser’s disapproval of Brian’s project relegates the amateur to the private sphere of leisure and play, whereas the professional defines wage labor and rule bounding of the public realm. Yet, ironically, the goal of Brian’s video project (and the visual style of the film itself) is to intimately depict what it is like to be on the police force.

Video gaming and 360-degree space End of Watch is a film about police enforcement, ironically detailed by Brian’s amateur videography. But the film is also about space and movement. By appropriating the codes and styles of amateur videography, Ayer depicts an intimate, adrenalized, and spontaneous account of Brian and Mike’s daily patrols. This is exemplified in Ayer’s violation of the 180-degree rule in the film’s documentation of events. The 180-degree rule is an imaginary line that the filmmaker establishes in order to keep on-screen spatial relations clear—a technique most notable in shot/revere-shot coverage. For example, if a character looks offscreen, the reverse edit must match what the character sees in order to create spatial continuity and fluid movement of space. Ayer often does away with the 180-degree rule in order to convey a realistic and heightened spectatorship, where space is fragmented, inconsistent, and unsettled. Steven Shaviro argues that new “stylistics” in the articulation of space in recent cinema is what he terms “post-continuity,” where big blockbuster films such as Transformers (Michael Bay, 2007) are preoccupied “with immediate effects [that] trump any concern for broader continuity—whether on the immediate shot-by-shot level, or on the overall narrative.”39 This is not to suggest that End of Watch entirely abandons editing that depicts continuous and fluid space. But, in certain action sequences, such as Mike’s brawl with Mr. Tree (Cle Sloan) early in the film, it can be suggested that audiences are more



6. The Politics of Homemade Filmmaking

113

accepting of jump cuts and rapid editing that break the 180-degree rule and still be immersed into the film’s narrative action. The intentional amateur videography and Ayer’s violation of the 180-degree rule not only allows events to unfold in a “realist” or documentary manner, but suggest, as explained earlier, that audiences have become accustomed to amateur videos found on social media sites such as YouTube and Vimeo. Here, End of Watch shares a commonality with Cloverfield and other recent found footage horror cinema in combining professional production values with amateur aesthetics in order to create an authentic, organic, and “homemade” depiction of law enforcement. By appropriating the traits of found footage horror, Ayers depicts space that is more akin to the strategies and values of amateur productions. Like Cloverfield, the film’s subjective vision offers viewers on-the-street perspective that is both imperfect and spontaneous. Part of the film’s spectatorship of uncertainty derives from Brian and Mike’s humor and friendship. Their patrol vehicle not only operates as a space of work, but as a place where viewers learn about Brian and Mike’s personal lives. But their intimate discussions are often interrupted by calls from dispatch or witnessing a crime spontaneously unfolds as they police the Southland. The amateur videography not only creates a heighted and realist perspective, but also allows viewers to experience Brian and Mike’s personal and private life—until they are called for duty. By allowing the characters to operate a camera within the film’s story world, Ayer depicts 360-degree diegetic space. Here the all-encompassing film coverage in End of Watch shares a commonality with Elephant and Cloverfield in evoking a gaming aesthetic, as in the opening dash-cam perspective as Brian and Mike pursue a car (see Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1  End of Watch. Dash-cam perspective from Brian and Mike’s police vehicle.

114

Capturing Digital Media

Like Elephant and Cloverfield, there is a pleasure component as viewers watch Brian and Mike chase the car through the alleys and streets of South Central. Yet there is also a danger in their daily patrols, such as their encounter with the Big Evil’s gang, members who include Demon (Richard Cabral), La La (Flakiss), and Wicked (Diamonique). Big Evil’s gang has ties to the Sinaola Drug Cartel, and they want Brian and Mike killed, which culminates in the film’s climax. On patrol, Brian and Mike witness a minivan run a red light and almost hit a truck. They pursue the minivan while calling dispatch for backup. The minivan leads them to a residential area, stopping them in front of an apartment building. Brian and Mike chase the driver into the apartment complex, leading them into an open courtyard. Brian’s Marine instincts kick in as he realizes that they have been ambushed. Big Evil’s gang open fires on Brian and Mike as they flee into a woman’s apartment. Operating in the mode of a war film, Brian says to Mike: “They’re moving. If they assault, we can’t hold them off. We have to lay down a base of fire and pivot.” Of course, Mike is confused by Brian’s military lingo. Mike instructs Brian to unleash fire at Big Evil’s gang so they can escape into the corridor of the apartment building. In the corridor, they encounter one of the gang members, who they instantly kill. They flee the apartment complex and end up in an alley littered with trash and fenced-in barking dogs. Headlights from a pickup truck approach at the end of the alley. A man in the bed of the truck fires at them. Brian fires back and kills both the driver and the man in the bed of the truck. But during the exchange of fire, Brian is shot. Mike tries to help Brian as he grasps for life. But Big Evil and his crew arrive from the opposite direction, trapping Mike as they point their guns at him. Demon says, “Check mate, puto.” The gang unleash their guns, tragically killing Mike as he falls on top of Brian. Demon’s line “Check mate” is indicative of the gaming and war mode operating in this sequence. Big Evil’s trapping of Brian and Mike in the alleyway is similar to the frightening and ambiguous ending of Van Sant’s Elephant, when Alex finds Carrie and Nathan hiding in a freezer in the school cafeteria. Alex taunts Carrie and Nathan, deciding who he is going to kill first as the film abruptly ends. But in End of Watch, viewers experience the horror and tragedy of Mike’s death up close and personal. This emotional sequence is, in part, derived from Ayer’s intimate portrait of Brian and Mike’s friendship. Whereas Elephant evokes a computer-like perfection in its uses of the long take and first-person shooter perspective, End of Watch’s visceral energy and unsettled space is articulated in the mixing of high production imagery, surveillance footage, and amateur videography. In both films,



6. The Politics of Homemade Filmmaking

115

character movement through space and their association with games and guns generate their political and social meanings. In the case of End of Watch, the film draws attention to the problem of gang activity in the Southland. End of Watch’s mixing of different formats and 360-degree spatial coverage blurs traditional markers of amateur and professional modes of filmmaking. The film’s combination of different modes of filmmaking reflects the various ways in which audiences produce and consume media, demonstrating how amateur production techniques have been incorporated into the Hollywood mode of production. As explained, the film complicates the boundaries of amateur and professional in Van Hauser’s disapproval of Brian’s video project, because it connotes fun, play, and leisure. At the same time, the film’s appropriation of footage shot by characters, dash cams, surveillance cameras, and body-worn cameras provides a visceral and intimate account of police enforcement. Yet the film’s adaptation of the amateur production as a form of imperfection underscores the uncertainty Brian and Mike face when policing the streets of the Southland. It is the interfacing of the personal and home mode that intensifies Brian and Mike’s unexpected encounter on the street. Both Y Tu Mamá También and End of Watch’s pathways to creating an intimate and personal cinema is through the amateur mode of filmmaking. Although Y Tu Mamá También is not considered a Dogme 95 film, Cuarón’s appropriation of codes and strategies of the amateur is not far from Dogme 95’s manifesto and its rejection of the precision of Hollywood. Y Tu Mamá También, in certain respects, was a response to Cuarón’s experience of making Great Expectations (1998), which he refers to as “the bad movie.” Cuarón stated in an article in The New York Times that “it’s a movie I did for the wrong reasons. I was too engaged in the machinery.”40 Cuarón’s cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki reiterates this, stating, “It was like making an industrial film. . . . It felt like going to the factory every day.”41 As the article explains, both Cuarón and Lubezki were too concerned with technical details of lighting and camera angles in making Great Expectations. By contrast, Y Tu Mamá También was a looser, more spontaneous, and intimate film, which I have described as having a homemade aesthetic. As explored in Chapter 1, Cuarón would go onto direct Gravity, a film technically opposite of Y Tu Mamá También. As The New York Times articles explain in the making of Y Tu Mamá También: “Mr. Cuarón likes to think of it as a movie that dispenses with technology.”42 Comparing both movies exemplify that, although the imperfection of the moving image is where

116

Capturing Digital Media

we locate the organic within the binary logic, the perfection of digital continues to be a strong allure in producing moving images. End of Watch speaks directly to the current influx of amateur videos that pervade the internet. Ayer’s breaking of the 180-degree rule and working with different forms of footage suggests that audience are accustomed to and are accepting of amateur codes and strategies within the professional domain of filmmaking. In this regard, the film’s variety of footage speaks to our current moment—what Lev Manovich describes as “the society of the screen”: the screen as “becoming the main means of accessing any kind of information.”43 The majority of narrative information that viewers see and experience in End of Watch is mediated by a screen, whether it is a dash-cam, body-worn camera, or Brian’s amateur footage. Yet what cuts through the proliferation of screens in End of Watch is the emphasis on the human subject, captured by amateur videography. The political dimension of Y Tu Mamá También and End of Watch arrives through the competing home and mass modes. Rather than unmasking ideology through cynical reason, both films allow for narrative pleasure, permitting us to form identification with the characters as the fiction unfolds. Y Tu Mamá También and End of Watch’s emphasis on the amateur aesthetic is not to alienate our spectatorship. Rather, it is the amateur aesthetic or home mode that elicits our desire to becoming fully absorbed into the film’s fiction so that we can encounter the film’s moment of disruption as an embodiment of the gaze.

CChapter 7 TIME-SHIFTING, DREAMS, AND UNCERTAINTY IN THE SOPRANOS

Before the phenomenon of time-shifting technologies, the passing of time and the illusion of movement in both cinema and television had lives of their own that could only be conjured by memory. Playback technologies now enable viewers to watch and re-watch film and television content not only according to their own leisure time but discover meanings that may have been missed in its initial viewing. Viewers’ enchantment with the moving image is not so much a result of these technologies; rather, these technologies are helping to forge an even closer and immediate relationship to cinematic and televisual texts. The ability to control the temporal flow of a movie or television show, for example, allows viewers to generate meanings that may have been missed in the initial viewing. In this sense, the moving-image text is not completely closed, but can be archived, owned, and “possessed” by viewers though electronic and digital media technologies. The popularity of playback technologies is also part of a cultural shift in the evolving temporal experience of everyday life. As Frederick Wasser observes, changing leisure time and work schedules in the 1970s had a direct connection to the consumer’s need for a VCR.1 The VCR allowed viewers to record and watch programs that match the home lifestyle of the nuclear family, with more choices and control in the consumption of television programming and movie rentals. Today’s digital technologies extend the cultural practice of home video renting, by now permitting instantaneous access to film and television texts with more flexibility. A recent Nielsen report stated that about half of all US household now have a VOD (video on demand) subscription service than a DVR (digital video recorder).2 Indeed, VOD digital streaming platforms offer viewers more control of media content in collapsing temporal barriers. Digital streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu enable viewers to not only watch television and film content based on their leisure time, but to consume it quickly

118

Capturing Digital Media

by way of binge-watching. “Anytime, Anywhere” was once the slogan for Netflix, and this motto is afforded by digital’s ability to transform content into binary code for the streaming of data rich audio and video without degradation. Digital playback technologies not only provide viewers with more flexibility in consuming television content, but also shape narrative construction as explored in Chapters 1, 2, and 3. Here it is important to stress that playback technologies, whether online streaming or screening a Blu-ray, are not radically changing the classical Hollywood mode of narration. Hollywood’s tradition of plotting linear narratives with explicit character development and desires continues to be the most popular form of storytelling. But when examining playback devices such as DVD, Blu-ray, and DVR from the practitioner’s perspective, one finds that more and more films are constructed and designed for re-watching and close analysis, especially in puzzle films such as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), Memento, and Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001). As David Bordwell speculates, “Some filmmakers have made their storylines harder to follow on a single viewing, encouraging DVD replays so we can figure out what’s going on. This strategy makes the films less classical in construction, to a greater or lesser extent.”3 Again, this trend does not mean that nonlinear structure has trumped linear narratives. But playback technologies are creating new conditions in the plotting of events and in the amount of story information being imparted to viewers. At the same time, playback technologies allow one to scrutinize the moving image for additional meanings that may have been missed on the first watch. It is no surprise that much of today’s intensified serialized television emerged out of the era of DVD and Web 2.0, and greater access to faster internet service for streaming. Part of interacting and interfacing with digital media, such as navigating the web or Skyping with a friend is engaging with these technologies smoothly and naturally. The designer’s goal, as Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin explain, is to achieve an “interfaceless interface,” where “the user will move through the [virtual] space interacting with the objects ‘naturally,’ as she does in the physical world.”4 A transparent interface involves subordinating the technology’s mediating process—to hide its brush strokes, so to speak. As a mode of spectatorship, the transparent interface has a strong correlation to the binary logic of the digital form: to completely remove the mediating process in order to craft the “perfected product.”5 The logic of classical narration is closely related to the perceptual immediacy of a transparent interface. Classical narrative’s series of causes and



7. Time-Shifting, Dreams, and Uncertainty

119

effects subordinate the film’s system of mediation in order to engage an immediate and immersive viewing experience, a process that involves orchestrating time and space that directs viewers’ attention toward the search for meaning and away from the film’s system of mediation. This is not to suggest that viewers are naive to the effacing process of mediation in classical narration. There is always some degree of self-consciousness in the process of representation. But the goal of verisimilitude in classical narrative closely follows Bolter and Grusin’s logic of transparent immediacy in its diminishing of the presence of mediation. The paradox is that viewers now even have more interfaces to access television content as a mode of hypermediacy. Yet the goal of many serialized television series such as Breaking Bad (2008–13), Orange is the New Black (2013–), and Stranger Things (2016–) is to create a spectatorship of immersion and immediacy. Media scholars have noted that recent contemporary primetime television demands a more intense level of spectatorship. Jason Mittell’s model of narrative complexity examines a number of storytelling practices in contemporary American television, such as the creative interplay of episodic and serial forms, and the use of experimental and self-aware storytelling techniques. Shows such as Lost (2004–10) and Breaking Bad creatively parse mysteries and narrative enigmas that demand intense engagement, keeping viewers watching over a long period of time. A notable example is the mysterious floating burned-up teddy bear in Walter White’s (Bryan Cranston) swimming pool, a flash forward that opens the second season of Breaking Bad. The ominous teddy bear reappears throughout the second season until it is finally explained in the season finale. As Mittell explains, these moments of confusion or ambiguity “ask us to trust in the payoff that we will eventual arrive at a moment of complex but coherent comprehension, not the ambiguity and questioned causality typical of many art films.”6 But what happens when a television series does not pay off or refrains from providing narrative meaning, such as the series finale of David Chases’s The Sopranos, the now infamous final scene that ends with no narrative closure, leaving viewers to ponder the fate of New Jersey mobster Tony Soprano? A key trait of The Sopranos is experimenting with narrative form, an aesthetic that is closely related to art-house cinema. The Sopranos often deviated from the traditions of the mafia narrative by using meandering plotlines, temporal interludes, dream sequences, and narrative enigmas. If Mittell claims that narrative gaps and mysteries in television will eventually supply answers, The Sopranos tended to embrace ambiguity and the nonlogical with no future pay off for viewers.7

120

Capturing Digital Media

Indeed, The Sopranos is a show of spontaneity that tends to emphasize accidents and contingencies. Yet the narrative unpredictability of The Sopranos is one of its allures. The unreliability of The Sopranos produced an environment where no character is entirely safe from getting “whacked,” where main characters can suddenly disappear, such as the death of Ralphie (Joe Pantoliano) and Adriana (Drea de Matteo). Guessing what character would be the episode’s central focus also contributed to the spontaneity in watching The Sopranos, such as Christopher’s (Michael Imperioli) exploration of screenwriting in “The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti,” or the hilarious and tragic effects of Paulie’s (Tony Sirico) parsimony in organizing the feast of Saint Elzéar of Sabran in “The Ride.”8 Certainly this does not mean that the series totally abandons the classical narrative mode. There is a strong desire for The Sopranos to adhere to the traditions of the gangster genre as well as provide narrative closure and deliver the goods, such as Tony and his crew killing mafia turned informer Sal aka “Big Pussy” (Vincent Pastore) that ends season 2. But narrative certainty is not guaranteed in The Soprano’s story world, such as the fate of Tony that ended the series, or an unexpected digression into a dream that can derail and halt the episode’s narrative flow. The Sopranos constructs its narrative by emphasizing the fleetingness of memory as an aesthetic of flow within the show’s universe of unpredictability and the nonlogical. At the same time, it is a show intimately informed by digital playback devices, not only in evoking multiple viewings, but in manner in which story information is imparted upon its viewers, particularly its frequent uses of dreams. Similar to the time-loop narratives of Chapter 2, this chapter argues that dream sequences in The Sopranos are akin to the logic of the drive—where enjoyment is found in the means rather than the ends. Whereas the goal in the time-loop narrative is to shut off the loop and restore the film to the logic of desire, The Sopranos’s atemporal dream sequences offer no solution to the questions it poses, as in the case of Tony Soprano’s twenty-three minute “test dream” in season 5. At the same time, the digression of the dream played a critical role in Tony’s preparation to kill his cousin, Tony Blundetto (Steve Buscemi) at the end of season 5. From this perspective, dreams in The Sopranos vacillate between de-accelerating the unfolding of time and space and manifesting unspoken and bizarre deductions that oddly progress narrative action. Yet, The Sopranos’s formal experimentations and anticlimactic moments can become a source of contention among viewers who are looking for narrative closure. On the one hand, practices of digital technology are



7. Time-Shifting, Dreams, and Uncertainty

121

a product of nonlinear cinema as explored in Chapters 2 and 3. On the other, The Sopranos works against the promise of the digital and the spatialization of time by emphasizing a spectatorship of uncertainty, absence, and loss.

Forward through delay: a talking fish In the season 2 episode “Proshai, Livushka,” Tony’s spouse, Carmela (Edie Falco), comes home to find him passed out on the kitchen floor near the refrigerator. She asks him what happened. Tony mumbles, “Uncle Ben.” Depicted quickly in reverse order, we see the events that led to his passing out, as if we are literally watching a video rewind. In reverse motion, we see Tony having a conversation with his daughter Meadow (Jamie Lynn-Sigler) and her boyfriend, Noah (Patrick Tully), who Tony disapproves of because he is half Jewish and half African American. The images then play in normal time as Tony walks down the stairs in his bathrobe. He stops in the living room to talk to Meadow who is, ironically, rewinding William A. Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931) for her film class. Tony then meets her boyfriend Noah. Tony intimidates him, telling him he does not approve of him dating Meadow because of his mixed race. Tony proceeds to the kitchen. A bit shaken up, he opens a cabinet and sees a box of Uncle Ben’s rice. He then has a panic attack and passes out. The video rewind technique sequence and its allusion to cinema history offers a number of discussion points pertaining to time and playback technologies in television. Although VHS evolved as part of Hollywood’s home entertainment in the late 1980s, owning seasons of a television series was not as popular as purchasing film titles because of the format’s limited recording space. Collecting the original Star Trek (1966–69) television series on VHS, for instance, could take up much space on one’s home shelf. But the format of the DVD can compress an entire television season onto three to four discs, making it more desirable to own. For Derek Kompare, the DVD box set conceptually changed how we think of television in relation to Raymond Williams’s concept of flow.9 Television is not only flow in its live and ephemeral broadcasting of disparate events, but it is now a publishable text that viewers can own without commercials. This aspect of the DVD box set publishing can inform how television content is consumed. The experience of binge-watching a television series on DVD versus watching the show in its live broadcast with commercials may elicit a

122

Capturing Digital Media

more immersive spectatorship.10 Instead of contemplating each episode on a week by week basis, watching an entire season at a quick pace allows narrative resolution and fast answered questions. Indeed, time-shifting devices have informed the plotting of events and the parceling of story information in recent television. As explained in Chapters 2 and 3, the trend in cinema’s temporal experimentations, such as database narrative and nonchronological plotting of events, is closely related to the landscape of digital media and playback devices. This is certainly the case for television, as in the example of Tony’s rewind/panic attack sequence. But the show’s temporal experimentations also illustrate the influence of art-house cinema that Chase had expressed as informing the series, such as narrative detours and digressions, and fluctuating tone. Certainly narrative gaps fuel fandom and cult viewers in generating speculation and theories, particularly with puzzle shows such as Twin Peaks (1990–91), Fringe (2008–13), and Lost. But narrative ambiguities can also serve an entirely different purpose, as in the employment of dreams and unmotivated digressions in The Sopranos. Digressive moments and dream sequences in The Sopranos touch upon the surreal and even otherworldly. These otherworldly digressions allow for character reflection as well as viewer speculation. That The Sopranos was televised on a commercial-free network permitted greater emphasis on delays and narrative departures. For instance, at the end of the first episode in season 6, “Members Only,” Tony is shot in the stomach by his Uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese), who is suffering from dementia. The shooting of Tony is a classic example

Figure 7.1  The Sopranos. Tony at the hotel in Costa Mesa looks off-screen.



7. Time-Shifting, Dreams, and Uncertainty

123

Figure 7.2 The Sopranos. Tony’s point of view of the elusive beacon light spinning on the horizon in Costa Mesa.

of a cliffhanger ending in television. One would think the follow-up episode would open with speed and immediacy: Tony being rushed to the hospital or doctors trying to save his life. On the contrary, the next episode, “Join the Club,” begins quietly as Tony lies on a bed in a hotel room. He leans up and looks offscreen. The image cuts to the hotel window that offers views of the cityscape. A strange glowing light spins in the distance (see Figures 7.1 and 7.2). Later, it is revealed that Tony is at a convention in Costa Mesa, California, and is in possession of a briefcase belonging to someone else—a man named Kevin Finnerty. Viewers learn that Tony is in a coma, and the hotel operates as a stand-in for his unconscious (or possibly he is in purgatory). The elusive and ambiguous glowing light spinning in the horizon suggests a beacon to the real world. But it takes time before the episode reveals this information, thus illustrating Chase’s penchant for drawn out durations and images that evoke contemplation and reflection. The intrusion of delay is a way in which The Sopranos destabilizes the narrative’s temporal flow. But in certain instances, digressions help characters to problem solve and overcome obstacles within the everyday, thereby pushing the narrative forward. This tactic is most notable in the show’s use of dreams. As Chase explains, “We’ve used . . . dreams to further the narrative.”11 As such, digressions in The Sopranos oscillate between slowing down the unfolding of time and space and enabling unspoken—or, what I describe as magical-like deductions that advance narrative action. Dreams in The Sopranos involve a double function in relation to digression and narrative causality. In the final episode of season 2,

124

Capturing Digital Media

“Funhouse,” Big Pussy (Sal) is revealed as an informant for the FBI, which leads to his execution and body being dumped into the ocean. Sal’s death reminds us of Peter Clemenza’s (Richard S. Castellano) famous line in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972): “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.” But Chase gives an interesting twist on this iconic mafia image by blowing Sal’s cover through the dreamscape. Early in the episode, Tony has fever dreams all night due to food poisoning. During one of Tony’s sick dreams, Sal is embodied as a talking fish. He tells Tony that he has “flipped” and is now an informant or “rat” for the FBI. Tony has had suspicions about Sal since the end of season 1, when Vin (John Heard), a police detective who supplies Tony with inside information, tells him that Sal is an informant. Tony asks Vin for proof that Sal is an informant. But Vin kills himself, leaving Tony to speculate about Sal’s status. The dream, however, confirms Tony’s suspicion. The following morning, Tony and Silvio (Steven Van Zandt) visit Sal’s home and find the wire. Instead of Sal blowing his cover or being exposed through the act of informing, he is caught by Tony’s dream. In this regard, Tony’s dream enacts a sort of magical-like deduction—a dream catcher if you will—leading him to uncover and expose Sal’s secret. The “test dream” in season 5 takes the form of the dream to even more extremes.

The “test” dream The narrative hook of The Sopranos is that Tony, a mobster, turns to therapy because of panic attacks and depression. In therapy, Tony discusses personal secrets and emotional baggage. Of course, Tony cannot say anything specific that will incriminate him as a mobster. Nevertheless, Dr. Jennifer Melfi’s (Lorraine Bracco) office is a secret space in which viewers learn of Tony’s feelings. Many sessions with Dr. Melfi show Tony truly expressing his pain and frustration, specifically in the pilot episode, in which Tony cries about a family of ducks leaving his pool, clearly revealing their symbolic connection to his concern about losing his family. But there are also many instances of Tony deflecting his true emotions, quickly switching topics, yelling at Dr. Melfi that therapy is “bullshit.” In Tony’s dreams, however, viewers have direct access to his true feelings. This is exemplified in “The Test Dream” episode in the late part of the fifth season. Recently separated from Carmela, Tony checks into New York’s landmark The Plaza Hotel for rest and relaxation. Tony has learned that his cousin, Tony Blundetto had taken part in



7. Time-Shifting, Dreams, and Uncertainty

125

the unauthorized murder of a New York gang member. Tony has come under extreme pressure to find and surrender his cousin in order to prevent a war with New York. That night, Tony has a series of dreams within a dream, lasting over twenty minutes of screen time. Tony’s dream is filled with bizarre scenarios, such as having dinner with Annette Bening, being run down by an angry mob, and riding in the backseat of his deceased father’s car with dead members of his crew. The dream ends with Tony being hectored by his high school football coach, Molinaro (Charley Scalies), for not being prepared. Waking from the dream, Tony calls Carmela and tells her that he had “one of his Coach Molinaro dreams” again. Tony’s reluctance to give up his cousin is entangled in a secret that has caused him guilt and shame. At the start of the fifth season, Tony B. is released from jail for serving time for hijacking a truck seventeen years ago—a job that Tony did not show up for because he was supposedly attacked by black men. But in episode five, “Unidentified Black Males,” Tony’s recent panic attacks are traced to his cousin. Tony tells Dr. Melfi that he missed the hijacking job because he had a panic attack after fighting with his mother. Tony lied to his cousin in order to conceal his secret. Here the “test dream” takes on additional significance. Cameron Golden explains that Tony’s dreams “are texts to be unlocked, and in ‘The Test Dream’ his abilities to read and interpret correctly are among many things being tested.”12 For Golden, Tony must break the code of the dream in order to resolve his reluctance to kill his cousin. But we must also consider the importance of the digression of the dream itself in prepping Tony to murder his cousin. Propelling the narrative typically occurs through a chain of events: causality, time, and space. To keep the story moving forward, television often avoids long or unnecessary narrative interludes in order to sustain viewer interest. The long digression into Tony’s mind, however, advances key narrative action in lieu of direct series of causes and effects. Tony B’s death is a significant event in the series and had repercussions for Tony and his crew in the sixth and final season. Whereas the manifest content of Tony’s sick dream confirms Big Pussy as a mob informer that ends the series’ second season, the form of the “test dream” serves its purpose in helping Tony in his decision-making process. In this regard, it is worthy to note the employment of windows and television sets that function as portals from vignette to vignette during Tony’s “test dream.” Although the images and movies on these TV sets in Tony’s “test dream,” such as Edwin L. Marin’s A Christmas Carol (1938) and Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952), and references to gangster movies The Godfather

126

Capturing Digital Media

and Barry Levinson’s Bugsy (1991) provide some context, Chase places emphasis on the mediating process of the screens, illustrating form over content in preparing Tony to kill his cousin (see Figures 7.3 and 7.4). Here the “test dream” closely captures the fleetingness and elusiveness of the discrete events of television flow. As such, the test dream sequence not only directly responds to television’s mediating process as a mode of hypermediacy but illustrates Chases’s frequent experimentation with surrealism. Indeed, digressions in The Sopranos oscillate between decelerating the temporal flow of the narrative and manifesting unspoken deductions that serve to propel the narrative forward. Tony’s dream helps him overcome his apprehension about killing his cousin, even though the manifest content is not entirely made clear to him. At the same time, the dream provides viewers direct access to Tony’s feelings toward his cousin, as his secret manifests through abstract imagery and bizarre scenarios. The use of dreams in The Sopranos derails the narrative flow and, simultaneously, secretly acts as a link within the narrative’s chain of cause and effect.13 Yet the manifest content of the dream offers no solutions to the questions it poses. As such, dreams in The Sopranos are not employed so much to build viewers’ comprehension skills, but to provide a gateway for characters to problem solve and overcome obstacles in the everyday world. This is not to suggest audiences are not highly involved in the narrative of The Sopranos. If anything, The Sopranos has demonstrated that tensions can emerge among vocal fans, creators, and TV networks when artistic choices challenge and deconstruct narrative

Figure 7.3  The Sopranos. Tony’s dream is mediated by windows.



7. Time-Shifting, Dreams, and Uncertainty

127

Figure 7.4  The Sopranos. Tony’s dream is mediated by televisions.

and genre conventions, such as digressing into long dream sequences or refusing to offer narrative closure. Tony’s “test dream” was singled out as a highlight of the series. But because the episode came late in the season, it was expected that the narrative would be compressed and forward the narrative more quickly toward its conclusion. In fact, the dream, turned out to be more of a digression, slowing down the story’s temporal flow rather than building anticipation and suspense. As Alan Sepinwall puts it: “The only complaint more persistent among ‘Sopranos’ fans . . . is those loud and long protests whenever Tony checks into a hotel and the viewers check into his unconscious mind.”14 Yet Tony’s dream, as explained, helps prepare him to kill his cousin Tony B. Perhaps part of this tension pertaining Tony’s “test dream” can be read within cult television discourse, particularly the stand-alone “event episode.” As Stacey Abbott observes, “The point of many ‘event episodes’ is to undermine, albeit briefly, the conventions of the series and to rupture its narrative diegesis, laying bare the construction of meaning within the text.”15 In the musical episode “Once More, with Feeling” in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a demon compels the “Scobby gang” to breakout in song and dance—musical numbers that expose their secrets. As Abbott explains, cult television programs tend to have (borrowing the term from Jeffrey Sconce) “narrative elasticity” in allowing for narrative and generic experimentation; whereas “playfulness would be too disruptive to generic boundaries of such ‘realist’ series,” such as The Wire (2002– 08) or ER (1984–95). Tony’s “test dream” closely resembles the standalone event narrative, demonstrating how the show often breaks with conventions of the gangster/mafia genre. Similar to the secrets revealed

128

Capturing Digital Media

in “Once More, with Feeling,” which ultimately challenge the cohesion of the “Scooby gang,” the “test dream” in The Sopranos not only provides access to Tony’s feelings of uncertainty but expresses a hidden truth (the latent content of the dream generated from his unconscious)—Tony must kill his cousin.

The pensive and possessive spectator Tony’s “test dream” episode exhibits the elusive nature of filmic time and human recollection, as if echoing that the ephemeral experience of analog flow of television and cinema has always made it hard for viewers to hold onto their favorite moments and images. But digital playback technologies have helped change this experience, allowing access to a large database of moving-image archives for textual analysis and repeated viewings for scrutiny. On the one hand, digital’s complete spatialization of time allows for instant access to movies and television show. On the other, digital media can halt the flow of moving images. Emerging from the power to delay and pause television is the formation of what Laura Mulvey refers to as the possessive and pensive spectator. The pensive spectator, as Mulvey explains, is a viewer whose curiosity and commitment to decipherment “opens a space for consciousness of the still frame within the moving image.”16 The pensive spectator exhibits a double logic with regard to narrative temporality and digital’s collapsing of temporal limits. First, the television image itself can elicit a contemplative spectatorship through style and aesthetics of delay in its presentation of the text, such as the long digression into Tony’s “test dream.” Second, the immediacy of digital playback technologies fortifies the pensive spectator, granting the tools to scrutinize the text for meanings that may have been missed in its live or initial viewing, and thus allowing something extra to be uncovered. A notable example is the “Pine Barrens” episode involving the strange disappearance of Valery (Vitali Baganov), a large Russian man and associate of the Russian mob who was shot and wounded by Christopher and Paulie in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. Chase never brings closure to Valery’s disappearance, leaving viewers to tarry with missing information. Yet many fans considered “Pine Barrens” one of the best episodes of the series. But the long digression into Tony’s “test dream,” however, conspicuously delays the temporal flow of the episode, arriving unexpectedly at a crucial point in the season when the narrative should



7. Time-Shifting, Dreams, and Uncertainty

129

(typically) be moving faster (the dream was roughly over twenty minutes in length). Certainly the pensive and possessive modes of spectatorship are well-suited for the online world of media fandom, where fans make homemade trailers, parodies, and “mash-up” videos of movies and television shows that circulate on social media sites. In March 2007, the mash-up video Seven Minutes Sopranos was posted on YouTube and had over 80,000 hits within a week.17 The timeliness of digital media enables immediate access to the film’s content, intensifying the colonization of the moving image, resembling what Matt Hills describes as “just-in-time fandom.” Hills explains that this practice of media fandom becomes “enmeshed within the rhythm and temporalities of broadcasting.”18 Fans’ production of meanings of a television text is entangled with the speed of transmission in its reception by way of online media. As explained in Chapter 5, the timeliness of online media diminishes the reception of the text’s “time-lag” and textual gaps (the reading and writing of the show after its initial airing). At the same time, “just-in-time fandom” increase viewers’ speed of consumption and gathering of narrative content, rather than contemplation of textual gaps. The Sopranos, for instance, has a number of online forums such as The Chase Lounge (thechaselounge.net) on which fans critiqued and analyzed each episode as a collective force for textual significance. Here, The Sopranos’s narrative gaps elicit fans’ desire, such as speculating the disappearance of Valery, or creating fan video to show their love of the show. At the same time, narrative gaps can become a source of contention. As widely reported, viewers visited HBO’s website after the abrupt cut to black that ended the series in 2007. Indeed, there was a strong desire for a cyber symposium for viewers who sought answers to the series’ ambiguous ending, a topic I will discuss further below. Both the uncertainty of Tony’s “test dream” invites reflection upon and contemplation of its meaning, thus establishing a pensive spectatorship. At the same time, viewers searching for answers or narrative completion demonstrate a mode of possessiveness. As such, the pensive spectatorship forces us to confront the contingency of time as in the case of Tony’s test dream. Yet we must tarry with the narrative gaps in trying to decode the various symbols and manifest content of the dream. In the same vein, the “Pine Barrens” episode has prompted fans to speculate whether Valery is still alive, or whether Chase will return to the narrative thread of this episode. Will Paulie be held accountable for his mistake in his mishandling of Valery in later episodes? Valery, in

130

Capturing Digital Media

fact, never shows up again, leaving his fate in limbo. Nor is Paulie ever punished for his mistake. Here it is important to note that the pensive and possessive spectatorships are not mutually exclusive. Images such as a bizarre dream sequence may overwhelm viewers, or they may temporally defer the narrative flow of a show’s episode, morphing into the surreal or the absurd. But in either case, the desire to understand and know its meaning persists, even if that desire counters the intended effect of the artist. This creative tension between spectator and artist was markedly provoked by the deferral of narrative closure in The Sopranos. David Chase was faced with criticism after the airing of “Made in America,” the now infamous finale episode for its lack of closure. The feedback came not from HBO, but from many viewers. The ambivalent ending drew so much traffic to HBO.com that the website crashed shortly after the airing of the episode. As Dana Polan explains, the scene’s abrupt cut to black caused many viewers to check their DVRs, thinking something had gone wrong in recording the episode.19 Chase stated in response to angry and unsatisfied fans of the show, “They had gleefully watched him [Tony] rob, kill, pillage, lie, and cheat. They had cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted ‘justice.’ They wanted to see his brains splattered on the wall.”20 Chase’s comment reminds us of Robert Warshow’s essay “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” which suggests that audiences’ reaction to the gangster film involves doubled sadism: “We gain the double satisfaction of participating vicariously in the gangster’s sadism and then seeing it turned against the gangster himself.”21 Going further, it can be suggested that ambiguity in the ending of The Sopranos enables a third act of sadism on the part of the audience. To quote Mulvey: “The possessive spectator commits an act of violence against the cohesion of a story, the aesthetic integrity that holds it together, and the vision of its creator.”22 Both Warshow’s and Mulvey’s readings of sadism returns us to the double logic of speed and the pensive and possessive spectator. First, the death of the gangster provides immediate resolution: releasing viewers from partaking in the sins of watching the gangster rob and kill. Second, digital playback technologies extend Warshow’s premise, allowing the death of the gangster to be possessed and repeated. In the finale of The Sopranos, however, no act of violence is committed against Tony. No cathartic ending is offered, and no image allows viewers to perform an “act of violence” on the flow of the narrative. Instead, viewers are left to contemplate the abrupt cut to black, which, in turn, leads to various readings of its elusive meaning.



7. Time-Shifting, Dreams, and Uncertainty

131

Closed or to be closed? The editing of The Sopranos’ final scene in the series’ final episode arouses expectations of narrative closure in the form of Tony’s public assassination—an event that never happens. Chase’s refusal to comply with the mobster genre’s tradition of spectacular violent endings illustrates a complex relationship between the producers’ intended effect and the reception by viewers. Here it is interesting to note that The Sopranos is one of HBO’s signature brands of “Original Series” programming, which markets to a specific demographic. Chase produced The Sopranos under the auspice of quality programming, stating, “I think The Sopranos is the only show that actually gave the audience credit for having some intelligence and attention span. We always operated as though people don’t need to be spoon-fed every single thing—that their instincts and feelings and humanity will tell them what’s going on.”23 But the hostile reception of the ending of The Sopranos highlights that even networks that produce programs with upscale appeal for specific imagined elite audiences are unable to predict their viewer reception.24 The possessive and pensive modes of viewing go some way toward explaining the phenomenon of upset and angry fans looking for narrative closure, even as they adopted these forms of spectatorship. Indeed, the controversial ending of The Sopranos forecloses viewers’ opportunity to repeat or “possess” the image. More importantly, spectators are denied the perfect ending as Chase refuses to provide narrative resolution, asserting his authorial control of the text. Writing on truncated and unresolved endings in television and cinema, Hugh Manon explains, “The cut to black produces a sense of textual death and correspondingly a feeling that our subjectivity has come unmoored and that we are no longer being cared for.”25 Truncation places the subject within a position of impossibility. As Manon notes, the abrupt ending situates the subject outside “the bounds of normative signifying practice.”26 As such, the subject is forced to realize that they have entered into a void, a place, according to Manon, that is “outside the comforting confines of the televisual fantasy.”27 At the same time, the truncated ending of The Sopranos has generated cultural currency where fans and viewers seize upon this narrative gap in order to make meaning out of it, such as the mysterious man wearing a Members Only jacket in the final scene of “Made in America” episode (see Figure 7.5).28 The ending of The Sopranos continues to be referenced, discussed, and debated to this day.29 In an interview with Mad Men (2007–15) creator and Sopranos writer, Matthew Weiner, Stephen Colbert jokingly

132

Capturing Digital Media

Figure 7.5  The Sopranos. The mysterious man wearing a Members Only jacket.

suggested to Weiner that a great ending for Mad Men would be “if in the last episode Don [Draper] turned to the camera and . . . explained the ending of The Sopranos.”30 Or consider Breaking Bad’s creator, Vince Gilligan’s thoughts on ending his series in 2013. Although Gilligan enjoyed the ending of The Sopranos, he stated: “I’m more of a closure guy.” When considering ideas on how to end Breaking Bad, Gilligan jokingly added: “We’re going to find a different Journey song.”31 Chase’s abrupt ending not only overtly halts the happy ending but violates a central convention of the gangster genre. The death of the mobster is often depicted in the resolution of the gangster narrative, such as Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy, Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949), GoodFellas, and Robert De Niro’s A Bronx Tale (1993), to name but a few. From this perspective, the gangster’s death is similar to the romantic union of the heterosexual couple in Hollywood cinema. Writing on the violent woman in Hollywood cinema, Hilary Neroni explains, “The love relationship makes each feel whole, which is to say, freedom from alienation and complete.”32 The violent woman, for Neroni, erupts the “complementarity” of the romantic union, which often “allows us to believe in the possibility of overcoming antagonism.”33 Certainly this is not to equate Tony as the violent woman. Rather, it is The Sopranos’s violation of the genre’s convention and abrupt cut to black that denies Tony’s death as narrative closure and ideological currency of the gangster genre. The abrupt ending of The Sopranos is violent, so to speak, not by killing Tony, but by exposing the antagonism that underlies the gangster genre. Chase defies our formal expectations of the gangster genre by excluding Tony’s death as the head of the New Jersey mob.



7. Time-Shifting, Dreams, and Uncertainty

133

Perhaps more importantly, Chase places the trauma on the spectator rather than Tony and his family. The show’s unpredictable universe lures our spectatorship, as no character is safe from the mob underworld, including Tony and his family. In the series’ final scene, we get too close to the trauma of this uncertainty; that is, we come too close to the object of desire. As such, Chase denies us wholeness in the abrupt cut to black and we are left uncomfortably with antagonism. Indeed, desire is emphasized in The Sopranos’s cut to black. Not unlike the unpredictability of Tony’s “test dream,” the ambiguity of the series’ final scene is akin to the subject’s relationship to lack and absence, as they are left with no solution to the question the scene poses. Chase’s denial of narrative closure also raises the question of media ownership and fandom in relation to digital culture. In an interview on the bonus disc for the first season of The Sopranos’s DVD box set, Chase was asked by filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich whether by virtue of the success of the show, he felt obligated to the fans (in terms of artistic decisions). Chase’s response was that he “fights the thought.”34 Owning and ownership, from this perspective, are two different processes in relation to Chase’s artistic choices, and to the fans’ expectation of the show. Chase constantly challenges viewer expectations by de-mythifying the mafia narrative, as is evident in the non-closure of the series. These artistic decisions presuppose the artist/network as the owner of the text At the same time, the popularity The Sopranos was signaled by extensive fan participation, such fans forming online communities to discuss the show’s narrative ambiguities. Ownership, in this respect, is a matter of fetishizing the text. This fetishism manifests when fans fill in the show’s narrative gaps, such as the appearance of the mysterious man wearing a Members Only jacket. The same holds for the “Pine Barrens” episode and the disappearance of Valery. Even though Chase resists the thought of having some sort of obligation to his fans, the show exemplifies (to a certain degree) how consumption can inform its mode of production. Chase, aware of the fans’ desire to know what happened to Valery in the “Pine Barrens” episode, for example, played with viewers by occasionally referencing the episode throughout the series as a joke. Steve Buscemi, who directed “Pine Barrens,” as character Tony B., makes a reference to the episode when he is swimming with his two sons. He yells at his kids by telling them to stop putting pine cones in the filter. Another instance occurs when Christopher retells the story about the incident at Pine Barrens to his crew at the Bada Bing Bar, and jokingly blames the botched killing on Paulie, who takes offense at Christopher’s joke, and a fight almost ensues. Chases’s teasing with

134

Capturing Digital Media

the show’s meanings not only illustrates the contingent relationship between production and reception of the television text, but also demonstrates how The Sopranos contradicts its own narrative thread, thus disrupting viewers’ formal expectations. Although the allure and the promise of time-shifting media offers viewers much more control and flexibility in accessing television content, The Sopranos exemplifies how conflicts between artist and fans can emerge when certain narrative expectations are not met, or when conventions of a genre are not enacted. The antagonism caused by the series finale demonstrates that relationships between viewer and producer are often not unified. Television producers can exercise their authorial power in governing a show’s story world. In such instances, both artists and fans become involved in the encoding and decoding of the text, and the question of ownership is blurred to the point of being contested.

CChapter 8 PLEASE SET YOUR BELIEF TO 16:9

Both Tony’s “test dream” and the non-closure finale of The Sopranos depict a radical departure from the traditions of the gangster genre. These aesthetic and narrative features of The Sopranos are aligned with the traits of art-house cinema that influenced David Chase. Not surprisingly, Chase chose to photograph and exhibit The Sopranos in a wide-screen format when the series initially aired in 1999, a time when most households owned televisions with a 4:3 square-shaped screen. The black bars above and below the image on a 4:3 screen not only visually displayed The Sopranos importing an aesthetic of cinema, but also followed HBO’s signature brand, “It’s Not TV. It’s HBO.” Certainly the wide-screen cinematography of The Sopranos signals the blurring of TV and film’s mediums at the turn of the millennium. Moreover, it raises a number of discussion points in relation to seeing and the screen in exhibiting wide-screen images for high-definition television (HDTV). Before the arrival of the DVD and Blu-ray formats, access to letterbox films for home viewing was available on laser disc, a cultural form marketed primarily to high-end film collectors. The popularity of the DVD and Blu-ray, however, has shifted the home video market from specialized film collectors and cinephiles to include more of the general viewing audience. Like laser disc, many films on DVD and Blu-ray are available in widescreen, bringing a wider acceptance of the original aspect ratio (OAR) of moving images. Alongside the popularity of DVD and Blu-ray formats, sales of HDTV have significantly increased, which has also led to a wider acceptance of OAR. Although HDTV has resulted in more film and television content being presented in a wide-screen aspect ratio, problems formatting moving images in nontheatrical environments persist. Because of the different venues and delivery systems available for accessing televisual and cinematic content, the variety of HD and standard definition (SD) television channels across cable and satellite providers, as well as the different aspect ratios which filmmakers can choose to photograph their

136

Capturing Digital Media

works, nontheatrical exhibition of the moving image continues to be a source of conflict in the age of high definition. This is most noticeable in the exhibition of 1.33:1 (4:3 aspect ratio) content for 16:9 screens; 4:3 aspect ratio displays black bars vertically on HDTV 16:9 screens, a process called pillarboxing (see Figure 8.3). Many older television series were shot on 4-perf 35 mm (Academy ratio) for 4:3 analog NTCS (National Television System Committee) broadcasting. Images filmed on 4-perf 35 mm (4 perforations/sprocket holes per frame) have a native 4:3 look (square-like frame) which formats well for SD TV. Television cinematography often included some negative space in composing shots for 4:3 (visual information outside the “safe-action area”). In postproduction, negative space was then matted on the left and right sides of the frame in preparation for 4:3 television broadcasting. If a television series filmed on 4-perf 35 mm had protected the negative space from unwanted visual information, such as light stands or boom microphones, the negative space can potentially be used for 16:9 HD, as in the case of Seinfeld (1989–98). In the mid1990s, more television shows such as That ‘70s Show (1998–2006) and Friends (1994–2004) used 3-perf 35 mm which has a native 16:9 aspect ratio but were still photographed for 4:3 television broadcasting. Again, if the visual space outside the safe-action area had been protected from unwanted information, shows filmed on 3-perf 35 mm would display well on HDTV in widescreen. But a majority of movies and television shows filmed in 4-perf 35 mm will be in a pillarbox format—if exhibited in their OAR.1 Indeed, the variety of aspect ratios highlight the appeal and concern of exhibiting film and television content for HDTV screens. In her study of home theatre viewing spaces, Barbara Klinger describes the allure of new entertainment technologies, such as time-shifting devices that allow one to “control” and “master” technology. Klinger cites Sony’s slogan for its 1980 VCR advertisement as: “‘Experience the freedom of total control. . . . Master time, memory, and circumstance’ through time-shifting.”2 From this perspective, cinephiles and home theatre enthusiasts not only seek to “master” and “tame” their home viewing technologies, but desire that the moving image be presented in its original or native aspect ratio. I argue that these descriptors “mastery” and “tame” speak to the logic of desire in the path toward the perfect viewing condition within the home setting. Not unlike Maxell’s 1983 high-fidelity television commercial of a man sitting on a Le Corbusier chair, “blown away” by the technology’s sound, the “complementarity” of high-definition screen and aspect ratio offers the



8. Please Set Your Belief to 16:9

137

possibility of obtaining the zenith of enjoyment in home entertainment. But the promise of perfectly transmitted and interfaced digital moving images for HDTV and digital screens can be compromised as the media industry attempts to reach a middle ground between the aesthetic tastes of the home theatre enthusiast and the general viewing audience. My claim is that what is at stake in the modification of moving images for home viewing is belief and duplicity. As I will argue, the issue for both home theatre enthusiasts and the general viewing audience is the pathway toward deception. This deception involves attracting and appealing to the viewer’s desire. From this perspective, the presentation and exhibition of the moving image is just as important as a film’s formal technique (editing, cinematography, sound, etc.) in attracting the spectator’s desire when watching a movie or television series outside of the theatre setting.

Widescreen and cinema’s fictional status Watching a movie on a large screen in a darkened theatre with state of art sound and digital effects offers an immersive world outside of the everyday. But in the case of television and the home environment, obstacles often stand in the way of theatrical immersion, such as commercial breaks, intruding graphics that advertise upcoming programs, and the ability to pause, rewind, and fast forward a program. Even the number of channels at viewers’ disposal draws attention to television’s mediation. Digital streaming of television and film content, too, can encounter disruptions that impact the performance of the text, such as buffering problems or router issues. But when it comes to displaying a television series or film’s native aspect ratio, the promise of digital perfection is more complex in terms of distraction and immersion. This antagonism is exemplified in The Onion’s mock article on a fictional character called Tyler Rosenstein from Brooklyn and his frustration with receiving the full-screen version of The Wachowski’s The Matrix Reloaded (2003) as a Hanukkah gift from his Aunt Hannah and Uncle Bernie: “Why do they call it ‘full-screen’ anyway, when its only two-thirds of the stupid movie?” Rosenstein asked. “Fucking bullshit aspect ratio!” . . . As of press time, Rosenstein had not decided what to do with the DVD [The Matrix Reloaded]. “I can’t trade it to any of my friends,” Rosenstein said. “They’d just roll their eyes when they saw it wasn’t

138

Capturing Digital Media

letterboxed. Basically, I’m screwed. I’m stuck with a product that has no reason to exist.”3

Indeed, The Onion plays on the stereotype of the general viewing audience not knowing the difference between letterbox and pan and scan (full-screen) versions, as well as ribbing DVD connoisseurs who can only truly appreciate a film’s OAR. After all, according to the article, Rosenstein is a seventeen-year-old philosophy student at NYU. As his uncle Bernie explains, “Tyler’s got very specific tastes. . . . He told us he likes those foreign films. What did he call it? The Criterion Collection. Well, Hannah and I tried to find those, but they didn’t have them at Target. We sure didn’t want what happened with the wizard movie to happen again.”4 The wizard movie, of course, is The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, 2001). Today, if we were to consider the same scenario in a network airing of The Matrix on HDTV, the film’s OAR would most likely be modified from its 2.35:1 aspect ratio to fit HDTV’s 16:9 digital screen. Although the frame size of HDTV is 16:9 (1.78:1 aspect ratio) and comfortably formats most wide-screen images, films photographed in 2.35:1 and 2.40:1, such as The Matrix, are still letterbox (black bars appear on the top and bottom of the image) (see Figure 8.2). For many viewers, the modification of The Matrix’s aspect ratio to fully fill HDTV’s 16:9 screen would most likely not distract their spectatorship. Even though The Matrix loses visual information in its television modification for HDTV, the narrative can be followed. From this perspective, most viewers would not recognize the modification of The Matrix’s OAR for HDTV exhibition. But for Tyler Rosenstein, the modified 16:9 version of The Matrix would presumably cause distress. To put it simply, the 16:9 digital exhibition of The Matrix would not be a perfect presentation for Tyler and therefore is a distraction.5 More importantly, the modification of The Matrix would fail to appeal to Tyler’s desire. As I will explain below, the exhibition of the moving image plays a significant role in eliciting the spectator’s desire toward narrative immersion. Letterboxing and panning-and-scanning have a correlation to Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s concepts of immediacy (looking through) and hypermediacy (looking at). The black bars of letterbox images closely follow the logic of hypermediacy where the interface does not completely erase itself. As Botler and Grusin explain, the “windowed interface does not attempt to unify the space around any one point of view. Instead, each text window defines its own verbal, each graphic window is its own visual, point of view.”6 This is not to



8. Please Set Your Belief to 16:9

139

suggest that letterbox content correlates to overlapping windows that we see on a laptop or computer. But the black bars are characteristic of hypermediacy in that they do not unify cinematic space for the viewer. That is, the letterbox image does not fully fill the television screen as a mode of immediacy (seeing through).7 Lev Manovich’s reading of digital compositing and spatial montage similarly follows Bolter and Grusin’s notion of immediacy and hypermediacy. Digital compositing marries multiple layers within a shot to create a seamless and transparent image. This is most notable in the use of green or blue screen processing as explored in Chapter 1, such as the long-take highway escape scene in War of the Worlds. For Manovich, digital compositing is another development of cinema that works toward “creating a fake reality.”8 The digitally synthetic image for Manovich does not attempt to create our bodily experience of seeing, but rather follows the processes of photorealism or “photographic reality.” As he notes, “For what is faked is, of course, not reality but photographic reality, reality as seen by the camera lens. . . . This image exists outside our consciousness on a screen—a window of limited size that presents a still imprint of a small part of our outer reality, filtered through a lens with limited depth of field, and then filtered through the film’s grain and limited tonal range.”9 The faked photographic image is the audience’s consensus of “photographic reality.” As explored in Chapter 1, the digital composited image is too real and must be degraded to meet what we accept as photographically filmed reality. Manovich further observes that the goal of digital compositing does not have to produce a “seamless virtual space,”10 but can create a “spatial montage.” Examples of spatial montage are split screen or multiple graphic windows on a computer program. As Manovich explains, “Different worlds can clash semantically rather than form a single universe.”11 Here the viewer is confronted with layers of information objects presented simultaneously within the image as a spectatorship of hypermediacy, such as Joel Schumacher’s use of the split-screen technique in Phone Booth (2002), or “windowed” images in the television series 24.12 The effect of hypermediacy certainly holds true for letterboxing, where the black bars operate as information objects within a television or digital device’s screen. Perhaps immediacy and hypermediacy are closely aligned to what Alexander Galloway terms “the interface effect.” The interface, as Galloway explains, is often defined less as a surface and more of a “doorway or window.”13 The common definition of the interface is “the point of transition between different mediatic layers within any nested system.”14

140

Capturing Digital Media

Galloway, however, argues that the interface also involves liminality, the “state of ‘being on the boundary.’”15 Galloway observes that the interface is not a thing, but an effect. The interface involves a “zone of indecision”16 between the center and edges of the image. We can think of the center of an image as performing (using Bolter and Grusin’s term) immediacy or looking through, subordinating the edges of the frame. Here the interface operates under what Galloways terms a “coherent aesthetic,” drawing the eye toward the center of the image. Whereas hypermediacy draws attention to the edges of the frame itself. As Galloway states, “the edges of art always make reference to the medium of itself.”17 By contrast, the intraface announces itself by presenting the edge and center simultaneously to the viewer. As Galloway explains, the intraface is an “interface internal to the interface.”18 Galloway provides an image of a banquet hall from the game World of Warcraft that displays both diegetic and non-diegetic space on screen. The diegetic space of the interior of a banquet hall demonstrates a Renaissance perspective of painting. Along the periphery of the diegetic space of the banquet hall involves non-diegetic space of icons, texts, progress bars, and numbers. The diegetic and non-diegetic space of World of Warcraft, according to Galloway, perform a “tension inside the medium.” As Galloway observes, “It is no longer a question of a ‘window’ interface between this side of the screen and that side . . ., but an intraface between the heads-up display, the text and icons in the foreground, and the 3-D, volumetric, diegetic space of the game itself—on the one side, writing; on the other, image.”19 Here we can see why the black bars of letterboxing reveal a tension between diegetic reality within the frame, and the threshold of the outer edges as a point of distraction. The black bars of letterboxing operate as non-diegetic space, a frame within a frame visible to the viewer. As such, letterboxing is a “tension inside the medium.”20 But unlike the example of the non-diegetic gauges and icons that exist on the periphery of the banquet hall in World of Warcraft, the black bars of letterboxing signify nothing; they are a protrusion that surrounds the image, a point I will further explore at the end of the chapter. Yet for those who enjoy the black bars, they are not an “incoherent aesthetic” to use Galloway’s term.21 The black bars do not call attention to the edges of the image as a point of indeterminacy. But for those who object to the black bars, they do, indeed, distract from the diegetic reality of the image itself. In other words, the black bars announce the edge of the frame as a direct address to the viewer. In both cases (those for or against black bars of letterboxing), the interface performs what Galloway argues as an effect.



8. Please Set Your Belief to 16:9

141

But what are the psychical effects of letterbox images? On the one hand, the black bars of letterbox images are spatial montage, no different than split-screen images. But unlike the splitscreen mode, the black bars serve no narrative purpose, unless they are to indicate a temporal transition as I will explain below. In this sense, the black bars reveal what Manovich notes as cinema’s lie—namely, it’s “visual fake reality” as mode of hypermediacy. Here the illusion of a coherent and unified space no longer holds for viewers as a mode of immediacy because the black bars reveal the fake story space of motion pictures. That is, the black bars of letterboxing generate lack for viewers that find them distracting. On the other hand, for cineastes such as Tyler Rosenstein, the black bars do not distract because their visual presence communicate that the film has been preserved in its OAR. Indeed, tensions can emerge when a mediator must create a consensus of wide-screen high-definition images for HDTV. The mediators, of course, are the networks, films studios, and even the filmmakers themselves. As such, letterboxing can unmask cinema’s fictional status in Manovich’s terms of faked visual reality. For home theatre enthusiasts and cineastes who enjoy letterbox images, the black bars are pleasurable because the image has not been modified. From this perspective, the black bars of letterboxing sustain the lie of cinema as, to use Galloway’s description, an aesthetic of coherency. But to modify the image for those who do not enjoy the black bars of letterbox images reveals cinema’s lie—namely, its fictional status. What one finds lacking in the image (the black bars), another finds fullness and richness. In short, it is cinema’s fictional status that becomes a site of tension for lovers or haters of letterbox images. This tension, I argue, pertains to deception, belief, and symbolic fiction.

Setting your belief to 16:9 Owning a HDTV is one of many steps in displaying and accessing HD content. For example, an issue with HDTV is presenting DVD content on 16:9 with theatre-like quality. A standard DVD has 480 lines of resolution, whereas Blu-ray has 1080. If a DVD has not been enhanced for 16:9 TVs, or “anamorphically enhanced,” the image will not properly display on 16:9 screens, presenting the image with a “stamped” or “windowbox” look, enveloping the image with black bars on all sides of the screen. Of course, not all DVDs are enhanced for 16:9, as in the case of the original theatrical versions of Star Wars (1977, 1980, and 1983) which were included with the remastered Special Edition

142

Capturing Digital Media

Figure 8.1  Star Wars: A New Hope. Windowbox.

DVDs in 2006.22 The original versions of Star Wars are not enhanced to display on a 16:9 screen; instead, the image is windowboxed, which has provoked outrage by fans as noted in the introduction (see Figure 8.1). At the same time, films can utilize the windowbox look for aesthetic and narrative purposes, specifically as a temporal indicator. For example, the credit sequence and the 1905 Kansas scenes in the opening of Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) are filmed in 4:3 and black and white to mimic the early silent cinema of the nickelodeon period. Once Oscar “Oz” (James Franco) enters the Land of Oz, the film slowly unveils into luscious colors and wide-screen aspect ratio. Viewing the film’s title sequence and opening scenes on HDTV 16:9 screens, the 4:3 images are windowboxed because the film is photographed in 2.35:1, appropriately displaying black bars on the top and bottom of the image. Oz the Great and Powerful offers an example in which the windowbox effect is narratively and temporally motivated. Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) also creatively uses multi-aspect ratios as an indicator of narrative time. Anderson explains: For years, I wanted to do a movie . . . in the “Academy Ratio,” which is more or less a square. . . . But it was not possible. . . . You could project it in a museum or in a revival house, but you couldn’t release a movie in multiplexes . . . because they have to adjust the projection to a degree—they don’t even have the equipment—so, you’d be faced with this tremendous cost and logistics, and it just didn’t happen. But now that it’s [projection is] digital, somebody can just push a button, and the thing goes the way you told them to.23



8. Please Set Your Belief to 16:9

143

Here Anderson describes the film’s three aspect ratios (1.37:1, 1.85:1, and 2.35:1) that frame the three narrative threads of The Grand Budapest Hotel. Each time period is represented by a different aspect ratio. The majority of the story takes place in the 1930s and is filmed in 1.37:1 (Academy ratio, also referred to as 1.33:1). As Anderson explains, Academy ratio was the standard aspect ratio for movies photographed from the early 1930s until the 1950s. The second aspect ratio is 1.85:1 and standard format of most movies today represents the story taking place in the 1980s. The third aspect ratio (2.35:1) frames the section of the story taking place in the 1960s. For Anderson, the three-tiered aspect ratio structures each story as a book, a technique often employed in his works. His creative uses of multiple aspect ratios are not only narratively motivated, but also historically motivated. Anderson explains his love of Academy ratio, and how he identifies this aspect ratio with cinema’s past, such as the films of Humphrey Bogart. As such, The Grand Budapest Hotel showcases the artistic possibilities and thematic meanings in its uses of multiple aspect ratios. The Grand Budapest Hotel’s three-tiered aspect ratio exemplifies the manipulability of the digital moving image. As Anderson observes, projecting a celluloid film that has changing aspect ratios was hard to achieve in the analog era. It is now much easier to project multiple aspect ratios in film using digital media. Moreover, Anderson’s experiment with multiple aspect ratios in The Grand Budapest Hotel demonstrates that widescreen is how we watch most theatrical presentations of movies. After all, widescreen was a technology that the film industry adapted into its mode of production to compete with television in distinguishing the two mediums. Today, television’s standard aspect ratio of 1.33:1 is now widescreen’s 16:9 (1.78:1) for HDTV, bringing cinema and television’s mode of production closer to each other. At the same time, The Grand Budapest Hotel’s multiple aspect ratios complicate a film’s native aspect ratio. Because most films and television shows are now projected digitally, the moving image is much more vulnerable to manipulation. Understanding Anderson’s decision to use multiple aspect ratios of The Grand Budapest Hotel rewards one’s technical expertise of cinema, particularly for the cineaste and home theatre buff. James Kendrick’s research on the Home Theatre Forum’s (HTF) web discussion board explores how contributors to the site debate and make sense of letterbox content within the home setting. Kendrick explains that these connoisseurs “pride themselves on being film buffs, with a great deal of knowledge about the artistic merits of the cinema, including issues of composition and framing.”24 For Kendrick, HTF film buffs attempt to “assert an identity” and to separate themselves from the general

144

Capturing Digital Media

viewing audience by “claiming a technical and cultural knowledge that is coupled within these debates to particular class distinctions.”25 Many of the contributors on HTF forum pride themselves of their home theatre knowledge. For this reason, the home theatre enthusiasts often take their frustrations out on the general viewing audience who do not understand the art of framing and composition for moving images. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of taste, Kendrick highlights comments from the forum’s posters who prefer to watch films in their OAR. Kendrick observes that Bourdieu’s theory of taste “is a function of one’s education and social upbringing; we are taught and socialized throughout our lives to find certain cultural objects either ‘tasteful’ or ‘distasteful.’ Because of this, taste . . . is intricately bounded up ‘in questions of power and class.’”26 These commentators, according to Kendrick, distinguish themselves from the general viewing audience by asserting their knowledge of letterboxing, particularly when discussing modified aspect ratio (MAR). Indeed, having knowledge of wide-screen processing can factor into one’s viewing experience of The Grand Budapest Hotel. At the start of film, a message appears on screen to “set your television monitor to 16 × 9” due the multiple aspect ratios employed in the film. Certainly this message can potentially confuse viewers, especially those who do not understand the nuances of aspect ratios, or may not even know how to set their television to 16:9. According to Kendrick, knowledge of framing and composition is operative to OAR discourse on HTF: “To properly discuss aspect ratios . . . one must not only know about the differences between pre-1950s films shot in the Academy aspect ratio and the myriad wide-screen processing years but also understand the details of the video transfer process and how home theatre equipment can be either used of misused to ensure proper presentation.”27 Class, according to Kendrick, is often brought up on HTF to distinguish the group’s identity. Some posters have derisively referred to these viewers as “Joe Six-Pack”—people who buy movies but do not care about the modification of a film’s aspect ratio. Joe Six-Pack wants to “fill his TV screen,” not understanding how pan and scan modifies a film’s OAR.28 Kendrick notes, “HTFers never overtly ridicule someone for lacking economic capital, but they do ridicule what their discourse suggests to be a corresponding lack of cultural capital, or knowledge.”29 Perhaps more strikingly is when Kendrick explains that HFT members “feel something is being taken away from them if the format does not follow the prescriptions they deem legitimate.”30 In turn, the general viewing audience becomes the film enthusiast’s object of scorn, because it



8. Please Set Your Belief to 16:9

145

cannot experience the moving image as intended by the filmmaker. It can be suggested that negative comments reflecting HTFers’ frustration with MAR images is in the inability to fully possess the “object” itself— namely, the film’s OAR. Possession of the object lends itself to a psychoanalytic reading of MAR images, particularly in terms of cynicism, knowledge, and desire. As Kendrick’s research uncovers, cineaste and home theatre enthusiasts often express their anger at the general viewing audience for not understanding films that are panned and scanned or have been modified to fit a 16:9 screen. One could suggest that HTFers’ knowledge of framing and composition would designate them as cynics. The cynic, as explored in Chapter 6, is the one who can see through the symbolic fiction of what Jacques Lacan calls the big Other. For Lacan, the symbolic order is the network of language and systems of communication. It is the place where we can take up different identities. It is also where laws, unwritten laws, and institutions are enacted. The big Other is the authority that puts the symbolic order to work. What drives the engine of the big Other is our shared belief in it. “The subject supposed to believe,” according to Slavoj Žižek, is one who believes “through the other.”31 What binds the symbolic order is a fiction, but it is a fiction that we collectively invest in. I cannot know that I believe in wide-screen images unless others also believe in wide-screen images. The cynic is aware that the big Other is a lie. They perceive themselves outside the stronghold of the symbolic authority due to their knowledge. But this perception does not have critical bite for undermining symbolic authority according to Žižek. For this reason, Žižek claims that cynicism operates as a form of ideology. As explained in Y Tu Mamá También, the cynic fails to see how fantasy coats over the contingency that is embedded within the symbolic order. Cynical reason misses the mechanisms of illusion at work within the symbolic order. The cynic “sees through” the fiction and knows that the symbolic is nothing but a mask. Yet the cynic retains the hegemony of the symbolic order. One can suggest that film buffs on HTF have a dimension of cynical reason, because he or she knows more than the average film spectator in terms of framing and composition of moving images. After all, this is one of the contentions that led certain HTFers to coin the label Joe Six-Pack: those who do not understand or know when they are in the presence of MAR images. Yet knowledge is precisely the problem for viewers who oppose MAR images. As Todd McGowan explains, knowledge and desire are at odds with each other: “The subject doesn’t want to know what it desires or how it enjoys.”32 I argue that knowledge is not what

146

Capturing Digital Media

underlies the concerns of MAR images for film buffs. Rather, what’s at stake for both film buffs and the general viewing audience is duplicity. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s notion of the “the non-duped err,” Jennifer Friedlander explains, “The subject that allows herself to be duped, who avoids believing that one can step outside the illusion [of the symbolic ruse], inhabits the truth that, deceitful or not, it is the symbolic fiction that structure reality.”33 For Friedlander, the dupe has a political dimension. By permitting ourselves to be deceived by the illusion of the fiction we can arrive at how the very structures of symbolic fiction operate. Letting ourselves be duped by the fiction, for example, we can experience shocking moments within a film. In the case of Y Tu Mamá También, the film invites our identification with the protagonists’ journey which, in turn, enables the film to disrupt our illusions in order to draw attention to Mexico’s changing social realities at the turn of the millennium. If we felt disturbed by the film’s unprompted disruptions, it is because we allowed ourselves to be duped by the film’s fiction. This is one of the key concerns in the modification of moving images for HDTV. It is not simply that fictional characters like Tyler Rosenstein or HTFers know more than the average viewer in terms of modified images. Rather, these film buffs are upset at modified images because it distracts them from being duped. In other words, it is not that those who enjoy letterbox movies watch from a critical and cynical distance. Rather, it is the opportunity to watch movies in their OAR that provides the pathway toward duplicity and deception. Likewise, for those who oppose letterbox image, the black bars problematize the entryway toward duplicity and deception. In both cases, the exhibition of the moving image fails to appeal to the viewer’s desire. Here we can see why, according to Galloway, the interface operates an effect. For those who do not enjoy the letterbox image, or not seeing the image completely fill their screen, it is because the interface has not provided the desired effect. The same can be said for those who enjoy the black bars of letterboxing. In both cases, the interface effect is to be duped. And duplicity involves appealing to the viewer’s desire. Digital intensifies this tension because the image is much more vulnerable to manipulation. On the one hand, perfection is for those who see letterbox context as respecting a film or television show’s OAR. On the other, the perfect viewing conditions can be images that fully fill the screen. In both cases, it is the desire to see through the image that is at stake for these viewers. Paradoxically, the perfect presentation of the image for home viewing is not obtaining the object cause of desire, but its failure to obtain it. From this perspective, the perfect presentation of the image, whether it is displayed in its OAR



8. Please Set Your Belief to 16:9

147

or MAR, is to sustain the sublime status of the object. For those who enjoy the black bars of letterboxing, the image retains its sublimity. That is, the black bars provide the necessary distance between the subject and its object. Likewise, for those who oppose the black bars, to fully fill the screen also sustains the object’s sublime status.

Black bars and René Magritte What is it about the black bars that surround the wide-screen image for HDTV screens that have caused strife among viewers? Why do networks, for instance, place text within the black pillar bars alongside the 4:3 image, such as their logo, or a blurring effect? Perhaps Žižek’s analysis of René Magritte’s painting The Looking Glass (1963) offers an explanation. Magritte’s painting entails a view of the sky and clouds seen through the windowpane. But within the painting is a narrow opening of the windowpane which does not show reality, but instead, to use Žižek’s description, reveals a “nondescript black mass.”34 For Žižek, Magritte’s painting provides insights into how the fantasy frame operates in relation to the real, the stumbling block of the symbolic order. As Žižek explains, “The painting would translate thus: the frame of the windowpane is the fantasy-frame which constitutes reality, whereas through the crack we get an insight into the ‘impossible’ Real, the Thingin-itself.”35 The black mass within the opening of the windowpane does not lead to another dimension that exists separately from reality, but rather realizes the limits of reality itself. This limit is the real. As Žižek notes, the limit of reality is “the abyss, the void around which it is structured.”36 Moreover, the slight opening of the windowpane into the abyss of the real speaks to the logic of desire. The gap between the subject and the real is protected by a fantasy frame. Without the fantasy frame we do not see reality as it truly is, but rather an unpleasant form of reality, as in the case of Cloverfield, when Hud drops the camera on the ground after his death as explained in Chapter 4. The trauma of the camera landing sideways after Hud’s death realizes how one’s desire distorts the visual field in the form of the gaze. Thus, our encounter with the gaze demonstrates that reality is never complete and neutral. As Žižek states, “There is always a void gaping in its midst.”37 For Žižek, Magritte’s painting illustrates the Lacanian barred subject. The gap that separates the subject from its object is an ontological gap for Lacan. Fantasy operates by coating over this gap, providing the necessary distance in order to “constitute reality” for the subject. By coming too

148

Capturing Digital Media

close to one’s “fundamental fantasy,” paradoxically, as Žižek explains “changes into the monstrous Real.”38 The black bars of letterboxing or pillarboxing share a commonality to the open window that shows a black mass in The Looking Glass (see Figures 8.2 and 8.3). If one finds the blackness above or on the sides of the image distracting, it is because it disrupts the fantasy frame, the pathway toward duplicity. After all, why would networks need to fill in something, such as a blurred effect or the network’s logo in the space of the pillarbox bars? It is to suggest that something must be represented in order to counteract this distracting and protruding black mass within the screen. Yet for those who do enjoy the black bars, they are not the real but signify that the image has been preserved in its native aspect ratio. But for those who find the black bars distracting, the black mass signifies nothing.

Figure 8.2  The Grand Budapest Hotel. Letterbox.

Figure 8.3  The Grand Budapest Hotel. Pillarbox.



8. Please Set Your Belief to 16:9

149

Indeed, digital images for HDTV have not entirely eradicated the concerns of modified images. Today, filmmakers have expressed concerns with the modification of wide-screen images for HD broadcasting, specifically cable networks cropping or modifying 2.35:1 and 2.40:1 images for HDTV. In 2009, filmmaker Steven Soderbergh’s editorial piece in DGA Quarterly discusses the altering of the presentation of 2.40:1 HD images on HDTV, writing, “Television operators . . . are taking the position that the viewers of television do not like watching 2.40 films letterboxed to fit their 16:9 screens, and that a film insisting on this is worth significantly less—or even nothing—to them.”39 For Soderbergh, preserving the 2.40:1 aspect ratio for HDTV is not only to retain visual information on the left and right sides of the frame, but also to distinguish movies from television. He specifically criticizes HBO for cropping movies photographed in 2.35:1 and 2.40:1. Yet other cable networks, such as Showtime, present the majority of films in their OAR, demonstrating the inconsistency in display formats for the moving image for HDTV. More so, Soderberg’s comments address the strange effects that can occur when the television and cinema mediums converge. The black bars of letterboxing reveal, that as much as the boundaries between the mediums of cinema and television are collapsing in the digital age, there are still demarcations among them, a point I will return to in the conclusion of this project. Although cropping 2.35:1 and 2.40:1 content for 16:9 is not as disastrous as panning and scanning for 4:3 screens, these texts are still losing visual information.40 The existence of a vast archive of film and television content shot on both 4:3 and widescreen raises questions on presenting HD content that is consistent and not distracting for viewers. Even though networks are adapting to HDTV by filming their content in HD widescreen, arguably, television faces a greater challenge, because it not only has to upgrade its technologies for HDTV, but also has to address different aspect ratios of television shows and movies—as well as cultural factors related to home viewing environments. Certainly the 16:9 frame size of HDTV has allowed many film and television texts to comfortably display wide-screen aspect ratios. But technical issues and the industry’s aesthetic consideration of the general viewing audiences has complicated the OAR of moving images as in the case of cropping 2.35:1 and 2.40:1 content. Indeed, HDTV and digital screens have provided greater experiences of seeing and hearing moving images but presenting moving images in the nontheatrical environment is even more challenging in the digital era. As Charles Acland observes, although new transitions of cinema and television’s apparatus may

150

Capturing Digital Media

offer new possibilities of seeing and hearing, these developments also involve “industry strategy and procedures, assumptions about audience practice, and ideas about relationships to other media . . . and to other sites of cultural engagements.”41 Networks must negotiate new television technologies to appease often disparate aesthetic preferences of home theatre enthusiasts, wide-screen preservationists, and the general viewing audience.

CONCLUSION

Kodak, the last remaining celluloid manufacturer, saw its last profitable year in 2007, after being hit hard by innovations in digital technologies. But with a surge in celluloid production in 2015, such as Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies and Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, as well as the phenomenal success of J. J. Abrams’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Kodak CEO Jeff Clarke predicts the company to be profitable by the end of 2016.1 A question addressed in Capturing Digital Media is if digital is now the standard format of filmmaking, then why are these and many other filmmakers sticking with celluloid? As argued, exploring the answer to this question entails not only an aesthetic preference, but also the social, symbolic, and psychical currency connected to photochemically processed images. In a Charlie Rose interview with filmmaker Sam Mendes and actor Daniel Craig, both discussed why Spectre (2015), the recent James Bond film, was filmed on celluloid. Mendes explained that celluloid aesthetically has a “softness” that visually captures the film’s love story. But he also stated that shooting Spectre on film was for reasons of nostalgia pertaining to past James Bond movies. Mendes’s reasons to photograph Spectre on celluloid are almost identical to J. J. Abrams’s rationale for filming The Force Awakens on film as explained in the Introduction. On the one hand, celluloid production has aesthetic value for both filmmakers in depicting their vision of the Bond and Star Wars story worlds. On the other, celluloid has cultural currency for Mendes and Abrams as they attempt to capture the values and meanings associated with both film franchises. But perhaps more poignant (and quite funny) is Daniel Craig’s response to Charlie Rose about the celluloid production of Spectre: “You spend all this time trying to make digital look like film, why not use film?”2 Craig’s response sums up the paradoxical allure and uncertainty of the digital form. The allure of the digital is that it can and does help filmmakers create both spectacular and realistic depictions of the moving image that were nearly impossible to achieve in the classic era of Hollywood. Yet many filmmakers use digital technologies to make

152

Capturing Digital Media

digitally produced images look like celluloid, thus illustrating the process of photorealism. Indeed, photorealism suggests the importance of organic properties in viewers’ relatability to digitally produced images. Avatar producer Jon Landau reinforces this notion, explaining that James Cameron pushed WETA Digital (the company that created Avatar’s visual effects) “to break down the tradition of standard visual effects where everything can be perfect and to make something imperfect, that’s what makes it cinematic.”3 The importance of the facial recognition technologies employed in the 3-D Banshee flying animated sequence in Avatar underscores Landau’s comment on imperfection. During the actors’ performance, a tiny boom camera digitally imaged their facial movements as they simulated flying the Banshees. Facial capture technologies are significant in viewers’ emotional connection to the animated characters, especially in the use of the close-up, which demonstrates what I have argued is the necessity of the organic in creating digital visual effects. As such, wounding the perfection of the digital appeals to our desire. Part of this project traced not only the intersection of the organic and the perfection of the digital, but also how digital environments are shaping experiences of temporality in relation to the subject of desire. Many of us are accustomed to working with computerized databases of simultaneous new media objects that require us to interface with its data, such as selecting an item from a dropdown menu, searching through a list of apps on an internet-ready television, or operating a playback media device. This is not to suggest that the recent increase in nonlinear narrative in cinema is a direct result of these practices of digital technology. But it can be suggested that the trends toward nonnarrative story methods are closely related to home practices of digital media. As explored in Chapter 2, nonlinear narrative films, such as Source Code, Looper, and Edge of Tomorrow, often engage with the question of memory and the database. Perhaps one of the most significant films of the 2000s that engaged with the theme of the digital database and memory production is Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a science-fiction love story that involves a recently separated couple Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet) who erase the memories of each other by a company called Lacuna. Halfway during Joel’s erasing procedure, he decides to evade the process by hiding his memories of Clementine within his humiliating memories. Yet by hiding her within his humiliation, Joel is forced to confront his memory

Conclusion

153

when first meeting Clementine at a beach house on Long Island. This memory is the film’s navel, located strategically at the center point of the film’s concentric narrative structure. Here we discover that Joel regrets not trespassing into a closed beach house with Clementine. As Joel says to her, “I didn’t want to go. I was too nervous. . . . I walked out the door. I felt like I was a scared little kid. . . . I ran back to the bonfire, trying to outrun my humiliation.” Erasing this painful memory requires that Joel must first confront it. In the same way, part of this project explored nonchronological and database films that not only actively engage us in the storytelling process but require that we bring our own memories and knowledge base into making sense of a film’s subject matter, as explored in Elephant and Cloverfield. Both films draw upon the allure of the digital in their database, computerized and video game aesthetics. At the same time, these films summon our memories of national tragedies, such as the Columbine shootings and 9/11, in order to make sense of their narrative gaps. As much as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind explores the subject of memory and pastness, it also addresses concerns of identity thief and data breach as when Patrick (Elijah Wood) steals Joel’s memory objects of Clementine. Patrick works for Lacuna and assists Stan (Mark Ruffalo) who is in charge of the erasure procedure while the client is asleep. During Clementine’s procedure, Patrick becomes attracted to her. To court her, he steals all of Joel’s memory objects of Clementine at the Lacuna office and uses them to court her. Perhaps more importantly, Patrick’s data breach of Joel’s identity gestures toward today’s data algorithms that map and predict our purchasing behaviors. This is precisely what Patrick does in the pursuit of Clementine. At one point, Patrick gives her a gift that Joel had purchased for her. When they are laying on the ice on Charles River, he recites one of Joel’s memories to Clementine. And it is at this very moment Clementine senses something strange about Patrick, and thus loses her desire for him. As such, Patrick (as a nightmarish form of digital algorithm) is too right or perfect in courting Clementine. The depiction of space in relation to the digital also has a strong correlation to memory and the archive. It is a topic that Martin Scorsese explores in his 3-D spectacle Hugo. In 1993, a hand-colored print of Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902) was discovered. The film was digitally restored and released to the public in 2011, the same year Hugo was released. As explained in the Introduction, digitization has preserved and restored many celluloid movies. Scorsese has been a longtime activist of film preservation, a concern he explores in the

154

Capturing Digital Media

depiction of silent filmmaker Méliès played by Ben Kingsley. Hugo is filled with references to early silent cinema, such as Sacha Baron Cohen’s Chaplin-like physical and slapstick humor, or Hugo Cabret’s (Asa Butterfield) hanging onto the train station’s clock tower high above the Paris streets, a call back to Harold Lloyd’s clock stunt in Safety Last! (Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, 1923). The film’s visual 3-D digressions, too, recall the exhibitionist qualities of early cinema. Hugo’s 3-D scenes of “cinema of attractions” vacillate between technological wonder and the desire for narrative immersion. At the same time, the film’s digital spectacle gestures to analog’s fragility, as when Méliès burns Hugo’s father’s (Jude Law) notebook which contains the drawing of his automaton. For Méliès, the notebook painfully reminds him of his filmmaking past. Yet Scorsese paradoxically uses this moment as an opportunity to exhibit 3-D technology. Méliès burns the notebook and gives the ashes to Hugo as they descend to the ground in a 3-D spectacle. We later learn that Méliès did not burn the book; it was a trick he played on Hugo. Of course, Méliès’s films were built on trickery, or what Tom Gunning describes as “magical attractions.”4 The ashes suggest that, as much as Hugo is a film about characters who are broken, it is a film about remembrance and healing intimately attached to the archive. Scorsese depicts this through the connection of Hugo’s broken automaton (which his deceased father found in a museum attic), and Méliès the forgotten filmmaker of early silent cinema. As we discover late in the film that the original owner of the automaton is in fact Méliès, and that he used parts from the automaton to build his moving camera. Tom Gunning points out that early cinema’s modes of exhibition were not concerned with creating immersive narrative worlds but with promoting its technology. In particular, the Hale’s Tours, as Gunning notes, not only reflected movement within the films screened, but the theatre itself was constructed as a train cart.5 Hugo’s constructed train station closely follows the cinema of attractions as a mode of exhibition. Externally, Hugo takes place mostly in a train station, a transient space of movement where throngs of people come and go. Internally, Méliès and Hugo must travel to the past and confront the archive to overcome their losses and heal their wounds. Throughout the movie, objects of the past are found hidden in boxes and drawers. Hugo and Isabel (Chloë Grace Moretz) visit a library to learn about early cinema, where they meet Rene Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg), a collector and scholar of silent cinema who believes Méliès is dead. It is Tabard who has a copy of A Trip to the Moon, which he screens for Isabelle, Hugo and Jeanne Méliès (Helen McCrory), and Méliès himself. It is through the screening

Conclusion

155

that Méliès is able to speak of his past. Hugo is a film about mechanical power and movement, but above all, it is a story of the preservation of memory and the magic and illusion of moving images. Perhaps more importantly, Hugo raises concerns of preserving celluloid movies that are vulnerable to decay and deterioration. A development of digital is the capability to completely map and scan a film’s diegetic space as in the case of Hugo. Not unlike the Lacuna procedure of mapping memories in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, once this process occurs, digital space is permeable where one can remove or move objects, color correct specific areas within an image, and even omit a cut entirely as explored in Chapter 1 on the long take. But the interfacing of the digital and the human subject can also create uncanny effects. Slavoj Žižek cites Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300 (2007) where the entire film is filmed against an artificial background of blue and green screens, a process known as “digital backlot.” Žižek explains that “it is only with 300 that the combination of ‘real’ actors and objects with a digital environment has come close to creating a truly new autonomous aesthetic space.”6 If 300 creates an autonomous aesthetic space, where does the human fit into this space? On the one hand, digital effects can help to create spectacular fictional worlds and battle sequences as in the case of 300. This is certainly an allure of digital compositing, where the computer can blend a number of digital objects. On the other hand, digital compositing can create strange effects where the subject appears out of sync within the image itself. This uncanny effect I argue realizes the demarcation of cinema and comic book mediums. As much as cinema is losing its medium-based specificities in the digital age, this medium still occupies boundaries that cannot fully converge into other mediums. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s “double logic of remediation” explains that “our culture wants both to multiply its media and erase all traces of mediation.”7 For Bolter and Grusin, as explored in Chapter 8, immediacy is the act of looking through and hypermediacy is looking at. 300 and Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (2005) are two films that attempt to remediate panels from Miller’s graphic novels by placing real physical actors against artificially and simulated backgrounds. From this perspective, 300 and Sin City are not much different than Robert Wiene remediating the conventions of expressionist theatre in creating the visually distorted world in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Lev Manovich notes Georges Méliès as the father of computer graphics.8 But we should not forget the importance of Caligari’s special effects. The iconic style of Caligari is known for its jagged rooftops,

156

Capturing Digital Media

Figure C.1  The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Cesare literally blends into the film’s expressionistic mise-en-scène.

chiaroscuro lighting, and painted effects of shadow and light. Caligari could almost be called an analog backlot film, where the majority of the film’s visual effects are theatrically built and painted. Yet the characters do not stick out against the visuals in Caligari, but rather must be integrated into its ornaments. Ian Roberts explain that actors in German Expressionists films “found themselves subordinated to the films’ visuals, their characters literally part of the decoration.”9 This is most notable in somnambulist Cesare (Conrad Veidt) slithering against a wall leading to Jane’s (Lil Dagover) home as he attempts to murder her, or the striking scene where he collapses and dies in the forest, mimicking the trees’ branches (see Figure C.1). But in the case of 300 and Sin City, something does not fully “blend” as an effect of immediacy via digital compositing in the remediation of Miller’s graphic novels. It is the human that sticks out in the digital environment as an effect of hypermediacy. As such, 300 and Sin City foreclose the unification and coherency of fictional space where the human subject appears to clash with the digital. To this end, Capturing Digital Media has attempted to map and make sense of a number of aesthetic, narrative, spectorial, social, and industrial developments of digital media and the moving image. Primarily drawing from Jacques Lacan’s concept of drive and desire, I argued that imperfecting the digital is not exclusively technologically motivated but entails a psychical dimension. For Lacan, the subject of desire seeks the lost object as the ultimate means of enjoyment. The

Conclusion

157

logic of desire functions on lack and absence. By contrast, the logic of drive does not seek the goal of locating the “lost object” as the ultimate enjoyment but finds enjoyment in repeating loss. The circularity of the drive opens up the possibility of atemporality, spawned by digital’s collapsing of temporal barrier and complete spatialization of time. But as much as we enjoy all that digital has to offer, whether it is 3-D digital effects or the ability to binge-watch and digitally stream all seasons of Lost or Breaking Bad, the element of the organic cannot be effaced. It is the barrier to the “new” that entices our desire and is the source of our enjoyment. As such, wounding the perfection of digital makes digital desirable. My approach to this project came from my love of analog films, and the excitement of the possibilities that the digital form offers the future of film and television.

158

NOTES Introduction 1 Quoted in James Hibberd, “J.J. Abrams Wants Star Wars Sequel to Feel Real—EXCLUSIVE,” Entertainment Weekly, September 13, 2013, http:​// ew.​com/a​rticl​e/201​3/09/​19/ab​rams-​star-​wars.​Author’s emphasis. 2 Nicholas Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age (London: Wallflower Press, 2009), 9. 3 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1977), 122. 4 Will Brooker, Star Wars (London: Palgrave Macmillan/BFI, 2009), 26. 5 Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age, 2. 6 As widely reported, many viewers found Abrams’s overuse of the lens flare in Star Trek to be distracting. Abrams publicly acknowledged this criticism: “I know what you’re saying with the lens flares. It was one of those things. . . . I wanted a visual system that felt unique. I know there are certain shots where even I watch and think, ‘Oh that’s ridiculous, that was too many.’” Quoted in Meredith Woerner, “J.J. Abrams Admits Star Trek Lens Flares Are ‘Ridiculous,’” io9 We Come from the Future, April 27, 2009, http:​//io9​.com/​52302​78/jj​-abra​ms-ad​mits-​star-​trek-​lens-​flare​s-are​-ridi​ culou​s. 7 Quoted in Matt Goldberg, “J.J. Abrams Talks STAR WARS: EPISODE VII; Says He Wants to Make It Feel Real,” Collider, September 20, 2013, http:​// col​lider​.com/​star-​wars-​episo​de-7-​jj-ab​rams-​real/​#ctLL​RR8p8​Ki6fe​7y.9.​ 8 Similarly, John Carpenter described his science-fiction film Dark Star (1974) as depicting “dirty space.” See Carpenter, The Real History of Science Fiction, dir. Andy Mosse (Los Angeles: BBC America, 2014), Episode 1. 9 VFX is a process where images are produced outside of live action. VFX can include both digital and non-digital effects. 10 Sarah Salovaara, The Wolf of Wall Street’s Seamless Visual Effects,” Filmmaker Magazine, January 13, 2014, http:​//fil​mmake​rmaga​zine.​com/8​ 3438-​the-w​olf-o​f-wal​l-str​eets-​seaml​ess-s​pecia​l-eff​ects/​#.UtV​OmrSA​p_B. 11 Lisa Purse, Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 5. 12 See Anne Friedberg, “The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 7th ed., eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 802–13. 13 Quoted in Sean O’Neal, “Fox Is Making Buffy Widescreen and Joss Whedon Isn’t Happy,” The A.V. Club, December 15, 2014, https​://ne​ws.av​

160 Notes club.​com/f​ox-is​-maki​ng-bu​ffy-w​idesc​reen-​and-j​oss-w​hedon​-isn-​t-ha-​ 17982​74895​. 14 Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), 62. 15 Certainly there is no lost object for the subject to find, since objet a was never lost to begin with. Herein lie the paradox for Lacan and the subject of desire. Desire is fueled by desire itself. That is, the logic of desire operates on lack not fullness. As Todd McGowan explains, “The subject’s desire is oriented around this lost object, but the object is nothing as a positive entity and exists insofar as it lost. This is why one can never attain the lost object or the object that causes one to desire.” Todd McGowan, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 29. 16 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 2000), 291. Author’s emphasis. 17 Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 134. Žižek nicely uses the example of the terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) in James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) as the embodiment of the drive. The terminator’s programmed and relentless pursuit of his victim Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) is “devoid of desire.” Žižek, Looking Awry, 22. Of course, in everyday life, drive and desire work together. That is, we cannot fully remove ourselves from desire. But The Terminator offers an excellent cinematic example of drive without desire. 18 Also see Chapter 1 in Mari Ruti, The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). 19 McGowan, Out of Time, 20. 20 Ibid., 25. 21 Also see Matthew Flisfeder, Postmodern Theory and Blade Runner (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 89–94. 22 McGowan, Out of Time, 33. 23 John Corbett notes that the technology of noise reduction is an attempt to remove traces of the performer for the rendering of musical autonomy. As Corbett explains, “The anxiety produced by the threat of visual loss audible in these imperfections, another strategy has developed: cultivation of lack itself; loving the gap; noise reduction; and consequently, fetishization of the technology that produces lack.” Corbett, Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 41. 24 The Criterion Collection teamed with L’Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna, Italy to restore the burnt negatives for all three films. The restoration entailed both the skills of digital and celluloid specialists. L’Immagine Ritrovata was involved with the analog remastering, a process that included rehydrating the negative in a solution of glycerol, acetone, and

Notes

161

water, repairing the film’s perforations, and re-splicing the film. The Criterion Collection then digitally cleaned the prints, creating a new 4K restoration of the films. Of course, not all celluloid films will receive the same treatment such as the preservation and digitization of The Apu Trilogy. See Ryan Vlastelica, “How Film Restorers Brought The Apu Trilogy Back to Life,” A.V. Club, May 7, 2015, http:​//www​.avcl​ub.co​m/art​ icle/​how-f​i lm-r​estor​ers-b​rough​t-apu​-tril​ogy-b​ack-l​ife-2​18781​. 25 Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film, trans. Edith Bone (New York: Roy Publishers, 1953), 60–88. 26 Hugh S. Manon, “Beyond the Beyond: CGI and the Anxiety of Overperfection,” in Žižek and Media Studies: A Reader, eds. Matthew Flisfeder and Louis-Paul Willis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 185. 27 Todd McGowan, Enjoying What We Don’t Have, 40. 28 Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age, 2. Author’s emphasis. 29 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 202. 30 For this reason, capitalism feeds on the subject of desire in terms of purchasing the new. See Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (New York: Columbia Press, 2016).

Chapter 1 1 Joe Fordham, “Children of Men: The Human Project,” Cinefex 110 (July 2007): 33–37, 34. 2 André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 36. 3 Bazin, What Is Cinema?, 34. 4 Fordham, “Children of Men,” 43. 5 David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 47. 6 Lewis stated that the scene was so real that, “Off-screen there were people that yelled, ‘They held up the bank, they held up the bank.’ It was so real and none of the bystanders [of the town] knew what we were doing. We had no extras except the people the policeman directed. Everything— cars, people—was there on the street.” Quoted in Jim Kitses, Gun Crazy (London: BFI Film Classics, 1996), 47. 7 Brian Henderson, A Critique of Film Theory (New York: Dutton Adult, 1980), 50. Author’s emphasis. 8 For a full analysis of film technologies, see Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, 3rd ed. (London: Starword, 2009). 9 Lutz Bacher, The Mobile Mise en Scene: A Critical Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Long-Take Camera Movement in Narrative Film (New York: Arno Press, 1978), 16.

162 Notes 10 Freund used two cameras during the production of The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau, 1924) for the purposes of creating three negatives for the export of the film. The other camera was a pathe-industrial camera. The Stachow was specifically used for camera movements. 11 Quoted in Bacher, Mobile Mise en Scene, 74–75. 12 Vincent LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (New York: D.I. Fine Books, 1997), 425. 13 James Morrison, “The Old Masters: Kubrick, Polanski, and the Late Style in Modern Cinema,” Raritan 21, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 29–47. 14 Manovich, The Language of New Media, 153. Author’s emphasis. 15 Quoted in Sandy Schaefer, “Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Gravity’ Features a 17-Minute Opening Shot,” Screen Rant, August 29, 2013, http:​//scr​eenra​ nt.co​m/alf​onsco​-cuar​on-gr​avity​-open​ing-s​hot-l​ong-t​akes-​sandy​-1642​62. 16 See Joe Fordham, “Gravity: Extra-Vehicular Activity,” Cinefex 136 (January 2014): 42–75. 17 Manovich, The Language of New Media, 191–92. 18 Ibid., 202. 19 Quoted in Jordan Zakarin, “The Crazy Long, Hard Road to ‘La La Land,'” Inverse, December 9, 2016, https​://ww​w.inv​erse.​com/a​rticl​e/249​70-da​ mien-​chaze​lle-i​nterv​iew-l​a-la-​land-​how-w​as-la​-la-l​and-s​hot. 20 Quoted in Tim Gray, “How Damien Chazelle & His ‘La La Land’ Team Created the ‘Magical’ Romance,” Variety, December 14, 2016, http:​//var​ iety.​com/2​016/f​i lm/n​ews/d​amien​-chaz​elle-​la-la​-land​-team​-magi​c-120​ 19411​78/. 21 Joe McGovern, “La La Land Director Breaks Down the Movie’s Amazing Opening,” Entertainment Weekly, December 21, 2016, http:​//ew.​com/m​ ovies​/2016​/12/2​1/la-​la-la​nd-fr​eeway​-musi​cal-n​umber​-dami​en-ch​azell​e. 22 Bazin, What Is Cinema?, 35. 23 Ibid., 35–36. 24 Henderson, Critique of Film Theory, 63. 25 Ibid., 80. 26 Slavoj Žižek, “Commentary,” in Children of Men, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (Burbank, CA: Universal Studios, 2006), Blu-ray. 27 Quoted in Fordham, “Human,” 34. 28 See Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle 8, no. 3–4 (Fall 1986): 63–70.

Chapter 2 1 See Allan Cameron, Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 2 Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age, 2. 3 Manovich, The Language of New Media, 317.

Notes

163

4 McGowan, Out of Time, 8. 5 Other examples of films that operate in an atemporal mode are Peppermint Candy (Lee Chang-dong, 1999), Adaption (Spike Jones, 2002), The Rules of Attraction (Roger Avary, 2002), Babel (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006), and The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011). 6 McGowan, Out of Time, 10. 7 Ibid., 10–11. 8 Adrian Johnston, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 282. 9 See also Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000), 22. 10 McGowan, Out of Time, 11. 11 Michael Eaton, Chinatown (London: Palgrave Macmillan/BFI, 2013), 17. 12 Ibid., 17. 13 Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 292. 14 Hilary Neroni, The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 87. 15 Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age, 2. 16 Ibid., 124. 17 McGowan, Out of Time, 25.

Chapter 3 1 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 3. 2 Though Elephant is based on the Columbine High School massacre, the film was also influenced by a short film called Elephant (1989) directed by British filmmaker Alan Clarke. Clarke’s Elephant dealt with issues in Northern Ireland and were based on actual accounts of killings that occurred in Belfast. The film is comprised of long shots where a character enters a specific setting, randomly kills a person, and then exits the surroundings. There is minimal dialogue and the killings are not clearly motivated. Like Van Sant’s Elephant, Clarke’s narrative approach assumes viewers will have previous knowledge of the events depicted in the film. 3 Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 157. 4 Marsha Kinder, “Hot Spots, Avatars, and Narrative Fields Forever: Buñuel’s Legacy for New Digital Media and Interactive Database Narrative,” Film Quarterly 55, no. 4 (2002): 2–15. 5 See Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), 109–10. 6 Vincent Miller, Understanding Digital Culture (London: SAGE Publications, 2011), 24.

164 Notes 7 Quoted in Peter Canavese, “Gus Van Sant’s Last Days,” Groucho Reviews, June 27, 2005, www.grouchoreviews.com/interviews/112. 8 Richard Fleischer’s The Boston Strangler’s use of split-screen projection is worthy to note in this respect. Like Elephant, The Boston Strangler is based on real events. It tells the story of Albert DeSalvo (Tony Curtis) who killed thirteen women in the early 1960s in Boston. To capture the city in panic, director Richard Fleischer employed multi-image projection, a new technology he discovered at the Montreal Expo in 1967. The multi-image projection in The Boston Strangler suggests the impossibility of representing a traumatic event through one perspective. Instead of focusing on one perspective, the film’s excess information is siphoned through various points of view occurring on one screen, as in the public precaution sequence where people are simultaneously shown locking doors, shutting shades, buying guns, and scrutinizing strangers in fear of the Boston Strangler. 9 Quoted in Henry Jenkins, “Lessons from Littleton,” Independent School 59, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 9, 25. 10 Ibid. 11 Ken Gelder, Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 2. 12 Jenkins, “Littleton.” Certainly issues of media effects are not new to the history of mass media. Concerns of violent entertainment can be traced to the Payne Fund Studies in the 1930s, the Comics Code Authority in the 1950s, and the PRMC (Parent Music Resource Center) in the 1980s. See also Chapter 7 in Deena Weinstein, Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology (New York: Lexington Books, 1991). 13 Todd McCarthy, “Review: ‘Elephant,’” Variety, May 18, 2003, http:​//var​iety.​ com/2​003/f​i lm/a​wards​/elep​hant-​2-120​05415​88/. Author’s emphasis. 14 Quoted in Amy Taubin, “Part of the Problem,” Film Comment, September–October 2003, 26–33. 15 Quoted in Gerald Peary, “Gus Van Sant’s Elephant,” Geraldpeary.com, November 2003, http:​//www​.gera​ldpea​ry.co​m/int​ervie​ws/st​uv/va​n-san​ t-ele​phant​.html​. 16 Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, vol. 18 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 67. 17 For more on The Matrix and gaming, see Joshua Clover, The Matrix (London: BFI, 2004). 18 Quoted in Scott Macaulay, “Sands of Time,” Filmmaker Magazine, Winter 2002, http:​//www​.film​maker​magaz​ine.c​om/ar​chive​s/iss​ues/w​inter​2002/​ featu​res/s​ands_​time.​php. 19 See Jan Simon, Playing the Waves: Lars Von Trier’s Gaming Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007). 20 Quoted in S.F. Said, “Shock Corridor,” Sight and Sound 14, no. 2 (2004): 16–18.

Notes

165

Chapter 4 1 Galloway, Gaming, 56. 2 Caetlin Benson-Allott, Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 192. 3 Quoted in Emanuel Levy, “Cloverfield with J.J. Abrams,” Emanuel Levy Cinema 24/7, http:​//www​.eman​uelle​vy.co​m/int​ervie​w/clo​verfi​eld-w​ith-j​ j-abr​ams-4​/. 4 Lo-fi (lower fidelity) refers to lesser audio fidelity in recording its source. Hi-fi (higher fidelity) more accurately reproduces the sound of its source. See Dan Trachtenberg and J. J. Abrams, “Commentary,” in 10 Cloverfield Lane, dir. Dan Trachtenberg (Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures, 2016), Blu-ray. 5 John Sanders, Studying Disaster Movies (Leighton Buzzard: Auteur, 2009), 96–97. 6 Laura Frost, “Black Screens, Lost Bodies: The Cinematic Apparatus of 9/11 Horror,” in Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror, eds. Aviva Briefel and Sam J. Miller (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 27. 7 Ryan Shand, “Theorizing Amateur Cinema: Limitations and Possibilities,” The Moving Image 8, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 36–60, 47. 8 Lisa Purse addresses this point in her reading of photorealism and Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (2007). See Purse, Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema 1–3. 9 Kristen Whissel, “Tales of Upward Mobility: The New Verticality and Digital Special Effects,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 7th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 837. 10 Purse, Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema, 15. 11 Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 117. 12 Ibid., 122. 13 Benson-Allott, Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens, 191–92. 14 Ibid., 192. 15 Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981), 92. 16 See Miran Božovič, “The Man behind His Own Retina,” in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan: But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 1992), 161–77. 17 Quoted in Levy, “Cloverfield.” 18 Galloway, Gaming, 56. 19 Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 42.

166 Notes 20 Galloway, Gaming, 56. 21 Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2009), 84. Author’s emphasis. 22 Quoted in Levy, “Cloverfield.” 23 It should be noted that the final scene appears to show an object falling out of the sky, landing in the ocean. This scene has led to a number of discussions and postings online, including videos on YouTube on what this object may potentially represent. 24 Lauren Rabinovitz, Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 2. 25 Ibid., 27. 26 See “Deno’s Wonder Wheel,” https://www.denoswonderwheel.com. 27 See Scott Bukatman, Blade Runner (London: BFI, 1997), 62–63. 28 Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In) Credulous Spectator,” in Film Theory and Criticism, 738. 29 Ibid., 747. 30 Ibid., 749. 31 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 142. 32 Galloway, Gaming, 63. 33 Ibid., 65. Author’s emphasis. 34 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 155. 35 Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 112. 36 Ibid., 112. 37 Quoted in Levy, “Cloverfield.”

Chapter 5 1 Stephen Prince, A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980–1989 (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 2000), 117. 2 Quoted in Gerald Peary, Quentin Tarantino Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 131. 3 Quoted in Dana B. Polan, Pulp Fiction (London: BFI, 2000), 35–37. 4 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 132. 5 Quoted in “YouTube Video Leads to Hollywood Contract,” BBC News, December 17, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8417789.stm. 6 Chuck Tryon, Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 96. 7 This is particularly felt in the increasing submissions of dramatic feature films to the Sundance Film Festival. In 2014, 4,057 dramatic features

Notes

167

were submitted to Sundance. Compared to the 2000 festival where 1,650 dramatic features were submitted. See Sundance, “30 Years of Sundance Film Festival,” http://www.sundance.org/festivalhistory. 8 Michael Koresky, “DVD RE-RUN INTERVIEW: The Mumblecore Movement? Andrew Bujalski on His ‘Funny Ha Ha,'” IndieWire, August 22, 2005, http:​//www​.indi​ewire​.com/​artic​le/dv​d_re-​run_i​nterv​iew_t​ he_mu​mblec​ore_m​oveme​nt_an​drew_​bujal​ski_o​n_his​_funn​y_h/.​ 9 Alicia Van Couvering and Joe Swanberg, “What I Meant to Say,” Filmmaker Magazine 15, no. 3 (2007): 40–47. 10 Manohla Dargis, “Hollywood Shines on Sundance: Independent Film Gets Burned,” The New York Times, January 21, 2007, http:​//www​.nyti​ mes.c​om/20​07/01​/21/m​ovies​/21da​rg.ht​ml. Although Dargis does not use the term “Mumblecore,” a number of directors associated with this development are mentioned in her article. 11 David Denby, “Youthquake: Mumblecore Movies,” The New Yorker, March 16, 2009, http:​//www​.newy​orker​.com/​arts/​criti​cs/ci​nema/​2009/​03/16​/0903​ 16crc​i_cin​ema_d​enby?​curre​ntPag​e=1. 12 Amy Taubin, “All Talk?: Supposedly the Voice of Its Generation, the Indie Film Movement Known as Mumblecore Has Had Its 15 Minutes,” Film Comment (2007): 45–48. Also see Andrew O’Hehir, “Beyond the Multiplex” Salon.com, August 23, 2007, and Roger Ebert, “Cyrus,” Chicago Sun-Times, June 23, 2010. 13 Greta Gerwig, interview by Tony Dokoupil, “Greta Gerwig on Directing: ‘It’s the Best Feeling in the World!’” Sunday Morning, CBS, January 7, 2018, https​://ww​w.cbs​news.​com/n​ews/g​reta-​gerwi​g-on-​direc​ting-​lady-​ bird/​. 14 Michael Z. Newman, Indie: An American Film Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 5. 15 Emanuel Levy, Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 501. 16 Geoff King, Indiewood, USA: Where Hollywood Meets Independent Cinema (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 1. 17 Newman, Indie: An American Film Culture, 15. 18 Ray Carney, Cassavetes on Cassavetes (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001), ix. 19 It should also be noted that Cassavetes had a “short fuse,” and was not hesitant to fire someone if he felt that a particular person was jeopardizing his vision or disrupting the atmosphere of the set. More specifically, as Carney points, Cassavetes had fired many cinematographers over the years. In Cassavetes’s words: “I’ve often fired cameramen. Not for any reason, except that I couldn’t work in an atmosphere that was less than friendly.” Quoted in Carney, Cassavetes on Cassavetes, 240. 20 Ray Carney, The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 152–55.

168 Notes 21 Chris Gore, Chris Gore’s Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide: The Essential Companion for Filmmakers and Festival-Goers, 4th ed. (New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 2009), 264–74. 22 As of 2008, Netflix shut down Red Envelope Entertainment. See Jeremy Kay, “Netflix Closes Down Red Envelope Entertainment,” Screen Daily, July 23, 2008, http:​//www​.scre​endai​ly.co​m/net​flix-​close​s-dow​n-red​-enve​ lope-​enter​tainm​ent/4​03999​4.art​icle.​ 23 Dargis, “Hollywood Shines on Sundance.” 24 Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 195. 25 Quoted in Shari Roman, Digital Babylon (Hollywood: IFILM Publishing, 2001), 85. 26 Ibid., 27. 27 Aymar Jean Christian, “Joe Swanberg, Intimacy, and the Digital Aesthetic,” Cinema Journal 50, no. 4 (2011): 117–35. 28 See Tryon, Reinventing Cinema, 93–94. 29 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 136. 30 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 65. 31 Ibid., 66. 32 Ibid., 94. 33 I thank Henry Krips for recommending Michael Warner’s work on public and counter-publics. 34 Ibid., 97–98. 35 Ibid., 98. 36 Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (London: Routledge, 2002), 178. 37 Also see Suzanne Scott, “Battlestar Galactica: Fans and Ancillary Content,” in How to Watch Television, eds. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 320–29. 38 McGowan, Out of Time, 20. 39 Of course, VCRs and now DVRs have altered appointment television. One can certainly watch a recorded movie or television show using a DVR at their own leisure time. We should add that not all digital streaming platforms are entirely divorced from material public’s linear ordering of time. Netflix will often lose streaming rights to content. Yet there are certain websites devoted to informing Netflix subscribers when a show or film is leaving, as well as announcing new and upcoming titles to be streamed. 40 Tryon, Reinventing Cinema, 116–24. 41 Gerwig, “Greta Gerwig on Directing.” 42 Quoted in Van Couvering and Swanberg, “What I Meant to Say.” 43 Ibid. 44 Dennis Lim, “A Generation Finds Its Mumble,” The New York Times, August 19, 2007, http:​//www​.nyti​mes.c​om/20​07/08​/19/m​ovies​/19li​m.htm​l.

Notes

169

45 Quoted in Van Couvering and Swanberg, “What I Meant to Say.” 46 Quoted in Matt Singer, “John C. Reilly Talks about ‘Terri,” IFC.com, June 29, 2011, http:​//www​.ifc.​com/f​i x/20​11/06​/john​-c-re​illy-​terri​-inte​rview​. 47 Newman, Indie: An American Film Culture, 11. 48 Ibid., 11–12. 49 Quoted in Lim, “A Generation Finds Its Mumble.”

Chapter 6 1 Benson-Allott, Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens, 179. 2 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (Jefferson: McFarland, 2014), 9. 3 Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 243–47. 4 Ibid., 245. 5 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, 1979), 109. See Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age, 105. 6 Patricia R. Zimmermann, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 1. 7 Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films, 8. 8 Zimmermann, Reel Families, 146. 9 Hebdige, Subculture, 130. 10 Ibid., 16. 11 Maya Deren, “Amateur versus Professional,” Film Culture 39 (1965): 45–46. 12 Ibid., 45–46. 13 Shand, “Theorizing Amateur Cinema,” 42. 14 Jonas Mekas, “Notes on the New American Cinema,” in Experimental Cinema: The Film Reader, eds., Wheeler W. Dixon and Gwendolyn A. Foster (London: Routledge, 2002), 68. 15 Quoted in Sean Martin, New Waves in Cinema (Harpenden: Kamera Books, 2013), 46. 16 Nicholas Rombes, 10/40/70: Constraint as Liberation in the Era of Digital Film Theory (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014), 6. 17 Quoted in Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age, 105. 18 Richard Chalfen, Snapshot Versions of Life (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987), 8. 19 Shand, “Theorizing Amateur Cinema,” 52. 20 Ibid., 53. 21 Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz, “Sex, Class, and Mexico in Alfonso Cuaron’s Y Tu Mamá También,” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 34, no. 1 (2004): 39–48, 40. Also see Nuala Finnegan, “‘So What’s Mexico Really Like?’ Framing the Local,

170 Notes Negotiating the Global in Alfonso Cuaron’s Y tu mamá también,” in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Breaking into the Global Market, ed. Deborah Shaw (Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield, 2007), 29–50. 22 Acevedo-Muñoz, Y Tu Mamá También, 40. 23 Ibid., 41. 24 Ibid., 44. 25 Ibid., 41. 26 Ibid., 46. 27 Jennifer Friedlander, Real Deceptions: The Contemporary Reinvention of Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 13. 28 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 33. 29 I thank Todd McGowan for this insight. 30 Todd McGowan, The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 15. 31 See Chapter 6 in Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004). 32 Acevedo-Muñoz, Y Tu Mamá También, 43. 33 Noel Murray, “Y Tu Mamá También,” The Dissolve, August 18, 2014, http:​ //the​disso​lve.c​om/re​views​/1006​-y-tu​-mama​-tamb​ien. 34 Chalfen, Snapshot Versions of Life, 51. 35 Shand, “Theorizing Amateur Cinema,” 40. Author’s emphasis. 36 Zimmermann, Reel Families, 145. 37 Ibid., 146. 38 Ibid., 4. 39 Steven Shaviro, Post Cinematic Affect (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2010), 123. 40 Quoted in Charles McGrath, “A Circuitous Route to Outer Space: Alfonso Cuarón Discusses His Films,” The New York Times, January 3, 2014, http:​ //www​.nyti​mes.c​om/20​14/01​/05/m​ovies​/awar​dssea​son/a​lfons​o-cua​ron-d​ iscus​ses-h​is-fi​lms.h​tml?_​r=0. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Manovich, The Language of New Media, 94.

Chapter 7 1 Frederick Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 76–80. 2 Todd Spangler, “More U.S. Households Now Have Access to Netflix than a DVR,” Variety, March 6, 2017, http:​//var​iety.​com/2​017/d​igita​l/new​s/net​ flix-​dvr-u​s-hou​sehol​ds-su​rvey-​12020​02673​. 3 David Bordwell, “New Media and Old Storytelling,” David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema, May 13, 2007, http:​//www​.davi​dbord​well.​net/b​log/2​ 007/0​5/13/​new-m​edia-​and-o​ld-st​oryte​lling​.

Notes

171

4 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 23. 5 Ibid., 25. 6 Jason Mittell, “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television,” Velvet Light Trap 58, no. 1 (2006): 29–40. 7 Also see Gry C. Rustad and Timotheus Vermeulen, “‘Did You Get Pears?’: Temporality and Temps Mortality in The Wire, Mad Men and Arrested Development,” in Time in Television Narrative: Exploring Temporality in Twenty-First Century Programming, ed. Melissa Ames (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 153–64. 8 See Dana Polan’s chapter on gaming The Sopranos. Dana Polan, The Sopranos (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 72–85. 9 Derek Kompare, “Publishing Flow,” Television & New Media 7, no. 4 (2006): 335–60. 10 Also see Jason Mittell, “Serial Boxes,” Media Commons, January 20, 2010, http:​//med​iacom​mons.​futur​eofth​ebook​.org/​conte​nt/se​rial-​boxes​. 11 Quoted in Alan Sepinwall, “The Stuff That Tony’s Dreams Are Made Of,” The Star Ledger, March 6, 2006, http:​//blo​g.nj.​com/s​opran​osarc​hive/​2006/​ 03/th​e_stu​ff_th​at_to​nys_d​reams​_ar.h​tml. 12 Cameron Golden, “‘You’re Annette Bening?’: Dreams and Hollywood as Subtext in The Sopranos,” in Reading the Sopranos: Hit TV from HBO, ed. David Lavery (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 96. 13 Deduction through dreams is not exclusive to Tony. During the “Cold Stones” episode, Carmela’s confirmation of Adriana’s death manifests through a dream. Adriana, who was the fiancée of Tony’s nephew and mob member Christopher, is killed at the end of the fifth season when she is discovered to be working with the FBI. To cover up her death, Tony lies that Adrianna left Christopher and moved away. But Carmela has had suspicions about Adriana’s random disappearance. Her feelings are confirmed during a dream where she sees Adriana walking along a park in Paris with her dog. In the dream, a police officer tells Carmela that Adriana is dead. 14 Sepinwall, “Dreams.” 15 Stacey Abbott, ed., “Innovative TV,” in The Cult TV Book: From, Star Trek to Dexter, New Approaches to TV Outside the Box (Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2010), 94. 16 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Book, 2006), 186. 17 Gary R. Edgerton, The Sopranos (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013), 16. 18 Hills, Fan Cultures, 178. 19 Polan, The Sopranos, 3. 20 Quoted in Brett Martin, The Sopranos: The Complete Book (New York: Time Inc. Home Entertainment, 2007), 184. 21 Robert Warshow, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” in Film Theory and Criticism, 578.

172 Notes 22 Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 171. 23 Quoted in Martin, The Sopranos, 185. 24 Polan, The Sopranos, 176. 25 Hugh S. Manon, “Resolution, Truncation, Glitch,” in Cinematic Cuts: Theorizing Film Endings, ed. Sheila Kunkle (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016), 20. 26 Manon, “Resolution.” 27 Ibid. 28 Some have speculated if the man wearing the Members Only jacket alludes to the “Members Only” episode in season 6, where Uncle Junior shoots Tony in the abdomen. 29 Saturday Night Live parodied The Sopranos’ finale which involved a political sketch of Donald Trump in comparison to the mafia. The skit aired ironically during SNL’s final episode of the 2017–18 season. 30 Matthew Weiner, interview by Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, May 20, 2014, http:​//www​.cc.c​om/vi​deo-c​lips/​zopbx​2/the​-colb​ert-r​eport​-matt​ hew-w​einer​. 31 Quoted in Tim Goodman, “‘Breaking Bad’: Looking Back at a Revealing Interview with Creator Vince Gilligan,” Hollywood Reporter, September 29, 2013, https​://ww​w.hol​lywoo​drepo​rter.​com/b​astar​d-mac​hine/​vince​ -gill​igan-​talks​-brea​king-​bad-6​38663​. Gilligan references the rock band Journey because their hit song “Don’t Stop Believing” played during the final scene in “Made in America.” 32 Neroni, The Violent Woman, 87. 33 Ibid., 98. 34 David Chase and Peter Bogdanovich, “Exclusive Interview,” in The Sopranos (New York, NY: HBO Home Video, 2000), Season 1, DVD.

Chapter 8 1 Some channels modify 4:3 images, using a process pejoratively known as “Stretch-O-Vision” to fill the entire HDTV screen. See Thomas J. Connelly, “Mapping Aspect Ratios in the Age of High-Definition Television,” Popular Communication 12, no. 3 (2014): 178–93. 2 Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex, 42–43. 3 “Non-Widescreen Version of DVD Received as Hanukkah Gift,” The Onion, December 17, 2003, http:​//www​.theo​nion.​com/a​rticl​e/non​-wide​ scree​n-ver​sion-​of-dv​d-rec​eived​-as-h​anukk​ah-10​38. 4 Ibid. 5 HDTV images are often not presented with a disclaimer indicating that the film you are about to watch has been modified. Tyler, however, would most likely know that the OAR of The Matrix has been modified in its network airing. 6 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 33.

Notes

173

7 Also see Chapter 5 in Harper Cossar, Letterboxed: The Evolution of Widescreen Cinema (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011). 8 Manovich, The Language of New Media, 146. 9 Ibid., 200. 10 Ibid., 158. 11 Ibid. 12 See Galloway, The Interface Effect, 109–19. 13 Ibid., 30. 14 Ibid., 31. 15 Ibid., 33. 16 Ibid., 40. 17 Ibid., 33. Author’s emphasis. 18 Ibid., 40. Author’s emphasis. 19 Ibid., 42. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 46. 22 A non-enhanced DVD is manufactured for SD 4:3 TVs with a best resolution of 640 × 480 pixels. The image displayed on a non-enhanced DVD will not fully fill the HDTV 16:9 screen. A 16:9 enhanced DVD, however, is made to properly format images for HDTV at a resolution of 720 × 480 pixels. The image on an enhanced DVDs is horizontally squeezed for HDTV. HDTV detects this on the enhanced DVD and unsqueezes the image to properly display the image without distortion. A non-enhanced DVD would not properly display the image on HDTV regardless if it is played on HD playback devices such as Blu-ray. 23 Quoted in David Crow, “Wes Anderson Interview Looks inside the Grand Budapest Hotel,” Den of Geek, March 4, 2014, http:​//www​.deno​fgeek​.com/​ us/mo​vies/​the-g​rand-​budap​est-h​otel/​23348​7/wes​-ande​rson-​inter​view-​ looks​-insi​de-th​e-gra​nd-bu​dapes​t-hot​el. 24 James Kendrick, “Aspect Ratios and Joe Six-Packs: Home Theatre Enthusiasts’ Battle to Legitimize the DVD Experience,” The Velvet Light Trap: A Critical Journal of Film and Television 56 (2005): 58–70, 61. 25 Ibid., 58. 26 Ibid., 63. 27 Ibid., 64. 28 Ibid., 66. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 63. 31 Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 2008, 136–38. 32 Todd McGowan, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 18. 33 Friedlander, Real Deceptions, 123. 34 Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 103.

174 Notes 35 Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 103. 36 Ibid., 116. 37 Ibid., 105. 38 Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 2000, 198. 39 Steven Soderbergh, “Format Wars,” DGA Quarterly, Summer 2009, http:​// www​.dga.​org/C​raft/​DGAQ/​All-A​rticl​es/09​02-Su​mmer-​2009/​In-My-Opin​ ion-S​teven​-Sode​rberg​h.asp​x. 40 Interesting to note that cable networks broadcasting 2.35:1 and 2.40:1 films that employ multiscreen imagery, such as The Boston Strangler or X-Men: First Class (Matthew Vaughn, 2011), will often fold these sequences into the film’s OAR and then return to a 4:3 pillarbox or 16:9 in order not to disrupt the narrative flow. 41 Charles R. Acland, Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 221.

Conclusion 1 Carolyn Giardina, “With Help from ‘Star Wars,’ Kodak CEO Says Its Film Business Will Return to Profitability,” The Hollywood Reporter, December 15, 2015, http:​//www​.holl​ywood​repor​ter.c​om/be​hind-​scree​n/hel​p-starwar​s-kod​ak-ce​o-848​593. 2 Daniel Craig and Sam Mendes, interview by Charlie Rose, Charlie Rose, PBS, November 4, 2015. 3 Quoted in AvatarBestChannel, March 6, 2012, https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/ w​atch?​v=oCD​h5Sdx​Ado. 4 Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction,” 63–70. 5 Ibid. 6 Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 71. 7 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 5. 8 Manovich, The Language of New Media, 200–1. 9 Ian Roberts, German Expressionist Cinema: The World of Light and Shadow (New York: Wallflower Press, 2008), 24.

INDEX 180-degree rule  28, 112 21 Grams. See Iñárritu, Alejandro González 24  139 300. See Synder, Zack 3-D effects  3, 157 The 400 Blows. See Truffaut, François 8 ½. See Fellini, Federico 9/11  12, 29, 70–2, 74–4, 83, 153 9/11 (2002). See Naudet, Jules and Gédéon Abbott, Stacey  127 Abrams, J.J. Cloverfield  70 Star Trek (2009)  2, 26, 159 n.6 Star Wars: The Force Awakens  1–2, 8–9, 14, 27, 151 Acevedo-Muñoz, Ernesto  106–8, 110 Acland, Charles  149–50 Adaption. See Jones, Spike alienation effect  108–10 Alvaerz, Fede Ataque de Pánico!  86 Evil Dead (2013)  86 amateur aesthetics  10–13, 52, 70, 75, 79, 82–3, 101, 105, 108, 110, 112, 116 evidential mode  11, 71–3 private sphere  101–2, 111–13 and professional  12, 88, 92–3, 96, 99, 101–4, 115 as subversion  104–6 American Beauty. See Mendes, Sam American Independent Cinema analog  99 commerical of  88

definition  12, 88, 98 digital distribution  91 digital feature  89 DIY  86, 99 video market  12, 85, 87 analog  1–3, 7–8, 12, 14, 27, 48, 85, 87, 99, 101, 128, 136, 143, 154, 157 Anderson, Paul Thomas Magnolia  89 Anderson, Wes The Grand Budapest Hotel  141–4 Antonioni, Michelangelo  17 appointment television  6, 95, 168 n.39 Apu Trilogy, The. See Ray, Satyajit Arrival at a Train Station. See Lumière, Brothers Ataque de Pánico. See Alvaerz, Fede atemporality. See McGowan, Todd Avary, Roger  86–6, 90 The Rules of Attraction  163 n.5 Avatar. See Cameron, James Ayer, David End of Watch  12–13, 103, 110–16 Babel. See Iñárritu, Alejandro González Bacher, Lutz  21 Baker, Sean Tangerine  86 Balázs, Béla  7 Band of Outsiders. See Godard, Jean-Luc Battle Hymm. See Sirk, Douglas Battle of Algiers, The. See Pontecorvo, Gillo

176 Index Bay, Michael Transformers  112 Bazin, André  17, 27–8, 56 belief  14, 82, 137, 141–7 Benjamin, Walter  80 Benson-Allott, Caetlin  69–70, 77, 101 Bigelow, Kathryn Strange Days  51–2, 72 big Other, the  145. See also Lacan, Jacques Big Sleep, The. See Chandler, Raymond Blade Runner. See Scott, Ridley Blair Witch Project, The. See Myrick, Daniel and Eduardo Sánchez Blomkamp, Neill District 9  26 Bogdanovich, Peter  133 Bolter, Jay David  52, 81, 118–19, 138, 139, 140, 155 Bordwell, David  19–20, 102, 118 Boston Strangler, The. See Fleischer, Richard Bourdieu, Pierre  144 Boys Don’t Cry. See Peirce, Kimberly Božovič, Miran  165 n.16 Brainstorm. See Trumbull, Douglas Breaking Bad  119, 132 Breathless. See Godard, Jean-Luc Bridge of Spies. See Spielberg, Steven A Bronx Tale. See De Niro, Robert Brooker, Will  2 Buffy the Vampire Slayer  4–5. See also Whedon, Joss “Once More, with Feeling”  127 Bugsy. See Levinson, Barry Buice, Susan and Arin Crumley Four Eyed Monsters  87, 90, 96 Bujalski, Andrew  96 Mutual Appreciation  87, 90 Bukatman, Scott  166 n.27 Buscemi, Steve  133

Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The. See Wiene, Robert Caché. See Haneke, Michael Cameron, Allan  162 n.1 Cameron, James Avatar  3, 152 The Terminator  160 n.17 Canavese, Peter  164 n.7 Carney, Ray  90, 167 n.8 Carpenter, John Dark Star  159 n.18 Cassavetes, John  89–90, 167 n.19 celluloid filmmaking  1–2, 7–8, 9, 14–15, 25, 27, 151–3, 155, 160–1 n.24 Chalfen, Richard  105 Chandler, Raymond Big Sleep, The  37 Charlie Rose  151 Chase, David  13, 119, 123, 130, 135. See also Sopranos, The Chazelle, Damien La La Land  27 Children of Men. See Cuarón, Alfonso Chinatown. See Polanski, Roman Christian, Aymar Jean  92 A Christmas Carol. See Marin, Edwin L. Chronicle. See Trank, Josh Churchill, Frazer  17 Citizen Kane. See Welles, Orson Citizen Ruth. See Payne, Alexander Clarke, Alan Elephant (1989)  163 n.2 classical narration  18–19, 53, 108 classic realism  108 Clover, Joshua  164 n.17 Cloverfield. See Reeves, Matt Colbert Report, The  131 Columbine High School massacre  11, 52, 54, 56–7, 62, 67–8, 72, 153

Index Comics Code Authority  164 n.12 computer-generated imagery (CGI)  3, 7–8, 25, 26 Constant Gardener, The. See Meirelles, Ferreira Coppola, Francis Ford The Godfather  124–5 Coppola, Sofia Lost In Translation  88 Corbett, John  160 n.23 Cossar, Harper  173 n.7 Coutard, Raoul  105 Craig, Daniel  151 Criterion Collection, The  138, 160–1 n.24 Crow, David  173 n.23 Crying Game, The. See Jordan, Neil Cuarón, Alfonso Children of Men  10, 17–19, 24, 27–9, 31, 44, 70, 104 Gravity  24–5, 115 Great Expectations  115 Y Tu Mamá También  12–13, 103, 105–11, 115–16, 145, 146 cult television  127 cynicism  145. See also Žižek, Slavoj Dargis, Manohla  167 n.10 Dark Star. See Carpenter, John data algorithm  153 database aesthetics  11, 52, 54, 67, 153 memory  52, 155 narrative  52–6 database culture  49 death drive. See Žižek, Slavoj Death Proof. See Tarantino, Quentin Denby, David  167 n.11 De Niro, Robert A Bronx Tale  132 Deno’s Wonder Wheel  79–80 Dentler, Matt  90

177

De Palma, Brian Sisters  54 Deren, Maya  104 Derrickson, Scott Doctor Strange  3, 31–3, 73 desire  5–10, 11, 13, 29, 32–5, 38, 41, 42, 44, 70, 76–7, 79, 87–8, 95, 101, 109–10, 120, 133, 136–7, 138, 145–6, 147–8, 152, 156–7, 160 n.15, 161 n.30. See also Lacan, Jacques DGA Quarterly  149 Die Hard. See McTiernan, John digital cinematic space  51, 153 cinematic time  22, 53 and organic  2, 152 in relation to celluloid  1–3 temporality  129 time-shifting media  95, 118 digital backlot  155 digital compositing  155. See also Manovich, Lev digital projection  143 digital streaming  6, 12, 91, 95, 117, 137, 168 n.39 digital visual effects  3–5, 8, 31 dirty space aesthetic  2–3, 159 n.8 disaster cinema  11, 82 District 9. See Blomkamp, Neill Doane, Mary Ann  80, 82 Doctor Strange. See Derrickson, Scott Dogme  95, 89, 102–3, 104, 105, 111, 115 Donnie Darko. See Kelly, Richard Doom  65 Double Indemnity. See Wilder, Billy Drinking Buddies. See Swanberg, Joe drive  5–7, 9, 11, 13, 29, 32–4, 40, 42, 44, 52, 59, 95, 101, 120, 156–7, 160 n.17. See also Lacan, Jacques

178 Index Duplass, Mark and Jay  96 The Puffy Chair  87, 91, 97 This is John  90 Togetherness  98 duplicity  14, 137, 146, 148. See also Friedlander, Jennifer Ebert, Roger  167 n.12 Edgerton, Gary R.  171 n.17 Edwards, Gareth Rogue One: A Star Wars Story  7 Election. See Payne, Alexander Elephant. See Van Sant, Gus Elephant (1989). See Clarke, Alan Empire Strikes Back, The. See Kershner, Irvin; Lucas, George End of Watch. See Ayer, David Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. See Gondry, Michel Evil Dead (2013). See Alvaerz, Fede existentialism  36, 37, 40 facial motion technology  7, 152 Falling Down. See Schumacher, Joel fan culture  93, 95, 129. See also Hills, Matt nostalgia  8–9 fantasy frame  78–9, 109, 147–8 Favreau, John Iron Man  73 Fellini, Federico 8 ½  27 film noir  40 Finnegan, Nuala  169 n.21 Flatliners. See Schumacher, Joel Fleischer, Richard The Boston Strangler  54, 164 n.8, 174 n.40 Flisfeder, Matthew  160 n.21 Fordham, Joe  161 n.1 found footage cinema  11, 69–70, 78, 82, 92, 101–2, 110–11, 113

Four Eyed Monsters. See Buice, Susan and Arin Crumley French New Wave, The  104–5 Freund, Karl  21, 162 n.10 Friedberg, Anne  74, 159 n.12 Friedlander, Jennifer  108, 146 Friends  136 Fringe  122 Frost, Laura  72 Galloway, Alexander R.  141, 163 n.5, 173 n.12 on gamic cinema  64 on gamic vision  81 on interface effect  139–41, 146 on intraface  140 on subjective shot  69, 70, 78 gaming aesthetics  10, 11, 13, 49, 52, 69–70, 71, 81, 113–15, 153 first-person shooter  64–7, 114 lurking perspective  66 Garmes, Lee  21 gaze, the  109, 116, 147. See also Lacan, Jacques Gelder, Ken  57 Gerry. See Van Sant, Gus Gerwig, Greta  96 Ladybird  98 on Mumblecore  87 Giardina, Carolyn  174 n.1 Gilligan, Vince  132, 172 n.31 Girl, Interrupted. See Mangold, James Godard, Jean-Luc Band of Outsiders  109 Breathless  105 Godfather, The. See Coppola, Francis Ford Golden, Cameron  125 Gondry, Michel Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind  31, 54, 152–3, 155 Goodman, Tim  172 n.31 Gore, Chris  168 n.21

Index Grand Budapest Hotel, The. See Anderson, Wes Gravity. See Cuarón, Alfonso Gray, Tim  162 n.20 Great Expectations. See Cuarón, Alfonso Greengrass, Paul United 93  165 n.8 Groundhog Day. See Ramis, Harold Grusin, Richard  52, 81, 118–19, 138, 139, 140, 155 Gun Crazy. See Lewis, Joseph H. Gunning, Tom on cinema of attractions  80, 154 Haneke, Michael  17 Caché  19 Hannah Takes the Stairs. See Swanberg, Joe Happy Christmas. See Swanberg, Joe Hateful Eight, The. See Tarantino, Quentin Hebdige, Dick  103 hegemony  67, 103–4, 145 Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra  102–3 Henderson, Brian  20 Hibberd, James  159 n.1 hi-fi (higher fidelity)  165 n.4 high definition television (HDTV)  4, 14. See also widescreen High Noon. See Zinnemann, Fred Hills, Matt just-in-time-fandom  95, 129 Hitchcock, Alfred Paradine Case, The  21 Rear Window  77 Rope  22 Saboteur  75 home and mass modes  73, 105, 115–16. See also Chalfen, Richard home video market  117, 135 Hopper, Dennis  105 Hugo. See Scorsese, Martin

179

ideology  39, 103, 108–10, 116, 132, 145 Idiots, The. See Von Trier, Lars immediacy and hypermediacy. See Bolter, Jay David; Grusin, Richard Iñárritu, Alejandro González 21 Grams  31 Babel  163 n.5 Inception. See Nolan, Christopher Indiewood  89 interface  118. See also Galloway, Alexander R. and spectatorship  118 intimate spectacle  12, 71 Iron Man. See Favreau, John Jackson, Peter The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring  138 Jacobs, Azazel Momma's Man  97 Jenkins, Henry  164 n.9 on folk culture  93 on violent entertainment  56 Johnson, Rian Looper  10, 39–44, 46, 47, 152 Johnston, Adrian  34 Jones, Duncan Source Code  10, 32, 34, 35–9, 40, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 152 Jones, Spike Adaption  163 n.5 Jordan, Neil The Crying Game  88 jouissance. See Lacan, Jacques Jurassic Park. See Spielberg, Stephen Katz, Aaron  96, 98 Quiet City  97 Kay, Jeremy  168 n.22 Kelly, Richard Donnie Darko  118 Kendrick, James  143–5

180 Index Kershner, Irvin The Empire Strikes Back  2 Kiarostami, Abbas  17 Kick-Ass. See Vaughn, Matthew Kinder, Marsha  53–4 King, Geoff  167 n.16 Kissing on the Mouth. See Swanberg, Joe Kitses, Jim  161 n.6 Klinger, Barbara  91, 136 Kodak  151 Kompare, Derek  121 Koresky, Michael  167 n.8 Kracauer, Siegfried  80 Krips, Henry  168 n.33 Kubrick, Stanley The Shining  22–3, 66 Lacan, Jacques on the big Other  145 on desire and drive  5–6, 156–7 on the gaze  12, 70, 76, 77–8 on jouissance  33 on objet petit a  5 on the real  77 on symbolic order  77 Ladybird. See Gerwig, Greta Lady in the Lake. See Montgomery, Robert La La Land. See Chazelle, Damien Landau, Jon  152 Last Laugh, The. See Murnau, F.W. Last Year at Marienbad. See Resnais, Alain Lee, Ang Life of Pi  4 Lee Chang-dong Peppermint Candy  163 n.5 LeRoy, Mervyn Little Caesar  132 Levinson, Barry Bugsy  126 Levy, Emanuel  89, 165 n.3 Lewis, Joseph H. Gun Crazy  20, 24, 161 n.6

Life of Pi. See Lee, Ang Lim, Dennis  97 Liman, Doug Edge of Tomorrow  10, 26, 32, 35, 44–7, 48, 49, 152 Lisberger, Steven Tron  51 Little Caesar. See LeRoy, Mervyn Edge of Tomorrow. See Liman, Doug LoBrutto, Vincent  22 Lo-fi (lower fidelity)  165 n.4 long take  1, 10, 17–29, 31, 44, 51, 52, 54–9, 62, 64, 65–6, 89, 104, 105, 106, 108, 114, 139, 155 Looking Glass, The. See Magritte, René Looper. See Johnson, Rian Lord of the Rings, The: The Fellowship of the Ring. See Jackson, Peter Lost  119, 122 Lost in Translation. See Coppola, Sofia Lubezki, Emmanuel  17, 24–5, 115 Lucas, George  1–4, 8, 86 The Empire Strikes Back  2 media ownership  4 Star Wars: A New Hope  1, 7 Star Wars in widescreen  4, 141–2 Lumière, Brothers Arrival of a Train at the Station  80 Lynch, David Mulholland Drive  118 The Straight Story  89 Twin Peaks (TV)  122 Macaulay, Scott  164 n.18 McCarthy, Todd  60

Index McG Terminator Salvation  26 McGovern, Joe  162 n.21 McGowan, Todd on alienation effect  110 on atemporal cinema  33–5 on atemporality  6–7 on capitalism and desire  161 n.30 on digital  49 on knowledge and desire  145–6 on lost object  160 n.15 on nostalgia  8 on spatialization of time  95 McGrath, Charles  170 n.40 McTiernan, John Die Hard  34, 73 Mad Men  131–2 Magnificent Ambersons, The. See Welles, Orson Magnolia. See Anderson, Paul Thomas Magritte, René The Looking Glass  147–8 Malick, Terrence The Tree of Life  163 n.5 Mangold, James Girl, Interrupted  89 Manon, Hugh on digital effects  7–8 on narrative closure  131 Manovich, Lev  32, 116, 139–40, 141, 155 on CGI  9 on digital compositing  23, 139 on spatial montage  139 on synthetic realism  25–6 Man with a Movie Camera. See Vertov, Dziga Marin, Edwin L. A Christmas Carol  125 Martin, Brett  171 n.20 Martin, Sean  169 n.15 Masunaga, Eric  86–7 Matrix, The. See The Wachowski’s

181

Matrix Reloaded, The. See The Wachowski’s medium-based specificity  4–5, 135, 143, 149, 155 Meirelles, Ferreira Constant Gardener, The  33 Mekas, Jonas  104 Méliès, Georges A Trip to the Moon  153–4 Memento. See Nolan, Christopher memory analog  48 database  152 Edge of Tomorrow  46–7 Eternal Sunshine on the Spotless Mind  152–3 Looper  43, 49 “Nightmare as a Child”  47–9 Source Code  36, 49 subjective vision  72 time-loop narrative  11, 31 Mendes, Sam American Beauty  88, 89 Spectre  151 microphysiognomic. See Balázs, Béla Minnelli, Vincent  21 Mittell, Jason  119, 171 n.10 modified aspect ratio (MAR). See widescreen Momma’s Man. See Jacobs, Azazel Montgomery, Robert Lady in the Lake  69, 78 Morrison, James  23 Mulholland Drive. See Lynch, David Mulvey, Laura  128, 130 Mumblecore  12 American Independent Cinema  89, 101 definition  86, 167 n.10 digital distribution  96 history  90 online streaming  91 reception of  97–9 Murnau, F.W. The Last Laugh  21, 162 n.10

182 Index Murray, Noel  110, 153 Mutual Appreciation. See Bujalski, Andrew Myrick, Daniel and Eduardo Sánchez The Blair Witch Project  69, 78, 82, 92, 97, 101–2, 111 Myst  65 narrative complexity. See Mittell, Jason narrative elasticity  127 Naudet, Jules and Gédéon 9/11 (2002)  72 navigable space  11, 51, 65–7, 69 Neroni, Hilary  39, 132 New American Cinema  104 Newman, Michael Z.  88–9, 98 Newmeyer, Fred C. and Sam Taylor Safety Last!  154 Nolan, Christopher Inception  72 Memento  31, 34, 118 nostalgia  1, 3, 8–9, 27, 151 objet petit a  5, 8, 87, 160 n.15. See also Lacan, Jacques O’Hehir, Andrew  167 n.12 O’Neal, Sean  159 n.13 Onion, The  137–8 Orange is the New Black  119 original aspect ratio (OAR). See widescreen Oz the Great and Powerful. See Raimi, Sam Paradine Case, The. See Hitchcock, Alfred Paranormal Activity. See Peli, Oren Parent Music Resource Center (PMRC)  164 n.12 Payne, Alexander Citizen Ruth  98 Election  89, 98 Sideways  98

Payne Fund Studies  164 n.12 Peary, Gerald  164 n.15, 166 n.2 Peirce, Kimberly Boys Don’t Cry  89 Peli, Oren Paranormal Activity  102 Penn, Arthur  105 People vs. George Lucas, The. See Philippe, Alexandre O. Peppermint Candy. See Lee Chang-dong Philippe, Alexandre O. The People vs. George Lucas  1 Phone Booth. See Schumacher, Joel photorealism  3–5, 7, 26, 139, 152, 165 n.8 pillarboxing. See widescreen Planet of the Apes. See Schaffner, Franklin J. Planet Terror. See Rodriguez, Robert Polan, Dana  130, 171 n.8 Polanski, Roman Chinatown  37 Pontecorvo, Gillo Battle of Algiers, The  17 possessive and pensive spectator  128–30, 131. See also Mulvey, Laura postmodernism  108 Preminger, Otto  21 Prince, Stephen  85 Public Enemy, The. See Wellman, William A. publics  93–5. See also Warner, Michael atemporality  95 material and online  12, 94–6, 101 temporality  93 Puffy Chair, The. See Duplass, Mark and Jay Pulp Fiction. See Tarantino, Quentin Purse, Lisa  3, 73, 165 n.8

Index Quiet City. See Katz, Aaron Rabinovitz, Lauren  79–80 Raging Bull. See Scorsese, Martin Raimi, Sam  86 Oz the Great and Powerful  142 Spider-Man  73 Ramis, Harold Groundhog Day  31 Ray, Satyajit The Apu Trilogy  15, 161 n.24 real, the  77, 109. See also Lacan, Jacques realism  1–3, 17–18, 56 Rear Window. See Hitchcock, Alfred Reeves, Matt  78–9, 82–3 Cloverfield  11, 13, 102, 109, 111, 113, 114, 147, 153, 166 n.23 Reilly, John C.  97 remediation. See Bolter, Jay David; Grusin, Richard residual culture. See Williams, Raymond Resnais, Alain Last Year at Marienbad  54 Return of the Jedi. See Lucas, George Richard Chalfen  105 Roberts, Ian  156 Rodriguez, Robert Planet Terror  1, 3 Sin City  155 Roman, Shari  168 n.25 Rombes, Nicholas  1–2, 9, 32, 45, 49, 105, 169 n.16 Rope. See Hitchcock, Alfred Rubio, Kevin Troops  86 Rules of Attraction, The. See Avary, Roger Run Lola Run. See Tykwer, Tom Russell, David O. Three Kings  89 Rustad, Gry C.  171 n.7 Ruti, Mari  160 n.18

183

Saboteur. See Hitchcock, Alfred Safety Last!. See Newmeyer, Fred C. and Sam Tay Said, S.F.  164 n.20 Salovaara, Sarah  159 n.10 Salt, Barry  161 n.8 Sanders, John  165 n.5 Saturday Night Live  172 n.29 Schaefer, Sandy  162 n.15 Schaffner, Franklin J. Planet of the Apes  76 Schumacher, Joel Falling Down  27 Flatliners  72 Phone Booth  139 Sconce, Jeffrey  82, 127 Scorsese, Martin  105 Hugo  3, 153–5 Raging Bull  61 The Wolf of Wall Street  3 Scott, Ridley Blade Runner  72, 160 n.21 Scott, Suzanne  168 n.37 Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. See Wright, Edgar Seinfeld  136 Sepinwall, Alan  127, 171 n.11 Sex, Lies, and Videotape. See Soderbergh, Steven Shand, Ryan  72, 104–5, 110 Shaviro, Steven  112 Shining, The. See Kubrick, Stanley Sideways. See Payne, Alexander Simon, Jan  164 n.19 Sin City. See Rodriguez, Robert Singer, Bryan X-Men  75 X-Men: Days of Future Past  81, 102 Singer, Matt  169 n.46 Sirk, Douglas Battle Hymm  35 Sisters. See De Palma, Brian slow cinema  17 Soderbergh, Steven

184 Index Sex, Lies, and Videotape  88 on widescreen  149 Sopranos, The  22 art-house aesthetics  119, 122 “Cold Stones”  171 n.13 cult television  127 dreams  13, 122–7, 129, 171 n.13 fan culture  129, 131, 133 finale and popular culture  131–2, 172 n.29 “Funhouse”  124 gangster genre  120, 127, 130, 132, 135 HBO  131 “Join the Club”  123 “The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti”  120 “Made in America”  130 media ownership  133–4 “Members Only”  122, 172 n.28 narrative closure  119–20, 127, 131–4 “Pine Barrens”  128, 129, 133 “Proshai, Livushka”  121 “The Ride”  120 temporality  13, 120 “The Test Dream”  124 “Unidentified Black Males”  125 widescreen  135 Source Code. See Jones, Duncan Spangler, Todd  170 n.2 spatialization of time  6, 157. See also McGowan, Todd Spectre. See Mendes, Sam speed ramping  10, 61–4 Spider-Man. See Raimi, Sam Spielberg, Steven Bridge of Spies  151 Jurassic Park  3 War of the Worlds (2005)  10, 25–6, 29, 31, 104, 139 Staiger, Janet  102 Star Trek (1966–1969)  121

Star Trek (2009). See Abrams, J.J. Star Wars: The Force Awakens. See Abrams, J.J. Star Wars VI: A New Hope. See Lucas, George Straight Story, The. See Lynch, David Strange Days. See Bigelow, Kathryn Stranger Things  119 Stretch-O-Vision. See widescreen subculture  56–7, 68, 87 style  103–5 violent entertainment  56–60 subjective vision  12, 51, 69–73 Sundance Film Festival  86, 90, 166 n.7 Swanberg, Joe  96, 97 Drinking Buddies  98 Hannah Takes the Stairs  96 Happy Christmas  98 Kissing on the Mouth  87, 90 symbolic fiction  141, 145–6 symbolic order  33, 39, 147. See also Lacan, Jacques Synder, Zack 300  155 Watchmen  51 Tangerine. See Baker, Sean Tarantino, Quentin  85 Death Proof  1, 3 The Hateful Eight  151 Pulp Fiction  31, 54, 86, 88, 166 n.3 Tarr, Béla  64 Taubin, Amy  87, 164 n.14 television flow  126. See also Williams, Raymond temporality  6–7, 152 perpetual present  6 publics  87, 94–6 Terminator, The. See Cameron, James Terminator Salvation. See McG

Index That ‘70s Show  136 Three Kings. See Russell, David O. time-shifting  134 narrative construction  118 playback technologies  117–19 publishing and flow  121 spectatorship  122 VHS  121 Tomb Raider  64 Total Recall. See Verhoeven, Paul Trank, Josh Chronicle  102 Transformers. See Bay, Michael Tree of Life, The. See Malick, Terrence A Trip to the Moon. See Méliès, Georges Tron. See Lisberger, Steven Troops. See Rubio, Kevin Truffaut, François The 400 Blows  105 Trumbull, Douglas Brainstorm  72 Tryon, Chuck  86, 96, 168 n.28 Twilight Zone, The “Nightmare as a Child”  47–9 “Where is Everybody?”  35–6 Tykwer, Tom Run Lola Run  54 uncanny valley  7–8 United 93. See Greengrass, Paul Van Couvering, Alicia  97 Van Sant, Gus Elephant  11, 13, 69, 70,  71, 72, 73, 113, 114, 153, 163 n.2 Gerry  57, 64 Vaughn, Matthew Kick-Ass  51 X-Men: First Class  174 n.40 Verhoeven, Paul Total Recall  72 Vermeulen, Timotheus  171 n.7

185

Vertov, Dziga Man with a Movie Camera  54 Vinterberg, Thomas  89, 91 violent entertainment  11, 52, 54–5, 56–7, 60, 67–8, 164 n.12 visual effects (VFX)  3–4, 25, 31, 64, 73, 102, 152, 159 n.9 Vlastelica, Ryan  161 n.24 Von Trier, Lars  89 The Idiots  105 The Wachowski’s The Matrix  3–4, 64, 102, 138, 164 n.17, 172 n.5 The Matrix Reloaded  137 Walsh, Raoul White Heat  132 Warner, Michael  93–5 War of the Worlds (2005). See Spielberg, Steven Warshow, Robert  130 Wasser, Frederick  117 Watchmen. See Synder, Zack Weiner, Matthew  131–2 Weinstein, Deena  164 n.12 Welles, Orson Citizen Kane  23, 33 Magnificent Ambersons, The  20 War of the Worlds (1938)  82 Wellman, William A. The Public Enemy  121, 132 Whedon, Joss Buffy in widscreen  4–5 Buffy the Vampire Slayer  4–5, 127 Whissel, Kristen  73 White Heat. See Walsh, Raoul widescreen  4–5, 14 anamorphic process  141 Blu-ray  135, 141, 173 n.22 digital projection  143 DVD  135, 141 HBO vs. Showtime  149 high definition (HD) broadcasting  149

186 Index high definition televisoin (HDTV)  14, 135–8, 141, 143, 149–50, 172 n.5 Home Theatre Forum  143 laser disc  135 modified aspect ratio (MAR)  144, 145–7 non-enhanced DVD  173 n.22 original aspect ratio (OAR)  135, 136, 138, 141, 144, 149 panning and scanning  138 pillarboxing  136, 148, 174 n.40 split-screen  54, 139, 141, 174 n.40 standard definition (SD)  135, 173 n.22 Stretch-O-Vision  172 n.1 temporal indicator  142 windowboxing  141–2 Wiene, Robert The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari  155–6 Wilder, Billy Double Indemnity  33 Williams, Raymond on flow  121 on residual culture  2 windowboxing. See widescreen Wire, The  127 Woerner, Meredith 159 n.6

Wolf of Wall Street, The. See Scorsese, Martin World of Warcraft  140 Wright, Edgar Scott Pilgrim vs. the World  51 X-Men. See Singer, Bryan X-Men: Days of Future Past. See Singer, Bryan X-Men: First Class. See Vaughn, Matthew Y Tu Mamá También. See Cuarón, Alfonso Zakarin, Jordan 162 n.19 Zimmermann, Patricia  103, 111–12 Zinnemann, Fred High Noon  125 Žižek, Slavoj on 300  155 on belief  145 on Children of Men  28 on cynicism  109, 145 on death drive  38 on desire and drive  5, 160 n.17 on fantasy  79 on Lady in the Lake  78 on The Looking Glass  147–8 on the real  148