US Independent Film After 1989: Possible Films 9780748692453

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US Independent Film After 1989

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For Jamie, and what is possible —CP For two indie lovers, Zoi and Collis —CV

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US Independent Film After 1989 Possible Films Edited by Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis

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© editorial matter and organisation Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis, 2015 © the chapters their several authors, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun - Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13 Monotype Ehrhardt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9244 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9245 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 9246 0 (epub) The right of Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis to be identified as Editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

Acknowledgements vii Introduction: Possible Films 1 Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis  1 All the Real Girls (2003): Indie Love 15 Claire Perkins  2 Bubble (2005): The Network Society 25 Radha O’Meara  3 Buffalo ’66 (1998): The Radical Conventionality of an Indie Happy Ending 35 James MacDowell  4 The Exploding Girl (2009): The Everyday and the Occluded Gaze 45 Laura Rascaroli  5 Frozen River (2008): Mobility and Uncertain Boundaries 53 Mark Berrettini  6 Jesus’ Son (1999): ‘I Knew Every Raindrop by Its Name’ 63 Constantine Verevis  7 Keane (2004): Cold Comfort Camera 73 Jaime Christley  8 Kicking and Screaming (1995): The Significance of Slightness 81 Chad R. Newsom  9 Laurel Canyon (2002): Lacuscular Cinema 91 Jodi Brooks 10 Living in Oblivion (1995): How Mistaking Chad for Brad Could Not Overcome the Commercial Limitations of the Self-­Reflexive Cycle 101 John Berra

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vi  c o nte nts 11 Lovely & Amazing (2001): Naked Chick Flick 111 Linda Badley 12 Old Joy (2006): Resisting Masculinity 123 E. Dawn Hall 13 Pariah (2011): Coming Out in the Middle 133 Patricia White 14 Primer (2004): A Primer in First-­Time Indie Filmmaking 145 Geoff King 15 Rachel Getting Married (2008): Personal Cinema and the Smart-­ Chick Film 155 Hilary Radner 16 Secretary (2002): Purple Pose, Indie Masochism, Bruised Romance 165 Elena Gorfinkel 17 Waitress (2007): Tragedy and Authorship in an Indie ‘Meta-­Movie’ 177 Steven Rawle 18 The Weight of Water (2000): A Spectacular, if Transformative Failure 187 R. Barton Palmer 19 Winter’s Bone (2010): Modest Deals and Film Adaptation 199 Noel King 20 You Can Count on Me (2000): Living in Dependence 209 Jesse Fox Mayshark Notes on Contributors 218 Index 223

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Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank the following people for their assistance and contributions. At Edinburgh University Press, thanks to Gillian Leslie (and her team) for her encouragement, assistance and sharp editorial vision at every stage of the project. At Monash University, we acknowledge the support of our colleagues in the School of Media, Film and Journalism. And, finally, a special word of thanks to our contributors: working with each one of you has been a genuine pleasure.

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Introduction: Possible Films Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis

I

n the second decade of the twenty-­first century, the term ‘independent’ is a cornerstone of American film studies. Substantially detached from traditional economic definitions in and through the rise of the neologism ‘indie’, the malleable concept has come to signify a brand or ‘genre’ of filmmaking, a taste culture, a speciality label for major film studios, a mode of discourse, and a resilient framework for auteurist study. Debate continues over the meaning and connotations of ‘independent’ in this critical landscape, with the keynote of the term understood in various ways, including as a ‘conception of quality’ different to conventional, classical Hollywood cinema (Staiger 2013: 21), a sensibility ‘both outside the Hollywood film industry and within it’ (Tzioumakis 2012: 1), and an ‘[aspiration] to hipness’ (Newman 2013: 71). Whether understood as an ‘operational category’ (King, Molloy and Tzioumakis 2013: 2), a ‘cultural formation’ (King 2014: 2), a ‘mode of practice’ (Staiger 2013: 23) or simply an ‘idea’ (Berra 2008: 11), indie is unanimously regarded as a concept relational to Hollywood: ‘what is at stake is a continuum, not an opposition’ (Holmlund and Wyatt 2005: 3). US Independent Film After 1989: Possible Films takes this landscape as its theme, delineating 1989 as a watershed moment in which many of these critical concepts became dominant. As many histories of US independent cinema show,1 this is the moment in which the indie ethos is institutionalised, in and through key developments such as the unprecedented success of Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), the attendant rise of the specialist ‘mini-­major’ industry model following Disney’s acquisition of Miramax in 1993, and the consolidation of the Sundance Institute. Describing the late 1980s and early 1990s as the ‘classic’ indie breakthrough period that announced the arrival of a first generation of films and filmmakers, Geoff King temporalises this ‘Sundance–Miramax’ era of indie history by suggesting that a second generation emerges around twenty years later as ‘indie 2.0’

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2  c l a i re pe rkins and co ns tan tin e verevis – practically and discursively shaped by game-­changing digital technologies at the levels of production, distribution, exhibition and reception. As another key marker in this history, 2010 is also the year in which Disney shuts down Miramax, foreshadowing the rapid closure of numerous other speciality divisions and symbolically drawing a line under the two decades in which indie is built up as a context: ‘an already-­established and institutionalised category in which both to work and for work to be placed – positively or negatively – by critics and other commentators’ (King 2014: 5). This volume takes a particular interest in how this twenty-­year period has functioned to produce a recognisable canon of film work. The discursive construction of the sector has arisen out of the evaluations of industry, critics and audiences on what is and isn’t indie and why, leading to specific films and directors being repeatedly attended to for the significance and/or representativeness of their contributions. This process has significant overlap with the commodification of the indie ethos that has accompanied its institutionalisation, where properties receive popular validation when they are readily marketable in terms of a ‘niche’ quality. For some, this development marks a low point in American cinema. As Kent Jones wrote in Film Comment in 2004, the operation of indie in a world of corporate global entertainment necessitates a strategy of ‘the self-­defined filmmaker’ who must ‘[wear] his or her sensibility like a suit of armour’ and ‘define themselves right out of the gate to such an extent that their reviews must almost write themselves’. Inhibiting the mobility with which filmmakers are able to move around within the studio system, Jones likens their brands or niches to ‘small patches of land endlessly worked and reworked within the vast, cutthroat tenant farming system that is modern American cinema’ (2004: 41). Demonstrating the auteurist imperative that underpins the indie sector, as well as the gender bias that has historically shaped the discourse of authorship as a whole, this self-­defining strategy has led to the formation of an indie canon governed primarily by the mythology of the white, male ‘maverick’ director. Films from a relatively small group of figures are regularly attended to in a sustained manner in critical and popular indie scholarship, not always because commentators are valuing their ‘greatness’, but because the work is representative of indie cinema as a cultural formation. Figures such as Quentin Tarantino, Joel and Ethan Coen, Wes Anderson, Todd Haynes, Jim Jarmusch, Charlie Kaufman, Paul Thomas Anderson, Hal Hartley, Todd Solondz and Kevin Smith have thus been consistently valued by both critics and audiences for singular and distinctive visions that resist conventions of genre, narrative and style, self-­consciously demanding an engagement both emotional and intellectual. Others, such as Steven Soderbergh, Gus Van Sant and Richard Linklater are esteemed for an opposingly diverse vision that navigates the independent–mainstream continuum in its movement between low and high

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possible films  3 budget, Hollywood work. From this group of writer/directors and more, films such as Slacker (Richard Linklater, 1991), Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), Clerks (Kevin Smith, 1994), Fargo (Joel Coen, 1996), Happiness (Todd Solondz, 1998), Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001) and Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007) have been discussed for the ways in which they announce themselves as indie properties in their knowing appeal to audiences seeking an ‘alternative’ worldview and a ‘quality’ product, and in this way brand indie discourse as a recognisable sensibility. Beyond this canon lie countless films that are regarded as significant to indie culture without so obviously demonstrating the indie ‘brand’, and it is to twenty such films that the contributors in this volume turn their attention. The aim of this approach is three-­fold. First, the book seeks to enable sustained discussion on a group of films that mobilise themes and strategies that are central to this sector but have received limited critical attention during the period here categorised as a ‘first generation’ of indie production and discourse. A specific focus is taken on the work of female practitioners to acknowledge that – while there are numerous women working within the indie context – theirs is far from the dominant narrative. Second, each essay begins with a film rather than a topic or concept, aiming to allow the contours of the indie sensibility to arise out of this engagement, rather than as a predetermined idea that the film serves to illustrate. Only one film by any single filmmaker is included in the group of twenty to further support this goal. A third, related objective is to specifically contest the manner in which the dominant indie canon has been formulated: acknowledging that, as Adrian Martin has noted in a recent reflection on the process of canonisation, some films and filmmakers are important not so much for the richness or representativeness of their art, but for ‘the role they play, the significance they have, in a film spectator’s life’ (2014). In assembling a diverse range of authors who all have an investment in indie culture, the book seeks to allow the cultural significance of these under-­theorised films to emerge in and through the individual perspective and experience of each. Limitations of space inevitably leads to the omission of more ‘possible films’ (and filmmakers) that would have enhanced the aims of the volume – titles such as Nadja (Michael Almereyda, 1994), Tully (Hilary Birmingham, 2000), The Tao of Steve (Jenniphr Goodman, 2000), Love Liza (Todd Louiso, 2002) and P.S. (Dylan Kidd, 2004). The approach taken in this volume seeks to complement the wide range of existing scholarship on US independent and indie cinema in the post-­1989 era, responding to what can be framed as three broad trends in this area. The first includes books that give an expansive overview and conceptualisation of independent film, dealing with a large variety of texts and topics in (necessarily) limited detail. This group includes directory-­style volumes such as the two books edited by John Berra for the ‘Directory of World Cinema’

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4  c l a i re pe rkins and co ns tan tin e verevis series – American Independent (2010) and American Independent 2 (2013) – where films and directors are discussed in brief themed sections, and Jason Wood’s more obviously canonic 100 American Independent Films (2004). It also includes books that collect together case studies on a range of films, directors, and topics such as Jim Hillier’s edited collection American Independent Cinema: A Sight and Sound Reader (2001), Rona Murray’s guide Studying American Independent Cinema (2011), and Chris Holmlund and Justin Wyatt’s seminal collection Contemporary American Independent Film: From the Margins to the Mainstream (2005) which brings original work by theorist/practitioners such as Jonas Mekas and Jon Jost together with contemporary authors to examine the industrial and ideological evolution of the term. These books all take a broad angle on independent cinema, writing from the perspective of the post-­1989 cultural phenomenon but taking a longer historical view on films, debates and ideas that led to and shaped this moment. A second trend takes a primarily institutional view of independent film in America, cataloguing and analysing the industrial developments that underpin the powerful economic narrative of independence. This grouping includes the exhaustive work of Yannis Tzioumakis in American Independent Cinema: An Introduction (2006) and Hollywood’s Indies: Classic Divisions, Specialty Labels and the American Film Market (2012): the former attending to the operation of independents from the studio era through to the mid-­2000s, the latter focusing on individual companies in play between 1980 and 2008 through the progressive categories of ‘independent’, ‘indie’, and ‘indiewood’. Alisa Perren focuses on the supremely influential role of Miramax in this later configuration in Indie, Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s (2012) and Peter Biskind attends to the specific individuals and personalities involved in Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film (2004). The third and largest group of scholarship focuses squarely on indie cinema as a contemporary cultural formation, tracing the films, practitioners, and discursive practices that have given rise to this. Restricting focus for the most part to material and developments from the 1980s onwards, this work combines industrial, textual and audience analysis to examine indie as what Michael Newman terms ‘an American film culture’: ‘[comprising] not only movies but also institutions – distributors, exhibitors, festivals, and critical media – within which movies are circulated and experienced, and wherein an indie community shares expectations about their forms and meanings’ (2011: 1). In addition to Newman’s Indie: An American Film Culture (2011), this grouping includes Geoff King’s comprehensive tracking of the era across American Independent Cinema (2005), Indiewood, USA: Where Hollywood Meets Independent Cinema (2009) and Indie 2.0: Change and Continuity in Contemporary American Indie Film (2014), and John Berra and Deidre E. Pribram’s coverage of slightly

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possible films  5 earlier eras in, respectively, Declarations of Independence: American Cinema and the Partiality of Independent Production (2008) and Cinema and Culture: Independent Film in the United States, 1980–2001 (2002). It also includes J.  J. Murphy’s specific attention to indie screenwriting in Me and You and Memento and Fargo: How Independent Screenplays Work (2007), the discussion of the niche indie sensibility of ‘smart’ cinema – a term coined by Jeffrey Sconce (2002) – in Claire Perkins’ American Smart Cinema (2012), the ethnographically impelled work of Sherry B. Ortner in Not Hollywood: Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream (2013), and the diverse approaches of the contributors to American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond (2013), edited by King, Tzioumakis and Claire Molloy. This wing of indie scholarship also includes a number of director-­focused studies that demonstrate the central place of authorship in the construction of indie as a cultural category, and specifically the notion of the male maverick auteur: James Mottram’s The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood (2006), Sharon Waxman’s Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System (2006), and Jesse Fox Mayshark’s Post-­Pop Cinema: The Search for Meaning in New American Film (2007).2 This work has enabled a wide range of constructive ways of understanding ‘independent’ and ‘indie’ as an industrial, textual and critical category of contemporary American filmmaking shaped by institutions, economics, ideology, taste, audiences, authors, critics, genre, narrative, style and technology. All of these factors are mobilised by the contributors to this volume in their analyses of this range of under-­theorised films. But what emerges as most significant is the way in which the contours of an alternate independence arise out of their description and discussion of how and why these films have not been absorbed by the rhetoric of Indiewood in the manner of the higher profile examples and figures discussed at length in the above body of scholarship. These films are positioned as being somewhat independent of this dominant indie canon, in a manner that – for some, like Buffalo ’66 (Vincent Gallo, 1998), Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, 2006), Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004), Bubble (Steven Soderbergh, 2006) and You Can Count on Me (Kenneth Lonergan, 2000) – picks up on and extends the scattered discussion of them that already exists in existing scholarly and cinephile writing.3 Various points are advanced in the discussion of how others have not been attended to in any sustained way in indie scholarship, including that they have been overshadowed by the writer/director’s other work (Kicking and Screaming [Noah Baumbach, 1995], Laurel Canyon [Lisa Cholodenko, 2002], The Weight of Water [Kathryn Bigelow, 2002]), that they have a profile that lies elsewhere (Living in Oblivion [Tom DiCillo, 1995], Secretary [Steven Shainberg, 2002]) and that their attention to female subjectivity does not fit with the male identity politics of the dominant indie

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6  c l a i re pe rkins and co ns tan tin e verevis tradition (Lovely & Amazing [Nicole Holofcener, 2001], Waitress [Adrienne Shelly, 2007], The Weight of Water, Secretary). Contributors to this volume take a diverse range of approaches in describing the independent qualities of these films, and in doing so give rise to a variety of positions on indie as a cultural category. A convincing dimension of this approach lies with the close and careful textual analysis that the essays undertake in engaging with a single film, which in each case is understood to be ‘small’ in both its internal scale and in the mark it has left on the landscape of American indie cinema. The range of perspectives that are mobilised – the lines and contours of each essay – can be mapped in three ways: methodologically, institutionally and thematically. A first way of mapping the essays is to identify how each falls into one of three broad methods. The first locates the film primarily in terms of its author and his or her indie profile, as demonstrated by Radha O’Meara on Bubble, Steven Rawle on Waitress, and R. Barton Palmer on The Weight of Water. The second approaches the film through a conception of indie as a form that hybridises and/or critiques other cinematic traditions and genres. This method is evident in Laura Rascaroli’s take on The Exploding Girl (Bradley Rust Gray, 2009) as a film that simultaneously channels and undermines the central principles of neo-­realism, in Mark Berrettini’s discussion of the fusion of tropes from crime films, adventure narratives and women’s films in Frozen River (Courtney Hunt, 2008), and in Elena Gorfinkel’s argument that the queasy affect of Secretary derives from its hybridisation of art cinema, soft-­ core pornography, literary adaptation, romantic comedy and smart cinema. In some essays, this approach is extended into a discussion of how the hybrid format mounts or invites a critique on the category of indie itself. This occurs in Linda Badley’s examination of how Lovely & Amazing intersects the traditions of smart cinema, the chick flick and feminist counter-­cinema in a manner that refuses to occupy a marketable indie ‘niche’ or brand, and in Hilary Radner’s employment of Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme, 2008) to question exactly how ‘independent’ the values of this ‘smart-­chick’ format are in relation to mainstream genres and ideologies. It is evident too in Patricia White’s analysis of how the politics of intersectionality that define Pariah (Dee Rees, 2011) dynamically inform contemporary indie culture, but simultaneously register the tensions that exist within this increasingly mainstreamed realm between community and commerce. A third method taken by contributors is to understand their chosen film in terms of indie cinema’s own discursive traditions or conventions. This approach is taken up in James MacDowell’s analysis of how Buffalo ’66 engages the indie convention of the ironic happy ending, and in John Berra’s identification of Living in Oblivion as the centrepiece of the mid-­1990s cycle of indie productions that self-­ consciously dramatise the trials and tribulations of independent filmmaking. A

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possible films  7 different line is taken in those analyses that locate their film primarily in terms of a common indie theme, including Constantine Verevis on drug subcultures in Jesus’ Son (Alison Maclean, 1999), Jaime Christley on mental instability in Keane (Lodge Kerrigan, 2004), Chad R. Newsom on post-­collegiate youth in Kicking and Screaming, Jodi Brooks on retro music cultures in Laurel Canyon, and Jesse Fox Mayshark on developmentally arrested adults in You Can Count on Me. Other essays working under this broad method show the central place of genre as a framework for understanding how indie films challenge and critique classical story formats and conventions. This is evident in Claire Perkins’ discussion of All the Real Girls (David Gordon Green, 2003) as an indie romance (a construct also signalled in connection with Buffalo ’66, Kicking and Screaming, Secretary and Waitress), in E. Dawn Hall’s nomination of Old Joy as an indie road movie, and in Geoff King’s identification of Primer as indie science fiction grounded in the ‘micro budget sector’ of production that lies at the opposite end of the indie spectrum from commercial features. A second map of the volume links the essays in terms of the institutional attention they pay to the indie character of their films. This is evident in the discussion of how the distribution and marketing strategies of companies including Focus Features, Fox Searchlight and Sony Classics targeted ‘smart’ and ‘alternative’ audiences for films including Pariah, Waitress, and Rachel Getting Married, and in how the identity of these and other works were paratextually shaped by critics and audiences through the mechanisms of festivals, reviews and awards. Unsurprisingly, the Sundance Institute figures significantly in this latter theme, with contributors specifically noting that All the Real Girls, Pariah, Primer, Secretary, Waitress, and You Can Count on Me all bear its imprimatur by way of an award, script development or prominent festival exhibition. Another key aspect of this institutional attention lies in how the essays together highlight a group of performers whose idiolects and personas have informed the post-­1989 indie sensibility in various ways. This effect arises most obviously from the specific attention authors give to a range of indie stars, including: Zooey Deschanel in All the Real Girls; Samantha Morton, Holly Hunter and Miranda July in Jesus’ Son; James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary; Adrienne Shelly in Waitress; and Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo in You Can Count on Me. But it is palpable, too, in the way other key indie players are named throughout – Melissa Leo in Frozen River, Frances McDormand in Laurel Canyon, Catherine Keener in Lovely & Amazing, Steve Buscemi and James LeGros in Living in Oblivion, Sarah Polley in The Weight of Water, John Hawkes in Winter’s Bone – and in the allusion to the indie ‘turn’ of other stars with a more obviously mainstream image: Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married and Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone. A third and final map of the essays is the most substantial. This map emerges from the range of interrelated textual and contextual continuities that

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8  c l a i re pe rkins and co ns tan tin e verevis cut across these methodological and institutional perspectives in each contributor’s ‘take’ on his or her film, producing a sense of the issues at stake in thinking about this realm of filmmaking in relation to mainstream Hollywood and other kinds of cinema. A first, prevailing theme is one with a long history in scholarship on independent film, which is the conception of indie as a space for the critique of social structures of class, race, gender and sexuality. This idea lies at the core of O’Meara’s argument that Bubble is ultimately a social problem film that highlights the ‘new poor’ who fail to function as useful consumers in society, and in Berrettini’s analysis of how the frozen, obstructing environment of Frozen River allegorises its characters’ struggles with racial and gender mobility. Friction with majoritarian categories of race, gender and sexuality is also taken up in White’s study on Pariah as a film that is to some extent ‘too black and too gay’ for the Sundance–Miramax brand of filmmaking, and in Hall’s angle on Old Joy as a film that examines and resists dominant constructions of masculinity in an America framed as a ‘fallen world’ in terms of its politics and natural environment. All of these essays point to the powerful interest that indie films take in ‘outsider’ figures who are marginalised by prevailing social and economic orders. This perspective informs Christley’s analysis of how Keane restricts its jittery point of view to that of the mentally ill protagonist struggling to integrate with society amongst the ‘misfit’ class of New York’s Port Authority bus terminal, and resonates too with the discussions of how the central characters of Buffalo ’66, Rachel Getting Married and Secretary deal with life outside of the correctional and rehabilitative institutions they leave at the beginning of each film (or, in the case of Jesus’ Son, find refuge at the very end). The discussions of the dire economic conditions of Bubble, Frozen River and Keane point to another keynote of the essays: the topic of realism. This is a central theme in indie scholarship, where it underpins a broad understanding of the way in which independent filmmaking refuses the melodramatic, heightened representations of Hollywood in alternatively realist and/or ‘small’ stories.4 In different ways, this idea informs Geoff King’s examination of Primer as a film whose ‘indie rendition’ of science fiction draws on an exaggerated tendency toward the ordinary and the everyday that is highly unusual within the genre, and in Noel King’s discussion of Winter’s Bone as a neo-­ realist adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s ‘country noir’ novel that uses authentic locations and non-­professional actors to frame its tense and dangerous story. Rascaroli takes up the assumptions and expectations surrounding indie realism directly in relation to The Exploding Girl, demonstrating how its immersion of the spectator into the unexceptional life of its young protagonist is only deceptively naturalist, and in fact hints – through the ‘occluded gaze’ of the camera – at the abject disintegration of self with which the film culminates. The tradition of ‘light and portable cinema’ that Gray’s film is here linked to

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possible films  9 is also referenced in relation to Bubble, Old Joy and Primer, where contributors comment on the ‘micro’ production scenarios of these films and the connection that this holds to a certain ‘authentic’ condition of independence. In a number of essays the attention to ‘quiet’ drama is linked to a film’s location in regional or small town America which, as Mayshark observes in relation to You Can Count on Me, is a good ‘dramatic laboratory’ for foregrounding the bonds of family and history. This is the context for the reunion of the estranged adult siblings of Lonergan’s film, as well as the doomed love story of All the Real Girls, the alienated interaction of Bubble, the dysfunctional homecoming of Buffalo ’66, the harrowing existences of Frozen River and Winter’s Bone, and the marital breakdown of Waitress. Brooks shows how the effect also resonates in Laurel Canyon, where, as the site for the reunion of an ideologically opposed mother and son, the Canyon is ‘a world that seems to be running according to its own clock and rhythms’ in the middle of a high-­ pressure city. Another theme that recurs across the essays relates to how various films engage the classical trope of transformation, which in Hollywood filmmaking governs the imperative for characters to grow and change across the course of a narrative. The manner in which indie films complicate the assumptions and expectations that attend the specific idea of love as a force for emotional transformation is the central line of investigation in each essay dealing with an ‘indie romance’. Perkins examines how All the Real Girls offers a self-­conscious meditation on the melodramatic foundation of this idea through a flattened temporal structure that deploys the indie trope of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and MacDowell shows that Buffalo ’66 offers a similarly ambiguous line on whether transformation ‘happens’ by muting the patent inauthenticity that typically accompanies the indie convention of the ironic happy ending. The question also informs Gorfinkel’s investigation on whether Secretary’s investment in romance makes its sadomasochistic relationship a ‘therapeutic salve’ for the central female protagonist’s trauma and self-­harm. The theme of transformation emerges in a different way in Verevis’ discussion of how the fractured and directionless journey of Jesus’ Son dramatises its narrator’s chemical addiction, demonstrating how a ‘cinema of addiction and intoxication’ can itself be transformative in delivering an experience beyond the routine of everyday life. Other essays comment on the opposite effect, showing how the endings of Keane, Kicking and Screaming and You Can Count on Me emphasise an untransformed, ongoing present-­ness where characters struggle to grow or change. The essays on these latter two films contextualise this effect in terms of the favoured indie theme of arrested development. Newsom identifies this subject as the anchor for the treatment of post-­collegiate malaise in Kicking and Screaming, where the film diverts into extended flashback sequences at those

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10  c l a i re pe rkins and co ns tan tin e verevis moments when the present seems unsatisfying and the future ­unattainable, and Mayshark contextualises You Can Count on Me in terms of a wave of indie productions concerned with a form of generational drift that defers maturity and authority, but argues that Lonergan locates his own ‘man-­child’ in an atypically consequential world. A state of arrested maturity is also considered in connection with the ‘manic insecurity’ of Billy (Vincent Gallo) in Buffalo ’66, the drifting life of Kurt (Will Oldham) in Old Joy, the narcissistic Michelle (Catherine Keener) in Lovely & Amazing, and the stunted, traumatised Lee (Maggie Gyllenhaal) in Secretary. The preoccupation with the past that defines these characters is addressed in a different way in the essays that locate the 1960s and 1970s as a specific reference point for their films. Brooks theorises the idea most explicitly in her claim that Laurel Canyon – a film set in the ‘afterlife’ of the region’s counter culture heyday – distinguishes itself from other indie films with a retro music sensibility through a unique ‘lacuscular’ aesthetic in which the image is itself made musical to reflect the Canyon as a force that connects past and present. The references to this period made in other essays link more directly to the tenet of indie scholarship that claims the contemporary era as a successor to the ‘golden age’ of the New Hollywood.5 This is evident in Perkins’ discussion of David Gordon Green’s reworking of the epic, natural environments of Terrence Malick in All the Real Girls, in Verevis’ identification of how Jesus’ Son recalls the unmotivated heroes and directionless journeys of the ‘anti-­ action’ films of the early 1970s, and in Radner’s recognition of how Rachel Getting Married consciously links its take on the wedding film to the cinema of Robert Altman. The self-­consciousness that these three films demonstrate in their attention to the past indicates the specific interest the collection takes in self-­ reflexivity as a knowing mode of indie expression. Berra shows how Living in Oblivion encodes Tom DiCillo’s experience on his previous film Johnny Suede (1991) as a way of mounting a broader critique on the canonisation of indie cinema in the 1990s, where films and directors such as those mentioned above – Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith and Steven Soderbergh – became cultural commodities as a result of their marketable personas and types of filmmaking. In a very different argument, Rawle explores the unintentional self-­reflexivity of Waitress as a document about director Adrienne Shelly, whose tragic death shortly before the film’s premiere transformed critical reception into memorialisation and shaped its legacy as a ‘meta-­movie’ about an important indie figure. The notion of meta-­commentary is also present in Newsom’s discussion of how Kicking and Screaming self-­consciously refers to its own slight scale through the interaction of the characters over their artistic pursuits, and in all of the essays that demonstrate how genre conventions are deliberately invoked, revised and critiqued – in All the Real Girls, Buffalo ’66,

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possible films  11 The Exploding Girl, Frozen River, Old Joy, Primer, Rachel Getting Married and Secretary. In a theme that is directly connected to this interest in destabilising classical tropes, numerous contributors attend to how the narrative structures of their films refuse strategies of exposition and continuity in favour of looser and more ambiguous formats. The approach is evident in Palmer’s examination of The Weight of Water as an ‘excessively fractured’ adaptation of Anita Shreve’s novel that registers Bigelow’s ‘transgressive’ resistance to the boundaries that separate accepted critical categories of mainstream and independent at the levels of practice and authorship. It is also apparent in King’s identification of how both the complexity and ‘authenticity’ of Primer arises from the film’s lack of conventional plotting, and in other contributors’ descriptions of storylines that are ‘loose’ (All the Real Girls, Living in Oblivion), ‘diaphanous’ (The Exploding Girl), ‘circuitous’ (Jesus’ Son), ‘aqueous’ (Laurel Canyon) and ‘meandering’ (Lovely & Amazing) in their prioritisation of atmosphere over plot. Several essays mobilise their arguments on a film’s resistance to established niches – both commercial and indie – to examine and question the ‘difference’ of an indie film that is directed by a woman and/or told from a female perspective. Radner demonstrates this line in coining the term ‘smart chick film’ to describe a work that is designed to appeal to smart film audiences while highlighting traditionally ‘female’ themes, but shows how Rachel Getting Married ultimately veers toward the more conservative values of ‘personal cinema’, while Badley takes up the case of Nicole Holofcener’s Lovely & Amazing – a director Radner locates squarely within the ‘smart chick’ category – to argue that her innovation and ‘complex marginalisation’ within the commercial-­ independent mainstream stems from the way this film frustrates the expectations of both chick flick and smart film audiences. Reichardt’s Old Joy is positioned by Hall as a female perspective on a male-­dominated genre, which, as a claim that is often levelled at Bigelow, is one line taken up by Palmer to elucidate how commentators have struggled to unanimously locate the director as either an auteur or an independent. Berrettini frames Frozen River as an ‘adventure’ narrative where the quest concerns surviving as a single mother, and observes how this film – like Waitress and Winter’s Bone – sidesteps the nuclear family model at its end by not relying upon mainstream conventions of heteronormative closure. Secretary – adapted from a Mary Gaitskills story – does end with the ultimate heterosexual couple, but Gorfinkel shows how this is a ‘perverse normativity’, and suggests that it is perhaps the film’s ‘commitment to the risky truths of female subjectivity’ that have made it an elusive object for indie film history. In Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons, Jonathan Rosenbaum notes that, while the practice of canon formation has been implicitly rejected

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12  c l a i re pe rkins and co ns tan tin e verevis by academic film discourse in the contemporary era, ‘canons have never left us; all that’s really happened is that we no longer acknowledge their existence . . . no longer play a conscious and active role in promoting them’ (2004: xiv). US Independent Film After 1989: Possible Films draws attention to how the operation of this process in the Sundance–Miramax era that comprises the first generation of indie discourse has given a high level of visibility to a narrow group of ‘self-­defined’ indie films and filmmakers. In putting forward close analyses of twenty films that are proximate to but distinct from this well-­known group, the volume self-­consciously contributes to the process of indie canonisation, but with the aim of demonstrating how the parameters of this sensibility can be expanded in and through the sustained attention to a fresh set of films read side by side.

N o te s 1. See, for instance, Peter Biskind’s (2004) Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film, Emanuel Levy’s (1999) Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film, John Pierson’s (1995) Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes: A Guided Tour Across a Decade of American Independent Cinema and the introductions to Jim Hillier’s (2001) American Independent Cinema: A Sight and Sound Reader and Chris Holmlund and Justin Wyatt’s (2005) Contemporary American Independent Film: From the Margins to the Mainstream. 2. Greg Merritt’s longer history of independent film also deploys the term ‘maverick’ in its title – Celluloid Mavericks: The History of American Independent Film – and it appears again as the name of the fifth section of Hillier’s collection, which attends to Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson, Abel Ferrara, Spike Jonze, Harmony Korine, David Lynch and John Sayles. The canonisation of a number of the post-­1989 figures has also been impelled by the appearance of individual volumes devoted to their work. Some examples include Edward Gallafent’s Quentin Tarantino, R. Barton Palmer’s Joel and Ethan Coen, Juan Antonio Suarez’s Jim Jarmusch, Mark Berrettini’s Hal Hartley and Steven Rawle’s Performance in the Cinema of Hal Hartley, Rob White’s Todd Haynes, Jason Sperb’s Blossoms and Blood: Postmodern Media Culture and the Films of Paul Thomas Anderson, Peter Kunze’s (ed.), The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon, and David LaRocca’s (ed.), The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman. 3. Buffalo ’66, Living in Oblivion and You Can Count on Me are included in capsule discussions in Wood’s 100 American Independent Films, Primer is attended to in Newman’s Indie: An American Film Culture, Bubble is considered in Mark Gallagher’s Another Steven Soderbergh Experience: Authorship and Contemporary Hollywood and Old Joy is discussed in King’s chapter on Kelly Reichardt in Indie 2.0: Change and Continuity in American Indie Film. 4. This idea is comprehensively covered by Newman in his chapter on ‘Indie Realism’ in Indie: An American Film Culture. 5. The post-­1989 indie era is discussed as a ‘sequel’ to the New Hollywood of 1967–1975 in Perkins’ American Smart Cinema, Mottram’s The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood, and Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film.

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possible films  13

R e f e r e nc e s Berra, John (2008), Declarations of Independence: American Cinema and the Partiality of Independent Production, Bristol: Intellect. Berra, John (ed.) (2010), American Independent, Bristol: Intellect. Berra, John (ed.) (2013), American Independent 2, Bristol: Intellect. Berrettini, Mark (2011), Hal Hartley, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Biskind, Peter (2004), Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film, New York: Simon & Schuster. Gallafent, Ed (2006), Quentin Tarantino, Harlow: Pearson Longman. Gallagher, Mark (2013), Another Steven Soderbergh Experience: Authorship and Contemporary Hollywood, Austin: University of Texas Press. Hiller, Jim (ed.) (2001), American Independent Cinema: A Sight and Sound Reader, London: British Film Institute. Holmlund, Chris and Justin Wyatt (eds) (2005), Contemporary American Independent Film: From the Margins to the Mainstream, London: Routledge. Jones, Kent (2004), ‘A Niche of One’s Own’, Film Comment, 40: 5, pp. 39–41. King, Geoff (2005), American Independent Cinema, London: I.B.Tauris. King, Geoff (2009), Indiewood, USA: Where Hollywood Meets Independent Cinema, London: I.B.Tauris. King, Geoff (2014), Indie 2.0: Change and Continuity in Contemporary American Indie Film, London: I.B.Tauris. King, Geoff, Claire Molloy and Yannis Tzioumakis (eds) (2013), American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond, New York: Routledge. Kunze, Peter (ed.) (2014), The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. LaRocca, David (ed.) (2011), The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Levy, Emanuel (1999), Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film, New York: New York University Press. Martin, Adrian (2014), ‘The Cinema Age’, De Film Krant, (last accessed 4 June 2014). Mayshark, Jesse Fox (2007), Post-­Pop Cinema: The Search for Meaning in New American Film, Westport: Praeger. Merritt, Greg (2000), Celluloid Mavericks: The History of American Independent Film, New York: Thunder’s Mouth. Mottram, James (2006), The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood, London: Faber. Murphy, J. J. (2007), Me and You and Memento and Fargo: How Independent Screenplays Work, New York: Continuum. Murray, Rona (2011), Studying American Independent Cinema, Leighton Buzzard: Auteur. Newman, Michael Z. (2011), Indie: An American Film Culture, New York: Columbia University Press. Newman, Michael Z. (2013), ‘Movies for Hipsters’, in G. King, C. Molloy and Y. Tzioumakis (eds), American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond, New York: Routledge. Ortner, Sherry B. (2013), Not Hollywood: Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Palmer, R. Barton (2004), Joel and Ethan Coen, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Perkins, Claire (2012), American Smart Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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14  c l a i re pe rkins and co ns tan tin e verevis Perren, Alisa (2012), Indie, Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s, Austin: University of Texas Press. Pierson, John (1995), Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes: A Guided Tour across a Decade of American Independent Cinema, New York: Miramax Books/Hyperion. Pribram, Deidre E. (2002), Cinema & Culture: Independent Film in the United States, 1980– 2001, New York: Peter Lang. Rawle, Steven (2011), Performance in the Cinema of Hal Hartley, Amherst: Cambria Press. Rosenbaum, Jonathan (2004), Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sconce, Jeffrey (2002), ‘Irony, Nihilism and the New American “Smart” Film’, Screen, 43: 4, pp. 349–69. Sperb, Jason (2013), Blossoms & Blood: Postmodern Media Culture and the Films of Paul Thomas Anderson, Austin: University of Texas Press. Staiger, Janet (2013), ‘Independent of What? Sorting out Differences from Hollywood’, in G. King, C. Molloy and Y. Tzioumakis (eds), American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond, New York: Routledge. Suarez, Juan Antonio (2007), Jim Jarmusch, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Tzioumakis, Yannis (2006), American Independent Cinema: An Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tzioumakis, Yannis (2012), Hollywood’s Indies: Classics Divisions, Specialty Labels and the American Film Market, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Waxman, Sharon (2006), Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System, New York: Harper Perennial. White, Rob (2013), Todd Haynes, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Wood, Jason (2004), 100 American Independent Films, London: British Film Institute.

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Ch apter 1

All the Real Girls (2003): Indie Love Claire Perkins

A

ll the Real Girls (David Gordon Green, 2003) begins in the middle of the love story that defines it. The film’s first scene fades up on a medium shot of protagonists Noel (Zooey Deschanel) and Paul (Paul Schneider) standing outside at night having a hushed, halted conversation. An unseen light source picks out their foreheads and cheekbones as they stand in profile facing one another, their hands shoved in the pockets of dark winter coats. Piles of abandoned debris can vaguely be made out in the dim, unfocused background. When they speak their breath clouds in the night air. Noel asks Paul why he has never kissed her and he replies that he’s scared of having to tell Tip. We don’t yet know that Tip (Shea Whigham) is Noel’s older brother, and that his resistance to their union will be the only source of external tension in the film’s loose plot. But the expositional detail doesn’t matter, for the meaning of the scene derives from the self-­conscious but affecting performance that follows. At Noel’s suggestion, Paul kisses her palm instead of her face: furtively glancing from side to side and theatrically brushing her hand clean before doing so. After he raises his head she reaches up to stroke his hair, then pulls him in to a kiss on the mouth. When they break apart, the scene continues as they shyly kiss twice more, then gently and wordlessly butt their faces together and embrace. In its single, static shot this opening scene runs for just under four minutes. This chapter mobilises All the Real Girls to attend to the concept and category of the indie love story. The notion has become a fixture of the institutionalised form of indie culture that has arisen since the beginning of the twenty-­first century, discursively constructed from the promotional material, reviews and comments of industry, critics and audiences. A search on the term turns up dozens of online lists and canons anchored by the commercial and cultural cachet of platforms such as Indiewire, Netflix, Sundance, TimeOut and IMDB, bringing together contemporary films including Before Sunrise

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16

c l a i re pe rkins

Figure 1 Zooey Deschanel and Paul Schneider in All the Real Girls (2003)

(Richard Linklater, 1995), Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003), Chasing Amy (Kevin Smith, 1997), Wild at Heart (David Lynch, 1990), Your Sister’s Sister (Lynn Shelton, 2011), Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance, 2010), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004), Punch Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002) and Take This Waltz (Sarah Polley, 2011). As a realm of filmmaking dominated by a concern for realist interpersonal dynamics, it is not surprising that love is a favoured indie theme. But it is noteworthy that in and through the acclaim for indie love stories such as those above, the mode of romantic drama acquires a certain distinguished profile that it has been denied historically. Mary Ann Doane has argued that the ordinary love story is critically ghettoised in film history because of its reliance on ‘unbounded affect’ over the activation of history. Films that are labelled ‘great’ love stories are those in which history endows space with meaning – Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) and Dr Zhivago (David Lean, 1965) – but the ordinary story restricts history to individual subjectivity: ‘history is an accumulation of memories of the loved one, and the diachronic axis of representation generates a relation governed by only one set of terms – separation and reunion’ (1987: 96). Like many other contemporary indie dramas, All the Real Girls is entirely consumed with these questions of (re)union and separation. Paul and Noel meet in their small, depressed Southern hometown when Noel returns from many years away at boarding school. Paul is the best friend of her older brother, and holds a reputation as a womaniser who has hurt many girls in town. The two develop an instant, heady bond but don’t consummate this, largely because of Paul’s desire to behave differently with Noel; to acknowledge that he feels for her in a way he has not previously, and in a vaguely understood effort to transform and improve himself as a person. On a weekend away at a friend’s lake house, Noel impulsively cuts her hair short and sleeps with someone else and,

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upon telling Paul, the two break up in a stunted and frustrated exchange. For the remaining part of the film they grieve the relationship in parallel, meeting again only for a single disaffected sexual encounter and, later, a regretful, ­conclusive conversation. With its hushed construction of the private, immersive world of this romantic connection, All the Real Girls attracted positive commentary in the early years of the 2000s, where it was discussed alongside Green’s equally loose and lyrical debut George Washington (2000) and the tighter but still impressionistic Undertow (2004) and Snow Angels (2007). Kent Jones identified the keynote of Green’s cinema to lie in its evocation of the 1970s as ‘a style, a genre and a dreamscape at once timeless and “realistic” ’ (2004: 39). As is strongly implied by his role as a producer on Undertow, Green’s specific 1970s reference point is the elliptical, transcendent cinema of Terrence Malick, with its serene view on human being as a minor point on a vast continuum of time and nature. Scattered commentary on Green’s first four films followed this line to build for him a basic level of indie fandom that emphasised his interest in outcast people and places and his poetic, lo-­fi style as ‘high arthouse cine-­Americana’ (Bradshaw 2003). In a compelling turn, this profile was only consolidated when Green turned in 2008 to an entirely different type of filmmaking, joining high-­ profile Hollywood comedians including Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, James Franco and Jonah Hill to direct the caper/gross-­out films Pineapple Express (2008), Your Highness (2011) and The Sitter (2011). As Peter Bradshaw’s Guardian review of the first film demonstrates – ‘only news of a Freebie and the Bean remake by Terrence Malick could have astonished me more’ – the reception of these Hollywood films worked to discursively construct a notion of ‘early David Gordon Green’, founded upon strong and predictable themes of authenticity and quality. The platform has created opportunity for Green’s latest films Prince Avalanche (2012) and Joe (2013) to be received as a return to his indie roots, with the latter film specifically ­promoted as a ‘return to greatness’ for both Green and star Nicholas Cage. Green’s profile reflects what Michael Newman describes as the ‘cultural mandate’ of post-­1989 US cinematic independence, which is to be legitimated in comparison to mainstream Hollywood (2011: 49). Under this rhetorical system, deciphering a contemporary film’s indie identity involves examining how it is marked as ‘distinct’ at the levels of textuality, criticism and reception. Geoff King has discussed in numerous places how this logic works largely in and through the register of genre – a regime of difference-­within-similarity where ‘the distinctive feature of the independent sector [is] the greater potential scope for difference’ (2005: 166). In the indie love story, though, I argue this difference is most palpable in the way that films diverge from the melodramatic mode that governs romantic drama as genre; a mode described by Linda Williams as the foundation of the classical Hollywood movie: ‘a ­peculiarly

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18  c l a i re pe rkins democratic and American form that seeks dramatic revelation of moral and emotional truths through a dialectic of pathos and action’ (1998: 42). As Williams shows, the factor that distinguishes melodrama as a mode of exciting, sensational and moving storytelling is ‘the combined function of realism, sentiment, spectacle, and action in effecting the recognition of a hidden or misunderstood virtue’ (1998: 54). The indie love story self-­consciously alters the dynamics of both action and pathos that underpin this system to take up the moral and emotional ‘truths’ of the romance genre as a question or thesis. The most striking and immediate way that All the Real Girls demonstrates this subversion of the melodramatic mode is with a temporal structure that empties all urgency from the romance narrative. The film unfolds as a series of isolated moments that are not continuous at the level of a recognisable diegetic time frame; a non-­chronological format that completely undermines melodrama’s definitively ‘teasing delay of the forward moving march of time’ (Williams 1998: 74). As described, Noel and Paul are together in the first scene, but are shown meeting for the first time a few scenes later. Sequences are not signalled as flashbacks or flashforwards, but simply hang together in an impressionistic embodiment of the film’s tagline: ‘Love is a puzzle. These are the pieces.’ They cycle between day and night randomly, and characters materialise without introduction or exposition. By the end of the film we still don’t know many of their names. The pensive guitar soundtrack washes over and across almost every scene, and the sequences anchored by conversation are intercut with shots of the brooding, mountainous North Carolina landscape – often bathed in the glow of mellow, late afternoon sunlight. Almost every scene in the film is shot outside, and a few time-­lapse sequences of rushing clouds and decaying environments emphasise the overarching concept of love as a force of nature; and, in turn, of nature as a force that dwarfs human desire. Across this assemblage of moments, Noel and Paul’s scenes together consist entirely of drifting and apparently arbitrary conversation as they wander their lush and decrepit environment. ‘Sometimes I pretend I only have ten seconds left to live’, Noel tells Paul as they sit high up in the mountains; ‘I can do this for an hour straight’, he counters in a later scene where he shows her a loping dance move while they stand in an empty bowling alley. The impression is of time spanned, to draw on the vocabulary of another indie love story, Buffalo ’66 (Vincent Gallo, 1998). Time is not wrangled into the charged terms of melodrama, where the audience always knows more than the characters and this knowledge governs the tension that virtue will not be recognised or achieved before it is too late. Time is flattened instead into an undifferentiated, largely action-­less present where the characters and their emotions are consistently available to one another and to us. For the film’s first half it is made to seem as though Paul and Noel are together all the time, with no second lost to boredom, despite the entirely unexceptional nature of the lovers’ actions and

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surrounds. The temporal sensation reflects that of being newly in love, where every moment seems euphorically possible – heightened and felt – and the naïve wish is for time to stay present in this manner, to stop. The effect points to a key aspect of indie form, which is the interplay between ideas and strategies of realism and artifice. The ‘small’ scale of indie drama is rhetorically governed by an imperative for realism that opposes the formula and spectacle of Hollywood production. In a romance like All the Real Girls, this realism is perceived in and through these minor, verbose scenes, where Noel and Paul’s dialogue is callow and maladroit in precisely the right way . . . it sounds like the things authentic twenty-­somethings really do say to each other, excruciatingly aware that the clichés they are clutching at don’t match up to what they do desperately want to articulate. (Bradshaw 2003) These exchanges, however, are contained by the parameters of the film’s ambient temporality and style, which imbue an unmistakable vitality to the ordinary events. In diverging from the structured terms of melodrama the film does not simply present ‘realism’. Like George Washington before it, All the Real Girls is structured around an atmosphere rather than a plot, where human connection and the natural environment infuse a depressed milieu with wonder and beauty. The pathos of this world arises from intermingling disappointment with the sublime to create a space that feels both fleeting and eternal. Unlike Malick’s films of the 2000s, where such an epic sensation is sustained by restless, soaring camerawork that bears down upon characters to evoke a sense that they are constantly being transported to another realm, Green’s early films allow the characters to dwell in their worlds. The figures of All the Real Girls are most often captured in long takes or slowly hovering tracking shots, sitting or reclining on the ground, by water, amongst abandoned cars or machinery. Their world is languid and hypnotic, but also inert – full of both wonder and a suffused, static dread. Green’s long-­time cinematographer Tim Orr gives some context to this atmosphere of transcendent everydayness when he describes how the film was shot on 35mm anamorphic film with repurposed vintage lenses that gave a deliberately soft, ‘Seventies’ quality. The lenses were susceptible to the flares that are frequently embraced in the film, and the shallow depth of field of the anamorphic format enabled the loose, floating backgrounds of most scenes. Orr also describes how he used a tobacco filter to amplify the warm autumn colours of the autumn shoot (Pizzello 2003: 108–10). Each strategy speaks to a desire to keep the film’s look ‘natural’, but to push this to a striking, impressionistic level that keeps the mood ordinary but pressing.1 It is this characteristically indie exchange between realism and artifice that structures the mood

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20  c l a i re pe rkins and tempo of All the Real Girls into a form that is resolutely distinct from more conventional romantic dramas. The film’s divergence from the classically melodramatic dialectic of pathos and action is also perceptible in the way that Noel and Paul’s exhilarating union breaks down, and it is in part the peculiar bluntness with which this occurs that saw the film win a special jury award for Emotional Truth at Sundance in 2003. In defying the formula of the happy ending, the film – like many indie love stories – deliberately promotes an impression that life is more complex and unpredictable than traditional generic conventions can represent. James MacDowell has discussed in detail how the Hollywood happy ending is understood as a standard convention that promotes closure and, in turn, a degree of ideological conservatism. Against this belief, films that refuse or subvert the convention are predictably validated as alternative forms that practice resistance (2013: 4–5). Within the indie context, the ending that refuses an ultimate romantic union is often understood to reflect a cynical perspective that questions the assumptions about love and happiness that lie at the heart of mainstream romantic narratives (Mortimer 2010: 138). I argue that this interpretation can be taken further to show that, in and through this questioning, indie love stories interrogate the fundamental preoccupation with moral value that conditions the melodramatic mode overall. This process is most evident in the way indie films treat the romantic narrative’s plot point of the problem or obstacle that arises for one or both characters to threaten the prospect of their final union. In order for the pair to reunite, and the narrative to resolve, the partner with the problem has to reach a point of enlightenment over the attitude, belief or value that is acting as an obstacle – typically in a dramatic moment of revelation.2 In this way, love is positioned as a transformative agent that impels emotional change as a virtue. All the Real Girls is intensely aware of this mythological construction of love, and can be read as a gently cynical reaction to the generic formula insofar as it presents a story that ends unhappily despite its central male protagonist being ‘enlightened’ from the outset. After many sexual encounters, Paul believes that he understands the politics of heterosexual relationships and deliberately acts on this in behaving differently with Noel, repeatedly claiming that he ‘doesn’t want it to be like it has with other girls’. The non-­ chronological structure of the narrative emphasises this motivation by beginning at the highest point of his virtue – when he is so anxious the relationship equate to his idealised notion of what love is that he is reluctant to even touch Noel. As can be anticipated from her conversely forthright reaction in this moment, Paul’s strategy doesn’t work; it doesn’t eventuate in a situation where – as he hopes – ‘a million years from now I can still see you up close and we still have amazing things to say’. The irony of the situation is that it’s Paul’s moral perspective that forces the break-­up: Noel, straight out of boarding school,

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does not obviously share his lofty goals for their relationship and – perhaps unconsciously – reacts against these in her banal infidelity. Following this, it is Paul’s belief system that becomes the obstacle to their reunion, when he cannot get over and forgive what she did when he was ‘finally on the right path, making the right moves’. In this move, the film references the structure of classical romance, where the third point of the triangle – the impediment that prevents the pair being together – is Paul’s idealised perspective. Ironising the classical format, the pathos of their affection comes from the obstacle to their love, which is the idea of love itself. This self-­reflexive meditation on love as a virtuous and transformative power is carried in part by the film’s deployment of the character archetype that has come to be known as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG). Coined by Nathan Rabin in a 2007 review of Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown to describe a type that ‘exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-­directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures’, the term has subsequently been taken up to describe numerous historical examples where an idiosyncratic female serves as the catalyst for a male character awakening to a more dynamic style of living – in films from Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938) to Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977) to Joe Versus the Volcano (John Patrick Shanley, 1990). The device serves to encapsulate and amplify the ‘enlightenment’ that the romantic narrative always promotes, but openly directs this beyond the terms of a specific relationship to a broader mode of engagement with the world. For this reason, the film is able to signal that it is taking love up as a subject rather than a straight narrative concern, and the default ‘happy’ ending is that the male gets a refreshed worldview, rather than – necessarily – the girl. The MPDG has a particular visibility in contemporary commodified indie culture, where she fits readily with a brand that favours offbeat characters, a self-­conscious stance toward generic conventions, and a general taste for fixing female characters in plastic and archetypal terms. The trope is in this way played ‘straight’ in a film such as Garden State (Zach Braff, 2004), but more frequently appears in a deconstructed format that evaluates the stereotypical assumptions that underpin it. Films such as 500 Days of Summer (Marc Webb, 2009), Ruby Sparks (Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 2012) and Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) all critique the idea of an undeveloped female character who exists solely to trigger change in a male by presenting the MPDG as a figure who is ­demonstrably an unreal figment of the protagonist’s imagination. It is the presence of Zooey Deschanel in All the Real Girls that most immediately links the film to this contemporary MPDG trope. Deschanel is one of a small group of hyper-­feminine American performers including Natalie Portman, Kirsten Dunst and Kate Hudson with which this archetype is associated. Each possesses a charming, benign star-­image that is grounded in

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22  c l a i re pe rkins classical beauty, a range of winning performances and a non-­toxic off-­screen life. Deschanel presents the most flawless screen with her porcelain complexion, wide blue eyes, sing-­song voice and quizzical expressiveness – features that have seen her cast in the part of an unfettered, bewitching agent in film and television roles including Weeds (2005–12), Yes Man (Peyton Reed, 2008), Gigantic (Matt Aselton, 2008), Our Idiot Brother (Jesse Peretz, 2011) and – in a sitcom where her MPDG is the very situation – New Girl (2011– ). Deschanel’s presence and performance in All the Real Girls unmistakably connects to this broad archetype in tangible ways. Noel is a virginal beauty who appears in Paul’s world as if from nowhere and is significantly less developed as a character than he is, appearing in only a handful of scenes without him – none of which provides exposition on her background or personality in the way that Paul’s scenes with his stoic mother Elvira (Patricia Clarkson) and brooding uncle Leland (Benjamin Mouton) do. She is coded as girlish, imaginative and unpredictable in her tastes and behaviour: playing the trombone, initiating a pillow fight instead of sex with Paul when they spend the night in a motel, and recounting her dreams to him – ‘you grew a garden on a trampoline and I was so happy that I invented peanut butter’. Most significantly, Noel sees Paul’s virtue in a way that the other characters do not: throughout the narrative he is bluntly told that he is not smart, educated, strong or faithful, and that he will be stuck in his hometown forever. He has no obvious job or ambition beyond loving Noel. Despite this construction, and – again – in a manner that is amplified by the lack of narrative exposition, her attraction is made to appear entirely natural and self-­evident: ‘you’re the best boy for me to hold onto, and I’m the best girl’ she tells him when they are first shown making out. As in the other films mentioned above, All the Real Girls goes some way toward deconstructing this trope of the MPDG by writing a commentary on the device into its narrative. Given Green’s fluid style, though, and the fact that the film preceded the discursive construction of the term by several years, this commentary is not as arch and knowing as it appears in later indie works. The crux of any effort to subvert the type lies in the extent to which it inhibits transformation, and All the Real Girls is decidedly ambiguous on this question. As described, the narrative begins at a point that, in the melodramatic mode, would mark the climax in which the hero’s moral value is recognised: Paul is in a ‘virtuous’ state of mind that understands love as a profound power distinct from sex. He is already in love with Noel, and this glorious connection – the first emotionally mature relationship for either character – promises to last forever and endow his life with a meaning that exceeds the listless activities he pursues elsewhere. In breaking his heart, it is this virtuous worldview that Noel transforms, providing a reality check that demonstrates their love is not eternal and invincible but vulnerable to ordinary betrayal. As Paul shows

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in their final conversation together, he comes to realise that he was trying to become a ‘better person’ in and through loving her, and his problem with their break-­up was ‘between me and me’. Noel’s MPDG thus functions to trigger Paul’s awareness of his assumptions on the transformative power of love. In the worldview of the film, though, the pathos of this awareness blurs completely with that of the classical form of longing that permeates the post-­break-up section, as well as the exultant experience of being together that precedes this. Nothing in the film’s tone or atmosphere changes across the three stages of narrative development that the melodramatic mode would organise into peaks and lulls of hope and loss – ‘moments of temporal prolongation when “in the nick of time” defies “too late” ’ (Williams 1998: 74). The resulting impression is of a serene, indomitable world where personal affairs are entirely inconsequential. Following her last conversation with Paul, Noel vanishes from the film, which continues on with several elliptical scenes of the town and its figures: her young brother and his young niece playing on some swings, Leland sitting on the back of his truck, Tip lying on the ground staring up at the sky and – in the film’s final scene – Paul standing waist-­deep in the reflective, slow-­moving river beseeching his dog to get in the water: ‘it’s time right now to take a chance’. The personal transformations of the plot are overwhelmed by the vast rhythms of the natural world, which slow life down to the transcendent listlessness that Paul remains within. Love hasn’t stirred him to seek beyond the scope of this life, but has perhaps shown him that such an epiphany is a fantasy after all. As a film that is marked as ‘authentic’ within David Gordon Green’s oeuvre, All the Real Girls demonstrates how the idiosyncrasy of the indie romance lies in its capacity to move spectators in a distinct way. By channelling the urgent temporal identity of melodrama into an undifferentiated present, the film disarms the dialectic of pathos and action that Williams calls the ‘basic vernacular of American moving pictures’ (1998: 58) but simultaneously gives rise to a dramatic character of its own – where ordinary events, emotion and time are made pressing and self-­aware. In this narrative system, affect is qualified and the moral virtue of love is taken as a question rather than a climax – ­redirecting the experience of pathos into a reflection on the ultimate possibility of human transformation.

Notes 1. For further discussion of this mode as a distinctly masculinist brand of indie filmmaking see Claire Perkins, ‘Beyond Indiewood: The Everyday Ethics of Nicole Holofcener’ (2014: 143–6). 2. On the ‘stages’ of romance in Hollywood films see Michele Schreiber, American Postfeminist Cinema: Women, Romance and Contemporary Culture (2014: 5–12).

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24  c l a i re pe rkins

References Bradshaw, Peter (2003), ‘Review of All the Real Girls’, The Guardian, 1 August, (last accessed 24 April 2014). Doane, Mary Ann (1987), The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jones, Kent (2004), ‘A Niche of One’s Own’, Film Comment, 40: 5, pp. 39–41. King, Geoff (2005), American Independent Cinema, London: I.B.Tauris. MacDowell, James (2013), Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema: Cliché, Convention and the Final Couple, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mortimer, Claire (2010), Romantic Comedy, London: Routledge. Newman, Michael Z. (2011), Indie: An American Film Culture, New York: Columbia University Press. Perkins, Claire (2014), ‘Beyond Indiewood: The Everyday Ethics of Nicole Holofcener’, Camera Obscura, 85, 29: 1, pp. 137–59. Pizzello, Stephen (2003), ‘All the Real Girls’, American Cinematographer, 84: 4, pp. 107–12. Rabin, Nathan (2007), ‘The Bataan Death March of Whimsy Case Film #1: Elizabethtown’, The A.V Club, 25 January, http://www.avclub.com/article/the-­bataan-death-­march-of-­ whimsy-case-­file-1-­emeli-15577 (last accessed 26 April 2014). Schreiber, Michele (2014), American Postfeminist Cinema: Women, Romance and Contemporary Culture, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Williams, Linda (1998), ‘Melodrama Revised’, in N. Browne (ed.), Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Ch apter 2

Bubble (2005): The Network Society Radha O’Meara

S

teven Soderbergh’s Bubble (2005) paints a stark portrait of the humdrum lives of three factory workers in Middle America. Its characters are ordinary yet compelling and its world is bleak yet absorbing. They seem distant from the technophilia, faux urgency and ephemerality of so much contemporary media culture. In particular, the existence portrayed in Bubble sits in tension with the film’s distribution and marketing. In January 2006, Bubble was released simultaneously in multiple formats and media. Its distribution was a new industrial strategy, and the film’s marketing fanfare emphasised the uniqueness of its delivery. This strategy and the hype surrounding it rely on a deeply technologised culture, which is absent from the film itself. This tension between embracing and eliding the network society means that the film offers a sharp critique of contemporary media culture. Bubble’s release in the US in January 2006 received lots of media attention. It created a new paradigm of media distribution when it was released in cinemas, on DVD and on cable TV on the same day, flouting Hollywood’s convention of staggering releases in various media. The promotion of the film and reviews heavily emphasised that ‘day and date’ release represented a new approach to film circulation, using telecommunications technologies to enable simultaneous consumption in different modes (HDNet Films 2006; Ebert 2006). For instance, Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post suggested that Bubble was, ‘the most visible example of an emerging model that could seismically shift the way Hollywood does business’ (2006). Some cited National Association of Theatre Owners president John Fithian’s assertion that this model was a ‘death threat’ to exhibitors (Gallagher 2013: 2, 13). Soderbergh’s own rhetoric around the project was ambivalent: he made audacious statements at the Tribeca Film Festival proclaiming Hollywood as ‘broken’ (Silverman 2006), but also downplayed the fact that Bubble was the first film to have a so-­called ‘day and date’ release officially, and emphasised that this had been happening

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Figure 2 Debbie Doebereiner, Dustin James Ashley and Misty Wilkins in Bubble (2005)

through underground or ‘informal’ distribution for years (Soderbergh cited in Maddox 2007; Lobato 2012). Soderbergh was uniquely placed to offer legitimacy to this pioneering distribution strategy. An eminent auteur, an award winner, and a director of global blockbusters, he also had wide enough name recognition to market Bubble as ‘Another Steven Soderbergh experience’. Soderbergh has written, directed, photographed, edited and produced a slew of productions, which display remarkable diversity across genres, themes, styles, industrial positions and media. His oeuvre and career are difficult to encapsulate, described as ‘eclectic’ (Soderbergh in Johnston 2002: 117; Baker 2011: ix; Schatz 2013: xiv), ‘elusive’ (Murray 2011: 80; Schatz 2013: xi), ‘inconsistent’ and ‘complex’ (Holt 2011: 356; de Waard and Tait 2013: 2). From gritty political sagas such as Erin Brockovich (2000) and Che (2008), through self-reflexive deconstruction in Schizopolis (1996) and The Limey (1999), to glitzy global hits such as the Ocean’s franchise (2001–7), Soderbergh continued to experiment with form, style and practice in dozens of films. The way Soderbergh cultivates his image as a renegade artist is revealed in his recent declaration that he will retire from making feature films in order to paint (Howell 2013). Most pertinently, Soderbergh’s debut feature, Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), was a darling of the expanding American indie scene. Shot quickly and on a small budget, it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, as well as a level of box-office success, which had generally eluded independent films of the 1980s. This was a landmark moment in American independent cinema, which was legitimised by and also legitimated key institutions such as the mini-major studio Miramax and Sundance Film Festival (then named the US Film Festival). In 2006, Soderbergh’s status offered the potential to legitimise the new paradigm of ‘day and date’ release in a similar way, and this seemed a promising development for independent film more broadly.

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Like Soderbergh’s breakout debut, Bubble could be considered a ‘small’ film, which focuses on character (Newman 2011: 86–95). Mark Gallagher links text and context insightfully, suggesting that Soderbergh’s production style, aesthetic choices, target audiences and commercial strategies make him a ­‘boutique brand, linked to scaled down artistry rather than mass circulation, and to promises of scaled down, quality economics’ (2013: 233). Captured on digital video with a lean crew, Bubble was shot quickly on location with a cast of non-­professional actors. Soderbergh directed, shot and edited the film himself. The production, distribution and consumption of Bubble relied notably on the integration of digital communications networks in contemporary cultural and commercial structures. Social theorists like Manuel Castells argue that a new form of social organisation emerged in the late twentieth century, and we are living in a network society, that is, ‘a society where the key social structures and activities are organised around electronically processed information networks’ (Castells quoted in Kreisler 2001). Networks are flexible, decentralised structures of organisation. Networks have existed for millennia, but they have become increasingly important as the basis for electronic communications technologies from the telegraph to the Internet. Social and technological networks have become intertwined and serve as the basic structure of organisation. As Robert Hassan puts it more poetically, our daily lives are made up of ‘digital fabric’ (2004: 10). The discourses surrounding Bubble celebrated new modes of cultural distribution and consumption, heralding the success of social and technological integration in the network society, and the choices this seemed to offer audiences simultaneously. From this perspective, the competitive, neoliberal logic of speed demonstrates how the network society functions seamlessly and prevails. On the other hand, Bubble critiques the limits of the network society by representing the very people it disenfranchises. The world depicted in the film is affected by the social structure and dominant logic of the network society, but shows how they are manifest in ways elided by the promotional rhetoric. Bubble is set in contemporary Middle America, where place and class seem to fix the fate of individuals in national and global society. Central characters Martha, Kyle and Rose are not networked in any technological or social sense. Castells argues that the network society fundamentally fragments social structures through a double logic of inclusion and exclusion. Martha, Kyle and Rose’s disenfranchisement by the network society is represented by their limited social contacts, the slow pace of their lives, their peripheral role in consumer culture, and their disconnection from the mediated public sphere. The characters in Bubble experience a very limited social network, bound by their immediate, physical presence in the world. Each of the main characters has only one other family member: Martha and Kyle each live with a parent, and Rose lives with her child. They interact daily with only a handful

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28  r a d h a o ’m e ara of other people, mostly co-­workers, and only ever travel a few miles. There are fewer than ten speaking parts in the entire film. This is a stark contrast to the international reach and abundant social interactions of characters in films like Ocean’s Eleven (2001), Traffic (2000) and Contagion (2011). There are very few extras in Bubble. Even in the close quarters of penal confinement, Martha is not seen interacting with others. Long sequences of the film represent Martha, Kyle and Rose’s work at the doll factory in a realist style. The characters are seen driving machinery: that is, they operate mechanical, rather than digital, tools. The work is mundane, monotonous and ponderous, and this is accentuated by the cinematography and editing. Long shots de-­emphasise character and mechanical movement in the frame. Characters are commonly isolated as the only figure in the composition, often diminished by the machines surrounding them. Shots of long duration with a static frame predominate, giving the impression of an observational mode of representation, as well as a lack of dynamism in the labour. The slow pace of these scenes reflects the lives of the central characters. Their experiences are languid, and could not be further from the sense of simultaneity used to promote the film’s release, and associated with the speed of global capitalism. These characters represent a monotonous, low-­rent existence, isolated from meaningful engagement with a socially accelerated culture. Matching the stark lives of these characters is the blunt visual style. Soderbergh uses high-­definition digital video without attempting to remove the artifice of this technology from the final image. In particular, he embraces the uniquely video aesthetic produced by a limited spectrum of light. The daily routines of these characters are caught in a restricted palette of colours, emphasising harsh edges. Aaron Baker notes that the noisy digital images suggest the characters’ confusion (2011: 79). Orangey light floods the factory under fluorescent tubes, a colour palette more flattering to the faux flesh tones of the rubber dolls than the pallid complexions of the workers. In this way, the blunt visual style of the film seems to celebrate the fractious collision of digital communications technologies and embodied social experience. This self-­consciousness of the digital artifice scuffles with the film’s strong realist tendencies to complicate the process of representation (Baker 2011: 76–7). Rose is murdered in an unseen act of violence, and we learn later that Martha killed her, vaguely motivated by her feeling of exploitation. The police visit each of the characters to question them, and it is significant that this killing is reported within the diegesis by word of mouth, rather than mediated through technology. Since Travis Bickle was hailed a hero in the press-­ clippings at the end of Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), there have been few murders in American movies that are not mediated through public sources within the diegesis. However, in Bubble, the murder does not become a public event, and remains a private experience for just a few people. The police visit

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Rose’s ex-­boyfriend. Martha goes shopping alone. The police visit Kyle and his mother in their trailer. Martha treats herself to a slice of pizza. We see her through the glass of the fast food store solemnly enjoying this last moment of freedom. The police visit Martha as she feeds her elderly father. In many films, death ironically brings characters together, and murder is the inciting incident of countless plots. However, in Bubble, these isolated characters continue in their isolation. The pace of the film and their lives remains listless. The mystery of whether Martha killed Rose carries no urgency. Strangely, for a film that has made so much press in relation to the very media of its release, mediated technology itself is notably absent from the lives of Bubble’s characters. In Bubble, no one ever uses a computer. No one listens to the radio or listens to music. No one uses a telephone. No one even has a mobile phone. No one reads a newspaper. The absence of media and communications technology is strangely notable for a film set in contemporary America. Compare this to Ocean’s Thirteen, released the following year, where the characters’ lives and the narrative drive are dominated by mobile phones, video surveillance and computer systems. The absence of mediation within the diegesis of Bubble is a stark indicator of the social isolation of these characters, of the level of their alienation and disengagement. Ingrid Volkmer has argued that in contemporary network society, the media has become the public sphere (2003). These characters seem not only disenfranchised from the public sphere, but also unaware of its very existence. The social isolation of Bubble’s characters is highlighted by an apparently banal feature of everyday culture: fast food. These characters are poor and do not consume much in our consumer society. However, they do constantly eat mass-­produced, highly processed foods like burgers, chips and donuts. This is partly a class indicator – poor Americans do eat more junk food and experience higher levels of obesity than middle and upper class Americans. Interestingly, the lead performer, Debbie Doebereiner, is a non-­professional actress, who previously managed a KFC in Ohio. Further, nobody is seen preparing food in Bubble, and characters are rarely even seen purchasing food. We repeatedly see the characters eat meals together, but the food seems to come from nowhere. It is completely disassociated from source, context, nature and labour. Food in Bubble represents the industrial separation of production and consumption. This disassociation of production and consumption is paralleled in the factory work. The dolls Martha, Kyle and Rose make never seem to leave the factory. The dolls never become objects of value, consumption, use or meaning. The complete disassociation of production and consumption in this film represents a breakdown of economic, social and cultural relations. Martha, Kyle and Rose are the new poor described by Zygmunt Bauman (2003), whose labour in production is not valued by society, and who fail to function usefully in society as significant consumers.

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30  r a d h a o ’m e ara The upper-­middle class, rampantly consuming Americans who populate our film and television screens in such profusion are also absent from Bubble. There is a funny scene, where Martha and Rose go to clean a house in the comfy suburbs. Shots of empty, affluent suburban streets introduce shots of empty, affluent suburban rooms. Each room in the middle-­class house is a statement of individuality through consumerism. The decor of the living areas reflects the trends of lifestyle television and magazines. The trappings of the house they clean fascinate Rose and Martha. Rose is intrigued by the conspicuous consumption and cultural engagement that it represents; Martha is bewildered by it. The white noise of the warehouse makes a bigger impact on these characters than the voices of mediated culture. For these characters, consumerism does not offer a glimpse of a better world. This version of industrial capitalism offers no circuit breaker, no escapism through illusion. And for us as an audience, there is no sense of the utopia offered by most Hollywood cinema, as described by Richard Dyer (1993) in his discussion of the musical. Indeed, the only escape seems to come through crime, as Rose is a compulsive thief and Martha becomes a murderer. Socially, these characters inhabit a liminal space, despite – or perhaps because of – their cultural geography in America’s heartland. Martha and Kyle work in a factory that was clearly built for a much larger workforce, and it can be inferred that their jobs will soon move offshore. The plant represents a decaying modern, mechanical industrialism. The doll factory is clearly in decline, as American society moves into a digitised, globalised, postmodern future. So the characters’ disenfranchisement from the network society might be read as a critique of the process of cultural change, whereby the development of the network society has not yet caught up with these characters. Bubble shows characters struggling with the cultural effects of postmodern capitalism, but they struggle at the fringes of society where the boundaries between modernity and postmodernity are unclear. The political and social sensibility of Bubble is consistent with some of Soderbergh’s other films, such as Traffic and Contagion. Indeed, the films share significant commonalities and differences. De Waard and Tait (2013) argue that many of Soderbergh’s films of the 2000s are best understood as ‘Global Social Problem’ films, which draw on the social problem melodramas of classical Hollywood, and use realism and multiple protagonists to address global institutional problems. The social problem of Bubble is the network society, but the isolated characters in this film contrast with the vast casts of Traffic and Contagion. There is a sense of overwhelming connectivity of characters in Traffic and Contagion, which suggests that everything and everyone is connected through integrated networks of people, organisations and technologies, and this discourse pervades contemporary media and culture. Geographies of multiple nodes and connections are seen in the networks of highways,

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telephones and hard drives which feature in films like Traffic. To some, the network society promises social equity, as it seems to dissolve the distinction between centre and periphery, and to erode hierarchy. This celebratory impulse is problematised in the complicated lines of power depicted in Traffic and Contagion, but it is more radically critiqued in Bubble. These characters without phones sit outside a new framework of power. On closer examination, Bubble’s critique of the network society is more fundamental than depicting a few characters stumbling to catch up with social change. Castells reminds us how the network society affects us all, without offering participation to all: The network society is a global society. However, this does not mean that people everywhere are included in these networks. In fact . . . most are not. But everybody is affected by the processes that take place in the global networks of this dominant social structure. (2004: 22) This is the problem faced by the characters in Bubble: how to deal with a system which impacts on their lives daily, but excludes them. Castells argues that the network society is fundamentally fractured: Societies . . . are deeply fragmented by the double logic of inclusion and exclusion in the global networks that structure production, consumption, communication and power . . . This fragmentation is not simply the expression of the time lag required by the gradual incorporation of previous social forms into the new dominant logic. It is, in fact, a structural feature of the network society. (2003: 23) This film addresses the fundamentally disenfranchising nature of the network society. These characters are not just alienated by the mediated public sphere and the social identities offered by consumer culture, they fail to even perceive them. Moreover, Bubble lingers on the complexities and complicities of spectatorship, and this highlights the relationship between the film’s diegesis and its circulation. The characters of Bubble watch the central dramatic action awkwardly, and their unease evokes resonances and tensions between this text and its circulation. One night, when Rose’s young child is upset and Rose and Martha try to calm the toddler, the camera lingers on Kyle’s uneasy face. His eyes dart around restlessly, as if he is reluctant to watch the distress, but they are drawn back to the interaction between the three. When a detective visits Kyle’s trailer, his mother examines her son’s words and gestures. As the detective reveals that Rose has been murdered, Helen squirms, scrutinising her son’s impassive response. Spectatorship itself is cause for attention. It is a significant social role, and an uncomfortable one.

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32  r a d h a o ’m e ara When Rose and Kyle smoke cigarettes in the break room at the factory, Martha’s wide-­eyed gaze on the pair is unwavering, even when it is met by Rose. Rose is aware of being watched, and Martha is aware of her social exclusion. A pane of glass visually represents the barrier between observed and observer, and the muffled tones of Rose and Kyle’s conversation underscore this. Martha pauses before she looks through the window, suggesting that the act of watching is considered, even calculated. Close-­ups help the audience to identify with the observers in these situations, implying a parallel between the diegetic audience for action and the filmic audience. We are awkwardly complicit in what unfolds. The climax of the film highlights the overlapping roles of participant and observer, agent and onlooker. After maintaining her innocence of Rose’s murder for some time, Martha stands alone in her jail cell, staring intently. She watches herself at the murder scene, standing over the body of Rose, and realises that she did kill her. In this moment of self-­observation, spectatorship becomes a critical method of understanding. Viewing is highlighted as a central process of individual and social identity construction. Soderbergh seems exceptionally cognisant of how audiences gain access to his films, and how they are positioned and conditioned to view by industrial and social practices and by the text itself. Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Schizopolis also play with spectatorship, but more overtly. In Bubble, the viewer is prompted subtly to self-­reflexively examine their role as viewer and the circumstances, which enabled access to their viewing position. Although the simultaneous, multi-­ modal release of Bubble seemed to provide unprecedented accessibility, its circulation through networks was still severely limited. ‘Day and date’ release offered access and choice, but only to a limited range of consumers, and only in the US. Within the diegetic world of Bubble, these characters would not have had access to view a film released in these ways. (In fact, the film’s premiere was held close to the shooting location.) Martha, Kyle and Rose are economically, geographically and technologically curbed from the boutique cinemas, cable channels and broadband Internet, which delivered the film. Although the film was released only a few years ago, the frenzy over its distribution already seems like a quaint historical moment (Holt 2011: 360). And this historical perspective only helps us to read the promotional discourses critically, especially in comparison to the film itself. In fact, Bubble’s distribution did not mark a seismic shift and barely registered with audiences. However, it did have a modest impact for small independent films, as the ‘day and date’ release model is cheaper to distribute and advertise than a traditional ‘window’ release, and Video on Demand (VOD) has since become more ­widespread and popular. Bubble critiques the network society, underlining the problems of the very

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structures, which enable the film’s distribution and consumption. Bubble is about social exclusion. This film critiques contemporary manifestations of class, as it represents characters who have been neglected culturally, technologically, socially and economically. It challenges the assumption that some kind of Reaganomic trickle-­down effect will eventually see everyone empowered by the technologies of a new age. Bubble shows us people who cannot even perceive the other side of the economic and cultural chasm that divides the network society. Notions of the network society are commonly associated with the media and with entertainment culture, parts of which are no doubt frivolous. Lest the focus here on Bubble’s circulation lead us to imagine that the problems of the network society are simply a restriction of access to luxury goods and trivial lifestyle experiences, the characters in Bubble remind us of the profound significance of social and cultural exclusion. The absence of mediation in Bubble illustrates that the implications of these cultural transformations penetrate far deeper than entertainment culture, and have serious and lasting consequences on society and politics. Disenfranchising people like Martha, Kyle and Rose impacts us all. Thanks to Andrew Saunders, who helped to write an early version of this chapter.

R e f e r e nc e s Baker, Aaron (2011), Steven Soderbergh, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bauman, Zygmunt (2003), Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (2nd edn), Maidenhead: Open University Press. Castells, Manuel (2004), ‘Informationalism, Networks, and the Network Society: A Theoretical Blueprint’, in M. Castells (ed.), The Network Society: A Cross-­Cultural Perspective, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 3–45. de Waard, Andrew and R. Colin Tait (2013), The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: Indie Sex, Corporate Lies and Digital Videotape, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Dyer, Richard (1993), ‘Entertainment and Utopia’, in S. During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader, London: Routledge, pp. 272–83. Ebert, Roger (2006), ‘Review of Bubble’, Chicago Sun-­Times, 27 January, (last accessed 10 November 2013). Gallagher, Mark (2013), Another Steven Soderbergh Experience: Authorship and Contemporary Hollywood, Austin: University of Texas Press. Hassan, Robert (2004), Media, Politics and the Network Society, Maidenhead: Open University Press. HDNet Films/Magnolia Pictures (2006), Bubble Website, (last accessed 10 November 2013). Holt, Jennifer (2011), ‘Steven Soderbergh’, in Y. Tasker (ed.), Fifty Contemporary Film Directors (2nd edn), New York: Routledge, pp. 355–64.

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34  r a d h a o ’m e ara Hornaday, Ann (2006), ‘Bubble Vision’, Washington Post, 22 January, (last accessed 10 November 2013). Howell, Peter (2013), ‘Steven Soderbergh on Retirement and the Oscars’, Toronto Star, 8 February, (last accessed 10 November 2013). Johnston, Sheila (2002), ‘The Flashback Kid’, in A. Kaufman (ed.), Steven Soderbergh: Interviews, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 114–19. Kreisler, Harry (2001), Conversation with Manuel Castells: Identity and Change in the Network Society, (last accessed 10 November 2013). Lobato, Ramon (2012), Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution, London: BFI Palgrave Macmillan. Maddox, Garry (2007), ‘Maverick Director Toys with Screen Conventions’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 22 March, (last accessed 10 November 2013). Murray, Rona (2011), Studying American Independent Cinema, Leighton Buzzard: Auteur. Newman, Michael Z. (2011), Indie: An American Film Culture, New York: Columbia University Press. Schatz, Thomas (2013), ‘Preface’, in A. de Waard and R. C. Tait (eds), The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: Indie Sex, Corporate Lies and Digital Videotape, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. xi–xiv. Silverman, Jason (2006), ‘Soderbergh: Burn, Hollywood, Burn’, Wired, 3 May, (last accessed 10 November 2013). Volkmer, Ingrid (2003), News in the Global Public Sphere: A Study of CNN and its impact on Global Communication, Luton: Luton University Press.

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Ch apter 3

Buffalo ’66 (1998): The Radical Conventionality of an Indie Happy Ending James MacDowell

B

uffalo ’66 (Vincent Gallo, 1998) concludes in both an utterly conventional and highly unconventional fashion. The reason this claim isn’t literally nonsensical is that to dub an aesthetic feature ‘conventional’ is not, of course, to invoke an absolute term but a deeply relational one: something familiarly conventional in one context may appear radical in another. In film studies the subject of convention is most frequently raised in relation to Hollywood cinema (for example, Bordwell et al. 1985: 12–23), while a key identifying feature of independent or indie films is often taken to be ‘the extent to which they depart from familiar conventions of the classical Hollywood variety’ (King 2005: 59). Yet, just as does Hollywood filmmaking, so does indie cinema frequently trade in familiar narrative, stylistic and generic conventions.1 And, as with many films, Buffalo ’66 is instantly identifiable as ‘indie’ not only because of its industrial/cultural positioning,2 but also because it makes use of such conventions: it is thematically preoccupied with ‘regional’ America and familial dysfunction, offers narrative digressions, overt stylistic self-­consciousness, a seemingly near-­sociopathic and largely ‘unsympathetic’ protagonist, and so on. Despite its manifestly indie identity, however, some of the film’s most striking moments come from its engagement with conventions recognisably wrested from classical cinema: a musical number, a solo dance sequence and – my primary focus here – a volte-­face ‘happy ending’. It is the proposition that transplanting ‘Hollywood’ conventions into an ‘indie’ context can sometimes make a film appear less rather than more conventional that will be my main concern in the following account of this idiosyncratic movie. Buffalo ’66 begins with Billy Brown (Vincent Gallo, the film’s writer/­ director) being released from prison after serving five years for a crime of which he was innocent, but to which he was forced to confess by a criminal bookie (Mickey Rourke) as payment for an outstanding debt. Billy’s fateful bet was on a Buffalo Bills Superbowl game that Buffalo lost because of a single

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Figure 3 Christina Ricci and Vincent Gallo in Buffalo ’66 (1998)

missed field goal. In revenge, Billy has bitterly sworn to his long-suffering friend Goon (Kevin Corrigan) that upon his release he will kill the nowretired player who missed that goal, Scott Woods, and then himself. However, he must first visit his antagonistic and unloving parents (Ben Gazzara and Angelica Huston), to whom he lied about his lengthy absence, informing them he was on a secret mission for the government and had married. To convince them, within hours of his release Billy impulsively kidnaps a young woman, Layla (Christina Ricci), and forces her to pose as his wife during a visit home. Layla plays her role with gusto, and gradually over the day grows fond of her kidnapper, despite Billy’s largely hostile attitude towards her (an example of one of his many unlikely threats: ‘I’ll take a bite out of your cheek and I’ll shit you out . . .’). By the evening the two have become closer, renting a motel room and even sharing a chaste kiss, but Billy’s manic insecurity has kept her largely at arm’s length. With Billy about to leave the motel room late at night in order to fulfil his plan of killing Woods (but under the pretence of buying Layla a hot chocolate), Layla forces him to promise he will come back. On the verge of tears, she proclaims that she loves him. Billy leaves without saying a word, and Layla is left alone. Billy now carries out his plan. Before venturing into the strip club Woods now owns, he uses a payphone to call Goon – towards whom he has hitherto acted consistently unconscionably. Struggling to keep his composure, Billy first tearfully apologises for always ‘calling you names and stuff’, going on to tell Goon that he can inherit anything he likes from Billy’s worldly possessions, which are stored in a locker in a Buffalo bowling alley. He then hangs up, enters the club, locates Woods (Bob Wahl), shoots him, then turns the

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gun to his own head and pulls the trigger. As we survey the bloody aftermath, we dissolve to a shot of Billy’s mother and father sitting by his grave, acting as coldly towards him in death as in life, his mother absorbed in the radio, his father complaining about needing food immediately. We fade to black before fading up again on a series of shots of Billy in a pool of blood. In a dramatic turn of events, however, this image of Billy’s body now begins to shrink within the frame (a stylistic strategy previously used by the film to signify the end of a flashback), and behind the receding image comes into focus a close-­up of Billy, alive and still standing in front of Woods in the club. Billy and Woods lock eyes for a few moments before Billy turns heel and exits the club. Once outside he exhales, looks across the road to the motel where he left Layla, flings his gun over the side of an overpass, and again rings Goon. Reneging on his original offer, he now cheerfully tells his much-­abused friend: Hey. Forget it. You hear what I said? Forget it. You cannot have anything in my locker – I take all it back, alright? . . . So stay away from my locker, and if I find out you go near my locker, I swear to God, I’ll give you a karate chop right in the head. Guess what happened today: I got a girl. There’s a girl who loves me, and she’s very pretty, and she’s very nice, and she loves me. So what do you think of that? So stay away from my locker, I take all my things back. Ending the call by telling Goon ‘I gotta go: my girlfriend’s waiting for me’, Billy next drops into a late night café adjacent to the motel and orders Layla her hot chocolate. The old man behind the counter (Manny Fried) is friendly and helpful, and Billy seems in a good mood for virtually the first time in the film – grinning and jovial. On a whim he also purchases a heart-­shaped cookie, and even buys a second for another man sitting in the café, instructing him to save it for his girlfriend. He compliments the barista on the heart cookies and asks who conceived the idea: ‘I don’t know’, comes the smiling reply, ‘Somebody . . . romantic?’ As Billy turns to exit the café we follow him and track right, into a close-­up on a vase of flowers. This image dissolves to a close-­up of Billy and Layla lying on a bed together, Billy’s eyes closed and his arms wrapped tightly around her, Layla staring ahead. The words ‘THE END’ appear, and we cut abruptly to white as the credits begin to the romantic strains of the song ‘Sweetness’ by Yes, whose lyrics sing of a girl who ‘brings the sunshine to a rainy afternoon . . .’. Whatever else it does, this conclusion clearly engages with the convention of the ‘happy ending’. A convention intimately bound up in the public and critical imagination with Hollywood cinema, the ‘happy ending’ has frequently been used as a linchpin in criticisms of this cinematic tradition, while its lack or subversion has often been key to the critical valorising of

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38  j a m es m acd o w e ll other, ‘alternative’ filmmaking cultures (see MacDowell 2013: 1–6). Given this context, how are we to interpret Buffalo ’66’s ultimate reliance upon this much-­maligned convention? An aesthetic convention’s deployment within a particular mode of filmmaking is traditionally said to require an appearance of appropriate ‘motivation’. In his study of the convention of the ‘happy ending’ David Bordwell stresses this demand above all else, stating that, ‘whether the happy ending succeeds depends on whether it is adequately motivated’ (1982: 2). Accounting for Buffalo ’66’s use of this convention requires acknowledging, firstly, that its ‘happy ending’ might appear ‘unmotivated’ in two main ways: in terms of cause-­and-effect narrative, and in terms of mode/genre. Firstly, concerning narrative motivation: what we have previously seen of Billy has shown him to be a bitter, self-­loathing and aggressive person. He has been violent (for example, needlessly assaulting a man in a public bathroom), displayed extreme emotional immaturity/insecurity (denouncing all women as ‘evil’ because of his treatment by one girl in grade school) and evidenced a pathological psychology (the plan to kill Woods). As such, if forming expectations based on what we see of his behaviour as our ‘goal-­oriented protagonist’ (Bordwell et al. 1985: 16), and thus minimally assessing the film’s narrative logic of cause-­and-effect, it seems likely that he would follow through his murderous and suicidal plan to its end. Despite its idiosyncrasies, this is hardly a film unmoored from conventional expectations regarding ‘consistent’ character motivation, meaning that its final reel about-­face in this regard cannot fail to strike us as such. Yet, as critics of narrowly ‘Aristotelian’ accounts of narrative sometimes point out, such a focus on the mechanics of plotting can overlook other significant kinds of motivation for a convention’s use, particularly those stemming from a perceived genre or mode. As Deborah Knight notes, in many instances spectators’ understandings of narrative conventions are ‘not primarily driven by the particular story but by expectations about genre and plot as they are realised in the particular text’ (1997: 344). Perhaps more important than its apparent reneging on consistent characterisation, then, Buffalo ’66’s ending also seems ‘unmotivated’ generically and/or modally. This film has throughout rhetorically announced its indie credentials via various conventions – from Gallo’s indie-­folk song ‘Lonely Boy’ that opened the movie, through its superimposed images-­within-images, its unusual film stock,3 and its ‘tableau’ framings (on this indie convention, see Sconce 2002: 359–60 and MacDowell 2010: 5–8). Equally, its plotting, tone and generally unsympathetic protagonist have helped in the creation of a fictional world aligned with generic frameworks common to the world of indie filmmaking – largely what we might term ‘dark’, ‘black’ or perhaps ‘smart’ comedy (see Sconce 2002 and Perkins 2012). The film’s comic register has seldom appeared warm or benevolent,

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but instead often caustic – say, coming at the expense of weak characters (for example, the treatment of Goon), or used to make bleak dramatic points (the absurdly/tragically unloving relationship between Billy and his parents). Indeed, the moment following the suicide, when we see Billy’s parents uncaringly bickering by his grave, uses comedy in precisely the film’s usual manner, and actually gives us a glimpse of one very plausible way this movie could end. Within such a generic world and associated mode of production, a hopeless ending in which Billy did go through with his plan would certainly not appear unusual. In fact, one might say that it is the most expected conclusion, since many American indie films of its period do end with their male protagonists’ deaths.4 The abrupt change of heart Billy apparently undergoes, by contrast, strongly invokes a closural convention far more familiar from the generic worlds of Hollywood romantic comedy or comedic fantasy: that of sudden realisation and/or ‘redemption’.5 Whether placed in the context of its preceding narrative or its broader mode/genre, then, by its end Buffalo ’66 has encouraged expectations it will ultimately upset through an apparently unmotivated use of the convention of the ‘happy ending’. However, it is worth acknowledging the existence of one further context within which even so seemingly incongruous a ‘happy ending’ as this could itself manage to appear nonetheless rather conventional. Virtually the only critical move ever reliably employed by scholars when making approving references to the ‘happy ending’ has been to argue that, in certain instances, the convention can be made to seem implausible, ironic or indeed ‘unmotivated’ (Bordwell’s preferred formulation [1982: 3]).6 A critical commonplace made famous by scholarship on directors such as Douglas Sirk (see Klinger 1994: 38–43) – and indebted to the legacy of the Greek concept of the deus ex machina7 – this category of the implausible ‘happy ending’ is claimed to reflexively ironise the convention even while presenting it, rhetorically ensuring that ‘the happy ending is there, but to some extent the need for it is denounced’ (Bordwell 1982: 7). Thus regarded as in some sense critical of Hollywood’s assumed aesthetic (and, implicitly, ideological) homogeneity, it is unsurprising that implausible ‘happy endings’ – while arguably a key feature of classical Hollywood cinema itself – should also have become a recurrent feature of American indie filmmaking. Indeed, ironic, implausible ‘happy endings’ have perhaps been found more reliably in American indie cinema than in any other filmmaking tradition. Possibly due to its ability to so economically express an apparent position of ‘comparable-­ to-yet-­ distinct-from Hollywood’ characteristic of much indie film practice, we would not be hard pressed to name many indie ‘happy endings’ that are heavily implied by style or context to be so artificial, improbable, or pointedly partial as to encourage an askance reading of their apparent ‘happiness’ – for instance, Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986), Wild at

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40  j a m es m acd o w e ll Heart (David Lynch, 1991), The Player (Robert Altman, 1992), Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), Things to do in Denver When You’re Dead (Gary Fleder, 1995), Full Frontal (Steven Soderbergh, 2002), Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog, 2009), and so on. Though enacting the strategy in diverse ways, what all such conclusions share is a desire to undercut, ironise or otherwise emphasise the naïve or illusory nature of the ‘happy ending’ they present.8 Having become over time less an incongruous anomaly than actually something of a convention of American indie cinema, then, can the category of the ironic ‘happy ending’ account for Buffalo ’66’s conclusion – making it, in fact, to this extent ‘conventional’? The decision to have an ‘unhappy ending’ recede and vanish within the frame only to reveal a ‘happy’ one could hardly act more explicitly as an invitation to weigh the relative plausibility of both, and it is certainly true that this conclusion has elements common to other implausible ‘happy endings’. In addition to the ways it appears ‘unmotivated’, it is also clearly significant that, iconographically, in its final few minutes Buffalo ’66 features a great number – some might say an excess – of signifiers of clichéd romanticism in quick succession: the heart cookies, the flowers, the concluding image of the embracing final couple, the song ‘Sweetness’ on the soundtrack and the (in 1998, anachronistic) appearance of the words ‘THE END’. A sense of iconographic and stylistic exaggeration frequently accompanies intentionally implausible ‘happy endings’ in indie cinema – say, Blue Velvet’s ultimate combination of images of a suburban home, a couple, happy family members, a patently fake robin, a smiling-­and-waving fireman and a mother playing with her child (accompanied by Julee Cruise’s ‘The Mystery of Love’); or – perhaps paradigmatically – The Player’s conclusion accumulating images of a husband’s homecoming, a wife waving across a garden of beautiful flowers while an American flag flies behind her, her pregnancy, a kiss, the resumption of a musical score that earlier accompanied another diegetic ‘Hollywood ending’ and the words ‘The End’ appearing over the couple as they depart from the receding camera. Recalling such approaches at least to a degree, the piling up of sentimental signifiers at Buffalo ’66’s close borders on creating a sense of excess, which – given the movie’s established modal/generic expectations – might suggest intentional artifice or fantasy, and could thus in turn imply an overall rhetoric of irony. Yet, at the same time, this ending also offers several elements that can’t quite be explained by the familiar logic of the implausible ‘happy ending’. For one thing, the conclusion mutes the parodic sense of inauthenticity that usually accompanies the convention via several features that are conventionally far more ‘naturalistic’. Firstly, there is the actual ending’s juxtaposition against the strategies used to render the preceding initial ‘unhappy ending’. Woods’ murder and Billy’s suicide are presented stylistically in a highly affected manner, using a technique subsequently dubbed ‘bullet time’ thanks

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to its use in the Matrix films (Andy and Larry [now Lana] Wachowski, 1999– 2004). Woods’ death is shown as a moment of paused action – arrested in mid-­ fall, blood frozen in mid-­air as it shoots from the back of his head – while the camera (seemingly impossibly) rotates around the frozen scene. This process is soon repeated after Billy shoots himself, letting out a dramatic silent scream as he does so – his fall to the floor depicted in a series of these still moments with mobile camera. Aesthetically extremely striking, these shots are also the most conspicuously and self-­consciously stylised in the entire film. This thus creates an opportunity for the ‘happy ending’ that follows to appear rather more unaffected by comparison – a rhetorical movement that begins immediately. Whereas the entirety of the sequence in the club had hitherto been depicted in either slow motion or ‘bullet-­time’ – and aurally accompanied first by a pulsing song that eclipsed all diegetic sound and then by an unnatural total silence – when returning to the scene to see Billy alive we experience it in real-­time and hear the diegetic sounds of the strip club. The film continues to use stylistic conventions associated with ‘naturalism’ until the end of the film: handheld camerawork, no slow motion, all diegetic sound (other than the final song), and so on. Thus, rather than exaggerated stylistic self-­consciousness being used to highlight the clichéd nature of a ‘happy ending’, here such self-­ consciousness is used instead at the moment of a misleading ‘unhappy ending’. We might say that the film inverts the usual logic of implausible closure for an indie context, using self-­consciousness and stylistic excess to draw our attention to – indeed, almost parody – what in this mode of filmmaking is the more conventional bleak ending, before subsequently upsetting our expectations with the (here) less conventional ‘happy’ conclusion. Billy’s behaviour upon leaving the club is also important to the film, curbing too pronounced a sense of implausibility. Although he is clearly suggested to have undergone a moment of enlightenment of sorts, his subsequent behaviour still retains enough elements of his previous mean-­spiritedness to appear at least nominally consistent. In his second call to Goon he communicates his new-­found lust for life in a manner still comically confrontational and self-­ centred, petulantly reclaiming his previously-­offered possessions (‘Forget it. You cannot have anything in my locker . . .’) and delivering ridiculous threats in his old manner (‘I find out you go near my locker, I swear to God, I’ll give you a karate-­chop right in the head’). His expression of joy at having found someone capable of loving him, too, comes across slightly like a childish boast: ‘she loves me. So what do you think of that?’ In the café scene as well we see traces of the old Billy’s rudeness even as he is acting ostensibly kindly (as when he instructs the patron not to ‘chomp on’ the heart cookie himself), and of his old cheapness, as when he reacts to the ringing up of the bill with a concerned, if light-­hearted, ‘Hey – go easy; easy, easy, easy . . .!’ These remnants of Billy’s previous less sympathetic traits help to keep the ‘happy ending’ grounded

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42  j a m es m acd o w e ll recognisably within the world it has established for itself, rather than only reasserting its falseness in the manner of films like Blue Velvet or The Player. Finally, there is something noticeably understated about many of the aforementioned – potentially excessive – romantic signifiers. The heart cookies, for example, are imperfectly shaped – the top one’s icing spilling over its edge in such a way as to considerably compromise its likeness to a heart, the sprinkles on it sparse and messy. This is a very real-­seeming, handmade attempt at a romantic signifier, rather than – say – the perfectly manicured all-­American house and garden of The Player’s conclusion, which achieves its (parodic) signifying function impeccably and wholly. Similarly, the flowers we rest on as Billy exits the café are pretty, but not overwhelmingly beautiful: they seem to be dried (perhaps they are even made of plastic?), and the predominant colour of the bouquet is of a muted greyish brown, the red of the roses breaking through only in places. Importantly, both images also speak of concerted efforts made within the world of the film to create a mise en scène of clichéd romance and beauty, rather than of clichéd romance and beauty being parachuted in by the film’s narration itself (as in, say, Blue Velvet). That is to say: here we are aware that these heart cookies have been made (by ‘somebody . . . romantic?’ is the unlikely but touching claim) in an attempt to approximate a conventionalised language of romance. In this way, these clichéd elements of iconography actually act paradoxically to increase the credibility of the conclusion, since they recall a world recognisably like our own – in which outlets manufacture and sell imperfectly realised items that attempt to conform to the conventional aesthetic language of ‘romance’, and eager-­to-please young men in love buy them for their girlfriends. In all these respects, then, at the same time as it remains undeniably ‘unmotivated’, Buffalo ’66’s conclusion also resists key characteristics of address that conventionally accompany indie cinema’s approach to the implausible ‘happy ending’. The meanings and effects of conventions invariably alter when transplanted into contexts other than those with which they are most readily associated. The most immediate change tends to be that, whereas in its original context the convention’s presence would create a feeling of familiarity, in its new context it now encourages recognition of incongruity. A concept commonly aligned with incongruity is irony, and irony is in turn a concept that has received significant attention in critical work on indie cinema (see Sconce 2002; MacDowell 2010; Perkins 2012). A posture of ironic ‘position-­taking’ (Sconce 2002: 360) – especially towards a convention considered so fundamental to Hollywood cinema as the ‘happy ending’ – has become one way American indie filmmaking has rhetorically asserted its aesthetic and ideological independence from the perceived conventions of the commercial mainstream. In this sense, this particular ironic gesture can itself be said to have become a convention of indie filmmaking.

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The conclusion of Buffalo ’66 is undoubtedly indebted to this indie convention, but I have also suggested it distinguishes itself from characteristic aspects of that convention’s associated rhetoric and register. What secures its relative unconventionality in this respect could be expressed in terms of the degree and kind of irony the film implies towards this kind of ‘happy ending’ (though see MacDowell 2010: 10–14 and Perkins 2012: 92–101 on comparably conflicted tonal strategies elsewhere in indie cinema). Making no attempt to conceal its ‘unmotivated’ appearance, and thus making it difficult for us to understand as entirely unironic its more clichéd elements, its tone nonetheless allows us to feel that if we take sincere pleasure in its appeals to sentiment we are not merely casting ourselves as a naïve or credulous dupes (as would certainly be the case in, say, The Player or Blue Velvet). Something similar might in fact be said of the film’s two other previous notable invocations of Hollywood convention: Billy’s father’s song (a quite obviously mimed performance that nonetheless isn’t acknowledged as such within the world of the film), and Layla’s tap dance in the bowling alley (featuring forthrightly un-­naturalistic music, sound and lighting effects). Though made to feel incongruous, this does not prevent them from also appearing heartfelt and melancholy in their sincerity and touchingly inexpert execution. To the extent that implausible ‘happy endings’ present an iconic Hollywood convention in such a way that ‘the need for it is denounced’ (Bordwell 1982: 7), we might align them with those voices in indie criticism who will tend to regard any film’s incorporation of ‘Hollywood’ conventions as unfortunate concessions. A film like Buffalo ’66 can remind us, firstly, that conventionality is simply bound to be a fact rather than a failing of any aesthetic tradition – ‘alternative’ traditions like indie filmmaking not excepted.9 Secondly, it suggests something paradoxical that it may be productive for us as critics to keep in mind: depending on context, consciously committing to rather than ‘subverting’ familiar conventions can sometimes be the more daring, and unconventional, gesture.

Notes 1. See King (2005: 59–195), Newman (2011: 87–182). 2. The film was produced by Cinepix and Muse but distributed by Columbia Tristar. Its indie credentials were stressed in its marketing, for example, a pull-­quote from Q magazine calling the film ‘the best independent movie of the decade’ is displayed prominently on the Region 2 DVD cover. 3. Discontinued 35mm Kodak 160T 5239 reversal stock, once used to shoot NFL games for television. 4. To name a few: Drugstore Cowboy (Gus van Sant, 1989), Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992), A Perfect World (Clint Eastwood, 1993), Heat (Michael Mann, 1995),

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44  j a m es m acd o w e ll Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995), Leaving Las Vegas (Mike Figgis, 1995), The Funeral (Abel Ferarra, 1996), Bulworth (Warren Beatty, 1998), Gods and Monsters (Bill Condon, 1998), etc. 5. On romantic comedy’s use of the convention of an ultimate moment of realisation following a ‘Dark Moment’ see Mernit (2000: 115). In terms of fantasy, in its ending’s avoidance of a protagonist’s suicide, the most famous comparison is probably It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946). 6. On the overarching critical category that I have called the implausible ‘happy ending’ see MacDowell (2013: 5–7, 153–68). 7. Especially as practised by Euripedes; the term ‘radical conventionality’, which gives this chapter its title, comes from Francis M. Dunn’s study of closure in this dramatist’s work (1996: 135). 8. A related convention (an inversion of which Buffalo ’66 enacts) is for a film to present ‘happy endings’ either as diegetic fictions or subjective fantasies before going on to reveal the film’s true, comparatively ‘downbeat’, ending, for example, Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977), Raising Arizona (Joel Coen, 1987), The 25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002), and so on. 9. Though perhaps under-­acknowledged, this fact is of course far from unacknowledged; see, for instance, Bordwell’s (1979) famous work on ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, and King’s (2005: 59–195) aforementioned work on indie conventionality.

References Bordwell, David (1979), ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, Film Criticism, 4: 1, pp. 56–64. Bordwell, David (1982), ‘Happily Ever After, Part Two’, Velvet Light Trap, 19, pp. 2–7. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson (1985), The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, New York: Routledge. Dunn, Francis M. (1996), Tragedy’s End: Closure and Innovation in Euripedean Drama, Oxford: Oxford University Press. King, Geoff (2005), American Independent Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Klinger, Barbara (1994), Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture and the Films of Douglas Sirk, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Knight, Deborah (1997), ‘Aristotelians on Speed: Paradoxes of Genre in the Context of Cinema’, in R. Allen and M. Smith (eds), Film Theory and Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 343–63. MacDowell, James (2010), ‘Notes on Quirky’, Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, 1, pp. 1–16. MacDowell, James (2013), Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema: Cliché, Convention and the Final Couple, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mernit, Billy (2000), Writing the Romantic Comedy, New York: Harper Collins. Newman, Michael Z. (2011), Indie: An American Film Culture, New York: Columbia University Press. Perkins, Claire (2012), American Smart Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sconce, Jeffrey (2002), ‘Irony, Nihilism and the New American “Smart” Film’, Screen, 43: 4, pp. 349–69.

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Ch apter 4

The Exploding Girl (2009): The Everyday and the Occluded Gaze Laura Rascaroli

It was a pleasure to shoot the film, despite the obstacles. For example, it took two hours to mount the camera on the hood of a car for the opening shot, and just when we finished, the battery died. So we had to spend another two hours re-­doing it. In turn, [we] had to cut two scenes out of the film in order to shoot the opening and closing scenes that day. But I haven’t missed those lost scenes since. And I’m happy with the beginning and end of the film. We also lost all of the financing about four weeks before starting and had to make the film on a fifth of the original budget. But I feel this helped focus our intentions, not that I’d like to repeat that approach. (Bradley Rust Gray, quoted in Saito 2011)

B

radley Rust Gray’s description of the problems he encountered during the making of his debut feature, The Exploding Girl (2009) hints on the one hand to the difficulties that are always likely to be experienced by any independent film produced on a small budget (US$40,000 in Gray’s case, according to Box Office Mojo n.d.) and, on the other hand, to the level of ­contingency that is liable to intervene when shooting on location. The complexities and effects of location shooting associate The Exploding Girl with an entire tradition of ‘light and portable’ cinema, which has taken stories and characters (and cameras) to real urban streets and squares, cafés and public parks, thus opening up to chance, but also to the sheer materiality of life. It is this materiality that both shapes the film and interposes itself between the filmmakers and their final product, creating obstacles, as Gray calls them in the above-­cited interview (the true significance and import of the concept of obstacle for the film will be established later in the chapter). The Exploding Girl closely connects with this tradition, and owes to it not only at the level of aesthetics, but also of its view of the world and of the cinema. In fact, Gray’s cited description of the production of his film is so typical of what we have

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46  l a u ra ras caro li

Figure 4  Zoe Kazan in The Exploding Girl (2009)

come to associate with independent cinema, and of the mythology surrounding it, that it reads like a declaration of belonging to a long, transnational history of inexpensive, instant, young filmmaking, with its distinctive ethical, aesthetic and political hues. The Exploding Girl in fact adopts (or, more appropriately, alludes to) the realist style that is, arguably, historically at the basis of all independent cinema. I refer to the realism pioneered by post-­war Italian neorealism, and then appropriated and reworked by the French nouvelle vague, cinema-­vérité and subsequent European and world new waves. This is, in ways, an ambiguous filmic lineage: characterised by radical formal experimentalism and self-­reflexivity, the new waves of the 1960s and 1970s were the heralds of an anti-­realistic cinema, which on the surface could not be more distant from what looked like the transparent realism of the Italian post-­war school. Yet, the two traditions are intimately connected, as was openly recognised by the young directors of the time (I refer, in particular, to the Bazinian group of the Cahiers du Cinéma), arguably on the basis of the two cinematic forms’ shared attention for reality and openness to contingency. To neorealism, The Exploding Girl owes its realist focus on the everyday and the unexceptional, on patient observation and narrative gaps; in line with the nouvelle vague, then, such focus is directed on young urbanites dealing with their blossoming sentiments, and becomes part of a linguistic experimentation that is inherently modern. The camera closely follows Ivy (Zoe Kazan, granddaughter of Elia Kazan) as she spends her spring break from college at home, in Brooklyn, with her mother (Maryann Urbano) and her best friend Al (Mark Rendall). The diaphanous storyline centres on Ivy’s romantic difficulties and

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eventual break-­up with her laconic boyfriend, with whom she is in sporadic cell-­phone contact; as well as on her friendship with Al, and on his barely concealed romantic interest in Ivy. The film’s attention is almost entirely focused on Ivy, a quiet, introspective girl who suffers from epilepsy and who interiorises disappointments. Her condition means that she must avoid stress and thus master her emotional reactions, as well as live a controlled life (she is directed not to drink or smoke, or even simply take a bath while alone in the house). As in a nouvelle vague film, young city dwellers who are busy discovering and experimenting with both friendship and love are often captured within their social milieu. Al, who has come home from college to find that his parents have rented out his room, seeks hospitality from Ivy and her mother, who invite him to stay with them and sleep on their couch. Ivy’s mum, who runs a dance studio, is often out, and the two friends spend some of their time together, on visits, sitting in parks or going to parties. In all these occasions, we find them deeply immersed in the material, kinetic and sonic fullness of their environment, which thus becomes a prominent, decisive filmic presence. Streets and parks buzz with people and cars and are filled with movement and noise. In a way, New York is framed almost like Paris in the films of François Truffaut, Jean-­Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer: the camera is deeply embedded in the reality of the city, which is thus transformed into a film set; romantic concerns, conversations about love and friendship, telephone calls and even Ivy’s break-­up are experienced in the streets, in the midst of the flow of everyday life, where the characters are surrounded by (real) strangers going about their lives. Often giving the impression of following events in real time, on account of its slow-­paced focus on everyday gestures, the film can thus be said to actualise the realist practice of closely ‘shadowing’ an unexceptional character, Ivy, and of immersing the spectator in her everyday world, with the conviction that – as the theorist of neorealism Cesare Zavattini famously claimed – there isn’t an hour in the life of a human being that does not deserve to be shown on the screen, and witnessed by an audience (see, for instance, Zavattini 2000: 52). To watch thoughtful Ivy while she lies in bed or moves around the house, busy in daily chores and routines, brings to mind striking scenes of neorealist cinema, perhaps most effectively encapsulated by a famous sequence from Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D (1952), in which a young maid gets up in the morning, goes to the kitchen and grinds coffee beans, with a set of gestures that denote daily routines, all the while silently musing about her condition and fate as a pregnant girl and future single mother. The Exploding Girl embraces the neorealist stance that the extraordinary resides, paradoxically, in the ordinary; and that the ordinary can be observed with a persistent, curious, compassionate cinematic gaze, which is capable of turning it into a subtly powerful realist filmic spectacle. Like De Sica’s young maid, Gray’s college student is an entirely

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48  l a u ra ras caro li unexceptional person, who does not seem driven by anything in particular – as some reviewers have punctually remarked. For Michael Koresky (2009), for instance, who wrote unfavourably on the film for the online quarterly Reverse Shot, Ivy is almost irritating in her lack of intellectual and emotional interests. In his review, Koresky likens her to a whole generation of similar characters in ‘American indies made in the latter half of the twenty-­first century’s inaugural decade that follow inarticulate youths as they graze absent-­mindedly through overgrown fields of urban anomie’. For the reviewer, this recurrent ‘indie’ approach barely conceals the filmmakers’ artistic lethargy and inarticulate use of camera and narrative conventions: ‘The tenets of realism become a black hole in which one can bury unnecessary details like story, momentum, ­motivation; staying on the surface equals ambiguity.’ Below the surface, however, The Exploding Girl’s deep motivations are not unproblematically realist, as the film’s title also intimates. The environment is not simply there, available to an unobstructed reading; and it does not contain the human figure in any straightforward way. It is precisely at the level of camerawork and filmic conventions that The Exploding Girl is furthest away from neorealism, while also radicalising the aesthetic discourse of the nouvelle vague. The film’s style is only deceptively minimalist, thus both playing with and undermining widespread assumptions and expectations surrounding indie production as one that matches ‘naturalism to self-­conscious quirkiness as evidence of an “indie” sensibility’ (Stone 2013: 61). These are the same assumptions and expectations that brought all reviewers of The Exploding Girl to take notice of the film’s naturalism – at times admiringly, at times disapprovingly. The Exploding Girl is far from straightforward sociological naturalism. If De Sica and Zavattini’s young, pregnant Sicilian maid was at once the symbol of a lumpenproletariat without rights and without class conscience and of the female condition in post-­war Italy, Ivy is a youth who could live anywhere in the contemporary urban west, and whose concerns are generational more obviously than they are societal (while of course also being a product of their time). The almost exclusive focus on two characters, and on a period of vacation, in fact, reduces the frequency of relational narrative opportunities and creates an ‘empty’ story. Equally, the naturalism of the film is only apparent. Far from the directness and simplicity of cinema-­vérité approaches, The Exploding Girl is a deeply allusive and intertextual film starting from its title, which is homage to ‘The Exploding Boy’, the flip side of The Cure’s ‘In Between Days’ – in turn the title of Gray’s partner So Yong Kim’s directorial debut, on which Gray served as both cowriter and producer. As well as quoting the rooftop sequences of Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954) – inclusive of pigeons, burgeoning romance and otherworldly distance from streets and docks – The Exploding

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Girl incorporates references to Jean Cocteau’s one-­act play La Voix humaine (The Human Voice, 1930), in which a woman speaks on the phone with her lover for one last time, before he leaves to marry another woman. The differences between the two texts are not insubstantial. In La Voix humaine, the woman’s lover is inaudible; the phone call, in spite of a few brief interruptions, is a single one, and takes place on one evening; the woman knows in advance of the call that her lover will leave her, and the farewell conversation had in fact been planned. In The Exploding Girl, conversely, the phone calls are several and are exchanged over a longer period of time; the voice of Ivy’s boyfriend is audible; and the break-­up is unexpected (even though foreshadowed by the difficulty of prior exchanges). Nevertheless, the presence of Cocteau’s text in The Exploding Girl is tangible – as is, indirectly, that of its many cinematic afterlives and citations, among which it is worth mentioning at least Roberto Rossellini’s adaptation starring Anna Magnani, Una voce umana, in the anthology film L’amore (Love, 1948) and Pedro Almodóvar’s Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, 1988) with Carmen Maura, which started as an adaptation of La Voix humaine and which pays homage to it, while deeply betraying it (Willem 1998). The emotional agony of Cocteau’s protagonist, who attempts to disguise her true feelings with her lover but is incapable of it, and breaks down several times in the course of the conversation, counterpoints Ivy’s quiet self-­possession, culminating in her rather cool reaction when told that the relationship is over. The melodramatic performances of fiery actresses such as Magnani and Maura thus play in the backdrop of Kazan’s unperturbed approach to her young character, revealing by contrast the emotional turmoil concealed by Ivy (but which will eventually come to the surface and lead her to ‘explode’). The cause of naturalism, with its claims on inconspicuousness and transparency, contingency and immediacy, is further undermined by Gray’s specific articulation of camerawork and sound. Slow, careful and reverential, the camera frequently looks at the characters – Ivy especially – from behind objects and bodies, which occlude its gaze in ways that are at times extreme. This strategy concretises and literalises the principle, mentioned at the onset of this chapter, that in its quest for realism independent cinema allows contingency onto the set; and that contingency interposes itself between the filmmaker and his or her final product. Vehicles, things and people often insinuate themselves between the lens and the actors, thus eclipsing them; at other times, the camera is placed so close to faces that they become indistinct; or, even, it shoots them through translucent screens or windows – like in the first sequence of the film, in which we must make out Ivy’s face behind a car’s windscreen, in turn framed in such a way as to transform it into a reflective surface that bounces our gaze off. Sounds as well as darkness, or even rays of light, furthermore, can conceal the characters either aurally or visually.

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50  l a u ra ras caro li One could attempt to see such a framing practice in light of a radical naturalism, and thus as the result of the camera’s embeddedness in the reality of the street. Accordingly, one could insist on unproblematically placing the film within the lineage of the naturalism that can be traced in the films of the new waves, paradoxically coupled with instances of Brechtian antirealism – as in the asides and asynchronous sound in Godard’s foundational A bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960). However, this framing practice is so insistent, so careful, so intentional in The Exploding Girl that it does not simply enhance the film’s claims on reality, as in a new-­wave production, or as in our expectations of indie cinema. Gray’s framing practice has a subtle but decisive cumulative effect, whose import becomes increasingly obvious as one keeps watching the film. This occlusion of the sight seems to be ultimately designed not to attract attention on contingency, but to emphasise the obstacle, the obstructive presence of objects in their opaque existence. The iteration of this gaze slowly changes the film’s emphasis from the minimalism of the story to the complexity of the world, from the transparency of narrative to the opacity of life, from naturalism’s visibility to the invisibility (and pervasiveness) of human drama. The Exploding Girl’s emphasis on objects, in fact, is not easily read through the filter of material culture, intended as the field of thought that concerns itself with artefacts and their role vis-­à-vis social relationships, cultures and identities. The focus on actual, specific objects that characterises the cinema of some auteurs deeply concerned with material culture as the expression of a specific modernity (Almodóvar, Michelangelo Antonioni, Aki Kaurismäki, Pedro Costa – to mention but a few) is absent. Objects are not part of cultural constructs; they are invisible in themselves, for the focus is not on them, as distinct, eloquent material presences; they are stains, obstacles, barriers to sight. The Exploding Girl’s framing practice thus seems to render into film Jacques Lacan’s concept of the gaze. The field of vision for Lacan is organised around a lack (the objet petit a) and, therefore, around that which cannot be seen: In our relation to things, in so far as this relation is constituted by the way of vision, and ordered in the figures of representation, something slips, passes, is transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always to some degree eluded in it – that is what we call the gaze. (Lacan 1998: 73) Taking Jean-­Paul Sartre’s (1956) concept of our objectification in the gaze of the Other one step further, Lacan maintains that we do not even need the presence of an onlooker to be made feel like a picture, like an object in the Other’s gaze: the simple act of looking makes us into a picture and an object. While objects are outside me, though, the picture is deep inside my eye: ‘That which is light looks at me, and by means of that light in the depths of my eye,

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something is painted’ (1998: 96). It is through light that a picture is painted deep inside my eye – a picture in which I do not appear (though the picture does not exist without me; hence, I am in every picture as the screen, the support of the image). At the same time, I am seen by the light; I am an object in the gaze. The gaze is thus ‘the stain’ for Lacan, for it makes us imagine ourselves like a blemish on the landscape, a spot for all to see. The gaze represents the occlusion of the transparency of the eye; if the eye coincides with the Cartesian subject, with the certainty of the ‘I’, the gaze turns us into objects of the Other’s vision. By becoming noticeable, the stain challenges the stability of the field of vision and, thus, of the subject. The tension between what is made visible and what is occluded in the visual realm is recreated by The Exploding Girl’s framing practice. Objects in Gray’s film are stains; they are uncanny points that mark the gaze. It thus becomes clear why such a quiet, composed, understated film alludes to no less than explosion and the disintegration of the Self through its title. The rupture is, of course, threatened by Ivy’s grand mal, which, once again in Lacanian (and Kristevan 1982) terms, marks the boundary between normality and abnormality, between the normative subject and the pre-­socialised self, between the symbolic order and the materiality of the body. Ivy’s epileptic crisis is the explosion announced by the film’s title and foreshadowed by a whole series of narrative clues: the periodic blood tests; the description of the last crisis; the precautions to prevent further crises; Ivy’s breaking the rules by drinking at a party. It is this explosion that, clued by the film’s title, we both expect and fear to see. We fear it, because the epileptic fit is an instance of the emergence of the abject, of the eruption of the Real, of the state of nature, from which we have become severed by our entrance into the symbolic order through language – but which always threatens to reappear: ‘Through the spectacle of the convulsive other, the normative subject is confronted with the spectre of a half-­forgotten, pre-­socialised self’ (Stirling 2010: 116). The abject explosion, capable of deeply destabilising the subject, is at once foretold and forestalled, alluded to and occluded, by all the stains in the film. When it finally deflagrates, the grand mal is, however, also stained – the camera observes Ivy’s seizure from behind some furniture and a semi-­open door, which are so close to the lens as to be blurred; furthermore, Al’s body is in the way, further restricting our scopic field. We look at Ivy’s convulsive body as if through a peephole, surrounded by a large stain that obfuscates most of the screen and of our field of vision. The gaze here looks back at us from behind the veil of representation; and the Lacanian Real is forever missed, deferred, occluded. Far from being the straightforward expression of the film’s ‘indie’ interest in the contingency of naturalism, The Exploding Girl’s objects are thus both an obstacle to and a limit of representation. As such, The Exploding Girl does not simply exploit a filmmaking technique developed for inexpensive,

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52  l a u ra ras caro li instant, independent cinema in order to craft a transparent realism and invite contingency on to the set. Rather, it uses it to forge a deeply symbolic and symptomatic filmic language, through which it frames the human condition like a syndrome.

References Box Office Mojo (n.d.), The Exploding Girl, (last accessed 30 January 2014). Koresky, Michael (2009), ‘The Exploding Girl: What Makes Her Tick?’, Reverse Shot, Issue 26, (last accessed 30 January 2014). Kristeva, Julia (1982), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, Jacques (1998), The Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, edited by Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. by Alan Sheridan, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Saito, Stephen (2011), ‘A Spirited Q & A with “The Exploding Girl” Director Bradley Rust Gray’, IFC.com, 4 February, (last accessed 30 January 2014). Sartre, Jean-­Paul (1956), Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, New York: Washington Square Press. Stirling, Jeannette (2010), Representing Epilepsy: Myth and Matter, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Stone, Rob (2013), The Cinema of Richard Linklater: Walk, Don’t Run, London/New York: Wallflower/Columbia University Press. Willem, Linda M. (1998), ‘Almodóvar on the Verge of Cocteau’s La Voix humaine’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 26, pp. 142–7. Zavattini, Cesare (2000), ‘Some Ideas on the Cinema’, in H. Curle and S. Snyder (eds), Vittorio De Sica: Contemporary Perspectives, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 50–61.

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Ch apter 5

Frozen River (2008): Mobility and Uncertain Boundaries Mark Berrettini

In film school, I often heard the complaint that ‘women’s films’ lacked adventure and this drove me crazy. I grew up with a single mom, who was working and struggling through school and, frankly, paying the rent was an adventure. (Courtney Hunt, screenwriter and director, Frozen River, quoted in Indiewire 2009)

A

s Courtney Hunt proposes above, her Sundance Grand Jury Prize­winning debut feature Frozen River revises standard cinematic depictions of adventure through its representation of international smuggling alongside the stories of two marginalised women raising their children in dire economic situations. Set around the St. Lawrence River within the multinational locations of upstate New York, Ontario, Quebec and the Mohawk Nation in Akwesasne, Hunt’s film foregrounds the borders between these locales as being ripe for risk-­taking activity as it alters aspects of crime films, adventure narratives and ‘women’s films’. Bree Spencer writes: St. Regis Mohawk Reservation (US) and Akwesasne Indian Reservation (Canada), known simply as Akwesasne, is a Native American reservation that straddles twelve miles of the United States–Canadian Border in northern New York State. The geographic, jurisdictional, environmental, and social dynamics of the Akwesasne region create a perfect environment for smuggling . . . Akwesasne spills into the municipalities of New York State, the Provinces of Ontario and Quebec, and the federal jurisdictions of both Canada and the United States. The St. Lawrence River bisects Akwesasne, cutting a forty-­nine acre swath of water and islands through the reservation. The river is narrow and freezes over in the winter ensuring that smugglers can move with ease year round, using speed boats in the warmer seasons and snow mobiles in the winter.

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Figure 5 Misty Upham and Melissa Leo in Frozen River (2008)

In addition to the geographical opportunity that Akwesasne provides to smugglers, the economically depressed nature of the reservation and the cultural marginalisation of the Mohawk people contribute to the vulnerability of the region. Organised crime groups take advantage of the lack of opportunity, hiring members of the community to turn a quick profit by assuming the risk of transporting illicit items through the reservation. (Spencer 2011: 1) Hunt addresses this national and geographic context through the representation of actual and thematic mobility within a winter landscape mise en scène, and as the title suggests, the film’s guiding, dominant conflict is between ‘frozen’ as that which signifies stasis and ‘river’ as that which flows. As Wilfred Raussert writes, a frozen river is an, ‘open pathway and landscape, thus a space for both mobility and vista [where] the border equals a mobile and changeable signifier’ (2011: 21). Similar to films such as Fargo (Joel Coen, 1996), A Simple Plan (Sam Raimi, 1998) or 30 Days of Night (David Slade, 2007), Frozen River complicates aspects of mobility through its use of snow, ice and gray skies. The weather effaces natural and manufactured landscape markers and the boundaries they are meant to delineate. Through repeated shots of snow-laden trees, snowdrifts and ice sheets that obscure the distinction between land and water, the film confronts viewers (in omniscient shots and from characters’ perspectives) with landscapes that reflect complicated psychological and ethical dilemmas related to smuggling and other activities – what are the ‘lines’ that one will cross to support family?1

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It is useful to sketch out Frozen River before I focus on its representation of mobility-­related concerns. The film briskly covers a few days around Christmas, and it opens with a wide shot that tilts up to show the expanse of the frozen St. Lawrence before it cuts to several shots of traffic moving between Canada and the United States and a sign announcing the Massena, New York location of an international border crossing. The film shifts into shots of an unfolding crisis for Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo), a poor white woman who lives in New York state with her two sons, fifteen-­year-old T.J. (Charlie McDermott) and five-­year-old Ricky (James Reilly). It is the morning of the delivery of Ray’s new prefabricated doublewide house for which she has paid a US$1,500 down payment and saved a balloon payment of US$4,200. Just ahead of the delivery, Ray has discovered that her recovering gambling addict husband Troy has relapsed and stolen the cash for the balloon payment that had been hidden in her car’s glove compartment. The delivery is cancelled, and Ray is given a few days to come up with the balloon payment so as not to lose her down payment and the house. Lila Littlewolf (Misty Upham), a younger Mohawk widow whose one-­yearold son lives with her former mother-­in-law, is introduced next as she walks along a busy highway to her job at a high-­stakes bingo hall on the Mohawk reservation. After sending her sons to school with spare change for lunch money, Ray tracks Troy to the bingo hall and finds his car is in the parking lot, but as she puzzles out his whereabouts, Lila leaves the hall and drives away in the car. Ray follows Lila to an isolated small tow trailer that sits within a snowbound grove of trees, and assumes that Troy is inside the trailer. After Ray yells for him to come out, she calmly shoots a pistol into the door, and Lila responds that her husband is not there. Although it is never confirmed, it is likely that Troy has taken a bus to Atlantic City (his flight allows him to escape the fixity of familial domesticity and precludes him from being an onscreen character). Lila and Ray establish their relationship through a debate about borders and the jurisdiction of the New York State Troopers and the Mohawk Tribal Police before Lila abruptly introduces the topic of smuggling. Troy’s car has a push-­button release trunk, which allows a smuggler–driver to stay in the car while on a run, and Lila offers that her smuggler friend will buy the car based upon this device. Ray reluctantly agrees to drive across the frozen river to meet the smuggler, and this decision eventually leads Lila and Ray into an uneasy pact in which they smuggle people, primarily Chinese immigrants, who have entered the reservation from Canada into New York. Smuggling is profitable, but their partnership is not without hazards, disagreements or competing agendas. Ray needs money to pay for her home, and she is not able to smuggle within the Mohawk reservation without Lila. Lila earns money to support her son, who is in the custody of her mother-­in-law against her wishes, and she needs Ray’s car to transport people and Ray’s white subjectivity to provide

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56  m a r k be rre ttini cover in New York. Ray tries to earn more money at her retail job and Lila tries to buy her own car for smuggling, but Ray cannot earn enough money at a legitimate job, while Lila, a known smuggler, cannot buy a used car on the reservation because the tribal council has prohibited tribal members from selling her one. The women turn to smuggling, and, in classic crime film convention, their risky actions escalate as their movements across and within borders keep them just ahead of law enforcement. Several additional problems converge during their fourth smuggling run when the ice on the river is soft and when there are no people on the reservation who need to be brought across the river. Despite these challenges, the women decide to drive into Quebec to what appears to be a rural strip club to deal with a Québécois man (Mark Boone Junior) shown earlier in the film. Lila and Ray pick up two young, possibly Chinese, women, and the conjunction of the location and the women’s subjectivities suggests sex trafficking, but this is not made explicit within the film. When the man tries to undercut the payment, Ray pulls her gun to force him to pay up, and as the women scramble to leave, he fires on them and grazes Ray’s ear.2 The women attract the attention of the Mohawk and the US authorities with their erratic flight from Quebec when their car becomes stuck in the ice, an impediment that forces them to seek refuge in a Mohawk woman’s home. Lila’s brother-­in-law and tribal leader Bernie (John Canoe) arrives at the home to negotiate a solution: Lila will be banned from the tribe for five years, and Ray and the smuggled women must be turned over to the US police. Ray says she cannot do this, and Lila agrees, so Ray flees through the woods before she realises that she must help Lila, turns back, and explains a new plan. Ray will surrender to the authorities and serve a several month prison stint, and Lila will take the smuggling money, buy a used singlewide trailer, and care for a blended family that includes her son and Ray’s sons. A brief scene follows in which Lila confronts her mother-­in-law without violence and retrieves her son, and the film ends at a later date with Lila playing with the three boys outside of Ray’s old home in the sun and surrounded by melting snow as the singlewide is delivered. Melissa Leo’s portrayal of Ray’s blunt style drives the film forward at a quick pace in a manner reminiscent of film noir characters whose constant movement and improvised plans scarcely cover over their desperation. With Leo’s characterisation as the film’s foundation, actual and thematic mobility circulate around Ray throughout, starting with Troy’s flight as it coincides with the delivery of her mobile home. Ray and Troy initially represent a conflict between familial fixity and individual mobility, while the mobile home acts as the material stakes in the conflict, although its name is something of a misnomer since such prefabricated homes, unlike a motorhome or a tow trailer, are only mobile when they are delivered or moved from location to

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location. Within this framework of Ray’s commitment to familial fixity, the mobile home will give her family a secure home base that offers more stability and improves the quality of their environment with its material upgrades from their current singlewide home – it has more space and, as Ray notes several times, it has a jetted spa bathtub and better insulation. The doublewide’s quality offers Ray’s family a more hospitable space, and it becomes a sign of so-­called upward mobility for the family, yet another appearance of mobility within the film. Along with shots of snow and ice, Hunt underscores the importance of the insulation with background radio and television weather reports, in shots of Ray tucking blankets over already-­curtained windows, and through an accident that T.J. initiates while Ray is on a smuggling run. T.J. discovers that the water pipes have frozen, so he thaws them with a propane torch and sets some insulation on fire, which leads Ray to deem the home uninhabitable. T.J. has seen his father use the torch in this way, but in an earlier scene, Ray has forbidden T.J. from using the torch for any reason. When T.J. destroys the insulation and ruins the home, he parallels his father’s disregard for the family’s physical home and spurs Ray into action. Ray must secure a new home quickly now that her singlewide is damaged, and since she is unable to earn more money at her retail job, she plans to smuggle more. Unfortunately for Ray, Lila has quit smuggling at this point in the film after a harrowing run in which they picked up a Pakistani male–female couple. The couple’s ethnic-­national status brings out Ray’s xenophobia in relation to perceived terrorist threats, and she fears that their large bag holds a weapon, so as they cross the river, she leaves the bag on the ice without the couple’s knowledge. At the motel, the distraught couple reveals that the bag held their baby, and the baby is not breathing when Lila and Ray retrieve him. By the time they reach the motel to reunite the family, Lila’s revives the baby, but the incident encourages her to quit smuggling. Ray therefore has to convince Lila to take another run by offering to help her reclaim her son; like characters in so many other crime films, Ray promises Lila that they will give up their criminal activity after one last score. Frozen River blurs the distinctions between lawful enterprise and criminal activity by questioning the system of ‘legitimate’ employment as exemplified by Ray’s job at Yankee Dollar (a narrative feature that recalls gangster films, heist films and drug trafficking narratives that indict business ventures and capitalist institutions). Ray’s ability to save money from her job is an ‘honourable’ way to move up within a class-­bound social sphere, but there seems to be little chance to save money since Ray is unable to secure a full-­time position at Yankee Dollar. Within the theme of mobility, Ray wants to obtain a fixed position at the store, but her manager states that he imagined her to be a short-­time worker. Ray’s valid counterpoint is that she has worked at the store for two

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58  m a r k be rre ttini years, and the film suggests that ageism is at play, since the manager favours a younger woman as a full-­time worker, even though Ray is more reliable. Faced with the inability to earn more money through legitimate work, Ray takes up smuggling with Lila, but maintains the façade of legitimate work by telling T.J. she got a promotion at the store. Lila meanwhile is shunned by several of her Mohawk compatriots, but not because she is a smuggler per se. As Lila notes, smuggling is not considered to be illegal by some Mohawks, but is instead free trade conducted between nations within the borders of Mohawk land. When Lila and Ray first drive through the snowy woods to the entrance to frozen river, Ray baulks at what she deems to be an illegal border crossing into Canada. Lila disputes these concerns with claims of safety – there is a driving path that has been ploughed across the ice – and with the explanation that this crossing is not a border breach since there is no border, just the Mohawk nation on both sides of the river. Lila’s marginalisation on the reservation instead stems from her husband’s death, a past action that is revealed at different moments within the film: a pregnant Lila and her husband became stuck in the melting ice on a smuggling run, and her husband drowned. Soon after, she gave birth, and her mother-­in-law took her newborn son from the hospital, an action sanctioned by some tribal elders as the exchange of one Mohawk son for another. Lila accepts this punishment and does not try to reclaim her son, but she does try to provide for him – Lila leaves her smuggling profits in potato chip cans outside of her mother-­in-law’s house, but her mother-­in-law refuses the money. Assigning blame to Lila ignores her husband’s role in smuggling, however, something that only Bernie acknowledges. Notably, Bernie aids Lila in terms of housing and employment; he owns Lila’s tow trailer home, a home that is less permanent than Ray’s and that signifies lack of stability and economic status when compared with Ray. Lila’s free trade becomes more difficult at the US border. When Ray and Lila take two Chinese men off the reservation into the US in their first smuggling run, a New York State Trooper waits at the border, but he does not stop the women. Lila explains this inaction in racial terms in that Ray’s presence assures that their border crossing will not be impeded. The assumption is that the state police would not suspect that Ray is involved in smuggling because she is a white woman, and her whiteness thus advances their mobility so that she and Lila are able to take the Chinese men to a motel in New York with no trouble. Ray’s mobility as a white woman again comes to the forefront of the narrative later in the film when a white New York State Trooper (Miles O’Keefe), probably the same trooper who was stationed at the border, warns Ray about Lila’s status as a smuggler. Feigning surprise, Ray claims that Lila is her babysitter and plays to the trooper’s assumptions about Ray’s whiteness (she is not a smuggler) and about Lila’s Mohawk subjectivity (she is domestic

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help, a white woman’s babysitter), which rest upon stereotyped appreciations of Lila’s and Ray’s racial and national difference. In such moments, Hunt effectively depicts how much Lila and Ray understand and exploit the racist underpinnings of mobility, social and actual, within their lives. Indeed, Ray supports such a racialised worldview when she disputes Lila’s claims about the sovereignty of the Mohawk nation and when she suspects the smuggled Pakistanis of terrorist intentions, but does not scrutinise the Chinese. As Ray explains to Ricky at another point in the film, the Chinese are trading partners of the US; she half-­jokingly tells him that their old home will become scrap metal that is shipped to China where it is made into toys that are shipped back to the US so that she can sell them in the dollar store. While both women function within localised communities that have fraught connections, both women acknowledge their places within global institutions and networks via these acts of smuggling, their comments about trade and Ray’s unfounded fears of terrorism. At the film’s conclusion, Lila and Ray have created an alliance beyond smuggling and informed by gender in order to support their children, pool resources and negotiate the legal authority of their respective states. Lila is banned from the reservation for a specified time period, but she and her son will not be homeless, while Ray will serve some time in jail, but Lila will care for her children; in a roundabout way, Lila does become Ray’s babysitter, but not in the usual configuration of this role. Ray’s husband’s betrayal no longer matters since she and Lila have sidestepped the nuclear family model and since the film does not rely upon mainstream cinematic conventions of heteronormative narrative closure. Frozen River’s representation of the Troy–Ray conflict counters standard cinematic representations of struggles between men and women in relation to gendered spheres of work and action. Whereas Troy functions as an active agent unbound by social or domestic concerns, he does not act as Ray’s saviour or as his family’s hero. Instead, the film represents Ray as an agent of change in relation to activities frequently depicted in film and television as women’s work, within the home and in retail environments, or men’s work, smuggling and evading legal authority. As an indication of the influence of such gendered notions of work, the film presents a running subplot about T.J.’s belief that he will fare better than his mother will within the working world, even though he is fifteen, has no work experience, and does not always display the best judgement. According to T.J.’s plan, he will not have a high school education, but he will have a leg up and gain access into the work world since gendered subjectivity outweighs his education level and his age. Ray does not support T.J. and instead reminds him that his job is to take care of his younger brother, a decidedly domestic pursuit that T.J. does not ignore, but does not value as much as working for pay. It is out of this context that T.J. becomes involved in a credit card scam

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60  m a r k be rre ttini and cons an older Mohawk woman into giving him her credit card number, which he sells to a classmate. At the film’s conclusion, a Mohawk Tribal Police officer brings the woman to Ray’s and Lila’s home so that T.J. can apologise to her, a resolution that mirrors Ray’s incarceration, but that also indicates that T.J. now accedes to Ray’s point of view. The gendered aspects of Lila’s outsider status on the reservation, finally, are challenged in Frozen River’s conclusion. Lila has been blamed for the death of her husband by other women and therefore is deemed unfit to be a mother. Through the action of partnering with Ray as smugglers, Lila reverses her predicament through the very act that helped to marginalise her. By creating an affiliation with Ray, Lila is able to reclaim her son, and the film presents this coupling as a successful one since the women negotiate the complex boundaries of their lives into a collaborative and stable situation. Hunt refrains from bringing in absent fathers or other men to offer solutions to Lila’s and Ray’s challenges so that the film, following from Gilbey’s (2009) comments, offers an alternative to mainstream, Thelma and Louise-­type narratives. Frozen River’s representation of a secure resolution for the two women and their families that does not rely upon men falls well in line with Hunt’s (above-­mentioned) notion of the ‘adventure’ that is single motherhood.

N o te s 1. For some of Hunt’s thinking about national borders that went into Frozen River, see her short commentary, ‘Lawless Hearts’. Along with Spencer, see Ruth Jamieson, ‘“Contested Jurisdiction Border Communities” and Cross-­Border Crime – The Case of Akwesasne’. Kate Morris also provides a description of these borders in ‘Running the “Medicine Line”: Images of the Border in the Contemporary Native American Art’, in which she discusses, ‘an increasing number of references to borders in contemporary Native American art and an increasing occurrence of border-­rights conflicts between Native nations and the governments of the United States and Canada [from a] period [of] roughly 1990 to the present’ (2011: 550–1). On the film’s representation of snow and ice, Raussert writes, ‘the snow’s grayness reflects the gray sky above. With such an opening earth and sky are hardly separable as both are dressed in grayish white. A borderline between the two is visually dismantled, as the camera shots create a vision blurring earth and sky’ (2011: 21); see this essay for a compelling consideration of Foucault’s notion of heterotopia and what the author names ‘inter-­American border discourses’ within the film. For another good consideration of Frozen River, see Kristin N. Frank’s MA thesis, ‘Exclusion at the Border: Female Smugglers in Maria Full of Grace and Frozen River’. 2. Early in the film, Ray’s willingness to shoot at Lila’s trailer appears unremarkable to both women, and Gilbey provides a good description of this scene and the later use of guns in the film in his review of it: ‘Guns are generally shown to be as much a part of life as snow shovels. One clever piece of framing has Ray shooting at Lila’s trailer door, without the camera first revealing that she has drawn, or even owns, a weapon. The effect is both to deny the firearm its traditional fetishisation, while paradoxically making its casual use all

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the more disturbing. It ensures too that the moment when Ray has to pull the gun on an adversary, to defend herself and Lila, is stripped of any Thelma and Louise-­style titillation. It’s just business’ (2009: 49).

R e f e r e nc e s Franks, Kristin N. (2009), Exclusion at the Border: Female Smugglers in Maria Full of Grace and Frozen River, Ohio University, MA Thesis. Gilbey, Ryan (2009), ‘Northern Exposure’, Sight and Sound, August, pp. 48–9, 63. Hunt, Courtney (2009), ‘Lawless Hearts’, Sight and Sound, August, p. 49. Indiewire (2009), ‘Oscar ‘09: Frozen River’s Courtney Hunt’, Indiewire, 12 February,