Film and Ethics : What Would You Have Done? [1 ed.] 9781443866460, 9781443844161

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Film and Ethics

LIVERPOOL HOPE UNIVERSITY STUDIES IN ETHICS SERIES SERIES EDITOR: DR DAVID TOREVELL SERIES DEPUTY EDITOR: DR JACQUI MILLER VOLUME ONE: ENGAGING RELIGIOUS EDUCATION Editors: Joy Schmack, Matthew Thompson and David Torevell with Camilla Cole

VOLUME TWO: RESERVOIRS OF HOPE: SUSTAINING SPIRITUALITY IN SCHOOL LEADERS Author: Alan Flintham

VOLUME THREE: LITERATURE AND ETHICS: FROM THE GREEN KNIGHT TO THE DARK KNIGHT Editors: Steve Brie and William T. Rossiter

VOLUME FOUR: POST-CONFLICT RECONSTRUCTION Editor: Neil Ferguson

VOLUME FIVE: FROM CRITIQUE TO ACTION: THE PRACTICAL ETHICS OF THE ORGANIZATIONAL WORLD Editors: David Weir and Nabil Sultan

VOLUME SIX: A LIFE OF ETHICS AND PERFORMANCE Editors: John Matthews and David Torevell

VOLUME SEVEN: PROFESSIONAL ETHICS: EDUCATION FOR A HUMANE SOCIETY Editors: Feng Su and Bart McGettrick

VOLUME EIGHT: CATHOLIC EDUCATION: UNIVERSALLY PRINCIPLES, LOCALLY APPLIED Editor: Andrew B. Morris

VOLUME NINE: GENDERING CHRISTIAN ETHICS Editor: Jenny Daggers

VOLUME TEN: PURSUING EUDAIMONIA: RE-APPROPRIATING THE GREEK PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE CHRISTIAN APOPHATIC TRADITION Brendan Cook

VOLUME ELEVEN: FILM AND ETHICS: WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE? Editor: Jacqui Miller

Film and Ethics: What Would You Have Done?

Edited by

Jacqui Miller

Film and Ethics: What Would You Have Done?, Edited Jacqui Miller This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2013 by Jacqui Miller and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4416-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4416-1

CONTENTS

Foreword

vii

Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction 1

“Rape, Ultra-violence and Beethoven”: The Transgressiveness and Controversial Success of A Clockwork Orange Peter Krämer

1

11

2 Confessions of a Nazi Spy: An Exercise in Courageous Filmmaking Jacqui Miller 29 3 The Unwritten Moral Code in Rcent Indian Cinema: Deception and Atonement? Felicity Hand

50

4 Morality, Politics and Self-interest: Framing the Hollywood Blacklist Brian Neve

67

5 The Film Spectator as “Bricoleur”: An Ethics of Viewing and Poaching John Keefe

82

6 The Wire: Moral Ambiguity and the Heroic Detective Agency Roshan Singh

106

7 The Ethics of Intimacy: The Restless Body, Performance and Desire Beth Johnson

136

vi

Table of Contents

8 From Filth to Fame: John Waters and Divine in the Dreamland Days Joseph Christopher Schaub

147

Contributors

166

Index

168

FOREWORD

Explicitly or implicitly, issues of ethics underpin every aspect of life, as public institutions and private individuals make decisions that will inform their own welfare and the lives of others. The ethical impulse and its determination has recently gained considerable intellectual attention, as many in the academy seek to understand the moral challenges and opportunities their own subject area presents. This series, which flows naturally from Liverpool Hope University’s unique mission, is distinctive in its multidisciplinary range and encompasses arts and humanities, social sciences, business and education. Each volume is informed by the latest research and poses important questions for academics, students and all those who wish to reflect more deeply on the values inherent within different disciplines. Bringing together international subject specialists, the series explores the complexities of ethics, its theoretical analysis and its practical applications and through the breadth of contributing subjects, demonstrates that understanding ethics is central to contemporary scholarship.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to everyone who has contributed to, or supported this book, and I would particularly like to acknowledge the patience of my contributors, my series editor David Torevell, and the staff at Cambridge Scholars Press, especially Carol Koulikourdi. Christopher Pipe was an invaluable proof-reader. Throughout, Liverpool Hope University has been unwavering in its support of research, made evident by its funding which has made this volume and the series possible

INTRODUCTION

At first glance, “ethics” is not necessarily a subject conventionally associated with film. Film is often regarded as a form of “lowbrow” popular culture, either offering bland entertainment or deliberately setting out to shock – or, more cynically, generate box office revenue – through gratuitous inclusion of sex and violence. There have always been a minority of films based on the stereotypically “ethical” subject of religion, although these have often generated the most controversy, from the studio system decree that it was blasphemous to represent the corporeal body of Christ to the furore surrounding Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988); more recently, scholarship has investigated issues such as disability (Pointon, 1997), representations of children (Mills & Mills, 2000) and of animals (Burt, 2002) . This book, however, will show that from the classical studio era to the present day, film has been inherently concerned with ethical issues. This is well illustrated by the chapters’ range of subject matters. Felicity Hand examines Bollywood as a space for the resolution of issues of fundamentalism and ethnic violence; Beth Johnson, through her reading of Patrice Chéreau’s Intimacy (2001) considers the significance of different types of intimacy such as emotional, physical, verbal and nonverbal; Peter Krämer investigates A Clockwork Orange’s (Stanley Kubrick, 1971) success and reception; John Keefe analyses the role of the spectator as a decision maker in the process of engagement with film; Jacqui Miller presents a study of the production and exhibition history of the groundbreaking American film Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Anatole Litvak, 1939); Joseph Schaub takes a revisionist perspective of John Waters’ Dreamland collaborations with Divine, Brian Neve assesses motivations of those caught up in Hollywood’s blacklist during the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) investigations, and Roshan Singh evaluates moral ambiguities surrounding characterizations of the detective in the HBO series The Wire. These chapters encompass a wide time frame from the 1930s (Miller), the 1950s (Neve), the 1970s (Schaub and Krämer) to the contemporary

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era (Johnson, Hand, Singh), a broad range of cinematic practice from the classical studio era (Miller), American mid-century independent work (Neve), American underground cinema (Schaub) the British/American renaissance (Krämer), contemporary art-house (Johnson), and Bollywood (Hand). A range of national productions is also presented from American (Miller, Schaub, Singh, Neve), British-American (Krämer), Anglo-French (Johnson), and Indian (Hand). It is also the case that several of the chapters address visual forms that cannot be narrowly conscribed. The Wire is a TV series, but shares many cinematic concepts and techniques, while Keefe’s study of the spectator draws on theories that may be equally well applied to live drama as to film. Indeed this point of multiplicity is highlighted by contributors. Keefe’s chapter exemplifies this in its ranging across film history and nationality from the classical musical (South Pacific) to the French New Wave (Cleo from 5 to 7, Weekend) to the Hitchcock thriller (Psycho) to the modern musical (Sweeney Todd) and this breadth is captured by a definition of one chapter’s subject: many popular Indian films are referred to as masala, originally a blend of spices, indicating the variety of different elements – music, song, dance, romance, action, comedy and drama – that can make up any one film (Nayar, 2004: 14).

Notwithstanding this range, links, commonalities and continuities may be seen across what might appear to be a disparate group of texts; several of the personnel involved in the making of Confessions of a Nazi Spy would, like Cyn Endfield and Elia Kazin, the main protagonists of Neve’s chapter, be caught up in the HUAC investigations, and Neve’s references to the “spy cases” of the 1950s and the notion of studies of the HUAC years as a “moral detective story” makes his chapter a fulcrum between Confessions of a Nazi Spy and The Wire; Johnson and Schaub both draw on French existentialist writings to underpin their arguments; Confessions of a Nazi Spy and A Clockwork Orange, although being made more than 30 years apart, were both produced by Warner Brothers, a studio with a long-standing reputation for courageous filmmaking. However, it remains to be demonstrated exactly how the works under consideration engage with ethics. It will be argued that this engagement has two principal elements. First, film is an arena for the construction and transmission of meaning. As Hand has described, it creates a “space”, a space of which studio production chief Jack Warner was well aware when he told the New York Times that “the visual power of the screen is tremendous”. But it

Introduction

3

would be simplistic simply to see the filmic text of itself as a discrete entity, the sole purveyor of meaning; there are many agencies involved in a film’s construction, transmission and reception, all of which contribute their own perspectives and ethics, and agencies to be considered include the filmmaker (an entity not limited to the producer or director), cinematic technique, characterization which is aligned to but also distinct from the actors playing their parts, the film industry and regulatory bodies such as America’s pre-1968 Production Code Administration (PCA) and the UK’s British Board of Film Censors as well as government bodies such as HUAC, the contextualizing society and the film audience. It should also be borne in mind that these are not necessarily static categories. For example, a film such as Confessions of a Nazi Spy was made at a time when the PCA narrowly proscribed film content (or at least attempted to do so) meaning that films, once having a PCA seal of approval, were available for a whole-family audience. As Krämer describes, in America at least this changed in 1968 with the demise of the PCA and the introduction of the ratings system which restricted not so much subject matter, but the age of intended audiences. In the West, these changes may have taken place towards the end of that decade of cultural upheaval, the 1960s, but, as Hand points out, Bollywood films made today have to be as careful as the makers of Confessions of a Nazi Spy 70 years ago: Mainstream films in the subcontinent are designed to cater for such a wide range of age groups, social classes, caste affiliations, and a multiplicity of ethno-religious backgrounds that delicate areas like sexuality and communalism need to be treated with the utmost caution for fear of causing offense. (Gokulsing & Dissanayaka, 1998).

Moreover, each historical period, from the perspective of its own inevitably subjective stance, will tend to revise judgements that once seemed fixed, for example, films granted “R” (in the United States) or “X” (in the UK) upon their original release have seen this modified upon their subsequent DVD launch as perspectives on what is suitable viewing, and for whom, change across time. Indeed, this leads into the second strand of the argument about film’s relationship with ethics. Throughout the chapters, certain terms recur, sometimes being the titular focus. Krämer writes of A Clockwork Orange’s “transgressiveness”, echoed closely by Schaub’s references to “shock value”, and Johnson’s attention to “new extreme” filmmaking. Seemingly conversely in relation to these culturally oppositional expressions, Miller makes claims for the “courage” of Warners in making Confessions of a Nazi Spy, and Neve considers the “morality” of those considering their responses

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to the blacklist. However, as if to demonstrate that meaning is always in flux, not only across time, Singh considers the “moral ambiguity” of the detective, while Hand acknowledges that a “moral code” may be aligned to “deception”. Throughout the chapters, and indeed throughout cinema, the driving narrative force hinges upon decision-making: Intimacy opens with Jay’s decision to try and end a relationship over which he seems to have no control; Warner Brothers had to decide whether to defy the PCA’s strictures to go ahead and make Confessions of a Nazi Spy; Cy Endfield and Elia Kazan had to decide whether or not to follow their conscience with regard to HUAC; Keefe posits the spectator as a “decision maker”. However, in each instance what might have been a decision becomes what Hand describes (in her section “the undecidable decides”) as “a terrible dilemma”. There are always at least two alternatives between which the decision-maker is pulled, recalling Hanna Schmitz’s (Kate Winslet) cry “What would you have done?” to the prosecuting counsel in The Reader (Stephen Daldry, 2008). As a working class woman in Nazi Germany, Hanna made what was to her a rational decision to take employment that would earn her keep and also hide the illiteracy of which she is bitterly ashamed – so ashamed that she would ultimately face life imprisonment rather than have it revealed. That this work happened to be as an SS guard shows the subjectivity of an ethical perspective, and also forces the spectator to search their own conscience; Schmitz doing her job as a guard would have been an ethical given within the Nazi regime. Of course Nazism was evil, but The Reader posits the uncomfortable possibility that at least some of those who, like Schmitz, were caught up in its practices might not have been evil but just pragmatic. How many people today, who fully recognize the evil of Nazism, would necessarily have had the courage to stand against it if they had been in Schmitz’ position? Indeed, Neve draws on this analogy when he quotes Cy Endfield’s conundrum as he considers whether or not to testify to HUAC: And I thought of the situation of being in Germany, and your best friend was a Jewish doctor who saved your life as a child. And you are coming down the street, and he is being kicked to death by a bunch of SS and Nazi activists. If you don’t put your own foot in they say, “Well, what’s wrong with you, you are under suspicion” (Neve, 1989: 120).

This book will take as its central theme the difficulty of decisions refracted through personal ethical codes, and will thus recognize that what counts as ethics, or morality, is always subjective and the product of a range of competing ethical perspectives which will now be examined.

Introduction

5

It might be presumed that in the making of a film (or television programme), the principal guiding force, or ethical vision belongs to the director (supported by the producer and production personnel) and the cast will channel this idea. Certainly most of the chapters are concerned with those who have been known either for a distinctive visual style or for an ideological outlook, each often informing and heightening the other. Stanley Kubrick was a highly influential maverick director who was far too individualistic to ever be categorized as part of a distinct film movement; his box office success with “two of the highest grossing blockbusters of all time (Spartacus in 1960 and 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968)” allowing him an extraordinary degree of autonomy in his work. John Waters in his early career, working with his Dreamland cast, particularly leading lady Divine, in their hunger for fame, developed, counter to Hollywood gloss, “a code that was at once an aesthetic principle, a marketing strategy, and an ethical practice”. Although corresponding to the art house rather than underground filmmaking, Patrice Chéreau also seeks to push back filmic boundaries in his “explorative extreme cinema”. The players in the HUAC drama used their filmmaking as an opportunity, before and after the inquisition, to make overt political commentary. Although the decisions through which Elia Kazin’s characters worked before HUAC might not have appeared to represent an analogy to their director’s personal choices, for instance Pinky’s choice (Pinky, 1949) to remain within her black identity despite her greater freedom in being able to pass for white, his subsequent account of his own decision to inform merges the desire for fame with a seemingly genuine adherence to an individual code that marked Waters’ stance: “I think of the choices I had, that was the right choice . . . As a matter of fact, as the years pass, I’ve been rather pleased with myself for what I did.” Throughout the studio era, or at least until FDR’s death, Warner Brothers was known as the social conscience studio, making films defending the “underdog” in American society, and making critical commentary on abuses in American society as well as implying where America should intervene internationally, whatever ire it might incur from the PCA. Confessions’ producer, Hal Wallis, commented: “Because Jack Warner and I were deeply concerned over the crisis in Europe in the late 1930s, we decided to undertake a policy of opposition to Nazism in our pictures, despite the very strong possibility that isolationist elements in America would surely criticise us”, a stance that probably unanimously reflects the attitude of all those involved in the production on both sides of the camera. HBO, producers of The Wire, has been seen as inheriting the mantle of Warners’ studio-era crusading as a company that “enlightens, enriches, challenges, involves and confronts. It dares to take risks, it’s honest

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and illuminating, it appeals to the intellect and touches the emotions. It requires concentration and attention, and it provokes thought” (Thomson, 1997: 13). Whilst deliberately dealing in controversial subject matters, the filmmakers discussed in Hand’s chapter remain aware of “the ever vigilant Censor Board which will order the deletion of scenes considered to be unnecessarily provocative” (Ganti, 2004). This is a reminder that filmmakers necessarily practise within the constraints of the film industry and its regulatory bodies, including governmental controls which may set up contrary or at least competing ethical visions around a film. In 1939, both Franklin Roosevelt and Warners faced regulatory strictures. Roosevelt was hampered in his desire to assist Britain and France by a climate of appeasement and isolationism, but sought to negotiate with Congress to revise neutrality legislation, referring by implication to the individual’s ethical code: “I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought . . . Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or his conscience”. Warners’ institutional opposition was threefold. First, the Hays Office, a body charged with overseeing film regulation since the silent era, objected that the film would lose Hollywood revenues, as it would alienate German-Americans in the United States and also the Axis and neutral nations overseas. Second, the German Consul in Los Angeles, George Gysell, raised objections with the third regulatory opponent of the film, PCA chief Joseph I. Breen. Although the PCA had a strict list of precluded film subjects, of which foreign commentary was one, as an anti-Semite, Breen’s own personal beliefs clashed with those of the Confessions production team, foreshadowing the religious clashes which Hand describes in her chapter on Bollywood. Made at another phase in the history of censorship, as the PCA had given way to the ratings system, censorship, or responses to it, has a prominent role in the cultural meaning given to A Clockwork Orange. An “R” certificate would have meant that children under 17 could have seen the film if accompanied by an adult, thus generating potentially much greater box office receipts, whereas an “X” certificate would have limited audiences to those over 18. It is likely that Kubrick’s auteur status and consistent box office results enabled him to remain within his directorial vision, or ethical code, and insist that the film retained its original content, rather than being tamed by cuts: “Kubrick is thought to have had final cut rights on Clockwork so WB couldn’t have battled the rating if it had wanted to” (Anon., 1971). However, added to this is the studio context of Warner Brothers. The social conscience studio of the 1930s, described by Groucho Marx during the making of Confessions as the only studio with “guts”, underwent a renaissance in this regard during the late 1960s/early 1970s, giving a comparatively free rein to directors. As Variety

Introduction

7

noted of Clockwork’s certificate in the article quoted above: “Warners is the only major [studio] to have two X features this year, with most of the other companies doing their utmost to avoid the rating” (Anon., 1971). Facing investigation by a federal government agency rather than a regulatory body, Neve’s protagonists also show the multivalence of ethics. It is stereotypical to see “friendly” witnesses to HUAC, those who named colleagues, as standing outside the pale; however, ethical considerations must mean listening to the range of voices. Kazin captures the lack of certainty that is part of the ethical concept: “I was trying to show that right and wrong get mixed up, and that there are values that have to be looked at more deeply than in that absolute approval-or-disapproval syndrome of my Left friends” (Ciment, 1973: 121). This sense of randomness, that meaning is constructed and imposed rather than inherent, is important too for Johnson’s work: “The problem is that censors create the concept of obscenity” (Brooks, 2001). At a more macro level, every film reflects its wider social context. Film is one of the richest sources for the cultural historian, providing not only a snapshot of the modes of speech, fashions and landscape of the times, but more importantly their mood, atmosphere and dominant ideology. It is likely that certain films are the product of a particular moment and could not have been made earlier, and probably not later. As Krämer points out, A Clockwork Orange was made at a time in cinema history when taboo-breaking films had popular success. This is partly due to the dynamics of the film industry in an era when directors were given unprecedented freedom, but that in itself is tied to American society’s receptivity for such films in the context of the Vietnam War and the Nixon presidency. Just as the violence of A Clockwork Orange can stand as a metaphor for war, so too a film set in the historical past may make commentary on its own present day. Neve considers a range of films which made metaphorical commentary on HUAC, from the biblical epic The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953), to a Western, High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952), to American and French noirs, Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953) and Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955), to a contemporary social commentary, The Underworld Story (Cy Endfield, 1950), as well as On the Waterfront (1954), which may be read as a line-by-line defence for director Elia Kazin’s (and screenwriter, Budd Schulberg and cast member Lee J. Cobb) act of informing. That film is able to act through metaphor underscores its status as a space or arena in which marginalized groups may confront dominant ideology. Intimacy depicts “a distinctly British . . . part of social alienation in the 21st century” – just as A Clockwork Orange did in 1972. Likewise, Waters’ Dreamlanders are his “hippie outcast friends”, whilst The Wire, like Waters’ films set in Baltimore some 30-plus years on, focuses on “the lower echelons

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of the community”. What is evident is that these outsiders have their own moral or ethical codes, perhaps contrary to those of the mainstream, but which necessarily expose hegemonic control. Just as A Clockwork Orange is redolent of the hypocrisy of a society which condemns those who enjoy violence whilst its government is supporting an undeclared colonial war in Vietnam, The Wire imbues drug dealers and petty criminals with a certain nobility for remaining within their “no snitching” code whilst they are in fact “dispensable commodities to be utilised like fodder, signed up to die like soldiers” – an analogy with the conflict in Iraq, ever lurking on the series’ margins. As Keefe suggests, “any discussion of film needs to treat the film as something in itself – a textual object”. Thus the construction of film through cinematic technique is aligned to previously discussed notions of ambiguity and deception, particularly with regard to issues of truth, reality and authenticity, and will lead on to considerations of the agency of characters and their relationship with actors “playing” or performing these parts. Jean-Luc Godard’s comment that “Cinema is truth 24 frames per second, and every cut is a lie” is echoed by Michael Haneke: “film is a lie at 24 frames per second”. If all non-documentary films are fiction, which is the more “truthful”: the classical studio film which effaces technique and purports to be reality, or the art house picture which foregrounds its technique and therefore its textuality but equally remains a work of artifice? Moreover, what is the ethical code propelling the choice? The production team on Confessions of a Nazi Spy went to great lengths to make a picture which was rendered “realistic” by incorporating actual documentary footage and a documentary-style narrator. Every detail was made as accurate as possible, but some of the highly deceptive methods needed to achieve this – the use of a miniature camera, photostatting German Bund literature, and the mooted possibility of joining the Bund – were surely antithetical to the ostensible ethical code of the team, practices that indeed replicated the very actions of the “spies” that were the film’s subject. This clearly brings into focus the liminality of ethics. Film technique or an “aesthetic principle” was also central for John Waters. This is explored through the shocking images in Multiple Maniacs. For Waters, everything seen is real. Some of the activities are incontrovertibly authentic but others may be staged, which again calls into question whether faithfulness to a code (in this case, Waters’ self styled “code of filth”) is provable. Implicit in the discourse between authenticity and ethics is the tension between the actor and the character. As Singh notes: “Although characters are not human beings, they are the agents through which human disposition is explored that enables the audience to experience emotions that may be attractive

Introduction

9

or repulsive.” Within classical cinema, although the audience is invited to suspend disbelief there remains a tacit understanding that an actor is playing a part. However, film that sets out to push boundaries, such as that of Waters, or Johnson’s “new extreme” cinema, may, as Johnson puts it, “blur the boundaries between performance and the real”. Like Waters’ shocking sights, some of the sex acts in Intimacy are palpably real, and performed for the first time within a British mainstream art-house film. This new authenticity causes “a disruption between actor and character”. Because the actor is physically performing an act, are they themselves or their character having the experience and is it indeed possible to draw an effective demarcation? Returning once more to the construction of meaning through cinematic technique, Johnson refers to “non-sensational camerawork” fixing “the perspective of the spectator”. Ultimately, it is the spectator or audience that remains the final part of the equation of film and ethics, particularly with regard to constructions of reality: “The fact remains that viewing suffering is especially problematic when the object of suffering is presumed to be real” (Boltanski 1991: 23). Similarly, for Schaub, Waters’ construction of authentically “real”, shocking acts, challenges the audience’s ethics, in this context, a sense of “decency”: “Rather than recoil in disgust, however, we watch intently. We, therefore, if we reflect upon it, are forced to acknowledge that we are not decent people.” Keefe’s phrase “the spectator as decision maker” invokes one of the pivots – the decision – of this book’s discussion of ethics and film. Certainly, film may seek to construct meaning for the spectator, drawing on a mutually recognized experience of “reality”, and this may be a necessary function of the filmmaker’s own code. As Nick Roddick points out in the discussion of Confessions of a Nazi Spy, “almost every scene has the feeling of an invisible presence – that of the ordinary American viewer at whom the dialogue is really aimed”. Classical cinematic technique relies on this relationship between spectator and character: The camera is such a persuasive tool and the absurd idea in fiction of a ‘central character’ so flattering to our sense of individuality that we respond intuitively to anyone who is deemed worthy of close-ups, or who is honoured with the responsibility of providing a voice-over. (Gilbey, 2003: 200)

This practice can be used to unsettle rather than comfort. As Keefe shows, films such as Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960), through their point of view shots, place the audience in the position of voyeurism, and Krämer points out that one of the ethical dilemmas within A Clockwork Orange is that it “aligns the viewer” with

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“an extremely violent young criminal . . . throughout his crimes”. Despite the spectator’s unease at implied identification with a killer, or engagement with scopophilia, to believe that the camera constructs a stance that cannot be challenged presents the dichotomous position that on the one hand, a spectator’s own code of ethics is transgressed by the activities with which they are “forcibly” aligned, whilst at the same time they are liberated to enjoy this spectacle – quite literally spectacle in the case of Bollywood, in which “episodes of violence and conspiracy are interspersed with song and dance routines” – because it has been “imposed”, thus retaining the sense that their code remains unsullied, or as Lietch says in discussion of The Wire, “the central function of the crime film [is] to allow viewers to experience the vicarious thrills of criminal behaviour, whoever is practicing it, as immoral”. Keefe sums it up: “we watch the otherwise un-watch-able”. However, spectators remain “decision makers”. As Johnson suggests, “a “morally neutral” perspective is impossible. Taking account of each individual’s personal experience and place in history, all those involved in the production and reception of a film will make an interpretation that responds to their own subjective but equally flawed and valid code of ethics.

References Anon. 1971a. ‘“X” for Clockwork: WB Must Accept “As Is” of Kubrick’, Variety 15 December. Unpaginated clipping in the A Clockwork Orange clippings file, Performing Arts Research Centre (PARC), New York Public Library. Boltanski, Luc. 1999. Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, trans. Graham Burchell. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Brooks, Libby. 2001. ‘The Joy of Sex’, Guardian Unlimited 23 November, available at www.filmguardian.co.uk/censorship/news/0,11729,660428,00.html – accessed 22 October 2005. Burt, Jonathan. 2002. Animals in Film. London. Reaktion Books. Ciment, Michel. 1973. Kazan on Kazan. New York. HarperCollins. Ganti, Tejaswini. 2004. Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema. London. Routledge. Gilbey, Ryan. 2003. It Don’t Worry Me: Nashville, Jaws, Star Wars and Beyond. London. Faber and Faber. Mills, Jean & Mills, Ricard W. 2000. Childhood Studies: A Reader in Perspectives of Childhood. London. Routledge. Pointon, Ann with Davies, Chris. 1997. Framed: Interrogating Disability in the Media. London. British Film Institute. Thompson, Richard J. 1996. Television’s Golden Age. Syracuse, NY. Syracuse University Press.

CHAPTER ONE “RAPE, ULTRA-VIOLENCE AND BEETHOVEN”: THE TRANSGRESSIVENESS AND CONTROVERSIAL SUCCESS OF A CLOCKWORK ORANGE PETER KRÄMER After consuming spiked drinks in a futuristic bar filled with pornographic furniture, four young men embark on an evening of violence. First they mock and beat up a homeless drunk, then they do battle with another gang who were about to rape a young woman in an abandoned theatre, and after that they steal a car. Finally the gang’s leader, Alex, who from the outset has provided a running voice-over commentary on the action using a peculiar slang, talks his way into a house in the countryside, where the four proceed to beat up a man and to make him watch while they rape his wife. Alex returns home and listens to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The next morning, he tells his parents that he cannot go to school because he does not feel well. He is visited by his social worker, after which he goes to a record shop where he picks up two young women with whom he proceeds to have sex in his room. He then meets the rest of his gang. An argument ensues and Alex asserts his authority by beating up two gang members. Afterwards, he breaks into the house of a middle-aged woman; he gets into a fight with her and batters her to death with the sculpture of a giant phallus. Waiting outside the house, the other gang members betray him. One of them hits him in the face with a bottle before the police arrive to arrest him. This is the action – much of it presented in a very graphic manner – of the first third of Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange, which was released in the United States in December 1971. Within a few weeks of its release, the film was named Best Motion Picture of 1971 by the New York Film Critics Association, and Kubrick won in the category Best Direction (Steinberg, 1980: 269). The film was also listed as one of the year’s ten best movies by the New York Times and Time magazine, and it was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay (Steinberg, 1980: 175, 179, 246). By the end of its long run in American theatres, the film had earned $17 million in rentals, which made

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it the seventh highest grossing title among the 432 films released in the US in 1971 (Krämer, 2005: 108; Steinberg, 1980: 43). It would seem, then, that despite its intensely transgressive opening sequence and the equally transgressive rest of the story (in which Alex escapes all punishment in the end), A Clockwork Orange was at – or close to – the very heart of American film culture in the early 1970s. However, the critical reception of A Clockwork Orange was by no means unanimously positive; quite on the contrary, the film was highly controversial. Indeed, A Clockwork Orange featured prominently in the Harvard Lampoon’s long-running “Movie Worsts” awards. It headed the list of the year’s “Ten Worst Movies”, while “the entire Society of New York Film Critics” won the award intended to identify “the film critic whose writing has most consistently explored the limits of bad taste” for naming A Clockwork Orange the best film of the year (Steinberg, 1980: 330). Critical attacks went beyond matters of taste; as we will see later, several writers accused the film and its supporters of promoting a nihilistic worldview which might encourage, in the world outside the movie theatre, both violent behaviour by members of the audience and political support for repressive state measures against such behaviour. Thus, A Clockwork Orange raises (at least) two very different ethical issues, one to do with the film’s success, the other with the attacks on it. At first sight, it is surely surprising that a film which features so much explicit sex and graphic violence focuses on the actions and experiences of an extremely violent young criminal and aligns the viewer with this protagonist throughout his crimes, his punishment and his final release from all constraints, could have been such a huge mainstream success. So how might we explain the success of this morally transgressive movie? In the first section of this essay, I propose to answer this question by looking at hit patterns at the American box office. I show that taboo-breaking films such as A Clockwork Orange were very prominent in the box office charts of this period, but not before and after. With regard to the attacks on the film, I then examine the film’s provocative marketing and the concerns expressed by film reviewers and other commentators about its possible impact, starting with cautionary remarks by the film’s supporters and ending with claims of its most vigorous detractors about the moral shortcomings of the film and of its appreciative audiences.

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Box Office Trends If we want to explain a film’s box office success, we can in principle distinguish between two different basic logics. On the one hand, a film might build on existing hit patterns, intensifying a particular pattern or combining various patterns, so that it can appeal to the cinemagoers whose preferences were responsible for establishing these hit patterns in the first place. On the other hand, a film might be innovative and thus able to meet an established, or emerging, preference among (actual or potential) cinemagoers which had previously not been met by the film industry’s output (Krämer, 2005: 38). The box office success of A Clockwork Orange can best be explained with reference to both logics being at work at the same time. The film built on several hit patterns established in the late 1960s, and these patterns in turn were innovative in meeting certain audience preferences that Hollywood had not previously catered for. When examining the annual charts of top grossing movies at the US box office (Krämer, 2005: 105–14), A Clockwork Orange stands out in that initially received an “X” rating, which meant that, at first, children under 17 were not allowed to see the film in movie theatres (the rating was changed to “R” in August 1972).1 Before November 1968 there had been no ratings, because Hollywood regulated its output through the Production Code which for several decades had aimed to make all films, in principle, uncontroversial and suitable for the whole family. However, already in 1966 the American film industry’s major trade organization, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), had in effect suspended the Production Code, because it now allowed films with previously prohibited material to be released as long as they carried the label “suggested for mature audiences”. In November 1968, the Code was officially replaced with ratings which were determined by the film industry’s Code and Rating Administration (CARA) which stipulated whether films were suitable for children or not (Krämer, 2005: 47–9). Consequently, when many of the pre-1966 films were rereleased from 1968 onwards, they mostly were rated “G”, which meant that they were considered suitable for all age groups, while quite a few films from the years 1966 to 1968 were given more restrictive ratings. The “M” rating, (later changed to “GP” and then to “PG”) advised parents that a particular film might contain elements unsuitable for their children. The “R” rating prevented children (initially under 16, from 1970 onwards under 17) from seeing the film at a movie theatre unless they were accompanied by an adult. None of the annual top ten hits released up to and including 1968

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received an “X” rating upon re-release. Indeed, none of the top ten hits in the decades after 1973 was rated “X” or “NC-172 (the label which replaced the disreputable “X” in 1990). Yet from 1969 to 1973, in addition to A Clockwork Orange, the annual top ten lists included the following “X”-rated films: the highly acclaimed contemporary Hollywood dramas Midnight Cowboy in 1969 (winning Oscars for Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay) and Last Tango in Paris in 1973 (nominated for Best Director and Actor, but also listed as the year’s worst movie by the Harvard Lampoon), as well as the two non-Hollywood hardcore porn films Deep Throat (1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973).2 In addition to the presence of “X”-rated films in the annual top tens, the late 1960s and early 1970s also saw the inclusion of increasingly transgressive material in “R”-rated movies. Indeed, with only minor changes, both A Clockwork Orange and Midnight Cowboy (a film featuring, among other things, male prostitution, explicit sex scenes and homoeroticism) were re-released with an “R”. Other “R”-rated top ten films of this period explored the connection between sex and violence which is so central to A Clockwork Orange. Rosemary’s Baby (1968) features a scene in which the drugged and only semi-conscious young wife is penetrated and inseminated by the devil himself. The story of Deliverance (1972) revolves around one of four river-rafting adventurers being raped by two local men. Then, 1973 saw the release not only of Last Tango in Paris, which blurred the lines between rape and consensual sex (especially in two scenes featuring anal penetration), but also of The Exorcist, the second highest grossing film of the decade 1967–76 when revenues are adjusted for inflation (Krämer, 2005: 110). In this film a 12-year-old girl, possessed by a male-identified demon, spouts incredibly graphic obscenities (such as “Your mother sucks cocks in hell”) and mimicks sexual behaviour, most shockingly when she violently stabs her genitals with a bloody crucifix, doing so in front of her mother, whose face she then pushes into her crotch with the words “Lick me!” Nothing comparable has ever been seen in a major hit movie since then. The release of A Clockwork Orange in 1971 thus came midway through a short period of rapidly escalating depictions of sex, in particular sexual violence, in top ten movies. At the same time, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw the proliferation of hit movies that – just like A Clockwork Orange – dealt very sympathetically with criminals. A quantitative content analysis of a representative sample of top ten films has shown that the share of major characters committing crimes rose from 27% in the period 1946–65 to 46% in the decade 1966–75, going down again to 38% for the period 1976–90;

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the share of major characters resorting to violence (both criminal and legal) doubled from 19% to 38%, and then went down to 34% (Powers, Rothman and Rothman, 1996: 105). Among the top ten films featuring criminals, in some cases extremely violent criminals, we find Bonnie and Clyde (1967), a film which was widely perceived at the time as marking the beginning of a new era in Hollywood history, the so-called “Hollywood Renaissance” or “New Hollywood” (Krämer, 2005: 1–2). It features two Depression era bank robbers who kill a bank employee, get into extended shoot-outs with the police and eventually die spectacularly in a hail of bullets. 1967 also saw the release of The Dirty Dozen, in which violent criminals are recruited for a suicide mission in France during World War II, culminating in a massive slaughter. Similarly violent criminals are at the centre of the heist and car chase movie The Getaway (1972), while the bank robber in Dog Day Afternoon (1975) is mainly concerned about getting money for the sex change operation of his male lover. Then there is, of course, The Godfather (1972), the fifth highest grossing movie of the decade 1967–76, and its sequel from 1974. Both films deal with the history of a crime family, featuring numerous murders of members of rival gangs and the police, and of traitors in the family’s own ranks. By comparison, the protagonist of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), in a mental institution after having been arrested for statutory rape, starts out rather harmlessly but in the end brutally attacks the head nurse. The prisoners of The Longest Yard (1974) channel their violence into a football game against the guards, whereas those in Papillon (1973) do everything to escape. In addition, we have the glamorous pair of Robert Redford and Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973), respectively the sixth and third highest grossing films of the decade 1967–76. The former film deals once again with robberies, a chase and the protagonists’ spectacular death, while the latter belongs to a cycle of hit movies dealing with small-time criminals. These include the con men (and con girl) of Midnight Cowboy and Paper Moon (1973) and the drug dealers of Easy Rider (1969). In many of these top ten films, the criminals end up dead, even when they are as gentle as the Dustin Hoffman character in Midnight Cowboy or the two hippies riding across America in Easy Rider. At the same time, for most of the narrative, their life of crime is shown to be exciting, the criminals’ fight against the police or prison guards heroic, their final death tragic.3 A Clockwork Orange, which comes out midway through this decade of criminal hit movies, builds on established audience interest in films about criminal outsiders, yet also offers several innovative twists. Rather than

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being in the service of larger criminal objectives (making money, taking revenge etc.), the initial violence executed by Alex and his gang is an end in itself; they are violent because they enjoy violence. In addition, unlike the other criminal hit movies, A Clockwork Orange foregrounds the pleasures of violence by mixing it with sex. Furthermore, unlike the endings of almost all top ten crime films, A Clockwork Orange does not conclude with the protagonist’s punishment, nor with any other indication that crime does not pay. Instead the film’s shocking opening third leads into an equally unsettling story in which Alex, now in prison, asks to become the test subject for a new medical procedure, the so-called Ludovico treatment, which combines the screening of violent films with the injection of drugs so as to create in him a strong aversion against the mere thought of violent or sexual action (and, accidentally, also against Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony). The prison chaplain objects to this treatment on the grounds that it removes free will and thus, in his view, the patient’s very humanity. Once the treatment is completed Alex is released, only to find that his parents have rented out his room and that he can’t defend himself when attacked by the drunk he once beat up, and by former gang members who have in the meantime joined the police. He takes refuge in the very house he had previously invaded; the wife he had raped is dead and her husband is in a wheelchair. When the husband belatedly realizes who Alex is, he drives him to a suicide attempt by playing Beethoven’s Ninth. This is also meant to serve as a political attack against the repressive government, yet backfires when Alex, now no longer under the influence of the Ludovico treatment, is co-opted by a representative of that government. The film ends with Alex in hospital, listening to Beethoven and fantasizing about sex, while in his voice-over he says: “I was cured all right.” In the end, A Clockwork Orange’s criminal protagonist escapes his punishment so that he is free to pursue further sexual adventures and also, perhaps, to continue his criminal career, with government support no less. The film’s enormous success derives to a considerable extent from the overall shift in hit patterns at the American box office during the late 1960s and early 1970s, which – for the first and last time in American film history – brought “X”-rated films, films featuring explicit sex as well as graphic violence (including sexual violence), and movies with criminal protagonists to the top of the annual charts. The success of A Clockwork Orange was probably helped by the fact that it did not merely follow established patterns but also introduced innovations, notably the protagonist’s pursuit of violence for the sake of violence and the (for him) happy ending of the story.

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If this analysis helps to understand the film’s success, how might we understand the controversy surrounding it?

The Clockwork Controversy A Clockwork Orange was released by Warner Brothers in the United States on 19 December 1971, being initially shown in only four cities (Anon., 1971a). Such a narrow release shortly before the end of the year was typical for high profile films at the time, because it meant that they were fresh on people’s minds when various lists for the best films of the year and the nominations for major awards were decided upon only a few weeks later. If a film was successful with critics and industry peers, its selection as the best, or one of the best, films of the year could then be used in the film’s advertising when it was released into a larger number of movie theatres across the country – which is exactly what happened with A Clockwork Orange. Apart from the release date, the key decision in presenting A Clockwork Orange to the public was to go with the “X”-rating given to the film by CARA, rather than re-editing it so as to get an “R” for the initial release (such re-editing only took place later in 1972). An article in Variety from 15 December 1971, which for the first time announced that the film was rated “X”, suggested that accepting the “X” may have been Kubrick’s decision, rather than that of the studio financing and distributing the film: “Kubrick is thought to have had final cut rights on Clockwork so WB couldn’t have battled the rating if it wanted to”. If Kubrick did indeed have the extremely rare right to determine the “final cut” of the film, he must have gained it on the basis of his outstanding track record, having produced four commercial (as well as critical) hits in a row since 1960, comprising two moderate box office successes (Lolita in 1962 and Dr. Strangelove in 1964) as well as two of the highest grossing blockbusters of all time (Spartacus in 1960 and 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968) (Krämer, 2010: 32–3, 93). Irrespective of Kubrick’s contractual power, however, the Variety article implied that the film’s distributor was quite willing to accept the “X” rating: “Warners is the only major [studio] to have two X features this year, with most of the other companies doing their utmost to avoid the rating”.4 Indeed, during the twelve months from November 1970 to October 1971, only three out of 238 films submitted to CARA by the major studios and the leading “minors” had been rated “X”, that is only about 1% of their overall output; this was down from 4% in the preceding two years (Steinberg, 1980: 402). For the twelve months from November 1971 to October 1972, only

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one film submitted by the majors and leading minors received an “‘X”. This was A Clockwork Orange, for which CARA issued a ratings certificate on 15 December 1971, only four days before the film’s release.5 Although Kubrick and Warner Brothers had probably been informed about CARA’s decision earlier than that, there must have been some uncertainty surrounding the “X” for A Clockwork Orange, because the initial print ads, radio spots and theatrical trailers, which were launched just over a week before the film’s release, did not yet give any information about its rating (Anon., 1971a). Variety was apprehensive about its commercial implications: “The X-tag is known to cut into the number of dates a film can play in the US, though what that means to ultimate boxoffice is difficult to determine” (Anon., 1971a). Indeed, up to 50% of exhibitors in the US said they would refuse to show “X”-rated movies (according to a 1969 poll cited in Farber, 1972: 48; see also Farber and Changas, 1972, cited in Wyatt, 2000: 244). Thus, the “X” rating was very divisive, separating theatres willing to show films with this rating from those that did not show them. A survey conducted in July 1973 suggested that cinema audiences were similarly divided (although we have to be careful about projecting these results back to the early months of the release of A Clockwork Orange; by July 1973 “X” had become closely associated with hardcore pornography: Wyatt, 2000). When a representative sample of people 18 and older were asked about their “least preferred type of movie”, the category “X-rated” received far more votes than any other (34% of the total; the second most prominent category was “‘Horror/Monster” with 23%) (Newspaper Advertising Bureau, 1974). Perhaps not surprisingly, women objected to “X”-rated films more strongly than men did; 45% listed them as their least favorite film type. Quite astonishingly, 10% of male respondents declared “X”-rated films to be their “most preferred type of movie”.6 It would seem, then, that the “X” rating set both movie theatres and audience segments against each other, notably men against women. To some extent, the marketing campaign for A Clockwork Orange intensified the divisiveness of its rating. The theatrical trailer consisted of a rapid montage of extremely brief shots, in some cases consisting of only a few frames. It intercuts action taken from the film, containing plenty of violence, with sexual imagery taken from poster art and words flashing on the screen. Many of these words – such as “witty”, “comic”, “exciting”, “thrilling” – suggested that the film would be a lot of fun, which one might find to be ironic, provocative or plainly offensive. The film’s main poster consisted of a painting of Alex staring at the viewer, while pushing a knife

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towards them, above it the tagline: “Being the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are rape, ultra-violence and Beethoven.” (This was, in fact, reminiscent of the initial tagline for Warner Bros’ earlier groundbreaking hit Bonnie and Clyde: “They’re young . . . they’re in love . . . and they kill people”: Hoberman, 1998: 125).7 In some versions of the Clockwork Orange poster, the drawing of Alex was combined with that of an almost naked woman on her knees, leaning suggestively forward. By March 1972, this provocative marketing, together with a large amount of extremely hostile press commentary on the film, resulted in a drastic measure taken by the Detroit News. Responding specifically to the release of A Clockwork Orange, the paper announced in a widely publicized editorial on 19 March that from 26 March it “no longer will publish display advertising [for] – or give editorial publicity to – X-rated motion pictures and those other unrated picures, which, in our judgment, are of a pornographic nature.”8 Among other things, this meant that the paper would no longer review “X”-rated films. By this time about 30 American newspapers had a similar policy regarding films rated “X” by CARA, considering them all as equivalent to hardcore pornography or “sadistic violence”, which they felt should in no way be supported (Anon., 1972a). At a time when print advertising for movies, together with the free publicity provided by articles in newspapers and magazines, was much more important than brief trailers or film programmes shown on television (and also, probably, more important than poster displays and radio ads), this was a serious restriction. However, most of the thirty papers mentioned above most likely continued, as the Detroit News said it would, to offer minimal information about “X”-rated films in their movie listings, and also to report on “general news developments concerning such pictures”; indeed, on 9 April 1972 the Detroit News printed a letter from Stanley Kubrick which attacked the paper’s policy and also offered a defence of A Clockwork Orange (Anon., 1972a). Thus, an “X”-rated film like A Clockwork Orange would have neither ads nor reviews or puff pieces in many newspapers, yet if it was controversial enough or made the news in any other way, these papers would still have to report on it. Let’s take a look now at what exactly the film’s detractors objected to.9 Already the reviews in the trade press, which were aimed at industry insiders and mainly focused on a film’s commercial potential, raised some concerns. Variety’s highly positive review characterized A Clockwork Orange as “dispute-generating”, noted that it was “not for weak stomachs” and bemoaned the fact that the “X-rating will preclude attendance by many who would appreciate” the film (Murphy, 1971). The even more

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enthuasiastic reviewer of the Hollywood Reporter also highlighted the “X” rating, condemning it for its “arbitrariness and stupidity” (Fisher, 1971). Both writers were nevertheless convinced of the film’s “broad audience potential” which would make it “a big success”. The Motion Picture Herald, which judged the film to be “excellent”, agreed that its “‘box office outlook [is] limitless . . . despite the X rating”, yet suggested that it would appeal most to those in the 18–30 age bracket (Anon., 1972b). Variety mentioned that due to the film’s “comic horrors”, “outrageous vulgarity” and “stark brutality” as well as its “opaque argument for the preservation of respect for man’s free will”, viewers would only be able to “find perverse solace” in it. This phrase suggested that the film did not provide audiences with the traditional pleasures of mainstream cinema and instead appealed to a certain “perversity” in them. Similarly, the Hollywood Reporter described the film as “a black, perverse, extraordinarily exhilarating tribute” to “the unregenerate human spirit”. In this way, trade press reviewers acknowledged that both the film and anyone who liked it might be called “perverse”, and at the same time criticized the film industry’s ratings system for restricting access to what they considered to be a timely masterpiece. Similarly, ambivalent and hostile reviews of the film in the general press were not only concerned about filmic qualities to do with style, story and theme, but also about the state of Hollywood, of American culture more generally, indeed of American society. They took the release of A Clockwork Orange to be a problematic, if not downright negative expression, or indication, of what they perceived to be disastrous developments in the United States. I have mainly looked at reviews from New York and Los Angeles based publications, which were, in fact, overwhelmingly very positive (leading the New York Film Critics Association to choose A Clockwork Orange as the best film of 1971). Like the two trade paper reviews, some of these positive notices objected strongly to the “X” rating (e.g. Reed, 1971). At the same time, the reviews praising the film also raised a number of concerns. Several found fault with its filmic qualities, judging it to be “curiously static and overlong”, “‘icy and abstract” (Champlin, 1971); or “a little too neat and too cold”, without “‘a sense of grief or of rage” (Cocks, 1971). Some generally supportive reviewers also found the film simply hard to make sense of, for two reasons; first of all, because of the slang used by Alex and his gang, secondly because they felt that the film’s answer to the questions it posed about violence, morality and the state was unclear: “The act is great, the answer enigmatic, muffled . . . It is the kind of picture that can be studied more readily than enjoyed” (Winsten, 1971).

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In addition, there were concerns about the film’s sheer unpleasantness. The reviewer in the New York Daily News felt it necessary to warn readers that A Clockwork Orange “may offend (it very nearly makes me nauseous)” (Carroll, 1971). In the New York Morning Telegraph, Leo Mishkin (1971) went even further: “It’s a shocking, stomach-turning, vomitous motion picture, but more awful than anything else, it may just possibly prove to be true as well.” While these generally positive reviews implied that such unpleasantness was probably a worthwhile, even necessary challenge for the film’s viewers, in a glowing review in the New York Times Vincent Canby (1972) worried that “there may be a very real problem when . . . such stylized representations [of violence] are seen by immature audiences”.10 He thus seemed to raise the possibility that the film might traumatize such audiences or even move them to engage in violence themselves. As can be expected, negative reviews of the film took up many of the above points of criticism and concern, both intensifying and extending them. Thus, the Nation complained that A Clockwork Orange combined “nauseating viciousness” with too much “tinsel”, that is stylistic flourishes getting in the way of conveying the “central proposition” of Burgess’ novel (Hatch, 1972).11 Gail Rock, of Women’s Wear Daily, found the film “interesting and well done, but totally unlikable”, and judged its “nonsense-syllable futuristic slang” to be “an annoying contrivance” and its representation of women to be exploitative; in her view, the film failed to convey the novel’s message about free will because “there is not a character here to care about nor a point of view to embrace” (Rock, 1971).12 For some reviewers, the film’s failings were a matter of broader concern, because they raised questions about the state of contemporary cinema, even contemporary society. Thus, the Christian Science Monitor questioned the ratings system when concluding its review with the statement: “it’s a film so repellent its ‘X’ rating seems not warning enough” (Anon., 1971b). Clayton Riley, whose attack on the film in the New York Times was printed opposite Vincent Canby’s glowing review which I cited earlier, covered all angles by describing the film as “a monumental bore, a fitful parade of those technical bonbons that characterize our television commercials”. He then laid into its supporters among critics and audiences, who, he wrote, “delight in deciphering [art], as if by doing so they became the possessor of some mystical insight, some delicious new registration of depravity” (Riley, 1972). This, for him, was not just a matter of bad taste and pretentiousness. With reference to Charles Manson, My Lai and Nazi terror, Riley objected to what he regarded as the film’s central idea: “the will to perpetrate evil is better than no will at all”. What is more, he feared that the film might

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actually inspire real-life violence: “Enough brutality of an instructive nature is contained in Orange to provide a manual for the needs of every street gang and knuckle society in the US.” In an equally comprehensive critique of the film in the Village Voice, Andrew Sarris pointed, like many other critics, to the attractiveness of its protagonist and to what, in his eyes, amounted to the film’s apologetic account of his deeds: “Alex and his friends are left off the hook. Anything this particular society gets, it asks for in the vile literalism of its lewdness” (Sarris, 1971; see also Staiger, 2003: 48–9). Then, in an ambiguous statement apparently referencing depictions of violence in other films and elsewhere in popular culture as well as real-life violence, Sarris turned apocalyptic: “‘What frightens me is the chaos that engulfs us all. I am tired of the cult of violence. I am tired of people smashing other people and things in the name of freedom and self-expression.” This would appear to raise the spectre of the film’s violence spilling over into the auditorium and into the streets, while also giving expression to Sarris’ very negative view of where American culture and society were currently heading. After these initial reviews, which mostly concentrated on this one film, had come out, A Clockwork Orange proceeded to become the focus of more general attacks on Hollywood and what were perceived to be troubling tendencies in American culture. Most notably, in February 1972 Fred M. Hechinger attacked A Clockwork Orange in an article entitled “A Liberal Fights Back” in the New York Times as a film which promoted “the thesis that man is irretrievably bad and corrupt”, an idea he considered to be the very “essence of fascism” (Hechinger, 1972). He argued that only “the repressive, illiberal, distrustful, violent institutions of fascism” could “be built on that pessimistic view of man’s nature”. For Hechinger, A Clockwork Orange was only the most egregious example of a widespread trend in Hollywood, which was rooted in the “deeply anti-liberal totalitarian nihilism emanating from beneath the counter-culture” that the studios had previously courted with a series of “mindless youth-culture exploitation” films. (Among the films Hechinger mentioned were two of the hits I have listed above: Easy Rider and The French Connection.) According to Hechinger, these filmic trends had strong political implications: “It is precisely because Hollywood’s antennae have in the past been so sensitive in picking up the national mood that the anti-liberal trend” should be taken seriously as an indication of a fascist disposition in American society. The following month saw another high profile statement about A Clockwork Orange and the perceived crisis in American culture, this time from what appeared to be a very different political direction. Directly

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contradicting a positive review of the film in his own paper, the features editor of the Pittsburgh Press wrote on 20 March 1972, only one day after the dramatic announcement by the Detroit Press about its ban of advertising and publicity for “X”-rated movies: “If Clockwork Orange is the best movie of 1971, the whole motion picture industry is so sick, the ailment may be fatal . . . It is enough to make you throw up, morally and physically” (Allen, 1972; quoted in Litman, 1972). The film’s commercial performance did not seem to be harmed by these negative reviews and commentaries, the widespread advertising and publicity ban, or the refusal of so many cinemas to show “X”-rated films. On 23 March 1972, only four days after the announcement by the Detroit News, the film industry trade press reported that A Clockwork Orange had been doing extremely well in the 28 cinemas in which it had been shown, having already earned $2.4m in rentals (Anon., 1972c). The film was scheduled to appear in 50 cinemas in April and to go on national release by appearing in hundreds of cinemas in cities and towns all over the US during the summer. It was expected that the film’s run in individual cinemas would last anywhere from 18 weeks to more than a year (Anon., 1972c). As mentioned above, this optimism was borne out by the fact that, in the end, A Clockwork Orange became the seventh highest grossing 1971 release. An audience survey conducted early in the film’s release, presumably by handing out a questionnaire after a regular screening of A Clockwork Orange, indicates reasons for the film’s success and also highlights once again its divisiveness (Gilbert Youth Research, 1972). The majority of respondents were male (57%), under 30 (70%) and, by the standards of the time, quite highly educated (73% had spent some time at college). Almost all of them appeared to be regular cinemagoers, attending at least once a month, with more than two thirds saying they had seen at least two films during the previous month. When asked how well they enjoyed the movie, almost half of the respondents under 21 chose “very good”; by contrast only 29% of those over 35 selected this answer. Conversely, whereas more than 20% of those over 35 found the film “poor” or “very poor”, only 3% of those under 21 did so. A similar, yet less dramatic division can be found in terms of gender. While 42% of males selected “very good”, only 34% of females did, and whereas 12% of women found the film “poor” or “very poor”, only 6% of men judged the film this way. When asked about their reasons for seeing Clockwork Orange, 37% stated that they had “read good reviews about it” (an option selected especially by those over 30), while 33% said that “friends/relatives suggested I see it” (an option particularly popular

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among younger respondents). Thus it would appear that the majority of respondents acted on specific recommendations, either from the press or from people they knew. (With regard to the newspaper boycott, it is also worth mentioning that the majority of respondents had first become aware of A Clockwork Orange through newspaper ads.) Importantly, young females were more inclined than any other group to state that they went to see the film because they had been “just curious”, or because “someone else had wanted to see it”, implying that they simply went along with that other person. By contrast, young males were more likely than any other group to declare that they were “attracted by this kind of movie”, by which they mostly expressed a preference for Kubrick films, although some of them also declared that they were attracted by violence. This survey strongly suggests that, having first seen print ads, potential cinemagoers were immediately divided along the lines of age and gender with regards to their interest in this obviously transgressive film by Stanley Kubrick. Educated young males who habitually went to the cinema were more likely than other groups to act on their interest, and once they had seen the film they were more likely to like it and to recommend it to others.13 In addition to such personal recommendations, good reviews in the press played an important part in motivating people to see the film. The very fact that the film initially received mostly celebratory reviews provoked a strong response from certain film writers and other cultural commentators. It was not only the film’s focus on an extremely violent, yet strangely appealing protagonist, its exhilarating depiction of sex and violence and its apparent message about both the depravity of man and the importance of free will which riled its detractors, but also the film’s critical and commercial success. For these writers, the huge success of A Clockwork Orange had troubling implications for where the American film industry, and indeed American society, was heading. In addition, some writers feared the direct impact A Clockwork Orange might have on the more impressionable segments of its audience, especially those who might be inspired to replicate the screen violence for real. Indeed, an audience survey revealed that the most important segment of the film’s audience were male youth. However unlike Alex and his gang, and also unlike the uneducated (“immature”) viewers that even such a strong supporter of the film as Vincent Canby was worried about, the large majority were current or former college students.

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Conclusion Due to its formal transgressiveness and its socially resonant themes, A Clockwork Orange was extremely divisive upon its initial release in the US, setting film theatres, audience segments and critics against each other. Yet, building on established hit patterns to do with taboo-breaking and criminal protagonists, and with strong support from many reviewers, the film’s appeal to those people it did not alienate – notably educated male youth – was so strong that it still became a major commercial success. A Clockwork Orange thus exemplifies a process of rapid change in American cinema during the late 1960s and early 1970s which allowed filmmakers and audiences to explore explicit imagery and transgressive storylines that had previously been excluded from mainstream American cinema, mainly on moral grounds (Krämer, 2005: chs 2–3).14 The fact that, for a few years, this exploration moved to the very centre of American film culture intensified the concerns of film critics and cultural commentators, among them liberals as well as conservatives, about the possible impact of films on their young audiences and also, more generally, about the overall direction of cultural, social and political developments in American society. Implicitly (and sometimes explicitly), writers attacking films like A Clockwork Orange posed the question whether individual filmmakers, and the film industry as a whole, had an ethical obligation to abstain from certain images, characters, storylines and ideas in their output. While the box office heyday of transgressive filmmaking is long gone, this question continues to be debated.

Notes 1

2

3

Information about ratings can be obtained from the official website of the Motion Picture Association of America, http://www.mpaa.org/movieratings. The CARA certificate giving A Clockwork Orange an “R” rating was issued on 22 August 1972; it is contained in folder SK/13/8/5/10, Stanley Kubrick Archive (SKA), University of the Arts London. While Deep Throat had been rated by CARA, the makers and distributors of The Devil in Miss Jones had not in fact submitted their film to CARA and instead had self-applied the “X”, which was possible because the MPAA had not copyrighted this rating, whereas the less restrictive ratings could only be used with their permission (Wyatt, 2000: 241). It is worth noting that this period also saw the proliferation of top ten films featuring often very violent policemen in contemporary America, who in places bend the law or even go beyond it. These films include Bullitt (1968), The

26

4

5 6

7

8 9

10

11 12 13

Peter Krämer French Connection (1971), and the first three Dirty Harry movies –Dirty Harry (1971), Magnum Force (1973) and The Enforcer (1976). There is also the title character of Billy Jack (1971) and The Trial of Billy Jack (1974), who is forced to become a criminal to defend his community. It is striking how many of the films mentioned in this section were released by Warner Bros, the studio behind A Clockwork Orange. They include Bonnie and Clyde, Bullitt, the Billy Jack and Dirty Harry movies, Deliverance, The Getaway, The Exorcist and Dog Day Afternoon. In addition the studio was responsible for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), a top ten hit which was instrumental in bringing about the suspension of the Production Code in 1966 (Krämer, 2005: 47–8). Together with my earlier observation that many of the violent crime movies and some of the other controversial films were released by Warner Bros, this comment would seem to suggest that perhaps there was a general studio policy at work here. Certificate contained in folder SK/13/8/5/10, SKA. Klenow and Crane (1977: 77–8) studied the audience for “X”-rated movies in 1973, closely identifying such films with sexually explicit material. This study characterizes the audience as consisting disproportionately of “young single male[s] with at least a high school education”, without “a particular religious affiliation”, residing “in a more populated area in the Eastern or Western regions of the United States”, and notes that “females attend X-rated films in lower percentages than males, and smaller percentages of the female attenders return in comparison to males”. With its surprising reference to classical music, the tagline for A Clockwork Orange also echoes the opening lines of the film Love Story (and its best-selling source novel), the biggest hit of 1970: “What can you say about a twenty-fiveold girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me.” The editorial was reprinted, together with a response from Stanley Kubrick, in Anon., 1972a. For a closely related discussion of the arguments used by the film’s detractors and supporters, see Staiger, 2003. Also of interest is a recent account of the shifting parameters of film criticism in the US (notably the increased emphasis on directors and the art of film in reviews across the 1960s and 1970s), which – although the book does not refer specifically to A Clockwork Orange – may help to explain why it had so many supporters in the first place (Baumann, 2007; see esp. pp. 120–21, 127, 139, 141, 153). This celebratory review – entitled “Orange – ‘Disorienting But Human Comedy . . .’” – appeared opposite a critical attack on the film by Clayton Riley: “. . . Or ‘A Dangerous, Criminally Irresponsible Horror Show’” (pp. 1, 13). Canby had written an earlier review of the film, published in the New York Times of 20 December 1971, p. 44. Staiger (2003: 47–8) notes the importance of comparisons with the book for both positive and negative reviews. Cf. Staiger’s (2003: 51) discussion of an early decidedly feminist critique of the film. Broadly speaking, the audience for A Clockwork Orange thus seems to be very

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similar to that of “X”-rated movies in general (Klenow and Crane, 1977). 14 This chapter and the following chapter also attempt to provide an explanation for the transformation of hit patterns between the Roadshow Era (1949–66) and the New Hollywood (1967–76).

References Allen, Bill. 1972. ‘A Clockwork Orange – Fascinatingly Tart or Merely Putrid?’, Pittsburgh Press (20 March). Anon. 1971a. ‘“X” for Clockwork: WB Must Accept “As Is” of Kubrick’, Variety. 15 December. Unpaginated clipping in the A Clockwork Orange clippings file, Performing Arts Research Centre (PARC), New York Public Library. Anon. 1971b. Review of A Clockwork Orange. Christian Science Monitor (20 December): 4. Anon. 1972a. ‘A Newspaper Says No to Orange’. New York Times (23 April): 11, 25. Anon. 1972b. Review of A Clockwork Orange. Motion Picture Herald (January). Unpaginated clipping on A Clockwork Orange clippings fiche, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), Beverly Hills. Anon. 1972c. ‘Clockwork Orange is Setting Records’. Hollywood Reporter (23 March). Unpaginated clipping on A Clockwork Orange fiche, AMPAS. Baumann, Shyon. 2007. Hollywood Highbrow: From Entertainment to Art. Princeton. Princeton University Press. Canby, Vincent. 1972. ‘Orange – “Disorienting But Human Comedy” . . .’ New York Times (9 January): 2:1, 7. Carroll, Kathleen. 1971. ‘A Clockwork Orange: Cynical Vision of Tomorrowland’. New York Daily News (20 December): 55. Champlin, Charles. 1971. ‘Kubrick’s Vision of Clockwork’. Los Angeles Times (21 December): Calendar 1, 10. Cocks, Jay. 1971. ‘Kubrick: Degrees of Madness’. Time (20 December): 80. Farber, Stephen. 1972. The Movie Ratings Game. Washington, DC. Public Affairs Press. Farber, Stephen, and Changas, Estelle. 1972. ‘Putting the Hex on “R” and “X”’. New York Times (9 April): D1. Fisher, Craig. 1971. ‘Stanley Kubrick Produces, Directs Clockwork Orange’. Hollywood Reporter (14 December): 3, 10. Gilbert Youth Research. 1972. ‘Theater Survey on A Clockwork Orange’, report submitted to Warner Bros in March; in folder SK/13/5/7, Stanley Kubrick Archive (SKA). Hatch, R. 1972. Review of A Clockwork Orange. The Nation (3 January). Unpaginated clipping, A Clockwork Orange clippings file, PARC. Hechinger, Fred M. 1972. ‘A Liberal Fights Back’. New York Times (13 February): 2:1, 33. Hoberman, J. 1998. ‘“A Test for the Individual Viewer”: Bonnie and Clyde’s Violent Reception’, in Jeffrey H. Goldstein (ed.), Why We Watch: The Attractions of

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Violent Entertainment. New York. Oxford University Press. Klenow, Daniel J., and Jeffrey L. Crane. 1977. ‘Selected Characteristics of the X-rated Movie Audience: Toward a National Profile of the Recidivist’. Sociological Symposium 20: 73–83. Krämer, Peter. 2005. The New Hollywood: From Bonnie and Clyde to Star Wars. London. Wallflower Press. Krämer, Peter. 2010. 2001: A Space Odyssey. London. British Film Institute. Litman, Lenny. 1972. ‘Pittsburgh Editor Rebukes Critic, Sees Clockwork As Fatal Diagnosis’. Variety (29 March). Unpaginated clipping, A Clockwork Orange clippings file, AMPAS. Mishkin, Leo. 1971. Review of A Clockwork Orange. Morning Telegraph (New York) (20 December): 3. Murphy, A. D. 1971. Review of A Clockwork Orange. Variety (15 December): 14. Newspaper Advertising Bureau. 1974. ‘Movie Going and Leisure Time’, January; report contained in folder MFL x n.c. 2,101 no. 4, PARC. Powers, Stephen, Rothman, David J. and Rothman, Stanley. 1996. Hollwyood’s America: Social and Political Themes in Motion Pictures. Boulder, CO. Westview. Reed, Rex. 1971. Review of A Clockwork Orange. New York Sunday News (26 December): 9. Riley, Clayton. 1972. ‘… Or “A Dangerous, Criminally Irresponsible Horror Show”’. New York Times (9 January): 2:1, 13. Rock, Gail. 1971. Review of A Clockwork Orange. Women’s Wear Daily (20 December): 14. Sarris, Andrew. 1971. Review of A Clockwork Orange. Village Voice (30 December): 49. Staiger, Janet. 2003. ‘The Cultural Productions of A Clockwork Orange’, in Stuart Y. McDougal (ed.), Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Steinberg, Cobbett. 1980. Film Facts. New York. Facts on File. Winsten, Archer. 1971. ‘Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange’. New York Post (20 December): 64. Wyatt, Justin. 2000. ‘The Stigma of X: Adult Cinema and the Institution of the MPAA Ratings System’, in Matthew Bernstein (ed.), Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation in the Studio Era. London. Athlone.

CHAPTER TWO CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY: AN EXERCISE IN COURAGEOUS FILMMAKING JACQUI MILLER

Introductory Context: The Studio System, Warner Bros and President Roosevelt During the classical studio system of filmmaking, encompassing the years approximately from 1930 to 1950, each major studio had a distinct identity, both visual and ideological, mainly arising from the perspective of the mogul(s) heading the company. For example, MGM, led by Louis B. Meyer and, until his untimely death at the age of 37 in 1936, Irving Thalberg, was considered the most American of the studios, its films, such as Meet Me in St Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944) transmitting at the narrative level conservative traditional values through the visual medium of a lavish, glossy mise-en-scène. MGM’s conservative ideology was attributable to Meyer’s support for the Republican Party, the lavish production values to Thalberg’s commitment to big budget projects. Conversely, Warner Brothers (usually abbreviated to Bros), by the 1930s led by Jack (in charge of production in Hollywood) and Harry (responsible for finance in New York), was the studio with a social conscience, making predominantly gritty films addressing contemporary issues, the subject matter being matched by rough and ready sets and largely low-key, black and white photography to convey a highly realistic milieu. In 1943 the New York Times described Warner Bros as ‘Combining good citizenship with good picture-making’. This quotation can also be seen to aptly describe the personal and political relationship between Jack and Harry Warner and their studio, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) and the Roosevelt administration. Contact between the filmmakers and the politician was initially made in 1930 when Warner Bros installed screening equipment in Roosevelt’s official residence as Governor of New York State. The Warners went on to promote Roosevelt on the West Coast

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during the 1932 presidential campaign, and continued to campaign for him, and to work for the administration and the Democratic Party, until his death in 1945. In addition, Warner Bros consistently produced films which supported Roosevelt’s domestic and diplomatic policies. The early and mid1930s saw pictures which targeted specific social problems and affirmed faith in the federal government. It also saw the launch of a pro-military “preparedness” cycle, and a series of so-called “patriotic shorts” which valorized American history and highlighted its relevance for contemporary society. From 1936, with the growing crisis in Europe, both FDR and the Warners increasingly turned their attention to international affairs and the part America should play. Roosevelt sought to counter Congress’ and the American people’s mood of isolationism, to strengthen American arms and to secure assistance for Britain and France. Concurrently the Warners produced pictures warning of fascism at home and abroad, ultimately demanding American intervention in Europe.

Warner Bros and FDR in 1939 Since 1930 the Warners had sent FDR and his staff numerous telegrams, variously offering congratulations for electoral victories, confirming political arrangements, offering birthday and season’s greetings, or providing information about film releases. Up until 1939, no telegram had commented on the New Deal or diplomatic policy, or on Roosevelt’s speeches. However, this year the brothers, showing their keen support for intervention in Europe, began to send telegrams giving praise and support when FDR defied Congress in his proactive foreign policy. Jack Warner sent FDR a wire congratulating him on his annual message to Congress given on 4 January (USC: JWC; FDRL: PPF 1050). Harry expressed similar approval of FDR’s address before a joint session of the Senate and House recommending revision of the Neutrality Law on 21 September. The second half of FDR’s annual message related to domestic affairs – chiefly the achievements of the New Deal since 1933, but Jack Warner singled out the first part of the message. In respect of contemporary Europe, Roosevelt denounces aggression from abroad which is seen to be attacking a triptych of American institutions, “religion, democracy and international good faith” and points out a need to build up American arms as a means of sound defence, using the term “preparedness” twice, and criticizing “legislated neutrality” (Dallek, 1974: 185). During the next few months, Roosevelt enlarged upon this position. In the spring he tried to persuade

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Hitler and Mussolini to cease international aggression. Although unsuccessful, this showed FDR’s sense of responsibility to intervene in world affairs. It had already become apparent to FDR that “legislated neutrality” was to the disadvantage of France and Britain; they could not buy American arms, and did not have the military strength of the Axis powers. In the summer he asked Congress to repeal the arms embargo of the Neutrality Act of 1937 on the grounds that this would act as a deterrent to war; Hitler would be less likely to attack powerfully equipped nations. If this strategy failed, he argued, lifting the embargo would still serve to make American involvement in a war less likely as Britain and France would be better able to defend themselves. Congress responded that selling arms was only likely to increase the chances of war, and on 11 July the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations voted to defer its decision until Congress met again in January 1940 (Divine 1965: 160). In August, Roosevelt renewed his messages to Italy and Germany, not so much because he believed he would be successful, but to make his own position clear. In his “fireside chat” the day war was declared in Europe, although he stressed his hatred of combat and his belief that America would remain neutral, at least in terms of military action, he added: “I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well. Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or his conscience” (Roosevelt, 1938–50: VIII 444). The outbreak of war led FDR to again ask Congress to revise the neutrality legislation. A compromise was reached on 3 November which repealed the arms embargo but retained the “cash and carry” principle with respect to their purchase. This not only materially advantaged the Allies but also indicated the direction of American allegiance. As Rexford Tugwell has pointed out, FDR had always sought American aid for the Allies “because they were fighting for a cause that was also America’s cause” (Tugwell, 1969: 499). The rhetoric used by FDR is matched closely by Jack Warner. In his annual message, Roosevelt told Congress: “There comes a time in the affairs of men when they must prepare to defend, not their homes alone, but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments and their very civilization are founded” (Roosevelt, 1938–50: VIII 2). In an interview given to the New York Times in January, Warner too stresses the need to keep faith with American traditions: “we know from personal experience the value of American philosophy. We are descendants of immigrants and we know why our fathers came to America . . . The visual power of the screen is tremendous and we propose to acquaint Americans with their heritage” (15 January 1939). The ideals underpinning American democracy

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were drawn on again in FDR’s September request that Congress revise the Neutrality Act: “Fate now seems to compel us to assume the task of helping to maintain in the western world a citadel wherein that civilization may be kept alive. That peace, the integrity, and the safety of the Americas – these must be kept firm and serene” (Roosevelt, 1938–50: VIII 518). Both FDR and the Warners were now to act upon their respective codes of ethics. During the year, FDR showed the courage of his convictions in confronting a still predominantly isolationist nation and gaining a revision of the Neutrality Act. Similarly, the Warners were now prepared to make their perspective plain with a highly controversial film, Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Anatole Litvak, 1939). As Jack Warner stated: “Defence of American democracy has been left almost entirely to the press. Through our medium we can reach from 40,000,000 with a single picture. We are determined to do this in spite of objections from surprising sources” (15 January 1939). Confessions of a Nazi Spy: The Ethics of Courage In February 1938 the FBI exposed a pro-Nazi German spy ring which was working on the East Coast, particularly New York City. The spies were prosecuted and found guilty in US of A v. Otto Herman Voss et al held at the Southern district of New York US District Court, heard by District Judge John C. Knox. Confessions, based on this case, had its Hollywood preview on 27 April 1939 (Sandeen, 1979: 69). The next day, Jack Warner, describing himself as an “old and good friend”, wired FDR that “three thousand people for a solid twenty minutes applauded and cheered this great American document of civilization” (FDRL: OF 73). Work on the film had begun in June 1938. Several changes of working title were tried from Storm Over America to The World is Ours until Confessions of a Nazi Spy was settled upon (USC: WB). It continued Warner Bros’ practice of using topical material, the screenplay being based on former FBI agent Leon G. Turrou’s book, The Nazi Conspiracy in America, in which he describes cracking the spy ring and propaganda machine within the German-American Bund on the East Coast, and the spies’ subsequent trial (Balio 1993: 298). Turrou was paid $25,000 for the use of his book, and was retained by the studio as technical advisor (USC: WB). Confessions is a difficult film to summarize. Held together by a March of Time style narrator it is essentially a series of propagandistic set pieces linked by a fictional narrative, culminating in the breaking up of the spy ring and subsequent trial. Each scene underscores the two key points that Warner

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Bros want to emphasize: Fascism and racial and class hatreds have gripped Germany and with the ascendancy of Hitler are now forcibly sweeping Europe; American democracy must play its part in turning back the tide, ensuring fascism never engulfs the United States. Although it was not made at the request of the Roosevelt administration, Confessions dramatized one of its concerns. FDR had asked the FBI to survey Nazi activity in America as early as 1934 and in 1936 directed both the FBI and military intelligence to investigate fascism. The worsening situation in Europe continued to exacerbate fears and by 1939 the administration “was apprehensive about Nazi spies” (Vaughn, 1994: 73). Spy activity in America was centred in the German-American Bund which traded on native loyalties of German-Americans as well as recruiting right-wing Americans who endorsed fascism. The Bund claimed to represent “Friends of the New Germany in the USA”, but ultimate control was in the hands of Rudolph Hess, Hitler’s Nationalist Socialist Party deputy leader (Manvell, 1974: 30). Confessions was the first openly anti-Nazi picture made in America and so plainly pro-interventionist as to have Ed Renard (Edward G. Robinson), the FBI agent based on Turrou actually say that America is at war with Germany: “It’s a new kind of war but it’s still war”. This made it “a landmark in cinema history” (Friedrich, 1987: 50). Writing three decades after its release, Lewis Jacobs recognized that Confessions’ timing was particularly disturbing: “American nerves were taught, and feeling was running high over Hitler’s ruthless aggression in Europe” (Jacobs, 1967–68: 6). Why, with such “feeling” in America, was Confessions such a controversial and courageous picture? Part of the answer is down to the financial structure of the film industry.

Taking a Stand Against the Film Industry During the 1930s American studios depended for up to 50% of their profits on foreign, particularly European, markets. Events in Europe might have seemed to offer ripe opportunities for sensational film subjects, notwithstanding objections from isolationists at home, but to make films, for example about Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, or even films critical of Nazi influence in America, would certainly lose sales not only to fascist and occupied nations, but also to neutral countries. Markets would probably be lost not only for the critical pictures but for a studio’s entire output, a situation that would be

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made worse by the fact that film companies continued to raise revenue from the exhibition in Europe of back-catalogue films that could no longer be screened at home. Therefore, quite apart from ideological outlook, the wish to preserve overseas markets kept the other studios away from international political comment. Indeed, they went on to comply with Nazi demands that all “non-Aryan” staff employed at German studio offices be fired (Koppes and Black, 1987: 21). Warner Bros would brook no such restrictions and had ceased to care about the German market. In 1936, their representative in Berlin, Joe Kauffman, had been beaten to death by Nazis and the studio closed its German office. However, they gained no support in their anti-Nazi stance from other studios. Upon hearing that Confessions had gone into production, Luigi Luraschi, employed in Paramount’s censorship department, commented that if the picture were “in any way uncomplimentary to Germany, as it must be if it is to be sincerely produced, then Warners will have on their hands the blood of a great many Jews in Germany” (PCA). Jack Warner recalled, in typically exuberant fashion, telling a studio head who protested that bookings in Germany were going to be affected: Listen, these murdering bastards killed our own man in Germany because he wouldn’t heil Hitler. The Silver Shirts and the Bundists and all the rest of these hoods are marching in Los Angeles right now. There are high school kids with Swastikas on their sleeves a few blocks from our studio. Is that what you want in exchange for some crummy royalties out of Germany? I’m going to finish this picture, and Hitler and Goebbels can scream all they want. And so can guys like you! (Warner, 1964: 262)

The Hays Office and the PCA (see Introduction, page 6) also objected to Confessions. Frederick Herron of the Hays Office directed the foreign relations division and expected studios to respect German requirements (Koppes and Black, 1987: 21), but the personality of Joseph I. Breen must be added to the Hays Office’s economic motives when considering its caveats. Before taking up his post as PCA chief, the conservative Catholic Breen had criticized Jews in Hollywood (Vaughn 1994: 76). He particularly loathed the Hollywood branch of the anti-Nazi League, which he described as “conducted and financed almost entirely by Jews” (Koppes and Black, 1987: 22). Breen’s hostility to pictures he believed were Jewish anti-Nazi propaganda pieces was further fuelled by demands from the German Consul in Los Angeles, Dr George Gyssling. During the spy trials Warner Bros sent one of their contracted writers, Milton Krims, to observe the case, the Hollywood Reporter announcing “Krims will get first hand information

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for a picture . . . subject which the studio is planning” (27 October 1938). Gyssling spotted this and sent the clipping to Breen with the “request”: “Will you kindly see to it that the matter which is mentioned . . . will not result in difficulties”. Shortly afterwards, another Hollywood Reporter article, referring to Warner Bros’ “Nazi spy film” spurred Gyssling to write to Breen asking “whether or not this firm has really the intention to make a picture like that”? (6 December 1938). The cautious Breen did not comment directly but passed Gyssling’s clipping and letters on to Jack Warner, and advised Gyssling to communicate directly with the studio (USC: JWC). Warner ignored Gyssling and work went ahead, but when the finished screenplay was sent to Breen for approval Warner asked that it be kept locked away as protection from the Bund and the German Consul (Koppes and Black, 1987: 28). Fierce argument in the PCA followed. One employee was particularly vociferous in his criticism, arguing that it was unfair to show Hitler as “a screaming madman”, that Confessions should at least show his “unchallenged political and social achievements”, and that the picture, if made, would be “one of the most lamentable mistakes ever made by the industry” (PCA). Breen’s stance was equivocal. A letter composed to Jack Warner questioning whether such a controversial picture should be made was not mailed, nor was a letter to Will Hays which also raised the point about the film’s contentiousness but wavered on the grounds that objections could be made by acknowledging that “important government officials” (such as the trial judge who had allowed Warner Bros to film in his courtroom) had given “indirect aid” to the production. Breen had to admit that Confessions was accurate and within the letter of the Production Code. He hoped that the studio would make the decision for him and retreat from the project, not only because international sales would be lost, but also because state censorship boards might refuse its exhibition for fear of ensuing anti-German riots (PCA).

An Ethical Production Team Breen’s caution was ignored and Confessions went ahead. Jack Warner’s deputy, Hal Wallis, has commented: “Because Jack Warner and I were deeply concerned over the crisis in Europe in the late 1930s, we decided to undertake a policy of opposition to Nazism in our pictures, despite the very strong possibility that isolationist elements in America would surely criticize us” (Wallis and Higham, 1980: 70). This defiance marks the attitude of

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many of the film’s personnel (some of whom, such as the actor Paul Lucas, were German émigrés) to Nazism in particular, but also their commitment to liberal, even left-wing political causes. These were sustained both during the late 1930s and beyond through to the House Un-American Affairs Committee’s (HUAC) investigations into Hollywood after World War II and into the early 1950s. The assistant producer on Confessions, Robert Lord, described it as “the most important Warner Brothers have made” (USC: WB). The director, Anatole Litvak, was Russian-born but had become a naturalized American whose loyalty during World War II was rewarded with a commission in the Army Signal Corps. When Senate investigations began into pro-war Hollywood propaganda, the Republican Senator Ralph O. Brewster of Maine queried the wisdom of commissioning a Russian, arguing to Under Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson: “So recent a convert to Americanism was not a particularly happy selection unless your talent was considerably exhausted. You could use somewhat more seasoned citizens” (Doherty, 1993: 191). Litvak would continue to attract right-wing opposition when he became a member of the Committee for the First Amendment’s (CFA) informal steering committee, set up in September 1947, to defend Hollywood from attack by HUAC (Ceplair and Englund, 1979: 275). Milton Krims co-wrote Confessions with John Wexley, a sometime member of the Communist Party who tended to “infiltrate” left-wing propaganda into his scripts (Dick, 1989: 185). He was now active in the Hollywood anti-Nazi movement, and would be black-listed following the HUAC investigations (Ceplair and Englund, 1979: 160). Wexley was influential in Warner Bros undertaking Confessions and worked to promote it not only at the studio, but also with the PCA (Neve, 1992: 4). He saw Confessions as an educational film, alerting audiences to the Nazi threat in their own country, and described this work as “the most exciting and exhilarating I have ever done in Hollywood” which would “prove a turning point in the motion picture industry” (TAC April 1939). The star of the film, Edward G. Robinson, was born Emmanuel Goldenberg in Hungary. His father took the family to America in 1902 partly to escape religious persecution. Robinson remembered his years in Bucharest as “a worried mother and father and sons who were growing up in an atmosphere of suspense and suspicion, not to say danger” (Screenbook June 1939). He was nine when his family emigrated and later said “I was born when I came to America”. He joined the US navy during World War I but saw no active service, and after the armistice felt depressed at having played no part in “saving the world for democracy” (Parish and Marill, 1972: 16–

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17). Robinson was a staunch supporter of liberal causes, and in 1939 alone he made contributions to over a hundred of these, from the Actors’ Refugee Committee to the Spanish Child Welfare Association, to the Hollywood Committee for Polish Relief (Doherty, 1993: 39). By the late 1930s he was at the vanguard of the Hollywood anti-Nazi movement, using his house as the meeting place for “the committee of 56”, a group pledged to promote activity in the film colony (Brownstein, 1990: 63). Speaking of Confessions at one of their meetings, fellow member Groucho Marx announced “I want to propose a toast to Warners – the only studio with any guts” (Hollywood Reporter 6 December 1938). Robinson believed in the picture so strongly he would “gladly have worked as first assistant to the propboy if it would help him get a crack on Adolph Hitler” (Screenbook June 1939), but he felt overall that his acting on the film was of less importance than contributions he had made to script development (Glasgow Evening Citizen 7 August 1939). In 1944, Robinson joined the Hollywood Democratic Committee (HDC), formed to support Roosevelt’s re-election, and took part in a radio programme which lampooned Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey. Along with fellow Warner Bros stars Paul Muni and John Garfield, Robinson sang, to the tune of “Daisy, Daisy”: “Dewey, Dewey, the White House is not for Youse/With your Hooey from the New York Daily News” (Los Angeles Times 31 November 1944). He continued to serve on the executive committee when in 1945 the HDC changed its name to the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, and widened its brief to endorse candidates for election and lobby for legislation both in Sacramento and Washington, particularly with reference to racial issues (Ceplair and Englund, 1979: 228–9). Robinson went on to sign CFA’s petition to HUAC in defence of the Hollywood Ten and became the target of Representative John Rankin’s anti-Semitic red-baiting to the House: “I want to read you some of these names . . . There is one who calls himself Edward Robinson. His real name is Emmanuel Goldenberg” (Trumbo, 1972: 140). In a similar vein of right-wing bigotry, Gerald L. K. Smith, leader of the racist Knights of the White Camelia, described Robinson in 1947 as “‘one of Stalin’s main agents in Hollywood” (Robinson, 1973: 196). Robinson found it hard to get work during the HUAC years, especially after being smeared by Red Channels, a publication which “exposed” alleged Communists in show business (Goodman, 1964: 290). Francis Lederer, who played who played the Nazi spy “as a piece of patriotic service” was a young Czech actor who had also recently taken out naturalization papers (Thorp, 1946:173). Lederer’s outlook was strongly

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fuelled by Czechoslovakia’s experience, and he had gone so far as to send Roosevelt a lengthy and emotional telegram setting out his feelings in detail. Its substance concerned recent attacks upon FDR in the German press, and the failure, as Lederer saw it, of newspapers to defend their president. He warned of a possible parallel between German activities in Austria and Czechoslovakia and what might follow in America when describing German propaganda attacks upon Schuschnigg and Beneš, the former leaders of Austria and Czechoslovakia. Lederer felt Schuschnigg and Beneš had displayed a misplaced “gentleness and noble attitude in the face of attack”, which was open to misinterpretation as an admission of guilt. Instead, he urged Roosevelt to answer the abuse “in the American way”, that is, through a radio address (FDRL: OF 136 (7)).

“All Kinds of Subterfuges” It has been variously claimed for Confessions that it was made at the request either of FBI chief, J. Edgar Hoover, or of the Roosevelt administration (Wallis and Higham, 1980: 139–40). There is no archival evidence to support either source, but the film did need clearance from Washington at several stages of production. In December 1938 the New York Post printed a series of articles by Turrou about the spy trials. Before publication this material was scrutinized by the Department of Justice and certain eliminations were made. Having discussed with Turrou the Post’s clearance procedure, Jacob Wilk, who was in charge of Warner Bros’ New York scenario department felt that the studio might be able to learn from this experience. Presuming that Jack Warner was already using his contacts in the administration to get script approval, Wilk nonetheless suggested to Warner that they contact the Post for advice “in the event that you do not succeed in clearing the material through the channels that you are now using” (USC: WB). As well as gaining general script approval, government permission was needed to photograph the interiors of key buildings. Herman Lissauer, head of the studio’s research department, asked Irving Deakin, one of Wilk’s team, to furnish precise detail of Federal Courts, the offices of the US District Attorney and the Passport Division of the New York office of the Department of State. Detail of the latter building was needed for a particular plot detail. As part of his work for the Nazi ring a German-born “spy” (Francis Lederer) is ordered to acquire some blank passports which he attempted to do by making the request over the telephone whilst posing as a government offi-

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cial. Deakin at first replied that he was having difficulty with the New York Passport Division because “‘permission . . . must come in writing from Washington”, but he was soon able to let Lissauer know he had Washington’s permission to photograph the New York Passport Bureau after hours (USC: WB). Although Warner Bros had made courageous films in the past – arguably any film of social criticism was controversial in 1930s Hollywood – there was a sense of entering uncharted waters with the making of Confessions. Production was shrouded in secrecy and a sense of danger was evident. When art director Carl Weyl was given the numerous artefacts and photographs researchers had collected relating to Bund activities, he was told to “guard them carefully” (USC: WB). The possibility of the script “leaking” was another source of unease. Before casting had been finalized, Charlie Einfield, head of advertising, suggested that Wallis should instruct actors who had a script “for the spy story . . . that it should be kept under lock and key” (USC: WB). Until now Wallis was unaware that actors – still worse, actors who were only provisionally cast – had been given scripts. The next day he dashed off a memo to Robert Lord and Anatole Litvak reminding them that he had already objected to actors being allowed to read the script. Stressing “the dynamite that is in this story”, Wallis suggested that actors be given “only their sides” rather than a complete script. Moreover, secrecy took precedence over the possibility of actors who would not consider taking a part without knowing the story’s outcome. Wallis felt “if they don’t want to take a test under those conditions, then we won’t use them” (USC: WB). The need for secrecy arose from Confessions’ close parallel with actual events and in this regard the studio made every possible effort to ensure accuracy. The $25,000 paid to Turrou for the rights to his story also retained his services as technical advisor to the film. Another contract clause gave the studio the right to use Turrou as an actor, and he was obliged, if requested, to appear in promotional trailers as his presence would give undoubted authenticity (USC: WB). During the trial of US of A v. Otto Herman Voss et al. co-writer Milton Krims attended daily to note all details and, in addition, a full set of the stenographer’s trial minutes was secured by the research department. As a matter of course Krims and Wallis were sent daily clippings from the New York newspapers, but researchers felt clippings from the West Coast press should also be kept “in case you get some material that we do not” (USC: WB). Although Harry Warner was not usually involved in the minutiae of film production, the importance of Confessions meant that he too passed on

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whatever information his New York office received. Even after shooting had begun, Warner Bros continued to try to weave in contemporary events, such as a meeting of the Bund held at Madison Square Garden in February 1939. This event attracted 22,000 members and supporters. Lissauer wondered if a story circulating about Jewish firms sacking their Gentile employees, which caused Macy’s department store to take out full page press denials, could provide a sub-plot (USC: WB). After production was completed, a subsequent re-issue featured additional newsreel footage showing the fall of the Netherlands and Norway. Accuracy in portraying the trial and related events was just one aspect of a film which strove for perfection in all its details. The tone was set from the beginning when Lissauer told Wilk “it is intended to be as authentic as possible in portraying the background of this picture”. Apologizing for the “terrific amount of work” his demands would cause, Lissauer pointed out the impossibility of finding out from California details such as “the little German concession in Grand Central near the Western Union Office” (USC: WB). Despite describing Lissauer’s request as “quite a tall order”, the New York studio office reassured him “the work has already been put in hand” (USC: WB). The task was made infinitely more difficult because most of the necessary material had to be collected secretly, drawing no attention to the studio. Some items would have been otherwise comparatively easy to obtain, but the widespread knowledge that Warner Bros were producing the picture put the Bund and pro-Nazis on their guard. Deakin warned Lissauer that to get photographs of Bund activities would mean “all kinds of subterfuges will have to be resorted to . . . it is rather a ticklish business”’ (USC: WB). A few days later, a photograph of a Bund meeting “obtained from a private source” was sent to Hollywood, followed within a month by a large batch of pictures, all taken at Camp Siegfried, a Bund camp for German-American Hitler Youth, just outside New York City (USC: WB). Another demand was made for photographs, this time of the SS Europa, a boat used by the Nazi ring to travel between Germany and the United States. Deakin stressed that he would do his best to get these, but added that it would need “both tact and diplomacy, to say nothing of a bit of finegling” (USC: WB). The “finegling” took the form of obsequience to the captain; unaware of Deakin’s motives, he allowed photographs to be taken of his ship providing he was included in the snaps (USC: WB). The next month photographs of the SS Hans arriving at the German pier were secured by Anatole Litvak under “difficult circumstances”. The circumstances? He used a miniature camera (USC: WB).

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The research team also needed several Bund publications. Deakin felt sure he would be able to obtain these but realized that to do so would require “some other approach more than merely that of ask and you shall receive”, to which Lissauer gratefully replied, “to be perfectly frank, I never dreamed you would be able to get some of the material which you have obtained for us” (USC: WB). Photostats were sent to California, including Jungvolk in Lager and Hitler – Jügend in Kampf, two pamphlets used by the youth section. These were also obtained by “subterfuge”. On loan from the youth headquarters in Brooklyn, the demand for their almost immediate return rendered photostats rather than the pamphlets themselves a necessity (USC: WB). Deakin was to be put under further pressure yet with regard to precision of detail. Asking Lissaeur if the publications Handbook of Foreign Germans by Hugo Grothe and Nazi Instruction for our Friends Overseas, Pamphlet 7 were absolutely essential, he explained that to obtain them “it is going to be necessary for someone of us to get further inside the Bund than we have got, perhaps even to the point of taking out a membership (which is not anything one wants to do) in order to get this material about which they are naturally very secretive” (USC: WB). Notwithstanding the difficulties they had faced, or perhaps because of them, the researchers were justifiably proud of their achievements. Lissauer wondered if it would impress Jack Warner to see Confession’s “bibles” (the collected research artefacts) as he believed them to be “very fine” (USC: WB).

Cinematic Style and the Construction of Realism Confessions has a texture of unfolding history that cannot be solely attributed to the meticulous accuracy of its background detail. The sense of seeing history as it happens was to quite an extent constructed by cinematic technique. First, it has more the atmosphere of a documentary than a feature film. A March of Time style narrator opens the film and explains and links sequences. Some historians place Confessions in the documentary tradition. Writing in 1949, Richard Griffith pointed out that for several years before 1939 documentary makers had been trying to warn of fascism’s increasing menace. He argues that Confession’s borrowings from dramatic documentaries, as well as from March of Time, produced a film “‘as illuminating as it is exciting” (Rotha, 1949: 460). Fictional episodes are interspersed with newsreel footage of, for example, Nazi rallies in Germany and the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Even

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more effectively these actual newsreel extracts slip into staged “newsreels” of Nazi activities through elliptical editing which would have been largely unremarked by audiences. Even the “piecemeal” nature of Confessions, which handicaps its easy synopsis, adds to the documentary effect. Historical events do not cohere into the easy format and neat closure of a fiction film. Thus the “plot” often seems absent; chronology of events and unfolding history take its place, even if the cost is a patchy narrative. All these aspects add up to give Confessions what Roger Manvell describes as “a powerful veneer of actuality” (Manvell, 1974: 30). Hal Wallis hoped to heighten realism by dispensing with pre-picture credits. Credits can act as an audience’s “protection” against difficult material. Seeing who wrote the “story” and which actors “played” the parts could provide a comforting buffer against events as discomforting as the discovery of a Nazi spy ring in America. Although actors and production personnel are usually highly competitive over their credits, attaching great importance to the order in which names appear and the size of the lettering, on this occasion there was full agreement to waive opening credits. Only the title appeared before the film itself, credits being given at the end (Dick, 1985: 56). Moreover, Warner Bros tried not to mar Confessions’ plausibility with heavy-handed propaganda, despite all the evidence that the research team had collected. Once shooting started, Wallis was particularly keen to avoid too many pictures of Hitler on screen. While these might be permissible in certain scenes, for example Bund meetings, he insisted Lord and Litvak shouldn’t “keep shoving this at them in every set we go into . . . I am afraid we are heaping it on too thick” (USC: WB). Two days later he reiterated his misgivings about pictures of Hitler and also expressed doubt about montage sequences and dissolves which spread swastikas “a little thick” (USC: WB). Wallis didn’t entirely get his way over this issue and Confessions probably remains as the only picture which separates scenes with a swastika-shaped wipe. The legal department urged that characters be given names different from their real-life counterparts. At first the studio was determined not to step down and indeed Wallis intended to use actual names, not only for characters but also for the liners Breman and Europa, and for the Vaterland cafe. However, according to Bernard F. Dick, the use of one “‘real” name was always out of the question, that of Kate Moog Busch. Dick claims, although the Roosevelt archives do not unequivocally support this, that Busch, a nurse in the Nazi ring who knew Admiral James F. Halsey, had actually worked as FDR’s nurse. In the film, the nurse was always referred

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to as Erica Woolf; this name switch was apparently a condition made by Washington for story approval (Dick, 1985: 83–6). When Morris Ebenstein made Wallis accept the very real possibility of a libel suit if actual names were used, Jack Warner himself suggested some alternatives, specifically Hanover and Dresden for the boats (USC: WB). Rather than give the cafe a fictional name, it is not actually referred to by name on-screen. Ebenstein wanted Wallis to go still further and preface the picture with the disclaiming foreword “While the particular characters and events in this photoplay are fictional, the espionage methods revealed are true and the methods of detecting the spies are also true”. Refusing, Wallis replied that to describe these characters and events as fictitious would result in “the biggest laugh of the picture” (USC: WB). The effectiveness of Confessions’ realism was matched by its emotive manipulation of the audience. This was achieved by attacks upon and then defence of signifiers of Americanisms that Warner Bros usually regarded as sacred. The Bund leader (Paul Lucas) tells German-Americans that “Germany must save America from the chaos that breeds with democracy and racial equality”. Nazis describe their plan to destroy “the chain which holds the whole American system together: the Constitution and the Bill of Rights”. Presumably this will be no difficult task because “after all, the Americans are a very simple-minded people”. Borrowing a technique from earlier anti-racist pictures such as Black Legion (Archie Mayo, 1937), restoring wisdom is given to the District Attorney who warns the jury of the perils of isolationism and insists that Americans must follow the European example and defend the constitution and the Bill of Rights. As Nick Roddick says, “almost every scene has the feeling of an invisible presence – that of the ordinary American viewer at whom the dialogue is really aimed” (Roddick, 1983: 162). It is impossible to believe, watching the film today, that result would have been other than exactly as intended.

Publicity, Exhibition and Reception Publicity pulled together the different aspects which cohered to make it such an effective film. Drawing on the studio’s reputation, posters announced “When a picture is so big . . . so timely . . . so great . . . you don’t have to be told who made it”. The verisimilitude, secrecy and danger were stressed in posters which told of “an American journey into truth” that was “straight from ‘hush hush’ State Department files”, the latter text being superimposed against a filing cabinet marked confidential. Finally, the traditions of Ameri-

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can history and bravery under tyranny were invoked by a poster promising “The greatest one man mission since Paul Revere’s ride” (USC: WB). Jack Warner claimed that “no picture ever aroused so much hate and bigotry” (Warner, 1964: 262). An atmosphere not just of controversy, but of danger surrounded its production and release. Robert Lord carried a pistol throughout “in a serious belief of the necessity of defending himself from Nazi agents” (Dick, 1985: 265). Other personnel felt endangered. Wallis and Jack and Harry Warner received hostile telephone calls and Robinson got threatening and abusive letters (Robinson, 1973: 206). In playing the FBI nemesis of the spies, Robinson was in particular danger, with the result that the studio put him under guard, whilst he also placed his son, Manny Robinson, under the protection of a bodyguard (Friedman, 1982: 81). Pre-release press screenings were held in secret, and security guards were hired for the New York opening. Violence broke out at some public showings (Parish and Marill, 1972:28). A cinema was burned down in a German district of Milwaukee by Nazi sympathizers. There was furore amongst Germans at Kansas City when the censorship board approved the film; Jack Warner responded “I cannot believe any group other than one sympathetic to the Nazi cause would object to Confessions” (Motion Picture Daily 10 May 1939) . An anti-Semitic right-wing priest and demagogue, Father Coughlin, added to the uproar in his Sunday address, arguing that it was “the invasion of propaganda in the United States in behalf of Great Britain” (Motion Picture Daily 10 May 1939). Jack Warner received numerous “crank” letters, including one from “an American born” who “disabused” him by writing “Please don’t think the American people are as dumb as you think they are”, and further suggested that the studio’s next picture should be “I am a Communist, starring Eddie Cantor and a few other Communist Jews” (USC: WB). When Robinson visited Paris in the summer of 1939, he requested special police protection because he too had continued to receive threatening mail (Glasgow Evening Citizen 10 May 1939). Following the outbreak of war, Robinson was in London for a series of broadcasts to occupied nations, and the legacy of Confessions continued; he was protected at all times by Scotland Yard and army personnel (Robinson, 1973: 206). Worst of all, in 1940, America learnt that some Polish exhibitors who had dared to show the film had been hanged in their cinemas (Friedman, 1982: 81). Unsurprisingly the German-American Bund objected to Confessions, their newspaper describing it as “a nightmarish concoction . . . the choicest collection of flubdub that a diseased mind could possibly pick out of the public ashcan” (Hamilton, 1990: 212). They tried to sue Warner Bros

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for $5,000,000 only dropping the case when their leader, Fritz Kuhn, was imprisoned for misappropriation of Bund funds (Roffman and Purdy, 1981: 213). Hans Thomsen, the German chargé d’affaires, complained to Secretary of State Cordell Hull and the German government, describing the film as “pernicious propaganda poisoning German-American relations” (Balio, 1993: 298). As the PCA had expected, Confessions was banned by several countries; not only the hostile nations of Japan, Germany, Italy and Spain but also neutrals such as Ireland, Switzerland and some South American republics. Holland, Sweden and Norway also refused it a screening although as Koppes and Black point out “they might have been better advised to watch it and take it to heart” (Koppes and Black, 1987: 30). When it was re-released in 1940 with footage of the invasion of Norway, Holland and Belgium, Frank Nugent of the New York Times commented: If the film is less startling today than a year ago, it is because of its exposure of Nazi “fifth column” preparation before the invasion is now common knowledge and because the scope of treachery has been immeasurably widened . . . it is a tribute to its prophetic accuracy that the newly inserted sequences that show havoc wreaked by international Nazi sympathizers in Norway, Holland, and Belgium become a logical climax to events whose shadows had been cast before them. (Friedman, 1982: 82)

Confessions received as much praise from those who admired its courage as it did criticism from right-wingers, isolationists and out and out fascists. In an article headlined “Salute to Courage”, Box Office wished other studios “displayed something resembling the Warners’ backbone”. Confessions, it was felt, “does democracy well, renders a service which may prove to be of irresistible worth, and at the same time, remains an exciting piece of entertainment” (Box Office 6 May 1939). Even James Dugan of New Masses, who was usually critical of Hollywood’s limited attempts at political comment, found that Confessions at least demonstrated “honest motivation” (Dugan, 1940: 9). In the New York Times, Nugent wrote: “Hitler’s pledge of non-aggression toward the Americas reached Warners too late yesterday. They had formally declared war on the Nazis at 8:15 a.m. with the first showing of the Confessions of a Nazi Spy at the Strand. Hitler won’t like it; neither will Goebbels” (Friedman, 1982). New York critics voted it the best film of 1939 (Parish and Marill, 1972: 20) and in that year Jack Warner was named as one of the film industry’s top ten personalities “for the fearlessness with which he has used the cinema to present contemporary dramas” (New York World Telegram 19 July 1939). Echoing Groucho Marx, the screenwriter

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Joseph Mankiewicz described Warner Bros as having “guts”. Unlike his own studio, MGM, which continued to court German sales, and which he claimed took names off pictures if they sounded Jewish, Warner Bros plainly hated the Nazis more “than they cared for . . . German grosses” (Geist, 1978: 91). The legal department had been nervous at the possible reception of Confessions in England and Canada. Asking Wallis if it was intended for release there, the legal team reminded him that those countries were following a policy of appeasement. The lawyers felt that could make Confessions the subject of a British lawsuit “arising under the law of privacy and more particularly under the libel law”, in which case Wallis “may not find the courts . . . as favourably disposed as the U.S. courts are likely to be” (USC: WB). The British censor did at first insist that some insulting references to Hitler be removed, but in 1940 the deleted sections were restored. Indeed, Robert Murphy argues that British audiences found it a reassuring picture: “The question of American support was a crucial one and films were seen as a weapon whereby American public opinion might be swayed in Britain’s favour” (Murphy, 1989: 15). The controversy surrounding Confessions had considerable longevity, stretching into the period immediately before Pearl Harbor and beyond American entry into the war. In 1941, the isolationist Senators Burton Wheeler of Montana, Gerald Nye of New York and Bennett Clark of Missouri induced the Senate to investigate pro-war propaganda in the film and radio industries. The Senate Subcommittee on War Propaganda, chaired by D. Worth Clark of Idaho, opened in September 1941 with a brief to investigate 48 feature films including Confessions (in 1940, the other studios had begun to make anti-Nazi pictures) (Suid, 1978: 38). Harry Warner’s name had been booed during a speech made by Nye in St Louis, but when called before Clark’s panel, Warner remained implacable (Vaughn 1994: 100). He told the investigators that he had always supported President Roosevelt’s foreign policy and that “Shortly after Hitler came to power in Germany I became convinced that Hitlerism was an evil force designed to destroy free people, whether they were Catholics, Protestants, or Jews”. When asked if Confessions was propaganda, he retorted that it was a “factual portrayal of a Nazi spy ring that actually operated in New York City. If that is propaganda, we plead guilty” (Behlmer, 1986: 185–93). The investigations ran out of steam when Clark postponed hearings on the grounds that too many committee members were away from Washington, but the events at Pearl Harbor in December made the question of pro-interventionist pictures irrelevant. Perhaps the most penetrating comment was

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made by Variety at the time of the film’s release: “Decades from now, what’s happening will be seen in perspective. And the historians will almost certainly take note of this daringly frank broadside from a picture company” (Variety 3 May 1939). These prophetic words provide context for a film which demonstrated the ethical decision made by a film studio and its personnel to abide by the courage of their convictions against the complacency and conservativism of Hollywood structures and isolationist politics. In so doing, Warner Bros provided film historians with a primary source revealing much about those who sought to placate and those who dared to take a stand against Nazism in America.

References

Archives FDRL: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum (Hyde Park, NY): Papers as President: Official Files (OF); President’s Personal Files (PPF) PCA: Production Code Administration Records, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California. USC: University of Southern California: Warner Brothers Production Files 1938–39 (WB); Jack Warner Collection 1939 (JWC)

Periodicals Box Office 6 May 1939. Glasgow Evening Citizen 7 August 1939. Hollywood Reporter 27 October 1938. Hollywood Reporter 6 December 1938. Los Angeles Times 30 November 1944. Motion Picture Daily 10 May 1939. New York Times 15 January 1939. New York World Telegram 14 July 1939. Screenbook June 1939. TAC, April 1939.

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Secondary sources Balio, Tino, ed. 1985. Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise 1930-1939. New York. University of California Press. Behlmer, Rudy, ed. 1986. Inside Warner Bros. (1935-1951). London. Viking. Brownstein, Ronald. 1990. The Power and the Glitter: The Washington-Hollywood Connection. New York. Vintage Books. Ceplair, Larry and Englund, Steven. 1979. The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960. Chicago. University of Illinois Press. Dallek, Robert. 1979. Franklin Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945. Oxford. Oxford University Press. Dick, Bernard F. 1985. The Star Spangled Screen: The American World War II Film. Lexington. University Press of Kentucky. ———. 1989. Radical Innocence: A Critical Study of the Hollywood Ten. Lexington. University Press of Kentucky. Divine, Robert A. 1969. The Illusion of Neutrality. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. Doherty, Thomas. 1993. Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II. New York. Columbia University Press. Dugan, James. 1940. ‘Changing the Reel’, New Masses, 34(3): 5–10. Friedman, Lester D. 1982. Hollywood’s Image of the Jew. New York. Ungar. Friedrich, Otto. 1987. City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s. London. University of California Press. Geist, Kenneth L. 1978. Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz. New York Scribner. Goodman, Walter. 1964. The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of The House Committee on Un-American Activities. London. Penguin Books. Hamilton, Ian. 1990. Writers in Hollywood, 1915-1951. New York. Carroll and Graf. Jacobs, Lewis. 1967-68. Cinema Journal (Winter): 6–8. Koppes, Klayton R. and Black, Gregory D. 1987. Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics Profits and Propaganda Helped Shape World War II Movies. London: I. B. Tauris. Manvell, Roger. 1974. Films and the Second World War. South Brunswick: Barnes and Noble. Murphy, Robert. 1989. Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1939-49. London. Routledge. Neve, Brian. 1992. Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition. London. Routledge. Parish, James and Marill, Alvin H. 1972. The Cinema of Edward G. Robinson. South Brunswick. A. S. Barnes. Robinson, Edward G. 1973. All My Yesterdays: An Autobiography. New York. W. H. Allen. Roddick, Nick. 1983. A New Deal in Entertainment: Warner Brothers in the 1930s. London. British Film Institute. Roffman, Peter and Purdy, Jim. 1981. The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties. Bloomington. Indiana University Press.

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Roosevelt, F. D.1938–50. The Public Papers and Addresses, edited by Samuel I. Rosenman. 12 volumes. New York. Random House. Rotha, Paul. 1949. The Film Till Now: A Survey of World Cinema. London. Funk & Wagnalls. Sandeen. Eric J. 1979. ‘Confessions of a Nazi Spy and the German American- Bund’, American Studies 20(2): 69-81. Suid, Lawrence H. 1978. Guts and Glory: Great American War Movies. Lexington. University Press of Kentucky. Thorp, Margaret Farrand. 1946. America at the Movies. London. Yale University Press. Trumbo, Dalton. 1972. The Time of the Toad: A Study of the Inquisition in America and Two Related Pamphlets. New York. HarperCollins. Tugwell, Rexford. 1969. The Democratic Roosevelt: A Biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Baltimore. Doubleday. Vaughn, Stephen. 1994. Ronald Reagan in Hollywood: Movies and Politics. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Wallis, Hal and Higham, Charles. 1980. Starmaker: The Autobiography of Hal Wallis. New York. Macmillan. Warner, Jack L. 1964. My First Hundred Years in Hollywood. New York. Random House.

CHAPTER THREE THE UNWRITTEN MORAL CODE IN RECENT INDIAN CINEMA: DECEPTION AND ATONEMENT? FELICITY HAND Indian commercial cinema, commonly known as Bollywood, has come to stand for a specific type of film aimed at a mass audience and combining – to many a western cinema-goer at least – an incredible medley of genres. In fact many popular Indian films are referred to as masala, originally a blend of spices, indicating the variety of different elements – music, song, dance, romance, action, comedy and drama – that can make up any one film (Nayar, 2004: 14). In the Indian context this is not a confusion of genres, but rather a totally different understanding of what a film genre consists of. Indian cinema has its own particular genres – mythological, devotional, folklore, social drama, lost-and-found, historical among many others – but even here they rarely stick rigorously to any sort of genre convention. They provide a “hybrid mishmash of style and content” (Pendakur, 2003: 116), catering for the tastes of as many spectators as possible, bearing in mind that in contemporary India cinema-going is still very much a family affair. The enormous social role played by Bollywood both in the subcontinent and in South Asian diasporic communities should not be underestimated. There are, however, certain areas that are still trodden with certain trepidation by film directors: the theme of ethnic or communal violence and interethnic sexuality, in particular relationships between high caste Hindu women and Muslim men. This is in part because of the ever vigilant Censor Board which will order the deletion of scenes considered unnecessarily provocative (Ganti, 2004). Thus, although popular films do not avoid political issues, they tend to downplay controversial topics and seek to cast as wide a net as possible in terms of genre. Since independence and partition in 1947, India has not managed to rid herself of sectarian conflicts, those between Hindus and Muslims being especially virulent – the riots in Ayodhya in 1992 and the unsolved problem of Kashmir stand out as notorious exam-

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ples – but it is only relatively recently that film makers are really taking on board this most delicate of issues.1 In this article I propose to look at four films, three Bollywood, Mission Kashmir (dir. Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 2000), Dil Se (dir. Mani Ratnam, 1998) and Fanaa (dir. Kunal Kohli, 2006) and one example of middle cinema, Mr & Mrs Iyer (dir. Aparna Sen, 2002), and discuss how successful each is in dealing with the theme of ethnic tensions and how each resolves the ethical issues that surface.2 All four films focus on individual conflicts rather than community issues, although they are set within the context of the resurgence of the Kashmir crisis of the 1990s (Mission Kashmir) or the early 21st century (Fanaa), in a separatist area in the North East of India (Dil Se) and in a deliberately vague area just after 9/11 (Mr and Mrs Iyer). Chopra focuses on hatred and revenge with last minute forgiveness and redemption, Kohli pushes Muslim identification with the Indian state centre stage, Ratnam probes individual interpretations of right and wrong while Sen’s film attempts to delve into the fears and prejudices that prevent true intercultural understanding and active engagement with the other. I will suggest that Bollywood and middle cinema can – each in its own specific way – create a space for the recognition that the problem of fundamentalism or ethnic violence can be solved. Thus I argue that there is a space for a reassessment of ethical issues and a questioning of what I am calling the unwritten moral code in contemporary Indian cinema. Mainstream films in the subcontinent are designed to cater for such a wide range of age groups, social classes, caste affiliations and ethnoreligious backgrounds that delicate areas like sexuality and communalism need to be treated with the utmost caution for fear of causing offence (Gokulsing & Dissanayaka, 1998). In this cultural minefield, films cannot easily create social awareness; instead they can merely reflect current trends or ideologies or, at their worst, interpellate the audience to identify with the discourses of the state and its dominant symbology. The cinema transmits what Chakravarty has called “the overriding official goal of Indian national unity” (1993: 7–8), that is the image of an India that, despite ethnic violence and separatism, that is much more than the sum of its integral parts. Coupled with this self-imposed censorship lies the expectation that films depicting social change should carry within them the correct solution to the moral dilemmas the protagonists are faced with, without which the audience would feel it had been somewhat cheated out of a glimmer of the “truth”. That ambiguous open endings disavow the enjoyment and satisfaction that a just or “right” outcome would provide may suggest that Indian cinema is a fantasy world that at best can only refract the trivialities of everyday life despite its thinly disguised profound statements on the rifts that separate

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human groups, be they ethnic, religious, class or gender differences. It should be borne in mind that the stories of the great Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata still resonate with contemporary audiences so in fact controversial or delicate issues can indeed be shown on the screen but the way these dilemmas are addressed and solved is firmly rooted in the moral code outlined in these traditional texts.3 The agency of women has undergone vast changes in recent years as has the treatment of communalism, yet there continues to prevail a nogo area when it comes to certain subaltern subjectivities, namely Hindu women and Muslims. The four films chosen for close scrutiny in this essay – seen from a Western perspective – hover between refusing a neat closure and providing a clear-cut moral resolution. They appear to ask more questions than they answer, and in doing so offer a space for negotiation about just how one should deal with extreme situations. The wound of partition lies at the back of all films about India’s multicultural make-up with the representation of Muslims falling into one of two major categories: either violent, bloodthirsty fanatics (Mission Kashmir) or else sanitized, domesticated, middle-class liberals (Mr and Mrs Iyer).4 The last two decades have witnessed a sea-change in gender roles as is shown in Dil Se where the private, feminized world versus the public masculine nation state is turned upside down with the female terrorist taking over the role of suicide bomber bent on her mission to destroy for what she understands to be a just cause. The reporter – played by superstar Shah Rukh Khan – is caught up in the maelstrom of separatist politics when he continues to pursue the woman even when he knows she is a terrorist. Likewise, in Mr and Mrs Iyer it is a woman, and more importantly a Hindu Brahmin woman, who overcomes her scruples and saves the life of her fellow Muslim passenger during an attack by Hindu rioters, while the latter fails to react and witnesses the killing of an elderly Muslim couple. In Fanaa the blindness of the female protagonist becomes a metaphor for the failure of the state to locate and root out subversive elements that endanger the integrity of the state.

Destroyed in Love Tamil director Manu Ratnam’s Dil Se, the third of his sucessful “terrorism trilogy” (Roja (1992), Bombay (1995) and Dil Se [From the Heart] (1998), narrates the brief and unexpected encounter of Amar, a Delhi radio journalist and Meghna, a mysteriously enigmatic woman at a railway station one dark, stormy night when he is on an assignment in the politically restless

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north-eastern part of India. Unknown to Amar, Meghna is a member of a terrorist group, bent on achieving independence from the Indian state and training to be a suicide bomber. Fate makes their paths cross on several occasions and Amar falls hopelessly in love with her. He even traces her to her village with the intention of proposing marriage.5 This poses more than one ethical question, primarily whether one’s loyalty to the state should overcome one’s own passions and desires. Should the community – here the Indian state – take preference over family or conjugal loyalties? Indeed, as Anustup Basu remarks, “Is it forbidden to fall in love with a terrorist simply because it is against the spirit of the law?” (2008: 164). From her own perspective Meghna defends a marginalized, almost outlawed secessionist region, so for her Indianness is already out of her reach. The Indian state has excluded her from its imaginary so she is entitled to pursue her passions and desires, which have little to do with Amar. There is no ethical dilemma for Meghna as she has already been judged as aberrant, deviant, beyond the pale of morally acceptable conduct.6 The dilemma in Dil Se is wholly Amar’s, he is the one who is obliged and expected to choose rightly. Interestingly, early on in the film, there is a moment when he is about to desist from his pursuit of her and this is when he believes her lie that she is already married and thus the “property” of another man. Once he realizes that she is only trying to dissuade him from becoming involved with her, he takes up the chase even more earnestly and in fact chooses to die with her at the end of the film. Even after Meghna’s terrorist activities become known to Amar and his own patriotism comes into question, his determination to obtain a prohibited or at least undesirable love (his family had chosen a suitable bride for him) overrides his better judgement or at least the dictates of a patriotic, middle-class urban Hindu family. We thus get a glimpse of a disconcerting new age, “urban” conjugal desire that is not afraid to cast itself against both the “not-yet modern” constitutional nation-state and the self-contained ethical universe of the feudal joint family. (Basu, 2008: 166)

Amar pleads with Meghna in the final scenes of the film to abandon her mission; he even suggests they run away to some kind of utopian landscape outside of the violent geopolitics of the nation-state but Meghna emerges the more clear-sighted of the two. She has been traumatized by the atrocities committed on her immediate family and is unable to think out of the secessionist politics branded into her skin by her community over years. Her suicide mission is, in a sense, frustrated as the Indian state suffers no

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terrorist attack but she cannot escape death as she dies locked in a lethal embrace with Amar. The explosives that were originally intended for the governmental authorities blow the couple up, putting an end to an impossible union. He cannot sanction the attack on the state, while she cannot elude the mission she has been trained for. He cannot live outside the established path, but she is not even allowed to tread that path. His death thus constitutes the atonement that, in accordance with the laws of karma, he must pay for deviating, albeit temporarily, from the path of righteousness. Amar must die to atone for his failure to live up to the concept of self-responsibility that lies at the heart of Hinduism. The audience accepts that Amar redeems himself by dying in order to save his country; for them there would be no other alternative. It is revealing that Dil Se was a greater success among South Asian diasporic communities than with viewers in the subcontinent itself (Chakravarty, 2000: 232; Kabir, 2003: 141). Its popularity points to a process of re-identification of the diasporic communities with the underlying ethos of Indian culture: that is, “through the act of sacrifice, the cosmos is kept in order” (Rodrigues, 2006: 48). The fatal denouement of Dil Se provides an interesting contrast with the ending of Fanaa, in which its protagonist – in this case female – is posed with an equally anguishing dilemma. Fanaa, set in the late 1990s, unravels the story of Zooni Ali Beg, a blind Kashmiri girl who travels to Delhi with her friends to perform a song and dance routine at the presidential palace on Republic Day. In Delhi, Zooni meets the Casanova-style tour guide Rehan Qadri. Over the next few days, Rehan and Zooni fall in love. On the day following the girl’s performance there is a bomb blast at the presidential palace. Zooni undergoes an eye operation to restore her eyesight before she and Rehan marry. Her parents arrive in Delhi to attend her wedding but they are told that Rehan has died in the explosion. Zooni returns to Kashmir, pregnant by Rehan. However, it turns out that not only is Rehan not dead, he is involved in a terrorist movement, the Independent Kashmir Front, on the orders of his grandfather. The film then jumps forward seven years. Indian Army intelligence receives information that the IKF has assembled a nuclear bomb and all it needs to complete the device is a trigger in the possession of an army unit based in Kashmir. Posing as an army officer, Rehan ambushes the unit and escapes with the trigger, but is wounded. He regains consciousness and finds himself in the house where Zooni lives with her father, now a widower, and her son, also named Rehan. Zooni, who can now see, fails to recognize Rehan as the father of her child but she and her son become attached to the mysterious man. Rehan’s true identity is finally revealed, after which they enjoy a short-lived happy family life,

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trapped indoors by a snowstorm. Zooni’s father suspects Rehan after a news bulletin warns of the presence of a dangerous terrorist in the area and he dies accidentally when Rehan struggles with him. Rehan is determined to fulfil his mission and attempts to use a neighbour’s radio to contact his IKF comrades. Zooni herself discovers her father’s dead body and panics. She then finds the nuclear trigger and informs Indian military intelligence. On Rehan’s appearance she is faced with a terrible dilemma: save the man she loves but risk the lives of thousands of people or prevent Rehan from completing his deadly mission. Zooni shoots him dead at the same time that Indian military personnel shoot down Rehan’s grandfather and other IKF members who have appeared on the scene. Fanaa skirts around the Kashmir crisis altogether, avoiding issues of history, sovereignty and especially the shameful record of human rights abuses on the part of the Indian army and in this sense is guilty of “lumping together all ‘terrorisms’ into one indistinguishable mass” (Sharma, 2008: 126). Communalism is a political ideology with religion clearly relegated to a cosmetic cover-up. Political mobilization is the means by which social and economic grievances can be redressed with religion being harnessed to the cause. For this reason, ethnic violence tends to be coded as communal conflict on the screen with Islamism, rather than Hindutva, portrayed as a threat to secularism, that is, the Indian state (Dirks, 2001: 163). Kohli’s film appeals to the emotions of the spectator, as do all Bollywood style films, by insisting on the family life of Zooni, her son and her widowed father, all patriotic Indian Muslims, prepared to sacrifice their personal happiness in order to save; this is presented as the integrity of India. Rehan’s involvement in the IFK does not appear to be linked in an ideological way. His loyalty to the cause of the Kashmiri separatists seems to be construed solely as part of his filial obedience to his grandfather, since his parents died when he was only three. In this way, it is hinted that Rehan’s essential Indianness – unlike his grandfather’s – has merely been frozen but his love for Zooni – which seems to be authentic – allows the viewer to condone his lack of political judgement. Rehan’s grandfather is constructed as lying beyond the pale of redemption, outside the national project but here the film flops sadly in failing to throw any light on the complex history of the Kashmiri bone of contention so Kohli “uses the Kashmiri issue as a mere peg on which to hang a tale of doomed love” (Ramachandran, 2006: 71). Fanaa presents the other side to the Dil Se quandary. Muslim marriage is a contract so Rehan has actually breached the contract by betraying Zooni’s love. He has killed her father and appears willing to condemn her and their son to a life of permanent alienation. The film would have taken on a

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completely different resolution had Zooni been a Hindu wife. According to the tenets of Hinduism, a husband is like a god so killing him – even in the case of his being a dangerous terrorist – flies in the face of wifely duty.7 That the film succeeds in portraying a wise decision rests neatly on the nuances of the religious affiliation of the heroine. The title of the film has a double interpretation, fanaa meaning ‘annihilation’ in Urdu and the Sufi concept, from the mystic tradition of Islam, meaning annihilation of the self so therefore union with God (Ruthven, 2000: 63–4), whereas in Hindi it conveys the idea of being totally lost – dominated – by love. The two resonate with each other as Amar and Meghna are the ones literally destroyed in and by love, whereas Zooni shoots Rehan as their love was already meaningless. Rehan is annihilated, and through his death peace is achieved. Although – or perhaps because – the main characters are Muslims, the Hindu notion of karma is contrasted with the Sufi concept and drawn together in a comparative ethical world. Self-effacement in the shape of the ultimate sacrifice (Amar’s suicide and Zooni’s murder of Rehan) leads them on the path to perfection.

The Undecidable Decides The beginning of Mission Kashmir seems to fall into the trap of communalizing the Kashmir issue and making it into a Hindu/Muslim case. The film opens with hints at cross-border terrorism originating from Pakistan, the strong independence movement in Kashmir itself and the excesses of the Indian state. In this respect political scientist Ashutosh Varshney comments on the fact that To India’s embarrassment, Kashmiris are now fighting India’s security forces, not Pakistan-backed invaders. In a place known for its quietist, syncretistic Islam, militant Islamic fundamentalism has acquired a foothold (Varshney, 1991: 999).

Mission Kashmir focuses on the similarities between the mainstream and the periphery rather than the unsolvable differences. One obvious way of differentiating cinematic genres is through the analysis of the iconography with the frontier signalling a Western and a bleak landscape with a thunderstorm a horror film (Gopalan, 2002: 15). However, the question of what genre Mission Kashmir belongs to is not easily ascertained from the opening scene. The beginning of the film shows a peaceful, idyllic lake with the traditional shikara bobbing placidly on the crystal-clear waters. Kashmir

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has so often been pictured as an iconic, almost mythical, territory.8 This paradise on earth is suddenly and violently disturbed by the explosion of a bomb on the shikara and as the credits come up on the screen the remains of the boat slowly burn away. This abrupt introduction to terrorism is swiftly juxtaposed with an act of heroism on the part of one of the protagonists of the film, the chief police officer, SSP Inayat Khan, who, without flinching an eyelid, rescues one of his men from certain death from an explosive hidden underneath the bridge he is standing on, thus saving his life and establishing his own credentials as a “good” man. Khan, played by Sanjay Dutt, is the ultimate authority in the region and, as such, represents the Indian nation state. In this way the film appears to belong to the thriller/action genre but Bollywood films are never so straightforward; the more hybrid they are, the greater their appeal to a wider audience. The film narrates a series of reprisals carried out ad infinitum, each one bloodier and more irrational than the previous one. The refusal of the medical staff to treat Khan’s unconscious son after a domestic accident, owing to a fatwa imposed by the separatist leader Malik-ul-Khan which forbids doctors from attending to Indian (i.e. non-Kashmiri) policemen or soldiers, spurs him into organizing a raid on a village where Malik-ul-Khan will be attending a wedding celebration. The police open fire in the house where the separatist leader is staying, killing everybody on sight, regardless of age, gender or political affiliation. The sole survivor is Altaaf, who will be haunted by the image of the cold, calculating eyes of a man clad in a balaclava helmet. The child is traumatized by this experience and Neelima, Khan’s wife, begs him to bring the child home so that he can substitute her own dead son. Chopra’s film is as ambiguous as Kahmir itself because Altaaf’s socioeconomic position clearly improves as we see him playing cricket with his new father in an elegant, spacious garden, poles apart from the humble village dwelling of his real parents. Khan and his wife develop a strong bond of affection with the boy who gradually appears to forget his horrific experience and become the product of a middle-class, liberalminded background, free from any taint of religious fundamentalism or separatism. Neelima is a Hindu married to a Muslim so in this way the Khan household is presented as the example of what Kashmir was or should be, a haven of tolerance, without any vestige of ethnic conflict.9 In similar way to the opening scene of the film, this harmonious family is ruptured and irretrievably fragmented. One evening the parents go out leaving Altaaf on his own doing his homework. He searches for a pen to replace the one he was using which has broken. On opening a drawer in his parents’ room, he discovers the telltale balaclava helmet, the sight of which brings

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back all the suppressed memories of the hooded killer of his family. Altaaf runs away and the film jumps forward ten years, during which time the boy has been tutored – the suggestion is that he has in fact been indoctrinated – by Hilal Kohistani (Jackie Shroff), a militant leader dedicated to a jihad seeking the independence of Kashmir. Hilal, together with three unidentified wealthy businessmen, are plotting the execution of “Mission Kashmir”, which, we, like Altaaf himself, discover in the closing scene of the film, would have meant the total destruction of the region. The plan involves the simultaneous bombing of a mosque and a Hindu temple, thus pitting each community against the other and bringing about unforeseen mayhem. Altaaf is led to believe that the plot is to assassinate the prime Minister of India on a visit to Kashmir. Altaaf, now grown up (and played by Hrithick Roshan), returns to the scene and attempts to kill his former “father”, now his sworn enemy. As is typical in Bollywood films, these episodes of violence and conspiracy are interspersed with song and dance routines. It is worth pointing out that the female protagonist, Sufiya Parvez, a childhood friend of Altaaf and now a successful television announcer, features in all of these routines. Two of the most memorable “interruptions” in this story of vengeance and loyalty to the state are when she is a child just before the murder of Altaaf’s family and when the couple meet again after the tenyear gap. I use the term “interruptions” on purpose following the theory of Lalitha Gopalan when she proposes a reading of contemporary Indian cinema as “very deftly combining dominant genre principles developed in Hollywood films with conventions particular to Indian cinema” (2002: 14). She argues that “it seems presumptuous to think that, when Hollywood genres are appropriated by other national cinemas, we should find a straightforward application of dominant genre principles instead of reading how local contexts of production and reception intervene and prevail over genre” (ibid.). In Mission Kashmir, and in particular in the song and dance sequences, the iconography is vast and overarching; the atmosphere is one of joy and conviviality; the emotions in the songs express ethnic harmony. One song reminds us that “music has no caste or creed”. Thus the apparent “interruptions” serve to buttress the image of a sole nation state and a secular one in the bargain. Whether or not joyful songs and dancing can really combine with scenes of bloody, indiscriminate killings and gospels of hatred is of course debatable but surely depends on the expectations of the spectators and their identification with the emotions relayed. Altaaf is recruited as the man to carry out the final destruction as, according to Hilal, he despises his own existence. Neelima disobeys her husband’s instructions and visits the now wanted man Altaaf in secret. The

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meeting between mother and adopted son is, of course, a poignant one with Neelima’s words of warning echoing in Altaaf’s brain at the final, decisive moment of the film. His wife’s disregard for security – always a key word in films of this nature (see Dirks, 2001) – places Inayat Khan himself in a delicate position. If he cannot control his own wife, how can he protect the life of the Prime Minister? Khan’s outburst “Do I have to continually be suspect despite 21 years’ service because my name is Khan rather than Deshpande?” is a reminder of the role in which Muslim characters are so often cast in Bollywood films. Sumita S. Chakravarty states that “the Indian Muslim [is] ‘the undecidable’ . . . whose loyalty to the motherland could not be counted upon and needed to be ritually re-affirmed” (2000: 228). The police move in on the separatists and a bomb intended for Khan goes off killing Neelima; Hilal, in a displaced and devious sense of logic, cunningly uses this as a valid reason for Altaaf not to give up his desire to murder Khan as “vengeance for the killing of your mother”. In a revealing side scene, two of Khan’s men, one Hindu and one Sikh (the man Khan had saved at the beginning of the film) bury their own family tragedies and ethnic grievances to announce “we’re here to protect”. The message could not be clearer: the individual must renounce his or her personal allegiances in order to uphold the oneness of the Indian state. The penultimate scene is the showdown between Khan and Altaaf with the former – with astonishing ease – convincing the young man of the real nature of the mission he has been entrusted with. The Kashmir contention is conflated with some of India’s recent ethnic clashes, such as the Babri Mosque conflict and the Golden Temple killings, thus levelling out any differences and simplifying 60 years of disaffection in a swoop.10 In an amazingly short space of time, Altaaf turns against his second adopted father, Hilal, killing him “for turning Kashmir from a paradise into a hell”. We are led to believe that he sacrifices himself in order to save the bombing of the – very significantly – Hindu temple but the final scene shows a recovering Altaaf calling Inayat Khan “abba” looked on by a faithful Sufiya. Chopra’s film appeals to the emotions of the spectator, as do all Bollywood style films, by insisting on the family life of SSP Khan, an affectionate husband and father, a courageous leader and a patriotic Indian Muslim, prepared to die in order to save the integrity of India. Altaaf´s personal vendetta is not linked in any way to the cause of the Kashmiri separatists so his essential Indianness is never in doubt and he transmits a Rambo-style earnestness that condones his lack of political judgement. The only character who is constructed as lying beyond the pale of redemption is Hilal Kohistani, outside the national project for his commitment to militant Islam.

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As a call to awareness of the evil of ethnic violence, Mission Kashmir is, to my mind, a non-starter as it fails to distinguish between the misuse of religion for political purposes and the complex history of the Kashmiri bone of contention.

Everyday Engagement Varshney has studied the link between civil society and its structures and ethnic or communal violence. He has focused his analysis on the intercommunal relations between Hindus and Muslims in a selection of Indian urban areas, cities where violence has broken out as well as those places where harmonious relations have prospered. He writes: Rural India . . . was the site of less than four percent of all deaths and roughly ten percent of all Hindu-Muslim riots in India between 1950 and 1995. Peace was maintained not because of associations but because everyday civic engagement between Hindus and Muslims was enough to keep potential rioters away. In cities, however, such everyday engagement was not enough, and associations were required. (2002: 45)

It is this lack of everyday engagement that Aparna Sen highlights in her film Mr & Mrs Iyer (2002). Set in an unidentified part of northern India, the film is generally regarded as a brief but poignant love story that is played out against a backdrop of communal riots. However, I prefer to read it as an act of generosity and commitment which saves a man’s life. Meenakshi Iyer, a Tamil Hindu played by Konkona Sen Sharma, is travelling back to Calcutta with her baby son. The first part of the journey is by bus, and among her fellow passengers there is a professional photographer, Jehangir Chowdhury, known as Raja to his friends. Meenakshi’s parents had asked Raja (Rahul Bose) to take care of her during the long trip as she is travelling alone with a child. The journey takes them through a predominantly Hindu area where a riot has erupted in response to the burning of a village – understood to be the work of Muslims – and a sudden curfew prevents the bus from proceeding. A group of Hindu extremists force their way onto the bus and demand the identity – read religious affiliation – of all the passengers. Meenakshi has only just discovered to her surprise and horror that Raja is in fact a Muslim but despite her initial rejection of him, she identifies him as her husband, thus saving him from certain death. Raja and Meenakshi are thrown together as the curfew prevents them from continuing their journey. Arguably the second part of the film, with its emphasis on the understand-

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ing that compromise is the only answer and the growing bond of affection that is forged between the two, underscores Sen’s message that this is the only way forward for India. She has stated that such a delicate issue as the Hindu/Muslim rift has to be handled with kid gloves: Scenes of communal hatred are not usually allowed in the movies . . . If you do portray it, then you are required to balance it out. And that’s the sad part. In reality, it is not balanced. In the Bombay riots and in the Gujarat riots, it was all a pogrom against the Muslims. (Rajan, 2002)

Meenakshi and Raja spend the night together-but-separately in a disused lodge until they are able to catch their train on to Calcutta. The enforced intimacy forces them to acknowledge and respect the cultural space of the other. Raja is the liberal, representing India’s modernity. Meenakshi, on the contrary, is an orthodox, strictly vegetarian Tamil Brahmin, little used to questioning traditional ideas of impurity and caste. He tries to coax her into a discussion of the irrationality of caste in contemporary India but she refuses to enter into debate. There is a kind of secondary message here as despite Meenakshi’s post-graduate studies – an unfinished masters in physics abandoned after marriage – she is still caught up in archaic, myopic customs and beliefs. It seems to me that Sen is making a link between the kind of secular education that can create enlightened tolerance on one hand and the political and social harmony that can only come about through day to day interaction. The struggle is not between Hindus and Muslims but between liberals and extremists. It becomes increasingly clear during the final leg of their trip that something more than a simple friendship brought about by the unusual circumstances has been kindled between them. Whether a young woman with a small child in tow, knowing that her husband is anxiously waiting for her at the end of the journey, would take the plunge and throw in her lot with a man who, two days before, was a total stranger and to all extents and purposes a total alien to her lifestyle is, I think, irrelevant to the ethos of the film. The highest hurdle has already been sucessfully overcome. She can enjoy his company, share his water, in short relate to him as a fellow human being rather than as “a Muslim”. The bus scene is, to my mind, the crucial moment in the film as the passengers represent a kind of mini-India covering a wide range of ages, social, linguistic, and religious differences. There are a group of students, a newlywedded couple, a woman with her handicapped son, two Sikhs, an elderly Muslim couple and a group of boozy men as well as the two protagonists. The carefully chosen passenger list – the majority of them Hindus – reflects

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the Indian mosaic – perhaps rather too neatly – but Sen is concerned with the reactions of the passengers to the outrage perpetrated and in this sense she needs a cross-section of cultural and regional backgrounds. The extremists burst their way onto the bus in search of Muslims, forcing the men to prove their Hindu credentials in a humiliating manner. The scene reveals the cowardice of the Jewish passenger, who betrays the elderly Muslims in order to save his own neck and the only person who voices a protest when the old man and his wife are roughly and callously dragged off the bus is one of the young female college students. Sen doesn’t portray the Indian male in a very flattering light. The Hindu men on the bus cower before the brute force of the extremists and the only act of defiance is that of Meenakshi, who sets aside her scruples in order to protect Raja, who otherwise would have suffered the same fate as the unfortuante Mr and Mrs Iqbal Ahmed Khan. It is in this brief but defining moment of danger that real practical humanism comes to the fore. The utter irrationality of the situation highlights the need to order one’s priorities in a split second and have the courage to defend common humanity over and above particularities. In the traditional wedding ceremony it is the husband who bestows a new name on his wife, but in Mr and Mrs Iyer Meenakshi will be the one to give Raja a name thus giving him a new life. Unlike many other films on ethnic or communal violence, where women are virtually absent from the political turmoil and often appear merely as the object of male desire, as in Mission Kashmir or even Roja, Aparna Sen’s film places a woman centre stage. Her reaction to the situation – unknown to the other passengers who readily believe her lie – is an indication of the importance of the role of women as mediators and conciliators. Popular cinema still shies away from representing Hindu–Muslim romances and on the occasions when it does deal with this somewhat taboo area it opts for a high-caste Hindu male marrying a social inferior, either of low caste or a non-Hindu. However, Aparna Sen’s Brahmin heroine symbolically marries a Muslim, thus allowing the woman to step out of her culturally defined space in defiance of patriarchal norms of accepted behaviour. The opening montage of newspaper clippings on sectarian violence in Aparna Sen’s film provides the global context in which we are invited to read the film and prepares the spectator for possible gory scenes of carnage. These are not to come, however, except perhaps the scene when, through Raja’s camera, Meenakshi witnesses a man having his throat cut. Her response “It’s so easy to kill a man” underscores one of the film’s objectives: the need to react against senseless hatred and discrimination as they only lead to destruction. In fact the most poignant and moving scene of

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all the film is no doubt when Raja notices the abandoned dentures of the elderly Muslim passenger lying in the mud, no longer of any use to him. It is through personal commitment with the other that bridges can be built between communities and, following Ashutosh Varshney’s findings on the importance of civic engagement, the film Mr and Mrs Iyer educates as well as entertains.

An Ethic of Deceit Indian films have borrowed heavily from traditional folk narrative techniques with the result that disguise, impersonation and mistaken identity have figured largely in commercial cinema with the dualities of right and wrong, good and evil, insider and outsider finding their way into many films. In Mission Kashmir a father hides the truth of his role in the murder of his adopted son’s family; the plot of Mr and Mrs Iyer focuses on a temporary impersonation while unmasking ethnic prejudices. In Fanaa Rehan hides the truth of his role in the Kashmiri independence movement and Dil Se unravels the projection of a man’s obsessive desire onto a seemingly undeserving subject, who is bent on the destruction of everything that he represents. My argument is that the theme of ethnic tensions is often masked as duty (the policeman in Mission Kashmir), as individual acts of heroism (Mr and Mrs Iyer) or questionable just causes (Dil Se and Fanaa) and an ethic of deceit is in constant operation. The choices made by the various characters – Amarkant Varma abandons his future wife and continues in pursuit of the enigmatic Meghna, Zooni kills Rehan out of loyalty to the state, Inayat Khan adopts the boy whose parents he had killed, Meenakshi Iyer and Raja Chowdhary finally go their separate ways – all respond to a moral code of conduct but the very ambiguity of these actions – should one love a terrorist? should one adopt a child one has just orphaned? can a woman kill a loved one out of a sense of duty? can one forget one’s own cowardice or one’s newly found passion so easily? – draws attention to the unsolved problems regarding ethnic tensions that remain lurking in the background. The Western viewer who delights in acts of subversion on the part of the individual characters in the film with no further consequence than that of their own personal triumph or defeat may overlook the moral code that is underscored by these films. The Indian filmgoer, on the contrary, is likely to search for atonement for these actions, without which the film would be a flop as this would go against the grain of traditional expectations.

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* Research for this paper has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN), project FFI2009–07711

Notes 1

2

In December 1992 the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya was demolished by militant Hindu activists to build a temple to Rama, in celebration of his alleged birth on that very spot. Widespread anti-Muslim riots followed on from the demolition (Sen, 2005: 209). For a full discussion of the Kashmir issue see Srivastava, 2001. I have deliberately avoided using the term “art film” in the aesthetic sense of an oppositional cinema that seeks to “challenge, subvert or reinvent artistic tenets and conventions” (Speidel, 2007: 62) as this definition is culture-specific and Sen’s film would pass as a strictly commercial film in the West. M. L. Raina’s third category of “middle cinema” seems to be a much more appropriate label for this kind of gentle consciousness-raising film. Raina defines it, rather scathingly, as follows: The middle cinema literally stands midway between the vulgar populism of the Bombay film and the high-brow exclusiveness of the New Wave film. It is different from the commercial cinema in that it eschews the garish display of sex and violence. It is different yet again from the New Wave (also termed the Other Cinema) in that it is less intellectual in content and does not make strenuous demands on its audience. It caters neither to the semi-literate and the pedestrian taste nor to the educated critically discerning perception. It is meant for that section of the middle class audience who are satisfied with their petit-bourgeois life-style and like the comforts of moderately high prosperity. This section does not on occasion mind their values being subjected to a mild scrutiny. (1986: 133)

3 4

5

6 7

“They are critiqued, their values challenged, their structures destabilized, even parodied, but they remain foundational nevertheless.” (Mishra, 2002: 4) Numerous films have been made featuring the partition of the subcontinent, for example Deepa Mehta’s Earth (1998) based on Bapsi Sidhwa’s 1988 novel IceCandy Man (reissued as Cracking India in 1991) and Sabiha Sumar’s Kamosh Paani [Silent Water] (2003). The film traces Amar’s journey through the seven shades of love in accordance with ancient Arabic literature, namely, attraction, infatuation, love, reverence, worship, obsession and death. See the official website for the film: http: //www.rage-india.com/dilse/ Kabir notes how “Meghna’s inscrutable eyes are also physical signs of her otherness” (2003: 149) suggesting that the emphasis lies on an ethno-geographic rather than a simple Hindu–Muslim religious difference. “A wife’s great and ongoing vrata is thus the pativrata, the ascetic dedication

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to her husband (pati) . . . Orthodox texts encourage Hindu wives to regards their husbands as gods” (Rodrigues, 2006: 98; italics in original). I am grateful to Professor Makarand Paranjape for pointing out this important distinction between Hindu and Muslim marriages. 8 Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister after independence, described it in the following terms: “Kashmir, where loveliness dwells and an enchantment steals over the senses” (1989: 555). 9 “The historic background of Kashmir shows that Kashmir has a legacy of harmony and humanism, a tradition of tolerance and a distinctiveness of culture and style of life in spite of barbarian invasions, oppression of tyrants and autocratic rulers. It has always harboured a destiny of the Kashmir identity by virtue of history, geography and tradition” (Srivastava, 2001: 78). Similarly, in Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (2006) Kashmir is depicted as an example of convivial harmony, which, coupled with the intense beauty of its scenery, proves that sectarianism is not necessarily an intrinsic part of Indian culture. 10 Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 1984 by two of her own Sikh bodyguards in an act of vengeance for the Indian army’s assault earlier that year on the sacred Golden Temple in Amritsar. Over 2,000 Sikhs were killed in a spate of communal violence directed against their community (Khilnani, 2003: 53). For the Babri Mosque conflict see note 1.

References Basu, Anustup. 2008. “The Music of Intolerable Love. Political Conjugality in Mani Ratman’s Dil Se” in Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance, ed. Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti. University of Minnesota Press, 2008: 153–176. Chakravarty, Sumita S. 1993. National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema 19471987. Austin, TX. University of Texas Press. ——. 2000. “Fragmenting the Nation. Images of Terrorism in Indian Popular Cinema” in Cinema and Nation ed. Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie. London. Routledge: 222–237. Dirks, Nicholas B. 2001. “The Home and the Nation. Consuming Culture and Politics in Roja”, in Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India ed. Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney. Delhi and Oxford. Oxford University Press: 161–185. Ganti, Tejaswini. 2004. Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema. London: Routledge. Gokulsing, K. Moti & Dissanayaka, W. 1998. Indian Popular Cinema: A Narrative of Cultural Change. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Gopalan, Lalitha. 2002. Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema. London. BFI Publishing. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. 2003. ‘Allegories of Alienation and Politics of Bargaining: Minority Subjectivities in Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se’, South Asian Popular Culture 1(2): 141–159. Khilnani, Sunil. 2003 [1997]. The Idea of India. New Delhi. Penguin Books.

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Mishra, Vijay. 2002. Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire. London. Routledge. Nayar, Sheila J. 2004. “Invisible Representation: The Oral Contours of a National Popular Cinema”, Film Quarterly 57(3): 13–23. Nehru, Jawaharlal. 1989 [1946]. The Discovery of India. Delhi. Oxford University Press. Pendakur, Manjunath. 2003. Indian Popular Cinema: Industry, Ideology, and Consciousness. Cresskill, NJ. Hampton Press. Raina, M. L. 1986. ‘“I’m All Right Jack”: Packaged Pleasures of the Middle Cinema,’ Journal of Popular Culture 20(2): 131–141. Rajan, Sara. 2002. ‘The Toughest Topic’, Time (4 November), available at http: //www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,386978,00.html – accessed August 2008. Ramachandran, Naman. 2006. Review of Fanaa, Sight & Sound 16(8): 71. Rodrigues, Hillary. 2006. Introducing Hinduism. London. Routledge. Rushdie, Salman. 2006. Shalimar the Clown. London. Vintage. Ruthven, Malise. 2000 [1997]. Islam: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford. Oxford University Press. Sen, Amartya. 2005. The Argumentative Indian. New Delhi. Penguin Books. Sharma, Alpana. 2008. ‘Paradise Lost in Mission Kashmir: Global Terrorism, Local Insurgencies, and the Question of Kashmir in Indian Cinema’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 25(2): 124–131. Speidel, Suzanne. 2007. ‘Film Form and Narrative’ in Introduction to Film Studies, 4th edn, ed. Jill Nelmes. London. Routledge: 61–89. Srivastava, Madhumita. 2001. International Dimensions of Ethnic Conflicts: A Case Study of Kashmir and Northern Ireland. New Delhi. Bhavana Books. Varshney, Ashutosh. 1991. ‘India, Pakistan, and Kashmir: Antinomies of Nationalism’, Asian Survey XXXI(11): 997–1019. Varshney, Ashutosh. 2002. Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India. New Haven, CT. Yale University Press.

CHAPTER FOUR MORALITY, POLITICS AND SELF-INTEREST: FRAMING THE HOLLYWOOD BLACKLIST BRIAN NEVE

I was invited to go to a Festival (with a panel on the Blacklist) in Barcelona . . . and I got a letter from the Director saying that he had invited Eddie Dmytryk (because) he was “part of the thing”. I said that’s like inviting Judas to a ceremony in which you are going to celebrate Christ because he happened to be at the Last Supper. You don’t do a thing like that. (Abraham Polonsky, 1988)1 Gadge deserved the Oscar, despite his testimony. Everybody did what they had to do in that crazy, evil period. (Kim Hunter, 1999)2

Although he was not the first to consider the ethical issues raised by the blacklist period in America (in particular in the late forties and the fifties) Victor Navasky’s 1980 book was distinctive in organizing its survey of testimonies and recollections around a central presumption against informing. While his book recognizes that everyone faced different circumstances, his focus is on the moral (rather than ideological) differences between those who cooperated with the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and “named names”, and those who avoided doing so or refused to do so at some cost to their lives and careers in the film industry. This chapter examines issues raised by this influential perspective on the blacklist choices of that time, as reflected in film, in scholarly and popular accounts, and in the controversy surrounding Elia Kazan’s 1999 honorary Academy Award.3 The historical origins of the “naming names” issue of the early fifties are relatively well known. Prompted by Congressional opportunism and the growth of conservative opposition to the New Deal, the House Committee held hearings in 1947, the year that American foreign policy shifted on to a Cold War footing. While conservative groups and some studio heads spoke in Washington of communism in the film industry, 19 “unfriendly”

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witnesses (in the main Communists and ex-Communists whose names had been supplied by the FBI) declined to answer questions as to their Party membership, standing implicitly (but not explicitly) on the First Amendment to the Constitution. Once HUAC disclosed details of the Communist Party membership of those of the 19 who testified (the “Hollywood Ten”) liberal support evaporated and the Congress held the men to be “in contempt”, leading the studio heads promptly to declare (in the Waldorf Statement) that they would not in future employ Communists in the industry. Legal appeals on behalf of the Ten failed, reflecting a new atmosphere of spy trials and of a tightening Soviet grip over Eastern Europe, so that they served sentences of six months to a year in prison in 1950. After the victory of the Chinese Communists and the beginning of the Korean War, a new round of HUAC hearings on Hollywood Communism was instituted in 1951 (encouraged by the American Legion) and this time the only effective defence against having to “name names” was to use the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. Yet the cost of this was blacklisting, and around 300 film industry workers (particularly writers) were denied employment or credit at the major studios having taken the Fifth (or avoided a subpoena); the unacknowledged blacklist and greylist – further bolstered by the campaigns of private anti-communist groups for a mixture of ideological and commercial reasons – only began to collapse at the end of the decade. These were special times, when for Communists, and some fellow travellers, the First Amendment lost its “‘preferred position” given the perceived primacy of the country’s national security.4 Although there were earlier studies of the blacklist, notably Cogley’s in the mid-fifties, it was Navasky’s book that generated a wider scholarly and public interest in the phenomenon. He stressed the importance to HUAC of the ritual (he used the phrase “degradation ceremony”) of giving names (generally already known), despite the Committee’s supposed constitutional role of preparing legislation. While there is reference to national politics, including the Administration’s concern to obtain Congressional support for its new defence and aid policies, and the broader anti-Communist purge in government, the unions and education involving FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Senator Joseph McCarthy and Senator Pat McCarran, the core of the book is what Navasky calls his “moral detective story”. None of the men and women who were subpoenaed had stories of espionage or state secrets to reveal or conceal, but the spy cases involving atomic and nuclear secrets had helped to create a widespread sense of the CPUSA and its members as constituting a fifth column. Perhaps most striking is Navasky’s account of the debate between fellow Hollywood Ten members Albert Maltz and

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Dalton Trumbo, the former objecting to the latter’s “only victims” speech in 1970, in which Trumbo argued that no one involved in the period, on either side, had emerged without sin. He stressed that the Committee, and other groups who fed the media, were the main enemy, and that although some witnesses “failed the test”, it was a test that no one should have been forced to face in a liberal democracy. In reply Maltz felt that Trumbo’s perspective had blurred the significance of what “victims” or “martyrs” (those who refused to comply) had fought for. Navasky records the debate but his own view favours a notion of the resisters as “moral exemplars” that is closer to Maltz’s position.5 In the world of theatre the playwright Arthur Miller’s own contemplation of these issues, over the decade from 1953, suggests a movement towards Trumbo’s perspective. When his play The Crucible was first performed, raising contemporarily relevant questions about informing in the context of the Salem witch trials of 1692, there was spontaneous applause when hero John Proctor asked “Is the accuser always holy now?” Yet Miller provides a more nuanced and specific account in After the Fall, in 1964, distributing blame and guilt more widely: the play presents a debate between two characters, Lou and Micky, which draws on Miller’s own meeting with his then friend and close collaborator Elia Kazan in the months before the director cooperated with HUAC. That testimony, in which Kazan unexpectedly named eight fellow members of a mid-thirties Group Theatre Communist Party unit, led to their estrangement, before they renewed their association when Kazan directed the first theatrical run of After the Fall in New York.6 A weakness in Navasky’s account is perhaps a reluctance to fully consider the impact of the Communist Party and its politics on decisions taken to co-operate or resist. The great bulk of those who “named names” had shown clear signs of leaving the sociological and cultural network represented by the Party some time before, while those who avoided testifying (sometimes by moving to Mexico or Europe) or who took the Fifth were generally, if not exclusively, Party members (or strong supporters) at the time. Ceplair and Englund, in their definitive survey of Hollywood politics, admire those who resisted but suggest that they were not themselves without flaws, and that in particular they were generally reticent about the role of the Party, either then or later. The effect of this reticence was to open up a later, sometimes polemical stand of blacklist writing which pointed to Party secrecy and highlighted the relationship between the American Communist Party and the Soviet Union as heavily qualifying the “moral exemplar” tradition.7 Recalling Dashiell Hammett’s line from The Maltese Falcon – that when your partner gets killed you’re supposed to do something about it

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– notions of friendship and solidarity are important to the “naming names” literature. The blacklisted screenwriter Paul Jarrico, one of the key Communist figures in Hollywood from the late thirties and a member until after the Khrushchev speech of 1956, was also the “resister” (he took the Fifth in 1951) who was later most reflective about the period. Jarrico seems to echo Thom Andersen’s notion of the importance of politics, in arguing that “for those who were generally pissed off at the party but reluctant to name names, the choice must have been difficult. For a person like me, a true blue red, the choice was easy.”8 The moral challenge, in other words, depended a good deal on how people saw the Party, or the “brotherhood” (in a line given to the Kazan character in After the Fall) at the time they faced a subpoena. The choice that was faced at the time owed much to a number of contingent factors, including when people joined, how long they stayed, why they left, and how much they moved politically or sociologically from a sense of solidarity or perceived friendship. There were of course many differences between cases, but these key issues, many of them brought out in Navasky’s rich collection of material, are important in getting a handle on whether or how people saw the balance between self-interest, loyalty to current or former friends, and ideology. For example, Maurice Rapf, who contributed one of best, most revealing and least bitter accounts of his and his family’s appalling experiences in dodging subpoenas while in New York, left the Party in 1946 but had not changed his politics. (He had left because Party work was taking too much of his time, undermining his own work and art.) He experienced real struggle, but there is no sense even for a moment that he considered testifying against the work, and the friends, that were central to his life and identity. To do so would be to change completely, to depart from the core of his sense of himself in a way that could be self-destructive (and perhaps was, in the lives of some friendly witnesses who did not think through their decision). A similar story might be told, for example, of Abraham Polonsky, a man brought up in a family tradition of utopian socialism and who maintained a powerful intellectual commitment to the Party’s ideas even as he argued fiercely with its policies. For him to engage in a sudden volte-face in the early fifties was, again, unthinkable.9 Compare someone, certainly by his own account, whose involvement with the Party had been less committed, more qualified. This seems certainly to have been the experience of writer-director Cy Endfield, and when he faced pressure to clear himself in the early 1950s, after signs that his Hollywood directing career was at last taking off, he seemed willing at first to take the view that he was not prepared to sacrifice future employment and

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opportunities for a cause that (in part because of his developing thoughts on domestic Soviet politics and the treatment of scientists) he no longer supported. By his own account he had attended his last Communist Party meeting by 1947, yet by the very early fifties he was encouraged by his agent to clear himself before the FBI: And I thought of the situation of being in Germany, and your best friend was a Jewish doctor who saved your life as a child. And you are coming down the street, and he is being kicked to death by a bunch of SS and Nazi activists. If you don’t put your own foot in they say, “Well, what’s wrong with you, you are under suspicion.” . . . Do you add your foot and kick them? I said to myself: “You do if you are saving your life, but do you to save your job?” Some people were frightened or scared to death, and I was too, about losing my profession. It is your way of living, your way of talking to the world, of saying who you are . . . I had worked very hard under difficult circumstances and was on the brink of a potential breakthrough. So it was a very testing situation.

Endfield, recalling the events of that time, continued: It was all very well organised. They said: “you meet a couple of people in the FBI office there . . . they will ask you all kinds of questions, and they will arrange a hearing for you . . . take care of you.” And the whole seediness of this action, of somehow becoming an informer for the FBI, struck me. And you are obviously going to be exploited for every bit of information that you have. The whole thing was a propaganda exercise. It was supposed to be a legislation creating committee. And I just had a sense of personal revulsion. And I can truthfully say that, because most of the blacklisted people (not all of them) had in a sense a political horse to whip: they had a political stake in what they believed, or in some past action.10

The outcome was that Endfield chose to leave America (it was fortuitous that he had a passport) and he struggled for most of the fifties to rebuild his career in Britain. In comparison writer-director Robert Rossen did not have a passport, something that limited his options: he had talked about his own Party membership in his first testimony but eventually cleared himself by returning to the Committee in 1953 as a cooperative witness.11 Endfield’s own continuing moral and practical dilemma in the UK is illustrated by a handwritten letter that he wrote to the HUAC Chairman in 1958: he made clear that his radical politics were a thing of the past, and asked for an opportunity to clear himself so that he could work on American film

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projects that (after the limited commercial success of Hell Drivers in 1957), he was beginning to be offered: The difficulty has been that I was not, nor still am not, prepared for what has seemed often to be the final or confirming criterion of anti-Communism in a former Communist sympathizer – that is, the naming of individuals who were associated with one’s political past. But I have probed my memory and conscience unendingly, and know with total certainty that this form of divulgence would be valueless, except for its possible opportunistic benefits to myself – and after these many years of professional deprivation for this factor alone, I still cannot find the resources within myself to overcome the emotional repugnance I feel against informing against others solely for selfgain.12

But HUAC was not willing to clear Endfield unless he went through with the ritual of naming or confirming a list of names. Frustrated at losing out on American projects, and feeling resentful that others, more political than him (in terms of their association with the Party) were writing for international projects “under the table”, he reversed his position in March 1960 and flew to Washington DC to appear as a cooperative witness before the Committee. Speaking at the end of 1989, the year of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the suppression of the student movement in China, he reflected further on that period, seeing some kind of complicity in being on the wrong side of history, underwriting to a degree the authority of the Soviet state: So if you’re that wrong you can’t go around saying “Oh, I only did it for the best motivations.” You were a fool. You were a companion of evil. I was a companion of evil, to the extent that I believed those things. Sure, I was doing things that I thought were good, and probably were good in a more local context, but really in the final way it’s hard to say who was more wrong.13

Not to examine these issues is surely to oversimplify the moral component in decisions most of us are spared. Finally I’ll later consider Elia Kazan. Quite apart from what differences of character there may have been (not to mention Kazan’s stronger stake in the industry in 1952), the fact that Kazan had been out of the Party for nearly 17 years, and had indeed been thrown out of the Party, was certainly a factor in how he saw and considered his options. Overlapping the threat of the blacklist, the loss of employment, during

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the post-war period was a reassessment during the early years of the Cold War of the relationship between the domestic Party and the policies, including foreign policies, of the Soviet Union. Writer Richard Collins, who had moved strongly against the Party in the late forties, told the Committee in 1951 of his fear, “‘which became a nightmare, that in the event of a war with the Soviet Union I would be considered a friend of the Soviet Union”. Another friendly witness, Budd Schulberg, later recalled that “My guilt is what we did to the Czechs, not to Ring Lardner.” In terms of writing on the period, Nathan Glazer, in a review of Lillian Hellman’s Scoundrel Time in 1976, made a related point: Yet the Communists were certainly connected to, defended, apologized for, and advanced the interests of an awesome power that was, after the defeat of Hitler, unquestionably the enemy of freedom throughout the world.14

Here is an attempt to win back some moral ground, and some years later Arthur Miller, who had been a defiant witness in 1956, acknowledged the point even as he deplored the Committee and those who cooperated with it; he asked in his autobiography “how many who knew by now that they had been supporting a paranoid and murderous Stalinist regime had really confronted their abetting of it”.15 With the release of the VERONA intercepts, and further revelations following from the opening up of the Soviet archives, this issue became prominent – particularly on the right, but not exclusively so – in discussions of the blacklist. More polarized perspectives on the McCarthy period and on whether all anti-Communism was “McCarthyite”, are reflected in much recent literature. While Joseph Litvak has written of “stoolpigeon culture” and of the way he sees political and ideological processes as ending a cosmopolitan and dissenting Jewish tradition in America, Alan Casty, in his Communism in Hollywood: The Moral Paradoxes of Testimony, Silence and Betrayal, is representative of a position that rejects the perspective of much of the so-called “New Left” literature on the period, stressing the element of principle in much early fifties anti-Communism (including testifying) and suggesting that American Communists had some responsibility for ignoring or denying the excesses of Stalinism.16

Film and the Blacklist choices Metaphors and allegories for that period bubble up in the films of the early fifties, when the bulk of the HUAC and other Congressional hearings took

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place. Jeff Smith has carefully examined some of the problems in assessing such films in his study of The Robe (1953), exploring the significance of issues of authorship, production circumstances and reception. Hollywood Ten member Albert Maltz wrote his early draft of the screenplay in 1946, before the first hearings, but nonetheless the changing historical context is seen as bleeding into the finished film and the way it was received. Even more interesting in terms of the earlier exchanges about informers is Pickup on South Street (1953), a film that was released during the period when the Congressional Committees were in full swing. The story concerns a secret microfilm being passed to Communist agents, reflecting a key motif of the 1948 melodrama of the Hiss-Chambers HUAC spy hearings. The film manages to combine anti-Communism, an acceptance that many informers had their reasons, and pejorative references to those who wrapped the information they traded to the authorities in the rhetoric of “flag-waving”. Sam Fuller, director and author of the final screenplay, introduced a character, Moe (played by Thelma Ritter) who although a “stoolie” is the most sympathetic character in a film that, as Smith argues, foreshadows something of Dalton Trumbo’s “only victims” speech of 1970.17 A less nuanced but more trenchant perspective on the times is evident in the Western High Noon (1952), which screenwriter Carl Foreman certainly intended as a metaphor for the way the Hollywood film industry failed to stand up against the destructive intervention of HUAC. It was in early 1951, just before the beginning of the second round of Washington hearings, that Foreman (who had been in the Communist Party in the late thirties and early forties) began “to think of using a western town as a parallel situation for our town”. Foreman had found himself in a minority of one in objecting to the institution of a loyalty oath within the Screen Writers Guild, and in adapting the story (“The Tin Star”) he noted that he “became the Cooper character”. Cooper, a traditional conservative, was ideal in representing a sense of duty that was undermined by the failure of the rest of the town’s citizenry, high or low, to rally to his support; to Foreman the Hollywood community, including the studio heads, had ducked for cover rather than confronting the Committee and what it represented.18 Generic elements, from rough justice to lynch mobs, are also used in other Westerns of the time, including Johnny Guitar (1953) and Silver Lode (1954), while dark crime thrillers (what was to be called film noir) also disguised contemporary references and unusual political content. A related reference to contemporary events is evident in The Underworld Story (1950), directed and rewritten by Cy Endfield from Henry Blankfort’s initial version of a Craig Rice story. The central protagonist, newspaperman

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Mike Reese (Duryea), is presented as a complete opportunist, blowing with the winds of a public opinion heavily influenced by the media, while the power of organized crime is linked and equated with the way inherited and corporate wealth organizes to defend its own class interests (Howard da Silva and Herbert Marshall play the gangster and press magnate respectively). Pressure is exerted in this way against supporters of a public committee formed to exonerate a young woman wrongly accused of murder, in a way that seems a pointed reference to the collapse of the Committee for the First Amendment protests after the initial Washington hearings of the Hollywood Ten. The name of the victim, Molly Rankin, surely a reference to the notoriously anti-Semitic Congressman who was a moving force behind the first post-war HUAC investigation of Hollywood Communism, seems a further clue as to the writers’ intentions, while a veteran newspaperman comments that it “looks like they’re burning witches again”. Director Jules Dassin avoided a subpoena by leaving America for France, and his first film following Night and the City (1950) was Rififi (Du rififi chez les Hommes) in 1955. A loose adaptation of the Série Noir underworld novel by Auguste Le Breton, Dassin’s heist film has a politically pointed sub-text. Borde and Chaumeton, in their pioneering mid-decade panorama of American film noir, described Rififi as “Dassin’s temporary revenge on the imbecility of the self-righteous”. The film is particularly known for the extended bank robbery sequence, played for 30 minutes without dialogue or music. Yet as important in reflecting Dassin’s own position is a scene in which César, an Italian expert safe cracker whose free talking betrays the gang, is shot dead by gang leader Tony le Stéphanois (Jean Servais). (The part of César is played by Dassin himself using the pseudonym of Perlo Vita.) César, played as a weak but not unsympathetic figure, tells Tony that he is sorry, that he was “scared”. Tony replies: “I liked you, I liked you Macaroni, but you know the rule”. The scene seems to capture something of Dassin’s feelings with regard to those previous friends who had “named names” in order to evade the blacklist. Perhaps he was in particular thinking of director Elia Kazan (a fellow pioneer of “semi-documentary” techniques in late forties Hollywood), whom Dassin had known well but never talked to again after he appeared as a cooperative witness before HUAC.19 Elia Kazan’s first major post-testimony film, On the Waterfront (1954), has often been interpreted as a justification of the cooperative testimonies of both Kazan and the film’s screenwriter (and late thirties Communist) Budd Schulberg. The film is much more than this, but Kazan certainly saw his testimony as relevant to how he briefed and directed Marlon Brando in the part of the central protagonist, Terry Malloy. Schulberg always denied

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any intention to refer to his and Kazan’s testimonies, having researched waterfront corruption in New York for some years, worked closely with the working class insurgents fighting the International Longshoreman’s Association (ILA) and attended the hearings of the New York State Crime Commission. The final screenplay was influenced by the real case of Tony Mike de Vincenzo’s testimony to the Crime Commission, although Kazan later doubted “that Budd was affected as personally as I was by the parallel of Tony Mike’s story”. As Leo Braudy has pointed out, the complexity of the film derives in part from the tension between the screenwriter’s emphasis on the Father Barry character and the director’s greater identification with his lead actor. The emotional spine relates to Terry’s conscience, and in this sense Terry’s struggle (although in the film his testimony is finally triggered and clearly justified by his brother’s murder) does echo Kazan’s own decision, which involved estrangement with some former friends and associates. As he told Michel Ciment: Terry Malloy felt as I did. He felt ashamed and proud of himself at the same time. He wavered between the two, and he also felt hurt by the fact that people – and his own friends – were rejecting him. He also felt that it was a necessary act.20

John Steinbeck wrote at the time that “this Congress thing tore him to pieces”, while Kazan – perhaps prompted by his wife, Molly Day Thacher – searched for justification from the writings of philosopher and anti-Stalinist Sidney Hook, whose pamphlet, Heresy No, Conspiracy Yes, he read during what he told Hook were some “very bewildering days”. Brando’s brilliant playing reaches at times beyond the text to capture a certain kind of anguish that did owe something to his director’s own struggle.21

The case of Elia Kazan Differences over how to interpret the blacklist period were projected onto a world stage at the 1999 Academy Awards ceremony, following the decision of the Academy Board to give an honorary award to Elia Kazan. Few doubted that he deserved it on account of his films, but various groups opposed the award on the basis of his 1952 testimony (and perhaps his refusal to apologize), and a significant segment of the audience declined to stand and applaud the director when he appeared on stage on the night.

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Appearing before HUAC for the second time in 1952, the director had named eight members of Communist Party unit in the Group Theatre in New York in the mid-thirties, and he also published a paid advertisement in the New York Times urging others who knew the facts of “a dangerous and alien conspiracy” to cooperate with “the appropriate Government agency”. Joseph McBride commented that to “give our highest award to him would be ignoring a serious moral issue”: that Kazan’s career was “built on the ruin of other people’s careers”. Yet Arthur Schlesinger Jr argued: “If the occasion calls for apologies, let Mr Kazan’s denouncers apologise for the aid and comfort they gave to Stalinism.”22 Before his testimony Kazan had made several films that turned on a central character’s moral and existential decision. For example in Pinky (1949) the protagonist, who can pass for white, finally decides to embrace and assert her black identity, at some cost to herself. Abraham Polonsky argued that Kazan’s post-testimony film work was marred by “bad conscience”, but in fact Kazan’s later films, including On the Waterfront, seem in many ways to be richer and more modern, and to be ethically more nuanced, because of the director’s ambivalence towards his decision. Kazan often sets up moral challenges for his protagonists. That friendly witnesses felt at some level that they had done something wrong is fairly evident, and Kazan’s interviews, and his autobiography, contain passages to this effect. Yet he also told the Christian Science Monitor in 1983: I think of the choices I had, that was the right choice. I certainly wouldn’t want to defend the secrecy of the Communists . . . As a matter of fact, as the years pass, I’ve been rather pleased with myself for what I did.23

It is also true that Kazan’s political perspectives had shifted in the turbulent times of the late forties. As evidence for this, his production notes for Boomerang! (1947) reveal a distinctly Marxist take on bourgeois society, while in preparing Panic in the Streets two years later he seemed particularly inspired by the work of Arthur Schlesinger Jr, whose new book at the time, The Vital Center, had championed a new anti-Communist liberalism. Schlesinger spoke up for Kazan both in 1952, after his testimony, and at the time of his 1999 award. While Panic in the Streets is not obviously, it seems to me, the “anti-communist” metaphor that some writers have seen, it certainly leaves romantic conceptions of the working class far behind and underwrites a strong federal response to a national emergency.24 The director’s next film after On the Waterfront was East of Eden (1955), from the closing section of John Steinbeck’s novel, and his enthusiasm for

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questioning puritan notions of morality, and absolute notions of good and bad, may also have related to his understanding of his own recent political experiences. As he later explained to Ciment: I was trying to show that right and wrong get mixed up, and that there are values that have to be looked at more deeply than in that absolute approvalor-disapproval syndrome of my Left friends.25

While Kazan and Schulberg’s second collaboration, A Face in the Crowd (1957), is rightly seen as an assertion of the authors’ continuing liberal-left commitment, here too there is a motif of justified betrayal, in a resolution in which Marsha Jeffreys (Patricia Neal) exposes to the wider public the corruption of her lover and part creation – Lonesome Rhodes (Andy Griffith). Further, in two personal films of the early sixties Kazan also presented his protagonists with emerging moral dilemmas. In his own early screenplay for what was finally called Wild River (1960), at a stage when the chief protagonist was a Jewish character called Dave Lantz, Kazan had associated Dave with himself in his days at the New Theatre League, a “hero of the insurgent working class movement” who was totally without self-doubt. In the completed film Chuck Glover (Montgomery Clift) is an Easterneducated federal official representing the Tennessee Valley Authority, charged with removing a recalcitrant old lady from a Deep South island that needs to be flooded so that a new dam can be built for the public benefit. Glover has more doubts than Dr Reed in Panic in the Streets, reflecting the way he comes to respect the character and values of his adversary, to see her as more than the enemy, and to appreciate tensions between morality as a person and as representative of the state.26 Finally, American America (1963), based on the saga of his immigrant uncle, is Kazan’s most autobiographical film, and also seems to make reference to issues of self-interest, a central drive to achieve a particular goal, and how this can be corrupting. It is the desperation and ultimately the ruthlessness of Kazan’s protagonist, Stravros Topouzohlou (Stathis Giallelis), that becomes an issue as he nears the promised land of America, losing his initial innocence. On the ship to New York, on the final stage of his epic journey from Anatolia, Stavros is briefly tempted to betray his fellow would-be immigrant, Hohannes, and Kazan’s script notes refer to Stavros facing this final “moral crisis”, and deciding that “it may not be worth the complete sacrifice of his integrity to get into the USA”.27 Such existential motifs seem to me to be distinctive if not always totally integrated elements in Kazan’s mature work.

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This writer (a baby boomer happy not to have faced the choices of the fifties and who perhaps avoided some of his own era) is led back to Dalton Trumbo’s 1970 address as a basis for ethical judgements on the blacklist period: Some suffered less than others, some grew and some diminished, but in the final tally we were all victims because almost without exception each of us felt compelled to say things he did not want to say, to do things he didn’t want to do, to deliver and receive wounds he truly did not want to exchange. That is why none of us – right, left or center – emerged from that long nightmare without sin.28

There are obvious dangers in the relativism implied by notions that everyone had their reasons, or did what they had to do. But this writer – and we all come to the issues from different points, with different disciplinary and political assumptions – feels nearer to Sam Fuller, or Kim Hunter, whose notion of an “evil, crazy period” implies structural factors but also degrees of individual complicity. There were all sorts of Communists, some with their own moral blind spots.29 New literature on lives affected by the blacklist, from Richard Schickel on Kazan to Alan Casty on Rossen (and for that matter Larry Ceplair on Paul Jarrico) is generally convincing in showing how individual cases differed, and how the HUAC decisions came out of and reflected distinct and complex circumstances.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5

Polonsky, interviewed by the author, Beverly Hills, 20 August 1988. Edward Dmytryk was one of the original Hollywood Ten, and served time in prison in 1950, before changing his position and becoming a cooperative witness before HUAC the next year. Kim Hunter, who had appeared in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), and was blacklisted for a time, was commenting on Kazan’s 1999 Academy Award; see Dick Vosburgh, ‘Elia Kazan: Controversial Film and Theatre Director’, Independent (UK) 30 September 2003. Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Viking, 1980), esp. pp. 402–406. See especially Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003). John Cogley, Report on Blacklisting I – Movies (New York: The Fund for the Republic, 1956); Navasky, Naming Names, pp. 399, 387–401. For Trumbo’s speech see Helen Manfull, ed., Additional Dialogue, Letters of Dalton Trumbo

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6

7

8

9

10 11

12

13

14

15 16

Brian Neve (New York: Bantam Books, 1972), pp. 604–606. A.P. Foulkes, Literature and Propaganda (London and New York: Methuen, 1983), p. 97; Arthur Miller, After the Fall (Harmonsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 43–44. Thom Andersen, ‘Red Hollywood’, in Frank Krutnik et al., eds, “Un-American” Hollywood: politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007), pp. 238–241. Jarrico, interviewed by Patrick McGilligan, in Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, eds, Tender Comreades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 346. See also on Jarrico, Larry Ceplair, The Marxist and the Movies: A Biography of Paul Jarrico (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2007). Maurice Rapf, Back Lot: Growing Up with the Movies (Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, 1999), pp. 88–89; Abraham Polonsky, interviewed by the author, August 20, 1988; also see Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Cy Endfield interview with the author, 19 December 1989, in Film Studies 7 (Winter 2005), p. 120. On Rossen between his two testimonies, and the passport issue see Carl Foreman BFI special collection, item 1, London; Endfield interview, Film Studies (2005), p. 125; and Alan Casty, Communism in Hollywood: The Moral Paradoxes of Testimony, Silence and Betrayal (Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2009), p. 226. Cyril Endfield, letter to Frances E. Walter, 18 August 1958, in HUAC file on Cyril Endfield, Center for Legislative Archives, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington DC. Endfield, Film Studies (2005), p. 126; see also Brian Neve, ‘Inflation (1943) and the Blacklist: the Disrupted Career of Cy Endfield’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 30(4) (December 2010), pp. 515–528. Collins testimony, Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, 82nd Congress, ‘Communist Infiltration of Hollywood Motion Picture Industry’, 12 April 1951, p. 255; Navasky, Naming Names (1980), p. 242; Glazer, ‘An Answer to Lillian Hellman’, Commentary 61(6) (June 1976), p. 37. Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 529. Robert M. Lichtman and Ronald D. Cohen, Deadly Farce: Harvey Matusow and the Informer System in the McCarthy Era (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), p. 161; Joseph Litvak, The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009); Alan Casty, Communism in Hollywood (2009). pp. 226ff. See also Dan Georgakas, ‘The Hollywood Reds Fifty Years Later’, American Communist History 2(1) (June 2003), pp. 63–76; Arthur Eckstein, ‘The Hollywood Ten in History and Memory’, Film History 16 (2004), pp. 424–436.

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17 Jeff Smith, ‘Are You Now or Have You Ever Been a Christian? The Strange History of The Robe as Political Allegory’, in Frank Krutnik et al., eds, “UnAmerican Hollywood”: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007); Jeff Smith, ‘Trading Information: Genre, allegory and the Politics of Naming Names in Pickup on South Street’, paper delivered at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference, 5 March 2006, Vancouver, British Columbia. 18 Carl Foreman BFI special collection, item 2 (transcripts of AFI seminars on High Noon), London. 19 On Dassin see Rebecca Prime, ‘Cloaked in Compromise: Jules Dassin’s “Naked” City’, in Krutnik et. al., “Un-American” Hollywood (2007), pp. 142–151; Raymond Borde and Etienne Chumeton, A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941-1953 (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2002), p. 135. 20 Navasky, Naming Names (1980), pp. 209–10; Leo Braudy, On the Waterfront (London: BFI, 2005), p. 60; Michel Ciment, ed., Kazan on Kazan (BFI/Secker & Warburg, 1973), p. 20. 21 Steinbeck to Annie Laurie Williams, 17 June 1952, in Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, eds, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, 1975, p. 450; Brian Neve, Elia Kazan: the Cinema of an American Outsider (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), p. 66–67; Sidney Hook, HERESY, yes – CONSPIRACY, no! (pamphlet, American Committee for Cultural Freedom, undated). 22 Richard Schickel, Elia Kazan, A Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), pp. 255–260; McBride, quoted by Doherty, ‘The Price of Kazan’s “Crime”, Boston Globe 7 March 1999; Schlesinger Jr, Los Angeles Times 3 March 1999, F1, 8. 23 Kazan, A Life (London: Deutsch, 1988), p. 465; Neve, Elia Kazan (2009), p. 73; Kazan, Christian Science Monitor 30 November 1983. 24 Neve, Elia Kazan (2009), pp. 18, 26–28; Murphy, Congressional Theatre (1999), pp. 259–264. 25 Ciment, Kazan on Kazan (1973), p. 121. 26 Kazan notebook, February 1958, Elia Kazan collection, Wesleyan University Cinema Archives (WUCA). 27 Kazan, America America draft screenplay, 26 February 1962, Elia Kazan collection (WUCA). 28 Trumbo, ‘Postscript’, in Helen Manfull, ed., Additional Dialogue (1972), p. 605. 29 Alan Wolfe, ‘Revising a False History’, Los Angeles Times 21 March 1999.

CHAPTER FIVE THE FILM SPECTATOR AS “BRICOLEUR”: AN ETHICS OF VIEWING AND POACHING JOHN KEEFE The fact remains that viewing suffering is especially problematic when the object of suffering is presumed to be real. (Boltanski, 1999: 23)

Introduction Death is the origin and the centre of culture . . . Living with the dead and with death is one of the most normal manifestations of human culture, and it presumably lies at the heart of the stuff of human existence. (Assmann, 2005: 1) They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more. (Beckett, 1956: 89) Such knowledge of the brief light and death marks us as humans; but the “curse” of knowing is also the mark of human agency. As Pozzo also says When! When! One day, is that not enough for you . . . one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? (ibid.)

By simply asking the questions beyond “enough”, we assert our freedom to act in the face of death. In counterpoint to death in driving our actions is the erotic: The erotic is at the heart of unconscious fantasy life. The infant, born from the erotic encounter of the parents, will find his or her earliest experiences are enveloped in the pre-Oedipal eroticism of mother and child . . . the erotic is also at the heart of conscious as well as unconscious fantasy life. (Mann, 1997: 4, 7)

Death and the erotic are thus trope and topos of our existence and culture,

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with the latter to be regarded as forms of time and space by which to contemplate and confront death and the erotic, to project ourselves in physical or tangible means beyond the instant that Beckett grants. Acts of creativity and memory become a process of “normalization”, a coming-to-terms with the otherwise terrifying nature of that knowledge of death and power of the erotic – actions of a self-aware, knowledgeable agent made within the parameters of our shared material, social and cultural existence; such actions themselves subject to the varying and variable parameters of greater or lesser power within which to exercize agency. Agency is a form of relationship. What has this to do with a volume on film? It is the subject of the series theme – studies in ethics – that informs my discussion of the film spectator as a particular manifestation of the human as ethical agent, as decision maker within systems of morals and rules of behaviour. Here, the film spectator (as in all forms of drama) uses agency and knowledge to watch, read and interpret the film text. This is done from within their accumulated personal biography and circumstances. (Of course a full “ethics of film” would embrace the conduct of the spectator in the cinema, the content of the film text with respect to moral and ethical considerations, the business and other practices of the film industry, including attitudes to writers, actors, directors and the other practitioners involved in the making and distributing of a film.) Theatre inserts its ethical questions into the lives of its spectators in a situation in which those spectators are unusually conscious of their own status as spectators and thus as people who may exercise ethical judgement. It also takes place in the presence of spectators who are aware of their status as spectators . . . We watch ourselves watching people engaging with an ethical problem while knowing that we are being watched in our watching . . . (Ridout, 2009: 15)

For theatre read film: we are dealing with activities and questions common to the nature of drama qua drama whatever the mode and medium of viewing. The ethical relationship is based on the same predicates of mimesis, recognition of the mimesis, empathy and aware spectatorial position. Thus my theme here is to raise certain considerations about the position, role and stance of the knowing spectator, within certain ideas and discussion of film theory. The literature on film theory is vast (on spectatorship, for example, Mayne, 1993; Hollows and Jancovich, 1995; Konijn and Hoorn, 2005) and an essay of this nature can only scratch the surface of its concerns. But from such scratchings, I hope to postulate an ethical spectator as

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one who reads film from the messy, contrary, always knowing awareness that reflects life as it is and could be. I will take two principles as my predicates: that knowing spectators are “ethical” poachers and nomads with all the paradoxes involved; that the spectator is always engaged as the ethical “spect-actor” who is outside the text but completes the film-performance text by their presence: This is theatre – the art of looking at our-selves . . . In this usage, all human beings are Actors (they act!) and Spectators (they observe!). They are SpectActors. (Boal, 1992: xxx)

An Ethics of Film Theory “Film theory” is best thought of as a substantive field of inquiry in which are clustered a number of discrete theories of cinema. (Rushton and Bettinson, 2010: 1)

Film theory is such a nexus of approaches, but such discourses remain at the level of theory - hypotheses neither provable or un-provable but remaining as such (see Kuhn, 1970; Murray and Keefe, 2007). In film theory, we must accept the hypotheses as modes of enquiry to move between, as differences to be worked with. Thus the clusters of discrete theories remain hypothetical stances and articulating paradigms. By looking at certain aspects of theories of films and cinemas – I prefer the plural – and a small but eclectic number of film texts, I propose the knowing spectator moves between the positions of competing fashions and discrete theories of film to come to readings reflecting their own ethical stance within a further nexus of incongruities, paradoxes and possibilities. Despite its basis in technology, (fictional) film is nevertheless one of the dramatic arts and shares with all drama the aim of offering images of redemption out of suffering, serenity out of upheaval, resolution out of reversal through mimesis and representation. Here the principle of “normalization” comes into play and into any play: the dramatic conventions that define the parameters of the represented world and allow us to accept that world as a fictional representation of our world. In this, the knowing spectator is placed and places him/herself in an ethical relationship to the text as that proposed by Aristotle; that imitation is natural to us, that the objects of imitation are actions made by agents, and that the pleasure we get from such imitations is to be learning something. That is, an ethical gain made by us as agents from the imitations (mimesis) of fictional agents (Aristotle, 1967:

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25, 29). Thus, I suggest any discussion of film needs to treat the film as something in itself – a textual object containing fictive imitations of agents and their actions mediated by the “knowing” camera and viewed as a real time event by the knowing spectator. It is a relationship. Like theatre, film is polysemic and dialectical in nature and construction: Film is a complex network of interactive, autonomous, specific cinematic sign systems in a formal dialectical relationship and which together comprise a fixed and recorded performance text or mise-en-scène, itself in an overt, albeit asymmetrical, dialectical relationship with the knowing spectator. (Murray and Keefe, 2007: 36, where the sources and origin of this formulation are given.)

Like theatre, film is a form of inter-subjectivity: The direct engagement, then, between spectator and film in the film experience cannot be considered a monologic one between a viewing subject and a viewed object. Rather, it is a dialectical engagement of two viewing subjects who also exist as visible objects. (Sobchack, 1992: 23)

In both of these the spectator’s ethical status and position is clearly positioned in relation to the film text and thus to the apparatus of its making, distribution and screening. It is a relationship. Sobchack’s wording forces us to acknowledge that the film addresses us as viewing subjects; that we place our thoughts and feelings, via empathy and knowledge, in to those being represented (mimesis). Thus, the meaning of any film lies in both the text and the spectatorial readings given. Such a phenomenological position – that film shows us both itself as text and as world represented – will be looked at as part of the concluding section. Perhaps, then, not a theory of film ethics as such but rather an understanding of film dramaturgy that places the text and the spectator in a relationship of a necessary, ethical dialectic. It is this position that I hope will emerge from the following pathways and “lookings” concerning film.

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The Ethics of the Spectator Made Absent Mulvey’s essay remains a remarkable one, for it condenses . . . a vast range of ideas relating to the cinema . . . Though film theory and feminism have moved on considerably since the publication of Mulvey’s article, the insights and formulations at its centre continue to inspire and intrigue . . . (Rushton and Bettinson, 2010: 71–2)

What is intriguing about this statement is that whilst Mulvey’s thesis does still arouse argument, the ideas on which it is predicated are those that seem to deny the presence of the knowing spectator. We see theorizing set out as an either-or rather than a spectrum across a dialectic of hypotheses. Mulvey posits a reality whereby, In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which (sic) is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed . . . so that they can be said to connote to-be-lookedat-ness (Mulvey, 1975: 11)

It may be that film theory and feminism “have moved on” but it is certain that things have not moved on in much of the real world and, echoing this, remains debatable whether film texts have “moved on”. “Looked-at-ness” remains for example in von Trier’s AntiChrist (2009) or Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me (2010). Natasha Walter has raised questions around the latter text, pointing out that depictions of violence against women have become more forensically detailed and asking, . . . why is it that our entertainment seems to rely so much on the fascinated depiction of women’s scarred and bruised bodies . . . the heroines of this film have almost nothing except pretty underwear and bruised flesh. (Walter, 2010: 3; see also Kermode et al., 2010)

The moving on is less than it seems in both the position and representation of women (androcentrism) and others. We remain faced with Boltanski’s question at the head of this essay. Mulvey stands for a reminder of a constructed and imposed world-view within and through texts, with women (and others) remaining as some “other”, as victims or transgressors, as objects of desire across a range of purposes.

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But her paper also represents the denial of the spectator from two ethical perspectives. The “making passive” of the spectator that arises from what we may call “apparatus theory” that denies forms of agency; in this, the notion that we can only be as an outcome of inheritances or social-cultural construction. Secondly, the confusion between necessary human looking and the fetishistic or sociopathic gaze. Here, the glissade from “malemarked gaze” to “looked at-ness” with its implication that all looking is to be equated with only one kind of looking – the objectifying gaze or voyeurism.

An Apparatus Discussions of the positions that underlie the making-passive of the spectator are to be found in many volumes and papers that I will not attempt to précis here. However I do want to touch on key ideas of Baudry and Mulvey as way-stations to certain positions that allow an invoking of psychoanalytic theory for a human commonality, knowing fantasy and repositioning the spectator as one who looks and is looked at. For Baudry, the apparatus is both ideological and psychoanalytical. The spectator is given apparent omniscience over the images and their effects, reinforced by the inter-cutting of points of view. But this “mastery” is only an illusion; the spectator perceiving themselves as having control over the text when they are only an effect of its making and operation through the “apparatus” (see Baudry, 1974–75). Thus the spectator is the victim of misapprehension, of cognitive dissonance, has “false consciousness” of their position as interpretive subject. In The Apparatus, Baudry invokes Freud’s image of “a photographic apparatus or something of the kind” (1976: 105) and Salomé’s remark that the cinematographic technique is the only one that makes possible a succession of images rapid enough to roughly correspond to our faculty for producing mental images. (Baudry, 1976: 106)

In these, Baudry is setting out cinema, and our experience of this, as a form of illusion analogous to the cave of Plato: The arrangement of the different elements – projector, darkened hall, screen – in addition from reproducing in a striking way the mise-en-scène of Plato’s cave. (Baudry, 1974–75: 45)

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and as analogous to dream: A parallel between dream and cinema had often been noted . . . The cinematographic projection is reminiscent of dream, would appear to be a kind of dream, really a dream. (Baudry, 1976: 114)

The common element is the screen and our supposed “dreamlike” or “oneiric” relationship to it, a relationship that often is taken beyond the metaphoric. Here Baudry and others draw on the work of Lewin and his notion of the “dream screen”. For Lewin (1946), the dream screen is the surface on which dreams appear to be projected, present but not seen as such and which, in psychoanalytical terms, is perceived and experienced as the mass of the flattened breast. Such a perceptual trope remains in force as an undertone of discussion and is developed by Eberwein (1980), but with an emphasis given to the oral stage of infant development; I will return to this stage when discussing Studlar. Whilst “there is no question of identifying mental image, filmic image, mental representation and cinematographic representation” (Baudry, 1976: 118), nevertheless dream and cinematographic apparatus are made reminiscent of each other in a darkened space that takes over the spectator. Whilst I remain enamoured of the resonances of Lewin’s image, it must be asked what relevance dreams have to the experience of film. Like theatre, a film text is neither a dream nor an illusion. Representational theatre is not illusionistic. In illusions we have mistaken beliefs about what we are seeing . . . We know we are watching people representing something else; we are aware of this, never forget it, and rarely get confused. (Rebellato, 2009: 18)

Film, whether in the cinema or at home, is experienced as a real event in the here-and-now about “real” events in the fictional there-and-now.

The Oral comes before the Mirror This idea of the “taken-over” spectator is common to the positions represented by Baudry and Mulvey. The mass of mainstream film . . . portrays a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience. Moreover, the extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also

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isolates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation . . . give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world. (Mulvey, 1975: 9)

This is both anachronistic – accepting the “magic” and “illusions” of the kino, and the conventions of nineteenth-century realism-Naturalism – and ignores the empirical fact of the light-spill from the screen and the shufflings, movings, shared laughter and other responses making me fully aware of the audience of which I am part. Cinema, like theatre, is a shared experience, not an isolating or cave-like one. It is not a cave Norma Desmond has in mind when she acknowledges “those wonderful people out there in the dark” (Sunset Boulevard, 1950) on whom she relies as a star. As Sobchack provocatively articulates it, a film on screen is an (implicitly ethical) engagement between “viewing” subjects. It is a relationship. The reducing of cinema and film to narcissism and ego becomes a reifying of one stage of human development – the mirror stage – with its emphasis on “lack” and consequences of “other to be feared” rather than knowing reciprocity; others and myself as both subject and object for each other. Thus, the equating of looking with scopophilia confuses a controlling gaze with the mutual curiosity between ourselves and others. If we are to take anything from the material of psychoanalysis, I suggest it must be from an earlier stage of human development when what is shared becomes part of a complex dialectic of sameness and difference. The male gaze is not always male, but it is male dominated. By male dominated, feminists mean male-gendered, not simply possessed of male anatomy. A key move distinguishes sex from gender. A child is born sexed; through education and experience, it acquires gender. (Devereaux, 1990: 339)

I would argue that Studlar’s locating of a male and female commonality at the oral stage is a necessary precursor to the equally important differences that theories and histories of oppression and power relations have identified. Studlar (1984: 267) follows the paths of psychoanalysis into masochism rather than sadism, arguing that the prevailing, hegemonic Freudian-Lacanian-Metzian model makes “the male controlling gaze the only position of spectatorial pleasure”. As such, I share her view that there are many

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positions of such pleasure, that “‘lack” is a too simplistic notion of sexual difference, and that both prefiguring and in tension with these positions is the oral stage of shared development. In favouring such a fictive discourse, Studlar identifies the power of the mother as commonly experienced by both the sexed male and female at the pre-genital (pre-gendered?) oral stage. Thus the gendered differentiated spectatorship discussed by Mulvey and others is to be counter-pointed by earlier common human experience. For Studlar, the child’s experience of the breast is ambivalent – the power of the mother experienced by both girls and boys; the boundaries between breast, face and ego becoming blurred; is both sensual and satisfying. This is a stage of primary narcissism, and Studlar sees cinema as an artificial regression into such a stage of fantasy. Rather than a visual pleasure marked by a dominant male gaze (and thus the “masculinization of the feminine spectator” (1984: 278), such visual pleasure is more complex, is “perverse” in its paradoxes and complexity. Thus Studlar points towards Kubie on psychic androgyny (the reverse of penis envy and both-sex identification): It overlooked the importance of the reverse and complementary envy of the male for the woman’s breast . . . from childhood and throughout life, on conscious, preconscious, and unconscious levels, in varying proportions and emphases, the human goal seems almost invariably to be both sexes with the inescapable consequence that we are always attempting in every moment and every act both to affirm and deny our gender identities. (Kubie, 1974: 353, 360; emphasis in original)

In film, fantasy allows for such same-sex (homo-erotic) and opposite-sex (hetero-erotic) identification. I would suggest that the film and cinematic apparatus – as with all drama – is one form of satisfaction of this deep human desire and tendency. Mulvey’s “masculinized” female spectator is counter-pointed by the feminized male spectator; thus Through the mobility of multiple, fluid identifications, the cinema provides an enunciative apparatus that functions as a protective guise like fantasy . . . (Studlar, 1984: 278)

. . . here fulfilling Kubie’s “deep tendency”. The oral stage identified by writers such as Studlar, Kubie and Mann provides us with common psychical ground alongside which other aspects of human life and actions take their place. My purpose here is to place multiple identifications derived from psychoanalytic theory alongside other tendencies in the material and cultural

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habitus and subsequent tensions in empathy and moral engagement. These tensions in relation to ethics, identity, death and the erotic remain with us. From birth, therefore, the human is concerned with the problem of the relationship between what is objectively perceived and what is subjectively conceived of . . . the task of reality-acceptance is never completed, no human is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality. (Winnicott, 1974: 13–15) Eroticism is one aspect of the inner life of man. We fail to realise this because man is everlastingly in search of an object outside himself but this object answers the innerness of the desire. (Bataille, 1957: 29)

Of Self, Other and Poaching Winnicott and Bataille’s insights capture the uneasy symbiotic relationship we are in with ourselves and with others. In this, we are a “mirror” of others and they of us; we are subject and object to ourselves and to others, and likewise they to themselves and to us. We are both akin to and wary of others, hence the codifying and parameters of (im)moral social behaviours. I have written elsewhere of the genetic, material and cultural dimensions of such behaviours (see Murray and Keefe, 2007; Keefe, 2009; Keefe, 2010). There I set out ideas about the embodied habitus of human life, the lived body of the “hyle”, the evolved cognitive systems behind values and agency, the “structures of feelings” of community, the neural roots of empathy in mirror-neurons and so on. I would argue the tensions of relating inner and outer reality require that we pay attention to the whole body and person. Much attention has been given in recent performance theory to the work of Emmanuel Levinas and his seeking to ideologically re-evaluate the (E)enlightenment and (M)modernist project (for example, Ridout, 2009). In favouring an ethics predicated on the “other”, Levinas (1969) appears to offer an alternative understanding of being based on a responsibility each for the other. My unease lies in Levinas’ claims that we cannot directly experience the consciousness of others; that we can only come near to this via the “face” of the other person(s). Such a position has two implications: a false fragmenting of the body (in film terms, one arguable consequence of the formal close-up but of course the “separation” of the face is momentary only and always juxtaposed with contextualizing and recontextualizing shots read by the spectator); an impossible purity of “knowing” with such

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an existential unknowing resolved by invoking a deistic Other as guarantor against fear. I would counter this with the positions already indicated of reciprocity and recognition, what we might think of as prefiguring and echoing of a phenomenological recognition of the messy paradoxes of human awareness – in film terms, the necessary relationships between texts and receivers as “an inter-textual network of discourses” (Rodowick, 1988: 262). If we think of humans by analogy as texts that “are” and are made “as” texts to be received and read, we are again placed in positions of reciprocity and mutuality. We are spectators who are agents yet only so in relation to others. Thus the necessities of the relational self: . . . see maturing as developing greater differentiation within the context of interdependence . . . self delineation is a dialogic process . . . (the) notion of “self-in-relation” points to the inherently relational nature of the person. (Fishbane, 2001: 274–5)

Thus the necessities of behaviour: To state this differently, “behaviour is always in relation to the behaviour of others – we ‘act in relation’.” (Cecchin, 1987: 405).

Thus the necessities of being among others: . . . that the among-others, like the for-itself and the for-others is indistinguishable, in its root nature, from the bodily being of persons. The space I live in is the space created, however indirectly, by such bodily being-with. (Grene, 1971–72: 41)

Thus the necessities of a dialogic “outsideness” in the polyphony (“heteroglossia”) of voices of ourselves within communities: Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life. (Bakhtin, 1984: 293)

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Thus the necessities of looking that precedes, but always with a potential to become, gazing: It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we can explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it . . . Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen. The eye of the other combines with our own eye to make it fully credible that we are part of the visible world. (Berger, 1972; 7, 9)

(The connections and paradoxes between all the above are deliberate.) Thus we return to one of the key qualities of film and its viewing: that fictional subjects are put up before us to look at, to undoubtedly (in Mulvey’s terms) gaze at sometimes, to read as representatives of ourselves being shown back to us with all the ethical implications of such an interaction between (pace Sobchack) viewing subjects. I would suggest films, as with all drama, are a synecdoche for our real social relations with ourselves and others, here expressed at the level of fictions and representations that we recognize as such. As knowing spectators we are both distanced and intimate with ourselves and others within the human constructions of social networks. As knowing spectators, we are in an ethical dialogue with ourselves, with the film and with fellow spectators – implicitly as part of the shared experience, explicitly when we laugh, sigh, gasp, recoil, applaud, discuss and otherwise respond in spectatorial complicity. In all of this I would appropriate Jenkins’ resonant term of “poaching” to characterize film (and other drama) spectators as poacher and nomad (Jenkins, 1992), here drawing on the notion of the active reader (see Certeau, 1984). Or rather, I suggest the “ethical poacher” that prefigures and echoes Boal’s “spect-actor” and Bakhtin’s “heteroglossia”. Jenkins differentiates poaching from theories of misreading and reception-encoding-decoding in that spectators appropriate or make meaning from the fluidity of their knowing interpretations. Such readings are likely to be contradictory, paradoxical, shaped by life experiences, influenced by previous viewings-readings of film and other texts. I characterize this as “‘recycling” (see Keefe, 2009), as a means by which socialized individual agents question and use what they inherit, rework what is known as the familiar reaches out to the imagined. Thus this essay is a manifestation of my (acknowledged) poachings-astrope, as useful to my purpose; it is a principle-based reworking of material analogous to the activities of “everyday life”.

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John Keefe Ethnographic work, in the sense of drawing on what we can perceive and experience in everyday settings, acquires its critical mark when it functions as a reminder that reality is always more complicated and diversified than our theories can represent . . . resides in its potential to make and keep our interpretations sensitive to the concrete specificities, to the unexpected, to history. (Ang, cited in Jenkins, 1992: 286)

(The fan-generated material that marks digital blogging and social networks is simply the latest form of poaching, as viewers exchange from their own diverse and myriad experiences of cultural product.) The apparatus and supposedly imposed positions are qualified in favour of nomadic roaming with all its attendant freedoms, problems of consumption and commodification, dangers of relativism, and acknowledgement of how we are experiencing the thing for itself.

Poachings and Roamings: Case Studies I want to present some case studies – eclectic film texts that illustrate the interpretive, knowing position of the ethical spectators as viewers who are aware. These examples also stand for the concept of the “knowing camera” – that the film text as mise-en-scène is there for the spectator, not the actors or characters, and assumes the eventual presence of a knowing spectator. Hence Godard’s (ironic) aphorism from Le Petit Soldat (1960) that “Photography is truth. Cinema is truth 24 frames per second , and every cut is a lie” and Haneke’s inverting of this to “‘film is a lie at 24 frames per second” (see Porton, 2005) are too easy; it is neither truth nor lie as such. Like all spectators, I see through the truth-lie. I know I am watching a fiction that engages or enraptures me in rhythms of suspension of disbelief. I know I am watching a fiction in real time that is relating greater or lesser truths about human lives within the contexts of human life.

Colour For twenty minutes or so, we have become used to the hues of saturated Technicolor as a backdrop to airplanes flying to the island and sailors dancing as they sing about “dames”; then suddenly as Bloody Mary sings of “Bali Hi”, the colour palette changes. A purple haze dissolves to green-gold, wiping to blue-purple before the film reverts to its chocolate box “realism”.

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South Pacific (1958) is a fantasy, with the world of the film bearing little relation to the Pacific and conditions of war. The saturated colour has significance only for the spectator, as a heightening of the already present received notions of the exotic; as an exaggerating of the romance and fantasy that suffuses the film. But the switch to colour filters heightens this suffusing. As a formal device its intention is to add another layer of mood to certain moments and locations; it adds an air of mystery and magic to a song about the forbidden island of Bali Hi on the horizon and its promise of pleasures. It acts on the spectator as further enchantment and fantasy through our suspension of disbelief. The later duet “Some Enchanted Evening” takes this further, the romance given coloured enchantment of a blurred frame of reds and gold around the singers. This is colour beyond realism. The effect is that of the follow-spot in the theatre, there for the spectator, not the figures; we accept it as part of our knowing fantasy and pleasure in the film. To label this as simple Hollywood mainstream escapism is itself an ethical position; it is patronizing to the spectator as it ignores the pleasure we get from knowingly entering the fantasy, the enchantment, and being momentarily seduced by it. A different set of demands is made by the overtly political use of colour in Godard’s Weekend (1967). The accepted realism of a standard colour film is undercut by the interpolated inter-titles done out in the French national colours – colour as punning, ironic, satirical, aphoristic. We are told the day and time, the speed of the car; we are given provocative slogans, references to other texts. The film forgoes the conventional single diegesis for multiple strands, not only of characters but formal effects of camera and editing and captions. Godard makes the same assumption about film spectators as Griffith: that we are capable of following fragmented or multi-stranded narrative paths. Colour combined with formal camera, diegetic/non-diegetic and editing devices creates a narrative structure that is a spectacle of critical awareness. Godard tells us we are watching a film as film, as a construction: in Weekend where Roland remarks that it’s a “rotten film”; in the subtitle of Une Femme Mariée – “Fragments of a film shot in 1964 in black and white”; in the characterizing of La Chinoise (1967) as “a film in the process of being made”. As with all directors of similar stature, Godard starts with the knowing spectator as a given.

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Musicals As with theatre, so with film: we always know we are watching a constructed fiction marked by some or other perspective; such marking is itself recognized and becomes part of the reading. Musicals take this to another level by the formal device of non-diegetic music accompanying the songs or dances. There are exceptions; for example, in Pal Joey (1957), the rendition of “My Funny Valentine” is given during a rehearsal in the club accompanied by the club band; the music is diegetic and part of the mimetic space – it is “realistic” but, as the figure sings, framed by the pink-white heart, she returns the spectators’ look through the close-up (pace Levinas and the fragmented body). A club rehearsal becomes a staged performance for the film spectator. Similarly, in Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961), Cleo begins to sing accompanied by a piano (diegetic) in the mimetic space but as the camera reframes the figure into close-up and a non-diegetic orchestra enters the fictional space, again turning the rehearsal into a performance for the spectator. We are repositioned in relation to the figure and the music, using the formal qualities of camera and framing, and again our look is returned (pace Sobchack). It is a relationship. But more conventionally, as with South Pacific, the figures sing to or dance with each other accompanied only by a non-diegetic orchestra that the actors must hear but the characters do not. This accompaniment is functional for the actor, but aesthetic for the knowing spectator only. There is a rupture, an anomaly in the reality of the world of the film that we are aware of but have no concern about – we are usually watching the film, not studying it. This is the filmic and formal apparatus creating (ethically contestable) fictions and representations we recognise and question, not illusions.

Layers of framing As with her earlier film Cleo from 5 to 7, Varda continues to play with the spectator in The Beaches of Agnès (2008). We accept the playful framings whilst responding to the images and poignancy: I don’t know what it means to recreate a scene like this. Do we relive the moment? For me its cinema, it’s a game. (The Beaches of Agnès, 2008)

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Reveries are juxtaposed with recreations, staging the past against the present using frames within frames, using formal techniques to overlap past with present, reframing photographs within mirrors. In other words, layers of memories and realities are constructed, not to trick us, but to delight us with reveries and musings as film. We enter the game. We play a different game with Burton’s reworking for the screen of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (2007). I emphasize Burton’s reworking as we recognize his ‘gothic-punk’ style (his authorial mark) from earlier films; we also recognize Depp-as-Depp-as-Todd and Bonham-Carter-as-BonhamCarter-as-Mrs Lovett (their “actorial” marks). We do not watch any film as innocents but with our recycled knowledge and recognitions of previous work; our viewings are aesthetically and ethically compromised by such knowledge but equally enriched. We make the new both fresh and old at the same time. Rather than the playings of Varda, we have darker layers; as Todd begins to sing “Epiphany”, there is a form of jump-cut as Todd remains in his attic but is projected from his barber shop to the streets of London. He strides past other walkers, addressing them as potential victims of his chair; they do not simply ignore him but do not see him. The streets crowded with groups and individuals become a device to emphasize his isolation. As he proclaims that he “will have vengeance”, he is singing not to these others but to himself; not to us but overheard by us. As with Godard, the layering of images-words-music reflects the similar multi-stranded quality of Sondheim’s compositions, Eisenstein’s editing, Dickens’ (or Shakespeare’s) narrative structures that we are expected to follow.

The knowing camera Both Mulvey and Baudry argue for forms of “counter-film” or “countercinema” to expose the ideological apparatus of the Hollywood mainstream. I would suggest such films equally rely on the knowing spectator to read and follow the formal conventions being used in alternative narratives; we familiarize the unfamiliar. Thus the “knowing camera” already instanced becomes more durationally overt in work such as Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943–59) or Marker’s La Jetée (1962) or indeed any avantgarde film. Here, another kind of knowing spectator is assumed, one who will follow the non-mainstream (non-linear/opaque/elliptical) narrative structure and work of the camera. Such film is itself ideological so arguably

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an alternative apparatus, appealing to a supposed avant-garde spectator; one who is acquainted with the norms and mores of such aesthetics. (The irony is that, as ethical poachers and nomads, we enter such work by “normalizing” it, finding the bits that seem familiar in order to read the less familiar material.) Likewise in Andersson’s Songs From the Second Floor (2000), the camera works with duration, knowingly holds the image, the mise-en-scène. We are invited into the frame, to linger and look in a direct manner. The spectator is given time different from that of continuity editing, to muse and meditate on the heightened and held compositions. A deliberate estranging technique plays on the spectator allowing the apparent objective “gaze” to become a poignant “looking in” and painful understanding.

Gazings and Lookings When we watch Marion undressing in her room though Norman’s crude peephole, then in the shower, we are placed in Norman and Marion’s positions. The point-of-view shot in Psycho (1960) momentarily makes us both the voyeur that Norman is and the victim that Marion is. We, through the characters, both objectify Marion’s body and then “become” subject as the knife rises and falls. Are we watching psychopathically as Norman or dying as Marion? Neither; we are uncomfortably placed in his shoes or her shower tray but we do not become him, as likewise we do not become Marion. We are not watching a piece of pornography (arguably the most overt objectifying imagery) but a scene in a “horror-thriller” film that has discernible authorial intentions: frisson, shock, telling a particular story, entertainment. The same question of intentions would arise in the similar Rear Window (1954) or Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). Pace Boltanski, why do we choose to see such a film? Why do we choose to stay when “placed” in Norman or Marion’s position? The answer lies as much in what we bring to the scene as with the author: It is actually a very chaste scene. There is no violence in that scene. It’s all implied. It’s all good angles and clever music and very artful cutting . . . All the violence in it is really what one brings to it as an audience, rather than what is actually on the screen. (Perkins, 2005)

From what we bring, we experience the pleasures of frisson and shock: we

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watch the otherwise unwatchable, we are exhilarated by what we should not be; there is no easy answer to the questions Boltanski and Walter pose. Unless we accept the false consciousness of the spectator – the only way we can follow Mulvey’s position – we must rather understand the spectator from the fluid and cross-relational identifications already suggested. A film (nor any fiction) does not take us over but allows us to see and experience that which we assign to others as well as ourself. How we can watch characters who inflict suffering or suffer when these characters “are” ourselves is among the questions and intentions I shall return to in my conclusions. The ambivalence of our position as spectator is always present. In Water Lilies (2006) we observe the demands and tensions of female adolescence through the world of synchronized swimming. Given the subject matter and BBFC certification of 15 it would seem aimed at an adolescent audience although it is shown also to adult audiences. So how do adults view the film? Do we objectify the actresses as erotic bodies as we watch? Is it inadvertently voyeuristic? (It is not seeking to use voyeurism as with Hitchcock or Powell.) If we accept the fluidity of psychic androgyny or “identifying with,” then does the film also speak to male adolescents? As spectators we will place our own ethical and moral responses against the filmmaker’s (ambiguous?) intentions; we will align or not with these but we cannot be forced into accepting them. My final example turns the voyeuristic position back on itself as the looked-gazed at knowingly poses and thus refuses to accept the imposed positioning. In Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai (1946/48), Hayworth/Elsa is continually posed for O’Hara, the boat crew, Grisby, us. After Grisby joins the yacht we are shown him explicitly and salaciously leering at Elsa through his own lens; we are then thrust into his position (point-of-view) to become the leerer-voyeur as we peer through the lens. We are left in no doubt about Grisby, but what of us. Heyworth/Elsa (the coupling is deliberate) is both posed and is posing, is performimg; as with some earlier examples, there is a knowing acknowledgement in the posing of our gazing-looking as the look is returned playfully to us, and by implication to Grisby. By watching the film we are colluding in the proffered gaze but we are also complicit in the playing as we accept the return of look as male and female spectator. In terms of the narrative arc, Welles’ intention is to set up Elsa as remote, untouchable until the hall-of-mirrors scene where her body is fragmented – as is Bannister’s – as the mirrors shatter in the tricks of reflections.

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Towards an Ethical Film Spectatorship (and towards Boltanski’s Dilemma) The case studies would indicate the precariousness of reducing the spectator to a passive role that denies their knowing engagement. A film text positions the spectator but we are not ethically bound to accept or remain in that position: as “ethical poachers” we contextualize the text and our own and others’ responses. I would argue the spectator is placed in an “agon” or state of pleasurable conflict as we engage with the film, with the spectrum of feelings and thoughts provoked by the film in the context of our experiences, with the “eftermaele” or that which follows, is said after (see Barba, 1992). Thus we work within ideological “apparatus” but also with what shapes us from within; what I might call the cognitive-neurological-empathetic “apparatus” from previously indicated writings. Here, we pay regard to the roots of empathy in the recognition of others’ intentions via our mirror neurons (see Iacoboni, 2005), to the feedback mechanisms that inform improvised and recycled responses (see Pressing, 1988), to the neural activity responding to images and representations that acts on our engagement with these (see Kay et al., 2008). To these we may add Bejan’s argument that shapes seemingly designed to match the golden ratio . . . emerge as part of an evolutionary phenomenon that facilitates the flow of information from the plane to the brain, in accordance with the constructal law. (Bejan, 2009: 97)

The fact and implications of such cognitive-neural bases enable, shape and compromise our ethical spectatorship. As with our identity (as both subject and object), our agency operates within material as well as social givens as we reshape these via action and agency. It is a relationship. I suggest that such processes inform the means by which meaning is created as a further “agon” at the interface between film (or performance) text and spectator – what Rozik discusses as a theory and process of generating theatre meaning: A process of generating theatre meaning assumedly takes place in the context of each theatre experience, ie. in the actual encounter between a theatre performance and a spectator. (Rozik, 2008: 1)

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Each such encounter is certainly the cumulative effect of a series of encounters but I go further than Rozik. Our encounters and experiences are diachronic and synchronic, formed from both aesthetic and non-aesthetic material. Such encounters with drama are also social events in that as spectator I am part of an audience, mutually affecting and being affected in my responses (see Bennett, 1997). Thus meaning is generated from iconicity as imagistic thinking. The ability of the brain for imagistic thinking and from this to understand the representation of things in the mind and to work with these when the representations are separated from direct experience; the partial bases of our responses in neural and other brain activity. In this we construct schemata or knowledge structures to access those stories being presented to us. We recycle-rework our knowledge as it plays its part, alongside neural and cognitive activity, in making the familiar strange and the strange familiar as meaning is generated and created (see Murray and Keefe, 2007: 165–7). However, we must not fall into other reductive ideologies or apparatus, for example “psychologism” or “neurologism”. The implications of Rozik’s ideas point towards a form of phenomenology to complement and counterpoint the shaping effects of brain and social factors. Thus generative encounters become things to be experienced for themselves in context, with intentionality, and consciousness of that intentionality – what I am calling “knowingness” and “agency”. Here, I would follow the approach to phenomenology presented by Gallagher and Zahavi (2008: 15–21), rejecting the notion that this is merely introspection or unqualified subjectivity. Rather, we have access to a phenomenon as aware and bodily experience (shaped directly and indirectly) of the phenomenon. My first-order phenomenal experience is already something of which I am aware in the very experiencing . . . how they are “given” or presented to the subject in experience.

For our experience of the film text this means taking account of all the formal and aesthetic elements and social–cultural elements that share in the generating of meaning as an ethical film spectatorship. In this I take the human to be a dynamic phenomenological system: of consciousness as an ‘a priori’ condition; of self-awareness; of cognition; of the subjective-objective lived and social body.

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Coda I remain aware that spectatorship seems always to return us, brings us back to the desire to look at what we find difficult or uncomfortable as well as to the undemanding. As Grehan quotes Dolan (2009: 3): “how do we write about our own spectatorship in nuanced ways that capture the complicated emotions that the best theatre experiences solicit?” I take “write” here to stand for talking to ourselves and others, for articulating to ourselves and others the complex and contrary emotions provoked by any film or other performance text. Such complexity is given greater force when we consider the obverse of empathy and altruism, what Bandura (1999) calls “moral disengagement”: where the fact of agency gives us power to behave inhumanely. Here we may see departure from moral behaviour under religious, political or other ideological imperatives, under proclamations of righteousness. As spectators we are caught in the paradox of distance whereby the knowing spectator displaces the distance necessary for suspension of disbelief (Husserl’s epoché or unique state of mind) with a distance from what is being viewed. What I may call spectatorial insulation arises not from a failure of imagination, but rather from a displacing of imagination or denial within awareness. Perhaps such insulation or distance is what leads to the aestheticizing of or elegant theorizing about the suffering of others. Bandura’s discussion of “cognitive restructuring” would seem applicable here as we watch suffering that we presume to be real; we know it is fiction yet we watch it just the same as we readjust or re-place our cognitive functions to embrace or accept such images of greater or lesser verisimilitude. Although not directly represented in my case studies (although implied in some examples cited), we are returned to the dilemma with which this essay opened as Boltanski’s ever-hovering question becomes evermore elusive in answering “why do we decide to watch?” Boltanski suggests we draw on ideas such as compassion versus pity (from Arendt), or recognition of the particular within the general, degrees of distance or involvement, and so on. But as I have suggested, film (and other drama or exhibitions) puts us “in position” to feel and imagine the circumstances of ourself and others in “relation to” with its attendant moral tensions. Perhaps we must accept the dilemmas as part of the complexity of viewing; that by taking up a spectatorial position, we become complicit in the fiction being shown. We engage or disengage, we balance the tension

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between the representational means being employed and the fictive ends aimed for as proxy for us against the near and distant backdrop of death and the erotic. Perhaps we are in states of “décalage” or perpetual transitions between understandings concerning the world from which we watch and the worlds we enter. Perhaps these understandings and decisions are a matter of learning as proposed by Aristotle and Brecht (see Murray and Keefe, 2007: 40–44). What we have learnt or not learnt about ourselves and others, as ethical poachers and “spect-actors”, avoiding simplistic relativism or solipsism by our necessary relations with others within the social-cultural mores that constitute our enduring-changing ethical landscape.

References Aristotle. 1967. The Poetics, trans. I. Bywater. Oxford. Oxford University Press. Assmann, Jan. 2005. Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, trans. David Lorton. Ithaca, NY. Cornell University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1929/1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed.and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis, MN. University of Minnesota Press. Bandura, Albert. 1999. ‘Moral Disengagement in the Perpetuation of Inhumanities’, Personality and Social Psychology Review 3(3): 193–209. Barba, Eugenio. 1992. ‘Eftermaele: that which will be said afterwards’, The Drama Review 36(2) 77–80. Bataille, Georges. 1957/1987. Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood. London. Marion Boyars. Baudry, Jean-Louis. 1974–75. ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, Film Quarterly 28(2): 39–47. ———. 1976. ‘The Apparatus’, Camera Obscura 1: 104–26. Beckett, Samuel. 1956. Waiting for Godot. London. Faber and Faber. Bejan, Adrian. 2009. ‘The Golden Ratio Predicted: Vision, Cognition and Locomotion as a Single Design in Nature’, International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics 4(2): 97–194. Bennett, Susan. 1997. Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception. London. Routledge. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. Harmondsworth. Penguin. Boal, Augusto. 1992. Games for Actors and Non-Actors, trans. Adrian Jackson. London. Routledge. Boltanski, Luc. 1999. Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, trans. Graham Burchell. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Cecchin, Gianfranco. 1987. ‘Hypothesizing, Circularity, and Neutrality Revisited: An Invitation to Curiosity’, Family Process 26(4): 405–413. Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA. University of California Press.

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Devereaux, Mary. 1990. ‘Oppressive Texts, Resisting Readers and the Gendered Spectator: The New Aesthetics’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48(4): 337–347. Eberwein, Robert T. 1980. ‘Reflections on the Breast’, Wide Angle 4(3): 48–53. Fishbane, Mona DeKoven. 2001. ‘Relational Narratives of the Self’, Family Process 40(3): 273–291. Gallagher, Shaun and Zahavi, Dan. 2008. The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. Abingdon. Routledge. Grehan, Helena. 2009. Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age. Basingstoke. Palgrave Macmillan. Grene, Marjorie. 1971–72. ‘Sartre and the Other’, Proceedings and Adresses of the APA 45: 22–41.Hollows, Joanne and Jancovich, Mark. 1995. Approaches to Popular Film. Manchester. Manchester University Press. Iacoboni, Marco et al. 2005. ‘Grasping the Intentions of Others with One’s Own Mirror Neuron System’, PLOS Biology 3(3). Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. London. Routledge. Kay, Kendrick et al. 2008. ‘Identifying Natural Images from Human Brain Activity’, Nature-online 452: 352–355. Keefe, John. 2009. ‘Recycling Sources and Experiencing Physical Theatres in Educating Professionals’ in Recycling in Arts, Education and Contemporary Theatre, ed. Camilla Eeg-Tverbakk and Knut Ove Arntzen. Halden. Norwegian Theatre Academy. ———. 2010. ‘A Spectatorial Dramaturgy, or The Spectator Enters the (Ethical) Frame’, Performing Ethos 1(1): 15–24. Kermode, Mark et al. 2010. ‘The Killer Inside Me: can the violence be justified?’ The Observer New Review, 13 July, p.14, London. Konijn, Elly A. and Hoorn, Johan F. 2005. ‘Some Like It Bad: Testing a Model for Perceiving and Experiencing Fictional Characters’, Media Psychology 7(2): 107–144. Kubie, Lawrence. 1974. ‘The Drive to Become Both Sexes’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 43(3): 349–425. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago. Chicago University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA. Duquesne University Press. Lewin, Bertram D. 1946. ‘Sleep, The Mouth, and The Dream Screen’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 15: 419–434. Mann, David. 1997. Psychotherapy: An Erotic Relationship. London. Routledge. Mayne, Judith. 1993. Cinema and Spectatorship. London. Routledge. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16(3): 6–18. Murray, Simon and Keefe, John. 2007. Physical Theatres: A Critical Introduction. Abingdon. Routledge. Perkins, Anthony. 2005. Bonus material on Psycho in Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection. Universal Studios. Porton, Richard. 2005. ‘Collective Guilt and Individual Responsibility: An Interview with Michael Haneke’, Cineaste 31(1): 50–51. Pressing, Jeff. 1988. ‘Improvisation: Methods and Models’ in Generative Processes

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in Music: The Psychology of Performance, Improvisation, and Composition edited by John A. Sloboda. Oxford. Oxford University Press. Rebellato, Dan. 2009. ‘When We Talk of Horses, or, What Do We See when We See a Play?’, Performance Research 14(1): 17–28. Ridout, N. 2009. Theatre and Ethics. Basingstoke. Palgrave Macmillan. Rodowick, David. 1988. The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory. Urbana, IL. University of Illinois Press. Rozik, Eli. 2008. Generating Theatre Meaning: A Theory and Methodology of Performance Analysis. Eastbourne. Susssex Academic Press. Rushton, Richard and Bettinson, Gary. 2010. What is Film Theory? Maidenhead. McGraw-Hill. Sobchack, V. 1992. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton, NJ. Princeton University Press. Studlar, Gaylyn. 1984. ‘Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of Cinema’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9(4): 267–282. Walter, Natasha. 2010. ‘Love and Death in Forensic Detail’, Guardian Film & Music 4 June: 3 Winnicott, David. 1974. Playing and Reality. Harmondsworth. Penguin.

CHAPTER SIX THE WIRE: MORAL AMBIGUITY AND THE HEROIC DETECTIVE AGENCY ROSHAN SINGH Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good without qualification, except a Good Will. Intelligence, wit, judgment, and the other talents of the mind, however they may be named, or courage, resolution, perseverance, as qualities of temperament, are undoubtedly good and desirable in many respects; but these gifts of nature may also become extremely bad and mischievous if the will which is to make use of them, and which, therefore, constitutes what is called character, is not good. (Kant, 1937: 10)

Over a ten year period, the US cable television channel Home Box Office (HBO) has established itself as a successful and radical innovator of television, especially in the drama series and the moral uncertainty of its characterization. Whilst the major networks in American television continued to produce a staple diet of familiar genres that were confined to audience expectations, HBO began to transform and reinvent generic paradigms. This is due to the fact that HBO is a subscription channel and therefore free from the pressures of advertisers or sponsors who have powers of restricting types of programming. It has enabled HBO and its production team, especially writers and producers, to ignore self-censorship and feel free to experiment and produce quality television drama. Its commitment to producing dynamic television can be measured by Robert J. Thompson’s criteria for quality programming that enlightens, enriches, challenges, involves, and confronts. It dares to take risks, it’s honest and illuminating, it appeals to the intellect and touches the emotions. It requires concentration and attention, and it provokes thought. Characterisation is explored. (Thompson, 1997: 13)

Characterization in dramatic terms, including the police procedural series, is imperative for underpinning the legitimacy of engaging in a narrative that is framed around social existence. Although characters are not human

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beings, they are the agents through which human disposition is explored that enables the audience to experience emotions that may be attractive or repulsive. Furthermore, Janet McCabe refers to Jane Feuer’s interpretation of quality programming as a site which is able to attract a quality audience that engages with television that is “more literate, more stylistically complex, and more psychologically ‘deep’” (McCabe and Akass, 2007: 8). HBO challenged TV viewers by reworking the gangster genre and inverting the gangster figure, traditionally familiar to film audiences. The Sopranos (1999–2007) created by David Chase, attracted intellectual interest in the psychologically complex construction of its central gangster character, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini). Moral ambiguity surrounds Tony Soprano as he struggles with his conscience when making immoral decisions to safeguard both his families, the one at home and the other associated with the Mafia. His susceptibility to anxiety attacks when forced to make choices as godfather based on his own questionable code of ethics induces audience empathy. Interrogating moral uncertainty reached its pinnacle in HBO’s The Wire (2002–2008) created by David Simon, a revival of the police procedural series that questions the virtues of both the upholders of law enforcement and the perpetrators of crime. Intrinsic to almost all police narratives is the interplay between crime, victims of crime and the restoration of justice through law enforcement and the audience’s expectation of retribution. The dramatic structure is predicated by initiating feelings of anxiety through acts of crime and disorder that threaten the moral fabric of society (Sparks, 1992). However, the hegemonic logic of police dramas and formulaic narratives dictated by a beginning (disruption by deviant action), middle (employment of lawful agency) and end (resolution and retribution endorsed by lawful agent) neutralizes any threat to the status quo and secures a belief in the judicial system. The restoring of justice and order is common practice and dependent on the constitution of a moral agency, untainted by corruption to counteract transgressed action. The Wire appears to follow this conventional pattern through the character of Detective James McNulty (Dominic West), an idealist who is driven by his own code of ethics in the belief that the right action is the one that secures convictions at any cost without regard to the consequences. However, not only is McNulty’s moral integrity compromised because of his licentiousness but, as part of transgressing genre expectations, he is made morally redundant by a black authority that is itself subject to moral ambiguity. This chapter will begin by considering the appeal of police procedurals and discuss the extent to which McNulty is denied heroic expression

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commonly associated with the detective figure. It will also illustrate a generic shift in TV representation of African American characters who are no longer subservient to a white authority and who are seen in contrast to McNulty in their humility. According to Richard Sparks’ study of television and crime, the underlying imperatives of the police procedural in general is the exploration of societal and psychological problems that cause anxieties. In TV the anxieties concerning crime, whether it is low-level crime addressed by everyday policing or the more serious and heinous sort involving homicide, have become a fertile source for dramatic entertainment. The endurance and popularity of the police procedural with its narratives of crime and punishment is that it relates to “things that matter to us”, including “our own sense of place and security, and the affirmation of cosmologies and moralities upon which we rely” (Sparks, 1992: 34). Hence, the continual appeal of televisual crime drama is grounded in a contractual agreement with the audience that reaffirms a narrative structure with a moral resolution. The implicit and mutual contract is also dependent on remaining faithful to its prototype and providing satisfaction by unexpected inflections that will “renew the genre without violating the viewer’s fundamental expectations” (Kaminsky and Mahan, 1985: 80). TV audiences have been conditioned by the rigidity of particular formats, forms and narrative structures, but HBO has challenged this restrictive mode by adopting the characteristics of film genres. The novelty and enticement of TV is then similar to the attraction of film genres: The very relaxing of the critical intelligence of the audience, relief that we need not make decisions – aesthetic, moral, metaphysical – about the film, allows the genre film to use our expectations against themselves, and, in the process, reveal to us expectations and assumptions that we may never have thought we had. (Braudy and Cohen, 1999: 617)

David Simon, in his proposal for The Wire to HBO’s chairman Chris Albrecht and president Carlyn Strauss, made it clear that his new idea for a TV series was grounded “to the most basic network universe – the cop show” (Alvarez, 2009: 33). Yet in the same letter he presented a challenge to the long standing television genre by asserting that the viewers will “find their carefully formed presumptions about cops and robbers undercut by alternative realities” (ibid.). It is seldom that a television programme is highly appreciated and compared to canonical works of literature and invites sociological debate and critical attention from a diverse section of the public

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including academia.1 The Wire attests to the type of quality programming initiated by Hill Street Blues (1981–87), a police show credited for a realistic and serious portrayal of inner city policing and considered “Dickensian in its superb character studies, its energy, its variety; above all, its audacity” (Thompson, 1996: 59). With its social critique of policing, Hill Street Blues reflected a radical departure from the police procedural. It challenged the series format by developing complex narratives and rejecting a resolution to many of its storylines. Stylistically, it incorporated a documentary style of camera work to register an aesthetic realism and employed a large multiracial cast. In a similar fashion, with a predominantly African American cast, The Wire appropriates a radical shift by violating audience expectations by transcending and transgressing the taxonomical codes, conventions and narrative strategies whilst remaining grounded in the basic premise of the police procedural which is always concerned with the war against crime. Thomas Leitch in his intensive study of Crime Films also identifies criminal behaviour and the subject of criminality as a method “used to focus the problematic relationship between individual and social power and justice” and “turn cultural anxiety into mass entertainment” with resolutions that celebrate “individual heroic action as a way of cutting through the complexities of moral dilemmas”. However, Leitch points out the inherent tension in attempting a meaningful study of crime because “each adopts a different point of view that restricts it to telling only part of the story” (Leitch, 2002: 292). In film, the problem of exploring crime in any meaningful manner is restrained by narrative time, normally 90–120 minutes, which only allows for recounting certain aspects of the criminal investigation. Historically, television dramas have been constrained by linear, episodic or circular narratives that provide stable resolutions on a regular basis in its serial/series format. Ironically, it is the generic feature of the long running series that The Wire exploits to its full potential by realizing and presenting a deeper and complex commentary and critique of crime and policing. Furthermore, anxieties of crime and transgressive action as a central taxonomy of police dramas can be correlated with Leitch’s assertion that the criminal more than the victim or the avenger, illustrates the central function of the crime film: to allow viewers to experience the vicarious thrills of criminal behaviour while leaving them free to condemn this behaviour, whoever is practicing it, as immoral. (Leitch, 2002: 306)

Relief from the trepidation of immoral malpractice in police dramas is the audience’s expectation of retribution mediated through a moral agency. It

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is common in police procedurals for moral obligations to be typified by the detective figure who conform to Alasdair Macintyre’s idea of “characters” as the “moral representatives of their culture” that “enter into social life in numerous ways: most obviously perhaps as explicit ideas in books”. Of course one can extend this to television where fictional characters take on “social roles” embodying “moral beliefs” (Macintyre, 1992: 28). Most televisual police procedurals include the virtuous detective figure that has long been established in fictions; Raymond Chandler describes the detective’s destiny as a modern day hero in an urban milieu: down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and; a good enough man for any world. (Chandler, 1950)

The first episode of The Wire is framed by a collective insight into the police procedural narrative and detective figure as described by Chandler. Much of the screen time is invested in establishing McNulty’s character and his individual pursuit so far of a criminal gang distributing drugs on the streets of Baltimore. It sets up the dilemma of a member of the drugs gang evading prosecution through the intimidation of witnesses. Further interest is sustained through police surveillance and street arrests involving fast cars and shoot outs. The prologue opens at night on the “mean streets” of Baltimore; a close-up pans a stream of blood, reflecting flashing blue lights of police vehicles. An immediate cut reveals a medium shot of hands wearing white surgical gloves retrieving empty bullet shells being placed into a small plastic bag. A further edit shows a crowd gathering around the crime scene including children sitting on the sidewalk, all of this with off-screen sounds of police sirens. The next shot foregrounds McNulty sitting on the concrete steps of a boarded up house with a police informant or witness holding an informal and amicable conversation about the dead man’s miserable life. McNulty conveys a sense of empathy for the victim who was stigmatized with the name “Snot Boogie” and attempts to comprehend a community that allows a thief to play a game of cards with a group of men who know that the thief intends to steal the winnings. The urban detective, according to Stuart M. Kaminsky, is capable of “an understanding of the human condition and a feeling for other people. The very commonness of these detectives dictates how they proceed” (Kaminsky and Mahan,

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1985: 55). On several occasions, McNulty appears to espouse this ethical responsibility towards others, not only his colleagues but also the criminal fraternity. For example, it is also in the first series that we witness McNulty attempting to understand and sympathize with street level drug dealers such as DeAngelo Barksdale (Larry Gilliard Jr) and Wallace (Michael B. Jordan). When McNulty is ordered by Judge Daniel Phelan (Peter Gerety) to explain his knowledge and personal pursuit of the drug gang that is out of his jurisdiction, he refers to what Kaminsky identifies as the “virtue and possible defect of the police detective . . . his commitment to the rule of law and the protection of the populace, which can often become obsessive” (Kaminsky and Mahan, 1985: 55). This obsessive commitment towards the pursuit of criminals also affects their family lives; in The Wire, empathy towards McNulty is heightened by his estrangement from his wife and two sons. Further character tropes of the detective that McNulty conforms to are his insubordinate behaviour towards his superiors and holding contempt for the legitimate judicial powers of state and bureaucracy. This element is intrinsic to the appealing nature of the anti-hero who takes action that may be counter to the rule of law, but ultimately his (they are traditionally men) responsibility lies in the reaffirmation of moral certitude overcoming irretrievable acts of crime. The publicity and marketing for The Wire explicitly foregrounds the character of McNulty as a driving force for the series and its dominant leading character. He is envisioned as the star of the show by heading the cast in each episode (even though his appearance is limited in series four) and is prominent on the publicity cover of the first series on the DVD. There are substantial examples of writing currently available on the internet that constantly position McNulty as the lead character and hero. For example, Bronwyn Jones considers him as the “show’s putative protagonist” who “epitomizes the modern hero, the guy who shakes up the smooth gears of the institution by forcing it to make good on its stated goals” (Jones, 2003)). She extends his heroic and moral individualism by referring to the inherent tension within the system that belies “corruption and incompetence” and his own department that “betrays him the most”. This characteristic of the detective figure aligns him with Sparks’ understanding of the detective as “committed to the implacable pursuit of wrong-doing, whereas his superiors (the highest echelons) recognize only raisons d’état and are preoccupied with counter-insurgency and the surveillance of civil disorder” (Sparks, 1992: 133). Kraniauskas (2012) repeatedly refers to McNulty as “homicide detective McNulty, the main star”; This article misleadingly suggests that “McNulty and Bunk reconstruct the crime” that implicates D’Angelo,

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when in fact the investigation is led by the black detective William “Bunk” Moreland (Wendell Price) who has to persuade McNulty (who at first is uninterested). The article repeatedly implies McNulty’s prominence, whilst everyone else is relegated to a secondary or subordinate position to him; it asserts his position as the central leading character normally associated with the hero principle of fictional narratives. Furthermore, Tito Chico extols McNulty’s virtues as a romantic detective hero with roguish qualities that date back to the eighteenth century: McNulty is not only a familiar real-life type but also an inspired mash-up of a long line of literary heroes stretching back to the 18th century . . . The rakish hero has been a stock character type, simultaneously attractive and dangerous, trading on the currency of temptation, the thrill of adventure, and the promise – almost never, ever fulfilled – that he’ll reform for the “right” woman . . . This kind of hero – the one who straddles the line between the criminal and the police, and who charms and betrays women left and right, but still seems to embody a true code of honour – lingers in all manner of crime and detective fiction today. (Alvarez, 2009: 486)

It comes as no surprise, therefore, if McNulty has been engrained subconsciously as the intended hero. The fact that McNulty is white, in a predominantly black state, complies with mainstream film and television that articulates a white experience and in the detective figure a white heroic expression. Richard Dyer makes transparent the colonial legacy of heroic expression in narrative cinema where the hero “provides the occasion for realization of white male virtues, which are not qualities of being but of doing – acting, discovering, taming, conquering” (Braudy and Cohen, 1999: 740). And Dyer stipulates how fictional narratives are employed as part of the “social, political and economic system” that imparts responsibility to a white male patronage that “carries with it challenges of responsibility, of the establishment and maintenance of order, of the application of reason and authority to situations” (ibid.). Bell Hooks also identifies the representation of black males in mainstream cinema as part of the many “cultural arenas”, including television, where “black males see themselves as always lacking, as always subordinated to more powerful white males whose approval they need to survive” (Hooks, 1996: 84). Although this has been evident through the characterization of the detective figure in many police dramas, it is ironically the one genre in which black representation has enabled a somewhat discordant heroic representation. Apart from the arbitrary black protagonist in R. W. Philip’s A Black Sherlock Holmes (1918) (Gates, 2004: 20), the earliest serious contender for a black detective was Sidney Poitier in In the

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Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967). Since then, the black detective has become a common character in American films –Eddie Murphy in the Beverly Hills Cop series (1984, 1987, 1994), Denzel Washington in The Pelican Brief (1993) and Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), Wesley Snipes in Passenger 57 (1992) and Murder at 1600 (1997) and Morgan Freeman in Seven (1995) and Along Came a Spider (2001). The television police procedural also has had black detectives such as Philip Michael Thomas in Miami Vice (1984–89). However, a comprehensive character construction as heroic agents in line with their white counterparts is problematized through certain cinematic codes of identification and representation that renders them subservient to a white authority. For example, the sub-genre of the police procedural that gained popularity in film and television is the biracial buddy movie such as the Lethal Weapon series and, on TV, Miami Vice, both conforming to the archetypal relationship between hero and sidekick. In both instances, the disconcerting issue is that the non-white detective figures are placed in the “protective custody” of the white lead or co-star and, therefore, in “conformity with mainstream white sensibilities and expectations of what blacks should be like” (Gates, 2004: 22). The expected representation of blacks is disturbingly evident in Miami Vice. In the pilot episode, the black detective Ricardo Tubbs2 (Philip Michael Thomas) is introduced as a sinister character shrouded in mystery by the night setting and seedy locations, such as all-night pool halls and disreputable night bars. In contrast, to suggest a virtuous character, the white detective James Crocket (Don Johnson) is introduced in broad blinding daylight wearing a white linen suit to reinforce the suggestion of righteousness. The preliminary episode becomes a narrative following the colonial pattern of the black male requiring the sanction of the white patriarch. A biracial partnership is only possible after Crocket permits Tubbs to work with him. By the end of the first series of The Wire, it becomes evident that it is closely bound by the taxonomy of the police procedural genre with a familiar narrative matrix of story, plot and characterization, including the configuration of biracial partnerships. However, the representation of the white McNulty as the leading detective with authority over his black colleague hardly conforms to the moral certainty of previous television police procedurals. As part of transgressing genre expectations, The Wire lures the audience into a false sense of hope in the white detective. Furthermore, The Wire attests to the type of quality programming that “dares to take risks” and “challenges” and “confronts” its audience with the destabilizing of an antiquated white authoritarian figure. In his study of White Utopias Henry

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Giroux recognizes the way in which whiteness has secured its dominance by appearing to be normal and invisible and argues for change where whiteness can no longer remain invisible as a racial, political, and historical construction . . . The privilege and practices of domination that underlie being white in America can no longer remain invisible through either an appeal to a universal norm or a refusal to explore how whiteness works to produce forms of ‘friendly’ colonialism. (Giroux, 1994: 79–80)

On the one hand the opening of The Wire appears to comply with the visual construction of most police procedurals. However, on close inspection, the opening sequence actually is a departure from the now cliché-ridden homicidal mise-en-scène that has become part of the cinematic trajectory for inducing voyeuristic pleasure. At a crucial point, the camera focuses and foregrounds dead Snott Boogie’s face with his eyes wide open looking out to the spectator (making us complicit in his misery). The fact that the death is never investigated points to the true purpose of the scene. It explodes the myth of the American dream of everyone having equal opportunity to succeed and alludes to previous cinematic narratives that have examined the dilemma of disenfranchised black Americans, especially males. The Wire sits in the context of a sub-genre of American films referred to as “hood” films, made in the late 1980s, that explored the urban experiences of (mainly black) males locked in perpetual crime and deviancy. The futile killing and negligence of the black community is also partly the premise of The Wire. The opening in fact calls to attention the prologue of the film Clockers (Spike Lee, 1995) which is cited by The Wire’s creator David Simon as having a huge influence on his own work – Simon actually invited the literary author of Clockers, Richard Price, to write on the show (Athitakis, 2008). Clockers begins by disturbing the audience with a proliferation of factual photographic stills from homicide scenes. Each still depicts distorted dead black male bodies lying prostrate on streets with gaping bullet wounds; the soundtrack laments the tragedy. It concentrates on driving the central narrative through the rites of passage story experienced by a black character, Ronald “Strike” Dunham (Mekhi Phifer). The moral centre in both the literary text and filmic text of Clockers is upheld through the character of a white detective Rocco Klein (Harvey Keitel).3 Rocco is invested with ethical integrity, demonstrated by him saving a black life. The film’s resolution conforms to Hollywood’s structure of happy endings that has Strike escape imprisonment and a life of drugs and crime by taking a train out of town with the possibility of a new future. However, it is only

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made possible through the historical legacy of repeated narratives that envision black males in a subordinate position of reliance upon an omnipotent white male. Bell Hooks points out that black males in film and television form part of the cultural arena where representations that “socialize black males to embrace subordinate as ‘natural’ tend to construct a worldview wherein white men are depicted as all-powerful” (Hooks, 1996: 84). This is evident through the benevolent actions of Rocco who helps Strike’s brother avoid a severe prison sentence and gives Strike an opportunity to start a new life. When Strike asks Rocco why he as a white police officer “gives a shit” whilst other police don’t care about the indiscriminate killings of black men by black men, Rocco takes a long pause. When he finally replies that if he ever sees him in this part of town that he will not be as lenient, Rocco reaffirms the legacy of white patriarchal authority that has a history of being invested with the characteristics of demonstrating the act of benevolence as a heroic gesture. On initial reception, the common traits of white benevolence and empathy appear to frame The Wire through the character of McNulty. Without doubt, McNulty appears to stand out as the central protagonist who creates antagonism within his department (who are ignorant of a new drugs gang in Baltimore) and is also the main catalyst for initiating investigations into the death of a prostitute and illegal trafficking of women.4 However, to be deserving of anything resembling earlier perceptions of morally upstanding detectives that we have become accustomed to, he is neither a hero nor the kind of antihero that elicits true admiration or qualifies for redemption. For instance, in the final series his single-minded determination to find the means of securing resources to continue investigating the drugs dealer Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector) have dire consequences, especially for the department and the wider community. The Wire refuses to make invisible the normal legacy of white superiority. McNulty not only becomes the visible white category for examination in a predominantly black Baltimore community, but also the risible white male who is ridiculed, subordinated and dependant on black authority for his existence. He is gradually disempowered, and there are several instances throughout the five series that suggest a morally bankrupt character. In the very first episode, when asked by Judge Phelan why he cares about the drugs gang and the killing of an innocent bystander by the Barksdale gang, his reply is “Who said I did?” This encapsulates a fundamental flaw to his character, that in spite of all his good intentions he is devoid of any emotional or genuine integrity. In the same scene, Phelan warns McNulty of the dangers of becoming involved on a personal level: “When you start

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coming with the customers, it’s time to get out of the business.” It echoes a previous detective, Jack Gittes (Jack Nicholson) from Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), who is warned not to allow himself to be involved on a personal level, which only leads to disaster. And like Gittes and possibly the earliest investigator, King Oedipus in Classical Greek drama, he will ignore the warnings to the detriment of himself and those close to him. It becomes apparent on a close study of this character that McNulty is deluded in believing his own self-righteous attitude towards his job, his family and colleagues. He constantly berates his own colleagues and superiors for lacking true conviction and commitment to bring the drugs cartel to justice. In the first series his personal ambition to convict Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) and his crew appears to be not out of professional obligation or sense of public duty but a personal vendetta against Barksdale’s partner Russell “Stringer” Bell (Idris Elba). The ensuing conflict between these two characters begins in the courtroom (1.1) during D’Angelo’s hearing. Bell is aware of McNulty’s presence and antagonizes him with his sketching of a black superhero with an outline of Africa on his chest with the legend “Fuck you detective”. Significantly, this open defiance is the first sign of challenging the detective agency and foregrounding a central theme of destabilizing established black and white paradigms of power. In his frustration of not finding anything to incriminate Bell, he jeopardizes his covert position and the undercover surveillance team by exposing himself and calling at Bell’s legitimate business print shop. For the second time, Bell challenges McNulty’s inability to demonstrate any power, legal or otherwise. He mockingly offers him his business card and services and openly invites McNulty to view one of his legitimate designer apartments should he ever need one. During McNulty’s pursuit in tracking down Bell and finding evidence to warrant a conviction he becomes compulsive to the extent of being misguided and irresponsible. For instance, whilst shopping with his two sons, he by chance sees Bell. McNulty takes a risk by using the boys to trail Bell and in the process loses them (1.8). During this scene a further opportunity to undermine McNulty is when his sons correct him for using the term black instead of “African American” when referring to Bell. This is not an isolated case to highlight McNulty’s outdated perceptions on race. An episode written by Richard Price (3.8) has McNulty and Detective Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn) tracing mobile phone purchases from a supermarket which is out of their jurisdiction in the southern state of Virginia. When they find it difficult to gain CCTV footage from a supermarket to help them identify the purchasers they go to the local police office. McNulty, assuming that he will have more of a chance to gain help without a black officer, tells Kima to “lay back

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on this . . . wait in the car”. To establish an affinity with the presiding white officer at the desk, McNulty implies that the judicial state of Baltimore is run by blacks and there is very little chance of a white person receiving justice. As he speaks, a black female officer enters from the back office and McNulty attempts to cover his misguided assumptions by suggesting that “they’re not all so bad” and is further perplexed and embarrassed when the female officer casually kisses her colleague on the forehead and is informed by the officer that she is his wife, Caroline. McNulty attempts to salvage the situation by suggesting that the officer should meet his partner, referring to Kima. After providing Kima and McNulty with information, the officer pulls Kima to one side and informs her that “your partner there . . . bit of an asshole”, which comes as no surprise to Kima (as she has already experienced his insensitive and outrageous behaviours) who responds with “For real?” pretending to be surprised. It has become a cliché for the police detective, if he is married, to demonstrate overriding commitment to his job at the expense of sacrificing his familial responsibilities. In spite of his detachment from home, the detective figure compensates for the guilt by retaining integrity through providing financial security for his family. However, McNulty contravenes this convention by being irresponsible, insensitive and totally self-absorbed to the point of being deceptive and lacking sincerity. During separation procedures from his wife, he agrees to the amount of alimony requested, only for it to be revealed later that it was on the pretext that he thought it would help him get back with his wife (3.4). After the rejection from his ex-wife, McNulty drowns his sorrows at a bar. Then whilst drunk, he recklessly smashes his car against a concrete bridge post and then proceeds to a café to sober up and picks up the waitress for sex (2.8). It is not an uncommon feature for the white male heterosexual detective to have success in sexual encounters, reinforcing his masculinity. However, McNulty’s incessant exploits become a further aspect of moral ambiguity that denies him self-respect. During a parents’ meeting at his school in the company of his ex-wife, he flirts with Theresa D’Agostino (Brandy Burre), who is fundraising for the school, and wastes no time in abandoning his wife to have sex with D’Agostino. There are several instances when McNulty is incapable of restraining his basic sexual urges; even during a police raid on a brothel, McNulty whilst undercover is unable to avoid temptation and proceeds to have sex with two prostitutes to the disbelief of his colleagues. On another occasion when an opportunity arises to have casual sex, he leaves his sons unattended in the middle of the night, only returning in the early hours of the morning, which further emphasizes his negligent attitude as a .

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father. Amongst other flaws to his character, it is revealed that McNulty is estranged from his wife and children due to infidelity and during the course of the long running series he attempts to make amends and re-forge their relationship. Frequently we witness McNulty’s insatiable desire for sex and his constant betrayal of his estranged wife, Elena McNulty (Melanie Nichols-King), Assistant State Attorney Rhonda Pearlman (Deirde Lovejoy) (whom he exploits whenever he needs occasional sex) and Beatrice “Beadie” Russell (Amy Ryan). In series two, McNulty appears to be affected by the murder of an unknown prostitute found on the harbour to the extent of trying to identify her and trace her family to give her death a sense of dignity. However, no sooner does he begin his mission than he abandons it as there is the opportunity to rekindle his relationship with Elena. Unlike previous upright detective figures that safeguard their integrity by a professional attitude to their work, there is evidence to suggest that McNulty abuses his power as a white detective in a predominantly black state to satisfy his sexual predatory needs. Furthermore, this over-sexualized depiction of a white male character can be seen as radically challenging the preconceived ideas and myths of racial codes that traditionally ascribe licentious drives to black males. From the perspective of race and sexual politics, The Wire presents an inversion and transgression of codifying black male sexuality. The fact that Rhonda abandons McNulty for Lieutenant Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick), a black man who is able to provide a stable and affectionate relationship, reinforces this point and thereby acts as a further affront to McNulty’s ego and white masculinity. On several occasions he is seen to inflate his own ego by employing his status as a detective to attract and impress (white) females. Whilst it has an effect on certain women, when it comes to someone who is able to see beyond his virility, such as Theresa, the reality of his ineptness is exposed when she rejects him once they have had sex. He has the audacity to complain to Kima of being used as a sex object by D’Agostino – he appeals for sympathy, saying, “like I’m just a breathing machine for my fucking dick”. Ironically, McNulty reveals his delusion as he continues to complain that Theresa is unable to value his police credentials: as he points out, “I’m the smartest asshole in three districts, and she looks at me like I’m some stupid fuck, playing some stupid game for stupid penny ante stake. She fucking looks through me Kima.” A close-up on Kima, who doesn’t respond but gives him an unsurprising look, speaks volumes (3.10). McNulty’s character and white masculinity is further subverted and undermined/mocked when he acknowledges the authority of Bunk, who on

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his initial transfer to Homicide “taught him all kinds of cool shit”; McNulty gratefully accepted Bunk’s initiation into the department, recalling during a drink with Bunk (using sexual metaphors), “when it came time for you to fuck me . . . you were gentle . . . cos you could have hauled me out of the garage and just bend me over the radio car . . . and no, you were gentle” (1.7). His delusion of being “good police” is the most damning character assassination of McNulty. In fact more than anyone else, he appears to be the most negligent detective in the whole series and is the cause of several unnecessary deaths and yet he is able to present the illusion and convince some of his colleagues that he is “natural police”. For instance, he is quick to recognize that Roland “Prez” Pryzbylewski (Jim True-Frost) is impressionable and exploits his vulnerability by using him for his own needs which is to Prez’s detriment.5 McNulty rather than do his own paperwork asks Kima to “Take a turn typing this shit” and offers to get a takeaway for the team working late, taking Prez with him. Outside the Chinese takeaway Prez reads from a fortune cookie that “A friend makes himself known”, which foreshadows Prez’s realization that someone close to him is actually a serious contender for “good police” and also an honest and sincere colleague.6 When a radio call comes in for assistance in a shooting incident five blocks away, McNulty, as way of impressing Prez, completely ignores protocol that it is not their responsibility and as senior officer orders Prez to the scene. Without any consideration of Prez’s reckless behaviour from past incidents involving the misuse of guns, which McNulty is aware of, he leads him into a dangerous situation where Prez ends up shooting a fellow black officer (3.9). Frequently our allegiance and trust in the official guardian of virtuous action is rendered uncertain as we witness drug dealers and lower echelons of the community secure the moral high ground through courageous actions, sound convictions and mental deliberations in taking the right course of action. There is no self-pity or complaint concerning their predicament as a consequence of an unjust system and they accept their fate (as evidenced from the outset with Snott Boogie). For instance, in spite of the fact that Preston “Bodie” Broadus (J. D. Williams) is a low level drug dealer and responsible for killing Wallace, we are encouraged to empathize with him when he gets killed. Bodie openly reveals his moral outrage at the way in which Marlo is indiscriminately killing black people to preserve his self-image as he shouts out (4.13), “Kills mother fuckers cos he can, not cos they snitchin, not cos it’s business . . . It’s like a nigger aint fit.” He is tormented with guilt by the fact that he inadvertently gave Kevin (Brandon

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Fobbs) advice to speak to Marlo to clarify a misunderstanding that leads to Kevin’s death on mere suspicion that he may be a threat. McNulty is at the scene when Bodie releases his frustrations on hearing of Kevin’s death by kicking and smashing the windows of a police car. McNulty witnesses the incident and instead of stepping in at that moment, waits for Bodie to be arrested and charged with the minor offence. In true Machiavellian fashion McNulty seizes the right opportunity to prey on his victim the next day after having him released. McNulty uses his cordial sympathetic approach to catch Bodie off guard from his true motives and says, “Do you think that charge gets dropped without somebody showing you special love . . . You hungry?” Beguiled by McNulty’s generosity, Bodie reveals his moral indignation at Marlo’s indiscriminate killings and implies that Marlo has to be removed. McNulty seizes the moment and challenges Bodie’s convictions and says, “And for that to happen, somebody’s gotta step up.” This is not the first time that Bodie’s competence is challenged. Previously a similar proposition is made by Bell “to step up” by killing Wallace on the grounds of snitching. Bodie is reminded of this by his friend Poot (Tray Chaney), but Bodie’s justification is the moral code that he and the gangsters abide by, that one doesn’t snitch. Paradoxically, although both McNulty and Bell exploit Bodie, Bell’s proposition is an opportunity to raise his status and secure a stake in the drug trade, whereas McNulty’s is a risk to his life. Bodie resigns himself to doing what he believes to be the right thing and holds onto his pride as he explains, “I gotta do what I gotta . . . I don’t give a fuck . . . Just don’t ask me to live on my fuckin knees, you know.” Mc Nulty responds that “You’re a soldier, Bodie”. It is a reminder of D’Angelo pointing out to Bodie in the first series how Bodie himself and all the other street pushers are pawns in the bigger game. Their sole purpose as dispensable commodities to be utilized like fodder, signed up to die like soldiers; it is not by chance that this analogy is suggested. A close reading of the series reveals several allusions to America’s conflict in Iraq, always in the background as a social and political commentary. Bodie shows conviction to stand as state witness to avenge Kevin’s death. He is at a point where he has lost self-restraint not out of misguided judgement but through his ethical code of standing firm against someone who he considers unethical and shows courage by being willing to stand up against Marlo and risk his own life. Unfortunately for Bodie, he allows himself to be off guard and is taken in by McNulty’s assuming friendship and generosity. This is seen by members of Marlo’s gang, which consequently leads to Marlo taking precautionary steps by having Bodie killed. On hearing of Bodie’s death our first impression is that McNulty is genuinely and

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emotionally affected when he hears the news and throws the death sheet across the floor in anger. We cut to him on the street stopping Poot on the pretext of a drugs search and passing his condolences and offers of help, “Sorry about Bodie . . . I ain’t jackin you off, I’m trying to do right for your boy . . . Who dropped him?” Poot’s response – “You all did” – is a resounding accusation not just of McNulty but of a system that has failed them from a very early age (4.13). The genuine truth of McNulty’s anguish is exposed when he is unable to sleep after Bodie’s death, and confesses to Beadie his thoughts wrapped up in sympathy for Bodie. His disappointment is not over the wasted life of another young black man, but is purely out of self-interest as he confesses to Beadie his desire to be part of Detective Lester Freamon’s (Clarke Peters) team who are making progress on the Marlo case with the dead bodies (4.13). Beadie attempting to be understanding and sympathetic to McNulty’s needs questions his motives: Beadie: You want in McNulty: I just feel like I owe it now Beadie: To who? McNulty: This kid, corner kid, getting ready to turn him you know, wrap him up and give him to Lester as a present.

As he speaks the expression on his face betrays his true pleasure in deceiving Bodie as an opportunity to get back into Homicide. He displays no remorse as he proceeds to get sexually aroused by the thoughts. To punctuate McNulty’s lack of genuine compassion, the edit immediately cuts to Sergeant Ellis Carver (Seth Gilliam) who has exhausted all avenues in trying to secure Randy Wagstaff (Maestro Harrell), a foster carer. Carver has to resign himself to the fact that he has to abandon him at a care home – the worst case scenario for Randy. After dropping him off, Carver sits in his car feeling enraged and guilty for failing the teenager, who is at the home because of police negligence. As he drives away, looking in the rear view mirror, he’s disgusted at his own image and releases his pent up frustrations by beating his fist furiously at the steering wheel in anguish. This is in contrast to McNulty, whose sentiments are less than compassionate or admirable; the next scene cuts to McNulty in Daniel’s office asking to be accepted back into Homicide and the case. It is also in this episode that we witness another white pretender, Mayor Thomas Carcetti (Aidan Gillen), betraying the very community that he has strongly showed leadership to. To avoid political humiliation and through a sense of self-pride Carcetti rejects

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a loan offered by the opposition state Senator. He forsakes the opportunity to safeguard resources for the education budget that could provide essential research undertaken in part through ex-Major “Bunny” Colvin (Robert Wisdom) which would secure an educational future for the children. Furthermore, in contrast to McNulty, even Namond’s father Wee-Bey (Hassan Johnson), a convicted killer, is willing to face humiliation by accepting that his son is too weak to be on the street and consents to him being fostered by Colvin in the hope that he may lead a better life. If there is a character deserving the status typically afforded to the detective figure, it is Lester Freamon. He is the character more than any other who is able to command respect and admiration from his colleagues and superiors. He is introduced as a time waster, busy reproducing miniature furniture when in fact his professional skills are gradually drawn out over the five series. It is Freamon who is able to provide two transparent and tangible clues to the anonymous drug baron Avon Barksdale with a photograph from his past and a number from a wall that links D’Angelo to Avon, all without any fuss and to the astonishment of his colleagues (1.4). His own experience of disrupting senior management is evident when he forewarns McNulty, “when they ask you where you want to go, keep your mouth shut” (1.4). His warning goes unheeded as McNulty is sent to harbour patrol (the place he did not want to go) at the end of series one. Once the investigation is secured with the necessary resources, Freamon is the detective who begins to store and piece together every scrap of information that will be vital in securing convictions and exposing police corruption and how the drug money is laundered and used to finance political campaigns. Freamon’s character as a respected figure is also a transgression of preserving the role of patriarch to a white character. Manthia Diawara, for example, has argued that in the the dominant ideology of cinema the “black male subject always appears to lose in the competition for the symbolic position of the father or authority figure” (Diawara, 1993: 216). Through the character of Freamon, The Wire is able to contest this position. For instance, it is under his supervision and tutelage that amongst others Kima, Prez and later Sydnor gain essential experience as detectives. He is even regarded with awe by McNulty, during his revelation of Avon Barksdale. During this scene (1.4), the camera remains on McNulty to register the admiration he has of this character and he later offers to buy him a drink. Ironically, it is Freamon that McNulty, fickle as he is, accuses of being a “boss’s man” when Freamon defends Daniels’s actions during investigations. Freamon counteracts McNulty’s attack by berating and confronting him with his unprofessional and personal crusade against Bell which is

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offensive to everyone else’s contributions to the investigation as a whole (3.4). Freamon conveys the destructive nature of McNulty (and his selfbelief as the only person that cares); he attacks his actions as he points out, “you set fire to everything you touch McNulty and then sit back and watch it burn” and devalues him by finishing his diatribe with “you’re not worth the skin off my nose”. As the dejected McNulty leaves, however, Freamon doesn’t allow his emotions to rule his intellect and is wise and astute enough to know that the misfit McNulty may have some information and so he asks Kima and Prez to check out anything McNulty reports. When McNulty feels proud of tailing Bell to find him enlisted on an educational course (which is actually prompted by Prez), he is told by Freamon that they already know that, which registers as another knock to his confidence. In a crucial “candid camera” moment Freamon and Prez, who are working on a Sunday, capture McNulty inflating his own ego at the expense of his colleagues and compares himself to Freamon saying, “We’re good at this Lester, in this town we’re as good as it gets”. Freamon responds “Natural police”, ridiculing and inflating McNulty’s ego. The close up shows that McNulty realizes he has been duped and attempts to counteract the embarrassing moment. He reacts with a futile attempt to undermine Feamon’s expertise in reproducing miniature antique furniture as an immature hobby playing with “doll’s house miniatures” (3.9). McNulty fails to recognize the patience and skills required for the work which parallels Freamon’s approach to detecting, and the fact that the financial rewards can outweigh their police salary. Paradoxically, in spite of their discordant relationship, McNulty continues to respect Freamon as a shrewd detective to the extent of measuring and aligning himself to his calibre. In a telling scene when Freamon considers an alternative possibility of tapping the drug dealers using disposable mobile phones after all wire taps have been suspended, McNulty implies he has the same brainwave when he interrupts Freamon with, “I know what you’re thinking . . . I just thought the same fucking thing” (3.10). This is to impress everyone including Daniels, who shows a look of disbelief. When the plan is put into action, it is Freamon, Kima and her informant Bubbles (Andre Royo) who are successful in securing the wire taps, not McNulty, but he takes credit by announcing in the presence of Daniels, “Lester, can you actually believe we sold the wire taps to the targets?” (3.11). The remark, which is weighted with an appeal towards Daniels to prove his credentials as a detective, is based on earlier confrontations of insubordination, whereby Daniels had threatened to release McNulty from his command at the end of the case.

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The extent to which Freamon commands reverence even extends to his superior Daniels, who confides his past errors to Freamon like a paternal figure and how Deputy Commissioner Ervin H. Burrell (Frankie R. Faison) has used that to blackmail him in the past. It is Daniels who also in a revealing moment refers to Freamon when he suggests that he is able see through people as a “father” does and how it is difficult to escape his paternal scrutiny. Daniels’s further recognition of Freamon’s capabilities is evident when he has to make a choice of selecting only two detectives to continue with investigations – all investigations have been suspended due to lack of resources and finances have been used from various departments to shore up the education budget. He has no hesitation in keeping Freamon with an assistant, Detective Leander Sydnor (Corey Parker Robinson) (5.1). However, the morally ambiguous nature of The Wire does not even allow Freamon to escape a slight fall from grace. In series five his character is tainted when he accepts McNulty’s offer to secure a wire tap on Marlo by illegitimate means. Although Freamon conspires with McNulty, it is Freamon who has the foresight and intuition to recognize the potential in McNulty’s unethical actions and takes the lead by taking McNulty under his charge to realize the scheme. As he explains when questioned about his meddling with a set of false teeth, Freamon replies that he is “gilding” McNulty’s “lillies”, in other words, improving his plan. The extent of McNulty’s incompetence and subservience is revealed when he asks Freamon, “What do you want me to do?” when they set about looking for a homeless victim (5.4). Freamon has to remind McNulty of his skills and replies, “What detectives do, detective”. Freamon (Bunk or Kima) may well endorse the qualities that are commensurate with the detective figure, however, the attributes which Klapp associates with the detective figure defy genre convention by their embodiement in the character of Omar Little (Michael K. Williams). According to Orin E. Klapp, heroes are high, exclusive and honorific. They are set apart, placed on a pedestal, rewarded with special privileges, and regarded with an awe that verges on veneration, having in many ways the ritual place of an ikon. Because of belief in their unusual merits, they are powerful leaders, with charismatic authority, widely imitated and followed. They acquire a circle of devotees who sing their praises, keep parts of their person or property as relics, and commemorate or enshrine them after death. Tales and memoirs of their exploits will be preserved as cherished legends. The purpose of hero-worship behaviour seems to be to convert a selected individual into an ideal, a durable symbol of supernormal performance – to capture and make a norm of the exceptional. (Klapp, 1954: 60)

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As an audience, we are initially deceived by Omar’s introduction as a gangster. His plundering of another gang is both sinister and violent, and the unpleasant scar down the side of his face presents a threatening appearance. When Omar is presented to the crown prosecution as a witness, his reliability as an upright citizen is questioned when she refers to Omar as a “sociopath” (2.5). Yet Omar, more than any other character, contravenes genre expectations of the gangster figure. Not only is he black and gay, he is one of the most popular figures in the series that can be described in the same category as the anti-hero in the modern sense. The qualities of inspiring awe and veneration amongst a circle of devotees transcends spheres of fiction and narrative space to include adoration from fans of the series including the United States president Barack Obama.7 The imperative of this character impedes the easy reliance on establishing a moral dichotomy between heroes and villains. In spite of his volatile nature and drug trafficking, he engages in acts of compassion and tenderness. There are instances when he refrains from exploiting the destitute addicts and administers drugs without financial gain, actions that are deemed deplorable and damaging to the drug cartel. The “high, exclusive and honorific” credentials reserved for heroes can be traced in Omar. For example, McNulty’s immorality can be compared to and measured by Omar’s capacity for displaying fidelity, loyalty, love and affection. On more than one occasion when someone close to him is hurt he feels and expresses the pain and anguish. When his boyfriend has been tortured to death under Bell’s instructions and he sees the dead body in the mortuary he cries out in genuine anguish in the presence of McNulty (1.6). Omar prides himself on living by his own moral code that is built on honour and integrity. For example, the act of “snitching” is considered the most damning act of disloyalty (to the extent of punishment by death); Omar abides by the rule as he says, “snitchin just rubs me wrong” but he extends it by his personal interpretation. He is willing to break the rule and assist police when it involves the killing of innocent bystanders or an “everyday working man”. In fact, he collaborates with the police to falsely construct Bird’s conviction when he was not at the scene of the crime. When asked by Bunk why he is willing to “step up” and risk his own life, Omar is quick to tell Bunk not to confuse his code of honour with misguided illusions of innocence: “He killed an everyday working man and all. Don’t get it twisted. I do some dirt too but I ain’t never put my gun on nobody who wasn’t in the game” (1.7). Strangely, his ethical beliefs extend even to disapproving of vulgar language and in a series where almost every character uses expletives he can

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be singled out as the person who expresses himself powerfully with the use of language appropriate for a character whose name Omar in Hebrew means “speaker”. It is ironic that this single character, described as a sociopath, is charismatic and commands an eloquent expression of the street vernacular. When he is being cross-examined whilst giving (false) evidence against Bird, he is able to withstand Maurice Levy’s (Michael Kostroff) interrogation with counter-rebuttals and “charismatic authority” that wins the admiration of the judge and jury (2.6). Furthermore, Freamon, Kima and McNulty acknowledge that Omar is responsible for the killing of two street dealers, but stand in “veneration” as he walks away. Omar asks politely (“gentlemen, ma’am”) to be excused, whilst McNulty asks “Lester, we still cops?” and Freamon replies uncertainly, “Technically, I suppose so” They sanction Omar’s killing and there will be no reprisals. He is “set apart” from other gangsters and placed on a “pedestal” receiving “special privileges” by McNulty and Kima, when they provide him with a surgeon to mend his wounded shoulder after a shoot-out with Avon (1.10). On the streets, Omar becomes a legend. Street dealers shout out his name to forewarn of his entrance (accompanied by an exclusive signature whistle that becomes part of his iconic persona). During an ambush set up by Marlo, he escapes by a “supernormal performance” of smashing through a pane of glass and then jumping from a balcony on the fourth floor of a high rise building, to the astonishment of Michael (Tristan Wilds), Chris (Gbenga Akinnagbe) and Snoop (Felicia Pearson) (5.5). Even Marlo is bewildered by Omar’s miraculous disappearance, referring to it as “Spiderman shit” (5.6). The extent of his exploits gains him a legendary status verging on hero-worship, to the extent of children imitating him on the streets. His sudden death is “preserved as cherished legend” and his body is stripped of personal possessions which will be kept as “relics” (5.8). The factual events surrounding his killing are exaggerated to the extent of becoming fables involving shoot-outs with gang members and powerful guns. Even after Omar’s death Marlo is unable to escape from him. As he steps out in the street free from conviction, two street dealers can be heard off camera extolling Omar’s exploits. Marlo confronts them, but they fail to remember him and he is rendered impotent – unlike Omar, he has to resort to violence in a futile attempt at gaining recognition (5.10). The ultimate violation (and one that adds insult to injury) is to deny McNulty a moral victory and extend the “heroic agency” to Omar. In the police procedural genre the overcoming of evil by good is reserved without

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compromise; the expectation is that the protagonist will engage in a climatic showdown: Evil will be punished in this world, not the hereafter. And there is no ending more uncompromising than the death of one’s antagonist. In the police story, justice is indefinitely suspended, the decisive combat postponed, until that final, cathartic scene in which the hero’s previous inability to “speak” the definitive reply to the criminal violence is suddenly cured. All barriers that prevented the cop from closing with his antagonist are now cleared away; the plot can now be cleansed of pollution. Desire is, at last, transformed into deed. In this moment of purifying violence, all the frustrations of the hero’s plot are focused into a gun barrel, all the delays of justice exploded by a single righteous bullet into the body of the criminal. (Kaminsky and Mahan, 1985: 81)

In the near climatic episode of the third series, the “decisive combat” to relieve anxiety (a “cathartic scene” whereby “desire is, at last transformed into deed” and “the frustrations of the hero’s plot are focused into a gun barrel”) comes about not with McNulty but with Omar. He is endorsed as the administrator of “purifying violence”. The “evil” of Bell’s becoming a legitimate businessman through illegitimate means; McNulty and the Homicide department were seeking to prosecute McNulty Bell for his criminal acts and are “cleansed” by the “righteous bullet” of Omar; the audience is denied a sense of cathartic relief and reassurance that the police are the ultimate saviours of justice. It may well be weighted by the questionable ethics of “vengeance” but arguably it is Omar who is legitimized in seeking an “eye for an eye” due to the attempts on his life, the torture and killing of his boyfriend and partners and near death of his grandmother all carried out under Bell’s command. Omar is also allowed the “hero’s previous inability to ‘speak’ the definitive reply to the criminal violence” when he informs Bell of his betrayer. He receives gratification having Bell on his knees pleading for mercy as he reveals “You still don’t get it, your boy let you down (referring to Avon), and we didn’t even have to lay a finger on him”. This is an affront and reminder to Bell that Omar’s boyfriend never betrayed him, even after torture. Bell’s demise is in line with the gangster paradigm of coming close to the dream but at the last moment it is just out of reach. The advertising billboard mockingly announces B&B (Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell) Residential Properties above the dead body riddled with Omar’s bullets. 8 Not only is McNulty denied any victory, his capabilities as a detective are compromised by the inability to validate his skills as “natural police” and

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his devastation is revealed as he decries to Bunk, “I caught him Bunk, on the wire . . . I caught him and he doesn’t even know it” (the emphasis on “I” is again an indication of McNulty’s delusion and failure to acknowledge others). It is worth pointing out that this disappointment echoes the initial provocation of white masculinity when Bell insulted him with the black superman sketch. The satisfaction of counteracting Bell’s first insult to his masculinity has been lost. McNulty’s distress and demoralization is so extreme that it is compared to losing someone from the family: as Kima says to Freamon when asked how he is taking it, she replies “Like he was kin”. It does bring into question what his obsession was over Bell. Perhaps the answer is found when McNulty searches Bell’s luxury apartment after his death. He is confronted with Bell’s expensively tasteful ornaments and minimalist surroundings; the implication may be that his unconsciously jaundiced and somewhat blinkered expectations of a black gangster have been exposed. The resounding revelation is when he picks up Adam Smith’s famous treaty on economics The Wealth of Nations – he probingly asks “What was I chasing?”, unable to comprehend the intellectual capacity of Bell. Feelings of demoralization haunt McNulty when he fails to convict his next target, Stanfield. Having not learnt from his errors or listened to good advice, McNulty for the second time goes on a moral crusade to convict Marlo. He shows complete negligence and is unable to restrain himself from retaliating against his department and superiors (who he believes have betrayed their commitment to the Marlo investigations). McNulty reaches a stage of depravity and deviancy when he tampers with evidence and the dead body of a homeless man and the kidnapping of another to fabricate the existence of a serial killer (5.2) in order to secure additional resources to pursue Marlo secretly. The mise-en-scène, including lighting and locations, is used to suggest a symbolic descent into the abyss. Seeking out homeless victims at night leads him to destitute environments beneath dark highway bridges. As he wanders amongst savage dogs, insane characters and open fires, it conjures the image of a subterranean underworld. McNulty’s fall into iniquity calls to attention the poignant message subliminally foregrounded at the beginning of every episode. The soundtrack lyrics warn not to “pay heed to temptation” and keep the “devil, way down in the hole” by walking the “straight and narrow track”. McNulty’s deception has a damning effect on the whole of Baltimore as the Mayor demands that all resources are invested in the apprehension of the serial killer at the expense of neglecting major state responsibilities. Not only does Marlo escape prosecution because McNulty

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jeopardizes the conviction by falsifying the court subpoenas for the wire tap, he actually is the cause of two homicides amongst the homeless. The only meaningful arrest is of Chris, Marlo’s henchman, which is due to Bunk and his persistence in carrying out “good honest detective work”. The ultimate symbolic demise of the white detective figure is a mock wake for McNulty when he is forced to retire. Jay Landsman (Delaney Williams), McNulty’s sergeant, tries to present a commendable account of McNulty when he says that if he should ever be found dead he would want McNulty to be the one standing over his dead body. But the eulogy is immediately punctured by Bunk’s interruption “It was probably McNulty who put you there” which is received with resounding laughter. In spite of the metaphoric death, David Simon and Ed Burns attempt a brave resurrection and redemption of McNulty. He accepts responsibility for the two copycat murders, but has the audacity to hold a moral position by refusing to accept another to close the case. He also appears to have taken responsibility at home with Beadie and her children. To bring a circular closure to the final series in the very last minutes of the last episode, McNulty returns with the kidnapped homeless victim and steps out of a white car in broad daylight. He stands for a few moments on the highway bridge overlooking the state of Baltimore and imparts the final gesture for atonement as he says “Let’s go home” to the homeless man in the car. In between McNulty stepping out of the car and speaking the last words, the montage sequence highlights the true unsung black heroes of Baltimore who are committed in their actions to help safeguard the city’s people. It includes Daniels, who refuses to be part of a corrupt system and becomes a lawyer, the City editor Gus Haynes (Clark Johnson) who will carry on trying to present an honest account of everyday news and Kima and Bunk who will replace McNulty’s tainted policing legacy. All of this renders the final gesture a hollow statement underlying a heroic falsehood and draws attention to McNulty’s ironic confession to Beadie, “‘When I start telling the story I feel like a hero.” She walks away before he can finish.

The Wire – Glossary of Characters Theresa D’Agostino – A high flying political strategist who will work for whoever pays her irrespective of political beliefs. She believes in working hard and playing hard including sleeping with McNulty after a casual encounter at his son’s school. Avon Barksdale – Head of Baltimore’s Westside drug organization that

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he has fought for and is proud of. He enjoys his life, having the money and influence and respect from the “street”. D’Angelo Barksdale – Nephew of Avon (his sister’s son). Although related he is not finding it easy to fulfil his family’s expectations. He is unable to resolve an argument and this leads to him shooting someone, but it is more in self-defence than intentional. He contemplates turning states witness but resigns himself to 20 years in prison. His loyalty is questioned and Bell considers him a risk and has him killed whilst in jail. Russell “Stringer” Bell – Barksdale’s second in command who deals with all the drug business side whilst trying to launder their money through their many legitimate businesses including property development via B & B Enterprise (Barksdale and Bell). He studies economics and is aiming his sights away from the “corners” to a different, improved lifestyle. Preston “Bodie” Broadus – Astute corner boy for the Barksdale gang. He is keen to learn “the game” and willingly agrees to “step up” to kill his friend Wallace who becomes a threat to the gang. He understands his lowly position of pawn in “the game” and accepts the risks. Ervin H. Burrell – Politically savvy police commissioner, mainly interested in serving himself whilst keeping whoever may be in power happy. He has some past information on Daniels which could possibly tarnish his reputation and career prospects. Thomas Carcetti – An idealist Councilman, with high aspirations, who against all odds becomes a white mayor in a predominantly black state. He is unable to keep his promises to the disenfranchised, the schools and many other service departments. Malik “Poot” Carr – A young black corner boy and close friend of Bodie. He enjoys life but has to kill his friend Wallace to prove his loyalty to the Barksdale gang. Ellis Carver – Rookie drugs detective who recognizes his mistakes and progresses through the department via the Serious Crimes Unit to become sergeant. He becomes aware of and concerned about the impact of drugs on individuals and families and tries to make a difference to the lives of the corner kids. He assists Major “Bunny” Colvin with his “Hamsterdam” project. Howard “Bunny” Colvin – Black divisional police major who is close to retirement. He becomes fed up of manipulating police statistics and resources to suit mayoral demands instead of considering the effective ways of managing the problems. He establishes (unknown to his superiors) uninhabited areas of the city where drugs can be administered under his surveillance and away from the community, which becomes known as

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“Hamsterdam”. Although his idea has an effect, when the project is exposed he is made a scapegoat and forced to retire. He is lured back to work on a schools project to help high-risk kids. He is able to have some influence on some of the kids and eventually adopts Namond Brice. Lieutenant Cedric Daniels – Senior black officer who has risen through the ranks despite some questions about past corruption. Astute and aware of police department politics. He endeavours to follow the chain of command with a keen eye on promotion and is placed in charge of the Barksdale case. The work strains his marriage and leads to an amicable separation; he then develops a strong relationship with Rhonda Pearlman. Lester Freamon – Very experienced older black detective who had been sidelined previously for questioning his superiors and was completing his years until reaching retirement buried in useless paperwork and making dolls’ house furniture to fill his time. His skills and experience are unknown or appreciated when transferred to the Serious Crimes Unit under Daniels, but slowly his “natural police” credentials begin to shed light on evidence and cases which other detectives struggle to decipher. Kima Greggs – Experienced black drugs detective, who has the most influential informant, “Bubbles”, and is willing to help him reform. After demonstrating her capabilities, she is moved to Homicide. Gus Haynes – City Editor of the Baltimore Sun newspaper who is constantly fighting to maintain journalistic standards in a fast changing news environment that wants sensational rather than factual news. Kevin – Corner boy for Marlo Stanfield’s gang who passes on a message to another corner boy which results in his murder by Chris and Snoop. Jay Landsman – Detective Sergeant in charge of the homicide unit, past caring about what really matters but just how to keep the numbers down to keep his superiors happy. Maurice Levy – Unethical white lawyer who has made his name and his money from representing criminals, particularly drug dealers. He also helps them find avenues to legitimize and “bank” their drug money. Omar Little – Notorious gay “stick up” man who is consistently ahead of the other drug gangs that he plunders. He is feared and revered by many but lives by his own “code”. He becomes embroiled in an ongoing feud with the Barksdale gang. Jimmy McNulty – White homicide detective who initiates the enquiry of the Barksdale drug organization. He is known in the department for his philandering, his drinking and his lack of respect for the chain of command. William “Bunk” Moreland – An experienced black homicide detective with whom McNulty is partnered with when he joins the department; they

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have remained close friends ever since. He relieves his stress by drinking, smoking cigars and occasionally womanizing when he is in bars with McNulty. Namond – Son of Wee-Bey, one of the Barksdale gang and always trying to prove his masculinity. However, beneath his bravado is a vulnerable teenager who is actually indifferent to violence. He is unable to live up to his mother’s expectations to follow his father’s footsteps as corner boy and eventually holding his own corner. His vulnerability and potential for education is recognized by Bunny who adopts him and provides him with an alternative path to follow. Chris Partlow – A confident head soldier of Marlow Stanfield. He is a ruthless killer and, together with Snoop, is responsible for hiding dead bodies that he has killed under Marlo’s command in derelict houses. Rhonda Pearlman – Female Assistant State Attorney who endeavours to achieve convictions of drug dealers. She is in an on and off relationship with McNulty which also resulted in his marriage break up. She gradually moves away from McNulty and into a stable and respectful relationship with Lieutenant Daniels. Felicia “Snoop” Pearson – Partner of Chris Partlow; despite her size she is a lethal killer. Judge Daniel Phelan – Angered that his courtroom was violated by the obvious tampering of witnesses in the D’Angelo Barksdale case, he summons McNulty to find out some background. It then transpires that McNulty knows much more which leads to Phelan demanding information and results.Roland ‘Prez’ Pryzbylewski – Son-in-law of a police department divisional commander, he struggles to fulfil expectations as a police detective. Acts impulsively and recklessly causing damage to both people and property, but finds his niche “following the money” on paper while undertaking police work under the supervision of Detective Lester Freamon. After killing a colleague accidentally, he leaves the police force to become a teacher. Beatrice “Beadie” Russell – White female port police officer who struggles to support her two children. She thinks she has a stabilizing influence on McNulty and takes a chance on forming a relationship. Marlow Stanfield – Head of new generation of drugs gang. He is astute and ruthless and recognizes no ethical code or rule of law or society. Leander Sydnor – Young black detective constantly undercover who is both patient and competent and willing to learn from Freamon. Randy Wagstaff – Corner boy living with a foster mother; he struggles to juggle the corner life with her house rules. His home is set on fire when he

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cooperates with the police and after negligence by the police department he ends up back in a care home and is branded as a “snitch”. Wallace – Young black corner boy struggling to care for his younger siblings. His naivety results in a brutal murder and he considers helping police with their enquiries, which ultimately results in his death. Wee-Bey – A member of the Barskdale’s gang who takes the rap for multiple murders and whilst in prison he agrees to Bunny’s request to give his son a chance for a better life.

Notes 1

2 3

4 5

6 7 8

In February 2009, University of California, Berkeley announced that their undergraduate students would be able to enrol on a module devoted to the study of The Wire. Also in 2009, the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change hosted an international conference, ‘The Wire as Social Science Fiction?’ The assigned name “Tubbs” possibly alludes to one of the first influential black detectives in American cinema in In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967), Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier). This more humanistic type of detective figure who attempts to understand the predicament of black youths can be seen as a departure from such films as Dirty Harry (Don Siegal, 1971) and The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971). Both films begin by reasserting white moral authority through the detective figures of “Dirty” Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) and James “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) over a black masculinity that had threatened to destabilize police authority during the “blaxploitation” period of American films in the 1970s. Even this is questionable, because in fact it occurs as a consequence of McNulty attempting to retaliate against Major Rawls for relegating him to harbour patrol. McNulty even boasts to Kima Greggs at one point about his detective abilities when he does not have any means of contacting Theresa D’Agostino: “Anyway, what kind of detective would I be if I couldn’t track a white woman in Baltimore?” (3.5), only to get Prez to do it for him under the pretence of it being part of their investigation (3.7). I am referring to Lester Freamon whom I discuss later on. Barack Obama informed the Las Vegas Sun that his favourite character in The Wire was Omar Little (Coolican, 2008). The scene alludes to early crime films that established the theme of the rise and fall of the gangster figure and the theme that “crime doesn’t pay”. In films such as The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931), Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931) and Scarface (Howard Hawkes, 1932), the gangsters, Tom Powers (James Cagney), Caesar “Rico” Bandello (Edward G. Robinson) and Antonio “Tony” Camonte (Paul Muni) all die beneath billboards that mock their attempt to achieve the American dream through illegitimate means.

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References Alvarez, Rafael. 2009. The Wire: Truth be Told. Edinburgh. Canongate Books. Athitakis, Mark. 2008. ‘Q&A with Novelist and Wire Writer Richard Price’, Washington City Paper available at http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/ articles/34519/qa-with-novelist-and-wire-writer-richard-price – accessed 26 November 2012. Braudy, Leo and Cohen, Marshal Cohen. 1999. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. 5th ed. Oxford. Oxford University Press. The essay by ‘White’ by Richard Dyer first appeared in Screen 29(4). Chandler, Raymond. 1950. The Simple Art of Murder. http://www.en.utexas.edu/ amlit/amlitprivate/scans/chandlerart.html – accessed 26 November 2012. The essay was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in December 1944. Coolican, J. Patrick. 2008. ‘Obama Goes Gloves off, Head-on’, Las Vegas Sun (14 January), available at http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/jan/14/obamagloves-off/ – accessed 27 November 2012. Diawara, Manthia. 1993. Black American Cinema. London. Routledge. Gates, Philippa. 2004. ‘Always a Partner in Crime: Black Masculinity in the Hollywood Detective Film’, Journal of Popular Film and Television 32(2). Giroux, Henry A. 1994. Disturbing Pleasures. London. Routledge. Hooks, Bell. 1996. Reel to Reel: Race, Sex and Class in Movies. London. Routledge, 1996. Jones, Bronwyn. 2003. ‘Clockers Done Right: “The Wire”: Second Season’, The High Hat 2, available at http://thehighhat.com/Static/002/the_wire.html – accessed 26 March 2010. Kaminsky, Stuart M. and Mahan, Jeffrey H. 1985. American Television Genres. Chicago. Nelson-Hall. Kant, I. 1937. Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics trans. T. K. Abbott. London. Longmans, Green. Klapp, Orrin E. 1954. ‘Heroes, Villains and Fools as Agents of Social Control’, American Sociological Review 19(1). Kraniauskas, John. 2012. ‘Elasticity of Demand: Reflections on The Wire’ in The Wire: Race, Clss, and Genre ed. Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro. Michigan. University of Michigan Press. Leitch, Thomas. 2002. Crime Films. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. McCabe, Janet and Akass, Kim, eds. 2007. Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond. London. I. B. Tauris. Macintyre, Alasdair. 1992. After Virtue. London. Duckworth. Sparks, Richard. 1992. Television and the Drama of Crime: Moral Tales and the Place of Crime in Public Life. Buckingham. Open University Press. Thompson, Richard J. 1996. Television’s Golden Age. Syracuse, NY. Syracuse University Press. Thompson, Richard J. 1997. Television’s Second Golden Age. Syracuse, NY. Syracuse University Press.

The Wire

Films A Black Sherlock Holmes (R.W. Phillips, 1918) In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967) Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971) The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971) Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974) Beverly Hills Cop series (1984, 1987, 1994) Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner, 1987, 1989, 1992, 1998) Passenger 57 (Kevin Hooks, 1992) The Pelican Brief (Alan J. Pakula, 1993) Clockers (Spike Lee, 1995) Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl Franklin, 1995) Seven (David Fincher, 1995) Murder at 1600 (Dwight H. Little, 1997) Along Came a Spider (Lee Tamahori, 2001)

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CHAPTER SEVEN THE ETHICS OF INTIMACY: THE RESTLESS BODY, PERFORMANCE AND DESIRE BETH JOHNSON

Jay: I wanna leave someone and I don’t know how. Ian: Fucking hell. So what’s the situation this time? Jay: It’s just a girl I’m seeing. She comes round, we fuck, she leaves. Without even asking her to come back or anything like that. I mean, I asked her round once but, well, what would you say? . . . I mean it’s not a hassle to me or anything – actually, it is . . . I’m afraid this bloody Wednesday thing, it’s like we owe it to each other or something. [Laughs.] It’s all wrong. Ian: And what does she say about all this? Jay: I don’t know. We don’t talk.

The above conversation is taken from Patrice Chéreau’s British film Intimacy (2001), a project that won the accolade of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in the year of its release. This European prize is significant in determining the status not only of Chéreau as a director, but of the European tradition in explorative extreme cinema which Intimacy taps into despite its obvious “Britishness”. Chéreau’s works – including Queen Margot (1994), Those Who Love Me Can Take The Train (1998), Intimacy and Son Frère (2003) – are comprehensively different in nature yet all can be summarized stylistically as forceful, provocative visions that explore the intimacies of the human condition in unsettling and confronting ways. Intimacy is notably however a complex term to define. In a general sense, “intimacy” refers to a faculty of “closeness”. Poignantly though, “intimacy” also implies something more. As Karen Prager notes, “intimate relationships are often differentiated from other personal relationships by the presence of confiding interactions between partners” (Prager, 1998: 1). Framed in juxtaposition to the “real” cinematic representations of wordless, urgent sex that constitute the incisive locus of Intimacy, Prager’s definition of the term seems initially perhaps out of place, yet the manifold layers of intimacy need teasing out in order to make visible the multiple dialogues afforded through Chéreau’s

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alternate reframing of contemporary sexual communication. Distinctions between different types of intimacy are integral to understanding its significance in the context of contemporary European cinema. As such, intimacy is to be demarked here as “physical”, “emotional”, “verbal” or “nonverbal”. While overlap undoubtedly occurs between these categories themselves and further concepts such as friendship, love and lust, the delineation of these various types of intimacy are made in order to better analyse the representations of “closeness” present in what Tim Palmer nominates as “narratives of the flesh” (Palmer, 2006: 22). Interestingly, Palmer links fleshy narratives such as Intimacy to a new and extreme “style and sensation in the contemporary French cinema of the body”, theorizing a new cinema of “brutal intimacy”. Exploring this assertion, Palmer notes that a cinema of brutal intimacy tends to spotlight “an increasingly explicit dissection of the body and its sexual behaviours”, presenting extreme tendencies such as “unmotivated or predatory sex, sexual conflicts, . . . disaffected and emotionless sex, arbitrary sex stripped of conventional . . . gestures of romance” (ibid.). Such a description seems particularly fitting in relation to Chéreau’s film as it so purposefully engages with the contemporary representation of explicit and intimate sexual behaviours while negating aesthetics of traditional romance.

An Unapologetic Cinema of the Body In Intimacy the “cinema of the body” is explored through explicit sex acts between two strangers – Jay (Mark Rylance) and Claire (Kerry Fox). Reframing the stranger-sex model so frequently employed both in serious European art-films such as Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972) and in stereotypical hard-core stories such as Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano, 1972), Chéreau makes visible the complex contours associated with contemporary cinematic “real sex” when emotional intimacy is markedly absent. Confronting, drab and saturated by palettes of greys and browns, the aesthetic of Intimacy reflects a gritty, realist and distinctly “British” commentary on social disintegration. Moreover, this social critique is also pointedly contemporary, highlighted through a diegesis of extreme sexual dysfunction representing a crucial part of social alienation in the twentyfirst century. While Intimacy is a sexually explicit film, however, it is not an erotic vision. Instead, sex is reframed here as arbitrary, unmotivated and unsettling. The stylized yet unsimulated sexual encounters of two (almost)

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strangers – Jay and Claire who meet every Wednesday afternoon for sex – dominates the film in an uncompromising way that dismantles and disarms as well as shocks with its extreme physical honesty. Accordingly, Chéreau could be situated amidst a genre of “new extremist” directors such as Michael Winterbottom, Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noé, Virginie Despentes, Coralie Trinh Thi and Michael Haneke. Incorporating hard-core elements showing real penetration, cunnilingus, anal sex, masturbation and fellatio, such directors have produced unapologetic and “real” explicit sexual content in texts such as 9 Songs (2004), Romance (1999), Irréversible (2002), Baise-moi (2000) and The Piano Teacher (2001). As Lisa Downing argues, such directors have “spawned a genre that seeks to dismantle the prohibition regarding the exposure of the body and of ‘real’ sexual activity in narrative film, within a cinematic climate that has seen a concerted return to the tenets of realism in other contexts” (Downing, 2004: 266). Indeed, Chéreau likewise directs a performance of sexual honesty in which the body is exposed, stimulated and showcased as “real”. A designation of “reality” is however not straightforward. As Mary Ann Doane argues: “the question of realism in the cinema has traditionally hinged on either the indexicality of the photographic image and sound (the approach of André Bazin) or generic or classical Hollywood conventions that produce an effect of the ‘real’” (Doane, 2009: 63). As a European art film, Intimacy can be differentiated from more classical Hollywood cinematic representations on the basis of employing a greater or more aesthetically vérité model of realism. In addition, stylistic markers of realism including the use of hand-held cameras, the long take, deep focus shots, fixed frames and close-miking of actors, are employed by Chéreau as traditional markers of a recognizable realist aesthetic. The more extreme mode of realist address presented by Chéreau however concerns the assaultive unsimulated sex that the couple enact. Often noisy, messy, and conducted amidst the squalor of Jay’s London flat, the lack of romantic and emotional intimacy between Claire and Jay when engaging in sex is assaulting from the outset of the film. Interestingly, Chéreau does not formally introduce Jay and Claire as a couple; neither does he show the audience how their sexual liaisons began. Rather, Chéreau opens his film with a scene of Jay being awoken on the floor of his dingy flat by the sound of a doorbell. Upon answering, Jay finds a woman. “Was this agreed?” he asks. “No,” she replies. After an awkward minute Claire approaches Jay, placing her hand on his face. The pair rapidly undress and have urgent sex. Their lack of speech in the run up to this sexual encounter not only emphasizes a deep lexical discomfort between the characters (which is also mirrored by the non-knowledge of the spectator), but also

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seems to confirm a mode of emotional ambivalence – the characters neither know each other very well nor desire to get to know each other well. The reality of the sex seen by the spectator is shocking in that it highlights Chéreau’s dismissal of “normative” romantic sexual relations. The absence of romantic coda, such as soft lighting, declarations of commitment and the exchange of tender spoken intimacies, challenges conventional narratives of intimacy where the act of sex brings with it responsibility for care for a partner and for including them in everyday life. Indeed, domestic moments involving the couple are nominal in Chéreau’s film, pointing to an uncompromising representation of sex that is initially presented as devoid of emotional and verbal intimacy. Arguably, emotional intimacy and attachment increases, at least for Jay, as the couple’s sexual encounters continue, but the urgency of the couple’s sexual trysts becomes proportionally more bewildering and more brutal. Yet, unlike hard-core representations, the sexual rendezvous are also devoid of pornographic positional pacing – a pacing in which sex scenes are staged through a repetitive medley of positions until the climactic cum-shot. Significantly, no cum-shots are staged in Intimacy. This is however not to say that the spectator doubts the reality of the sexual performances screened. Rather, while foregrounding the significance of real-sex in the narrative of the film, it appears that such sexual liaisons are not foregrounded for the camera or the spectator.

Performing Intimacy Although the bodies of the actors (including genitalia) are seen, they are notably underexposed – even in their extreme nakedness. The camera does not probe the actors’ genitals in a pornographic way, but rather is frequently positioned at the outer limits of Jay’s threadbare room. The resulting image is rendered as cold because of its blue light. Chéreau is not afraid of nudity (the Royal Shakespeare Company actor Mark Rylance is seen being fellated – the first time a serious British film had shown such an act), but uses it seriously and intermittently against a back-drop of dark English squalor, the milieu apparently abandoned by any sense of civic responsibility or order. In a cranking up of the noir tradition, everything is extremely darkly-lit. On meeting up at Jay’s flat for a second time, the couple, again wordlessly, kiss hungrily before undressing. Positioned on their knees, Claire and Jay face one another before she caresses his penis with her right hand. Framed tightly, Jay lies back while Claire continues to tenderly touch him. The physical intimacy seen here is extremely challenging. As Linda Williams

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notes: “While I do not suppose that this gesture is at all uncommon in the . . . repertoires of heterosexual sex, I found myself shocked to see such an intimate gesture on film.” Williams goes on to explain that her shock relates to the familiarity of the “real” gesture placed on display: “so often in mainstream movies women’s gestures seem organized to deny prior familiarity with the movements of sex” (Williams, 2008: 272). Thus it is the screening of Claire’s desire as well as Jay’s that is accentuated and given space here. Despite this however, the sex act on screen is also framed as exclusive, and, as it progresses, allusive. While the scene discussed above is definitively intimate, the continuation of it reveals Chéreau’s awkward positioning of physical intimacy. Neither turned on nor turned off, the camera here places the audience in a space which feels immensely private. Viewing the following sex act filmed from a static tripod, the spectator is neither pushed out nor pulled into the scene but remains an inert observer. A sense of discomfort ensues. This discomfort is not (for me at least) experienced in regard to the bodies on show, but in response to an aesthetic of intrusion.The physical honesty of the scene functions to confront the viewer, who is positioned statically by the camera on the fringes of the cinematic space; the scene, it seems, is only allowed to occur on the premise that the relationship between the couple is an immensely private physical affair. The sexual experience seen is rendered palpably problematic. The momentary pleasure on show seems to be achieved solely for the characters in the film rather than for spectators of it. Chéreau’s film appears to foreclose the possibility of an intimate spectator response yet, by provoking the spectator to recognize their own distance from the physical intimacy performed, Chéreau also motivates a recognition of the potential of the medium of film to shift the parameters of pleasure and displeasure. Because the director does not use sensational camerawork, the perspective of the spectator is fixed. Yet, although the bodies of Rylance and Fox are not fragmented into sexualized bits and pieces (as conventionally occurs in pornography), it is still questionable if a static camera equals what Downing refers to as a “morally neutral” perspective (Downing, 2004: 276). As a discourse of power, sex and the performance of real-sex on-screen provokes important and pertinent questions regarding a performed yet “real” physical intimacy. Claire’s demand to be sexually satisfied arguably presents a cross-over in which her performance as an actor and her personal identity as Kerry Fox become intimately entwined. This film is in part a vision that demonstrates the blurring of boundaries between performance and the real. In performing the real act of sex (or, at least, fellatio), Fox becomes intimate

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with Rylance in spite of the fact that her character’s unspoken demand for sex is not her own. Fox and Rylance do engage in intimate acts; however, as Linda Williams suggests, the term “act” may be best replaced by the term “performance” due to the actuality of penetration, that is, a penetration of “safely contained boundaries of acting”. Perhaps acting is not the right word here. Acting implies artifice, being precisely what one is not, through drawing on what one has been in order to create an appearance that is credible. To “act” a scene in which the action is sex is . . . to really engage in sex . . . Actual sexual intimacy with another person does take place in the sex scene whether one “really” feels desire or whether one “really” comes. This may be one of those occasions where the word performance – connoting an avant-garde edge challenging the more safely contained boundaries of acting – is more appropriate. (Williams, 2001: 22)

Chéreau thus explores intimate performance in a scene in which we see Claire take Jay’s penis in her mouth. As previously noted, Intimacy is the first serious British film to show fellatio in this way and thus marks out an aesthetic movement of new extreme honesty. Actively magnifying a disruption of the separation between actor and character, Chéreau is able to probe the complicated capacity of performance in the principal characters’ lives.

Arresting Restlessness As aforementioned, the relationship between Jay and Claire goes against normal cinematic conventions of romantic love. Jay and Claire are middleaged, have non-pornographic bodies, are not situated in a domestic, familial or friendly relationship and are not searching for true love. Indeed, they do not appear (at least initially) to link physical sex with emotional intimacy or love in any way. Such a refusal to rely on a representation of romantic intimacy is exemplified further through a form of avid restlessness, a constant inability to be still in each other’s company. Indeed, apart from when engaged in sex, Jay and Claire never just spend time together, talk to one another or appear to desire to get to know the other. In each other’s company they appear awkward, unsure, uncomfortable, continuously and abruptly moving around, rendering the space between them a site of visual and emotional confusion and disconnection. Subsequently, what is ironically lacking in Intimacy then, is emotional intimacy. Intimacy can be seen to represent a vision of social reality in which “regular” language and regular “intimacy”

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are problematized. This social critique of contemporary British life is exemplified in the absence of specific motivations regarding sexual desire. Sex in Chéreau’s vision is “of the body” rather than “of the mind” and so can again be read in line with Palmer’s theory of “brutal intimacy” understood through commonalities such as representations of confused worlds on-screen, . . . actual acts of . . . sex represented as intrusive and alarming, even nondescript events and settings manifest a brooding, unspecified malaise . . . The most shocking and unflinching of sexual interactions are situated, in effect, within narratives that oscillate between experimental extremes: drawn-out sequences of passive meditation, inscrutable character interactions, even, at times, an abiding sense of boredom, and contrasting bursts of sudden, overwhelmingly abrupt movements and action. (Palmer, 2006: 29)

Although the bodies of Chéreau’s main characters (Jay and Claire) are fully revealed and their sexual communication is positioned as ineffably “authentic” using close-up shots of fellatio, the sex on display is simultaneously dark. Emotional intimacy as an element of love is perverted in Chéreau’s vision. Pleasure is not gained from an in-depth relationship or knowing a partner emotionally, but rather can be found in a new, extreme, alternative, non-knowledge of the other’s emotions. Physical intimacy here, in contrast, seems to be present in simply wanting the same thing at the same time without demanding more: a quest for pleasure where sex represents a physical honesty.

Looking On The way in which Chéreau directs the shooting of Jay and Claire’s sexual encounters renders the scenes (particularly of Claire’s body) underexposed: nothing about the woman is clearly identified. Precisely, she is not exhibited as an object of the “gaze”. Rather, it is Jay’s penis that is the star of these encounters. The audience’s eyes are definitely focused towards Jay’s body rather than Claire’s as it is Jay who is positioned on-screen with his legs spread apart. Jay’s penis is the object of demand here (rather than the woman’s body as the conventional object of desire). The audience’s gaze is on Jay’s penis primarily, I would suggest, because this is the first “serious” English film to show an erect penis. An image hitherto regarded as obscene (and off-screen) appears on screen for the first time and exemplifies a new

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extremity borne from a process of pushing the boundaries of visibility first recognized in the British “18” certificate given to Breillat’s Romance. As with Intimacy, the experience of viewing Romance is an uncomfortable one. Catherine Breillat not only (like Chéreau) demands that the spectator witness private moments of erotic anxiety, but she presents the film as political art by again challenging moral perceptions of obscenity and censorship. This is accomplished in part through her controversial casting of the pornographic actor Rocco Siffredi (Paulo) as Marie (Caroline Ducey)’s lover. Blurring the distinctions between pornography and art, Breillat purposefully presents a vision of new extreme cinema in order to directly assault previous chaotic and absurd classifications of obscenity. Speaking at the Edinburgh Film Festival she stated: “the problem is that censors create the concept of obscenity. By supposedly trying to protect us, they form an absurd concept of what is obscene” (Brooks, 2001: 2). By littering her film with images previously classified as hard-core including an erect penis, fellatio and anal sex, Breillat reconfigures the dissemination of real-sex as a direct representation of dis-pleasurable physical intimacy. In showing brutal scenes of real-sex which require audiences to consider issues such as consensuality and liminality, Breillat re-imagines contemporary contextual parameters regarding what should and what should not be shown on screen. In Intimacy Jay also questions the notions of sexual liminality as he doggedly pursues Claire in order to discover the context of their Wednesday sex. While Jay is notably not violent toward Claire, the appearance/discovery of Claire’s husband, Andy (Timothy Spall) and Jay’s purposefully ambiguous, probing relationship with Andy is extremely significant. Ensuring both spatial and emotional intimacy with Andy, Jay talks to him about his own estranged wife as if she had committed adultery in exactly the same way as Claire. The point of this conversation serves to place Jay imaginarily in Andy’s position in order to perhaps trigger some recognition. As such these scenes constitute some of the most intimate and tense in the entire film. When confronted by Claire, Jay’s explanation of why he follows her is brutally honest yet simultaneously ambiguous: If what we did together was all that you wanted [I thought] it was because you knew more than me. I thought you’d found something. I thought you were ahead of me. And that in the end you would tell me what you knew . . . but you just kept your bloody gob shut.

In the final chapter of Intimacy, Chéreau codes the terminal scene of sex between Jay and Claire in more brutal terms. As in the beginning of the film,

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Claire’s presence is signalled by the ringing of Jay’s doorbell. Allowing her entry, Claire and Jay actually engage in a conversation where they verbally express emotional intimacy for the first time. Speaking of his anger toward her regarding his discovery that she has a husband and a son, a life beyond him, Jay says: I know you’ve given me something that I didn’t ask for, and that no one does that ever, and that I should be grateful, but somehow all I seem to do is hold it against you. That you should be so close to someone, tears me apart. You being close, tears me apart . . . I didn’t know I’d become so closely tied to you.

Closely-miked and shot separately, Jay asks Claire to stay with him. His voice betrays pain and his eyes fill with salty tears. Claire, mirroring his emotional grief with her own, refuses, but does not leave. In the desolate derelict space, Jay and Claire, sit apart, each silently making visible their intimate and emotional feelings for the other. Next, they are shown standing close to each other in the darkness. As the camera zooms in toward the couple, who place their arms around one another, the image on screen becomes distorted and exceedingly dark. The close-miking of the actors allows the audience to hear rather than see their painful intimacy. Signalled by heavy breathing and the sound of clothing rubbing against clothing, the scene signals an aesthetic of reality. As Tanya Krzywinska notes of real-sex aesthetics in film, such a “sum of strategies gives a sense that the camera is following, rather than orchestrating, a real rather than fabricated and choreographed event; going, as it were, with the action” (Krzywinska, 2006: 223–4). However, almost immediately the framing changes as the camera stops moving restlessly and remains still and peripheral in the diegetic space. Still clothed in outdoor coats and scarves but now positioned against a cold concrete wall, Jay presses Claire into the wall urgently trying to locate and remove her knickers. Once inside her, Jay thrusts violently, before Claire is shown to reciprocate via a consensual rhythm. Jay’s brutal urgency, his initial and forceful desire for Claire here, is difficult to decode. Invoking a questioning of Claire’s consensuality, the sex on display is rendered as provocative, bewildering and extreme. Suddenly, however, Claire reciprocates, moving her body with Jay. The camera shifts position again, restlessly and closely roaming the space of their bodies in an abstract way. Following this, the focus once again becomes clearer, spotlighting a foot, before closing in on Claire’s naked knee, then working its way up to her wrists and arms wrapped tightly around Jay’s back. After what we infer to be a mutual climax, Claire pulls away from Jay stating that she is “going”.

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The visual abstraction of this closing chapter can be read as aesthetically akin to Philippe Grandrieux’s new extremist film A New Life (2002). Focusing on fraught intimacy, sex, violence and betrayal, Grandrieux employs a pulsating, visually and aurally abstract aesthetic in order to highlight the disintegration of contemporary social structures. Discussing the film, Palmer notes that “A New Life at times, approach[es] a level of visual abstraction . . . conveying piecemeal narratives of . . . brutality through lyrical flashes of unfocused colors, dense visual textures, handheld camerawork, and barely perceptible figure movements” (Palmer, 2006: 25). While notably not as brutal as A New Life, Intimacy does, in the aforementioned scene, convey a simultaneously claustrophobic and abstract sense of extreme vulnerability. Again then, the notion of pleasure is problematized in this scene of emotional penetration and separation. Indeed, both Jay and Claire, via their confessions of desiring emotional as well as physical intimacy from each other, appear extremely vulnerable in this closing chapter. This brutal closeness as a result of their verbal communication results then in equal yet painful admissions of damage and desire. Such confessions are interesting in the context of their new found emotional intimacy. As “Aunt Sally” writes: “Intimacy is the admission of human frailties on both sides . . . two people who recognise the damage in each other . . . We are attracted to fragilities in other people that we know, often at an unconscious level, we share ourselves” (2007: 39). The sharing of fragilities and vulnerabilities highlights an alternative perspective through which Chéreau can disrupt and undermine habitual real-sex stories, legitimizing his work and differentiating it from pornography. As Downing notes of Intimacy and other new extremist French films: these films are not porn. Nor are they even art about porn. Rather, they are attempts to disrupt, fragment and destroy the naturalised relationship between the voyeur and the desired spectacle in cinema. (Downing, 2004: 279)

Conclusion What is the desired spectacle of the voyeur of Intimacy? Transforming the “real” immediacy of hard-core, Chéreau instead employs a number of aesthetic and stylistic features which invoke his intent to reframe contemporary intimacy in new and extreme ways. The lack of narrative clarity, oscillation between hand-held and static camera work, close-miking of the actors, abstraction of images and the explicit blurring of the real and the performed

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determine that the on-screen spectacle is rendered as complex, curious and anti-climactic. The minimal domestic details also operate to draw our attention to the fringes of the frame in order to make-meaning. As Melanie Williams argues in her review of Winterbottom’s 9 Songs: “an interesting side-effect of this minimalist approach is that it makes the viewer all the more attentive to the details that are glimpsed in the margins” (Williams, 2006: 61). Marginal details are crucial to the multiple perspectives and layers of Intimacy. Indeed, Jay’s debris strewn house, dirty smeared windows, cluttered and chaotic surfaces and decrepit dented furniture all arguably serve to unveil his lack of emotional control and order. While he notes in the speech that opens this chapter his lack of interest and emotional intimacy regarding his “Wednesday man” relationship with Claire, Jay is clearly internally disturbed by her possible closeness to another. His self-control is indeed imaginary and although it is initially believed to be “real”, peripheral details soon show that Jay’s ambivalence is a painful and unsustainable performance, a product of performance rather than reality. Jean-Paul Sartre’s consideration of the process of déréalisation (an entering into the imaginary) seems fitting here. Of the erotic act, he writes: “[man attempts] to identify himself with the woman he is possessing, to steal from her the [obscene] sensations that she appears to experience: This confused and swooning flesh, it is himself” (Howells, 1992: 56).

Bibliography Aunt Sally. 2007. ‘Help Yourself’, Sunday Times Magazine 13 May. Brooks, Libby. 2001. ‘The Joy of Sex’, Guardian Unlimited 23 November, available at www.filmguardian.co.uk/censorship/news/0,11729,660428,00.html – accessed 22 October 2005. Downing, Lisa. 2004. ‘French Cinema’s New “Sexual Revolution”: Postmodern Porn and Troubled Genre’, French Cultural Studies 15(3). Howells, Christina, ed. 1992. The Cambridge Companion to Sartre. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Krzywinska, Tanya. 2006. Sex and the Cinema. London and New York. Wallflower Press. Palmer, Tim. 2006. ‘Style and Sensation in the Contemporary French Cinema of the Body’, Journal of Film and Video 58(3). Prager, Karen. 1998. The Psychology of Intimacy. London. Guilford Press. Williams, Linda. 2001. ‘Cinema and the Sex Act’, Cineaste 27(1). Williams, Melanie. 2006. ‘9 Songs’, Film Quarterly 59(3): 61.

CHAPTER EIGHT FROM FILTH TO FAME: JOHN WATERS AND DIVINE IN THE DREAMLAND DAYS JOSEPH CHRISTOPHER SCHAUB Hairspray (1988), the story of a high school girl’s battle to get a place in a TV dance show in the early 1960s, was the last film collaboration between the eccentric auteur John Waters and his leading lady, Divine. Thanks to the phenomenally successful musical adaptation of Hairspray, and a 2007 film remake, John Waters now enjoys a reputation in popular culture as a “family friendly” director, and Divine is remembered for his performance as the loving, supportive mother of the original movie’s teenage heroine. Waters has made several films since Hairspray, including Cry Baby (1990), which also became a musical, but none has been as successful. Divine died in his sleep shortly after Hairspray’s release, on the eve of landing a regular role in the Fox television series Married . . . with Children (Jay, 1993: 6). In the late 1980s, Hairspray had given Waters and Divine mainstream respectability, something that would have been impossible to imagine in the early 1970s, when Waters released his first sync-sound features from Dreamland Studios. Founded in a bedroom in his parents’ suburban Baltimore home, Dreamland was far from the mainstream and anything but respectable. Nevertheless, Waters and the Dreamlanders, his hippie outcast friends of whom Divine was the most prominent, desired fame, and to achieve it they lived and made movies according to a code that was at once an aesthetic principle, a marketing strategy and an ethical practice. To achieve their dream of fame, Waters and Divine adopted the code of filth. In this chapter, I want to explore the code of filth as it develops in John Waters’ Dreamland films of the 1970s. The films, Multiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974), all promote the aesthetics of filth, not only in their usage of low-budget production techniques and cheap 16mm film stock, but also by featuring stories premised upon grotesque stunts and obscene acts that provided “shock value” for the audience. In A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, Scott

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MacDonald explains that “what Waters came to call ‘shock value’ was a way of overcoming the inevitable difficulties of making feature-length, sync-sound narrative films on picayune budgets” (1982: 223). When Waters founded Dreamland after dropping out of New York University in 1966, his only source of funding was the meagre loans he was able to coax from his reluctant father. So, rather than seduce his audiences with Hollywood glamour, Waters shocked them with Dreamland filth. Specializing in films that shattered taboos, Waters and Divine appealed to the newly emerging “midnight movie” circuit, which attracted an audience of young cinephiles who, by 1970, were disenchanted with mainstream movie offerings and seeking alternative sources of screen entertainment. Some in those midnight movie audiences undoubtedly came just to witness the “vaudevillian string of prize gross-outs” (Hoberman and Rosenbaum, 1991: 152) that these Dreamland films promised and certainly delivered. In my analysis, I hope to reveal the more profound dimensions to the code of filth beyond the initial shock value that lures the curious. As narratives, Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble might almost be considered morality tales in which filth triumphs, even when it is rejected by an uncomprehending and judgemental society. In each of the three films, Divine plays a woman who wants to become famous through committing crimes. Also in each, she is opposed by a heterosexual couple, featuring David Lochary in the male role and either Mary Vivian Pearce or Mink Stole playing the female role. The couple are likewise engaged in filthy acts, but where Divine decides to adhere to her code of filth irrespective of the consequences, the couple invariably falter. In other words, Divine is authentically filthy while the couple exhibit only a bad-faith display of filth. The strong contrast between the authentic filth of Divine and the bad faith of the couple has clear parallels in Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist ethics, while the emphasis on filth draws particular attention to Sartre’s lengthy study of the outlaw poet Jean Genet.1 In Saint Genet, Sartre interprets Genet’s aspiration to become the labels applied to him by French society – thief, homosexual, prostitute, criminal – as an ethical choice. Genet was engaged in a lifelong project to force the mainstream to acknowledge the dignity of its marginal outcasts. The Dreamland films of the 1970s do the same thing. The code of filth that these three Dreamland films evince, is not only an aesthetic principle that purposefully replaces Hollywood production values with shock value, but also an existential ethics that demands dignity for a wide array of social deviants.

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Multiple Maniacs Financed with a budget of only $5000 that Waters borrowed from his father, Multiple Maniacs provides a stark portrait of counter-cultural American youth as amoral petty criminals and drug addicted sex fiends. The film begins with a carnival barker, Mr David (David Lochary) luring young suburbanites toward a tent containing “Lady Divine’s Cavalcade of Perversions”. Soon it becomes clear that the Cavalcade of Perversions is really a screen for Lady Divine’s criminal operation. After luring patrons into her tent, Lady Divine robs and occasionally murders them. Mr David grows weary of Lady Divine’s violence and plans to leave her for Bonnie (Mary Vivian Pearce), but Lady Divine finds out, and with the help of Mink, the religious whore (Mink Stole), she plans to murder them. In a chaotic apartment scene a bloodbath ensues. Divine murders Bonnie, Mink, and Mr David, eating the heart of the latter and, after being raped by a giant lobster, recognizes her divine criminality and runs out to terrorize Baltimore. Finally, she is gunned down in the streets by the National Guard. With many of the elements that would be developed and perfected in Waters’ next two features, Multiple Maniacs serves as a fascinating prototype. All three films draw inspiration from the “Helter Skelter” murders committed by the Charles Manson family in the summer of 1969. Waters had just read about the murder of Sharon Tate and “wanted ‘to scare the world,’ just like the unheard-of Manson Family, but [with] . . . a movie camera instead of deadly weapons” (Waters, 1981: 62). Multiple Maniacs explicitly references the Sharon Tate murders in its narrative line, while Pink Flamingos is dedicated to “Sadie, Katie, and Les” the Manson Girls.2 Female Trouble is dedicated to Charles “Tex” Watson, Manson’s top lieutenant. Part of Waters’ attraction to the Manson family with its communal crime culture was its similarity to the Dreamlanders, except, as Waters notes, “these kids, with backgrounds so similar to mine, committed in real life the awful crimes against peace and love that we were acting out in our films” (Waters, 2010: 48). Filth emanates from every frame of Multiple Maniacs’ mise-en-scène. Its black and white 16mm cinematography gives it, in Waters’ words, a “meanness and harsh documentary look” (McCarty, 1995: 121) that contributes greatly to the filth aesthetic. In addition, Waters fills Multiple Maniacs with the lurid visual spectacle, the “shock value” that became Dreamland’s trademark. The puke eaters, bicycle seat sniffers and armpit lickers of the Cavalcade of Perversions at the film’s beginning serve as a prelude for more transgressive combinations of the sacred and profane

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like the “rosary job”, during which Mink seduces Divine in a Catholic church by inserting a rosary into Divine’s “most private parts” while reciting the stations of the cross. As Divine approaches orgasm the scene is carefully cross-cut with a realistic dramatization of Jesus’ passion and crucifixion. Waters, who was raised Catholic, attributes his theatricality to his religious upbringing, and has stated that the only gratuitous element of the controversial scene is the heroin junky who shoots up at the end of it (Waters, 1981: 65), but clearly the sequence was intended to shock and succeeds. Multiple Maniacs was banned in Waters’ home state until 1981, when Maryland’s censor board was abolished. Multiple Maniacs is also the first of the Dreamland films to make a claim to being authentically filthy directly in the film’s narrative line. Mr David’s opening monologue assures us, “Yes, folks, this isn’t any cheap Xrated movie or any fifth-rate porno play – this is the show you want; ‘Lady Divine’s Cavalcade of Perversions,’ the sleaziest show on earth. Not actors, not paid imposters, but real actual filth who have been carefully screened in order to present to you the most flagrant violations of natural law known to man.” This overt promotion of filth within the film is, of course, part of the marketing strategy that Waters uses, but the claim to represent authentic filth also exposes a contradiction in the way that distinctions are upheld between the mainstream and the margins. Mr David tells us the performers in the Cavalcade “have committed acts against God and nature, acts that by their mere existence would make any decent person recoil in disgust. You want to see them and we’ve got them.” It is this unique form of appeal that draws the passing suburbanites into the tent. They, like the film audience in the theatre, want to see that which “would make any decent person recoil in disgust”. Rather than recoil in disgust, however, we watch intently. We, therefore, if we reflect upon it, are forced to acknowledge that we are not decent people. If we pretend to be, then, like the patrons of the Cavalcade who condemn the performers as “repulsive” and “filthy”, we are living a life of bad faith. Waters is pointing out that there is very little distance between participant and observer when it comes to filth, and that deviants on the margins are not really so far from the mainstream. Multiple Maniacs establishes the notion of authentic filth on two levels. On the first level, it is a promise the filmmaker makes with his audience that what you are seeing is “authentic” filth. Yet we suspect that these characters in the film are not “real actual filth”, as Mr David tells us they are. The puke eater, one of the Cavalcade’s attractions, probably is not actually eating puke, but the armpit lickers are actually licking a woman’s armpits. Waters is playing with the idea of authenticity, because some of the attractions are

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real, and some are not. Is the heroin junky really shooting heroin? Certainly the “two actual queers kissing each other like lovers on the lips,” probably are “actual queers” as Mr David says, but what about the rosary job scene? It was definitely shot in an actual Baltimore church. Obviously, Divine does not kill anybody, and she is not eating Mr David’s heart at the end, but she is clearly eating an actual heart of some kind.3 The numerous filthy stunts in this film function like a series of Rorschach inkblots by which our faith is put to the test. If, as Sartre defines it, bad faith is “not-believing-what-onebelieves” (Sartre, 1956: 115), Multiple Maniacs forces us to confront our bad faith by asking us to believe what we can’t believe. On a deeper level, Dreamland’s approach to authentic filth is similar to the way that Jean Genet approached his life of crime. In Saint Genet, Sartre describes the moment when Genet, still a child, is accused of being a thief. Rather than deny or reject the accusation, Genet embraces it: I will be a Thief. That is my profession of faith, it will be my martyrdom. He needed rules, precepts, advice; he loves the constraint of Good. He will now establish a black ethic, with precepts and rules, pitiless constraints, a Jansenism of Evil. But he will not thereby reject the simple-minded, theological morality of property owners. His system of values will be grafted on this morality and will develop on it like a cancer. (Sartre, 1963: 62)

At least as influential on Waters as the underground movies he watched on his teenage pilgrimages to New York, Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers provides a subterranean road map of the spiritual aspirations of the Dreamland films. Written entirely from prison, Our Lady of the Flowers is Genet’s tale of the cross-dressing heroine Divine, his lover Darling, and a cadre of delinquents of all stripes, including the youthful murderer called Our Lady of the Flowers. Part criminal confession and part onanistic reverie, Our Lady of the Flowers is the book in which, as Sartre notes, Genet discovers “his aesthetic purpose: to shit himself so as to appear as excrement on the table of the just” (Sartre, 1963: 526). Waters not only gave the name Divine to Dreamland’s 300-pound crossdressing star, Harris Glenn Milstead,4 he also wrote parts in which Divine would adopt Genet’s black ethic and behave in all cases according to the highest standards of the code of filth, no matter what the consequences. In Multiple Maniacs Divine’s devotion to the code stands out in stark contrast to Mr David’s failings. His cowardice and inability to pursue filth is the most extreme act of bad faith. He leaves the Cavalcade because he is afraid Divine is out of control, and fears the police. He leaves Divine for what is essentially a more conventional relationship with the young,

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blonde Bonnie.5 When he is called “Mr Fag Man” by another character, he emphatically protests, denying he has “the particular neurosis you so rudely attribute to me”. By contrast, Divine’s rosary job in the church is a lesbian encounter with Mink. Shortly afterward they are accosted by a police officer who calls them “lezbeen hookers”. Later, when Divine introduces David to Mink, he says, “So you finally turned dyke, I’m not surprised.” Clearly, sexual orientation is an important factor in determining authentic filth in Dreamland, but there is also a case to be made for all marginal groups having a better claim to authenticity than the mainstream. Existential ethicist Stuart Zane Charme writes, “If bad faith and inauthenticity are required to support the dominant group’s image of itself, then those who are both excluded from that group and aware of their exclusion may have a greater opportunity to achieve authenticity” (1997: 323). Thus by championing filth and embracing lesbianism Divine gains what Charme describes as “admission to the ranks of the authentically marginal and a way out of the world of the marginally authentic” (1997: 322). By contrast, when Mr David and Bonnie deny their filth and take up the mantle of bad faith, they become like the “inauthentic self that finds security in the fixed rules and values of the world of civility and that refuses to call into question the comforting structures and institutions of society” (Charme, 1997: 323). It is for this reason, more than their infidelity, that Divine kills them. The ending of Multiple Maniacs is surprisingly poignant for a comedy. Following her rape by “Lobstora”, Divine is transformed, saying to herself, “Oh, Divine, you have to go out into the world in your own way now . . . I am a maniac . . . I AM DIVINE!” She runs out into the snow wearing only a bathing suit, high heels and a fur coat. Divine steals one car and smashes the windows out of another while Gustav Holst’s “Mars the Bringer of War” plays on the soundtrack. Finally, after Divine chases pedestrians down the streets of Baltimore’s Fells Point area, a dozen National Guard soldiers appear and attack her while a crowd cheers them. The soldiers beat Divine with their rifles and fire on her until she eventually collapses and dies. The film’s final image shows a defeated drag queen lying dead in the street as soldiers raise their rifles victoriously and Kate Smith’s “God Bless America” plays on the soundtrack. Divine pays the ultimate price for refusing to be marginalized. Her bold embracing of filth inspired Mike Getz to pick up this $5000 film for his Cinema 12 circuit,6 and Dreamland got its first taste of cult recognition. With his next film, Waters would push cult status to its absolute limits.

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Pink Flamingos The plot of Pink Flamingos is rather simple. It concerns a competition between two families to determine “the filthiest people alive”. Divine, going by the alias of Babs Johnson, lives with her mother Edie (Edith Massey), her son Crackers (Danny Mills) and her travelling companion Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce) in a trailer home somewhere north of Baltimore. Her rivals for the title are Raymond (David Lochary) and Connie Marble (Mink Stole). The two families engage in a series of revenge-motivated attacks, which eventually lead the Marbles to burn down Divine’s trailer home. After that, Divine kidnaps the Marbles, tries them, finds them guilty of “assholism”, and executes them in front of several tabloid reporters. The dog faeces-eating scene functions as a kind of coda with Divine proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that she is the filthiest person alive as she, Cotton and Crackers prepare to leave Baltimore for Boise, Idaho. Pink Flamingos allegedly began with a proposition Waters made to Divine. The two had been discussing the possibility of a scene in which Divine would eat dog faeces for years. According to Divine, “Waters finally laid it on the line: ‘I want to be famous. You want to be famous. The time has come to stop fooling around’” (Hoberman and Rosenbaum, 1991: 154). The grand finale, as it were, was thus the first scene to be scripted. In his memoir, Shock Value, Waters states, “I knew I had only $10,000 to work with, so I figured I had to give the audiences something no other studio could dare give them even with multimillion-dollar budgets. Something to leave them gagging in the aisles. Something they could never forget” (1981: 12). As in Multiple Maniacs, the authenticity of filth appears on two levels in Pink Flamingos. This time Waters himself promises his audience authentic filth in voice-over-narration. Affecting a heavy Baltimore accent and calling himself Mr Jay, Waters not only lures his audience toward obscene spectacle, but entices them further by offering the privilege of seeing something forbidden to most. Mr Jay tells us that because of Divine’s newfound fame, she has been forced to go underground and live in a trailer park under an alias. In other words, Pink Flamingos begins by transforming Divine’s forced exile (by execution) at the end of Multiple Maniacs into a free choice. Divine chooses to live on the margins to avoid the probing curiosity of the mainstream, represented by “sleazy national tabloids” like The Midnight. Divine’s transformation between the two films reveals Dreamland’s affinity with the major goal in Jean Genet’s work, which is to demonstrate “the crushing of man (sic) by the course of the world, but with a final reversal: the failure becoming a token of victory” (Sartre, 1963: 432).

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The crushing of Divine in Multiple Maniacs sets the stage for her victory in Pink Flamingos. In terms of shock value filth, Pink Flamingos, even after nearly four decades, still delivers. A review in the Detroit Free Press called it “a septic tank explosion” (Waters, 1981: 21). Along with the profane sex, cannibalism and murder that appear in Multiple Maniacs, Waters adds incest, bestiality, castration, dismemberment, indecent exposure, transsexual exhibitionism, a singing sphincter, and, in the film’s memorable ending scene, coprophagia. When New Line Cinema’s founder, Robert Shaye, saw the scene in which a good-looking girl being harassed by Raymond pulls up her skirt to reveal her penis, Shaye knew that he “had something that was appropriate for [his] fledgling distribution company” (Divine Trash, 1998). The real coup in terms of authentic filth, however, is the scene at the very end where Divine eats dog faeces. Waters clearly understood the importance of “authenticity” in devising the infamous publicity stunt that made him, Divine and Pink Flamingos infamous. He writes: It couldn’t be fake. It had to be one continuous shot, turd to mouth, so to speak. No cutaway reaction to give me a chance to replace the real shit with some special effects ripoff. No sirree, you’d see the dog shit, she’d pick it up and eat it right before your very eyes. My audience demanded as much. I realized filmgoers would have trouble believing it even without a cut. No actor could be that dedicated to cinema “art” to eat dogshit, dressed in drag, solely for the audience’s amusement and entertainment. But no one realized what a trouper Divine really was. (Waters, 1981: 13)

The authenticity of shock value filth like Divine’s ingestion of dog faeces establishes her credibility for her authenticity within the narrative. As in Multiple Maniacs, Divine is again opposed to a heterosexual couple who, it turns out, are not authentically filthy. Pink Flamingos foregrounds this opposition by placing Divine in direct competition with the Marbles, who want to challenge her claim to being the filthiest person alive. Where the Marbles have a traditional heterosexual marriage, Divine’s sexuality is ambiguous. Cotton is her traveling companion, and there is the suggestion that they had been lesbian lovers, but Divine also goes into town with Crackers “looking for action”. Divine’s sexuality is not definable by terms like gay or straight.7 It is authentically her own, whereas everything about the Marbles is tainted with bad faith, because they hide their filthiness behind middle class respectability. The Marbles are not only a straight, married couple, but there are obvious class distinctions between them and Divine, which further emphasizes their mainstream status. The Marbles

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live in an opulent home with servants while Divine and her family live in a trailer. The Marbles are successful at business, running a kidnapping and baby selling operation with investments in schoolyard drug rings, while Divine and her family appear to be raising chickens. The Marbles think they are filthy because they break laws and exploit others, yet they resort to calling the police on Divine after viewing the outrageous spectacle of her birthday party, which features, among other acts, a man singing the Trashmen song, “Surfin’ Bird” through his anus. Ultimately, the Marbles want the title of the filthiest people alive because they are jealous of Divine. The Marbles hate and envy her because of her tabloid notoriety. When Connie reads the story in The Midnight she becomes infuriated, saying, “We’ll see who’s the filthiest person alive”, as she tears up the paper, but Waters reveals that authentic filth is antithetical to middle class comfort and concern for social standing. In spite of their enjoyment of the trappings of filth, there is ultimately a limit to how far the Marbles are willing to go. Divine, by contrast, is truly devoted to the code of filth, fully prepared to stop at nothing to maintain her title. After the Marbles burn down Divine’s mobile home, she and Crackers kidnap them and call photographers and reporters to document their trial and execution. In her interview with the tabloids, a reporter asks Divine about her political beliefs. She states, “Kill everyone now! Condone first-degree murder! Advocate cannibalism! Eat shit! Filth is my politics. Filth is my life!” While Divine’s reply stresses a radical devotion to filth that is continuous with her character in Multiple Maniacs, the image we see reveals a new dimension to the code. Immediately following her exhortation, Divine poses for photographs in her red fishtail dress. Her hair is shaved back to the middle of her head to make room for her eye make-up, which is so extreme it appears clown-like. Much of this new look can be attributed to Van Smith, who joined Dreamland during the making of Pink Flamingos, but there is also a sense that the code of filth is developing in these films. Where filth was an aesthetic necessity in Multiple Maniacs, it becomes a powerful fashion choice in Pink Flamingos. Divine refuses to be marginalized in Multiple Maniacs but is gunned down for it. In Pink Flamingos, Divine is making an example of the Marbles. She tells the press, “Let the good people of this country know that they cannot fuck with Divine and get away with it. Let them know that we are indeed, the filthiest people alive.” After Divine shoots Connie and Raymond, Pink Flamingos moves towards its unforgettable ending. Although the dog faeces scene that ends Pink Flamingos is frequently dismissed as a mere publicity stunt, it has narrative motivations that comment directly on Divine’s evolving interpretation of the code of filth.

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Just before Divine’s birthday party, the Marbles send her a gift-wrapped bowel movement as a present. Rather than being appreciative Divine is horrified. It isn’t the contents of the box that bother her, since she receives other filthy presents, a gift-wrapped pig’s head, delousing shampoo, and vomit stuck to paper, with jubilation; it is the hateful gesture behind it that horrifies Divine. She understands the intention behind the stunt because the Marbles have indicated that the present comes from “the filthiest people alive”. After opening the box Divine screams, “This is a direct attack on my Divinity . . . an outrageous attempt to humiliate and disgrace my private life. Someone will pay for this. Someone will pay with their life for this grossly offensive act.” Divine’s violent reaction to the bowel movement makes her ingestion of dog faeces at the end that much more stunning. It is not that Divine enjoys eating excrement, nor does she appreciate receiving it as a gift if it is not given in the proper spirit. Rather, Divine’s devotion to the code of filth inspires her gesture at the end, and turns the act of eating excrement into a beautiful act. The Marbles, in sending Divine a bowel movement, have misrepresented filth as merely the carrying out of a crass gesture. Divine, by eating excrement at the end, reestablishes filth as a code that ultimately aspires to transform beauty. As Sartre points out, “This beauty is not easy: it requires constant tension, a sustained effort to make the two terms which repel each other – trash and jewel – hold together” (1963: 421). Divine is the filthiest person alive because she is able to make the trash into jewel. What Sartre says of Genet is just as applicable to her: “If we are to admire the artist who is able to work with the most sumptuous matters, how much more admirable is the one who uses only waste matter” (1963: 421). Interestingly, Pink Flamingos is the only film of the three in which Divine lives at the end, and thereby retains her title of the filthiest person alive. It serves as an important linchpin in the Dreamland trilogy. In Multiple Maniacs, Divine takes filth out of the margins and into the mainstream, but the mainstream is not ready for her, and she is killed for her transgression. In Pink Flamingos, Divine is brought back, and she is now marginally famous. Filth is fashionable. The real world success of the film somewhat reflected this narrative progression. Beginning with a 48-week run at the Elgin, Pink Flamingos played for two straight years as a midnight movie in New York, and was revived for shorter runs throughout the decade, eventually becoming “one of the most profitable movies ever released, grossing better than 100: 1 on its initial investment” (Hoberman and Rosenbaum, 1991: 148). In his next Dreamland film, Waters has Divine take the code of filth to its logical

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extreme. By equating crime with beauty in Female Trouble, Waters explores what Sartre calls the “Black Aesthetic” of Jean Genet (1963: 385).

Female Trouble Made with the $27,000 in profits Waters received from Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble tells the story of career criminal, Dawn Davenport (Divine). We meet Dawn as a high school student in 1960, shortly before she runs away from home because her parents didn’t give her cha-cha heels for Christmas. On the road she is seduced and impregnated by Earl Peterson (Divine), eventually giving birth to a daughter, Taffy (Mink Stole). At the Lipstick beauty salon, she meets Donald Dasher (David Lochary) and his wife Donna (Mary Vivian Pearce). She marries Gator (Michael Potter) one of their employees, but eventually divorces him and becomes the model for the Dashers crime/beauty experiments and photo shoots until Gator’s Aunt Ida (Edith Massey) throws acid in her face because Dawn drove her nephew away. In spite of her disfigurement, the Dashers convince her that she’s more beautiful than ever, and Dawn stages a nightclub act at which she starts shooting into the audience. She is eventually tried for murder and executed in the electric chair. According to Waters scholar Jack Stevenson, Female Trouble is “the film that many Waters freaks still consider his best” (1996:14). It was Divine’s personal favorite, and Waters’ favorite of the Divine vehicles.8 Divine gives what may be the best performance of her career, and Waters’ script is also inspired. It takes Dawn Davenport from one misfortune to the next, leading inexorably to her execution, and yet, as Dawn gives her final speech in the electric chair, there is a poignancy that greatly exceeds the usual gross out comedy fare. Female Trouble is the Dreamland film in which the influence of Jean Genet is most visible. Waters’ goal is in many ways similar to Genet’s for his heroine, Divine. Genet writes, “I want to strip her of every vestige of happiness so as to make a saint of her . . . A morality is being born, which is certainly not the usual morality (it is consonant with Divine), though it is a morality all the same, with its Good and Evil” (1963: 109). In Female Trouble, Waters, like the Genet of Dreamland, strips his heroine of every vestige of happiness, but not to make her a saint. Waters wants to make of his heroine a famous artist. Unlike Multiple Maniacs and Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble does not claim any sort of authentic reality for its filthy representations. There is no narrator telling us that what we are seeing is real, authentic filth. Where

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Divine played Lady Divine in Multiple Maniacs and used an alias in Pink Flamingos, she plays an actual character in Female Trouble, as do all the Dreamland players. In the aesthetic representation of filth, Waters moves away from the shock value attained from the belief that what we are seeing is real, an authentic act, such as Divine’s ingestion of dog faeces in Pink Flamingos, towards a filth that acquires its authenticity from the fact that it is fake. Sartre describes this same tendency in Genet when he describes his preference for “the glass diamond and the synthetic pearl . . . He will make use of it to legitimize his perversion. If a cabochon is allowed to become a fake diamond, why is not Divine allowed to become a fake woman?” (1963: 393). After the success of Pink Flamingos, Waters turns the tables. He demands of his audience the same commitment that he demanded of Divine. If filth is to progress beyond the mere filming of vulgar acts,9 then the audience must accept filth authentically as artifice, and then as art. Sartre says of Genet, “It may be that his poetry is the art of making us eat shit” (1963: 429). The same can be said of Waters’ in Female Trouble. In making this shift from authentically real to authentically fake filth in Female Trouble there is no shortage of Dreamland’s trademark shock value. Divine plays both parts (Dawn Davenport and Earl Peterson) in a riotous outdoor sex scene on a junkyard mattress. Filth reaches new heights (or depths) following a shot of Peterson’s oversized, soiled underpants. Dawn gives birth to a baby on a flop-house couch, then chews through, and spits out, the umbilical cord afterward. She chops off Aunt Ida’s hand with an axe. Whereas Divine plays unconventional, but affectionate, mothers in Multiple Maniacs and Pink Flamingos, in Female Trouble she is comically abusive. After locking Taffy up in handcuffs and leg irons in her dark attic room, Dawn tells her friends Chicklet (Susan Walsh) and Concetta (Cookie Mueller): “I’ve done everything a mother can do! I’ve locked her in her room, I’ve beaten her with a car aerial, nothing changes her. It’s hard being a loving mother.” She tells Taffy that she is retarded. She breaks a chair over her back. Ultimately, Dawn strangles Taffy to death after Taffy joins the Hare Krishnas. If Dawn’s treatment of Taffy were real, the filmmakers’ crimes would hardly be funny, but precisely because it is so obviously fake, audiences must be held responsible if they laugh (and they do). Like Multiple Maniacs and Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble also features a heterosexual couple to contrast with Divine’s character in order to differentiate authentic devotion to the code of filth from the bad faith of the mainstream. The Dashers are similar to the Marbles in that they are eccentrically sophisticated, comfortably affluent, married business owners. Dawn’s involvement with them begins immediately following

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her separation from Gator. Her only sexual relationship following her separation from Gator occurs with her female prison cellmate Ernestine (Elizabeth Coffey). As in previous Dreamland films, Dawn’s bisexuality is more authentically filthy, because of its marginal status, than the Dasher’s heterosexuality. The Dashers actually are not sexually active at all. They insist that no one mention the sex act in front of them, and Donna tells Dawn, “We view sex as a violation of the spirit, and we would certainly never allow ourselves to be caught in one of those ludicrous positions.” They serve as proof of Sartre’s belief that the “denial of nature could produce the kind of hypocritical civility that he associated with bourgeois bad faith” (Charme, 1997: 322). The Dashers take bad faith to new levels, correspondingly elevating Dawn’s authenticity. They want to take pictures of Dawn committing crimes to test their theory that crime enhances beauty, and, as Donald tells Dawn, “the worse the crime gets, the more ravishing one becomes”. They make her promises of glamour and fame, while assuring she will not be arrested. Yet, when Dawn follows their credo to its extreme, committing mass murder by firing her pistol into a crowd during her nightclub act, the Dashers immediately betray Dawn when threatened with arrest. In spite of their betrayal, Dawn never wavers. The Dashers’ extreme bad faith manifests Dawn’s authenticity. Female Trouble provides Waters with a canvas on which to fully develop the connection between the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of the code of filth. Sartre saw the same effort in Genet’s work. He writes, “If Genet feels in his heart that Beauty concerns him, the reason is that, like evil, it demands of him the most difficult conduct. It requires that he live according to its law, the law that Wilde, prince of aesthetes, calls style and Genet elegance” (Sartre, 1963: 410). For Waters, the law of beauty is the equivalent to the code of filth, and it is far from any conventional definition. We see Waters conflating beauty and filth during the unveiling of Dawn’s face after she has been disfigured with acid and is recuperating in a hospital. With the Dashers and her friends gathered around, the bandages are unravelled and Dawn’s acid-scarred face is revealed. Donald shouts, “Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous!” Donna tells Dawn, “It makes the Mona Lisa look like a number painting.” At no point does anyone betray any feeling but admiration for Dawn. The scene is perhaps the clearest expression of Waters’ own views on beauty. Waters has said, “To me, beauty is when I’m walking down the street and I see somebody and I think, ‘Oh my god, look at that person!’ That’s beauty to me, because I notice it. I certainly don’t want to make movies that star people who look like everyday people” (MacDonald, 1982:

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236). For Waters, filth is beautiful precisely because of its marginal status. In bringing it to the mainstream he first inoculates it as art. Nowhere is the complex ethics of Female Trouble more manifest than in Dawn’s nightclub act. Dawn begins by doing trampoline stunts. She then tears a phone book in half, jumps into a kettle of fish and rubs them all over her body. The audience is wildly appreciative, but then Dawn grabs a gun and addresses the audience: Thank you! I love you. Thank you from the bottom of my black, little heart! You came here for some excitement tonight, and that’s just what you’re going to get! Take a good look at me because I’m going to be on the front page of every newspaper in the country tomorrow! You’re looking at crime personified, and don’t you forget it! . . . Now everybody freeze! Who wants to be famous? Who wants to die for art?”

A man in the audience says, “I do,” and Dawn shoots him, then begins firing randomly into the crowd. Dawn is prepared to die and become famous for art, so she asks the same from her audience. By including a scene like this Waters again reminds us that that fame and recognition are at the heart of the filthy act. In carrying out filthy acts the marginalized is recognized by the mainstream. Sartre explains this same motivation in the crimes of Genet, “What tempts him in crime is not blood, and even less the suffering and cries of the victim or the soft sound of the knife entering the flesh, but rather the glory it procures” (Sartre, 1963: 522). As in Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble tests the code of filth with a trial. Thanks to Dreamland’s make-up guru, Van Smith, Divine’s look becomes more and more extreme, and by the time of her trial, dressed in her prison clothes, chains, her Mohawk hair, scars on her face and radical mascara, Divine appears to be a fashion bridge between the psychedelic ’60s and the punk ’70s. At the trial, the Dashers serve as witnesses to the prosecution. They have been granted total immunity. They lie to protect themselves. They cry on the witness stand, and they pay Aunt Ida to incriminate Dawn. They have completely abandoned their ideals. By contrast, Dawn is unrepentant at her trial. She is a willing convert to the Dasher’s credo, and never falters even to the point of her execution. When asked if she strangled her daughter, she answers, “Yes, I did, and I’m proud of it!” When asked about her nightclub act she says, “Even the people that died loved it. How could they not love dying if they’re going to become famous for it?” In describing the reversal that Genet enacts upon his accusers in Our Lady of the Flowers, Sartre sheds light on the transformation that Dawn undergoes during her trial in Female Trouble. Sartre writes:

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In boasting of the most heinous crimes, Genet confirmed the Others in their opinion. Everything changes if the culprit appeals to Beauty as his authority: one value is being set up against another; the Good man is disconcerted, for he pushes hatred of Evil to the point of wanting the evil-doer to hate himself and to recognize his error with loathing; nothing mystifies him more completely than happiness in crime. In demanding to be judged according to the norms of the Beautiful, the culprit escapes and flits off into a fourth dimension. (1963: 405)

This is precisely what Dawn does. She transforms her trial into a publicity event. She calls her lawyer her “press agent”, and rebukes him for not booking the event “in a large, large theater where I belong”. Dawn’s lawyer tries to argue that she is insane, but she is not. She accepts her condemnation as a high honor, because it is also the source of her fame. She tells the jury, “Look at me! I’m the most famous person you’ve ever seen.” Female Trouble reveals a progression in the three Dreamland films in which filth is negotiated between the margins and the mainstream. In Multiple Maniacs, Divine takes filth from the margins (her sideshow act) into the mainstream (the streets of Baltimore), but she is rejected. In Pink Flamingos a crass mainstream couple (the Marbles) takes filth from the margins (Divine’s mobile home) and tries to co-opt it for their own ends, but Divine takes it back. In Female Trouble, Divine (as Dawn) both accepts and rejects recognition from the mainstream. She accepts the fame she receives for her filthy act, but rejects the mainstream defining her as a criminal. She calls herself an artist, instead. The mainstream both accepts and rejects her, making her a famous celebrity, but condemning her to execution for her crimes. Again, Genet is the model: When he was an underdog, he dreamed of a Day of Glory when they would be forced to accept him while continuing to reject him. This contradiction reflected his own conflict: society had to welcome him as he was, that is, as an evildoer. But is not the evildoer the man whom all society rejects? It therefore had to glorify him precisely to the extent that it condemned him. (Sartre, 1963: 613)

In simultaneously accepting and rejecting Dawn “as she was”, the jury brings about her Day of Glory. Following Dawn’s conviction, the last minutes of Female Trouble occur in prison as Dawn, head shaved, in prison garb, without make-up says goodbye to her friends and lovers before being taken to the electric chair. Dawn is happy and unafraid. The death penalty, she explains to her

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girlfriend Ernestine,10 “Is the biggest award I could get in my field.” She dies making an acceptance speech, thanking “all the wonderful people that made this great moment . . . come true”. A freeze frame of Dawn’s face, contorted with electricity, ends the film as final credits roll.

Conclusion Female Trouble was Waters’ last film for Dreamland Studios. Although he made one more film in the 1970s, Desperate Living (1977), it was financed through a partnership called Charm City Productions. While Desperate Living is in some respects Waters’ filthiest film, in that the set of its mythical village, Mortville, is constructed entirely of trash, the filth seems more forced than fun. Shocks begin to lose their value when an audience expects them. Desperate Living also lacks the dynamic that the opposition of Divine and David Lochary brought to Waters’ previous films. Divine was under contract to perform the stage show, “Women Behind Bars” around the country, and David Lochary had died of a drug overdose in 1976. Perhaps most importantly, the code of filth that Waters had developed in the Dreamland trilogy had been fully explored and could not be taken any further in Desperate Living. Curiously, the title of the film reflects his situation. Waters had already realized his dream of becoming famous and, unwilling to die for the cause, like Dawn in Female Trouble, he was faced with the prospect of living desperately. By the 1980s Waters had largely abandoned filth as a code of filmmaking, turning instead to absurd melodrama in Polyester (1981) and quirky nostalgia in later films like Hairspray and Cry Baby. Although Waters has moved on, and Dreamland has disappeared, there remains an enduring current of filth in the landscape of popular culture. The financial success of the Dreamland trilogy revealed a market in the mainstream for shock value gross out comedies that continues to produce not just cult classics, but mainstream blockbusters. By and large these gross out comedies have adopted, and indeed, advanced, the aesthetics of filth, but few have really understood or adhered to the code. Examining the Dreamland trilogy through the lens of Sartre’s existential ethics reveals the clear distinctions that Waters makes between authentic filth and a filth based on bad faith. If the filth in these recent gross out comedies cannot pass the authenticity test, it may not be the fault of the filmmakers. Few of them have been able to work with an actor of Divine’s stature. Divine, namesake of the drag queen heroine of Jean Genet’s infamous prison memoir, was the champion of authenticity in Waters’ films, and Waters was never able to

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make a truly filthy film without Divine.11 Divine was as important to Waters’ success as he was to hers, and filth was the key to the success of both. Still, Waters has not completely abandoned filth. In the last chapter of his most recent book, Role Models, he makes a passionate plea for a return to filth, that moves beyond the aesthetic and the ethical dimensions into the religious and spiritual: Pope Benedict XVI may have denounced “filth,” but we know better. Filth is just the beginning battle in the war on taste. The certain megalomania we all share will strengthen our delusions of grandeur and make it possible for us to go that extra step into what I will call “radical holiness.” Fellow faith followers, isolated we are just ex-Catholics or slacker Jews fighting over the limits of shame and guilt. Or worse yet, Protestants turned alcoholic atheists or pussy agnostics who chicken out on the big questions daily. Together we can become saints of sordidness, “the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised,” as Jesse Jackson once so beautifully called his followers. Perverts who are fanatical in their devotion to a new dogma of dirt. Yes, a filth movement for the next century, which will claw its way down the ladder of respectability to the final Armageddon of the elimination of the tyranny of good taste. (Waters, 2010: 274)

Clearly, Waters still has filth on his mind. In his writings and interviews, he now refers to himself as a “filth elder”, at once acknowledging his ties to, and distancing himself from, the current crop of gross-out comedy filmmakers.

Notes 1

2

3

Sartre’s key terms “authenticity” and “bad faith”, which appear throughout his work, have been widely appropriated and commented upon by others in the study of existential ethics. Sartre gives a detailed analysis of bad faith in Being and Nothingness, which was originally published in 1943, and of authenticity in his War Diaries, which, although written in 1939–40, were not published until 1983. My chapter draws primarily from Sartre’s analysis of Jean Genet in Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, which first appeared in 1952. Sadie, Katie and Les are Susan Atkins (aka Sadie Mae Glutz), Patricia Krenwinkle and Leslie Van Houten (aka Lulu). In his most recent book, Role Models, Waters has expressed remorse about exploiting the crimes to promote his films. He writes, “I am guilty too, guilty of using the Manson murders in a jokey, smart-ass way in my earlier films without the slightest regard for the victims’ families or the lives of the brainwashed Manson killer kids who were also victims in this sad and terrible case” (2010: 45). Actually, in Shock Value, Waters tells us that Divine was eating a cow’s heart

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that, because it had been out on the set all day, had gone slightly rotten (1981: 64). 4 Waters gives a somewhat contradictory account of the origins of Divine’s name. In Divine Trash (1998), Steve Yeager’s documentary about the early days of Dreamland Studios, Waters states, “They say, everyone, that Divine was named from the Jean Genet book, but I remember it being named Divine because it was a Catholic word they always used in high school. This is Divine, and this is Divine. And that’s where it came from for me. I didn’t remember the thing in Our Lady of the Flowers. Although, that must be impossible, because I did read that book around that time.” 5 Although Mr David’s relationship with Bonnie is more conventional than his relationship with Divine, it is hardly conventional. When he introduces Bonnie to Divine Mr David describes her as “an autoerotic, a coprophasiac, and a gerontophiliac”. 6 In the late 1960s Mike Getz started packaging underground films so that they could tour cities outside of New York. On his Cinema 12 circuit, “Multiple Maniacs toured sixteen cities, including San Diego, Cleveland, and London, England. But despite, or perhaps because of, the film’s antihippie gibes, the city in which it enjoyed the greatest success was San Francisco, its [midnight] run coinciding almost exactly with the El Topo phenomenon [i.e. throughout 1971] in New York” (Hoberman and Rosenbaum, 1991: 147). 7 Since Divine is performing in drag throughout these films, the notion of gay or straight is even more complicated. Can Divine be considered straight if he is a male actor having a relationship with another male actor, or gay if he is having a relationship with a female actor? Ambiguity is clearly the point. 8 Waters states this in the introduction to the published screenplay (2005: xi), and Bernard Jay writes about Female Trouble being Divine’s “personal favorite” (1993: 35). 9 The popularity of the MTV Jackass television shows and the Paramount movies based on Jackass would suggest that filth has not progressed, but has rather congealed into a series of authentically staged dangerous and vulgar stunts. 10 Perhaps not coincidentally, Ernestine is the only person present when Genet’s Divine dies in Our Lady of the Flowers, only in Genet’s book, Ernestine is Divine’s mother. Genet’s description of Divine’s death certainly reminds one of Waters. He writes, “A vast physical peace relaxed Divine. Filth, an almost liquid shit, spread out beneath her like a warm little lake, into which she gently, very gently – as the vessel of a hopeless emperor sinks, still warm, into the waters of Lake Nemi – was engulfed, and with this relief she heaved another sigh, which rose to her mouth with blood, then another sigh, the last” (1963: 315). “A Dirty Shame is monotonous, repetitive and sometimes wildly wrong in what it hopes is funny” (Ebert, 2004).

References Charme, S. Z. 1997. ‘Sartre’s Images of the Other and the Search for Authenticity’ in W. L. McBride, ed. Existential Ethics. New York. Garland Publishing.

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Ebert, R. 2004. “A Dirty Shame,” Chicago Sun Times 24 September, available at http: //rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040924/REVIEWS/ 40913001/1023 – accessed 29 November 2012. Genet, J. 1963. Our Lady of the Flowers Trans. B. Frechtman. New York. Grove Press. Hoberman, J., and Rosenbaum, J. 1991. Midnight Movies. New York. Da Capo Press. Jay, B. 1993. Not Simply Divine: Beneath the Makeup, Above the Heels, and Behind the Scenes With a Cult Superstar. New York. Fireside. McCarty, J. 1995. The Sleaze Merchants: Adventures in Exploitation Filmmaking. New York. St Martin’s Press. MacDonald, S. 1982. A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers. Berkeley. University of California Press. Sartre, J.-P. 1956. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Trans. H. E. Barnes. New York. Washington Square Press. Sartre, J.-P. 1963. Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr. Trans. B. Frechtman. New York. Mentor Books. Stevenson, J. 1996. Desperate Visions: The Films of John Waters and the Kuchar Brothers. London. Creation Books. Waters, J. 1981. Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste. New York. Dell. Waters, J. 2005. Hairspray, Female Trouble, and Multiple Maniacs: Three More Screenplays by John Waters. New York. Thunder’s Mouth Press. Waters, J. 2010. Role Models. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

CONTRIBUTORS Felicity Hand is senior lecturer in the English Department of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. She teaches history and culture of the British Isles and post-colonial literatures. Her research interests include the literatures and cultures of the south west Indian Ocean, the South Asian diaspora and Bollywood cinema. Her recent publications include Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific Beth Johnson joined the University of Keele as a lecturer in Film, Visual Theory and English in 2009. Her research interests and teaching specialisms include aesthetics, ocularcentrism, screening sexualities, realism, psychoanalysis, the ‘cult’ and the avant garde in European cinema. She has recently published two books, Paul Abbott the Television Series (Manchester University Press, 2012) and (with Basil Glynn and James Aston, eds) Television, Sex and Society: Analysing Contemporary Representations (Continuum, 2012). John Keefe is a lecturer in theatre-performance-film, a theatre director and performance dramaturge. Publications include the two-volume project Physical Theatres: A Critical Introduction, and Physical Theatres: A Critical Reader (Routledge, 2007), with Simon Murray ‘A spectatorial dramaturgy, or the spectator enters the ethical frame’ (Performing Ethos, 2010), and ‘Play(ing) it again: recycling as theatres, histories, memories’ (Art History and Criticism, 2010). Peter Krämer is senior lecturer in the Department of Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia. His teaching and research deal with American film history from its beginnings to the present and with the global dimensions of Hollywood cinema, especially its relationship with Germany. He has published very widely across areas as diverse as Buster Keaton, Audrey Hepburn and the New Hollywood. His most recent publications include 2001: A Space Odyssey (BFI, 2010) and A Clockwork Orange (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

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Jacqui Miller is a Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication at Liverpool Hope University. Her principle teaching and research interests are the representations of history and society on film. Recent publications include ‘The French New Wave and the New Hollywood: Le Samourai and its American Legacy’, Film and Media Studies (2010), ‘An American in Europe: US Colonialism in The Talented Mr Ripley and Ripley’s Game’, Journal of European Popular Culture (2011) and ‘“What’s Wrong With a Cowboy in Hamburg?”: New German Cinema and the German-American Cultural Frontier’ in Raita Merivirta and Kimmo Ahonen (eds.), Frontiers of Screen History: Imagining European Borders in Cinema, 1945–2010 (London: Intellect, 2012). Brian Neve is senior lecturer in Politics at the University of Bath. His research interests focus on film, with particular reference to political film and the relationship between film/cinema, history and politics, especially in America, Britain and Europe. His books include Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition (Routledge, 1992) and Elia Kazin: The Cinema of an American Outsider (I. B. Taurus, 2009). Joseph Christopher Schaub is a faculty member of the department of Communication at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland. His interests include cultural theory, digital media, film studies, Japanese cinema and media studies. His papers include Presenting the Cyborg’s Futurist Past: An Analysis of Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera, Kusunagi’s Body: Gender and Technology in Mecha-Anime and The Wire: Big Brother is Not Watching You In Body-More, Murdaland. Roshan Singh is an independent scholar and screenwriter who has been Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Liverpool Hope University. His teaching and research interests include screenwriting, British Asian cinema and the gangster genre. He has given papers at a range of conferences, including Theorising the Popular (Liverpool Hope University, 2010 & 2011) and Selling Cultures (Liverpool John Moores, 2010).

INDEX agency (ethical) 83–105 agon 100 Albrecht, Chris 108 American America 78–9 anti-heroes 125 audience surveys 23–4 authenticity 163n1 bad faith 151, 163n1 Bakhtin, Mikhail 92–3 Bandura, Albert 102 Bataille, Georges 91 Baudry, Jean-Louis 87–8, 97 Beaches of Agnès 96 beauty, and filth 156, 158, 159–61 best film awards 17 black detectives 112–13 Boal, Augusto 84, 93 Bollywood 50–65 Boltanski, Luc 82, 102 Bonnie and Clyde 15, 19 Boomerang! 77 box office success 13, 16 Clockwork Orange, A 13, 16, 25 Exorcist, The 14 Pink Flamingos 156 Breen, Joseph I. 6, 34–5 Breillat, Catherine 143 Brewster, Ralph O. 36 brutal intimacy 142 Busch, Kate Moog 42 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 15 Canby, Vincent 21 Casty, Alan 73 censorship in India 50 self-imposed 51 in the USA 6–7 Chandler, Raymond 110 characters, as moral representatives 110

Charme, Stuart Zane 152 Chéreau, Patrice 5 Chico, Tito 112 Chinatown 116 Chopra, Vidhu Vinod 51 Cleo from 5 to 7 96 Clockers 114 Clockwork Orange, A 11–25 audience survey 23–4 box office success 13, 16, 25 critical reception 12 ratings certificates 6 violence 9–10 Collins, Richard 73 colour 94–5 communalism 55 communism 67–80 Confessions of a Nazi Spy 29–47 realism 8 crime films 10, 15–16, 106–33 Dassin, Jules 75 Deakin, Irving 38, 40–1 death, and the erotic 82–3 décalage 103 Deep Throat 14 Deliverance 14 déréalisation 146 Desmond, Norma 89 Desperate Living 162 detectives as heroes 110–13 Devil in Miss Jones, The 14 Dick, Bernard F. 42 Dil Se 51, 52–5 Dirty Dozen, The 15 Divine (Harris Glenn Milstead) 147–64 Dmytryk, Edward 79n1 Dog Day Afternoon 15 dream screen 88 Dreamland Studios 7–8, 147–64 Dugan, James 45

Index Dyer, Richard 112 East of Eden 77–8 Easy Rider 15 Ebenstein, Morris 43 eftermaele 100 empathy 100 Endfield, Cy 70–2, 74–5 erotic, and death 82–3 Exorcist, The, box office success 14 Face in the Crowd, A 78 Fanaa 51, 54–6 Female Trouble 148, 149, 157–62 feminism 86, 89–90 film theory 84–5 filth 147–64 Foreman, Carl 74 Fox, Kerry 140–1 framing 96–7 Fuller, Sam 74 Gallagher, Shaun 101 gangsters, moral code 120, 125 Garfield, John 37 gender 89–90 gender roles 52 Genet, Jean 148, 153, 157, 159–61 genres 50, 58, 107, 108 Getaway, The 15 Giroux, Henry 113–14 Godard, Jean-Luc 94, 95 Godfather, The 15 Gopalan, Lalitha 58 Grandrieux, Philippe 145 Gysell, George 6 Gyssling, George 34–5 Hairspray 147 Hays Office 6, 34 HBO 5–6, 106–8 Hechinger, Fred M. 22 Herron, Frederick 34 heteroglossia 92–3 High Noon 74 Hill Street Blues 109 Hinduism, women in 52, 56 Hollywood blacklist 67–80

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Hollywood Democratic Committee 37 Home Box Office (HBO) 5–6, 106–8 Hook, Sidney 76 Hooks, Bell 112, 115 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) 4–5, 67–80 and informers 7 Hunter, Kim 79n1 Indian cinema 50–65 informers, and House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) 7 Intimacy 9, 136–46 Iraq war 120 Jarrico, Paul 70 Jenkins, Henry 93–4 Jetée, La 97 Jones, Bronwyn 111 Kashmir 55–60 Kazan, Elia 67, 69, 72, 75–9 knowing camera 97–8 knowingness 101 Kohli, Kunal 51 Kraniauskas, John 111–12 Krims, Milton 34–5, 36, 39 Kubie, Lawrence 90 Kubrick, Stanley 5, 17 see also Clockwork Orange Lady from Shanghai, The 99 Last Tango in Paris 14 Last Temptation of Christ, The 1 Lederer, Francis 37–8 Leitch, Thomas 109 Lethal Weapon 113 Levinas, Emmanuel 91–2 Lewin, Bertram D. 88 Lissauer, Herman 38, 40–1 Litvak, Anatole 36 Longest Yard, The 15 Lord, Robert 36, 44 Luraschi, Luigi 34 McBride, Joseph 77 McCarthy, Joseph 68 MacDonald, Scott 147–8

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Macintyre, Alasdair 110 Maltz, Albert 68, 74 Manson family 149 Marx, Groucho 37 Meshes of the Afternoon 97 Meyer, Louis B. 28 MGM 28, 46 Miami Vice 113 middle cinema 51, 64n2 Midnight Cowboy 14, 15 Miller, Arthur 69, 73 Milstead, Harris Glenn (Divine) 147–64 Mission Kashmir 51, 56–60 moral ambiguity 106–33 moral code of filth 147–64 of gangsters 120, 125 moral disengagement 102 Mr & Mrs Iyer 51, 60–3 Multiple Maniacs 148, 149–52 realism 8 Mulvey, Laura 86–9, 97 Muni, Paul 37 musicals 96 Muslims, in Indian films 52, 55–6, 59, 60–3 Navasky, Victor 67, 68–9 Nazism 4 neurologism 101 New Life, A 145 9 Songs 146 nudity 139–40 Nugent, Frank 45 On the Waterfront 75–7 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 15 Pal Joey 96 Palmer, Time 142 Panic in the Streets 77 Paper Moon 15 Papillon 15 Peeping Tom 9, 98 phenomenology 101 Pink Flamingos 148, 149, 153–7 box office success 156 Pinky 5, 77 poaching 93–4

Index police in films 25–6n3, 107–21 Polonsky, Abraham 67, 70, 77 poster art 18–20 Production Code 13, 26n3 Production Code Administration (PCA) 3, 6, 34 Psycho 9, 98 psychoanalytic theory 90 psychologism 101 Rankin, John 37 Rapf, Maurice 70 ratings system 3, 6, 13–14, 17–20 Ratnam, Mani 51, 52–5 Reader, The 4 realism 138, 140–1, 144 Confessions of a Nazi Spy 8 Multiple Maniacs 8 Rear Window 98 reviews 18–23 Rififi 75 Riley, Clayton 21 Robinson, Edward G. 36–7, 44 Romance 143 Roosevelt, Franklin D. hindered by appeasers 6 and Warner Bros 29–32 Rosemary’s Baby 14 Rossen, Robert 71 Rozik, ELi 100–1 Rylance, Mark 139–41 Sarris, Andrew 22 Sartre, Jean-Paul on beauty 156, 158, 159–61 on déréalisation 146 on Jean Genet 148, 151 Schlesinger, Arthur Jr 77 Schulberg, Budd 73, 78 Scorsese, Martin 1 Sen, Aparna 51 sex, in psychoanalytic theory 90 sexual behaviour 117–18, 136–46 sexual orientation 152 Shaye, Robert 154 Simon, David 108, 114 Smith, Gerald L. K. 37 Smith, Jeff 74

171

Sobchack, V. 85, 89 Sondheim, Stephen 97 Songs from the Second Floor 98 Sopranos, The 107 South Pacific 94–5 Sparks, Richard 108 spect-actors 84, 93 spectators 83–105 Sting, The 15 Strauss, Carlyn 108 Studlar, Gaylyn 89–90 Sweeney Todd 97 taboos 148 Tate, Sharon 149 terrorism 52–60 Thalberg, Irving 28 Thomsen, Hans 45 Trumbo, Dalton 79 Turrou, Leon G. 32, 38 Underworld Story, The 74–5 Varda, Agnès 96 Varshney, Ashutosh 60 Vietnam war 7–8 violence in Clockwork Orange, A 9–10 in Multiple Maniacs 149 voyeurism 99, 114 Waldorf Statement 68 Wallis, Hal 5, 35, 39, 42–3 Walter, Natasha 86 Warner Brothers 5, 6–7, 17 Confessions of a Nazi Spy 29–47 Warner, Harry 39–40, 46 Warner, Jack 38, 43, 44, 45 Water Lilies 99 Waters, John 5, 147–64 code of filth 8–9 Weekend 95 Wexley, John 36 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 26n3 Wild River 78 Wilk, Jacob 38 Williams, Linda 139–40 Williams, Melanie 146

172 Winnicott, David 91 Wire, The 7–8, 106–33 “X”-rated films 18–20 Zahavi, Dan 101

Index