Flickers of Film: Nostalgia in the Time of Digital Cinema 9780813576046

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FLICKERS OF FILM

FLICKERS OF FILM Nostalgia in the Time of Digital Cinema

J a son Sperb

Rutger s Uni v er sit y P r ess New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Sperb, Jason, 1978–­ Flickers of film : nostalgia in the time of digital cinema / Jason Sperb. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–­0–­8135–­7602–­2 (hardcover : alk. paper) —­ ISBN 978–­0–­8135–­7601–­5 (pbk. : alk. paper) —­ISBN 978–­0–­8135–­7603–­9 (e-­book (epub)) —­ISBN 978–­0–­8135–­7604–­6 (e-­book (web pdf)) 1. Nostalgia in motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures—­Technological innovations. I. Title. PN1995.9.N67S64 2015 791.43’653—­dc23 2015011171 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2016 by Jason Sperb All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our website: http://​rutgerspress​.rutgers​.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

To Simmons

Because history itself is the specter haunting modern society, pseudo-­ history has to be fabricated at every level of the consumption of life; otherwise, the equilibrium of the frozen time that presently holds sway could not be preserved. —­Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

CONTENTS

Preface xi Acknowledgments xiii



Introduction: Self-­Theorizing Nostalgia

1

I’ll (Always) Be Back: Virtual Performances; or, The Cinematic Logic of Late Capitalism

38

They Saw No Future: New Nostalgia Movies and Digital Exhibition

52

Digital Decasia: Preserving Film, Database Histories, and the Potential Value of Reflective Nostalgia

71

Going Home . . . for the First Time: Pixar Studios, Digital Animation, and the Limits of Reflective Nostalgia

89

2 3 4 5 6

1

TRON Legacies: Disney and Nostalgia Blockbusters in the Age of Transmedia Storytelling

114

Game (Not) Over: Video-­Game Pastiche and Nostalgic Disavowals in the Postcinematic Era

139

Conclusion: On Clouds and Be Kind Rewind 160 Notes 165 Selected Bibliography 175 Index 181

PREFACE

I suppose pages such as these are inherently nostalgic. Contrary to some assumptions, though, this has been a difficult book to write. It’s perhaps the first time I ever found myself deep within the recesses of composing something that, to admit now in retrospect, I honestly began to doubt I’d ever finish. After completing two books in back-­to-­back fashion on two very different topics, I found myself at a crossroads—­a combination of disillusionment and exhaustion, along with an uncertainty about the general value of all the academic work that I’ve done. Writing is a long, lonely journey down a dark, seemingly endless, tunnel with—­for the most part—­little in the way of a guiding light in the distance. And, sometimes, we writers can come to discover that an even greater darkness awaits us at the end. I take pride most of all in this work among all of my other writing accomplishments—­ given the daunting circumstances (personally and professionally) I was able to overcome in order to complete it. And I am most grateful to those who’ve stood by me through the entire journey. What more can a scholar say beyond that? Spring 2015

xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Material from the introduction and chapter 1 originally appeared in “I’ll (Always) Be Back / Virtual Performance and Post-­Human Labor in the Age of Digital Cinema,” in Culture, Theory & Critique 54.3 (Oct. 2012): 383–­97. Material from the introduction and chapter 2 originally appeared in: “Specters of Film / New Nostalgia Movies and Hollywood’s Digital Transition,” in Jump Cut 56 (winter 2014–­15): www​.ejumpcut​.org/​currentissue/​SperbDigital​-nostalgia/​index​.html.

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INTRODUCTION Self-­Theorizing Nostalgia

As film disappears into an aesthetic universe constructed from digital intermediates and images combining computer synthesis and capture, and while I continue to feel engaged by many contemporary movies, I still have a deep sense, which is very hard to describe or qualify, of time lost. —­D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film

The specters of film haunt digital cinema’s future—­a future that, for all practical purposes, has already passed. We can understand this literally: culminating with the industry-­wide push in 2011 toward exclusive production of digital cameras and the standardization of digital theatrical projection, no aspect of movie production, distribution, or reception today is outside the use of digital technologies. Yet the idea of a future already passed could be more usefully approached symbolically; making sense of dramatic changes may require not looking further forward but glancing back, resisting the endless rush of late capitalist “innovation.” It’s no secret today that movies have transitioned into the “digital” age, but are we seeing a radically new era of change, or a more nuanced and complicated historical moment in cinema largely dependent on film’s past? And for those shifts that perhaps have been profound, what other cultural and industrial reasons may remain still underexplored? These are easy questions to ask but not to answer. In that anachronistic spirit this book is an ambivalent polemic about the role of nostalgia—­primarily nostalgia for film but also the analog era more generally—­in the time of digital cinema. In this context film of course refers to the actual rolls of celluloid that anchored every aspect of movies in the past, while cinema refers to a broader culture of movie consumption, which has technically, if not always spiritually, shifted in the transition from analog 1

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to digital media. There was always something about the old film medium that lent itself to questions of time. It took time to shoot, to process, to distribute, to archive—­all in ways that the digital transition has since streamlined. Nick James has noted that “what makes digital the chosen form for the industry, however, is simple: it’s cheaper, more convenient and probably more consistent in quality. [And] arguments against this ease of use are potent in artistic terms but moot when it comes to the industrial needs of a mass-­market system.”1 Of course, the financial difference—­as with young upstart filmmakers—­is sometimes a vital (though misleading) one, but the larger point about “industrial needs” is key. This project explores the value in that obstinate notion of film’s time, of its physical and symbolic resistance today, particularly given that the long-­term economic impact of the digital transition is a question that has yet to be answered. “There is nothing quite like speculating about the future,” writes Michele Pierson, “for raising questions about the way we remember the past.”2 The idea of time lends itself to a space for such reflection within the rush of the perpetual presents of cinematic interfaces and innovations—­a hypermediated landscape that has only intensified in the digital age, a culture wherein not only “history” in the abstract is heavily mediated but also our own private relationships to the past (accessing memories of the past through the pop culture artifacts remaining in its own kind of perpetual present). And that sense of time inherent to the fading flickers of celluloid, an affect of the past, haunts digital cinema now; this haunting is, however, less about taking us back to the spaces of film history and more about guiding us going forward. Of course, film’s time is already past (as in, the era of celluloid’s dominance). But there is also something of value in rethinking the importance of holding on to film as more than just regret and denial. “In terms of time and contemplation,” James adds, “maybe we’re all losing something we’ll end up missing in the long run.”3 The time for reflection here is, I argue, a nostalgic one. Nostalgia is always most intense during periods of dramatic cultural and technological upheaval, whereby the perceived reassurances of a simpler past anchor our perception of an uncertain present (and future). “Nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism,” writes Svetlana Boym, “in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.”4 Nostalgia, then, is less about reclaiming a vanishing past than about paradoxically resisting a potentially threatening future: how to pull back against the endless rush to change or against the inevitable end of mortality itself? In this sense nostalgia is often really about the lingering specter of death; the awareness that everything must one day end nurtures the idea that moments and memories lost will never come again. Paradoxically, personal and collective (cinematic) fantasies of a past that often never existed in the first place become the only way to relive it.



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It’s easy to see how the fading medium of film, imagining its own mortality in sight, has symbolically resisted the inevitability of its own digital mummification by often retreating back to its joyous youth, even in movies that contain no necessary material connection to the decaying medium of celluloid. In late 2013 Disney debuted a Mickey Mouse short, Get a Horse (fig. 1), before the start of its more celebrated feature-­length smash, Frozen. Originally promoted in the months up to Frozen’s release as a long-­lost short from the early days of sound cartoons, briefly teasing animation history buffs, Get a Horse was eventually revealed to be an all new, entirely digital production, a knowing celebration of both Disney and cinematic history—­centered not so much on Mickey’s role as the face of the company but on his central, and perhaps now mostly forgotten, status as arguably the first star of the sound film era. Meanwhile, six months earlier, Disney had also released the more high-­profile prequel, Oz: The Great and Powerful (2013). Like Get a Horse, Oz reflexively negotiated its own playful relationship to the history of media transitions that preceded it. The opening pastiche moments of the movie, set during the days of early cinema, mimic the look of silent movies in both the absence of color and the limited aspect ratio, while the narrative of a mischievous and deceptive circus magician, the “wizard” Oz (played by James Franco), likewise harks back to cinema’s pretheatrical origins as a magical sideshow attraction. In this regard Oz closely echoed Martin Scorsese’s more critically acclaimed Hugo (2011), joining a line of recent titles (including Get a Horse and the Oscar-­winning The Artist [2011]) that toyed with nostalgia for (much) earlier periods of media history at the dawn of the digital transition. In a 2011 review of The Artist Peter Debruge suggested that Hugo’s modest appeal was a reaction to other digital developments: “the medium is in a similar transition today, as such sincere, emotional stories are forced to compete with digital spectacle and 3D extravaganzas.”5 Thus, if the continually stark juxtaposition of film’s (sometimes distant) past with cinema’s (equally hazy) future in so many of these recent digital productions seems ironic, it really shouldn’t. Generally speaking, the forward march of progress often exists alongside the reassurances of nostalgia, such that (in Hollywood) “technological advances and special effects are frequently used to recreate visions of the past, from the sinking Titanic to dying gladiators [Gladiator] and extinct dinosaurs [Jurassic Park].”6 In The Virtual Life of Film D. N. Rodowick speculated that “the idea of cinema persists in the term ‘digital cinema’ as a way of easing the transition to a different [technological] world” beyond celluloid.7 “If the success of The Artist is any indication,” Variety observed in 2012, eerily foreshadowing Argo’s (2012) unexpected Best Picture victory at the 2013 Academy Awards, “paying tribute to the glories of Hollywood past is a far more palatable option than contemplating the uncertainties of the medium’s future.”8 Meanwhile, Pixar Animation—­long one of the industry leaders within the still

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Figure 1. Disney’s Get a Horse (2013) is one of many recent digital movies to express nos-

talgia for earlier periods of technological innovation.

uncertain, shifting, field of digital cinema—­has also been producing deeply nostalgic and reassuring narratives since the baby-­boomer appeals of the original Toy Story (1995). As Colleen Montgomery has argued, “Pixar’s championing of the analogue, the obsolete, and the low tech, arguably functions to allay anxieties surrounding the very processes of digitization which Pixar has helped usher in.”9 Certainly, the self-­reflexively anachronistic relationship between these two media serves some manner of acclimation beyond creative convenience or comfort—­but for whom? Sandra Annett previously noted Hugo as one example of what she terms “nostalgic remediation,” whereby one medium internalizes another but also betrays a deeper affection for its imagined loss and “shifts between transcending celluloid cinema and longing for its return; between the recovery and loss of cinema’s historical memory; and between the concepts of old and new media themselves.”10 Collectively, the persistence of this dynamic suggests a trend worth pursuing further, though not always in the most self-­evident or, more important, progressive ways. Indeed, these movies’ own intense self-­ reflexivity, as well as the industry’s recent coronation of such nostalgic love letters (The Artist, Argo) should serve as a cautionary note that in the rush to defend nostalgia for film we must also be mindful of how shrewdly aware the industry itself is when it comes to nostalgia’s (economic, as well as aesthetic) value. Outside Hollywood’s more conventional consumerist logic, meanwhile, such nostalgia need not be automatically conservative—­the most common and likely assumption—­but can instead be perverse, idiosyncratic, subversive, and strangely counterintuitive. How else are we to make sense of Randy Moore’s



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bizarre, deeply flawed, but nonetheless fascinating low-­budget indie movie Escape from Tomorrow (2013) (fig. 2)—­yet another variation on Disney-­related nostalgia released the same year as Oz, Get a Horse, and Frozen? Shot guerrilla-­ style on digital video inside the Disney parks in Florida and California, Escape from Tomorrow tells the story of a father of two who loses his job on the first day of his family’s long-­awaited vacation and starts to go insane—­a feeling of disorientation and exhaustion that is intensified by the ways in which the movie exaggerates once-­ familiar Disney imagery to grotesque extremes (such as an unforgettably creepy sequence inside the It’s a Small World ride). The specter of labor and its absence is also interesting here. There is a perhaps unintended correlation between a man losing his job and a movie shot on a shoestring budget, neither of which presents a healthy option economically for the industry going forward. Escape from Tomorrow represents the utopic potential of digital technologies today, since the type of tiny digital cameras needed to shoot the movie discreetly in the first place—­and at such a strikingly sharp high-­definition resolution—­did not exist even five years earlier. And yet the movie is anchored by an ambivalent nostalgia, too—­one that does not fit easily with the “official” reassuring brand of family consumerist nostalgia we normally associate with Disney or with the more broadly conservative forms we could identify in the other Hollywood movies discussed above. By Moore’s own admission, such nostalgia reflects his own memories of going to Disney World, while the movie also possesses a kind of affective nostalgia that such rare indexical images inside the parks themselves would inevitably trigger in much of its audience (before turning such melancholic impulses

Figure 2. For all its ideological flaws, the independent movie Escape from Tomorrow

(2013) suggests the difficulty, and possibilities, of nostalgia for Disney that runs counter to the company’s depiction of itself.

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on their head). The title itself, Escape from Tomorrow, not only plays on Disney’s Tomorrowland attraction but also represents nostalgia’s most traditional appeal: attempting to resist the inevitable changes that lie ahead in life. The movie recalls the classic Twilight Zone episode “Walking Distance” (1959), another narrative of a middle-­aged man dealing with a midlife crisis by trying futilely to return to his childhood but with predictably disastrous consequences that in turn challenge the illusory simplicities of nostalgia’s appeal in the first place. At the very least this movie suggests that such intense nostalgia at the very advances of digital cinema’s technical achievements offers no easy answer to what its value ultimately is, while also (somewhat unsuccessfully) positing an alternative to Hollywood’s aggressive commodification of nostalgia. At first glance many of the digital movies referenced above could be read as playful variations on what Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster have noted as the “curious mix of nostalgia and futurism” that has dominated the digital age.11 Certainly, such a specter of the (analog) past always had a special appeal. “For all its surface novelty,” writes Dan North, “the early years of CGI proliferation in Hollywood were almost exclusively devoted to using the technology to rework older, or less ‘hi-­tech’ forms of spectacle”—­a knowing anachronism that allowed the latest special effects to announce and celebrate their own innovation in self-­evident ways.12 Meanwhile, Nicholas Rombes has argued that there was long “a tendency in digital media—­and cinema especially—­to reassert imperfection, flaws, an aura of human mistakes to counterbalance the logic of perfection that pervades the digital.”13 Perhaps most overtly nostalgic in this regard, Pierson notes in Special Effects that the photorealism of most computer-­ generated imagery had already lost its novelty value at least as far back as the late 1990s. This recognition led her to note, in regard to Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999), that “in this context it is the digital simulation of a special photographic effect, the flickering blue image generated by a holographic communicator, that still looks special, its simulated degradation of an analog image a rare curiosity.”14 More broadly, these cinematic mixtures of old and new echo what Philip Rosen once called medium “hybridity” within the ontology of the digital.15 Contemporary media will not be purely digital, despite utopic claims to the contrary, but rather will awkwardly negotiate the technological and aesthetic tensions between itself and its analog predecessors. In this sense remarkably advanced digital movies such as Oz, Hugo, Get a Horse, and so forth do not attempt to conceal those anachronistic differences between old and new as much as celebrate their hybridity in reassuringly nostalgic ways. Yet, importantly, this notion of hybridity was not a purely aesthetic or technological dilemma; rather, it was one deeply, and inherently, tied to the logic of late capitalism in the postindustrial age. As Charles Acland points out, “Even with all the local instances of



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innovation—­and yes, to be sure, parts of the entertainment business are shifting dramatically—­the language of ‘game changing’ is another way to talk about business as usual.”16 This search for “radical novelty”—­one of the utopic ideals that Rosen argued was central to innovation in the digital age—­is closely tied to the business rhetoric of “consumer culture, whose advertising logic is in perpetual search of product differentiation and hence a rhetoric of the new.”17 Digital cinema, then, is the latest in a long line of economic shifts, inside and outside the entertainment industry, dependent on the seeming oxymoron that is a permanent state of change, which is fostered by planned technical obsolescence, while the digital products themselves are first and foremost commodities, ultimately defined by their exchange value—­as well as by the labor that does, and does not, go into their production.

Self-­Theorizing Nostalgia The unresolved paradox here is that nostalgia for celluloid can be (at the very least) a powerful ally in highlighting and questioning, from an economic standpoint, the necessity of the digital transition—­even while that same nostalgia too often serves as a fully complicit coconspirator in the industry’s relentless rush to some imagined new era. Nostalgia, Boxoffice noted (in a rare moment of honesty) in the spring of 2013, is “one of our greatest commodities, just ahead of infomercials and energy drinks. And since our industry is all about escapism—­don’t deny it—­the act of transporting oneself to another time and place fits us like an Under Armour T-­shirt.”18 This intense reflexivity, cinema’s knowing homages to itself, in so many recent nostalgia movies should be read less as some kind of radical creative innovation in a new age of technological possibility and more as Hollywood’s further appropriation of the reflective potential that a more progressive (mostly unfulfilled) nostalgia might offer—­with the intention of shutting down any challenges to the kind of forward-­thinking consumerism that defines postindustrial late capitalism. Kevin Esch has perhaps most acutely highlighted this dilemma in his discussion of one of the more blatant examples of film nostalgia in the digital age, the Quentin Tarantino / Robert Rodriquez collaboration Grindhouse (2007): “The nostalgia of Grindhouse attempts to offer a progressive critique of the business practices of late capitalist cinema-­going and exhibition, one that ultimately fails because of the film’s inescapable place within Hollywood’s political economy—­an economy exemplified by that compromised DVD release of the film.”19 The failure of Grindhouse’s shrewd film nostalgia to mount a successful critique of exhibition and production shifts in the face of market realities was likewise echoed in Caetlin Benson-­Allott’s insightful reading of the film and its distribution history.20 Thus, the question is not just aesthetic but primarily

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economic. It is not a coincidence that so many of the movies mentioned above are in some sense industrial histories that both highlight and conceal, through their respective nostalgic hazes, technological and studio histories past. This kind of self-­theorizing nostalgia involves Hollywood media and their paratexts’ lovingly explicit foregrounding of its own pastiche past in reflexive but uncritical ways, celebrating the relationship between film’s past and cinema’s future through reassuring narratives that promote the imagined inevitability of aesthetic and technological change. Yet moments of this kind of self-­aware nostalgia block off the possibility of resistant space for doubt, critique, and alternatives regarding the messy economic realities of a digital transition that contains more troubling questions than answers beneath its self-­referential surfaces (thus, is it the least bit surprising that so many “future-­oriented” blockbusters consist mainly of the nostalgic recycling of past franchises, as Hollywood itself is largely built today around the self-­sustaining economic and aesthetic value of nostalgia?).21 There remains room, of course, for a more fragmentary, individualized kind of truly “reflective” nostalgia, one somewhat outside the “official” channels of contemporary Hollywood culture—­perhaps in the form of indie movies such as Escape from Tomorrow or Holy Motors (2012), film archives with a different perspective on the material challenges of movie history, avant-­garde artists who deliberately incorporate anachronistic, “poor” media as a form of critique,22 or even in rethinking the past self-­theorizing of older films about the impending digital transition (to name only a few possibilities). But they all remain dependent on active and idiosyncratic impulses within particular sites of exhibition and reception, which are sometimes separate from, but hardly oppositional to, the present cycles of consumption; thus, their ultimate value remains generally unclear, particularly in a postmodern culture that too often rewards the kind of ignorance and passivity that further feeds the market imperatives and dehistoricizing logic of such self-­theorizing impulses in the first place. So, while there is value in considering numerous potential nostalgias, productively questioning the myth of the active viewer, rather than further enabling it, has the greatest urgency today. Many scholarly discourses on the innovations of digital cinema, while otherwise plentiful, have still not fully come to grips with disturbing questions regarding the negative impact on labor forces, consumption, and other economic conditions, which are in large part intensified by the digital transition. What does it mean to be a postindustrial, information-­based economy, particularly in the context of a modern entertainment industry (Hollywood) so dependent on the kinds of “affective” labor that, as Michael Hardt argued, “has achieved a dominant position of the highest value in the contemporary informational economy” and that by its very immateriality is susceptible to exploitation?23 Film is (was) not only a time-­intensive but also a labor-­intensive medium. Yet while it



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may seem fair to celebrate some of the money saved as a result of the cheap economics of digital video (DV) cinematography, Internet distribution, and even perhaps digital theatrical exhibition (for some), it seems fair to ask, at what cost? In his remarkable study on the modern cultures of Hollywood production, John Caldwell documents what is too often overlooked: “New technologies generally decreased the number of workers needed to operate film/video technologies, even as they made some traditional technical tasks obsolete.”24 This is not limited to the exigencies of DV cinematography, which has rapidly overtaken film production and literally requires fewer people just to shoot, but also extends out to the so-­called digital sweatshops, on which the Oscar protests of recent years briefly shined light. Meanwhile, on the subject of digital projection in theaters, the trade paper Variety, hardly a bastion of anti-­Hollywood rhetoric, reported in 2013 that “once the digital transition is complete  .  .  . [it] could put 10,000 theatre staffers out of work.”25 The only time Hollywood expresses concern over how savings brought on by the digital will be a cause for unemployment is, predictably, when it is discussing piracy and other forms of illegal distribution, issues that affect its own bottom line. Almost every aspect of cinema costs more with the medium of film than it does with digital, yet that’s also because more people were employed (from film developers to inkers and painters to union projectionists)—­a shift that has generally been so overwhelming that few seem fully willing to acknowledge it. Dystopic self-­theorizing anxieties over technology’s imminent replacement of human beings is of course nothing new, especially in movies that are in some way about computers. One is reminded of the otherwise utopic TRON’s (1982) ominous, but not entirely inaccurate, suggestion that “pretty soon the computers will start thinking and the people will stop.” We can trace this idea all the way back to 1957’s Desk Set, a movie, not incidentally, supported by an IBM Corporation invested in allaying such anxieties (fig. 3). Desk Set is one of several movies over the decades, as Andrew Utterson has discussed, that attempted to address the kind of technophobic rhetoric that has long accompanied the advent of the computer age.26 In this late Katharine Hepburn–­Spencer Tracy romantic comedy a giant computer is installed in the research department of a New York City television network. Its function is to store all the information and data contained within the vast archives of the department so that it can be retrieved instantly. Understandably, the women working there, led by Hepburn’s character, become convinced the computer’s primary role is to replace them. Thus we see one of the earliest examples of an anxiety that increasingly pervades discussions regarding the value of labor in digital late capitalism today. Of course, the reassuring twist at the end of the movie is that the computer cannot adequately work without significant human oversight and that its job there is not to replace the women but to “free” them up to devote even more time to do research on the clock. In 1957, no doubt,

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Figure 3. Desk Set (1957) was an early attempt by Hollywood to theorize anxieties about

the coming digital age—­namely, its impact on labor. Despite the film’s utopic ending, the intervening fifty years have only raised more questions than answers on that score.

this seemed plausible, and the dystopic future it briefly envisioned was so far off that any real question on the matter was probably far too abstract to consider seriously. Yet, reflecting back on the film today, it seems that there was a great deal of truth in those anxieties, as we can reasonably assume that in real life computers did contribute to a great deal of downsizing and even the elimination of research staffs (and other forms of “redundant” labor) at countless companies, since all their work could now be stored. It is equally interesting that we don’t see such self-­theorizing narratives about the potentially negative effects of technical innovation on labor out of Hollywood anymore (other than ones, such as The Artist, safely isolated in a nostalgic past), probably because such naive optimism today would cut too close to home. Of course, I’m not at all arguing that we will ever be entirely (or even mostly) replaced by computers. But there are longer-­term questions here that are worth pursuing and that movies such as Desk Set, in retrospect, provided only a short-­term solution to, or even a deflection from, by exaggerating otherwise legitimate concerns in such a way that negated them. In short, the movie’s utopic depiction of a world where computers and a large-­scale workforce could possibly coexist creates a less reassuring feeling today. At the same time, even highly skilled jobs suffer from the generally decreasing value of one’s labor in the late capitalist marketplace, as indicated by the 2013 Oscar protest around the treatment of effects artists and animators working on Life of Pi (2012) and since repeated at the 2014 Academy Awards. Studios saved money by transferring to digital production and distribution, but



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this has not translated to lower ticket prices (quite the opposite in an age of IMAX and 3D ticket inflation). And what of the audience’s own labor (often itself anchored by nostalgic fandoms) in a leisure-­based economy of participatory culture and crowd sourcing, when studios increasingly rely on uncompensated audience production (blogs, videos), the free hype of social media, and other digital avenues to promote movies at minimal cost? “The ‘gift economy’ characteristic of online and hacking cultures,” observes Melissa Gregg, “fits neatly with the profit-­seeking, crowd-­sourcing aspirations of both established and budget-­conscious start-­up media companies.” One larger possibility, she adds, is that film and media scholars may be blind to such practices in part because such “self-­exploiting” productivity has long been a part of one’s academic career—­“ ‘sacrificial labour’ is clearly ingrained in an industry [of higher education] where the notion of ‘service’ neatly obscures the amount of unpaid work inherent to major activities like journal publishing.”27 Academics may be conditioned more than most to see much of their productivity inevitably emerging from the traditional spaces of “leisure” one usually associates with popular culture consumption. There are still other disturbing long-­term economic questions in the age of digital cinema that people are only beginning to ask: How does the digital transition affect the economic viability of film archives, celluloid manufacturers, and independent movie theaters, all of whom risk extinction under crushing financial burdens that only rise as film itself becomes increasingly rare and thus more expensive? How will market concerns shape which media titles survive digitally, and which are left behind, in the relentless rush of planned, technological obsolescence? How much will the upkeep and maintenance of fragile new digital projectors cost cinemas in the coming years? How will upstart filmmakers collectively translate their first no-­budget production into a sustainable economic model for current and future cultures of production? How will these same ambitious young artists continue to afford the relentless upgrades to newer cameras, newer equipment, and the equally expensive software programs needed to support them? (The notion that “digital is cheaper” is a bubble waiting to burst.) These questions only scratch the surface of possible issues looming. Yet Hollywood’s solution so far has not been to idealize a sustainable future so much as to romanticize the industrial changes of the past, to pin hopes on the idea that economic problems will work themselves out because, such nostalgic logic goes, “they always have.” This haze of historical reassurance fits the intense reflexivity that Caldwell has already noted comes preinstalled in Hollywood rhetoric today—­how it positions and sells itself in ways that both promote and conceal modern labor conditions in the industry.28 In Production Cultures he combs through various trade publications and other kinds of industrial discourses to articulate the ways in

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which communities within Hollywood theorize themselves—­“self-­theorizing talk”29—­using rhetoric that is readily distributed to the larger public as a means to frame larger perceptions of the primary text. (Derek Johnson has also followed this line of inquiry in his insightful discussion of media franchising, while Montgomery has noted this in relation to Pixar’s own hyperreflexivity.)30 “Film and Television today,” Caldwell writes, “reflect obsessively back upon themselves and invest considerable energy in over-­producing and distributing this industrial self-­analysis to the public.”31 There is, in other words, no “authentic” reality inside or outside the industry and its production (textual and metatextual) when all information is carefully managed for demographic and advertising ends. This, then, has profound implications for the traditional scholar seeking to analyze such texts. It’s not enough to suggest that cinema’s tendency to theorize itself offers up new reading strategies for a more active viewer. That would risk overlooking both Hollywood’s relentless ability for market adaptation while also championing the myth of an active spectator who somehow stands in consistent opposition to this consumer onslaught, instead of (more often than not) its generally reliable ally. “Critics and theorists have traditionally hyped reflexivity and deconstruction,” Caldwell adds, “as indications of vanguard cinematic agitation or critical audience resistance” despite increasing evidence to the contrary.32 The industry’s self-­aware theorizing of nostalgia in the digital age follows a similar logic—­as Hollywood is intensely aware of, and invested in, the promotion and maintenance of such nostalgia as a central sustaining economic force, as well as a stabilizing aesthetic presence that conceals the arbitrary nature of such changes. And the many textual moments of the industry’s self-­awareness about its own (and its audience’s) nostalgic investments are hardly the sites of an active resistance to its aggressively protean capitalist sensibilities, even as they may on occasion enable an unexpected line of flight. For its part, Flickers of Film confines such industry analysis to textual readings of the inherently reflexive nature of the films themselves (how their visions of industry and technical innovation reflect a self-­awareness of an industry in a period of transition) and to the textual analysis of paratexts33—­namely, some attention to trade periodicals, videos, trailers, and more or less official biographies of the companies and figures at the heart of the project. In particular, my research tends to gravitate toward the kind of rhetoric that emphasizes a “reductive” and a “preemptive” form.34 The former stresses a kind of inherent “magic” about how the films are made, while the latter emphasizes the often hyperbolic celebration of these newest innovations. Both, meanwhile, stress the natural manifestation of good, old-­fashioned hard work and artistic vision over the messy complications of technical details and collective efforts. Thus, both seem closely attuned to “explaining” the elaborate developments of the digital age through a nostalgia for past inevitability.



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Importantly, though, the industry itself tends to outwardly deny the centrality of such nostalgia (or of nostalgia for itself) when explicitly evoked. In a review of The Artist, Variety film critic Peter Debruge actually suggested that “today’s [audiences] demonstrate little nostalgia for cinema’s roots,”35 despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary within and outside the industry. Timothy M. Gray framed the phenomenon slightly differently, suggesting that the continued fascination with the film medium is not about nostalgia at all; rather, “the pleasure in looking back should not be a fake comfort in recalling ‘simpler times,’ but an avenue for research, learning, and inspiration.”36 This rhetoric suggests, at a minimum, that even the industry is conscious of appropriating nostalgia’s potentially more reflective forms while also being aware of nostalgia’s usually negative connotation when explicitly addressed as such. Those most intensely nostalgic can be the ones most in denial about its presence, preferring to see such romanticizing as simply the “way things were.” At the same time, many movies that narratively acknowledge a nostalgic impulse (Toy Story 3 [2010], Midnight in Paris [2011], World’s End [2013]) do so only to the extent that they then claim to reject the trappings of living in the past in a kind of “nostalgic disavowal” not too dissimilar from larger industrial rhetoric on the matter. Part of Hollywood’s self-­theorizing trick here involves maximizing nostalgia’s economic and aesthetic power at the same time the industry disavows any direct acknowledgment of it—­given the knee-­jerk assumptions of its creative laziness, its simplistic sentimentality, and, perhaps most important, its potential resistance to the inevitability of change so otherwise inherent to the forward progress of late capitalism: “Nostalgia isn’t nostalgia; it’s something else . . .”—­even as it is. In trying to understand contemporary cinema’s peculiar relationship to its past, history is always thoroughly intertwined with nostalgia. They exist, along with memory, on what Pam Cook has called a “continuum” of various ways in which we engage with the past.37 It is thus practically impossible to separate one from the other in understanding how popular culture mediates our relationship to the past in increasingly self-­aware ways. This kind of “nostalgia” mode refers to the ways in which cinematic depictions of the past rely more on stylistic clichés and other shorthand allusions than on attempting to understand the contradictions and ambiguities of history. In this regard, then, I argue that some iteration of the postmodern attuned to late capitalism remains a viable mode of analysis in discussions of our present cinematic historical consciousness. The question is not merely representational, or indexical, regarding the ontology of digital media as usually posed. Rosen, for instance, has suggested that “recent arguments for the radical novelty of representational and epistemological fields often involve claims that ideals of indexicality have been displaced [in the transition from analog to digital]. ‘Postmodernism’ is only one widespread code word for forwarding such

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a position in theories of culture and representation.”38 The postmodern—­when pulled back from its too often admittedly broad, populist usage—­can continue to work as one possible framework for digital cinema within a very specific intersection of recent nostalgia movies, an elusive sense of historical consciousness (for the industry and for audiences), and late capitalist culture. As Michael Hardt, Fredric Jameson, Steven Shaviro, Kathleen Stewart, and others have argued, the postmodern era is inseparable from the postindustrial one.39 In this sense postmodernism is a close aesthetic and cultural reflection of economic changes in the information-­based economy, where the idea of “historical consciousness” is defined in part as an (in)attention to dialectical questions of market shifts and labor practices that create a deeper context for nostalgic images too often uprooted from such historical origins in the postmodern age. Such cinematic visions of history—­both old films still circulating and contemporary depictions of the past—­are undoubtedly affectively rich (meaning, they possess the potential to provoke any number of possible responses from the viewer). But on their own these same images are inherently meaningless beyond pastiche representations of the past—­more random files in the vast databases of the digital age—­without the too-­often-­neglected contexts beyond the surface, which might generate a sustained sense of historical consciousness. It’s also important, however, to acknowledge how our access to some sense of “history” still remains, in spite of this kind of nostalgia, through enough time, research, and labor. As a film historian myself, I certainly believe in this ideal. As Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Foster have noted, too, about the supposed ubiquity of movie titles and information available in the digital age, “there’s much, much more out there for those willing to take the time to troll the web for diversion or enlightenment—­though there’s also apparently more of the former than the latter.”40 More important, it’s equally true that such intensive work, the taking of one’s time, is very rarely done in a moment of popular culture, where quick, superficial feedback to queries online is too easily accessible, where personal interpretations of old films become equated with studying movie history (as my previous work on such historically ungrounded fan defenses of Song of the South [1946] sought to demonstrate),41 and where the audience appeal of mainstream narratives is so often precisely in the desire “not to have to think” for a few hours. “Postmodernism replicates or reproduces—­reinforces—­the logic of consumer capitalism; the more significant question is whether there is also a way in which it resists that logic,” Jameson admits, “but that is a question we must leave open.”42 So where might another kind of nostalgic “access” to media history possibly reside; or, more to the point, what can it offer in the way of resistance? In The Future of Nostalgia Boym put forth the provocatively useful concept of “reflective” nostalgia—­a messier, more idiosyncratic and self-­aware vision of a



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fractured, incomplete past that uses that knowing sense of yearning for yesterday to construct a dialogue with the present (and future). Such nostalgia “reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment, or critical reflection.”43 Yet this utopic ideal of reflective nostalgia is also always in tension with more “restorative” forms that imagine and seek to preserve a simplistic, collective vision of an idealized, stable, and self-­contained past that never quite existed in the first place. Even Boym holds mainstream cinema up as representative of the most conservative conceptions of nostalgia in her discussion of Jurassic Park (1993): “Popular culture made in Hollywood, the vessel for national myths that America exports abroad, both induces nostalgia and offers a tranquilizer; instead of disquieting ambivalence and paradoxical dialectic of past, present, and future, it provides a total restoration of extinct creatures [dinosaurs] and a conflict resolution.”44 This is the kind of restorative nostalgia more in line with Hollywood’s loving sense of its own self-­contained history, with most mainstream audiences’ affection for media’s past, and with Jameson’s polemical notion of historical consciousness in the postmodern age—­the kind that “proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up memory gaps” and that “does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition.”45 Any meaningful account of nostalgia in popular culture today must keep these two approaches, reflective and restorative, in productive struggle with one another. In the postmodern age, writes Stewart, nostalgia ultimately “depends on where you stand.”46 That said, however, Boym also recognizes how, by its very peculiar and individualized nature, such reflective nostalgia is the rare exception and perhaps is ultimately inconclusive, or at least ephemeral, in what progressive or oppositional value it offers—­particularly when looking at contemporary pop culture. “At best,” she writes, “reflective nostalgia can present an ethical and creative challenge” to the constant obsession with newness and progress.47 Restorative nostalgia, in this context, resides in the cultural dominant that is Hollywood’s hegemonic economic and aesthetic ideologies; reflective nostalgia is that fleeting flicker of something else, which somehow slips occasionally and briefly outside those otherwise all-­consuming perimeters—­that something that is frustrated (and frustrating). Thus, this book remains attentive to (if also skeptical of) this ideal held out by Boym’s less common form of nostalgia, since yet another form of “self-­theorizing” in Flickers of Film would be the ways in which this project follows its own idiosyncratic, unapologetically autobiographical and deeply ambivalent engagement with the last thirty years of digital cinema. No insignificant part of the nostalgia here is admittedly my own, though that distinctive perspective rests reflectively in dialogue with larger industrial and theoretical questions, such as the continuing value in thinking about digital cinema in relation to late capitalism and discourses on postmodernism.

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Postmodernism’s Real Illusions The intersection between Hollywood’s intense self-­reflexivity and pastiche past is only one way to situate digital cinema within the ambivalences of the postmodern age. Something distinctly postmodern emerged as film culture migrated from a dependence on analog media to digital ones. The beauty of digital media is that its mediation, not merely its modes of production, had become increasingly seamless. Whereas the physical materiality of film projectors, books, or televisions called attention to the act of engaging with said media, computers can cleanly efface the bonds of incongruous media, as well as the sense of how we engage with what we engage with. Analog nostalgia across all aspects of popular culture—­more as stylistic practice than as a substantial call back to historical periods or their modes of production—­attempts to deny the profoundly immaterial realities of the digital age. We could say that the older notion of a postmodern “depthlessness” takes on a new, maybe even more literal, significance today amid digital cinema’s surfaces. Digital sounds and images have a strange and contradictory power. They evoke a sense of place and time even though they bear no necessary ontological relationship to the material world. With an older analog medium such as film, light reflected directly off a physical object as it moved in space and time, burning its indexical mark on celluloid. Yet digital cameras convert that same light into ones and zeroes, later recombining them into discrete elements that seamlessly re-create the illusion of movement. The effect is uncanny, to the point of invisibility, but it’s not quite the same. And there’s a new layer of immaterial malleability that has silently crept into the image: in ways unique to the digital age it’s problematic to assume that one is actually looking at what one is looking at. Thus, a mutual anxiety over the relationship between reality and its representation rests at the core of both the postmodern notion of the simulacrum and the digital image. While the logic of the simulacrum presumes to signify that which never existed, the endless interactivity, malleability, reproducibility, and ontological nature of digital media does away once and for all with any necessary pretense of a direct (indexical) relationship between hypermediated representation and real-­world referent. More usefully, then, both concepts shift the question away from preserving some semblance of a preexisting truth that media purports to “represent” and instead move toward the more urgent question of what media “does,” its affective power—­as Shaviro has argued (any hope of a truly reflective nostalgia finds itself somewhere within this contradiction—­the affective future of cinema’s mediated past). No longer bound to the older rules of time and duration, digital media also have a strange and contradictory history. The perpetually present interfaces of the medium itself visualize the possibility of time in the very process of its



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erasure amid an increasingly nonlinear database culture. Digital images, meanwhile, can uproot their self-­generating representations from the material world, offering the promise of a pure fantasy bounded only by the limitless (immaterial) potential of imagination. But, in their very immateriality, digital media further impact the material world. The history of the postmodern has been anchored, paradoxically, by a loss of historical consciousness within a hypermediated visual culture whose images, sounds, and capital were mapped out by the ubiquitous presence of simulacra. In this regard the term simulacrum doesn’t simply refer to a copy without an original—­though the loss of a particular form of “reality” is not irrelevant, either. For Jameson (drawing on the work of Guy Debord) the simulacrum was the ultimate commodity in the age of late capitalism, an entity divorced not simply from reality in the abstract but from any sense of its use value, as well as from an awareness of its mode of production. Like simulacra, commodities are often literally self-­referential, free-­floating, and immaterial, since so many resources and products are created, stored, and circulated digitally; for example, the material “referent” of cash (or the gold standard) has become a relatively quaint notion. Capitalism has increasingly consolidated markets in an era of government deregulation, horizontal integration, and free-­ trade globalization, which has proliferated exponentially, with little oversight, as companies seek cheaper labor pools in domestic and international markets. Yet the centrality of consumer capitalism’s resiliency begged the question of its histories in spite of its self-­effacing immateriality. I attempted to articulate this years ago in a reading of Ghost World (2001)—­a postmodern film about this loss of historical consciousness but one that nonetheless seemed to call forth some engagement with the past—­as it both challenged and affirmed the difficulty in accessing history in a culture dominated by commodified simulacra.48 In the movie Enid (Thora Birch) is a teenager who discovers that the Cook’s restaurant chain is a whitewashed version of its more overtly racist origin—­“Coon’s” Chicken, which once featured an offensive stereotype as its corporate symbol, before being replaced by a generic white one. Yet, ultimately, Enid is unable to do anything with that information other than to acknowledge its existence, the felt presence of an unknowable past, which in turn says more about the lack of historical depth in our postmodern present than about some “original” lost to history, particularly as those around her work to ignorantly whitewash this history all over again, without anyone (including Enid) ever really engaging with the historical question of why it’s racist. And what is particularly unique about Ghost World is not only its contradictory sense of postmodern history—­of a past unrepresentable yet nonetheless there—­but also how it acutely articulates this dilemma as the direct result of the market imperatives of our commodity culture in the age of late capitalism. In the postmodern era the simulacrum symbolized a network of social

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relations dictated by commodities that often offer no real material use value, those that exist only for the sake of being exchanged for more commodities in a continual cycle of consumerism as grotesque as the endless, generic landscapes of mass consumption that stretch across the diegesis of Ghost World. And, I would add, it seems to be this aspect of postmodernism itself that has been too often neglected, as though postmodernism’s own history has been in a sense uprooted as much as Coon’s Chicken was. No shortage of technological innovations have been celebrated (perhaps to the point of excess) in the two or three decades since the heyday of postmodern theory, yet the larger culture of late capitalism hasn’t shifted nearly as much. Instead, this reading of the economic and aesthetic logic of an emergent digital (“electronic”) media culture retains a quiet, admittedly polemical, relevance, particularly as global capitalism builds an immense digital landscape of networks whose resilience is in direct proportion to its immaterial existence. Just as pressingly, this postmodern image culture celebrates, through discourses of individualism and “convenience,” the false impression of autonomy—­the seductive lie that consumers now have power over their own consumption in the age of media convergence. Audiences are consistently reminded of how they can produce, manipulate, and (re)circulate media content. Yet such narcissistic logic is deceptively circular. It ignores larger questions about control in favor of tired narratives of individualism; in a sense it’s the purest form of capitalism yet, a completely predesigned system of pure consumption masked by the real illusion of choice. “Freedom,” Sean Cubitt wrote in The Cinema Effect, “is so central to North American ideology that its lack is invisible.”49 Indeed, Cubitt’s larger argument is centered on how Hollywood’s transition to the digital age has been in great measure about creating purely fantasy worlds “outside history” (meaning outside ideological critique), while also continuing analog trends in production through the cheaper means that the digital innovations have provided and will continue to provide. The postmodern “end of history”—­not the end of representing the world but of the dialectic between capital and labor that creates historical consciousness—­ becomes more acute in a digital age that seems to forgo such material consciousness altogether. We needn’t necessarily look any further than recent developments within the Hollywood industry today.

Digital Workflows; or, Life of Pi and the Oscar VFX Protests This concern found particular prominence recently in the controversies around the “digital sweatshops” of animation and visual effects shops. These freelancing companies offer to do extensive postproduction work for studios on contract,



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remaining competitive by avoiding the requirements of union labor, generally minimizing the size of their workforce at all times, and thus heavily overworking those employees that they do have on staff. In 2013 David Cohen noted in Variety that there was “an oversupply of high-­end vfx capacity, which has depressed the cost of vfx and pitted all those [special effects] houses against each other. It’s a buyer’s market.” Later he asks rhetorically, “Would tentpole production [of blockbusters] make sense if the studios couldn’t play all these people [vfx workers as well as government subsidies] for saps?”50 The fact that some workers are generally well-­compensated for their contribution at the time obscures two key factors beyond just working conditions: one, they are the elite members of an otherwise dwindling workforce; and two, they risk suffering from burnout and generally have little job security because of a robust competition for contracts and the inherent discrimination against older workers in favor of younger ones willing to work for less. During the 2013 Academy Awards ceremony numerous members and supporters of the digital animation and VFX artist communities in Hollywood protested outside the fabled awards show in order to call attention to unfair labor practices within the industry and to the continued exploitation of below-­the-­line workers so key to Hollywood’s numerous visual innovations. Namely, the protestors were upset in particular about the recent bankruptcy of the major visual effects company Rhythm and Hues, which had left hundreds of workers not only unemployed but also often still unpaid for weeks or months of work (including overtime and weekends). The timing of the protest was far from a coincidence, as Rhythm and Hues’ extensive postproduction work on high-­profile movies Life of Pi and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) were two of the major visual effects achievements being honored that night by the Academy. It was also troubling that the company risked going under given that its work on such high-­profile studio films had been so consistently well received within the industry and at the box office. The deeper problem, though, was not just with the studios or with that particular effects house. The controversy and the protests called renewed attention, however briefly, to a larger global economy of dispersed workers, contingent labor, and competitive bidding that has generally driven down the value of even highly skilled workers. Similar concerns undergirded the 2007–­8 Writers Guild Association strike, where entertainment writers and their allies fought against the shifting monetary value of their work and the increased opportunities for exploitation in an age of digitally distributed content. The studios and networks, however, were quick to strike back: “The net effect of the strike [was] to exacerbate and accelerate all the ominous trends that already were looming over the writing trade. Talk to writers, agents, or company dealmakers and you learn that pay levels are declining, jobs are dwindling and overall deals are on the endangered list.”51

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The failure of Rhythm and Hues also highlighted the importance of those whom the studios are so dependent on in an age dominated, and sustained, by a steady stream of CGI blockbuster content across multiple media platforms. Despite the fact that special effects are arguably the star attraction of so many high-­profile pictures, the companies that create them, on the average, see only a measly 5 percent return on income relative to production costs—­assuming they can even find projects to work on.52 The considerable profits that the studios earn on these blockbusters never filter down to the anonymous, below-­the-­line laborers most responsible for the achievements in question. Meanwhile, the increasing postproduction work on so many effects-­driven movies requires a far greater time commitment from directors and cinematographers, meaning they can take on fewer projects overall even as their fee for each job also goes down.53 In the case of both high-­profile artists and those more quietly working in the VFX shops, studios are increasingly content to go with less proven talent that will require less compensation. Without exploited laborers above and below the line, the (post)modern studio product dies very quickly, taking the endlessly lucrative ancillary products with it. Meanwhile, more ironic and puzzling than the bittersweet fact that Life of Pi won a well-­deserved Oscar for Best Visual Effects was that it also won Best Cinematography, despite the fact much of the film’s glorious visuals were not captured in camera by the director of photography but painstakingly created in postproduction by some of the very same people who were unpaid and now unemployed. (This echoed a similar complaint around Avatar’s win for Best Cinematography several years earlier; both were visually stunning movies, to be sure, but ones whose principal photography was shot heavily on blue-­screen soundstages and whose “look” came much later, in postproduction.) Cinematographer Christopher Doyle infamously went on a rant to an interviewer afterward regarding the Oscar win for colleague Claudio Miranda on Life of Pi. Doyle noted (perhaps excessively) that “since 97 per cent of the film is not under his control, what the fuck are you talking about cinematography, sorry. I’m sorry. . . . I think it’s a fucking insult to cinematography.”54 The ontological distinction here, to be clear, is not between the film medium and digital video, the relationship that otherwise structures much of this book. The emphasis here is on what was recorded on set during that day’s shooting—­either on video or celluloid, which is the cinematographer’s job—­versus what was added to the image after that fact by VFX artists, animators, and other digital intermediate technicians, a process called the “digital workflow,” over which DPs have varying degrees of control. Despite his harsh words, meanwhile, Doyle was careful not to target Miranda personally (though he did imply he wouldn’t have accepted the award himself) but rather the Academy voters, whom he said have “no fucking idea what cinematography is. . . . The award is given to the technicians, to the producers, it’s not



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to the cinematographer.”55 In the digital age the distinction between cinematography and digital intermediate work has become increasingly muddled for many, even for those individuals within the industry voting for the awards, who should presumably know better. This debate, meanwhile, has been going on at least as far back as the controversy around Roger Deakins’s work on the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). A stunningly lush, sepia-­toned vision of the 1930s American South, O Brother was a classic “nostalgia film” in Jameson’s sense of the term—­a deeply idealized and stylized vision of the region whose golden look was explicitly intended to evoke feelings of old paintings and photographs. The images’ stunningly warm gloss, meanwhile, was not achieved through careful filter and color tests by the DP but entirely through digital intermediates, which converted the rather unremarkable, even drab, footage shot on location to the iconic images that audiences see today. It was thus one of the first Hollywood films to use digital intermediates to adjust the look of every frame of the film, and it wasn’t until Deakins was nominated for Best Cinematography that year that the irony of his achievement was noticed. And it may be a testament, finally, to the lack of attention and respect paid to behind-­the-­camera and below-­the-­ line laborers—­the very fact that motivated the 2013 Oscar protests in the first place—­that this debate remains as unnoticed and unaddressed in the popular media as it was a dozen years earlier. This would reiterate how the larger public’s general awareness of the latest innovations in 3D and CGI spectacles is more the result of industrial promotion than technical knowledge. Of course, what was going on with the Life of Pi protests was simply a microcosm of the larger economic issues at stake in Hollywood’s postindustrial economy, which is partly why the entire effects and animation community was so quick to rally behind its colleagues at Rhythm and Hues. Ultimately, the debate, at least at the Oscar level, will center on redefining what “work” in filmmaking means in the digital age. The current buzzword, workflow, according to film critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, refers to “the relationship between production and postproduction—­shooting and editing. A workflow encompasses everything from the hard drives on which image data is recorded to the final delivery of the film for distribution. Workflow theories emphasize flexibility and maneuverability.”56 There is a continuous, fluid assembly line, a flow, from production to post and, in short, often no clear boundaries anymore between profilmic and postfilmic elements, that which was captured in camera and that which was added by digital intermediates later. For Vishnevetsky the question is largely an aesthetic one, however, exploring how the workflow affects editorial decisions made on set by digital proponents such as Steven Soderbergh and David Fincher, as well as the endless possibility of changes available once principal photography has officially wrapped. In reflecting further on the

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concept, however, Shaviro has added that “film and videomakers employ workflow methods in order to save time and money, cut corners, and respond quickly to frequent demands from clients,” tying this issue back to deeper questions involved in the cultural logic of late capitalism.57 In this regard the idea of “workflow” is ironic: recent developments are tied as much to minimizing work as to the real human labor that comes with it. The idea of the workflow, meanwhile, gives greater clarity to Rodowick’s controversial reading of one of the most prominent early examples of a movie shot on digital video, 2002’s Russian Ark. An astonishing meditation on centuries of Russian history within the haunted walls of the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum, the film is perhaps most famous today for being the only feature-­length movie shot in one continuous single take. It is a temporally ironic sense of the long take—­the use of continuous duration to capture a nonchronological view of Russia’s rich, overlapping past. The movie was successfully completed on the fourth take, the camera wandering for an hour and a half through the halls of the museum, encountering famous figures from Russian history in a semirandom fashion. Yet, ironically for Rodowick, the fact that it was a single take gives him occasion to reflect on the malleable ontology of the digital image; in short, is it really “one” take when the raw footage shot that day in fact required extensive postproduction work, everything from major, noticeable visual effects to minor, unseen, color and focus corrections? Instead, Rodowick argues, the movie should be regarded as a work of “spatial montage,” since every moment within the long take was not capturing a single event in continuous space and time but rather discrete elements carefully recombined in postproduction. It is a deeply counterintuitive, knowingly polemical, move to argue that the digital image, even a long take, cannot convey time through its nature as a series of ones and zeroes that are captured as information, stored, and then recombined later to give the impression of continuity and duration. For some, this might seem a purely (arbitrary) theoretical point based entirely on how much one privileges the ontological distinction between celluloid’s old Bazinian indexical realism, on the one hand, and digital media’s technical emphasis on an explicit form of simulating the real, on the other (while Francesco Casetti has usefully reminded us how cinematic “realism” in the digital age is, as it always was, a product of several discursive contexts).58 Yet the attention to spatial montage becomes more interesting when we consider how it anticipates the ontological anxieties that take center stage in the current age of digital workflows—­in particular, the increasing centrality of postproduction in the filmmaking process. Rodowick’s argument, ultimately, is not an evaluative one (which medium is better? Is Russian Ark a “great” achievement?) but a technical one. The idea of the spatial montage was largely predicated on the provocative, but perfectly valid, idea that our traditional definition



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of a “shot” (or of a “profilmic” event) would become essentially meaningless in a digital age where all images are first and foremost data and information—­an assertion that seems not only plausible in the age of workflows but, more likely, a given. I invoke Rodowick’s discussion of Russian Ark here for other reasons as well. For one, the movie itself offers another instance of the profound importance of nostalgia as an anchor during great change. Revealed through a melancholic haze, the imagined stability of prominent Russian historical events, as well as the older “medium” of theater, which the movie’s elaborate real-­time staging ironically evokes, guides the audience (like an ark) through the radically new and strange deployment of this remarkable technological innovation. For another, Rodowick’s own reading of the movie, and the larger argument he posits about celluloid’s “virtual life” in the digital age, is inherently a nostalgic one. At one point Rodowick finally admits late in The Virtual Life of Film that “I do find it difficult to overcome my nostalgia for the analogical world (and it is in the nature of analogical worlds to provoke a yearning for the past)”59—­though, as I have said, he is careful to add that he is not making an evaluative distinction. In a later article he expanded on the idea, noting that “my love and nostalgia for the 35mm image was never greater than when I realized it was lost irretrievably”;60 here, he highlights the necessity of loss, of permanent absence, which is key to nostalgic appeals. In the era of workflows and intermediates there is unquestionably a nostalgia for the analog at the heart of these desires to hold on to what a “shot” once meant, although—­as the debates above imply about who deserves an Oscar and about how to adequately compensate VFX and animation workers—­it’s a desire with very real material implications.

The “Death” of Film The notion of film’s death lies at the center of Rodowick’s discussion of its resurrection in a “virtual” life in the age of digital cinema, essentially a specter that will continue to haunt how movies are made and distributed long after it’s gone. Meanwhile, nostalgia itself is inherently a by-­product of mortality. Certainly, the idea of the “death” of film is an old one, going back at least as far as Susan Sontag’s famous lament at the end of the twentieth century, although the death she was imagining was more the death of a particular kind of moviegoing experience—­an older generation of cinephilia—­in an age dominated by what she saw as forgettable, cookie-­cutter blockbusters. More broadly, death was always at the center of (cinematic) representation, from André Bazin’s notion of movies as “death masks” to Laura Mulvey’s meditation on the death of the film medium and its indexical relation to the history of the twentieth century. At the advent of digital cinema’s emergence Mulvey looked back to the temporal and resurrecting

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power of celluloid: “to see the [movie] star on the screen in the retrospectives that follow his or her death is also to see cinema’s uncertain relation to life and death. Just as cinema animates still frames, so it brings back to life, in perfect fossil form, anyone it has ever recorded, from great star to fleeting extra.”61 Film’s relationship to mortality was about preserving life (before death). This always existed in tension with the experiential presence of death with which old films confront us—­that audiences are literally watching the reanimation of a dead person at twenty-­four frames per second. There was also the more abstract notion of a film’s indexicality existing in a paradoxical temporal relation to that which it captured, photographing not a moment per se but more precisely the moment’s passing. In the digital age, at least, the idea of film’s death has a more literal quality. This tension rests at the core of David Cronenberg’s remarkable short-­subject digital movie Camera (2000) (fig. 4), which straddles the line between film and digital video with a knowing meditation on “death,” celluloid, and mediation at the turn of the century. Shot almost entirely on an earlier generation of digital video (which, like Russian Ark’s equally primitive DV, always already itself carries now the affect of past time), the movie follows kids around a house as they haul a 35 mm camera in and prepare to shoot a scene with the veteran actor Les Carlson, while he speaks to the audience. Camera is a movie expressly about time. Clearly showing on his face the wear and tear of almost seven decades, Carlson plays an older actor (maybe himself) who thinks back on his long life in mediation and how representation made him older and more aware of his age. As kids run around, he sits at a kitchen table, waiting

Figure 4. David Cronenberg’s Camera (2000) is a brilliant early meditation on the “death” of film in the digital age and of cinema’s relationship to mortality in general.



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for them to photograph him with the 35 mm camera. “One day,” he says to open the short, “the children brought home an old camera.” He later mentions again that the camera is old and that “the camera itself had aged.” By “growing old together” with the camera, Carlson also suggests that time passing is captured in the reproduction and vice versa. “I used to be an actor,” Carlson adds, emphasizing again his age; “the best days are behind me.” Carlson displays anxiety about the kids playing with the camera. “If you look at it in a cold light,” he says, as a cold light bounces off the overlit background and onto the harshness of the digital image, “Photography is death. It’s all about death. Memory and desire . . . aging . . . and death.” He emphasizes that this is all the more haunting for an actor, someone who sees himself forever shown back to himself in “younger” representation, as though he is always looking back into frozen mirrors. “I had a dream,” he admits quietly, “a long time ago, before I had achieved anything professionally. I dreamt I was in the cinema, watching a movie with an audience. And suddenly I realized I was aging rapidly, growing horribly old as I sat there. It was the movie that was doing it. I had caught some kind of disease from the movie and it was making me grow old, bringing me closer and closer to death. I woke up terrified. Look at me now,” he then says; “look where I am now.” Through the awareness of mortality that haunts him, his dream and the medium of celluloid, he implores the audience to somehow see time: “You see? The dream is coming true.” The image of Camera as a movie is not merely representing age but creating age in Carlson, accelerating his awareness of his own aging in the knowing juxtaposition of his always already aging with the fixed past self onscreen. This is articulated in perhaps the movie’s most notable line: “When you record the moment,” he says, “you record the death of the moment.” The moment is frozen in the image, but as that moment is continually replayed, an affect of time is generated anew. In this respect Camera becomes a useful example of reflective nostalgia, perhaps, as it details an older man’s awareness of how images mediate the spaces between the melancholies of the present and a fractured, lost past. The moment of him in the movie becomes increasingly that which is present and that which passes to the past in the present. Camera ends with a shot of Carlson being photographed with the 35 mm camera; its soft, glossy, professional look (which one might normally associate with an uncritical nostalgia) ironically contrasts strikingly, even grotesquely, with the harsh immediacy of the digital camcorder. It is fitting precisely because Carlson repeats the film’s opening lines—­“one day, the children brought home an old camera.” By reserving the grotesqueness of film’s look for this final shot—­the moment we become most acutely aware of Carlson’s acknowledgment of his own mortality—­Camera highlights how the death of the film medium, along with the passing of the attendant twentieth century, had already occurred; it also calls into question our older indexical assumptions,

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wherein the warm ontology of film, which audiences were once used to as a movie’s “typical” look, is rewritten as being just as artificial as the ugliness of early digital video.

Zodiac: The Banality of Digital Pastiche Death and nostalgia, meanwhile, take on a much different mask in another important early digital movie. In his recent book Digital Visual Effects in Cinema Stephen Prince notes that Zodiac (2007) “is a historically important film because it places digital effects in the service of banality rather than spectacle.”62 This retelling of the true story of the Zodiac killings in the San Francisco Bay area during the 1960s and 1970s was a landmark achievement in the early history of digital cinema, yet it seems mostly memorable for its rather dry procedural account of those historical events, coupled with its lack of a clear narrative resolution (just as the murders themselves were never legally solved). Indeed, most people probably don’t even notice the first time they watch it how much of the movie is digital—­not only the then-­cutting-­edge use of 2K digital cinematography to shoot the movie but the often very subtle use of CGI to re-create virtual sets and landscapes from the time period. Some moments in the narrative clearly announce themselves as elaborate digital effects, such as the tour-­ de-­force time-­lapse photography construction of the Transamerica Building. Yet others, such as an establishing shot of the San Francisco Pier or the location of the early taxicab murder—­both were entirely computer-­generated—­make little attempt to announce themselves as the cutting-­edge digital spectacles they were. While technological innovations in the cinema often depend on promoting their own achievements (not merely for self-­congratulation but also to lure audiences), Zodiac seemed generally content to embrace and foreground the most mundane aspects of its story. Despite its grim subject matter Zodiac is a thoroughly nostalgic text, reflecting something of director David Fincher’s own childhood memories of living through this tense time in the city. The connection between the reassurance of childhood nostalgia and the horrors of serial killers is not as far-­fetched as it might seem; nostalgia is often tied to both childhood (literally or symbolically), on one end, and an inherent fear of mortality, on the other, thus causing a retreat into the seeming simplicity of an endlessly renewable past. The film’s opening Fourth of July sequence, a classic American nostalgia ritual of holiday celebration, presents San Francisco in a loving haze, covered with the warm glow of fireworks, as the camera wanders through a typical tract of late-­1960s suburbia. The anxiety over the impending violence, foreshadowed and intensified by lyrics from the song “Easy to Be Hard” (“How can people be so heartless? / How can people be so cruel?”) playing on the soundtrack, merely highlights further this



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nostalgic image of a (lost) childhood paradise about to be violently disrupted. The song from the musical Hair, meanwhile, is not only historically appropriate but also a meditation on the dangers of obsession (the film’s dominant theme), as well as the frustration with one’s attention and affection going unnoticed as a result. The feeling of being ignored is a classic childhood reaction. The rest of the film, meanwhile, navigates this fine line between the horror of the Zodiac killings and the idyllic digital re-creation of 1970s San Francisco they threatened. The decision to extensively use such digital technologies in Zodiac was both aesthetic and practical. On the one hand, the elaborate use of CGI imagery throughout the movie to digitally render San Francisco from that period was largely based on Fincher’s obsessive desire to re-create parts of the city with as much historical accuracy as possible rather than simply set-­dressing locations today. The latter would have been not only much cheaper but also just as effective for most audiences. We see here again the “banality” of otherwise spectacular visual effects on display. On the other hand, shooting Zodiac on digital video was far more practical than shooting on film for Fincher, an early and vocal proponent of digital cinematography (a position that seems less rooted in aesthetic questions and more in his impatience on set and distrust of cinematographers). Yet even the soft yellow glow of the 2K image—­more easily prone to capturing light than the sharp contrast of film—­paradoxically creates a nostalgic haze; the traditional overlighting of digital video is here reappraised to create a warm sepia veneer. Finally, the attention to a historically authentic re-­ presentation of late 1960s/1970s San Francisco in Zodiac is somewhat ironic, given that the film also has a distinctly postmodern notion of history; that is to say, the sense of San Francisco’s past here is mediated through older films as much as through archival research. One could argue that—­from at least the glory days of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958)—­San Francisco is America’s most cinematic city, even more so than New York—­from Bullitt (1969) to Star Trek IV (1986). We see this in the film’s explicit nod to Dirty Harry (1971), for which Zodiac has both affection and criticism insofar as the early Clint Eastwood movie not only defined this moment of the city’s history in the public imagination but also distorted the police procedures that went into the actual investigation. This cinephiliac impulse also manifests itself in the implication that the Zodiac Killer himself was influenced by The Most Dangerous Game (1932), as well as its own auteurist intertextual relation to Fincher’s other famous serial killer film, Se7en (1995). Moreover, Julie Turnock has argued that Zodiac’s cinematography is a classic example of the “photorealism” she equates with 1970s Hollywood cinema in general, a highly artificial cinematic style that audiences have been conditioned to read as “realistic.” This pseudorealism “developed at the time [of New Hollywood] to accentuate—­not hide—­the process of filming, and included such techniques as lens flares, handheld cameras, and rack focus.”63 The look of Zodiac is (in more

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ways than one) thoroughly cinematic, no matter its investment otherwise in the banality of historical documentation. At its cinephiliac core, then, rests another form of nostalgic pastiche—­the look of 1970s cinema as the decade of the 1970s, and vice versa—­in the age of late capitalism. Finally, this notion of pastiche—­of a dehistoricized, stylized, nostalgic romanticizing of the past—­moves us to the heart of the matter. Jameson’s idea of pastiche as an apolitical form of allusion has come under considerable scrutiny since its debut more than thirty years ago. While he posited that pastiche—­the cinematic deployment of random styles to connote pastness—­became a historical blockage for contemporary audiences to understand and explore the past, numerous critics have argued that it can open up an access to history as well. The central claims are primarily focused on the ways in which Jameson’s connection between “genuine” history and postmodernist art fails to account for the potential resistance within the historically specific circumstances of its production or reception. Most famously, Linda Hutcheon highlighted the importance of situating acts of parody within the social context of their actual use; postmodern art serves different functions for different audiences. “Even the most self-­conscious and parodic of contemporary works,” she wrote, “do not try to escape, but indeed foreground, the historical, social, ideological contexts in which they have existed and continue to exist.” Thus, “the past as referent is not bracketed or effaced, as Jameson would like to believe: it is incorporated and modified, given new and different life and meaning.”64 Most intriguing, the postmodern was always already a deeply historical project, Hutcheon argues, since it attempted to reclaim that sense of “genuine historicity” Jameson also sought as a reaction against its alter ego, modernism, itself a formalist project designed to efface history through the ideals of philosophical rationalism and scientific empiricism at the dawn of the machine age. Somewhere within the critical distance postmodernism sought from modernism through parody, its intense self-­reflexivity, was thus for Hutcheon the location of its political potential. The postmodern’s “deliberate refusal [to articulate a genuine historicity] is not a naive one: what postmodernism does is to contest the very possibility of there ever being ‘ultimate objects.’ ”65 Yet the question of what function, or potential, nostalgia itself serves in this context remains underexplored, which is no small matter since, as this book documents, apolitical forms of postmodern nostalgia have both exploded since and become so visible to the industry’s self-­theorizing sense of itself. In her one reference to nostalgia Hutcheon seems contemptuous of it as a valid aesthetic category: “what starts to look naive is this reductive notion that any recall of the past must, by definition, be sentimental nostalgia.”66 Though she resists Jameson’s use of the phrase to describe the postmodern’s relationship to history, the critique is centered more on the reactionary idea that nostalgia is inherently destructive (or just “sentimental”)



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than on the more rewarding idea that nostalgia itself may have more ambivalent definitions than just being relegated back to its marginal critical status as little more than a degenerative obsession with the past. Thus, Vera Dika attempted to revive the value of nostalgia and pastiche as part of a broader discussion of Jameson that affirms much of what he argued, while nonetheless creating a space for critical resistance. Like Hutcheon she suggests that the “actual practice [of the nostalgia film] has not yet been closely described.”67 Dika takes at face value the postmodern assumption that we are not only a hypermediated society of images but that the point of resistance is located within the self-­aware recycling of particular past texts. Thus the nostalgia film can retain its resistant potential through the ironic juxtaposition, or opposition, within competing forms of past (cinematic) history. For Dika American Graffiti (1974) is not simply a surface recycling of “1950s-­ness” since its style and sensibility are often in tension with actual 1950s coming-­of-­age movies (such as Rebel without a Cause). Instead, an unresolved tension exists between the historical image and the personal memories of its targeted audience: “It is precisely this conflict between memory and history—­the tension that comes from the juxtaposition of the coded material against the historical context of the film itself—­that encourages a new set of meanings to arise. Seen in this clash, American Graffiti has the structure of irony, producing a feeling of nostalgia but also of pathos, and registering the historical events as the cause of an irretrievable loss.”68 Throughout many of these discussions of pastiche one is increasingly struck by the idea that it is not nostalgia that lacks a clear definition; “history” itself is also what remains undefined when articulating the new nostalgia mode in popular culture today. While the aesthetics of nostalgia in cinema have been explored with increasing detail and specificity, what might constitute a meaningful form of historical consciousness, as the postmodern initially sought, has been left behind. Certainly, as the respective pastiche of Zodiac, The Artist, Oz, Hugo, and Get a Horse shows, history does not fully exist outside its mediation; this is precisely the challenge. Yet the persistence of trying to approach it through the cinematic image, or through audiences’ affective responses (which are crucial but fragmentary), only perpetuates the same unresolved issues. Or, in a way, it affirms the point about surfaces in the age of late capitalism more so than refutes it. In the end “history” in the postmodern age, in which the nostalgia film is permanently entangled, could be approached through a revived focus on media industry studies, wherein one form of historical consciousness beyond the image can be envisioned. This means an attention not only to individual production histories but also to the larger historical narratives, the economic mythologies, of Hollywood itself. This becomes intensified by the turn away from the film medium in an age of digital cinema, whose innovations renew attention to these histories but whose immateriality also further effaces them.

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The End of Participatory Culture Another often-­embraced defense of audience potential in an age of pastiche, finally, was Richard Dyer’s challenge in his book of the same name. His goal was to “rescue pastiche from postmodernism.”69 In his powerful reading of Far from Heaven (2002), a nostalgic film par excellence as it alludes to Douglas Sirk’s stylized vision of 1950s America, Dyer confesses to being deeply moved by the movie, despite its admittedly “dehistoricized” take on its subject matter. “A pastiche like Far from Heaven,” he writes, “may also serve as a reminder that what we know of the past, above all the feelings of the past, we know through the art that is left behind”70—­an idea that even something as historically faithful as Zodiac seems invested in. The idea Dyer promotes is that we can still affectively engage with the past through pastiche, that we can feel if not what it was like to be in the 1950s then at least what it was like to be a 1950s moviegoer or maybe just what it was like watching 1950s movies. This idea is predicated on being aware of the imitation, he adds, of the space between the imitation and that which it is imitating. This is a deeply historical project, meanwhile, where “the most valuable point of pastiche resides in its ability to move us even while allowing us to be conscious of where the means of our being moved [the imitation] comes from, its historicity.”71 Here, to be aware of past texts necessitates being aware of the past’s inherent mediation. The profound beauty of Richard Dyer’s writing over the years often has been displayed in his ability to connect his own idiosyncratic, deeply affective, engagements with cinema to broader claims regarding film and cultural theory. From his discussion of stars to whiteness to classic Hollywood musicals, Dyer has repeatedly demonstrated a singular ability to show how (his) personal is indeed political. But in his discussion of Far from Heaven and pastiche that connection does not hold. Dyer himself admits that his own interpretation of the film is highly subjective, yet he tries to make a generalizing claim nonetheless. But his momentary reservation is telling; one could reasonably assume that a man as accomplished and brilliant as Dyer would, for any number of personal and scholarly reasons, react to Far from Heaven as powerfully as he did. Yet what of the (countless) number of others among the general audience who came to the same movie without Dyer’s specific background? The history Dyer feels would most likely be completely lost on most of them, as well as the distinction between the imitation and the thing being imitated. Criticisms of Jameson’s definition of pastiche are generally too dependent on an active, informed spectator—­a utopic belief (only intensified in the age of convergence culture) that is far less resilient when applied in its broad generalizations than Jameson’s admittedly dystopic assumptions are in his. Such critiques reflect the last gasp of an outdated “participatory” model, which celebrated viewers as dynamic, engaged, and equal participants in the



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construction of a text’s meaning. And I’ll be the first to admit that much of my approach in this specific context is shaped to a great extent by my past research on Song of the South fandom (fig. 5). Song of the South is a racist anachronism, an “Uncle Tom” Plantation musical from the 1940s, that Disney has wisely kept in its “Vault” for the last thirty years. Song of the South is itself an example of pastiche—­a romanticized vision of the Old South with no actual connection to nineteenth-­century plantation culture. Awareness of its offenses is nothing new, but what is more recent is the astonishing commitment to historical revisionism that its most hard-­core supporters promote. In my book I held out hope while documenting defenses of the film that such people meant well and were generally open-­minded, even inquisitive, about the film’s actual histories—­despite the overwhelming evidence that the most vocal Song of the South fans are near uniformly, willfully ignorant and even at times outright mean-­spirited. Such beliefs were confirmed by reactions to the book’s appearance, which was often dominated by the worst kinds of anti-­intellectualism and reactionary attitudes too common amid our pop culture landscape today. Song of the South defenses are guilty of a deep ahistoricism promoting the myths that, among others, “Uncle Walt” meant well, that the film was “acceptable” in 1946, and worst of all, that it actually promotes

Figure 5. Disney’s Song of the South (1946) elicits disturbing questions about not only

nostalgia’s reactionary relationship to history but also general audiences’ inability to engage with complicated historical questions beyond the film’s reassuring white nostalgia.

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positive race relations, despite no hard historical evidence to support any of those claims. It is all, at best, nostalgic wishful thinking, a particularly corrosive instance of restorative nostalgia that masquerades as “truth” and “tradition.” So, how do such defenses of Song of the South relate back to Dyer’s point about pastiche? I argue here that, in their own admittedly extreme way, these kinds of fan discourses are far more common, more representative, of a “typical” audience member than anything put forth in Pastiche. There is no “active” engagement here on the part of a majority of Song of the South (and Disney) fans, other than the occasional commitment to ignorance. For one thing, there is the utter lack of anything approaching historical consciousness; defenders show little, often no, interest in the film’s actual production and reception histories, a messy and complicated discussion of which they want no part. In its place is a nostalgic fantasy about Uncle Walt with little historical depth. For another, many defenses of the film simply regurgitate standard industry and promotional rhetoric—­that the movie is just a heart-­warming, positive, happy, musical form of light entertainment not intended for any kind of serious thought, or some variation thereof. Are all audiences like this? No, and I’m not making that claim. But what I am arguing is that such passivity, at best, is more representative of most audiences’ engagement with pastiche. Within the specific context of home-­ movie viewing, Francesco Casetti poses a rhetorical question with broader implications: At a time when the spectator seems to become more “active,” what is really her/ his degree of freedom? . . . Subjects often “invent” ways of building their “own” experience. This invention can be seen as a negative act (when they give up the linear viewing of a film and simply linger on privileged clips), and as a positive spectatorial proactiveness (when they use home theatre systems to reintroduce a certain sacredness to the act of viewing). Such creativity is, however, ambiguous. It is often simply an execution of pre-­established rules (DVDs allow—­and actually anticipate—­viewing “in pieces”). Creativity is often also dictated by nostalgia (the “sacred” value of viewing is no longer on the agenda).72

Most audiences engage with Hollywood texts more or less the way studios and their direct and indirect self-­theorizing circles (trade discourses, promotional rhetoric, fan bases) want them to, oftentimes aided further by some manner of nostalgic reassurance. Added to that, too many people equate the simple act of watching an old movie today with the more arduous task of actually doing film history; and, related to that, too many people equate their own personal interpretation of an old movie with a properly historical one. This is perhaps the ultimate nostalgic vision of history in the age of



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participatory culture: one’s own present feelings take precedence over all other considerations. Lest this conversation become a bit too dystopic, let me take a step back to reiterate that there are no doubt many instances of the kind of critical engagement with pastiche that Dika and Dyer promote. But, as with all instances of reflective nostalgia, their potential is the rare exception that proves the rule. Thus I hold on to older notions of pastiche (and postmodernism) because of the broader economic and cultural questions they provoke about nostalgia. Jameson’s notion of postmodernism works best as a polemic—­a to some degree simplified, but generally on-­the-­nose, discussion of what it means to talk about “history” within a general loss of historical consciousness in our postmodern pop-­culture landscape, and which the challenges to it have more often affirmed than refuted in the last three decades. This is, sadly, one lesson to take away from the deep historical ignorance—­including “well-­intentioned” ones—­of so many Song of the South defenses (to say nothing of many discussions about race in the United States which have left the hard-­fought lessons and messy histories of the civil rights movement behind in favor of the kind of utopic and nostalgic appeals to a “postracial” society). Thus, despite the needed attention to historical context that both Hutcheon’s and Dyer’s admirable critiques promote, this centrality of individual agency seems itself a bit utopic, particularly given that in the decades since then parody and other forms of imitation have become increasingly internalized as part of Hollywood’s “self-­theorizing” business strategy (rather than, as Hutcheon championed, primarily an artistic weapon for marginalized voices). Too often, the critical potential or goal of the nostalgia film, its “deliberateness,” is muddled at best, especially as it deflects the key issue of postmodernism as an aesthetic expression of late capitalism.

Archaeologies of the Future What follows is a brief sketch of Flickers of Film’s several chapters, which in their own ambivalent ways extend from the core ideas outlined above, constituting one long, highly idiosyncratic, line of flight. The first one, “I’ll (Always) Be Back,” explores the phenomenon of the “synthespian” (or the virtual actor), a composite of motion-­capture performance and postproduction animation to create a virtual performance. One prominent example is the virtual Arnold Schwarzenegger (fig. 6) first seen in Terminator: Salvation (2009) and later in Terminator: Genisys (2015)—­a remarkable achievement whereby the aging actor is brought back to his youthful iconic role via the latest advancements in CGI. It is here that I revisit Rosen’s theory of the “forecast” rhetoric, or the “not yet,” as a viable means to historicize the age of digital cinema. More than a decade ago Rosen argued that discussions of technological innovations tended to emphasize what could happen

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Figure 6. “Virtual performances” such as the young Arnold Schwarzenegger in recent

Terminator movies (2009, 2015) serve as useful metaphors for the value of labor in the age of digital late capitalism.

over what was actually occurring. Yet in this chapter I seek to put past visions of the forecast in dialogue with what has happened since. For example, I look back to Looker (1981), a dystopic, self-­theorizing vision of the relationship between digital performances, advertising culture, mediated politics, and late capitalism that looks far more prescient today than its absurd satire of such issues at the time would have allowed. It is this rethinking of a “not yet” dialogue—­between recent developments in both postmodernism and digital cinema and their historical parallels two and three decades ago—­that structures much of this book. The next chapter, “They Saw No Future,” explores more closely the historical parallels that opened this introduction—­namely, the call-­backs in recent 3D digital productions to early periods of cinematic innovation (early cinema, the sound transition). I look in particular at the wave of new nostalgia movies that garnered significant attention in 2011—­Midnight in Paris, The Artist, and, especially, Hugo. Each movie romanticizes an early moment in cinephiliac history as a means to comment on the current sense of film nostalgia in the digital age. As nostalgia is often most intense during periods of great change, these three films predictably look back to the last period of profound aesthetic and economic revolution (primarily, the sound transition of the late 1920s) to alleviate current anxieties about the digital transition. But they should be read in dialogue with recent industrial shifts as well. Hugo’s role as a prominent 3D spectacle within the theatrical exhibition conversion to Digital Cinema Packages (DCPs), along with its and The Artist’s respective fantasies of resilient labor during a deep economic crisis, are both worth revisiting. Hugo’s pronounced celebration of film preservation in the digital age, meanwhile, echoes into the next chapter, “Digital Decasia,” where I look at the ways in which old movies both are (and are not) preserved in our modern moment,



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while also offering a broader discussion of how limited our access to film history is today, recalling a postmodern historical consciousness wherein we’re condemned to access the past through mediation and representation. Too often, utopic rhetoric about the digital age promotes the notion of a seemingly endless pool of old films accessible through a quick keyword search, even though “of course, only a small percentage of titles are actually available, which is part of the problem.”73 Much of this chapter also concerns Lobster Films’ remarkable digital restoration of Méliès’s long-­thought-­lost color print of A Trip to the Moon (1902). The restoration was an ironic one: in a state of rapid decay, the print had to be destroyed by film preservationists in order to copy its remaining fragments to digital files, where—­using intermediates and other copies of the film as a guide—­an essentially all new, entirely digital version of the color print was created inside a computer. It becomes an interesting literalization of Boym’s notion of reflective nostalgia, where the idea is less about reclaiming a vanishing past than on using fragments of the past, and the sense of loss that comes with them, to construct a better future. That chapter ends on a particularly illuminating example of decay—­not a century-­old film print but the much more recent Pixar debut, Toy Story, the original files of which were nearly lost to technical obsolescence just a few years after its first theatrical appearance. It is a reminder of how unstable the digital ultimately is as a storage device, which also serves as a metaphorical commentary on its relationship to cinematic history in a broader sense. Building on that discussion of Toy Story, the next chapter revisits the studio history of Pixar itself—­from its uninspiring beginnings as a wing of Lucasfilm to its singular status today, for better and for worse, as a leading presence in digital animation and as one of the most popular entertainment brands in the world. No subject today may better embody the contradictions I am exploring in this book: “although Pixar Animation’s corporate identity has long been tied to the studio’s advancement of digital animation technologies,” Montgomery writes, “many of Pixar’s films paradoxically seem to highlight, and even champion, disused, archaic, and obsolete technologies over their digital successors.”74 Moreover, no subject highlights the tensions between the kind of restorative nostalgia that Pixar itself heavily promotes through its own self-­ theorizing movies and studio metanarratives, with the more resistant, ambivalent nostalgia that many people who grew up on Pixar feel today in the wake of its more recent, creatively uneven, output. This chapter resists the company’s nostalgic reimagining of its own history, while also analyzing its textual outputs’ long negotiation of nostalgia in increasingly self-­aware ways—­an uncritical reflexivity further intensified by the company’s desire to negotiate and promote its own critical and commercial success. A backdrop to this, meanwhile, is Pixar’s role (and digital imaging systems’ more generally) in the transition within Hollywood from a Fordist to a postindustrial production model of labor.

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Another context to Pixar’s success is of course the influence of its even more famous parent company, the Walt Disney Corporation. Thus, the next chapter, “TRON Legacies,” looks at Disney’s initially awkward engagement with participatory culture, transmedia franchising, and other economic changes in the age of digital cinema—­using as a focal case study the long and strange history of the TRON franchise. TRON went from a beloved, but anachronistic, cult relic from the earliest days of computer-­generated animation to Disney’s main initial foray into the modern age of “transmedia storytelling”—­the attempt to spread would­be blockbusters across multiple ancillary media markets (comics, videogames, social media, etc.). While the efforts to revitalize the old franchise were generally unsuccessful, its failure tells us much about how Hollywood has attempted to negotiate a powerful nostalgia for the 1980s that pervades a great majority of high-­profile films, while also reflecting in explicitly visual ways the affective power of such anachronistic nostalgia. TRON: Legacy was (and is) only one of a countless number of reboots, remakes, sequels, and prequels that continually attempt to exploit (as Pixar increasingly does today) the value of existing media franchises in ways that both foreground and elide their own nostalgia. We can certainly see this as a general lack of creativity. “Is there a spark of originality in any of these projects?” Dixon and Foster ask rhetorically. “Of course not, but that’s the point. They’re pre-­sold and they’ll probably sell.”75 This need for reassurance is magnified further by the risk involved when studios put several hundred million dollars into the production and promotion of a single movie. Yet I would push this a step further and suggest that this endless stream of repackaging in Hollywood is too often framed as a debate about originality at the expense of the much more elusive and powerfully real affect of nostalgia—­something TRON’s visual anachronisms in particular draw to the surface. Finally, Disney’s shrewd manipulation of the original film’s considerable cult following also says much about how such nostalgia might intersect in not necessarily healthy forms with Hollywood’s continued exploitation of free fan work in a way that older models of “participatory culture” fail to articulate and echoes with other accounts in the book of the general devaluing of one’s labor in the age of digital late capitalism. Finally, the last chapter, “Game (Not) Over,” continues the TRON line of flight by exploring the equally important role of video games in various recent movies that are in some sense nostalgic for that same era of early CGI and public gaming arcades. For decades TRON was more readily recognized as a video game than as a movie, while its computer graphics similarly anticipate both the look of later video games and the increasing tendency in today’s era of media convergence for movies to look like games, and vice versa. Yet this final chapter does not celebrate the ways in which, as this might suggest, digital media have somewhat deemphasized medium specificity—­a common take on video-­game movies. Rather, I focus on instances of video-­game pastiche—­how the boundaries of



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outdated gaming forms are celebrated and foregrounded rather than erased—­in recent movies that involve games. In addition to TRON: Legacy I look at Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), Wreck-­It Ralph (2010), King of Kong (2007), and The Lego Movie (2014)—­all of which in very different ways owe their look to a kind of gaming anachronism, which nostalgic impulses further intensify. Yet, as the emphasis on pastiche suggests, these movies are all very carefully apolitical looks back to earlier media forms, using a nostalgic celebration of the surface histories of media transition to elude the attendant histories of late capitalism haunting them. This is most apparent in the questions of labor and consumerism, which some of these films erase in the process of their own occasional narrative highlighting. Still, the anachronism of video-­game pastiche in movies is a powerful one, paradoxically celebrating in nostalgic ways cinema’s continuing central role in an age of media convergence rather than announcing its imminent demise.

1 • I’LL ( ALWAYS) BE BACK Virtual Performances; or, The Cinematic Logic of Late Capitalism

[Computers] are indeed machines of reproduction rather than of production, and they make very different demands on our capacity for aesthetic representation than did the relatively mimetic idolatry of the older machinery of the futurist moment, of some older speed-­and-­energy sculpture. Here we have less to do with kinetic energy than with all kinds of new reproductive processes. —­Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism”

Philip Rosen wrote that attempts to understand digital media are often framed within a rhetoric of “not yet.”1 Critics and theorists, he observed, focus on what will or could happen in the future of technological developments rather than on what actually is occurring “now.” Yet in the ever-­advancing terrain of digital cinema this anticipatory logic of the “not yet” seems as ephemeral as that which innovation seeks, or sought, to overcome. While science fiction films have always heralded the arrival of technological futures that never quite come to pass (e.g., 2001), film theorists often underestimate the efficiency with which new innovations endlessly rewrite the art of the possible. Less than two decades ago, on the heels of George Lucas’s public embrace of a fully realized digital cinema, reasonable critics and scholars cautioned against absurd declarations that digital cameras would ever replace 35 mm ones—­in look or industry practice. Yet such seemingly clear-­eyed analysis already appears profoundly short-­sighted at a moment when major suppliers such as ARRI and Panavision have discontinued production of celluloid cameras and the visual distinctions between the two are effectively minimal by all practical considerations. 38



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Similarly, it was a decade ago, in The Virtual Life of Film, that D. N. Rodowick pointed out how “Cyberware  .  .  . [,] a company that specializes in three-­dimensional scanning and digitization of actors, assures us that Arnold Schwarzenegger will have a career as a ‘synthespian’ long after he has retired or passed on to the Chateau Marmont in the sky.”2 The timing proved extraordinary: while Rodowick’s account suggested a distant possibility, it would only be two years later before this was realized in Terminator: Salvation (2009) and then replicated again in Terminator: Genisys (2015). These two generally forgettable installments in the popular sci-­fi franchise featured yet another appearance of Schwarzenegger in his most iconic role: as a T-­101 cyborg, or the “Terminator.” The “performance” was memorable for one reason, which Rodowick’s anecdote anticipated: Schwarzenegger’s presence in Salvation was entirely digital, while the actual trick was a combination of profilmic and postproduction techniques (in Genisys, meanwhile, the actor himself reappeared to play alongside his virtual counterpart). Using a computer model based on an early 1990s body cast of the actor, the younger Schwarzenegger’s digital likeness was mapped in postproduction onto a model who served as a stand-­in during principal shooting. The creative decision in Salvation in particular was largely driven as a cinephiliac nod to fans of the originals, which otherwise bear little in common with the 2009 installment. It also more subtly acknowledged that the now sixty-­year-­old actor and former bodybuilder could no longer maintain the perfect, timeless, physique for which the Terminator is so well known. In the case of both nostalgic appeals to the 1980s and Schwarzenegger’s own material existence, there was an awareness of time irreversibly passed, even in the process of its own digital rebirth. Particularly notable, as well, was how incidental Schwarzenegger’s actual labor was to the process of producing his digital counterpart, as the actor’s own contribution to Virtual Arnold did not extend beyond granting permission to filmmakers to use his likeness. The brief appearance itself in Salvation is narratively excessive: it doesn’t advance any plot points (unlike in Genisys, where the presence of Virtual Arnold is key to its time travel revisionism). Understandably, the initial encounter with Virtual Arnold feels arbitrary, then, because it was; the filmmakers wanted to retain the possibility of cutting the scene later if the image and movement didn’t look quite convincing enough. It becomes a pure digital indulgence, the luxury of using an actor without actually using the actor—­a “virtual” performance in two senses of the word. It was not only digitally rendered, but it was also not really a performance in the traditional profilmic sense. More important, it signaled the latest evolution in a long line of attempts by filmmakers, producers of television shows, and ad agencies to use repurposed older footage of celebrities, both dead and alive, as the raw material with which to create a “new” performance digitally. This is only one part of a larger cycle in

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Hollywood blockbusters that increasingly replaces real humans in movies with partially or fully computer-­generated ones. Virtual performances began with the digital replacement of countless extras in large crowd scenes (e.g., Lord of the Rings)3 and of stunt performers involved in dangerous, at times even physically impossible, tasks (Spiderman). Yet as the potential for various forms of perceptual realism and photorealism evolved, technicians and artists increasingly explored the possibility of complex, individuated digital performances. “The virtual actor,” writes Dan North in an echo of the “not yet,” “has gained currency as a science fictional idea that technology is not yet equipped to deliver, but the possibility of its arrival is as significant as its actual creation could turn out to be.”4 North argues that discourses around the “synthespian” reflect a current iteration of the Frankenstein myth: “our own fear of replication and obsolescence, our replacement by digital constructs capable of outstripping our every capability and nuance.”5 This general cultural anxiety has long been a staple of the sci-­fi genre; however, there are also very real material considerations at work here. The actual task of constructing a virtual performance is heavily labor-­intensive, involving the work of numerous artists at multiple stages throughout the workflow process. And the idea of an eventually self-­aware, self-­sustaining synthespian that offers performances at the click of a button would seem to be an absurd technical impossibility that will never be achieved. Terminator: Salvation may be the most fully realized moment thus far of capitalism’s utopic intersection between dead stardom, living representation, spectacle as pure exchange value, and marginalized labor (both contained and concealed). The admittedly polemical focus in this chapter explores the cultural and economic implications of virtual characters, framing the phenomenon within the larger context of a postmodern media culture that privileges images as reality at the expense of historical consciousness. The dialectic between capital and labor becomes increasingly unmoored in the immateriality of the digital age, where the excesses of unwanted labor become further marginalized, to the point of spectacle (e.g., Madison, Wisconsin; Zuccotti Park). “The culture of the simulacrum comes to life,” Jameson wrote, “in a society where exchange-­value has been generalized to the point at which the memory of use-­value is effaced.”6 North and others have noted that the age of the synthespian isn’t quite upon us, yet the practice of virtual performances invites deeper consideration of the larger industrial contexts and historical logic underlining digital (postindustrial) Hollywood. What’s at stake here is less another account, let alone celebration, of the technological innovations at work behind such spectacles than a sustained look at the emerging shift to “posthuman” labor practices—­both in terms of the impact on actual material labor demands and in terms of the generally decreasing value of those who do and do not work in the industry.



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Dead Human Capital Computers, Jameson wrote, are “machines of reproduction rather than of production.”7 More so than other media that preceded them, computers function as a site as much for the symbolic and literal storage of existing labor as for creating opportunities for new production (this is not to say that the latter are insignificant, of course, only that computers radically shift the nature of production). While in hindsight one might fault Jameson for selling far too short the creative potential of new media technologies, my point is that the critical value of stored labor, which Jameson anticipated in the digital age, is a powerfully forceful one, which here operates on multiple levels. For example, once Schwarzenegger’s physical data was stored by Cyberware (itself an eerie parallel to the Cyberdyne corporation in Terminator 2: Judgment Day [1991]), his performance could be endlessly reused, and reimagined, for different roles. For Jameson human subjects, especially stars, are commodified by and through their own image; they increasingly become a site not of labor but of spectacle, endlessly recycled as pure exchange value. His infamous declaration of a “waning of (personal) affect” was rooted not simply in the death of a fixed individual subject but in the indistinction that comes from mass production, between origins and copies, between use value and exchange value. The postmodern waning of affect is, he wrote, “perhaps best initially approached by way of the human figure, and it is obvious that what we have said about the commodification of objects holds as strongly for [Andy] Warhol’s human subjects, stars—­like Marilyn Monroe—­who are themselves commodified and transformed into their own images.”8 More recently, North posited that the digital shift to synthespians is the inevitable outgrowth of Hollywood’s star-­driven economy: “the logical extension of an industry that has developed, over the decades, the art of manufacturing star images.”9 The potential for human subjects to become “commodified and transformed into their own images” only intensifies in the age of digital reproduction. Perfect copies are not only endlessly reproducible but are now open to practically infinite malleability, and their manipulation is always a reflection and perpetuation of late capitalism. The very notion of a “posthuman” form of labor, or of (sometimes literally) dead and stored human capital, highlights how objects of consumption become further removed from their original modes of production. If computers do indeed store various forms of dead labor, then the question becomes “What life does death have in the age of digital cinema?” Schwarzenegger himself will always be confronted with his own mortality every time he goes back to watch a copy of his younger self in the first Terminator, but his virtual selves in the newer movies take on a very different life of their own. The aura of watching the first Terminator film in another fifty years will be in its preservation

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of a young Arnold—­the perpetual presence of life. But we (or someone else) would also be seeing the presence of a dead man. With the endlessly reproductive and malleable potential of digital imaging technologies, the ontological distinction between life and death in representation becomes increasingly arbitrary, since there will no longer be a finite collection of (past) performances to preserve. The aura of Arnold in the original Terminator rests in the death of those moments that were captured on film in the 1980s; the exchange value of “Arnold” in Salvation, however, is defined by a program’s open-­ended capacity to keep giving us any possible performance that audiences are willing to pay for. Indeed, the explicit obsession with death proves consistent within the long history of virtual digital performances. It is not surprising that the earliest examples of this innovation were the recycling of footage of dead celebrities, such as Humphrey Bogart and Fred Astaire in otherwise forgettable 1990s television commercials. More recently, feature-­length films saw the digital revival of Marlon Brando in Superman Returns (2006) and Laurence Olivier in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), spectacles that Lisa Bode has provocatively called “posthumous” performances.10 Here, we see the digital insertion of old analog footage into new digital scenes in a way that is meant to create the self-­ referential illusion of a new performance from a quite dead star. Bode notes, too, that both films playfully acknowledge, in metatextual ways, the passing of their respective stars. Indeed, the acknowledgment of death becomes necessary to the novelty here. What would be the (selling) point of having a computer re-create the performance of someone still alive? Not only would it be more cost-­efficient to use a living actor, but it would also fail to transparently announce the novelty of its own production. Seeing Brando or Olivier again, within a new diegetic context, is its own self-­aware spectacle, since audiences have to wonder, and briefly admire, how they were brought “back to life.” These performances, Bode writes, are “of interest for how they disintegrate and reconstitute moving images of those we know to be dead.”11 She argues that the artifice of posthumous performances calls attention to the artifice of all cinematic performances, the fact that each one is always highly constructed out of individual moments and fragments (i.e., different takes on different days). This, too, would imply a breakdown in the distinction between alive and dead, between the value of a living actor and a dead one, provided that the dead one is a recognized star from Hollywood’s past.

The “Utopia” of Media Convergence The remarkably intensified history of electronic technology and its relation to labor, whether in Hollywood or in Detroit, has consistently demonstrated the interdependent relationship between innovation and the marginalization of human need (as in, the need for humans). While some more specialized jobs



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have certainly emerged, the larger workforce trends have been toward labor reduction and decreasing compensation. We have in CGI performances such as Virtual Arnold no less than the complete allegorical spectacularization, if not literally the execution, of old-­fashioned corporate downsizing—­where the one star is foregrounded at the expense of the many expendable, below-­the-­ line laborers sweating away, with little job security, to make it possible. Movie studios and television networks, writes John Caldwell, “justify downsizing as a way to realize greater efficiencies in the organization by eliminating dead wood, functional redundancies, union entitlements, or obsolete manufacturing processes.”12 Convenience and efficiency invariably present the necessity of extra people as a costly luxury or, worse, an unwanted annoyance standing in the way of progress. Costing less is invariably defined as the obligation to pay fewer people, which translates the disregard for human labor into savings. To push this to one possible extreme (no, “not yet”), we no longer even need actors, as Virtual Arnold suggests, performing in space and time to create the illusion of a performance; we no longer necessarily need people to see people. Of course, it remains extremely cost-­prohibitive to actually replace real actors with digital ones, as the Life of Pi (2013) controversy reminded us. A virtual army of artists and technicians was required to rebuild the original Terminator onscreen in Salvation while the “real” Arnold was off trying to crush California unions in his brief role as that state’s governor—­a performance far more destructive than his movies’ many immeasurable body counts. Yet the self-­ evident irony in those real-­life labor struggles is how much the value of actual work is concealed from the spectacle. The workers we don’t see (working in the studio) are more valued than the ones we do (labor supporters “complaining” on nightly TV news). At the same time, it’s not merely a matter of seeing but of the unseen, decreasing dependence on physical labor as a whole. Setting aside the immense logistics behind virtual performances, there is a more urgent and disturbing trend regarding the digital’s impact on labor. Whether discussing the fate of newspapers or auto assembly lines, technological advances may offer increased accessibility and affordability, but they also further marginalize the need for human labor and disrupt economic growth, particularly as it shuts down the flow of capital. One is reminded of the grotesque theme park display in Roger and Me (1989), where an audio-­animatronic auto worker sings in unison with the machine that replaced him and his production on the assembly line—­the “real” (unemployed) Michigan auto worker had been thus doubly replaced. The only thing more degrading than losing your first job to a robot would have to be paying good money to sit through the spectacle of your sad life story being performed by another one. First time, tragedy; second time, farce. That theme park, mercifully, closed soon enough; since nobody in Flint had a job anymore, there was no money to spend there. As less labor is required

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to perform material tasks, fewer people can maintain the income levels necessary for a sustainable life. Thus, more money flows to fewer and fewer people. On a broader scale this history may not be a profound revelation in the age of postindustrial, global capitalism—­particularly as media outlets increasingly explore the possible root causes of the United States’ continuing economic struggles. But what remains slightly disquieting is the extent to which filmmakers, producers, and other sections of the modern media industry continue to accept—­and even celebrate at the level of spectacle, or “access”—­such disturbing economic trends. The question of access may at first seem tangential to the issues of posthuman labor and digital effects, but it’s really another key way in which these industrial contexts and other discussions of the modes of production become further obscured. The idea that everyone can participate in the age of digital cinema represents the core utopic impulse of modern media convergence. This narrative of individualism persistently sells the notion of a more “democratic” relationship between consumers and producers as a result of advances in digital technologies. But even setting aside the significant question of who has access in the first place (as in, who has money in the first place), the notion of access creates a perceived culture of inclusion that makes it harder to see the rituals of exclusion around which Hollywood has always been structured. It also obfuscates how the so-­called democratization of film production and consumption in the digital age has instead “contribute[d] to a more fragmented, individualized media culture”13 (which, I would add, restricts dialogue and knowledge in the so-­called age of “participatory culture” as much as it enables it). DVDs and Blu-­rays are heavily marketed on the idea that they offer consumers more than just the movie itself; through making-­of documentaries, deleted scenes, and detailed commentaries from filmmakers, actors, critics, and historians, these elaborate and seductive packages sell audiences on the promise that they will know nearly as much as the filmmakers, as well as on the idea that they might be able to replicate those achievements. Chuck Tryon notes that “industry efforts to sell the DVD as a superior home format marketed it as inherently democratizing, both in terms of access to new films and in terms of access to new forms of knowledge.”14 The Terminator: Salvation disc, unsurprisingly, contains a seemingly endless supply of features on the production of its expensive, but generally commonplace (as the “typical” blockbuster goes), digital visual effects, including one dedicated just to the work on bringing Arnold back. Meanwhile, the availability of high-­definition, industry-­grade digital cameras in the consumer market, the widespread use of professional editing programs such as Final Cut Pro, and the user-­friendly distribution of YouTube and other file-­sharing programs collectively work to create a culture in which everyone can now imagine him-­or herself as an upstart filmmaker.



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Yet precisely because everyone can aspire to be a self-­sustaining auteur-­in-­ waiting, these opportunities and skills paradoxically conceal just how “worthless” their talents are (as in, the ubiquity of such cheap labor further drives down its value, regardless of how gifted many such young artists might be). Also, the feeling that everyone is a filmmaker obscures the efforts put in by those talented artists and technicians who have not only “broken into” the industry but actually produce quality work, such as those who worked on Virtual Arnold. The considerable accomplishments of virtual performances thus further lose their significance in a culture where access to a computer and enough money would appear to be sufficient to qualify one as a filmmaker. As Tryon also cautions, the promises of media convergence “invariably obscure the work of below-­the-­line laborers and, quite often, mask the fact that digital media has led to the increased use of non-­ union labor, often on a part-­time basis.”15 Thus, the wholly commodified ideal that “everyone” is now a part of the filmmaking experience, or at least that “everyone” can now have access to the knowledge, practices, and technology informing various forms of production, works to conceal how alienated most audiences are from the actual labor involved. The danger is in remystifying these spectacles as products of new innovation and unquestionably talented artists and technicians, without recognizing how such conditions have changed from the more labor-­ intensive days of the old Fordist studio system. Ironically, the public awareness of CGI’s overall potential, and of the wonders (if not the details) of postproduction digital work such as that done on Salvation, has put an end to the age-­old, predigital question: “How’d they do that?” Movie audiences today are generally savvy enough to know that films can in a sense “represent” anything the mind can imagine—­even to a fault—­as in they may assume the technology is far more advanced than it really is, while also becoming increasingly desensitized to the novelty of each new visual wonder (this may also explain the nostalgic turn back to emphasizing profilmic sets and practical, in-­camera effects in major Hollywood projects, such as the latest Star Wars trilogy [2015–­19]). Thus, we see an increasing indifference to the once awe-­inspiring final product, coupled with the ubiquity of self-­theorizing “behind the scenes” footage, which perhaps unintentionally naturalizes these achievements as routine rather than celebrates them as unique.

The Commodification of Virtual Performances The histories of virtual performance and capitalist consumption have long been explicitly tied. As early as late 1991 (the same period in which Arnold’s body cast was made), an ad agency for Diet Coke recycled colorized footage of Louis Armstrong, James Cagney, and Humphrey Bogart in a commercial featuring Elton John. The classic Hollywood icons appear to walk seamlessly through the spaces

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of a nightclub while Armstrong plays his trumpet alongside John’s piano. The effect was created by the painstaking frame-­by-­frame insertion of old footage into a newer digital image, recontextualizing the analog material within a carefully staged profilmic situation to create the illusion of “new” footage. Back then, Time magazine also pointed out that these dead actors “were resurrected to shill for a soft drink . . . 60 seconds of inspired flackery that since its first airing two days before Thanksgiving, has become one of the most talked-­about TV commercials of the year.”16 It’s telling, in retrospect, that a Diet Coke commercial caused such a stir in 1991, whereas less than twenty years later the much more viscerally impressive image of Virtual Arnold seemed like little more than another attempt at product differentiation in a crowded summer marketplace. More recently, the corporation behind Orville Redenbacher Popcorn used entirely computer-­generated footage of Orville himself to bring the dead patriarch back to life as a salesman in a new commercial. In that spot other diegetic characters are “surprised” to see the old man come back to life, but it’s not hard to imagine that they’re also a little freaked out by the grotesque image of a dead man (digitally) revived as a sickly looking ghost. In a sense that vague hint of repulsion is a more honest account of initial reactions to such a death-­mask digital spectacle than the Diet Coke spot decades earlier. More to the point, it should not be the least bit surprising that these instances were all from television commercials. Bode notes how posthumous performances remind us “that star actors in both new and old Hollywood have not just been cultural laborers but have also been circulated as brand icons, lending their glow to cosmetics, clothing, sunglasses, beer, and cigarettes.”17 One may charitably say that such a modest format as a short commercial, like music videos, allows greater room for such visual experimentation, opposed to the more expensive commitment of doing so in feature-­length narrative films. Indeed, The Matrix’s (1999) “bullet time” effect actually appeared first in Michel Gondry commercials for Smirnoff Vodka and Gap Jeans (it’s also interesting that Pixar got its economic start primarily in advertising as well). Yet the very transparent way in which these dead celebrities and their digital likenesses were literally reduced to their exchange value in a bald sales pitch for forgettable commodities cannot be overlooked either. Such examples of virtual characters and performances serve as an allegory for larger questions regarding the “value” of posthuman labor, the elevation of stardom’s pure exchange value as a key commodity, and the continued erasure of history (in this case heavily enabled by nostalgia for cinema’s past) in a perpetual present of simulation, in an age when digital technologies now affect every stage of the filmmaking process. Is it not legitimate to ask how post-­Fordist Hollywood’s industrial and aesthetic models are also reflecting a postindustrial age where the importance of a vast physical labor pool has given way to a smaller, more specialized workforce? This trend becomes internalized, naturalized, in



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the kind of thoroughly computer-­generated blockbusters—­Terminator, Lord of the Rings, TRON: Legacy, Spider-­Man, Man of Steel, and so on—­whose aesthetic and paratexts celebrate the posthuman image through the reassuring engagement with spectacle. As typical narratives of Western individualism, many of these films both deny and celebrate the increasing insignificance of humans in a postindustrial, digital cinema. There’s no point in denying that the use of specialized technicians remains essential to creating virtual worlds and performances. However, the history of technological innovation, especially within the digital age, cautions us against assuming as we go forward that the same number of people will always be needed by the studios to fulfill the same functions.

Looker; or, An Archaeology of Digital Cinema’s Prehistory This brings us back to the synthespian as an economic ideal toward which an industry built on the star system could strive—­wherein such perfect simulations can be, at gradually decreasing cost, not only infinitely repeatable but also increasingly malleable. Once stored, these performances are freed from the actors who helped create them. Andrew Niccol’s S1m0ne (2002) told the story of a famous director, played by Al Pacino, who becomes fed up with his prima donna star (Winona Ryder) and replaces her with a digital actress, “S1m0ne,” whose performance he can manipulate and insert into existing footage with ease (fig. 7). It’s an utterly absurd premise, starting with the fact that it’s impossible

Figure 7. Ostensibly the story of a Hitchcockian controlling director, S1m0ne (2002) also anticipates the possibility of virtual performances in a playfully satirical way.

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for one individual to create a virtual performance, let alone an old-­school film director who seems to be at best a novice with the computer. As North notes, the film’s narrative has the unintended effect of highlighting the distant impracticality of any actual such development, while insulting the intelligence of media audiences who would, and will, be cued into the possibility of such virtual performances long before they ever come within technical reach.18 The joke of the film, certainly, is less about advances in CGI, though, and more about the decades-­old mythology of a controlling Hitchcockian auteur who’d love to do away with actors altogether in order to fully realize “his” vision. Yet there’s a deeper truth in S1m0ne as well—­namely, Hollywood’s not-­so-­secret and only partially unfulfilled desire to do away with as much excess labor as possible, up to and including the traditionally profilmic conception of screen performance. Whereas the first generation of virtual performances were simply the digital reproduction and manipulation of existing analog footage (Diet Coke commercials, Sky Captain), the latest Terminator suggests the possibility, only partially satirized in S1m0ne, of (endlessly) new performances through a skillful combination of archived data, keyframe animation, and motion-­capture performance—­along with some other, yet unimagined, innovation. I wish to end by reflecting on the fascinating cult film Looker (1981) (fig. 8). Two decades before S1m0ne, writer-­director Michael Crichton envisioned a world where powerful media interests would exploit the digital archiving of virtual performances for an endless supply of free labor and complete artistic control. In Looker a plastic surgeon named Larry Roberts (Albert Finney)

Figure 8. Looker (1981) satirizes the idea of unlimited posthuman labor in the modern

corporate consumer culture in ways that seem less far-­fetched today.



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discovers an elaborate conspiracy on the part of “Digital Matrix Services” to use computer programs and television signals to manipulate consumers viewing at home into buying any range of possible products, from kitchen cleaning supplies to presidential candidates. To a degree Crichton’s film echoes similar anxieties about media technology in American science fiction of the period and, perhaps, was meant to allay those concerns in its own self-­theorizing way more so than to intensify them. While TRON (1982) suggested that distinctions between real and “virtual” selves would become increasingly arbitrary, Videodrome (1982) more sinisterly posited that media would not only blur that difference but also drive us mad to the point of murder and suicide. Looker, meanwhile, offers a variation on these two opposed approaches to a postmodern loss of reality—­satirically combining TRON’s ambitious vision of the digital’s reproductive capabilities (though stripped of its hacker utopia) with Videodrome’s more ominous anxiety about audience manipulation, endless consumption, and a loss of personal control. In Looker Roberts discovers that Digital Matrix Services seeks to convert “real” glamour models, such as Cindy (Susan Dey), into computer programs so that their virtual avatars can always be reused and reimagined later whenever the company needs another commercial. Meanwhile, the models themselves are subsequently killed off as unnecessary corporate liabilities once the conversion is complete. The term computer model takes on a brilliant new double meaning as sales pitches are now possible at the click of a button, with no analog (human, paper) trail behind. Looker seems to take Jameson’s comment about a computer’s ability to store dead human capital to absurdly sublime levels of literalness. This brilliant satire of the early Reagan era so clearly anticipated the corporate desire to reduce human capital to mimetic digital programing, to reduce appealing faces to free-­floating, endlessly reworkable commodities, and to reduce expensive living labor to cheap stored data with such utter precision that of course no one took the movie seriously when it first appeared. As with Desk Set its vision of the future seemed not only implausible but too far off to contemplate seriously in any event. Political and fiscal conservatism thrives on denying even the possibility of alternatives to accepted norms and practices, which Looker further assists by way of a gleeful postmodern satire that encourages the spectator to dismiss its absurdity. Even the film’s production betrays its own impossibility. The only actual digital images of a human in the film (a first) are split-­second renderings of Cindy on one of Digital Matrix’s computer screens as her body is methodically scanned into data storage on the hard drive. Otherwise, all the other “computer” renderings of models and politicians in Looker are just traditionally shot 35 mm footage coded within the narrative as a supposedly digital image. That it was technologically impossible in 1981 to use a computer to convincingly replicate the look and texture of a flesh-­and-­blood human is beside the point. More telling is how many

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no doubt envisioned it would remain that way indefinitely. Yet a perverse historical irony in looking back at Looker is that the medium of film was used effectively by filmmakers to emulate the “look” of digital media; today, of course, the opposite is true. Looker, though, still holds on to the necessity of the real world as a material anchor for the digital one. Later in the film those same stored computer programs of models are digitally reinserted into live footage of profilmic sets in real television soundstages as a demonstration to investors of their potential, setting up one of the film’s better sight gags. Roberts and the film’s henchman (Tim Rossovich) chase each other around the soundstage during the live broadcast, causing them to appear on the televised image side by side with the (absent) computer-­rendered salespeople for the unintended amusement of diegetic television spectators in the movie, a comedic scene that escalates wonderfully as their confrontation becomes increasingly bloody. Yet if we were to be suddenly concerned with Looker’s narrative logic, we would notice that while Digital Matrix depends on the stored labor of virtual models, it still inexplicably requires otherwise physical locations to seamlessly pull off the CGI-­enhanced commercial. Ultimately, Looker’s only thematic failure might have been in its continued naiveté, in its own nostalgia for the persistence of humans and of the material (analog) world. By trying to scan Cindy into binary code, or by forcing models to undergo plastic surgery to better fit a computer’s preexisting ideal of aesthetic beauty, Looker erred by holding on to the belief that computers would still need the indexical presence of the human subject to begin with. We know “now” that the material presence of physical objects in space and time can be helpful for modeling, for ideals of real-­world reference and photorealism, and so forth, but they aren’t necessarily required in an age that increasingly depends on the financial benefits of stored labor. Digital cinema is a thoroughly historical concept, despite its best attempts at erasing history in a perpetual, virtual present of simulation. Yet within the presence of digital images there remains an affect of the past that can guide us toward the future. Comparing digital media to the explosion of nickelodeons at the dawn of the twentieth century, Rodowick stressed the impossibility of grasping, then as now, what the medium truly was, let alone where it was headed.19 That once-­future unknowability lost in the analog past—­whose discovery can perhaps be one possible by-­product of a more reflective nostalgia—­becomes, paradoxically, a way to map the awaiting unimaginable possibilities of the digital present. Looker may be the ultimate artifact of digital cinema’s prehistory, a past vision of the digital future so prescient that we are only now beginning to excavate what it says, beneath the satire, about the intersection of global capitalism’s ambition, the ubiquity of advertising culture, the aestheticizing of politics,



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the seamless potential of computer graphics, and the inevitability of some manner of posthuman labor. Its perceived absurdity in 1981 only reflected a limited awareness of the digital’s ultimate, still largely unrealized, potential. Thus, Rosen’s “not yet” seems perpetually in tension with the “always already.” In other words potentially careless speculation about future developments is constantly in tension with the once unimaginable possibilities that have already come to pass—­such as digital cameras’ uncanny mimicry of celluloid’s look today, the industry-­wide shift to digital exhibition, corporations’ increasing use of digital spokespersons, and the media industry’s relentless recycling of existing commodities across a range of platforms and venues. Excavating thoroughly enough will present a historical model that maps for us the future changes still to come.

2 • THEY SAW NO FUTURE New Nostalgia Movies and Digital Exhibition

Except they don’t speak, and that is the point. —­Joshua Clover, “Enjoy the Silents”

In 2011 a series of nostalgic love letters to the cinema—­The Artist, Hugo, and Midnight in Paris—­dominated end-­of-­the year accolades among film critic circles and industry award shows. In their own idiosyncratic, occasionally ambivalent, ways all three cinephiliac works celebrated the imagined simplicity of film production and exhibition in the late 1920s and early 1930s. “Each of these movies deals with the conflict of reconciling past and present,” writes Andrew Gilbert, “and offers its own solution and resolutions that while not always practical, satisfy us emotionally. In each we find the pain of nostalgia, the problem of transition, and the power of, and need for, the past.”1 At the same time, though less celebrated, the year 2011 also marked two key shifts in the cinema’s decades-­ long digital transition: the wide-­scale industrial push to end celluloid projection in theatrical exhibition and to cease the production of 35 mm cameras (Panavision, ARRI) altogether. At the technological dawn of the most fully realized conception of “digital cinema” yet, where every aspect of traditional moviegoing (production, distribution, and exhibition) was now quite often digital, we saw instead an emphatic celebration of Hollywood’s celluloid past by several famous filmmakers intensely invested in the preservation of film history. Looking at many of these 2011 “nostalgia films,” Gilbert takes an ambivalent approach to the larger industrial impact of the digital transition in Hollywood. Acknowledging the importance of film nostalgia today, he insists that “the change is good; digital is cheaper and quicker.”2 This democratic logic is in some ways sound. If a flood of low-­budget digital movies becomes more economically feasible, opening up more avenues (in both production and distribution) 52



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for more filmmakers, the hope is that more interesting, maybe even more original, movies will emerge without the pressure of appealing to a mass audience in order to recoup escalating production and promotional expenses. Nostalgia, Gilbert argues, becomes merely a way for the studios to alleviate the tensions inherent in an uncertain, but perhaps profound, moment of industrial change—­ “their answer to the crisis of this [digital] evolution.”3 Yet the power relationship as described here may pose the problem wrongly. Rather than simply reacting to a transition over which it otherwise has no control, Hollywood’s as much to blame for the crisis in question. Meanwhile, the point is not that studios are trying to find a solution so much as that they are trying to naturalize the shock of an arbitrary technological change they have forced in the name of economic opportunism. “Harsh economic times and the affordability of digital media” are definitely both central factors in pushing the film medium out,4 yet the bigger mistake is in failing to foreground the extent to which “harsh economic times and the affordability of digital media” are not two separate phenomena but have instead maintained a mutually destructive relationship over the last several years and even decades. In contrast, Joshua Clover sees in Hugo a nostalgically reassuring allegory for labor in the age of digital cinema. In Hugo, he notes, everybody is trying to find their place, their function within a larger mechanism (i.e., their job). The emphasis on machines in the movie, such as the clocks and the toy automaton, is ironic, since “automation is what replaces living labor, increasing productivity but undermining the very source of surplus value until every process is nearly perfected, nearly everybody is out of work, and the economy is in crisis.”5 In short, the persistent utopic notion that in terms of cutting costs the digital’s short-­term benefits are somehow a solution to harsh economic situations, rather than one key contribution to them, may be precisely the root of the larger problem. On their own Hugo and The Artist fail to maintain a coherent critique beyond the passive Hollywood endorsement of capitalism typical to most mass-­marketed films, an ideological muddle directly extending from their mutually reactive sense of history as synonymous with its cinematic mediation. What to make of this kind of pastiche? Richard Dyer insists that “pastiche allows us to feel the historicity of our feelings,” through acknowledging the felt presence of the past, through the juxtaposition of the knowing imitation (the pastiche) with the original text being imitated.6 In this regard, for example, Dyer might argue that The Artist (fig. 9) still creates an opening to understand film history by recognizing the difference between its own present pastiche and the original era of late silent film techniques it perfectly imitates. Similarly, Sandra Annett has argued that Hugo rejects the kind of dehistoricized commodification its highly stylized vision might offer by way of its “knowing self-­reflexivity” regarding the history of film mediation, with “digital cinema’s longing for

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Figure 9. The Artist (2011) allegorizes the digital transition through a romantic vision of

past technological innovation—­the coming of sound.

celluloid as part of our affective experience of film within today’s new media ecology.”7 These readings are a perfectly legitimate possibility, yet they privilege an ideal, active spectator in a popular consumer culture that too often thrives on passivity and inattention, while also failing to foreground the degree to which reflexivity is already central to the industry’s economic logic. And, going forward, such nostalgic mythologies about cinema’s past (as in The Artist and Hugo), like all nostalgic fantasies, can over time too easily take on a historical life of their own, an idea too closely aligned, sadly, with more conservative definitions of pastiche. In understanding how history is (not) “represented” in such forms of popular commercial cinema, the term nostalgia seems appropriate to articulating a past that often is shaped, distorted, ignored, and even replaced by the prejudices and arrogance of present ideologies. Recent cinematic self-­theorizing of nostalgia, especially film’s nostalgia for itself, must be considered, at least in part, as an attempt (conscious or otherwise) to hide those destructive capitalistic tendencies underlining the digital transition within reassuring narratives of individual perseverance, industry tradition, and technological inevitability. Clover has previously noted the provocative irony that both Hugo and The Artist are about “technology-­driven unemployment”8—­ narratives that both involve the economically depressed historical period of the late 1920s and early 1930s and magically resolve these same labor problems by the end of their respective narratives. As recent stylistic iterations of postmodern pastiche, both films nostalgically imagine an era before the sound transition as a metaphor for the shift from analog to digital technologies. As a means of easing



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the transition from one period to the next, they look longingly back to the last instance of truly profound economic and aesthetic change in the movie industry as the result of technological innovation. Specifically, the transition in the 1920s was about more than just adding “talking” to otherwise silent images; the painstaking incorporation of dialogue, music, and sound effects had a profound impact on what kind of cinematic stories could be told, how they could be told, by whom, and to whom. Sound radically changed filmmaking far more than subsequent experiments in color, widescreen, 3D, and so forth. And, yet, so what? What does that historical parallel foregrounded here between the periods of silent and digital cinema ultimately mean, ideologically? “Beyond their metacinematic nostalgia,” Clover writes, both Hugo and The Artist “speak to something larger. Except they don’t speak, and that is the point.”9 Although it’s seductive to imagine the present fascination with this kind of nostalgia as one last rallying cry for the dying medium of celluloid’s value, or at least as a space to engage with film history in some new way, such a melancholic haze conceals far more than it illuminates. Hugo, for example, was also part of the prominent wave of digital 3D movies released between roughly 2009 and 2011 (including the so-­called all-­time box-­office “champ,” Avatar),10 which existed in large measure to simply force the market-­wide conversion from 35 mm projectors to Digital Cinema Packages (DCPs), since none of these, often highly lucrative, titles could be screened on film. Moreover, Martin Scorsese’s auteurist vision was especially key to critically legitimizing digital 3D on aesthetic, not just economic, grounds. (Interestingly, explicit nostalgic appeals to film’s past were at the center of one of the earliest public demonstrations of digital projection, when, as far back as 1994, Sharp Technologies, United Artists Theatre chain, and American Movie Classics collaborated to theatrically screen classic films, such as Rear Window [1954], off laserdiscs.)11 The transition was an extremely expensive undertaking for movie theaters and one whose longer-­term financial costs—­especially for independent and art cinemas, as well as the larger labor force of distribution and exhibition that supports theaters and multiplexes worldwide—­are cloudy at best.12 Also at risk, meanwhile, are the few remaining drive-­in theaters—­long sites for nostalgic memories of eras past but ones whose sense of loss becomes more immediate today with the struggles to convert. “Of the 366 Drive In theatres left in the United States,” Variety reported in 2012, “only a handful have converted to digital projection; another 10% are expected to convert before this summer.”13 In short, we should be mindful of how deeper economic problems are ignored—­or, worse, naturalized as unavoidable—­in the present through these uprooted nostalgic fantasies that reenvision a past where technological change is always inevitable, always unrelated to market forces, and always overcome through the power of individual perseverance. And this, in short, is why the depoliticized assumptions of pastiche inherent in the nostalgia mode are not only apt in this instance but

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essential, even as, admittedly, a very different kind of reflective nostalgia here (a love for the irretrievability of the 35 mm theatrical experience) also serves as the potential catalyst for resistance to such industrial change.

A New Kind of Magic Looking back on the early days of his filmmaking career, Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley) humorously noted during a particularly nostalgic flashback in Hugo (within the larger nostalgic flashback of the movie itself) that the Lumière brothers, essentially the inventors of cinema, “saw no future” for the medium: “It was like a new kind of magic. I asked the Lumière brothers to sell me a camera, but they refused. You see they were convinced that movies were only a passing fad and they saw no future in it, or so they said.” It’s a not-­so-­subtle reference to one of early cinema’s great historical ironies, referred to by cinephiles throughout the decades. “The cinema is an invention without a future,” Louis Lumière supposedly declared at the dawn of movie history. The historical parallel in Hugo, meanwhile, is also partially a wink to the future of movies in the digital age: if film survived, and even thrived, in the twentieth century, then certainly digital cinema (in whatever form) will thrive in the twenty-­first. The anachronism, though, is readily apparent in the film’s unapologetic nostalgia. Hugo is more about understanding present developments (digital cinematography and 3D exhibition) in the movie industry through past future(s)—­the then-­unimaginable potential of early cinema that even someone as visionary as Lumière apparently couldn’t see—­than about actually imagining the still unrealized futures of digital cinema. There is an active resistance to imagining the future in favor of a reassuringly nostalgic look back since capitalism’s greatest strength may be shutting down the potential futures of possible alternatives. Indeed, for all the utopic industrial rhetoric about the imagined promises of technological innovation, discourses about digital cinema are rarely really about the future. Instead, they are often discussions of present conditions filtered through romanticized understandings of history that use such past futures to resolve our sense of the modern. Such an idea by itself is neither inherently progressive nor reactionary, as the notion of lost futures in the past can be mobilized to enact any number of different possibilities in the present. Looking back is partly a response to an innate need for reassurance in times of great upheaval. Yet too often, particularly in nostalgic narratives geared toward mass audiences, it can also be about limiting options for the future through predetermined historical narratives (not just individual movies per se but the larger industry discourses of hype and promotion that surround particular titles and innovations). As Jameson argued, the nostalgia mode’s resistance in the postmodern era to



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the uncertainties and ambiguities of the future was actually a key component of capitalist ideology: “There cannot but be much that is deplorable and reprehensible in a cultural form of image addiction which, by transforming the past into visual mirages, stereotypes, or texts, effectively abolishes any practical sense of the future and of the collective project, thereby abandoning the thinking of future change.”14 Reactionary capitalist ideologies thrive on the nostalgic idea that problems and solutions will work out a certain way, as they do in The Artist and Hugo, because that’s the way it’s “always” been (whether true or not), a conservative logic in which even relatively progressive artists or explicitly reflexive movies can become complicit. The nostalgic Hollywood obsession with its (cinematic) past is often about consciously resisting the creative uncertainty, the political instability, and the progressive potential that radical, or even modest, changes in the future might offer. The lost futures of nostalgia can be a guide forward, but too often they can also be a blockage. These temporal contradictions and anachronisms in postmodern depictions of the past come to the surface in the so-­called nostalgia film,15 which is less about the sort of personal and affective usages of the term and more about a particularly stylized, sanitized, and simplified view of history. In this scenario the word nostalgia is perhaps initially misleading but nonetheless apt, since it is, above all, more about the present day’s romanticized fantasy with the past than about its messy contradictions and unresolvable uncertainties. Yet if this idea of postmodern pastiche seems itself dated now, one needn’t look any further than The Artist. The film concerns the initial failure of a major movie star from the silent era, George Valentin ( Jean Dujardin), to survive the transition to sound, finding himself quickly left behind by both an industry and a love interest, rising starlet Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), who have made the adjustment to a fundamentally new type of cinematic storytelling. A textbook instance of Hollywood pastiche in its representation of the end of the silent era, the film reproduces the style of a black-­and-­white movie with limited aspect ratio and no dialogue. Director Michel Hazanavicius wanted to make a silent film in part because of its inherent focus on the image as the primary means of storytelling. The use of black and white also echoes what Christine Sprengler, drawing on the work of Marc Le Sueur, referred to as a “deliberate archaism,” which intentionally “strive[s] to re-create not only the look and feel of the period [mise-­en-­scène] in question but also the [formal] appearance of art from that distant time.”16 As a particularly acute instance of the postmodern nostalgia film, The Artist makes no distinction between silent black-­and-­white movies from the late 1920s and the decade itself; the medium was the decade, and vice versa. Moreover, the use of actual Hollywood soundstages from the 1920s during production was intended to give the film an added “realism,” noted cast member John Goodman in a making-­of video—­an ironic choice of words (as in, sites of cinematically staged

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authenticity are equated with historical authenticity). In both cases there’s no (historical) space outside that cinematic surface. Yet simply defining The Artist as a textbook example of postmodern pastiche in the digital age is perhaps the easiest, and certainly less urgent, half of the question. The film thoroughly dehistoricizes the very same moment in Hollywood industry that it so lovingly mimics and memorializes. Its deeper mythology involves a fantasy of triumphant individualism in the face of uncontrollable economic hardships: while Valentin reinvents himself and survives the transition, many real-­life Valentins in the movie industry (onscreen and off) did not. Clover notes the irony of The Artist’s revisionist depiction of the end of the 1920s: “Valentin, fictional star of the late silent age, is left behind by the advent of talkies—­which in a fudged timeline falls on the day of the market collapse inaugurating the Great Depression. He is doubly displaced: by industrial advances, and by the collapse of the labor market. . . . Technology and the market have left him behind.”17 The absence of history, then, is directly tied to its representation of labor, about which The Artist fails to say anything (in more ways than one) other than to offer the easy solution in the end of Valentin’s magically finding a new talent (dancing) and thus a new job to pull himself out of his own (great) depression. Certainly, there are potentially sly historical jokes in the film—­at the end Valentin finally speaks to the audience with a heavy French accent, humorously highlighting how spoken words in movies weren’t relevant yet—­that, more importantly, suggest silent cinema in that regard was a truly global language. The irony is profoundly (probably unintentionally) sad, reiterating how English became the dominant language of the twentieth century in part because of Hollywood’s (post–­World War I) domination of the marketplace, while also at times marginalizing non-­English audiences and filmmakers in ways different from the silent period. Along those lines Clover adds that the unintended impact of The Artist’s success is to call attention to Hollywood’s (only slightly waning) influence in an age of global capitalism today, since it is a movie about the old studio system made by French filmmakers, a new dialectic “at the limits of American hegemony,”18 particularly since it was so embraced and celebrated by the industry itself. Such nostalgia for silent cinema, moreover, comes at a time when the English language’s global domination is increasingly threatened in an era of emergent cultural and economic power centers all over the world. The Artist’s global appeal may in part be the ways in which it does not present a “foreign” (French) challenge to Hollywood’s hegemony so much as it reaffirms the industry’s resilience by offering a nostalgic fantasy of itself. Thus, in the end, what the film’s play with verbal language is “really” trying to say ideologically is muddled at best—­which is only one issue in trying to convincingly argue that the nostalgic impulse can create a space of critical resistance from which to reflect on the history being effaced.



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Midnight in Paris; or, Self-­Theorizing Disavowal Although it doesn’t embrace the cinematic surface quite as literally as The Artist does, Midnight in Paris offers every bit as much a pastiche vision of the past, reimagining an idealized 1920s Paris as a nostalgic utopia overflowing with historical artists whose collective presence serves to evoke “1920s-­ness” (and “Paris-­ness”) in place of history. It’s also the first Woody Allen film to use postproduction digital work to provide distinctive color to its Parisian landscape. Like Hugo, Midnight in Paris features a random appearance by an actor playing Salvador Dalí—­a key pastiche signifier of Paris’s idealized cinematic culture during this time. Yet Midnight in Paris’s sense of nostalgia is ultimately very different from what we see in Hazanavicius’s film. The premise of this movie is a struggling American writer who discovers a way to travel back in time to 1920s Paris, a heyday of artistic exploration in literature, music, cinema, and painting. Along the way he meets the usual suspects: Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Luis Buñuel, T. S. Eliot, Cole Porter, and so forth. If The Artist suggests the “nostalgia film” in its most conservative iteration as an unrelentingly melancholic gesture to an imagined lost era, we needn’t assume that all films of this trend are equally invested in restoring an idealized past in this way. Whereas The Artist embodies the “restorative” form of nostalgia, Midnight in Paris struggles unsuccessfully to present a more “reflective” approach, ultimately accepting that the idealized “golden age” in question is as destructive as it is desirable. If The Artist uses nostalgia to mobilize an ideology in the present, pining for the simplicity of the presound (read “predigital”) era, Midnight in Paris is skeptical of such romantic impulses. Midnight in Paris creates a reflective critical space for understanding the nostalgia film’s relationship to the present in a way that neither The Artist nor Hugo do. We could charitably say that Allen’s film uses nostalgia to intentionally historicize the present through the thematic device of one writer’s desire to live in the past as a knowing means to defamiliarize his own relationship to the present. Midnight in Paris is not, strictly speaking, a “period piece,” even though much of it takes place within a setting we are meant to believe is 1920s Paris. Instead, the movie is largely set in the modern day, and its sense of historical consciousness is confined to one contemporary writer and his fantastical journeys every midnight into a past world full of his artistic heroes, a world that may or may not be a product of his imagination (or insanity). Midnight in Paris is more science fiction than historical film. In that way, then, it explicitly foregrounds the recognition that nostalgia is nothing more than the present’s fantasy with a past that likely never existed. Indeed, Midnight in Paris explicitly foregrounds its own critique of the nostalgic impulse. In case the audience were to miss the film’s central theme, there

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is the obligatory pretentious intellectual (Michael Sheen), whose main narrative function, aside from being one part of the usual love-­triangle plot, is to spell out for us the film’s larger thematic understanding of nostalgia rather early in the narrative. As in so many of his films, Allen often seems to deflect his own pretentious impulses through a narrativized contempt for the self-­involved intellectuals who express the movie’s themes. So, even though Sheen’s character, Paul, is presented as a dislikable know-­it-­all snob with a questionable grasp on historical knowledge, his thoughts on nostalgia seem to resonate thematically with other events throughout the entire film. In Midnight in Paris Paul volunteers to other characters (and the audience) a rather transparent lecture on how “nostalgia is denial—­denial of the painful present. The name for this denial is ‘golden age’ thinking—­the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one’s living in. It’s a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.” If anything, the problem with this speech’s conception of nostalgia, much like the whole movie, is that it’s a bit too “on the nose” in its critique of such melancholic fantasies. Later, the film makes explicit “the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one’s living in” when, in a twist, Gil (Owen Wilson) and his 1920s love interest, Adriana (Marion Cotillard), find themselves suddenly further back in time, in yet another “golden age” of 1890s Paris. Here, Degas and Toulouse-­Lautrec take the place of Fitzgerald, Stein, and Buñuel as signifiers of pastness. This causes Adriana to now become intensely nostalgic, so much so that she refuses to return to the 1920s, just as Gil has fought the inevitability of returning to the twenty-­first century. This revelation in Midnight in Paris serves to explicitly highlight the arbitrary, idiosyncratic nature of such “golden age” thinking. The film’s critique of nostalgia centers on how an impulsive desire to venture into the past becomes endlessly deferred, as one person’s nostalgic past is another’s stifling present. This forces Gil finally to confront the dangers inherent in his own romanticizing of the past and causes him to accept the present for what it is (not). Despite the late revelation, however, Midnight in Paris’s sense of nostalgia is far more ambivalent, or perhaps just contradictory, than it might first appear. What is lost, in the end, are the nuances and contradictions of nostalgia, for better and for worse. The twist, for example, doesn’t really undermine the idealized representation of 1920s Paris it promotes; it only suggests that it wasn’t nostalgic for the people who lived through it, that nostalgia is predicated on a sense of temporal distance in order to exist, just as Gil has trouble living with his own present. But we are left nonetheless with the feeling that the 1920s were just as wonderful as they are represented onscreen, a perfect pastiche of life as it was represented through the work of the various artists who inhabit it in the movie. We are left to believe that Midnight in Paris, as well as perhaps Allen himself, really does believe the golden age fantasy of the past Paris it creates. Paul’s speech



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becomes a not-­so-­simple way for the film to problematize the oft-­denigrated impulse that it nevertheless still embraces beneath its surface. Just like Hugo and The Artist, the problem with the time and place represented in Midnight in Paris is not that the movie doesn’t think it didn’t exist; it’s only that we cannot get back to it, except through our imagination, and that we cannot remain for long once there. We are stuck instead with making the best of the present. A deep fondness for the past, along with fantastical ways of dissolving the boundaries between mediated and “real” life, has always informed Allen’s work, especially during his heyday of postmodern pastiche in the 1980s and early 1990s (The Purple Rose of Cairo, Zelig, Radio Days, Shadows and Fog, and so forth). Yet those impulses have never felt quite so explicit in their self-­awareness and, by extension, their rather blatant self-­critique, as in Midnight in Paris. Although the film is often light and humorous, as clever and witty (particularly in its artistic allusions) as any of Allen’s films, it is undermined by what is at its core a deep contempt for the nostalgic impulse that nonetheless informs both this particular film and the filmmaker’s entire body of work, a contempt that perhaps has never before been quite so explicitly articulated cinematically. What is both fascinating and maddening about Midnight in Paris is how it interrogates nostalgia in-­depth yet simplifies it in problematic ways, which is all the more frustrating given Allen’s career-­long fascination with the subject. In particular, Midnight in Paris often risks (even unintentionally) reducing the idea of nostalgia to the most simple-­minded definition possible: an unhealthy obsession with the past at the expense of the present. This isn’t necessarily wrong much of the time, as so many recent nostalgia films suggest. Yet, like all crude definitions of complicated ideas, the didacticism leaves out far more than it includes, and it misses a chance to embrace fully the contradictions and ambiguities of a truly reflective nostalgia to which it briefly gestures. Perhaps most destructive of all, it reinforces Hollywood’s dominant approach to the subject—­a full-­blown nostalgic affair that somehow pretends to be more than just such an indulgence.

DCP and the Digital Divide Narratives of technical inevitability, such as The Artist, seek to naturalize the shock of a sudden change that is quietly driven by the determined, but arbitrary, forces of the marketplace. Writing on the “onrush to digital [theatrical] conversion” over the last few years, James Quandt has added that “late capitalism has taught us that inevitability is often a disguise or excuse for commercial coercion, and there is a whiff of intimidation in the accompanying terminology (e.g., ‘digital complaint’).”19 This coercion, moreover, had led to a deepening digital divide between those with the resources to profit from transition and those who may not even have the resources to survive. For instance, the negative impact of the

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transition to sound film wasn’t simply confined to a few high-­profile movie stars. “In the 1920s,” Bruce Goldstein notes, “the smallest theatres couldn’t afford the cost of wiring for sound, and many of them went under—­particularly after the market crashed in 1929.”20 Goldstein’s larger point here is to use the early sound era to highlight the impact of the digital age on the economics of theatrical exhibition today, a lurking historical parallel worth investigating further. On that note I’d like to briefly revisit the recent conversion to digital exhibition that has swept through movie theaters in just the last few years—­an all the more appropriate site for analysis, given that The Artist, Midnight in Paris, and Hugo’s respective nostalgia for film history also implicitly promotes nostalgia for the imagined good old days of theatrical moviegoing with large audiences in massive movie palaces—­at a time of both digital distribution and, with it, often more solitary viewings. In 2002 six major Hollywood studios collaborated to standardize the technology underlining the future of digital projection. The result was the “Digital Cinema Initiatives” (DCI), which were intended “to ensure the quality, compatibility, and security of the digital exhibition of their films.”21 This eventually appeared in the form of the Digital Cinema Package (DCP), where several bulky film canisters are now replaced with a large jump drive containing all the information needed to screen the movie, saved as encrypted files, inserted directly into the digital projector. Going forward, movie theaters would need the compatible hardware and technology in place to screen the latest digital titles. There is certainly a historical echo here from the early days of cinema: the move back then to make 35 mm film production and exhibition technology the industry standard, which coexisted with the patent wars that subsequently grew out of this standardizing. Creating one universal technology allowed the powers that be to control the market going forward. Moreover, it is this industrial history that directly intertwines with the nostalgic mythologies we see in Hugo (fig. 10). Thus, the industry-­wide push by the studios for digital cinema projection was far more economic than aesthetic in intent; while popular discourses around this new innovation visibly promoted the idea of a flawless digital image with no tears, scratches, or other forms of degradation over time, the real reasons involved studios’ need to combat financial losses involved in the (often illegal) Internet delivery of movies and to save money on theatrical distribution costs that did not necessarily translate to savings for anyone else (paying customers, but also low-­end movie theaters without the resources of the major multiplexes). “The shift to digital promised a tremendous savings for the studios,” writes Lisa Dombrowski; “IHS Screen Digest estimates digital will produce an 80 per cent savings on direct releasing costs . . . (a digital print costs between $100 and $300, while a 35mm print averages $1200 to $2000 more).”22 The novelty of Digital 3D exhibition (so central to Hugo’s promotion and critical reception), meanwhile, was largely a means to force the issue. As increasingly



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Figure 10. Hugo (2011) sentimentalizes the life of film pioneer Georges Méliès in ways that obscure deeper economic problems, past and present.

bad movies (e.g. Wrath of the Titans) further exploited the gimmick, countless criticisms of 3D, especially postconversion jobs, eventually crept in—­that it’s a cheap excuse to charge higher ticket prices, that it’s a strain on the eyes to watch, and so forth. Yet these common (and mostly valid) criticisms were a distraction from the real issue. In retrospect, “once the technology has been installed and amortized via a season of successful 3D films, it does not matter whether 3D is a big screen mainstay, or a niche product,” notes Thomas Elsaesser.23 Moreover, the industrial value of this 3D wave went far beyond the screen: “While extraordinarily conventional in story and characterization,” wrote Charles Acland, “Avatar is celebrated and promoted to stand out as a flagship work beckoning the next wave of industrial and consumer technologies and entertainments. With Avatar we have 3-­D filming processes, 3-­D exhibition, digital exhibition, and 3-­D home entertainment all counting on the film’s appeal for their own advancement.”24 If Avatar gave digital 3D its high-­profile “tentpole” franchise, Hugo provided its auteurist “prestige” picture, but both were in service of similar marketplace goals. In just a couple of years digital projection for both 2D and 3D movies became the industry standard thanks in part to, but certainly not dependent upon, either the passing novelty, or future sustainability, of the latter format. The conversion has come at a great economic cost, especially for independent theaters and art cinemas that could not afford the transition (which was also, of course, part of the point, as both studios and major theater chains benefit from

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driving out competition). “Virtual Print Fee” (VPF) financing, where third-­party loans were used to offset some of the costs for digital upgrading, “was designed by the major studios to assist their primary exhibition partners—­first-­run commercial multiplexes that debut studio features in rapid succession.”25 Even then, the VPF loan system does not take into account the long-­term maintenance and upgrade costs of digital projectors: “the ultimate price tag of digital equipment is hidden to exhibitors right now. Little expenses add up. . . . And digital is notoriously temperamental.”26 While major chain multiplexes could afford the upgrades, since they could disperse the costs through financing plans and across the income of thousands of screens, single-­and dual-­screen cinemas faced an often impossible financial burden, which led to many of them shutting down, especially as access to any 35 mm prints, old or new, became increasingly rare on their own. What the age of digital cinema has brought to theatrical exhibition is further economic disparity and rising costs for consumers and disadvantaged competitors, despite the supposed financial savings such innovations promised. “Non-­DCI-­compliant forms of digital cinema—­known as ‘e-­cinema’—­ are much more common in art houses than [the compliant] d-­cinema,” writes Dombrowski, “creating a digital divide between those theatres that are DCI-­ complaint and able to screen films from all distributors, and those that are not.”27 In discussing the economic impact of DCP on independent and art cinemas, Dombrowski is understandably ambivalent, given that some theaters have managed to survive on low-­cost alternatives, such as screening Blu-­ray discs, while also allowing indie filmmakers to screen their movies shot digitally without the financial burdens of converting them to either 35 mm prints or compliant digital packages. Still, her closing question is a valid one: “If d-­cinema [DCI-­complaint] does become uniform across the entire motion picture industry, will it lower costs after the end of VPFs place the major studios and independents, the multiplexes and the art houses on more equal footing, or will the majors’ oligopolistic control continue to dictate terms of the marketplace?”28 The long-­term uncertainty of this profound inequality, of a “digital divide” that exists behind movie theater economics, is troubling. While a benefit of DCP might be “freeing staff to spend more time with customers and less time in the projection booth,”29 it seems more likely to leave staff with a bit too much time on their hands (as in, unemployed), perceived as a wasteful redundancy in a steadily shrinking labor force—­just like the union projectionist whose job once upon a time was to splice together the feature film celluloid print, along with the trailers shipped separately (all the material that now comes preloaded on a DCP drive). “Projectionists are not the only ones whose jobs are in danger,” wrote Gendy Alimurung. “It used to take a small army of shippers to deliver films from studio to theatre. But digital downloads render physical transport



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obsolete.”30 The reduction in shipping costs when comparing relatively modest digital cinema packages with the much more labor-­intensive canisters of 35 mm film invariably impacts countless secondary jobs in the labor force once charged with manufacturing, packaging, and delivering them (and what of Hollywood’s ultimate dream of a completely immaterial delivery to theaters via satellite, only being held up at the moment by piracy concerns?). Studios and other powerful businesses in the film industry are not looking to hire more workers in the wake of digital innovations that save money. That would defeat the whole purpose. Even in filmmaking communities (inside and outside Hollywood) similarly at risk, the conservative myth that lowering costs will somehow improve the collective financial future, rather than continue to put a strain on our overall economic well-­being, is frustratingly persistent. Finally, to return to the subject of “historical consciousness,” the economics and logistics of the digital conversion are also literally impacting our access to film history, since studios generally refuse to loan out 35 mm prints stored in their vaults in favor of Blu-­ray copies (when available) and those rare old titles that have been converted to DCP. On the surface the argument is to preserve the condition of the old prints, but stamping out the last vestige of production and exhibition on celluloid is no doubt a motivation as well. While film archives have helped fill the void to some degree, they, too, have legitimate reservations regarding the fragile status of old film prints for which they can barely afford the preservation and storage costs to begin with. In this sense, DCPs become another way in which the digital divide—­who has access to what, and in which formats, versus what is left behind (either because of cost or inattention)—­further shapes our sense of cinema’s past.

Hugo and the All-­Fantasy Genre More than a decade ago, in response to George Lucas’s earliest proclamations of an all-­digital future, John Belton wrote a teachable article on the long-­term implications of the transition from celluloid to digital cinema. He focused on the industrial realities and limitations regarding the new medium’s ambitions, as well as on the fundamental ways that digital cinema often aspires to do little more creatively than simply emulate film’s existing theatrical experience (as opposed, for example, to fostering more interactive audiences); hence, he saw this development as “a false revolution”: Other filmmakers rely less upon special effects and fantasy; there are scores of directors like Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Stephen Frears, John Sayles, Paul Schrader, and Mike Leigh, who make films about more or less realistically conceived characters in more or less realistic settings. There is no

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reason for the digital fantasies of sci-­fi to drive an industry that, since the sci-­fi blockbusters of the late 1970s and early ’80s, has become increasingly diverse in terms of narrative content. Indeed, the danger is that an all-­digital cinema might very well lead to an all-­fantasy cinema—­to essentially one genre.31

For Belton the creative temptation some filmmakers might feel to explore more fantastical plots and settings in order to more fully exploit the unlimited potential of digital technologies, such as visual imagery or sound design, “might very well lead to an all-­fantasy cinema.” An irony, in hindsight, is his citation of Scorsese as one such prominent standard-­bearer of an older “realism”—­a problematic category on its own but presumably defined in opposition to the “digital fantasies of sci-­fi” embodied by the likes of blockbusters such as Star Wars or Avatar. A strong proponent of shooting on digital video, Scorsese may also paradoxically be the most intensely nostalgic for film among the older generation Belton listed, deploying the latest advances in digital production to ironically re-create a distant (often cinematic) past. In just the last decade films such as Hugo and The Aviator (2004) explicitly negotiated the question of film history, while others, such as Shutter Island (2010) and his executively produced HBO program Boardwalk Empire (2010–­14), are meticulous period pieces that at times more subtly negotiate the relationship between the past and its cinematic mediation. In Screening Nostalgia Sprengler argues that the digital re-creation of two-­strip Technicolor in The Aviator was a nostalgic celebration of film history, which (following Dyer’s notion of pastiche) allowed audiences to engage affectively with cinema’s history by experiencing films as past audiences would have. Yet in addition to the unresolved question of how active actual moviegoers might be, this kind of nostalgic textual analysis being done by the hypothetical spectator is nonetheless mostly still a surface engagement with film history. More so than The Aviator’s digital tricks or sense of film history, Scorsese’s subsequent Hugo emerges as the most perfectly realized dream (or nightmare) to arise from Belton’s observation about digital cinema’s role in Hollywood’s move to an “all-­fantasy genre.” In ways more obvious, but also more subtle, than The Artist, Hugo is a postmodern nostalgia film that conflates history with cinematic mediations of that past. The movie’s cinephiliac references to Lumière and Jean Renoir balance “the director’s homage to (French) film culture and cinephilia with a somewhat more ambiguous appropriation of Méliès’s genius as the ‘precursor’ of Hollywood’s 3D revival . . . ,” Elsaesser wrote; “it also hints at a paradigm shift in the way we might come to look at 3D itself . . . fitting for an age when cinema (and television) history is likely to become the only history our culture has an affective memory of.”32 Like its auteurist overseer, Hugo is a champion both of shooting on digital video and of the literal and symbolic preservation of old films (with slightly less attention to film history). It is also an



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all-­out digital 3D spectacle that exists in no small measure to show off the legendary auteur’s skills with a new array of digital tools. Scorsese’s status as canonical filmmaker, in return, added greater artistic credibility to the all-­pervasive, but much critically maligned, fantasy film genre, as well as to the revived novelty of 3D filmmaking. Employing the latest innovations at the time in high-­definition cinematography (ARRI Alexa), visual and sound effects work, and 3D aesthetics, Hugo presents an impossibly perfect vision of 1930s Paris, a digital landscape more akin to an idealized painting of the city than to its faithful (and mechanical) reproduction as a photograph. “One could argue that Hugo’s lovely, dramatic vision of Paris is more fond reverie than social reality,” writes Annett; “at the same time, however, Scorsese complicates the picture by centering nostalgia less on a given culture, time period or country, and more self-­reflexively on film itself, as medium and mechanism.”33 Within that digital vision is a larger romance with the legacy of the machine age—­for a predigital era of materiality (when we could still physically see how things worked), for that glorious glimpse of modernity’s potential, which came and went somewhere between 1931 and 2011. Thus, what’s striking in Hugo is not simply the lush 3D visuals but the consistent fetishization of machines and their moving parts—­clocks, trains, windup toys, hand-­cranked movie projectors, and, of course, the cherished automaton, which represents the last material link between a boy and his deceased father. This refers to real automata from the nineteenth century—­elaborate robotic dolls that, with the precise timing of various weights, gears, and other mechanisms, came to life by mimicking basic tasks such as writing words or playing music. The production of the robot in Hugo, a nostalgic throwback to the possibilities of the machine age, was carefully generated by both profilmic and postproduction computer work, while the elaborate artwork created by this particular automaton (a drawn “still” from Méliès’s Trip to the Moon) far surpassed the actual capacities of those devices historically. Yet Hugo’s tenuous relationship to anything resembling a historically accurate presentation of the artistry and technology of 1930s Paris is easy to overlook. After all, the brilliance of Hugo’s digital homage to Méliès is based partially on the magical idea that he was the first filmmaker to understand cinema’s capacity to deceive the eye (jump cuts). Appeals to historical fidelity seem even more irrelevant given the movie’s own narrative ambitions as ostensibly little more than a fantastical kid’s fable. But as Sean Cubitt has highlighted in The Cinema Effect, a key point of Hollywood’s embrace of fantasy ideologically in the digital age was to close off space for criticism, a goal further intensified by what could reasonably be deemed “only” a children’s movie. The idea of “effects-­driven movies as enclosed and enclosing worlds,” Cubitt argues, “may seem to remove them from the political analyses of ideology critique. That, indeed, is their purpose: to

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abstract themselves from the temporal to grasp the eternal.”34 In place of ideological critique, in place of history, is the story of undying love in Hugo that transcends space, time, and technology, a generational nostalgia involving a father and son. What anchors Hugo for some of its most ardent cinephiliac fans is its deeply nostalgic affection for early cinema, for the era of innocent wonder that the days of Méliès and the Lumières suggest. Hugo makes literal the otherwise symbolic connection between the “cinema of attractions” at the end of the nineteenth century and an “all-­fantasy cinema” at the end of the twentieth (though it’s easy to be skeptical of this historical connection). Scholars commonly use this parallel to add historical perspective to the larger technological shift in cinema at the dawn of the digital age, often (heavily) modifying Tom Gunning’s work on early “attractions” for the era of the CGI blockbuster. While some fear a descent into VFX spectacles with little interest in storytelling, others hold out hope that such developments will evoke cinema’s early prenarrative fascination with spectacle for its own sake. Thus, it’s unsurprising that on Hugo’s release many cinephiles, historians, and other film buffs delighted in the digital spectacle. As Variety noted, “If you ever needed proof that Martin Scorsese is loved by film critics, you need go no further than pulling up reviews for Hugo.”35 Film historian Dan North wrote that Scorsese is “the maker of some astonishingly powerful, influential, and innovative work, and his love of cinema history, which drives him to emulate his favourites rather than attempt to honour them with blandly imitative homages, is always infectious.”36 Meanwhile, in his profuse five-­star review the late Roger Ebert wrote that “Scorsese uses 3-­D here as it should be used, not as a gimmick but as an enhancement of the total effect. Notice in particular his re-­creation of the famous little film Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1897), by the Lumiere brothers. You’ve probably heard its legend: As a train rushes toward the camera, the audience panics and struggles to get out of its way. That is a shot which demonstrates the proper use of 3-­D, which the Lumieres might have used had it been available.”37 As these reviews suggest, of particular fascination were the ways in which Hugo embraced 3D technology to re-create landmark images from the heyday of early cinema, both literally (using restored Méliès prints in the new format) and symbolically (such as the aforementioned references to other filmmakers). Yet before sliding too far into Hugo’s nostalgic fantasy of movie history, the continued deployment by writers such as Ebert of L’arrivée d’un train’s infamous historical anecdote should give pause. One of Gunning’s key insights into early cinema history was to debunk the persistent claim, which continues in some circles to this day, that the earliest movie spectators were too dumb to distinguish the silent, black-­and-­white moving image of a train from the presence of a real one and thus panicked (generally speaking, one ugly undercurrent to so much



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of nostalgia’s usual romance with a “simpler” time is the unspoken and condescending assumption that people back then weren’t as “enlightened” as we are today).38 Hugo, meanwhile, remystifies that anecdotal history more so than challenges it—­especially by (1) altering that film for 3D exhibition so that the train really does come out of the screen, (2) depicting easily frightened past audiences (both in 1895 and 1931), and (3) celebrating cinema’s general affective potential to excess through its embrace of 3D aesthetics. The curious reimagining of early cinema history, however, is not nearly as pressing as Hugo’s main structuring absence: the emergent economic histories around Méliès’s rise and fall. While Hugo is reasonably accurate in its presentation of the film pioneer’s life, it obscures at least one important detail: his downfall wasn’t just World War I, which brought different collective moods and logistical demands. What wiped Méliès out in the long run was continually losing distribution and patent battles with more powerful “pioneers” like the Pathé Company and Thomas Edison (and even his own brother, Gaston).39 Méliès battled the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), the sheer output of others’ mass production as a result of standardized film technology, and unscrupulous competition that pirated copies of his films for US distribution, without compensation.40 Hugo overlooks the fact that Méliès’s waning popularity was due as much to questionable market practices as fading interest in the novelty of his product. Both The Artist and Hugo present historical visions that reduce the arc of cinematic progress to the usual Hollywood whims of random fate and individualism—­p eople are mere victims of unfortunate circumstances beyond anyone’s control (war, market shifts, evolving sensibilities, changing technology)—­instead of the very real institutional and legal contexts that go unacknowledged. To be clear, my interest is not historical fidelity so much as how film histories are selectively retold through pastiche and what’s at stake in the nostalgic fantasy (in both senses of the word) presented in its place. The historical carelessness befits an industry that has no interest in criticizing ambitions for global market domination. For Hollywood to criticize Edison would mean criticizing itself, particularly today, as studios push for digital exhibition to squeeze out piracy and independent competitors and embrace “transmedia storytelling” (books, records, games, etc.) to maximize the corporate imperative and market reach of horizontal integration. Certainly, complicated legal and industrial histories are not the ideal subject matter for a kid’s film, but the point is precisely that Hollywood hides ideologically behind the seeming “innocence” of such fantastical indulgences all the time. So, when looking at a kid’s movie like Hugo—­enveloped in the ideological safety net of a particular market demographic, in cinephiliac nostalgia, and in auteurist prestige—­we aren’t meant to notice the dialectical histories being erased.

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1920s-­ness? This absence in Hugo points toward what’s at stake, beyond shallow aesthetic questions of pastiche, in the new iterations of Hollywood’s (digital) nostalgia movie: the further dehistoricization of the present. The technological and aesthetic upheaval of the digital age evokes nostalgia for the creative reassurances of surviving sound’s imminent arrival, while also avoiding the realities of digital cinema’s present and future. Midnight in Paris, Hugo, and The Artist evoke a postmodern pastiche of “1920s-­ness,” romanticizing cinematic culture at the end of the 1920s yet also obscuring, through that nostalgic haze, deeper economic histories in unresolved tension with the digital image itself. This is the more fascinating reason for why 1920s movie culture may have experienced a brief nostalgic resurgence. This was also the era—­at the beginning of modernity’s great push toward mass standardization, distribution, and consumption—­marked by “the rise of Hollywood [as an industry] and of the image as commodity.”41 This laid the foundation for what Guy Debord would later dub the “Society of the Spectacle” in the 1960s, a society where social relations were now mediated by an image culture thoroughly controlled by late capitalism. After World War I decimated many European film industries, Hollywood moved to dominate competing foreign markets, while continued unrest slowly gutted the pools of talent who largely fled for the studio system in California. The implicit appeal of the 1920s today is Hollywood’s nostalgia for its own global emergence as the hegemonic model for film aesthetics, industry practices, and form of commodified perception.42 But this particular industrial history isn’t quite told in the new nostalgia movies I have discussed. Rather, it’s obscured by romantic narratives of individualism, of nostalgic love, that celebrate the perceived innocence of an earlier artistic culture, one untainted by the possibility of larger capitalist market forces (which are either incidental or absent entirely). This is the core of postmodern pastiche, which is not merely the constant reappropriation of random cinematic styles for their own sake but the deliberate depoliticizing of the histories they superficially evoke but also largely avoid. At best, as with The Artist’s reenactment of the 1929 stock market crash, technological and cultural change is presented as an inevitable (and thus unopposable) force, something that just “is” and that no one can do much about, except to reject or embrace—­like the recent push to DCPs in theatrical exhibition. Valentin’s and Méliès’s respective careers are threatened as a result of forces beyond their control, these movies passively suggest, befitting a Hollywood industry that resists creative and economic opposition, whose “seamless” style and “natural” ideologies are designed to survive precisely by going unquestioned and even unnoticed.

3 • DIGITAL DEC ASIA Preserving Film, Database Histories, and the Potential Value of Reflective Nostalgia

Nostalgia in any form gives me the creeps. Brooding over the past bores me to death. —­Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema

In the much-­publicized 2012 documentary Side by Side actor-­director Keanu Reeves explores the current debate in movie culture today over the value of the film medium versus the so-­called revolution of “digital cinema.” For the most part the debate is superficial, arguing at length over the fleeting significance of cinematic surfaces (as in, the “destructive game” of which image “looks” better).1 Numerous high-­profile filmmakers—­not only directors such as Martin Scorsese and David Fincher but also cinematographers such as Wally Pfister (an increasingly lone voice in the dying defense of film)—­often placed particular emphasis on the moving target that is digital versus celluloid cinematography (fig. 11). The debate over which offers the better image quality, or which is better to shoot with, becomes tedious and arbitrary as the documentary wears on; as anyone with a reasonable historical perspective would note, we already know the final score to that game, while the technology is so rapidly changing as to make a fixed point of discussion on the topic impossible anyway.2 Generally speaking, then, Side by Side’s ephemeral significance feels like yet another self-­theorizing attempt to do little more than sell some imagined audience on the desired inevitability of the digital transition in cinema—­as much a systematic argument in defense of late capitalist progress and innovation as an honestly sustained debate on what is at stake. That said, ironically, the documentary itself contains a space for the kind of reflective nostalgia that could give one 71

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Figure 11. Side by Side (2012) offers a superficial debate about film versus digital media in ways that work to naturalize the inevitability of innovation rather than question its necessity.

pause within its otherwise bottom line–­driven mind-­set, one motivated by the flickeringly stubborn resilience of celluloid’s continuing presence. This emerges in Side by Side when topics turn from short-­term gratifications to the more contemplative ramifications of using both formats—­both opportunities for reflection during the actual production process of movies today and the long-­term durability of film versus digital files (the bigger question still haunting all of these debates). Scorsese, for example, even as a proponent of digital video, still likes the ritual of watching “dailies” the next day because they give him a chance to reflect on the footage captured in a way that the immediacy of digital cinematography doesn’t necessarily offer. The convenient ability with DV to shoot more footage more quickly than had been the case with the more labor-­intensive, time-­consuming medium of film (as well as the instant feedback of high-­quality DV playback on set) could have the unintended consequence of becoming a mental blockage, Scorsese argues, which too often prevents one from taking a breather once in a while to reflect on the footage in a way that, ideally, old-­fashioned dailies used to allow. Another consideration, meanwhile, is how the ability to “delete” take after take in the heat of digital shooting, as Fincher is so keen to do, might also have the unintended effect of erasing a shot that may have proved, on reflection, to be the best option.3 In the seemingly perpetual present of the digital age, it is still so often this sense of time (contemplative, historical, nostalgic) that allows a space for critical thought. Thus, perhaps more fascinating still are the brief observations of



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archivists toward the end of Side by Side, those individuals less interested in the shifting winds of image quality than on the material challenges of holding on to the dying medium of film in the digital age—­in a completely literal sense. In From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition Giovanna Fossati notes the rare position of film archivists at the beginning of the digital age: “In the middle of the technological transition, with a sense of the direction (towards the digital) but with no real sense of the destination, we have a unique (and uniquely limited) point of view.”4 It is difficult, if not impossible, of course, to think historically about the present moment of digital cinema, even as this transitional stage still allows the opportunity to affect the future directions innovation might take. Looking over the many hands-­on debates today regarding film versus digital as they play out in a variety of different media contexts, it seems increasingly apparent that the film archivists (more so than the filmmakers or other industry officials) are the ones who most consistently possess any real ontological perspective on the long and still incomplete transition from celluloid to digital cinema. So many of the other questions (the aesthetic qualities of computer-­ generated imagery, of digital video, or of 3D projection) will remain rhizomatic for the foreseeable future, thoroughly contingent on endlessly changing technological, cultural, and economic circumstances. The challenge to the archivists in the documentary was not which medium is more aesthetically pleasing, or more practical in an age of skyrocketing production costs, but rather which one can last. While digital files fight the constant issue of obsolescence, celluloid remains by far the more durable, if still finite, storage medium. This is a sharp contrast to George Lucas’s appearance in the documentary, where he claimed that “there’s too much digital information out there not to figure out a foolproof way to store it forever.” Collectively, archivists are the one group of professionals in Side by Side, by and large, who understand that the only issue that matters long-­term in the numerous debates around digital cinema is that of time. Whether its Christopher Nolan’s defiant defense of celluloid or the archivists’ collective championing of the continuing need for preservation, such fascination with film in the age of digital cinema is too often dismissed as merely nostalgia, as a sad, naive rejection of change’s inevitability in the face of relentless market forces that sell the importance of “progress,” whether necessary or not. And yet, though it is rarely acknowledged directly, there is no use in denying that attitudes toward film in the digital age indeed are often nostalgic; the need to hold on to the older medium is motivated by an unmistakable sense of loss, that film will never again be the dominant cultural medium in the digital age (mostly, not inconsequently, for economic reasons). We can see this relationship as simply reactionary—­as in, this love for various aspects of the dying medium of film becomes merely a personal or aesthetic reassurance during a turbulent age of change one otherwise wishes to resist or deny (a common aspect of nostalgia,

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historically), a sensibility so prevalent in the dismissive claims regarding nostalgia for film today. Or we can see this nostalgic impulse as one potentially valuable and constructive guide through the inevitability of technological change, focused not on “returning” to an imagined golden age of celluloid but rather on creating a space for reflecting on, and finding productive purpose in, the time of digital cinema. Recuperating some opportunities for this latter, “reflective,” potential of film nostalgia, one that has thus far been underserved in the book precisely because it is so rare, is the focal point of this chapter.

Reflective Nostalgia and Creative Destruction Lobster Films’ decades-­long restoration of a rare, thought-­lost, color print of Georges Méliès’s Trip to the Moon serves as an occasion to rethink one potential way in which nostalgia for film can serve a constructive function in the digital age (fig. 12). The process of “restoration” here was ironic, as preserving the film itself meant paradoxically destroying the original. In a rapid state of decay, the old 35 mm print was subjected to a chemical process that allowed archivists to take it apart, fragment by fragment, to be rephotographed and stored digitally. This process essentially left the original print in even worse shape, a rapidly decaying pile of celluloid shards. Then the film was re-created through intermediates who reconstructed it based on these digital fragments, as well as on other surviving black-­and-­white prints of the film to fill in the numerous gaps of partially or completely missing frames. Color was added; scratches and tears were

Figure 12. The meticulous digital preservation of a rare color print of A Trip to the Moon (1902) offers a rare glimpse of film nostalgia’s future potential.



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removed. The final version was as much a new digital creation as the “preservation” of a now truly lost print. A central paradox was at work in the Lobster restoration: the movie was destroyed in order to be saved. This allegorizes some of the contradictions of film preservation today, as well as the larger challenges involving access, research, and storage, in regard to film history in the digital age. Through market-­driven forces film is being forced out in favor of digital media, which leaves troubling longer-­ term economic questions for the film archives. Yet only lamenting that state of loss is not useful either. How might digital media literally destroy (or replace) the film medium in ways that could seek to preserve its spirit, if not its materiality? Can digital cinema be seen at times (as with the Lobster restoration) as an act of creative destruction? Even then, however, this must be balanced out by the broader implications for our access to film history in the digital age: what is saved, and what is left behind? Nostalgia is too often a destructive act, using the prejudices, beliefs, and desires of the present to denature history even as it seeks to (re)create some imagined lost era from years past. Yet the future, as always, remains to be written, and within the anachronism that is past futures (futures past) we may still find nostalgia’s continuing value. For writers such as Svetlana Boym, Christine Sprengler, and Mark Fisher, nostalgic obsessions with the past can really be about the future, both lost futures in the past and future changes still to come, which are in some sense guided by a sense of recuperating that which has been lost.5 Boym has posited the notion of a self-­aware nostalgia that “is more concerned with historical and individual time, with the irrevocability of the past and human infinitude. Re-­flection suggests new flexibility, not the reestablishment of stasis.”6 Such nostalgic narratives are individual and cultural rather than nationalistic; they embrace contradictions and are frequently “ironic, inconclusive and fragmentary.”7 Hugo, for example, an unapologetically nostalgic love letter to Méliès and early cinema, can also be read as much as an attempt to champion continuing film preservation in this present day (reflective) as a desire to return to the deeply romanticized history that is visualized in the movie’s impossibly beautiful, and mechanically cinephiliac, 3D digital re-creation of 1930s Paris (restorative). There is no shortage of ironies at work: Scorsese is a proponent of film preservation who also happens to be one of Hollywood’s biggest champions when it comes to shooting on digital video, while Lobster’s restoration of A Trip to the Moon showcased the digital’s central function in restoring a film print that it was also complicit in destroying. In both cases there is a core paradox: the inevitability of film’s figurative and literal passing spurs an ironic dependence on digital technologies as a way to reflect on the passage of cinematic time. And in each the nostalgic celebration of celluloid seemed dependent on its digital destruction. The more interesting question about the waning

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presence of film in the digital age is not identifying nostalgic impulses but rather determining what use they are put to (good and bad). In this sense the notion of “preservation” feels particularly relevant as a reflective act of nostalgia, using digital media not only to restore, archive, and access copies of old prints such as Méliès’s but also to create symbolic digital visions of that past, such as Hugo. Yet we should also be cautious to avoid utopic narratives of preservation and access regarding film history in the time of digital cinema, given that a fundamental problem here remains: nostalgia is by definition a romanticized simplification of the past (and in this sense must remain separate from “history” per se). Despite its reflective potential regarding the topic of modern-­day preservation, Hugo is also as much a pastiche of film history as it is a detailed account both of early cinema itself and of subsequent preservation efforts in the early 1930s. As a children’s fantasy film, Hugo has gotten a pass ideologically from many fans, cinephiles, and history buffs, yet its depiction of film history raises as many questions as answers.8 Thus, I am equally reluctant to let go of more reactionary criticisms of nostalgia, those based largely on challenging the reassurance of, and power in, omission (intentional or not), since another core issue in film preservation in the digital age remains what gets left behind, by whom, and to what purpose. “As convenient and user friendly as instant downloads [and other forms of digital delivery] are,” write Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, “they also have the unintentional (and perhaps intentional) side effect; they erase the past.”9 While film theorists such as Nicholas Rombes have criticized Fredric Jameson’s infamous “flattening” of history in a digital age that offers unprecedented access to old film titles online, archivists such as Paolo Cherchi Usai have pointed out the fallacy in believing that film history is virtually at our fingertips, to say nothing of the dangers in believing that digital technologies will be the savior to film-­print degradation—­a historical problem of durability versus obsolescence that the indisputably amazing restoration of A Trip to the Moon obscures rather than highlights. While the current pop culture obsession with nostalgia has been sometimes unfairly maligned, the larger historical questions involving both preservation of and access to film history (which the cases of Méliès’s Trip to the Moon and Scorsese’s Hugo evoke) suggest the importance of ambivalence regarding the cultural dominant today that is film nostalgia in the time of digital cinema.

A Round-­Trip to the Moon Lobster’s decade-­long restoration of an extremely rare hand-­tinted color 35 mm print of A Trip to the Moon, thought to be the only copy left in existence, culminated in 2010. Color prints from the days of early cinema were always rare to begin with, since all the coloring had to be done by hand, one frame at a time.



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But the “preservation” came at an ironic cost: saving the film frame by frame digitally meant essentially destroying the “old” print for good. Because the layers of celluloid had started to congeal together, only by exposing the print to certain gases could archivists begin to take the reel apart by hand, which would eventually destroy the film even more rapidly than it was already decaying. So, starting in 2000, archivists began peeling the decaying reel apart—­layer by layer, frame by frame, fragment by fragment—­photographing each available element with a digital camera and storing them on CD until the technology and the funding would be available to finish the restoration. Covering the span of two full years, this monumental undertaking successfully preserved the remaining elements of Méliès’s film on a hard drive, but the labor-­intensive process itself completely reduced the print to a pile of brittle and decomposing celluloid fragments. By the end of the last decade, meanwhile, the opportunity to restore the film finally emerged whereby these stored individual images could be recombined into an essentially new digital version of the old color print. But even this wasn’t so simple; many frames, whole or in part, had already been lost, requiring preservationists to use other black-­and-­white versions of Méliès’s film to fill in gaps in the color print. This also then meant using surviving elements of the color print as a guide for how to digitally color in the discreetly inserted black-­and-­white footage. Thus, the restored print, a celebration of film’s survival, was also paradoxically a (painstaking) work of pure digital reconstruction, including many elements (colors, frame fragments) not necessarily taken from the original color version being preserved. Of course, this cinephiliac achievement was not universally embraced. For example, many preservationist purists were particularly irate over the addition of what they saw as an obnoxious new musical score by famed electronica group Air. There was also the ethical ambiguity surrounding the process of celluloid destruction itself, an ironic act of “preservation.” In short, fully converting this decaying and now destroyed historically significant version of Méliès’s film to computer files and then completely rebuilding it in part with digital images that were often not necessarily “original” to begin with (along with the controversial new score) was, at the very least, not at all the same as restoring an extremely rare and now lost color print of A Trip to the Moon. Yet the decision appears not to have been a site for much widespread controversy. Perhaps because even under ideal storage conditions film prints cannot survive more than a century or so, even the most die-­hard of film preservationists and archivists recognized the need for some kind of significant compromise, and the always seductive promise of digital innovation seemed to make the most sense: even a digital echo of the lost hand-­tinted Trip to the Moon was preferable to abstract, hazy memories of an “original” film print. Yet this compromise should not be read as an unconditional celebration of the digital age’s impact on the preservation of film history. Usai has pointed out how this utopic

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notion of digital technology as a savior in the battle for film archiving is illusory; he argues that a computer’s immaterial storage capacity—­as well as issues of platform (in)compatibility and generational obsolescence—­is a much less reliable means of preservation than the more sturdy materiality of celluloid.

Film History in the Age of Digital Cinema Despite these questions of durability and longevity, the use of digital technologies will remain a central component to restoring and engaging with an otherwise fading, and in many cases already lost, film history. In a slightly different context Christine Sprengler has suggested that, as much as the films themselves, “perhaps our access to early twentieth-­century films will come to depend . . . on our capacity to not just digitally transfer, but also digitally re-create aspects of these works.”10 Sprengler’s argument in Screening Nostalgia is particularly useful as she directly negotiates the value of nostalgia’s role in encouraging, rather than blocking, audiences’ mediated engagement with film history. In examining several “nostalgia films,” such as The Good German (2006), Sin City (2004), Far from Heaven, and The Aviator, she argues that many filmmakers’ nostalgic investment in the explicitly mediated forms of film’s past performs “a kind of preservation work” by re-creating (often with the use of digital intermediates) how movies used to look.11 In one chapter on Scorsese’s The Aviator Sprengler focuses in particular on the film’s postproduction process, where digital intermediates were used to alter the original celluloid to re-create the effect of earlier forms of Technicolor. Of particular interest here is how her analysis balances the relationship among nostalgia, film history, digital cinema, and the function of Scorsese’s authorship in ways that anticipate the more recent and celebrated Hugo—­the latter of which, like Lobster’s restoration of A Trip to the Moon, relies heavily on digital technologies to paradoxically celebrate Méliès’s celluloid legacy. Sprengler’s argument about the function of cinematic nostalgia extends from reservations voiced by other critics and scholars regarding initial work on the popular aesthetics of nostalgia; namely, they argue that just because a movie is an example of pastiche, a surface-­level work of stylistic imitation, that fact doesn’t negate the opportunity for critical resistance on the part of the individual spectator.12 “The Aviator’s deliberate archaism [referring to the film’s re-creation of early Technicolor],” she writes, “engages with history (rather than evacuates it) by performing a kind of preservation work that approximates the look of specific technological processes and, more importantly, the significance of colour in early cinema.”13 In this sense Sprengler argues that a nostalgic impulse becomes not only important but possibly central to initiating contemporary engagement



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with film’s history. Thus, for Sprengler, the digital re-creation in The Aviator of two-­strip (red/blue) and three-­strip (red/blue/green) Technicolor—­as well as the doctored black-­and-­white newsreel footage in-­between (where actor Leonardo DiCaprio is inserted digitally into Howard Hughes’s place)—­compels the audience to engage affectively with film history and to reflect on the mediated artifice of that cinematic past. The 1920s become inseparable from the look of two-­strip Technicolor, she argues, and vice versa. In The Aviator “it is the technicolor aesthetic on its own as well as in conjunction with other self-­consciously mediated moments that opens up history (and cinema history) for analysis and reflection.”14 Moreover, a part of this “preservation work” is tied into Scorsese’s extratextual reputation as someone deeply invested in conserving old film prints. This emphasis on recovering film history, with the attendant anxiety of lost cinematic pasts, operates even more explicitly in Hugo, both through the literal preservation of Méliès’s work as a part of the actual film text and through the movie’s overt narrative politics of film preservation. The journey of a film historian in the 1930s (Prof. Rene Tabard, a clear stand-­in for Scorsese himself), and his diegetic engagement with Méliès’s critical and commercial neglect in the aftermath of World War I, reflects the larger extradiegetic cause of rescuing our cinematic past from the so-­called dustbin of film history today. Although Screening Nostalgia was finished before Hugo appeared in theaters in late 2011, it seems reasonable to speculate that Scorsese’s fantastical take on Méliès and early cinema preservation would likely resonate with Sprengler’s argument about the nostalgia movie’s ability to engage contemporary audiences with the experience of early film spectacle, particularly as it cleverly equates the early “cinema of attractions” with the contemporary “attraction” of digital visual effects and digital 3D exhibition. Moreover, Hugo’s climactic diegetic retrospective of Méliès’s career was both dependent on and a showcasing of the painstaking restoration of his old prints. The celebration of celluloid restoration in the film’s third act is not merely symbolic but literal, as Scorsese decided to use actual footage from the restored color print of A Trip to the Moon during the movie’s screening (and even has one character call attention to the novelty of it). In Hugo, then, the anxiety of loss central to nostalgia, in this case the recognition of film’s fading history, becomes central to the movie’s collective fantasy of championing future efforts to continue preserving old films today. In this limited way nostalgia’s future-­oriented attitude is a far more useful conception of the term. One of the most frustrating aspects of Hugo, ultimately, is that it awkwardly (and unsuccessfully) tries both to reconcile the restoration of a lovingly idealized, dehistoricized moment in the past and to embrace (rather than deny) that loss in order to appropriate that felt absence as an ideal to guide preservation decisions still to come.

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Drowning in History The digital age seems only to have intensified one key question that haunts Jameson’s work: how are we to access history (in this case both films and film history)? His work on historicity in the postmodern age figures prominently as a backdrop in more recent scholarship on digital cinema, in no small part because his work on late capitalism, the visual logic of the simulacrum, and even technological shifts in the “electronic” age of the 1980s and early 1990s seemed to presciently (if not unproblematically) anticipate cultural and economic questions arising from the coming postindustrial, digital age of the twenty-­first century.15 Nicholas Rombes has evoked, but also challenged, Jameson’s work in his provocative polemic, Cinema in the Digital Age, where he suggests that “the vast [digital] archives of retrievable information that make the past ever more available in the present” defy the notion of a “flattening” of history in the age of postmodernism.16 Rombes’s criticism here is directly indebted to the utopic notion of boundless preservation and limitless access that the digital age ideally offers to cinema’s past in terms of saving, as well as circulating, artifacts of film history that may otherwise be forgotten. Skeptical of such lost historical consciousness in the digital age, Rombes asks rhetorically: “Is it not true that, despite our best efforts, it is a fact of the digital era that we cannot escape the overbearing past? It is there, at every turn, on every channel, on every web page, waiting to be clicked. If anything, we are drowning in history. History in the digital era has a stranglehold upon us.” This obsession with older cinematic traditions, texts, and aesthetics, he adds, “is not even nostalgia, because the past is everywhere, enveloping us.”17 (The use of nostalgia here is strangely confusing, as the presence of the past in popular culture—­seeing the past as the present wishes to see it—­is a precondition for such nostalgic impulses.) Rombes views this as a “database logic” (borrowing from the work of Lev Manovich) for cinema in the digital age, whereby seemingly never-­ending access to everything from film history knowledge (in the form of DVD commentaries or trivia web pages, as just two examples) to obscure or forgotten titles (provided on sites such as YouTube or Archive​.org) effectively present the contemporary filmgoer with the utopia of history at the tip of her fingers. Even some archivists would concede this new potential to a point: “new forms of (digital) archives are being developed via the Internet,” Fossati notes, “that make use of participatory media to provide a significantly wider and more open form of access than any traditional archive has ever offered before.”18 Likewise, Dan Streible recently challenged Hugo’s pedagogical dictum that “time has not been kind to old movies,” suggesting that “digital access to some of those films has greatly altered the possibilities for writing film history. This is very largely beneficial, provided we remain aware of when the moving image before us is a



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film, and when it is a digital transformation of a work born on film.”19 (Streible’s larger argument is that we need to reconsider using the word film at all in documenting cinema history, since technically it often does not apply to just any given “moving image” object of study.) Ideally, the seductions inherent in the digital access of film history, the lure of being able to “Google” that rare version of A Trip to the Moon instantaneously, can encourage making active use of the artifacts still available in some form or another. At the same time, the idea that we are “drowning in history” as a result of digital innovation doesn’t seem nearly so simple. These “vast archives” in a sense echo Jameson’s equally polemical point that “we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach.”20 In other words the question remains open regarding to what degree this digital “database logic” of film history heightens, or further destabilizes, these recorded pasts as mediated through the commercial platforms of popular culture. “The film spectators that film archives have known are changing into users who expect to participate actively,” Fossati notes, “and have open access to archival collections.”21 Yet access as articulated here is a double-­edged sword. In the age of participatory culture restless, even inattentive, consumption of historical artifacts should not be confused with critical engagement with film history but rather should be viewed as the kind of restorative nostalgia that more often marks present engagements with the past. Likewise, even digital databases—­which increasingly provide a wealth of older, often obscure, titles and an embarrassment of secondary materials (promotional ads, studio records, distribution notes, filmmaker correspondences, ad infinitum) to the active researcher—­can fall victim to challenges similar to those that haunted historians in the analog age. Keywords can be as limiting as they are illuminating, while also being beholden to how the material is tagged and organized in the first place. “Our collective decisions to include or exclude certain things as data can be every bit as determining as the more familiar gaps in the paper or film record that traditionally plague historians,” writes William Uricchio.22 How material is digitally catalogued, along with how it is organized and accessed (or not) by algorithm-­based systems, can be profoundly restraining at times, while researchers can be just as apt to depend on our own predetermined assumptions about that data’s potential value in the face of massive amounts of material—­in essence, seeing what we want to see—­which blinds us to other potentially useful findings in a massive sea of information that doesn’t necessarily contain any link from one piece of data to the next. The question, then, of interpretation becomes urgent again. We may recall Kris Fallon’s discussion of the digital “database aesthetics” of Errol Morris documentaries such as Standard Operating Procedure (2008) (fig. 13), which documented the archiving and researching of torture photos from the infamous Abu

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Figure 13. Standard Operating Procedure (2008) brilliantly highlights the difficulty of

reconstructing history in the age of digital databases, despite the assumption of access to an unprecedented numbers of movies, images, documents, and other materials.

Ghraib scandals during the Iraq War. Such archives of digital photographs contain a wealth of data and metadata, but—­Morris seems to be arguing—­by themselves they are inherently meaningless. Again drawing on Manovich’s discussion of a digital database logic, Fallon argues that “the database as a cultural form is characterized as a collection of discrete entities with an infinite number of possible connections to each other, but lacking any structure to order or prioritize them. Unlike the narrative, which imposes specific cause/effect, beginning/middle/ end relationships on its constituent elements, the database leaves these connections undefined.”23 Here, we might also replace the “narrative” causality with a historical one to argue that images presumably of the past in a database contain no inherent organization or meaning on their own. At best they are open to subjective interpretation by the viewer, as with Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, which says more about the spectator’s own priorities than about what may or may not have been actually captured in the image. It is only the historical work, the time-­intensive process of triangulating such images within their various contexts, that can begin to flesh out the meaning of these otherwise decontextualized digital artifacts. On that note it may be important to reiterate here that the postmodern notion of historical consciousness was not simply about the (in)ability to recall artifacts, clips, names, and dates from the past through databases and archives, analog or digital; rather, it was about understanding the material forces that created a sense of historical consciousness around those images. Thus, we may be able to access early films thought lost, such as A Trip to the Moon, through a quick keyword



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search. Yet how easy (or desired) is it to then access the perhaps mostly forgotten, historical-­materialist contexts of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception that might provide that video with a more meaningful depth beyond the present, fleeting surfaces of novelty? Dehistoricized “pop images” and “simulacra” have a more resilient stranglehold on popular conceptions of film and media history than we might initially realize.

A Seductive Promise One way to ground historically these visual fragments of film’s past circulating digitally is to return to the material challenges of film archives. This idea that film history “is there, at every turn, on every channel, on every web page, waiting to be clicked,” overlooks more than just the issue of accessing an old film’s original historical contexts. As interviews in Side by Side underscore, and the case of Lobster’s work on A Trip to the Moon further demonstrate, the utopic belief that digital technologies will create greater access to the vastness of film history repeatedly runs up against the frustration of film archivists. Paolo Cherchi Usai, senior curator at the George Eastman House International Museum and one of film preservation’s most prominent advocates, vocalized some of the common frustrations in his own polemic, The Death of Cinema. Although Usai is open-­ minded about the potential value of such new innovations, he is deeply skeptical of the blind faith that others put in the digital age to solve all, if any, of the long-­ term problems associated with film preservation: “The notion that a digital or satellite library would make it possible to browse through an entire history of cinema on our monitors is an astonishing misconception, failing as it does to recognize the realities of a mass of obscure motion pictures that only a handful of people will ever want to see and even fewer distributors will bother making accessible for cash.”24 This utopic rhetoric seems even more prescient in our current culture of “cloud”-­based archiving (an unabashedly immaterial metaphor for such real material concerns). Digital proponents such as Rombes are not necessarily arguing that the “entire history of cinema” is available on websites such as YouTube, of course. Indeed, Rombes’s own discussion of postmodern historical consciousness in the digital age, of being drowned in (by?) history online, is more complicated; elsewhere he argues that such “ahistorical postmodernity has been realised even as history now abounds due to the digital archive. . . . Such sites are deeply historical even as they render history ironic through a random juxtaposition of video clips.”25 Historical context is secondary to an information overload that does not lend itself easily to a simplified cause-­effect logic in an era of endless digital digression: “Isn’t this tendency to document relentlessly the multiple tributaries of thought that form the Main Idea—­whether it be in digressive postmodern fiction, or in the ever-­expanding bonus and supplementary

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features of DVDs, or in the replicating archive of YouTube—­the practical outgrowth of postmodernism, which taught us that behind every story was another story?”26 The idea that we are “drowning in history,” contextualized or otherwise, thanks to the ready availability of online search engines that can instantly pull up countless old films on video promotes the kind of utopic rhetoric of which preservationists such as Usai are so skeptical. Embracing the unquestionable wealth of titles now more conveniently accessible online too easily enables one to not notice all the forgotten titles not available—­not just the millions of films already lost per se (or simply in need of urgent restoration) but rather old ones that may survive in some usable form but which never made the digital conversion necessary to upload it online (this also echoes critic David Kehr’s recent reminder that film history is lost every day in the market-­driven rush to embrace DVD, Blu-­ray, and now streaming video, where countless films, even once relatively mainstream Hollywood ones, never make the transition from one format to the next).27 At the very least, unconditionally celebrating digital technologies’ positive contributions to accessing film history risks obscuring important questions regarding access rather than highlighting them. Another important issue is not just that resources such as the Internet may or may not make more old films easily accessible but also the fallacy that converting rapidly decaying films, such as A Trip to the Moon, to digital format will automatically ensure them a long shelf life. One of digital cinema’s key aspects, which has thus far not received nearly as much critical attention as technical advancements in either cinematography, effects work, or even theatrical projection, is the rather transparent but overlooked fact that celluloid remains a much more reliable storage medium than does a computer file. While lamenting the unavoidability of film’s eventual decay in a very material sense, no matter how carefully stored, Usai nonetheless strongly resists the easy siren call of digital preservation: “Digital technology offers the seductive promise of a real miracle: perfect vision, eternal moving images that can be reproduced ad infinitum with no loss of visual information—­as blatant a lie as the claim that compact discs and cd-­roms will last a lifetime.”28 Indeed, the recent celebration of Méliès’s restored color print, an undeniably impressive achievement, is in some ways very deceiving in its presentation of film’s instability and may even (especially given Technicolor’s active involvement) reinforce the industry’s desire to sell digital as a cure-­all to film’s troubles. While digital intermediates painstakingly saved, even “improved,” that film from its rapid irreversible state, the irony is that a new film print of the digital restoration would nonetheless remain far more stable and reliable over the course of the next fifty to one hundred years than the files themselves. The key issue is both planned and unintended obsolescence, where the computer technology and the software programs needed to store and access such digital copies of movies are



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constantly going out of date as a result of capitalist demands, which consistently insist on a new platform to perpetuate the market. What the medium of celluloid lacks in terms of the interactivity or malleability that digital cinema offers, it makes up for with a material stability, which can last a hundred years, with relatively minimal maintenance (this is also a question that haunts the durable viability of the fragile digital projectors in movie theaters that have so recently supplanted the many 35 mm ones that in some cases lasted nearly a century). While some hold on to the idea that constant upgrades and backups will prevent data loss, such as Lucas’s proclamation that there is too much information not to find a foolproof way to save it forever, the long-­term view suggests the unavoidability of lost (digital) movies. Even if there existed a situation in which files never become corrupted, the deeper concern—­as with all aspects of film preservation—­is that such maintenance is not financially sustainable for cash-­strapped archives, those run by people such as Usai who seem to spend nearly as much time seeking out funding as they do actually saving films. This, in turn, leads to his ironic notion of the lamentable “Absolute Masterpiece” that further complicates preservation attempts—­the idea that most archiving efforts and funds are focused on constantly restoring different (often minor) variations of the same classic film instead of investing that time and money into saving more obscure titles that really are in danger of being lost for good (such as neglected nontheatrical and so-­called orphan films but also minor studio and foreign productions with lasting historical significance but little commercial value). While no one would dispute the immense critical and cultural value of a Citizen Kane or Metropolis, their demise is hardly imminent. “Will the time ever come,” Usai asks rhetorically, “when we leave The Absolute Masterpiece© alone for a while and concentrate on some of the [preservation] catastrophes that are staring us in the face?”29 This dilemma has particular relevance to the present discussion, as the remarkable process involved with restoring the decaying color print of A Trip to the Moon in the end may be a part of the larger logistical and economic problems with film restoration in the digital age, as much as celebrating its potential technological achievements.

Nostalgia for the Present “So the question presents itself,” observes Scott Foundas. “What will become of all the films currently being archived only as digital files? Will archivists dutifully re-­archive these files every decade or so as hard drives threaten to fail or the software needed to access said files becomes obsolete? Or will the film programmers of the future, instead of being told that a print is scratched or faded, discover a total systems failure instead?”30 Perhaps the most illuminating example of the

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very real and constant threat of digital decay and obsolescence came during an attempt to preserve not an old black-­and-­white artifact from the days of early cinema but rather a much more recent, seemingly ubiquitous, popular title from the last few decades. Pixar Studios’ feature-­length movie debut, Toy Story (1995), revolutionized animation, setting the industry on an aesthetic and technological path from 2D cel animation to 3D digital animation and permanently altering the way cartoons, and perhaps movies in general, are made. Yet that film also later became a cautionary tale in the limits of digital storage capacities, highlighting the persistent problem of format obsolescence, which is much more urgent now than in the age of celluloid film. In 2000 Pixar went back to the original files of Toy Story in order to transfer it for the first time to the newer medium of DVD (the film had originally been released only on VHS). To its shock the studio discovered that roughly 20 percent of the film had already been lost, the files permanently corrupted. The animators at Pixar thus had to re-create the missing footage based on available prints, videos, and production notes. (In this sense the DVD and Blu-­ray copies of Toy Story in circulation today are as much a digital “restoration” of a partially lost film as Lobster Films’ more celebrated restored print of A Trip to the Moon.) This anecdote is telling enough on its own, yet it’s not the end of the Toy Story franchise’s troubled history with digital storage issues. Around this same time, Toy Story 2 (1999) was nearly lost to user error during its initial production, when all the files for the movie were thought to have been accidently deleted: Pixar stored the Toy Story 2 files on a Linux machine. One afternoon, someone accidentally hit the delete key sequence on the drive. The movie started disappearing. First Woody’s hat went. Then his boots. Then his body. Then entire scenes. Imagine the horror: 20 people’s work for two years, erased in 20 seconds. Animators were able to reconstitute the missing elements purely by chance: Pixar’s visual arts director had just had a baby, and she’d brought a copy of the movie—­the only remaining copy—­with her to work on at home.31

These cautionary tales involving just how delicate Toy Story’s virtual existence is should force us to reflect on deeper concerns regarding the historical instability of digital technologies as a storage medium, while also cautioning us against the arrogance of assuming that such backup problems have long since been fixed. While nearly losing a film to user error such as accidental deletion is certainly not the same thing as losing a file to format obsolescence, the same deeper point remains—­digital files lack the material durability of celluloid. The Toy Story franchise is itself also a testament to the lingering dangers of nostalgia. The trilogy is often deeply dependent on restorative nostalgia—­once



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longing for the baby-­boomer generation of cowboys and spacemen to which it originally appealed (in the first and second films) and now increasingly longing for itself (Toy Story 3 [2011]), as with so many other Pixar films today. Even at its most melancholic extreme Hugo seems more conscious of nostalgia’s potentially reflective value than the somewhat shameless emotional and commercial manipulation of Toy Story 3 (and this aesthetic critique is to say nothing of the troubling impact of digital innovation on animation’s behind-­the-­scenes labor). An investment in recuperating nostalgia should not preclude deep skepticism about its worst cultural and commercial excesses, an indulgence made only worse by industry giants (such as Pixar and its parent company, Disney) all too anxious to exploit it. At the same time, it may be hard to see this without, paradoxically, taking a nostalgic step back from the studio’s recent rush to sequelization and repackaging. In looking to the anecdote of a partially lost Toy Story, one may also be surprised to realize that the franchise is already twenty years old. Thus, like the larger digital age of cinema it helped to usher in, Pixar, too, already has a history, through which this kind of nostalgia can create a separate space for critical reflection (for good or ill). The stories of partially or nearly “lost” Pixar movies remind us of just how ephemeral even the present must be. In the digital age, reflective nostalgia embraces the fragments of film’s past, literally and figuratively, as a means to reflect on the numerous challenges facing digital cinema’s present and future. While the incomplete files of the original Toy Story do not constitute a fragment from “film” history, technically speaking, they are an informative fragment nonetheless, which accurately reflects the tasks in an age of digital media involved in trying to hold on to cinema’s history—­even that (perhaps most tellingly) of the recent past. Haunting these Pixar anecdotes, Hugo’s longing sense of early film history, and Usai’s anxiety over the continuing technological challenges of preservation is a profound anxiety over the perpetual prospect of irretrievable loss, which is such a mobilizing force to most all forms of nostalgia and has only been intensified by the technological innovations and economic imperatives of the age of digital cinema. I began this chapter with a quote from Usai—­“Nostalgia in any form gives me the creeps. Brooding over the past bores me to death”—­which, by now, should be clearly seen in terms of the irony Usai intended. In a more recent article he states directly that fascination with the materiality of celluloid has been “shrugged off as nostalgic or fetishist. Interestingly enough, the reactionary connotations of both labels are being taken for granted by the digital intelligentsia.”32 Nostalgia is unavoidable when dealing with the collective desire of many to hold on to film history. As scholars such as Sprengler have argued, it may even be a necessary starting point of engagement, particularly for the more casual filmgoer. While such thoughts might be a bit too idealistic, they carry a deeper truth about the value of nostalgia. In any case degrading it out of hand serves no useful purpose. What

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does it mean to have already lost part of Pixar’s feature-­length debut? What does it mean that Méliès’s rare color print of A Trip to the Moon is now, in a very literal sense, gone forever? History is not simply about accessing fragments of the past but about actively reflecting and building on them. The idea is not to resist the digital changeover, which has already come to pass, but, as with Scorsese’s nostalgic use of dailies during production today, to perhaps use the arduous logistics involved with the more labor-­intensive medium as an occasion that compels one to take one’s time with cinema’s challenges in the digital age.

4 • GOING HOME . . . FOR THE FIRST TIME Pixar Studios, Digital Animation, and the Limits of Reflective Nostalgia

[Wall-­E’s] ambivalence reflects a contemporary society in which nonstop consumption, concerns about environmental destruction, and anxieties regarding technology share an uneasy coexistence. . . . It is not so much a failure of the film itself as an illustration of the quandary in which we all find ourselves as participants in consumer culture. —­Christopher Todd Anderson, “Post-­Apocalyptic Nostalgia”

One early theatrical teaser for Pixar’s Wall-­E (2008) offered a fascinating glimpse into the studio’s emergent sense of nostalgia for its own history. The trailer opens with a black-­and-­white vision of the Hidden City Café (fig. 14), with lead animator and director Andrew Stanton fondly recalling a memory from the mid-­1990s: after production on their landmark feature-­length debut, Toy Story (1995), was largely complete, the Pixar brain trust sat around imagining which projects they wanted to tackle next. This teaser promoted the idea that almost every single triumph after Toy Story’s stunning commercial and critical success was envisioned, in some form, that day. In The Pixar Touch David Price’s research on the studio’s history suggests that this idealized lunch probably never quite took place as presented in the trailer. For example, A Bug’s Life (1998) originated in a conversation between Stanton and Joe Ranft,1 while Finding Nemo’s (2004) origins were in a separate one-­hour pitch from Stanton to creative lead John Lasseter during the production of A Bug’s Life. Meanwhile, Variety reported that Stanton didn’t actually begin on a script for Wall-­E until 2002, with an idea 89

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Figure 14. Wall-­E’s (2008) teaser trailer is typical of Pixar’s aggressive self-­theorizing nos-

talgia, selling itself in ways that romanticize its brand as well as distort its own studio history.

that barely resembled the finished product.2 The Hidden City Café was animator and director Pete Docter’s favorite restaurant in Point Richmond, close to Pixar’s old studio. “Hidden City” also was Pixar’s code name in preproduction for Monsters, Inc. (2001) and would even make an appearance briefly in the movie itself. On more than one level, then, the romanticized haze on display in the Wall-­E teaser revealed Pixar’s own deep nostalgic yearning for itself by 2008. At the height of all its fame the company inevitably desired to look fondly back on its own history, imagining a simplistic origin story, even though, ironically, it was the forward-­thinking innovations in the field of digital animation that allowed it to achieve this prestigious industrial and cultural status in the first place. The use of black-­and-­white images in the trailer is itself instantly notable, since one doesn’t associate that aesthetic with the look or feel of 1990s visual media. Instead, this “deliberate archaicism”3 evokes pastness for its own sake; the audience is meant to recognize the image as a distant memory, as overtly nostalgic, precisely because of the soft use of monochrome. Colleen Montgomery has made a similar observation in regard to the vintage “Woody’s Roundup” television footage in Toy Story 2 (1999) (fig. 15): “the sequence romanticizes low-­tech, anachronistic media, yet simultaneously exploits and exhibits the aesthetic/ representational versatility of digital rendering software.”4 As the Wall-­E trailer transitions into color, meanwhile, featuring iconic moments from Toy Story, A



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Figure 15. Analog nostalgia is often at the center of Pixar’s movies, such as Toy Story 2

(1999), despite the company’s own commitment to cutting-­edge innovation.

Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc., and Finding Nemo, what is similarly intriguing is that these images are all rendered through the effect of flat, two-­dimensional, hand-­ drawn sketches rather than the three-­dimensional animation used in the movies themselves—­all the more ironic given that it was the landmark advancement in digital animation that distinguished the studio’s output in the first place. Thus, a nostalgia for black-­and-­white visual media (film and TV), for cel animation, and for the passing era of making films with film in general is ironically deployed to affectively generate nostalgia for older Pixar movies, despite all being technological anachronisms that contradict the company’s own actual innovation. The trailer culminates by telling us that Wall-­E was the last of these early ideas the company came up with during that fateful lunch long since passed, instilling in this latest film an industrial aura of both nostalgia and prestige regarding Pixar’s critical and commercial legacy. In short, Pixar was selling Pixar, not Wall-­E. The trailer also ironically foregrounded the unintended possibility that the initial golden age of Pixar was coming to an end, implying that all the original ideas from the beginning of its remarkable run had now been exhausted. Indeed, more so than celebrate the company, or its latest theatrical achievement, the trailer mostly just offered a mournful look back, more a melancholic end to one chapter than a beginning of the next. And, indeed, in recent years the animation studio has increasingly depended on recycling older films with a fairly consistent stream of sequels and prequels: Toy Story 3 (2010), Cars 2 (2011), Monsters University (2013), and Finding Dory (2016), along with releasing repackaged 3D conversions of older classics, such as Nemo, as well. This leads to the predictable (if

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no less valid) speculation regarding Pixar’s perceived creative stagnation today. While Toy Story 3 was celebrated, perhaps to excess, as a critical and commercial triumph, there were more mixed reactions to Cars 2 and Monsters University (how Finding Dory fares remains to be seen). Moreover, one could argue that Toy Story 3’s success was more the result of its shrewd, reflexive, but also to a degree accidental, exploitation of the larger generational nostalgia for the franchise history at hand rather than an original and innovative artistic achievement on par with the early classics that inform the nostalgic celebration of the Wall-­E teaser trailer. Of course, much of the impetus for sequelization is tied to Pixar’s partnership with the Walt Disney Company, a media giant that has successfully specialized in the nostalgic repackaging of older properties since the golden age of “Disneyland” in the 1950s, where generational nostalgia sustained the ABC program of the same name, while also paying for and promoting the new theme park in Anaheim, California. Although it is too simple to pin Pixar’s recent creative stagnation on any perceived corrupting influence of Disney, there are interesting historical parallels. Both companies defined themselves initially through cutting-­edge innovations in the art of animation—­for Disney there was the first effective integration of sound with animated images (a major reason for Mickey Mouse’s popularity); the first use of three-­strip Technicolor (1932’s Flowers and Trees); the first widely embraced feature-­length cartoon, Snow White (1937); the most successful creation of the illusion of three-­dimensional depth (the multiplane camera); and so forth. Like Pixar throughout the 1990s and beyond, Disney was both a critical and commercial darling in the 1930s. The 1940s, however, were generally unprofitable, with government contracts keeping the company afloat during World War  II. But on the eve of Disneyland in the 1950s, the company discovered a whole generation of parents now nostalgically recalling their own childhood memories of Mickey and the Silly Symphonies. As with Toy Story 3’s success with college-­aged audiences and their parents today, it was somewhat luck; Disney had leveraged broadcast rights to its old properties out of financial desperation. Meanwhile, Pixar waited so long in making sequels and prequels in part because it feared being perceived as money-­driven and creatively bankrupt (there’s also a parallel to Disney’s once-­reluctant embrace of the now-­ubiquitous “Princess” movies, explaining why it took fourteen years after Snow White to return to the fairy tale genre with 1951’s Cinderella). The accidental payoff with the latest Toy Story, however, was a generation that had, like the human characters in that movie, literally grown up with Woody and Buzz. Pixar is approaching something of its own “Disneyland” moment today and not just because there literally is now a Cars-­themed section of Disney’s California Adventures in Anaheim. Rather, the studio is facing a tension between



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trying to continue to be innovative in the field of digital animation (where originality has now been relegated mostly to low-­risk short-­subject cartoons, such as 2012’s stunning La Luna) while also maximizing the relatively easy and seductive commercial opportunities inherent in milking the nostalgic investment of parents and children who have lived on, and grown up with, Pixar movies. Yet the latter does not easily lend itself to the former; thus, the most effective negotiation of this (and impossible to repeat with the same power) may be something like Toy Story 3’s intensely self-­aware nostalgia. In some regards this tension also best explains the trailer for Wall-­E, a remarkably ambitious and original movie (though one fraught with troubling ideological contradictions) that was sold not on its own unique aesthetic terms but as a culmination of the studio’s nostalgia for itself. In short, Pixar’s recent artistic troubles are not only about creative stagnation but also about an awareness that such franchise recycling negotiates and reinforces the powerfully self-­sustaining nostalgia that anchors the company’s success. Studying Pixar’s intense self-­theorizing today reveals the power and limits of reflective nostalgia, using the sense of loss inherent to such melancholia as a way to chart a path forward. We see this narrativized in the futuristic Wall-­E itself. Late in the film the Axiom’s ship captain (voiced by Jeff Garlin) comes into contact with Earth soil for the first time, having lived his whole life, like the rest of the human population, on a ship way out in the vast recesses of outer space. His goal of returning to his “home” planet is predicated on an ironic, but wholly appropriate, sense of nostalgia—­romanticizing an Earth he’s never actually experienced for himself. Thus, on finding the plant that proves that life on the planet is now sustainable after humans exhausted its natural resources seven hundred years earlier, the captain humorously declares, “We can go home . . . for the first time!” The desire to return home, both geographically and temporally, is traditionally viewed as a strong nostalgic impulse, often tied up with notions of reclaiming the innocence and reassurances of childhood. Yet the acknowledgment of doing it “for the first time” betrays a recognition that such a place doesn’t really exist now, if it ever did. The captain’s sense of Earth’s past is purely mediated through a vast, random archive of historical images, now separated from their original context, which allows him to construct a utopic Earth in his mind. This database of live-­action images is reiterated, meanwhile, by other such footage throughout the movie (such as the images of the Buy-­N-­Large president, played by Fred Willard), wherein live-­action is equated with the past. In his discussion of Pixar, Eric Herhuth sharply observes that “by staging the future as animated and the past as live, the film combines the nostalgia for aura with a similar nostalgia for the indexical, human past.”5 Thus Herhuth points up a dynamic between ontological assumptions about the analog versus the digital (profilmic versus postfilmic)

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that structures many of the nostalgic impulses explored throughout this book. Meanwhile, the somewhat conventional idea of nostalgia promoted by the scene with the captain, as ultimately a romance with one’s own imagination, is shattered when he views recorded footage of the actual planet, which still looks barren and destitute. But rather than try to lament the loss of a past that never quite existed, or retreat back into his mediated fantasy, the hope implicit in that vanished ideal of a green, sustainable planet becomes his guide for future action (returning to Earth and restoring its ecosystem). In Wall-­E, both the film and the larger industrial discourses around it, we see the ironies of nostalgia—­its contradictions and its impossibilities but also its inevitabilities. To a point the question then becomes, as with the captain, what to do with it? Even if we are skeptical of the power of nostalgia in trying to understand Pixar today, I would likewise suggest it is impossible to stand fully outside it either. In response to the nostalgic “official” studio history promoted in the Wall-­E trailer and other Pixar paratexts, we may wish to take a step back and construct an alternative historical narrative—­also nostalgic but reflectively so. This requires paradoxically stepping outside (as much as one can) the worst trappings of nostalgic impulses, of which the company is itself so fond, even though, admittedly, a certain nostalgia for the glory days of Toy Story and other early Pixar movies (one lost past to which we can never return) motivates this project. And, as I have already proposed, implied in the idea of going “home . . . for the first time” is the likelihood that it was, in retrospect, a messier and more complicated moment in the history of the animation industry than we may wish to imagine. Ironically, it may even be the company’s own obsession with shamelessly repackaging its past in the years since Wall-­E that makes it easier to pull back from that relentless, market-­driven force (always) moving forward. While many Pixar fans and animation buffs may love Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, and so forth, is it particularly desirable to see a slate of recent and forthcoming titles dominated by their sequels, prequels, 3D conversions, and so forth? Moreover, even more original and daring works, such as Wall-­E or Up (2009), seem at times narratively compromised by their commercial obligations as much as they reveal traces of the artistic innovation that once defined the company and the brand. This, just as importantly, is also a reflective approach that has come increasingly to define broader critical and fan discussions of Pixar today; people long fond of the studio’s past glories are still wondering where their beloved object is headed now. Similarly, if we are to take an alternative look at the history of Pixar Studios, then this will also require actually looking at the studio itself and not just the movies. In particular, there is a fundamental, unresolved tension embedded in the history of the studio between the nostalgia of and for the films themselves (and for the studio’s collective achievements) and the deeper economic history



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underlining and challenging it; both are tied to the animation technology on display. For instance, the example of Wall-­E is also telling, as the futuristic story of a robot who saves humanity from itself is ironic in the context of Pixar’s own economic impact on the history of labor needs in the animation industry. This dates back to the development of the Computer Animated Production System (CAPS) in the late 1980s, which saved money on traditional cel animation by cutting the number of people needed as part of the process and increasingly storing one’s (now redundant) labor for repetitive tasks. Artists’ drawings could now be read into a computer, where much of the production and postproduction labor needs could be downsized. Ink-­and-­painters, tracers, and in-­betweeners were effectively a thing of the past. Back in the 1930s, animation studios like Disney used to require countless workers just to create and store the different paints used on animation cels. Now such color patterns are permanently stored, just a click away. CAPS also allowed for more elaborate 3D animation and virtual camera movement, which had been all but impossible in the analog era. Certainly, the famed multiplane camera, which had been in use since the 1930s, allowed for the illusion of a very limited amount of 3D movement but not on the scale of CAPS, and it required much more time-­consuming, painstaking work on the part of studio technicians. At the dawn of computer-­aided animation a fraction of the workforce was required to do what took so long to perform in the 1930s. Many artists and computer specialists were safe, but everyone else was expendable. Indeed, Alexander Schure, who was the earliest financial supporter of Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull, specifically moved into computer animation because he was looking to save on labor costs.6 Later, Catmull and partner Alvy Ray Smith tried to sell Disney and others on the economic benefits of innovations such as CAPS because it would save them money in the long run by cutting staff. Thus, Wall-­E’s reassuring allegory of posthuman labor—­of a machine that replaces humans yet does not threaten their livelihood—­seems intriguing at best in the context of the larger economic history of digital animation. In general, more can be said on the movies’ reflective interaction with their own industrial histories, especially when, as Leon Gurevitch notes, “what is apparent [even in ‘nature’ movies such as A Bug’s Life and Finding Nemo] in the mass-­produced quality of these features, that betrays their synthetic nature, is the fact that nonhuman automation has clearly played a large part.”7 As much as its own sense of nostalgia, Pixar has been proactive in self-­ theorizing its own effect on labor. Unsurprisingly, the hagiographic documentary The Pixar Story (2007) addressed head-­on the anxiety of computers replacing human needs in the production of animated features. Packaged with Blu-­ray home video editions of Wall-­E, the documentary is a fairly by-­the-­numbers insiders’ account of Pixar’s long march from one commercial, artistic, and technological

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triumph to another. For the most part it reinscribes the kind of rhetoric usually associated with Pixar—­a space of creativity, originality, and spontaneity that was necessary to creating so many of the modern-­day “masterpieces” associated with the company (while, of course, generally leaving behind the behind-­the-­scenes drama that also played a part in its accomplishments and generally underplaying the long-­running tension with Disney). All in all the documentary retrospectively constructs Pixar’s history as a narrative of destiny, which perhaps had the unintended effect, as with the initial Wall-­E trailer, of suggesting the company was due for a letdown. More interesting than that, however, is how The Pixar Story presented any concerns about digital innovation replacing human workers as being little more than irrational, misguided, Cold War–­era hysteria. Computers, the documentary argues, are simply another tool for the artist to use—­frustratingly, and knowingly, overlooking how it becomes a tool with fewer human needs. Beyond representations of technological innovation’s impact on the value of human labor, there is also the troubling (and more often noted) question of its seemingly hypocritical critique of overconsumption in Wall-­E. Hugh McNaughtan aptly describes the movie (with knowing irony) as an “anti-­ consumerist blockbuster.”8 At best, Wall-­E’s populist environmental message about the dangers of overconsumption comes across as something of a mea culpa from a studio too often central to the worst excesses of our media-­driven consumer culture today. At worst, it’s a disingenuous message that distracts its own passive audience from a dangerous and seemingly never-­ending cycle of popular culture consumption in which any and all things Pixar hardly offer a meaningful guide out. Christopher Todd Anderson argues that Wall-­E’s “ambivalence reflects a contemporary society in which nonstop consumption, concerns about environmental destruction, and anxieties regarding technology share an uneasy coexistence,” adding that these contradictions are “not so much a failure of the film itself as an illustration of the quandary in which we all find ourselves as participants in consumer culture.”9 In one crucial respect I agree that such thematic ambivalence—­which is itself so dependent on, or merely the outgrowth of, the contradictions of consumer nostalgia—­best explains Wall-­E’s many conflicting cultural, technological, and economic ideologies. Yet I would also add that it is a “failure” of the film itself; more precisely, it is a failure of Pixar, as the ambivalence regarding nonstop consumption and anxieties about technology are very much at the core of the history of the studio, which is itself far more a sustained agent for change in our consumer pop culture than merely something reacting helplessly against it. This may be never more true than attempting to promote Wall-­E by nostalgically reiterating (and thus further repromoting) the entire history of consumption that made the production of that movie possible in the first place. This comes, meanwhile, at the expense of another studio history not told in the Wall-­E trailer.



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Pixar’s Prehistory of Posthuman Labor While quite a bit has already been written about Wall-­E’s intricate cultural politics, very little of it has been put in dialogue with the larger narrative of labor that both the movie and its parent studio have quietly constructed. Only Colleen Montgomery has pointed out how this movie’s depiction of work, as with Monsters, Inc., “troubles the rise of digital industries in relation to the consequent eradication of traditional industrial modes of labour and production,”10 wherein many forms of manual labor will continue to become increasingly obsolete. Wall-­E is a remarkably ironic allegory, intended or otherwise, for not only the frustrating contradictions of our consumer-­driven culture but also for the larger phenomenon in the age of digital cinema for posthuman labor—­that is, for our decreasing dependence on a material workforce (and thus the workers who provide it) in favor of various forms of automated labor. I say “ironic” primarily because of the film’s production and promotion contexts: two entertainment media giants producing a somewhat incoherent (perhaps, merely ambivalent) environmentalist critique of mass consumption, endless material waste, and passive humanity. It’s also ironic because, as the Life of Pi protests highlighted, the (d)evolution of labor practices in Hollywood since the 1930s is nowhere more apparent than in the field of digital effects and animation. The transition from hand-­drawn, hand-­painted 2D cel animation to 3D digital animation closely reflects the larger, devastating shift in late capitalism from a massive labor force in the manufacturing age to a much smaller, more specialized (and increasingly exploited), workforce in the information and leisure-­based one. Pixar began as a wing of Lucasfilm in the late 1970s, known then as the “Graphics Group.” Flush with funds from the success of the original Star Wars, Lucas spent considerable money exploring how computers might eventually assist the filmmaking process, streamlining some of the more labor-­intensive aspects of production. At the time, however, he was less interested in digital visual effects and animation, in which the future Pixar artists and computer technicians were invested, and more focused on innovations such as nonlinear editing systems to replace film splicing. Indeed, one of the great ironies in Pixar’s (pre)history is that it was often financially supported by individuals, such as Lucas (and later Steve Jobs), with little to no interest at the time in either the artistry, or even possibility, of digital animation, especially at the level of a feature-­length narrative. Another coexisting historical irony was that Lucas, now regarded as one of digital cinema’s early visionaries, had very little interest in or respect for the work being done by his animators at the time—­even after the otherwise well-­received digital cartoon debut of The Adventures of Andre and Wally B (1984) brought the house down at that year’s SIGGRAPH conference.

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For this reason, among others, Lucas was anxious to sell off his investment; after a long period of different potential investors (including Disney), failed negotiations here and there, and generally lukewarm interest, the group eventually ended up with Jobs. At this point in his career Jobs was no longer the young wunderkind who had helped found Apple Computers; rather, he was something of a Silicon Valley outcast who was looking to make another big splash. Even then, however, Pixar was not an animation studio but a hardware manufacturer of the “Pixar Image Computer,” which specialized in offering early digital 3D renderings of such tasks as medical body scans or geological surveys. Pixar’s animation department back then served a small, but critical, function: while it generated no income on its own, its innovative short-­subject cartoons were Pixar’s most visible product, as they were designed to show off the technological potential of the imaging systems for prospective investors (even though, ironically, most of the digital cartoons back then weren’t actually rendered with the Pixar Image Computer itself). That hardware failed to find a market, however, in part because the technology might have been too advanced for novice users, who were the targeted audience (such as doctors with little computer training and much on the line in terms of careful diagnosis). Instead, Pixar largely abandoned hardware production as its primary goal and committed itself to digital animation full-­time (which had been the secret dream of these innovators going back to their days with Lucasfilm). They made ends meet by doing animation for television commercials such as Listerine. Gurevitch argues that Pixar’s eventual entrance into feature-­length filmmaking was in many ways the end result of this long history of the studio’s inseparability from overtly commercial interests. In Toy Story, he notes, “Buzz does not just usurp Woody’s place in the diegetic hierarchy of the movie—­his aesthetic existence represents the culmination of a 20-­year and more process in which Pixar developed the rendering of industrial objects to a fine art. Buzz and his seductively perfect, industrially manufactured form functioned for Pixar not as the beginning of a brave new era in CG animation (as many commentators claimed on the movie’s release), but as the product and showcase of years of research development already undertaken in the domain of industrial design, rendering, and advertising.”11 Pixar depended on ad revenue to remain economically viable, making as many as fifteen commercials in one calendar year (1991), and that dependence continued to influence the studio’s aesthetic long after it moved fully into feature-­length films. Although the ambitious and innovative short subjects guided by Lasseter initially brought people’s attention to Pixar, the subsequent advertising contracts brought it the most exposure and credibility, commercially speaking. Some within the studio feared that this dependence on advertising pulled them away from the creative side of animation, whereas others justified it to themselves by maintaining creative control over the types



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of commercials they were willing to do, by training new artists, and by accepting the idea that they were learning “basically what kind of production infrastructure [they] would need to make a big movie.”12 More famously, Pixar also made ends meet by developing the revolutionary program “CAPS,” which it sold to Disney in the late 1980s. While its innovation offered such artistic achievements as virtual camera movement and more vibrant, consistent colors in the animated image, it also had a profound impact on labor practices. The programs and specialized labor involved with something like CAPS might have been initially costly, but in the long run it was cheaper than sustaining a much larger labor pool, a fact of which Pixar was quite aware. “In the early 1980s,” writes Price, “Catmull and Smith persuaded a Disney engineer named Lem Davis of the merits of using computers to replace the battalions of women who laboriously painted cels by hand in the Ink and Paint Building.”13 Meanwhile, even basic computer tasks like creating keyframes eliminated the need for junior animators to draw in the “in-­between” frames in a senior artist’s animation.14 Later, part of Pixar’s appeal in the early 1990s to Disney feature-­ length film production was the fact that it was a nonunion company operating technically as an outside contractor, which allowed the bigger studio to circumvent union rules governing labor practices within its own walls.15 We see here the early days of the so-­called digital sweatshops, where studios saved money on animation and VFX work by contracting out assignments to nonunion production houses that are forced to bid against each other for contracts. Working on Toy Story, various Pixar and Disney workers were technically employed, Price noted, “by a Pixar-­Disney joint venture called Hi Tech Toons, formed to shield the two companies from liability and to simplify accounting—­a standard Hollywood practice. In the case of Toy Story the separate company also took care of the union issue for Disney, enabling the studio to produce a nonunion film through an entity that was nominally, at least, at arm’s length.”16 Pixar’s upstart status may have allowed it to think creatively outside the box, but it also helped to contribute to increasingly distressing labor practices within the industry. Thus, CAPS was only the beginning of the ways in which digital animation in general would require fewer individuals working in production than with its celluloid counterpart. In 1996 Screen International highlighted the explosion in animated productions in the wake of Pixar’s digital breakthroughs, reporting that more “economic” computer systems are “also having a dramatic impact on the costs and potential volume of animated features.”17 For example, whereas more than six hundred people worked on the production of 1994’s The Lion King (largely still hand-­drawn, though benefiting in postproduction from the help of CAPS),18 only a few more than one hundred worked on Toy Story a year later19—­a revolution that not only highlighted the aesthetic potential in digital animation to do more with less but also, more disturbingly, called attention to

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the sheer scope of its economic impact on cost-­cutting. Although I am not suggesting that the unique production exigencies of animation necessarily represent shifts in other aspects of Hollywood production in regard to labor needs, the story of CAPS, Pixar, and the era of digital animation the studio helped to define symbolizes the collective economic impact of the shift to a postindustrial, information-­based economy. Another great irony for Pixar in this regard is how often nonhuman characters figure as primary characters narratively; Wall-­E, Toy Story, Cars, and so forth serve as allegories for posthuman worlds, worlds where humans are either nonexistent (Cars) or at best serve as peripheral characters whose function is to fill the emotional needs of the primary nonhuman characters. Although the story and characters for Toy Story shifted several times throughout its long preproduction history, Price reported that one aspect of the plot never changed: “the toys deeply want children to play with them. . . . This desire drives their hopes, fears and actions.”20 Similarly, Wall-­E works as a reassuring vision of posthuman labor in part because it is the story of a robot that both replaces human labor (cleaning up an apocalyptic mess on Earth, which humans have abandoned) and yet still becomes invested in saving humans from themselves. Like Woody and Buzz in Toy Story, Wall-­E does not logistically depend on people for survival, but the emotional satisfaction of human approval nonetheless gives him one purpose (the deeper leisure culture fantasy in both cases seems to be the idea that nonhumans will remain in service to humans)—­not unlike how popular culture collectively holds on to the importance of human beings in a digital age increasingly automated and self-­sufficient. It is, in a sense, nostalgia for humanity itself. Of course, many have noted that nonhuman characters figured so prominently in early Pixar shorts (including pre–­Toy Story titles such as Luxo, Jr. and Red’s Dream) because human characters are much harder to animate (as Tin Toy’s monstrously hideous baby demonstrated) and because Pixar’s lead animator, Disney cast-­off Lasseter, specialized in animating inanimate objects, going back to his college days at the California Institute of the Arts. Given that the reassurance of nostalgia is so often key to alleviating the perceived threat, or even just grounding the inherent strangeness, of change (such as technological innovation), it should not surprise us that Lasseter’s own intense nostalgia also pervades those Pixar movies on which he had such a prominent stamp. A perfect example was the first Toy Story, which despite being a landmark digital achievement could scarcely have been more of an unapologetically nostalgic love letter to American popular culture from the second half of the twentieth century. As far back as the Oscar-­winning short-­subject film Tin Toy, Lasseter’s personal stamp on digital animation had been informed by “his lifetime love of toys: he kept a collection of vintage toys at home.”21



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Less a reflection of popular toys at the time it was made (early 1990s), Toy Story reenacted the aging baby boomer’s fond memories of growing up within the material prosperities of postwar America. The tension between Woody (Tom Hanks), the all-­too-­earnest cowboy, and Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), the lovably misguided astronaut, replayed the transition from a 1950s love affair with frontier westerns to the 1960s obsession with the atomic-­age space race. This historical transition is made explicit in the second Toy Story, which explores Woody’s backstory as a popular TV star whose fame is cut short by the outer-­space craze that emerges in the wake of the Sputnik launch, which the toy character immediately identifies as a parallel to his own relationship with Buzz. By the time of the films’ appearance decades later, this vision of childhood consumption was acutely anachronistic; few boys growing up in the 1990s still worshipped the dual frontier mythologies of cowboys and astronauts in the way that Lasseter’s generation did more than thirty years earlier (meanwhile, Dietmar Meinel has convincingly argued that Wall-­E’s appeal lies partly in its overt frontier mise-­en-­scène as well).22 Moreover, beyond the two main characters, “the toys in the room were mostly classics familiar to baby boom parents, or variations on classics; Lasseter feared that faddish toys would soon give the film a dated, musty feel.”23 At the time of its release Variety credited the movie with boosting a “nostalgia market” for toymakers, who “increasingly [were] re-­creating classic toys from the 1950s and ’60s, not only for today’s kiddie consumers, but for their parents as well.”24 This anachronism was even more acute—­and honest—­in Toy Story 2, which also foregrounded Woody’s status as a valuable antique collectible through a narrative built around an unscrupulous collector who recognizes the toy’s vintage value. Toy Story 2 pushed the “youthful” appeal of Andy’s toys, at the end of the century, to the breaking point, offering that franchise’s last wistful look back to (and for) the baby-­boomer crowd, before a more reflexive nostalgia would overtake the third installment.

Pixar’s Nostalgia (for Itself) At the end of Ratatouille (2007) the rodent chef, Remy (Patton Oswald), wins over his toughest critic by cooking him an unassuming vegetable stew that immediately and powerfully evokes warm memories of the old man’s childhood. The recipe here is a simple one and cuts to the core of Pixar’s success: find the nostalgic sweet spot of your audience, and everything else will fall into place. Yet early Pixar films (A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc., The Incredibles, Finding Nemo) generally avoided overt textual mediations on the subject. On the eve of Toy Story 3’s appearance the Hollywood Reporter even lauded Pixar for always having “its eye solidly on the future of moviemaking, using cutting-­edge technology and old-­ fashioned storytelling to propel animation into the 21st century. It rarely has

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looked backward or indulged in nostalgia about its success.”25 Certainly, nostalgia was always a part of the brand’s appeal and self-­promotional rhetoric, but only in the last decade has the studio’s output gravitated increasingly toward the kinds of transparently melancholic narratives seen in the third Toy Story. These narratives often seem focused on responding to Pixar’s own artistic and commercial legacy after dominating its market niche for more than two decades. And often “these [more recent Pixar] films evince a pronounced nostalgia for obsolete or outmoded technologies” as a means, perhaps, to disavow the complicated technological innovations and cutting-­edge technology informing them.26 The critically maligned Cars, a decade after Toy Story, was similarly shaped by Lasseter’s nostalgia for the same postwar era. Instead of Howdy Doody and the early days of television, however, it was a longing for summer road trips at the dawn of the highway age and for the Route 66 tourist culture that thrived on that (not coincidentally, the lure of Disneyland on both ABC television and in Southern California was a central component to both postwar phenomena). For all its flaws there is something ironically appropriate in Cars about Pixar’s larger relationship to the value of nostalgia. The movie’s narrative focuses on a hotshot race car, Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson), who is forced to detour through the sleepy backwoods town of Radiator Springs, a relic of the Route 66 days whose inhabitants and commerce were left behind when the highway was built a few miles away. The movie, somewhat simplistically, asks us to slow down, just as McQueen must literally slow down and take a look at all that is being driven past in the endless rush of everyday life. The allegory in effect is also partly about the sudden changes of the digital age, about how Pixar’s monumental, sudden, and decisive impact on animation (and on the digital transition within cinema in general) had left little time to reflect back on the profound changes in its wake. There is clearly a (perhaps unintended) parallel between the critique of the efficiency of modernity in Cars’ depiction of the highways and the efficiency of innovations that Pixar brought to traditional animation. Gurevitch adds that “in an irony consistent across all of these features [such as Cars’ depiction of highways], automated industrial processes and the space they inhabit are presented as the enemy of our central characters. And yet these animated visual spaces are only made possible through exactly such automated industrial processes.”27 Like Toy Story, Cars was a product primarily of Lasseter’s creative guidance, and the backstory to Cars’ inception is deeply nostalgic. In 2000, amid the rush of Pixar’s remarkable early success, Lasseter and his wife decided that it was important for him to take a break from his workaholic lifestyle and spend time with his children. This inspired him to take a long summer road trip, literally finding a way to slow down and enjoy time with his family, while also living out the nostalgic fantasy of cross-­country road trips he took as a child. This trip,



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plus his father’s lifelong fascination with automobiles, planted the seeds for Cars’ admittedly strange premise. Reflecting these autobiographical influences, the movie is unabashedly nostalgic for what it perceives as the lost Eden of small-­ town America left behind in the mindless flash of interstate freeways. In this sense Cars was the first Pixar movie that consciously used nostalgia as a thematic device. What the audience was supposed to take away from it, however, seems to be a very different matter; in the end it feels like little more than a self-­ conscious rehash of Toy Story’s baby-­boomer melancholia. And any admirable claims to a kind of metatextual, reflective nostalgia regarding the position of Pixar at that time seem further offset by the film’s dubious reputation today as more of a shameless promotion for its hugely lucrative toy merchandise line than as one of Pixar’s finest artistic achievements (a reputation only further cemented by its aesthetically incoherent and clearly market-­driven follow-­up in 2011). Thus, even as Cars was originally the by-­product of Lasseter’s desire to pause from the consistently increasing critical and commercial pressure that Pixar faced by the early 2000s, the movie ironically became in time the primary symbol of the studio’s general turn away from the remarkable innovation that originally defined Pixar and toward the siren calls of crass commercialism—­just what had happened with Disney decades earlier. It is perhaps this challenge that Pixar would then negotiate with Wall-­E’s subsequent critique of mindless consumption. While Cars is unapologetically sentimental for the simplicity of mid-­ twentieth-­century Route 66 culture, a film like Up both wallows in nostalgia and mobilizes it as a means to set the primary narrative in order. Both films center on the desire for restoration—­while Cars wants to return to and preserve the prehighway heyday of Radiator Springs, Up seeks to live out the exploration that Ellie and Carl never achieved during her lifetime. Both films also position nostalgia as a reaction against the rushing forces of geographic change: in Cars it’s the emergence of the highway system; in Up it’s urban redevelopment, which literally threatens to destroy the main character’s home. “Home” as a metaphor for nostalgia takes on a curious dimension in Up, since it is literally Carl’s house that, with the aid of an impossible number of balloons, he takes on his journey. The movie opens with a remarkable montage detailing the ups and downs of a decades-­long marriage, a moving sequence detailing both the joy of life and the pain of loss (loved ones, yes, but also very much lost time itself). Meanwhile, it is Carl’s desire to live out fond childhood memories that he and his wife shared (including a mutual fascination with explorer Charles Muntz) that initiates his spectacular journey to Venezuela. Ellie and Carl’s long-­planned yet never-­realized trip to Paradise Falls serves as the painful absence in his past that becomes the inspiration for him to embark on that journey. In this sense one could argue that Up is closer to a more reflective mode of nostalgia thematically than any other Pixar movie to date, since the

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story is focused on making sense, and even use, of Carl’s profound loss, while simultaneously challenging him to let go of that past as he prepares to move forward in life.

Pixar’s Disavowal; or, Letting Go of the Need to Ever Let Go The idea of letting go of the past is also explicitly featured in Pixar’s subsequent film, Toy Story 3. Unlike Up, however, this particular narrative is much more complicated by franchise ironies that better reflect the studio’s creative opportunities and limitations today. The most recent entry in the Toy Story trilogy negotiates nostalgia both narratively (as Up and Wall-­E do) and generationally, as Cars and the earlier Toy Story movies had. Yet here it is no longer Lasseter’s baby-­boomer nostalgia that serves as the anchor. Somewhere in the eleven years between Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3 that generational appeal shifted, and the nostalgia now resonated for a very different audience: those who grew up (figuratively and literally) with the franchise itself. In the first two movies the character of Andy was largely a plot device, a means to give emotional and narrative value to the central figures of Woody and Buzz, whose purpose as toys was to bring joy to the little boy’s life (part of Andy’s marginal role, too, was certainly the results of Pixar’s reluctance in the early days of digital animation to put too much audience investment in human characters, whose rendering risked evoking the “uncanny valley” effect). In Toy Story 3, however, Andy becomes much more of an overt point of identification for audiences, and in his relationship with both the toys and his family lies the film’s powerful and overtly reflexive nostalgic appeal. The film’s opening moments re-create the parent’s nostalgic point of view, showing us a predigital video camcorder recording of Andy as a child, circa the first Toy Story. Like the black-­and-­white look of the Wall-­E trailer, the surface effect of this earlier generation of media technologies is to connote pastness for its own sake. Even without seeing the first two installments, one could immediately recognize this stylistic device as suggesting the presence of the past. Its powerful ending, meanwhile, where a now teenaged Andy gives up his beloved Woody to a little girl, was more about the generation of kids who grew up with the Toy Story franchise and now are moving on to adulthood—­symbolized here by Andy’s imminent departure for college. Interestingly, the premise of Monsters University, where Sulley ( John Goodman) and Mike (Billy Crystal) head off to college, is a symbolic continuation of Andy’s leaving for school, both of which remind us that Pixar’s original core demographic is also now college-­aged. It’s simple enough to highlight Pixar’s artistic rut by recycling properties over and over rather than



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explore more original, ambitious (if still compromised) narratives, such as Up or Wall-­E. Yet the truth is that the company is very much beholden to its loyal audience in ways that restrict the kind of innovation that helped distinguish Pixar in the beginning. Or, perhaps, the innovation comes in how to carefully negotiate those nostalgic impulses in ways that do not appear merely hypocritical or opportunistic. Despite all the critical acclaim bestowed on Toy Story 3 at the time of its release, the film’s success seems dependent on a uniquely historical moment for both the franchise and the studio. It benefited from the unusually long time separating the second and third installments. Ironically, the studio waited more than a decade to make all three films because Pixar long resisted the lure of sequelization, even as Disney itself pushed aggressively for more Toy Storys (even having its own version of Toy Story 2 in preproduction at one point). Price notes that in the late 1990s Lasseter didn’t want to do another Toy Story himself but didn’t want Disney to have creative control over it either.28 Added to this, Pixar’s reluctance to do sequels also concerned the fine print of its original distribution deal with Disney, which wouldn’t count any sequel as one of the several “new” films that the upstart animation studio owed its parent company over the life of the contract; any sequels or prequels would count as “bonus” films.29 Thus, the emotional effect of the third one, having a character who aged perfectly alongside his target audience, was in some ways quite accidental, the aesthetic by-­product of deeper industry histories. Going forward, the particular nostalgic pull of Toy Story 3, especially in the end, will not be achieved for a mass audience at any other time than when it appeared in 2010. One couldn’t reproduce this same emotional impact with children today; it would require showing them the first Toy Story, waiting four years before letting them see the second, and then another, no doubt excruciating, eleven years before seeing the conclusion. No child would go along with that (and, generally speaking, our collective media consumption habits today are such that if we discover anything new, such as a television series on DVD or Netflix, the inevitable temptation is to devour it all at once). While any aspect of the Toy Story movies could still remain emotionally powerful in the years ahead, the specific generational effect that Andy’s decision to let go of his toys (his childhood) had on teenagers and twenty-­somethings today could never be repeated for another generation, nor for the parents who also followed the trilogy through the years and who see in Andy and his mom the same pain of having to let go. The Toy Story trilogy is a useful demonstration of how historically specific audiences’ relationship to media texts can be. As this generational memory fades over time, however, Toy Story 3 may well lose some of its critical luster, which has so far shielded it from the criticism commonly applied to other Pixar sequels, prequels, and reissues.

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Of course, the greater irony in Toy Story 3’s emotional conclusion is that Andy’s generation never really does let go of the past—­hence, the nostalgic power of that trilogy and of the Pixar brand in general. Indeed, it is really quite the opposite; the appeal of watching and rewatching Toy Story 3 is that, in a sense, the audience never has to move on from the franchise (or, more precisely, from their memories of the franchise) but rather can endlessly indulge in that nostalgia, while the self-­reflexivity of the movie’s final moments allows them a form of disavowal. If Andy lets go of his childhood nostalgia and moves on, then Toy Story fans don’t really have to, as the narrative recognition of the potential value in such an act is sufficient. Actually moving on becomes infinitely deferred in an endless cycle of consumption (rewatching the movies, purchasing new versions of the movie, purchasing more and more Toy Story–­related merchandise, rewatching them yet again with the next generation of children, and so forth). Pixar’s own nostalgia for itself and its nostalgia for consumerism are so intertwined because the products themselves are purely commercialized in not only their function but also their aesthetic.

Wall-­E and the Limits of Reflective Nostalgia Nostalgia for consumerism, the desire to hold on to obsolescent products of the past, is at the core of Pixar’s contradictions, as Wall-­E (fig. 16) highlights with its lovingly anachronistic vision of a past consumer society. Far more than any other Pixar movie, critics have turned with increasing skepticism toward this one since its near universally praised debut in 2008, yet the continued fascination critics have with it reflects its deep importance to our understanding of Pixar today. Such fascination extended beyond academics to general audiences, who found within its conflicting ideologies much with which to empathize, often regardless

Figure 16. Wall-­E perhaps best embodies Pixar’s contradictory attitudes on nostalgia,

consumerism, technology, and even its own (often passive) audience.



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of political or social backgrounds. Wall-­E, writes Herhuth, “confuses the rational-­ irrational dichotomy by merging competing rationalities: programmatic directives become abstract, liberal desire. It seems appropriate that a film with this confusion at its core has been claimed by competing groups to be representative of their causes.”30 It is also this “confusion” between external directives and internal desires that cuts to the consumer core of modern global capitalism’s resilient power and that nostalgic impulses effectively navigate by way of their essentially protean nature. It’s ironic that this movie is the only Pixar one set in the distant future, because Wall-­E is also perhaps the most nostalgic. As Anderson notes, the movie “conveys a reverence for a lost past” (i.e., our present); thus, “embedded within its lament over large-­scale environmental destruction is a nostalgic fondness for consumer goods, a sentiment that complicates the film’s powerful if heavy-­ handed warnings about consumerism and environmental pollution.”31 Although the film is set seven hundred years in the future, Wall-­E himself is fascinated with consumer objects from a very specific time (our own late twentieth century), with little sense of the decades, or even centuries, before or after. Humanity clearly survived for a while after that, before abandoning the planet, as evidenced by Buy-­N-­Large’s eventual economic and political domination. Meanwhile, the clumsy and clunky Wall-­E himself, with his tape deck, optical lenses, and old-­ fashioned hydraulics, reflects ironically more of a relic from the machine age of the twentieth century than a utopic vision of future developments in robotics, especially when compared to the postindustrial Eve’s seamless Apple iPad-­like interface. The movie’s main character becomes a stand-­in for the nostalgic impulses that dominate contemporary popular culture at the dawn of the twenty-­first century, longing for a period he himself never experienced. As Herhuth observes, “the film’s speculative, distant-­future perspective has less to do with any actual future and more to do with a now recent past.”32 Wall-­E seems especially interested in objects associated with the 1970s and 1980s—­Atari, music cassettes, Twinkies, Rubik’s Cubes, VHS tapes, and so forth—­objects largely from the animators’ collective childhoods, most of which would not have survived several centuries in such good condition, if at all (such as the notoriously unreliable videotape). “The teeming consumer detritus in Wall-­E’s truck,” McNaughtan observes, “is composed of items the filmmakers remember being fascinated by as children; for the creators, as for their creation, naivety, curiosity, emergent identity are all best demonstrated by relationships to things.”33 In its own more overtly melancholic way Wall-­E is just as nostalgic for the excessive consumption of baby-­ boomer culture as Toy Story was, but the only way to maintain Pixar’s investment in nostalgia for the present day is to project the narrative into the far-­off, even impossible, future and then look back.

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Like Up, Wall-­E focuses on the unspoken but self-­evident pain of nostalgia as the wound that initiates change. In this case it’s not the feeling of loss at the core of a decades-­old marriage but the imagined inevitability of an eco-­nostalgia for Earth itself. As Robin Murray and Joseph Heumann have noted about Wall-­E’s eco-­ ambivalence: “Although many reviewers note the film’s nostalgic appeal,   . . none of them connect this nostalgia with nature. Instead, they highlight WALL-­E’s nostalgia for human artifacts without connecting those artifacts with the natural world. . . . Images of Earth (or an Earth-­like constructed planet) from space introduce a collective nostalgia, a memory of a pristine natural world.”34 Trying to return the planet to its days when life itself was still sustainable is what initiates Wall-­E and Eve’s trip out to the Axiom and then the human population’s desire to return to Earth. More so than just the self-­reflexive consumerist nostalgia of Toy Story 3, Wall-­E represents Pixar’s most transparent (if not entirely successful) attempt to date to negotiate the challenges inherent to (1) its own ambivalent aesthetic and industrial status as a key innovator for better or for worse in the age of digital cinema; (2) its own indulgent complicity within the excessive consumption of American popular culture; (3) its own fascination with, and dependence on, the inevitability of nostalgia in periods of great change and achievement; and (4) its own desire to somehow remain artistically innovative in the face of increasing market pressures (often of its own making). All in all Wall-­E embodies the contradictions of Pixar itself at the time the movie was made, and it reveals the limits of the nostalgia that has so often guided the studio, with increasing visibility and reflexivity, through the first few decades of digital animation. Although Pixar has become generally less creative with its feature-­length films (the short subjects are certainly a separate matter), some of them retain the ambitious spirit that defined the company in the first place. Yet this also occasionally manifests itself in tonally awkward narratives. There may be no better example of this than Wall-­E. Even beyond its relatively daring themes of overconsumption, the movie is undeniably ambitious at a narrative level. Numerous critics have noted the opening thirty minutes of the movie, which follows Wall-­E himself around during his day-­to-­day routine, contains almost no dialogue and pushes the potential for nonnarrative about as far as it could go in a family film geared toward a mass audience. Meanwhile, the rest of the film follows a more conventional and generic adventure structure that works mostly through more predictable modes of sentimentalism and broad humor. Even this, however, is offset by an unrelentingly negative depiction of humanity—­ daring, to the extent that Pixar is transparently insulting its own core demographic in the form of a future human race that consists entirely of fat, passive spectators, and risking considerable resistance from potentially offended audiences.



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Yet the narrative (and thematic) incoherence of Wall-­E overall is also telling. On the one hand the powerful opening moments suggest a studio still trying to experiment and innovate with its form, while the remainder of the film works as an attempt to appease its conventional genre expectations for fear of alienating its audience. In this respect one could read Wall-­E’s barely suppressed contempt for humanity as a form of resentment implicit in the film’s wild shift halfway through to a more commercially viable narrative. Although the captain’s decision to return to and care for Earth is an admirable one, the movie never really resolves the deeper problem throughout, which is that the humans as depicted here aren’t worth saving (they destroyed the planet and then literally spent the next seven hundred years doing absolutely nothing except gaining weight). In the end why are we to believe that they learned their lesson on the return home? The credits sequence, which (re)tells the story of humanity’s future through the remediation of different Western art forms, perhaps inadvertently suggests that civilization is doomed to repeat itself. As an audience we might recognize the pattern of overconsumption, but whether the characters themselves do is a very different matter. This also cuts to the core of the film’s depiction of humankind’s dependence on technology. Coexisting with the above question regarding whether people are worth saving is the other one regarding how incidental their collective existence is in a world that is now run benignly, but completely, by machines. Here we see an allegory for Pixar’s own innovations as Wall-­E imagines a world dominated by the labor-­saving workforce of robots and yet holds on to the nostalgic ideal that humans will somehow still maintain a meaningful place. Like Toy Story, Wall-­E promotes the romantic idea of humanity’s central emotional importance in a diegetic world where this is not necessarily the case (and this may also be worth noting when considering why these films have been more warmly embraced than Cars, which has a similar nonhuman premise but forsakes the presence, and thus the value, of people altogether). Meanwhile, Herhuth speculates that Pixar movies such as Wall-­E “are preparing people for new forms of personhood” in an increasingly posthuman world.35 Generally speaking, the film is a strange hodgepodge of dystopic and utopic sci-­fi futures—­the dystopia of a planet and population destroyed by mindless consumption alongside one of the most utopic depictions of technology imaginable: self-­sustaining, self-­aware robots whose only desire in the future will be to save humanity from itself rather than leave it behind. “The anxiety attached to the thing-­that-­becomes-­human [Wall-­E himself] in some SF films,” McNaughtan writes, “is entirely absent” here.36 The last, and most often noted, contradiction is the still unresolved question of Wall-­E’s explicit, and perhaps hypocritical, critique of overconsumption within present-­day materialist consumer culture. The ironies of the movie are self-­evident enough: Wall-­E suggests that, as a society, if we continue with our

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present patterns of mindless, excessive consumption and of showing little regard for the planet’s well-­being, we will destroy Earth. On paper this is a valuable instance of pedagogy, especially for the film’s targeted younger audience. Yet it doesn’t take a media scholar to recognize that it’s a movie that sits at the heart of one of the most extensive media empires in the world—­perhaps the biggest today after the acquisition of not only Pixar but also Marvel and Lucasfilm—­where the feature films often serve as little more than expensive advertising for all the domestic and global ancillary markets that extend from them. As McNaughtan notes, Pixar’s typical intertextuality (placing objects and characters in the diegesis from other studio movies) takes on a particular irony in Wall-­E: “pointedly present in the mountains of disposable consumer goods that blanket the deserted earth is merchandise from previous Pixar films, including Toy Story (1995) and Monsters, Inc. (2001), a self-­accusatory gesture that aims to defuse potential criticism through the ironic display of self-­awareness.”37 In this context it is hard to take Wall-­E’s didacticism seriously; at best it reads (as with the film’s hopelessly obese human population) as a compromised, partly self-­critical, recognition of Pixar’s own participation in a reckless and wasteful culture of consumption spiraling out of control, which it can textually critique even as its very economic existence fuels it further. To bring the discussion full circle, this also ties back to the film’s curious nostalgia for late twentieth-­century consumer society. As other scholars have noted, Wall-­E’s critique of overconsumption is also ironic when we consider how much the main character cherishes the material relics of this time. It is waste that destroyed the planet, yet it is also waste that Wall-­E himself adores so much and that serves as one catalyst for saving humankind. How, then, to believe that the movie really promotes stepping back from the cycle of consumption, since it places such an emphasis on nostalgically holding on to old junk that serves no practical purpose other than to fill endlessly deferred emotional needs? For Anderson these contradictions are centered on the specific emphasis on “garbage” in the narrative, which “reveals our ambivalent feelings toward consumption, technology and waste.  .  .  . There is a fine line between useful products and wasteful trash; between prosperity and decadence; between nostalgia and guilt; between high-­tech civilization and post-­apocalyptic ruin.”38 Meanwhile, McNaughtan has observed that Wall-­E makes “a heavy-­handed distinction . . . between the ‘right’ kind of consumption (rebellious, distinctive) and the ‘wrong’ (slavish, thoughtless). The audience member, disgusted by the over-­fed infants of consumerism’s ‘total environment,’ can console himself—­‘I am not that kind of consumer; my pleasures are not manufactured for me’—­and preserve the illusion of self-­distinction through choice.”39 (The same distinction about acceptable forms of consumerism, meanwhile, could be made regarding Andy’s emotional investment in Woody versus the collector’s financial one in Toy Story 2.) Wall-­E



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himself represents a responsible consumer in this model, then, somebody who engages in a pattern of consumption yet confers specific appreciation and thus conscious value on the things he owns. Meanwhile, the humans on the Axiom are passive, inattentive to the things they consume, and wasteful. Moreover, as McNaughtan notes, the film’s vision of a gluttonous and obese consumer culture may serve the function of actually distracting audiences from recognizing some aspect of their own bad habits within the grotesquely exaggerated bodies and routines onscreen. Wall-­E’s bleak depiction of a consumer society in which it plays such a central part resolves its many contradictions through this sort of disavowal. For McNaughtan the film positions itself as a form of populist anticonsumerism, which nonetheless still validates consumer capitalism through an emphasis on (the illusion of) an individual’s autonomous purchasing power. “The widely experienced contradiction between consumer capitalism’s valorization of the sovereign individual and our lack of ‘real’ freedoms generates the need for this myth” of consumer autonomy embodied in the character of Wall-­E, he argues, whereby “it is through such exercise of ‘individual’ taste that he stands out from the film’s serried ranks of robotic functionaries (human and machine), becoming ‘person’ enough to serve as the hero of the drama.”40 But Wall-­E’s kind of “rebellious” consumerism rings hollow, both in the narrative and for the audience. Rebellion is here defined as ironic, unauthorized, or personal interpretations of popular texts, such as camp and nostalgia. Yet, as McNaughtan argues, the idea of a nostalgic appropriation of consumer objects, such as Wall-­E’s reassuring affection for Rubik’s Cubes and old Hollywood musicals, is hardly deviant, even if the film tries to suggest otherwise: “the extent to which such acts actually create autonomous space for subjects of consumer capitalism (which has been persuasively argued by its more pessimistic theoreticians [e.g., Fredric Jameson] to actually encourage such ‘deviant’ modes of consumption) is debatable.”41 Instead, he rightly notes, “camp, like the nostalgia mode, can be comfortably accommodated, even welcomed, by consumer capitalism.”42 This seems never more true than when dealing with a Pixar-­Disney media empire that, even more so than technological innovation, harnesses and self-­theorizes a steady flow of nostalgia as its primary sustaining creative and economic force.

Nostalgic (In)Action? We begin to return here to the limits of reflective nostalgia: how to celebrate the past in constructive ways that can move beyond just its opportunistic commercial recycling? Indeed, Pixar’s negotiation with this challenge reflects a continuing dialogue with Disney’s commercial and artistic legacy. Murray and Heumann have argued that “by critiquing consumerism so overtly, WALL-­E also

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critiques Disney aesthetic and production values,” even while “the film also reinforces a conservative romantic ideology found in classic Disney features from Snow White forward.”43 Near the end of The Pixar Touch Price provocatively speculates that the critique of a once great business visionary now reduced to the crass repackaging of an old brand in Ratatouille, the movie that concludes his time line, was perhaps the upstart studio’s not-­so-­subtle swing at the Disney Company: “Above all, the script for Ratatouille held that where creative talent did exist, whatever its source, it should be treated as precious. Without it comes decline: the slow but sure decline, for instance of a restaurant that merely recycles the ideas of its past and capitalizes on its founder’s fame. . . . The scenario was an apt metaphor for the Walt Disney Studios that Lasseter and [director Brad] Bird had experienced after CalArts.”44 However, a deeper irony in reading that passage several years later is in the very real possibility that perhaps Lasseter and others within the studio have come to fear that, on some level, something similar might also happen, or already was happening, within Pixar itself—­a moment of critical introspection that may have become even more acute in the self-­loathing commercialism of Ratatouille’s follow-­up, Wall-­E. Pixar is clearly aware of the increasing centrality of nostalgia to its long history of critical and commercial success. At the same time, the studio struggles to call attention to it in ways that avoid simply repeating the company’s worst indulgences instead of creating a space for creative potential that moves beyond the usual patterns of consumption that sustain the company. Moreover, it puts a great deal of expectation on an audience that, as Wall-­E satirically made explicit, is too often passive and mindless, more often than not consuming anything with Pixar (or Disney) slapped on the poster (or DVD cover). Unlike McNaughtan, Anderson is ambivalent about Wall-­E’s conflicting economic and environmental ideologies, but he does similarly caution against the utopic idea that many audiences will see in the film a call to critical reflection: “If viewers are canny enough to notice the film’s contradictory messages and to develop the critical stance toward nostalgia that [Linda] Hutcheon advocates [in response to Jameson], that ironic awareness would be considered a step in the right direction for those of us concerned about environmental destruction and its roots in unfettered consumption. However, that’s a big ‘if,’ and most casual filmgoers are unlikely to ‘get’ the irony that might counteract the film’s purely nostalgic elements.”45 The myth of the hypothetical, active viewer reacting to the nostalgia film in unexpected, or “rebellious,” ways is further complicated with Pixar’s own shrewd reappropriation of the audience’s nostalgia for the studio (and the brand). Like Disney before it, Pixar works aggressively to control all the different potential avenues for nostalgia (films, home video, reissues, theme park attractions, promotional campaigns, and so forth). The ability to use nostalgic impulses to pull back and reflect depends ironically on coexisting with a space outside nostalgia,



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a space where the more ambivalent facts of (studio) histories are not viewed through such rose-­colored glasses. A space outside nostalgia, however, is increasingly hard to find within the cycle of consumption sustaining, and sustained by, the Pixar-­Disney media empire. Still, we cannot let go of nostalgia’s value, either. While nostalgia for the glory days of Pixar’s early innovations and dominance might lure us into engaging with the studio’s history, its recent, transparently market-­driven, obsession with sequels and reissues should cause us to pull back. Thus, it is certainly an act of reflective nostalgia to construct this history of Pixar to begin with—­looking back to some degree fondly on the company’s many undeniable innovations and artistic triumphs, while also putting that in a meaningful dialogue with both its ambivalent studio history and the equally disturbing economic histories of the larger age of digital cinema in which the company played a central role. It looks even better, meanwhile, alongside its parent company, Disney—­a company whose general creative bankruptcy essentially forced it to buy its way to successful properties like Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars. Yet, even this is cause for further reflection: will Pixar’s new role within the Disney empire (as well as important changes such as Lasseter’s subsequent role as the creative head of “Disney” animation) allow for new triumphs in the future or an endless cycle of Toy Story and Cars sequels, for the simple fact that they are both far too lucrative as toy lines to fade away into the dustbin of (digital) cinema history? It’s telling in some way that one of Pixar’s most recent movies (Brave) looks a lot like the kind of property Disney long ago started specializing in—­the so-­called Princess genre (even while, as Hannah Ebrahim notes, the move was also partly designed to defuse the “male-­centric” nature of most Pixar stories).46 In any event, it’s equally likely that Disney could kill all three recently acquired brands through eventual overexposure. Ideally, reflective nostalgia on the part of the audience, as well as within the studio, might be most valuable in countering this dystopic possibility, as Wall-­E and Ratatouille both struggled to do. While some remain fond of already “old” Pixar titles such as Toy Story, that does not mean that we should aspire for little more than endless reiterations, retellings, and repackaging, especially in those self-­theorizing narratives that simultaneously attempt to disavow this commercially mandated crassness through disingenuous narratives of anticonsumption (Wall-­E) or of just “letting go.” This is what makes the ending of Toy Story 3 so frustrating, indeed.

5 • TRON LEGACIES Disney and Nostalgia Blockbusters in the Age of Transmedia Storytelling

We’re reviving a canceled undercover project from the ’80s and revamping it for modern times. The people behind this lack creativity and they’ve run out of ideas, so what they do now is just recycle shit from the past and hope that nobody will notice. —­Deputy Chief Hardy (Nick Offerman), 21 Jump Street (2012)

One needn’t dip one’s toes in The Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) to note the extent of Hollywood’s recent obsession with the 1980s, the kind of recent prepackaged consumerist past that the Walt Disney Company long ago learned to harness for maximum aesthetic and economic value. Fittingly, the year 2010 saw two very different attempts by Disney to tap into both that cultural dominant and, as the company is apt to do, recycle some aspect of its own properties for a new generation of audiences. One such effort was the Rapunzel-­ centered movie Tangled, a throwback to the hugely lucrative “Princess” tradition of movies that was initiated by a remarkable run that included The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1993), and Pocahontas (1995). Of course, Disney had been making such movies sporadically throughout its early decades—­namely, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Cinderella (1951), and Sleeping Beauty (1959)—­but the idea of the “Princess” as a distinct and visible brand within the larger Disney universe was born with the formation of the Team Disney era of the 1980s and 1990s, which began to give it sustained attention as much for its merchandise potential as for its box-­office totals. Yet while the princesses had steadily moved toys, T-­shirts, dolls, and so forth, for well over a decade by 2010, Disney hadn’t produced any new such films since the 114



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late 1990s. The studio began to address this a year earlier with The Princess and the Frog (2009), which one could speculate had as much to do with a particularly glaring absence in the Princess merchandise line as with how much money the film would pull in at the multiplex. Tangled, meanwhile, was a remarkable success, tapping into girls’ obsession with the Princess motif and an older generation of mothers, aunts, and grandmothers’ nostalgia for the Princesses of their own childhoods. Around the same holiday season Disney brought back a decidedly less successful cinematic text from the 1980s, TRON (1982), in the form of its big-­ budget IMAX 3D transmedia sequel, TRON: Legacy. Ambitions were huge at the time; Variety reported then that “TRON: Legacy isn’t just a representation of the future; it’s a proving ground for Disney’s ambitions to generate megabucks across all [ancillary] divisions from what’s playing—­and what’s played—­at the box office.”1 The innovation of 3D, then, was not only about forcing digital conversion or raising ticket prices but also, as Chuck Tryon has noted, about giving studios an opening “to revitalize dormant franchises through sequels.”2 For a couple of decades in American culture, the name TRON had evoked, if anything, little more than wistful visions of early advances in CGI and lost afternoons at the local arcade. While the gaming version of TRON hung around gaming centers, shopping malls, and multiplex lobbies for years, the film itself quickly fizzled out theatrically, the latest at the time in a long line of major disappointments for its parent studio. While the film would always hold a place in the annals of landmark special effects achievements, the cinematic text TRON itself was at best a beloved, but hopelessly cheesy, cult classic for a very limited set of moviegoers (fig. 17). In fact it would not be an exaggeration to suggest that, by the dawn of the twenty-­first century, TRON was much more recognized in popular culture as a video game than as a movie. That inverted paratextual hierarchy was affirmed when Disney released TRON 2.0 in 2003, an interactive “sequel” of sorts that debuted on PC gaming formats rather than as a traditional theatrical narrative experience on 70 mm film. In the annals of 1980s American sci-­fi, TRON was at best a classic cult film, a beloved but generally obscure historical curiosity that had nowhere near the stature of other comparable properties like Blade Runner (1982) or Star Wars (1977). TRON failed with audiences in the early 1980s because the idea of a world inside computers was too far ahead of its time, or the technology was not yet up to realizing the stunning digital visions its filmmakers intended. Along those lines perhaps TRON gave us a fleeting glimpse of what Michele Pierson has called early digital cinema’s “hyperrealist” aesthetic—­what imaginative worlds CGI could present to audiences unbounded by notions of photorealism—­ before the more common “simulationist” model overtook Hollywood’s digital imaging.3 Instead of predicting the future, TRON quickly became a dated vision

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Figure 17. TRON’s (1982) ambitious vision of the future quickly became a nostalgically anachronistic look back.

of the past. Thus, this utopic vision of cyberspace at the dawn of the digital age, a hacker fantasy that promoted the ideal of knowledge being free for everyone, now evokes mainly a historical vision of the unique intersection in the early 1980s’ American fascination with sci-­fi movies, computer-­generated imagery, and the explosion of arcades. But its anachronistic strangeness is precisely what makes it so distinct from the “timeless” (as in, diegetic worlds outside any sense of historical time) quality of Star Wars, on the one hand, and the Princess films, on the other—­two mythic, fantastic brands that on the surface seem more suited to the larger Disney universe today. Along those lines of an inherent strangeness, what TRON lacked in 1982, especially given its place at the heart of the Disney empire, was the lure of nostalgia, either as a reference to earlier franchises or to existing formulas. This lack is crucial because the film was essentially helping to guide audiences from one age (analog) to another (digital). Disney’s long track record of technical innovation may have seemed to fit TRON at the time, but in reality the company’s success in this regard had long been more anchored by some manner of nostalgic appeals. Indeed, there is nothing inherently nostalgic, nothing reassuring to audiences, about the original TRON at the time it was made; it was just something radically new and eccentric. Contrast this with another innovation in digital animation to which TRON is often compared, Toy Story (1995); the success of that movie was not so much in its visual innovation as in how that fundamental eccentricity was anchored in a thoroughly recognizable baby-­boomer nostalgia. Both The Little Mermaid and Toy Story fit a long history of Disney novelty and reinvention



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that was also dependent on the kind of nostalgic appeal lacking in TRON, whose cold, futuristic aesthetic failed to alleviate various anxieties over its alienating vision of the transition into the digital age. Thus, I also say the TRON franchise is a “strange” phenomenon because, even as an admitted fan of the original, I’m not sure why it continued to exist as anything other than a useful window into the past—­a landmark achievement, to be sure, but a generally pretty clunky and laborious melodrama with mediocre acting, worse writing, and little in the way of dependable box-­office track records. Even its most ardent cult fans recognized, and perhaps even embraced, its simplistic plot and often cringe-­inducing dialogue. Even a talented and bona fide star like Jeff Bridges gives a wildly uneven performance, particularly in his interpretation of “Clu” (the same character who is killed early on yet comes back as the villain in Legacy without explanation). On the eve of Legacy’s appearance the original’s particular kind of nostalgia for early 1980s pop media was not the kind of timelessness or acclaim around which to build a major franchise. In order to extend TRON beyond its dusty shelf life, which expired sometime in the early 1990s, the clear temporal rupture needed to be foregrounded. While the original TRON began with an impressive and extensive display of CGI, TRON: Legacy opens as a period piece, set in the late 1980s and featuring a wistful conversation between a father and his son, who are surrounded to excess by TRON memorabilia (one of the film’s many bizarre anachronisms). Yet this gets to the heart of the matter: what made TRON strange in the 1980s made its sequel a seemingly good fit in 2010 for a company dependent on maximizing the nostalgic impulses of its fan base. How else are we to understand TRON: Legacy’s peculiar negotiation of time? In the early moments of the film Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) speculates about the circumstances surrounding the possible return of his long-­lost father, Kevin (Bridges): “Alan,” he says to Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner), another nostalgic ghost of TRON past, “you’re acting like I’m going to find him sittin’ at work, just, ‘Hey, kiddo, lost track of time.’ ” The concept of time is often referenced in the film but in a way that negates its significance: it’s been a “long time,” Sam says when he finally meets his dad again inside the digital “Grid” he created. “You have no idea.” Generally, the contemplation of time in this latest film echoes the role of nostalgia in so many recent transmedia blockbusters: an acknowledgment of how nostalgia, like the digital, positions itself as invested in, yet also outside, “time.” Despite the original’s underwhelming box office, the decision to revitalize the franchise made some sense. TRON’s cult following offered a presumably deep pool of dependably loyal (and nostalgic) audience investment, which (as with Tangled) would bring its younger generation with it. Moreover, at that time, Disney had little else in its famed “Vault” that could tap into the heavily sci-­fi and action-­adventure slant of 1980s nostalgia, which was increasingly dominating the

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modern transmedia blockbuster landscape throughout the early 2000s. Perhaps the closest comparable film was 1979’s The Black Hole, a space adventure that had performed more or less as poorly as TRON at the box office and had aged even worse in the years since (though it’s telling that The Black Hole is frequently rumored as a property for rebooting). Finally, TRON’s success as a ubiquitous and highly lucrative arcade game more so than a movie in some ways anticipated the current obsession with transmedia storytelling, the idea of a diegetic world that spills across numerous media platforms, which dominates the industrial and aesthetic logic of convergence culture today. Seen from these perspectives, the idea of resurrecting TRON seemed not only plausible but potentially inspired. Yet something happened on the way from 1980s cult classic to 2010 would­be transmedia blockbuster. While both Tangled and TRON: Legacy generated strong box-­office numbers domestically (Tangled did about $30 million more), the former was seen as a pleasant surprise given the studio’s own fears of a limited (read “female”) audience constrained by the aging “Princess” formula, while the latter was seen as a considerable disappointment given the months and even years of hype surrounding the franchise’s return—­not to mention its incredibly elaborate promotional campaign that covered years of Comic Con conventions. This underwhelming return was magnified in light of Avatar’s (2009) record-­ breaking run a year earlier and the larger trend of IMAX and 3D movies dominating the box office either out of genuine demand or obscenely inflated ticket prices. Added to this was a shrewd viral campaign that was meant to maximize the potential of the original’s devoted fan base, a component thought key to sustaining any successful franchise in Hollywood today. Although the company was reluctant to rerelease the original to a new generation of audiences, Disney’s emphasis on servicing the nostalgic impulses of TRON’s fan base went so far as to lovingly re-create the film’s iconic arcade, Flynn’s, inside the Hollywood back lot portion of Disney’s California Adventure theme park in Anaheim—­a nostalgic journey back into time reenacted within the sequel itself (Disney’s devotion to authenticity in this regard included tracking down actual vintage video-­game machines from the early 1980s through antique collectors).4 Yet, as nostalgia blockbusters went, TRON: Legacy failed to leave much of an impression, as the cult following failed to support such an expensive and ambitious reboot. So, what happened? Nostalgia was essential to the movie’s existence, I argue, but also the key to its undoing. Most enduringly nostalgic brands possess a central archetypal or mythic quality to their narrative structures, meaning that they can be (relatively) universalized from one culture to another and from one generation to another. This certainly is important to the longevity of the Princess films, aided by the oft-­noted ontological timelessness of the animation itself. Indeed, how many live-­action films as old as, or older than, Snow White (almost eighty years old as of this writing) can claim to be anywhere near as popular and



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lucrative today as they ever were? Only an elite few, such as The Wizard of Oz (1939) or Casablanca (1942). Little touches or restorations may be added here and there for a younger generation, but overall the images stay the same. Rebecca-­ Anne Do Rozario has discussed how little maintenance is really required on Disney’s part to keep the Princess formula contemporary: “The princess has thus always been rendered in the cinematic trends occurring at her original release. Disney actually maintains her contemporaneity in its dual aspects: maintaining the original design, while successively renewing its appeal by re-­rendering her in new releases, marketing, and merchandising. Disney does not precisely erase her original quality, so much as create continuity between that quality and her contemporary audiences. Thus, the animation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs available on the DVD, while matching that of the original print, is re-­released and packaged using the technology and aesthetic of the twenty-­first century.”5 Thus, the core elements of these successful brands remain relatively consistent. TRON, however, was so unique in its depiction of cyberspace, in its dependence on the arcade gaming culture, and in its wonderfully primitive use of CGI that it’s impossible to see it as anything other than an anachronistic relic from the early 1980s. In this regard TRON: Legacy is typical of so many of the anchors to Hollywood’s most lucrative transmedia properties. Yet unlike many of those other recycled franchises from the decade of Reagan, TRON’s anachronistic 1980s-­ness—­its dated vision of cyberspace and arcade culture—­is essential to its narrative goals and appeal. So, as a counterpoint, while a film like the original Predator (1987) could be read as a fascinating ideological reflection of Reagan’s America in the post-­Vietnam age, it’s equally easy to see how the basic premise of the movie could be recycled today, without that historical context, and still be engaging and timely. Predators (2009), for instance, was a direct sequel to that film, and though it was made more than twenty years later, it feels like a movie that could have just as easily taken place the next day in a way that a sequel to TRON never could. In trying to merge its own highly successful “Vault” strategy with this larger cultural dominant pervading Western popular culture today, Disney created a jarringly anachronistic text. Yet the untenable temporal paradox here can tell us much in broader terms today about the aesthetic and industrial value of nostalgia in the age of transmedia storytelling. To think more closely about the advent of this nostalgic transmedia blockbuster, I would like to explore the strange and symbolically appropriate phenomenon of this cult classic, its 2010 sequel, attendant paratexts (“Next Day”), and larger transmedia universe (TRON: Uprising, TRON: Evolution). Before taking a closer look at this franchise, however, I will contextualize the return of TRON through four different, interrelated historical and theoretical contexts: (1) the underconsidered centrality of affect in the age of transmedia storytelling, which by its very name more often privileges narrative;

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(2) the ubiquity of nostalgia for the 1980s in Hollywood popular culture generally; (3) the larger theoretical legacy of nostalgia, which originally informed even 1980s movies themselves (including their fascination within the usually forward-­ looking genre of science fiction); and (4) the larger history of the Disney company—­in particular, its long dependence on the aesthetic and industrial value of nostalgia and its decades-­long attempt to catch up with the Star Wars phenomenon. All of these factors inform in different ways the anachronistic legacies of TRON and vice versa. In the end the unanswerable question, which TRON’s underwhelming performance most urgently asks but which also frames these larger contexts, may be this: while nostalgia anchors these transmedia franchises in the short term, is it ultimately sustainable, aesthetically and economically, especially in the wake of Disney’s considerable investment in Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, at the expense of its own live-­action properties?

Affect and Labor in the Age of Transmedia Storytelling Transmedia storytelling is a relatively recent term used to describe the industry trend toward developing a single diegetic world across multiple media platforms in our modern age of media convergence. Both the horizontal integration of different media companies under the umbrella of a dominant conglomerate, such as Disney, and the relative ease with which digital media, particularly online, allow for a mapping of more complex story lines, have encouraged the demand for a new kind of narrative. In the early days of film, and even the more expansive canvas of television, stories were relatively self-­contained to a single text, with the occasional sequel, or crossover episode, as the primary means through which those stories expanded to additional texts. Even the economic imperative of syndication, meaning each individual episode had to be relatively independent of the other so that they could be broadcast in any order, required that more elaborate story lines on television be severely limited. But today new innovations have not only encouraged, but perhaps have required, large narrative universes that can accommodate not only tentpole blockbusters at the multiplex but also the lucrative ancillary markets of video games, comic books, viral clips, and so forth. (Indeed, Jonathan Gray has argued that these so-­called “paratexts” are so ubiquitous and crucial to our investment in the larger franchise as to make the hierarchal distinction between a primary text—­i.e., the feature-­length movie—­and the secondary one increasingly arbitrary.)6 More recently, Aylish Wood has pushed TRON: Legacy’s relationship to paratexts a step further, arguing in part that the movie’s spectacle cannot be understood outside the production cultures and other “making of ” narratives that framed its reception.7 These



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more elaborate narratives not only provide a hook to lure audiences from one platform to the next but also build a larger form of brand recognition and loyalty that exceeds investment in a single character or plotline. It may be a mistake to see this in largely narrative or cognitive terms, however. Indeed, Henry Jenkins’s most detailed discussion of transmedia storytelling in Convergence Culture comes in his elaborate reading of the general failure of The Matrix sequels (2003). He convincingly argues that the primary reason the films came across as inscrutable to most audiences, despite the immense hype and popularity of the groundbreaking original, was because the process of trying to follow the complicated narrative was too dependent on existing knowledge of events that occurred earlier in paratexts such as the anime shorts like The Last Flight of the Osiris (2003) or the tie-­in video game, Enter the Matrix (2003). Yet on a broader level it would also seem that many other lucrative transmedia franchises thrive despite a general inattentiveness on the part of most audiences. Thus, I would suggest, the investment would seem to be more affective than cognitive. By this I mean that once audiences buy into a certain franchise, the connection is more often about feeling engaged with that diegetic world than with the ability to consciously recognize or recall most of the individual plot points—­ assuming they’ve even taken the time to explore the full extent of that transmediated world. Richard Dyer’s notion of “nonrepresentational” signs would seem to have a certain renewed relevance in the age of transmedia storytelling. In his canonical essay “Entertainment and Utopia” Dyer explored in particular the genre of classic Hollywood musicals, making a distinction between what he called representational and nonrepresentational signs. The former, he argued, placed emphasis on stars, characters, and plots. However, not enough attention was paid to the more abstract ideas of sound, color, movement, and so forth. Yet, he noted, information was conveyed affectively through these signs every bit as much as through the more narratological elements that film and media scholars usually focus on—­in particular, the feeling of utopia, which anchored audiences to the otherwise obvious theatricality and unbelievability of the typical musical’s mise-­ en-­scène and plot developments (i.e., regular folks breaking inexplicably into song). Similarly, the bond in transmedia storytelling for audiences is just as often affective in this regard—­a utopic investment in the excess of these transmedia worlds, which spills out across multiple media, more so than the individual narrative elements. I evoke the idea of nonrepresentational signs in part because it seems particularly well suited to describing the transmedia world of TRON today. If we accept the idea that the look of TRON is fundamentally a relic from the early 1980s—­the simplistic geometric shapes of primitive CGI—­then its continued appearance now in shaping the look of a modern movie, video game, or television series is

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primarily affective more than motivated by a logical narrative causality. The idea of TRON, that earlier hacker utopia long since passed, would seem to be more, to borrow Dyer’s language, in how such a dated digital world would feel today than in how it would look. And that particular feeling, certainly, is tied up in the power of nostalgia, which is by definition utopic on at least one level: it is an impossibly idealized vision of the past. Thus the affective, and by extension the narrative, logic of TRON’s transmedia landscape is dictated first and foremost by the nonrepresentational power of nostalgia for the era in which the original appeared. And, I would argue, this kind of nostalgia pervades most transmedia blockbusters. But it’s only most obvious in TRON because here the anachronism, the jarring rupture between past and present, is the most visible. But there is still more in Dyer’s argument worth elaborating on here. These feelings of utopia on which the classical Hollywood musical thrived were not a form of audience engagement for its own sake. They were also presented as imagined solutions to real-­world problems; thus, these utopic spaces aggressively denied the tensions of class, gender, sexuality, and race as meaningful issues beyond the screen. Interestingly, many of the utopian solutions that Dyer discusses—­Abundance (as opposed to Scarcity), Transparency (as opposed to Manipulation), and Community (as opposed to Fragmentation)—­closely echo not only some of the themes in the hacker utopia of the original TRON but also more generally so much of the utopic rhetoric surrounding digital participatory culture today. Yet we should also caution against such short-­sighted rhetoric when confronting the question of how abundant, transparent, and communal the Internet really is, despite TRON’s promotion of such themes. The flip side of transmedia storytelling in the age of convergence culture is the active and passive work that audiences are expected to do to some degree on their own. It is this emphasis on labor in the age of the Internet that seems both intensified and concealed within the transmedia universe of TRON today. For example, in addition to a designated “TRON Night,” where select footage of the movie was premiered to the public in advance (taking a page from Avatar), a key promotional campaign in the months leading up to TRON: Legacy’s debut was the “Flynn Lives” viral campaign online, which aggressively courted the active labor of the franchise’s longtime fan base, and a game that reportedly attracted more than three million players.8 Like a lot of the textual and extratextual elements of nostalgia that weave in and out of TRON’s transmedia franchise, the “Flynn Lives” campaign existed both inside and outside of the film’s diegetic universe. “Flynn Lives” was both an Internet viral campaign and an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) premised on the idea that fans would participate in a series of online and real-­world challenges under the narrative guise of proving that Kevin Flynn was still alive, thus leading them into the sequel itself (coverage of the campaign was later used as another extra feature on the Legacy home-­video



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release). The end-­game to the impressively conceived series of challenges was, predictably, to be one of the first to see Legacy in advance sneak previews across sixteen cities. While the payoff was a free screening of a movie fans would have paid to see anyway, and probably still did (on a second viewing), the reward for Disney was copious amounts of relatively free publicity in which fans did most of the work. The “Flynn Lives” campaign was an elaborate continuation of the increasingly sophisticated exploitation within the industry of fan labor in the promotion of these sorts of franchises. Variety noted in 2010 that “as movie marketers continue to lament the tens of millions they put into television advertising, ARGs provide a way to target the mostly young, videogame enthusiasts that are also pic fans,”9 with the unspoken assumption that it also saves money overall. “It’s really a treat for the fan,” one Hollywood PR executive was quoted as saying. “In return, the studio counts on the player to make noise.”10 Certainly, the devotion of fandom is a key component to the importance of the endless recycling of such properties in the age of transmedia storytelling. “This form of world-­building can also encourage forms of enduring engagement as fans are provided with more opportunities to explore a story world in detail,”11 which in turn becomes a near limitless supply of relatively free labor. As scholars such as Eleanor Stribling and Abigail De Kosnik have noted, the notion of a fan’s work and its potential exchange value, particularly in the rapid proliferation of Web 2.0 and “user-­generated content,” have thus far been largely overlooked in the field of fan studies. For instance, Stribling notes that the industrial shift to an increasingly personalized and niche-­driven economy of media consumption has meant that there’s less a need for a stable mass audience than for “a dedicated core of fans who will contribute enough economic value to achieve sustainability through primary sources and who will recruit more people like them to help grow the market or at least compensate for attrition.”12 In this regard the modern transmedia investment in an anachronistic cult film like TRON begins to make more sense, especially in regard to Stribling’s insightful articulation of “progression”—­“the observation of fan behavior over time”13—­as a uniquely enduring form of fan labor (and into which the notion of nostalgia would seem to slide comfortably). TRON’s textual celebration of the “user” (i.e., the longtime fan turned Internet-­savvy participant) is also a nostalgic concealment of an exploitation of said individuals, which increasingly pervades the modern era of convergence and is itself another savvy manifestation of postindustrial capitalism’s exploitation of individualism. While the democracy of the digital age is premised on the idea of saving money, among other things, such cost-­cutting only benefits those at the top. Until the value of labor in all its manifestations is reaffirmed in our culture (a key polemic underlining this entire book), we shouldn’t expect the value

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of fan efforts to be markedly different. This is all the more apparent when fans themselves (at their own peril) resist the idea of calling their work “labor,” as it implies nothing more than an obligatory chore—­as opposed to a necessary part of the Hollywood hype machine, as it is currently configured. De Kosnik highlights resistance to using words like exploitation or labor when describing such activity because many fans see themselves as happily and freely participating in the promotional activities.14 The problem instead, she argues, is fans have willingly conceded “too much, too soon” to the media producers who steward their beloved franchises. But this idea of a “negotiation” would seem to overlook that the primary impetus in the first place toward exploiting the free labor of a fan’s user-­generated content—­or Stribling’s distinction between direct and indirect fan labor—­is precisely to use the imagined transparency and abundance of collective work in the digital age to cut costs. Also, the term negotiation would seem to give fans more power and leverage than they actually possess (as is too often the case in notions of participatory culture). This, finally, is further complicated by the fact that fan investment in TRON is also deepened by the bounds of 1980s nostalgia in general.

Nostalgia for Nostalgia Certainly, nostalgia in the cinema is not unique to our modern moment. After all, Hollywood productions back in the 1980s—­what with the then-­renewed popularity of surprisingly resilient franchises such as Star Trek, GI Joe, Batman, and James Bond—­also looked a lot like the 1960s. In trying to unpack the presence of nostalgia across the larger history of Hollywood, one quickly feels the melancholic trap sprung on the protagonist of Midnight in Paris—­where a nostalgic romanticizing of one lost period quickly gives way to an equally idealized vision of an even earlier one. Still, nostalgia may be especially crucial today in part because of the necessary fan investment needed to maintain both brand recognition and the deeper affective loyalty that is key to anchoring these larger transmedia worlds. Nostalgia is not only a reaction to the emergent era of convergence culture but its necessary companion. Since the days of modernity, nostalgia never existed in a void, as a random impulse to return to a simpler past, but as a reaction against change. And increasingly, it becomes nostalgia for little more than an earlier nostalgic era. For instance, the wistful desire in the 1980s itself for the “1950s” wasn’t just a general, unmotivated desire by a whole generation of baby boomers to return to their childhood. It was also a need for some to return to a time before the maturation of the civil rights and feminist movements (1960s and 1970s), a largely successful attempt at the time to reinstall a conservative order on a changing world by appealing to the illusion of a “simpler” (preactivism) white,



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masculine identity of the 1950s. Following this, meanwhile, it is hardly surprising that George Lucas, the so-­called poster boy for the future of digital cinema,15 should simultaneously be so intensely nostalgic. Lucas’s first major hit, American Graffiti (1974), is of course today regarded as the American “nostalgia film” par excellence in its evocation of that era. Yet as scholars have noted, even the timeless pull of Star Wars was more subtly but equally nostalgic. Its spectacular emphasis on the possibilities of space exploration and high-­tech wizardry may occasionally distract us from the idea that it’s actually set in the distant, mythic past. As Vivian Sobchack has noted, “The Star Wars trilogy, of course, stands as the most representative (and popular) of the appropriation of pop imagery to nostalgically constitute the pseudo-­history of ‘long, long ago . . . in a galaxy far, far away.’”16 Moreover, the melancholic look back, which always underpinned the Star Wars franchise—­an obsessive need Lucas possessed to hold onto this past—­was especially intensified not only by the inevitable prequels, which literally looked back, but also by his endless digital tinkering with subsequent editions of the original trilogy. Indeed, Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster have even gone so far as to claim that Lucas’s plans to convert all the old Star Wars films to 3D formats for theatrical reissue represented the “complete failure of imagination” that is so common to Hollywood’s remake obsession today.17 Thus, while Lucas was quick to express disdain for the obsolescence of the film medium at the end of the twentieth century, his thoroughly nostalgic body of work reveals the larger heart of the matter. One also wonders if the postclassical era of the blockbuster, which Star Wars was key to initiating in the mid-­1970s, has now been around for so long that its nostalgia is powerfully self-­referential and self-­sustaining. How else are we to explain the sudden resurgence of “event” films that remake, reboot, and generally recycle popular franchises from the 1970s and 1980s? The last few years of mainstream cinema have seen—­in addition to Predator, TRON, and Star Wars—­the return of G.I. Joe (1985), Robocop (1987), The Karate Kid (1984), Star Trek (1966, 1979), Die Hard (1988), Terminator (1984), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and even The A-­Team (1983). As one reason we could cite the usual suspect—­namely, a well-­noted lack of anything resembling creativity or originality in Hollywood. “For a long time, the studios have been ‘running on empty’ in the content department,” write Dixon and Foster, and “as the film capital moves into the 2nd century of cinema, this seems truer than ever, with a plethora of movies awaiting resurrection.”18 There is also, certainly, the usual historical wave of generational nostalgia; the last decade of mainstream transmedia properties looks predictably like what would happen when middle-­class white kids from the 1980s took over Hollywood. We have the appearance of studio executives, filmmakers, ancillary markets, and willing audiences all finding common

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generational ground in nostalgic appeals to the imaginary space of a shared collective cinematic past—­a variation on what Sobchack has called the “literal generation of a pseudo-­history.”19 Of course, as Sobchack also noted, the dominant mode of 1980s American science fiction, which so many of these recent movies directly and indirectly recycle, was itself nostalgic. The ironic resistance to a future was replaced by a desire for a return to a past that never existed. Both generations of heavily sci-­fi-­leaning nostalgia become invested in replacing history with intertextuality, meaning references to other films and television shows become equated with a past that they (don’t) represent. As Fredric Jameson argued: “The word ‘remake’ is, however, anachronistic to the degree to which our awareness of the preexistence of other versions (previous films of the novel as well as the novel itself) is now a constitutive and essential part of the film’s structure: we are now, in other words, in ‘intertextuality’ as a deliberate, built-­in feature of the aesthetic effect and as the operator of a new connotation of ‘pastness’ and pseudohistorical depth, in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces ‘real’ history.”20 The most recent wave of nostalgia for the 1980s becomes a particularly interesting variation on Sobchack’s notion of “nostalgia-­in-­itself ”—­the idea that several prominent films from the time, such as Back to the Future, were nostalgic for the (imaginary) past of 1950s television-­mediated nostalgia more than the ambivalent, often ugly, 1950s of McCarthyism, sexual repression, and racial tensions. These films revealed a “postmodernist disbelief in the future,” which was offset by a “comic nostalgia born of consumer reflexivity and commercial hindsight.”21 In the 1980s, science fiction’s failure to imagine a progressive future was replaced by a nostalgia for an imagined past that positioned the future as the past, a disturbing trend that has only intensified in the thirty years since. This was perhaps nowhere better realized in the past than with the Star Trek franchise, which evolved from a 1960s-­era forward-­looking liberal utopianism to 1980s-­era backward-­looking conservative nostalgia. Or, perhaps, the nostalgia for the television series felt by Star Trek fans during its 1980s theatrical run may be more charitably positioned as a nostalgia for what could have been (the TV show’s imagined racial, political, and economic utopia) but wasn’t. This makes the continued milking of said nostalgia into the twenty-­first century—­both with the creatively uninspired reboots of the same old characters (2009, 2013, 2016) and in the dismissive exploitation of a loyal fan base, which once constituted the high-­water mark of fandom’s potential22—­all the more profoundly depressing and the transparent resistance to a new possible future all the more acute. This postmodern intertextual history had another impact, however, one that may still somehow offer a reflective path to the future. To contextualize an earlier quote, Sobchack also noted:



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All three of the [original] Star Trek films [written in the mid-­1980s] constitute a particularly poignant and intertextually grounded pseudo-­history of their own. (Indeed, the prequels and sequels slated for both the Star Wars and Star Trek films ensure both intertextuality and the literal “generation” of a pseudo-­history.) The “futurism” of the Star Trek films is nostalgically backward-­looking to earlier visions of the future . . . as well, the television series characters (persistently youthful over years of reruns) have been embodied in the much older, if refitted, bodies of their previous performers, and thus have acquired a spatially marked history of an experience they do not narratively possess—­necessitating and made up for by the explicit and lengthy meditations on aging, regret, loss, and death found in all three films.23

Intriguing here is not only the explicit narrativization of nostalgia, of regret and time passing, in these early Star Trek films, which aptly summarizes a similar trend in the current glut of nostalgia blockbusters, but also the even more intriguing notion of a “real” generation that nonetheless grows up with and within this diegetic “pseudo-­history.” This confirms to a point Sobchack’s (and Jameson’s) argument about the dialectics of history being replaced with the surfaces of intertextuality, while also leaving open a historical space for the “real” experiences (in Dyer’s sense of the impact of nonrepresentational signs) of audiences who grew up with the simulated visions of this postmodern culture. This postmodern pseudohistory may also account for TRON’s particularly anachronistic existence today, embodied in part by Bridges himself. Within the ahistorical world of the Grid (a digital space in a sense outside time), a world still holding on to the vintage look of the original, the actor and the part he plays have both nonetheless aged. At the same time, his much discussed mo-­cap performance as “Clu” holds on to the idea of a Flynn both outside time (one who never ages) and beholden to it (the affective power of the “young” Clu lies precisely in its temporal difference from the older Bridges). Ironically, though, Sobchack appropriately read the original cyberspace of TRON as speaking to the collapsing of space, not time, in the postmodern age—­the perfect expression in its own quaint way of a simulacric existence. “For most of that film,” she wrote, “almost everything and everyone have mutated into a simulation, and the category of the ‘real’ (that narrative ‘real world’ mainframing the computer program world) is short-­circuited and loses power. Simulation seems the only mode and space of being.”24 This makes TRON’s evolution as flat digital surface into something nonetheless intensely nostalgic and thus affectively temporal all the more revealing. Moreover, TRON: Legacy seems narratively cued into the kind of “nostalgia born of consumer reflexivity and commercial hindsight” that Sobchack noted was key to the postmodern’s distrust of the future. Indeed, the sequel ultimately had little interest in fulfilling its own utopic rhetoric of a

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possible “digital frontier” that might lie ahead, when nostalgia was so much simpler. And fewer companies historically have been more savvy about promoting a consumer-­based nostalgia than the Walt Disney Company.

Disney and Star Wakes Redoing TRON as a nostalgic father-­son story—­a rather transparent allegory for the generation raised on the film, who now returned with their own children—­ was only the most overt Disneyesque component of the franchise’s aging appeal. Understanding why something like TRON, despite all its faults, might have appealed to Disney also requires appreciating many of the company’s other core business principles. For one, Disney has long preferred to recycle its own properties in various media platforms rather than come up with new ones, which serves a variety of important functions across its media empire. The reuse of old properties—­either rereleasing them as is on newer formats or modifying them for a new generation of audiences and technological possibilities—­provides newer products with a built-­in aesthetic framework and nostalgic audience recognition. And TRON was the only one at the time that fit the string of 1980s blockbuster nostalgia pervading modern Hollywood. Finally, not having to generate new content is extremely cost-­effective. What began as a practical strategy in the 1940s and 1950s—­first with theatrical reissues, then with the new medium of television, and later (reluctantly) with the age of home video—­eventually evolved into its central aesthetic and industrial practice, serving as a model for other entertainment conglomerates to follow. Ironically, though, the original TRON did not begin in-­house; it was the first Disney property that originated with an outside production company. This was an increasingly common Hollywood practice, the so-­called package deal, which Disney was late to embrace—­one of many signs of its economic difficulties by the start of the 1980s. Disney’s reluctance, however, should be understood in the context of Walt’s lifetime obsession with complete control. Although he himself passed away in 1966, the company largely followed his model, the so-­called What Would Walt Do? strategy. Part of being able to continually recycle old properties meant having complete control over them in the first place, a lesson firmly in place ever since Walt himself lost the rights to “Oswald the Rabbit” to Universal way back in the 1920s. But by the end of the 1970s it had become obvious that Disney’s film division was losing out on too many upcoming prospects as a result of this outdated model—­including Star Wars during its earlier phase. So when TRON’s director-­producer, Steven Lisberger, and his upstart digital animation company came along, Disney finally decided to take a chance on an outside project. The decision to collaborate on TRON spoke to Disney’s general creative stagnation during this time—­TRON being the second of two failed attempts,



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following The Black Hole, to cash in on the popularity of big-­budget sci-­fi caused by the release of Star Wars. The sudden obsession with space exploration was so widespread as to affect such unlikely franchises as the James Bond movies, which postponed plans for For Your Eyes Only (1981) in order to rush the regrettable Moonraker (1979) through production. I mention this historical irony—­that Disney was playing catch-­up with Star Wars and the new type of Hollywood it initiated—­because one could argue that Disney’s stature in the industry when it released TRON: Legacy in 2010 was not terribly different from the early 1980s in at least one regard. While the company and its many iterations of Disneyland set the industry standard in the 1950s for what today we would call “media convergence,” by the 1980s it was behind the creative curve, a few laps behind the Lucases and Spielbergs in a New Hollywood era of the blockbuster. The company returned from the dead by reinvesting in its nostalgic roots (foregrounding images of “Uncle Walt,” reinvesting in Disney Animation, and branding the Disney “Princess”) while also embracing a new era of corporate synergy under the guidance of Michael Eisner, Frank Wells, and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Similarly, one could argue that part of the interest in turning TRON into the latest 3D IMAX spectacle was to cash in on the innovative trends started by Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight’s [2008] impressive IMAX sequences) and James Cameron (the Digital 3D of Avatar). In retrospect Disney’s decision to purchase Lucasfilm and Star Wars in 2012 would seem inevitable given the company’s failed forty-­year quest both to copy that juggernaut’s success and, further down, to atone for the mistake of letting the property slip through its fingers in the first place. Disney passed on Star Wars in the mid-­1970s in part because they refused to give ground to Lucas on merchandising rights, an extremely lucrative ancillary market that Disney appreciated more than others back then. If Disney was behind other Hollywood studios by the 1970s in terms of adjusting to the impact of the postclassical blockbuster, it was decades ahead of them in terms of understanding both the considerable revenue streams provided by film soundtracks, books, dolls, and other toys and, in return, the added visibility and promotional value that these secondary markets provided for the original text. As early as the late 1920s, Disney licensed out the rights to characters such as Mickey Mouse in order to offset the considerable costs of an animation studio that produced much groundbreaking artistry but little in terms of box-­office revenue. Disney quickly realized, meanwhile, that his studio was also essentially being paid by other companies for the rights to advertise its own products. In this sense another appeal of TRON was in its longtime amenability to such transmedia marketing, which Disney attempted to revive with TRON: Evolution (on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360) and with its investment in the high-­profile Daft Punk–­ scored soundtrack. While the sounds of Daft Punk might seem unique within

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the rich history of Disney music, the business model actually fits firmly within a long tradition of Disney entertainment, on film and TV, which privileges the value of a soundtrack’s income potential as much as the prospects of its theatrical revenue. Still another central component to Disney’s success has been directly repackaging older films and shows, using the occasion of a new sequel, reboot, or similar formula (e.g., the Princess movies) as an excuse to rerelease a related film from the Disney Vault in a transparent money-­grab. But this begins to point us toward some of the problems and limitations involved in revisiting TRON. The closer one looks, the more apparent it becomes that TRON: Legacy was hardly an unconditional embrace of the original, even though it seemed ironically dependent on its nostalgic “legacy” to ensure an audience. Instead, Disney revealed a strategic ambivalence in 2010 toward the existence of the original TRON as it moved closer and closer to the sequel’s release date. The film’s production, for example, suggested a superficial relationship to many of the top-­level artists involved with the original film. Beyond the symbolic gesture of Lisberger’s contribution (he appears only briefly in one scene as the End of Line Club’s bartender) the new filmmakers sought very little input from the first TRON’s guiding hands. Also telling was the company’s decision not to rerelease the old film on DVD or Blu-­ray in anticipation of the long-­awaited sequel. The move was strange, and not only because of the revenue potentially lost as curiosity seekers struggled to track down secondhand copies of the long out-­of-­print video. After a successful Twentieth Anniversary DVD reissue in 2002, TRON sat idly in the infamous Vault for several years, with used copies then going for hundreds of dollars on Amazon​.com in the run up to TRON: Legacy’s theatrical debut. Just as important, the media attention surrounding the arrival of TRON on home video would also have served as added publicity and promotion for the sequel, a strategy Disney and others know all too well. Why, then, would Disney pass up those historically lucrative opportunities? Variety reported that Disney went out of its way to distance the franchise from the original film, at least in marketing: since a whole new generation was unfamiliar with TRON, “the studio’s marketers were liberated to start from scratch instead of relying on the previous pic’s iconography. There were no efforts to release the original film.”25 In hindsight one answer very clearly was that, even in the company’s own opinion, the original TRON was, aesthetically speaking, not very good. Wiping away “the fog of uncritical nostalgia,” wrote Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy at the time, better explains “Disney’s wise decision to delay the release of a spruced-­up Blu-­ray Disc edition until early next year.”26 If the uninitiated saw the original in 2010, the studio reasoned, it might well kill, rather than intensify, any enthusiastic anticipation for the new version. This was a curious way to promote a new movie so dependent on nostalgia for the original and brings us full circle to the impossible



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anachronism of TRON: the intense nostalgia its look and feel generated for the past was dependent on the same aesthetic’s inability to translate to the present. Still the franchise’s own attempt to bridge that temporal gap textually was nonetheless considerable.

“Flynn Came Back . . . Just a Little Bit Younger” The sequel is littered with references to the original movie, such as the “End of Line” Club and the exact same joke, repeated by father and son in TRON and Legacy, respectively, about ENCOM’s “big door.” Aside from their prominent exhibition promotion as high-­profile 3D digital films, TRON: Legacy and Hugo (2011) also share the same basic nostalgic premise: both are stories of abandoned sons using the latest technology to reestablish a connection with their absent fathers. While in Martin Scorsese’s movie the automaton is the last direct link to the memory of Hugo’s dead father, in Legacy Sam Flynn enters the Grid to find his dad, Kevin, missing and presumed dead since the 1990s. In both Legacy and Hugo the son believes that the technology contains a “message” from his dad—­the ironic relationship of an advanced future (technological innovation) anchored mostly by an unfulfilled need from the past (generational nostalgia). We see here in the coexistence of absent fathers and technology an explicit appeal to loss (and to the role of generational relationships in shaping our sense of time) so often at the heart of nostalgia. Yet while the story of a boy and his dad is meant to foreground Hugo’s family-­friendly appeal, the same dynamic in Legacy serves two specific functions, both targeted at the original film’s now largely middle-­aged fan base: it evokes memories of one’s own past as a kid during the release and ancillary distribution of TRON in the 1980s, and it appeals to that same generation’s emergence today as parents themselves. The close intermingling of father-­son relationships and larger nostalgic appeals in Legacy is established in the very first scene, a flashback to the late 1980s (several years after the end of TRON), where we meet a young Sam and are reintroduced to a now-­digitized younger Jeff Bridges, reprising his role as Flynn. As the father sits on his son’s bed and vividly describes the Grid to his captivated offspring, the original world of TRON is explicitly situated as the same old childhood fantasy now come back to life. Littered throughout Sam’s bedroom are vintage memorabilia of TRON’s past—­action figures, toy light cycles, and promotional materials, such as reproductions of original TRON theatrical posters (fig. 18). The very presence of these artifacts doesn’t make any narrative sense, of course, because in the original movie, the idea of “TRON” wasn’t marketed as merchandise; it was simply the name of a program within ENCOM. The only media circulated for general consumption within its diegetic world were arcade games Flynn designed like “Space Paranoids” (one is tempted to assume,

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Figure 18. TRON: Legacy’s (2010) flashback opening explicitly evokes nostalgia for the

original, while also rewriting Disney’s own history of the time—­namely, TRON and The Black Hole (1979) as centerpieces of young boys’ childhood instead of the box-­office failures they were.

in classic Disney fashion, that Flynn came back from the Grid after the end of TRON and started a successful line of kid’s toys based on his experiences inside). The imaginary space of a 1980s middle-­class suburban nostalgia becomes the now-­middle-­aged adult’s point of reference in approaching Legacy. The mise-­en-­ scène of Sam’s bedroom evokes nostalgia not only for TRON but for a more generalized, uniquely Disneyfied, consumerist childhood of the time. Also on Sam’s shelves are relics from The Black Hole. Behind statues of a TRON disc battle is The Black Hole poster, while a miniature figure of V.I.N.C.E.N.T., that film’s version of R2D2, also makes a brief appearance in the corner of one frame. Indeed, one assumes that had Disney purchased the rights to Star Wars prior to 2010, we’d also be treated to excessive close-­ups of Darth Vader, Yoda, and Obi Wan Kenobi, too (of course, had Disney owned Star Wars back then, the studio probably would not have bothered bringing TRON back). By the end of this intro the line between TRON’s original diegetic world and the larger ancillary market of TRON and other Disney merchandise that existed in the 1980s has completely evaporated. Growing up within the TRON narrative and growing up with TRON toys are now one and the same, and fans of the original find themselves immediately identifying with the boy by way of growing up in that same commercial market, a scenario that fits neatly with the larger promotional strategy of conflating “real” TRON fans with fictional “Flynn Lives” followers. The film’s nostalgia for the earlier era of TRON becomes especially acute when an older Sam returns years later to his father’s now-­abandoned arcade (fig. 19)—­the only recognizable set from the original to which Legacy returns. The eerily cavernous spaces of the old building highlight the sense of temporal distance both from the first film and from that lost era, the space between one generation and another.



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Figure 19. TRON: Legacy also highlights nostalgia’s sense of loss by presenting audiences with one of the film’s original sets, Flynn’s Arcade, in a state of neglect.

As Sam searches the abandoned building for a sign of his father, the sense of loss so acute to nostalgia is intensified. Moreover, we also see a TRON arcade game that, upon reflection, is as diegetically out of place as the TRON toys in Sam’s childhood bedroom, since a “TRON” arcade game was never in the movie to begin with. The image of that game, and others, meanwhile, foregrounds a larger nostalgia for the era of general public video-­game arcades whose immense popularity came and went somewhere in the thirty years between the releases of these two movies. Nostalgia for that generation of arcade culture was even more acute in Daft Punk’s video for “Derezzed” (2010) (fig. 20), which was set inside a TRON-­era

Figure 20. TRON: Legacy paratexts, such as the music video for Daft Punk’s “Derezzed,” were as central to constructing nostalgia as the movie itself.

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video game, featuring an ENCOM 1981 copyright and emulating the aesthetic of the original’s simple wire-­grid graphics. More subtly, too, we are reminded of the affinity during this time in American popular culture between the representation of arcade games and the emergence of CGI in Hollywood films, which was drawn out by movies such as TRON and The Last Starfighter (1984). This was part of a larger aesthetic trend, traced back to Westworld (1973) and Star Wars, to posit any CG imagery as the direct product of a diegetic computer screen. By the time Sam actually enters the Grid itself in the basement of his dad’s arcade, we have been conditioned to read the subsequent digital environment not as the product of the latest technological innovation but as an elaborately remastered nostalgic fantasy.

“The Next Day” Alongside the “Derezzed” music video the most interesting paratext may be the viral clip, “The Next Day,” which positions itself narratively as what happens in the immediate aftermath of TRON: Legacy, once Sam returns from the Grid to take over the company. “The Next Day” was a culmination of the “Flynn Lives” viral campaign I mentioned earlier (born out of “loss,” we are told), which circulated in promotion of the feature-­length film. The campaign was run by a shadowy “Bansky”-­type figure named “Zack Attack.” What is intriguing about the brief ten-­minute film is that, despite its appeal to the future of the TRON franchise—­“what happens now?”—­it’s arguably even more evocative of nostalgic impulses than Legacy itself. As “Zack” frantically runs around destroying evidence of the campaign in his office, which includes another quaint sight of TRON arcade games, vintage television sets, and worn-­ out VHS tapes, the unseen person narrates a final video to his followers, which feels like a “thank you” note to longtime fans of the franchise. As he thanks “especially those of you who have been there from the very beginning,” the video cuts to an image of an old audiotape, implicitly highlighting the long history of media transition underlying TRON. The first part of the short is an extensive sequence shot in a pseudodocumentary, talking-­head format, explaining in depth what happened to ENCOM after Flynn disappeared in the late 1980s (though some elements clearly don’t fit, such as Dillinger’s rise in the ENCOM ranks, despite being smeared and fired at the end of the original). “The Next Day” relies on scripted interviews, including Alan talking about the “TRON” program he created and his friendship with Flynn, and several screen grabs from the original TRON passed off as old news photographs, bringing us up to speed on what else happened. It turns out in “The Next Day” that the leader of the “Flynn Lives” campaign is really Roy “Ram” Kleinberg, played by Dan Shor, and that he’s been in cahoots



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with Alan the whole time. The short thus culminates in an extended conversation between Roy and Alan, who appears suddenly in Zack’s secret hideout. Their brief exchange is a richly nostalgic treat for longtime fans, as Shor is reprising his dual role of “Roy”/“Ram” from the original. Although the bulk of his screen time in TRON was as Ram, a computer program, he also appeared briefly as Roy, Ram’s old “user,” in a scene with Boxleitner. Alan’s first words to him, “Greetings, Programs!” is a throwback to one of TRON’s most famous lines. When Alan reaches for Roy’s popcorn a few seconds later, meanwhile, it’s a clear homage to Roy’s asking permission to eat Alan’s popcorn in the only scene they shared in TRON. At the end, finally, both address each other by their program names, “TRON” and “Ram.” The short references more than just the original film, however, such as when Roy calls Alan “ISOlated thinker,” a reference to a crypt username that popped on the “Flynn Lives” forums during the viral promotional campaign—­the idea being that it was Alan posting all along. Alan is there to let Roy know he’s been invited to rejoin ENCOM—­“we have our company back,” Alan excitedly declares, which has the effect of saying that these two have, for the moment, the franchise back. Unlike Legacy “The Next Day” has the feel of being put together by people who actually watched the original film, and in its own modest way it is more of a direct sequel than the bigger budget theatrical film, which largely dispenses with much of the older story events and characters in favor of creating a new mythology around Sam. This exchange is one of the only times within TRON’s transmedia universe that two actors from the original film actually share a scene together. In Legacy the only time Boxleitner and Bridges are seen together is in the form of motion-­capture performances during a brief flashback. This minor sequence is one of the few attempts in the movie to vaguely explain what happened narratively in the Grid between the two films. Of course, the primary goal of “The Next Day” is to lay the possible foundation, and build anticipation, for another feature-­length sequel; one might even cynically suggest that the presence of Alan and Roy here—­who are marginal and nonexistent figures, respectively, in Legacy itself—­is intended to do little beyond keep the original fan base invested in a franchise that otherwise maintains little direct connection to TRON. This would seem to be confirmed by the fact that “The Next Day” ends not with either of the older actors but with Sam defiantly announcing to the press his allegiance to the “Flynn Lives” movement as the new de facto head of ENCOM.

What Will Disney Do? There remains, of course, a whole other generation of young audiences today who are fans of newer TRON properties, such as the sequel or Uprising, but have little to no awareness of the original. In time their fandom may change the

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perspective of the franchise. One mistake we should not make here—­as happened with many older Star Wars fans in the wake of the prequels’ debut—­is assume that the (franchise) universe revolves around only one generation. Thus, TRON may yet survive (another sequel was recently announced), but it seems safe to speculate that its uniquely nostalgic popularity will continue to be somewhat limited to cult status, at best—­something unable to cross over to a broader audience, as other Disney properties have. But this is not to say that other Disney films are not infallible. My opening juxtaposition of Tangled and TRON in 2010 takes on a particularly ironic perspective when we consider that part of Disney’s motivation in reviving the old sci-­fi franchise in the first place was based on the concern, midway into the first decade of the 2000s, that the Princesses—­while unmistakably lucrative for merchandising—­generally failed to reach beyond largely female audiences in theaters and on home video, and were even then threatening to limit the company’s brand. Indeed, Tangled was changed from its original title, Rapunzel, and early promotional strategies emphasized the comic misadventures of the lead male character, the curiously named “Flynn,” more so than the princess over exactly this concern for limited demographics—­a strategy that may have paid off. Only in the wake of Frozen’s (2013) phenomenal success was there revived attention to the power of the Princess formula theatrically for the first time since the early 1990s—­though initial advertising for that movie as well deemphasized the Princesses in favor of ensembles and clownish snowmen. Meanwhile, Disney’s subsequent acquisition of Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm was in part a reflection of the company’s larger failure to expand beyond the core base of fairy tales and magic kingdoms, a failure of which TRON was one of the more prominent examples. In the years since, the emphasis on these newly acquired brands such as Pixar and Lucasfilm has become so focused that it has led Disney to streamline its own live-­action feature-­length movie production to almost exclusively such proven commodities. As one trade paper reported in the wake of the high-­profile summer blockbuster fiasco The Lone Ranger (2013)—­itself a strange attempt at a reboot, which suggests how strained modern Hollywood has become in its attempts to find new caves for mining the dangerous riches of nostalgia—­“Disney has deferred moviemaking responsibility to Marvel, Pixar and Lucasfilm because those subsidiaries don’t make movies. They make juggernauts. Their movies are also video games, theme park attractions and toys. They are brands, and those brands are why Disney reported record revenue on Thursday.”27 The writer clearly believes that this is a smart strategy given how lucrative those three names are. Also significant is how the acquisition of these brands allowed Disney to consolidate certain sections of production and distribution, such as the complete gutting of LucasArts video games in 2013, and thus further downsize labor in an effort to reduce costs. Since the initial purchase of



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Pixar in 2006, Bob Iger has worked aggressively to cut work staff across the Disney Universe: 650 staffers in 2006 1,900 in 2009 (mainly from theme parks) 450 in 2010 (ImageMovers) 250 in 2011 (mainly film studio and interactive personnel) 60 in 2012 (Disney Interactive) 300 in 2013 (Disney film studio and LucasArts)28 Meanwhile, Iger’s own personal earnings increased by 13.6 percent in 2011 alone.29 Added to this are the accusations that Disney/Pixar, Lucasfilm, and others conspired for years to keep wages down even before the merger.30 Thus, any celebration of aesthetic potential given the avenues available to audiences and producers today always feels premature; increased consolidation of media brands may open up the creative possibilities for transmedia storytelling, but it also restricts the opportunities for a rejuvenated and healthy labor pool in the era of media convergence. Given Disney’s long history of succeeding across multiple media platforms, there’s precedence for the assumption that the revenue generated by the big three will carry the company through the lean period, but any media historian would immediately wonder how sustainable such a limiting model is. Disney’s history reveals some significant bumps along the way. The post-­Walt period of creative stagnation, which only culminated with TRON (1966–­84), was largely marked by the failure to find anything new, thus giving way to the Team Disney era of rebirth led by Eisner and company. Meanwhile, this more recent trend of the Bob Iger era—­the overreliance on such a small number of tentpole franchises to sustain an ever-­expansive transmedia empire—­begs the question not only of how long it may be before overexposure sets in but also of how long nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, which too often sets in with so much shameless recycling and repurposing, can be sustained as a business model. The other angle to Disney’s historical success here in maintaining and promoting nostalgic investments is that the company has not been able to survive on only recycling its lucrative properties, as the distant memory of the once ubiquitous Davy Crockett, a phenomenon that defined the baby boomers’ generation, could attest. Disney has been increasingly aggressive since 2000, particularly with closely overseeing its licensing deals, to ensure this doesn’t happen. “Passive licensing is a highly efficient business model in terms of [profit] margin,” Chairman of Disney Consumer Products Worldwide Andy Mooney said in 2011, “but it’s also highly ineffective at creating sustained growth.”31 The Princess formula is as much a cautionary tale in this regard as anything else, since the

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renewed attention to it at the feature-­length level since 2009 can be seen as an attempt to reinvigorate the larger brand. Not only was it relatively dated theatrically by c. 2005, but it was partly the emergence of Pixar in the mid-­1990s, which supplanted those Princess films in the first place, filling a broader void of family audiences that Disney-­produced animation was struggling to hold on to by the end of the 1990s. As Hannah Ebrahim noted, “Departing from what is frequently seen as the Disney formula—­even if that notion is something of a simplification—­of princesses and fairy-­tale fantasies, Pixar’s stories are perceived as fresh and innovative, combining a motley assortment of characters, both human and nonhuman, with technologically sophisticated and artistically acclaimed animation.”32 The purchase of Pixar in 2006 was as much an admission of this inability to deviate from the Disney “formula” as the purchasing of Lucasfilm was a few years later. They may rejuvenate the Disney brand for now, but they also risk running aground as much as some past Disney properties have, especially as the parent company becomes increasingly dependent on them at the expense of new blood. Even the industry has started to take notice of the creative, if not really labor, impact. In 2013 Variety reported: What looks good on a financial spreadsheet won’t sit well with Hollywood’s creative community. The cuts come with a price. Merging the Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm operations under the Disney umbrella makes sense, and eliminating individuals that do the same jobs under the consolidation is also understandable. But studio execs bemoan the fact that Iger has stripped away much of the inherent creative magic from what once defined a Disney movie and the overall Disney brand. The corporate-­mandated focus is now on the bottom line and pumping out games, toys, and theme park attractions, and less about taking risks on Disney-­ originated properties that could launch new franchises. But the spotlight will ultimately be on Iger’s business acumen, just the way [former CEO Jack] Welch’s legacy is tied to his turnaround of GE. And history should be kinder, given the power of Disney’s family brand.33

Pixar, Star Wars, and Marvel may have more lasting commercial power than the TRONs, Lone Rangers, or Davy Crocketts of the world, but the necessity of their very acquisition speaks to the limits of a brand to endure; they are beneficiaries of, but also beholden to, the generational power of nostalgia. TRON was only the most visible example of this in the Disney Universe, but whether it is an exception or the canary in the coal mine remains to be seen. Conversely, Disney may finally be so powerful today as to be able to buy up the next lucrative brand once these other wells invariably run dry.

6 • GA ME (NOT) OVER Video-­Game Pastiche and Nostalgic Disavowals in the Postcinematic Era

Games today . . . they look like movies. But we wanted to go beyond that. —­Rich Moore, on the making of Wreck-­It Ralph

The most famous sequence from the original TRON would certainly be the “light cycle” racing scene. At first glance it’s arguably the movie’s most spectacular display of digital animation and, to this day, a still relatively thrilling few minutes of cinema within the otherwise laborious narrative, as the light cycles race quickly around the Grid, side by side, between, and into, their own “jet” walls. And as I watch it today, yet another idea emerges, rooted in the movie’s own diegetic arcade context: the light cycle race is not only literally an arcade game, but, more provocatively, moments of this sequence visually anticipate the future aesthetics of more advanced video games. Although TRON failed to reach a mass audience in 1982, Disney nonetheless had the distinction of introducing “game environments to the big screen” with the film,1 thus foreshadowing the increasing convergence in the future of the two. The first-­person perspective of following the racers as they fly between the jet walls anticipates the first-­person point of view in many driving and shooter games today. This also matches a scene earlier in the film when Flynn ( Jeff Bridges) plays an arcade game with a similar first-­person perspective, despite the fact that actual games of the time had yet to utilize such three-­dimensional depth so common today. Likewise, The Last Starfighter (1984), another groundbreaking early advance in computer-­generated imagery, equated the interactivity of gaming space with the new forms of virtual reality that digital animation was just beginning to offer filmmakers. Both early 1980s movies anticipated in remarkably similar ways how cinematic space, especially that of science 139

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fiction action-­adventure, and gaming space would look increasingly alike in an age of rapidly advancing photorealistic digital imagery. In the current age of media convergence it is often noted that historically distinct media platforms increasingly overlap both stylistically and in their mode of distribution and delivery. As Philip Rosen argued long ago, the utopic ideal of convergence would be predicated on the idea that digital images (as pure data) would be able to migrate seamlessly across different platforms (even while he also noted that practical considerations would make the full realization of this ideal impossible).2 Similarly, D.  N. Rodowick followed this logic further, noting how students of his often equated the single-­take digital movie Russian Ark (2002)—­as its mobile camera creates a wandering, unblinking first-­person point of view—­with the same effect created by shooter games.3 While Rodowick does not endorse that specific comparison, the increasing similarities between cinema and gaming aesthetics echo his larger discussion. Such similarities, meanwhile, went further still in the digital quasi-­long-­take movie Gravity (2013), which pushed the shooter aesthetic—­literally embodying the main character’s first-­person perspective—­to its cinematic extreme, where the breakdown between the two becomes as much a distraction as a celebration. Meanwhile, the sci-­fi thriller Edge of Tomorrow (2014) represents another variation on gaming’s influence on cinema—­telling the story of a soldier (Tom Cruise) who keeps dying over and over in the same battle, which closely echoes the experience of a hard-­core gamer’s extreme frustration at repeatedly dying and respawning just in order to beat the current level and move on to the game’s next challenges. Certainly, connections between the gaming logic of cinema and the cinematic logic of gaming are nearly as old as video games themselves (as the example of TRON suggests), yet the symbiotic relationship between the two takes on progressively greater importance in an era of increasingly sophisticated newer media. The common ontology of digital media threatens to blur, and even eventually obliterate, any clear traditional boundaries between once distinctly separate media. In his essay “The Cinemas of Interactions” Leon Gurevitch writes that “the aesthetic and textual distinctions among media have diminished under digital imaging and distribution,” so much so that what he terms these “digital attractions” (for instance, elaborate CGI spectacles that often serve as the centerpiece for blockbuster trailers) can migrate effortlessly from one medium to another, in a constant stream of self-­promotion: “At first glance the film and game industries are clearly separate and distinct entities. Not only do they involve different production practices and business models but they also produce separate and distinct products. However, there are also now more and more overlaps. While Hollywood has edged closer to a system of ‘transmedia storytelling’ with an audiovisual form that is increasingly computer generated, the emergent global gaming industry has continued to develop a photorealistic aesthetic that in turn places ever more demands upon the



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quality and nature of the narrative form which accompanies it.”4 For instance, there is little difference in retrospect between a trailer for Avatar (2009) the movie and one for Avatar the game; not coincidentally, the movie’s visual effects were done by a CGI production company (Hybride) that was owned by the same game developer (Ubisoft) that created the Avatar game. The centrality of advertising and promotion in both instances was strategic; the digital attraction sells itself and the products and platforms across which it migrates. Thus, as with many aspects of convergence in the digital age, CGI spectacles seem decreasingly medium-­specific, even while important differences of interactivity versus passivity remain. The aesthetic dilemma of this digital attraction, the fact that games can look a lot like movies, and vice versa, is what concerned Wreck-­It Ralph (2012) director Rich Moore when it came time to conceptualize the look of the faux first-­person shooter Hero’s Duty. This latter game was one of several games-­ within-­the-­diegesis featured in the animated movie, a generally nostalgic look back to the golden era of video-­game arcades, just as TRON: Legacy (2010) had been two years earlier. Hero’s Duty, however, was the most “contemporary” of the mostly fictional games featured, a distinctive hybrid of recent shooter games such as the Call of Duty or Halo franchises. The problem for Moore was how to make Hero’s Duty still feel like a video game in an age when games and animated movies tend to look increasingly identical. I mention this anecdote less because of that dilemma for its own sake—­though this seamlessness bears further investigation—­and more for how Hero’s Duty was the exception in Wreck-­It Ralph that proves the rule (fig. 21). The video game looks in the movie are otherwise

Figure 21. Wreck-­It Ralph (2012) was one of several movies that increasingly incorporated

anachronistic video-­game aesthetics in movies nostalgic for an earlier period of media history.

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highly anachronistic in their appropriation of gaming aesthetics, especially in the eight-­bit world of the Fix-­It Felix Jr. game, which serves as the movie’s primary setting, and in its extensive use of vintage game cameos (Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Mario Bros., Q*bert, and so on). Even the film’s public arcade setting, which allows these divergent gaming worlds to connect, is itself a nostalgic anachronism, just as it had been in the abandoned version (“Flynn’s”) featured in TRON: Legacy. The original TRON seemed to anticipate not only the end of film in the age of digital media but also, perhaps, the end of a certain kind of traditional moviegoing experience that the imagined interactivity of gaming might one day present. And yet more recent movies that are in some sense “about” video games—­including Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), Wreck-­It Ralph, and TRON: Legacy—­seem to offer a very different reaction to the possibility of this eventual convergence between divergent media. Such repurposing of obsolete technologies could be yet another avenue of exploration for what Raiford Guins has usefully called the “afterlife” of vintage video games.5 Although Guins is exploring the ways in which such games otherwise exist outside a state of commodification (as museum exhibits, for instance), these movies could be read as attempts to reintegrate these otherwise archaic media artifacts back into a cycle of consumption by way of exploiting their remaining market value via the pull of nostalgia, a sentiment that Guins sees as a blockage to understanding gaming history rather than an asset. The commodification today of otherwise valueless (and even sometimes unplayable) media properties, such as the incorporation of outdated game aesthetics in Wreck-­It Ralph, also speaks to the larger idea of what I am calling video-­game pastiche in the cinema, a style that manifests itself in several recent high-­profile movies. Why “pastiche”? In Wreck-­It Ralph the history of video games comes to stand in for history itself, and vice versa. In this cinematic context video-­game pastiche refers to the remediation of often anachronistic gaming aesthetics within a contemporary, ostensibly incompatible, cinematic space—­a celebration, usually but not necessarily nostalgic in nature, of irreconcilable media sensibilities. Unlike the digital attraction of TRON: Legacy, which attempted to seamlessly merge the look of gaming and cinema across a wide range of media platforms (itself an impossibility, given the inherent datedness of the original’s look), video-­game pastiche consciously foregrounds the anachronism of obsolete games to a number of aesthetic and thematic ends. Pastiche is useful for thinking about such stylistic mimicry as resolutely apolitical (that is, a political stance that operates through the perceived absence of such), as well as the larger questions of late capitalism that this issue evokes. Video-­game pastiche allows cinema to generate nostalgia for earlier periods of media history, which becomes a reflection on its own status in the age of media convergence as much



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as on other platforms, allowing for a particular awareness of one kind of metatextual history (a self-­contained history of media transition), which paradoxically becomes a blockage, as pastiche and nostalgia often do, to a deeper sense of historical consciousness beyond the cinema itself. In this chapter I will focus in particular on several recent movies that deploy this aesthetic in different contexts and to different thematic ends, all of which romanticize the childhood impulse of joyous, relentless consumption for which video games are one key outlet. While TRON: Legacy and Wreck-­It Ralph might not appear at first to constitute a larger trend of movies nostalgically remediating video-­game aesthetics in some way, this use of video-­game pastiche echoes across other recent titles as well. First, I will explore Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a fascinatingly intense demonstration of mediated nostalgia in the postcinematic era, making extensive use of both older video-­game aesthetics and an overt “gaming” narrative structure. Then, after a brief discussion of the fascinating video-­game documentary The King of Kong (2007), I will look closely at The Lego Movie (2014). While this last title might not strike one as a “video-­game”-­themed movie, since Lego is identified first and foremost as a children’s toy, it is important to remember that Lego has been hugely successful through a series of themed video games in recent years (fifty titles in fewer than two decades)—­licensing other lucrative properties, such as Lucasfilm and Marvel. Meanwhile the movie’s own narrative emphasis on “master builders” is as indebted to the games’ challenges as to the toys (indeed, the very idea of a Lego “narrative” is more a product of the games’ linear structure than the more open-­ended forms of play associated with early Lego toys). In short, it was the affection for the games as much as the toys that in part drove the popularity of the movie. For my last chapter, then, it seems appropriate to more directly address a question that has haunted the entire book: what value, finally, does cinema—­so often anchored by various forms of nostalgia for its celluloid predecessor—­still have within an age of media convergence where movies are just one of many possible platforms for consumption, and when the technological and aesthetic boundaries between different media seem to be increasingly breaking down anyway? In an age when, at the very least, there no longer remains any necessary ontological difference between traditionally distinct media (as Rodowick and numerous others have suggested), I argue that video-­game pastiche reaffirms the spaces between. Pushed further, these spaces exist as a point of nostalgic resistance for cinema itself at a moment when the dissolving of such boundaries is pushed, and even celebrated, within industry hype. They explicitly foreground the inherent medium “hybridity” of the digital age, which its most utopic aspirations try to conceal as another roadblock on the long march to a digital ideal of “true” convergence.6 The “game is (not) over” for cinema, as these

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movies highlight the history and popularity of video games in a way that paradoxically reaffirms cinema’s value in the age of media convergence, an age when even a comic book company had to turn to movie production to survive. Marvel “remained a contradiction,” Derek Johnson writes, “a reminder of the continued significance of cinema even as convergence meant redefining the film industry around external content, companies, and creators.”7 By celebrating the “old” boundaries, these movies also foreground cinema’s role as the flagship of larger multimedia franchises. Through a more overt economic lens, video-­game pastiche can also be seen as one possible response to what Steven Shaviro has recently called “post-­ cinematic affect.” Whereas “film gave way to television as a ‘cultural dominant’ a long time ago,” he notes, postcinematic affect articulates what it feels like in an age where “digital technologies, together with neoliberal economic relations, have given birth to radically new ways of manufacturing and articulating lived experience,”8 where the spectator is subjected to life in a kind of mediated perpetual present. At the heart of this theory is the provocative notion that “our social life is so overpacked and overstimulated and hypermediated, that we can only feel it in the immediate instant.”9 Meanwhile, I would build on this argument to also note that video-­game pastiche is one of several possible reactions against this rush of the postcinematic, using its own often hypermediated logic to generate a kind of nostalgic effect at the textual level. Yet while this particular use of pastiche may be seen as an aesthetic reaction, it is important to note that it (perhaps inadvertently) reaffirms many of the deeper economic tenets in the postindustrial age of late capitalism highlighted in Shaviro’s work. This is most acute of all in The Lego Movie, which superficially celebrates the utopic potential of participatory culture in an age of media convergence at the very same moment it aggressively works to appropriate, and thus shut down, such possibilities, while also presenting a bizarrely contradictory message to what one would imagine is the movie’s core nostalgic demographic. In some of these movies nostalgia works through the kind of disavowal I explored earlier in my discussion of Pixar and Toy Story 3 (2010). These movies foreground the power and (to a point) the dangers of nostalgia, often through story lines that, ironically but fairly explicitly, engage in some sense with a need to let go of the past. Yet despite their different approaches, they all engage this question in such a way that only seems to reaffirm the continuing presence of that melancholic longing on a deeper, often unnoted level. In short, nostalgic disavowals are narratives that intensify nostalgia at the exact moment that it dramatizes the surface level necessity of its imagined loss. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World seems in denial about the context of its own nostalgia (writer-­director Edgar Wright projects his childhood love of video games onto a younger generation that was less likely to have grown up on the games he did). Yet Wright’s more



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recent film The World’s End (2013) was a much more transparent negotiation of the kind of nostalgic disavowal that structures all of his prior films, each of which dealt with the filmmaker’s affectionate reappropriation of his hypermediated childhood (action films, zombie movies, etc.). In Wreck-­It Ralph the disavowal is much more subtle. As a virtual character in a particularly literal sense, Ralph and the others in the movie exist outside time, despite the explicit narrative recognition of decades passing, which is necessary to both contextualize the games’ anachronisms and intensify the nostalgia these old games can evoke. But the characters never actually age, of course, and, as a clever early joke involving Felix demonstrates, they can never really die (it is introduced that characters can die outside their own games, but this is largely a plot device to ensure some sense of dramatic tension in the second half of the movie). The anachronism of Ralph’s game (more so than his actual animation), then, intensifies the nostalgia for the era he represents at the same time that his paradoxical timelessness, his presence outside history, circumvents any awareness of time’s actual passing (it is this reason, among others, that explains the enduring appeal of animated movies far more than live-­action ones, along with the ambivalent attitudes toward watching beloved stars age onscreen). Finally, the nostalgic disavowal at the end of The Lego Movie seems particularly interesting because it most explicitly intersects, like Wall-­E, with questions of responsible forms of consumption. The father-­son relationship that ultimately structures the dramatic tension at the core of The Lego Movie turns in the end on the father’s recognition of the need to ease up on his own lifelong love of Lego toys in favor of his child’s more playful, unpredictable use of the toys, conceding that obsession to a new generation with which he needs to share and which presents its own nostalgic value through the theme of family. Lego’s very brand is deeply nostalgic, not only insofar as it has survived for generations now but for how the company consciously mobilizes that affective attachment through the kinds of other media companies it licenses. “Nostalgia-­driven success,” wrote the Hollywood Reporter, represents the kind of holy grail for the licensing world that all these [media] franchises are seeking. It’s the moment when the franchise becomes timeless and the toys continue to move independent of box office. Those few franchises are the only ones that Lego looks to license for the “construction category.” Their current lineup includes Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, Cars, Toy Story, Winnie the Pooh and Star Wars, the reigning king of toy licenses.10

Thus, the reassuring, self-­theorizing narrative about the power of creativity and individuality is undermined (as many critics noted when the movie first

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appeared) by being in the service of promoting the continued dominance of a single high-­profile product that rules over its own respective marketplace and has countless crossover deals with other prominent brands. In this sense the Lego “universe” is that rare one that literally encompasses almost every corner of the modern popular culture landscape—­making its narrative of individualism deeply ironic, even hypocritical. The relentless critique of Lord Business’s goal of complete world domination is negated by the plot twist and the nostalgic reassurances of the narrative’s end: the Lego toys become another site for family bonding. All of this thus serves to obscure, even disavow, the deeper message of monopolization the movie works in service of and the mindless cycle of excessive media consumption all these video-­game movies ultimately promote. In short, any discussion of the pastiche in these texts requires a larger discussion of the economic value of nostalgia in the postcinematic, and postindustrial, era of media convergence.

Affect in the Age of Late Capitalism The (co)presence of nostalgia within the perpetual presents of a hypermediated, postcinematic era should hardly be surprising here, as it fits a larger pattern throughout this book of exploring how the reassurance of older media anchors a period of otherwise great technological change. Yet it is also important first to explore Shaviro’s notion of “post-­cinematic affect” more closely, in no small part because he specifically highlights this idea in opposition to what we would normally view as some kind of melancholic impulse. Citing examples such as Gamer (2009), Boarding Gate (2007), and Southland Tales (2006), Shaviro argues that the style of many movies today reflects a hypermediated pop culture landscape in which cinema is no longer the dominant medium and vision no longer the governing mode of sensory engagement. The idea of a “post-­cinematic affect” is a nuanced and politically savvy expansion on a range of analytical concepts, such as what has been broadly labeled “intensified (or post) continuity” forms of film editing—­which defines everything from the science fiction spectacles of Michael Bay to the spy thrillers of Paul Greengrass. Intensified continuity forsakes an adherence to the rules of spatial and temporal continuity from shot to shot, which grounded the classical and postclassical forms of Hollywood storytelling, in favor of a style of editing that affectively maintains a general feeling of continuity despite repeated temporal and spatial gaps between cuts. Unlike the rules of montage editing, the goal is not so much to create meaning through juxtaposition or disorientation but more often to move the story along more quickly and with more energy. Shaviro takes this a step further: the audience is anchored through this chaotic rush of images not by visual laws of continuity but rather by the ways in



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which this postcinematic style affectively reflects the chaos and distraction of our contemporary, multiple interface, media environment. Thus, in the postcinematic era different media awkwardly and tangibly coexist: “movies” emulate the diverse formal properties of video games, television, and the Internet as much as the older, receding, medium of film, and vice versa. (In this sense his argument is quite different from the theories on digital cinema articulated by Rosen and Rodowick, who both argue, in various ways, that the formal properties of “film” still largely shape these newer media.) Meanwhile, the key is not representation in the old cinematic sense of the word but affect—­not what movies show us but the feelings, sensations, and emotions they generate. Shaviro sees this shift in the industry to postcinematic forms of storytelling as reflecting deeper economic shifts in the age of late capitalism: “Just as the old Hollywood continuity editing system was an integral part of the Fordist mode of production, so the editing methods and formal devices of digital video and film belong directly to the computing-­and-­information-­technology infrastructure of contemporary neoliberal finance.”11 The coexistence of different media forms, as well as the free flow of information across them, reflects a late capitalism era of flexible commodity accumulation and of the fluid immateriality of an information-­based economy, just as the assembly-­line logic of the older studio system reflected the fixed materiality of a manufacturing-­based one. This flexible and free-­flowing exchange of commodified information is embodied, in a sense, in the notion of affect, which connotes an energy outside our ability to capture and represent it, thus motivating Shaviro to call for a kind of “affective mapping” of the postindustrial global economy—­a modification of Jameson’s earlier notions of affect as “free-­floating and impersonal” and of “cognitive mapping.”12 Both ideas are predicated on the need to navigate an unrepresentable social space tied to, but also beyond, its own processes of visual and aural mediation. Affect approximates the excess of space and feeling that media cannot capture. In Postmodernism Jameson’s discussion of affect not incidentally precedes his discussion of pastiche. The infamous “waning of affect” had less to do with an absence of emotion, which had arguably intensified in the postmodern age, and more to do with the waning of a fixed subject and its ability to express a distinctly individualistic point of view in a consumer culture dominated by intertextuality. In its absence was the rise of pastiche, a (media) culture based first and foremost on commodified imitation more than oppositional originality. “The producers of culture,” he wrote, “have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitations of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture.”13 Jameson himself admits that such pastiche can still have entertainment value or even be infused with a certain passionate spirit. Yet critics who (rightly) point out the possibilities for creativity within the act of allusion—­that perhaps the personal style can be expressed through

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distinctive “imitations of dead styles”—­miss a larger point: these “random stylistic allusions” visualize a culture of the simulacrum, of copies without originals, wherein the thoroughly commodified (recycled) image evokes notions of pastness at the exact same moment that it blocks a deeper sense of historical time. This “vast collection of images,” however clever, also dehistoricizes a sense of the collective class struggle that brought us to this moment—­“the retrospective dimension indispensable to any vital reorientation of our collective future,”14 which the regimes of late capitalism (such as contemporary Hollywood) have so effectively shut off. It is the absence of this “retrospective dimension” that video-­ game pastiche attempts to both alleviate through an effect of the past that it can textually generate (stylized nostalgia) and conceal through its inherently depoliticized, and thus dehistoricized, nature in the postcinematic age.

Gamer’s “Hypermediated Nows” Shaviro draws on the video-­game movie Gamer as typifying the centrality of postcinematic affect in the age of digital cinema. While the movie is hardly nostalgic for an earlier generation of video games in the way that others I have explored in this chapter are, it nonetheless revels in the same aesthetic tensions between different media styles and forms of representation. Shot on digital video with the 4K Red One camera, Gamer is less a traditional feature-­length movie than a postcinematic combination of “the two most prominent popular entertainment forms of the early twenty-­first century: online gaming and reality television.”15 A hyperviolent, visually and aurally frenetic, example of classic dystopic science fiction, Gamer is the story of a world in the not-­too-­distant future where artificial nanocells can be implanted into an individual’s brain, allowing third-­ party gamers to control the human being’s every movement. It is therefore a literalization of the virtual avatars so central to most all forms of gaming. By virtue of this grotesque possibility it also allows the movie to hyperbolize and satirize popular culture’s desire for both control and safe distance within the (virtual) interactions of everyday life. The nanocell technology is used within the movie to control people’s actions for two games: Society (a variation of online social gaming such as Second Life) and Slayer (a much bloodier game that uses convicted death-­row criminals to play out a form of the third-­person shooter as a literal gladiator-­style death match). Meanwhile, Slayer pushes the critique of pop culture excess a step further: gamers not only play their avatars to the death, but all the live combat is simultaneously broadcast worldwide in a perverse, Truman Show–­esque mockery of reality television. A postcinematic text, Gamer “posits a social space in which the ubiquity of gaming has become nearly absolute,”16 where there is no “reality” outside hypermediation or mindless consumerism. The movie, though, is less a coherent critique of postmodern global capitalism,



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Shaviro argues, than a celebration of the unavoidable excess it generates and thrives on. Shaviro posits Gamer as an implicit rejection of the many nostalgic laments regarding the death of film, both literally and symbolically, in the age of digital media, directly citing Rodowick as one example. In Gamer the filmmakers “respond to this situation [the death of film] without nostalgia, and without regret. Instead of ironically recycling cinema’s glorious past, they hyperbolize the contemporary media landscape.”17 For Shaviro the nostalgic recycling of film’s past is exemplified by filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers, whose melancholic love of film is mitigated through the safety of ironic distance from that which they recycle. Gamer apologizes for neither its rejection of nostalgia for film nor its resistance to the nostalgic impulse itself; nor does it entertain the possibility of a past time capable of generating a nostalgic response to the present. Shaviro cites one of the film’s few “flashbacks,” where Kable (Gerard Butler) is handed a photograph of his family and then imagines (we assume) a past moment driving in a car with them.18 Consistent with the logic of the simulacrum, Kable’s “memory” is more an effect of the image than a photographic “representation” of a past time. Indeed, as Shaviro notes, this sequence of the whole family in the car actually appears at the end of the movie; thus, “the sequence was not a flashback, but a flashforward. The insert does not represent memory, but rather anticipation.”19 Thus, a sense of time—­temporality itself—­ seems strangely absent in the perpetual postmodern present of Gamer’s diegetic world, a space of “heightened and intensified, hypermediated Nows.”20 Indeed, one of mostly unspoken but consistent themes throughout the larger theory of postcinematic affect is the rejection of nostalgic impulses in the digital age, not just for film but for any sense of the past in general.

Scott Pilgrim’s Postcinematic Nostalgia What, then, are we to make of a film like Wright’s remarkable Scott Pilgrim vs. the World? In a blog post on the subject Shaviro himself referred to Scott Pilgrim as another example of the “post-­cinematic,” citing “the widespread integration of graphics, sound effects, and mixtures of footage emulating video games” throughout the movie.21 Like Gamer, Scott Pilgrim is as much a product of gaming forms as cinema aesthetics. Beyond that, however, these two movies—­one brutally nihilistic, the other playfully frivolous—­wouldn’t seem to have much in common. Yet Wright has long been invested as a filmmaker in playing not only with genre expectations but also with the boundaries of postclassical editing in a way similar to other postcinematic filmmakers. His previous film, Hot Fuzz (2006), an action film spoof, parodied but also beautifully mimicked the intensified continuity of filmmakers such as Tony Scott. Meanwhile, Scott Pilgrim is the

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story of a slacker (Michael Cera) who falls for his dream girl, Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), only to discover that he must defeat her seven evil exes in order to date her (fig. 22). The film’s style is deeply invested in the multimedia logic of postcinematic affect; the movie draws explicitly not only on the look of its graphic novel adaptation but also on older video games that are central to the film’s narrative. Scott must defeat one ex at a time in a way that clearly draws on beating the different “levels” required in most kinds of gaming. Meanwhile, most every kind of intertextual allusion—­from texting to kung fu films, from television censorship to concert films, from Bollywood musicals to sitcom laugh tracks—­plays an explicit formal role in Scott Pilgrim. The film is “postcinematic” in the sense that no one medium dominates, and the different forms of textuality on display coexist awkwardly. That is to say, the movie doesn’t “adapt” these other media into cinematic form per se; rather, it reuses these media in their original form. Within the film’s frame, video-­game graphics look like video-­game graphics, comic book panels look like comic book panels, and so forth. Moreover, it is sound that bridges the cuts. Scott Pilgrim is in some ways also a concert film, as the diegetic musical performances of the title character’s garage band (Sex Bob-­omb), as well as those of his romantic rivals, are another key anchor to the film’s narrative. Nondiegetic songs are also often used as bridges from one scene to the next, but more subtly Scott Pilgrim also repeatedly uses conversations to cross from one location to the next. Throughout the film one

Figure 22. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) not only highlighted its own video-­game

pastiche aesthetic but also suggested the ways in which nostalgia remains perfectly compatible with what Steven Shaviro has called the otherwise unsentimental “post-­cinematic” affect that dominates our hypermediated culture today.



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character’s line of dialogue is directly answered by another character in a completely different diegetic location. Collectively, these different instances of sound bridges throughout the movie, along with the intensified editing, suggest that Scott Pilgrim, for all its visual creativity, is driven narratively by sound, not image, in the postcinematic era (other moments throughout the movie also subtly undermine the authority of visual representation, such as Scott’s nonsensical scribbling of Ramona’s face being instantly recognized by Michael [Nelson Franklin]). Yet this film ultimately has a very different feel from something like Gamer, even though stylistically the two are somewhat similar. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is, I would argue, also a testament to the continuing centrality of nostalgia in the age of digital cinema, even in the context of something as otherwise aggressively unsentimental—­perhaps even completely devoid of a sense of temporality—­as the perpetual presents of postcinematic affect. From its intense and vibrant opening title sequence, which subtly evokes a century of avant-­garde filmmaking as much as it does concert footage, the film repeatedly draws in explicit ways on stylistic looks of the past. More prominently, Scott Pilgrim’s homages to gaming are firmly rooted in the recognition of stylistic interpretations of (much) earlier generations of eight-­bit and sixteen-­bit gaming platforms. This includes not only the deliberately outdated graphics but also the use of flat, two-­dimensional framing more evocative of Mortal Kombat visuals than cinematic long shots. The archaic look of these styles creates a visually sharper contrast between the diegetic worlds of gaming and cinema, respectively, as they exist in productive tension throughout Scott Pilgrim. Indeed, the use of recognizably older styles of gaming are necessary to the film’s aesthetic, given that more contemporary platforms, such as the most recent versions of PlayStation or Xbox, often privilege a video game’s ability to seamlessly emulate the realistic look of cinema. Meanwhile, the vintage sounds of these games are crucial as well, such as the reinterpretation of the Universal Studios’ theme, which opens the film, or the use of Legend of Zelda music during a dream sequence (nostalgia for the 1990s is on display in other ways, too, such as the curious use of Seinfeld’s music cues to set up the film’s overt sitcom sequence—­also marked by the laugh tracks and intentionally lame one-­liners). As with most bodies of work so dependent on a love of intertextuality, Wright’s films have always been deeply nostalgic in particularly reflexive ways. While Hot Fuzz reveled in its guilty pleasure affection for the chaotic action of directors such as Scott, Bay, Kathryn Bigelow, and others, his earlier zombie spoof, Shaun of the Dead (2004), was a textbook love letter to the old apocalyptic visions of George A. Romero. The World’s End is perhaps the most overt in its negotiation of nostalgia: the story of one man’s pathetic attempt (at least initially) to try to re-create the fondest night of his life, an epic bar crawl, twenty

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years later. Yet part of what makes Wright’s films so consistently interesting is the way that nostalgic impulse is so rigorously interrogated through genre and stylistic mimesis. His movies are dependent on, but also work affectively beyond, nostalgia. To modify Shaviro’s discussion of the affective logic of postcinema forms, it is the effect of nostalgia here more than a mere representation of it. In other words the films work not simply as wistful looks back, pale imitations of these past forms (cinema, gaming, etc.), but as aggressively creative, yet stylistically faithful, reinterpretations that complicate the simplistic feelings of nostalgia (as well as ironic distance) that other homages depend on. What’s perhaps most fascinating about Scott Pilgrim is how it reconciles the perpetual presents of postcinematic affect with a deeper nostalgic investment in the history of multiple media forms, while never compromising the intensity of its “postcontinuity” style. Rather the nostalgia emerges affectively through the unreconciled aural and visual tensions between the pasts and presents of different forms (and generations) of various media. Wright’s body of work manages a remarkable balancing act between both “ironically recycling cinema’s glorious past” and “hyperbolizing the contemporary media landscape.”22 Or, better yet, Wright’s films consistently draw out how often the hyperbole of contemporary media excess necessarily coexists with the self-­aware recycling of past forms. What distinguishes Scott Pilgrim, meanwhile, may be that this movie is ultimately more an ironic recycling of media’s (not merely, cinema’s) “glorious past”—­a postcinematic nostalgia within a kind of overt video-­game pastiche aesthetic. The fascination with nostalgia in The World’s End, finally, echoes Midnight in Paris (2011), and not just because they are both movies explicitly about the dangers of trying to live in the past (interestingly, in its early stages of development, The World’s End was planned to be, like Midnight in Paris, a time-­travel narrative). Both films pretend to look down on nostalgic impulses as a way to hide their own thoroughly melancholic fascination with the past. Midnight in Paris attempts to act as though it is above the desire to romanticize previous eras, even as it does so. The World’s End functions in a similar way, using the conceit of Gary’s (Simon Pegg) obsessive need to re-create the failed bar crawl as a thinly veiled allegory for the filmmakers’ own recognition that nostalgic memories of Shaun and Hot Fuzz—­both their own nostalgic experiences making those movies and the deep subsequent fan investment in them—­hang over the production and expectations of this new film. Gary’s need to grow up and move on is a dictum to themselves as filmmakers and to the fans (as in, be careful not to become too invested in the past). Yet, of course, this is an endlessly deferred goal, a nostalgic disavowal not unlike the heavy-­handed ending of Toy Story 3. In this regard The World’s End is a less interesting negotiation of nostalgic impulses in the postcinematic age than Scott Pilgrim because Wright’s nostalgia manifests itself less through the stylistic cleverness of video-­ game pastiche than through transparent narrative meditations on the topic. As



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in Midnight in Paris and Toy Story 3, the direct rejection of nostalgia is, on the one hand, a bit too on the nose but also, on the other, a distraction from the very real melancholic impulses that constitute those films’ central appeal.

King of Kong Instead of disavowal, a more interesting inversion of this nostalgia for the golden age of video-­game arcades appeared long before TRON: Legacy revived its specter or Wreck-­It Ralph proved to be a surprise critical and commercial hit. The 2007 documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (fig. 23) explored the history of high-­score competition in such games since the early 1980s, with particular attention to the struggle of one man and his attempts at becoming the world champion of the once-­hugely popular game Donkey Kong. The records are themselves maintained by an organization called Twin Galaxies, a society that Guins also cited as one of the important caretakers for the “afterlife” of vintage games and whose founder, Walter Day, served as the inspiration for the character of Mr. Litwak in Wreck-­It Ralph. As something of a cinema verité glimpse into the lives of the actual video gamers to which these movies might appeal, and how they reflect back on their many years of gaming, the documentary offers a sharp contrast to those later, more overtly commercially driven, fiction films. While also often evoking the same kind of video-­game pastiche aesthetic, The King of Kong presents such nostalgic impulses among those gamers as invariably

Figure 23. Perhaps owing to its documentary format, The King of Kong (2007) is a rare

video-­game movie that highlights the sadness of holding on to a (media) past in ways that other such movies avoid.

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pathetic (even while the film seems dependent on such melancholia to attract at least part of its audience in the first place). Rather than reaffirm such nostalgia at the moment of its disavowal, The King of Kong rejects the melancholic impulse at the exact moment it highlights other people’s nostalgic investment. The King of Kong’s sadness lies precisely in doing what Wreck-­It Ralph, Scott Pilgrim, and The Lego Movie all avoid in different ways: fully acknowledging the reality of time’s passing and the dangers for a certain generation of gamers in obsessively holding on to a past that they mediate. In the movie the world record for Donkey Kong, along with numerous other classic games, is still standing after thirty years of gaming. The unspoken assumption, however, is that the reason all these records still stand is likely because most people stopped caring about those particular games in the intervening three decades as numerous other, more advanced, games and platforms came along. The game’s record-­holder, Billy Mitchell, becomes a symbol of the worst sort of nostalgic excesses—­someone still trying not only to hold on to his glory days of decades past, unable to move forward, but also to profit from them without the slightest bit of self-­awareness. Meanwhile, his band of followers are represented as even more pathetic, as they invest their own lives in an association with Billy’s past glory. Even the film’s “hero,” Steve Wiebe, a sad pushover who finds solace in Donkey Kong as he attempts to recover from the depression of losing his job, becomes sympathetic largely only by virtue of his essential decency as a human being when contrasted with Billy and his gang of fellow bullies. Despite The King of Kong’s nostalgic appeal, the movie derives much of its power from a somewhat condescending view of the past—­that while the audience can enjoy the memories, real or imagined, the documentary’s harsh glare on its unreflexive subjects, those who really are trying to live in the past, suggests a source of amusement and even a cautionary tale for others.

The Lego Movie At first glance The Lego Movie seems to offer a similar critique of the TRON / Donkey Kong generation as The King of Kong in the figure of Will Ferrell’s mysterious character, who embodies the movie’s contradictory messages about nostalgia, consumerism, and control. Like The World’s End, The Lego Movie (fig. 24) superficially posits a critique of those same nostalgic impulses that constitute its appeal, while also mounting an equally thin critique of capitalist control. Not coincidentally, both ideas are in a sense contrasted with the opposite notion of originality rooted in the movie’s promotion of Lego toys as a gateway to creativity. Moreover, this investment in the illusion of creativity is also tied into the perceived interactivity of video games—­that gamers, because they can control the movement of their virtual counterparts, have some semblance of autonomy over a gaming space that is completely controlled by the programs in the game engine.



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Figure 24. Criticized on its release for contradictory messages of consumer capitalism,

The Lego Movie (2014) is fueled by an acute sense of nostalgia that is both omnipresent and problematic.

In the movie we are initially exposed to a beautifully rendered Lego landscape, where toy characters have come to life in a look owing equally to the aesthetics of both earlier Lego games and old-­fashioned stop-­motion animation techniques, the latter of which offers a uniquely interesting instance of analog nostalgia in the age of digital animation. “There’s something about that tactile aspect [of stop motion] that makes people want to reach into the screen and touch it,” says Chris Butler, one of the directors of ParaNorman (2012). “Stop motion connects with people on a nostalgic level. Imagine your toys coming to life.”23 Within this world of living toys the narrative follows Emmett and master builders like Wyldstyle, who can seemingly make anything out of the surrounding Lego materials. Their quest is centered on defeating the evil Lord Business, who is trying to take complete control over the Lego universe. The villain’s name, plus his insatiable and transparent desire for total domination of the marketplace, would seem to suggest a rather explicit critique of the movement in late capitalist culture toward synergy and horizontal integration in the era of deregulation, the consolidation of multiple industries under a small number of powerful companies. Indeed, some of the film’s initial right-­wing and probusiness critics, probably without having seen the film, made this charge in an extremely misguided defense of free-­market capitalism (“misguided” given that the movie is an unabashed celebration of consumerism). The critique shifts, however, during the plot twist from one focused on the worst excesses of modern capitalism in “Lord Business” to one simply about an overbearing father with an unhealthy obsession with building carefully and meticulous crafted Lego towns in his basement. In this sense “Business” goes from alluding to “Big Business” to alluding to someone who is “all business”—­ that is, takes himself and his toys too seriously. Moreover, we can reasonably

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assume that the dad’s obsession with Lego is rooted in a lifelong devotion to the product. In this sense his refusal to stop playing with toys suggests a fairly transparent attempt to refuse to grow up, the ultimate nostalgic fantasy of endlessly reliving one’s youth. And, thus, what’s even more interesting is how the movie comes dangerously close to mocking, or at least gently criticizing, its own target audience—­upper-­and middle-­class kids of the 1970s and 1980s who grew up with the TRONs and Donkey Kongs of that era of popular culture, the same era that Fix-­it Felix and the eight-­bit graphics of Scott Pilgrim directly evoke. Finally, this is most significant because the excessive consumption habits of that generation are so key today to the thriving nostalgia industries for that same era that motivate the production of these various movies in the first place—­precisely what The Lego Movie is critiquing through the figure of the middle-­aged dad who takes his toys too seriously. The King of Kong, TRON: Legacy, and Wreck-­It Ralph are in large part targeting, and depending on, the continued market embrace of that same generation, which, to widely varying degrees, does not want to let go of its media-­driven childhoods any more than the dad does in The Lego Movie. Of course, this critique of the dad’s selfishness is mitigated in part by the affectionate relationship between the father and his son, which evokes another level of nostalgia at the same time that it criticizes the self-­centered indulgences of the dad’s relationship to his own childhood. Once again, as in TRON: Legacy and Hugo (2011), the central relationship here is a boy and his dad—­the kind of convenient generational nostalgia that has been, and continues to be, the sustaining force for the longer term viability of modern media franchises, where one generation’s nostalgia brings the next one along for the ride. It also sets up the deeper, and more common, depiction of consumer capitalism that The Lego Movie, like many recent movies, further perpetuates: the battle between “bad” (excessive) consumerism, which the dad embodies, and “good” (responsible) consumerism, which the boy symbolizes. The film’s superficial critique of marketplace domination, through the excessive control of Lord Business, hides the deeper affirmation of the individual consumer as a stalwart of autonomous choice. All of this is in lip service to the illusion of consumer control and autonomy, the greatest myth of modern capitalism today, which paradoxically conceals how little actual freedom consumers have in an era of industry consolidation and where media conglomerates are increasingly sophisticated at manipulating market demographics and content delivery. Meanwhile, this illusion of control to a great degree reinvokes the implicit video-­game aesthetic of The Lego Movie, as well as the nostalgic memories of game playing from which its look and narrative similarly benefit. Along those lines Eric Herhuth has related computer animation in a broader sense back to the logistics of the gaming experience: “The space of play offered by computer animation corresponds with the expanse of ludic practices across technology



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industries; and akin to the creativity divide in gaming, in which the creative capacity of a gamer is fundamentally different from that of game designers, the playful experience of watching computer animation differs significantly from the experiences of animators.”24 Moreover, this would seem to be most acute in a narrative such as The Lego Movie, which takes such “ludic practices” as its central subject matter. Through the illusion provided to us of a democratic interactivity and complete autonomy that increasingly sophisticated games, existing within elaborate (at times, even photorealistic) virtual worlds, provide, players may like to pretend (and may even momentarily forget) that in games we really have minimal control over events within a game engine that has already mapped out, and can anticipate, our every possible move. This does not, of course, mean that there isn’t still some room for the very real feeling of interactivity and autonomy, as well as of the genuine effect of pleasure derived therein. Yet these sensations do not offset the overwhelming control the game maintains over the player (satirically but appropriately reflected in the power dynamics of Gamer), nor should they blind us to the larger commercial interests these games serve, both in the sales themselves and in the expanding ancillary markets dependent upon them (particularly for more lucrative franchises). In both video games and The Lego Movie the true villain always remains hidden within media experiences that, despite their many differences, celebrate acts of creative nonconformity on a superficial level. These are venues where good consumerism is coded as engaged and interactive, and bad consumerism is associated with thoughtlessness, passivity, or worse, nonparticipation. Thus, ultimately, this battle between good and bad forms of consumerism moves us to the heart of the matter. To argue, as some have, that the movie is really a celebration of the kind of creative freedom that can trace its roots back to hacker utopias, or more recently, remix culture (that the film’s profound creativity lies in reworking the existing channels of power), is to miss a profoundly visible point: despite its own disavowal, everything in the movie reinforces the kind of continued and destructive overconsumption it claims to critique (in ways not unlike Wall-­E). But it also reinforces the centrality of the Lego Corporation as the dominant brand of its kind, one that increasingly consolidates its control through partnerships with nearly every other major media brand. No shortage of more skeptical critics stated what was so blatantly obvious and direct—­that, at the end of the day, The Lego Movie was really just a glorified commercial for more Lego consumption. Indeed, the consumerism was so transparent that some defenders of the movie (including those within academia) were able to move quickly toward dismissing such criticism as little more than “cynicism”—­which is an irresponsible, knee-­ jerk use of the kind of industry rhetoric too often used to block off such spaces for reflexivity. Certainly, the use of movies to promote toys is nothing particularly remarkable in and of itself. Since the earliest days of Disney’s cross-­market

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success, and later refined in the wake of the original Star Wars’ lucrative toy market, it has been assumed that any new kid’s movie is simultaneously an advertisement for the new line of toys (and clothes, soundtracks, and various products ad infinitum) that comes with it. What makes movies such as Wall-­E and The Lego Movie particularly frustrating in this regard is how the critique of overconsumption disingenuously reinforces said behavior and then further validates it by suggesting that as long as we are aware of such dangerous practices in others, we will somehow manage to avoid it in an imagined world of “responsible” consumerism—­in a culture generally dominated by anything but restrained consumption habits and further enabled by a rhetoric of participation.

Work Displays Beneath all of this, finally, is the continued obsession with the consumer’s needs in all of these movies at the expense of labor’s (general) absence. Thus, Emmett’s job as a construction worker, as a regular working-­class guy, in The Lego Movie is also worth revisiting. Like Felix the plumber in Wreck-­It Ralph, Emmett represents an older generation of work culture based heavily on manual labor, of physical work, that is more or less fading within the dominant immaterialities of an information age. Similarly, Ralph himself does not have a traditional laborer job in that sense, but he does explicitly take pride in his work ethic as a performer within the game, and he expresses gratitude for having a “steady” job for more than thirty years. This ethic is then echoed throughout Wreck-­It Ralph, where several other characters emphasize the jobs they are expected to perform. The idea of animated characters working for the gamer is ironic, not only because of the changing nature of most work over the last thirty years but also because of its decreasing emphasis in a culture dominated more by the values of leisure than of labor. They recall what Dean MacCannell called the “work displays” of a leisure-­based economy.25 We are further alienated from our own work through the performance of another’s labor as “fun.” Wreck-­It Ralph in particular reflects the emergent mind-­set of such a service-­based economy: the work of others is not only celebrated, but the work of others in service of the audience (or the gamer) is foregrounded as well—­a fantasy of manual labor in an age when the workforce is dwindling in the shift from an industrial to a postindustrial economy. Is it of any significance that Steve Wiebe’s intense embrace of a game from his childhood in The King of Kong was intended, at least in part, as a direct distraction from his own bout with un(der)employment, a specter that haunts many questions about the digital transition in cinema? All of this is to reiterate that the cultural and economic logic of the postindustrial age remains very much at the heart of these instances of video-­game pastiche, which is perfectly compatible with the postcinematic nostalgia celebrated



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in these movies—­the celebration of the “spaces between” media. Such dehistoricized stylization further works to conceal the deeper dialectical histories erased in the era of late capitalism, where the surface apolitics of pastiche affirm first and foremost distinctive market imperatives. If anything, then, the dialectic between older games and new movies, and the illusion of historical consciousness created through that veil of nostalgia, works as a substitute for the older dialectic between labor and capital too rarely engaged. Meanwhile, both Emmett’s and Ralph’s respective timelessness—­as both steady workers and as individuals who literally never age—­bridges through concealment such a profound economic transition, while also serving as one final reiteration of the kind of valorized posthuman labor, a kind of potentially limitless nonhuman labor source, that I have discussed throughout this book.

CONCLUSION On Clouds and Be Kind Rewind

Rather than dismiss the fading flickers of film in cinema culture today as little more than nostalgia for a bygone era, we might usefully rethink celluloid’s value from any number of aesthetic and, more importantly, economic perspectives even as we prepare to move ahead one day, perhaps, without it. Such nostalgia for film coexists in a mutually reaffirming relationship with the potential presented today for digital media to sustain that nostalgic desire for the analog, while in turn such yearning for yesterday can (ideally) continue to also carry with it the weight of the many histories that too often otherwise dissipate. I wish to conclude appropriately on a movie that insists that we look back through a narrative that presents profoundly interesting, at times depressing and often unanswered, questions about our ability to “access” the past. Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind (2008) is an elegiac love letter to an earlier moment of movie consumption. Perhaps the ultimate expression of film nostalgia in the age of digital cinema, it articulates an affection for the forgotten era at the end of the twentieth century between film’s dominance and the emergence now of a more or less totally digitized cinema culture: the era of television and VHS consumption. In a sense, it imagines an era outside linear time, when even the film medium itself was a long since forgotten memory. Be Kind Rewind is the story of two bumbling video-­store clerks who accidentally erase all the old VHS tapes in the store and decide to remake (“swede”) the titles, one by one, using their own do-­it-­yourself aesthetics. Thus, it evokes memories not only of home-­ video consumption but also the amateurish home movies shot by a generation of children—­including remakes of beloved Hollywood titles. It is a nostalgic movie that, profoundly and often subtly, asks us to look back—­but not only at passed media technologies. Be Kind Rewind is also about an earlier moment in American culture that came and went somewhere in the 160

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middle of the twentieth century, as decades of highways and white flight disrupted older urban spaces, and the private transportation of the automobile replaced the public service of the train. In this sense Gondry’s film is about the material spaces left in the wake of “progress,” just as the store clerks paint graffiti under the overpass of a highway that has plowed over and moved beyond the older neighborhood. It is their form of reappropriating a sight of mass transit, just as their “sweded” movies are themselves a form of reappropriating artifacts of mass production and consumption; in both cases they personalize impersonal objects of modernity and progress. In short, Be Kind Rewind is a powerful meditation not only on what gets left behind during periods of innovation and transition but on the dangers of being obsessed with constant progress and newness for their own sake. And yet Be Kind Rewind is a film that seems only partially conscious of the ironies embedded within its own contradictory sense of nostalgia, particularly as it pertains to both trends in modern fandom and the whims of distribution. It poignantly articulates a dystopic vision of “access” in the age of digital divides, where the economic gap, between people who do have access to newer media and those who do not, appears to be widening. Yet it seems oblivious to the power of the Internet (a medium curiously absent from the narrative) as expanding our general ability to access film and media in ways that the transition from VHS to DVD did not. This, importantly, is not to articulate a utopic sense of “total” film history at our fingertips but simply to note that, relatively speaking, the Internet, and digital distribution more generally, has done a better job than other media at democratizing questions of access (with the usual caveats about the economics of the digital divide). But, of course, as Be Kind Rewind suggests, these new opportunities have come at a profound economic cost in a postindustrial age of late capitalism where the value of such labor—­both discursive fan productions (videos, web postings) and an attendant goal of promoting new and existing films—­has become essentially worthless in terms of its exchange value (in this regard, too, the film’s advertising campaign was somewhat disingenuous as it exploited the uncompensated labor of fans who made their own “sweded” versions of movies as part of its promotion). Instead, Be Kind Rewind imagines such expressions of nostalgic love for old movies, ironically, as a threat to existing business models to the extent that the studios would send in their copyright lawyers to clamp down on such imaginative demonstrations of fandom—­in an age, however, where Hollywood can’t seem to get enough of such cheap publicity and production. In an era when even Disney (a notoriously litigious corporation in the predigital age) doesn’t seem terribly invested in enforcing copyright claims for fear of bad publicity, perhaps the most nostalgic aspect of Be Kind Rewind’s self-­theorizing fandom ultimately is in its desire for a time when fan production was still somehow considered

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oppositional, deviant, or even just divergent—­an autonomous site for originality and commentary in the old days of what Henry Jenkins once called “participatory culture”—­instead of a standardized norm within Hollywood’s shrewd mechanisms of hype. Still another irony here is the resilient economic value of nostalgia for old movies in an age of digital distribution, the considerable savings accrued by studios as they keep repackaging older films at a faster rate than they produce new ones. Repackaging nostalgia is cheaper and easier than generating new content. Here, again, we can look back to the business model that Disney once pioneered (and partially explains the studio’s checkered past as a defender of copyright). During World War II the Disney studio was desperate for cash; feature-­length animation was hugely time-­intensive and thus extremely expensive in any event, but it became even more of an issue as production was tied up in making propaganda films for the US government. It was at this point that Disney hit on the idea—­out of economic desperation (as was often the case)—­to rerelease its older movies, such as Snow White, which was still less than a decade old at that point. Hence, the Disney “Vault” strategy was born, which was not only about restricting access to beloved titles, and reintroducing a new generation to old classics, but also about generating pure profit through the lure of nostalgia without incurring any other major expenses than promotion. Today most Hollywood studios benefit more or less from a similar strategy, as their old libraries are often as lucrative as their newest production. The only thing that has changed since Snow White was reissued in 1944 is that most all repackaging and distribution is done through home video and Internet delivery rather than theatrically—­though not entirely so. This provides yet more incentive for the continued reissues of “classic” titles in 3D or IMAX today, such as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999) or The Lion King (1994). Disney resisted the transition to VHS in the 1980s for exactly this reason; the ready availability of movies on home media platforms would dry up its lucrative theatrical markets. Yet this is an issue that the company successfully combated through both the Vault strategy and, as every other studio has, planned obsolescence, where the introductions of new technologies will always ensure the continued demand of popular titles. It is perhaps the effect of this last issue, the obsession with change for change’s (market-­driven) sake, that Be Kind Rewind most poignantly captures in its nostalgic vision of an obsolete, but still perfectly functional, world content with VHS—­a world that, for reasons never made convincingly clear, must adapt or be left behind. Indeed, the materiality of Be Kind Rewind—­its fondness for physical things such as videotape but also for the other raw materials used to re-create sweded films—­already anticipates a nostalgia for life in the aftermath of DVDs and Blu-­ rays, as the next phase of distribution (the most seductively dangerous of all)

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has already arrived: the immateriality of new online storage systems. “Our mass conversion to a digital and cloud-­based society is picking up steam and impacting DVD/Blu-­R ay, consumer products and distribution to say the least,” Starlight Runner Entertainment CEO Jeff Gomez was quoted as saying in 2013; “it makes sense to move people around as a result, or to even cut staff. We last saw this at the studios not long after DVD sales peaked earlier last decade.”1 Here again the impact of new technologies has a direct impact on the workforce as the increasing recycling of old movies not only minimizes the need for new labor to produce content, but its digital nature also requires fewer new material needs in terms of distribution. Only the reliability of such cloud-­based data storage—­ whether or not people can trust this material to always be there when digital has thus far not been dependable in that regard—­will decide this question one way or another. Ultimately, the “cloud” is simply another reminder that innovation, the notion of permanent change, will remain a constant in the age of digital cinema. Be Kind Rewind, however, is a reminder of our most basic, stubborn (material) resistance to such “progress” for its own sake. It also serves as an echo of Philip Rosen’s notion of “hybridity,” that we will never quite achieve a pure digital utopia of one kind or another in a culture that continues—­for economic, and not just technological or nostalgic, reasons—­to appropriate an awkward mix of old and new. (I am also reminded of Chuck Tryon’s discussion of the huge popularity of Redbox kiosks, a remarkable technical innovation in the annals of digital distribution but one still stubbornly dependent on the “older” medium of DVDs and one born out of financial, as well as logistical, convenience.)2 It is due to this notion of permanent change, for which nostalgia could be a useful corrective, that I have resisted keeping up with the latest developments. Instead, Flickers of Film has offered a broader historical view on the age of digital cinema, one possible among many, that charts parallels between past and present more so than it gets caught up in the steady, invariably industry-­driven, hype of the “new.” But I’d like to believe that this has not been a book about the past but about contemplating what might still be to come, by looking through the lens of what already has. And, while some profound changes have certainly taken place, it is productive to think about that which has stayed the same, and why (for better or for worse), as well as that which could have, and might still, come to pass. In there, ultimately, resides nostalgia’s most positive potential, frustrated by a culture too often dominated by its most depressing, debilitating realities. Or, perhaps, a certain sense of failure is the point, ultimately. Ah, well. In the end even Be Kind Rewind finds a way to let go—­and so, eventually, must I.

NOTES

Introduction 1.  Nick James, “Elegy for Analogue,” Sight & Sound 22 (April 2012): 5. 2.  Michele Pierson, Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder (New York: Columbia University

Press, 2002), 137.

3.  James, “Elegy for Analogue,” 5. 4.  Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xiv. Maryse Fauvel

previously looked at some recent developments in digital cinema through the lens of Boym’s work on nostalgia, highlighting how two French movies utilized a fondness for film’s past at the very forefront of the digital age—­The Gleaners and I’s (2000) digital video callbacks to Agnes Varda’s foundational role in cinema verité documentaries of the 1960s and Triplets of Belleville’s (2003) reworking of 2D cel animation; see Maryse Fauvel, “Nostalgia and Digital Technology: Gleaners and I (Varda, 2000) and Triplets of Belleville (Chomet, 2003) as Reflective Genres,” Studies in French Cinema 5.3 (2005): 219–­29. 5.  Peter Debruge, “The Artist Paints Vivid Picture,” Variety, 23 May 2011, 16. 6.  Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xiv. 7.  D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 177. 8.  Justin Chang, “Biz Can’t Resist Pics with Insider Twists,” Daily Variety, 30 Oct. 2012, 12. 9.  Colleen Montgomery, “Woody’s Roundup and Wall-­E’s Wunderkammer: Technophilia and Nostalgia in Pixar Animation,” Animation Studies Online Journal 6 (Sept. 2011), http://​journal​ .animationstudies​.org/​colleen​-montgomery​-woodys​-roundup​-and​-walles​-wunderkammer/. 10.  Sandra Annett, “The Nostalgic Remediation of Cinema in Hugo and Paprika,” Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 7.2 (2014): 170. 11.  Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, 21st-­Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era of Transformation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 28. Here they are referring specifically to the innovative Hulu​.com website’s early role as an archive of old movies and TV shows. 12.  Dan North, Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects, and the Virtual Actor (London: Wallflower, 2008), 137. 13.  Nicholas Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age (London: Wallflower, 2009), 2 (Rombes’s emphasis). 14.  Pierson, Special Effects, 154. 15.  Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 303. 16.  Charles Acland, “Avatar as Technological Tentpole.” FlowTV 11 ( Jan. 2010): http://​flowtv​ .org/​2010/​01/​avatar​-as​-technological​-tentpole​-charles​-r​-acland​-concordia​-university/. 17.  Rosen, Change Mummified, 304 (my emphasis). 18.  David Binet, “Celebrating American Drive-­Ins,” Boxoffice, April 2013, 10. 19.  Kevin Esch, “ ‘The Lesser of the Attractions’: Grindhouse and Theatrical Nostalgia,” Jump Cut 54 (Fall 2012): www​.ejumpcut​.org/​archive/​jc54​.2012/​EschGrindhouse/​index​.html.

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Notes to Pages 7–17

20.  Caetlin Benson-­Allott, “Grindhouse: An Experiment in the Death of Cinema,” Film Quar-

terly 62.1 (2008): 20–­24.

21.  Numerous ambitious CGI spectacles today may claim to imagine possible futures—­such as

Star Wars (2015), Star Trek (2009/2013), Terminator (2015), TRON: Legacy (2010), Robocop (2014), or Transformers (2014)—­but these are, of course, nostalgic retellings of decades-­old properties. 22.  Francesco Casetti and Antonio Somaini, “The Conflict between High Definition and Low Definition in Contemporary Cinema,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 19.4 (2013): 416. 23.  Michael Hardt, “Affective Labor,” boundary 2 26.2 (1999): 97. 24.  John Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 155. 25.  David S. Cohen and Andrew Stuart, “Jobs Jolted by Celluloid Sayonara,” Variety, 16 April 2013, 46. 26.  Andrew Utterson, From MGM to IBM: Cinema at the Dawn of the Digital Age (London: British Film Institute, 2011). 27.  Melissa Gregg, “Learning to (Love) Labour: Production Cultures and the Affective Turn,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6.2 ( June 2009): 210–­11. 28.  Rombes, too, had earlier noted cinema’s increasing tendency in the digital age to offer its “own theory,” an approach that largely promotes the utopic ideal that media itself will offer spaces (perhaps more in the avant-­garde tradition) to critique from within; see Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age, 59. 29.  Caldwell, Production Culture, 15. 30.  See Derek Johnson, Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in Creative Industries (New York: New York University Press, 2013); and Montgomery, “Woody’s Roundup.” 31.  Caldwell, Production Culture, 1. 32.  Ibid. 33.  Johnathan Gray, Show Sold Separately (New York: New York University Press, 2010). 34.  Caldwell, Production Culture, 21, 22. 35.  Debruge, “The Artist Paints Vivid Picture,” 16. 36.  Timothy M. Gray, “Key to the Future Seen in the Past,” Variety, 2 August 2010, 28. 37.  Pam Cook, Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (London: Routledge, 2005), 3. 38.  Rosen, Change Mummified, 302. 39.  See Hardt, “Affective Labor”; Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Steven Shaviro, Post-­Cinematic Affect (New York: Zero Books, 2010); Kathleen Stewart, “Nostalgia—­A Polemic,” Cultural Anthropology 3.3 (1988): 227–­41. 40.  Dixon and Foster, 21st-­Century Hollywood, 30. 41.  Jason Sperb, Disney’s Most Notorious Film: Race, Convergence and the Hidden Histories of “Song of the South” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012). 42.  Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–­1998 (New York: Verso, 1999), 20. 43.  Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 50. 44.  Ibid., 33. 45.  Ibid., 41, xvii. 46.  Stewart, “Nostalgia—­A Polemic,” 228. 47.  Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xviii. 48.  See Jason Sperb, “Ghost without a Machine: Enid’s Anxiety of Depthlessness,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21.3 (2004): 209–­17.



Notes to Pages 18–40

167

49.  Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 252. 50.  David Cohen, “Studio Ills Give F/X Biz Chills,” Daily Variety, 14 Feb. 2014, 4. 51.  Peter Bart, “Tough Times for the Guild Militants,” Variety, 25 August 2008, 4. 52.  David Cohen, “Prana Purchase Offers Lifeline for VFX Co,” Variety, 2 April 2013, 6. 53.  Tatiana Siegel and Dave McNary, “Cheaper by the Vision,” Variety, 21 June 2010, 29. 54.  Quoted in “Christopher Doyle Interview, Part 2: Life of Pi Oscar Is an Insult to Cinema-

tography,” Blouin Artinfo, 5 March 2013, http://​sea​.blouinartinfo​.com/​news/​story/​874483/​ christopher​-doyle​-interview​-part​-2​-life​-of​-pi​-oscar​-is​-an#. 55.  Ibid. 56.  Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, “What Is the 21st Century? Revising the Dictionary,” MUBI Notebook, 1 Feb. 2013, https://​mubi​.com/​notebook/​posts/​what​-is​-the​-21st​-century​-revising​-the​-dictionary. 57.  Steven Shaviro, “Workflow/Rihanna,” The Pinocchio Theory, 23 April 2014, www​.shaviro​ .com/​Blog/​?p​=​1215. 58.  See Francesco Casetti, “Sutured Reality: Film, from Photographic to Digital,” October 138 (Fall 2011): 95–­106. 59.  Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, 174. 60.  Quoted in Jared Rapfogel et al., “From 35mm to DCP,” Cineaste (spring 2012): 41. 61.  Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2005), 15. 62.  Stephen Prince, Digital Visual Effects in Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 84. 63.  Julie Turnock, “The ILM Version: Recent Digital Effects and the Aesthetics of 1970s Cinematography,” Film History 24.2 (2012): 158. 64.  Linda Hutcheon, “The Politics of Postmodernism: Parody and History,” Cultural Critique 5 (Winter 1986–­87): 183, 182. 65.  Ibid., 182 (Hutcheon’s emphasis). 66.  Ibid., 192. 67.  Vera Dika, Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film: The Uses of Nostalgia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 2; see also Paul Grainge, Monochrome Memories: Nostalgia and Style in Retro America (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002). 68.  Dika, Recycled Culture, 91. 69.  Richard Dyer, Pastiche (London: Routledge, 2007), 131. 70.  Ibid., 178. 71.  Ibid., 138. 72.  Francesco Casetti, “Filmic Experience,” Screen 50.1 (2009): 64–­65 (my emphasis). 73.  Dixon and Foster, 21st-­Century Hollywood, 5. 74.  Montgomery, “Woody’s Roundup.” 75.  Dixon and Foster, 21st-­Century Hollywood, 62.

Chapter 1. Virtual Performances 1.  Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 2.  D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 6–­7. 3.  See Kristen Whissel, “The Digital Multitude,” Cinema Journal 49.4 (2010): 90–­110. 4.  Dan North, Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects, and the Virtual Actor (London: Wallflower, 2008), 149.

1 68

Notes to Pages 40–55

5.  Ibid., 155. 6.  Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left

Review 146 ( July-­August 1984): 66. 7.  Ibid., 79. 8.  Ibid., 61. 9.  North, Performing Illusions, 156. 10.  Lisa Bode, “No Longer Themselves? Framing Digitally Enabled Posthumous ‘Performance,’ ” Cinema Journal 49.4 (2010): 46–­70. 11.  Ibid., 48. 12.  John Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 154. 13.  Chuck Tryon, On-­Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 2. 14.  Chuck Tryon, Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Convergence (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 18. 15.  Ibid. 16.  Michael Quinn, “Marketing Ghosts in the Commercial: Computer Wizardry Brings New Life to Some Old Stars in Diet Coke’s Ads,” Time, 23 Dec. 1991, http://​content​.time​.com/​ time/​magazine/​article/​0​,9171​,974504​,00​.html. 17.  Bode, “No Longer Themselves?” 51. 18.  North, Performing Illusions, 148. 19.  Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, 2.

Chapter 2. New Nostalgia Movies and Digital Exhibition 1.  Andrew Gilbert, “The Death of Film and the Hollywood Response,” Senses of Cinema 62

(March 2012): http://​sensesofcinema​.com/​2012/​feature​-articles/​the​-death​-of​-film​-and​-the​ -hollywood​-response/. 2.  Ibid. 3.  Ibid. 4.  Ibid. 5.  Joshua Clover, “Enjoy the Silents: Marx and Coca-­Cola,” Film Quarterly 65.4 (2012): 7. 6.  Richard Dyer, Pastiche (New York: Routledge, 2006), 130. 7.  Sandra Annett, “The Nostalgic Remediation of Cinema in Hugo and Paprika,” Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 7.2 (2014): 170. 8.  Clover, “Enjoy the Silents,” 7. 9.  Ibid. 10.  Of course, this accomplishment is misleading in the context of box-­office inflation, however—­another instance wherein Hollywood’s consumerist-­driven mind-­set invariably rewrites history. 11.  Wade Major, “Days of Future Past,” Boxoffice, 1 Nov. 1994, 61. 12.  For more on the conversion to DCP see Lisa Dombrowski, “Not If, but When and How: Digital Comes to the American Art House,” Film History 24.2 (2012): 235–­48; Jared Rapfogel et al., “From 35mm to DCP,” Cineaste 37.4 (2012): 32–­42; Thomas Elsaesser, “The ‘Return’ of 3D: On Some of the Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the Twenty-­First Century,” Critical Inquiry 39 (Winter 2013): 217–­46; and John Belton, “Digital 3D Cinema: Digital Cinema’s Missing Novelty Phase,” Film History 24.2 (2012): 187–­95. 13.  Dan Doperalski, “Drive-­Ins in a Digital Bind,” Variety, 8 Feb. 2012, 1.



Notes to Pages 57–71

169

14.  Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 46. 15.  Ibid. 16.  Christine Sprengler, Screening Nostalgia: Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary American Film (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 86. 17.  Clover, “Enjoy the Silents,” 7. 18.  Ibid. 19.  Quoted in Rapfogel, “From 35mm to DCP,” 40. 20.  Quoted in ibid., 38. 21.  Dombrowski, “Not If, but When and How,” 236. 22.  Ibid. 23.  Elsaesser, “The ‘Return’ of 3D,” 222. 24.  Charles Acland, “Avatar as Technological Tentpole,” FlowTV 11 ( Jan. 2010): http://​flowtv​ .org/​2010/​01/​avatar​-as​-technological​-tentpole​-charles​-r​-acland​-concordia​-university/. 25.  Dombrowski, “Not If, but When and How,” 238. 26.  Gendy Alimurung, “Movie Studios Are Forcing Hollywood to Abandon 35mm Film, but the Consequences of Going Digital Are Vast, and Troubling,” LA Weekly, 12 April 2012, www​ .laweekly​.com/​film/​movie​-studios​-are​-forcing​-hollywood​-to​-abandon​-35mm​-film​-but​-the​ -consequences​-of​-going​-digital​-are​-vast​-and​-troubling​-2174582. 27.  Dombrowski, “Not If, but When and How,” 237. 28.  Ibid., 246. 29.  Ibid., 238. 30.  Alimurung, “Movie Studios Are Forcing Hollywood.” 31.  John Belton, “Digital Cinema: A False Revolution?” October 100 (Spring 2002): 105–­6. 32.  Elsaesser, “The ‘Return’ of 3D,” 217–­18. 33.  Annett, “Nostalgic Remediation of Cinema,” 174. 34.  Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 245. 35.  Thomas J. McLean, “Hugo,” Daily Variety, 15 Feb. 2012, 13. 36.  Dan North, “Digesting Hugo,” Spectacular Attractions, 13 April 2012, http://​drnorth​.wordpress​ .com/​2012/​04/​13/​digesting​-hugo/. 37.  Roger Ebert, “Hugo,” Roger Ebert, 21 Nov. 2011, www​.rogerebert​.com/​reviews/​hugo​ -2011. 38.  Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-­ Garde,” Wide Angle 8.3 (1986): 56–­62. 39.  Edison sued Méliès, among others, over copyright infringement as early as 1904; see Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Cinema to 1907 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 402. On Gaston’s suit see Eileen Bower, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–­1915 (Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991), 30. 40.  Bower, The Transformation of Cinema, 26; Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 364. 41.  Jameson, Postmodernism, 22. 42.  See Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth University Press, 2006).

Chapter 3. Preserving Film 1.  Paolo Cherchi Usai, quoted in Kit Hughes and Heather Heckman, “Dossier: Materiality and the Archive,” Velvet Light Trap 70 (Fall 2012): 60.

170

Notes to Pages 71–87

2.  For this reason I consciously resisted writing at length on cinematography anywhere in this book. 3.  See, e.g., Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, 21st-­Century Cinema:

Movies in an Era of Transformation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 33. 4.  Giovanna Fossati, From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 14. 5.  See Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic, 2001); Christine Sprengler, Screening Nostalgia: Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary American Film (New York: Berghahn, 2009); and Mark Fisher, “What Is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly 66.1 (2012): 16–­24. 6.  Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 49 (italics in original). 7.  Ibid., 50. 8.  See Joshua Clover, “Marx and Coca-­Cola: Enjoy the Silents,” Film Quarterly 65.4 (2012): 7. 9.  Dixon and Foster, 21st-­Century Cinema, 5–­6. 10.  Sprengler, Screening Nostalgia, 149. 11.  Ibid., 148. 12.  See, e.g., Richard Dyer, Pastiche (New York: Routledge, 2006). 13.  Sprengler, Screening Nostalgia, 148 (my emphasis). 14.  Ibid., 160. 15.  See, e.g., Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Steven Shaviro, Post-­Cinematic Affect (Blue Ridge, PA: Zero Books, 2010); and Nicholas Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age (London: Wallflower, 2009). 16.  Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age, 87. 17.  Ibid., 124–­25. 18.  Fossati, From Grain to Pixel, 15. 19.  Dan Streible, “Moving Image History and the F-­Word; or, ‘Digital Film’ Is an Oxymoron,” Film History 25.1–­2 (2013): 232, 234. 20.  Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 25. 21.  Fossati, From Grain to Pixel, 17. 22.  William Uricchio, “History and Its Shadow: Thinking about the Contours of Absence in the Construction of Media History,” Screen 55.1 (2014): 126. 23.  Kris Fallon, “Archives Analog and Digital: Errol Morris and Documentary Film in the Digital Age,” Screen 54.1 (2013): 38. 24.  Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark Age (London: British Film Institute, 2001), 125. 25.  Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age, 29. 26.  Ibid., 26. 27.  David Kehr, “Goodbye, DVD. Hello, Future,” New York Times, 4 March 2011, www​ .nytimes​.com/​2011/​03/​06/​movies/​homevideo/​06dvds​.html. 28.  Usai, The Death of Cinema, 113. 29.  Ibid., 117. 30.  Quoted in Jared Rapfogel et al., “From 35mm to DCP,” Cineaste 37.4 (2012): 37. 31.  Gendy Alimurung, “Movie Studios Are Forcing Hollywood to Abandon 35mm Film, but the Consequences of Going Digital Are Vast, and Troubling,” LA Weekly, 12 April 2012, www​ .laweekly​.com/​film/​movie​-studios​-are​-forcing​-hollywood​-to​-abandon​-35mm​-film​-but​-the​ -consequences​-of​-going​-digital​-are​-vast​-and​-troubling​-2174582 (my emphasis). 32.  Quoted in Hughes and Heckman, “Dossier: Materiality and the Archive,” 60.



Notes to Pages 89–105

171

Chapter 4. Pixar Studios and Digital Animation 1.  David Price, The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 158. 2.  Ellen Wolff, “Big Upside to Long Pipelines,” Daily Variety, 6 Feb. 2009, A11. 3.  Marc Le Sueur, “Theory Number Five: Anatomy of Nostalgia Films: Heritage and Methods,” Journal of Popular Film 6.2 (1977): 192. 4.  Colleen Montgomery, “Woody’s Roundup and Wall-­ E’s Wunderkammer: Technophilia and Nostalgia in Pixar Animation,” Animation Studies Online Journal 6 (Sept. 2011): http://​journal​.animationstudies​.org/​colleen​-montgomery​-woodys​-roundup​-and​-walles​ -wunderkammer/. 5.  Eric Herhuth, “Life, Love, and Programming: The Culture and Politics of Wall-­E and Pixar Computer Animation,” Cinema Journal 53.4 (2004): 71. 6.  Price, The Pixar Touch, 16. 7.  Leon Gurevitch, “Computer Generated Animation as Product Design Engineered Culture; or, Buzz Lightyear to the Sales Floor, to the Checkout and Beyond!” Animation 7 (2012), 134–­35. 8.  Hugh McNaughtan, “Distinctive Consumption and Popular Anti-­consumerism: The Case of Wall-­E,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 26.5 (2012): 760. 9.  Christopher Todd Anderson, “Post-­Apocalyptic Nostalgia: WALL-­E, Garbage, and American Ambivalence toward Manufactured Goods,” Literature, Interpretation, Theory 23.2 (2012): 279. 10.  Montgomery, “Woody’s Roundup.” 11.  Gurevitch, “Computer Generated Animation,” 141. 12.  Price, The Pixar Touch, 109–­11. 13.  Ibid., 69. 14.  Ibid., 135. 15.  Ibid., 118. 16.  Ibid., 133. 17.  “Drawing Up for Battle,” Screen International, 24 May 1996, 14. 18.  Steve Daly, “Mane Attraction,” Entertainment Weekly, 8 July 1994, www​.ew​.com/​ew/​article/​ 0,​,302837​,00​.html. 19.  Brent Schlender and Jane Furth, “Steve Jobs’ Amazing Movie Adventure,” CNNMoney, 18 Sept. 1995, http://​money​.cnn​.com/​magazines/​fortune/​fortune​_archive/​1995/​09/​18/​ 206099/​index​.htm. 20.  Price, The Pixar Touch, 121. 21.  Ibid., 105. 22.  Dietmar Meinel, “ ‘Space: The Final Fun-­tier’—­Returning Home to the Frontier in Pixar’s Wall-­E,” Animation Studies Online Journal 8 (August 2013): http://​journal​.animationstudies​ .org/​dietmar​-meinel​-space​-the​-final​-fun​-tier​-returning​-home​-to​-the​-frontier/. 23.  Price, The Pixar Touch, 128. 24.  Michael Mallory, “Toy Fair & Licensing: Spotlight: Return of the Classics,” Variety, 12 Feb. 1996, 74. 25.  Thomas J. McLean, “Making of Toy Story 3,” Hollywood Reporter, 19 Jan. 2011, 68. 26.  Montgomery, “Woody’s Roundup.” 27.  Gurevitch, “Computer Generated Animation,” 135. 28.  Price, The Pixar Touch, 229. 29.  Ibid.

172

Notes to Pages 107–124

30.  Herhuth, “Life, Love, and Programming,” 60. 31.  Anderson, “Post-­Apocalyptic Nostalgia,” 270, 267. 32.  Herhuth, “Life, Love, and Programming,” 55. 33.  McNaughtan, “Distinctive Consumption,” 762. 34.  Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann, “WALL-­E: From Environmental Adaptation

to Sentimental Nostalgia,” Jump Cut 51 (Spring 2009): http://​www​.ejumpcut​.org/​archive/​ jc51​.2009/​WallE/​text​.html. 35.  Herhuth, “Life, Love, and Programming,” 71. 36.  McNaughtan, “Distinctive Consumption,” 762. 37.  Ibid., 763. 38.  Anderson, “Post-­Apocalyptic Nostalgia,” 273. 39.  McNaughtan, “Distinctive Consumption,” 763. 40.  Ibid., 760–­62. 41.  Ibid., 757 (McNaughtan’s emphasis). 42.  Ibid., 761. 43.  Murray and Heumann, “WALL-­E.” 44.  Price, The Pixar Touch, 251. 45.  Anderson, “Post-­Apocalyptic Nostalgia,” 276. 46.  Hannah Ebrahim, “Are the ‘Boys’ at Pixar Afraid of Little Girls?” Journal of Film & Video 66.3 (2014): 44.

Chapter 5. Disney and Nostalgia Blockbusters 1.  Marc Graser, “Chips and Blips, Anyone?” Daily Variety, 10 Dec. 2010, 26. 2.  Chuck Tryon, On-­Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies (New Bruns-

wick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 91. 3.  Michele Pierson, Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 157. 4.  Raiford Guins, Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 240. 5.  Rebecca-­Anne C. Do Rozario, “The Princess and the Magic Kingdom: Beyond Nostalgia, the Function of the Disney Princess,” Women’s Studies in Communication 27.1 (2004), 36–­37. 6.  Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Paratexts (New York: New York University Press, 2010). 7.  Aylish Wood, “Contests and Simulations: Tron: Legacy’s Connections with Technologies,” Journal of Film & Video 66.3 (2014): 31–­42. 8.  Pamela McClintock, “Studios Bring Auds into the Game,” Variety, 12 July 2010, 8. 9.  Ibid., 31. 10.  Quoted in ibid. 11.  Tryon, On-­Demand Culture, 9. 12.  Eleanor Stribling, “Valuing Fans,” in Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, ed. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green (New York: New York University Press, 2013), http://​spreadablemedia​.org/​essays/​stribling/​#​.U7MhS7Et0X8. 13.  Ibid. 14.  Abigail De Kosnik, “Interrogating ‘Free’ Fan Labor,” in Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, ed. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green (New York: New York University Press, 2013), http://​ spreadablemedia​ .org/​ essays/​ kosnik/​ #​ .U7MiILEt0X8.



Notes to Pages 125–144

173

15.  John Belton, “Digital Cinema: A False Revolution?” October 100 (Spring 2002): 103. 16.  Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film, 2nd enl. ed. (New

Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 276. 17.  Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, 21st-­Century Hollywood: Movies in an Era of Transformation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 13. 18.  Ibid., 60. 19.  Sobchack, Screening Space, 276–­77. 20.  Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 20. 21.  Sobchack, Screening Space, 248. 22.  See Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 2012). 23.  Sobchack, Screening Space, 276–­77. 24.  Ibid., 257. 25.  Graser, “Chips and Blips, Anyone?” 26. 26.  Todd McCarthy, “Tron: Legacy,” Hollywood Reporter, 15 Dec. 2010, 90. 27.  Lucas Shaw, “Disney’s Brilliant Strategy: Make Fewer Movies,” The Wrap, 7 Nov. 2013, www​.thewrap​.com/​disney​-doesnt​-make​-movies​-thats​-smart/. 28.  Data provided by Marc Graser, “Iger’s Legacy Cutting Close to ‘Neutron Jack’s,’” Variety, 16 April 2013, 16. 29.  Jill Goldsmith, “Iger Pay Up 13% in 2011,” Daily Variety, 23 Jan. 2012, 5. 30.  See Gina Hall, “Disney, DreamWorks Animation, and Lucasfilm Slammed with Lawsuit over ‘Non-­Poaching’ Agreements,” The Wrap, 8 Sept. 2014, www​.thewrap​.com/ ​disney​-dreamworks​-animation​-and​-lucasfilm​-slammed​-with​-lawsuit​-over​-non​-poaching​ -agreements/. 31.  Quoted in Alex Ben Block and Georg Szalai, “Who’s Winning the Toy Wars,” Hollywood Reporter, 19 August 2011, 28. 32.  Hannah Ebrahim, “Are the ‘Boys’ at Pixar Afraid of Little Girls?” Journal of Film & Video 66.3 (2014): 44. 33.  Graser, “Iger’s Legacy Cutting Close to ‘Neutron Jack’s,’ ” 16.

Chapter 6. Video-Game Pastiche 1.  Raiford Guins, Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 221. 2.  Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 326. 3.  D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 173. My students have often made a similar comparison in the classroom. 4.  Leon Gurevitch, “The Cinemas of Interactions,” Senses of Cinema 57 (Dec. 2010): http://​sensesofcinema​.com/​2010/​feature​-articles/​the​-cinemas​-of​-interactions​-cinematics​-and​-the​-​%E2​%80​ %98game​-effect​%E2​%80​%99​-in​-the​-age​-of​-digital​-attractions/. 5.  Guins, Game After, 7. 6.  Rosen, Change Mummified, 303. 7.  Derek Johnson, “Cinematic Destiny: Marvel Studios and the Trade Stories of Industrial Convergence,” Cinema Journal 52.1 (2012): 2. 8.  Steven Shaviro, Post-­Cinematic Affect (Seattle: Zero Books, 2010), 1, 2. 9.  Ibid., 115.

1 74

Notes to Pages 145–163

10.  Alex Ben Block and Georg Szalai, “Who’s Winning the Toy Wars,” Hollywood Reporter, 19 August 2011, 28. 11.  Shaviro, Post-­Cinematic Affect, 3. 12.  See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 16. 13.  Ibid., 17–­18. 14.  Ibid., 18. 15.  Shaviro, Post-­Cinematic Affect, 94. 16.  Ibid., 7. 17.  Ibid., 94. 18.  Shaviro highlights that we cannot necessarily ascribe this memory to Kable’s own subjective point of view, just because the film’s formal grammar of visual association would normally make this assumption a given. 19.  Ibid., 114. 20.  Ibid., 112. 21.  Steven Shaviro, “Post-­Continuity,” The Pinocchio Theory, 26 March 2012, www​.shaviro​ .com/​Blog/​?p​=​1034. 22.  Shaviro, Post-­Cinematic Affect, 94. 23.  Quoted in Robert Goldrich, “The Road to Oscar, Part IV,” Shoot, 25 Jan. 2013, 9. 24.  Eric Herhuth, “Life, Love, and Programming: The Culture and Politics of Wall-­E and Pixar Computer Animation,” Cinema Journal 53.4 (2004): 74. 25.  Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 36.

Conclusion 1.  Quoted in Kirsten Acuna, “Here’s Why Disney Is Cutting Jobs by the Hundreds,” Business

Insider, 12 April 2013, www​.businessinsider​.com/​disney​-layoffs​-led​-by​-poor​-dvd​-sales​-2013–4​ #ixzz2mM3RQFiX. 2.  Chuck Tryon, On-­Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 13.

SELECTED BIBLIOGR APHY

Acland, Charles R. “Avatar as Technological Tentpole.” FlowTV 11 ( Jan. 2010): http://​flowtv​ .org/​2010/​01/​avatar​-as​-technological​-tentpole​-charles​-r​-acland​-concordia​-university/. Anderson, Christopher Todd. “Post-­Apocalyptic Nostalgia: WALL-­E, Garbage, and American Ambivalence toward Manufactured Goods.” Literature, Interpretation, Theory 23.2 (2012): 267–­82. Anderson, Tim J. “As If History Was Merely a Record.” Music, Sound & the Moving Image 2.1 (2008): 51–­78. Annett, Sandra. “The Nostalgic Remediation of Cinema in Hugo and Paprika.” Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 7.2 (2014): 169–­80. Balcerzak, Scott, and Jason Sperb, eds. Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction. Vol. 1. London: Wallflower, 2009. ———. Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction. Vol. 2. London: Wallflower, 2012. Balsom, Erika. “A Cinema in the Gallery, a Cinema in Ruins.” Screen 50.4 (2009): 411–­27. Beller, Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth University Press, 2006. Belton, John. “Digital Cinema: A False Revolution?” October 100 (Spring 2002): 98–­114. ———. “Digital 3D Cinema: Digital Cinema’s Missing Novelty Phase.” Film History 24.2 (2012): 187–­95. Benson-­Allott, Caetlin. “Grindhouse: An Experiment in the Death of Cinema.” Film Quarterly 62.1 (2008): 20–­24. ———. Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Bode, Lisa. “No Longer Themselves? Framing Digitally Enabled Posthumous ‘Performance.’ ” Cinema Journal 49.4 (2010): 46–­70. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Brookey, Robert Alan. Hollywood Gamers: Digital Convergence in the Film and Video Game Industries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Bulut, Ergin. “Seeing and Playing as Labor: Toward a Visual Materialist Pedagogy of Video Games through Walter Benjamin.” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 35.5 (2013): 408–­25. Caldwell, John. Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Casetti, Francesco, and Antonio Somaini. “The Conflict between High Definition and Low Definition in Contemporary Cinema.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 19.4 (2013): 415–­22. ———. “Filmic Experience.” Screen 50.1 (2009): 56–­66. ———. The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. ———. “Sutured Reality: Film, from Photographic to Digital.” October 138 (Fall 2011): 95–­106. Church, David. Grindhouse Nostalgia: Memory, Home Video, and Exploitation Film Fandom. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.

175

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Clover, Joshua. “Enjoy the Silents: Marx and Coca-­Cola.” Film Quarterly 65.4 (2012): 6–­7. Cook, Pam. Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema. London: Routledge, 2005. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Davis, Fred. Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: Free Press, 1979. De Kosnik, Abigail. “Interrogating ‘Free’ Fan Labor.” In Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, ed. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. New York: New York University Press, 2013. http://​spreadablemedia​.org/​essays/​kosnik/​#​.U7MiILEt0X8. Dika, Vera. Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film: The Uses of Nostalgia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Dixon, Wheeler Winston, and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. 21st-­Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era of Transformation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011. Dombrowski, Lisa. “Not If, but When and How: Digital Comes to the American Art House.” Film History 24.2 (2012): 235–­48. Do Rozario, Rebecca-­Anne C. “The Princess and the Magic Kingdom: Beyond Nostalgia, the Function of the Disney Princess.” Women’s Studies in Communication 27.1 (2004): 34–­59. Dyer, Richard. “Entertainment and Utopia.” In Movies and Methods, edited by Bill Nichols, 2:220–­32. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. ———. Pastiche. New York: Routledge, 2006. Ebrahim, Haseenah. “Are the ‘Boys’ at Pixar Afraid of Little Girls?” Journal of Film & Video 66.3 (2014): 43–­56. Edney, Kathryn A. T., and Kit Hughes. “Hello WALL-­E! Nostalgia, Utopia, and the Science Fiction Musical.” In Sounds of the Future: Essays on Music in Science Fiction Film, ed. Matthew J. Bartkowiak, 44–­66. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. Eig, Jonathan. “The Tail Wags: Hollywood’s Crumbling Infrastructure.” Jump Cut 56 (Winter 2014–­15): www​.ejumpcut​.org/​archive/​jc56​.2014/​eigHollywood/​index​.html. Elsaesser, Thomas. “The ‘Return’ of 3D: On Some of the Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the Twenty-­First Century.” Critical Inquiry 39 (Winter 2013): 217–­46. Esch, Kevin. “ ‘The Lesser of the Attractions’: Grindhouse and Theatrical Nostalgia.” Jump Cut 54 (Fall 2012): www​.ejumpcut​.org/​archive/​jc54​.2012/​EschGrindhouse/​index​.html. Fallon, Kris. “Archives Analog and Digital: Errol Morris and Documentary Film in the Digital Age.” Film Quarterly 54.1 (2013): 20–­43. Fauvel, Maryse. “Nostalgia and Digital Technology: Gleaners and I (Varda, 2000) and Triplets of Belleville (Chomet, 2003) as Reflective Genres.” Studies in French Cinema 5.3 (2005): 219–­29. Fisher, Marc. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures. Seattle: Zero Books, 2014. ———. “What Is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly 66.1 (2012): 16–­24. Fossati, Giovanna. From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. Freedman, Yacov. “Is It Real . . . or Is It Motion Capture? The Battle to Redefine Animation in the Age of Digital Performance.” Velvet Light Trap 69 (Spring 2012): 38–­49. Gaylard, Gerald. “Postmodern Archaic: The Return of the Real in Digital Virtuality.” Postmodern Culture: An Electronic Journal of Interdisciplinary Criticism 15.1 (2004): http://​ pmc​.iath​.virginia​.edu/​text​-only/​issue​.904/​15​.1gaylard​.txt. Gilbert, Andrew. “The Death of Film and the Hollywood Response.” Senses of Cinema 62 (March 2012): http://​sensesofcinema​.com/​2012/​feature​-articles/​the​-death​-of​-film​-and​ -the​-hollywood​-response/.



Selected Bibliography 177

Grainge, Paul. Monochrome Memories: Nostalgia and Style in Retro America. New York: Praeger, 2002. Gray, Jonathan. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Paratexts. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Gregg, Melissa. “Learning to (Love) Labour: Production Cultures and the Affective Turn.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6.2 (2009): 209–­14. Guins, Raiford. Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-­Garde.” Wide Angle 8.3 (1986): 56–­62. Gurevitch, Leon. “The Cinema of Transactions: The Exchangeable Currency of the Digital Attraction.” Television and New Media 11.5 (2010): 367–­85. ———. “The Cinemas of Interactions: Cinematics and the ‘Game Effect’ in the Age of Digital Attractions.” Senses of Cinema 57 (Dec. 2010): http://​sensesofcinema​.com/​2010/​ feature​-articles/​the​-cinemas​-of​-interactions​-cinematics​-and​-the​-​%E2​%80​%98game​ -effect​%E2​%80​%99​-in​-the​-age​-of​-digital​-attractions. ———. “Computer Generated Animation as Product Design Engineered Culture; or, Buzz Lightyear to the Sales Floor, to the Checkout and Beyond!” Animation 7.2 (2012): 131–­49. HaDuong, Mary. “Out of Print: The Changing Landscape of Print Accessibility for Repertory Programming.” Moving Image 12.2 (2012): 148–­61. Hardt, Michael. “Affective Labor.” boundary 2 26.2 (1999): 89–­100. Herhuth, Eric. “Cooking like a Rat: Sensation and Politics in Disney-­Pixar’s Ratatouille.” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 31.5 (2014): 469–­85. ———. “Life, Love, and Programming: The Culture and Politics of Wall-­E and Pixar Computer Animation.” Cinema Journal 53.4 (2014): 53–­75. Higgins, Scott. “3D in Depth: Coraline, Hugo, and a Sustainable Aesthetic.” Film History 24.2 (2012): 196–­209. Hoesterey, Ingeborg. Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, and Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Hughes, Kit, and Heather Heckman. “Dossier: Materiality and the Archive.” Velvet Light Trap 70 (Fall 2012): 59–­63. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989. ———. “The Politics of Postmodernism: Parody and History.” Cultural Critique 5 (Winter 1986–­87): 179–­207. James, Nick. “Elegy for Analogue.” Sight & Sound 22.4 (2012): 5. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. ———. “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146 ( July-­August 1984): 59–­92. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. ———. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 2013. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, eds. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Johnson, Derek. “Cinematic Destiny: Marvel Studios and the Trade Stories of Industrial Convergence.” Cinema Journal 52.1 (2012): 1–­24.

1 7 8

Selected Bibliography

———. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in Creative Industries. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Kiwitt, Peter. “What Is Cinema in the Digital Age? Divergent Definitions from a Production Perspective.” Journal of Film and Video 64.4 (2012): 3–­22. Knight, Julia. “Archiving, Distribution, and Experimental Moving Image Histories.” Moving Image 12.1 (2012): 65–­86. Kuhn, Annette. An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory. London: IB Tauris, 2002. Laycock, Joseph. “Tron: Legacy.” Journal of Religion & Film 15.1 (2011): 1–­3. Le Sueur, Marc. “Theory Number Five: Anatomy of Nostalgia Films: Heritage and Methods.” Journal of Popular Film 6.2 (1977): 187–­97. Leyda, Julia. “Demon Debt: Paranormal Activity as Recessionary Post-­Cinematic Allegory.” Jump Cut 56 (Winter 2014–­15): www​.ejumpcut​.org/​archive/​jc56​.2014/​LeydaParanormalActivity/​ index​.html. Lowenthal, David. “Nostalgic Dreams and Nightmares.” Change over Time 3.1 (2013): 28–­54. ———. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. McNaughtan, Hugh. “Distinctive Consumption and Popular Anti-­consumerism: The Case of Wall-­E.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 26.5 (2012): 753–­66. Meinel, Dietmar. “ ‘Space: The Final Fun-­tier’—­Returning Home to the Frontier in Pixar’s Wall-­E.” Animation Studies Online Journal 8 (August 2013): http://​journal​.animationstudies​.org/​ dietmar​-meinel​-space​-the​-final​-fun​-tier​-returning​-home​-to​-the​-frontier/. Montgomery, Colleen. “Woody’s Roundup and Wall-­E’s Wunderkammer: Technophilia and Nostalgia in Pixar Animation.” Animation Studies Online Journal 6 (Sept. 2011): http://​ journal​.animationstudies​.org/​dietmar​-meinel​-space​-the​-final​-fun​-tier​-returning​-home​-to​ -the​-frontier/. Morrison, Aimee. “Newfangled Computers and Old-­Fashioned Romantic Comedy: You’ve Got Mail’s Futuristic Nostalgia.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 19.1 (2010): 41–­58. Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion, 2005. Murray, Robin L., and Joseph K. Heumann. “WALL-­E: From Environmental Adaptation to Sentimental Nostalgia.” Jump Cut 51 (Spring 2009): www​.ejumpcut​.org/​archive/​jc51​ .2009/​WallE/​text​.html. Niessen, Niels. “Lives of Cinema: Against Its ‘Death.’ ” Screen 52.3 (2011): 307–­26. North, Dan. Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects, and the Virtual Actor. London: Wallflower, 2008. Pallant, Chris. “Digital Dimensions in Actorly Performance: The Aesthetic Potential of Performance Capture.” Film International 57 ( Jan. 2012): 37–­49. Palmer, Lorrie. “Cranked Masculinity: Hypermediation in Digital Action Cinema.” Cinema Journal 51.4 (2012): 1–­25. Pierson, Michelle. Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Vintage, 2009. Prince, Stephen. Digital Visual Effects in Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012. Purse, Lisa. “Digital Heroes in Contemporary Hollywood: Exertion, Identification, and the Virtual Action Body.” Film Criticism 32.1 (2007): 5–­25. Rapfogel, Jared, et al. “From 35mm to DCP.” Cineaste 37.4 (2012): 32–­42. Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. New York: Faber and Faber, 2011.



Selected Bibliography 179

Rodowick, D. N. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Rogers, Ariel. Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Media Technologies. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Rombes, Nicholas. Cinema in the Digital Age. London: Wallflower, 2007. Rosen, Philip. Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ———. Post-­Cinematic Affect. Seattle: Zero Books, 2011. Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. 2nd enl. ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Sperb, Jason. Disney’s Most Notorious Film: Race, Convergence, and the Hidden Histories of “Song of the South.” Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012. ———. “Islands of Detroit: Affect, Nostalgia, and Whiteness.” Culture, Theory & Critique 49.2 (2008): 183–­201. Sprengler, Christine. Screening Nostalgia: Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary American Film. New York: Berghahn, 2009. Stamm, Matthew D. C. “CGI: An Evolution in Cinema.” Film Matters 4.1 (2013): 38–­43. Stewart, Kathleen. “Nostalgia—­A Polemic.” Cultural Anthropology 3.3 (1988): 227–­41. Streible, Dan. “Moving Image History and the F-­Word; or, ‘Digital Film’ Is an Oxymoron.” Film History 25.1–­2 (2013): 227–­35. Stribling, Eleanor Baird. “Valuing Fans.” In Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, ed. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. New York: New York University Press, 2013. http://​spreadablemedia​.org/​essays/​stribling/​#​.U7MhS7Et0X8. Torlasco, Domietta. “Against House Arrest: Digital Memory and the Impossible Archive.” Camera Obscura 26.1 (2011): 39–­63. Tryon, Chuck. On-­Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013. ———. Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Convergence. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Turim, Maureen. Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History. London: Routledge, 1989. Turnock, Julie. Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. ———. “Removing the Pane of Glass: The Hobbit, 3D High Frame Rate Filmmaking, and the Rhetoric of Digital Convergence.” Film Criticism 37.3/38.1 (2013): 30–­59. Uricchio, William. “History and Its Shadow: Thinking about the Contours of Absence in the Construction of Media History.” Screen 55.1 (2014): 120–­27. Usai, Paolo Cherchi. The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark Age. London: British Film Institute, 2001. Utterson, Andrew. From IBM to MGM: Cinema at the Dawn of the Digital Age. London: British Film Institute, 2011. Whissel, Kristen. “The Digital Multitude.” Cinema Journal 49.4 (2010): 90–­110. ———. Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Wood, Aylish. “Contests and Simulations: Tron: Legacy’s Connections with Technologies.” Journal of Film & Video 66.3 (2014): 31–­42. ———. “Pixel Visions: Digital Intermediates and Micromanipulations of the Image.” Film Criticism 32.1 (2007): 72–­94.

INDEX

3D: aesthetics, 21, 55, 63, 66–­69, 73, 75, 79, 130; connection to sequels, 115, 118, 129, 131, 162; format conversion, 91, 162; relationship to digital transition, 34, 55, 62–­63, 115; ticket prices, 11, 115, 118, 129 21 Jump Street (2012), 114 2001 (1968), 38 Abu Ghraib scandals (Iraq), 81–­82 academics, 11 Acland, Charles, 6–­7, 63 The Adventures of Andre and Wally B (1984), 97 advertising, 7 affective labor, 8, 122–­124, 161 Air (music group), 77 Alimurung, Gendy, 64 Aladdin (1993), 114 Allen, Tim, 101 Allen, Woody, 59, 61, 65 Altman, Robert, 65 Amazon.com, 130 American Graffiti (1974), 29, 125 American Movie Classics (cable channel), 55 Anderson, Christopher Todd, 89, 96, 107, 110, 112 Annett, Sandra, 4, 53–­54, 67 Archive.org, 80 Argo (2012), 3–­4 Armstrong, Louis, 45–­46 ARRI (camera production company), 38, 52, 67 Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1897), 68 The Artist (2011), 3–­4, 10, 13, 29, 34, 52–­55, 57–­60, 62, 66, 69–­70 Astaire, Fred, 42 The A-­Team (1983), 125 audiences: consumption habits, 18, 96–­97, 106–­113, 110, 112, 117, 131–­133, 145, 157–­158; labor, 8, 11, 36, 122–­124, 161; reception practices, 8, 12, 14, 29, 112 auteurism, 66–­67, 69 avant-­garde production, 8, 151

Avatar (2009), 20, 55, 63, 118, 122, 129, 141 Avatar (videogame), 141 The Aviator (2004), 66, 78–­79 “baby boom” generation, 101, 103–­104, 107, 116, 137 Back to the Future (1985), 126 Barthes, Roland, 82 Batman (fictional character), 124 Bay, Michael, 146, 151 Bazin, André, 22, 23 Beauty and the Beast (1991), 114 Bejo, Bérénice, 57 Be Kind Rewind (2008), 160–­163 Belton, John, 65–­66 Benson-­Allott, Caetlin, 7 Bigelow, Kathryn, 151 Birch, Thora, 17 Bird, Brad, 112 The Black Hole (1979), 118, 129, 132 Blade Runner (1982), 115 blogs, 11 Boarding Gate (2007), 146 Boardwalk Empire (HBO, 2010–­2014), 66 Bode, Lisa, 42, 46 Bogart, Humphrey, 42, 45–­46 Boym, Svetlana, 2–­3, 14–­15, 35, 75 Boxleitner, Bruce, 117, 135 Boxoffice (periodical), 7 Brando, Marlon, 42 Brave (2012), 113 Bridges, Jeff, 117, 127, 131, 135, 139 A Bug’s Life (1998), 89, 91, 95, 101 Bullitt (1969), 27 Buñuel, Luis, 59–­60 Butler, Chris, 155 Butler, Gerard, 149 Cagney, James, 45 Caldwell, John, 9, 11–­12, 43 California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), 100, 112

181

182

Index

Call of Duty (videogame), 141 Camera (2000), 24–­25 Cameron, James, 129 camp (aesthetic practice), 111 Carlson, Les, 24–­25 Cars (2006), 100, 102–­104, 109, 113, 145 Cars 2 (2011), 91–­92 Casablanca (1942), 119 Casetti, Francesco, 22, 32 Catmull, Ed, 95, 99 Cera, Michael, 150 Cinderella (1951), 92, 114 “cinema of attractions,” 68, 79 cinephilia, 23, 28, 39, 56, 66, 68–­69, 75, 77 Citizen Kane (1941), 85 civil rights movement, 33, 124 “cloud” (online storage), 83, 163 Clover, Joshua, 52–­55, 58 Coen, Ethan and Joel, 21, 149 Cohen, David, 19 comic books, 120, 150 Comic Con (fan convention), 118 Computer Animated Production System (CAPS), 95, 99–­100 convergence culture, 30, 42, 120, 124 Cook, Pam, 13 Cotillard, Marion, 60 Crichton, Michael, 48 Cronenberg, David, 24 crowdsourcing, 11 Cruise, Tom, 140 Crystal, Billy, 104 Cubitt, Sean, 18, 67–­68 Daft Punk, 129–­130, 133–­134 Dalí, Salvador, 59 The Dark Knight (2008), 129 “database logic,” 14, 16–­17, 80–­82 Davis, Lem, 99 Davy Crockett (fictional character), 137–­138 Day, Walter, 153 Deakins, Roger, 21 Debord, Guy, 17, 70 Debruge, Peter, 3, 13 De Kosnik, Abigail, 123–­124 deregulation, 17 “Derezzed” (music video), 133 Desk Set (1957), 9–­10, 49 Detroit, MI, assembly-­line labor system, 42

Dey, Susan, 49 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 79 Die Hard (1988), 125 Diet Coke commercial, 45–­46, 48 digital cinema, impact on labor, 5, 8–­11, 17–­20, 35, 40, 43, 64–­65, 87, 95–­97, 99–­100, 102, 109, 122–­124, 136–­138, 161, 163 Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI), 62, 64 Digital Cinema Package (DCP), 1, 9, 11, 34, 51, 52, 55, 61–­65, 70, 84–­85 digital “sweatshops,” 9, 18–­20, 99 digital video (DV) cinematography, 9, 20–­21, 24, 26–­27, 38, 51, 52, 56, 66–­67, 71–­73, 148 digital video discs (DVDs): binge-­watching, 105; distribution, 7, 84, 86, 112, 119, 130, 161–­163; interactivity, 32; special features, 44, 80, 83–­84 digital “workflow,” 18–­23, 40 Dika, Vera, 29, 33 Dirty Harry (1971), 27 Disney Interactive, 137 Disneyland (theme park), 5, 92, 102, 129 Disneyland (TV show), 92, 102, 129 Disney’s California Adventure (theme park), 118 Disney World (theme park), 5 Dixon, Wheeler Winston, 6, 14, 36, 76, 125 Docter, Pete, 90 Dombrowski, Lisa, 62, 64 Donkey Kong (videogame), 153, 156 Do Rozario, Rebecca-­Anne, 119 Doyle, Christopher, 20 drive-­in theaters, 55 Dujardin, Jean, 57 Dyer, Richard, 30, 32–­33, 53–­54, 66, 121–­122, 127 Eastwood, Clint, 27 Ebert, Roger, 68 Ebrahim, Hannah, 113, 138 Edge of Tomorrow (2014), 140 Edison, Thomas, 69 Eisner, Michael, 129, 137 Eliot, T. S., 59 Elsaesser, Thomas, 63, 66 Enter the Matrix (videogame), 121 Escape from Tomorrow (2013), 5–­6, 8 Esch, Kevin, 7

Fallon, Kris, 81–­83 fandom, 11, 36, 122–­124, 126, 161–­162 Far from Heaven (2002), 30, 78 feminist movements, 124 Ferrell, Will, 154 film archives, 8, 11, 72–­73, 83–­84 Final Cut Pro (editing software), 44 Fincher, David, 21, 26–­27, 71 Finding Dory (2016), 91 Finding Nemo (2004), 89, 91–­92, 94, 95, 101 Finney, Albert, 48 Fisher, Mark, 75 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 60 Flowers and Trees (1932), 92 “Flynn Lives” (TRON viral campaign), 122, 132, 134–­135 For Your Eyes Only (1981), 129 Fossati, Giovanna, 73, 80–­81 Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey, 6, 14, 36, 76, 125 Foundas, Scott, 85 Franklin, Nelson, 151 Frears, Stephen, 65 Frozen (2013), 3, 5, 136 Gamer (2009), 146, 148–­149, 151, 157 Garlin, Jeff, 93 Get a Horse (2013), 3–­6, 29 “gift economy” (Gregg), 11 Ghost World (2001), 17–­18 G.I. Joe (1985), 124–­125 Gilbert, Andrew, 52–­53 Gladiator (2000), 3 globalization, 17 Goldstein, Bruce, 62 Gomez, Jeff, 163 Gondry, Michel, 46, 160–­161 The Good German (2006), 78 Goodman, John, 57, 104 Google (search engine), 81 Gravity (2013), 140 Gray, Jonathan, 120 Gray, Timothy M., 13 Greengrass, Paul, 146 Gregg, Melissa, 11 Grindhouse (2007), 7 Guins, Raiford, 142, 153 Gunning, Tom, 68 Gurevitch, Leon, 95, 98, 102, 140–­141

Index 183 Hair (musical), 26–­27 Halo (videogame), 141 Hanks, Tom, 101 Hardt, Michael, 8, 14 Harry Potter franchise, 145 Hazanavicius, Michel, 57, 59 Hedlund, Garrett, 117 Hemingway, Ernest, 59 Hepburn, Katharine, 9–­10 Herhuth, Eric, 93, 107, 109, 156–­157 Heumann, Joseph, 108, 111–­112 historical consciousness, 13–­15, 17–­18, 28–­29, 32–­33, 35, 40, 59, 65, 82, 143 Hitchcock, Alfred, 27, 48 Hi Tech Toons, 99 Hollywood Reporter (periodical), 101–­102, 130, 145 Holy Motors (2012), 8 Hot Fuzz (2006), 149, 151–­152 The Hot Tub Time Machine (2010), 114 Howdy Doody (fictional character), 102 Hughes, Howard, 79 Hugo (2011), 3–­4, 6, 29, 34, 52–­57, 59–­60, 62–­63, 65–­70, 75–­76, 78–­79, 87, 131, 156 Hutcheon, Linda, 28, 33, 112 Hybride (CGI production company), 141 “hyperrealist” aesthetic (Pierson), 115 IBM Corporation, 9–­10 Iger, Bob, 137–­138 ImageMovers, 137 IMAX, 11 The Incredibles (2004), 101 independent movie theaters, 11 indexicality, 13, 16, 22–­25 Internet distribution, 9, 161–­162 intertextuality, 27, 110, 126–­127, 147, 150 “It’s a Small World” (theme park attraction), 5 James, Nick, 2 James Bond (fictional character), 124, 129 Jameson, Fredric, 14–­15, 17, 21, 28–­30, 33, 38, 40–­41, 49, 56, 76, 80, 111–­112, 126–­127, 147–­148 Jenkins, Henry, 121, 162 Jobs, Steve, 97–­98 John, Elton, 45–­46 Johnson, Derek, 12, 144 Jurassic Park (1993), 3, 15

184

Index

The Karate Kid (1984), 125 Katzenberg, Jeffrey, 129 Kehr, David, 84 The King of Kong (2007), 37, 143, 153–­154, 156, 158 Kingsley, Ben, 56 La Luna (2012), 93 Lasseter, John, 89, 98, 100, 102, 104–­105, 112–­113 The Last Flight of the Osiris (2003), 121 The Last Starfighter (1984), 134, 139 late capitalism (economic era), 6–­7, 9–­10, 13–­15, 17–­18, 22, 28–­29, 33, 37, 41, 71, 80, 142, 146–­148, 159, 161 Legend of Zelda (videogame), 151 Lego (toys), 143, 145–­146, 154–­157 The Lego Movie (2014), 37, 143–­146, 154–­159 Leigh, Mike, 65 leisure culture, 158 Le Sueur, Marc, 57 Life of Pi (2012), 10, 18–­21, 43, 97 The Lion King (1994), 99, 162 Lisberger, Steven, 128, 130 The Little Mermaid (1989), 114, 116 Lobster Films, 35, 74–­78, 83, 86 The Lone Ranger (2013), 136, 138 long-­take aesthetics, 22, 140 Looker (1981), 34, 47, 48–­50 Lord of the Rings (2001), 40, 47 Lucas, George, 38, 65, 73, 85, 97–­98, 125, 129 LucasArts, 136–­137 LucasFilm, 35, 97–­98, 110, 113, 129, 136–­138, 143 Lumière, Auguste and Louis, 56, 66, 68 Luxo, Jr. (1986), 100 MacCannell, Dean, 158 Madison, WI, union protests, 40 malleability, 16, 22, 41, 85 Man of Steel (2013), 47 Manovich, Lev, 80, 82 Marvel, 110, 113, 120, 136, 138, 143–­144 The Matrix (1999), 46; sequels (2003), 121 McCarthy, Todd, 130 McNaughtan, Hugh, 96, 107, 109–­112 media industry studies, 29 “medium hybridity” (Rosen), 6, 143–­144, 163

Meinel, Dietmar, 101 Méliès, Gaston, 69 Méliès, Georges, 35, 56, 66–­70, 74–­79, 84, 88 Metropolis (1927), 85 Mickey Mouse (fictional character), 3, 92, 129 Midnight in Paris (2011), 13, 34, 52, 59–­62, 70, 124, 152–­153 Miranda, Claudio, 20 Mitchell, Billy, 154 modernism, 28 modernity, 67, 102, 124 Monroe, Marilyn, 41 Monsters, Inc. (2001), 90–­91, 94, 97, 101, 110 Monsters University (2013), 91–­92, 104 Montgomery, Colleen, 4, 12, 35, 90, 97 Moonraker (1979), 129 Moore, Randy, 4–­5 Moore, Rich, 139, 141 Morris, Errol, 81–­82 Mortal Kombat (videogame), 151 The Most Dangerous Game (1932), 27 Motion Picture Patents Company, 69 Mulvey, Laura, 23–­24 Murray, Robin, 108, 111–­112 Netflix, 105 “Next Day” (TRON viral movie), 119, 134–­135 Niccol, Andrew, 47 Nolan, Christopher, 73, 129 nonlinear editing, 97 nonrepresentational signs, 121 North, Dan, 6, 40–­41, 48, 68 nostalgia. See “reflective nostalgia”; “restorative nostalgia”; self-­theorizing nostalgia nostalgic disavowal, 13, 59, 102, 104–­106, 111, 113, 144–­145, 153–­154, 157 “nostalgic remediation” (Annett), 4 “not yet” (Rosen), 33–­34, 38, 43, 51 O Brother, Where Are Thou? (2000), 21 Offerman, Nick, 114 Olivier, Laurence, 42 Orville Redenbacher Popcorn commercial, 46 Oscar protests (2013, 2014), 9–­10, 18–­19, 21, 23 Oswald, Patton, 101

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (fictional character), 128 Oz: The Great and Powerful (2013), 3, 5–­6, 29 Pacino, Al, 47 Panavision, 38, 52 ParaNorman (2012), 155 paratexts, 8, 12, 94, 119–­121, 129–­130, 133–­135 parody, 28 participatory culture, 11, 30–­33, 36, 44, 80, 115, 122–­124, 144, 161–­162 pastiche, 8, 13–­14, 16, 26–­33, 54, 57–­60, 66, 70, 76–­78, 142–­144, 146–­148, 152–­154, 158–­159 Pathé Company, 69 Pegg, Simon, 152 Pfister, Wally, 71 photorealism, 6, 27, 40, 50, 115, 140, 157 Pierson, Michelle, 2, 6, 115 piracy, 9 Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, 145 Pixar Animation Studios: contrast with Disney “Princess” films, 138; impact on labor, 95–­97, 99–­100, 102, 109, 136–­138; intertextuality, 110; and nostalgia, 3–­4, 86–­87, 93–­94, 100, 102–­106, 112–­113; prehistory, 97–­100; production histories, 35–­36, 86–­90, 105, 113; relationship to consumer culture, 96–­97, 106, 108, 110, 112; roots in advertising, 46, 98–­99; self-­theorizing, 12, 35, 93, 95–­96, 111, 113; sequels, prequels, etc., 92, 94, 103, 105, 112–­113; short subject movies, 93, 97, 100, 107 Pixar Image Computer, 98 The Pixar Story (2007), 95–­96 Pocahontas (1995), 114 Porter, Cole, 59 postcinematic era, 139, 143–­144, 146–­152, 158–­159 postindustrial era, 6–­8, 14, 21, 35, 40, 44, 46, 80, 100, 123, 146, 168–­159, 161 postmodernism, 8, 13–­18, 27–­30, 33, 35, 38, 40–­41, 49, 54, 56–­58, 61, 66, 70, 80, 82–­84, 126–­127, 147–­149 Predator (1987), 119, 125 Predators (2009), 119 Price, David, 89, 99–­100, 105, 112 Prince, Stephen, 26

Index 185 The Princess and the Frog (2009), 115 “Princess” films (Disney), 92, 113–­116, 118–­119, 129–­130, 136–­138 The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), 61 Quandt, James, 61 Q*bert (videogame), 142 “radical novelty” (Rosen), 7 Radio Days (1987), 61 Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), 125 Ranft, Joe, 89 Ratatouille (2007), 101, 112–­113 Reagan, Ronald, 49, 119 Rebel without a Cause (1955), 29 Redbox, 163 Red’s Dream (1987), 100 Reeves, Keanu, 71 “reflective nostalgia” (Boym), 8, 13, 14–­15, 25, 32, 35, 50, 56, 59, 61, 71, 74–­76, 87, 93–­94, 103–­104, 106, 111, 113 Renoir, Jean, 66 “restorative nostalgia” (Boym), 15, 32, 35, 75, 81, 86 Rhythm and Hues, 19–­21 Robocop (1987), 125 Rodowick, D. N., 1, 3, 22–­23, 39, 50, 140, 143, 147, 149 Rodriquez, Robert, 7 Roger and Me (1989), 43 Rombes, Nicholas, 6, 76, 80, 83 Rosen, Philip, 6–­7, 13, 33, 38, 51, 140, 147, 163 Rossovich, Tim, 50 Route 66, 102–­103 Russian Ark (2002), 22–­24, 140 Ryder, Winona, 47 Sayles, John, 65 Schrader, Paul, 65 Schure, Alexander, 95 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 33–­34, 39, 41–­43 science-­fiction genre, 38–­40, 49, 59, 66, 109, 115–­117, 120, 126, 129, 136, 139–­140, 146 Scorsese, Martin, 3, 55, 65–­67, 71–­72, 75–­76, 78–­79, 88, 131 Scott, Tony, 149, 151 Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), 37, 142–­144, 149–­152, 154, 156 Seinfeld (TV show), 151

186

Index

“self-­theorizing” (Caldwell), 12, 32–­34, 45, 49, 71 self-­theorizing nostalgia, 7–­9, 12–­13, 15, 28, 35, 59, 93, 95–­96, 111, 113, 145–­146, 161 Se7en (1995), 27 Shadows and Fog (1992), 61 Sharp Technologies, 55 Shaun of the Dead (2004), 151–­152 Shaviro, Steven, 14, 16, 22, 144, 146–­150, 152 Sheen, Michael, 59 Shor, Dan, 134–­135 Shutter Island (2010), 66 Side by Side (2012), 71–­73 SIGGRAPH Conference (1984), 97 Silly Symphonies, 92 S1m0ne (2002), 47–­48 simulacrum, 16–­17, 40, 80, 127, 148–­149 “simulationist” aesthetic (Pierson), 115 Sin City (2004), 78 Sirk, Douglas, 30 Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), 42, 48 Sleeping Beauty (1959), 114 Smith, Alvy Ray, 95, 99 Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), 19 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), 92, 112, 114, 118–­119, 162 Sobchack, Vivian, 125–­127 Soderbergh, Steven, 21 Sonic the Hedgehog (videogame), 142 Song of the South (1946), 14, 31–­33 Sontag, Susan, 23 Southland Tales (2009), 146 Spiderman (2002), 40, 47 Spielberg, Steven, 129 Sprengler, Christine, 57, 66, 75, 78–­79, 86 Standard Operating Procedure (2008), 81–­82 Stanton, Andrew, 89 Star Trek (2009), 126 Star Trek IV (1986), 27 Star Trek franchise, 124–­127 Star Wars franchise, 45, 97, 113, 115–­116, 120, 127, 132, 136, 138, 145, 158 Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999), 6, 162 Stein, Gertrude, 59–­60 Stewart, Kathleen, 14–­15 Streible, Dan, 80–­81 Stribling, Eleanor, 123–­124

Superman Returns (2006), 42 Super Mario Bros. (videogame), 142 “synthespian” (virtual actor), 33, 39–­41, 47 Tangled (2010), 114–­115, 117–­118, 136 Tarantino, Quentin, 7, 149 technological obsolescence, 4, 7, 9, 11, 35, 40, 43, 65, 73, 76, 78, 84–­86, 97, 102, 106, 125, 162 technophobia, 9 Terminator (1984), 125 Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), 41 Terminator: Genisys (2015), 33–­34, 39 Terminator: Salvation (2009), 33–­34, 39–­40, 42–­45, 47–­48 theater (medium), 23 Time magazine, 46 time travel, 152 Tin Toy (1988), 100 Titanic (1997), 3 Tomorrowland (theme park attraction), 6 Toy Story (1995), 4, 35, 86, 89–­90, 94, 98–­105, 107, 109–­110, 113, 116, 145 Toy Story 2 (1999), 86, 90, 101, 104–­105, 110 Toy Story 3 (2010), 13, 86–­87, 91–­93, 101–­102, 104–­106, 108, 113, 144, 153 Tracy, Spencer, 9–­10 transmedia storytelling, 36, 69, 118–­123, 137, 140–­141 A Trip to the Moon (1902), 35, 67, 74–­79, 81–­86, 88 TRON (1982): cult status, 36, 115–­119, 121–­122, 130, 135–­136, 138, 154, 156; DVD release, 130; initial absence of nostalgic appeal, 116–­117; landmark CGI, 115, 117, 121, 134, 139; limits of nostalgia, 130, 138; memorabilia, 131–­133; nostalgic appeal, 117, 122, 125; relationship to gaming, 36, 115, 118–­119, 133–­134, 139–­140, 142, 154, 156; representations of technology, 9, 49, 115, 117, 119 TRON 2.0 (videogame), 115 TRON: Evolution (videogame), 119, 129 TRON: Legacy (2010): anachronistic aesthetic, 37, 119, 127, 130–­131, 142–­143; box office performance, 118, 120; depiction of consumerism, 117, 131–­133; fan labor in promotion of, 122–­124; IMAX/3D exhibition, 115, 118, 129, 131; “making of ”

documentary, 120; new generation of fans, 135–­136; and participatory culture, 118; posthuman aesthetic, 47; relationship to transmedia storytelling, 36, 115, 118–­120, 133–­135; representation of nostalgia, 117, 131–­134, 141–­142, 153, 156 “TRON Night” (promotional event), 122 TRON: Uprising (TV show), 119, 135 The Truman Show (1998), 148 Tryon, Chuck, 44–­45, 115, 163 Turnock, Julie, 27 Twilight Zone (TV show), 6 Ubisoft (game developer), 141 United Artists Theatre chain, 55 Universal Studios, 128, 151 Up (2009), 94, 103–­105 upstart filmmakers, 2, 11 Uricchio, William, 81 Usai, Paolo Cherchi, 71, 76, 77, 83–­85, 87 Utterson, Andrew, 9 Variety (periodical), 3, 9, 13, 19, 55, 89, 101, 123, 130, 138 Vertigo (1958), 27 Videodrome (1982), 49 video-­game pastiche, 36–­37, 142–­144, 148, 152–­154, 158–­159 video games, cinematic representations of, 36, 115, 118–­120, 132–­134, 139–­144, 148, 153–­154, 156–­157 Virtual Print Fee (VPF), 64 Vishnevetsky, Ignatiy, 21 “Walking Distance” (Twilight Zone episode), 6 Wall-­E (2008): consumerism in, 96–­97, 103, 106–­113, 145, 157–­158; depiction of audiences, 106, 108–­112; environmental messages in, 96–­97, 108, 112; frontier imagery in, 101; nostalgia in, 93–­94, 104–­108, 110–­111, 113; preproduction, 89–­90; representation of labor, 95, 97, 100, 108–­109; representation of technology, 107–­109; teaser trailer, 89–­93, 96, 104 Walt Disney Corporation: ancillary markets, 129–­130, 132, 136–­138, 157–­158, 162; appeals to nostalgia, 3–­5, 31–­32, 36, 87, 92, 96, 98–­99, 105, 110–­116, 120, 128, 131–­133, 162; classic films, 31–­32, 95,

Index 187 112, 119, 129, 162; the Disney “Vault,” 31, 117–­119, 128, 130, 162; impact on labor, 136–­138; licensing, 129, 137; limits of nostalgia, 130; ontology of animation, 118–­119; recent productions, 3–­5, 36, 113–­116, 136; relationship to Pixar, 87, 92, 96, 98–­99, 105, 110–­113, 120, 136–­138; relationship to Star Wars, 113, 120, 128–­129, 132; relationship to transmedia, 115, 120, 129–­130, 137–­138; reputation for technological innovation, 92, 116; self-­theorizing, 111; Team Disney era, 114, 129, 137; “What Would Walt Do?,” 128, 137. See also Disney Interactive; Disneyland (theme park); Disneyland (TV show); Disney’s California Adventure (theme park); Disney World (theme park); “Princess” films Warhol, Andy, 41 Welch, Jack, 138 Wells, Frank, 129 whiteness, 30 Wiebe, Steve, 154, 158 Willard, Fred, 93 Wilson, Owen, 60, 102 Winnie the Pooh franchise, 145 Winstead, Mary Elizabeth, 150 The Wizard of Oz (1939), 119 Wood, Aylish, 120 “Woody’s Round-­Up” (Toy Story 2), 90, 101 The World’s End (2013), 13, 145, 151–­154 World War I, 69–­70, 79 World War II, 92, 162 Wrath of the Titans (2012), 63 Wreck-­It Ralph (2010), 37, 139, 141–­143, 145, 153–­156, 158–­159 Wright, Edgar, 143–­145, 149, 151–­152 Writers Guild Association (WGA) strike (2007–­2008), 19 YouTube, 44, 80, 83–­84 Zelig (1983), 61 Zodiac (2007), 26–­27, 29–­30 Zuccotti Park (Occupy Movement), 40

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jason Sperb is a lecturer in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at North-

western University in Evanston, Illinois. He is the author of Blossoms & Blood: Postmodern Media Culture and the Films of Paul Thomas Anderson (2013); Disney’s Most Notorious Film: Race, Convergence, and the Hidden Histories of Disney’s “Song of the South” (2012); and The Kubrick Façade: Faces and Voices in the Films of Stanley Kubrick (2006). He is also the coeditor (with Scott Balcerzak) of both volumes of Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction (2009, 2012). He is currently working on a project that charts representations of Hawai’i in mainland US media from the 1930s to the 1970s.