Otherness in Hollywood Cinema 9781628928839, 9780826443526, 9780826463111

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Chapter 1 Figure 1 The coming of the Europeans in The New World. Figure 2 Colin Farrell and Raoul Trujillo forming an uneasy rapprochement in The New World.

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Chapter 2 Figure 3 Jeffrey Hunter and John Wayne losing the track of the Comanche in The Searchers.

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Chapter 3 Figure 4 Anna May Wong and Marlene Dietrich waiting for embarkation in Shanghai Express. Figure 5 Gene Tierney offering her soul to Victor Mature in The Shanghai Gesture.

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Chapter 4 Figure 6 Merian C. Cooper (left) and Ernest B. Schoedsack communing among the Baktiari. Figure 7 The primitive as spectacle: King Kong.

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Chapter 5 Figure 8 Joan Bennett ensnaring Edward G. Robinson from both sides in The Woman in the Window. Figure 9 Dressed to Kill: Jane Greer appears from out of the sunlight in Out of the Past. Figure 10 Death comes from the city in the form of Charles McGraw and William Conrad: The Killers. Figure 11 The hands as Other: Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place.

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96 98 99 101

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List of Illustrations Chapter 6 Figure 12 Contemplating the aliens in The Thing from Another World. Figure 13 Kevin McCarthy learning the meaning of fear in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Figure 14 Shirley Yamaguchi initiating Robert Stack into cultural difference in House of Bamboo.

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Chapter 7 Figure 15 Bela Lugosi making an unexpected appearance in White Zombie. Figure 16 Frances Dee and Christine Gordon take the zombie walk in I Walked with a Zombie. Figure 17 The zombie walk in Dawn of the Dead. Figure 18 Brub the Zombie begins to re-learn social skills in Day of the Dead.

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Chapter 8 Figure 19 Martin Sheen finally gets out of the boat in Apocalypse Now.

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Chapter 9 Figure 20 Bill Murray above the crowd in Lost in Translation.

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Chapter 10 Figure 21 The welcome to the United States in Amistad.

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Chapter 11 Figure 22 Gary Farmer and Johnny Depp contemplate a legend in the making in Dead Man. Figure 23 Ghost Dog and The Samurai in Camouflage exchange greetings in Ghost Dog, the Way of the Samurai.

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Chapter 12 Figure 24 Merian C. Cooper dreaming his dream. Figure 25 Aceh village after a massacre by the Dutch (1901).

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PREFACE

This book offers an analysis of aspects of how questions about ‘otherness’ have been historically addressed in Hollywood cinema. By ‘otherness’, as will be discussed in the introduction, a myriad of different elements are involved, but central to the study is the relationship between Hollywood as a manifestation of American society in its relation with the rest of the world. As major constituents of how the United States presents itself to the outside world, the films of Hollywood have an important place in the memory traces, doubts and assurances of the Twentieth Century. Its memory is our memory; it is a memory of the world, cast before us as irrevocable evidence of a century that has passed. It is about ‘America’, not as a place but as a complex amalgam of hopes and desires – constituting a central aspect of what we call the ‘American dream’ – but also about something much broader which implicates us all. Films both reflect and feed back into a larger socio-cultural landscape and, if we accept, with Walter Benjamin, that Paris was the capital of the nineteenth century, then surely Hollywood served a similar role in the twentieth. Grounded in American society while being international in its scope and in many of its values, Hollywood offers fascinating source material for an examination of what, in the modern world, we understand by ‘Otherness’. To the extent that very few, if any, Hollywood films have ever been made for an exclusively American audience, they may be seen as a means - perhaps even the principal means - by which America has projected itself to the world. Such a projection is, however, far from being monolithic. Indeed, precisely because Hollywood films needed to appeal to a wide and diverse audience, they could not afford to convey a monolithic message even if their need for broad appeal

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may in other respects incline them towards homogeneity. As the predominant popular cinema aimed at an international audience, Hollywood movies, as a condition of their very popularity, have needed to give expression to the desires and anxieties of a wide public, such that they inevitably incarnate and reflect the social and cultural determinants of the era in which they were made. What is especially interesting is the fact that if American film culture is a form of representation that reflects tensions within US society in its relationship with the rest of the world we are all implicated in the experience of Hollywood, even if only as viewers. Even within the framework of a system which has for most of its history sought to impose a strict regularity on its modes of production, the sheer scale upon which Hollywood functions has generally given scope for aberrant or personal expression and at times to violate or contradict the logic of its own rational as a dream factory, producing a commercial yield as a product of what Adorno aptly called the ‘Culture Industry’. Although it functions within certain (political, ideological, aesthetic and above all financial) parameters which limit its room for manoeuvre, Hollywood cinema as a whole has historically offered a rich setting for understanding cultural interaction that provided a key herald of what would become, by the end of the century of cinema, a global world. A very revealing internal memo in the files of the Motion Picture Producers & Distributors of America (MPPDA) of 1928 shows that the cultural impact of cinema was on the agenda early in the history of Hollywood: Motion pictures are the most conspicuous of all the American exports. They do not lose their identity. They betray their nationality and their country of origin. They are easily recognised. They are all pervasive. They color the minds of those who see them. They are demonstrably the greatest single factors in the Americanization of the world and as such may fairly be called the most important and significant of America’s exported products. They are such indirect and undersigned propaganda for the purveying of national ideas, modes of life, methods of thought and standards of living as no other country in the world has ever enjoyed’ (quoted in Vasey, 1998: 43).

Furthermore: Good motion pictures necessarily have an appeal to all men because good motion pictures, just as good literature and all good art, appeal to the basic human motives. Love of home, love of family, love of children, love of husband

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Preface or wife, love of parents, worship of a Supreme Being, love of play, love of sport, love of country – these are the basic elements in the make up of all men. They mean as much to the German as they do to the American, as much to the English as they do to the Russian. And, on the screen, these basic motives can be presented to all people for the first time in history, a means of universal communication has been found (quoted in Vasey, 1998: 44–5).

These quotations mark out some of the ground that will be covered in this book. They show that, from the very beginnings of film making in Hollywood there was awareness of the extent to which films both reflect and influence the attitudes and behaviour of people. They also show that the ‘Americanisation of the world’ was at times a consciously elaborated strategy within which film was seen as playing a major part. Nevertheless, the films themselves did not always play by these rules (indeed, it was precisely because they did not that the MPPDA, and later the Hays Production Code, were established, as moral arbiters, to monitor and censor if necessary those films that did not conform with ‘acceptable standards’, a task that proved far more difficult than could be imagined). What was at stake was more than the mere purveying of entertainment. Film was once perceived to have enormous (potential) influence, far more so than it is has today (when its role has been overtaken by the media in a more general sense). The power of film lay partly in the fact that it exposes our imagination to what in our everyday lives is only an unrealisable potential. Through films, we can enter into a world that is ordinarily closed to us. This opens up a sense of otherness in a broad sense, bringing us into sometimes intimate contact with realities we could not otherwise conceive. A film may allow us to see into a past era or a far distant land in a way that we can understand something of what makes it different from our reality, but it can also allow us to recognise continuities with our own world. Functioning as concentrations of attitudes, films represent a rich and complex but also indeterminate mixture of elements as their production process forces them to undergo a complex interaction with their broader environment. This book emerges from a desire to understand some of the ways in which Hollywood cinema has over time negotiated the sometimes tortuous process of portraying other cultures. At the same time, to speak of an ‘other’ culture is already to raise difficulties of interpretation. What is ‘other’ depends upon the identification of the ‘self’ from which

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a sense of what is ‘other’ takes its point of departure and, as we shall see, this relation between ‘self’ and ‘other’ is extremely complex, containing many contradictions and pitfalls. In considering the question of otherness, therefore, it will also be necessary to consider what the Hollywood ‘self’ is and of what it consists.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Tomoko Shimizu, Kumiko Yamada, John Hutnyk and Jill Fenton for all their help. Thanks also to the research committee of Waseda University for a grant which helped to cover some of the initial costs of the research that resulted in this book. Some of the material in Chapter 11 is taken from an essay entitled ‘The Phantom of Communication’ published in Third Text, issue no 104, May 2010.

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Introduction

HOLLYWOOD CINEMA AND THE ‘OTHER’ During the course of the twentieth century, the United States became the dominant world power. Its dominance had political effects but it was essentially by means of economic and cultural factors that it established and maintained its position. And no institution has been more successful at binding together economic and cultural dominance on a world stage than Hollywood. The movie industry that formed in California just as the First World War was setting in place the germs that would result in the dethroning of Western European dominance of the world was soon to become the institution that would act as a conduit for America’s cultural relationship with the rest of the world. Through the films of Hollywood people outside of the United States have come to identify themselves in a concrete way with the concept that is ‘America’. Other cultural icons such as Coca Cola or Levis may have forged an abstract sense of identification with American values, but without the immediacy of the film industry these emblematic products would have found it more difficult to have penetrated into other cultures. And yet, unlike such quintessentially American symbols, Hollywood’s relation to American values is ambivalent and sometimes uneasy. Hollywood cinema may perhaps be characterized less as the purveyor of American ideals than as the medium by which America has looked out onto the world. It represents an America that wishes to see and be seen. Its films tell us little directly about the reality of life in the United States. Even its most grimly realistic films are dream productions, contributing towards the establishment of a myth of contemporary life. In effect, throughout the twentieth century, Hollywood cinema has existed as a world cinema – or more precisely, a cinema in which everyone in the world has been invited to participate – in which this ‘world’ is an indistinct place, albeit one fully imbued with an American 1

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sensibility. As such, it stands as one of the defining myths of the century. In this respect it has functioned not so much as a cinema of American life as a marker of America in its interaction with the wider world. Indeed, the myth Hollywood has constructed looms so large that it may be said that anyone living in the world today belongs to Hollywood, just as Hollywood itself belongs to us. Against this backdrop, the ways in which Hollywood cinema has treated other cultures and, more generally, how the idea of otherness had been inscribed in its productions has a particular significance. The relation Hollywood has to ‘America’ is at the same time far from unproblematic. Paradoxically it stands from a certain perspective as the most American of institutions while from another it can appear not to be ‘American’ at all. Founded and sustained by immigrant Jews, the Hollywood system was apart from, even as it sought incorporation within, the Anglo-Saxon heritage upon which the notion of ‘America’ was founded. Imbued with unbridled ambition and sustained by resources with which no other national cinema could compete, the Hollywood moguls set about forging a cinema that would conquer the planet. Coaxing the finest talents from around the world and needing to produce films with an almost universal appeal, Hollywood from its very beginnings first of all confounded American insularity. The fact that its films at the beginning were aimed at a mass world audience, with a basis of appeal in the United States at least to a predominantly to an immigrant or working-class one, also gave to it a certain outsider status that it retained for a long time in relation to the American elite and to sections of the broader public. Therefore, as American an institution as Hollywood undoubtedly is, the ‘America’ it projects is specific to itself and only partially represents the cultural sensibility of the United States or general American values. In fact, Hollywood films have consistently ignored central elements of American reality. For instance, it may be argued that the culture of the American South and Mid-West are as much (if not more) ‘other’ to many Hollywood film makers as foreign cultures. It is not easy to think of major Hollywood films that present the Deep South in other than exotic tones, while the Mid-West is usually a place for travelling through rather than tarrying in. To judge from the films, the United States largely consists of a few large cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Miami and Chicago, with New Orleans as a kind of exotic counterpoint) together with a few rather anonymous small towns set in a vast rural hinterland. Moreover, films with settings in the South or the Mid-West tend to be horror films and even when they are not,

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these parts of the United States are generally represented as places that are either dangerous or crazy. The guignol element tends to predominate even in adaptations of the work of southern writers such as William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams or Carson McCullers, notwithstanding the gargantuan success of Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, two films which both typify Hollywood and function as exceptions to it.1 At the same time, Hollywood stands not simply for an American dream, but a European one; like American culture in its generality, it is an extension of a European sensibility to the New World, but a sensibility transformed by the experience of transposition. In addition, it has always been a cinema of exiles. This is so in many ways. Most obviously it has acted as a Mecca for film makers from around the globe and thus many of the greatest figures in Hollywood history have been European immigrants or film makers lured from Europe by Hollywood glamour and prestige or by political pressures at home, especially in the crucial decade before the Second World War when realities in Europe forced many people in the industry to seek work elsewhere. The sense of exile is, however, much broader than this. Hollywood itself may be said not to be an indigenous industry, but one transplanted from elsewhere. Its foundation in California was as an immigrant community that situated itself in an area that was sometimes quite hostile to it. It was not generated out of the Californian soil, but was formed by people who had ‘exiled’ themselves from their bases in New York, Chicago and other places east. Most of those who founded Hollywood were Jewish, generally second-generation immigrants from Eastern Europe. Hollywood cinema is thus paradoxical, as paradoxical as the concept of America itself. Founded and made great above all by Jewish immigrants and providing a refuge for foreigners in the United States, in many ways it has been a somewhat ‘un-American’ institution, just as it is at the same time the most American of institutions. As Neal Gabler says in his fascinating account of how Jewish producers created Hollywood, ‘The paradox is that the American film industry, which Will Hays . . . called “the quintessence of what we mean by ‘America’ ” was founded by Eastern European Jews who seemed to be anything but the quintessence of America’ (1988: 1). This was so not only of the moguls and producers, but also ‘The most powerful talent agencies were run by Jews. Jewish lawyers transacted most of the industry’s business and Jewish doctors ministered the industry’s sick’ (1988: 2).

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The Hollywood community thus formed could be exclusive and enclosed, as reviled as it was admired by the surrounding society. This also resulted in a certain paranoid relation to the external establishment for, as Gabler further notes, while the Hollywood Jews were assailed by know-nothings for conspiring against traditional American values and the power structure that sustained them, they were desperately embracing these values and working to enter the power structure. Above all things, they wanted to be regarded as Americans, not Jews; they wanted to reinvent themselves here as new men. (1988: 2)

Gabler speaks of this quest as ‘pathological’, a pathology that went on to ‘colonise the American imagination’: ‘Ultimately, by creating their idealized America on the screen, the Jews invented the country in the image of their fiction’ (1988: 3). To this extent, ‘The American Dream – is a Jewish invention’, in the words of Jill Robinson (quoted by Gabler, 1988: 1). The movie moguls were thus simultaneously embodiments of the American Dream and its negation, at least to the extent that they proved the adage that it was possible to succeed through one’s own efforts to and yet, no matter how successful one was, could still be excluded from the greater society (for instance, many of the Hollywood moguls were never permitted to join exclusive Californian clubs, reserved as they were for WASPS). The acute sense of inclusion and exclusion this generated undoubtedly provides one of the keys to understanding how Hollywood has treated issues surrounding otherness in its films. It meant that it played a unique role in reflecting and purveying a myth of America while yet being apart from it. Moreover, as powerful as Hollywood might appear, it has actually occupied a quite vulnerable position within American society. This point needs to be borne in mind as we consider the ways in which the collective memory (which we might equate with the ‘colonisation of the imagination’ that Gabler speaks of) of the past century has been affected by Hollywood. In the way in which it placed images on the screen which could be recalled and reinvented by new generations, Hollywood provided us with a tapestry of twentieth century hopes and desires. It represents a dream of the century, one that in many ways is extremely limited but nevertheless which related to people’s actual lives in a way that extended – when it didn’t control and limit – their imaginations. These elements were all added to the fact that the cinema in its generality involves a certain experience of otherness: we sit in darkness

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before a screen upon which are projected images of people we will never meet in our actual lives and to whom things occur that we are unlikely ever to encounter everyday. Yet we are able to make a form of identification with these alien images, the nature of which is fundamentally mysterious. In the cinema, the Other is doubly present to us as we identify both with the characters whose stories are told as well as with the stars who incarnate them. *** Any consideration of the significance of Hollywood as a myth of America has to begin with the film from which Hollywood really developed, a film that was both typical and untypical of what was to follow: D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915). Hollywood’s first film, in fact, was also the most controversial film that would ever come out of it studios. Birth of a Nation, with its grandiose title (a title given to it only after its initial screenings), represented also the birth of Hollywood cinema not because it was the first film made there (Hollywood production had actually started a few years earlier in a fairly modest way), nor even because it codified many of the technical and narrative effects that would come to characterize its production system, but more because it embodied some of the paradoxes of its cinema as a whole in that it seems to mark out the paths that Hollywood would both take and not take. In its sensational and spectacular approach, and resulting boxoffice triumph, Birth of a Nation would set a standard for the Hollywood success story. At the same time, however, its approach to its subject matter and its ideological standpoint would be precisely what Hollywood production would from that time steer well clear of, not only during its heyday, but in fact up to the present. It is not simply the controversial nature of the film, nor even the racism that renders the film beyond the pale for audiences today (and for many at the time), that has made it problematic for the way Hollywood would develop. Perhaps more significant was the fact that it opens up to debate an issue few people working in Hollywood wished to engage with, which is precisely what constitutes the idea of ‘America’. For Hollywood as it developed as an institution, any engagement with what it meant to be ‘American’ meant could only be an embarrassment. The Hollywood ‘dream’ of America would precisely be one that blunted the edges of any contradictions of identity; it would be the dream of an

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amorphous place, recognizably associated with the actual United States, to be sure, but sufficiently undefined so that anyone in the world could identify with it and find their own place (even if only by aspiration) within it. Nothing could be further from this than the ideology promoted, whether consciously or not, by Birth of a Nation of a vision of Americans reconciled and, as one of the intertitles in the film puts it, ‘united again in common defence of their Aryan birthright’. We read this statement in a far more sinister way than could have been imagined at the time, now that we cannot be unaware of the linkage of this idea with the ideology of Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, we should note that even at the time it must have been apparent that this statement excluded not only black people and Indians but also the Jews as well as the Irish and Italians who made up a significant part of the Hollywood community. How far did the unthinking racism of this statement reflect a common view of what constituted ‘America’ at the time? Probably quite a lot, if the record attendances the film drew are anything to go by. No doubt some people were simply captivated by the exciting action and the romantic canvas (or simply by the fact that it is an accomplished film). However, they could hardly have been unaware of the controversy surrounding the film, especially given that it was banned in many places. That it still broke box office records indicates that it chimed with a general sensibility of the time, at least among white Americans. Even though the controversy would certainly have given Hollywood producers pause about tackling a comparable theme, one might have expected that, given such an enormous financial success, some producers would have been keen to capitalize on it. It seems, however, that it never entered anyone’s mind. Griffith himself went on to make his epic Intolerance (1916), the theme of which seems to reflect a reaction to the furore over Birth of a Nation as stories from four historical eras are used to attack bigotry over the ages. In none of his subsequent movies did Griffith return to the themes of his landmark film. Birth of a Nation promotes a homogeneous sense of American identity in which there may be difference but in which the only place for otherness is on the outside. Hollywood wanted a more heterogeneous America, since that was the world the majority of its producers and personnel felt comfortable with. Griffith’s closed world was alien to the experience of those drawn to Hollywood, most of whom were outsiders; outsiders who might desperately have wanted to be part of an American Dream but on terms they would themselves define.

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The exclusive image of America that Birth of a Nation asserts has since been conspicuously absent in Hollywood production throughout its long history. To my knowledge, the only film that compares with it in intention is John Wayne’s The Alamo (1960), but the latter film is distinguished by the fact that it is about Texan independence and the right to belong to America rather than about the constitution of the United States itself. Significantly, when Hollywood did return to make its next blockbuster set in the Civil War with Gone with the Wind in 1939, it successfully steered clear of most of the difficult issues of national identity. It was perhaps inconceivable for Hollywood even to contemplate returning to the thematics of Birth of a Nation not only because the vision of America it presented was far from that to which the majority of Hollywood people subscribed but also because the ‘American Dream’ it represented was a long way from the culturally inclusive, entrepreneurial America that Hollywood would promote. Despite this, we should be careful not to dissociate the attitudes inherent in Birth of a Nation entirely from Hollywood. If Griffith’s view of America as a unity of Aryan blood may have been unacceptable within Hollywood, the latter dissented from it only to the extent that it wished to be included in a more expansive sense of American unity. This was a unity perceived as being co-terminus with its European heritage, which it incorporated while distinguishing itself, so that the ‘America’ of Hollywood is one that is of a transposed (although formally different) European nation. The very openness of this conception, however, left it open to different interpretations so that the Otherness that Birth of a Nation wished to deny would emerge in multifarious and often extremely ambivalent ways in Hollywood films. Even if it hardly needs saying that the portrayal of non-Americans throughout Hollywood history has involved processes of typification and stereotyping that have frequently been offensive to the people being portrayed, a closer look at these representations reveals something more subtle than a superficial survey might suggest. In fact, as much as Hollywood representations might be criticized, there is no other cinematic tradition that has engaged with (or even given any recognition to) issues of otherness to the extent that we find in Hollywood. 2 *** The representation of otherness is never easy. When a particular group or historical situation is depicted, it is almost inevitable that people

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who identify themselves with that group or situation will be offended in some way, no matter how much care is taken to treat it with sensitivity. This may be nothing more than a difference of perception: no two people ever view the same thing in precisely the same way and it is therefore inevitable that when we witness another person’s depiction of ourselves, or of something with which we identify, we are likely to object, finding the lack of match with our own perception a matter of concern. We have all experienced watching a film adaptation of a favourite book which disappoints because the filmmakers’ vision of the story does not correspond to our own. The experience of viewing any film about something we care about will generally be the same: we will complain that the filmmakers’ have missed something important, that they have distorted or misunderstood vital elements of the situation. In some cases, it may even be argued, the fact that people are offended merely reflects the effectiveness of the representation, because it may be revealing of aspects of the situation which the people themselves are too close to be able to perceive or which they may wish to deny. Trying to please all of the people, or at least aiming not to offend those who will identify with the characters or situation of the film, may indeed compromise the integrity of the film or the filmmakers’ vision. Here it is perhaps inevitable that one has to invoke Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism, as the starting point for today’s debates about the representation of cultures. Said’s controversial book was instrumental in creating the conditions for widespread discussion of post-colonialism, political correctness and of the need to be careful about how one represents another culture. Today film makers have to be alert to the dangers of portraying minorities in derogatory ways. If they are not careful then accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia and so on are likely to follow which may have negative consequences for the reception of the film. Yet if Said should be applauded for having placed the issue of the political implications of images on the agenda in such a direct way, the lack of subtlety and nuance in his analysis has tended to encourage one-dimensional and polarized debate. Orientalist representations are neither as nefarious nor as clear-cut in their effects as Said and his admirers have tended to present them. Such critiques can lead to over-simplification and analytical complacency, something we find especially prevalent in so-called ‘post-colonial’ studies. Any consideration of the effect of images needs to begin from the recognition that there is no such thing as an ‘accurate’ representation;

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all representation, by its very nature, distorts for at least three principal reasons: first by omission, because it is not possible to reveal every facet of what it is representing; secondly by appearance, since no one ever sees the same phenomenon in the same way; and thirdly by the representation itself, which necessarily involves a process of translation by which the thing being represented is taken into the system of codes which constitute the representation. All of this precedes any conscious or unconscious ideological bias. For all that, political correctness is not simply a fashion. It responds in a real way to the manipulations that are effected by representation. Yet it may serve to displace the real issues when it leads to particular portrayals of what may be considered the ‘other’ being treated independently of the whole context in which they were actually founded, of which the socio-political situation is merely one facet. Jack Shaheen (2001), for instance, has taken up the challenge of documenting Hollywood’s admittedly often dubious representations of Arabs by minutely detailing every single (it appears) appearance of an Arab character in Hollywood films. Impressive though this is as a document, one has to wonder at its significance when he classifies films according to how well they represent their Arab characters. Shaheen’s only critical consideration seems how sympathetically they are presented, so that Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves (1991) becomes one of the most highly rated films (despite the fact that its Arabic figure is shallowly drawn and is anyway pilfered from the far better British TV series Robin of Sherwood [1983–86]), while Bertolucci’s complex The Sheltering Sky (1990) is classified among the worst due to its portrayal of the ‘Bedouin’. However there are no Bedouin in the latter film – the people Shaheen is presumably referring to are Tuareg, who are not Arabs at all and would no doubt be offended to be identified as such – it is not only Hollywood that has problems with misrepresentation! In a similar vein, Eugene Franklin Wong argued that earlier Hollywood films have reflected American society’s general ignorance (with rare exceptions) of the people and thematic material depicted. The element of ignorance was pivotal and nonproblematic within the time period because the level of ignorance was reciprocal between the industry and society . . . [Nevertheless] the degree of ignorance of Asians, Asian-Americans, and Asian themes was avoidable. Compounded over time, there was, and to a large extent still is, a seemingly conscious unwillingness (an even deliberate intellectual parsimoniousness) to learn about, and hopefully to know, the human and thematic area depicted. (2002: 53)

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The naivety here – and it is a naivety that is endemic in modern society and quite as insidious as that in earlier period – is to believe that the problem was ignorance. Still more dubious is the assumption in this quotation that the only problem in our presumably more enlightened times is how to deal with the residues of that past. What level of ‘knowledge’, however, would have been necessary to have ‘avoided’ the problems created by the supposed ‘ignorance’? Are film makers to be expected to have an anthropological or sociological knowledge about any people they depict?3 And even if they did have such knowledge, would this solve the distortions of representation? Any film maker works within limits that are determined not only by his or her knowledge and experience but also by the ‘pact’ that exists between makers and audience. We can applaud film makers who attempt to challenge negative portrayals or stereotypes of particular groups, but even as they do so it is inevitable that they will engender new portrayals that will contain their own biases and distortions. This is inevitable because representation, by its very nature, reduces: it emphasizes certain characteristics at the expense of others. In fact, the idea that the problematic of representation is something that has only recently entered the discourse is erroneous. Hollywood has in fact been acutely aware of the problem from its very earliest years (the controversy surrounding Birth of the Nation was but the first of many examples concerned with how particular groups should be portrayed). Had he looked into the scholarship on censorship in early Hollywood, Wong would hardly have made the assertions he does in the above quote. From the beginning, film makers had to satisfy a myriad of different interest groups which made life difficult for any film that represented their particular group in a way they did not like. Asian groups, and most especially the Chinese and Japanese governments, were particularly vigilant about what they saw as misrepresentation (see, for example, Black, 1994; Couvares, 2006; Vasey, 1998). The fact that today we now find representations offensive that passed without controversy at the time points to the fact that rather more was involved than ‘ignorance’ (in fact when we examine these representations, we will find that the ones that caused the greatest concern were not the ones that traded in stereotypes, but precisely those that challenged them). While it is important to expose the historical determinants that have led to stereotypes of certain groups being established and perpetuated through representation in ways that have had unfortunate consequences, it is equally important to recognize that this is essentially a problem

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inherent to representation itself (and more broadly a general problem set by the limitations of language). This means that it is not an issue that can be solved or that will ever go away. It is too easy to condemn earlier representations and assume that we are now more ‘enlightened’. This may make people feel better but it does nothing to address current iniquities. The power of representation certainly imposes a responsibility on those who control it (one should not abuse this power by presenting the represented in a distorted way) but the relationship is never entirely one way: there is always an element of complicity on the part of those represented. Moreover, the power of those responsible initially for the representation is usually limited: they have little control over how the representation is disseminated, which is controlled by processes within the dominant discourse to which the representation belongs. It should also be remembered that in general people do not like being represented because the view that one has of oneself rarely accords with how other people see you. Indeed, it may be the case that if the representation pleases the represented it is because it has failed as representation: that it is merely a superficial portrait, flattering the ego of the represented but not reflecting their broader traits. Efforts to lay bare the representational injustices that have been done to particular groups through critical analysis or to correct them through new portrayals are often valuable but such efforts should come with recognition that any representation, by its very nature, is violent. There is therefore the contrary risk that, in being more reflexive in our representations, we will lose the sense of danger that inheres in any form of communication. Images may become safe, predictable and banal, fitting everyone into a frame that is principally designed not to offend rather than be true to its object. Such would be a renunciation of one of the roles of art: to reveal what is not immediately apparent, to make us aware of facets of ourselves and others of which we were unaware. ‘Sensitive representation’, in this sense, may often work against ‘truth’. Previous generations of film makers were not imperialist stooges; they worked within frameworks of collective knowledge (and ignorance) that necessarily bound them if they were to retain their audience, not to mention their very possibility of making films. All societies function on the basis of unspoken norms which can only be crossed with delicacy and with a recognition – be it unconscious – of the effect of transgression and the anguish it entails. It is easy to forget this fact today, living as we do in a society today that thinks little of

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transgression. But, as Georges Bataille pointed out, transgression soon ceases to be transgression: it becomes the norm and so erects a new orthodoxy. Rather than chart the ‘distortions’, ideological ‘inaccuracies’ or stereotypical representations we find in Hollywood films, therefore, the current work is concerned to understand how such representations were formed: what were the cultural conditions that gave rise to them, how have they changed over time, and what is their latent significance? *** Who or what is the ‘Other’? Any answer to this question needs first to determine the position of the ‘Self’ in relation to it. The self is always implicated in the other and indeed it may be said that the I can never know the Other precisely because it is nothing but a projection of the self. It is, in fact, an essential element of self-awareness: there can be no Self without an ‘Other’ against which to measure itself. At the same time, however, it is never merely a projection. There is an entity that corresponds to this projection, and it is one that has its own integral reality of which the I can know nothing. Any representation needs to be aware of this tension and strive to give recognition to the integral reality of which it is a part. Such recognition, however, can never be total: the representation will always contain an element of the self’s projection. Moreover, it is never easy to give recognition to the Other. Traditionally the response of society in general has been to expel anything that does not belong, precisely what is considered ‘Other’ (as dangerous), to the community. This may also lead to Otherness being rejected or suppressed within oneself since the urge to belong – to be part of a group which excludes those who are perceived to be different – is exceedingly strong within human beings. Indeed, there is perhaps a natural tendency to assume that all people are similar to oneself, or at least that we share certain core values with those people with whom we are in regular or close contact, especially those we consider friends or kinfolk. This is why the sense of betrayal we feel when they behave dishonourably is so acute. Some form of displacement from the familiar may be required for an appreciation of otherness to emerge within the individual (or the community) and even then the response may be to recoil from it and retreat ever more into familiar territory or even, when this is not an option, into forms of mental illness or breakdown. Conversely, otherness may offer an attractive alternative to

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belonging, serving to reinforce our self-identity precisely against the society to which we belong. This is the basis of exoticism, the embrace of difference principally because it is different. Of course, our sense of identification and need to belong is never constant but is ever changing in response to our experiences and sense of self-identity. The feeling of affinity or lack of affinity we feel for others is provisional and depends as much upon what we project onto the other as it does on what they are actually like, since we can never entirely separate our projection from the reality of the other person. A ‘psychic unity of mankind’ may exist (there has to be some unifying feature to enable communication to take place at all) but it is as dangerous to make this assumption as it is to deny it. It should rather be held in abeyance: doubtless at some level I have an affinity with all other people, but equally at another level I am alien to every one else. To presume a fundamental affinity or a fundamental enmity is equally delusive. In order words, we may necessarily legitimize ourselves in relation to an ‘Other’ that is defined either negatively or positively. In either case, however, the Other is abstracted from itself and exists only as a point of comparison by which we may strengthen our own sense of self in relation to the surrounding community (serving either to bind us to it or to provide us with a point of comparison by which we can justify to ourselves our estrangement from it). This double movement – found for instance in the contradictory Enlightenment view of non-Europeans as either barbarians or noble savages – is to be found constantly reprised in Hollywood films as it is in other cultural manifestations. Equally, ‘otherness’ may assume myriad different forms which are subject to modification in different circumstances. Within my relationship with her, my wife may be ‘other’ to me, but when we are together in company with others, she becomes part of my ‘self’ (we are together against ‘them’). As an abstraction, the ‘Other’ may be racially or culturally defined, determining the difference between particular groups or nations or between broader entities, such between a white, European ‘self’ and a non-white ‘Other’, but it may also be defined in gender, religious or ideological terms, between capitalism and communism, or between human and non-human forms (animals, robots, androids, extra-terrestrials or even, as we will see in the chapter on film noir, the city). In fact it refers to any human relation, since we are always separate from those with whom we have a relationship and can never know them as they know themselves. In this sense, otherness is ubiquitous in human relations.

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Yet, for all of the ubiquity of this relation, the ‘Other’ as such does not really exist but is in the end always determined by the self, of which it is above all an emanation or an extension rather than a concrete reality. It is a relation that is mutually determining: the ‘Other’ exists only where there is ‘Self’ and vice versa. It is for this reason above all that we can never say that representation of the other is false and that therefore to seek to find a means of accurate representation of others must be a vain task. What is more important is to understand the determinants of why particular representations have been formed: what do they tell us about the ‘self’ that if forming them; what is the context in which they are being formed; and what are the consequences of these particular representations? The ‘other’ in this sense, has no autonomous existence and when we speak of the ‘other’ we are always speaking of the ‘self’, whether in an individual or a collective sense. Recognition of the problematic of Otherness, for all that, is not a given. We may live our whole lives under the assumption that we exist as a being separate from all others, who in their turn are separate from us and give no thought to what our very self owes to others. Such recognition is strongest among those people who have encountered some strong form of displacement, perhaps of exile or of one’s own identity. This signifies a confusion, if not a lack, of belonging which needs to be confronted in some way: one probably has to have had the experience of feeling oneself to be ‘Other’; to feel that one’s own identity has been placed in question. It is not simply the experience of feeling Other, however, that allows one to appreciate the relation between self and other. In fact, more often than not, the emotional displacement this produces leads to a strengthening of the self: an alienated consciousness may result in self-absorption and an even greater disavowal of the Other. It is not enough, then, to feel excluded or alienated, something which may create an even greater desire for integration with that from which one has been excluded. One also has to be comfortable in this dialectical sense that one’s own self is dependant upon the relation with the Other. Groucho Marx’s quip that he would not join any club that would have him as a member is perhaps the essence of such a sensibility: not wishing to belong, to accept that one is essentially alien everywhere, is the essence of appreciating otherness. This is the acceptance that the other will remain always strange and alien precisely because we remain strange and alien to ourselves, and otherness is nothing but the projection of our own otherness onto the canvas of another person. Whenever it is a question of the Other, to

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repeat, it is always also a question of the Self. In particular, to recognize the Other as Other is to recognize the relation this other has to oneself, to recognize that it only exists as a result of the self’s own recognition of it. All of these factors have contributed to the myriad of often ambiguous ways in which Hollywood cinema has dealt with the question of ‘the Other’. The fact that Hollywood has always been predominantly a community of exiles, of people who, for one reason or another, have found it difficult to integrate into their community of origin, has meant that its films are more revealing in this respect than we might imagine. *** Today the effects of technology and globalization are transforming our understanding of otherness, to the extent that some commentators see it as disappearing into a kind of indistinction of diversity and difference. Accordingly, identity is seen as being established less through our relation with others as through an assuming of difference: we identify with other people through what makes us different from them. In this scenario the only thing we share is our difference. An emanation of the ideology of multiculturalism, this aims at the dissolving of otherness as such. Technology enables such a perspective by giving us the possibility of being what we want to be rather than engaging with our biological or social given. This opens up enormous possibilities for personal development, or so it seems. Plastic surgery, limb replacements, organ transplants and so on provide the means to transcend our biological destiny while the globalization of culture sunders us from a cultural dependency on our immediate locality. In the social sphere, too, greater freedom of movement allows us to experience of wide range of different cultural phenomena. These processes also apparently make it easier to assume different identities rather than follow a developmental process by which the self establishes its identity through the recognition of and by the other. In an interesting exploration of the ways in which technology brings into question how we understand memory, Alison Landsberg argues that one of the consequences is that instead of identity being constituted by the formation of a subjectivized self, it will become an unstable concatenation of the emanations of our memories divorced from experience. As such, memories will not be traces of the past, but will belong to ‘the domain of the present’.

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She traces this idea through a consideration of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990). In both of these films the main characters are unsure of their identities since, in the worlds they inhabit, memories can be fabricated as part of the process of constructing machines (in other words, robots, androids or replicants as they are variously called) as ersatz humans and the distinction between what is human and what is a machine becomes blurred. Landsberg claims that this disrupts the ‘mirror stage’, which the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan identified as determining how we become ‘human’, and by which we become aware of what separates ‘us’ from ‘others’. In Total Recall there is even a key scene in which Quaid, the hero played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, encounters himself in a mirror (in the form of a video screen) which gives the image of his own face but this image actually belongs to another person: he does not, as Lacan argued was essential to human development, encounter himself in the mirror as other but as difference. He spends the rest of the movie in a quest for himself. Although for the character this doubt about who he is results in a continual feeling of anguish, Landsberg sees it as something positive. For her, whether his memory is true or false does not matter: the authenticity of the character is dependent not upon actual experiences but upon what is contained in the memory. Similarly, in Blade Runner, the replicant Rachael has just been told that her childhood memories are not real but have been implanted into her and are actually the memories of someone else. Landsberg writes: Rachael sits down at the piano in Deckard’s apartment, takes her hair down, and begins to play. Deckard joins her at the piano. ‘I remember lessons’ she says, ‘I don’t know if it’s me or Tyrell’s niece’. Instead of focusing on that ambiguity, Deckard says, ‘You play beautifully.’ At this point Deckard, in effect, rejects the distinction between ‘real’ and prosphetic memories. Her memories of lessons allows her to play beautifully, so it matters little whether she lived through the lessons or not. (2004: 40–1)

This scene, however, may be interpreted very differently. No one ever learns to ‘play beautifully’ from lessons, let alone from the memory of lessons divorced from experience (if it were so then everyone who has had piano lessons would play just as well). Rachael’s memories would have been implanted in order to verify her programming, not to allow her to play the piano. Her capability to play is therefore either the result of her programming or of her experience. Deckard’s comment that she plays beautifully does not make the distinction between real

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and prosphetic memories irrelevant; it indicates that he believes her piano playing is the result of her own ability independent of her programming: in other words, she has learned from experience and in effect ‘become human’, having developed her own subjectivity through interaction with others despite her non-human genesis. She has in fact done the opposite of what Landsberg thinks: she has gained individual awareness by means of an inter-relationship with what is external to her (in other words she has undergone her own mirror stage). In any event, if the human sensibility was reducible to its sum of memories it would be endlessly malleable, as it is in Alex Proyas’s Dark City (1998), where aliens have established a society based upon pure difference. In imposing such malleability on human beings by constantly changing their memories, however, the aliens discover that the human essence resists this process, which in this film is characterized as totalitarian. The wish to dissolve otherness into difference arises paradoxically from a similarly totalitarian desire for uniformity. It is the logical complement of – or reaction to – rampant individualism. Both seek a self-sufficiency of the character – the former through endless transmutation; the latter through a stability of identity – while denying the extent to which the personality is formed in interaction with others and through the experience of existence. Both assume too that human beings can exist independently of identification with an other of one sort or another. This seems highly doubtful: we establish who we are in relation to multiple forms of identification, with the intricate tangle of attraction and repulsion this implies. The complex process of identity formation is not reducible to one of its elements. Identity is an unstable unity that exists in a constant state of assembly and dispersion. It is inherently unstable, ambiguous and obscure, dependent as it is upon which aspect of otherness we are responding to at a given moment. These elements of instability, ambiguity and obscurity in relation to how Hollywood cinema has historically formed its own identity through interaction with its international audience are what this study seeks to elucidate.

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Chapter 1

THE OTHER AND THE WILDERNESS ‘America’, both as a place and as an idea, was founded in an encounter with what was ‘other’ to itself. All nations, all peoples, have, of course, shaped themselves in contradistinction to what was perceived as different from themselves, but this took a particular form as Europeans forged a new society in North America as a settler community, with people coming from elsewhere to establish themselves in an environment they perceived as being fundamentally alien to them and taking it as their mission to ‘overcome’ even as they marvelled at the richness of what they encountered. This ‘wilderness’ was unknown to them: they could do little but project their own perceptions on to it, since neither the landscape nor the populace were immediately present to them. Indeed, so integrated were the natives of the North America with their environment, that these newcomers could barely distinguish the one from the other. The way of life of the native peoples was like nothing that could have been known by the incoming Europeans, to the extent that it could barely be conceptualized by them. Unlike the Spanish Conquistadors, who encountered in Mexico and Peru peoples whose customs may have appeared barbaric to them but whose actual mode of existence was not so very different to that known by Europeans of the time, the North Americans came across peoples who followed ways of life that, if they had ever existed in Europe, had been abandoned millennia before, leaving little trace in the consciousness of contemporary peoples. They found themselves not merely in a hostile landscape, but in one that was unqualifiedly alien. Equally, many of those settlers who founded North America – and continued to populate it until the early decades of the twentieth century – were themselves fugitives from an unhealthy or hostile environment, seeking in the ‘new world’ a fresh chance, the possibility of escaping from poverty and hardship. 18

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In many ways this perception was the fundamental feature underlying the foundation of what we now call the ‘United States of America’ and it is a feature that continues to permeate its cultural landscape. The primitive distinction between the domestic and the wild thus retains a force in US culture in a way that is perhaps more clearly marked than in any other industrial, modern society. The extraordinary resistance Americans have displayed to recognizing the ecological crisis in modern society marks the extent to which this distinction between domestic and wild is still ingrained in the American sensibility as an indistinct collective memory. Hollywood has played its part in preserving this sense of a wilderness which has, through the past century, been internalized as a recurrent, if elusive, threat to selfdefinition. The Enlightenment desire for mastery of nature having been realized more completely in the United States than in Europe has paradoxically not brought a greater sense of security but increasing anxiety. The threat, or fear, of catastrophe (whether brought by nature itself, by nuclear annihilation, by alien invasion, the anger of the deity or the return of the dead) remains strikingly present throughout American popular culture and is significantly represented in the history of Hollywood cinema. Such fears also have a universal dimension, but the use that Hollywood has made of catastrophe responds to specifically American worries even as it also feeds into broader universal fears. The wilderness becomes anything out there liable to invade ‘our’ space. It thus stands as a historical memory deeply ingrained in the American sensibility, while retaining powerful echoes in today’s world. Even so, the theme of wilderness itself has not often been explored directly in Hollywood films, and is more often latently present, sometimes in unlikely places. In the particular North American response to the wilderness we can perhaps perceive a fundamental difference from the European treatment of nature in that, while Europeans aspired to control over nature by understanding its workings, Americans sought to tame it through possession. Nature was domesticated; but it remained present precisely as ‘other’, and where is remained untamed it had to be excluded, consigned to the wilderness that lay beyond what was conceptualized as ‘American’. In this confrontation, the native population was conflated with the otherness of nature and was likewise expected to be tamed or, if it could not be tamed, to be exterminated. ***

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Despite its importance, there have been surprisingly few cinematic attempts to tell the story of the settlement of North America. In fact, the most significant examples appear to be recent: the Disney company’s mendacious (and widely criticized) Pocahontas (Mike Gabriel, 1995) and Terrence Malick’s ambitious The New World (2005).

Figure 1 The coming of the Europeans in The New World. Neither of these films, even then, were really concerned with the settlement itself; they seem more fixated on the myth of Pocahontas and her redemptive role as saviour of the first colonists. Even if conceived very differently, both films are essentially love stories centred upon the relationship between the young Indian girl and the rough settler John Smith, a love that historians seem to agree never actually existed. Pocahontas, a musical aimed squarely at children, presents an unashamedly romanticized and imperialist view of the settlement. Malick’s film could hardly be more different, but does not escape some of the same problems. Although Malick gives a good representation of the sense of wilderness that the early settlers must have experienced upon coming to the new land, he does not, I think, convincingly convey the unwonted nature of the culture clash this involved, even if we concede that the film represented a brave attempt to conceive of how two peoples who had hitherto been almost completely ignorant of one another might have responded to their encounter. We might expect that Malick, philosophically literate and with a profound understanding of the implications of human dependence upon nature, would present nature as a major player in the drama and give the Indians their due. Yet the emphasis he places on this aspect unbalances the film due to the fact that it is disconnected from

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human motivation. The interactions of his human characters (whether white or Indian) do not seem very well conceived, with the result that they decorate the action rather than being central to it. His anthropological insights, one might say, do not match his philosophical understanding. The film was apparently meticulously researched (to the extent that Malick had linguistic experts recreate the extinct Algonquin language), perhaps too much so, since the most of the actors seem inhibited, playing parts that are too detached from their own natural experience. This is especially so of the Indians, whose movements often appear choreographed, making them seem more like contemporary ballet dancers (or perhaps Japanese Butoh performers) than Powhatan people of four centuries ago. This effectively undercuts the feeling of otherness in the encounter between European and Indian which Malick at moments conveys quite powerfully (notably in the ‘first contact’ scene). It was perhaps a mistake not to have given subtitles to the Indian dialogue. No doubt the intention in not doing so was to recreate the problems of communication that the two peoples would have had at the time. However, in not allowing us access to their words, the spectator is placed in the role of the European settler, so exoticizing the Indians (this must even be the case for any American Indian viewer: if the Algonquin language is extinct, then presumably no one could understand it and not even the actors could have known precisely what they were saying). This also reduces the possibility of interaction among the Indians, which further distances the spectator from their world in a way that reinforces the element of exoticism. Moreover, and more seriously, as a strategy it is undermined by the fact that the voiceovers by Pocahontas have to be given in English, which weakens the impact of her words, effectively neutralizing them. It makes her seem less like a Powhatan maiden than a sixties hippie flower child. Indeed, the way in which her character is set up by the script undermines the sense of encounter between different cultural values. Although the actress (Q’Orianka Kilcher) does a fine job of conveying the tremulousness of a young girl infatuated with an older man (as she does later in the film of communicating the sense of her displacement when she is forced into becoming ‘English’), the film imbues her relationship with Smith with more import than it can sustain. Making the film essentially a love story between them, and especially as one which symbolically represents the problematic of cultural communication, seems a fundamental miscalculation (there

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is apparently no evidence that such a love affair ever occurred in actuality – Pocahontas was no more than twelve at the time). Their scenes together are uncomfortable, as though the actors were unsure about how they should behave, due no doubt to the taboo against representations of underage sex in modern society. Treating their relations with such ‘sensitivity’, however, means that their relationship never seems believable. But more importantly, the love affair simplifies and compromises the motivations of Pocahontas: she becomes a crazy kid in love rather than the potential intermediary between different cultures that Malick apparently saw her as being. Caught betwixt and between cultures, the tragedy of Pocahontas is the tragedy of cultural contact and her story contains various fascinating elements which the concentration upon her love for Smith eclipses. Pocahontas is shown to be remarkable because she alone is fascinated rather than repelled by the challenge of otherness represented by these visitors from another world. For Malick, it is she, and not the settlers, who has a vision of ‘the new world’, a world of cross-cultural collaboration that will never be realized because the clash of values was too great to be overcome. Most of the English, with the exception of Smith (who, at the beginning of the film, is under sentence of death and yet seems to want to grasp the freshness of the air from within the ship’s hold), in contrast seem more weary than excited by the prospect of settling in this new land. Even upon arrival they appear to have as little curiosity about the land as they have about its inhabitants and any enthusiasm they might have is soon dispelled by the difficulty of the conditions they find. The ‘naturals’, as they call the Indians, are merely another danger to be guarded against. Smith, who is saved from execution twice in the first twenty minutes of the film, is a shadowy figure whose motivations are difficult to discern. His troubled musings in the voiceover, in which he seems to admire the Indian culture and be repelled by his own, seem more like the thoughts of a man of the twentieth century than those of an explorer of the seventeenth. He seems happier living with the Indians than with his own people and given the conditions in the Jamestown settlement it is believable that he would have questioned his sense of belonging, but it still seems difficult to accept that he would respond in this way to the dilemma this may have created in his mind. His feelings for Pocahontas are no more clearly defined. Is he simply grateful to her for saving his life and for her subsequent devotion? Or is he denying his love for her, afraid to commit himself to her?

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And what can the vision of the new world ultimately be for Pocahontas? Is it any more than a young girl’s curiosity over something new that has entered her world? If so, it is a curiosity that causes her to betray her own people, playing a comparable role to that of La Malinche in Mexico and becoming a new illustration of the story of Pandora, in which the visitors constitute all of the evils of the world. Although Malick gives us access to her thoughts through her voiceovers, he confines these to monologues in which she declaims mystical jargon that tells us nothing about her actions. What qualities did she see in these hardly very admirable foreigners that would impel her to take such a fateful course of action? Can this simply be explained by her love for Smith? But if so, her story becomes just another tale of betrayed love and her role as emissary of cultural communication is invalidated. Since the character of Pocahontas is so central to the story, she has to carry the weight of the film, but Malick does not allow her the breadth of character necessary to convey the dilemmas set up by the encounter between Europe and America.

Figure 2 Colin Farrell and Raoul Trujillo forming an uneasy rapprochement in The New World. Malick does effectively set up the sense of discovery of this new world as a wilderness. Despite the weariness of the voyagers, he is able to convey to us as viewers a sense of a fresh seemingly untouched land, evoking European ideas of the western isles as a paradise to be discovered and where life can begin anew. He also captures very well

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the sense of awe, fear and curiosity with which the Indians must have responded to these interlopers: the scene in which the Powhatan tentatively approach the strangers for the first time and one of them ‘smells out’ Captain Newport (Christopher Plummer) with a sense of revulsion is splendidly handled. Although the film is full of such moments, it conveys an overall sense neither of how the clash of cultures was historically played out nor of how the settlement resonates on contemporary America. *** If the settlement of North American has been under-represented in Hollywood films, the situation is not much different for the whole of the colonial period. One of the most interesting films that gives us an almost archetypal Hollywood presentation of the myth of wilderness and its conquest, is John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk (1939). In this film, set in the year of the Declaration of Independence and the intensification of the revolutionary war against the British, the establishment of a home in the wilderness becomes a statement of intent marking the dynamism of the ‘us’ against the otherness that is out there, represented not simply by the natural world and the Indians, but also by the British colonists. The film concerns pioneer Gil (Henry Fonda), just married to Lana (Claudette Colbert), the daughter of a wealthy Albany family, who has built a log cabin in the wilderness of the Mohawk Valley where they will raise their family. Symbolic in the way in which it also unites New York sophistication with the frontier spirit, the film establishes a foundation myth of the American Nation through their experiences as Lana, after initially being unable to cope with the rigours of frontier life and wanting to return to Albany, perseveres and eventually finds her place there as a tough frontier woman. When their home is destroyed by the Iroquois, acting as agents for the British and incited by nefarious general Tory Caldwell (John Carradine), the couple are brought face to face with the precariousness of their situation, which can only be overcome through collective action with other settlers. A sense of common purpose must be established, uniting the settlers against their enemies and in the process forming them as ‘Americans’. The suggestion is that these enemies (whether Indians, the British or the wilderness) must not so much be defeated as expelled, not just physically, but psychologically, in order that ‘America’ may come into being.

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The ‘other’, here, is not really what is ‘different’, but what must be excluded: one’s identity as American is founded in solidarity with others, whose situation and common interests and values unite them. These values are – and must be – unique to them. Ford sets up the proposition that Americans are not one people among others: they are an originating people, a new people, who have established their uniqueness through struggle and opposition. As it is presented here, American exceptionalism is founded in the communal values of solid work and self-sacrifice in the service of the construction of a new society out of the wilderness. At the same time, however, it admits of no ambivalence: anyone who does not accept these values is to be excluded. Little distinction is here made between the British, the Iroquois or nature itself: all must be overcome or subdued. The principal opposition is war, which is seen as the characteristic of the wilderness and identifies the Indians and the British with it, since warfare (if for different reasons) is endemic to both. ‘Americans’, in contrast, only fight to defend themselves and their own. Nevertheless, a place in America is found for anyone prepared to assimilate and the film ends with a series of cuts of people in the fort, having just been informed of the victory over the British, playing silent homage to the Stars and Stripes. Although it ends with a shot held on Gil and Lana, it also gives prominence to the loyal Indian Blueback (Chief John Big Tree) and their black servant: the unity of those who know their places. Blueback is an interesting character. Ford gives him the privilege of killing the villain of the piece, British general Caldwell, although in a subtle way. We do not see the actual killing: American soldiers pass through the church, demanding to know what has happened to Caldwell. Blueback stands up in the pulpit and, with a mischievous look but without saying anything, draws the British general’s trademark eye patch over his own eye. As a ‘tamed’ native, Blueback in fact almost stands as the symbol of the American conquest of wilderness. Our initial sight of him is when Gil and Lana have arrived at the cabin (symbolically, in the midst of a torrential storm) after their marriage. He makes a dramatic entrance, appearing at the door in a flash of lightning when Lana is alone. He seems the very image of the savage Indian associated with the wilderness as he almost seems to materialize out of the lightning, inducing in Lana a hysterical fit before Gil returns to reassure her that Blueback is their friend: the wilderness, in the form of the Indian, has been tempered and turned to their advantage. Blueback leaves but a few moments later reappears to tell Gil that he has a good woman, but giving him a stick with which

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to beat her (woman still belongs to the wilderness and so requires ‘taming’). There are some quite subtle levels of interplay between self and other occurring simultaneously here: between home and wilderness, between city life and countryside, between cultivated society and frontier life, between Indian and white and between man and woman. Lana’s response to her first encounter with wilderness is repulsion. She breaks down and demands that they return at once to the city. Soon, however, she shows herself as stronger than her husband and when wilderness returns in its most devastating colours as a Iroquois war party supporting the British burn down their cabin and destroy their crops, it is she who insists that they must remain and rebuild it while he is now the one who wants to go back to the city. Here we see American exceptionalism in its purest form. With no foundation in blood or soil, indeed being resolutely opposed to those ideas of blood and soil that have over the centuries given so much grief to the European cultures from which it was derived, American culture forged its destiny by denying its link to the land. Blood and soil must both be surmounted through hard work to gain legitimacy in order to form the ‘melting pot’ from which the ‘American’ sensibility is to be shaped. Nevertheless, purity of the blood remains crucial: what ‘melts’ within the pot is any commitment to other cultural values, not the racial ‘stain’ of being Indian or black. So, while cultural unity is an achievable ideal, at the same time one must know one’s place and racial integrity must be maintained: nothing is worse that the mongrel, the product of miscegenation, which has been considered a greater horror in the United States than almost anywhere else. The implication is that the American sensibility would be founded on a cultural mixture of people of pure blood lines under the tutelage of an Anglo elite to which all other groups must subordinate themselves. In this process the wilderness itself is implicated with impurity of blood and needs to be cleansed through cultivation. For the pioneers it presented an insurmountable obstacle which could not be negotiated but had to be overcome and forced out. Despite its centrality to the American experience, it is surprising how fitfully the wilderness as such has been addressed in Hollywood films. Indeed, neither the colonial era, nor even the Revolution and its aftermath, appear as natural realms of Hollywood representation. The paucity of films set in this era compared to those documenting the opening up of American West is instructive. It is almost as though American history begins for Hollywood only in the nineteenth century with the Indian and the Civil wars. The colonial era is perhaps too distant from the

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sensibility of Hollywood producers and film makers to impinge substantially on their interests. Just as the mentality of the South is fundamentally alien to the Hollywood experience and vision of ‘America’ so there can have been few people in Hollywood who have shared the Puritan sensibility of those who founded the American colonies and perhaps this accounts for the paucity of films either set in this era or addressing in a cogent way the challenges and moral dilemmas faced by the pioneers of American culture. But there is also a sense, which Drums Along the Mohawk essentially promotes, that ‘America’ was born not with the British settlement, but emerged as a kind of ‘virgin birth’ from the sensibility that arose from the Revolution and attained maturity with the opening up of the west which really constitutes the ‘matter of America’ that is the real Hollywood myth. This also perhaps explains why very few of the early American novels have received cinematic treatments. James Fennimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) appears to be the exception that proves the rule.1 Set in 1757 during the French and Indian War, it concerns the abduction of two daughters of Colonel Munro, the British commander of Ft. William Henry, by Magua, a renegade Huron warrior, and their rescue by Chingachgook and Uncas, the two Mohicans of the title, with their white trapper friend Hawkeye (known by several other names in the book and as Nathanial in the 1993 film version). It has been brought to the screen several times, the most notable versions being those made in 1920, 1936 and 1992. The best is the first, made by Maurice Tourneur and Clarence Brown. Unlike the others, this one remains relatively true in spirit to the original story. Its most remarkable feature is the central relationship between Uncas, the Mohican, and Cora, given a surprisingly intense representation in view of the strength of the taboo against miscegenation, the very mention of which would be outlawed by the Production Code of 1930. And Cora’s attraction to Uncas is shown to lie precisely in his ‘otherness’, in the fact that he belongs to the wilderness rather than to refined society (even though his manners are in fact far more refined than most of the ‘civilised’ characters). The opposition of wilderness and civilization is established in one of the first intertitles, which introduces us to Cora and Alice, the two Munro girls, with the announcement that, ‘Even in the wilderness gently-bred women somehow maintain the grace and dignity of life’. The wilderness nevertheless enters the very room with the appearance of Uncas, come to warn the gathering that the Huron are on the warpath. This is a remarkable scene, in which Cora is as though transfixed by the presence of this gentle savage. The intertitle has

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it that ‘Her girlish fancy invests the young chief with a halo of romance’. However, in her look there seems to be something more: a fascination for what eludes the regimentation of garrison life. Uncas is far from being a ‘savage’; he has a dignity that links him with the wilderness while also separating him from it. He represents the freedom of the life force beyond the artificial separation between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’. He is, in fact, very much the hero of the film and it is through his presence and his almost primal struggle with the Huron villain Magua (essentially over possession of Cora) that the theme of wilderness is addressed.2 With the 1936 film version, the story is given its Hollywood makeover, so that Hawkeye becomes the white hero of the film and the Indians are marginalized, making a mockery of the title and really undercutting any engagement with the idea of wilderness. Interestingly, also, there is a convergence with one of the themes of Drums Along the Mohawk in that a theme of hostility between the ‘Americans’ and the ‘British’ is introduced in a way that also equates the British with what must be expelled. One might have expected that a director as ambitious as Michael Mann would have addressed the themes of the novel through fresh eyes when he came to make his version in 1993, as the story is one that appears ripe for a re-interpretation today. Disappointingly, though, his film is basically a lazy re-telling of the 1936 version and makes little attempt to re-imagine its themes. In fact, he largely did the opposite and transformed it into pure romance, in which melodrama (admittedly beautifully filmed and the film does stand as a stirring adventure story) completely overwhelms the more serious themes that are contained within the story. Unlike Terrence Malick, Mann appears to have made no effort to evoke the mood of the earlier period and twentieth century attitudes are simply projected onto the eighteenth century. Motivation is determined by the pride or lust for revenge of the individual (embodied most especially by Magua, but also to a lesser extent by the two English protagonists – Colonel Munro and Major Heyward – both of whom are nevertheless allowed redemption in their deaths) in ways that seem singularly anachronistic (the theme of hostility between ‘Americans’ and ‘British’ introduced by the 1936 version is extended). Centre stage now is given to a passionate love affair between Hawkeye (called Nathaniel through most of the film) and Cora, so eliminating a key element of the original story which the two earlier films retained: the problematic of attraction across racial and cultural divides (the

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idea of Hawkeye as lover – although in this case his attraction was for Alice – was introduced in the 1936 film, but even here the relationship between Uncas and Cora was given greater prominence; in the 1920 film, Hawkeye is a rather unprepossessing character and plays a subservient role to those of the two Indians). Like all of the relationships in the film this is sentimentally given entirely in modern colours. Even more seriously, it deforms the very heart of the story, displacing it from the two Mohicans, who become mere appendages to the super hero white man and are as invisible as characters as in the most conventional old-style Western, barely speaking, either with words or gestures – Uncas is merely given his moment in his death battle with Magua, in which a belated and rather half-hearted attempt is made to suggest that he is acting out of love for Alice. Even at the end of the film, it is the love between Hawkeye and Cora rather than the death of the Mohican that is given emphasis. Just as love is personified in modern terms, Magua is filled with a purely late twentieth century desire for revenge. We can understand that he hates Colonel Munro for having destroyed his village and killed his wife and children, but this hatred is transformed into an individual quest for a justice that responds entirely to modern attitudes and appears to have little correspondence with what an Indian of the eighteenth century might have felt (his determination to kill Munro and his daughters in order to put an end to his family lineage surely reflects a European way of thinking completely alien to that of American Indians). In many ways Magua actually becomes the central protagonist of the film as a result of Wes Studi’s powerful characterization, which suggests depths to Magua’s personality (even as a villain) that go far beyond caricature. However this remains latent, as even Studi cannot transcend the pantomime villain envisaged by the script. This is another striking contrast with the 1920 film, in which Magua was a more rounded character who was as much motivated by sexual attraction towards Cora as by hatred of Munro – in fact, he wants to take Cora as his wife and seems to have some genuine affection for her. In 1936, he is also a caricature, but even this portrayal seems preferable to the entrepreneurial villain devoid of redeeming qualities he becomes in 1993. Such a personification was no doubt only made acceptable to modern audiences by the extent to which it is emphasized that he is not really an Indian: his hatred has perverted him so much that he is more a white man in red skin. This is spelled out in the absurd climax in the Huron village when Magua makes a speech to the Sachem that

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basically advocates that the Indians should become good capitalists. It is left to Nathaniel to accuse Magua of having been corrupted by the whites, something that make no sense in eighteenth century terms but plays to the desire of a late twentieth century audience for identification with the alternative of a lost Indian culture. In this scenario, any themes of wilderness have vanished and otherness is neither recognized nor respected. Conflict is reduced to a struggle between abstract powers (whether English, French or Huron – a plague is on all their houses), in relation to which all individuals are either innocent or not so innocent bystanders, or else willing or not so willing participants. The forest is merely a picturesque backdrop against which the action is set. When Cora and Nathaniel first become acquainted, the question of otherness is raised and then quickly dispensed with. He tells her that Chingachgook warned him against the white man: ‘Do not try to understand them. And do not try to make them understand you. That is because they are a breed apart and make no sense.’ But Cora ‘crosses’, not to become ‘Other’, but to become ‘us’, that is an ‘Indian’, since our perspective as viewers has been entirely turned upside down so that ‘we’ are ‘them’: ‘In your particular case, Miss, I’d make an allowance’, Nathanial almost immediately corrects himself. In effect, this is addressed not only to her but also to the audience, allowing us the luxury of not being considered among those who cannot be ‘understood’. In effect, identification is here turned upside down so completely that Chingachgook’s advice does not, therefore, imply cross-cultural incommensurability but its opposite: two hundred years later we belong to the Indian, not the French or British colonists’ lineage. Instead of Chingachgook being the ‘last of the Mohicans’, a new, purely fictional family line is initiated. It is the colonists who became extinct. Just as we can reject Magua because he has ceased to be Indian, so we can accept Nathaniel and Cora because they have rejected the white man’s ways and have become ‘Indian’. We are expected to identify with them and, to a lesser extent, with the homesteaders, and if there is an ‘Other’ it is the British and French States and their minions, who pursue their interests with no concern for the lives of their subjects, whom they treat as mere canon-fodder to serve a meaningless political confrontation. This hostility to the Europeans was an addition to the story made in the 1936 version, in which Hawkeye anachronistically becomes a kind of guerrilla fighter for American independence, but here it is taken further so that he becomes more of a counter-cultural hero, representing the interests of individual endeavour against imposition by authority. Magua is in this

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respect joined as villain by Colonel Munro and Major Duncan in that all three of them place glory and service to the State above individual autonomy. Yet the consequence is that not only is otherness denied through what Armando José Prats calls an ‘othered sameness’, but the singularity of Indian culture is appropriated to a modern ideology of difference so that, as Prats says: Chingachgook fades into his ahistorical region at the precise moment that the hero emerges into an ahistorical moment of his own. Mythological historicism exacts from the Indian the surrender of his own historical status as ‘first American’ . . . [he will become] merely an Othered Same, an Adam compromised by his own (pre)history, a being, then, whose very Otherness contests his paradisal legacy and implicates him in the very Conquest that he so vehemently denounced. (2002: 253)

Equally implicated in this process is the landscape, which now has a purely formal and decorative function: it looks magnificent but is just a backdrop to the human drama, more like a national park than a wilderness that threatens the sanctity of the home. This assimilation of otherness into a form of extended difference that may also be perceived as sameness, the ‘othered sameness’ that Prats warns against, is an element that has integrated into American ideology especially since the 1960s and has gained a persistent representation in Hollywood films. In distancing the story from its foundation in colonial history, Mann’s version of The Last of the Mohicans continues a trend within Hollywood films by which the notion of ‘America’ is abstracted from its historical roots in the European settlement of the continent, centred not so much in the Puritan idea of an overcoming of the wilderness as in Jacksonian democracy and the expansionist notion of the conquest of the frontier, something which is generally shaded through the immigrant experience of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Just as Hollywood has tended to treat the deep South and the midWest of the United States as an ‘other’ culture, so too it has never been entirely comfortable with the settler mentality of New England. The very foundations of Hollywood seem rather to have been securely set in the frontier mentality of the nineteenth century and this gave rise to the western, the most emblematic of all Hollywood genres whose films have established not only some of the most persistent myths with which we associate with Hollywood but have also greatly conditioned the way in which the notion of ‘America’ would be conceived.

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Chapter 2

THE MYTH OF THE FRONTIER The idea of the frontier is a founding principle of the American myth that is fundamental to the sensibility of Hollywood. It conjoins with the notion of wilderness, from which it is nevertheless in many ways distinct and is an idea that comes into its own only with the founding of the Republic. To a certain extent there is even a contradiction between the two notions since a wilderness contains no frontiers; it is undefined and unformed and of unknown extent. It is constantly present and always threatens to invade us; consequently, the main concern when faced with a wilderness is to defend a space of one’s own, to define a sense of what is the inside as distinct from what is outside. A frontier, in contrast, is created only when one feels relatively established within a terrain and so can set the wilderness in the distance. With the growing sense of self-confidence that followed the creation of the new nation based on values which distinguished it from the old colonial regime, this idea of wilderness gradually gives way to the myth of the frontier. It does not replace it, but rather re-classifies it. Wilderness is no longer pervasive: it may remain a characteristic of what lies beyond the frontier, the point at which one’s own space is no longer defined, and it can also be retained as a space within the frontier, retained precisely as what has largely but not quite been tamed, encapsulated by the idea of a national park, which represents a wildness that is under control. The frontier therefore marks not simply the boundary between the domestic and the wild, but between what is and what is not felt to be under control. It gradually takes shape not as a space but as a marking point beyond which we cannot pass without being exposed to what challenges our sense of self-identity. Wilderness is empty of humans; it is a place given over to

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nature and which is hostile to the human as a species (even if what are physiologically humans may exist within it, they are not recognized as belonging to the species and to enter it is to make oneself wild and, at least potentially, an enemy of the freedom and progress promised by the new Republic). The frontier, then, marks the point which delineates where sameness ends and otherness begins, but it constitutes a boundary that may be crossed and re-defined: it is no longer a fixed point but a physical border that also has a metaphysical quality. It may define a boundary between cultures, between humans and nature, between this planet and the rest of the universe or even one existing within America itself, but by the fact of staking out a boundary it implies that culture has won out against the wildness of nature. In specific terms, the frontier in American mythology is a post-colonial creation made possible by the defeat of the British and concretized perhaps most especially by the Louisiana purchase of 1803 by which the United States was able to double its legally constituted land mass, taking in an area into which barely a single American had ever ventured at the time and which the French were entitled to sell only under the rules of European jurisprudence, but which really ‘belonged’, by right of possession, to the hundreds of American Indian nations that inhabited it. The Louisiana Purchase was important because it settled arguments between the expansionists and those who believed that the United States should remain a self-contained and restricted territory. All at once, the American nation of States united in a common cause was given a fresh horizon, a vast unexplored hinterland of unknown possibilities, a border which it had legal sanction to cross, but which still needed to be ‘conquered’. In this schema, the idea of the wilderness still retained its power as a unifying element out there that conjoins the community: a sense of togetherness is now established less upon affinity than in relation to what is perceived to exist externally as a collective threat or promise. In his magisterial three volume cultural history of the United States, Richard Slotkin takes up the theme of the frontier as the key myth upon which the American sense of identity is founded. For Slotkin this notion is fundamentally ambivalent as it founds a sense of American identity as existing within a pure space situated between the European culture from which it had emerged (seen as decadent and corrupt) and the savagery of what lay beyond the frontier and which it assumed as its task to eradicate in order to maintain its own essential purity.

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He defines this ambivalence in these terms: The American must cross the border into ‘Indian country’ and experience a ‘regression’ to a more primitive and natural condition of life so that the false values of the ‘metropolis’ can be purged and a new, purified social contract enacted. Although the Indian and the Wilderness are the settler’s enemy, they also provide him with the new consciousness through which he will transform the world. (1992: 14)

As Slotkin emphasizes, the Indian and the wilderness remain present as Other precisely to facilitate a sense of American identity as what is created through the struggle against the primitive on the one hand and over-refinement and corruption on the other hand; as such the notion of the frontier has functioned as an enactment of a process of continual purification and renewal: by means of confronting the frontier and pushing it back through struggle, American singularity is established and re-affirmed. In considering the continuing importance of the frontier, it hardly needs to be said that we need to take the Western as an essential starting point. The myth of America as constructed through Hollywood is inscribed in the Western, which offers a cinematic documentation of how a vision of America as frontier was not so much established as given mythic force and sustained for future generations, effectively re-enacting and universalizing the process of the western colonization to give a glorious ordainment to what had in fact been one of the more shameful episodes in human history. Although this process of mythologization had begun before the invention of the cinema, it was the movies that gave it a characteristic sheen and vividness that would enable it to assume a universal form. Founded in the war of 1843 with Mexico, which resulted in what can really only be described as an act of theft of half of the adversary’s sovereign territory, and sustained by a process of genocide enacted against the native population of the vast lands of the western part of the North American continent, the winning of the west represented, among other things, a consolidation of an Anglo-American singularity based upon the cultural expulsion of an Otherness that above all assumed two principal faces: that of the Native American on the one hand and that of the Hispanic Mexican on the other, both of whom were associated with the wilderness that lay beyond the frontier and had to be swept aside in the process of conquering the frontier. While the Western has not always endorsed the resulting ideology, it has consistently throughout its history maintained the parameters

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of it even while extending it or even seeking to contest its legitimacy. In this sense, it has maintained a form of imperial hegemony that excludes – or consigns to a mythological wilderness – forms of Otherness which it has projected onto the Indian and the Mexican. As Armando José Prats has ably demonstrated, in the Western, the Indian is always absent even when he is present (and the same thing is equally true for the Mexican and the Afro-American). For all that, we should not fall into the trap of dismissing the Western’s representation of others as purely mis-representation. Hollywood has not, in fact, historically treated American Indians as badly as one might superficially imagine. The Western certainly constructed a stereotype of the Indian which no doubt had little in common with the self-perception of the Native peoples themselves, but it was a stereotype that was actually quite nuanced, even if it has largely been retained in our collective consciousness as a crude image of savages attacking wagon trains and creating mayhem. The latter image certainly existed, but there were many examples in which the Indians were treated sympathetically, even with a degree of understanding by which their cultural difference was respected (even if only in superficial terms). This was in conformity with the way Hollywood has always been sympathetic towards outsiders (for instance, outlaws and losers), a sympathy no doubt shaped by the outsider status that Hollywood studios themselves had in American society. Nevertheless, the dominant image was given its characteristic form in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), in which the Indians lack of individuation (other than in emblematic form through the use of the name ‘Geronimo’ to signal the danger that faces the travellers) presents a sharp contrast with the well-defined individual characterizations of each of the travellers in the stagecoach. Whether they are good or evil, pleasant or nasty, the white people are recognizable and familiar to us. We feel comfortable in their presence. The Indians, in contrast, are out there; they have no cultural link with us, but represent nature in its most unbounded and wild form. The message conveyed to the audience is that civilization cannot be founded with them but only against them. They are thus irredeemably Other precisely because they exist as part of the wilderness that is ‘beyond the frontier’. At the same time, the treatment of the Indian has undergone periodic revision by which we can mark changing perceptions of how the frontier itself has changed historically in the American sensibility. This of course is a contentious matter and it is not difficult to demonize Hollywood for its general portrayal of American Indians. Certainly, the

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Indian nations themselves have cause to be outraged. It hardly needs saying that the vast majority of films which portray Indians in historical settings are triumphalist (this is true even of those films which treat the Indians in a positive way). Yet it would be extraordinary had it been otherwise. History is always written by the victors and the winning of the West is – whatever one thinks of its morality – a heroic adventure, one that occurred in an immediate past that retained historical actuality for both the producers and audiences of Hollywood films. In the aftermath of such a monumental struggle, to expect the victors to do justice to the losers would be naïve. Only with the passing of time is a perceived enemy likely to be treated fairly. A representation can never do justice to an enemy ‘other’; if it did it would undermine the still fragile identity of the self (unsure whether its cause was ‘just’). It needs to wait until it is no longer perceived as a threat and thus can be treated with respect. But even then the representation remains always – necessarily so – on the self’s own terms; the Self is conceptually unable to treat the Other in the Other’s own terms. In addition, as discussed in the introduction, no attempt at ‘accuracy’ can correct the injustices of representation. A genuine Indian perspective could only emerge if they were to make their own Westerns, but even then they would still face the problem of resources and of finding an audience able to view the films on their own terms. Failing which they would need to engage with the Hollywood system, and the inevitable compromises that entails, not to mention the burden of the history of the Western itself, which would need to be confronted before an alternative vision could be elaborated. Therefore, while it is right to insist on both greater accuracy and a greater sensitivity to the specificity of Indian cultures, this is unlikely ever to change the underlying ideology. To this extent, when the newspaper man in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) stated that ‘When legend becomes fact, print the legend’ he was simply articulating the effect of representation generally. Within all historical memory there is a legendary aspect which can never entirely be detached from it: when a legend has become a fact, it cannot be unravelled to reveal the ‘truth’; the most that can be done is to show how it became a fact. Furthermore, film portrayals in general (and not just those in Hollywood), are dream projections and their relationship with ‘real life’ is always mediated by cinematic form. ***

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In considering otherness within the Western, John Ford’s films cannot be ignored, not simply because Ford more than any other director has come to be recognized as the Western director, but because his films encapsulate the myth in its most complex forms. Ford’s relation to otherness cannot be easily characterized. His films provide a kind of cinematic template for the treatment of the frontier and the ‘winning of the West’ but one that is extremely complex and that allows for a range of ambivalences and disturbances. His portrayal of the Indians is especially complex. As Ken Nolley, in an excellent essay, says: In a filmed interview, Ford once said, ‘My sympathy was always with the Indians’. In some ways this may have been the case. But the shaping power of studio decisions and generic conventions regularly and reliably turned the principal sympathies of his audience toward his white characters. The Western was at root an expression of white culture justifying its expansion, and Ford largely participated in that expression, sometimes by choice, at others by default. On the other hand [ . . . ] Ford (in conjunction with his collaborators) did struggle in some measure to modify the terms of this terrible white discourse on Native Americans [ . . . ] It is probably true, as Ford indicated, that he felt profoundly sympathetic with Native Americans and that such sympathy grew out of his Irish background. At the same time, he accepted the myth of Manifest Destiny with fervour: ‘Perhaps it’s my Irish atavism, my sense of reality, of the beauty of clans, in contrast to the modern world, the masses, the collective irresponsibility. Who better than an Irishman could understand the Indians, while still being stirred by the tales of the US Cavalry?’ (Nolley, 1999: 83)

Nolley further emphasizes the extent to which the films constitute at once a myth and a historical memory: . . . as far as Native Americans are concerned, Ford’s Westerns are more typified by the conflation of myth and history than by the binary opposition between them that traditional Ford criticism has invoked. In this sense too, whether Ford’s Westerns were intended to be accurate historical representations (or whether they were, as Maltby contends, intended to be inaccurate historical representations) is not the sole important consideration. If fictional representations are taken as history, they have real historical consequences (Stam 15). In this sense, Ford’s films function as if they were historical texts, constructing a sense of Native American life on the frontier, participating in the social and political events of the era in which they were produced, and helping to construct much of what still stands for popular historical knowledge of Native American life. (1999: 76–7)

What is striking here is that the ‘real historical consequences’ constitute more than an additional consideration: they make the extent to which

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the films are either accurate or inaccurate historical representations irrelevant. It is these real historical consequences that matter and the picking out of what is accurate or inaccurate in them becomes a mere detail, and moreover a detail that is impossible to determine because the weight of representation overwhelms it. As Nolley adds: The history of Native Americans in North America is undoubtedly not accurately represented in Ford’s films, but beyond the question of accuracy, his films, like all historical films, come with hermeneutic instructions on how to interpret that history . . . In many ways, Ford’s representations of Native Americans developed out of traditional Hollywood portrayals. Hollywood had never shown any serious respect for the importance and individuality of Native American peoples and cultures, for their respective histories, or for the vitality of Native American life. (1999: 77)

These quotations sum up a range of issues inherent to Ford’s films and emphasize the way that their ambivalences are central to the Hollywood myth of the West, which was always a self-interested myth, and even when the Indian was given ‘respect’ it was still on the white man’s terms. As such, the Indian is excluded, either constituted as a threat ‘out there’, or as an unknown element comparable to the otherness of the landscape itself. He may be regarded as nothing but an indistinct enemy to be defeated but may also be offered a recognition by which the ‘otherness’ is tempered so that he is given a humanity as a foe with similar needs and desires to ‘ours’ or obliterated altogether as he is tamed and incorporated into the American myth (as we saw with Blueback in Drums Along the Mohawk). Any such recognition is given parsimoniously, however, so that while being rendered the same as ‘us’, in the sense that they face similar dilemmas, they remain distinct and no recognition is given to their actual otherness. A good example of this occurs in Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) when John Wayne’s retiring colonel goes to the Indian camp to try to avert war. The Indian chief agrees that they should come to an agreement but says he is powerless to stop the war fever of the young men, which seems to be ascribed to youthful exuberance: the conflict is less the result of racial hatred than, to use contemporary parlance, an ‘excess of testosterone’. In this way the Indians are universalized as being like us but not part of us. There is no cultural conflict here, no ‘clash of civilisations’; only a clash of interests which has to be resolved in favour of the white man. Ford rarely demonizes the Indians; to the extent that they behave in a monstrous way, they are associated with the untamed land which it is ‘our’ duty to subjugate.

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Those white men who submit to the land in fact often act in a worse way than do the Indians. The Indians are thus given a humanity which correlates with ‘ours’ but is in conflict with it because of an incompatibility of interests to the extent the Indians place their wager on the ‘wilderness’. Above all, it is the fact that they accept the harshness of the land and do not recognize the need to conquer it which makes them an obstacle that has to be removed. Yet Ford also admires the wilderness, while accepting the inevitably that it will be tamed without being convinced that it should be. However, this ambivalence does not go as far as recognizing the distinctiveness of Indian culture. The Indians can only be seen as projections of this wilderness and so their existence as ‘other’ is simultaneously affirmed and denied. Arguably this makes their subjection and possible extermination justifiable: it is a necessary, if regrettable, consequence of Western development. The ambivalences of Ford’s vision came full circle with The Searchers (1956), in which John Wayne turns Indian as he seeks vengeance for a massacre by a group of Comanche of his ‘family’ (although in many ways he is a stranger to the family and his relationship with them is deeply ambivalent) and the abduction of the two young girls, Debbie and Lucy. We do not know whether his quest is motivated more by revenge for the deaths of his kin or by a will to prevent the two girls from being contaminated by incorporation into Comanche society. Miscegenation even seems to represent a greater horror for him than rapine, so that he intends not to save Debbie and Lucy but to kill them if they have cohabited with their abductor, the Chief Scar. When, in the most enigmatic scene in the film, Lucy is eventually found by the pursing party only Ethan sees her. What has happened to her is kept from both us as the audience and from his two companions. He tells her fiancé with a sense of revulsion ‘not to ask’ about her. We no doubt assume that she has been violated by the Comanche, but this is left unclear. Indeed, we may wonder why they would keep her with them for so long and then violate her on the trail, especially as Ethan has insisted that they would not kill the women they take captive. Perhaps they left her behind for the pursuers to find and Ethan was the one who killed her? His revulsion may therefore be self-revulsion at what he has forced himself to do. He had to do it because, as he says, ‘Living with the Comanch ain’t being alive.’ Having been tainted by her sexual association with the Comanche, she has become for Ethan a kind of undead, to be as relentlessly pursued and destroyed as the zombies in

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George Romero’s films. This is confirmed at an army post when we see a group of crazed women who had been liberated from their capture by the Comanche. And yet it is later denied when we finally see Debbie, who appears to be perfectly integrated into her new life and to have suffered no ill effects from it. The notion that it is ‘better to be dead than red’ is given an especially sinister tone here. Indeed, this horror of miscegenation seems more of a pretext than a reason for Ethan’s hatred. So filled with hate is he that his quest goes beyond a simple racism. Even if we grant that this hatred is justified to the extent that the Comanche have killed his family, we sense that his motivation is more complicated than this. A Confederate veteran of the Civil War who has not accepted the surrender, Ethan is a man at war who needs an object of hate to justify himself. This kind of hatred is at root a form of self-hatred, but one that is projected outwards. The Comanche provide a pretext for the externalization of his hatred, but it seems to be directed all around him. The landscape, this unforgiving, untamed space beyond the frontier is also part of this externalization. In fact, it may be that this is ultimately what he wants to kill. Not Scar, not Debbie. But the wilderness itself, given a living form by the Indians, a living form that for him is a mere semblance of life, but it is actually the life to which he is himself consigned.

Figure 3 Jeffrey Hunter and John Wayne losing the track of the Comanche in The Searchers.

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The whole of The Searchers is thus a complex allegory of otherness, but one that in the end turns on itself: for Ethan ultimately the Other is the Self. As many commentators have noted, he and his Comanche adversary Scar are really aspects of the same person. According to Armando José Prats, as a result of his scalping of Scar, Ethan has even become ‘Indian’ (2002: 284). This is so much so that by the end, unlike Debbie, he is ‘unredeemable’ and as such has no place in the American future as symbolized by the Jorgensen’s family home to which he will return her. Yet, for all Ethan’s assumption of Indian ways, and the fact that from the beginning of the film he has consistently been shown to be apart from the settled life that will be the American future, he knows Indian ways only well enough to fight against them. He has little appreciation of their way of life; so little appreciation, in fact, that he takes Scar’s scalp even though he has not been the one who killed him (it is not, therefore, a trophy of war, but of revenge). When Scar says that he ‘speaks good Comanch’, the remark seems ironic, because Ethan has in fact said nothing in the Comanche language: he has only been able to understand what they say. What understanding he has is of a purely formal sort; it does not enable him to have any genuine communication with them. As Ethan gains in awareness during the course of his quest, this does not bring him any closer to the Indian; it only detaches him further from the American consciousness with which he identifies and which he serves. He resembles the Indian only in that he also becomes subsumed into the otherness of the wilderness and so he becomes invisible at the end of the film: a figure of myth who can only fade into the landscape, becoming increasingly indistinct as the new society becomes more secure in itself. The French title of the film in fact makes this manifest; he is La Prisonnière du désert. As such, Ethan stands as a prime example of what Richard Slotkin identified as ‘the man who knows Indians’, almost invariably someone who, while being ‘American’ is not ‘of’ America. The prototype is the historical personage of Daniel Boone, as mythologized most notably in the character of Hawkeye in the novels of Fennimore Cooper. This frontier figure appears in numerous guises in the Western, as army scout, hired gun or outlaw turned lawman, and he is personified by many of the characters played by John Wayne, but Ethan offers the most complex example of the type. He embodies the fact that, in order to make possible the new sensibility, the Americans needed first to breach the frontier and to incorporate the knowledge of the other into their own experience, without, however, allowing this knowledge to affect them directly, something which would ‘contaminate’ them.

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This emissary, however, ‘knows Indians’ only within a narrow framework. He learns only what he needs to know in order to prevail and to allow the frontier to be overcome, even if he has to sacrifice himself to the wilderness in the process. Curiously, the abducted Debbie seems almost the most integrated character in the film. Is this why Ethan finally spares her life after Scar has been killed? There is irony in his reconciling words, ‘let’s go home, Debbie’, since Debbie was at home with the Comanche, a home Ethan has destroyed as Scar had earlier destroyed her original home. Debbie’s ‘redemption’ at the end is filled with ambivalence. What is she being returned to? To a loving family, perhaps, but one which is not actually her own and whose bonds seem extremely tenuous (a father who is kindly but insensitive; the daughter who is prejudiced and presumptuous; a likely husband who takes her for granted). Whether she wishes it or not, Debbie will be reintegrated into a ‘family of nations’ that constitutes the democratic union of the United States, an association that represents the closure of the frontier, something that is affirmed by the admittance of this ‘impure’ woman and the exclusion of the man who has effected her ‘purification’. Ethan is excluded because his task is done: the ‘man who knows Indians’ can vanish into the air, having made America ‘safe for democracy’. Ford’s early films were largely determined by an affective foundation of community: people recognized ‘their own’ and formed a society from which the external ‘other’ was excluded. When Ethan takes Debbie home, however, this sense of affective security is brought into question. It involves not simply a recognition that good and evil are not so easily separable, but that their qualities are what people need to confront within themselves and that their reconciliation does not automatically lead to a place within the affective community that is constituted uneasily at the end of the film. *** We come across a similar figure to Ethan in Samuel Fuller’s Run of the Arrow (1957) in which another Confederate soldier unwilling to swear allegiance to the Union flees west. Unlike Ethan, however, O’Meara (Rod Steiger) is not filled with a complex hatred that needs to be expunged. Taking refuge among a branch of Red Cloud’s Oglala Dakota, O’Meara’s experience rather reveals tensions about what it means to be American that are resolved in a way that offers no immediate resolution.

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Unlike Ford, Fuller is not concerned with the winning of the West but with its consequences and especially with how different cultural realities can be reconciled within the American context. The ideology of the film (like much of Fuller’s work) is founded in a kind of multiculturalism: all cultures should be respected but one also needs to know where one belongs. Thus the lesson O’Meara learns is that, even though he has a greater affinity with the Sioux than with the Yankees, he is culturally tied to the latter and cannot cross the cultural boundary to become ‘other’. He therefore has to reconcile himself with the new reality. This is explicitly spelled out by the commentary at the end: ‘the surrender was not the death of the South, but the birth of the United States’. This is underlined by a caption, in Fuller’s best journalistic style, that emphasizes its continuing relevance: ‘The end of this picture can only be written by you’. In Fuller’s America different cultural loyalties are tied together by belonging to a greater American culture that embraces it. Yet this is a project laden with contradictions. In Run of the Arrow it is apparent through the fact that, although O’Meara cannot ‘become Sioux’ and must return to his only real home among the white men, his wife Yellow Moccasin follows him, seemingly without hesitation, leaving behind her own culture for a future in which we can only presume she will be an American wife: although the American cannot be ‘Sioux’, the Sioux can become ‘American’. A later film which takes some of these themes further is Robert Aldrich’s Ulzana’s Raid (1972), one of the very few films from Hollywood or anywhere else to have confronted the issue of radical Otherness. In this film, the ‘searcher’ is Lieutenant DeBuin (Bruce Davison), a young cavalry officer fresh out of West Point who is given command of a mission to track down an Apache band led by Ulzana which has broken out of the reservation. DeBuin is imbued with Christian values (his father is a minister) and takes it for granted that these have a universal application. However, he is forced to re-examine this assumption as he learns first to hate and then to respect, if not understand, the Apache and recognize that they are not assimilable to what he has been taught is ‘human nature’. Armando José Prats, in a powerful and intricate analysis of the film that concentrates on precisely this element, writes: DeBuin remains [ . . . ] beguiled by a persistent white fantasy about the Other, but that illusion, in the name of a bountiful benevolence, only masks a deepseated cultural arrogance – namely that the Indian’s humanity must perforce be

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Otherness in Hollywood Cinema like ours, derived through ours, perfected through ours. He is human only to the extent that he is human like us; and without us to endorse his humanity, to develop it and bring it forth into the world [ . . . ] he would remain forever the benighted brute . . . (2002: 271)

Ulzana’s Raid challenges this assumption by showing that human values are not necessarily translatable. From a Christian humanist point of view, the behaviour of the Apache in the film is unconscionable: they attack, rape and torture defenceless men and women. Confronted with the evidence, DeBuin is disgusted and learns to hate in a way not dissimilar to the hatred of Ethan in The Searchers. He does not, however, surrender to his hatred but interrogates Ke-Ni-Tay, the Apache scout who accompanies his troop, about why the Apache are so cruel. For Ke-Ni-Tay this is a meaningless question: how they act is merely ‘how they are’. He does, however, make it clear that it is not cruelty; it is rather a matter of taking ‘power’, something which alone can allow the Apache to survive in their environment. As such, this way of living is given an ontological necessity that situates the Apache in their harsh surroundings. This leaves Christian universality in tatters, as DeBuin appears to recognize at the end of the film when the scout, McIntosh (Burt Lancaster), mortally wounded, insists on remaining in the desert to die. ‘It isn’t Christian,’ responds DeBuin. ‘You’re right, lieutenant’ says McIntosh. ‘It isn’t’. There is recognition here that this environment is irrevocably ‘other’. It cannot be ‘civilised’ but represents a frontier that cannot be crossed. McIntosh provides a counterpoint to DeBuin. Like Ethan he follows in the line of outsider ‘Hawkeye’ type figures, but he would be better described as a man ‘who knows that he doesn’t know Indians’. When DeBuin says, for instance, ‘I was given to believe that you could track as well as any Indian’, McIntosh’s response is ‘Well, you was given to believe wrong, lieutenant’. McIntosh lives with an Apache woman, thus breaking the taboo against miscegenation, but effects to be merely pragmatic. His response when DeBuin asks if he hates the Apache is telling: ‘Be like hating the desert “cause there ain’t no water on it. For the moment I get by being plenty scared of ‘em” ’. Yet, in this statement lies a renunciation of the idea of the frontier and consequently of the ideology of Manifest destiny. McIntosh recognizes that ‘Indians’ are not a generic category; they cannot be understood as a whole because they have individual agency. At the same time, neither individually nor collectively, can they be assimilated to American society. Their otherness is radical not because of an underlying mentality or

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customs, but precisely because they do not and cannot have any conception of a frontier. Their lives are determined by adaptation to circumstances and they act in accordance with its needs, not seeking a goal beyond the immediate. Armando José Prats emphasizes the fact that the two Apache are perhaps unique in the annals of Hollywood film making in being given a voice of their own. They are not the faceless stereotypes of so many traditional Westerns, but nor are they the sympathetic figures found in the more recent revisionist films. More significantly, perhaps, they are not, like Magua in Mann’s Last of the Mohicans or Scar in The Searchers, mere reflections of the white man’s evil, acting in accordance with comprehensible (to a white audience) motives of revenge and hatred. Ulzana seeks only what Ke-Ni-Tay calls ‘power’. Having been confined to a reservation, denied his freedom to act, his break out is an assertion of his sense of ‘cultural integrity’, the determination to exist on his own terms. This represents a resolve not to submit to alien values, no matter what they are, and thus to retain an indomitable integrity. Ke-Ni-Tay, in contrast, has taken power by signing the white man’s paper, which commits him to a path allowing him a certain level of autonomy even if he is in service to alien values. His killing of Ulzana signifies not so much an end of the Apache way of life as its transference into a new form: Ke-Ni-Tay takes Ulzana’s ‘power’ through an articulation, precisely, of its radical otherness. The Indian in American culture, as Prats emphasizes, can easily be suppressed because he is a mere invention of the American. The portrayal of the Apache in Ulzana’s Raid is one of the few (if not the only) Hollywood film, to challenge not stereotypical representations of the Indian, but the very root of the American invention from which such representations have developed. The acting in Ulzana’s Raid is uniformly outstanding, but that of Joaquin Martinez as Ulzana and Jorge Luke as Ke-Ni-Tay stands out. Both men are Mexicans and neither seems to be of Apache descent, but they are able to convey a sense of the otherness of Apache culture such that I have never seen in any Western made either before it or since. Not that this is necessarily how Apache warriors of the 1880s would have moved or acted (how could it be?) but their ways of moving, their language (generally unspoken and given by expression and gesture) make us believe that these are people who live in, and are comfortable within, a harsh and unforgiving landscape. We recognize their humanness and thus our common humanity with them but we are made aware that their experience is so different from ours

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(no matter who we are) that it presents an insuperable barrier to understanding.1 This is a film of gestures, none more poignant that the expressions the three men (Ke-Ni-Tay, MacIntosh and DeBuin) exchange at the end of the film, expressions not of understanding but of recognition: recognition that what we share cannot be expressed in words. Ulzana, and his Apache warriors, too, communicate more through their eyes, hands or movements of their heads than they do with words as they move among the desert rocks confidently, waiting for the prey or stalking them with an exactitude and economy of movement that is quite breathtaking to watch. While we may be impressed by these details, we should still remind ourselves that they respond to the needs of representation and are no more ‘accurate’ to the reality of the Apache of more than a century ago than any other film.2 *** If in Ulzana’s Raid Aldrich tried to re-think the notion of the frontier, Sam Peckinpah throughout many of his films strove to re-invent it when he wasn’t mourning its loss, making of the frontier a mental boundary, as much temporal as spatial, which persists into the present day. What Fuller set up as a challenge to the future was seen by Peckinpah as an irrevocable loss and a calamity. Peckinpah, however, turns the notion of the frontier on its head so that it becomes the place of authenticity in which the wilderness is maintained against the constraints of modern society. It is precisely the place where otherness may be encountered and it is Mexico as a cultural icon that above all exemplifies this ‘otherness’ as it offers itself as a repository of frontier values. For Peckinpah the frontier is not something to be conquered but rather held in suspension because it allows us a space within which we can prove ourselves as human beings, a place where the idea of freedom remains alive, where distinctions of good and evil can be distinguished from the greyness of modernity as represented by the manifest destiny of US ideology. It is something that has constantly to be re-discovered, as Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan) and Sykes (Edmund O’Brien) find at the end of The Wild Bunch when they join the Mexican Revolution: ‘It ain’t what it used to be, but it’ll do for now . . .’ In the films of Clint Eastwood another interesting variant of the frontier myth is offered, one which probably responds to a peculiarly West coast, if not specifically San Francisco, sensibility, in which the outsider and the outcast are accorded a special place. Although his

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understanding of cultural difference is rather one-dimensional, it is interesting precisely for that reason. In Eastwood’s films the Other is never treated as alien, but nor is he assimilated to the same. Unlike in Peckinpah or Leone, the Mexican does not live on the other side of the border, beyond the frontier. Unlike in Arthur Penn or Costner, the Indian does not represent an alternative, more human, way of life. In Eastwood, Indians and Mexicans are treated like anyone else and judged according to their individual human characteristics. They are generally given sympathetic treatment, but this does not seem to have anything to do either with their racial or their cultural qualities. It rather responds to the fact that they are outsiders almost by definition. Indeed, his sympathetic characters are always loners, people who live outside society and follow their own course of action. This is so to such an extent that Eastwood seems to regard society as an enemy because it forces roles on people which are elementally corrupting; once a person accepts the role that society imposes on them, they are marked by this corruption. His attitude seems to be founded in an extreme form of individualism: the assumption that individual people are basically decent; but as soon as they accept a place in society, they are as if doomed. There is something almost Heideggerian about this: a man must establish and maintain his own sense of authenticity against the societal forces ranged around him. An interesting contrast exists here with John Ford, who was himself ambivalent about society, which he saw as a necessary evil; necessary, because it was the foundation of civilization and progress, evil because it tied people to it and separated them from their own natural destiny. Eastwood appears largely to share this attitude, but with him there is no ambivalence: society is a fundamental evil that must be resisted at all costs. This sensibility is most obviously manifest (even if in a crude way) in High Plains Drifter (1973), Eastwood’s variant of Dashiel Hammett’s Red Harvest, where a stranger, who may be a dead man, arrives in a small town and, having turned the it upside down and literally painted the town red, while re-naming it Hell, returns to the grave from where he may have come. A purging of the curse of society is often for Eastwood the hero’s necessary task and here he is an avenging angel, possibly the spirit of the former town marshal who was whipped to death in a crime in which the whole town was implicated. In this archetypal frontier town, only the Indians are innocent, precisely because they are not part of the society, while the only worthy character is Mordecai, the

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dwarf, whom the stranger makes Marshall and Mayor, his outsider status conferring upon him this distinction precisely because of the fact that, not being part of the society, he is exempted from the general corruption. If society is rejected, however, the idea of community is affirmed and in many of Eastwood’s films a community emerges by chance. Some of his films (most notably Bronco Billy, The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), even his most recent, Gran Torino [2008]) might even be used to illustrate the distinction identified by Tönnies between gemeinschaft (a community defined by affinity) and gesselschaft (a society based on contract). Gemeinschaft emerges as a result of people acting together and forging a community spirit that allows them to maintain their individuality without succumbing to the anonymity and social imprinting that a society imposes. Within these terms, Eastwood judges people on their actions, not on what they present themselves as being: they need to prove their authenticity. In High Plains Drifter (1973), as the avenger prepares the devastation which will cleanse the town, Mordecai asks, ‘What do we do after?’ ‘You live with it,’ responds the stranger. This is a frequent theme that recurs in different forms in Eastwood’s films, in which the hero performs a cleansing operation before leaving the future to the survivors. It takes its most fortuitous shape in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), in which another renegade refugee from the American Civil War finds, without willing it, that a community takes shape around him, consisting entirely of outsiders. In the celebrated Unforgiven, the avenging angel of High Plains Drifter is reprised in more complex form. Will Muney, the ‘hero’, here is a tormented man who seems to have been chosen as the instrument of vengeance against his will and, perhaps, against his own character. A former notorious gunman who has married and become a farmer, he will be drawn back into his old style of life when a prostitute is scarred by a client and her sister whores put together a reward for anyone who kills the men responsible. Muney takes up the challenge less for the financial reward (although he does need the money) than as a calling, something dictated from elsewhere, an imperative of destiny. What we learn of his past is that he was once a vicious killer who was ‘reformed’ by the love of a good woman who, although she has since died, still maintains a hold over him. He hates his past as a gunman principally, it appears, because it conflicts with his love for his wife and this leaves him torn between two destinies. We are told that he was hated and feared even by his partners in crime, even though Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), who previously rode with him and

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now joins him in his quest, clearly holds him in great affection. He appears to feel neither guilt nor remorse for his past; more a sort of bewilderment. His wife did not so much reform him, as draw him away from the path upon which he had been set by fate. A figure thus beyond good and evil, he seems drawn to act as a moral imperative. His task, like that of the stranger in High Plains Drifter, is to punish men for the fact of being men. Here his target is the law as an institution that functions to maintain the evil of society. Lawman Little Bill (Gene Hackman) runs the town on the basis of zero tolerance and assumes absolute power. Although effective, he exercises the law inequitably, punishing the men who scare the prostitute only to the extent that she was a valuable property ‘owned’ by Slim, the bar-owner, and ignoring the hurt that had been done. Little Bill, devoted to life and order, is doomed by that very fact, which is precisely what turns him into a tyrant as he seeks to maintain both his own personal security (by building a house) and that of the town (by acting on behalf of the powers that be through the enactment of the law). ‘I don’t deserve this. I was building a house’, are his dying words. ‘Deserve has nothing to do with it,’ is the devastating response of the vengeful Muney, a rebuttal of this very human – if vain – desire and a defiance of all human endeavour: we never get ‘what we deserve’ since we are subject to an implacable will which cannot be transgressed but dispenses a justice beyond human comprehension or even conception. There are many lawmen in Eastwood’s films, but usually their honesty forces them to work outside of or even to fall foul of the law itself. Little Bill, in contrast is the representative of a society which is not only corrupt in itself, but is dependant on his tyranny. Anti-progress and anti-transcendence, Eastwood’s sensibility responds to a kind of folk wisdom (which partly accounts for the popularity of his films) and this remains largely consistent even in those films directed by others. Founded in an American frontier individualism extended into modern life, in Eastwood’s work the frontier, far from being on the point of vanishing, is constantly being renewed. It is a world in which people are accepted as they are, neither different nor the same, but simply being. The distinction lies between those who have been true to themselves and those who have in a sense abandoned this frontier and chosen to surrender themselves to society. Since there is only being, otherness is all around. It does not define the self, but is simply an element through which being expresses itself. Even when evil appears in, say, Dirty Harry, it is self-contained and has no contaminating quality (it is not, therefore, other) and the

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real problem lies essentially in the corruption of society and its constraining laws. As American as it is, Eastwood’s vision is profoundly counter to the sense of historical destiny tied to Enlightenment notions of progress, freedom and democracy upon which American society is based. This apparent paradox bears witness to the heterogeneity of American culture which in certain ways gives a place to outsiders and eccentrics whose otherness it would otherwise deny.

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Chapter 3

CHASING CHINESE SHADOWS The Yellow Peril Reconsidered The conceptualization of China in Hollywood cinema is as oblique as it is complex. In the first place, when we use the word ‘China’ here it may also mean at times Japan or Korea as well as China itself. Saying this alerts us to the fact that we are not speaking about a real place or a real people but precisely about a concept that may be utilized to fit certain cultural pre-conceptions, which match an Orientalism of the ‘Far East’. The dominant assumption of this conception is that such people are ‘inscrutable’; their intentions are not easily readable, their smiles may conceal a malevolent intent or something other than what we might expect: they are never to be trusted. Contained in this idea was also a certain respect, combined with an equal mixture of contempt and fear. Unlike the Americans Indians, the Chinese were not perceived as conquerable; therefore the ideology of Manifest Destiny did not extend to them. But this very fact made them dangerous: they were beyond the ‘frontier’ yet not precisely of the wilderness; equally they could not be inserted into the melting pot that constituted American civilization. A peculiarly ambivalent quality inhered to many of the characterizations so that the word ‘China’ has a certain magical quality in Hollywood films, something that was invoked emblematically in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1973), a film which has nothing to do with Chinatown in any direct sense. Its evocation in the title and at various points in the film as a place of otherness is a recognition of the extent to which the concept ‘China’ signifies less a concrete place than a state of mind in Euro-American consciousness. We may often encounter an analogous evocation of an absent China, notably a quarter of a century earlier in Orson Welles’s Lady 51

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from Shanghai (1947) in which the word Shanghai is used to conjure up an aura of unease from nothing but certain associations already present in the popular imagination and which had been amplified through a whole tradition of cinematic portrayals, most memorably no doubt by Marlene Dietrich’s Magdalena in Shanghai Express (1932), who needed ‘more than one man’ to transform herself into the notorious ‘fallen woman’ named Shanghai Lily. Of course, the Shanghai of the 1930s also had an allure as an ultimate border town, as invoked in numerous films and most memorably in Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture (1941) in which it is defined as ‘a refuge for people who wished to live between the lines of laws and customs, a modern Tower of Babel’. Sternberg was aware of the quality of indistinction that an allusion to Shanghai brings with it, and he emphasizes here the fact that Shanghai is not actually China, but rather an international city outside of national boundaries. As the comprador, one of the characters in this film, says, ‘Not all Chinese are like me. There are some honest ones. If I so much as set foot in the Chinese city . . .’ The sentence is left hanging in the air, bringing attention to the artificial nature of the ‘Shanghai’ that is depicted in the film. In a parallel way, Rita Hayworth, the ‘Lady from Shanghai’ in Welles’s film, can be nothing other than dangerous to know, not because she is Chinese but because, like Magdalena, she has become ‘other’ through contact with the legendary Chinese city: ‘You need more than luck in Shanghai’, as she cryptically says. Although she claims to be Russian, she is, unlike Dietrich, a recognizably American type (indeed she was at the time the epitome of the American woman), but there is something ‘exotic’ about her persona, at least in this film and her earlier role in Gilda. She is a kind of a hybrid American, someone whose American soul has been compromised through having contact with what is outside of the United States: like Gene Tierney’s, Hayward’s cinematic persona was often slightly off-kilter, an ambivalent, not quite wholesome, American woman, whose questionable status is explained in this film by the contact she has had with a legendary China. The supposed ‘inscrutability’ of the Far East is also an admittance of the fact that while Westerners have generally assumed that they can understand the ways of most ‘Others’ they do not understand China. ‘The man who understands the Chinese’ does not exist in the same way as ‘the man who understands Indians’. Contradictory feelings of contempt and respect follow on from the lack of intimacy in this relation: China was only imperfectly colonized and the depth of

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Chinese history and scholarship give the lie to the immediate Western perception that it was a place of barbarism. There is also a peculiarly Hollywood – or perhaps Californian – tinge to the representation of the Chinese, arising no doubt from the fact that the Chinese were the ethnic group most immediately present to the inhabitants of the Golden State, and were often regarded there with more suspicion – doubtless in proportion to how vital they were to the economic health of the State – than blacks or Mexicans, something that induced the explicitly racist Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which, aside from introducing draconian measures against Chinese immigration, also gave official sanction to discrimination against Asians that could be as harsh as that against Afro-Americans, especially in California, where the lynching of Chinese was a common occurrence. Furthermore, the fact that among all of the immigrant groups in the United States, the Chinese were most resistant to incorporation into the idea of the American Dream contributed to the mysterious persona they assumed for Americans. Indeed, prior to the Second World War, the Chinese appear to have been as foreign to the American sensibility as the Native Indians: Kipling’s mantra, ‘east is east and west is west’ was perhaps even truer in the United States than in Europe. But where Native Americans could be confined to reservations and blacks to a de facto apartheid, the Chinese excluded themselves, establishing their own communities and networks that did not depend on the greater American society. As a result, Chinatown became a special kind of ‘no place’, somewhere that could not be spoken about, or if it was, never in other than hushed tones. It is precisely upon this ‘no place’ quality that its evocation in Polanski’s eponymous film played upon, justifying the District Attorney’s advice to his police officers there to do ‘as little as possible’ there. It represented less a racial than as a cultural threat to American values and moral purity. These perceptions, combined in the early part of the twentieth century with the emergence of Japan as a world power, fuelled the idea of a ‘Yellow Peril’, a notion that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and persisted until the end of the Second World War (and remains latent and available for re-activation at times when the West feels threatened). For Gina Marchetti, ‘the yellow peril combines racist terror of alien cultures, sexual anxieties, and the belief that the West will be overpowered and enveloped by the irresistible, dark, occult forces of the East’ (1993: 2). Insofar as it goes, this is probably

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true but the matter is much more complicated than this and such a statement begs more questions than it answers. The underlying attitude towards the Chinese was of a great civilization fallen into decadence, degrading its people but still retaining fragments of its former glory. These fragments, however, could become active; they could be joined together to constitute a threat to the integrity of Euro–American dominance of the world. It was this threat that was mythologized as the ‘Yellow Peril’, an inchoate, yet deadly, conspiracy determined upon opposing Western values and which could be set in motion by an evil genius able to join together the immemorial knowledge of ancient China with the findings of modern West. There were many such figures in the popular literature of the early twentieth century, but the most memorable, and the one who made the greatest mark in film, was the cold, saturnine and sometimes sadistic figure of Dr Fu Manchu. *** Fu Manchu was the creation of English writer Sax Rohmer and appeared for the first time in 1913 in his novel The Mystery of Fu Manchu (the American title was The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu). Rohmer himself described Fu Manchu as ‘the yellow peril incarnate in one man’ and he was indeed a remarkable creation, embodying so many of the fears of the Westerners of the time: as intelligent as he was cruel, able to combine the ancient wisdom of China with extensive knowledge of modern science and implacably devoted to the destruction of Western civilization. Nevertheless, Fu Manchu was not a simple racial stereotype. If the characterization may have drawn upon racist fears, we may wonder to what extent his author shared them since Fu Manchu is by no means entirely unsympathetic. Rohmer clearly had a certain admiration for him and may even (probably subconsciously or latently) used him to express his own distrust about the West, since we can read Fu Manchu uttering anti-colonialist sentiments and criticisms of the West of quite surprising acuity which his Western adversaries are unable to answer with anything but empty platitudes. Through his actions and the fact that he eludes any ‘victim’ sensibility, Fu Manchu may be seen as an eternal avenger of a sort that the oppressor fears, one who is the projection of his own fears and guilty secrets.1 It is all too easy to see in the ‘Yellow Peril’ in general nothing but the crassest of racist stereotypes or it may simply be seen as a paranoid

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Western fantasy. Japan in the 1930s did represent a threat to Western dominance and imperialist interests in East Asia. Yet this was always a struggle for influence in the modern world, not the consequence of a ‘clash of civilisations’ resulting from the recrudescence of ancient cultural values. The construction of the idea of the Yellow Peril in part served to deny this reality, sublimating the threat. Even after the war, the view that the emergence of an aggressive Japan had resulted from its supposed ‘warrior tradition’ which had to be extirpated in order for Japan to become a proper ‘modern’ nation, showed how deeply ingrained this perception was and in fact it still underlies American foreign policy, as can be seen in relation to the Middle East, where any sort of objective understanding of prevailing conditions seems to have been long ago thrown out of the window in favour of a perception that the problems of the region are the result of a ‘perverse’ refusal of modernity. It is hardly fanciful to see the almost mythic figure of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network – with its uncanny resemblance of the Sax Rohmer’s fictional creation of Fu Manchu and the Si Fan – as a materialization of deep-seated Euro–American fears of cultural contamination from the ‘East’. Unlike the American Indian, consigned to the background as a nameless, amorphous threat (and one that by the time Hollywood entered the scene had been overcome), the Oriental was present and armed. He was given a name and a personality which was often villainous but could be sympathetic, as in the cases of Charlie Chan or Mr Moto (and even Fu Manchu was given a likeable character in The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu [1929]). Whether genial or villainous, however, all of these characters played on the ‘inscrutable’ stereotype. And these figures of genius or mysterious powers were a perhaps necessary contrast with the idea of the ignorant coolie (no Chinese character could simply be an ordinary person). As today’s depictions of Islam date back to the Crusades, representations of China have their roots in the earliest contacts between Europe and China and the legends of Genghis Khan and collective fears that the threat from the ‘Mongol hordes’ presented to medieval Europe. This is invoked in one of the best of the Fu Manchu films, The Mask of Fu Manchu (Charles Brabin and Charles Vidor, 1932), in which the evil doctor covets the treasure of Genghis Khan in order to advance his quest for world domination. Incredibly perverse, ridiculous both in plot and details, this film nevertheless attains a savage poetry. What is interesting in much of the Fu Manchu stories, and it is something which is carried over into this adaptation, is that while the

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opposition between West and East is set up as a conflict between good and evil, the motivations of the Europeans often seem as dubious as those of the Asians. In this film Fu Manchu is presented as evil incarnate, but the Europeans are also a pretty unpleasant bunch – arrogant and crassly racist, they are quite ruthless in their pursuit of the treasure and have little or no regard for the feelings or even the safety of their native helpers. Nayland Smith, the British detective who is the hero of the tale, distinguishes between the European archaeologists and Fu Manchu, commending them because they are merely seeking ‘interesting archaeological specimens for the British Museum – you must bring these pretty things back to Britain’ while dismissing Fu Manchu as being ‘insane for power’. Yet this opposition is belied by the visuals, which show the archaeologists behaving in a completely selfish way when they open the tomb and discover the treasure – they are clearly more interested in the glory and career advancement the finding will bring to them than serving disinterested scientific knowledge (Fu Manchu at least shows some respect for these relics). And when Fu Manchu is defeated by his own death ray and their own safety is now assured, the Europeans leave the ray running so that it will indiscriminately annihilate all of his followers (Fu Manchu would never resort to such mass murder – it is the delight of inflicting languorous, agonizing death that appeals to him!). By the end of the film, Nayland Smith himself even seems to doubt archaeological innocence as he casts the treasure into the middle of the Indian Ocean instead of taking it to the British Museum. Fu Manchu has ‘a doctorate in philosophy from Edinburgh, a doctorate in law from Christ College and a doctorate in medicine from Harvard’, yet from the beginning is treated with contempt by the Europeans. His ‘evil’ is taken for granted; never for a moment is it considered that he might have any good qualities. At the same time, his whole aura is fantastic. Indeed, so perverse is the presentation of Fu Manchu’s court that the scenario might have come from the pen of the Marquis de Sade. The relish with which Boris Karloff, as Fu Manchu, and Myrna Loy,2 as his daughter Fah Lo Suee, assume their roles, contribute to the strange mood of the film by which it almost overflows any sense of normalcy to the extent that it almost becomes manifest that Fu Manchu is not so much a Chinese caricature as an inverse extension of the West’s fear of itself: his cruelty, his hunger for wealth, power, worldwide domination and sexual excess are our colonial crimes turned back against us. Furthermore, the film almost lays bare the West’s atavistic and superstitious dread of some mysterious power

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that may reside in Asia’s past and be reactivated. All it requires is for Fu Manchu to have possession of Genghis Khan’s sword and mask and, as Nayland Smith believes, ‘all Asia will rise and unite behind him’. ‘Asia’ here is one and indivisible and no distinction is made between different traditions. So the Chinese Fu Manchu intends to offer the heroine in sacrifice as bride to Shiva in a Buddhist ceremony, attended by a motley group of Asiatics, many of whom appear from their attire to be Moslems! This conflation of different elements of Asian culture illustrates the generalized fear of Asian conspiracy, epitomized by Fu Manchu’s invocation to his followers to ‘kill the white man and take his women’! Clearly Asians did not share the West’s terror of miscegenation! From today’s perspective the sort of representation given of China in this film would be unacceptable, but how would audiences of the time have responded to it? Would they have considered it to have any relation with the ‘real’ China, or treated it as belonging to a kind of impossible world, an Arabian Nights type fantasy. The very excessiveness of the evil makes one wonder. And while such representations arise from fears and desires within the Western audience itself, and a cumulative residue must attach to them that had an effect upon popular consciousness and confirmed stereotypes, this is far more indeterminate than many post-colonialist critics are want to assume. Other contemporary films indicate, at least, that audiences were not expected to take the myth of the Yellow Peril entirely at face value but to recognize its ironical aspects. William Wellman’s 1929 film Chinatown Nights, for instance, opens with what appears to be a vicious Tong war which we later discover to have been nothing but an elaborate performance staged for the benefit of tourists. Throughout this film, San Francisco’s Chinatown, while it is presented as a place where things are never as they seem and all appearances are to be distrusted, is sketched on a broad canvas indicating that the Chinese community is as variegated and heterogeneous as any other. The ambivalence of the myth of the evil Chinaman was also played upon in an extraordinary scene in The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Frank Capra, 1933), in which Barbara Stanwyck, having been abducted by a Chinese warlord, dreams that she is about to be raped by a Fu Manchu figure, the General Yen of the title. A masked figure comes to the rescue who we at first take for a dashing European. He shoots the evil Chinaman, who immediately vanishes. Stanwyck rapturously welcomes him into her arms as he removes his mask and leans to kiss her, revealing himself to be none other than General Yen himself.

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This simultaneous sense of attraction and revulsion, of desire mingled with fear, here makes manifest a latent element within the 1930s representation of the Yellow Peril which the film exposes with considerable subtlety. In this film, Stanwyck is prim New England girl Megan Davies, just arrived in Shanghai to marry smug missionary Dr Strike. Before the event can take place, she becomes caught up in a skirmish between rival factions and is knocked unconscious, only to awaken in the train of notorious warlord General Yen, who takes her to his summer palace. She is woken the next morning by the sound of gunfire. Looking out of the window she witnesses groups of men being executed. When she protests against this to the General, he orders a stop to the executions and promises her that in future they will take place where she cannot see or hear them. Appalled at his apparent callousness, she berates him, but he explains that food is scarce and cannot be spared to feed prisoners: ‘Surely it is more humane to kill them quickly than let them starve’. This is spoken in such a reasonable tone and with unanswerable authority that, if we may not accept its moral validity, we accept it as a legitimate point of view. Crude as this example may appear, it chips away at Megan’s certainty of a universally applicable Christian morality. Gradually she realizes that he is not a sadist but a man of taste and discernment and she tries to convert him to Christianity. In doing so she unwittingly betrays him to his enemies and destroys him. The instrument of the General’s downfall is his mistress Mah-Li (Toshia Mori). Having discovered that she is a spy for a rival warlord, Yen has ordered her death. Megan pleads for her life, arguing that to grant mercy would be to ensure Mah-Li’s loyalty. General Yen doesn’t believe it but agrees a wager with Megan: if she will act as surety for the girl’s loyalty he will set her free. Megan agrees, but Mah-Li replays kindness by passing vital secrets to the enemy. In doing so, she unhesitatingly places class loyalty (and love) above any obligation either to Yen or to the Christian kindness shown to her by Megan. If she is portrayed as treacherous she is also shown to have her motives. Moreover it is suggested that her duplicity is less due to her Chinese background than the result of a cruel upbringing – an orphan, she was taken in and brought up in a Christian mission school. Perhaps the most extraordinary moment in the film comes after the betrayal has become known. When Yen confronts Megan with the fact that she pledged her life against Mah-Li’s and therefore her own life is now forfeit, she recoils in sudden realization, which signifies his triumph. Yen has set the wager knowing that he was putting his

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life at stake. For Megan, however, it was an abstract game of whose consequences she was completely unaware. Yen’s taunting that her Christian faith is just an empty façade is confirmed and her moral certainty is annihilated. It is a stunning moment as Yen wins an argument by losing his life. Devastated by the failure of her Christian ethos, Megan returns to her room and makes herself up, changing into the dress the General has reserved for his future bride. She offers herself to him, but as they embrace he drinks poisoned tea, leaving her to hold him tenderly as he dies. The film ends as Yen’s American advisor, Jones, makes his escape to Shanghai on a barge in company with Megan. The cynical Jones gives this peculiar but quite moving eulogy for Yen: Great guy, great gambler. Told me he couldn’t lose. Well, the joke was on him. He lost his province, his army, his life. Maybe not, maybe the joke’s on us. Maybe you will marry Strike. Yen was crazy. He said we never really die, we only change. He was nuts about cherry trees. Maybe he is a cherry tree now. Maybe he’s the wind that’s pushing that sail. Maybe he’s the wind that’s playing around your hair. Ah, it’s all a lot of hooey. I’m drunk. Just the same, I hope when I cool off, the guy that changes me sends me where Yen is. And I’ll bet I’ll find you there too.

Megan says nothing. The camera holds on her face, leaving us to decide what her future will be. This recognition – given and withdrawn simultaneously – that Yen’s world view is both legitimate and fundamentally at odds with (and perhaps even superior to) Euro-American notions of reality is striking. Doubtless only a somewhat disreputable and comical character – a cynic and a drunkard – would be allowed to make such a statement in a film of the time. Yet it implicates Megan and responds to what she appears to be thinking; everything in the film suggests that she has been profoundly changed by her encounter with other cultural values. The fascination of The Bitter Tea of General Yen lies in its intertwining of the exotic with erotic and sexual connotations. If the presentation of China is stereotypical, real issues of cultural communication are being explored in it as these very stereotypes are questioned even as they are being set up. Indeed, a genuine effort is made to engage with the determinants of otherness: the encounter between Megan and Yen is established as a challenge on both sides and the cultural and moral values of each are seriously questioned. Yen berates Megan for having come to China full of moral certainty while knowing nothing of the

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culture: ‘Have you ever read our poetry?’ he asks. It is a question whose answer is already implied. Despite its melodramatic plot, then, the film touches on genuine issues of cross-cultural communication in a more honest way than many films being made today. On its release The Bitter Tea of General Yen ran into considerable censorship problems, both at home and abroad. Ironically, it was banned in China as anti-Chinese and in Japan as pro-Chinese while in the United States it was subject to a campaign directed against it by women’s groups who considered it immoral.3 Such are the vagaries of what may be read into representations! *** In the portrayal of the Chinese, otherness is signified not only by race but also by sex: the fascination of Chinese women was seen in terms of their being either docile Madame Butterfly types or as dangerous dragon woman. We can see these two contrasting figures drawn in broad strokes in the forms of Fu Manchu’s ferocious daughter, Fah Lo Suee, and his ‘captive woman’ Ardatha, who performs his will against her apparently naturally sweet nature. In the stories there is considerable ambivalence in the characterizations of both women, whose ‘inscrutable’ qualities are even more in evidence than they are in the men. This ambivalence was rarely explored in the Fu Manchu movies, however, which were mostly content to utilize the stereotypes in predictable ways. Their determinants were however challenged in Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932) and The Shanghai Gesture (1941). The first featured radiant Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong as Hui Fei, who becomes the heroine of the plot when she kills the villainous general, while the latter depicts the ultimate ‘Dragon Woman’ in the character of Mother Gin-Sling. A mention should be given here to the tragedy of the career of Anna May Wong, one of Hollywood’s greatest actresses and yet condemned to spend her career as a bit part player, usually playing slaves, servants or prostitutes (in fact she turned down the role of Mah-li in Bitter Tea, regarding it as demeaning) because she could never be allowed to be the love interest of a Caucasian.4 Only in Shanghai Express did she receive a role commensurate with her talent. Even here she played a prostitute and her role was subsidiary to that of Marlene Dietrich, but she was still given the opportunity to shine as an actress. Sternberg appears to comment upon the injustice done

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to her by Hollywood by having Captain Harvey (the ‘hero’ of the story) refuse to shake her hand in a scene which still seems shocking today.

Figure 4 Anna May Wong and Marlene Dietrich waiting for embarkation in Shanghai Express. Shanghai Express is a consciously ‘Orientalist’ construct but Sternberg had an appreciation of the complexities of cultural representation that was as great as any film maker and he plays on it to examine the relationships between a motley group of travellers. Boarding the Shanghai Express in Peking along with the Chinese woman played by Wong and the German Dietrich are an English officer, a French soldier, a German salesman, an old lady from England, an American entrepreneur, a Scottish minister and a Chinese warlord. In the confined setting of a train, these characters work through the relationships with one another. In a way, the film is about how people establish a sense of space within which they feel comfortable and that enables them to interact with others. The confined environment also allows for consideration of spatial relations not simply between the characters but also in terms of how they respond to the material reality of the train itself, which offers a further image of otherness (when asked why everyone in the film spoke in an even monotone, Sternberg replied, ‘This is the Shanghai Express. Everyone must talk like a train’) within the context of an imagined China. The Chinese republican government

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were nevertheless not amused. In fact the film angered them even more than Bitter Tea and they demanded that it be banned and all copies of it burned. Sternberg recounts that: I thought the canvas of China, as evoked by my imagination, quite effective. The film . . . featured a hold-up by bandits. This caused the Chinese to resent the slur on their national law and order, and they banned the film wherever they could, and I was told that if ever I appeared in China I would be arrested and punished. Nevertheless, some years later I managed to enter that extraordinary country, after the train that brought me there was delayed by bandits after crossing the Manchurian border. The actual Shanghai Express, which I then took out of Peking, was thoroughly unlike the train I had invented, except that it, too, carried a protecting complement of armed military. I was more than pleased that I had delineated a China before being confronted with its vast and variegated reality. There is quite a difference between fact and fancy. (Sternberg, 1965: 163–4)

Sternberg emphasizes the fact that his ‘China’ was an imaginative construction that had no necessary relation with the ‘real’ China, but this cut no ice with the Chinese government which took exception to the depiction of the country as a chaotic place in which legal authority had only tenuous control. Yet not only China and the Chinese are presented through the lens of stereotype: all of the characterizations play upon national stereotypes in a way that is richly ironical and serves to undermine those very stereotypes. None of the characters, in fact, are what they seem to be and they are all in different ways running away from something or have something to hide, even if it is only (in the case of the elderly English lady) the fact that she has hidden her dog from the authorities. The journey through China is like a passing through purgatory, in which all secrets will be revealed by the end when the souls of each of the characters will either be redeemed or lost forever. Sternberg made two other films set in China: The Shanghai Gesture (1941) and Macao (1952). The latter is a relatively conventional thriller, but The Shanghai Gesture is one of the strangest films to come from Hollywood’s golden years. This film was drawn from a successful stage play which producers had been attempting to turn into a film for many years. Thirty-two scripts had been rejected by the Hays Code before the version Sternberg would direct was finally considered acceptable. It may seem surprising that a film having decadence and amorality as central themes and treating miscegenation as a key motif should have been accepted in 1941. Prior to this, the Hays Office would most likely have been as concerned about the offence the film would have given to the governments of China (for its representation of Shanghai) and Britain (for its acerbic presentation of behaviour of English capitalists). By 1941, however, such considerations no longer applied, as the war

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had placed both markets off limits and perhaps the film passed censure for this reason. The film is set in a notorious gambling den in the international quarter of Shanghai run by the formidable Mother Gin-Sling (Una Munson). As the film begins she learns that she will have to close: English capitalist and property developer Sir Guy Charteris (Walter Huston) is developing the area for real estate. This sets the scene for a deadly confrontation between them, in which the pawn will be Sir Guy’s daughter Victoria (Gene Tierney), who assumes the name ‘Poppy Smith’ when she becomes a habitué of the casino. In this setting, a group of exotic characters, at war with each other and with themselves, are brought together for a fateful encounter. As a film about manipulation and the mechanics of a decadent society, The Shanghai Gesture stands as a critique of both capitalism and colonialism that is as incisive as any film made in Hollywood. It is also a film also about chance and fate, set in a place of ‘ghastly familiarity’ as Poppy expresses it, that ‘smells so incredibly evil’ and which could not exist anywhere ‘except in the imagination.’ With a marked sense of characters being trapped in time, lost in a ritual they cannot escape, it stands as a meditation on transitoriness of all things. If Charteris is an archetypal imperialist, an imperialism that has social, cultural, sexual and moral dimensions, he is more than matched by the defence mechanisms erected by Gin-Sling. Marx’s contention that history repeats itself first as a tragedy then as a farce receives an odd confirmation in this tale of sexual aggressor returning 20 years later to demand not the woman’s body, but her kingdom. Paralleling the relationship between Charteris and Gin-Sling is the more intense but no less degraded one between Poppy and Dr Omar (Victor Mature). ‘Nothing human is foreign to me,’ says Dr Omar in a moment of dazzling erotic intensity and he dresses and undresses Poppy’s arm. Having been charged by Mother Gin-Sling with the task of administering Poppy’s ruin, Omar acts as a kind of ‘homme fatal’, preparing her for a Chinese New Year celebration – the day when all debts are paid. Dr Omar, the ‘poet of Shanghai . . . and Gomorrah’, is almost Otherness incarnate; an ‘other’ to everything, including himself. ‘Look at that Arab or whatever he is’ says Poppy when she first sees him, with the emphasis on the ‘whatever’. He is like a figure conjured up in an opium dream, an amazing Doctor of Nothing of languorous lethargy, a character of no substance, a mere appearance, who could never have been born but comes into existence only as a phantasm of other people’s imagination. He is the eternal seducer who is either indifferent to the

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results of his seduction, or perhaps disgusted that his victims have succumbed so easily. He degrades Poppy on orders from Mother Gin-sling, but one also feels it is as much for his own satisfaction. Poppy is his perfect complement as she also contains a strong element of Otherness within herself and in succumbing to him it is as though she is submitting to a destiny that is as much desired as it is appropriate. Has she not recognized the casino as a place of evil, a place where people lose their souls, if they had any in the first place? One wonders whether any actress would have been able to convey this sense as well as Gene Tierney, a woman who had an unstable personality and found it difficult to adapt to her own self and may even be said to have experienced herself as ‘Other’. As she once said: ‘My problem was not to play characters, but to assume my own’. (quoted in Domecq, 1981: 69) At the same time, there is something recognizably everyday about Poppy’s transformation, as Douglas McVay notes: ‘In a way, this sexual metamorphosis occurs in most women as a result of sexual awakening: in fact, for many men it is the ability to change a frosty, elegant, selfcontained female into a warm, dishevelled, uncontrolled, adoringly dependent animal which constitutes the essential, primary excitement in sexual pursuit and conquest’ (McVay, 1977: 19). Tierney conveys this metamorphosis with great panache.

Figure 5 Gene Tierney offering her soul to Victor Mature in The Shanghai Gesture.

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As an imaginative construction set in the ‘Orient’, The Shanghai Gesture draws attention to its own ‘inauthenticity’ even more than Shanghai Express. Shanghai as a dark and dangerous place, full of double-dealing and secret vices, might stand as a pure exemplar of the Orientalism that Edward Said condemned as ‘a European invention [that] had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences’ (Said, 1978: xxi). And yet Sternberg’s ironical and knowing approach almost brings such a critique into question. Sternberg was not ignorant about the ‘East’. He had studied and was deeply impressed with Chinese and Japanese culture and he incorporated motifs and acting styles drawn from Chinese opera and Japanese Kabuki theatre into the film. His final film, The Saga of Anatahan (1953), was in fact a Japanese film, made in Osaka with Japanese finance and using an entirely Japanese cast and crew (it also remains one of the most remarkable examples of cultural crossover in its story of Japanese soldiers shipwrecked on a Pacific island whose only inhabitants are a single man and woman). Yet he was not at all an ‘Orientalist’ seduced by the exotic image. Even as he made use of it, he maintained a sardonic, ironical distance from this exoticism. This is made apparent by the character of the Coolie in The Shanghai Gesture, who acts as a kind of chorus, commenting on the action – usually through gesture rather than language, although he also has the last word. Charteris, making his way to the fateful party, condescendingly asks him, ‘you likee Chinee New Year?’ He responds, ‘I likee’. Later, when Charteris is leaving, having been confronted with some terrible truths and with his daughter dead, it is the Coolie’s turn to return the question: ‘You likee Chinee New Year?’ The devastating irony here is merely the culmination of a thread that has run through the whole film. Sternberg in fact never misses an opportunity to satirize the pomposity and hypocrisy of the Europeans. The most obnoxious character is the English flunky Caesar Hawkins (Eric Blore). In a scene which recalls the one in Shanghai Express in which Doc Harvey refuses to shake hands with Hui Fei, Hawkins comments to his companions after a Chinese waiter has taken the group’s order, ‘Confounded Asiatics, insist on trying to speak English’. Yet the Chinese man has spoken in immaculate English: Hawkins is the one whose English diction is suspect. This sort of irony runs through Sternberg’s work and allows him constantly to undermine the exotic stereotypes he sets up in extremely knowing ways.

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Even though it is a stylized and imagined construction, this legendary Shanghai is not arbitrary. The international quarter of Shanghai in the 1930s did have a reputation for debauchery and intrigue (something upon which later Chinese films like Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad (1995) have played upon), but this surely makes a more significant comment about its European colonization than it does on the Chinese (and of course by 1941 the city was under Japanese occupation). The sense that Sternberg above all conveys is that this is a city under a curse, which hangs like a weight above the heads of each of the characters, none of whom ultimately have free will but function according to some pre-determined ritual. Only Mother Gin-Sling and Charteris appear to have the power to act, but each of them are trapped by their pasts. They in fact should perhaps be considered as masks rather than real characters – testifying to the influence of Chinese opera and Japanese theatre traditions on Sternberg – all of the habitués of the casino being refugees, deserters from many lands. A strong strain of anti-nationalism runs through the whole film. As the Russian bartender says: ‘I have no country, and the more I see of countries the better I like the idea’. The only heroic and admirable characters in these two films are the women – Hui Fei and Magdalena in Shanghai Express and Mother Gin Sling in The Shanghai Gesture, each of them presented as ‘fallen women’ and as emanations of the otherness of the ‘Orient’. Free spirits in a world that has succumbed to lethargy, they are, along with Charteris, the only decisive characters, but where Charteris acts only in the service of his conglomerate’s interests, the three women are all motivated by passion (the only really false note in the two films is why Magdalena would be so much in love with the pompous and overbearing Doc Harvey). And while Mother Gin-Sling may be ruthless and rule her kingdom with an iron hand, she is protective of those under her care and we learn that she has had to have been tough to survive in the violent and cruel world to which Charteris abandoned her when their love affair ended 20 years earlier. In all of cinema history, no one, I think, has matched Sternberg for his nuanced and intricate understanding of cultural difference and in these two Shanghai films he was able to utilize ‘Orientalism’ in a sense against its nature. In doing so, he raises the question of representation and its effect in complex ways which do not allow the luxury of an easy dismissal of the Chinese as constituting a ‘Yellow Peril’, but presents them as part of the tapestry of a human culture. In Hui Fei and Mother Gin-Sling (and even the Mongolian ‘coolie’ in The Shanghai Gesture)

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he created articulate and multi-dimensional characters who may not escape from stereotypes, but they do not (at least for any attentive viewer) confirm them, while the one unpleasant Chinese character, the warlord Mr Chang (Walter Orland) in Shanghai Express, is still allowed to make barbed comments about the decadence of the West. The notion of the ‘Yellow Peril’ was certainly a nefarious one that arose from a generalized suspicion and paranoia within Euro-American consciousness in the early years of the twentieth century and often confirmed racist sentiment. It contained, however, shades of meaning and implication which could be turned back against western vanity and colonial arrogance, at times with considerable subtlety, as we have seen in the cases of Capra’s and Sternberg’s films, but even in directors less sensitive to cultural difference sub-textual and latent elements could introduce themselves to subvert the manifest meaning and cause the viewer a certain level of disquiet.

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Chapter 4

THE EXOTIC AS SPECTACLE If American Indians or Chinese were part of a living discourse, to the extent that the popular cinema audience knew, or thought they knew, something about them, there emerged from the 1920s an attraction towards what was almost completely unknown to them, at least in terms of its living reality. This was a fascination for the distant or the ‘primitive’, brought to the commercial cinema through documentaries made in the 1920s which transmuted during the 1930s into the exotic adventure film. Partly no doubt as a response to the deprivations of the Depression, audiences were able to find a momentary escape in the far away, projecting themselves as adventurers penetrating into strange and perhaps dangerous situations. The exotic as spectacle can be said to have been initiated in 1922 by Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, a film which lies at the origin of the documentary tradition and initiated the possibility of anthropological film making.1 Of course, exotic spectacle and film were hardly strangers to one another; in fact the cinema was founded as a spectacle and the display of the exotic was a time-honoured element of spectacle. But the spectacles of early cinema were conceived most often as imaginative projections into the past, bringing to life the colour and pageantry of ancient Rome, Babylon or Egypt in epic style. The spectacle, indeed, was expected to be ‘larger than life’ and no one regarded the ancient Babylon of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, for instance, as anything other than a manifestation of Hollywood grandiloquence. Setting his film among living Inuit, Flaherty in contrast thrilled audiences not with extravagance, but with the exoticism of the ordinary. With the claim it made to reveal the reality of Inuit life combined with the commercial success it would know, Nanook opened up the possibility of a new genre of film making, an ethnographically informed encounter with the otherness of remote societies. In fact, this ‘genre’ had a very short lifespan.2 68

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What it really gave birth to was the exotic adventure film set in a distant, but contemporary, reality. Not that Flaherty’s films are really exotic. Or at least, they are so only in their setting, which he enters in order to render an account of the ‘ordinary’ behaviour of the people being filmed. Nanook purports to be an account of an actual Inuit family and yet their behaviour is remarkably in tune with norms of the nuclear family.3 In this sense, Flaherty almost obliterates otherness, or even resolutely refuses to see it. The only difference between his Eskimos and ‘us’ results from the environment, which alone in Nanook of the North contains an element of otherness.4 Yet, even if the film is an extremely moving drama of everyday life, the more one watches it the more one realizes that it is almost devoid of ethnographic detail and what little there is cannot be taken on trust. Strangely, viewing Nicholas Ray’s entirely fictional The Savage Innocents (1959) probably gives us greater insight into the otherness Inuit life and culture than Nanook of the North, since at least Ray asked himself what made the culture of the Inuit distinctive, while Flaherty simply took surface appearance for ‘truth’ and never appears to have questioned the extent to which it was conditioned by his own subjectivity.5 Paradoxically Nanook almost stands today as the antithesis of a documentary because it is so transparently dramatized. Or at least, to the extent that it was directly observed, it raises uncomfortable questions. Flaherty emphasizes the harshness of his subjects’ lives and during some of the hunting events it is explained that the people are on the verge of starvation and, if the hunt fails, might die. Wouldn’t there even be something immoral about filming people at a time when they were engaged in such an elemental struggle? Was the film maker also starving? Did he share in the spoils of their successful hunts?6 Such uncomfortable questions are general ones about documentary film making. Yet, as we look back at the film from today’s perspective, we can still see that Nanook’s great value lies precisely in the fact that it is a dramatization of a struggle rather than a real struggle. It is the peoples’ own story, told admittedly through Flaherty and obeying certain of his own assumptions about what they ought to be like, but still the result of a genuine collaboration. It is thus their reality, not observed in the raw as it was actually lived (which in any event film can never really portray), but as an account of how they wanted to present their lives to others. These were people Flaherty knew well. He had been visiting the area since 1910 as a mining engineer and fur trader and had made an earlier film, which was lost when the negative caught fire. He was thus well placed to depict the reality of Inuit life, even if

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he romanticized it and twisted its details to serve his own image of what they should be like. The fact that we know that several scenes in the film are flagrantly ‘false’ in terms of the actual lives of Nanook and his family, as it depicted practices which were by then obsolete, such as the dangerous scene of the harpooning of the walrus, or even indulged in pure primitivist fantasy (the scene in which Nanook is shown trying to eat a gramophone record) does not bring into question the fundamental truth that Nanook contains as a document of Eskimo life as relayed through an encounter between Flaherty and a native group of the time and placed in evidence on film. What is important is the way in which this ‘truth’ is understood. There is much that is commendable about Flaherty’s flattening of cultural difference and his determination to see people simply as people engaged in a struggle for existence. Especially in 1922, for audiences to see people they considered as ‘primitives’ having fundamentally the same human problems as ‘us’ was doubtless salutary in a way that makes the flagrant distortions of representation excusable if not to be endorsed. The commercial success of Nanook led to Flaherty being offered a contract with Paramount, at the time one of the most prestigious Hollywood studios, to make a series of similar films about other distant peoples. Unfortunately he was never to find a set of circumstances as congenial to his personality as those which had given rise to Nanook. Principally this was because he did not have the opportunity to develop the sort of intimate relation he had known among the Inuit, but also his lack of awareness of socio-cultural difference and his insensitivity to political determinants, as well as his scorn for the mechanics of film making and the way in which meaning is inscribed in film, were all factors that made the remainder of his film making career somewhat frustrating. In fact, his career in Hollywood was largely a series of misadventures from which he was only able to take one film to completion. This was Moana, set in Samoa. He intended to approach the film in the same way as he had Nanook, filming whatever caught his eye and approaching the subject with no preconceived idea. He was faced with all sorts of unanticipated problems, however: pressure from producers to complete the film, technical problems with the film equipment, and an inability to integrate with the local population were among the factors that made the experience trying. Flaherty also became more aware of the problems of representation: in the Arctic his many years of experience living among the Inuit allowed him to focus significant aspects of their daily life as they related to his own

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thematic concern: the elemental struggle of people against nature in a harsh environment. But existence in Samoa could hardly have been more different than that in the Arctic and exposed the limitations of Flaherty’s approach. Moana is not a bad film, but it lacks the special qualities that made Nanook so compelling: the fact that Flaherty had known the people he was portraying for many years allowed the film to be essentially collaborative. In Moana, however, his ‘collaborators’ were really a paid cast acting out a role assigned to them, and this only accentuated the extent to which Flaherty tended to impose his own vision on the material. In his next project, White Shadows in the South Seas, drawn from a popular novel by Frederick J. O’Brien published in 1919, the problems became even more pronounced and the film had to be completed by his assistant, Woody Van Dyke. After this he worked collaboratively with the great German director, F. W. Murnau on Tabu (1929). Creatively and temperamentally, however, they were unable to work together and the film would be completed by Murnau alone. Flaherty’s films illustrate graphically the merits and dangers of working by instinct. Given the right conditions, as he had with Nanook, it could result in a film of great power and popular interest. But even here, his lack of reflection both about his own involvement and about the process of film making meant that it was largely his vision of life that was emerged on the screen rather than an objective observation of another cultural reality. His claim that distortion was necessary in order to catch the ‘true spirit’ of a thing was really a disingenuous acknowledgement of his inability to objectivize his relationship with his subjects. In Tabu, these issues came to the fore. The story was based upon a native legend that had been heard by Flaherty while working on White Shadows. One of the points of discord between him and Murnau was the relation to film making: where Flaherty saw film as a means to be utilized only to the extent necessary to record events in the most effective way, Murnau, more aware of the reality of film as a construction, knew that the process of filming could not be separated from the object of the filming and that one’s subjectivity always intervened. For Murnau, therefore, the idea capturing the ‘true spirit’ of the object had little meaning. Compared to Nanook or even Moana, therefore, we are always aware in Tabu that we are witnessing a constructed story and that whether or not it is accurate to the lives of the peoples it depicts is not the primary issue.

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At the same time, however, Murnau was similar to Flaherty in the extent to which he imposed his concerns on the story rather than allowing the subject to shape itself in an objective way. This was another reason for the discord between the two men, since Flaherty still wanted to explore his old themes of man’s survival against nature, while Murnau was interested in the workings of fate. Murnau was no more interested than Flaherty in socio-political issues and so the indigenous culture in Tabu is represented largely outside of social reality and any conflict between it and French colonial power is seen purely in terms of a primitive/civilized dichotomy which obviates otherness as it reifies the notion of the ‘primitive’.7 Nevertheless, having a darker sensibility than Flaherty, Murnau inscribes Tabu with an awareness of the otherness that exists within human beings and leads to social tension and disturbance. *** Other Hollywood films of the 1920s and 1930s were, however, by no means blind to the colonialist effects of cultural contact. Exotic potboilers like White Shadows in the South Seas (in Van Dyke’s hands a better film and displaying greater political insight than Flaherty would have been likely to have given it) or King Vidor’s Bird of Paradise (1932) portray white adventurers in a hardly favourable light. In the latter, the hero, played by Joel McCrea, sweeps a South Seas princess off her feet (literally), in the process breaking a host of local taboos and condemning his lover to certain death when he departs. Seeing this film today leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, less for the portrayal of South Seas life than for the outrageous way in which the white man assumes he has the right to enter an alien culture and behave just as his likes, oblivious to the disturbance he causes and the chaos he leaves behind him. The film does not endorse his behaviour but equally does not suggest any reproach of it and may at times indulge it, giving a sense that, while such behaviour might be deplorable, it was nevertheless sanctioned by the superiority of the white man’s culture. The ambivalence Vidor’s film displays towards the ‘primitive’ is put in starker evidence by the films of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, two adventurers who, with Grass, a Nation’s Battle for Life (1925), brought to its greatest fruition the early ‘ethnographic’ style of film making initiated by Flaherty. They would go on to become masters of the spectacular adventure film in the 1930s, making the greatest example of the genre, King Kong (1933). Cooper and

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Schoedsack had none of Flaherty’s self-justificatory and at times self-delusively high-minded claims for their work. They were after spectacle and excitement and were seeking to dazzle their audience. Nevertheless, as an ethnographic document Grass (made in circumstances every bit as extraordinary) is the equal of Nanook and reveals different aspects of the difficulty of the depiction of ‘otherness’. The film concerns the bi-annual migration of the Bakhtiari people of the Persian Gulf as they cross the mountains to find grass for their herd. Living as the tribe lived, Cooper and Schoedsack were able to obtain some extraordinary footage (although not as much as they would have liked – they had intended to accompany the Bakhtiari on their return migration later in the year but the region became engulfed in a civil war which made it impossible).

Figure 6 Merian C. Cooper (left) and Ernest B. Schoedsack communing among the Baktiari.

Cooper and Schoedsack had better ‘ethnographic eyes’ than Flaherty, able to recognize some of the specificity of Bakhtiari culture and not simply seeing them as ‘us’ transposed to a harsher time and place.

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Filming an entire group of 50,000 people, they did not reduce the ‘other’ to the ‘same’ as Flaherty had when he made the Inuit ‘recognizable’ to a Western audience by imposing upon their familial relations the structure of the nuclear family.8 Moreover, unlike Flaherty, they were ambitious film makers who understood the nature of the medium and its power of constructing images. Though they may have been as politically naïve, and though as much as Flaherty they had an agenda which they imposed upon their subjects, Cooper and Schoedsack had a reflexive sense that was absent with Flaherty: they recognized that film did not ‘capture’ the truth of reality but rather imposed its own reality. The ‘truth’ of the film did not, therefore, lie in the observation of a subject, but in the relationship that was established between the film makers and the object. For them the ‘factual’ film and the ‘fictional’ film were not in contradiction to one another but were mutually informing phenomena. Nevertheless, Cooper’s and Schoedsack’s approach was determined by their taste for the spectacular, and they presented themselves in Grass as adventurers in quest not necessarily of the ‘primitive’ but of what had been ‘forgotten’ as civilization moved westwards. While they respected the Bakhtiari way of life as ‘other’, they clearly regarded American civilization as the dynamic core of culture which all others lagged behind, somewhat as the tail of a comet trailing off into the distance. Their rationale for making Grass was to penetrate into this tail and recover some of its forgotten aspects. Yet, far from being a ‘forgotten people’ as claimed in the commentary, the Bakhtiari were a powerful political force in Iran and they allowed Cooper and Schoedsack to make their film (apparently at the behest of the British, with whom the Bakhtiari, in possession of land containing extensive oil fields, were allied) because they knew it would be a useful propaganda tool. Like Nanook, Grass was taken up by Paramount and experienced a comparable commercial success. The studio then financed Cooper and Schoedsack to go to Siam (now Thailand) to make another film of a similar type. This became Chang (1927), a more story-bound and spectacular film than Grass and closer to the sort of picture Cooper and Schoedsack wanted to make (in fact Cooper stated in an interview towards the end of his life that he considered it his best film9). Accurately subtitled a ‘drama of the wilderness’, Chang charted the survival of a community living deep in the jungle (claimed to be the place in the world where people were most at threat from attack

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by wild animals). Enormously successful at the box-office (Cooper believed it was the most profitable film in movie history up till that point10), Chang confirmed Cooper’s and Schoedsack’s credentials and set in place the parameters of the genre of adventure film as it would develop in the coming years, reaching its culmination with their own King Kong (1933). King Kong is a film so resonant and able to be interpreted in so many different ways that any analysis of it will inevitably be inadequate and subject to challenge. Nevertheless it is surely indisputable that this film more than any other embodied 1930s attitudes towards otherness and that Kong himself stood tall (literally) as otherness incarnate. Animator Willis O’Brien had an extraordinary ability to bring his creations to life and Kong is given a personality that is almost quintessentially uncanny. A liminal character, existing in a netherworld between the imaginary and the real, he touches us in the depths of our subconscious and attains the very image of otherness, a simultaneous projection and reflection of the desires and fears of the audience that makes the sadness that people tend to feel at his demise comprehensible. The makers of the film were perfectly aware of the absurd premises upon which the film was based and rather than try to conceal them, brought attention to them. In so doing, they made the audience their accomplices in such a way that the film becomes a collective dream and, because it follows a dream logic, it does not need to make sense at a conscious level. Contributing to the sense that we are witnessing a dream is the way it cleverly draws upon ancient myths, most particularly the folk story of Beauty and the Beast. In turn, King Kong has itself become a myth, penetrating into the collective unconsciousness in perceptible and imperceptible ways. The film cannot, however, be dismissed as escapist fare or fantasy. Although its success was undoubtedly partly due to the fact that it offered an escape from the cares of the Depression, as it did so it addressed something far deeper within human consciousness. In particular, it effects a kind of interpenetration of otherness, by which I mean that it disturbs any easy sense of identification which would allow for a definitive interpretation of the meaning of any of its aspects. It can (and in fact has been) be interpreted in ways that may appear ingenious and convincing if taken in isolation but which are often contradictory to one another.

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Figure 7 The primitive as spectacle: King Kong.

This is especially so because of the reflexive way in which it was made, that it is a film as much about the process of film making as it is a monster movie. First of all, it details how a topic is chosen, how a film gets cast, produced, directed, and promoted. It is also a film about the media in general, its relationship to the audience, and its need for sensation and novelty. Moreover, Cooper and Schoedsack had an extremely well-developed (if intuitive) understanding of how images work and how representation functions. This is most clearly seen in their use of stereotypes. Although King Kong is undoubtedly a racist film according to our current criteria, the way in which racial stereotypes are set up in the film is extraordinarily knowing. Neither Cooper nor Schoedsack were in any way subversives. In fact they probably shared most of the prejudices of their audience, but they had an element of emotional empathy (combined with the fact that they did not take themselves seriously) that enabled them to assume a role less as creators of a film than as mediators between the audience and the topic of the film. By all accounts they (or at least certainly Cooper11) were as excitable and credulous as anyone in the audience, but theirs was a credulity informed by experience and by an understanding that the world and the image of the world were not the same thing. They were able to play upon the fact, asking questions of the audience as to what they could and could not believe.12

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They were also playing on their own roles as film makers: appearing in the film as the pilots who kill Kong at the end they make a conscious comment on the role of the film maker as both creator and destroyer by means of images, another of the themes that runs throughout the film, illustrating the idea that the camera is both an image maker and a weapon. This is even announced early in the film when Denham first discloses that he is intending to make a film about Kong. ‘What if he doesn’t like having his photo taken?’ responds Driscoll. If it was their mixture of naivety and sophistication that allowed Cooper and Schoedsack to make a film so resonant that connected with the taste of the audience and acted on the unconscious in such a way as to reveal universal themes, we can see from their other films that they were far from being uncritical about their own attitudes. In The Most Dangerous Game (1932), for instance, a film made contemporaneously with King Kong,13 the protagonist is a big game hunter who has the tables turned on him when he is shipwrecked on an isolated island owned by Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks), a crazed Russian hunter who has taken the idea of big game hunting to its logical conclusion and tracks down ‘the most dangerous game’: human beings. Zaroff is as fascinating a character as Kong as a representation of otherness, a character who is simultaneously utterly alien and yet curiously familiar: alien in the sense that his behaviour goes beyond acceptable human conduct, but familiar because he does no more than take to a logical extreme an activity (hunting) we ordinarily regard as quite normal. Zaroff’s explanations for his actions are perfectly ‘logical’ in their own terms; they are only answerable in terms of the moral responsibility that humans have for one another. Zaroff’s ‘insanity’, in fact, lies in his denial of the social nature of human beings: dependent only on himself, he sees other people as nothing but prey, to the point that otherness for him is reduced to invisibility since it is paradoxically everywhere. In the way in which Cooper and Schoedsack treat the thematic of otherness, no clear line of division can be drawn between the ‘ethnographic’ filming of Grass and the flight of the imagination that is King Kong or indeed some of their other fictional films. Although it is unlikely that they cared one way or the other about any questions of anthropological validity, the two films could be analysed as complementary to one another in raising complex issues of anthropological representation. All of these factors contribute to making King Kong an enigmatic film that defies any easy analysis, or rather no analysis of it can fully explain or exhaust the enigma of a film that so exemplifies the era

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in which it was made and yet – by the same token and in the same movement – transcends it. *** Another element of the appeal of King Kong is the extent to which it plays upon the grotesque, a common theme in the cinema of the 1920s, the master of which was Tod Browning, especially in the films he made with Lon Chaney. There has been no more perfect pairing in the cinema than that between Browning and Chaney, the man of a thousand faces and the actor who, more than any other in the history of cinema, contained otherness within himself. Chaney was more than capable of giving expression to empathy with the most extreme forms of human disability, as most memorably when he played the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Phantom of the Opera, but Tod Browning added a level of human depravity that took Chaney’s characterizations to a different level in which love and hate have never been so tightly woven together. In much of Chaney’s work for other directors the grotesque was mingled with the pathetic, taken to an extreme in Sjöstrom’s He Who Gets Slapped (1924), a film that is a veritable orgy of masochism. In Browning’s films, in contrast, sentimentality is given short shrift as the overriding motivation of his damaged characters is retribution for what they have suffered. Yet, while his characters never invoke our pity as they engage in often pitiless and malicious behaviour, they also embody universal emotions and consequently force us to recognize our affinity (and sympathy) with people who act in ways we would usually regard as unconscionable. Two of the strangest of the Browning/Chaney collaborations are The Unknown (1927) and West of Zanzibar (1928). In the first, Chaney plays Alonzo, who is apparently an armless knife-thrower in a circus but is really an able-bodied criminal who uses the fact that people believe that he does not have any arms to put the police off the scent. But when he falls in love with his partner (Joan Crawford), a young woman with a dread of being touched, he decides to have his arms surgically removed, both because he thinks this will cause her to love him, and to hide from her his deception, since she had unknowingly seen him strangle the circus proprietor (as Alonzo had his back to her and used his hands – one of which is deformed with a double thumb – it does not occur to her that it could have been him). But when he re-appears, now genuinely armless, he learns, in a scene that may well

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be the most rending in the whole of cinema, that she has overcome her fear of being touched and is to be married to the circus strongman. He prepares a terrible revenge. In West of Zanzibar, Chaney plays Phroso, a stage magician who discovers that his wife is planning to run off with an ivory trader, Crane (Lionel Barrymore). During a fight with Crane, Phroso falls from a balcony and becomes paralysed. A year later his wife dies in childbirth. He brings up the baby but, thinking it is Crane’s, treats her abominably, leaving her in a Zanzibar brothel, while he runs a bar in a tyrannical fashion on the African continent. When she is 18 he sends for her and sets about corrupting her. Phroso (now called Dead Legs) has chosen the site because it is on the route Crane uses to trade ivory. This allows him to rip off the latter’s goods. When Crane shows up to confront him, Dead Legs takes what he thinks is his revenge by showing Crane his debauched daughter. But the laugh is on Dead Legs: the girl is revealed to be his daughter. In both of these films, physical deformity is used as a means to portray states of extreme mental aberration in an extremely complex way. Both of Chaney’s characters are pushed to an extreme by unrequited (or betrayed) love, something that was a constant theme in most of Chaney’s roles. As the Phantom of the Opera says, it is man’s hatred that has made him what he is. Browning takes this to another level in which hatred is mutually reinforcing: the Chaney characters’ determination not to be victims of their disabilities turns them into monsters. What they discover, however, is a dark otherness within themselves, and we are given a sense that this is not simply a characteristic of these individuals, but is something that is contained within us all. Comparable to the way Cooper and Schoedsack played upon our empathy with Kong, Browning and Chaney take us into the souls of monsters like Alonso and Phroso so that we recognize ourselves within them: their anger and resentment against the world is also our anger and resentment. It is this, I think, that made these films the enormously popular movies they were at the time. Browning was, however, much less in tune with the public when he made the notorious Freaks in 1932, in which he uses actual sideshow performers to tell a story of a circus trapeze artist, Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) who marries wealthy midget Hans (Harry Earles), while conspiring with her lover, the strongman (Henry Victor), to murder him so they will inherit his fortune. Browning here normalizes the outsiders he presents. They may be ‘freaks of nature’ (they include a Skeleton Man, Siamese Twins,

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a hermaphrodite, pinheads, a man with no limbs etc), but they have formed an exemplary community based upon the principle of self-help. Their grotesqueness is confined to their physique, at least as defined by what we generally consider ‘normal’; in spirit and attitude there is nothing out of the ordinary about them. Their ‘otherness’ in fact lies more than anything in their moral commitment to one another: as a group shunned by the greater society, they know that they only have one another to rely on. Their solidarity is a necessity, not a luxury, and it does not allow for the intrusion of the selfishness and greed that usually destroys human societies. The irony of Browning’s title is that the ‘freaks’ are really the ‘normal’ couple who place money above genuine feelings. Despite its notoriety, Freaks is in many ways a lighter and less disturbing film than either The Unknown or West of Zanzibar (at least, if one does not find the mere representation of the physical otherness of freaks of nature in itself disturbing). Although the revenge taken by them on the couple who have offended them is gruesome, it is not the result of the festering resentment and anger that motivates Alonzo and Dead Legs, but represents natural justice, their justice, which is no more excessive than that meted out by ‘normal’ society. The furore surrounding Freaks perhaps destroyed the film of the grotesque – at least, nothing has since emerged in Hollywood film that bears comparison with Browning’s films of the 1920s: when films now treat physical or mental deformity, they almost always do so in ‘tasteful’ way. But perhaps this was also due to the changing tastes of the audience, which wanted to be thrilled in a different way, reflecting an era of uncertainty in which the fears of the audience became differently configured. *** The exotic in the 1930s film takes many forms, and in the films of Josef von Sternberg (which we have already considered in relation to the representation of East Asia) its representation attains a complexity and sophistication that has rarely since been equalled. Above all, Sternberg recognized, perhaps more than any other film maker before or since, the complex interactions that are involved in the relationship between self and other. Sternberg’s background had some similarities with that of Browning: both were largely self-taught and had difficult childhoods. But where Browning’s life experience came from the circus, where he gained his

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sympathy with and understanding of the plight of disabled people, Sternberg’s was on the streets, which seems to have taught him that, in order to survive, one had to become different to what one was, precisely to become ‘other’. By all accounts an extremely sensitive and shy man in private, Sternberg transformed himself into a flamboyant and autocratic personality in public, and most especially when he was on a film set. He was also acutely conscious of his outsider status and his split cultural background as a Jew from Vienna exiled in New York, or conversely as a Brooklyn boy burdened with a Jewish-Austrian birthright. This appears to have given him a broad understanding of the range of human multiplicity, and an expansive – if cynical – sense of how people interacted on an emotional and affective level. Sternberg is now remembered above all for his ‘creation’ of Marlene Dietrich. According to Tom Flynn, he once said, ‘In my films Marlene is not herself. Remember that, Marlene is not Marlene. I am Marlene, she knows that better than anyone’ (1972: 9). In his autobiography, in contrast, he refuses any such overarching role: I did not endow her with a personality that was not her own; one sees what one wants to see, and I gave her nothing that she did not already have. What I did was to dramatize her attributes and make them visible for all to see; though, as there were perhaps too many, I concealed some. (1965: 227)

The first statement may simply have been braggadocio, a provocative response to claims that she was Trilby to his Svengali,14 but the disparity between these two quotes nevertheless points to the complex play upon questions of otherness which was part of Sternberg’s personality and which is reflected in his films. Sternberg had no truck with realism: he made it clear that his films were solely imaginative projections. Nevertheless, they were always set in recognizable geographical locales and he took some care to establish a sense of verisimilitude with the real place, but only in order to emphasize the illusory nature of its ‘reality’. For instance, he claimed that the Pasha of Marrakech mistook the studio sets of Morocco (1930) for real streets in Marrakech, to which Sternberg responded that ‘this was no more than an accidental resemblance, a flaw due to my lack of talent to avoid such similarity’. Such verisimilitude was a necessary starting point from which to shape a locale that would be a place of the mind, invoking a complex dialectic between the real and the imaginary whose intent is well conveyed by his anecdote that he once

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asked a Russian whether Russians behaved as they did in his film The Last Command: ‘they do not, but they should’, was the response (Sternberg, 1965: 242). Many similar anecdotes are recounted in Sternberg’s autobiography attesting to his view that reality existed beyond immediate appearance and was something that had to be sought out. Not everyone, however, had the insight of the Russian in this anecdote, and the fact that place in Sternberg’s film was always projected from the imagination did not prevent dissention about how Sternberg depicted his exotic locales. Like the Chinese in relation to Shanghai Express, the Spanish government objected to The Devil is a Woman (1935) so strongly that they created a diplomatic incident and demanded the film’s suppression (prints of it were burned into presence of the Spanish ambassador and only one fortunately survived). That the Spanish should have been so outraged by the fairy tale atmosphere of this film seems bizarre and shows that problems of representation are not always foreseeable and may be received by interested parties in ways that may surprise us.15 Yet the ‘otherness’ of location is a crucial element of the drama being played out in Sternberg’s films. It provides a background against which the characters confront their affective fears and passions. Almost always deserters of one sort or another, his characters appear to live in a constant state of escape; they are not necessarily escaping from anything in particular; it is more that their restless state of being constantly requires them to desert whatever situation they find themselves in. This is most explicit in Morocco, with its setting among the French foreign legion (this film also experienced trouble from French government censors!), in which the Dietrich character announces her comradeship in otherness to Gary Cooper: ‘There is a Foreign Legion for women too’. The pre-eminent ‘other’ for Sternberg was not another culture but woman, and the female characters in his films are some of the most complex and memorably drawn in movie history. This is so not only of the seven films made with Dietrich: he also drew remarkable performances from Evelyn Brent in at least two films (Underworld [1927] and The Last Command [1928]16), from Georgia Hale (The Salvation Hunters, 1925), from Betty Compson (The Docks of New York, 1928), from Gene Tierney and Una Munson (The Shanghai Gesture, 1941) and from Akemi Negishi (The Saga of Anatahan, 1953). The presence of all of these women is disruptive and erotically provocative but it is an error to see any of them as femme fatales. They are ‘other’, but only from the perspective of men. Like the men, they act in accordance with forces

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that are often greater than themselves, frequently unsure of who they are or what motivates them. What the characters are thinking and feeling and what they are doing is often as imponderable and revelatory to them as it is to us. At times their identities seem to be slipping visibly away from them as they divest themselves of one mask merely to reveal another one. They struggle not simply with their own identities and their relations with others but with their environment, which is an active force upon which they struggle to impose themselves. The ‘otherness’ that is ultimately at issue here is the fundamental mystery of existence. For this reason love is ubiquitous and obsessive but also deceptive, its object never corresponding with its subject as conflicting emotions and desires threaten to overwhelm the person. Because love is an assertion of one’s own identity as much as it is recognition of another person, it follows contradictory paths which are unlikely ever to be reconciled. It consequently promises but never delivers, even if it may captivate on the way. In his aim to present things as they ‘should be’ rather than as they were, Sternberg never succumbs to idealization. His characters – almost without exception – are typified rather than stereotyped and he took enormous care in rendering them. Even the most minor of his characters are memorable and they offer a tapestry of disparate perspectives. The success of films such as these suggests that, for audiences in the 1930s, the hardships of the Depression and the uncertainties of the international situation, marked by the rise of fascism and the threat of a new world war, made the exotic a ‘desirable place to be’, at least in the imagination.

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Chapter 5

OTHERNESS IN THE NIGHT Film Noir Film noir is intimately linked to the trauma of the Second World War and the American coming to terms with the engagement with the external world made necessary by the war. It is hardly a coincidence that the first films generally considered to be noirs are dated to 1941, the year the United States entered the war, but as significant as the fact of the war was no doubt the abrupt emergence from the cocoon of isolationism. This ‘rebirth’ changed the relationship the United States had with the rest of the world, inserting a disquieting sense of obligation which it has perhaps never quite known how to deal with even to the present day. The Second World War, following on from the Depression, seems to have created a ‘crisis of consciousness’ that paralleled – even as it had very different roots – the one which followed the First World War in Europe. Its mood of disillusion arose not so much from a sense of demoralization at the horrors of war and the destruction it had wrought as from a feeling of helplessness, a feeling that one was excluded both from the society in which one lived and from the world in general. Where the European crisis was of legitimacy, a sense that world war had by 1918 destroyed the very social contract upon which society was founded, in the United States after 1945 it appears to have contributed to a mood of anxiety that caused people no longer to know where they belonged. It was a crisis of confidence, not of despair. Confirmed as the dominant world power, the United States was constrained to engage with the outside world, something the years of isolationism had left its people ill-prepared to deal with at the level of collective consciousness. And in the coming years, the tension between the new prosperity and sense of social exclusion that so many felt was 84

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paralleled in Hollywood by anxiety about the impact of television and by the increasing paranoia fanned by McCarthyism. On top of all this was the spectre of the atom bomb and the realization that the ending of the war had brought with it the possibility of something even worse: total annihilation. In noir, as James Naremore rightly says, ‘the dangers that assail the protagonists arise from a modern, highly organized society, but a society that has been transformed into an almost mythical ‘bad place’ where the forces of rationality and progress seem vulnerable or corrupt, and where characters on the margins of the middle-class encounter a variety of ‘others’: not savages, but criminals, sexually independent women, homosexuals, Asians, Latins, and black people’ (1998: 220). This sense of encounter is important, but a still more significant engagement with otherness is apparent in film noir generally in which otherness is displaced onto ourselves. In a certain sense it is we who become other; the ‘self’ is not ‘us’ but the amorphous and abstract devouring mechanics of the city in which we live and from which we also feel alienated. The noir protagonist is lost in this labyrinthine apparatus in which he (and occasionally she) is threatened at every turn, but at the same time it is an apparatus which is indelibly linked with the self. Fear is everywhere, and this fear is a fear primarily of otherness, an otherness that is ever present, contained in everything, even within oneself. It is a truism to point out in film noir disillusion with the American Dream is a constant theme. Or, it may be more accurate to say that noir represents its underside, offering a mark of its unattainability for all but a privileged few. The myth of a land of unlimited opportunity, the subtext of noir suggested, was just that: a myth. Far from being a classless society offering unconstrained freedom, the United States was a place of exclusion. The very opportunities offered were a snare, causing people to overreach themselves in a vain effort to attain riches that were beyond them. In the process they were more likely to destroy themselves than to fulfil their desires. But at the same time, the films we now call noir went beyond a specifically American cultural context to invoke an association with European culture and its malaise. The directors especially associated with film noir mostly had German or East European backgrounds (Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang, Edgar Ulmer, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Max Ophuls, Curtis Bernhardt, John Brahm, Michael Curtiz, Charles Vidor) with a dash of French (Jacques Tourneur) and many of those American directors who made noirs had what

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may be called a certain ‘European’ or at least outsider sensibility (John Huston, Orson Welles, Robert Aldrich, Joseph H. Lewis, Jules Dassin). Of the most significant noirs, we only see a specifically ‘American’ sensibility fully at work in the works of a minority of directors, such as Anthony Mann, Sam Fuller, Howard Hawks and Raoul Walsh. And even Fuller, as ‘American’ as he was, was an uncomfortable presence in the American of the 1950s whose films tended to appeal more to Europeans than to Americans. Such classification is necessarily arbitrary, but it brings attention to the extent to which these films represented a kind of German–American collaboration and should not be seen solely as a phenomenon arising from the context of postwar America. They are also significant for their complex historical genealogy, incorporating socio-cultural, cinematic and literary memory rooted variously in 1920s Germany and 1930s France by way of the American depression and with deep American roots in the Black Mask hard-boiled thriller that emerged in the 1920s, not to mention the gangster film of the 1930s. It is this lineage that goes a long way to explain the intricate ways in which otherness is treated in these films. James Naremore, who explores the various cross-currents by which film noir as practice and theory was inflected by Europe, says that film noir existed in ‘a liminal space somewhere between Europe and America’ (1998: 220). While it responded to very real elements within American society, it was at the same time very much a cinema of exile. Most of the European directors mentioned above had come to America not because it was the land of opportunity – although it did of course offer them greater career prospects, most had established reputations before they set foot in the States – but because it had become impossible for them to work in their homeland where even the very lives of many of them would have been under threat had they remained. This very real sense of physical upheaval was nevertheless only one aspect of a more general, existential exile which found expression in their films. The particular atmosphere of film noir was thus due both to its specific context in post-war America and to a broader context of universal anxiety and unease. Much has been written about the remarkable emergence and continuance of noir: the fact that the generic affinities between the considerable number of films now considered to constitute this ‘style’ or ‘genre’ (no one knows what its correct designation should be) was completely unrecognized in Hollywood and was identified by French critics, only entering American parlance in the 1970s, when the age of noir was long past. This seems

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amazing to us today, when these affinities seem so obvious, but the fact that they passed unnoticed at the time attests to the fact that the films were so integrated into the sensibility of the time that they did not need to be defined as apart from it. In other words, it seems to indicate that the fears and anxieties these films evoked must have been so integral to what people were feeling during the period in which the films were produced that they took them for granted. What is especially remarkable about this is that on the surface these films present an image of the United States that is as far as one can imagine from the cheerleader optimism we generally ascribe to the American sensibility and is the impression that will come to dominate the memory of the 1950s. Yet here we have a welter of films consigned to the night and to darkness, thematically concerned with personal and collective vulnerability, featuring heroes (often tarnished) who are frequently isolated and marginalized, if not at the beginning of the film, then by the events that occur during its course; people who have doubts about their identity and often sense themselves as being ruled by a fateful, if not malevolent, destiny that is almost like a tangible presence hanging over them and over which they have no control. The sense of entrapment – not only for the characters, but also sometimes for the audience – is often overwhelming. Powerlessness, guilt, uncertainty, betrayal, obsession, alienation, vulnerability, madness and paranoia, these are some of the themes that arise again and again. Often there is no fixity in the relationships between characters. Identities are as unstable as the narrative itself and the characters may be doomed from the beginning of the film, as in Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950), where the events are recounted by a corpse, or D. O. A. (Rudolph Maté, 1950), in which a dead man tracks down the people who have killed him. When not actually doomed, the characters may be cast out of their familiar circumstances and be geographically uprooted, forced to face circumstances or situations in which they are completely out of their depth. It is characteristically a world of uncertainty in which nothing is precisely what it appears to be. The strange power that film noir maintains also lies in its dream quality. This is not the dream of Hollywood, nor is it the American Dream, but rather is recognition of the impermeable way in which dream life penetrates everyday life. Without being precisely a nightmare, the world noir depicts is a dream from the other side. Not exactly contrary to the dream of America, but its shadow, even, one might say, its ‘other’. Many of these films offer no hope: they portray life as bleakly as any in cinema, making the gloomiest films of Ingmar Bergman seem

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positively optimistic in comparison. But their appeal, despite their darkness and the often mean and violent actions they depict, lies in their curiously uplifting quality. In spite of the events depicted, the films do not induce a negative mood and one presumes that audiences at the time did not come out of the movie house in a depressed frame of mind (otherwise it is difficult to imagine the films would have been made). This apparent paradox is perhaps explained through the analogy with experience of dream: we emerge from the cinema as we awaken from a dream that has disturbed but also enervated us, making us feel more alive. If the experience of seeing a horror film parallels that of a nightmare, which equally disturbs us, but from which we emerge with a sense of relief that it was not ‘real’ and that we have been restored to normality, the experience of noir has a greater continuity with everyday life, whose possibilities appear enriched even as they are darkened. Otherness here is abstract: it is darkness itself. But it is also necessary: the darkness of night hides dark deeds, but it also provides the wrongly accused man with the respite he needs to solve the mystery, even if, in solving it, he may make things worse for others and not infrequently for himself. Entry into the labyrinth of dark secrets which is frequently the underlying theme of noir films is both threatening and exciting and it is perhaps the tension between these two emotions that also partly explains their appeal: they allow us to experience a collapse of everyday certainties from the secure perspective of those very certainties. This involves a complex sense of audience identification. Film noir protagonists are rarely untarnished heroes; frequently, in fact, they may be rather unpleasant and even when they appear attractive, are usually criminals in one way or another. Personable, even attractive, characters like Walter Neff in Double Indemnity or the Swede in The Killers (1946) allow themselves, with little resistance, to be drawn into criminal and murderous plots. As they are cast into situations in which their identities are brought into question, they are given a sense of human proportion, which is precisely an encounter with otherness. Like that of the myth of the Minotaur, the labyrinth of noir sets up a situation in which the world takes its revenge against human arrogance, something which can only be combated by people learning to integrate themselves into the flow of existence: it becomes a quest of becoming in which people can rediscover a sense of their place in the surrounding world. Whether the characters will be successful in this quest or overwhelmed by it, their sense of self-certainty is undermined. In film noir, it is almost as though life has spun a spider’s web with which to entrap human beings. Recognizing this and striving to unravel ourselves from

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it, we are brought closer to a sense of our own insignificance. In a reversal of the Enlightenment, it tends to be precisely darkness not light that reveals truth and offers safety. Film noir also reflects a changed relation between men and women. Coming back from the war not only did many men have difficulty in adapting to civilian society, they also found that women had moved into the workplace and were less willing to accept a subservient role as a housewife. But women’s increasing assertiveness also challenged gender relations and led to suspicion and distrust on the part of men. In the noir world, as is well known, the femme fatale and the spider woman are characteristic presences, unscrupulous or immoral women who entice men into fateful or dangerous situations. But even women who cannot be characterized in this way are dangerous and disruptive. Most unsettling in this respect is Gilda, Rita Hayworth’s character in the film of the same title. In this film, Farrell (Glenn Ford), a down-at-heel gambler, arrives in Buenos Aires. When shady night-club owner Mundson (George McReady) offers him a job, he rapidly rises in the organization to become its manager and Mundson’s trusted right-hand man. Their friendship is placed under stain, however, when Mundson leaves on a trip and returns with a bride, the aforesaid Gilda. We soon learn that Farrell and Gilda know each other; in fact, they are former lovers who parted on bad terms and now hate one another with a vengeance. Their separation bears comparison with that of Magdalena and Doc in Shanghai Express and the Buenos Aires setting here functions much as did the emblematic Shanghai Express for Sternberg, as a non-place of suspension in which lives are held in abeyance so enabling people to discover one another through the masks they assume. In comparison with the elemental hatred of Farrell and Gilda, however, the parting of Magdalena and Doc seems almost benign. In neither case do we learn much about the traumatic events that drove the lovers apart, except that in the case of Magdalena and Doc it was partly a misunderstanding caused by distrust. We are told nothing of what happened between Farrell and Gilda. We do, however, gain the impression that Farrell hates Gilda largely because she is a woman, or more precisely because she is not a woman in the way that he expects a woman to be. In other words, he cannot accept her for what she is because she has stepped out of her assigned role; she has thus become the unknown Other. One of the fascinations of the film is the way we witness the process by which Farrell has to learn to come to terms with female otherness. In this respect, Gilda could take

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her place beside the ferocious female characters in the fiction of Georges Bataille as a mythological provocation and fearful motivation for male desire. This mythological status is even invoked by the enigmatic poster legend advertising the film: ‘There NEVER was a woman like Gilda’ and is marvellously conveyed by the chameleon-like beauty of Rita Hayworth. Gilda is often considered to be a gay romance interrupted by Gilda’s appearance. This ignores the fact that it is Rita Hayworth’s film; that Gilda is its eponymous heroine. As Gérald Legrand (1982: 68) pointed out, it is her body that is the real subject of the film, just as the film (made when she was at the height of her popularity) exploits the commercial appeal of her persona (Legrand also points out the significance of the fact that the film was produced by Virginia Van Upp, Hayworth’s close confidante, and speculates that the role was directed against Columbia studio boss Harry Cohn’s moulding of her image). If Mundson undoubtedly has the perverse aura of a homosexual predator, he is also an authoritarian father figure to whom Farrell is drawn less by desire than by a need for protection as a reaction to his experience with Gilda. This is so strongly conveyed that we might see the film as obliquely referring to the relation of the German masses to the Führer (Mundson is in fact in consort with the Nazis), a relation that contained a strong homosexual undertone through an accentuated masculinity that clearly arose from fear of the female principle. Gilda’s role as a mythological being of the flesh brings into question Farrell’s cowardly craving for the certainty of an abusive association that gradually divests him of his human feelings, turning him into a spiteful and petty tyrant. Gilda’s presence – the promise of life itself – threatens a catastrophic disruption of this abusive relationship, which it is beyond the power of the weak Farrell to break, and thus it is that his hatred for the woman is intensified. Standing in the midst of this primal struggle is Uncle Pio (Steven Geray), the philosopher of the washroom, the lowly jester of the court who sees beyond all appearances, immediately recognizing Farrell as a ‘peasant’ whose pose of sophisticated overseer hides a fundamentally submissive personality. Uncle Pio will finally slay the monster (Mundson) and release Farrell from his slavish devotion, allowing him to recognize the truth about his feelings for Gilda. *** It is not only women who may be fatal in film noir. The homme fatal finds an apotheosis in the character of Sam in Robert Wise’s Born To Kill (1947),1 although he is here paired with a woman who is fatal not

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so much to men as to herself (the film was originally called Deadlier than the Male, a over-explicit and misogynistic title which would have undermined the ambivalence of characterization in this intricately constructed film). The killer of the title is Sam, played with glacial sincerity by Lawrence Tierney. Having murdered his flighty girlfriend and the boy she has spent the evening with in order to make him jealous, he flees to San Francisco, meeting on the train Helen (Claire Trevor), a woman as hard-bitten as him, who is returning from Reno after having obtained a quick divorce in order to marry a rich San Francisco financier. Helen is at once intensely attracted and repelled by this seductive man. Even though they each recognize themselves in each other, Helen does not submit to her attraction: when they arrive in San Francisco, she says goodbye and refuses to give him her address. He nevertheless tracks her down and when she makes it clear to him that she will marry her fiancé, Sam turn his attention to her rich half-sister. After a whirlwind romance, they marry, but the past, and his attraction to Helen will inexorably lead to their mutual destruction. In some ways the film feels like an updated version of Wuthering Heights. At least, the passion between Sam and Helen is as elemental as that of Heathcliff and Cathy, and Sam is even more unrestrained, even more like a wild beast, than Heathcliff. We know nothing of his background but it is clear that he has recently been released, along with his sidekick Marty (Elisha J. Cook), from an institution, perhaps prison, but more likely from the army. Like many noir characters, their pathology appears to be the result of having served together in the war. This would at least explain their overbearing attitude and complete disregard for social norms by which they perceive themselves to be above the law, able to act however they wish with impunity. After he commits his first murders, Marty tells Sam that ‘You can’t just go around killing people’, to which the reply is ‘Why not?’, a response that is perhaps only comprehensible as that of a battle hardened soldier. Indeed, the lack of calculation in their attitudes is a remarkable feature of the film. These are not criminals: Sam’s expectation is that he should be able to have whatever he wants and simply has to take it. Although he wants money and respect, he has no intention of working for them (even in a criminal way) and will do no more than take advantage of whatever opportunities are offered, an attitude of a soldier hardened to the horrors of war but also aware of the opportunities for pillage available to a victorious army unit able to act beyond the reach of any law or authority: the important thing is to take what you can from life because any moment could be your last.

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Marty’s behaviour, too, his willingness to kill in order to protect his buddy, seems characteristic of the camaraderie of combat situations. Sam commits murder only because people cross him, not because he bears them any malice, and he appears to have no ulterior motive and no thought of necessarily profiting from the deaths of the people he kills. His psychopathology is to recognize no social responsibility or duty to others, but at the same time he takes no pleasure from the harm he does; he is not a sadist. His revolt is of a more existential nature. As he says, he ‘just wants to spit in everyone’s eye’. Yet, scary as he may be, Sam is no match for Helen, whose motivations are as complex as any character in film noir, something aided by an extraordinary performance from Claire Trevor. Helen recognizes that she has some of the same tendencies within herself as Sam, but has a self-awareness that makes her a very different sort of person. Sam appears to be afraid of nothing and yet, late in the film he momentarily glimpses fear, a fear of the unknown awoken by Helen: ‘It is as if she is looking inside of me’. Helen, too, is afraid of only one thing: herself. She tries, not always successfully, to confront what is within herself. Cold hearted she may be, but she is not devoid of human sympathy. She appears to have genuine affection for her half-sister, even if she isn’t going to go out of her way to make her happy. Any resentment she feels towards her seems to be the result of a feeling of dependency rather than bitterness at the fact that it was her sister and not she who inherited the family wealth. Helen thus cannot be equated with the femme fatales so prevalent in film noir. She does not try to entrap anyone and is herself one of Sam’s victims. Her fiancé, Fred, chooses to be with her and she does nothing to retain him when he rejects her. In fact she does nothing very bad in the film, yet we tend to perceive her as the villainess. Helen understands evil and knows that it resides within herself, and what makes her interesting is the ambivalence of her actions. We do not know what her intentions are and nor, one suspects, does she. She is calculating and intelligent, but her emotional uncertainty means that her calculations can contradict themselves and thus things do not turn out as she plans them. She says at the beginning – probably accurately – that she knows exactly what she wants, but this certainty collapses because the things she wants are contradictory: she knows, for instance, that she wants the security and sense of belonging that her fiancé offers, but she also wants the danger and excitement that Sam can give her. But as fascinating as these two characters are individually, it is in their interaction that their real allure lies. Sam in fact appears as a

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kind of personification of the darkest aspects of Helen’s personality. He recognizes a kindred spirit in her and in this recognition reveals he is not so bound up in himself as to be completely lacking of human feeling. There is no appreciation of otherness, to be sure: his recognition of Helen is a projection of what he feels himself. It is a recognition of a common darkness of spirit. Where Helen fundamentally differs from him is that, apart from the fact that she is more intelligent, she has awareness of otherness and the ambivalence of the personality, her own more than anyone’s. Yet if the tussle between Sam and Helen revolves around the apprehension of evil, none of the characters in the film are shown in a particularly good light. The half-sister Georgia is as self-centred as she is naïve and her first impulse upon learning that Sam is a murderer is to flee with him: we feel she gets no more than she deserves when she marries him; Fred, the fiancé, is one of the male ‘turnips’ for whom Helen shows contempt at the beginning of the film and he deserts her when she needs him, while private detective Arnett, despite his cynical charm, is just sleazy, and Mrs Kraft, the one sympathetic character, who employs him to track down the perpetrator of the murder of the girlfriend at the beginning of the film, is so despairing of human meanness that she has to drown herself in alcohol. Of all of them, Helen alone has self-awareness and she is the only character who learns anything through the course of the film. She is no longer the same person at the end that she was at the beginning: her encounter with Sam has effected a change in her. Above all, she recognizes a responsibility towards others singularly absent in the way she is portrayed at the beginning of the film. When everything is closing in around them, she chooses to save her sister by effectively sacrificing herself: she tells Georgia what Sam is and says (in his presence) that she has shopped him to the police (although this is not true – the police have actually been alerted by the private investigator), knowing that he will kill her for it. It is as if she must atone for all of the crimes committed in the movie, even though she has not been responsible for any of them. *** The complexity of female motivation is taken to a mythological level in Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), the film in which the idea of the world having been ‘turned upside down’ characteristic of noir is taken to an extreme; in fact it is not so much turned upside down as obliterated, and not only in the sense that the end of the world in a

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nuclear holocaust is envisaged in it. The world under threat is an exclusively male one in which three main female characters function as mythological beings come to herald the downfall. In this film, private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) is deflected from his self-satisfied existence when a woman flags down his car in the night. She is escaping from something, something terrible, we will learn, and she will soon be killed, but not before, like a kind of anti-Ariadne, she has given him a thread which will lead him to, not back from, an encounter with the Minotaur. As his girlfriend, Velda (Maxine Cooper), will later warn him: ‘First you find a little thread. Little thread leads you to a string, and the string leads you to a rope. And from the rope, you hang by the neck.’ Hammer is in fact, like several noir heroes, a dead man. We might believe, along with Jack Shadoian, that he died in the car crash that occurs in the opening scenes of the film and is ‘a character who comes back from the dead because it is necessary for him to question and expose his world’ (Shadoian 1979: 272). This is given credence by the fact that he wanders through the action like a ghost, or an avenging angel. He goes where he pleases and people think they see him, but do they really? He effects escapes and responds to them in a way that is distracted, and when he kills people it appears almost to be an act of a supernatural being. But even if we believe that he survived this crash, he is still, in a sense, a ‘dead man walking’, a man who exists in a bubble, isolated from everything around him that isn’t directly related to his own egocentric universe. Shadoian is one of several critics who have associated Hammer’s task with the grail quest, but if this is so it is a perverse one, a grail quest turned upside down, in which he is seeking for what will destroy the world rather than renew it. But then this is a world in which everything is turned upside down and in which otherness has already been obliterated by male arrogance. This is announced in the opening dialogue: Christina: You have only one real lasting love. Hammer: Now who could that be? Christina: You. You’re one of those self-indulgent males who thinks about nothing but his clothes, his car, himself. Bet you do push-ups every morning just to keep your belly hard. Hammer: You against good health or somethin’? Christina: I could tolerate flabby muscles in a man if it would make him more friendly. You’re the kind of a person who never gives in a relationship – who only takes. (Sardonically) Ah, woman, the incomplete sex. And what does she need to complete her? (Mocking) Why, man, of course. A wonderful man.

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Hammer is ‘all-man’; yet he is also nothing but a man: he is really just the appearance of a man, with nothing behind the façade. Even though women throw themselves at him, he seems oblivious to them except as ‘goodies’ to be devoured but not tasted. As Christina says, he has nothing to give them in return. Yet, even as a dead man, Hammer is more ‘alive’ than the other men in the film. Dr Soberin (Albert Decker), the sinister ‘brains’ behind the ‘great whatsit’ Hammer is seeking, is apparently acting only, in his words, to find ‘somewhere to be sad and melancholy again’; the gangsters who work for him appear to have no reason to exist other than to protect their place in the sun by violence, while the FBI man, Pat, behind his supercilious self-righteous exterior, is just creepy. None of these characters seem to feel anything; they are not dead, but they are not alive either. They exist in a limbo would, concerned only with their own interests and to hell with anything else, while Hammer at least is a working man, doing what he has to get by, dirty though it may be, and he has enough human feeling to be upset when he learns that his friend Nick has been murdered, going to drown his sorrows in a ‘coloured’ jazz bar, in which, even though he is the only white man there, he is completely accepted (at a time when, we should recall, the colour bar was still in place). As disreputable as he is, he is thus still the representative of the common man, struggling to survive and find meaning in a world gone mad. The presiding spirits of the film, however, are the three women, who may be directly equated with the three Furies of Greek mythology: Christina (Cloris Leachman) is actually less Ariadne than Clotho, spinning together the threads of life; Velda is Lachesis, who measures out the threads and preserves the life force, while Gabrielle (Gaby Rodgers) is Atropos, who cuts the threads that bind us to life. Knowledge here is woman’s preserve; men act, thinking they have a purpose, but in reality they do no more than tie themselves up in the threads that have been spun for them. They kill Christina, ignore the warnings given to them by Velda, and deliver themselves up to the fatality of Gabrielle. None of them display any real intelligence: what little they have is devoted to satisfying their immediate needs with no concern for the consequences. Most deluded is Dr Soberin, who trusts his own intelligence and believes himself to be in complete control of circumstances, but is no match for Gabrielle. Even in death he misrecognizes her as Pandora or Lot’s wife. But Gabrielle is not overcome with curiosity; she knows exactly what she wants when she opens the box, which is to be embraced by death. As she tells Hammer: ‘Kiss me, Mike. I want you to kiss me . . . The liar’s kiss that says “I love you,” but

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means something else. You’re good at giving such kisses. Kiss me.’ This liar’s kiss is male pride, which she will return with interest – in fact, the only times when Hammer does kiss a woman in the film, it is not in response to desire, but in order to gain information. We should remember too that early in the film, Velda had told Hammer to be careful with the warning: ‘Someone might blow you a kiss’. The end of the film may be a representation of the end of the world in a nuclear holocaust, but in this destruction of a rotten world, we might see the ending not as the death of everything but as Velda preserving the life force as she leads Hammer (who alone of the male characters retains, at least, ‘a vestige of the thoughts that once we had’) into the spume of the ocean, taking him into the slime of existence from which life can be started again. Kiss Me Deadly is the most extreme of all film noirs, both in its situation and its characters, but there is ‘something of the night’ in most noir characters who are often no good and know it. Walter and Phyllis in Double Indemnity explicitly confess as much to each other, and Laurie tells Bart the same thing in Gun Crazy. Yet even the most ordinary of men can be drawn into the darkness of the noir world, as occurs to characters played by Edward G. Robinson in two films he made with Fritz Lang, The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945). In both he comes under the spell of Joan Bennett. The latter is a relatively straightforward thriller about a man being ensnared by a femme fatale, but the Woman in the Window is something else.

Figure 8 Joan Bennett ensnaring Edward G. Robinson from both sides in The Woman in the Window.

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In this film, Robinson plays Richard Wanley, a happily married psychology professor enjoying a night out at the club with his middleaged friends. They observe a striking painting of a beautiful woman in a shopfront display and over drinks fantasize about meeting this ‘woman in the window’. When he leaves, Wanley stops to contemplate the painting. Her image doubles: the woman of the painting is beside him in the flesh. Her name is Alice. They talk and, one thing leading to another, end up at her apartment. As they are sharing a drink, a crazed man appears and attacks the Professor who kills him in selfdefence. Neither he nor the woman wanting to be involved in a police investigation, they agree to cover up the incident and dispose of the body. It so happens that Wanley’s close friend (one of those with whom he had spent the evening, in fact) is the District Attorney, and when the body is found and an investigation undertaken, he tags along. As it proceeds, however, he continually drops clues implicating himself until, thinking the game is up, he is about to commit suicide. At that moment a hand shakes his shoulder, waking him. The hand of the law, about to arrest him? No, it is the attendant of the club: he had fallen asleep and the whole adventure was ‘just a dream’. Unlike Kiss Me Deadly, the world here is not edging towards catastrophe. On the surface it is appears perfectly stable – too stable, in fact, for our hero, who, as he discusses the portrait of the young woman in the shop window is wistful for the excitement of his lost youth while the others warn him against the ‘siren call of adventure’. Many critics have expressed disappointment at the surprise ending, and even Lang himself apologized for it, claiming that it was a ruse to satisfy censorship. In fact, though, it turns what otherwise would have been a relatively straightforward thriller into something quite mysterious, transforming Alice from an old man’s fantasy figure or some banal Jungian anima of the subconscious into an ambiguous Dream Woman invested with a mythic status comparable to that of Gilda or the women of Kiss Me Deadly. In this case she is an incarnation of the submerged goddess who intervenes in the structure of everyday life to bring its foundations into doubt, revealing how close we all are at each moment to the chaos of existence and so provoking a crisis of consciousness within the male. The primordial force of so many of the women in noir is encountered in two of the most important noirs, Out of the Past and The Killers, which resemble one another to the extent that the protagonists in each film have at the beginning literally become ‘other’, having shed their previous personas. Indeed, both Jeff (Robert Mitchum) in Out of

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the Past and the Swede (Burt Lancaster) in The Killers have left behind the corruption of the city to become small town garage attendants in order to escape from a time and a place when they ‘did something wrong – once’, as the words of the Swede have it.

Figure 9 Dressed to Kill: Jane Greer appears from out of the sunlight in Out of the Past. Both men also share with Mike Hammer a ‘dead man’ persona, since their previous actions have doomed them. The Swede, in fact, will be killed in the opening scenes of the film and we learn what happened only through the inquiry conducted into his death by insurance investigator Reardon (Edmund O’Brien), who becomes almost like the Swede’s avenging angel from beyond the grave when he takes possession of the Swede’s most precious article, a scarf given to him by Kitty (Ava Gardner), the woman responsible for his demise. Jeff is equally doomed, but will be forced to confront his own ghosts as he is drawn back into his previous existence, to assume once more his persona of private detective and act out a parallel scenario in which he again encounters his treacherous woman, Kathie (Jane Greer). The women in these two films are genuinely fatal women, as seductive as they are duplicitous, as alluring as they are avaricious, and yet they retain a certain ‘innocence’ as they almost assume the form of traps set for gullible men to fall into. In other respects, however, they are very different. Kitty is almost childlike, and her pleading at the end of the

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film for her lover to save her when she is about to be arrested wipes away any sympathy we might have had for her, but Kathie is implacable. ‘I never told you I was anything other than what I am. You just wanted to imagine I was’, she tells Jeff and we realize in this moment that these words are also spoken to us, making us aware that we only see Kathie through Jeff’s eyes: her real nature remains hidden from us as it does from him. Both of these films also share with Gilda and Kiss Me Deadly, an ‘otherworldly’ sense, a sense that, despite what it appears, the action is really taking place in some privileged place removed from everyday reality, in a dark world of eternal recurrence. As in so many noirs, too, the city assumes a life and a character that is in a sense ‘other’ to the lives of its human inhabitants, who inhabit it as if on sufferance. This is especially marked in The Killers, in which the two ‘killers’ of the title personify the malevolent sense of the city, especially in the extraordinary opening sequence, when they descend like messengers of doom on a sleepy town, as if the city itself at its most menacing has decided to enter the countryside to track down its recalcitrant son, the Swede.

Figure 10 Death comes from the city in the form of Charles McGraw and William Conrad: The Killers. *** To explore all of the myriad paths taken through the labyrinth of otherness in the noir pantheon would require a whole volume in itself.2

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A mention should, however, be given to the work of Nicholas Ray, whose films give a place to otherness which was more self-conscious but also more narcissistic and superficial than we generally find in noir. Ray took as his catchword the phrase I’m a Stranger Here (the title of his autobiography) and throughout his life seems to have felt out-of-place and misunderstood. This was combined with a sense of victimhood in which otherness comes to be what sets apart the gifted from the ordinary people. An exchange between the ‘normal’ couple, cop Brub and his wife Sylvia, in his film In a Lonely Place (1950) makes this apparent. They are discussing the troubled protagonist, Dix Steele (Humphrey Bogart): Sylvia: Brub: Sylvia: Brub: Sylvia:

I’m glad you’re not a genius. He’s a sick man, Brub. There’s something wrong with him. He’s like that. He’s exciting . . . . I know Dix better than you do . . . . There’s nothing the matter with his mind, except that it’s superior. He’s exciting because he isn’t quite normal. Us cops could use some of that abnormality. I learned more from him in five minutes than I did for all our investigations . . . Alright, but I still like the way you are, attractive and average.

They are arguing after an remarkable scene in which Dix, who is under suspicion for a murder, has enacted how the killing might have taken place by assuming the role of a film director and directing the couple to perform the roles of murderer and victim so powerfully that one feels he could have induced Brub actually to have strangled Sylvia. This scene is uncomfortable not simply because it shows how a murder might be committed, but also because it articulates the permeation of reality and artifice that is the magic of the cinema (and the essence of the director’s skill) in a way sets the film maker ‘above’ ordinary human beings. In a Lonely Place is one of the most profound cinematic studies of loneliness, but Ray’s self-absorption was such that broader issues of otherness that are suggested by the scenario are not pursued. In On Dangerous Ground (1949), in contrast, a rather contrived scenario is underwritten with layerings of otherness in a way that is very affecting. In this film, Robert Ryan plays Jim Wilson, a cop brutalized by having to deal with the dregs of city life. Sent to the countryside to help in a murder investigation, he is spiritually redeemed by an encounter with Mary, a blind woman played by Ida Lupino whose mentally retarded brother turns out to be the murderer. The modulations of character by which these two damaged individuals respond to events and to each other powerfully transform their respective apprehension of the world

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Figure 11 The hands as Other: Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place. as they are confronted with different strands of otherness. Bound to them by involvement in a tragic event, the father of the murdered girl also finds redemption through empathy for what is different from the (or rather his) norm as the ultimately accidental death of the young murderer sates his taste for revenge. The oppositions set up here (city verses countryside; normal verses abnormal; sight verses blindness; warmth versus coldness; innocence versus guilt) are reconciled in an almost dialectical way. *** The world conjured up in noir was specific to its time and gave expression to a consciousness of uncertainty that manifested itself in a complex of ways. We can appreciate its particular qualities by their absence of the remake of The Killers, made by Don Siegel in 1964. Siegel’s film is an example of what a ‘re-make’ should be but rarely is: it marks out the changes in sensibility that have occurred in the intervening years, adding to the qualities of the original without trying to outdo it and allowing us to view both films as part of a broader

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thematic tapestry. It could be said to represent the day to Robert Siodmak’s noir night. Where Siodmak’s film is all shadows and ambiguity, Siegel’s film is shot in garish colours in which everything is sharply distinguished. If the motivations of the characters in the 1946 film are infuriatingly unclear, in Siegel’s film they could hardly be clearer (the only mystery is that which intrigues one of the killers, Lee Marvin’s Charlie, who wants to know why a man would surrender himself passively to death. This mystery solved, the film effectively ends, whereas in Siodmak’s version the mystery remains even after all of the loose ends of the story have been tied up). Geoffrey O’Brien expresses very well the distinction between the two films in his introduction to the DVD: ‘Siodmak’s film conjured up nocturnal shadows and emotional depths, Siegel brings us into the harsh light of a casually violent and unrelievedly mercenary day. All the gestures that the 40’s made poetic and mysterious are here stripped of whatever made them glisten’. One might see Siegel’s film as pivotal in marking a change of sensibility, announcing a world of surfaces that would pre-figure both the hedonism of the 1960s and the cupidity of the 1980s, an era of moral complacency and shallow self-indulgence that is manifested already here in the characters portrayed by Angie Dickinson and Ronald Reagan. If Angie Dickinson’s character is an archetypal 1960s dolly bird, enthused by nothing but the surface of things and by immediate gratification, Reagan already portrays the man who would one day become President and exalt rapaciousness as a virtue of the first order. He was an inspired choice to portray the character of Jack Browning, a powerful man in apparent control of his life while being seemingly disconnected from it, and in whom all of the uncertainties of the noir era (yet reflecting a plenitude of being) can be seen to have vanished, giving way to a certainty that would ultimately be devoid of moral purpose.

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Chapter 6

OF MONSTERS AND COLD WARS If film noir was a phenomenon nurtured by the impact of the Second World War, its heyday was in the three years that followed it. Although noirs would continue to appear until 1959, by 1948, the dark mood of self-examination they represented had shifted. As the effects of the war subsided and US polity adjusted to the nation’s newly established position in the world, so the internalization of otherness that film noir reflected gradually became externalized or even expelled, gaining an object in the supposed threat posed by communism and the sense of paranoia this created. Paradoxically, however, this externalization was then turned back on itself, becoming internalized in a different way: not as self-examination, but as suspicion of appearances. This was reflected in Hollywood by a retrenchment of attitudes: where danger had once been characterized principally in terms of an encounter with something out there, to be found in exotic or distant climes, in the 1950s it assumes an amorphous shape within, as something that might rise up anywhere at all, maybe even within what is most familiar. Perhaps as a defensive response to America’s dominance as a world power and the fact that it could no longer remain aloof from the rest of the world, a sense of threat was experienced, bearing on manifest and genuine fears, to be sure, but internalized in a way that drew upon age old fears and imaginings as much as it did upon the objective conditions of the time. It was an atmosphere that both gave rise to and was a symptom of the Cold War and its social manifestations, most notably McCarthyism. The Cold War should not be seen simply as a response to Stalinist aggression. It was as much a creation of American paranoia, having deep roots within American history which became expressively manifest after the Second World War, when it might be said that the United States was forced – against its will – to look back to the ‘East’ 103

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rather than continuing on its path of Western conquest. The ‘East’ here is different from – although related to – that represented by Asia in the pre-war era but it similarly does not define a specific place. Rather, it was a location of a fundamentally different nature from the ‘West’, that realm of expanding promise which effectively ended at the Pacific Ocean. This ‘East’ was an inheritance of old and new European fears which Hollywood also over-wrote with American atavistic anxieties. It is an ‘East’ that lies in the past, as a folk memory of what Americans had left behind them when they set sail from European shores to embark upon their western adventure and leave behind the ‘old country’ of affected and faux enlightenment from which they had nevertheless inherited a fear of what lay to the east – specifically of central Europe and its supposedly barbaric customs and superstitious fears. These fears, at the root of US isolationism, lie deep within the American sensibility, and one almost feels that the Red Scare was needed in order to write over, like a palimpsest, such doubts and anxieties about the wider world that had been brought into the open by involvement in the Second World War. From this perspective, it might be argued that Soviet aggression was the pretext rather than the cause of the Cold War and that it really reflected an internal conflict taking place within the American sensibility. In some ways we can see that this conflict is already present and as though anticipated by the horror films of the 1930s. In looking at them now, it is curious how distant these films are from any specifically American themes, sources or settings. Virtually all of them were set in a mythologized Europe, most often in middle or Eastern Europe, but whether it took the shape of Transylvania, London, France or ancient Egypt, the location assumed a similar form and the same determinants were present: some force or repressed desire became activated by the actions of foolish or misguided individuals, nearly always Europeans. The extent of the association of horror with Europe in these films is extraordinary. The great actors who appeared in them were almost exclusively European, especially English (Boris Karloff, Claude Rains, Lionel Atwill, Colin Clive, Charles Laughton, Basil Rathbone) or Hungarian (Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre), and even those few who were actually American became European in the films (the Barrymore brothers John (playing an Austrian Jew in Svengali [1931]) and Lionel (playing a Frenchman in The Devil Doll [1936]), and Frederic March (playing a Scotsman in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde). The stories, too, were

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nearly always taken from European sources, and even when they were American (notably Poe adaptations like The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) or The Black Cat [1934]), the settings were still European and in fact did not have too much in common with their supposed source material. It was a tradition that continued into the 1940s, with the series of Val Lewton films. Cat People may take place in New York, but the cat woman herself is from Central Europe, while The Body Snatcher and The Isle of the Dead are set in Europe. Not until The Seventh Victim (1943), which shades into film noir, do we really see the horror film really entering American society itself. In addition and unlike film noir, which had a symbiotic relation with American hard-boiled literature, the horror film of the 1930s seems almost alien to American traditions, which seems surprising given the vitality of indigenous writing of horror stories. Why did no film makers think to adapt the stories of Robert Chalmers, H. P. Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith, or even take on works of classic authors like Washington Irving or Charles Brockden Brown? It is almost as if horror could exist only elsewhere, safely contained outside of the borders of the United States, but dangerous nonetheless, out there and in danger of entering the familiar domain (as it does in a few films; The Mystery of the Wax Museum, Son of Dracula (1943), and Cat People [1942], for instance, take place in the United States, but even here the horror has been transmitted from Europe). Insofar as many of these films were directed by recent exiles and give voice to the immediate threat of fascism, from which many of these directors were directly fleeing, this immediate fear was also conjoined with the atavistic American fears which underlay the isolationist sensibility that characterized attitudes at this time. One imagines that these were not necessarily the films the European directors chose to make but ones which were assigned to them, most likely because producers saw the horror film as belonging to Europe. In this sense the horror film of the 1930s, while responding to several different anxieties, also offers an intimation of Cold War fears, and places in evidence a suggestion that the Cold War was a necessary aspect of American consciousness rather than purely a result of a perceived threat emanating from the Soviet Union. From this perspective it may be argued that for Hollywood the roots of what would become the ‘Cold War’ go back psychologically to 1931 with the production of Tod Browning’s Dracula, the film which opened

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the cycle of Universal horror films and located a dangerous force emanating from Eastern Europe (or even from Europe as a whole) which threatened to overflow into American social polity (as of course it already had when the United States had unwillingly been dragged into the First World War). With the ending of the Second World War also came the end of American innocence. The reaction to the invention and use of the atomic bomb, at first welcomed for hastening the end of the war, gradually gave way to the realization that it brought with it the possibility that the world might be destroyed by human actions and that, after the USSR tested its own bomb, ‘we’ were as likely to be its target as ‘them’, something which substantially increased paranoid tendencies and enhanced the idea that the ‘Reds’ were seeking to destroy ‘us’ from within as well as from without. These twin horrors, brought by science on the one hand and communism on the other, were in a certain sense the poorly understood twins of evil in 1950s demonology (in fact, this ‘communism’ was little more than a scare word – as an ideology it seems to have been completely absent from the discourse and the general attitude was perhaps summed by Moe in Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953) when she says, ‘What do I know about commies? I just know I don’t like them’) but which were subsumed together as part of a generalized fear of the unknown. Moreover, sensational stories about communist indoctrination in Korea and China gave evidence that people could literally be made ‘alien’, transformed into beings who would act and, more disturbingly still, think in ways that their ‘real’ selves would regard as abhorrent. Yet, despite such generalized fears of the ‘horror’, few significant strictly horror films were made during the 1950s even if many of the motifs that had been explored in the 1930s were transmuted first into film noir and then into science fiction, thematically taking on in different ways the new realities of the time, in which a fear of invasion assumed multiple forms and could be as likely to come from within as from without. *** In Hollywood itself this was also combined with the fact that it found itself the target of some of these fears and was even equated with communism. Always unpopular and distrusted by certain sectors of the American public, Hollywood had powerful enemies with the capability to scapegoat it. Indeed, the McCarthy investigations, as

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they aimed at Hollywood, found their targets with remarkable ease. We may wonder why Hollywood put up so little resistance. Was its own power and influence not strong enough to defend itself against what were often demonstrably risible accusations? Instead, it reacted with panic, instituting a blacklist which severely affected and even destroyed the careers of some of its more creative figures and doing irreparable damage to its own industry. One of the keys to understanding this reaction doubtless lies in the ostensible nature of the investigations. Although supposedly an inquiry into communist infiltration, the committee defined itself as investigating ‘un-American’ activities. It was by means of a sleight of hand – aided by the context of the time – that it made ‘un-American’ equate with ‘communism’ and so created an atmosphere in which mere association with a communist group or activity was sufficient proof of being ‘unAmerican’, which in turn was enough to define someone as a dangerous enemy even if there was no suggestion that they had engaged in any sort of subversive activity. For Hollywood moguls above all, one imagines, it was less the accusation of communism that hit home, than of being ‘un-American’, something to which their ambivalent position within mainstream American society made them especially responsive and fearful. The accusation of ‘un-Americanism’ was effectively an accusation of otherness precisely of the sort that the moguls must have feared from the very moment they were establishing Hollywood, and which determined the defensive way they had always reacted to allegations of scandal, from the time of the Arbuckle case in the 1920s onwards.1 The tenor of the times appears to have led to Hollywood becoming considerably more insular both in terms of the films that were made and in the extent that it even raised, let alone questioned, the relationship between America and other cultures. The majority of films made in the 1950s were set in American locations and those that were not often might as well have been since little effort seems to have been made generally to evoke a sense of place: Rome, Tokyo or Paris were often presented as a kind of extension of America, and almost always the central character was an American. It also appears that the studios were no longer interested in attracting foreign talent. No major directors came from overseas to Hollywood during the 1950s and except for a smattering of British actors and actresses (Audrey Hepburn, Jean Simmons, Deborah Kerr, James Mason), few foreigners became stars. Indeed, there were so few foreign actors around that the convention that American Indians or Chinese should be played by white actors was

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extended so that any foreigner had to be played by an American. In fact, Anthony Quinn tended to be pressed into service as the all-purpose alien, able to assume ‘otherness’ whenever required, from Mongols to Eskimos by way of Greeks, a fate that could even befall a major star like Marlon Brando, who became the Mexican Emiliano Zapata in Viva Zapata (1952) and a Japanese interpreter in The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956). At the same time there was a re-conceptualization of the notion of the frontier. The period between 1948 and 1964 was the golden age of the Western, whose evolution reveals an intricate relation with Cold War ideology, as Richard Slotkin has shown (1992: 347–483). Otherwise, exotic adventure films continued to be made, but far less frequently and with little of the sense of strangeness of those in the 1930s: the dangers faced by Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen (John Huston, 1953), for instance, come more from within themselves and from the mundane hazards of nature than from their displacement in an outside, alien world that is inherently hostile to them. Since the United States now ruled the world, there was a sense that Americans could venture into the outside world with confidence and that any physical danger they might face there would be of a commonplace sort. It was thus no longer so much the foreign that was to be feared as the alien who sought to gain an entry into the space of home. And this alien was no longer the stranger, the foreigner whose otherness was strange either because we could not understand it due to cultural difference or because he belonged to a more primitive state of human evolution. Rather, he was now the irrevocable ‘other’ who had no necessary connection with ‘us’ at all. Since we had nothing in common with him, no basis existed for shared understanding. At best, there might be something we could learn from him if, as in Robert Wise’s film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), he came from an advanced civilization with good intentions (although even here, our own distrust meant we were unable to draw any benefit from his wisdom). More often, however, he came with evil intent, seeking either to destroy or to enslave us. In this context, the science fiction film came into its own. Prior to 1950 it was a genre that barely existed, but in that year it veritably exploded, to proliferate throughout the following decade. And the overriding theme that linked the vast majority of these films was that of alien invasion of one sort or another.

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Figure 12 Contemplating the aliens in The Thing from Another World. In the 1950s science fiction film the alien invaders generally sought control of the mind rather than engage in direct confrontation. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956) is the most celebrated (and discussed) of these films. The well-known plot centres on a small Californian town subject to what at first seems a strange case of mass hysteria: people are overcome with a strong feeling that certain of their closest friends and relatives are no longer themselves. In all respects they look and act the same, but there is something wrong, something is lacking in them. After a few days, the ‘delusion’ vanishes and everything returns to normal in the relationship again. Except that it is no delusion. As the film progresses, we learn that the people are being taken over by clones formed by seeds that have fallen from the sky which assume the exact form of the human in every respect. The only difference is that they are devoid of emotion. Commentators have noted how difficult it is to read the film since it can be understood in contradictory ways – is it a warning against communism, or against the conformity of suburban life and its embrace of consumerism? This contradiction no longer seems so apparent today when the word ‘communism’ has lost its alarmist meaning and the diversification of suburban life means that is does not have the same connotation of uniformity. Made in 1955, as the public were

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losing patience with McCarthy, its ambivalence may be down to the fact that the early 1950s sense of panic was increasingly subsiding and people were becoming less certain about the nature and cause of their worries. The film seems to offer a warning against social passivity in general, rather than against any specific danger and this gives it a broader resonance that has sustained its significance beyond that of its original context. Even in 1955 one feels that it would have been difficult to equate the invasion with communism. Or at least without feeling somewhat uncomfortable about doing so. While the uniformity and regimentation of the new society of pod people may have been how a communist society was viewed in the States at the time, what is disturbing is how readily people welcome this invasion. No coercion is involved; the only violence the aliens engage in is to try to prevent anyone from leaving town and spreading the alarm. Their sole weapon is to wait for their victims to fall asleep. If these are communist tactics, they bring into question the legal basis of HUAC and the communist witchhunt, which was that communists promoted the violent overthrow of the government. In The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, there appears to be no ideological reason or ulterior motive for the takeover by the pods, no other intelligence appears to be behind the invasion since the transformed humans act just as they did in their previous lives. They have not been brainwashed to believe in something that would have been contrary to their beliefs. If they help to propagate the seeds, this seems to be a logical response to their changed situation. It is not entirely clear whether the aliens are other beings who have taken over the bodies and minds of the humans, or whether the seeds simply germinated in such a way as to take away from the humans their emotional life. The latter case seems more likely, since their personalities remain intact and their actions after the transformation are perfectly consistent with their humanity. The seeds appear to function simply as agents, responding to the passive wishes of the humans themselves. They have become alien only to the extent that they have suffered a loss of what we consider an essential element of their personalities. The film tends to suggest that the seeds happened to fall on California by chance rather than design and that their replication was a natural – albeit perhaps otherworldly – phenomenon. In this sense, the film might be seen as representing the end game of Enlightenment, when it has succeeded to such an extent that it threatens to collapse into overwhelming light. Now sleep and the night are to be feared not because of their inherent terrors, but because

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their power is so weak that they leave us vulnerable to complete take over by the light. This might almost be a reversal of Goya’s ‘Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters’. Now, far from bringing monsters, the Sleep of Reason dispels all monsters and brings only tranquillity and certainty. All of the fear affecting everyday life is taken away and sleep presumably becomes unnecessary. The film seems thus less to be about the literal mechanics of alien invasion as about a wide-awake nightmare slowly occluding the everyday world and reason itself.

Figure 13 Kevin McCarthy learning the meaning of fear in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Indeed, viewed today, does it not also represent an anticipation and a warning against the transparency of the 24-hour society, that triumph of Enlightenment that celebrates the abandoning of the use-value of sleep and darkness as it turns everything into light? The darkness and shadows of film noir have almost completely dissipated, and seen from the perspective of today, the film seems to presage a time when we see our humanity potentially being drained away in a myriad of ways – from identification with machines via cosmetic surgery to cloning, to CCTV observation (all of which respond to the same Enlightenment desire for security in the light) the need to fight to stay human remains as urgent today as it was for Miles (Kevin McCarthy), the hero of the film. Might indeed those parents today who complain that their children hiding in their room playing computer games and seem ‘changed’ not be perceiving the same displacement that this 1950s film warns us about? There is also a recognition of the attraction of uniformity and formlessness, the reduction of the personality and the withdrawal of responsibility, all symptoms of a surrender to what Freud called the death drive. One of the interesting facets of this is that what begins

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as fear of otherness (the fear that ‘Uncle Ira is no longer Uncle Ira’, which is in fact a recognized psychological condition) is dissolved into a generalized otherness, taken to such an extreme that it becomes sameness. This divesting of otherness of precisely its ‘otherness’ can be seen as a key thematic throughout much of 1950s science fiction films. In this respect, the most enigmatic scene in the film, and in fact the most discordant, comes when love appears unable to resist the power of conformity: Miles, having apparently escaped from the pod people with his girlfriend Becky kisses her and receives no emotional response, realizing that she has ‘changed’. He comments: ‘I’d been afraid a lot of times in my life but I didn’t know the meaning of fear until I kissed Becky. A moment’s sleep and the girl I loved was an inhuman alien bent on my destruction. That moment was death to Becky’s soul . . .’ This moment is discordant because throughout the film we have been given to believe that, for a person to be changed, a pod needs to be placed near them to gestate, something that takes time. However, the pod people do not at this time know where the couple are, so how could they have set up Becky’s pod and how could it have gestated in the few moments that Miles was away from her? This sets up another scenario for the film. It might incline us to think that the whole film reflects not a collapse into uniformity by the community, but the growing perceptual alienation of Miles himself, unable to recognize those around him for what they are. Miles and Becky had been childhood sweethearts who married other people from whom they have recently divorced at the beginning of the film. They rediscover their love as the epidemic of misrecognition begins occurring all around them. In such a heightened atmosphere, might not this love itself be a form of mis-recognition on the part of Miles? Another of the many possible interpretations of the film could be that Becky’s kiss does indeed signify that she has changed: she no longer loves him. Maybe it is this that has induced in Miles a trauma of which has sent him into a delusive state in which he denies the reality of the world around him and thinks that everyone had been ‘changed’. Alternatively, it could signal his own rejection of Becky: a sudden recoil from love based on his past disappointments. As the pod people have told him: love never lasts and by being in love you are only letting yourself in for a later disillusionment. This interpretation undermines the idea of a generalized collapse of society, but it still reflects a broad sense of personal paranoia and distrust. However one wishes to interpret this deeply ambiguous film, there is no doubt that Invasion of the Body Snatchers feeds into a range of

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anxieties on a number of levels about the nature of existence and identity, love and friendship and our relations with others, whether we can trust them and rely on what they what we are told and tend to accept as truth. It also reflects fear of the atom bomb and its ecological consequences. Miles hypothesises at one point that the pods may be caused by radiation, the effects of which are so little understood. And it shares with many other 1950s SF films the fact that the threat comes from the effect that nuclear research might have on the lower living orders: marine, vegetable or insect life is transformed in so many of these films into something monstrous, another element of the ‘alien’. We can witness attacks from ants (Them!, 1954); spiders (Tarantula, 1955); octopi (It Came from Beyond the Sea, 1955); grasshoppers (The Black Scorpion, 1957); snails (The Monster that Challenged the World, 1957); crabs (Attack of the Crab Monsters, 1957); wasps (Monster from Green Hell, 1958); praying mantis (The Deadly Mantis, 1957) and leeches (Attack of the Giant Leeches, 1959). In addition there were such films of insect to human transformation as The Leech Woman (1960) and The Wasp Woman (1959) or vice versa (The Fly, 1958). In The Thing from Another World (1951) the Thing, although it has a humanoid shape, is also of vegetative matter and at one point is even described as constituted like a giant carrot. Most of these creatures, of course, are also normally extremely small but for one reason or another (and usually due to human interference in nature) have grown to an enormous extent. There seems to have been almost an obsession with things growing too quickly and getting out of control: it is a fair bet that the words like ‘big’, ‘giant’, ‘colossal’ are to be found more commonly than any others in 1950s Hollywood movies. Conversely, as in Jack Arnold’s remarkable Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), it is man who becomes small, making ordinary objects massive in comparison. All of these films testify to a sense that something has gone fundamentally wrong in the state of nature. There is here a double sense of anxiety: on the one hand that the alien is out there, dangerous and malevolent and waiting for the opportunity to destroy us but on the other hand that this alien is of our own creation, that it is our irresponsibility that has caused the potential disaster. In Invaders from Mars (William Cameron Menzies, 1953), the aliens take over humans and then order them to sabotage the US space programme. Remarkably, in this film it is not their threat to ‘us’ that is emphasized, but our’s to ‘them’. At one point a scientist explains that we are about to put a satellite into space which will make it possible

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to prevent any attack on the United States by any foreign power (a precursor of Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ project!) and posits that this has so alarmed the Martians that they have sent an emissary to destroy the work and prevent the project from coming to fruition. This is emphasized in the film’s trailer, which says that the Martians were ‘pitting themselves against mankind’s dream of controlling the universe’. An anti-Enlightenment theme runs through this film, which is as deeply ambiguous in its message as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and may similarly be interpreted in a myriad of different ways. If ambiguity of the message is a theme throughout much of 1950s science fiction, a consistent ideology may be perceived in many of the films in that they tend to assume an irrevocable separation between ‘them’ and ‘us’ (although what the ‘them’ and the ‘us’ actually signified was deeply problematic: ‘we’ could never be sure of who the ‘them’ or even who the ‘we’ were, since ‘we’ could easily slip over to become ‘them’ if we were not careful). Despite this slippage, the division between the two was absolute: there could be no communication between the two conditions. Identity remained one thing or the other and there was no room for compromise between them: the principle of noncontradiction remained inviolate. In consequence, otherness was so internalized that it no longer really exists. In a sense, this is less clearly affirmative of the Enlightenment than might appear. Rather, it represents an uneasy truce with it to the extent that the inviolability of individual identity is affirmed and reciprocal dependency and communication as the foundation of the personality is denied. At the same time, fear of oneself and of what one is capable of doing is the basis of uncertainty, which is either repressed within or projected externally. Otherness must be expelled and there is a sense that ‘we’ must destroy ‘them’ or ‘they’ will destroy ‘us’, even though it was often so difficult to distinguish between who was one or who the other. *** This characteristic was particular to many science fiction films but is not to be found so clearly within other genres, where an interplay between self and other often remained as a striking theme. In the western above all, perhaps because the conflict was displaced to the past, complex moral issues could be addressed. A particular thematic that Hollywood has often handled well is that of a battle of wills between two male (usually) protagonists in which ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are played out.

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Some of the finest examples were made during this period, including Key Largo (John Huston, 1948); The Desperate Hours (William Wyler, 1955), Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges, 1955) and 3.10 to Yuma (Delmer Daves, 1957).2 In each of these films an ordinary (good) man is placed in an unexpected and deadly confrontation with an (evil) outlaw with whom he at first feels he has nothing in common. As the struggle develops, however, he increasingly gains an understanding of his opponent, which may be sympathetic or not but in any event it causes him to realize that he bears within himself some of the qualities of his opponent, so forcing him to recognize their affinity. Indeed, it is this recognition that gives strength and vitality to the hero enabling him to prevail over his apparently stronger protagonist. Any of these films might serve as a primer to illustrate Hegel’s master and slave dialectic, and they bear witness to the fact that below the surface a questioning of the relations of self and other was occurring in 1950s movie discourse. A parallel dynamic can also be discerned in the changing relation towards youth, increasingly seen as a ‘problem’ within. This was embodied by the personae of enfants terribles like James Dean and Marlon Brando, and perhaps given its most interesting shape in the confrontation between Glenn Ford’s schoolteacher and Vic Morrow’s violently disruptive high-school student in The Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955). It also appeared in the structure of the movie industry itself, as the drive-in theatre gained in popularity with films directly aimed at the teenage audience in a way that presaged the ‘generation gap’ that would become a key feature underlying the revolt of the 1960s generation and which brought forth a considerable number of B films like I Was a Teenage Werewolf, which emphasized the ‘otherness’ of young people. In all of these films, however, the concern is inwardly directed. The foreign is barely alluded to, as though ‘America’ and its problems and resolutions constituted the whole world. *** Going against the grain of this insularity were the films of Sam Fuller. One of the few Hollywood directors in the 1950s who seems to have been interested in international or cross-cultural issues, there is a certain symmetry to his films of the decade: three war films (The Steel Helmet, 1950; Fixed Bayonets, 1951, Merril’s Marauders, 1961); three films about cultural conflict in the aftermath of war (House of Bamboo, 1955; The Crimson Kimono, 1959; Verboten! 1959); three films set against the backdrop of the Cold War (Pick Up on South Street, 1953; Hell and High

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Water, 1954; China Gate, 1957), and for good measure three Westerns (I Shot Jesse James, 1949; Run of the Arrow, 1956; Forty Guns, 1957). These films together represent a kind of summa of the confusions of what it meant to be ‘American’ at this time. All of them are about American identity in very different ways and in different situations in which a key element is the treatment of racism (Fuller would later direct two of the most important films ever made about racism, Shock Corridor [1963] and White Dog [1982]). The underlying impulse here is remarkably similar to the central concern of the science fiction film: the question of belonging and determination of who may be included within ‘our’ frame of reference and who must be expelled from it. Fuller likewise makes a clear distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ but it is not a distinction that is internalized. It lies rather in actions by which one does or does not prove oneself to be a part of the ‘us’. Furthermore, in Fuller this does not involve a denial of otherness, which remains a constituent part of the ‘us’. For Fuller in these films, the reality of the world is American. He believes in the American Dream, but in an almost contradictory way. As Phil Hardy, in his book on the director, says In his battle-field view of a society whose members are engaged in an endless struggle, America is literally in a position to be the saviour of the world, in short to play the role the Puritans assigned to it. But Fuller is also aware that ‘the City upon a hill’ [ . . . ] is torn by racism [ . . . ] and internal strife . . .’ (1970: 13)

Hardy stresses that for Fuller ‘America’ is ‘the world’. It does not belong to those who were born within the borders of the United States; it is rather a concept into which one gains entrance through one’s actions. Conversely, negative experience will lead one away from America into a netherland ultimately entailing one’s exclusion from the privilege that belonging to America signifies. Being ‘American’ thus transcends both nationality and culture. As we saw earlier in discussing Run of the Arrow, this strangely contradictory sensibility is simultaneously profoundly American while also having a certain anti-American foundation. Or, more precisely, it sets an America as it ‘should be’ against an America ‘as it is’. At the same time, there is no alternative to ‘being American’: as we saw in Run of the Arrow, the Sioux woman Yellow Moccasin can become American, but O’Meara cannot become Sioux. Indeed, O’Meara himself has to learn to ‘become American’ by overcoming the hatred generated in him by the Civil War and recognizing his responsibility to participate in the building of a new nation. In the same way, the Japanese

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woman Mariko in House of Bamboo or the German woman Helga in Verboten! are essentially recruited to ‘America’ through their actions. The question that haunts Verboten! – ‘what is the difference between a Nazi and a German?’ runs throughout Fuller’s 1950s films in particular and is really asking: ‘what is the difference between an American and an alien?’ This ‘alien’ is someone unworthy of belonging, who disrupts the harmony of the multicultural world of the true America. The ‘villains’ in Fuller’s films tend to be faceless or abstract (the communists in Pick Up on South Street, the Nazis in Verboten!, the Union in Run of the Arrow). The two most vivid individual villains are the gangsters led Sandy (Robert Ryan) in House of Bamboo and the double renegades Driscoll (Ralph Meeker) and Crazy Wolf (H. M. Wynant) in Run of the Arrow. Whether an abstraction or not, however, they always function as counterpoints through which the central protagonist can act to define or concretize his becoming as part of the broad conception of what America should be. In House of Bamboo, for instance, Sergeant Kenner arrives in Tokyo as the stereotype of the vulgar American lacking in any sensitivity to the native culture. He expects everyone to speak English, pushes people around at will and ignores Japanese etiquette. Sandy, the gangster it is his mission to track down, is in contrast superficially integrated into Japanese life, which he respects only to the extent that is necessary for him to maintain his illegal operation. Kenner is helpless against Sandy without the aid of Mariko (Shirley Yamaguchi), a woman who had been married to one of Sandy’s henchmen until he was killed during a robbery. In order to prevail, he needs to learn to become ‘American’, paradoxically, by learning to respect Japanese culture.

Figure 14 Shirley Yamaguchi initiating Robert Stack into cultural difference in House of Bamboo.

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Miscegenation, far from being a danger, for Fuller is an essential building block of the creation of his America and thus in this film Mariko’s point of view becomes crucial as she softens Kenner’s personality by making him responsive to the diversity of culture. As he does so, Mariko, like Yellow Moccassin, is drawn into ‘being American’ as she is rejected by ‘her people’, who disapprove of her relationship with the American. In equating Mariko with ‘her people’ as though the Japanese are a generic category from which Mariko’s individuation requires that she detach herself, Fuller reveals his ultimate inability to think outside of American culture. He can only conceive of Japanese culture in stereotypical terms, from which Mariko, as an individual, has to be freed in order to join with the American. So, even though Fuller made every effort to engage with Japanese culture, watching Japanese films and attempting to give House of Bamboo the look of how the Japanese viewed their own society, one still feels he lacked the imaginative faculty to think of himself outside of his own culture, to conceive of himself as Other within Japan or, conversely, to recognize the otherness (as Other) of Japanese culture. He could not, that is, escape his own preconceptions. This is especially apparent when we notice that he cannot resist adding exoticism. Sandy’s home, although it is in Ginza, commands an impressive view of Mount Fuji, while when Sandy sends Kenner out to buy some new clothes, he goes all the way to Kamakura (a round trip that would probably have taken at least four hours) to make contact with the police at the shrine of the Great Buddha. Not surprisingly, Sandy is annoyed at how long he has taken! What is fascinating about Fuller’s films from this era is that, as much as he tries honestly to engage with otherness and to respect ‘other cultures’, in the end he can do so only by affirming American culture as not so much superior as the only true culture, against which all others revolve. Where the Tokyo of House of Bamboo is as of taken over by the false aspect of America in the shape of Sandy and his gang, in The Crimson Kimono (1959), it is as if the Little Tokyo of Los Angeles has become the epitome of America as Fuller conceives it. We could not be further here from the Orientalist image of the Yellow Peril examined in Chapter 3 or the legendary Chinatown in which the San Francisco police chief in Polanski’s Chinatown advises his officers to do ‘as little as possible’. These Nisei (Japanese Americans) seem perfectly integrated into American life on their own terms: the police chief even attends the annual kendo championships. The only tension seems to exist in the personality of Joe Kojako (James Shigeta), a Nisei detective whose

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latent sense of inferiority is brought to the surface when he and his partner and best friend Charlie (Glenn Corbett) fall in love with the same girl, artist Chris (Victoria Shaw). When Chris reveals that he is the one she loves, his guilt about his racial identity and about the fact that he has ‘stolen’ his friend’s girl conjoin, causing a destructive mood of racial distrust that boils over into violence. He must re-establish a sense of harmony by recognizing the true nature of things and not be taken in by the appearances created by his own destructive passion, in particular his sudden conviction that Charlie despises him because he is Japanese-American. He has to recognize that there is nothing racial about this, that if Charlie now hates him it is nothing but good healthy jealousy: even within Fuller’s ideal America, love remains a battlefield. Despite the fact that Fuller was the most cosmopolitan of all American directors of the 1950s, his films of this 1950s could not elude a certain prevalent narcissism by which the idea of ‘America’ constituted the whole world. *** The 1950s were a time of retrenchment within US society in which, under cover of fears about communism and alien invasion, it was really asking questions of itself. The insularity of the pre-war period, against which Hollywood functioned as a kind of emissary, sending its film across the world for international consumption, was re-stated in introspective terms as Americans became aware of their new standing in the world. This introversion turned Hollywood itself inward, as it recoiled from the McCarthyite accusations, both in terms of the films made (films that emphasized home life and familiar environments rather than strange, exotic lands) and in terms of themes in which paranoia vied with escapism. Any era of taboo, however, tends to contain the seeds of transgression and as the decade wore on these seeds increasingly germinated, coming to bloom in the 1960s, in which we see the inwardness of the 1950s giving way to an expansiveness of the American sensibility as the whole world now becomes American and there is no longer a beyond, no ‘other’ to be encountered or to be feared. This may appear to go against manifest appearance. The Cold War, after all, was at its height during the 1960s, reaching its culmination in the Cuban missile crisis and the Vietnam War. Yet, despite this objective danger, communism was no longer perceived as a moral threat to American identity, which had by the 1960s stabilized and become more secure. The idea that communists were trying to infiltrate and corrupt American culture

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ceased to be taken really seriously – Americans were now so confident about themselves that they no longer feared any such subversion. The threat was still there but had become nebulous, lying in a struggle for world influence rather than a will of conquest, and increasingly the danger of nuclear war was perceived to be more likely to result from a misunderstanding or error rather than from any malicious intent. The ‘communists’ in a sense no longer existed, at least not in the way they were understood at the beginning of the 1950s. They had become the ‘Soviets’, a rival power, having a different ideology, but one which was essentially tied to political influence rather than to a transformation of consciousness. These Soviets, that is, were no longer ‘Other’. This did not make them any the less dangerous but the danger they posed was of a different nature: it threatened ‘our’ interests in the world rather than the undermining of ‘our’ way of life. Moreover, for young people especially, as the decade progressed, the impact of the Vietnam War and greater cultural awareness, combined with economic security, made for a paradoxical self-assurance: on the one hand the American place in the world was assured and could not be undermined by external forces, but on the other hand this very internal security seemed to be troubling. The most remarkable effects of this shift can be seen in the horror film. As noted earlier, very few strictly horror films were made during the 1950s when the thematic of the genre was largely taken over by the science fiction film. When it re-emerges in the early 1960s, its whole scope and ethos is as if transformed. Beginning with the appearance of Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960, a new viscerality was added to the shivers induced by the traditional horror film. Gradually the horror genre in Hollywood eschewed the mythological films set in European locales that had earlier been its staple, to locate the horror within what was most familiar, so that the home itself has tended to become its most frequent setting, and the disintegration, or absence, of the family its most common theme. What is especially notable about this transformation is that where once horror was once almost exclusively a ‘foreign affair’ generally featuring non-American characters, it now comes home, in a sense with a vengeance, as suddenly not only the locales but also the characters are almost always American; foreigners rarely feature, even as villains. Increasingly, the paradigm of the evil doctor or thing (vampire, werewolf, alien from outer space) from elsewhere disappears, to be replaced by the serial killer, the malevolent ghost or by the zombie, all of them creatures that emerge from within, reflecting a radical change of perceptions in which what is feared seems to lie, above all, not within the ‘other’ but in what is unknown within the ‘self’.

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Chapter 7

THE MYTH OF THE ZOMBIE The myth of the zombie has taken a strange course in American cinema. One of the great mythical characters of cinema, standing alongside Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and the Mummy as a perennial figure of fascination, in the course of its cinematic history the zombie has undergone a remarkable transformation. First introduced in the film White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1931), it was associated with the figure from Haitian folklore in half a dozen or so films made during the following twenty or so years of which only one, I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943) has made much of an impression on film history. From the 1960s, however, in its cinematic form this figure has largely lost its link with Haitian folklore and assumed a radically different character. This ‘new’ zombie has since become perhaps the most popular monster depicted in horror films. It embodies some of the deepest fears within the modern global audience but in a way that has diverged so much from the original idea that we are really speaking of two different creatures, to the extent that a distinction should be made between the Haitian ‘zombi’ and the American ‘zombie’. The transformation of the one into the other is an interesting reflection of changing attitudes and relations of otherness which bears upon the movement detected in the previous chapters that occurred after the Second World War from the danger as being perceived out there, to becoming internalized as a threat within American polity itself. Some historical background is necessary to understand this significance. The zombie entered American consciousness principally as a result of the US occupation of Haiti that occurred between 1915 and 1934. This was a crucial event of twentieth century culture that has been insufficiently studied. In many ways it acted as a primer for many of the US military adventures that followed, uncannily pre-figuring

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both Vietnam and the invasion of Iraq. The immediate pretext for the invasion was to restore order following the killing of President Sam by an enraged mob. The Monroe Doctrine was also invoked, since the US feared that a European power, most likely Germany, might try to annex Haiti as a colonial possession. The principal reason for the invasion, however, was to protect US interests and make Haiti subject to US economic suzerainty. A 19-year occupation followed a pattern that has since become familiar: a re-writing of the constitution, supposedly ‘democratic’ elections slanted in such a way as to bring to power a friendly government followed by a long war of resistance, strikes and student protests, which finally forced the US to withdraw the marines but retain control of the country’s economy. This wasn’t by any means the first US colonial adventure, which had really started with the appropriation of Texas in the 1840s and later with the annexation in 1898 of Hawaii and the Spanish American wars which led to shameful US occupations of Cuba and the Philippines. The US intervened militarily in Cuba again in 1906 and 1912, in Panama in 1908 and 1912 and in Nicaragua in 1908. The occupation of Haiti, however, was the first foreign adventure that appears to have made a significant impact upon US consciousness and to have provoked active opposition at home as well as in Haiti. The Americans invaded Haiti with no understanding of the society and completely unprepared for what they would encounter. For the most part they came with racist and paternalistic attitudes, expecting to find a population as deferential as the African-Americans most of them were familiar with in the segregated US. Instead they encountered a society divided along class lines but whose people were proud and not inclined to kowtow to white men. The experience of serving in Haiti appears to have represented for many of the marines a genuine encounter with otherness, an encounter for which they were psychologically entirely unprepared, and which affected them in unpredictable ways. In particular, coming into contact with an environment in which black people were masters did not fit in with their view of the world. This sense of disorientation is conveyed well in a story by Haitian writer Jacques Stephen Alexis, ‘The Bewitched Second Lieutenant’, in which an American soldier is ‘captured’ by the Haitian environment and later executed by the US army as a traitor for having consorted with the enemy.1 What Alexis evokes in this story is a sense of incommensurability between Haitian and US worldviews that precludes any attempt to impose American cultural and moral values on the island.

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At the same time doubts at home about the moral right of the US to impose its ‘civilising mission’ also provided a focus of opposition, led by the burgeoning civil rights movement. The First World War had reinforced American doubts about the supposedly ‘civilised’ values of Europe as well as leading to a re-awakening by African-Americans that white civilization did not have all the answers to the human condition. The 1920s, of course, was the decade in which jazz became a popular music and black culture was entering the consciousness of white America, fuelled also by the poets and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, for whom Haiti was a source of inspiration. Langston Hughes, Katherine Dunham, Jacob Lawrence and Zora Neale Hurston were among the black intellectuals who travelled to Haiti during the 1920s and 1930s. In Haiti itself, the trauma of invasion encouraged cultural resistance and a desire to re-appraise native beliefs which in turn both stimulated and was stimulated by anthropological research. The publication in 1928 of Ainsi parla l’oncle a book by a Haitian intellectual, Jean Price-Mars was a defiant act against the occupation which also opened the Haitian elite, as well as foreign anthropologists, to the richness of Haitian peasant culture and to the importance of the voodoo religion. Hollywood representations of the zombi emerged against this backdrop, even if precious little of this background information found its way into American films of the time. Aside from documentaries, the predominant image of Haiti in American cinema has been of a land dominated by weird rituals and especially by the myth of the zombie. Only one Hollywood film, so far as I am aware, has ever made even an attempt to represent Haitian beliefs in any broad sense, and even this played on the sensational elements: Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow, made in 1988. And of the many films based upon the myth of the zombi, only two seem worthy of consideration: White Zombie (1932) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), both of which are inscribed with some of the complexities and ambivalences of the American relation to Haiti. The Zombi myth itself is a specifically, one might even say archetypal, New World myth which, though having its roots in Africa, addressed broader American realities in its particularity. Most specifically, it was obviously formed from out of the experience of slavery. Accounts of zombis in Euro-American discourse tend to focus on whether the zombi has a real physical existence; whether, that is, these are really beings

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who have returned from the grave. In a sense, this is irrelevant: the zombi is real because it is the personification of slavery as a persistent presence within historical memory. The French anthropologist Alfred Métraux was well aware of this in the description he gives of the zombi: He moves, eats, even speaks, but has no memory, and is not aware of his condition. The zombi is a beast of burden exploited mercilessly by his master who forces him to toil in the fields, crushes him with work, and whips him at the slightest pretext, whilst feeding him on the blandest of diets . . . Zombis can be recognised by their vague look, their dull, almost glazed, eyes, and above all by the nasality of their voice, a trait also characteristic of the ‘Guedé’ spirits of the dead. Their docility is absolute as long as they are given no salt. If they inadvertently eat any food containing even a single grain of salt, the fog enveloping their minds is immediately dispelled and they become suddenly aware of their environment. This discovery arouses in them an immense anger and an uncontrollable desire for revenge. They hurl themselves on their master, kill him, ravage his goods, then go off in search of their graves. (Métraux, 1957: 250–1)

Quite clearly this is nothing but the collective memory of slavery and the certainty that it must, one day, be avenged. But it is not simply a reflection of the slave’s helplessness: it is also a myth of regeneration. And it is a form of re-enactment: a myth of return, which guards against the apprehension of a return of slavery.

Figure 15 Bela Lugosi making an unexpected appearance in White Zombie.

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White Zombie is the only Hollywood film that retains some of these essential qualities of the Haitian myth, although it still distorts them. The story concerns an American couple, Madeline (Madge Bellamy) and Neil (John Harron) who, in Haiti to get married, meet Beaumont (Robert Frazer), a wealthy businessman, who offers Neil a position with his company – he also suggests that the marriage takes place at his manor house. However, his motives are far from pure: he has designs on Madeline and asks a sinister magician, a sugar mill owner called Murder Legendre, to bewitch her in order to prevent the marriage and allow him time to convince her of his love. Legendre, however, turns her into a zombie and taunts Beaumont with the fact that she will never love him. Regretting what he has done, Beaumont tries to force Legendre to restore her to life, finally killing Legendre and releasing Madeline from the spell. Legendre, played with chilling intensity by Bela Lugosi, is a plantation owner who collects zombis to work his plant. Slavery, therefore, has returned in this film. Legendre is a powerful magician who has enslaved all of his enemies by making them zombi. He is a not entirely unsympathetic figure, since his malevolence arises from his contempt for the privileged elite who have ruined the country, but his lack of empathy for others means that he can only be an even greater oppressor. After he has first zombified Madeline and fulfilled his contract, it is not clear why he later seeks to take her from Beaumont other than as a means to torment him. In effect, the film restores Haiti to its colonial period, in which the land was exclusively owned by French people. After independence in 1804 it had been illegal for non-Haitians to own land in Haiti and one of the first acts of the US occupation was to force the Haitians to repeal this law, opening the way for foreign plundering of the land in the coming years. This colonial imposition is as if replicated in the film, thus denying the revolutionary integrity of Haiti, by restoring white power in the form of Beaumont. The depiction of zombis is in line with Haitian accounts, and the scene of them working the sugar mill gives a startlingly powerful image of the horror of slavery, especially when we see one of the zombis fall into the sugar vat without making any attempt to save himself while no one goes to his aid. One crucial element is missing, however, in that the zombis are given no possibility of revolt: they are irrevocably tied to their master and their only possible relief is to find actual death (which is induced at the end by leading them all to walk blindly over the castle wall and fall into the sea). How much more effective the film

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would have been if Halperin had followed Haitian belief and given the zombis salt and let them tear Legendre to pieces! Yet even this recompense is denied them. They could not be allowed any level of agency and Legendre has to be killed by the white man, Beaumont. This refusal to admit the reality that power in Haiti lay in the hands of black people and assert that even evil here is a white preserve, given to corrupt and nefarious Europeans, reflects a persistent American myth of the period that black people could only serve. White Zombie, made while the United States was still occupying Haiti, was loosely based on The Magic Isle, a sensational but interesting account of voodoo practices, published in 1929 by William Seabrook, an American adventurer who had travelled widely in Haiti. Having become a bestseller in the States, this book stimulated interest in Haiti and provided a context in which White Zombie could find a public. Although it is a crudely made film, having been made on a tiny budget, it is oddly compelling, having a strange power that reflects in interesting ways American fear of the ‘otherness’ of Haiti and of black culture in general and doubtless also drawing to an extent upon the experience of the marines in Haiti and the way voodoo practices spread fear among the American soldiers. Despite its distortions of Haitian reality, it is one of the few Hollywood films to have taken seriously the link between zombification, slavery and capitalism. I Walked with a Zombie, made a decade later, is a more subtle and better made film, but it lacks the alien, uncanny quality of the earlier film, even if it too is both atmospheric and haunting. Part of a series of films made under the aegis of Val Lewton, one of the more creative Hollywood producers, and directed by Jacques Tourneur, it was a follow up to their success with Cat People, a film likewise about the eruption of otherness into the regularity of American life. Most of Lewton’s films in fact play upon colonial heritage and the guilt associated with it. There is also a sense in this film of how the past intrudes on the present and how long ago events contain echoes that return to haunt the present. The film is respectful of Haitian beliefs, although it doesn’t go beyond a superficial representation of them. And it is true to say that its perspective remains entirely Western (in fact the story is a very loose adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre). Made a decade after White Zombie, it no doubt reflects a time when the horrors of world war were more immediate than primitive terrors of otherness. In I Walked with a Zombie black people are treated more sympathetically and the voodoo religion is shown more respect than perhaps in any Hollywood film, either before or since. It is taken seriously as a

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Figure 16 Frances Dee and Christine Gordon take the zombie walk in I Walked with a Zombie.

belief system and some effort seems to have been made to depict it relatively accurately. This doesn’t prevent serious distortions, however: Carrefour, the spirit of the crossroads, one of the most powerful voodoo loa, is represented as a zombie which can be commanded by human will, and the actions of the voodoo practitioners seem to be no more than an imaginative construction of the film makers. This is a sceptical approach to the unknown, one that acknowledges the validity of voodoo belief without accepting its particular significance in the Haitian context. As such, the otherness of voodoo practice is flattened out: it is treated as merely another religious practice, superstitious, perhaps, but having a psychological efficacy that gives it a primitive legitimacy. If anything it is the white family who are ‘other’, at least to the extent that they have a secret which makes them an object of suspicion to the natives. Yet the intriguing thing about I Walked with a Zombie is that there is no apparent evil here, everything is suggestion. The story concerns the bewitchment of the wife of one of the plantation owners (again property is in the hands of white people). By whom and for what purpose is never made clear. Is the wife an actual zombi? This again we never learn. The natives believe so, as she does not bleed when stabbed at the houmfor, the voodoo meeting place. However,

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there is no bokor, or magician, controlling her and if she has been turned into a zombi, it seems to be clear that it has nothing to do with the natives, but is entirely contained within the white family, which consists of two brothers, one English and one American, along with the former’s comatose wife and their mother. Into this mix comes a Canadian nurse, hired to look after the wife. The nurse falls in love with the English brother and the film ends with the other brother drowning himself in the sea along with the wife. We are largely left in the dark about what motivated these actions, or the behaviour of the mother, a doctor who participates in voodoo ceremonies and at one point admits to being responsible for the bewitchment of the wife, although this is immediately dismissed by everyone else. The film takes its power from the sense of uncertainty created, which attains a poetic intensity in which the exotic locale of the Caribbean island appears to give a pretext for events that have a mysterious causation, but this is more related to a fundamental white corruption which the alien environment brings out. This is conveyed by the most intriguing character in the film, a calypso singer called Sir Lancelot. Alternately insolent and ingratiating, he plays upon and undermines black deference and functions as a kind of accusatory chorus as he intones a song intimating that evil did indeed take place within the white family. A recurring image, too, is that of Ti Misery, a figurehead from an old slave ship, which stands at the entrance of the family estate, and suggests an interaction between present and past and is a further intimation that the family troubles are more deep-seated than their present-day difficulties and are tied in with a past linked with slavery. I Walked with a Zombie is a fascinating and evocative film which remains, along with White Zombie, the only American film that acknowledges how voodoo belief is founded in the pain and suffering of slavery and the rigours of colonialism, as well as being the only cinematic residues we have of the American occupation of Haiti and the otherness they found there. *** The transformation of the figure of the zombi into that of the American zombie begins in the 1960s with Sidney Salkov’s The Last Man on Earth (1964), an adaptation of Richard Matheson’s story ‘I am Legend’, in which a plague spreads across the world causing death and the resurrection of the corpse as a kind of flesh-eating vampire. It was, however, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, made in 1968 and drawing

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on Salkov’s film, which irrevocably changed the way the zombi was imagined. Of the enormous number of films made since then featuring the living dead, almost all of them owe a direct debt to Romero’s film. Following Night of the Living Dead, Romero has contributed four sequels: Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), Land of the Dead (2005) and Diary of the Dead (2007). These films represent a passage, marked by their titles: we pass from night, through dawn, to the day and finally the land itself. With each subsequent film the zombies become more prevalent. Where at first they had been associated with the night, gradually they penetrate the dawn, then the day and finally the landscape as a whole, when they begin to re-emerge into a state of self-awareness (Diary of the Dead, which returns more directly to the themes of the first film, is anomalous to this sequence).

Figure 17 The zombie walk in Dawn of the Dead. These ‘zombies’ have almost nothing in common with the Haitian zombi (the designation of which as ‘living dead’ would be a misnomer, since the point about zombis is that they are neither living nor dead). As mythological creatures they are closer to the ghoul, a figure from Middle Eastern mythology. Ghouls are not returning dead people, but demons which haunt cemeteries and have a taste for human flesh.2 Romero’s creatures can thus be seen as an amalgam of the traditional zombi and ghoul responding to very modern anxieties that are both general and specific to American society, used by Romero not only to scare but also to make political comment. They should be seen as peculiarly modern creatures. If they derive from folk memory and age old fears of death and enslavement, they add to them modern anxieties

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about the effects of consumerism, over-population and dependency upon machines with the consequent loss of humanity, community and self-determination this involves. Above all the zombie reflects the loss of a sacred relation to the world within modern consciousness that involves a denial not so much of the material fact of death as of its metaphysical implications. Having reduced existence to the material fact of life, we have placed a burden upon the living which is so great that even when dead they do not feel they have been released from it but must return to continue a meaningless existence. The first of Romero’s films, Night of the Living Dead addresses similar issues to those of Invasion of the Body Snatchers from a decade earlier but the nature of the attack has now been entirely internalized. There is no longer any suggestion that this might be an invasion by aliens or some outside power. The threat explicitly comes from within – the zombies are ‘us’, as Romero himself insists. Whatever the actual cause of the sickness, it is apparent that it is we who are ultimately responsible for it – not necessarily because of what we have specifically done, but because of the complacency of our lives. In Day of the Dead, the film ends with the heroine Sarah about to make an escape by helicopter when she is attacked by a zombie. At that moment she awakens on a beach where her two companions are playing a ball game. Is the whole film, then, Sarah’s bad dream, the dream of a guilty tourist sunning herself on a beach while the world goes mad? The whole series perhaps turns on this ambivalence. In fact, the proliferation of the zombies in these films makes no logical sense because, if they completely devour their victims, as Romero takes great pleasure in showing that they do, then nothing would remain to become a zombie in its turn. They only become zombies, it seems, when they escape after having been bitten and die later. But if this is so, then their proliferation on the scale shown in the films would be impossible. They can thus only be seen as creatures from nightmare whose impossibility answers to some of the antagonisms and powerlessness that exist below the surface within contemporary society. There are two further crucial differences from The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. First, the condition of the zombie offers no comfort: there is no return to the womb, no Freudian death drive, behind this sickness. It is in fact quite the opposite. Desire is now completely absent, even the desire for indistinction. Second, what is being attacked is not the mind but the body of the living. In fact, the brain is the one part that lives on as a purely motor response, impelling what remains of the unwilling body to continue living, even if this ‘living’ is only

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a semblance of life: we may surmise that there is no need to attack the mind because it had already been completely colonized when they were still alive. All of the ambiguity of the 1950s science fiction films surrounding the nature and meaning of the attack has vanished. There is no suggestion now that this is some form of paranoid fantasy. Moreover, it is made clear that these creatures are not the consequence of any evil (there is no agent that has brought them into being), but of a generalized rapacity of modern society. Any sense of perturbation at an encounter with otherness has gone because everything has been reduced to the same. In fact, historical memory is silent. Only a superficial present remains, in which the real danger is oneself and those one is close to. The zombies are simply the other side of ‘us’: having rid ourselves of our ‘other’, we have become literally shadows of ourselves. The central theme of all of Romero’s zombie films is ultimately the loss of community in modern society; not simply the fact of the general dispersion made possible within society by modern communications, but the consequences this has had upon the very foundation of the relationships between people. This is already set up in Night of the Living Dead, in which family relations, not to say human relations in general, are seen to be corrupted at root. The zombies act out of compulsion, interested only in devouring living, human flesh. Is this some form of cannibalism? Strictly no, because they are no longer human and are therefore not devouring their own species. But as they are not aware that they have ceased to be alive, it could be said that their impulse is cannibalistic. Moreover, since their target is only humans (they don’t appear to attack animals, although this is not certain as animals seem curiously absent from the films, another element that emphasizes their dream logic) it appears that some kind of mechanical revenge is being enacted. At the same time, a transgressive impulse to their actions is suggested. Since cannibalism is the strongest taboo that exists within human society (along with incest, which is also prominent), the deliberate targeting of people in this way seems to imply a generalized revolt on the part of those who have died against the social norms that had conditioned their lives. We learn that there is no functional reason for their behaviour. In Day of the Dead, the scientist demonstrates that they cannot digest what they eat and that they still have the desire for this form of consumption even when their stomachs are removed. Nevertheless, their actions conform to none of the recognized reasons

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for cannibalistic behaviour. Not only have they no need of nourishment, they also are not seeking to assume the power of their adversary. On the contrary, they only strive to destroy that power, to render their adversary as powerless as they themselves are. The confusion about their status seems to impel them to act as though they are alive, but they lack the functions necessary to living and so out of frustration they attack those who live as once they did. As the human survivors in Dawn of the Dead postulate, they congregate at the shopping mall because it was the most important place in their lives even though they are now indifferent to the consumer goods on offer. Uncertain as to their status, they seek to establish whatever their condition might be, a theme that comes to the fore in Land of the Dead. In their forlorn clinging to being human, their inability of let go of life, they have a desperate need for a recognition that can never be given. And because it can never be given, it only induces a sense of mindless rage. Respect (or lack of it) for the dead is a central element of this estrangement. Night of the Living Dead begins with John and Barbra travelling to lay a wreath on their mother’s grave out of a sense of duty which neither of them really believes is necessary and John would prefer to ignore altogether. The first zombie appears in the cemetery almost as a response to their playacting. Maybe, therefore, it is simply that the dead are returning to take revenge on a culture that has refused to accord them respect through proper funeral rituals. This is emphasized in Dawn of the Dead when the government scientist demands that people burn the body as soon as people are dead: ‘They’re just dead flesh, and dangerous.’ This indicates a total loss of any link with the ancestors and implies a world in which there is no possibility of the sacred. Rituals surrounding burial lie at the basis of human culture. Respect for the dead is one of the things that distinguishes us from other animals and in many cultures ensuring that the deceased person has a proper passage to the other world is a fundamental responsibility placed upon the living in order to maintain the continuity of the life force and protect it from retribution from beyond the grave. Yet in the profane society in which we live today, a society which reifies everything, treating all things as devoid of any sacred quality, the dead are just another object to be disposed of as efficiently as possible. Is one of the messages of Romero’s films, therefore, that failure to honour the dead is a sign of a decadence that has to be punished? ‘When there’s no more room in hell, the dead shall walk the earth’ is given in Day of the Dead as the reason for the zombie phenomenon, but it could be that the dead have been denied entrance to the other world

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because the living have failed to provide them with necessary means to enter it: they therefore have no choice but to return to ‘life’. We should note that the fury of the zombies is out of all proportion to their motor capabilities: they lumber around awkwardly until they find a living being, when they suddenly gain strength and furiously tear out the insides, or take large bites out of the flesh of their victims. Here an interesting contrast may be made with the way zombies are considered in Haiti, where it is precisely the care that is taken over funeral that will prevent the dead from becoming zombi. Although the respective myths reveal a fear of the dead returning from the grave, this assumes a very different import in the two cases. Haitians are afraid of becoming zombi principally because it would represent a return to slavery, but also because it would rupture the continuity between the living and the dead. Haitians, however, do not appear to fear the loss of identity that seems to underlie the apparition of the American zombie. The Haitian zombi remains human and continues to be what it recognizably was in life: it has merely lost its will-power and so fails to recognize its human state, having become trapped in an in-between state that is neither life nor death. In contrast, the fear the American zombie represents is the loss of identity of the living person, the fact that the I will become something alien, something other, but only in an entirely negative sense. It is an ‘otherness’ sundered from any affective relation. It is simply the other side of what we are, representing fear not of the unknown but of an emptiness we experience at the heart of our own lives: the fear that we might already be zombies. In a sense the zombie can be seen the intimation of the walkman wearer or the mobile phone user who uses the apparatus as a shield to close out the rest of the world.

Figure 18 Brub the Zombie begins to re-learn social skills in Day of the Dead.

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In marked contrast to the American zombie, the Haitian zombi is harmless; the only person who needs to fear it is its master should the zombi ever become aware of its condition. The American zombie on the other hand retains the aggression and acquisitiveness of its living state. It has not been called back from beyond the grave by some malevolent magician in order to carry out hard labour. If it is enslaved, it is by virtue of a necessity imposed upon it when it was alive: so conditioned has it been to accumulate and consume that these impulses continue after death as purely motor responses. Now it acts out of compulsion, but with no desire and no aim. In Romero’s films, too, there is a fear of ceasing to be human, of being reduced to the state of a devouring beast devoid of will. None of this is contained in the Haitian zombi. Haitians fear becoming zombies because a return to slavery means a surrendering of one’s will to another and loss of fundamental freedom. American zombies on the other hand have no masters and do no work; they remain free, but it is a meaningless freedom, one which is devoid of any purpose. There is no suggestion of any redemptive element at all in any of Romero’s films until Land of the Dead when the zombie Big Daddy begins to gain awareness. Rather than the savour of salt as in the Haitian myth, however, the reviving condiment here is petrol and awareness means regaining rationality as he re-learns the negative aspects of the life as he knew it and starts to become able to make plans. The explosion of passion and anger that characterizes the Haitian zombie as it regains awareness of the taste of life and knowledge of which it has been deprived is absent. There is no indication that new creative and imaginative possibilities are being revealed and the revenge taken by the newly aware zombies is purely retributative. Moreover, the retribution is taken not against anyone who might have been responsible for their becoming zombies, but only upon those who have taken advantage of the situation (it is a considerable weakness of Land of the Dead that Kaufman [Dennis Hopper] is such a stereotyped villain, since this makes the revenge of zombies insipid and purely conventional). It is thus an awakening that is quite different from the assertion of freedom of the Haitian myth. Throughout the series of dead films, Romero also raised questions about the role of the media and mass communication, suggesting that their very constitution makes them unable to deal effectively with a crisis. This has a wider implication, since it arises from the manipulative ways in which the media functions, so leading it to give a distorted and fundamentally confused account of reality in which we tend to place

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a misguided faith. When a crisis does occur, this faith may compound the difficulties that people face. This theme was taken up directly in Diary of the Dead, in which we are returned to the initial outbreak of the dead returning to life. At the time a group of students are themselves making a movie and the film focuses upon their response to the emergency, in which their fear is confounded with their desire to record their experience. In particular, in their desire to make a video diary recording of their actual experience in a way that would counter the dominant media images they cannot extricate themselves from the very structures of the medium itself. Moreover this desire, especially as it becomes obsessive in the megalomania of the director, increasingly threatens their own safety. Although treading much familiar ground, Diary of the Dead serves to make explicit a undercurrent theme of the whole series: that our dependence upon media technology tends towards making us lose a sense of what makes us human and so blurs the distinction between the living and the dead and that this, perhaps, accounts for the emergence of this liminal being, the zombie. Each of these films has been very much situated in their time and makes a sometimes acerbic comment about the social realities of the period. As has often been pointed out: Night of the Living Dead caught a mood of social dis-aggregation within US society as the Vietnam War was at its height, Dawn of the Dead, gives a warning about the effects of unlimited consumption, Day of the Dead shows some of the social effects of Reaganite economics and social dis-aggregation, and Land of the Dead, responds to 9/11 and its aftermath. Together, they constitute a record of the generalized disintegration of human identity and purpose which Romero seems to see as being the overall direction in which social processes over the 40 years of the cycle have led. *** Romero’s dead films signalled a remarkable transformation of the American horror film. Not only did they initiate a whole genre of imitations which made the zombie the most popular monster, displacing the vampires and werewolves of earlier horror films, they also concretized in a more general sense a trend that had started in the early 1960s towards a more graphic and brutal style of representation of horror. Although this shift is partly explained by technological advances which made possible the exposure of the effects of violence upon the body in ways that would not have been possible in earlier eras (there is

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little doubt that part of the appeal of these films lies in appreciation of their special effects), it also marks some significant changes of attitudes within modern society. Just as the Caribbean no longer provides the locus for the zombie film, so adaptations of European authors or European themes that dominated the horror genre before the war virtually come to an end. With The Exorcist (1973) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) the ‘Americanization of the horror film’ seems to reach a point of no return. In addition to the zombie film, it would be the slasher movie and theme of the haunted house that would assume dominance throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The appeal of these films seems to lie in a realm of pure viscerality, responding more to a fear of what is the same (our own bodies, our neighbours, the government) than to any threat from without. Otherness here – doubtless stimulated by the threat posed by new viral diseases like AIDS – is represented less by other people than on the one hand by microbes that exist within us and assume manifest shape in the form of the serial killer, or in the form of faceless authority represented by administrative control and the media.

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Chapter 8

APOCALYPSE NOW ON A BORDERLINE OF CONSCIOUSNESS We know that the Vietnam conflict traumatized the American psyche; the only time, it likes to believe, that the United States ‘lost’ a war, something which for a while brought into question the sense of ‘manifest destiny’ with which US governments seem to have been imbued since the beginning of the twentieth century. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that almost all of the films centred upon the Vietnam War have been concerned not so much with the war itself but with its impact upon American consciousness, both as an event, and as an aftermath. From this perspective, the fact that virtually no fictional film has confronted or raised the issue of American/ Vietnamese relations, or shown the slightest interest in the impact the war made upon the Vietnamese should really not surprise us. This is especially the case in Apocalypse Now, a film which is undoubtedly the most significant cinematic exploration of the conflict, and yet there is virtually no Vietnamese presence in it. It is not so much that no recognition is given to a Vietnamese perspective as the fact that the Vietnamese are virtually invisible, even as adversaries, that gives pause for reflection. It is worthy of note that the only two occasions in the film when we actually see Vietnamese people it is as anonymous victims; first of a gratuitous American attack on a village and then of the freaked-out, trigger-happy crew on the boat that takes Willard up river. Yet is there not a certain truth to this exclusion? Does it not reflect the way the Americans approached not only this war but all wars; indeed does not the psychological determinant that lies at the heart of US enthusiasm for imperialist intervention represent an inability to think about the consequences for those on the receiving end of these adventures?

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From the film, one might be persuaded that the real ‘enemy’ the Americans were fighting was themselves. Indeed, the profound meaning of the film may lie in this realization, a realization Coppola himself almost articulated when he said that the film was not ‘about’ Vietnam, but ‘was Vietnam’. This notorious statement has always seemed like hyperbole, and yet it contains a certain truth: Apocalypse Now is a film about the United States written, like a palimpsest, across the landscape of Vietnam. The hyperbole itself has a peculiarly American feel to it, especially insofar as it subsumes ‘Vietnam’ totally into American experience: it is not so much that the US intervened in Vietnam, more that Vietnam came to the US to provide a new frontier, constituted by the Vietnamese countryside. The sense of the land as being ‘beyond the frontier’, as the wilderness where ‘there be dragons’ is made explicit in the extraordinary sequence when Chef insists on going into the jungle to seek mangoes and with Willard encounters a tiger, which pounces from out of the undergrowth. ‘Never get out of the boat. Absolutely goddamn right. Unless you were going all the way,’ Willard reflects, and there is a sense throughout in which the river is a neutral zone, that it is not Vietnam: ‘Vietnam’ only exists when they leave the boat and it is a dangerous and threatening place, the place in which the other is hidden, and into which one should not enter unless one is ‘going all the way’. The film thus opens up certain myths – often in latent form – inherent to US society. And what is significant is that these myths are not simply integral to the US perception of itself; they are also entangled in the way in which much of the rest of the world is implicated in this mythical self-perception. American self-absorption and indifference to its impact on the external world in this context should not naively be confused just with insularity. Nor should it be misrecognized simply as a reflection of a certain parochialism affecting a particular part of the American psyche. It is rather something that lies at its heart in ways that are deeply ambivalent. Indeed, it may be that the very richness of US society, its plurality and its multi-dimensionality (enabling it to stand above the localization of its problems and see them in terms of a universal perspective), is founded precisely in the fact that it closes out knowledge or interest in the rest of the world. This is, at least, certainly the case as regards the version of ‘America’ that Hollywood promulgates, one which projects itself outwards at the same time and in the same movement as it turns back on itself. As noted previously, this means that we all – no matter how involuntarily – participate in the concept of ‘America’, since a mutually symbiotic

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Figure 19 Martin Sheen finally gets out of the boat in Apocalypse Now. relation (on cultural, social and political levels) is established that irrevocably ties ‘our’ fate (whoever ‘we’ may be) with ‘theirs’. This is the foundation and the particular quality of the American colonial attitude and it is what Apocalypse Now is ultimately all about. The film was never really about a war in a foreign land called Vietnam; it was always about something within ‘ourselves’, to the extent that ‘we’ – whether we be ‘Europeans’ or ‘Americans’ – have bought into the American Dream: and this means all of us who accept – or are forced to live our lives under – the dominance of an individualist, consumer led, attitude towards life. No film in Hollywood history, I think, has directly confronted themes of otherness in a more complex or a more uncomfortable way than Apocalypse Now. And the more one sees the film the more uncomfortable it becomes. As rich as it is, its meaning constantly slips away and it confounds any attempt at pigeon-holing. Is it to be viewed as a commentary on the Vietnam War, as a war film, as a quest film drawing upon mythological elements, as an adaptation of Conrad exploring the darkness within human consciousness? It is, of course, all of these things and at the same time none of them. It establishes its own domain: its uniqueness arises from the fact that it mythologizes an actual historical situation in a way that has few obvious parallels in the history of film. It is this that establishes its peculiar property of being able to elude us just as we feel we are coming to terms with it. Simultaneously it succeeds in being the Vietnam War film, while in a real sense not being about Vietnam at all. At the very least, it transcends

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such context. It is, however, a powerful testimony of the American psyche, a testimony that lies both within and without the beast. These troubling qualities affected its director as much as anyone. The difficulties Coppola experienced, both in making the film and then in coming to terms with what he had produced, are well known. The history of Hollywood cinema is littered with costly vanity projects which are generally self-indulgent when they are not outright disasters. Coppola’s film threatened to be both before ultimately triumphing, and no one surely has committed himself to a film as fully as Coppola did with Apocalypse Now: it represented a genuine journey into the depths of the soul, not only Coppola’s own soul, but the soul of the United States itself. It was, precisely, a confrontation with otherness. Our perspective on it has also been subject to constant revision. At the beginning of the 1990s, Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper’s Film Maker’s Apocalypse (1991) gave us fresh insight into the process of the making of the film. More recently, Coppola gave us a brand new version of the film itself, Apocalypse Now Redux, suitably packaged with all the accoutrements of the times so that what had once been a testimony to the anguish felt by a nation at defeat in war, now becomes a neatly packaged text specially prepared for the age of the internet and DVD players. For all that, its power remains undimmed, and the new version gives us fresh insight into the determinants underlying the film, without adding too much to our overall comprehension. Despite its evasions on the specifics of the conflict with the Vietnamese, it remains as much a document of the war as the newsreels of the time. Nevertheless, Apocalypse Now seems to bring attention to its lack of authenticity. The film was shot in the Philippines, supposedly because the landscape is similar to that in Vietnam and yet there is no ‘Nung River’ in Vietnam, indeed there are no navigable rivers upon which one could travel from central Vietnam into Cambodia. Much of the rest of the film is based on distortion of the reality of Vietnam and the stage of combat. For instance, it is a land of over-populated agricultural regions interspersed with mountains, not the sparsely populated country dominated by jungle the film suggests; the feature of combat was not in general attack by a hidden foe that kept its distance, but close quarters fighting in which it was difficult to distinguish foe from friend; ancient Khmer ruins are not to be found in eastern Cambodia. Most serious of all, there is no evidence that – for all of the madness of the war – anything occurred that was in any way comparable to what is represented at Kurtz’s encampment. If it is true that US agents did mobilize groups of Montagnards against the Vietcong, that we are

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supposed to believe that a group of them would ever worship a white man to excess in the way the film depicts is really stretching the bounds of credulity to breaking point. The image of the white man as God to the natives is something that – as historically inaccurate and mystificatory as it is – ought to have vanished as an idea with ending of colonialism; that it hasn’t is the most troubling aspect of the film. In fact, everything about the representation of Kurtz’s compound is so fantastical and unbelievable that it ought to bring the integrity of the whole film into question (that it doesn’t is significant and bears upon the psychological will of the audience to believe in its own superiority over the ‘Other’). Furthermore, the fact that the script is essentially an adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a work set in Africa in completely different social, geographical and historical circumstances, also brings attention to the film’s fictional genesis (it is difficult to see how Conrad’s story could ever have been adapted in any way that would approximate the actual situation of the Vietnam War). The difficulties of locating Apocalypse Now in Vietnam raise the question of whether Coppola was being dishonest in setting the film there. Far from being about the experience of Vietnam, is it rather a fantasy film having more to do with a mythological world summoned up by his imagination than with a specific country that suffered for more than a decade from an American imperialist occupation? Should our terms of reference in judging the film be films like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings rather than the historical specificity of Vietnam? This suggestion has certain attractions, allowing us to give attention to the mythological elements of the film rather than being bogged down by debates about how true it is to the experience of the actual war between the United States and Vietnam. There is of course no such thing as a pure fantasy film that hangs out of time: Star Wars and Lord of the Rings are also of their time and the former, made contemporaneously with Apocalypse Now, could equally be analysed in relation to the Vietnam experience since in different ways it, as much as Apocalypse Now, is about coming to terms with the trauma the war with Vietnam created within American consciousness (the fact that Star Wars was directed by George Lucas, whose project Apocalypse Now originally was, also gives weight to such a suggestion). Yet, however ‘fantastical’ it may be, and despite the distortions it may effect in the actuality of the Vietnam War, Apocalypse Now does not really elide the experience of the war and is concerned at a manifest level with its reality. Its mythical aspects cannot be subsumed to an allegorical or latent level: they are integral to the way it deals with such

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actuality. The particular quality of the film is that it goes beyond its own generic limits; it is both directly about the war with Vietnam and not about it. It is simultaneously the richest – and probably most accurate – account of the experience of the war, especially in its madness, and the least true to life, the most distorted. This brings us back to the further significance of Coppola’s statement that Apocalypse Now was not a representation of Vietnam but was Vietnam. Coppola elaborated his statement: ‘We made Apocalypse the way Americans made war in Vietnam. There were too many of us, too much money and equipment – and little by little, we went insane.’ This does not seem to be far from the truth, for its making does seem to reflect the same sort of mentality that still underlies US foreign policy, especially in the way the film strives to bend reality to what its makers wanted it to be (of which inventing the non-existent Nung river in Vietnam to make it possible to tell the story Coppola wanted to tell is the most conspicuous example) rather than deal directly with that reality. Thanks to A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse we can see something of the madness as it was occurring, although one has to say that while the documentary confirms the ‘madness’, it does not entirely support Coppola’s reasons for it. Rather, it suggests that the madness came from the fact that it was a poorly conceived project that went into location shooting without having been subject to proper pre-production planning. The same thing, of course, could be said of the US intervention in Vietnam, although one might say that what resulted from Coppola’s folly was of considerably greater value. I know of no other major film in which one senses a director less in control of his material. And yet this may be one of the film’s great strengths. If it is Coppola’s film, it is true to say that it also reflects a patchwork of different – often contradictory – voices that never allows for a single perspective to prevail. Coppola’s achievement is to have allowed these different voices to come together in an unstable unity, and it is also because of this, no doubt, that the film so effectively reflects the contradictions within US society that the Vietnam experience laid bare. Apocalypse Now thus stands on a borderline between actuality and symbolic representation, and the different levels at which the representation takes place bring each into question. It plunges us into the maelstrom of activity that constitutes a war, bringing us face to face with its visceral actuality, while simultaneously drawing us back from it. It is thus both a ‘realistic’ and a ‘fantasy’ film or, more accurately, it is neither, since it brings such a demarcation into question. Its audacity – its foolishness, even – is to try to mesh together mythological elements

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with contemporary realities in a way that I don’t think has otherwise been attempted in film, either before or since. Its truth, ultimately, is inseparable from its mendacity. The endless fascination the film has comes from the fact that it never settles, never allows us to be comfortable with it at any level, even as we are entranced and often seduced by it. If it is not a film about the Vietnam War, it represents a recreation of the American experience of Vietnam in microcosm. But this experience was not that of real soldiers fighting a war in a real place called Vietnam. Coppola never went to Vietnam. He doubtless had as little understanding of what the soldiers on the ground went through as those generals who directed the war from Washington or Saigon. The Vietnam experience recorded in Apocalypse Now was rather a projection, an imaginary summa, of how the United States as a whole experienced Vietnam, with all its confusions, mis-directions and failures. It is in this way that Coppola lived through Vietnam, and to this extent was right to say that, ‘My film is not about Vietnam. My film is Vietnam.’1 Yet, what does this ‘Vietnam’ mean? It is clearly not a real place but a Vietnam of the mind that the American psyche inhabited long before the US became involved historically in Vietnam and it represents a trauma that is present on the screen because it was re-lived in the filming. It is a trauma of rootlessness, formed from a peculiar tension between the longing for the security of home and a relentless urge to leave it behind, at whose heart lies a profound fear of otherness. In the opening scene of the film, Willard confides: ‘When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. I’d wake up and there’d be nothing . . . I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to a divorce. When I was here, I wanted to be there, but when I was there, I wanted to think I was getting back into the jungle.’ As Willard’s crew disentangle themselves from the aftermath of Kilgore’s massacre, Willard’s commentary tells us that ‘Someday this war’s gonna end. That would be just fine with the boys on the boat. They weren’t looking for anything more than a way home. Trouble is, I’ve been back there, and I knew that it just didn’t exist anymore.’ Similarly, Kurtz writes in a letter to his wife: ‘Sell the house. Sell the car. Sell the kids. Find someone else. Forget it. I’m never coming back. Forget it.’ An encounter with the Other seems here to be so contaminating that it undermines everything: those intrepid souls who set out on the trail are so polluted that there is no returning home for them. Willard’s smashing of his image in the mirror at the beginning of the film also suggests in this context a denial of one’s own otherness to oneself, the desire to return to the

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‘imaginary’ state of indifferentiation that Lacan considered was the human condition before the mirror stage. And this is the sense in which we perhaps need to understand that ‘Vietnam’, in the context of the US experience of it, is not a place but just a word, a word that really means the ‘Other’ or simply the ‘unknown’. The war – and this is probably true of all wars fought by the US with the probable exception of the two World Wars – was a war fought within, a war not principally with the Vietnamese but with its own psyche, reinforcing the sense that the United States is still fighting a frontier war, still struggling to define its own identity. This is the point at which the film touches Conrad and makes a real contribution to examination of the ‘heart of darkness’ at the core of contemporary society. Touching the ‘heart of darkness’ means to embark upon an encounter with life itself. This also links the motifs of the film with its central mythological theme, that of the Grail Quest. *** Apocalypse Now retains essential elements of the Grail story and can be considered to be a contemporary re-interpretation of the myth, albeit a perverse and problematic one. Let us first recall the key aspects of the story as it relates to Apocalypse Now: a youth (Perceval) leaves home to become a knight, leaving his heartbroken mother behind and embarks on the Grail Quest. He meets a fisherman, who invites him to his castle where he sees a squire carrying a white lance, blood dripping from its tip. Next a beautiful woman appears carrying a ‘grail’ (variously described as a cup, a dish, a ciborum or a stone) made of precious materials. The company sits down to eat. Perceval is racked with curiosity at the strange occurrences but says nothing. Later he is politely shown to bed. Next day he wakes to find the castle deserted. Riding out into the forest he meets a woman who tells him that by failing to ask about the lance and especially about the grail, he had at the same time failed to heal the king’s wounds and had caused the land to turn into a wasteland. At first glance, this seems to have little to do with Apocalypse Now, and one may be tempted to believe that Coppola was simply throwing in another cultural reference to add gravitas to a project he feared was insufficiently developed. As we look closer at the film, however, the extent to which the Grail legend permeates it becomes clearer. The Grail legend is a fertility and initiation rite whose purpose is the healing of the Fisher King’s wounds and restoration of the wasteland

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to fecundity (at least this is the thesis of Jessie L. Weston’s study From Ritual to Romance, from which Coppola derived most of the Grail imagery in the film). What is the wasteland in Apocalypse Now? Even though Vietnam was laid waste by the war, its land does not need to be made fertile (it may even be too fertile, harbouring monstrous proliferations). Here the Fisher King (Kurtz) has set up his court far from home and has created the wasteland around him; it did not exist until he arrived there. It is rather a wasteland that he carries with him, which is the projection of a mental wasteland existing within the American psyche. In the Grail legend, we do not know what brought about the wasteland; in Apocalypse Now it is made explicit: the US way of fighting the war produces a wasteland as a matter of policy and we even observe the process of its creation in the Kilgore sequence earlier in the film. When Willard receives his commission to ‘terminate’ Kurtz it is presented as a re-birth. This is perhaps an attempt to give him the necessary cachet as a grail quester, but Willard has none of the innocence that marks the grail hero – the very fact that his mission is a murderous one makes this clear. This ought to undermine any idea of the story as an initiation ritual, and yet the initiatory element remains strong. The question this raises is: what is Willard being initiated into? Although the Grail Quest now tends to be regarded as symbolizing heroic failure,2 as an initiation ritual it was successful: Perceval proves himself as a knight even though he fails in the test with which he is confronted at the Grail Castle. The fact that he neither cures the Fisher King’s wounds nor brings back the Grail is probably subsidiary to the main point of the story, which is the becoming of a knight. Willard, on the other hand, does succeed in his mission insofar as he kills the wounded king. The wasteland has hardly been made fertile, however, and instead of assuming the mantle of guardian of the land, Willard turns away in confusion. And this confusion is hardly surprising since he has done no more than bring to an end one manifestation of the wasteland. Since others are being created all around him any resolution is impossible. Willard recognized this in the encounter with Kilgore: ‘If this was the way Kilgore fought the war, I wondered what they had against Kurtz’. But Kurtz’s ‘methods’ had become ‘unsound’; unlike Kilgore’s, presumably, they no longer conformed to ‘acceptable standards’. As a fertility ritual, the vital feature of the Grail legend that is lacking in Apocalypse Now is a feminine presence. In the original Grail story, women appear at each critical point to mark the path the knight must follow and to admonish him for his failures. They act as counterpoints

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to the action, witnesses to the quest and bearers of its secret. Yet in Apocalypse Now it is the almost complete absence of female presence that is so striking. The only women we see in the original version of the film are in the Playboy bunny sequence. These girls carry guns, not cups; they are less women than extensions of male fantasies, virilized to the demands of a male value system. Otherwise, the only other women we see briefly are Vietnamese: the woman who throws a bomb into the helicopter during Kilgore’s attack on the village and the woman killed on the boat they encounter on the river. In Apocalypse Now Redux, we have two extended scenes: the Playboy bunnies are encountered again further down river, and in the added French plantation sequence, Willard is ‘humanised’ by his attraction to the French woman Roxanne. Insofar as this is a war film, the absence of women is perhaps understandable. And yet, in basing the film partly on the theme of the Grail and invoking its framework as a fertility rite, Coppola is begging some important questions. He seems to have been aware of this and this is doubtless the reason he tried to create a space for women in the story, in however unsatisfactory a way. But by incorporating women in the way he did, virility itself is questioned. This marks its difference from the Grail stories, because if the underlying nature of the Fisher King’s disability is apparent, this is a natural process of decline that calls for renewal. In Apocalypse Now, in contrast, there is no clear sense of where precisely the impotence lies. It is certainly not a natural process: in an immediate sense Kurtz may have been the one to lay the land waste, but if anything this is due to an excess rather than lack of virility. It is, though, virility misdirected: a virility that destroys rather than creates; an impotent virility that has dispensed with the fertility of the female and represents nothing but male egotism. Kurtz may thus be sick (‘his mind is clear but his brain is mad’, as the photo-journalist tells us), but the film seems uncertain about the nature of this sickness and veers between admiration and disgust for him. If anything, Willard is the one who is insecure about his virility, from the opening sequence of self-wounding through his feeling of inadequacy as he traverses the jungle on the way to Kurtz, there is a sense that, having become a killer, he has ceased to be a lover. And this is heightened in Apocalypse Now Redux with the inclusion of French plantation scene when Roxanne tells him that there are two men inside him: one that kills and one that loves. Like a reprise, in different form, of the opening scene, Willard is again forced to smash his mirror image when he rejects Roxanne’s entreaty to stay at the plantation and instead continues his quest

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for Kurtz. But her comment is a judgement in a void: it offers no possibility of a remedy. Here we have a collapsing of the identities of wounded healer and innocent quester: Kurtz has not lost virility, since he was never a ‘lover’ in the first place and he has nothing to offer to his quester than a half-baked philosophy based upon refusing lies and facing the ‘horror’. On the other hand, Willard is never innocent and if he is seeking anything it is not the purity of the Grail: Willard’s quest is patently not, as in the original legend, to gain knowledge. Willard’s fascination with Kurtz seems to emerge more from the fact that he represents what Willard fears within himself, what he fears he may be capable of or, perhaps worse, what he fears he may not be capable of. What really is the nature of his task? He must kill Kurtz but then what? To assume his mantle, to face the darkness he faced? As he travels up-river reading Kurtz’s dossier, Willard’s fascination is palpable and impressively conveyed, both by actor and by director. Yet one can’t help but wonder what the reason is for this fascination. Nothing in the dossier seems to justify the awe with which Willard comes to array Kurtz; one has the impression that Willard is creating his own myth: Kurtz as his fantasy of power. Yet, as awesome as he appears to him, he is really T. S. Eliot’s hollow man, giving himself airs and spouting meaningless words drawn pell-mell from a cultural tradition he has detached himself from at the very moment he pays it homage. A false prophet, the only message he brings is that evil, like everything else, is banal. Life here has become stagnant, devoid of meaning, a wasteland of thought. This may be a further aspect of the heart of darkness explored by the film: the failure of culture to signify anything beyond an emptiness that can be used for effect, form overwhelming content. In Kilgore’s use of Wagner to accompany the raid on the village (‘because it scares the hell out of the slopes’), high culture is shown to be in complicity with terrorism as the music is used as a weapon to intimidate the villagers; creativity is again virilized against fertility and in favour of destruction. Male values are shown to dominate – and devastate – everything, women included. We are presented with a culture in which a male point of view is determining and women are reduced to a condition that divests them of any meaningful role just as The Grail itself, a symbol of women and fertility, seems to be absent from this quest. In the Grail legend women function almost as moral arbiters, even, in some versions, as bearers of a superior knowledge which men could only clumsily attain by passing through a series of trials. None of this remains in Apocalypse Now. Even Roxanne, who appears as the

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redemptive 17th card of the tarot, finds that the water she dispenses (in the form of the question of whether to be a lover or a killer) falls on barren ground, since Willard is impermeable to any female mediation.3 Like all of the women in the film, Roxanne serves male authority; not a trace of the role (so crucial to the medieval Grail stories) of woman as keeper of secrets inaccessible to the male remains. Woman’s Otherness, like that of the Vietnamese, must be denied, either by being shown to be non-existent (being reduced, like the Playboy bunnies, to mere sex-objects) – or to a status of a dangerous enemy (Rosanne and the Vietnamese combatants). A notable female absence, too, is Willard’s wife, who is included only to be rejected, as Willard recognizes his own wound, while being powerless to do anything about it (other than say yes to a divorce). *** In considering the purpose of the mission we also need to consider what is signified by the double sacrifice that ends the film. The meaning of sacrifice in general is complex but it contains two essential components: 1. in one way or another it serves communal unity; 2. it serves as an aid to fertility and to protect the balance between humans and the cosmos. Neither seems to pertain here. We know that an actual sacrifice of a bull witnessed by Coppola among the Ifugao people in the Philippines inspired this scene, which was therefore contingent upon circumstances rather than a planned part of the film, although it also doubtless gave him an experiential sense of what he had read in Frazer. Through the enactment of sacrifice in the film, Coppola seems to have been searching for some epiphany – some revelation – that stubbornly refused to come. That he failed to find one in a sense encapsulates the tragedy of the American adventure in Indochina, reflecting its impotence and lack of purpose or clear aim. In the film the double sacrifice seems to serve nothing; the sacrifice of Kurtz has a certain quality as a necessary act of purification, but only because it removes a palpable instance of abuse. But insofar, as has already been noted, that Kurtz’s madness is only an extension of what is happening all around in a more generalized way, then no real purification is possible. A sacrifice in such circumstances can neither renew the community nor contribute to fertility. Impotence, indeed, seems to mark the whole film as it marked the American presence in Vietnam, so that the Fisher King’s malady is diffused: killing Kurtz merely cuts off one of its cells, which will immediately reappear.

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Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, from which Coppola drew most of his information about the Grail legend, was in turn derived from J. G. Frazer’s monumental The Golden Bough, which was another of Coppola’s sources for the use he made of sacrifice. Yet the way that Apocalypse Now incorporates its mythological elements is both deeply problematic and revealing. Meshing together elements taken from the Grail legend, from Frazer, Conrad and Eliot works well at certain levels, but – lacking intellectual rigour – also leads to confusion. This intellectual confusion is especially apparent in the way in which sacrifice is treated. It is too easy to criticize Coppola for using archaic sources in a cavalier way to underwrite the theme at the film’s heart. Yet, by not consulting more recent theories on the role of sacrifice, Coppola was again collapsing the time gap separating the film from theories that were current at the beginning of the twentieth century. By telescoping time, turning uncritically to Frazer, Conrad and Eliot, in addition to the Grail myth, as markers for the American adventure in Vietnam, the particularity of Vietnam, as well as that of the experience of war more generally during the twentieth century, is distanced and this serves to reduce that experience to a generality of human experience of doubtful provenance that tends to underline the fictional genesis of the project. In Frazer, the killing of the Divine King is explained as the need to transfer power from an ailing sovereign to a vigorous successor without compromising the illusion (or reality) of the divinity the king embodies. A central difficulty with the theory is that there is little real evidence that ‘primitives’ anywhere have ever believed that the king, as an individual, had supernatural powers: that kings were ever worshiped in the sense in which Christians worship their God is a pure a form of ethnocentrism. The divinity of kings in such a context is based on a quite different understanding of the relationship between humanity and the divine, in which the king is a liminal being symbolically suspended between human and divine realms. In failing to recognize this, Coppola falls into a fabrication that even Frazer would not have countenanced: that of the white god worshipped to excess by ‘primitive’ or ‘coloured’ races. There is as far as I am aware no reliable historical record of such a thing ever having occurred anywhere in the world (and certainly not in Vietnam). Indeed, the anthropological evidence suggests that such a power relation is impossible in the situation of a ‘primitive’ or small-scale society, the social polity of which depends upon authority carrying a purely nominal or

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symbolic character that never allows one individual to have power over another. Pierre Clastres has even gone so far as to argue, convincingly if not conclusively, that ‘primitive’ societies work in such a way as to preclude the possibility of the development of any form of state power. Such power – characteristic as it is of large-scale ‘civilised’ societies – may be so inherent to our consciousness that it becomes individually manifest when we are forced to live in a small community, as evidence from reality TV tends to confirm and which, at an extreme, may take an apocalyptic form as occurred for instance in 1978 at Jonestown (an event which uncannily happened as Coppola was editing Apocalypse Now – we should remember that those who worshipped the insane leader at Jonestown were largely white and middle class). The inability of modern people to live together as a community may in fact be a further aspect of the ‘heart of darkness’ of today’s society, but this is certainly one element that cannot be traced back to any ‘primitive’ origin: if it exists, it is a uniquely modern phenomenon, a problem integral to modern ways of living. The suggestion that the Montagnards (who gave support to the Americans precisely because they feared dominance by the Vietnamese) would blindly follow Kurtz is a slander against them that is the most reprehensible part of the film. It also serves to elide the heart of darkness within contemporary society to which the film otherwise pays attention. *** In this respect, the frightening thing about Kurtz is the clarity of his (in)sanity. As the film is related to Conrad, so it is often viewed as a film about how thin the veneer of civilization is and how easily a civilized man can return to savagery when civilized constraints no longer apply. However, Kurtz’s behaviour is incommensurate with anything we know either in the animal kingdom or in primitive society. It is something characteristic of ‘civilisation’, and as such is merely an extreme form of what may be encountered everyday within the reality of our world. Psychologically Kurtz could no doubt be classified as a sociopath and the only thing that probably separates him from those generals who get decorated in war is that he is intelligent enough to recognize the nature of what he is doing. Willard’s questioning, in recognition of this point, of what the generals had against Kurtz, needs here to be explored. Of course, what ‘they’ had against Kurtz is made explicit: his methods are ‘unsound’. Not, let us note, that they are ‘ineffective’. Indeed,

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there is ambivalence about whether overall the ‘message’ of the film may even be ‘pro-war’, indicating that the war was ‘winnable’ had the powers that be not been so squeamish about its conduct. Like Willard, the film seems unable to decide whether it is disgusted by Kurtz or whether it admires him. The comment defining Kurtz, that he has a lucid intelligence, but his mind is mad, is true, by extension, of ‘America’ as a concept. In Jean-Luc Godard’s film Éloge de l’amour the identity of ‘America’ is effectively dismantled: it is a country without a name, a no-place where everything is enacted. We cannot speak of this country: we call it ‘America’, but America is a continent, not a country; more accurately we can call it ‘the United States of America’, but this too is indeterminate: as Godard’s character states, Brazil, Mexico and Canada are also ‘United States of America’. This is thus a country without a name and to lack a name is to lack an identity. Godard’s character asks if this is why the United States has to steal other people’s histories. This is a pertinent comment to make in relation to Apocalypse Now because the fact is that this quest film seems to be a desperate search to discover meaning in a place where it has already been decided that no meaning exists. American certainty is a certainty of uncertainty: it knows that it has discovered the secret of human satisfaction while perceiving – if only subconsciously – that this satisfaction is superficial and, ultimately, worthless; it knows, too, that all the world envies the United States and strives to be like it, except that it also recognizes that, for some perverse reason, many people don’t accept and even reject this self-evident truth. The explanation Kurtz gives for his behaviour is that when the Americans vaccinated Vietnamese villagers, the Vietcong moved in after they left and cut off the vaccinated arms. There is no record of the Vietcong ever doing anything like this. Perhaps this anecdote was suggested by the fact that some young South Vietnamese cut off their own limbs rather than obey the army call-up but, even if it did happen, its significance is unclear. Kurtz records it as – what? – a sign of inherent savagery? He is apparently unable to explain it in any other way because he lacks the imagination to think otherness. He seeks in it a great revelation: of savage strength and ruthlessness that weak willed Americans have lost – and they will lose the war because of it. But could not the import of such an incident rather be more pertinently considered as a refusal of contamination by the enemy – by the values of the invading Americans?4 Kurtz appears to have dimly perceived such an answer, but it remains incomprehensible to him because he

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believes in the American Dream and cannot understand how anyone would refuse it. It confirms that Vietnam is a ‘mad’ country. But the real madness is the failure to recognize the importance of self-determination; the fact that people would prefer to die (or cut off their limbs) rather than live dominated by alien values. Coppola has been strongly criticized – perhaps rightly – for inventing this detail. Yet, it is a revealing moment that is neither as fanciful nor as gratuitous as it might appear. Indeed, we might argue that its truth shines through, and it shines through even more clearly when we know that there is no evidence that anything of the sort ever having happened. Because this little anecdote encapsulates a certain US selfperception (or self-delusion): that its good intentions are constantly being frustrated by an irrational doubt or suspicion on the part of its ‘beneficiaries’. But beyond this, and disregarding the manifest content that suggests that the Vietnamese are too stupid or superstitious to recognize where their best interests lie, there is contained within this anecdote a curious glimpse of American doubt about its own omnipotence, a doubt which feeds paranoia and fear. Kurtz’s bewilderment at this incident suggests that it may be he who has doubts about the efficacy of progress and enlightenment. His fury and his madness appear to flow not so much from the failure of the American war effort as from his own sense of being contaminated by the environment of Vietnam, of discovering not necessarily this ‘heart of darkness’, but something within himself that might be ‘other’, that is, something incomprehensible to his identity as an American. As such, the descent into the ‘heart of darkness’ (a consequence of going beyond the frontier) becomes an alibi, a means by which to deny that there may be other ways of living, other ways of perceiving the world, than that which the ‘American way’ embodies. As Willard had recognized, Kurtz has ‘got off the boat’, but he was wrong to add that he had ‘gone all the way’. He had, in fact, gone nowhere. His audacity was simply to step onto the alien land without understanding the significance of the move. The land remained alien to him and even rejected him, something Willard recognized and invoked as perhaps the determining justification for his killing of Kurtz: ‘Even the jungle wanted him dead and that was who he took his orders from’. Killing Kurtz is not allowed under the law (he is after all an American citizen); in his jungle kingdom, however, he has become a sovereign being, and such a being cannot be killed but only sacrificed. But his sovereignty is a myth created by the Euro-American psyche. Kurtz is thus in limbo: no longer an American, since he has been corrupted by

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‘them’, but still an American because he is uncomprehending about other values. His divinity is thus a sham and for this he deserves to die. But precisely because of this, he cannot be sacrificed. He must be reduced to the order of homo sacer which, according to Giorgio Agamben, can be killed but not sacrificed. This is even explicitly established in the film: Kurtz is the subject of a ban that excludes him from the definition of a ‘human being’, reducing him to the level of bare life (because he has gone beyond ‘all human limits’ he can be killed with impunity); it is this that justifies the order to ‘terminate his command with extreme prejudice’. This order creates a dilemma for Willard, who now finds himself transfixed by the malady that has struck down Kurtz, which makes him unfit to assume the role of sacrificer. A killing enacted in imitation of the Montagnards’ sacrifice of the water buffalo provides an escape route for Willard, enabling him to overcome the prohibition his sacralization of Kurtz has established and so fulfil his mission. And yet this is a sacrifice for Willard alone; it serves no communal purpose, it simply releases Willard from the thrall in which he holds Kurtz (and divests the American military establishment of an embarrassment), but the event must remain unknown – ‘this mission does not exist, nor will it ever exist’ – which makes of the action a sacrifice in a void, in other words not a sacrifice at all. The thrall felt by Willard comes from the destructive power Kurtz embodies, a destructive power that lies within the American psyche as a repressed death wish. It is in making this death wish manifest that Kurtz has excluded himself from American polity and transformed himself into a sacred being. Yet, in modern society, the sacred is what cannot be accepted. By killing him, therefore, Willard is restoring the dominant order, or rather reincorporating Kurtz into it (thus cleansing him of the contamination of otherness – one imagines that in reporting his death, Kurtz will be accorded full military honours and thus restored to the domain of the law). This is incomplete, however, because the temptation of otherness remains and is contained by the peculiar form of millenarianism that has become pervasive within the United States and is contained within the title of the film. *** The title Apocalypse Now has an immediacy that begs questions. What apocalypse? Is it not an overly melodramatic title for the content of the film? Despite the carpet bombing, which we might regard as a crime against humanity, nuclear weapons were not used and Vietnam was

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not destroyed. Clearly, the title refers to something more than the war in Vietnam. We see the words ‘Apocalypse Now’ for the first time as we enter Kurtz’s compound, with the implication that the apocalypse is happening now. Or is it something to come, something perpetual as an inevitable consequence of a sensibility that sees all life in terms of itself, denying anything that is outside of it or that refuses its frame of reference. This is an apocalypse that may as easily come with a whimper as with a bang. Viewed historically, we can see that in virtually every foreign intervention the United States has made since 1895 it has left behind chaos and long-term disorder, even when it has fulfilled its aims. Yet only in Vietnam has the experience left real wounds on the US sensibility; the reality of those scars are still apparent although denied through an evasion with which Apocalypse Now is complicit: the belief that the war could and should have been won. The fact that the war was unwinnable because it was waged against a whole people, or at least was winnable only at the price of the annihilation of that people, still barely seems to have registered with the American psyche. And yet Apocalypse Now does acknowledge this fact through its title and general orientation: an American victory would have required creating of Vietnam an apocalypse. In this sense, we might say that Coppola’s notorious statement should be amended: ‘My film is not about the United States. My film is the United States.’ Yet, ‘America’, both as a concept and as a reality, encapsulates Western dreams, Western dilemmas. Built upon the brutal suppression of the native culture by outcasts fleeing from another, European, culture, the United States embodies, in a peculiarly paranoiac way, the aspirations and the decadence of the civilization it was fleeing. At its root is a contradiction between the concept of liberty upon which the US society prides itself in having established and the means by which it was actually founded: in genocide and slavery. And, from being a fugitive outpost of Western civilization, it has today become its core and its determining element. This is a civilization that has for a long time been on the edge of catastrophe, and US foreign policy, the craziness of which increases daily, gives a tangible quality to the means by which the catastrophe is likely to be realized. Kurtz in this sense is the shadow presence of American power, the result and inevitable consequence of its denial of other values, but internalized and made manifest. It is commonplace to note that this power requires an enemy, which was effectively provided by the Soviet Union for a half a century and that since 1989 it has been seeking

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a replacement, usually in an Arabic or Islamic form. It is interesting to reflect on how much the most visible recent embodiments of that enemy – Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden – seem to have in common with Kurtz – as myths if not in their actual persons. In fact, just about the only thing Saddam and bin Laden had in common is that they both began as US allies who, like Kurtz, ‘turned’ and could not be controlled. All of them thus became sacred beings whose command had to be ‘terminated’. This makes them mythical beasts on a par with one of the icons of American mythology, the white whale Moby Dick. Captain Ahab’s rage indeed is a peculiarly American rage which can be resolved in only one way: through the total destruction of the object because Otherness must be overcome at all costs. At the same time Apocalypse Now marks a notable contrast between the characters who embody America (Willard, Kurtz, Kilgore as well as the photo journalist in another way), those who can never go back there ‘because it doesn’t exist’, and the crew of the boat, none of whom appear to have bought into the war, but are just doing what they have to do: one has the impression that for them ‘back home’ does still exist; it is Vietnam that is unreal. Nor – with the exception of Lance, the all-American boy who seems strangely at home in Kurtz’s compound – do they appear to be contaminated by the madness. They embody (albeit it alienated form) an ‘Other’ America, one that simply wants to get on with the task of living. Perhaps this is because they are marginals to ‘America’, others within; perhaps because of this, too, they all have to die during the course of the film. And perhaps, too, it is this realization that causes the Chief, in dying, to try to take Willard with him: the recognition that the latter represents the real ‘heart of darkness’ which lies not in its ‘primitive’ core, but in the fact that it is so detached from itself that it can convince itself that its mission ‘to terminate with extreme prejudice’ is a necessary task.

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Chapter 9

REFIGURATIONS OF THE EXOTIC IN CONTEMPORARY CINEMA Since the 1960s, otherness has taken a variety of forms in Hollywood films. It makes its appearance in directors as diverse as Robert Altman, John Frankenheimer, John Sayles, Joe Dante, Larry Cohen, Paul Schrader, David Lynch, the Coen Brothers, David Fincher and Bryan Singer, although not in an especially refined or subtle way (and, apart from Altman and Schrader, none of these filmmakers have much of an international perspective). It is central to the films of Tim Burton, a filmmaker with a well-developed and sophisticated sense of both cultural difference and the problematics of otherness, which has assumed an especially intricate form in Edward Scissorhands (1990), Mars Attacks! (1996) and The Corpse Bride (2005) in particular. Overall, however, appreciation of what is involved in the issue of otherness is a quite thin element in the work of most contemporary American filmmakers. From the 1960s foreign directors were again sought out and welcomed to Hollywood after the interregnum of the 1950s and not surprisingly it is in the work of foreign directors like John Boorman, Bernardo Bertolucci, Ridley Scott, Peter Weir, Alex Proyas and Ivan Passer that we find some of the more persistent explorations of themes of otherness, although in many of their cases the edge has been taken off their interest the longer they have made films in Hollywood. This is especially the case for Boorman, whose Hell in the Pacific (1968), in which Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune, as opposing Second World War soldiers stranded together on a desert island brilliantly play out a drama of Hegelian recognition, is one of the most complex of all Hollywood films addressing the relation of self to other across cultural divides. Point Blank (1967) and Deliverance (1972) also show

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an astute and subtle awareness of issues of otherness, but later he tended to succumb to exotic chic in his presentation respectively of Amazonian Indians and Burma in The Emerald Forest (1985) and Beyond Rangoon (1995). It is not possible to consider all of these representations but we will here take a closer look at four films which raise some broad issues about the treatment of the exotic and the representation of other cultures in recent cinema: Martin Scorsese’s Kundun (1997), Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987) and The Sheltering Sky (1990) and Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003). It is interesting first to compare Bertolucci and Martin Scorsese. Their respective backgrounds suggest some affinities and distinctions: where Scorsese is American but from a largely working-class Italian background, Bertolucci is Italian, with an upper-class upbringing and a cosmopolitan outlook. Both work in a Hollywood system within which they do not feel entirely comfortable and this raises tensions in their work. Both are interested in themes having a moral dimension, and both have made films about Buddhism, although Bertolucci’s Little Buddha (1993) is considerably less interesting than Scorsese’s Kundun. Otherness is an often submerged theme in both directors’ work, treated with varying degrees of sensitivity. Scorsese’s biopic of the Dalai Lama, Kundun is an anomaly of Hollywood cinema, a film which could only be made as a concession given to a successful director. It was a personal project for Scorsese who approached his task with an admirable seriousness of purpose, going to a great deal of trouble to establish a ‘Tibetan’ point of view and being careful not to cause any offence to the Tibetan people or to the Dalai Lama or his coterie. In this respect, the film succeeded, but this very ‘success’ begs some troubling questions about the extent to which any Hollywood film can engage with the reality of another culture from within in the way that Scorsese attempted to do. At the time it seemed strange that Scorsese – as an Italian-American and (lapsed) Catholic, many of whose best films are deeply associated with New York – should have been interested in making a film so distanced from his own experience as the life of the Dalai Lama and the context of Tibetan society prior to the Chinese occupation. At the same time, he has always displayed an interest in issues of spirituality and the importance of religion in contemporary society. His only other major film set outside the United States, The Last Temptation of Christ, is similarly concerned with the life of a great spiritual leader.

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Scorsese has explained how the project came about: I started getting interested in [the Dalai Lama] in 1989, when he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Before that I didn’t hear anything about Tibet. Tibet isn’t interesting to us, they aren’t bombing anyone. But then I began seeing him on television a little bit. And I was beginning to understand the scope of the situation, and the way he was behaving fascinated me. Meaning that I think he was doing the right thing. I think he behaves the way we all should behave. And then I met him with Melissa [Mathison, his screenwriter], and what happens is that you want to be like him. And I don’t find that with many clerics in my own religion. I always wanted to make a film about priests and nuns who’ve had to overcome their own pride in order to deal with people, to have true compassion . . . I wanted to capture the essence of their spirit: who are they, their culture and their religion. [ . . . We made it] from the Dalai Lama’s point of view. The only way I could do the film – because I’m not a Buddhist and I’m not an authority on Tibetan history – was to stay with the people. Stay with the kid . . . and literally see things from his point of view’. (Scorsese, 1998: 8)

An admirable anthropological aim and one can hardly fault the care which went into establishing the accuracy of detail in Kundun. Extensively researched by Melissa Mathison, who worked on it for seven years and gained the active involvement of the Dalai Lama and his relatives, many of whom appear as actors in the film (the woman, for instance, playing the Dalai Lama’s mother is portraying her own grandmother), it vividly recreates the life of the Dalai Lama’s court and can even claim a certain ‘ethnographic’ authenticity in terms of its period detail. It takes the reality of Buddhist concepts like reincarnation for granted and equally Mathison and Scorsese should be commended for eschewing Western expectations about character development and story construction. Scorsese was also careful not to restrict himself to surface authenticity in décor and details. In the way the story is told and the film edited it strives to capture the sense of Tibetan culture by establishing a contemplative and serene mood rather than relying on the dramatic incident and character development that tend to characterize Western film construction. He and Mathison recognized that Tibetans do not share Western notions of the individual and development of the personality and they tried to find a way of representation that reflects this (although this emphasis is compromised by having the characters speak English). Scorsese’s will to raise the profile of the Tibetan struggle for independence from Chinese oppression is also admirable. Yet, much as one might applaud this seriousness of purpose, we have to question whether the very fact of striving to present Tibetan

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culture in a way that is accurate and yet accessible to a Western audience imposes a tension that is impossible to resolve. An earlier filmmaker like Josef von Sternberg would no doubt have regarded such an approach as naïve precisely because one cannot elude the traps of representation contained in the disjunction that exists between accuracy and accessibility on the one hand, and between one’s own imaginative projection and the actuality of the subject on the other. In attempting to represent Tibetan reality, Scorsese was placing himself in an especially difficult position because, as he admitted, he is neither a Buddhist nor an authority on Tibetan culture. As such, the reality of Tibetan society and ideas could only be that of an ‘unknown Other’ to Scorsese, and yet, through his filmmaking, by telling the story in such an intimate way as if through the eyes of the Dalai Lama, he was claiming such authority and so eliding his own presence and effectively reducing the Other to the Same. Ultimately Tibetan specificity is lost and they become part of the family of humanity, with Buddhism being incorporated into a universal, all-embracing, Christian worldview as merely a different path to the same end. The rhetoric here undermines the reality it sought to engage with, so that a process of universal brotherhood is affirmed and Tibetan culture is simply a differently formulated incarnation of American culture, taking its place within the tapestry of the same (and thus, ultimately, contributing to the ideology of the ‘melting pot’ concept of ‘America’). The result is that otherness is erased, or reduced to a question of appearance. In this respect it may be the film Tibetans wanted made: it reveals them to be decent people, little different from Americans, despite their mysticism and strange rituals, a people with whom Westerners should affirm their solidarity. As it does so, however, it contributes to a reduction that ultimately may constitute an insidious form of cultural imperialism. This probably could not have been avoided because the mode of address used meant that processes of identification intrude to undermine the seriousness with which Scorsese sought to approach Tibetan culture. What he could not escape was his own background and presence even as he sought to tell the story through the eyes of the Dalai Lama. Ultimately, Scorsese could be the only one telling the story. He is the one who retains control of the discourse and the authority of its mode of address. As such, it was inevitable that his own sensibility would be collapsed into that of his subject, a person of a fundamentally different nature. What is used as a distancing technique –the telling of the story by the Other – thereby serves to emphasize familiarity, not distance. Rather than an understanding

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of the Other, therefore, it becomes an understanding of the same projected outwards. This fits rather too neatly into Scorsese’s oeuvre as an auteur: Tibet becomes another incarnation of the diverse culture of New York. Any specifically Tibetan cultural features thereby are abstracted from their context and instead find a place within a global world, in which the primary need is not to be other, but be accepted as part of the diverse ‘same’. Furthermore, if the Otherness of the Tibetans is erased, a radical Otherness is retained, here reserved for the Chinese, who are caricatured as beings from another place, precisely as Others with whom we can have no sense of identification. Scorsese, in the interview quoted above, speaks of Mao as ‘an incredible gangster’, a statement which is revealing in showing the limited nature of his worldview, in the sense that he is able to conceptualize Mao only by relating him to the New York characters he grew up among, even though the context and circumstances of Mao’s life make his personality and mentality incommensurate with that of an American (or even a Chinese) gangster. The result is that Mao’s characterization in the film (like that of the Chinese in general) is an empty shell, something which does no justice to the complexity of the relation either between Mao and the Dalai Lama or between China and Tibet. The Chinese government were opposed to Scorsese’s project and made strong protests against it, threatening sanctions against its production company, the Disney Corporation, and banning Scorsese and Mathison from ever visiting China. No doubt they would have objected to any film made on this topic, but one has to admit that the Chinese in the film are as stereotypically villainous as any in a 1930s Yellow Peril thriller and this serves to reinforce simplistic Western notions of a conflict about which few people in the audience would be likely to have a very sophisticated understanding. Furthermore, it also casts a light back onto the very ‘authenticity’ of the portrayal of the Tibetans, since the inauthenticity of the representation of the Chinese becomes a counterpoint to it, imbuing both with a sense of artificiality. This again emphasizes Scorsese’s inability to think outside of his own experience. In the most effective of his earlier films, he casts a penetrating eye on his own environment, but it is an enclosed world in which otherness is internalized. Even a character as repellent as Travis in Taxi Driver is portrayed insightfully as someone whose experiences have led him to a set of false identifications about the nature of the world. Nevertheless, even as we are appalled by him, we can identify with his sense of estrangement. He assumes the

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form of a familiar character, someone we would not be comfortable to meet, but who has a ‘problem’ we can recognize. This, indeed, is the strength of Scorsese’s best films: he takes us into the worlds of characters who have made bad choices in their life decisions. Even the best of his characters are flawed and the tension in many of his films comes from how they live with the decisions they have made. Scorsese is uncomfortable in dealing with people whose experience does not fit this model and one feels that in making Kundun he was struggling to close the gap between his experience of the world and that of his protagonists. Moreover, it is not without significance that Mathison also wrote E.T. (which appears to be her only other major screenwriting credit), a film about another friendly alien whose alienness dissolves so that he can became an aspect of ourselves with which we feel comfortable. Their respective backgrounds did not equip them with the necessary tools to think through the determinants of otherness and therefore, despite the extensive research done with Dalai Lama’s family, neither of them were able to translate the experience of Tibet into terms that allowed viewers to recognize that what they were watching was presented ‘through the Dalai Lama’s eyes’ only in the most superficial sense. Neither writer nor director, one feels, could detach themselves from their own perspective and they unconsciously imposed their own subjectivity on the project. Despite these reservations (which would be endemic to any such project), Kundun was a courageous film to have made and its virtues no doubt outweigh its faults. Scorsese is certainly to be commended for refusing to succumb to blandishments to make the film a product that could be easily consumed by a Western audience and especially for allowing the Tibetan context to be allowed to speak for itself, providing no Euro-American character to give a point of identification for Western viewers and mediate the action. This may have severely limited the commercial possibilities of the film, but it does allow a space by which attentive viewers are able to question their relationship to what is being depicted on screen and to recognize that they have no cultural proprietorship over these images of an alien culture. *** This is more than can be said for Bertolucci’s comparable The Last Emperor, a film which put aside any cross-cultural engagement in favour of a classic epic storytelling mode that presses all the right buttons as far as public acceptance is concerned. Yet, if this film pleased both

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Western audiences and the Chinese authorities, it completely elides the sorts of problems Kundun raises. Charting the life of P’u Yi, the last Chinese emperor, Bertolucci’s film never really transcends its status as a bio-pic and makes little attempt to imagine the otherness of life in either Imperial, Republican or Maoist China, but constructs a cinematic spectacle founded in a false universalism by which the whole of Chinese history during the twentieth century is subsumed to a series of revolutionary upheavals that follow a familiar pattern without offering any enlightenment about their broader significance. The Last Emperor nevertheless raises important questions about identity in general. P’u Yi is simply presented as an ordinary person tragically cast in an impossible role as an emperor without an empire. As such he grows up as a man without an identity, thrown this way and that by the vicissitudes of history, until finally able to ‘find himself’ as a result of the Maoist re-education process, presented here as essentially benevolent. Curiously, this ‘re-education’ is many ways a continuation of what was started by the Scottish tutor Reginald Johnston who was appointed to P’u Yi when he was a youth and sought to turn him into an ‘English gentleman’. Brought up in his formative years to be ‘the Emperor’, P’u Yi cannot be ‘educated’ but only ‘re-educated’. As he says at one point, ‘I am not allowed to say what I mean’, which seems tantamount to saying, ‘I am not allowed to be what I am’. This perhaps explains why he succumbs to the promise falsely offered by the Japanese to restore him to the position of Emperor, because ultimately he has not been allowed to have any genuine identity: he has to be either an Emperor or nothing. In a sense, this makes the re-education process futile, since ‘P’u Yi’ is a series of masks covering the void that is his personality. He can thus be neither the ‘English gentleman’ his tutor tries to make him, nor the ‘new man’ his communist instructor thinks he has turned him into. P’u Yi may find contentment in his gardening at the end, but one feels it is a displacement activity and that his real existence lies elsewhere, which in fact is nowhere, because his reason to live has dissolved into air. We thus come to ‘understand’ P’u Yi because there is nothing about him to understand: he embodies an emptiness we fear may exist at the heart of our own sense of what we are. The film thus becomes more of a meditation on kingship in general, treating it as an anachronism which in the twentieth century cruelly stifles the personality of the king and prevents his realization as an individual but leaves him in thrall to the vicissitudes of history and politics. P’u Yi’s example is interesting for the fact that he was one of the few sovereigns whose legitimacy was rescinded without him

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either losing his life or being emasculated by having his position reduced to a purely ceremonial role. He was thus forced to confront his ordinariness. As such he became an exemplar of the fate of the individual forced into playing a role inimical to the free development of the personality. This is perhaps what interested Bertolucci, many of whose films are concerned with how individuals respond to unexpected social or personal change. But in this film the cultural specificity of Chinese society is never really addressed and Bertolucci does not question his entitlement to make a film like this or to engage with his own relationship with the representation of Chinese reality. This is surprising as elsewhere in his work Bertolucci shows much greater awareness of cultural displacement. In this respect, his most interesting film is The Sheltering Sky. In this film, set in 1947 – a significant time, when the French were trying to re-assert their authority in North Africa after the Second World War – rich American couple Port and Kit Moresby arrive in Tangier (at the time an international port) for an extended journey across Northern Africa with their friend George Tunner. Tensions emerge in their relationships as they confront the alien reality of the societies they pass through. The three characters experience this reality in very different ways: Supercilious Port (John Malkovich), defining himself as a traveller rather than the commonplace tourist he considers Tunner to be (‘The tourist thinks about going home the moment he arrives, the traveller might not go back at all’), seems to conceive of himself as something of an amateur anthropologist and expects to gain understanding from his encounter with the exotic culture. Tunner, it is true, views everything as a spectator and he has little interest in understanding the experience, while Kit (Debra Winger), who recognizes herself as half way between being a traveller and a tourist, has fewer expectations about what she will find and is more open to the experience. Port and Kit have been married for ten years but are emotionally dislocated from one another. Tunner is drawn to Kit and intrudes into their relationship, but he is not the cause of their increasing estrangement from one another. Through these characters, representing three distinct attitudes towards the encounter with the exotic, an aspect of what constitutes the complex Western colonial mindset is explored. The three Americans appear on the African coast as somewhat bewildered intruders and the two men might even be seen as two models of the colonial impulse: Port as the adventurer dissatisfied with his own culture and seeking something ‘other’ but failing either to recognize

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or respect it when he finds it; Tunner as the capitalist who follows in his wake and cleans up the path he has opened up, insensitive to local custom or sensibility. Kit upsets the symmetry of this combination of elements because she does not know where she fits within it. This allegorical element should not be pushed too far, but it is nevertheless a striking aspect within the film. Otherness is inscribed throughout the narrative, as the response of the three characters to their surroundings emanates from and reflects back onto their own relationships with one another. Port and Kit are characters in limbo. They still love one another, or think they love one another, or want to love one another, and yet they find it difficult even to tolerate each other. Their amorphous desires which have led them to undertake this adventure, by which they apparently hope to resolve their sense of estrangement, are in fact at its root: since their problems lie within themselves they inevitably take these problems with them. There is thus no culture clash in their encounter with Africa because none of them have ever made any contact with any reality outside of themselves: they merely remain displaced Americans stranded in an environment that is hostile to them because they are hostile to it. This mutual hostility is in fact the only reciprocity that really occurs in the film and it also infects the characters relationships with one another. Port appears to expect some form of revelation in the wilderness. He wants to ‘get off the boat’, but when he tries to do so he finds himself confronted only with himself. He actually becomes the least adaptable character and the one who is most contemptuous of the native people. We see this first in an early scene in which he is taken to a prostitute. Entering her tent, he refuses to follow convention and take off his shoes (in fact, wilfully misunderstanding the request to do so). When she steals his wallet while they are having sex he becomes aware of the fact and pilfers the wallet back. Yet instead of thanking his good fortune and exiting gracefully, he cannot resist taunting her in a way that suggests an arrogant cultural superiority on his part. Even though he barely escapes from this encounter unscathed it teaches him nothing. Never, in the course of the film, do we see any of the characters have a conversation on equal terms with any of the local people. Every exchange is framed in terms of the Americans wanting something from them, either information or refreshment. This culminates in the unpleasant scene in which Port bullies the local trader to give them tickets on the bus to Agadez even though it is already full. ‘C’est possible,’ he repeats over and over as he throws money into the man’s

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face in a scene that recalls Mike Hammer’s method of obtaining information in Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly. Nevertheless, this is only an extension of the characters’ inability to communicate effectively among themselves, something that becomes most apparent in their relation with the landscape and it is appropriate that their estrangement reaches its culmination when Port and Kit take a bicycle ride into the desert. Everything falls apart as they (fail to) make love. This rending scene simultaneously represents the end of love and the failure of communication, but it also hints at something even vaster. It is in this scene that the title of the film is explained: Port:

‘The sky here is so strange. It’s like a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind.’ Kit: ‘What’s behind?’ Port: ‘Nothing, I suppose.’

It protects them both from what lies behind them and what is beyond the atmosphere, but not from what is ahead of them. Endlessly restless, Port realizes that he can never be at home anywhere. And soon he will be dead, leaving Kit alone in the middle of the Sahara. It is then as if his death deprives her of her self. She does not even wait for his funeral, but takes her small suitcase, leaving behind the mass of belongings she had brought with her, and waits in the desert. A wandering soul, she surrenders herself to the eventual. Taking refuge with a passing Tuareg caravan, she becomes the mistress of one of the traders, named Belqassim. When the Tuareg reach their home city, she is kept sequestered, more a plaything of Belqassim, an object of curiosity, than an individual in her own right. When he leaves on a new expedition, the hostility of his wives and the other women in the community forces her to leave. Now complexly distracted, she somehow finds her way back to Tangier and the sanctuary of a hospital run by nuns. A representative of the American embassy takes her back to the hotel where the journey started. Tunner, the tourist, meanwhile, has not ceased to look for her and has made the best of what he finds, always aware that he is living in an alien environment even if he makes as little compromise with it as possible. Nevertheless, she evades him. She is asked a question, ‘Are you lost?’ And replies, ‘Yes.’ In this response, the conclusion of the film, she recognizes that there is no place for her in this world of the Other. She was an intruder there, having imposed herself on it, and she has been accepted on sufferance. But if she is not welcome there, where does she belong? This is a question that permeates the whole of the film.

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The representation of the Tuareg in The Sheltering Sky offends those concerned with political correctness but is in fact one of the more honest portrayals of otherness we find in Hollywood cinema in that it resolutely refuses to allow us the luxury of thinking we ‘understand’ this culture. It remains opaque and ‘other’ only to the extent that it refuses to enter into an engagement with ‘us’. We see the Tuareg only through the eyes of Kit as she undergoes a traumatic, disordered experience. In making no attempt to represent North African culture from an indigenous point of view Bertolucci accepts his outsider status and sees the land entirely from a Western perspective so that both the land and the people remain ‘Other’ to the end of the film. In reflecting upon this, we are presented with the opposite sorts of problems to those raised by Kundun. Bertolucci makes us aware of the limits of understanding we face when we encounter what is foreign. Yet, if this suggests that a foreign culture is impenetrable and incomprehensible, it is so only because the characters see this culture solely through their own perceptions: they project their desires on to it and find it wanting from this perspective. *** Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation shares with The Sheltering Sky this sense of the incomprehensibility of the foreign culture, in this case of Japan. The lead characters in this film are also just as lost as Kit and Port. In other respects, however, they could hardly be more different. Neither Bob (Bill Murray) nor Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) wants to be in Japan. He is a fading actor who finds himself there to appear in an Suntory whisky advertising campaign, while she has accompanied her photographer husband on an assignment. Neither of them have a restless personality: they are not looking to find themselves in a foreign environment or an encounter with otherness. On the contrary, they both appear to be longing for comfort in what is familiar. He is a middle-aged man, married and experiencing a (minor) mid-life crisis, irritated by his wife’s bickering and his responsibility to the children, while she, newly married and only just out of college, is finding that married life is not what she expected. Tokyo provides a backdrop against which their respective senses of displacement is played out as they become friends and provide one another with mutual support. The mood is wistful and it very effectively captures the sense of two people finding a mutual empathy by virtue of a common response to being placed in a situation with which they are uncomfortable. Is this

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a real friendship – even a potential love – or one that is simply born from a mutual discomfort? The film is subtle enough to leave such a question hanging. Lost in Translation is an interesting film, by turns insightful and clichéd, which fairly honestly plays upon the sense of displacement that anyone feels upon first encountering a foreign city. It also drew upon Coppola’s own experience of visiting Tokyo and is a beautifully observed study of how tourists and casual visitors respond to the city. More interesting than the film itself, however, was the reaction to it by certain people in the west who objected to the representation of the Japanese, making the film something of a cause célèbre. Symptomatic was an article published in the British daily paper The Guardian (24 January 2004) written by one Kiku Day ‘a musician specializing in shakuhachi [who] spent 10 years living in Japan’, and claiming on this basis to be ‘half-Japanese’ and to be deeply offended by the way they were portrayed in the film: ‘The viewer is sledgehammered into laughing at these small, yellow people and their funny ways, desperately aping the western lifestyle without knowledge of its real meaning’. This doesn’t accord with my experience of the film but I suppose it all depends on the viewer: to an extent one sees what one wants to see. In any event, however, Day’s arrogance in taking offence on behalf of the Japanese is surely more offensive than anything to be found in Coppola’s film. And despite objecting to Coppola’s ‘inaccuracies’, she can state in the article that the ‘Tokugawa regime’ had an isolationist policy for ‘400 years’ (the Tokugawa era itself lasted only for 265 years and the isolationist policy was in place for half a century less than this!). In the States, Lost in Translation was also subject to a campaign of vilification by which Asian Mediawatch, a pressure group, which sought to prevent the film from gaining recognition at the Academy Awards. The complaint was that: The humor and lampooning of the Japanese in the film has a distinctly racial element. The film portrays the Japanese people as a collection of shallow stereotypes. The audience laughs AT the Japanese people and not with them. Japanese characters in the film include the weird prostitute and other Japanese who mispronounce their R’s and L’s; an ineffectual film director, strippers, and doctors who assault you with the Japanese language; the stoic arrogant sushi chef; and an emasculate colorful talk show host and partygoers. The main characters’ callous treatment towards these stereotyped Japanese is unfair and offensive. The main characters are portrayed as normal people while the Japanese are bizarre. The main characters prey on the Japanese and their inability to understand English. Particularly offensive are the hackneyed stereotypical jokes such as the overdone juxtaposition of L’s and R’s, mocking

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them because they bow and are short, and references to their disgusting food. The main characters visibly express disdain, and make insulting remarks and jokes in the direct presence of Japanese characters. There are no redeeming Japanese roles in the film, nor is there any significant dialogue between the main characters and the Japanese characters. They merely serve as buffoons for the main characters to ridicule. Lost in Translation provides a biased and offensive portrayal of the Japanese people and perpetuates negative stereotypes that are harmful to the AsianAmerican community.1

These assertions are significant less for what they say about the film than for what they reveal about processes of identification and cultural allegiance. In the context of the storyline of the film, they are patently nonsense. Some of them are simply untrue: there are no references to the food as ‘disgusting’ (in fact at one point Bob tells his wife that he wants to eat Japanese food in future because he prefers it to the pasta they normally have2) and neither character make any ‘insulting remarks and jokes in the direct presence of Japanese characters’. Anyone who has spent time in Tokyo will recognize the portrayal as a sometimes devastatingly accurate portrayal of the way western tourists respond to the city (Coppola seems to have taken great care to make it clear that the presentation of the Japanese is how the Americans view them, not how they really are, something that it is surely obvious to any unbiased viewer). Of course, the representation is shallow and unbalanced, but this is surely how most people experience a foreign country for the first time, especially when they are not there by choice and will only be staying for a few days. Bob is doubly resentful. Not only does he not want to be in Tokyo, he also does not want to be doing the work he is doing, even if he is being paid $2 million for it and his agent tells him it is essential for his career. Suffering from jet lag, it is not surprising that he should be irritable. Charlotte doesn’t know what she wants; she has accompanied her husband largely out of boredom, and being away from home has brought to the surface her disillusion with her marriage and dissatisfaction with her life. She is too self-absorbed to respond to what is going on around her, even as she makes an obligatory attempt to be a good tourist and engage with some parts of ‘traditional’ Japan. The behaviour of both characters seem to be entirely consistent with who they are. Given their situation how likely is it that they would have any opportunity to meet ‘normal Japanese’ (whatever that might mean) let alone engage in ‘significant dialogue’ with them (in fact this claim is also not really true: when they go to a hospital after Charlotte has hurt her foot, Bob does have a very ‘meaningful dialogue’ with a Japanese man, much to the amusement of two Japanese women sitting behind them)?

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It is the claim that Charlotte and Bob treat the Japanese with ‘disregard and disdain’ and ‘ridicule’ that most jars. I can’t see this at all in the film, but if it was so then surely it would reflect badly on them, not on the Japanese. Normally if we see people behaving with disdain towards others our natural reaction would be to feel revulsion for them and sympathize with those who are the object of their disdain. Yet the proponents of Asian Mediawatch appear to identify with the ‘disdain’ they perceive rather than be repelled by it. This tends to suggest that they guiltily share it and that their sensitivity towards the portrayal of the Japanese here may reflect more upon their own conflicted loyalties as Asian-Americans than it does the content of the film. Identifying with both the Americans and the Japanese in the film, it perhaps rouses too many disturbing resonances within them they would prefer to remain dormant. It may remind them of the disdain with which some Americans at home do no doubt treat them, while also playing upon their embarrassment about their association with aspects of Japanese culture that exist but are perhaps unseemly to someone brought up in the States (like the fact shabu shabu is prepared by the restaurant for the customers to cook at their table). This is also suggested by the protests against the portrayal of older Japanese as short,3 as not being able to pronounce ‘l’s’ and ‘r’s’ and that they bow a lot, all of which are simply things that one can hardly fail to notice when in Japan. As for the objection to the fact that the hospital doctor only speaks to Charlotte in Japanese, what can one say? Would Asian Mediawatch have been happy if all the Japanese in the movie had been tall, spoke perfect English, and never bowed when meeting people?

Figure 20 Bill Murray above the crowd in Lost in Translation.

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At issue here is the question of identification. The sorts of criticisms made by Asian Mediawatch seem to reflect a sense of wounded pride in people who identify themselves with characters on the screen whom they perceive to be portrayed in a way that is out of kilter with their sense of identification. They seem entirely unconcerned to determine whether the portrayals are accurate or not. Indeed, they do not seem at all concerned with the representation of Japan as such, but only on the way it impacts on their own perception of themselves, as is made explicit in the final sentence of the above quote that the film ‘perpetuates negative stereotypes that are harmful to the Asian American community’. In fact, a disturbing feature of the Asian Mediawatch communiqué is the assumption that the ‘Japanese’ are a generic category who should be presented in a particular way that corresponds neither with how Japanese people actually are or how they perceive themselves, but with how Asian-Americans would like them to be. Why, we might wonder, should a filmmaker making a film in which no Asian-Americans appear be expected to take their feelings into account? The campaign by Asian Mediawatch is disturbing on a number of counts but above all because it trivializes issues about representation that have arisen in the wake of debates about Orientalism and postcolonialism and shows how they may be cynically used by pressure groups to advance their own interests. The criticisms made, by ignoring context and taking the representations in isolation, are really a continuation of the ways in which governments around the world once sought to control how Hollywood portrayed their subjects. They are singularly inappropriate when applied to a film that is manifestly about communication, or more precisely mis-communication. This fact, spelled out by the title of the film, seems to have entirely passed by those who have criticized its modes of representation. This is not to deny that stereotyping and caricature (whether negative or positive) does have real consequences and can be used to support prejudice and bigotry. At the same time, however, they are a legitimate and indeed essential element of cultural representation from which it is impossible to escape. Stereotypes become dangerous only when they are reinforced through repetition and come to be taken for reality. The challenge for a filmmaker, therefore, should be not to avoid stereotypes, but to make their nature as stereotypes apparent. In this respect Coppola’s film may more legitimately be criticized. It might be said that it treats the world as a kind of American playground, to which ‘others’ are mere backdrops, and there is also a certain complacency, or perhaps lack of self-reflection, in the way she

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plays on stereotypes. It should be said, however, that it is all too rare to find any sense of irony among contemporary American filmmakers that would allow such self-reflection. Most take themselves far more seriously than filmmakers of the past, such that it would be unlikely that we would encounter the sort of ironic play on stereotypes to be found, for instance in the work of Josef von Sternberg, as examined in Chapter 3. Let us refer back, for instance, to The Shanghai Gesture, where the casino patrons insist on calling the barman ‘boy’ which he accepts silently until finally exploding: ‘I am not a boy, I am 47 years old and my name is . . .’ This example, as it subverts the stereotype it has set up, also brings attention to the fact that in modern films minor characters are normally treated not so much as stereotypes as forgettable or disposable: it is as if we are supposed only to remember the main characters. Self-reflection may be absent in Lost in Translation but we do at least remember the minor characters, even if they are caricatured. Many directors making such a film, one imagines, would have made the Japanese characters so bland that we would barely have noticed that the film was even made in Tokyo. What was most strange about the controversy over Lost in Translation, however, was why this film should have aroused such passion when it appeared at the same time as The Last Samurai, a film whose portrayal of Japan was objectively far more suspect, and yet seems to have been approved of by Asian Mediawatch. Set during the early days of the Meiji Restoration, Tom Cruise here plays Nathan Algren, a disenchanted ex-American soldier, a cliché amalgam of the embittered Vietnam vet and the frontier hero of the Hawkeye type we encountered in Michael Mann’s Last of the Mohicans. Like Nathanial in that film, Algren is unable to prevent the passing of an ancient culture – in this case the Samurai – but it isn’t for want of trying. Not only does he learn the Japanese language and the discipline of the Samurai in a matter of months, something for which a mere Japanese requires years of training, but he becomes an acknowledged leader – indeed the most accomplished warrior – of the Daimu rebellion. Even after this is defeated, far from being executed as one might expect (and as he undoubtedly deserves) he is invited to the Meiji court to advise the Emperor! What is offensive about this film is not the representation of the other culture but the assumptions behind its scenario and their symptomatic nature. The Last Samurai ‘respects’ Japanese culture, at least in its traditional (and lost) form, which it sets against the rampant vulgarity of American capitalism. It is difficult not to see this

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as a hypocritical ploy to satisfy ‘political correctness’ while engaging in precisely in the same imperialist logic it is supposedly criticizing. What is disconcerting is that this ploy may have worked, since the film seems to have received a warm welcome in Japan and generally to have avoided major controversy. Indeed, it follows in a long line of dubious contemporary Hollywood films which are very good at ‘having their cake and eating it’, as the saying goes, through employing a kind of substitutionist logic by which the self in effect becomes the other as the American hero paradoxically becomes the hero by turning ‘anti’American. This attitude doubtless has its genesis in the revisionist Western and such films as A Man Called Horse (Eliot Silverstein, 1970), in which Richard Harris becomes a ‘better Sioux than the Sioux’ and which initiated a ‘genre’ of films in which a good white man gains salvation by righting the wrongs done by the bad men. The image of the American as both oppressor and liberator – a myth which deprives native peoples of agency – is a potent one that has underwritten American foreign policy and been reinforced by a range of films that have appeared over the past 40 years. The arrogance by which Americans often credit themselves with the creation of modern Japan (through its opening up to the world through the black ships and by the reconstruction after the Second World War) is extended here and presented as the genius underlying the Meiji Restoration (in which in reality Americans played virtually no part). There is something particularly offensive about this appropriation of the other’s history, which only becomes active through the intervention of an American hero. The fact that the setting is the past tends to elide the insidiousness of this process by which everything in a sense ‘becomes American’ since by this means the other’s story is transformed in ‘our’ (i.e., American) terms. The implications of this procedure are serious, because they reverberate in such a way that everyone – be they European, African or even the Japanese themselves – begin to perceive world history as an American history. In this way films like The Last Samurai serve to create and reinforce a kind of imprint that resonates in a way that almost certainly affects perceptions in a more dangerous way than the playful caricatures of a film like Lost in Translation.

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Chapter 10

STEVEN SPIELBERG AND THE SANCTIFICATION OF DIFFERENCE Steven Spielberg is a curious filmmaker in that the significance of his films seems to be simultaneously easy and difficult to grasp; they seem to be at once one-dimensional and yet multi-faceted. He is one of the few current Hollywood directors to have an international perspective and at the same time to be among the more parochial of filmmakers, whose films never stray – despite multifarious subject matter – beyond the limits of a rather restricted canvas. To this extent, he seems worthy of equal amounts of admiration and scorn. This is especially the case when regarding his recent, more ‘serious’ films, films which address themes that probably no other Hollywood director today would be allowed to touch and yet which do so in a way that does not do justice to these themes. Should we be grateful for the fact that Spielberg is at least placing important issues on the agenda that would otherwise be ignored, or dismayed that he does not have the intellectual or imaginative resources to address them with the acuity they demand? Almost all of his films are set in places spatially or temporally distant from his own everyday experience. The first major director whose worldview has largely been formed through his response to the media (film and TV in particular) rather than as a result of sensual appreciation of the world, Spielberg brings to most of his films an attitude that is at one with the mediatised environment of contemporary society while not being quite comfortable with it. As such his films embody a range of perspectives which resonate with today’s audiences in a way that satisfies a desire for entertainment while engaging with important issues affecting modern society. And to the extent to which he addresses questions of cultural conflict, while he does not shy away from controversy, he is always careful not to alienate his audience.

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Yet even though, given the themes his films address, one would expect otherness to be a major issue in his work, the fact is that what we see more clearly is a profound disavowal of otherness as such. Insofar as there is an engagement with the ‘Other’, it is an engagement with an absence, since, as we shall see, his world view ultimately can only exclude otherness by consecrating it as pure difference. The extraordinary success story that is Spielberg’s career relies on an ability to take the audience with him. As manipulative a director as Hitchcock, Spielberg has none of the latter’s sly humour and sense of mischief. This is perhaps why his films may antagonize as much as they attract the viewer. For myself, for instance, I found Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and Schindler’s List (1993) difficult to watch: the former because it was excruciatingly bad (not to say racist); the latter because it seemed artificial, never finding a mode of storytelling worthy of its subject matter. These two films find the director on his best and worst behaviour; the first film being a roller coaster adventure story having no pretensions to seriousness, while the latter could hardly be more serious in its theme. And yet they seem disturbingly similar in the ways in which they establish character and work through their themes. Although his films in general are not ones I find it easy to relate to, I recognize them as interesting and important documents of our times. It is not only his technical mastery and storytelling mode that make Spielberg such a successful director, it is also the fact that his attitudes chime with a broad section of the film-watching public. Indeed, the very contradictions within Spielberg’s work make his films of particular interest since they both reflect and disclose some of the prevalent attitudes – themselves often contradictory – towards questions of cultural difference, both in the United States and universally. Spielberg has given us films set in various exotic locales in which different aspects of cultural encounter are thematized with varying degrees of seriousness and discernment, yet notwithstanding the distance invoked (whether he takes us to the distant future or the distant past, or to a contemporary war zone) an overriding sense of familiarity is maintained. Spielberg wants us to be comfortable with what is foreign: he takes the audience out of their habitual settings without disorienting them or making them feel that they have left home. This is consistent throughout his work so that even as his films have become increasingly more sophisticated in recent years there remains a simple underlying attitude that prevents them from being disturbing. A sense of security is founded in the assumption that human beings may be complicated

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and do terrible things, but that they still act within a recognizable framework, one which is comprehensible. It is this belief that human behaviour is comprehensible that causes Spielberg, I feel, to exclude otherness. Or at least, that otherness can only be represented as outside of the category of the human, a category that is mutable so that certain characters (for instance, Goeth in Schindler’s List) effectively step outside of it and cease to be ‘human’ as they caught up within webs of evil. The ‘evil’ indeed appears to be embedded within them as part of their very nature rather than being motivated by anything that has happened to them: they are evil because no other choice is offered to them. Moreover, this evil remains unexamined; its purpose within the film is rarely more than to provide a necessary opposition that is formed as a counterpoint to the ‘good’ that is represented by the hero. Such a schema seems to owe more on Spielberg’s part to an immersion in film history than to any observation of how actual human beings behave. Indeed, it is film history, not his own experience, that gives Spielberg both his point of departure and provides him with a kind of ‘mythos’ through which he is able to mediate ‘reality’ in his films. His work takes strength from this, and it is to a great extent what makes his films so compelling: because he is adept at utilizing the film conventions with which the audience is familiar they can be so absorbed by the story that their resistance to questioning what they are seeing is less than it might be with other filmmakers. In this way, however, ‘reality’ is always kept at bay, even when he is striving to address a topic as serious as the Holocaust. It means that no matter how strongly or honestly Spielberg aims to confront real problems and make films that contribute to our knowledge or understanding of the world, he can deal with his subject only at a remove which undermines such an intention. Reality is thereby given tangibility through film rather than vice versa. For all that, Spielberg’s approach does not feed into the play of signifiers that Baudrillard saw as being the modern condition and which makes reality elusive if not inaccessible. It rather reflects the fact that for Spielberg the only way to make sense of the world is to transpose it into filmic terms. He does not celebrate media simulation, but one has the impression that when he is conceiving a new film, he first constructs in his mind a template of how its theme can be effectively addressed in cinematic terms, and in a way that is entirely drawn from his knowledge of film history. It is only when this template is clear in his mind that he inserts into it the ‘reality’ the film is addressing. And because this process is so calculated, it also means that no intuitive

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or unconscious insights can enter the work. Equally, no imaginative projection or sub-textual implication is possible: what we see is what we get and we either accept it as it is or not at all. *** Although Spielberg is generally seen as having an optimistic worldview he is by no means an uncritical commentator on either the modern condition or American attitudes in general. Indeed, there is a pessimistic core to his work, even a paranoid fear that contemporary society may be in prey to a mechanistic and brutalized authority. Examples may be found throughout his work, most explicitly in Minority Report (2002), but it is perhaps clearest in Munich (2005), where terrorism is treated as a form of contagion that inevitably consumes its perpetrators, no matter what their intentions might be. This is seen to be because it is driven from above, put into effect by a shadowy authority which ultimately subjects individuals to its will. In most of his films this pessimism is tempered, however, by an overriding confidence in human agency as the means by which such dangers can be defeated, overcome, or at least postponed, even if a darker tone may have coloured some of his more recent films. In The War of the Worlds (2005), humanity is presented as almost entirely consumed by its own fear and is saved not by its own agency but by happenstance, while in AI (2001) the end of humanity is envisaged as the logical result of its own cupidity. Even here, however, this dark core is papered over: humanity may destroy itself in AI but the human spirit lives on in the androids they have created. These optimistic and pessimistic strands of Spielberg’s sensibility are complementary to one another only to the extent that they are as mutually confirming as they are mutually exclusive. Evil occurs when humans surrender to their base qualities (which generally implies submitting to authority) rather than rising above them by enacting their power of agency. In this sense Spielberg is a pure Enlightenment thinker, imbued with a faith in the ability of the human mind to overcome adversity, but also with an awareness that this is a constant fight against the powers of darkness, and that the result of this struggle is by no means a certain victory for the forces of light. Or at least his view comes with the recognition that, if Enlightenment is to be attained, it may not be humans who will accomplish it. However, this is very much a twentieth century version of Enlightenment, one that is tinged with a certain mysticism that enters it by means of the ideas of C. G. Jung and Joseph Campbell. These two hardly

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rigorous thinkers feed into Spielberg’s work in a way that gives it a certain consistency but one whose basis is superficial and ultimately trivializing, especially when it is also combined with a nostalgia of childhood that seems largely derived from what we might call a ‘Disney’ mentality. Without disparaging them, one can say that Spielberg’s films resemble the world of Disney to the extent that they are cleverly constructed to encompass a kind of double nostalgia: for the adult, they respond to a memory trace of childhood; for the child, they give a sense of what they hope the adult world is and what they will become. In other words, it is precisely the child within that they address: not the actuality of childhood, but a displaced childhood and, conversely, a displaced adulthood. By this, I mean that the adult characters in his films have never properly left their childhoods behind, while the children are not really children but adults in the making. They exist in a kind of nether world in which the child and the adult within each of them intersects. There is another link with the sensibility of Disney in Spielberg’s work in an assumption that human beings follow a rigid developmental process by which the child grows into an adult. This implies that all people are made of the same stuff and learn through experience. The experience is not their’s alone, however: they also learn through the accumulated knowledge of the generations. It is here that the Disney conception of human becoming conjoins with the basis of Jungian psychology and the mythos of Joseph Campbell, all of which assume, along with Spielberg, that there is a universal consciousness which is repeated in each person’s life cycle in ways that can to a large extent be mapped and predicted, even if the outcomes in each case may be very different. The influence of the ideas of Jung and Campbell on Spielberg may have been largely mediated through George Lucas, but they are congenial to Spielberg’s worldview and help us to explicate the intellectual basis of his films. What further conjoins Spielberg’s vision with Jung and Campbell is the assumption that the key to the human condition lies within the individual independently of social, cultural or political conditions. Each individual contains within himself or herself the memory of the world as a trace which is revealed through the constant appearance of archetypes within human behaviour and its social, political and cultural representations. It follows that good and evil are inherent within all people but that we are distinguished by the freedom of choice given to us: we are all at liberty to make decisions when faced with life’s challenges. This fundamental freedom allows us to choose

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either to follow the good or the evil aspects of our personality. This is not, however, a version of Manichean dualism, since there is no clear division between the good and the evil. They each remain latent within us and we must continually struggle against their twin pulls. Having made a choice, however, we are not thereby rendered ‘good’ or ‘evil’ since the choice is perpetual and an ever present temptation remains. This is because it is the choice itself, not the motivation or the consequences that follow from it, that determines its status. We see this scenario again and again in Spielberg’s films, but let us take the example of Indiana Jones, whose actions and motivations are often no better than those of the villains, but who is redeemed by the fact that he chooses the side of the good over the evil. It is the fact of this conscious choice that makes him the hero, not the motivation that determined the choice or its result, even if, due to the fact that a correct choice has been made, a good result is guaranteed. This circular logic can clearly be seen in Raiders of the Lost Ark in that his choices alone distinguish Indy from his archaeological adversary, René Bellocq, who chooses evil by association, although his motivations and actions are not essentially different from those of Indy. Indeed, Indy is a ruthless and quite selfish individual whose behaviour becomes acceptable only because of his derring-do and by the fact that his adversaries are Nazis and therefore, by definition, beyond the pale. His flaws also add to our sense of identification with him in much the same way that we can identify with, say, Spider Man’s teenage insecurities. And yet, he is distinguished from such super heroes because their flaws vanish when they put on their masks or costumes and themselves become other. Indy in contrast always remains what he is and therefore stands for the ordinary person impelled to perform great things. Where we respond to the super hero as doing what we would like to be capable of while recognizing its impossibility, Indy is a direct projection of us, with our flaws intact and yet still able to conquer an apparently more powerful adversary. There is something disingenuous about such a characterization, which elides the hero’s (and by projection our own) inadequacy and even justifies appalling behaviour. In Raiders, it functions as a screen by which we can overlook Indy’s treatment of others, notably of women and native peoples: towards the former he generally behaves callously, while in respect of the natives he is almost always exploitative and imperialist in his attitude when he deigns to notice them at all, and he displays little compunction about sacrificing either in order to achieve his own aims. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, his adversary, Dr. René Belloq even notes how

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similar their personalities are: ‘I am a shadowy reflection of you, and it would only take a nudge to make you like me, to push you out of the light’. In fact in some ways Belloq could be seen as the more sympathetic character: he reveals greater consideration for Marion and more sensitivity towards the native peoples – in Peru he speaks the native language and both there and in Egypt appears to be much more comfortable with the locals. Indy can be redeemed only by force of the irruption of the evil that is pitted against him. This also means that his villains become mere ciphers, lacking the intensity and ambivalent malevolence of those in the films from which the series takes its point of departure such as the Emperor Ming or Dr Fu Manchu, or even those of more recent vintage who oppose Batman or Superman or other super heroes. Spielberg, in fact, has never been fair to his villains, none of whom are especially memorable. Again, this logically follows from the coincidence of his worldview with the ideas of Jung and Campbell, both of whose thinking implies that any ‘otherness’ is archetypally contained within the individual. Functioning as obstacles to self realization, these oppositions are what the individual must confront and conquer in order to fulfil his (and this schema is fundamentally one of male becoming) destiny. The supreme example of this is Schindler who requires the eruption of evil around him in order to make a choice in favour of the ‘good’, a choice that makes him into a hero, even though he remains a fundamentally flawed character whose motives remain opaque. In what is essentially a solipsistic universe, it is this ability to choose that determines the human character, not the moral action that underlies the choice. It is in this perspective that Goeth, the Nazi commander in the film, is really cast outside the category of a human being altogether, not because he ‘chooses’ evil but precisely because he does not make a choice against it. The fact that choosing the ‘good’ justifies the rightness of one’s actions makes Munich Spielberg’s most uncomfortable film because the choice made by its ‘hero’, Avner, is increasingly brought into question through the course of the film: did he really choose the good, or was the only choice open to him between two evils? Was he, in fact, really allowed to choose? We will return to this theme in a moment. For now, however, let us return to consider the relation of Spielberg to ‘Enlightenment’. *** The persistence of an Enlightenment sensibility in Spielberg’s work is made most apparent in AI where, even though humanity is destroyed,

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the aliens who succeed it appear by the end of the film to have realized the Dream of Enlightenment. They have done so precisely because they are not subject to the human faults which undermine the Dream (they are not ‘flawed’) while still being completely human (they appear to have no other desires than those we identify with the human). They are the pure rationality of mind which, created in full light, has necessarily transcended the need to choose. Yet these aliens/androids have a strange nostalgia, even after several millennia have passed, for the humans who destroyed themselves and devastated the planet. Enlightened they may be, but these aliens seem only to exist as shadow humans, unable to establish any parameters of their own existence. They effectively continue the human project even in the realization that it has failed (or that humans have failed it). As they tell David, the child android whose story AI is, ‘humans hold the key to the meaning of existence’. Like the humans in Jurassic Park, they remain consumed with the past and with the possibility of restoring to life what no longer exists, but unlike the ‘flawed’ humans in the latter film they appear to have no rationale for doing so: neither a need for scientific knowledge, since they know everything about the humans they have superseded, nor to exploit their exoticism for the purposes of tourism, since this is something for which their superior society has no need. Of course, for the androids, the extinct humans are not simply their ancestors: they are also their creators. We might say that the humans are to them what the creator God was to the humans, but there is at least one crucial distinction: God, for those who believe, made humans in his own image and they were subservient to him, while the androids became superior to the humans who created them and completely transcended them. And where the Christian God was unknowable to humans and ‘worked in mysterious ways’, humans hold no mysteries for the androids; they are not even ‘other’ to them in the somewhat superficial sense in which the dinosaurs are to the humans of Jurassic Park (based upon their fundamental mysteriousness). The past seems to hold no mysteries for the androids. They can even recreate it, only for a short time, admittedly, but such total knowledge would make it seem unlikely that, after two thousand years, they would retain very much interest in the long lost, tarnished, human world. The interest in the recreation of the past by the scientists in Jurassic Park, in contrast, follows the filmic convention by which scientific experiment with otherness has horrifying consequences. They want to re-create dinosaurs not for the sake of the creatures themselves, but for what they can learn from them, and yet they are unable to control

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the results as the experiment slips out of control precisely because they remain subject to their own cupidity. They make a choice for Enlightenment but it is one that is tarnished by the commercial necessities that alone can make their experiments possible. Like the shark in Jaws (1975) or Goeth in Schindler’s List, the dinosaurs come to represent a pure difference that cannot be tamed (or brought into the light) and must therefore be destroyed. This sense of total difference is exemplified by the attitude of Hooper, the supposed expert in Jaws, who displays no interest in the characteristics of sharks beyond their outward behaviour. Fascinated by their sheer power, their pure predatory instinct, he seems completely uninterested in understanding why they behave as they do. As he states: ‘they swim, they eat and they produce baby sharks, that’s all they do’. His interest is purely in the mechanics of how they subsist – they have a fascination as pure killing machines; as such they are an example of this unknown ‘otherness’, an otherness that is so complete that it has no other point of contact with the ‘human’. This sense of total otherness is both underlined and contradicted by the experience of Quint (Robert Shaw), a survivor of the Indianapolis disaster, a real event of World War Two, in which the ship that carried the atom bomb to be loaded onto the Enola Gay for dispatch to Hiroshima was later sunk by a Japanese torpedo. The survivors spent five days in the water, attracting sharks which killed hundreds of them before they were finally rescued. This disaster, the greatest recorded incident of animal attack on humans, justifies Quint’s hatred for sharks. At the same time, the fact that the sharks preyed upon the ship which delivered the most monstrous weapon ever used on earth, gives them a certain retributive agency. Can the episode even be seen as nature’s revenge for the horror of Hiroshima? If one takes the latter perspective, the whole focus of the film changes, the ‘otherness’ of sharks assumes a different form and they become avatars of a moral judgement: far from being mere killing machines, they act as agents of a greater justice, one coming from elsewhere but which is nevertheless comprehensible in human terms. This association may have been unintended, since it indicates an allusiveness rarely found in Spielberg’s films and in fact it contradicts what is otherwise largely consistent throughout all of his films that what is ‘other’ cannot make a choice; it acts only out of pure instinct. Unlike Moby Dick, the other great predatory marine beast mythologized in American culture, the shark has no symbolic value and remains nameless, reduced to only one feature, its jaws, which are presented as its entire reality.1

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The shark is thus evil not by choice but by its very nature (by its inability to choose). It shares this quality with the Nazis – whether in the Indiana Jones films or in Schindler’s List – the slavers in Amistad (1997), the aliens in War of the Worlds and the lorry in Duel (1971). At the same time, these characters are distinguished from villains like Bellocq or Lomar Burgess in Minority Report, or from the mayor in Jaws, who are misguided humans whose choices are ‘wrong’ and make them complicit with evil. A similar character can be found in most of Spielberg’s films and generally they are figures who have positions of authority. Spielberg is distrustful of authority in a very American way, because it corrupts and limits individual agency and initiative. *** Because there is no ‘other’ within the realm of the human, Spielberg feels able to assume the standpoint of the Afro-Americans of The Color Purple or the Africans of Amistad, the suffering of the victims of the Holocaust, or even of the aliens of Close Encounters or ET without having to make an adjustment to the incommensurability of their experience with his own. In this sense, the aliens of the latter two films, like those of AI, are not really alien at all, but idealized projections of the human. Incommensurability within the human world does not exist in Spielberg’s world and no self and other relationship can exist: everything is either contained within the self or belongs to something that is external and unfathomable. Yet this creates problems when he is dealing with people who are victims of oppression. Spielberg needs the African slaves of Amistad and the Jews in Schindler’s List to be ‘comprehensible’ to us (which allows them to remain human). The problem is that these situations are so far outside of normal experience as to be fundamentally incomprehensible, to the extent that we cannot (any more than can Spielberg) project ourselves into that situation. To render this incomprehensibility as incomprehensible is, however, unacceptable to Spielberg. He strives to make it comprehensible, by treating it as a heightened form of what we can understand, so that it becomes the extreme limit of what we can imagine. Yet this fails to address the inhuman situation of an event like the Holocaust or the phenomenon of the Atlantic slave trade, which is not simply an extreme of what is existent, but is literally unimaginable. The enforced displacement of people out of their usual circumstances into such an unimaginable horror changes everything about the person’s situation in the world, so that all reference points are obliterated. The resulting

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trauma means that the person becomes ‘other’ to what they were: torn from their habitual lives and cast into something unthinkable which separates them from everything they have previously known, their very personalities would almost inevitably be transformed in a fundamental way. Yet Spielberg presents them as responding to the situation as though it has not changed them at all. Notwithstanding their fear, anger and apprehension, they remain recognizably the same people as they were before, with their personal integrity and dignity intact. Above all, they continue to act as largely rational beings, even as they see the Nazis in Schindler’s List randomly humiliating and killing their confreres and in the recognition that they are likely to be next. A particularly jarring example of this is the scene when Goeth first comes to the ghetto and a young Jewish architect is berating those working on a new building because the foundation has been incorrectly constructed and the building will be subject to subsidence. Goeth listens to her, shoots her for her impertinence, but orders the workers to do as she says. What seems anomalous about this is not Goeth’s reaction, but the fact that the architect would place her professional pride above the indignity of her situation and be so enthusiastic about her work as to be unafraid to confront her oppressors in this way. This is an especially notable example, but throughout the film the oppressed never lose their dignity or become irrational or (the most likely response to such horror) become impassive and apathetic, resigned to their fate. In a similar fashion in Amistad, while our sense of identification tends to lie principally with the defenders of the slaves, the slaves themselves retain complete dignity; their leader, Cinque (Djimon Hounsou), even assumes a heroic role and the slaves never lose their quality of intransigence. Cinque himself is a wholly ‘Spielbergian’ hero (one can imagine him, in different circumstances, assuming Indy’s role): unbowed and completely unintimidated by circumstances, it is impossible to imagine him as a slave. There is none of the nuanced portrayal of the slaves we find in other important films that have treated slavery more convincingly, such as Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s The Last Supper (1978) or Hailé Gerima’s Sankofa (1993), in which the slaves assert their dignity, to be sure, but through revolt rather than resilience or intransigence, and a revolt that is pervaded with confusions and slippages. A fundamental problem of this type of ‘issue’ film making within the context of mainstream Hollywood lies in audience identification. The ability to direct the characters with whom the audience identifies

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is central to Spielberg’s success and the differentiation he establishes between the heroes and villains of his adventure films is what gives these films their dynamism. Treating serious historical themes in the same way, however, creates problems. In Schindler’s List or Amistad our point of identification as an audience lies with the ‘enlightened’ white men who act on behalf of the oppressed against their own historical class, something emphasized by what we have seen of the inhuman treatment dealt to the concentration camp victims or the slaves. This feeds our complacency as viewers, creating an emotional bond with the oppressed and allowing us to imagine ourselves in the place of the enlightened whites.

Figure 21 The welcome to the United States in Amistad. The problem with this is that it means that the audience is invited to make a false identification with the fate of the victims. It gives us the luxury of thinking that we would respond with the same sense of dignity and remain unbowed in the face of horror. Our outrage at what we are witnessing is lessened because we respond less to the barbarity of Nazi oppression or slave trading than to the resilience of the victims. They mirror our own terror and despair but also what we might like to believe would be our intransigence in the face of horror, and so we can associate ourselves with their strength of resistance rather than consider more uncomfortable questions about our own capacity either to endure or inflict such treatment and, indeed, our potential or actual complicity with oppression.

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It is consistent with Spielberg’s general view that the victims must not be allowed to lose their sense of humanity which, as we have seen, lies in the their ability to choose, and they have to retain this ability even in the worst of circumstances. The inhumanity, indeed, lies not in their situation, but in its imposition from outside. To this extent, the Nazis and the slavers cannot be rendered as ‘human’. Rather, they come from ‘elsewhere’, somewhere that is precisely ‘incomprehensible’. We see this in the first appearance of Goeth, who rides into the ghetto like an alien being devoid of all human feelings, analogous to the shark as it appears in the waters off the coast of the New England town of Amity. With our sense of identification so fixed on the resilience of the victims we are allowed no distance from which to contemplate what has made Goeth into such a monster. As the film develops, Spielberg seems not to know what to do with this character, torn between ‘humanising’ him or maintaining him at the limit of monstrousness. The slight softening he does undergo seems false, however, as it goes against the more likely scenario that people grow into becoming monsters and that once embarked on the process, each act of monstrosity justifies another; they do not start as uncompromising monsters and then develop doubts about what they are doing. In a revealing comment, Spielberg once stated that, ‘I’ve never been touched by film noir or trauma drama, psychodrama, anything to do with the deep human condition’ (interview with Bianca Jagger and Andy Warhol, quoted in Taylor, 1992). This self-recognition is a confirmation of what is apparent from his films, but also makes it surprising that he should increasingly be drawn to subjects which require some insight into the ‘deep human condition’ if they are to be handled effectively. *** What is above all missing from Spielberg’s world is desire. Love for him appears to be a purely affective link that connects two lovers or a child to a parent but it seems to be forged by some kind of mystical bond. None of the couples in any of Spielberg’s films ever seem to have fallen in love. It is at least difficult to discern what motivated their attachments. Love is rather the pre-given assumption of their relationship even if it is usually the case that the couple have become antagonistic to or estranged from one another. Furthermore, there is also no graduation in forms of love: love for a parent is fundamentally of the same nature as love for a man or a woman. Above all, no sense of desire intrudes into the relationship.

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Artificial Intelligence: AI is a film ostensibly about love, but what sort of love is this? In it, a couple whose son has suffered serious injuries in an accident from which he is unlikely ever to recover, take possession, as a surrogate son, of a prototype android which has been programmed to give unconditional love. When the real son miraculously recovers, however, he sets about sabotaging the place that David, the androidusurper, has found within the family and especially in the affections of his mother. In the end, the parents conclude that they have to choose between the two children and decide to return David to the manufacturer for destruction. The mother, however, cannot face doing so and sets him free, abandoning him in a forest. Through a series of adventures that last for more than two thousand years, David is consumed by a will to find his mother again in order to give her his love, which he expects to be reciprocated. The question that principally interests Spielberg in this scenario is one that is raised by one of the researchers early in the film. When Professor Hobby (William Hurt), David’s creator, unveils his idea of an android that will give ‘love like the love of a child for a parent, a love that will never end’, she asks him: ‘what is the responsibility of the parent in return’? The answer to the question turns upon the nature of the android. Would it care if its love was not reciprocated? This returns us to an imponderable issue we considered in the introduction in relation to prosphetic memory and Alison Landsberg’s discussion of Blade Runner. Surely it would only care if it was programmed to care (in which case any responsibility would turn on whether an android’s programmed pain was real pain), or if it was able to transcend its programming to assume its own feelings as given to it through experience, and thus to be hurt by human responses to it. In AI, any responsibility must lie solely with the creator, since he states that his android’s love will be constant and never changing. Even in the unlikely event that this sort of ‘love’ was what the parents wanted, however, there will come a time when they die and the android will be left with the pain of no longer being able to love. Far more likely is that, even if they reciprocate the love to begin with, they will soon grow tired of the sugary and clinging sort of love that David offers, especially if it never changes, since it is surely an essential feature of love that it responds to changes within the one who is loved and that reciprocity will be dependent upon those changes. Since David seeks obsessively to restore the love he was programmed to give and receive, this makes him (whether he is an android or a human) such a one-dimensional being that it would surely be impossible for anyone to love him for long.

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Yet Spielberg proceeds as if a real moral issue was involved here and misses the more significant issues of identity and moral responsibility raised by a scenario which was originally to be a project for Stanley Kubrick, who would no doubt have given a very different emphasis to the film. Nevertheless, it is important to consider the reasons for Spielberg’s rather single-minded stress on this issue, which clearly matters a great deal to him to judge from the short lecture he gives in an extra that is included on the DVD, in which he speaks of the need for us to be responsible ‘for what we place on the planet’. It seems apparent that he sees love only in terms of duty or responsibility and not as an actualization or fulfilment of desire. Desire perhaps has to be denied because it is the conducting line between self and other as well as the touchstone that activates love as the most intense point of recognition of an other’s existence. If there is no desire there can be no recognition of the other. What emerges very clearly here is this sense that is present throughout Spielberg’s work of a fundamentally human and self-centred world from which otherness is either absent or to be expelled. Neither David nor the other androids in AI are ‘other’ in any perceptible sense. In David’s case, his only desire, apart from receiving love from his ‘mom’ is to be a real boy, like Pinocchio. Everything here is determined by the human and anything that is not ‘human’ judges itself in relation to it, even the splendiferous aliens we see at the end of the film who exist two thousand years after humanity has destroyed itself. Indeed, the very idea of creating robots with the capacity to ‘love’ is a fundamental denial of otherness, since it assumes that love (or any other emotion) is an inherent quality present within the person rather than something that emerges from interaction between two different (other) sensibilities. In this sense love is inseparable from a sense of identity, which it simultaneously and paradoxically upholds and undermines as we project our feelings onto another person, and that projection feeds back into our own personality. Even if the feeling of love could be isolated and hardwired into a robot it could surely never be possible to programme into it the complex forms of projection and counter-projection by which love comes to realization, because in most cases so many elements of suspicion, resistance and even repulsion are encountered before the initial attraction is fully realized. This is as true of the love between parent and child as it is of that between lovers: we do not want to be loved for what another person thinks we are but for what we perceive ourselves to be and this involves an inevitable conflict. The relationship between lovers always has to

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negotiate what is an irresolvable dilemma (irresolvable because the perceptions of two people can never totally coincide). This also explains the close link that exists between love and hate, since we may came to hate the object which fails to conform to the image we have of it. In order for a robot to be able to love, it would also need to have the ability to hate. Yet if it were able to hate it would be extremely dangerous because its hatred, like its love, being inherent to it rather than formed by interrelation to an Other, would be unconditional and thus uncontrollable. In this sense, David never displays any genuine love towards his ‘mom’, but only a form of devotion that is like that of a dog for its master. Curiously, however, another android in the film does seem to have the ability to love; this is Teddy, an android ‘toy’ which seems to have both the ability to think for himself and has a genuine affection for David that is not dependent upon his programming. Teddy, in fact, has a genuinely uncanny presence; he is perhaps the only character in any of Spielberg’s films who has such a sense of otherness. This is so anomalous that one wonders if it was an element of the script which slipped into the final film unnoticed due to Spielberg being so focused on David (certainly, Spielberg himself seems entirely unaware of it). The denial of otherness also extends to the way that Spielberg treats women who, like his villains, are rarely given memorable roles (The Color Purple is an exception, but hardly an auspicious one) but are present only as adjuncts to the men, as nurturing spirits or as aspects of the hero’s ‘anima’. *** In the rather schematic world we generally find in Spielberg’s films, Munich (2005) stands out as an exception insofar as the choice made by the hero does not have clearly ‘good’ consequences. Spielberg could have treated this project as a pure thriller, making the Palestinians simple villains and the Israelis justified avengers. To his credit, however, he made a genuine attempt to engage with the morality of terrorism and to treat its perpetrators not as ‘evil’ but as being caught up in a spiralling web of violence in which they are compelled to perform unconscionable acts. It is probably only a rare director like Francesco Rosi or Gilo Pontecorvo who could have handled a theme like this without trivializing it and the broad canvas against which Spielberg chose to set the actions meant that it was almost inevitably going to be superficial in its treatment of its central theme of political violence.

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Moreover, any film addressing such a topic in the context of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is certain to court controversy and Spielberg has been criticized from all sides, accused or being either too balanced or not balanced enough in his approach. This seems to miss the point, because clearly his aim was not to contribute to understanding of the rights or wrongs of the conflict but to explore the brutalizing effect that any participation in terrorist activities has upon the humans involved. And of course, Spielberg is bound by his own limitations: we should hardly be surprised that his Mossad assassination squad are a motley group of individuals as stereotyped as they are unlikely or that factual accuracy is never allowed to stand in the way of dramatic effect. Nor should we expect him to have an insight into the tangled politics of the Middle East conflict. What is interesting, at least for the current study, is the ambivalent consequences of the choice made by Avner, the ‘hero’ of the film. In the film, Avner is a Mossad agent commissioned to head an assassination squad to track down and kill the Palestinians responsible for the kidnap and subsequent killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games. He begins his quest convinced of its righteousness but with each assassination is increasingly plagued by doubts as he realizes that there is no clear cut distinction between those who commit political crimes and those who pursue them and that vengeance is as much accursed as the original offence. In accepting the Mossad commission, has Avner made the wrong choice? This dilemma of course is also Spielberg’s and it arises from his divided loyalty, torn between his support for the State of Israel and his recognition of the justice of the Palestinian cause. If reciprocal otherness cannot be accepted within Spielberg’s worldview, the Palestinian/Israeli conflict must be seen as a clash between different interests. The Palestinians thus cannot, like the Nazis, be demonized as totally Other (i.e., outside of the human) but have to be given their due as part of the tapestry of difference. They may be misguided in their methods, but are those methods any different from the ones used by the Israeli State against them? In this sense, both are terrorists and equally guilty of making bad choices, which lead to evil. How can this spiral into evil be halted? The answer is obvious: by making correct choices. But what are the correct choices? This is where Spielberg reaches an impasse and can go no further: Avner is left with nothing but his guilt. In an interview with Richard Shickel at the time of the release of Munich, Spielberg stated: ‘You are assigned a mission, and you do it

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because you believe in the mission, but there is something about killing people at close range that is excruciating [ . . . ] It’s bound to try a man’s soul, so it was very important to me to show Avner struggling to keep his soul intact’. According to Shickel, Spielberg and his screenwriter Tony Kushner spent many hours talking to the former Mossad man Avner was based on, and Spielberg concludes that ‘I don’t think he will ever find peace’. These sentiments, however, are on the one hand banal and somewhat glib (that killing is excruciating and disturbs one’s peace of mind is surely what any murderer who doesn’t want to be considered a psychopath would say) and on the other hand their perspective fits so perfectly with the mentality we can observe throughout Spielberg’s films that one has to approach these quotations with an element of wariness and wonder whether Spielberg simply heard what he wanted to hear. The lack of nuance here suggests that any research done into the effects of killing as part of a ‘justified’ mission was perfunctory and that these statements rather tell us what Spielberg himself feels someone in the position of Avner should have felt after having committed such atrocities. What is missing is any of the mixed emotions one would expect to find in someone who had undertaken such a mission convinced of its necessity but later having doubts its morality. One would have thought that feelings of self-justification would be mingled with doubt, that pride would vie with a feeling of horror, that a sense of fulfilment would be mixed with sorrow. In any event, that one’s emotions would be actively involved, that one would be subject to some violent mood swings. Yet Avner seems a strangely passive character throughout and his doubts and paranoia seem to emerge as an entirely rational response to the horror he is increasingly being forced to face. As we noted with respect to the Holocaust victims in Schindler’s List or the slaves in Amistad, neither Avner nor his co-conspirators – each of whom undergoes his own crisis of consciousness (although in a graduated way that clearly responds to the formula of Hollywood scriptwriting) – lose a sense of their self-possession. Although their experience is supposed to be traumatic, the trauma reinforces rather than destabilizes their sense of self by giving them moral doubts and a sense of guilt that show that they are human and not inhuman monsters like Goeth. Yet as Mossad agents they would surely have been rigorously trained not to allow these sorts of moral doubts to arise. That they develop such a feeling of guilt leaves us with the impression that they are amateurs; not real spies but just ordinary people acting from a sense of moral outrage against what happened at Munich. This indicates

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more clearly than anything that these characters are essentially ciphers for Spielberg himself and represent his own moral conflicts about the Israeli-Palestine conflict. There is, it seems, no means open to Spielberg to come out of his solipsistic universe in which everything is determined by the self and its own responses. Difference radiates out from this self, mediated by media representations which seem to be the means by which Spielberg relates to the wider world. There can be no otherness here: what makes me different from you is simply that we have had different experiences and my existence is not dependent upon you, just as you are not dependent upon me. Moral responsibility is dependent upon the freedom to choose, which allows Spielberg to extrapolate from Schindler’s example: ‘Save one man and you save the whole world’. In Spielberg’s films otherness is erased as the self asserts itself as complete to itself while containing difference, constituting a pure emanation of individuation responding to a modern disregard of the fact that ultimately things as such are less important than the relationships they establish with other things. The treatment of childhood is a key to this attitude because, the child, unable to choose, represents not simply an adult in the making, but a being that is free from the responsibility of choosing and constitutes a realm of security upon which the adult can look back upon with nostalgia. Contrary to the use made by the child’s perspective in different ways by Kiarostami or Švankmajer, the two other contemporary directors who have most effectively explored the world of childhood as ‘other’, no challenge is offered to adult world precisely because the otherness of childhood is effectively neutered in Spielberg’s films. Spielberg is thrilled by the prospect of the dark, but only because it provides a pretext by which light will triumph, in one form or another. Fear is evoked as a stimulant by which evil manifests itself as a pure metaphor, given embodied form only to the extent that it allows the good to prevail. There can be no Conradian ‘horror’ here because this ‘evil’ always remains external to the self. We are therefore responsible for evil occurrences only because we fail to make a choice against them.

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Chapter 11

JIM JARMUSCH OR COMMUNICATION IN CRISIS Of all contemporary filmmakers, no one has addressed themes of otherness as frequently or in as sophisticated a manner as Jim Jarmusch. In Jarmusch’s films we are all strangers in a strange world, a world that is ‘stranger than paradise’ as the title of his first commercially released film put it. This engagement with otherness is extended as far as his relationship with Hollywood, whose pull he has largely been able to avoid. Perhaps alone of all major American filmmakers he has succeeded in maintaining complete control of his films, having raised finance outside of the Hollywood system and been able to cut distribution deals largely on his own terms. Formed in a cosmopolitan New York environment and fed by an engagement with foreign – especially French and Japanese – cultures, through films as well as through actual travel, Jarmusch is paradoxically both situated and uprooted. An extended stay in France during his university years apparently proved formative, opening him up to world culture and deepening his distrust and questioning of American values. Although originally from Ohio, Jarmusch has assumed a particular New York sensibility which sees itself as apart from the rest of the United States, that even feels ‘other’ within the melting pot of American culture. In an interview he mentioned seeing graffiti demanding ‘US out of New York’ (in Hertzberg, 2001: 204), which would seem to reflect his own feelings. His films, as has often been noted, contravene the usual expectations of contemporary Hollywood movies. They take their time, with frequent pauses, telling tales about characters who are usually lacking direction and are often drifters, oddballs, outsiders, foreigners or other socially marginalized figures. This is even the case in his most conventional film, Broken Flowers (2005), in which the

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protagonist is a successful computer expert who has earned enough no longer to need to work and is left at a loose end. In all of his films, Jarmusch has been fascinated by cultural crossovers and understandings, by the possibility of translation and by what happens to knowledge when it is transmitted across cultural boundaries. This is explored against the backdrop of the impact that increased cultural contact is having on the modern world. Jarmusch sees this as opening up possibilities for communication but also as having potentially devastating effects both for individuals and for society in general. In his more recent films, he has been particularly concerned about the dehumanizing impact that the development of technology is having on people, questioning whether it prevents rather than allows genuine communication to take place. Indeed, the suggestion is made that it may cause humans to become disconnected from themselves and from the society to which they belong. Most of the characters in his films have difficulties in coping with the changes taking place in modern society and only those who are able to re-make themselves through an engagement with other cultural traditions have the possibility to survive. In its most extreme form, in Ghost Dog, the Way of the Samurai (1999), we are presented with a world on the edge of catastrophe and at one point we even see a man who is building a boat on top of his roof, a modern Noah awaiting the apocalypse. In Broken Flowers, Don (Bill Murray), having retired, refuses to have a computer in the house but the effect of having worked so extensively with them seems to have sapped his energy to do anything else. One of the consistent themes Jarmusch explores is the difficulty people have in ‘communicating’, even though they are living in what is supposedly a ‘communication age’. The possibilities for communication of course have certainly never been greater than today and Jarmusch takes full advantage of these possibilities to pursue themes by which people from different cultural backgrounds come into contact and find affinities and a sense of empathy. This concern with cultural integration and difference never descends into mere new-ageism: Jarmusch is never seduced by the different cultural values he incorporates into his vision but retains his critical edge in the way that he relates to them. He brings a sensitivity in his approach to apparently distant cultural realities, so that he is able to bring together in Ghost Dog traditional Japanese culture and the contemporary hip hop scene or, in Dead Man, the poet William Blake and Plains Indian culture, in an entirely appropriate and often quite remarkable way.

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Interested in the marginality of life, Jarmusch engages with otherness at numerous levels, treating not only his characters but also the actors themselves as part of the tapestry of otherness. His films are, as much as any director’s, collaborations with both his cast and crew which grow out of the process of their making. As he says, ‘I collect the details and then try to construct a puzzle or story. I have a theme and a kind of mood and the characters but not a plotline’ (in Hertzberg, 2001: 13). Jarmusch’s films have their own special rhythm which in itself emphasizes that what he is presenting is an outsider view of American reality. Like some contemporary jazz musicians, he brings attention to the silences and spaces that exist between things, the recognition of which is an important aspect of the process of communication. Jarmusch signals his distance from the stylistic of contemporary Hollywood film in numerous ways, but perhaps most significantly through his cutting and especially his trademark fade to black, which separates the action (allowing each sequence to maintain its own integrity rather than submitting to the demands of ‘continuity’), allowing the viewer a moment for reflection. Jarmusch’s mode of storytelling proceeds by association and demands from the viewer participation in the associations he makes: his films are like good liquor; they need to be savoured, not tossed back indiscriminately. This is an essential element of viewing a Jarmusch film because, since communication is often effected in an oblique way and through a process of engagement, one cannot rely upon language (whether written or filmic) to convey the message but has to be attentive to a series of signs which disclose their meaning only gradually. In many ways, Jarmusch’s films are about the experience of being a ‘foreigner’, but this ‘foreigner’ is also ‘everyman’, since we are all foreigners at times. This exploration of foreignness is generally explored, however, through people who have cast themselves adrift from dominant social values. In particular they are people who are not seduced by the ‘American dream’. Material well-being, ambition and family, mean little to them and they accept feelings of isolation which the socially adjusted suppress within themselves. They are foreigners wherever they might find themselves, whether it be in their own country or even in their own homes (the décor of Don’s house in Broken Flowers, for instance, seems to have no relation to his personality and he seems like an alien within it). In his approach, Jarmusch displays a sense of detachment that enables him to explore how Americans experience the foreign and conversely how foreigners

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experience America, but also how people in general respond to space, how changing place involves also a change of perspective which changes them and their sense of being. Crucial to this is a sense of encounter arising from the crucial gesture of opening oneself to experience of the unknown, which externalizes one’s position in relation to culture (a challenge in itself to the historical tendency of Americans towards isolationalism). Jarmusch’s attitude might be seen as the exact opposite of that of Spielberg. Where Spielberg assumes identification except where there is exclusion, Jarmusch assumes a total incommensurability between people which is only negotiated painfully. And where Spielberg’s positivist imagination leaves him incapable of conceiving of otherness except as a threat, as an ‘evil’ to be overcome, Jarmusch welcomes the impenetrability of otherness and the challenge to communication that it offers. Accepting the limits of knowledge and the disorientation that follows from recognition that any understanding of the world can only be provisional, he can say that, Personally I like being in a state of bewilderment, I’ve lived in Berlin for two months and I have deliberately not studied any German whatsoever. I enjoy visiting Japan, where I can’t even read the street signs – it opens up my imagination, it makes me interpret things the wrong way, I live in a state where in a way I’m dependent on my imagination. (in Hertzberg, 2001: 78)

In his earlier films, Jarmusch addressed the themes of otherness and communication in a minimalist way. From his student film Permanent Vacation (1980) to Night on Earth (1991) he was concerned with telling stories that critics have tended to describe as ‘inconsequential’. At a time when few Hollywood films have much content and rarely rise above the most trivial situation, this observation should perhaps not carry much weight, except that it brings attention to what ought to be a positive aspect of Jarmusch’s work: that it is concerned with the undramatic moments of life and the ways in which they are imbued with consequence. In Stranger than Paradise, the film that brought him to people’s attention, Eva (Ezster Balint), a young woman from Hungary, intervenes in the lives of two listless men, Willie (John Lurie) and Eddie (Richard Edson), inducing them to make a journey down the East Coast, going first to Cleveland and then on to Miami. This is not journey of discovery, however: wherever they go the two men seem overwhelmed by their environment and only Eva is open to the possibilities that are opened up to them.

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Jarmusch’s next film, Down By Law (1986) has essentially the same plot line: two lackadaisical Americans, Jack (John Lurie) and Zack (Tom Waits), are again stirred into (relative) action through the intrusion of an enervated foreigner. Here, the two men are in prison, having both been framed for crimes they did not commit. They are joined by an Italian, Bob (Roberto Benigni), who effects their escape from prison. For the two Americans, however, this only leads to another prison as they find themselves lost in the Louisiana swamplands. Bob, on the other hand, is never discountenanced and always finds a way to benefit from even the worst of situations. Open to the vagaries of chance, he even finds true love in the most unlikely of places, while Zack and Jack end the film unable to decide where they are going. Mystery Train (1989) and Night on Earth take further the sense of encounter that is always open to people who remain receptive to the possibilities (no matter how ephemeral) that existence presents. Each of these beautifully observed films are held together by the connections (or non-connections) made between characters who may not often understand each other but whose encounters contain resonances which affect them and extend beyond themselves. Jarmusch’s films up till this point seem to have been preparing the themes he would develop and articulate in a more complex way in his next two films, Dead Man (1995) and Ghost Dog, the Way of the Samurai (1999), which are two of the most important to have emerged from the United States in recent years. In 1994, Jarmusch featured in Mika Kaurismäki’s film Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made, in which he journeys in company with Sam Fuller into the Amazon to try to track down an Indian community with which Fuller had stayed when scouting for locations for a film he was to have made in the 1950s called Tigrero, but which had the plug pulled on it before any of the main filming started. It is not difficult to see that Jarmusch’s experience in the Amazon had a considerable, if not decisive, effect upon him which would also inform in a significant way his next film. Dead Man resembles a Western, but it is unlike any made before it or since. In it, Bill Blake (Johnny Depp), an accountant from Cleveland, travels by railway to the ‘end of the line’, arriving at the heavily industrialized frontier town of Machine where he has been promised employment. However, his employer, John Dickinson (Robert Mitchum), refuses to recognize the contract, and he finds himself cast adrift in a strange, hellish place. He helps a pretty flower seller, Thel (Mili Avital), who invites him to

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spend the night with her, but when her boyfriend turns up there is a confrontation which results in the boyfriend shooting at Blake. Thel intercedes and takes the bullet, which kills her. Blake instinctively fires back, killing the boyfriend. He finds himself on the run with a price on his head set by Dickinson, whose son it was that he killed. Pursued by three hired killers, Blake encounters an outcast Indian who calls himself ‘Nobody’ (Gary Farmer) and takes care of him (the bullet which killed Thel had gone right through her and ended up close to his heart), leading him to the West Coast, where he will be able to pass into the spirit world. Dead Man is a film of encounter and transformation. Blake, presumably destined to a stolid career as an accountant in Cleveland, finds his world turned upside down when his parents die suddenly and his fiancée leaves him. Expecting a fresh start in the West, he finds instead nothing but disillusionment, pain and ultimately death. In the process, however, he also learns more than he ever would have done had he remained in his secure life in Cleveland. Blake’s fate is already foretold during his journey by the railway stoker, who warns him not to trust written words, which are ‘likely to lead you to your grave’ as, contemplating the landscape through which they are passing, he collapses the distinction between the inner and outer worlds: ‘Doesn’t this remind you of when [ . . . ] the water in your head was not dissimilar from the landscape?’ During this remarkable opening sequence Blake’s seemingly interminable journey functions as a kind of initiation ritual in which he does nothing, but the world is transformed around him. He is transported into a different universe as the vista outside the window constantly alters and the respectable well-dressed easterners who are his fellow passengers at the start of the journey are replaced first by settlers and then by increasingly wild looking and unkempt mountain men and hunters as he reaches his destination. When the other passengers all suddenly jump up and start shooting wildly out of the window, we sense along with Blake that we have entered a crazy world, a world where different rules apply. It turns out that they are shooting buffalo, as the stoker tells him: the massacre of which perhaps more than anything symbolized the ‘winning of the West’. Thus begins the passage which will transform Bill Blake, the accountant, into William Blake, the poet, a process that will occur largely independently of his will and as a result of a series of fortuitous and not so fortuitous encounters. The town of Machine, a personification of Blake’s place of ‘dark satanic mills’ of which the stoker also

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forewarned him (‘Why have you come to Hell?’), will be the place where his destiny is turned around. From this hell of civilization, Blake passes into the wilderness. He encounters Nobody, who tries, upon finding Blake unconscious, to remove the bullet from his chest, but it is too close to the heart to be removed. Nobody recognizes Blake as a fellow ‘dead man’. As we will soon learn, Nobody has assumed this name because he is an outcast from his people and thus is condemned to wander, socially and literally ‘dead’ even though, like Blake, he remains ‘physically’ alive. Nobody’s recognition has been facilitated by a bird with indigo plumage, which told him to help the ‘stupid fucking white man’ he has found unconscious.

Figure 22 Gary Farmer and Johnny Depp contemplate a legend in the making in Dead Man. This initial recognition will be fortified when he learns that he has befriended ‘William Blake’. It turns out that Nobody’s outcast status has arisen from the fact that he was kidnapped as a young man and shipped to England as a circus exhibit. There he learned the white man’s ways and become fascinated by the poetry of William Blake. Having escaped and made his way back to the Americas he had rejoined his people, but his strange ways learned from the white man’s culture caused him to be rejected by the group. The coincidence of names between the poet and the person he has sought to help is confirmation for Nobody of the instruction given to

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him by the bird: it becomes the task of Nobody to assist Blake upon his path back to the spirit world. The fact that Bill Blake knows nothing about poetry and is only perplexed when Nobody quotes lines from William Blake’s work, does not at all deflect Nobody’s conviction that this is the incarnation of the William Blake. Part of Nobody’s task will be to make it possible for Blake to recognize who he is, to make him worthy of the name he bears. Blake’s fate in this lifetime is ‘to write his poetry in white man’s blood’, because his predicament does not leave any other sort of poetry available to him. As pivotal as is the role of Nobody in the story, we should not ignore the importance of Thel, the woman who dies before she is born in Blake’s poem, a wandering spirit who refuses life because it cannot match her expectations of it. In sacrificing herself in the film for Blake she is in secret complicity with Nobody as the catalyst by whose actions he will fulfil his destiny. Blake’s liminal existence between life and death is engraved by his encounter with these two beings both of whom already really belong to the other world. Jonathan Rosenbaum, in his book on Dead Man, claims that Blake ‘learns nothing’ during his journey, but this is surely not the case. He may not ‘understand’ much of what is happening to him, but he is surely well aware that it is of vast significance. The things he learns are incalculable. He learns first of all about the paucity of reality with which his previous existence was imbued and that it was merely one moment in a vast continuity of existence lying beyond life and death, which links him with all things. He also learns to see the hollowness of the white man’s ‘civilisation’, which degrades rather than ennobles and reduces all things to an empty shell. Rosenbaum rightly notes that a sense is conveyed of an America ensnared by the genocide that presided over its conquest, [and] one thing that makes Dead Man a haunted film is a sense of this enormity crawling around its edges, informing every moment and every gesture, without ever quite taking centre stage. (2000: 21)

In this respect, the poetry of Blake, or more precisely the ‘philosophy’ and vision of the world it contains, is conjoined with aspects of the worldviews of American Indians. Rosenbaum further argues that the singularity of Dead Man lies in the fact ‘that it is the first Western made by a white film-maker that assumes as well as addresses Native American spectators’ (2000: 18). This is partly true, but is also a problematic statement. It may be true that Dead Man is the first film

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to have been genuinely responsive to the otherness of American Indian culture. Among westerns it shares with perhaps only Ulzana’s Raid a portrayal of Native American cultures as containing distinct world views that are legitimate in their own terms which are yet incommensurate with American values at the same time as they provide a moral counterpoint to them that simultaneously brings those values into question.1 And unlike Aldrich’s film, which ultimately posits this moral difference not only as incommensurate but also as incommunicable, Jarmusch is not prepared to foreclose on the possibility of dialogue, a possibility which is mediated by the poetry of Blake. The very fact that Jarmusch assumed a complicity with Blackfoot people by incorporating jokes and allusions which only they would understand, as well as through a more general running joke about tobacco, is an indication both of the care he took to undermine the assumption made by most filmmakers that they are only addressing a non-Indian audience, and by his recognition that he should, as a filmmaker, try to act as mediator between cultures (and here how much preferable surely is Jarmusch’s approach to the academic way in which Terrence Malick addressed this problem in The New World). Nevertheless, Rosenbaum’s comment seems problematic to the extent that it assumes a ‘Native American spectator’. Jarmusch explains that he did not want the native languages that are used to be subtitled, because ‘I wanted it to be a little gift for those people who understand the language’ (Rosenbaum, 2000: 23). Apparently, Nobody speaks three languages in the film apart from English (Picani, the language of the Blackfoot and the Blood, Cree and Makah [see interview with Jarmusch in Rosenbaum, 2000: 23–4]). He explains that he is of mixed Blackfoot and Blood parentage, while the Makah are the coastal Indians among whom he has friends who are able to aid Blake’s journey to the spirit world. Quite why, and when, he speaks Cree is not clear, but presumably these languages are incomprehensible to the vast majority of ‘Native Americans’. Indeed, the assumption that ‘Native Americans’ are a generic category that can be addressed as one people is something that needs to be questioned, not taken for granted. Would the traditions of the Blackfoot or the Makah, for instance, necessarily have great significance for the Hopi or the Seminole? This is important because Rosenbaum’s assumption seems to deflect attention away from some of the more significant aspects of the film. He is nevertheless correct, I think, to indicate that Dead Man is almost certainly unique in treating native American culture merely as

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something there and neither on the one hand as an obstacle or an enemy to be overcome by the advance of white civilization, nor on the other hand to constitute a desired Other offering a refuge for those disillusioned with the values of that civilization. It is certainly refreshing to see American Indians purely in themselves rather than as a mirror reflection of the ‘good’ or ‘evil’ qualities of American civilization. Most especially, unlike what we find in the so-called ‘revisionist’ westerns, Indian life is not held up as a space by which the protagonist can elude the rigours and corruptions of American civilization. Blake can enter into communion with native Americans only because, as a ‘dead man’, he has entered into a liminal state where he is able to shed his former skin and assume another identity, which has been foreshadowed for him by his name and in the recognition of his ‘true’ nature, initiated by the ‘Nobody’ who functions less as a human being than as a spirit guide, sent to conduct him to the land of souls. Nobody’s responsibility is to set the tasks by which a judgement will be taken as to whether Blake is worthy to pass into the land of spirits. This may correspond to Native American beliefs but there is also something almost of the Egyptian ‘negative confession’ in this challenge: Blake must reveal the sins he has not committed. It would thus be an error to see Dead Man as a simple denunciation of American values or as an endorsement of those of American Indians. The character of Nobody comes from nowhere. He does not belong to – and is certainly not representative of – a traditional American Indian culture. Lying between cultures, born into Indian society but having absorbed European cultures, he has no home and no real identity of his own. He is also a being ‘out of time’, who functions as an intermediary linking us, as twenty-first century viewers, with the period in which the film was set. But also, as a ‘nobody’, whose name no longer belongs to him, he represents a generalized Indian culture that has been cast adrift from its roots and is unable to return home to find a place at the hearthside of its ancestors. And it is perhaps this that is signified by the final shootout when Nobody and Cole Wilson, the ferocious hired gunman who has been trailing Blake, simultaneously fire at one another and die in a similarly balletic movement. Along with many commentators, I must admit to finding this ending the one discordant note in the film, and yet maybe it is an indication that the destruction of the red man’s culture is merely the foretelling of a subsequent destruction of the culture that has done the destroying. Dead Man, however, is a film that is so rich it does not yield up all of

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its meanings, and this indeed is one of its fascinations. We are left to ponder the mysterious epigraph by Henri Michaux that introduces the film, ‘It’s preferable not to travel with a Dead Man’. Jarmusch’s next film, Ghost Dog, the Way of the Samurai, may be seen as a kind of companion piece to Dead Man, and in it the issues of cultural collision, otherness and communication are given an even broader canvas and resonance. In this film Jarmusch is concerned not simply with the relationships existing among human beings or between humans and their environment but also with communication in a cosmic sense, as well as engaging more specifically with how communication in general is being affected by the development of modern society and technological processes. Here the protagonist, Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker) is almost otherness incarnate. He lives a life so detached from the common as to be unbelievable and yet it is one that is nevertheless comprehensible. He is a hit man for the mafia working on a contract basis, yet lives on the roof of a high-rise building in a shack alone but for his pigeons, which provide his sole means of communication with his employers. He apparently owns nothing except a few books and the equipment he needs to ply his ‘trade’. Despite this rudimentary existence, he is completely cognisant with the latest technological developments, at least to the extent that it is necessary for him to subsist in the world effectively. And, despite living in the heart of the modern city, he has managed to establish a primal relation with the world. He is a perfectly self-sufficient character. Even though he is no more adjusted to his society than the drifters of Jarmusch’s earlier films, he has a sense of purpose that is lacking to them and which he has constructed through a personal interpretation of the ancient Japanese code of Bushido. In the process he has learned the language of the birds, the originary language that existed before the building of the Tower of Babel and is not merely a means of communicating meaning, but also constitutes a system of knowledge: the gay science of medieval thought evoked by Nietzsche in his book of this title. As such it therefore constitutes not simply the beginning of language but is also a language which transcends language. This language of the birds connects Ghost Dog directly with his only real companions, the pigeons which share his ‘penthouse’, but also make it possible for him to achieve a state of consciousness by which he is able to engage with a range of characters and phenomena signalled as ‘Other’, both in human (the Haitian ice-cream vendor; Pearline, the little girl; the street gangstas who greet him knowingly;

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the Samurai in camouflage) and animal (the pigeons; the dog in the park, the dead bear which we never clearly see but which stands as a kind of totemic reference point from which Ghost Dog’s underlying motivation can be understood) form, but which also puts him in touch with cosmic forces which facilitate his link with Japanese culture and give him the authority to assume a role as a modern ‘samurai’.

Figure 23 Ghost Dog and The Samurai in Camouflage exchange greetings in Ghost Dog, the Way of the Samurai. It would be easy to dismiss Jarmusch’s use of Japanese culture here as a simple appropriation of an alien thought system. In the modern globalizing world it has become easy to plunder foreign cultures for forms and ideas which are simply utilized for the sake of novelty and exotic identification but with no appreciation of their context or deeper meanings. In so many cinematic cross-cultural exchanges, of which a hybrid like Tarantino’s Kill Bill is a perfect example, the filmmakers seem only interested in utilizing the motifs of the foreign culture to enhance the vividness of their representation. Jarmusch, however, is after something else. Having an awareness of the difficulties of translation and the dangers inherent in a seizure of an alien form, Jarmusch does not, like Tarantino, merely draw Japanese culture into a Western context. Rather, he uses it as a kind of intermediary through which many of the film’s themes are enacted. In this way it is linked with the language of the birds, and becomes comprehensible not through consciously acquired knowledge about it, but by means of an intuitive leap that establishes correspondences between disparate

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realities. Ghost Dog becomes fascinated by the book from which he has drawn his understanding of Samurai culture, the Hagakure, but also by a translation of, Rashomon, a book of stories by Ryu¯nosuke Akutagawa, which is passed to him by Louise, the gangster’s daughter whose lover he has been contracted to kill. This book assumes in the film several levels of significance in the film. The book itself is less well known in the West than the film of the same title (1950), in which Kurosawa adapted two of Akutagawa’s tales into a single storyline and which has particular importance as the first Japanese film to gain international recognition. What especially interested Western audiences about the film was the storytelling mode, in which the same story was recounted from different perspectives. By showing how the same set of circumstances cannot simply be related differently by the various people acting within it but also perceived differently by each of them, the story shows how difficult it is to discern the ‘truth’ about a particular incident, but also how complex and value-laden the process of representation itself is. With his referencing of this collection of stories – or more specifically one of the stories in it, ‘In a Grove’, which is actually the one on which Kurosawa most directly drew for his film and which is the preferred story in the book for both Ghost Dog and Pearline, a little girl Ghost Dog befriends – Jarmusch simultaneously evokes several lines of correspondence. Since the actual content of the book is never discussed, we are left with an unspoken code, which we can draw on in accordance with how we wish to interpret its significance. In this way, the book also serves as another link between modern society and ancient tradition. It becomes a kind of talisman to be communicated by hand, passing first from Louise to Ghost Dog, who will later pass it on to Pearline, the little girl who befriends him in the park, before being returned to Louise via Louie (Ghost Dog’s employer) at the end of the film – Louise then hands it to Louie to read. There is something corporeal about this process of transmission, suggesting that the fact of its passing from hand to hand is as important as the actual content of the book itself. A story set in ancient Japan thus gains meaning through the process of exchange, establishing a kind of modern Kula ring (Ghost Dog gives it to Pearline, for instance, on the condition that she tells him what she thinks about it – the story must be returned with interest). Louise equally tells Ghost Dog when he picks up the book she has discarded (her gesture is almost like an offering, a message in a bottle cast to the tides and awaiting a recipient) that ‘ancient Japan was a pretty strange place’. What does this phrase signify?

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Jarmusch draws upon Japanese culture in several ways, borrowing motifs and stylistic flourishes from various Japanese films. These borrowings are not arbitrary. Just as Jarmusch is aware that cultural translation and communicability are not at all simple so he appreciates that any transposition of cultural motifs must remain alert to fundamental difference. This is made clear with a quotation taken from the Hagakure asserting that one thing should not become two. What is being translated, then, are not elements of ‘Japanese’ culture, but universal ideas which have found a potent embodiment within Japanese culture. Cultural difference is important not as something ‘exotic’, but because it provides a means by which a problem may be considered from a fresh perspective. The Way of the Samurai therefore offers Ghost Dog guidance that initiates him into a mode of existence that would be impossible for him to discover using anything within American culture. For Jarmusch what appears to be most important about borrowings from other cultures is finding notions that can stand as counterpoints to American values, serving a critical function. Ghost Dog’s adherence to the Samurai code is not therefore a matter of exoticism but part of a quest for personal identity, meaning and value. The recognition, then, that ‘ancient Japan was a pretty strange place’ is not a value judgement, but rather recognition that it is so fundamentally different from today’s world that in order to understand it one needs to make an adjustment within one’s own sensibility, in other words, to treat its strangeness precisely as something strange and not assume that it can be simply transposed into a modern context. Its strangeness needs to be taken into oneself in order that one may gain a new perspective that will enable one to re-make the world anew. Ghost Dog utilizes the Samurai code in order to make sense of his existence. The fact that this means nothing to the surrounding society further emphasizes the extent of the alienation of modern society and shows how necessary it is to withdraw from it so that the new sensibility can be enacted as a preface to a new community which needs to be constructed in secrecy. We see hints of this not simply in his way of life but in the relationships Ghost Dog establishes with the other characters, especially in the moment of convergence of intention that marks his fleeting encounter with the ‘Samurai in camouflage’ played by RZA. This moment – as brief as it is – is charged with significance. This character, the ‘Samurai in camouflage’ (he is never named in the film itself; we only know this is his name if we pay attention to the credits), appears like a phantom, but seems to have some sort of close bond

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with Ghost Dog, to the extent that we may feel that he is actually the spirit of an ancient Samurai returned in modern guise to sanctify Ghost Dog’s mission and confirm its communicative validity. But he also represents the street-wise rapper, harbinger of new values, reflecting the role that RZA himself to some extent assumes in real life as a representative of a sensibility secreted within the fissures of modern city life (and whose sensibility, as composer of the music, is contained within the structure of the film). The implication is that the regeneration of society occurs through, and only through, the maintenance of cultural values and that any society which loses a sense of its deep cultural values is doomed. Jarmusch clearly sees such a loss as indicative of contemporary American society, something which can only be redressed from without: through activities within its own sub-cultures as well as through interaction with other cultures. Japanese culture offers one possibility through which a renewal may be effected, but it is transmitted via its literature and cinema rather than by personal contact. It is therefore mediated and inevitably altered by the process of this mediation. We will return to the significance of the form this mediation takes, but it is important to note that the implication is that what is engaged with is not Japanese tradition as such but an ersatz form of it. Jarmusch, indeed, is well aware that his knowledge of that tradition is not very deep and may even be distorted. However, his interest is not in the authenticity or otherwise of cultural traditions, but in discovering points of convergence, moments when an idea becomes detached from its specific cultural context and so provides the possibility for direct communication between people not across boundaries but specifically within a place and a context. In the use he makes of it, Ghost Dog is therefore not striving to revive the Way of the Samurai, or to transpose its precepts into contemporary America, but to use the example it provides as a means to situate himself in the world in which he finds himself. His appropriation of samurai teachings is neither true nor false, or, to be more specific, its truth or falsity is not to be measured by how accurately it corresponds to its practice in feudal Japan, but by the extent to which it provides a means to address the realities which Ghost Dog faces in his everyday life. This is emphasized by the quotation from the Hagakure to which we alluded earlier: It is bad when One thing becomes Two. One should not look for anything else in the Way of the Samurai. It is the same for anything else that is called a Way. If one understands things in this manner, he should be able to hear about all Ways and be more and more in accord with his own.

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What is being promoted, therefore, is not the hybridity of culture. Rather it is a matter of responding to multifarious elements in a way that respects their integrity but also enables one to find a new path, a fresh way of looking at the world through them. The Way of the Samurai is One but it is at the same time protean, containing within itself its Other: different courses may be pursued, but the process at work and the end result is ultimately the same. This presents us with a stark contrast with the world of the mobsters, who have allowed their organization to bifurcate. They have no flexibility by which to question and renew their practice of existence. Far from the all-powerful image usually given of the mafia in movies, these people are linked only by empty codes which they are forced to follow even though they have largely become outmoded and meaningless. The gangsters are in fact consumed by the form of things rather than by their substance. They may like rap music or cartoons but, unlike Ghost Dog, they take no meaning from them. These cultural forms serve merely as empty signifiers for them which they mindlessly devour rather than appreciate. This is most apparent in their underboss, Sonny Valerio (Cliff Gorman), who thinks he is ‘hip’ because knows about rap music and is able to chant Public Enemy’s songs, yet he has no perception, or even conception, of the living matter that has gone into the songs. Sonny in fact is the one character who seems oblivious to the changing nature of the reality around him: among the mobsters, too, he appears to be the one most responsible for their predicament. The foot soldiers know that things are changing, but they are impotent as to how to act to address these changes. Only the don, Vargo (Victor Arago), has any real insight into what is going on and appears to recognize that their time has come. When Ghost Dog sends his pigeon to them with an enigmatic message, he is the only one who understands it: ‘It is poetry – the poetry of war’. And when he is finally confronted by Ghost Dog, he is resigned to his fate: ‘I’ve been expecting you’, is his only reaction as he almost invites Ghost Dog to shoot him. The pigeon arrives as the whole gang is gathered together in a state of lethargy, embarrassed both by their failure to rub out Ghost Dog and by the fact that Sonny is again unable to pay the rent. At the same time they seem to be incapable of communicating with one another except by gesture. An earlier sequence of scenes has already given an emphasis to this sense of dissociation. When Louie is called in to see Vargo to account for the fallout from the assassination of Handsome Frank, the mood is fraught and uncomfortable in a way that reveals a lack of warmth

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between protagonists who seem united only by fear, even though they put on an outward show of solidarity. We move then to a scene in a park where a group of black kids are shown in perfect harmony with one another as they engage in rapping together. At the same time, Ghost Dog is accosted by a strange dog and then by the little girl, Pearline, who takes the dog’s fascination with Ghost Dog as an opportunity to speak to him. Following this, we learn for the first time of the strange convergence of thoughts that connects Ghost Dog and Raymond, the ice-cream seller. Each of these scenes establishes a different communicative mode, of which only that of the gangsters is shown to be unnatural: their communication is forced even though they are familiar with one another and are one ‘family’, while the characters in the succeeding scene have established real relationships based upon an affectivity of feeling. The gangsters stand as exemplars of a dying society, a society that is tired and unable to cope with the very cultural multiplicity it has created or that has grown up around it, and thus it is alienated from genuine feeling. The gangster’s commitment to the family is precisely what has created this sense of decay and lethargy. If the film presents a world on the edge of catastrophe, it also suggests that within this world the seeds of renewal and revitalisation are present, if only in latent form. Ghost Dog himself stands as a kind of catalyst, dispensing intimations by which a transformation might be effected. A sense of hope is contained in the fact that the survivors at the end of the film are neither Ghost Dog nor the gangsters but the ice-cream man and the two girls, each of whom is unassuming and not bound by old codes that no longer mean anything. Even though we have been alerted to the dominance of modern forms of communication at the beginning of the film, the most characteristic of these forms – computers and mobile phones – are conspicuous by their absence. The only person we see using a mobile phone is Handsome Frank immediately before Ghost Dog kills him, which occurs after he has ignored the warning contained in the call. Ghost Dog’s rejection of modern communication has a certain practicality for him since a pigeon cannot easily be traced by modern surveillance methods. More significantly, though, is the continuity it displays with ancient means of communication. It is significant that one of the mobsters, on learning of this bizarre way of communicating says, referring not to carrier pigeons but to passenger pigeons, ‘They’re extinct!’ This suggestion, that the old ways of the world no longer exist, is something Jarmusch appears to wish to refute (passenger pigeons

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are indeed extinct, but they were wild pigeons not known for carrying messages). The linkage here is between technology and language. Jarmusch is suggesting, I think, that technological forms of communication, being founded in language in its most limited sense (as a means of direct expression) are fundamentally flawed and limited in their application. Jarmusch distrusts the direct transmission of messages. In most of his films direct forms of communication are undermined and spoken and written language is treated with some suspicion. Modern society increasingly puts its faith in language, to the extent that only what can be expressed in language – since it alone can be communicated freely and easily by modern means – has a genuine reality. But is something lost in this process? With his invocation of the language of the birds, Jarmusch appears to believe so and to consider that earlier communicative forms need to be re-examined in order to recover something of the reality they embodied. As the world is constantly changing, there is a danger that we will lose a sense of these earlier forms as we place too much faith in technologies which appear to offer greater communicative means when they are actually restricting what it is possible to say. The film might be seen as a nostalgic paean for a life that is inevitably being lost, indicating that ancient ways are doomed to extinction due to the voracity of the technological world. The real message of the film, however, seems to be just the opposite: that the survival of these ancient ways – transfigured, perhaps, and given a different form – represents the only hope of the continuance of life in a world on the edge of catastrophe. It is their persistence alone that can keep alive genuine communication since modern media in fact is fundamentally non-communicative – a strange paradox – and that when communication does take place, it occurs despite the ubiquity of media, almost in its absence, or in its being turned against itself. This raises a question about the nature of mediation involved in the process of media. For some of its advocates, following on from McLuhan, the development of technological media leads towards a recovery of forms of direct transmission characteristic of oral societies but which were reduced when writing became dominant following the invention of the printing press. This argument, however, appears flawed due to the fact that the message still has to pass through the form of the media, as well as by the fact that it still largely functions through writing. Does it therefore allow for direct transmission in the way that oral communication does, or does it give us the illusion that we are communicating directly?

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The problem is that what is missing in this form of communication is a sense of intimacy which is the hallmark of a genuine contact between people. Such intimacy may not be possible through the media because there is always a third presence: the media itself. The claim that modern media allows direct communication is based upon the assumption that media is neutral; it is merely the medium of transmission. Is this, however, really so? That we speak of the ‘ubiquity’ of the media is an indication that something more is involved. To do so is to evoke a theological terminology: previously it was only God who was ubiquitous. The terminology implies a perception that the media has taken the place of god in modern society and serves a comparable need: we rely on it and it watches over us and even protects us. There is a tendency to place a faith that sometimes seems overwhelming in technological media which parallels the faith people once had in God. Indeed, our lives are doubtless more dependent upon the technology we have ourselves created than people ever were upon God. Furthermore, the ubiquity of media forms means that they transcend human control: human beings cannot be everywhere; they cannot know the entirety of media function. We may think the media merely serves as a vehicle for the transmission of information, making it available to all. In reality, however, it is the media itself (and not the human beings who input and withdraw the data) which controls this flow of information. This is something that is hinted at by Jarmusch in Ghost Dog which begins with a pigeon’s eye view of the city taken over by its means of communication. Information flows endlessly, not settling anywhere. What, then, can actually be communicated through such a process? In the end, must not the media simply communicate with itself, using human beings as its agents? If this is so, then far from aiding connectivity between people, what the media ultimately may be doing is inserting its own exigencies into human affairs. The inevitable consequence of such a process would be that rather than the media serving human interests, the situation will be reversed: we humans would begin to serve the interests of the technology we have created. It is clear that already we are increasingly forced to accept the media message as truth, making it difficult to establish a critical distance from it. Furthermore, trusting the neutrality of the media, we confide to it our most intimate thoughts and lose a sense of where the boundary between our reality and that of the media is to be found.

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This assumes a transparency and objectivity of knowledge which the modern society promotes. This goes against ancient ideas of knowledge which believed that it was something precious and needed to be treated with respect and coaxed to reveal itself. An emphasis was placed not on openness but on secrecy and the passage to genuine knowledge was difficult, dangerous, and could be shared only at the risk of your life. The German philosopher Novalis invoked this idea succinctly when he wrote: ‘Every true secret must automatically exclude profane people. Whoever understands it is already, and rightly so, an initiate.’ Jarmusch appears to share something of this attitude, and his film Ghost Dog acts as a warning to us not to take the media and the messages that we transmit on it for granted. It suggests that we need to be alert to the messages contained within the traditions of our own society and learn to challenge our current attitudes by engaging with them and with the traditions of other societies in ways that respect their strangeness and distance from where we are now. The structure of Ghost Dog suggests a double movement, the recognition of whose unity is a vital task for us in today’s world: the fact that while everything changes and the old must give way to the new, the old remains present and persists despite, at times even through, the changes that necessarily occur. Although Jarmusch’s films are severely critical of American society, both as it now is and how it has been historically formed, his attitude does not appear to support any particular alternative. If he gives voice to various sub-cultures or counter-cultural positions, it is for their life-affirming qualities rather than because they represent a clear alternative to established society.

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Chapter 12

THE PERSISTENCE OF KING KONG When Cooper and Schoedsack made King Kong in 1933, they created a cinematic myth. It is one that has extended into society with resonances to the present day. Even if you have never actually seen the film, it has almost certainly left a trace in your mind through the influence it has had on other films and the ways in which its theme has been drawn upon in numerous ways, not only in film but in advertising and comic books, in art and in literature. Its themes, as we considered briefly in an earlier chapter, include the conflict between the primitive and the modern and between the forces of nature and culture, the struggle for survival in an inhospitable world (of which we are given contrasting examples: the wildness of Skull Island and the harshness of the Depression), the meaning of love, and the repression of sexual desires, the nature of filmmaking and the responsibilities of the filmmakers both to the subjects of the film and to their audience (not to mention also to their producers). These themes are brought together in the extraordinary climax (surely the most amazing in all cinema) in which the supreme force of nature represented by Kong, having made his way to the very ‘top of the world’ in the form of the newly constructed Empire State Building, is plummeted back to earth and destroyed by the forces of culture in the technological form of modern airplanes. Yet this summation of the triumph of Enlightenment and progress is tinged with sadness and loss. It creates complex and conflicting feelings in the audience and no one can be unmoved by Kong’s death at the end. The last line of the film – ‘Oh, no, it wasn’t the airplanes, it was beauty that killed the beast’ is etched into popular consciousness and adds another twist to its intricate themes. In the end, this is the real truth of the film. Kong could have lived in captivity as an exhibit for the curiosity of man, an eternal symbol of the triumph of human control of nature. Instead he 212

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Figure 24 Merian C. Cooper dreaming his dream. preferred freedom, in the form of his love for Ann, and tore himself free from his shackles, defiantly announcing to the world that would chain him that it had not defeated him. Kong thus represents one of the most striking – and outrageous – portrayals of otherness the cinema has given us. Moreover, the film encapsulated some of the more general problems of the representation of otherness with which we have engaged throughout this book. It has also proved to be inimitable. Attempts by Cooper and Schoedsack to follow up its success with sequels merely resulted in pale imitations with none of the power of the original. Two misguided attempts have been made to re-make the film. The first, in 1976 was directed by John Guillerman and is generally treated with contempt by most admirers of the original. It is bad, but not, in my view, quite as bad as the more highly regarded recent version made by Peter Jackson (2005). Part of the power of the original King Kong also lies in the fact that it is both of its time and timeless as well as being of its place and

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universal. This is not so paradoxical as it appears: it is timeless because it responds to universal fears and desires, but it is of its time by virtue not simply of its Depression setting, but also because it embodied, in a highly sophisticated way, the mores of its time, to the extent that it is internally both colonialist and a critique of colonialism, racist and a critique of racism, but also because it encapsulates a relationship between humanity and the natural world that is no longer ours today. This means that King Kong is not simply a document of otherness, as a film it is also other to our sensibility today and so does not have the power of transposition of other movie legends, such as Frankenstein, Dracula or the zombie. This perhaps explains why it has proved so difficult to re-interpret it for later generations. Nevertheless, a comparison between the different versions is instructive as a marker of how attitudes towards otherness and its representation have changed over the intervening years. It seems fairly certain that the complexity of King Kong did not arise from a conscious intention on the part of its filmmakers. Everything we know about Cooper and Schoedsack indicates that they never saw themselves as anything but pure entertainers concerned ‘to give the audience what they want’, as the saying goes. But unconsciously – or intuitively – they drew upon a vast range of ideas that were in the air at the time, something that was facilitated by their own extraordinary life stories. It is unquestionably this that made the film so special and overrode its weaknesses: even in 1933 it was obvious how carelessly made it was; its narrative doesn’t always make sense, even if one accepts the rather ridiculous premise upon which it is based, and it is easy to berate the rather stilted direction, the overblown dialogue and the mannered acting, not to mention its political incorrectness and transparent racism. In fact, however, all of these apparent ‘weaknesses’ contribute to the strength and fascination of the film. Indeed, everything suggests that the filmmakers were quite well aware of most of these aspects and, instead of trying to hide them, brought attention to them. Even the racism is not as simple as it first may appear. The work of Willis O’Brien, the master of stop-action animation, was also crucial to its success. O’Brien has justifiably been showered with so many superlatives as to make further comment redundant. Suffice it to say here that he had an extraordinary ability to bring his creations to life and Kong is given a personality that makes one believe in his reality. This accounts in considerable part for how he became an image of otherness which both projected and reflected the fears of the

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audience. All of these elements helped to create a complicity with the viewer. They turned the film into a collective dream and, because it follows a dream logic, it does not need to make sense. For anyone attempting to re-imagine the film for later audiences, it is thus extremely difficult to know how to approach it. The two remakes applied opposing strategies. The 1976 version updates the story, treating the original with little respect. It has a certain kitsch value but otherwise is hardly worth discussing. The 2005 version, directed by Peter Jackson, however, treats the original with perhaps too much respect and, no doubt recognizing that it was so much of its time that any attempt to update the story would be a mistake, Jackson situated it within the context of the Depression. This might have worked had he approached the time gap with some critical detachment. The period setting, however, is used as nothing but a colourful backdrop and Jackson contents himself with attempting to iron out some of the more dubious aspects of the earlier film’s representations, at least as perceived by an early twenty first century audience alert to the strictures of multiculturalism and political correctness. Jackson has stated that King Kong is his favourite film and in approaching the re-make he did so in a spirit more of imitation rather than innovation. He appears to have been motivated by a desire to wipe away the memory of the 1976 version and to re-assert the seriousness of the original. In addition, he seems to have wanted to use the technological advances that were unavailable to Cooper and Schoedsack to replicate the wonder and mystery of the original for modern audiences. He certainly succeeded in delivering a spectacular action movie but it was one that missed virtually all of the nuances and levels of meaning that made Cooper’s and Schoedsack’s film so compelling. Nevertheless, his film does tell us much about contemporary attitudes and if we compare it with the original we can cast a light on how attitudes have changed in a number of significant ways since the 1930s. This is most obvious in the treatment of the native population. Of course, to have replicated the way the natives are portrayed in Cooper’s and Schoedsack’s film would have been offensive and unacceptable to an audience today. Jackson plays upon this in the wittiest scene in his film, where he does replicate the scenes of native dances from the original, but only as a vaudeville number that precedes Kong’s appearance at the New York theatre. He attempts to elude the problems of representation of the actual natives of Skull Island by making them so overblown that no one could take them as representations of any living people. This means that, unlike in the original film,

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no one would be likely to identify with them and so be offended by the representation. But this, I think, leaves a problem for the viewer. We cannot relate to people who have come from nowhere, especially when they are perhaps the most degraded portrayal of the ‘primitive’ ever to have been committed to film. This raises a question: who are these people? Are they a pre-historic remnant, a people who have never advanced beyond the earliest evolutionary stage of humanity, perhaps some pre-human group that never evolved? But if so, how did the wall come to be built? They are so savage we might believe that Kong himself constructed it to keep them out of the rest of the island. Certainly they are not ‘primitives’ in any recognizable sense of the word – they bear no relation to any human group of which we have any information. Furthermore, in rendering them so wild and feral, the kidnapping and sacrifice of Ann becomes incomprehensible, since sacrifice is a product of social relations, which these creatures seem utterly to lack. And since they are so dextrous as to be able to leap across the rocks into the ship, would they not be more likely to attack the ship and kill all of its inhabitants than seek to kidnap the white woman. How would it be possible for them to survive on this small enclave? Do they exist purely by propagating and devouring themselves? Perhaps they are the descendents of Sawney Bean’s family deported to the far reaches of the South Seas – though in this case where do they find their victims? The mind boggles. And what happens to them in the film when they vanish after the initial sortie – did the crew simply annihilate them all?1 Perhaps this was the significance of the crew member reading Heart of Darkness, providing the primer for the extermination of the brutes. They are chilling examples of what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘bare life’: people who have been excluded from the human community and may be killed with impunity (see Agamben, 1995), except that there is no human community from which they could have been expelled. Here the film is revealed to be considerably more racist than the original, since it plays upon this zone of exclusion that Agamben sees as the mark of modern totalitarianism: they are not really natives, but are identifiable as ‘enemy combatants’. Because they are marked not as ‘primitives’ (which would imbue them with a sympathetic tinge), but as outcasts of civilization they might disturbingly be consigned to the same frame of incomprehensibility as suicide bombers or terrorists. As such they are not ‘other’ but simply folk representations of a feared savagery, living beings who have surrendered their humanity. Jackson’s vulgar attempt to imbue gravitas by having the cabin boy read Heart of

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Darkness here assumes a sinister shading (although the actors should be congratulated for their ability to intone the unbelievably embarrassing dialogue given to them [‘this isn’t an adventure story, is it Mr Hayes?’ ‘No, Jimmy, it isn’t’] so portentously). On the idiotic spoof ‘documentary’ about Skull Island that accompanies the DVD, Jackson explains that the natives were probably a group of Micronesian hunters-gatherers who had been shipwrecked and lost to other human contact. However, this re-asserts the notion of the primitive and makes the representation doubly dubious not to say constituting a gross slander against hunter-gatherers (besides all else, human sacrifice emerges with agricultural societies and is alien to the basis of hunter-gatherer society). We tend to ascribe the earlier representation of the natives to the ignorance and racism of the period and a viewing of the original King Kong may induce laughter or embarrassment in an audience today which thinks itself more enlightened than that of 70 years ago. But Jackson’s portrayal might make us wonder whether this is so. We should remember that in the early 1930s the South Seas were all the rage: it was the locale of countless novels and travellers accounts. Moreover, Margaret Mead had just (in 1928) published her best selling anthropological study, Coming of Age in Samoa. It is therefore arguable that a general movie audience in the 1930s may have had greater knowledge about the South Seas islands than one today, distorted, undoubtedly, but as we have seen, all representation distorts. Writing this in 2008, at a time when a prospective Vice-President of the United States thought that Africa was a country, it cannot be simply assumed that people today are generally better informed than they were a century ago. Of course, the representation of the natives was also part of the absurdity of the story, and the extent to which it was taken seriously by contemporary audiences as a representation of South Seas islanders is open to question. In an important early essay written in 1934, the surrealist writer Jean Ferry (2000: 170–4) brought attention to the extent of the absurdities in the original film, arguing that, far from diminishing its power, they provided its raison d’être, since they followed a consistent dream logic founded in the invocation of the uncanny. Jackson’s film, on the contrary, ironed out these absurdities. This does not, however, mean that it doesn’t contain as many absurdities of its own. Indeed one could probably enumerate even more than in the original: how could any ship navigate such treacherous waters? Can we really take seriously the dinosaur stampede, or accept that any

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of the humans could have survived it? And given the ‘realistic’ portrayal of the monsters, how is it that they never seem to bleed, while Kong himself, with I don’t know how many hundreds of bullets inside him, miraculously falls from the top of the Empire State Building to the ground with his body intact? And how did New York in the Depression come to be so clean and glossy? Even the dirt is ‘sparkling’. Similarly, the creatures in the jungle appear to have showered and groomed themselves before appearing. In Cooper and Schoedsack’s film all of the crew who enter the jungle to pursue Kong are killed, with the exception of Denham and Jack, yet here most incredibly survive far more terrible perils. Ann, meanwhile, undergoes an experience of inconceivable terror with nary a scratch or a tear in her dress – the way Kong throws her around at the beginning would almost certainly have killed her, but even if she had survived this, she would have been torn to shreds several times over in the endless battles between Kong and the dinosaurs. Yet at the end of this incredible ordeal not only does she survive but seems positively enervated by it and can still come up smiling to cheer up the lonely Kong with her song and dance routine. The relationship between Kong and Ann is the most embarrassing thing about the film and the less said the better about this ridiculous mime show (which replaces the sublime scene in which Kong undresses Ann in the original), the play acting on the Central Park ice, or her suicidal climb to the top of the Empire State building to be with him in his last moments. At least Fay Wray had the decency to be appropriately terrified by what happened to her, but Naomi Watts seems fearless to the point of stupidity. The extent to which the film shamelessly partakes of the modern human sentimentality and sense of identification with what is misconceived as the bestial (exposed brilliantly by Werner Herzog in Grizzly Man, a film which should be given as a corrective to anyone moved by Kong’s portrayal in this film) is as distasteful as its portrayal of the natives. Some of these absurdities are the result of the inherent absurdity of the story which could not be avoided. Yet, where Cooper and Schoedsack played upon the absurdities to follow, as Ferry noted, an inscrutable, but discernible, dream logic, Jackson uses them for no other purpose than to increase the spectacular quality of the film, which he hopes will cause the audience to overlook the absurdity of the situation. In the process he flattens out virtually all of the ambivalences of the original, leaving us with a literalist, empty shell of a film. Above all, the uncanny effect of the original is undone

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by Jackson; there is no dialectic between reality and dream, there is only reality, but this ‘reality’ is nothing but a pure visceral experience captured on film and rendered with staggering, but meaningless, verisimilitude. This brings us to the nature of Kong himself. How do we respond to him? Do we really regard him as a giant gorilla, as a symbolic creature embodying human fears of nature, or simply as an articulated model which the ‘suspension of disbelief’ which supposedly overcomes us when we enter the cinema serves to convince us is a real creature? As Jean Ferry argued at the time of the original film, it is precisely his ambivalent status, the fact that all of these things are simultaneously present that forms the uncanny effect which enables us to relate to him. In Jackson’s film, however, this uncanny effect is diminished if not exterminated by the very care that is taken to make Kong a living, breathing creature. The power of Wallis O’Brien’s creatures came from the sense of the uncanny generated from our appreciation of their semblance of life combined with our knowledge they did not really have life. They are a classic example of what Freud analyses in his famous essay on the uncanny, which ‘is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar’ (Freud, 1983: 341). It can only be understood in relation to its opposite, the ‘homely’, that is what is familiar and comfortable. The essential quality of the uncanny is that it makes us feel uncomfortable. Among other things, this discomfort is also allied with the fact that doubt is aroused that what we have assumed to be impossible might – for no accountable reason – actually occur, that what is ‘unreal’ might actually be ‘real’. Jackson’s creatures, in contrast, function in precisely the opposite sense. Although they can deceive our eyes and convince us at the level of pure visual perception that they really are dinosaurs, this is only because we can conceptualize the reality of prehistoric animals from the reconstructions we see in museums, of which these figures are effectively animated – or, more correctly, projected – versions. Yet, the reliance on surface verisimilitude to maintain a sense of reality works against any uncanny effect precisely because Jackson contrives to make Kong known and familiar. Furthermore, this emphasis on verisimilitude only makes us more aware of the artificial nature of Jackson’s film, the fact that the only referent it has with actual life is its relationship with the original film. In contrast, the original had its foundation in the actual experiences of Cooper and Schoedsack. We know that they were adventurers, and

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Figure 25 Aceh village after a massacre by the Dutch (1901). their inspiration arose principally from what they had observed in their own lives, whether in ‘reality’ or in ‘dream’. Both Cooper and Schoedsack were very familiar with the Indonesian archipelago and Schoedsack had spent some time in the Nias Islands with his wife Ruth Rose (who would write the script for King Kong) and the language of the natives in the film in fact is based on that spoken in these islands. This part of Indonesia was known for its tenacious opposition to colonialism. The Nias islanders themselves had a ferocious reputation and the nearby Sumatran mainland had suffered greatly from the effects of a brutal colonial war conducted by the Dutch against the Aceh people. Although this had officially ended in 1904, Dutch control of the region remained tenuous and the memory of Dutch atrocities, recorded in some harrowing photographs of the time, was still fresh in peoples’ memories. One wonders if Cooper and Schoedsack may have seen these photos, since the scenes of devastation caused by Kong to the native village are oddly reminiscent of them. This suggests that the filmmakers may have had a surprisingly sophisticated – if entirely intuitive and unconscious – appreciation of the effects of the representation of colonial violence. Not that it should be thought that Cooper and Schoedsack had ‘progressive’ attitudes. Far from it, they were completely embedded in

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their time. They were men of action who responded intuitively and instantly to their experiences. All the evidence suggests that they were rather naïve, unreflective men who took things at face value.2 It is the fact of being responsive to their experiences and having the imagination to transpose those experiences into dream images that is important here. In contrast Jackson’s whole world view seems to have been formed from films. If he has a life outside of the movies he has seen, nothing of it manifests itself on the screen. In this he is very similar to Spielberg, although he lacks Spielberg’s curiosity and inventiveness. One of the aspects of King Kong which so far as I know has never been commented upon is the rationale for the native sacrifice. What is its purpose? In Jackson’s version it just seems anomalous, as we have previously noted, because the people appear to lack the social organization even to conceive of the idea of sacrifice. Furthermore, as Kong approaches they are like possessed beasts slathering at the idea of Ann being devoured by Kong, which doesn’t chime with anything we know about sacrificial practices. Their sense of excitement, in fact, appears to be rather to be drawn from an exaggerated sense of the reaction of a juvenile audience to a modern horror film when it knows that something horrible is about to occur on the screen. In the original, the portrayal plays upon traditional representations of sacrifice and the fear the practice provoked among white explorers and it does contain something of the propitiatory element that was undoubtedly part of the rationale for traditional sacrificial practices. What is anomalous, though, is why it should be thought that Kong would be interested in the women sacrificed to him? After all, given their size in proportion to his (they are about the ratio of a hamster to a human), if he eats them they would hardly provide him with more than an appetiser which, far from satisfying his hunger, would be likely to increase it. Perhaps he likes to keep them as exotic pets in his lair and has a whole harem of them there? Who knows? Again, the rationale lies in dream logic, but Cooper and Schoedsack play on it in a way that almost traps the audience into revealing some of their own prejudices. Many commentators have perceived in the fact that the natives discard their intended victim when they see Ann to represent an aspect the original film’s racism and that Kong’s fascination with Ann lies in her exoticism, in her white skin and blonde hair, which set her apart from the usual fare offered to him. This might, however, reflect more on our own projective racism. In this respect, it should be noted that

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the assumption that Ann’s fascination for the natives is due to her blonde hair is not shared by Denham, who is unable at first to account for it until it is pointed out to him, when he reacts: ‘Gee, I guess blondes are scarce around here.’ In fact, the natives’ fascination with Ann is surely entirely comprehensible and perfectly natural. It does not have to imply that they find her more beautiful than their native women. She is simply exotic and different and would thus provide a unique present for Kong. In fact, how do we know whether he regards Ann any differently from the other women sacrificed to him? Might he not treat them all in the same protective way as does with Ann? Might his rage in fact arise not from the fact that Ann is special to him, but as a response to the humans’ audacity in seeking to take back what they had freely offered to him? That what is involved is less a matter of sexual attraction than of wounded pride and power? There is of course an undeniably powerful erotic dimension to Kong’s fascination and the scene in which he strips the clothes from Ann and sniffs her body, far from being an outlandish – or even perverse – image of impossible sexuality, is as beautifully appropriate as it is absurd. Appropriate because it is surely precisely through her scent that an animal of Kong’s genus would respond to her. He would not be attracted to her blonde hair or white skin. Her fascination for him would lie in what she smelled like. Perhaps what accounts for her special quality as opposed to the native women was her scent. It may not have been attraction to her human qualities, in fact, but an exotic fascination with what was artificial, since, as a potential film star, she was presumably wearing an expensive perfume. In divesting his film of this erotic element and replacing it with the scene in which Ann charms Kong with her song and dance routine, causing him not to be erotically aroused but to ‘fall in love’ with her, Jackson undermines one of the core themes of the original and replaces it with something far more ridiculous and dubious than anything to be found in the original. What it does above all is to destroy the animality of Kong, as well as his status as an impossible being. Jackson apparently took a great effort to ensure that the creature moves and reacts like a real gorilla but this sort of verisimilitude, however impressive it looks, is completely misplaced when the script gives him the affective feelings of a human being. He becomes simply an oversized human in gorilla form, a being who is sadly out of place in the world, lonely and craving a ‘relationship’ in the most banal modern sense of the term (when they are in New York, they even have

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a little row, almost a component part of what is understood as a modern human ‘relationship’). In the end Kong is just an old softy whose destructiveness is a consequence of the fact that ‘they’ (the media, the pressures of modern society) won’t leave him alone to enjoy a home life with Ann. This pandering to what is most mawkish and maudlin in contemporary culture undermines the uneasy qualities of the original, unhinging Jackson’s film more than anything else. One of the miracles of Cooper and Schoedsack’s film was to convey the way in which these two incommensurable worlds of the human and the animal do meet in some strangely ineffable way. In Jackson’s world, on the other hand, the animal world is entirely subsumed to that of the human. What this attitude represents is a desire to deny, or to expel, genuine otherness. Absolute otherness does make its appearance in the film in the degraded form of the fantasy ‘primitives’ but Kong himself is domesticated, he becomes ‘us’ in a grotesque form. His progenitor is not the original Kong, but a distorted human, or a projection of the human desire for conquest over nature. This also reveals how much the pact between audience and filmmaker has changed over seventy years. The complicity established between Cooper and Schoedsack and their audience was founded, perhaps, in naivety (both on the part of the filmmakers and the audience – as we know, the character of Denham was based on Cooper and apparently captured well his qualities of exuberance and wide-eyed excitement) and a certain (acknowledged) ignorance. At the same time there was a sense of trust which enabled meaning to be unstated and implied, and which thus allowed latent meanings to take shape and for the film to enter deeply into the collective subconscious. Jackson, however, has no such trust in the audience. He appears to believe that everything must be made manifest and explicit, with nothing left to the audience’s imagination or powers of affective extension. The pact his film makes with the audience is principally based on visceral action and knowing allusion, playing at once on the audience’s folk memory of the original film and their feeling of superiority towards it. Of course, this memory is not dependent on their having seen the original, indeed Jackson seems to have assumed that most of the audience would not be familiar with the film as such, but would have some hazy appreciation of it as a clunky, black and white fantasy. He wants to give them the sense of excitement that he himself had when he first saw it as a young boy. Yet, because this appreciation lies in a childhood excitement rather than in any critical comprehension, his interpretation can only be reductive. His film can

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thus rightly be described as a ‘fan’s film made for fans’, a designation that implies an admiration that refuses critical appreciation or any desire to question what makes the film so special. Since Kong represents the epitome of otherness, we might consider to what extent the differences between his original incarnation in 1933 and his 2005 reincarnation are indicative of fundamental changes in attitudes. This is not easy to answer because the filmmakers of the versions were working to different agendas and the nature of Hollywood has changed, as have the audience and the expectations of the greater society. Nevertheless, the fact that Jackson seems to have been so keen to divest Kong precisely of his otherness does seem to reflect a significant shift (which we have also seen to an extent in Spielberg) by which tolerance is given to differences that appear ‘worthy’ and so at an extreme even a monster like Kong can be portrayed with ‘sympathy’ because he has a distinction that makes him ‘like us’ (he responds emotionally in ways we can identify with) – in a sense his monstrousness would be ‘our’s’ if we were confined in an outsize body and were subjected to the same sort of treatment as he is given. Otherness is transferred from Kong to the savages and in such a way that it inscribes them with a radical divergence with which there can be no negotiation since it is wholly alien to ‘us’ and deserving only of annihilation (equating them, as noted above, with ‘enemy combatants’). This reflects ways in which, while, our society today has become far more inclusive, far more tolerant of differences within a certain framework, at the same time it has perhaps become even less tolerant towards types of ‘otherness’ less easily perceptible to us but which we sense are incommensurate with our own values and which the uncanny aspect of the original Kong embodied.

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EPILOGUE Today Hollywood no longer rules the world of images. It may have retained control of worldwide distribution channels, but the films it makes now are shadows, pale reflections of the films it once made. Indeed, it might be argued that the ‘Hollywood’ that is the subject of this book no longer exists. To a great extent this is an inevitable consequence of the development of modern society. Cinema no longer holds a place of centrality within people’s lives. It is not experienced as an everyday activity but, if at all, as something that is planned as a special event. Popular culture has diversified and the role that cinema once had has been replaced by a variety of cultural forms, the consequence of the inexorable development of different technological processes, from TV to the internet. Moreover, the broad popular audience which classic Hollywood film aimed to serve has long dissipated. Hollywood now targets particular niche markets, directing the majority of its films at a worldwide youth audience (of 16–24 year olds) and any universal or regional appeal they may have is usually accidental or secondary. At the same time, global processes have penetrated the world, creating new markets functioning in fundamentally different ways to those of the past. Globalization has opened up possibilities and raised new challenges for today’s filmmakers. Film production has both diversified and narrowed and many of the best American films are produced independently of Hollywood studios. The mobility of the labour market has also meant that people are far more aware of and have greater personal contact with the ‘foreign’, both in terms of their own everyday lives and their cultural values. In many ways we have entered a world of the Deleuzian rhizome, in which everything is connected and no one is expected to have roots. Transnationalism and the effects of the global economic market mean that an Indian director may make a film about Eskimos or a Brazilian set his film in an African country through finance obtained from Japan, Germany and the United States. The fact that some of the

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Hollywood studios are now foreign owned and all of them are branches of huge international conglomerates for whom making films is only a small part of a wide range of interests has also had an impact upon film production process. At the same time, the permeation of managerial and neo-liberal attitudes that have infected the film industry as much as everything else impose a straightjacket probably much tighter than that of the Fordist production line that underlay the classic Hollywood system, imposing a homogeneity of product that it is difficult to break. The extent to which Hollywood is America projecting itself to the world, as discussed in the introduction, is no longer apparent since global considerations are now paramount for film production companies. There are some gains in this process. Filmmakers of integrity who establish their own particular niche market may find it easier to make the films they want to. In other respects, however, general Hollywood film production is far more subject to the sort of uniformity we associate with what Adorno identified as the ‘Culture Industry’ than it was at the time he was writing. With so much concern about multiculturalism, equal opportunities and open debate about the problems of minorities in general discourse, we may think we live today in more ‘enlightened’ times as regards representation of other cultures is concerned, especially when we take into account the centrality of issues of representation in intellectual debate. If people’s actual attitudes have really changed that much, however, it barely registers on big budget film production. As we have seen in considering Jackson’s version of King Kong, in many ways modern audiences appear quite as naïve in the way they receive images as those in the past, especially when extravagant special effects and dazzling action sequences can cause any critical judgement to be suspended for the course of the film. Recent productions have actually revealed a recrudescence of very dubious forms of exoticism which, much like Jackson’s King Kong, justify themselves in terms of surface verisimilitude and exactness of detail at the expense of the overall impact of the film. Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto (2006), for instance, goes to extraordinary length to dress up a tale set in ancient Mayan society in clothes of authenticity (involving making meticulous models of weaponry, jewellery and clothing of the time, and having the whole cast speak in a Mayan language) while stringing together virtually every tired cliché that could be mustered from movie history about primitive and ancient civilizations. We are expected to believe, for instance, that a civilization which had perhaps the greatest understanding of astronomy of any ancient society would

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break down in panic at the old turkey of an eclipse of the sun, opportunely occurring as the hero is about to have his heart torn out. Or that the end of this civilization, which collapsed sometime around the tenth century, would be presaged by the appearance five hundred years later of the first Spanish ships, presented here as that other turkey of primitivism, the white man as divine messenger. And for good measure, the whole film is centred around the oldest cliché of the lot: the duality by which the primitive is as either a ‘noble savage’ or ‘savage barbarian’ with nothing in between. Reducing the complex civilization of the Maya to that of a feral people hardly less barbaric than the Skull islanders of Jackson’s King Kong is perhaps less insidious than the assumptions behind the filmmaking that are revealed by the publicity. It was announced as a non-stop action-adventure [that] transports you to an ancient Central American civilization, for an experience unlike anything you’ve ever known. In the twilight of the mysterious Mayan culture, young Jaguar Paw is captured and taken to the great Mayan city, where he fears a harrowing end. Driven by the power of his love for his wife and son, he makes an adrenaline-soaked, heart-racing escape to rescue them and ultimately save his way of life (descriptive comment on the DVD).

The most inaccurate statement here is that you will be in for ‘an experience unlike anything you have ever known’. This scenario is so familiar that it might provide the template for any Hollywood action film today set in ‘exotic’ climes. This joy-ride roller coaster, utterly insensitive to cultural difference, plays upon the credulousness of the viewer who takes the presentations of a theme park for reality. The problem here is not to do with inaccuracy of the data, but with the relation of filmmaker to the material. The reality of Mayan society is so distant from us today as to be unimaginable and consequently unrepresentable. The verisimilitude of detail, however, gives us to believe that it is imaginable, that we have a common bond with these people of long ago that lies in our sense of identification with heroic victims of oppression against the evil tyranny which has oppressed them. This serves our own arrogant sense of superiority which in a sense justifies the modern imperialism of intervention while, as it denies the otherness of Mayan civilization – the fact that it cannot be imagined by us – it reduces human possibility, contributing to the idea that human beings function only within a comprehensible frame of reference determined by us. This positivist assumption that everything is knowable and that an ancient civilization like the Maya is not other but is us in different

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circumstances and at an earlier stage of evolution is itself a form of mental imperialism as it imbues us with the luxury of feeling that we have control of the past, and that the actions and motivations of people in an earlier time are comprehensible to us. Apocalypto is as ridiculous in its theme as any old Hollywood potboiler like The Mask of Fu Manchu, which was considered in Chapter 3. However, in taking itself far more seriously it can contain none of the latent sub-textual elements we were able to discern in the latter film (Fu Manchu may be outrageously cruel, but he has his ‘reasons’, which in fact cast a light back on those of his adversaries). The appropriation of the Maya in Apocalypto is purely opportunistic, justifying itself by nothing other than the roller-coaster ‘experience’ it offers to the viewer. This might be just the sort of ‘mindless entertainment’ that Hollywood has always been accused of purveying, but in fact it is a very ‘twenty-first century’ modification of it, one in which technical mastery of the filmmaking process allows the director to paper over the film’s lack of genuine content. Gibson’s film may be an example of the new Orientalism in Hollywood film but its knockabout style is at least preferable to a type of liberal movie that plays on Western guilt and the audience’s humanitarian heartstrings as it contrives a feel good feeling from the contemplation of another’s misery. This type of film is becoming so common it could be considered a genre, of which Danny Boyle’s crowd pleasing academy sensation, Slumdog Millionaire (2008), is one of the more recent examples. In this world there are three types of people: heroes (who nevertheless, probably taking their cue from Spielberg, have to be ‘flawed’), villains (who are beyond the pale) and victims (one of whom may learn to fight for their dignity under the tutelage of the hero). The ‘accolade’ for this sort of sanctimonious imperialism probably ought to go to Edward Zwick, who has built his career upon variants of it. His Blood Diamond (2006), however, is perhaps the most insidious example, one which provides a template from which the determinants of the genre may be discerned: nasty white people exploit or oppress the locals (most likely in complicity with nasty natives) until a white hero appears to right the wrongs that have been done. This template offers endless possibilities for variation to suit different situations. Even Fernando Meirelles the Brazilian director of the feted City of God, a film which appeared to show awareness of real misery, has been unable to resist the lure of this model, in making his abject The Constant Gardener (2005).

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There is a danger here that, because we have greater opportunities to experience alien cultures, we may become complacent about our relation to them. We are less rooted, which paradoxically makes us less aware of the reality of otherness, even as we are more alert to the problems of cultural difference. As film production has narrowed its scope, becoming more detached from the apprehensions of everyday life than it once was (even as ‘dreams’, classic Hollywood film responded directly to people’s everyday concerns), so the films being made are no longer the markers of popular consciousness they once were. Even if the diversity of modern society has led to an emphasis upon respect for cultural difference and greater interest in the problems of ‘other’ societies, this is often reflected only in a superficial way in mainstream Hollywood films.

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NOTES Introduction 1

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In fact, throughout the whole history of Hollywood it is not easy to find major players (whether producers, directors or stars) who came from the Deep South (on Gone with the Wind, for example, none of the key personnel – the producer, three directors, writers, stars or cinematographer – appear to have had any Southern blood). Among major film makers D. W. Griffith seems to be almost alone in having a specifically southern sensibility. For instance, how many British films have treated the distinctiveness of Scottish culture? Or how many French films have acknowledged that nation’s colonial past? Examples exist, to be sure, but with nowhere near the frequency that we find such issues emerging, if sometimes latently, within Hollywood films. The history of ethnographic film making hardly offers much evidence that knowledge about the culture necessarily means that the representation will be any more acceptable or even truthful than that to be found in Hollywood films.

Chapter 1 1

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There appear to have been no other significant movies made from Fennimore Cooper’s tales other than a German version of The Deerslayer, from 1920 (with Bela Lugosi as Chingachgook!) – the best version of The Last of the Mohicans appears to be a 1971 BBC TV adaptation. One of the very few films to capture a sense of the magnitude of the American colonial landscape as a wilderness is Bruce Berisford’s Black Robe (1992), but this is a Canadian, not a United States, production. This is despite the fact that that both characters, along with all of the Indians, are played by white actors who are among the least convincing ‘Indians’ one could imagine.

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When white men assume the role of Indians, we are always conscious of their lack of authenticity, but even now that it is usual for Indian actors to take on such roles, it appears difficult to escape the framework of the Hollywood image. This is in great part because the scripts are still drawing upon that image, but it should be remembered that the ‘Indian’ of the nineteenth century is ‘other’ to those living today, an ‘otherness’ not simply of the past but also of the different Indian nations: Wes Studi, for instance, as a Cherokee, has to conceptualize himself as Apache in order to play Geronimo (this, of course, presents exactly the same problems as it would for an English actor to plays a Frenchman). To cite one example of a naivety which is not uncommon in analysis of the Western’s treatment of the Indian, Jon Tuska (1985) in a rather hysterical book that is as unsystematic as it is angry (he claims to have watched thousands of Westerns but appears never to have liked a single one of them), berates the makers of Ulzana’s Raid for depicting a rape by an Apache war party, claiming that the Chiricahua disapproved of rape and that it rarely happened on raids. He concludes that ‘It should [ . . . ] be required of filmmakers, if they expect their films to be taken seriously and not classed as a form racist propaganda, to be truthful not only to the period and the place but to the people as well’ (1985: 258). Perhaps. But what does it mean to be ‘truthful’ in this context? Should a filmmaker be expected to check every detail of a film with experts in the area, and only to include uncontested evidence (since in many instances the experts will be bound to disagree)? Certainly filmmakers should be criticized if they depart from known fact, but in this case Tuska himself is merely quoting another critic, Jack Nachbar, based upon what indistinctly appears to be a 1941 anthropological account. Is it legitimate to base a case on privileged third-hand evidence in this way? In that he appears not to have checked the reliability of this source and ascertained whether it is reasonable for the filmmakers to have been aware of it, is Tuska himself not guilty of the same lack of care he complains about in the filmmakers? More seriously, even if it were the case that Chiricahua society disapproved of rape, part of the logic of the film is that the Indians have been separated from their own society and cooped up in a reservation; angry and having broken out would they still feel bound by the norms of their culture? By reducing individuals to their cultural values Tuska is reifying the Indians in the film and denying their individual agency, something in its way just as ‘racist’ as anything he imputes to the filmmakers.

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Chapter 3 1

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Fu Manchu was created just after the Chi’ing Dynasty had been overthrown in a revolutionary upheaval. It is curious, therefore, that Rohmer should give him a name that associated him not with ancient Chinese tradition, but with the very regime that the Chinese themselves regarded as having been responsible for their decline. Someone with such a name would surely be the last person the Chinese would declare their allegiance to. That Rohmer chose this name probably reflected not simply his ignorance of Chinese \ history but also another aspect of his ambivalent attitude: wanting to make his character appear powerful, but giving him an association with the immediate imperial past rather than with what might offer a revolutionary future. Myrna Loy would later became ‘Queen of Hollywood’, but in her early career her looks were considered so exotic that she was given a kind of ‘Oriental’ persona, before she found her niche as the intelligent and composed American woman embodied most obviously by Nora Charles in the Thin Man series. In the latter persona she stood as a counterpoint to the overtly sexual, but decidedly unexotic, beauty of, say, Jean Harlow. That Loy was able to make this transition suggests, in a parallel way to the personas of Hayworth and Tierney, that for Hollywood the intelligent American woman may contain something ‘Oriental’ within herself by virtue of representing the idea of woman as ‘Otherness within’. Barbara Stanwyck noted that ‘The women’s clubs came out very strongly against it, because the white woman was in love with the yellow man and kissed his hand. So what! I was so shocked [by the reaction]. It never occurred to me, and I don’t think it occurred to Mr. Capra when we were doing it. I accepted it, believed in it, loved it’ (quoted in McBride, 1992: 281). She had a luminous beauty comparable to that of Louise Brooks and it is interesting that, like Brooks, her few great leading performances (Song [1928], Pavement Butterfly [1929], and Piccadilly [1929]) were all made in Europe. We might therefore conjecture that her exoticism for American audiences did not devolve entirely from the fact that she was Chinese; her beauty, like that of Brooks, was too free-spirited and insolent to be entirely attractive to American audiences of the time.

Chapter 4 1

Nanook of the North’s reputation in this respect is not entirely accurate and might be challenged by Edmund Curtis’s In the Land of the Headhunters (1914), a film made in collaboration with Kwakiutl Indians and illustrating

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their myths. Curtis never pretended that his film was anything but a re-enactment, although it might be argued that this is all that Nanook was and that Curtis was simply more honest in his presentation. Moreover, Curtis never intended his film for a wide audience, while Flaherty, as a business man, always had one eye on how his films could be commercially exploited. Even though Nanook was made independently and outside the conventional film distribution channels of the time, Flaherty had the entrepreneurial skills that enabled him very effectively to promote the film. In fact, commercial films on American Indian themes, set pre-Conquest and with native American actors, were common before 1922. It might be interesting to consider why this genre died out and why subsequently Hollywood films have generally only presented native cultures through the eyes of a white protagonist, something that persists to the present day with only a few exceptions. One reason may have been that Nanook, presented as both factual and actual, made reconstructions of native culture seem artificial. This was perhaps the genesis of the separation of ‘documentary’ and ‘fiction’ film. In the documentary form, the natives were filmed ‘as they really were’ by the white man, while the fictional film had licence to imagine them in terms of how they were experienced by the white hero. Consequently there was no longer a space for an indigenous voice in fictional films. This ‘genre’ really only consists, apart from Nanook, of Cooper and Schoedsack’s Grass (1925) and Flaherty’s own Moana (1926). In fact they were an entirely fictional family. Nanook’s real name was Allakariallak and he had several wives but the woman who plays his wife in the film was not one of them. The whole situation is thus contrived and one could say that they were really acting a part. The only other ‘otherness’ for Flaherty appears to have been modern technology, which is either wilfully absent (in Nanook, Moana and Man of Aran) or a threat (Industrial Britain, Louisiana Story). This is not to say that Ray’s representation was in any way more ‘accurate’ than Flaherty’s (Ray did not even use Inuit actors – his lead character was played by Hollywood’s ‘man for all indigenous roles’, Anthony Quinn, and the rest are Asians, something imposed against Ray’s wishes by the producers – so his film is manifestly ‘inauthentic’), but because Ray was a better filmmaker, far more aware of how meaning is inscribed in gesture, facial expression and movement, and with a greater awareness of cultural difference, he was able to inscribe his film with elements that disturb our easy identification with the characters and force us to question our relation to them. Saying that Ray was a ‘better’ filmmaker than Flaherty is not to say that his is the ‘more effective’ film. In fact the reverse is the case: Flaherty’s

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film is a more satisfying cinematic experience and far easier to watch than Ray’s precisely because it is more simply made. Flaherty’s understanding of film technique may have been basic, but he knew how to get the effect he wanted and shrewdly understood how to make an audience identify with his characters. This latter quality, which is also fundamentally the same understanding as that which informs the making of today’s soap operas, also works against ethnographic veracity. Allakariallak died two years after the filming, from starvation according to Flaherty, but it is apparently more likely to have been from tuberculosis. For an excellent discussion of the issues raised in this respect by Tabu see the chapter ‘Ethnotopia: F.W. Murnau’s Tabu’ in Oksiloff (2001). It should however be mentioned that Grass is such a fascinating ethnographic document because Cooper and Schoedsack did not have sufficient footage to make the film they would really have liked to have made, which would have been more dramatic and story oriented. In fact, they had wanted to centre the film on one family, but conditions made this impossible. See the interview with Rudy Behlmer included in the Milestone DVD of the film. Ibid. Schoedsack appears to have had a more aloof personality, although this impression may have been created from those who knew him in his later years: an accident during the Second World War severely affected his eyesight, leaving him almost blind and therefore unable to continue to make films. Cooper was executive producer for many of John Ford’s best films made between 1948 and 1954 and one imagines that he must have been a not inconsiderable influence on Ford’s movement towards greater complexity of representation during this period. The Most Dangerous Game was directed by Schoedsack and Irving Pichel and only produced by Cooper, but it clearly partakes of the same sensibility. Flynn does not give a source for this quote, but I assume it to have been made during the time Sternberg was making the films with Dietrich. It appears that the portrayal of the Spanish Civil Guard – whose members were hardly known for their sense of humour – was at the heart of the problem. The insecure government perhaps feared that screening the film in Spain would have stirred up trouble in a volatile environment. However, this could have been obviated by refusing the film an import licence. That they felt the need to create a diplomatic incident and have the film destroyed shows how far a representation that could hardly be considered malicious (Sternberg regarded the film, which he had entitled Capriccio Español – The Devil is a Woman is a studio title imposed against Sternberg’s wishes and

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contrary to his conception of the heroine), to be an affectionate homage to his idea of Spain. He made a third film with Evelyn Brent, Drag Net (1929), but this has been lost. I have not included Anna May Wong in this list because her performance alone appears to have been the result of her own sensibility rather than Sternberg’s direction.

Chapter 5 1

2

Although Robert Wise is generally regarded as a journeyman director, one only as good as his scripts, it is interesting to see that Otherness is a significant theme throughout his prolific and rather unassuming career, present not only in noirs like The Set Up (1949) and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) but also in his musicals (West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965) as well as in his horror and science fiction films (The Body Snatcher, 1945; The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951; The Haunting, 1963). The appreciation of the qualities of otherness is subtle and understated in most of these films and yet it is indelibly present. In The Haunting, for instance, we never know whether the ghosts in the haunted house are really there or are emanations of the characters’ mental states, projecting aspects of their being of which they are unaware. A book that explores noir in terms that have the closest bearing on the issues raised in this chapter is that by Nicholas Christopher (1997).

Chapter 6 1

2

This is not to discount the extent to which Hollywood producers cynically welcomed the HUAC accusations to the extent that they provided them with an excuse and a means by which to undermine and act against the power of the unions. The recent re-make of 3.10 to Yuma (2007) is completely oblivious to this aspect of the original film, leading it towards an ending that is as stupid as the original’s is astute.

Chapter 7 1

This story is to be found in Jacques Stephen Alexis (1960) Romancero aux étoiles. Paris: Gallimard.

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In fact, in neither The Last Man on Earth nor in Night of the Living Dead are the dead called zombies. Indeed, Romero did not consider his creatures to be zombies and this moniker attached to them in the public reception of the film.

Chapter 8 1

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Bizarrely – or not so bizarrely, perhaps – Apocalypse Now feeds into actual war situations: during the US intervention in Haiti in 1993, the Wagnerian theme tune was apparently used by the Marines in much the same way as in the film; in Iraq in 2003, the United States used ‘death cards’ to identify their targets, inspired, perhaps, by Kilgore’s use of cards to mark his victims. In fact it can be argued that it is ‘successful’ at every level, the idea that it represents an unattainable ideal is a later (probably capitalist) rationalization tied to the idea that ‘success’ is to be equated with possession; the fact that the Grail can never be possessed is by contrast its determining feature. In the original screenplay this choice is duplicitous, offered only to deceive Willard (she sleeps with him in order to distract him so that the French can steal the Americans arms and ammunition – this is omitted from Apocalypse Now Redux, but it seems to give the French plantation scene a rationale it otherwise lacks. There is, however, little evidence that the Vietnamese ever feared contamination by American values. They appear on the whole to be perfectly comfortable with them when those values can serve them positively, rejecting them only when they sought power over their own values.

Chapter 9 1

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Details of this campaign can be found at http://www.asianmediawatch.net and http://www.lost in racism.org/flyer2.pdf The scene that is presumably meant here is when they order shabu shabu; Bob later grumbles not about the food but the fact that they had to cook it themselves. The joke here is on the Americans, who have gone to a restaurant in complete ignorance of the types of Japanese food that might be available. In Jim Jarmusch’s film Broken Flowers (2005), there is a scene occurring in a train in which the same Bill Murray towers high above the other

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(American) passengers. It is very similar to the scene in Lost in Translation that Asian Mediawatch complained about. Should this therefore be seen as Jarmusch caricaturing the average American is too short?

Chapter 10 1

As an aside, it is curious how in this respect Jaws prefigures the slasher film, in which a creature – human but not human – has no other reason for existence than to prey upon vulnerable humans.

Chapter 11 1

The only other film to my knowledge that contains a comparable recognition, although it doesn’t explore it with the same depth, is Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976).

Chapter 12 1

2

This disappearance is in marked contrast to the original film where the natives and the crew co-operate against Kong’s rage (it is worth noting that no villagers are killed by the white men in the original film and that Kong shows no discrimination in taking out his rage on natives and crew alike). They were both, for instance, fervent anti-communists, although not, it seems, out of any ideological conviction, but because they happened to find themselves in Poland at the time of the Bolshevik invasion and directly witnessed the atrocities committed (one imagines that had they been in Leningrad at the time of the siege they would probably have become communist partisans).

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FILMOGRAPHY 3.10 to Yuma (Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1957) Director: Delmer Daves. African Queen, The (Romulus Films, 1953) Director: John Huston. AI Artificial Intelligence (Warner Bros. Pictures, DreamWorks SKG, Amblin Entertainment & Stanley Kubrick Productions, 2001) Director: Steven Spielberg. Alamo, The (Alamo Company & The Batjac Productions, 1960) Director: John Wayne. Alien (Twentieth Century-Fox, Brandywine Productions, 1979) Director: Ridley Scott. Amistad (DreamWorks SKG & Home Box Office, 1997) Director: Steven Spielberg. Apocalypse Now (Zoetrope Studios, 1978) Director: Francis Ford Coppola. Apocalypto (Icon Entertainment International, Icon Productions & Touchstone Pictures, 2006) Director: Mel Gibson. Attack of the Crab Monsters, The (Los Altos Productions, 1957) Director: Roger Corman. Attack of the Giant Leeches, The (American International Pictures, 1959) Bernard Kowalski. Bad Day at Black Rock (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1955) Director: John Sturges. Beyond Rangoon (Castle Rock Entertainment & Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1995) Director: John Boorman. Bird of Paradise (RKO Radio Pictures, 1932) Director: King Vidor. Birth of a Nation, The (David W. Griffith Corp & Epoch Producing, 1915) Director: D.W Griffith. Bitter Tea of General Yen, The (Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1933) Director: Frank Capra. Black Cat, The (Universal Pictures, 1934) Director: Edgar G. Ulmer. Black Robe (Alliance Communications & Samuel Goldwyn, 1991) Director: Bruce Beresford.

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Black Scorpion, The (Amex Productions Frank Melford-Jack Dietz Productions, 1957) Director: Edward Ludwig. Blackboard Jungle, The (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1955) Director: Richard Brooks. Blade Runner (Ladd Co & Warner Bros, 1982) Director: Ridley Scott. Blood Diamond (Warner Bros. Pictures, Bedford Falls Productions, Initial Entertainment Group & Lonely Film Productions, 2006) Director: Edward Zwick. Body Snatcher, The (RKO Radio Pictures, 1945) Director: Robert Wise. Born to Kill (RKO Radio Pictures, 1947) Director: Robert Wise. Broken Flowers (Focus Features & Bac Films, 2005) Director: Jim Jarmusch. Bronco Billy (Warner Bros. Pictures & Second Street Films, 1980) Director: Clint Eastwood. Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (Dino De Laurentiis Corporation & Lions Gate Films, 1976) Director: Robert Altman. Cat People (RKO Radio Pictures, 1942) Director: Jacques Tourneur. Chang, a Drama of the Wilderness (Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation, 1927) Directors: Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack. China Gate (Globe Enterprises, 1957) Director: Samuel Fuller. Chinatown (Paramount Pictures, 1973) Director: Roman Polanski. Chinatown Nights (Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation, 1929) Director: William Wellman. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Columbia Pictures Corporation in association with EMI Films, 1977) Director: Steven Spielberg. Coffee and Cigarettes (Asmik Ace, BIM & Smokescreen Inc., 2003) Director: Jim Jarmusch. Color Purple, The (Amblin Entertainment in association with Warner Bros. Pictures, 1995) Director: Steven Spielberg. Constant Gardener, The (Potboiler Productions, Epsilon Motion Pictures, Scion Films, UK Film Council & Vierte Babelsberg Film, 2005) Director: Fernando Meirelles. Corpse Bride (Warner Bros. Pictures, Tim Burton Animation Co., Laika Entertainment, Patalex Productions & Will Vinton Studios, 2005) Director: Tim Burton. Crimson Kimono, The (Globe Enterprises, 1959) Director: Samuel Fuller. D.O.A. (Cardinal Pictures, 1950) Director: Rudolph Maté. Dances with Wolves (Tig Productions & Orion Pictures, 1990) Director: Kevin Costner.

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Dark City (Mystery Clock Cinema, New Line Cinema, 1998) Director: Alex Proyas. Dark Passage (Warner Bros., First National Pictures, 1947) Director: Delmer Daves. Dawn of the Dead (Laurel-Day Inc., 1978) Director: George Romero. Day of the Dead, The (Dead Films Inc. & Laurel Entertainment Inc., 1985) Director: George Romero. Day the Earth Stood Still, The (Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1951) Director: Robert Wise. Dead Man (Miramax, 1995) Director: Jim Jarmusch. Deadly Mantis, The (Universal International Pictures, 1957) Director: Nathan Juran. Deliverance (Warner Bros. Pictures & Elmer Enterprises 1972) Director: John Boorman. Desperate Hours, The (Paramount Pictures, 1955) Director: William Wyler. Devil Doll, The (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1936) Director: Tod Browning. Devil is a Woman, The (Paramount Pictures, 1935) Director: Josef von Sternberg. Diary of the Dead (Artfire Films with Romero-Grunwald Productions, 2007) Directed by George Romero. Dirty Harry (Malpaso Productions & Warner Bros. Pictures, 1971) Director: Don Siegel. Docks of New York, The (Famous Players, Lasky Paramount, 1929) Director: Josef von Sternberg. Double Indemnity (Paramount Pictures, 1944) Director: Billy Wilder. Down by Law (Black Snake, Grokenberger Film Produktion & Island Pictures, 1986) Director: Jim Jarmusch. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Paramount Pictures, 1931) Director: Rouben Mamoulian. Dracula (Universal Pictures, 1931) Director: Tod Browning. Drums Along the Mohawk (Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1939) Director: John Ford. Duel (Universal TV, 1971) Director: Steven Spielberg. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (Amblin Entertainment for Universal Pictures, 1982) Director: Steven Spielberg. Edward Scissorhands (Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1990) Director: Tim Burton Emerald Forest, The (Christel Films & Embassy Pictures Corporation, 1985) Director: John Boorman. Exorcist, The (Hoya Productions & Warner Bros. Pictures, 1973) Directed by William Friedkin.

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Fixed Bayonets (Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1951) Director: Samuel Fuller. Fly, The (Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation , 1958) Director: Kurt Neumann. Forty Guns (Globe Enterprises, 1957) Director: Samuel Fuller. Frankenstein (Universal Studios, 1931) Director: James Whale. Freaks (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1932) Director: Tod Browning. Geronimo: An American Legend (Columbia Pictures, 1993) Director: Walter Hill. Ghost Dog, the Way of the Samurai (Pandora Films in association with ARD/Degeto, Plywood Productions, Bac Films, Studio Canal & JVC, 1999) Director: Jim Jarmusch. Gilda (Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1946) Director: Charles Vidor. Gone with the Wind (Selznick International Pictures Metro-GoldwynMayer, 1939) Director: Victor Fleming. Gran Torino (Matten Productions, Double Nickel Entertainment, Gerber Pictures, Malpaso Productions Media Magik Entertainment Village Roadshow Pictures, WV Films IV & Warner Bros. Pictures, 2008) Director: Clint Eastwood. Grass, a Nation’s Battle for Life (Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, 1925) Directors: Merian C. Cooper & Ernest Schoedsack. Gun Crazy (United Artists & King Brothers Productions, 1950) Director: Joseph H. Lewis. Haunting, The (Argyle Enterprises, 1963) Director: Robert Wise. He Who Gets Slapped (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1924) Director: Victor Sjöström. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (American Zoetrope, 1991) Directors: Fax Bahr & George Hickenlooper. Hell and High Water (Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1954) Director: Samuel Fuller. Hell in the Pacific (American Broadcasting Company (ABC), Henry G. Saperstein Enterprises Inc. & Selmur Productions, 1968) Director: John Boorman. High Plains Drifter (The Malpaso Company, 1973) Director: Clint Eastwood. House of Bamboo (Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1955) Director: Samuel Fuller. I Shot Jesse James (Lippert Pictures, 1949) Director: Samuel Fuller. I Walked with a Zombie (RKO Radio Pictures, 1943) Director: Jacques Tourneur.

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I Was a Teenage Werewolf (Sunset Productions, 1957) Director: Gene Fowler. In a Lonely Place (Columbia Pictures Corporation & Santana Pictures Corporation 1950) Director: Nicholas Ray. In the Land of the Head Hunters (Seattle Film Co, 1914) Director: Edward S. Curtis. Incredible Shrinking Man (Universal International Pictures, 1957) Director: Jack Arnold. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Paramount Pictures & Lucasfilm, 1984) Director: Steven Spielberg. Industrial Britain (Empire Marketing Board Film Unit, 1931) Director: Robert Flaherty. Intolerance: Love’s Struggle throughout the Ages (Triangle Film Corporation & Wark Producing, 1916) Director: D.W. Griffith. Invaders from Mars (National Pictures Corporation, 1953) Director: William Cameron Menzies. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Walter Wanger Productions Inc., 1956) Director: Don Siegel. It Came from Beyond the Sea (Clover Productions, 1955) Director: Robert Gordon. Jaws (Zanuck/Brown Productions for Universal Pictures, 1975) Director: Steven Spielberg. Key Largo (Warner Bros. Pictures, 1948) Director: John Huston. Killers, The (Mark Hellinger Productions for Universal Pictures, 1946) Director: Robert Siodmak. Killers, The (Revue Studios, 1964) Director: Don Siegel. King Kong (Big Primate Pictures, Universal Pictures, WingNut Films MFPV Film, 2005) Director: Peter Jackson. King Kong (Dino De Laurentiis Company for Paramount Pictures, 1976) Director: John Guillerman. King Kong (RKO Radio Pictures, 1933) Directors: Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack. Kiss Me Deadly (Parklane Pictures Inc. 1955) Director: Robert Aldrich. Kundun (De Fina-Cappa Dune Films Refuge Productions Inc. Touchstone Pictures, 1997) Director: Martin Scorsese. Lady from Shanghai, The (Columbia Pictures Corporation 1947) Director: Orson Welles. Land of the Dead (Universal Pictures Atmosphere Entertainment MM Exception Wild Bunch Romero-Grunwald Productions, 2005) Director: George Romero.

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Last Command, The (Paramount Pictures, 1928) Director: Josef von Sternberg. Last Emperor, The (Hemdale Film, Yanco Films Limited & TAO Film, 1987) Director: Bernardo Betolucci. Last Man on Earth, The (Associated Producers, 1964) Directed by Sidney Salkov. Last of the Mohicans, The (Associated Productions, 1920) Directors: Maurice Tourneur and Clarence Brown. Last of the Mohicans, The (Morgan Creek Productions & Twentieth Century-Fox, 1992) Director: Michael Mann. Last of the Mohicans, The (Reliance Production, United Artists, 1936) Director: George B. Seitz. Last Samurai, The (Warner Bros. Pictures & Bedford Falls Company, 2003) Director: Edward Zwick. Last Supper, The (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos, 1976) Director: Tomas Gutierrez Alea. Last Temptation of Christ, The (Cineplex-Odeon Films for Universal Pictures,1988) Director: Martin Scorsese. Laura (Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation 1944) Director: Otto Preminger. Leech Woman, The (Universal International Pictures, 1960) Director: Edward Dein. Little Big Man (Cinema Center 100 & National General Pictures, 1970) Director: Arthur Penn. Little Buddha (CiBy 2000, Recorded Picture Company (RPC), Serprocor Anstalt, 1993) Director: Bernardo Bertolucci. Lost in Translation (Focus Features Tohokashinsha Film Company Ltd. American Zoetrope Elemental Films, 2003) Director: Sofia Coppola. Louisiana Story (Robert Flaherty Productions Inc., 1948) Director: Robert Flaherty Macao (RKO Radio Pictures, 1952) Director: Josef von Sternberg. Man Called Horse, A (Cinema Center Films, 1970) Director: Eliot Silverstein. Man of Aran (Gainsborough Pictures, 1934) Director: Robert Flaherty. Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The (Paramount Pictures John Ford Productions, 1962) Director: John Ford. Mars Attacks! (Warner Bros, 1996) Director: Tim Burton. . Mask of Fu Manchu, The (Cosmopolitan Productions for MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, 1932) Directors: Charles Brabin and Charles Vidor.

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244

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Merril’s Marauders (United States Pictures, 1961) Director: Samuel Fuller. Minority Report (Twentieth Century-Fox & DreamWorks SKG, 2002) Director: Steven Spielberg. Moana (Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, 1926) Director: Robert Flaherty. Monster from Green Hell (Gross-Krasne Productions, 1958) Director: Kenneth Crane. Monster that Challenged the World, The (Gramercy Pictures, 1957) Director: Arnold Laven. Morocco (Paramount Pictures, 1930) Director: Josef von Sternberg. Most Dangerous Game, The (RKO Radio Pictures, 1932) Directors: Irving Pichel and Ernest Schoedsack. Munich (DreamWorks SKG & Universal Pictures, 2005) Director: Steven Spielberg. Murders in the Rue Morgue, The (Universal Pictures, 1932) Director: Robert Florey. Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu, The (Rowland V. Lee Productions for Paramount Pictures, 1929) Director: Rowland V. Lee. Mystery of the Wax Museum, The (Warner Bros. Pictures,1933) Director: Michael Curtiz. Mystery Train (JVC Entertainment, 1989) Director: Jim Jarmusch. Nanook of the North (Les Frères Revillon Pathé Exchange, 1922) Director: Robert Flaherty. New World, The (New Line Cinema, 2005) Director: Terrence Malick. Night of the Hunter, The (Paul Gregory Productions, 1955) Director: Charles Laughton. Night of the Living Dead (Image Ten, Laurel Group, 1968) Director: George Romero. Night on Earth (Victor Company of Japan, Pyramide Productions, Canal+, Pandora Cinema, Channel Four Films, JVC Entertainment & Locus Solus Entertainment, 1991) Director: Jim Jarmusch. Odds Against Tomorrow (HarBel Productions, 1959) Director: Robert Wise. On Dangerous Ground (RKO Radio Pictures, 1952) Director: Nicholas Ray. Out of the Past (RKO Radio Pictures 1947) Director: Jacques Tourneur. Outlaw Josey Wales, The (The Malpaso Co. & Warner Bros, 1976) Director: Clint Eastwood. Pavement Butterfly (Richard Eichberg-Film GmbH for British International Pictures) Director: Richard Eichberg.

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Permanent Vacation (Cinesthesia Productions, 1980) Director: Jim Jarmusch. Piccadilly (British International Pictures, 1929) Director: E.A. Dupont Pickup on South Street (Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1953) Director: Samuel Fuller. Pocahontas (Walt Disney Pictures, 1995) Directors: Mike Gabriel & Eric Goldberg Point Blank (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1967) Director: John Boorman. Psycho (Shamley Productions, 1960) Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Raiders of the Lost Ark (Paramount Pictures & Lucasfilm, 1981) Director: Steven Spielberg. Rashômon (Daiei Motion Picture Company, 1950) Director: Akira Kurosawa. Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves (Warner Bros. Pictures & Morgan Creek Productions,1991) Director: Kevin Reynolds. Robin of Sherwood (HTV, in association with Goldcrest Television, 1983–86) Directors: Paul Knight and Esta Clarkham. Run of the Arrow (Globe Enterprises & RKO, 1957) Director: Samuel Fuller. Saga of Anatahan, The (Daiwa-Towa Productions, 1953) Director: Josef von Sternberg. Salvation Hunters, The (Academy Pictures, United Artists, 1925) Director: Josef von Sternberg. Sankofa (Channel Four Films, Ghana National Commission on Culture, Mypheduh Films, Negod-Gwad Productions, Norddeutscher Rundfunk & Westdeutscher Rundfunk, 1993) Director: Haile Gérima. Savage Innocents, The (Gray Film-Pathé, 1959) Director: Nicholas Ray. Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang Productions, 1945) Director: Fritz Lang. Schindler’s List (Universal Pictures & Amblin Entertainment, 1993) Director: Steven Spielberg. Searchers, The (C.V. Witney Pictures & Warner Bros, 1956) Director: John Ford. Serpent and the Rainbow, The (Universal Pictures, 1988) Directed by Wes Craven. Set Up, The (RKO Radio Pictures, 1949) Director: Robert Wise. Seventh Victim, The (RKO Radio Pictures, 1943) Director: Mark Robson. Shanghai Express (Paramount Pictures, 1932) Director: Josef von Sternberg.

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Shanghai Gesture, The (United Artists, 1941) Director: Josef von Sternberg. Shanghai Triad (Alpha Films & Shanghai Film Studio,1995) Director: Zhang Yimou. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (Argosy Pictures & RKO, 1949) Director: John Ford. Sheltering Sky, The (Warner Bros. Pictures Aldrich Group Pictures Trustees Ltd. Recorded Picture Company, Sahara Company TAO Film, 1990) Director: Bernardo Bertolucci. Shock Corridor (F & F Productions, 1963) Director: Sam Fuller. Son of Dracula (Universal Pictures, 1943) Director: Robert Siodmak. Song (British International Pictures, Richard Eichberg-Film GmbH) Director: Richard Eichberg. Sound of Music, The (Robert Wise Productions for Twentieth CenturyFox Film Corporation, 1965) Director: Robert Wise. Stagecoach (Walter Wanger Productions, United Artists, 1939) Director: John Ford. Steel Helmet, The (Deputy Corporation, 1950) Director: Samuel Fuller. Stranger Than Paradise (Cinesthesia Productions, Grokenberger Film Produktion & Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, 1984) Director: Jim Jarmusch. Sunset Boulevard (Paramount Pictures, 1950) Director: Billy Wilder. Svengali (Warner Bros. Pictures, 1931) Director: Archie Mayo. Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (Murnau-Flaherty Productions for Paramount Pictures, 1931) Director: F. W. Murnau. Tarantula (Universal International Pictures, 1955) Director: Jack Arnold. Teahouse of the August Moon, The (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1956) Director: Daniel Mann. Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The (Vortex, 1974) Directed by Tobe Hooper. Them! (Warner Bros. Pictures, 1954) Director: Gordon Douglas. Thief of Bagdad, (The Douglas Fairbanks Pictures, 1924) Director: Raoul Walsh. Thing from Another World, The (Winchester Pictures Corporation, 1951) Directors: Christian Nyby, Howard Hawks. . Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made (Marianna Films, 1994) Director: Mika Kaurismäki. Total Recall (Carolco International N.V. & TriStar Pictures, 1990) Director: Paul Verhoeven.

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Ulzana’s Raid (Associates & Aldrich Company, The De Haven Productions for Universal Pictures, 1972) Directed by Robert Aldrich. Unforgiven (Malpaso Productions & Warner Bros. Pictures, 1992) Director: Clint Eastwood. Unknown, The (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1927) Director: Tod Browning. Verboten! (Globe Enterprises, 1959) Director: Samuel Fuller. Viva Zapata (Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1952) Director: Elia Kazan. War of the Worlds (Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks SKG & Amblin Entertainment, 2005) Director: Steven Spielberg. Wasp Woman, The (Film Group Feature Santa Cruz Productions Inc, 1959) Director: Roger Corman. West of Zanzibar (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1928) Director: Tod Browning. West Side Story (Mirisch Pictures in association with Seven Arts Productions,1961) Director: Robert Wise. White Dog (Paramount Pictures 1982) Director: Samuel Fuller. White Shadows in the South Seas (Cosmopolitan Productions for MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, 1929) Director: Woody Van Dyke. White Zombie (Edward Halperin Productions, 1931) Director: Victor Halperin. Wild Bunch, The (Warner Brothers/Seven Arts, 1969) Director: Sam Peckinpah. Woman in the Window (International Pictures, 1944) Director: Fritz Lang.

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INDEX 3.10 to Yuma 115 Adorno, Theodor ix, 226 African Queen, The 108 Agamben, Giorgio 153, 216 AI 176, 179–82, 186–7 Ainsi parla l’oncle (Price-Mars) 123 Akutagawa Ryunosuke 204 Alamo, The (1960) 7 Aldrich, Robert 43, 46, 85, 93, 165, 200 Alea, Tomas Gutierrez 183 Alexis, Jacques Stephen 122, 235 Allakariallak 233 Altman, Robert 156, 237 American Dream 3, 4, 6, 7, 53, 85, 87, 116, 139, 152, 194 Amistad 182, 190 Apocalypse Now 137–55, 236 Apocalypse Now Redux 140, 146, 236 Apocalypto 226–8 Arago, Victor 207 Arbuckle Case 107 Arnold, Jack 113 Asian Mediawatch 167, 169–71 Attack of the Crab Monsters 113 Attack of the Giant Leeches 113 Atwill, Lionel 104 Avital, Mili 196 Baclanova, Olga 79 Bad Day at Black Rock 115 Bahr, Fax 140 Banks, Leslie 77 Barrymore, John 104 Barrymore, Lionel 79, 104 Bataille, Georges 12, 90 Baudrillard, Jean 175 Benigni, Roberto 196 Benjamin, Walter viii Bennett, Joan 96 Bergman, Ingmar 87 Bernhardt, Curtis 85

Bertolucci, Bernardo 9, 156–7, 161–3, 166 Big Tree, Chief John 25 bin Laden, Osama 55, 155 Bird of Paradise 72 Birth of a Nation 3, 5–7, 10 Bitter Tea of General Yen, The 57–62 Black Cat, The 105 Black Mask 86 Black Robe 230 Black Scorpion, The 113 Blackboard Jungle, The 115 Blade Runner 16, 186 Blake, William 193, 195–200 Blood Diamond 228 Body Snatcher, The 105 Bogart, Humphrey 100, 108 Boone, Daniel 41 Boorman, John 156 Born to Kill 90–3 Brabin, Charles 56 Brahm, John 85 Brando, Marlon 108, 115 Brent, Evelyn 81, 235 Brockden Brown, Charles 105 Broken Flowers 192–3, 236 Bronco Billy 48 Brontë, Charlotte 126 Brooks, Louise 232 Brooks, Richard 115 Brown, Clarence 27 Buddhism 158 Buffalo Bill and the Indians 237 Burton, Tim 156 Bushido 202 Campbell, Joseph 176–7, 179 cannibalism 131–2 Capra, Frank 57, 67 Carradine, John 105 Cat People 105, 126 Chaney, Lon 78–9 Chang 74–5

255

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256

Index

China Gate 115 Chinatown 51, 118 Chinatown Nights 57 Chinese Exclusion Act 1882, 53 Christopher, Nicholas 235 City of God 228 Clastres, Pierre 150 Clive, Colin 104 Close Encounters of the Third Kind 182 Coen Brothers 156 Cohen, Larry 156 Cohn, Harry 90 Colbert, Claudette 24 Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead) 217 communication 21, 23, 41, 59–60, 114, 165, 170, 191–211 communism 106–7, 109, 110, 119–20 Compson, Betty 82 Conrad, Joseph 136, 141, 144, 149, 150, 191 Conrad, William 99 Constant Gardner, The 228 Cook Jr, Elisha 91 Cooper, Gary 82 Cooper, Maxine 94 Cooper, Merian C. 70–7, 212–15, 218–23, 233–4 Coppola, Francis Ford 138–54 Coppola, Sofia 157, 165–8, 170 Corpse Bride 156 Costner, Kevin 9 Craven, Wes 123 Crawford, Joan 78 Crimson Kimono, The 115, 118–19 Cruise, Tom 171 Culture Industry ix, 226 Curtis, Edmund 232–3 Curtiz, Michael 232–3 D.O.A. 87 Dalai Lama 157 Dante, Joe 156 Dark City 17 Dassin, Jules 85 Daves, Delmer 115 Davison, Bruce 43 Dawn of the Dead 129, 132, 135 Day of the Dead 129, 131–3, 135 Day the Earth Stood Still, The 108 Day, Kiku 167 Dead Man 193, 196–202 Deadly Mantis, The 113 Dean, James 115

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Decker, Albert 95 Deerslayer, The 230 Deleuze, Gilles 225 Deliverance 156 Depp, Johnny 196, 198 Desperate Hours, The 115 Devil Doll, The 104 Devil is a Woman 82, 234 Diary of the Dead 129, 135 Dietrich, Marlene 52, 60–1, 80, 82 Dirty Harry 89 Disney Company 160 Double Indemnity 88, 96 Down By Law 196 Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde 104 Dracula (1931) 106 Drums Along the Mohawk 24, 27–8, 38 Duel 182 Dunham, Katherine 123 Earles, Harry 79 Eastwood, Clint 46–50 Edson, Richard 195 Edward Scissorhands 156 Eliot, T. S. 147, 149 Éloge de l’amour 151 Enlightenment 110–11, 114, 176, 179–80 ET 182 exile 14, 86 Farmer, Gary 197–8 Faulkner, William 2 Fennimore Cooper, James 27, 41, 230 Ferry, Jean 217–19 Film Maker’s Apocalypse 140 Fincher, David 156 Fixed Bayonets 115 Flaherty, Robert 68–73, 233–4 Fly, The 113 Flynn, Tom 81, 234 Fonda, Henry 24 Ford, Glenn 89, 115 Ford, John 24, 35–7, 43, 47, 234 Forty Guns 115 Frankenheimer, John 156 Frazer, J. G. 148–9 Frazer, Robert 125 Freaks 79–80 Freeman, Morgan 48 Freud, Sigmund 111, 219 From Ritual to Romance 144, 149 frontier 24, 26, 31, 32–50, 108, 138, 144, 152

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Index Fu Manchu 54–7, 57, 60 Fuller, Sam 42–3, 46, 86, 106, 115–19, 190 Gabler, Neal 3–4 Gardner, Ava 98 Geray, Steven 80 Gerima, Hailé 183 Geronimo 35, 195 Ghost Dog, the Way of the Samurai 193, 195, 203–9, 210–11 ghouls 129 Gibson, Mel 226–8 Gilda 52, 89, 99 globalisation 14, 235 Godard, Jean-Luc 151 Golden Bough, The 149 Gone with the Wind 3, 7, 230 Gorman, Cliff 207 Goya, Francisco 111 Grail Quest 94, 144–9 Gran Torino 48 Grass 72–4, 77 Griffith, D. W. 5–7, 68, 230 Grizzly Man 218 Gun Crazy 96 Hackman, Gene 49 Hagakure 204–5 Hale, Georgia 82 Halperin, Victor 121 Hammett, Dashiel 47 Hardy, Phil 116 Harlem Renaissance 123 Harlow, Jean 232 Haunting, The 235 Hawks, Howard 85 Hays Production Code x, 27, 62 Hayworth, Rita 82, 89–90, 232 He Who Gets Slapped 78 Heart of Darkness 141, 216 Hegel, G. W. F. 115, 156 Heidegger, Martin 47 Hell and High Water 115 Hell in the Pacific 156 Hepburn, Audrey 107 Hepburn, Katharine 108 Herzog, Werner 218 Hickenlooper, George 140 High Plains Drifter 47–9 home 24, 26, 31,41, 42, 108, 119, 120, 143 Hopper, Dennis 134 Hounson, Djimion 183

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257

House of Bamboo 115, 117–18 Hughes, Langston 123 Hurston, Zora Neale 123 Hurt, William 186 Hussein, Saddam 155 Huston, John 86, 108, 115 Huston, Walter 63 I Shot Jessie James 115 I Walked with a Zombie 121, 123, 126–8 I Was a Teenage Werewolf 115 identification 30, 88, 155, 161, 168–70, 183, 227 identity 14, 25, 32–4, 83, 87, 112–14, 116, 118, 133, 157, 162, 187, 210, 205 In a Lonely Place 100 In the Land of the Headhunters 232 Incredible Shrinking Man 113 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom 174 Intolerance 6, 68 Invaders from Mars 113–14 Invasion of the Body Snatchers 109–12, 114, 117, 130 Isle of the Dead 105 It Came from Beyond the Sea 113 Jackson, Peter 213, 215–19, 223–4, 226–7 Jane Eyre (Brontë) 126 Jarmusch, Jim 192–211, 237 Jaws 181, 182, 237 jazz 123 Johansson, Scarlett 165 Jung, C. G. 176–7, 179 Jurassic Park 180 Karloff, Boris 56, 104 Kaurismäki, Mika 196 Kerr, Deborah 107 Key Largo 115 Khan, Ghengis 55, 57 Kiarostami, Abbas 191 Kilcher, Q’Orianka 21 Killers, The (1946) 88, 97–9 Killers, The (1964) 100 King Kong (1933) 70, 72, 75–8, 212–24 King Kong (1975) 213, 215 King Kong (2005) 213, 215–19, 221–4 Kipling, Rudyard 53 Kiss Me Deadly 93–7, 99, 165 Kubrick, Stanley 187 Kundun 157–63, 166 Kurosawa Akira 204

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258 Lacan, Jacques 16, 144 Lady from Shanghai 51–2 Lancaster, Burt 43, 98 Lancelot, Sir 128 Land of the Dead 129, 132, 134 Landsberg, Alison 15–16, 186 Lang, Fritz 85, 96, 197 language of the birds 202–3, 209 Last Command, The 82 Last Man on Earth, The 128–9, 236 Last of the Mohicans, The (Fennimore Cooper) 27 Last of the Mohicans, The (1920) 27–8 Last of the Mohicans, The (1936) 28 Last of the Mohicans, The (1993) 28–31, 45, 171 Last Supper, The 183 Last Temptation of Christ, The 157 Laughton, Charles 104 Lawrence, Jacob 122 Leachman, Cloris 95 Leech Woman, The 113 Legrand, Gérard 90 Leone, Sergio 47 Lewis, Joseph H. 85 Lewton, Val 126 Little Buddha 157 Lorre, Peter 104 Lovecraft, H. P. 105 Loy, Myrna 56, 232 Lucas, George 141, 177 Lugosi, Bela 104, 124, 230 Luke, Jorge 45 Lupino, Ida 100 Lurie, John 195, 196 Lynch, David 156 Macao 62 Malick, Terrence 20–4, 28, 200 Malkovich, John 163 Man Called Horse, A 172 Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The 36 manifest destiny 44, 46, 51 Mann, Anthony 85 Mann, Michael 28, 45, 171 Mao Tse-tung 160 March, Frederic 104 Marchetti, Gina 53 Mars Attacks! 156 Martinez, Joaquin 45 Marvin, Lee 101, 156 Marx, Groucho 14

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Index Marx, Karl 63 Mask of Fu Manchu, The 56, 228 Mason, James 107 Maté, Rudolph 85, 87 Matheson, Richard 128 Mathison, Melissa 158–60 Mature, Victor 63 McCarthy, Kevin 111 McCarthyism 85, 103, 106, 110, 119 McCrea, Joel 72 McCullers, Carson 3 McGraw, Charles 99 McLuhan, Marshall 209 McReady, George 89 McVay, Douglas 64 Mead, Margaret 217 Meeker, Ralph 94, 117 Meirelles, Fernando 228 melting pot 26, 51, 159 memory viii, 16, 177, 186 Menzies, William Cameron 113 Merril’s Marauders 115 Métraux, Alfred 124 Michaux, Henri 202 Mifune Toshiro 156 Minority Report 176, 182 Minotaur 88, 94 miscegenation 39, 57, 62, 118 Mitchum, Robert 97, 196 Moana 70–1 Moby Dick 155, 181 Monster from Green Hell The 113 Monster that Challenged the World, The 113 Morocco 81, 82 Morrow, Vic 115 Most Dangerous Game, The 77 MPPDA ix, x Munich 176, 179, 188–90 Munson, Una 63, 82 Murders in the Rue Morgue, The 105 Murnau, F. W. 71–2, 234 Murray, Bill 165 169, 193, 236 Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu, The 54 Mystery of Fu Manchu, The (Rohmer) 55 Mystery of the Wax Museum, The 105 Mystery Train 196 Nanook of the North 68–71, 232–3 Naremore, James 85–6 New World, The 20–4, 200 Nietzsche, Friedrich 202 Night of the Living Dead 128–32, 135

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Index Night on Earth 195, 196 Nolley, Ken 37–8 Novalis 211 O’Brien, Edmund 46, 98 O’Brien, Frederick J. 71 O’Brien, Geoffrey 101 O’Brien, Willis 75, 214, 219 Odds Against Tomorrow 255 On Dangerous Ground 100 Ophuls, Max 85 Orientalism 8, 118, 170, 228 Orland, Walter 67 Out of the Past 97–8, 101 Outlaw Josey Wales, The 43 P’u Yi 162 Passer, Ivan 156 Pavement Butterfly 232 Peckinpah, Sam 46–7 Permanent Vacation 198 Piccadilly 232 Pick Up on South Street 106, 115, 117 Pocahontas 20 Poe, Edgar Allen 105 Polanski, Roman 51, 53, 118 Pontecorvo, Gilo 188 Prats, Armando José 31, 35, 41, 43–4 Preminger, Otto 85 Price-Mars, Jean 122 Proyas, Alex 17, 156 Quinn, Anthony 108 racism 5, 6, 54, 76, 116,122, 214, 221 Raiders of the Lost Ark 178 Rains, Claude 104 Rashomon 204 Rathbone, Basil 104 Ray, Nicholas 69, 100, 233 Reagan, Ronald 101, 114 Red Cloud 42 Red Harvest (Hammett) 47 representation 6–10, 36, 38, 70, 76, 82, 135, 159–60, 167, 170, 204, 215–7, 226, 227 Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves 9 Robin of Sherwood 9 Robinson, Edward G. 96–7 Robinson, Jill 4 Rodgers, Gaby 95 Rohmer, Sax 54–5 Romero, George 40, 128–35

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259

Rose, Ruth 220 Rosenbaum, Jonathan 199–200 Rosi, Francesco 188 Run of the Arrow 42–3, 116, 117 Ryan, Robert 46, 100, 117 RZA 206–7 sacrifice 148–9, 152–3, 216–17, 221–2 Sade, Donatian Alphonse François 56 Saga of Anatahan, The 65, 82 Said, Edward 8, 65 Salkov, Sidney 128–9 Salvation Hunters, The 82 Sankofa 188 Savage Innocents, The 69 Sayles, John 156 Scarlet Street 96 Schindler’s List 179, 181, 182, 190 Schoedsack, Ernest 70–7, 79, 212, 214, 234 Schrader, Paul 156 Schwarzenager, Arnold 16 Scorsese, Martin 157–61 Scott, Ridley 16, 156 Seabrook, William 126 Searchers, The 35–42, 44–5 Serpent and the Rainbow, The 123 Set Up, The 235 Seventh Victim, The 105 Shadoian, Jack 94 Shaheen, Jack 9 Shanghai Express 52, 60–6, 67, 82 Shanghai Gesture, The 52, 60–6, 82, 171 Shanghai Triad 66 She Wore a Yellow Ribbon 38 Sheen, Martin 139 Sheltering Sky, The 9, 157, 163–6 Shickel, Richard 189–90 Shock Corridor 116 Siegel, Don 100, 109 Simmons, Jean 107 Singer, Bryan 156 Siodmak, Robert 85, 101 Sjöstrom, Victor 78 slavery 123–4, 134, 183 Slotkin, Richard 33–4, 41, 108 Slumdog Millionaire 228 Smith, Clark Ashton 105 Son of Dracula 105 Song 232 Sound of Music, The 235 Spielberg, Steven 173–91, 195, 221, 224, 228

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260 Stack, Robert 117 Stagecoach 35 Stanwyck, Barbara 57–8, 232 Star Wars 141 Steel Helmet, The 115 Steiger, Rod 42 stereotype 62, 76, 170 Sternberg, Josef von 60–7, 80–3, 159, 171, 234 Stranger than Paradise 195 Studi, Wes 20, 230 Sturges, John 115 Sunset Boulevard 87 Švankmajer, Jan 191 Tabu 71 Tarantino, Quintin 203 Tarantula 113 Taxi Driver 160 Teahouse of the August Moon, The 108 technology 14, 135, 193, 209–10, 212, 225 Them! 113 Thing from Another World, The 113 Tierney, Gene 52, 63, 82, 232 Tierney, Lawrence 91 Tigrero: A Film That was Never Made 196 Tönnies, Ferdinand 48 Total Recall 16 Tourneur, Jacques 85, 121, 126 Tourneur, Maurice 27 transgression 12, 119 Trevor, Claire 91–2 Tuareg 165–6 Tuska, Jon 231 Ulmer, Edgar 85 Ulzana’s Raid 43–6, 200, 231 Underworld 82 Unforgiven 48–9 Unknown, The 78, 80 Van Dyke, Woody 71 Van Upp, Virginia 90

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Index Vasey, Ruth ix, x Verboten! 115, 117 Verhoeven, Paul 16 Vidor, Charles 55, 85 Vidor, King 72 Vietnam War 119–20, 122, 135, 137–55 Viva Zapata 108 Voodoo 126–7 Waits, Tom 196 Walsh, Raoul 85 War of the Worlds, The 176, 182 Wasp Woman, The 113 wasteland 143–4 Watts, Naomi 218 Wayne, John 7, 38, 41 Weir, Peter 156 Welles, Orson 51, 86 Wellman, William 57 West of Zanzibar 78, 80 West Side Story 235 Weston, Jessie L. 144, 149 White Dog 116 White Shadows in the South Seas 71 White Zombie 121–6, 128, 130 Wild Bunch, The 46 Wilder, Billy 85, 87 wilderness 18–31, 32–5, 39–42, 46, 138 Williams, Tennessee 3 Winger, Debra 163 Wise, Robert 91–2, 108, 235 Woman in the Window 96 Wong, Anna May 60, 232, 235 Wong, Eugene Franklin 9–10 Wuthering Heights (Brontë) 91 Wyler, William 115 Wynant, H. M. 117 Yamaguchi, Shirley 117 yellow Peril 52–8, 66, 118, 160 Zapata, Emiliano 108 zombi 121–9, 133–4 zombie 121–36, 214 Zwick, Edward 228

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