This article was written as a response to a number of people I know who didn’t see much anything worthwhile in the film in question. I liked it a whole bunch, and basically just wanted to state, as cogently as I could muster, why. Any feedback, dissenting or otherwise, would be wonderful.

In Clint Eastwood’s pivotal Boston-noir piece Mystic River (2003), Tim Robbins plays a broken man named Dave who was, as a young boy, abducted, abused and raped by a couple of pedophiles. In the wake of the murder of his childhood friend’s daughter, Dave’s long-fragile psyche begins a tragic descent into complete psychosis, and after his wife arrives home late one night to find him watching “some vampire movie” in a despondent slump, he makes the following desperate and disjointed attempt to explain things to her:

Know what I was thinking about? Vampires… [t]hey’re un-dead, but I think maybe there’s something beautiful about it. Maybe one day you wake up and you forget what it’s like to be human. Maybe then it’s okay… They [the kidnappers] were wolves, and Dave was the boy who escaped from wolves… They took me on a four-day ride. They buried me in this ratty old cellar with a sleeping bag. And man, Celeste, did they have their fun… Dave’s dead. I don’t know who came out of that cellar, but it sure as shit wasn’t Dave. You see, honey… it’s like vampires. Once it’s in you, it stays.

This is the metaphor at the heart of Let the Right One In, although it doesn’t really stop there. It’s at the heart of the film, all through its veins and sometimes right out its orifices – taken to such plentiful extremes that it becomes damn-near literal. I don’t say this as rebuke or criticism: extremity of metaphor is a staple of all great horror, and if, for the Victorian gothic novel, vampirism was nothing less than sexuality itself (base, exotic, dangerous and irresistible), then for twenty-first century audiences it must find a more contemporary taboo. The one best suited, as Let the Right One In demonstrates, is paedophilia, turning everything about the vampiric condition that is monstrously sexual into something about the human condition that is sexually monstrous.

Twelve year-old Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) lives with his mother in an apartment complex, surrounded by snowy, small-town Sweden and severe, peer-based victimization. Eli (Lina Leandersson), also twelve, has just moved into the adjoining apartment, accompanied by an old man who seems oddly subservient to her. That’s the least of what’s odd about Eli, though – higher up on the list are that she only appears at night, she can fly and she lives off human blood. Namely for those reasons, she tells Oskar right off the bat that they can’t be friends… but she doesn’t really enforce it. Before too long, friends is just what they are, and before much longer, there’s definite prepubescent romance.

There’s a few qualifications I should make about that summary, but before I do I’d like to point out that getting bogged down in the plot specifics of a film like this is a mistake – it isn’t uneventful, but it is slow, and situational, and atmospheric. And reading it as a horror film (at least in the traditional sense) is a mistake, too – there’s blood and death and darkness, but nothing that overrides the increasing sensibility of pathos. Everything that is here expressed of gore and terror is just an echo; a perpetuation of whatever despicable act drained the colour from Eli’s face and haunts her eyes with despair. In this particular case it was supernatural, but it could easily have been completely human; such is the transcendence of Leandersson’s performance and presence, which consistently project innocence that’s been wounded by the world.

I mention that both the children live with adult guardians, but for all the film’s intents and purposes they live alone, syphoned off from the rest of humanity by sheer indifference on humanity’s part. The adults of the town get to gather in restaurants and have drinks and discuss politics (Russians and rattlesnakes), and for them, the events of Let the Right One In probably do feel, unreservedly, like a horror movie. There’s something coldly unsympathetic about their plight, though, because they are complacent pieces in the irresponsible society that got these kids so damaged in the first place. Even before the insertion of a vampire child, this is evident: no one seems to care that Oskar spends his time wandering around by himself in the snow, threatening imaginary fiends like a little Travis Bickle, or standing in solitude before a window, linking hands with his own reflection. He isn’t damaged like Eli, but he’s getting there – he is a chronic misfit, and if she hadn’t shown up, then the school bully (whose torments harbour disturbing elements of homosexual sadomasochism) would probably have killed him. By the same token, if Eli hadn’t met Oskar, she probably wouldn’t have ever remembered how to smile, or feel things. What it’s like to be human. It’s their very isolation that connects them, which is established early on: “I want to be left alone,” she tells him when they both find themselves sitting in the courtyard. “So do I,” he retorts, and so they tacitly concede to be alone, together.

Of course, Eli’s isolation is deeper than Oskar’s, born of her affliction and, we suspect, the unsavoury relationship she has with the old man who shelters her. We don’t get much explicit dictation on the nature of this relationship (though there is something about Eli’s sexual history that is made incredibly explicit), but as I’ve intimated, it’s mostly the vampire part that lays the sexual abuse undertones: years ago, some human animal did something awful to this little girl, and now she’s cursed with it, closed off from intimacy, eternally arrested in the moment of her ruin.  “I’ve been twelve for a long time,” she admits to Oskar – like Dave of Mystic River, Eli never came out of the cellar.

But because Oskar knows his fair share of abuse and neglect and loneliness, the nice part is that she doesn’t have to – he’s perfectly willing to keep her company down there, and maybe shed a light or two. It takes a while for each to get used to this arrangement: still with most his innocence intact, Oskar can’t help but stumble occasionally over the dangerous terrain of Eli’s dark maturity. He offers her candy, but consuming solid food makes her ill; he tries to cement their bond by playing blood-brothers, but she runs scared for the hunger; and, upon discovering what she is, he plays an innocuous game of getting her to enter uninvited, which invokes a terribly un-innocuous consequence (and confronts his prepubescent mind with a spectacularly grotesque menstruation metaphor). Make no mistake though: this is not about coming of age, because age, through the tragic conceptions of this film, is evil. It’s about forging a youthful light and warmth against night and snow, and if the end result finds itself morally dialectic (which the climactic scene, taking place by a swimming pool, surely does), then it isn’t the fault of Eli and Oskar, but of everybody else.

Particularly with regards to this last, the film shares a specific characteristic with Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), in that it is an adult movie about children dealing with adult matters that never betrays the child’s guileless perspective. This is more the achievement of Alfredson that one might think: from what I’ve heard of the original novel, a great deal of things (including the revelation regarding Eli’s sexuality that I haven’t much discussed) were dwelt upon in detail that are here simply, and very wisely, hinted at. We don’t need to see the act of destruction, merely the aftermath of desolation, and we don’t need the implications galvanized, merely the metaphors extreme. This approach may lead to misconstruction, but it’s also infinitely more poetic.

What I mean is, sexuality is the elephant in the room through most of Let the Right One In, and though everybody duly refrains from talking about it, we do occasionally catch them glancing, uneasily, in its direction—Eli’s guardian asks that she do one thing for him, and “not see that boy tonight”, to which she responds by gently stroking the old man’s face, while Oskar’s once-in-a-blue-moon visit to his father is ruined by the arrival of a creepy family friend who won’t stop staring at him. So when, in a bed-sharing scene, the two children agree to officially “go steady”, we may accidentally read their intimacy and mild physicality as prematurely sexual – it isn’t. It is, as is all the film, the emotional solidarity of children unloved, reaching out through the adult damage they’ve sustained to find that beautifully innocent state of engagement: ‘I really like you’. Even if you are a misfit; even if you are a monster.

One may even speak of a culture, in which senseless killing and violence now belong to the Serbs’ sense of themselves: as a wounded people that keep on wounding themselves, and even their best friends and neighbours. We can apply Mark Seltzer’s notion of America’s “wound culture” to modern Serbia. The wound stands paradigmatically as a metaphor for a culture that is traumatized by endless war and everyday violence, and morbidly obsessed with it.

-Igor Krstic, Serbia’s Wound Culture: Teenage Killers in Milosevic’s Serbia. p. 101

The social and psychological impact of genocide on a people is undeniable. In the wake of such a catastrophic event, the mind must attempt to process the hows and whys of what has happened and find a way to live in the aftermath of those events. The pain and suffering of the genocide become a part of the cultural identity of both victims and perpetrators and the evidence of this newfound component of their cultural identity trickles down through all levels of society. An excellent example is the media which a culture produces in the wake of genocide. The artists who create these creative works are not any more or less affected by the genocide than any other members of society and, deliberately or subconsciously, their works of art will reflect the changes that have occurred in the wake of genocide or other devastating cultural event. In this paper we use Srdan Dragojevic’s Rane(which translates as “The Wounds”) as a case study to explore the role of film and media in understanding the advent and consequences of genocide to a people. Due to the restriction of space, we will assume that the reader has a general familiarity with the Bosnian genocide, though all information pertinent to the examples given from the film will be included. While, optimally, we would spend a thousand words on both the Bosnian genocide and critical film theory, this would prevent us from achieving the level of analysis required to answer the question. We will also assume that readers have seen Rane and a copy has been included with this submission. Let us begin with a short summary of the interpretive methods we will use to analyse Rane.

The first thing we must acknowledge, when critically examining a film, is that it is completely constructed, an artifice which has been created through an enormous process of deliberation and arrangement. Each component of a film has been placed there to the exclusion of thousands of other possible choices. From the soundtrack to the lighting, the character names to what appears in any given shot, every detail has been deliberately placed before us on the screen. In the academic jargon of cinema studies, this construction is referred to as mise en scene. This stems from a French phrase which literally means “putting into the scene” and was first applied to the practice of directing plays. It was adopted by film scholars to describe the director’s control over what appears in the film frame. Secondly, we must briefly outline a key concept in cinema studies, that of the auteur. Like photography, when film first appeared, it was considered too industrial to be an artistic endeavour.  It used machinery to reproduce an image and studios mass produced films for public consumption. As a result, film makers were relegated to the category of technicians, rather than artists. At the very least, particularly in France, a distinction was drawn between commercial film (typically American) and the European Art Film movement. This changed in the mid-1950s, when a group of young French filmmakers published a number of articles in Cashiers du Cinema, a prominent French film journal, which asserted the idea of the film director as artist. They argued that, of all the hundreds of people who contributed to a film, the director had the most broad-reaching control and, thus, authorial voice. They claimed that, over the career of particular directors, we can see certain trends or preoccupations in their films and it is these directors that can truly be considered artists or auteurs. It is very important that we bear these two concepts in mind because, in our analysis of Rane, we will be regarding Srdan Dragojevic as an auteur and referring to his manipulation of mise en scene to educate his audience about the Bosnian Genocide. Now, without further delay, we will examine what we can learn from Rane about the cultural legacy and impact of the Bosnian Genocide on the Serbian and Croatian people.

At its heart, Rane is a film about what happens to a generation of young men who are disconnected from their cultural inheritance of masculinity and community, and the new cultural practices which they introduce to replace those which have been lost. Using the classic structure of a Hollywood Film Noir (two friends, torn apart by a femme fatal and a corrupt world) Rane presents us with a picture of progressive social and economic deterioration in Serbia between 1991 and 1996. It follows the descent of two young Serbian boys, Pinki and Svaba (which loosely translates to ‘Kraut’) into the expansive criminal underground which arose in Serbia during the Yugoslav wars. The film is almost obsessive in its exploration of the disappearance of Serbian traditional folk culture and its replacement with kitsch trash culture and, particularly among young men, wound culture. We will begin by exploring the idea of the rise of trash culture in Serbia during the 1990s, we will then explore the idea of wound culture.

Over the course of any protracted conflict a great number of people die. When we add genocide to the mix, the number greatly increases. Let us consider for a moment the demographic most likely to engage in, and die as a result of, warfare. On both sides of a conflict it is the 18 to 30 year old males who fight. In the case of Serbia, not only did many men die during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, many had died during the Yugoslav People’s Liberation War (which occurred during World War II in Yugoslavia). The natural effect of this was that many young people growing up in Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s did not have fathers or grandfathers from whom they could inherit their cultural rites of passage, celebrations or religious practices. Even when these rites or events were observed, such an observation became a pale, superficial imitation of the original practice. The result is the amalgamation of traditional Eastern European folklore with popular culture which fills the void left from the severed familial link to the original beliefs and practices of the culture. This cultural heritage is replaced by a “trash culture” which is “replete with signs, commodities and symbols of kitsch, camp and trash” (Krstic, 98). We can see countless examples and representations of this trash culture in Rane, in fact the mise en scene is relentless in its depiction of the new Serbian culture of the 1990s.

The most immediate example of trash culture presented to the viewer in Rane is the blaring Turbofolk soundtrack which assaults the audience during the opening credits and continues as a prominent feature of the film’s soundtrack. Dutch anthropologist, Mathijs van de Port describes Turbofolk as an amalgamation of text, vision and music which draws upon the traditional and modern. Classic folk melodies are used to sing about contemporary topics such as “foreign currency, weekend romances, tractors and bio-energy” (Mathijs van de Port, 57). The traditional meanings and significance of the songs are lost, discarded in favour of the trappings of modern, commercial life. There are several clues which suggest to us that Turbofolk serves a greater function than merely acting as a soundtrack or audio context for the film. Significantly, if we look to Kure (which is an affectionate shortening of a Serbian name, the loose equivalent to “Dickie” or “Sammy”) and Suzana (Pinki and Svaba’s first mentors in the ways of the Serbian criminal underground) we find stellar examples of Turbofolk culture. Suzana herself is a Turbofolk singer and both her and Kure surround themselves with the material symbols of trash culture; gold crucifix pendants, a BMW and brand clothing and shoes. Kure wears a crucifix, but doesn’t attend church or express any faith in the film. The crucifix has ceased to be a symbol of Christianity and become a symbol of Serbian cultural heritage. Similarly, while shooting heroin Kure demands that Pinki and Svaba sing Serbian folk songs not because he believes in the message of the songs, but because (like his crucifix) they are one of the handful of things he has to connect him to his culture.

At the other end of the spectrum, we find Svaba’s grandmother who lives in an urban apartment, surrounded by chickens and living in the glow of her television screen. Fed copious amounts of narcotics by her grandson, she exists in a twilight world in which the modern and traditional merge, where she recounts stories of the massacres of the Second World War in a fairy tale narrative format. With the exception of her grandson, Svaba, all of her family are dead (or at least absent) and her only connection to the world is through the trash culture lens of her grandson and her television. We can see from this that Rane presents us with a society which is experiencing a cultural vaccum, which is in part being filled by trash culture. Trash culture, however, is not the only thing which fills this void nor is the primary concern of the film. There is a darker consequence to the cultural void left by the Yugoslav wars and Bosnian genocide; Wound Culture.

From the very first scene of Rane, Dragojevic presents us with a world dripping with violence and the after effects of violence. This violence and violent culture is often intimately paired with the images of trash culture which we discussed above. For example, the film begins in (and spends much of its time in) a graveyard, which houses both graves and the rusted chassis of old cars and buses. This amalgamation of scrap-yard and graveyard images suggests a close link between the mass-production and consumption of trash culture and death. Similarly, while Kure does push-ups and watches Puls Asfalta (a television show in the film in which criminals are idolized and interviewed) we can see an image of the Last Supper in the background, another marriage of the religious or spiritual simulacra of trash culture and the death and violent crime which were rife in 1990s Serbia. The very first image we see in the film is a crucifix pendant (complete with crucified Christ figure) which is immediately paired with the introduction of the main character, Pinki, who is nursing what appear to be grievous gunshot wounds. Repeatedly, Dragojevic pairs the cultural vacuum of trash culture with death, injury and pain. Perhaps the ultimate instance of this pairing occurs in a scene in which Kure engages in a titanic brawl (in which he wields an entire spit roasted pig as a bizarre bludgeoning weapon) in the club in which Suzana works, while she weeps and sing a Turbofolk song as the fight rages beneath her. While the mise en scene of Rane contains an abundant amount of pairings between the violent and the kitsch, suggesting a cultural centrality of violence in 1990s Serbia, we need not limit ourselves to the subtleties of mise en scene to understand the film’s message about Serbian wound culture; we need only look to the film’s protagonists, Pinki and Svaba.

From the start of the film, we know that violence, and in particular wounds, are central to the film. When we are introduced to Pinki and Svaba they are in a car, driving through the tumultuous anti-Milosevic protests of 1996, Pinki nursing some grievous wounds. The violent and frenetic aesthetic of the riots (much of the footage we see of them is archival) suggests a general violence and destabilization in the characters’ environment, while Pinki’s wounds (and the casual way in which he relates to them) firmly grounds that violent aesthetic in the realm of the personal. We then flashback to the previously mentioned graveyard / scrapyard in which Pinki and Svaba play Serbs vs Croats (essentially cowboys and Indians) with their friend Dijabola. Teams are not chosen, but are allocated based on the ethnicity of the boys fathers, this means that Pinki and Svaba default to Serb and Dijabola defaults to Croatian. We know from the dialogue that these boys have grown up together and consider one another friends, but now one of the ways in which they ritually relate to one another is to throw rocks at each other because of their ethnic differences. When Dijabola cries and asserts that he isn’t a Croat, Svaba replies “Serbs don’t cry like pussies”. This may seem like an inconsequential moment, which could be attributed to male adolescence, but in the context of the ethnically motivated stoning of Dijabola and the arbitrary system of categorization we are given a window into the bizarre nature of the Yugoslav wars. These boys have no reason to hurt one another, but they do, ritualistically, as if it were expected.

Earlier, when discussing the rise of trash culture, we noted that one of the central factors in creating this cultural vacuum is the absence of paternal figures and this is central, perhaps even more so, to the rise of wound culture. As mentioned above, Svaba’s parents are completely absent and he lives with his grandmother in an urban apartment, completely devoid of a father figure. Pinki lives with his parents and, while he has a father, he’s somewhat of a buffoon. While Pinki loves his father it is clear that he does not respect him however, unlike Svaba, he at least has a male role-model. Svaba substitutes his absent father with one of the only prominent figures of masculinity in the neighbourhood, Kure. Kure never fought for any cause and places little or no worth in traditional Serbian culture. As we have described earlier, Kure is the poster child for trash culture and a gangster. Svaba introduces Pinki to Kure and the two begin to work for him, dealing drugs. Svaba is the most loyal and zealous to Kure’s lifestyle and philosophy. He eagerly engages in violent crime and Kure’s initiation ceremonies (such as running headlong into Kure’s fist repeatedly as a measure of withstanding pain) while Pinki remains distant. This resistance to the violent lifestyle and philosophy of Kure and Svaba abruptly ends when Pinki’s father kills himself. He joins Svaba in a spiralling descent into drugs and violent crime, and even explicitly states “Torture helped me forget my stupid dead father”. The two become obsessed with being gangsters, not with the profits of crime, but the status of it. Ultimately, however, there is no greater example of Wound Culture and the results of a cultural vacuum from a war than the chilling final scene of the film.

After a dispute over a lover Svaba shoots Pinki five times. Pinki prematurely leaves hospital, finds Svaba and the two travel to the graveyard to complete an unspoken pact. There is no malice or hatred between the two boys, just an understanding that in order to level the score, Pinki must shoot Svaba five times. They even stop at a pharmacist to get bandages and gauze so that Svaba won’t bleed to death. For these boys this is the only way to resolve the situation. Dijabola arrives with an automatic weapon and, in a grim parody of the opening scene the boys play out their Serbian vs Croatian game, this time with bullets instead of rocks. The result is a harsh condemnation of the Milosevic regime and its effects on subsequent generations, particularly the young men of those generations.

To conclude we can see, even from this brief overview that Dragojevic’s Rane is completely fixated on the cultural devastation which occurred as a result of the Yugoslav wars and Bosnian genocide. More than exploiting a moment in history for dramatic effect, Dragojecic shows us the consequences of the loss of patriarchs from a traditionally patriarchal society. We can see that when Serbia lost its connection to its traditional, cultural heritage a cultural vacuum was created, which was filled with trash culture and wound culture and Dragojevic is a true auteur in the sense that he has a clear agenda to educate people about post-Tito Serbia. At every moment he meticulously manipulates the mise en scene of his film to communicate the trappings of trash and wound culture. There was, unfortunately, much we did not have space to cover and this author encourages you, and anyone interested in the cultural impact of the Yugoslav wars, to look closely at Rane. It is a powerful and convincing model for the things we can learn from fictional films which explore historical events.

Bibliography and Further Reading List

• Benson, L. Yugoslavia: A concise history. Palgrave MacMillan. London: UK. 2002.
• Bordwell, D. & Thompson K. Film Art: An Introduction, 7^th edn, McGraw-Hill, New York: New York. 2004.
• Gabrino, J. Beyond the Body Count: Moderating the effects of war on children. In R. Lerner (ed) Handbook of Applied Developmental Science. Volume 2. Sage Publications. Thousand Oaks: California. 2003.
• Krstic, I. Serbia’s Wound Culture: Teenage Killers in Milosevic’s Serbia. In Horton, A. (ed) The Central Europe Review: The Celluloid Tinderbox. www.ce-review.org published 2000. Viewed on 5/10/2009.
• Leavitt, L. & Fox, N. The Psychological Effects of War and Violence on Children. Laurence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale: New Jersey. 1993
• Mcleod, M. Saw and spectre of 9/11 in contemporary horror. Published 10/11/2008 www.pleasantfluff.com/saw viewed on 10/10/2009.
• Norwell-Smith, G. (ed) The Oxford History of World Cinema, 1^st edn, Oxford University Press, Oxford: New York. 1996.
• Rane, Srdan Dragojevic (dir), Performances: Dusan Pekic & Milan Maric. DVD. First Run Features. 2000.
• Van de Port, M. Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild. Civilisation in a Serbian Town. Amsterdam, 1998.

Here at pleasantfluff.com, we’re all massive fans of Fight Club and today marks the 10th anniversary of its general release in cinemas. In order to celebrate, we’re going to publishing Mr. Bailey Smith’s article on it and (one of) its Japanese counterparts, Battle Royale. We had hoped to get it out by today, but we’re all bogged down in the end of semester quagmire.

Enough bleating! Happy Birthday Fight Club, may you inspire many more young men to adopt an iconoclastic stance in our increasingly alienating world.

Part I

Introduction

Mulvey’s psychoanalytic feminist film theory had many implications for the study of cinema, and this essay aims to first delineate the way in which these implications have influenced and challenged feminist film theory. Mulvey’s article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” raised several issues which have been taken up by feminist film theorists since; as primary examples in relation to horror cinema I use Barbara Creed and Carol Clover, whose works on the monstrous-feminine and the slasher film (respectively) are both seminal and deeply indebted to Mulvey’s theory. The examination of those sources in relation to Mulvey’s theory concludes Part I of this essay.

Part II will analyse two modern horror films which, I argue, take as their subject woman and the feminine in ways which challenge and oppose what Mulvey calls “the language of the dominant patriarchal order” (Mulvey 485). This essay will argue that it is now possible to attempt an analysis of some – by no means all – modern horror cinema, which occupies a position outside of traditional or mainstream patriarchal codification, a position referred to (and henceforth described) as primal sisterhood. ¹

Laura Mulvey’s psychoanalytic feminist film theory and its implications.

In her paper “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Mulvey posits that “the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form,” but that “the paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world” (Mulvey 483). She goes on to describe woman’s central place in the ordering of the patriarchal, and her constitution as signifier of phallic lack; symbolically, woman “as representation signifies castration, inducing voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent her threat” (Ibid. 493).

It was this idea of woman not only as signifier of castration, but as deadly castrator herself, that Barbara Creed theorised in The Monstrous-Feminine (1993), taking as her starting point a lack of discussion of “the representation of woman-as-monster. Instead,” Creed states, “emphasis has been on woman as victim of the (mainly male) monster” (Creed – Monstrous-Feminine 1). But Creed’s analysis by no means suggests that the presence of the monstrous-feminine in cinema indicates a break from the structures of patriarchal language which Mulvey aimed to attack (Creed – Monstrous-Feminine 7, Mulvey 484 respectively). Instead, the monstrous-feminine “speaks more to us about male fears than about female desire or feminine subjectivity” (Creed Ibid.). In effect, whilst theorising the monstrous-feminine gives us access to images of woman previously repressed, it does not constitute a theory of the “female unconscious” independent of phallocentric theory. Nonetheless, to challenge the phallocentric ordering of the unconscious as represented in film is what Mulvey sought.

Carol Clover took Mulvey’s theory (among others) and used the slasher film to demonstrate how the gaze has changed in modern horror – and not just the gaze, but the modes of gender identification at work in cinema. Sue Thornham states in Feminist Film Theory: a reader that Clover argues for an “ambiguous and oscillating gender identity of the slasher film’s Final Girl (which) allows its male spectator, too, to oscillate between ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ viewing positions” (230-231).

But in Clover’s own words it is more than that; in relation to Mulvey’s theory (here quoting Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”):

“The classic split between ‘spectacle and narrative, which ‘supposes the man’s role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen’, is at least unsettled in the slasher film. When the Final Girl…assumes the ‘active investigating gaze’, she exactly reverses the look, making a spectacle of the killer and a spectator of herself.

(…)The gaze becomes, at least for awhile, female. More to the point, the female exercise of scopic control results not in her annihilation, in the manner of classic cinema, but in her triumph; indeed, her triumph depends on her assumption of the gaze.” (Clover 245)

What Clover argues the slasher film does, and I argue, what the following films attempt, is what Mulvey called for in her article; a breaking down of dominating, structuring convention, and a constitution of the feminine which does not depend solely on the codes of the patriarchal unconscious in order to be made intelligible. ²

Part II

Primal Sisterhood versus Female Solidarity in Ginger Snaps.

“Woman, animal, death,” Barbara Creed argues, “they are inextricably linked” (Creed Phallic Panic 25). For Creed, they form the essential features of what she calls the primal uncanny (Ibid. 24). In Ginger Snaps, we are clearly in the realm of the primal uncanny; it is the accompanying idea of “sisterhood” which gives us trouble here. ³

In Sue Short’s analysis of Ginger Snaps she quotes Molly Haskell, “framed very much as a lament”, asking the question “where…is the camaraderie, the much vaunted mutual support among women?” (Short 88-89). One of Short’s concerns is “the difficulties of establishing female solidarity, and the greater tendency to depict women in competition with one another” (Ibid.88). The idea that there should be any kind of female solidarity at all is something Ginger Snaps toys with; the sisters Ginger and Brigitte, despite a blood pact which appears twice in the film – and at the end, its import is magnified and transformed by the transference of the lycanthropic virus from one sister to the other – are still divided in the realm of sex, puberty and identity, to the extent that one sister must kill the other, but not before becoming her. For Haskell, this undermines “feminist” notions of unity; but for critical feminism, and by extension I argue the female unconscious (because when we are in the realm of the primal as we are in Ginger Snaps, I argue that we are dealing with issues of the female unconscious) this is the issue of the female subject – within feminism, within society – described perfectly.

Sue Short points to the depiction of women in competition with one another in order to draw this link with Haskell’s lament, essentially arguing that female characters such as Ginger and Brigitte represent the disintegration of the female subject, pointing to rivalry, jealousy and aggression as things which attack female kinship and ultimately destroy it – “Brigitte holds her dead sister…more wolf than human…‘not even related any more’” (Short 98). According to Short, “Brigitte is ultimately forced to make a separation, exclaiming… ‘I’m not dying in this room with you’” – a separation which I do not believe exists, as Brigitte, infected voluntarily with lycanthropy, holds her sister in her arms as she dies. The phrase “I’m not dying in this room with you” can be read to emphasise Brigitte’s wish for Ginger to survive, breaking not only the curse of lycanthropy but the suicide pact the sisters have made and renewed with lycanthropy. Here, it is the “camaraderie” and “solidarity” of the female – expressed by blood pact – which must be broken in order for the feminine to survive, suggesting that the survival of the feminine is more than just a matter of keeping the female subject “solid”.

Ginger Snaps is more than a cautionary tale; it is a complex rendering of the fight to define the female subject against a flattened, “universal” image, regardless of whether any of the females concerned achieve success. It is this fight which Short labels “competition” and “rivalry”, setting the struggle against an unfortunately sexist background which dictates that women should stick together, and that competitive, aggressive behaviour towards other females is “masculine”, a stance Creed criticises and which I refer to above in Part I.

The cautionary aspect of such a reading is further undermined by the “accidental kill” – of all the murder and mayhem executed by Ginger, it is the off-hand, accidental death of Trina which threatens the sisters the most. This is a motif found in both Ginger Snaps and The Descent, but its wider significance is beyond the scope of this essay.

Instead, if we can view the overriding themes of Ginger Snaps as the unifying factors of a kind of primal femininity – blood/fluids/death, woman/sexuality/violence, animal/nature/the pre-patriarchal – then we can examine Ginger (who represents almost all these aspects) and Brigitte (seemingly a pre-patriarchal, pre-sexual girl who nonetheless gets her hands dirty, assuming Ginger’s “identity” as a werewolf in order to find a cure for her sister by engaging in a tense relationship with an overtly mature male figure and eventually killing her sister in a bloody battle), and the other significant female figures of the film (Pamela, the mother who takes responsibility for Trina’s death against all logic, and Trina, the school bitch who Ginger accidentally kills with little aggression and less sympathy), as signifying not aspects of a divided self but aspects of a female subject which, by nature, is in competition with itself and which is constituted (not deconstituted) in the violence of such exchanges. If this is not an obviously “empowering” view of the emergence of a female unconscious order to rival the patriarchal, then we must question the assumption that such an emergence should be “empowering” at all.

Feminism, Cannibalism, and the Female Subject in The Descent.

Here too we are clearly in the realm of the primal – six women descend into the twisting bowels of the earth, muck about in a lot of mud, blood and guts, and finally die there – though it is more the abjection of Creed’s theory (Creed – Monstrous-Feminine 8-14) than the primal uncanny itself. However, abjection in relation to the feminine face of the monstrous does not adequately describe the horror delineated by The Descent – of which the abject constitutes only a third of the film’s horrific or monstrous content. Before the six women encounter the deformed, evolved/devolved humanoids which pursue them through pools and caverns full of human and animal remains in all stages of decomposition and eventually eat them, they first voluntarily elect to descend, and in the final sequence each of their deaths (and Sarah’s entombment in her own madness, both physical and symbolic) is in fact a result of each woman’s transgressions against one (or more) of her sisters. It is this painful exercise in subtle horror – the horror of the female subject essentially eating itself, without the use of teeth – that we find compelling in the first two thirds of the film, and which bears fruit in the overt form of the abject in the last third.

Of no small import is the fact that, with the exception of Juno’s accidental butchery of Beth, and Sarah’s subsequent butchering of Juno, all these transgressions are forgiven – or rather, dismissed. Even when it is only us, as an audience, who can comment on the transgression – as when Sarah first enters the cave, finds a bloody fingerprint, but neglects to say anything about it and thereby allows the entire group to descend unwitting into a trap full of cannibals. We forgive her, because she – and we – are then distracted by a flock of bats bursting out of the darkness to frighten Sarah – and us.

Even Juno’s betrayal of Beth, and Beth’s dying message to Sarah, has this element of forgiveness/dismissal – Juno “kills” Beth by stabbing her in the neck with an ice-pick, but Beth’s response is to plead, “don’t leave me”. When Sarah later finds Beth, dying but not yet dead, Beth’s words again are “she did this to me – she left me”, not “she killed me”, or “she stabbed me in the bloody neck”. For Beth, the transgression is not in the accident, but in the emotional betrayal that proceeds it – both hers, when Juno leaves her, and Sarah’s, when Beth rips the necklace from Juno as she falls and discovers Juno’s affair with Sarah’s now-dead husband. It is not the killing female which Beth (and the spectator) finds monstrous, but the idea of the female abandoning itself. This notion is repeated in the final exchange between Sarah and Juno – even though we have followed Sarah’s parallel descent into the primal, animalistic, pre-patriarchal state closer perhaps than we have followed Juno’s, it is still with Juno that our sympathies lie when Sarah butchers her, exacting revenge and leaving her for the monsters. All of this is Juno’s fault – it was her “ego” and misguided wish which trapped the women in the uncharted cave in the first place – yet we sympathise with her because she has been betrayed by her sister.

We can view this interplay between females – females who take on “masculine” roles without recourse to the presence of the male order within the film, females who continuously affect each other with each decision, good or bad, that they make – as describing the problematisation of the female unconscious. Drawing from Creed and Clover, these women are not merely “phallicised” protagonists; they operate in a world which is too female, too abject, too primal – marked as it is by nature, the animal or non-human, by blood, fluids, death, and the pre-patriarchal “cave” or womb of genesis without recourse to sex, where Sarah and Juno are reborn as their primal selves without recourse to the male – to allow them full expression as mere stand-ins for male counterparts. What is described is a spectrum of the female subject, a map of transgression and forgiveness in relation to the self, where the path home is never discovered. But it is a path charted without necessary recourse to the phallic; that there is no clear way out speaks deeply of the feminist nature of the journey.

Conclusion

If Carol Clover was “deeply reluctant to make progressive claims for a body of cinema as spectacularly nasty towards women as the slasher film is,” despite the fact that it does “in its own perverse way and for better or worse, constitute a visible adjustment” (Clover 247), then this essay can profess no such reluctance towards a brand of horror which is uniquely feminine, if no less nasty to its subject.

The Descent and Ginger Snaps may both be purchased on DVD from our online store.

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This essay arose when Bailey and I (both long time Cronenberg fans) had an opportunity to write an essay about him in the same class. Naturally, a competition ensued. Here was my entrant:

For Cronenberg sex represents intimacy, betrayal, sublimation, absorption and the merging of identities all at once. Cronenberg has stated that the body is the “first fact of human existence” (Günberg 95). For Cronenberg our physicality and sensual experience of the world is all that we can know for sure (Günberg 95) and, because it is perhaps the ultimate physical act, sex is the intersection of thought, identity and biology. Any pretence of a higher, non-physical person is subsumed in this act of raw physicality and passion. Videodrome, Naked Lunch and Crash are excellent case studies in Cronenberg’s obsessive pre-occupation with human sexuality because each features a central character whose latent sexuality blossoms over the course of the film, for better or worse. This essay will examine the methods Cronenberg uses to expose and explore the expansive and polymorphous entity that is human sexuality in his films.

Cronenberg was heavily influenced by C. S. Lewis’ work The Allegory of Love, which puts forward the idea that romantic love, as it is known in the western world, is a construct of poetry that arose in the twelfth century (ctd. in Günberg 117). Prior to that point it was unheard of for a gentleman to kneel before a lady or serenade her from the base of a tower. It is apparent that to Cronenberg the western notion of love is a contrived lie. True love, as it appears in his films (and his philosophy), is a more deep-seeded primal experience with its roots in biochemistry (Günberg 122). In essence, love and sex are tied to “a desire to fuse with, to absorb and to somehow cut beneath the surface of” a lover (Günberg 117). The ultimate intimacy lies within the body for Cronenberg. Furthermore, if the west’s accepted ideal of love was invented and taken up in the twelfth century then the implication is twofold. Firstly, there was another, alien, notion of love prior to that and secondly (perhaps more importantly) concepts like love in our society that are presented as absolutes are “variable and they’re open to change and transformation” (Günberg 122).

This notion of nothing being absolute is essential to understanding Cronenberg. He has an obsession with shattering the aesthetics of the modern age and opening the possibility of new ones (Günberg 92). This has an intimate relationship with Cronenberg’s obsession with the body. His films continually attempt to redefine the definition and limitations of the human body and, as a result, human sexuality. In the Videodrome Commentary Cronenberg states, “I love to re-invent the human body”. He goes on to say, “In society now we are allowing the expression of things that a few years ago would not have been allowed … [people] think of these things as sexual delights or explorations. They don’t even want to call these things perversion … but if you [called them] new forms of expressing love, people would probably get very upset.” (Günberg 123). This is evident in Videodrome in many places (such as the ear piercing and sadomasochistic scenes) but also in Videodrome’s general exploration of society’s limits on what the media can and can’t depict (a debate which Cronenberg’s films have often fuelled). Are sex and violence something that will corrupt people from the outside or are they lying dormant within us? For the protagonist of Videodrome, Max Renn, they appear to be very much an existing part of his psyche, waiting to surface.

With societal restrictions and enforcement of a ‘norm’ we’re much less likely to get to the full spectrum of something as complex and varied as human sexuality. People will not readily admit to being aroused by something that is branded ‘perverse’, so how can we hope to know how ubiquitous any sexual fantasy is? This results in the creation of an outward sexual normality which, Videodrome, Nikki Brand is the physical manifestation of. In the television interview with Max she condemns his TV station’s broadcasting of violent and pornographic material despite dressing in a very provocative fashion and flirting with Max off air. Publicly, she presents herself as socially and sexually conservative but, in private, her social and sexual realm of experience very much align with (and exceed) those of Max. Max, on the other hand, is the physical manifestation of the latent perversion. We know that Max always had sadomasochistic tendencies (as evidenced by his branding the series Samurai Dreams ‘too soft’, expressing a desire for something ‘harder’ and more ‘extreme’) but it took meeting Nikki Brand to bring them out.

It is interesting to note the way in which Nikki opens the dialogue on sadomasochism with Max. She goes through his videos, looking for pornography (which she claims ‘gets her in the mood’) and finds Videodrome. The dialogue is as follows:

Nikki: What’s this? Videodrome?

Max: Torture, Murder…

Nikki: Sounds great.

Max: Ain’t exactly sex.

Nikki: Says who?

Nikki then has Max pierce her ears with a needle. Cronenberg comments “For a kind of mini-sadomasochistic experience ear-piercing was quite potent. If you want to introduce someone into the world of sadomasochism then maybe getting them to pierce your ears is the way to do it” (Cronenberg Videodrome Commentary). Just as Nikki is peeling away the layers of what Max finds sexually permissible, Cronenberg is doing the same to his audience. First we are introduced to the notion that there exists a link between pain and sex. Then there is a miniature foray into sadomasochism with the piercing of the ears. The images layer and accumulate until we are flung with Max and Nikki into an alien sexual space; the Videodrome set. The juxtaposition of strong eroticism generated by the sex scene and resonant violence left by our last experience of the Videodrome set combine to violently change our perception of Max and Nikki’s relationship. As their relationship escalates Nikki leads Max through more extreme acts. When she invites him to burn her with a cigarette Cronenberg comments “Nikki’s drawing him into a part of himself that would be better left unexplored. Does this movie draw its audience into places that would be better left unexplored?” (Cronenberg Videodrome Commentary).

As Max is drawn deeper and deeper into his Videodrome hallucination his body, technology, violence and eroticism merge into a single perverse continuum. Nikki’s image appears on Max’s television, the camera zooming in to focus on her red, luscious lips. Max is drawn to the television set, which grows a series of veins and arteries and begins to sensuously pulsate as Max caresses it.  The screen, with Nikki’s lips projecting from it, billows out into a breast shaped dome which Max buries his face in while he caresses the rest of the television set. Beard (134) comments that this organic transformation of the television set “transfer[s] technology into the intimate and personal realm of the body”. For Max and Nikki, Videodrome (and by extension, television) and sex have all bled into one. His aberrant sexual practices with Nikki while watching Videodrome have made television and technology a part of the spectrum of things he finds erotic. When Bianca O’Blivion comes to visit Max, he flies into a rage and slaps her when she mentions Videodrome. For an instant Bianca becomes Nikki as Max slaps her. This is further reinforcement that for Max Nikki, violence and television\Videodrome are intimately linked. We can see from these examples that, at its core, Videodrome is a hallucinatory journey through Max Renn’s innermost desires and this is a common thread that ties all of Cronenberg’s work together.

Of all of Cronenberg’s literary adaptations, Crash and Naked Lunch are the most sexually charged. Both focus on a protagonist who undergoes a journey of transformation in which their latent sexuality manifests itself as a powerful force of change in their lives. In Cronenberg’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs sprawling, anarchic and hallucinatory novel, Naked Lunch, we are presented with a torrent of raw biology and human sexuality. William Beard (282) claims that in order to understand the rampant sexual imagery present in Naked Lunch we must look to Burroughs own psychopathology before we can understand the ways in which Cronenberg co-opts and transforms it in his adaptation.

Burroughs was, at his core, a self-loathing homosexual (Beard 297). He was a man who struggled, through his writing, to rationalize his sexual desires which he equated with “cruelty, violence and a deep [revulsion]” (Beard 297). As a result, Burroughs writings are riddled with images of cruel homosexual sexual predators that prey on young men and transform into monsters during the sexual act. The following example is just one of many:

During the sex act he metamorphosed himself into a green crab

from the waist up, retaining human legs and genitals that secreted

a caustic erogenous slime, while a horrible stench filled the hut.

-Burroughs 91-2

This self loathing resulted in Burroughs developing a number of paranoid fantasies to explain away his sexual urges, most involving a clandestine power conspiring against him and forcing sexual perversion onto him as a means of control (Beard 300). This seems to have been Burroughs’ only way to account for his utter self loathing and ongoing drug addiction. This is the final crucial thing we must understand about Burroughs before we can talk about Cronenberg’s adaptation of Naked Lunch; Burroughs was a drug addict. While heroin played a large role in Burroughs life (as evidenced by his autobiographical book Junky) Burroughs didn’t limit himself to any one drug. In the Naked Lunch DVD Commentary Peter Weller (who stars as William Lee in the film and researched Burroughs extensively) claims that the first thing Burroughs would do when he landed in a new city or country was to explore the drug trade (Weller Naked Lunch Commentary). As a result of his extensive experience with narcotics and addiction Burroughs developed some very strong ideas about the nature of addiction. He felt that drug addiction was an analogy for anything that placed barriers between a person and self understanding or clarity (Beard 2006, Weller Naked Lunch Commentary). For Burroughs drugs, alcohol, sexual pleasure and any number of other human distractions were a part of the aforementioned ‘conspiracy of control’ which prevented people from really living. Ironically for Burroughs, rather than both heroin addiction and homosexual drive being barriers to self understanding, it was perhaps drug addiction that Burroughs used to avoid the ultimate truth of himself; that he was homosexual. When we consider these three elements; self-loathing sexuality, outside control and layers of deception we can see why Cronenberg would be drawn to such a project.

In order to adapt Naked Lunch Cronenberg was faced with the problem of inserting a narrative structure to what was a rambling, incoherent, apocalyptic miasma of social and political discourse. His solution was an elegantly simple one; he took events from Burroughs life and other short works and weaved them together with the hallucinatory discourses and treatments from Naked Lunch. The result is a psychotic hallucination of a man coming to grips with his true nature. Burroughs’ surrogate on screen, William Lee (which was Burroughs pen name for many of his works) frequently encounters giant cockroaches which have a large anus on their backs out of which they talk. Cronenberg claims that this was his way of “employing Burroughs’ device of the talking ass-hole without being censored in every country” (Cronenberg Naked Lunch Commentary). There is more at play here, however. Peter Weller comments that Burroughs uses the talking anus as a metaphor for the part of us that we “don’t want to address” or acknowledge (Weller Naked Lunch Commentary). We cannot ignore the fact that these talking anuses often appear alongside scenes linked to Burroughs homosexuality. In the first instance of the bug typewriter appearing (complete with talking anus) William Lee is instructed by it to “type something into me, it’s not something you’re going to like”. The typewriter instructs Lee to type the phrase “homosexuality is the best cover an agent can have” into his report and seems to receive great sexual gratification from Lee’s touch and typing. This is a clear moment of Lee’s psyche partitioning itself in such a way that it can admit it’s darkest secret to itself. Furthermore, this secret is delivered via the Burroughsian trope of the talking anus which stands for everything about ourselves which we cannot face. Lee would not offer this information freely, it can only manifest itself as hallucination of an outside, controlling force instructing him to associate with homosexuality. It is also significant that Lee’s homosexual subconscious manifests itself as a talking anus when we consider that anal sex is the default association that most people have with male homosexuals.

At first ‘meeting’ (for it was, after all, a hallucination) between Lee and the ‘talking bug’, Lee is instructed (by the bug) to kill his wife. The bug claims that she’s an ‘enemy agent’ and a member of an ‘alien species’ (which alludes to both women and heterosexuals as ‘alien’ and incomprehensible). Not only does Lee accept the bug’s presence and murderous instructions, he actively carries them out, shooting his wife in the head. The hallucinatory bug powder (which is revealed to be a highly addictive substance) which Lee works with on a daily basis has given his homosexual psyche a way to communicate his dissatisfaction with his marriage and instructs him to kill his wife, in effect killing heterosexuality. As we have seen in Videodrome, hallucinations are a vital storytelling device in Cronenberg’s films because they allow him to expose the fears and desires of his character’s subconscious, a device he shares intimately with Burroughs.

Over the course of the film Lee jumps through many addictions in an attempt to hide from his true, homosexual nature. He begins with a bug powder habit, which he inherits from his wife. Dr. Benway exposes Lee to the Tangierian centipede powder, which Lee consumes with gusto, going so far as to move to Tangier after killing his wife so that he can be closer to the source (which his subconscious rationalizes as a trip to get closer to ‘the enemy’, Interzone). Each successive addiction is ultimately unsatisfying and, finally, in his descent into drug induced psychosis, Lee turns to homosexual sex when he is rescued from living on the streets by a Tangierian boy, Kiki. After a brief affair with Kiki, Lee cannot cope with the truth and takes Kiki to the house of the gay sexual predator,  Cloquet. He effectively trades Kiki’s innocence for information by allowing Kiki to be raped by Cloquet after receiving ‘dirt’ on Interzone agents. Cronenberg reveals the rape of Kiki in a classically Burroughsian style. Cloquet is transformed into a gigantic crustacean whose pincers painfully pierce Kiki’s flesh, resulting in painful, weeping sores while Cloquet’s giant carapace undulates and thrusts from behind the young boy. When Lee attempted to live with his true nature (by engaging in a homosexual relationship with Kiki) his psyche couldn’t handle it. He rejected it, casting the boy into the hands of a sexual predator and once more seeing homosexuality as a state inhabited by monsters. Ironically, by delivering Kiki to Cloquet, Lee is a crucial component of this monstrosity. Without his interferance, Kiki and Cloquet would not have met.

Finally we turn our attention to Crash, Cronenberg’s adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s novel. More a case study in the evolution of human sexuality than a feature film, Crash explores the marriage of technology and eroticism. The protagonist, James, is involved in a series of car crashes. While in hospital he meets Vaughn, a man obsessed with car crashes and “the eroticism of wounds”. As James spends more time with Vaughn his sexual associations shift and he becomes consumed by an erotic obsession with cars, in effect becoming Vaughn. The parallels with Cronenberg’s other works are clear. Obsession, control, a bridge between the biological and technological and a pervasive, mutable sexuality are present. It is likely that the core of Cronenberg’s attraction to Crash as a novel to adapt to film lies in a simple passage:

The crash was the only real experience I had been through in years.

For the first time I was in physical confrontation with my own body, an

inexhaustible encyclopaedia of pains and discharges.

-Ballard 39

If, for Cronenberg, the body is the “first fact of human existence” (Günberg 95) then this revelation by James is telling. James is a disillusioned, disconnected member of society who has been distanced from his body. It took the violent and sudden trauma of a car crash to reintroduce James to an intimate relationship with his own body. The logical extension of this is the pairing of any intimate experience for James with violence and technology.

James and Catherine (the other crash victim) develop a relationship which quickly evolves into a sexual one. James’ sex with his wife becomes stale and unsatisfying compared to the sex he has with Catherine. Beard (400) asserts that this is because, for James, the sex with his wife is too “beautiful” and “perfect”. After his car crash, James’ marriage and sex life with his wife have become just as stale and superficial as everything outside of the crash. Because Catherine has not only experienced a car crash, but the same car crash as James, his sex with her is filled with the intimacy and bodily communion that he experienced at the moment of his crash.

Catherine introduces James to Vaughn, although they briefly met in hospital when Vaughn admired James’ wounds. If James is beginning to embark on a journey of erotic rebirth then Vaughn is the end-point of that journey. His body a litany of scar tissue, Vaughn is a “creature who delights in [his] creatureness” (Beard 401). Vaughn occupies his time working on “the project”, an umbrella term for a wide range of activities which marry car accidents and eroticism. These activities include photographing car accidents, having sex in car washes and deliberately causing car accidents. Cronenberg films these accidents in a remarkably sexual fashion. Vaughn stalks his potential victims, his gaze upon them a clearly sexual one. He initiates contact with his target by thrusting towards them and breaking suddenly. His thrusts into the car in front of him become increasingly powerful until he connects with them. For Vaughn the separation between man and machine no longer exists. His car is a phallic extension of himself which he uses to violently penetrate the cars of others. This behaviour eventually kills Vaughn, James resurrects his car and assumes Vaughn’s persona in the film. He then uses Vaughn’s car to crash into his wife and has sex with her mangled body while they lie beside her mangled car. It is only after he has forced his wife to endure the same trauma he experienced that James can have a fulfilling sexual experience. He has at once merged his old and new sexualities together by incorporating the extreme elements of Vaughn into his personality and drawing his wife into the same sexual realm.

In conclusion, when we examine Videodrome, Naked Lunch and Crash we can see that not only is the cinema a sexual entity for Cronenberg but his consuming obsession with human sexuality manifests itself in the protagonists his films. In each of the three films we examined in this essay we see character whose latent, abnormal sexual urges are brought to the surface by external forces. For Cronenberg the body is the central focus of human existence, but there could be no body without sex. In effect sex takes on a hyper-real status in Cronenberg’s films. As Cronenberg said himself, during the Criterion Collection Naked Lunch Commentary, “sexuality transforms you into something more than human”. Nothing could be truer for Max Renn, William Lee and James Ballard.

Works Cited

• Ballard, J. G. Crash London: Vintage 2004
• Beard, William The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg
  Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2006
• Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch New York: Grove  1966
• Burroughs, William S. The Soft Machine New York: Grove 1961
• Crash dir. David Cronenberg. Perf. James Spader & Holly Hunter. Alliance Communications Corporation 1996. DVD Newline Home Entertainment 2005.
• Günberg, Serge David Cronenberg: Interviews with Serge Grunberg London: Plexus Publishing Ltd. 2006
• Naked Lunch dir. David Cronenberg. Perf. Peter Weller & Judy Davis. Film Trustees Ltd. 1991. DVD Criterion Collection 2003. DVD Commentary by David Cronenberg and Peter Weller.
• Videodrome dir. David Cronenberg. Perf. James Woods & Deborah Harry. CFDC 1983. DVD Criterion Collection 2004. DVD Commentary by David Cronenberg and Mark Irwin.

Depictions of Native Americans in film have existed since the beginning of the film industry and similar depictions existed before film in the form of wild-west shows. Historically these depictions have been created by and for Euro-Americans and, as a result, present a skewed and stereotyped image of Native American people. While Native people have been involved in the film industry for over a century, it took until 1998 for a completely Native American production to arise with a Native writer, director and crew. Smoke Signals premiered at a time when, regrettably, many people thought that Native Americans no longer existed as a distinct culture or people. This essay will explore how Smoke Signals challenged contemporary and historical views of Native Americans in American film. However, before we can understand the significance of Native American depictions in Smoke Signals we must first gain and understanding of how Native Americans have been historically depicted in American films and entertainment and why such depictions are significant. Since the late 19^th century Native Americans have been exploited for the purposes of entertaining Euro-American audiences and it was during the late 19^th century that many of the media stereotypes relating to Native Americans were popularized. These began in the Wild West Show phenomenon, a traveling entertainment show which in equal parts reenacted and embellished upon “renowned battles” from the American frontier (King 12). These shows emerged at a time when the American frontier was essentially considered civilized and the focus on relations with Native Americans had shifted from a militaristic to an administrative nature (King 12). This presented a problem for the American public because it meant that a people who had, historically, been viewed as an enemy or threat were now, effectively under their care. The Wild West Shows “encouraged Americans to grapple with questions of racial difference and cultural evolution, while prompting nostalgic yearnings for nature, tradition, and indigenous communities destroyed by progress and manifest destiny” (King 12). In effect, with the war over, the Euro-American population needed ways to rationalize the treatment and ultimate fate of the Native American people and the Wild West Shows presented them with a set of cultural stereotypes which allowed them to do that. Native Americans were divided into a collection of archetypes; the noble savage, the brutal warrior, the loyal sidekick, the chief, the princess and the squaw (King 5). These early archetypes combined with a handful of narratives (civilization conquering the frontier and progress vs. primitive life were the most common themes) to create what would become the predominate Euro-American perception of Native Americans (King 12).

It is estimated that over 2000 films and over 10,000 television shows have been produced which feature Native Americans since the end of the 19^th century (Churchhill 43). The majority of these productions were created by and for the Euro-American market and perpetuated many of the stereotypes established by the Wild West Shows (the two, in fact, overlapped with the last of the Wild West Shows occurring in the 1930s) (King 12). More than any other culture, the Native American’s image has been defined through film (Rollins ix). The question arises then, how is it that these media depictions can define a people’s image and why does such a definition matter? For one thing, Native Americans represent a very small portion of the American population and, for many Americans, media such as film and television are the primary way in which they are represented (King 6). The ways in which people, places and ideas are presented in the media shape the conceptions of those who access that media (King 7). This is problematic for Native Americans when we consider that while there has there been a huge saturation of media with Native American content, the overwhelming majority of that content works to reinforce negative 19^th century stereotypes (King 7).  This has created a positive feedback loop where the Euro-Americans who had the means to produce this media had been consumers of it all their lives. After several generations of this style of media production the media is completely removed from any truth about Native Americans (or even from a deliberate intention to create anti-Native American propaganda) and relies on simulacra of Native Americans which were created at the turn of the century. Rather than producing films and television shows based on Native Americans, the industry was creating films and television shows based on earlier film and television shows. It is for this reason that Smoke Signals is such a significant film. For first time, Native Americans had the opportunity to represent themselves in film and to challenge many of the stereotypes which had plagued them for the last century. A major departure from the classic treatment of Native Americans, Smoke Signals is an outwardly human story, riddled with subversive political comment. Amanda J. Cobb, a Native American Studies scholar who has researched Native depictions in film extensively, attributes much of the film’s success to its quietly political nature and the fact that its political subtext “never becomes overtly political” (Cobb 213). The narrative is one which many could relate to, with its focus on human relationships and redemption. Two young men, Victor and Thomas grew up together on a Reservation. When the two boys were young there was a house fire on the fourth of July which killed Thomas’ parents and many of Victor’s relatives. Victor’s father, Arnold, saved the two boys from the fire, but was emotionally crippled by grief and turned to a life of alcohol and violence. Arnold eventually leaves the Reservation and, years later, Victor receives word that his father has died in Arizona. Someone must collect the Arnold’s estate but no one in Victor’s family has the money to travel to Arizona, and Victor has little but bad memories of his father. Thomas, who never experienced the alcoholism or domestic violence that plagued Victor’s childhood, idolizes the man who saved him from the fire and offers to give Victor the money to travel to Arizona, as long as he can tag along. On the surface, Smoke Signals is structured as a classical Hollywood buddy road movie, in which two friends or companions travel across the country together. Beneath this veneer of comedy and character development there exists a barrage of references to Native American history and culture (Cobb 210). The Reservation in which Victor and Thomas grew up is utilized extensively by the screenplay’s author, Sherman Alexie, who uses humor and elements of mise en scene to establish the poverty and socio-economic issues which still plague reservation life, while challenging the perceptions that people hold about life on reservations. The first thing we encounter on the reservation is the sounds of the KREZ radio station, accompanied by the housing and local businesses of the reservation. The radio station crosses to its weather and traffic van, which broke down years ago and whose driver\reporter still sits atop of.  This serves a two-fold symbolic purpose. Firstly, the reservation we are presented with is relatively modern, with individual housing, cars and commerce. The Native Americans here are living a comparatively modern existence (no teepees or longhouses). There is, however, a flip side to this modern depiction. Despite the modern veneer there are serious economic problems on the Reservation. We can speculate that while the community has a traffic and weather van, there is so little money that the van cannot be fixed when it breaks down (even after a number of years). This is echoed later when Victor and Thomas encounter their relatives, Velma and Lucy, who are driving a car which only travels in reverse. Anywhere else in the country the car’s gearbox would be replaced but here there is simply no money for such repairs.  Where many film makers would deal with these reservation related issues with heated political debate, Alexie uses strong political statements, “subtly veiled” (Cobb 210) with wry humor. Appropriately, much of the film’s political subtext relates to Native American representations and identity. In a particularly telling exchange between Victor and Thomas it is revealed that the negative impact of inaccurate media representations is not restricted to Euro-American consumers. Thomas, who styles himself as a latter day medicine man and dresses in cheap suits, is berated by Victor for not knowing how to act like a “real Indian”. Victor jeers at Thomas for styling himself as a medicine man and for being too influenced by films like Dances with Wolves. However, when Victor tells Thomas that he should look “stoic” and like he’s “just killed a buffalo”, Thomas counters this by telling Victor that their tribe, the Coeur d’Alene, never hunted buffalo and were fisherman. This exposes both young men as victims of the same cultural whitewashing that has shaped Euro-American’s perceptions of Native Americans through film and television. In this respect Native Americans are not only “objects of popular culture” but also “consumers and participants” in the same media and culture which capitalize on their image (Cobb 216). Ultimately, however, the real symbolic core of Smoke Signals exists in the personal relationships of the characters, particularly those they have with their parents. The precedent for this is established at the beginning of the film, during Thomas’ opening monologue: You know there are some children who aren’t really children at all, they’re just pillars of flame that burn everything they touch. And there are some children who are just pillars of ash, that fall apart when you touch them… Victor and me, we were children of flame and ash.

-Thomas, Smoke Signals

By styling himself as a latter day medicine man, with his incessant stories, Thomas seems to have little regard for hurting others feelings with his tales in fact, it often lands him in a great deal of trouble. In this respect, Thomas is a pillar of flame that burns everything he touches. Victor, conversely, is so emotionally devastated by his past that it is impossible for him to emotionally engage with anyone and, in effect, “fall[s] apart” when anyone touches him.  This is not only a neat metaphor for the psychological profiles of Victor and Thomas, but for those of many Native Americans. Let us consider those living on the Pine Ridge reservation during the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee. The reservation was under the control of tribal chairman, Richard Wilson who ruled the reservation with an iron fist (Iverson 152). Firsthand accounts of those living on the reservation allow us to categorize them into these two loose psychological profiles, laid out by Alexie in Smoke Signals. Many of those who lived in the reservation with Wilson (and his vigilante squads) lived in absolute fear and either became violent themselves (fire) or withdrawn (ash) (Iverson 152). Wilson and those who responded violently to him and the FBI could easily be described as “pillars of fire” like Thomas, “burning everything they touch”, while the more subdued members of the community simply could not. Both the Native American council on the reservation (Wilson) and the United States government (represented here by the FBI) had completely failed them and thus they “[fell] apart when [anyone] touches them”, like Victor whom family, government and ideology have failed. Ultimately, the greatest parallel between the narrative Smoke Signals of and the legacy of injustice between Native and Euro-Americans is the constant theme of betrayal at the hands of a father. Victor and Thomas have both been dramatically affected the absence of Victor’s father. Native Americans have a history of referring to the President of the United States as the “great white father” and this gains a special resonance when we consider Thomas’ closing monologue in the film: “How do we forgive our fathers? Maybe in a dream. Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often, or forever, when we were little? Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage, or making us nervous because there never seemed to be any rage there at all? Do we forgive our fathers for marrying, or not marrying, our mothers? Or divorcing, or not divorcing, our mothers? And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness? Shall we forgive them for pushing, or leaning? For shutting doors or speaking through walls? For never speaking, or never being silent? Do we forgive our fathers in our age, or in theirs? Or in their deaths, saying it to them or not saying it. If we forgive our fathers, what is left?“ This final meditation on Thomas’ part is a reflection on the relationship between a colonial power and the indigenous people it takes in its charge. The colonial past of Euro-Americans placed them in a traditionally antagonistic and authoritarian position, i.e. in the role of the father. By the tail end of the 20^th century, when Smoke Signals appears, Native Americans still find themselves subservient to an abusive, neglectful father. How are you supposed to feel towards this father who has alternately neglected and interfered with you? How do you heal a legacy of pain which has existed for generations? Finally, if you do decide to forgive this awful parent, what comes next? It is by virtue of these astounding layers of complex symbolism and political comment that makes Smoke Signals a departure from other depictions of Native Americans in film. While the significance of Native American involvement at all levels of the production cannot be ignored, it is the thoroughly human and emotional level with which Smoke Signals appeals to its audience in order to communicate its message that sets it apart from other attempts. Bibliography

• Churchhill, W. “American Indians in Film: Thematic Contours of Cinematic Colonization”, in Reversing the Lens: Ethnicity, Race, Gender and Sexuality Through Film, Jun Xing and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, eds. Boulder, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 2003
• Cobb, Amanda J. “This is What it Means to Say Smoke Signals”, in Peter C. Rollins and John E. Connor, Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003
• Iverson, Peter. We Are Still Here: American Indians in the Twentieth Century, Illinios: Harlan Davidson, 1998
• King C. R., Media Images And Representations. New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 2006
• Rollins, Peter C. and John E. Connor, Hollywood’s Indian, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003.

• Smoke Signals Dir. Chris Eyre. Shadowcatcher Entertainment. 1998

-Morgan

The spirited bush girl was a feature of early Australian film. As part of the patriotic nation building drive of the 1920s and 1930s, the bush girl was a wholesome and admirable ideal of womanhood, independent and healthy, representing the prosperity and fertility of the nation. The bush heroine was a prominent figure in films such as A Girl of the Bush (Barrett, 1921) and The Squatter’s Daughter (Hall, 1933). However, somewhat in opposition to the emancipated bush girl, are bush heroines who suffer in their relationships with men. Films such as The Woman Suffers (Longford, 1918) and The Far Paradise (McDonagh, 1928) feature girls trapped by circumstances beyond their control. The young female protagonist is portrayed as the innocent victim of unprincipled men and the inevitable marriage that resolves the film rescues the heroine from her situation, rather than consolidating her power.

The idea of the bush girl is one that is heavily representative of the many changes surrounding the Australian identity as it developed around the beginning of the twentieth century. There is a marked absence of the feminine in the early development of the Australian national type, as cultural pioneers (in particular the bohemian artists of the late 1800s) were trying to present an active, bush-orientated masculine image as the quintessence of Australianness. Women were seen as a “negation of the type” (White 83) because of their natural passivity but more so than this, “’feminine’ values were associated with the ‘respectability’ which the young bohemians condemned” (White 101). However, the inter-war years (from 1919 to 1939) were characterised by a strong drive towards nation building and the taming of the land, and the girl of the bush was an apt symbol of the young, fertile, post-colonial ideal. She was the “flower of the bush” (Tulloch 378) and was a fixture in Australian film from around 1920 to the late 1930s when the increasing prominence of conservative ideology separated masculine and feminine roles and recast the role of women as “decoration and urban mother, […] almost entirely absent from images of rural productivity” (FitzSimons and Ward 128).

While independent women have featured in the cinema of many countries, the ‘bush girl’ appears to be uniquely Australian (Routt 31) and her role in the national consciousness was significant in the inter-war years. As the frontiers of the nation expanded, women gained a symbolic role as the “agents of civilisation and custodians of race” (Lake 154), charged with ensuring the continuation of empire. This is usually expressed through the father-daughter archetype that dominated many films of the time. The close relationship between the father (or father figure) and daughter is echoed in the imperial relationship between England and the empire (Routt 45). The engine of the plot in father-daughter films such as A Girl of the Bush and The Squatter’s Daughter is the inheritance of land and the continuation of the established patriarchal hegemony through traditional relationships. The ‘bush girl’ may be an independent woman but it is this independence and economic self-sufficiency that makes her an object of desire for both worthy and unworthy men. It is interesting to note, however, that while the films reaffirm the necessity for men to sustain the economic strength of the nation (in these films, by means of the secure inheritance of property), “representations of young women on the Australian screen during the 1920s and 1930s are consistently more interesting and memorable than those of young men” (Routt 32).

These forthright women were not the only representations of bush femininity in the inter-war period. The ‘bush girl’ is used in a similar way in more melodramatic films such as Raymond Longford’s The Woman Suffers and, to a certain extent, in the McDonagh sisters’ The Far Paradise. These films foreground the wholesomeness of young women in the country but unlike the “sheep films” (Verhoeven, Sheep Cinema 1), the bush is the setting for the suffering of women. However, they reinforce the simplistic association of the country with goodness and the city with evil, as the city is still presented as the environment ultimately responsible for their suffering as its “moral poverty” (Tulloch 384) can be seen to influence the male characters who cause their distress.

Franklyn Barrett’s A Girl of the Bush is a perfect example of the interpretation of the bush heroine as a symbol of imperial wealth and pastoral fertility. The film was made during a strongly nationalistic period in the Australian film industry (Shirley and Adams 59) and it immediately “locates its heroine at the centre of production and display of Australia’s ‘wealth’ of wool” (Verhoeven, Sheep Cinema 101). Lorna Denver is the quintessential “young rural woman with considerable knowledge and power in relation to the land” (FitzSimons and Ward 123), which is strongly emphasised in the film by the contrast with her lazy ‘cousin’ Oswald Keane, nephew to Lorna’s guardian. A Girl of the Bush is a film that draws a parallel between “country woman and country plenitude” (Tulloch 384) through the opening sequences showing Lorna as an active participant in the production of Kangaroo Flat’s famous wool. The father-daughter relationship between Lorna and her guardian, Jim Keane, is an essential part of the narrative as it establishes the fact that the daughter figure has inherited “the patriarch’s virtue” and is therefore the “rightful heir” to the property (Routt 33, 34). Viewed as an imperial analogy, the colony represents a continuation of empire.

The narrative constantly reiterates the degenerate nature of the city and contrasts it with the wholesome country. The city-country divide is the means by which country life is presented as the ideal, as vice (in reality, a universal phenomenon) is “transferred to the mores of the city” (Tulloch 358) through the character of Oswald and his actions – drinking, gambling and the suggestion of sex. The bush heroine is presented as both the heroine of a naturalistic world, where she is defined by her economic power and fertility, as well as the subject of melodrama. This creates a tension within the story as the bush heroine is the ideal rural woman but as a female protagonist, is strongly associated with melodrama. To solve this, the film establishes an “alternate female discourse” (Tulloch 378) in the story of Mary Burns, who becomes the villain’s innocent victim. In this way, female power is separated from female sexuality (Tulloch 396) and the film reaffirms the traditional cinematic archetype that “younger, unmarried women tend to conform […] to the dichotomy of “damned whores” and “God’s police”” (Molloy 77).

Similarly, historians and critics argue that Ken G. Hall’s The Squatter’s Daughter is a film that is concerned with the association of rural women, breeding and reproductive purity, as “the question of breeding, both of sheep and of men, is at the heart of the plot” (Molloy 67). As in A Girl of the Bush, the narrative is driven by a father-daughter motif and the search for a partner worthy of the bush heroine Joan Enderby in order to safeguard the inheritance of the land. However, there is also a significant fixation with breeding and identity in The Squatter’s Daughter. This association of suitability with good breeding makes it almost inevitable that the foundling Wayne will turn out to be the rightful heir to the neighbouring Waratah Station rather than the villainous Clive Sherrington, as he is clearly the heroine’s choice of mate. Verhoeven suggests that the country of the film is an “Edenic location” (Sheep Cinema, 116), imbuing the couple with biblical significance in their roles as mother and father to the newly united Waratah-Enderby land. Again the bush heroine is associated with the population of the fertile outback and “encapsulates a national desire for prosperity through productivity” (Verhoeven, “Sheep’s Clothing” 153).

Raymond Longford’s The Woman Suffers is a film about young women of the bush that is motivated by a different (and possibly more realistic) conception of the bush girl. In contrast to the female heroines of films such as A Girl of the Bush and The Squatter’s Daughter, The Woman Suffers conveys just that – female suffering. In portraying women as the victims of men however, “the film hammers home a fairly strong feminist message in which men are the villains” (Creed 88). If Lorna Denver and Joan Enderby are ideals of active rural womanhood, Joan Stockdale and Marjory Manton are equally representative of the innocent female victim on the frontier. For these women the frontier society represents not a pure country existence but one defined by “isolation, vulnerability and defencelessness” (Lake 153). Unlike the films with strong bush heroines, The Woman Suffers does not reject the cultural archetype that insists on women being victims.

In the context of the bush heroine, the film explores the negative aspects of feminine fertility and life on the frontier. It highlights the danger young women are exposed to on the edges of civilisation and emphasises their need for protection from “marauding frontiersmen” (Lake 153). In doing so it continues to emphasise the purity of the bush girl. In particular, the strong association of religion, whiteness, nature and water equates Joan’s suicide with a “holy sacrifice” (Creed 88). Creed also suggests that Joan’s death is “used […] to emphasise the form and nature of female suffering” and, with its echoes of pre-Raphaelite Ophelia, reinforces the impression of her as a “betrayed and abandoned heroine” (88). Initially, Marjory appears to be a bush heroine in the style of Lorna Denver, active on the farm during mustering and quite comfortable on horseback. This emphasises the tragedy of her situation, as it seems utterly out of character. Despite being a stronger woman than Joan, this offers her no protection from Philip’s revenge.

Structurally, the film offers a solution to the tragedy of Joan by the exact parallel of Marjory’s story. As Philip seduces Marjory in exactly the same way as her brother Ralph seduced Philip’s sister Joan, there are two outcomes to the story. The negative resolution – suicide – is contrasted with the positive – marriage. The implicit observation in the story is that in a society that has “enshrined masculine values and interests” (Lake 152), women are in particular need of protection from the freedom a patriarchal society affords men. As such, the bush heroine is presented as a symbol of purity and fertility but one in need of masculine protection. It is Philip’s marriage to Marjory that saves her (and her child) from disgrace. This emphasises the truth of the film’s tagline “- while the man goes free!” as neither Philip nor Ralph are held publicly accountable for their actions and while Philip appears to repent, Ralph does not.

In the McDonagh sisters’ The Far Paradise the heroine is not a traditional bush heroine, but is forced into the role of frontier daughter by her father’s criminal activity and alcoholism which have ruined him. In this film, the country is not seen as a bastion of goodness and a respite from the wickedness of the city but a form of purgatory for the heroine, as she is separated from her group of friends by both distance and social circumstance. However, despite the extreme negativity of her situation and the fact that she is not a bush heroine in the traditional sense, she still conveys the image of rural female purity and vulnerability. She is exhausted and ashamed of the “ramshackle farm” (Shirley and Adams 84) but is saved from her situation by Peter, the man she loves. As in The Woman Suffers, the male protagonist acts as rescuer.

The bush heroine was a key figure of the 1920s and 1930s Australian cinema. As a symbol of fertility, national prosperity and the continuation of empire, the active young girl of the bush was an important facet of the national consciousness. Her independence and power were associated with economic self-sufficiency, a fact emphasised by the contrast between the naturalistic heroines of films such as A Girl of the Bush and The Squatter’s Daughter and the melodramatic heroine-victims of Longford’s The Woman Suffers and the McDonagh sisters’ The Far Paradise. The narrative of films featuring the active bush heroine tend to emphasise the notions of patriarchy and succession as both necessary and positive while the films of the passive bush heroine tend to foreground the darker side of a patriarchal social system and women’s vulnerability within it. The former is the more recognised cinematic archetype but both Lake in her study of women on the frontier, and FitzSimons and Ward in their overview of the character across various artistic forms, suggest that the latter is closer to the reality of the bush heroine.

Works Cited

A Girl of the Bush. Dir. Franklyn Barrett. Perf. Vera James, Jack Martin and Herbert Linden. 1921. VHS. NFSA, 1996.

Creed, Barbara, “The Woman Suffers – Again!” Screening The Past: Aspects of Early Australian Film. Ed. Berryman, Ken. Acton, ACT: NFSA, 1995.

The Far Paradise in Women of the Silent Era: Virgins, Vamps and Heroines (Selections from Australian Film 1896 – 1930). VHS. NFSA, 1997.

FitzSimons, Trish and Ward, Susan. “Girls of the Bush – Tracking an Enigma Across Films, Fictions, Memories and Histories.” Screening The Past: Aspects of Early Australian Film. Ed. Berryman, Ken. Acton, ACT: NFSA, 1995.

Lake, Marilyn. “Frontier Feminism.” The Australian Legend and Its Discontents. Ed. Nile, Richard. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2000.

Molloy, Bruce. Before the Interval: Australian Mythology and Feature Films, 1930 – 1960. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1990.

Routt, William D. “The Fairest Child of the Motherland: Colonialism and Family in Films of the 1920s and 1930s.” The Australian Screen. Ed. Moran, Albert and O’Regan, Tom. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1989.

Shirley, Graham and Adams, Brian. Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years. A&R Publishing/Currency Press, 1983.

The Squatter’s Daughter in Don’t Call Me Girlie. Dir. Young, Stewart and Wright, Andree. VHS. Ronin Films, 1985.

The Squatter’s Daughter in Now You’re Talking. Dir. Gow, Keith. VHS. Film Australia, 1981.

Tulloch, John. Legends on the Screen. Sydney: Currency Press, 1981.

Verhoeven, Deb. Sheep and the Australian Cinema. Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Publishing, 2006.

Verhoeven, Deb. “Sheep’s Clothing: A dress in some Australian films.” Screening The Past: Aspects of Early Australian Film. Ed. Berryman, Ken. Acton, ACT: NFSA, 1995.

White, Richard. Inventing Australia: Images and Identity. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1981.

The Woman Suffers. Dir. Raymond Longford. Perf. Lottie Lyell and Boyd Irwin. 1918. VHS. NFSA, 1996.

The trailer presents us with a vision of a classic crime film, complete with an 8 Mile-esque soundtrack and premise, but when we dig deeper we see it offers us much more than another tale about youth embroiled in crime. Tarek, played by Les Chantery, is a young Lebanese-Australian man who is stuck in a rut and a dead-end job as a panel beater. When presented with an opportunity to steal a vast quantity of pills from a drug-dealer’s apartment, he seizes it as an obvious chance to make a vast quantity of money and set himself up for life. Despite the trailer’s marketing itself to a younger generation with needlessly flashy editing and an overtly gritty sensibility, the film itself presents an interesting synthesis of the gangster film and that most steadfast of Australian cinematic traditions, the Australian ethnic drama.

Running against the grain of the gangster genre is the film’s ability to humanise these disreputable and oft-outright criminal characters and effectively communicate the very human costs that their lives have to both themselves and their families. Like the so-called ‘heroes’ of the gangster genre, Tony Montana, Vito Corleone, Henry Hill and Frank Lucas. the characters of Cedar Boys endure the same heady highs and harrowing lows of a life of crime and of a classically-informed tragedy, but do so in the vastly understated, fundamentally parochial manner that marks many of the best Australian character-based dramas.While many gangster films focus on characters with immigrant or ethnic characters, Cedar Boys also draws on a long Australian tradition of films dealing with immigration, ethnicity, racial tension, the fight to attain or resist assimilation and the loneliness and alienation of being a stranger in a strange land. From the misguidedly prejudiced They’re a Weird Mob to The Combination, Romulus, My Father, Romper Stomper and the astounding mini-series Marking Time, Australian filmmakers have been exploring and expounding upon the pathos of migrant life for decades.

A still from Serhat Caradee's Cedar Boys

The combination of these two genres gifts a third dimension to the film. The careful and patient attention paid to showing us the lives of the characters before before the fall makes the consequences of that fall devastating, to both the characters and audience. This gives the film a definite noir sensibility. This is nothing new in Australian film, the many shining moments of which include Two Hands, The Bank and The Square. This film is, essentially, more than the sum of its parts and they’re all good parts. - Morgan

~~~~

What strikes me perhaps most forcefully about Cedar Boys is the manner in which its atmosphere, sensibility and aesthetic are all procured through, and sustained by, an arguable lack. Digital video lacks the sumptuous analog texture and vibrancy of the 35mm film stock that informed crime epics like The Godfather (though shooting digitally gifts Cedar Boys with a greater sense of urgency, immediacy and spontaneity than that film), while the contemporaneous era in which the film is set lacks the overwrought sense of self that characterised the ’70s and ’80s and films (and media, more generally, regardless of its medium of production) of and about those eras, and even Australian currency lacks the sheer value and worth of, say, the British pound or the American dollar, imparting a certain provincial triviality to the proceedings in the context of global crime narratives.

Chief amongst these is that last: there is a charming and beguiling lack of pretension about Cedar Boys. There is no real effort made to aggrandise the grubby, low-down business of drug dealing or those who are drawn to it, and the privileges and advantages that Tarek and his friends risk their lives and their futures for are transient at best and heartbreakingly ephemeral at worst.   Sam, for instance, buys rims with his newly acquired wealth, in what might very well be seen as a vicious parody of the classic montage-sequence-as-indicator-of-success, while all Tarek wants, desperately, is to raise the funds necessary to fast-track his older brother’s legal appeal. The overarching message of Cedar Boys, to its audience as well as to those disaffected youths it hopes to portray (and these two groups may very well be separate), is that this, all of this, is fundamentally and inarguably not worth it, in the most literal as well as abstract fashions, and it manages to say so without preaching.

Aesthetically, this dearth of glamour is reflected always and primarily in the workmanlike cinematography, ‘workmanlike’ being a descriptor I choose carefully and without deprecatory intent: by this I mean the art direction to be rarely showy, always prizing functionality and the comprehension of the audience over the artistic qualities of compositions such as you might find in, say, the work of Scorcese (most, if not all, of Scorcese’s efforts in manipulating the frame alone could be framed in their own right, his penchant for characterising his cities of choice through their architecture is a trend that goes back at least as far as Mean Streets), and in this way Caradee retains the essential kernel of truth at the heart of his film: by not giving in to the desire to make things more than they are, a commendable instinct and one that the odious One Perfect Day (which deals with similar subject matter, if tangentially and with hands of ham) could have benefited greatly from. Les Chantery’s performance as the disabused Tarek is remarkable in its spareness, in its very minimalism; he conveys only just as much as is needed in the early stages in the film so that when he is finally called upon to express something, anything, in the vein of Travis Bickle, he seems to suddenly explode (though unlike Travis, it is grief rather than rage that fuels the fire and that mushrooms up from the ruins of his life). So it is that Chantery sublimates himself in service to the film, to the point that the untrained eye might suspect him of genuine reticence or some form of thespian incompetence when the reality is far-removed from such assertions.

That said, the film is rarely drab, in either performance or the visual aspect, but one occasionally wishes Caradee would loosen the reins ever-so-slightly: there are a handful of moments that display his natural cinematic flair (a late-night party at a suburban mansion, for instance, is luscious with wealth and dimly-lit sleaze), and on the quality of that handful alone, a few more would have been unlikely to endanger the serious (often dour) nature of the tale under discussion: indeed,  noir was always, historically, attracted to and informed by the stark lines and monochromatic obsessions of German expressionism and later architectural modernism, and in its unrepentant identification with the noir ideal, Cedar Boys could afford to freewheel further than it does.

If Cedar Boys can truly be said to fall down in any way, it is only in the straightforwardness of its gist, in its lack of twists and turns, in the telegraphing of its punches. As an exercise in mimicry of what, it might be argued, is a steadfastly American criminal-tragedy tradition, a staggering, stumbling post-modern behemoth like the permanently off-kilter Two Hands does a much better job of making the form its own, however grotesquely bloated it eventually becomes through its own narcissism.

I don’t think, however, that Cedar Boys should be marked on its ability to bend its genre of choice or its ability to make fresh again perhaps that most overdone of cinematic formulas. Instead, it should be marked on its honesty, its refreshing lack of irony, and its steadfast desire to depict a ethno-subcultural tradition: it’s more social document than narrative innovator. Cedar Boys is to be commended for, perhaps like (of all things) The Wrestler, being of the world it depicts instead of about the world it depicts, for better or worse (David Field’s The Combination functions in a similarly narratively transcendent manner). Its portraits are perhaps not deep, but they are vivid, and that counts for a lot. - Martin

Cedar Boys opens in a limited release in Australia and screening locations can be found at the official website. While the release is certainly limited, it’s not that limited, with the film receiving screenings at most Hoyts and Palace Cinemas.

The work of Woody Allen reveals perhaps some of the most instinctively recognized preoccupations and consistent attitudes of contemporary screenwriting. In all of his most celebrated and well-known films (Annie Hall {1977}, Manhattan {1979}, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask {1972}, Match Point {2005}) there exists innate cursors of the screenwriter’s opinions and attitude towards his craft that will, in this essay, be evidenced not just by the films themselves but by Allen’s own remarks, as made in Eric Lax’s Conversations with Woody Allen: His films, the movies, and moviemaking. Not only this, but through discussion of the three of the four films mentioned, as well as Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), common story patterns, character types and treatment of themes will be explored, as they pertain to Allen’s writing and the aforementioned opinions he holds.

The primary fact of Allen’s process and career as a screenwriter must be his origins as a comedian. It’s apparent from his earliest screenplays (Take the Money and Run) {1969}, Bananas{1971}) and from some of the later, more successful ones that integrated elements of them greatly that Allen began his film-making career seeing movies as a means of channeling his comedy. This is perhaps exemplified by Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex…, which literally has no plot; only a series of comedic skits, shown one after the other. Understanding that, for Allen, screenwriting and filmmaking grew out of a creative wellspring of stand-up comic methodology is vital in understanding how he approaches the writing of a film.

Aside from the circumstances of its outset, by the mid nineteen seventies, Allen’s grasp of the craft of screenwriting and his attitudes toward it had changed significantly and, quite arguably, deepened. He is by this stage telling Lax that “plot is dynamite in comedy”, and is operating on a screenwriting level out of an internalized understanding of movie-viewing’s historical progression:

You see [the old movies] as old movies, so they’re delightful. But they’re plotty, based on mechanics the public’s outgrown. In this new script [which will become Annie Hall] I’m trying to work from within, from the neurosis out, so it will not seem dated a hundred years from now. (Lax 10)

Allen also now ascertains that “there’s something less satisfying about comedy, even though it’s harder to do” (Lax 67). His opinion of his ‘craft’, which refers very specifically to the writing of comedies, is that it will “never have the impact” of the more “serious stuff” (Lax 66). Through this minor dissatisfaction with the inferior impact of comedic films and screenplays will come the more philosophical and emotionally potent narratives of Annie Hall and Manhattan. Judging by these professional developments, it’s fair to assume that Allen’s attitude towards his craft is that it must very much reflect himself in all honesty, while still retaining ‘impact’ and respecting the art form of films as they are appreciated by the public.

This more-or-less covers the issue of how Allen relates to the craft of screenwriting in general, but the more forceful issue when discussing this particular writer is the entirely specific niche that he occupies in contemporary cinema. I am of course referring to the thoroughly self-referential and self-aware nature of his writing, and the revolving of his seminal films around the constant of what can only be described as ‘the Woody Allen character’ – a neurotic, urban, intellectual type with a frank sexuality but a problem with women. Though this can and will be classified as a recurring theme or pattern, it also needs a significant portion of attention devoted to it as a matter of screenwriting, because it is a such a specific element that influences so greatly the construction of so many of his screenplays.

Allen talks at great length about this in his conversations with Lax, but perhaps his most succinct discussion of it is thus: “It’s hard to write good films and accommodate my character.” Allen professes that ‘his character’, which is prolific in spawning most any of his most recognized and accomplished films, can be a problem in the writing stages if only because it limits the film to a specific, personal and intimate space. He goes on to say:

I’ve got to get an idea that’s believable, yet funny, and within my miniscule acting range…[t]herefore plot possibilities get reduced to human relationships, and because they get reduced to human relationships…the conflicts become internal and not as visually active and cinematic as they were years ago. (Lax 9)

Here is a fine example of how Allen’s attitude towards the generic craft of screenwriting is intensified when furthered in relation to his specific and personalized craft of writing ‘Woody Allen’ films, meaning those in which he is a character and with which he is most closely associated. The writing of a ‘Woody Allen’ character-based film is almost a craft unto itself, one which Allen has explored in as many different genres as he can, and of which his opinions are just as steadfast as those he holds in regard to all screenwriting.

This quickly honed sense of his own specific films and subsequent writing style lead to 1977’s Annie Hall, the most acclaimed (four Academy Awards) and celebrated of all his films and here the first of discussion. In the context of Allen’s career, Annie Hall establishes almost all of the story patterns, character types and themes that would later come to define him as a writer and performer. Although it had been present as far back as Take the Money, the Woody Allen character is here for the first time really strongly realized and contextualized, given a background that is not outlandish and a lifestyle situation that does not ring false. It also follows quite closely a story pattern that Allen will use a number of times later: the Woody Allen character (in this case Alvy Singer) meets a woman, falls steadily in love and goes through a series of dynamics with her over a number of years. (Incidentally, this pervasive plot indicates an adaptive element of Allen’s writing: apparently in the original screenplay “[t]here were a million other digressions…Then we found the story was so strong that nobody cared about anything else. They wanted to get back to the parts about ‘you and Annie’ so I let it grow that way” {Lax 19}).

Another immeasurably key element that Annie Hall introduces with the full fervor that the topic really warrants in the context of Allen’s films is the location of New York. Late in their ill-fated relationship, Diane Keaton’s titular character exasperates to the film’s surrogate Allen: “You’re like New York city…you’re just this island, all by yourself.” This reference and comparison is vital, as the city is in so many of Allen’s films not just as an atmosphere but as an emblem, and her labeling of him as an ‘island’ helps place the city’s significance to Allen firmly in the metaphysical realm. Both Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters also make direct reference to New York as being fundamentally and inseparably “his”: in the first it is through opening narration that the Allen character (while tellingly writing a work of fiction about himself) firmly labels New York “his town; it would always be his town”. In Hannah, the Allen character uses this trope as a comfort, assuring himself that no illness, no harm at all could befall him in New York City, for which he feels such a strong affinity.

The last point is one that relates most strongly to the writing of the film and the writing of Allen to follow, and that is the motif of characters writing texts that are strictly based on their experiences. This is particularly important when it is found in Allen’s own characters as it is here (one of the final scenes is of the enactment of a play that Alvy has written specifically detailing his relationship with Annie), because it helps the audience feel they can read Allen through the film, and it reflects nicely the sentiment that “[a]lmost all my work is autobiographical and yet so exaggerated and distorted it reads to me like fiction” (Lax 7).

His next film, Manhattan, made two years later, will also be the next film of discussion, and one that perhaps solidified the public image of Allen as a character and hence as a writer. Described by Angela Errigo as “the rapturous high point of Woody Allen’s on-screen love affair with New York City”, Manhattan did indeed expand strongly the romanticism of the town that Annie Hall hinted at, going so far as to open with voice over narration (another beloved Allen device) that riffs on the Allen character (Isaac Davis)’s love for New York. Admittedly, this narration is spoken in the voice of an internally fictional character that Isaac is writing for, but as fictional writing has already been suggested by Annie Hall to be a theme that represents the character doing the writing (and since Isaac will later give direct evidence that he himself does love the city he inhabits) we can safely assume it is really his own voice he’s speaking in during this opening montage.

Aside from this, New York City is given much more significance and credence in the writing of Manhattan that the simple presence and mention of it in Annie Hall could achieve. Although Allen’s role as director is not the issue of focus here, it’s necessary to note that as a writer, at least in the case of this film, he was thinking even during the conceptual stages in a directorial capacity:

I had brought Michael Tilson Thomas’s recordings of Gershwin overtures and I kept hearing them in the shower everyday and thinking, God, a scene would be great set to this, or a scene would be great set to that. And I started working out the story with Marshall Brickman (Lax 32).

The spark of an exclusively George Gershwin soundtrack here was the origins of the whole screenplay, and found its way into the script very easily and early. This happens during the opening monologue, wherein Isaac states his ‘fictional character’ “romanticized [New York] all out of proportion”, imagining it as a place where George Gershwin was always playing and everything was black and white (this seed of imagery sown in the screenplay of course influenced Allen’s own decision to shoot the whole film in black and white).

Also, the city’s symbolic nature is all but announced in the beginning when Isaac writes “he adored New York, although to him it was a metaphor.” He goes on to say that the metaphorical implications of the city pertain directly to the “decay of contemporary culture”, which Mary (Diane Keaton) underlies with her hostility towards what Isaac considers the great figures of contemporary culture (Bergman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jung, Van Gough). In one of the final scenes, Isaac suggests to his Dictaphone that “his town” breeds emotional neurosis of petty issues to shelter its inhabitants from the “unsolvable, terrifying” issues. So Manhattan features quite pivotally and extensively the city of New York in its narrative.

The other element of Allen’s work that is deepened in the screenplay for Manhattan is the intertwining of human relationships; the focus of desire shifts for all four of the main characters of the film, to each other, off each other, onto someone else. This film, like the one before it, studies romantic relationships in a tight social circle over a long period of time and pointedly observes any changes. In Annie Hall, it was only a brief encounter with a rock journalist (Shelley Duvall) that served to be Alvy’s distraction away from Annie, but in Manhattan Isaac finds himself equally in love with two separate women, and suffering at the hands of fate and irony in both cases. There is also a serious narrative focus on infidelity, which will become an issue even more tightly connected between Hannah and Her Sisters and Match Point.

In fact, the two films just mentioned, for the reasons just mentioned, are probably best discussed together. Hannah, despite an increasing interest in other characters besides the Woody Allen character, is still set in his beloved town and features him quite strongly (and almost entirely apart from everyone else, as though narratively sheltered and alien). Nonetheless, there is much more emphasis put on the women of the film, and their various relationships. The most important theme that this attention reveals is one of infidelity, more particularly infidelity amongst familiar people. In this case, Elliot (Michael Caine) cheats on his wife Hannah (Mia Farrow) with her sister Lee (actress). It’s interesting to note that even in comedic environments such as this film, the theme of infidelity is always treated by Allen with seriousness.

The much later Match Point deviates from the Woody Allen model in some crucial ways, but using Hannah as a mediator, it’s clear to see it also abides by a lot of the writer’s established rules. It is far removed from New York, set instead in London and harbouring only one American character, Nola Rice (Scarlet Johanssen). Ergo, there is also no Woody Allen character, not even one that isn’t played by Allen himself, as has been the case in a quite a few other films (Celebrity {1998}, for example, which featured a distinctly written Woody Allen character played by Kenneth Brannaugh). Match Point is also not, in any sense, a comedy, which makes for some interesting comparisons between treatment of themes: it has in common with Allen’s very first screenplay (Take the Money and Run) strong elements of crime and punishment, yet doesn’t at all treat them in a jokey manner, rather with a disturbing practical and emotional realism.

Yet the central theme of infidelity is kept from Hannah, and even too are the premises and emotional consequences of the infidelity kept the same. In both films, a man (Elliot in Hannah, Chris in Match Point) marries a beautiful woman, yet instigates an affair with a close member of her family (sister in Hannah, sister-in-law in Match Point). They then fail to follow the affair through and leave their wives, which although having quite different outcomes in the two films (in Hannah the mistress simply moves on and finds another man, leaving Elliot still somewhat pining after her; in Match Point the mistress threatens to break up Chris’s marriage and he murders her to prevent this), nonetheless does not result in anybody ever discovering the infidelity.

Judging by these two separate and stylistically opposed films, its fair to suppose that the “plot possibilities [that were] reduced to human relationships” (Lax 9) by Allen’s initial restriction of writing his own character have become, over the course of his career, actively preferred. In other words, even when the Woody Allen character is no longer present, the focus on intimate human relationships that the character once dictated remain a pivotal part of Allen’s writing.

The last recurring motif of Allen’s writing that I would like to discuss is his dramatic use of apartments. Throughout all of the films examined here, it has not yet been noted how prominently the apartments, the intimate living spaces of the characters are presented. Perhaps as a by-product of his urban New York sensibilities, the apartments of Allen’s characters, particularly his own character, are always brought closely to the attention of the audience and almost reach and equal symbolic status as New York City itself.

Consider Annie Hall, where it is the argument over whether Annie should give up her own apartment to live permanently in Alvy’s that trigger’s the couple’s and the film’s first serious emotional altercation, and lays the groundwork for their first break up. Or Manhattan, where Isaac’s artistic integrity costs him his beloved apartment and ends him up in a living space and living arrangement that he is uncomfortable with, one that makes strange noises and produces suspect water. Yet despite being totally uncomfortable of and in his intimate apartment, Isaac is still extremely reluctant to let Tracy spend the night there, to let her be too familiar with this architectural extension of himself.

Even Match Point, the most removed of the films, anchors its typically Allen human relationships in the emotional logistics of the character’s apartments. Chris begans London life with an expensive yet inferior apartment, physically present in the English city of dreams (or the English New York City) but without a yet-suitable intimate environment. In the structure of the screenplay, we notice that after he has married into wealth and class, he is given the most luxurious and spacious apartment imaginable… with an amazing city view. Compare this to Nola’s apartment, which is small, clustered and cheap but warm and personal, and where every single passionate moment of their official affair takes place.

Woody Allen’s screenplays seem then to relate very strongly to his views and opinions about the process of writing them – they tell of honest, human relationships, they interchange comedic and dramatic takes on subjects close to his heart, and they reflect him, even when they do not contain ‘the Woody Allen character’ that so uniquely defines him. At his most honest, Woody Allen appears to be a writer who is completely unafraid to write films about nothing but his own simple concerns and pleasures, and at his most daring, he appears totally unafraid to explore them in “relation to what other people feel” (Lax 20). In either case, his devotion to human relationships is real, complex and complete, and his films, no matter their specifics, consistently demonstrate this.

Further Reading

Lax, Eric. Conversations with Woody Allen: His films, the movies and moviemaking. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

It would be genuinely remiss, at this late stage, to discount outright any of the films considered momentous by the foremost critical minds of the Western World, as subsequently critically or cinematically unimportant, in opposition to their accrued reputations. The re-evaluatory anti-establishment instincts that reside within most contentious critics have wrought their best and their worst on our modern understanding of the world that the cinema gifts us with, and yet, these films still stand tall.

That having been said, it would be equally negligent not to consider the possibility that many of the films elevated to the status of pantheon members are as celebrated on account of their oft-torturous histories as their content, which is not to their detriment, but ought be taken into consideration nonetheless.

When French director, writer, actor Jean Renoir died, passing away in the February of 1979, at the ripe old age of 84, Orson Welles, quite possibly the greatest cinematic iconoclast of the 20^th century, published a heartfelt obituary in the Los Angeles Times for his close, late friend, and nestled amongst its paragraphs is a claim formed from wholesale immodesty and untold generosity, namely that “Jean Renoir stands on his own: the greatest of European directors: very probably the greatest of all directors, a gigantic silhouette on the horizon of our waning century.”

High praise, indeed, from a man in full possession of a character that Andre Bazin (his article featured in Mark W. Estrin’s collection of interviews with Welles, held as part of the Conversations With Filmmakers series of texts) once described as “god-like as Jupiter…an affable tyrant, wielding a ten-inch cigar instead of a bolt of lightning…truly Orson the Magnificent…the living illustration of [the] particular biology of genius, bent on growing to the bitter end” (p. 48), and yet, fitting.

Nine years earlier, in 1970, Jean Renoir gave an interview with Renoir scholar Leo Braudy (“Renoir at Home”, published separately from Braudy’s 1972 tome, Jean Renoir: The World of his Films). When asked, in passing, Renoir posits, “The best director in our days…that’s Orson Welles. He’s a great creator. The idea of a tycoon is not the same, can’t be the same, after Citizen Kane…” (p. 8 )

Renoir and Welles led separate lives and conducted separate careers, but as the years passed discussion of one would so often provoke mention of the other within the space of the same sentence, paragraph or breath until they were all but inseparable in the critical mind: in 1958, for instance, in the same moment that Bazin remarks on Welles’ Herculean ebullience and how such a thing stands at odds with his ever-advancing age, he illustrates the phenomenon by reference to what he believes to be a similar process at work within Jean Renoir, arguing “maturity…effects a strange metamorphosis…the Jean Renoir we know would be at least half a foot taller than the Jean Renoir of the thirties. Clearly he has amplified in all senses of the word; his very bones doubled in size.” (p. 49)

Whatever they shared personally, it is undebatable that they were both craftsmen of the highest cinematic order, and participated independently in what ought to have been a singularly prescient perception of the nature of film: at its most simplistic, this can be seen to be reflected in that together they occupied, between 1972 and 1992, the top two ranks (Welles’ at 1^st and Renoir at 2^nd) of the much-respected BFI Sight and Sound Critics’ Top Ten, and the first and third, respectively, in 1962 and 2002.

Craftsmen, then, but in the eyes of their many subsequent critical defenders and, by all accounts, from within the radius of their own appreciation, ones who went largely unappreciated for far too long, at least until they were well past their respective cinematic primes, and this was a growing and always bitterly-seasoned bone of contention shared out equally between the two, and perhaps over which they most ardently bonded.

Welles summarises Renoir’s forty-year cinematic career thus, with rancour and a crisp clarity of phrase that might lead an unsuspecting reader to imagine he was speaking of his own career (true of so much of Welles’ writing), rather than that of his beloved contemporary and colleague: “Some of [his films] were commercial and even, in their time, critical failures. Some enjoyed success. None were blockbusters. Many are immortal.” Taking all of these determinations together and at face value, there is only one product of Renoir’s dedication to his calling that can be said to fit perfectly the description attained: 1939’s La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game, as I will refer to it from now on).

The Rules of the Game was Renoir’s Citizen Kane, in more ways than one; indeed, it could be said to be Europe’s Kane, but while there are technical and historical similarities and comparisons to be made, there are also important differences, in the formation of an abiding legend as much as in elements of its formal construction, though despite that it remains a useful analytical tool when discussing critical cinematic watersheds.

It is, for instance, important to note that Citizen Kane’s popular reputation was formed largely on account of the colossal war of words and wills precipitated between Orson Welles and William Randolph Hearst (the cost of which was perhaps best totaled in W.A. Swanberg’s 600-page biographical tome, “Citizen Hearst” [1961]), and though it was hidden away from public eyes in the direct aftermath of the tremendous legal battle, critically it was immediately appreciated, if not, perhaps, lauded to the degree that it eventually would be. It did, after all, win an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and was nominated for eight others.

The Rules of the Game, on the other hand, did not fare nearly so well, even relatively. Indeed, it is a film made infamous predominantly through the propagation of anecdotes regarding its popular reception (or hysterical lack thereof), up to and including purported attempts to incinerate cinemas wherein the film was showing, and it confused French critics almost as much as it did audiences, who reacted with hostility to its explicit contempt for the bourgeoisie.

In Janet Bergstrom’s article, “Jean Renoir’s Return to France”, she attributes a great deal of the critical disdain the film provoked to the fact that Renoir “changed the conception of the hero radically, in part by increasing the number of important characters so that no one of them would carry the action or the moral attitude of the film.” (p. 462) The resultant ensemble film “confused and alienated critics as well as the public.” (p. 462) Bergstrom quotes from numerous 1939 critical reviews of the film, noting the most common element, critical confusion as to where the audience’s sympathies should lie and with which characters. It was not until long after the shadow of WW2 had passed on that the film would begin to be re-evaluated, and late into the ‘50s that it would be acclaimed in Renoir’s native homeland. Truffaut, for instance, in a 1963 interview with Paul Ronder, is notably sympathetic: “Rules of the Game is one of those rare cases where a great film passed over the heads of its public… I’m convinced that sometimes a film-maker must violate his public.” (p. 10)

Still, Renoir’s “bitter disappoint at the hostile French reaction to this film he had put so much of himself into and staked so much of his future on,” (p. 460) was such that, in combination with the arrival of the Second World War on his veritable doorstep, it drove him from his first home and towards America and the American film system (and clearly, into the path of Orson Welles), a decision with which Bergstrom displays a restrained disgust, as she does with Renoir’s post-war work in general, feeling that, whatever merits one picks out, overall “it is simply a fact that the cinema, and not only French cinema, lost a lot when Renoir abandoned the direction he had pursued with so much conviction during the 1930s in France.” (p. 460)

Like Welles, Renoir’s subsequent critical decline, seen retrospectively, is such that it marks out films like 1937’s The Grand Illusion and especially Rules of the Game as almost crystalline in their encapsulation of everything that made Renoir great and, thus, everything his later work came to be seen to lack. Welles’ own personal narrative differs slightly, insofar as that Kane was Welles’ first feature-length film, leading to the propagation of a certain ‘enfant terrible’ mystique, while Renoir had amassed a formidable body of work by 1939.

Bergstrom (using numerous historical documents and comprehensively referenced technical studies) argues that Renoir’s incredibly accomplished directorial style, showcased in the long takes, deep focus and complex choreography of The Rules of the Game, was in later years compromised entirely by executives from RKO (Welles’ studio of choice) and Renoir’s “lack of confidence in his understanding of American business, the American idiom and the American public” (p. 468), arguing that Renoir was reticent, that “there were too many areas in which Renoir, still the new-comer, understandably lacked experience and deferred to the Americans.” (p. 470).

In summary, she notes, having built a strong argument from the exemplary statistically analytical work of Alexander Sesonske, “In Hollywood Renoir was no longer able to work as a writer-director within a system he understood or could influence effectively. None of his American films were as fully integrated, conceptually and technically, as his work of the 1930s.”

Thus, if Renoir’s films after The Rules of the Game were inarticulate through studio meddling and an authorial lack of confidence in the face of an unfamiliar and vaguely hostile system, then such films as he produced before the aforementioned landmark have been received by the passing of time with precious little in the way of extra patience.

Andre Bazin, in his foundational “What Is Cinema? Volume One” defines The Rules of the Game as a landmark in pure cinematic terms, saying, in the process of becoming the director and the man who could produce such a film, he “uncovered the secret of a film form that would permit everything to be said without chopping the world up into little fragments, that would reveal the hidden meanings in people and things without disturbing the unity natural to them.”

According to Stephen Tifft in his “Theatre in the Round: The Politics of Space in the Films of Jean Renoir”, the socialist politics of The Rules of the Game are implicitly and in permanence bound up in Renoir’s late ‘30s obsession with deep focus and long takes, arguing that in doing so one could “tame the disruptive tendencies of cinematic language in order to make the mediation of the imagine unobtrusive” in an effort to “reproduce…reality” (p. 329).

Tifft’s work is based in the comprehensive groundwork of Bazin, but this fact is worth less than one might imagine simply by virtue of the fact that Bazin arrived on the scene first and has staked out of all the available ground, meaning one is all but forced to stand upon his formidable shoulders. Tifft does, however, locate one of the true origins of the later Italian neorealist tradition in Renoir’s 1935 work Toni, arguing it “[establishes] a highly naturalistic mise en scene…and [uses] non-professional or local actors who came from the region and class of their characters and spoke with native accents…his later films…continue to stake out a powerful claim to realism…but this now centers…on the naturalized standing of the spectator.” (p. 331)

Bergstrom feels similarly, noting “although Renoir kept his distance from party affiliations, his films showed a strong social and political sensitivity to the inequities of class structures in France and a sympathy for the working class.”  (p. 456)

Peter Harcourt concurs, arguing, “when a film-maker composes in depth, he allows the spectator to select certain features within the frame that he then can respond to. Hence the ambiguity of potential response…the film-maker who depends more upon editing, is more concerned to direct the response of the spectator.” (p. 23) This vaguely ‘democratic’ approach to formal composition resides fully in line with Renoir’s equally vague socialist, humanist politics.

There is a particularly cynical argument that routinely and inevitably raises its head when one professes a wish to discuss the idea and subsequent critical maintenance of a cinematic canon: to wit, the suggestion that the critical (as opposed, perhaps problematically, from popular appreciations, both in the moment and with an eye to retrospectivity) reputations of films like Citizen Kane and Rules of the Game are future-proofed, so to speak, by the anecdotally robust controversies (as discussed above) they evoked in the era of their assembly and exhibition, rather than by the fact that their critical and popular relevance remains a power in the world no matter how far from the origin of such monoliths we grow.

As I say, it’s a case formed from hardened cynicism and little else, assuming that critics are unable to determine for themselves the qualities of a film, formal, emotional or otherwise, or, perhaps more incredibly, that there is some conspiracy to keep truly ‘important’ films out of the public eye and to instead favour ‘safe’ films, whatever they are.

Boston University film theorist and Cassavettes scholar Ray Carney combines a particularly vitriolic form of this raison d’être with virulent anti-mainstream invective, leading to his declaring Kane, “one of the ten most over-rated American films of all time.” (”Citizen Kane on its Fiftieth Anniversary: The Greatest Movie Ever Made?”) and “[Schindler’s List] is a Hollywood producer’s self-congratulatory fantasy of how giving people a chance to work for you is doing them a big favor” (”Pulp Affliction: The Sorry State of Contemporary Film”). This is clearly his prerogative, and doubtless many possessing of a homogenous agenda will align themselves similarly.

For a defence of the films under attack to be mounted, however, is a simple matter, far simpler than one might imagine, and it’s one to be found, encapsulated in its entirety, in Peter Harcourt’s “What, Indeed, Is Cinema?”, wherein he states in no uncertain terms that “Bazin is at his best, as are all critics, when he is talking about the films that have engaged him most deeply.” (p. 28)

What more needs be said than that a critic’s engagement (indeed, an audience member’s engagement, for that matter) with a film should not be assumed to be false, no matter the intellectual or political contempt in which you hold the critical establishment that birthed them: when a film has touched and influenced so many both sentimentally and cognitively, it isn’t a ruse or grounds for derision. To continue to deploy such rhetoric in the name of questioning the fundamentals is to needlessly shake the foundations of your own house without desiring to build something more viable where the wreck might one day stand (perhaps the true purpose and calling of all self-identifying polemicists).

You can acquire the Criterion edition of Rules of the Game from Amazon.com.

Works Cited:

Bazin, Andre. What Is Cinema? (Vol 1) (What is Cinema?). New York: University of California P, 1968.

Bergstrom, Janet. “Jean Renoir’s Return to France.” Poetics Today (Duke University Press) Creativity and Exile 17 (1996): 453-89. JSTOR. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. 24 May 2009. Keyword: renoir.

Carney, Ray. “About Ray Carney: Career Overview.” People.bu.edu — people on the Web at Boston University. Boston University. 07 June 2009 <http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/aboutrc/bio.shtml>.

Carney, Ray. “Citizen Kane on its Fiftieth Anniversary: The Greatest Movie Ever Made?” People.bu.edu — people on the Web at Boston University. Boston University. 7 June 2009 <http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/carncult/orfilms.shtml>.

Carney, Ray. “”Pulp Affliction: The Sorry State of Contemporary Film,”" The Baffler May 1996.

Harcourt, Peter. “What, Indeed, Is Cinema?” University of Texas Cinema Journal 8 (1968): 22-28. JSTOR. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. 24 May 2009. Keyword: renoir.

Litle, Michael. “Sound Track: “The Rules of the Game”" University of Texas Cinema Journal 13 (1973): 35-44. JSTOR. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. 24 May 2009. Keyword: renoir.

Renoir, Jean, and Leo Braudy. “Renoir at Home: Interview with Jean Renoir.” University of California Film Quarterly 50 (1996): 2-8. JSTOR. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. 24 May 2009. Keyword: renoir.

The Rules of the Game. Dir. Jean Renoir. Perf. Nora Gregor, Paulette Dubost, Jean Renoir. DVD. Criterion, 2004.

Swanberg, W. A. Citizen Hearst A Biography of William Randolph Hearst. New York: Collier Books, 1981.

Tifft, Stephen. “Theatre in the Round: The Politics of Space in the Films of Jean Renoir.” Johns Hopkins University Theatre Journal 39 (1987): 328-46. JSTOR. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. 24 May 2009. Keyword: renoir.

Truffaut, François, and Paul Ronder. “François Truffaut: An Interview.” University of California Film Quarterly 17 (1963): 3-13. JSTOR. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. 24 May 2009. Keyword: renoir.

Welles, Orson, and Mark W. Estrin. Orson Welles Interviews (Conversations With Filmmakers Series). New York: University P of Mississippi, 2002.

Welles, Orson. “Jean Renoir: ‘The Greatest of All Directors’” The Los Angeles Times 18 Feb. 1979: 1-1. Orson Welles Archive. 23 Nov. 2006. 24 May 2009 <http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=120>.

Welles, Orson. “Jean Renoir: ‘The Greatest of All Directors’” The Los Angeles Times 18 Feb. 1979: 1-1. Orson Welles Archive. 23 Nov. 2006. 24 May 2009 <http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=120>.