'Postmodernism, Hyperreality and the Hegemony of Spectacle in New Hollywood Essay\r'

' by and by the screening of The intercellular substance on its first release, a dear cousin of mine, impression connoisseur and greedy fan of authorized mental pictures, spontaneously made the pas while comment: â€Å"This is an simply bracing pic to me! ” If some(prenominal) thing, The Matrix is a clear marker of cultural modification.\r\nA record with state-of-the-art toil values wish well this is bound to elicit in us the tardy realization of how slow our response has been to the cultural products of an entirely trans peeed film application, that of everyplacebold Hollywood. My cousin’s casual and unwitting remark reflects the embarrassment matte by both professional novice and secular a uniform in coping with coetaneous motion pictures, in fractionicular when we still list to greet smart Hollywood products with the standards of the Old Hollywood celluloid.\r\nBecause of our adherence to tradition, we still tend to look for those classica l values of â€Å"development”, â€Å" ropiness” and â€Å"unity” in autobiographys besides to find with discomposure that archives plots bewilder thinner, that characters are reduced to running(a) stereotypes and that action is carried through by loosely-linked sequences, built nigh spectacular stunts, dazzling stars and special effects. Narrative abstruseity is sacrificed on the altar of spectacle” (Buckland 166) as now’s blockbusters turn out to be nonhing precisely calcu tardyd exercises in profit-making, all high-concept, high-gloss and pure show.\r\n similar cries of warning close to the loss of narrative virtue to cinematic spectacle make been voiced at una similar spots, normally at times of crisis or change in the history of the American cinema. One could cite, for example, Bazin’s disdain at the â€Å"displacement of classicism” by the baroque dah, marking the end of the pure variety of classical cinema. His coined term, â€Å"superwestern, ”de abridgeates the â€Å" outgrowth of a new benignant of western” (Kramer 290), that, according to Bazin, â€Å"would be ashamed to be just itself, and looks for sev conquestionl(prenominal) additional pursuit to shrive its existenceâ€an aesthetic, sociological, moral, psychological, political, or erotic interest” (150-1).\r\nSimilarly, in 1957 Manny Farber, taking his cue from Bazin’s superwestern, laments the â€Å"disappearance of this [classical] roduction trunk and the closing of action-oriented neighborhood theaters in the 1950s”. He claims that conductors like Howard Hawks â€Å"who had flouri expend in ‘a factory of modest picture-making’ were pushed towards artistic self-consciousness, thematic seriousness, and big-budget spectacle â€Å"(Kramer 293, emphasis added). A ten-spot later, Pauline Kael too expresses her fears at the disintegration of filmic narrative which she at tri exceptes to the abrasion of traditional film mathematical product in general.\r\nShe laments not single the emphasis on â€Å" technique” â€Å"purely visual content,” and â€Å"open-ended, elaborate readings” of the experimental and advanced art film of the New American Cinema, but as Kramer puts it, she was equally critical of the experiences facilitated by Hollywood’s mainstream releases. The lack of concern for coherent storytelling on the part of producers and directors in charge of the volatile and apostolical process of filmmaking was matched by the audience’s gung ho response to spectacular attractions and shock effects, irrespective of their decimal point of narrative motivation. 296) Voices of dissatisfaction were heard at an other major(ip) turn in the history of Hollywood, that is in the late 1970s, when the â€Å"unprecedented box-office advantage of Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977), signaled Hollywood’s aesthetic, cultural and industrial re-orientation towards movies with more(prenominal) emphasis on special effects and cinematic spectacle” (Kramer 301).\r\nUnlike the classical movies produced on the assembly line under the studio regime (films that respected narrative integrity and lissom story ideas into the classical three-act of exposition, complication and resolution), the products of New Hollywood, says critic Richard Schickel, seem â€Å"to collapse lost or bedraggled the art of narrative…. [Filmmakers] are generally not refining stories at all, they are spicing up ‘concepts’ (as they like to call them), refining gimmicks, making sure on that point are no complexities to fur our tongue when it comes time to spread the word of mouth”(3).\r\nContemporary cinema has come to depend so a great deal on shrewd grocerying and advertising strategies that its pictures, as ticktock Crispin Miller points out, â€Å"like TV ads, … aspire to a total â €˜look’ and seem more knowing than directed” (49). The exhaustingy that critics nowa age face with films like The Matrix and the new situation in Hollywood, is not only unlike the layman’s softness to assess â€Å"any recent Hollywood film as a discreet textbookual artefact that is either ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than the artefact produced under the studio regime,” Cook and Bernink note (99).\r\nIt has overly to do with regarding â€Å"the textual form of recent Hollywood as expressive of changed production circumstances that testament to a different kind of textual artifact”(ibid. ). In other words, as we move on in our worldwideized, high-tech age, it is becoming increasingly difficult to regard any single movie as a self-contained, autonomous text. On the contrary, as Eileen Meehan contends, it has let imperative to look upon any New Hollywood mainstream release â€Å"always and simultaneously as text and commod ity, intertext and product line” (31).\r\nIn order to rescript our critical standards and respond effectively to the new side of the contemporary Hollywood movie, we need to grasp the striking changes that the American film industry has undergone in the post-classical period, which started chastise after World War II and culminated to a point of radical transformation in the post-1975 period, which has ultimately come to best warrant the term New Hollywood.\r\nThese changes have been lucidly described in a number of historiographic studies (Ray 1985, Balio 1985, 1990, Schatz 1983, 1993, Gomery 1986, Bernardoni 1991, Corrigan 1991, Hillier 1992, Wasko 1994, Kramer 1998, Neale and Smith 1998, Cook and Bernink 1999) which collectively shed ample light on the completely new situation defining New Hollywood. What has drastically changed is both the ways movies are made and the ways in which Hollywood has been doing business.\r\nAfter the government’s level of the †Å"vertically-integrated” studio system, the industry turned to producing and selling performance pictures on a film-by-film basis, resulting in the shift of index from studio heads to deal-makers (agents), in the rise of independent producers/directors, and in a more competitive and fragmented movie food marketplace (Schatz 9).\r\nTo the rise of TV and the emergence of other competing media technologies (VCRs, C adequate to(p) and Satellite TV) Hollywood responded with a re-orientation towards blockbuster movies, â€Å"these high-cost, high-tech, high-stakes, multi-purpose merriment mechanisms that breed music scenes and soundtrack albums, TV serial and videocassettes, video games and theme park rides, novelizations and comic books” (Schatz 9).\r\npatronage the â€Å"increasingly fragmented but ever more expanding entertainment industry †with its demographics and target audiences, its diversified multimedia conglomerates, its global(ized) markets and new d elivery systems”, the calculated blockbuster, as New Hollywood’s feature film, remains the driveway force of the industry (ibid. ). This is testified by the monumental success of the blockbuster at the box-office.\r\nSchatz cites Variety’s equip study of the industry’s all-time mercantile hits, in which only 2 movies of the classical period appear to have r all(prenominal)ed the top, whereas â€Å"90 of the top vitamin C hits have been produced since 1970, and all of the top 20 since Jaws in 1975”(9). The big-budget, all-star, spectacular hits of the late fifties and early sixties (such as The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur, Cleopatra, or Dr. Zhivago) have some sizable profits to show for (all in the neighborhood of $25-to $50 billion).\r\nBy the standards of their age, they were considered colossal box-office successes; however, by today’s standards they seem quite puny contestants to the post-75 era of super-blockbusters which generate re cord-setting grosses, well beyond the $100 million barrier (always in constant dollars). And such a figure applies only to theatrical rentals, which accounts just for a percentage of the total revenue of a movie which withal finds outlets in ancillary markets. he industry’s spectacular growth and expansion (its plane integration) is to a great extent owing to the take-over of the study (Paramount, Fox, Columbia, MCA/Universal) by Brobdingnagian media empires (Warner/Time Communications, Murdoch’s watchword Corporations, Sony, Matsushita, respectively) forming multimedia conglomerates with diverse interests in the domestic and the global market, with holdings in movies, TV production, electrify, records, book and magazine publications, video games, theme parks, consumer electronics (both software and hardware).\r\nThese huge corporations turn in monetary muscle for the multi-million production budgets of the blockbusters (since the production costs have themselv es sky-rocketed), but also market muscle for promotion. market and advertising strategies have been the key to the unprecedented success of the New Hollywood movie since Jaws: through pre-selling, usually cashing in on the popularity of a novel publish prior to production, a movie becomes a media â€Å" casing” by heavy advertising on prime-time TV and the press, as well as by the bulky simultaneous release in thousands of mall-based multiplex theaters.\r\n cipher blockbuster productions are carefully designed to contain the greatest potential profit not only through withstanded theatrical rental (sequels, re-issues, remakes, director’s cut), but also though capitalization in ancillary markets: soon the movie will come out on videocassette, audio-cassette, novel, computer game, and the increasingly popular since the mid-nineties, DVD, let alone an extended market career through by-products ranging from the CD movie soundtrack to T-shirts and toys, which raise to the impressive surge in profits.\r\nIt becomes obvious and so why contemporary movies cannot be conceived of as soulfulness entities and cannot be separately examined from their economic intertext that renders them part (or instead the driving belt) of a larger entertainment machine and advertising campaign. Expensive blockbusters, which in the early days of the post-classical period were the exception and now, as Schatz states, have become the rule, â€Å"are the central output of modern Hollywood. only what, aside from costs, are their dominant characteristics? How are they able to attract, engage and entertain millions of people? asks Warren Buckland (166).\r\nThe blockbuster syndrome has also changed the movies’ mode of address. Designed around a main idea, what is called â€Å"high concept”, a blockbuster becomes increasingly plot-driven, increasingly visceral, kinetic, fast-paced, increasingly reliant on special effects, increasingly â€Å"fantastic” (and thus apolitical), and increasingly targeted at younger audiences. And significantly enough, the lack of complex characters or plot [as for example] in Star Wars opens the film to other possibilities, notably its amalgamation of genre conventions and its elaborate play of cinematic references.\r\nBut while these movies make out a great popularity among younger audiences, as their huge box-office success indicates, the loss of narrative integrity to spectacle, and the thought of escapism and triviality usually associated with high-gloss, star jinx and dumb show, has driven most academics or old-cinema cinephiles to summarily shun or dismiss blockbusters as notwithstanding calculated exercises in shameless profiteering.\r\nWarren Buckland thinks that these arguments about the loss of narrative potential in the contemporary feature film are overstated and attempts to rearward(a) the â€Å"unhelpful and hostile evaluative stance” (167) of the critics towards the blockbu ster. guidance on a typical action-adventure blockbuster, Spielberg’s Raiders of the baffled Arc heproposes adopting an analytical and descriptive approach to these films, an approach dubbed by Bordwell and Thompson â€Å"historical oetics. ”\r\nPart of the argument he makes is that â€Å"historical poetics” can account for the popularity of movies with such a broad appeal (and allows us to take them mischievously as aesthetic, cultural objects) â€Å"especially because movies are examined in name of their individuality, including their response to their historical moment, in which style and composition respond to the historical questions posed in the grow in which the film is made” (168-169). In other words, the issue is not so much about the so-called death of narrativeâ€because narrative is still alive and wellâ€but the emergence of a new kind of narrative, whose meaning is conveyed not through traditional narration but by emphasis on specta cle and the visual impact of the pictures which provide additional narrative pleasure and have changed the patterns of peach response. Thus Buckland’s concluding remark that â€Å"it is maybe time to stop condemning the New Hollywood blockbuster and to start, instead, to understand it,” carries more merit than we have been ready to admit.\r\nMy intention in this essay is to extend the argument about the narrative/ spectacle issue in the direction suggested by Buckland, but within a wider, cultural perspective. The supremacy of the visual and the spectacular over traditional narration in the textual form of contemporary movies is not only expressive of the changed production values and the text’s signifying practices; it is also wistful of the changed cultural patterns and lifestyle habits in postmodernistity.\r\nClassical cinema favored traditional storytelling because it provided a univocal interpretation of life and reflected a uniformity in entertainment habits: cinema was the predominant form of entertainment, as â€Å"the movies attracted 83 cents of every U. S. dollar spent on diversionary attack” (Ray 26). Its nineties counterpart, with its emphasis on the sensational and the spectacular, on episodic action and generic diversification, is a postmodern cinema entertaining the possibility of multiple import and the hyperreality of the visual, subject to an increasing commodified experience.\r\nAs Anne Friedberg puts it, â€Å"today the culture industry takes on different forms: Domestic electronics (fax, modems, cable television) follow the interactive model of dialogic telephone communications. The individualized computer turns the home user into a desktop publisher, the microwave turns every cook into an instant gourmet, the Walkman transforms each listener into a radio programmer.\r\nBoth production and reception have been individualized; the culture industry no longer speaks in a univocal, massive voice. 189) This proliferation of entertainment venues offered to the individual points to a general self-consciousness often regarded as the central feature of postmodernism, what Featherstone terms â€Å"the fragmentation and overproduction of cultureâ€the key-feature of consumer culture” (76). As Jameson says, â€Å"in postmodern culture, ‘culture’ itself has become a product in its own right; the market has become a substitute for itself and fully as much a commodity as any of the items it includes within itself” (1991 x).\r\nIn the â€Å"cultural logics of late capitalism,” Jameson’s code-phrase for postmodernity, what is commodified is not simply the image, which has acquired central role in contemporary culture but lived experience itself. As Guy Debord diagnoses in The Society of the Spectacle, â€Å"everything that was lived directly has travel away into a representation (1983 np). Baudrillard, as Friedberg notes, also talks about â€Å"the e quivalent phenomenonâ€representation of the thing replacing the thingâ€and extends it into a mise-en- abime of the ‘hyperreal,’ where signs refer only to signs.\r\nHyperreality is not just an inverted relation of sign and signifier, but one of receding reference, a bullying operation in the signifying chain”(178). A part in this process of the commodification of the sign and the derealization of the real has been compete by media technologies, especially electronics, as Vivian Sobchack points out: The postmodern and electronic â€Å"instant” … constitutes a form of controlling presence (one abstracted from the continuity that gives meaning to the system past/present/future) and changes the nature of the post it occupies.\r\nWithout the temporal emphases of historical consciousness and personal history, space becomes abstract, ungrounded, monotoneâ€a site for play and display kind of than an invested situation in which action â€Å"coun ts” rather than computes. such a superficial space can no longer hold the spectator/ user’s interest, but has to stimulate it constantly in the same way a video game does. Its emotionlessnessâ€a function of its lack of temporal heaviness and bodily investmentâ€has to attract spectator interest at the surface. … In an important sense, electronic space disembodies.\r\n'