Son of Rambow and tropes of media effects

 
Garth Jennings’ 2007 film Son of Rambow sets the stage for a spectacular clash of cultures.  Will Proudfoot and his sheltered upbringing rigidly proscribed by the Plymouth Brethren, to which his family belongs, are set immediately on a collision course with Lee Carter and his feral lack of supervision.  Lee bootlegging the same film that Will’s sect opens the film by protesting creates a drastic and immediate comparison.  The Plymouth Brethren’s protectionist insistence that such worldly influences as the cinema will corrupt those who indulge in them is put to the test as Will engages in Lee Carter’s world, and ultimately fails to come to fruition.

There are multiple characters and scenarios throughout the film that seem to embody classifications of the media effects discipline.  Interestingly, although Media Effects leans toward a protectionist stance regarding media consumption, the film, using the character arc of Will Proudfoot and the traction of his unlikely relationship with Lee Carter, seems determined to make a case for a freer and more optimistic paradigm for media encounters.

The Plymouth Brethren sect is depicted as a somber, tense, and pessimistic congregation. Their protest in front of the theater where First Blood is screening is illustrative of concerns that mirror many of the questions addressed by the Charter Motion Pictures and Youth Study.[1]  “What sort of scenes do children see when they attend theaters?  How do the mores depicted in these scenes compare with those of the community? What effect does what they witness have upon [children’s] ideals an attitudes? Do they affect the conduct of children? Are they related to delinquency or crime?”  The Plymouth Brethren are clearly concerned with media having an effect on viewers, and they are deeply suspicious of aberrant, corrupting influences.

Under such a culture, Will is sheltered from nearly the entirety of pop culture, and it renders him socially handicap.  Only once a series of unlikely events leads to his viewing of First Blood does he have a common reference point with his peers.  Lasswell[2] pointed out that the formation of Attention Aggregates relies upon common symbols of reference, and only once Will Proudfoot becomes acquainted with the world of Rambo does he have the common symbols of reference to become the center of the social project that “Son of Rambow” will become. 

Likely because it was his first encounter with any such text, Will’s response to it was far less conditioned than that of any of the other children in the film.  As a symbol specialist (Lasswell) he is the only child engaging with the text as a manipulator/controller rather than a mere handler.  His conception of the concept of Rambo as plastic and manipulatable contrasts with Lee’s conception of First Blood as just another movie – something to consume and discard – and he has consumed enough films that he has “cultivated”[3] a conception of films as a consumable good, and less of a text that he can engage in .  His surprise at Will’s pronouncement that he is the “Son of Rambow” shows that he had not thought to engage with or manipulate the text in this way.

If, as Gerbner defines, cultivation is “the independent contributions television (or media) makes to viewer conceptions of social reality,” then viewing “First Blood” clearly cultivated some conceptions in Will’s character.  However, viewing of the film does not itself account for the zeal and ambition that follows.  The film seems to counter or complicate this definition by suggesting that the text could only catalyze beliefs, interests, and convictions that were already in place in Will’s personality and imagination.  Will’s overactive imagination and his apathy toward the Plymouth Brethren’s imperatives had already been clearly illustrated through his whimsical drawings in his Bible.  His wholehearted embracing of the narrative world of Rambo may have been a surprise, but it was not a shock.

The manner in which Will manipulated the Rambo narrative speaks to Gerbner’s concept of “resonance.”  Having lost his own father to a brain aneurism, Will created an opportunity to save a figurative father figure.  Gerbner said that media will resonate with an audience when “everyday reality and television provide a double dose of messages that resonate and amplify cultivation.”  The lack of a patriarch in Will’s home is depicted as a point of angst throughout the film, and for Will to act as a media manipulator involved in creating a narrative that resonates with his personal life shows an inversion or reversal of Gerber’s unidirectional parameters of resonance.

Lee Carter also proved an interesting foil to Gerbner’s “Mean World Syndrome”.  Claiming that exposure to violence in media would “cultivate an image of a relatively mean and dangerous world in [one’s] conception of reality,” Gerbner proposed that heavy exposure to the world of television cultivates “exaggerated perceptions of the number of people involved in violence in any given week.”  Lee is certainly introduced in the film as a character inundated with violent media, and with a marked pessimism about the people he interacts with and their intentions toward him.  However, the film clearly illustrates that a factor outside of media (in this case his friendship with Will, and their joint project of creating the “Son of Rambow” movie) have a marked influence on his outlook, which within the scope of the film seem to have the opposite effect and in a much more pronounced fashion than Gerbner’s description.

While the film explores the expectation that exposure to a film as violent as “First Blood” could lead to problematic behavior, it definitely depicts both Lee and Will as being enriched by their encounter with that text and with one another.  It depicts interpersonal relationships as being a more important factor than media influence in determining the effect of media (not altogether incongruent with Katz and Lazarsfeld’s[4] discussion of small groups and a 2-step process of media effects.)  It also depicts Will’s experience with the text as being so full of joy as to be transcendent.  This type of engagement is conspicuously absent in the media effects texts we have explored, and Jennings’ film frames this omission as the most important thing about engaging with a film text.

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[1] Charters, W. W. 1935. Motion Pictures and Youth: A Summary. New York: Macmillan.

[2] Lasswell, Harold (1948). Bryson, L., ed. The Structure and Function of Communication in Society. The Communication of Ideas. New York: Institute for Religious and Social Studies.

[3] Gerbner, G. (1998). "Cultivation analysis: An overview".Mass Communication and Society, 3/4, 175-194.

[4] Katz & Lazarsfeld (1955). "Personal Influence". New York: Free Press.

Generic Ambiguity – playing with audience expectations in The Maltese Falcon

The Maltese Falcon provides an interesting case study for genre analysis, as it is credited with a role in catalyzing the era of Film Noir and as the film itself uses, plays with, and resists genre-based audience expectations.

It is worth noting that this film was seminal in establishing both Bogart and Huston’s careers. Audiences were not familiar with either of them when this film was released in 1941, less than 2 months prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and engagement of the US in World War II.   A retrospective understanding of eminent historical events and of the legacy of Bogart’s career playing a litany of variations on Sam Spade affect a modern viewer’s engagement with this text in a way impossible for its contemporary audience to chew on. The film is now, in several ways representative of a style (and arguably a genre) that was not yet established upon its release.

The film opens under the pretext of a detective mystery, but following the generic shift of the novel on which it is based, the hero of this mystery is flawed and proletariat, speaking in jargon and functioning under a fallen pretense of the society in which he works.  Prior to this film, and even in previous film adaptations of the same novel, the hero and his worldview were significantly softened and romanticized.  Huston’s achievement here may have been in finding a way to cinematically express the pessimistic realism of hard-boiled writers while avoiding conflict with censors or the Hayes Code, and establishing a pattern for all of Film Noir to follow. In some ways he cinematically introduced, what Schrader termed the "narcissistic, defeatist code"[1] of protagonists created by Hard Boiled writers like Dashiell Hammett.

The ultimate nature of the film remains ambiguous throughout, as romantic elements struggle against gritty pessimism.  The ambiguity is ultimately tied up in the mystery of Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s compulsive lies and in uncertainty to how Sam Spade will ultimately respond to her.  In establishing the plot and mystery over the course of the film, several possible solutions are proposed, each of which, if “proven” would create parameters of a given moral code for the film, and thus define it’s genre quite differently.  Each proposition varies based on the level of romanticism versus realism in the characters of Sam and Brigid as well as in the amount of corruption revealed in each character.

If Brigid’s initial lie about her "sister" had been true, the film could have been a straightforward crime drama with a heavy dose of innocuous romantic involvement. "Good guys" and "Bad Guys" would have been easy to identify and categorize.  But each time Spade resists believing her façade and her character becomes increasingly morally dubious, the implications for the moral order of the entire film are that its reality becomes increasingly dark, dangerous, and pessimistic.  The introduction of the possibility that Sam will engage in behavior as corrupt and self-serving as that of Brigid or the more overt criminals Kasper, Joel, or Wilmer, creates a terrific range of possible moral orders for the film, within the film. 

The film concluded in perhaps the perfect place to catalyze the Film Noir movement.  Brigid was revealed as an intractable black widow type femme fatale, but Sam’s actions cast him instead as quintessentially “hard-boiled.”   Ultimately he is a lone wolf – resistant to the allure of Brigid’s dangerous romanticism; a little bit lawless, but fundamentally incorruptible at some limit.

 

This moral order, where climactically the protagonist can be trusted to resist corruption, but every other character (and the world of the film at large) is suspect, seems like the perfect signature for nascent Film Noir. 

The Maltese Falcon is absent many of the more visual, semantic elements usually attributed to Noir films.  Its lighting in particular is even and unexpressive, but in syntactic elements, many of the structures required for Noir to take off were strongly introduced here; particularly the tension between pessimistic realism and romanticism and the sympathetic portrayal of the protagonist’s narcissistic pessimism and acceptance of his flaws as benign in relation to those of others. (A palatable entry of the anti-hero?)  

It seems that the moral order of the universe of the film is an additional syntactic element that may be used to identify genre, as it certainly relates to the audience’s expectations of any given text.  Altman said that “the audience for a genre film is sufficiently committed to generic values to tolerate and even enjoy in genre films capricious, violent, or licentious behavior which they might disapprove of in real life.” [2]  This would seem to be because the audience has an acceptance and expectation for a moral order in the universe of a given genre’s reality that they accept is different from that of their reality.  If, however, an audience came to a film text prepared to accept a given moral order and were then presented or affronted with a contrary one (as might have occurred in the Maltese Falcon had Sam ultimately proved corruptible), it would likely leave the audience considerably unsettled. 

That potential for unease has certainly been exploited intentionally in more recent times, but in 1941 the gritty pessimism of Sam Spade may have been just enough Noir to be widely acclaimed and accepted and to jumpstart a decade of deep darkness and high style. The counter-cultural acceptance of this defeatist morality works, according to Altman, "When we are in the world, we follow its rule; when we enter into a genre film, all our decisions are self-consciously modified to support a different kind of satisfaction."  The Maltese Falcon appears to have introduced, in large measure, the "satisfaction" possible in Film Noir, and with it's unexpected commercial success, created a "world" and a moral order that audiences were willing to re-enter repeatedly, embracing its "overtly counter-cultural acts" in order to experience the kind of satisfaction that came from watching Sam Spade soundly reject romanticism, living by the moral order of a "narcissistic, defeatist code".

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[1] Schrader, Paul. (1972) Notes on Film Noir, Film Comment, Vol. 8, No. 1. Spring, 1972.
[2] Altman, R. (1996) 'Cinema and Genre', in Nowell-Smith, G. (ed) 1996 The Oxford History of World Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.276-85. 

History of Animation: Early Disney

1924 - At which point Disney's animation was relatively on par with everyone elses.  He was not yet spending 3-10x what his competition could afford to spend on each project. But some good fluidity, and certainly some novelty.

How Green Was My Valley; How much of Ford?

If, as Sarris stated, the Auteur Theory is in a “pattern of constant flux,” [1] then it seems rather problematic to use any defined parameters of what constitutes an Auteur to prove the Auteurism of any given director, writer or other film artist or technician.

 Yet the inclusion of certain names in any theoretician’s pantheon of Auteurs also brings into question what the use of the name of that director implies.  Foucault indicated “unlike a proper name, which moves from the interior of a discourse to the real person outside who produced it, the name of the author remains at the contours of texts – separating one from the other, defining their form, and characterizing their mode of existence.”[2]  It is possible then, that the reason the films of John Ford are strung together for contextual analysis as one “work” is primarily because they are all brandished with his name, and that the trends and value binaries that are prevalent in his work are as much reflective of the cultures in which he functioned as of his unique personality or influence.  If it is true, as Barthes argued, that “The text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture,”[3] then it might become impossible to separate the influence of Ford on the film from the influence of the contemporary culture and fashionable practices on the film from the influence of the contemporary culture and fashionable practices on Ford. 

While on the one hand, a practitioner like Sarris would likely look for similarities amongst Ford’s work to constitute a signature, Wollen would attempt to “reveal [an] author where none had been seen before”[4] by employing a deep textual analysis to identify “defining characteristics of an author’s work [that] are not necessarily those which are most readily apparent,” and while Wollen’s approach is more likely to effectively trace shifts over time in the more complex textual themes of Ford’s work, they still default to identifying these shifts with Ford as an author or defining influence, rather than more overarching cultural tensions, or even the effect of these tensions on Ford himself.

We know that over the course of John Ford’s prolific career, his personal political inclinations shifted significantly, and it is possible that this is reflected in the darkening and maturation of his work.  It’s certainly possible to attribute this shift as a catalyst for his revisionist Westerns.  Though, Foucault might point out there was also a World War and a number of weighty paradigm shifts happening world wide throughout that shift.  Whether Ford’s shift from portraying the “mythology of the American West to portraying the American West as a myth”[5] can be attributed to his personal disillusionment, to the disillusionment of the culture for which he created, to the increasingly complicated and benevolent relationship he had with the Navajo tribe he repeatedly used to portray “Indians” for good or ill in his films, or to the maturity of aging, is impossible to dissect and compartmentalize. 

How Green Was My Valley (was certainly steeped in visual and thematic stylizations that a Sarris-level Auteur definition would expect and that are fairly consistent throughout the films that Ford directed.  There was ample screen space afforded to ritual and routine, a plethora of purposely framed symbolic shots, (Mr. Gruffydd framed in a cemetery after Angharad’s wedding) an implied worldview within the performed text that women exist only in relation to men (evidenced by every spoken line by a woman, and reaffirmed by the text ending with the loss of the last adult male) , and a healthy dose of tension between archetypically opposing forces.  (Tradition vs. Modernity, Poverty vs. Dignity) It is certain that both Sarris and Wollen were able to find ample instances to analyze this film as a piece authored by Ford. 

But interestingly, Ford was brought into this project rather last second.  It was initially adapted from the Richard Llewellyn novel by Philip Dunne to be directed by William Wyler as a 4-hour-long epic.  The script was whittled down to include only Huw’s childhood while it was still under Wyler’s hand, and Ford made no notable changes to that script.  The only recorded changes he made to the existing plan were to re-cast Bronwyn and Angharad with 2 of his favorite actresses, and to bring on Arthur Miller as the director of photography.  This potentially complicates the application of the Auteur theory, but possible strengthens Sarris’ incorporeal argument that the temperature of the director on set, or the “élan of his soul” becomes manifest in the completed work.  Beyond his signature applications of mise-en-scene, few of the other tensions and themes consistent with his other work can be directly traced to his post-pre-production work, and if present, must then be attributed to his presence on the set, directing and conversing with the actors and crew.

If, in a film like How Green Was My Valley, the Auterism of John Ford managed to be manifest, it is possibly a testament to the more cinematic and less explicable features of the Auteur theory, proving that “ the structure is associated with a single director… not because he has played the role of the artist, expressing himself or his own vision in the film, but because it is through the force of his preoccupations that an unconscious, unintended meaning can be decoded in the film, usually to the surprise of the individual involved.” (Wollen)

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[1] Sarris, Andrew. Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962

[2] Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Cornell University Press, 1977.  Essay: “What is an Author?”

[3] Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author. Ubu Web Papers. 1967

[4] Wollen, Peter. From “Signs and Meanings in the Cinema.” The Auteur Theory. British Film Institute, 1997.

[5] http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2010janmar/ford.html

History of Animation: Fleischer Bros. Inkwell and Betty Boop

Fleischer Bros., who ruled the animation roost until the code came to town.  The code affected everything they did, while it barely affected Disney's aesthetic.  Essentially, Disney survived the code and Max Fleischer was pummeled by it. A far more urbane sensibility, also - early use of rotoscoping to stimulate more realistic movement.

History of Animation: Winsor McCay

Little Nemo: 1911


Actual animation starts at   7:20

But also, begins to show how slow and laborious pre-cell, pre-industrialized animation (done on paper) must have been.

This is not the revolution you think it is. Studio 60 and the structure of domination.

The 2006 pilot of the television series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip lays out a bold and promising premise.  It purports to be laying the foundation for a revolutionary show-within-a-show.  It portends to be introducing a dynamic, countercultural piece of media, uniquely poised to succeed at authenticity where others fail, to hijack the system and turn it on its head.   “This show is going to be daringly different,” it promises.

Unfortunately, this promissory bravado seems to operate under the delusion that revolution can occur without any significant change to the superstructure.  The false premise that we can function under the same systems and get different results underlies the entire plot.  So while the show seems to promise revolution and resistance, it may be more accurately providing mere coping.  As Garnam pointed out, “It is … a question of recognizing the systemic constraints within which [people] construct their forms of cultural coping and how unemancipative these can be.”  He criticized the “tendency of cultural studies to validate all and every popular culture practice as resistance – in its desire to avoid being tarred and feathered with an elitist brush – [as being] profoundly damaging to its political project.”[1] 

Studio 60, both as a show and as a show within a show, are problematically depicted as being emancipatory and resistive, when neither actually challenge the structure of domination they function under.  Rather, because of the character of Jordan McDeere, the new president of the fictional NBS network, they are simply going to play the same game over again with a keener instinct for navigating audience work[2] to their benefit and a higher tolerance for risk of aspersion. But as Garnam pointed out “little dent will be made in domination if… nothing is done about processes of economic development,” and “no empowerment will mean much unless it is accompanied by a massive shift in control of economic resources.”  Studio 60 plays at a façade of empowerment and anti-domination without so much a second glance at the power structure of the media industry.

Inasmuch as her character seems constantly to be holistically strategizing, Jordan McDeere presents an interesting paradox.  She seems unusually adept at wielding what Garnam called “Corporate Power”, “power exercised by economic agents within these overall structural constraints, but where the ownership or control of resources provides some room for intentional strategic manouvre.”[3] Her resources in this case tend to be private information about Matt Albie and Danny Tripp’s private and professional lives, as well as better forecasting of the response to Wes Mendell’s live breakdown than her peers.  The way the episode is structured, Jordan’s heightened understanding of the functionality of the “free lunch”, “to whet the prospective audience member’s appetites and thus (1) attract and keep them attending the program…; (2) cultivate a mood conducive to favorable reaction to the advertisers’ explicit and implicit messages” allows her to see potential controversy and media buzz as a fiscal asset to her company.  But it is very clear that she is not welcoming provocative content as a form of resistance or empowerment, but as an economically minded strategy to “produce audiences to sell to the advertisers.”(Smythe)

Her character seems to have grasped that Wes Mendell’s breakdown will have suggested to media consumers that they have a problem, and that by altering the content and direction of the show in this way she is promising a fix to that problem.  It’s an effective response based on Smythe’s description of advertising and audience work, “Customers do not buy things, they buy tools to solve problems… The nature of the work done by audience power thus seems to be to the advertising free lunch combination of sensory stimuli to determine whether (s)he has the “problem” the advertiser is posing, [and] (2) is aware that there is a class of commodities which, if purchased and used will “solve” that problem… [and](3) ought to add brand x of that class of commodities to the mental or physical shopping list.” 

So while Jordan may on some level appear to be countercultural or revolutionary, she is really just upholding the same superstructure more effectively and with a better understanding of its mechanics than her more outwardly dominating, unflatteringly depicted peers.  This revolution she is orchestrating is just a flashy free lunch.

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[1] Garnam, Nicholas. Political Economy and Cultural Studies: Reconciliation or Divorce? March 1993(?)

[2] Smythe, Dallas Walker.  Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness, and Canada. “On the Audience Commodity and its Work.” Ablex Publishing Corporation. New Jersey, 1981.

[3] Garnam, Nicholas.  Emancipation, the Media, and Modernity.  Arguments about the Media and Social Theory. Oxford University Press. 2000.