The Inevitable Identification With Film and Its Many Wonders

After reading Sarah's blog, I had two immediate thoughts:

1) Good grief! we're back to Sleepless in Seattle again. It is interesting (I say that a bit begrudgingly) how such an irritating movie has become so relevant to this class and our study of film and its many elements.  This gives me hope that my mundane and pathetically simple little life will become the best-selling book I so badly want it to be.  I mean, if Sleepless can do it, so can I.  Heck, compared to Ryan's Annie, I'll even look "normal." Score.

2) Sarah's discussion of Christian Metz and his notion of the role that film plays in our lives is striking.  Yet while she offers the erudite and cultured reader an escape (these are "just momentary" influences), I am unable to do the same. I firmly believe that the effect that film has on our sense of (self-)identification is much greater than we can even know and almost certainly greater than we will ever to admit.  

Albeit unprofessional/cheating/informal/etc, I feel obliged to draw upon several personal experiences to make my point.  (Kind reader, do not judge me yet.)

First and foremost, film is omnipresent in our lives, from the time we are born until the time we die. We might begin with television ("Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?" oh, sing with me!) or we might be started on video right away (On account of being the super-eldest cousin of all 14, I've seen "Baby Mozart" more times that I care to discuss), but ultimately we always end up at film. Even if our parents try to keep us from it, inevitably, they fail because film has become such an important educational and cultural tool that children are bound to come across it at school (if they never have before) or after, and since every child is required by law to be given an education, they will all encounter it at some point or another (yes, even the home-schooled ones).  Film is an intricate part of culture and society, and we, as byproducts of both, are shaped and affected by it.  

What's more, we're bound to encounter many different types of film throughout our early lives. The soon-to-be-autobiographer's very own sibling is a prime example.  My youngest brother, devoted Barney fan until the age of 5 (we humor him that it was 3), at which point he moved onto Power Rangers Seasons 3-12, now finds in himself a supreme affinity for James Bond and Seth Rogen.  Shocking? Hardly, considering what came after Barney and during Power Rangers: Mission: Impossible (TBS), Mrs. Doubtfire (mother-approved), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (ditto), American Pie 1&2 (mother-not-knowing), Saving Private Ryan (Father: "Well, your great uncle did fight in World War II..."),  and the Van Wilder special collection.  The child (precocious young thing) has seen more than his share of films from different genres, appreciated them all (sort of), and developed his own tastes.  But what's more, this repertoire has affected him.  He's been clever, resourceful, confident, wickedly funny, a "typical teenage boy," and solemn.  And while he would have experienced all of these things without the guidance of popular film icons, his understanding and impression of these traits has been forever altered by them.  In today's world, it is impossible to not associate Matt Damon with serious, intelligent (ex?) government worker and Kiera Knightly with Renaissance couture, syntax, and custom.  The actors and characters come to personify traits that, when presented by us, echo, even if just momentarily, that characters who once truly embodied them.  

Thus, as Sarah says, the protagonist of the film becomes a role model for us, someone we try to emulate in hopes of coming across the same way that they do or having what they have.  Does my younger brother want to be an unemployed pothead?  Hardly.  But he does like the cavalier demeanor and hilarious stream of consciousness that are part of Seth Rogen's usually (deep-down) nice guy characters.  Does he want to be constantly on the run and in danger of losing his life? Not if Heaven doesn't have X-Box live.  But Bond's debonair nature and lavish lifestyle are undeniably appealing.  

Annie's (Meg Ryan) role model, although unidimensional and porous, is a role model nonetheless (one who reflects the aforementioned traits back onto Annie).  And the truth is, Annie herself becomes a role model as well.  Granted, her dedicated "followers" might be few in number, but they are there nonetheless because they want to believe in Annie's quest for memorable love, the same way that Annie wants to believe Terry McKay (Deborah Kerr).  I would suggest that her waivering isn't so much insecurity or uncertainty as it is reason battling against the siege her heart has just launched.  Annie knows it's foolish to want to be like Terry, but some part of her just can't help it.  

This inner battle is, I'd wager, something we've all seen before.  For my part, I've done many silly things for the sake of  imitating my role models.  After seeing My Best Friend's Wedding (another sneak-by-the-mother film.  Tragically, I was later caught), I wanted nothing more than to dress and speak and look the way that Kimmy (Cameron Diaz) did.  This was short-lived, as I met Rose (Kate Winslet, still my idol) aboard the Titanic not long after, and her gorgeous necklace completely changed my sentiments about jewelry.  And then there was Satine (Nicole Kidman, Moulin Rouge!) a few years later, who re-kindled the French flame that had died out years before.  Most recently, I've aimed to be some hybrid of Audrey Hepburn and Eva Green, an endeavor which has colored my closet a lot blacker, forced my to work of my enunciation of words, and left me in search of, of course, a smart black hat.  

Is this all fruitless?  Almost completely, because just as Sarah recognizes of herself and Annie, the success of these imitations is greatly hampered within the social constructs of the real world.  But my failure to make these imitations work only serves to further reminds me that while life is not like film, mankind will never cease in trying to make it so.  We are forever tied to what we have seen on the screen before, and what we will see before we die.  The images, the relationships, and the characters all endure; we merely serve to fulfill their legacy as we, deliberately or accidentally, strive to achieve the perfection they once attained on screen.  While this may not help women in their quest for good role models, it promises results if one should ever come into a frame.  

Genre, My Middle School Years, & Film Noir

Rick Altman’s critical piece “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre” seemed me to fit our film class as perfectly as Tania Modleski’s article compliments Rear Window.  As Altman says in the beginning of his article, “We all know a genre when we see one. Scratch only where it itches.”  While this is not, I’m sure, the case for all the members of our class, it most certainly was the case for me.  Before coming to college, I had in my mind a very clear idea of which names classified which films, and I had never really deviated from that.  How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days was romantic comedy (aka “chick flick”), Beauty and the Beast was animation for kids, Robin Hood: Men in Tights was plain comedy, The Bourne Identity was thriller, and Silence of the Lambs was horror. That was that, and I was blissfully ignorant. 

I then believed much in what I know now is the audience’s ritual relationship. I believed that film adhered to the supply and demand theory, that what audiences saw in theatres and the success they brought to released films carefully shaped what would next be produced. Spiderman 1 did well, so they made a Spiderman 2, which did well so they made a Spiderman 3. Suffice it to say, I personally won’t be the least bit surprised if I find myself lined up outside of the IMAX wearing Michael Pennock’s Spiderman shirt (the black one with the glow-in-the-dark Spidey eyes) waiting for the fourth film which is starting (gasp!) five minutes after (!!) midnight on opening day.

 

My middle school years were defined by Friday and Saturday nights at the movies (and Thursdays, as above), seeing whatever new “chick flicks” my girlfriends and I could convince our guy friends to come to while occasionally acquiescing to their demands to see Saw IV or other suitable gore.  It worked beautifully--we saw the same types of movies, which allowed us to continue to see (surprise!) more of the same.  As Graeme Turner discusses in the first chapter of his book Film as Social Practice, going to the movies decades ago was an event all to itself; for us, the same way true.  What was playing mattered less than being at the movie with friends.  Our very own Cocoaplex worked much in the same that the theatre in Cinema Paradiso did.   People mated, people dated, we laughed, we cried, we missed parts of or entire movies for the sake of our own social lives.   Truth was, it didn't matter--our knowledge of Hollywood's use of semantics and syntax allowed us to fill in the gaps, whether they gaps from lapse in attention or cinematographic gaps in film.  

The former can be left at that.  The latter, however, was only made possible by our understanding of genre through the use of Altman's notions of syntax and semantics.  We have been and continue to be "heavily conditioned by the choice of semantic elements and atmosphere, because a given semantics used in a specific cultural situation will recall to an actual interpretive community the particular syntax with which that semantics has traditionally been associated in other texts.  This syntactic expectation, set up by a semantic signal, is matched by a parallel tendency to expect specific syntactic signals to lead to predetermined semantic fields."  It is these semantic elements that allow us, for example, to make the connection between Annie (Meg Ryan) and Sam (Tom Hanks) in the film Sleepless in Seattle and thus classify it as a romantic comedy.  Conversely, when these are not present and our syntactic expectations are not met, as in  Caché, we begin to feel less certain about our understanding of the film and, consequently, find ourselves unable to classify the film with absolute certainty.  

Then there are those films that, despite classification in nomenclature, semantics, syntactics, and form, still manage to puzzle us.  Out of the Past is merely one of these, a paradigm of what is known as film noir.  In his critical work "Notes on Film Noir," Paul Schrader successfully classifies the influences, seven stylistics, and three phases of film noir.  Schrader's list of items captures perfectly the elements of Out of the Past that situate within such a genre.  The lighting, as he says, is mostly at night; and, if not at night, it is indoors.  In fact, it is established early on in the film that it is more a nocturnal thing--Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer) won't meet Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) anytim in Mexico until dusk.  As well, the climax of the film all takes place at night with Bailey lurking in alley ways in San Francisco, quietly entering and leaving dimly lit rooms, and waiting by the fireplace for Kathie.  

Oblique lines, another of Scrader's elements, are also present in the film, most notably at white and Kathie's house--their gate, the architecture, their window panes--but also in the forest where Bailey and Ann Miller (Virginia Huston) meet.  Equal lighting--what Schrader defines as the same amount of lighting given--is to nearly every character in all scenes, save when Kathie is wearing white in Mexico.  Such lighting allows the characters to blend into the background and makes the setting feel authentic and less contrived.  (See image.)  Schrader also says that "compositional tension is preferred to physical action."  A great example of this is the scene of Joe's (Paul Valentine) death.  Joe has followed The Kid (Dickie Moore) down to the river where Joe knows that The Kid will find Bailey.  The tension in the film is high as Joe silently observes the spectacle and then draws his gun to shoot Bailey.  We the spectators are convinced that Bailey is done for until, at the last moment, the kid snags Joe's jacket with his fishing line and pulls him over the edge where he falls to his death.  The scene is pure mastery, full of suspense and tension.   Despite none of the three men acknowledging each other let alone coming in close close contact, we are tense with anticipation. 

The Freudian attachment to water that Schrader notes is most exemplified in Mexico as Bailey  and Kathie meet each evening on the beach.  The movement of the ocean contrasts against their silhouettes, creating brilliant compositions that sexualize their romance and fetishize Kathie.  This compliments another of Shrader's elemets--that of "a love of romantic narration."  Interestingly enough, there are several in this film, most of them overlapping.  But the main two players--Kathie and Bailey--are at the heart of it all, for Whit who loved Kathie hired Bailey to find her, and it is Bailey who is telling this whole story to his current squeeze, Ann.  Schrader notes that in Out of the Past, Bailey "relates his history with such pathetic relish that it is obvious there is no hope for any future: one can only take pleasure in reliving a doomed past."  This relates to his final point, one that boasts of a complicated order--not entirely chronological--in this films.  This is quite true for Bailey's story.  It begins in present, goes back to the past, returns to the present, and then moves forward to Bailey's demise. "The manipulation of time," says Schrader," whether slight of complex, is often used to reinforce a noir principle: the how is always more important than the what."  This is quite obviously true--the events that led to Bailey's death are far more intriguing than his actual death, and they impact Ann accordingly.  

And yet Schrader, in his perfect description of film noir, is unable to succinctly capture the genre.  With lists, history, and various other information, he is able to explain that movies such as Out of the Past constitute what we know as film noir.  But throughout his article, he not once captures the essence of film noir in one sentence.  It is not a fun or satirical film that ends with most everyone happy (comedy) or a story about a man and a woman and their struggles to find peace and happiness with each other (romance).  In truth, it is not even a genre that we can completely understand.  If such a film were made today (it wouldn't be), I still wouldn't see (new) middle school girls dragging their guy friends and crushes to it, or said guy friends/crushes coercing the girls to see it.  There isn't enough consistency to fill in the gaps from those lost moments or cinematographic moves; the semantics and the syntax don't ever quite add up, and even if they do, we still don't get what we expected.  This is, after all, what makes film noir so thrilling.  But it is likely that this same aspect contributed to its cessation in production in 1953--it was great (or later became great) for critics to explore, but audiences were unable to appreciate it in the same way.  "Film noir operates on opposite principles: the theme is hidden in the style, and bogus themes are often flaunted," says Schrader.  Critics and audiences loved it, but they love equally and understood better westerns and gangster films.  Without this understanding, there could never be true appreciation for the genius of film noir.  There is hope for this in retrospective study, as critics come closer to defining and truly understanding the complexity of film noir.  But until then, I'd bet you that given the choice, my friends and I (in Michael Pennock's Spidey-eye t-shirt) would opt to wait in line for Spiderman 4 any day.