While writing an essay on the post-Vietnam film Rolling Thunder, I thought of William Wyler’s much-applauded 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives, about three veterans returning at the close of World War II. I revisit this film often, but as much as I appreciate it (I am as moved as anyone by the “corridor reunion” of Al and Milly Stephenson [Fredric March and Myrna Loy], typically harmed by Wyler and his editors by the insert shots of their approving children), especially for its importance as a cultural document about the postwar period, I always have reservations about Wyler, to my mind the least interesting director of the old Hollywood (The Letter, Mrs. Miniver, and The Children’s Hour are of interest, but what can one say about Ben-Hur, The Big Country [best illuminated by Romero’s Survival of the Dead], and so much else?). But it is striking what The Best Years of Our Lives shares in common with Vietnam veteran films like Rolling Thunder, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, and First Blood. Among these concerns are the veteran’s anxieties about reentering an often hostile civilian world; a pervasive castration anxiety (basically symbolic in the case of Fred Derry [Dana Andrews] in Best Years, more literal in Homer Parrish [Harold Russell] in the same film, and Major Ranes [William Devane] in Rolling Thunder); the sense of rivalry within the postwar male group that threatens a basic homoeroticism; the threat posed by the female and the domestic scene; the suffocation and outright hostility of bourgeois life.

The Vietnam films are to be distinguished, of course, from a film such as The Best Years of Our Lives by their level of rage, hysteria, and violence, attributable to the ideological conflicts of the period, the loss of a major US imperialist venture, the economic catastrophe caused by the war, and the hatred within US patriarchal society toward the progressive movements coinciding with the Vietnam assault, especially the women’s, peace, and civil rights movements. The Best Years of Our Lives should be noted as a preamble to a cycle of films dealing with the disempowerment of the veteran in the 1950s, and the depression, alcoholism, sexual frustration, and hatred of the job world felt by the male in general. The reaction in these films is plain enough, but it is contained so as to point to the contradictory features of postwar bourgeois life, showing us that their nominal heroes hate what they are supposed to love. In this, these films don’t simply exploit rage (as do the Vietnam films) caused by ideological confusion. Examples are plentiful, but a representative list would include Douglas Sirk’s There’s Always Tomorrow (1956), Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running (1958), Nunnally Johnson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), and the intelligent if very flawed John Frankenheimer film Seconds (1966). Most of these films enjoyed some degree of popularity (not Seconds, seen as too downbeat for a Rock Hudson film), countering present-day notions about US culture in the postwar era.

An Aside on “The Greatest Generation”

The Best Years of Our Lives, and the films of its sensibility in the postwar period, tend to refute current assumptions about the war era and its aftermath. One idea is that of “the greatest generation,” a phrase that entered the popular lexicon after the publication of a book by newscaster Tom Brokaw. The book’s title gave us the phrase, now very commonly used indeed, and typically never interrogated, even to remind us of its source. I must confess that I never read the book in full, but merely chunks of it when it was on display at a local supermarket. The book’s argument – or rather its assertion – was easily apprehended, and there was nothing of substance compelling me to buy the book. According to Brokaw, the Greatest Generation was that which came of age during the Great Depression, fought World War II, and returned to “build America.” I felt this to be a child’s idea, basically because, as a child, I thought my mother and father probably suffered a great deal during the Depression and the war. My mother spoke mainly about the grimness of the era, but basically told me that one got by. Her role, like that of most women, was marginal in patriarchal society, confined to being a “housewife” taking care of children and putting meals on the table. My father, a decorated Army officer who served in the Pacific, had no interest in reliving the war, recalling it only as horror, with aerial bombing and artillery shelling its main feature (heroic infantry charges were almost entirely a thing of the past – not to suggest that infantry weren’t butchered – but of course the cinema asserts the contrary). He had no interest in going to the American Legion or other veterans’ groups to gab about the war; he felt that men who attended those affairs were crazy, alcoholics, or people whose service was marginal, if at all, but who enjoyed hobnobbing with men who were “over there” with the action. In time I felt my father’s remarks to be basically true; the men in my hometown who loved talking about the war seemed to be blowhards, or perhaps even psychotics, certainly extreme reactionaries who loved hanging out in bars telling tall tales. After the war, my father took a series of unsatisfactory jobs, finally becoming a civil servant, a job he hated but one that at least paid him a decent wage. My parents’ experiences (my father abandoned my mother after forty years of marriage – my sense then and now is that he was, in part, simply disgusted with bourgeois life despite his deep conservatism) corresponded to that of most of the local people I knew. I don’t wish to bore the reader with anecdotes, but I think my experience was common. Far from “building America,” most people went about their fairly difficult lives in small town or urban America until corporatization destroyed privately-owned retail business, the small farm, and small town life itself (my home town, in eastern Pennsylvania, was “saved” by gentrification – it is recognizable to me but lacking all the little charms I once knew – even as I dreamed of nothing but escaping it).

Brokaw’s ideas may be dismissed on all sorts of levels. The Soviet Union fought and defeated Nazism at a terrible cost, but their real contribution is never acknowledged. America came into the European theater very late, and US troops were often simply wasted, such as in the badly-planned D-Day operation. The returning veteran did not return to “build America.” This was done by corporate capitalism, with the postwar male roughly in the position of the men in postwar melodramas: stuck in loveless marriages and mind-deadening jobs. On the other hand, the GI Bill was the most generous public program for veterans ever conceived, so the veteran was hardly abandoned, as Brokaw at times suggests.

One could argue that Brokaw’s agenda is similar to that of films like The Best Years of Our Lives: he wants to pay proper tribute, and to acknowledge men forgotten or ignored by much of the population. But The Best Years of Our Lives presents us with some extraordinarily complex problems – at the level of its “political unconscious” – within its desire to offer catharsis and closure, while the Greatest Generation myth has a very different ideological agenda.

Creating memorials for WWII veterans (now mostly dead or very elderly, so not really an issue to confront) has become something of a fad in recent years, with nothing accompanying them by way of extra financial or other forms of assistance to the few surviving veterans – during the Reagan era there was a real chance that veterans’ benefits would be cut severely. One must keep in mind that the Greatest Generation idea is profoundly and deliberately exclusionary. At one point Brokaw actually suggests that this generation was the greatest ever to exist, an extraordinary idea. His larger point, I think, is to separate the Greatest Generation from the ones that followed, especially that which came of age in the 1960s, when the Greatest Generation found itself in conflict with its own children, deemed spoiled, degenerate, refusing to follow orders (he says that the Greatest “never whined,” another extraordinary remark signaling his agenda), challenging sexual mores and racial segregation – all the things that the Greatest supported (we should note that Brokaw ignores the members of the Greatest who took part in sit-down strikes during the Depression, or who protested the Cold War, the execution of the Rosenbergs, the antics of HUAC and McCarthy). Needless to say, Brokaw never looks fully at the origins of European fascism, and how WWII need not have been fought if the West had quickly undermined fascism. Instead, it supported it, until fascism’s goals turned against the rest of capitalism. It is evident that the naming of the Greatest Generation is one of the capstones to several decades of reaction following the 1960s, as American society became militarized, focused entirely on business, and in need of the right heroes to celebrate. But if we examine the postwar period with focus, including its representation in fictions like The Best Years of Our Lives, we might realize that Brokaw’s project and the industry it spawned ignores entirely the conditions of the postwar era, and certainly the vision of the era’s art. The Best Years’ worldview, for all its ultimate consolations, runs very much counter to the consolations of the present.

The Return and Psychiatry

A key premise of The Best Years of Our Lives is offered in the establishing sequence. Captain Fred Derry tries to get home on a commercial airliner. It is sold out, and Derry is curtly dismissed by the female desk clerk as a fat businessman elbows Derry out of the way to get his ticket (there is a superb touch in the black porter carrying the fat man’s glove clubs – far from the allied victory ensuring equality, segregation continues with a vengeance in postwar America). The scene underscores a contempt for the bourgeoisie, sensible in the Fred Derry scene, since he comes from humble origins and there is a sense, at the end, that he might not escape them. The desk clerk is important, as the female’s sticking to the rules (Myrna Loy’s Milly Stephenson) or lewd behavior (Derry’s “tramp” wife Marie [Virginia Mayo]) are crucial to the expectations of the returning male.

Disheartened, Fred walks across the airport tarmac when he learns of a B-17 military craft that will take him to his home in Boone City. As he walks to the depot, he passes under the commercial plane he was refused. The point is efficiently made: capitalism cannot be trusted – only the military can provide the veteran solace. It is a moment capturing the contradictions of the era and of America itself, then and now. The population believes in and serves the capitalist system even while hating it, and valorizes the enforcement apparatus supporting it.

At the other depot Fred meets a sailor, Homer Parrish, who is also going to Boone City. Homer lost both hands in the war (my feelings are always more than mixed about the casting of “real life” veteran Harold Russell, who in fact lost his hands – the casting seems cloying and opportunistic, and Russell, a non-actor, often gives awkward line-readings), and too many scenes involve a focus on his predicament, with Homer smiling and feeling fine about his situation (he is expert with the metal hooks replacing his hands) except for great anxiety about whether or not his fiancé Wilma (Cathy O’Donnell) will accept him. We keep seeing people staring at his hooks, or Homer dropping things out of nervousness. The point is made quickly but the film won’t let it go – Homer was ready to sacrifice part of his body for the state, but the folks back home won’t let him be (the latter idea makes Homer’s situation important to the film’s ideology, with the homefront and bourgeois heterosexual life nuisances at best).

The two men are joined by Sergeant Al Stephenson, also on his way to Boone City, which is constructed as the locus of Middle America. Fred was a bombardier during the war, so he acquaints the men with the B-17. The three then sit in the glass nose of the plane as it flies at a low level over the open plains and towns of the Midwest – there is a haunting, vague reminder that America escaped the terrible onslaught visited upon Europe and Japan, but as the film comes to its conclusion Fred might wish it had been destroyed. The men fall asleep, the camera showing them in a peaceful homoerotic tableau; the idea of the preference for the male group is introduced, and reintroduced throughout the film.

As Homer sleeps, Al and Fred begin to chat in one of the film’s crucial scenes. Al says “What scares me most is that everybody will try to rehabilitate me.” Fred says that if he has a “good job, a future, and a nice home for me and my wife, that’s all the rehabilitation I’ll need,” unaware of the extent of his trauma, and certainly unaware of the prospects awaiting him, nor is Al yet aware of his alcoholism. Fred exemplifies an almost caricatured notion of a past generation’s supposed concept of the American Dream (given the tableau composed of the three men in near-embrace, it is tempting to argue that Fred and Al are concerned with people interfering with their gayness, new-found in the Army). Psychoanalysis had long become a topic in popular fiction, but for much of the American mainstream it still had very negative connotations. The science was viewed as a non-science dominated by crackpots or people who were themselves crazy; it was something for women, who are always nuts anyway, or was linked to Jews, another reason to hate them and their plotting. Yet the film acknowledges the deep problems that the men deny, although not so much as to undermine the essential “independence” and stoicism of the returning heroes.

Afraid of impotence after his long separation from Milly, Al takes his wife for a night on the town (rather than right to bed) after their emotional reunion – Boone City seems to have more nightclubs than New York, featuring stars of the day like jazz drummer Gene Krupa and hillbilly singer Tennessee Ernie Ford, the point being that America is a cornucopia of unfettered but innocent joys, an idea undercut as the narrative unfolds. The night out becomes a drunken bender that reunites the three men. The moment also introduces Al’s alcoholism, which burdens his return to the workaday world. Al and Fred are concerned about Homer (or say they are – the concern seems an excuse to keep the men together). But Homer is looked after by his piano-playing uncle Butch (another cornball star of the time, Hoagy Carmichael), owner of the men’s favorite bar. Butch will allow Homer only beer, the implicit idea being that Homer is an overgrown child, never dispelled even at Homer’s wedding, which closes the film.

The moment of actually going home is resisted by Al, Fred, and Homer, all of whom project nervousness. Their final arrival in Boone City contains an important sequence showing images of the town’s main street from their point of view, as a taxi takes the three to their homes. We see a whitewashed hot dog stand, a diner, a shoeshine parlor, F.W. Woolworth store – the types of small, independent enterprises today long gone, demolished by corporate capitalism. The sequence introduces us to the warmth of small-town America, but the moment will have greater utility, especially when Fred looks for work, and Al returns to his old job.

Capitalism, Democracy, and Castration

The film conveys the notion of the military as the “great leveler” of capitalist society, abolishing the class structure. Al is a prosperous banker who lives in a pricey apartment, yet he rose only to the rank of sergeant in the Army. Fred came from poverty, yet ended the war as a dashing, decorated captain in the Army Air Corps. The armed services emphasize the American idea that what you do is important, not what you are. The idea becomes strained, since Al’s education and social position would have certainly allowed him at least the opportunity for promotion – unless we imagine that his drinking held him back. But the notion of a classless society is overridden when the two men go back to the job world (Homer’s most pressing problem is dealing with his family’s and Wilma’s view of his impairment).

Al puts on a pinstripe suit and returns to the bank, where he is greeted by his old boss Mr. Milton (Ray Collins, forever the nefarious Jim Gettys of Citizen Kane). In a key sequence, Milton sits in a leather chair at the right side of the frame, his bulk taking up considerable space. Al sits at a lower position on a sofa facing the camera. Milton praises America as “a land of unlimited opportunity,” and says he respects Al’s sensitivity toward the veteran and his needs, but also knows that Al appreciates “fundamental principles of sound banking.” Milton’s mention of the GI Bill of Rights has a discernible edge of contempt. When Al takes his new desk he is handed a bulky dossier of loans needing consideration. He jokes “what’s this, the Bretton Woods agreement?” The joke has resonance in retrospect. The Bretton Woods economic accords, formulated by John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White, created the postwar liberal economic order, with the US the world’s banker and the dollar the standard for currencies, undergirded by gold. Bretton Woods contained many key provisions aimed at protecting democracy under the assumptions of capitalism, including regulation of the migration of capital. With the economic debacle of the Vietnam invasion, Richard Nixon unilaterally scrapped Bretton Woods in 1971, ushering in the deindustrialized age of capital migration, job loss, and an economy based on speculation. Bretton Woods played a role in creating the postwar nation that Al and his friends temporarily enjoyed – it was quickly destroyed, despite all the rhapsodies today by Brokaw and his like-minded observers.

Al gives a loan to a young veteran named Novak (Dean White) despite the man’s lack of collateral. Al later takes a small tongue lashing from Milton, an insult Al quickly self-medicates with alcohol. Later, at a bank-sponsored dinner, Al is asked to give a speech to make the trustees feel proud of themselves. Totally drunk, Al says “Our country stands today where it stands today…wherever that is!” The idea of America as absurdity is introduced. He says, with bitter sarcasm, that the “good old bank” gave him the experience to survive the invasion of Okinawa. The first remark suggests America is a joke – it stands nowhere and for nothing. The second comment is even more telling, and corresponds to Fred’s experience: the job world taught Al nothing, and merely made use of him as a wage slave. Al’s speech can be read both as a rejection of capitalism from the right and as an affirmation of the veteran as the “true man,” with those who stayed home lazy parasites, or effeminate (as we find in Fred’s job search). Any reading offers a rejection of the capitalist state that seems inconceivable in a commercial film today, especially one regarded as a heartwarming celebration of the US.

Al’s drinking presents a complex set of problems. There were few Hollywood films of the studio system that portrayed the disease in anything like a sensible light (there are some small, if overly melodramatic exceptions, such as The Lost Weekend [1945] and Days of Wine and Roses [1962]). Rio Bravo (1959) is among the films most egregiously misleading and insulting on the subject, tying alcoholism to moral failure, and a failure of will and masculinity. The Best Years of Our Lives is reasonably intelligent on the topic, but with limitations. It is obvious that the stresses of the moment make Al drink, but exactly what lies at the origin of his alcoholism? If we examine his drinking within the context of his dinner speech, we might infer that America made him drink, both capitalism and its enforcement arm in state power, the military. Milly is the dutiful wife through it all – she is, in pop psychology terms, an enabler, keeping track of how many drinks Al takes (she even makes marks on the tablecloth to keep a tally during the banquet) but never stating her abhorrence of what he is doing – in this she is the dutiful, concerned wife, enduring the unexplained misery that she mentions briefly to daughter Peggy (Teresa Wright) when Peggy reveals her love of Fred. At Homer’s wedding at the film’s end Al has simply stopped drinking – he protests to Milly that the punch he sips is suitable for a child. There is a suggestion that Milly’s re-domestication of Al has worked. By patiently standing by her man, Milly cured him of his failings, including his rage at Fred for wanting to date Peggy. He has returned to solid-citizenship, with its implication of castration.

The Store and the Feminine

Fred’s return to the job world focuses on feminization and castration, and the new world of capital dominated by the degenerate male. Fred inevitably finds himself back at Bullard’s Drugstore, where he worked as a “soda jerk” before the war. What he remembered as an unassuming neighborhood store is now a large, vulgar concern owned by the Midway corporation, the kindly Mr. Bullard (Erskine Sanford) now reduced to being a clerk in the pharmacy. Fred is introduced to Thorpe (Howland Chamberlain), the reptilian manager of the store. Thorpe constantly uses a nasal inhaler and talks down to Fred. He is coded as intellectual, self-absorbed, and feminine, that ineffectual category of men who did not participate in the war and scoff at those who did. Thorpe quizzes Fred on Army-learned skills that might be applied to a job at Midway; he feigns surprise to learn that Fred, although promoted to captain, was trained to do nothing but drop bombs (an interesting before-the-fact response to contemporary ads claiming that the Army is a pathway to a career) and has no managerial skills whatsoever. Fred’s employment plight seems similar to Al’s in the sense that work before the war provided him with little satisfaction, and will certainly give little now. But Fred’s predicament is more complex. As portrayed by Dana Andrews (in what may be his best performance), Fred Derry was certainly not a teenager when he stopped soda-jerking at Bullard’s to enter the Army Air Corps. The man we see here is approaching middle age. An answer may be the scarcity of jobs during the last years of the Depression (the film could be seen as supportive of the argument – a common one – that only the war ended the economic crisis of the 1930s), forcing an adult to continue at a low-paying job associated with young people. Or is Fred indeed the low-ambition, feckless man castigated by Marie?

Thorpe tells Fred that he can work as a sales clerk, with duties back at the soda fountain, all under the supervision of Clarence Merkle (Norman Phillips, Jr.), whose name is acknowledged, with a chuckle, by Fred, using the nickname “Sticky” (does the word refer to the masturbation of an invert as much as the confections he sells?), making Thorpe bristle. Sticky Merkle assisted Fred at the ice cream fountain before the war; now the role is reversed, with Fred in the demeaning position of working for an overdressed, carefully-coiffed, effete sissy who was once his lackey. This sequence seems to be offered as one of the most unsettling, simply because the hero is demeaned by the new, femininized postwar culture. Fred is more than hesitant to accept the job, but does so to please his gold-digger wife Marie, whose taste for nightlife are finally not supported by her husband’s work at a drugstore, causing more castigation. Fred imposes austerity at home (meals from cans), as he grins and bears it at Midway. Fred’s castration takes place in ever-more-humiliating degrees, such as when Sticky makes Fred learn the names of the new French perfumes so that he can work the counter; a plump matron asks Fred about the hefty price of a bottle of perfume called “Seduction.” Fred says that it’s a “nice size,” but when he takes the box apart discovers that the bottle is almost a thimble, a nice metaphor for his sexual diminution. The sequence becomes a slam of domestic life: a spoiled brat plays with and smashes up toys on the store counter, as Fred barely keeps his grin in place. He is visited by Peggy Stephenson, their romance in full bloom. Pretending to conduct business, Fred holds up a jar of cold cream, then a jar of cold cream remover, joking “if you don’t buy the one, you don’t need the other,” a nice deconstruction of postwar commodity culture and its imposed needs that also serves a genuine moment of mutual seduction, but one offset by the reality of domestic life in the overbearing chaos of the drugstore.

Fred literally breaks out of Midway in a flurry of violence in defense of Homer, who drops by to gab with his friend. Homer is joined at the counter by a right-wing fanatic (Ray Teal) who praises Homer’s courage for serving in the war while scoffing at the US involvement. The man is no isolationist, but a Commie hater who thinks that the US should have sided with the Nazis against the “real” enemy, a very common refrain (which included anti-Semitic slurs, Jews being the ultimate source of the problem) of postwar America. Outraged, Homer attacks the fanatic; Fred leaps over the counter, decking the rightist with one punch and destroying the perfume counter in the bargain. Promptly fired (“the customer is always right”), a disgusted Fred prepares to leave town.

Castration by the female continues to be at least as great a threat to the male at home as the same threat in the job world. Marie continues to manipulate Fred, wanting him to wear his uniform in public even though it is an identity Fred wants to discard (Marie says “you look like yourself,” suggesting that Fred’s own identity is a fraud, uninteresting, or worthless). She humiliates him by her physical presence – one shot shows her seated with her long legs draped on the arm of a chair as she gossips with a friend, the blonde bombshell as infernal woman. She brings home her boyfriend Cliff (Steve Cochran), to Fred’s very fleeting consternation. He sees an Army Air Corps pin on Cliff’s lapel. Far from telling us “there are bad veterans too,” the moment reinforces male camaraderie, which reaches hysterical heights when Al learns of Fred’s romance with his daughter Peggy. Al confronts Fred at Butch’s bar, the two men seated at a table, shot in profile. The Fred-Al-Peggy construct has a strong touch of the perverse, because it seems incestuous (Fred’s sexual involvement with Peggy seems a violation of his partnership with Al, and his acceptance by Al’s family) and pedophilic (Peggy is Al’s daughter, and is constantly referred to as such – although Teresa Wright was 29 at the time, her character is a typically infantilized woman). Al is suspicious of Fred’s married status, wondering how Fred sees Peggy fitting into “this romantic arrangement.” Even as he contemplates the possible ménage, Al assures Fred “I’m very fond of you too.” It seems that Al is merely overly protective of a child, fearing that Fred, a married man, will merely want love with Peggy “on a bootleg basis.” But the rivalry that Al instigates flows from dependence – he is comfortable only in Fred’s presence (Homer is regarded, again, as a child and something of a simp to be patronized). The homoerotic/homosocial bond is reinforced at Homer’s wedding when Al, Fred, and Homer reunite on the porch for a cigarette and the benign punch.

Homer’s Moment

When Homer disrobes in the bedroom in front of Wilma, the film’s sexual politics become unraveled. He removes his robe and the harness holding his artificial limbs in place. He stands before her, displaying the bandaged stubs of both arms. Castration anxiety could not be clearer, and one asks the question why? His fear is rooted in the basic concern of patriarchy – loss of power. There is no evidence that his genitals have been damaged; he is still capable of kissing and caressing Wilma, but his inability to be “in control” of the sex act is the turning point he faces. As he does so, Al and Fred simultaneously confront their own castration and ability to live with it. Al has already acquiesced by returning to the bank and Milly, and relinquishing Peggy to Fred. Fred’s fleeing both the drugstore and Marie suggests his insistence on the male group and independence; he is the one most resentful of castration.

The Scrapyard

Fred says goodbye to his parents (he has already fled contemptuously from the betraying tramp Marie) and goes to the Boone City airport, asking for the first flight out – like an errant gunfighter, he has no interest in destination. The film cuts to Fred’s father quietly reading a letter from General James Doolittle, citing Fred for extraordinary bravery, and recommending him for the Distinguished Flying Cross, about which Fred has said nothing. What follows is a stunning sequence, perhaps the greatest valorization of the male in film history (the DVD chapter title reads “American Hero”). As he awaits his flight, Fred wanders into the massive airplane scrapyard the three men noted when they flew into Boone City. Fred walks within the endless graveyard of military overproduction, with its thousands of rusting husks manufactured too late to be deployed in war. Fred suddenly spots a B-17, the type of plane from which he dropped bombs – its markings shows it had numerous “kills.” Fred climbs up into its cockpit, then sits, shuts his eyes, and goes into a tortured meditation. The moment contains Fred’s momentary embrace of death, life and the erotic having failed him. In an extraordinary shot sequence, the camera dollies forward, looking up at Fred inside the dirty glass cockpit from a low angle, emphasizing his stoic bravery – this is the man who won the war. The shot cuts to various angles, finally showing him in close shot through the badly scratched glass of the cockpit; Fred’s eyes are closed, the composition conveying a fractured psyche and wounds still unaddressed. We were already shown his troubled sleep, which gave the lie to his assertion that “rehabilitation” is a silly notion meant for the weak.

Fred’s memories are interrupted by a loud voice from below telling him to get out of the plane. The foreman of the yard is gruff with Fred, especially for his terming the old planes “junk.” They are to be used in making “pre-fabricated houses.” Fred jumps at the chance for a job. He gets one, seemingly confirming Brokaw’s myth that veterans returned to “build America.” It is impossible not to appreciate this swords-into-ploughshares moment within the context of the last seventy years. Prefabricated housing produced the Levittowns of America, the miles of cheap, nondescript tract housing that became synonymous with conformity and spiritual death in the postwar US (one of the best renderings of the problem on film is Martin Ritt’s No Down Payment, 1957, at this date not available on home video). Almost as bad, prefabricated housing became associated with shoddy workmanship, rip-offs, and kickbacks to contractors; many pre-fab developments became abandoned wastelands within twenty-five years of their construction. Today, the pre-fab commitment to cheapness is such that walls are put together with glue rather than nails.

Not seeing any of this of course, Fred is overjoyed, and runs back to Boone City, where we next see him as best man at Homer’s wedding; he later spots Peggy, proposes to her, even though he says that they will probably be “kicked around” (by the economy?). The three bourgeois couples are sanctified several times over as Butch plays the piano, children sing, and consolation becomes complete. But The Best Years of Our Lives is among the melodramas whose happy ending could not contain more anxiety, given all that we have witnessed in the previous two hours and forty-eight minutes, not only regarding the plight the characters have suffered, but their uninterrogated world.

“The Best Years of My Life”

There has always been a question, to my mind, as to what the title means. It could suggest that the people of the narrative lost part of their youth due to the war, or that the best years are still ahead despite their respective heartaches. The only time the phrase of the title is used is when the bimbo Marie gripes to Fred that she gave him “the best years of [my] life,” with the suggestion, given how we are meant to see her, that her life is worth nothing. The easy irony, of course, is that the lives of Al, Fred, and the others are worth everything, and they aren’t complaining. But the film can be seen now as one big complaint about America that is never addressed, at least not in fact.

Christopher Sharrett is Professor of Communication and Film Studies at Seton Hall University. He writes regularly for Film International and other publications. He has been revisiting the albums of David Bowie, who, with Bryan Ferry/Roxy Music, seems the last great surge of energy of the great era of rock. Punk/new wave would offer the form a shot in the arm before corporatization of music produced the nondescript, devitalized muck of the present. Bowie needs a final tip of the hat for his accomplished genius, his skills as writer and singer. His androgynous, bisexual pose may have been precisely that, but it seems more compelling than Jagger’s, more integrated into his art (“Rebel Rebel,” “John, I’m Only Dancing”). The albums Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs are more fully prescient of the deindustrialized, postmodern moment than anything I can think of in rock, the “Berlin” albums (Low, “Heroes,” Lodger), along with Scary Monsters and Inside, superb commentaries on that moment as it arrived. Yet Bowie retained romanticism (his performance of “Wild is the Wind” on Station to Station).

         “I said no to Hollywood. There you have no freedom to create.”

(Bielinsky to Federico Fahsbender)

“Film audiences won’t find in [The Aura] an accessible or agreeable story. Also, the film doesn’t show a bit of sympathy or good intentions for any of the characters. I’m talking not only about the near total lack of humor, but also that dramatic concessions were avoided in the screenplay – even though this is not a very good attitude when you think of a film as a product to be sold.”

                         (Bielinsky to Amadeo Lukas)

Fabián Bielinsky’s career was brief but incandescent, and yet his moment in the public eye came after years of hard work and apprenticeship. Born 3 Feb. 1959 in Buenos Aires, Bielinsky was obsessed with cinema from childhood, and by the age of 13 began making films while studying at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, with the short film Continuidad de los Parques (1971), based on a short story by Julio Cortázar. After graduating high school, Bielinsky suddenly decided to pursue studies in psychology, but soon abandoned this to enter the Centro de Experimentación y Realización Cinematografia (aka known as Escuela Nacional de Experimentación y Realización Cinematográfica, or ENERC) where he directed another short film, La Espera (The Wait, 1983), this time from a story by Jorge Luis Borges, which also attracted favorable attention, winning First Prize at the International Festival of Huesco in Spain (Moviefone). This led to a plethora of work as an assistant director, and before his debut as a feature director with Nine Queens in 1998, Bielinsky drove himself into the ground working on roughly 400 television commercials, along with, in the words of one biographer,

“several high-profile feature films including Marco Bechis’ Alambrado, Mario Levin’s Sotto Voce, and Carlos Sorin’s Eterna Sonrise de New Jersey. Bielinsky then worked his way up the ladder, climbing up to the tier of co-screenwriter and second director on two projects for filmmaker Fernando Spiner: Bajamar, la Costa del Silencio and La Sonambula. Bielinsky’s graduation to director happened somewhat capriciously; he won first prize in a filmmaking contest sponsored by Patagonik Film Group, Kodak, Cinecolor, JZ y Associados and FX Sound – a cash prize that gave him the funds to shoot his debut feature. This effort, 1998’s Nine Queens, [won] awards around the globe, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and seven other accolades at the 2001 Argentinean Film Critics’ Association Awards; Best Argentinean Film of the Year by FIPRESCI 2001; and the Audience Award and Best Director prizes at the 2001 Lleida Latin-American Film Festival. The picture, a labyrinthine crime thriller sans the comic overtones of Pulp Fiction and True Romance that had become en vogue at the time, deals with two small-time con artists, Juan (Gastón Pauls) and Marcos (Ricardo Darín), who partner up for a hotel-centered scam that involves a philatelic forgery.” (Moviefone)

Nine Queens

Indeed, the film was a worldwide hit, and even spawned a tepid American remake, Criminal (Gregory Jacobs, 2004), with John C. Reilly, Diego Luna and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Diplomatically, Bielinsky refused to discuss Criminal, telling Jorge Leterier that, “I promised not to talk about it. Let everyone draw their own conclusions. What do I know? It has very good actors.” But in the meantime, Nine Queens unexpectedly “typed” Bielinsky as an expert in “caper comedies,” something that he hadn’t fully appreciated when the film was first released. But even with Nine Queens, which is nothing more or less than a blinding series of double and triple crosses, coupled with “slamming door” farce dealing with inopportune and/or staged exits and entrances, Bielinsky was trying mightily to break out beyond the barriers of convention. Fluent in both Spanish and English, Bielinsky was courted by the World Press, and gave a series of valedictory press junket interviews on the film, telling the BBC’s Tom Dawson that,

“people told me that they wanted to make something more commercial. Before Nine Queens, in Argentina if you wanted to make money with your film, you had to do a stupid comedy with television actors. Nine Queens proved that you could make a personal film, without big stars, which wasn’t a comedy, and that it could still make a load of money and get good reviews.”

Nine Queens

But of course, this really isn’t the case; Nine Queens is resolutely commercial from start to finish, and is seemingly designed to both dazzle and confuse audiences, in the most non-threatening fashion possible. One can hardly blame Bielinsky, though, for trying so ferociously to work his way out of the world of 60-second television spots and assistant director jobs with his first feature, for which he also wrote the screenplay. As Andrew L. Urban noted, while conducting an interview with Bielinsky shortly after the film’s release, Bielinsky has

“the odd phone call from those producers who had been offered the script but [rejected it]. ‘Some never called me again, but a few called and said “what can I say, I was wrong, I’m an [asshole]…everybody’s telling me I’m an [asshole] and they’re right”…but believe me, it’s nothing like revenge for me because I did end up with the right producers and I’m glad I didn’t make the film with those that knocked me back. Fate led me to the right place… [---] I’ve had a lot of phone calls […] something like 15 different production companies from all over the world, but mainly Americans – have approached the production company to buy the script and do an English language remake. But not only American… there were also people from England and France interested. When there was vague talk of me directing a remake, I said absolutely not. I’m not going to make my first and second film the same. That’s a crazy idea. [---] [Instead, I’m working on] a psychological thriller – or something like that… about a decent man who is tempted by crime […]. I’d like to…you know, make it a small, warm film and keep full control. But the most amazing thing that happened to me with Nine Queens is that everybody from all over the world is calling me and they want to work with me and they offer me production and everything. All these doors are wide open waiting for me. But I’m trying not to think about all that…just thinking of the script and to finish that first.’”

Nine Queens

Of course, in refusing to try to repeat himself, with almost guaranteed diminishing returns – not to mention limiting his future creative options for the rest of his career, Bielinsky was already moving on, even disavowing the film that had put him on the map to a degree, refusing to categorize it as a comedy, but rather, a “personal film.” Yes, it was a film over which Bielinsky had total creative control, but if Bielinsky had followed in the ill-advised footsteps of such directors as Géla Babluani, whose slavishly uninspired 2010 American remake of his brilliant 13 Tzameti (2005), titled simply 13, pretty much finished his career, or George Sluizer, whose watered-down and fatally compromised 1993 American remake of his 1988 hit The Vanishing (Spoorloos) also caused a major career setback, he probably would have suffered much the same fate. As he told Urban of the proposed American remake, even at that early stage, the entire idea was inherently ridiculous; “You as director and the crew and the producers who made the film with you, we all agree that the film was perfect. Everybody loved the film, and it went great at the box office and we won all these accolades and awards and everybody liked the film…so, let’s do it again.”

No – that would not happen to Fabián Bielinsky. Even though, as Stuart Klawans would point out after Bielinsky’s death, Bielinsky received “no [financial] windfall from Nine Queens, having signed away the film’s rights to the [organizers of the competition that provided the financing]” (Klawans 2006: 348), making Nine Queens as his debut feature was still an exceptionally shrewd move. As Klawans notes, Nine Queens outgrossed Ridley Scott’s Gladiator in Argentinian cinemas, but such outsize success comes with a definite price. As the press junket for Nine Queens wore on and on, even into 2002, Bielinsky

“[began] to sound apologetic. Because of Nine Queens, ‘I’m in a privileged situation,’ he [said] in March 2002 to Anthony Kaufman, an American reporter for IndieWire. ‘I have international connections and European and American production companies contacting me to see what I want to do next. But filmmaking here is still very hard. I may be okay, but some of my friends are not, and the rest of the country is not, so it’s not exactly a happy feeling’ [---] To the world at large, [Bielinsky] embodie[d] the New Argentine Cinema; but to […] critics and festival programmers who support them, Bielinsky is more like a Hollywood director with a Porteño accent. They see that the intricate, money-driven plot and quick pace of Nine Queens might easily be translated into an American re-make […] [m]eanwhile, the upsurge of New Argentine Cinema is producing films that can’t be categorized, translated or easily financed: Lucrecia Martel’s brooding, atmospheric examination of middle-class rot, La Ciénaga; Adrián Caetano’s neo-realist portrait of an immigrant laborer, Bolivia; Diego Lerman’s lesbian punk road movie, Tan de repente; Carlos Sorin’s rueful and funny portrayal of small lives in large Patagonian spaces, Historias mínimas.” (347)

And money, as it always is, remains the real stumbling block to creating anything of lasting value and worth in the cinema: give the public what they want, and you’ll probably make a least a modest profit, even if you don’t hit the jackpot; try something riskier, and you’re in unchartered territory. As Klawans put it,

Nine Queens

“Bielinsky was not an impractical man. He chose to put forward Nine Queens, rather than another screenplay on hand, because it was playful in spirit, full of trickery and imposture. So ingeniously constructed was this mechanical toy that it might have belonged to a fairytale Emperor of China. So smoothly did the device amuse its actual owners – the ticket-buying masses – that audiences could accept it as if it were a conventional product. Bielinsky started out by giving the people something he knew they’d want: a yarn about an inexperienced young con artist, a swaggering older one, a primly beautiful woman, and an allegedly valuable sheet of postage stamps. [---] Stylistically self-contradictory and precedent-defying yet instantly accessible, Nine Queens belonged to no category except the biggest of them all: the movies. The generic thrill that Bielinsky offered his audience, and shared with them, was that of a Saturday matinée. ‘I felt the pleasure as a spectator all my life,’ he told an American interviewer, Pam Grady, around the time Nine Queens was released in the United States. ‘A teenage feeling. Oh, two hours of movies! To see the Metro lion and the Twentieth Century Fox searchlight and the Warner Bros. WB… It’s like somebody telling you that you’re going to have a good time.’”(348-349)

Except that something terrible had happened in the interim – Argentina’s financial structure, always somewhat perilous, spiraled into near total collapse. As Anthony Kaufman reported,

“On Dec. 19 [2001], mass protests erupted in Argentina over an economic crisis that was only getting worse. After riots in Buenos Aires resulted in a reported seven deaths, the economic minister and the president resigned, and what was South America’s second largest economy (after Brazil) lay in ruin. Subsequently, the country has had several interim presidents and seems to be on the road to recovery, but as [Argentine director Juan Jose] Campanella says, ‘No one knows exactly what’s going to happen. It’s even more complicated than Enron.’ At the 2002 Rotterdam Film Festival, several attending Argentine filmmakers issued a statement expressing their collective concerns. ‘Due to the lack of honesty and talent of the governing class,’ it said, ‘a richly endowed country was brought down at the very same moment that the Argentine cinema started to bear the fruits of the changes in the industry.’”

In this atmosphere of free fall, Bielinsky stood out as a commercial director, in both senses of the word – he not only directed feature films, on the evidence of Nine Queens, that were resolutely commercial, he also directed actual commercials for television, relying upon his skill in the medium to support his family, while driving himself harder and harder – in short, successful in the midst of catastrophe. Chain smoking, eating heavy foods, living on coffee and nerves, Bielinsky was soon diagnosed with hypertension, brought on by both overwork and overweight, but he could see no way out of his situation. To repeat himself would be both artistic and career suicide; he could see that clearly. What, then, to do, other than to continue on with his hectic lifestyle, living hand to mouth directing commercials, desperately trying to patch together funding for the project that would emerge as his last feature film, The Aura (2005)?

The Aura

The roots of The Aura go way back in Bielinsky’s childhood, to a screening of John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), which so mesmerized the young cineaste that he refused to leave his seat until the management gave him a poster of the film as a souvenir (Harley 2013). Over the years, Deliverance occupied almost the entire space in the young director’s mind, and it’s worth noting that even as he suggested after the success of Nine Queens that he might next like to try his hand at “a psychological thriller,” the first draft of the script for The Aura was written in 1983, the year he directed the short film La Espera, and graduated from the national film school (Ibid.). The film was in every way darker and more fatalistic than Nine Queens; as he declared from the outset of the film’s production, The Aura was designed to please no one but its maker.

As Bielinsky told Jorge Letelier in the film journal Mabuse, “the [film’s] theme is crime, but its structure allows for more discussions because […] I decided to accept a series of brutal and dangerous breaks in the structure, because in a genre film audiences expect a certain type of structure and rhythm according to the rules of the genre in question. I opted to go on breaking those rules, so that things wouldn’t happen when they were supposed to happen.” And this, indeed, is precisely what sets The Aura apart from more traditional crime “thrillers” – it is, at its heart, a study in psychological penetration, gesturing back to the director’s early studies in psychology, and his examination of the ethos of machismo in Latin American society.

And it’s clear that as an omnivorous moviegoer, Bielinsky knew, much better than most of the people who interviewed him, that Nine Queens had been a work of precise calculation, every bit the same sleight-of-hand trick that the film itself celebrated. Make The Aura first? Not likely. Make a crowd pleaser first, designed to appeal to the widest possible audience, and then, if you were lucky and worked hard, you just might get a shot at a script that had been kicking around in your file drawers since your 24th birthday – a work so dark, so uncompromising, so willfully designed not to please, that it might as well have been Godard’s Le Petit Soldat or Les Carabiniers (both 1963), films which represented an outright assault on their respective audiences. And when an unsuspecting critic suggested that someone like David Mamet might be an influence on Bielinsky’s work, the director was quick to disabuse them of that mistaken notion. When David Edwards ventured that Mamet might perhaps have been “a particular influence,” Bielinsky good naturedly, but firmly, put Edwards in his place, saying that,

“well, you know I was writing ideas like this before I even knew David Mamet existed! Of course, it’s flattering to be compared to him because he’s such a great scriptwriter and playwright. But, you know, Mamet didn’t invent this. There’s a whole history of con man movies before he came on the scene. I mean, I think about films like The Sting, Paper Moon, The Flim Flam Man, House of Games, the films of Fellini and other Italian films I saw when I was a teenager.”

So the roots of both Nine Queens and The Aura run deeply into not only Bielinsky’s past, but the past of cinema as a whole, and now, with the immense success of his first film, and the American remake racking up acceptable grosses, producers who were formerly unwilling to take a chance on Bielinsky’s pet project now agreed to participate. True, he had to cobble together financing from a variety of sources, and especially in the wake of Argentina’s financial collapse, everything – not just filmmaking – was a daily struggle, but at length, all was in place, and Bielinsky was allowed to embark upon the dark journey of The Aura which, though he did not know it at the time, would be his last testament as a filmmaker. If Nine Queens presents the picture of a world becoming undone, a picture, in the words of Michael Chanan “of a corrupt society, where everyone is conning everyone else, a metaphor for a dangerous political situation on the verge of coming to a head, with a closing scene – as a bank puts up its shutters and depositors clamor for their money – that is nothing short of prophetic,” then The Aura shows the aftermath of that society’s collapse, which is now no longer a joking matter, but rather a deadly serious fight for survival.

The Aura

The Aura’s central plot, in contrast to that of Nine Queens, while equally complex, takes on a much more sinister hue from the film’s first moments. When we first meet The Aura’s protagonist, an epileptic loner named Esteban Espinoza (Ricardo Darin again, in a superb performance), we’re introduced to him in a vertiginous overhead crane shot as he regains consciousness after passing out at an ATM in the deserted lobby of a Buenos Aires bank, with no one around to help him. From the opening of The Aura, Esteban’s isolation from society is complete; afflicted with blackouts he can’t control, alienated from the world, and utterly alone, Esteban is the epitome of the modern man – solitary, hopeless, friendless. Pulling himself together, Esteban marches his way back to his house, where he works on some stuffed animals for a museum display while listening to Vivaldi’s Sinfonia alla rusticaon his radio.

In the next room, his wife pounds on the translucent glass door to Esteban’s workroom, but Esteban ignores her, and turns up the radio to drown out her voice, continuing with his work in a calm, unconcerned manner – it’s clear that whatever relationship they might have had is over. And indeed, we never really see his wife, just her shadow, as she tries to get his attention with shouts and threats, but none of it touches Esteban in the slightest – he’s in his own world, bringing the dead “back to life” with artificial eyes, fur, and other totemic aspects of existence, even if this imitation of life is utterly superficial and phantasmal.

The Aura

At the museum, Esteban meets a fellow taxidermist, who is also bringing along some dead animals for display, but though the two men “know” each other, one could hardly call them friends. Sontag (Alejandro Awada) is a gruff, brutal man, utterly lacking in compassion or humanity, and both men readily admit that they’re trying to pawn off some inferior goods on the museum; recycled trophies that they’ve previously used in other dioramas. Wandering through the museum while they wait for the display director to decide what he’ll buy from them, Esteban and Sontag walk through the halls of the decaying building, commenting on how rundown the place has become.

The Aura

When Esteban gently touches one of the stuffed animals on display, its antlers immediately fall off – everything is appearance, and fragile appearance at that. A few minutes later, in the payroll office for the museum, as Esteban and Sontag line up for their checks, however, the film’s central narrative kicks in – Esteban’s fantasy life as a master criminal. In a superbly executed “fantasy projection” sequence, Esteban describes to Sontag just how he would rob the payroll office with a group of imaginary accomplices, as Bielinsky shows us the entire robbery in detail in a blur of activity, while Esteban and Sontag remain in the center of the commotion, unaffected by the events around them. None of this is “really” happening, of course – it’s all in Esteban’s mind, and his calm detachment as he narrates the details of the crime to Sontag, a crime we are “witnessing,” is in stark contrast to the sleek efficiency of the phantom criminals, who pull off the “robbery” without a hitch, and vanish down a secret catwalk to make good their escape.

This is the most visceral scene in the film up to this point in the narrative, and makes it clear that Esteban lives more fully in his imagination than he does in real life. Sontag has heard all this before, in various other scenarios – how Esteban would pull off the “perfect” robbery in any number of locations – but he is still amazed by Esteban’s photographic memory. Without looking twice, Esteban is able to instantly memorize the serial numbers on the bags of money carried by the payroll guards; perhaps this is a side effect of his epilepsy, of the “aura” that envelopes him with inexorable inevitability just before each attack. But, with the fantasy robbery “complete” in Esteban’s imagination, Bielinsky returns us to the quotidian drabness of the payroll office, and the dull certainty of everyday life. It’s just a dream, after all, though we sense that Esteban, if given the chance, might just follow through on such a scenario.

The Aura

Returning home, Esteban discovers that his wife has left him, leaving just a cursory note that we never see, and when Sontag suggests that the two men take a vacation to do some hunting, they eventually arrive at the forest lodge of Carlos Dietrich (Manuel Rodal), a mysterious figure who keeps a secret hunting lodge deep in the woods, and, as it eventually becomes clear, is involved in preparations for an elaborate payroll robbery. However, we don’t meet Dietrich at this point in the narrative; he is out on a hunting trip, leaving his abused wife Diana (Dolores Fonzi) in charge of the lodge. In the meantime, Sontag has become disgusted with Esteban’s inability to effectively stalk and kill the very same animals he stuffs for a living, and after a quarrel, the two men separate, with Sontag essentially abandoning Esteban at Dietrich’s remote hunting lodge. Alone, unsure of what to do next, Esteban ventures deep into the forest, determined at last to hunt and kill a deer to prove, in some fashion, that he has the cojones to take a life.

The Aura

But just as he is about to pull the trigger, and bring down a magnificent stag that seems unaware of his presence, Esteban suffers another epileptic seizure, which Bielinsky signals with a series of sweeping tracking shots, as the world seems to collapse around Esteban, obliterating his conscious existence. When, at length, Esteban wakes up, not knowing how long he’s been unconscious, he instinctively grabs his rifle and aims at the first thing that moves – unfortunately, this turns out to be Dietrich, whom Esteban, in the first genuinely violent act of the film, kills with a single shot to the head. This is the first time we’ve seen Dietrich, and it’s also the last; a figure viewed in distance, his living presence in the film is confined to a matter of seconds, but the corpse of Dietrich is a different matter altogether – it reveals, upon examination, a host of information on Dietrich’s planned payroll job and a key to the cabin in the woods where Dietrich secretly made his plans, and with Dietrich’s death, Esteban is also “adopted” by Dietrich’s dog, a massive animal with one blue eye, and one brown eye, who seemingly transfers his loyalty from his dead master to Esteban, and serves as Esteban’s erstwhile guide into Dietrich’s dark domain. Entering Dietrich’s cabin, Esteban discovers the complete plan for the robbery, and with his photographic memory, absorbs every detail of the plan.

Returning to the lodge, Esteban is confronted by two of Dietrich’s criminal associates, Sosa (Pablo Cedron) and Montero (Walter Reyno), and passes himself off as Dietrich’s partner in the proposed payroll robbery, explaining that Dietrich had to leave suddenly on business. Dietrich’s wife, Diana, is completely unaware of her late husband’s plans, although she knows that something is in the works. But at the same time, the much younger Diana, who bears the scores of Dietrich’s savage beatings on her back, is really more a prisoner of Dietrich’s lodge than anything else; it’s clear that she long ago ceased to care for her husband.

The Aura

As Esteban, Sosa and Montero proceed with their plans for the robbery, Diana keeps her distance, even as she befriends Esteban, recognizing that there’s some good in him; the robbery, for Esteban, is more of an adventure than a criminal enterprise – for once in his life, Esteban would like to see one of his schemes played out for real, but he doesn’t really understand the potential consequences of what he’s doing. Esteban is a dreamer, not a hardened criminal; in contrast, Sosa and Montero are utterly ruthless, willing to kill at a moment’s notice. As the plan picks up speed and starts to unfold, Esteban finds himself utterly alone in a hostile world of greed, violence and brutality, far more vicious than anything he could ever have imagined. “Perfect” crimes happen only in daydreams; in the real world, with everyone out for themselves, things will unfold in a decidedly different manner.

I will leave the rest of the narrative to the viewer to discover; indeed, all I have sketched is the first thirty or so minutes of the film, which then embarks on a series of spectacular double crosses and deceptions reminiscent of Nine Queens, but far more sinister in both their implications and their consequences. Through it all, Esteban sleepwalks through the steps of Dietrich’s plan as if lost in a dream, in which reality and fantasy are impossible to separate. The music for the film, a stunningly hypnotic drone score composed by Lucio Godoy, suitably amplifies this “disconnect” from society. Even though he is “part” of Dietrich’s scheme, he is still in the dark about many of the twists and turns in the plan, and is left to discover – often, to his detriment – numerous aspects of the scheme that aren’t readily apparent.

Esteban seems almost more like a spectator, rather than a participant, in the film’s action – he’s along for the ride, but he has no real idea of how things will eventually turn out. During one memorable sequence midway through the film, as Esteban tracks the various ancillary characters in Dietrich’s scheme, he witnesses a payroll robbery at a manufacturing plant from his car across the street, not more than 100 feet away from a scene of violence and mayhem. As the robbery unfolds, viewed exclusively from Esteban’s point-of-view in a series of long shots, Esteban leaves his car and wanders across the street, right into the thick of a vicious gun battle between the thieves and the police, seemingly oblivious to the risk he’s taking – and indeed, he is oblivious. None of this is real to him. His entire life is a dream. Indeed, all of the events in The Aura may well be entirely imaginary – is any of this really happening at all?

As Bielinsky’s friend Diego Lerer noted, after the director’s death,

“In the world of Fabián Bielinsky, behind every corner there was darkness. The unexpected, the impossible, the surreal could come up at every turn. In El aura, his second and, sadly, last film, the main character walks in the woods, surrounded by shadows and fog, with only flashes of light illuminating the tall trees. The light is out there – the world, the possibility of happiness – but he can’t see it. His mind is somewhere else: planning the next step of an elaborate robbery, stealing the identity of the man he just killed. Obsessive to the point of memorizing every number, every face, every step he had to walk to get out of the woods, the protagonist cannot, finally, control everything that’s around him. Because real life, real things, can’t be controlled, processed, written down on a piece of paper and handled as if it were a map, where space and time are fixed and easy to follow. His mind controls him, but can’t control the world. [---]

[Like Esteban, Bielinsky’s] mind was always somewhere else, maybe a few steps ahead of yours, like a great chess player that has the entire game in his mind before even moving the first piece. [---] He would shoot and reshoot every scene until it looked exactly the way he had conceived it in his mind. He fought to maintain a very long cut of El aura (at the expense of a tighter editing that would have given the film a better and longer commercial run) because he believed that was the only way the audience could get into the mind of the protagonist. He also made the entire film from the main character’s point-of-view, forcing the audience to be outside the main action during long sequences. But he had a vision of what he wanted. And he stuck to that, with great results. [---]

The Aura

[Bielinsky] was able to show a strong command of storytelling in Nine Queens. But that film was – still is – basically a great script, shot in a very classical, unobtrusive way, helped by a career-making performance by Darín. No wonder it was compared to the films of David Mamet, another great storyteller not particularly famous for his visual skills. El aura was a different thing altogether. Standing apart from the precise logic of Nine Queens, Bielinsky dared to abandon the big city and go to the woods in Patagonia, when time, space and events are harder to predict. The wildlife, the guns, the mysterious animals, the traps were not as easy to handle as they had been when the main character […] was in Buenos Aires working as a taxidermist. These animals, these people, these guns were real, and they could turn things around at any given time. Even the shooting of the film ended up being more difficult than the production company had predicted: they couldn’t control the weather, the light, the hundreds of things that can go wrong when you are out in the wilderness.

With El aura came a different approach in terms of screenwriting, a decision to let things more open to interpretation, to avoid closing all the doors to the audience for a satisfying and conclusive ending. With that, also came a more lyrical approach to filmmaking. Longer takes, moody atmosphere, a visual palette that’s closer to a painting created by a disturbed mind (the mind of the protagonist), and a filmic style you can compare to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks or Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan.” (Lerer 2006)

The Aura

Bielinsky’s achievement in The Aura, then, is one of transcendence, of escape from the real into the zone of imagination, which then doubles back up on itself to encompass actuality. It’s also worth noting in passing that this idea of a “sleep walking” protagonist was not new to Bielinsky, who scripted the equally dreamlike The Sleep Walker (La Sonámbula) for director Fernando Spiner in 1998, and when working in commercials, assisted none other than Wim Wenders in the shooting of a Renault Mégane commercial – the Mégane is a small family car manufactured by Renault – in Argentina, which had a similarly surrealistic bent (Chanan 2006). As Esteban tells Diana Dietrich in The Aura, he lives his life in a state of perpetual uncertainty, never knowing when an attack will come on, simultaneously dreading each episode, and yet anticipating it, as if his hold on reality remains very slight indeed; as he describes it, “there’s a moment, a shift… things suddenly change… The fit is coming, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Nothing. It’s horrible… and it’s perfect. Because during those few seconds, you’re free. There’s no choice. No alternative. Nothing for you to decide.”

And yet, for all of its sophistication – or rather, precisely because of it – The Aura failed to duplicate the commercial success of Nine Queens, but then again, Bielinsky made it manifestly clear going into the project that he more or less expected a lukewarm public reception. Never mind; he would keep directing commercials until a new project presented itself; though not a box office smash, The Aura had been an overwhelming critical success, and that was all that mattered. But it was not to be. As Vince Keenan notes,

“El aura did not achieve Neuve Reinas’s level of exposure in the United States. It was distributed via the Independent Film Channel’s First Take series, released on demand and in theaters simultaneously. This approach makes films available to a wider audience […] but at the expense of publicity. Even being named one of 2006’s best films by The New York Times’s A. O. Scott didn’t garner El aura additional attention. On June 26, 2006, El aura swept Argentina’s film awards, taking home prizes for best picture, Bielinsky’s script and direction, and Darín’s performance among others. Two days later, in a hotel room in São Paulo, Brazil where he was casting a TV commercial, Fabián Bielinsky died of a heart attack at age 47, leaving behind a wife and a young son.”

In one of his last interviews, conducted on 21 Apr. 2006 by Mariano Colalongo and Alvaro Fuentes at Bielinsky’s home in La Plata, Buenos Aires – “a comfortable and bright house with a home theater, with DVD shelves of some 400 classic American films” – Bielinsky told his two listeners that, with regard to The Aura,

“I am glad to have done what I did in terms of the whole work. I was convinced I wanted to open the picture to other completely different spaces, to precisely my own decisions… The Aura is a more personal film, from a different place, linked to certain obsessions or fantasies or thoughts that are mine… [At the premiere of the film] I remember [Ricardo] Darin [saying] ‘It’s you that you see on the screen – it’s you’… Yes, the truth is that there is a personal component in terms of atmosphere, climate, a level of obsession.”

But who is it that Darin saw on the screen? As Megan Ratner noted,

“Despite their tight narratives, Bielinsky’s films pose questions about the suppositions and assumptions most film viewers make, even about the very act of viewing itself. The taxidermist especially is remote, unable to be in life except as a kind of fill-in. Even in the midst of a shoot-out, he seems invisible to those taking part, protected by his semi-existence. Later in the film, deep into a heist, one of his unwilling associates accosts him: ‘Who are you? Where do you come from?’ as if unable to imagine this man is flesh and blood. What he responds to is the taxidermist’s lack of affect, the profound uninvolvement that allows him to watch even a gunfight as if at a screening. Though his plotting and techniques drew largely on traditions of Wilder and other established masters, Bielinsky set challenges as far-reaching as Michael Haneke’s in Code Unknown and Caché about our roles as actors and witnesses and about the soothing passivity so easily abetted by standing by and watching, watching, watching.”

Thus, Bielinsky, the obsessive moviegoer, the perpetual spectator, the creator of hundreds of television commercials that sold a lifestyle that never existed, seems in the end to have had a similarly disassociated view of life itself. Nine Queens was a commercial entertainment that put him on the map, but in The Aura, he reveals what’s behind all the duplicity, greed and violence – emptiness. Esteban’s greatest moments of clarity, by his own admission, come right before the seizures that render him unconscious; in the real world, he observes, but doesn’t really interact. It’s only when he accidentally stumbles into some else’s fantasy projection that he actually embraces his existence, and only then because he’s caught up in the excitement and intricacy of Dietrich’s scheme.

The Aura

It’s telling that the only time we see Dietrich is for a split second before Esteban accidentally shoots him; although there’s no actual communication between the two men, Dietrich does leave behind his master plan, his own dream of a life beyond the insulation of a remote hunting lodge, located at the outmost margins of society, catering to a clientele of losers, misfits, and violent outcasts. It is very much like the world of Deliverance – Dietrich’s hunting camp can only exist beyond the boundaries of conventional society, in an outlaw zone where the only law is the rule of brutality and greed. In this phantom zone, people cease to exist as we know them; they become only the manifestations of their primal designs — to hunt, to kill, to steal, to break all the rules and somehow get away with it. The question is really apt – “Who are you? Where do you come from?” No one knows; and there really is no answer.

In the end, the genre trappings of The Aura fade into insignificance – the film is more concerned with the human condition than any quotidian criminal enterprise. That, and the uncertainty and ephemerality of existence, the unknowable interior of each person’s individual being. “Who are you? Where do you come from?” – there will never be an answer to these questions, not for Esteban, or Bielinsky, or for any of us. The triumph of The Aura, then, is to make the mystery of our being a question that perpetually hovers over every other aspect of the film. We can’t know ourselves, or each other, or even the motives that drive us towards certain specific actions, and away from others.

For me, at least, the career of Fabián Bielinsky had just begun, and his death has robbed us of one of the cinema’s most original and deeply penetrating talents. What he might have accomplished had he lived is, of course, a matter of utter conjecture, but there can be no doubt that, in his brief time on earth, Bielinsky was moving toward a meditational cinema that extended beyond the boundaries of the known, both in life and in art, and extended out far beyond the vicissitudes of daily life, towards larger questions of metaphysical existence and philosophical contemplation, a journey he had only just begun.

The author wishes to thank Richard Graham for research assistance on this essay, as well as Arso Risteski for three translations of interviews with Bielinsky originally conducted in Spanish.

Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Professor of Film Studies, Coordinator of the Film Studies Program, Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and Editor in Chief, with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. His newest books are Streaming: Movies, Media and Instant Access (University of Kentucky Press, 2013); Death of the Moguls: The End of Classical Hollywood (Rutgers University Press, 2012); 21st Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era of Transformation (co-authored with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster; Rutgers University Press, 2011); A History of Horror (Rutgers University Press, 2010; reprinted in 2011), Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia (Edinburgh University Press/Rutgers University Press, 2009), and A Short History of Film (co-authored with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster; Rutgers University Press, 2008; reprinted 6 times through 2012, with a new edition in 2013). His website, Frame by Frame, can be found here and a series of videos by Dixon on film history, theory and criticism, also titled Frame by Frame, can be found here.

Works Cited and Consulted

Abraham, Jugu (2010), “104. The Late Argentine Director Fabián Bielinsky’s El Aura (The Aura, 2005): A Mind-Bending Thriller That Takes You Beyond Guns, Women and Lucre”, Movies that make you think, August 24.

Chanan, Michael (2006), “Fabián Bielinsky: Fresh New Spirit of the Mainstream Cinema in Argentina”, The Guardian, July 19.

Colalongo, Mariano and Alvaro Fuentes (2006), “Entrevista con Fabián Bielinsky”, La Ventana Indiscreta, April 21. Translated by Arso Risteski.

Dawson, Tom (2002), “Fabián Bielinsky: Nine Queens”, BBC, July 2.

Edwards, David (2002), “Fabián Bielinsky: Nine Queens”, The Blurb, September 26.

Moviefone (no date), “Fabián Bielinsky Biography”.

Fahsbender, Federico (2005), “‘Le dije que no a Hollywood. Allá no tenés libertad para crear”, Gente. Translated by Arso Risteski.

Falicov, Tamara L. (2012), “Argentine Cinema and the Crisis of Audience” in Daniela Ingruber and Ursula Prutsch (eds.), The Argentine Film, Münster, Berlin, Vienna and Zurich: LIT Verlag, pp. 207-218.

Harley, Kevin (2006), “Fabián Bielinsky”, The Independent, July 20.

Kaufman, Anthony, (2002) “World Cinema Report: Argentina’s Next Wave Struggle Sustains Momentum Amid Economic Collapse”, Indiewire, March 20. 2002.

Keenan, Vince (2009), “Too Soon Gone: the Noir Legacy of Fabián Bielinsky”, Vince Keenan: Movies. Crime Fiction. Baseball. Jazz. Cocktails., July 3.

Khasnis, Giridhar (2012), “Aura of a master”, Deccan Herald.

Klawans, Stuart (2006), “Imitation of Life: A Valediction for Fabián Bielinsky,” Parnassus: Poetry in Review, 30.1/2, pp. 347-354.

Knipp, Chris (2006), “Fabián Bielinsky: The Aura (2006)”, Film Leaf, December 19.

Kusmin, Nicolás (2006), “Fabián Bielinsky”, Leedor.com, July 3.

Lerer, Diego (2006), “Fabián Bielinsky, 1959-2006” Fipresci.

Letelier, Jorge (2006), “Fabián Bielinsky, director de El aura “El apoyo de la crítica para las películas pequeñas es decisivo” Mabuse, January 29. 2006. Translated by Arso Risteski.

Lukas, Amadeo (2005/2009), “An Interview with Fabián Bielinsky”, originally published in Raíces del Cine 2005. Reprinted in Hungarian in Odeon 9 Apr. 2009.

Nord, Cristina (2005), “Dead Skin”, Fipresci.

O’Brien, Geoffrey (2006), “Best Laid Plans: The Aura”, Film Comment, Nov./Dec.

Ratner, Megan (2007), “A Legacy Slight But Substantial”, Bright Lights Film Journal 55, February.

Urban, Andrew (2002), “Four Aces for Nine Queens” Urban Cinefile, September 26.

Young, Neil (2007), “A Fitting Epitaph?: Fabián Bielinsky’s The Aura”, Neil Young’s Film Lounge, June 24.

“Watch new blood on the eighteen inch screen
The corpse is a new personality
Watch new blood on the eighteen inch screen
The corpse is a new personality.”
(Gang of Four, “5:45,” from the album Entertainment! [1979])

Television shows such as I Was Impaled (2012-) and 1000 Ways to Die (2008-) appropriate tropes from horror film and re-narrate them into digestible bite-size “safe” forms. I’d argue they have similar voyeuristic pleasures as the horror film, but they are almost entirely shorn of narrative and any sense of morality. In 1000 Ways to Die, “hilarious” stories of death, loosely based on actual stories, are stripped of any humanism, and edited together as a series of graphic and repetitive mini-narratives of sadistic slaughter. It’s all for sick kicks; set to quirky music, sutured together by a wisecracking voiceover narrator. Here, the destruction of the body is almost a postmodern destruction of humanity, with a snuff-like lack of ethos; presented much in the same manner as the “funny” clips from America’s Funniest Home Videos, which themselves often rely on the humor in watching, for example, children hurting themselves.

We live in an era of what I call “family friendly torture porn”: we are surrounded by amoral metanarratives that display our almost complete lack of empathy for others. Our insatiable appetite for the display of excessive pain and banally routine death and dismemberment reflects our embrace of an endlessly warring culture. Our culture is dominated not by Eros, but by Thanatos. We barely acknowledge our own ghoulish depravity as cultural imperialists and warmongers as we continue to support questionable invasions and occupations. We are told to “support the troops,” but we are barely allowed to openly question exactly what acts and policies are we being forced to accept? Our blind acceptance of a culture of war and death, and the big business economy of a warring culture is blithely accepted by most.

For example, we have almost completely forgotten the shocking photographs of the torture in Gitmo and elsewhere, and we ignore at our moral peril our collective ability to find laughter and hilarity in depravity and our fascistic impulses. We seem, as a culture, almost bored by death and pain, and at the same time there is a rise in the fascistic display of sculpted bodies of perfection, the hypermuscular bodies of 300, for example: these are bodies only sculpted in readiness for war and death. Morally, we must take note that fascistic anti-human TV is but a small reflection of our acceptance of the practice of torture and the wider embrace of a culture of death in American popular culture.

I Was Impaled

In I Was Impaled, things are handled in a slightly less snarky manner than 1000 Ways to Die, but bodily harm and gruesome depravity is still presented with lip-smacking relish, as if the entire affair was some sort of ghastly freak show for our depraved amusement. Impalements, horrifying moments, and ghoulish bodily dismemberments are edited together for shock value, though they become almost boring and numbing as a result of their generic display. We become completely numb and pain becomes dull, we completely lack empathy for the suffering of human beings. The danger of such an amoral lack of empathy is paved over by laughs, sick kicks.

Significantly, in these television programs, (and many similar ones that I simply don’t have time to discuss here), the victims are so fully “othered” as objects of morbid fascination and fun, that in both shows the dominant message is that these Darwinian idiots “deserve to die.” In fact, these shows trade on the hierarchical idiom of the question of who most “deserves” to die.

The idea that some humans are less than human and “deserve” to die should certainly be familiar to anyone with an understanding of mass genocide. A culture ready and willing and able to commit genocide is only possible in an ideology that supports the notion of the “deserved” death. It comes as little surprise then, that the official website for 1000 Ways to Die opens with the most popularly searched online feature, entitled, “The Most-Deserved Deaths On 1000 Ways To Die.” Writer Aaron Ahmadi opens the piece with the following paragraph:

1000 Ways to Die

“On 1000 Ways To Die you’ve seen plenty of folk falling into the hands of the grim reaper because they were either just plain stupid or full of vein-popping rage (heck, sometimes both). Many of these imbeciles were just jerks and had it coming one way or another – real jerks. With all these jackasses on the show you’re probably thinking the same thing as us at this point: which of these numbskulls deserved what they got in the end the most? Hmm, do we really have to pick?”

Immediately under the paragraph, the most popular and supposedly “deserved” deaths are available by download for the amusement of the viewer and, interestingly enough, they are presented exactly the same way porn sites present the most popular pornographic “money shots,” which themselves often involve brutality and inhumanity. Currently the most popular porn money shot involves a very young Asian girl being repeatedly punched in the face while she is sprayed with male ejaculate. I mention this casual and popular depravity because it demonstrates that family friendly torture porn holds no higher moral ground than the sadly vile and sadly routine display of a lack of empathy towards the “Other” in porn. No doubt the Asian Other is seen as a Darwinian idiot who supposedly “deserves” such abasement. The viewer laughs and finds sexual pleasure in hearing her pathetic cries for help. Is finding pleasure in her pain and ignoring her repeated cries really any different than finding amusement in the impalements and myriad forms of indescribable pain presented in family friendly torture porn? I think not.

Thus potentially, in comparison with even the most extreme horror films, family friendly torture porn is perhaps far more exploitational by virtue of the fact that it is presented as “all in good fun.” I suggest that even though it may seem like silly innocuous “fun” and perfectly appropriate material for family viewing, family friendly torture porn reduces horror to a series of excessive, interchangeable, violent, bloody and gory thrills shorn of any cohesive narrative, any sense of identification, and any sense of morality. It cheapens human life and frequently appropriates the aesthetics of horror film while selling a product devoid of humanism and one that is indicative of a coldhearted culture of depravity and routine political atrocity, thus positioning the viewer as a sadistic libertine and exposing American culture as one of brutal fascistic pleasure, a culture at home with genocide, pain, torture and death.

I find it fascinating that this same culture, by turn, is uncomfortable with narratives of pleasure and sentiment, love and the nurturing of bodies. The most routinely scorned programming on television is that which embraces Eros and life, and stories of romance, love, and melodrama, specifically the Lifetimes Network, which is signaled out as an object of constant derision. The ideology of bodies “deserving” of love, life, romance, and heart-touching lovemaking and intimacy is routinely met with scorn and outright hatred. We are a culture that seems to hate love; we seem to be oddly disgusted by romance. Any sentiment and feeling for others is frequently viewed as a stupid waste of time. If it is not a narrative of death, dismemberment and indescribable pain, it must be sentimental, melodramatic, sappy, and associated with the female, the overly emotional. She is too compassionate and empathetic: compassion and pathos are rejected in our culture and replaced by the reckless embrace of narratives of torture; genocidal impulses that betray our wider embrace of a warring Thanatopic culture, one that celebrates Darwinian individualism, empathy deficit disorder, and conspicuous communal consumption of atrocity for family fun-time pleasure.

I Was Impaled

For anyone unfamiliar with the infamous Discovery Fit and Health channel’s program I Was Impaled, I’ll offer here some brief plot summaries. I Was Impaled features people who accidentally end up with foreign objects impaled in their body. While examining how these mysterious items were often initially ignored and later “discovered,” the program carefully reenacts the gruesome impalements and also features faux forensic material popular to any reality programming. Here, in CSI style, we are treated to gruesome reenactments of actors playing medics and surgeons who use the most groundbreaking techniques to extract objects from bodies as a flat voiceover narrative explains what we are watching in excessively bloody detail. Using cutting-edge animation, firsthand testimony and sophisticated recreations, often including CGI, each 60-minute episode highlights the stories of three or four “impalements,” from the time the injury occurs to the moment the person “realizes” they are actually impaled by something, through the euphoric moment when the object is removed, and usually it includes an actor saying “I should not be alive,” or some variant on that idea, in this way gesturing to the trope of the so-called “deservedness ”of death as it is featured on 1000 Ways to Die.

The stories include a woman who was impaled on a five-inch iron spike railing; a man whose esophagus was ripped open by a French fry; a gardener whom fell face first onto his pruning shears; a young man who was accidentally shot with a five-foot long fishing spear; a man who was impaled by a six-foot fence post; a woman who fell directly onto a hooked planter while gardening; a man who had a foreign object mysteriously lodged into his brain; a woman who was impaled through her neck by a Christmas tree; a boy who accidentally swallowed a barbed hook while fishing; a man who nearly died after being pumped full of enough air to blow up a thousand party balloons; a surfer who ended up with his fiberglass surfboard embedded in his skull; a motocross rider who crashed and ended up with a stick in his face; a 64-year-old woman who discovered a bug in her ear and a pencil in her brain; a carpenter who got a splinter in his eye; and an ex-Marine who was left with a pole penetrating his mouth after a car accident (TV Tango).

As you can tell from these plot descriptions, the definition of “impalement” is stretched beyond credulity. The show promises the kinds of impalements one would expect from a horror film, but impalement from within by a French fry, or being pumped up with excess air seems hardly comparable with classic horror movie impalements. A classic horror film, usually a moral tale, often involves the impalement of a vampire by wooden stake, or a villain being impaled on an iron spike, specifically a black wrought iron spiked gate of the type found either in Victorian England, or the Transylvanian countryside. While I Was Impaled may borrow from the classic horror film (one that almost always features a clear morality tale), it leaves behind the moral binarisms of good vs. evil in the traditional horror film. Instead, the program foregrounds a series of impalements and dismemberments without the narrative conscience of a moral center.

I Was Impaled

Reality horror shows such as I Was Impaled routinely appropriate many of the common tropes of horror films through reenactments that gesture to classical horror as well as more recent torture porn. The musical score, editing, lighting, foregrounding, narrative emphasis upon dread and fear are all common filmic devices appropriated here, but reality TV tends to flatten the horror narrative into simple affect, devoid of romance, sentiment, good guys, bad guys, audience problem-solving, moral conflict and most significantly – emotional involvement. It is therefore difficult to summon any moral complexity, emotional richness, or resolution from a show such as I Was Impaled, except that human beings are idiots who deserve to get impaled hilariously for our amusement.

In I Was Impaled, the frail and permeable human body is reduced into consumable bite-size portions of snuff-like snark and gallows humor, the body in pain as a consumable Other, at the expense of those who have been unlucky or stupid enough to find themselves staked, impaled or otherwise gored. The problem with those who deserve to die or deserve to be impaled is that they are not fascistic impermeable bodies as presented in hyper-muscularized warring culture such as that displayed in 300 and elsewhere in war-obsessed popular culture, a culture of disciplined bodies preparing for endless war. I Was Impaled is more superficially serious than 1000 Ways to Die, but ultimately just as mindless and formulaic, and the careful reenactments have the bizarre effect of summoning indifference; a flattening of what should be a heightened effect. We become fully desensitized to the pain and horror. Interestingly, as Cynthia Freeland notes,

“If the narratives and spectacles of violence on TV are equated with the flat, unreal experiences of reality, this may be because people are actually seeking a more rich and meaningful narrative of violence and evil — one say, more like the ideal for classified tragedy described by Aristotle in his Poetics.” (2004: 257-258)

1000 Ways to Die

Lost in the appropriation from tragic and horror films to reality TV is any sort of classical tragedy. If evil is reduced to chance and doesn’t come in the form of a cohesive fictional narrative, it risks becoming empty, indifferent and predictably fascist, like the dark humor that is present in many torture porn films. But even many torture porn films, as specific a genre as it is, usually at least attempt to include elements of classical tragedy, some sort of moral center, some delineation of “good” and “bad” characters, monster, victims, survivors. Cynthia Freeland notes that horror reality TV reveals “contradictory” messages as “such programs are both arousing and deadening, frightening and reassuring, serious and comical, ‘real’ and ‘unreal’” (246). This “contradictory” sense noted by Freeland has a rather flattening effect, especially with regard to human suffering and torture.

It is worth noting that this blasé attitude toward torture is also highly prevalent in other areas of popular culture, particularly in Hollywood films such as Zero Dark Thirty, which fully embraces both a warring culture and the practice of torture, and was, amazingly, nominated for the top Academy Awards.[i] Another example of the many feature films that similarly display a blasé attitude towards death is The ABCs of Death, which is brazenly marketed as a comedy on the official website, boasting “26 directors, 26 way to die”:

“The ABC’s OF DEATH is perhaps the most ambitious anthology film ever conceived with productions spanning fifteen countries and featuring segments directed by over two dozen of the world’s leading talents in contemporary genre film. Inspired by children’s educational books, the motion picture is comprised of twenty-six individual chapters, each helmed by a different director assigned a letter of the alphabet. The directors were then given free reign in choosing a word to create a story involving death. Provocative, shocking, funny and ultimately confrontational, THE ABC’s OF DEATH is the definitive vision of modern horror diversity.”

But, interestingly enough, horror film aficionados have generally dismissed the film as flat and suffering from a lack of moral centeredness. They do not even seem to find the film to be engaging or funny. This comment on IMDB from “jolenewebber” typifies the reaction to the film:

The ABCs of Death

“This is the worst waste of time in the world, Whoever made some of these scenes should seriously be put in a high security institution or be offed with, anyone who displays any type of sick slide where a child is sexually abused, and people crushing kittens with feet..is f**kd beyond ALL recognition, that’s two hours of my life i’ll [sic] never get back, that’s some sick bastards who made this horrible traumatizing crock of sh*t. I hope whoever created those disturbing flicks rolls over dead [sic].”

Freeland is correct. It seems that plenty of horror fans are fatigued by the flattening effect found in morality free horror feature films. They do seek more meaningful narratives of good and evil and stories that feature the moral center associated with tragedy and Aristotle. As “matta-11” comments on IMDB;

“I am not sure if I was expecting the wrong thing […] But I was thinking this was supposed to be a horror anthology with an interesting concept. In the end it felt more like a competition for the segment that is the most absurd, outrageous, ultra-violent, hyper-sexual, or all of the above combined. [---] I would not recommend this to anyone unless you NEED to see it for you self to satisfy your curiosity, or if you are really into senseless extreme movies.”

Ironically, in the competition to be the most repellent, it is the resulting predictable and repetitive flatness of movies such as The ABCs of Death or family friendly torture porn like I Was Impaled that leaves these narratives shorn of meaning, boring and devoid of evil and its attendant tropes, so that ultimately pain becomes parodic and humorous inviting either spectatorial disgust or a complacency and pleasurable enjoyment closely associated with that of the fascistic genocidal mindset in which bodies as Other simply deserve punishment and death. It’s interesting to note that as horror films themselves move away from classic narrative traditions toward snarkier, more supposedly humorous torture porn, for example, and toward less realist and more ridiculous spectacles of the destruction of human bodies – televisual horror “reality” shows similarly trade in ridiculousness, excess and rather mean-spirited humor.

The ABCs of Death

Fans of the ABCs of Death show up in the reviews on Amazon, a typical fan says, “I spent as much time laughing as I did repulsed.” It is interesting to note that hyper-sexuality is something “matta-11” finds repellent and stupid in her review of The ABCs of Death, as sex and death are interchangeable in our Thanatopic culture of excessive depravity. I Was Impaled frequently borrows the use of sexual innuendo from the traditional horror film, especially in the titles of the episodes. In an old horror film from the fifties the first victim of a bad monster is often a couple about to embark on a sexual encounter, but we all know they may pay with their lives.

In a sense, they “deserve” to die, or at least to be frightened by some hairy monster or atomic beast. I Was Impaled gestures back to classical horror films in its constant references to sexuality. The most famous episode is a good example of the excessive and unnecessary references to sex, the episode entitled “Don’t Pull It Out!” obviously refers to the most rudimental form of sexual birth control, even while the episode has little to do with sex. Here, “Don’t Pull It Out” refers to the fact that many people who survive impalements of one kind or another only survive because they have the sense not to pull out the object of impalement and bleed to death.

2 1/2 Men

But frequent sexual references are designed for family friendly viewing here in the way they are constantly deployed in one of the most popular current situation comedies, 2 1/2 Men, a TV show that never misses an opportunity to weave in a sexual innuendo. It is funny to observe that while actual porn is generally consumed in private and is surrounded with at least a modicum of taboo, a family friendly show such as 2 1/2 Men is a prurient show designed for a communal audience. The entire family is expected to sit together on the couch to take in the show, perhaps followed by a marathon of episodes of 1000 Ways to Die and maybe for dessert, a marathon of I Was Impaled. It seems doubly ironic that family friendly torture porn, which employ such a dull repetitive narrative strategy (so repetitive that it results in a sense of numbing), do even better (in terms of viewership) when episodes are run one after the other for hours in the newly popularized practice of marathon television programming. The lack of empathy that is generated by one show is only multiplied exponentially when the show is presented for hours on end in these marathon family friendly events.

An article in The Oregonian posed the obvious question, with “Who’d Watch a Show Called I Was Impaled?” As Kristi Turnquist writes:

“You can keep your Hillbilly Handfishin’, your Here Comes Honey, Boo Boo and the rest of the gator-chasin’, pawnbrokin’, pickin’, storage unit-buyin’ reality shows. Today brings news of what’s possibly the most awesomely insane concept for a show ever: I Was Impaled. What could this be about? Oh, gee, I dunno, maybe it’s stories of people who were IMPALED? And really, who wouldn’t want to watch that while sharing quality time with the whole family? Maybe after having grilled a couple of skewers of chicken and veggies out in the backyard. Yum. Though it sounds like an April Fool’s joke, I Was Impaled is really coming to Discovery Fit & Health, starting Sept. 8. The 6 episodes listed in a press release that must have been a challenge to write, include the lead-off outing, called – and I’m not making this up – ‘Don’t Pull It Out!’”

And indeed, the press release on the home page of Discovery Fit and Health promises, “[we’ve] hunted down the most absurd freak accidents possible! [---] Can’t get enough?” Next comes a list of episodes, the first one another strangely sexualized episode entitled “Penetrations Gone Wrong,” described as follows:

“A glass eye in a woman’s vagina, a man with four Barbie doll heads in his rectum, lined up ‘like a totem pole’ and a whole host of vegetables, light bulbs, tools and cell phones reportedly make it into people’s bodies through whichever orifice they can stick it in. Believe it or not, these kinds of scenarios are extremely common in hospital and emergency room settings. An article by ABC News says that ‘patients with objects stuck in the rectum are more likely to be between the ages of 20 and 40,’ and that men are 28 times more likely than women to be the culprits. Well guys, maybe you should be a little more careful when you’re trying to change things up.” (Wolfe 2012)

Interestingly enough, the press release ends by posing the question, “Why do we think about death? Read on to find out about an entire field of study dedicated to exploring death,” after which links are provided to the Discovery Channel’s program How Stuff Works, including episodes on the “Worst Way to Die,” “I Was Impaled by the Most Bizarre Injuries” and “Can Impalement be an Art Form”?

I Was Impaled

It’s intriguing to look at the anonymous web postings that respond to episodes of I Was Impaled. Many just coldly state, LOL, “laugh out loud.” In response to the episode “Tree Branch Through the Neck”, someone comments, “Well that’s what I call a deep throat – Hell yeah!” Another commentator is disappointed at the lack of gore. “No showing how they removed it,” he complains. The online comments say a great deal about audience lust for a moral free zone of death and depravity.

In Spike TV’s splatter gore-fest 1000 Ways to Die most of the humor is attributable to the sarcastic voiceover narration by Ron Perlman, who is nimbly able to go from somber description to rather ghoulish punch lines in a heartbeat. His timing and delivery are impeccable. Like the audience, he’s too smart to ever get impaled, and so pain and mutilation becomes hilarious. 1000 Ways to Die, which Wheeler Winston Dixon dubbed “docu-fiction,” is so loosely based on true events that it stretches credulity well beyond the breaking point, becoming nothing more than a porn loop snuff film. The funny thing about 1000 Ways to Die is that at face value it may seem even less moral and less influenced by the tropes of horror film, but at closer inspection it is actually far more dependent on specific horror tropes, traditional narrative storytelling techniques, and, most importantly, the inclusion of the good-evil rubric: these people all deserve to die.

1000 Ways to Die

Despite the level of blood, gore, sex, frequently outrageous reenactments and the liberal use of CSI style graphics, the show is always careful to sprinkle the black humor with the distinct message that people deserve to die. 1000 Ways to Die is both jaw dropping and disgusting, but it is so aware of itself that it appears to be a self-reflexive parody. The deaths depicted in the program are so patently absurd that the show quickly becomes addictive, but at the same time you find yourself rapidly moving from an attitude of superiority (in which it all seems hilarious and fun), to increasingly disgusted with yourself and finally you end up turning the show off – not sure if you are more disgusted with yourself or with the producers of the show. Enormously popular, the show provides, just like I Was Impaled, a sort of family-friendly version of torture porn, though it does have a TV rating of TV-14 for graphic bloody violence and moderate sexual content, including women in skimpy clothing and depictions of sexual intercourse, coupled with “language.”

Again, those marked for death in 1000 Ways to Die remind me of teens chosen to die in older horror films for simply being stupid, and more likely, they “deserve” to die for being actively sexual. A few narrative summaries from the series aptly demonstrate this. In “Death Over Easy,” a mushroom-infused trip leads a guy into a fetish orgy and some grisly realizations.” In “Dead and Deader,” “a 30 year old virgin has a deadly reaction to being stuffed into a rubber suit by a bewitching dominatrix.” In “Death Gets Busy,” “a super model eats herself to death,” and “a porn addict gets ‘blown’ away by an exploding tire.”

1000 Ways to Die

I am not the first to note that it seems like lesbians and those deemed “stupid” enough to become involved in sexual threesomes seem to die pretty frequently in 1000 Ways to Die. For a show that prides itself on its “cool” outsider status, 1000 Ways to Die proves to be rather conservative and based on right-wing “family values” when choosing the type of people who most “deserve” to die. Family friendly torture porn such as 1000 Ways to Die and I Was Impaled belie the neoconservativism and repression found in torture porn by Christopher Sharrett in his essay “The Problem with Saw: Torture Porn and the Conservatism of Contemporary Horror Films,” as symptomatic of a right-wing culture that glorifies torture, and which threatens to defeat historically progressive aspects of contemporary society.

While traditional older horror films often challenge mainstream societal values, question patriarchy, and disrupt the ideologies of capitalism and the traditional nuclear family, television schlock such as I Was Impaled and 1000 Ways to Die afford a safe voyeuristic thrill-ride through torture, death, capital, and sexism, and promote an empty nihilism and conformism that is closely associated to fascist ideology. This isn’t to negate the possibility of some audience members’ ability to “read against the grain” and see through these shows for what they are, but merely to point out their coldhearted and ideologically brutal fascistic pleasure and how they avoid, perhaps, what is most relevant in horror films, any challenge to the status quo.

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2013 Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference in Washington, DC; my thanks to the audience members and other participants for their insightful comments.

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is Professor of Film Studies in the Department of English, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and an Editor of the journal Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Her many books include 21^st Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era of Transformation (2011) and the second, revised edition of A Short History of Film (2013), both co-authored with Wheeler Winston Dixon; as well as Class-Passing: Social Mobility in Film and Popular Culture (2005), Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman (2003), and Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian Diaspora: Decolonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity (1997).

References

1000 Ways to Die Blog, Spike.com. Accessed 24 March 2013.

ABCs of Death, Official Website. Accessed 13 April 2013.

Ahmadi, Aaron (2012), “The Most-Deserved Deaths on 1,000 Ways to Die”, Spike.com, 26 Sept. Accessed 13 April 2013.

Freeland, Cynthia (2004), “Ordinary Horror on Reality TV,” in Narrative Across Media: The Languages Storytelling, Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.), Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 244-266.

Sharrett, Christopher (2009), “The Problem of Saw: ‘Torture Porn’ and the Conservatism of Contemporary Horror Films,” Cineaste 35:1, Winter, pp. 32-38.

Turnquist, Kristi (2012), “Who’d Watch a Show Called I Was Impaled?”, The Oregonian, 23 August. Accessed 24 Mar. 2013.

TV Tango, I Was Impaled, Official Website. Accessed 24 March 2013.

Wolfe, Jen (2012), “Strange and Weird Things: 5 Freak Accidents and Bizarre Injuries”, Discovery Fit and Health Insider, 24 August. Accessed 24 March 2013.

 “The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defence of their Aryan birthright.”

(D.W. Griffith in The Birth of a Nation)

“A single Negro regiment would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves… A war of this kind must be conducted on revolutionary lines while the Yankees have thus far been trying to conduct it constitutionally.”

(Karl Marx in Writings on the American Civil War)

Broomhilda & Django and Michelle & Barack. The ugly fictional truth on one side and the reassuring liberal embroidery on the other. This year’s White House-sanctioned and delivered Oscar to Argo celebrated fiction as the ultimate redeeming force in (the re-writing of) history. But then again the Californian suburb has always had a soft spot for fictional rather than factual (hi)stories.

Paradoxically so, one of the few 2012 nominated films that avoided all together any pretension of historical re-enactment, Tarantino’s Django, is, to our mind, the most cogent and germane commentary on contemporary America. Race and above all racism, Hollywood and the Obama administration would have us thinking, are part of the American past, sanitised issues that are scarcely relevant today. Lincoln abolished slavery; the current US president is the living proof of the benefits that his individualist bureaucratic battle brought about. What more do you want than a black president? Revenge, would be Django’s answer. Revenge in Django nonetheless is not a (merely) rancorous, destructive feeling but more the realization that certain crimes allow for neither forgiveness nor forgetting. Django’s vengeful impetus is the cry of the voiceless: American history is indefensible the film insinuates as well as founded on genocide. To the philanthropic concessions of Lincoln, Django prefers a rather undiplomatic form of justice. Against the grotesque white mask that Samuel L. Jackson wears in his immaculate performance, Jamie Foxx reclaims his dangerous black skin. Exploitation in Django cannot be reformed, only demolished.

Furthermore, Django’s final resolution is not (only) aimed to the evil white man; his rage obliterates the plantation as a structural whole. Candyland is in the film an economic reality as well as the putrescent mansion of the refined, Francophile “villain”. While abolition in Lincoln is a charitable and idealist act that has to go through the legislative intricacies of an improvable system, slavery is in Django a marketplace of injustice. “It’s a flesh for cash business – just like slavery,” Dr Schultz says of his profession. As well as a crime against humanity, slavery was also the profitable engine of colonialism. The American Civil War, amongst other things, marked the passage from a settler/agrarian economy to an industrial one whose main urban poles were in fact in the north. The transition from slaves in the southern plantations to “free” men in the northern factories was part of the Negroes’ “emancipation.” Like Zero Dark Thirty, Lincoln reduces politics to their procedural dimension, carefully avoiding any socio-economic contextualization. Django does the exact opposite.

It is worth noting that the dramatic peak of Tarantino’s film is in fact a purchase, an economic transaction. Freedom needs to be bought. Throughout the film slavery never transcends its commercial dimension until the very end, when it is rejected all together, delegitimized through destruction. Dr. Schultz and Django navigates the legal caveats of the slave economy to their own benefits while human beings are sold and bought around them to the benefit of the cotton industry. Marx conceived of slavery as a global mercantile machine, rather than a “merely” ethical issue. “Direct slavery is the pivot of our industrialism today as much as machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton, without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given value to the colonies; it is the colonies that created world trade; it is world trade that is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry” he noted in his analysis on the American Civil War. If for Lincoln slavery is an ethical battle to be fought in the house of law, for Django it is an unlawful aberration to be violently obliterated. The constitutional “debate” around slavery in Lincoln implicitly legitimizes the anti-abolitionist stance; Django on the contrary deems it too immoral and inhuman to be dealt with “democratically.”

It is precisely this focus on the material and monetary side of slavery, at the expenses of “historical accuracy,” which posits Django at the very heart of contemporary racial issues. As Michelle Alexander substantiates in her book The New Jim Crow, the institutional racism that Obama would have archived for good, is alive and bad. Almost as bad as it ever was for, as Alexander’s volume chillingly proves, “an extraordinary percentage of black men in the United States are legally barred from voting today, just as they have been throughout most of American history.” Mass incarceration, as it happens, responds in fact to a very practical financial necessity, that of domestic cheap labour. With the war on drugs providing a moralistically convenient recruiting tool.

Discrimination has just undergone a rebranding; a new post-racial design projects a pacified vision of a just America, open to anyone, even to a Black president. Through linguistic racial cleansing the discourse around racism has reached a sort of happy ending that Django vehemently refuses by gushing out the repressed horrors. Tarantino violently restates the centrality of race – may Spike Lee forgive us, also for the use of the controversial signifier nigger – while abolishing current liberal notions that see race as merely residual, a thing of the past. While “serious” cinema, from Birth of a Nation to ZDT, has inscribed a cleansed version of history in the American consciousness, Tarantino uses “sleazy” entertainment to delegitimize it.

By drawing from – and paying homage to – the b-movies’ aesthetic and poetically visceral repertory, Tarantino sides with the wretched of the 7^th Art. In Lincoln instead the stylistic frame of reference is represented by the fulsome pomposity of 19^th century painting, self-commissioned art that relegates history to the museum of the righteous. Coincidentally enough Spielberg has in his (early) career passively benefitted from the formal innovations of exploitation filmmaking (films like Jaws and Close Encounters would have been unthinkable as blockbusters without the preliminary innovations of the Cormanian factory). Tarantino’s re-imagination of exploitation cinema counters the polished and family-centric vision of Spielbergian cinema. Through political incorrectness, Django addresses the patronising benevolence of the founding fathers of modern Hollywood. By letting in to the diegetic realm of the film the immoral blues of 21^st century (gangsta rap), Tarantino flippantly opens a crack in the post-racial farce of Obama America. It is an insolent move, as insolent as Django’s mocking parade as he leaves the ruins of an immoral white house behind him, riding into an alternative future with his beloved Broomhilda.

Celluloid Liberation Front is a multi-use(r) name, an “open reputation” informally adopted and shared by a desiring multitude of insurgent cinephiles, transmedial terrorists, aesthetic dynamyters and random deviants. For reasons that remain unknown, the name was borrowed from a collective of anti-imperialist blind filmmakers from the Cayman Islands. Twitter feed here.

Read also: Jacob Mertens, ‘“It was Dr. Schultz, in the library, with a hidden pistol up his sleeve”: Django Unchained (2012)’.

In Iron Man 2 (2010), Tony Stark discovers that his deceased father has left behind coded sketches for a revolutionary new element that could not be realized during his lifetime due to technological limitations. It is up to the son to decode these and use the means at his time’s disposal to device into existence something that has previously only existed in the mind of one individual.

This course of events will serve to illustrate the hopes put upon new technologies by a new generation of film analysts. In our scenario, Stanley Kubrick will play the part of the superior genius far ahead of his time and the generation around Web 2.0 the tech-savvy decoders who are only now beginning to get privy to the masters message.

Recent years have seen an avalanche of interest in the films of Stanley Kubrick, and in particular for his mysterious 1980 horror outing, arguably mostly famed for a writers block-suffering, axe-swinging and Johnny Carson-quoting Jack Nicholson. The documentary Room 237 (2012) presents a collage of theories devoted to The Shining, which range from the insightful to the astonishingly absurd.

The question to be asked is why The Shining? Why now? One answer is given by the film’s John Fell Ryan (2012), who on the blog adhoc.fm stipulates that it is not until now that the technology is on offer to catch up with the remarkable genius of Kubrick. New media is not decisive for all the theorists in Room 237, but a majority of them rely on it in one way or another. And there is more, lots more, to be found on the Internet. Ryan’s point about new technologies’ facilitating new approaches to film is therefore worth exploring, not only in regards to Kubrick but to film analysis in general. One of the most obvious effects of new media is of course that through the Internet, works can be published on authors’ own volition, thereby bypassing the often rigorous demands of academic editors. To be cynical, it is doubtful whether, without the self-publication enabled by the Internet, some of the more outlandish contributions to Kubrick-studies would ever have seen the light of day. However, the impact of new media can also be noted in the ways film analysis is practiced and presented. With the aid of HDTVs, search engines, zoom-enabled BluRay’s and desktop editing it is possible to get closer to the object of analysis than ever before. By dissecting and mapping film to degrees previously impossible, details can be unearthed that have before now existed outside the radar of film analysis. Furthermore, the accessibility of digital video and tools for editing entails that arguments can be presented and quotations be made in the same medium as the object of study, which is something that has previously impeded – in comparison to the study of a static art such as painting or a language-based art such as literature – film scholars’ pursuit of their time-dependent object. As Raymond Bellour (2001) had it, the fleeting and flickering signifiers of film are for the writer always to some degree “unattainable.” Not as much for the digital videographer.

There is, however, a flipside. When the object of analysis and the means for conducting it medially overlap, it becomes easier for the analyst to misidentify herself with the truth. The margin of error posed by limitations in the human perceptual apparatus is eliminated and consequently new discoveries are presented as irrefutable “proof” of the theory. “It’s actually there, look for yourself!” seems to be the contention when yet another video is posted on YouTube of a hi-res zoom-in of a supposedly meaningful detail that has previously gone unnoticed. Analysis before new media proceeded from the tacit understanding that they skirted the edges of fiction. The consequence of one medium being translated into another – moving images and sounds into words on paper – is that the object of study emerges as elusive and that its essence can only be pursued through an act that risks distortion. What’s lost by digital precision is the ever so human quality of fallibility – and with it the prospects for dialogue.

There is not much dialogue to speak of between the theorists presented in Room 237. All are equally convinced that they hold the truth to the secrets of The Shining. And in this context the value of truth increases relative to the level of sensationalism. One mustn’t forget that the results of some of these Kubrick-fanatics are published in the vast ocean of opinions and self-promotions that is the Internet, where whoever shouts the loudest takes the prize. Accordingly, it is a veritable yelling match as to who can come up with the most spectacular findings and push their theories the furthest. Call it “scoop-research.” Because like the modus operandi of tabloids, the hope is that the thrill of astonishment will put to halt closer scrutiny.

On YouTube, one can partake of videos that seemingly take inspiration for their titles from Dan Brown novels. And not unlike the author’s famous cryptologist hero, the creators of videos such as “The Shone Report” and the “The Shining Code” do their best to pimp something as unglamorous as academic semiotics off to the public with the promise of The Great Discovery. One of the masters of fleshing out grand revelations of Kubrick’s work is Jay Weidner. A toiler in alchemism and new age mysticism on the side, he dedicates a lot of his time to putting together videos that aim to blow the whistle on governmental conspiracies through the films of Kubrick. In his essay film Kubrick’s Odyssey (2011) he assumes the role of Morpheus to us the Neos who have inhabited a Matrix-like world of illusions. “It may be uncomfortable, but it is the truth,” announces Weidner before revealing the secrets of how Kubrick helped fake the first moon landing and later exposed it by encoding clues into The Shining. Ideas about Kubrick’s involvement in the Apollo 11 mission have been in pop-cultural orbit for some time, and the mockumentary Dark Side of the Moon (2002) bluffed its way through them with convincing poker-face. With such success, apparently, that Weidner swallowed it wholesale, because by him the same ideas are presented without a hint of irony.

Weidner draws all the benefits of having film for medium of his analysis. Slow motion extends scenes for emphatic clarification and swelling strings underpin just the right parts in order to shortcut conviction through the route of emotions. Like good propaganda, it makes you want to believe, in spite of better judgment. In the context of the other clues highlighted by Weidner, it is for instance tempting to accept that the famous hexagon patterns on the carpet in the Overlook Hotel bears a striking resemblance to NASA’s launching ramps. And when the playing Danny, dressed in a jumper decorated with Apollo 11, rises from the center of one of these hexagons – like a rocket about to take off – it is at once clear what Kubrick is trying to get across: that the Apollo-mission was make-believe – a simulation – and that he was the one behind it all. By running the concerned clip in tandem with Weidner’s revising take on what we have before us, we get all the emotional potency of the original imagery but overlaid with an entirely new meaning. This is film analysis as drama, and it is not without embarrassment over one’s willingness to be duped that one recognizes a shiver running down the spine.

The theories in Room 237 are but the tip of an iceberg. Sensation-prone “revelation-pieces” in the vein of Weidner flourish on the Internet. Among the more extreme, blogger Wrong Way Wizard imparts the harrowing insight that The Shining encrypts information about 9/11. The sceptic here objects that the film was actually made twenty years prior to the planes went crashing into the Twin Towers. What such naïveté has failed to realize is that Kubrick was, if not the one who staged the whole thing, at least clued in to the plans around it. In poor taste? Quite. Thrilling? Without a doubt. And this is not even to get into the link between Kubrick and the movie-theatre killings in Aurora last year.

How are academic educations to relate to this genre of new media-facilitated scoop analysis? They are often startlingly ambitious, being the results of years of research; they often fulfill academic criteria of argumentative stringency and coherence. Add to this opportune placement. A great many students today regard the Internet as their primary tool of research. In a class assignment on The Shining, therefore, pieces such as Weidner’s are closest at hand. Universities are not exempt to the influence of technological change. As they shouldn’t be. Yet places of education cannot make concessions to research that thrives more on chock-value and emotional seduction than on historical accuracy and respect for textual integrity. New means for presenting analysis must be accompanied by renewed attention to source evaluation. When film analysis begin to exploit the emotional force structures of the objects they’re studying for purposes of seducing addressees into conviction, they only displace the purpose of analysis. Meta-levels keep propagating and piling up. What is needed now is analysis of analysis in order to penetrate the thrill of sensationalism and emotional response to videos such as Weidner’s. Maybe Room 237 can lead the way.

By passing off source material from different movies as coherent, as well as letting different clips resonate off each other, Room 237 underscores the manufactured nature of cinema and demonstrates that its means of conviction is not based on rational logic but of loose, associative links. Yes, Jack tumbling down the stairs after being struck by Wendy’s baseball bat does resemble the Mayan human sacrifice from another movie (Apocalypto [2006]), but so what? Does this make The Shining a movie about Mayans now? Even if this is so, as another blogger has attempted to prove, how does this enrich our enjoyment and/or understanding of the medium of film? These self-styled code-breakers of Kubrick’s films would do well to heed the warning of Michel Chion (2002), who, in a thoughtful and restrained analysis of Eyes Wide Shut, notes that there is a temptation, spurred by Kubrick’s stated desire to leave his films open and unexplained, to construct the “perfect interpretation.” However, when film is explained according to an underlying code, it is reduced to a lifeless cipher that does not account for the fascination that surely attracted interpreters to The Shining in the first place. Moreover, by proposing the ultimate explanation for The Shining, an exit is offered where there might not be one. As other exponents have shown, the film itself is constructed like a labyrinth similar to the one in which Jack Torrance gets lost – full of red herrings and dead ends.

Of the theorists interviewed in Room 237, only one takes recourse to postmodern authorless justification for his interpretation. For some of the others, it seems important that Kubrick actually intended the film to mean what they argue. When commentators style themselves as spokespersons for directors’ intentions and the truth, Room 237 can, again, offer means of source evaluation. By compiling and juxtaposing wildly different theories on The Shining it, like a film-discursive Rashomon (1950), at the very least demonstrates that truth is relative. For The Shining couldn’t very well be about the Holocaust, the genocide of Native Americans, and faked moon landings all at the same time? Or would assuming that it could not be to underestimate the genius of Stanley Kubrick?

Hampus Hagman is awaiting evaluation of his dissertation, which concerns split screens in film. In the meanwhile he writes articles on film, music and art.

References

Bellour, Raymond (2001), The Analysis of Film, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Chion, Michel (2002), Eyes Wide Shut, London: British Film Institute.

Ryan, John Fell (2012), “I Look At The Shining And It Shows Me Things: John Fell Ryan Gets Lost Inside The Overlook Hotel”, May 22. Accessed February 25, 2013.

I write this comment on Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty more out of a sense of moral obligation and outrage rather than as an evaluation of a serious work. I find nothing at all to recommend this film, so impoverished is it at every political, moral, aesthetic, and philosophical level. I should say at the outset that I dislike Bigelow immensely, and have been at odds with friends over her work. Bigelow has been applauded by many cinephiles; there is reason for so doing, since she is a woman filmmaker, and we are most obviously in need of women in an art form still dominated by men. But her celebration may take attention away from important women we do have in cinema (Claire Denis, Catherine Breillat, Catherine Corsini are only a few examples). More important, we note Bigelow as a phallic woman serving the interests of the commercial industry and the ideology supporting it.

By this I do not mean that she wishes to have a penis. Rather, she imbibes and projects the ideology of patriarchal capitalism, and the imperialism that is the central topic of her two recent films, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. Or perhaps I should say that she masks this imperialism, since the policy underneath the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan is nowhere in evidence in her film, amazing since there could hardly be risk in exploring imperialist ambition at this stage, given how much the trail has been blazed by a variety of artists, from documentarians like Robert Greenwald to narrative filmmakers like Brian De Palma. Even the liberal MSNBC television channel offers a very derivative expose on the Iraq monstrousness entitled Hubris.

Bigelow’s response has essentially been that she is offering action fare, or a collage of material from which the viewer can draw her/his own conclusion. Of course viewers always interpret, but the failure of the artist not to confront explicitly political material is a principal index of Bigelow’s moral bankruptcy.

Bigelow’s films have always contained enough frisson, enough of a patina of film school sophistication that her overall enterprise has gone unquestioned, to a point that some reviewers of an ostensibly progressive bent seem absolutely blind to what is on the screen. Her first film, The Loveless (1982), about a listless group of outlaw bikers, is clearly the kind of exercise that flows from film education. It is the work of an impoverished sensibility, one grounded in film alone, with the rest of the humanities left on the shelf. We hardly need Bigelow’s DVD commentary track to know that the film adds nothing to the sources to which she must pay homage, such as The Wild One and Scorpio Rising. Her’s seems to be a temperament born of the video age, yet another movie brat, unable to discriminate, to figure the significance of her own enterprise, in order to give a piece of art a sense of value; indeed, one wonders if she has any real criteria for establishing value. She is a temperament of Tarantino’s ilk, but without his false humor, crudity, and nihilism.

I don’t want to go through each and every film made by Bigelow, simply because so few have interested me. Her horror film Near Dark (1987) caught my attention many years ago. It seemed to be her response to the horror renaissance of the 1960s and 70s, when the key works of Romero, Larry Cohen, Tobe Hooper, and others were released. If this is the case, Near Dark may be a template for understanding Bigelow. The key concern of the progressive wing of the horror cinema (meaning all the very best, from the Weimar cinema to the present) is to question the demarcation of self and other, the normal and the abnormal. Bigelow’s film does quite the opposite, with its horrific vampire clan (coded as “poor white trash”) sadistically murdering, while taking over the life of a Midwestern farm boy until they are brought low in the film’s operatic finale (totally unwarranted, since opera with such final tropes works within the realm of tragedy, and there is little tragic about the vampire family). Some scenes contain typical Bigelow misjudgments that seem her way of displaying erudite hipness and sophistication, such as dressing the repulsive vampire child-bully in a William Burroughs T-shirt. Where is Burroughs’s left anarchism, his hatred of power in all forms, on display in this film? Far worse, the clan leader, Jesse, is said to be so old that he “fought for the South,” that is, for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Admittedly, the Confederate States of America has always been honored in the American cinema (Gone with the Wind being the most egregious example) and throughout American culture, certainly with the right, as the North embraced fully (it wasn’t hard to) the racist ideology of the South. But is it not reasonable at this date (or in 1987) for a person with benefit of a middle-class education to know that saying “fought for the South” is tantamount to saying “fought with the SS” or “fought for the Third Reich,” since the slavocracy of the Confederacy represented the modern era’s most regressive, totalitarian political movement in the western world before European fascism, one recognized as such by historians, and certainly civil rights organizations, since Reconstruction? Near Dark is fascinating for its hyperbole (the performance by Bill Paxton, which resembles Max Baer, Jr. as Jethro Bodine in the 60s TV show The Beverly Hillbillies), so much so that it continues to be subject of special pleading.

My dear friend Barry Grant makes an interesting plea by citing Allen Ginsberg’s comment about Middle America being the “heart of the vortex.” Grant amplifies Ginsberg by stating “out of which [the vortex] American violence emanates.” What can one make of this? It is as strong a defense of Near Dark as I have seen, but Grant simply observes, after Ginsberg, that America is a violent place (news?) and that somehow Bigelow immerses us in it in Near Dark, but such a case could be made for any film about American violence, and Bigelow’s ambitions are so obscure – yet so palpably vicious – one can hardly say that she takes us beyond the insights (not to mention morality) of Peckinpah, Romero, and countless others.

One can simply forget about Bigelow, but her war films concerned with recent adventures of state power are so repugnant that the common view of her reputation, such as it is, needs to be stripped away, along with whatever loyalty is seen as owed to her for being – what? – an unusual player in the game?

In her introduction to a Bigelow interview in Artforum, Amy Taubin says that “Bigelow and Boal’s most brilliant choice was to end the movie [Zero Dark Thirty] with despair rather than triumph.” Exactly where is the “despair” (suggesting total anguish in the face of alienation and moral defeat) in the final scenes of this film? We see the woefully drab actor Jessica Chastain, as CIA planner Maya, aboard a military transport plane on her way home. Her face is shown in prolonged close-up, during which she sheds tears. Is she crying out of exhaustion? Out of the prolonged ordeal to kill bin Laden? Out of the burden of her office? Is there enough in this scene to allow us to extrapolate her utter “despair” over the murder – and the attendant bankruptcy of state policy? Maya’s characterization is so bewildering, that it causes one to question if she is capable of feeling or thinking anything at all. She is a technocrat, albeit one very often at the margins of the film (is she the central figure, as she is supposed to be?), although she is occasionally pushed forward, as in a particularly awkward scene where she announces to a group of CIA male hotshots that she is a “motherfucker.” Is this a way of impressing people? Whatever the purpose, the moment is one of the film’s many misconceived embarrassments.

Zero Dark Thirty is at this writing an Oscar contender – it seems unlikely (I could care less) that it will win the awards of her previous war film The Hurt Locker, whose central proposition is “will the bomb go off or won’t it?”, the politics of the morally bankrupt invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan nowhere to be seen, along with the people of these benighted nations except as they serve as threatening exotics opposing “our boys.”

There are at least two moral, legal, and political issues in Zero Dark Thirty: the use of torture by the US government against people seen as likely “terrorists,” and the assassination by US state power of Osama bin Laden. Of the first issue, interested people by now have been well-informed on official terror. Activists have appeared at some theaters showing Zero Dark Thirty, handing out pamphlets adumbrating the uses of torture by the CIA during both occupations. I’ll take for granted that all reading this essay see torture by anyone against anyone as savage activity, indicative of a civilization in decline; we’ll set aside whether or not this activity is “productive.” The film shows US thugs “waterboarding” a terror suspect (perhaps this form of torture has received disproportionate publicity, making people think that all the other methods in the CIA repertoire were not used – such as genital torture and sexual humiliation, explicitly in use in the Abu Ghraib photos). We should note that torture has been part of all the US postwar incursions, especially Vietnam. What differentiates the horrors of the Middle East invasions from those of the past is the state’s bold-faced legitimizing of torture, and its encouraging of the US population to do same.

Francisco Goya, The Third of May 1808 (1814).

The torture in Zero Dark Thirty is conducted by a sweaty American tough guy who transforms into a coat-and-tie CIA analyst. Bigelow clearly presents the torture as one step among many leading the US to bin Laden’s hideout. When confronted with the issue, she says she offers the scene as an image about which the public needs to make its own interpretation, as if her film is something like a Robert Rauschenberg painting. Perhaps we should see the film this way, but this would represent a turning point in American film history: state-sponsored torture and murder presented by an artist as an abstraction. Could one imagine Goya’s The Third of May 1808, Picasso’s Guernica, Guzman’s The Battle of Chile, or even Dali’s Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War offered as abstractions, devoid of any moral premise?

The other, more central issue in this film is, of course, the assassination of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALs, an action fully sanctioned by the US power structure, including President Barack Obama, celebrated by many as a liberal. I want to say straight off that this is not a brief for bin Laden. I find his type of reactionary, oppressive religious ideology repugnant, as I do all doctrinaire religious systems. Bin Laden is no doubt guilty of many crimes. But the central crime for which he was pursued by the US government were the attacks on the US of September 11, 2001, known popularly by the apocalyptic numerals “9/11” (most haven’t noticed that this date has been appropriated; the “original” 9/11, a far more hellish one than the crimes of 2001 [not to underrate the suffering of that day] was the overthrow of the democratically-elected socialist government of Chile on September 11, 1973, in a US-backed coup that included the bombing of the presidential palace, the death of President Salvador Allende, and the torture and murder of many thousands in the decades of rule by fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet). But was bin Laden guilty? In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the Taliban government offered to turn bin Laden over to a third country if the US could produce evidence of his involvement in the crimes, a not unreasonable offer. Much blood and treasure could have been saved, perhaps, if the offer was pursued. It wasn’t, as the Bush crowd decided to see the matter as reason for war rather than an international criminal investigation, at a time when the US enjoyed enormous international good will – which would soon dissolve.

Noam Chomsky remarks that eight months after 9/11, FBI Director Robert Mueller said he “believed” the attacks were planned in Afghanistan, the planners then perhaps moving to Germany. In a famous letter, FBI lawyer Coleen Rowley expressed her frustration about not being able to investigate possible terrorists before the fact of 9/11, sardonically saying “I know I shouldn’t be flippant about this, but jokes were actually made that the key FBI HQ personnel had to be spies or moles […] who were actually working for Osama bin Laden to have so undercut Minneapolis’s efforts [to investigate possible hijackers].” George W. Bush tried to obstruct all efforts to investigate 9/11, but political pressure resulted in the lackluster, compromised 9/11 Commission. The whys and wherefores of the 9/11 attacks are still a topic of public discourse. I have yet to read a magazine article or book that details the particulars of the attacks in a clear, detailed, well-argued, logical narrative. Many people, especially liberals it seems, debunk “conspiracy theories” and those who participate in the 9/11 Truth Movement (was Watergate not a conspiracy, not to mention a good deal of US “covert” foreign policy?), conflating “truthers” with “birthers,” the sectors of the racist right who do not believe that President Obama is a citizen of the United States. There is much nonsense that circulates within this Movement, but also authentic democratic impulses to be informed.

It may be decades, if ever, before we know the facts about the 9/11 attacks. It is a commonplace, however, that the attacks were used as a pretext for war in the Middle East and Central Asia. It is well known to those who have followed recent history that Osama bin Laden played a key role in leading the reactionary, US-backed Mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s. For all practical purposes, bin Laden was a CIA contract agent, a fact that may have embarrassed US authority had bin Laden gone to trial and said his piece (the same might be said of Saddam Hussein, neatly disposed of without mention of his years as a US client). And here we have a crucial issue. There was never an attempt to bring bin Laden before the bar of justice. When he was shot and his body quickly disposed of, media accounts said he was “reaching for a weapon” when he was shot by SEALs. Questions immediately presented themselves. What kind of a “weapon”? A sword? A pistol? He reached for a weapon when the SEALs “had the drop” on him? Zero Dark Thirty shows a rifle on a wall. It became clear that bin Laden was simply assassinated. Very soon, all pretense of the SEALs acting in self-defense was dropped, as liberal comedians and commentators made light of the affair, enjoying President Obama’s boost in the polls, his moment in the sun for “taking down” this international criminal (which he no doubt was). In the 1970s the mood might have been a trifle different.

In the wake of the Vietnam horrors, seen as a huge defeat for US policy assumptions, along with the Watergate affair, which amounted to the Nixon government waging war on the Constitution and the political process, the Congress began a series of investigations. Indeed, the 70s were known to many as the Age of Investigation, with many activists thinking they could transform their political radicalism into collaboration with the state in the “open the files” activity of the decade, not realizing that what took place was a way for the state to save face amid a profound legitimation crisis.

Senators Frank Church (D-Idaho) and John Tower (D-Texas) examine a weapon developed for a CIA assassination program.

The most significant investigation of the era – after the Watergate probes – was that of the first Senate Intelligence Committee, headed by Senator Frank Church, a cold warrior-turned-liberal. The Church Committee took on the CIA, FBI, and military intelligence, uncovering wiretapping plots, testing of LSD and biological weapons on civilians and military, and the assassinations of Patrice Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo, Che Guevara, and Salvador Allende, in which the CIA was “perhaps” involved, along with numerous assassination plots against Fidel Castro. The committee’s activities were the subject of headlines, with tongue-clucking on the part of the public, and accusations of treason from conservatives. The committee created a sub-committee, led by Senators Richard Schweiker and Gary Hart, to reopen the investigation of the John F. Kennedy assassination; this probe evolved into the compromised House Select Committee on Assassinations of 1976-79, which concluded that Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King were victims of “probable” conspiracies, although no conspirator was named.

The information produced by the investigations of the 70s caused anger, embarrassment, and distrust within the general public. Although the American public was taught to hate the figures that bit the dust in the 1950s and 60s (especially Commies like Che), many could not stomach – at least for the moment – the notion of official murder. State power was flustered, and began much finger-pointing that came to an end with the Reagan era’s “morning in America” patriotism, the rise of Rambo and his ilk in pop culture, and the gradual acclimation of the public to state-sponsored murder as Reagan began a new terror campaign in Central America – a major ambition of the Reagan period was not merely to erase the activism of the “turbulent” (the word still most used as descriptive adjective) 1960s, but to make the public applaud state violence. The movie Rambo: First Blood II (1986), which took our hero back to Vietnam, used the tagline “this time we win,” indicating both the amorality and fantasyland that was the 1980s.

The sentiments of Rambo have been in place ever since, never more so than in Zero Dark Thirty. State violence might be grim, but nothing to fret about – at least nothing beyond a few tears of exhausted pride. Who cares if the US has rolled back international agreements dating to the Magna Carta and the Habeas Corpus Act, guaranteeing that the accused person be brought before accusers and representatives of law? We now live in an age so morally bankrupt that violence is the currency of our moment, so we should take in stride all that flows from it, including the massacre of children. What better way of conditioning their peers for the future? Zero Dark Thirty fits within a film culture wherein every other movie poster features a man proudly brandishing a gun. The celebration of 007’s fiftieth year is very telling: why not offer laurels to the men with licenses to kill on behalf of our way of life?

Christopher Sharrett is Professor of Communication and Film Studies at Seton Hall University. He writes frequently for Film International. He recommends to the reader, with a few reservations (Solti’s usual bombast), choral excerpts from St. Matthew Passion conducted by Georg Solti, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Decca CD. He also recommends the Rolling Stones’ retrospective on an era long in the past, the compilation Grrrr, as well as the release of their 1965 tour film Charley is My Darling, that reminds him of his youth, his hope for the future, his hunger for fun at every turn. They represent the defiance of all that he has written about above, and the affirmation of the libido and life over the depravity of the present. When they appeared in the early 60s, the nuns who were his high school teachers (the word is used for convenience) termed them “insolent.” At least they had a little perception.

References

Noam Chomsky (2011), 9/II: Was There an Alternative? New York: Seven Stories Press.

Barry Keith Grant (2011), Shadows of Doubt: Negotiations of Masculinity in American Genre Films, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, p. 182.

Hearing before the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate Ninety-Fourth Congress, First Session, Vols. 1-VI, Washington, DC. Government Printing Office, 1975.

Michael Parenti (2002), The Terrorism Trap: September 11 and Beyond, San Francisco: City Lights Books.

Amy Taubin (2013), “1000 Words: Kathryn Bigelow,” Artforum, January, p. 166.

“Targets are people…and you could be one of them!”

(Tagline for Targets)

Peter Bogdanovich got his start as a critic and historian, conducting interviews with some of cinema’s most illustrious directors in their twilight years, which were published first in a variety of books and magazines, and finally collected in his volume Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors in 1998. But Bogdanovich wanted to do more. He moved to Los Angeles and fell in with the Roger Corman circle at the height of its creative brilliance, and soon found himself working on such landmark exploitation vehicles as The Wild Angels (1966), in which he did double duty as an Assistant Director and an extra.

The next logical step was directing a movie himself, and Corman, then able to green light films with modest budgets that would actually wind up in a theater, as opposed to going straight to tape, VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray or VOD, famously offered Bogdanovich a deal. Boris Karloff owed Corman two days work on a multipicture deal, and he offered the fledgling director two days of Karloff, twenty minutes of footage from the recently completed film The Terror (1963, ostensibly a Corman film, but one which nearly everyone in Corman’s circle had a hand in directing, including Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill and Jack Nicholson), with a minimal budget and shooting schedule. Corman told Bogdanovich that if the finished film was any good, he’d distribute it through Paramount; if not, he’d dump it in drive ins through American International Pictures.

Absorbing this, Bogdanovich went home, and working with his then-wife, Polly Platt, and an uncredited Samuel Fuller, who contributed considerably to the final script, drafted a screenplay about the last days of a aging horror star, Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff), who wants to quit the business because he’s sick of starring in one rotten horror film after another; in addition, he feels that his brand of Gothicism is out of date, and that he should quit the business gracefully while he’s still in demand. At the same time, in a parallel story, young All-American Vietnam veteran Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly, in a terrifyingly realistic performance) is having trouble readjusting to society after his hitch in the service, and goes on a murderous rampage as a sniper, picking off unsuspecting people from the top of a huge oil refinery tank, and later, from behind the screen of a drive in theater. He does all of this quite casually, as if the entire rampage was simply a sporting event, which, of course, it is for him. He has no empathy for his victims; he has no feeling for anyone. All of his victims are simply targets, as the title states with succinct finality.

It is at this point that the two stories converge; Orlok has been persuaded to make one final public appearance at the drive in to plug his final film, and during the screening, Bobby starts killing people in their cars with a high-powered rifle. Taking command of the situation, Orlok summons all his strength and confronts Bobby, knocking him down in front of the screen; he’s aided in this effort by the fact that Bobby can’t distinguish between Orlok on the screen, striding through the opening of The Terror, and Orlok in real life, walking towards him in a similar outfit – Samuel Fuller suggested this touch, and it’s a brilliant one. With Bobby subdued, Orlok looks down at the pathetic figure before him, and murmurs, “is this what I was afraid of?” And thus the film ends. When Corman saw the finished product, made for less than $100,000, and on which Karloff wound up working five days instead of two – the three extra days were a gift to Bogdanovich from Karloff, who correctly sensed that the project would be a significant and important film – he immediately realized that he’d gotten a much better film than he bargained for. Corman sold it to Paramount, where it received a desultory release – see below – before vanishing into oblivion, only to resurface on DVD and VHS years later.

But Targets (1968) was and remains a brilliant, stunningly prescient film, and perhaps Bogdanovich’s finest work, precisely because he had nothing to work with. When you have nothing, you have to give everything to a project to make it work, unless you don’t care, and Bogdanovich certainly cared – intensely. Bogdanovich cast himself in the film as director Sammy Michaels, who desperately wants Orlok to make another film – which would be Sammy’s big break as a director – simply because he had no money for anyone else. Despite the fact that the film got only a limited release, the critics quickly recognized it as the masterpiece it was and is, and thus it fulfilled its primary function, in getting Bogdanovich on the map as a director. Shortly after that, Bogdanovich directed The Last Picture Show (1971), and his career was assured.

The topicality of Targets was also a plus, because for the sniper section of this bifurcated film, Bogdanovich didn’t have to go far to find a story line. The inspiration for Targets was utterly contemporary; the reign of terror inflicted on the citizens of Austin, Texas by Charles Whitman on August 1, 1966, when Whitman, armed to the teeth with an arsenal of legally acquired weapons, ascended to the top of the University of Texas Tower and began randomly shooting anyone who came into view.

Before this attack, during which Whitman killed 14 people and wounded 32 others with deadly, methodical precision, Whitman killed both his wife and his mother, leaving behind a suicide note as more than ample evidence of his unbalanced mental state. The partially typewritten note, which was later recovered by police, is dated July 31, 1966, and begins with these chillingly prophetic words, “I do not quite understand what it is that compels me to type this letter. Perhaps it is to leave some vague reason for the actions I have recently performed. I do not really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I cannot recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts.” Then, after adding several additional sections of text to his note, some in ballpoint pen, Whitman went out to kill. In the end, the Austin police finally stormed the tower, and shot Whitman dead. He was 25 years old. The weapons the police found at the shooting site included a machete, a Remington 700 ADL 6mm rifle, a Universal M1 carbine rifle, a 12 gauge semi-automatic shotgun, a Smith and Wesson M19 .357 magnum handgun, a Luger P08 9mm pistol, and a Galesi-Brescia .25 ACP pistol.

At the time, the Whitman rampage was seen as an utterly aberrant act, although if one looks at the era more closely, we can see that alongside the Peace movement and Flower Power era many remember with affection, dark events were occurring in American society with regularity, including the endless Vietnam war itself, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, the Watts riots, and numerous other societal disruptions, which in their own way pointed inexorably to an ever more ominous future. Violence became the cultural currency of the era, and then as now, the nation was split, between those who embraced guns and the culture they were a part of, and those who sought to restrict guns to forestall a repeat of the Whitman incident, and many that were sadly to follow. Now, in 2013, we confront in the United States a new wave of terror brought on by gun violence, with a series of mass shootings too mind numbing to recount, and too terrifying to fully comprehend.

Bogdanovich himself has confessed his own bewilderment over the current state of affairs in the United States surrounding the gun culture, which seems to grow ever more vocal every day, essentially tone deaf to what the majority of Americans wish; stricter controls on guns, especially automatic weapons. As Bogdanovich wrote in an op-ed piece for The Hollywood Reporter, shortly after the massacre in Colorado at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises on July 20, 2012,

“We made Targets 44 years ago. It was based on something that happened in Texas, when that guy Charles Whitman shot a bunch of people after killing his mother and his wife. Paramount bought it, but then was terrified by it when Martin Luther King was killed and Bobby Kennedy was killed. The studio didn’t want to release the film at all. So they released it with a pro-gun-control campaign, but that made the picture seem like a documentary to people, and it didn’t do too well. It was meant to be a cautionary fable. It was a way of saying the Boris Karloff kind of violence, the Victorian violence of the past, wasn’t as scary as the kind of random violence that we associate with a sniper – or what happened last weekend. That’s modern horror.

At first, some of the people [at The Dark Knight Rises] thought it was part of the movie. That’s very telling. Violence on the screen has increased tenfold. It’s almost pornographic. In fact, it is pornographic. Video games are violent, too. It’s all out of control […] Back in the ’70s, I asked Orson Welles what he thought was happening to pictures, and he said, ‘We’re brutalizing the audience. We’re going to end up like the Roman circus, live at the Coliseum.’ The respect for human life seems to be eroding […] It’s too easy to show murders in movies now. There are too many of them, and it’s too easy. There is a general lack of respect for life, because it’s so easy to just kill people. Nothing’s changed in 44 years [since Targets]. Things have gotten worse when it comes to the control of guns. This guy in Colorado legally had an arsenal. What’s an AK attack rifle for? What is that for but to kill people? It’s not for hunting. Why is it for sale? It boggles the mind.”

And, of course, there’s much more to it than that. The Saw films, the Hostel series, and the Texas Chainsaw films, all deal in the “cheapness” of human life, and invite the audience to vicariously identify with the killer in a series of nihilistic slasher films that degrade both the audience and the people who make them – not that they’ll stop doing it, especially in view of the genre’s continued profitability. But there’s another issue here, and that’s the essential emptiness of American culture on a mass basis, fueled by fear and a desire to consume, consume, consume, even as the “news,” skewed either to the left or right, is so stage managed and leveraged with “expert opinion” that the facts in any given situation are often impossible to discern.

But what makes Targets an altogether different experience from the films mentioned above is that it relentlessly, with scalpel like precision, examines the complete failure of American society to either address the social causes behind such rampages, but also to provide audiences with print, television or cinematic material that has any real content – it’s just an endless diet of junk food. In Targets, Bobby’s father, Robert Thompson Sr. (an appropriately militaristic Tom Brown) knows only guns, and mindless television as recreational activities; in a scene early on in the film set at a shooting range, when Thompson Sr. goes out on the practice field to pick up some targets during a shooting session, Bobby levels the sight of his gun on his father, idly considering whether or not to kill him. Bobby’s father catches him in the act, and severely reprimands him, and Bobby sheepishly apologizes for his “error” in judgment.

But it’s already clear what’s going to happen, as Bobby’s mental state continues to spiral into free fall. At night, in a superbly executed dolly sequence through a house utterly barren of any intellectual sustenance – no books in sight, other than cookbooks and the Bible, mass produced paintings on the wall, conversations that never go beyond “Hi, how are you?” and “What’s on TV tonight?” – Bobby and his family watch television. We never see what’s on the TV, but it’s obviously a late night talk show a la Johnny Carson, and there’s no real contact between any members of the family.

As the camera prowls the barren air-conditioned nightmare that is their Southern California dream home, we hear them chuckle mindlessly at the antics on the screen, their faces illuminated only by the bluish glow of the television screen. At length, the family members peel themselves away from the electronic hearth to go to bed, but there’s no real conversation, no communication, no sense that this family is a unit, or that they even know each other. They’re just four people in a room, thrown together by chance and circumstance; a son who’s about to go off the deep end, a by-the-book father with no emotional or intellectual depth, an equally blank slate for a mother, Charlotte (Mary Jackson), and Bobby’s similarly uncomprehending wife Ilene (Tanya Morgan).

Shortly before he goes out to kill, Bobby makes one last desperate attempt to break through to his wife in a scene that is as economical as it is chilling, trying to explain to her that something is going wrong – he doesn’t know what, but something is happening to him that he can’t explain – and though Ilene tries to listen, she simply doesn’t have the depth to understand anything more than fashion magazines and Southern California pop culture. As the pair slouch against a wall in their bedroom, Bobby’s face illuminated only by the glow at the end of his cigarette, it becomes clear to the viewer that nothing will stop Bobby now, because the people around him lack any social reference points, indeed, any real feeling for anything other than the instant gratification that throwaway culture so relentlessly provides. Bogdanovich lights the scene so that Ilene gets some illumination, but Bobby is shrouded in darkness, the darkness that will soon consume both himself, and those around him.

It’s also interesting to note that there’s no music in the film other than synthetic top 40 pop music, complete with a motor-mouthing disc jockey, which endlessly pours forth from the radio in Bobby’s car, and, if one wants to count it, Ronald Stein’s original score for The Terror. Like Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), which used only “sound patterns” created by Bernard Herrmann, Remi Gassmann and Oskar Sala based on the sounds of birds in flight, calling to each other, Targets is set in a world that is all the more realistic because it eschews extra-diegetic music, which audiences have come to rely on for emotional response cues. There’s nothing like that here; it’s never apologize, never explain. The other thing that’s remarkable about Bobby, of course, is his complete lack of remarkability; Bobby Thompson seems like an utterly reliable, responsible, straight ahead citizen who smoothly engages in idle chit chat with both his family members and those outside the home with a casual ease that makes his ferocious eruption all the more terrifying, and all the more credible.

As he prepares for his shooting spree by buying even more guns and ammunition at a local gun shop, Bobby seems to be an absolutely balanced individual, hiding in plain sight, a normal, easy going individual who has nevertheless completely lost touch with reality. And indeed, there’s nothing for him to hang on to. The society that has created Bobby Thompson has given him nothing to fill his mind with other than guns, violence, and junk culture; significantly, he’s a horror movie fan, and early on in the film recognizes Byron Orlok outside a Los Angeles screening room (while purchasing still more weapons), and later picks the drive in where Orlok will be appearing, for his last, murderous stint as a sniper.

There’s nothing here that’s even remotely sensationalistic; Targets is a masterly depiction of the emptiness of conventional American life – sports, guns, videogames, junk movies and junk television, plus junk novels – that offers nothing for something, and leaves the reader, listener or viewer both unsatisfied and undernourished, still empty after two a half hours of a mind numbing spectacle at the multiplex, or knowing nothing new or useful after consuming yet another pop culture serial killer novel. It’s all junk, and there’s nothing to be gleaned from it. Bogdanovich’s film all too accurately depicts what the world was becoming in the late 1960s, even as many struggled against it; a culture ruled by mob consensus, fear, and conspiracy theories, which people with nothing better to do were more than happy to propagate.

In the late 60s, we were moving towards where we are now in American society – total emptiness. Nothing challenging, nothing sentient, nothing to believe in. One might try to dismiss Orson Welles’ comment that “we’re going to end up like the Roman circus, live at the Coliseum,” but the fact is we’re already there. This is the terrifying prophecy of Targets, a vision that now has come to be true through decades of cultural neglect, and the devaluation of both the humanities, and humanity itself. Targets thus depicts an utterly empty universe, in which there’s nothing real for anyone to hold on to; just things to buy, fast food to eat, pop music to deaden the senses. In showing us the future of America – whether he knew it or not – Bogdanovich has given us a clear blueprint of what will happen, and continue to happen, unless we take steps to reign in the violence, and the culture that embraces and glorifies it.

Wheeler Winston Dixon is the Ryan Professor of Film Studies, Coordinator of the Film Studies Program, Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and Editor in Chief, with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. His newest books are Death of the Moguls: The End of Classical Hollywood (Rutgers University Press, 2012); 21^st Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era of Transformation (co-authored with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster; Rutgers University Press, 2011); A History of Horror (Rutgers University Press, 2010), Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia (Edinburgh University Press/Rutgers University Press, 2009), and A Short History of Film (co-authored with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster; Rutgers University Press, 2008; revised 2^nd edition published 2013). His blog, Frame by Frame, can be found here and a series of videos by Dixon on film history, theory and criticism, also titled Frame by Frame, can be found here. His newest projects include the just completed Streaming: Movies, Media and Instant Access, forthcoming from University Press of Kentucky in May 2013.

Works Cited and Consulted

Bogdanovich, Peter (2012), “Legendary Director Peter Bogdanovich: What If Movies Are Part of the Problem?” in The Hollywood Reporter, July 25.

Sterritt, David (2010), “Targets”, Fipresci 6.4.

I recently happened upon a very good Studio Canal DVD of the John Flynn/Paul Schrader film Rolling Thunder (1977). The film, of some distinction at least as a symptom of profound problems within US ideology in the 70s, has always been to me, in Norman Mailer’s words, a “dark fascination,” and one of the more interesting films that attempt to “deal with” (that is, help the American psyche overcome) the US invasion of Southeast Asia. The film manages to condense a number of tendencies and genres of the post-Vietnam cinema. The essence of the disaster film is figured in the idea of the disintegration of the American family/community in the Vietnam/Watergate years. The vigilante film, so prominent in the 70s (Dirty Harry, Death Wish, Walking Tall), is also embodied in essence through the hero’s never-verbalized rage, and the sense that his ultimate violence is somewhat free-floating in character, with the targeted bad guys perhaps merely hypostatizing his own turmoil.

I should say at the outset that I view none of the Hollywood films about the Vietnam incursion to be in any way honest in dealing forthrightly with policy toward Southeast Asia (we must note that “Vietnam” really means that nation plus Cambodia and Laos), and certainly not the enormous suffering of the Vietnamese people and their neighbors. The body count of US troops and the number of POWs/MIAs are always subjects of discussion (Noam Chomsky has remarked that the total number of MIAs in the two world wars and Korea far surpassed those in Vietnam – the issue here is the U.S. agony over losing the war, and being forced to confront, with great resistance, the consequences of the US barbarism). The US has been successful in resisting confrontation with its amorality, always speaking of the attack as a noble mistake, or some such, but the number of dead in Vietnam – something like three million – is of no concern.

The Real Vietnam Cinema

There are only two films about Vietnam of any substantial value. The most crucial work is Loin du Vietnam/Far from Vietnam (1967), by Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Agnes Varda, Claude Lelouch, William Klein and Joris Ivens, a compendium film that is the greatest legacy of the French New Wave (and not surprisingly is available only in bootlegged versions). We see the Vietnamese patiently dismantling bombs and heading for bomb shelters (often holes in the street), juxtaposed with images of a parade in New York celebrating the war. Mayor John Lindsay says from the sidelines that “a parade is a parade,” a testament to bourgeois cynicism, and indifference toward his own degraded class in the face of an awful reality. A group of young executives chants “Bomb Hanoi!” with big grins on their faces. One official says the Lord’s Prayer in celebration of the police and military.

The other noteworthy film is Emile de Antonio’s In the Year of the Pig (1967), an agit-prop documentary done in de Antonio’s inimitable caustic style. De Antonio was criticized for the film’s collage method (he had great admiration for the abstract expressionists). He argued that the film’s refusal of linear narrative in no way detracted from its display of the truth – one could arrange scenes of burned children, grinning generals, and repugnant politicians in any order and still confront the key issue (the sequence wherein Col. George S. Patton III says, fangs bared, that he has a “bloody good buncha killers” could be shown with or without any context whatsoever – it contains the whole of US sentiment superbly). The image culture produced by the Vietnam incursion is one of horror, a gallery portraying the world center of capitalism, its richest empire, gloating over the deaths of peasants because of their apparent embrace of an economic system, and their insistence on stopping invaders.

To this short list I would add Chris Marker’s melancholy meditation on the collapse of the international left, Le Fond de l’air est rouge/The Base of the Air is Red/A Grin without a Cat (1977/1992), for its extraordinary first sequence on Vietnam, with its ghoulish bomber pilot telling us how much he likes to “hose down Charlie” with napalm. One would call this man psychotic, until we stop and realize that state power always redefines notions of psychosis. One is allowed to turn the id loose, to be as crazy as hell (indeed, boot camp encourages it, as Kubrick points out in one of the very few Vietnam films from the Hollywood industry worth screening [even given Kubrick’s nihilism] Full Metal Jacket), if one is serving dominant ideological interests.

Hollywood in Vietnam

I tend to feel that the Hollywood fiction films about Vietnam can be consigned to the rubbish bin of history with no great loss, but of course this is unreasonable. These films need to be studied, less for their contribution to film art (especially authentic political art), than for their disingenuousness, their consistently bad judgment, their fundamental amorality. Some of them try to assume a laughable costume of sophisticated erudition by citing the Great Works of the past, as if understanding art (within a willfully ignorant and cruel society) will help us greet the “better angels of our nature” (Lincoln’s phrase used in Apocalypse Now). Fenimore Cooper is the obvious allusion in The Deer Hunter, Melville in Platoon, Conrad, T.S. Eliot, J.G. Frazer, and not a few others in Apocalypse Now, along with the continued bowdlerization of Wagner, and plenty of rock music to provide the proper momentum to the film’s display of its spectacle. The point is embarrassingly obvious in each case: the deerstalker is no longer able to teach civilization a lesson; Ahab can be overcome, tentatively; we may be able to face our “heart of darkness” once the Primal Father has been dethroned – but what does all this have to do with a crime against humanity? Apocalypse Now struck me as possibly useful in its display of the breakdown of language, and the accidental use of same as a form of terrorism as it backfires on the American self-concept. But the film’s presentation of the Vietnam invasion as a bizarre circus is mostly risible; it is not incidental that it prompted the reprehensible Baudrillard, the most flagrant example of the bankrupt postmodern reaction, to say things like “The real war is waged by Coppola as it is by Westmoreland” (Baudrillard 1994: 59).

I don’t want to paint with too much of a broad brush. There is the occasional masterpiece, such as Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1979), one of Robert Aldrich’s last films, one that fully displays his left sensibility (the film was so neglected that it has only now appeared on DVD – its marginalization makes ideological sense of course). The insane General Lawrence Dell (Burt Lancaster) takes command of a missile base, threatening to start World War III unless the power structure comes clean about the “true reason” for the Vietnam War. There is no one to root for in this film (one has reservations about the hapless president played by Charles Durning), something it shares with Larry Cohen’s masterpiece The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977). Aldrich’s film condenses much: the Pentagon Papers, the assassinations of the 60s, and things Aldrich might have dreamed of, like Nixon’s remark, disgorged in 2004 to little notice, that he wanted “everything that flies on everything that moves,” during the Cambodia onslaught, as Chomsky remarks, one of the clearest calls for genocide in modern history, matching or exceeding those of the Nazis (Chomsky 2004).

Rolling Thunder and the Veteran

Rolling Thunder comes under a specific heading of Vietnam films: the issue of the veteran and, more broadly, the Returning Warrior and his ability to restore wholeness to the community, an archetypal topic in literature that has been long entrenched in the action cinema (The Searchers). Rolling Thunder is, at least marginally, involved in the discourse informing us that the veteran was mistreated or dismissed outright by the US population, with the anti-war movement and the youth movement being the chief culprits in the veteran’s humiliation. The notion that veterans were actually spat upon by hippies has been revealed to be largely a myth that deflects attention from the fact that US society as a whole stigmatized and systematically disenfranchised the Vietnam veteran (Reagan’s Morning in America, which included a bizarre attempt to re-fight Vietnam in the mass imagination, had little to do with veteran’s benefits, substituting instead parades, which are still a fixation of those parts of the bourgeoisie promoting state doctrine, including liberal commentators like Rachel Maddow of the MSNBC channel).

Rolling Thunder and the not-dismissible original Rambo film, First Blood (1982), partake of the image of the veteran as well-oiled killing machine striking out at the society that rejects him. In First Blood, veteran John Rambo is driven out of town by the local sheriff, for no other reason than he is a stranger with long hair – the sheriff’s animosity intensifies with knowledge that Rambo is a veteran, an odd notion since the sheriff is a true-blue Middle American. Rambo seems to be conflated with the youth culture, which he rejects (when he surrenders, he complains to his commanding officer about “those maggots at the airport”). The film’s inability to sort out hippies and veterans speaks to its ideological confusion. The highpoint of this rather apocalyptic film is Rambo’s destruction of the small town from which he has been excluded, one of the more extraordinary moments in the post-Vietnam cinema – the hero abolishes that which he (historically and concretely in regard to the military’s role, so we are told) protects, the very image of American goodness and tranquility.

The anger of Rolling Thunder is even more diffused and confused. The title suggests the roiling rage concealed just behind the hero’s public face (the title in fact refers to something never represented – the long-term US bombing campaign in Vietnam, obviously now long forgotten. It is tragic that the term’s references now are Quentin Tarantino’s video company and a long-ago Bob Dylan revue).

The Returning Warriors

Major Charles Rane (William Devane) and his young friend, Sergeant John Vohden (Tommy Lee Jones), are veterans returning from years in a North Vietnam prison. The film’s key issue is established in the first sequence, as their airplane approaches San Antonio, Texas. Vohden says to Rane, “Major, I sure do hate to face all them people,” to which Rane responds “Then put your glasses on, John.” Sunglasses become the archetypal barrier that they have always been in mass culture (when not suggesting “cool”), a way of preventing people from seeing one’s eyes and hence gauging thoughts, while the wearer can observe without others knowing. Rane and Vohden go through the motions: Rane, the senior-most officer and celebrated local son, says a few words to the crowd. He says that the experience (of imprisonment and torture) “made a better man [of him].” The question arises as to Rane’s sanity. Is he simply telling the crowd what he thinks it wants to hear? We might imagine Rane as the pilot in A Grin without a Cat, as we observe the crowd’s essential vulgarity, amplified by Vohden’s loud, coarse family, which comes to embody the America community as a whole – the crowd is complemented by the local bar, and the suburban wasteland that is Rane’s home.

At the airport ceremony, Vohden is clearly uneasy when Rane walks away from him. He is stiff and unresponsive when his obnoxious wife kisses him. Rane’s farewell is clearly a low point for Vohden; when Rane assures him that things will be all right, Vohden responds with an energetic but obviously forced “Oh yeah.” The Rane/Vohden relationship, to which I will return, repeats the American action cinema’s frequent insistence on the male relationship and its dismissal of home and heterosexual couple (Hawks is most instructive).

Rane’s home is shot by Jordan Cronenweth with deep shadow, so much so figures are somewhat obscured. This film noir effect heightens the sense of the bourgeois family immersed in lies and fakery – its unfortunate consequence is to aid the mise-en-scène in demonizing the wife (Lisa Richards) by suggesting that the domicile, the domain of the female, has become steeped in wrongdoing. The point is crucial as she reveals to Rane that she is having an affair with Cliff (Lawrason Driscoll) and plans to marry him. The film’s point of view, here and in so many scenes, becomes problematical. One can loathe the wife for bringing up the matter so soon, until the countershot reveals a man both already full of resentment yet emotionally dead.

Rolling Thunder’s restraint (until the final massacre) is notable. Although this film is seen as a Paul Schrader project, his original screenplay resembles Heywood Gould’s rewrite only in broad contours. In Schrader’s ham-fisted, grossly overwritten draft, with his typical rightist Puritanism that is just short of John Milius, Rane is always saying too much, eventually revealing himself as a racist. Schrader’s screenplay also makes Mexicans dominant among the home invaders/killers. By contrast, Gould’s rewrite makes the film taut, with the mostly silent Rane making us wonder if he is the “strong silent type,” as said by his self-described “groupie” Linda (Linda Haynes), or a psychotic. He answers in a polite monotone that people accept, even as it speaks to a loss of affect – Rane confirms this when he talks about the time when he was “alive.” William Devane’s performance gives the sense of a man living behind grit teeth. He still recalls the social niceties that help him get by (as he constantly flashes back to memories of torture in Vietnam), but is barely able to suppress the contempt he feels for the world around him, with its gift of a new red Cadillac and a box of silver dollars (which precipitates his final crisis). Rane’s face is again hidden by sunglasses when he cuts down with a chainsaw a sign commemorating his days in captivity. His tense hands and body convey much: he may be striking out at the vulgar town as much as participating in the celebration of his own freedom (certainly celebration means nothing to him, since what he really wants is solitude so he can relive his torture). There is never a moment when Rane talks about America or the armed services, nor Vietnam, nor American policies. Nor do we learn why and how Rane joined the Air Force. Since he is a major, we might assume that he is a career soldier, but this is never discussed. There is a moment of interchange with a therapist (Dabney Coleman), but this focuses solely on his lack of sleep and the impending divorce, with the possible separation from his son, the very thought of which raises his anger, the only subject that does. Rane seems a cipher or slate, portrayed as such in order to contain the contradictions of the narrative: Rane may be an avenging lunatic precisely because he is a creation of the American community.

Rane and Vohden

John Vohden might be regarded as Rane’s double, the figure in whom negative qualities are most clearly embodied. Vohden seems to hate reentry into “the world.” His family is portrayed as simply unbearable, particularly notable when Rane goes to Vohden’s home to recruit him for the massacre. The young Tommy Lee Jones is typically superb in expressing Vohden’s depression and deep embarrassment – he is so humiliated by his family’s brainless hillbilly chatter (about football and television – the conversation is exemplary of the decline in confidence and class awareness in 70s Middle America, as the dullard family derides the “Japs,” but also complains about the shoddy workmanship in modern American appliances) that he feels he must apologize to Rane. One also recognizes Vohden as an obvious psychotic, since his public performance is less refined than Rane’s, yet his problem is totally unrecognized by his family (they are surprised to see Vohden suddenly in uniform, but only because he refused to wear it for them). One troublesome issue here is the portrayal of Vohden’s family as stupid because they are low on the class ladder. There is a suggestion that Vohden’s own pathology may stem from his unacknowledged intelligence, his recognition of his family’s backwardness. But little guesswork is needed about his psychology when he goes into action – he smiles before and during the massacre. Rane has just told Vohden about his locating the killers when Vohden quickly replies “I’ll just get my gear.” As Rane throws in another scrap of information, Vohden replies “Let’s go clean ‘em up.” During the massacre itself, Vohden is lithe, gleeful, and lethal – in one quick image, as he cuts the throat of one of the bandits, his body coils and strikes with savage energy, his hair flying about. Vohden represents the coming-apart of civilized man, begging the question of whether this disintegration was caused by Vietnam or preceded the war.

The Domestic Scene, the Couple, the Homoerotic

Patriarchy asserts itself as a central issue of Rolling Thunder when Rane learns of his wife’s unfaithfulness and her plans for divorce. She informs him of this the very night of his return, when he is clearly exhausted. Here is the film’s central ideological problem. Women are never regarded sympathetically; Rane’s vengeance is centered solely on the murder of his son, the wife a nonentity. Linda is simply abandoned by Rane when she has served her purpose, Rane leaving her money as she sleeps. Rane tries to assert his primacy in the domestic household, especially when Cliff attempts some camaraderie by offering him a drink (which he never actually drinks). Rane shows his typical smoldering outrage toward Cliff, who calls his son “runt” (it makes sense, according to the film’s logic, that Cliff is finally portrayed as inept, and dispatched by Automatic Slim [Luke Askew]). The scene in the shed is important on two levels: Rane is able to put Cliff on the defensive actually by making the clearly nervous man the torturer (when Rane forces him to reenact the Vietnam scene), revealing also Rane’s masochism and a looked-for homoerotic bond that is found in the film’s denouement, when the wounded Rane picks up the wounded Vohden, and says “let’s go home, John,” the line always delivered by the man to the woman in American cinema. The mock-torture scene is extraordinary in Rane’s expression of anger and hatred, all, once again, rendered so that we see far more than the characters who continue to valorize him as the returning hero. The home invasion is a moment when the hero’s primacy is brought low. Automatic Slim is unimpressed by Rane, saying “Now don’t give me that hard officer shit!” (class issues again appear). When the wife asks a badly injured Rane why he didn’t give them the cash box, The Texan (James Best) answers for him: “I’ll tell you why, lady – because he’s one macho motherfucker.” James Best’s delivery of the line is crucial, as he stares at Rane with a look both of admiration and contempt – and mockery? It is unimportant if the Texan means to praise rather than mock him; the appraisal is coming from an outright psychopath. Whether praise, contempt, or mockery, we are offered the film’s crucial reappraisal of machismo. It is extraordinary that machismo is linked to Rane’s deadened affect, and its association with the violation of domestic life (we are constantly reminded of how much modernization Rane has missed – no more bras, the arrival of miniskirts, counterculture jargon – during his years as POW).

Torture and Homoeroticism

The home invasion is important on two levels. First, it is the moment when the home-grown killers are directly conflated with the North Vietnam torturers, as the film cuts back and forth as Rane endures the beating. The film economically tells us that Rane is marshalling the survival skills he learned in jail, which have an erotic complexion (“you learn to love the rope”), while also making most apparent both the torturers and the killers as at least partial manifestations of Rane’s “macho motherfucker” persona. Second, Rane’s fear of castration is central to the home invasion. Castration is the dominant topic in the earlier “rope trick” scene. Cliff says “you’re lucky they didn’t ruin you for life” (genital torture the obvious reference). Is Rane in fact impotent? There is no evidence that he has intercourse either with his wife or Linda, although castration-in-the-heterosexual-domicile may be the necessary avenue for Rane’s coupling with Vohden and reentering the male group. Castration is amplified, symbolically, when the killers amputate Rane’s hand in the garbage disposal. The incomplete symbolic castration allows Rane’s rage to explode. The dramatic conceit of removing the castration and the murder of Rane’s family from dramatic realism (one would expect an all-out manhunt, with every service in the nation involved) is the film’s transition to psychological/mythic territory. The problem here is that Rane’s vengeance needs the typically stigmatized Other, as he crosses the border into Nuevo Laredo, to brutalize scheming Mexicans (another version of the Alamo). Male rage must be displaced, even if its origins are at least partially within the self and the culture that has constructed it.

The Massacre

The final shootout in the brothel owes much, of course to Peckinpah (especially The Getaway); by the late 70s, Peckinpah was the single most dominant influence in the American cinema. The sequence attempts Peckinpah’s sophistication in showing the close linkage of eros with death. Again the racial dynamic comes into play, when Vohden rejects the advances of a Mexican prostitute (“not with you, muchacho”) in favor of an Anglo (Cassie Yates). The reasoning here is odd (since he has no interest in sex, even when the attractive young hooker stands naked), and can be ascribed only to Vohden’s basic rage, racism, and total alienation – another moment when he is the uninflected double of Rane. Vohden is totally unresponsive in female company. We saw this at the airport family reunion. But the eros-death conjunction is most clear when the hooker masturbates an impassive Vohden. The camera shows his hand pulling a shotgun barrel out of his satchel. He jumps up to assemble the weapon when he hears Rane’s signal. He responds to the hooker’s frightened question with the emotionless “We’re gonna kill a buncha people.” His reunion with Rane for the death orgy is the film’s most energetic moment: Vohden grins in several shots as Rane seems unusually animated (the only comparable moment is earlier in the film when he pins a Mexican to a table with the sharpened point of his metal hand). The two men “have each other’s backs” as they descend the brothel staircase, firing at the outlaws, who at the final stage seem mostly Anglo, lead by Automatic Slim. Slim was the outlaw most defiant of Rane, his principle castrator at the home invasion who scoffed at the romanticizing of veterans (he is one). Rane shoots him several times, then throws his pistol on the bar. He conveys more the sense of a job finished than exhaustion and self-loathing.

The film’s point of view at this stage is wholly with Rane and Vohden, encouraging full audience identification with their attack and final victory, the most offensive aspect of this deeply troubled film. A touch of its deep contradictions return with the final Rane-Vohden embrace and “Let’s go home, John.” But the finale is ultimately deeply unsatisfactory. While there is a small sense that nothing has been accomplished, the film doesn’t repudiate what has happened. The Oedipal construct is vindicated, yet the son is still dead and Rane has no place to go. The film simply ends, which makes me look to its creators’ slovenliness, and the moral bankruptcy that encompasses most of the project.

Afterthought

One of the very few virtues of the original Paul Schrader screenplay is its inclusion of two epigraphs, the first from a 1954 report by a committee on veterans medical problems, stating that 53.4 percent of the deaths of WWII POWs held in “the Orient” were “attributed to violent causes: murder, suicide, in the act of crime or on the highway […] this was a violent death rate four times the normal expectancy.” The second epigraph is taken from Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 “Report on Crime in America.” It states: “Our returning prisoners of war are examples of the high moral fiber […] which will help make this a nation […] free from crime.” Nixon’s remark simply speaks to the denial and moral emptiness of state power. When considered in the context of the film’s narrative, it tends to enforce, with a very stupid sense of irony, the notion of the veteran as killer. The veterans medical quote debunks the notion of WWII veterans as the vanguard of the “greatest generation,” the popular, and patently absurd, valorization of the 1950s as a sunny time of renewal. Together, the quotes might remind us that the soldier is never more than cannon fodder for dominant interests; his/her image can be manipulated – even if the soldier dies – in order to advance further those interests. But as tragic as the veteran’s situation was and is, we must give deeper thought to the awful plight of the victims of US imperialism. Considering the current complexion of US ideology, this consideration can only be wished for sometime in the distant future.

My gratitude to Tony Williams for sharing with me Paul Schrader’s early draft of Rolling Thunder. My thanks also for his formidable work on the Vietnam cinema.

Christopher Sharrett is Professor of Communication and Film Studies at Seton Hall University. He is currently revisiting the paintings and sculptures of the Italian Renaissance, especially the work situated in Florence. Have we seen in recent times such a gift to human culture?

References

Baudrillard, Jean (1994), Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Chomsky, Noam (2004), “War Crimes and Imperial Fantasies”, International Socialist Review, 37, September-October.

Robot Monster

The perfect double bill is an elusive, mythical thing. A single entertainment event comprised of two unique artistic expressions. A tradition steeped in social history and Hollywood controversy, the evolution of which has shaped our cinema trips for decades and shapes our home-cinema experiences today.

First becoming popular in the 1930s when economic struggles were rife and the world was at war, cinemas boosted ticket sales by essentially offering a “2 for 1” deal. For the price of a normal single feature movie ticket, the audience would be treated to trailers, a newsreel (invaluable during wartime), a cartoon or short film, a lower budget “B” movie and finally, the main, higher budget “A” feature. This type of presentation became so popular that major movie studios responded to demand by commissioning and producing their own “B” movies.

This was the era of the “Studio System,” which saw major film studios making and distributing movies using only long-term contract personnel and controlled distributors. Studios engaged in manipulative booking techniques with cinemas, dictating which of their “B” movies should be purchased along with the more commercial “A” features. This proved highly restrictive for exhibitors, and when the US Supreme Court ruled that this was illegal in 1948 (United States vs. Paramount), exhibitors in most countries began to enjoy more freedom in the movies they screened. The Studio System as it was faltered and eventually came to an end, evolving into a new, more flexible work method. Smaller, independent cinemas continued the double bill trend to boost their ticket sales, often pairing a commercial new release with a re-release of an older feature.

The Astor Theatre, Melbourne (1936)

The Astor Theatre in Melbourne, Australia was established in 1936, on the original site of The Diamond Theatre which began showing movies in 1908. This spot has seen the evolution of film exhibition from its inception, through the rise of movie double bills as a popular form of entertainment, to those becoming a nostalgic treat. As the last single screen cinema of its kind that has continuously operated in Melbourne, the theatre has retained the charm of the double bill heyday, with its original art deco features, soft lighting and overstuffed chairs. With an overall seating capacity of 1,150 and varied programme, the theatre strives to bring great cinematic art to its audience in the double feature tradition.

George Florence has been running The Astor Theatre since 1982 and has purposefully ensured that double features remain at the core of its programming philosophy. “I suppose The Astor Theatre is now quite unique, as I know of few other movie theatres doing exactly our sort of eclectic programming mix of mainly double features of classic and new titles, with daily changes. We run hundreds of movies a year, and in my time at The Astor I reckon we’ve screened something like 20,000 movies.”

The programming philosophy at The Astor Theatre is not as straightforward as it may first appear, with many factors influencing the selection of movies to be paired and screened. Legal restrictions still binding exhibitors in Australia mean that both films in a double feature must come from the same distributor – not usually the case in most other countries. As George Florence explains, “This presents some challenges as the obvious ‘perfect’ double is not possible because movie A is from Fox and movie B is from Paramount, for example.

“We choose movies that complement each other, either by theme, stylistically, director or just by the notion that an audience coming to see one movie will probably appreciate the other. Sometimes it is just not possible to strike a good mix, and we do run some odd doubles.”

Further restrictions apply in the form of available theatrical rights. The existence of a movie – even one with a Home Entertainment release – does not guarantee valid theatrical screening rights and where those are not available, the movie cannot be shown. Likewise, with film formats, some prints are “junked” or destroyed, and are therefore unavailable until new, re-mastered prints are produced.

“The running times of movies must also be taken into account,” George Florence explains. “Sometimes we do run some very long doubles – over 2 and a half hours each, which means with a twenty minute intermission, our patrons are with us for up to five or six hours. This is a big time commitment in today’s frantic, time-starved world.”

Ultimately, commercial considerations can also restrict the choice of programming at repertory establishments such as The Astor Theatre, as well. For example, a recent Astor screening of very rare prints of early 50s Sci-Fi films Cat-Women Of The Moon (1953) and Robot Monster (1953) was relatively poorly attended with an estimated 80 people in the audience. George Florence comments, “If this was on at some major film festival retrospective, there should be thousands clambering to experience rare screenings like this.” A similar situation arose during a John Waters mini-retrospective held at the venue. Striking an effective balance between commercial viability and the provision of a unique cinematic experience is essential to the survival of cinemas such as The Astor Theatre.

George Florence highlights the dissonance between the audience and the programmers involved in his endeavour to continue to bring the double bill experience to cinema-goers. “Most patrons don’t understand the restrictions on placing doubles, and from a broader perspective, most patrons don’t understand the limitations to theatrical programming, period. In order for a movie to be screened in a theatre, both rights for that territory have to be held by a local distributor, and there must be either a film print or digital file available. This severely limits the range of available options.”

The Astor Theatre holds a very special card up its sleeve when it comes to selecting films to pair and screen, however. Proprietor George Florence also runs a film distribution business – Chapel Distribution – co-founded with Mark Spratt. The company holds many hundreds of classic film prints, which are readily available to screen. As a result, The Astor Theatre is at the forefront of the continued preservation and exhibition of rare film prints. Their enviable collection, coupled with a range of projection equipment, enables them to provide a mix of film and digital screenings. While the intention of such an organisation is to ensure that rare film prints remain available for future generations and are not lost to film history, it also aids the future of the theatre itself, at a time when technological advances mean movie-viewing no longer needs to be restricted to the theatre.

As our options to experience film have evolved from solely theatre viewing to include viewing at home and even on our mobile phones, so our viewing preferences have determined the evolution of film-making, exhibition and marketing. As our leisure time has reduced, we have become more selective about how we spend that time. We want to see the “A” movie and move on, so cinemas and exhibitors have followed suit moving from double features being the norm, to single features. Movies tend to be longer now, since the prospect of the audience having to watch two movies in the cinema is no longer a consideration. Short films are now rarely seen in a cinema setting – with the exception being most Pixar presentations – but advertising has developed to be more cinematic in nature. Now that we spend less time in the movie theatre, the emphasis is on impact.

Possibly the clearest example of this cultural shift was the 2007 film Grindhouse. This highly anticipated project by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez featured two films (Planet Terror and Death Proof) edited together with fake 1970s exploitation trailers, with the purpose of recreating the “Grindhouse” style double feature experience. The result was critically acclaimed, but the presentation was a commercial failure in US movie theatres. Audiences simply did not want to invest the time. Consequently, the two films were split and screened individually for their international releases. Ironically, this homage to a specific type of double feature theatrical experience could then only be seen as intended in the film fan’s own home, or at special screening events.

With so many restrictions on which movies can be successfully paired and screened at a cinema, it is tempting to stay in the comfort of your own home and make your own selections. However, being at the other extreme, with perhaps no restrictions at all, how does the perfect pairing come about?

Just like creating a mix tape, selecting the perfect movie double bill at home can be a treacherous endeavour. While the easy solution is to pop in discs one and two of a popular franchise, a little creativity can lead to a much more satisfying viewing experience for the film fan.

As Tara Judah, staff member at The Astor Theatre, explains, the dream double bill is a very personal thing. “I’m not sure what my dream double bill would be – sometimes the doubles that work the best are the ones where you’ve never seen either of the films before and you’re not sure if you’re going to enjoy both or either of the films, but you put your trust in the people who have put it together.”

“I think the most important aspect of a double bill – again, from my personal perspective – is that the films complement one another in some way – be it tonally, aesthetically, thematically or even through a more obvious link such as director or star. A double feature is one event and so the experience needs to feel connected.”

Office Space

This philosophy seems obvious at first, but looking a little deeper opens up a whole new world of possibility. Of course, you could follow True Romance (1993) with Natural Born Killers (1994), or Mary Poppins (1964) with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). But wouldn’t your evening become much more interesting if you followed Bullitt (1968) with Drive (2011)? Or Office Space (1999) with Horrible Bosses (2011)? You could very easily play it safe and enjoy a one-two of Delicatessen (1991) and The City of Lost Children (1995), but expand your vision and you could team Troll Hunter (2010) with Cloverfield (2008). The potential of home cinema for winning combinations is endless. The main ingredients are there –  just add a dash of imagination.

The relationship between home cinema and theatre is not so simple, however. While the demise of the double feature as a regular theatre experience is indelibly linked with the cultural and technological changes in society in general – at one time pitting the theatre and home cinema experiences against each other – it seems a further shift is taking place. In a bid to survive, repertory cinemas across the globe have adapted their programming philosophies accordingly. Whereas, in the 1930s, we would have enjoyed the full double feature experience during any trip to the cinema to see a new release, we now seek it out specifically for the purpose of an unusual experience.

The Prince Charles Cinema in London has operated in its current form since 1991, and is the only non-subsidised repertory cinema in the UK. Its survival, outside of screening the “usual” big releases, depends on its seasonal programming and festivals. Regularly, patrons are able to view interesting double-bill pairings, and spectacular movie events. Sing-A-Longs to The Sound Of Music (1965) or The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) are immensely popular, along with Quote-A-Longs to films such as Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) or Ghostbusters (1984), and fancy dress is most definitely encouraged. This is audience participation at its finest for any avid film fan, and it is what the repertory cinema experience offers that home-cinema simply can’t achieve: the excitement of sitting in a darkened auditorium, surrounded by lots of like-minded people, enjoying a rare collective experience. Anyone can wear a basque and suspenders in the comfort of their own home, but do it at a repertory theatre, and you are Dr Frank-N-Furter – cinematic icon.

Even the unlimited choice of a DVD collection or digital streaming can’t compete with that.

Sarah Myles is a freelance writer based in North Yorkshire, UK.

Doomsday Preppers

“Consider Your Man Card Reissued”

(Print ad for Bushmaster Firearms)

I write this as I watch in sadness, surrounded by a bank of televisions at the gym, all conveying images of the “theatre” of war that is now America at Christmas in 2012. The slaying of school children and their teachers in Newtown, Connecticut, a town where my husband spent his holidays at his aunt’s home, is the logical end result of a culture of death, a culture of prepping, and a culture of the military-industrial complex which ultimately renders all places in the United States, all spaces, especially crowded spaces, such as malls, churches, schools, and workplaces as potential killing “theatres” just as volatile as those killing theatres of mass slaughter whose images have almost become mundane and seem unmoving to many Americans – Pakistan, Afghanistan, My Lai, Chile, Vietnam, neighborhoods in Africa and Latin America, Muslim lands, Mexico; so many killing fields. We are accustomed as Americans to think of the “military-industrial complex” as something to fear outside of our borders, and an incoming threat. When we think of “theatres” of war, we pull up images of slaughter and killing outside of America.

But America is a theatre of war, Americans are armed, prepped and in an apocalyptic mindset that is heavily informed by a return of the kind of irrational hysteria and paranoia we associate with the Cold War and the nineteen-fifties. On leaving office, President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave a very famous and oft-quoted speech condemning the rise of the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower specified that Americans “must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow.” Though he no doubt was referring to the escalation of government funding for armaments, the military, and weapons of mass destruction, he would be appalled by the manner in which individual Americans have begun selfishly destroying the environment as they individually prepare for war.

A culture of hoarding and prepping, one that is directly responsible for the recent events in Newtown, Connecticut, is, arguably, itself a direct outgrowth of the complex ideology that supported the rise of the military-industrial complex. Americans, once predominately fearing the Other outside its borders, are now seemingly preparing for a civil war on US soil, brought on by doomsday scenarios such as economic collapse, environmental apocalypse, or social breakdown. America is armed and dangerous and lacking in empathy. There are an estimated 270,000,000 guns owned by civilians in the US alone; in a comparison of privately owned guns in 178 countries, the United States comes in at first place. It is only a matter of time before there are more guns than people (GunPolicy.org 2012).

America is a military industrial complex and psychologically, Americans appear to have a mass disorder caused by this complex. You can see it not only in our outrageously large arsenal and war chest; you can see it on the eyes of the preppers, and preppers are no longer outsiders. They are becoming the norm. The obsession with guns in the United States is seen in film, pop culture, games, etc.; but also in-home arsenals increasing in size at an alarming intensity. Many American citizens obviously feel powerless in the face of the recession and they cling to guns in an effort to find a masculine patriarchal feeling of faux safety found in the fetishistic pleasure of the feel of an instrument of death. Americans are ill and would seem to need an intervention.

Eisenhower further warned that America “must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate,” yet clearly this is the America that has arisen from the Cold War, a war that never fully ended. It is a terrific shame that our government and our leaders paid so little attention to Eisenhower’s plea for disarmament; instead, we are a nation feared and mistrusted. Go to any country around the world and ask people what they think of Americans. They are afraid of us. We send secret drone missions to kill people without taking responsibility; we start and perpetuate wars without the support of the American people, with little legal grounds; we hold human beings without legal grounds, we make films that celebrate our supposed military superiority. We torture, even though torture does not solve terrorism against us or yield any information from those we torture; we even celebrate images of torture in our feature films, in our television programs, and in our video games. We export our culture of death, torture and guns, and yet we are much surprised that the chickens eventually return home to roost.

Almost every TV commentator who endlessly poked at the remains of the horrific spectacle of the elementary school killings in Newtown had the audacity to call the mass murder a “senseless” and heinous crime. Heinous, yes. Senseless, no. This crime makes sense to me. Allegedly (and it should be stated that the facts in the case are still unreliable; coverage has been much more hysterical than factual) a mother, herself a prepper, a gun enthusiast, apparently regularly took her son, a mentally challenged, if intellectually bright, young man to target practice. This young man, it has also been reported widely, perhaps suffered from Asperger syndrome, which, most authorities agree, may include a symptomatic lack of empathy for others. This young man was doing exactly what he was taught to do, it seems to me; shoot a gun to relieve his stress. This was not a “senseless” crime, in my opinion. The shooter simply did as he was taught.

Doomsday Preppers

As to the question of his lack of empathy for others, I will leave that up to those trained in psychology to hash out. I do, however, wish to note that in the wake of the murders, the emphasis turned to a decidedly morbid display of the photographs of the deceased children, running it seems 24/7 on TV, the web and everywhere with no regard for their privacy or the privacy of the citizens of Newtown, especially the parents and family of the victims. While the Belfast Telegraph ran an informative and investigative article aptly titled “Mother of Sandy Hook Gunman Adam Lanza ‘Was a Gun Obsessive Living in Fear of Society’s Collapse’,” almost entirely missing in most coverage in the United States was the fact that the mother was a gun enthusiast and doomsday prepper. With a few exceptions, the media in the United States is as careful to tiptoe around the mental illness of the shooter as it is wary of critiquing the culture of guns. Even in the wake of the shootings, in the endless discussion of gun control, there is a noticeable lack of specific discussion of preppers and prepper culture. Only The New York Post, of all newspapers, got it right, when they wrote in an article on the tragedy that “she created a monster,” a reference to the shooter’s mother, adding that she methodically “taught her son how to become a killing machine” (Rosario, Oliveira Jr. and MacLeod 2012).

Perhaps this disparity in coverage can be partially explained by a general fear of offending the gun lobby, a small, but well-armed and moneyed group, lack of recognition of the rise of prepper culture, and fear of offending groups that defend the rights of the mentally ill. Either way, our myriad televisual platforms rapidly gave way to the ghoulish and outrageous omnipresence of Wayne La Pierre, the head of the NRA, who seemed to be on every network for weeks advocating the arming of teachers and schools. Yes, the child victims were not yet even buried as the head of the gun lobby appeared on so many programs defending the right to own assault weapons and pushing to sell yet more weapons. This is what I’d call “senseless,” and completely lacking in empathy. And as senseless and vile this spectacle is gun stores now cannot keep up with the demand for assault weapons and gun magazines. In the wake of the tragedy, the fear of gun control legislation has led many to purchase even more guns, specifically the type used by mass shooters: essentially machine guns. We have officially become the “community of dreadful fear and hate” of which Eisenhower warned.

But fear, hate, paranoia, bunker-building, and prepping were all part of the atomic meta-narrative of the Cold War era, apparently a dress rehearsal for the events that horrify us on the news today; mass shootings abound, and empathy for others is distinctly lacking. Beneath the fear of the Other in the Cold War was the fear of ourselves. Subversives in popular film and popular culture were Others; godless Commies, Jews, intellectuals, union members, homosexuals, juvenile delinquents, even the monsters in horror and sci-fi represented our fear of that projected Other whom ultimately turned out to be our armed-up selves – as the end result of a culture hell-bent on gunning up, both at home and as a giant lucrative military-industrial complex.

This phenomenon arose out of a so-called crisis of masculinity experienced by the collective unconscious. America felt threatened and emasculated and looked for ways to prove that it was still the strong and mighty nation that had just come through WWII. America feels threatened again today as we lose ground in the economic arena, we are psychologically and fiscally emasculated by China, among other things. Beneath the bravado in our macho action films, it appears that we fear that American bullying, aggression and masculinity is not up to the challenge of global warming or any of the myriad possible causes of the supposed coming doomsday or apocalypse.

Doomsday Preppers

A brief history of Atom Age hysteria films of the Cold War makes evident the through-line to prepping as a form of overcompensation around the fear of emasculation of the nation, from films such as Alfred E. Green’s Invasion, U.S.A. (1952) to more recent television programs such as Doomsday Preppers. Invasion U.S.A. is a prime example of a fascinating, almost forgotten genre of post-war red scare films that traded on American fear and hysteria in the Cold War era. It typifies the post-war captivity narratives in which Americans are subject to wholesale Communist takeovers in what amounts to a repetitive psychologically driven compulsive mass hysteria.

While trading upon the crisis of masculinity, the film poster for Invasion U.S.A. promised the exploitational kicks Americans love to devour in their filmed nightmares: “See vast U.S. cities vanish before your very eyes.” Indeed, in a morally objectionable use of stock footage, audiences of the film were barraged with actual documentary war images from World War II; actual air raids, on camera deaths of American soldiers and images of endless destruction and mayhem were disturbingly exploited as stand-ins to portray a massive Communist military invasion of the United States. Invasion U.S.A. is an outright plea for massive spending and expansion of the American military. Repeatedly, the United States is dishonestly depicted as militarily emasculated, ill equipped, and poorly prepared.

Jack Webb in Red Nightmare

Like Red Nightmare (George Waggner, 1962), Invasion U.S.A. is revealed to be a hypnotic dream, or a nightmare that is incurred by the brandy-swirling Dan O’Herlihy, who hypnotizes a bar full of patrons into believing that America has been taken over by an unnamed Communist nation. Red Nightmare and Invasion, U.S.A. were designed to both exploit hysteria and add even more irrational fear to an already frightened nation experiencing a crisis of masculinity. “It will scare the pants off you,” wrote Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper for the poster of Invasion, U.S.A. Jack Webb, an ultra rightwing bully, and star of the radio and television series Dragnet, really scares the pants off the audience as the narrator of Red Nightmare. This “educational” film features Jack Webb presenting a vision of an alternative America, a dream scenario proudly sponsored by the United States Department of Defense, in which average American Jerry Donavan (Jack Kelly), who is not much interested in civil defense, much less Army Reserve Conferences, gets his just comeuppance in the form of a nightmare sent by macho Jack Webb.

“Let’s give him a real red nightmare,” threatens Webb, and indeed Jerry’s character awakens to a frightening captivity narrative – once again, the United States has been taken over by Communist forces. Jerry’s daughter Linda (Patricia Woodell), formerly sweet, feminine, and docile, announces she is going off to work on a collective. The nuclear family falls apart completely; Jerry’s wife and friends turn against him when Jerry is arrested for treason and he has no one to turn to. He is the emasculated American male brought to his knees by Communist enemies from within.

Red Nightmare

Paranoid enough for you? Yet ironically, Jerry’s trial, in which he is falsely accused of treason and undone by his own family’s testimony, looks very much like a microcosmic version of the HUAC hearings that were equally unfair and horrifyingly real. American popular culture has an odd way of psychologically projecting reality on the Other: the parallels between the HUAC hearings and the perils of Jerry Donavan under Communist fascism in Red Nightmare exemplify a return of the repressed. Over and over in Cold War hysteria films, we see such exemplifications of historical truth projected through a twisted prism lens of paranoia where topsy-turvy logic and unreason predominate over rationality, all with the intent to exploit, entertain, and ultimately make Americans hardwired for prepping, hardwired for mass hysteria and conformity, and xenophobic to the point at which they wonder if they themselves are the perp, the shooter, the saboteur, the threatening Other.

Americans are obsessed with terrorism, and we have systematically terrorized ourselves with Cold War propaganda techniques that portray Americans as possible terrorists, or, worse than that, dupes. For example, hardworking union dockworker Robert Ryan is duped by sexy Commie agent Janis Carter in Robert Stevenson’s infamous domestic terrorist drama, I Married a Communist (1949). Produced by Howard Hughes, who backed many Red hysteria films, I Married a Communist (later retitled The Woman on Pier 13) demonstrates that you can be a subversive and not even really know it. Ryan plays Brad Collins, a man who has changed his name because of a youthful interest in Communism. He has all but erased and forgotten his past, and married a sweet submissive woman named Nan (Laraine Day), only to be dragged back into the “Pinko” world when (blonde = bad girl) former gal pal Commie cell member Christine Norman (Janis Carter) uses her overripe sexuality and feminine wiles to seduce him back into the Commie fold.

After all, a manly man can’t trust himself around a woman with a secret photo lab hidden in her kitchen, the very womb of femininity in the architecture of the private sphere of the 50s. As if women were more naturally fit to be subversive, the poster boldly announces: “Trained in an art as old as time! She served a mob of terror whose one mission is to destroy!” Family members are suspect, even you yourself: audience member, you, too, are suspect! In Leo McCarey’s My Son John (1952), poor Lucille and Dan Jefferson (Helen Hayes and Dean Jagger) learn that their own son John (Robert Walker) is a Commie subversive. He is not masculine and overtly heterosexual like his brothers. He’s an intellectual who has lost belief in God, he’s heavily coded as queer, and presents a stark contrast to his two very heterosexual, anti-intellectual brothers, who early in the film don military uniforms and go off to fight in the Korean War. Your son is a threat in the fifties; he’s a potential terrorist now. The terms have changed but the enemy comes from within. We all feel that way every time we go through airport security.

This message is consistent and recurring in films and behavior spawned from Cold War hysteria. John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962) features Commie mother Eleanor Iselin (Angela Lansbury); so evil is she that she has incestuous feelings for her own son, Raymond (Laurence Harvey), a Korean War vet who has been programmed to kill without any empathy. The threat of brainwashing was so prevalent during the Korean War that many vets were thanked for their duty on returning to the States by being accused of being brainwashed by the Communists. But The Manchurian Candidate exposed and projected our own xenophobic-inspired fears. The hysteria of the fifties eventually gave way somewhat with the social upheavals of the sixties. Young Americans began to question authority, question gender roles, question cultural brainwashing and even confront it. Masculinity and the threat of the Other is not so simple in James Bond films, starting with Terence Young’s Dr. No (1962), and the later spy spoof films Our Man Flint (Delbert Mann, 1966) and In Like Flint (Gordon Douglas, 1967). Films that outright challenged cold war hysteria such as The Front found success when Americans more widely continued to question Cold War events and began to embrace outsider culture, beat culture, and antiestablishment ideas, culminating in the antiwar movement against US involvement in Vietnam, and the slow but eventual changes in gender roles in America.

But in the Cold War 1950s, young viewers were perhaps fatigued by fear-mongering exploitational vehicles such as William Cameron Menzies’ The Whip Hand (1951), in which bumbling newspaperman Matt Corbin (Elliot Reid) stumbles upon a Commie lab run by Dr. Wilhelm Bucholtz (Otto Waldis), which is involved in germ warfare experimentation on humans. Produced once again by Howard Hughes, The Whip Hand was originally intended to exploit the Nazi as the bad Other, but Hughes and Menzies quickly rewrote the Nazis as Commies when that theme became more topical. Again, projection of a deep fear of the development of chemical warfare in American wartime history becomes clear in looking at The Whip Hand in retrospect. A revealing New Yorker essay, “Operation Delirium” by Raffi Khatchadourian (2012), uncovers the ghastly true story that American doctors were experimenting on members of the armed forces during this time period, from the forties until the seventies. We “tested” (read “inflicted”) nerve gas, LSD, BZ, and a host of other chemical warfare agents on our own soldiers in a nonfictional story that is far more disturbing than the events shown in The Whip Hand.

Jacob's Ladder

Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder (1990) is a little known film that attempts to portray this truly frightening experimentation. Though it has developed a cult following over the years, thanks in part to Tim Robbins’ performance in the leading role, it remains on the fringes of mainstream cinema history. But it is fascinating that a Cold War hysteria film such as The Whip Hand skirts ever so closely with events that went on in real life. Americans revealed themselves to be deadly to other Americans, but in the movie-mad psychological projection of the returned-repressed, it is Germanic Soviets such as Steve Loomis (Raymond Burr) and Dr. Bucholtz who are the feared Other. Teenagers must have been quite tired of being told to be afraid. Everywhere they looked in pop culture they saw aliens on the attack. Giant ants, body snatchers, pod-people, killer Martians as in Byron Haskin’s The War of the Worlds (1953) were joined by juveniles as the Other in films such as Gene Fowler Jr.’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Herbert L. Strock’s I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (both 1957), to say nothing of Tom Graeff’s Teenagers From Outer Space (1959), which promised audiences “thrill-crazed space kids blasting the flesh off humans!”

Teenagers joined the ranks as outsiders to be destroyed in many films of the Cold War era including Harry Keller’s less well-known The Unguarded Moment (1956) in which John Saxon plays a teen rapist. His schoolteacher Esther Williams tries to treat him with kindness and empathy, but she is demonstrably depicted as a left-leaning educator, who stupidly relies on words rather than guns. Apparently empathy is a bad thing in American culture. In the end only masculine patriarchal intervention saves her. Women exist in films of the fifties to be saved by men, to be available to men for sex, and to be protected as property; they are props to counterbalance the mass hysteria of the crisis in masculinity of the period.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

Not only were young Americans (particularly male teens) portrayed as sinister and dangerous to the American way of life, but at school they were bombarded, literally assaulted, with images and texts that spelled out the “incontrovertible eventuality of atomic war – and with it the end of civilization” (Scheibach 2003: 105). For anyone unfamiliar with the scare tactics that were used in classrooms in America during the Cold War, the fascinating Atomic Narratives and American Youth: Coming of Age with the Atom, 1945-1955, by Michael Scheibach is a must-read. In between after-school films such as Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), high school students in the postwar era were subjects to almost terroristic daily indoctrination in American classrooms. The message was clear, atomic war was inevitable, the United States was overrun with Communist infiltrators, and it is the responsibility of youth to fix the Cold War realities somehow by obeying authority, or joining groups such as the Good Citizens.

Every day at school, students were not only told to be vigilant and look out for any informants or subversives, but they were continually reminded that the H bomb put them in mortal danger. Girls Scouts were trained in civil defense and taught to detect radioactivity. Students routinely watched “instructional” films such as Atomic Alert and Making Atomic Energy a Blessing, in a way making them prime candidates for prepping. At school, “Loyalty Day” was a popular school project and assembly used to discuss the importance of loyalty and vigilance. It was only a few steps shy from mind-controlling indoctrination.

One particular story that Scheibach includes demonstrates just how casually Americans inculcate fear and mass hysteria, especially in American children. In 1953, at North Hampton High School in Pennsylvania, during a presentation of the student council a fake Communist takeover was performed on the unsuspecting students. As Scheibach notes, “the doors suddenly burst open. A man clad in an army sergeant’s uniform, and safeguarded by a police officer, rushed the stage. ‘At one o’clock today the United States government as such no longer exists’” (78). The classroom was told that the Nationalists Party had taken over, and that resistance was futile. Real guns were used and displayed. Armed officers threatened the students and “arrested” a teacher who “objected,” “leaving students startled and even more confused. They sat white-faced with fear, some holding back tears” (79).

Doomsday Preppers

Eventually, students were told the truth, but this classroom “activity” was obviously orchestrated as an act of terrorism – American adults terrorizing American children. America as a whole was hysterical, terrorized and building bunkers, just as we are today. In early 2012, Doomsday Preppers, a wildly popular “reality” television program, began appearing on the National Geographic channel. Television may not just inform and exploit, it also tends to “mainstream” certain behaviors, such as prepping (which was once considered rather fringy and non-mainstream). Doomsday Preppers cultivates and affirms the values of doomsday preppers, their belief system, their values, their selfish hoarding, and perhaps most importantly, their gun worship. The show has a decided return to Cold War values. Gender roles have reverted to those of the past. Most often the man of the family is the head of the prepping operation. In most cases the wives and children seem to gamely go along with his mad plans for surviving the end of days. Guns rule. The nuclear family has notably returned to the past, with women relegated to gathering and canning food, and men arming the home and preparing for the eventual arrival of the war-like conditions. Men are in charge in prepper families. Indeed, often children and wives giggle and tell the camera in asides that they are only going along with all this prepping to keep the man of the house happy.

Keith O’Brien, writing in The New York Times Magazine, articulates how doomsday prepping has gone from being seen as an outsider “gun nut” culture to a more mainstream and consumable culture in his essay “How to Survive Societal Collapse in Suburbia” (2012). O’Brien demonstrates that the mercantile aspects of the survivalist industry resulted in the mainstreaming of prepping so that much more prepping merchandise can be sold. Prepping has become basic and mainstream, even preppy. There is a tremendous amount of money to be made from prepping. Being prepared for the end of the world is pretty expensive. Hysteria and alarmist ideas are utterly mainstreamed to the point where the expression “the end of the world as we know it” has an acronym “Teotwawki” (38).

Doomsday Preppers

It hardly matters to the merchandisers what Americans are afraid of; Mayan apocalypse, economic meltdown, asteroids, nuclear annihilation, comets, environmental disasters, a worldwide power shortage. Teotwawki sells stuff and the merchandisers care little about politics and reason; they just want you to buy guns and ammo, food prep, and underground living shelters. Indeed, as Keith O’Brien demonstrates, the companies in the business of prepping wish to make “preparedness” so mainstream that it is no longer associated with survivalists or right wing extremist groups. Still, it was the extremists who founded most of the preparedness groups and one can’t ignore that after our first African American was elected president, gun sales went up exponentially. And on Doomsday Preppers, there may be a few hippie types, and a few mainstream middle Americans, but many appear to be dedicated Tea Party enthusiasts.

Watching Doomsday Preppers, one is inclined to notice certain formulaic tropes, including the section when the prepper family patriarch unveils the weapon arsenal. Who are they arming themselves against? Zombies, aliens, the government? No, they are arming themselves against Other Americans. They are armed to the teeth against any intruder, and odds are that any intruder would be another American. In this way, we can see how indeed the military-industrial complex has come home to roost right here in the USA. Preppers are armed against reason, armed against other American civilians. Prepping is demonstrably related to a lack of empathy for others. It is by nature selfish, macho, reclusive and paranoid; the inverse of the hippie commune lifestyle.

Doomsday Preppers

Every episode of Doomsday Preppers includes a section in which the preppers brag about the prospect of killing anyone who might come to them for aid or food. Prepping is not about inviting others into the manger. Prepping is selfish, not selfless. Though many of the preppers are self-professed Christians, when it comes to sharing with others or mercy for the poor, starving, or hurt, well, you guessed it… Clearly outsiders are going to be shot first – no questions asked. In some strange way the rise of the prepper makes sense given our roots of paranoia and lack of empathy, indoctrinated so fully during the Cold War and the rise of the military-industrial complex. America is a series of “theatres” of potential wars. It’s also linked to a perceived loss of “masculinity” engendered by the rise of the left, and fear of the Obama administration. We seem to need guns to perform masculinity. This may seem like hyperbole or hysteria, but in the context of our history and our images, it makes a kind of morbid “sense.” In the words of Pogo, the cartoon character created by the late Walt Kelly, “we have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster writes extensively on film and popular culture.

Works Cited

Belfast Telegraph (2012), “Mother of Sandy Hook Gunman Adam Lanza ‘Was a Gun Obsessive Living in Fear of Society’s Collapse’”, December 17.

Eisenhower, Dwight D. (1961), “Military-Industrial Complex Speech, January 17, 1961”, Public Papers of the Presidents.

GunPolicy.org (2012), “United States – Gun Facts, Figures and the Law”. Last updated on 20 December 2012.

Khatchadourian, Raffi (2012), “Operation Delirium”, The New Yorker, December 17.

O’Brien, Keith (2012), “How to Survive Societal Collapse in Suburbia”, The New York Times Magazine, November 16.

Rosario, Frank, Pedro Oliveira Jr. and Dan MacLeod (2012), “Mother Shared Her Gun Obsession with School Shooter Adam Lanza”, New York Post, December 16.

Scheibach, Michael (2003), Atomic Narratives and American Youth: Coming of Age with the Atom 1945-1955, Jefferson, NC: McFarland.