One of Godard’s best notions had to do with the nature of form and content on film. “To me, style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body. Both go together, they can’t be separated.” Under that notion, it would seem we were living in a hyper-kinetic world of flash, trash, and an attention-deficit, where the reality is glossy, tabloid, and demented. Take some of our box-office megahits: The Dark Knight (2008), Titanic (1997), Lord of the Rings: Twin Towers (2002). Hollywood of the past ten years has cultivated a sort of blockbuster movie that is epic and operatic, as well as glutted with special effects explosions and disasters. Is there a sort of cultural yearning for these spectacles? And how do they interact with our conscious notions of the real world?
The Hollywood blockbuster is no new invention. It has taken many forms throughout cinema history. The first films were spectacles (by DeMille, D.W. Griffith), meant to attract and mesmerize large audiences and make them forget about the reality beyond theater doors. Ironically, newsreels used to also be viewed before the “main show”—newsreel which explicitly and propagandistically shaped the reality beyond theater doors. Stories of war and fanciful escapades (Birth of a Nation, The Mark of Zorro) gave way to historic epics (Lawrence of Arabia), and then to sci-fi epics (Star Wars). By the early nineties, CGI technology allowed for a blockbuster on a larger scale—unimaginable disasters that jolted their audiences with monsters and explosions that looked more and more “real”. Jurassic Park (1993) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), to name a few.
But with the rise in importance of the mega-blockbuster over the past ten years, I am inclined to say that there is a certain type of spectacle that the globalized American public prefers to see again and again. This type of film is operatic and they share the same striking intensities, so that if you took a machine and just measured the tempo of these films, you’d find remarkable similarities between Dark Knight, Twin Towers, Spiderman and any other schlock blockbuster coming out of Hollywood right now. They all feel the same, maybe in the same way that all of Godard’s movies from a certain period of the sixties share a rhythm, or how all of David Lynch’s films share a style, tone and rhythm. The difference of course is that Godard and Lynch are director auteurs, whereas the movie directors who made the aforementioned blockbusters are all virtually interchangeable, with little identifiable or formal interests at all.
Maybe what young cinephiles and serious filmmakers should study is the mass audience desire for the shock and fears and thrills of blockbuster films. To be close to disaster—and not affected by it—to be cathartically moved or thrilled by it—seems to be a collective desire amongst audiences worldwide. Audiences want “shock and awe”, but is it at a lobotomizing expense? Or is the “shock and awe” of blockbuster films an important communal sensation for our society?
And how do these films shape our sense of global disaster (Twin Towers) and mass violence (Dark Knight)? It might be noted that it’s not precisely what happens in these movies or the protagonists and antagonists involved, but the way it happens, the tone. Just like on the news when we see horrific events, but don’t pay attention to the sanctimonious tone of the report, or how the news is presented and framed for us as it shapes a reality.
Film anthropologists, is there a rise in ticket sales for these box-office blockbusters of the post-9/11 era?
Is there a cultural fantasy for epic disaster?
Is there a lingering dream of American communal solidarity? In the way in which the good rally together to defeat the bad in these films? Aren’t Americans just always hoping for that type of unity which began the country?
Maybe we just have a glossy vision of violence and disaster, which is not only cathartic and fun in a demented way, but (paradoxically) not entirely desensitizing or unhealthy. Disaster epics merely confirm the attitudes of the country. Pop culture gives us the thrill of jouissance (pleasure, and any stimulation, which can be too much to bear); of violence and disaster without violence or disaster (as theorist Slavoj Zizek might say, it’s “decaf coffee”). People go to blockbusters to escape, to be thrilled, to “experience” a spectacle together. The blockbuster ritual binds Americans, at the same time it’s the source of their problems. The unified wish presented in American blockbusters is the wish that we will fight evil together.
I tend to think that serious young filmmakers and cineastes should take note of the wild success, popularity and tones of the blockbuster films. We should train ourselves to become anthropologists of the image, and anthropologists of entertainment. The fantasies of American culture are contained in their good/bad Manichean battles (perfectly typified by the recent revival of comic book blockbusters), their Dolby Surround Sound Boeing 707 effects (when will wind and air blasts be part of the cinematic experience?), the hundreds of bodies careening across the screen from apocalyptic mega-explosions. But might it not just be a way to work through the wish for American solidarity? And perhaps the blockbuster is moreover an artificial jouissance, a thrill that never becomes too much to bear, a disaster that is manageable and where “good” will win in the end; a simulation of the reductionist Republican vision of the ongoing Iraq War.
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