“Passionate Detachment”

UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title "Passionate Detachment": Technologies of Vision and Violence in American Cinema, 1967 - 1974 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1kr03667 Author Rust, Amy Leigh Publication Date 2010 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California ―Passionate Detachment‖: Technologies of Vision and Violence in American Cinema, 1967 - 1974 By Amy Leigh Rust A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric and the Designated Emphasis in Film Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Linda Williams, Chair Professor Carol J. Clover Professor Martin Jay Spring 2010 ―Passionate Detachment‖: Technologies of Vision and Violence in American Cinema, 1967 - 1974 © 2010 by Amy Leigh Rust Abstract ―Passionate Detachment‖: Technologies of Vision and Violence in American Cinema, 1967 – 1974 by Amy Leigh Rust Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric and the Designated Emphasis in Film Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Linda Williams, Chair My dissertation explores the emergence of graphic, corporeal violence in American films of the late 1960s and early 1970s in order to ground an approach for seeing cinematic brutality today. In particular, I turn to three technologies—multiple-speed montage, squibs and artificial blood, and freeze frames—that make possible the iterative, explicit, and protracted spectacles of violence for which Hollywood filmmaking after the Production Code is known. Doing so, I move the form and logic of screen violence to the center of my investigation. An evident orientation, perhaps, but one surprisingly overlooked by the leading literature, which frequently appeals to narrative structure or authorial intent to lend significance to what it otherwise deems senseless, sadistic excesses. Refuting these claims, my project uncovers the unremarked logics and complex pleasures that inhere in the formal construction of violence itself. More than mere tools, I argue, the aforementioned technologies also function as figures that speak to the era‘s broader preoccupation with demonstrative violence. This is the age of Civil Rights, Vietnam, and Watergate, after all, events that stoked public distrust for perceptible appearances and found Americans across the political spectrum demanding, however, paradoxically, visual—and increasingly violent—demonstrations of more authentic realities. Multiple-speed montage, squibs and artificial blood, and freeze frames crystallize this passion, leaning on cinema‘s indexical capacity for documentation to upend everyday visibility with evidentiary force. As figures, these technologies not only give shape to fantasies of authenticity that characterize this moment, but also permit one to trace the violent political blind spots that unwittingly obstruct these visions. For this reason, I contend, my approach to multiple-speed montage, squibs and artificial blood, and freeze frames affords a heretofore unacknowledged critical position. Marked by what I call ―passionate detachment,‖ this position appreciates the fervor for disclosure that animates these visions of violence at the same time that it recognizes the frequently gendered and racialized relations of power from which their promises of authenticity derive. In all, the project unites cinematic and sociocultural histories of film violence to rethink both conventional accounts of cinematic indexicality and the place of sadism in theories of spectatorial pleasure. 1 For Scott i Table of Contents Chapter 1: 1 The Logic of Film Violence or, Figuring the ―Sense‖ in Sensation Chapter 2: 16 A Parallax View: The Violent Synchrony of Multiple-Speed Montage Chapter 3: 43 Violence Incarnate: Squibs, Artificial Blood, and Wounds That Speak Chapter 4: 65 Hitting the ―Vérité Jackpot‖: The Ecstatic Profits of Freeze-Framed Violence Epilogue: 90 ―Passionate Detachment‖ References 94 Bibliography 117 ii Acknowledgments Thank you to my dissertation committee and faculty readers, Linda Williams, Carol J. Clover, Martin Jay, and Kaja Silverman; my parents, Robert and Jeanne Rust; siblings, Anne Rust and Paul Rust; and extended family, Alexis Madsen, Frank and Lisa Ferguson, and Lauren, Jeff, and Aiden Wilhite. Thanks, too, to friends and colleagues, Jonathan Haynes, Erica Levin, Irene Chien, and Norman Gendelman. Special thanks to my partner in work and life, Scott Ferguson, who supported me when things were difficult as much as when they were easy. And finally, thank you to my dear boy, Elias, who only helped—and never hindered—my achievement of this goal. iii Chapter 1 The Logic of Film Violence or, Figuring the ―Sense‖ in Sensation The movie is 126 minutes long, and I would guess that at least 100 of those minutes, maybe more, are concerned specifically and graphically with the details of … torture and death. … This is the most violent film I have ever seen.—Roger Ebert on The Passion of the Christ (2004), Chicago Sun-Times, February 24, 2004 But then comes the carnage, full tilt and with no holds barred, filmed in gory slow motion—just like Bonnie and Clyde—that records every agonizing moment. … [This film] must surely contain the bloodiest battle ever recorded on film.—Jeanne Miller on The Wild Bunch (1969), San Francisco Examiner, June 26, 1969 As Roger Ebert attests, Mel Gibson‘s The Passion of the Christ (2004) recently earned a place of privilege in the history of cinematic brutality, inspiring fervid statements about ―film violence‖ in the twenty-first century.1 Foremost among these was the notion that Passion permitted spectators to see more in the way of corporeal brutality than did other films. ―Then comes the Crucifixion,‖ writes The New Yorker‘s David Denby, ―dramatized with a curious fixation on the technical details—an arm pulled out of its socket, huge nails hammered into hands.‖2 Adds A. O. Scott at The New York Times: ―By rubbing our faces in the grisly reality of Jesus‘ death and fixing our eyes on every welt and gash on his body, this film means to make literal an event that … tends to be thought about somewhat abstractly.‖3 Here, and in other assessments of Passion, ―seeing more‖ lies at the intersection of three mutually reinforcing tendencies: multiplication, explicitness, and duration. At issue, in other words, are the iterative possibilities of montage (Scott‘s ―every welt and gash‖); graphic special effects (what J. Hoberman calls ―filigreed and caramelized blood‖4); and protracted images of torture and pain (The scourging, writes Newsweek, ―goes on endlessly.‖5) [Figure 1]. For those who find it objectionable, this ―more‖ represents an unmanageable and twofold ―excess.‖ Not only do spectators see too many images of violence, but the graphic quality of these views means that they also see too much. Of course, as Jeanne Miller indicates, these tendencies—what one might call the visual code of contemporary cinematic brutality——are indebted to a ―seeing more‖ that goes back to Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969), and the circumstances of another code‘s, the Production Code‘s, demise [Figure 2]. Before its reduction to a set of ten general guidelines in 1966, or its total conversion to a G-M-R-X rating system in 1968, the Production Code sought to restrict images of what its administrators called ―brutality and possible gruesomeness‖—images that foregrounded the graphic, corporeal effects of physical violence. Hence the clichés of ―classical‖ Hollywood violence: shadow-play shootings, clutch-and-fall deaths, strategic cutaways, and symbolic environmental damage.6 With the Code‘s fall in the midst of war, political assassinations, and social unrest, as well as film industry recession, corporate conglomeration, and the solicitation of a freshly conceived ―youth market,‖ a new philosophy of visibility emerged, one that, for many critics, spectators, and cultural watchdogs, precipitated another ―fall‖ into the ―too many‖ and ―too much‖ of today‘s purportedly unredeemable ―ultraviolence.‖7 In fact, as scholars Stephen Prince, J. David Slocum, and Martin Baker have argued, ―violence‖—whether in society or on the screen—only arose as a ―thing-in-itself‖ at this historical moment.8 Before the 1960s, filmmakers, censors, and policymakers spoke of brutal acts and behaviors, but not violence per 1 Figure 1: ―Seeing more‖ violence: The Passion of the Christ (Icon Productions, 2004) Figure 2: The Wild Bunch (Warner Brothers / Seven Arts, 1969) 2 se. By 1968, however, Lyndon B. Johnson had established the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, before which Jack Valenti, then president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), defended Hollywood‘s increasingly graphic depictions of brutality against charges of ―excess.‖9 In the meantime, another set of images from 2004—that of Iraqi prisoners tortured by American troops at Abu Ghraib—exhibited a conception of visibility and violence not uncommon to the late 1960s and 1970s, when images of war and civil unrest helped establish the conventions of ―authentic‖ revelation for fiction and non-fiction alike.10 Consider Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler, 1968), a ―fiction‖ set in the streets of 1968 Chicago, or Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970), which, according to the filmmaker, models its climactic massacre after images of American atrocities at My Lai.11 Such films disclose

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