I certify that the thesis entitled

Twisted Things: Playing with Time submitted for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy is the result of my own work and that where reference is made to the work of others, due acknowledgment is given.

I also certify that any material in the thesis which has been accepted for a degree or diploma by any university or institution is identified in the text.

ʹI certify that I am the student named below and that the information provided in the form is correctʹ

Full Name: Virginia Stewart Murray

Signed ...... …….…

Date ...... …….……

Twisted Things: Playing with Time

by

Virginia Stewart Murray (BA Dip Ed)

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Deakin University

January 2012

Table of Contents

Volume One Creative Component Introduction to Thesis 1 Preface: Neither Fish nor Fowl 3 TWISTED THINGS 7

Volume Two Exegesis Playing with time: an exegesis in three chapters Introduction 127 Chapter One: On the Beach: A Contextual History Part 1 141 Part II 158 Chapter 2: Glamour and Celebrity: 1950s Australian Style 172 Chapter 3: The Role of the Unconscious: Playing with Time in Film 236 Camera Consciousness and Reterritorialisation in 12 Monkeys 249 Sheets of the Past in Jacob’s Ladder 257 Incompossible Worlds in Donnie Darko 264 Suddenly Thirty and the Peaks of the Present 269 Conclusion 280 Works Cited 287 Filmography 299 Works Consulted 308

Exegesis

Playing with Time

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INTRODUCTION

Any time is completely present

Only present exists

The Stoic theory of time (Gioli)

Whether if soul (mind) did not exist, time would exist or not, is a

question that may be fairly asked; for if there cannot be someone to

count there cannot be anything that can be counted…

Aristotle Physics, chapter 14

In the early part of my research for this thesis I travelled to Canadian Bay, about an hour from Melbourne, to see the location of the beach sequences of Stanley Kramer’s 1959 film On the Beach. I had been to the State Library of Victoria in search of ‘traces’ of the film and had seen slides taken during the filming showing Ava Gardner in a white bathrobe, ‘stand‐ins‘ on racing yachts, and a shirtless film crew wrestling an arc light through what must have been blistering sand. And in every background shot and at the edge of every frame spectators jostled for a better view. It was winter now and I wasn’t expecting any crowds but the thick white fog that

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reduced visibility to a foot at most created a different landscape which was unsettling and yet at the same time thrilling. Surrounded by whiteness I was completely lost and I realised that when I lost my physical bearings I lost my sense of time too. I had no idea how long I’d been there.

Like my experience at Canadian Bay, much of my research has been without a reality checkpoint and perhaps because of this it’s been a search for connections that lead to other connections rather than a destination. As

I felt my way first through my screenplay and then the exegesis, I found myself increasingly concerned with time and how we might show the movements between the past, the present and even the future through cinema. I found it curious how my reading on the philosophy and theory of time found its way between my creative and theoretical work in a continual back and forth process.

We all feel we know time, but we agree we cannot explain it. The measurement of physical time has always preoccupied mathematicians, while philosophers and artists have been more inclined to consider psychological time. St Augustine in the 4th century AD identified three times: ‘… a present of things past, a present of things present and a present of things future. The present of things past is memory, the present of things present is sight and the present of things future, expectation’

(Augustine, Humanistic texts, accessed 5/12/11,

).

Augustine concluded that the existence of time depended on an intelligent being who was able to comprehend past, present and future,

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thus paving the way for Kant. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant suggests our minds structure our perceptions a priori so that we experience time like a mathematical line. He argued that time is a conscious experience and we must already have a sense of time in order to experience this. The predilection of humans to see the world subjectively and reduce the world to measurable quantities is reflected in the way we contemplate time, history and art. The relationship between art and history is particularly relevant to my project, which is a creative exploration of the past employing fictive and non‐fictive elements in a screenplay. My project is a ‘timeslip’ story that alternates between contemporary Melbourne and the Melbourne of 1959. Questions of how to realise time, how history might be appropriated and the relationships between art and history were uppermost in my mind. Further, the relations between history and literary art are not the same as those between history and cinema. Both concerned me, as my creative work is a screenplay that is literary art in the process of becoming cinematic art.

Hayden White’s essay The Historical Text as Literary Artifact was valuable here. It problematised the relationship between history and art in terms of the limitations of subjectivity and a priori knowledge that are relevant to both literary and cinematic art.

White’s essay appeared in 1978 and provides a useful summary of the narrative tradition of history and the problems raised by narrative subjectivity. He begins by questioning the authority of historical narratives as they are ‘verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their

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counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences’

(White, 1978: 82). White, a modernist concerned with form, pointed out that the same historical event could be plotted satirically, comically or tragically depending on the historian’s viewpoint and the type of language used. Further, and in order to make the unfamiliar familiar to the audience, the historical narrative needs to point the reader towards a particular pregeneric plot structure, tragedy or comedy, for instance (1978:

86, 88). This decision rests with the historian, who may or may not be conscious of the language choices he makes to direct his readers in this or that direction. White wanted to find ways of indicating to the audience

‘what is fictive in all putatively realistic representations of the world and what is realistic in all manifestly fictive ones’ (1978: 88). Initially he suggests encoding and recoding historical narratives modally (say as comedy, or tragedy) to reveal what the ‘true nature of events consists of’, but concludes that this tells us more about the relationships between modalities than the events themselves (1978: 97).

One of White’s final arguments suggests that if history were to draw

‘nearer to its origins in literary sensibility we should be able to identify the ideological, because it is the fictive element in our own discourse’ (1978:

99). The ‘we’ here refers to historians but surely the readership need also to be aware of the fictive nature of historiography. White’s suggestion of recasting the same historical elements in different modes would be illuminating but is unlikely to be realised in a written text that would reach any kind of large‐scale audience. White’s thesis on the fictive elements of historical narrative is, however, powerfully realised

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cinematically in Oliver Stone’s film Nixon (1995). In his analysis of Nixon,

Marc Singer argues that one of the purposes of the film is to reveal how mutable historical narrative is. The character of Nixon, always conscious of how he will be viewed by the press and history, reshapes and represses historical narrative to serve Nixon himself. Stone goes further than White by fabricating real events, and, by portraying the Kennedy assassination as a theatrical spectacle, hints ‘that history as well as narrative events can be plotted’ (Singer, 2008:191). Throughout the film, Stone uses a number of techniques to alert viewers that they are watching a ‘historical fabrication’.

Well‐known actors are cast in cameo roles to remind audiences they are watching Hollywood celebrities rather than historical figures. Characters engaged in emplotment are instantly recognisable referents to other movies and television shows such as Dr Strangelove and Dallas. Seen this way any audience would become suspicious of accepting historical narrative at face value, which is surely one of White’s aims.

Returning to White’s essay, it is striking to note the effects of postmodernism now on White’s arguments. White never questions the overall explanatory power of narrative history. He does suggest such narratives may be told in different modes, but all within the phenomenological sense of ‘lived’ human sense and experience of

Western civilisation. What might White have made of Foucault’s arguments that the idea of the narrator (i.e. humanity) may vary, as does the way the narrated time and space is experienced? (Foucault, 1972: 187)

White’s acceptance of humanity as the narrator of history and the existence of cultural a priori knowledge, such as pregeneric plot structures

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and time as linear progression that explanatory historical narrative requires is not questioned by him. White writes:

We experience the ‘fictionalisation’ of history as an ‘explanation’ for the

same reason we experience great fiction as an illumination of a world that

we inhabit along with the author. In both we recognise the forms by which

consciousness both constitutes and colonises the world it seeks to inhabit

comfortably (1978: 99).

The assumption that everything that can be experienced is known already is clear, and further it appears that the purpose of fiction and perhaps even art is to extend the past into the present, to make the passage from past to present continuous and comfortable.

Nietzsche is relevant here. In ‘On The Uses And Disadvantages Of

History For Life’ (1874), Nietzsche discusses the ‘antiquarian’ aspect of history which belongs to he who, ‘preserves and reveres… By tending with care that which has existed from old, he wants to preserve for those who shall come into existence after him the conditions under which he himself came into existence’ (1983: 72‐3). If our explanation of history must conform to forms that we already know and representations already present, we are using the past to justify the present as a continuous whole.

But the past doesn’t have to be read this way.

Nietzsche suggests a third aspect of the past—the critical: ‘If he is to live, man must possess and from time to time employ the strength to break up and dissolve a part of the past’ (1983: 76). One way of doing this is to see the past not as part of the continuous present but as an opportunity to allow the new through difference. Another concept of

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Nietzsche’s, the idea of the ‘eternal return’1 is relevant here, although not at first reading. As a form of time the eternal return is often read as the return of the identical, but the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze argues that as only what is different will return, ‘difference inhabits repetition’

(1994: 76). Thus, what is returning is not what existed before, ‘the subject of the eternal return is not the same but the different, not the similar but the dissimilar, not the one but the many … (1994: 126). Further, if only what is different returns then eternal return operates selectively which is an affirmation of difference (1994: 126).

If we consider events such as art as an expression of the power of life to differ, then by reconsidering them we allow the past to create time again. Deleuze argues that references to the process of art in an artwork, for example the film within the film, are not self‐referential dead ends that show the exhaustion of art; on the contrary they show the potential of life

1 Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return is laid out as Zarathustra’s central teaching in the penultimate aphorism of Gay Science (1882) and repeated as a prelude to his next text, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883‐5). The ‘what if’ indicates that Nietzsche regarded it as hypothetical speculation only. The concept is as follows: The greatest weight—What if, some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ʹYou are a god and never have I heard anything more divineʹ (Nietzsche, 1882: 341).

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through art to be more than itself (1989: 76‐7). In this way art reveals the virtual power of the false, that is by presenting the film within the film we release the other infinite future possibilities of what is not given: ‘To the extent that the pure event is each time imprisoned forever in its actualisation, counter‐actualisation liberates it, always for other times’

(1990: 161). What art does is encapsulate within time and space the singularities that have the power to be perceived within chronological time. These singularities have the power to be there for all time, that is they can be actualised again and again and so return eternally.

Chronological time has a place here too. Deleuze saw expressions of artistic style as emerging from chance connections and events, but history is not a random sequence of forms. Instead it is a particular duration that opens paths for change that may or may not be acted on. There are always chances that are not taken and we can return to past events and imagine them differently. The future and progress are not steps toward a transcendental ideal, but rather struggles to achieve self‐differentiation. ‘If there is progress in art it is because art can live only by creating new precepts and affects as so many detours, returns, dividing lines, changes of level and scale’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 193). Progress and futurity can be seen as the capacity for a technique to achieve maximum difference. Marc Singer’s article, referred to above in the discussion of

Nixon, provides a good example of the progression of art. One of the purposes of Singer’s article, ‘Making History: Cinematic time and the

Powers of Retrospection in Citizen Kane and Nixon’ is to compare how

Citizen Kane (1941) and Nixon (1995) made some fifty years apart treat

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time. Both films disorder and rearrange their timelines to reveal the psychological time experienced by their protagonists but through different models. Singer argues that Citizen Kane is essentially an experience of time in the modernist era. The characters seek to regain the past through nostalgia and the possession of fetishised objects such as the sled

‘Rosebud’. Imprisoned as they are within the chronological structure of the narrative, they can never reach the past they seek, and, as the film reveals, the idyllic past never existed anyway. At the end of Citizen Kane the audience are invited to retrospectively assess the two narratives presented in the film—Thompson’s investigation and Kane’s biography. It is as if, writes Laura Mulvey, reminiscent of White:

The film’s “active spectator” is forced to look back at and re‐examine

events as though the film were suggesting that history itself should be

constantly subjected to re‐examination. Not only should history never be

accepted at face, or story, value but also, from a political perspective, it

should be detached from personality and point of view and be

rediscovered, as it were, in its materiality and through the decoding of its

symptoms (1995, 286‐7 in Singer, 2008: 194).

Thompson’s investigative frame provides the audience with a stable present from which to keep its footing, but no such reality checkpoint is provided in Nixon. That film provides no stable temporality and operates through the free‐association of Richard Nixon’s memory that dispenses with any organised narrative. As Singer points out, far from being irretrievable as in Citizen Kane, the past in Nixon is too present in the present (2008:195). Nixon suggests the past can be reshaped retroactively through memory and narrative (Singer, 2008: 178). Nixon is decidedly

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postmodern and my point here is that the postmodern features of Nixon— its malleable time and narrative—are only possible because we are already familiar with the modernist time forms of Citizen Kane.

My creative work has more in common with the formalist structure of Citizen Kane than the postmodernist structure of Nixon. Like Citizen

Kane, I use an investigative frame in the chronological present to explore the past to uncover a past murder and a lost identity. In brief, the plot of my screenplay is as follows: when Nora’s estranged father, Harry, is discovered unconscious in his home Nora starts to investigate his past.

Her father, a cinematographer, may have had an affair with an unknown actress who disappeared during the filming of Stanley Kramer’s On the

Beach in Melbourne in 1959. Nora’s identity begins to unravel when she discovers her birth certificate has been forged. Comatose after a hit and run accident, when she ‘comes to’ she finds herself in 1959 on the set of On the Beach as an actress, the same actress who will be murdered. In the present, Nora’s partner Lucy works to communicate with Nora and continue the investigation into Nora’s father. In the past, Nora struggles to survive and find out who she was. The presence of the film On the Beach within the film of my screenplay serves two purposes. On the one hand it anchors my story in 1959 Melbourne, and on the other it reminds the audience of the ‘power of the false’—that this is but one of the infinite variations the past may take when it returns.

As I have discovered through my research, the creative possibilities offered by the past are inexhaustible. I began by attempting to appropriate

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1959 through learning about that era of Australian history, and, like

Thompson in Citizen Kane quickly found there was no access to the past.

No matter how much information I collected, the past remained elusive.

However, I realised that connections to the past could be made not by trying to appropriate it, but instead by creating differences. The 1959 I have created is essentially different from the creation of anyone else’s 1959 but there is no single authentic creation of the past. While I provide a stable present in Lucy’s world of contemporary Melbourne and the hit and run accident as a ‘launching pad’ into the past is clear, Nora’s present in the past of 1959 should be unstable. I might in subsequent production drafts of the screenplay undermine my 1959 even further. In this way I would not feel tied to any preconception of 1959 and would make it clear to the audience that the rules of cause and effect may not hold here.

Even though my 1959 does not aim to be an explanatory extension of the past, I realised I still needed to know about aspects of Australia in 1959 that would help me create a sense of the difference between 1959 and now.

Therefore, in the process of writing the script there were research questions to be answered. In deciding to set Nora as a character in a fictional world that commented on crucial political and psychological aspects of living in the 1950s, my research questions were:

1. What were the social, political and psychological forces in the fifties

that led to the construction of the film, On the Beach?

2. Given the impact the making of the film had on Melbourne in terms

of the presence of famous film stars, how might this event have

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affected Australian men and women’s representation and

understanding of themselves as sexual beings within the context of

glamour?

3. How can time, in all its manifestations, whether chronologically

viewed or the subject of aesthetics and philosophy, be utilised in

art, in particular cinematic art, when interpreting and representing

the vagaries of the human condition?

Chapter One of this exegesis is presented in two parts. Part I gives the historical context of the advent of the filming of On the Beach (1959). Given that the subject matter of the film dealt with the outcome of a nuclear war, this section examines the social environment of the postwar period when people lived with this threat. It therefore investigates the discursive nature of the film and why its message of doom was moralistic in tone, drawing attention to the self‐destructive foolishness of war. This section also investigates the state of filmmaking in Australia at the time. It shows how,

‘Hollywood coming to Melbourne’ influenced Australian film and why the making of the film in Australia was significant aesthetically, economically and politically in the history of Australian film.

Part II explicates the nature of my artistic experiment. I was to write a fictional script with documentary allure; it would appear factual because it was based on a known historical event—Stanley Kramer’s movie, On the

Beach—and I would be inferring that my script was based on ‘facts’ that

On the Beach had not represented. In going back in time I could draw from

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the lessons of hindsight and this itself would add to its apparent

‘authenticity’ and difference.

Part II discusses various techniques I used in appropriating the flavour of a past era. It also examines the way I managed the time sequences as the plot moves back and forth between the present and the past. This section goes on to discuss other influences on my work in relation to time jumps and the aesthetic use of time symbolically.

Chapter Two responds to research question two and follows the

‘adventures’ of Ava Gardner during her time in Melbourne for the shooting of On the Beach. This was the beginning in Australia of celebrity photojournalism at close quarters. In many ways it not only tested the behaviours and code of conduct of the press, it also gave Melbourne women an opportunity of assessing their own personas in relation to

‘presentation of self’. In this chapter, I take a close look at the relationship between the film and the press in Melbourne.

Chapter Three takes the concept of ‘time’ to a different ‘plane’.

Whereas Chapters One and Two investigate historical and sociological contexts, Chapter Three is more interested in the psychological and aesthetic use of time. In order to understand ‘playing’ with the time concept aesthetically, I investigated the way selected films invoked this technique. I selected examples from different genres to represent a full spectrum of opportunities afforded to artists when they seek to utilise

‘time’ outside its chronological and positivist constraints.

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It is anticipated that a reader of both the screenplay and the exegesis will see connections between the two but will also experience the extent to which one is independent from the other, seeking as they do quite different forms of expression.

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Chapter One

‘On the Beach’: a contextual history Part I

Making ‘On the Beach’ Nevil Shute’s book, On the Beach and Stanley Kramer’s subsequent movie came out of the nuclear anxiety existent post‐World War II and throughout the 1950s. Immediately after World War II, Cold War tensions were such that people expected another world war. In Australia in the late‐forties, ‘at least one in three people believed peace could not last beyond 1953, and two in three believed it could not last beyond 1958’

(Murphy, 2000: 92).

By 1950 the obsessive fears of nuclear annihilation after Nagasaki and Hiroshima gave way to an uneasy acceptance that nuclear weapons were necessary to retain supremacy over the Soviet Union. Fear over nuclear fallout increased after the Americans and the Soviets started atmospheric nuclear testing in 1952 followed by the American test series of 1954. American public alarm increased in 1955 when radioactive rain fell in Chicago, Strontium‐90 showed up in commercially sold milk, and scientists warned of leukaemia, bone cancer and genetic mutations (Boyer,

1994: 352). Nuclear themes were in the forefront in American popular culture. The medical, psychological and ethical implications of nuclear

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arms and warfare were explored in fiction and non‐fiction articles. Movies such as the science fiction, Them! (1954) about mutant ants imagined scenarios of genetic damage caused by radiation.

At the end of the fifties the Soviet Union appeared to have the upper hand in weapons development with its missile programs and success in space with Sputnik. Castro’s victory in Cuba in 1959 brought communism too close for comfort and the Soviets downed an American U‐2 spy plane ending any possible progress of the Paris peace talks in the spring of 1960.

With the building of the Berlin Wall by the Soviet Union in 1961,

American opinions on nuclear power polarised and there were calls for a more aggressive stance towards the Soviet Union by both the Republicans and Democrats in the United States. President Kennedy expanded conventional and nuclear weapons, increased American Cold War rhetoric thus maintaining the illusion that the United States could conduct an H‐ bomb war and protect its citizens in homemade bomb shelters.

This more aggressive stance was countered by the ‘Armageddon attitude,’ which sought to present the reality of nuclear war for human life. After such a war there would be either no survivors or if there were, there would be no life worth living. Nevil Shute’s novel, On the Beach and

Kramer’s movie adaptation, were particularly responsible for ‘defining and dramatising this sober, more realistic view of nuclear aggression’

(Dyson, 1984: 195). Dyson makes the point that while almost all the technical details in On the Beach are inaccurate, the human message that

‘nuclear war means death’ (Dyson, 1984: 34) came through clearly and

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was listened to. The emergence of a war movement and the grasping of the blunt realities of nuclear war jolted people out of their postwar atomic apathy and led to a more critical, less apathetic society (Hienriksen,

1997:197).

Shute had begun writing On the Beach in 1956 with the purpose of alerting the general population to the dangers of nuclear brinkmanship.

Kramer was just as concerned by the nuclear hysteria:

The tension between the United States and the Soviet Union was so

constant and ominous that many people expected nuclear war to begin at

any moment and end within half an hour, the whole world and everything

in it either dead or doomed to die

(Stanley Kramer correspondence with Nevil Shute Norway 14/7/58 in

Davey, 2005: 4).

Kramer bought the screen rights to the novel in 1957, before publication, convinced this was a story that needed telling. The novel’s subsequent bestseller status must have justified his decision and convinced him that an adaptation could reach and persuade a worldwide audience of the catastrophe of nuclear war.

On the Beach depicts the gradual end of human life in the Southern hemisphere, specifically Melbourne, Australia, as a deadly atomic cloud drifts southward after a nuclear war in the Northern hemisphere. As the war has all destroyed human life in the Northern hemisphere, the survivors can only speculate on the escalation of hostilities that led to the war. Life is maintained as normally as possible. Privations such as lack of

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petrol and power are endured with dignity and stoicism as the characters grapple with the meaningless and indiscriminate nature of nuclear death.

As the end approaches, some characters reveal small acts of desperation, but the general population accepts its imminent death without fuss, forming orderly lines to receive their government issued poison pills.

Nevil Shute took his title from a T.S. Eliot poem, The Hollow Men:

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river…

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but with a whimper (1957: Title page of On the Beach).

Both the novel and Kramer’s film are didactic. Kramer’s film ends in the empty streets of Melbourne with a ragged Salvation Army banner carrying the message, ‘Brother, there’s still time’. Shute’s novel ends with a discussion between the young married couple whose final weeks we have followed. The husband responds to his wife’s question, ‘Couldn’t anyone have stopped it?’:

I don’t know… some kinds of silliness you just can’t stop… I mean, if a

couple of hundred million people all decide that their national honour

requires them to drop cobalt bombs upon their neighbour, well, there’s not

much that you or I can do about it. The only possible hope would have

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been to educate them out of their silliness (Shute, 1957: 301 in Hienriksen,

1997:195).

By 1957 Stanley Kramer had a reputation in Hollywood as a message director/producer. Kramer had been an independent producer since 1947.

He was able to take advantage of the postwar break up of the distribution and exhibition monopoly of the major studios with a number of modest but successful social realist feature films that dealt with contemporary issues and contained good performances. Such films include Champion

(1949) about a washed‐up boxer launched Kirk Douglas’s career; Home of the Brave (1949) based on a play about anti‐Semitism but adapted as a film on race relations; and The Men (1950) about paraplegic war veterans featuring Marlon Brando. During the fifties he continued to choose films that examined issues of social justice (High Noon, 1952, The Defiant Ones,

1958). He also often chose adaptations: Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), Death of a

Salesman (1951), Member of the Wedding (1952), and The Caine Mutiny (1954).

Although one of the later criticisms of On the Beach was that it could have been filmed anywhere, Kramer was keen to make the film on location:

‘…when a film has as its background a certain place in the world, going to the source somehow gives you greater authenticity, a greater emotional impact, even in the making of the film …’ (radio interview for promotion of On the Beach, 1959 in Davey, 2005: 5).

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The Film World in Australia: 1950s Thirteen feature films were made in Australia between 1950 and 1960, with most made after 1956 by overseas companies. This group (which included Kangaroo 1952, Long John Silver 1954, A Town Like Alice 1956,

Robbery Under Arms 1957, The Shiralee 1957, On the Beach 1959, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll 1959, The Sundowners 1960) were known as

‘Hollywood in Australia’, although over half were British (Shirley and

Adams, 1983: 204). During the seventies and eighties, as the cinematic expression of national identity became important, the ‘Hollywood in

Australia’ films were generally condemned in Australian cinema culture for being ‘culturally inauthentic’ (O’Regan: 1987, accessed 5/4/11) and exploiting Australian exotica for international audiences. I suggest this is a simplistic judgement that ignores the production and distribution conditions faced by the local industry at the time.

The rise in the international exploitation of Australian exotica was generally attributed to several factors, among them the worldwide influence of the documentary movement and specifically the quasi‐ documentary style of The Overlanders (1946) made by Ealing Studios, which was an international critical and commercial success (O’Regan: 1987

accessed

5/4/11). Australian producer Lee Robinson was also influential in bringing

Australian locations to international attention. Producers like Robinson had to rely on international finance and audiences when, after the war, opportunities for Australian feature film production and distribution dried up. British company Ealing withdrew from Australian production

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and American Greater Union refused to invest after their merger with the

British company Rank. With no local distribution, local producers were locked out of the market.

Unable to afford ‘name’ actors, writers or directors, Robinson’s career owed much to minimising set construction and taking advantage of the international market for Australian exotica. He pitched his product to the international B‐grade market. Robinson’s strategy for international success was to use genres familiar to international audiences to offset the unfamiliar Australian backgrounds and accents. Robinson and actor Chips

Rafferty formed Southern International and made several features that featured Australian locations (King of the Coral Sea 1954, Walk into Paradise

1956, Dust in the Sun 1958, The Stowaway 1958, The Restless and the Damned

1959) before being forced into liquidation when television dried up the B‐ grade cinema market (Shirley and Adams, 1983: 203).

One of the contemporary assumptions about the 1950s is that the cultural philistinism that has defined it was a product of the conservative

Menzies government. Certain anti‐inflationary measures, such as the 1951 capital issues prevention, which stopped pubic companies forming for specific purposes where capital exceeded 10,000 pounds, were detrimental to local film production, but there is no evidence to suggest that the government deliberately set out to eradicate the film industry. Instead, it appears that the Menzies government saw other ways of articulating

Australian identity and simply neglected the local film industry. Postwar, the local film industry suffered as Australia’s cultural, business, trade and

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foreign policy focus swung from the United Kingdom towards the United

States. The most profitable parts of the Australian film industry— distribution and exhibition—were American‐owned. From 1948, the

Australian Federal government allowed American distributors to return

70% of their profits to the U.S. after having already reduced their income tax from 30% to 10% in 1942 (Shirley and Adams, 1983: 186).

Coming on the back of high wartime cinema attendances, the 1948 move meant Australia provided a good market for American companies.

The president of the Motion Picture Association of America publicly expressed his gratification: ‘American companies have been able to realise from this market a steady flow of earnings, thanks to the cooperative spirit of Australian government officials and their informed interest in

American film distribution problems’ (Sydney Morning Herald 18/6/53 in

Shirley and Adams, 1983: 186). Director Cecil Holmes wrote what this meant for local producers in 1953:

As American capital has extended and strengthened its control of the

Australian film business, so have opportunities for production dwindled.

After all, why should big organisations like Hoyts and Greater Union,

whose connections extend into productions in other countries, bother with Australian films? (Cecil Holmes in Shirley and Adams, 1983: 186).

A few statistics from 1954 show the situation for Australian features: of 25 cinemas in central Sydney, two were independent, two were owned by

MGM and the rest were owned by Hoyts and Greater Union

(Cecil Holmes in Shirley and Adams: 186); of the 376 feature films imported in the 1952‐3 financial year, only three were local features and

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only one of these—The Phantom Stockman, a Rafferty‐Robinson production was released (Shirley and Adams, 1983: 186).

Unsurprisingly, given the economic climate, much of the local creative film talent left Australia during the fifties. The ‘Hollywood in

Australia’ films did have benefits of keeping actors and technicians at work and also in articulating the questions of Australian content and identity and the nature of film as an art form that occupied the resurgent

Australian film industry in the 1970s. Of the thirteen ‘Hollywood’ features shot in Australia during the fifties, independent producers shooting mainly on location made eight of them, including On the Beach. The eventual demise of the studio system had given rise to independent production companies, which, like Robinson’s Southern International, relied on location shooting rather than studio sets. Stanley Kramer’s

Lomitas Productions was in a better position than most; backed by United

Artists, he shot on location where possible but didn’t have to compromise production values.

Pre‐production Jitters Keen as Stanley Kramer was on location shooting, the limited production facilities and the logistics of shooting On the Beach in Australia were such that he initially planned to shoot the film in California and Hollywood

(Davey, 2005: 5). Yet, before making his final decision in 1958, Kramer sent his production manager, Clem Beauchamp, and his production designer,

Rudy Sternad, to Melbourne to explore the feasibility of shooting on

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location. They were surprised to be met at the airport by the Victorian

Promotion Committee.

The Victorian Promotion Committee was a state‐financed body created to source international investment opportunities with the potential to benefit the Australian state of Victoria. Established in the early fifties with the 1956 Olympic games in mind, the Committee’s United States offices were alert to Kramer’s purchase of the rights to On the Beach and the potential business and tourism opportunities for Melbourne if the film was made there. The Committee offered the Americans unprecedented co‐ operation. With close ties to the premier’s office, they promised the services of state authorities such as the police, the Harbour Trust, the

Tramways and Victorian Railways. The state government reasoned that the inconvenience and cost to the taxpayer would be outweighed by the millions of dollars the film would inject into the local economy and the global recognition Melbourne would receive. The Department of the Navy also agreed to provide port facilities, an aircraft carrier and even a substitute submarine if necessary (Davey, 2005: 6). Journalist Ted Madden, who was ‘embedded’ with the production during the making of the film and interviewed Kramer’s two heads of department, noted their surprise:

For Rudy and Clem, who had expected a pack of difficulties, all this had a

certain dreamlike quality about it. It was too easy. Any minute they

expected to wake up. The Victorian Promotion Committee even looked

after their office work for them (1959: 35).

Generators and equipment were imported from the United States along with twenty‐five key department heads and technicians. The remaining

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110 technical and production staff—drivers, electricians, grips, camera crews, props, carpenters, stills, caterers—were hired from Melbourne and

Sydney. The biggest problem was viable studio space. Melbourne had no sound studios. A big space that could be converted and was not too far from the city was needed. A solution was found when the Royal

Agricultural Society offered the land and the buildings on the

Showground to the production, and so, went the local joke, the pigs were moved out so the hams could move in.

The Cast and Crowds

Kramer wanted well‐known actors in the lead parts to ensure that the movie and its message would be noticed (Kramer, 1997: 158). A cast of stars probably helped convince United Artists to finance the film—they were convinced its bleak message would sink it at the box office. As well as Ava Gardner, Kramer contracted Gregory Peck and Fred Astaire and two relatively unknown actors, Tony Perkins and Donna Anderson. While the American stars carried the plot line, much of the texture of On the

Beach derived from the crowd scenes and the many cameo parts by local actors. Following an announcement in The Age that On the Beach was to be made in Melbourne, some 5000 hopeful actors contacted the Australian

Casting Agency to audition for speaking parts. Such was the interest that people were willing to pay to be in the film – a hoaxer offered one woman parts for her children for one hundred pounds a week (Davey, 2005: 47).

Kramer used expatriate Americans for the crew of the American

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submarine and Australian stage, radio and television personalities played cameos and featured bit parts. Locals and professional extras were used in crowd scenes though they were sacked instantly if they looked at the camera or were recognised.

The production crew arrived in October 1958, with shooting scheduled to begin in January 1959. Public excitement grew as the

American stars arrived in early January. Flies and ‘millions of bloody people who drove everyone mad’ (Eden in Davey, 2005: 78) surrounded the cast and crew shooting the exterior scenes that January. Actor Keith

Eden continued:

Gardner [was] standing outside the station with all these people crowding

around. She was fed up with the flies, as everybody on the set was, and

waving her hand all over the place she screamed: “Aw, fuck the flies”.

People were stunned and even horrified…’ (Keith Eden in Davey, 2005:

78).

At Canadian Bay, outside the cordoned‐off beach area used for filming, crowds of people stood and watched the proceedings. Even Kramer was struck by the persistence of the crowds:

None of us will soon forget the thousands of bathers who stood in

shoulder‐deep water at Canadian Bay to watch us, and who applauded

our cast after each take. Their enthusiasm was gratifying in this respect if

not in all others, as when thousands of people began crowding forward to

get a closer look at Ava Gardner, they repeatedly moved into camera range

(Stanley Kramer in The Age, 14/3/59 in Davey, 2005: 97).

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Ava Gardner had a clause in her contract that specified her approval of all photographs of herself before release, but this proved unenforceable.

Amateur and professional photographers alike hid in ti‐trees around the beach and in boats off shore to photograph Gardner in a bathing suit. ‘In the end, Kramer’s public relations team threw up their hands in despair saying “take what you like, we can’t stop you”’(Davey, 2005: 93).

The beach scenes, although physically demanding, involved a limited number of extras and organisation. The opposite was true of the city scenes shot in Melbourne’s CBD. The daylight scenes involved about

400 extras walking, on bicycles, horseback and in engineless cars. ‘The

Yanks had plenty of money and I was amazed at how they damaged almost new cars for the props’ (Reg Sharman in Davey, 2005: 196). They were also somewhat careless with their accounting. Some extras went back to the pay table three or four times without detection. Wages for some 400 extras came to $4600 a day (Madden, 1959: 153). Another 100 extras were required for an exterior street scene at Melbourne’s main hospital where the dying citizens were issued their suicide pills:

There were a lot of characters—swaggies, homeless people etc—in and

around Melbourne in those days; they prowled around the place … on this

particular Sunday there was an old toothless man (a Mr Beech) and an old lady hanging around Lonsdale Street and the State Library… Stanley Kramer was quick to recognise the significance of using real life identities

and recruited these two old characters to be in the queue. They were

matched up together and can be seen leaving the queue after receiving

their pills (Nanette Good in Davey, 2005: 133).

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Kramer used the Melbourne CBD for location shooting on four Sundays and after midnight with the help of the police to close intersections.

Shooting on Sundays minimised traffic disruption (and interruption) but allowed maximum spectator exposure. Ted Madden gave an account of the end of one Sunday’s filming in the city:

At the words, ‘It’s a wrap!’ the crowd, which had been patient and docile all day,

went wild. The target was Peck. They came at him from all sides. Good‐natured as

ever, he grinned, signed autographs, politely fought his way to his caravan. It was

hard, at such a moment, to envy him (Madden, 1959: 151) (Figure 1).

Shooting of the film was completed in March 1959 with a big wrap party held at the Showgrounds. The studio was turned into a nightclub for the night complete with dance band and ice sculptures. Each crew member received a souvenir of forty production stills in a leather album with their name embossed in gold. Some of these souvenirs have since been donated to libraries around Victoria. At the end of the night, Kramer spoke of his hopes that the film would make a difference to the nuclear debate (Davey,

2005: 175).

Critical Responses to ‘On the Beach’

On the Beach opened in December 1959 simultaneously in eighteen capital cities, Melbourne included. After seeing the movie, ‘it was nice to get outside and find Melbourne still alive’, although the audience quickly came to accept the portrayal of the city ‘as a symbol of ANYWHERE’

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Figure 1. ‘They came at him from all sides’. Gregory Peck signs autographs during a break in filming the poison pill scene outside the Queen Victoria Hospital, Lonsdale St, Melbourne (Davey, 2005: 150).

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(Colin Bennett, ‘Great Impact of New Film’ in The Age, 18/12/59 in Davey,

2005: 198). Reaction to the film was generally favourable elsewhere in the world. At a midnight press conference in Los Angeles after the screening,

Kramer chaired a twelve‐member panel of international scientists and intellectuals who endorsed the film’s warning of the horrors of nuclear warfare and the importance of nuclear disarmament. Responses in 1959 to

On the Beach tended to be determined by the political leanings of the reviewer. The most common conservative criticism condemned the film’s

‘defeatist attitude,’ claiming ‘it played right into the hands of the Kremlin and the Western defeatists and/or traitors who continually activated for the abolition of the H‐bomb’ (Bosley Crowther, ‘Liable to Fallout—On the

Beach Rouses Ire of Specialists, in New York Times, 17/1/60 in Davey, 2005:

208).

Naturally it’s impossible today to view On the Beach the same way as the 1959 viewer. Nuclear anxiety began to dissipate in 1962 after the

Cuban Missile Crisis when the United States and the Soviet Union pulled back from the nuclear brink, and people were reassured a new way could be found. Then in 1963, nuclear fear disappeared practically when the

United States, Russia and the United Kingdom signed a treaty to ban nuclear atmospheric testing. Nuclear testing continued but it was underground and so out of sight. After 1963, cultural engagement with nuclear issues declined sharply. In 1959, 64% of Americans listed nuclear war as the most urgent issue, by 1964 this was 16% and soon after it ceased to become a survey topic. By the early 1970s it was a dead issue in

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student attitude surveys (Boyer, 1994: 355). A quick survey of 135 user reviews of On the Beach on IMDB (accessed 16/10/11) show the scenario of

On the Beach – how ordinary people might deal with the end of life—still resonates with modern viewers and is still applicable to contemporary issues, such as climate change. Even so, viewed today On the Beach has noticeably dated.

To the contemporary viewer the film can appear didactic and too sanitised, similar to those war movies where no blood is shed1. On the

Beach might be one of those rare films that would be improved by release of a director’s cut. By the time of commercial release, the film was fifty minutes shorter than the first cut and the scenes removed were mostly those showing the chaos and desperation of approaching death. Possibly they were cut because of pressure from United Artists (Server, 2006: 381).

Alan Harkness, the assistant editor on the film had seen the first cut:

At three hours ten it was a great, great movie. What got taken out were

all these little scenes that had humour and drama and ordinary people,

and he left in every scene that repeated the message about the stupidity

of mankind in destroying itself, and in doing so he took out too much

drama and left in too much message. It actually felt longer and slower

at two hours and fifteen minutes than at three hours ten. When I went

to the premiere I was the most disappointed person in the theatre

because I knew what was missing (Server, 2006: 381).

1 See for example: 12 O’clock High (1949), Pork Chop Hill (1959), The Guns of Navarone (1961).

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Part II

Writing the creative work

The knowledge that there was exorcised footage of On the Beach provided wonderful opportunities for me in building the credibility of my own script. My creative work is a fiction that uses a factual subject, the filming of On the Beach in Melbourne, Australia in 1959. I wanted to create what

Roscoe and Hight in Faking It: Mock Documentary And The Subversion Of

Factuality, call a ‘faction’. My aim was:

To use real world events and characters as templates around which

invented stories are constructed: Audiences [are required] to connect to an

‘out‐of‐story’ factual template, and rely on naturalism as the major means

of dramatic representation (condensed from Paget, 1998: 82–3 in Roscoe

and Hight, 2001: 43).

I wanted to create the impression that the story was factual, that the events had occurred but were then forgotten. There was to be a deliberate blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction. The intention was ‘to secure a position … that is closer to documentary [i.e. truth] than to fiction’ (Roscoe and Hight, 2001: 44). In this way my work was close to

‘drama‐documentary’, which is historically accurate and stays close to the historical event in this case the original film, but ‘fills in’ the emotional landscape of factual material with fiction.

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My starting point was different however from the usual drama‐ documentary. In drama‐documentary, the starting point is the historical event and the purpose of the ‘filler’ is to construct a credible narrative of facts to convince the audience of the veracity of a particular reading. My starting point was fictional. My intention was to use the ‘blurriness’ around the historical event, the existence of deleted scenes for example, to alert audiences to the idea of many possible truths. My purpose was to create a historically accurate version of what might have happened but then instil doubts as to the veracity of that version. Instead of convincing the audience of the truth of one particular reading, I wanted to alert them to the possibility of many possible readings. In production there are several methods of doing this, some of which are discussed in more detail below in relation to the television series Life on Mars (2006‐7).

In writing a film about a film I was also able to use what audiences know about filmmaking to both increase the credibility and fictional possibilities inherent in filmmaking. The filmmaking process has been demystified in the last fifty years due to films such as Fellini’s 8½ (1963) and Frank Oz’s Bowfinger (1999). Most audiences know that not all the scenes shot for a movie are used. I could use that knowledge to create a fictional storyline in the real On the Beach for an actress whose scenes were lost ‘on the cutting room floor.’

This additional storyline also serves to underline the fictional nature of my story. The part of Tania played by my protagonist Nora in Twisted

Things doesn’t exist in On the Beach. Anyone familiar with the plot of On

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the Beach would realise this. That storyline began as a way of avoiding copyright problems if my screenplay were ever made, but the storyline is credible as it plays with the theme of loss present in the original. Tania is not present in the existing shooting script of On the Beach, though of course she may have once been. At this point an outline of the plot of the original

On the Beach is useful.

It’s 1964. The world has been destroyed by nuclear war and the last inhabited place on earth is southern Australia. Not for long though, as it’s only a matter of time until the deadly nuclear cloud arrives to end human and animal life. The United States submarine Sawfish has escaped the destruction and docked in Australia before embarking on a mission to investigate possible signs of life in California. They return with no hope.

In Australia, the inhabitants of Melbourne know their fate. Each deals with mortality differently. Good time local girl Moira Davidson (Ava

Gardner) falls in love with the U.S. commander Dwight Towers (Gregory

Peck). Towers finally accepts that his family has died in the northern nuclear war and allows himself to respond to Moira. They enjoy a short‐ lived happiness. Moira’s ex‐lover, scientist Julian Osborne (Fred Astaire) realises his ambition to win the Grand Prix and then suicides. Young couple Peter and Mary Holmes (Anthony Perkins and Donna Anderson) come to accept their own deaths and the knowledge that their baby will never grow up. At the end of the film, a banner erected by the Salvation

Army at the State Library reads, ‘Brother, there is still time!’ as rubbish swirls through the empty city. The warning to audiences is clear.

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My screenplay, Twisted Things, moves between contemporary

Melbourne (2011) and the Melbourne of 1959 during the making of

Stanley Kramer’s film. In order to slip between fact and fiction for the 1959 section of the film I co‐opted various documentary conventions and built these into a fictional narrative. In the text I used archival material and still photographs, some factual and others fictional, and created scenes that appear to be part of the original On the Beach. The main supporting character, Lucy, functions as a detective who progresses the plot by discovering factual material. The verisimilitude of the story, the notion that if it didn’t happen it could have, relies on factual accuracy.

Although important elements of Twisted Things rely on verifiable aspects of the historical event, I wanted to play on audience expectations to enhance the fictional construct. If the script were to be produced, I would use name actors to represent historical figures such as Gregory

Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Stanley Kramer. For the 1959 sections I would work for a softer look with bleached colours, as if that part of the story were filmed with the technology and film stock of the time and the On the Beach scenes would be shot in black and white. By contrast, the contemporary sections of the story would be cooler and crisper, darker and more crowded.

Appropriating 1959

The concept of a ‘1959 look’ raised an interesting set of questions. A 1959 look (such as bleached colour) appears to be based on a set of conventions

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that satisfies contemporary audience expectations of visual representations of 1959. But are these expectations valid? And are visual conventions sufficient to appropriate the past, when it is often other senses such as sound and smell that take us back to the past? Is it even possible to appropriate the past?

There is increasing emphasis on the embodiment of the film experience so that in experiencing a film we become ‘spatially and temporally embodied’ by the film’s subject, which includes the

‘constraints of history and culture’ (Sobchack, 2004: 2). This embodiment is not just visual but includes the other senses, particularly sound

(including language) and touch. Sobchack is a phenomenologist after

Merleau‐Ponty, where meaning and value emerge as a synthesis of the subjective and objective experience. Sobchack argues that this materialist approach means that particular historical and cultural experiences can be unpacked to reveal ‘general or possible’ structures to make that experience meaningful to others. The proof of success here is not whether the reader/audience has had the experience, but rather that they could contemplate ‘inhabiting’ it (2004: 4).

An example of this concept is Robert Toplin’s, ‘Hollywood’s D‐Day from the Perspective of the 1960s and the 1990s: The Longest Day and

Saving Private Ryan’ (2006) where he compares two Hollywood war movies, The Longest Day (1962) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). Both movies have the same subject matter—the D‐Day landing of June 1944— but Private Ryan concentrates on the experiential, while Longest Day shows

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plenty of bodies but no blood and concentrates on giving information about the landing. According to Toplin, the difference occurs primarily because the audience of The Longest Day would have had a much closer connection with the D‐Day landing either through direct experience or through that of their parents. What that audience wanted from The Longest

Day was information on strategy, tactics and the like. Most of the audience of Private Ryan, on the other hand, would not have experienced warfare.

They needed and desired to be reminded of what the experience could be like.

Increasingly however, contemporary audiences are not asked to contemplate inhabiting an experience, rather they are thrust into it. In a historical film, technological advances such as Dolby sound and

Steadicam camera are used to enhance the experiential nature of the medium to make the windows to the past more transparent. Of course paradoxically, the more one strives to find windows to the past the further away it becomes. There is no way to return to the past, as it was when it was the present, as we constantly mediate it consciously and unconsciously. The best we can do is to create a simulated past based on traces. It’s a ‘what might have been’ story constructed to create meaning in the present. Returning to Sobchack’s premise of success as the reader’s ability to imagine the experience, perhaps this depends on the ability of the creative work to create structures that allow the reader to respond emotionally.

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Creating emotional meaning remains the central challenge for the filmmaker and it is increasingly difficult. Postmodernism tells us there is no grand historical narrative but now there is no border between what is significant and what is trivial, what is fact and what is fiction. This idea appears to come from modernism. Hayden White’s essay, ‘The

Modernistic Event‘ (1996), gives an example from Virginia Woolf’s

Between the Acts (1941). Here, as the central character muses on books and newspapers, she recalls a rape reported in the newspaper. Just then her sister‐in‐law enters carrying a hammer. The two events are given equal meaning and intermingle so the otherwise ordinary entry of the sister‐in‐ law becomes threatening and potentially violent. Examples like this, where we can’t distinguish between the real and the imaginary, abound in contemporary films, such as Jacob’s Ladder, Shutter Island, and Inception.

Whereas occurrence of an event once automatically endowed meaning, this no longer holds. It’s not just because we can’t distinguish between what has and what has not occurred. Replaying footage of an event over and over doesn’t offer insights as to the meaning of it. I’ve seen footage of the plane crashing into one of the Twin Towers on 9/11 over and over and my insight into the event has not increased.

White suggests different techniques of representation other than

‘artistic realism’ may be required to regain meaning. He urges us to resist making stories of these kinds of traumatic events (1996:17). Such stories have the potential to create ‘narrative‐fetishes’ which keep us bogged down, unable to transcend the narrative and see any meaning beyond.

White specifically mentions the Holocaust and the Kennedy assassination,

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but 9/11 would fit here too. White advocates the ‘anti‐narrative non‐ stories’ (1996: 23) of modernism as a way forward but is unclear as to what these are. One possibility of the ‘anti‐narrative, non‐story’ may be the multi‐narrative. In conceptualising my creative work, I found the concept of a multi‐narrative form incorporating the past and the present compelling, but knew I needed a powerful narrative driver to push the plot back and forth between the present and the past. Such a driver could be provided dramatically via the murder mystery genre with a detective character searching for answers. I also needed a credible plot that would straddle the past and the present.

Inspiration was provided by the British TV series, Life on Mars

(2006‐7). Sam Tyler, the central character in the series is a Manchester detective who has an accident and wakes up in 1973. James Chapman’s article, ‘Not “Another Bloody Cop Show”: Life on Mars and British

Television Drama’ (2009), suggests how the series might be read.

Throughout the series, Sam Tyler can still recall his ‘real’ life in the

‘present’ (2006) so when he hears ‘voices’ inaudible to others from the television, radio and telephone, he assumes he must be in a coma and the voices are those of the medical team. He decides the world of 1973 is a construct of his imagination that he must deal with, until, like Dorothy in

The Wizard of Oz, he can return home. He even asks one character, ‘Which part of my imagination do you hail from?’ (Chapman, 2009: 9). Yet, the writers leave room to doubt Sam’s assumption: in every title sequence after Episode 1 Sam’s voiceover asks the question, ‘Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time?’ and the question is not answered until the end of the

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series. Even so, Sam’s reading that 1973 is imaginary is the preferred one

(Chapman, 2009: 9). The historical anachronisms and non‐sequiturs that appear throughout the series, such as digital watches, satellite dishes and

CCTV cameras, can be explained as evidence of his brain damage

(Chapman, 2009: 9).

My story, Twisted Things, is also a ‘timeslip’ story. Like Sam Tyler, my protagonist Nora is the victim of a hit and run and wakes to find herself in 1959 and an actress in On the Beach. She is in fact the very actress who was murdered—her mother. Nora has hazy recollections of her life in

2011 before the accident but, unlike Sam Tyler, once in 1959 she is too preoccupied with what she discovers and the subsequent task of staying alive to contemplate occupying the imaginary construct of a coma.

It’s obvious to the audience that the timeslips in both Twisted Things and Life on Mars are products of the protagonists’ minds and certainly in my story, Twisted Things, a search for identity. Both protagonists explore some Oedipal issues (Chapman, 2009: 9) although not in the usual sense of incestuous dilemmas as in the 1980s movie, Back to the Future (1985). My character, Nora, comes to understand her mother and meets herself as a baby, and, in Life on Mars, Sam Tyler meets his parents and discovers whom his father was. Unlike Back to the Future, however, Oedipal issues are not the central purpose of the journeys to the past. Instead the timeslips in both Twisted Things and Life on Mars work as ways of cinematically examining the mind.

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According to Chapman, Life on Mars ‘revolves around the disjuncture between a discourse of rationality (Sam’s insistence that he is from the future and in a coma) and unreality (the world that he believes exists only in his imagination) (2009: 10). The series does this by moving back and forth between two different points of view. Chapman draws on

John Ellis’s analysis of A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell, 1946) to show how that movie uses the same method to examine the nature of representation. It is unclear here whether the two discourses of rationality and unreality are mutually exclusive. Chapman appears to be arguing they are, yet these positions seem to predicate rather than contradict each other because Sam is living in a coma he can rationally create and inhabit a world that exists in his imagination. Also where does one go from there?

Chapman doesn’t go further other than to say the series, ‘also examines the nature of representation by refusing to clarify what is real and what is not’ (Chapman, 2009: 10).

A more fruitful path may be Deleuze’s theories of cinematic time‐ image, not only as methods of investigating concepts of rationality and unreality, but also in the rich narrative possibilities they offer. The film 12

Monkeys and its inspiration, La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962), where a character haunted by a killing he witnessed as a child returns from the future to discover he is the murder victim, spring to mind as examples of theory informing and enriching narrative. 12 Monkeys and La Jetée employ the notion of ‘the crystal’, where virtual and actual time, subjective and objective points of view are indistinguishable from one another. In these

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films the character experiences two different times simultaneously; he is child and adult simultaneously but it’s impossible to tell one time from the other, the real from the imaginary, because they conflate. In developing my narrative, I knew I wanted Nora to go back to 1959 and encounter herself as a child. And, although she doesn’t experience two different times simultaneously, the concept of the crystal convinced me that Nora the daughter could become Nora Stovale her mother.2

I also knew my character was a time‐image protagonist. Her search for identity meant she had to go back in time, but in order to do this she needed to be immobilised. I wanted to find a framework that would establish the idea that the character’s thoughts instead of her movements decided what the audience saw. If the audience understood this, they could jump from place to place and forward and backward in time depending on the character’s memories. If this were accepted, the audience would not even have to suspend disbelief because they would be experiencing time for themselves. A coma provided the narrative framework I was looking for. My protagonist, Nora, became the victim of a botched attempted murder—a hit and run. With her body immobilised in a coma in hospital Nora’s mind travels back to 1959 where she becomes her mother, the actress in On the Beach. Now, not only could Nora encounter herself as a baby, she could also find out what happened to her mother.

2 For further discussion of Deleuzian influences on the creative work see Chapter 3.

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The coma provides the potential for other readings. Chapman raises several which are suggested at the resolution of Life on Mars. What if, for example, the whole diegetic world of the coma was a fictional text?

That is, instead of Sam imagining himself a detective in 1973, what if he were imagining himself in a 1970s police series? Or even what if he was a character in a series and didn’t know it, as in Dennis Potter’s The Singing

Detective (1986). Various clues support this reading such as the 1973 police show (The Sweeney) plays on the television in Sam Tyler’s hospital room

(Chapman, 2009: 10‐11). Although Chapman never refers to Deleuze, his suggested readings have a Deleuzian element.

One possible reading is that the entire story takes place in Nora’s mind rather than ‘real’ life. The existence of Nora Stovale’s body proved she died, but Nora’s explanation of the events—the one presented in the screenplay—is only one of many possible explanations. Doubts as to the truth of Nora’s explanation might be raised if, say, clues to 1959 or the femme fatale theme of the lying woman, for example Whistle Stop, one of

Ava Gardner’s early femme fatale movies of the period, happened to be on the television in comatose Nora’s hospital room.

There was another aspect of Deleuzian theory that seemed relevant to my script. This was Deleuze’s concept of the ‘peaks of the present’.

Peaks of the present make sense if we think of time vertically rather than spatially. According to Deleuze, if we are in a single event which can be anything, such as a world, a life or a single episode, then there is no successive past, present or future because we can’t tell where each ends

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and the next begins (1989: 100). Peaks of the present opened narrative and character possibilities for my story in terms of who knew what when and in what world—the present or the past. Characters could make decisions in 1959 that had implications for 2011 and events could happen in 2011 that influenced what happened in 1959 because the main character was present in both time frames. I discuss Deleuzian theory in more detail in regard to several contemporary films in Chapter Three: The Role of the

Unconscious: Playing with Time in Film. As the final chapter of the exegesis, it is designed to take us from the past to the present.

When Sam Tyler from Life on Mars wakes up and finds himself in

1973 he says, ‘Whateverʹs happened itʹs like Iʹve landed on a different planet’. That different planet—the past—is what I seek to explore, dramatically through the film script and theoretically through the exegesis.

People have always looked to the past to create the meaning of the present, but the slipperiness of postmodernist culture creates many meanings and many pasts, not necessarily validated by their existence.

Our acceptance of many pasts leaves us desiring of individual experience rather than overarching narrative. Visual culture is easily able to express the presence of many narratives so easily that many mainstream films such as Christopher Nolan’s Inception now play with the idea of the valid and invalid past. Perhaps this is why fragments of meaning may be more meaningful than one over‐arching narrative.

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One of the fragments of meaning I chose to explore exegetically in my attempt to appropriate the past—Melbourne in 1959—was to take a concept that we are all familiar with—glamour—and, as far as I was able, try and understand it in 1959 as a way of trying to grasp what life in

Melbourne was like then. That is the central concern of Chapter Two,

Glamour and Celebrity, 1950s Australian Style.

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Chapter Two

Glamour and Celebrity: 1950s Australian Style

On the Beach is a story about the end of the world, and Melbourne

sure is the right place to film it (Neil Jillet, 1959, Sydney Morning

Herald, attributed to Ava Gardner).

In January 1959, when the Hollywood stars of On the Beach stepped off the plane at Melbourne’s Essendon airport, eager crowds pressed forward desperate to see them in the flesh. For the next four months the stars were mobbed. Gregory Peck’s secretary described the atmosphere:

The people here … applaud and cheer and practically tear the house

down. It’s rather heart warming to see and hear but the crowds can be

pretty frightening at times … They have never had anything like this

here and the people are in a mad frenzy trying to get a glimpse of one

of them [the stars] (Bella A. Rackoff, Melbourne letter to Sy Bartlett,

2/3/59 in Davey, 2005: 55).

The crowds and the press were interested in Fred Astaire and

Gregory Peck, but it was ‘love goddess’ Ava Gardner who they really turned out to see. Gardner’s acrimonious relationship with the

Melbourne press and her alleged denigration of the city (cited above), are well known. We associate Gardner with glamour and sexuality.

She was marketed as if she were created for male pleasure, yet most

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of her fans were women. What did glamour and sexuality mean in

1959? Do they mean the same today? What is their relationship with celebrity? And has the relationship between celebrity and ordinary people changed since 1959, and if so, how?

These questions form part of the overall challenge of this chapter, namely, how the contemporary reader might access 1959

Melbourne during the making of On the Beach. One possible way of doing this might be to examine through a figure like Gardner, what ideas of glamour and sexuality might have meant in Australia in

1959. The inspiration for this method came from Richard Dyer’s reading of Marilyn Monroe through the ideas about sexuality that circulated in the 1950s in ‘Monroe and Sexuality’ (1987). I differ from

Dyer in that I endeavoured to read a historical period (Melbourne in

1959) through Gardner in the context of glamour and sexuality in

Australia in 1959, rather than Gardner herself as an embodiment of glamour and sexuality. Having said this, some aspects of my treatment do overlap with Dyer’s. The period is the same—Gardner and Monroe were more or less contemporaries being only four years apart in age, and sometimes I do contrast Gardner’s embodiment of glamour and sexuality with Monroe’s in order to understand the different facets of glamour and sexuality more fully.

Like Dyer, I acknowledge that I am ‘mak[ing] over the past in the concerns of the present’ (Dyer, 1987: 24) both in the creative work and this chapter. In the creative work I can shortcut the process by

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placing a character in the past, and, to a limited degree, observe her reactions to the past. In this chapter I attempt to access the past through the examination of ideas and sources. Both approaches have their limitations in that they will never truly reflect the past as they cannot escape the concerns of the present. On the other hand they may reflect an aspect of the past that has not been considered before. I begin by outlining the origins of glamour and its relationship with modern consumer society, globally and in Australia. This is followed by an examination of the tensions of postwar Australian society and the role played by glamour and Hollywood in the development of mass consumption and modern capitalism in Australia.

Before the fifties: glamour and the origins of modern consumer society The word ‘glamour’ has a contemporary edge and a resonance of its own. It sparkles and enchants, but what does it mean? It’s a quality that appeals to the senses, primarily visual. It has an ephemeral quality so definitions are few and far between. Relatively recently a body of work has been developed around the origins and functions of glamour, focusing on the relationship between glamour and artifice, image, mass consumption, capitalism, fashion, film, celebrity and female movie stars on and off screen. The biggest contributors to this field so far have been Stephen Gundle, Reká Buckley and Stephan

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Castelli working with Gundle with particular emphasis on Italy1.

Naturally, work on glamour overlaps other areas of research such as film studies, media and cultural studies, history and philosophy.

While beauty and glamour are often regarded as interchangeable—how often has Cleopatra been described as glamorous—glamour appears to be an essential component of modern capitalism and a nineteenth century product of modernity.

According to Gundle, glamour emerged when society changed from being dominated by the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. Glamour required a bourgeois mentality of aspiration and dreams of consumption and transformation. The word was first used in 1805 by

Walter Scott to mean ‘an enchantment that could make ordinary men and women appear as magnificent versions of themselves’ (Gundle,

2008:7). As they grew rich and extended their social influence, this was exactly how the bourgeoisie wished to be seen. Glamour operated through images whose purpose was to ignite the imagination and arouse wonder and envy.

To arouse wonder and envy, glamour employed the elements of ‘beauty, sexuality, theatricality, wealth, dynamism, notoriety, movement and leisure’, with direct correlation between the number of elements present and the amount of glamour (Gundle, 2008: 6).

The end product that was glamour appeared to be the result of a perfect storm of four mutually reinforcing factors: the commodity

1 See Works Cited.

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culture produced by modern capitalism; urbanisation and technological development; political change resulting from the

French and Industrial Revolutions; and the system of bourgeois values. To elaborate on the last point first, bourgeois values were important to glamour because they established the normalcy of owning and consuming rather than producing. Part of the joy of possessing was showing off one’s possessions, thus conspicuous display and spectacle were other facets of glamour. Flaunting material commodities to their best advantage to increase one’s status and create envy was an essential part of bourgeois culture.

A corollary of ‘having’ was the desire to possess. When this was not possible bourgeois values created a system of deferred gratification. Immediate satisfaction was the experience of the aristocracy, deferred gratification was the experience of the bourgeoisie. Bourgeois deferred gratification created the yearning that sustained ‘an entire culture of dreams’ which fuelled commodity desire (Gundle and Castelli, 2006: 8). Deferred gratification also applied to bourgeois sexuality. This meant restraint before marriage and fidelity after. It had the effect of dividing society into the respectable and the non‐respectable—terms mostly applied to women. Glamour was created by personalities who defied convention but had enough cachet to appear beyond society rather than dependent on it. The combination of fashion, fame and wealth could insulate one from the conventions of society. Glamour was associated with the seduction and allure of the demi‐monde world of

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non‐respectable sexuality, a parallel culture of sensual pleasure, distraction and excess that provided a safety valve for middle‐class male society. This kind of parallel culture demanded masks and deception and consolidated the concept of appearance as the judge of worth. It also provided a rich source of characters for nineteenth century European literature: the respected businessman who is really a debt‐ridden libertine; the pious married woman busily exploiting three rich lovers. These are familiar characters in Balzac’s Human

Comedy of bourgeois machinations in nineteenth‐century France.2

Glamour’s real power lay in its relationship with commodity culture and the retail revolution that occurred from the mid‐ nineteenth century (Whitwell 1989: 7). Mass distribution and mass marketing were essential components of modern capitalism and provided the link between mass consumption and mass production.

In order for mass consumption to succeed, people had to be persuaded to buy what they didn’t necessarily need. The development of consumer culture received a big boost with the creation of the department store in Europe and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth‐century. As the fixed shop began to displace hawkers and street markets, some of these shops expanded into department stores, offering customers a new retail experience.

2 See in particular Balzac’s Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions) 1837‐43, La cousine Bette (Cousin Bette) 1846, Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (A Harlot High and Low) 1847.

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The department store was a sensuous fantasy world of glamour that encouraged shoppers to dream, promising the possibility of personal transformation through the magic of consuming. Michael

Miller describes the techniques used by Aristide Boucicault, the owner of Bon Marché the most famous of the Parisian department stores:

More than price and service incentives, mass marketing demanded a

wizardry that could stir unrealised appetites, provoke overpowering

urges, create new states of mind. Selling consumption was a matter of

seduction and showmanship, and in these Boucicault excelled,

enveloping his marketplace in an aura of fascination that turned

buying into a special and irresistible occasion. Dazzling and sensuous,

the Bon Marché became a permanent fair, an institution, a fantasy

world, a spectacle of enormous proportions, so that going to the store

became an event, an adventure (Miller in Whitwell, 1989: 9).

The dazzling and sensual worlds of department stores were highly visual. They were created through a confection of colours, mirrors, and lighting, using technologies created and refined by photographers, graphic artists, industrial designers and architects.

They transformed the urban imagination in the nineteenth century into a mythical dream world in an ‘architectural extravaganza’

(Gundle, 2006: 41) of theatres, shops, stations, spas, arcades and government buildings. Nor were these extravaganzas confined to

Europe. Examples can be seen all over Melbourne as products of the nineteenth century Gold Rush.

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The Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote that in modern cities:

The “threatening and alluring face” of myth was everywhere… It

appeared prototypically, in the [shopping] arcades, where the

commodities are suspended and shoved together in such boundless

confusion that [they appear] like images out of the most incoherent

dreams’ (Benjamin in Buck‐Morss, 1989: 254).

Benjamin’s thesis was essentially that under modern capitalism a

‘phantasmagoria of false consciousness’ (Buck‐Morss, 1989: 252) had been created from which there would one day be an ‘awakening’.

As precursors to the department stores, perhaps the most concrete representations of this ephemeral dream world were the

Great Exhibitions of the nineteenth century. The first Exhibition was held in London in 1851 but the next in 1855 and subsequent

Exhibitions in 1867 and 1878 were held Paris and were an important part of France’s claim as the heart of European civilisation (Gundle and Castelli, 2006: 75). The Exhibitions brought together art, commerce, entertainment, technology and industry in huge spectacles and awe‐inspiring displays. The structures built to showcase displays were tremendous in themselves. London’s Crystal Palace was a gargantuan cast iron structure with over a million feet of glass

(Victorian station accessed 24/4/11). Melbourne’s own Exhibition was held in 1854 in a building modelled on the original Crystal Palace in London. People

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poured in to visit the Exhibitions: over six million visited London’s

Exhibition and in Melbourne, forty thousand people—one fifth of the then population—queued to visit (La Trobe Journal: 1995,

accessed 10/4/11). Like the department stores to come, all classes of people were encouraged to attend. An important distinction was that unlike the London Exhibition, the goods in the

Paris Exhibition in 1855 had price tags attached allowing everyone to

‘browse, explore and dream of potential ownership’ (Williams in

Gundle, 2006: 75).

The department stores of the early‐twentieth‐century went on to outshine the Exhibitions in the art of presentation. Window displays created fantastical sets to entice passers‐by inside. Shopping became a pleasurable leisure activity wherein it was possible for anyone, irrespective of class, to dream of attaining the goods on show.

Australian department stores like David Jones paid particular attention to their window displays, showing idealised scenes from everyday life with particular emphasis on romance, courtship and marriage. Gail Reekie’s analysis of Australian department store retailing describes a 1927 David Jones (Sydney) window which showed a cathedral‐like setting of a bride’s trousseau complete with attendants (1993: 95). Reekie also noted the sensual pleasure women derived from gazing at the shop windows when flannelette underwear was replaced by the, ‘giddiness of georgette and the allure of crepe‐de‐chine’ (Shop Assistants Journal, 1926 in Reekie, 1993: 98).

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Reekie’s main argument is that as the majority of shoppers were women, consumer culture was a patriarchal and capitalist conspiracy to exploit the female customer (1993: xii). Perhaps this is too simplistic. Women as ‘consuming subjects’ became more common as mass production escalated, but so too did the position of women as

‘objects of consumption’. How and why the commodity became sexualised and what the relationship is between consumption and erotic desire centred on women, are questions particularly relevant to the history and meaning of glamour.

An interesting argument suggested by Abigail Solomon‐Godeau attributes the sexualization of the commodity with the growing availability of visual images, which occurred after the invention of the lithograph in mid‐nineteenth century France. The lithograph enabled images to be produced quickly to cater for current fashion.

Many of these images were also sexualised femininity‐as‐display. For example, in the 1829 lithograph (Figure 2), two women, one in a state of deshabille, the other holding a fashionable novel (then a symbol of dubious morality), seductively gaze out at the viewer as if inviting him into their boudoir with the message: ‘You too can have this world and all that’s in it’. Images such as these straddling both bourgeois and aristocratic culture created the beginning of ‘mass culture’. Solomon‐Godeau suggests these eroticised fantasies of the image world were popular because they were ‘compensatory fantasies’ (1996:125), the result of bourgeois culture’s exclusion of women from the public and political world of the city. Solomon‐

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Godeau calls such images commodities because they had no real referent, they were ‘woman‐as‐image’ (1996:128), as opposed to image‐of‐woman, that is, they were not real, individual women but erotic tokens designed for visual consumption. Woman‐as‐image, the fetishised form of femininity was the pre‐condition of woman‐as‐ commodity mutually reinforced in the courtesan, ‘saleswoman and wares in one’, as Walter Benjamin called her (1996:130).

This specularisation of female bodies, the quality of what Laura

Mulvey called, ‘to‐be‐looked‐at‐ness’ is ‘commodity culture’s primary and privileged form of address’ that resulted in ‘the heightened visibility of femininity (in Solomon‐Godeau, 1996:130). In Figure 3 we see a phallicised rendering of the male gaze set within a social and cultural space where female specularity was encouraged and enacted. In these spaces, such as the Opéra loge, society women, their marriageable daughters and courtesans conducted various rituals of display.

M.L. Roberts, critiquing Solomon‐Godeau, points out these arguments of compensatory fantasies and fetishised woman‐as‐ image, as the pre‐condition of woman‐as‐commodity, are circular and purely speculative (1998: 830). Nevertheless, they do consider how and why gender became an integral part of the representation of commodities, and show how important gender ideology and commodity fetishism are to commodity culture ‐ something not considered in the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School. Solomon‐

Godeau equates the ‘imagery of eroticised feminine display’ with the

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Figure 2. Achille Devéria, Le Roman du jour/ The Fashionable Novel, Lithograph, 1829 (Solomon‐Godeau in de Grazia (ed.), 1996: 124).

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commodity culture or more simply the commodity of desire, and

‘once this happened it is not surprising that mass consumer culture would use feminine desirability as its most powerful icon’ (1996: 115).

Figure 3. Grandville (Jean‐Ignace‐Isidore Gérard), Venus at the Opera, 1844 (Solomon‐Godeau in de Grazia (ed.), 1996: 129).

Yet commodity culture did more than sell goods. As Roberts indicates, it also had a profound effect on how members of society perceived themselves and others (1998: 832). In a study of the issues appearing most often in United States self‐help manuals in the twenty years between 1899 and 1920, Warren Susman found that people wanted to develop ‘personality’ over ‘character’. In 1899, character

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meant self‐mastery and self‐development within a moral framework.

Words such as ‘citizen, duty, democracy, work, … honour, reputation, morals, manners, integrity…’ (2003: 274), featured often in self‐help literature. This was because in a production economy, thrift, hard work and sublimation of the individual for purposes of moral and social order were the models for true self‐fulfilment. Twenty years later the shift to mass consumption and mass distribution was widespread. In order to meet the challenges of living in a mass society, a new vision of self was required. The challenge was to stand out from the crowd but still be liked and accepted. This could be achieved if one had ‘personality’. Personality comprised two elements: the individual’s unique qualities that made him stand out and the ‘performing self that attracts others’ (Susman, 2003: 281). Like character, personality could be learned with practice, by becoming ‘… stunning, attractive, magnetic’, and understanding the importance of

‘personal charm’ (Susman, 2003: 277). Externalisation of the self through fashion and beauty was an accepted part of self‐expression and self‐presentation. For women, beauty was still the most accepted way to achieve upward mobility and success.

In gendered terms, this was clearly shown in the use of cosmetics. Originally cosmetics were seen as symbols of artifice used by ‘painted Jezebels’ to entrap men, but in the nineteenth century respectable women began using cosmetics for photographic portraiture. By the 1920s not only in the United States but in Australia too, cosmetic use had become much more generalised as women

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became more visible and often worked outside the home (Reekie,

1993: 149). In an exploration of cosmetic culture, Kathy Peiss in

‘Making Up, Making Over’ in The Sex of Things (1996) showed not only how commodities promised transformation to a new self, but also how fluid identities had become. By purchasing either (or both) lipsticks called ‘Lady’ or ‘Hussy’, women could choose opposing social identities. Once these identities had been fixed, now they could be bought at whim. The possibility of transformation into a new self showed the fine line between revealing a woman’s inner self and the revealing of the transformed face—the one most acceptable to society—as the inner self. In 1921, David Jones department store in

Sydney ran a ‘Most Charming Girl’ competition to find the most

‘classically correct countenance’ (Reekie, 1993: 149). As the competition was run by a department store, presumably the message was that the achievement of such a countenance could always be helped by beauty aids.

Susman noted the importance personality literature placed on the face. Examining cinema of the early twentieth‐century then developing as ‘a popular middle‐class art’ he found clear ‘evidence of participation in the “culture of personality”’ (2003: 277). Like the self‐ help literature, one of cinema’s major concerns was the relationship between mass society and the individual. In early cinema, crowds were often dramatically juxtaposed against the individual through the use of the close up, where ‘the face, bigger than life and

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abstracted from it, provides a brilliant expression of self, of an individual’ (Susman, 2003: 282).

Glamour and Hollywood Originally Hollywood avoided naming and publicising its actors for fear it would lead to exorbitant wage demands by individuals. This changed in 1909 when budding movie mogul Carl Laemmle started a rumour that ‘Biograph Girl’, Florence Lawrence, had been killed.

After a good deal of publicity he published a story, ‘We Nail a Lie,’ revealing she was alive and about to star in his new picture. As a result Lawrence’s popularity greatly increased and the concept of the movie star was born. The presentation embodied in the constructed movie star was one commensurate with the concept of glamour. To many in the audience the actors were gods and goddesses who lived in an unreal fantasy world. Part of the allure of the star was that they had been ordinary people until their star quality was discovered.

Potentially anyone could be a star; they just had to be in the right place at the right time and have ‘it’.

What was ‘it’? ‘It’ was ‘star quality’, the combination of charm, charisma and mystery exuded by Hollywood stars. ‘It’ was

‘personality’ that made them stand out from the crowd. Were personality, star quality and glamour interchangeable? Using the androgynous, transcendental glamour of Greta Garbo during the silent movie era, Judith Brown argues glamour in the Hollywood

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context was personality taken to the extreme—so extreme that it becomes impersonality (2009: 99).

The glamour of Garbo, her ‘on‐screen powers of seduction’ and her worship by millions owed much to a seemingly contradictory theory of impersonality (part of a plea by T.S. Eliot to eliminate personality from literature 3), wherein the messiness of individual personality needed to be expunged ‘for the sake of the expression of form and its expression of feeling’ (Brown, 2009: 117). It was only when detail was evacuated that ‘luminous (or radiant) form’ emerged. Garbo transcended gender and even humanity to become

Art itself. Much of what was written about Garbo is hyperbolic not in exaggeration but in intensity, as in this example by Barthes, writing in

Mythologies:

The name given to her, the Divine, probably aimed to convey less a

superlative state of beauty than the essence of her corporeal person,

descended from a heaven where all things are formed and perfected in the clearest light (Barthes, 1972: 62 in Brown, 2009: 108). Garbo never gave interviews and little was publicised about her personal life. Her acting style was ‘somnambulistic’; her attention elsewhere

(where?); her expression deliberately blank; the crowds went wild. Left with a blank screen they supplied their own fantasies.

3 In his essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919) Eliot advocated the depersonalisation of poetry along the lines of science and away from the metaphysical Romantic tendencies of expression of the soul: ‘the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in

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Figure 4. Greta Garbo in Queen Christina (1933). ‘Garbo offers to one’s gaze a sort of Platonic Idea of the human creature, which explains why her face is almost sexually undefined, without however leaving one in doubt’ (Barthes, 1972: 56 in Brown, 2009: 109‐10).

Fascinated by her they yearned for more. Here was glamour, ‘backed by absence, suffused with longing and defined by the fantasy of distance’ (Brown, 2009: 117). In figure 4, taken from the closing shots of Queen Christina (1933), Garbo was apparently told by director

Rouben Mamoulian to ‘think of nothing’ (2009: 117).

This kind of glamour depended on the photographed image.

With the advent of photography, a new form of beauty was privileged—photogenic beauty. Black and white photography and overhead lighting accentuated the planes of the face. It was smooth,

which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways’ ( accessed 11/11/11).

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standardised, and mechanical: ‘caught in time, it is a perfection that never ages, and experiences no mood swings. The idiosyncrasies of character are forged into the market‐tested gleam of personality’

(Ewen, 1989: 89 in Brown, 2009: 100). It is a personality caught by the camera, like a distinctive hairstyle such as Veronica Lake’s peek‐a‐ boo fringe or Jean Harlow’s platinum blonde statement. Perhaps then, and using Garbo as an example, in the relationship between glamour, personality, and star quality, glamour is dependent on image rather than personality, and star quality may be an individualised image.

Photography consolidated the dominance of the visual image and with it eroticised female display. Unlike the ultimately consumable and presumably satisfying wares of the courtesans, the erotic appeal of movie stars promised not satisfaction but continual yearning. Glamour portraits of the 1930s maximised the fantasy of distance. They were highly artificial concoctions of lighting and sensual costumes of fur, silk and satins that maximised the female star’s seductive appeal. Who was this erotic glamour created for?

The glamour of the courtesan incited male sexual desire, and both male and female envy. Glamour photographs were widely distributed through movie magazines with an overwhelmingly female readership (Stokes, 1999: 45). Perhaps the purpose of the erotic glamour of the movie star was not to create sexual desire but rather

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desire in general—the desire to be wealthy, to wear luxurious clothes, to be beautiful and admired—basically to escape ordinary life.

All of these are female rather than male desires and the star system itself was very much aimed at women (Stokes, 1999: 44).

Richard Dyer’s work also points to empirical evidence of the intense relationships some groups have with stars. Typically these are women, gays, adolescents and children, all groups who are excluded to some degree from the dominant adult, male, heterosexual culture

(Dyer, 1989: 32). Perhaps it was this majority female readership of fan magazines that promoted the concept of a female dominated audience, because by the 1920s Hollywood was convinced that women made up most of any film audience. This conclusion was anecdotal as there were no scientific audience surveys until Gallup and Handel in 1937‐39. True or not, Hollywood reconfigured itself to take advantage of female consumers when statistics showed women making 80‐90% of household purchases in the late 1920s and early

1930s (Eckert in Stokes, 1999: 44).

In one sense, Hollywood consumerism was straightforward.

Hollywood used product ‘tie‐ups’, licensing deals and stars as

‘merchandising assets’ to sell fashion, cosmetics, and lifestyle to women moviegoers by exploiting their desire to identify with stars

(Eckert in Gledhill: 38). MGM contracts for female stars, for example, specified that one day at the end of the picture was devoted to fashion and portrait stills for women’s, lifestyle and fan magazines

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(Davis, 1993: 154). Australian editions of American and British fan magazines such as Photoplay, Movie Life, Motion Picture Magazine, and

New Screen News published Hollywood articles with local advertisements for skin care, fashion and hairstyling. And in accordance with Eckert’s statement that women were responsible for

80‐90% of family purchases, there were advertisements for homecare products such as kerosene heating and paint (Photoplay, 1954, 1958).

One of the criticisms of the study of Hollywood and the role of stars is that most of the work has been textural and essentially ignores the role of the cinema audience. The dominant theoretical feminist position has been Laura Mulvey’s ‘women‐as‐image’; the passive subject to male gaze approach mentioned above as a precursor to the fetishism of women and the role of female desirability in commodity culture. While this is an important element in understanding the role of glamour, there is evidence to show that women are not simply passive consumers duped by glamour, as Reekie advocates, or passive icons of sexuality. More recent work by Jackie Stacey on the role of audiences and reception shows that women moviegoers actively created meanings from the movies they saw and movies also influenced their behaviour and dress (1994: 100).

Stacey’s research on female spectatorship supports findings of an earlier study by Blumer in Chicago in the late 1920s. Blumer’s survey involved asking a representative sample of moviegoers to write ‘autobiographies’ of movies they had seen and their responses

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to them (Stokes, 1999: 51). The gender of the respondents was easy to discern and their responses showed that women often used the movies to create escapist fantasies, added elements of star’s fashion to their own and experimented with different behaviours, though this was mediated by their own appearance, personality and social position (Stokes, 1999: 52).

Stacey’s research on female audiences in Britain in the 1940s and

1950s and their relationships to stars found two types of identification that provided pleasure and fascination. One took place inside the cinema, and, like Blumer, involved fantasies of transformation and escapism while still recognising differences between the spectator and the star. Stacey’s British audience remembered ‘the “glamour” of

Hollywood and its stars in contrast to the seriousness of British cinema and its actors’ (Stacey, 1994: 97). Here, women used the stars as role models in terms of physical beauty and behaviour. The other type of identification took place outside the cinema where the spectator transformed part of her identity as a result of her identification with the star such as imitating Bette Davis’s staccato speech patterns while puffing on a cigarette, and copying hairstyles and clothes (Stacey in Gledhill (ed.), 1991: 154‐5).

To my knowledge, no surveys on female cinema spectatorship have been done in Australia. It is reasonable to assume that female audience reactions would have been similar to the United States and

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Britain given the cultural affinities between the countries, and the fact that many of the same movies were shown.

Cinema going was popular in Australia during the 1920s. By

1921 it was the most popular form of entertainment in the country with 68 million annual admissions in a population of 5.4 million compared with 16 million combined for the next two most popular forms—live theatre and horse racing. In 1928, film sound arrived and admissions hit an all time high of 187 million a year. For a population of 6.3 million this meant an average of 29.7 attendances a year per person (Collins, 1986: 16). Hollywood female stars set standards of beauty in movies and magazines (Reekie, 1991: 149). By the 1920s the foundation for a modern consumer society was in place in the United

States, Britain, Australia and elsewhere. In these countries there was an urbanised population with disposable income and infrastructure of mass production and distribution. Advertising was highly visual.

Yet, expansion slowed with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929.

Demand and output declined and World War II restricted the production of consumer goods. Consumer society had to wait until the end of the war to take off again.

Post‐war Australia: the right place to film a story about the end of the world? A common perception is that Australia in the 1950s was caught in a time warp, isolated by the ‘tyranny of distance’ and suspended in an

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‘endless doze’ from which it would groggily awaken sometime in the sixties with the arrival of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

But Australia in the 1950s was actually a lively place. It was a mass of contradictions evidenced by a large amount of frustration and anxiety as government grappled with ways of governing 1950s prosperity. Politicians, academics and bureaucrats, Australia’s

‘guardians of society,’ as Nicholas Brown’s Governing Prosperity (1995:

4) called them, were used to a top‐down style of management. This had worked for a society threatened internally and externally by the

Depression, World War II and postwar reconstruction. But the war had broken many of the traditional foundations of society such as religion, class, hierarchy, and duty and the new prosperity of the

1950s threatened to fragment them even further.

If traditional values no longer bound society together, how could society be maintained when faced with new international pressures such as the Cold War, materialism, increasing societal fragmentation and mobility? How could these forces be managed?

Could the moral fibre of the people be counted on? These were the anxieties of the 1950s in Australia (Brown, 1995: 5).

Australia entered a boom period at the beginning of the 1950s.

The manufacturing industry, fully geared for wartime, now turned out peacetime goods for the domestic economy which was protected by wide ranging import controls from 1952 (Brown, 1995: 101). From

1946‐52 Australia resisted efforts to sign a Treaty of Friendship,

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Commerce and Navigation with the United States that would have allowed for considerable expansion of American investment into

Australia at the expense of the British. Although this treaty was never signed, it led to concessions for American pastoral and mineral companies and an ‘open door’ policy to American private investment

(Curthoys and Merritt, 1984: 36). Such investment combined with technological and managerial investments led to increased skills, scale and efficiency in production.

The ‘Long Boom’, as it was known because it extended from

1940 to 1970, was truly extraordinary. The increase in the number of

Australian workers employed in manufacturing was huge. For instance, motor vehicle production employees went from 85,600 to

126,700 (Lees and Senyard, 1987: 30). Production of Holden cars went from 10 per day in 1939 to 465 per day in 1958 (Australian Bureau of

Statistics figures in Australia Today, 1960 in Lees and Senyard, 1987:

18). The number of people available for work increased as well, mainly through postwar immigration and married women joining the labour force. Between 1940 and 1970, ‘the economy … provide[d] 80 per cent more people [with] double the standard of living that had been enjoyed previously (Haig, 1978: 31).

During the early‐1950s economists were anxious about inflation. Ninety per cent of men and thirty per cent of women were mobilised during the war (Brown, 1995: 5) and they wanted to spend their accumulated wartime savings. After decades of restraint, first

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the Great Depression and then the war, people wanted to improve their living standards. As pent‐up wartime demand surged into a decontrolled economy, prices rose by 10% a year between 1947 and

1952 (Brown, 1995: 103). Materialistic self‐gratification or

‘overconsumption’ was seen as the biggest threat to what was good for the nation and citizenship.

Prosperity brought more buying power for the consumer. The consumer was defined as an individual who had enough income to provide for his basic needs in goods and services and whose income was also sufficient to make his own decisions. Such an individual was therefore difficult to govern—a result of prosperity and also a threat to it, but direct government intervention went against the political philosophy of the conservative government newly elected in 1949.

The conservative government stood for respect for private initiative and a non‐intrusive state. At the same time mixed messages abounded. Manufacturing and commercial interests in organisations such as the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) were supportive of the government and pushed for the free expression of individual consumerism as a means to the good life. This close alignment of self‐ esteem to domestic consumption became pivotal to the political rhetoric of the conservative party during the fifties. The IPA warned that the way to stand out from the crowd and avoid ‘the growth of mass mentality, the mass mind and character’ was through the development of individual aspiration and acquisition (IPA Review,

1949: 175).

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Standing out from the crowd, one of the key concepts at the beginning of mass consumption and modern consumer society in the

1920s re‐emerged with added spending power in the 1950s. Further, the ability to buy on credit through hire‐purchase was now within reach of practically everyone rather than the select few it had been in the 1920s. Most western countries increased their hire‐purchase debt after World War II, but none so rapidly as Australia. In 1939 the amount of debt was $39 million. By 1950 hire‐purchase debt was

$140.6 million. By 1955 it was $435.8 million and $1021 million by

1960—giving an astounding average annual increase of around 34% and an average increase of 46.2% between 1945 and 1950 (Scott in

Whitwell, 1989: 35). A huge quality and quantity of goods were consumed as more people bought big‐ticket items such as cars, refrigerators, furniture; what had once been considered luxury items were now considered essentials (Whitwell, 1989: 5). In the post‐war period the class differences in consumption decreased and consumption became more homogenised. In this way a truly mass consumption society was achieved.

With so much choice, households had to be persuaded by producers to choose their product over a rival’s. Advertising became more intensive across all medias in an effort to reach the widest possible audience. Glamour—as a way of adding mystery and excitement to everyday products and everyday lives—was used as part of the incentive to buy particular products, such as cars. Cars were advertised as enchantments of fantasy and desire with female

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imagery often incorporated as it could appeal to both sexes. The 1950s was the age of suburban living. In Australia, car ownership expanded as home ownership was encouraged by the government through low interest rates. The suburbs meant detached houses, a focus on the nuclear family and increased individualisation. These concepts carried different meanings for men and women.

For women, the postwar emphasis on domesticity as the bourgeois ideal meant most middle‐class women stayed at home in the suburbs at least while they had children. Happy, competent woman‐as‐image housewives sold domesticity and material goods such as household durables to other women. The home was the site of status markers, ‘especially the kitchen, the motor car and the personal presentation of the housewife and mother’ (Gundle, 2008:

247).

For middle‐class men, suburban living meant a separation from home and work. Products such as cars, hotels, vacations, grooming aids and fragrances used sexy woman‐as‐image to exploit male fantasies of sexual promiscuity and a commitment‐free lifestyle that could be secretly indulged in the spaces between home and work.

After all, bourgeois respectability still had to be maintained. In 1950, the American sociologist David Reisman predicted the rise of a new type of individual as a product of consumer society. It would be one who was determined more by media and what others thought than by an inner compass of values. Such a type was thought to be able to

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adapt easily to the changes in society, and be less constrained by its traditions. Most typical of the new type were young working women who were driven by fashion and personal relationships (Gundle,

2008: 246), instead of the church, class and traditional hierarchies.

Male or female, this kind of malleable person was a threat to the top‐ down paternal style of Australian social management traditions.

With threats such as urbanisation, consumerism and social mobility looming, it’s not surprising that in the 1950s, society was examined and commented on more carefully than ever before. In addition, efforts were made to govern the individual from ‘within’, through self‐regulation. Nor is it surprising that with so much scrutiny from within and without, postwar suburbia was characterised by conformity. In 1950s United States, William Whyte, in his book on white‐collar suburban dwellers The Organization Man

(1956), noted their extreme conformity. Inconspicuous consumption rather than conspicuous consumption was the norm. Whyte observed that when people made negative comments about conspicuous consumption they were quick to say that they themselves saw nothing wrong with it but others might (1956: 84). To aspire oneself was a mark of laudatory ambition and the conspicuous consumption of celebrity lifestyles was a source of constant aspiration.

While the connection between Hollywood and consumer culture was made during the 1920s, it was not until the 1950s that Australian consumers in any numbers had the disposable income to obtain the

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kind of consumer products promoted by Hollywood glamour.

Although some of the movies seen were British, the majority were

American. As in the 1920s moviegoing was extremely popular in

Australia during the 1940s and 1950s. The popularity of cinema during the postwar period is apparent when we compare the admissions figures with today. In 2009 admissions were 90.7 million with a population of 21.9 giving an admissions per head of 4.1, but in

1945 when the population was 7.4 million, attendance was 151.0 million. On average people went to the movies about five times more than they do today, giving 20.4 admissions per head, though nothing like the 29.7 achieved in 1928. In 1957 attendance had dropped but still dwarfed today’s figures. With a population of 9.4 million, attendance was 124.0 million giving 12.9 admissions per head (Screen

Australia, ‘Cinema admissions and key events’ accessed 23/4/11).

Much of the success of Hollywood films was due to the control and marketing of its stars.

Ava Gardner and Hollywood The successful marketing of Biograph Girl, Florence Lawrence (as mentioned earlier), showed Hollywood the marquee value of promoting stars. The first Hollywood stars earned huge sums, but by the thirties and forties stars were under studio control in tightly written contracts. The studios themselves were small in number—the

Big Five (Warner Bros, Loews/MGM, Paramount, RKO, Twentieth‐

Century Fox) and the Little Three (Universal, Columbia and United

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Artists)—but they had vertical control of the industry until the 1950s when their monopoly of production, distribution and exhibition was broken up and the stars became independent. An analysis of Ava

Gardner’s career until 1959 is a useful example of this transition.

Gardner’s career began in 1941 during the studio system and her role in On the Beach in 1959 was her first as an independent star.

Ava Gardner’s ‘discovery’ is an example of the circular argument of ‘star quality’—if you have star quality you will be discovered and if you’re discovered you have star quality. In 1941

Gardner was an unemployed eighteen‐year‐old high school graduate living in North Carolina. Her father was a tobacco farmer and she was the youngest of seven children. A runner from MGM spotted her picture displayed in her brother‐in‐law’s photography shop in New

York. Her sister pursued the connection and secured a screen test for her because, then as now, Hollywood was the pinnacle of glamour and success. Although Gardner had no ambition to be an actress, she was extraordinarily beautiful and the camera loved her. The MGM executive who viewed the test summed up her potential: ‘…she can’t act, she can’t talk, but she’s a terrific piece of merchandise’ (Fowles,

1992: 61). Gardner was immediately offered a minimum wage contract of fifty dollars a week and began the life of a movie starlet of walk‐on parts and cheesecake photos.

Gardner remained an unknown for some six years. She wasn’t ambitious and MGM did not appear interested in developing her

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career. Her break came when two non‐MGM film noir movies recognised her femme fatale potential. Whistle Stop (1945), in which she was ‘man bait’, was a minor film, but The Killers (1946) where ‘She

Spelled Trouble For Every Guy That Made A Play For Her!’ was an instant success. High contrast film noir lighting maximised her erotic effect in The Killers (figure 5) and images of the siren Gardner, ‘Every kiss carved his name on another bullet’, three stories high in a black satin evening dress, drew around‐the‐block crowds. Gardner now was a marketable femme fatale and appeared in a couple of mediocre films that exploited that image: The Hucksters (1947) and Singapore

(1947). MGM charged other studios more for her services but didn’t spend much time in developing her profile and career perhaps because it was occupied elsewhere: the world as the studios had known it was changing. The peak year for the American movie industry was 1946 when it was estimated there were 90 million admissions to theatres every week (Kindem, 1982: 88), but it was the beginning of the end. Between 1947 and 1953 admissions declined steeply, probably due to changing postwar lifestyles and increasing competition from television.

In 1948 the studio era ended when divorcement decrees led to the separation of production and distribution from exhibition. The studios concentrated on fewer productions with bigger budgets and bigger stars. During this time, the popularity of stars was evaluated through fan mail, audience response cards, and Marquee Value audits for marketing and casting possibilities and continuation of

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Figure 5. Studio portrait of Ava Gardner featuring the high contrast lighting used in The Killers (Server, 2006: cover image).

contracts (Kindem 1982: 87). Lesser movie stars were released from their contracts while others, such as Gardner, were kept and exploited further.

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Until the studios lost control over the stars, information on them was created and distributed to the press and gossip columnists by publicists employed by the studios. The publicist’s job was to create an image for each actor and it was the actor’s job to maintain it.

‘Inside’ information consolidated the actor’s image or dissipated it to allow for other roles. The piece below, written for fan magazine

Screen Guide by Maxine Block writing as Gardner, was an example of the latter:

I must have a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde split personality because I

photograph so differently from my real character. Men seem to expect

to see the femme‐fatale sultry Jezebel dripping orchids and mink.

When they see, instead, a skirt, sweater and saddle‐shoe girl with no

make‐up, it’s a great let‐down—Ava Gardner (Maxine Block, Screen Guide, 1950 in Server, 2006:135). Although the studios didn’t own the fan magazines, they controlled what the magazines published by withdrawing advertising if they weren’t happy with what was written about a star. Similar standover tactics were used on actors. If an actor were unco‐operative, the studio would plant unfavourable articles about the actor in gossip columns or coerce a columnist into starting an unpleasant rumour

(Davis, 1993: 155‐156).

Publicity was often manufactured to maintain and manipulate the public’s interest. The manufacture of contrived events created to be vividly reported and reproduced by the media such as the

Florence Lawrence event are described by Daniel Boorstin as

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‘pseudo‐events’ (1962: 3). Writing in 1962, Boorstin detailed the acceleration of pseudo‐events in media reporting once precise visual and graphic images could be created and distributed. Such events were bigger, brighter and better than reality and once reported and reproduced the pseudo‐event became more newsworthy for having been reported. Pseudo‐events, as documented by Daniel Boorstin, existed quite independently in journalism aside from Hollywood but the demise of studio‐controlled publicity increased mainstream celebrity journalism (1962: 75). The celebrity is the human equivalent of the pseudo‐event, a person who is known because they are famous.

Movie stars were obvious celebrities. Through movies, millions knew them and each piece of subsequent information about them promised to reveal the real person. Of course, each story only led to another.

While media outlets in the fifties were a fraction of what they are today, the private lives of movie stars were reported in movie newsreels, newspapers, magazines, and radio—gossip columnist

Hedda Hopper had her own show on radio and later television—as well as the more specialised fan magazines such as Photoplay. As the public’s expectation for pleasure, comfort, flattery and fascination was high and celebrities were replaceable, the celebrity’s private life needed plenty of partying, romance, marriage, heartache, divorce and preferably a life‐threatening disease or two to keep the public’s interest. Gardner was able to satisfy all except the last point. By 1946 she had married and divorced two other celebrities, actor Mickey

Rooney and jazz musician Artie Shaw. In the early 1950s she began a

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highly public romance with singer Frank Sinatra, who had a huge fan base. Their affair was avidly reported by the press and broke up his marriage to Nancy Barbato, which had hitherto survived many less publicised affairs. Sinatra’s combative relationship with the press and both his and Gardner’s fiery personalities provided a wealth of headlines and speculation as the public chartered the on again‐off again course of their romance, marriage and subsequent divorce.

Independent of studio machinations, Gardner’s private life complemented the femme fatale image perfectly.

During the late forties and early fifties Gardner’s screen roles matched her public persona of troublesome sexy temptress (The Bribe,

1948; The Great Sinner, 1948; East Side, West Side, 1949; Lone Star, 1952;

Ride Vaquero, 1953; Mogambo, 1953; Knights of the Round Table, 1954;

The Barefoot Contessa, 1954).

Gardner also played the showgirl (Showboat, 1951; Mogambo,

1953; The Barefoot Contessa, 1954; The Angel Wore Red, 1960). Showgirls were marked as non‐respectable women often with professional sexual experience. They were typically associated with femme fatales; they were gold diggers who used lures such as beauty, jewellery, feathered costumes, and makeup to bewitch men. Aspects of the femme fatale such as death, excess, sexual desire, nature and the supernatural borrow heavily from perceptions of the Orient, a place of superstition, evil and danger. The other role Gardner played during this time was to embody essence of woman (One Touch of

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Venus, 1948; Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, 1951; The Snows of

Kilimanjaro, 1951). Again she is trouble—she was never the girl‐next‐ door type—but the sexuality appeared less overt, except in the way men responded to her.

Gardner and Sexuality Although I’ve drawn a distinction between the types of roles Gardner played at this time, what defined all of them was sexuality. In his essay ‘Monroe and Sexuality’, Richard Dyer observes how Monroe is seen through the point‐of‐view shots of the male characters and is ‘set up as an object of the male sexual gaze’ (1987: 21). The same could be said of Gardner’s films with their suggestive tag lines (figures 6 and

7). Like Monroe, Gardner embodied the central concern of the fifties—sexuality. Hollywood movie stars were often sexy but sexuality was always associated with Monroe and Gardner.

Embodying sexuality really meant being a body for male sexuality

(Dyer, 1987: 41). It was if Monroe and Gardner were created for the enjoyment of men:

I know that keeping the lips slightly parted and wetting them

occasionally with the tongue makes them appear fresh and appealing.

So I do it (Ava Gardner, Screen Guide 1950, in Server, 2006: 135).

The ‘Love Goddess’ flew out of the skies to England yesterday. Green‐

eyed Ava Gardner voted, ‘The World’s Best Shape’, went straight to a

room at London’s Claridge’s Hotel at 8a.m., locked the door and went

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to sleep. The Shape was feeling out of shape (Daily Express, 1951 in

Server, 2006:191).

Figure 6. Poster for One Touch of Venus (1948) with the tag line: ‘Love’s Little Busy Body… and how you’ll love to watch her work!’

Sexually embodied as they were, Monroe and Gardner played out different sexual personas in the fifties. Their hair colour epitomised the differences between them, Monroe the platinum blonde was associated with light, innocence and comedy, while Gardner the brunette was associated with darkness, trouble and drama.

Adjectives like, ‘stormy’ and ‘sultry’ were often used to describe her.

Gardner’s original dark and dangerous femme fatale image remained throughout her life, even appearing in headlines announcing her

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death: ‘Film Femme Fatale Ava Gardner Dies’, Hollywood Reporter,

26/1/90 and ‘Ava Gardner, Sultry Film Star Dies at 67 in London’, Los

Angeles Times, 26/1/90 (Server, 2006: 524).

Figure 7. Poster for The Barefooted Contessa (1954) with the tag, ‘The World’s Most Beautiful Animal’.

As the fifties progressed and the forties’ femme fatale lost currency, Gardner was often cast as a Latin (The Barefoot Contessa,

1954 The Naked Maja, 1959; The Angel Wore Red, 1960) or a half‐caste,

(Showboat, 1951; Bhowani Junction, 1956). Red was Gardner’s signature colour. Red meant fire, passion, glory, blood, tragedy, life and death

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and she wore it in The Angel Wore Red, The Barefoot Contessa, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman and On the Beach. The connection deepened when she lived in Spain, romanced bullfighters and took up flamenco

(Gundle and Castelli, 2006: 115). While still appealing—MGM kept her on contract until 1959—it seems she was too exotic, too sexually threatening and just too difficult for middle‐American tastes. This is hardly surprising in a culture where uncomplicated sex as epitomised by Monroe was seen as the ideal. As Norman Mailer in his biography of Monroe put it, ‘Marilyn suggested sex might be difficult and dangerous with others but ice cream with her’ (1973:1).

Several of Monroe’s projected personality traits summed up the fifties image of desirability: she was vulnerable, always available and it looked like sex with her would be easy. Monroe promised a man

‘good sex uncomplicated by the worry of satisfying his woman’

(‘What Every Husband Needs,’ Readers Digest, 1957 in Miller and

Nowak in Dyer, 1987: 42). Monroe’s form of desirability ignored the issue of sexual satisfaction for women but the very existence of articles like ‘What Every Husband Needs’ indicated the tensions beneath the surface. It could be argued that Gardner acted as

Monroe’s dark twin, a pressure valve of sorts. Gardner’s roles at least acknowledge the concept of a female sexuality, even if they played on the assumed instability of women and the misfortune bound to result from active female sexuality.

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The short‐term solution to female sexuality was to play it down and encourage women to take responsibility for their own and their husband’s pleasure. In research on American marital sex manuals from 1920‐1963, Jessamyn Neuhas quotes ‘experts’ in the postwar manuals playing down the need for female sexual pleasure because female sexuality was ‘problematic, neurotic and faulty’ (2000: 463), and if women didn’t find pleasure during sex, the fault lay with them. During the fifties, Freudian psychoanalytic ideas which took sexuality as the cause and effect of every problem were everywhere in public discourse—in movies, magazines, newspapers, family relations, marriage guidance counselling, social work and fiction

(Dyer, 1987: 51). Betty Friedan related how, in the late‐fifties, when interviewing suburban housewives for The Feminine Mystique, she often received ‘an explicitly sexual answer to a question that was not sexual at all’ (Friedan, 1963: 258).

Despite the general prosperity, there was a lot to be anxious about in 1950s America. People feared nuclear war, communist conspiracies, economic recession and the changing role of women and there was an overall fear that things would never go back to

‘normal’. With hindsight, overall social change was the reason for changed gender norms and marriage instability, but at the time it was easier to blame individuals—particularly women and young people,

‘juvenile delinquents’ for failing to meet society’s expectations of putting society before oneself.

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Australia and Sexuality in the 1950s Remembering that my protagonist, Nora Stovale, dies because she fails to provide sexual satisfaction to the male characters obsessive desires, it becomes relevant here to focus on Australia’s attitude to sexuality at the time in which my screenplay is set. Australian society experienced the same anxieties as the United States, but it was overall a less pluralist and less tolerant society. The sociological and psychological trend in Australia was to identify ‘personality weaknesses’ that would inhibit individuals from integrating into larger society. The nuclear family as the cradle of stable society assumed more importance than before, which could be threatened by the ‘sexual delinquency’ of the individual. Marriage breakdown was seen as one example of ‘personality weakness’, while couples who were childless through choice were regarded as ‘exhibiting the signs of “maladjustment“ to social and personal roles’ (Brown, 1995: 196).

As in the marital sex manuals discussed above, women were judged particularly harshly. Marriage counselling records in Western

Australia during the 1950s showed sex as the underlying cause of marital problems. The notes showed that women were expected to make the necessary ‘adjustments’. At the same time they had to be careful not to transgress the limits of a female sexuality dependent on male sexuality otherwise they risked being condemned as ‘frigid’ or

‘dominant’ (Brown, 1995:197).

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While individuals were being scrutinised, the guardians of society were keeping a watchful eye on outside influences likely to encourage moral corruption and/or communist subversion which would undermine society. A rigorous censorship program against heterosexual obscenity and any mention of homosexuality was active until the mid‐sixties. Australian customs commonly applied the

‘Householder Test’ to imported books (and magazines). Would ‘the average householder’ allow the book to be reading matter for his family? If so, the book was allowed in. Using this test large numbers of books were banned in Australia including educational and medical textbooks and popular novels such as Peyton Place (1956), Return to

Peyton Place (1961), Mickey Spillane thrillers and Playboy magazine

(until 1967).

Even so, in a survey of Coast to Coast, a 1950s bi‐annual anthology of Australian short stories of the current issues of the time,

Nicholas Brown, in Governing Prosperity, found that sexuality, particularly the destructive nature of female sexuality, was a constant theme. Brown points out how:

Masculinist’ assumptions about men and women were made on the

basis of sexuality with no reference to economic or social gender roles.

Men invited ‘tolerance and sympathy through reference to a form of

self‐possession and self‐knowledge’, whereas women were ‘vulnerable, flawed even corrupt’ (1995: 202).

Compared to the United States, Australian attitudes towards women were generally more hostile. In the 1960s, Ronald Conway’s critique

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of Australian society labelled it as ‘matrist’ resulting in sexually promiscuous, emotionally indulgent men devoid of ‘real masculine strength and restraint’ (1971: 132). Again it appears that changes in society were attributed to gender differences between males and females rather than changes in society itself.

At the same time, the image of women had become more sexualised in popular culture. The way the pin‐up was depicted was an example of this. During the war, pin‐ups were ‘natural’ girls (figure 8), sweethearts and sisters photographed in the water and on the beach, but the post‐war pin‐up was a professional model who assumed a glossier, sexier, more provocative image in order to sell consumer products (figure 9).

‘Desirability,’ the female sexual attribute that characterised

Monroe’s appeal and to a lesser extent Gardner’s, characterised the models advertising everything from deodorant to tourism and cars.

The equation of sex with the consumer lifestyle was led by Playboy magazine. Playboy first appeared in 1953 with ‘ideal playmate’

Monroe on the cover (and centrefold). It promoted a consumer fantasy lifestyle to men and combined that with glossy production values and articles by well‐known authors. Although Playboy was banned in Australia until 1967, a number of Australian publications, in particular Man magazine, imitated its centrefold format

(‘Manadorables’) and philosophy of all women as potentially purchasable sex objects.

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Figure 8. Pix, 25 January 1941, Adelie Hurley, one of Australia’s ‘natural’ girls (Hamilton, 2009:18).

Man magazine first appeared in the 1930s; its circulation peaked during the war and then dropped throughout the fifties. In 1952 circulation was 175,000 but was only 115,000 by 1960 (Murphy, 2000:

41). Pre‐war Man’s readership was skilled workers and the services,

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but postwar the readership was middle‐class men—white‐collar workers who lived in the suburbs and worked in offices. By the fifties, presumably borrowing from aspects of the Playboy philosophy of ‘free love’ and escapism, Man represented suburban life as a prison ruled by the nagging wife and the boss. By the late‐fifties Man was preoccupied by erotic escapist fantasies such as the ‘Love Goddesses’ of Tahiti and ‘Glamour Girls on the Gold Coast’ (White, 1979: 207).

Figure 9. ‘A model poses suggestively for a 1950s advertisement’ (Hamilton, 2009: 3).

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Gardner and Australia Ava Gardner walked onto the tarmac at Melbourne’s Essendon airport in January 1959. She walked into a society that on the surface was ordered, straightforward and prosperous, if somewhat conservative but underneath was individualised, misogynist, insecure and judgemental. The filming of On the Beach had been written about for months in the Australian press. At the time, there was no local film industry to speak of and only a few feature films with well‐known international stars had been made in Australia in the fifties—Kangaroo in 1952, with Maureen O’Hara and Peter

Lawford and A Town Like Alice in 1956 with Virginia McKenna and

Peter Finch. Stars as big as Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire and Gardner in accessible locations were rare.

Gardner was the last big star to arrive in Melbourne. Astaire and

Peck had arrived a few days earlier and given press conferences, but the press were really waiting for Gardner. In terms of visibility she was a publicist’s dream. Her life comprised of the sort of incidents publicists embellished to attract public interest—except in her case it was true. By 1959 she was known more for her lifestyle as a non‐stop party girl with a bigger presence in the gossip columns than movies.

Her last picture, The Naked Maja (1958) had been filmed in Rome. She and her then amour Tony Franciosa had several clashes with aggressive photographers chasing them through the streets after

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nightclubbing on the Via Veneto, and rumour had it that she was the inspiration for Fellini’s bored movie star in La dolce vita (1960).

In fact, if they had been allowed to read it before 1971,

Gardner’s reputation would have reminded Melbournians of the opening sentence of Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place:

Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she

comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she

will come at all, nor for how long she will stay . . . (1956: 1)

Gardner arrived in Melbourne as a newly independent star. The Naked

Maja had been her last picture under MGM for which she was paid

$90,000 while MGM received $450,000. Her new manager and former publicist, David Hanna, had negotiated $400,000 for her for On the

Beach (Server, 2006: 364). Now that she was getting paid more she hoped she would be able to retire sooner, as she explained at her first press conference crowded with reporters and photographers.

Gardner was candid at that first conference. Movie work was boring—the makeup alone took two hours—and she wanted to retire

‘when I’ve made enough money’ (Madden, 1959: 52). Things went downhill after Gardner was asked if she was still in love with Frank

Sinatra. She ‘went bananas’ (interview with Tony Charlton in Davey,

2005: 56). Kramer tried to mediate but she refused to attend a press reception scheduled for that night and avoided the press for at least a month.

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The papers must have been desperate. Everyone knew Gardner was in Melbourne; the public wanted pictures but she wouldn’t co‐ operate. On the Beach’s publicity department wanted to emphasise the serious nature of the movie but the press only wanted Gardner.

Photographers besieged the publicity department for copy to go with a photograph of Gardner leaving her flat. An in‐depth interview with

Gregory Peck was cut for a photograph of Gardner entering a restaurant (Madden: 58). The Sun‐News Pictorial made do with a photograph of Gardner’s maid.

Demand but no copy created the perfect conditions for ‘pseudo‐ eventing’. In 1959, Melbourne had one daily broadsheet—The Age; one daily tabloid—The Sun News‐Pictorial; one afternoon broadsheet—The Herald and one weekly, The Truth. The Herald and

The Sun News‐Pictorial had daily circulations in 1961 of around

500,000 each and The Truth about 200,000 per week (Mayer, 1964: 40‐

41). The population of Melbourne was almost two million people in

1960, so there was approximately one non‐broadsheet bought for every two people (History Victoria,

viewed

8/4/11).

One lasting pseudo‐event was the quote attributed to Gardner:

‘On the Beach is a story about the end of the world and Melbourne sure is the right place to film it’. The quote was published everywhere but was written by a Sydney Morning Herald reporter, Neil Jillett, who

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had nothing to write about after he was unsuccessful in getting an interview with Gardner. He wrote the quote as a joke but the context was lost. Jillett tried to correct it, ‘but the editor didn’t care’ (Server,

2006: 369). Jillett as a Sydney journalist was joking in the context of longstanding Melbourne‐Sydney rivalry but the remark played into

Melbourne’s self‐acknowledged reputation as a wowser city.

Defensiveness together with a David and Goliath attitude and the need for news was probably the cause of The Truth’s acrimonious relationship with Gardner. When Gardner refused to attend a press reception the day after her first press conference, The Truth forced to create a pseudo‐event out of nothing perceived a snub and reacted quickly to exploit Melbourne pride. It ran a banner headline, ‘Why be rude, Miss Gardner?’ (figure 10) with a stock cheesecake photograph and followed with:

We know you’re beautiful, Miss Gardner. Beautiful, rich … and 36.

But why be rude? That is Truth’s word for Ava’s ear after the

happenings of this week in warm hearted, hospitable old Melbourne,

which was all agog for sight, sound … of a famous star who it thought

would be polite as well as good‐looking (10/1/1959).

The Truth prided itself on being a moral, commercial and judicial watchdog for the ordinary person. It had a reputation of exposing injustices and crusaded for the reform of selective aspects of society by informing and mobilising public opinion. It encouraged readers to write to the paper with information on individual injustices or corrupt individuals. Investigations and exposures of this kind

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created the impression of action without threatening social hierarchy

(McKnight, 1999: 167).

In Gardner’s case, The Truth’s moral outrage played on an assumed pact of mutual obligation between a star and her public

(read The Truth) that Gardner had betrayed by denying them access to her. The concept that stardom was a privilege conferred or removed by the public on one of their own was encouraged by the early fan magazines in order to conceal the fact that stardom was constructed by the studios. The Truth’s argument regarding Gardner was problematic, of course. In order to punish her by pulling her down to size they first had to justify her star status. They did this by emphasising her beauty:

She is bewitching, indeed, when you can get to talk to her. Her eyes

are so wonderful; you scarcely look at her lips. With Stanley Kramer to

help her she can say nothing more seductively than almost anyone

(10/1/59).

And titillating readers with her reputed escapades:

… Ava Gardner’s score card reads three marriages and a number of reported

romances … there were also sensations when she was a) thrown out of a hotel in

Brazil; b) reported to be losing her beauty after stopping a round‐arm right with

her eye at a party in Madrid and c) mentioned as Lana Turner’s partner in one of

the most sizzling swops (sic) in Hollywood history (10/1/59).

There is no moral censure here. The Truth probably hoped to needle

Gardner into some kind of provocative behaviour. The other On the

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Figure 10. ‘Why be rude Miss Gardner? The Truth’s opening salvo 10/1/1959.

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Beach stars who attended the press reception had nice things written about them, even if it was on the back page.

Figure 11. ‘Sinatra Snubs Melbourne And Fans Are Fighting Mad’ (The Truth 22/1/195).

The Truth’s response to Gardner’s non‐cooperation was almost identical to their response to Frank Sinatra’s four years earlier. In 1955,

Sinatra arrived in Melbourne and went straight to his car without greeting fans. He didn’t attend a reception, threw reporters out of a rehearsal and refused to give more than one interview. ‘Sinatra Snubs Melbourne And

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Fans Are Fighting Mad’, ran The Truth’s 22/1/1955 headline (figure 11).

Calling him ‘The Hobo from Hoboken,’ they noted ‘his comely visage and balding head’ but were most scathing about his singing: his ‘greatest admirers would hardly classify him as a singer in the conventional sense of the word,’ describing his concerts as ‘the nights he howled down at the

Stadium (The Truth, 22/1/1955). Yet, Sinatra had more support than The

Truth thought. The following issue they published a cross‐section of the

‘flood of letters for and against our article’:

Frankie’s fans are not mad at Frankie, they’re mad at The Truth for

writing that article. I don’t blame him for snubbing the Press, seeing

you can’t be civil to him. I’m sticking up for someone who doesn’t

deserve your criticism—Joy Barty, North Fitzroy

I am a Frank Sinatra fan and was very shocked to read about Frank. I

happen to know Frank is not like what you said he was. I think it’s

terrible that because he doesn’t like reporters he gets bad publicity—

Betty Denison, City (29/1/1955).

The Truth said nothing more about Sinatra. He finished his tour and left without further comment.

By 1959 The Truth was a somewhat different beast. Although its

‘Service Queries’ page giving medical and legal advice still ran regularly, its ‘Letters to the Editor’ page was more sporadic and no special effort made to report reader’s reactions to The Truth’s treatment of Gardner. In the issue after Gardner’s ‘snub’, The Truth ran the headline, ‘All Wet—Ava’s Act,’ beside a full‐page photograph of a bedraggled Gardner during the filming of On the Beach (figure

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12). The unflattering shot was The Truth’s retaliation to Gardner’s demand that she vet all press photographs of her image. The accompanying text gleefully detailed Gardner’s refusal to pose and the production company’s unsuccessful efforts to prevent The Truth and the other papers from taking photos: ‘All told it was a most diverting day. We actually saw the Goddess. We actually photographed her’ (24 /1/1959).

Even so, under the title, ‘Reader’s Reproach’, one reader’s letter was published:

While I am not interested in how Ava Gardner looks when she is wet I am interested in how you, your “star‐struck” reporters and cameramen, look when wet which, judging by last week’s story must be fairly often. To me the story looks like something conjured up in the minds of a group of spiteful females. After all we are all aware that most stars and film people are inclined to be a little temperamental, so why try to make news out of it? I think you should have been satisfied with publishing the pictures— BE TOLERANT, North Carlton (31/1/1959). Although The Truth’s antagonistic style and stance had a precedent in its treatment of Sinatra in 1955, its style has a contemporary feel. This style wasn’t totally accepted by its readership in 1955 and judging from BE TOLERANT’s letter, its aggressive style was still ahead of its readership’s tastes in 1959. Perhaps reader reaction was the reason for

The Truth’s back‐pedalling in a article published two months later in its social page titled, ‘Let’s Give the Stars a Break!’ which suggested giving stars some time away from their public ‘responsibilities’:

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‘There could be too much pressure on these generous people, too much imposition on what leisure time they have’ (7/3/59).

Figure 12. ‘All Wet’ (The Truth, 24 /1/1959).

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It’s useful to compare The Truth’s reportage of Gardner with the reverential reportage of The Herald and The Sun News‐Pictorial. These two papers gushed over Gardner, (‘Ava, Ava, Beautiful, Considerate,

Kind…’ The Sun News‐Pictorial 7/1/59) and filled their columns with details of the number of cigarettes delivered to Gardner’s flat (The

Herald, 8/1/59), and descriptions of Gardner’s restaurant meals (The

Sun News‐Pictorial, 7/1/59).

The Truth’s angle on Sinatra in 1955 and Gardner in 1959 would be familiar with contemporary tabloid readers. Popular culture research reveals some parallels with The Truth’s style and contemporary British tabloids, though one wonders whether The

Truth would have stopped at methods employed today such as phone hacking4. There are no contemporary Melbourne tabloids with which to compare The Truth so comparison with British tabloids is the closest match. The Truth ceased publication in Melbourne in 1993 and the daily Herald‐Sun (the amalgamation of The Herald and Sun News‐

Pictorial) is much milder than the British tabloids.

An analysis of British tabloids by Connell in 1992 found that the most common tabloid celebrity story related to the abuse of privilege by a member of the ‘have’ (money, fame, beauty) caste. The ‘have’

4 In April 2011 British tabloid News of the World admitted hacking into the phones of prominent people in search of exclusive stories. Publisher, News Ltd. closed the paper down in July 2011. It is rumoured that phone hacking had been going on for years and it’s unproven how far up the chain of command knowledge of the practice extended (BBC News UK, ‘Q & A News of the World phone‐hacking scandal’, accessed 13/12/11).

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was subsequently brought to account by the paper on behalf of the

‘have‐nots’ (the readers) and shown to be undeserving of their privileges (1992: 72). Like The Truth, the British tabloids were not against privilege provided it was not given to the undeserving, because with privilege comes responsibility, and, like The Truth, the

British tabloids focused on simple moral lessons that appealed to the emotions. They targeted celebrities or possible aberrant individuals rather than an unjust system.

Research by Johansson (2005) into the social use of tabloid celebrity revealed an active if vacillating relationship between tabloid readers and celebrities. In interviews with readers, Johansson again looking at British tabloids, found readers identified with the humanness of celebrities and imagining themselves in the celebrity’s glamorous world provided escape fantasies from their own (2005:

352). Nevertheless, at the same time, readers were also reminded of the limitations of their own lives in relation to access to material goods and social mobility. The result was a dynamic relationship of

‘identification, disassociation and even aggression’ (Johansson, 2005:

352). Contemporary readers like to see celebrities picked on in order to reverse the power balance of disempowerment in the same way the fan magazines liked to give their readership the illusion that they could decide the fate of stars. Momentary power and control provides a way of involving the reader in a more interactive fashion than simply receiving information.

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The Internet has increased the ways readers interact with celebrities. Readers are now well aware of the constructed nature of celebrity lives and the Internet offers ways of satisfying the fans’ desires for intimacy, identification and emulation. One example is

‘popslash,’ where fans write fictional celebrity narratives on the

Internet for other fans. The Internet offers unlimited identities so any number of fan positions may be occupied as well as assuming celebrity points of view. Most of the stories concern the split between public and private lives and the difficulties of maintaining both.

Rather than simply reproducing star stereotypes many of the popslash writers ‘rehumanise’ celebrities by creating textured back‐ stories and complex inner lives. Often fans insert themselves in the narrative (Busse, 2006: 253‐267).

Today, the lack of any sense of identification with Gardner by the press in 1959 is striking. Stars like Gardner were truly stars and led lives with no association to those of ordinary Australians. Perhaps that’s why in spite of The Truth’s best efforts, there appeared to be no sense of public resentment of Gardner. Gardner’s visit may also inadvertently have brought modern tabloid journalism to Australia by increasing the use of paparazzi‐style photography.

Before Gardner’s arrival, relations between photographer and subject rarely got to the point where so many photographers were focused on such an unwilling subject. The battlelines were drawn once Gardner refused permission for the publication of unauthorised

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photographs and withdrew publicly. In order to fill the demand for news, it is not surprising that a self‐styled people’s champion like The

Truth published their own photographs and took a defensive stance to justify it. Gardner already had a reputation of antagonism towards the press—one reporter from the Sydney Sun wrote about her throwing a drink over him, ‘Last night I shared a glass of champagne with Ava Gardner: she sipped it and I wore it’ (Server, 2006: 373)—so pseudo‐events by The Truth that emphasised Gardner’s rudeness and arrogance were credible.

Several scenes in my creative work highlight Gardner’s acrimonious relationship with the press though not perhaps the pseudo‐event aspect. For example, photographers surprise Ava

Gardner at the hotel reception (although the real Ava didn’t attend) and later Nora walks past a newspaper headline berating Ava for ignoring disabled children. Reverential as they were, The Herald and

Sun News‐Pictorial also stalked Gardner for photographs. As well as staking out her flat and restaurants, ‘they would hide behind trees and drive by in a car and take pictures. They just haunted her’

(Trabert in Server 2006: 368).

In 1959, free from studio control, Gardner was responsible for her own image for the first time. Her reaction to the publication of unauthorised photographs may have stemmed from fear that she was losing her looks and needed a controlled environment to be photographed to advantage or that recent facial surgery due to an

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accident would be revealed. In Gardner’s case there is no evidence that ownership of her own image gave her control of it. Her attempted method of control—withdrawal—wasn’t effective. Her absence while she was newsworthy allowed the press to create a mythical image of her. Obviously if the supposed aim of paparazzi photography is to present a ‘truth’ to the public as opposed to the actor’s desire to maintain an image, then that truth is just as open to construction as any image. The ‘off guard’ constructed photograph may be even more persuasive given the assumption that such photographs give an insight into what the star is really like.

Today, the blurred lines between truth and artifice are incorporated into celebrity culture. Contemporary celebrities often work with paparazzi to provide some ‘real’ images to create audience empathy (Lai, 2006: 228) and part of the appeal of celebrity gossip lies in its ‘freedom from but resemblance to truth’ (Gamson, 1994: 177).

Commenting on the mechanics behind celebrity creation provides entertainment and empowerment for the public and successful satiric television series, such as The Games, Frontline and The Chasers, have successfully exploited this niche. Perhaps Gardner may have been more successful in controlling her image if she had made efforts to distance herself from it in the way MGM did earlier in her career (see

Screen Guide examples discussed earlier in this chapter), or in the way contemporary celebrities such as Angelina Jolie—bad girl on screen, earth mother off screen—do today.

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Ava Gardner left Australia in April 1959. The contrast between the numbers of press present to record her departure with the number there to welcome her in January was stark. Her farewell statement to Melbourne was ‘Miss Gardner does not feel like talking today’ (Server, 2006: 375). Gardner continued to make headlines and be described as glamorous in the world press. She appeared to see her celebrity as a burden to be endured as a by‐product of Hollywood rather than a position to aspire to and control to her own advantage.

She was never ambitious. Early in her career when urged by another actor to push for top billing in a movie she reportedly replied, ‘Who wants it?’ (Server, 2006: 156) and yet ironically she is cited as a role model for girls who aspire to a glamorous life (Gundle, 2008: 395). It is interesting to speculate whether Gardner today would have succeeded as spectacularly as she did in her own time. Most probably she would not have made it as an enduring Hollywood star.

Several factors that worked to her advantage do not exist today.

As oppressive and exploitative as Gardner found the studio system, it provided her with training, publicity and exposure to other producers. The femme fatale persona that established her belongs to the past. Male and female worlds are no longer as separate as they once were due to mass communication and greater participation by women in the world which has led to demystification of the sexes

(Gundle, 2006: 392). Another factor would have been Gardner’s lack of interest in controlling her media image. Gardner’s contemporary,

Elizabeth Taylor, also known more for her star persona than her

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acting ability, was far more successful in controlling her image and getting what she wanted from the Hollywood system.

Gardner may well have succeeded as a ‘supermodel’ of the

1990s. Glamour is still configured in feminine terms and beauty is the way girls from nowhere get ahead. Through no effort of her own

Gardner was loaded with beauty and sex appeal, the qualities required to make people take notice. That she was at her prime during the age of controlled photographic mass production also worked to her advantage. In the multiplicity of media and the expansion of the fashion and luxury industries, Gardner’s photogenic qualities would have been in demand. Whereas today’s Hollywood stars are concerned with acting, as Gardner never was, supermodels have been presented as images whose primary function was to create illusions of glamour through their looks and lifestyles that appealed to consumers. Ironically the supermodels of the 1990s paid homage to the stars of Gardner’s era. In 1996, French Vogue photographed models made up as Marlene Dietrich and Gardner (Gundle, 2006:

365). Yet perhaps Gardner may not have succeeded as a supermodel.

Similar to the way Garbo was effective, the supermodels needed blank faces on which the public could project their fantasies. Gardner may not have been able to expunge her individual personality to that degree. The supermodels dissolved when they became too expensive, too ubiquitous and put a price tag on themselves ($10,000 a day) subsequently destroying their mystique (Gundle, 2006: 370).

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Above all, glamour appears to depend on the combination of elitism and accessibility. Gardner was glamorous because of her looks and sex appeal. She also transgressed social norms and her scandalous behaviour was legendary. Gardner lived on the cusp of the media’s trend to blend the public with the private, but when media outlets were not so numerous as to destroy the distance required to cultivate mystique. Perhaps this is why figures such as

Gardner and periods such as the fifties continue to fascinate us—close enough to be almost tangible, yet distant enough to mystify.

In the final chapter, I move away from discussion of a particular period and examine how ‘time’ as a concept can be utilised in art to speculate on the human condition.

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Chapter Three

The Role of the Unconscious: Playing with Time in

Film

When characters can no longer move, they are forced to think. Time

‘opens up’ to them and they can ‘see’ for the first time. These

characters are no longer ‘agents’ but ‘seers’ (Deleuze, 1989: xi).

In the last fifty years, popular film culture has shown a growing fascination with the unconscious mind. In the 1950s, the unconscious was usually linked to Freudian psychoanalysis (for example, Spellbound, (1945),

The Three Faces of Eve, (1957), Psycho, (1960)). But over the last twenty years or so, films about the mind have become increasingly adventurous. While psychological drama remains the most popular genre, films of the mind range from mainstream to art‐house, and from melodrama through to horror and comedy romance. What connects these new movies of the mind and distinguishes them from those of the past is the increasing time spent within the protagonist’s mind (for example, Inception (2010), Shutter

Island (2010) Mysterious Skin (2004), The Butterfly Effect 1‐3, (2004‐2009),

Suddenly Thirty (2004), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), The

Others (2001), Donnie Darko (2001), The Matrix (1999), The Sixth Sense

(1999), 12 Monkeys (1996), Jacob’s Ladder (1990)). Once within the mind, the

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narratives inevitably play with the possibilities offered by time: the past; the future; the present; what might or might not have happened; misunderstandings; coincidences and repetitions to name a few.

Something is happening in modern cinema. Perhaps our ‘uncertain times’ can account for the increasing number of films that play with time? Such concerns lead us directly to the philosophical thought of Gilles Deleuze.

For the student of cinema, Deleuze offers a new way of seeing that is refreshingly different from the usual interpretive methods of cultural studies or literary theory. Deleuze did not see cinema as conveying a message, nor did he see cinematic images as representational. In his two‐ volume work on film, Cinema 1: The Movement‐Image and Cinema 2: The

Time‐Image, Deleuze drew on cinema to write philosophy and on philosophy to write on cinema. Post‐World War II, in Italian neo‐realism cinema, when the action‐reaction schema no longer sufficed, Deleuze created the philosophical concepts of the time‐image in response to a situation that was ‘primarily optical and of sound, invested by the senses’

(Deleuze, 1989: 4). Cinema offered new futures for thinking, most specifically with the possibilities presented by the virtual power of difference beyond actual images:

If cinema goes beyond perception, it is in the sense that it reaches to the

genetic element of all possible perception, that is, the point which changes,

and which makes perception change, the differential of perception itself

(Deleuze, 1989: 83).

Deleuze saw cinema as the medium that allows us to re‐think time. In cinema, time is presented both indirectly through the movement‐image

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and directly through the time‐image. The movement‐image allows us to view time indirectly by presenting (and later juxtaposing through montage) movement as it moves. In montage, different points of view (or flows of time) are placed alongside each other and the different rhythms of objects, human and inhuman, that make up time are revealed.

Movement is viewed through images, and cinema is able to isolate images such as colours, movements, textures, sounds, tones and lights that are unorganised and without a point of view, what Deleuze called

‘singularities’. In her overview of Deleuze, Claire Colebrook characterises these as, ‘the impersonal events from which we compose the world into actual bodies’ (2001: 33). Although Deleuzian images do have subjective

(the mental images of Hitchcock) and objective (the static frames of early cinema) biases they are never one or the other completely. These subjective and objective poles are related in different ways, what Deleuze calls the perception‐image, the affection‐image, the action‐image, and so on. We are most familiar with the action‐image of the classical Hollywood narrative where a character with a goal overcomes problems through action (situation–action–new situation). The purpose of Cinema 1 was to set out all the possible variants of the movement‐image. At the end of

Cinema 1 Deleuze claims the movement‐image is exhausted and asks if cinema can find a new way of thinking beyond ‘a world‐wide, diffuse conspiracy, an enterprise of generalised enslavement which extends to every location of the any‐space‐whatever, spreading death everywhere’

(Deleuze, 1986: 214). As John Mullarkey argues in Film, Theory And

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Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (2009), as Deleuze saw it, a crisis for cinema is also a crisis for our philosophy and culture (2009:183).

Deleuze takes the end of World War II as the beginning of Cinema 2:

The Time‐Image. Essentially this was because ‘the sensory‐motor schemata, the clichés with which we had lived our lives no longer worked ‘(Deleuze,

1989: 20). In Europe, the postwar period greatly increased situations we no longer knew how to react to, in spaces we no longer knew how to describe. What Deleuze called ‘”any spaces whatever”’ (1989: xi). Clichés could not respond or adapt to the devastation of postwar Europe. But the solution lay in the very failure of form of the cliché. This is understood by

Mullarkey who writes:

When something breaks, when a habitual act fails to find its target, it

emerges (as it really is) into consciousness. When vision fails, we see (the

truth of) vision… We see not the thing, but what it is to see (or not see) the

thing. We see the process of seeing (2009: 184).

We see the time‐image through ‘irrational cuts’ as opposed to the rational cuts of the movement‐image. Irrational cuts where time breaks—where visual image and sound image disassociate for example—prevent us from ordering images into wholes and allow experience to be broken down into un‐unified singularities which have no viewpoint or point of reference. In the preface to the English edition of Cinema 2, Deleuze quotes Hamlet’s

‘time is out of joint’, where (time), ‘increasingly appears for itself and creates paradoxical movements’ (1989: xi). As Mullarkey argues, ’time out of joint is true time, for time really is what puts things out of joint, what dismembers any organised situation’ (2009: 184).

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Deleuze begins Cinema 2 by arguing that the revolution in philosophy where ‘the subordination of time to movement was reversed’ which had taken ‘from the Greeks to Kant’ to occur had now taken place in cinema, but ‘in more fast‐moving circumstances’ (Deleuze, 1989: xi). At the same time, Deleuze wrote that through the time‐image, cinema could create reasons to restore our belief in the world: ‘we need an ethic or a faith… it is not a need to believe in something else, but a need to believe in this world’ (1989: 173). How is this faith manifested in the narratives of the cinema Deleuze looked at—the cinema of the Italian neo‐realists, Welles,

Resnais, Duras and Hitchcock?

The answer, Deleuze believed, lay in developing new relationships between sight and sound, new spaces and new types of actors,

‘professional non‐actors, or … “actor‐mediums”, capable of seeing or showing rather than acting’ (1989: 20). This is also a cinema of new bodies,

‘which has broken… with the sensory‐motor schema [the action‐image] through action being replaced with attitude’ (1989: 276). The new ‘cinema of the body’ is ‘caught in quite a different space… This is the space before action… which does not point to an indecision of the spirit, but to an undecidability of the body’ (1989: 203). When the character is unable to move, ‘time is no longer subordinated to movement, but rather movement to time’ (1989: xi). In this situation, time:

Increasingly appears for itself, resulting in a discontinuous narrative. When

characters can no longer move, they are forced to think. Time ‘opens up’ to

them and they can ‘see’ for the first time. These characters are no longer

‘agents’ but ‘seers’ (1989: xi).

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For myself, searching for a device to allow time to ‘appear for itself’ to my protagonist Nora to enable her ‘to “see” for the first time, the concept of a body unable to move as a result of a coma but a mind that could, was a revelation. A similar device is used in Jacob’s Ladder (1990), which will be analysed below.

Since Deleuze first accounted for ‘any spaces whatever’, uncertainty and doubts about our place in the world and possibilities for the future have increased rather than diminished. Fears of natural and man‐made disasters in the form of nuclear threat, war and terrorism have increased the rate and scale of emotional and physical upheavals; political change and economic migration; moral and social re‐evaluation. Has this state of uncertainty and doubt led to a triumph of the time‐image in modern cinema? Obviously not. Hollywood action‐image movies still make good box office. Patricia Pisters in The Matrix of Visual Culture argues, ‘the traditional transcendental [I see] model of the cinematographic apparatus is still vigorously alive’ (2003: 13) as she shows in the hugely successful non‐Deleuzian transcendental world of The Matrix (1999). Even so, there are an increasing number of popular films that play with time.

Pisters suggests one reason for the increasing acceptance of these kinds of films is because contemporary culture now operates in Deleuze’s after Bergson’s concept of the metacinematic universe (2003: 2). We are already very comfortable with one important aspect of the metacinematic universe put forward in Cinema 1, the objective viewpoint of the camera, which removes the viewer from the centre of events (Deleuze, 1989: 3). In

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his book, Cinematic Geopolitics (2008), Michael Shapiro argues that cinema allows ‘the disorganised multiplicity of the world to emerge’ by

‘effect[ing] a decentering mode of creation and reception’ (2008: 6). A second important aspect of Deleuze’s metacinematic universe may be as follows.

In Bergsonian and Deleuzian theory, the image is not a representation of other transcendental (I see) worlds; the image already exists. If we accept that we think in unmediated images rather than mediated representational ones, then the division between the real and the unreal (dreams, fiction, memories) no longer holds and the distinction between objective and subjective less important. As Deleuze explains when the visual description replaces the motor action:

We no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, in the

situation, not because they are confused, but because we do not have to

know and there is no longer even a place from which to ask. It is as if the

real and the imaginary were running after each other, as if each were being

reflected in the other around a point of indiscernibility1 (1989: 7).

Mainstream movies (for example, Inception (2010) and Shutter Island

(2010)) increasingly play with this notion. Pisters, accurately I think, points out that since the images are all ‘real’, then Deleuze’s distinction between the virtual and the actual may be a better way to describe them (2003: 3).

1 The point of indiscernibility is ‘the coalescence of the actual image and the virtual image, the image with two sides, actual and virtual at the same time’ (Deleuze 1989: 69). Deleuze goes on to say that the crystal image ‘has two sides that are not to be confused’. Indiscernibility … ‘does not suppress the distinction between the two sides but makes it unattributable, each side taking the other’s role’ in a ‘reversibility’ (Deleuze, 1989: 69).

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In a metacinematic universe, virtual (past and future) images are stored and actual (present) images are constantly generated, influencing each other in the process. Deleuze explains it in Cinema 2, this way:

In Bergsonian terms, the real object is reflected in a mirror‐image as in the

virtual object, which, from its side and simultaneously, envelops or reflects

the real: there is “coalescence” between the two. There is a formation of an

image with two sides, actual and virtual. It is as if an image in a mirror, a

photo or a postcard came to life, assumed independence and passed into the

actual, even if this meant the actual image returned into the mirror and

resumed its place in the postcard or photo following a double movement of

liberation and capture (1989:68).

The image of the photograph becoming actual and its reverse, the actual becoming virtual, is so widely accepted we scarcely notice it anymore.

First used as a plot device,2 it is now used as an editing technique. Before realising it was an example of metacinema I had used it myself as a transition from the present to 1959 in Twisted Things.3

Objective ‘camera consciousness’ enables us to understand our past, present and future. By means of the image we can ‘jump between layers of time as well as between the actual and the virtual’ (Pisters, 2003: 2). We now see mainstream films where the camera ‘articulates a world rather than the specific drama within it’ (2003:2). Shapiro cites The Pledge (2001)

2 Stanley Kubrick in The Shining (1980) and Woody Allen in Zelig (1983) and The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) used the movement between virtual and actual in the photograph as a plot device. The Purple Rose of Cairo has the IMDB tag line: ‘a character walks off the screen and into real life’ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089853/accessed 11/11/11). 3 See Twisted Things, p. 52.

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directed by Sean Penn as an example where the protagonist’s narrative is backgrounded to reveal ‘the existence of different dimensions of ethnic and geopolitical time’ (2008: 9). Here, the audience is placed in ‘spatial and temporal positions’ that are different to those occupied by the protagonist,

Jerry (Jack Nicholson) a retired police officer obsessed with solving a series of murders:

But the film reveals that to which Jerry is inattentive. When the land‐ and

ethno‐scape shots are shown, often in contrast to Jerry’s perceptions, Jerry

becomes effectively a transparent figure whose movements point to a

historical, politically fraught trajectory (Shapiro, 2008: 10).

This is what Deleuze would term a metacinematic universe where the

‘viewer’s problem becomes, “What is there to see in the image?” (and not now “What are we going to see in the next image?”)’ (1989: 272).

Obviously many modern films that play with time are not typical time‐travel films where the characters, with a ‘pervasive uneasiness about our future… escape to the past to fix it’ (Gordon in Redmond (ed.), 2004:

116). This may be possible in continuous linear narrative where there is a straight line back to the past, but as Deleuze indicates, time is not as simple as that. Cinema is capable of revealing complex temporal structures with many narrative lines and many possible pasts. The aim and challenge of this chapter then, is to discover the possible relevance of

Deleuze in four examples of commercial cinema.

The four films chosen are from different genres—12 Monkeys (1996),

Jacob’s Ladder (1990), Donnie Darko (2001), and Suddenly Thirty (2004)—two

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thrillers, a melodrama and a romantic comedy. They share common threads of discontinuous narratives, different time spaces and protagonists who see as well as act. While the number of texts that analyse popular films using Deleuze is growing, (Powell (2005, 2007), Martin‐

Jones (2006) and Pisters (2003)), the number is still small and there is no formal method of analysis. Indeed to suggest such a thing would be anti‐

Deleuzian. Like Pisters, in the spirit of Deleuze, my aim is to see if some of his ideas work on the films I examine and if any new ideas emerge. Pisters points out however that one of the ‘most challenging aspects of

“applying” Deleuze is to highlight the relation of the cinema books to concepts he developed elsewhere, mostly together with Guattari’ (2003:

9).4

4 The most useful concepts were: ‘the rhizome’, ‘deterritorialistion/reterritorialisation’, and ‘line of flight’. Most of these were developed with Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus written in 1980 (translated 1987)(republished 2003), three years before Cinema 1. The rhizome The rhizome describes an open‐ended pattern of thinking that develops according to random connections between every thing and everybody – concrete and virtual – that may develop in any order. The rhizome appears to have been developed in opposition to binary ‘arborescent thought’: ‘unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature… The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2003: 21). Rhizomatic actions can be applied to all kinds of entities such as music, mathematics, economics, politics, art, science, and cinema. In addition, a rhizome is ‘a map and not a tracing [hence there is no ‘deep structure’]… a map has multiple entryways as opposed to the tracing which always comes back to “to the same”’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2003: 12). In this way, rhizomatic cinema (and writing) is a process of continual transformation. Deterritorialisation/Reterritorialisation and the Line of flight

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‘Deterritorialisation’ is the allowing of a body to change and open to new connections by removing the constraints that held it in place. Deleuze does not mention deterritorialisation/reterritorialisation in his cinema books, but the concepts have been useful for film scholars. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write of the ‘cutting edges of deterritorialisation’ of an assemblage (a territorial entity). The ‘tetravalence of the assemblage’ and its relationship to deterritorialisation/ reterritorialisation is as follows: On the first, horizontal, axis, an assemblage comprises two segments, one of content [materials], the other of expression. On the one hand it is a machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another; on the other hand it is a collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies. Then on a vertical axis, the assemblage has both territorial sides, or reterritorialised sides that stabilise it, and cutting edges of deterritorialisation that carry it away (authors’ emphasis) (Deleuze and Guattari, 2003: 88). In cinematic terms, Pisters uses the horizontal axis of form and content to distinguish image types (action‐image, relation image and so on). In Pisters’ analysis (2003: 58‐ 60), Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘rhizomatic politics’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2003: 505‐6) is also important. Each of us (individual or group) is made up of three (political) lines. The first is the ‘segmental line’, which forms the individual/group (gender, class family structures etc.) and creates the world of the film (political, historical, economic etc.). The segmental line forms the territorial sides (or reterritorialised sides), which stabilise us (or the group) on the vertical axis. The second line is the ‘molecular line’. On this line small individual changes within the individual or group can occur, but it stays within the segmentation. How these changes are expressed depends on the image type of the film. The third line is the ‘line of flight’ that breaks with the segmental line and draws the individual/group into new territories. When characters follow their line of flight they are in most danger, or in traditional scriptwriting terms, this is when the stakes are highest with the most to gain and the most to lose. This is the cutting edge of deterritorialisation of the vertical axis. Deleuze’s ideas developed differently according to different contexts so that his ideas are open to a number of interpretations. Assemblages can be constructed in other ways. Pisters chooses to analyse rhizomic assemblages constructed around for example, ‘images of the flesh that are about to become meat’ (2003: 58), but she also mentions Ian Buchanan’s analysis of Blade Runner (1982) where he looks at the whole film as an assemblage (Deleuzism: A Metacommentary, 2000: pp 129‐30). David Martin‐Jones’s arguments around deterritorialisation/reterritorialisation focus on what he sees as an oscillating relationship between the plane of organisation and the plane of consistency on the plane of immanence where Deleuze theorised all matter on a molecular level as light existed in a virtual or actual state (Cinema 1, 1986: 60).

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One further hypothesis to account for what David Martin‐Jones in

Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity (2006) calls the ‘jumbled, fragmented, multiplied or reversed film narratives’ (2006:32) used by many modern films, refines rather than contradicts Pisters. Martin‐Jones suggests the purpose of discontinuous time narratives is to examine and ‘renegotiate’ issues of national identity in turbulent times. In Martin‐Jones’s thesis, contemporary films using discontinuous narrative are commonly hybrids which possess characteristics of both time‐image and movement‐image

(2006: 39). In these films, discontinuous narrative (time‐image) breaks away from (deterritoralises) the linear narrative (movement‐image) before being reincorporated (reterritorialised) back into the linear narrative as a way of showing the correct way to behave. In this way alternative issues of national identity can be examined and usually ‘corrected’. Similarities can be seen here between Martin‐Jones’s model and the Hollywood

‘restorative three‐act structure’5 which can in turn be traced back to

Martin‐Jones argues that ‘the movement image emerges as a reterritorialisation of the time‐image’ (2006: 26) from the following statement from A Thousand Plateaus: The plane of organisation is constantly working away at the plane of consistency, always trying to plug the lines of flight, stop or interrupt the movements of deterritorialisation, weigh them down, restratify them, reconstitute forms and subjects in a dimension of depth. Conversely, the plane of consistency is constantly extricating itself from the plane of organisation… breaking down functions by means of assemblages or micro‐assemblages (2003: 270). Martin‐Jones argues the movement‐image exists on the plane of organisation, the plane of the actual, where ‘it always concerns the development of forms and the formation of subjects’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2003: 265), while the time‐image exists on the plane of consistency as a constant deterritorialising force (2006: 25‐27). 5 The Hollywood ‘restorative three‐act structure’ refers to essentially character orientated action‐reaction stories wherein the protagonist transgresses, recognises their mistakes and learns from them. They are then able to resume normal life but as a changed

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Aristotle’s Poetics 6. In this sense, the films I examine are hybrids too. They contain characteristics of both time and movement image, and to some degree, and including my own creative work, each follow Martin‐Jones’s hypothesis of reterritorialising disrupted time‐image narratives back into the movement‐image in order to escape the mistakes of the past. The two most mainstream films Suddenly Thirty and Donnie Darko clearly show the movement‐image path as the correct way to live in society, even when it results in the death of the protagonist, as in Donnie Darko.

Much of the narrative energy of all the films examined comes from the tension between the subversive deterritorialising forces of the time image (‘the plane of consistency’) against the reterritorialising forces of the linear movement‐image (‘the plane of organisation’). The first film examined, 12 Monkeys, also provides a good example of the universe as metacinema as well as the ways in which the forces of the time‐image can deterritorialise the movement‐image.

(better) person. Act 1 normally introduces us to the world of the character and creates a problem the character commits to solving. Act 2 adds complications and implies the protagonist will be defeated. Act 3 allows the protagonist to find the solution from within, solve the problem and return to society a changed person who has learned from their mistakes (Dancyger and Rush: 16‐27). 6 See ‘Tragic Catharsis’ (Sachs, J. ‘Aristotle: Poetics’ accessed 28/12/11).

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Camera consciousness and reterritorialisation in 12 Monkeys

Camera Consciousness

12 Monkeys (1996) is an art‐house science fiction thriller directed by Terry

Gilliam and written by Hollywood veterans David and Janet Peoples. It was inspired by Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962). A brief synopsis is as follows: it is 2035 and the earth is uninhabitable. In 1996 a virus was released that wiped out five billion people, leaving animals to roam the world. The surviving remnants of the human population now live underground ‘like worms’. The main character, James Cole, a criminal, is sent back to 1996 to find clues to help a group of scientists make earth habitable for humans again. It is not a question of preventing the human wipe‐out; what happened, happened. Cole’s mission is to locate the virus and to discover how a solution might be found.

James Cole is haunted by a recurring childhood dream of a shooting at an airport. In his dream, a man, aided by a woman, runs towards the airport gate but is gunned down by police. There is no ambiguity as to whose subjective viewpoint this is: the film opens with the dream and a close‐up of the eyes of Cole as a child witness. The shooting at the airport, overexposed and in slow motion is stylistically distinguished from the rest of the film. Such images are what Deleuze terms ‘optical images’ and characteristic of the time‐image. They are objective images with no

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context. They make us think, searching through our memories trying to place them.

At first it appears there is no confusion between actual and virtual in the film. Cole, as an action‐image protagonist, has a mission. In 2035 the scientists send him to different time periods (albeit with some mistakes) to find information on the army of the 12 Monkeys. Gradually, however, the lines between actual and virtual blur. Cole, together with the audience, begins to recognise characters in the dream. First he realises the woman aiding the man is the psychiatrist Kathryn Railly, who becomes his lover.

Then, towards the end of the film when the couple go to the airport to escape, Cole recognises the airport and realises it is not a dream but a memory of what he saw as a child. Cole and Railly are the couple the child

Cole saw at the airport. Now Cole the adult will die, and Cole the child will witness his own death.

At the airport we see both Cole the adult (trying to evade the police for kidnapping Railly) and Cole the child (at the airport with his parents to see the planes) and we participate in two different times simultaneously.

Cole and the child are the same person but they occupy different times

(the virtual past and the actual present). It is impossible to tell one time from the other because they conflate. This is Deleuze and Bergson’s crystal image of time because it is the same moment, virtual and actual.

These scenes provided the inspiration for my creative work. I found the idea that Cole experienced the past, present and future in the same moment fascinating and endeavoured to create a similar scenario in

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Twisted Things with the protagonist Nora experiencing past, present and future simultaneously. This occurs first when she dreams of the baby crying until it sees its mother, and again towards the end of the screenplay when Nora as her own mother sees herself as a baby.7 As in 12 Monkeys and La Jetée, my scene begins as an optical image but when we see the same images again towards the end of the film they have become relational images because of the connections they now carry.

After Cole’s death we return to the child Cole’s subjectivity. We see

Railly remember something and look searchingly through the crowd. She sees Cole the boy. Their eyes meet and Railly is satisfied. The boy’s eyes fill with tears and when returning to the car with his parents he looks upwards towards the audience as if aware of his future.

Although James Cole is essentially an action‐image protagonist—he is played by Bruce Willis, after all—as the story moves towards the climactic airport scene he becomes more like a time‐image character. He is unsure of whom and where he is, what is real and not real and whether he is mad or not. He becomes one of Deleuze’s seers and visionaries: ‘the visionary, the seer, is the one who sees in the crystal, and what he sees is the gushing of time’ (Deleuze, 1989: 81). The clearest example of Cole as visionary is the sequence prior to the airport scene. Cole and Railly hide from the police at an all night Hitchcock festival where Vertigo is playing.8

7 See Twisted Things p. 27 and p. 68. 8 It’s no accident that Vertigo should be the film playing. Time is an obvious element in that film and it lends itself to a Deleuzian reading (see Pisters, pp. 33‐38). The story in brief: ‘Scottie’ Ferguson is a retired police detective in San Francisco. An old school

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They watch the scene in the forest where the virtual Carlotta actualised in

Madeleine marks out her past life to Scottie. Cole remembers Vertigo from childhood. He says to Railly:

I have seen it but I don’t remember this part. Funny, it’s like what’s

happening to us, like the past. The movie never changes—it can’t

change—but every time you see it, it seems to be different because

you’re different ‐ you notice different things (Peoples & Peoples, 1994:

110).

His words recall his dream and prefigure the next sequence at the airport, which is, as in Vertigo, the virtual past and the actual present together reflecting different things9. Cole falls asleep in the cinema and wakes to find that the virtual woman in his dream has been actualised in Kathryn who has turned blonde like Madeleine. They kiss while the Vertigo theme plays over them. In both films not only the virtual and the actual but also the subjective and objective exist together (is the airport scene from Cole the adult’s or Cole the child’s point of view?). It is impossible to tell them

friend asks him to keep an eye on his wife, Madeleine. Madeleine is a wanderer who slips into the identity of her great‐grandmother, Carlotta, who committed suicide young. Scottie follows Madeleine and saves her from suicide once. He falls in love with her and together they wander through the redwood forest where Madeleine slips into being Carlotta. Unfortunately, Scottie can’t prevent Madeleine from suicide again. Distraught, he meets Judy, Madeleine’s ‘living image’, and he tries to transform her into Madeleine. His efforts result in Judy’s accidental death but not before he discovers Judy was in fact Madeleine employed by the old school friend in a plot to set Scottie up as a witness in the murder of his wife. Scottie can’t love the real Judy, only the imaginary Madeleine, and, as a result loses them both. 9 For further discussion on 12 Monkeys particularly in regard to complex systems’ behaviour see Anthony Hood’s 2002 Ph.d thesis. Hood argues Cole’s airport dream is an example of ‘how memory and consciousness is perpetually recomposing with experience’ (2002, 167) which in turn reacts with ‘material reality’. This in turn affects our future behaviour to some degree thus creating a loop effect.

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apart. Here we can see what Pisters means when she says after Deleuze that in the universe as metacinema, ‘a camera consciousness starts to make mental connections in time’:

The camera is no longer content sometimes to follow the character’s

movement, sometimes itself to undertake movements of which they are

merely the object, but in every case it subordinates descriptions of a space to

the functions of thought. This is not a simple distinction between the

subjective and the objective, the real and the imaginary; it is on the contrary

their indiscernibility, which will endow the camera with a rich array of

functions… Hitchcock’s premonition will come true: a camera consciousness

which would no longer be defined by the movements it is able to follow or

make, but by the mental connections it is able to enter into (Deleuze, 1989:

23, from Pisters, 2003: 36).

The Forces of Deterritorialisation

Deleuze’s concepts of territorialisation and deterritorialisation can be summarised briefly as follows: the forces of territorialisation (molar line) maintain the status quo and the forces of deterritorialisation (line of flight) subvert it. Between these two lines is the ‘plane of composition’ of the film on which the molecular line is situated. The molecular line contains the reactions of each character ‘schizzes’ to events and is the first signal of resistance to the status quo. Molecular lines are expressed in different image categories. In 12 Monkeys the most powerful forces of deterritorialisation are expressed as time‐images.

This first occurs when Cole begins to question his sanity and hence his identity. The film opens with a text scroll from 1996 citing Cole’s

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prediction of the human wipe‐out but labels him a ‘certified schizophrenic’. We, the audience, soon know better—Cole is sane, but he just seems mad. Railly, a psychiatrist moves from doubt to belief just as

Cole begins to doubt himself. At first Railly tries to convince him he’s made the whole thing up—the virus is a ‘substitute reality’ he has constructed. Cole wants to believe her. He’d rather be mad than know the world will end shortly. Cole is returned to 2035 which he now thinks exists only in his mind and is consequently restrained. When Cole questions his sanity and therefore his identity, his actions stop and he opens up to time.

Cole’s doubts about his identity are increased by another deterritorialising force expressed as a time‐image. This is the force of sound. When sound and picture don’t match, the virtual and the actual can interchange. This is how acousmatic sound is used here. Acousmatic sound is the disembodied voice, the voice of God. It is extremely powerful, precisely because it is disembodied. The disembodied voice is called ‘Raspy Voice’ in the script. Significantly Raspy Voice makes his first appearance in one of Cole’s airport dreams but he continues speaking after Cole wakes up. Cole asks if Raspy Voice is in the next cell. Raspy

Voice replies ‘Maybe’. Asked what that’s supposed to mean Raspy Voice says:

Maybe. Means ‘maybe’ I’m in the next cell, another ‘volunteer’ like you ‐‐‐

or ‘maybe’ I’m in the Central Office spying on you for all those science

bozos. Or, hey, ‘maybe’ I’m not even here. ‘Maybe’ I’m just in your head. No

way to confirm anything. Ha Ha (Peoples and Peoples, 1994: 34).

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This is the first time Cole’s identity is shaken. His very being is invaded by a voice that is definitely not his. It is no wonder he comes to believe he is mad. Merleau‐Ponty notes that when the disembodied voice becomes embodied it loses its power (Pisters, 2003: 275). This is exactly what happens later when Cole travels to 1996 and finds Raspy Voice embodied in Louie the derelict. Raspy doesn’t stop there, however. He/it? returns, disembodied with power restored, in 2035 where Cole suspected of insanity is immobilised by restraints. Raspy Voice whispers ways for Cole to outwit the system and get what he wants. He doesn’t sound like Cole but he articulates Cole’s desires. Is he Cole? And if he isn’t Cole, who is he? We don’t know and neither does Cole. Raspy Voice’s final appearance is at the airport just before Cole’s death where in his wisdom he tells Cole he is not permitted to stay despite what he desires.

The deterritorialising forces of the time‐image of sound and madness outlined above lead us to the climactic scene at the airport where Cole

(and the audience) experience time changing from Chronos (clock time) to

Aion (non‐chronological time). At the airport, as already discussed, we participate in two different times at the same moment. Cole and the child are the same person but they occupy different times (the virtual past and the actual present). It is impossible to tell one time from the other because they conflate. It is a crystal image because it is the same moment virtual and actual. This is Bergson’s notion of ‘duration,’ which is central to

Deleuze’s concept of the time‐image. Duration’ is term developed by

Henri Bergson (1859‐1941) who contributed significantly to Deleuze’s philosophical thought. It was Bergson who first conceived of time as ‘a

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non‐spatial and a continuous multiplicity’ (Time and Free Will: 1888), hence one aspect of duration is, ‘non‐spatial time’ (Pearson, K.A and Mullarkey,

J. (eds), 2002: 9). Bergson’s thinking on duration changed during his career. He first thought of duration as a ‘phenomenon of consciousness and something solely inner or psychological,’ but in Matter and Memory

(1896) wondered whether duration could be applied to ‘external things’.

By the time he published Creative‐Evolution (1907) he had decided that duration was ‘immanent to the universe’ and crucial to understanding the creative nature of evolution. Deleuze argued that in Bergson, duration increasingly becomes the ‘variable essence of things’ (Deleuze, 1991: 34), what Colebrook calls, ‘the flow of differing difference’, that is different for each object rather than a just a ‘psychological experience’ (Pearson, K.A and Mullarkey, J. (eds), (2002): 9). Hence duration can be thought of as ‘a

“transition,” of a “change,” a becoming’ (Deleuze, 1988a: 37).

Duration often ends with the character’s death, as is the case in 12

Monkeys. But then what? Can the film end there? Time‐image cinema offers no solutions unlike movement‐image cinema. This may be one reason why the time‐image concludes in being reterritorialised by the movement‐image in that the traditional action‐image narrative takes over.10 Western cinema requires an ending, even for an art‐house film like

10 David Martin‐Jones explains the significance of reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation as follows: Reterritorialisation entails a constraining of a narrative into one linear timeline; evidence of this suggests the presence of a strong movement‐image. Deterritorialisation, on the other hand, enables a displacement of narrative into

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12 Monkeys. A redemptive ending is better still. The final scene shows one of the scientists from 2035 sitting next to Dr Peters who has just released the virus. The message is clear: Cole succeeded in his mission; he has alerted the scientists from the future to the whom, when and where of the virus. Now the scientists can start work on an antidote and one day the

Earth will be habitable again.

Sheets of the past in Jacob’s Ladder

The second film I wish to read with Deleuze is Jacob’s Ladder. This film was made in 1990—though written several years earlier—and is credited as a vision of Adrian Lynn (director) and Bruce Joel Rubin (writer). The story centres on Jacob Singer, a Vietnam War veteran who is pursued by demons and flashbacks as a result of his war experiences. Jacob discovers his old army buddies are experiencing the same phenomena, which appear to originate from one particular attack in Vietnam when he (Jacob) was bayoneted and badly wounded. Jacob is determined to find out what happened.

Like the other films examined, Jacob’s Ladder is both an action‐image and a time‐image film. On one level the film is pure action‐image cause and effect thriller. Jacob feels the army is hiding something. It is a race against time to discover what happened before the army kills him. The

multiple labyrinthine versions. Evidence of deterritorialisation suggests the unruly presence of a strong time‐image‘ (2006:4).

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action steps up a notch after another war buddy’s car explodes. The mystery is resolved when an army chemist tells all. Jacob’s unit was secretly trialled with a drug called ‘the Ladder’ designed to make them more aggressive. The experiment went wrong and the men killed each other whereupon the army hushed the whole thing up.

The film turns on a narrative shock which relies on indiscernibility—

‘the coalescence of the actual image and the virtual image’ (Deleuze, 1989:

69)—and it occurs in the final moments of the film. The screen is bright.

We realise this is a light which has suddenly been switched off. We pull back from Jacob who has just died. We are in an army hospital in Vietnam.

The shock is that Vietnam is the present not the past and what we thought was the present never happened. These states were indiscernible because in time there is no difference between the past and the present and the future. Events we thought took place over months happened in the few hours interval between when Jacob was bayoneted and when he died. We move back and forth between the actual and the virtual mistaking one for the other. Seen this way the film becomes an example of what Deleuze means by saying cinema can show us time.

How is time shown in Jacob’s Ladder? The time‐image occurs when the sensory‐motor link is broken and the protagonist becomes immobilised without the power to take action. In 12 Monkeys, James Cole is open to time only for the short periods he is immobilised. At the end of

Jacob’s Ladder, we realise Jacob has spent the entire film immobilised. In the interval between perception and action, says David Martin‐Jones, the

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protagonist begins ‘to slip through the virtual whole of time’ (2006: 22).

Jacob can perceive but he can’t take action. Martin‐Jones uses D.N.

Rodowick’s example of La Jetée to show that in this situation ‘time in the time‐image is discontinuous rather than linear’ and images may be

‘thrown up’ from ‘the past, the present or the future in any order’ (2006:

23). In the movement‐image, the character moves through time but in the time‐image time moves around the character who is immobilised. But as

Anna Powell points out, the interface between the time‐image and the movement‐image is ‘permeable and fluid’ as ‘movement is always in time, and one force does not function without the other’ (2005: 155). This explains the narrative shock at the end of the film. Jacob’s Ladder can function convincingly as an action‐image within time without the audience suspecting anything.

We see Jacob the protagonist moving through time in two different ways, first as an action‐image protagonist, then as a time‐image protagonist. He shifts between these modes throughout the film but I will discuss the action‐image mode first. As an action‐image protagonist his goal is to find out what happened that night in Vietnam. Accordingly he searches for clues through one of the ways the time‐image is manifested ‐

‘sheets of the past’.11 According to Bergson, as time flows it divides into

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the present that passes which is an actual image and the past that is preserved that is virtual. The past that is preserved can be thought of as a cone, with the point as the present (time at its most contracted) and the largest circle as time at its most dilated or pre‐existence in general (See footnote 10). Between these two exist the sheets of the past, each with its own ‘dominant’ themes. According to Deleuze, when we look for a particular memory we put ourselves into the past in general and then look through the different sheets for the memory we want (1989: 98). Although

11 Deleuze’s ‘sheets of the past’ (Deleuze, 1989: 98‐125) involves ‘all the circles of the past constituting so many stretched or shrunk regions, strata and sheets, (Deleuze, 1989: 99) refers to AB, A’B’, A”B” in Bergson’s cone of time (Bergson: [1908] 2005: 162). Here the cone SAB represents ‘the totality of the recollections accumulated in my memory’. The base AB ‘situated in the past, remains motionless’ while the point S, ‘which indicates at all times my present’, moves forward in contact with ‘the moving plane P of my actual representations of the universe’ (Bergson [1908] 2005:155). At S, the body which is just an image and therefore cannot store images itself, receives help from all the recollections the cone possesses to act but the original appeal comes from the present. The sheets Deleuze refers to are infinite in number and are defined by ‘dominant themes’, for example ‘my adolescence’, ‘my childhood’. They are the co‐ existing virtual regions we ‘leap into’ to search for memories. Deleuze reminds us that the cone is the virtual past and so that AB means ‘pre‐existence in general’ and S means ‘infinitely contracted past’. The sheets where we search are more or less contracted as they approach the present.

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the sheets might look like they succeed each other, they in fact co‐exist.

When we have found the memory we wanted we actualise the virtual image and bring it to the present, ‘something like the focusing of a camera’

(Bergson 1991: 134).12 These circuits moving between present and past refer back to ‘a small internal circuit between a present and its own past, between an actual image and its virtual image’, as in the airport scene in

12 Monkeys, for example, or ‘deeper and deeper circuits which are themselves virtual, which each time mobilise the whole of the past, but in which the relative circuits bathe or plunge to trace an actual shape and bring in their provisional harvest’ (Deleuze, 1989: 80). In Jacob’s Ladder,

Jacob must plunge into the past itself to find his memories.

Bergson, in Matter and Memory (1991), puts forward two types of memory, habitual recollection and active recollection. Habitual recollection is a linear, goal‐oriented process, where recognition extends into action without thinking. Suzanne Guerlac gives the example of driving a car on automatic pilot (2006: 126). In habitual recollection there is no space for an interval between perception and action but the appeal as to how to drive has been sent from the point of the cone (S) to all the virtual recollections contained within the cone (SAB) (See Footnote 10).

Active recollection by comparison involves a larger interval between perception and action, yet once the memory has been found action can

12 David Martin‐Jones describes the process in relation to the cone as follows: ‘During this process the cone simultaneously contracts the region of the past that contains the appropriate recollection‐image and rotates the cone to bring that particular region of the past to bear upon the sensory‐motor present (2006: 52).

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resume again. Active recollection usually requires an ‘active effort of mind’ and is brought on by a moment of physical repose or reflection—the physical embodiment of the interval.

The delay before action is resumed is the usual method of distinction between active and habitual recollection, but it doesn’t have to happen.

Anna Powell in Deleuze and the Horror Film maintains that the real difference is between actuality and subjectivity (2005: 161). While habitual recollection relies on the actual, that is, ‘objective, spatial reality’, active recollection is subjective in that it withdraws from outside stimuli to descend through the layers of the mind to find solutions to problems

(2005: 161). In Jacob’s Ladder continuity of action makes it difficult to tell the difference between actuality and subjectivity. The filmmakers use indiscernibility between virtual and actual in the movement‐image to set up the audience for the narrative shock at the end.

There is yet another way that the filmmakers use continuity of action to create indiscernibility—this time in relation to the flashback. Flashbacks are usually signalled visually by a delay between perception and the resumption of action. Resumption of action is one of the reasons why

Deleuze sees the flashback as belonging to the movement‐image. Often the character has a physical moment of repose or perhaps the image starts to shimmer. In Jacob’s Ladder there is no visual signal between flashbacks and normal forward action, so we can’t tell the difference. The filmmakers turn what we think are flashbacks (the scenes in Vietnam) into the present and what we think is the present into time‐image—conflation of past, present

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and future. As a time‐image protagonist Jacob is a wanderer, a seer, rather than an agent. In this state memories from different sheets of the past suddenly appear, completely out of context, for example, when his ex‐wife and sons suddenly appear at his hospital bedside. Otherwise, if the virtual image is powerful—Bergson maintains these memories give out light— then the memory can be triggered by the senses. There are several cogent examples of sudden memory shifts triggered by acute sense stimuli, such as Louis the chiropractor’s violent readjustment of Jacob’s spine causes a sudden shift back to Vietnam, or the impact of fifty pounds of ice on

Jacob’s boiling body sends him back to a freezing night before his son died. Other shifts occur suddenly through the use of disassociated sound and picture, such as Jacob’s scream as he is bayoneted which transforms into the scream of the subway. We know we are shifting between virtual and actual, but as they are indistinguishable we mistake the virtual for the actual and vice versa.

Deleuze argues that the relation‐image marks the last stage of the movement‐image wherein the perception‐image is exhausted. New ways of thinking, feeling and perceiving must be found and the way to do this is through the time‐image. As we have already seen, when one is immobilised for whatever reason, the opportunity occurs to open up to time. At the end of the film we understand why the time‐image is the major aspect of the film—Jacob has been immobilised on the operating table the entire time. We have in fact been observing the movements of time rather than Jacob’s movements.

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Incompossible worlds in Donnie Darko

The third film to be looked at is Donnie Darko, written and directed by

Richard Kelly in 2001. Like the other films examined, the narrative shock of Donnie Darko depends on indiscernibility between virtual and actual, although the time‐image functions differently in this film. While Jacob’s

Ladder presented the time‐image through sheets of time, Donnie Darko presents it through the labyrinth of time, what Deleuze calls

‘incompossible worlds’ or parallel universes (1989:225). Anna Powell’s analysis of Donnie Darko describes the film in terms of ‘peaks of the present’ (2007:128) rather than incompossible worlds, but as I understand it the concepts are the same. I analyse the film in terms of parallel universes as I think the purpose of the narrative is clearer if seen that way.

Moreover, I come to slightly different conclusions about the film as will be detailed further on. A short synopsis is necessary in order to understand how the parallel worlds function.

Set in 1988, the film is a combination of retro‐teen supernatural thriller and spiritual art‐house. It centres on troubled teenager, Donnie

Darko, on medication and seeing a psychiatrist. He also sleepwalks.

Afflicted in this manner we can straightaway identify Donnie as one of

Deleuze’s seers. As a result of these ‘altered states’ there is confusion between what is actual and what is virtual. One night, Donnie is woken by a voice that leads him out of the house onto the golf links. The voice belongs to a someone/thing called Frank, wearing a rabbit costume. Frank

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tells Donnie he is here to save him and the world will end in 28 days, 42 minutes and 12 seconds. Next morning, Donnie, woken by golfers, returns home to find his bedroom destroyed. Frank did save him—his room was obliterated by a mysterious jet engine that fell from the sky. Frank tells

Donnie to do antisocial things, such as flood his school, but through this he meets Gretchen, the new girl at school who becomes his girlfriend.

Frank prompts Donnie’s interest in time travel. Time manifests for

Donnie as ‘vector spears’ which are spears of ‘plastic gel’ that come out of people’s chests showing them the path of their desires. Later, Donnie puts his head into Gretchen’s vector spear and sees ‘an abyssal tunnel of light’.

Donnie’s teacher discusses short cuts in space‐time through time portals using ‘the Einstein‐Rosen Bridge’. Donnie deduces that all that’s needed to escape the end of the world is a conduit between the space‐times. Even the jet engine that hit his house could do it if there was a time portal available.

The days count down. On the final day, Halloween, Gretchen is hit and killed by a car driven by ‘Frank,’ a boy in a Halloween rabbit costume.

Donnie shoots Frank. Donnie sees a time portal forming above his house and thinks about time turning back. Time runs back to where the jet engine hit Donnie’s bedroom. This time Frank does not appear to save

Donnie. Donnie has just finished his book on time travel and is looking forward to the future. He dies smiling. Next day Gretchen cycles past as

Donnie’s body is being loaded into the ambulance. She and Donnie’s mother Rose exchange waves. Rose feels she might have met Gretchen somewhere before.

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Donnie Darko plays with ideas of the labyrinth of time and concepts of parallel universes that can be examined through Deleuze. As outlined by David Martin‐Jones, according to Deleuze and developed from

Bergson’s concept of duration, time functions as a ‘labyrinth’ or a set of pathways that expand outwards towards infinity as multiple parallel universes (2006: 23). These parallel universes exist virtually. We see only one straight pathway which is time in its actual state, but really, argues

Deleuze, ‘the straight line as force of time, as labyrinth of time is also the line which forks and keeps on forking, passing through incompossible presents and not‐necessarily true pasts’ (1989: 131). This happens, notes

Deleuze, because incompossible present(s) and not‐necessarily true pasts all exist in the same universe.

What are incompossible presents and not‐necessarily true pasts?

Leibniz conceived these terms to resolve the paradox of ‘contingent futures,’ where time shows two true possibilities the consequences of which cannot both be true. To account for the true possibilities, Leibniz suggested two parallel universes: in one universe, the event takes place and in the other it doesn’t (Leibniz, Theodicy, sections 414‐16 in Deleuze,

1989: 130). Similarly the past may be true but not‐necessarily true: in one universe the event took place, in the other it didn’t. Deleuze points out that the consequence of multiple virtual incompossible presents and not necessarily‐true pasts co‐existing in the same universe is that there can no longer be only one truth. The ‘powers of the false’ (virtual) exist alongside the ‘form of the true’ (actual) but they are indistinguishable from each other and appear and disappear depending on how the present is

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arranged. The ascendency of the powers of the false over the form of the true, says Deleuze, was recognised by Nietzsche who ‘resolves the crisis of the truth … in favour of the false and its artistic creative power…’

(Deleuze, 1989: 131).

We see the manifestation of incompossible presents and not‐ necessarily true pasts in the plot of Donnie Darko. In one universe, Donnie listens to Frank and is saved. He exposes the paedophile Jim Cunningham but his girlfriend Gretchen is killed and he ends up a murderer. In the other universe, Frank doesn’t appear and Donnie is killed but Gretchen is saved through never meeting Donnie. It’s not clear whether Donnie dies knowing he is sacrificing himself to save Gretchen, but we can assume he does by his happiness just before his death in the film and the description in the script: ‘Donnie wakes up. He is laughing hysterically’ (Kelly, 2001:

89). And when his body is found in the wreckage: ‘There is blood gushing from his mouth, as his face is contorted into an expression that could almost be a smile’ (Kelly, 2001: 89).

In Powell’s analysis, Donnie ‘wills time’s arrow to fork back and adopt another path’ (Powell, 2007:130). In willing this, Powell argues

Donnie’s agency turns him into the character who Deleuze calls ‘the forger’. With the ascendency of the powers of the false, says Deleuze, ‘the forger becomes the character of the [time‐image] cinema… to the detriment of all action,’ he:

Passes into the crystal and makes the direct time‐image visible; he provokes

undecidable alternatives and inexplicable differences between the true and

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the false, and thereby imposes a power of the false as adequate to time, in

contrast to any form of the true which would control time (1989: 132).

I argue that it is unclear either from the script or the film how much agency Donnie has. In the script, Donnie, seeing the time portal form over his house simply gets into the car and takes Gretchen’s hand. The jet engine of the plane then falls into the time portal and time turns back. In

Donnie’s next scene he is in bed laughing hysterically, perhaps knowing what is about to happen. In the film, there is an additional scene of Donnie driving back to his house after seeing the portal, Gretchen’s body beside him and her voiceover from a previous scene saying: ‘What if you could go back in time! Take all those hours of darkness and pain and replace them…with whatever you wanted.’ Then time turns back. Rather than agency it seems that Donnie merely deduces what could happen if he is in the right place at the right time, although it could be argued he chooses one fate over another.

Following Powell’s argument further, if Donnie has the powers of the forger it would seem that ‘as maker of the crystal image’ (2007: 136) his power is to make the virtual and the actual indiscernible in multiple not necessarily true pasts. Is it possible in the labyrinth to roll time back exactly the way it came to its original starting point of Donnie in bed? If

Donnie is the forger character it seems likely that he has knowledge of what is to come, but the exact rollback of time is an example of Martin‐

Jones’s thesis of a time‐image reterritorialisation by a movement‐image.

Following that argument, when Donnie makes the ‘right’ decision to sacrifice himself, time functions as a movement‐image flashback whereby

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the narrative has a fixed end point and rolls back to that point therein excluding all other possibilities. The movement‐image then continues forward as life moves on.

The movement‐image ultimately claims ascendency in Donnie Darko, but just before it does we see a wonderful example of Pisters’ metacinema, or what Deleuze called Hitchcock’s premonition: ‘a camera‐consciousness which [is] no longer defined by the movements it is able to follow or make but by the mental connections it is able to enter into’ (1989: 23). After time has rolled back and just before the jet engine hits Donnie’s room at 1:30am, several of the characters wake as if by premonition. It as if the camera is independently making the mental connections between each of these characters and Donnie.

Suddenly Thirty and the peaks of the present

The fourth film I wish to look at is a mainstream romantic comedy

Suddenly Thirty, aka 13 Going on 30, directed by Gary Winick and released in 2004. Playing with time in the romance comedy genre is not new for

Hollywood, but the use of incompossible worlds and peaks of the present offer rich potential for new directions of narrative.13 The story of Suddenly

Thirty centres on Jenna Rink and her search for happiness, but it is also a

13 Probably the most famous ‘time out of joint’ comedy romance is Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941) remade as Heaven Can Wait (1978). Powell and Pressberger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1948) discussed in Chapter 1 also qualifies. More recent examples are Sliding Doors (1998) Just Like Heaven (2005) and Kate and Leopold (2001).

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story of free will over destiny. As in Donnie Darko, at the end of the story time turns back to where the story began and Jenna, conscious of what happened last time, this time chooses differently.

The story opens in the past where Jenna is thirteen and desperate to be accepted by the cool crowd. Her best friend is her next‐door neighbour, a geeky boy called Matt. When Jenna is humiliated by cool‐girl Lucy at her thirteenth birthday party she blames Matt and throws his present (a doll’s house) back at him. Alone, she wishes she were thirty. Magic dust from the doll’s house falls on her. She ‘comes to’ aged thirty with no memory of the intervening years. She discovers she is now a take‐no‐prisoners magazine editor with no friends except Lucy who later betrays her. She seeks out Matt, they fall in love but he tells her ‘you can’t turn back time’ and leaves her to marry his girlfriend. As a parting gift he gives her the doll’s house she threw at him all those years before. Alone, she wishes she were thirteen again. Magic dust from the house falls on her and she is back at her thirteenth birthday party. This time she tells Lucy where to go, kisses Matt and runs up stairs with him to their future life together.

Unlike Donnie Darko, Suddenly Thirty does not literally show us time.

Instead we understand time in this film through Deleuze’s concept of peaks of the present. According to Deleuze, peaks of the present are a different type of time image from the becoming of the sheets of the past.

We can make the present ‘stand for the whole of time’ (1989: 100), if we think of time vertically rather than spatially. This is ‘empty time’ where nothing happens. If we are in a single event—which can be the world, or a

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life or an episode, then there is no successive past, present or future because we can’t tell where each ends and the next begins. This is St

Augustine’s ‘present of the future, present of the present and present of the past,’14 which happen simultaneously in the single event. In this situation, true contradictory events can take place at the same time leaving narrative possibilities wide open. Deleuze uses the example of the key in

Robbe‐Grillet’s Trans‐Europ‐Express: ‘At the same time someone no longer has the key (that is used to have it), still has it (had not lost it), and finds it

(that is, will have it and did not have it)’ (1989: 101). Each character reacts to the situation according to the logic of their particular present. None of the situations are disproved; in fact they are all validated and become even more complex by being shown to be dependent on one another. Once again we have incompossible worlds where the same event is played out differently in different worlds. We can see how this opens up the narrative possibilities in Suddenly Thirty.

In Suddenly Thirty, when Jenna wakes up aged thirty she goes to find

Matt. She finds that he knew her but she has no recollection of him. Matt shows her their high school yearbooks and relates how she snubbed him at high school and took up with Lucy’s crowd, all of which she has no knowledge. In the present of the past, Jenna does not know Matt but she knows Lucy the cool girl from high school who is now her best friend at the magazine. Lucy knows both of Jenna and Matt. In the present of the present, when Lucy betrays Jenna she stops the romance between Jenna

14 See Introduction.

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and Matt and he marries his girlfriend. In the present of the future Jenna snubs Lucy, stays friends with Matt and ends up marrying him.

The situation in Suddenly Thirty is not as sophisticated as the Robbe‐

Grillet example quoted above, where the three presents support, and, at the same time confound each other. In Suddenly Thirty the audience knows the magic dust is the explanation for the paradoxes between the three presents even though the characters don’t. The characters could question the paradoxes but they don’t. If Jenna doesn’t know Matt, wouldn’t Matt think either she’s lying or not whom she says she is? We know she isn’t lying but why would he? Nor is the movement‐image totally replaced by the time‐image. In the present of the present, Matt accepts that Jenna doesn’t know him and they are able to fall in love so that the present of the present is not prevented by the present of the past, in fact it is enabled.

The present of the future (Matt and Jenna marrying) is contradicted by the present of the present (Matt marries his girlfriend) so the magic dust is used to take Jenna back to the past. Like the return to the past in Donnie

Darko we return to the exact same point in the past like a movement‐image flashback. Now the same event can play out differently in a different world but now Jenna knows how to act. Martin‐Jones’s argument in the early part of this chapter for the reterritorialisation of the time‐image by the movement‐image could be made for this film too.

Although there are many aspects of the movement‐image in the film—Jenna has goals, she wants to save her magazine from going under and she wants to marry Matt—Jenna is still quintessentially a time‐image

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protagonist. The theme of the film is her search for identity. When she is immobilised in the cupboard she opens up to time and the confusion between the virtual and the actual. She searches through the past, present and future for recollection images as to who she might be. She is thirteen at the same time as she is thirty and the film makes some comedy out of this. One could even plausibly argue that the whole event of becoming thirty takes place entirely in her head.

My creative work also makes use of ‘peaks of the present’ by enabling protagonist Nora Bennett to access different presents. My use of peaks of the present provides character motivation and serves to remind the audience that Nora Bennett is living in her mother’s body. Nora’s knowledge from the present of the present that the body she inhabits will cease on 26 March 1959 motivates her to find Nora Stovale’s killer. This is the most sustained use of peaks of the present but there are several other examples also. In the present of the past in 1959 Nora recognises Walter as a friend when she remembers his hat and his gesture of running his hand through his hair from the present of the future.15 Later when he offers her a lift home, she calls his new car old, as it was when she first saw it in the present of the present.16 Finally on the day of the murder in 1959 Nora resists wearing the pearls, which she knows will become the murder weapon.17

15 See Twisted Things p. 53. 16 See Twisted Things p.53. 17 See Twisted Things p. 102.

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The films examined here show contemporary cinema’s emerging fascination with time. Whereas films concerned with time were once the realm of science fiction or set in the future, this is no longer the case.

Along with the four films analysed, there are a host made in the last ten years that contain time‐disrupted narratives, for example: Betrayal, Lost

Highway, Mulholland Drive, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Groundhog

Day, Sliding Doors, 21 Grams, Memento, The Others, The Sixth Sense and no doubt many more. Playing with time is no longer the realm of art‐house cinema. What is striking about these films and the four films analysed is the extent to which time is concerned with memory and identity. In the films examined, the protagonists all have unstable identities. As a result of

‘disturbances of memory and the failures of recognition’ (Deleuze, 1989:

55), the protagonists move through time and are unsure of who they are.

Here Deleuze is influenced by Spinoza who saw the subject as constantly changing through time18.

A common thread in the four films analysed and my own screenplay is the protagonists are thought to be mad or ill, either by others or themselves.19 Madness, notes Deleuze, was one of the first ways European cinema approached a ‘mystery of time’ (1989: 55). In conventional

18 Spinoza argued that subjectivity is an illusion where we imagine that we are the cause of our thoughts and actions based on their affect on us but we are not. Spinoza rejects the transcendental in favour of a ‘single substance’ (Deleuze and Bergson’s plane of immanence) ‘where all bodies are modal expressions of the one substance’ (Deleuze, 1988b:122 in Roffe, Gilles Deleuze, (accessed 14/12/11). 19 Nora’s strange behaviour is attributed to concussion. See Twisted Things p. 53.

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movement‐image cinema ‘mad’ protagonists are traditionally difficult for the audience to identify with and screenwriters are normally warned off them. Perhaps their contemporary popularity is indicative of the declining need for the audience to identify with the subject, so long the backbone of psychoanalytic film theory. Instead of ‘being tied to one identity in opposition to the other and governed by the Eye and the Gaze of representational thinking and psychoanalysis’ (Pisters, 2003: 224), Pisters suggests we might want to think of several identities that respond in different ways to the different combinations of images that are presented.

This is Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of rhizomatic thinking where the brain is the screen. In the contemporary world where we are less able to take direct action, are more often immobilised and forced to think, we are more aware of time and the fragmentation of the self. It is highly likely that the protagonists of future films concerned with time will no longer be singled out as mad, but instead be quite normal.

In the contemporary world with the increasing prevalence of digital technology, photo‐realistic photography can no longer be regarded as a true representation of the world. Computer Generated Images in movies and 3D computer animation in computer games all create virtual worlds where Deleuze’s conception of cinema as ‘pure semiotics of movement, sound and images’ (Pisters, 2003: 216) seems more relevant than the traditional conception of cinema as representation.20 As Pisters

20 Computer generated animated filmmaking within a real‐time virtual 3D environment tends towards hyper‐realism, for example the Toy Story movies and The Sims computer games, or photo‐realism as special effects for movies. Neither style can be

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demonstrates, the ability of digital images (including photo‐realistic ones) to morph into different forms brings them closer to animation than representations of the real world. A representation presumes a model of experience to compare with, but there is no model here. It is increasingly difficult to tell the difference between real and unreal but it is also becoming easier to dismiss the psychoanalytic concern of the difference between the real and the unreal. Increasingly, such distinctions appear less relevant. After all, according to Deleuze, the virtual and the actual are both real, but the actual happens to be in the present at this particular moment. Moreover, if we can’t tell the difference between the real and the unreal why should the real be better? Again Deleuzian thinking is very attractive because it is non‐judgemental. We need to change our mode of thinking to be able to deal with everyday life and Deleuzian thinking offers more possibilities for approaching the challenges of contemporary life than the negativity of deterministic psychoanalytic thought.

Martin‐Jones argues that narratives that play with time are merely ways of reconstructing national narrative identity in troubled times, rather than avatars of a metacinematic universe. I suggest that it is not a question of either/or. There are elements of both Pisters and Martin‐Jones’s theses at work in these films. We are in what film and sound editor Walter

seen as representational. Machinma, a technique that uses 3D engines to create a recorded performance within virtual worlds that can then be modified using filmic techniques, offers audiences the opportunity to interact directly with these virtual worlds. This has already been taken up by commercial television BSkyB’s in the Ages of Avatar project and Britain’s Channel 4 in the Heaven & Hell project. In all these instances audiences interact with images directly. (Nitsche, Michael, (2005) ‘Film Live: An Excursion into Machinima’ pp 1‐20).

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Murch calls the ‘double chandelier’ phase—when chandeliers were fitted with both gas and electricity—the familiar and the new are both employed

(Murch, 2001).21 The narrative possibilities of the time‐image have opened up to us but mainstream films use them in familiar structures to provide answers to the conventional questions of identity—who am I? What should I believe in? The films analysed are most often movement‐images in content and time‐images in expression. We are stimulated by the possibilities of time but are reluctant to give up the familiar comfort of the closure of the movement‐image. But just as the digitalisation of images has transformed how they affect us, we can see how form is shaping content as part of the Deleuzian process of becoming.

As explained in Chapter One, Part II, the creative work that accompanies this exegesis is also one in which I have experimented with

‘time’. I found my analysis of the four films was necessary research that consolidated my writing and the structure of my creative work. However, my concerns with ‘time experiments’ differ from those utilised above even though they evidently share common elements. As noted earlier, the films discussed and my own creative work use time jumps as a device to release plot information and a means by which the characters work out the

‘correct way to act’—what Martin‐Jones would call reterritorialisation of the time‐image by the movement‐image, where the movement‐image is able to eliminate all other possible paths of time except the actual. In all

21 Murch used this analogy to describe the changeover from editing by the physical process of cutting film to editing using digital technology in Murch, W (2001) In the Blink of an Eye: a Perspective on Film Editing.

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the works, both the protagonists and the audience retain their memory of the other outcome, that is, what will happen if they fail to act correctly this time.

What is distinct about my creative work is that its insights about life and society are also constructed from art in the form of the film, On the

Beach, both in terms of the film itself and the archival material available from its construction. Various newspaper headlines, the conditions of shooting On the Beach, such as the star’s caravans, functions and relationships between actors and crew members, events such as receptions for the stars at the Savoy Plaza Hotel; the newsreel footage of the stars arriving at Melbourne’s Essendon airport; the shooting of the beach scenes at Canadian Bay; and the poison pill scene in Lonsdale Street are all drawn from archival material about the making of On the Beach.22 The film itself provided inspiration as to the possibilities and outcomes of mistaken identity. For example, in On the Beach, Dwight Towers mistakenly calls

Moira Davidson by his wife’s name (Sharon).23 This error inspired me to create a fictitious character who credibly might have had a part in the real production but whose absence could be easily explained in a subsequent viewing of the real film.

This is one of the ways I was able to utilise in Twisted Things not only what contemporary audiences know about the process of art

(filmmaking), but also their postmodern sensibility. We no longer expect

22 See Davey, P. (2005) When Hollywood Came to Melbourne. 23 Paxton, John (1958) On the Beach, screenplay p.65.

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the past to form a continuous narrative with the present and accept there may be many possible explanations for the past, both real and virtual. This acceptance of the virtual allows the return of lost people, events and works of art to be manifested in different forms and temporal contexts by the unconscious. Cinema offers many ways of exploring the virtual. Some of these ways have been explored in the films discussed above, Twisted

Things offers yet another.

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CONCLUSION

In the introduction to this thesis I set forth the proposition that identifying and understanding the crucial political and psychological aspects of living in the 1950s would help me authenticate the fictional world that my protagonist, Nora, would inhabit. Three research questions were formulated that would help to identify these aspects: the first aimed to identify the social, political and psychological forces in the fifties that led to the construction of the film, On the Beach; the second sought to assess the impact the making of Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach had on 1959

Melbourne and asked if it changed Australian men and women’s representation and understanding of themselves within the context of glamour; and the third question asked how time, in all its manifestations, chronologically or the subject of aesthetics and philosophy, can be utilised in cinematic art when interpreting and representing the vagaries of the human condition.

Now with the completion of the creative work and exegesis I feel the goalposts have shifted slightly. My primary purpose is no longer how authentic can the fictional world of my creative work be, but rather how can the past be used to make the present more meaningful? I understand from my research into the past that what returns will be different from what was once there, but that is not the point. If history appears to be, now more than before, a chance selection of occurrences that could just as easily not happened as happened, then our engagement with the past and

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its infinitely possible variations becomes more exciting. If we accept the

‘power of the false’ we understand there are many possible pasts. We are forced to think more about possible connections between past and present than if we accept the view that the past as presented is the only possible past. The desire to perceive possible new connections between past and present becomes the driver behind all three research questions.

Seen this way, re‐examining the possible forces that led to the making of On the Beach becomes a fascinating exercise. Certainly from

Kramer’s correspondence with Nevil Shute it would appear that their combined desires to communicate the message that ‘nuclear war means death’ fuelled and sustained Kramer’s drive to make the film1. But just how pivotal other factors, such as the unexpected presence of the

Victorian Promotion Committee, and the co‐operation of the Victorian state government and the Australian navy, were to the decision to make the movie in Melbourne can only be speculated upon.

Kramer’s decision to name Melbourne in On the Beach appears deliberate and intentionally ironic—how was it that such an out of the way place became the last bastion of humanity—even if the 1959

Melbourne audience didn’t see it this way.2 Consequently, in my creative work it was important that Melbourne be identified in order to maximise the contrast between past and present and to allow an audience to incorporate their own experience of Melbourne, geographically and

1 See Chapter 1 Making On the Beach. 2 See Chapter 1 Critical Responses to On the Beach.

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historically, to their cinematic experience. Audience awareness that

Melbourne has many unknown histories makes it easier to accept the fiction of Twisted Things as yet another unknown history.

The second research question that deals with the impact of Stanley

Kramer’s On the Beach on 1959 Melbourne led to an intensive study of the press and its handling of ‘stars’ and ‘glamour’ as represented by the

Hollywood star Ava Gardner. The overall press coverage of the making of

On the Beach and the hostile and provocative treatment of Ava Gardner by

The Truth (Davey, 2005: 93, 186) was as much a product of ‘pseudo‐ eventing’ by the press as genuine public interest, although obviously the relationship between the two was mutual. Read today, The Truth’s coverage of Gardner seems mild and not particularly vindictive. It reeks of frustration born out of lack of copy and the inability of a star to manage her public image. As I write, I am continually reminded of the power of the pseudo‐event to magnify and transform. Neil Gillet’s Ava Gardner

‘quote’: ‘On the Beach is a story about the end of the world, and Melbourne sure is the right place to film it’, is relevant here. Who would have guessed this iconic remark had its genesis in parochial rivalry between Sydney and

Melbourne.3

Furthermore, the presence and response to Ava Gardner led me to compare and contrast Australia’s understanding of sexuality and glamour with that of the United States. In Twisted Things I have tried to portray the allure, power and ultimate unreality of glamour through the behaviour of

3 See Chapter 1.

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the crowds towards the making of the film and its stars.4 It appears the public and the press hardly saw the stars as human, their portrayed mode of living being so far removed from that of ordinary Australians. Again, I am conscious that this is my interpretation from the present and whether glamour has lost any of its allure since 1959 is a moot point.

I wonder, too, in Twisted Things if I have paid enough attention to the sense of insecurity that underpinned Australia’s new purchasing power; the widening gulf between the older and younger generations; and the general dislocation of society that resulted from the World War II. Read today it appears that much of this insecurity mutated into misogyny.5

Female sexuality was increasingly commercially exploited, but also feared as a potentially destructive force that could tear families apart and destroy society. My failure in the creative work may be to incorporate only the misogynist atmosphere rather than the sense of fear and insecurity from which it came. I am reminded here of Kramer’s failure to incorporate the

‘humour and drama and ordinary people’6 that would have provided powerful human context into On the Beach.

The final research question considers uses of time in cinematic art.

This question provided the most insights into my creative project as I began to approach the myriad ways time might be presented cinematically. In Twisted Things, the protagonist Nora, trapped in a coma,

4 See Chapter 2. 5 See Chapter 2. 6 See Harkness in (Server, 2006: 381) Chapter 1.

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begins to see time differently. Her mind can move while her body cannot.

In a production I would aim to underline Nora’s subjectivity by providing examples that Nora’s explanation of events may or may not be true—it is simply one of a number of possible explanations. I want to show that while Nora, unlike Richard Nixon in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, has no conscious reason to rewrite the past, the past constantly returns differently and Nora’s version of it may be influenced by arbitrary events such as an old movie playing in her hotel room.7 No doubt in a production other opportunities for showing the mutability of the past would present themselves, either during the shooting or in the editing room.

In Twisted Things I present other subjectivities besides that of the protagonist, for example Lucy and Nora Bennett in contemporary

Melbourne have a different way of viewing the past and a different subjectivity than Nora Bennett as Nora Stovale in 1959, but I do not feel I have escaped the transcendental ‘I see’. I have not attempted to present the possibility of other subjectivities, other durations besides human ones.

The mental connections that a machine (such as the camera) can enter into maybe a potentially powerful way of linking the characters, for example through premonition, but this option has yet to be explored.

It is becoming clear here that other manifestations of time are available to be explored in a production of Twisted Things. As already discussed in the introduction to the creative work, the screenplay is an unfinished work. When production begins, the actors bring their own

7 See Chapter 1 Appropriating 1959.

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process of layering to the written material and the physical locations create further resonances. What has been up until now a literary document will materialise into a physical (though probably digital) entity that embodies the senses, particularly sound and music. While some of the ways acousmatic sound as disembodied voice can work as a deterritorialising force have already been discussed,8 the role of music has not. In some ways the choice of music encapsulates the essence of the screenplay.

What kind of music should Twisted Things employ? When Nora is in

1959, employing contemporaneous music seems an obvious way of appropriating 1959, but contemporary music might be an effective way of indicating the temporal instability of Nora’s experience. How would

Stairway to Heaven a song that implies a connection between Nora and

Lucy manifest itself in Nora’s 1959 experience? Might it provide a way back into the present, however transient? Alternatively, could music from

1959 take Nora back to 1959 even perhaps against her will?

Although there are no definitive answers to this and the posed research questions, it is certainly the case that in pursuing answers the subsequent research created a frame of reference that might enhance a reading of the script. How much it influenced the writing itself is not easily ascertained as the research took place during and after the writing the creative work. The structure of the creative work had already been conceived before I discovered my protagonist, Nora, was one of Deleuze’s

8 See Chapter 3, 12 Monkeys The Forces of Deterritorialisation.

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time‐image protagonists. When I realised this, I was able to draw on other aspects of the time‐image in Deleuze and Bergson’s theory. For example, the concept of the crystal in 12 Monkeys, where the protagonist, Cole, sees himself simultaneously in the past, present and future, inspired me to create a similar scene where my protagonist meets herself as a child.

Deleuze notes in ʹOn Four Formulasʹ:

It is not ʹtimeʹ that is interior to us, or at least it is not specifically interior to us; it is

we who are interior to time, and for this reason time always separates us from

what determines us by affecting it. Interiority constantly hollows us out, splits us

in two, doubles us, even though our unity subsists. But because time has no end,

this doubling never reaches its limits (1993, 31).

My work, both the creative writing and the exegesis, represent, ‘a plurality of ways of being in the world’ (Deleuze, 1993, xxvii) which are incompatible but coexist and which allow an infinity of viewpoints.

In the end, writing a creative work and writing a discursive one, even when it is concerned generally with the same subject inhabit different, though related, aesthetic and intellectual ‘time spaces’. The ‘past’ and the ‘present’ in being inextricably fused in the creation of narrative are equally, though differently, multiplied and fused in analytical, discursive and reflective work.

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Filmography

12 Monkeys (motion picture) 1996, USA, Universal Pictures, prod. Charles

Roven, dir. Terry Gilliam.

12 O’clock High (motion picture) 1949, USA, Twentieth Century Fox Film

Corporation, prod. Darryl F. Zanuck, dir. Henry King.

21 Grams (motion picture) 2003, USA, This Is That Productions, prod. &

dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu.

8 1/2 (motion picture) 1963, Italy, Cineriz; Francinez, prod. A Rizzoli, dir.

Federico Fellini.

Angel Wore Red, The (motion picture) 1960, Italy, Titanus prod. Goffredo

Lombardo, dir. Nunnally Johnson.

Back to the Future (motion picture) 1985, USA, Universal Pictures, prod.

Neil Canton, dir. Robert Zemekis.

Barefoot Contessa, The (motion picture) 1954, USA, Figaro, dir. Joseph L.

Mankiewicz.

Bowfinger (motion picture) 1999, USA, Universal Pictures, prod. Brian

Grazer, dir. Frank Oz.

Bribe, The (motion picture) 1948, USA, MGM, prod. Pandro S. Berman, dir.

Robert S Leonard.

Butterfly Effect, The (motion picture) 2004, USA, BenderSpink, prod. Chris

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300

Caine Mutiny,The (motion picture) 1954, USA, Columbia Pictures

Corporation, prod. Stanley Kramer, dir. Edward Dmytrk.

Champion (motion picture) 1949, USA, Screen Plays Corporation, prod.

Stanley Kramer, dir. Mark Robson.

Chasers War on Everything, The (television series) 2006‐9, Australia, ABC.

Citizen Kane (motion picture) 1941, Mercury Productions, prod. & dir.

Orson Welles.

Cyrano de Bergerac (motion picture) 1950, USA, Stanley Kramer

Productions, prod. Stanley Kramer, dir. Michael Gordon.

Dallas (TV series) 1978–1991, USA, Lorimar Productions, created by David

Jacobs.

Death of a Salesman (motion picture) 1951, USA, Stanley Kramer

Productions, prod. Stanley Kramer, dir. Laslo Benedek.

Defiant Ones, The (motion picture) 1958, USA, Stanley Kramer Productions,

prod. & dir. Stanley Kramer.

Donnie Darko (motion picture) 2001, USA, Pandora Cinema, prod. Adam

Fields, dir. Richard Kelly.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

(motion picture) 1964, USA, Columbia Pictures Corporation, prod. &

dir. Stanley Kubrick.

Dust in the Sun (motion picture) 1958, Australia, Southern Films

International, prod. Chips Rafferty, dir. Lee Robinson.

301

East Side West Side (motion picture) 1949, USA, MGM, prod. Mervyn

LeRoy, prod. Voldemar Vetluguin.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (motion picture) 2004, USA, Focus

Features, prod. Anthony Bregman, dir. Michel Gondry.

Frontline (television series) 1994–97, Australia, ABC.

Games, The (television series) 1998–2000, Australia, ABC.

Great Sinner, The (motion picture) 1948, USA, MGM, prod. Gottfried

Reinhardt, dir. Robert Siodmak.

Groundhog Day (motion picture) 1993, USA, Columbia Pictures

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Guns of Navarone, The (motion picture) 1961, USA, Columbia Pictures,

prod. Carl Foreman, dir. J. Lee Thompson.

Heaven Can Wait (motion picture) 1978, USA, Paramount Pictures, prod. &

dir. Warren Beatty.

Here Comes Mr Jordan (motion picture) 1941, USA, Columbia Pictures

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High Noon (motion picture) 1952, USA, Stanley Kramer Productions, prod.

Stanley Kramer, dir. Fred Zinnemann.

Higher Than High (motion picture short) 1989, Australia, prod. & dir.

Virginia Murray.

Home of the Brave (motion picture) 1949, USA, Stanley Kramer Productions,

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302

Hucksters, The (motion picture) 1947, USA, MGM, prod. Arthur Hornblow

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Inception (motion picture) 2010, USA, Warner Bros. Pictures, prod & dir.

Christopher Nolan.

Jacob’s Ladder (motion picture) 1990, USA, Carolco Pictures, prod. Alan

Marshall, dir. Adrian Lyne.

Just Like Heaven (motion picture) 2005, USA, Dreamworks SKG, prod.

Laurie MacDonald, dir. Mark Waters.

Kangaroo (motion picture) 1952, USA, Twentieth Century Fox Film

Corporation, prod. Robert Bassler, dir. Lewis Milestone.

Kate and Leopold (motion picture) 2001, USA, Konrad Pictures, prod. Cathy

Konrad, dir. James Mangold.

Killers, The (motion picture) 1946, USA, Mark Hellinger Productions, prod.

Mark Hellinger, dir. Robert Siodmak.

King of the Coral Sea (motion picture) 1954, Australia, Southern Films

International, prod. Chips Rafferty, dir. Lee Robinson.

Knights of the Round Table (motion picture) 1954, USA, MGM British

Studios, prod. Pandro S. Berman, dir. Richard Thorpe.

La Dolce Vita (motion picture) 1960, Italy, Riama Film, prod. Giuseppe

Amato, dir. Federico Fellini.

La Jetée(motion picture short) 1962, France, Argos Films, dir. Chris Marker.

303

Lead Dress, The (motion picture short) 1985, Australia, prod. & dir. Virginia

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Life on Mars (television series) 2006–7, UK, Kudos Film & Television,

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Lone Star (motion picture) 1952, USA, MGM, prod. Z Wayne Griffin, dir.

Vincent Sherman.

Long John Silver (motion picture) 1954, Australia, Treasure Island Pictures,

prod. Joe Kaufmann, dir. Byron Haskin.

Longest Day, The (motion picture) 1962, Twentieth Century Fox Film

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Marton.

Lost Highway (motion picture) 1997, USA, October Films, prod. Deepak

Nayar, dir. David Lynch.

Matrix, The (motion picture) 1999, USA, Warner Bros Pictures, prod. Bruce

Berman, dir. Andy & Lana Wachowski.

Matter of Life and Death, A (motion picture) 1946, UK, The Archers, prod.

& dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger.

Member of the Wedding (motion picture) 1952, USA, Stanley Kramer

Productions, prod. Stanley Kramer, dir. Fred Zinnemann.

Memento (motion picture) 2000, USA, Newmarket Capital Group, prod.

Christopher Ball, dir. Christopher Nolan.

304

Men, The (motion picture) 1950, USA, Stanley Kramer Productions, prod.

Stanley Kramer, dir. Fred Zinnemann.

Mogambo (motion picture) 1953, USA, Loew’s, prod. Stan Zimbalist, dir.

John Ford.

Mulholland Drive (motion picture) 2001, USA, Les Films Alain Sarde, prod.

Neal Edelstein, dir. David Lynch.

Mysterious Skin (motion picture) 2004, USA, Desperate Pictures, prod. and

dir. Greg Araki.

Naked Maja, The (motion picture) 1958, Italy, SCG, prod. Silvio Clementelli,

dir. Henry Kostler.

Nixon (motion picture) 1995, USA, Cinergi Pictures Entertainment, prods.

Dan Halstead & Eric Hamburg, dir. Oliver Stone.

On the Beach (motion picture) 1959, USA, Stanley Kramer Productions,

prod. & dir. Stanley Kramer.

One Touch Venus (motion picture) 1948, USA, Universal Studios, prod.

Lester Cowan, dir. William A. Seiter.

Others, The (motion picture) 2001, USA, Cruise/Wagner Productions, prod.

Fernando Bovaira, dir. Alejandro Amenábar.

Overlanders,The (motion picture) 1946, UK, Ealing Studios, prod. Michael

Balcon, dir. Harry Watt.

Phantom Stockman, The (motion picture) 1953, Australia, Platypus

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305

Pledge, The (motion picture) 2001 USA, Morgan Creek Productions, prod.

Michael Fitzgerald, dir. Sean Penn.

Pork Chop Hill (motion picture) 1959, USA, Melville Productions, prod. Sy

Bartlett, dir. Lewis Milestone.

Psycho (motion picture) 1960, USA, Shamley Productions, prod. & dir.

Alfred Hitchcock.

Purple Rose of Cairo, The (motion picture) 1985, USA, Orion Pictures

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Queen Christina (motion picture) 1933, USA, MGM, prod. Walter Wanger,

dir. Rouben Mamoulian.

Restless and the Damned, The (motion picture) 1959, Australia, Southern

Films International, prod. Chips Rafferty, dir. Lee Robinson.

Ride Vanquero! (motion picture) 1953, USA, MGM, prod. Stephen Ames,

dir. John Farrow.

Robbery Under Arms (motion picture) 1957, UK, The Rank Organisation,

prod. Joseph Janni, dir. Jack Lee.

Saving Private Ryan (motion picture) 1995, USA, Amblin Entertainment,

prod. Ian Bryce, dir. Steven Spielberg.

Shining, The (motion picture) 1980, UK, Warner Bros. Pictures, prod. and

dir. Stanley Kubrick.

Shiralee, The (motion picture) 1957, UK, Ealing Productions, prod. Michael

Balcon, dir. Leslie Norman.

306

Shutter Island (motion picture) 2010, USA, Paramount Pictures, prod.

Bradley J Fischer, dir. Martin Scorsese.

Singapore (motion picture) 1947, USA Universal International Pictures,

prod. Jerry Bresler, dir. John Brahm.

Singing Detective, The (TV mini‐series) 1986 UK, BBC created by Dennis

Potter.

Sixth Sense, The (motion picture) 1999, USA, Barry Mendel Productions,

prod. Kathleen Kennedy, dir. M. Night Shyamalan.

Sliding Doors (motion picture) 1998, USA, UK Intermedia Films, prod.

Philippa Braithwaite, dir. Peter Howitt.

Spellbound (motion picture) 1945, USA, Selznick International Pictures,

prod. David O. Selznick, dir. Alfred Hitchcock.

Stowaway, The (motion picture) 1958, Australia, Southern Films

International, prod. Chips Rafferty, dir. Lee Robinson.

Suddenly Thirty original title 13 Going on 30 (motion picture) 2004, USA,

Revolution Studios, prod. Susan Arnold, dir. Gary Winick.

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll aka Season of Passion 1960, UK/USA, Hill‐

Hecht‐Lancaster Productions, prod & dir. Leslie Norman.

Sundowners, The (motion picture) 1960, UK, Warner Bros, prod. Gerry

Blattner, dir. Fred Zinnemann.

Sweeney, The (TV series) 1975–78 UK, Euston Films, created by Troy

Kennedy Martin.

307

Them! (motion picture) 1954, USA, Warner Bros Pictures, prod. David

Weisbart, dir. Gordon Douglas.

Three Faces of Eve, The (motion picture) 1957, USA, Twentieth Century Fox

Film Corporation, prod. & dir. Nunnally Johnson.

Town Like Alice, A (motion picture) 1956, UK, The Rank Organisation,

prod. Joseph Janni, dir. Jack Lee.

Trans‐Europ‐Express (motion picture) 1967, France, Como Film

Productions, prod. Samy Halfon, dir. Alain Robbe‐Grillet.

Vertigo (motion picture) 1958, USA, Alfred J Hitchcock Productions &

Paramount Pictures, prod. & dir. Alfred Hitchcock.

Walk into Paradise (motion picture) 1956, Australia, Southern Films

International, prod. Chips Rafferty, dir. Lee Robinson.

Whistle Stop (motion picture) 1946, USA, Nero Films, prod. Seymour

Nebenzal, dir. Léonide Moguy.

Wizard of Oz, The (motion picture) 1939, USA, Warner Bros. prod. Mervyn

LeRoy, dir. Victor Fleming.

Zelig (motion picture) 1983, USA, Orion Pictures Corporation, prod.

Robert Greenhut, dir. Woody Allen.

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