Tom Jennings
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12 | VARIANT 27 | WINTER 2006 Rose Coloured Spectacles Tom Jennings Jonathan Demme’s anti-Bush broadside of a film fare with personal commitment to lower-budget The Manchurian Candidate (2004) effectively releases paid for with its proceeds. Moreover, updates John Frankenheimer’s classic 1962 after Clinton’s neoliberalism, Seattle’s protest conspiracy thriller – with Iraq rather than Korean revival, and post-9/11 Bush barbarism, many also War veterans brainwashed into becoming political vociferously criticise orthodox politics, publicly moles and assassins by corporate, not KGB, agents. supporting grass-roots campaigns instead. By this Given our familiarity with the amoral criminality account, subversive hope unexpectedly supplants of the military-industrial complex and government cynical despair. via mythology, mystification and spin, these revisions seem highly appropriate. The unfolding plot shows Army bureaucrat (Denzel Washington Focusing on Power in Frank Sinatra’s role) and Vice Presidential Obvious manifestations of these phenomena may candidate (Liev Shrieber for Laurence Harvey) be sought in film treatments of formal political grappling with Gulf War Syndrome zombification processes themselves. Conventional 1990s satires amid manipulation by Shreiber’s Senator mother centralised the network of PR spin and corporate (Meryl Streep instead of Angela Lansbury) and media influence on dodgy leaders, from the and sundry electoral, big business and media Machiavellian machinations of Bob Roberts (dir. masterminds, crooks, lobbyists, lackeys and Tim Robbins, 1992) to more sympathetic power- lickspittles. seekers led astray both by their own narcissism However, despite a very neat new denouement, and the electoral farce. Primary Colors (dir. much of the political sharpness of the source novel Mike Nichols, 1998) and Wag the Dog (dir. Barry by Richard Condon is lost, wherein McCarthyism Levinson, 1998) were comically pertinent to succeeded thanks to Kremlin plotters finding it the Clinton regime’s practice, but said nothing thoroughly congenial to their authoritarian aims about either political consequences or ordinary – a fascinating, if muddled, disentangling of the viewers/voters beyond them being suckered (which contradictions of Cold War politics. Unfortunately, might apply more to liberal filmmakers falling the supposedly liberal-left Demme substitutes for Clinton’s progressive rhetoric). Meanwhile the benign intelligence agencies which only ever historical revisionism of JFK (dir. Oliver Stone, use dirty tricks to foil the multinational menace, 1991) and LA Confidential (dir. Curtis Hanson, plus honourable old-school patriotic patricians 1997) had already applied film noir devices to national and local institutional and governmental who have for years fought Party takeover bids by glossed and generalised to apply to society as a structures, implying their utter moral bankruptcy. tycoons. In other words, the radical potential of a whole. More complex and less conventional narratives critique of the interdependency of the state and Other treatments of significant trends in followed suit, exploiting the flexibility of genre- capitalism is squandered in favour of regressive contemporary US films have no patience with crossover to link the lives of the citizenry into the conservative recuperation – much like, in fact, the such pessimistic and totalising assessments of degradations of politics. 2004 Democratic presidential campaign itself. the sector’s long-range value and significance. Most trenchantly, elite Democrat Senator The changing contours of cinematic conspiracies Bucking the tendency of major studio output in Bulworth (dir. Warren Beatty, 1999) goes AWOL can thus be interpreted as adjustments to what the 1990s to converge towards ever more inflated in South Central LA after a nervous breakdown filmmakers and studios understand ‘politics’ and repetitious replicas with little more than on the campaign trail, emerging as a champion to mean to themselves and viewers today special effects enhancements and celebrity of the underclasses. Borrowing elements of ’90s – in a trajectory from stark Orwellian paranoia presence to recommend them, a diverse collection ‘hood film’ style works here, thanks to immense through nihilistic neo-noir to recent efforts such of creative film-making talents instead brought respect shown for ghetto philosophy, intelligence as Demme’s glossy pastiche, Traffic (dir. Steven the sensitivities and dynamism of subcultural and and creativity, counterposed by Warren Beatty’s Soderbergh, 2001), The Quiet American (dir. Philip cult media and genres to bear. The achievements hysterical vanity and, crucially, laughably Noyce, 2002), Silver City (dir. John Sayles, 2004), of some of these in persuading major studios incompetent rapping.5 Other recent films also The Constant Gardener (dir. Fernando Mereilles, to part with substantial production budgets are bridge the gap between culture and politics in 2005) and Syriana (dir. Andrew Gaghan, 2005). celebrated by James Mottram in his study The diverse ways and with varying degrees of success. Moreover, the last few years have seen a growing Sundance Kids.2 This title furnishes a spurious However, apart from Bamboozled’s (dir. Spike tendency for supposedly progressive themes to be collectivity – when many, such as Soderbergh Lee, 2001) exposure of corporate media’s racism tackled in big-budget Hollywood fictions, along and Tarantino, had little or no truck with in colonising Black traditions, all invoke heroic with the incorporation of originally marginal- Robert Redford’s nursery and showcase at the individualism to drive history: Cradle Will Rock (dir. aesthetic choices and strategies in the production Sundance Institute. It also encourages a strained Tim Robbins, 2000) revisits the political context of cinematic blockbusters, brands and franchises. intergenerational comparison with the 1970s New of the 1930s US Federal Theatre Project in a This survey describes some of these phenomena Hollywood of Scorcese, Spielberg and Coppola musical celebration of proletarian art served up and the critical response to them, and discusses et al, who rose to prominence from the sixties by elite intellectuals like Orson Welles and John their ambivalent implications and limitations. countercultural demolition of outdated industry Housman; Good Night & Good Luck’s (dir. George practices before subsequently finding themselves Clooney, 2005) implied critique of modern media thoroughly tamed by what replaced them. Sharon Shifting Perspective requires merely journalistic integrity to scupper Waxman’s anecdotal survey Rebels On The Backlot3 In their book A World in Chaos: Social Crisis and McCarthyism; and 8 Mile (dir. Curtis Hanson, 2003) at least concentrates on detailing insider gossip the Rise of Postmodern Cinema, Carl Boggs and and Erin Brockovich (dir. Steven Soderbergh, 2000) and dissecting networking patterns in showing Thomas Pollard match recent developments in connect uplift from the constraints of working- how an arbitrary selection of younger independent cinema to the lived experiences of its audiences class culture only with personal success in music directors have combined personal entrepreneurial in the “globalizing, consumer-oriented capitalist and law respectively – reducing those represented prowess and self-promotion with genuine artistic order” constituted by “gross material inequalities, (whether in the hip-hop or legal senses) to flair in advancing their careers. social polarization, possessive individualism, civic passivity. Conversely, rather than translating cinematic fragmentation, and impending chaos”.1 Elements More ambitious is Silver City’s bitter texts as sociocultural reflections, and with a much of classic Hollywood genres are combined and denunciation of prevailing power. This crime less sanguine approach to cultural commerce, attenuated in many recent films so that their thriller-cum-political conspiracy follows an ex- Ben Dickenson’s Hollywood’s New Radicalism4, narratives depict incomprehensible and corrupt crusading journalist (Danny Huston) grappling focusing on the efforts of liberals and leftists worlds where conventional rational understanding, with environmental destruction and the involved in film production to reflect their social collective organisation and public action have exploitation of migrant workers perpetrated awareness in their work, charts the changing lost the capacity to offer explanations or effect by corporate greed – all fronted by cretinous structure of an industry whose consolidation political change – thanks in no small part to the mouthpieces elected through omnipresent and profit-seeking agendas fluctuate according saturation of our psyches with corporate media soundbites and photo-ops. Although crippled to wider political and economic trends. Recent trivia. And although the book’s overly loose by annoyingly patronising expositions (when generations of independent innovators gained definition of postmodernism in films encompasses the message emerges more effectively from the arthouse footholds with regular box-office hits many long-established forms and styles, its narrative), the film is effective in critiquing left, refreshing moribund blockbuster formulae – and proposition is surely plausible: that earlier right and centre while still hinting at hope. So the now that niche marketing and diversification representations of brutal, miserable, hopeless and right-on countercultural veteran does eventually are prominent megastudio strategies,