The Solaris Effect

The Solaris Effect ................................................................ THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK Art & Artifice in Contemporary American Film The .................... SOLARIS EFFECT.................... Steven Dillon university of texas press austin Copyright © 2006 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2006 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dillon, Steven, 1960– The Solaris effect : art and artifice in contemporary American film / Steven Dillon. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-292-71344-4 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-292-71344-4 (alk. paper) isbn-13: 978-0-292-71345-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-292-71345-2 (alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures—United States. I. Title. pn1993.5.u6d47 2006 791.430973—dc22 2006014047 To my parents THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK Contents ................................................................ Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii 1 Tarkovsky’s Solaris and the Cinematic Abyss 1 2 Steven Soderbergh’s Tinted World 21 3 Aronofsky, Sundance, and the Return to Nature 45 4 Mulholland Drive, Cahiers du cinéma, and the Horror of Cinephilia 77 5 Spielberg’s A.I.: Animation, Time, and Digital Culture 105 6 Cinema against Art: Artists and Paintings in Contemporary American Film 141 7 A Plague of Frogs: Expressionism and Naturalism in 1990s American Film 173 8 Situating American Film in Godard, Jarmusch, and Scorsese 209 Notes 233 Bibliography 253 Index 261 vii THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK Preface ................................................................ ike Mount Rushmore, this book has several faces. For now, I will begin by L taking a postcard picture, by stepping back and looking at all four heads at once. Later on, like Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, we will roam over the nostrils and chins of these big heads, through lots of overly enlarged details. First, a brief view of the mountain, before we go scrabbling about among the sculptures and the rocks. This book is, on the one hand, or one face, a survey of contemporary Ameri- can film from 1990 to 2002. The Solaris Effect contains substantial descriptions of about sixty films. These descriptions ought to stand on their own, as probes and forays into a fascinating decade of cinema. There is still relatively little critical work on directors such as Steven Soderbergh, Darren Aronofsky, Todd Haynes, Harmony Korine, and Gus Van Sant. This book treats Soderbergh and Aronofsky at length, and tends to emphasize small-budget independent American film at the expense of blockbuster Hollywood film. Yet more canonical figures like Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, and Steven Spielberg also make detailed appearances. One way to read The Solaris Effect is as a modest 1 supplement to Robert Kolker’s Cinema of Loneliness. Kolker surveys major figures (Kubrick, Spielberg, Scorsese, Stone) in a nearly definitive manner, but omits anyone not admitted to his limited pantheon. For instance, Kolker does not even mention David Lynch. The Solaris Effect is deliberately sculpted. I organize my look at contemporary American film around ideas of art and artifice. Since both political eco- consciousness and digital cgi-consciousness developed and increased in the 1990s, American film stands as a particularly interesting place to reflect on art. Many of the canonical figures (Scorsese, Kubrick, Altman) readily don the ix mantle of artist, and younger directors, too, often directly explore regions of art, of creativity, of making and representation. My chapters often go back and forth between the sculptures and the rock, between art and nature. How do science fiction films like Spielberg’s A.I. and Aronofsky’s π represent the relationship between nature and artifice? How do the winners of the Sundance Film Festival regard the apparent oppositions between nature and culture, wild and tame, river and bridge? If independent film casts off the glossy artifices of big-budget Hollywood, does it then go to the natural world for an authentic alternative, a ground of truth? To organize this discussion of nature and art in contemporary American film, I use Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) as a model. Solaris is philosophical science fiction that relentlessly explores the relationship between the powers of nature and the powers of art. Tarkovsky himself is usually taken for a cinematic naif, regarded often as an innocent lover of the natural world. But one of the many subplots of The Solaris Effect consists of an argument on behalf of Tar- kovsky’s cinematic self-consciousness. This self-consciousness is also called self-reflexivity. When Tarkovsky takes a picture of the natural world, he does so self-consciously, not innocently. Hence my other theoretical hero is Jean-Luc Godard. The four heads of The Solaris Effect rest on the two sturdy shoulders of Tarkovsky and Godard. Godard’s practice helps explain what we might mean by cinematic self- reflexivity. From time to time, I will invoke examples from early (New Wave), middle (politically militant), and late (post–Sauve qui peut [la vie], 1980) Go- dard. By the end of the book I hope to have contributed to an understand- ing of what we might mean by self-reflexive cinema. I also hope to have significantly complicated the apparent opposition between naive Tarkovsky and hypersophisticated Godard. Both are extraordinarily self-reflexive film- makers, and late Godard—philosophical, lyrical, slow, with a surprising num- ber of landscapes—is never too far away from the cinematic worlds invented by Tarkovsky. And so these descriptions of American film will turn prescriptive. The final head on the hill is the head of critical judgment. I will argue that American film must work self-reflexively. American film must acknowledge not only that it exists as a film, but also that it is located, that it is situated in the United States. Film is a major artifact of American cultural imperialism, now more than ever, and American film must always acknowledge its own origin. Unless one’s aesthetics are sheerly relativistic or completely generous, critical judg- x The Solaris Effect ments must have criteria. My aesthetic criteria are what I take to be Godardian. Late Godardian politics are not dogmatic (especially compared to those from middle-period Godard), and they are attended by an enormous range of social and cultural issues. But Godard’s films are always placed, situated, not only in the history of film, but also in a global landscape. It may surprise some readers how often American films, too, concretely situate themselves on a global map. The monument, or hydra, thus looks something like this: 1. A survey of American film from 1990 to 2002 (with a rare example from 2003) 2. The categories of nature and art as organizing principles of the survey 3. Film art evaluated according to its cinematic self-reflexivity 4. A critical judgment that American films, in the end, will have more chance of aesthetic success when they are self-reflexive, that is, when they refer to themselves not only as film artifacts, but also as being lo- catedonaglobalmap As will be evident in the chapter on David Lynch, I am a great fan of French film criticism, especially that represented by the journal Cahiers du cinéma. My writing does not look very much like that of any Cahiers critic, but it has been strongly influenced by the whole history of the magazine and the work of many of its writers. I am still much moved by the early cinephilia of Godard and Truffaut, and consider myself a crazily enthusiastic cinephile in many re- spects. But the politically militant Cahiers du cinéma of the late 1960s and the 1970s has also made a strong impression on me. In its more recent incarna- tions, Cahiers has returned to a more openly enthusiastic mode, but with a political and philosophical awareness of what such enthusiasm entails. I see much of this book as following in the contradictory, figurative, self-aware, multifaceted spirit of Cahiers du cinéma. Hitchcock liked to conclude his films with landmark set pieces. When his films find themselves at Mount Rushmore or the Albert Hall or the British Museum or the Statue of Liberty, the monuments lend their grandeur to the chase (here, at last, is a location worthy of the narrative), at the same time that a blackly ironic humor descends upon the landmark. It is thrilling and thrillingly funny to see Cary Grant scurry over Abraham Lincoln’s giant head. When famous landmarks are used for a playground, a kind of witty desecra- tion takes place. Hitchcock does not destroy the landmark, like a terrorist, or Preface xi like the aliens in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (Sears, 1956). Instead, Hitchcock 2 teases the landmark, vibrating the statue rather than toppling it. Movies are monuments that are there and not there. Where are they? The photographed face both is and is not that person. These four Solaris faces are not presidents, they are residents. The faces of American film look at us and tell us where they are. The faces are cut into a dark hill. xii The Solaris Effect Acknowledgments ................................................................ hanks again to my editor, Jim Burr, for his suggestions, and for making the Teditorial process run so smoothly. Kip Keller copyedited the manuscript masterfully. I took seriously the many substantial comments by an anony- mous reader for the Press, and I hope that the book was improved as a re- sult.

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