COUNTER-AMERICANA:

THE LIBERAL OPPOSITION IN HOLLYWOOD, 2004 -2008

MALCOLM MORTON

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GRADUATE PROGRAM IN FILM

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COUNTER-AMERICANA:

THE LIBERAL OPPOSITION IN HOLLYWOOD, 2004-2008

By Malcolm Morton

My thesis draws upon aspects of genre theory to outline a highly politicized interpretation of recent filmmaking within the Hollywood commercial mainstream. Specifically, it examines the formal and thematic qualities of a selection of films between the years 2004 and 2008 to formulate a genre called "counter-Americana." Counter-Americana was a cycle of films which drew upon the legacy of 1960's liberalism to craft an anti-fascist dramaturgy - one which dramatizes ideals of a crusadingly inquisitive media, an emancipated appreciation of popular culture, and a neo-pagan reverence towards Nature rather than Christianity - which would oppose the worldview of the Bush administration at basic moral and emotional levels. My thesis utilizes close formal and ideological analysis of key relevant films in order to delineate the workings of this aesthetic. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract iv

Introduction . 1

Chapter 1: Counter-Americana as Genre 13

Chapter 2: Anti-Fascism .... 43

Chapter 3: The Media. .... 63

Chapter 4: Popular Culture .... 77

Chapter 5: Nature ..... 92

Chapter 6: The Sixties. .... 106

Conclusion ...... 121

Notes ...... 125

Bibliography ...... 131 1

Introduction

At the dawn of the 1980s, Hollywood lurched from the Left to the Right, and the renaissance of the New Hollywood came to an end. In Washington, the failures and vacillations of the Carter administration had allowed the election of Ronald Reagan to be

spun in terms of a "Reagan Revolution." The synchronic shift which took place in

Hollywood, however, was to be undisguisedly counter-revolutionary in nature, quashing the last of a genuinely revolutionary time in American filmmaking. The New Hollywood

which had hitherto been a font of political messages which ranged from the liberal to the

anarchic to the revolutionary was taken over by a deregulation-crazed corporate sector

and turned into a force for complacency and reaction.

The New Hollywood of 1967 to 1980 had represented nothing less than an effort

to establish an American equivalent to the European auteur cinema within the Hollywood

mainstream. The sort of profoundly personal cinematic artistry which directors such as

Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Francois Truffaut, and

Rainer Werner Fassbinder had come to symbolize on one side of the Atlantic was taken

up by young American filmmakers such as Francis Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Robert

Altman, Martin Scorsese, Paul Schraeder, William Freidkin, Hal Ashby, Brian De Palma,

Michael Cimino, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. In doing so, they would sweep

away the last ossified remnants of the Classical Hollywood studio system, and create a

new cinema which would speak directly to a more politically aware and culturally febrile

youth generation. "The dream of the New Hollywood transcended individual movies"

Peter Biskind avows... 2

At its most ambitious, the New Hollywood was a movement intended to cut film free of its evil twin, commerce, enabling it to fly high through the thin air of art. The filmmakers of the '70s hoped to overthrow the studio system, or at least render it irrelevant, by democratizing filmmaking, putting it into the hands of anyone with talent and determination. The avatars of the movement were "filmmakers," not "directors" or "editors" or "cinematographers"... 1

This ideal of a New Hollywood was one in keeping with the anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian sentiments of the Sixties, and was thus, from the very beginning, a movement of the Left, though never one so systematically politicized as to be doctrinaire.

"Alienation, anarchy, anomie and absurdism" were the watchwords of the day.

The seminal titles of the New Hollywood vary in how well they are remembered

in the third decade of the counter-revolution. Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider, the two

Godfather films, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now all, in

spite of their availability to politically oppositional readings, received that greatest mark

of official sanction - inclusion upon the American Film Institute's much-vaunted "All-

Time Greatest 100" list - while Jaws and Star Wars would continue to generate sequels.

In contrast, films such as Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie, Peter Bogdanovich's At Long

Last Love, or William Friedkin's Sorcerer - arguably just as important to the path of the

New Hollywood as any of the above titles - have today been largely forgotten.

The quest after profundity which had so defined the cinematic aesthetics of the

late 1970s was anathematized with astonishing speed and completeness at the dawn of

the 1980s. Under the new corporate regime, "high concept" - an aesthetic of slickness

which prizes a single, aggressively marketable angle over thematic complexity - became

the dominant wisdom in Hollywood, with films such as Rocky III, The Karate Kid,

Ghostbusters, Top Gun, and innumerable others. The auteurist fire of the New 3

Hollywood was ruthlessly and remorselessly doused, or turned into a new form of branding, and the attendant political re-orientation was inevitable: a calamitous shift to the Right. This new Rightist orientation in Hollywood was not generally expressed in terms of reactionary politics being openly and avowedly dramatized in films, although this happened with greater regularity. Rather, the new high concept ethos thrived upon what Henry A. Giroux has called the "depoliticizing of politics" 3 - the cinematic presentation, and implicit naturalization, of a world which contains no sign of any pressing issues, political strife, or ideological contradictions. If Right-wing politics were inherent in this, they were rarely actually articulated in the films' screenplays. Instead, stylistic slickness and thematic shallowness were the hallmarks of the high concept aesthetic of the 1980s.

The arrival of the 1990s did not fundamentally change this. Unlike the seismic changes of the dawn of the 80s, the dawn of the 90s not only brought no dramatic change in Hollywood's Zeitgeist, but seemed to represent only the continuation and ever-greater consolidation of corporatized high concept aesthetics. Politics thus remained depoliticized. As the 1990s wore on, however, some change to this situation finally arrived. The depoliticization of politics simply reached such an extreme point that even the bedrock of conservative politics which had been inherent in Hollywood throughout the 1980s and early 1990s began to erode and dissolve. The middle of the decade saw a succession of films such as Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Ed Wood, and Natural Born

Killers, which began to undermine fundamental and empirical assumptions about logic, intelligence, morality, quality, and time. 4 This was by no means an avowedly liberal or 4 progressive trend in filmmaking, but unlike much of what had proceeded throughout the

1980s, neither was it readily available to conservatism. A cinematic climate of nihilistic

knowingness was coming to define Hollywood.

As the 90s progressed, and the dawn of a new millennium loomed closer, this

trend accelerated. Unlike the 1980s, whose aesthetic and ideological character would be

resoundingly defined in its very first years, the 1990s was a decade whose unique and

distinctive character would only become fully apparent in its last years. At the end of the

1990s, the idea of "the End of History" 5, as articulated by Francis Fukuyama earlier in

the decade, had seemingly become the animating philosophy of Hollywood. With history

at an end, it followed, no further fundamental developments to human social and

economic reality could be expected, and so the nature of the world - as it was now, and

apparently always would be - could be imaginatively revised and satirized endlessly.

This gave enormous scope to Hollywood screenwriters, who took full advantage. Among

the key films of 1997 and 1998 were Wag the Dog and The Truman Show, which posited

that modern media had become so omnipresent and all-determining in society that it was

now possible to manufacture, respectively, a war, or an entire human life, entirely within

the media sphere.

1999 was a watershed year for American cinema. It was the year of Fight Club,

Being John Malkovich, Magnolia, The Green Mile, The Sixth Sense, American Beauty,

and most of all, The Matrix. Any one of these films in isolation would bespeak an

ideological climate growing detached from political engagement or concern with the

tangible state of the world. In combination, however, they represented a complete 5 decoupling from all concerns of history, culture, or truth, and the apparent onset of a world of relativism and subjectivity. The films dramatize a worldview where nothing can be taken at face value, because there are always more potent and unpredictable forces at work just beyond the limits of human comprehension or understanding. In the face of such a notion, it follows that nothing immediately apparent and tangible is relevant enough to inspire concern, and a detachment and knowing disdain towards outwardly apparent social realities came to dominate.

This climate of depoliticized abstraction would come to a brutally violent end on

September 11th, 2001. The terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington D.C., which left over 3,000 Americans dead, came as a harsh reminder that history had not in fact come a halt, and its political forces were far from having dissolved into a globalized miasma. This fact was emphasized by the very omnipresent media sphere which had given rise to the prior illusion, as the 9/11 attacks played out in real time, with endless replays, on innumerable different TV channels. The pop cultural climate of detachment which had seemed so logical on September 10th now seemed, on September 12th, to be so much naive delusion. Films such as Executive Decision now seemed eerily prescient, while the numerous apocalyptic fantasy movies which the 1990s had produced -

Outbreak, Independence Day, Mars Attacks!, Twelve Monkeys, Armageddon, Deep

Impact, End of Days, etc. - now seemed the products of comfortable complacency, reflecting not a shrewd acceptance of the provisional and fragile nature of American society, but an immature incapacity to truly examine the implications of its destruction. 6

In the wake of this, the reality of the resumption of history and a renewed political urgency began to appear on Hollywood screens. A number of politically engaged and relevant films were released throughout 2003, of which The 25th Hour and Monster were particularly important. 2004, however, was a second watershed year for American film.

This time its distinction lay not in its final and total divorce from politics, but from its intense re-engagement with them. At the high noon of the Bush administration, and the intensified culture wars it had wrought, the Hollywood filmmaking community become openly politicized to an extent not seen in a generation. The list of powerfully politically engaged films - produced at whatever economic level - released throughout 2004 is daunting. With the electoral contest between George W. Bush and John Kerry acting as a lightning rod stoking America's culture wars to new heights, it was one of the few years in modern Hollywood where politics went mainstream. Politicized documentaries re- entered the public discourse with a vengeance with such titles as The Corporation,

Control Room, Super Size Me and, most of all, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, which

impossibly did better business than many blockbuster spectacles. Beyond this, many

long-standing American filmmakers would release some of their most politically engaged

work ever, as with John Sayles's Silver City, which clinically dissected the corrupt

interplay of money and power in modern politics, or Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar

Baby, which infuriated America's conservative Christians by dramatizing euthanasia with

deep probity and respect. Foreign imports such as Maria Full of Grace, Vera Drake, The

Sea Inside, and The Motorcycle Diaries encouraged the trend towards politicized cinema,

and even the hegemonic centre of the Hollywood mainstream saw an upswing in this 7 regard. The Manchurian Candidate and The Day After Tomorrow ushered in the phenomenon of politically articulate blockbusters, which would see many subsequent examples in the following years. So general was the political tenor of the moment that

Team America: World Police was able to tap into the Zeitgeist and provide a ribald, vulgarian satire of the culture war mentality.

At this febrile moment in American political filmmaking, a new genre phenomenon emerged. A cycle of films best defined as "counter-Americana" came to crystallize all the liberal opposition to the Bush administration's conduct. These films were released, in the vast majority, via the major studios' subsidiary labels for classier, less obviously commercial products - Fox Searchlight, Warner Independent, Paramount

Vantage, etc. Their budgets, accordingly, were far less than those of their blockbuster brethren, with none of them even approaching the nine-figure price tag which has become

increasingly mandatory for large Hollywood spectacle. In spite of this, these films drew

immense support from the Hollywood community, boasting stellar casts and creative

personnel attached to the projects for creative rather than mercenary reasons. Like the

New Hollywood, it was a phenomenon born of a broad selection of the Hollywood

creative community being politically oriented in the same direction, with similar creative

ambitions. The counter-Americana cycle was all about opposing the Bush administration,

while proving that intelligent and aesthetically rich films could still be made in modern

Hollywood. This was admittedly a more modest goal than the New Hollywood's

grandiose vision of championing the counter-culture to victory while remaking the entire

creative tenor of Hollywood, but the affinity is nonetheless unavoidable. 8

A film critic or historian who was determined to draw ineluctable links between the New Hollywood and the counter-Americana years - to make one the linear descendent of the other, and thus elide the 1980s and 90s from history altogether - would have some legitimate points to make. For many of the former New Hollywood auteurs, the counter-Americana years were a time of renewed engagement, brining forth their most audacious and politicized work in years. Martin Scorsese's The Aviator and Brian

De Palma's The Black Dahlia displayed a political engagement directly proportional to their cinephilia, with narratives about capitalism's perverse self-destructiveness featuring the films of Howard Hughes and Paul Leni's The Man who Laughs as prominent plot

devices. Meanwhile, The Departed and Redacted took an anti-establishment line towards

police and military authority fully worthy of the New Hollywood. With Munich, Steven

Spielberg finally completed the process of aesthetic and political maturation which he

had begun with Schindler's List, Amistad, and Saving Private Ryan, and the ploddingly

pedestrian nature of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull seemed only to

confirm the disconnect from his previous self.

For other New Hollywood auteurs, the counter-Americana years marked a

tentative return from exile or obscurity. Paul Schraeder's Dominion: Prequel to The

Exorcist took the appropriate form of revisiting one of the great New Hollywood classics.

Following upon The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick's direction of The New World and

co-writer/producer work on Amazing Grace seemed to confirm his return to the

filmmaking fold after a famous twenty-year exile. Most of all, with Youth without Youth,

Francis Ford Coppola finally regained his creative freedom after a long spell of 9 mercenary work such as The Rainmaker and Jack. He would also receive producer credits on both Kinsey and The Good Shepherd, two of the key counter-Americana films discussed below.

Beyond these, there are other, less immediately tangible resonances between the two

Hollywood periods. The post-9/11 Zeitgeist brought back much of the paranoid sensibility which distinguished the 1970s, as thrillers such as Syriana, Michael Clayton, Body of

Lies and State of Play attest. Poseidon represented a revisiting and correcting of the 70s disaster cycle, imbuing them with the sort of New-Hollywood-ish themes of amorality and apocalypse that the conservative originals had so doggedly refused. Lastly, the counter-Americana years' kinship with the New Hollywood was sadly emphasized in

2006 with the death of Robert Altman at the age of 76. 2005's A Prairie Home

Companion was to be the final film of one of the New Hollywood's key figures. A champion of the following year's Oscars, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, closed with a dedication to his memory.

In spite of all this, the counter-Americana cycle is not the direct descendant of the

New Hollywood. The weight of their priorities is finally too different. "The New

Hollywood lasted barely a decade," says Biskind...

But in addition to bequeathing a body of landmark films, it has a lot to teach us about the way Hollywood is run now, why today's pictures, with a few happy exceptions, are so unrelievedly awful, why Hollywood is in a perpetual state of crisis and self-loathing. 6

The counter-Americana films can claim only to be representative of the happy exceptions, not to contradict Biskind in toto. Whereas the great films of the New

Hollywood were momentous in both political and aesthetic terms - each new landmark of 10 the New Hollywood seeming to press back the limits of filmmaking in thematic and

cinematographic terms - the counter-Americana cycle is chiefly relevant only for its

political import. Its entries consistently displayed high levels of technical polish, to be

sure, but they did not substantially advance the craft of filmmaking itself. Rather, they

remain invaluable as demonstrations that the slickly technical craft of modern Hollywood

filmmaking can, given sufficient impetus, be mobilized towards politically committed

liberal aims.

In historical terms, the counter-Americana films benefit enormously from being

examined through the prism of the New Hollywood, because in this wider context they

take on a far greater importance than they would as mere symptoms of immediate

ideological dissatisfaction with the Bush administration. Understood as avatars of the

New Hollywood, they represent the final undoing of Hollywood's Reagan counter-

revolution, and the restoration of Hollywood as inhospitable terrain for conservative or

reactionary dramaturgies. Throughout the 1980s, doubts and equivocations about the new

ultra-conservative Zeitgeist were pushed to the very margins of Hollywood's texts, often

caricatured as no more than snide cynicism, outmoded and impractical radicalism, or

boorish nonsense. Counter-Americana thus represents Hollywood finally coming full

circle: the cumulation of liberal ideals' quarter-century slog back to full possession of the

text, just in time for the next two-term Republican president.

The following thesis will engage with this notion by employing genre theory to

parse the political workings of the counter-Americana cycle. The first chapter will define

counter-Americana as a liberal political phenomenon in terms of its contrast to 11

"Americana," a long-standing Hollywood tradition indivisibly wedded to conservative politics. The following five chapters will chart the key thematic terms of counter-

Americana, and how their deployment signifies in terms antithetical to the political climate of the Bush administration.

This thesis may be understood as a tripartite synthesis of the work of film theorist

Rick Altman and film critics Peter Biskind and Robin Wood. Altaian's writings on the subject of film genre supply my immediate theoretical methodology, giving a simple yet effective set of intellectual tools to structure an analysis of a few very crucial years of

Hollywood filmmaking. Of most central importance is Altaian's 1985 essay "For a

Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Genre," which structures my conceptualization of counter-Americana for this thesis. Such a conceptualization cannot and should not be carried out in a historical vacuum, however, and requires a firm context. To this end, I have also drawn upon Peter Biskind's writing on the history of Hollywood filmmaking.

Biskind's impassioned and broad-ranging history of the New Hollywood, Easy Riders,

Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, has been invaluable in imbuing this thesis with a wider historical perspective, and enabling the achievements of the counter-Americana years to be better understood by being thrown into relief with the products of a previous era of oppositional filmmaking. Lastly,

"oppositional filmmaking" is a very diffuse term, and requires an interpretive template to go by. In this regard, the single greatest influence upon this thesis has been the collected works of Robin Wood, whose seminal essays, such as "Papering the Cracks: Fantasy and

Ideology in the Reagan Era" and "Hollywood Today: Is an Oppositional Cinema 12

Possible?", have lucidly brought Marxist and Freudian analysis to bear on the products of popular Hollywood cinema. Wood's writings, with their insistent critique of bourgeois capitalist patriarchy, and constant humanist commitment to social revolution, have provided the political bedrock of this thesis, upon which Altaian and Biskind's formulations have been invoked and redeployed.

In seeking to synthesize the vitality of these three authors, this thesis endeavours to craft an interpretive model to bring to bear upon an urgently contemporary moment in film and politics - one whose history has yet to be definitively written. What follows represents an attempt to lay out some basic ideas toward this end. 13

Chapter 1: Counter-Americana as Genre

Americana is a cinematic aesthetic which seeks to mobilize all the most instinctive,

culturally ingrained sympathies of a putative average, archetypal American spectator, and

direct them towards the idealization and celebration of the American experience. It seeks to define America in the most self-congratulatory terms, and to do so addresses its

spectators in terms of key socio-political points against which s/he is presumed to have

no cognitive ramparts, or instinctive suspicion, so naturalized are they in the dominant

ideology. In a 1998 gloss on the subject of film and politics, Douglas Kellner wrote that

The Hollywood genres taught that money and success were important values; that heterosexual romance, marriage, and family were the proper social forms; that the state, police, and legal system were legitimate sources of power and authority; that violence was justified to destroy any threats to the system; and that American values and institutions were basically sound, benevolent, and beneficial to society as a whole. In this way, Hollywood film ... helped establish a certain hegemony or cultural dominance of existing institutions and values to the exclusion of others.1

Albeit with later qualifications, this was Kellner describing all Hollywood cinema

without exception. What seems impossibly categorical in general nevertheless catches the

particular spirit of Americana quite well. Once it is taken as an axiomatic given that

American audiences will not reflexively jeer at a filmic aesthetic which privileges money

and success; that a narrative of heterosexual romance leading to marriage and the rearing

of a family is more likely to be met with dewy-eyed sympathy than with derisive scoffs;

and that respectful depictions of state, police and legal power will be met with respect

rather than be hissed at, then there is no objective reason why any of these ideological

messages should not be emphasized with a maximum of emotional force and a minimum

of irony. Americana is what happens when this is done. Americana is the litmus test for the degree to which subject matter is assimilable into the dominant conservative

American ideology. If something can be incorporated positively into a work of

Americana, it is by definition not transgressive.

Americana is primarily about traditional American institutions - first and

foremost the patriarchal nuclear family, but also the community, the church, the army,

etc. - and attitudes being re-affirmed as foundational to the American character and

system of values. As a rule, any alternative ideologies or social modalities are not

criticized or interrogated but simply ignored. Any injustices or deficiencies in traditional

institutions, in turn, are either denied outright, or strategically minimized. Americana is

thus an aesthetic predicated strongly upon Roland Barthes's concept of "inoculation,"

whereby the status quo is affirmed and exalted by acknowledging its drawbacks and

inadequacies: "one inoculates the public with a contingent evil in order to prevent or cure

an essential one." 2 Barthes deemed this inoculation to be a peculiarly modern ideological

manoeuvre, replacing older Manichaean claims of "Established Order = Good, Dissent =

Evil."

Three films which illustrate the political economy of Americana well enough in

isolation will together form a fairly comprehensive portrait of Americana as an aesthetic.

They share numerous key socio-sexual suppositions, and yet there is barely any overlap

whatsoever between their periods, settings, or subject matter.

1) Kevin Costner's 2003 film Open Range is a key demonstration of how Americana can

influence a genre film without much effect upon the genre itself. Open Range is

recognizably a western, but a western shot through with an Americana discourse. The 15 narrative concerns a group of free-graze cattle herders running afoul of a powerful rancher who determines to have them killed. The two head cattlemen, Boss Spearman

(played by Robert Duvall) and Charley Waite (Costner himself), fight back and defend themselves, with a small town named Harmonville caught in the middle.

Open Range is best understood in comparison with another western directed by

Kevin Costner, Dances with Wolves. The latter is unavailable to Americana due to its direct confrontation of the ideological issue which Open Range determinedly avoids: the place of Native Americans - "the Indians" - in American history. No single factor has influenced the evolution of the western as a genre more than the recognition of the fact that the colonization of the American frontier was largely a work of genocide and plunder, entailing the breaking of treaties, the starting of wars, eco-vandalism, rape, and cultural defamation of the worst kind. These aspects of American history were long denied or elided from the western genre, but their gradual acknowledgment necessarily meant changes to the western as a genre. A contemporary western must either confront the ugly facts, and thus demythologize the West, or structure its narrative so that the issue does not obtrude into the story. Dances with Wolves was an example of the former, Open

Range of the latter. The Indians in Open Range are simply gone and vanished. At one point the town's rambling old coot passingly alludes to how "Harmonville" used to be

"Fort Harmon," a garrison of troops "chasin' off the Injuns!" Mere minutes later, the film's villain deviously speaks of how the town's people "hate free grazers, more than they used to hate the Indians." Crucially, both these lines have been given to characters with no narrative or moral authority, and the issue is never raised again. The film has, in a 16

sense, inoculated itself against a difficult issue which would stand in the way of a good

piece of Americana.

2) Ron Howard's Cinderella Man is a dramatization of the true story of heavyweight

boxer Benjamin Braddock, whose career suffered a string of reverses just at the onset of

the Great Depression, causing him and his family to endure a painful riches-to-rags journey, exchanging an affluent suburban life for a cold and cramped tenement. Reduced

to working as a day labourer on the docks, Braddock gets an improbable chance to return

to the ring, and seizes upon it to fight his way to the championship. Cinderella Man

illustrates another potent ideological tenet of Americana: the idealization of competitive

sports. Sport, in Americana, is held to be not merely physically healthy, but morally

healthy as well. It represents, ideally, a benignly non-disruptive way to work off society's

repressed energy and aggression, in a forum which fosters the conservative values of

community and group loyalty, and also masculine vigour organized into observed

hierarchy. In competitive sports, the difference between winner and loser is clear and

unanswerable, and it is key to the aesthetics of Americana that the spectator always be

provided with an athlete who embodies American values of determined yet humble self-

reliance more fully than his opponent, in order that his inevitable victory should appear

the more inspiring. As such, Cinderella Man strategically fudged on historical fact in

order to make Braddock's climactic opponent Max Baer more arrogant and brutal than

the facts bear out. He is made into a blustering monster who revels in his expensive

suits, swooning molls, swanky hotels, and fine food and drink, all the while unremorseful 17 about having killed two men in the ring. He is, in short, not a repository of Americana values, and his pride is soon humbled by Braddock in the ring.

While its most obvious cinematic forebear would seem to be Rocky, Cinderella

Man actually has less in common with that film than it does with Seabiscuit. Rocky's relativism about the nature of triumph - Sylvester Stallone's hero technically loses to his boastful opponent by a split decision, but has nonetheless defied all odds and won a major moral victory by doing that much - is outside the mainstream of Americana's sympathies. Seabiscuit, in spite of its titular athlete being a horse, hews to the Americana ethos much more closely. Both films take place during the Great Depression, and both

Seabiscuit and Tobey Macguire's jockey character are made humble and unboastful, as opposed to War Admiral, whose "superior breeding" is emphasized endlessly by his owner. Like Braddock against Baer, then, Seabiscuit's eventual victory over War

Admiral is not made simply the incidental result of an athletic competition, but a resounding reaffirmation and re-naturalization of American values.

The world of professional sports which both Cinderella Man and Seabiscuit represent is set in the past for good reason. Much of the world of modern professional sports - with its drugs, promiscuity, profanity, violence, steroids, and corporate machinations - is completely antithetical to the Americana worldview. Films which attempt to paint a wholesome picture of the world of modern sports must either skirt the margins of its world, as with Jerry McGuire, or relegate themselves to the realm of children's entertainment, as with Angels in the Outfield. Oliver Stone's 1999 film Any

Given Sunday is perhaps the only major Hollywood film ever to openly celebrate the 18 culture of depravity to some degree, and thus stands as the most complete rebuttal to

Americana sports possible.

3) Frank Darabont's 2001 film The Majestic is set in 1951, and is about a Hollywood screenwriter named Peter (played by Jim Carrey) brought under investigation by the

House Un-American Activities Committee. Finding his burgeoning Hollywood career suddenly terminated, he dejectedly drives out along the California coastline, has an accident on a bridge and falls into the ocean, a blow to the head inducing amnesia. He awakens in a small town named Lawson and is mistaken for a favoured local son named

"Luke," who was believed lost in World War II. Not knowing that he is not really Luke,

Peter "re-integrates" into Lawson's community and returns to his putative father's movie theatre The Majestic. Peter soon finds a life more personally fulfilling than he has ever known before, even falling in love with "Adele," the woman who was formerly Luke's

fiancee. When his true identity emerges and he is called by HUAC to testify, however, all

is threatened.

The Majestic is that rare Americana film which actually acknowledges the

existence of Leftist politics in America, but its acknowledgment goes no further than that.

The film depicts the HUAC committee men as conniving hypocrites, and repeatedly

acknowledges that (pace John Wayne's Big Jim McClain) being a Communist in America

was not a crime. Nonetheless, there are no actual Left-leaning characters in the film -

Peter being "innocent" of the charges against him. Unlike Warren Beatty's Reds, which

endeavoured to dramatize Leftist politics as central to American history, The Majestic, in 19 effect, deems communism a harmless nonsense which American society is big and generous-minded enough to contain.

The Majestic is also rare in being an Americana film which is self-referential about its own medium. As will be seen below, the ideological privileging of popular culture is a key tenet of counter-Americana, which gives The Majestic additional importance as a counterpoint. The differences between the two aesthetics, in the end, are telling. Americana treats the appreciation of popular culture in wholly social terms.

Music is appreciated only to set the mood at public dances, while movie-going is made into a form of community bonding, with the size of the crowds at The Majestic proportional to Peter's standing in the town at the moment. There is no indication that aesthetic appreciation of the films themselves is anywhere on anybody's priority list, and the selection of films screened are thoroughly conventional ones: An American in Paris,

A Streetcar Named Desire, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Sand Pirates of the Sahara

- the last being a fictitious B-movie for which Peter wrote the screenplay in his prior life.

Beyond this, Hollywood itself is subjected to moral critique - not of the sort in Robert

Altaian's The Player, which castigates it for falling short of an ideal, but of a more fundamental kind. Peter's initial life in Hollywood is depicted in pragmatic terms of going along to get along. He endures the debauching and bowdlerizing of his ideas in screenwriting meetings with executives, and it is implicitly understood that his initial girlfriend, an aspiring actress, is with him primarily to pool their resources in the industry. Later, Peter is made to describe himself as having previously been a man of no principle. Now, having been morally regenerated by small-town life, he finally derides the studio executives as philistines, leaves Hollywood, and returns to Lawson for good.

Counter-Americana, it will be seen, treats Nature as spiritually and physically regenerating. Americana, in contrast, deems old-fashioned small-town life to be morally regenerative, stripping away the cynicism and decadence which urban subjectivity can instil. In a small town, supposedly, everyone is known by everyone else, and has a fixed role and persona in the community, the performance of which imbues them with self- respect and a sense of meaning in their lives. As demonstrated in Pleasantville, this is an ideal which contains very real totalitarian potential, but it is one which is nonetheless persistent in American cinema. Its deployment need not always be authoritarian in its ideological import - the 2006 Pixar film Cars, for example, showed great sensitivity in endeavouring to unite this Americana vision of the small town with the counter-

Americana vision of Nature - but it nonetheless represents a key fault line in

Hollywood's political economy.

The above three films, so dissimilar in terms of spectacle, nonetheless reveal key ideological assumptions about the politics of Americana. The aesthetic is one which draws upon and unites two key aspects of American ideology: economic populism and

Puritan morality. Ambitions toward wealth, sensuality, worldliness and sophistication put one morally beyond the pale in Americana. Small and simple things are the only morally healthy things to aspire to. The American character is supposedly based upon an ideal of common sense and humble lack of pretence which has no use for the grandiose. All this goes hand in hand with an ideal of great inwardness and self-possession. Another unifying point about these Americana films is that they are chaste and desexualized. Even though clearly aimed at adult audiences, and each possessing a strong romantic element to their narrative, they nonetheless repress sexuality. The burgeoning relationship between Charlie and Sue in Open Range is never consummated, indeed even the hint of its possible consummation is swiftly repressed on a number of occasions; the Braddocks' marriage, despite having produced three children in the past, is left virtually platonic for the film's purposes; while Peter and Adele never advance beyond chaste kisses. The ideal self-possession at the core of Americana is one grounded in sexual repression.

Americana values are conservatively masculine in conception and depiction. The envisioned place of women in Americana, meanwhile, is uncertain. On the one hand, a woman's role as wife and mother is exalted above all else, with all three films depicting the patriarchal nuclear family in unqualifiedly positive terms. On the other hand, the films having been made in the twenty-first century, there is some implicit concession to feminism. Unlike an Americana classic such as It's a Wonderful Life, the domestic sphere is now acknowledged as not quite enough of a forum for women to achieve their full human potential. Accordingly, both Open Range and The Majestic rewrite American history to make it appear that there never really were any educational or social barriers to intelligent and ambitious women. In Open Range, Sue lives with her brother not as a spinster dependent, but as a full partner in his medical practice, while in The Majestic,

Adele is depicted as having just passed the bar and become certified as a lawyer. The exception is Cinderella Man, which has Renee Zellweger's wife and mother character 22

"Mae" consist solely of piously hoping for her husband's safety in the ring and hysterically seeking to dissuade her children from taking up the punishing sport of boxing themselves. That Cinderella Man is the only one of the three films based substantially on historical fact gives the measure of the ideological manoeuvring at work in the other two.

The fact that Americana's basic political economy is so consistent across such a

broad and seemingly inconsistent spectrum of subject matter makes it intriguingly

congruent with Rick Altaian's theory of the semantic-syntactic approach to film genre.

Altaian's theory offers an ideal descriptive schematic to engage with the immediate

issues of cinematic spectacle, and the political import which inheres in it. This will be

vital to the critical articulation of counter-Americana to follow, and its ultimate validity

as a genre phenomenon.

Genre is one of the most elusive, and yet essential, bodies of theory in Film

Studies. It is self-evidently valid on some basic level - as positing the idea that most

films are ultimately reducible to a limited array of typologies - but attempts to

definitively articulate these typologies frequently founder upon difficulties of definition.

When attempting to define genre as a concept, or describe an individual genre, a

theoretical net is either cast so broadly and inclusively as to become near-useless for

practical purposes, or intellectual criteria are set which are so exclusive and demanding

that the vast rank and file of actual films are disqualified. 4

Altaian's theory of the semantic/syntactic theory of genre offers a means of

overcoming this difficulty. In this theory, a genre's syntax is its set of fundamental and

distinctive "meaning-bearing structures" - in short, the basic narrative, thematic, and 23 philosophical issues featured in a given genre.5 A genre's semantic elements, by contrast, are simply the basic filmmaking building-blocks which can generally be expected to make up a given example of a genre - "common traits, attitudes, characters, shots, locations, set, and the like," as Altman puts it. 6 The distinction between a syntactic and a semantic element is necessarily not clear-cut or self-evident, and indeed the same narrative element can frequently represent both. Altman locates the distinction primarily in the difference between the "textual" and the "linguistic" - between the broader intellectual and emotional connotations a narrative element may have, and the blunt denotative fact of the thing itself. 7 An individual film may have a semantic/syntactic relationship uniquely its own. In the climactic scene of Jurassic Park for example, the

Tyrannosaurus Rex is, semantically speaking, just a 45-foot, 8-ton theropod giving a bellowing roar; syntactically speaking, however, it represents the triumphant return of an evolutionary epoch more volatile and violent than our own, which it was folly to think we could control. Although there has never been a "dinosaur movie" as a Hollywood genre, the same semantic element has nonetheless been used many times before and since to signify menace and monstrosity. Steven Spielberg's more generous-minded syntactic re- interpretation remains a genuine original.

Understanding all genre as a continuous interplay between the syntax and the semantic can free genre theory from the contradictions of definition mentioned above because it acknowledges not only that not every film engages with its genre identity to the same extent, but that a genre is a thing which is ever evolving and mutating in the face of other influences. This latter point, moreover, highlights that when a genre's syntax and semantics are considered in tandem, it becomes apparent that genres are by no means discreet within themselves. Altman posits that World War II propaganda films - such as All Through the Night, Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, and the serial

The Winslow Boy - were able to cohere as a genre so swiftly because they simply adopted wholesale "the righteous cops-punish-criminals syntax that the gangster genre of the early thirties had turned to starting with G-Men" and applied it to the new semantic elements of villainous Germans and Japanese. 8 Likewise, Altman pointed out that the science fiction film had undergone a fundamental shift in its syntactic genre alignment

from the horror film, with films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing, and

Them!, to the western with films such as Star Wars. 9 And indeed, a sci-fi film such as

Alien, as Marc Cronlund Anderson has pointed out, may be syntactically speaking an

even split between the two.10

A longstanding genre can only coalesce and stabilize once a coherent syntax has

been firmly imposed over a wide array of semantic signifiers. Altman stresses that the

most long-lived Hollywood genres, such as the western and the musical, are those which

have such a simple but effective syntax, whereas flash-in-the-pan genres such as the

disaster film {Airport, The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake) are

those which may have many recurring semantic elements, but no real syntax to unify

them - "the special bilingualism required of a durable genre," as Altman puts it. 11 A

sufficiently entrenched syntax is one strong enough to be re-interpreted for changing

times, and these genres can thus survive even the greatest sea changes in Hollywood. The

western, unlike much else in Classical Hollywood, was not killed by the rise of the New 25

Hollywood, but merely reborn in new forms with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,

Soldier Blue, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, The Missouri

Breaks, Heaven's Gate, and the films of Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah. It has since revived time and time again, both in the early 1990s with such films as Back to the

Future Part III, Dances with Wolves, The Last of the Mohicans, Unforgiven, Tombstone, and Wyatt Earp, among others; and currently at the time of writing, with such films as

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 3:10 to Yuma, No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood and others. The syntax of the western is seemingly so

inherent in the American cinematic character as to render it above history - changes in political climate and social assumptions will not kill it off, but simply impel its

reinterpretation and reformulation.

It is here, then, that ideology finally enters the equation fully. Genre is inherently

political, as Thomas Schatz articulates...

The nature of drama is to generate and resolve conflict, and as America's principle means of public discourse early earlier in this century, movies - particularly genre movies - served in a very real sense as social problem-solving operations. The "happy endings" and idealized heroes in genre movies do indicate that, on the surface at least, these movies would work to resolve social conflicts. But the sustained success of any genre, whatever it is that keeps audiences coming back time and again to its ritualized dramatics, seems to rely more on the social conflicts that the genre repeatedly animates than it does on the genre's false promise of resolution. In other words, genres address 12 ongoing social problems that simply cannot be solved.

An idea which Schatz's gloss alludes to but does not address is whether these "social

problems" are in fact a key enabling condition for genres to exist. Altman's talk of the

historical contingency of genre, of certain genres coming into being because of certain

syntaxes germinating out of a certain "semantic environment," raises the issue of the

Zeitgeist - the extent to which the social, political, and economic tenor of a historical 26 period can genuinely call genres into existence. 1 ^ The succession of paranoid thrillers of the 1970s - The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, The Domino Effect, Winter

Kills, etc. - certainly seem attributable to America's breakdown in confidence in civic institutions at the time of Watergate. Likewise, the succession of bombastically anti- communist action films produced barely a decade later - Rocky TV, Rambo: First Blood,

Part II, Red Dawn, Missing in Action, Uncommon Valour, etc. - would seem to reflect the re-intensification of the Cold War under the Reagan administration. It should go without saying, however, that neither of these cycles reflected the sum total of political opinion of their times. The two periods of Hollywood filmmaking have become identified by these types of films, however, because they are the films which would either not have been made at all in another time, or if they were made, would not enjoy the same success.

Anticommunism was still very much present in Hollywood and America during the era of detente, but lacked the legitimacy it would gain during the following decade. Likewise,

Sam Peckinpah's The Osterman Weekend, which transferred the workings of the 70s paranoid thriller into the new climate of the 1980s, ultimately proved a beached whale - one which influenced nothing and quickly died.

Altman frames these issues in terms of the interplay between the ritual theory of genre - where Hollywood's output is determined chiefly by the dictates of audience taste

- and the ideological theory of genre - where audiences will follow where Hollywood chooses to lead. 14 The ritual theory of genre would have it that the Hollywood filmmaking community has no entrenched creative instincts, and only makes films which accord with the prevailing national social-political mood. The ideological theory of 27 genre, in contrast, posits that the Hollywood filmmaking community very much has a political conscience, and will produce films which reflect it irrespective of audience demand. Neither of these two positions is exclusively true, but the interplay between them is just as vital as that between the semantic and the syntactic in genre. As Altman puts it:

Hollywood does not simply lend its voice to the public's desires, nor does it simply manipulate the audience. On the contrary, most genres go through a period of accommodation during which the public's desires are fitted to Hollywood's priorities (and vice-versa). 15

A loose analogy of the difference between the ritual theory of genre and the ideological can be found in the difference between Americana and counter-Americana. The former is dedicated to the vindication and reaffirmation of the American people and experience, drawing freely on different movie plots and settings with the unifying goal of presenting a viewing experience which scrupulously and determinedly bolsters the audience's sense of self-worth and human decency. It is essentially the ritualized uplift of the audience. In practice, the resultant films tend to signify as conservative, but crucially, never as authoritarian or fascistic. The distinction lies in how Americana's narratives often seem to extend greater toleration toward doubters and sceptics. Rather than invariably being brutally pilloried or banished, they can be genially tolerated, assigned a lower place in a conservative hierarchy, or magnanimously brought back into the fold for the final act -

"inoculation" at work again. These latter solutions, moreover, imply a more ritualistic impulse toward the preservation or restoration of order.

Conversely, counter-Americana deals in the highlighting of the American experience and people's discomfiting and unofficial aspects, with the ultimate goal of 28 recuperating a fundamentally different ideal of America. This ideological element of the films was not a vague exercise in civic history, however, but an immediately topical response to the Bush administration's own defining of America. Accordingly, the counter-Americana films tended to draw less widely upon period settings and subject matter than the representative Americana films described above, and instead dramatized issues of immediate import - the trustworthiness of large corporations, the justifiability of torture, the implications of conservative culture for women's rights, the spiritual in

Nature as opposed to Christianity, etc. As more detailed analysis below will show, the counter-Americana films - coming out of a definable segment of the Hollywood creative community — all hew a remarkably consistent ideological line on all these points, and one not necessarily in sync with majority opinion in America at the time. Questions of scale and permanence notwithstanding, thus, counter-Americana provides insight into

Altman's ideological theory of genre.

Americana does not have the vital syntactic/semantic duality of the most vivid genres - where syntax and semantic tropes are indivisible and mutually reinforcing - because it is, in effect, a floating syntax. It possesses a very real and demonstrable philosophical/narrative foundation, but no corresponding semantic signifiers. Americana thus hovers over many different genres, lending its syntactic meaning to them to various degrees in varying films, but not finally and conclusively defining any of them. They all retain their own independent genre meanings, and have merely been graced by

Americana on certain occasions. One can speak of an individual western such as Open

Range as "Americana," but the western still remains the western for all that. Americana 29 consists solely of its abstract, syntactic inner meaning, without key visual semantic manifestations to give it the same weight as other, more immediately recognizable, genres.

Nonetheless, for all this there are certain genres in which Americana is more naturally at home than others - some genres which are more receptive to the consistent and unequivocal reaffirmation of conservative American ideals and institutions, as opposed to genres which derive their fundamental narrative energy from violating or disrupting them. One does not see many Americana crime thrillers, for instance, and it would be difficult to imagine what an Americana slasher film might look like. Such hypothetical films could only impose a conservative ending or "moral" onto a narrative which has hitherto impugned law and order, capitalism, the nuclear family, teenage chastity, or other conservative ideals. Moreover, the imposition may be sufficiently transparent and unconvincing as to still leave the film's prior energy in the dominant.

On the other hand, Cinderella Man and The Majestic show that the sports film is a popular forum for Americana, and dramas about small-town life are barely possible except in terms of Americana. It is the western with which Americana is most profitably compared, however. Although the western has only a mixed track record of being explicitly made into Americana, the two syntaxes exist in tandem because they are both indivisible from American filmmaking. The western is the recreation and dramatization of possibly the most unique and formative aspect of America's history, while Americana is simply the dramatization and eulogization of the American experience and character in general. As long as filmmaking continues in a United States which has any sense of nation or history, these two filmmaking syntaxes may well prove ineradicable.

If Americana can be said to be timeless in Hollywood - an ideological syntax which has existed and will exist as long as there is an America to reaffirm - then counter-

Americana is virtually the opposite. Rather than having existed in one form or another for as long as Hollywood, counter-Americana is a highly distinct genre cycle identified with a specific period in history. As a result, it is more semantically grounded than Americana, and can be spoken of in somewhat more concrete genre terms. Moreover, counter-

Americana is a sufficiently sophisticated syntactic phenomenon that its semantic distinguishers can be other than just visual and thematic. They can also be fundamental decisions about narrative structure - seemingly innocuous in isolation, but when found consistently across all the films in the cycle, revealing further syntactic insights about counter-Americana's ideological project.

For instance, the counter-Americana films almost without exception utilize non- linear narratives, where the storytelling diegesis may be extremely fragmented, or divided into numerous overlapping stands which may loop back upon themselves, conceal fundamental information to the last, or take the entire length of the film to reveal the narrative's catalyst. Structures such as these are not unique, or even exceptional, in contemporary Hollywood. The counter-Americana cycle, however, makes use of non- linear narrative chronology with such consistency and determinacy that the device takes on a distinct political meaning - emphasizing by their discontinuity and fracture the relativity, contingency, and uncertainty which can undermine linear and rational notions of truth.

The Good Shepherd and North Country both structure their entire narratives in

flashback, around investigations and hearings which aim to root out an elusive, and

finally unpalatable, truth, which destroys treasured illusions about loyalty and family.

Syriana and Lions for Lambs each consist of three or more narrative strands playing out

simultaneously on different sides of the world, emphasizing the globalized

interconnection of events, and the individual's limited awareness of the whole. Bobby,

meanwhile, fractures its narrative into more than a dozen contemporaneous strands.

Rendition staggers its narrative developments so that characters which the spectator has

spent much of the movie empathizing with are revealed to have been dead the whole

time. Even a film such as In the Valley of Elah, which lacks any bracketing or

overlapping structure, does so by virtue of telling a story in which all the initial narrative

certainties are progressively problematized and overturned. In a medium such as cinema,

with the inherently naturalizing power of its images, this body of work emphasizes

relativity and the de-naturalizing of truth to an extreme degree. Michael Clayton's

tagline, "The Truth Can Be Adjusted," cuts right to the core of counter-Americana's

philosophy.

In light of all this, Americana-inflected notions of simple and self-evident moral

truths, forming the bedrock for all social organization, are resoundingly discredited.

Moreover, the politics of the counter-Americana films do not stop merely at this tendency

to complicate their narratives in the name of non-absolute truth. 32

Counter-Americana is best described by the application of five different thematic lines of analysis - two parallel syntaxes which bracket between them three semantic signifiers. The first and foremost syntax, anti-fascism, is the underlying basis of all the cinematic representations and political content in the counter-Americana films. A counter-Americana film can no more be fascistic than a pornographic film can be chaste or a slasher film can be bloodless. From this anti-fascistic foundation, thus, three semantic lines of attack can be traced: privileging of the institutions and social function of the media, the insistence upon taking popular culture seriously as a societal and cultural good, and the showing of spiritual respect for Nature as a realm of uplift and renewal. The second syntax, and final relevant theme, is the way in which counter-

Americana's cultural, intellectual and political assumptions are very much rooted in the

Sixties, with all the connotations of youth culture, anti-establishment rebellion and societal change which the phrase bears.

This anti-fascist basis, the three semantic tropes which embody it, and the emotional grounding in the Sixties, are none of them original to the counter-Americana genre, and they are certainly not limited to it. Moreover, they often reach their greatest pitch of intensity and prominence in films that are, even if within the same historical period, nonetheless outside of the counter-Americana cycle. Kinsey may set its romantically cathartic scenes in a lush forest of great Natural beauty, but these scenes are dwarfed in scale and spectacle by comparable ones in Twilight. The difference, however, is that in Catherin Hardwicke's film, these scenes exist only at face value - for the beauty and romance of the location, with no deeper anti-fascist resonances. In Bill Condon's 33 film, by contrast, they are an integral part of an overarching thesis about the benign nature of human sexuality, repressed by fascistic forces in American society. With their lower budgets and profiles, thus, the counter-Americana films were more modest in terms of spectacle, but more ambitious and comprehensive in intellectual and ideological terms.

It is counter-Americana's defining characteristic as a genre, therefore, not that it reifies any one of its five themes to their absolute fullest, but rather that its films hold most or all of them in some form of balance, and draws actual ideological conclusions from them.

In this regard, Tony Gilroy's 2007 film Michael Clayton is incomparable, and must generally be treated as the film which best establishes the paradigm through which counter-Americana is comprehensible. It lends itself readily to all five lines of thematic analysis, in relative proportions which give the best sense of how the counter-Americana cycle seeks to convey contemporary American life and the American national character.

Few genres may be said to have crystallized so fluently in one film. Perhaps the only valid comparison is to say that Michael Clayton is the quintessential counter-Americana film in the same way that Double Indemnity may be called the quintessential film noir.

Neither was the first or the last film of their respective cycles, and neither fulfills every genre expectation of its cycle so completely as to become a comprehensive schematic of it. They simply find the elemental syntax of their genre more surely and more completely than any other individual film. Double Indemnity features all the semantic hallmarks of the film noir. the femme fatale, the revolvers, the night-time streets, the tawdry settings, etc. It also, however, hits the key syntactic notes: the all-pervasive corruption, the general 34

sense of human venality, the tragic-but-inevitable doom, and most of all the elegiac ruefulness that it needn't all have been so.

The western and the film noir are habitually privileged as genres because they are readily interpretable in light of a prevailing tone and visual vocabulary. But if the

western's affinity with Americana is based on a sense of timelessness and naturalization,

what the film noir and counter-Americana share in common is an urgent sense of

historical specificity. Both film noir and counter-Americana were genre phenomenon

which grew out of very distinct wartime periods in American history. Film noir was

uniquely a genre of World War II and America's immediate post-war years - a

pessimistically jaded and existentially detached reaction to a jingoistic climate first of

patriotism and then of self-congratulation. When all was meant to illuminate American

wholesome goodness and optimism, the culture produced a reaction that dwelt chiefly in

a world of darkness, shadow and amorality. For the year of 1946, The Big Sleep is the

mirror-image of The Best Years of Our Lives. This historical confluence is made most

visible in films such as 1944's Ministry of Fear and 1947's Crossfire, where the

supposed certainties of the war are obscured and distorted by the world of noir. Likewise,

at a time when the Bush administration was seeking to exploit the War on Terror to

define America solely in its own terms - social conservatism, fundamentalist

Christianity, unregulated corporate capitalism at home, and a role in the world abroad

which combined unilateral military action with a belief in America as above reproach and

beyond accountability - counter-Americana emerged with a contrasting definition. The

Bush administration's polarizing style sought to deny not merely the legitimacy, but as 35 far as possible the very existence of anything resembling liberal lifestyles or Left-of- centre politics. Counter-Americana was a manifestation of those politics clinging to life and pointing out that something was rotten in the American state.

Ultimately, very few films can ultimately defy genre categorization completely, and lay claim to a completely original cinematic mode of address. In 2004, Roger Ebert wrote that "Jacques Tati's Playtime, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, or The Blair Witch

Project, or Russian Ark, is one of a kind, complete in itself, a species already extinct at the moment of its birth. ... It occupies no genre and does not create a new one. It is a filmmaker showing us how his mind processes the world around him." 16 This is an astute statement for two reasons. Firstly, it shows how chimerical genre theory can be in the face of cinematic artistry. It would be deceptively easy to simply deem Playtime a comedy, 2001 a science-fiction film, The Blair Witch Project a horror film, and Russian

Ark a historical drama, but such reductions would come at the cost of more modest, yet more coherent, definitions of those four genres. Secondly, it introduces one of the key bodies of theory which can challenge genre in film studies: auteurism. Playtime may baffle a theoretical system of genre, but it fits snugly into a systematization of Jacques

Tati as an auteur, representing the culmination of an aesthetic of detached observation which had been gradually building throughout Jour de Fete, Les Vacances du Monsieur

Hulot, and Mon Oncle, respectively.

If genre is made subordinate to auteur, then the problems of exact systematization and definition which can plague genre theory seem less vital - the genre terms being, after all, simply ways to distinguish the artistic range of a given auteur. The frequent diffusion in modes of address among films which seem to be of the same genre also ceases to be such a vexing question. Ebert again observed that Robert Altman's Gosford

Park was likely to be interpreted as a murder mystery in the Agatha Christie tradition, but deemed this misguided. Gosford Park was an Agatha Christie-style whodunit "in the same sense that M.A.S.H. is a war movie, McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a western and

Nashville is a musical." 17 In auteur studies, genre distinctions are secondary to authorial imprint.

Americana is open to auteurist examinations. Certainly it is difficult to discuss

Frank Capra's filmography without employing the term, and films such as Mr. Deeds

Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and above all It's a Wonderful Life are some of the most definitive works of Americana ever, setting a standard by which others may be assessed. Perhaps no American filmmaker ever displayed greater mastery of the synthesis of emotionalism, populism, affirmatism, and patriotism which make up the aesthetic.

One of counter-Americana's unique distinguishing features as a genre phenomenon is that it is largely unavailable to conventional auteurist readings. Not only did no major Hollywood directors contribute directly to the cycle, but virtually the entire cycle was the work of new directors who did not yet possess a defined authorial style.

Michael Clayton was Tony Gilroy's directorial debut after a career previously spent as a screenwriter. Rendition and North Country were Gavin Hood and Niki Caro's debuts within the Hollywood system upon arriving from South Africa and New Zealand after the international successes of Tsotsi and Whale Rider, respectively. Good Night, and Good Luck and The Good Shepherd were George Clooney and Robert De Niro's second

directorial ventures after Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and A Bronx Tale. And

before Kinsey, Bobby, and In the Valley of Elah, Bill Condon, Emilio Estevez and Paul

Haggis's chief directorial experience had been in television. Only Robert Redford might

be said to have brought some sort of auteur persona to counter-Americana, and that only

on the basis, before Lions for Lambs, of six films over twenty-seven years.

Counter-Americana, then, was not a director-oriented cycle. Nonetheless, it came

very much from the upper echelons of the Hollywood community where actors,

producers, and screenwriters were concerned. George Clooney, Matt Damon, Meryl

Streep and Charlize Theron appeared in no fewer than nine key counter-Americana films

between them, while Reese Witherspoon, Tom Cruise, Robert Redford, Tommy Lee

Jones, and Angelina Jolie lent their star power to single entries in the cycle. Bobby, with

its cast of two dozen recognizable names, dwarfs them all. Moreover, the roles of actors,

directors, writers, and producers were seldom mutually exclusive in the cycle, with every

single film featuring a director doubling as an actor, an actor as a producer, or writer and

director being one and the same. Clooney is probably the chief auteur of counter-

Americana in this regard, not only directing Good Night, and Good Luck, but co-writing

and co-starring in it, as well as co-starring in and co-producing Syriana and starring in

and co-producing Michael Clayton. The counter-Americana cycle, then, symbolized the

Hollywood community acting with great solidarity, all towards a definable political end -

that of refuting the conservative Zeitgeist of the Bush administration. As such, it again 38 illuminates Altman's ideological theory of genre, wherein a Hollywood filmmaking community may articulate its own political agenda.

With its determined depoliticizing of the political, Americana entails a host of ideological constructions which invite refutation. This situation grew especially acute during the Bush administration years, when many of Americana's ideological

suppositions - about benevolent patriarchy, noble American militarism, and responsible corporate capitalism, for example - were being transferred wholesale from the movie

screen to the real world in the form of faith-based social policies, the Iraq War, and enormous tax cuts for the nation's richest. The counter-Americana cycle must be understood as just that refutation.

If the films of the counter-Americana cycle are readily interpretable in light of a

few recurring thematic traits, it is because they represent a cultural aesthetic - that of

American liberalism - which was on the defensive before the intensely conservative

Zeitgeist of the Bush administration. The counter-Americana films, in short, were a

cinematic reification of a siege mentality, where confrontation with a harsh and

uncongenial hegemony prompted a fall-back onto the most culturally sacrosanct of

ideological positions which problematize Americana's ideals - consistently bringing up

aspects of the American character and experience which are difficult or impossible for

Americana to assimilate. Where Americana depoliticizes politics by making everything

into a matter of individual morality and leaving underlying social systems unquestioned,

counter-Americana does the opposite, highlighting the political construction inherent in all culture — be it the legal profession in Michael Clayton, the business community in

Syriana, or a small-town church congregation in North Country.

Beyond this, counter-Americana shows a consistent determination, in the maelstrom of the Bush administration, to abandon traditional liberal notions of compromise and relativism. Political balance, and disinclination toward strident judgment, have often characterized the American liberal tradition on film. Most

American films which have been determinedly shot through with liberal ideology seem to display a sensibility that bombastically declaring the one philosophy to be right and its opponents' wrong - and ordering the narrative and cinematic discourse so as to leave absolutely no doubt on this point - would savour too much of the dogmatic and absolutist, and so be no better than the Rightist ideologies they oppose. Accordingly, tragic defeat and personal muddle, coupled with a refusal to vilify or demonize their villains, are often at the heart of America's liberal cinematic representations. "Martyrdom to ideology is a central tenet of liberal ideology," as Terry Christensen put it.18 When this political aesthetic gels, in a film such as Mike Nichols's Silkwood, the results can be pleasant and educational, if not spectacular or inspiring. All too often, however, moderation can slide into self-flagellation. In different eras of Hollywood filmmaking, liberal films, in the name of non-dogmaticism, have denied their protagonists agency or competence, given the film's energy and narrative authority to its villains, had the film's political quest end in failure, and then concluded on a thematic note of the unpredictability and frequent unfairness of life in a world which contains so many unreasonable bigots and reactionaries. Examples such as The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), The China Syndrome (1979), and Redacted (2007) illustrate the point emphatically,

dramatizing a world where the game is hopelessly rigged against progressive values.

With rare exceptions, such as certain films by Oliver Stone, there is a historical paucity of

Left-wing filmmaking within the Hollywood tradition willing or able to flout this tradition and forcefully affirm the film's ultimate ideological agenda - to depict fascism

being beaten and liberalism prevailing. The exceptional nature of the counter-Americana

films, thus, is that they represent a liberal cinema which has finally learned to fight -

where decisive action is aligned with audience sympathy, and the villains are

characterized as just that. If many of the films still end on pessimistic notes, the

concluding tone is at least very different.

Nonetheless, it is imperative from the very first that the term "counter-

Americana" not be confused in its implications with anti-Americanism. The counter-

Americana films are so named because they strategically subvert the genre workings of

Americana in order to draw the crypto-fascist poison from them - a far more delicate and

subtle filmmaking task than simply contradicting and diametrically reversing them,

which is what an "anti-Americana" aesthetic would logically amount to. Nonetheless, the

idea merits exploration.

One of the deadeningly constant hallmarks of the counter-Americana years was

the tendency of the American Right to stigmatize any objection to or criticism of the

Bush administration's policies coming from a liberal quarter as unpatriotic at best, and

downright anti-American at worst. Under a relentless barrage of such rhetoric, it would

have been unsurprising had a body of films emerged which played into the Right's hands 41 and lashed out against America and its symbols, on the basis that since liberal politics seems to have no stake or legitimacy in Bush-era America, they accordingly owe no allegiance to it either. It was such themes as these which animated the various apocalyptic and/or dystopian films of previous eras in American politics, and they were not entirely absent during the counter-Americana years, either. One of the cinematic controversies of 2006 was the release of Gabriel Range's film Death of a President — a film which brought "Bush-hatred" to its logical conclusion in staging a fantasy assassination scenario in which George Bush is assassinated by a rooftop sniper who turns out to have been an embittered Iraq War veteran. Bush is thus brought down by the very violence he was so cavalier about initiating. The film is ultimately a simplistic and muddled thing, however; its brief fame and notoriety deriving solely from the sheer audacity of its premise.

A much more insightful and profound examination of the same theme came two years earlier with The Assassination of Richard Nixon. This is a film which does not stop merely at the counter-Americana idea that something is rotten in the state of America, but goes vastly further and implies that the American state is fundamentally rotten to the core.

The counter-Americana films do not fall under this rubric, however. The films counteract the ideology of Americana not to do destroy America in search of a different society, but to save it from the fascist threats that lurk implicit in Americana. The counter-Americana films are very much shot through with ideals of patriotic virtue being found in the vigorous exchange of vision and ideas for one's country, rather than simply in terms of violence endured and inflicted for the sake of it. Virtually all the counter-Americana films feature a moment of some form of reaffirmation of patriotism and love of country, in spite of their narratives being largely about exposing the horrors within America's social and political fabric. The closest any of the counter-Americana films comes to an anti-American statement is in Kinsey, where Alfred Kinsey is made to furiously exclaim

"I sometimes wonder what this country would look like if the Puritans had stayed at home. What if all the rogues and libertines had crossed the Atlantic instead?" A film devoted to such an alternate history, along the lines of Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames, would certainly be a potent piece of anti-Americana.

It goes without saying that such a hypothetical "anti-Americana" aesthetic would be far more questing and revolutionary than the counter-Americana aesthetic outlined above, which is, in the final analysis, little more than defensive and reformist. Counter-

Americana is fundamentally a liberal genre cycle, rather than a radical or Leftist one. It gives no support or legitimacy to conservative or fascistic systems of representation, but neither is it in any sense revolutionary. The liberal politics in the films of the cycle simply refuted as untrue and harmful the worldview of conservative Americana which the

Bush administration sought to promulgate - no more, no less. Coming at a time when it was self-evidently needed, this was not an insubstantial undertaking, but neither did it constitute the beginning of any potentially innovative new revolutionary creed for the future of the 21st century. That will have to be sought elsewhere in cinema, both

American and global. Chapter 2: Anti-Fascism

The liberal themes of counter-Americana films are first and foremost assimilable into a broad, unifying anti-fascist discourse. Simply stated, this fact does not imply any special ideological commitment, as anti-fascism has long stood as one of Hollywood's most reliable dramatic devices. Virtually every kind of Hollywood film, from the Indiana

Jones franchise to gross-out comedies such as Dirty Work and Tomcats, has framed its narrative in anti-fascist terms insofar as it features an arrogant villain who is presumptuous of social, financial, intellectual, or military superiority, with no compunctions about using it autocratically. The hero/protagonist is then sympathetically positioned against this force. The name or characterization given to a villainous fascism can be anything at all, foreign or domestic, human or not, depending on a film's ideological agenda. It only matters that the threat be vilified, Other-ed and externalized as much as possible. The reason for this is to distract the spectator's attention from the fascism which is innate in many of Hollywood's dramaturgies.

One of the themes of fascism most relevant to the cinema is the ideal of the

"Third Way," as delineated by Zeev Stemhell. 1 The notion of the Third Way sees fascism as a uniquely modern revolt against positivist ideologies; one that rejects both the planned solutions of Marxism as well as the ditheringly indecisive status quo of liberal democracy, and seeks to tap into the innate, elemental strength of a national people.

This accomplished, the exhortation goes, there is no social, economic or military problem that cannot be solved through determined and direct action. The affinity with cinematic drama is almost immediate. The heroics of the Hollywood mainstream have traditionally relied upon a cinematic dramaturgy which privileges irrepressibility and indomitability - the arbitrary abrogation of power to oneself, and the subsequent unapologetic use of it.

Such an ethos is notoriously difficult to theorize in academic terms, but fits uncannily well with the workings of Third Way fascism. A film such as 300, consisting in the main of hyper-masculinized, super-humanly muscled Spartan warriors cleaving their way through innumerable Persian soldiers, bellowing about "freedom," is one which embodies this ideal near-perfectly. The actual political substance of this freedom is never dwelt upon, and the film scrupulously denies the spectator any human empathy with the

Persians. The entire film is simply a marathon of atavistic identification with unstoppable and self-righteous force. 300 is that rare film which fully matches Robin Wood's description of Leni Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will, it is not a film about fascism, as with Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist, but rather a fascist film.3 That it proved an immense box-office success, and received many positive reviews - Film Comment praised its immense conviction and power, claiming that it offered "some kind of consolation to a nation betrayed and forced to watch the daily slaughter of its own fighting men in an immoral and far less glorious war" 4 - is a testament to the fact that fascist themes and aesthetics are always implicit in Hollywood cinema to some degree, and when every so often they crystallize totally, are readily interpretable simply as superior examples of Hollywood filmmaking.

The fact that the Hollywood cinema has perpetual undercurrents of fascism within itself, however, means that it also has great power to engage with and refute fascism, as well as to glorify and promote it. The counter-Americana cycle is one of the most 45

significant examples of the former. Throughout the counter-Americana films, fascism takes various forms. Geo-political violence is dramatized as popular political movements

in foreign countries being suppressed with eco-terrorism in The Good Shepherd, or progressive regime changes being swiftly crushed with missile strikes in Syriana.

Fascism may also take the form of state terror within America's borders - a large

Monsanto-style corporation knowingly kills hundreds with a faulty product in Michael

Clayton, War on Terror mavens detain and torture innocent civilians in Rendition.

Finally, fascism may be embodied in the repressions and injustices of everyday life as

sexually and professionally independent women are insulted or abused in North Country

and In the Valley of Elah. What all these share, however, is a profound sympathy for

human beings who endeavour to be true to their own consciences and aspirations, and to

engage with the world around them on their own individual terms. For counter-

Americana, anti-fascism is a piously liberal humanist sentiment, which emphatically

denies that power can make its own rules, or that human empathy should ever be

discarded.

Anti-fascism has been inconsistently represented throughout Hollywood's history

because two conflicting ideals are perpetually struggling for pre-eminence in its aesthetic.

On the one hand, fundamental to almost all of American cinema's narratives from Edison

onwards has been populist individualism, the presentation of a supposedly normative

protagonist-figure with whom the (putatively) archetypal spectator can identify, and the

consequent vilification as fascistic those who would harm or oppress him (or, crucially

less often, her). It means that very few films produced within the Hollywood mainstream 46 are ever entirely devoid of anti-fascist potential. Within this populist impulse, however, there exists a conservative corollary. Individualism is only liberal and anti-fascistic so far.

Taken to further extremes, it takes on fascistic overtones of its own, characterized by the extreme privileging of a single idealized figure, at the expense of all others. The

Hollywood star system often tapped this crypto-fascist vein, especially in Rambo-style action films which centre on hyper-masculinised heroes, to the exclusion or subordination of all other characters.

Left unchecked in a film's diegesis, this fetishization of the individual can eventually mutate into a refusal to accept any notion of society, or even the basic rights of

others. In practice, this means that exactly those normative and sympathetic protagonists

whom Hollywood seems to champion are often crypto-fascists, only awaiting their

moment to ruthlessly destroy their oppressors, but in doing so to replace them.

Hollywood audiences are only instinctively anti-fascistic so long as they are assured that

only villains can act fascistically, never heroes. Spectators are allowed to savour the

beguiling attractions of fascism under the supposition that they are in fact watching a

liberal tale of fascism being discredited and destroyed. One of the richest political films

ever produced in Hollywood would be Fritz Lang's 1936 film Fury, because it fluently

depicts exactly this process. Spencer Tracy's protagonist is at first an unassuming and

hard-working everyman, but when he is mistakenly imprisoned for a crime against a

child, a lynch mob burns him within an inch of his life. He narrowly escapes, but

traumatized and infuriated by his experience, he goes into hiding and undertakes to have

all the lynchers tried and executed for his supposed murder. Lang fills the film's later 47 sections with scenes of him listening to the trial on the radio, sadistically savouring his revenge while the accused hysterically break down as they are condemned. The film ends on an ambiguous note — Tracy improbably reveals himself in the courtroom at the last minute, whereupon the film promptly concludes without any reflection on the ramifications of this - because the implications of this scenario are too grim to be carried through to their ultimate conclusion. Whereas most Hollywood films from whatever era dance around such issues of fascism, Fury confronts them with a naked clarity.

The ability of Hollywood spectacle to tap into the beguiling allure of fascism has been a recurring ideological balancing act: between on the one hand quailing in the face of fascism and retreating into piously ineffectual humanism, and on the other hand capitulating to fascism, and allowing aesthetic subtlety and sensitivity to gradually be pulverized by it. The success of 300 is a testament to the Hollywood mainstream's capacity to skilfully deal in the latter. The counter-Americana films, in their turn, are distinctive because they are able to finesse enough of Hollywood's fascist streak into their films to ward off any taint of pathetic hand-wringing, and achieve in their films a vital liberal individualism. They constitute a corpus of films in which power signifies, in

Robin Wood's words, as "simply power over oneself, self-control, the means to the achievement of self-respect." 5 This concept of power-as-self-respect was born of Wood's reading of Howard Hawk's Rio Bravo, which denied its status as a "Right-wing answer to

High Noon," and instead posited that its calculated deployment of star personas (John

Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson) against largely anonymous villains, who implicitly represent capitalist power, makes it a film very much available to the Left. 6 It is in this spirit that Rendition is one of counter-Americana's great achievements in anti-fascism. This can best be understood by reading it against two thematically similar films from the same period, Road to Guantanamo and Redacted. All three of these films deal with the same premise - the assault and abuse of innocent Arab civilians by

American military power - and condemn this as fascistic. Both the latter films, however, make this political point in a crude and didactic way which alienates the spectator from the filmic diegesis. Road to Guantanamo positions spectatorial identification exclusively with the three Anglo-Pakistani protagonists who are mistakenly arrested and processed as terrorists, while Redacted aligns the spectator solely with the American soldiers who rape and murder a family of Iraqi civilians. Both films purport to be anti-fascist, the former by vicariously inflicting fascistic persecution on the spectator, the latter by positioning them alongside fascism at its most unrelievedly repugnant. Both of these aesthetic approaches, however, are ultimately reductive, and function by dehumanizing one side or the other.

Guantanamo's functionaries are completely faceless and anonymous, given no characterization or personality beyond that of interrogator. Redacted, meanwhile, elicits less sympathy for its Iraqi family than it might have by characterizing them as scarcely more than generic "innocent civilians." The film's outrage is more on an intellectual level than a visceral one. Rendition, however, avoids both pitfalls. Unlike either of the above films, it shows the beguiling allure of fascism, embodying it in the form of CIA employees Corrine Whitman (Meryl Streep at her most serpentine) and, initially, Douglas

Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal, in the same charismatic mode as with Jarhead). Equally, the film's Egyptian-American victim of fascism is humanized with a name (Anwar El- Ibrahim), a profession (chemical engineer), a family (his wife is played by Reese

Witherspoon), and a personality (placid middle-class technocrat). The end result is that when, in a moment of undisguised fascism mid-way through the film, Freeman impatiently slams into El-Ibrahim and begins throttling him, the average spectator's response will not be detached and easy disgust, but a much deeper sense of unease.

Likewise, at the film's conclusion, with Freeman regaining his sense of self-respect by acknowledging his man's innocence and releasing him in defiance of orders, the triumphant sense of anti-fascism is accordingly greater.

Counter-Americana embraces traditional Hollywood narrative characterization because it implicitly recognizes that for all its supposed fetishization of the individual, when taken to its final conclusion, fascism is ultimately about dehumanization. The broad mass of humanity is made to sacrifice their own individuality the better to adulate one quasi-divine leader figure, who in turn has been raised so high that all of his own human individuality has fallen away, and he has become little more than a symbol or an invocation, devoid of humanizing nuances or fallibilities. The ultimate terminus of this, as Wood points out, has been immortalized on film with Adolf Hitler being set above an undifferentiated German populace in Triumph of the Will.1

Dehumanizing leader-worship, and the above discussion of violence and domination, however, are only the most obvious and simplistic ways in which fascism denies human beings their own individual complexity and dignity. More importantly is how, implicit within them, are assumptions about gender and the social formation thereof

- the way, according again to Wood, fascism concerns itself with human sexuality, and 50 invests itself with the power to restrict, mould, and organize it in order to define gender roles, subordinate women, and eliminate sexual diversity. This is the ultimate import of fascist ideology in the cinema.

Fascism, in Hollywood as in life, has always been a cult of masculinity. It is this fact, summed up in Wood's phrase "the Law of the Father" 9, which finally provides the key to linking the spectacular images of onscreen fascism with their banal underlying principles. The much-vaunted Third Way which fascism promises is, at base, little more than the legal and cultural sanctification of the most basic and atavistic of masculinist instincts. The Law of the Father implies a totalizing and all-encompassing conception of the order of things, one which cannot be appealed against to any higher power or

authority. This, in turn, derives from the implications of omnipotent patriarchy which the phrase bears. The old Eisenhower-era mantra of "father knows best" does not do justice to this. "The Father" here is not merely a genial arbiter of disputes, or a court of last

appeal in sundry matters - as the individual Americana film generally casts him - but the

first, final, and eternal issuer of all norms and standards regarding conduct, morality, and

thought. This totalitarian formulation, in turn, is implicitly legitimized by the supposed

existence of a natural law which dictates that things be thus. In a vast majority of films

produced throughout Hollywood history, this natural law has taken the form of the

Christian religion, and the eschatological notion that Biblical Scripture is indeed the

Revealed Word of Almighty God the Father. Thus, the Law of the Father conveyed by it

can no more be questioned or defied than the more mundane aspects of God's creation

such as the Law of Gravity. From all this, it follows that the male figure who fully accepts and strives to embody his natural patriarchal role is fulfilling his masculine duty in the world impeccably, and is thus morally beyond reproach - a figure to be admired and emulated, with any flaws and imperfections ignored, minimized, or whitewashed.

It goes without saying that under the Law of the Father, women's ideological position is an untenable one. An ideology which establishes a certain kind of man - heterosexual, authoritative, capitalistic, vaguely Puritanical, determinedly non- intellectual, and generally uninterested in art and culture - as the absolute bedrock of societal order must necessarily condemn women to subordinate positions. Under such an ideology, the "good woman" is one who accepts a position of worldly inferiority - reduced to her basic reproductive function, and not possessing any economic, political, intellectual or physical power of her own - in order to be deemed morally superior by the men who are accorded agency.

Sentimentalizing of the Mother is a fundamental premise of the Law of the Father.

Likewise, for a woman to insist on axiomatically wielding the same human power and agency as men, beholden to the same moral standards, is the most fundamental violation of the Law of the Father imaginable. Hollywood has a long tradition of hysterically caricaturing such women as monstrous or evil, to be heroically destroyed by men who may just as bad, or even worse. The list of films throughout Hollywood's history that have flatly reified this ideal, without a hint of qualification or irony, is soberingly long.

Wood singles out as especially important a few films which demonstrate the ideological extremes to which the Father can be privileged in Hollywood: he "must be loved respected and accepted, even is he is initially inadequate {Kramer vs. Kramer) or 52 generally deficient, unpleasant or monstrous (Tribute, The Great Santini)," or even if he is capable of banishing the Mother as an inconvenient nuisance (as in Ordinary People).

10 Beyond these, Fatal Attraction trumps them all by awarding the Father the right to commit cold-blooded murder of a woman whom he wronged first. All this in turn makes those films which have, ideologically speaking, stuck their necks out to challenge the

Law of the Father all the more interesting. The acceptance of, refusal of, or equivocation about the Law of the Father is not something which operates according to a stable timeline or teleology in Hollywood history. Like Americana in general, it ebbs and flows throughout various periods, sometimes with a solitary film forming an island in a period of untrammelled patriarchal dominance, and sometimes a single searingly misogynistic film deflating an era of otherwise progressive sentiment.

If the counter-Americana years were ultimately progressive ones with regards to the Law of the Father, it was by no means obvious at their start that this would be the case. In 2005, Walt Disney Studios released The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the

Witch, and the Wardrobe, a film based on the first book of the famous children's fantasy series, which drew fully upon Hollywood's powers of conjuring up grandiose fascistic spectacles — and one which presented a strikingly comprehensive portrait of the mentality and worldview of the Law of the Father. It is this achievement of ideological spectacle, fluently uniting the fascistic spectacle of 300 with the fascistic gender assumptions of the

Kramer/Tribute/Great Santini/Ordinary People/Fatal Attraction panoply, which may perversely be its single greatest success as an adaptation, and its most lasting historical importance. Its utilization of the power of the cinematic image enabled it to build 53 substantially upon the works of C.S. Lewis, making viscerally apparent onscreen themes which were only passingly alluded to on the printed page. The film's depictions of the four Pevensie siblings (Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy), the White Witch Jadis, and

Asian the Lion concisely illustrate the mental spectrum of the Law of the Father.

The film begins with Edmund rushing back into a building during an air raid to retrieve a photograph of their father. This piece of melodrama, not present in Lewis's original text, ensures that the ideal of the Father will now cast an ideological shadow over everything that follows. Henceforth, the figure of Peter becomes, as eldest brother, a surrogate Father-figure, which translates into his forcefully, even violently, giving orders and issuing ultimatums to the three younger siblings. The film never holds this against him, but rather unproblematically depicts him as heroic because of it. Such is the film's devotion to the Law of the Father that there are even anguished scenes where Peter ponders whether he is yet sufficiently paternal and leaderly. This is all meant to code him as heroic according to the Law of the Father. Edmund, meanwhile, is coded by the opening sequence as the more sensitive and thinking of the two brothers. This marks him as lesser than Peter. Under the Law of the Father, qualities such as intelligence and soulfulness are no substitute for the moral certitudes provided by patriarchal/religious conviction. The former lead ineluctably to self-destructive moral relativism, as when

Edmund fails to intuit the White Witch as evil, while the latter are held to be the bedrock of true greatness, as with Peter's instinctive reverence before Asian, Lewis's lion allegory for God. 54

Lewis emphasized this to the fullest possible extent, not hesitating to engage with the fascism inherent in the Law of the Father as embodied in Asian - "People who have not been in Narnia," he wrote in describing Him, "sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time." 11 Over the course of the seven books of the

Chronicles of Narnia, Asian's goodness is simply made an ideological precondition - much repeated but little justified. His terribleness, however, is vividly demonstrated time and time again. '"I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms,'" he says at one point. 12 Elsewhere, he slashes apart the shoulders of a young girl, turns small boys into pigs, a man into a donkey, lays waste to human settlements, strips beings of their powers of thought, and eventually brings the whole of Narnia to an end. "Not tame, but good" is the rhetorical line the books take to all of this, and which is dutifully repeated in the screenplay of the film. C.S. Lewis the

Christian was always at pains to account for how a force capable of such things could nonetheless be axiomatically and unproblematically good, and how its Law could somehow stand for freedom (a word used frequently in book and film of Narnia). This was a dilemma Lewis never resolved. In the event, he could only resort to caricature, desperately making all those who disbelieved in or acted against Asian out to be either obtuse and ridiculous, or even crueller and more tyrannical than Asian.

One of the most fundamental dramaturgies in the Law of the Father is the transition in a character from supposedly self-indulgent and irresolute beginnings to a commanding and self-possessed finish, through the gradual recognition and acceptance of higher sources of authority. This is a sentiment profoundly at odds with liberal notions of 55 plurality and multiculturalism, acceptance of the fact that there are numerous sources of moral understanding in the world, and that as long as they harm no one else by it, people should be allowed to formulate their own codes of ethics and order their lives as they wish. Such notions are incompatible with the Law of the Father, which is based on ideals of discipline deriving from the presumed existence of only one code of correct behaviour and thought, to which one must be reformed, reconciled and brought into line. "Why can't you just do as you're told?" Peter furiously demands of Edmund early on, the film privileging his authority to do so. These ideals not only structure Edmund's character arc in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but form the basis of numerous other conservative films throughout Hollywood's history. An Officer and a Gentleman is one of the great classics in this regard, using glamorous cinematography and an intensely popular soundtrack to make the taking of orders and the observance of rank seem defiant

and hip.

It is fundamental to the Law of the Father, moreover, that epic moral turpitudes

and grand character arcs are an exclusively masculine domain. Women are not accorded

sufficient depth of spirit or complexity of character to sustain such things. The Lion, the

Witch, and The Wardrobe contains, in essence, only two different models of femininity:

self-abnegation and damnation. The female characters who are the most favourably

depicted, such as Lucy, are those who give themselves over to the Law of the Father

more fervently than any of the male characters. Because femininity is accorded a lower

place under the Law of the Father, overcompensation is required for women to become as

morally admirable as men are held from the very start. This is essentially the same school of thought as a Christianity which deems woman to be the tempter of Adam and bearer of

Original Sin, and thus demands far greater piety from Her in expiation. Lewis, who was capable, in another book, of writing the words:

"You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve," said Asian. "And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders 13 of the greatest emperor on earth..."

...could surely not have been insensible to this dimension.

The most notorious manifestation of the Law of the Father, however, is when women are held to have violated it, and are punished for it. As described above,

Hollywood's record in this department, with films such as Fatal Attraction, is long and grim. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is just one more example of a story being ideologically constructed so as to make a woman who rejects the Law of the Father, and seeks to order her world as she sees fit, into a figure of pure evil. The "witch" of the film's title is played by Tilda Swinton in an imperious performance that evokes the various evil women throughout Hollywood's Bible epics of the 1950s. In these films, paganism was always equated with femininity and decadence, with pagan men goaded on by promiscuous and powerful pagan women being the ultimate mark of degeneracy.

Christianity, meanwhile, was equated with moral health and masculinity, Christian women invariably being meek, sexless and submissive to virile Christian men. This is a dynamic which The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe rehabilitated for the Bush administration years, with the only modification being the removal of any overt sexual dimension. The Law of the Father is now ostensibly sexless, the White Witch being so named for her personal coldness and association with winter, her power over gullible men explained in terms of magical hypnosis rather than carnality.

Counter-Americana rejects all this in no uncertain terms. Whereas many other diverse films produced during the counter-Americana years, from In Good Company to

Flicka to Live Free or Die Hard would hesitate to break completely with the Law of the

Father — trying instead to neuter it to the point of practical irrelevance while still retaining it as a concept - the counter-Americana films consistently dispense with it totally. In counter-Americana, to set oneself up as the Father, with all the fascistic implications that carries, is to doom oneself to death, disgrace, or irrelevance. In such core counter-

Americana films as Kinsey, Rendition and In the Valley of Elah, the film's chief embodiment of the Father has been resoundingly shamed - in both rhetorical and narrative terms - and discredited by the end. The Good Shepherd's narrative and thematic scale allows it to go much further than this, creating no fewer than five Father-figures and two elder brother figures, all of whom are rendered dead, disgraced or discredited by the film's end. It is significant, however, that throughout the counter-Americana cycle there is one incarnation of the Father that is not only spared this condemnation, but praised and privileged. This is the figure of the teacher. Robert Redford's political science professor in Lions for Lambs is the only character in any counter-Americana film appreciable as a noble patriarchal, while Michael Gambon's literature professor in The Good Shepherd is the only patriarch whose death is treated by the film as tragic. Half-Nelson presents Ryan

Gosling's elementary school-teacher as a burgeoning father-figure who must fulfill this destiny rather than flame out in drug addiction. Aside from demonstrating that counter- 58

Americana is free of the anti-intellectualism that has often devilled Hollywood cinema, the ideological implication to all this is clear: the Law of the Father is not a natural law - not a fundamental right conveyed by mere reproductive accident - rather to the extent that it can, or should, exist at all, it must be earned through intellectual superiority. This

distinction between earned and innate authority is another vital difference between

counter-Americana and Americana, which tends to depict the two as axiomatically

synonymous. The Majestic, for instance, sees Martin Landau create a relatively drab and

unprepossessing father for Peter's "Luke," who was supposedly a gifted and glorious

prodigy of the highest order. A strict pater-filial hierarchy between them, however, is

upheld throughout the film. The rationale for this is finally made explicit in one of the

most infamous contortions of Americana ever filmed, Leo McCarey's My Son John,

which declares that the Father has "more wisdom than all of us because you listen to your

heart." 14 All the epistemic authority that is required for the Father, apparently, is to

emotionally revel in his role.

Counter-Americana's rejection of the Law of the Father clears the way for the

rehabilitation of women. Few films from the period dramatize this more effectively than

The Savages. Written and directed by Tamara Jenkins - one of the still-few female

authorial voices in Hollywood - the film dispenses wholly with the sort of epic status

awarded to a dying Father by Tribute and The Great Santini, and instead makes it simply

a squalid and biological affair, characterized by incontinence and failing memory. The

catharsis for its sibling protagonists comes not from any last-minute reconciliation with 59 the Father, but through reconnecting with each other and coming to terms with a lifetime of traumatic memories wrought by the Law of the Father.

Beyond this, a fortuitous piece of historical synchronicity saw Tilda Swinton also appearing as a villainess in Michael Clayton. This enables the fundamental differences in ideology between counter-Americana and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to fully crystallize. Whereas in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Swinton's villainy was rooted in her challenge to a fascistic order of things, in Michael Clayton she is a villainess by virtue of subscribing to a fascist order - in this case the nihilism of global corporate capitalism - and seeking to further its interests. The White Witch sought to set herself up as a queen and completely determine her own being, whereas Swinton's villainess in Michael Clayton, "Karen Crowder," is shown to have attained her position as head of her company's in-house legal department chiefly upon the patronage and

"mentoring" of a grimly anonymous corporate man named "Don Jeffries." In exchange for this moderate advancement within the masculinist corporate hierarchy, the film dramatizes at length how she must minutely hone and modulate every aspect of her identity and appearance. Two montage sequences depict her taking endless time and care over her dressing and rehearsing of speeches, no detail too small to be overlooked, no hint of human individuality or female sexuality allowed to obtrude. She has attained power over herself, but not in the pursuit of self-respect, but rather of subordination toward furthering the ends of fascism through perjury, bribery and murder. Accordingly, when her defeat comes, it lacks even the epic resonances of the White Witch's death. Her minutely controlled fafade simply shatters as she breaks down in a sweaty panic attack. For all its sophistication, however, Michael Clayton merely engages with the implicit fascism of peacetime socio-sexual norms. A vital fact about the counter-

Americana cycle is that it was unfolding in the thick of the Bush administration's War on

Terror, when far more explicit and unequivocal instances of fascism were arising within the American consciousness, and shamefully redefining America's image to much of the world. Counter-Americana's anti-fascism is so consistently unequivocal because it was produced contemporaneously to the outlandish prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, the neo-concentration-camp conditions at Guantanamo Bay, and the virtually open sanctioning of torture through extraordinary rendition.

In counter-Americana, there are consistent allusions made, both subtle and unsubtle, to the existence of an extra-legal fascistic apparatus of power behind the scenes of America's official arms of state. Its exact nature and extent is never certain, and indeed varies according to the degree of paranoia or sensationalism present in any individual film. Nonetheless, throughout the counter-Americana years, it has at one point or another included the corporate/financial world, the legal profession, a universe of unelected bureaucrats and neo-conservative think-thanks, the armed forces, the CIA, and the United

States Senate, along with an incestuous and nihilistic web of lobbyists, sycophants and hit men which connect them all.

In the midst of the Bush era virtually no counter-Americana film was complete without a dire threat assessment regarding the future of American democracy in the face of this creeping internal fascism. The fascist potential within America, rather than the enemy without (i.e., terrorism, fuelled and funded by Islamic fundamentalism around the world), had become the target of the films' dramatic and rhetorical energy. While the counter-Americana films, as befitted their basic commitment to intellectual rather than sensational narratives, disdained to explicitly link the two, many of the more blockbuster- oriented films of the period frequently had no such scruples. In The Manchurian

Candidate, a vast American equity firm is depicted as conspiring with unspecified forces in Iraq to place a brainwashed veteran in the White House and, presumably, then issue in the most deregulatory administration in American history; Shooter envisioned a cabal of

corrupt American politicians and businessmen conspiring to foment tribal warfare and

genocide in Africa in order to facilitate oil dealings; Vantage Point had a terrorist attempt

to disrupt a multilateral summit in Europe and take a (liberal) President of the United

States hostage made possible by at least one traitor within the Secret Service; and Iron

Man depicted malevolent corporate moneymen seeking to make themselves master of

world-controlling weapons, and liaising easily with Afghanistan-based terrorists for the

purpose. This list is not exhaustive, but it establishes that, in historical terms, the most

remarkable thing about Hollywood during the counter-Americana period is a willingness

to locate villainy within as well as without.

Compared to the year 1985, the high point of anti-communist hysteria in Ronald

Reagan's renewed Cold War, featuring films such as Red Dawn, Rambo: First Blood

Part II, Rocky IV, and White Nights, the contrast with 2005 and the anti-terrorism climate

of the Bush administration's War on Terror could scarcely be greater. By 1985 standards,

films such as Ladder 49, The Kingdom and The Guardian - retreats into comforting

depictions of heroic masculinity in the form of firemen, SWAT teams, and naval men - 62 ought to have been the norm during the counter-Americana years. Instead films such as these were a minority, and comparatively marginal. The Kingdom in particular is distinctive by its seeming uniqueness, depicting as it does exactly the sort of wartime fantasy - a sole American SWAT team ventures into an Arab Muslim society and wreaks havoc upon a terrorist cell - which personified so much of Reagan-era entertainment. The economic rationale of the 1980s counter-revolution in Hollywood may remain, but its accordant political logic has seemingly come completely decoupled. 63

Chapter 3: The Media

If so much of the American apparatus of state, and so many lines of endeavour in

American life, are deemed to be tainted with fascism, self-destructive, or both, then the question would naturally arise as to what pursuit one could dedicate one's life to that would genuinely improve and enrich America. To this, counter-Americana has at least one ready answer: the media.

One simple dramatic litmus test which reliably indicates a film's liberal or conservative orientation is the treatment a film metes out to journalists and reporters. In conservative films, this class of society is invariably subjected to some level of caricature: as intrusive and parasitical, making its living by harassing the values of dignified and productive people; not only serving no useful social role, but openly filling society with triviality and irreverence. Liberal dramaturgies, needless to say, take exactly the opposite stance, deeming the profession of distributing knowledge, information and entertainment to wide audiences of people to be the most inherently noble task in society, allowing one to further the democratic ideal by exercising one's own intellectual and creative powers. Simply put, the sanctity of the private individual is the highest conservative article of faith, while freedom of speech and information is a corresponding liberal value.

These two ideological modes, although conflicting, are not always mutually exclusive. Henry Hathaway's 1948 film Call Northside 777 is fascinating precisely because it contains both of the conflicting attitudes toward the media within the same narrative. James Stewart's reporter doggedly pursues the truth of a story about a man who 64 may or may not have been falsely accused of murdering a policeman, and is characterized as heroic for doing so. Nonetheless, the film contains a bizarre profusion of scenes in which Stewart's invasion of bourgeois domestic spaces to ask questions is presented as rude and morally suspect. The film privileges the moments when people take umbrage at being asked questions by a reporter, making Stewart seem sincerely contrite over the necessity of doing so. Nevertheless, there is never left any doubt that necessity it is. This is an ideological balancing act which few films have ever troubled to imitate.

It would be an exaggeration, although not a very large one, to claim that naivete is held to be a concrete good in Americana. Certainly sophistication, worldliness and knowingness are not held up as cardinal virtues in the Americana worldview - they can seem to connote a pride and elitism that is inimical to the ideal of folksy, unpretentious earnestness which stands as the high moral exemplar in Americana. The ideal in

Americana is that everything that is worth knowing can be learned from a small-town education grounded in family, church, and a small circle of like-minded individuals. Even if this does not teach everything there is to know about the world, it will, ideally, at least have imparted such a solid moral grounding that all manner of more esoteric knowledge can be grasped and assimilated without damaging this home-spun Americana outlook.

The notion that one could or should know things about the wider world that cannot be gleaned from such a school of life, and that one might come to distress through this ignorance - in other words, that a certain jaded cynicism about the world might be an advantage rather than a moral failing - is one that sits very uneasily with an Americana outlook. Because the media has as its chief purpose the disseminating of such potentially 65 preconception-jolting information about the wider world, it is thus also an object of great suspicion in Americana discourses. Films which draw upon Americana aesthetics have rarely hesitated to caricature it accordingly.

The climactic, cathartic diatribe in Frank Capra's 1936 film Mr. Deeds Goes to

Town is representative. Jean Arthur's journalist heroine breaks down before a crowded courtroom and piously declares that Gary Cooper's guileless small-town hero has been

"hurt" by "every conniving crook in town" - the latter meaning the newspapermen. She flagellates herself for being the worst of all of them, twisting everything he says around to sound imbecilic for no other reason than to merit a raise and a month's vacation. "He could never fit in with our distorted viewpoint, because he's honest, and sincere, and good!" she declares at the end.

This touches on most of the themes of conservative disdain for the news media - the stigmatizing of it as small-minded, corrupt, self-interested and mocking. The ideal of the "honest, sincere and good" private individual, completely secure and confident within himself, and content to make his way through the world by his own moral compass and upon his own resources, is one highly prized by conservative ideology. The media, however, is philosophically untenable by these lights, because its very purpose is to interject into this self-containment, jolting it by speaking of events and trends outside the individual's experience and expertise, presenting facts which he may have no context or use for, and generally providing a forum for a multiplicity of voices. All this could well be uncongenial to a securely self-contained temperament given to regard its own accumulated wisdom as sufficient, but it need not produce a crisis of faith. Mr. Deeds 66

Goes to Town is filled with various instances of Gary Cooper's hero placidly shrugging

off needling reporters and intellectuals with home-spun anecdotes and homilies, never allowing their questions or insinuations to influence his parochial outlook. This sort of

determined unworldliness is presented as a wholly admirable human temperament, and is

consistent throughout the films of Frank Capra. The media receive even more disdainful treatment in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and State of the Union, and even It Happened

One Night declines to allow Clark Gable to do much about his journalistic profession, as

he decides not to file the story, but rather to do the "moral" thing as a private individual.

In an example of Americana's supposed generosity of spirit, his editor understands and

agrees. This sort of thing is a crucial element of Americana discourses. The one thing that

Capra's films, and Americana in general, can never do is actually revel in the rarefied

thrills of getting and breaking a news story.

The contrast with Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday could not be greater. In this

film, Cary Grant's hero is characterized as amoral, able and willing to commit feats of

deception, larceny or subterfuge if it will get a better story into a more sensational shape.

Whereas an Americana discourse might start off with this characterization only to

moralistically reform him by the end, His Girl Friday takes the opposite approach, and

depicts Rosalind Russell's heroine rediscovering her journalistic killer instincts,

eventually breaking off her engagement to an Americana-style good boy in order to

rejoin the journalistic fold. The film frankly admits that a certain amorality may be a

fundamental prerequisite for the media to do its job to the fullest, and this again 67 underscores the battle lines with conservative, Americana dramaturgies, in which moral defensibility is held up as the highest criterion of value.

By conservative lights, however, the critical step which turns the media into a moral enemy is when it seems to draw upon its informational advantages to privilege - or even present as fact - moral assumptions that do not accord with an Americana worldview. Questions of journalistic bias have probably existed for as long as any form of news media. Throughout the later twentieth century, however, accusations by the

American Right that the major American news media is uncomfortably to the Left of the

American people as a whole have been elevated to near hysterical proportions. Accusing cries of "liberal media" were probably even more omnipresent than cries of "liberal

Hollywood." It is perhaps unsurprising then, that the two objects of conservative invective frequently come to each other's aid. The counter-Americana cycle was unstinting and unwavering in its positive depictions of the news media's anti-fascist potential.

In all this, the counter-Americana cycle powerfully tapped into the memory of its

New Hollywood forbears. In 1976, with retrospect, it was becoming increasingly clear that the most heady and radical days of the New Hollywood had passed, and that

Hollywood's output was settling back into a day-to-day routine of producing commercial spectacle. 1 This same year, nonetheless, two films, Network and All the President's Men, emerged in quick succession to set out two very ambitious, and profoundly different, paradigms of the media's efficacy as a bulwark against American crypto-fascism. The root of the difference between the two films lies in the fact that they represented a 68 generational crossroads in the American media - All the President's Men dealing with print newspaper media and Network dealing with broadcast television media, at a time in history when the cultural gulf between them was widening.

Newsprint has gone through many cycles and phases throughout American history, from the sophisticated pamphleteering of the late eighteenth-century to the heyday of yellow journalism at the dawn of the twentieth. The story of the Washington

Post's investigation into the Watergate break-in was a landmark, however, and changed the nature of print journalism's relationship towards state power. All the President's Men did not grapple with these wider implications. What it did do, however, was break new ground in depicting investigative journalism as possessing a near-absolute legitimacy and righteousness, contrary to Americana's fetishization of the private home and individual.

Such conservative values as these could now be dramatized - with some historical validity - as being, implicitly, mere smokescreens and enablers for fascism. Throughout

All the President's Men, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman portray Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as relentlessly dogging and pursuing interview subjects - on the telephone, in their offices, in their homes - stopping at nothing to gain one more piece of the Watergate puzzle. Their interviewing style is often brusque, their tactics often make use of subterfuge, and even occasionally border on harassment, as when Bernstein corners a young woman in her living room and grills her for six hours, disregarding her every protestation that she will say no more. All this is implicitly justified by the goal of exposing the Nixon administration's abuses of power. All the President's Men was perhaps the first major Hollywood film to so completely break with any residual sympathy with Americana notions about the media - to display single-minded, amoral, journalistic determination not as equivocal, or as a necessary-but-imperfect social

institution, but as unqualifiedly heroic.

This increase in power and prestige, however, came at a time when print journalism was losing ground to television as America's primary media forum. As

Marshall McLuhan observed, there is a "pattern of being that reveals new and opposite

forms just as the earlier forms reach their peak performance" i.e., if it works, it's

obsolete. 2 1976, as Network makes clear, roughly coincides with television's one-

generation anniversary on the American scene. The medium that started out in the early

1950s had now fostered an entire adult generation which had grown up watching TV, and

the generation initially responsible for bringing television to the American masses was

beginning to retire. This bore profound implications for the nature of the medium - very

different from those which All the President's Men imputed to print media - and Network

was unmerciful in dissecting them.

It has already been stated that a certain amorality is probably necessary to the

functioning of the news media, but Network's theme of amorality goes far beyond this.

The film sets its tone in the opening sequence, with William Holden's news division

manager idly speculating about programs such as "Suicide of the Week" and "Execution

of the Week," before going on to say "I love it. Suicides, assassinations, mad bombers,

Mafia hitmen, automobile smash-ups: 'The Death Hour.' A great Sunday night show for

the whole family. It'd wipe that fuckin' Disney right off the air." The film starts on this

note, and maintains it until the end. The film is dedicated to the thesis that television and intelligent journalism are not inherently antithetical to each other, but have been allowed to spend a quarter century drifting apart. The same opening sequence which has Holden speculating about "The Death Hour" also has him reminiscing about his professional days, spent with broadcasting legend Edward R. Murrow. He later emphasizes this further by taking down a photograph and scanning it reverentially, pointing out "Murrow,

Hollenbeck, Friendly."

In spite of this opening, the film is far from nihilistic or juvenile. Paddy

Chayefsky's screenplay contains no illusions or sentiment about the bureaucratic and inglorious realities of mainstream television broadcasting. The film, nonetheless, retains an unshakeable conviction that in the face of America's uncertain future, the media is still the first and best safeguard against a home-grown American fascism. This version of fascism is exemplified in Ned Beatty's megalomaniacal rant about modern economics, declaring that there is no America and no democracy, but only "the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet." This monologue confirms that corporate capitalism, at its fundamental level, is indivisible from fascistic dehumanization, and that the gradual subsuming of the news media under corporate umbrellas is the gravest of all threats to American democracy. The film ruefully acknowledges that average TV viewers, wanting chiefly entertainment, may not notice or mind this overmuch. Chayefsky does not allow this to be a reason or an excuse for withdrawal from politics, however - quite the opposite. Network's immortal refrain of

"I'm Mad as Hell and I'm Not Going to Take it Anymore!" is a visceral call to renewed political action and awareness, and is compounded by its subsequent portrayal of mass 71

popular protest against corporate capitalism being initiated through even a momentary reclamation of the airwaves for political purposes. The film is ultimately bleak and

pessimistic in the final analysis, but without giving in to easy and passive cynicism.

Although it contains a wide cast of memorably bizarre characters, it never resorts to overt

and facile caricature.

Ultimately, for all its insight, Network may have cried doom too soon. With the

coming of the 1980s and the onslaught of the Reagan Revolution, the trends toward

network mergers, dumbing-down, pursuit of the bottom line, and avoidance of

controversy would only become more and more advanced. In spite of everything,

however, the ideal of the news media as a bulwark against fascism - one which would

keep the populace informed and speak truth to power - stubbornly refused to die. Even as

this ideal receded further and further from everyday reality, filmmakers - among

innumerable others in the media sphere - have steadfastly refused to simply abandon the

idea to the ash-heap of history and dutifully accept the corporate dehumanization which

Network so chilling articulated. The 1980s saw the release of a number of films which

continued to depict the media as an anti-fascist force. Oliver Stone's Salvador, Sam

Peckinpah's The Osterman Weekend, and Barry Levinson's Good Morning Vietnam

respectively pit photojournalism against American complicity with Latin American

dictatorships, TV broadcasting against a CIA-plotted coup, and radio against American

excess in Vietnam. The degree and coherence of critique in these films may vary, but all

represent a contrasting narrative to endless media-bashing in many Reaganite

entertainments. Most of all, James L. Brooks's 1987 film Broadcast News virtually picks up where Network left off. TV news has now become so debauched that gigantic domino displays are considered fit news to broadcast, and a producer who insists instead upon the relevance of the latest SALT II developments succeeds only in emptying the room.

Nonetheless, the film does not countenance despair. It makes the point that even as all the major media outlets grow ever-more compromised, there will always be smaller outlets which will still afford an opportunity to challenge corporate hegemony. In 2004, finally,

John Sayles's Silver City would posit that the onset of the Internet age has enabled this attitude still further.

Just a year short of All the President's Men and Network's thirtieth anniversary, a new film arrived which tied their two political angles together as one. George Clooney's

Good Night, and Good Luck is a concise and stylized look at the period between late

1953 and early 1954 when a succession of television broadcasts by Edward R. Murrow on CBS's "See It Now" were instrumental in deflating the infamous anti-Communist crusade of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Good Night and Good Luck takes from All the

President's Men the unequivocal affirmation of the idea that a determined news media can take on and thwart fascism in America. It dedicates its entire narrative to the minutia of the internal workings of the media, with only the most token allusions to the world outside of the newsroom, making the media career the sole measure of its protagonists.

Likewise, it took from Network the idealized historical context of Murrow and his colleagues - the brief moment at the dawn of television when it was still hoped by many that television could be, in the main, a force for intellectual and cultural enrichment - and posits the dawn of television's inexorable decline into evasive triviality. 73

The first thing to note about Good Night, and Good Luck is what an aesthetically close and claustrophobic film it is. Not only are the CBS broadcasting premises presented as habitually cramped, cluttered and crowded, but the film's shooting style is characterized by a striking dearth of establishing shots, or even long shots in general.

Much of the film is spent cutting or panning between close-ups and medium shots of the

CBS staff, emphasizing the close quarters and constant time demands under which they work. This is a thematic irony, given that the gigantic scope of their broadcasts will reach across the entire nation, into millions of homes.

There is a deeper reason for this, though, which speaks to very heart of the film's anti-fascist agenda. The film's close quarters are used to emphasize a sense of uncertainty and dread at the looming spectre of fascism in America. Good Night, and Good Luck dramatizes McCarthyism as the first time American citizens virtually lived under modern fascism. The first scene after the introduction sets the tone by having two characters take refuge in a deserted room and confer, in cautious whispers, about a "loyalty oath" the entire staff is being required, on pain of their jobs, to sign. It is the whispering that is key.

A hallmark of a fascist society is that one is never safe even in one's own home or workplace, and as the film articulates in a later scene between the same couple, even making a telephone call impels them to glance over their shoulders to verify that they are not watched. Characters euphemistically speak of "the Committee" to designate HUAC, in a sort of totemic suspicion that even speaking its full name is to ask for trouble. A scene preceding the film's first broadcast sequence has Fred Friendly (George Clooney) facing down two hatchet-faced colonels who have appeared at his office, and presumed their right to warn CBS off a story about an Air Force lieutenant summarily discharged without trial. They offer no reasons or justification for their interjection, but simply tersely and sternly deem the story "without merit," and something that CBS is not competent to speak of. McCarthy himself is made the embodiment of all this, seeking to cow opposition simply with pugnacious bombast and character assassination, always mentioning evidence but never producing or substantiating it. The keynote to all of this is intimidation and fear, the goal of making the populace so deferential to self-appointed authority that it will no longer occur to anyone to speak up and answer back.

The rest of the film is dedicated to flouting this goal by making enlightened and committed use of television broadcasting. It begins when Friendly categorically informs the two colonels that the story will air with or without their approval, and is subsequently reaffirmed by Murrow throughout the film. "The terror is right here in this room," he says to his gathered colleagues at one point, going on to say that never having read a controversial book, or having a friend who was different, or joining an organization dedicated to change would make the American citizenry "exactly the kind of people Joe

McCarthy wants." This is ultimately hammered home in the central moment of the film,

Murrow's key March 9th, 1954 broadcast against McCarthy:

We will not walk in fear of one another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason... we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to associate, to speak, and to defend the causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

Good Night, and Good Luck treats the media rejoinder to McCarthy as no less of a war against fascism than World War II a decade before. The film's broadcast sequences are, indeed, paced like a cinematic battle, with much foreshadowing and jostling, frenzied preparation leading up to the event; then the upshot of it all, the broadcast itself, is treated with the most reverential seriousness; then a brief period of calm and uncertainty after the storm, before audience response begins to coalesce; and then the recriminations set in, by which time the soldiers/newsmen themselves have retired to a bar to recuperate.

Launching their retaliatory sallies against McCarthy, in virtuous defence of freedom, is made into a physically and emotionally draining act for the CBS crew, with their only reward being the knowledge of having done the right thing, and hopefully having inspired others. This last point is one the film emphasizes. Murrow mordantly acknowledges at one point that McCarthy will presume that "a Senator trumps a newsman." This is made by the film into a grievously incorrect assumption, as Murrow's newsman is instead made into a direct precursor of Joseph Welch, and his famous rhetorical "have you no sense of decency, sir?" The point is made even more emphatic by having Murrow then be succeeded by none other than President Dwight Eisenhower himself - former Supreme

Allied Commander in World War II - who is made to echo Murrow almost exactly with a speech stating...

From the beginning of this nation, a man can walk upright, no matter who he or she is. He can walk upright and meet his friend or his enemy, and he does not fear that because that enemy may be in a position of great power, that he can be suddenly thrown in jail to rot there without charges and with no recourse to justice.

Good Night, and Good Luck, then, makes the media out to be a more consistent and reliable defender of America's freedom than its president. At least it has that potential.

The film is bookended by a scene set only four years later, with Murrow being given a valedictory honouring, which he than scandalizes by declaring TV to have become a medium of "decadence, escapism, and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live," and being used to "distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us." "Just once," he says, "let us exalt the importance of ideas and information"...

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate, and yes, it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it towards those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box.

All this makes clear the fundamental point about counter-Americana's relationship with the news media - it is one strongly inflected by Barthes-ian inoculation. 3 In counter-

Americana, however, a device that the Marxist Barthes originally imputed to the Right is now being deployed towards liberal ends, in keeping alive the ideal of media as a weapon against fascism, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. Lions for Lambs makes this point even more resonantly than Good Night, and Good Luck. Meryl Streep's journalist heroine "Janine Roth" admits that her station has long since become "a windsock" more concerned with ad revenue and ratings than hard news, but she still fights for media probity. In conference with her recalcitrant producer regarding a dubious new initiative in

Afghanistan, she anguishedly declares "We can't do this again!" The media, she continues, could well have shut down the Iraq War before it began, had they only examined the evidence before them and endeavoured to connect the dots. Instead they servilely rolled over and accepted the White House's line verbatim. The film ends on an ambiguous note as to whether Roth has capitulated, resigned in protest, or will somehow get the story out. In a sense, the strict resolution is immaterial. The rhetorical and ideological point has been made vividly. 77

Chapter 4: Popular Culture

The content of much of what virtually all modern media delivers - popular culture - is the second semantic form in which counter-Americana's anti-fascism inheres. Almost every one of the key films depicts popular culture - be it music, television programming, mass-circulation magazines, pulp literature, the world of professional sport, toys, the modern clubbing scene, or, of course, cinema itself - in respectful terms, as having genuine real-life relevance. In counter-Americana, how one reacts to an artefact of popular culture is indicative of one's human qualities.

This is a testament to the liberal nature of counter-Americana, and its paucity of any real radicalism. Any radical, Leftist ideology worth its salt tends to call for a more democratic, non-commercialized, folk tradition of art, and excoriates mass popular culture as a new evil which has joined religion as the opiate of the masses. There are very few instances of this sentiment in the counter-Americana films. The most significant would be the concluding scene of Lions for Lambs, and even this, as shall be shown in a later chapter, has been deliberately exaggerated to serve other thematic purposes. The counter-Americana cycle has simply adopted popular culture as a liberal good. The reasons for this shall become apparent in due course.

This shift with regards to popular culture is in itself is a mark of how

Hollywood's political and cultural outlook has changed since the Reagan counter- revolution. As the 1980s got underway, Robin Wood remarked that Hollywood's current tendency towards sequels and repetition - with one Rocky, Jaws, Star Wars, Star Trek,

Indiana Jones, Rambo, Ghostbusters or Beverly Hills Cop sequel interminably following 78 another — was the mark of a conservative reaction in Hollywood, where reassuring repetition was now prized over stimulation and surprise of the sort which was more readily available in past filmmaking periods. 1 This was avoidance of originality in its most naked and undisguised form, with one instalment being cranked out after another, and the franchises seemingly content to pile up entries until catastrophic box office failure deterred the production of any more. Although this tendency has not disappeared in contemporary Hollywood, it has shifted and grown more sophisticated since its birth in the 1980s. The shameless production of endless sequels within a limited number of franchises has now given place to a broader trend of determined adaptation and re- making of any and every other aspect of popular culture.

The output of Hollywood today is often characterized by the confusion of ontologies. How can a film such as Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix be credibly analyzed as an original text when it is not only a fourth sequel, but also an adaptation of a well-known contemporary bestseller? How can a film such as X-Men: The

Last Stand be treated as original when all its narrative elements and themes are painstakingly selected from a vast, pre-existing comic book universe? How can a film such as The Simpsons Movie be understood as original when its entire viewing experience is predicated upon assumed familiarity with another viewing experience, of a television show? As opposed to the reassuring repetition of the Reagan-era, by the counter-

Americana years, popular culture had become strikingly complicated.

Congruent with this shift toward greater diffusion and multiplicity in Hollywood has been a greater seriousness in many of the texts themselves. The licence to 79 unmitigated escapism and frivolity which so many of the 1980s sequel franchises granted themselves has apparently been revoked, and their counter-Americana-era equivalents -

The Bourne trilogy, the Spider-Man trilogy, the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, for instance - treat their subject matter, be it covert operations, superheroics, or piracy, with markedly more intellectual engagement. The historical and philosophical rationales are at least alluded to, rather than the subject simply being used as a staging ground for rote comic distraction. Moreover, the three above examples take a far less than re-assuring emotional tone, all concluding on ambiguous, or even tragic notes. All this, in retrospect, was seemingly building towards the epochal box-office success, in the summer of 2008, of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight - a film which demonstrates conclusively the extent to which a seemingly trivial aspect of popular culture can be transformed into an intensely intellectually and politically challenging cinematic experience. The themes which the film deals in are numerous and profound - the malleable ontology of identity, the dialectics of historical processes, issues of loyalty in law enforcement, and questions of the limits of democracy - and cohere into a whole which posits that hero worship is a dangerous game for a society to play. Its unspoken epigraph is from Brecht's Life of

Galileo: '"Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero'/'No... unhappy is the land that has need of heroes'." 2 The underlying sentiment of the films' Reagan/Bush-era predecessors

- that films adapted from comic books need exhibit no intelligence or sophistication - has been fully expurgated, and the creative fecundity of popular culture accorded due respect.

In light of this, the situation with the counter-Americana films is again simply a matter of greater degree and acknowledgment - making explicit through narrative engagement with popular culture what is merely implicit in the existence of films such as

The Dark Knight. Although they do not share their blockbuster peers' tendency toward untrammelled adaptation, almost all of the counter-Americana films can boast some historical, literary or cinematic inspiration, albeit not one dependent upon an "original" source. Bill Condon acknowledges that a pair of newly-published biographies may have influenced Kinsey, but insists the film is largely the result of original research. Norman

Mailer's monumental novel Harlot's Ghost was an initial spur to Eric Roth's screenplay for The Good Shepherd, but it metamorphosed endlessly with further research and development. 4 Syriana is inspired by Robert Baer's memoir See No Evil, but this does not do justice to the film's vast scope and intricate plotting. Bobby is openly derivative of the classic film Grand Hotel in its broadest structure, but beyond this is just calculatedly written to sound the maximum number of historical Zeitgeist notes. Good Night, and

Good Luck is based on a large body of well-documented historical fact, but no single codified interpretation of it all. In the Valley ofElah is loosely based upon real events, but their chief media exposure hitherto had consisted of an article in Playboy magazine.5

Outside the strict confines of the counter-Americana cycle, I Am Legend delves even further into Hollywood's capacity to exalt popular culture as a spiritual and political good. The film tells the story of a post-apocalyptic world in which a military scientist

"Dr. Robert Neville" (played by Will Smith) is now seemingly the sole human inhabitant of New York City. It does not merely invoke popular culture incidentally to make thematic points, but is fundamentally structured around it. The very title is an act of re- writing. The "legend" of the title is revealed, late in the film, as an explicit reference to Bob Marley's 1984 album Legend when Neville holds a CD case before fellow-survivor

"Anna" and declares "best album ever." This moment is a prelude to one of the film's most resonant moments - one which demonstrates the immense degree to which popular culture is prized in counter-Americana aesthetics. Having put the CD on, and heard the strains of Marley's "Stir it Up" begin, Neville delivers the following monologue...

He had this idea, it was kind of a virologists's idea. He believed that you could cure racism and hate. Literally cure it, by injecting music and love into people's lives. One day he was scheduled to perform at a peace rally. Gunmen came to his house and shot him down. Two days later, he walked out on that stage and sang. Somebody asked him why. He said, "The people who are trying to make this world worse are not taking a day off. How can I?"

All this is said not with an air of glibness or complacency, as with many discussions of popular culture in films by Quentin Tarantino, but with a tone of real sincerity and reverence. After this monologue, Neville pauses, and then portentously adds: "Light up the darkness." This refrain of Bob Marley's is urgently necessary to the world the film envisions - giving inspiration to carry on when all has been reduced to a state of darkness and desperation by the apocalyptic virus. Beyond its specific applicability to Bob Marley, this potently creates an idea of a religion parallel to any orthodox one - complete with its own vision for humanity, its own mode of evangelisation, and its own tale of martyrdom.

It presents the idea that modern popular culture could be a sort of new ur-religion, to transcend all previous doctrinal divisions, inter-faith hostilities, and suspicions between believers and unbelievers - something around which all humans, regardless of theological background, could rally and identify. So as to leave no ambiguity on the point, the film then has Anna put forth her own terrifyingly fascistic vision of religion, which denies and devalues human life every bit as much as the music of Bob Marley treasures it. She 82 claims that because some 99% of the world's people have died, "the Earth is quieter now," and the survivors, in a mark of divine favour, can hear God's voice the more clearly. Nonetheless, by the film's climax, she has apparently been moved. The final fade to end credits happens over her affirming "Light up the Darkness."

I am Legend thus reinforces the positive use value and spiritual import of popular culture. As always with counter-Americana, however, Michael Clayton is the most fluent and coherent. The film creates a fictional role-playing fantasy universe - similar to

Dungeons & Dragons or Pokemon - called Realm & Conquest, which has a computer program, a board game, playing cards, and a novel, with at least 15 major characters populating its mythology. The narrative underlying it all is one of dislocation and alienation, where warriors who have lost their way congregate together, uncertain of where they are, what they should do, or who they might trust. In a chapter of the novel entitled "Summons to Conquest," these lost souls then find themselves subject to dreams and visions which impel them on a Navajo-style vision quest. The film makes this narrative into a grand metaphor for the unhappiness and malaise felt by characters who, as a result of years of incremental professional decisions, find themselves complicit with the fascist machinations of the corporate world. Tom Wilkinson's mentally unstable character "Arthur Edens," hearing this story told to him while off his medication and mentally adrift, undergoes a vision-quest-style epiphany of his own, and determines to expose the corporate malfeasance he is tasked with concealing. He makes thousands of copies of an incriminating memo, symbolically bound in binders reading Summons to

Conquest. 83

For counter-Americana, in short, popular culture offers a forum for cultivating the positive, anti-fascist aspects of the American character. It can be redemptive, even spiritually rejuvenating. This is an ideal which gets to the very core of counter-

Americana's resonance with the ethos of the New Hollywood, and vividly illustrates its incompatibility with the Reaganite turn in Hollywood at the start of the 1980s. The New

Hollywood's frequently jarring, often apocalyptic, and occasionally even revolutionary cinematic aesthetics were antithetical to a conservative understanding of popular culture which deemed it a popular narcotic to keep the populace docile and ideologically sound.

As Wood puts it:

The sense of recklessness, prodigal extravagance, no expense spared - is essential: the unemployment lines in the world outside may get longer and longer, we may even have to go out and join them, but if capitalism can still throw out entertainments like Star Wars (the films' very uselessness an aspect of the prodigality), the system must be basically OK, right? Hence, as capitalism approaches its ultimate breakdown ... its entertainments become more dazzling, more extravagant, more luxuriously unnecessary. 6

In the face of this, the counter-Americana years were ones of redemption - a time when a more politically engaged popular-culture-artistry resurfaced with a vengeance not only within the counter-Americana cycle itself, but throughout the Hollywood mainstream as a whole. From 2004's The Manchurian Candidate and The Day After Tomorrow onwards,

Hollywood entertainments were no longer automatically synonymous with useless prodigality. Films such as these - and others such as Shooter, Lord of War, Munich, etc. - instead share a tone of ominous pessimism about the future, and the wisdom of society to meet it. Taken as a group, they seem to imply that while temporary and symbolic victories against the oncoming darkness are possible, the most anyone can ultimately hope for is to go out with a clean conscience. None of them bow to the traditional Hollywood convention of the happy ending, and all propose that the conceit of the white, heterosexual, practical-minded, adult male being the natural leader of American society is at best a fallacy and at worst a malign and dangerous conspiracy. At this time, even some of the old 1980s franchises resurfaced wearing a much different ideological colour - Star

Wars films ended on notes of death and disaster, Rocky loses his climactic bout again,

Rambo and Indiana Jones finally confront themselves and realize it's time for retirement.

Popular culture as it exists in North America today is often no longer reducible simply to discreet texts, which can be analyzed in isolation from each other and then compared. Modern consumerism has advanced to the point where different kinds of popular culture texts - the written word, the still image, the moving image, and the recorded sound - are engineered to overlap with each other, creating an overall

Experience which is greater than the sum of the individual texts' sensory impressions.

Popular culture today in North America today is most often indivisible from the workings of corporate-controlled consumerism, which embodies a worldview which deems leisure and sensory enjoyment to be endlessly variable and perfectible, and seek to modulate it in ways that will prompt brand loyalty. All manner of individual artefacts of popular culture are mobilized towards this task - this branding of experience - with no single one being prized overall.

Most forms of modern consumer leisure are constructed to some degree around these principles of all-encompassing experience. Another seminal documentary of 2004,

The Corporation, dramatizes the extent to which the modern corporate world is obsessed with the branding of experience, and how millions of dollars and countless man-hours are 85 funnelled into the association of certain advertising aesthetics with certain trademark experiences. Throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, the expansions in the range of consumer goods available have been driven by the implicit neo-liberal idea that lifestyle choices, product selections, and leisure preferences are not so much triviality, but are genuine significations of the persona one wishes to construct for oneself, and thus the range of choice should be as wide as possible. Ideally, one should be able to construct a fully satisfactory identity for oneself out of catalogues. This is an attitude incisively captured in David Fincher's 1999 film Fight Club, when Edward Norton's narrator asks, with all apparent sincerity, "which set of designer kitchenware really defines me as a person?" The moral environment is one in which the individual consumer is encouraged to heedlessly spend like there's no tomorrow in hopes of bringing his actual life into accord with the fantasy world with which advertisements have deluged him. It goes without saying this is impossible, because new advertising campaigns will be periodically launched, aestheticizing new forms of popular culture, new lifestyles and leisure modes which will require new consumer spending. Inexorably, the consumer sinks into debt while the corporations make billions.

This unequal economic manipulation contains an ominous fascist dimension, the workings of which The Corporation ardently strives to delineate for the average moviegoer. It is another testament to the non-radical/revolutionary nature of counter-

Americana, however, that the films of the cycle do not resoundingly condemn this popular culture of consumerism. Instead, in the same way that individual texts of popular culture were turned into means to anti-fascism by taking them at face value - and rejecting the ideological associations of ephemerality and escapism that came with them

- this ideal of endless freedom of modulation in lifestyle choices is made into something

inimical to fascism, rather than simply the workings of fascism in its corporate form.

Simply put, freedom of choice, and the notion that demand should produce supply, are

ideals which are seen to contain great potential for liberation. It is only in practice, when

the corporate world has a monopoly on framing these terms, that neo-liberalism can take

on fascist overtones. The counter-Americana cycle seeks to show how it could be

otherwise - how the workings of popular consumer culture, if understood in its idealized

terms of unapologetic freedom of lifestyle choice, could be powerfully anti-fascist.

Rendition and In the Valley of Elah are both particularly interesting in this regard,

since both make this point in the most hedonistic and sensual terms. Rendition depicts

Douglas Freeman living in North Africa not as a clueless or dissatisfied expatriate in a

strange country, but as a young man who has mastered all the details of the local

nightlife, and has carved out a very comfortable niche for himself within it. Central

sequences of the film depict him ensconced in an ornately designed Arabic nightclub.

These scenes possess an ambience almost reminiscent of The Thousand and One Nights,

with vibrant music, dancing girls, and exotic views from the balcony patio. He is

variously depicted as spending his time here knocking back rounds of liquor and smoking

a hookah. His consumerist lifestyle instincts have led him to the part of the Muslim world

least amenable to "War on Terror" stereotypes, and the film tacitly insists that he has

derived wisdom from this. Secure in his familiar territory, he is shown trying desperately

over his cell phone to make clear his doubts about the current case. His superiors - both 87

American and Arabic - however, are all depicted as leading thoroughly conventional, bourgeois existences, their leisure either furtive or non-existent. Thus coded as narrow and unimaginative, they dismiss his objections, eventually driving him to release his prisoner on his own authority. This contrast between Puritanism and sensual hedonism, with the latter signifying humanity and generosity of spirit, and the former signifying fascism, is the inverse of many Hollywood narratives - the North African setting brings

Raiders of the Lost Ark readily to mind - and is a far more liberal one. It accepts humanity in all its imperfection, and disdains to stigmatize legitimate pleasure as morally transgressive. This theme is a persistent on in counter-Americana, also having been central to Kinsey three years earlier.

In the Valley of Elah takes up the same theme as Rendition, but returns it to an

American setting. As opposed to the unnamed nightclub in Rendition, In the Valley of

Elah presents the spectator with a strip club called "TD's," which seems designed not merely to stimulate the senses but to incapacitate them. The club is shot as a claustrophobic flesh pit, filled with dazzling multicoloured strobe lights contrasting with an ambience of cold blue. The soundtrack is filled with loudly pounding music, to which * innumerable strippers go through their paces with crowds of raucous young men mere feet away. The narrative presents this as being a thoroughly unremarkable spot for young soldiers to be found, while Tommy Lee Jones's protagonist, "Hank Deerfield," is very visibly discomfited and uncertain.

This mise-en-scene vividly establishes what is to be one of In the Valley of Elah's key themes: the cultural gap which has supposedly grown up between the military 88 generation of the Vietnam War, and that just reaching manhood during the Iraq War. The former was implicitly formed at a time when consumer lifestyle choices were still held in check by some common societal standards, whereas by the early 21st century, consumer pop culture has become so all-encompassing as to be unbeholden to anything but its own potentialities and inner logic. The result is that the young men in the Iraq War take in stride a level of unselfconscious exhibitionism that leaves their elders baffled. It is the former who fight the Iraq War, but the latter who started it. The film emphasizes Hank's initial reflexive patriotism - his listening to George W. Bush's speeches about "freedom on the march," his extreme respect for the flag, his speaking uncomplicatedly of

"bringing democracy to a shithole" - in order to position him as someone who is an ideological enabler of the Iraq War, but out of touch with its reality.

Beyond TD's, the film is full of sundry other strip clubs, topless bars, prostitutes, and drug use. The references to alcohol are too numerous to count, and Charlize Theron's heroine is an unapologetic single mother. Like Rendition, however, In the Valley of Elah makes no moral comment upon any of this, but presents it as a salutary and liberating vision of social progress - one which accepts humanity's foibles and earthiness rather than prudishly denying them. Hank's seemingly outdated moral assumptions and old- fashioned manners are consistently depicted as setting him apart as he tries to navigate contemporary military base culture. As one old preconception after another is confounded, Hank's attempts to resist the idea of his own obsolescence gradually wear down, eventually reaching a point of resignation. Ultimately, In the Valley of Elah depicts the shameless exhibitionism inherent in so much modern popular culture as antithetical to 89 the conservative military mindset that enabled the Iraq War, and may offer the best hope for awakening inhibited, soldierly types to the importance of the anti-fascist issues at stake.

Both Rendition and In the Valley of Elah, thus, advance the thesis that the appreciation of modern consumer popular culture, and the perfecting of a satisfying consumerist lifestyle, are pursuits fundamentally antithetical to fascism, and may in the end prove stronger. In both, it is the Iraq War and the excesses of the War on Terror which are depicted as a looming, dehumanized fascism against which genuine humanity -

- fallibly hedonistic and free-spending - is positioned. In both films, racking up credit card purchases is depicted not as a societal vice, but as something which provides an invaluable paper trail to locate a person should they vanish unaccountably. Neither film contains anything to praise corporate consumerism, but nonetheless their only moments of real trauma come not from any moral concerns over a culture of immediate gratification, but from whatever fascistic events cause real pain and suffering: an innocent man is beaten, shocked and waterboarded, for instance; or a young girl is shredded in a shrapnel blast; or a child is run over by a Humvee; or a PTSD-crazed veteran kills his wife and then himself. Valuable documentary films such as Robert

Greenwald's Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers have striven to demonstrate an ineluctable link between corporate consumerism and these fascistic horrors. The counter-Americana films, in the main, resist this conclusion.

Michael Clayton is the only counter-Americana film which actually attempts the contradiction of couching its anti-fascist message in explicitly pro-pop-culture but 90 forcefully anti-corporate terms. The film makes one last, imperative, ideological point: that although the corporate world can endeavour to brand experience through advertising, it has no ultimate power to enforce how consumers privately interpret and make use of its products. Copyright law may govern the public use or display of intellectual property, but thought-policing to enforce the acceptance and embrace of branded lifestyles is still beyond the corporate world's abilities, for all that The Corporation insists upon the quest for it. Michael Clayton, in the meantime, establishes a theme of resistance to this fascistic notion in favour of the creation of uniquely individual lifestyle environments.

Casting nine-year old actor Austin Williams as the titular protagonist's son

"Henry," the film depicts how children today, having been born into and raised in this

culture of consumerism, may blithely accept its products but refuse its advertising.

Michael Clayton's cinematography emphasizes how, while his father brings himself to

grief and desperation by endeavouring to scrupulously live out a brand-name corporate

world lifestyle, Henry Clayton has subverted the brand name children's lifestyle to his

own ends. The narrative proper begins on this theme, with the structuring flashback

"Four Days Earlier" fading onto the screen-saver for the Realm & Conquest computer

program. Subsequently, long takes of close-up pans across his desk show many of the

sort of consumer toys which advertising teaches children to want - superhero action

figures and toy Star Wars spaceships - but also many which defy this branding -

numerous old plastic dinosaurs, model toys from the 1995 anime classic Neon Genesis:

Evangelion - and several which are simply bizarrely unrecognizable - plastic spiders

with enormous proboscis, bizarre dragon creatures, and baffling bio-mechanical entities. All these are arrayed in such a way - strategically adorning lamps, or seeming to interact with each other - as to create unique and personal tableaus. Beyond this, seemingly every surface - from the boxes on the shelves in the background to the computer screen in the foreground - has been adorned with stickers. The wider room is decorated with an equal mixture of posters and art which Henry has evidently created himself, producing new effects through their juxtaposition. This room - this haven of self-expression - is not only the environment in which the story begins, but it is later made to provide a key narrative catalyst as Henry summarizes Realm & Conquest to Arthur Edens from it. The mise-en- scene has him nestled with a cordless phone between two piles of bedding, the art on his wall looming over the whole scene.

The counter-Americana ideal is one of resistance to the fascist potential inherent in popular culture consumerism by thinking seriously about its products, and thus re- appropriating and reinterpreting them for one's own purposes. This is what the gradual re-intellectualization of popular culture since the Reagan era has implied, and in Henry,

Michael Clayton holds out hope that the trend will continue on through the next Chapter 5: Nature

Counter-Americana's scepticism toward orthodox religion is inherent in its basic anti- fascism, and the previous section saw the first tentative attempts to find an alternative source of sublimity in the realm of popular culture. Popular culture, however, has only limited emancipatory potential in broader political and historical terms because its anti- fascist possibilities are too finely divisible from the very real fascistic aspects of corporate capitalism. To find a truly workable alternative source of sublime inspiration, it is necessary to step outside the realm of human social construction altogether. In short, back to Nature. This is, as will be seen below, an ideological construction, and not always a tenable one, but is nonetheless sincere within the counter-Americana cycle.

The counter-Americana films contain a seemingly limitless reverence for Nature - its landscapes, its vegetation, and the animals that live there. Only those films most absolutely constrained by location, subject matter, and overall aesthetic tone - as with

Good Night, and Good Luck - fail to contain at least one important scene or thematic subtext which shows this passion for Nature. The vast majority of the other counter-

Americana films, as well as many of the other most critically and ideologically important films of those years, are incomplete without images of Nature, and moments which emphasize respect for Nature at the narrative level. From the gigantic spectacle of 10,000

B.C. - with its marathon of prehistoric megafauna - to the comic farce of Failure to

Launch - in which an adult who still lives with his parents is bitten by seemingly cute and harmless animals to emphasize that he is out of sync with Nature - the Hollywood that produced the counter-Americana films is one where big-game hunting is more likely 93 to be a mark of villainy than a signifier of heroic virility, where the ideal of rejuvenation by communing with Nature is treated with respect rather than derision, and it is no longer ideologically acceptable to dismiss environmentalist sentiments as so much hysterical nonsense. The Reagan era of "trees cause pollution," in short, had been definitively left behind.

It is Bill Condon's 2004 film Kinsey which gets to the root of the matter, openly identifying this idealization of nature as a rejection of orthodox religion in general - and

Christianity in particular — in favour of a kind of neo-paganism. The specific workings of

Condon's film will be dealt with in turn, but one vital opening point rewards discussion here: an opening scene in which two young boy scouts by a lakeside, rendered uncomfortable in each other's presence by their burgeoning young sexuality, kneel down to pray. The camera positions itself at an angle where their two bodies appear directly beneath the vast expanse of lake, and the forested mountains on the other side of it. The image is one of sheer natural beauty, to which their bowing of their heads in myopic

Christian prayer has blinded them and made them insensible. The juxtaposition in the image leaves the impression of something wrong with the world. Had the two boy scouts been established as kneeling in reverence to the awe-inspiring landscape before them, all might have seemed much more organic.

Likewise, the opening sequence of Michael Clayton is a fully coherent dramatization of where the counter-Americana spectator is positioned with regards to

Nature. The film is framed by its titular protagonist walking to the top of a countryside hill to stand before a group of wild horses. After a long and soul-crushing period of 94 complicity with corporate and legal fascism, his haggard, pale, and sleepless appearance make a stark contrast with the freedom and whinnying unconcern of the horses.

Clooney's silent performance in the scene conveys extreme humility and reverence, and the original screenplay's description of it uses language uncannily similar to Kinsey's opening monologue. Michael Clayton is...

A man who needs more than anything to see one pure, natural thing, and by some miracle has found his way to this place. The wet grass and cold air and no coat - none of it makes any difference to him now - he's a pilgrim stumbling into the cathedral. 1

The examples by no means cease there. Films such as The New World, Beowulf and

Bridge to Terabithia all de-privilege Christianity in favour of alternative, more Natural sublimes, such as Native American animist religion, Old Norse paganism, or the simple power of the human imagination. Even Amazing Grace's positive depiction of

Christianity was couched in dramatic terms of love of Nature. In 2008, Oliver Stone took this aesthetic device to the audacious extreme of applying it to George W. Bush personally. The scene in W which must account for Bush's conversion from dissolute alcoholic to born-again Christian does so by having him collapse in hung-over agony on a forested road, and in his dazed state, see for a moment the trees brightly silhouetted against the sky with a sublimity inaccessible to normal consciousness. Nature-worship is seemingly the only avenue through which the Hollywood mainstream can engage constructively with religion.

This Nature-worship, however, is ultimately the most problematic of the counter-

Americana tenets. To posit Nature as a repository of anti-fascism is an idea which requires great qualification. Unlike the media and popular culture, one does not need to 95 search out undercurrents of fascistic potential in Nature - they are inherently there from the very start. The phrase "law of the jungle" - with its connotations of the rule of force and death to the weak or maladapted - is not a misnomer. 300 is, in a way, a film far more in touch with Nature than any of those mentioned above, since its most basic theme

- violent conflict between males over territory and breeding rights - is a constant throughout much of the animal kingdom. It is not war, but pacifism, which signifies a uniquely human divorce from Nature. Liberal ideology, however, has a tendency to recoil at the sight of blood, and often elides these facts from its conception of Nature. The penultimate image in North Country's opening segment is representative. As Charlize

Theron's heroine "Josey Aimes" stops her truck at a gas station along a country highway, the glaring lights above her forming an island in a sea of darkness, a truck drives by with two deer carcasses - evidently just killed on a hunting trip - loaded in its back. A shot/reverse shot has Aimes making eye contact with the dead deer before the truck vanishes into the darkness, the soulful eyes of the one meeting the lifeless eyes of the other, both victims of human male violence. This is Nature held up as a mirror which starkly clarifies the realities of human social life. Its pious recoiling from violence, however, shows an ultimate refusal to truly engage with the realities of Nature itself.

Nature is fundamentally about predation and death, as much as the renewal and affirmation of life, and if conservative mentalities in Hollywood's history have often distorted or caricatured the former fact, they have at least been willing to acknowledge it in a way that liberal films rarely have. Throughout the counter-Americana years, thus, many of the most innovative and powerful films dealing with Nature came from not outside the counter-Americana cycle, but from outside the Hollywood mainstream as a whole.

For all that counter-Americana seems to eschew orthodox religion and set up

Nature as a new neo-pagan force, in doing so it abnegates any real risk or danger in its engagement with Nature. The above summaries of Kinsey, Michael Clayton, and North

Country reveal the basis of counter-Americana's regard for Nature - that it is something beautiful to look at, but not to touch. All three films simply rely upon shot/reverse-shot exchanges to emphasize that their protagonists are gazing upon Nature with reverence, but not truly going out into Nature and being acted upon by it. The theme of the son's death in In the Valley of Elah is symptomatic of this. It is a key plot point in the film that the young man whose disappearance drives the narrative was chopped up and incompletely burned in a field of brush, and his remains afterwards scattered and scavenged by animals - presumably coyotes and the like. This last fact is subsequently harped upon repeatedly in the film's dialogue, as a final indignity for a murdered war veteran to endure, but the film's visual discourse makes no reference to it. There are no shots of the event actually happening, there are no shots of pawprints or scraps in the investigation scenes, and there aire no visible teeth marks in the autopsy scenes. A human form being abandoned helpless in Nature, and being chewed apart by Nature's creatures - such an event is far enough outside counter-Americana's usual range of sympathy that it is left hanging and not reified to its full potential. Syriana takes this to perhaps its most cynical extreme, with Matt Damon's young protagonist simply gazing out of a car window. "It's beautiful out here," he remarks, as vast waving oceans of golden sand fleet by, the dunes seeming to stretch off into eternity. Nonetheless, he does not for a moment actually consider leaving the car and venturing out into the desert to truly commune with its beauty - the desert is, after all, hot, parching and dangerous, and he has things to do and places to be.

The reason for all this uncertainty and ideological confusion in counter-

Americana with regards to Nature is clear enough. Almost without exception, the counter-Americana films are urban, or at the very least suburban, in their mentality and orientation, and - as with Damon in Syriana - tend to possess a mindset of educated professionals with little to no real, direct experience of Nature. The genre's heavy emphasis upon media and popular culture, and the constant spectre of fascistic social control, are likewise the immediate concerns of those who live in a densely populated, highly regulated environment. Against this, Nature is simply easily idealized as a polar opposite - not somewhere where people live, but where they can go to be alone, to be rejuvenated, or occasionally to die. The opening sequence of Michael Clayton again demonstrates this point. The premise of the scene is that Clayton has come to this isolated

Natural location enclosed inside the artificial technological cocoon of his ultramodern car and immaculate business suit, still connected up to the metropolis via his GPS and cell phone. Divorced from Nature and miserable, he feels compelled to leave his car to commune with the horses in hopes of gaining some solace. The film's discourse makes no suggestion that this signifies a fundamental or permanent change in Clayton's lifestyle, but the sublimity of the immediate moment is not diminished by the fact. The film karmically rewards him for his naturalist impulse, ultimately, by making it his escape from a bomb back in his car, which explodes with him safely away from it.

In a dramatic moment such as this, the horses do not really possess any independent existence of their own. They are important only insofar as they appeal to and feed sentimental human sensibilities. A film which endeavours to truly be about the reality of animals in their Natural environment, mediated through human concerns as little as possible, is rare. In this regard, Jean-Jacques Anneaud's The Bear is practically sui generis. Michael Clayton and its counter-Americana peers are much more inflected by sentiments reminiscent of William Wordsworth, who creates a chaste and platonic vision of Nature as an all-encompassing Mother, before which humanity reaches its highest greatness through passive appreciation - be it strolling through a shady glen or admiring a ruined overgrown abbey. 2 The Bower of Bliss is a pleasant and soothing idea, but one with no vitality because it is premised on denials about the nature of Nature.

Nature's status as the third key anti-fascist tenet of counter-Americana is further complicated, moreover, by the fact that it is the one theme which has been genuinely and consistently competed for by the Right. Outright, unqualified praise of the media's social function is virtually un-heard-of in Rightist dramaturgies, and popular culture usually dismissed as so much frivolity and distraction. Nature, however, has a vital tradition in

Right-of-centre parts of Hollywood history, and is virtually a prerequisite for any film made within the Americana tradition. This aesthetic does not remotely posit Nature as a surrogate deity or as fundamentally rejuvenating, but does something more practical and immediately graspable than counter-Americana: simply presenting Nature as a realm which it is morally and physically healthy to inhabit. "Beautiful country," says Boss

Spearman in Open Range, "a man can get lost out here. Forget there's people and things which ain't so simple as this." On Golden Pond, a key work of Reagan-era Americana, is exactly such a love letter to the America's natural beauty, depicting life in a cottage by the lake in upstate New York forest as an idyllic existence, in which difficulties and contradictions in the American national character may be dissolved. A film such as

Tommy Lee Jones's The Three Burials of Melqiuades Estrada, set in southern Texas ranching country, is not readily available to Americana - there is too much amorality, frank sexuality, respectful depiction of Mexico and questioning of American national authority for that - but it is a powerful work of libertarianism which displays a much easier familiarity with Nature than the counter-Americana films, which must so often ponderously or portentously insist upon Nature's sublimity.

A recent cinematic engagement with Nature is Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, a film shot through with the same anarchic Right-wing sensibility as Braveheart and The

Passion of the Christ, and one which fundamentally depicts Nature not as rejuvenating or restorative, but as ruthless and lethal. The apocalyptic connotations of the title refer to the triumph of Nature over humanity. The film is ostensibly set in the final days of the

Mayan Empire, where infrastructure and society are crumbling, strife is rampant, and force is fast becoming the only authority. In short, a constructed civilization is reverting to a state of Nature. In Gibson's hands, Nature becomes a charnel house. Landscapes such as forests and rivers are just so many lethal obstacle courses. Animals which are not meat are fanged or venomous. The film contains a potent theme of Nature worship, but 100 this is a worship of Nature not based upon uplift but on fear, and is equated disproportionately with human sacrifice.

The violent imagery of the film's Nature is near-limitless. A man is gruesomely dismembered by a jaguar, which is then itself stabbed to death with spears. Men are

smashed to pieces at the bottom of a giant waterfall. A pregnant woman smashes in a

monkey's head with a rock. The film is structured around the theme of the hunt, and the

capture or the kill. Throughout Apocalypto, humans hunt and kill both animals and each

other, and all of the film's key dramatic moments hinge upon the notion of the hunter becoming the hunted. The arrival of the first European conquistadores at the end of the

film, bringing Christianity with them, thus signifies very differently than in counter-

Americana films, where the Christian denial of Nature is treated with unmitigated scorn.

Here, that denial might be expected to act as a corrective to the horrors and excesses of

Nature the film has emphasized thus far. The film does not insist on this, however,

instead ambiguously ending with its hero and his family returning to the forest.

Uncertain and imperfect within itself, then, and contested by ideologically

opposed representation, the question arises: did the counter-Americana Zeitgeist produce

anything truly resonant with its own vision of Nature? The answer to this is yes, finally.

The key text which shows what heights of Natural sublimity counter-Americana could

ascend, given the right material and talent, is Sean Penn's Into the Wild - an adaptation of

Jon Kracauer's non-fiction book about the travels of Christopher McCandless, a young

college graduate who quixotically abandoned his bourgeois American life and went on a

two-year odyssey of hitchhiking and working his way across the United States without 101 money, identification, or communication with his family. If not literally part of the cycle

- it contains no semantic elements of media or popular culture - Into the Wild is unmistakably aligned with the counter-Americana tradition because it provides some of the most forcefully anti-fascist denunciations of the Law of the Father, and also contains an unstintingly positive theme of nostalgia for the Sixties.

Ultimately, Into the Wild takes that fundamental step: changing the counter-

Americana vision of Nature from one of simply gazing upon and appreciation to one of genuine tactile engagement - going out into. Not only is this implicit in the very title, but the film articulates it even further in a scene where, in a drunken rant, Chris declares his main ambition...

I'm just gonna be all the way out there, all the way fucking out there. Just on my own. You know, no fucking watch, no map, no axe, no nothing. No nothing. Just be out there. Just be out there in it. You know, big mountains, river, sky, game, Just be out there in it, you know? In the wild.

This emphasis on "in" is not misplaced. Throughout the film, Chris will genuinely inhabit and immerse himself in Nature's environs on a level which the protagonists of Kinsey,

Syriana, Michael Clayton, and North Country seem incapable. Out in the California redwoods, as per Kinsey, Chris does not merely stride a forest trail and feel himself enriched by the beauty of his surroundings, but actually ventures into the tangle of Nature and balances atop a fallen trunk. Driving through desert country, as per Syriana, he does not merely glance out his window and exclaim the desert's beauty, but drives off the road to ensconce himself for the night and is then buffeted by a flash flood. Chris does not merely stand and passively make eye contact with stationary or horses or deer, as in

Michael Clayton and North Country, but heedlessly rushes alongside their migrating 102 herds - sheer speed and joy in living seeming to efface the difference in species. Beyond this, he plunges into rivers from cliffs and through them in kayaks, and doggedly climbs up mountains as well as simply gazing upon their beauty. Into the Wild, ultimately, is a film which does not merely respectfully acknowledge Nature, but endeavours to use the cinema's powers of reification to convey a genuinely tactile, sensate engagement with it.

Furthermore, the film's focus upon the technocratic details of wilderness living —

watches, maps, axes, etc. - is not coincidental. Into the Wild brings a genuine counter-

Americana sensibility to its vision of Nature because it acknowledges the urban

orientation of its spectator and genre - the fact that the modern literate, media-centred

Western citizen cannot survive out in Nature without any number of invented supports

and prior research. Whereas in Open Range, Boss Spearman was made to sentimentally

praise the "simplicity" of Nature, Into the Wild makes a key plot point out of the sheer

complexity of Nature by emphasizing the inordinate amount of knowledge and skill

required in bringing down big game for food supplies. Having shot and killed a moose,

Chris must desperately race against the clock to drain its blood, remove its heart, carve

away what joints of meat he needs, and get those shaved and smoked before flies become

attracted to the carcass and excrete maggot larvae onto it. Pathetically working from

notes, Chris's efforts ultimately fail. The scene ends on a bittersweet note when a pack of

wolves and a bald eagle are shown getting a hearty meal out of the now-carrion of the

moose - Into the Wild revisiting and correcting In the Valley of Elah, in effect.

This generosity of spirit towards wild animals - teetering on the verge of

sentimentality without actually falling calamitously into it - is another of Into the Wild's distinctions. Kinsey privileges as gatekeepers the animals who inhabit Nature, but the film's imaginative scope is limited in this regard, generally going no further than squirrels, owls and deer. Into the Wild builds immensely upon Kinsey, featuring moose, wolves, eagles, caribou, whales, and chaotic swarms of large oceanic birds. Whereas

Apocalypto's vision of humanity's interaction with Nature was not merely brutal, but, dramatically speaking, often callous and cruel - the ravening jaguar which kills a man and is then speared to death was a female, a mother defending her cub - Into the Wild's is far more sensitive. At one point Chris has drawn a bead upon a caribou, but desists as soon as he sees it is a mother with a fawn. When Chris's experiment in moose-butchery fails, he declares his regret for having undertaken it in the first place, deeming it the greatest tragedy of his life. Such moments may still be more mawkish than the ironic detachment to be found in Werner Herzog Nature-themed films such as Grizzly Man,

Rescue Dawn and Encounters at the End of the World, but in light of such vitality and depth of feeling, a fundamental aesthetic difference between Into the Wild and the other counter-Americana films becomes clear. Into the Wild's implicit insight is its eschewing of Wordsworth for his Romantic successor Byron, a poet of speed and space, unconcerned with viewing the world from above and afar - as though riding far above the

Earth on a "winged steed" - but one whose work surges with vital attachment to the tangible world. 3 Into the Wild does not merely have its hero gazing reverently upon sublime Nature-scapes - although there is still plenty of that - but actively rushing across or towards them. The film begins with an epigraph from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage...

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods There is a rapture on the lonely shore 104

There is society where none intrudes By the deep sand and the music in its roar; I love not man the less, but Nature more... 4

...and soon proceeds to direct Byron's vitality in the direction of Nature by invoking

Henry David Thoreau with great regularity. The film's most eerily resonant citation, which seems to unite the two sensibilities, is that....

There was clearly felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place of heathenism and superstitious rites, to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to the wild animals than we.

The above is read by Chris in voice-over, over an image of him floating naked down an

Alaskan river, at once symbolically immersing himself in Nature's rhythm and flow, and also abandoning and surrendering himself to it - the two things which other counter-

Americana protagonists are not shown to do. This not only affirms Into the Wild's greater awareness of Nature than its counter-Americana peers, but definitively creates a Nature- worshipping sensibility distinct from any of the Right-of-centre dramaturgies described above.

Into the Wild's visual style often evokes Yasujiro Ozu's famous "pillow shots," since on numerous occasions Penn disrupts the visual diegesis of the film to cut away and dwell briefly upon an extreme-close-up of some aspect of a scene's Natural environment.

5 Over the course of the film's 148-minute running time, the spectator sees a great diversity of these images: delicate outcroppings of snow and icicles in the midst of great

Alaskan snowbanks, a mosquito buzzing about on the billowing inflap of a tent, a furry caterpillar scrunching its way along a branch, a crab laboriously dragging itself across wet sand, some delicate Alaskan grass shimmering with dew, a tarantula scurrying across a rock. It is here, in the great beauty, but frequent incongruity and seeming randomness of 105 these various images, that the film finally approaches Herzog's attitude of whimsically bemused observations of Nature. These are images devoid of Christian associations.

Alone, they would not signify in political terms, but united with everything else the film conveys, they form the final piece in a fluently Nature-worshipping text - a great neo- pagan celebration of Nature's grandeur and power. 106

Chapter 6: The Sixties

A moment in the Coen brothers's 1999 film The Big Lebowski sums it up pretty well: a county sheriff, frustrated at the insouciance of Jeff Bridges's "the Dude," flings an ashtray across his desk, hitting Bridges square in the forehead. "Fucking fascist!" the

Dude exclaims, in an apparently instinctive exclamation. Counter-Americana's anti- fascists suspicion of the established order, which manifests itself in the prizing of media and popular culture, and in the Nature-worshipping alternative to Christianity, are all traceable to the intellectual and creative ontology of counter-Americana: the Sixties - its counter-culture, its political activism, and its climate of social change. If counter-

Americana's engagement with Nature represented Wordsworth at his weakest, the Sixties evokes Wordsworth at his best: "Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven!" 1

The Big Lebowski, in the meantime, was a far more prescient film than the Coens could have known. Set in 1991, with America's TV screens filled with a President Bush announcing his determination to use military force against Iraq, the film nonetheless declares the Sixties to still be very much present in America. The Dude is characterized as a walking reminder of all the contrarian, hedonistic, androgynous and non-judgmental aspects of the American character which came to the fore in the Sixties. These were antithetical to the patrician, conservative values which George H.W. Bush embodied, and by whipping the nation up into a patriotic fervour over Desert Storm, he could momentarily deny them in favour of old-fashioned Americana patriotism. The Dude's dogged survival throughout the film serves as a standing rebuke to this fascistic hubris. 107

He is an artefact of the Sixties which, however awkwardly preserved, implies that the counter-culture values represented by the Sixties remain ineradicable. Twelve years later, in 2003, America would find itself poised to attack Iraq yet again, on an even more vast and permanent scale. Coincidentally, in the years to come, the Sixties would enjoy an unprecedented renaissance on American screens. In the counter-Americana cycle, the

Dude would not only be rehabilitated, but accorded a place of honour in American history. As fascistic military aggression again rears its head in America's establishment, in short, the memory of a high water mark of anti-establishmentarianism looms all the larger and more honourable.

The Sixties are the parallel syntax to anti-fascism for counter-Americana, but signify very differently. Anti-fascism is the bedrock ideological assumption upon which all the films are constructed. It is perfectly appreciable in all the films at face value. The

Sixties, in contrast, are the aspect of counter-Americana which is least frequent, but implicit in the films' meanings and implications. These latter are simply summarized as the enduring importance of politics, and the importance of sincerely engaging with them.

The counter-Americana films repeatedly emphasize that withdrawal from or lack of interest in politics is irresponsible in the short term, and disastrous in the long run to oneself and others. A moment early in The Good Shepherd encapsulates this. Matt

Damon's then-young protagonist says, "I'm a poetry student ... I'm not political," but agrees to be drawn into some amateur espionage because of appeals made to his basic patriotism. By the end of the film, set some twenty years later, this initial lack of interest in politics has finally left him completely alone and trapped in the fascistic labyrinth of 108 the CIA, bereft of any stable principle or sense of himself. Doing anything whatsoever out of a sense of patriotism is deemed a recipe for disaster. One must actually think about the political implications of one's actions. Such a rejection of the "my country, right or wrong" mentality underlay the protests against the Vietnam War, as well as a whole host of other movements in the Sixties. The Sixties could be referred to as the spiritual

animating essence of the counter-Americana films — the historical light which continues to shine down upon the creative climate of American cinema, immediately appreciable in

the filmic texts, but only if sought out by more active reading.

This style of political engagement, however, is a far remove from the genial,

complacent self-containment so dear to Americana. The two mentalities are simply

antithetical, and - unlike the ideological balancing act towards the media in Call

Northside 777 — it seems unthinkable that they could made to co-exist simultaneously

throughout the same film without utter incoherence resulting. One mentality must be

privileged by the narrative diegesis, and must be made to win out over the other.

Certainly some Americana films throughout history have dramatized a return to a home-

spun commonsense mentality after a dangerous odyssey through irresponsible political

dabbling (My Son John most infamously), but this is in essence the dramatization of

mental regression, and as such, is difficult to make intellectually convincing or

dramatically satisfying. Counter-Americana, in contrast, has consistently employed the

far more timeless and archetypal narrative trajectory of "the getting of wisdom" or "the

coming to knowledge." For counter-Americana purposes, this means the abandonment of

wilful naivete about the nature of American society and power, and engagement in the 109 political struggle against the fascist aspects of these. In the Valley of Elah symbolically dramatizes this in the same fashion as Costa Gavras's Missing, with an aging father - one who has seemingly never had a contrary or rebellious thought in his life - is shocked into political consciousness by the disappearance and death of his son. In both films, his subsequent engagement with politics is not dwelt upon in great depth. It is merely the mental conversion that matters.

This talk of engagement with politics, however, only tells part of the story. What is ultimately at issue in counter-Americana is a re-engagement with politics - the sloughing off of a torpor of complacency and conformism, and actually standing up for or caring about something. The counter-Americana films are very much of their period in this regard. They are one more manifestation of the Reagan counter-revolution having run for an entire generation, and at last exhausted itself. In spite of everything, the idealistic urge to use film politically had still not left the industry. The counter-

Americana years finally gave this aspect a chance to emerge and shine. After a quarter century of conservative and/or depoliticized politics, the counter-Americana cycle at last showed a willingness on Hollywood's part to re-politicize. Seemingly everything else had been advertised, marketed and sold to audiences. Why should urgent political engagement not join their number?

It is here that counter-Americana's spiritual legacy of the Sixties is most clear: the

Sixties were, in substantial part, a reaction against American culture of the 1950s - the

"Eisenhower era" - with all its connotations of suburban stability, cultural tranquility and political consensus. Even before the counter-Americana years, disdain for the 50s is a theme Hollywood was rarely content to leave for long. L.A. Confidential, Pleasantville,

Far From Heaven, Mona Lisa Smile, and other such films were much less shy about

emphasizing historical progress and change than most period pieces, presenting a vision of a society whose underlying mores are subtly but inexorably shifting, and such change being indubitably for the better. All this is a testament to the liberal tradition in

Hollywood. Once the counter-Americana cycle got underway, however, the gloves truly

came off. Good Night, and Good Luck, Capote and Revolutionary Road all depicted the

50s as an alien society. The three films in tandem depict a determinedly narrow-minded

and parochial society filled with soporific television shows, censorship in libraries,

unfulfilling careers, and culturally barren lives, where alcohol and tobacco use are the

only reliable ways to dull the pain. In contemporary Hollywood's historical narrative, the

Sixties represent an embrace of plurality, impetuosity and globalized consciousness

which rejects all this. Pleasantville, especially, made this totally explicit by closing with a

coda of The Beatles' "Across the Universe" - one of the key anthems of Sixties spirit -

playing over images of a 50s small town which has finally opened its hearts and minds to

the wider world and different ways of living.

The counter-Americana years and those immediately beforehand, thus, were

favourable ones for memories of the Sixties, but there have been other cinematic

historiographies of the period. Cinematic disputes over the legacy of the Sixties emerged

even before the period proper was over, and have oscillated markedly ever since. Another

important film of the 90s, Forrest Gump, was one of the most comprehensive pieces of

revisionism to which the Sixties has ever been subjected. Jonathan Rosenbaum has Ill masterfully dissected the film by positing that Robert Zemeckis's sensibility seems to be grounded in the spirited, anarchic nastiness of 50s MAD magazine comics. As such,

Zemeckis is fully capable, in films such as Death Becomes Her, of making death and mutilation play as comic — something which takes aesthetic skill and narrative courage, no doubt, but nonetheless limits the possibilities for sincere political engagement. 3 A wryly observant style that may have read as iconoclastic in the 50s will have become anything but by the mid-90s. Rather than puncturing conformist sentimentality, it now simply evokes "the neocon jeering found these days in the pages of publications like the

American Spectator." 4

This idea of "jeering" is a crucial one. A key litmus test of attitudes towards the

Sixties is how monolithic a text holds the social movements and youth culture of the time to be. Any book or film which shoehorns the entire revolutionary Zeitgeist of the Sixties into the form of pejoratively caricatured hippies - invariably with long hair and beards, beads, medallions, psychedelic colours, battered old vans, and stoned-out enunciations of

"Peace, Man" - immediately convicts itself of a Right-wing bias. Such a representation as this trivializes the Sixties by making them into a mere fashion trend with little to no contemporary relevance; a bit of harmless youthful nonsense at best, an embarrassing blot upon American history at worst.

"Consider the evidence," Rosenbaum continues. Forrest Gump depicts Vietnam as a tragedy only for Americans, with not a single Vietnamese person to be seen. The film contains no political analysis of the war whatsoever - young men "simply found themselves miraculously transported there, fighting for incomprehensible reasons." 5 The antiwar movement, meanwhile, is made into "a cynical con game spearheaded by pushy women, ranting Black Panthers, and unwashed male hippies who liked to slap their flower-power girlfriends around, giving the lie to their 'peace' platform." 6 The film, in short, accuses the counter-culture of a general hypocrisy. A specific example of this, and another litmus test of Right-wing "jeering" at the Sixties, is the issue of drug use. Is it depicted simply as one more point of contemptible self-indulgence and/or self- destruction, and all the talk about vision, revelation, and harmony merely a hypocritical smokescreen, or does the film take this idea seriously? The counter-Americana years came at a time when Ronald Reagan's vaunted War on Drugs was finally beginning to be understood by growing numbers throughout the West as having failed, and ideas about the legalization of drugs were beginning to gain some traction. A film's treatment of drugs is thus culturally and politically relevant. In Forrest Gump, no attempt is made to depict the counter-culture's drug use positively, or even very seriously. Hallucinogens are made to lead straight to hard drugs, with the horrors of the latter dwelt upon at mordant length.7 This is the reiteration of the idea of marijuana as a "gateway drug" to worse and more potent things - the talking point so dear to proponents of War on Drugs rhetoric.

Even 11 years before Forrest Gump, The Big Chill's fleeting treatment of this theme was far more sensitive, treating William Hurt's capitulation to cocaine use as yet another tragic example of 80s nihilism having triumphed over Sixties idealism. Following five years upon Forrest Gump, The Big Lebowski would contradict the very idea itself, depicting the Dude's cannabis use as a harmlessly relaxing and mellowing ritual with no sinister implications. Come the counter-Americana years, however, the equation would 113 be reversed. Dramatic films such as Bobby and Across the Universe, to say nothing of comedies such as Pineapple Express, seem to herald a new political orthodoxy in

Hollywood, where 60-style convivial drug use is not merely harmless, but benign and enlightening.

Beyond this specific point, however, Julie Taymor's Across the Universe is truly a revelation. As per Wordsworth, it is a film which exudes an almost tangible sense of the

Sixties as having been the most vital and relevant time in the 20th century to have been alive, and especially to have been young. It is, unlike Bobby, not a film merely concerned to eulogize, to revisit, or to recount the Sixties, but to genuinely recapture, and make live again, an ideal of what it could be to come of age - both physically, intellectually, and morally - in 1968. Unlike films devoted to Right-wing jeering, there are no hippie caricatures to be found in the film. Indeed the hippie culture, as conventionally understood, is strikingly absent from the film. In its place, the film reminds us that Sixties youthful rebellion took an endless different number of shapes and forms. Taymor's film rejects any notion of simply swapping the establishment culture's status quo for a mirror- image counter-culture status quo, and instead frames its depiction of the Sixties in terms of a celebration of rootlessness and impermanence. The rejection of establishment culture by the youth of America's middle class is not simply a matter of affecting different clothes and personal habits, but of more fundamentally rejecting its notion of a planned and predetermined life. The film astutely portrays a generation that has been raised from the very first with the expectation that they would chart a course from high school to college, then into the working world, then steadily moving up the professional ladder, 114 finally purchasing a large house in the suburbs where they would be rooted while they raised a family of their own to repeat the whole process over again. Across the Universe is a hymn to those young men and women who emphatically rejected this projected life trajectory, and instead adopted a subsistence lifestyle of going wherever chance offered to take one, and living for the moment while there. Between all the main characters in the film, the Atlantic Ocean is crossed three times, the Pacific twice, from California to New

York, from Detroit to New York, from Dayton, Ohio to New York, and from a generic middle-American suburb to New York.

The narrative's obvious privileging of New York City goes beyond mere choice of setting. Americana's privileging of the small town and the domestic sphere, where supposedly everybody has a fixed and stable identity to hold onto and give their lives meaning, is also a form of moral coercion. A social unit small enough for everyone to know and appreciate everyone else also means that the individual is perpetually at the mercy of group censure, as The Majestic made so clear. Across the Universe is a film which grasps this, and accordingly, fundamentally rejects the Americana privileging of the small town and the traditional family. It instead privileges the urban anonymity and subjectivity of New York as liberating, a place where identity can be grappled with and reshaped from the very bottom up. The Beatles refrain of "I am me as you are he as you are me and we are all together" is one of the film's rallying cries, upon which a central character elaborates "That is so right. That's right. And, you know, if nobody's everybody then someone can be anybody, right?" Certainly identity is no longer determined by career or vocation or sexuality. Throughout the film, transitory and 115 fleeting jobs as waitresses, cab drivers and sketch artists come and go without making much impression. There is the need to sustain oneself at some level, but even paying the rent is a remote concern since the whole cast lives in basically communal and egalitarian conditions in the same apartment, with people casually coming and going as they please - the antithesis of the bourgeois family home with its hierarchies and obsession with permanence.

Across the Universe operates in two thematic registers. On the one hand, there is the above depiction of informal and unregimented community. The lack of bourgeois sensibility in the characters' Greenwich Village habitat is one of the film's most notable points. There seems to be considerable overlap between the characters' communal apartment and their favoured hang-out, the "Cafe Huh?!" where at least two of them earn their living as musicians. The exact number of residents in their apartment, moreover, is never made clear because it is never fixed. People come and go from the frame and the film with no ritual or ceremony, and with no obligations imposed upon them. Of the roughly eight characters which the film develops at any length, "Max" came straight to

New York after dropping out of Princeton, bringing "Jude" who casually drifted into his acquaintance just beforehand, being recently arrived from England and hitherto sleeping in the janitor's office at Princeton. Max's sister "Lucy" gravitates to New York simply to be with him. The Asian-American lesbian "Prudence" hitchhiked away from Dayton,

Ohio in disgust at the suffocating middle-American conformity, and literally takes up residence with the group by crawling in the bathroom window. "Jojo," an African-

American guitarist, left Detroit upon the riots and, finding work in the Cafe Huh?!, 116

inevitably ends up living with the group. "Sadie" is nominally their landlady, but lives in the same conditions as everyone else. Two other characters, although given key dialogue

scenes, are never even named, and the film's cast of extras is sizeable. The ebb and flow

of humanity in the film is inexorable, and unlike films aligned with small-town

Americana ideology, this is made to signify not alienation but vitality, not loss of

selfhood but scope for selfhood. One of the film's most iconic images is an overhead shot

of nine of the cast all lying in tall grass in a grand circle, their heads pointed inwards to

form the center. All are equals, and the mise-en-scene can privilege no one especially.

On the other hand, however, there is a potent strand of Romantic solitude and

Byronic isolation throughout the film. The film opens with Jude sitting alone on a vast

stretch of beach gazing out to sea, wrestling with his emotions and his memories. He

gazes directly into the camera, and begins to express his emotions in the arch form of the

Beatles song "Girl" - a form of popular culture soliloquy, in effect. This is to become one

of the film's overarching devices. All of the main characters are at one point or another

given a substantial sequence, set to a Beatles song, in which they are on their own within

themselves, emphasized by the film as completely apart from the rest of the world. To the

tones of "Because," Max lies floating on the surface of a lake naked, mordantly looking

up at the sky, grimly knowing he will soon be helicoptering around Vietnam. Lucy,

alternately walking through a derelict warehouse and at the edge of a large gathering in

the apartment, weighs her feelings for Max to "If I Fell." Prudence, meanwhile, has a

moment where she perches herself on a railing far outside the apartment window and,

taking up a refrain of "I Want You," gazes waif-like back inside. In short, all these sequences powerfully privilege the Romantic ideal of the individual. Across the Universe, thus, is an emancipated and humanistic film which succeeds where fascist representations fail - at dignifying the individual on the one hand, and yet still valorizing the group on the other. In fascism, these both inevitably fail and lead to dehumanization, with a single ur-individual raised above mere humanity such that all others are denied their basic human dignity. The lone individual is exalted by all others being compulsorily sublimated into a group subservient to him. As has been seen, this basic pattern ranges in scope from the all-encompassing universal of Christian theology to the immediately personal of the patriarchal nuclear family, but the ideological working is the same. The ideal of the Sixties evoked in Across the Universe is a far more humane system, where the group is optional, and all individuals are equal within it. As the film makes clear, moreover, this model leads not to lassitude or indiscipline (as the fascist objection would go), but rather to far more sincere political commitment.

Lions for Lambs is a film which depicts this resonantly. Roughly a third of the film is dedicated to a prolonged conversation between Robert Redford playing worldly- wise political science professor "Stephen Malley," and Andrew Garfield as bright but unmotivated student "Todd Hayes." At the start of their dialogue, Hayes - once an aggressive student of political theory - has now become a dilettante, seemingly concerned only with his designer shirt, and with no higher ambitions than to become a member of America's affluent consumer class and "live the good life." When even gently prodded, however, he unleashes a torrent of fluent invective against America's current political landscape - accusing it of cynicism, venality, avarice, hypocrisy, conformism 118 and degeneracy, and seeking thus to justify his aversion to political engagement. At a time when America's Congress had become the most despised in living memory, such sentiments were less radical than they sounded. Over the ensuing course of the film,

Malley seeks to re-inspire Hayes with hope and purpose, describing his own experiences throughout the Sixties - drafted to Vietnam, then wounded in Chicago in '68, aspiring to become a world-changing political theorist. It all climaxes in the monologue:

Rome is burning, son, and the problem is not with the people that started this. They're past irredeemable. The problem is with us. All of us. Who do nothing. Who just fiddle. Who try to manoeuvre around the edges of the flame. And I'll tell you something, there are people , day-to-day, all over the world, that are fighting to make things better.

After this, Hayes departs Malley's office with one final warning not to delay political engagement too long: "...you're never going to be the same person you are right now.

And promise and potential, it's very fickle. And it may not be there any more." This sort of resonant appeal to youthful revolutionary fervour is rare in Hollywood, far more so than any films such as The Strawberry Statement or Wild in the Streets produced at the

n actual time of the Sixties. Significantly, however, the film offers no clues as to what form such political re-engagement might take. Lions for Lambs is remarkably like a short manifesto, seeking only to galvanize rather than lay out a program. Any remotely politically conscious viewer thus has licence to read his own hopes and aspirations into the film's vague rhetoric about "making a difference" and "changing things."

It was mentioned in an earlier section that Lions for Lambs seemed to be the only important counter-Americana film to evince disdain for modern popular culture. A scene at the very end of the film sees Hayes return to his fraternity and be lazily told by a roommate about an upcoming "Madden tourney," while watching a TV report dealing with "pop singer Fate" having "finally filed for divorce from rapper husband Bully-Dog" after a "now-notorious Pacific Rim tour last summer." Other stories about new "all- natural" cosmetics dealing with "skin turgidity," and "baby toupees" also flicker across the screen. Certainly this seems like a studied caricature on the film's part to emphasize the sheer inane triviality of much modern entertainment. This merely conceals a larger ideological point, however, and that larger point is again the exhortation to re-engage with politics. The film deploys this caricature not for its own sake to disparage popular culture in general, but to make more self-evident the fact that Hayes cannot now resume his old life. Confirming this is another of the film's tributes to the Sixties. Janine Roth, quailing in the face of parroting the latest Republican line, invokes The Who's lyric

"meet the new boss/same as the old boss" to explain the cynicism at work. The same process as in I am Legend is at work — because the Sixties are the cultural and political font of so much Hollywood creativity, its popular culture is awarded great weight of wisdom in explaining the world.

The penultimate image of Lions for Lambs is a slight, barely-perceptible, zoom in on Hayes' face, which in the final seconds subtly shifts from an expression of tortured indecision into one of concentration and resolve. One is reminded of Alberto Korda's immortal photograph of Che Guevara - another key icon of Sixties culture which was restored to prominence during the counter-Americana years, first with 2004's The

Motorcycle Diaries (produced by Redford), and then in 2008 with Stephen Soderbergh's two-part epic Che. Both are far more accomplished works than Richard Fleischer's now- obscure 1969 film Che!, and the latter far more the product of the Hollywood 120 establishment. For better or for worse, the branding and marketing of revolution continues apace. 121

Conclusion

At one point in Annie Hall, Woody Allen declares that "a relationship is like a shark. It has to constantly move forward or it dies." One of many quotable lines in a film filled with them, this statement also applies uniquely well to film genre cycles. Counter-

Americana, which had been so urgently resonant between 2004 and 2006, would reach its peak in 2007, and thereafter begin to drift for lack of direction. Between the rise of a new

Democratic hegemony in Washington after the 2006 mid-term elections, and the imminent election of the liberal Democrat Barack Obama to the American presidency in

November 2008, the oppositional impetus which spurred counter-Americana - the production and release of such a relatively large number of generically coherent films within barely four years of each other - had receded.

As per Allen, by 2008 the cycle had had to move forward and seek out new sources of relevance and urgency, or face an ignominious end through inertia. The former could be seen in the turn towards politicized comedies, such as Harold and Kumar

Escape from Guantanamo Bay and Burn After Reading — wryly satirical films which were the logical heirs to Rendition and The Good Shepherd, once their ideological ground had been mapped out in a serious fashion. The same political statements cannot be made over and over in a solemn fashion without stagnation setting in. The latter fate was keenly to be seen in a film such as Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon, which sounded the same pro- media notes as Good Night, and Good Luck, and possessed the same Nature-revering,

Sixties-eulogizing semantic elements as its counter-Americana predecessors. The film lacked their sense of immediacy, however, and left merely a sense of rote recitation. With the Bush administration moribund - wracked by high-profile scandals, its approval ratings in the lower 30% range, no legislative initiatives left - there was far greater

leeway for Hollywood to engage with it directly without alienating mass audiences. The

earlier counter-Americana films had taken risks in being made at all, and thus had

habitually dealt with contemporary politics by allegorically revisiting past moments of

political theatre. By 2008, however, Hollywood could at last dispense with this approach

and move in for the kill. This was represented by Oliver Stone's W. and the climax of

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, both of which directly appropriated

and interpreted the person and career of President Bush with an authority and sense of

entitlement which would have seemed impossibly audacious back in 2004 or 2005.

Counter-Americana had reached its logical terminus, and had nowhere left to go.

In the final analysis, counter-Americana was only one of a number of different

political threads operating in Hollywood during the second Bush administration. The

cycle's chief distinction was not that it dealt in terms of urgent re-engagement with

politics, or its revisionist dramatization of the American experience, but that it combined

these two syntactic themes. Both had their own independent representation throughout

those febrile years. The theme of Generation Y re-engagement with politics which was so

crucial to Lions for Lambs also formed the basis of a diverse array of films such as V for

Vendetta, Inside Man, and The Illusionist. All of these films deal with young, educated,

professional technocrat types growing beyond the narrow worldview of their craft to

reveal a profound political conscience. Whether it takes the form of bringing a former

Nazi war criminal to book, toppling a corrupt and bigoted prince, or seeing through a 123 full-blown revolution, all of these films rhyme with the counter-Americana cycle emphasizing the importance of political engagement. Politics is made into something redemptive for the individual - a far cry from Americana's genial depoliticization.

As a rule, however, these films know no nationality, with Vfor Vendetta taking place in a caricature of the United Kingdom, Inside Man emphasizing the globalized nature of New York, and The Illusionist taking place in 19th century Germany. They do not link their political verve to any commentary upon contemporary America. Another cinematic trend running parallel to counter-Americana, however does this is spades - a

"New Americana" with a political aesthetic diametrically opposed to Americana's conservatism. Films such as Sideways, Little Miss Sunshine, and Juno share with

Americana the same syntactic celebration of the American character and experience, but recognize that the myths which Americana lives by are ones which have drifted out of touch with the realities of modern American life, and seek to install new semantic tropes in their place. The Western frontier of Open Range gives way, in Little Miss Sunshine, to an emphasis on California as the most populous and vital state in the union; the folksy and unpretentious small town of The Majestic gives way, in Sideways, to extremely chic and sophisticated small towns based around vineyards and wineries; and the conservative nuclear family of Cinderella Man gives way, in Juno, to family units which have abandoned all pretence at traditional normalcy, and simply relate to each other on a pragmatic basis. These films emphasize, as a whole, the random, itinerate, unpredictable, and above all, the comically ludicrous, nature of life in American society today. This was 124 a turn which counter-Americana only took at the very last, having been urgently humourless for the majority of its life cycle.

In the last analysis, then, counter-Americana represents a crucial instance of the

Hollywood mainstream fostering a movement of Leftist, politically oppositional cinema within itself, rather than at its anti-hegemonic margins. That the substance of these politics was highly multifaceted, and its tenor did not remain consistent for long, does not mitigate this fact. Left filmmaking movements have never been a unified or coherent

affair, but simply have broad underlying themes and allegiances. In France, poetic realism in the 1930s fearfully foreshadowed the coming of fascism, and the nouvelle- vague at the dawn of the Sixties insistently showed a world beyond Gaullism. The New

Latin American Cinema, throughout its long and uncertain history, was utterly indivisible

from revolutionary politics. The New German Cinema of the 1970s and early 80s

dramatized the emergence of a new generation, un-complicit with Nazism and refusing to

bear its parents' guilt. And in the 2000s, with the counter-Americana cycle and all the

other politicized currents which flanked it, Hollywood finally joined this august

company. 125

Notes

Introduction

1 Biskind, Peter, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and Rock 'n' Roll

Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), p. 17.

2 King, Noel, '"The Last Good Time We Ever Had': Remembering the New Hollywood

Cinema" in The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in

the 1970s, eds. Horwath, Alexander, Noel King, and Thomas Elsaesser

(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), p. 20.

Giroux, Henry, "Reclaiming the Social: Pedagogy, Resistance, and Politics in

Celluloid Culture" in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, eds. Jim Collins, Hillary

Radner and Ava Preacher Collins (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 37.

4 Rosenbaum, Jonathan, Movies as Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1997), p. 173.

5 Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon, 1993), p.

xi - xii.

6 Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, op. cit., p. 17.

Chapter 1: Counter-Americana as Genre

1 Kellner, Douglas, "Politics and Cinema" in The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, eds.

Hill, John and Pamela Church Gibson (Oxford / New York: Oxford University

Press, 1998), p. 358-359. 126

2 Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (St. Albans, England: Paladin,

1973), p. 42.

3 Anonymous, "Max Baer Jr. Angered by Portrayal of Father in Howard Movie." Studio

Briefing - Film News, June 3 2005. http://www.imdb.com/news/ni0103216/.

Retrieved January 31, 2010.

4 Altman, Rick, Film/Genre (London: BFI Publishing, 1999), p. 216-17.

5 Ibid., p. 220.

6 Ibid. p. 219.

7 Ibid., p. 224.

8 Ibid., p. 222.

9 Ibid.

10 Anderson, Marc Cronlund, Cowboy Imperialism and Hollywood Film (New York:

Peter Lang, 2007), p. 131-132.

11 Altman, Film/Genre, op. cit., p. 223.

12 Schatz, Thomas, "Genre" in The Political Companion to American Film, ed.

Crowdus, Gary (Chicago: Lakeview Press, 1994), p. 180.

13 Altman, op. cit., p. 223.

14 Ibid., p. 218-219.

15 Ibid., p. 223.

16 Ebert, Roger, "Playtime," Chicago Sun-Times, August 29, 2004. 127

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article? AID=%2F20040829%2FRE V

IEWS08%2F408290301 %2F 1023. Retrieved July 28, 2009.

17 Ebert, Roger, "Gosford Park" Chicago Sun-Times, January 1, 2002.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20020101/REVIEWS/

201010302/1023. Retrieved July 28, 2009.

18 Christensen, Terry, Reel Politics: American Political Movies from Birth of a Nation

to Platoon (Oxford / New York: Blackwell, 1987), p. 119.

Chapter 2: Anti-Fascism

1 Sternhell, Zeev, "Fascist Ideology" in Fascism: A Reader's Guide (Berkeley / Los

Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), p. 353-354.

2 Griffin, Roger, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter, 1991), p. 6.

3 Wood, Robin, Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 14.

4 Smith, Gavin, "300." Film Comment 44.1 (2008), p. 39.

5 Wood, Robin, Rio Bravo (London: British Film Institute, 2003), p. 58.

6 Ibid., p. 10.

7 Wood, Sexual Politics, op. cit., p. 19.

8 Ibid., p. 13.

9 Wood, Robin, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan... and Beyond (New York: 128

Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 152.

10 Ibid., p. 153-154.

11 Lewis, C.S., The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (New York: HarperTrophy,

1994), p. 140.

12 Lewis, C.S., The Silver Chair (New York: Colliers Books, 1975), p. 17.

13 Lewis, C.S., Prince Caspian (New York: HarperTrophy: 1994), p. 218.

14 Leab, Daniel J., "Anti-Communist Films" in The Political Companion to American

Film (Chicago: Lakeview Press, 1994), p. 29.

Chapter 3: The Media

1 Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, op. cit., p. 281.

2 McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York /

Scarborough, Ont.: New American Library, 1964), p. 27.

3 Barthes, Mythologies, op. cit., p. 41-42.

Chapter 4: Popular Culture

1 Wood, Robin, Hollywood, op. cit., p. 144-145.

2 Brecht, Bertolt, The Life of Galileo. Trans. Howard Brenton (London: Methuen,

1980), p. 75-76.

3 Grundmann, Roy, "Sex, Science, and the Biopic: An Interview with Bill Condon."

Cineaste 30.2 (2005), p. 11.

4 Crowdus, Gary, "Living in a Wilderness of Mirrors: An Interview with Eric Roth." 129

Cineaste 32.3 (2007), p. 14.

5 Boal, Marc, "Death and Dishonour." Playboy, May 2004.

http://www.playboy.com/magazine/features/death-and-dishonor/death-and-

dishonor-pl.htm. Accessed January 30 2010.

6 Wood, Hollywood, op. cit., p. 148.

Chapter 5: Nature

1 Gilroy, Tony, Michael Clayton: The Shooting Script (New York: Newmarket Press,

2007), p. 15-16.

2 Paglia, Camille, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily

Dickinson (1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1991), p. 300-301.

3 Ibid, p., 357.

4 Byron, George Gordon, Baron, The Poetical Works of Byron, ed. Robert F. Gleckner

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), p. 81.

5 Burch, Noel, To the Distant Observer (London: Scolar Press, 1979), p. 160-162.

Chapter 6: The Sixties

1 Wordsworth, William, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850: Authoritative texts, context

and reception, recent critical essays, eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams

and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 396.

Rosenbaum, Movies as Politics, op. cit., p. 169.

3 Ibid. 130

4 Ibid.

5-Ibid., p. 169-170.

6-Ibid., p. 169.

7-Ibid., p. 170.

8 - Ryan, Michael, and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica : The Politics and Ideology of

Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Press,

1990), p. 34. 131

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