Going Global by J.D
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Smokey and the Bandit GOING GLOBAL BY J.D. CONNOR What holds the movies of 1977 together beyond a co- independent filmmakers found their unique voices. In incidence of the calendar? Is there something in the the U.S., there was Charles Burnett’s realism in Killer zeitgeist animating both Suspiria and Smokey and of Sheep and David Lynch’s surrealism in Eraserhead. the Bandit? Slap Shot and Ceddo? Killer of Sheep Even Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s bonkers horror film House and The Car? Probably not. But they might be held began as Toho’s attempt to make a homegrown ver- together in more abstract ways. If you watch enough sion of Jaws. A new Hollywood classicism was on the movies from a given year, you’ll start to see unex- rise, ceding more extreme aesthetic experiments to pected continuities and contrasts, points of cultural these indies and auteurs who had earned their id- consensus and subjects for debate that were invisi- iosyncrasy (Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire). ble at the time. That is, you’ll get a sense of the era’s One can see in Ridley Scott’s first feature, The Duel- themes. Range widely enough and you will also gain lists, the centrality of production design and texture, a sense of what the aesthetic limits of cinema were, of narrative balance, tension, and release that would what enforced them, and where the energy to bust allow him to soon emerge as one of the most import- them apart was coming from. ant Hollywood directors of his era (with Alien and This series plunges you into a moment when glob- Blade Runner). This Hollywood neoclassicism would al cinema was being remade in contradictory ways. favor stunning moments—such as the harrowing styl- The multi-star Hollywood blockbuster in the mold of ization of the end of Richard Brooks’s Looking for Mr. Airport ’77 was having its last gasp, pushed aside by Goodbar—over oneiric narratives, as in Altman’s 3 the genre blockbuster, by horror and space opera. Women or Friedkin’s Sorcerer, films that would only Early seventies character studies such as Five Easy later find major followings. Pieces (1970) had given way to simpler underdog sto- As wide-ranging as it is, the series includes nei- ries such as Rocky (1976). Jaws (1975) would be the ther the biggest movie of the year, Star Wars (George model for a new era of Hollywood-dominated global Lucas), nor the third biggest, Close Encounters of the success. In opposition to this, a range of resistant, Third Kind (Steven Spielberg), which is owed in large @FILMLINC The Car part to the regime of intellectual property protection fascinating: a movie that has all sorts of truckers— and exploitation that they both participated in and women truckers, black truckers, Asian truckers—and helped shape. The 1977 theatrical version of Star no Teamsters. It would be overreaching to say that Wars—the version that, in many ways, remade popu- kindly outlaws like Burt Reynolds’s Bandit were the lar culture—no longer circulates, replaced by a rejig- leading edge of the neoliberal wedge; anachronistic, gered, digitally tweaked version. Why show that if one independent proprietors are the backbone of half a wants to recapture the movie’s unique vision of tech- dozen Hollywood genres. But the late-’70s CB craze nology as both planetarily enormous and intimate— and the trucking genre—White Line Fever (1975), lived-in, beat-up, and kludged together? The story Convoy (1978), Every Which Way But Loose (1978), with Close Encounters is the opposite: it is being held the TV series B.J. and the Bear (1978–81), and, in its by its copyright owner (Sony) for a grand 40th anni- of-kilter way, Jonathan Demme’s Handle with Care/ versary re-release. Why let anyone reduce your movie Citizens Band—revitalized the question of what the “This series plunges you into a moment when global cinema was being remade in contradictory ways.” to a historical curiosity when there is still substantial social really amounted to. Is society defined by an value to be wrung from its long tail? arrangement of government-sanctioned institutions Even in their absence, Lucas and Spielberg sug- like the ICC, the Teamsters, and the Federal Highway gest the forces at work in the widespread turn toward Administration, or is it a contingent network of indi- myth and fantasy. Star Wars ofered mythological viduals clamoring to be heard on all-but-unregulated flights on top of gritty world-building; Close Encoun- public channels? Smokey and the Bandit suggests ters grounded its alien fantasies in an everyday world the latter; it is not a movie about Interstate Highways of air trafc controllers, power company workers, and or the little guy against the faceless empire. Instead, nosey suburbanites. Ralph Bakshi’s animated Wiz- it’s a movie about back roads, county mounties, and ards and Derek Jarman’s Jubilee are earthy fables beer that can’t be shipped east of Texas. like Star Wars. Weir’s The Last Wave and Cronen- In 1977, President Carter began the process of berg’s Rabid are earthbound fantasies. Both storytell- deregulating the trucking and airline industries. ing modes emerge when ordinary political structures (Deregulation would also make home-brewing le- fail to ofer a real collective possibility. gal.) When Smokey premiered, the Brewery Work- Nestled between Star Wars and Close Encounters ers union had just walked out of Coors. The brutal atop the 1977 U.S. box ofce was Smokey and the strike would last more than a year. The company Bandit. When I went back to watch it, I was worried would be hurt by a union-led, nationwide boycott, that the good-time, New Southern outlaw story would but it would find enough scabs to keep going. And be unscreenable—shot through with inexcusable sex- it would hold out long enough that Coors workers ism,FOR grim TICKETS: racism, FILMLINC.ORGor both. It isn’t—it’s something more would eventually vote to decertify the union. That sort of desperation was common enough in the histo- decentering of male physical labor in the emerging ryDEMON of American SEED labor—Barbara Kopple’s 1976 release new economy has an ofshoot in tales of the endear- Donald Cammell, USA, 1977, 35mm, 94m Harlan County, USA won the Academy Award for best ing sexual obsessions of alienated men (Annie Hall, Sunday,documentary August feature 6, 9:30pm in early 1977 for its depiction The Man Who Loved Women). The female counter- of just such a strike. But Smokey’s seamless con- part, though, is nearly always dangerously self-de- version of the contradictions of late capitalism into structive (Goodbar). By filtering women’s subjectivity entertainment makes it a soft volley in the opening of through male eyes, even those films most open to the neoliberal era. the extremes of female experience (Mr. Goodbar, William Friedkin’s Sorcerer tells a parallel tale of 3 Women, Demon Seed) excuse their distance with men who become truck drivers because they have style. Slap Shot, written by Nancy Dowd (and direct- nothing to lose. They are carrying nitroglycerin, not ed by George Roy Hill), reverses the situation. Here, beer, and their workplace protections are nonexis- the relative absence of style allows the confusions tent—that is the whole point. But despite their des- and contradictions of male identity under economic peration, the men have a sense of what society might pressure to simmer without the need to boil over, as be—should be—and just how far away it has slipped. they will in the backseat rape in Saturday Night Fe- The real converse of Smokey’s genial network is ver. Slap Shot is one of the great dirtbag comedies Werner Herzog’s Stroszek, with its central trio and al- of the seventies (like The Bad News Bears [1976]), cohol-soaked story. Stroszek is a canted road movie attuned to class dynamics and far more openhearted that, however funny it is (and it can be hilarious), tells and less self-justifying about its weirdos than 1977’s the story of the progressive absenting of society. Best Picture winner Annie Hall. In Smokey, white, Southern manhood is the locus Today, nearly all of these films are available for of social resistance. In Saturday Night Fever and the home viewing. And if you were to watch these movies documentary Pumping Iron, the ground of the sub- at home, you would see one thing on just about all of ject’s resistance lies in the cultivation and competitive them: a piracy warning. INTERPOL, you would read, “has display of his own body. In both, the startling scene expressed its concern about motion picture and sound comes when our protagonist is forced to recognize recording piracy to all of its member national police forc- someone else’s superiority. In Fever, John Travolta’s es. (Resolution adopted at INTERPOL General Assembly, character realizes that he has won the dance com- Stockholm, Sweden, September 8, 1977.)” The push to petition through racism. As he hands the trophy to head of movie piracy even before the VCR became the deserving African-American couple, he explains, widely available is both an example of the movie indus- “good is good.” In Iron, when Arnold Schwarzeneg- try’s foresight and, in its flatfooted, bureaucratic way, ger watches Ed Corney posing in the under–200 lb. perhaps the closest thing to a truly “global” moment competition, his face beams with an almost infant joy: in cinema. But seeing these films in the social intimacy “That’s what I call posing.” These are the heroes of of the theater today is more than antiquarianism, more the new age—not because they are the best, but be- than nostalgia.