The Erasure of Politics in American Cinema

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Not a History Lesson: The Erasure of Politics in American Cinema

SHERRY B. ORTNER

There is a long-standing distinction in Hollywood between “entertainment” and everything else. The “everything else” includes among other things any direct address of political subjects, which are assumed to turn American audiences off. This article presents both an ethnographic account of this Hollywood ideology and an examination of several recent films in terms of their different strategies for erasing politics, both narratively and visually. It also reviews some of the theories of how this ideology became hegemonic in the world of American film, and how it plays out at different historical periods. [entertainment, hegemony, Hollywood, independent film, politics]

Introduction invasion of Iraq, and furthermore made some massive errors of judgment, and thus we can be shown very he inspiration for this article came initially from a precisely how Iraq was allowed to disintegrate into series of puzzling experiences with several films chaos. In the film, Ferguson interviews a wide range of that struck me as very “political,” but that were policy people, military people, and journalists who speak T 1 explicitly described by their directors as “not political.” with incredible frankness and eloquence about what The first was a film called Paradise Now (2005) directed needed to be done but wasn’t, and what shouldn’t have by Palestinian-Dutch director Hany Abu-Assad, which I been done but was. The result, as the film makes crystal saw in a screening in Los Angeles. The film is about two clear, was the almost complete disintegration of the rule young men in Palestine, Said and Khaled, who are of law in Iraq after the American invasion, as American recruited to be suicide bombers. Having made the deci- troops stood by and did nothing. sion, however, the two find it difficult to sustain their The film was outstanding—it won the Special Jury commitment. First Said, then Khaled, changes his mind, award at Sundance—but the screening produced the and then Said changes back again. In the last shot, we same puzzle for me as the screening of Paradise Now. see him riding on a bus in Tel Aviv full of Israeli soldiers; The director, Charles Ferguson, spoke for a few moments we see a close-up of his tortured yet determined face; before the film started. Among other things, he said, and then we see a total whiteout, of which the only “This is a film about politics and policy but it is not a interpretation is that he has blown up the bus and political film.” Again, I was taken aback. How could a himself. There was a Q&A after the screening with the film that is overtly and deeply critical of the Bush director, Abu-Assad. It was the first Q&A of my project, administration’s misconduct of an extended and devas- and I did not take detailed notes on the questions but tating war be said to be “not political”? I wrote in my have a note to myself that “the director said several times notes, “I’ve gotten used to hearing this, and by now I ‘I don’t believe in putting politics in movies’.” I was think I know what it means, but it still is startling to me.” stunned—what could it mean to say that a movie about Palestinian suicide bombers is “not political”? For a second example, director Charles Ferguson Independent Film made a documentary about the Iraq War called No End in Sight, which I saw at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. This article, which addresses this puzzle and the more The basic point of the film is that the Bush administration general issue of the erasure of politics in film, is one made virtually no plans for the occupation following the part of a larger study of the world of American

Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 29, Issue 2, pp. 77–88, ISSN 1058-7187, online ISSN 1548-7458. © 2013 by the American Anthropological Association. DOI: 10.1111/var.12006. 78 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 29 Number 2 Fall 2013

independent film (Ortner 2010, 2012, 2013). I should say two other political documentaries, Chicago 10 (Bret immediately that the erasure of politics is not specific to Morgen, 2007) and Operation Homecoming: Writing the independent film, and in fact is general to American Wartime Experience (Richard E. Robbins, 2008). cinema as a whole. If anything, one can find more The other films to be discussed are three American- political films in the independent sector than in made features, including Half Nelson (Ryan Fleck, Hollywood, especially among documentaries. But my 2006), Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006), and examples for this article will be drawn from independent There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007). Half film, since that was the focus of the research, and since in Nelson is a relatively classic “indie,” in that it was made any event many independent filmmakers share with on quite a low budget ($700,000) and was completely Hollywood the idea that politics in film are to be avoided. independently financed. Marie Antoinette was a rela- A few words first about the distinction between tively big-budget film, but it was made at American independent films—“indies”—and Hollywood movies. Zoetrope, a breakaway mini-studio founded by Francis For the most part, people who make independent films Ford Coppola and others as a place to make films that define their work as being against Hollywood, or not depart from Hollywood norms. There Will Be Blood, also Hollywood: not commercial, not formulaic, not pander- a relatively big-budget film, was made under the aus- ing to some lowest common denominator of taste. Inde- pices of a division of Paramount Studios called Para- pendent films are ideally made outside of the Hollywood mount Vantage. When independent films started to studios, on low budgets and with money from outside become popular in the 1990s, most of the Hollywood investors. The whole idea is to explore subject matter studios started up so-called specialty divisions like that Hollywood would not address, or to explore famil- Paramount Vantage, designed to make independent- iar subjects in ways that Hollywood would never do. style films—somewhat off-Hollywood but yet with Independent films are often quite challenging and some (they hoped) commercial potential.3 unpleasurable to watch. One Hollywood-oriented film- Looking at the group as a whole, we see much, but maker, clearly no fan of indies, described them collec- not quite all, of the indie spectrum. At one end, the very tively as “dark, dysfunctional, heavy, violent, twisted, low-budget (five-figure) film, which is in a sense the alternative kinds of things” (Jennifer Farmer, quoted in prototypical independent film, is missing. This is simply Stubbs and Rodriguez 2000:28). One can also find com- an artifact of my choices for this article. At the other edies among independent films, but they are always a end, the reader may be wondering why the big-budget little strange—the term one often hears is “quirky”— features count as independent films at all. This would be compared to mainstream comedies. In addition, all the subject of a good argument within the world of documentaries are independent films. independent film itself, but it would take me too far By way of providing some examples, I will use the afield to try to pursue the question here. The short films that will be discussed in this article. I have already answer would be that, despite their relatively large introduced Paradise Now, which is actually a foreign budgets, they still embody a so-called “independent film. Foreign films circulate on the independent film spirit.” In any event, the answer is not crucial for this circuits along with American indies; they often share the article, since as noted earlier, the question of the erasure same anti-Hollywood attitude and aesthetic, and are of politics in American cinema runs through both Hol- seen as kindred spirits to American independent films.2 I lywood and independent films. have also introduced No End in Sight, which is a documentary. Documentaries have been independently financed throughout the history of American cinema, as Ethnography and Texts they are not commercial enough for the Hollywood studios. It is mostly among documentaries that, in the The larger project of which this article is a part is a American context, one will find explicitly political films. hybrid enterprise combining both ethnography and film Thus, in addition to No End in Sight, I will also discuss interpretation. On the ethnographic side, it is a study of

Sherry B. Ortner is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She has done extensive ﬁeldwork in Nepal; the ﬁnal book on her Nepal research, Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering, was awarded the J. I. Staley Prize in 2004. She has been doing research in the United States since the early 1990s, producing New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of ’58, and most recently, Not Hollywood: Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream. Erasure of Politics in American Cinema ORTNER 79

the social and cultural world of independent filmmak- cultural world of independent filmmaking but also in ing. The ethnographic work itself is very broadly con- what might be called ethnography of the films.5 I have ceived, including an oral history of the independent film sought to thicken textual interpretation with ethno- movement, an exploration of the discourses through graphic information wherever possible, and specifically which the independent film community defines itself, a with two additional kinds of information. The first—at discussion of the unsung role of producers in the art and the production end of the process—involves the exten- labor of making independent films, a participant- sive use of interviews with filmmakers, whether by me or observational account of the on-set production process, by other interviewers. Published interviews of filmmak- and more (Ortner 2013).4 ers are available in abundance; they are a standard Yet, there are limits to a purely ethnographic per- feature of the culture and practice of the film world. spective. When anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker Needless to say, I do not assume some one-to-one did an ethnographic study of Hollywood in the 1940s, relationship between the filmmaker’s stated intentions she spent the entire book discussing Hollywood as a and the meaning(s) of the film. The relationship between social and cultural universe and never at any point the filmmaker’s intentions and the final product, not to talked about the actual films being made (Powdermaker mention the relationship between the filmmaker’s inten- 1950). She did talk about Hollywood films in general, tions and the reception by audiences, is enormously mainly to say that they were largely of low quality, but indirect and complex, if not perhaps nonexistent. But I she never named or discussed any actual films in pro- assume that we would need to learn this rather than duction or distribution at the time of her research. This presuming it; it is not a theoretical a priori but an seemed to me very unsatisfactory; why study the film ethnographic question. This does not mean that one industry if it is not making some product that is signifi- accepts every declaration by a filmmaker as to the cantly different from automobiles or shampoo? Thus, meaning of his or her film—far from it. But it does from the outset of the present project, I began watching mean that filmmakers’ representations about their independent films in great quantity, with the notion that work—part of what we in anthropology call “the native some discussion of these films as texts would have to be point of view”—can be used to enlarge the text itself. part of the writings to come out of the project. The other major source of ethnographic data useful Anthropologists are often uncomfortable with for enriching and supporting textual interpretation is at strictly textual work, and in many cases for good the reception end of the process. The whole issue of reasons. For one thing, textual interpretation in (Ameri- reception studies is very complex, and I cannot explore can) anthropology was for a long time associated with it in any depth here.6 In the case of this particular the tradition of work descending from Clifford Geertz project, however, I was able to take advantage of a (e.g., 1973), concerned with “culture” and “meaning.” practice that has become central to the world of inde- Geertzian-style interpretive anthropology was—like pendent film: the screening of films where the film- much of mainstream anthropology at the time— maker sometimes introduces the film beforehand, and in relatively apolitical or uncritical. Although I was trained any event takes Q&A afterward. Screenings with Q&A in the Geertzian tradition, I was later drawn to the much are central to the independent film scene in part because more critical interpretive work of the Birmingham Cul- they constitute a cheap kind of publicity for films that tural Studies school, in which pioneering scholars like by definition do not have large publicity and marketing Raymond Williams (1977) and Stuart Hall (1977) devel- budgets. I watched probably a hundred films with Q&A oped an original synthesis between a Marxist critical afterward, and took notes on the discussions; this con- perspective on the one hand, and an interest in culture stituted an unexpected well of ethnographic data that and meaning on the other. This work, along with related also enlarged the texts in the sense noted above. work linking feminist theory with textual studies (e.g., With all this in mind, let me get back to the point Clover 1992; Traube 1992), has inspired and informed of this article, which is the representation and my approach to textual interpretation in this project and nonrepresentation of politics in American films, includ- this article (see also Kellner 2010; Pfeil 1995). ing both Hollywood and independent films. Another objection to textual interpretation in anthropology is that it may appear highly subjective— as one person’s individual reading of a film or other text, The Representation of Politics in American which may have little to do with the on-the-ground Film History understandings of either filmmakers or audiences. In response to this objection, I have engaged throughout First, what do I mean by “politics”? For present pur- the project not only in ethnography of the social and poses, I am referring here to the politics of large-scale 80 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 29 Number 2 Fall 2013

systems: capitalism, colonialism, the state, war, etc. In A final approach, which again is not incompatible other contexts, I explore issues of what we think of with the others, asks what is specific to the present today as “personal” politics—gender, sexuality, work, moment that might be influencing filmmakers today to family, etc. While it is somewhat artificial to separate avoid the overt representation of politics in film. Here, these two levels, one cannot do everything at once, and I point to a variety of work that has argued that there is the present discussion is confined to politics of the large something particularly politically apathetic or disen- scale. gaged about the post-boomer generation, so-called In addition, I will use a very simple definition of Generation X, which is the generation that has been politics in film: a political film is one that is centrally most involved in the emergence of the independent film concerned with the dynamics of systems of power. This movement. There is a body of work on Generation X would include propaganda films serving the forces of (born roughly between 1961 and 1981) that contrasts domination from above, but I do not address propa- their alleged political apathy with the activism of the ganda films in this work. For the rest, the question is preceding boomer generation, and although there has whether a film serves the opposite purpose, whether the been a certain resistance to this point, on the whole Xers film in some ways “speaks truth to power.” The famous themselves do tend to agree with this charge (Ortner Quaker phrase is particularly useful for my purposes 2006). There is also the work of Fredric Jameson on here as I am interested in the portrayal of relatively the postmodern condition, which again emphasizes overt political criticism, the idea that some individuals the political disengagement of the new generations. or characters actually give voice to critical points of Jameson links this political disengagement with, among view. other things, what he calls the “weakening of historic- The erasure of political messages from films on ity,” the loss of a sense of the past in general and the political subjects has certainly been noted before, and Left/radical past in particular (1984). Jameson’s lan- has been addressed in several different ways. One line of guage linking politics and history will be relevant to thinking focuses on a long-lingering effect of American several of the discussions that follow. I will return in the cultural politics in the mid-20th century. During World conclusions to the various approaches just sketched. War II, there was tremendous emphasis on national solidarity in the fight against the nation’s enemies during the war. Representations of social dissidence “This Is Not a History Lesson” were unpatriotic. World War II was followed by the Cold War and the era of Communist witch hunting, during As the opening examples of the article illustrate, the which expressions of progressive political views were idea that (American) filmmakers do not want to make, not just unpatriotic but “un-American” and actually or do not want to be seen as making, “political films” is quite dangerous (see Biskind 1983; May 1989; Sklar quite explicit in the world of American cinema. Further, 1975). there is a particular trope through which this point is A different, though not necessarily incompatible, made: the idea that one’s film should not come across as line of discussion has recently been opened up by “a history lesson.” I heard this over and over throughout French sociologist Violaine Roussel. Drawing on the the project and will provide some examples here. work of Pierre Bourdieu and others, Roussel places the I first heard this phrase in a class that Barbara films in the context of the norms and values of film- Boyle, then Chair of the Department of Film and Tele- making as a profession, in which filmmakers are trying vision at UCLA film school, was teaching in the school’s to both “make ‘good art’ and sell it” (2010:148). Roussel Producers Masters program. Boyle was teaching stu- argues that taking an unambiguous political position in dents about the art of the “pitch,” the ability to boil a film would “transgress the codes and norms defining down an idea for a film into a few catchy phrases, in admissible and valuable artworks” in the world of pro- order to sell the idea for the film to investors, studios, or fessional filmmaking (2010:140). To this, I would add other relevant parties. The students had been assigned that those “codes and norms” are embedded in a very to find something—a news report, a work of fiction or old dichotomy in Hollywood culture between “enter- nonfiction—that they thought would make a good film, tainment” and everything else, the “everything else” and then to pitch it to the class and to Boyle. A brave including not only politics but also educational, infor- student launched the first pitch, about a book that told mational, and factual materials. Even in the world of a true story about a man named Scott McClung, who independent film, where there is generally significantly was falsely arrested and imprisoned in Mexico, and less emphasis on “entertainment,” some version of this was almost murdered, but was ultimately released. dichotomy is in play. Boyle interrupted the student immediately: “Is this a Erasure of Politics in American Cinema ORTNER 81

documentary?” The student said no. Boyle then while in this view a film—or presumably any other expanded her points about what a pitch is supposed to literary/artistic creation—sees those “facts” as of inter- be and do—as she put it, “to sell, not tell, the story.” The est largely as a context within which larger understand- student started again, trying to accommodate these ings about the human condition emerge. We can hear points, but he kept being too descriptive, too didactic. this in Barbara Boyle’s further elaborations to her Boyle interrupted again, saying: “Are you giving me a student: “You need a thesis sentence, set up your frame- history lesson?” (field notes, November 16, 2004). work, grab your listener. ‘This is a drama about . . . !,’ For an older example, writer Tom Wolfe is quoted as ‘This is a comedy about . . . !’.” And the “about,” though telling a funny story about being on an interview show she never articulated this explicitly, was not the story of promoting the film The Right Stuff (Philip Kaufman, Scott McClung, but what she kept calling “the theme”— 1983), based on his book of the same name. The quote e.g., “a good man caught in a web of corruption” (field starts with Wolfe speaking: notes, November 16, 2004). There are many things that get erased with the “The subject of the show was ‘Movies and Propa- erasure of history, but one of them is a sense of the ganda’ and on the show was [Constantin] Costa political nature of the world as we know it. From Karl Gavras, the most totally propagandistic director Marx to Fredric Jameson, the erasure of history is a ever to breathe the air. . . . [T]he [interviewers] turn metaphor for the erasure of political consciousness as to Costa Gavras, who had just made a movie about such. I will have more to say about the underlying logic the Israelis slaughtering the Arabs, and they turned of this kind of thinking below. For now, however, I want to him and posed a question about politics and to turn to a number of movies and examine the par- propaganda.” [Costa Gavras said,] “ ‘Oh, I don’t ticular strategies they use to erase history and turn really know about such things, I just do entertain- politics into some larger “theme.” ment.” . . . Wolfe chuckled as he thought about Costa Gavras. “Entertainment. He kept using that word, entertainment, . . . and if he said it once, he The Anti-Politics Machine: Strategies said it forty times.” . . . [Eventually Wolfe came to of Erasure7 understand] that Costa Gavras knew exactly what he was doing. “He didn’t want to turn anybody off There are innumerable ways of removing large-scale his films by saying they’re going to get a history politics from films. At the simplest level, the writer (who lesson.” [Quoted in Salamon 2002 (1991):398–399, in independent film is also usually the director) may emphasis added] literally erase a political plotline completely from the script. A striking example of this is the movie There Will For one more example, I saw a documentary at Be Blood directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. The film is Sundance called Chicago 10, about the radical summer described as being “based on” the novel Oil!, published in of 1968 in the United States, and about the trial of the 1926 by radical activist Upton Sinclair, one of the so-called Chicago 7. The film was made by a young so-called “muckraking” journalists of that era. The novel filmmaker, Bret Morgen, who had not been born at the contains a powerful critique of capitalism, described at time these events took place, but who had the idea of one point as “an evil Power which roams the earth, making a film that would carry the political message of crippling the bodies of men and women, and luring the “The Sixties” to the younger generations. The film is not nations to destruction by visions of unearned wealth, and wholly committed to realist representational strategies, the opportunity to enslave and exploit labor” (Sinclair however, and it occasionally does fairly strange things 1926 [2007]:548). One of the central characters in the with the facts and realities of the era that I will talk novel is a man called Paul Watkins, who was radicalized about at greater length below. Thus, in order to prepare as a young man, and who becomes active in organizing the audience for what was to come, Morgen felt com- labor on the oil fields of California in the 1920s. He and pelled to say in advance that, while the film was meant his political friends are constantly harassed by the police. to capture the spirit and energy of the times, nonethe- In the end, the police raid a political meeting, Watkins less “it is not a history lesson” (field notes, January 28, and others are brutally beaten, and Watkins dies a few 2007). days later. It is not difficult to tease out what “not a history Now, anyone who has seen the movie knows that lesson” means in these contexts. “A history lesson” this entire story has been excised from the plot. Both focuses the viewer on the facts of the case and treats Paul Watkins as a character, and the political plotline them as interesting or important in and of themselves, that had been central to the novel, have been erased 82 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 29 Number 2 Fall 2013

from the film. Instead, Paul’s brother Eli, an evangelical person said, “We had several criteria, but one of them preacher, becomes the main antagonist of the oilman was just looking for good art. So much great literature Daniel Plainview, setting up an entirely different has come out of war.” Here then was a documentary tension concerning God and “superstition” rather than about an enormously “political” subject, but the film- capitalism and exploitation. makers and funders decided to move the film away from A second, and perhaps more common, strategy for “politics” and toward “the individual,” “the human,” erasing politics in film involves confining a film to a set and “art.” of relationships that might be located anywhere and The prejudice against explicit representation of anytime at all; all the drama is in the playing out of the politics goes back very far in Hollywood, as I said relationships, regardless of context or backdrop. The earlier, and there is nothing especially contemporary most trivial version of this approach is the (stereotypic) about the general pattern. But there is, I would suggest, soap opera; the most complex and sophisticated version at least one new strategy for taking what would other- is to be found in many so-called “personal” independent wise be a very political subject and somehow destroying films being made today. There is of course a world of or undermining its political message. This is a strategy difference between soap operas and personal indepen- of omitting large chunks of actual “history,” while at the dent films, but both kinds of productions share the same time willfully creating confusion or ambiguity characteristic of focusing tightly on interpersonal rela- about the historical significance of the film. I offer here tionships in a kind of social and historical vacuum. two examples. Yet another strategy is to take what appears on the The first is Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, surface to be a political subject, and to draw to the fore described on the back of the DVD box as follows: its “universal” elements. I discussed this strategy a moment ago, when I was talking about the art of the Academy Award winner Sofia Coppola . . . directs pitch. Here is another example, in this case about a an electrifying yet intimate re-telling of the turbu- documentary called Operation Homecoming: Writing lent life of history’s favorite villainess, Marie Antoi- the Wartime Experience, which I saw at a screening for nette. Kirsten Dunst portrays the ill-fated child Oscar-nominated films followed by a Q&A session. The princess who married France’s young and indiffer- film is based on writing workshops funded by the ent King Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman). Feeling National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for veterans isolated in a royal court rife with scandal and returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, intrigue, Marie Antoinette defied both royalty and designed to help them express and deal with their expe- commoner by living like a rock star, which served riences in the war through writing. The centerpiece of only to seal her fate. the film consists of Hollywood stars doing readings from the vets’ writings about their experiences, and reenactments or other visuals accompanying those The film makes little effort to inform the audience readings. There are also on-screen interviews with the about the world-historic social and political significance veterans and with famous veteran authors (e.g., Tim of the French Revolution, and the most obvious thing to O’Brien) who have written about war. At no point in the say is that Marie Antoinette, the movie, is most defi- film is there any address of the question of whether the nitely not a history lesson. Even though New York Times war was right or wrong, a good thing or a bad thing. film critic A. O. Scott tried to defend the film on other Much of the Q&A afterward focused on this issue. grounds, he also described it as “historically irrespon- On the one hand, one questioner, who identified himself sible and politically suspect” (2006:1). as a veteran of the Iraq War, said, “Congratulations on But Coppola does not merely leave larger historical not making a didactic film. You let people make up their and political information out of the film, information own minds.” But another questioner said, “There is that might have clarified the circumstances with which something about the way the film is set up that is the young Marie Antoinette had to cope. In addition, de-politicizing.” The producer replied, “We made the Coppola plays with the temporality of the film both decision to focus on the human level.” And the repre- aurally and visually, as if to willfully subvert any kind sentative of the National Endowment for the Arts, who of linear historical reasoning. Aurally, the sound track is was also present at the screening, said, “We focused on almost entirely drawn from contemporary rock and rap. the individuals, and on the art, more than the politics.” Visually, there is the famous shot of a pair of sneakers Toward the end, the questioning from the audience among Marie Antoinette’s vast and precious collection focused on how the makers of the film had chosen the of period footwear (see Figure 1). The “rock star” refer- particular writing selections they included. The NEA ence in the box copy was not an accident. Erasure of Politics in American Cinema ORTNER 83

of the] My Lai [massacre in Vietnam], the Rolling Stones played Altamont, and Leonard Bernstein threw a party for the Panther 24 (inspiring Tom Wolfe’s term “radical chic”). America was introduced to new personalities: The Weathermen, Lieu- tenant William Calley, Charlie Manson. . . . From the perspective of the conspiracy trial, the most dramatic event occurred a few days before the defense began its case: Chicago police stormed the apartment of the charismatic local Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and shot him dead in his bed. [Hoberman 2008]. FIGURE 1. Marie Antoinette’s sneakers, from Marie Antoinette. In addition to the almost total lack of relevant historical information, the film plays the same games with I should say here that I am not against unusual “history” that Marie Antoinette did. Aurally, the sound juxtapositions of music and text in films, or against track was almost completely anachronistic, using music whimsical touches like sneakers in an 18th-century from later rock and rap groups like Rage Against the closet, as a general rule or principle. I am, however, Machine, the Beastie Boys, and Eminem, despite the calling attention to the ways in which such filmmaking fact that rap did not even exist as a genre at that time. devices, in the context of a film about major political Visually, in the live footage portions, the film was very events, may work to subvert the political significance of heavy on rapid sequences of images, and on blurry the film or the events themselves. montages, making it hard to read, both scene by scene For another example, seemingly very different but and in sequence. In the animated portions, the style of actually very similar, let us look at the 2007 documen- animation chosen was cartoonish, with very bright, tary Chicago 10, discussed briefly above. The film con- saturated colors and sharp outlines. While it has sisted of live footage from the massive political become relatively standard in documentary filmmaking demonstrations during the Democratic National Con- to use animation in the absence of available live vention of 1968, including very centrally the violent footage, the particular style chosen made the characters police riot against the demonstrators. It consisted as look like figures in a children’s cartoon. Between the well of an animated reenactment of the trial of the sound track and the visual look, the film came across, anti-war radicals who were arrested during the melee as I wrote in my notes at the time, “like an MTV version (“the Chicago 7”), with the voices done by actors, based of 1968.” on the transcripts of the trial. The filmmaker’s intentions, as noted earlier, were laudable—to bring the important political events of “The Sixties” to the aware- ness of the younger generation. A More Complicated Case: Half Nelson Yet the film wound up undermining the filmmaker’s good intentions, using virtually all of the same kinds of Half Nelson, directed by Ryan Fleck (2006), was an deconstruction of “history” and “politics” that we saw in exceptionally popular independent film. It won 22 Marie Antoinette. In the first place, there was almost no awards including Best Film at the Gotham Awards, and historical information that would help the viewer to many best actor awards for the leads, Ryan Gosling and understand what was going on. Many reviewers Shareeka Epps. It also garnered exceptionally strong remarked on this point, but I will quote the Village reviews like the following, just to pick up the one that Voice’s J. Hoberman, since he makes a point of provid- happens to be at hand: ing a capsule account of what is missing from the film. He notes early the film’s “deliberate and irritating To think of this near-perfect drama as merely a absence of context” and then reels off the following seasonal antidote . . . is to damn it with the faintest relevant historical information: of praise. Modest yet moving, this character study reaffirms the humanistic potential of independent During those months, a half-million anti-war dem- cinema and might be the best film you will see all onstrators marched on Washington and were tear- year. [David Fear in Time Out New York, August gassed on the Mall, Seymour Hersh broke [the story 10–16, 2006:85] 84 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 29 Number 2 Fall 2013

In the film, Ryan Gosling plays an idealistic white Salvador Allende. The students are blank-faced as they history teacher, Dan Dunne, who teaches in a mostly recite, and clearly have little understanding of what black inner city middle school. We learn from the outset they are talking about. At the end of each of these that Dan has certain radical ideals, and tries to teach his scenes, the film cuts back to the realist mode and students “dialectics”—the idea, as he says, that history resumes the narrative. works through the struggle between “opposites.” There I will interpret this striking pattern through the lens is a scene in which a fellow teacher is at his apartment of the Jameson article on postmodernism sketched and finds copies of the works of Karl Marx on his earlier (1984). In that article, Jameson has an extended bookshelf. discussion of what he calls “the weakening of historic- But Dan is also a serious base-head junkie whose ity,” or sometimes “the waning of historicity,” in con- habit is bad to begin with and continues to deteriorate temporary (“postmodern”) society. This is one of several throughout the film. The drama begins when he gets ways, including also the “waning of affect” and the loss wasted in the girls’ locker room after school hours and of “depth models” (id/ego, base/superstructure), accord- is found by one of his students, Drey, played by ing to Jameson, through which the capacity for radical Shareeka Epps. Drey is 12-going-on-13 with a long- political thinking and action is being undermined in this gone father, a brother in jail for selling drugs, and a new epoch. caring mother who nonetheless has to work long hours The film appears as a virtual dramatization of and is rarely home. A certain chemistry starts up Jameson’s essay. That is, this is not a film in which between Dan and Drey, with Drey somewhat more of the politics are erased, but rather a film about the erasure, or pursuer. Dan tries to keep things professional, but as his anyway the loss, of historical and political conscious- habit gets worse his relationship with Drey—for ness. We get this sense of “weakening” both in the example, close dancing at a school dance—becomes realist scenes in the classroom, and in the set pieces. In more problematic. It actually takes the neighborhood the classroom, Dan says all the relevant radical things, drug peddler to suggest to Drey that her relationship but he never displays great conviction or passion. Even- with her teacher might be “inappropriate”—“after all,” tually, he says to another teacher, though the reference he says, “he’s your teacher.” is unclear, “I can’t do this any more.” Similarly, the But let us focus on the political story. We note first students try in a good-natured way to respond to what that Dan is a history teacher, and he is specifically he is talking about, but it is clear that it does not make teaching his students about political events in the much sense to them, and the discussion quickly dete- sixties and seventies. At one point, he shows them a clip riorates into joking and horsing around. of Mario Savio speaking in Berkeley during the Free The set pieces with the student recitations and the Speech movement, shouting about the necessity of news clips arguably make the same point, but in a more “resisting the machine,” and Dan tries to get the stu- complicated way. As noted above, the students are dents to discuss what Savio means by “the machine.” He shown not in a classroom but against a blank back- himself is clearly too young to have participated in the ground, on which is projected news footage from the movements of the sixties; we learn later in the film that events in question. The footage includes clips from his parents are old sixties people who still carry the the Civil Rights movement and other events in which torch for the music and the political movements of the the United States is shown to be unjust and violent. The era. students recite their pieces flatly, without tone or All of this is shown in the film in a realist narrative emphasis. I took this as making the same point as the mode. But at certain moments in the film there are events in the classroom—an effort to perform what the oddly staged scenes. The film leaves the realist mode, teacher wants of them but without genuine engagement and we suddenly see a student against a blank back- in the content. But why the different setting? The ground reciting a set piece about some political event of impression made (at least for me) by the mises-en- the sixties or seventies. The student faces the camera scènes of these vignettes was of a newscast, with the and speaks directly into it and to the audience, with students as anchorpersons, facing the camera, speaking news footage of the event playing in the background. in that kind of pleasant but completely impersonal way The first student recites a piece about the Civil Rights about events that—they seemed to be saying—had movement; the second about the Attica prison riot and nothing to do with them. massacre; the third about the assassination of Harvey And then there are the clips of news footage Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public themselves. All of these are short, fragmentary, office; and finally, Drey gives a report on how the CIA chaotic, and hard to read. The sense of chaos is overthrew Chile’s democratically elected president, created by both the jumpy camera movements of news Erasure of Politics in American Cinema ORTNER 85

footage taken on the scene of rapidly unfolding events perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the and the jumpy editing that cuts abruptly between postmodernisms” (p. 60).8 scenes of violence and agitated speakers talking about But back to the main point of this section: Half what is going on. At the same time, the clips are all in Nelson is, as I said earlier, not a film in which history is black and white, often blurry and overexposed. It is as erased, but a film about, among other things, the erasure if the film as material has literally faded over time, a of history. It represents a break with, and an important visual representation of Jameson’s weakening or exception from, the main subject of this article, which is waning of historicity. the vast majority of American feature films in which But there is still the question of why create these history and politics have, through one or another filmic out-of-context scenes in the first place. Dan Dunne as strategy, been removed from the visual and narrative teacher can show visual material in the classroom as he story. did with the clip of Mario Savio’s speech. Why create these strange “newsrooms,” breaking up the narrative continuity of the film? I propose we are seeing Some Brief Conclusions here another aspect of Jameson’s discussion. These decontextualized scenes seem to be saying that history In conclusion, let us return to the question of has not only become faded and distant, but that events why filmmakers, most of whose personal politics are that once had meaning as part of an overarching nar- quite progressive, would pursue these strategies of rative have themselves been decontextualized, broken depoliticizing their films. One way to think about it is as out of linear time and broken up into pieces. The scenes a fairly conscious strategy. It acknowledges the hege- can thus be read as visual statements of Jameson’s mony of the Hollywood worldview that favors enter- famous point, drawing on Guy Debord, that the past has tainment over politics. It asks how one might put a become fragmented into “a vast collection of images, a political message across within this kind of cultural/ multitudinous photographic simulacrum.” He goes on: ideological environment. We heard this in the Costa- “Debord’s powerful slogan is now even more apt for the Gavras story, in which Tom Wolfe saw Costa-Gavras as ‘prehistory’ of a society bereft of all historicity, whose intentionally downplaying the “history lesson” in favor own putative past is little more than a set of dusty of “entertainment” in order to allow his political spectacles” (1984:66). message to get through. Another filmmaker who more And finally one could ask what all this has to do or less explicitly takes this line is Michael Moore. In an with the fact that the well-meaning radical history interview at the 2007 Los Angeles Film Festival, Moore teacher is a drug addict, losing control of his life. I am said, “My first objective is to make a good movie. That’s reluctant to open up a new line of interpretation here, as what I think first, not the politics. If you put the politics I am running out of time and space, but I will make first nobody will want to see it. . . . Don’t forget, it’s a a few brief comments. If one continues within the movie. It’s not a sermon, not a diatribe. You are asking Jamesonian framework, one would have to look at people to spend their money to see it. It is not a Jameson’s discussions of postmodern subjectivity, not documentary, it’s a movie” (field notes, June 26, 2007). unrelated to, but distinct from, his discussions of history There is also a less intentionally strategic version of this and historicity. In this context, Dan Dunne’s progres- same point, as many filmmakers will say that an overly sively deteriorating drug addiction appears as an almost overt political message insults the intelligence of the literal portrayal of a passage from a life of (“modernist”) audience. Audiences should be given the story and the thought and purpose (the radical politics) into new information, and then left to draw their own conclu- forms of postmodern affect. Jameson describes these sions. We heard a whiff of this in the Q&A about new forms of affect in several different ways, but at Operation Homecoming, where an Iraq War veteran in one point he uses the phrase “euphoria and self- the audience congratulated the filmmakers for not annihilation” (p. 62), a combination captured almost too making a didactic film but allowing the audience literally by the drug addiction. Along these lines, we members to think for themselves. may also consider the students’ blank and expression- For many film people (producers and filmmakers), less faces as they read the “news.” Here, too, there is an however, the sense of the need to avoid “politics” does almost perfect fit with another of Jameson’s claims not seem to be consciously strategic. Rather, as Violaine about postmodern subjectivity: the students in these Roussel also argued, it seems to be part of a deeply contexts can be read as enactments or embodiments of taken-for-granted set of assumptions about what makes what Jameson calls “the waning of affect,” defined as for a good and effective film in relation to an American “a new kind of flatness and depthlessness [which is] audience. Here then, we must return to the various 86 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 29 Number 2 Fall 2013

theories/interpretations of the origins and ongoing 2 The majority of films included in the project are American operation of this set of assumptions. made, but I do include the occasional foreign film when I Perhaps the leading interpretation sees the erasure saw it in an American independent film context—an of politics in American cinema as beginning in the American film festival, or a screening sponsored by an mid-20th century, with World War II followed by American independent film organization. 3 With the constriction of the American economy starting in the Cold War and the Communist witch hunting of the 2007, most of these specialty divisions have closed (see 1950s. This may be correct, but it is also clear that the Ortner 2013:Conclusions). elevation of “entertainment” to the status of a dominant 4 Drawing on anthropology, film studies scholar John value starts much earlier, with the early Hollywood Caldwell has spearheaded an ethnographic movement moguls and their ideas about what audiences wanted in that field (Caldwell 2008; Mayer et al. 2009). Caldwell (Gabler 1988). Thus, I think it might be more useful to has been enormously helpful to me and supportive of this think of the primacy of the value of entertainment as a project, and I want to thank him again here. kind of long-running hegemony but one that exerts 5 For other examples, see Abu-Lughod 2005, Caton 1999, greater or lesser force in different historical periods. The Ganti 2012, Larkin 2008, Mankekar 1999, Pandian 2011, circumstances of the 1950s created a great deal of and Roussel 2010. For more about the methodologies of pressure to avoid “history lessons”—that is, any kind of this project, see Ortner 2010. 6 Among anthropologists, Lila Abu-Lughod (2005) and politics—and to promote what were often the most Purnima Mankekar (1999) have both done ethnographic vacuous kinds of “entertainment.” The present moment work on television reception with viewers, David Sutton appears somewhat different. Whether one is talking and Peter Wogan (2009) have done some preliminary work about Generation X as politically apathetic, or the on Hollywood movie reception with students, and there is postmodern subject as politically blank, the “history a large literature on reception in film studies, which I do lesson” appears less as dangerous than as boring and not try to reference here. irrelevant. Either way, however, the point is that for 7 The phrase “the anti-politics machine” is from the title of both periods, and no doubt others, one would ask about a book by the same name, by anthropologist James what kinds of historical pressures are at work in rein- Ferguson (1994). 8 forcing or undermining the hegemony. Thanks to Tim Taylor for pointing out the “waning of affect” And finally, it is worth keeping in mind that sharply connection. More generally, the fit between many aspects of the film and many of the key points of Jameson’s article is critical political films are, after all, being made and are so striking that one is led to wonder whether the connection finding substantial audiences, even in this supposedly might have been intentional on the part of the filmmaker. I apolitical time. Thus, Michael Moore’s films (e.g., have no idea, of course, but it is worth noting here that Bowling for Columbine, 2002) have been extraordinarily many independent film people (producers and filmmakers) successful, despite the fact (and despite his denials) of majored in English literature in college and enjoy reading taking a clear political position against American capi- and talking about literary theory (Ortner 2013:169–171), so talism. Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job (2010) was a laser- the intentionality is at least conceivable. sharp indictment of the American financial industry in relation to the near meltdown of the economy in 2008. Both films did very well at the box office, and both won Selected Filmography Academy Awards. Moreover, both filmmakers made pointed political comments at the podium when they 2002 Bowling for Columbine. Michael Moore, director. received their awards. We need to be alert, then, to the Jim Czarnecki, Kathleen Glynn, and Michael Moore, ways in which a hegemonic formation may be powerful producers. but never total or absolute. 2007 Chicago 10. Bret Morgen, director. Graydon Carter and Brett Morgen, producers. 2006 Half Nelson. Ryan Fleck, director. Jamie Patricof, Notes Alex Orlovsky, Lynette Howell, Anna Boden, and Roseann Korenberg, producers. 2010 Inside Job. Charles Ferguson, director. Jeffrey Lurie 1 A sincere big thank-you to my colleague, Chris Kelty, who and Christina Weiss Lurie, producers. helped me locate the images for this article. Thanks too to Gwendolyn Kelly for managing the image permissions for 2006 Marie Antoinette. Sophia Coppola, director. Sophia publication. In the end I was only able to get permission to Coppola, Ross Katz, Francis Ford Coppola, producers. use one image, which appears as Figure 1. In addition, for 2007 No End in Sight. Charles Ferguson, director. Jennie valuable feedback on the text, I thank Brent Luvaas, Amias, Charles Ferguson, Audrey Marrs, and Jessi Timothy D. Taylor, and an anonymous VAR reviewer. Vogelson, producers. Erasure of Politics in American Cinema ORTNER 87

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