The Erasure of Politics in American Cinema
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bs_bs_banner 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 docu- mentary. 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.