COUNTER-AMERICANA: THE LIBERAL OPPOSITION IN HOLLYWOOD, 2004 -2008 MALCOLM MORTON A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER'S OF ARTS GRADUATE PROGRAM IN FILM YORK UNIVERSITY, TORONTO, ONTARIO FEBRUARY 2010 Library and Archives Bibliothgque et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'Sdition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-62304-6 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-62304-6 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliothgque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par Nnternet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distribute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non- support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. 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Canada iv 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