The End of Cinema As We Know It

and I Feel ...

An Introduction to a Book on Nineties American Film

Jon Lewis

ALM Os T HALF A century ago, Jean-Luc Godard famously remarked,

"I await the end of cinema with optimism." Lots of us have been wait-
ing ever since for this prophecy to finally come true.
Nineties cinema was destined to be important even if it wasn't any
good. History is sometimes driven by chronology. Events happen be-
cause the calendar turns a rare and significant page. The nineties fea-
tured two such significant calendar events. First there was the celebra-
tion of film's centenary. Surveys and retrospectives, reruns and retreads
of old products and product lines were mounted in anticipation and cel-
ebration of the motion picture's one-hundred-year anniversary. The
centenary brought proof positive, if such proof was still necessary, that
movies were the dominant art form and format of the twentieth century.
Scholars and journalists alike encouraged a reexamination of the classi-
cal American cinema, the auteur renaissance, the so-called new Holly-
wood with an eye on each moment's importance to "the American cen-
tury." The studios viewed the centenary as an occasion for nostalgia
and self-congratulation, two sentiments they have always found easy to
muster.
From mid-decade on, the celebration of film's past gave way to the
inevitable countdown to the millennium. Films staging the end of the
world proved to be exciting, profitable, and fun. Toying for an hour or
two with some sort of revelation and rapture reflected and refracted
a culture that awaited the end of this or that with irony if not opti-
mism. The millennium (on and off screen) promised a sort of cosmic
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2 JON LEWIS
spring-cleaning. Cinema loomed as a possible casualty. But nobody
seemed all that worried. It wasn't like there'd be nothing for us to watch
in the movies' absence.
The way films were made and exhibited changed significantly at
century's end. The vast twenty-first-century entertainment market-
place now features all sorts of new audiovisual products and new ways
to consume them (over and over again). Films, some of which are not
exactly "films," can now be projected on screens in significantly re-
vamped theaters, in homes on big, highly resolved TVs with multi-
channel and multispeaker home entertainment setups, on little screens
in minivans and on home computers, or on private, personal viewers
we can strap on like those telephones travel agents use. But with all this
new gear, and all sorts of new product, will we necessarily get different,
better movies? Or might we someday in the not so distant future look
back on the '90s with nostalgia and wonder how things might have
been different, if ... ? This book assumes the historic importance of
nineties American cinema and endeavors to examine the key films and
filmmakers, the corporate players and industry trends, film styles, and
audiovisual technologies ... cinema as we once knew it before the dust
of the twentieth century had fully and finally settled.
SOME QUICK OBSERVATIONS ON THE NINETIES
The movie business in the nineties was characterized by an, increasing
concentration of industrial power among a select group of multina-
tional players. Relevant here are four big mergers-Time and Warner
Communications, Paramount Communications and Viacom, the Dis-
ney Corporation and Capital Cities/ ABC, and Time Warner and Turner
Broadcasting (a deal complicated further by an end-of-the-century
merger-in-principle with America Online). To this growing conglomer-
ation and vertical and horizontal integration, we can add some signifi-
cant inter-industry developments: strategic alliances between Internet
companies, telephone carriers, cable television outfits, and what were
once upon a time just film studios.
Nineties Hollywood was dominated by five companies that con-
trolled the industry more completely than the old studio trusts ever did.
This conglomeration was accompanied by growing internationaliza-
tion. As the importance of foreign markets increased, Japanese, French,
THE END OP-CINEMA AS WE KNOW IT AND I FEEL . . . 3
Australian, Canadian, and Italian companies, at one time or another
during the decade, took control of a major "American" film studio. By
decade's end the term" American film" had become relative, perhaps
even obsolete.
New technologies radically changed production, distribution and
exhibition. Forrest Gump (1994), one of the biggest hits of the decade,
ably exploited computer-generated imagery, so much so it made possi-
ble, even inevitable, a future cinema in which location shooting and live
production might become obsolete. More and more multiplexes were
equipped with one or another variant of digital, Dolby sound. The re-
sult was not only higher-quality film exhibition but an increasing pro-
duction emphasis on action-based sound effects (whammies, producer
Joel Silver calls them), pop music packages, and MTV video and record-
;, ing company tie-ins.
Exhibition technologies impacted significantly on motion picture
production. Much of what we saw on screen-The Rock (1996), for ex-
ample, or better yet The Matrix (1999)-was made to suit and exploit the
new sound and image capabilities of the modern movie house.
But despite these improvements, there are plenty of indications that
"going to the movies" may be on its way out. A vast array of sophisti-
cated home box office delivery systems and exhibition software and
hardware became available in the nineties: hardline cables carrying dig-
ital signals, advanced home-TV satellite dishes, the perfect and con-
venient and cheap DVD, big TV screens and home entertainment com-
ponents. Proposed tie-ins with tele-computer home information sys-
tems in development (and much in the financial news) at decade's end
promised to destabilize the theatrical film.going experience even fur-
ther. We can now envision a not so distant future in which we will never
have to leave our houses to see a movie. The rare movie we will leave
our houses to see will be exhibited in dramatically new formats (like
today's IMAX) or at new and different sorts of venues (with five-star
restaurants, with theme park attractions in the lobby).
What made certain films and filmmakers important in the nineties
had less to do with relative quality than with success in the market-
place, a success complicated and multiplied exponentially by merchan-
dising, global distribution, ancillary formats, and the multitude of de-
livery and exhibition systems. The important films were those that
seemed to use filmmaking technology best, films that declared in their
very form and format their status as contemporary, new, or different
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4 JON LEWIS
With each big film the ante was upped with regard to special effects,
(pseudo-) realism, even gross-outs. Film production resembled nothing
so much as a high-stakes poker game, a game in which all the players
bet heavy on the audience's continued desire to see and hear bigger and
louder movies. It was a strategy that carried with it the promise of as-
tronomical profits and paydays. But as every good card player and
every savvy industry player knows, it was also a strategy that required
lots of cash on hand. Only players with enough money to safely play in
such a high-stakes game had any chance of walking away from the table
a winner.
THE END OF CINEMA AS WE KNOW IT
Just as the 1990s came to a close, I wrote to some friends and colleagues
who I think write persuasively on contemporary film and I asked them
to take one quick shot at the decade past.
The thirty-four essays that comprise this book are their responses. I
insisted on brief essays, but that was about all I did to determine things
in advance. So, while this anthology does not necessarily present a
comprehensive tour through the decade, it does offer an indication of
what films, what events, what stories, what signs of a future with or
without cinema most interested film scholars at the end of the 1990s.
The first part, "Movies, Money, and History," includes Thomas El-
saesser' s "The Blockbuster: Everything Connects, but Not Everything
Goes," my essay, "Those Who Disagree Can Kiss Jack Valenti's Ass,"
Jan-Christopher Horak' s "The Hollywood History Business," and Mur-
ray Pomerance's "The Man Who Wanted to Go Back." These essays ex-
amine the ways film history (its unfolding, its preservation, and its
retelling) has become inextricably tied to corporate matters. The ways
films were made, released, and screened, policed and censored, pre-
served and restored in the nineties-how film history was made and re-
membered-bear out that, in the final analysis, in Hollywood, it's al-
ways about the money.
"Things American (Sort Of)," the second section, speaks to the in-
creasingly misleading term "American film." Few films these days are
made in Hollywood. And while most of the studios maintain corporate
offices in Los Angeles, the financing, production, distribution, and ex-
hibition of so-called American films have become so complex and in-
THE END OF CINEMA AS WE KNOW IT AND I FEEL... 5
ternational these days that geographic borders seem quite beside the
point. The three essays in this part-Charlie Keil's American' Cinema
111
in the 1990s and Beyond: Whose Country's Filmmaking Is It Anyway?"
Justin Wyatt's "Marketing Marginalized Cultures: The Wedding Banquet,
Cultural Identities, and Independent Cinema of the 1990s," and Hilary
Radner's "Hollywood Redux: All about My Mother and Gladiator"-
focus on how American cinema in the nineties, in terms of investment
as well as on-screen content, was a global affair.
With the decade only just ending as work on this project began, the
task of identifying certain films as somehow the most important, the
most indicative of what lay ahead was very much the stuff of educated
guesswork. Time will tell whether the contributors to part 3 have cho-
sen films that spoke specifically and only to a certain place and time or
if they have identified films that will emerge as classics of a certain style
or type of filmmaking that took root in the United States in the last years
of the twentieth century. In part 3, "Four Key Films," Pat Mellencamp,
Henry A. Giroux and Imre Szeman, Eric S. Mallin, Frank P. Tomasulo,
and Krin Gabbard provide the following short list: The Matrix, Fight
Club (1999), The Blair Witch Project (1999), and Saving Private Ryan (1998).
What does such a list of important if not good, of indicative if not clas-
sic, films tell us about the nineties? What does the list tell us about
American cinema as we once knew it, about a new American "cinema"
that threatened to emerge at century's end?
It is axiomatic that nineties films-commercial nineties films, at
least-were apolitical. A commitment to political correctness at the stu-
dios and at the MPAA led to a watering down of content. This was less
a political than an economic strategy, as inoffensive films can be mar-
keted to the largest possible audience. The five essays in part 4, "Pic-
tures and Politics," do little to refute the notion that, with regard to con-
tent, nineties American film went soft politically. Instead, these essays
reveal the different ways politics on and in films became an issue. In
"The Confusions of Warren Beatty," Dana Polan examines the complex
politics of celebrity. Thomas Doherty, in his essay, "Movie Star Presi-
dents," focuses on the representation of politics on screen. Like Polan,
Doherty examines how politics in the nineties became the stuff of cine-
matic spectacle, subsumed, confused, and conflated with celebrity im-
ages. Maureen Turim's essay, "The Fantasy Image: Fixed and Moving,"
discusses the official, federal political reaction to on-screen images,
their alleged connection to and liability for the off-screen, on-the-street
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6 JON LEWIS
behavior of impressionable, violent-movie, computer-game-addicted
youth. Ralph E. Rodriguez and Chon A. Noriega discuss films that fash-
ion themselves as political, films targeted at niche markets inclined to
consume politically liberal insights into the lives of peoples of color in
North America. What both Rodriguez and Noriega argue is that even
the best political intentions are thwarted by concessions to genre, con-
ventional storytelling, and narrow and na'ive attempts to rework time-
worn ethnic stereotypes.
R. L. Rutsky's "Being Keanu," David R. Shumway's "Woody Allen,
'the Artist,' and 'the Little Girl,"' Marita Sturken's "Affliction: When
Paranoid Male Narratives Fail," and Alexandra Juhasz's "The Phallus
UnFetished: The End of Masculinity As We Know It in Late-1990s 'Fem-
inist' Cinema" all take aim at one of the decade's most talked about top-
ics, the apparent crisis of masculinity in nineties culture. Rutsky and
Shumway focus on two very different male celebrities: the transcen-
dentally handsome and inscrutable star Keanu Reeves and the consis-
tently newsworthy New York Jewish comic actor, writer, and director
Woody Allen. Sturken sets her sights on a single indicative film, Afflic-
tion (1997). The film, like the Russell Banks novel on which it is based,
focuses on a fruitless battle between an abusive father and an under-
achieving son-two all too familiar nineties men bound by-blood and
despair. In "The Phallus UnFetished," Juhasz closes the chapter by ex-
amining two very popular and different films: Fight Club and South
Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut (1999). That these two films represent
"male trouble" in the nineties in some interesting or important way
dauntingly satisfies the essence of the essay's subtitle: it's "the end of
masculinity as we know it."
Cinema is of course a visual medium, and as such it has from its
start been engaged in setting the standards of physical beauty, even per-
fection. In part 6, "Bodies at Rest and in Motion," Elizabeth Young and
Jerry Mosher examine another sort of cinematic body: the deformed, re-
formed, or just fat. In the body of the female monster in the 1935 film
Bride of Frankenstein (brought back to life again in two very different
nineties films, Frankenhooker, 1990, and Gods and Monsters, 1998), Young
finds a deft game with gender and homosociality. Mosher examines the
ways certain nineties films depict and exploit images of fat people. Be-
cause overweight bodies are so unusual in obsessively fit Hollywood,
fat has become an easy way of identifying film characters as outsiders,
as objects of rejection, humor, or if they're lucky, pity and sympathy.
THE END OF CINEMA AS WE KNOW IT AND I FEEL . . . 7
Much was made in the nineties of a supposed indie revolution.
After all, a handful of independently produced and released titles did
well at the Academy Awards and at the box office. Some of the decade's
most memorable movies (The Blair Witch Project and Being John
Malkovich, 1999, come immediately to mind here) were made and dis-
tributed by so-called independents. But economic analysis hardly bears
out such optimism about an emerging alternative American cinema.
The nineties saw a decline in the number of indie distributors and the
purchase of premier indie outlets by conglomerate studios. The four
contributors to part 7, titled "Independents," take a long hard look at
the alternative scene at the end of the century. Their accounts are, col-
lectively, hardly upbeat. In his Independent Feature Project (Indepen-
dent Spirit Award) speech, writer-producer James Schamus rants about
11 the impossibility of independence in the contemporary marketplace.
Robert Sklar shares Schamus's frustration as he too contends that the
1990s indie scene was far too closely tied economically and formally to
traditional studio product lines. Sklar finds independence only at the
far margins of Hollywood, in, for.example, the intentionally offensive
oeuvre of Harmony Karine. To find the independent spirit, Kathleen
McHugh and Murray Smith venture.even further from the studio main-
stream. McHugh's discussion of Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman
(1996) and Smith's examination of Wayne Wang's adaptation of Paul
Auster's Smoke (1995) and Blue in the Face (1995) suggest that independ-
ence is rooted not in production budgets or in distribution strategies but
in a certain way of making movies, a production grammar that was
once dubbed a new American cinema.
The essays in part 8, "Not Films Exactly," focus on works even fur-
ther from the mainstream, even further from the tradHional setting of
the movie theater. Chuck Kleinhans's "Pamela Anderson on the Slip-
pery Slope" examines the decade's most talked about "film"-the home
video of celebrities Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's honeymoon va-
cation. The distribution and exhibition (transmission, downloading) of
the honeymoon tape, Kleinhans maintains, promise all sorts of prob-
lems and products for the future-films that aren't really films made
available instantaneously to anyone with a modem and an Internet
connection. Hamid Naficy focuses on the only other amateur video to
attain as much nationwide interest: the beating of Rodney King by sev-
eral officers from the LAPD. Naficy takes a provocative look at this
much-seen artifact, arguing in part that the video operated in terms of
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8 JON LEWIS

familiar, fictional cinematic images of people of color in American cities

today. In "Live Video," Laura U. Marks ventures to the museum to find
films that aren't exactly films. An offshoot of performance art and per-
formance video, "live video" is the stuff of mixing and matching new
technologies to provide an expressive and inexpensive alternative to
Hollywood-style filmmaking.
The contributors to part 9, "Endgames," take the collection's title
seriously. Christopher Sharrett, Heather Hendershot, Paul Arthur,
and Wheeler Winston Dixon spell out the end of cinema in terms of
postmodern irony, cynicism, and exhaustion; religious fundamental-
ism and fanaticism made widely accessible by cl~ver entrepreneur-
ship and media savvy; the doomsday formulas in disaster-genre pic-
tures and the cinematic stagings of Armageddon in popular Holly-
wood films; and finally the decline (into oblivion) of what we once
used to call film culture.

At the risk of complicating matters here at the start, perhaps this is not
the end of cinema but rather a transitional period from one new Amer-
ican cinema to another. Perhaps what we are seeing are only new mate-
rial conditions under which film history will persist. American film has
always had a tendency toward repetition (of styles, stars, genres). Even
such significant technological developments as the advent of sound,
color, and the introduction of TV have only revealed the flexibility and
resilience of the industry and the medium it produces.
The basic corporate structure that makes and delivers American
films is stronger than ever. If there is to be an end of cinema, I am sure
it is something these few companies have planned for and are now en-
gineering. Maybe optimism isn't the right term here ... Godard was just
being clever anyway. So long as there is so much money at stake and at
risk, we can all relax. Even if films will soon no longer exactly be films,
even if cinema is once and for all (in some specific, narrow way) really
dead, it's not like there will be nothing for us to pay for and watch in the
future. The likes of Time Warner and Disney will see to that.