Ryan McNab (11314117)
From Aspiration to Defection: Myths of Hegemony, Class
Identity, and the Role of Subjectivity in Some American
Films of Late 1960’s.
Date of Completion: 3/09/2017
1
stReader: Maryn Wilkinson
2
ndReader: Abraham Geil
MA Film Studies
University of Amsterdam
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*
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168 Allerburn Lea,
Alnwick,
Northumberland,
United Kingdom
NE662QR
r.mcnab13@hotmail.co.uk/
ryan.mcnab13@gmail.com
(+44)7863002774
CONTENTS
Introduction
…1
Chapter 1: Identity as Ideology: Hegemonic Masculinity
and Aspirational Consumerism in The Swimmer
(Frank Perry, 1968).
…5
Chapter 2: Go Ask Archie: Petulia’s (Richard Lester, 1968)
Narrative of Defection and the Representation
of Ambivalence in Subjectivity
…24
Chapter 3: From an Aesthetics of Apathy towards a
Dialogism of Image in Model Shop (Jacques Demy,
1969)
…42
Conclusion: Where to Now? Into a New Decade of
Uncertainty
…58
Bibliography
…60
From Aspiration to Defection: Myths of Hegemony, Class Identity,
and the Role of Subjectivity in Some American Films of Late 1960’s.
The period of the late 1960’s in American culture is often characterized as one of great schismatic polarity. The post-war years saw America undergo significant social and cultural change. Prompted primarily by a booming economy which helped gear national identity towards ‘a new dynamic of capital accumulation centered on consumerism’1, affluence was increasingly touted as the key to emotional fulfillment. Raised in this environment of consumerist celebration and increasing leisure time, many of the “baby-boom” generation gradually found dissatisfaction with the ‘altar of commodity fetishism’2 that had emerged during the 1950s. Coupled with the ramping up of Cold War tension through the country’s amplified military intervention in Vietnam, the continued intensification of various protest movements demanding improved civil rights, and the “loss of innocence” caused by the Kennedy assassination, by the end of the decade, the generational gap had been wrenched to a yawning extremity. Catalysed in part by the civil rights movement’s policies of consciousness raising, ‘the stress on feeling, on personal authenticity, on moral commitment’3 emerges as a central concern for many whose real experiences created a vortex of disillusionment in response to the rampant consumerism that promised a fantasy of fulfillment through capitalism. In response to this ‘social hemorrhaging’4 demonstrated by the counterculture’s increasing visibility, ideological orientations within cultural works began to shift to reflect a less affirmative and assured sense of national identity, and instead attempted to narrate the collapse of an imagined American ideal.
This emerging antagonism that was directed towards mainstream culture nevertheless found itself caught in a state of dependency, in which in order to articulate any attempts at differentiation, ‘a furtive embrace of that culture’5 was nonetheless required. As a key example of this hostile reliance, cinema during this period sees a radical shift in the way narrative structure and formal aesthetics are conceived and
1 Anthony Ashbolt. ‘Hegemony and the sixties: observations, polemics, meanderings’. Rethinking
Marxism: a Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 19.2 (2007). 208-220. 210.
2 Ibid. 211. 3 Ibid. 212.
4 Joan Didion. ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Farrar, Straus and
Giroux: New York, 2008. 84-128. 85.
deployed. With the increase of dissent within wider socio-political life within America, cinema becomes responsive to this sense of routelessness, with emerging filmmakers foregrounding narratives in which the hero is placed within an environment that is acutely jarring and potently obfuscating. The sense of ambiguity regarding the possibility for emotional directedness and its relationship to futurity and movement structured around desire emerges as the central discursive concern during this period. Indeed, Lauren Berlant explains: ‘Political struggle breeds new and ungoverned spaces, which transform constantly in crisis time.’6 Subsequently, the spaces (both diegetic and psychological) that emerge within these text very often reflect the collapse of epistemological understandings of certainty, demonstrating the infiltration of a new kind of consciousness regarding complex ideological registers at work at any given time. In light of the emergence of these narratives of negative assertion, in which the primary emotional thrust is based upon an allergic reactiveness to hegemonic society, the crux of this investigation is an examination in the ways in which subjectivity is produced during late 1960s American film.
Whilst there has been much critical and academic attention already afforded to this period within cinema history, this investigation attempts to combine several seemingly disparate branches of cultural and political criticism in order to shed light upon the role of social identity to the conception of subjectivity at this time. The three key aspects that will be interrogated during this investigation are the role of consumerism, specifically how it manifests as an ideological backdrop within these narratives of dispossession; the conception of gender identity, thinking particularly about the way in which masculinity is constituted through performances of power; and finally, how these both inform and are transform when viewed through the lens of cinematic modernism and its potential for unshackling certain discursive fixities that had previously been diminished by an dominance of propulsive narrative.
The choice to focus upon three somewhat critically neglected films (neglected when compared to canonized works such as The Graduate and Five Easy Pieces, for example) is rooted in the awareness that they offer a myriad of compelling points of investigation into a specific class-based experience. It will hopefully become evident that the films selected, The Swimmer (Frank Perry, 1968), Petulia (Richard Lester, 1968) and Model Shop (Jacque Demy, 1969), all possess unique possibilities in locating the shift in understandings of subjectivity as a political construct through complex renderings of
bourgeois society collapsing under the effects of postwar consumerism. All three films are formally innovative and can be identified as part of the break with classical cinema through their affiliation with character-based narratives as opposed to the of progressive action narratives of the Hollywood tradition. Furthermore, their awareness of the possibilities offered by careful treatment of multiple image registers, demonstrates their acute sensitivity to rendering the anxieties, frictions, and liberatory potential of contemporary modernity.
Ultimately, this thesis aims to position these films as representative examples of their contemporary political climate, demonstrative of the increasingly fraught relationship between identity and the wider sociopolitical upheaval that was occurring nationally and internationally. Thomas Elsaesser’s work on the shift within the motivational logic underpinning many of the ‘New Hollywood’ films of late 1960s and early 1970s will serve as the foundational discourse underpinning much of the reading into understandings of image and its place in relation to narrative structure. Furthermore, this investigation will draw upon the work of several theorists that have been writing from the 1980s onwards, and will hopefully demonstrate the usefulness of thier application in helping to deconstruct to these films. Responding especially to the work of Lauren Berlant and R. W. Connell, it will become evident that the role of gender identity and sociopolitical (dis)enfranchisement are intrinsically bound up within these films. Furthermore, it is through Berlant’s exposure of the intrinsic affective structure produced within an individual under a capitalist system, particularly with regard to the role of fantasy and the promise of self-mobilization, that much of the cinema of disillusionment at this time can be identified as operating in response to the disappointment induced by promise of fulfillment through consumerism. Aiming to provide a synthesis of both the films’ narrative and visual material through close reading alongside an overarching analysis of discursive structures relationship to the wider questions of subjectivity, this thesis will attempt to explicate the aesthetic dimensions and ideological positioning embedded within these three late 1960s films of alienation and defection.
Chapter Outlines:
Chapter 1: Hoping to identify the interdependence upon socioeconomic positions and gender identity, this chapter will draw upon Berlant’s aforementioned work, as well examining the central protagonist of The Swimmer in relation to the concept
of ‘Hegemonic Masculinity’. The chapter will position The Swimmer as a film built around ideological entropy, in which the downfall of the protagonist is produced as both metaphor of its dysfunction and indication of the essential precarity underlying identity in fickle bourgeois society.
Chapter 2: Examining the development of the narrative of alienation that emerges in American cinema at this time, this chapter will identify the way in which Petulia functions as a film structured around an essential ambivalence that manifests at the level of narratological authority. Looking particularly at the way in which Lester produces an incredibly ambivalent perspective throughout the film, the chapter hope to reconcile Elsaesser’s theories of defection alongside a pervasive uncertainty over the role of the bourgeois subject.
Chapter 3: Finally, this chapter aims to situate the fluctuation between image registers identified within Chapter 2 in the context of an urban narrative constructed around the processes of looking (Model Shop). Inspecting the way in which Demy uses the frame as an ambiguous entity, the relationship between space, power, and their representation within cinematic modernism will be made visible, and placed within the context of the kind of post-traumatic narratives witnessed more explicitly in the following decade.
Ultimately, this thesis hopes to explicate the complications that emerge within American culture during this time, specifically by examining the way in which identity can be seen to fracture in light of increasing hostility and suspicion regarding the efficacy of the state as a force of (imperialistic) cultural totality. The desired result for this project is to demonstrate the way in which cinema attempted to grapple with the increasingly complex and polarized political and social environment that emerged by producing a kind of cinema that aimed to problematize the stability of subjectivity and ideology within late modernity, and so figuratively embed the very question of power dispersal and deterritorialisation within their reactionary aesthetics.
Chapter 1 | Identity as Ideology: Hegemonic Masculinity and Aspirational
Consumerism in The Swimmer (Frank Perry, 1968).
Along with other contemporaneous films such as The Graduate (Nichols, 1967), The
Arrangement (Kazan, 1969), and Five Easy Pieces (Rafelson, 1970), The Swimmer can be seen as one of several films of the late 1960s that aimed to interrogate middle class identity and its relationship to the role of social worth and individual alienation from larger community structures. Positioned as an exploration into relationship between citizenship and ostracism, the film works to depict a portrait of bourgeois myopia, of the self-contained communities of ‘wealthy exurban elites’7 who have retreated into the safety of secluded isolation from metropolitan uncertainty. Although the notion of fixed social codes of behaviour and identity were undergoing major disturbance by this point in the decade, a film such as The Swimmer illustrates the way in which the socioeconomically privileged were able to retain (or at least maintain some belief in) a certain kind of separatism from the upheaval that was occurring in urban centres across the country8. Set at the seasonal turning point, as summer’s verdurous abundance is beginning to give way, the film’s depiction of a variety of woozy Sunday afternoon cocktail parties depicts a world in which an essential uniformity in social codes of behaviour dominates. Perry consciously locates the film at the very centre of a mainstream American idyll (that of segregated wealth and whiteness), and he uses the narrative’s episodic structure to comment upon the way in which highly demarcated spaces of existence (in this case the domestically sanitized outdoors) are seen to be constantly at risk of evisceration through improper social intrusion by their patrons. When placed into wider context of 1968, the film is imbued with a distinctly decadent quality, with only the most oblique implication hinting at any kind of contemporary social unrest.
It is through this framing of the relationship between space and social power that the film demonstrates the way in which identity is configured as incredibly malleable and therefore highly precarious. Charting the decline and fall of a symbol of hegemonic power (social and political), The Swimmer offers unique insight into the position of the individual in a society dependent upon materialism as a form of social expression. Placed
7 Christopher Brown. “The Pools of The Swimmer (1968): Exurbia, Topography, Decay”. The
Cinema of the Swimming Pool. Ed. Christopher Brown, Pam Hirsch. Germany: Peter Lang, 2014.
89-99. 89.
8 ‘By 1960 as many people lived in the suburbs as in cities. The new suburbs were relatively
homogenous [… being] predominantly white and middle class’. Nigel Whiteley. ‘Towards a Throw-Away Culture. Consumerism, “Style Obsolescence” and Cultural Theory in the 1950s and 1960s.’ Oxford Art Journal 10.2 (1987). 3-27. 6.
into the context of the late 1960s, it emerges as a film implicitly concerned with the burgeoning counterculture and other reactionary forms of dissent that were materializing at an international level through its depiction of a culture gone stale. As a narrative of ideological implosion, Perry’s film can be identified as being part of the shift in narrative focus and form that emerged during this time (and will be discussed in the subsequent chapters).
Providing a useful theoretical framework in which to consider this understanding of identity’s dynamic relationship to wider structures, Lauren Berlant’s work examines, what she terms, the “cluster of promises”9 that emerges through the intersection between desire, time, and the self within capitalist cultures. Berlant positions her reading of the subject rendered in relation to capitalism as determined by a type of fantasy structure dependent upon anticipation. This (forward-looking) direction of affective fixation becomes a kind of prolepsis of sustenance for the desiring subject, something which Berlant describes as “a relation of cruel optimism”10 inasmuch as it produces a dependence upon the “sustaining inclination to return to the scene of fantasy”11. Berlant’s revealing of the complex affective structures of an individual’s emotional life within a consumer-driven system presents two important points of enquiry with regard to not just The Swimmer but to the wider context of the late 1960s. Though Berlant’s theories of affective structures produced under capitalism are not developed until the 1990’s, they nonetheless offer a potent entry point into both determining and examining the genesis of the mood of defection and alienation that emerges during this decade.
Set in a wealthy upstate New York suburb on a hot Sunday, the plot charts the “slow apocalypse”12 of Ned Merrill (Burt Lancaster), a once glorious upper-middle class alpha-male, as he embarks on his boyish quest to “swim home” through neighbourhood swimming pools. Identifying a somewhat coherent channel in which to move through these neighbourhood pools, Ned christens his newly ‘discovered’ route home as the Lucinda River, aptly named after his wife who, like the actual river of Ned’s zealous imagination, remains absent from the narrative. From the opening sequence of Ned emerging from the forest into the first glistening pool until the final dawning realisation of his cataclysm and isolation as he limps towards the abandoned mansion he and his family once occupied, the film is best understood as a series of disparate encounters that
9 Lauren Berlant. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 2011. 23. 10 Ibid. 1.
11 Ibid. 2.
12 Anne Enright. “Anne Enright Reads John Cheever.” The New Yorker: Fiction. WNYC Studios
all conspire towards producing a narrative structured around the emergence of a crisis time borne out of the cyclicality of a trauma that cannot escape revisiting its own process of collapse.
With this in mind, it becomes clear that The Swimmer can be seen to be enacting into narrative the same kind of double positioning that Berlant’s identifies within work. At the level of the diegetic narrative, Ned’s journey functions as the undoing of the optimism engendered within capitalism’s promise of meritocracy. However, the perspectival positioning of the work as a whole mirrors the way in which this fantasy structure of optimism is itself rendered ineffectual. Therefore, the film takes at once a sympathetic and ironic position in relation to Ned’s plight, and it is clear that the film aims primarily to denaturalize a mythologizing of the labour processes found within capitalism by rendering their ‘inherent’ reward structure ineffectual. Berlant identifies within this structure of optimism a dependence upon various fantasy images that produce within the subject am embedded time-structure that promises the apotheosis of fulfillment in futurity13. Although during the course of the film Ned’s grasp upon time becomes more suspect, the premise of his journey should be read in relation to this idea of the fantasy image, in which the desire to reach his house by swimming becomes a manifestation of Ned’s wish for self-determination, and is constructed as endpoint through which he is able to assert his grandiose masculine identity.
As seen in the film’s opening sequence, Perry playfully indicates the film’s potentiality to toy with comic moments: initially, the unidentified figure of Ned is presented akin to a kind of mythic first man figure wandering through the woods, before he is suddenly thrust into conventional modernity as he dives into an unoccupied, pristine pool. Ned’s dive into the inaugural pool is presented as a euphoric moment, simultaneously baptismal and essentially corporeal. Though seen most clearly here in this opening transition from the woodland to the manicured lawn, throughout the film the conception of the pool operates as a mediating space that facilitates “the transition from the natural to the civilized”14. Certainly, Ned’s use of pools throughout the narrative is demonstrative of their function for him as sanctioned spaces that allow him both to engage with the social milieu and simultaneously suspend himself as a social body by becoming a purely physical entity. Furthermore, the pools within the film are constructed as socially determined spaces in that they both permit and require Ned to demonstrate
13 Ibid. 23.
his gender identity, increasingly recognized to be masculinity through muscularity. This extends further to the way in which identity is self becomes determinate upon context in that “Masculinities [sic] are configurations of practice that are accomplished in social action”15. For Ned, a performance of his identity as a masculine figure demonstrates an attempt to invoke a sense of coherence through adherence to a relatively normative notion of self-worth. However, his inability to remain fully normative within this social context reveals itself through his muscularity in comparison to the rest of the slightly flabby, and comparatively emasculated, husbands.
With this notion then that “masculinity is constituted in social process”16, the question of Ned’s own culpability to his position within the wider social group becomes a central tenet of understanding how the film deals with identity. As mentioned, Ned’s body throughout the film becomes a site of immense discursive conflict. Operating as visualization of masculinity, with his muscularity demonstrative of a specific type of effective citizenship: on the one hand it indicates the possession of raw strength and is highly functional, but it also implicitly indicates self-discipline in that Ned’s body is a product of exertion. The film visually separates Ned from his other male neighbours, who are all politely clothed and physically less imposing, a point of which Ned himself makes teasing reference to, gesturing towards the middle-aged spread an old friend has acquired. Ned is clearly a troubling body; he disturbs the passivity of the various pools he visits (particularly towards the first half of the narrative) with his overt display of an ideal of authentic masculinity, structured around the promise physical virility. Obviously this has to be read a specifically performative type of gender embodiment, in which Ned’s (almost) nakedness seemingly demonstrates a lack of self-consciousness that emerges as a direct consequence of his (fallacious) self-belief in his social currency. Whilst Ned’s actions are noticeably divergent from that of the rest of his neighbours, his presence throughout the various pool encounters (particularly when he is still ‘in command’ at the beginning) is demonstrative of a kind of fantasy of masculinity in which the ‘interplay of obligation and desire’17 to a hegemonic ideal is enacted. As with any kind of performative aspect of identity, the juncture between dependence and self-determination is relatively indistinguishable. When Ned’s display of his physicality is considered in relation to his status, it becomes evident that his potential for disturbance, whilst alarming on the level
15 R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt. ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the
Concept’. Gender and Society 19.6 (Dec. 2005). 829-859. 836.
16 Ibid. 838.
17 Judith Butler. ‘Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics’. AIRB. Revista de Antrhopologia
of wider social implication, places him at a significant deficit in comparison to his less corporeally engaged male neighbours. As the final scene reveals, Ned is deficient at the level of material and financial success, having lost it all through job redundancy and marital breakdown. Subsequently, he occupies a dual position for his neighbours throughout the film as symbolic of the potential for significant material loss, a warning manifestation of the inability to sustain the promise of upward mobility, whilst also calling into relief the listlessness of domesticated life through his unguarded vitality.
Of the ten pools he visits during his quest to swim home, the first five (ignoring a tense encounter with the mother of a now deceased friend at the third pool) all receive Ned with open arms, displaying a cordiality and excitement at his unexpected appearance in their gardens. In fact, this first section of the film positions Ned not only as a welcome figure for the majority of those attending the various parties, but also demonstrates him as a site of intense desire, an erotic locus for much of the neighbourhood’s married women. It is in part through Ned’s own prepossession of his status as a figure imbued with much erotic potential, however, that he inadvertently initiates the beginning of his own decline through his hubristic adherence to the fantasy of his own grandiose status. It is at the fourth pool that Ned is able to coerce his daughters’ former babysitter, Julie Ann Hooper (Janet Landgard), to join him on his ardent journey, and, after a brief sojourn through one of the film’s two self-consciously ‘sophisticated’ parties, they find
Fig. 1. The film’s most ironically aestheticized scene of Ned’s journey, in that the glaring artifice of the rock, grass, and trees, in addition to the three point lighting, help to echo the type of studio-bound nature more commonly witnessed in previous decades. Compared to the scene in the public pool, Perry produces this as an environment of pure fantasy.
themselves in a wooded glen (fig. 1). With Ned lost in his nostalgic and heavily romanticized fantasy space, quoting the Song of Solomon (“that belly is like a heap of wheat | Fenced about with lilies”), Julie Ann finds herself confessing the history of her infatuation with Ned. However, Ned’s fantasy of both protection and erotic desire towards Julie Ann backfires and she flees from him after he forcefully tries to kiss her. Functioning as a point of narrative rupture, it is here in which the pure buoyancy of Ned’s fantasy life is first punctured. The film’s constructs this scene as an image of heightened artifice, not only heavily gesturing to the trope found in classical pastoral myth narratives in which a bronzed shepherd woos a virginal nymph, but also by adopting a mise en scene that actively recalls the kind of aesthetically expressive environments found in studio era melodramas and musicals (e.g. Brigadoon). When pressed to know what she did with his shirt that she had stolen, Julie Ann admits to throwing it away: “After a while I decided it was just a shirt”. In demonstrating the maturation of her erotic fixation upon Ned, Julie Ann inadvertently gestures towards an irrevocability of finitude. This sentiment is devastating to Ned in that it reasserts the imposition of time within the trajectory of a self-fashioned narrative constructed around fantasy and desire, and demonstrates to him that feelings and things do alter and eventually abate. With this emerge of the idea of inevitability into his consciousness, Ned’s subsequent encounters at the various other pools gradually force him to emotionally resurface into the reality of his situation, in which he has lost his job, his money, and (it is implied) his family. Receiving a hostile reception at the Biswanger’s raucous party, Ned’s final two pools directly place him back into the timeframe of his socioeconomic disgrace. These encounter with his former mistress (Janice Rule) and the local business owners to whom he owes money produce the final collapse of Ned’s imposing self-image and reveal the ultimate fallaciousness of his notion of his former life. A narrative of the impossibility to exist permanently within a fantasy ideals, Ned’s journey through the various pools reveals a tension between the need for an affective structure that promises a form of coherent and respected citizenship, even if achieved only in fantasy, and the reality of precarity that exists for the individual striving to maintain their belief in this promise.
Through Ned’s fantasy of self, the film demonstrates an implicit concern with the manifestation of gender hegemony as a method of producing experience through its ability to both produce and provide an articulation of an individual’s identity. For Ned, the adoption of various forms of performative masculinity reveal the way in which
gender is frequently constituted through a process of social differentiation. This can be witnessed through the very premise of his journey. In the act of fashioning of his quest to swim home down the self-discovered ‘Lucinda River’, Ned transforms himself into the role of suburban cartographer. With this impulse he effectively refashions suburbia in servitude of his desire, restructuring the county’s topography to facilitate his quest of personal fulfillment by transforming the gardens and pools of his neighbours from their status as private property into sections of a semi-public channel. In many ways this impulse is indicative of his social positioning, in that he moves through the county with the entitlement of his socioeconomic standing, seemingly safe in the assurance that his trespassing is fundamentally unthreatening as it poses no significant material risk. Yet, simultaneously, he problematizes a particularly bourgeois notion of the right to property and privacy through his imposition and appropriation of his neighbours’ pools (not to mention his own apparent placelessness, evidenced even with his assertion of having been “here and there” of late in response to enquiries into his recent absence). His assertion, “I look honest, don’t I?” demonstrates his intrinsic belief in the intertwining of appearances and worth, and itself reflects the film’s own concern with mining the complex relationship “around the notions of surface and depth, understood in terms of ‘form’ and ‘content’”18, that is deftly deployed through the representative symbols of the swimming pools. This implicit tension played out in the battle for authentic meaning certainly operates in the way in which social space and its oscillating discourses react to Ned’s presence at various different points in the film. Indeed, Ned functions as a site of ambiguity and can be read very much in relation to this inherent tension between surface and depth, form and content, in that he undergoes a process of rupture, in which his asserted identity is fractured to reveal an underlying preciousness that had previously lain dormant.
This oscillation in reception in terms of Ned’s place within the narrative’s diegesis is aided immensely by the narrative’s manner of development. Drawing upon the traditions of the picaresque mode’s episodic structure, Ned’s re-encountering of numerous familiar faces during his journey allows him to fully demonstrate a kind of identity that is indicative of his social positioning as a phenomenon of surety, in which the world is constructed in the service of this affirmatively asserted (socially and economically) individual. Indeed, this structuring of experience in relation to Ned is
18 Blandine Joret. “Today, Icarus: On the Persistence of André Bazin’s Myth of Total Cinema”
highly indicative of his identification with a form of gendered citizenship he perceives as correct and stable. For Ned, his masculine identity as a rich, attractive, and virile white man is indicative of his investment in the social fantasy that in part has to be constantly performed in order for it to remain intact and seemingly stable: R.W. Connell describes this “idealized definition of masculinity” as necessarily “constituted in social process.” Therefore, Ned’s quest is itself born out of a underlying desperation to maintain his fantasy of identity by swimming home, an activity that will facilitate a literal display of his embodied masculinity. In spite of this attempt of assertion, Ned discovers the inverse side of his formerly stable citizenship.
Throughout The Swimmer the consequences of being in some form of reliance to a hegemonic structure is central to the text’s affective and political configuration. This is most clearly visible in the way in which identity is seen to be in a relation of dependency towards material forms. For example, the Grahams’ state of the art pool filtration system, the Biswangers’ caviar, and even the Hallorans’ African American driver all function within the film as externalizations of their respective identities; a comingling of the economic alongside the aspirational, the material world is demonstrated as site of sustenance for the class-based fantasy of self. Evidently, an individual’s ability for actualization is rendered in relation to their specific social context. The Swimmer presents this discursive context as that of a specifically suburban type of progressivism that is realized through the act of commodity display. Nigel Whiteley describes this process of ‘communication by possessions’ [original emphasis] during the decade as part of the struggle for ‘status and prestige’19 within the socioeconomically homogenous suburban communities that emerge within post-war America20. Emerging a gauge of self-worth, technological progressivism and materialism become locus points or “provider[s] of material dreams”21, offering a reduction in effort and promising the fantasy of what Berlant identifies as the utopian desire for stasis, in which the necessity of labour has been overcome. In many ways, the emergence of the suburbs during the later post-war years and into the 1960s sees the acceleration of consumerism in part due to the isolation between places of work and these new domestically focused communities. With the increase of economic prosperity in the 1950s coupled with technological advancements, the image of the suburbs emerges as a place specifically geared towards leisure in that the site of labour, places in which income is generated, remains in the located in the nearest
19 Whiteley. “Toward a Throw-Away Culture.” 6.
20 See Becky Nicolaides, Andrew Wiese, ed. The Suburb Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006. 21 Whiteley. “Toward a Throw-Away Culture.” 10.
urban centres. This is certainly the case for socioeconomic grouping found within The Swimmer, in which the presence of New York is frequently alluded to as a contraction for the looming presence of Monday morning. In the film’s opening scenes, Ned’s old camp friend, Stu Fosberg, already dressed as if for the office, passes up the opportunity for a Sunday afternoon drink, motioning to the need for him and his wife to head back to the south after spending three weeks on the Cape. Though a small example, this implication between the end of leisure time and leaving the suburban/exurban space permeates throughout the film. In many ways, for the white-collar husbands encountered obliquely throughout, the imposition of Monday morning rings strong. A key example is during the first party Ned wanders into with Julie Ann, in which he brushes off a job offer by one man and pointedly ignores (at this moment, out of ignorance) the apology given to him for his sacking by another. Ned’s resistance could initially be seen as a rejection of the potentially porous nature between the suburbs and the city, and to some extent this perhaps legitimate. However, it should also be consider that the suburbs in this film represent a crisis of masculinity in the sense that the imprint of the office upon many of the male characters to some extent cannot be shifted. Perhaps when considered in this manner, Ned’s engagement with the swimming pools can be seen as an attempt to occupy the suburban domestic community through an engagement with male physicality; like the notion of the cartographer mapping out a new route, Ned could be seen to be attempting to colonize the somewhat feminine spaces of the suburbs by bringing (masculine) exertion of his journey into leisure. In this sense, the pools not only represent socioeconomic markers or status symbols through their displaying of their owner’s right to leisure-time. And yet, they simultaneously function as liminal zones, situated somewhere between the domesticity of the home and the dream of uncultivated nature, produced a fantasy space for Ned in which he can attempt to reorganize the power dispersals that situate modern masculinity away from suburbia back into his favour. As the film situates itself in relation to specific kinds of class-based experience, evidently the pool comes to represent the kind of financial abundance that begets the option of engagement; it is no mistake that of the nine privately owned pools that Ned visits during the course of his journey, only two of them are being used, in spite of the frequently quoted high temperatures of the day.
Predominantly the pools of the wealthy are depicted as spaces of tranquility, peaceably undisturbed, and at times purposefully disengaged with. This is most notably demonstrated during the Biswangers’ party in which Ned’s already undesired presence is entrenched into
scandal in part by his dive into their unpopulated pool. Ironically, it is seen as strange and disruptive by the guests, demonstrating the way in which the Biswangers’ pool is less a space for physical engagement
but instead a focal point which allows them to display their increasing financial prosperity. This scene in particular is loaded with absurdities, including a series of handheld shots depicting ravenous guests scooping up caviar (fig. 2) and dancing with purposeful extremity in the latest hip style. Indeed, it is made clear that the Biswangers themselves are positioned outside the pantheon of good taste within the community, and they operate within the film as the incarnation of a kind of decadent materialism that is seen as gauche. Their ownership of Ned’s old hot-dog wagon, bought at a white elephant sale at his house, in part demonstrates their attempt to acquire prestige within the neighbourhood through an almost vulture-like reconstituion of things. The openly hostile confrontation from both Grace and Henry Biswanger to Ned’s uninvited presence belies not only Ned’s now unprestigous social status, but further echoes the process of social mobility as form of negotiation, in which the Biswangers have been once ostrasized and dismissed as being nouveau-riche. This negotiation with socioeconomic prestige as being realised through matieral display in part perhaps lies adjacent to the film’s concern with investigating the tension generated between a gulf of form and content. In many ways, the Biswangers are positioned as the zenith of 1960’s decadent materialism, in that their adherence to the idea of upward mobility has pushed them towards the edge into absurdity. Of course, what they represent in terms of
(Fig. 2) The scramble for caviar demonstrates a performance of opulence. Perry’s use of handheld camera here indicates a potential for destabilization, in which the kinetics of this kind of decadence has the potential to resist the order of traditional composition.
materialism gone awry matches Ned’s attempts to (re)construct his own identity through his masculine sojourn. Ned’s position as an ambivalent figure is exacerbated to an even greater degree here through his inability to effectively reintegrate himself into this scene of class performance, and although that in itself could be read as an indictment of such a crassness of material wealth, it could equally be demonstrable as an indictment of the entire process of social mobility; as the Biswangers attempt to forge a new generation of elites within the neighbourhood, they themselves engage in a policy of exclusion, enacting the very ‘cluster of hegemonic promises’22 that has rendered them socially outcast. Both mired in their respective fantasies, they demonstrate ‘the longing for “content:”’ in which ‘the image exists in all its glory, but it has lost touch with reality.’23
Ned’s position within this scene is very much typical of the kinds of dramaturgical composition he is constructed through throughout the film. Perry frequently demonstrates the discrepancy between Ned and his neighbours by having him constantly modulate his position during his various poolside encounters, imbuing him with a restlessness that maintains his social position as relatively ambiguous. This juxtaposition of movement and stasis is indicative of the wider question of success and status within middle class identity. Berlant identifies a wish for ontological stasis within the optimistic attachment to socioeconomic mobility that is central to promise of capitalism. Writing about stasis as symbolic of the culmination of desire’s progressive dynamism, she states that the wishing subject yearns for the ‘end of mobility as a fantasy of endless upwardness, […] the aspiration toward achieving an impasse’24; clearly, this is a theoretical illustration of a particular type of affective dynamic that is produced within a socioeconomic system that is constructed to be dependent upon aspiration in order to maintain its effective momentum. Although Berlant’s argumentation in many ways elides formal consideration, instead focusing more on the implications of the narratives themselves, if this notion of restlessness in relation to sociopolitical orientation and interaction is translated, for our purposes, into a poetics of motivation, then the aforementioned precarity of citizenship within The Swimmer becomes even more potently visible. Ned is an inexorably mobile figure, constantly jostling with the threat of stillness and it the risk of what it might expose.
22 Berlant. Cruel Optimism. 167. 23 Joret. “Today, Icarus”. 186. 24 Ibid. 181-82.
This inability for stasis is seen perhaps most cleanly in an early encounter at the pool of the Grahams (fig. 3). The scene explores the tension that arises from the
sparking of a long-standing, unconsummated erotic connection between Ned and Betty Graham (Kim Hunter). Depicted in an immaculate blue suit and with conservatively coifed hair, Betty Graham is visually indicated as exemplary of the kind of sensible stylishness typical of women of her ilk. Initiated with a roguish slap on the stooped over Betty, the scene is engendered with a playful yet unthreateningly nostalgic energy. Much like his later confrontation with his former mistress (Janice Rule), Ned’s reminiscing with Betty is told as much through the modulations of physical contact and withdrawal as it is with the content of the dialogue itself. The scene perhaps best captures the kind of emotional tumult of possible dissatisfaction that operates underneath much of the asinine pleasantness of the neighborhood. Throughout the short scene the pool is used as an anchoring point, a distracting focusing space in which to return to from moments of potentially troubling implication. As already made apparent from the previous scene, that of the first pool, it was made evident that through the response to Ned by the wife of his old friend, that he functions as a site of erotic attraction. This is certainly upheld throughout much of the film, in which on several occasions Ned comes to be a point of fixation and erotic fantasy for a plethora of the neighbourhood’s females.
As with the rest of these flirtations, Ned’s is positioned in this encounter with Betty Graham as an ambivalent figure who is somewhat dangerous through the erotic
(Fig. 3) This shot demonstrates Ned’s sense of power within the scene: dominating the foreground and stood, bronzed in the sunlight, Betty conversely is diminished in the shadows of middle ground. Kim Hunter’s performance demonstrates a frustrated timidity, and her stance here denotes her shyness when faced with Ned’s bravado.
potential he suggests. Throughout the scene there is a sense of displaced or unfulfilled contact between the two. Conversely, however, it is not a unilateral tension of desire but instead differs greatly in intention. Somewhat similarly to the other encounters aforementioned, Betty Graham seems ambivalently invested in the idea of Ned in that she is half-enamored with his exoticism yet at the same time consciously aware of the risk of he represents. Disparately, Ned’s declaration of “I was crazy about you”, which Lancaster delivers with a kind of unguarded earnestness, is notably situated in the past tense. Though seemingly innocuous when considered in isolation, this moment serves as further example of a network of desire for authenticity that permeates throughout Ned’s entire idea of life. Seemingly, Ned’s own ‘affective’ time-scheme is a complex fluctuation between the urgency of the present, the imperative necessity to swim home, and a continual return to a nostalgic state of youth, seen most overtly with Julie Ann in the woods. Ned’s slippage into these moments of direct honesty has the effect of interrupting the social flow of polite conversation, and frequently renders him as somewhat irregular within the wider social context. Betty’s positioning towards this irregularity clearly oscillates between intrigue and a self-correction mired in her sense of responsibility towards her status as a married woman. For example, her tone when informing Ned about the purity of the new pool (“It filters 99.99.99% of all matter out of the water”) is ambiguously situated between proud declaration and ironic contempt at the what the excessive sanitization may have come to represent within her marriage. This ambivalence at the level of the verbal expression within this scene demonstrates the kind of malaise that has become synonymous with the suburbs, and her association between the filtration system and her husband implies an emotional stagnancy she is unwilling to fully investigate.
The political undercurrent of The Swimmer becomes increasingly made visible within this scene through the deployment of suburbia in its most pristine and ultimately mundane form. Much like the hyper-sanitized pool, the Graham’s garden is the most overtly pruned and spotless within the film. Though Perry does not construct his sets with the same kind of directly absurdist lens as contemporaneous filmmakers Richard Lester and Jacques Demy, the association with modernity and cleanliness (or rather the eradication of unpleasantness) is strongly gestured towards throughout the film. It is within this environment of excessive neatness and precision that Betty’s cautious ambivalence momentarily breaks through: when considered with the implicit erotic tension that emerged a minute earlier when talking with Ned, her subsequent declaration
that “I’ve got everything I ever wanted” seems unintentionally disingenuous. Perry plays upon this internal tension within the character with the emergence of Howie Graham sat on his new lawnmower, as Betty utters, “Funny the way things turn out.” Like Ned’s ‘overweight’ childhood friend from the previous scene, Howie is an emasculated suburban husband, and is distinctly unerotic when compared to Ned’s overt display of muscularity. Ned’s assurance to Howie that his lawnmower is running slow further demonstrates the way in which he acts as a troubling force in that his emphasis of Howie’s implied inefficiency (Howie is made almost synonymous with his gadgets and tools) symbolizes the wider phallic threat he appears to pose to the neighbourhood’s other complacent and docile husbands. The implications of the affective progressiveness associated with capitalism’s optimism-merit trajectory are rendered here at the level of commodity: the Graham’s life should be without tremor because of their investment in items that “cost a bundle”. However, Ned is able to upset this balance between improvement and happiness through his brief intrusion. This short scene is demonstrative of the film’s attempts to generate a dialogue regarding the relationship between desire and authenticity when transmogrified through modernity’s celebration of a kind of hyper-materialism.
In contrast, to this private scene of assertion and erotic suggestion, the public pool that Ned reaches towards the end of his journey is conversely a site of turmoil. Depicted as oversaturated with bodies and noise, it doubly represents a divergent type of socioeconomic space in comparison the privately owned bourgeois sites that have been visited thus far, but it also transforms the very nature of the pool into a space of social plurality. Although the narrative positions the intersection of Ned’s awareness of his personal disgrace with the emergence of the working class into the narrative, it would be too crude to assume that the film equates class position with a type of moral failure. Rather, this scene in the public pool instead can be understood as a potent rejection of materialism as a life practice; instead, the pool is produced a site of revelry and, crucially, is there to be used. It because of its collapsing of the worldview that has dominated Ned’s experience up to this point in the narrative, the public pool necessarily functions as “a domain of humiliation”25 for him, as his transgression of property and/or social boundaries is no longer left without reprimand. Confronted by the angry locals to whom he owes money, class divisions are entrenched to reveal Ned as exploitative, a symbol of the upper echelons of the community who attempt to rely upon their charm and
assurance in lieu of fair treatment. No longer able to move through his carefree adventure of swimming home, instead he has become lost in this ‘extended crisis’ of the present, with ‘one happening piling on another.”26 In response, his body literally begins to fail as he moves closer to his endpoint, realizing its illusory reality.
Within the pool itself, Ned’s humiliation is generated more from his essential anonymity. Perry varies here between wider, long shots of Ned shot from above in addition to a more frenetic subjective camerawork, in which the frame is subject to a myriad of water splashes and jostling bodies (fig. 4). Unlike the private pools that offer Ned an opportunity for physical and ontological suspension, here is confronted with the reality of his own vulnerability. Whereas during his private swims he is able to become literally and figuratively weightless, thereby placing himself in the impasse between crisis points, here, his weight and body manifest as hindrance to him. He is suddenly obstructed from his usual a performance masculinity that is dependent upon a fundamentally virile physicality. This scene in particular demonstrates an ‘extended crisis’ for Ned in he finds himself in an ‘intensified situation in which extensive threats to
survival’27 bombard his emotional stability. This is in part is demonstrated through his anonymity, which produces his body as at once a physical presence, but crucially a presence that is not registered by the surrounding occupants of the pool. Perry’s switching between subjective and objective camera angles demonstrates the way in which for Ned this experience serves as an ontological bifurcation, in which two interpenetrative image registers operate concurrently and temporarily collapse the authorizing perspective.
26 Berlant. Cruel Optimism. 7. 27 Lauren Berlant. Cruel Optimism. 7.
(Fig. 4.) Perry produces the public pool as an experience of extremity for Ned: oscillating between shots of him diminished in the crowd, lost in anonymity, and an inescapable subjectivity produced through hectic point of view shots that work to generate a dizzying quality.
However, it would be remiss to suggest that this scene towards the latter half of the film’s narrative is unique its dialogical variation between point of view within various the image fields. In fact, from the film’s outset, Perry inaugurates the film with a carefully controlled sequence that subtly undermines its own sentimental surface. Commencing with the title sequence, the film opens with the heavy footsteps of an unseen figure (soon revealed to be him), tramping through fenced-off woodland. The presence of the fence immediately demonstrates the film’s concern with property, ownership, and the relations between space and power. Within the context of the forest itself, the presence of this figure is acutely felt as a young buck is startled away from drinking from an idling brook, and a rabbit scarpers at the rustle of the bushes. In these shots, the film’s first engagement with a subtly acerbic playfulness can be glimpsed through the way in which Perry renders an essentially harmonious, even Edenic, vision of nature; Ned’s disturbance of the almost saccharinely pastoral scene (maudlin violins included) is the first indication of the film’s deployment of a covertly ironic and stylized perspective. Later on, during Ned’s wanderings through meadows and woodland with Julie Ann, the camera replicates this interest in foreground the natural world as it dreamily meanders away from them. The continuance of their conversation in voiceover contrasts with the bleached out and half-surrealistic shots of plants, trees, and sunlight, all of which has the effect of imbuing nature with a potentiality to disturb anthropocentricity. In this specific scene, the camera, or at least the frame, asserts itself as somewhat material in its independence from standard (centring) shot composition. As with the subjective camera work in the public pool, by enacting this process of decentring, in which both of Ned and Julie Ann drift in and out of shot in the distance, the issue of the frame as type of point of view is made even more apparent. As with the opening sequence’s use of somewhat pasotral images alongside a restrictive or withholding framing, in this instance Perry constructs not only natural space as semi-transcendent through his use of various visual effects (fig. 5), but introduces a ‘strong visual tension’ by gesturing towards the ‘vacant centre’28 left by obscuring Ned and Julie Ann. By temporarily displacing the protagonists from their own narrative, Perry demonstrates The Swimmer as a text inherently concerned with deterritorialisation and the emergence of oblique and marginal perspectives. By undergoing a process of deframing or decentring, ‘the edges of the frame appear to slice into
28 Jacques Aumont. “The Role of the Apparatus”. Post-war Cinema and Modernity: A Film Reader.
the representation,’ thereby the ability to ‘to “cut off”’29 the narrative focus from their own image is given precedence. To an extent, Ned’s becomes visually extracted from his own narrative of collapse. It is through this process of indicating the precarity of representation within an image that the film demonstrates itself as self-reflexively engaging in disturbing its own formal practices. Whilst these moments of formal slippage (specifically meaning diversion away from producing Ned, etc. as the visual, and therefore narrative, focal point) are rare within the film, their inclusion works to indicate the way in which even the conventionally rendered images are themselves representations. As will be discussed later with regard to Petulia (Lester, 1968), disruption at the level of form allows The Swimmer to become unshackled from the primacy of a singular ideological positioning by indicating the possibility of plurality of alternate viewpoints, implicating a post-humanism in relation to the way its process of decentring destabilizes the totality of an anthropocentric perspective. When considered in relation to Berlant, it demonstrates an attempt to produce an aesthetics that reflects an ability to see the structures of experience
that have been falsely naturalized as singular; by straying from the central narrative with these sequences of shots, the film politicizes the very nature of perspective by revealing its monopoly within the traditional remits proscribed to cinema.
With this polyvalent potential at work within the film’s image registers, it is interesting and perhaps appropriate that in many respects, Ned is positioned throughout the film as a fetish object. As his memory begins to be re-invigorated with the reality of his situation, his body starts to become a site of insufficiency, reflective of the failure of the individual to maintain independence. The transformation of Ned’s body from an image of strength and power, both social and erotic (and therefore a differently rendered fetish image in itself), into a site of immense of vulnerability is shown most directly after
29 Ibid.
(Fig. 5) Though remaining somewhat central within this specific shot, the blur effect demonstrates Perry’s attempts to reorient the frame away from the standard focus of the narrative’s protagonists.
he has been humiliated at the public pool. As he scrambles up the rock, now fleeing to his home, his injured leg (hurt earlier in the narrative) falters and he collapses (fig. 6). For a figure who’s identity is so enmeshed with his physical ability, this moment of falter comes a point of complete identity destabilization. Stripped of his primary
attribute, the metaphor of Ned’s ostrachism is translated into an image of recalling the great heroes of classical tragedy. However, in this narrative Perry has demonstrated that without the possibility of usefulness and ability of maintain that usefulness within the community, Ned is revoked of his very (metaphoric) citizenship. In being perhaps the film’s most fetishistic image, Ned’s body becomes a visual indicator of the collapse of bourgeois self-mythology; it is an image of comeuppance within the context of the film as kind of morality tale charting the implosion of aspirational hegemonic class politics. The positioning of Lancaster’s body works to create an image that suggests a complete defenselessness, whilst at the same time recalling a kind of baroque quality to the inherent beauty within his suffering. As will be made evident with Julie Christie in the following chapter, Perry draws upon the star persona of Lancaster within this scene to demonstrate a metaphoric collapse of the kind of ideological assertion that had dominated American political and cultural life during the previous decades. By clearly intertextually gesturing towards the stratospherically famous shot of Lancaster and Deborah Kerr on the beach in From Here to Eternity (1954), Perry depicts not only Ned Merrill as a fallen symbol, but the also the very apotheosis of masculine strength and virility: Lancaster himself. Perhaps because of the clear sense of Lancaster’s own persona pushing through the diegesis of the film in this moment, the aesthetic quality it is given is one simultaneous beauty alongside the pathos induced by Ned’s humiliation. In mirroring the tension that Ned himself produces by being concurrently both agent and spectacle, this explicitly aesthetic treatment of image demonstrates the film’s interest in producing moments of arrestment through strangeness or rather uniqueness in form and (Fig. 6) Though Cheever described Ned Merrill as a Narcissus figure, the association between his trajectory and the Icarus-myth are perhaps even more visible in this moment.
composition. As with the wandering frame in the meadows, the polyphonic possibilities within images are made explicit through a consciously ironic treatment of surface. Perry can be seen to be producing with this shot an acknowledgement that ideology is imploding, and yet the sense of poignancy and perhaps even nostalgia they induce nonetheless recognizes the right to mourn them.
Chapter 2 | Go Ask Archie: Petulia’s (Richard Lester, 1968) Narrative of
Defection and the Representation of Ambivalence in Subjectivity
As already demonstrated through examination of The Swimmer, the interdependence between capitalism and mobility as an affective metaphor is central to its successful functioning within culture. With the emergence of a cinema of disillusionment during the late 1960s, it becomes evident that a significant rupture has occurred between the reality of lived experience and the optimistic affective structure that is encourage through the kind of aspirational capitalism placed under examination within The Swimmer. Rather, the question of self-determination is situated as the central point of enquiry in both of these films, and though they offer multiple, seemingly contradictory, positions in relation to this, it is evident that each film presents divergent conclusions. Rather than the affirmative mobility and dynamism demonstrated by a pre-collapse Ned Merrill, there emerges during this period an emphasis upon floundering within the remits of livings prescribed by hegemonic society. Emerging from this, in conjunction and interdependently to the burgeoning protest and countercultural movements, issues of self-determination and the right to individual fulfillment away from consumerist materialism and domestic sanctification become vital within the American consciousness.
In many ways, this chapter commences in the residual light of Ned Merrill’s “catastrophe of self”. Looking at the way in which the dream of advancement, of what Berlant would term the ‘sustaining inclination’30 towards the promise of progressive mobility, has finally plateaued and been determined hollow, the question that is begat becomes “and what now?” Certainly, the later period of the 1960s saw the rise of disillusionment with modernity become transformed into an oft-professed cultural maxim calling for everyone to ‘drop out’ of this perceived cycle of dispossession. The rise of the counterculture, alongside escalating tension within many inner cities and increasing presence of the burgeoning women’s movement, generated a cultural milieu intent upon refashioning American culture and its ideology into various radical forms of social and political redistribution. Serving in part as a catalyst as well as a focal point for this mobilizing dissent, the Vietnam War had the effect of generating polarization and insidious divisiveness among the population during this period. Dependent upon affiliation to either pro- or anti-War stances, not only was the question of how
citizenship should exists in relation to certain types of nationalism, but also, various implications regarding the social roles and organization of people within civilian society itself were increasingly transformed through the influence of the War: ‘Within the American counterculture, revulsion against the brutality of war disengaged masculinity from its traditional anchors.’31 With this sense of social dislocation produced through the militancy of the American government during this period, the spirit of protest naturally imbricated itself into the work of many contemporary filmmakers. Drawing upon this sense of emotional fracturing exposed by a background of political strife, cinema found itself recalibrating many rules and schemas that had dominated not only narrative structure but also formal and aesthetic arrangement for decades.
Thomas Elsaesser has described American film during this period, retrospectively termed ‘New Hollywood’, as undergoing a significant transition in relation to the way in which narrative was constructed. Moving away from a classical narrative tradition in which a progressive development of plot is typically privileged over a character-centric focus, what emerges during this period are films that increasingly attempt to invert this narratological inclination towards a propulsive dynamic. Elsaesser identifies within American film at this time a shift in the ‘motivational logic’32 underpinning the temporal and spatial structures composing these narratives’ formal shape. According to Elsaesser, one of the defining features of this new filmmaking was the emphasis upon a certain kind of dispossession, manifested as a denial of assertive action and often rendered in terms of plot through the adoption of a journey motif to provide a logical extension of this emotional listlessness. Whilst classical cinema often drew upon narratives of journeying, often this was enacted in collusion with a frontier mythos, structured around the momentum of progressing toward a final destination. During this period of New Hollywood cinema, however, this narrative assertiveness is shifted in favour of an environment increasingly characterized by apathy towards emotional and/psychological climax.
Elsaesser describes many of the films of this period as aesthetically rendered in terms of ‘a kind of negative, self-demolishing dynamic’33. Inherent within this reactive
31 Sara M. Evans. “Sons, Daughters, and Patriarchy: Gender and the 1968 Generation”. The
American Historical Review 114.2 (Apr., 2009). 331-347. 335-36.
32 Thomas Elsaesser. “The Pathos of Failure: American Films in the 1970s: Notes on the
Unmotivated Hero [1975]”. The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywod Cinema in the 1970s. ed. Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, Noel King. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004. 279-292. 280.
and destructive energy, protagonists typified within this paradigm exhibit a ‘pathos of failure’, in which they embody and enact ‘a radical skepticism about American virtues of ambition, vision, drives’34. Elsaesser’s identification of an essential inertia within many of the contemporaneous heroes at this time gestures towards an extremities of emotional experience, in which it is ‘as if too many contradictions had cancelled the impulse toward meaning and purpose’35. This is certainly evident in Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969) (to be discussed in the following chapter) with its suffusion listlessness of generated by the dread of draft call up hanging over the central character’s final day in Los Angeles. The effect of this foregrounding of emotional routelessness is to produce narratives that attempt to ‘neautralizes [sic] goal-directedness and warns [sic] one not to expect an affirmation of purposes and meanings.’36 In fact, many of these narratives take the motif of the road as a way to examine the very act of moving for movement’s sake. A key example of this cinema of restlessness is found in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People (1969), in which a pregnant housewife (Shirley Knight) decides to hit the road in search of an emotional clarity that extends beyond her experiences within an unfulfilling domestic situation. The film is typical of many of its contemporaries in that it depicts an attempt to exorcise oneself out of a (dubiously) “stable” family or community structure. With the large majority of these road or journey-centric films, the narrative is produced around a process of rejection, constituted through a negation of purpose as opposed to the affirmative nature of the propulsive quest narrative seen previously. Thus, because of the abandonment of the goal-based dynamic seen in these newly structured journey narratives, frequently the traditional anchoring of futurity as an affective motor-device has been elided. Rather, the present emerges as the primary structuring dynamic within these narratives, and is often created as a space that is concerned with the reformation or actualization of a displaced emotional and psychological deficit. It is through this narratological shift seen within many New Hollywood films of this period, that the very question of how to live within time is positioned as vital. Elsaesser even goes as far as to identify these films as ‘dramatise [sic] the end of history’37, eradicating momentum as a central plot concern and subsequently displacing conflict instead into the ‘formal dimension’ of the film’s aesthetic arrangement.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid. 291.
36 Ibid. 281.
