I find it a piece of irony that the new, and once again updated hd blu-ray release of the Star Wars sextet is being released in the same week that The people vs. George Lucas comes available on blu-ray as well. The latter is a documentary piece of film criticism that any serious film historian, or Star Wars fan should see. The former is sure to be loved by the film historians as fodder for criticism, and hated by Star Wars fans. I’m a bit of both. I write film and theatre reviews for the Martlet and studied film as part of my MA. I also have Darth Vader tattooed up a good part of my right arm. Now I hear tell that Lucas has tampered with the original trilogy even further, whilst again mandating that retailers remove all former versions from their inventories. He's like a child with ADD who's created the perfect lego spaceship but just can't resist adding bits every time he plays with it. And Lucas’s efforts to eliminate old versions are more than just a marketing mandate. It’s as though he wants to re-write film history. “No, no. Those older versions never existed. This is the real Star Wars.”
In the newest version of the original trilogy, along with all of the changes made just before 1999 to “match” with the new trilogy, apparently the ewoks are now animated to blink. Ok. So far I can live with that. Also the massive door to Jabba’s palace that R2 and C3PO approach is animated to look even more massive. Alright. Pointless, but alright. More x-wing fighters are being added to the attack on the second death star. Well, that can only be cool, if equally pointless. Elderly Obi-wan has a newly added battle cry of some sort!? What!? Now that compromises characterization pretty severely, and I’m not so cool with it. And when Vader tosses the Emperor into the reactor core in Jedi, he now howls a lamenting, “Noooooooooooooo!” presumably in an effort to ‘match’ the same cry he lets out in Episode III upon discovering that Padmé is dead. My response?: Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo! I used to love that moment of anagnorisis, of redemption, of death and resolution. It was very oedipal and entirely cathartic. Now it will just be goofy.
In The People vs. George Lucas, Lucas’ public and political outcry against the colorization of classic black and white films is represented as the ultimate hypocrisy. I kind of have to agree. I understand that Star Wars is a playground, but isn’t there ample new material that could be made without tampering with the original? Lucas seems to misunderstand the mythical place the original three movies occupy in people’s hearts, memories, and in film history. He also seems to have a need for all of the episodes to meld together in an entirely congruent narrative whole, but he only focuses on doing that visually. The very storyline that he deployed in Episodes I, II, and III creates incongruencies. For example, how is it that Leia has at least some memory of her mother in Jedi but Padmé dies in childbirth in Revenge? Is she referring to her step-mother on Alderaan? How is it that Kenobi hasn’t gone by Obi-wan, “since, oooooh, before [Luke was] born,” but he is present at Luke’s birth as Obi-wan?
Admittedly, none of these incongruencies bothered me much. I liked the new trilogy, as blasphemous as that probably sounds to die-hard original trilogy fans, but allow me to mitigate. I think that some of the die-hard fans are just as guilty as Lucas of trying to tie the trilogies together. The original trilogy is only worthy of hatred if they make some claim to appropriate the mystical glory of the first three. I found it fascinating how Lucas managed to create a pre-history that was already written, but my association ends there (except that midi-chlorians really bothered me). If the old trilogy never existed and these movies came out as new science-fiction, I bet everybody would have loved them. In their own right, they’re great! (Jar-jar Binks and the performance of Hayden Christensen notwithstanding). This hatred can only act to shy Lucas away from making Episodes 7, 8, and 9. I want those to be made! What honest Star Wars fan doesn’t? Fortunately, Lucas’ egomaniacally-driven financial leviathan may prompt him to make 7, 8, and 9 anyway. Otherwise I have to wait fifty years after he’s dead for the rights to become public and watch them made then. I’ll be dead by then too, though. Maybe his daughter will make them. Ok, ok, so we need George Lucas to die, like, right now. But I digress.
I don’t mind some of the changes that were made in the previous revised release. I couldn’t have cared less if Cloud City was given a more colorful look through its windows, and the removal of the smudged force-field under Luke’s speeder went entirely unnoticed by me. Unlike Han shooting second [at Greedo in the Cantina in Mos Eisley], which seriously compromised his original melodramatic characterization as a roguish hero. I liked Empire better when I genuinely didn’t want such a “scoundrel” as Han kissing my beautiful damsel-in-distress princess. Likewise, Jabba appearing in Episode IV as a simpering worm really detracts from his more ominous presence in Jedi. And wtf is with the growly-voiced jazz-blues singer in Jabba’s palace? Sy Snootles was truly creepy until that little artistic manipulation ruined her! “Wuh-oh!”
As for the blu-ray, ewok eyelids really does little to hinder my enjoyment of the film as it represents a piece of 1983 heritage to me. Fortunately, it seems Lucas’s ‘corrections’ are becoming less and less invasive, but even the slightest change will give offense to the truly emotionally invested. My beef? For all the ‘corrections,' Vader’s helmet still blows in the wind in the shaft on Cloud City? Isn’t that damn thing part of a vacuum-sealed iron lung?! Lucas should have corrected such genuine little mistakes as that, and left the blinkin’ teddy-bear eyes alone!
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Stage and Film Review: Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein broadcast live at Silver City from the National Theatre in London
Frankenstein! It doesn’t get better than Frankenstein! Ever since Mary Shelley published her wildly popular eighteenth-century novel, this tale has spawned a plethora of interpretations and offshoots, especially in film. While early film melodrama made something of a camp convention out of the tale, its original text remains iconographic. Kenneth Branagh made some effort to remain loyal to the original tale, but even he could not help the impulse to take some artistic license.
Danny Boyle (creator of 28 Days) has produced a stage version that is spectacular in its effects and absolutely stunning in its performance. In Boyle’s interpretation, the first third of the novel’s original plotline is cut out. Instead, Boyle chooses to begin with the ‘birth’ of the wretch, and he maintains that as his primary perspective throughout. Boyle has his two lead actors, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, rotate the roles of Victor and The Wretch on alternating nights to focus on their dichotomy as foils: one lusts for social interaction and is unable to participate, the other rejects social interaction and is unwilling to participate; one desires a wife and lover who would surely reject him, the other is blessed with a beautiful and ever-forgiving wife and lover whom he cannot help but reject; one is violently desperate for the love of his maker-father, the other is unable to connect with a father that dotes on him. The racial differentiation between Victor and the actor that plays his father (Victor is white, his father is black) only emphasizes this latter juxtaposition.
But the real story here is the performance. The physical representation of a ‘new’ body is unbelievably convincing and dramatically horrific. The first almost ten minutes of the production are silently but physically acted as The Wretch comes to grips with his new body and the horror of his isolation. Victor only briefly appears in this opening scene to reject him and flee. Nevertheless, Victor is almost as compelling, and I only wish I could have seen a live performance of the next night’s show to see the actors switch roles, borrow from each other’s interpretations, and add their own.
This single live performance will be complemented by an encore live performance broadcast on March 31st at 7:00 PM at both Silver City and Odeon theatres.
Danny Boyle (creator of 28 Days) has produced a stage version that is spectacular in its effects and absolutely stunning in its performance. In Boyle’s interpretation, the first third of the novel’s original plotline is cut out. Instead, Boyle chooses to begin with the ‘birth’ of the wretch, and he maintains that as his primary perspective throughout. Boyle has his two lead actors, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, rotate the roles of Victor and The Wretch on alternating nights to focus on their dichotomy as foils: one lusts for social interaction and is unable to participate, the other rejects social interaction and is unwilling to participate; one desires a wife and lover who would surely reject him, the other is blessed with a beautiful and ever-forgiving wife and lover whom he cannot help but reject; one is violently desperate for the love of his maker-father, the other is unable to connect with a father that dotes on him. The racial differentiation between Victor and the actor that plays his father (Victor is white, his father is black) only emphasizes this latter juxtaposition.
But the real story here is the performance. The physical representation of a ‘new’ body is unbelievably convincing and dramatically horrific. The first almost ten minutes of the production are silently but physically acted as The Wretch comes to grips with his new body and the horror of his isolation. Victor only briefly appears in this opening scene to reject him and flee. Nevertheless, Victor is almost as compelling, and I only wish I could have seen a live performance of the next night’s show to see the actors switch roles, borrow from each other’s interpretations, and add their own.
This single live performance will be complemented by an encore live performance broadcast on March 31st at 7:00 PM at both Silver City and Odeon theatres.
Movie Review: Insidious
After nineteen hours in five sessions under the needle I finally got my Darth Vader tattoo finished. Oh yeah, I did it. The relationship I developed with the artist/owner resulted in his generously donating his free preview movie passes to Insidious to me. In the past few years I have become something of a horror movie aficionado and this one didn't disappoint.
From the makers of Paranormal Activity and Saw, Insidious is, for all intents and purposes, a re-visitation of Poltergeist, the only popular horror film in history to deal with the repressed fear of child abduction, until now. In this version, the child's body remains in the earthly realm while his "astral projection" is held captive in a hellish netherworld called "the further" by entities with an "insidious agenda."
The premise gives rise to myriad thrills and chills in both this realm and "the further" with visually spectacular demons, monsters, ghosts, and a particularly disturbing twilight-zone-like setting in the netherworld. The film is filled with all manner of horrific deliciousness and even includes some refreshing comic relief which openly ridicules its own horror genre. In this case the comedy is accomplished with a requisite pair of ghost-hunting buffoons reminiscent of the Ghostbusters, or the Frog Brothers from The Lost Boys.
This is a great film. Unlike its production predecessors, it makes no effort at faux-documentary realism (as with Paranormal Activity a la Blair Witch Project), nor does it fall back on the easy emotional and gore spectacle of torture porn (as with Saw). It's just a good ol' fashioned horror film, but it has some fantastic innovations. There are some contrived plot conventions, and more than one moment of absurdism, but the film is unencumbered with the heavy emotion elicited by torture porn, or abused children, which one uncomfortably assumes will be the premise from the outset. Ultimately, it relies a little too heavily on the visual shock that had me jumping out of my seat at an exhausting rate, but the visuals that caused these moments were absolutely chilling. Insidious will leave you with powerful, if not somewhat clichéd images, that will haunt your visual memory for days after. I like it more today than right after I saw it. Very cool. 4/5 stars.
From the makers of Paranormal Activity and Saw, Insidious is, for all intents and purposes, a re-visitation of Poltergeist, the only popular horror film in history to deal with the repressed fear of child abduction, until now. In this version, the child's body remains in the earthly realm while his "astral projection" is held captive in a hellish netherworld called "the further" by entities with an "insidious agenda."
The premise gives rise to myriad thrills and chills in both this realm and "the further" with visually spectacular demons, monsters, ghosts, and a particularly disturbing twilight-zone-like setting in the netherworld. The film is filled with all manner of horrific deliciousness and even includes some refreshing comic relief which openly ridicules its own horror genre. In this case the comedy is accomplished with a requisite pair of ghost-hunting buffoons reminiscent of the Ghostbusters, or the Frog Brothers from The Lost Boys.
This is a great film. Unlike its production predecessors, it makes no effort at faux-documentary realism (as with Paranormal Activity a la Blair Witch Project), nor does it fall back on the easy emotional and gore spectacle of torture porn (as with Saw). It's just a good ol' fashioned horror film, but it has some fantastic innovations. There are some contrived plot conventions, and more than one moment of absurdism, but the film is unencumbered with the heavy emotion elicited by torture porn, or abused children, which one uncomfortably assumes will be the premise from the outset. Ultimately, it relies a little too heavily on the visual shock that had me jumping out of my seat at an exhausting rate, but the visuals that caused these moments were absolutely chilling. Insidious will leave you with powerful, if not somewhat clichéd images, that will haunt your visual memory for days after. I like it more today than right after I saw it. Very cool. 4/5 stars.
House of Spells
Canadian author Robert Pepper-Smith’s latest book House of Spells is a simple, emotional, and riveting read. Because of its brevity and style, and appeal make it a novel that you’ll probably read it in one go, but you will want to re-read it time and again in order to relive the engaging drama and revisit the landscapes Pepper-Smith paints with words.
The book makes use of a stylized syntax that is almost confusing at times, and that creates the illusion of narrative simplicity. In spite of its simplicity, the text is rich. A celebration of British Columbia’s winter landscape dominates the prose. The narrative follows the first-person perspective of young Lacey as she observes the emotions stirred by the teenaged-pregnancy of her best friend Rose, and the dubious efforts of the town patriarch Mr. Giacomo to adopt the child. This primary plotline comes across as little more than background in Lacey’s thoughts until the high impact birth of the child - and I mean high impact!
The narrative is framed by the italicized and distanced interjections of the first person narrator from her fire-tower perch high above the landscape of the rest of the story. From this vantage point, Pepper-Smith creates the illusion of a reflective omniscience, overlooking the town from above. The rest of the narrative follows Lacey’s ground-level interactions with her parents, Rose, and other members of her small 1970s B.C. community. Lacey’s introspective and often distracted observations can be disjointed in smaller passages, but become marvelously cohesive in the larger narrative. At the end of the text, Lacey’s voice as the omniscient narrator and the teenage protagonist conflate.
The book deals with such historiographic, social, and personal issues as the Japanese Canadian internment, small-town poverty, community, teen pregnancy, adoption, friendship, malice, loss, guilt, parenthood, and the most beautiful descriptions of infancy. The adoptive fate of the child becomes the central focus of all the book’s prominent characters, and of the reader too. The conclusion feels unresolved but leaves wonderful hope for what might have happened. In its simplicity, Lacey’s voice is entirely convincing, and the overall effect is delightful and invasive. From simultaneously vile and tragic Mr. Giacomo to the barely present infant boy, every one of the characters is entirely human, sympathetic , and full of soul. Pepper-Smith’s powerful and repetitive theme is the need to be gentle, demonstrated in the delicate emotional situations in which the characters find themselves, the metaphoric descriptions of the delicate process of Japanese-styled paper manufacture, and the more overt closing statements.
A refreshing - not brooding - melancholy hangs over every word that Pepper-Smith has written, and the book heaves and sighs within that framework. This is the first book that has made me cry since I was a child myself; it is simple and glorious. From the beautiful sentiments of adoption and loss, to the dilapidated fantasy doll-house abandoned by the Giacomos, this text will cast a spell over your imagination and sympathies. You will be talking about with your dearest friends and family as soon as they have read it, too.
The book makes use of a stylized syntax that is almost confusing at times, and that creates the illusion of narrative simplicity. In spite of its simplicity, the text is rich. A celebration of British Columbia’s winter landscape dominates the prose. The narrative follows the first-person perspective of young Lacey as she observes the emotions stirred by the teenaged-pregnancy of her best friend Rose, and the dubious efforts of the town patriarch Mr. Giacomo to adopt the child. This primary plotline comes across as little more than background in Lacey’s thoughts until the high impact birth of the child - and I mean high impact!
The narrative is framed by the italicized and distanced interjections of the first person narrator from her fire-tower perch high above the landscape of the rest of the story. From this vantage point, Pepper-Smith creates the illusion of a reflective omniscience, overlooking the town from above. The rest of the narrative follows Lacey’s ground-level interactions with her parents, Rose, and other members of her small 1970s B.C. community. Lacey’s introspective and often distracted observations can be disjointed in smaller passages, but become marvelously cohesive in the larger narrative. At the end of the text, Lacey’s voice as the omniscient narrator and the teenage protagonist conflate.
The book deals with such historiographic, social, and personal issues as the Japanese Canadian internment, small-town poverty, community, teen pregnancy, adoption, friendship, malice, loss, guilt, parenthood, and the most beautiful descriptions of infancy. The adoptive fate of the child becomes the central focus of all the book’s prominent characters, and of the reader too. The conclusion feels unresolved but leaves wonderful hope for what might have happened. In its simplicity, Lacey’s voice is entirely convincing, and the overall effect is delightful and invasive. From simultaneously vile and tragic Mr. Giacomo to the barely present infant boy, every one of the characters is entirely human, sympathetic , and full of soul. Pepper-Smith’s powerful and repetitive theme is the need to be gentle, demonstrated in the delicate emotional situations in which the characters find themselves, the metaphoric descriptions of the delicate process of Japanese-styled paper manufacture, and the more overt closing statements.
A refreshing - not brooding - melancholy hangs over every word that Pepper-Smith has written, and the book heaves and sighs within that framework. This is the first book that has made me cry since I was a child myself; it is simple and glorious. From the beautiful sentiments of adoption and loss, to the dilapidated fantasy doll-house abandoned by the Giacomos, this text will cast a spell over your imagination and sympathies. You will be talking about with your dearest friends and family as soon as they have read it, too.
Videodrome and the Canadian Fear of American Media Culture
Canadian media culture has long been inundated, if not overwhelmed, by American broadcasting. Equally long-lived has been the debate surrounding the social value of media culture as an information tool or a corrupting force. American forms of journalism and entertainment have been simultaneously a bastion of higher production qualities and a pariah of cultural corruption. “What is also clear is that the fear of Americanization is closely related to a distrust (regardless of national origin) of emerging forms of popular culture” (Story 9). In 1980 the German film The Tin Drum was deemed pornographic by Ontario’s film review board and banned (CBC). Soon after came the 1983 release of the Canadian-produced movie Videodrome which addresses a social anxiety regarding American video and broadcasting imports in the graphic detail provided by the horror film genre. In his pivotal essay “An Intoriduction the the American Horror Film,” Robin Wood refers to the “Other” as the identifiable threat in horror films and the symbolic representation of social anxieties (Wood 199). These anxieties frequently involve such ostensible threats as homosexuality, feminism, racial integration, and economic threats to the capitalist structure (Wood). In Videodrome, the “Other” is an integral part of the American capitalist structure – the American mass media and broadcasting industry. It is an “Other” that would typically be naturalized in Wood’s definition. Videodrome articulates a Leavisist Canadian fear of American broadcast media in the 1980s as an invasive and corrupting force.
The dominant presence of American cinema and television broadcasting in Canada is unapologetically visible. In his 1998 article, “Redefining Cinema: International and Avant-Garde Alternatives,” Stephen Crofts claims that
other varieties of nation-state cinema production fight over the remainder [of audience markets], their principal enemy being Hollywood, which dominates most anglophone [sic] markets and exerts considerable influence through the United States’ world-wide strategic, economic, and cultural links (Crofts 392).
In order for this observation to be relevant to a discussion of Videodrome, it requires the broad conflation of television broadcast with cinema distribution. Videodrome invites such a slide. The broadcast signal that initially infects the protagonist, Max Renn, is eventually replaced with videocassette cinemas inserted directly into Max’s body. At the very least Croft’s observation elucidates the dominance of popular American entertainment culture worldwide. In such an environment, it is easy to see how the Canadian media and broadcast entertainment industry might well deem the American cultural influence a threat to its sovereignty.
The subjective position in Videodrome is explicitly a Canadian one. Two of the three producers, Claude Héroux and Pierre David, are Canadian, as is writer-director David Cronenberg. If there is any validity to the auteur theory, then the film must certainly have a Canadian perspective. Canadian actress Sonja Smits portrays the odd heroine Bianca O’Blivion. Her character is pivotal in fighting against the Videodrome forces. Although the protagonist is played by American actor James Woods, his diegetic counterpart is specifically Canadian. Within the diegesis of the film, Max Renn is the president of a Toronto television broadcasting station. He becomes enamored of a pirate broadcast signal that he initially believes to be transmitted from Malaysia. It is quickly revealed that its actual source is Pittsburgh. At one point Max acquires a video from an enigmatic media critic named “O’Blivion” in which O’Blivion articulates the primary fear the film depicts. “The battle for North America will be fought in the video arena. The Videodrome” (Videodrome). Eventually, the Videodrome invades Max’s body and destroys him. The indictment is not only of the invasive power of media broadcasting in general, but of its specifically American source.
In the case of American popular culture hegemony over the Canadian broadcasting media, the theoretical perspective of Antonio Gramsci is particularly a propos. “Gramsci … uses the term ‘hegemony’ to refer to the way in which dominant groups in society, through a process of ‘intellectual and moral leadership’ … seek to win the consent of subordinate groups in society” (Storey 10). “Those using this approach see popular culture as a site of struggle between the ‘resistance’ of subordinate groups and the forces of incorporation operating in the interests of dominant groups” (Storey 10). The relevance to a discussion of Videodrome is twofold. Firstly, the entire thematic of the film demonstrates a resistance to a perceived hegemony of dominant American media broadcasting that attempts to incorporate Canadian media broadcasting. The Videodrome literally incorporates Max. His body becomes physically involved with the Videodrome signal. By the end of the film, his physical existence is entirely subsumed by the Videodrome world (Videodrome). Secondly, the film implies a Canadian “intellectual and moral leadership” threatened by a hedonistic American media culture, in this case the Videodrome, and attempts to initiate a new hegemony – a “common sense” that American popular culture is dangerously corrosive (Landy 8).
Videodrome graphically addresses the popular culture theoretical notion of “what Marx termed the fetishism of commodities, the ways in which commodities seem to take on a life of their own so as to seem natural and organic,” especially in capitalist economies (Landy 8). O’Blivion's daughter, Bianca, articulates her desire to achieve her deceased father’s goal to have video interlocutors replace every aspect of human social interaction (Videodrome). The corollary to commodity fetishism is the way in which human beings are reduced to objects in the production machine. Shortly after her exposure to Videodrome, Nicki Brand, played by Debbie Harry, almost immediately departs to incorporate herself into the product and audition for a part. By doing so, she facilitates Max’s physical absorption into the Videodrome media nightmare. In one iconic scene, Max is drawn into an erotic image of Nicki on his television screen; his face and head merge with the picture tube. Even the semiotics of her name is a blatant metaphor of this commodity fetishism. Where one might be loyal to ‘Kleenex brand’ facial tissue, Max cannot resist ‘Nicki Brand’ Videodrome. Slowly the physical boundary between reality and the world of Max’s Videodrome hallucinations becomes indistinguishable. O’Blivion informs Max that
The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore the television screen is part of the structure of the brain. Whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore television is reality and reality is less than television. Max, … your reality is already half video hallucination (Videodrome).
Eventually, Max becomes the instrument of the destruction that the Videodrome visits upon him and he goes on a killing spree. He attempts to turn the violence back upon the source by reprogramming himself, with Bianca’s assistance, to execute the human agents of Videodrome, but he is unable to save himself in the process. In both his bodily physicality and his actions, Max merges with and becomes the Videodrome itself (Videodrome).
Videodrome also indicts American media culture in terms of the “false consciousness” and the reification offered by commodity fetishism (Storey 3). Initially, the Videodrome appears to fulfill both Max’s professional and personal desires. The video stream represents the type of avant-garde fare that he wishes to broadcast in order to corner a viable commercial market, and it appeals to him on a personal psycho-sexual level which bleeds into his sexual intrigues with Nikki. Max also enjoys a false sense of security when the broadcast source is understood to be as remote as Malaysia. The discovery that it is from Pittsburgh is almost immediately followed by a dire warning to avoid the Videodrome from Max’s eccentric pornography adviser Masha. “Max, Videodrome is something for you to leave alone. It is definitely not for public consumption ... I think it’s dangerous Max, Videodrome ... It’s more political ... It has something that you don’t have, Max. It has a philosophy, and that makes it dangerous” (Videodrome). The proximity and powerful hegemony of American media entertainment poses an immediate and palpable threat. Nevertheless, Max succumbs to the lure of easy satisfaction. Max’s “consumption of mass culture is a form of repression; the empty texts and practices of mass culture are consumed to fill an emptiness within, which grows ever more empty the more the empty texts and practices of mass culture are consumed” (Storey 31). Videodrome depicts this emptiness quite literally. As Max recedes further into his hallucinatory world, a vaginal opening appears in the front of his torso in front of his stomach. As this stomach hungers, Max fills the emptiness with a handgun, an icon of difference between American and Canadian culture, and later the evil agents of Videodrome fill it with videocassettes that program Max’s behaviour. The connotations regarding “the monstrous feminine” as articulated by Barbara Creed in her essay “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection” are obvious but are more pertinent to a discussion of feminism in horror film than of this particular examination of popular culture. In any case, it is the American Videodrome that presents itself to Max as the satisfaction of his desires, only to empty him of his own identity further and further until it ultimately destroys him.
Within a thinly veiled Canadian nationalist agenda of the film resides a scathing Leavisist indictment of American media culture. In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, John Storey describes Leavisism as a philosophy in which “the twentieth century has been marked by an increasing cultural decline” and “Mass civilization and its mass culture pose a subversive front” and a threat to more respectable forms of cultural authority (Storey 22, 24). Northrop Frye characterizes Canada as doubly-colonized by both the British and the Americans (Frye 14). In her book Cinematic Uses of the Past, Marcia Landy tells us that “common sense [is] polysemic … a residue of previous conceptions of the world” (Landy 8). If there is any vestige of British “common sense” in Canadian culture, it might well be invoked as an anti-American ideology. As early as the 1920s, when the cultural traces of British colonialism held strong in Canada, “American patriotic symbols were cut from films, since these might be considered damaging to pro-British Canadian nationalist sentiments” (Whitaker 25). By villainizing American media culture, the film implies a Canadian moral superiority in its popular culture media broadcasting and the inevitable cultural decline American media culture will bring. In Videodrome Max’s choices of programming have already made him somewhat of a pariah as depicted in his televised interview early in the film (Videodrome). When he invites the culturally destructive American Videodrome into the Canadian setting, he seals his doom. At the end of the narrative, Max takes refuge in a derelict boat that emphasizes his Canadian location. It is marked by a sign that reads “Condemned Vessel by order of Toronto Harbour Commissioners” (with specifically Canadian spelling) (Videodrome). Shortly thereafter, a Videodrome hallucination of the ostensibly already deceased Nicki Brand guides him through the act of shooting himself in the head.
The media culture depicted in Videodrome is characterized as doubly egregious for both its invasive media format and its American source. The movie indicates a Canadian fear that American culture will supersede its own and that Canadian culture may be becoming just as degenerate. In Concepts of National Cinema, Crofts makes reference to “Bakhtin’s dialogic mode” which he quotes Willeman as defining as the use of “one’s understanding of another cultural practice to re-perceive and rethink one’s own cultural constellation” (Crofts 393). Videodrome makes American media culture its blackguard in order to interrogate Canada’s own lacking censorship policies, the welcoming of American hegemony, and the potentially culturally devastating effects of video mass media. The film depicts an American media culture that is entirely corrosive and from which there is little hope of Canadian culture escaping. The irony of the message resides outside of the film’s diegesis in the fact that the medium used to deliver the message is cinema itself. The question thus remains as to how Canadian culture can survive the perceived threat of American media culture if it can only spread its message through the very instrument it fears.
Works Cited
"CBC Radio – The Current – Whole Show Blow-by-Blow". The Current. CBC. 7 August 2004. Radio.
Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection.” The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. 35-65. Print.
Crofts, Stephen. “Concepts of National Cinema.” The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Eds. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 385-395. Print.
Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Anansi, 1971. Print.
Hebidge, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1979. Print.
Landy, Marcia. Cinematic Uses of the Past. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Print.
Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, fifth edition. New York: Pearson Education Ltd., 2009. Print.
Videodrome. Dir. David Cronenberg. Universal Studios, 1983. DVD.
Whitaker, Reg. “Chameleon on a Changing Background: The Politics of Censorship in Canada.” Interpreting Censorship in Canada. Eds. Klaus Petersen and Allan C. Hutchinson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 199. 19-39. Print.
Willeman, Paul. “The National.” Looks and Frictions. London: British Film Institute, 1994. Print.
Wood, Robin. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” Movies and Methods Volume II. Ed. Bill Nichols. London, England: University of California Press, 1985. 195-220. Print.
The dominant presence of American cinema and television broadcasting in Canada is unapologetically visible. In his 1998 article, “Redefining Cinema: International and Avant-Garde Alternatives,” Stephen Crofts claims that
other varieties of nation-state cinema production fight over the remainder [of audience markets], their principal enemy being Hollywood, which dominates most anglophone [sic] markets and exerts considerable influence through the United States’ world-wide strategic, economic, and cultural links (Crofts 392).
In order for this observation to be relevant to a discussion of Videodrome, it requires the broad conflation of television broadcast with cinema distribution. Videodrome invites such a slide. The broadcast signal that initially infects the protagonist, Max Renn, is eventually replaced with videocassette cinemas inserted directly into Max’s body. At the very least Croft’s observation elucidates the dominance of popular American entertainment culture worldwide. In such an environment, it is easy to see how the Canadian media and broadcast entertainment industry might well deem the American cultural influence a threat to its sovereignty.
The subjective position in Videodrome is explicitly a Canadian one. Two of the three producers, Claude Héroux and Pierre David, are Canadian, as is writer-director David Cronenberg. If there is any validity to the auteur theory, then the film must certainly have a Canadian perspective. Canadian actress Sonja Smits portrays the odd heroine Bianca O’Blivion. Her character is pivotal in fighting against the Videodrome forces. Although the protagonist is played by American actor James Woods, his diegetic counterpart is specifically Canadian. Within the diegesis of the film, Max Renn is the president of a Toronto television broadcasting station. He becomes enamored of a pirate broadcast signal that he initially believes to be transmitted from Malaysia. It is quickly revealed that its actual source is Pittsburgh. At one point Max acquires a video from an enigmatic media critic named “O’Blivion” in which O’Blivion articulates the primary fear the film depicts. “The battle for North America will be fought in the video arena. The Videodrome” (Videodrome). Eventually, the Videodrome invades Max’s body and destroys him. The indictment is not only of the invasive power of media broadcasting in general, but of its specifically American source.
In the case of American popular culture hegemony over the Canadian broadcasting media, the theoretical perspective of Antonio Gramsci is particularly a propos. “Gramsci … uses the term ‘hegemony’ to refer to the way in which dominant groups in society, through a process of ‘intellectual and moral leadership’ … seek to win the consent of subordinate groups in society” (Storey 10). “Those using this approach see popular culture as a site of struggle between the ‘resistance’ of subordinate groups and the forces of incorporation operating in the interests of dominant groups” (Storey 10). The relevance to a discussion of Videodrome is twofold. Firstly, the entire thematic of the film demonstrates a resistance to a perceived hegemony of dominant American media broadcasting that attempts to incorporate Canadian media broadcasting. The Videodrome literally incorporates Max. His body becomes physically involved with the Videodrome signal. By the end of the film, his physical existence is entirely subsumed by the Videodrome world (Videodrome). Secondly, the film implies a Canadian “intellectual and moral leadership” threatened by a hedonistic American media culture, in this case the Videodrome, and attempts to initiate a new hegemony – a “common sense” that American popular culture is dangerously corrosive (Landy 8).
Videodrome graphically addresses the popular culture theoretical notion of “what Marx termed the fetishism of commodities, the ways in which commodities seem to take on a life of their own so as to seem natural and organic,” especially in capitalist economies (Landy 8). O’Blivion's daughter, Bianca, articulates her desire to achieve her deceased father’s goal to have video interlocutors replace every aspect of human social interaction (Videodrome). The corollary to commodity fetishism is the way in which human beings are reduced to objects in the production machine. Shortly after her exposure to Videodrome, Nicki Brand, played by Debbie Harry, almost immediately departs to incorporate herself into the product and audition for a part. By doing so, she facilitates Max’s physical absorption into the Videodrome media nightmare. In one iconic scene, Max is drawn into an erotic image of Nicki on his television screen; his face and head merge with the picture tube. Even the semiotics of her name is a blatant metaphor of this commodity fetishism. Where one might be loyal to ‘Kleenex brand’ facial tissue, Max cannot resist ‘Nicki Brand’ Videodrome. Slowly the physical boundary between reality and the world of Max’s Videodrome hallucinations becomes indistinguishable. O’Blivion informs Max that
The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore the television screen is part of the structure of the brain. Whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore television is reality and reality is less than television. Max, … your reality is already half video hallucination (Videodrome).
Eventually, Max becomes the instrument of the destruction that the Videodrome visits upon him and he goes on a killing spree. He attempts to turn the violence back upon the source by reprogramming himself, with Bianca’s assistance, to execute the human agents of Videodrome, but he is unable to save himself in the process. In both his bodily physicality and his actions, Max merges with and becomes the Videodrome itself (Videodrome).
Videodrome also indicts American media culture in terms of the “false consciousness” and the reification offered by commodity fetishism (Storey 3). Initially, the Videodrome appears to fulfill both Max’s professional and personal desires. The video stream represents the type of avant-garde fare that he wishes to broadcast in order to corner a viable commercial market, and it appeals to him on a personal psycho-sexual level which bleeds into his sexual intrigues with Nikki. Max also enjoys a false sense of security when the broadcast source is understood to be as remote as Malaysia. The discovery that it is from Pittsburgh is almost immediately followed by a dire warning to avoid the Videodrome from Max’s eccentric pornography adviser Masha. “Max, Videodrome is something for you to leave alone. It is definitely not for public consumption ... I think it’s dangerous Max, Videodrome ... It’s more political ... It has something that you don’t have, Max. It has a philosophy, and that makes it dangerous” (Videodrome). The proximity and powerful hegemony of American media entertainment poses an immediate and palpable threat. Nevertheless, Max succumbs to the lure of easy satisfaction. Max’s “consumption of mass culture is a form of repression; the empty texts and practices of mass culture are consumed to fill an emptiness within, which grows ever more empty the more the empty texts and practices of mass culture are consumed” (Storey 31). Videodrome depicts this emptiness quite literally. As Max recedes further into his hallucinatory world, a vaginal opening appears in the front of his torso in front of his stomach. As this stomach hungers, Max fills the emptiness with a handgun, an icon of difference between American and Canadian culture, and later the evil agents of Videodrome fill it with videocassettes that program Max’s behaviour. The connotations regarding “the monstrous feminine” as articulated by Barbara Creed in her essay “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection” are obvious but are more pertinent to a discussion of feminism in horror film than of this particular examination of popular culture. In any case, it is the American Videodrome that presents itself to Max as the satisfaction of his desires, only to empty him of his own identity further and further until it ultimately destroys him.
Within a thinly veiled Canadian nationalist agenda of the film resides a scathing Leavisist indictment of American media culture. In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, John Storey describes Leavisism as a philosophy in which “the twentieth century has been marked by an increasing cultural decline” and “Mass civilization and its mass culture pose a subversive front” and a threat to more respectable forms of cultural authority (Storey 22, 24). Northrop Frye characterizes Canada as doubly-colonized by both the British and the Americans (Frye 14). In her book Cinematic Uses of the Past, Marcia Landy tells us that “common sense [is] polysemic … a residue of previous conceptions of the world” (Landy 8). If there is any vestige of British “common sense” in Canadian culture, it might well be invoked as an anti-American ideology. As early as the 1920s, when the cultural traces of British colonialism held strong in Canada, “American patriotic symbols were cut from films, since these might be considered damaging to pro-British Canadian nationalist sentiments” (Whitaker 25). By villainizing American media culture, the film implies a Canadian moral superiority in its popular culture media broadcasting and the inevitable cultural decline American media culture will bring. In Videodrome Max’s choices of programming have already made him somewhat of a pariah as depicted in his televised interview early in the film (Videodrome). When he invites the culturally destructive American Videodrome into the Canadian setting, he seals his doom. At the end of the narrative, Max takes refuge in a derelict boat that emphasizes his Canadian location. It is marked by a sign that reads “Condemned Vessel by order of Toronto Harbour Commissioners” (with specifically Canadian spelling) (Videodrome). Shortly thereafter, a Videodrome hallucination of the ostensibly already deceased Nicki Brand guides him through the act of shooting himself in the head.
The media culture depicted in Videodrome is characterized as doubly egregious for both its invasive media format and its American source. The movie indicates a Canadian fear that American culture will supersede its own and that Canadian culture may be becoming just as degenerate. In Concepts of National Cinema, Crofts makes reference to “Bakhtin’s dialogic mode” which he quotes Willeman as defining as the use of “one’s understanding of another cultural practice to re-perceive and rethink one’s own cultural constellation” (Crofts 393). Videodrome makes American media culture its blackguard in order to interrogate Canada’s own lacking censorship policies, the welcoming of American hegemony, and the potentially culturally devastating effects of video mass media. The film depicts an American media culture that is entirely corrosive and from which there is little hope of Canadian culture escaping. The irony of the message resides outside of the film’s diegesis in the fact that the medium used to deliver the message is cinema itself. The question thus remains as to how Canadian culture can survive the perceived threat of American media culture if it can only spread its message through the very instrument it fears.
Works Cited
"CBC Radio – The Current – Whole Show Blow-by-Blow". The Current. CBC. 7 August 2004. Radio.
Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection.” The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. 35-65. Print.
Crofts, Stephen. “Concepts of National Cinema.” The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Eds. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 385-395. Print.
Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Anansi, 1971. Print.
Hebidge, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1979. Print.
Landy, Marcia. Cinematic Uses of the Past. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Print.
Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, fifth edition. New York: Pearson Education Ltd., 2009. Print.
Videodrome. Dir. David Cronenberg. Universal Studios, 1983. DVD.
Whitaker, Reg. “Chameleon on a Changing Background: The Politics of Censorship in Canada.” Interpreting Censorship in Canada. Eds. Klaus Petersen and Allan C. Hutchinson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 199. 19-39. Print.
Willeman, Paul. “The National.” Looks and Frictions. London: British Film Institute, 1994. Print.
Wood, Robin. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” Movies and Methods Volume II. Ed. Bill Nichols. London, England: University of California Press, 1985. 195-220. Print.
Mise-En-Scene in The Madness of King George and the Illusion of Historical Authenticity
The late eighteenth century was a fascinating time. The Georgian century had been a time of relative quiescence in English History. However, as the century wound to a close, English culture would be disrupted by, amongst other things, the looming French Revolution. In the final decades of the eighteenth century, the hegemony of Enlightenment ideology slowly gave way to Romanticism. Gothic literature reached its apex with the publication of such classics as Matthew Gregory Lewis’s infamous The Monk (1796). The middle-class was experiencing its own quiet revolution with the rapid growth of its populace. The demographics of theatre audiences, for example, were increasingly middle-classed gentlemen and merchants. And King George III went mad. It is this tenor of mixed tradition and change, of urgency and ideological revolution, of constitutional monarchy, parliamentary influence, and questionable regency that director Nicholas Hytner attempts to capture in The Madness of King George (1994). Historically, sociocultural interactions and ideology are not particularly tangible and substantially ephemeral. In terms of generating historical authenticity the only recourse to stratagem remaining to the filmmaker is how things looked. Hytner relies heavily on mise-en-scene, particularly costume and setting, to create the necessary historical backdrop in which to explore George’s mental interregnum and the political intrigues that it prompted within the royal family. The Madness of King George employs a strategic combination of costuming, architecture, character, and contemporary and historical fact to develop the illusion of an authentic late eighteenth century setting.
Costuming is the most apparent of these strategies. Although the Elizabethan enforcement of sumptuary laws was long past during George’s reign, the delineation of social rank according to fashion was still a stratifying force in English culture. The costume drama has an even greater historical impact given such cultural conditions. In her book Fashioning the Nation, Pam Cook explores the cinematic British costume drama and its impact on the maintenance and construction of national identity. She claims that “Costume drama is … notoriously inauthentic, as any costume historian will testify” (Cook 6). Published in 1996 shortly after the release of The Madness of King George in 1995 (in the U.K.), Cook has underestimated costuming efforts in the costume drama as a subcategory of the historical drama. If the costume drama’s primary impetus is the drama, the historical accuracy of the costuming is a secondary agenda. By contrast, the historical drama often makes a concerted effort towards historical authenticity and the costuming is reflectively as accurate as it can be. Even in the absence of accuracy, however, the historical drama draws upon the sensibilities of the audience to create the illusion of a cinematic window to the past. Within the diegesis of the film, George highlights the importance of costume to the construction of meaning when he interrogates Dr. Willis, he states, “By your dress, sir, and general demeanor, I'd say you were a minister of God” (Madness). Cook claims that the costume drama puts an “emphasis on masquerade” (Cook 6). Certainly, in The Madness of King George, both Dr. Willis and George do just that.
Hytner takes full advantage of this powerful element of the mise-en-scene to establish the historical setting of the film. The credits list a battery of costume related experts: an Assistant Costume Designer, a Costume Supervisor, a Wardrobe Master, a Wardrobe Mistress, four Costume Assistants, seventeen individual or commercial Costume Makers, a Millinery of three, five names under the heading Production Wardrobe, and two Wardrobe Drivers. Their talents are put to work early in the film. The movie begins with a scene of George being dressed for a parliamentary address. The intercut scene pans across a sort of waiting room in the palace where other members of the royal party are in attendance while the King is readied. From left to right are seen the Queen in an elaborately ornate gown, and a stylized wig with a small, feminine crown perched aloft; several of the young royal daughters in widely frilled dresses and even more widely-rimmed ornate hats; the two eldest princes wearing a combination of traditional waistcoats, vibrant blue, and adorned with a spectacle of deep reds and gold trim, knee-length knickers and stockings, along with various regal medals; and a variety of footmen in ornately vibrant red overcoats and white gloves. The scene then follows one of the royal daughters as she runs crying for her father, only to be taken breathlessly aback upon seeing the iconically recognizable British crown placed upon George’s head in all his regal pageantry. The episode is intercut with moments of footmen accommodating various aspects of the King’s wardrobe until he is finally revealed to us in his entirety with a full red royal cloak rimmed with spotted fur and his ornate crown aloft his equally stylized eighteenth century wig. The costume of the monarchy reflects the elaborate remnants of baroque and rococo pageantry that was common at the time and still used by the monarchy today in some rituals and pageants. The entire scene is overwhelmed by the decadence of the period-specific costuming.
As the scene changes to the House of Lords, their costumes are distinctly more conservative than those of the royal family but equally period authentic. All of the peers wear generic black and brown overcoats. As they stand to depart the camera frames the two party leaders, Mr. Fox and Mr. Pitt, in witty repartee. Their clothing is at least as authentic as it is documented in paintings that have come down to us depicting the somewhat unscrupulous and often irrationally competitive two party political system. The costuming becomes even more conservative in the film’s representations of the working classes. Setting complements the costuming in this regard. Dr. Willis is first depicted in an outdoor setting on a vast agricultural field where his patients engage in manual labour. His clothes are comparatively practical and demonstrate a sort of down to earth simplicity. There is nothing in his attire of the courtly decadence seen earlier. In this way costuming and setting work in concert to create visual metaphor of the societal stratification with which history has come to characterize the late eighteenth century. All the costuming choices, even George’s less decadent undergarments – a simple, frilled, white cotton housecoat, are at least superficially indicative of an historically distant era of fashion.
The film also goes to great lengths to create the illusion of historical authenticity in its settings. The credits of the film confirm that it was shot at Shepperton Studios in London, and on location at Eton College, Bodleian Library, Arundel Castle, Syon Park, Royal Naval College Greenwich, Wilton House, Broughton Castle, Thame Park, and St. Paul’s Cathedral. Most of these locations include architectural monoliths which have seen very little change since their construction prior to George’s reign and in their use during the era in which the film plot is set. Early in the film, the temporal setting is clearly established as George addresses parliament with the phrase “In this year of our lord 1788” (Madness). Arundel Castle was restored in 1787, the year prior to the most symptomatically severe outburst of George’s illness and the established date of the plot. The castle has remained in very much the same condition since. If these locations do not represent George’s true haunts (such as Westminster Abbey, Windsor Castle, or Cheltenham Spa), they at least proximate the architectural classicism and magnitude that would be expected by modern audiences in a depiction of George’s actual residences.
Hytner further establishes the illusion of historical authenticity with the use of racial inauthenticity. The ethnicity of all characters, even the extras within the throngs on the streets, is exclusively and entirely Caucasoid. Surely even eighteenth century England was more colourful than that. In his essay “Race, Ethnicity and Film,” Robert Wiegman discusses “Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (USA, 1957), in which scenes of New York City are devoid of people of colour” (Wiegman 165). In Framing Monsters, Joshua Bellin makes very much the same point in his chapter about King Kong (1933) in which he also specifically identifies a lack of people of colour in New York. If The Wrong Man “offers a racial discourse keyed to white visual pleasure,” as Wiegman claims, then the lack of any visible race other than Euro-caucasoid in The Madness of King George might well be a symptom of the expected demographics of the audience for a British monarchical historical drama. Such an audience might well derive pleasure from the proud depiction of an all Caucasian British cast. In this way, the filmmaker provides an inauthentic visual history that has a greater historical appeal for the audience. Cook articulates an observation that can be extended to link the power of historical costuming into this notion of a construction of national identity through film. She states that “costume plays an important part in asserting and reinforcing national identity” (Cook 41). In order to create a fantasy-desired historical authenticity around the English court of 1788, all of the characters are white and have only minor dialect variations of the British accent.
In combination with these elements of costuming and setting, Hytner makes use of character movement and idiosyncrasy to create the illusion of historical authenticity. Character movements participate closely with the narrative in generating a late-eighteenth century feel. In their duties as the royal family, George and his family appear to be incessantly rushed, with the exception of the eldest son (played by Rupert Everett) who fills the void of villain in the otherwise unmelodramatic narrative of an historical event. Where George is stout, quick, and hearty, even in the throes of the most debilitating moments of his illness, the Prince of Wales is effeminate, less refined in his wig and fashion choices, married to a harlot, and quite a fop by comparison. The polarization of George against his scheming son coincides with melodramatic interpretations of the grand narrative regarding the actual history of events. Another character strategy employed by Hytner to generate the illusion of historical authenticity emerges in the form of George’s vernacular. In order to posit George as a ‘real’ personage, his character is imbued with idiomatic phrases such as his characteristic “What-what!” This phrase is used to signify George’s sanity and return to health. It falls out of his speech during his mental illness and is quoted as evidence of his sound mind when the phrase re-emerges. The Lord Chancellor reports that the king is “better … The ‘what-what’s back” (Madness). By locating George’s sanity in idiosyncrasy, Hytner effectively superimposes a present-tense realism onto the history of the drama. By doing so he generates a palpable immediacy to the historical illness George suffered.
Hytner uses modern sensibilities regarding disease to add further authenticity to the historical truth of the film. The methods of George’s “rehabilitation” are representative of a modern sensibility regarding medieval or Gothic machinations as they ostensibly emerged in the late eighteenth century. At one point George suffers the punitive bondage of being strapped into a chair and gagged until his tourettes-like symptoms are self-regulated. Furthermore, the methods of the royal doctors are depicted as comically primitive. Much is made of their obsession with the colour of George’s feces and urine in the narrative. Late twentieth century audiences might expect such quackery from these appropriately primitive medical practitioners. Ironically, one of the closing captions attempts to reformulate the medical quackery depicted within the drama as evidence of historical truth based on modern medical knowledge. “The colour of the King’s urine suggests that he was suffering from porphyria, a physical illness that affects the nervous system” (Madness). The coincidence of modern medical knowledge with the observations of the historical doctors within the film’s diegesis lends credibility to the historical truth of the drama.
While sartorial considerations seem to dominate Hytner’s historical mise-en-scene, they do not act in isolation. The on-location settings create an equally effective illusion of historical authenticity. These two obvious and visual aspects of the mise-en-scene are combined with more subtle elements such as character behaviour and the superimposition of modern medical knowledge onto the historical record. In concert with each other and with the realist style of film (that attempts to render form invisible and continuity feasible enough to manipulate a suspension of disbelief), the effect is powerful and convincing. Behind the camera filming was done in the late twentieth century; within the diegesis of the film Hytner has been careful to create an illusion of historical accuracy that only rarely betrays the actual date of the film’s construction, but otherwise barely reveals any hint that what is depicted on-screen are not actually visual moments plucked directly from the late eighteenth century.
Works Cited
Bellin, Joshua David. Framing Monsters – Fantasy Film and Social Alienation. Southern Illinois University, 2005. Print.
Cook, Pam. Fashioning the Nation. British Film Institute, 1996. Print
Madness of King George, The. Dir. Nicholas Hytner. Samuel Goldwyn Company, 1994. DVD.
Wiegman, Robert. “Race, Ethnicity and Film.” Eds. John HillL, & Pamela C. Gibson. The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Oxford: O.U.P., 1998. 158-168. Print.
Costuming is the most apparent of these strategies. Although the Elizabethan enforcement of sumptuary laws was long past during George’s reign, the delineation of social rank according to fashion was still a stratifying force in English culture. The costume drama has an even greater historical impact given such cultural conditions. In her book Fashioning the Nation, Pam Cook explores the cinematic British costume drama and its impact on the maintenance and construction of national identity. She claims that “Costume drama is … notoriously inauthentic, as any costume historian will testify” (Cook 6). Published in 1996 shortly after the release of The Madness of King George in 1995 (in the U.K.), Cook has underestimated costuming efforts in the costume drama as a subcategory of the historical drama. If the costume drama’s primary impetus is the drama, the historical accuracy of the costuming is a secondary agenda. By contrast, the historical drama often makes a concerted effort towards historical authenticity and the costuming is reflectively as accurate as it can be. Even in the absence of accuracy, however, the historical drama draws upon the sensibilities of the audience to create the illusion of a cinematic window to the past. Within the diegesis of the film, George highlights the importance of costume to the construction of meaning when he interrogates Dr. Willis, he states, “By your dress, sir, and general demeanor, I'd say you were a minister of God” (Madness). Cook claims that the costume drama puts an “emphasis on masquerade” (Cook 6). Certainly, in The Madness of King George, both Dr. Willis and George do just that.
Hytner takes full advantage of this powerful element of the mise-en-scene to establish the historical setting of the film. The credits list a battery of costume related experts: an Assistant Costume Designer, a Costume Supervisor, a Wardrobe Master, a Wardrobe Mistress, four Costume Assistants, seventeen individual or commercial Costume Makers, a Millinery of three, five names under the heading Production Wardrobe, and two Wardrobe Drivers. Their talents are put to work early in the film. The movie begins with a scene of George being dressed for a parliamentary address. The intercut scene pans across a sort of waiting room in the palace where other members of the royal party are in attendance while the King is readied. From left to right are seen the Queen in an elaborately ornate gown, and a stylized wig with a small, feminine crown perched aloft; several of the young royal daughters in widely frilled dresses and even more widely-rimmed ornate hats; the two eldest princes wearing a combination of traditional waistcoats, vibrant blue, and adorned with a spectacle of deep reds and gold trim, knee-length knickers and stockings, along with various regal medals; and a variety of footmen in ornately vibrant red overcoats and white gloves. The scene then follows one of the royal daughters as she runs crying for her father, only to be taken breathlessly aback upon seeing the iconically recognizable British crown placed upon George’s head in all his regal pageantry. The episode is intercut with moments of footmen accommodating various aspects of the King’s wardrobe until he is finally revealed to us in his entirety with a full red royal cloak rimmed with spotted fur and his ornate crown aloft his equally stylized eighteenth century wig. The costume of the monarchy reflects the elaborate remnants of baroque and rococo pageantry that was common at the time and still used by the monarchy today in some rituals and pageants. The entire scene is overwhelmed by the decadence of the period-specific costuming.
As the scene changes to the House of Lords, their costumes are distinctly more conservative than those of the royal family but equally period authentic. All of the peers wear generic black and brown overcoats. As they stand to depart the camera frames the two party leaders, Mr. Fox and Mr. Pitt, in witty repartee. Their clothing is at least as authentic as it is documented in paintings that have come down to us depicting the somewhat unscrupulous and often irrationally competitive two party political system. The costuming becomes even more conservative in the film’s representations of the working classes. Setting complements the costuming in this regard. Dr. Willis is first depicted in an outdoor setting on a vast agricultural field where his patients engage in manual labour. His clothes are comparatively practical and demonstrate a sort of down to earth simplicity. There is nothing in his attire of the courtly decadence seen earlier. In this way costuming and setting work in concert to create visual metaphor of the societal stratification with which history has come to characterize the late eighteenth century. All the costuming choices, even George’s less decadent undergarments – a simple, frilled, white cotton housecoat, are at least superficially indicative of an historically distant era of fashion.
The film also goes to great lengths to create the illusion of historical authenticity in its settings. The credits of the film confirm that it was shot at Shepperton Studios in London, and on location at Eton College, Bodleian Library, Arundel Castle, Syon Park, Royal Naval College Greenwich, Wilton House, Broughton Castle, Thame Park, and St. Paul’s Cathedral. Most of these locations include architectural monoliths which have seen very little change since their construction prior to George’s reign and in their use during the era in which the film plot is set. Early in the film, the temporal setting is clearly established as George addresses parliament with the phrase “In this year of our lord 1788” (Madness). Arundel Castle was restored in 1787, the year prior to the most symptomatically severe outburst of George’s illness and the established date of the plot. The castle has remained in very much the same condition since. If these locations do not represent George’s true haunts (such as Westminster Abbey, Windsor Castle, or Cheltenham Spa), they at least proximate the architectural classicism and magnitude that would be expected by modern audiences in a depiction of George’s actual residences.
Hytner further establishes the illusion of historical authenticity with the use of racial inauthenticity. The ethnicity of all characters, even the extras within the throngs on the streets, is exclusively and entirely Caucasoid. Surely even eighteenth century England was more colourful than that. In his essay “Race, Ethnicity and Film,” Robert Wiegman discusses “Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (USA, 1957), in which scenes of New York City are devoid of people of colour” (Wiegman 165). In Framing Monsters, Joshua Bellin makes very much the same point in his chapter about King Kong (1933) in which he also specifically identifies a lack of people of colour in New York. If The Wrong Man “offers a racial discourse keyed to white visual pleasure,” as Wiegman claims, then the lack of any visible race other than Euro-caucasoid in The Madness of King George might well be a symptom of the expected demographics of the audience for a British monarchical historical drama. Such an audience might well derive pleasure from the proud depiction of an all Caucasian British cast. In this way, the filmmaker provides an inauthentic visual history that has a greater historical appeal for the audience. Cook articulates an observation that can be extended to link the power of historical costuming into this notion of a construction of national identity through film. She states that “costume plays an important part in asserting and reinforcing national identity” (Cook 41). In order to create a fantasy-desired historical authenticity around the English court of 1788, all of the characters are white and have only minor dialect variations of the British accent.
In combination with these elements of costuming and setting, Hytner makes use of character movement and idiosyncrasy to create the illusion of historical authenticity. Character movements participate closely with the narrative in generating a late-eighteenth century feel. In their duties as the royal family, George and his family appear to be incessantly rushed, with the exception of the eldest son (played by Rupert Everett) who fills the void of villain in the otherwise unmelodramatic narrative of an historical event. Where George is stout, quick, and hearty, even in the throes of the most debilitating moments of his illness, the Prince of Wales is effeminate, less refined in his wig and fashion choices, married to a harlot, and quite a fop by comparison. The polarization of George against his scheming son coincides with melodramatic interpretations of the grand narrative regarding the actual history of events. Another character strategy employed by Hytner to generate the illusion of historical authenticity emerges in the form of George’s vernacular. In order to posit George as a ‘real’ personage, his character is imbued with idiomatic phrases such as his characteristic “What-what!” This phrase is used to signify George’s sanity and return to health. It falls out of his speech during his mental illness and is quoted as evidence of his sound mind when the phrase re-emerges. The Lord Chancellor reports that the king is “better … The ‘what-what’s back” (Madness). By locating George’s sanity in idiosyncrasy, Hytner effectively superimposes a present-tense realism onto the history of the drama. By doing so he generates a palpable immediacy to the historical illness George suffered.
Hytner uses modern sensibilities regarding disease to add further authenticity to the historical truth of the film. The methods of George’s “rehabilitation” are representative of a modern sensibility regarding medieval or Gothic machinations as they ostensibly emerged in the late eighteenth century. At one point George suffers the punitive bondage of being strapped into a chair and gagged until his tourettes-like symptoms are self-regulated. Furthermore, the methods of the royal doctors are depicted as comically primitive. Much is made of their obsession with the colour of George’s feces and urine in the narrative. Late twentieth century audiences might expect such quackery from these appropriately primitive medical practitioners. Ironically, one of the closing captions attempts to reformulate the medical quackery depicted within the drama as evidence of historical truth based on modern medical knowledge. “The colour of the King’s urine suggests that he was suffering from porphyria, a physical illness that affects the nervous system” (Madness). The coincidence of modern medical knowledge with the observations of the historical doctors within the film’s diegesis lends credibility to the historical truth of the drama.
While sartorial considerations seem to dominate Hytner’s historical mise-en-scene, they do not act in isolation. The on-location settings create an equally effective illusion of historical authenticity. These two obvious and visual aspects of the mise-en-scene are combined with more subtle elements such as character behaviour and the superimposition of modern medical knowledge onto the historical record. In concert with each other and with the realist style of film (that attempts to render form invisible and continuity feasible enough to manipulate a suspension of disbelief), the effect is powerful and convincing. Behind the camera filming was done in the late twentieth century; within the diegesis of the film Hytner has been careful to create an illusion of historical accuracy that only rarely betrays the actual date of the film’s construction, but otherwise barely reveals any hint that what is depicted on-screen are not actually visual moments plucked directly from the late eighteenth century.
Works Cited
Bellin, Joshua David. Framing Monsters – Fantasy Film and Social Alienation. Southern Illinois University, 2005. Print.
Cook, Pam. Fashioning the Nation. British Film Institute, 1996. Print
Madness of King George, The. Dir. Nicholas Hytner. Samuel Goldwyn Company, 1994. DVD.
Wiegman, Robert. “Race, Ethnicity and Film.” Eds. John HillL, & Pamela C. Gibson. The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Oxford: O.U.P., 1998. 158-168. Print.
Documentary Conventions and the Fear of Reality in The Blair Witch Project
What is truth and what is reality? One might do just ask well to as what the meaning of life is. In art and film, at least, the former question has received much attention in an effort to differentiate narrative fiction and documentary films. But the lines of distinction are not as clear as one might think. In Introduction to Documentary, Bill Nichols demonstrates that the two modes of film are mutually characterized by substantial overlap. Both are subject to the artifice of cinematography and to the editing choices of the filmmaker. The documentary claim to truth is problematized by its own medium of representation. In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard complicates the problem even further, suggesting that the advent of simulation in film may very well be a simulation of no identifiable referent. In 1999 an innovative film emerged that spawned a generation of documentary-styled ‘found footage’ horror films and that celebrate the documentary claim to reality and truth as powerfully horrific. In The Blair Witch Project, the documentary style of the film locates the source of repressed fear in reality itself and inverts the psychology of horror. The monster is not merely some fantastical creature inherent to a fictitious narrative; the monster is reality itself within the boundaries of a documentary record, and the monster is as elusive as the referent. The Blair Witch Project is a film in which the monster is the documentary film format and its ability to delude and misrepresent. It is the use of documentary conventions that renders the absent witch's existence so convincing and that demonstrates a repressed fear of the representation of reality to which documentary films lay claim.
The Blair Witch Project’s first claim to authenticity emerges in its simulation of found footage. The film presents what the introductory inter-titular caption states is film footage that was discovered in the woods following the disappearance of three young filmmakers. The ‘found footage’ genre of art has a long history that predates the invention of film. Its earliest incarnation is the fictitious epistolary novel. Works such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1787) attempt to appropriate the authenticity of apparently genuine letters into a fiction constructed out of the narrative contents of the letters. Of course, there are problems in maintaining the continuity of such a narrative when the narrative calls for omniscient knowledge. Richardson managed to circumvent the problem by inserting a lengthy prose narration into the middle of his series of letters. The result highlighted the epistolary characteristic of the rest of the novel as contrived and reduced its own authenticity. Critics such as Henry Fielding saw such a contrivance as entirely risible. His parody Shamela (1741) highlights all of the weaknesses of such a genre. However, the genre was not abandoned. The ‘found documents’ epistolary novel would find its most brilliant articulations when married with gothic romance in such novels as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). This early form of horror ‘mockumentary’ would not be able to manifest itself in film until technology allowed it to do so in the late twentieth century.
In order to claim that the epistolary style of the ‘found footage’ horror film is contingent upon documentary conventions requires a working definition of the term ‘documentary.’ Bill Nichols admits that a solid definition of the term documentary remains elusive and that the best articulation of a definition of ‘documentary’ is relative. That is to say, he defines documentaries as a family of films that often have certain characteristics in common but not necessarily all of them (Nichols 21). Nichols delineates a definition that includes “An Institutional Framework,” “A Community of Practitioners,” and “A Corpus of Texts” (Nichols 22, 25, 26). This last category includes Nichols lucid description of six reactionary modes of documentary as he has observed them throughout the history of the genre. These modes include the “Poetic Mode,” “Expository Mode,” “Observational Mode,” “Participatory Mode,” “Reflexive Mode,” and the “Performative Mode” (Nichols 33-4). The Blair Witch Project is a film that demonstrates aspects of at least five of Bill Nichols’ documentary “modes” (Nichols 33).
At the outset, The Blair Witch Project demonstrates qualities of Nichols’ Expository Mode. Nichols defines the Expository Mode as one which “emphasizes verbal commentary and an argumentative logic” (Nichols 33). The introduction to the film presents a textual exposition which claims, “In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found” (0:00:36). Shortly thereafter, while standing in a local cemetery, the character Heather Donahue provides an expository narration. She states,
This is Burkittsville, formerly Blair. It is a small, quiet Maryland town, much like a small quiet town anywhere. No more than twenty families laid their roots here over 200 years ago, many of whom remain either on this hill or in the town below. There are an unusually high number of children laid to rest here, most of whom passed in the 1940s, yet no-one in the town seems to recall anything unusual about this time, to us anyway. Yet legend tells a different story. One whose evidence is all around us, etched in stone (0:03:53-0:04:40).
What follows is a series of interviews from local citizens which extends the exposition. One gentleman explains that “Mr. Parr was an old hermit and he lived up on the mountain” (0:04:49-0:5:05). The man goes on to explain that “In the winter of 1940” the police found the bodies of seven kids that had disappeared from the area in Parr’s house (0:05:39-0:06:25). Another young man explains the method in which Mr. Parr committed the murders. He would take the kids into the “basement by twos and make one face into the corner and then he would kill the other one, and when he was done with that he’d grab the one out of the corner and kill that one too” (0:06:26-0:06:37). The end of the film visually suggests that this method of murder is the one suffered by Heather and Michael (1:17:01-1:17:08). Throughout the film, the narration of the three characters provides first-person participatory exposition of what they have experienced during time ellipses when the cameras were not rolling as well as what they see when the camera is not aimed at what they are discussing. For the fictitious narrative to unfold in an explicit way, the film depends on the expository mode.
The Blair Witch Project loosely demonstrates characteristics of both the Poetic Mode and the Participatory Mode as well. Nichols defines the Poetic Mode as one which “emphasizes visual associations, tonal or rhythmic qualities, descriptive passages, and formal organization” (Nichols 33). Throughout the film, the forest in which the action takes place is simultaneously romantically beautiful and horrifically sublime. The forest is associated with our most primal fears of the untamed wilderness and is presented as a location in which isolation and disorientation can create the most horrifying experiences. The use of a grainy, black and white 16mm film amplifies the fearful images of the deep, dark forest. Initially, the three protagonists revel in their wilderness excursion but they are quickly subsumed by the forest’s more terrifying aspects. As they succumb to hunger, fear, and disorientation the remainder of the narrative organizes itself around their attempts to navigate their way out of the wilderness in which they find themselves isolated. In this way, the makers of the documentary within the ‘found footage’ inadvertently participate as the victims of their own poetic horror documentary. Nichols defines the Participatory Mode as one which “emphasizes the interaction between filmmaker and subject” (Nichols 34). Within this poetic organizational framework, the three protagonists become the latest victims of the witch they are attempting to document.
The film also demonstrates characteristics of Nichols’ Reflexive Mode but in a substantially subtle way. Nichols defines the Reflexive Mode as one which “calls attention to the assumptions and conventions that govern documentary filmmaking” and “[i]ncreases our awareness of the constructedness of the film’s representation of reality” (Nichols 33). The introductory text defines the raw footage as the content of an intended documentary. By doing so the footage’s status and value as documentary is presented as a given which is not interrogated by an audience already in the throes of the suspension of disbelief. In a much less subtle moment, Josh laments his desire to escape the real situation in which he finds himself. “I can see why you like this video camera so much … It’s not quite reality … It’s totally like a filtered reality, man. It’s like you can pretend everything’s not quite the way it is (0:50:09-0:50:35). However, his situation is not real. Ironically, he is speaking from the diegetic confines of a fiction film masquerading as reality. His ironic comments emphasize the fact that the film is not reality but that documentary conventions have the ability to make it seem so.
The Blair Witch Project makes its most important claim to authenticity through its use of Nichols’ Observational Mode. Nichols defines the Observational Mode as one which “emphasizes a direct engagement with the everyday life of subjects as observed by an unobtrusive camera” (Nichols 34). In the movie, the entity or ‘witch’ that terrorizes the three filmmakers is clearly unconcerned with the presence of the cameras and proceeds to traumatize and murder Heather, Josh, and Michael. Even so, the witch is careful never to appear in any corporeal form in the film, but there is no reason to believe that such behavior is not standard to the witch’s modus operandi. Throughout the film, the claim to ‘found footage’ makes clear that what is seen is simply the raw footage that ‘observed’ exactly what the three filmmakers experienced in their descent into the horrors of the forest and their eventual disappearance. The otherwise inanimate footage makes a substantial claim to objectivity and authenticity. What is seen on the film must be real.
By using documentary conventions, The Blair Witch Project heightens the participation of the viewer in the horror presented before them and confuses fiction with reality. Nichols points out that “Fiction may be content to suspend disbelief (to accept its world as plausible), but non-fiction wants to install belief (to accept its world as actual)” (Nichols 2). He goes on to point out that “In documentaries we find stories or arguments, evocations or descriptions that let us see the world anew. The ability of the photographic image to reproduce the likeness of what is set before it compels us to believe that it is reality itself re-presented before us” (Nichols 3). The compulsion to believe has resulted in a powerful tacit agreement between viewers and filmmakers that documentary conventions must depict an objective reality. Referring to Mitchell Block’s 1973 film faux documentary No Lies, Nichols maintains that “[w]e are unsettled . . . by the off-screen filmmaker’s (Block’s) deliberate misrepresentation of the film’s status as a fiction with contractual bonds to its actors” (Nichols 13). When this social contract is breached it can cause serious backlash against the filmmaker. In her essay “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner,” Alison Landsberg states that “the experience within the movie theatre and the memories that the cinema affords–despite the fact that the spectator did not live through them–might be as significant in constructing or deconstructing the spectator’s identity as any experience that s/he actually lived through” (Landsberg 180). As a function of their identity construction, audiences might well react violently when conventional tacit agreements of documentary filmmaking are breached. For example, in the bonus materials included with Peter Jackson’s faux documentary Forgotten Silver (1995), he claims that he received hate mail and death threats following the film’s airing on public television.
Jean Baudrillard claims that what is simulated in artistic representations, which certainly includes film, has no cultural referent in the real world. He states that film simulation is “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (Baudrillard 1). Furthermore, Nichols states that “the act of filmmaking alters the reality it sets out to represent” (Nichols 6). In documentary film this might be seen as a sort of artistic Heisenberg uncertainty principle. That is to say, the act of filming (the experiment) will inherently skew the reality it records (the results of the experiment). This ability to alter reality is not necessarily confined to the mise-en-scene or narrative within the film, but can have repercussions in the real world. Allardyce Nicoll articulates this thesis clearly when she states, “What we have witnessed on the screen becomes the real for us” (Nicoll 38). In “Subject Positions, Speaking Positions: From Holocaust, Our Hitler, and Heimat to Shoah and Schindler’s List,” Thomas Elsaesser argues that “No longer is story telling the culture’s meaning-making response” (Elsaesser 146). In light of Nicoll’s, Nichols’ and Baudrillard’s arguments, then, what is simulated in a film becomes the origin, the referent itself.
The ability to construct reality is even more powerful if a fiction film appropriates documentary conventions.
Films like This is Spinal Tap [sic] (Rob Reiner, 1982) build this type of institutional framing into the film itself in a mischievous or ironic way: the film announces itself to be a documentary, only to prove to be a fabrication or simulation of a documentary. If we take its own self-description seriously, we will believe that the group Spinal Tap is an actual rock group. Since one had to be created for the film, just as a “Blair Witch” had to be created for The Blair Witch Project [sic], we will not be wrong. What we may fail to realize is that neither the rock group nor the witch had any existence whatsoever prior to the production of these films” (Nichols 23).
However, Nichols fails to recognize two major distinctions between the two films. First of all, The Blair Witch Project doesn’t highlight its artifice. There is no comedy in the narrative to mark it as a mockumentary as there is in This is Spinal Tap. In its documentary presentation The Blair Witch Project plays on audience expectations that the horror within is authentic. More importantly, while the rock band appears in its movie, the witch never does. Therefore Nichols is right that the conception of a Blair Witch is certainly brought into the same existence that the film simulates.
In Robin Wood’s pivotal work “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” he clearly articulates a Freudian argument which delineates how monsters in horror films are metaphoric representations of repressed social fears (Wood 200-201). He refers to these metaphoric representations as depictions of the “Other” (Wood 196). As we have already seen, the simulation of reality in a fiction film is rendered more powerful in a documentary style. If Baudrillard is right in his claim that film can create an illusion of a reality with no referent, then the simulacrum becomes equally more powerful. Baudrillard states that
One can live with the idea of a distorted truth. But … metaphysical despair came from the idea that the images concealed nothing at all, and that in fact they were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination (Baudrillard 3).
The Blair Witch Project doesn't stop at demonstrating a simulation of an entity that doesn't exist. It proves Baudrillard’s thesis by example. It simulates something that doesn't exist in reality with a representation that doesn’t show the witch! That is to say, The Blair Witch Project perfectly represents Baudrillard’s lacking referent with a lacking simulation. Nichols points out that “Images lack tense and a negative form” (Nichols 30). The Blair Witch Project merely suggests that the antagonist is some sort of supernatural entity. There is nothing in the images of the ostensibly found footage that says it was not the witch. Nevertheless, the witch never appears in the film. In fact, nothing that occurs in the film is exempt from the possibility of otherwise mundane, if unlikely, explanations. The film even offers an explanation that a man named Parr was the murderer from the 1940s who insisted he was possessed by the witch. There is no reason to believe that all that transpires in the film is not the work of another twisted, but entirely mortal, “Other.” However, no mundane “Other” appears either. If there is no “Other” in the film, then what makes it so terrifying? The answer is in its form of representation.
It is reality itself, as measured by documentary film conventions, that has become the repressed fear. Early in the film, a local woman explains that she heard about the Blair Witch from another credible documentary source. “I saw a documentary on the discovery channel or somewhere” (0:05:18-0:05:22). In this way the horror film becomes a documentary about documentaries. By exemplifying Baudrillard’s thesis of an absent referent in the real world, it is merely the representation that is the source of fear. Indeed, as Elsaesser points out, the representation has become all too real in American culture. “‘Do you remember the day Kennedy was shot?’ really means ‘Do you remember the day you watched Kennedy being shot all day on television?’” (Elsaesser 146). Similarly, our memories of 9/11 are constructed around visuals presented on news television (primarily on CNN). It has become a cliché to refer to the documentary-styled images in broadcast journalism not as “the news” but as “the bad news.” Film has become our touchstone for reality rather than reality being the touchstone for filmic realism, and our film reality is a terrifying one.
The Blair Witch Project is a meta-cinematic representation of three filmmakers who create their own reality – one that is never simulated on-screen because it has no documentary (i.e. objectively real) referent in the real world, but that consumes them all the same. The movie is simultaneously a fiction and a documentary. Nichols delineates these categories as “documentaries of wish-fulfillment and … documentaries of social representation” (Nichols 1).
Documentaries of wish-fulfillment are what we would normally call fictions. These films give tangible expression to our wishes and dreams, our nightmares and dreads. They make the stuff of the imagination concrete – visible and audible. They give a sense of what we wish, or fear, reality itself might be or become (Nichols 1).
However, The Blair Witch Project does not make the nightmare concrete. It makes the nightmare all the more frightening by avoiding the concrete. The nightmare is entirely elusive. “Documentaries of social representation are what we typically call non-fiction. These films give tangible expression to aspects of the world we already inhabit and share” (Nichols 1). The Blair Witch Project blurs the boundary between these categories. The film conflates what we “fear reality … might … become” with “the world we already inhabit and share” (Nichols 1). As Nichols points out, “Every film is a documentary” (Nichols 1). The Blair Witch Project is a film that documents our fear of the real through a fictitious “Other” that is absent on-screen.
The Blair Witch Project demonstrates Baudrillard’s thesis of simulacra in three ways. First, it brings into existence the simulation of a witch that has no referent in the real world. Ask any film buff if they know what the Blair Witch is and they will assuredly answer in the affirmative. Second, the film deploys a documentary format to lend credibility to the witch’s existence. Lastly, the film proves Baudrillard’s assertion that film simulations have no referent in that the simulation itself doesn’t occur on-screen. In this way, The Blair Witch Project is brilliant - appropriating the documentary claim to represent reality, it creates fear of an entity that is present neither in the real world nor in the film. As such, The Blair Witch Project demonstrates that the fear has become a fear of the representation itself and that simulation, for the purposes the of horror film, becomes more frightening in the absolute absence of the referent on both the screen and in reality.
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Print.
Deren, Maya. “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality.” Film Theory and Practice. Eds. G Mast and M. Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Elsaesser, Thomas. “Subject Positions, Speaking Positions: From Holocaust, Our Hitler, and Heimat to Shoah and Schindler’s List.” The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event. Ed. Vivian Sobchack. New York: Routledge, 1995. 146. Print.
Landsberg, Alison. “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner.” Body and Society 1, nos. 3-4 (1995): 190. Print.
Nicoll, Allardyce. “Film Reality: The Cinema and the Theater.” Film: An Anthology. Ed. Daniel Talbot. Berkeley: U of California P, 1959. 33-50. Print.
Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Print.
The Blair Witch Project. Dir. Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez. Artisan Entertainment, 1999. DVD.
Wood, Robin. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” Movies and Methods Volume II. Ed. Bill Nichols. London, England: University of California Press, 1985. 195-220. Print.
The Blair Witch Project’s first claim to authenticity emerges in its simulation of found footage. The film presents what the introductory inter-titular caption states is film footage that was discovered in the woods following the disappearance of three young filmmakers. The ‘found footage’ genre of art has a long history that predates the invention of film. Its earliest incarnation is the fictitious epistolary novel. Works such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1787) attempt to appropriate the authenticity of apparently genuine letters into a fiction constructed out of the narrative contents of the letters. Of course, there are problems in maintaining the continuity of such a narrative when the narrative calls for omniscient knowledge. Richardson managed to circumvent the problem by inserting a lengthy prose narration into the middle of his series of letters. The result highlighted the epistolary characteristic of the rest of the novel as contrived and reduced its own authenticity. Critics such as Henry Fielding saw such a contrivance as entirely risible. His parody Shamela (1741) highlights all of the weaknesses of such a genre. However, the genre was not abandoned. The ‘found documents’ epistolary novel would find its most brilliant articulations when married with gothic romance in such novels as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). This early form of horror ‘mockumentary’ would not be able to manifest itself in film until technology allowed it to do so in the late twentieth century.
In order to claim that the epistolary style of the ‘found footage’ horror film is contingent upon documentary conventions requires a working definition of the term ‘documentary.’ Bill Nichols admits that a solid definition of the term documentary remains elusive and that the best articulation of a definition of ‘documentary’ is relative. That is to say, he defines documentaries as a family of films that often have certain characteristics in common but not necessarily all of them (Nichols 21). Nichols delineates a definition that includes “An Institutional Framework,” “A Community of Practitioners,” and “A Corpus of Texts” (Nichols 22, 25, 26). This last category includes Nichols lucid description of six reactionary modes of documentary as he has observed them throughout the history of the genre. These modes include the “Poetic Mode,” “Expository Mode,” “Observational Mode,” “Participatory Mode,” “Reflexive Mode,” and the “Performative Mode” (Nichols 33-4). The Blair Witch Project is a film that demonstrates aspects of at least five of Bill Nichols’ documentary “modes” (Nichols 33).
At the outset, The Blair Witch Project demonstrates qualities of Nichols’ Expository Mode. Nichols defines the Expository Mode as one which “emphasizes verbal commentary and an argumentative logic” (Nichols 33). The introduction to the film presents a textual exposition which claims, “In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found” (0:00:36). Shortly thereafter, while standing in a local cemetery, the character Heather Donahue provides an expository narration. She states,
This is Burkittsville, formerly Blair. It is a small, quiet Maryland town, much like a small quiet town anywhere. No more than twenty families laid their roots here over 200 years ago, many of whom remain either on this hill or in the town below. There are an unusually high number of children laid to rest here, most of whom passed in the 1940s, yet no-one in the town seems to recall anything unusual about this time, to us anyway. Yet legend tells a different story. One whose evidence is all around us, etched in stone (0:03:53-0:04:40).
What follows is a series of interviews from local citizens which extends the exposition. One gentleman explains that “Mr. Parr was an old hermit and he lived up on the mountain” (0:04:49-0:5:05). The man goes on to explain that “In the winter of 1940” the police found the bodies of seven kids that had disappeared from the area in Parr’s house (0:05:39-0:06:25). Another young man explains the method in which Mr. Parr committed the murders. He would take the kids into the “basement by twos and make one face into the corner and then he would kill the other one, and when he was done with that he’d grab the one out of the corner and kill that one too” (0:06:26-0:06:37). The end of the film visually suggests that this method of murder is the one suffered by Heather and Michael (1:17:01-1:17:08). Throughout the film, the narration of the three characters provides first-person participatory exposition of what they have experienced during time ellipses when the cameras were not rolling as well as what they see when the camera is not aimed at what they are discussing. For the fictitious narrative to unfold in an explicit way, the film depends on the expository mode.
The Blair Witch Project loosely demonstrates characteristics of both the Poetic Mode and the Participatory Mode as well. Nichols defines the Poetic Mode as one which “emphasizes visual associations, tonal or rhythmic qualities, descriptive passages, and formal organization” (Nichols 33). Throughout the film, the forest in which the action takes place is simultaneously romantically beautiful and horrifically sublime. The forest is associated with our most primal fears of the untamed wilderness and is presented as a location in which isolation and disorientation can create the most horrifying experiences. The use of a grainy, black and white 16mm film amplifies the fearful images of the deep, dark forest. Initially, the three protagonists revel in their wilderness excursion but they are quickly subsumed by the forest’s more terrifying aspects. As they succumb to hunger, fear, and disorientation the remainder of the narrative organizes itself around their attempts to navigate their way out of the wilderness in which they find themselves isolated. In this way, the makers of the documentary within the ‘found footage’ inadvertently participate as the victims of their own poetic horror documentary. Nichols defines the Participatory Mode as one which “emphasizes the interaction between filmmaker and subject” (Nichols 34). Within this poetic organizational framework, the three protagonists become the latest victims of the witch they are attempting to document.
The film also demonstrates characteristics of Nichols’ Reflexive Mode but in a substantially subtle way. Nichols defines the Reflexive Mode as one which “calls attention to the assumptions and conventions that govern documentary filmmaking” and “[i]ncreases our awareness of the constructedness of the film’s representation of reality” (Nichols 33). The introductory text defines the raw footage as the content of an intended documentary. By doing so the footage’s status and value as documentary is presented as a given which is not interrogated by an audience already in the throes of the suspension of disbelief. In a much less subtle moment, Josh laments his desire to escape the real situation in which he finds himself. “I can see why you like this video camera so much … It’s not quite reality … It’s totally like a filtered reality, man. It’s like you can pretend everything’s not quite the way it is (0:50:09-0:50:35). However, his situation is not real. Ironically, he is speaking from the diegetic confines of a fiction film masquerading as reality. His ironic comments emphasize the fact that the film is not reality but that documentary conventions have the ability to make it seem so.
The Blair Witch Project makes its most important claim to authenticity through its use of Nichols’ Observational Mode. Nichols defines the Observational Mode as one which “emphasizes a direct engagement with the everyday life of subjects as observed by an unobtrusive camera” (Nichols 34). In the movie, the entity or ‘witch’ that terrorizes the three filmmakers is clearly unconcerned with the presence of the cameras and proceeds to traumatize and murder Heather, Josh, and Michael. Even so, the witch is careful never to appear in any corporeal form in the film, but there is no reason to believe that such behavior is not standard to the witch’s modus operandi. Throughout the film, the claim to ‘found footage’ makes clear that what is seen is simply the raw footage that ‘observed’ exactly what the three filmmakers experienced in their descent into the horrors of the forest and their eventual disappearance. The otherwise inanimate footage makes a substantial claim to objectivity and authenticity. What is seen on the film must be real.
By using documentary conventions, The Blair Witch Project heightens the participation of the viewer in the horror presented before them and confuses fiction with reality. Nichols points out that “Fiction may be content to suspend disbelief (to accept its world as plausible), but non-fiction wants to install belief (to accept its world as actual)” (Nichols 2). He goes on to point out that “In documentaries we find stories or arguments, evocations or descriptions that let us see the world anew. The ability of the photographic image to reproduce the likeness of what is set before it compels us to believe that it is reality itself re-presented before us” (Nichols 3). The compulsion to believe has resulted in a powerful tacit agreement between viewers and filmmakers that documentary conventions must depict an objective reality. Referring to Mitchell Block’s 1973 film faux documentary No Lies, Nichols maintains that “[w]e are unsettled . . . by the off-screen filmmaker’s (Block’s) deliberate misrepresentation of the film’s status as a fiction with contractual bonds to its actors” (Nichols 13). When this social contract is breached it can cause serious backlash against the filmmaker. In her essay “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner,” Alison Landsberg states that “the experience within the movie theatre and the memories that the cinema affords–despite the fact that the spectator did not live through them–might be as significant in constructing or deconstructing the spectator’s identity as any experience that s/he actually lived through” (Landsberg 180). As a function of their identity construction, audiences might well react violently when conventional tacit agreements of documentary filmmaking are breached. For example, in the bonus materials included with Peter Jackson’s faux documentary Forgotten Silver (1995), he claims that he received hate mail and death threats following the film’s airing on public television.
Jean Baudrillard claims that what is simulated in artistic representations, which certainly includes film, has no cultural referent in the real world. He states that film simulation is “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (Baudrillard 1). Furthermore, Nichols states that “the act of filmmaking alters the reality it sets out to represent” (Nichols 6). In documentary film this might be seen as a sort of artistic Heisenberg uncertainty principle. That is to say, the act of filming (the experiment) will inherently skew the reality it records (the results of the experiment). This ability to alter reality is not necessarily confined to the mise-en-scene or narrative within the film, but can have repercussions in the real world. Allardyce Nicoll articulates this thesis clearly when she states, “What we have witnessed on the screen becomes the real for us” (Nicoll 38). In “Subject Positions, Speaking Positions: From Holocaust, Our Hitler, and Heimat to Shoah and Schindler’s List,” Thomas Elsaesser argues that “No longer is story telling the culture’s meaning-making response” (Elsaesser 146). In light of Nicoll’s, Nichols’ and Baudrillard’s arguments, then, what is simulated in a film becomes the origin, the referent itself.
The ability to construct reality is even more powerful if a fiction film appropriates documentary conventions.
Films like This is Spinal Tap [sic] (Rob Reiner, 1982) build this type of institutional framing into the film itself in a mischievous or ironic way: the film announces itself to be a documentary, only to prove to be a fabrication or simulation of a documentary. If we take its own self-description seriously, we will believe that the group Spinal Tap is an actual rock group. Since one had to be created for the film, just as a “Blair Witch” had to be created for The Blair Witch Project [sic], we will not be wrong. What we may fail to realize is that neither the rock group nor the witch had any existence whatsoever prior to the production of these films” (Nichols 23).
However, Nichols fails to recognize two major distinctions between the two films. First of all, The Blair Witch Project doesn’t highlight its artifice. There is no comedy in the narrative to mark it as a mockumentary as there is in This is Spinal Tap. In its documentary presentation The Blair Witch Project plays on audience expectations that the horror within is authentic. More importantly, while the rock band appears in its movie, the witch never does. Therefore Nichols is right that the conception of a Blair Witch is certainly brought into the same existence that the film simulates.
In Robin Wood’s pivotal work “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” he clearly articulates a Freudian argument which delineates how monsters in horror films are metaphoric representations of repressed social fears (Wood 200-201). He refers to these metaphoric representations as depictions of the “Other” (Wood 196). As we have already seen, the simulation of reality in a fiction film is rendered more powerful in a documentary style. If Baudrillard is right in his claim that film can create an illusion of a reality with no referent, then the simulacrum becomes equally more powerful. Baudrillard states that
One can live with the idea of a distorted truth. But … metaphysical despair came from the idea that the images concealed nothing at all, and that in fact they were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination (Baudrillard 3).
The Blair Witch Project doesn't stop at demonstrating a simulation of an entity that doesn't exist. It proves Baudrillard’s thesis by example. It simulates something that doesn't exist in reality with a representation that doesn’t show the witch! That is to say, The Blair Witch Project perfectly represents Baudrillard’s lacking referent with a lacking simulation. Nichols points out that “Images lack tense and a negative form” (Nichols 30). The Blair Witch Project merely suggests that the antagonist is some sort of supernatural entity. There is nothing in the images of the ostensibly found footage that says it was not the witch. Nevertheless, the witch never appears in the film. In fact, nothing that occurs in the film is exempt from the possibility of otherwise mundane, if unlikely, explanations. The film even offers an explanation that a man named Parr was the murderer from the 1940s who insisted he was possessed by the witch. There is no reason to believe that all that transpires in the film is not the work of another twisted, but entirely mortal, “Other.” However, no mundane “Other” appears either. If there is no “Other” in the film, then what makes it so terrifying? The answer is in its form of representation.
It is reality itself, as measured by documentary film conventions, that has become the repressed fear. Early in the film, a local woman explains that she heard about the Blair Witch from another credible documentary source. “I saw a documentary on the discovery channel or somewhere” (0:05:18-0:05:22). In this way the horror film becomes a documentary about documentaries. By exemplifying Baudrillard’s thesis of an absent referent in the real world, it is merely the representation that is the source of fear. Indeed, as Elsaesser points out, the representation has become all too real in American culture. “‘Do you remember the day Kennedy was shot?’ really means ‘Do you remember the day you watched Kennedy being shot all day on television?’” (Elsaesser 146). Similarly, our memories of 9/11 are constructed around visuals presented on news television (primarily on CNN). It has become a cliché to refer to the documentary-styled images in broadcast journalism not as “the news” but as “the bad news.” Film has become our touchstone for reality rather than reality being the touchstone for filmic realism, and our film reality is a terrifying one.
The Blair Witch Project is a meta-cinematic representation of three filmmakers who create their own reality – one that is never simulated on-screen because it has no documentary (i.e. objectively real) referent in the real world, but that consumes them all the same. The movie is simultaneously a fiction and a documentary. Nichols delineates these categories as “documentaries of wish-fulfillment and … documentaries of social representation” (Nichols 1).
Documentaries of wish-fulfillment are what we would normally call fictions. These films give tangible expression to our wishes and dreams, our nightmares and dreads. They make the stuff of the imagination concrete – visible and audible. They give a sense of what we wish, or fear, reality itself might be or become (Nichols 1).
However, The Blair Witch Project does not make the nightmare concrete. It makes the nightmare all the more frightening by avoiding the concrete. The nightmare is entirely elusive. “Documentaries of social representation are what we typically call non-fiction. These films give tangible expression to aspects of the world we already inhabit and share” (Nichols 1). The Blair Witch Project blurs the boundary between these categories. The film conflates what we “fear reality … might … become” with “the world we already inhabit and share” (Nichols 1). As Nichols points out, “Every film is a documentary” (Nichols 1). The Blair Witch Project is a film that documents our fear of the real through a fictitious “Other” that is absent on-screen.
The Blair Witch Project demonstrates Baudrillard’s thesis of simulacra in three ways. First, it brings into existence the simulation of a witch that has no referent in the real world. Ask any film buff if they know what the Blair Witch is and they will assuredly answer in the affirmative. Second, the film deploys a documentary format to lend credibility to the witch’s existence. Lastly, the film proves Baudrillard’s assertion that film simulations have no referent in that the simulation itself doesn’t occur on-screen. In this way, The Blair Witch Project is brilliant - appropriating the documentary claim to represent reality, it creates fear of an entity that is present neither in the real world nor in the film. As such, The Blair Witch Project demonstrates that the fear has become a fear of the representation itself and that simulation, for the purposes the of horror film, becomes more frightening in the absolute absence of the referent on both the screen and in reality.
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Print.
Deren, Maya. “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality.” Film Theory and Practice. Eds. G Mast and M. Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Elsaesser, Thomas. “Subject Positions, Speaking Positions: From Holocaust, Our Hitler, and Heimat to Shoah and Schindler’s List.” The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event. Ed. Vivian Sobchack. New York: Routledge, 1995. 146. Print.
Landsberg, Alison. “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner.” Body and Society 1, nos. 3-4 (1995): 190. Print.
Nicoll, Allardyce. “Film Reality: The Cinema and the Theater.” Film: An Anthology. Ed. Daniel Talbot. Berkeley: U of California P, 1959. 33-50. Print.
Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Print.
The Blair Witch Project. Dir. Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez. Artisan Entertainment, 1999. DVD.
Wood, Robin. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” Movies and Methods Volume II. Ed. Bill Nichols. London, England: University of California Press, 1985. 195-220. Print.
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