independent film at the twilight of the American dream

Visual Studies

ISSN: 1472-586X (Print) 1472-5878 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rvst20

Not Hollywood: independent film at the twilight of the American dream John Grady To cite this article: John Grady (2015): Not Hollywood: independent film at the twilight of the American dream, Visual Studies, DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2015.1024509 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2015.1024509

Published online: 26 Mar 2015.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 11

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rvst20 Download by: [Wheaton College]

Date: 28 September 2015, At: 11:46

Visual Studies, 2015

Review

Downloaded by [Wheaton College] at 11:46 28 September 2015

Not Hollywood: independent film at the twilight of the American dream by Sherry B. Ortner Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013, 331 pages ISBN: 978-0-8223-5426-0 (paperback) Price: US$22.50 Reviewed by John Grady, Wheaton College, Norton, MA Sherry Ortner, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, set out to update Hortense Powdermaker’s searing ethnography of the film industry, Hollywood, The Dream Factory (1950), but was unable to gain access to an institution she defines as ‘one of the most powerful sites for the production of hegemonic … American culture, and for the seduction of American and global audiences into the values of that culture’ (2). Fortunately for us, Ortner made a big discovery during her foray into the world of moviemaking that she has turned into a richly informative study, which is the subject of this book. What she found was that since the late 1980s, the US has been home to an astonishingly vibrant, productive and more or less economically successful film movement that enthusiastically celebrates its independence from the major Hollywood studios and their prevailing film conventions. The films’ narratives are also generally counter-hegemonic and constitute a diverse and wide-ranging critique of what Ortner in her subtitle refers to as the ‘twilight of the American Dream.’ Ortner dates the rise of the Independent Film Movement (IFM) to Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989). Since that date, independent filmmakers have produced thousands of films – Ortner reports that she has personally viewed 650 – many of which have received critical acclaim, even from Hollywood. In fact, since 2003, independent films have won 87 Oscars in 22 categories (Independent Film and Television Alliance news release, 24 February 2013). For Ortner, independent films are all those films not made by the major studios. As such her universe spans a continuum from low-budget movies made by film students, innumerable films produced with ever cheaper digital cameras and desktop computers by aspiring film-makers as well as fairly large production efforts funded – in all or in part – by ‘creative’

subdivisions of the big studios. Diverse examples include (1) Apocalypse Now (1979) that Frances Ford Coppola bankrolled himself for $31 million. It returned $150 million on worldwide rentals. (2) The Blair Witch Project (1999) that cost its producers $60,000 and which has made a quarter of a billion dollars worldwide. (3) More typical success stories are Frozen River (2008) and Winter’s Bone (2010) made for 1 and 2 million dollars, respectively, and which have garnered $5 million (Frozen River) and $13 million (Winter’s Bone), as well as numerous Oscar nominations. A number of factors contributed to the rise of the IFM. Cable television fostered demand for new content, while video and DVD players opened up markets for film distribution. On another front, one after another of the major Hollywood studios were purchased by international media conglomerates that encouraged the production of big blockbuster hits with a lower common denominator aesthetic: moralistic stories with lots of action and special effects. As lucrative as these films often were, it was still difficult to predict whether an audience would flock to a particular film. Therefore, the conglomerates established a host of specialty divisions to underwrite more varied movies to offset possible losses by the blockbusters. In addition, an increasingly culturally diverse and more educated audience provided a growing market for relatively low-budget niche films, many made by cinema literate film school graduates aware of, if not influenced by, socially critical and aesthetically imaginative international films. Crucially important has been the role of a new breed of film producers (often independently wealthy), who are both more politically progressive and less risk-averse than earlier generations in actively seeking out ‘cutting edge’ film projects of one kind or another. Indicative of the change is the remarkable fact that women, who constituted less than 1 percent of film producers in 1973, now make up about one half of the total. Ortner’s central argument is that the major motivation behind the rise of the IFM has been the experience of Generation X (people born between 1961 and 1981) with ascendant neoliberalism. In some ways this has been positive, as the new entrepreneurialism fostered by a market-friendly economic environment has created the technologies and markets that encourage creative


2

Review

innovation in film-making. On the other hand, the growing insecurity brought about by an increasingly deregulated economy, depressed wages, rising housing costs, unstable job tenure and a pattern of growing inequality that has depressed many regions and communities in America, has eroded both shared prosperity and the welfare state, creating bleak prospects for those born after 1960. For Generation Xers – rising adults from the late 1980s and early 1990s on – the American Dream became a nightmare. Not surprisingly, many of that generation’s film-makers turned away from fantasy, wish fulfilment and happy endings towards darker ‘neo-realist’ narratives that reveal the bleakness of everyday life. A flourishing festival circuit provides an expanding number of venues to showcase independent films and their new sensibility. Finally, digital streaming has only made these products more available. The result is a tidal wave of films that are either explicitly critical of the cultural order or more often ‘perform cultural critique by way of embracing a kind of harsh realism, by making films that display the dark realities in contemporary life, and that make demands on the viewer to viscerally experience and come to grips with those realities’ (29). Nevertheless, Ortner acknowledges that mainstream and independent film-making are very much entwined. Hollywood, among other strategies, keeps its finger on the pulse of the audience by mining ideas, themes, techniques and talent first developed by those beyond the pale and this interaction appears to be a cyclic process. As Hollywood successfully appropriates promising innovations, independent film-makers constantly search for new ways to push the envelope. Ortner’s case for linking this unprecedented output of critically independent films to the ascendancy of neoliberal ideology is quite convincing and well argued. Lamentably, however, she gives short shrift to two important historical factors that, when considered, suggest a more dynamic process and complex story. First, Ortner underestimates the number of darkly critical films that both Hollywood and independent producers have made since the mid-1960s, if not before. The Dark Knight (2008) comes readily to mind as a recent example. This aesthetic undercurrent has many sources, which include, variously, the pre-code films of the 1930s, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), film noir as a genre, On the Waterfront (1954), as well as more strictly independent products like the films of John Cassavetes from the late 1960s and early 1970s, which Ortner only comments on fleetingly. Completely overlooked is Morris Engel’s Little Fugitive (1953) that enjoyed reasonable box-office success and is credited by Francois Truffaut as the inspiration for 400 Blows (1959)

and the entire French New Wave. While more numerous since 1990, meditations on the dark side of American society and culture are nothing new. Likewise, Ortner’s treatment of generational dynamics is oversimplified. She assumes that a given epoch – or identifiable time period – reflects the consciousness of a specific generation, as though that period was not experienced by other generations at different stages of the life course and who also contributed to how its events were interpreted and enacted. This is a shame because Ortner has done a great service by introducing and utilising the concept of generational dynamics as an explanatory factor in social and cultural analysis. Close attention to Strauss and Howe’s Generations (1991), which she does not cite but whose periodisation she utilises, suggests that Generation X’s mindset is not just a product of their encounter with neoliberalism but may also be framed by what they made of the high expectations and disappointments of their parental generation, the Baby Boomers (1943–1960) as well as how they manage their own apprehensions for their Millennial generation (1981–2003) children. It is a commonplace that the Baby Boomers came of age in the 1960s with a confidently optimistic view of their place in the world and how they could change it for the better. By 1973, however, the Arab oil embargo and other economic shocks eroded their faith in the future, replacing it with anxiety and foreboding. Not surprisingly, many films of the late 1960s and 1970s provide a jaundiced treatment of deteriorating American social and cultural institutions where protagonists’ quests are dashed by the arrogance of power, violence, and corruption. Think of The Godfather – Part I (1972) and II (1974) – Chinatown (1974), One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), and, of course, The Deer Hunter (l978) and Apocalypse Now (1979), all of which were in the top 20 moneymaking films the year they were released. Even a celebration of the American Dream like Rocky (1976) is premised on an America of depressed communities, dead-end jobs and overcoming an implausibly long shot at success. These are the films that spoke to the Baby Boomers as rising adults and were absorbed by their children in Generation X as teenagers, preparing them for the films their generation was to make after 1990. Ortner also claims that Generation X is a ‘long generation’ and that its world view and aesthetic is shared by subsequent generations, the aforementioned Millennials born after 1981 and the as yet unnamed Generation Z, born after 2004. ‘They express themselves – in their writings, their music and their films – as angry and frustrated, damaged and


Review

depressed, or as a defense against all that, ironically removed from, and with a dark sense of humor about the world’ (21). Ortner identifies many themes in the films she has viewed that certainly support her argument: economic insecurity, bodily fear, relative helplessness, hopelessness, family dysfunction, paedophilia, the downward mobility of middle class women and so on. But she has not paid any systematic attention to how these treatments might be changing over time. For example, recent films like Frozen River and Winter’s Bone chronicle the struggle of women in broken families to survive under adverse economic circumstances. Yet people consciously choosing to act as kin and tie their fates together resolve both of these narratives. The ethos of ‘pulling together as one’ is a leitmotif of the films favoured by the Millennial Generation, whose parents compensated for their own anxiety by very much protecting their children. Note, for example, the important scene in The Dark Knight, where two groups of hostages – one mostly minority prisoners and the other mostly white middle-class urbanites – refuse to play a fiendish prisoner’s dilemma devised by the Joker and instead trump him with an act of moral solidarity that ensures their collective survival.

3

These films are still dark, but are also finding new, unconventional and, perhaps, more convincing ways of scripting hope and redemption into their narratives. In other words, what is often dismissed as cultural seduction in popular film might be more fruitfully interpreted as part of a conversation about moral responsibility. Only close attention to how themes and storylines vary and evolve over time in both mainstream and independent films can enable us to make full use of the riches they provide for social and cultural analysis. There is much to be done and Sherry Ortner is to be commended for getting us started. REFERENCES Howe, N., and W. Strauss. 1991. Generations. New York, NY: William Morrow and Company. Powdermaker, H. 1950. Hollywood, the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the Movie-Makers. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company.

© 2015 John Grady http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2015.1024509