On Tue, 30 Aug 1994, Edward R. O'Neill wrote: > Just to clarify my recent post on NBK. Jeff B. took me to task a bit > for underestimating Stone's attention to detail and control. I don't > undervalue these at all. Stone clearly created a vibrant visual > surface. What I said was that the director didn't interest himself too > much in the narrative, which is sloppy at best and hackneyed at worst. This is a reading I simply don't follow at all. I thought that Stone was meticulous - almost painfully so - in his organization of images. No, he didn't invest a lot in narrative, and I'll try to get to the why of that in a minute. > Perhaps these critical terms are too blunt. When a director strives to > exceed a more normative Hollywood style, narrative structure is bound > to change, too. Even at the level of pure style, though, I don't find > what Stone's doing in this film too original or too interesting. It's > more (dare I say it) a pastiche (including effects borrowed from > Zentropa), as is the case at the level of plot, too. As I noted in an earlier post, and as I think Jeff also made pretty clear, what we are seeing stylistically isn't NEW, per se. I know I've seen something darned similar before. 1959 - Godard's BREATHLESS - generally regarded as something of a breakthrough in New Wave filmmaking. And I see it just about every time I flip on MTV. It's fresh not because it hasn't been done before, but because it has been so long abandoned by Hollywood that we're not used to seeing such an approach on the big screen. And then there's that word - "pastiche." Jameson uses that word to refer to the "contrived depthlessness" of "postmodern" art. And while Edward has clearly invested more in the actual text than that boob Jameson ever did, I think the word has become tainted by its association with an unduly elitist approach. The precept is that images are tossed together willy-nilly and that the surface, while quite attractive mirrors no deeper, richer meaning. Simply not so in this film. We get a powerful comment on where media is going and on its potential role in facilitating our further slide into a decidedly Gibsonesque dark, cyberpunk future. The inherently modernist idea that such imagistic approaches cannot adequately match narrative structure in creating textured, deep meaningfulness is one that I believe dies at the threshhold of the age of television. Culturally, there is a longstanding (dare I say eternal?) bias toward the narrative because narrative has been the traditional mode of socialization and cultural transmission. How do we learn about our world? Storytelling. Now, though, storytelling has been replaced by television, with children in the critical pre-school years watching an average of 30-33 hours of television a week. By age 18 we have spent 11,000 hours in the classroom and 22,000 hours in front of the TV. And TV, whatever else may be said of it, is clearly NOT a narrative medium in any sense that compares to traditional modes of storytelling. As Chinua Achebe says, his father told him many stories about the world. Now, his children tell his grandchildren almost no stories at all - and this is in Nigeria. It isn't unreasonable to expect that such a people, suckled at the imagistic teat of American broadcasting, might be constructed differently with respect to how they perceive their world and how they think about it. One thing that is clear in my dealings with my students: they are NOT shallow people. They are bright, deep, and find tremendous meaning in the art around them. I daresay this process is different from what we would find in their pre-TV ancestors, but it is nonetheless valid. Communication creates meaning in people's lives, and Stone's "pastiche" approach, while decidedly image-over-narrative, I think works quite well when considered in this light. > I do credit Stone with doing something out of the ordinary, I merely > question to what end. Particularly important to me is the supposed > critique of the media and violence, which, as I said last time, is not > so much a critique as a valentine. Stone gets high on what he's > supposedly looking down on. Perhaps this is what makes him interesting: > he can't manage pat moral attitudes, because he's so conflicted and > his conflicts are so out there on the surface. I agree with the first part but not the second. "Valentine" is a wonderful word, and I think this is perhaps where Stone is at his most effective. I mean, no audience member can possibly see the movie as a glorification of mass murder. Aside from the obvious cultural predisposition against such things, the movie itself is so obviously a parody that I don't think even the least critical viewer could miss the point. Stone makes a valentine of the whoel media-violence gestalt because the media makes a valentine of it. Just in case anybody missed the point of the movie Oliver does a heavy-handed surf through the Bobbits and the OJs at the end (BTW - John Bobbit is now making a hard-core porn movie to prove that he's still, um, functional). What better critique of the media can be made than simply flooding reality with a little light - and a dash or two of rose-colored light here and there just for effect? I do not agree that Stone is conflicted. The characters - most notably Wayne Gale's - are viciously-drawn parodies that overstate what we see on TV nightly only be a fraction. You may think Stone is conflicted, but I'll bet people like Geraldo and some of those Inside Edition boobs caught the insult. Gale is a self-indulgent whore who is guilty of everything that Mickey and Mallory accuse him of at the end. He is - and Stone makes this clear - he is lower on the food chain than two cold-blooded psychofruit mass murderers. > Charley Murphy's post brings up some interesting questions: if > MTV bears some relation to experimental film, what is to be made of the > differences, such as the commercial end of MTV, which, even as we speak, > is test marketing an MTV home shopping channel? > Combining recent posts about NBK and a thread about product placement: > apparently Coke was only told that their commercial would appear > within the context of a mythical superbowl broadcast. It seems they > did not bother to read the script and were, of course, livid with the > results. Seeing a nearly full-length Coke ad on the movie screen was > probably for me the most interesting and enjoyable moment in the film, > since Stone seemed to be pushing the limits of the cinema-tv question-- > how are they to differentiate themselves?--as well as giving Coke a > big slap in t he face. Right on here. I got into a huge argument on H-PCAACA when I suggested that product placement wasn't necessarily an evil and corrupted thing - that there was some obligation to represent the world as it exists, and that advertising and merchandising were inescapable elements of our cultural landscape. Stone here makes vividly clear what I was getting at, and he does so in as sinister a fashion as possible. Coke was livid, huh? Good. I like Pepsi better anyway. :) > Isn't it significant that so many films which appear in the movie > theaters now are derived from old TV shows, as if Hollywood's long- > standing attempt to distance itself from TV were somehow reversing > itself? Yeah, isn't it? I know this ran long, but many thanks to Edward for posting and to the rest of you for reading. A lively list is a happy list. ================================================================== Samuel Random Smith Center for Mass Media Research 303.543.8610 (voice) University of Colorado [log in to unmask] ==================================================================