Transnational Media Imaginaries: Cinema, Digital Technology and Uneven Globalization

TRANSNATIONAL MEDIA IMAGINARIES:

CINEMA,

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY

AND UNEVEN GLOBALIZATION

by

Vicente Rodriguez Ortega

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Cinema Studies

New York University

September, 2007

Robert P. Stam

© Vicente Rodriguez Ortega

All Rights Reserved, 2007

iii

DEDICATION

This dissertation is dedicated to my father, Vicente, and my mother, Pilar, for

their love and support.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my advisor, Robert Stam, for his thoughtful comments,

constant support and contagious enthusiasm throughout the writing process of this

dissertation. I would also like to thank all my committee members, Robert Sklar,

Christine Gledhill, Jung-Bong Choi and Dana Polan as well as professor Zhang Zhen

for their great care in reviewing and analyzing my work. I am deeply indebted to all

my friends and peers at NYU, especially Stefano Ciammaroni, Cecilia Sayad and

Ohad Landesman for countless conversations and disagreements about auteurs,

blockbusters and transnational cinema. In addition, I am very grateful to all the staff in

the Cinema Studies Department, especially Ventura Castro, Ken Sweeney, Liza

Greenfield, Ann Harris, Mai Kiang and Cathy Holter. Lastly, above all, I would like

to thank my girlfriend, Mila Dragomirova Voinikova, for her incredible support, love

and many other things words cannot fully express.

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication iii Acknowledgments iv List of Figures vi Introduction: Bodies that Move, Bodies 1 that Do not Move: Transnational Cinema and Uneven Globalization Chapter 1: Hyperlinked Spectators: Trailer 54 Watching and Remaking in the Digital Age Chapter 2: Bodies in Crisis: Affect, Sickness 152 and Capital in the Global Cityscape Chapter 3: Violence, Cross-cultural Translation 269 and Genre: Woo, Amenábar and Tarantino’s Global Reach Chapter 4: Digital Technology and Political 360 Filmmaking: Illegal and Corporate Bodies in Motion Postscript: A New Discourse of Earnestness? 437 Bibliography 458

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1 YouTube Website 78

Fig. 2 YouTube Player 80

Fig. 3 YouTube User’s Comments 81

Fig. 4 Kill Christ 1 88

Fig. 5 Kill Christ 2 88

Fig. 6 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Web Site 91 Fig. 7 The Daily Sixer 99 Fig. 8 Scary Movie 4 Web site 115

Fig. 9 Scary Movie 4 MySpace site 118

Fig. 10 Movie Trailer Trash 127

Fig. 11 Apple Trailer site 133

Fig. 12 Movies AOL 137

Fig. 13 Movie Page 141

1

INTRODUCTION

BODIES THAT MOVE, BODIES THAT DO NOT MOVE:

TRANSNATIONAL CINEMA AND UNEVEN GLOBALIZATION

“In Mexico, you won’t get anything unless you corrupt yourself. With honesty, you can only get frijoles and eggs. Those who study, study to steal.” —Mexican construction worker in In the Pit

Juan Carlos Rulfo’s In the Pit (2006) ends with a breathtaking five-minute-

and-thirty-second aerial shot of “El Segundo Piso,” an elevated freeway built above

the Periferico (one of the main transportation arteries crossing Mexico City). This is

the first time the filmmaker situates the spectator above ground, showing how the

Dantesque four-year project the film documents is almost finished. The voices of

several of the construction workers we have followed throughout the preceding

seventy-five minutes accompany this grandiose finale. They express their pride as

their work comes to an end, and yet they also mark themselves among those who will

not likely utilize the freeway since their paychecks, as one of the workers eloquently

affirms, barely allows them to buy a bicycle, let alone an automobile. In this respect,

In the Pit may be understood as a political project that gives voice to the invisible

pawns of society’s underbelly. In so doing, the film unearths the exploitative dynamic

of economic and social discrimination that characterizes the institutional policies of

2

the Mexican government and exposes the perverted functioning of a contemporary

social order in which class and race dictate who remains “down there” and who rises

“up there” into the social spheres. The film brings to the fore the hidden voices

typically muted by the governmental discourse, one that presents the construction of

“El Segundo Piso” as a groundbreaking step towards the full-fledged modernization of

Mexico City. Thus it interrogates the freeway-as-spectacle framework that organizes

this institutional discourse through the point of view of the racially marginalized and

socially and economically deprived. In this sense, the superior elevation of the

“Segundo Piso” and its discriminating politics of access form direct correlatives to the

pit where the workers remain throughout the entire film. Their only chance to be

above the ground is to hang dangerously from the scaffolds and metallic structures

they painstakingly shape for others to use. The closing aerial shot, with its awesome

power to visually map out the gigantic structure we have only seen before as

construction bits and pieces, points directly to the kind of propagandistic perspectives

that governments mobilize to remain in a position of privilege. From this height, we

see an abstract canvas, in a non-human point-of-view shot that vacuums out the human

labor and economic deprivation that literally undergirds the construction of the

freeway. However, the overlaid voices of the workers go a long way to humanize this

totalizing bird eye’s shot, reminding us of the thousands of invisible human beings

that have ramained and will remain below “El Segundo Piso’s” ground.

3

In the Pit is more than an ode to the suffering worker conceived as part of an

abstract work force epitomizing the uneven distribution of wealth in our contemporary

milieu. Rather, it offers a polysemantic tapestry of the competing voices that inhabit

the sweetest and the darkest realms of the workers’ personae. As they exchange words

of camaraderie among themselves, engaging in spontaneous reflections about who

they are, want to be, have become, or wish to be in a future that does not seem

feasible, they are pictured as profoundly disenchanted, generous, good-hearted but

also biased, egotistical, and, on occasion, homophobic and misogynistic—in short,

human. Moreover, their dark skins remind us of the structuring absence of their kind

within the standard discourses of the most powerful Mexican media corporations such

as Televisa and TV Azteca. In these audiovisual venues the fair-skinned Mexican rules

almighty—from newscasts to romantic soap operas to entertainment shows. In

Mexico, the indigenous Other is often treated as an uneducated pariah—namely, an

obstacle on the path of modernization. Mexico thus remains stuck in a schizophrenic

condition, caused both by the rampant racism of U.S. immigration policies and by its

own internal practices of epidemic racism against those who do not conform to the

paradigm of modernity they wish to exploit for a new and better Mexico.1 This self-

identification as North American rather than Southern or Central American is

1 In my personal experience, having lived in Mexico for extended periods of time, whenever I referred to Mexico as belonging to South or Central America, the natives of this country always responded with a look of surprise if not anger. Mexicans almost invariably identify themselves as “North-Americans.”

4

symptomatic of the internal network of racial and economic hierarchies that shapes the

country’s social fabric—thus Rulfo’s depiction of the Mexico City low-class

construction workers is inextricable from Mexico’s liminal positioning as a threshold

between the riches of the North and the underdeveloped South.

Perhaps the defining image of In the Pit is the lonesome way home undertaken

by “Chaparro” (“Shorty”). Having ended his job at the freeway, Chaparro waves

goodbye to his co-workers and the camera follows him to his bus stop. He becomes

excited as the bus is about to pull up; he is indeed ready to leave behind the fourteen-

hour shifts he has endured for months. However, the bus skips the stop, leaving

Chaparro behind. His reaction is neither one of frustration nor indignation nor sadness.

“Now we have to walk,” and so he goes. For Chaparro is caged within a social fabric

that needs his labor to keep functioning and simultaneously excludes his kind from the

access to those venues of social and economic mobility designed to perpetuate the

established order. Therefore, he knows well there is no point in waiting for the next

bus—the only way to get home is to walk and not look back.

In the Pit offers a critical take on the processes of uneven globalization that

characterize the contemporary world. On the one hand, it gives voice to those who do

not move and typically will not move. On the other, it penetrates the surface of the

modernity-as-spectacle freeway to unveil the social order that enables its existence.

Far from being only a critical essay on the state of affairs of the contemporary

Mexican society, Rulfo’s film points elsewhere: the uneven economic and social

5

structures that dictate the exchanges between the different ethnic and cultural groups

across nations in the global era. But, what exactly is globalization? Is it an adequate

term to account for the social, economic and cultural structures and exchanges in the

contemporary geopolitical arena? And, most importantly, how does contemporary

cinema engage with the myriad process of economic and cultural globalization? How

does it account, explicitly or implicitly, for the processes through which the social and

the cultural interact with one another?

This dissertation tackles the relationship between competing accounts of the

epochal and theoretical framework of globalization; on the one hand, I engage with the

ongoing debate in the field of film studies regarding the flunctuating interaction

between the national and the transnational; on the other, while acknowledging that

film products stem from a series of imbrications between local, regional, national and

global forces in specific contexts of production, circulation and reception, this project

emphasizes the contact zones through which a variety of cinematic efforts fertilize

each other across territorial borders. Therefore, it rejects fruitlessly antagonistic

frameworks—such “Hollywood vs. other national cinemas”—in favor of analyzing the

multiple ways in which cinematic exchanges occur, as mediated by or under the radar

of Hollywood, often establishing unexpected vectors of exchange between different

cinematic traditions and social formations. Hence, I pay close attention to the diverse

positions of speech these cinematic products inhabit in relation to the current

sociopolitical milieu.

6

How does cinema, then, engage with this multitechnological, multicultural,

uneven and polysemantic state of affairs in the present era? How can the distinctive

microcosms offered by this diverse set of films allow the spectator and the cultural

thinker to make a leap from the specificies of the different milieus they address to the

macropolitics of the global? What is ultimately the purpose of performing such an act

of critique? At first, it seems that in a world of intensified interconnectedness between

media discourses across national borders, the understanding of the cinematic as a

transnationally operative mode of address would provide a fruitful modus operandi to

carry out this endeavor. However, what does it mean exactly to adopt a transational

approach to contemporary cinema? Hasn’t cinema from its very inception been a

transnational practice through which artists, craftsmen, economic models, distribution,

networks and cultural agents have routinely crossed borders and interacted with one

another, shaping thus the history of cinema as a continuous process of transterritorial

cross-fertilization? Even if we acknowledge that the degree of these exchanges has

increased from both an economic and aesthetic point of view in the last two decades,

should we not also highlight that the functioning of these newly “transterritorial

communities” is, at the same time, co-dependent on the specific configurations of

local forms of cultural production within each territorial boundary?

The first step in properly theorizing the usefulness of a transnational approach

to cinema is to identify the dominant logics that structure the production, circulation,

exhibition and reception of film today. I seek to explore what film styles, from a

7

narrative, audiovisual and generic standpoint have garnered global appreciation and

which have not, and what is the relationship between the circulation networks that

enable the worldwide distribution (or lack of) of cinematic goods, the differing critical

viewpoints these diverse films offer on the current geopolitical era and the

idiosyncrasies of their competing aesthetic fabrics. To accomplish this goal, I first

engage with a thorough investigation of the meanings and nuances of contesting

accounts of globalization. Then I proceed to break down the different facets of my

transnational approach to cinema.

Pinning Down Globalization

At first there were 198 victims. Soon there were 199. In the end, there were

more than 200. A seven-month baby died on March 12, 2004 as a result of the chain

of explosions that occurred in four different locations in Madrid and its periphery.

Fingers pointed in two directions: E.T.A.—the Basque nationalist group that seeks the

emancipation of the Basque country from Spain since the late 1960’s—and an Al

Qaeda-related transnational terrorist cell operating under a fundamentalist agenda.

Two days before the general election in Spain, the right-wing governing party—PP—

did not discard any of these two possibilities. However, its propagandistic apparatus

singled out E.T.A. as the perpetrator. The reason was crystal-clear: along with the U.K

government, the Spanish governing elite had been the most outspoken ally of the Bush

administration’s global crusade against terrorism. The Spanish social body had

8

remained more than skeptical in relation to such a position. The acceptance that an

Arab fundamentalist group was guilty of the Madrid massacre would certainly entail a

heavy loss of votes for the PP and would endanger their heavily favored position—

according to the polls—to remain in power for a new legislature. The logical stance of

the common Spaniard was unequivocal in this respect: if the Spanish government had

not supported the U.S. crusade against Arab terrorism, the Madrid attack would have

never happened. The leader of the Centrist opposition party—PSOE—demanded that

the government acknowledge that the terrorist attack had been a direct result of the

PP’s foreign policy. His agenda was to utilize the massacre to seize power, which he

ultimately accomplished.

All of a sudden, Spain lived in the aftermath of a horrible disaster that could be

caused by the demands of an “old-fashioned” nationalist group, aiming to gain

territorial sovereignty or by a ubiquitous, in-motion, transnational terrorist threat that

had no territorial claims within Spain. In other words, for a period of about a week

Spanish people lived with the uncertainty of not knowing whether over two hundred

people died because of the post-9/11 global terrorist threat or due to a forty-year long

dispute that is inscribed within the coordinates of the nation-state. As Fredric Jameson

remarked about the 9-11 attack, historical events “are never really punctual—despite

the appearance of this one and the abruptness of its violence—but extend into a before

and an after of historical time that only gradually unfold, to disclose the full

dimensions of the historicity of the event” (“Dialectics of Disaster” 301). Even if

9

fingers ultimately pointed to Al-Qaeda as guilty of the terrorist attack, the condition of

uncertainty regarding the Madrid massacre in the hours following the event offers us

an epistemological tool for analyzing the present geopolitical scenario as a crisscross

of competing discourses regarding the concepts of globalization, the nation-state and

the conditions under which cultural production functions within the social field.

In the Spanish media, March 11, 2004 became 11-M, mimicking the coverage

of September 11 as 9-11 in Western media. In its media formation, the Madrid

massacre was immediately linked to the WTC global imaginary that haunts the United

States and its allies in the shape of a paranoid fear of an imminent terrorist attack (it

could happen anytime, anywhere!). The hundreds of (literally) faceless individuals

that perished before becoming a media event—mostly working class factory workers,

maids, immigrants and students—had little awareness of the discourses of

contemporary scholarship that position them within the worldwide flow of free capital

and the unprecedented expansion of cultural networks of exchange. In fact, they would

not be a part of this reflection on globalization, had not they become a transnational

media event that is inscribed within the co-dependent coordinates of the national and

the global.

What remains utterly indisputable is that innocent victims died here and there

and continue to perish in England, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Chad and many other

places. What kind of world allowed for these mass killings to become a daily

occurrence? What coordinates created the very possibility that both a group of local

10

nationalists and a transnational terrorist cell might be behind the act in Madrid? We

live in an expanding network of multinational private corporate and state-sponsored

institutions—IMF, World Bank, WTO—in which an uneven distribution of wealth,

technological resources and means of survival not only persists in relation to previous

epochs but continues to grow wider. It is a world in which the wealthiest nation-states,

far from losing power in the ever-evolving and diasporic flows, have gained a position

of overwhelming hegemony due to their control over most of the informational and

technological channels through which information, capital and culture are exchanged

(Poster 77).

Some cultural commentators have argued that multinational corporations and

global organizations such as the World Trade Organization and World Bank bypass to

“some degree” national organizations in the regulation of trade even if the most

powerful countries in the world heavily influence them. Although it may be correct to

point to the importance of transnational institutions in regulating the workings of

finance and culture in the contemporary milieu, the acknowledgement of the central

role of certain states signals the imbalance between nations as acting players within

this global scenario and, therefore, re-centers the importance of the nation-state. For

we live in a world in which wannabe-actor nation-states such as Spain embrace the

mighty military superpower—the United States—in an attempt to remain wired into

the existing network of privilege. As the cases of Cuba and North Korea remind us,

11

exclusion means isolation and, consequently, economic deprivation and social

fracture.

Do we all live in the era of “Globalization”? Not unless we restrict the scope of

such a term. Globalization must be qualified, emphasizing, on the one hand, the

uneven distribution of resources across the world and, on the other, the expansion of

communication networks that has allowed those privileged enough to have access to

them to multiply the channels of cultural and social exchange. It may be true that cell

phones, for example, are more widely used in underdeveloped countries than in

Western economic and technological powerhouses. However, the utilization of these

items has not eased the economic and medical deprivation suffered by the natives of

these countries. On the contrary, those who benefit from the expanding use of cell

phones around the world to achieve upward social mobility are more likely to be Wall

street brokers or suburban-America engineers than workers in a small factory in Sudan

who constantly send text-messages to their friends as a way-out of the mental

deadlock the eighteen-hour shifts they have to endure day after day imposes on their

bodies and psyches. In this multi-layered landscape those at the top control the

majority of resources across the globe and those at the bottom suffer the consequences

of their exclusion from these spheres of power, even if they benefit from technological

developments in their social interactions. In short, they are consumers but rarely

producers, being thus barred from the benefits of having access to these networks of

production.

12

Even though initially globalization referred to an economic set of practices in

the context of a free market capitalist model, my approach attempts to establish a

series of links between the realm of political economy and the social and cultural

fields. I rearticulate the meanings of the term globalization in order to build a

historical and theoretical paradigm capable of understanding contemporary cinematic

practices and scrutinizing the ways in which diverse cultures, modes of film

production and spectatorship interact with one another. In my view, globalization is

two-fold. On the one hand, it names a historical epoch linked to the increasing

circulation of economic and cultural agents as related to the expansion of

communication and transportation networks enabled by the development of digital

technology. On the other, it refers to a set of theoretical frameworks through which the

dynamics of capital, technology, culture, social practices and citizenship are studied.

Hence, my goal is to intervene in the ongoing debate regarding the impact of the

epochal shift of the global on the cinematic by engaging with a series of competing

frameworks of globalization and the diverse set of interactions between the social and

the cultural different film products put forward. I do not favor any account of

globalization anchored in a totalizing impulse since we are discussing a multi-faceted

phenomenon in constant change—namely, a series of social and economic practices

that are unevenly operative in different regions of the world. In addition, the

production, circulation and consumption of films continuously challenge any

totalizing account of the cinematic, creating instead a rich variety of encounters

13

between the aesthetic and the social that individuals living in diverse parts of the

world understand differently.

It is impossible to separate economics and culture is misleading. When a

seventy-year old Spanish woman sees an American soap opera on TV, she is not only

consuming a cultural product but also a lifestyle, and, consequently, an economic and

social model (Jameson, “Notes”). Whether this Spanish lady distances herself from the

“sold” social and economic models or internalizes them as an ideal scenario is

ultimately dependent on a series of social, economic, ethnic and even religious factors

that stem from the micropolitics of each individual’s own engagement with

audiovisual products. Undoubtedly though, some models are more easily sold than

others. Consequently, certain social, economic and cultural groups hold a privileged

position of speech in relation to others, configuring a mediascape in which specific

representational models have a dominant status and others struggle to remain

“visible.”

The euphoric view of globalization celebrates the fact that today a Chilean

woman vacationing in Spain can buy a Peruvian-looking poncho in a street market

stand run by a Moroccan vendor. This form of economic and cultural exchange does

reveal that currently cultures operate through new and unexpected modalities of

exchange. But the euphoric view ignores that the Poncho might be labeled “Made in

Bangladesh.” Consequently, Peruvian artisans do not benefit from the outcome of this

economic exchange. Instead, the beneficiary of the Chilean woman’s purchase is

14

likely to be a European or U.S. corporation—that is, a type of multinational enterprise

that is solidly entrenched in East and South Asia, running sweatshops in these

countries to reduce worker’s wages. Moreover, the Chilean tourist probably belongs to

a specific social stratum for which transatlantic trips are affordable. All of a sudden

our celebrated global exchange has become tainted through the illuminating

framework of class and racial imbalance, determining who can travel and buy and who

produces or sells replicates the economic unevenness of the current geopolitical state

of affairs in the world. Even if illegal underground networks thrive through film

piracy, to take another example, making them available for consumers in La Paz,

Beijing and Johannesburg long before they are legally released in these countries, the

above-detailed exchange between the Chilean woman and the Moroccan vendor shows

us that the access to the cultural Other is often dependent on certain routes of

exchange, taken by those individuals whose socioeconomic status allows them to flow,

while limiting and often prosecuting others.

Emphasizing the potentialities for resistance against the modus operandi of

global capital enabled by the expansion of information and transportation technologies

and the unparalleled movement of bodies across geopolitical spaces, euphoric

accounts of globalization ignore or downplay a series of facts that point to a radically

different sociopolitical scenario. First, they ignore the uneven distribution of

resources around the world perpetuated by the flows of free capital and the

concentration of power within the realm of a few nation-states; second, the discrepant

15

degrees of difficulty that those bodies who move (or try to move) encounter when

trying to cross different geopolitical borders—e.g. a Spanish citizen wanting to enter

the U.S. has certainly less difficulties than a Pakistani or a Mexican attempting to

perform the same act; third, the uneven availability of electronic information

networks, which are often controlled by a series of multinational corporations—e.g.

AOL—linked to the economic centers of power that dictate the pace and rhythms of

the world. Although it might be true that “the condition of globalization … imposes a

new and heightened level of interaction between cultures,” (Poster 9) we also need to

ask ourselves which the cultural, social and economic classes that have access to this

interactive pool and which remain excluded. Fourth, the widespread expansion of

multinational corporations throughout the world has created a new distribution of

labor that enlarges the exploitation of socially disfavored natives as much as it

connects distant time-spaces. Last, as demonstrated through the U.S. (and its allies)

global crusade against terrorism, a military imbalance exists in the world, and

supposedly democratic institutions such as the UN are utterly powerless when

confronted with the irreversible will of the leading military and economic power to

perform an act of transnational violence. In a nutshell, as Shohat and Stam stated over

a decade ago “discernable patterns of domination channel the ‘fluidities’ even of a

‘multipolar’ world; the same hegemony that unifies the world through global networks

of circulation of goods and information also distributes circulating goods according to

hierarchical structures of power, even if those hegemonies are now more subtle and

16

dispersed” (31). Faced with the socioeconomic fiascos and imbalances of the historical

era associated with globalization, some scholars point to the parallel development of

transnational alliances enabled by the current uncontrollable communication grids.

They conceptualize grassroots anti-globalization groups as new, in-the-making, actors

with egalitarian political agendas. In this context, modern formations such as political

parties are not necessarily the arena of resistance to hegemonic politics. For Roger

Burbach, for example, we are witnessing new kinds of unlocalizable attempts to seize

power operating within the contingent dynamics of transnationality (Postmodern

Politics). For example, when labor movements, environmentalists and students joined

forces to protest the WTO meeting in Seattle, their link was not a pre-established

political agenda but the common goal of subverting the monopoly of the economic

elite in organizing objects and subjects in the contemporary world.

In Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai offers a deterritorialized set of

overlapping frameworks—ethnoscapes, mediascapes, ideoscapes, technoscapes, and

financescapes—to understand global flows. Within this paradigm, imagination, as an

active social practice and political force, connects different people all around the

world and establishes quasi-impossible-to-control fields of subversion. Mass media

offer an “ever-changing store of possible of lives” (Appadurai, Modernity 53)

individuals mobilize to subvert centralized control, transporting life styles and cultural

practices across borders. Even though imagination is not completely liberating or

entirely disciplined, it acts as a collective space of contestation. It is a starting ground

17

for action that feeds off the economic networks the forces of free capital put in motion,

such as the consumer market, to produce politically active subjectivities that promote

agency. Rather than conceiving mass consumption as an automatized entry-point of

the subject into the unstoppable dynamics of free market control, Appadurai links

consumption with agency. He draws a map of the global traversed by two fundamental

axes: disjunction and motion, which escape homogenizing views. Consumers are

privileged sites of active thinking that do not passively use cultural materials but

process and appropriate them according to their own socio-cultural background and

their interconnectedness with their transnational allies and peers. Even though

grassroots anti-globalization groups have failed so far to mobilize the advantages of

the global information networks to accomplish their goals—that is, to disrupt the

modus operandi of transnational institutions such as the World Bank—the potentiality

for such transterritorial practices of counter-politics to have an impact is undeniable.

Drawing on a series of successful transnational strikes and protests against

multinational corporations and national governments, Jeremy Brecher argues that

Appadurai's ideal of counter-globalization is, in actuality, fully operative (“Global

Village”). What both Appadurai and Brecher seem to neglect is that potentially

counter-hegemonic practices such as consumption or grassroots activism are in fact

dependent of the national and transnational political, economic and law-enforcement

18

structures that enable or put a stop to them.2 In his later work, “Grassroots

Globalization and the Research Imagination,” Appadurai demarcates more clearly the

two contradictory aspects of imagination—namely, its potentially subversive character

as articulated in Modernity at Large and the fact that the states and markets also use

imagination to discipline and control individuals (“Grassroots” 6). However, his

conceptualization of mass media as a potential arena for socio-cultural subversion

forgets to address the specificity of the different media he discusses. He also fails to

acknowledge, as Mark Poster explains, the differences between media that are

controlled by multinational capital and those that create new “positions of speech” for

the individual (35). What is more, Appadurai’s own privileged position within the

intellectual elite of the global cultural field is intrinsically related to his failure to

address the specific nuances of the processes of social and global exchange mapped

out in his totalizing account of the contemporary world. For as Victor Li argues, the

term globalization is partial and ideologically selective. In other words, “globalization

is for those who have access to pathways, and is not for those who have fallen out of

its circuit (“Name” 16).

Globalization discourses then claim to speak about the whole world, and they

do so from economically or socially favored hegemonic positions that might

2 Pheng Cheah offers a criticism of Appadurai’s work along these lines. See. Cheah, Pheng. “Spectral Nationality: The Living On of the Postcolonial Nation in Neocolonial Globalization.”

19

experience the world as a whole but neglect the multiple pockets that the uneven

distribution of wealth leaves out. As García-Canclini observes, globalization is a

process of fragmentation and re-composition; even though it does not necessarily

homogenize the world, it certainly “reorders differences and inequalities without

eliminating them” (Consumers 3). In such a scenario, and signaling to the powerful

ideological implications of the performative act of naming, when we conceptualize the

present historical epoch as “global” we are narcissistically reflecting our own social,

cultural and economic position within communicational grids across borders (Li 28).

We are also forgetting the untold, faceless, Others who remain totally or partially

excluded from the privileged social spheres that imprison them within a particular

socio-economic condition.

Whereas Appadurai conceives the current landscape of global flows as a

multiplicity of sites of agency, Hardt and Negri conceptualize it in terms of Imperial

domination. For them, we live in Empire, “a decentered and deterritorializing

apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its

open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and

plural exchanges through modulating networks of command (Empire XII-XIII).

Empire interweaves three forms of political organization: monarchic—the U.S.

military and its superior technology effectively rules the world—aristocratic—the elite

actors, both in terms of a few leading nation-states and the transnational institutions

they control (IMF, WTO, World Bank)—and, lastly, democratic—since it claims to

20

represent the global people—through apparently all-inclusive institutions but

ultimately powerless such as the UN. Hardt and Negri’s alternative to this gloomy

scenario of neo-imperial domination is to act globally. If global capital is

characterized by a predatory mobility across time-spaces that renders local struggles

ineffective to subvert its power, only a world-scale counter-force can successfully

resist and, eventually, overcome it. They coin the term multitude to account for the

kind of counter-hegemonic actors that may overthrow Empire. In this respect, they

define the modern conception of representational democracy as a duping governing

construct that mistakenly locates agency in the people. They then establish the

necessity to move from the concept of people to that of multitude in order to respond

to the deterritorialized dynamic of Empire. Whereas within the realm of the nation-

state, “the people" was conceived as a (voting) unity, the multitude is, conversely,

heterogeneous. Whereas the people is a representation that creates a unity out of the

population, the multitude is a non-fixable social agent that operates ubiquitously,

counteracting the deterritorialized character of Empire. Counter power should no

longer act inside the limited sovereignty of the nation-state but across “the unlimited

sovereignty of Empire… in an unlimited or unbound way” (Hardt and Negri,

“Democracy” 118). However, Hardt and Negri fail to pinpoint the exact configuration

of this counter power, and we are only led to know that “in the flesh of the multitude is

inscribed a new power, a counter power, a living thing that is against Empire … the

new barbarians, monsters, and beautiful giants that continually emerge from within the

21

interstices of imperial power and against imperial power itself” (Hardt and Negri,

“Democracy” 119). In addition, Hardt and Negri link the dynamic relationship

between Empire and multitude with the development of networked digital technology

but they fail to anchor their analysis within a thorough account of the mechanisms

through which power is enacted and contested within this media space, resorting

instead to an all-reaching set of generalizing statements that rarely abandon the realm

of conceptual pyrotechnics. Their framework thus lacks the capacity to explain the

material dimension of specific instances of social and cultural life.

Furthermore, while Hardt and Negri emphasize the deterritorialized nature of

Empire’s control and its emblematic institutions, they ignore the undeniable power of

specific nation-states in Empire’s disembodied practices of economic exploitation. As

Stanley Aronowitz argues, Hardt and Negri underestimate the “role of the leading

nation-states in constituting its institutional infrastructure and completely deny their

relative autonomy” (“Global Capital” 189).3 Although the free market flows have

generated an increasing co-dependence between different nation-states in their

functioning as different nodes of the current system of capital, a hierarchy of power

remains intact in terms of the positions that different nation-states hold within the

deterritorialized movement of capital, culture and bodies. The regulatory principles of

3 In Global Hollywood, Miller et al defend a similar perspective. For them, the demise of the nation-state has been mistakenly predicted since the 19th century and, in fact, we are witnessing a contemporary atomization of larger nation-states into smaller geopolitical territories (42).

22

Empire reproduce and perpetuate the imbalance that locates certain nation-states

above others in both economic and cultural terms.

Appadurai claims that the United States “is no longer the puppeteer of a world

system of images but is only one node of a complex transnational construction of

imaginary landscapes” (Modernity 31). It is indeed a node but one that occupies a

position of hegemony in regulating and establishing the rules through which economic

and cultural neocolonialism operates. Therefore, far from dead, the nation-state plays a

strategic role in the circulation of both capital and culture across the world. In its

shifting positioning, the nation-state, at a lower level stands as the enemy of difference

and minorities, defending its unitary status and homogenizing a wide array of cultures

through a single label or flag. At a higher level, the nation-state, faced with the threat

of Americanization and standardization of their national products, acts championing

heterogeneity and cultural specificity as the defining characteristics of its uniqueness.

Rather than understand globalization as an all-inclusive term and the nation-

sate as exclusive, the latter should instead be conceptualized within the negotiating

coordinates of integration and specificity. On the one hand, given the quasi-fatal

consequences entailed in an exclusion from the global circulation of capital, the

nation-state needs to remain hooked to the supranational circuit of economic

exchange. In these terms, states lose their “-nation” and operate as different

components within an international network. They function, simultaneously, as

indigenized markets to which diverse capitalist enterprises adapt to remain

23

competitive and as undifferentiated nodes guaranteeing the circulation of capital. On

the other hand, when applying cultural criteria to the market, the nation-state appeals

to its national specificity to defend its cultural idiosyncrasies. As Ernest Gellner has

pointed out, both the nation and the state are a contingency and not a universal

necessity (6). They are variably a unit or separate bodies that function within a two-

fold dynamic of inclusion and exclusion in relation to the global market. Therefore,

we may understand the changing role of the nation not only in terms of its status as a

system of cultural signification characterized by its contingent instability (Bhabha),

but also as an economic entity operating within the coordinates of the uneven

distribution of wealth that the profit-making oriented system of capitalism embraces in

order to self-perpetuate. In this context, contemporary discussions of the concept of

national cinema and its diverse degrees of transnationalism are invariably tied to the

clash between the promotion and protection of those practices that embody the cultural

specificity of a nation and the blatant reality of a consumer market that favors the

Hollywood giant across the globe. The ferocious defense of Western European

countries (lead by France) to exclude audiovisual sectors from the GATT treaty in

1993 and the United States fight for their inclusion not only reveals the differing

understanding of cinema as culture or commerce respectively, but also the pivotal role

of the nation-state in the current era and its shifting strategic positioning as both an

inclusive and exclusive operative structure (Miller et al 36). In addition, if we

acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet block, the liberalization of the Chinese

24

market, the full-blown realization of the European Union as a supranational state, the

increasing multinational ownership of film companies and the expansion of electronic

networks with the consequent multiplication of the channels through which media

products are distributed, exhibited and consumed, we must recognize a transterritorial

expansion of the film market that favors those with more economic and technological

resources to spread their products wider. Moreover, if we accept that the contact zones

between different cultures have dramatically increased in the last two decades and

that, consequently, different cultures have been exposed to a broader range of aesthetic

and ideological practices, to anchor a theorization of cinema through territorial

paradigms—such as the concept of national cinema—appears to be outdated if not

misleading. A transnational approach to cinema becomes thus the most productive

framework to tackle the state of affairs of the relationship between the social and the

cinematic today.

A transnational approach to cinema: economics, aesthetics and the social

Without neglecting cultural specificity, a transnational understanding of

filmmaking explores the mechanisms through which cultural and ideological flows

interact beyond territorial boundaries, analyzing them in a dialogic fashion. Although

it stresses exchange and diversity rather than unity and homogeneity, this framework

acknowledges the role of the different nation-states and multimedia corporations in

financing or enabling filmmaking practices. As Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden

25

state “cinema is borderless to varying degrees, subject to the same uneven mobility as

people…To a large extent, cinematic mobility, like human mobility, is determined by

both geopolitical factors and financial pedigree” (5).

Film scholarship has traditionally promoted the establishment of clear-cut

criteria in order to organize its heterogeneous field of study into easily distinguishable

national cinema frameworks. Many cinema scholarly books and articles privilege a

series of canonical texts, authors, generic configurations or aesthetic movements,

creating a teleological history and theory of filmmaking that partially neglects the

polyphonic and non-cohesive character of artistic creation. For example, they establish

a series of criteria to determine the characteristics of a national film movement (New

German Cinema, the French New Wave, Italian Neorealism etc.) and make

symptomatic readings of a cinematic text to then fix its multiple meanings in relation

to the accepted taxonomy of films that are supposed to belong to the film movement in

question. The project of transnational cinema rejects these comfort zones altogether

and seeks to unravel the diverse manners through which contemporary filmmaking

operates. First, it consists of being open to identifying new ways in which filmmakers

from different regions of the world may establish unexpected forms of interaction

between one another in terms of aesthetics and how these stylistic choices are

informed by the wider socio-cultural and economic landscapes in which films are

produced and consumed. Second, it evaluates the channels that enable cross-territorial

interaction between films. In other words, it assesses what films are in and what films

26

are out of the global networks of circulation and why. It examines, for example, what

is the relationship between Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Hong Kong action flicks in

aesthetic terms and what was the role of the Tarantino/Miramax powerhouse in the

distribution of Asian foreign films in the U.S. market after Pulp Fiction (1994)’s great

commercial and critical success. Third, a transnational approach to cinema addresses

the relationship between the increasing presence of Hollywood films all around the

world and the expansion of the communication and information networks in the global

age. Yet, at the same time, it refuses to reduce the millions of decisions that are made

in the Hollywood studios on a daily basis to a monolithic whole. What one may do is

to identify the dominant logics at play in contemporary Hollywood cinema and

analyze them in relation to other forms of production, aesthetic approaches and

economic models that cohabit the space between the social and the cinematic.

It is obvious that Hollywood studios bank on attracting successful foreign film

talent into their dominant ideological, economic and aesthetic machinery in order to

broaden the scope of their products. Simultaneously, through this process, they

typically weaken competing film industries. However, this “brain drain” is not

necessarily a product of the development of information and entertainment

technologies in the last two decades. In fact, countless foreign directors have migrated

to Hollywood from the silent period all throughout the 20th century and the beginning

of the 21st century. In this respect, the junctures of history have indeed played a key

role in these migratory processes. The move of several filmmakers to Hollywood in

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the late 1920’s and 1930’s, for example, was directly related to the rise of the Nazi

party in Germany during this period. However, it would be mistaken to simply state

that social and political history overdetermines the artistic and economic operations at

work in a particular period of the cinematic. There are a wide variety of variables—a

director’s own wish to explore different film ventures, changes in the cultural

legislation in a particular geopolitical territory, the functioning of independent video

distribution networks, the media-specificity through which film objects circulate

etc.— that shape the exact coordinates of these migratory practices. Furthermore, we

must acknowledge that, from the early stages of cinema, film talent and aesthetics

have traveled across borders as a result of both artistic and economic factors—e.g. the

Hollywood studios and the UFA attempted to expand worldwide and competed with

one another to gain control of foreign film markets and their rival’s distribution and

exhibition networks. Consequently, there is not necessarily a direct cause/effect

relation between the global expansion of communication and information networks

and the understanding of filmmaking as a transnational practice. What is certain,

however, is that recently we have witnessed an increasing internationalization of film

production, distribution, exhibition and consumption, a situation that calls for a

broader theoretical framework to approach contemporary filmmaking in tune with the

radically new forms of production (the establishment of digital video as a cheap

alternative to 35mm film), circulation (the rise of complex networks of pirated film

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products facilitated by the reproducibility of the digital medium) and reception

(viewing of films on the Internet).

In addition, to call Hollywood itself American is misleading since the 1990's

marked the era of corporate mergers and the establishment of multinational

conglomerates. As Janet Staiger states, “anyone attempting to figure out to what

‘nation’ any major film conglomerate ‘belongs’ is really attempting the impossible—

and the unnecessary” ("Neo-Marxist" 234). When we utilize the term Hollywood,

thus, we are not only discussing a globally dominant film industry but also a

multinational and multimedia set of competing enterprises that resist a territorial

taxonomy to account for their economic, aesthetic and ideological operations.

Hollywood’s global domination of the market has dramatically skyrocketed, favored

by the liberalization of capital, the technological development of media industries—

VCRs, DVDs, cable TV—, the privatization of previously state-operated TV stations

and the historical collapse of competing economic and social models.4 In fact, 1993

was the first year in which international rentals for Hollywood films exceeded

domestic ones. In addition, major U.S. studios received more revenue from films they

4 According to Tino Balio, since the mid 1990s the international video rentals of Hollywood motion pictures have superseded the domestic market. See: Balio, Tino. “’A Major Presence in All the World’s Important Markets’: The Globalization of Hollywood in the 1990’s.” Armand Mattelart reports that American revenue in ECC countries in the 1990’s was $US3.719 billion, between TV, cinema and video, whilst revenue of EEC in U.S was only $247 million during the same period. See: Mattelart, Armand. “European Film Policy and the Response to Hollywood.” For a thorough account of the global reach of Hollywood see Miller, Toby et al, Global Hollywood.

29

had in theatrical release abroad than they did from those in the United States (Acland

26).

Moreover, today films are only one of the many steps in the commodity chain

through which audiovisual media function in the cultural field. Theatrical releases are

fundamentally a springboard for other “market windows” that open up as soon as

movie theater runs end. As Charles Acland remarks: “The rising centrality of the

intermedia migration of texts … indicates that the full financial and cultural

significance of any single work can only be gauged across its media incarnations. So-

called box office disasters may well gather steam as they subsequently appear on

DVD, videotape, and TV, or as they move on to the other markets” (24-5). Therefore,

if we wish to fully comprehend how these processes work within the cinematic field

we have to emphasize both the transterritorial and transmedia dynamic that drives

them, while detecting what forms of audiovisual storytelling have managed to solidify

their dominant status within this continuous and, often unpredictable, crisscross of

filmic and socio-cultural discourses.

Hollywood is thus constantly negotiating the dynamics of the market and re-

adapting its products to consumers’ demands. For example, after Vertigo

Entertainment remade the Japanese horror film Ringu with incredible success in 2003,

Hollywood has turned to both the remaking of widely acclaimed Asian horror films

(Dark Water, 2005, Pulse, 2006, The Grudge, 2004, The Host, pre-production), the

remaking of old American horror classics (Dawn of the Dead, 2004, The Texas

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Chainsaw Massacre, 2003, The Hitchhiker, 2006 Wicker man, 2006) and the

production of prequels to long-forgotten franchises (Exorcist: The Beginning, 2004,

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, 2006).5 Although this cycle of

remaking of East Asian horror films within Hollywood is bound to fade away sooner

or later and be substituted by another “hot” trend, it clearly signals the transnational

drive that determines the aesthetic and economic cross-fertilization between films

stemming from different nations. Hollywood does not only attract talent from all

around the world as a strategy to weaken other “national cinemas;” it also incorporates

the aesthetics of other cinematic traditions—including those of art cinema,

experimental film, music videos, advertising and other commercial national

industries— into its goal-oriented continuity and action/spectacle/romance-based

narratives to capture a greater share of the market worldwide. While attempting to

deliver globally, Hollywood singles out specific markets as strongholds for each of

their upcoming products depending on a variety of factors—the star power of certain

actors, the variable prominence of specific genres within a particular national film

tradition etc. In other words, Hollywood works through a process of planned

differentiation, targeting with each film not only the domestic market but also the

5 Roy Lee, co-founder of Vertigo Entertainment, is perhaps the key figure in the Hollywood remaking of Asian films. It is notable that his work is not limited to horror films since he recently acted as executive producer for the Academy-Award winner The Departed (2006), a remake of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs (2001).

31

global one, and specific age, ethnic or national groups. As Richard Maltby

acknowledges, in the contemporary era “the major companies, acting primarily as

financiers and distributors, have gradually come to terms with a fragmentation of the

audience, a concern with ideas of demographics and target audiences derived from

market research, globalized markets and new delivery systems" (23). Does this mean,

as Jonathan Rosenbaum has stated, that American cinema no longer exists and is, in

actuality, a multinational product, preserving its original American name as a

commercial label to sell “the package” (75)? Or is it, as Sydney Pollack states, that

Hollywood is simply “making sort of homogenized European movies, re-conceived by

some sort of commonality that is partially dictated by the fact that it doesn’t require a

culture to understand it?” (qtd. in Allen 71). Hollywood’s multinational character in

terms of talent, production location, ownership and investment is undeniable. Yet it is

equally undeniable that Hollywood privileges a series of values—e.g. the capacity of

the individual hero to resolve conflicts, heteronormativity etc.—and that these values

are often attached to a patriotic re-assertion of “America’s” national identity. Linking

these fundamental principles with the founding myths and tropes of the U.S.’s

constructed identity as a nation, Hollywood appears, before our eyes, to embody a

series of national-turned-into-universal standards that are supposed to define that

slippery category often referred to as “the human condition” (Jameson, “Notes”).

Refuting the last statement, scholars have pointed out that Hollywood’s control

of the global audiovisual imaginary does not necessarily produce homogenization but

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may instead threaten it. Since each culture decodes the same texts in diverse ways,

different social groups put them in contact with local, regional and national forms of

social life, and, therefore, intervene on these cultural products, changing their

meanings. For Kwame Anthony Appiah, the understanding of cultural exchange

through a framework of cultural imperialism treats social groups across the globe as

tabulae rasae where capitalism leaves “its finger prints” and ignores their marked

cultural heterogeneity (109-111). In my view, however, emphasizing the economic

imbalance that dictates the contours of cultural production allows us to address the key

structural principle through which Capitalism articulates itself and the fact that

audiovisual media are cultural tools that reflect, contest, condone or radically oppose

competing economic and social models. If, like Appiah, we celebrate that Somali

individuals indigenize American TV soap operas in unexpected ways, resisting the

ethnic and social stereotypes at work in these cultural artifacts, we may forget that the

reason why they may actually consume these products (even if they would prefer to

watch their own) is because of the fact that their country has been ravaged by warfare

and genocide for decades and the possibility of having a home-grown TV or film

industry is simply unimaginable. In addition, as Andrew Higson has remarked, as

much as different audiences may intervene in the Hollywood text through their acts of

consumption, they never fully stamp out its U.S. character (282). Instead, they

negotiate the Hollywood audiovisual products they access, which are fundamentally

"American," from their own cultural and social backgrounds.

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However, as Susan Hayward remarks, framing the concept of national cinema

against the dominance of Hollywood runs the risk of “reducing the idea of a national

cinema to economies of scale and therefore to one concept of value: namely, economic

well-being” (91). It also ignores the rich cinematic exchange that is occurring today in

parallel to Hollywood’s domination of the global film market. For those individuals

who are privileged enough to be hooked to the transnational spectrum of global flows

can indeed access a quasi-infinite variety of audiovisual products. Their social

practices and imaginations are likely to be shaped in a multicultural fashion and their

cinematic interventions can potentially counter-attack the dominant templates at work

in the global film markets and offer alternative aesthetic and ideological choices to

film spectators across different territories. Moreover, filmmakers are no longer

necessarily the by-product of either the studios’ instrumentalization of talent or the art-

house movie circuit; they are also video store and cable-TV junkies, or commercial

TV and music video directors or a group of teenagers who own a video camera and

strike gold with a brilliant idea that, all of a sudden, becomes a media event on the

Web. In other words, aesthetic exchange is not shaped in the dark corners of a movie

theater or the executive suites of studio moguls but in the transmedia landscape of

communicative expansion and technological development. These exchanges cannot be

seen as instances of cooptation, which only strengthen the Hollywood mega-monster

and weaken less powerful national film industries. The reverse pattern has

significantly defined the ways in which filmmakers working within the economic,

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distribution and exhibition boundaries of non-Hollywood industries have aimed at

competing with Hollywood historically. In other words, these filmmakers often

attempt to appropriate the very generic and narrative configurations of the successful

Hollywood blockbusters in order to capture a share of their domestic market, and,

occasionally, a piece of the international cake.

While banking on the national specificities of the cultural and socio-political

formations of their own countries—e.g. Shiri (1999) in South Korea; Tesis (1995) in

Spain; The Fabulous Destiny of Amelie Poulain (2001) in France—certain filmmakers

“hollywoodize” their films in a variety of manners, appealing to the privileged status

of American genre films on the cinematic and TV screens of their respective nations.

Consequently, although Ezra and Rowden may not be entirely wrong in stating that

“Hollywood as the standard-bearer for popular film as a world system has so far

proven itself capable of co-opting the forces of hybridity and difference effectively

enough to avoid breakdown or the significant loss of global hegemony” (11), one must

always remember that the opposite trajectory is also at work in the global film

markets. What is more, the appropriation of Hollywood films by other national

industries is one of the fundamental manners through they have managed to stay afloat

historically and, often, expand the reach of their products. Bollywood remakes of

Hollywood films (Ghajini, 2005, Sarkar, 2005 Zinda, 2006 etc.), for example,

neutralize the cultural Americanness of the films they remake and adapt them to the

cultural idiosyncrasies, generic common places and narrative characteristics of

35

commercial Indian cinema in order to appeal to the taste and knowledge of their main

target audiences, which are not limited to India but also to the Middle East, East Asia

and diasporic South Asian communities across the globe.

A transnational approach to cinema must thus scrutinize the various

ideological and aesthetic modes through which Hollywood and other cinematic

traditions and modes of production interact with one another and acknowledge their

implications, as related to the wider or narrower set of choices that film spectators

have in different geopolitical spaces. This project addresses several layers of cinematic

transnationalism in mapping out the relationship between cinematic traditions and

modes of representation across geopolitical borders. In so doing, I do not follow a

critical model that tries to simply identify the transnational within a specific national

field delimited by territorial borders. Even though scholars have indeed produced

remark able efforts in tracing the intrinsic transnational dimension of particular

national cinemas in both economic and aesthetic terms (Bordwell; Desser; Hjort;

Hsiao-peng Lu; Triana-Toribio; Xavier), my framework emphasizes instead the

relational character of the cinematic and its capacity to create representational,

ideological and social bridges between different socio-cultural formations across

nations and transterritorial communities that are culturally tied through their diasporic

or immigrant consciousness, their relationship to a common homeland or their similar

degrees of engagement with foreign cinematic endeavors. Following Andrew Higson,

I understand the category of national cinema both as a site of production and

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reception. In other words, we may conceptualize national cinemas not only in terms of

the films that are produced within a given particular territory, or made by talent who

hold a particular national passport but also by taking into consideration what films are

consumed inside a particular territorial boundary, shaping the imaginations and

cultural pointers of different social groups. Any nation or supranational community

(such as the European Union) is not only an economic and geographical entity but is

also constituted by the discourses that represent and imagine it. In short, it exists

within the representational, not outside it (Hall 61).

Cinema thus acts as a space of representation in which the tensions between

local, national, supranational and global agents of nation making and debunking take

place. It also functions as a central site for a range of competing discourses to

understand how these complex networks of cinematic and social relationships veer in

a multiplicity of complementary or antagonistic directions. Within the information

saturation of the global era, national cinema becomes then “a changeable and non-

permanent notion … a transboundary process rather than a set of fixed attributes”

(Higson 40).6 The critical modus operandi I propose takes as a point of departure the

acknowledgement that the national-cinematic is a fluctuating category that

6 In a similar fashion, Tim Bergfelder argues that in order to understand the increasingly fluid arena of contemporary European film, scholars need to avoid a discourse of “containment” and instead emphasize “the fluidity of identities” at work in defining the supranational character of many European productions. See: “National, Transnational or Supranational Cinema: Rethinking European Film Studies.” Media, Culture & Society. 27.3 (2005): 315-331.

37

continuously circulates in a variety of transterritorial cultural fields, subject to re-

definition as conflicting social, ideological and economic forces re-configure it

following differing agendas. Therefore, while I pay close attention to the circulation of

film aesthetics and talent in the current age, the software of the cinematic, I start by

analyzing the cultural hardware of our geopolitical age—namely, the Internet and the

global city as the two fundamental time-spaces where socio-cultural objects and

subjects encounter each other.

Four chapters, four kinds of movement

The Internet represents a challenge to traditional understandings of film culture

in as much as it has opened up a whole new dimension to both production (homemade

videos pop up everywhere on the Web), film consumption (at home, in the personal

computer or in multimedia portable players), distribution and circulation (millions of

film spectators now bypass movie theater going and download films online). The

Internet acts as a multi-channel and multi-window frame that defies the understanding

of film exchanges between the producers and consumers of culture according to

territorial criteria and re-articulates their interactions according to a different

paradigm—namely, the access to software applications to run programs, the linguistic

competence in English and/or other languages, the speed of the user’s connection to

stream and download files. As Mark Poster states, cultural objects posted on the

Internet “exist in a digital domain that is everywhere at once” (10). It would be

38

misguided though to simply define the Internet as an open ground for cultural access

and production and disregard the deeply entrenched corporate drive that structures

many of its contents. In fact, there is a tendency to think about the Internet in terms of

“virtuality,” forgetting that like any other communication network, the “Net” is

actually material, consisting of a series of wires, cables, satellites, computer servers

and software applications, which are indeed located in specific loci. These, in turn,

point to the different hierarchies of power that dictate who produces Web content and

who does not, and who navigates the Web and who is left out (Poster 55).

At the same time, we should not forget the work of “hackers” and “samplers”

of cultural items, the counter-cultural drive that typically structures many of their

interventions and their ability to strategically utilize the Net as a primary

communication tool to contest or resist the discoursive stance of those who hold a

position of privilege in the contemporary world order. Moreover, as Poster remarks,

the Internet, like other media such as the TV or the radio, deterritorializes cultural

exchanges but differs from them in its architectural structure since it does not have

centralized points of emission; conversely, it is based on a communication model in

which any point can establish connections with any other points of its structure. In this

sense, peer-to-peer exchanges disrupt the mechanisms of control put in place to

monitor the exchanges between consumers and producers of media thus creating a

ground for an unprecedented set of subversive interventions due to the

unmappeability of its architectural decentralization. At the same time, it is indisputable

39

that specific points of this network hold a dominant status within the Net and that

many of them are tied to corporate power and, consequently, to the production of

capital. In other words, digital media both multiply the capability of state and

corporate institutions to deliver their information and manage subjects and also allows

for individuals to hold “positions of speech” through which they may circulate and

share data beyond the controlling practices of these institutions (Poster 78, 192-193).

Chapter 1, “Hyperlinked Spectators: Trailer Watching and Remaking in the

Digital Age,” takes a close look at the practices of Internet trailer viewing and re-

making as a platform to understand the variety of manners in which film objects and

spectators interact with one another in the transterritorial universe of the Internet. On

the one hand, it pins down the diversified economic players that give birth to Internet

films today and, on the other, it conceptualizes the experiencing of film products

within the unbound realm of the Web, attempting to define the hyperlinked nature of

spectatorship—i.e. the positions made possible by text and viewing situations—within

this media.

The encounters between a given trailer and a spectator are not stand-alone

experiences akin to traditional forms of cinephilia. On the contrary, they are temporary

steps in a lengthy chain of Internet navigation choices that participate from a series of

economic and cultural discurses in which the cinematic object often shares the short-

span attention of the Web navigator with apparently unrelated activities such as

Internet dating, emailing and blogging. The affordability of digital equipment and the

40

increasing literacy of consumers in audiovisual media has indeed generated a new

kind of “do-it-yourself” cinematic culture that challenges the restrictions of copyright

laws and the official discourses of the legally legitimized media players of the movie

business. However, we need to contextualize the scale of these challenges and the

degree to which media powerhouses such as Apple or Sony still hold a dominant

position in the majority of the exchanges that occur on the Web.7

Whereas trailer remaking seems to mostly function through a dynamic of high

creative freedom since it produces little economic revenue, the viewing of original

and homemade trailer remakes is one of the fundamental practices of the increasingly

“nomadic” Web browsing, one that multimedia corporations champion to redirect

consumers through their multiple market windows independently of the various

degrees of engagement Internet users typically may have with them. Taking trailers as

a central issue of analysis, chapter 1 explores the nuances of the cinematic within the

Net and identifies the dominant cultural logics of the Internet’s film culture.

Chapter 2, “Bodies in Crisis: Affect, Sickness and Capital in the Global

Cityscape,” turns to the cinematic representation of global cityscapes to pin down the

aesthetic and ideological fabric of a variety of competing accounts of their social

7 Not accidentally, Google, the preeminent Internet search engine and, therefore, gatekeeper of information on the Web, recently closed a multi-billion dollar deal to buy YouTube, the largest video server for home videos. In other words, those who dare to challenge the status quo, if successful and profitable, seem to be immediately swallowed by the key players of the digital medium and, consequently, often evolve to be tied to their ideological discourses and their circulation networks.

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complexity. Within the arena of film studies, critical inquiries on the relationship

between the city and cinema are often framed through the prism of modernity. The

growth of urban centers at the turn of the twentieth century is typically associated with

the surge of a new sensorium in the city dweller as a result of the overwhelming

assault on human subjectivity that the myriad stimuli of the cityscape perform

(Hansen). The rise of modernity championed the emergence of new social practices

such as high speed movement, increased numbers of leisure activities tied with the re-

configuration of the modern cityscape—e.g. flaneurism, window shopping, etc.— and

the re-organization of the work force as a result of capitalist industrialization

(Benjamin). Filmic renderings of these processes necessarily record the surge of new

interfaces between humans and the changing cityscape. Therefore, cinema registered

the increased pace of modern city life and, simultaneously, normalized its frantic and

disadjusted rhythms (Clarke 3). It was both a component of these new forms of social

life and a recording device that accounted for them, increasing the human field of

action since it granted access to all those spaces that the city dweller could not,

otherwise, intellectually and physically map. While the modern city is a hyper-

concentrated array of stimuli that assault its beleaguered inhabitants, it is also a space

of social strangeness and physical proximity organized around a series of imposed

societal regulations and tacit agreements between city dwellers. It became a space

where “universal strangehood was coming to predominate” (Clarke 4) since its

42

inhabitants had to continuously negotiate the chasm between reciprocal contiguous

physicality and a series of social rules that generated affective distance.

In the project of modernity, the city epitomizes the site of a desirable

cosmopolitanism while stamping upon “the local a derogatory image: as enclaves of

backwardness left out of progress, as the realm of rural stagnation against the

dynamism of the urban, industrial civilization of capitalism” (Dirlik 23). The local

thus becomes a victim of modernist teleology. In the present era, though, the status of

the local has significantly changed since it is alternatively seen as a site of resistance

and subversive political agency, a fading species constantly under the attack of the

homogenizing power of the all-around global economic and socio-cultural flows or the

site in which the imbrication between the local and the global becomes visible (Dirlik;

Sassen, Discontents). The cityscape has become a time-space that, as Manuel Castells

states, features a never-ending encounter between “the globally-oriented economic

functions of the city with the locally-rooted society and culture” (“European Cities”

28). When discussing the global city, cultural and film scholars alike speak of a world

of interconnectedness, economic and media flows and the collapse of temporal and

spatial differences triggered by the development of transportation and information

technologies (Castells, Informational City; Sassen Discontents; Elsaesser, European).

Cities are multicultural clusters of local, regional, national and global relations that far

from being autonomous co-exist in a hyper-connected grid.

43

Rather than losing their status as the nodal points through which the dispersed

social and economic exchanges take place in this networked society, cities have

renewed their centrality as strategic sites from which these concrete operations

originate. They have become concentrated spaces where both the high echelons of

transnational corporations and the low-paid workers—in many cases immigrants—

coexist, reproducing in a single location the imbalanced distribution of resources that

exists in the world (Sassen, World Economy). Through their multiethnic constituents

they crystallize the promise of mobility and unlimited cultural interconnectedness that

euphoric accounts of globalization identify in looking at our unbounded world of

multi-speed information highways. At the same time, they often shape the paths these

human bodies may take to transcend their respective niches through their organizing

technologies, cartographically distributing bodies according to racial, social and

cultural criteria. While the global city constantly creates new sources and materials for

imaginary work, it also may limit the routes and impact that these productive forms of

agency may have in the social field.

How has contemporary cinema responded to the representational challenge

posed by the “global city”? How can we explore the workings of filmmaking as both a

component of the global metropolis’ fabric and an organizational and expressive tool

to account for its challenging complexities? How do contemporary films register the

impact of the intensification of transterritorial processes of social exchange and the

growth of cultural communities that are no longer physically tied to territorial

44

boundaries—e.g. Chinese diasporic groups stationed in different countries? Can we

truly discuss the global city or should we re-work our epistemological framework to

take as a point of departure the contextual specificity of each of the approached cities

even if their degree of interrelation has dramatically escalated in the last twenty years?

Chapter 2 attempts to map out the forces at play in the constitution of different global

cityscapes and scrutinizes several cinematic representations that engage with their

palimpsestic constitution. I explore the deployment of diverse aesthetic systems to

capture the elusive time-space of the global cityscape (e.g. Wong Kar-Wai’s multi-

speed framing of Hong Kong, Tsai Ming-Liang long-take and slow-paced renderings

of Taipei, the disaster blockbuster’s superlative and kinetic discourse of destruction)

while tracing the cultural and social forces in contact (and often in conflict) inside

them.

At the same time, binding the economic and social with the representational, I

analyze the relationship between those films that deeply root the cinematic cities they

deliver in the historical fabric of their site of intervention— e.g. Hong Kong and

Taipei in the 1990s—and those that construct any-spaces-wherever to account for

universalized or, at least nationwide, parameters of social and affective exchange

between its inhabitants—e.g. Safe (1995), Fight Club (1999) etc. My goal is not to

simply offer a catalogue of different ways in which the cinematic encounters the

global city. I attempt, instead, to delineate the dominant representational templates at

work in drawing the multiple cinematic cities this chapter traverses and scrutinize the

45

relationship between a set of aesthetic frameworks and their implied political stances. I

argue that healing narratives such as the disaster blockbuster downplay the physical

dimension of the interaction between the city and its dwellers and predominantly

thrive on the mobilization of character types devoid of psychological depth and the

foregrounding of the potency of their generic, cutting-edge technological spectacles.

Conversely, those films that engage with the specifics of the social and cultural

milieus they approach often center on the exploration of a series of mental and

psychological crises at the core of their characters’ negotiations of the cityscapes they

inhabit. These films’ typical deviation from cinematic illusionism is a key

representational strategy through which these crises acquire a visual and aural

cinematic form.

I ultimately analyze how contemporary cinema imagines a variety of global

cityscapes, scrutinizing the temporal and spatial frameworks negotiated by their

inhabitants as they move and halt through them, engage in acts of consumption, touch

and are touched by them, and encounter other city dwellers and the time-spaces of the

city itself.

Chapter 3, “Violence, Cross-cultural Translation and Genre: Woo, Amenábar

and Tarantino’s Global Reach” engages in a variety of manners with the

transterritorial migration of film aesthetics and artists. I follow the complementary

trajectory of three directors—John Woo, Alejandro Amenábar and Quentin

46

Tarantino— to conceptualize the economic, ideological and aesthetic cross-

fertilization between Hollywood cinema and other national modes of production.

John Woo’s migration journey seems at first sight to fall into the “brain drain”

practice of which Hollywood industry is often accused. After being an action film

maverick in Hong Kong and gaining worldwide recognition with his late 1980’s work,

Woo moved to Hollywood and has since then become an A-list director in charge of

projects that surpass the $100 million dollar budget. While his influence has been

ever-present within the action film panorama for the last fifteen years, his work seems

to have suffered from both a thematic and aesthetic “mainstreaming” inside the

Hollywood machinery. His case has been flagged as representative of the “dangers”

world auteurs typically encounter if migrating to the cash-first freedom-last

Hollywood industry. Is Woo’s case that simple though? The first part of this chapter

scrutinizes his Hong Kong to the U.S. journey as a passport into the study of the

relationship between Hollywood and other national industries in the current era while

analyzing the malleability and readability of Woo’s films to explain their international

success.

Amenábar’s big splash in the Spanish film panorama in 1995 clearly points to

a successful strategy used by many non-U.S. filmmakers to conquer their native

markets and then proceed to “expand” internationally: the direct appropriation of the

audiovisual and narrative codes of globally operative generic categories (especially

prominent within the Hollywood arena) in order to capitalize on their popular appeal

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to social and cultural groups all over the world. In other words, Amenábar has

repeatedly managed to beat Hollywood at its own game, ultimately moving into the

English-language filmmaking with The Others (2002) only to “retreat” back into the

idiosyncrasies of Spanish society with his Academy-award winning The Sea Inside

(2005). His work exemplifies the dynamic relationship between global and national

representational forces in shaping the coordinates of the cinematic within a specific

national industry.

Finally, Tarantino, for his part, has built his career on the appropriation of a

variety of generic traditions that range from exploitation discourses to European art

film auteurs such as Jean Luc Godard and Chinese martial arts films. For many, he is

the ultimate pasticheur, the wet-dream for all those cultural theorists who have

proclaimed our plunging into the postmodern era ever since they detected the

incapacity of the modernist master narratives to give an account of the changing

coordinates of history and culture. Consequently, Tarantino’s apparent cult of the

blank surface of the cinematic and his combinatory mélange of film traditions easily

locate him at the forefront of one of the key representational shifts—the cultural turn

of the postmodern—within the realm of the arts.8 His works also point to the

8 The recovery drive that seems to characterize Tarantino’s work—resuscitating the careers of long forgotten actors such as Pam Grier, David Carradine or Kurt Russell and also the reworking of fringe or cult cinematic traditions such as “Grindhouse” films—makes his work perfectly fit the mould of postmodern art theorized by some scholars. Ingeberg Hoesterey, for example, points that postmodern art defers from its

48

increasingly derivative character of the cinematic in the age of postmodern recycling.

Furthermore, his multi-generic compilation films satisfy both the voracious

cinephile—eager to deploy her own archive of cinematic moments and prove she is

able to fully read the Tarantinesque web of references—and the occasional moviegoer

whose sensorium is well-equipped to engage with the kinetic images and sounds that

structure his films. In addition, while he started as an independent filmmaker, his

career epitomizes the rise of what some cultural commentators have called

“Indiewood” throughout the mid and late 1990’s. His journey thus signals, on the one

hand, a key change in the economics of the American film industry and, on the other,

the flip side of the coin of Woo’s case, since Tarantino’s works translate other

cinematic traditions stemming from the working coordinates of the evolving American

film industry throughout the 1990’s.

How can we conceptualize this diverse set of exchanges and what do they tell

us about the ways in which film aesthetics circulate across borders today? It is my

contention that now, more than ever, the contemporary film panorama works through

a multi-layered dynamic of dispersed processes that resists the tyranny of the nation-

state as a fundamental conceptual framework and calls, rather, for a more flexible

approach to the understanding of the ways in which films and filmmakers travel (or

fail to do so). I approach the different migration trajectories of these three directors in modern counterpart in as much as its practice “ostentatiously borrows” from the pre-existent cultural archive, searching for the unperformed, dismissed or forgotten. See: Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film and Literature.

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order to understand what salient elements of their work have facilitated their

successful transterritorial journey and to determine whether we may be able to trace a

series of commonalities in their works to explain their worldwide success.

Following this path, I establish a dialogue with recent developments on genre

theory to map out the functioning of a transgeneric “mode of violence” in current

cinema as a privileged epistemological tool to engage with the present geopolitical

milieu. In this respect, I conceptualize generic categories through a model that not

only takes into consideration their audiovisual and aesthetic fabric but also the kind of

exchanges that they establish with film spectators and their historical mutability

according to social and historical factors. As Stephen Neale has acknowledged, genres

are not only films but also “specific systems of expectations and hypothesis which

spectators bring with them to the cinema and which interact with films themselves

during the course of the viewing process” (Neale 31), providing spectators with

models of representation they can recognize, understand and appreciate as they

continuously negotiate the dynamic between repetition and novelty. Furthermore,

taking cues from Linda Williams and Christine Gledhill’s work on melodrama-as-

mode, I foreground not only the ongoing cross-fertilization between the different

generic categories but also the manners in which violence-as-a-mode attaches itself to

different generic models in the works of the three studied directors and how this

process may give us some clues about their successful trajectories. Lastly, I draw from

critical scholarship on the concepts of Hollywood, European and world cinema to

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explore the concept of the “world auteur” as a key figure to define the relationship

between social politics and cinematic transnationalism.

Taking the concept of the world auteur as a point of departure, chapter 4,

“Digital Technology and Political Filmmaking: Illegal and Corporate Bodies in

Motion” theorizes different spaces for radical politics in contemporary film by

concentrating on a variety of films that thematically deal with a diverse set of

individuals who can or cannot move across geographical borders. In other words, I

focus on tracing how the cinematic accounts for the social discourses that establish the

difference between “those who circulate capital” and those “whom capital circulates,”

in Slavoj Zizek’s words. First, I study the role of the world auteur in creating

narratives of contestation and resistance in the film arena. I analyze the case of Elia

Suleiman, a Palestinian filmmaker who given the non-existence of a film industry in

his country of origin, has taken the diasporic route to finance his films while

maintaining a strong commitment to the narrativization of Palestinian-Israeli conflict

via the deployment of an art cinema discourse. Tracing a series of connecting vectors

with the 1960’s counter-cinemas and their tight links with de-colonization processes

all around the world, I move on to argue that politically committed filmmakers remain

active forces in the social field by mobilizing a variety of techniques that blend the

modus operandi of art cinema, globally operative genres within mainstream arenas

and, at times, documentary practices. I then deal with specific case studies of this form

of politically active world auteurism. First, I scrutinize Michael Winterbottom’s

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strategic utilization of digital technology in In this World (2002) and Road to

Guantánamo (2006) to create cinematic universes that blur the limits between the real

and the fictional. I argue that in his depiction of illegal immigration and forced

incarceration in these two films, Winterbottom capitalizes on the wide-reaching

presence of digital imagery in our contemporary mediascape to legitimate the

authenticating appeal of his films. The second part of the chapter concentrates on

Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things (2003) as a springboard to discuss the social

coordinates that illegal immigrants must negotiate once they have entered the Western

Visa Fortresses. I discuss how Frears’ film utilizes a worldwide dominant form of

address by anchoring his narrative in a melodramatic and thriller-driven account of a

romance between two illegal immigrants. This leads me into a discussion of the

concept of popular film and its translatability in regard to cultural specificity. I argue

that forms of popular entertainment hold a potentially wide-reaching power to

intervene in the social field by those who aim to center the marginalized leftovers of

the global order through their cinematic endeavors. The last part of the chapter enters

the bowels of the corporate world by analyzing Oliver Assayas’ highly experimental

DemonLover (2002). If Winterbottom and Frears’ films thoroughly engage with a

narrativization of the social underbelly that supports Western societies, Assayas, on

his part, addresses the exploitative contours of the high echelons of multinational

capitalism and their ruthless effects on human subjectivity via the exploitation of the

human body as a site to enact digitally enabled acts of violence.

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All these films expose who moves, who does not and who is forcibly moved.

They also explore the effects of transterritorial mobility (or lack of) on human

subjectivity and chronicle the constitution of a multi-lingual, multi-cultural and

polysemantic social field where identity is increasingly defined through a series of

social and cultural forces that surpass the nation-state as a structuring agent in

organizing bodies across social and economic strata. Yet, they also call attention to the

importance of the state’s social policies and sanctions in determining the hierarchies

through which human bodies are layered within the territorial boundaries they control.

Perhaps most remarkably, despite their aesthetic and thematic heterogeneity, all these

cinematic efforts dig beneath the veneer of Capital and expose the socially skewed

character of its supporting mechanisms. This is a path mainstream films very rarely

care or dare to take.

I conclude with a comparative analysis of two cultural artifacts—the film

Children of Men (2006) and the television series 24—in an attempt to scrutinize two

competing accounts of the current highly militarized geopolitical scenario that signal

the rise of a new discourse of unambiguous ideological earnestness in the present

cultural mediascape.

This dissertation ultimately maps out different modalities of movement in the

current cinematic arena. Through an analysis of the multiple media platforms through

which films circulate, I conceptualize a theoretical framework to understand the

variety of encounters between historical events, ideological discourses, film texts and

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spectators. My goal is not to draw a totalizing account of these processes. Instead, I

attempt to mobilize a transnational paradigm in the analysis of film practices with the

purpose of mapping some of the fundamental ways in which the producers and

consumers of culture encounter each other. I embark thus on a discussion of a series of

physical and cultural bodies meeting in the cross-fertilizing spaces between the

cinematic and the social.

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1

HYPERLINKED SPECTATORS:

TRAILER WATCHING & REMAKING IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Anyone living in the United States today can easily avoid waiting in line at the

theater. Moviegoers can buy their tickets online, print them at home and easily walk

into the movie house to see the film they have chosen. No waiting time required.9

Buying tickets online, though, is simply one of the many ways that the flourishing of

Web pages devoted to film culture has enabled. Now, movie fans can rent films using

online services such as those provided by Netflix or Blockbuster, go to sites such as

IMDB.com and Rottentomatoes.com to consult critics’ reviews and gather box-office,

cast and crew or release date information. They can download movie trailers on their

Ipods and watch them while commuting daily to their work place or they can enter the

official Web site of a film before or after its theatrical release to get sneak previews,

trailers, stills, wallpapers and a variety of ancillary products. As J. P. Telotte argues,

official Web sites not only provide information or lures to advertise the films they

9 Even though typically buying movie tickets from home is normally associated with mainstream cinema and multiplexes, many of the so-called “art-houses” such as the Angelika Film Center, BAM Cinemateque, Film Forum or the Walter Reade theater at Lincoln Center offer similar services.

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promote “but also effectively tell the ‘story of the film’, that is, as the film’s makers

and/or distributors see it and want it to be understood” (34). These sites thus promote

the film while launching a multi-media array of stimuli designed to hook the movie

fan by offering complementary forms of entertainment that are not limited to the

viewing of an audiovisual product. In other words, they try the spectator-to-be to fully

integrate the film in her daily whereabouts by providing a spectrum of digital products

that act as constant reminders of the film they stand for. As Henry Jenkins has argued,

new media ownership and production display a growing tendency toward

convergence, integrating several content delivery systems (Convergence). Multimedia

companies traverse different cultural and technological fields; film studios are

components of vertically and horizontally integrated entertainment conglomerates that

do not only produce content but also partake of “theater ownership, publishing, home

video, television network ownership, computer online services, music publishing,

recording and distribution, merchandising, retailing and theme park operations” (Davis

78). They allow films to seamlessly move through a variety of exploitation windows

while remaining under the control of the same company. In other words, a movie fan

can read a positive review of an upcoming film in a magazine, call a friend on her cell

phone to arrange a time and place to view the film, see the movie in a specific theater,

and then a few weeks later buy a video game that expands the narrative strands set up

by the film, play the game on a console and remain, throughout all these activities,

within the confines of the same multimedia corporation. Consequently, this approach

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to the creation and distribution of cultural products by media players “opens multiple

entry points into the consumption process, and, at the same time, enables consumers to

more quickly locate new manifestations of a popular narrative” (Jenkins, "Tarantino"

284).

Media convergence also refers to the migratory behavior of audiences, who

navigate media spaces to enjoy a variety of entertainment experiences. The immediate

consequence of this newly dominant model of production and consumption is that it

creates a more interactive platform of exchange between the different players in the

dissemination of cultural items—namely, producers, distributors, exhibitors and

consumers. Moreover, the fleeting materiality of the Internet undermines a clear-cut

distinction between these four types of cultural agents and re-situates consumers in a

dispersed multimedia framework where they have become key actors.

Even though Internet users may indeed get a higher degree of pleasure if they

have seen a given film (or plan to), film Web sites can also function as stand-alone

entertainment tools that exist to be enjoyed for their own sake or in direct contiguity

and interaction with similar sites, not necessarily as subordinate to a film theatrical

attraction.10 Film fans can also engage in conversations with people from all over the

world in the numerous chat rooms that day after day pop up on the Web or they can

religiously re-visit their favorite film bloggers and become members of a community

10 For a detailed discussion of the Blair Witch Project official site, see Telotte’s above-mentioned article.

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of Internet fans that share their thoughts and ideas about upcoming films, cult classics,

films stars or directors. They can legally and illegally download films, bypassing the

physical dimension of pictures—from celluloid to videotapes to DVDs— that has

traditionally characterized the interaction between film spectators and motion pictures.

Fans can also upload clips of homemade films or remake their own favorites classics

by changing the soundtrack of a film or cutting and pasting different films together. In

brief, even though the 35mm film format seems to be resisting, at least for now, the

growing threat of digital technology in movie houses, in our contemporary milieu

most of the exchanges regarding film culture take place in the virtual landscape of the

cyber world. The ultimate goal of multimedia distribution and production companies

may indeed be to get the user re-united with some form of monetary encounter with

the film product—e.g. buy a DVD or pay a fee for a legal download of files containing

the film. However, the amount of effort expended in appealing to the cyber-taste of

movie fans is paramount regardless of whether customers purchase or not a particular

film product. Besides, since the Internet respects no borders, these companies—both

small movie distribution houses and multinational corporations—can easily utilize its

quasi-infinite tentacles to deliver their products worldwide. Moreover, film Web sites

are also the very loci where a variety of non-filmic and economic-driven enterprises

showcase their products, attempting to lure the movie fan or occasional visitor of a

given Web site into buying a variety of items which, for the most part, have little to do

with the cinema. Finally, networking Web sites such as YouTube and MySpace offer

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an open ground for users to upload their homemade videos and share them with

millions of people. Their service is free; their revenue comes from advertising.11

For this synergy-based model to be successful, audiences must engage in a

long lasting relationship with one or several narrative universes, designed to trigger

not a one-time act of consumption but a prolonged succession of them. This approach

to media production demands from companies to be increasingly aware of the

audiences’ demands and even directly interact with them throughout the creation stage

of forthcoming products. In short, the clear-cut distinction between the producers and

consumers of culture is becoming increasingly blurred. Even though it would be

misleading to simply equate the role of George Lucas with an amateur filmmaker that

has made a seven-minute spoof film of Star Wars: The Attack of the Clones (2002) in

the creation and dissemination of culture, it is, simultaneously, erroneous to ignore the

decisive roles of grassroots filmmaking in the current socio-cultural field of

production.12 Furthermore, whereas analog cultural objects can be mass-produced but

only from fixed points of production, peer-to-peer and file sharing exchanges on the

11 As I write these lines, Universal, one of the biggest music labels in the world, is getting ready to launch Spiralfrog, a Web site that will allow users to legally download music by the artists for free. This marketing move is aimed at competing with the ruling music download business today, Apple’s Itunes. Likewise Microsoft has recently launched “Zune”, a download music store and player. See <http://www.ft.com/cms/s/b194883e-36b2-11db-89d6-0000779e2340.html> 12 Henry Jenkins traces a history of this form of participatory culture from the use of the photocopy machine to the VCR (a device that allowed film fans to both create their own personal archive of films and re-edit them on tape) to the collage aesthetic of “Photoshop” and music sampling.

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Internet undermine this model of cultural production, blurring thus the boundaries

between the consumers and producers of culture and re-configuring the venues

through which these objects are distributed and, therefore, consumed (Poster 194).

One of the powerful effects of the dominant positioning of Internet-based film

consumption practices today is the shifting role of movie trailers in the advertisement

and promotion of films and their commercial tie-ins. Functioning far beyond the

limited realm of the movie house, trailers partake in an array of contending discourses

that spreads ad infinitum through the Web. What follows is a critical evaluation of the

modes in which movie trailers engage film consumers in diverse Web spaces—from

film production and distribution companies sites to Internet trailer, DVD and video

services pages. My goal is to draw a map of the range of manners in which trailers

circulate on the Internet in an attempt to define the multiple consumer positions in

which the various cyber-incarnations of movie trailers place spectators. This project is

motivated by the need to account for an expanding form of cultural production that

features a climactic clash between corporate ownership, which understands cultural

products as intellectual property subjected to strict copyright laws, and fans, who treat

“film or television as if it offered the raw material for telling their own stories and

resources for forging their own communities” (Jenkins, "Tarantino" 288).

Before proceeding into this direction a clarification is necessary: as I write

these words, all the discussed trailer cyber-texts are indeed existent and all the links

cited would direct the reader to the described location. However, it is very possible

60

that this may not be the case within hours or even minutes. Although I do discuss

well-established Web sites such as Movietrailertrash.com or the Apple QuickTime

Trailer showcase, I also engage in an analysis of homemade YouTube-uploaded

trailers that may remain online for months, perhaps years or may disappear in a matter

of days after their upload, depending on their author’s commitment to maintain her

account operative or not. Some may question the usefulness of the following study

given that it is indeed destined to discuss in detail film texts that one day will be non-

existent, as opposed to the majority of film scholarship, which deals with fixed objects

that will not change and are/will be readily available for repeated viewings and

analyses. What is the purpose, then, of this temporally sensitive inquiry into the ever-

changing contours of Internet trailer viewing and remaking? On the one hand, to give

a thorough account of one of the most fundamental forms of interaction between

spectators and films today, and, consequently, map out a key aspect of contemporary

film culture. The goal is to identify a key shift in the different forms of consumption

that film products offer spectators as framed within the multiple time-spaces of the

World Wide Web in relation to previous historical eras. On the other hand, I attempt to

scrutinize and contextualize the very loci of these film related practices within the

wider socio-cultural field and, by so doing, define the diverse forms of aesthetic and

political engagement that the expansion of the World Wide Web has opened and

closed for film artists, fans, social activists, corporate drones, government officials

and, more extensively, Internet users in every hooked confine of planet earth.

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Online trailers are not simply commercially driven sneak peeks for upcoming

attractions and feature films are not necessarily the end product of all film-connected

activities. Instead, trailers are often the ultimate objects of desire of scores of online

film actions and represent a form of cultural exchange that is specific to the digital

medium, re-articulating the relationship between the producers and consumers of

culture. Those who double-click on a particular window or link to enjoy a specific

trailer experience take as a point of departure the fact that the chosen trailer is going to

offer a series of hermeneutic clues— namely privileged insights on upcoming

theatrical attractions or, in the case of being a trailer remake, present the already

known with a twist (e.g. the “Brokeback” trailer series I will discuss below).

Therefore, the temporary character of these trailers, the inevitability of their falling

prey to the unstoppable dynamic of change that marks the contents and resources of

the Internet, does not prejudice the following discussion. On the contrary, it is an

essential factor for the understanding of both the material fabric of online films and

the ways in which users approach them. The fleeting status of these films’ cyber

existence in combination with the cult for a “permanent Now” (the need to be aware of

the current “big online thing”) and the users’ short attention span while surfing the

Web highly characterize most Internet user-to-user exchanges and navigation

practices. Consequently, although I do agree with Henry Jenkins about the fact that

multimedia companies try to hook the Internet user in a prolonged narrative of

interlinked processes of consumption, I also feel the need to highlight that consumers’

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participatory practices on the Web have more to do with short-termed acts of multi-

window and multi-task navigation than with the compliance to a pre-established

narrative structure. 13 What Internet users typically consume is short audiovisual

spectacles (or excerpts of them) that do not necessarily command their full attention

since any given Internet navigator may be writing an email or performing a Web

search while “watching” a trailer for an upcoming release. While appealing kinetically

to their senses, online trailers are also integrated in a much broader socio-cultural field

that frames them and ultimately conditions both their meaning and their aesthetic

fabric. Lastly, the unprecedented distributibility and the manipulable digital fabric of

online trailers contribute decisively to transform them into both the culmination of an

act of consumption that is not necessarily linked to a monetary exchange and a space

for cultural intervention. For the digital medium allows for consumers to change

cultural objects and make them readily available through file sharing on the Internet.

Through digitization, consequently, the consumer can also be “a producer, reproducer,

distributor, and creator of cultural objects" (Poster 198); one who does not obey the

dictates of market economy and creates a parallel public sphere in which cultural

objects are no longer only commodities but fundamentally the very means through

which a deterritorialized network of cultural exchange articulates itself. Mark Poster

13 In her essay “The Virtual Window,” Anne Friedberg argues that the “Windows” trope in computer software epitomizes the collapse of the single viewpoint, establishing a model of a window we can’t see through since the different windows computer users open ultimately overlap and obscure each other.

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states that this kind of practice points to the fact that a new infrastructure of cultural

exchange is in the making, one that is characterized by the variability of the cultural

object, signaling the complete blurring of the distinction between and consumers of

culture. He argues, though, that this new mode of exchange is not fully set in place yet

because culture continues operating according to the dictates of the long-lasting

sedimentation of the “fixity” of the object as the standard practice of exchange (Poster

204). Without entirely disputing this claim, I believe that this form of exchange is

indeed already a full-fledged realization, dramatically re-tooling the ways in which

culture shapes our social fabric. The following pages map out the ways in which the

trailer text, the digitally-savvy producer of culture and the online spectator encounter

one another and the implications of such meeting coordinates for fully understanding

the changing role of cinematic products in our transterritorial, multi-channel and

multi-window Internet-mediated age.

From Movie Fans to Trailer junkies: A new form of Cinephilia?

In 2003, New Line picked up a script in turnaround titled “Snakes on a Plane”.

Paramount had initially the rights to the script but had decided to pass on it due to the

politically inadequate status plane disaster films had in the aftermath of Al-Qaeda’s

World Trade Center attack. According to inside sources, New Line saw Snakes on a

Plane (2006) as a low-risk investment for industry standards—$30 million—that

would neither become a media event nor cause the New York-based company

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financial troubles, ultimately delivering moderate profits after going through all the

different market windows. Ronnie Yu (The Bride with White Hair, 1993, Bride of

Chucky, 1998, Freddy vs. Jason, 2002) was initially slated to direct but he soon left

the project.14 New Line then put the project in the hands of a reliable director, Robert

E. Ellis, who had previously delivered a successful sequel, Final Destination 2 (2003).

Despite the fact that his thriller Cellular had been a big flop, Ellis was still considered

to be both a bankable director and an able craftsman, ideally suited for a shallow

entertainment ride such as Snakes on a Plane. Samuel L. Jackson was then enlisted to

play the main role in the film. However, New Line faced great difficulties in finding

other talent. In fact, several agents stated that their actors would not even look at a

screenplay titled Snakes on a Plane. The studio then decided to change the title to

Pacific Air Flight 121. The casting process was completed and the film rolled into pre-

production. However, this was just the beginning of the story…

In parallel to New Line’s efforts to launch the film, a different narrative was in

the making. Screenwriter Josh Friedman wrote in his blog about his misadventures in

getting involved in the project.15 This sparked an Internet buzz to the point that law

student Brian Finkelstein started a fan site entirely dedicated to the film

(snakesonablog.com). Finkelstein’s quest was propelled by his drive to get invited to

14 In an interview with Jon Stewart in The Daily Show, Samuel L. Jackson affirmed that Ronnie Yu was, in fact, fired. See: <http://YouTube.com/watch?v=oxhwCilpoQQ> 15 <http://hucksblog.blogspot.com/2005/08/snakes-on-motherfucking-plane.html>

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the Hollywood premiere of the film. Soon thereafter, hundreds of blog entries and fan

sites popped on the Internet demanding New Line to change the title back to Snakes on

a Plane and for Samuel L. Jackson to utter the word “motherfucker” in the film.16

Jackson, for his part, spoke openly about the inadequacy of the new title, claiming that

the only reason he decided to act in the film was the original title itself.17 After a few

months, New Line rode the fan’s wave and the original title was reinstated. Soon after,

fans started making home videos inspired by Snakes on a Plane (e.g. Snakes on an

Elevator, Cats on a Plane) and uploaded them on YouTube and MySpace, often

taking sound bites from other films in which Jackson characteristically uttered the

word “motherfucker” such as Pulp Fiction or Jackie Brown (1997). But things did not

stop there. The Internet hype around the film continued to skyrocket to the point that

bloggers and self-declared fans of an unreleased film started creating t-shirts, cartoons.

posters, mock trailers, fake auditions and innumerable Web sites devoted to the film.

New Line, realizing that a potential blockbuster had fell off the sky, joined the forces

of the growing fan base of the film and organized a “song contest” in collaboration

with social networking Web site Tagworld.18 The winner songs would play in the

16 For an example of one of the multiple articles reporting the unprecedented Internet buzz that surrounded the film before its release see: <http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/film/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002234847> 17 <http://www.collider.com/entertainment/news/archive_detail.asp?aid=599&tcid=1> 18 To listen to the winners of the Tagworld music contest go to: http://www.tagworld.com/snakesonaplane/musicwinners

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film’s soundtrack. A few months before the film opening on August 18th 2006,

Varitalk started an advertising campaign in which fans could send semi-personalized

messages in the voice of Samuel L. Jackson to telephone numbers of their choice. In

Internet chat rooms, the phrase “Snakes on Plane” became a synonym for nonsense.

More extensively, the acronym of the film’s title, SoaP, and the title itself have

became a slang term for “Whaddya gonna do?” or “Shit happens.”19 In addition, even

though Snakes on a Plane had wrapped up shooting months ago in Vancouver, New

Line decided to schedule a five-day reshoot in Los Angeles to add a scene with

Jackson uttering the famous word and amp up the rating of the film to “R” via the

inclusion of more explicit sexual and gore imagery. The production company

attempted to target a late teens to mid twenties male audience, which constituted the

backbone of the fan base that had sprung upon the Web.20 Since then Black Flame has

published a novelization of the film and comic book writer Chuck Dixon announced

on his Web site that he would be writing the comic book adaptation of Snakes on a

Plane. DC Comics announced that their Wildstorm imprint would release a two issue

miniseries on August 16th and August 30th. All of a sudden, a film that had been

selected by Wired magazine as the “best worst movie of 2006” exclusively based on

its title and concept had transformed into a media event, becoming a movie geek

19 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=snakes+on+a+plane 20 New Line launched the official Web site of the film, snakesonaplane.com, on May 3rd 2006. Initially, the site only offered an image of the film’s logo, a link to fan-designed wallpapers and an entry point to the fan site of the week.

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darling and elevating its status within a large part of the World Wide Web's film-

hungry community to a must-see.21

What is Snakes on a Plane? The plot seems to be a standard variation of the

airplane thriller subgenre: Neville Flynn and Sean Jones, FBI agents, escort John

Saunders to testify in a highly publicized case against an L.A. mafioso. The mobster

sneaks a time-release crate of several hundred snakes of various sizes on board in an

attempt to kill the witness. While flying between Hawaii and California, havoc ensues

and the FBI agents must protect their witness and the rest of the passengers. Why did

this movie title spark by itself an unprecendented fan culture on the Web? Perhaps, as

Friedman states in his blog, the appeal of the film is that: “It's a title. It's a concept. It's

a poster and a logline and whatever else you need it to be. It's perfect. Perfect. It's the

everlasting Gobstopper of movie titles.”22 Indeed the title Snakes on a Plane exploits

to the extreme the unambiguous and stamps it on the film spectator’s eyes, proudly

announcing its structuring shallowness and mobilizing it as its major asset. Was the

buzz about Snakes on a Plane a new phenomenon or were we re-living in the months

prior to the film’s release a Blairwitch Project–like media event? According to David

Waldon, author of Snakes on a Plane: the Guide to the Internet Sensation (published

June 2006), Snakes on a Plane taps into unprecedented territory since those movies

21 According to Wikipedia, a rip-off horror B-movie, Snakes on a Train, was released straight to DVD on August 15, 2006, only 3 days prior to Snakes on a Plane's theatrical release. 22 Friedman, same Web site.

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that amass a similar high-profile hype in the months preceding their theatrical release

are invariably based on cultural items the public already knows well either through a

previous film of the same series (e.g. Star Wars) or pre-existent books (Harry Potter

and The Lord of the Rings. Waldon then proceeds to give credit to Internet networking

Web sites such as the above-mentioned YouTube: "I'm not sure there would have been

a phenomenon without these sites… It's kind of a new wave of do-it-yourself

'Internetting’.”23 What is, then, the fundamental difference between Lions Gate film’s

brilliantly orchestrated Internet campaign for The Blairwitch Project (1999) and the

user-to-user dynamic behind the Snakes on a Plane Internet hype? Whereas the great

notoriety of the former was mostly based on the dissemination of the “story” of the

film via its official Web site, the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon was indeed a product

of amateur trailer making and Internet blogging. In other words, while in the case of

The Blairwitch Project the film itself retained its status as the central attraction in the

myriad Internet discourses that increased its exposure, in discussing Snakes on a

Plane, we need to point out a marginalization of the film’s status in the benefit of a

variety of networking practices. How can we account for this new form of Internet-

mediated “cinephilia” given that today movie fans and Web surfers may be less

interested in the active decipherment of a cinematic text and in sitting back and

enjoying a pure kinetic entertainment ride than in tracing the multimedia paraphernalia

23 <http://data.vip.msu.edu/MainSite/ViewNews.aspx?NEWSID=22>

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that surrounds the making and marketing of a given film in the months or weeks

before its theatrical release? Are we really discussing cinephilia when we account for

the operations of re-making that Internet users perform by intervening in the

materiality of films themselves, opening them up to unexpected generic, narrative and

audiovisual patterns? Is this kind of pleasure akin or similar to forms of earlier

cinephilia? In other words, how has the increased flexibility and mobility of films in

digital format, whether through the capacity to de-compose them to their minimal

aural and visual units and combine them with other minimal units from other films or

through the capability of delivering them quasi-everywhere via the Web, changed our

understanding of the cinematic medium? Finally, how can we account for these

shifting parameters by scrutinizing the widespread practice of online trailer viewing

and amateur trailer making?

De Baecque and Fremaux define cinephilia as a way of watching films and of

discussing them, a “cultural system of cultural organization that engenders rituals

around the gaze, speech, and the written word” (qtd. in Keathley 6). Following Paul

Willemen, Christian Keathley defines the cinephile as a spectator with a panoramic

perception, who sweeps the screen visually in order to register the totality of the image

and its most intricate nuances, namely those who remain unnoticed by the “run-of-the-

mill” spectator. The cinephile is a type of spectator who can register what the

filmmaker wanted spectators to read and still has a leftover of energy to go beyond

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this more standard reading, given her panoramic approach to the image. The cinephile

does not fetishize those cinematic moments designed to be the objects of widespread

appreciation (e.g. the opening shot of A Clockwork Orange, 1971, the cat/ Orson

Welles sequence in The Third Man, 1949, the Kim Novak/Jimmy Stewart 360 degrees

kiss in Vertigo, 1958) but concentrates her energies on those forgotten details that do

not attract the attention of the average spectator. Moreover, for Keathley the cinephilic

moment is not only a visual encounter but also a sensuous one, namely, “an

experience that has been repeatedly linked in critical writing to the haptic, the tactile

and the bodily” (6). Keathley then goes on to describe how the increased availability

of films today in a variety of reception venues has changed the patterns of film

consumption and claims that these new forms of spectatorship signal the end of the

cinematic as an event marked by specific spatial and temporal coordinates. In fact, he

argues that the televisual image, as opposed to its filmic counterpart, seems to exist in

a perpetual present, being always available (Tivo and DVR are perhaps the epitome of

such eternal contemporaneity).

The Internet undoubtedly pushes a step further this idea of perpetual present at

work in the televisual by making the object of cinephilic appreciation not only

temporally and physically unbound but also readily available for Web surfer to

experience it at will, in unplanned simultaneity with many unknown Others in

geographically distant locations. In other words, it is precisely the Internet user who

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chooses when to start and finish the “cinematic event” on the Web (unless a

malfunctioning occurs and the almighty power of the digital breaks down) and,

whether she wants it or not, she is likely to be one of many in a constellation of users

performing the same act and sharing the same file. This form of exchange between the

cinematic product and the cinephile calls for an epistemological framework that is able

to trace the similarities and differences between the pre-digital film/spectator

encounter and the present World Wide Web-mediated interaction between cinematic

object and viewer. With that purpose in mind, Thomas Elsaesser distinguishes

between an older form of film appreciation, cinephilia take one, and a new kind of

Internet-enabled film culture—cinephilia take two. Cinephilia take one is place-bound,

“topographically site-specific, defined by the movie houses, neighborhoods and cafés

one frequented” (Elsaesser, “Cinephilia” 31). Elsaesser goes on to claim that

cinephilia today is two-headed. On the hand, there is the auteurist film fan culture,

which maintains a certain attachment to specific cinephilic routes throughout the space

of the city and is still anchored in the cult for celluloid (hence the enormous

importance that this kind of cinephile endows to the screening of new prints and the

restoration of film negatives). On the other, there is a form of cinephilia that has

embraced new technologies, such as DVD, non-linear home editors and the Internet,

creating online communities that share diverse types of interests for films. The

auteurist cinephilia’s home is the film festival circuit, the repertory theater and the

film museum. The second form of cinephilia utilizes technology as a weapon to

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express one’s interest for the cinema and, according to Elsaesser, is characterized by

three related operations: re-mastering, re-purposing, and re-framing ( “Cinephilia” 36).

Re-mastering refers to a gesture of appropriation, seizing the images to make them

signify something different for a given community. Re-purposing points to the

industry’s continuous attempt to open new market windows for the film product, re-

packaging the same content for different media in diverse manners to maximize profit

by creating new allures for the consumer—from DVD extras to the film’s official Web

site. Most films are already born with a set of discourses or paratexts, in Genette’s

terms, which in turn foment the creation of more discourses. In this sense, the critic,

movie fan, Internet blogger and occasional Web surfer are already part of the package

even before they set in motion their intervention in relation to a particular film.

Finally, there is “reframing,” which refers to “the conceptual frame, the emotional

frame, as well as the temporal frame that regulate the DVD or Internet forms of

cinephilia” ("Cinephilia" 38). This type of cinephile is not concerned with selecting a

particular venue to see a film; she is not obsessed either with sitting in a particular row

in the movie theater as the ultimate guarantor for the full cinematic experience.

Instead, this mode of cultural consumption is characterized by the mobility,

malleability and instability of its object of appreciation. It breathes through a

continuous circulation of audiovisual objects and negotiates the fact that almost the

whole history of the film medium is digitizable. Therefore, this cyber-cinemateque is

always potentially present here and now, ready to be streamed or downloaded. In

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addition, the gap between the loved object and the lover/cinephile has been bridged.

Now, the cinephile can indeed touch it, manipulating the object of her appreciation

and share any given intervention in the materiality of the film’s fabric with her

community of fellow Internet cinephiles. While pointing to the preference of

contemporary media for the close-up and the blur instead of engaging a focusing gaze

(an aesthetic approach classical Hollywood cinema used to favor), Elsaesser

summarizes the difference between cinephilia take one and two as follows:

Cinephilia take one, then, was identified with the means of holding its

object in place, with the uniqueness of the moment, as well as with the

singularity of sacred space, because it valued the film almost as much

for the effort it took to catch it on its first release or its single showing

at a retrospective, as for the spiritual revelation, the sheer aesthetic

pleasure or somatic engagement… On all these counts, cinephilia take

two would seem to be a more complex affair involving an even more

ambivalent state of mind and body. Against ‘trepidation in anticipation’

(take one), the agitation of cinephilia take two might best be described

by the terms ‘stressed/ distressed,’ having to live in a non-linear, non-

directional ‘too much/ all at once’ state of permanent tension, not so

much about missing the unique moment, but almost its opposite,

namely about how to cope with a flow that knows no privileged points

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of capture at all, and yet seeks that special sense of self-presence that

love promises and sometimes provides ("Cinephilia" 38-9).

Elsaesser concludes by arguing that cinephilia, now and then, is characterized

by a crisis of memory—filmic memory at first, but ultimately also cultural memory, as

mediated by the technologies of recording, storage and retrieval. For we live in a

cultural era in which it is impossible to experience the present as such since we are

always multi-tasking, negotiating multiple temporalities (a decisive characteristic of

the take 2 cinephilic experience) through a fractured mode of attention. Consequently,

the need to always be conscious of these competing temporal axes has become a

generalized condition dominating the cultural field. Since our experience of the

present is always already (media) memory, the cinephile take two performs a new

task: she is an archivist not so much of the cinema but of our fleeting self-

experiences.24 Furthermore, deploying an unprecedented technological mastery, this

new breed of cinephile re-creates “in and through the textual manipulations, but also

through the choice of media and storage formats that sense of the unique, that sense of

place, occasion, and moment so essential to all forms of cinephilia, even as it is caught

in the compulsion to repeat” ("Cinephilia" 41). Caught up in the World Wide Web’s

frenzy for quasi-instantaneous novelty, those products created or shared across media

24 In this sense, as Elsaesser notes, this new form of cinephilia recuperates junk and values it. These forgotten filmic pieces are now extras and bonuses the cinephile eagerly consumes to gain extra knowledge on the film she has long adored.

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by the technologically capable cinephile become events on their own. They crisscross

the Web through the multiple temporal frameworks that organize the experiencing of

these fragments of filmic discourse throughout previously disjointed spatial zones

However, we should ask ourselves if Elsaesser is actually discussing a series of

practices of cinephilia when defining the characteristics of cinephilia take two or if he

is, instead, outlining the features of a wider socio-cultural phenomenon of

transterritorial networking via the Web that happens to utilize film viewing and/or re-

making as one of its central modes of exchange. In other words, when we choose to

view an online clip located in the personal Web page of an Internet blogger are we

simply fulfilling our drive to know what this audiovisual product has to offer or are we

also, and perhaps fundamentally, performing this viewing operation as a part of our

investment (libidinal or not) on the Internet user whose personal site we have entered?

From Snakes on a Plane to YouTube: Does the film really matter?

Even though it topped the domestic box-office in its opening weekend, Snakes

on a Plane barely struck the $14 million mark.25 As a comparative measure, the hits of

the 2006 summer season were Pirates of the Caribbean 2 (2006), Superman Returns,

(2006), and Talladega Nights, (2006), earning $135, $52 and $47 million,

25 <http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060820/wr_nm/boxoffice_dc_1>

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respectively. Far from a blockbuster, Snakes on a Plane will pass the test of history as

a mediocre box-office champion in a weekend of weak releases (its main competitors

being Hillary Duff’s Material Girls, 2006 and the college comedy Accepted, 2006).26

In brief, the Internet buzz surrounding the film did not translate into flocks of

spectators rushing to catch a glimpse of its big-screen premiere.27 What does this tell

us about the online fan base that had launched innumerable Web sites, designed t-

shirts, composed SoaP-themed songs and filled up pages and pages of blogging in

anticipation of the film’s release? First, it becomes obvious that the SoaP frenzy did

not stem from a cinephilic root. The months-long addictive obsession of Internet

navigators, bloggers and related Web species was not necessarily the film itself (with

the exception of those SoaP hardcore fans that fell into the cultish appreciation of a

film that had not even seen yet) but the derivative set of Internet networking and

entertainment practices SoaP catalyzed. Second, the event of the film’s release

mattered less than ever. Cinematic products are now multimedia cultural artifacts that,

through their successive incarnations, appeal to users in concentrated periods before

and after their theatrical release. Occasionally films with a fairly unremarkable

26 In fact, according to industry insiders, Snakes on a Plane scared off competing studios, which moved their “hotter” films to different release dates. 27 In an article titled “’Snakes’ All Hiss and No Bite,” Brandon Gray acknowledges the fact that after all the hype, Snakes on a Plane has ended only being an average summer horror flick. Its box-office number compare to Anacondas: the Hunt for the Blood Orchid (2004) and are inferior to Wes Craven’s Red Eye (2006), for example. See: <http://www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=2135&p=.htm>

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theatrical run become DVD or video events, catapulting the extraordinary success of

the theatrical incarnation of their sequels (e.g. Austin Powers 2: the Spy Who Shagged

Me, 1999). For the most part, with the exception of highly anticipated mega

blockbusters a la The Lord of the Rings, distribution companies treat the theatrical run

of a film as a long advertisement for its DVD and video rentals since it is in the arena

of home consumption where most film companies obtain profit. The flourishing of

personalized networking Web sites such as Friendster or MySpace and the popularity

of an ever-increasing number of online blogs allow for films to become ongoing user-

to-user arenas of exchange in which different individuals invest not only their

cinephilic appreciation of their film but also their personal interests, intentions and

desires in relation to, let’s say, a single woman who has created her personal MySpace

site with the goal of finding a dating partner and happens to share a liking for Fight

Club with a certain Internet user. In addition, the growing popularity of short

videos/clips Web sites such as YouTube.com (“Broadcast yourself”) has opened up

new expressive venues for those who, armed with user-friendly non-linear editing

tools such as Imovie, have jumped into the wagon of trailer making.

YouTube is undoubtedly the Internet leading page in terms of audiovisual

uploading and consumption.28 The products it features are directly uploaded by users,

28 After being acquired by Google in 2006, YouTube has come under fire due to the fact that copyrighted material is routinely showcased on the Web site. Several companies from a variety of fields of cultural production (including, for example, the

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thrown “out there” in the cyberspace to be consumed by whoever encounters or

actively searches for them. As one enters YouTube, there is a roster of featured videos

that changes periodically:

Fig. 1— YouTube Web site

On top, there are a series of tabs: Home (which each user can personalize),

Videos (which features the most viewed in a given date), Channels (showcasing the

most subscribed or most popular videoblogs), Groups (lumping together people with

similar interests), Categories (Arts & Animation, Autos & Vehicles, Comedy,

Entertainment, Music, News & Blogs, People, Pets & Animals, Science &

soccer association FIFA) are threatening to sue unless the new owners restrict the access to the property they own the rights for. Recently the media corporation Viacom has sued Google regarding YouTube.

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Technology, Sports, Travel & Places and Video Games), and Upload (allowing users

to upload their videos). Underneath a series of links compete to attract the Web user’s

attention: “Most recent, Most Viewed, Top Rated, Most Discussed, Top Favorites,

Most linked, Recently Featured.” Users can also search for a particular video using a

keyword engine.

On August 21st, 2006, the first in the “Home” list was “All your Snakes Are

Belong to Us, ” a music video inspired by Robert E. Ellis’ film. The initial screen

offers a ranking, a frame of the featured video, information about the contents of the

video, a series of tags, the category to which the video belongs (i.e. entertainment), the

date added, name of user who uploaded it, number of views, how many stars (5

maximum) the video has been given by spectators and the number of people who have

rated it.

YouTube caters to the widest community of Web users possible. Certain

videobloggers become indeed temporary YouTube celebrities. Moreover, the Web site

foments peer-to-peer exchange by offering commentary and ranking possibilities for

each of the available videos in an attempt to create different communities of users who

share a set of common interests. Furthermore, this site stands as the epitome of

connectivity since each viewing experience opens several windows or links to view

related videos. In other words, watching a video is never a stand-alone experience, but

only one thread in a consumption chain that is potentially infinite. After watching a

specific video, the viewer immediately is offered two options “Share” or “Watch

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again.” In addition, two new videos that are thematically related to the one just viewed

are featured as options for the Internet user to explore. Every ten seconds, these

options vary:

Fig. 2— YouTube player

Moreover, users can “save to favorites”, “Add to groups”, “Blog Video” or

“Flag as inappropriate.” They can also read other users’ comments or see a list of

related videos that are featured on the right side of the cursor:

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Fig 3. — YouTube Users’ comments

For example, after watching “All your Snakes Are Belong to Us” one of the

available options was a Jon Stewart interview with Samuel L. Jackson. As soon as the

user loads this new video, the playlist on the right changes, featuring now different

clips from The Daily Show. And so it goes.

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YouTube is also one of the premiere venues where trailermakers feature their

work and the first interactive space we will explore to pin down the workings of trailer

viewing and remaking within the slippery and ever-changing contours of the digital

age. Making a simple keyword search in YouTube on August 21, 2006 (two days

after Snakes on a Plane opened theatrically) for “Snakes on a Plane” yielded 587

results. I will now analyze the first ten:

1. A low-quality upload of the first New Line trailer for the film. The New York

based company capitalizes on the uniqueness of Snakes on a Plane (no other

movie will have snakes on a plane) in comparison to the rest of the 2006 summer

blockbusters. A series of title cards informs the spectator that this film will not

feature secret codes (The Da Vinci Code), swashbuckler pirates (Pirates of the

Caribbean II: the Dead Man’s Chest) or superheroes, (Bryan Singer’s Superman

Returns). Unlike all of them, it will have, though, snakes on a plane. In other

words, New Line displays an extremely relational approach to their own film,

placing Snakes on a Plane in direct antagonism with the rest of the summer

blockbusters by playing out the extreme transparent simplicity that has marked the

film’s commercial appeal ever since its sudden Internet acclaim.29 In fact, the

29 Arguably, this trailer follows the same marketing logic behind New Line’s Austin Powers 2: the Spy Who Shagged Me in the summer of 1999. Knowing that Lucas’ Star Wars: the Phantom Menace was the most awaited hit in the summer, New Line devised an advertising campaign in which they explicitly encouraged users to see two

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trailer is basically a succession of title cards and only in the end we see actual

footage of the film, depicting Samuel L. Jackson and a few of the venomous

snakes. The trailer ends by stating that “Summer really begins on August 18th,”

implying that this film will ultimately deliver the dose of summer entertainment

that real summer blockbusters are supposed to contain.

2. “2 Snakes 2 Many Snakes on an Mp3”: It is a homemade hip-hop song inspired by

the film. It was posted online towards the end of June, right when the Internet buzz

had reached a steady fifth gear. The video displays cheap décor simulating a plane

and plastic snakes in an attempt to contextualize visually the theme of the song.

3. Second New Line Snakes on Plane official trailer: As opposed to number 1, this

trailer is absolutely star-driven (Samuel L. Jackson), and displays extreme fast

cutting editing, showcasing the non-stop action the film promises to deliver. In

addition, a voiceover and a series of title cards inform us that the fear of snakes is

the ultimate dread, containing all others (agoraphobia, aviophobia, claustrophobia

etc.)

4. First mock trailer of the series: the author, Mitch Murphy, employs a Warner Bros

logo to give official legitimacy to his work. Two successive title cards follow:

“Get ready, they’re coming” and ”Motherfucking.” Then we see a series of images

of Samuel L. from Star Wars, followed by Pulp Fiction stills of the same actor.

movies that summer: first, Star Wars (a movie released and produced by a different company); second, Austin Powers.

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The trailer continues to exploit the alternation between the word “motherfucker”

and the above-mentioned images along with the insertion of low-quality animation

images featuring snakes.

5. Second mock trailer: It deploys the soundtrack from Team America: World Police

2004): “America, fuck yeah!!” and well-known images of Samuel L. Jackson

along with very low-quality animated snakes. The whole trailer centers on the

concepts of “a plane,” “ a man” and “snakes,” embracing adamantly the

transparency and utter simplicity of the film’s title and concept.

6. Official Snakes on a Plane music video (music performed by “Cobra Starship”):

this song plays over the end credits of the film. The different members of the

featured band play a group of terrorists smuggling snakes on a plane. Samuel L.

Jackson is featured as an observant secret agent that keeps the gang under

surveillance.

7. Third mock trailer: A cheap, low quality homemade video in which a teenager

holds a series of sheets of paper with drawings of snakes and a plane. A second

shot shows a car standing for a plane, and the videomaker himself plays the role of

an attacked passenger. The drawings of the snakes are taped over the windows of

the car.

8. Number 3 repeated.

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9. “Early Auditions: Snakes on a plane:” It is a video put together by DCLugi who

impersonates Christopher Walken, Jack Nicholson, Joe Pesci and Robert DeNiro

as though they were trying to get a role in the film.

10. “Snakes on a Plane!!”: Another music video. The soundtrack is Jungle Boogie,

which became a smash hit after the release of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.

The visuals combine footage from Snakes on a Plane and United 93 (2006), while

a series of title cards express that there is an imminent danger looming over the

White House. The author, “DarthEvilDead,” capitalizes on a combinatory

approach to the audiovisual fabric of the trailer format by lumping together an

immediately recognizable and catchy tune and images of two films belonging to

the airplane thriller subgenre, while directly inserting the film within the socio-

political coordinates of the post 9/11 world order.30

This last trailer immediately points to the centrality of an aesthetic of disparate

juxtaposition, already at work in the first ever Snakes on a Plane teaser trailer, which

combined music from Requiem for a Dream (2000), images from United 93 and audio

30 Linking Snakes on a Plane with the recent foiled plan to blow up ten planes while flying from the United Kingdom to the United States, one of The Nation’s bloggers, Richard Kim, reads the film as a political allegory of our times. He suggests that the “comic horror films like Snakes on a Plane and the mass-mediated, transatlantic spectacle of the summer of 2006 are two sides of the same coin. The former inspires laughs and thrills; the latter instills fear and acquiescence. But both appeal to the shop-worn conventions of the mass disaster, and both, in their way, are pleasurable.” See: <http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?pid=112773>

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excerpts from a Samuel L. Jackson NPR interview.31 Whereas the extreme variety of

the first ten items of our search does indeed signal one of the most remarkable

characteristics of the online dissemination of cultural artifacts: the fact that almost

anything goes (unless a “nipple” is involved and the impeding machinery of

censorship is put in motion).32 It also points to a form of multimedia and multicultural

collage that is enacted by combining a series of “already widely read” surfaces (such

as the Samuel L. Jackson from Pulp Fiction) within the domain of popular culture

with those visual or aural fragments that temporarily hold the highest online hype in

the fleeting Now of the Internet world order.33 Even if any of these films, such as

DarthEvilDead’s Snakes on a Plane, seek to offer a politically engaged intervention in

relation to the historical milieu from which they spring, they do so by capitalizing on

the displacement of the very surfaces of these images into new contexts, as facilitated

by the mutual contamination that they exercise for one another.34 Even though the

Snakes on a Plane hype has certainly created one of the biggest amount of teaser

trailer re-makes, many others fed off the seed SoaP spread wider.

31 To view this trailer go to: http://www.snakesonablog.com/2006/02/22/snakes-on-a-trailer/ 32 Here I am referring to the scandal that ensued after Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s Superbowl performance. 33 In YouTube, users themselves act as censorship agents. One of the options viewers have when choosing to watch a video is “flag as inappropriate.” 34 Needless to say that I am making a generalizing statement that attempts to define the dominant logic at work in these kind of films. Certainly, I do recognize the possibility that other trailer remakes deploy different strategies to make meaning and produce entertainment.

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Internet Hypes, Trailer making and Movie Web sites: From Kill Christ to the

“Brokeback” movies.

The Web site http://killchrist.singlereel.com/download.html informs us that

NYU student Spencer Somers was forced to remove his trailer film Kill Christ (a

parody of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, 2004, and Kill Bill vol. I, 2003)

from the NYU servers when New Market Films and Gibson threatened to sue after

seeing the film. Singlereel.com, wishing to recognize freedom of speech, showcases

the trailer On the Internet.35 Ifilm (www.ifilm.com) offers the same film under the title

“Tarantino’s Passion of the Christ”. The fan trailer-film juxtaposes the main musical

theme of Kill Bill with the images of Gibson’s Christian epic. The closing part of the

trailer features a series of red intertitles, “In the year 2004, the Jews will Kill Christ,”

which utilize the font at work in Kill Bill. The author of the piece has intelligently

recognized that the gory imagery of Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and

Tarantino’s works are not that far apart. The following two frames are consecutive

shots of the trailer:

35 Singlereel.com is a multimedia portal that offers a variety of services, from allowing media creators to show their videos online to providing Web space to compressing videos and web design for companies.

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Fig. 4— Kill Christ 1

Fig. 5—Kill Christ 2

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A quick look at the rest of homemade films the site offers immediately brings

to the fore The Matrix (2000), The Star Wars trilogy or Stark Trek. The main Ifilm

legends states that: “Hundreds of fan films pay homage to everything from Captain

Kirk's hairpiece to Star Wars (of course)—and much, MUCH more. We get new films

every month, so check back often. SEE ALL OUR FILMS IN THE NAVIGATION

ON THE RIGHT”.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (1999) made over $120 million in the U.S.

domestic box-office, becoming the highest grossing non-English language film of all

time.36 Its worldwide gross is over $200 million.37 The U.S. official Crouching Tiger,

Hidden Dragon (http://www.sonypictures.com/cthv/crouchingtiger/feedback.htm) is a

very sophisticated audio-visual spectacle that lives up to the chic and state-of-the-art

production values that garnered the film global notoriety as a technological and artistic

breakthrough in the martial arts genre—at least for non-Chinese audiences. While

providing a variety of “behind the scenes” footage, the Web site also offers an

assortment of products ranging from wallpapers to e-cards. The official Crouching

Tiger, Hidden Dragon Web site is thus not simply an add on to the film but a part of

the event the distributors and producers shot for when the film was released in its

successive market windows. For, as Janet Staiger points out, from the early age of

36 Web sites offer slightly different numbers. All the figures are between $120 million and $130 million. 37 http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/2000/DRAGN.html

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cinema “it was not at all apparent that what the industry had to sell was a product.

Rather it was the experience of an entire show that had to be sold: a show that

eventually would feature one special film that would run for only a certain period of

time and be replaced by a similar—but different—movie” ("Announcing Wares" 6).

Now, in the age of ceaseless multimedia reproducibility, the show is fundamentally

characterized by the fact that even though it still has a limited theatrical run, it goes on

and on in its successive manifestations. Hence, after its tremendous splash in the

global box office, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon continues to re-live a myriad of

incarnations on the Web, allowing Internet users to re-visit and re-furbish their

knowledge about the film in a potentially never-ending manner.

Trailerwise, the Web site showcases both the international and the U.S. trailer,

and earlier versions of both. It even goes a step further: fans can create their own

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon trailer: “Have you ever wanted to edit a movie

trailer? Now is your chance. When your masterpiece is finished you will be able to

email it to a friend… Click on next to continue.” If you follow the instructions, a

simplified timeline appears:

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Fig. 6— Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Web Site

To start with, film fans turned into trailer makers can choose from three clips,

all of which include the movie title. Then, users can decide from a range of 23 clips

and stills. At any time, they can preview their work and shift the order of clips through

a series of simple navigation steps. When the image track is finished, the site prompts

users to choose one out of three audio tracks. After the audio has been added, users

can preview the trailer once again, or as a final step to finish their work, add their

name to it. Once this is done, a final screen with the name of the cyber-trailer maker

and the title of the film appears: “A trailer edited by user’s name,” on top of “An Ang

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Lee Film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. www.crouchingtiger.com.”38 Once users

consider the trailer finished they can e-mail it to their friends. In fact, users can

preview their trailer at any step of their filmmaking process. When doing so, two

screens, invisible before to the user, appear out of the blue: the first one features the

standard rating screen “The following preview has been approved for all audiences by

the motion picture association of America” the second is the “Columbia pictures” logo

image. The inclusion of these two title cards intensifies the illusion that the user has

generated one of those “official” trailers she routinely sees in movie theaters or

browsing the Web. At the same, it reminds users that even though they have created

their own, personal, version of the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon trailer, this

process has occurred according to the rules and limitations established by a privately

owned multinational corporation—Columbia pictures—that holds the copyright of all

the images and sound bites the creator has utilized to fulfill his fantasy of becoming a

trailermaker. It also brings to the fore the fact that the 23 clips users can choose from

to make their trailers have been pre-selected by Columbia and that, given that users

can e-mail their final work to other people, this selection of clips is ultimately aimed at

promoting the consumption of the film in its present existing formats—namely, DVD,

video and Internet download. 38 Interestingly, crouchingtiger.com is an empty site today. Now, the official Web site of the film is, as mentioned above, <http://www.sonypictures.com/cthv/crouchingtiger/feedback.htm> Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s main value is no longer as a stand-alone product but in contiguous interaction with other, potentially sellable, Sony products.

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The fact that Columbia offers the option of creating a trailer for the movie fans

interested in checking out information about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon not

only implies that they expect a significant amount of film fans to have a great deal of

interest in the film given its global success but also that any potential movie fan

possesses the skills to become a trailermaker. Moreover, the recipients of the

trailermaker’s work will appreciate it due to the fact that they are aware of the generic

conventions that characterize trailers themselves. For, even though trailers are not

necessarily a film genre but a format intended to advertise the whole they stand for,

they invariably feed off historical archives of recognizable genre conventions,

functioning across multiple generic boundaries. While some trailers target specific

ethnic, social or film fan groups, others aim at reaching across them. As several

scholars have substantially proven (Altman; Neale), the industry typically utilizes

genre mixing as a weapon to appeal simultaneously to a variety of social and cultural

groups. In addition, trailers mobilize a series of complementary discourses—subject

matter, the promise of an unprecedented technological achievement, movie stars and

the cultural recognizibility of the director, producer(s) or production company of the

film— to elicit the audience’s desire to see the film they pre-sell. Since trailers are a

quick glimpse of a universe that promises to deliver novelty while building up on a

pre-existing common ground between spectators and moviemakers, they mostly

attempt to open multiple entry points for diverse audience groups so that their want to

see the film they advertise becomes maximized. As a consequence, they reveal as

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much as they withhold; they lie, manipulate, mislay, displace and, above all, promise

to be what they may or may not be in their full format persona. Therefore, unlike a

particular genre film, that is directed to a great extent to fulfill the expectations of the

genre connoisseurs that have paid to watch it precisely because of its very generic

fabric, the condensed trailer film format recycles generic specificity to target a

particular market niche and, in most occasions, simultaneously binds it together with a

variety of alluring images and sound bites to attract the wider range of audiences

possible.

Occasionally, an initial artistic gesture of personal self-importance—such as

wanting to make one’s own Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon –may become a mini-

worldwide cultural event. In October 2005, Robert Ryang became instantaneously

one the hottest topics among movie fans’ exchanges on the Web.39 Ryang entered a

contest for assistant editors sponsored by the New York chapter of the Association of

Independent Creative Editors.40 The challenge was to take any film and cut a new

trailer for it — but in an entirely different genre. Only the sound and dialogue could be

modified, not the visuals. Ryang re-cut Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), making

39 Ayaf Asif is an early pioneer of the spoof trailer practice. Along with his friend Ted Bracewell, Asif produced a spoof of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace trailer employing characters from South Park. The final product was called Park Wars: The Little Menace. Then they proceeded to make a series of short films based on this concept. 40 The conditions of the contest are posted in http://www.aice.org/trailerpark.html. For a more thorough description of the contest, click on Kathryn Hempel, the person who conceived the idea of this competition.

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it into a trailer for a romantic comedy. Soon the initial lack of notoriety Ryang had

garnered by winning the AICE contest suddenly changed. His trailer called the

attention of Web users and movie fanatics when the secret location in his company’s

Web site where he had posted his trailer was immediately flooded with requests. A

friend of Ryang’s added a link to the location of the trailer in his blog. This link

triggered a Web event. Soon The New York Times published an article on Ryang’s

instantaneous rise to fame.41 All of a sudden, he had gained global recognition.

The celebration of Ryang’s artistic feat does not stem from the way in which

he re-cut the original trailer for The Shining since very few people are likely to be

familiar with it. What viewers appreciated in Ryang’s work was his capacity to

refurbish a well-known horror tale into a comedy within the conventions of a well-

known cinematic format—that of the trailer. For, as stated above, on the Internet

world, trailers often are no longer a mere advertising device studios and distributors

utilize to sell the feature film the trailer “impersonates” but the end product itself film

fans enjoy. In fact, as Henry Jenkins remarks, “spoof trailers are, in some senses, the

perfect genre for the current state of digital cinema—short, pithy, reflecting the

amateur filmmaker’s self-conscious relationship to commercial media, and

recognizable by a mass audience who can be assumed to be familiar with the material

that inspired them” ("Tarantino" 295). Or at least, they are the ideal vehicle for an 41See: <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/30/movies/30shin.html?ex=1285732800&en=83343164f9dcda6e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss>

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amateur filmmaker who identifies a “catch concept” as an ideally spoofable raw

material to inscribe one’s favorite cinematic moments; hence, the birth of the

“Brokeback” online trailer-remaking phenomenon.

In fact, with “Brokeback,” trailer makers do not necessarily tap on the

recognized status of a well-established masterpiece within the film canon, such as in

Ryang’s remaking of the The Shining as a romantic comedy. The great critical success

of Brokeback Mountain (2005) and the vast amount of academy awards nominations

and prizes it got seem to have little to do with the internal logic that structures most of

the trailer remakes of the film. What catalyzed the film as a privileged object of

appropriation and poaching in the cultural field is its explicit depiction of a

homosexual relationship between two “cowboys” and the humorous outcomes such an

iconic cultural artifact could generate if displaced into the contexts of other well-

known cinematic products. Brokeback Mountain, despite director Ang Lee’s repeated

insistence that the film was a “universal love story” independently of whether its

subject matter was gay or straight, became known as the “gay Western.”42 Not

accidentally, the trailer available in the film’s official website

(http://www.brokebackmountain.com/home.html) does not explicitly address the gay

content of the film; on the contrary, it features several images of both Heath Ledger

42 For an example of this kind of statement, see Garth Franklin’s interview with Ang Lee at http://www.darkhorizons.com/news05/brokeback2.php.

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and Jake Gyllenhaal in erotic or affective exchanges with their respective wives.43

Even though several scenes show both actors engaged in different types of bodily

contact (from a hug to a fight), the dominant homoerotic discourse that structures

Lee’s cinematic endeavor remains hidden under a heterosexual register and the

citation of several samples of critical praise. However, the initial trailer of the film

(still available at

http://www.apple.com/trailers/focus_features/brokeback_mountain/trailer/) does

indeed explicitly tackle the narrative arch of the film— namely from forbidden

homosexuality to the plunging into the trap of conformity via marriage to the return of

the repressed “stain” of same-sex desire. Whereas the trailer in the official Web site of

the film ends by stating that the DVD is now available, the second trailer I just

described was shown in movie theaters, purposefully catering to a more specialized

and mature audience. Paradoxically, the buried explicit gayness of the film in its

official Web site has catalyzed its widespread presence in the online public imaginary.

Whereas the film earned a remarkable $75 million box-office in the domestic market if

we take into account its very limited budget ($15 million), its impact in the cultural

field is not comparable to the Brokeback trailer phenomenon.

43 I recently visited the official Brokeback Mountain Web site (April 2007) and the trailer is no longer available. Even though Internet users may download sound bites from the film and all kinds of other paraphernalia, it seems as though Focus Features has decided that the “Brokeback” Web event has grown too big, obviously in a direction this company has not championed.

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The film has generated dozens of trailer parodies and over 43 million Google

page references.44 As in the case of Snakes on a Plane, viewers do not need to have

seen Lee’s film to enjoy the different parodies or spoofs of the film in trailer format.

The juxtaposition of Gay and Western is an immediately comprehensible cultural

oxymoron the Brokeback trailer series has made explode for comedic purposes.45

When the coined adjective “Brokeback” is attached to any notorious film in the culture

imaginary, it is clearly understood that homosexuality has been introduced in a

previously “untainted” (a.k.a. straight) cinematic product. The source of humor is thus

the skillful insertion of gayness by mimicking the strategies at work in Lee's tragic

effort, often appropriating some of the techniques Focus Features deployed in the

trailer of the film—especially its soundtrack and title cards.

On August 30th, a simple Google search for “Brokeback Spoofs” rendered

97,500 results. Two months later, on October 1st, the same search returned 200,000.

The phenomenon seems to be ever expanding. The first entry leads us directly into

44 See: <http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/Oscars2006/story?id=1680323&page=1> 45 The reasons behind the immediate antagonism between homosexuality and the Westerns are not simply related to the stereotypical association of gayness with effeminate and urban milieus and the consideration of the Western as a tough, hyper-masculine and ragged universe. The Western did indeed have a tremendous importance in the dissemination of a particular worldview (white ethnocentric, heterosexual and masculine) in the making of the United States as a nation. To color the Western with the stain of homosexuality has far-reaching ideological implications that radically puts under interrogation several of the myths-turned-into-facts that, still today, organize the set of social and cultural discourses that hold a hegemonic position in the United States.

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dailysixer.com. This Web page (updated every week day with QuickTime files

submitted by Internet users) displays thirty-six Brokeback trailers ranging from The

three Stooges (2000 TV) and Scrubs (1999) to Fight Club:

Fig. 7— The Daily Sixer

“Star Wars: The Empire Brokeback,” for example, utilizes the main musical

theme from Ang Lee’s film along with a similar structure if compared to the original

theatrical trailer—namely, a series of title cards alternating with images. Most

significantly two of the key statements of this original trailer “It was a friendship that

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became a secret” and Gyllenhaal’s confession to Ledger: “I wish I knew how to quit

you” are prominently figured. In fact, these two have become the catch phrases in the

majority of the spoof trailers concerning the two films.46 A Brokeback parody of Fight

Club (http://YouTube.com/watch?v=phcbqQu5Exk) similarly utilizes these catch

phrases along with the soundtrack from Lee’s film while remaining faithful to

Fincher’s film by inserting subliminal frames of Tyler Durden’s in two occasions.47

However, “Brokeback/Fight Club” (available at

http://YouTube.com/watch?v=XomdBaZrteg) only uses images and diegetic sounds of

Fight Club along with Brokeback Mountain’s main musical theme, staying away from

the ubiquitous catch phrases and yet conveying a similar mood of impeding tragedy

the rest of the trailers seem to retain besides their often flamboyant comedic effect.

“Point Brokeback” (http://YouTube.com/watch?v=BCRITsdDvhw) thrives on the

already latent homoeroticism of Kathleen Bigelow’s Point Break (1991) while

bringing this underlying motif to the fore with the inclusion of Lee’s film soundtrack.

In other cases, the reference to Brokeback is practically non-existent. “The Brokeback

Samurai” (http://YouTube.com/watch?v=J6mzw6MD0so) sets up a tale of homoerotic

46 See Virginia Heffernan’s “Critic’s Notebook; Brokeback Spoofs: Tough Guys Unmasked,” in The New York Times, March 2, 2006, Late Edition - Final, Section E, Page 1, Column 1. For a report on how the “Brokeback Spoofs” have generated both positive and negative reactions see <http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/03/earlyshow/leisure/boxoffice/main1365464.shtml> 47 Throughout Fight Club, director David Fincher extensively utilized this technique to signal Tyler Durden’s “subliminal” presence.

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desire between Ken Watanabe and Tom Cruise by inserting two stills that link it to

Brokeback Mountain (a frame from the film and a photo of Gyllenhaal and Ledger

smiling while receiving an award). Other than that, the author, “Makeitstop,” uses

footage from The Last Samurai in combination with and eclectic soundtrack that

includes several 1970's soul themes, a cover of “Fever” and Simon and Garfunkel’s

“The Sound of Silence.” Even further, a homoerotic rendering of Michael Mann’s

Heat (1995) (http://YouTube.com/watch?v=kt7VgdOwA_c) via trailer making is

lumped with the rest of Brokeback spoofs by Dailysixer.com even though no reference

to Brokeback Mountain is made. It seems as though the hyper-dominant status of

Brokeback in relation to the representation of homoerotic desire in the current

practices of online trailer making and viewing would have vacuumed the history of

cinema of such precedents and made all previous, non-explicit male-to-male desire, to

become only visible if seen in relation to Lee’s film.48 Whether the inclusion of Heat

as part of the Brokeback series in both YouTube and Dailysixer is due to the fact that

their author submitted his or her video to the Web page administrators within this

framework or the latter chose to identify this trailer with the many other Brokebacks 48 For a comprehensive list of Brokeback parodies, see USA Today Whitney Matheson’s blog: <http://blogs.usatoday.com/popcandy/2006/02/roping_in_the_b.html> (this is a Web site that proclaims to be dedicated to unwrap “pop culture’s hip and hidden treasures”) or <http://dailysixer.com/bbheat.shtml> For a brief history of the Brokeback online cultural phenomenon see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brokeback_Mountain_parodies> For a full list of re-cut trailers and a brief history of this online practice see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-cut_trailers>

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that are populating the Internet, the key role of temporary Internet hypes such as

“Brokeback” and their power to greatly condition Web surfing, networking and

entertainment comes to the fore in framing the placement of the Heat spoof in the

above-mentioned site. Here it may be worth pointing out that one of the first

“Brokeback” trailers, “Brokeback to the Future” (uploaded on YouTube on February

1st, 2006) created by the comedy troupe Chocolate Cake City

(chocolatecakecity.com),49 did explicitly capitalized on the homosexuality & Western

combo that characterizes Lee’s film by re-contextualizing a series of physical and

verbal exchanges between Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd from Back to the

Future III (set in a 1885 Western milieu).50 In other words, what we have witnessed

throughout the course of the Brokeback Internet hype is the progressive detachment

from its key referential pointer, Ang Lee’s film, and the full-throttle re-articulation of

the signifier “Brokeback” as a synonym for a homosexually-inflected parodic

discourse within the specific norms and rules of the movie trailer format. Within this

dynamic, the re-makings of a wide variety of films under the spell of the Brokeback

phenomenon have little to do with cinematic craftsmanship (a skill that is arguably

remarkable in Robert Ryang’s rendering of The Shining) or a thorough knowledge and

49Many of the Internet trailer remakes end with the email or Web site information to contact their authors. YouTube has also become a way to attract industry talent hunters. In such scenario, trailer re-making is one of the different works that aspiring filmmakers add to their resumes. 50 To see “Brokeback to the Future” go to <http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=zfODSPIYwpQ>

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capacity to re-invent the contours of the trailer format. Instead, the myriad Brokeback

movies that pop in and out daily in YouTube and similar Web sites are, for the most

part, predictable renderings of an already firmly established and easily identifiable

narrative and ideological pattern: the comedic displacement of a non sexual male to

male relationship in a given film into explicit erotically-charged gayness. Furthermore,

since all these derivative “Brokeback” trailers follow the same structural pattern, they

are indeed designed for a rapid act of consumption sandwiched between two

operations of hyperlinked navigation. These trailers are thus ideally suited for the

sensibility of the Internet networker/surfer whose interest in cinema does not

necessarily spring from a diachronically acquired cinephilic taste. Conversely, they are

a direct consequence of the fleeting dynamic of immediate satisfaction the Web

favors. The closest correlative to the encounter between the “Brokeback” films and

their consumers is not the movie theater patron sitting in a dark room in front of a

continuous strip of celluloid but the EBay shopper bidding on seven products

simultaneously and jumping from window to window by using a keyboard short cut.

The making of the Brokeback trailers or Snakes on a Plane’s interactive

exchange between fans and New Line may be identified as part of a cultural

continuum that was already functioning in the development of entertainment products

such as Doom (a computer game designed by id Software in 1993), which marked the

beginning of our full-throttle immersion in the digital media era. Id Software released

a basic version of Doom as well as the tools to allow consumers to create new levels.

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In other words, it encouraged players to expand it, hack it, following a model of

cultural economy that does not respect a sharp divide between producers and

consumers (Manovich, Media 245). Hacking became essential to the success of the

game, since players would upload new levels of Doom on a daily basis, allowing its

fans to play it endlessly. Through this prism, the fact that Snakes on a Plane was, after

all its hype, a moderate box-office disappointment is perfectly understandable: once

New Line released and, therefore, fixed the text, the scores of users that had

contributed to its multifarious incarnations lost all interest in such a product and

moved on to new “alterable” media products. Despite the fact that this early precedent

of interactive media-making introduced the potential inexhaustibility of the product as

a major asset of its success (a principle that is indeed at work in both Brokeback and

Snakes on a Plane) and anticipated the current age of excessive interactivity we have

plunged into in the first years of the twenty-first century, it remained restricted within

the limits of a particular media object—i.e. the computer game—and its interactivity

was only applicable to a reduced roster of users that could potentially hack and,

therefore, intervene in the game. The key difference between the interactive character

of digital media in the early to mid 1990's and today is the computer literacy of

users/digital media makers. For, computer companies now have accomplished to

create a new generation of computer savvy users who have the capacity to break down

and alter a variety of audiovisual products using software products—e.g. Apple’s

IMovie, Photoshop, Illustrator—that handle a wide variety of universally standard

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types of visual and audio files such as tiff, Jpeg, mp3, QuickTime or wav. In this

sense, any piece of audiovisual information is re-codable in a standard format, and,

therefore, alterable. This widespread alterability of audiovisual media has indeed

championed its re-placement in a combinatory universe where bits and pieces of aural

and visual information are more in contact with others than in precedent eras. I am not

only referring to an aesthetic of contiguity and/or juxtaposition but also a literal

combination of sounds and images via their transformability in universally readable

codes, which appeals to the short-span all-around-popular culture sensibility of the

270-channel cable TV surfer/viewer and the MySpace random search Web junkie.

This aesthetic of non-stop surface-driven pastiche also structures one of the most

successful film franchises of the last ten years: Scary Movie.

The latest issue of the franchise, Scary Movie 4 (2006), blatantly rides on the

cusp of the Brokeback phenomenon. The two black male characters of the film, Kevin

Hart and Anthony Anderson, are featured in a dream sequence playing the role of two

gay cowboys. This scene was an add-on, shot in the late stages of the production in

trying to capitalize on the great notoriety “Brokeback” had garnered in the cultural

field. In fact, producer Robert Weiss affirms that director Jerry Zucker and his team

were committed to an extremely fast turnaround between the release of the spoofed

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films and their incorporation into the “story” of Scary Movie 4. According to Weiss,

the film attempt to spook “movies that our audience really should have just seen.”51

The Scary Movies are fundamentally a non-stop compilation of gags glued

together through a parodic register that subordinates storytelling to the production of a

chain of quick laughs. Ever since the first film of the series opened in the movie

theaters, Scary Movie has been a favorite target for the scorn of well-respected film

critics for whom the different installments of the franchise epitomize a low-point of

creativity in the U.S. film industry. Michael Atkinson from The Village Voice states

that “parodying self-parody has become something of a bottom-shelf cultural staple

for American entertainment media; if you accept that many original slasher movies

already began with a clear idea of how absurd they were, then the Wayans boys (stars

and co-screenwriters Marlon and Shawn, director Keenan Ivory) are working at

several removes from their proposed ground zero. Indeed, the redundant Scary Movie

(Kevin Williamson's original Scream script title) is a big, stupid bull with bodacious

tits.”52 Commentators invariably highlight the extreme relational character of the Scary

movie project. Since each of the films is an hour and half review of the last two-three

years of blockbusters and U.S. popular cultural events (occasionally hinting at a re-

reading of key socio-political events such as the Iraq war in the fourth issue of the

franchise), Scary Movie is not only deeply rooted in the Americanness of these

51 Scary Movie 4 official press kit. 52 See: <http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0028,atkinson,16325,20.html>

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products but also refuses to open any entry point to the spectator who does not know

the intertexts the series attempts to parody.53 The official tagline of the 4th film: “Bury

the Grudge. Burn the village. See the Saw” is indeed absolutely incomprehensible

unless spectators have seen or, at least, have a general knowledge of the three

blockbusters it spoofs—namely, The Grudge (2004) The Village (2004) and Saw

(2004). However, the Scary Movie gurus aim at delivering globally and, therefore,

they privilege those films who have had a tremendous economic success in both the

U.S. domestic market and abroad. In brief, their selection criteria is not aesthetic or

thematic but purely financial. Not accidentally the box-office of all the Scary Movie

domestically is around $80 million, half of what is considered the minimum standard

for successful A-list blockbusters.54 It is as though each film of the franchise would act

as a take two on the blockbusters of the last few years that precede their release. First,

spectators go to see War of the World (2005), Saw, The Village etc. and if they feel

like having a comedic reprise of these films, they pay their tickets Scary Movie. In

other words, Scary Movie not only recycles film excerpts from previous films but also

audiences and sets out for a lesser prize but, since it is a series whose formula could

indeed be reproducible ad infinitum, it keeps accumulating capital time after time

53 See A. O. Scott review of “Scary Movie” (The New York Times, July 7th) <http://www.nytimes.com/library/film/070700scary-film-review.html> 54 According to Boxoffice Mojo Scary Movie made $40 million in its opening weekend and itwent on to make over $90 million in the domestic market. See: <http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=scarymovie4.htm>

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(Scary Movie 5 is already on its way) and will eventually surpass the single efforts of

each of the spoofed films.

Scary Movie has thus managed to master the trick of appealing to such general

forms of popular knowledge and pleasure that its derivative character is easily

neutralized. Its supposedly parodic register is not designed to complicate the

recognizibility of the franchise, and, therefore, jeopardize its commercial potential.

Since it cites what everyone may already know and also attempts to appeal to different

focus groups of spectators—horror or sci-fi action fans, for example—along with the

average megaplex moviegoer, the series is organized under the rubric of a quote-and-

throw dynamic calculated to generate a chain of rapid detections on the spectator’s

part. In other words, if you miss one reference, don’t worry, you’re getting the next

one…Now you’ve forgotten already the previous one, no big deal; But, beware!

Something else is coming. Come on, try to get it!

Discussing the second film of the franchise, Dennis Lim goes even further in

his assessment of its relational character: Scary Movie does not mobilize a parodic

mode of address but instead banks on the cheap thrill of recognition as a “piss-poor

substitute for comedy.”55 In his review of Scary Movie 3 (2003), Roger Ebert seems to

point in the same direction even if the writer seems to confuse parody with satire:

“Scary Movie 3 understands the concept of a spoof but not the concept of a satire. It

clicks off several popular movies (Signs, 2002, The Sixth Sense, 1999, The Matrix, 8 55 See: <http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0128,lim,26251,20.html>

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Mile, 2002, The Ring, 2003) and recycles scenes from them through a spoofalator, but

it's feeding off these movies, not skewering them. The average issue of Mad magazine

contains significantly smarter movie satire, because Mad goes for the vulnerable

elements and Scary Movie 3 just wants to quote and kid.”56 Or as Keith Phipps from

The Onion affirms, whereas Airplane! (1980), Top Secret! (1984) or The Naked Gun:

from the Files of the Police Squad! (1988)—the films that arguably started the

compilation derivative parody subgenre and were created by Jerry Zucker and Jim

Abraham, the team behind Scary Movie 4— “mixed slapstick, verbal humor, film

parodies, and pop-culture references, Scary Movie 4 sticks to a single, numbing

approach: take a scene from a popular movie. Add some pratfalls or poop jokes. Keep

moving.”57 Ultimately, Nathan Rabin brilliantly pinpoints the aesthetic and cultural

codes at work behind the success of the Scary Movie series in terms of its capacity to

neutralize its derivative nature to gain a greater share of the market: “In-jokes, by

definition, fracture audiences into two camps: those who are in on the joke and those

who aren't. Scary Movie's commercial masterstroke was in creating a lowest-common-

denominator blockbuster that had the winking tone of a feature-length in-joke, but

stemmed from source material so ubiquitous that viewers with even a passing interest

in popular culture could feel hip and knowledgeable” (Web site no longer active). 56 See: <http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20031024/REVIEWS/310240305/1023> 57 It is of interest to highlight that Scary Movie 4 is the first collaboration between director Jerry Zucker and writer Jim Abrahams in the last twenty-five years.

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Reviewing the same film of the series Ebert and Rabin discuss, Stephen Holden offers

as a clue in the functioning of the Scary Movie series and its intimate relationship with

Internet viewing and trailer (re)making: “The barrage of jokes and references flies by

so thick and so fast that there's usually no time to react to one gag before two more

have passed. Narrative cohesion falls by the wayside as the tonnage accumulates.”58

Isn’t this same dynamic of high-speed recognition, reaction/ quick digestion and move

on what dictates the consumption of the Snakes on a Plane mock trailers or any of the

Brokeback trailer remakes? Typically Internet users do not only consume one of the

trailers in the series. On the contrary, the venues of their reception are carefully

designed to prompt Web surfers to potentially consume the countless set of related

films they showcase. In this context, this is exactly what made Snakes on a Plane a

perfect vehicle for this kind of product-to-consumer encounter since the recognition of

its package only requires for a quick, semi-automatic, dose of attention. In the case of

the “Brokeback” hype, it is precisely the transformation of Brokeback into a code

word for male-to-male homosexuality and the almost complete disregard for its role in

Ang Lee’s narrative what has facilitated its readability and its flexible re-adaptation to

pre-existent films to generate a comedic effect. In this sense, whereas Snakes on a

Plane signals the readily obvious in-built nature of its plot in its very enunciation, the

58 See: <http://movies2.nytimes.com/mem/movies/review.html?title1=Scary%20Movie%203%20(Movie)&title2=Scary%20Movie%203%20(Movie)&reviewer=Stephen%20Holden&v_id=282860>

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Brokeback trailers have effectively reduced the nuances of the original artifact from

which they originate to the gay gimmick they have come to signify. Aside from their

different approaches to the cinematic, the remarkable popular success of the two

above-mentioned phenomena and the Scary Movie series signals a shift in the

dominant mode through which cinematic products engage consumers in the rapidly

changing supranational and Internet-mediated contemporary age. We are witnessing,

as Lev Manovich points out, the waning of the “super-genre of realistic fiction” that

has dominated a great amount of cinematic creation throughout the 20th century. It is

perhaps no longer the default alternative; now it coexists with many others (“Digital

Cinema”). This super-genre, largely based on cinematic verisimilitude and cause and

effect, goal-oriented narratives, is being reshuffled through an unprecedented

emphasis on short format audiovisual products (e.g. trailers) or episodic-structured

features (Snakes on a Plane and Scary Movie) that demand a very concentrated and,

yet, temporally limited attention spans on the spectators’ part. In other words, rather

than carefully composing a puzzle the spectator needs to ultimately put together to

make meaning, these kind of film endeavors capitalize either on a kinetic engagement

with the spectators’ nervous system to provoke a string of thrills, delivering through

this process the mighty potency of a cinematic spectacle and/or re-furbish the “already

experienced” within a different generic register, appealing to the widespread

recognizibility of intra or extra-cinematic popular cultural staples. This cinema of

derivative attractions that digital visual culture champions is not simply new;

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conversely, as Martin Lester et al explain, it continues a tradition of spectacular

entertainment that “runs throughout the twentieth century (from vaudeville and ‘trick’

films at the turn of the century, through theme park rides, musicals to music video,

CGI, IMAX, motion simulators, etc) but with its origins much earlier in the magic

lantern shows, phantasmagoria, and dioramas of the eighteenth and nineteenth

century” (150). 59 However, to state that popular digital culture practices a cult of the

depthless often draws the implication that unlike the classic realist text, it lacks

meaning. In other words, those characteristics that have been criticized by film

theorists as ideologically biased and illusionist (character psychological depth,

narrative coherence, closure etc.) contain the meaning which has been forever lost

now within the depthless realm of digital culture. This technological determinism de-

historicizes digital technology as a discontinuous development within the history of

visual culture and equates too easily notions of spectacle with depthlessness. Andrew

Darley et al summarizes the achievements and drawbacks of this position by stating

that visual digital artifacts “lack symbolic depth and representational complexity of

earlier forms, appearing by contrast to operate within a drastically reduced field of

meaning. They are direct and one-dimensional… Popular forms of diversion and

amusement, these new technological entertainments are, perhaps, the clearest

manifestations of the advance of the culture of the ‘depthless image” (Darley et al 76).

59 Lester et al draw many of their conclusions from Andrew Darley’s arguments in Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in the New Media Genres.

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A consideration of Scary Movie, Snakes on a Plane and the “Brokeback” trailers along

Darley’s line of thought would disregard the ideological conditions within the

historical period that has given birth to these cinematic products both in terms of the

wider social panorama and also within the U.S. film industry, more specifically. It also

ignores the key role of the link—the relational—in both the movie house and the

Internet User/Web page interaction. If, as scholars have repeatedly argued, we accept

that in the last twenty years, because of the increasing degree of connectivity and

access to cultural artifacts, films have turned increasingly towards the performative

and self-conscious interplay with other films and, more extensively, a variety of

objects belonging to popular culture, we should acknowledge the dramatic influence

of Internet-based consumption in the cinematic. The hyperlinked functioning of the

Internet has, on the one hand, contributed to train spectators in never-ending chains of

relational audiovisual consumption and, on the other, influenced the ways non-Internet

popular forms of entertainment have to come to operate. Furthermore, as Lev

Manovich asserts, the rise of hyperlinking as the dominant form of structuring data on

the Internet can be associated with the contemporary “preference for the aesthetic of

collage in which radically different sources are brought together within a singular

cultural object (“Digital Cinema” 76). Understood in these terms, Scary Movie’s

success in engaging the spectator in its all-around logic of appropriation and recycling

is directly dependent on the co-existence of all these other forms of consumption

based on the logic of (hyper)linked fragmentation of popular culture. Furthermore,

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unlike less mainstream forms of audiovisual engagements such as Virtual Reality

(VR), which aim at accomplishing the total immersion of the spectator in the cyber

world, the foremost Internet form of hyperlinked consumption of cinematic texts calls

for short-span attention skills since any processed data continuously presents itself as

already something else, requiring the Internet navigator to perform an operation of

double-clicking to unearth the “secret” hidden under the linkable character of a

particular image or text. Each film is a further step into a potentially infinite Web of

products that opens different entry points into multiple signifying strands. In this

context, the importance of narrative signification becomes marginal. Instead the direct

encounter with the mono-semantic concept (“Brokeback”) or catch phrase (“Snakes on

a Plane”) occurs. The spectator then easily deciphers the spectacular performativity

that this kind of audiovisual product showcases and moves on and on, dragged to a

different branch of hyperlinked data.

Not accidentally, the Weinstein Company, which produced Scary Movie 4,

recognizes the intimate connection between the present trend of Internet trailermaking,

Internet networking practices and the organizing structure at work in its film. The

official Web site of Scary Movie 4, http://www.scarymovie.com/homepage, features

the stars of their line-up in the center of the screen:

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Fig. 8—Scary Movie 4 Web site

On top, a set of quotes from different critics rotates, legitimating the film as a

non-stop laughter ride.60 On the right side, Internet users can choose from a variety of

options: On the left side of the screen a series of links offer Web surfers different

entertainment alternatives—from E-cards, to Wall papers to theatrical trailers and

behind the scenes footage to buying theatre tickets through fandango.com. Below the

main graphic cluster of the page, four links are given:

60 These quotes include: “I laughed my socks off!” (Bill Diehl/ ABC Radio Network) or “More laughs than hyenas on Nitrous Oxide” (Jeffre K. Howard/KCLV, Las Vegas), “So funny I almost wet my pants” Steve Chpnick/Movieweb.com) or “Scary Movie 4 rocks” Earl Dittman/Wireless Magazines. In other words, the designers of the Web site are not shooting for prestige but for the immediate appeal of a series of quotes from the media that emphasize the unprecedented comedic achievement of the film.

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1. “Visit the Scary Movie MySpace profile

2. “Talk scary to me”: in which users can add dialogue to a pre-established set

of captions and email it to their friends while entering a contest in which

everyday the highest-rated caption is featured on the home page.

3. “Battle to the Death”: Offers users the possibility of playing a hybrid

between a sumo fight and a boxing match by choosing one of the

characters in the film.

4. “Visit Booble Earth”: a game in which users operate a high-tech gun-

machine designed to destroy missiles that are aiming at planet earth.

In the last two years, MySpace has become the premiere Internet networking

tool around the world, easily surpassing the much more limited Friendster. Typically,

in MySpace anyone can create their own profile and use it to meet other Web surfers.

As soon as one adds another user as a friend, she becomes a node in a mounting

network that has an almost infinite amount of connections since each new “friend” is a

window into another user’s universe and, therefore, a vast amount of links. In the

beginning, the primary function of MySpace was to meet other people in a close

geographical area and it is still largely employed to enable romantic or sexual

encounters between people in their teens and early-to-mid twenties.61 However, what

61 Proof of this is that the MySpace “browsing” options directly set a series of criteria that try to find other users according to their online goals (dating, networking and friends, most remarkably) and their physical appearance (height, weight, eight color etc).

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started as a singles networking tool has become of the most important marketing tools

in the entertainment business. Now, most music bands and films have their own

MySpace page, which they utilize to showcase their work and sell their products.

Within MySpace, people can perform searches according to different criteria (from

name to email to interests), add people as friends, send messages to people or post

comments about them. On September 20th, 2006, the Scary Movie 4 MySpace profile

(http://www.MySpace.com/scarymovie4) had 32,079 friends. Needless to say that any

user can browse this list of friends and view the profile of their Scary Movie 4 fan of

choice. The page displays a series of clips from the film and offers the possibility of

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buying the unrated DVD:62

Fig. 9—Scary Movie 4 MySpace site

62 As opposed to Scary Movie 1 and 2, which are R rated, issues 3 and 4 drew a less strict PG-13.

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Users can view four different videos featuring excerpts from the film: the

film’s trailer, “Bareback Mountain,” (the spoof of Lee’s film mentioned above

featuring Kevin Heart and Anthony Anderson) “Bareback blooper,” and “Death by

Viagra.” There are also a series of forums in which “friends of the film” can add

comments on several topics of discussion (for example, there is a very popular forum

in which fans hypothesize about what movies Scary Movie 5 will spoof, giving the

producers of the film a clear indication of what audiences want; in a different one,

friends of the film speculate about the poster for the fifth issue of the franchise). The

impact of the “Brokeback” phenomenon goes even further. The site features a contest

for the best fan-made spoof. Whereas anyone can view the featured spoofs, to vote for

one of them, one needs to add herself as a friend of Scary Movie 4. In other words, to

become an easily localizable target for the Weinstein’s company marketing effort. The

featured short films spoof a range of films—Star Wars, The Ring, Saw, among

others—that are not always necessarily the ones parodied in Scary Movie 4. Once

again, the presence of a “Brokeback” film, in this case, “Humpback Mountain” is

inevitable. Once one double-clicks on any of the captured frames to view the films, a

new MySpace window opens, bringing us to the location where their makers have

uploaded the films. Once in those pages, we can also access the filmmaker’s profile

and potentially browse the rest of the films he or she has made and, perhaps, add

him/her as a friend and, if accepted as such, enter a new strand of the community of

Scary Movie fans and short spoof films’ makers.

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How can we understand thus the presence of the “spoof” contest and the

centrality given to the relatively minor “Bareback” episode in Scary Movie 4 in the

film’s MySpace site within the context of the Weinstein Company’s marketing

strategy? It seems that the people in charge of the dissemination of the Scary Movie

multimedia product on the Web clearly acknowledge that those interested in the re-

making and viewing of trailers on the Internet and the potential costumers Scary

Movie 4 targets fit a very similar consumer profile. The viewing of this series of

shorts functions as a hook to immerse the viewer into the Scary Movie 4 universe, and,

potentially, increase its exposure since the Weinstein Company’s marketing gurus

assume that any MySpace user that enters the Scary Movie site, if interested, will

forward its location to many others and, consequently, will multiply the film’s

circulation venues on the Web. By making this explicit link between these two forms

of derivative filmmaking, the Weinstein Company recognizes the key structural

similarities between these two audiovisual endeavors and designs its product to

properly work through the networked succession of portals that defines MySpace. The

designers of the Scary Movie 4 Internet campaign understand that motion pictures

themselves are not necessarily the centerpieces of the movie experience, especially

when displacing the time and location –the specific act of going to the movie theater—

into the materially unbound realm of the World Wide Web. In fact, entering the Scary

Movie 4 MySpace site and viewing “Bareback mountain” and the first thirty seconds

of the film’s trailer may well be the result of the idle surfing of an Internet user that

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played those clips while attempting to find an attractive Korean-American woman in

her early twenties who lives in Seattle among those added to the film’s list of friends.

In other cases, a user may digest all the featured spoofs, vote for one of them and write

to all their makers, eager to devour more samples of their homemade craft. Or it is

indeed possible that a MySpace user may have performed a genuine search for “Scary

Movie 4” and once she has encountered what she was looking for she may spend

hours browsing all the forums eagerly looking for specific data she has come to covet.

The possibilities are indeed endless. However, the remarkable size of the Scary Movie

4 MySpace link in the film’s official Web site does signal the importance of this type

of venue to disseminate the “story” of the film worldwide while pointing to the

intimate relationship between movie culture and interpersonal networking in our

present age. Although it is clear that the Internet has undoubtedly enabled multiple

venues for the cinephile’s imagination to flourish and expand, it has most importantly

managed to multiply the spaces where films exist as circulating items of exchange

between users independently of their aesthetic qualities or critical recognition. While

sound bites, stills and reshuffled clips of films are now more present than ever in

thousands of daily communications between individuals unbound by territorial and

time zones, films as such have generally ceased to exist as a distinct form of

entertainment tied to a particular delivery apparatus and now circulate through a

dynamic of compression and decompression of files in the same way that Photoshop

or mp3 files function. For the most part, Internet users do not consume films as

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traditionally understood. Instead, they access recycled audiovisual fragments of a large

universal archive and often search for those that have become dominant in a given

historical juncture due to their reiterative presence within the quasi-infinite portals of

the Internet’s public sphere. However, despite this dominant trend of audiovisual

consumption, cinephilia, per se, still persists in its Web incarnation. This is why, on

the flip side of the YouTube and MySpace universes, a varied amount of Web sites

practice or, at least, pretend to, the cult of the cinematic while showcasing trailers that

perform a more traditional role in relation to the features they announce—namely,

offer sneak previews of upcoming theatrical releases. What is the role of these and

how can we relate them to the vastly popular forms of networking and Internet trailer

remaking we have described above?

Trailer Web sites: Tales of Cinephiles, Capital and Cutting Edge Technology

The owners of the Trailervision Web site (trailervision.com), one of the long-

lasting trailer venues on the Web exclusively devoted to this form of filmmaking,

affirm that: “Trailervision is a revolutionary concept in filmmaking. It pioneers the

movie trailer as a new medium. Trailers are fast, funny and entertaining in their own

right and often better than the movies they advertise.”63 In fact, although the Web site

offers a fair amount of free trailers, Internet users need to pay in order to view the

63 Trailervision.com operates since the summer of 1999.

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hottest and newest material.64 The site offers a comprehensive archive of “original”

trailers organized under different categories—Top 10, most viewed, Top 40 (by votes)

and most recommended—along with a search engine. Trailervision also legitimizes

itself critically with a significant number of quotes from media organizations that hail

its unparalleled entertainment values.

Both a trailer production and distribution company that creates its own trailers

and an open ground for amateur filmmakers to submit their trailers for showcasing,

Trailervision represents indeed a new kind of filmic production that exclusively

inhabits the Internet world and thrives on the increasing demand for original trailers as

a form of mass entertainment. The site also offers a variety of production services—

Music videos, promos, shorts from documentaries, Industrial videos, Visual Effects,

Motion Graphics design etc. In short, it is a vertically integrated company that

functions similarly to multinational corporations such as Sony or Microsoft in as much

an Internet user can possibly can come up with an idea for a trailer spoof, pay to use

the Trailervision facility to edit and then hire one of the Trailervision filmmakers to

create the special effects for her film.65 In short, trailer making is now a well-

established Internet industry. As with any form of cultural production, critical

gatekeepers spring from everywhere.

Peter Debruge, a Los Angeles-based film critic launched in 2000 the Web page 64 The site claims that it went “pay” to offset massive bandwidth costs caused by high-traffic. 65 In fact, Trailervision has also commercialized a DVD of its products.

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Movie Trailer Trash (http://www.movietrailertrash.com/homesweettrailer.html). The

site reviews and evaluates movie trailers of upcoming films while analyzing the

distinctive idiosyncrasies of the trailer format. Debruge defines the purpose of his site

as follows:

There’s no question: Trailers are the best part of going to the movies,

period. Most times, they’re better than the movies they advertise. When

you compare What your imagination can do with 2 minutes of carefully

selected scenes from an upcoming movie to the finished product, your

imagination wins out every time. But nobody said it was easy picking the

right clips to get an audience excited to see yet another blockbuster – or,

for that matter, to give them reason to consider an obscure foreign film or

documentary. That doesn’t even take into account all the work that goes

into editing, narrating, and scoring a trailer. There's a fine art to giving

audiences a good reason to part with their hard-earned 10 bucks (although

I’d argue that getting to see half a dozen new trailers before the show

makes up for almost any dud).

So that brings us to the purpose of this site. I've created Movie Trailer

Trash as the place to turn for commentary on the latest and greatest

trailers on the web, with added insights on classic previews and how the

movie advertising racket works.

So stay tuned, come back often, and be sure to share your comments!

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For Debruge, trailers are an art form that critics need to scrutinize and study in

the same ways they do with feature or short films. He understands the experience of

movie going as a composite of seeing a feature—the main attraction—and the variety

of trailer films that precede it. What is more, trailers are unquestionably “the best part

of the movies” because they manage to deliver the same kind of audiovisual and

narrative rush feature films provide in a condensed span of time.66 While attempting to

illicit the spectators’ attraction to a particular movie star or film genre—or both

combined—they generate a set of expectations that are not immediately fulfilled but

projected into the near future. In other words, what makes them an extremely powerful

cultural product that in many occasions overwrites their attachment to the feature they

stand for is that, if successful, the trailer allows audiences to project their wishes for a

finished film by providing the pieces of a puzzle the spectators’ imaginations re-

compose on their own.

The very transitional character of the trailer’s placement in the movie market—

between the yet-to-be-released film and the launching of such a product— is what

makes them often be fully satisfying at first sight, and, on occasion, the main reason

moviegoers pay a ticket to go to the movie house. For in specific instances trailers 66 Debruge’s idea that trailers provide everything the feature has to offer in a concentrated span of time recalls the semiologists’ preference for studying the beginnings of films since these display a set of densely interwoven meanings that are expanded throughout the reminder of a film. I need to thank Robert Stam for this comment.

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have become events themselves that anticipated the greater event of the feature film

they anticipate. When 20th Century Fox launched the marketing campaign for Star

Wars: the Phantom Menace or New Line showcased the first The Lord of the Rings:

The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) trailers, many moviegoers paid their full ticket just

to see the trailer of the film they were eagerly awaiting and left the theater without

seeing whatever feature was presented next. Obviously, these fans coveted the viewing

of these trailers because they offered them a first glimpse into the film they longed to

see in full-format. At the same time, though, they went to the movie theater under the

assumption that the trailer itself was going to be fully satisfying as an audiovisual

form of entertainment—namely, the main attraction of their movie night.

Debruge’s Movie trailer trash main page opens with a variation of the standard

rating screen: “The following PREVIEWS have been reviewed for all audiences. By

movie trailer trash.com’s Peter Debruge. The Films advertised have been rated, Trash

(T). Viewers strongly conditioned.” Clicking anywhere on the text brings us to a

second screen that features a trailer illuminated by a halo of green:

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Fig. 10—Movie Trailer Trash

Two different concepts—one economic and cultural, movie trailer—and the

other social and cultural—white trash (living in a trailer park)—have been lumped

together to create the logo of the Web page. Three options, which correspond to the

three parts in which the featured trailer is divided, are offered. The first, “Reviews of

the films (You’ve seen the trailer, what about the movie?)” offers a short collection of

film reviews, written by Debruge. The second one, “Views (The Hall of fame)” and

“Reviews (plus experts answer everything you ever wanted to know)” includes essays

on the history of trailers and sequels, a set of criteria to judge trailers and a practical

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exercise on how to cut a trailer of a pre-existent movie—Psycho—in a completely

different genre—namely, romantic comedy. The third section is “Previews (“visit the

only place where previews are the first attraction”). If one chooses this last link, our

browser leads us to “Movie trash trailer: preview, reviews + commentary on the art of

movie advertising”. A gigantic popcorn bag salutes the user from the top right of the

screen as though she were in a movie house.

The main text has a series of reviews on trailers (of films that are in the midst

of their theatrical run or are about to be released when the user accesses the Web site)

organized by date. Users can also view the trailers using QuickTime. Although

Debruge mostly discusses the trailers, on occasion—e.g. Syriana, Oct 05, 2005—he

also offers an analysis of other marketing strategies such as the poster of the film. In

the case of big-time Hollywood blockbusters such as War of the Worlds or Charlie

and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Debruge discusses the evolution in time of the

whole trailer campaign—namely, the progression throughout the different teasers

leading to the final trailer(s).

As Debruge’s site points, on the Internet world, trailers are not only the

commercials for the films they stand for but the passport into a variety of critical

discourses about the film, often allowing the Internet user to create a sense of

belonging to a community of fellow-trailer makers and/or viewers. They also are the

hook into a series of economically-driven advertisements—film or not film related—

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that assault the user, often out of the blue, from everywhere on the Web browser

window.

The access to movie trailers online grants the user the potentiality of a

personalized and repeated act of consumption, no longer subjected to the ephemeral

and communal experience of viewing them in the movie theater. If the invention of

VCRs allowed movie fans to view the films they loved repeatedly at will and the rise

of DVDs permits to gain information “behind the scenes” of the film product, the

Internet not only has enabled worldwide piracy of films and the detachment of the film

product from its direct, physical, basis but also the recycling of movie trailers within

the conditions of an ongoing business practice that extends their lives beyond any

temporal deadline. The dissemination of Internet movie trailers on the Internet has

created a new kind of film spectator—the trailer junkie—who devours film trailers

time after time not necessarily as a process of research to decide whether to buy a

particular VHS or DVD but for the sheer pleasure of enjoying the trailer for itself.

This well explains the instantaneous rise to temporary fame of Robert Ryang.

Moreover, if we acknowledge the fact that his endeavor came to existence within a

multimedia age in which trailers have become a privileged form of audiovisual

consumption, we can easily pin down why Internet users instantly recognized Ryang’s

craftsmanship and transformed his film into a global media event through a word of

mouth e-mail frenzy. On the one hand, they recognized an ingenious displacement of

the generic boundaries of Stanley Kubrick’s horror film into the realm of the comedic

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via the re-contextualization of a series of images and sound bites. On the other, they

identified the very typical strategies and tricks marketing campaigns of production and

distribution companies utilize to advertise their upcoming feature. For these economic-

driven enterprises “sell a certain story” of a film through a trailer that in many

occasions purposefully misguides spectators into purchasing a ticket for a film that is

not exactly what the trailer presented to them.

However, Ryang’s work had an accelerated demise as a hip event and rapidly

moved to the margins of the myriad circulating discourses on movie trailers around the

Web once the initial excitement about his feat faded away and the next big online

thing—such as the parodic series of Brokeback trailers—became the privileged subject

of e-mail forwarding, blogging and Internet searching. In addition, Ryang’s trailer-

film lacks the economic dimension that perpetuates the existence of movie trailers in

their Web form in stable sites such as those launched by distributors to sell the DVD

of a film once it has entered its home video market window. Moreover, while being an

extremely well-crafted spoof, it lacks a “catchy,” easily decipherable at first sight

concept such as “Brokeback.” In addition, it is “fun” but it only appeals to those who

already know Kubrick’s The Shining, not necessarily to potential buyers of the DVD

or VHS of the film. Interestingly, once a particular film is no longer shown

theatrically, DVD and VHS distribution companies make use of trailers via their Web

pages to advertise their products and prompt users to purchase them. In addition, the

different trailers of the roster of movies a distribution company holds typically cohabit

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a contiguous space. In other words, while distribution companies try to satisfy a

particular shopper’s interest, they also try to market the rest of their products. This is

indeed an extension of a common practice within the realm of the movie theater.

Typically, distribution companies showcase their upcoming attractions before a

feature film they are releasing so that spectators are well informed of this fact or in

partnership with a film that is released by a different company but has generic

similarities with their product. If the release date of their own film is far in time, they

would try to showcase their future products in direct contact with a movie that is

projected to be a smashing box-office hit.

Although Debruge and Ryang’s artistic approach to trailers is essential to

understand their role in the digital age, for the most part, trailers circulating on the

Web act as a commercial hookup inside/out the cinematic field. While users retain

their agency, since they can stop watching a particular trailer or bypass it at any given

time while browsing the Web, the trailer junkie becomes the “under attack” locus of a

series of competing film and non-film companies. Pleasure via consumption becomes

unavoidably tainted with the attempt to direct such a pleasure to generate revenue.

Even though, as Lisa Kernan states a trailer continues to be “a brief film text that

usually displays images from a specific feature film while asserting its excellence, and

that is created for the purpose of projecting in theaters to promote a film’s theatrical

release” (Kernan 1), our plunging on the Internet age has exponentially increased its

marketing value. For, movie trailers viewed in theaters are now only the entry point

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into the wider audio-visual universe of the movie they represent. Routinely, at the end

of a trailer, the company credits of films appear on screen. Included in those, trailers

highlight the existence of the film’s Web page, a source of information spectators can

access to get more details about the film. Within the terrain of the movie theater, they

continue to be a form of advertisement, a format that is fundamentally deployed by

film production, distribution and exhibition companies to sell upcoming attractions.

Internet movie trailers address spectators as inserted within a commercially oriented

environment that extends beyond the cinematic field. My next step is to analyze the

fabric of several of the (quasi)monographic trailer Web pages that have flourished on

the Web to pinpoint the multiple manners in which Internet users negotiate their

encounters with film commodities in this deterritorialized media cyberspace.

a) http://www.apple.com/trailers

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Fig. 11—Apple Trailer site

It is well known that Apple is a corporation whose different product lines

deliver cutting edge entry points into a multi-media world of interconnected digital

experiences. Its marketing campaigns—blueberry, Imac, Ipod nano etc—typically sell

their products through a strong emphasis on their slick design and the hip or cool

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lifestyle they associate with them.67 This page functions primarily to allow a

multinational corporation—Apple—to showcase one of its products—QuickTime.

Film trailers are, consequently, instrumentalized for this purpose.68 Furthermore, the

Apple QuickTime site acts simply as a passport into the different official film sites:

double-clicking on each of the films offers users several size options for viewing so

that they can make a selection depending on their Internet connection speed. A

warning is in place to inform those users with problems viewing the loaded page of the

reasons behind this fact: “Broken Movie icons: QuickTime 7 is now required to view

the latest movie trailers.”

On top of the page, the Apple site features “high definition trailers,” the cream

of the crop, followed by “Trailers exclusive,” “Newest trailers” and “Current &

Upcoming films”, organized by distributor. Smaller films are lumped together under

the category “Independent.” The presence of the high-definition trailers option is a

very conscious move on Apple behalf to promote its cutting edge prestige as high

quality provider of media technology. In addition, the left side of the screen features

an ad for Ipod products along with links to Itunes Web site, Top 5 soundtrack albums 67 The initial tag line for Ipod shuffle, for example, was “Life is random”. Their new slogan is “Give chance a chance” <http://www.apple.com/ipodshuffle>. In other words, the very limitation of the Ipod shuffle product—the fact that the user cannot select what songs he is playing or choose how to organize order them—is repackaged into an ongoing series of utopian messages that embrace random and the unknown as a lifestyle. 68 In a very similar fashion, <http://movies.real.com/?rnd=1130174087765&bw=36571&has-player=true>promotes real player.

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and a series of free audio bites for the Ipod (“Ebert & Roeper,” “The Movie Review”

etc.) to promote the use of Apple’s portable audio and video player. Finally, the Web

page informs of the Weekend Box Office top 11—the movies the trailers of which

users may want to watch— and provides information about movies opening the

current week.

b) http://www.movie-list.com

Although not exclusively dedicated to trailers, the site makes of them its

central asset.69 The main text offers a daily update on added trailers, organized

alphabetically. Otherwise, trailers are organized in three categories: “Coming soon,”

“Now playing” and “Classics.” Choosing any of these three brings us to an

alphabetical list of available trailers. Similarly to the Apple QuickTime site, on the left

side of the screen, Movie-list lists trailers under “Top rated,” “Opening this Week”

and “Top Ten Box Office.”

Interestingly enough, the “Classic options” points to the growing interest in the

very act of cyber-trailer viewing: “What are Movie-List Classics? Some trailers which

are no longer (or never have been) available on the 'net, have been Re-encoded, in

high-resolution picture and sound, and made available for Movie-List users. These are

Movie-List Classics, and new ones are added each week. Here's what's been added so

far...” An alphabetical list follows.

69 This Web site also offers reviews, posters, list of top ten downloads organized monthly, forums and dates on DVD and VHS releases.

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Double clicking on any of the available titles in each of the three categories

takes users to a page that offers general information about the film—distribution

company, plot, cast, release date, director, review, rating of the film and a link to the

official Web site (if available). Trailers are available on QuickTime in different

qualities (very-high-res, high-res, mid-res and low-res). At any given time, users can

perform a search by movie title and bypass all the categorizations movie-list.com

offers to find trailers. As you navigate from page to page, a shifting amount of ads try

to catch the user’s attention from the top and left sides of the screen.

c) http://movies.aol.com/trailers/main.adp

This trailer monographic page is accessed from its parent site http://movies.aol.com.

The bigger site is designed to keep movie fans informed on a variety of film culture

issues, ranging from “Who’s Hot,” “Star Talk,” “Indie film guide,” “Moviefone top 5

films,” “Hottest video rentals” to reports on different movie awards ceremonies and

gossip columns. The top banner offers the following options: Showtimes & Tix,

Editor’s picks, reviews features, coming soon, trailers & clips, DVD, short films.

The smaller trailer site, “Trailers & Clips” showcases on top a short roster of featured

trailers. Below, trailers are organized by “Date added”:

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Fig. 12—Movies AOL

Once again, priority is given to what is “new and hot” now. A further link is

offered: “Watch 1000s of trailers & clips.” In this part of the Web site, users can

browse trailers organized alphabetically or by genre. In the main trailer page, some of

the trailers are marked as “Exclusive” (a commercial hook-up used by all majors

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trailer Web sites), pointing to the fact that this is the very site Internet users should

browse when wanting to watch the newest trailers out there. If we select a trailer to

watch, “North Country—Trailer No. 1,” for example, a window pops up: “Dial up or

Broadband.” Once we select one of these two options, the trailer plays automatically

in a small QuickTime window. To the left, users get several options, which vary

depending on the status of the film on the market. If the film is out in the theaters or

about to be released, we can typically choose from “Buy tickets,” “Buy soundtrack”

and “Movie mail.” If the movie is already available on DVD or VHS, the options are:

Buy DVD/Rent DVD/Moviemail. As users watch trailers they can also watch award-

winning short films, view full-screen high quality trailers, download movies or try the

Moviefone DVD rental service. If we double-click on the movie title, our browser

does not lead us to the film’s official Web site but to another AOL/Moviefone page in

which users can buy or rent the DVD of the film.

d) http://videodetective.com

Videodetective.com, the self-proclaimed “largest movie preview and film

trailer search engine on the Web” and “the most comprehensive trailer database,”

assaults users with a shifting spectacle of images from the outset. At the center of the

Web page, a shifting screen shows stills of a variety of films that are out or about to be

released in the movie theater. As the still frame changes from film to film, a link

below it, “Watch Preview,” allows users to choose the trailer they prefer to view. To

the right of this screen the following message salutes the viewer: “Welcome. Just click

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watch (on the videodetective logo). We’ve got the previews you want.” On the right

side of this message, there is a visual add that changes each time you access the Web

site.

The top of the screen offers several options: Home, Theatrical, DVD, Music Videos

and Browse Trailers. Below, Videodetective has two categories: “Top Box Office”

and “Top 50 New Trailers.” On the top left users can browse movie trailers and

previews by title, genre or decade. When the user looks for a movie title, the search

engine provides information about the film: cast, year, rating and genre. If we click on

the title three more options appear: “Preview”, “Buy” or “Netflix” to rent it on DVD.

However, unlike the previously described sites, Videodetective does not use

QuickTime as a viewing platform. Conversely, it requires Microsoft software (Apple’s

main competitor) to view the trailers.

Watching a trailer in Videodetective is a commercial hook-up that offers users

a series of consecutive chances to buy any of the products, film related or not, the Web

site showcases. Offering information about upcoming films or short audiovisual

samples of older films functions as a calculated step in a producer-to-consumer

trajectory. I did a search for Zhang Yimou’s The Road Home (1999), a smaller

window popped up. Three options: preview, buy it or rent it. The fact that viewing the

trailer is labeled as “preview” entails that those who design the access to it do not

intend the viewing of the trailer to be the end of the process for the consumer. The

Videodetective owners seem to tell users: since you are interested in the film, preview

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it and then buy or rent it, we’ll provide you with the necessary links to fulfill this goal.

When I double clicked on the icon to view the trailer, a series of commercial preceded

and followed it. Furthermore, even though the trailer remains the same, accessing it,

even with a few minutes of temporal lapse, I encountered commercials for different

products (from heartburn relievers to a pain reliever patch to a Yes-man ad). In a

different occasion, the trailer of a film that has not been released yet theatrically

followed The Road Home’s trailer. On October 18th 2005, without warning or pause, I

unexpectedly encountered the trailer for Peter Jackson’s widely awaited King Kong

(2005). The same day, a trailer of George A. Romero’s Hungry Wives (1972), newly

released on DVD, followed the trailer of The Story of Qiu Ju (1992). Three days later I

saw the trailer of The Road Home; a Zantac commercial played after it. Immediately

after I randomly selected a film that would have very few things to do with Zhang’s,

Three Kings (1999). The same Zantac commercial played before the trailer of the

David O. Russell’s film. After the Three Kings trailer, the King Kong trailer played

again, offering always the option to buy or rent it. In this case, since Jackson’s film

was not coming out in theaters until December 2005, when I double-clicked on buy,

then the Web page did not bring me to a link to pre-buy the DVD but to a

comprehensive films of older films featuring the monster King Kong. In short, when

viewing a trailer in Videodetective.com, the trailer occupies the space reserved to a

series on TV or feature films in the movie house.

e) http://www.movie-page.com/trailers.htm

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Movie-page is a home-made Web page maintained by Bjorn Erik Hundland

devoted to several aspects of film culture. It offers feature reviews, downloadable

scripts, along with posters, a DVD section, trailers and links to other sites featuring

trailers. Noticeably, the only add on the Web site is an allposters.com:

Fig. 13—Movie Page

Trailers are organized in alphabetical order and featured in a variety of

formats—including QuickTime, Real player and Microsoft’s Windows Media Player.

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In fact, Hunland’s site is, for the most part, a compilation trailer page that offers a

comprehensive collection of trailers available elsewhere on the Web. In other words,

even though the commercial motivation of his endeavor is not clearly visible, he re-

directs users to other Web sites in which the intimate link between trailer consumption

and money-making corporative activities is more visible.

f) http://movies.yahoo.com/trailers

The main site, http://movies.yahoo.com showcases the typical array of

information that characterizes any major movie-based Web page: Top rated films,

Showtimes & Tickets, Movies Home, In Theaters and so on. The Trailers & Clips

section allows users to browse alphabetically while featuring trailers as main stories

and signaling the top-rated, newly added and most watched trailers. Yahoo, though,

goes a step further. There are sub-pages for a variety of national territories.

http://it.movies.yahoo.com/trailers and http://es.movies.yahoo.com/trailers-

cine/

offer trailer information and viewing options customized according to status of the

theatrical and DVD/VHS market in Italy and Spain, respectively. In both cases, big-

time Hollywood productions occupy center stage. Not surprisingly national

productions are pushed to the margins even though occasionally, depending on the

exceptionality of a particular film’s release, they may de-center Hollywood

momentarily. In other words, the planned differentiation that informs the ways in

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which Hollywood designs its global reach is also at play in the ways in which some of

the cyber-gatekeepers of the movie world sell and advertise upcoming feature films.

In other cases, such as in the Brazilian Web site

http://www.angelfire.com/tv/seleto/cinema/trailers.htm, the need to command a

foreign language to enjoy the major part of movie trailers is utilized to advertise

English classes. Often, movie and trailer Web pages are the native languages of their

respective target markets but emphasis is given to Hollywood films (e.g.

http://www.orientfilmes.com.br/trailers.asp and http://www.comuny.com (both in

Portuguese), http://www.trailersdecine.com and http://www.quedetrailers.com

(Spanish) or http://www.mov6.com/trailer, and

http://movie.91.com/modules/foreshow.aspx (Chinese).70

After extensively analyzing a significant amount of the Web’s most important

trailer sites, two things have become apparent. First, Hollywood maintains a global

stronghold in the trailer cyber culture. Second, Web trailer viewing is only a stage of a

journey that subjects Internet surfers to a variety of interwoven consumption choices.

What can we make, thus, of the dominant status of this hyperlinked form of film

culture in the contemporary filmic panorama?

70 On October 8th, 2005, the top 10 seen trailers in trailersdecine.com are Charlie’s Angels, Hulk, The Hunted, X-Men 2, X-Men 2 (trailer 2), Spider-Man, Harry Potter 3, The Animatrix, Dreamcatcher and Solaris. All of these films originate in Hollywood except for The Animatrix.

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Movie Trailers & Digital Technology: Perpetual Motion & Multi-tasking

While sitting around a grill in the backyard of a West Harlem brownstone, I

became acquainted with the building manager of the AMC Empire mega complex in

42nd street.71 He jokingly told me that he did not sell movie tickets but nachos, buckets

of popcorn and pints of soda. To my bewilderment, he stated that the theater—without

a doubt one of the biggest multiplexes in New York City—did not make any money

with the films themselves. It was “all about” food and drinks.72 A few days later, a

friend who used to work for Kino International—a small New York based independent

distribution company, which mostly specializes in foreign films and can only afford

low-budget acquisitions—confessed to me that despite their five-year-long string of

box-office fiascos, the DVD and video department allowed the company to stay afloat.

Through my conversations with industry insiders, it has become increasingly obvious

that film theatrical runs have lost their economic importance in the film business and

now work as a marketing centerpiece whose primary function is to catalyze other

leisure activities (from buying popcorn to renting a DVD) that return revenue for the 71 This multiplex has 28 screens and showcases mostly Hollywood blockbusters but also has two or three screens devoted to American independent features and, occasionally, foreign films. When moviegoers take the back escalator to leave the theater, in their way down, they pass by a series of entertainment choices (from restaurants to game arcades) that attempt for them to take a further step into the consumption chain film going has launched. 72 In fact, film exhibition companies are increasingly surrounding the act of film going with a variety of other services. The Landmark theater chain, for example, plans to utilize digital projectors to show a variety of audiovisual products, ranging from films, film live music concerts and sports events. In addition, other theater chains such as Regal and AMC use their state-of-the-arts facilities to host corporate conferences.

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involved companies. These two conversations occurred three years ago, in the fall of

2003, when YouTube did not exist and MySpace was a recent Web site created the

summer before and had not exploded yet as a primary networking Internet site.

Likewise, online trailer viewing was not as widespread as it today, trailer re-making

was not the worldwide phenomenon it has become and Emule was not a “monster”

peer-to-peer file sharing client that millions of Internet surfers utilize all over the

planet to download music and movies. In addition, in recent years movie houses have

started to have digital projections and it seems inevitable that the heyday of celluloid

is bound to perish and give way to the more cost-efficient digital format. Even though

prior to the explosion of digital film culture, the centrality of the “film event” was

indeed fading away, it is undoubtedly the dramatic malleability and transmitability of

the digital medium and its insertion with a set of contiguous practices of interpersonal

networking has given it the final strike. 35mm and celluloid-loving film buffs are not

going to disappear. However, they are on their way to become residual reminders of a

by-gone era in the entertainment business while the rise of digital technology keeps

constantly displacing them towards the periphery of film culture. Currently the vast

majority of film-to-spectator interactions happen via one of the different media

formats—from pirated VCD disks to downloaded files—the digital can inhabit.

Furthermore, as I hope to have demonstrated above, the hyperlinked chain of short-

term consumption acts spectators typically practice while navigating the portals of the

Web in partnership with the intensified connectivity between cultural items produced

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in distant temporal and spatial zones has dramatically altered the dominant manner

through which audiovisual products address the consumers of culture. Audiovisual

products display an extreme propensity towards the intertextual citation of other texts

and the spectacular deployment of groundbreaking technological feats in detriment of

a previously prevailing form of storytelling based on a cause and effect signifying

structure. In addition, contemporary commentators are the privileged witnesses of a

radical transformation of audiovisual production in which amateur film culture is

evolving “from a focus on home movies toward a focus on public movies, from local

audiences to a global audience, from mastering the technology to mastering the

mechanism for publicity and promotion, and from self-documentaries to an aesthetic

based on appropriation, parody, and the dialogic” (Jenkins, "Tarantino" 309). This is a

form of cultural production that, as Henry Jenkins states, does not understand the

possibilities of production and dissemination of culture enabled by digital technology

as a potential platform to perform subversive politics, like avant-garde or grassroots

filmmaking initially did. It does not fit either with an understanding of the digital as a

hyper-saturated space for commercialism that intensifies the dominance of hegemonic

forms of corporate control. Instead, it negotiates the coordinates of both these worlds

in a “war time period” between newly formed types of media ownership that

champion convergence and legal sanctions to those who break copyright laws and

increasingly visually and computer literate fans, who approach media products not as

closed texts but as the aural and visual spaces where they can inscribe their imprint

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and make them potentially re-circulate almost everywhere.73 And the war has only

started…

Negotiating the meanders of this super-Web-highway that has too much

information, the Internet user is, above all, an ever-moving navigator characterized

for her incapacity to remain fully satisfied with one Web site or audiovisual

experience for a long period of time. If in discussing TV reception, we may identify

the wish to avoid commercials as an early catalyst of channel surfing and as a definite

precedent of the frenzy of remote control button pushing that the paramount

expansion of cable packages to thousands of on-demand channels has fostered, trailer

viewing and re-making may be opening the paths to short forms of audiovisual

entertainment that may still be on the making. The Internet surfer or cable channel

spectator is often only partially watching an audiovisual product for she is typically

already in motion, ready to temporarily re-focus or advance on to the next channel or

hyperlinked site. In other terms, the Internet movie fan’s dominant form of

engagement with the film text is not the panoramic gaze of the cinephile but the

multi-window short-cut oriented dynamic of the computer savvy user who endlessly

navigates the Web in search for an immediately available audiovisual thrill.

73 As I finish writing this chapter, The Trailer Mash (thetrailermash.com) has come to existence. This Web site is exclusively devoted to the collection of recut trailers, arranging them according to the genre they were “recut into.” The Trailer Mash does not host the recut trailers; it simply offers a portal to access them easily, creating a series of links to the actual cyber-location (mostly YouTube) were the trailers have been uploaded.

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Likewise, the audiovisual products this spectator decodes are already

something else, both in terms of their extreme connectivity to the contiguous items on

the Web site in which they are located and the portals they typically open to other

products, potentially perpetuating the act of consumption ad infinitum. In addition,

this Web surfer I have just described is indeed unpredictable. She may visit a hundred

Web sites in an hour or linger in one of them for hours, watching one after another all

the showcased Snakes on a Plane and Brokeback spoofs. She might be patient

enough to watch all of them in their entirety or just quickly browse and fast-forward

through them in search for a funny catch phrase. Moreover, she may just do that or

she may be writing emails or MSN messages to her friends simultaneously. In other

words, unlike the movie house film spectator who is clearly mappable in terms of her

volition to go to a dark room to encounter a film for a pre-determined period of time,

the Internet user can potentially inhabit many different entertainment loci at any

given time and extend her act of consumption at will. Therefore, she resists a clear-

cut categorization.

As a global citizen navigating an immense grid of multi-layered Russian dolls,

the Internet film spectator keeps on sailing, embracing not only the power to map out

the Web’s contents via the surgical procedures of increasingly precise search engines

such as Google, Yahoo or Altavista but also its multi-window malleable structure,

which champions the resourcefulness of the multi-task user, and, ultimately, the

alluring charm of chance that its hyperlinked character cultivates. As Ann Friedberg

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states, the multi-screen, character of the Windows software has become the ideal

trope to define this multiplied and divided subjectivity. Furthermore, “as the beholder

of multiple windows, we receive images—still and moving, large and small, artwork

and commodity—in fractured spatial and temporal frames” (Friedberg 348). We are

thus in two or more time-frames at once, inside a “fractured post-Cartesian cyber-

time.” Barely shielding the torrential downpour of pieces of aural and visual

information, the Internet user is indeed a new breed of film spectator, one that knows

too much and too little at the same time; one that marketing departments of multi-

million dollar corporations can fully chart in terms of her Internet history but never,

ever, completely define in terms of her modes of interaction within the myriad

possibilities of the digital medium. Like a fleeting passerby in a crowded street of a

contemporary global megalopolis, any Internet user may be a perfect lover we have

missed the opportunity to meet, a horrible monster we have been lucky enough to

only encounter for a split second in turning around a busy corner or simply one of the

many strangers we brush with as we draw one of the many itineraries we invent in

our daily negotiation of the multiple routes cities lay out for their inhabitants to

navigate. In this sense, the Internet film spectator and/or trailer maker and the

inhabitant of the global city share a common trait: they perpetually attempt to grab on

a fleeting affect that seems invariably bound to slip away. And, they keep trying:

watching and re-making films while sheltered in their cyber egos; or, alternatively,

within the meanders of the material city, exchanging objects, bits of information or

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gazes of reciprocity with that physically proximate stranger they pass by every other

day. Contemporary global cityscapes resemble the untotalizable multi-vector time-

space of the World Wide Web since in both cases we are discussing an

interconnected network of “sites” human beings traverse and dwell in. Isn’t a rented

or owned apartment somewhat equivalent to a personalized Web page? Aren’t the

different airports, bus, train stations and roads that connect different cities

comparable to the information highways that facilitate the circulation of bodies in the

Web?). In other words, finding and watching a “Brokeback” trailer on the Web today,

given its temporary mainstream status, would be the analogous to going to a chain

store such as H&M in a New York shopping district and buying a brown pair of pants

hundreds of thousands of people have purchased around the world.74 In addition, if

the Web is also the multi-focal time-space where marginal cinematic products—such

as experimental videos or installation works—circulate on a limited scale, the city

offers its dwellers analogous spaces such as neighborhood falafel joints or second-

hand bookstore that sometimes manage to prevail generation after generation,

containing the heavy-duty artillery of multinational corporations. The fundamental

difference between the Web and the global city is the characteristic de-centralization 74 However, whereas H&M, Zara or Old Navy have remained clothing powerhouses for years due to their sweatshop-enabled affordable prices and their cutting edge fashion imprint, “Brokeback” is bound to ultimately become a marginal Internet body (a store in liquidation indeed) in the ever-flowing dynamic of information overload that dictates the working parameters of the Web. Sooner or later a different hype will overtake its privileged position and steer Internet users away from “Brokeback” Google searches and trailer viewing.

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of the former in relation to the latter. Contemporary megalopolis are marked by the

non-deletable and ubiquitous presence of the Starbuck’s, McDonald’s and Virgin

Megastores and equivalent species in direct co-existence and often conflict with

locally flavored cultural practices. On the Internet, even though the presence of such

multinational endeavors is indeed strongly felt, users have the strong capacity to click

away from them and jump to different sites, untainted yet by the aggressive

campaigns of this kind of corporate enterprise (even if that journey is likely to bring

the user to another ad-plagued site).

The next chapter examines how the cinematic approaches contemporary global

cities from a variety of perspectives, engaging with both their location-specific

idiosyncrasies and the presence of global, corporate-sponsored, practices. I give an

account of the multiple ways in which human bodies circulate through the time-spaces

of the global city and a variety of approaches filmmakers utilize to chronicle such

practices. Finally, I will establish a link between the current era of U.S. global

domination in geopolitical terms and Hollywood’s unprecedented domination of the

world film markets.

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2

BODIES IN CRISIS:

AFFECT, SICKNESS AND CAPITAL IN THE GLOBAL CITYSCAPE

The differences between the Hong Kong and U.S. trailers of Chungking

Express (1994) signal the typical manner in which American distribution companies

attempt to cancel out cultural specificity in foreign films in order to widen their appeal

and, therefore, maximize the profit they return. In addition, their diverse treatments of

the Hong Kong cityscape point to two antagonistic representational models in

exploring the multi-layered complexities of contemporary global cities: one that takes

as a point of departure the in-depth exploration of their textual particularities and one

that favors a superficial sketch of the cities it approaches to create a universalizing

discourse to be delivered globally.

The U.S., Miramax-made, Chungking Express trailer features a voiceover

narration that positions the film within a mixed generic label—mystery and

romance—aimed at targeting a broad spectrum of spectators. At the same time, none

of the characters is given a single line of dialogue. This is a widespread maneuver of

contemporary film distributors in the United States in regards to foreign films,

especially those who have the potential to cross over into a mainstream exhibition

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circuit.75 Consequently, while still attempting to address a sophisticated audience, U.S.

trailers of foreign films often silence their linguistic alterity to catch the attention of

the notoriously monolingual and subtitle-hater American spectator.76 While they bank

on the recognizability of a particular auteur or foreign star persona to attract the

“educated” filmgoer, they simultaneously shoot wider, penetrating the mainstream

circuits. Miramax also legitimizes the film with a series of critics’ quotes—Richard

Corliss from Time, Kevin Thomas from LA Times and Manohla Dargis from LA

Weekly—that highlight both the cutting edge character of the film and its exquisitely

romantic backbone. In addition, the complex narrative structure of the film—a series

of interlinked stories that cross each other’s paths to compose a polyphonic tapestry of

Hong Kong—is deduced to a love triangle composed by two women—Brigitte Lin

and Faye Wong—and a man—Takeshi Kaneshiro.77 Although the opening words of

the voiceover narration are “In the streets of Hong Kong…” Miramax does not seek to 75 Foreign films occasionally manage to escape the art-house niche where they are routinely showcased—e.g. The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), Frida (2002), All about My Mother (1999), Life is Beautiful (1997)—and jump into multiplex battlefields such as the Regal and the AMC Empire theaters. Besides, several art theaters have grown to be national chains—e.g. Landmark Sunshine, Angelika etc—spreading over selected urban centers throughout the United States and, therefore, creating a constellation of cosmopolitan filmgoers in different geographical locations from East to West coast that share a well-established appreciation for the foreign and the independent. 76 This tactic reached a histrionic moment in the trailer of Almodóvar´s All about my Mother (released by Sony Picture Classics). The ultra fast-paced, editing-driven trailer featured a single line of dialogue in Spanish, uttered by Penélope Cruz: the name of her dog in the film, “Sapic”. 77 The US trailer of the film does show images of Tony Leung—the fourth main character that the voiceover narration “represses” in order to simplify the film’s narrative. However, the trailer does not explicitly state his key importance in the film.

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emphasize the Hong Kongness of the film, but, conversely, it deploys the above-

described variety of strategies to eliminate any of its specific cultural markers. Hong

Kong is thus treated as an exotic urban space in which the thrills of violence and

heterosexual romance collide, creating a visually stylish and action-driven tour de

force U.S. audiences will not want to miss since it promises to be both easily

decipherable for the average spectator while offering a certain dose of newness

through its cultural Otherness.

The original Hong Kong trailer could not be more different from its U.S.

counterpart. First, there is no voiceover narration. Instead we are introduced to the

four main characters of the film consecutively, performing an action that offers us a

glimpse of their problematic psychological and sentimental conditions. Brigitte Lin

shoots an unidentified male and then silently leans against a wall while smoking a

cigarette protected by her unmistakable noir outfit: black sunglasses, a raincoat and a

blonde wig. Faye Wong compulsively searches a bed with the help of a magnifying

glass; eventually, she becomes ecstatic when she finds a lock of hair. Tony Leung

makes a United Airlines airplane miniature toy perform a long landing trajectory over

the sweaty back of his female lover. Finally, Takeshi Kaneshiro runs frantically from

left to right of the screen in a short sequence that features the characteristic step-

printing visual effect for which the film became internationally renown. Each of these

four vignettes is separated by an intertitle that names the actors. No clear narrative link

is established to explain the seemingly disjointed journey that takes us from character

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to another. After introducing the four main stars of the film, the last two title screens

announce the name of the film’s director and the film’s title. As the title is shown, a

series of gunshots underscore the forceful presence of violence throughout the film.

The trailer concludes with a succession of low-angle shots of fast-moving clouds

framed on each side by dark, old buildings.

If the Miramax trailer of the film rhythmically complies with the fast-cutting,

flashy images of most movie trailers today and is clearly structured to offer spectators

a story arch they can easily comprehend, the Hong Kong one, conversely, is based on

the use of long, handheld takes, and provides no sense of a storyline. In short, whereas

the U.S. trailer is genre and cause-and-effect narrative-based, the Hong Kong one is

star-driven and location-specific via the presence of the signifier “Chungking” in the

title of the film. Wong utilizes the star power of each of his four actors in combination

with Fan Kei-Chan’s electronic musical theme to introduce a roster of imbalanced

psyches and ultimately frame them inside the violent-prone cultural palimpsest of

Chungking Mansions, “a dingy down-market, mall-cum-flophouse, incredibly located

in Tsimshatsui, Hong Kong’s most expensive area” (Abbas 12). In fact, whereas the

original Hong Kong title is "Chungking Jungle," the film was internationally re-named

as Chungking Express. In other words, the original title clearly points to the frenetic,

multicultural, edgy and violent character of Chungking Mansions, banking on the

Hong Kong natives’ knowledge of such an idiosyncratic space to frame the story. The

international title plays down the wildness of Chungking Mansions and emphasizes,

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instead, the notion of high speed via the inclusion of “Express.” It arguably mobilizes

the globally operative image of Hong Kong as a hyper concentrated center for

Capitalist enterprise where individuals frantically circulate, negotiating its market-

driven routines and its crammed architectural layout.

Summing up, whereas Miramax lays on top of the Hong Kongness of the film

an easily decipherable discourse of universality that is aimed at appealing to the

American spectator regardless of her knowledge of Hong Kong culture or cinema, Jet

Tone (Wong’s production company) anchors the allure of the film in several aspects of

its defining cultural specificity—from the stars of the film to the heterotopic space of

Chungking Mansions. This universality vs. locality dichotomy is a decisive arena of

contention in the representations of the city competing cinematic efforts offer. How do

films negotiate the tension between the locally, nationally specific and the globally

understandable in terms of the representational devices they utilize to render different

versions of the multi-layered cityscapes they depict? Do the complexities of the city

become invariably simplified for the sake of the creation of transculturally effective

narratives and audiovisual templates? Is it possible to achieve a universalizing mode

of address while scrutinizing the textual idiosyncrasies of a given cityscape or is such

an endeavor condemned to remain locked within the national film markets without

having an international exposure due to the paramount challenge of cultural

translatability? More extensively, what representational models occupy a dominant

position in portraying the contemporary global city and can we relate those to both the

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industrial practices through which they are born and the broader historical cultural

fields that envelop them?

The Global, the Local and the Cityscape

A priest steps out of a bus as the high-pitched metal score of Def Con Dos

assaults our ears. After studying the book of the Apocalypse for over twenty-five years

he has deciphered its secret code: the son of Satan will be born in Madrid, at dawn on

Christmas day. The priest’s goal is to do evil in order to become acquainted with those

who serve the Fallen Angel and ultimately frustrate their plans. This is the basic

premise of Alex de la Iglesia’s genre-bending and commercially successful second

full-length feature, The Day of the Beast (1995).

As the priest gets off the bus, on the right side of the frame two apparently

disparate images collapse. First, we see a billboard of the infamous Kio Towers that

labels them Puerta de Europa—the Gateway to Europe. Second, under the billboard, a

gypsy family performs a typical keyboard routine accompanied by a goat (a popular

culture signifier of the Devil itself). The gypsy family is undoubtedly a marker of

Spanishness that roots the very fabric of the Madrid cityscape within the meanders of

folk culture. At the same time, De la Iglesia also plunges the spectator into Spain-in-

Europe, a country that has left behind the nightmare of the Francoist tyranny and

warmly opened its arms to an active membership in the growing supranational

construct known as the European Union. In addition, the unfinished Kio Towers not

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only epitomize the modernizing openness towards the integration of Spain into the

European Union that the PSOE government had relentlessly championed but mostly

remind the spectator of the real estate scandal that had halted the construction of this

emblematic site for a new, transnational Spain, pointing directly to the corruption

spiral the Socialist government was undergoing from the early 1990s.78

As the priest strolls through the Madrid streets, armed policemen brutally beat

up a group of North African immigrants.79 The Day of the Beast has suddenly shifted

gears to depict a country crisscrossed by racial prejudice and hatred towards non-

European others who migrate into the Spanish national territory. Soon thereafter we

also find out that we are in a country driven by a reality show, violence-overloaded,

audiovisual culture embodied in the figure of TV fortune teller/con man Cavan.80

78 One of the images we see on a TV set as the priest wanders Madrid is Mario Rubio, the former head of the Bank of Spain, leaving the prison of Alcalá Meco (Madrid). I need to thank Stephen Marsh for pointing out this fact to me. 79 When the policemen beat up the North African immigrants, we can see in the background a “Satanika” poster. De la Iglesia has begun to signal the equation between Satanism and racism the film fully exposes later on. 80 In the mid 1990's, TV shows like La Máquina de la Verdad or Esta Noche Cruzamos el Mississippi conquered the largest amount of audiences. This sort of shows was largely based in the shameless exploitation of violent and sexual contents. The late 1990's and the beginning of the new millennium witnessed the rise of Javier Sardá’s Crónicas Marcianas, a show that deepened the fall into “bad taste” the above mentioned forerunners had championed. In addition, Cavan works for Tele 3, a frontal reference to Spanish TV station Tele 5. This channel, initially owned by Italian media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, favored a vulgar entertainment-driven programming roster epitomized by the semi-cladless Mama Chicho, a cultural staple of the Spanish late night TV consumerscape.

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Less than a year after the release of The Day of the Beast, the twelve-year

tenure of the PSOE came to an end when the right-wing PP won the national election,

obtaining absolute majority in congress. Early in the film, De La Iglesia equates the

latent racism within the mid 1990's Spanish milieu—represented within the diegesis

by the murder-driven “Limpia Madrid” (Clean Madrid) group—with the rise of the

right-wing ideology that had become dominant in the Spanish political and socio-

cultural fabric. Not accidentally, De La Iglesia himself explains that the members of

this vigilante group wear a “PPeros” jacket.81 This type of attire, the Spanish director

claims, makes them look as though they were always hunting when in reality they may

have never done it. What they hunt, the film seems to state, is not animals but non-

white and non-European immigrants. This facts points to the blinding effect that the

Europeization of Spain has performed in as much as it has intensified a culture of

widespread elitism in the Spanish collective unconscious in relation to those

unprivileged bodies who migrate from economically and socially disfavored countries.

Juxtaposing this initial series of images and events, De la Iglesia’s film chronicles the

turn to the right Spain had taken in the mid 1990s and constructs Madrid as a

heterotopic space both locally and transnationally marked.

Like The Day of the Beast, Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (released also in

1995) signals the centrality of race in the social and economic imbalance at work in

the spatial organization of the contemporary multicultural cityscape. It also points to 81 DVD audio commentary.

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the displacement of the colonial distinction between the metropolis—the center of

cultural and civilization—and the periphery—the domain of savaged or uncivilized

racial Others—to that of the “city proper” and the “outskirts” (Fielder 271). Fleeing

the military police siege in the projects in the outskirts of Paris, Said (Arab), Vinz

(Jewish) and Hubert (black) reach postcard, white Paris to visit their friend Abdel,

who had been brutally beat the police the night before. After facing several instances

of racial prejudice and getting involved in a series of violent confrontations that lands

Vinz in prison for several hours, they miss the last train back to their neighborhood.

They are stuck, hindered by the very transportation technology that makes their

peripheral spatiality a component of the expansive living space known as Paris; one

that distributes social and economic strata along a communication network which

diminishes the further you get from “Paris-The City of Love” and the closer you are to

the multicultural projects inhabited largely by racial groups who migrated from the

former colonies of the French Empire. The symbols of the globally known Paris—the

Louvre, the Senne banks, the quaint buildings of Louis island—rise within the

confines of a highly laid out transportation network. Conversely, the banlieue are an

“anywhere-in-the-periphery” serialized clusters of anonymous buildings that lack a

cultural specificity immediately detectable for the foreign eye. The route to access

them? A single train line.

Unable to leave the Parisian center, expelled from the interior spaces they

attempt to temporarily occupy—Asterix apartment, a night club, an art gallery—and

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tired of wandering the empty streets of Paris, the three friends seek shelter in the

empty hallways of a mall. As they find out through a TV broadcast that Abdel has

passed away, an enormous Heineken logo stares back at them in silence. The

juxtaposition of a global marker of neoliberal Capitalism—the Heineken logo standing

for the borderless reach of multinational corporations—and the very specificity of the

TV riots footage in the early 1990s Paris milieu maps out the French urban metropolis

as a composite of co-existent global and local forces that embody the economic and

social imbalance at its constitutive core.82 The utter brutality of a racially-biased act of

murder and the far-reaching power of “beyond-politics” multinational corporations to

be everywhere allows Mathieu Kassovitz to chronicle one of the fundamental cultural

and socio-economic encounters cityscapes offer today: the continuous negotiation

between the forces of historical specificity and the worldwide ubiquity of

economically-driven enterprises such as the Heineken corporation.

At several points of La Haine’s story, the three friends pass by a billboard

featuring a corporate logo (Perrier and Heineken, most remarkably). Kassovitz’

camera then stays still even if the three friends walk out of frame, as though it were

chronicling the presence of these markers of corporate culture in the contemporary

Parisian cityscape and also mimicking through the camera stillness the alluring power 82 The film opens with footage of the Paris riots. A Bob Marley anthem of liberation accompanies the different images of confrontation that are showcased. Whereas the image track localizes the conflict in the mid 1990's Paris, the audio track adds to it a universal appeal, resorting to a key cultural figure of subversive thought, Marley, to transcend the historical specificity of the racial and social problem the film addresses.

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that they have for a wide amount of consumers worldwide. In addition, as they

commute to Paris, the three friends encounter several times a billboard depicting

planet earth with the following logo: La Monde a Vous (``The World is Yours”). Said

uses his graffiti-art skills to change it to “”Le Monde a Nous” (The World is Ours”).

The violent resolution of the film, with Said staring helplessly at the death of his two

friends, points otherwise. The world the three friends inhabit is indeed far beyond their

control. Evidently, the contrast between the social disparity depicted in the film and

the superficially euphoric mapping of the world given in this billboard does nothing

but emphasize the uneven distribution of political and economic power the film

exposes. As Adrian Fielder states, Banlieue films, such as La Haine, seem to advocate

“a (tactical) performative mode of inhabiting the city, through which emergent urban

subcultures might attempt—even within the most striated of state-regulated spaces—to

constitute an urban body nominalism” (280). At the same time, Kassovitz’s film

frames this tactical intervention in the city-text within the overarching traces of late

Capitalism and the specific forms of economic and social imbalance that permeate its

organizing structures.

Any cinematic effort that attempts to map out the complex fabric of the

contemporary cityscape performs a variety of related operations. First, it scrutinizes

the multi-origin vectors that shape the daily whereabouts and timeabouts of the

individuals’ who inhabit them. Second, it also evaluates the changing idiosyncrasies of

the local (and the dynamic between the national and the local) in the context of the

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partial intensification of the global processes of economic and socio-cultural

exchange. Third, it inscribes newly developed subjectivities inside the specifics of a

particular historical juncture within the cityscape in the midst of a competing set of

global, national and local forces that are continuously about to become something else

within the dynamic of negotiation between high-speed information channels and the

centuries-long presence of local forms of socio-cultural engagement. When

filmmakers approach a global city (or several of them for that matter), they encounter

several of these instances of negotiation—e.g. the gypsy family and the Kio towers in

The Day of the Beast or the co-existence of McDonald’s, Cantonese restaurants and

the multifarious Midnight Express in Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express and Fallen

Angels (1995)—and slice the real via the cinematic to offer entry points into the

complexities of a varying totality—the cityscape—that cannot be ultimately

comprehended as a whole. These films do not necessarily aim at endowing human

subjects with a sense of ‘heightened awareness’ of their place within the global

networks of transterritorial exchange but, conversely, they map out the local and

global components of the city to diagnose its dwellers’ localized negotiations of the

larger time-spaces that frame their daily existence. Fragmentary, elliptical, self-

reflexive, multi-media, disorienting, articulating affect through explosive and often

violent intensities and prone to reject the healing gesture of character’s fixity through

closure, a wide range of contemporary narratives offer a multicultural and

heterogeneous political and aesthetic stance on the late capitalist social order and its

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relationship with the cityscape. These efforts are spaces of multivalent plurals that

offer dialogic views of the global and resist the tempting, periodizing gesture of a

single-label categorization. What these disparate films offer, though, are analogous

encounters between the cinematic and the global cities they navigate, providing the

scholar with a series of clues to unravel the fundamental organizing social, cultural

and aesthetic forces that facilitate, qualify, condition and often hinder the production,

circulation and reception of these cinematic products.

It is thus unproductive to approach “the global city” as a transnational

construct operating across different nations unless we complement such an analysis

with a thorough scrutinizing of the social, economic and cultural idiosyncrasies that

characterize the exchanges between local and global forces in each cityscape.

Although smaller and larger megalopolis have indeed become more interconnected

since the mid 1980’s, their textual fabric remains deeply embedded in the varying

peculiarities that shape their spatial and temporal contours. The global does not

overwrite the local since “the places of social space are different from those of natural

space in as much as they are not juxtaposed, but combined. As a consequence, the

local does not disappear, “for it is never absorbed by the regional, national or even

worldwide level” (Lefebvre, Production 68). Consequently, any attempt to analyze the

impact of the worldwide socio-economic routes that traverse global cityscapes in a

generalizing fashion runs the risk of becoming a panoramic sketch of limited

applicability in as much as it may favor patterns of societal and economic

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commonality at the expense of a thorough evaluation of the micro politics of the

multiple cityscapes it cruises by. Today, even though, we have entered a new era in

which the scale of dislocation and the amount of deterritorialized socio-cultural

encounters have quantitatively skyrocketed, it would be misleading to diagnose a

transnational attenuation of local space. That is, the “breaking of space into

‘discontinuous realities’ which alters our sense of ourselves as individuals, members

of various groups and communities, as citizens of a nation state” (Siegel 155).

Similarly, to simply equate our present historical juncture with a cluster of glocal

instances of transnational cross-fertilization would invariably neglect to take into

account the particular coordinates of the dynamic exchanges between the materially-

anchored, diachronically stabilized and territorially-specific nuances of the local and

the multiple external forces that time after time interact with them, often to slide into

the local fabric of a specific site and have a dramatic impact on it, changing in the

process of detaching themselves from their nebulous, unspecific global character. As

Henri Lefebvre states, cities do not simply reflect the changes in the social whole but

they re-configure them in the relational exchanges between the different groups that

compose them and the larger institutions that ultimately organize them. They are

situated at “an interface, half-way between what is called the near order (relations of

individuals in groups of variable size) … and the far order, that of society, regulated

by large and powerful institutions (Church and State), by a legal code formalized or

not, by a ‘culture’ and significant ensembles endowed with powers, by which the far

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order projects itself at this ‘higher’ level and imposes itself” (Writing on Cities 100-

101). Cities thus are neither fixed time-spaces nor uncontrollable sites of subversive

political agency. They are a changing spectrum of multi-directional practices often

temporarily and partially stabilized through repetition and routine but ultimately non-

predictable. Individuals move and halt, turn around or walk straight negotiating the

different technologies of transportation, production, consumption and idleness at their

disposal through a dynamic of controlled variation that resists a clear-cut

systematization in spite of the organizing economies of leisure, affect and labor the

subject must comply with to become or remain a component of the cityscape.

Ultimately, neither cities nor the cultural, social and economic groups that operate

inside/out them are monolithic entities. Consequently, the interventions of these

groups in the time-space of the city render a variety of diverse flows, events, spatial

configurations and cartographies of movement, that are only temporarily stable and

evolve as the city and its dwellers re-configure them.

Surely multicultural identities have been an integral part of large cityscapes for

decades or even centuries. Today the quasi-limitless reach of digital technologies has

easily opened myriad venues of exchange between, for example, those living in Hong

Kong and Los Angeles, on an hourly basis. Certainly the rise of neoliberal Capitalism

as a worldwide dominant has tinted the street corners of cities with ubiquitous

corporate logos that make it easy for lazy travelers to taste the same grain of coffee in

cities thousands of kilometers apart. Undoubtedly media powerhouses such as MTV

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aim at reaching everywhere and arguably influence fashion and music trends across

the globe. Yet, global cities resist a schematization drive even if corporate

headquarters across the world reduce their spontaneous and contingent ambiguity to

dots, grids and statistics. The centuries-long sedimentation of local popular culture

(from eating habits to day parades to apartment lay outs) continues breathing

throughout the series of additions and subtractions the impact of different migration

waves, natural disasters, large economic investments or technological breakthroughs

may have. Even though the global processes of exchange that digital technology

enables have indeed reshaped the coordinates of “places”—the city, the neighborhood,

the street, the grocery store in the corner, I would argue that they have not necessarily

threatened them but re-configured the very definition of place in terms of a dynamic

of (often uneven) exchange between the transnational and the local. It is not as simple

as a corporation opening a ten-floor shopping complex in a street corner, offering

goods at lower prices and all the local stores going out of business. This indeed has

happened numerous times and will continue to occur. However, aren’t we forgetting,

perhaps, that all the, let’s say, flower shops that were forced to close because of the

newly opened commercial center had previously bought out a thriving cluster of

Italian delis when most of their customers moved elsewhere in the city? And, isn’t it

possible that these Italian shops were the result of migration wave in the beginning of

the twentieth century from Southern Italy to New York that little by little displaced the

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formerly dominant German population in this part of the city?83 The rise of corporate

businesses and the de-humanized character of their practices of economic domination

across the world make us more suspicious of these types of displacement since in most

cases they are, after all, not multinational corporations but multi-sweatshop

enterprises. In addition, as Mark Shiel points out, this kind of space, “a shopping mall,

a corporate headquarters, a hotel lobby, a downtown street, or, indeed, a multiplex

cinema, is not notable simply because of its ubiquity or familiarity, but more

particularly because if, as Foucault suggests, all space is controlled, the any-space-

whatever is a space in which the source of control, the center of power, is curiously

difficult to apprehend. It is a space in which the intangibility of global capitalism is

particularly palpable” (11-12). However, we should not forget that city dwellers do

constantly enact their agency in the choices they make. It is up to the walker to turn

around the corner of Times Square, leaving the Toys’R’Us and Disney stores, the

chain restaurants and the gigantic high-tech mega video screens behind and walk into

McHale’s—an old-fashioned American diner.84 It is the curious dweller that exits the

tourist cocoon of Zona Rosa in Mexico City and enters a local bar with white plastic

chairs and sizzling pans of deep-fried guaraches at the doorstep that often remains 83 Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) captures these processes of local-to-local displacement when Da Mayor complains to the Korean corner storeowners about the fact that they no longer carry “Miller High Life” beer. Da Mayor has been drinking this brand of beer for years. He does not easily adapt to the new coordinates imposed by the new owners of the store, who know little about the types of products their customers favor. 84 As I write this dissertation, McHale’s sadly closed down.

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invisible, even if it exists only around the corner from the tourist fortress. For the

defining co-existence of these different maps of global and local cultures and the

idiosyncratic character of these shared time-spaces in each city is what constitutes the

core of the varying interaction between sameness and difference negotiated by city

dwellers. Even if the very principles of their daily existences follow the dictates of the

global patterns of societal organization neoliberal capitalism imposes almost

everywhere, the constant deviation from robotic homogeneity city inhabitants perform

is not only a way-out of our “Brave Global World” but, fundamentally, the ultimate

proof that when we label our present era under the umbrella term of globalization we

are in various degrees neglecting to fully understand the defining processes of

interfacing that reshuffle the local, the national and the global. The issue, thus, is not

that global capitalism prefers homogeneity and that diversity and heterogeneity are

only acceptable as long as they generate profit but the realization that global

capitalism constantly negotiates “between homogeneity and difference at local and

global levels, a process that becomes dramatically visible in the changing cultural

geography of cities” (Shiel 13-4). Likewise, as Rick Roderick states, transnational

corporations—the supreme agents of Capital today—do not simply create a global

product that they deliver everywhere. On the contrary, they micro map the world into

consumer zones according to residual cultural factors—linguistic particularities, folk

traditions, religious dominants etc.—dominant cultural factors—TV ratings, home

video and DVD rentals, fashion and musical tastes etc.—and emergent cultural

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factors—Internet connection speeds, number of and use mobile phones etc (qtd. in

Dirlik 33).

When approaching Madrid, Hong Kong, Paris or any other global city,

contemporary films thus reorganize specific contingencies of the cityscape in

audiovisual and narrative terms in an attempt to pin down the nuances of this interplay

of multifarious forces, or, conversely, reduce their complexity to a list of salient,

globally readable, social and cultural staples. By choosing a series of films to diagnose

the varying interfaces between the global and the local within a variety of global

cityscapes, I intend to accomplish a dual purpose. First, I examine their diverse

degrees of engagement with the complex interactions between local markers of

identity and transnational economic and social formations. Second, I scrutinize the

mobilization of a variety of audiovisual strategies to account for the multi-layered

specificity that defines each of the discussed cityscapes and the defining centrality of

mental and physical character sickness that stands at the core of many of these

cinematic projects. In other words, like the very transnational corporations that dictate

the coordinates of the economic market today, this project attempts to think globally—

pointing at the dominant logics at work in a variety of cinematic endeavors and act

locally—through detailed textual analysis of each of the studied films.

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Affect Interrupted: Multi-speed Hong Kong, post-linguistic Taipei, the

Body and the Ephemeral

Chungking Express and Fallen Angels deliver a polyphonic and multi-speed

injection into contemporary Hong Kong.85 While mobilizing a variety of aural and

visual transcultural intertexts ranging from Chinese and Western film genres to a

heterogeneous roster of musical soundscapes, Wong Kar-Wai intervenes in the

materiality of the film frame to account for the encounters between city dwellers as

inserted within the 1990s historical juncture in the Asian megalopolis.86 These films

filter Hong Kong’s rapid-shifting and crammed spatial and temporal fabric via a series

of competing voices that project the dweller’s internal emotional struggles in the

interior and exterior loci of the city—most remarkably, bars, chain restaurants, fast

food joints and hotel rooms. In addition, Wong’s Hong Kong citizen reshuffles a

variety of objects of consumption either in an attempt to exchange them in order to

bridge the gap that separates her from the Other or she personifies them to make them

stand for the absent subject they long for. Hong Kong becomes a composite of

ephemeral intensities Wong’s characters experience as they cruise through the city, try

85 The first story in Fallen Angels was originally conceived as part of Chungking Express. Ultimately Wong decided to leave out of the film and use it as the springboard for Fallen Angels. In this sense, the latter may be understood as a continuation of Chungking Express. 86 In “A Life of Its Own: Musical Discourses in Wong Kar-Wai's Films,” Yeh Yueh-Yu utilizes the multinational and multigeneric character of the music Wong’s films to question the adequacy of the national cinema framework to account for the complexities of film style.

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to escape it, abandon it and return to it. Furthermore, by inscribing their subjectivities

into the external world through the diverse objects of consumption dwellers trade,

Wong manages to diagnose the multilingual and multicultural character of Hong

Kong—its placement as a nodal component of the worldwide grid of interconnected

spaces across borders—and draw the very particularity of its textual idiosyncrasy,

which in turn points to a multiplicity of co-existent cultures and economic forces.87

For as Achbar Abbas states in Hong Kong the “local is already a translation, it cannot

be separated from the question of cultural translation itself” (12).

Tsai’s Taipei narratives are, conversely, a succession of dead, uneventful

moments sprinkled with short, and often unsuccessful, instances of interpersonal

exchanges—in most cases non-linguistic. He repeatedly situates city dwellers within a

collection of barely discrete interior and exterior spaces where any form of

interpersonal communication has been left behind. His characters’ encounters with the

Other are the easy way out to satisfy one’s own physical drives or the potential spaces

to cancel out the individual’s isolated existence inside the cityscape. Invariably, in

Tsai’s world, characters turn towards their bodies as the only site where they can

shelter their emotive imbalance. In Rebels of the Neon God (1992), for example, Ah-

Tze enters a room barely furnished with a mattress, a TV and a poster, seats in bed, 87 In “Subjective Culture and History: The Ethnographic Cinema of Wong Kar-Wai,” Curtis Tsui affirms that multigeneric and multinational character of the Chungking Express soundtrack along with the multiple languages characters speak throughout the film—Hindi, Cantonese, Mandarin and English—provide the viewer with “a sonic tapestry evoking a polyglot culture that is very much the Crown Colony” (115).

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takes off his shirt, smells it, lights a cigarette and lies down in bed. The camera stays

with him, in a static long shot, as he masturbates upon hearing his brother making love

through the thin walls of his room. The core of Tsai’s exploration of the interactions

between the Taipei cityscape and its dwellers is significantly rooted in this

spontaneous—apparently anecdotal— smelling gesture of his character, framed within

the pervading duration of the long take. As Olivier Joyans remarks, in Tsai’s films we

see a “body that touches everything, is touched by everything”(70). Like Wong’s,

Tsai’s city dwellers remain perpetually in motion through the meanders of the city, in

permanent search for a space of satisfaction they invariably fail to grasp. However,

whereas Wong mobilizes a series of disconnected voiceovers to give access to his

characters’ personal intellectualizations of their urban malaise, Tsai chronicles instead

the “remnants of social relations” inside the cityscape (Chow, “Pain” 129). He refuses

to grant the spectator access to their interior lives and offers instead a collection of

gestures, movements and bodily exchanges that offer a temporary derailment from the

self-isolated existence his characters live. His camera then returns time after time to

the extended exploration of the solitary encounter between lone individuals and the

physical spaces of the city that envelops them. Tsai’s recurrent use of the establishing

shot and long take epitomizes his attempt to show the reality of his characters’ lives as

inserted in the spaces where they (co)-exist. He structures his films through the

shifting immediacy of a moment that extends through time and is only limited by the

very linearity of the film medium itself. His films may be conceptualized as a varying

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project to capture the immediacy of the individual’s isolation—the monad trapped in

her bodily intimacy inside the four walls of a room—as inserted within the concrete

Taipei monster.

Whereas Wong’s films perform a double operation of internalization—drawing

Hong Kong’s time-space through the mental landscapes of its inhabitants—and

externalization—featuring the objects of consumption the city provides as a catalyst of

interpersonal exchange given his character’s inability to directly engage with each

other, Tsai’s vacuum all intellectual access to his characters’ psyches and construct a

map of two bodies in permanent touch—that of the individual and that of the city

itself. His canvases feature a penetrable spectrum of human bodies the city attacks as

they circulate between public and private spaces negotiating the unbearable weight of

a dead time they cannot escape. In such scenarios, the body and its basic, non-

linguistic, functions—fornicating, eating, feeling pain, masturbating, inhaling and

exhaling—take center stage. As Rey Chow states, Tsai’s scenes “resemble those of a

sparsely decorated stage set on which it is human bodies (their basic physical needs,

automatized movements, and weird behaviors) rather than human minds that become

the primary sites of drama” (“Pain” 125). In traversing the anonymous space of the

city, Tsai’s monads bypass their human peers in their way to fulfill their bodily needs

and, only on occasion, they temporarily fix their drives on them in order to satisfy a

particular craving. However, lone forms of self-satisfaction take more time that any

inter-personal instance of communication (Biro 81).

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Ultimately, whereas Wong’s characters occasionally step out of the cities’

boundaries and heal their emotional sickness—e.g. Sato-san, the Japanese restaurant

owner in Fallen Angels or May in Chungking Express—Tsai’s fail to cancel out to

their enslavement to the city’s body, circulating around their quasi-anonymous

apartments in their futile efforts to come to terms with it. When they leave the city and

go elsewhere, such as Shiang-chyi in What Time is it There? (2001) traveling to Paris,

they only encounter the same coordinates of absent interpersonal affect that the

alienating nature of the overgrown Taipei brings invariably to the fore.

In addition, the representational strategies of both filmmakers bring to the fore

the consideration of the body as an active agent in the production of the city. They also

signal the inseparability of the time-space of the city and the bodies it contains, gives

birth to, shapes and releases. For, the city and the body produce one another. As

Elizabeth Grosz states, the city, as a site of cultural saturation, is “the place where the

body is representationally re-explored, transformed, contested, re-inscribed. In turn,

the body (as cultural product) transforms, re-inscribes the urban landscape according

to its changing (demographic, economic, and psychological) needs, extending the

limits of the city, of the suburban, even towards the countryside which borders it”

(301). The city is thus the space where the body is policed, holistically conceived for

social and economic purposes, and often made anonymous as a floating and

dispensable component of the city’s fabric that is instrumentalized to fulfill a

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particular function. At the same time, the human body itself produces the nuances of

the city and is fundamental structural principles.

Wong and Tsai’s cinematic efforts rescue the body and psyche of the dwellers

from this functional anonymity. They diagnose the city inhabitants’ ongoing

negotiation between the enveloping societal order and their drives, affects and

longings. They slice up the encounters between these human bodies and the cityscape

in spatial and temporal segments that both point to the necessarily fragmentary

character of the global city dweller’s experiencing of her surroundings and the

interwoven nature of the simultaneous spatialities and temporalities she must

continuously inhabit.

Even though Wong and Tsai have reached the status of international cinema

auteurs, often appreciated much more within the European and U.S. art house circuit

than in their countries of origin, their films are not necessarily consumed globally as

postmodern reified renderings of ethnic culture.88 According to Rey Chow, in the

present era, even when directors like Wong “try to communicate ‘literally’ by

invoking concrete objects, in a globalized cinematic context where audiences scan

spectacles without necessarily knowing anything about the historical specifics behind

them, the ‘metaphorical’ side of film tends to take over, translating or reducing even

the most local details into generalizable events” (“Sentimental Returns” 650). Film 88 Although Wong’s films typically sweep the Hong Kong film awards, his films are not very successful in the Hong Kong box-office. Tsai’s case is more extreme: his films are barely seen in Taiwan.

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spectators’ lack of knowledge in regard to the Hong Kong or Taipei cityscapes or,

more extensively, their ignorance of the history of a specific geopolitical area does not

preclude them from gaining access to the local via the cinematic nor does it

automatically entail the reduction of local markers to worldwide behavioral patterns or

socio-cultural formations. In addition, even if we accept Chow’s hypothesis, isn’t this

the manner in which film spectators have engaged with cinematic texts from the dawn

of cinema? Aren’t we patronizing their untrained eyes and ears by packaging their

potentially innumerable active engagements with film texts under the alibi of a

totalizing understanding of the present historical era as a scanning pandemonium of

too-many-texts the overwhelmed individual is unable to fully grasp? While,

undoubtedly strong parallels may be established between Hong Kong, Taipei and

other contemporary global cityscapes, and Wong and Tsai’s takes on the respective

cities they approach may potentially be displaced into other contexts, generalized and,

therefore, de-localized, it is perhaps misled to theorize a non-discrete global spectator

that, by her very being, automatically translates the local into the generalized or

metaphorical global. On the contrary, it is by emphasizing that spectators approach the

local-and-yet-global film text from their own embedded locality/globality how we

may be able to trace the coordinates of these routes of exchange.

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a. Wong’s Hong Kong

The cinematography and editing in Wong’s contemporary Hong King films

are both, a “blur”, as Gina Marchetti expresses, that renders “a vertiginous feeling of

spatial/temporal disorientation” (293).89 Wong’s segmentation of the frame in

multiple-speed planes of action, along with the narrative fragmentation, rapid editing

and aural and generic heterogeneity that structure his films are central to capture the

transcultural ephemeral nature of Hong Kong city life. What Wong aims at seizing is

not the totality of the mid 1990's Hong Kong real but the structural ephemerality that

the city imposes on its dwellers. In the processing of approaching this elusive

encounter between human psyches and the Hong Kong time-space, he delineates the

imbricated interplay between locality and globalism that crisscrosses Hong Kong

while delivering an aesthetic framework that consciously breaks down the reality he

approaches to account for its untotalizable qualities.

One of the two interlinked stories of Fallen Angels features the relationship

between a hitman and his female partner. She sets ups his killings by visiting the

locations where they will happen, draws a map of them and faxes it to him. They share

a shady apartment next to a train track in Hong Kong. However, they never coincide in

it. He settles in the apartment every time he flies to Hong Kong to carry on with one of

his murders and immediately leaves. Before his scheduled arrival or once he is gone,

she cleans up the apartment for him, vacuuming out all the personal traces he has left 89 David Bordwell prefers to call Wong’s style “an aesthetic of glimpse” (Planet 289).

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behind. In fact, the female partner does not discard the hitman’s garbage but studies it

thoroughly to map out his whereabouts in Hong Kong and figure out ways to

encounter him in person since she has developed feelings for him. Her efforts are to no

avail since ultimately they inhabit different time-spaces and their mismatch remains

unaltered. Whereas the female partner rents a room in Chungking mansions (a clearly

identifiable Hong Kong location), the fixed quarters of the hitman are never specified.

Cued by the female partner’s changing of the hour in the temporary apartment’s clock

just before his arrival, we may guess that he travels to Hong Kong from a neighboring

location in the Pacific Rim. One way or another, what the Hong Kong Wong depicts

from the beginning is a space of transience and continuous movement that prevents its

dwellers from achieving full simultaneity and reciprocity.

In the first half of the story, the hitman is set to exterminate a gang of South

Asian thugs. Wong approaches this narrative node by using a parallel montage, in

slow motion, alternating between the assassin and his female counterpart strolling

through the corridors of a hair salon—despite the fact that her visit happened before

his, as a part of the set-up for the killings. As the hitman draws his gun, Wong inserts

a shot of his partner that preserves the spatial continuity of the location but dislocates

the temporal linearity of the action. The spectator catches a glimpse of the female

partner’s back as she rotates her neck and glances behind her in one of the numerous

mirrors in the salon. It is as though she would look back to follow the hitman’s actions

with her eyes, projecting herself into the near future. Immediately after, the film cuts

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back to the hitman who completes his gun drawing, slaughters the South Asian gang

and walks away into the Hong Kong streets.

This scene dislocates the temporal causality of continuity and linear-based

narratives in three fundamental ways. First, it alternates between the two characters as

they walk through the hair salon by framing their movements identically and bridging

the temporal lapse between their actions with the continuous use of music throughout

the scene. In other words, past and present are conflated in alternation to undermine

linearity for the sake of an aesthetic of temporary simultaneity. As Larry Gross states,

the hitman and his partner’s quasi-spatial synchronicity “illustrates their proximity,

their desire and the impossibility of its fulfillment” (8). Second, he shreds to pieces

one of the key principles of analytical editing—a match on action—in order to

foreground the inadequacy of linearity to capture the ephemerality and multi-speed

driven character of the Hong Kong time-space. Third, it exposes the materiality of the

film image by the use of an extremely mobile camera and quick editing, post-

production moving and lighting effects and the ultimate opaqueness of the image itself

as the camera gets closer the action depicted.90 For Fallen Angel’s main concern is to

draw a map of an inter-individual affective mismatch as inserted within the Hong

Kong cityscape via a thorough exploration of different forms of an audio-visual

90 Wong’s aesthetic of the blur is especially evident in his depiction of the violent confrontation between the hitman and the South Asian thugs. As bullets fly, the camera struggles to find a focus, decomposing the action in a composite of colors that blend subjects and environment.

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fragmented imagery in tune with the atomizing effect of Hong Kong in its dwellers’

experiencing of interpersonal exchanges.

In the blatant realization that the emotional exchange with the Other is

incessantly bound to slip away within the contingent meanders of the city, Wong’s

Hong Kong dwellers are trapped in a multi-speed time-space of dislocated affect they

seldom manage to decipher. Wong constructs an “(anti) structure of feeling” that

permeates the characters’ negotiation of the time-spaces in which they live, rejecting

the suturing closure of the couple’s match for the sake of the elusiveness of desire and

reciprocal affection. His subjects are in incessant physical and emotional imbalance,

dragged by the contingent options—taken or never fulfilled— that the changing spaces

of the postmodern megalopolis offers. In other words, they are overwhelmed flaneurs

that can no longer establish a discrete differentiation between their observant gaze and

the world they decode as they attempt to map the city out. They are thus confronted

with their necessity of unthinking themselves beyond the immediacy of the moment—

Fallen Angels—, or they can refigure their desires in the non-materiality of an

imagined world that promises a better life—Chungking Express.

The 1997 handover of Hong Kong from Great Britain to China has been

critically discussed as the most influential historical event in relation to the emergence

of the first and second New Waves of Hong Kong Cinema. In Hong Kong: Culture

and Politics of Disappearance, Achbar Abbas conceptualizes Hong Kong as a space in

disappearance (1-26). The historical particularity of the handover relies on the fact

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that it had a definite date set into the future—July 1st 1997—defined more than ten

years in advance with the 1984 Sino-British joint declaration. For, Abbas,

consequently, life in Hong Kong in the 1980's and 1990's was mediated by the

fundamental anxiety of losing the living space, as known, once China’s geopolitical

control of the region would take place. In this context, Abbas performs an allegorical

reading of Wong’s films in relation to this socio-historical watershed. He then

proceeds to define the particularity of Hong Kong in terms of its transitioning from

being a colony to become a postcolonial state without an actual process of

decolonization. For Hong Kong stands in the late capitalist global market as one of the

trade centers where the spectacular economic imbalance between “First-world” and

“Third-world” countries fuse in the monstrous form of an over-grown megalopolis.

As Esther Yau points out, Hong Kong acts as a world-oriented, profit driven and time

competitive regional finance center that both “anticipates and registers the impact of

speed in the era of immediate global access” (3).

Anthony King has interestingly argued that colonial cities—such as Hong

Kong—“can be viewed as forerunners of what the contemporary capitalist world city

would eventually become”, allowing colonialism to make the leap to globalism (qtd.

in Abbas 3). However, such a leap cannot be understood as anything but a mutation

since the economic, technological and military imbalance between the old Empires—

or recent ones like the United States—and the former colonies not only has persisted

but also widened. Multinational capitalism is a new form of the old imperial

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domination disguised under the veneer of a reciprocal exchange—democratic if we

wish—that re-inscribes power in the seemingly innocuous violence of the McDonald’s

icon—a recurrent image in Wong’s narratives—or the billboard of the latest

Hollywood blockbuster or one of its ancillary products. However, the growing

extension of the transnational communication network, embodied by digital

technology, questions the lineal economy that informs King’s hypothesis. It is not that

colonial cities are “testing labs” for the late capitalist centers of power. On the

contrary, they stand as simultaneous “indigenized” versions of the parent network of

metropolis (not necessarily a country but often a set of interconnected multinationally

owned corporate headquarters) they ultimately depend on.

Allegory is indeed a powerful tool for the ideological and cultural decoding of

texts. However, the one-to-one allegory— e.g. the foregrounding of time in Wong’s

films directly addresses the issue of the 1997 handover—strikes one as a simplistic

rendering of Wong’s multi-layered narratives. It overlooks the importance of the two

fundamental organizing principles in his work: the problematic of inter-individual

affect and the fact that every image in Wong’s films foregrounds its own

fragmentariness (Gross 18). For, as Ismail Xavier points out in his brilliant discussion

of Brazilian cinema, Allegories of Underdevelopment: “There are cases in which the

juxtaposition of data and the fragmentation of the discourse do not allow for any

anchorage, and the film seems to go against the traditional vocation of allegory—to

march from fragmentation toward totality.” (Underdevelopment 16). In this scenario, a

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totalization of a national experience as Abbas attempts to perform appears insufficient.

If, however, we rethink allegory in terms of its capacity to account for the

fragmentation of experience in a shifting time-space where interpersonal affect is

endlessly on the verge of slipping way, we might be able to approach creatively the

complexities of Wong’s Hong Kong sullen ballads.

By foregrounding the opacity of the image, decomposing it in multiple planes,

and fragmenting his narratives, Wong exposes the limitations of the transparency and

seamlessness of the major part of today’s cinematic production to engage with the

historically specific real of the global era. It is not simply, though, that the changing,

elusive realities Wong’s offers are necessarily exemplary instances of the processes of

inter-individual exchange within the specific historical juncture of contemporary Hong

Kong. Only by fully scrutinizing Wong’s intervention in the very materiality of the

film text we are able to understand the fragmentary, ambiguous and contradictory

interaction between the personal and the hyperglobal scenario he is aiming to

capture.91

Consequently, as Xavier points out, an allegorical understanding of a film

cannot limit itself to the storytelling process but also has to pay attention to the very

nuances of its visual compositions, the interactions between sound and image as well 91 Abbas defines the common theme of Hong Kong cinema in the 1980's and 1990's as follows: “a problematic of disappearance, that is to say, a sense of the elusiveness, the slipperiness, the ambivalences of Hong Kong’s cultural space that some Hong Kong filmmakers have caught in their use of the film medium, in their explorations of history and memory, in their excavation of the evocative detail”(23).

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as the series of intertexts that speak differently through it since “reading films

allegorically is always a multi-focal cultural gesture, requiring the capacity to explore

what is suggested both by the horizontal succession of shots and by the vertical effects

of visual compositions or cultural codes embedded on its soundtrack” (“Historical

Allegory” 337). The parallel montage of the hitman/partner sequence becomes then a

scenario in which verticality and horizontality fuse to allegorize the individual’s

reality in a Hong Kong milieu that moves too fast—or too slow—to allow a

synchronous emotional match beyond the immediacy of a moment bound to slip away.

Speed, however, cannot be misread in terms of quickness. Wong’s films do not

simply register the immediacy of the continuous shifting reality that the global

communication networks create in their dislocation of time and spatial differences;

they also foreground the co-existence of multiple speeds to record the mismatched

affective malaise that identifies his characters. To do so, Wong redefines the depth-of-

field of the cinematic image not only in terms of spatiality but also time, showing

characters moving at different frame rates in the same shot. In other words, Wong’s

films radically disrupt the transparency of the cinematic image by constantly

experimenting with its materiality and dislocating the synchronicity of sound and

image tracks. What we encounter in his work is a drastic re-conceptualization of the

individual’s negotiation of her shifting affection in a given time-space where/when

contingency works adrift amidst the technological and consumption-driven

pandemonium of the cityscape. The 1997 Chinese takeover thus becomes, a subtext

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that, as Evans Chan affirms, is “more often an afterthought than an integral part of the

creative intent” (no pagination). Rather than allegorize an imminent historical change

in the socio-political and economic status of Hong Kong, what Chungking Express

and Fallen Angels do is capture its contemporaneity via the depiction of selected

fragments of the elusive affect its dwellers constantly negotiate. Wong’s complex

textualities stems from the infinite centers of culture, in Roland Barthes’ words,

transnational filmmakers have at their disposal. In turn, as Peter Brunette states,

Wong’s films have become “part of the vast, unanchored, global image repertoire that

can, like everything else, be freely borrowed from” (Brunette 60).92 By performing this

transcultural cinematic exploration of the historical juncture of the Asian capital,

Wong’s films render its time-space as a linearly dislocated cluster of affected loci

where reciprocity perishes in the dynamic of multicultural ephemerality with which

the city envelops its subjects, pointing also to other locations where similar (anti)

structures of feeling work similarly.

The spatial quasi co-existence via editing of the hitman and his female partner

stand as two stages of a temporal continuum that Wong’s intercutting attempts to

render as co-dependent. Moreover, the glimpse of spatial contiguity between hitman

and the female partner exposes the impossibility of the continuous existence of such 92 Wong himself declared that “now we have reached an age of recycling. Our generation gets to see lots of movies, and takes these movies to the heart; and we knock them down and start reconstructing. It is like going to the same supermarket where we are all faced with the same stock, we make an effort to cook up something new.” (“A Dialogue with Wong Kar-wai: Cutting between Time and two Cities,” 83).

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an affective match since their emotional asynchronicity throughout the narrative is

bound to remain intact once the film itself falls prey of the its own linear economy.

For, she wants him but she doesn’t want to get too close. Even though he confesses his

attraction to her in one of his multiple interior monologues, he ultimately seeks shelter

from an unambiguous commitment to her by mobilizing a social cliché, “partners

shouldn’t get emotionally involved with each other.” In turn, he displaces his sexual

drives into a chance encounter with a blonde-wigged ex-girlfriend that was-is-will-

not-be.93 What we experience in Fallen Angels is not the foregrounding of “time” per

se but of “affective time” (Deleuze, Cinema 2 37). The self is perpetually tied to the

contingent utterance of his/her desires inside a “present” that, by its passing, becomes

simultaneously past and, therefore, ephemeral. Affect exists within this unbound

dynamic: destined to fade away and concurrently persisting in a changing immediacy

that dislocates the linearity of time by foregrounding the different stages of the

temporal spectrum characters inhabit in trying to attach themselves to the Other.

In Chungking Express, when cop 663 goes to the Midnight Express to get his

customary dinner, May (the counter girl) delivers him a letter the cop’s girlfriend has

left for him. Knowing that his girlfriend’s letter is a goodbye, cop 663 states that he

93 The hitman’s blonde-haired ex-girlfriend clearly rhymes with the blonde in Chungking Express. She functions as another variation of the same visual motif but unlike in the latter film, she does not operate within the contours of the iconography of film noir. She seems to be, otherwise, beyond the capacity to recognize that her affect towards the hitman is bound to slip away, trapped in a memoir of a previous love affair with him in which both of them were unproblematically happy together.

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will read it after he finishes his coffee. In that precise moment, Wong cuts to a long

shot that places cop 663 and May in the background of the frame. While he drinks his

coffee in slow motion, May stares at him quasi-immobile, without being noticed by

the cop. She wears a white t-shirt with a highly noticeable blue heart on the front,

reflecting her unambiguous attraction to cop 663. The very fabric of her fashion

choice, thus, speaks her mind. This is a message that cop 663 has not learned how to

read yet. In the foreground, pedestrians cruise by at high speed, disappearing

instantaneously. After a few seconds, the crowd noise fades out. We are in complete

silence. Wong’s slow-motion rendering of cop 663’s drinking the coffee not only

reflects his present mental condition—if he complies with what he said he will need to

confront his sentimental split up right after finishing his coffee and he is attempting to

delay the imminence of that moment—but also filters the cityscape’s multi-layered

dynamic through both his mental condition and May’s.94 Wong breaks down the

unified surface of the image in multiple layers to account for the simultaneity of

diverse experiencings of its multi-focal spatiality by different characters. By slowing

down cop 663 and Faye’s movements and speeding up the movements of all others

that pass by them, the spectator temporarily inhabits both his and her mental spaces—

mulling about his lost girlfriend and being mesmerized by the figure of the man she

has fallen in love with, respectively. As Janice Tong states, in the film ”the materiality

94 This same technique is employed later on in the story when May fails to appear for her rendezvous with cop 663 in the California bar.

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of time is fractured visually, opening itself up to different temporal intensities in the

one shot” (51). For both May and cop 663 are, at this moment, in a isolated time-space

where all surrounding stimuli have ceased to appeal to their senses or, at least they

have become a blurred array of indistinguishable data—glimpses that are not fully

registered— that they process as a non-discrete whole.95 Instead of resorting to

superimpositions—like Greg Toland and Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (1941)—to

create multiple layers of action in depth, Wong and cinematographer Doyle recur to

the alteration of the standard twenty-four-frame speed convention of the cinematic

image to account for the multiple experiencings of interpersonal communication

within a single space inside Hong Kong multi-speed spatiality.96

The Cahiers du Cinema group hailed Rossellini’s rendering of the

conversation between an American soldier and an Italian peasant in the opening

episode of Paisa (1946) as a landmark of cinematic realism precisely because of the

Italian director’s refusal to cut, allowing their verbal exchange to unfold in time

without any intrusive interruptions. Wong’s manipulative deployment of speed effects

to encapsulate the exact state of cop 663 and May’s affective mismatch at this point of

the narrative is significantly aimed in the same direction: to occupy their respective

95 For Peter Brunette, this scene illustrates “the old theme of lonely individual isolation in the midst of the pulsating anonymous crowd” (52). 96 David Bordwell discusses in detail Andre Bazin hailed Welles and Toland’s style in Citizen Kane as an exemplifying instance of the indeclinable evolution of film language towards his ideal of realism. See David Bordwell’s On the History of Film Style.

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wordless experiencing of affect while accounting for their physical proximity and the

mental chasm that separates them.

Wong accomplishes the visualization of interpersonal desire in the only way

at-full-speed Hong Kong allows: extracting two of its dwellers from the faceless

masses that fill the cityscape’s streets and placing them at a different speed dimension

in relation to the rest of city dwellers. Italian neorealist filmmakers largely chose a

long-take, deep-focus visual aesthetics attempting to capture the daily reality before

their eyes. Encountering the shifting reality of post World War II Italy, they explored

new aesthetic forms to account for the changing social content of a new reality that

was “no longer represented or reproduced but ‘aimed at’. Instead of representing an

already deciphered real, neo-realism aimed at an always ambiguous, to be deciphered,

real (Deleuze, Cinema 2 1). If Rossellini framed the linguistic mismatch between

black American soldier and the Roman boy using as a backdrop the residues of

bombed buildings in Paisa, Wong situates cop 663 and May in the Midnight express,

a multinational fast food joints that offers its clients products ranging from chef

salad’s to fish and chips to local indigenous food. Not accidentally, a Coca-Cola

vending machine is sandwiched between cop 663 and May. On top of the machine, we

can see seven bottles of different sauces, seven diverse ways to spice up one’s meals

by choosing from a multiculinary spectrum of dining. If the Coca-Cola corporation

icon alludes to the limitless reach of this kind of economic enterprise, the collection of

bottles points to the multiethnic character of the services the Midnight Express offers

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to its customers. From chef salads—a standardized item for consumption anywhere—

to fish and chips to hamburgers to noodle dishes, the fast food joint showcases eating

choices designed to fulfill the different expectations of the at full-speed Hong Kong

dwellers and, simultaneously, calls attention to the indigenization of a variety of

culinary traditions by local owners to appeal to the world citizen. Utilizing the same

single-shot multi-speed technique in Fallen Angels, Wong accounts for the recurrent

motif of the affective mismatch in his films but also anchors the functioning of human

subjectivity inside an inescapable matrix of consumption that Hong Kong’s market

driven character epitomizes.97

In the second story in Fallen Angels, deaf-mute He Zhiwu meets Charlie by

chance; a young woman who is in shock after finding out that her boyfriend is getting

married to another woman—Blondie.98 He Zhiwu embarks with Charlie in her aimless

attempt to find the mysterious Blondie and falls in love with her in the process.

However, she continues to miss her lost boyfriend, ignoring him. Facing her lack of

reciprocity, he mulls about their relationship while sitting in a store with her. Wong

frames the scene in black & white, with He Zhiwu and Charlie sitting on stools in the 97 Achbar Abbas defines Hong Kong as a space in which everything is aimed at the economic sphere. In other words, Hong Kong is a one-dimensional development in a closed space (3). 98 He Zhiwu became deaf-mute at an early age by eating an outdated can of pineapple. This is a reference to one of the characters in Chungking Express, cop 223, who, dumped by his girlfriend, decides to collect pineapple cans with a certain expiration date. When the deadline he has set himself to get back together with his girlfriend arrives, he eats the thirty pineapple cans he has collected in one night and later vomits in a bar. The same actor, Takeshi Kaneshiro, plays both characters.

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foreground.99 He rubs his head in slow motion over her shoulder, as she looks away

from him, unaware of his emotional engagement. In the background, a continuous

stream of people enters and leaves the store with accelerated movements. We hear He

Zhiwu’s thoughts through an interior monologue:

On May 30th, 1995, I fell in love for the first time. It was raining

that night. I looked at her and had this feeling like I was a store…

and she was me. Without any warning, she suddenly enters the store.

I don’t know how long she’ll stay. The longer the better, of course.

The simultaneity of different speeds inside the same frame contrasts He

Zhiwu’s desire to retain her his physical attachment with her as inserted with the

frantic experiencing of consumption. By imagining himself to be a “store” and Charlie

as the consumer, he is placing himself in the space—consumption—she will re-visit

invariably as a Hong Kong dweller. Moreover, he is indeed expressing his wish to

become the very space—the store—Charlie, himself and the dozens of dwellers that

cruise by in the background are sharing at this particular time, without necessarily

engaging in a communicative exchange.

99 In a private conversation, cinematographer Christopher Doyle told me that the inclusion of black and white footage in Fallen Angels was the result of a mistake since six spoiled reels were accidentally used during the shooting of the film. As a result Wong and Doyle tried to make the use of black and white a recurrent visual motif a posteriori.

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As in the Midnight Express scene between cop 663 and May, depth-of-field

becomes the displaced scenario where “affective time” takes over the narrative. As

passing bodies move quickly in the background and He Zhiwu rubs his head over

Charlie’s shoulder in the forefront, his sentimental interior monologue is positioned in

stark contrast with the merciless consumer frenzy that his discursive mobilization of

love veils. As He Zhiwu’s voice fades out, the romantic continues to taint the scene

within the affective; the narrative only moves on once the song has finished. The

spectator is offered the pure spectacle of witnessing He Zhiwu’s futile bodily attempts

to grasp a physical contiguity with Charlie he is bound to lose. The frenzy through

which the anonymous bodies in the background move acts as a reminder of such an

impossibility. For, they come and go as the affective mismatch between Charlie and

He Zhiwu will. Only the alluring power of the soundtrack dupes us into the

momentary belief in the unchangeability of their attained reciprocity. In addition, He

Zhiwu’s aural equation of his own subjectivity with a store in conjunction with the

multi-speed, still camera and cut-free long take situates the conflicted negotiation of

interpersonal affect of Wong’s Hong Kong dwellers within a space where multiple

temporal economies contiguously circulate but never fully meet.

In the opening segment of Fallen Angels, Wong offers a complex rendering of

the co-existence in Hong Kong of the global and the local. We enter a world

permeated with technological intrusion, transnational identity and frantic movement.

Following the title screen, Wong shows the female partner as she walks along the

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empty hallways and steps onto several escalators.100 He frames her from behind, with

quick cuts, in slow motion, accompanied by electronic music that activates the

possible scenario of a music video aesthetic. As she gets to a building, the music fades

out. She takes a key from an opened hole in the cracked glass of one of the windows

and enters an apartment. Her cleaning is framed with the alien voices of pedestrians

walking down the streets, the recurrent sound and visual glimpses of bullet trains and

cars passing by, and the co-existence of Cantonese and English along with the sudden

appearance of the IBM icon in a TV set she has turned on. Doyle’s wide-angle lens

and handheld movements follow the female partner as she frenetically completes her

cleaning and gets ready to leave. As she approaches a window and closes it, the

camera pans to the right. Once again, the inevitable bullet train cruises over the left

side of the frame.

100 In Fallen Angels the characters’ walking routes are rendered as technologically channeled from the very beginning. However, it is not only that the mechanic passive riding of the escalator becomes the allegorical signifier of the subject’s lack of agency in the urban postmodern cityscape. Moreover, the penetration of technology in our daily lives has reached a point in which individual and environment suddenly become one—namely, a scenario in which the body is fused with the attaching bodies of technology and becomes networked in a panoptic fashion—cell phones might be the ultimate example of this tendency. Portable CD or MP3 players have been often demonized as an example of the monadic self-isolation in which the individual plunges herself in spite of her physical contiguity with the Other in the urban landscape. However, these devices can indeed act as a positive creative force since the playing of music can trigger the power of imagination. Music can function as an alternative world of desire in contrast to the negative reality that locks the individual in self-absorbed bleakness.

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The barely furnished apartment, situated in the top floor of a decaying

building, stands in clear contrast with the recurrent image of the hypermodern train

that constantly flashes the nearby space. One of the defining characteristics of the

global urban landscape is precisely the striking co-existence of technological newness

and the unfinished residues it has left behind. We are in front of the stark mismatch

between the promise of a better future that science provides with the continuous

technological advances it provides and the ruins of an old-fashioned order that have

not been effaced. The reiterative presence of the bullet trains throughout the film reach

a pinnacle when the female partner, being inside one of them, looks out the window to

catch a glimpse of the man she loves—the hitman—and fails to do so. Wong never

reveals to us the destination or origin of any of these trains. They simply cruise by

several narrative vignettes bearing inside them the longings and desires of millions of

other fallen angels the spectator never gets to know.

In the last scene of the film He Zhiwu and the hitman’s partner come together

in a bike ride home. As he drives the motorcycle and she leans her head on his

shoulder, her voice gives us a final thought: “I am about to leave, I ask him to take me

home. I haven’t ridden a bike for a long time nor I have been so close with a man for

ages. The road home isn’t long and I know I’ll be getting off soon. But, at this

moment, I’m feeling such a lovely warmth.” As her voice fades out and they exit a

tunnel, the camera tilts and leaves us with the blue coldness of the Hong Kong skyline.

Among the bleakness, alienation and the affective mismatches the global cityscape

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offers the dweller in every corner, nothing good may last more than a short bike ride

home. And, it is precisely by embracing the ephemeral nature of this “lovely warmth”

how one will manage to prevail or simply keep going in the midst of the swallowing

plasma of consumerist frenzy that populates every meander of the Asian city.

Like Fallen Angels, Chunking Express intertwines two stories that meet, miss

each other, converge and diverge at several points of the narrative.101 The first one is

centered on a cop—223—and a trench-coated blonde-wigged Chinese woman. In the

opening sequence, Wong follows her walking—that suddenly becomes his—through

the mazelike underworld of Chungking Mansions. Soon his non-diegetic voice

reminds the viewer of the elusiveness and ruling contingency through which

interpersonal relationships evolve: “Everyday we brush past so many other people.

People we may never meet or people who may become close friends.” The blonde

woman and cop 223 touch each other as they walk past the other; cop 223’s voice

continues: “This was the closest we ever got. Just 0.01 of a centimeter between us”,

her image freezes in the frame, “But fifty-seven hours later…I fell in love with this

woman.”102 Once again, in Wong’s world, present and future collapse in the perceptive

101 The two stories overlap in as much as we can catch a glimpse of the two main characters of the second story—May and cop 663—in passing through the meanders of the first story. In this respect, as Peter Brunette remarks, this points to the fact that the two stories are actually occurring simultaneously, not consecutively (49-50). 102 The opening scene of Chungking Express was shot using a step-printing technique and slow-shutter speed. This has become the staple critics and audiences alike identify with Wong’s visual style. As Stephen Teo acknowledges “Such a technique creates a distortion of movement, a sense of false seed, which paradoxically has the effect of

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reflection of one of Wong’s voices. cop 223’s interior monologue foreshadows his

rendezvous with the blonde woman that will take place later in the story and, at the

same time, anticipates the failure of the possible affective match we will witness.

The cop’s voice does not simply come, though, from a comfortable future of

certainty that reflects upon past events. On the contrary, it is imbued with the dynamic

of immediacy that permeates Wong’s narratives; that is, the tragic conviction that

despite the gap between the self and the Other, individuals lack control over their own

irrational affections and the unfulfilling realization of their self-isolation does nothing

but reinforce the desire to close again and again the gap that separates us from the

others. Like cop 223, dumped by his girlfriend May and persistently calling her to

negotiate a reconciliation that can never happen, cop 633, in the second story, having

been abandoned by his airhostess girlfriend, mournfully talks to the objects in his

apartment, trying to conjure her back by uttering the unbearable melancholy her

absence has caused him to suffer.

In addition, the extensive use of the wide-angle lens (especially in Fallen

Angels) creates an effect on distance-in-proximity (Rayns 13). By increasing the

distance between characters that are, otherwise, physically proximate, the camera

accomplishes to render the mismatch between their physical proximity and their non-

synchronized mental condition. As Peter Brunette states, “the distorting effect of the

dynamically heightening velocity” (62). For a thorough discussion of this technique see Janice Tong 's essay.

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wide-angle lens … adds a whole new charge to Wong’s visual expressivity,” (62)

making the faces and bodies of those who are close-and-yet-far-away to visually

embody the main motif of affective asynchronicity that structures Fallen Angels

Cop 633 visits Midnight Express every night to buy a chef’s salad for his

girlfriend.103 After she dumps him, he continues going to the food joint and ordering

the same dish. Still hopeful that she might come back if he persists to frame his life

within the coordinates on which their relationship was established when it was

successful. By being imbued in his loss, he fails to miss the constant signs of interest

that the outgoing May constantly sends him. May gains access to his apartment and

starts rearranging it at will and without his consent. However, cop 633 fails once more

to notice her intervention in his personal space and melancholically grieves over his

loneliness by establishing one-sided dialogues with the objects in his apartment. As

his tuna cans becomes sardine ones, his wining soap is replaced by a new one, her

girlfriend’s puppet is substituted for May’s, he misreads those modifications as

changes in the “apartment’s mood” instead of as traces of May’s intervention.

Eventually, one day they meet when he unexpectedly runs to his apartment in the

middle of the day having had the feeling that his ex-girlfriend was back. Instead, he

finds the apartment flooded. As he is cleaning, May shows up. They share for the first

time a contiguous private space. Cop 633 plays a CD for May, “California Dreamin’," 103 In the first story of Chungking Express, cop 223 also orders a chef salad while spending a night in a hotel room watching TV. The consumption of the same objects is one of Wong’s primary techniques to interlink the two stories in the film.

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that he claims it was his girlfriend’s favorite. However, May’s internal monologue

tells us the CD is in fact hers. Once again, cop 633 misreads May’s reshaping of his

apartment as the remains of his ex-girlfriend’s imprint in his life.

After a while, he gains interest in May and they set up a meeting in the

“California” bar in Hong Kong.104 She stands him up. Instead she leaves an envelope

for him, he only opens days later: she has written a boarding pass for him with a

specific date on it. However, the rain damages the boarding pass and he is unable to

read the written date. Later we find out through her interior monologue that May did

go to meet him but it was so cold and rainy that she decided to leave the bar and go to

the real California.

In the end of the story, cop 663 has become the new owner of the fast-food

“Midnight Express.” May comes back dressed as an airhostess. Realizing that his

boarding pass has expired, he asks her to write a new one. “Where to?” she asks;

“Whatever you want to take me,” he replies. The end.

Unlike in Fallen Angels, where characters are condemned to encounter full

reciprocity for a limited period of time, Chungking Express offers us the potential of

an emotional match in a dreamt promised land located somewhere else—namely,

California. It would be inexact, perhaps, to equate the reassuring California May has

embraced as her ideal living space with the United States California. California in the 104 Wong and Doyle utilize the multi-speed frame technique in two different scenes at the California bar. First, when cop 663 waits for May to show up for their date. Second, when May stops by at bar prior to visiting cop 663 at the Midnight Express.

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film stands as the ultimate signifier for that imagined elsewhere, a purer time-space of

achievable reciprocity in which affect may last. As Arjun Appadurai affirms in

Modernity at Large today “imagination” has become the … staging ground for action,

not only escape” (7). May imagined California as a “better somewhere else” while

sitting in its caging simulacrum—the bar in Hong Kong with the same name—and

left. This is the only legitimate move Wong’s character envision to overcome the

perpetual mismatch that the contingent meanders of the global megalopolis offers: to

go away, to escape the jailing identity that frames us in the abusive continuum of

frantic consumption and emotional discrepancy. Her willingness to rewrite the

boarding pass for cop 633 not only highlights her desire to take him with her but the

pervading continuity of a sharing feeling that Hong Kong invariably effaces in its

shifting multi-speed thickness. For Wong, imagination is indeed the subjective arena

of ultimate inter-individual communication. Will May and cop 663’s new achieved

reciprocity last? Chungking Express ends before an answer to such question is given.

Picturing the articulation of the self’s subjectivity into the objects of

consumption that surround individuals behind every corner of the global cityscape and

projecting a series of mismatched economies of affect into the bodies and psyches of

Hong Kong’s dwellers, Wong’s multi-speed canvases and polyphonic soundscapes

delineate the Asian city’s time-space in perpetual motion (Mazierska and Rascaroli).

Gina Marchetti states that:

In Chungking Express, Hong Kong serves as an image for

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contemplation, a stylish, cinematic commodity for consumption.

The film makes its surface visible; canted angles, step-printing,

slow motion, jump cuts, handheld camera movements, startling

ranges of under/overexposure, play with light and filters foreground

the technique involved in making the film. It is an object with a

surface like the tin of sardines it depicts. It circulates in global

markets, perhaps ‘speaking’ in unexpected ways like the crying

dish rag (296).

The film’s sleekness and chicness may indeed reflect the very hyper-

consumption dynamic that constitutes the core of Hong Kong’s textual fabric as a city.

However, under such penetrable surface, Wong’s Hong Kong is ultimately an

unfixable chronotope of unfulfilled interpersonal exchanges where the naturalized

presence of the IBM, United Airlines and McDonald’s logos, incessant bullet trains,

quasi-infinite escalators, fast-food joints and flop houses build up a series of

cartographic routes for the monad to escape her self-isolating cocoon and attempt to

communicate with the Other. In addition, the deployment of several filmic and

musical genres—most remarkably noir and melodrama—re-fabricate Hong Kong’s

multicultural and heterogeneous palimpsest in cinematic terms and situate Wong’s

treatment in the mid 1990s global cityscape within a dynamic of transnational

exchange that, while deeply rooted in the historical specificity of the Hong Kong’s

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textuality, points in as many multiple directions as the origins and destinations of its

ever-flowing inhabitants. Furthermore, the repeated appearance of corporate icons

does not simply point to a critique of American cultural imperialism but to the fact that

“these are quasi-universal signifiers … that have apparently broken free from their

original American signifieds, though the economic connection always remains in force

at some level, hidden under the flashy, ‘innocent’ surface” (Brunette 55-56).

Naturalized as ubiquitous components of the global cityscape in Hong Kong and

elsewhere, these transnational markers silently signal, whether we like it or not, a

common ground in negotiating the contours of the global city that is arguably

universal. One of the keys to understand the wide translatability of Wong’s Hong

Kong as an exemplifying instance of the contemporary global today lies, perhaps, in

the filmmaker’s ability to mobilize the recognizibility of these global markers in direct

interaction with more autochthonous cultural practices and social formations. This is

precisely why Wong chooses as the two defining spaces of Hong Kong’s heterotopic

character the jungle of Chungking Mansions—a multicultural, “global village

resounding with exotic sounds and languages” (Teo 53), and—the Midnight Express

food stall— an international fast food joint that is opened night and day, ready for the

quick dispatching of the numerous customers that cruise by, consume and continue

moving across the streets of city.

The film’s worldwide popularity suggests that audiences who have never been

to Hong Kong can legitimately view its play with space and time as an inseparable

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element of Wong’s post-modern style” (Teo 54). Or, at least, those global spectators

who lack the specific knowledge to decode Wong’s cinematic remapping of the 1990s

real Hong Kong, may re-map Hong Kong according to the specifics of the global

cities they intimately know and establish a conceptual and affective link between

Wong’s Hong Kong and their own daily experiencing of city life. In addition, Wong’s

material depiction of Hong Kong allows the spectator, as Henri Lefebvre hypothesizes

in a different context, to rediscover time, and, by doing so, offering us a tempo-

topographic map of the interpersonal urban malaise that prevents individuals from

crossing the small physical gap that separates them on daily basis (Production 94).

The constant foregrounding of expiration dates and clocks in partnership with the very

visualization of co-existent and differing experiencings of time via the alteration of

film speed undo the very vanishing of time inside the specialized instruments of

measurement—i.e. calendars, and clocks—in modern societies while re-inventing it in

cinematic terms. In his narratives, time is mindfully re-imagined and traceable,

reshuffled through his characters’ attempts to master Hong Kong’s space in order to

cancel out their affective void. Conversely, Tsai’s Taipei leaves no room for the

contemplation of such a possibility. It weighs down its inhabitants’ bodies, physically

assaulting them and incessantly preventing their longing for a reciprocal encounter

with the Other.

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b. Tsai Ming-Liang’s Taipei

In the closing scene of Tsai’s What Time is it There?, the dead father—who

also plays the father role in The River (1997) and Rebels of the Neon God—reappears

unexpectedly in the empty streets of Paris. This narrative move stands as an

unprecedented gesture in Tsai’s filmmaking. For Tsai’s project, based to a great extent

in leaving any artificial sign out of his narratives and the persistent attempt to “show

reality”, resorts, suddenly, into the supernatural— a dead Taiwanese man appears

alive in the other side of the world. The ghostly figure of the father embodies the

contingent law of affective (dis)encounters that shapes the story. Whereas the

individuals’ approaching of the supernatural as a solution for their respective woes—

the mother trying to use spiritual healers to bring back her husband in What Time is it

There? or Hsiao-Kang visiting healing temples in The River— repeatedly figures in

Tsai’s works a series of vacuous attempts to come to terms with the unavoidable

burden of isolation, here it is uncharacteristically offered as one of the several

scenarios in which the monad adrift exists. Shiang-chyi sleeps in a bench near the

Louvre museum in Paris after her anti-climatic failure to engage sexually with her

female Hong-Kong acquaintance, and her luggage floats in a fountain, lost in its quiet

waters. The dead father appears, takes her luggage out of the water, and then throws it

back in immediately. He observes her in silence as she sleeps, turns around and walks

away.

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Prior to The Wayward Cloud (2005), in Tsai’s narratives, characters intersect

but they never truly interact. As in most of Wong’s works, the possibility of successful

affect is invariably interrupted. As a result, they turn toward themselves in a final cry

of desperation that has left behind the possibility of encountering a reciprocal affective

match. In the concluding scene of Vive L’Amour (1994), May Lin, the female broker,

walks away from the city into a desolate construction field and sits in the empty stands

of a stadium, crying alone. She lights a cigarette, and resumes her crying as the camera

lingers in her helplessness. Ultimately, her walking away from the city to a deserted

field becomes a desperate attempt to escape the claustrophobic space that entraps her.

Throughout the film, the only spaces she inhabits are the empty apartments she

attempts to sell or rent unsuccessfully and occasionally uses to fornicate with

acquaintances. When deciding to cry out the bleakness of her desperate isolation, she

aims at escaping from the constructed city that shapes her alienation, trying to find a

space the devouring megalopolis has not swallowed yet. However, the traces of the

construction work that Tsai shows in the background of her stroll act as ominous

reminders that this space is about to be transformed into a compartmentalized section

of the city—namely, a trap that limits the possibility of the individual’s self-expression

through its numbing effect. Furthermore, as a real state agent, she may indeed

contribute to the jailing of many others who—like her—will feel trapped inside the

impersonal space of the mass-produced apartment.

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The mediating power of the apartment-niche is also the defining aspect of the

Taipei Edward Yang draws in Yi Yi (1999). The city is figured as a space of refracted

surfaces that block time after time our direct access to the human bodies it envelopes,

preventing the spectator from gaining access to the individuals’ interior condition as

articulated through their facial expressions. Privileging sites of encounter placed in the

corner of two meeting roads—coffee shops, highway underpasses— Yang often places

his camera outside a framing glass that contains his characters’ interactions,

punctuating their exchanges with the passing of circulating cars in constant motion

through Taipei’s network of freeways.105 Alternatively, when addressing N.J.’s family

troubles, the camera remains outside their balcony, statically recording the break down

into tears of his wife as a light goes off inside the apartment and her body becomes

invisible, while the reflected images of cars cruise by the surface of the windows that

frame her inside her household. At the same time, the neighbors next door engage in a

shouting match that presents us with another version of the interpersonal malaise that

Yang records as contained within the space of the anonymous and serialized Taipei

apartment building.

The bodies inside the cars and apartment-niches that remain unexplored in the

invisible outskirts of the frame stand as anonymous alter egos of the characters Yang 105 As in Wong’s Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, the presence of US culture exists through the serialized presence of chain stores such as McDonald’s and New York Bagels in Yi Yi. Edward Yang refuses to vilify them but simply records their existence as mediating spaces through which the Taipei inhabitant’s subjectivity functions.

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has chosen to study in depth. Even when these characters wish to escape the

enveloping city—like N.J. does, isolating himself in the car with a pair of headphones

after a frustrating business meeting—Taipei ultimately proofs inescapable, framing the

human subject through the reflections of countless buildings in the car’s window.

These masses of concrete, glass and metal are indeed the anonymous backdrop for the

featured characters’ experiencing of Taipei. Yang’s cityscape is thus a multi-layered

time-space that individualizes the struggles of a particular family to exemplify the

troubles of many others since the apartment windows reflect the cars passing by, and,

in turn, the in-motion car’s windows reflect the exterior of the buildings they bypass,

pointing continuously elsewhere. The only way out of this inability to bridge the

communicative gap with the Other is to escape elsewhere temporally—e.g. N.J. and

his former lover re-living their nostalgic love story—, spatially—Japan, where the two

ex-lovers stroll down a park collecting the memories of their past affair or where N.J.

shares a few moments of friendship with the visionary Japanese businessman Ato—or

psychologically—each member of the family confesses their troubles to the terminally

ill mother.106

Like the Taipei in Yi Yi, Tsai’s What Time is it There? focuses on the

individual struggle of one of its many dwellers—Hsiao-Kang—while recording the 106 Yang frames the character’s confession to the ill grandmother in static medium close-ups, with no cuts, maintaining the body of the old woman off-screen. They are not, therefore, exchanges but monologic discourses that are not supposed to elicit a response. Exceptionally, a true exchange occurs after the grandmother dies. Her spirit visits her granddaughter and comforts her.

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unperturbed and unstoppable dynamic of reflected movement-on-surfaces that

surrounds the Taipei dweller. In a desperate attempt to find ways to express his

attraction for Shiang-chyi after she has gone to Paris, Hsiao-Kang changes the time of

all the watches he sells to Paris time. He goes even further: armed with an antenna, he

steps onto the roof a high building and changes the time in the gigantic clock that

adorns it. Tsai frames Hsiao-Kang’s dramatic act in a long overhead shot that shows

cars and passersby circulating at ground level, reflected in the huge glass façade of the

building. The futility of Hsiao-Kang’s efforts to maintain a connection with the distant

body of the woman he loves contrasts with the way in which he mechanically engages

in an act of fornication with another Taipei dweller (a woman who seeks refuge from

the rain) in his car. Likewise, Shiang-chyi’s attempts to find physical reciprocity with

her Hong Kong female acquaintance in Paris render ultimately frustration and

increased self-isolation in a time-space, that of the European megalopolis, she does not

know how to negotiate. Both Yi Yi and What Time is it There?’s Taipei are cityscapes

of utter physicality and unfulfilled reciprocity where the body of the city and those of

its dwellers remain in permanent contact, and yet, feature affectively isolated

individuals who do not find neither another human body or a city space where

reciprocity can be fully achieved.

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Tsai’s The River records Hsiao-Kang and his father’s mapping of Taipei in

their attempts to find a cure of the son’s unbearable neck pain.107 Unable to succeed in

their enterprise, they check in a hotel and momentarily seem to follow different paths.

However, they both end in the same gay bathhouse. In the barely lit environment of

the bathhouse, Hsiao-Kang enters a room and engages in a sexual exchange with an

anonymous man who turns out to be his father. As they return to the hotel where they

share a room and a bed, the father slaps Hsiao-Kang as a punishing gesture but,

otherwise, they both remain silent about their encounter. The next morning, Hsiao-

Kang gets up and exits to the balcony of his hotel room. He then proceeds to walk

back and forth from side to side of the reduced space of the balcony, caged in the

grotesque fiasco of his body, barely able to bear the burden of the mysterious neck

pain that cannot be healed.108 Furthermore, as the story progresses Hsiao-Kang‘s social

alterity—his gayness—becomes visible and points to the increased sense of isolation

that dominates his miserable life. Not accidentally, in the closing shot of the film, Tsai

107 Kang-Sheng gets his neck pain after he jumps in the river working as a film extra. 108The narrative of The River creates the expectation of Kang’s suicide. As the hotel room is framed with establishing shot, we see father and son sleeping together in bed. Kang’s father wakes up, calls the healer, and, after knowing that they must go back to Taipei to visit a doctor—a move that the narrative has already rendered hopeless—he walks out to buy breakfast. The camera stays with Kang as he slowly gets up, opens the balcony’s door and walks outside. The spectator feels the incurability of his illness and is prompted to desire Kang’s liberation of his psychic desperation by jumping off the balcony. Tsai, though, once again denies his narrative a dramatic closure. We are left, instead, with Kang’s senseless, desperate strolling through the diminutive surface of the balcony. This image encapsulates the monad’s self-entrapment in a world where the bridging of the communicative gap with the Other is rarely accomplished.

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frames him walking aimlessly in an extremely reduced space, pointing to the fact that

he does not know what to do or where to go in order to escape the lack of mental and

physical reciprocity that governs his life.

The dead father’s observation of the sleeping woman in What Time is it

There? becomes particularly significant in this context since he aims to meet the Other

although his physical alterity—his ghostness—prevents him from doing so.

Therefore, he ultimately fails to accomplish his goal and leaves. In this sense, this

glimpse of communicative hope rhymes with the final gesture of reciprocity of the

upstairs neighbor to the female downstairs in The Hole (1999). The two of them

finally meet, indeed. However, the mutual acknowledgement of the other only occurs

when their death is figured as inevitable. Perhaps, The Wayward Cloud offers a slight

departure from Tsai obsession with monadic isolation.109 For the first time in his body

of works, the narrative dwells on a series of reciprocal exchanges between the main

male and female characters in ways that signal the possibility of a fully involved

reciprocity between the two. However, although arguably in the end they attain a

space of reciprocal affection through oral sex, their exchange occurs in the midst of a

porn film shoot in which the female lead lies unconscious as Hsiao-Kang penetrates

her while Shiang-chyi observes their intercourse from a barred window. After 109 It is important to remark here that The Wayward Cloud is a direct continuation of the story started in What Time is it There? In fact, Tsai had already continued the story with his short film The Skywalk is Gone (2002). In this last film, Shiang-chyi came back from Paris looking for the street vendor, Hsiao-Kang. She fails to find him since the skywalk where he used to be everyday has disappeared.

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observing the porn shoot for a few minutes, she aurally starts engaging with Hsiao-

Kang in a sexual fashion, moaning in a crescendo, as he continues to penetrate his

porn co-lead. In a final gesture of “reciprocity”, he sticks his penis inside her mouth

and comes. As Hsiao-Kang maintains his penis inside her mouth, a tear slowly

descends down her cheek. Is this tear a physical manifestation of the fact that she can

barely breath, having Hsiao-Kang’s penis inside her mouth? Is she completely

disillusioned about him because now she has realized that he only wanted her as a

means to fulfill his sexual drives? Or, is this a tear of happiness, that is, a physical

manifestation of their achieved full reciprocity, one that may lead into a long-lasting

affective interpersonal relationship? One way or another, their reciprocal fulfillment

remains confined within the boundaries of the physical unless filtered through the

grotesquely excessive and colorful dream world of the musical numbers that pepper

the narrative. This is perhaps why the successful exchange between the deceased

grandmother (in her ghostly persona) and the granddaughter remains the most

powerful instance of a communicative exchange in Yi Yi and links it to the presence of

the supernatural in Tsai’s work. It is only through the peacefulness of the after death

when a gesture of reciprocity becomes possible. Otherwise, Taipei’s refracted

surfaces, caging apartment buildings and fast-moving freeways block individuals from

one another.

Tsai argues that “in relationships with other people we all know that there is

always something artificial. People often wear masks, but what I want to show is the

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genuine side of individuals, their intimate selves. That’s why I often choose the

moments when my characters are alone, because the way they behave in relation to

others is often influenced by politeness, and things which I don’t feel are true” (qtd. in

Rehm 100). It is in these moments of utter self-isolation when Tsai’s camera finds its

way “under their skin” of his characters, framing them as inserted in the space in

which they belong. In Tsai’s world, characters emotions do not typically exist in the

dramatic gesture of the close-up or the seamless invisibility of the conventional

shot/reverse shot structure. Likewise, his stories are not anchored in the rhetorical

move of the establishing shot that identifies a certain scenario through which the

characters would move, interact and then zooms in to come to a resolution of a

specific conflict. On the contrary, scenario and characters, the city and its dwellers, are

components of a continuum that encompasses as well the time of their existences.

Time is not simply spatialized in the gloomy cage of the monad’s apartment and, per

extension, in the uneven technological pandemonium of the late capitalist metropolis.

Time is present as the driving axis of his narratives. The spectator is faced with the

very immediacy the character lives, in the poetic statism of a long take that could last

until the character dies since Tsai’s project is to “move closer to the center of that

private self” (qtd. in Rehm 97). This is a goal, he claims, he has failed to fully

accomplish so far. In fact, this unfinished attempt to capture the true self of his

characters clashes with the elusiveness of the universes he draws. For the filmmaker

can only plant his camera in a certain space, roll the film and wait for events to

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happen, for things to constantly change, for the unexpected nature of the

uncontrollable reality characters encounter to unravel in its defining imprecision. In

Tsai’s world the dichotomy inside/outside is rendered meaningless; the aesthetic

gesture of zooming in/out becomes—both technically and metaphorically—unreal.

The surgical character of continuity editing patterns is rendered insufficient.

Moreover, the structural absence of the latter in Tsai’s films marks it as a duping

mechanism that leaves out precisely what Tsai aims to capture as the kernel of his

reality. Those moments in which characters, left out in isolation, can be true to

themselves and especially to their bodies.

Unlike Wong Kar-Wai’s narratives, in which characters confront the

awareness of the fading immediacy of their sharing through the deployment of interior

monologues, Tsai’s follow their characters’ futile attempts to communicate with the

contiguous Other into the non-verbal loneliness of the bedroom space or the deserted

landscape. They never articulate their anguish verbally. In What Time is it There?, the

mother, after failing bring back the spirit of her husband repeatedly, masturbates in her

bedroom only to end up crying, staring at the empty space he has left and which will

never be refilled. Likewise, in Rebels of the Neon God, after Kang observes from a

hotel room how his plans to avenge Ah-Tze’s attack on her father’s taxi have

succeeded, he then jumps on the bed in joy until he hits the ceiling and sits down

mournfully, not knowing what to do next. Or, in Vive L’Amour, Hsiao-kang, after

masturbating under the bed while the real estate agent and the street peddler make

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love, he crawls in bed after she has left and kisses the peddler, only to face the fact

that the Other does not desire his body, and leaves.

Tsai’s narratives highlight the contradiction between the horizontal mobility of

his characters within the limits of the cityscape—the teenagers riding their

motorcycles in Rebels of the Neon God, the real state agent driving from location to

location in Vive L’Amour or Hsiao-Kang and his father driving around Taipei to cure

the son’s neck pain in The River— and the isolating verticality of their leaking

apartments. For instance, in Rebels of the Neon God, every time it rains, Ah-Tze’s

apartment is permanently flooded; or in The River, each attempt to stop the leaking

water from the upstairs’ apartment is rendered fruitless until the very end of the story

when the spectator has been reassured that Hsiao-Kang’s pain will likely remain

incurable.110 The hole that connects the apartments of the two main leads in The Hole

epitomizes literally and metaphorically Tsai’s leaking leit-motif and, at the same time,

stands “for the immense void surrounding his protagonists, the bleak fulcrum of the

aimless rat race that defines the entire urban landscape; the ruthless order of modern

110 In The Wayward Cloud, water is a central motif as well. However, this time Taipei is undergoing a drought. People treat water like a precious token. Watermelons have become its day-to-day substitute. The full implications of this radical shift in the representational role of water in Tsai’s latest film remain to be explored. As a working hypothesis I would argue that whereas in previous films water seemed to be an unstoppable force of nature that managed to overcome the isolating character of apartment buildings and, therefore, potentially act as a conduit to link individuals (especially in The Hole), in his latest effort it performs a similar function, but, precisely because of its scarcity. The possession of water itself is what brings Hsiao-Kang and Shiang-chyi together after their respective existences have gone separate.

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life and endured condition of existence … the hole represents emptiness and absence,

that peculiar and elusive liberty that renders everything volatile and fugitive, bereft of

any substance” (Biro 79).

Seven days before the millennium, Taipei has been hit by a mysterious

epidemic that threatens the life of every individual. The government to cut the water

supply in certain areas to avoid widespread contagion. The Hole opens with a black

screen featuring a polyphony of voices that juxtaposes the government official

discourse on the epidemic with the locals’ helplessness upon the elusiveness of the

mysterious “Taiwan virus” that threatens their lives. When prompted by state officials

to leave their households—since the water supply is going to be cut and they won’t be

able to survive if they stay— a series of voices express their desperation and

unwillingness to move. They have lived all their lives in the same place and they

cannot understand or imagine being elsewhere. This is the universe the film depicts:

the ultimate collapse of an individual, who, desperate to retain her known space of

security, stubbornly ignores the irreversible danger and stays where she has always

belonged.

Facing this gloomy scenario, two tenants, a woman and her male neighbor

upstairs, choose to remain where they live, as the rain persists and a bad plumbing job

leaves a hole in the upstairs living room, connecting the two apartments. As the water

keeps leaking from upstairs and the constant sound of the rain frames the whole

narrative, the woman’s apartment begins to fall apart; the water takes over her space

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by stripping off the walls’ covers and winning the ceiling. As the symptoms of the

millennium virus start affecting her body, she fails to acknowledge the blunt reality of

such a condition and chooses to remain in isolation inside the four walls of her

apartment. Meanwhile, the male neighbor continues his daily routine—smoking

constantly, drinking innumerable cans of beers, opening his little shop in a deserted

market—as though his fate would be sealed and he could do nothing to reverse the

unavoidable death that his decision to remain in the apartment entails.

Through the connecting hole, suddenly, their lives become potentially

interwoven. This communicating hole between the two apartments does not function

as a fracture in the alienating materiality of the apartment complex that might channel

reciprocity between two isolated neighbors. Conversely, it activates a voyeuristic drive

in the man that she instantaneously reads as a threat to her intimacy, prompting her to

close the hole time after time. However, all her attempts are futile. Either he re-opens

the hole driven by his voyeuristic interest or the leaking water—that eventually floods

her apartment—denies her wish to regain intimacy. In the end, when he realizes that

the “Taiwan virus” has infected her, he encounters the desperation triggered by the

realization that soon he will stand in complete loneliness and bursts out in tears,

breaking the aseptic lack of emotion that permeates his actions throughout the

narrative. For the first time he realizes that his monadic, self-isolating, existence is

inscribed in the relational. For only the presence of the Other establishes a human

being as such. In a final dramatic gesture, he extends his hand down to her apartment

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to offer her a glass of water as he hears her crawling—the unmistakable symptom of

the virus. She drinks the water and looks up, seeing him as a human being for the first

time. He takes the glass of water and offers her his hand once more, lifting her out of

her flooded apartment. The gap between the two has been canceled. However, he has

only been able to relate to her once he has realized that her condition is irreversible.

By taking her hand, he also seals his imminent death, since, by touching her, the life-

ending virus will infect him. Tsai frames this scene with a single establishing shot set

of her living room. The neighbor’s hand enters the upper part of the frame from the off

screen space as it reaches for her. Significantly enough, when his hand lifts her over to

his apartment, Tsai’s camera remains static as she disappears through the upper limit

of the frame. Their final sharing occurs outside the bleak space of isolation Tsai’s

mise-en-scene privileges throughout The Hole.111

The Hole also gives a vertical dimension to the space of the living room, one of

Tsai’s recurrent motifs. In the rest of his films, the living room functions as the

transitional space where the members of the family coincide, without interacting, and

proceed to fulfill the rituals that define them within the social realm—eating, watching

TV. It acts as the center of the apartment that leads into different bedrooms where

characters, completely freed of their social masks, can relate to the physicality of their

own bodies without any inhibition. Moreover, it repeatedly acts as the on-focus in-

111 Several interpolated musical numbers stop the narrative flow throughout the film and reshape the corridors and elevators of the apartment building as spaces of fantasy.

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frame space that stays in the fore and opens the variability of affections that the out-of-

focus and/or out-of-frame bedrooms hide. The father, mother and son’s repeated and

non-communicative appearances in the family’s living-room in The River build a

space in which the familial household has turned into a material space of

individualized fulfillment of the most basic physical needs. Tsai’s characters lack the

capacity to communicate their inner lives to Others. The familial household becomes

then, as Rey Chow affirms, “a key archeological find, its members being the walking

exhibits of a collective order that has survived in the form of ruins… In their

desolation, these ruins constitute the most important elements of Tsai's production of a

discursivity in which the social becomes part of the cinematic” (“Pain” 79). In The

Hole, however, the living room is given a vertical dimension that confers it the

intimate bodily quality its established horizontality lacks. Through the hole, the male

character is now able to enter the private space of his neighbor and observe her

intimate self. The living room, consequently, is pictured as a site of pleasure and

escapism—for the individual living alone as opposed to the family member— from

the bleak reality that surrounds the self. The communicative potentiality of the hole

threatens the promise of intimacy and physical relief/ Consequently, instead of being

seen as a relational space by the two neighbors, becomes, on the contrary, the fighting

arena of their disparate emotive responses to the Other, until unlikely reciprocity

comes to the fore in the end of the film.

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The spatial distancing from Taipei caused by the female protagonist trip to

Paris in What Time is it There? allows Tsai to endow the self-isolating affective

mismatch of the urban monad with a global dimension. The film re-evaluates the

isolating character of Tsai’s recurrent Taipei scenario to reinforce the global nature of

the individual’s communicative collapse when faced with the Other. Escapism, such a

vacation in Paris, is rendered as an inane spatial move that remains inside the vortex of

affective mismatches the individual feels inside the urban space. Paris and Taipei are

depicted as two geographically distant and temporally disjointed places that trigger

analogous behavioral patterns and failures within the arena of interpersonal

communication. Hsiao-kang and the female protagonist, as physically far as ever, are

in actuality in the Other’s place as much as in their own. Although both cities are

marked by their own culturally and historically specific referents, in both cities the

individual remains trapped in a similar affective deadlock. Global access and mobility

becomes, consequently, a mechanism that reiterates the affective loop of isolation

inside which human beings are trapped.

In the last scene of What Time is it There? the three defining spatial

movements of Tsai’s narratives meet in the temporal dynamic of the establishing

shot/long take. As, the female protagonist’s luggage moves adrift through water, the

dead father walks away from the camera while a wheel circles in the background,

looping indefinitely. Affection is framed as the contingent—devoid of agency—

defining characteristic of the self-isolated individual unmediated by the impossible

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words that remain inside the monad’s consciousness. The potentially healing utterance

of the linguistic exchange never occurs. Their emotional gap is never bridged. Instead

the individual walks away in solitude only to face the circular invariability that will

bring back the contingent opportunity to communicate with the Other. This path will

rarely be taken. Only after death, like the dead eyes of the ghostly figure of the father

in What Time is it Over There?, can the individual observe and fully comprehend the

Other’s isolating burden.

In “Bringing in the Rain,” Jean-Pierre Rehm invokes Walter Benjamin’s

concept of “cinema as a place of narration” to frame Tsai Ming-Liang’s project within

the realm of the modern. According to Benjamin, the modern narration requires “ a

new precision and a new imprecision joined together in a single narrative jargon” (qtd.

in Rehm 9), Rehm then, proceeds to locate Tsai’s “modern precision/imprecision

dynamic” in his abandonment of the dramatic narrative style for the sake of the direct

presentation of the opaqueness of the actor’s bodies; the quasi silent record of their

intimate everydayness in the immediacy of the moment stripped off the dramatic

surplus of the conventional narrative. Or in Tsai’s own words, exploring the defining

incongruity between the attempt to get “under the skin” of his actors/characters in

order to show reality and the failure to accomplish such ambition (Rehm 83). Tsai’s

films aim to show reality. At the same time, his project targets precisely the

redefinition of the work of art and, one dares to say, its ultimate aesthetic death. André

Bazin’s concept of “pure cinema”—“No more actors, no more story, no more sets,

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which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema”

(Bazin 60)—provides a stimulating framework to understand Tsai’s films. His

compromise to show reality is not only rooted in the use of (mostly) non-professional

actors—almost the same group in all his films—, the practical lack of story in his

narratives or the invariable rejection of the fabricated studio to shoot but also—and

fundamentally—in the casual intimate gesture that the individual only carries out

when alone, fearless to be who she truly is. At times, one feels Tsai’s actors forget

the camera is rolling in front of them and act out their own true selves. Here is

precisely where reality dwells: inside the changing subjectivity of the individual

unafraid to act out the immediacy of the self and touch—be touched—by the world

around her. This is an experience that Tsai’s films challenge the spectator to explore,

bodily and relentlessly.

The relationship between these two bodies—that of the city and that of the

dweller—and the bodily and psychological crises this relationship triggers is also a

central concern of a wide variety of American films approaching the contemporary

milieu from a wide spectrum of representational and ideological positions. I will focus

on two supposedly antagonistic approaches to the U.S. society’s textual configuration:

the spectacular action-packed Hollywood disaster blockbuster and the politically

engaged critical film.112 Whereas the Hollywood disaster blockbuster reduces the

112 Here I shy away from simply making a distinction between Hollywood and independent American film. Such a distinction strikes one as rather simplistic. It is

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world to “America” and a series of cliché landmarks of other cultural spaces, a number

of critical filmmakers launch a full-frontal attack on the corporate and suburban-

mediated homogeneity that surrounds the human psyche in anywhere-America. These

films—Fight Club; In the Company of Men (1997); Safe; Se7en (1997)— often resort

to the partial erasure of these salient landmarks and the subsequent abstraction of the

social spaces they construct to instrumentalize it as a representative microcosm of a

larger, country-wide, social conflict. While still anchoring their interventions with

clues of the nuanced particularities of the specific locations they take as a point of

departure, these films mobilize the rhetorical power of transforming a specific location

into anywhere-in-America to chronicle the effects of what Michel Foucault labeled the

“micro-technologies of power” on the city dwellers’ bodies and psyches (Foucault,

Discipline).

From Landmarked Cities to Anywhere-in-America: Unmarking the National,

Penetrating the Body

Disclosure (1994) deals with Tom Sanders’ struggles to clear his name after

his newly appointed superior, Meredith Johnson, files a sexual harassment lawsuit

against him. The film is set in Seattle, where a high-tech corporation is on the verge of

accomplishing to manufacture “Corridor”, a groundbreaking virtual reality database

more a journalistic and fan-based category that ultimately obscures the deep interconnectedness between so-called independent filmmakers and Hollywood studios.

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that can potentially give the company an unprecedented edge in the communications

market. In his pursuit to unveil Johnson’s crooked practices, Sanders breaks in the

hotel room of the company’s CEO and hacks into “Corridor” to gather key

information. When he puts on the headset that gives him access to the database, he

enters a virtual world that creates the illusion that he is wandering the corridors of a

Greco-Roman temple lined with filing archives. As he is about to accomplish his goal,

Johnson accesses the program from a remote location; subsequently, their real world

confrontation takes now place in the virtuality of “Corridor.” She eventually manages

to delete the traces of her corruptive practices and frustrates his efforts temporarily.

The enveloping of the file system inside the frame of the Greco-Roman temple

points to two interconnected cultural assumptions. Firstly, it endows the digital storage

of data system with a cultivated look, activating the well-known consideration of

Greek and Roman cultures as two of the apexes of Western civilization, namely, as

fundamental steps leading into the borderless technological feat of Corridor.113

Secondly, it exposes one of the fundamentals manners through which a large part of

Hollywood films, and most specifically that multi-semantic category known as the

blockbuster, treat both foreign and American forms of cultural production and social

113 In Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media , Ella Shohat and Robert Stam point to the ethnocentric drive at work in tracing a line from the Greek and Roman Empires to the European Empires of the 16th to 19th centuries as the pinnacle of “civilization. Their project is to de-center Europe and offer a polycentric account of the ways in which marginalized media projects offer competing and subversive versions of historical events and cultural identity.

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organization: the cult of an opaque surface that vacuums out the realities of the

different social and economic conflicts and alliances at work in a given historical

juncture by reducing them to a series of de-historicized clichés.

In her study of contemporary Nordic co-productions, Mette Hjort establishes a

dichotomy between “marked” and “unmarked” films. The first category aims at

appealing to a social group’s sense of cultural ownership, foregrounding the localized

specificity of certain historical formations to draw the interest of a certain target

audience. The second type are ‘culturally inflected’ stories that, although situated in a

given socio-historical context, do not attempt to appeal to a sense of cultural

ownership but, conversely, increase their exposure by attracting audiences with

different cultural and social investments (Hjort, “Epiphanic”). Whereas it is easy to

identify The Day of the Beast or Do the Right Thing, for example, as ‘marked’ films,

the ‘unmarkedness’ of others becomes a far more problematic label since it often

encompasses films that perform antagonistic ideological and aesthetic operations. On

the one hand, the contemporary blockbuster exerts an unmarking of a set of U.S. and

foreign specific social formations by resorting to a series of easily readable stereotypes

designed to deliver narratives that garner universal reach. The immediate consequence

of such a maneuver is the reduction of the “foreign” and the “American” to a

collection of historically prominent signposts that block the spectators’ access to the

multi-layered intricacies of the social configurations the blockbuster renders as

transparent and unambiguous. On the other, the partial unmarking at work in those

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films that directly address the social complexity the blockbuster typically bypasses has

a very different purpose: to anchor their critical engagement in a localized social

formation while pointing to its widespread existence beyond the chosen field of

investigation. Unmarking then functions as a critical strategy that propels the specific

coordinates of the films’ story worlds beyond the specificity of the social reality they

stem from but does not mobilize a simplifying or stereotyping impulse to deliver a

universal message a la Independence Day (1996) or Deep Impact (1998).

a. The Eventful Blockbuster: Creating the Superlative City

Following this cult for the unmarked surface, the blockbuster flattens the

interwoven complexities of the cityscape to create technologically superior

audiovisual spectacles that are narrativized via the establishment of a clear-cut moral

legibility between good and evil and the cancellation of real-life social, economic and

racial differences.114 Furthermore, in those blockbusters that have an in-built global

reach—such as the disaster film or the spy thriller—“America” becomes the world.

114 Roland Emerich’s bombastic The Day After Tomorrow (2004) offers a veiled criticism of the punitive migration policy existing today for Mexicans attempting to make it into the United States. After the ice in the poles melts and the U.S. is about to be covered in a freezing ice that will kill all human life, U.S. citizens are forced to migrate South of Rio Grande to save their lives. After this wave of migration turns overwhelming, the Mexican government decides to close the border. This reversal of the current prohibitive social sanctions between the U.S. and Mexico points to both the contingent character of such practices and attempts, within the limits of a necessarily U.S.-centered narrative, to expose the utter arbitrariness and de-humanizing nature of the very social policies that structure our world today.

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One of the fundamental effects of Hollywood’s decades-long domination of the film

market has been the export of several of the U.S. nation-buildings symbols as

universal ideals—e.g. the Lincoln memorial as a signifier of the democratic

governance the U.S is supposed to epitomize. Other nations and cultures are reduced

to the very surfaces of the clichéd imagery that identifies them transhistorically from

the point of view of U.S., which in turn is featured as the very center of the world.

Non-U.S. bodies and psyches are passive spectators of their own destiny, which is in

the hands of a multi-racial group of “brave” Americans set to save the world from an

immediate menace, once the presence of this external threat has suspended all social

and economic hierarchies.115 In tune with this simplification, the complexity of the

United States social and cultural variety is reduced to its landmarked signs, bypassing,

consequently, the multifaceted spectrum of historical forces that has endowed these

markers with such a status within the U.S. cultural imaginary.

Not accidentally, the main slogan of the Independence Day marketing

campaign was: “July 4th, opens everywhere.” As Julian Stringer explains, the key

notion to understand the social and aesthetic implications of the blockbuster is size.

Stringer, though, qualifies this statement by acknowledging that even though the

disaster movie genre seems to meet all the criteria to be identified as a blockbuster if

we take into account both its reliance on large audiovisual spectacles of destruction

115 The ultimate example of this kind of approach is Michael Bay’s Armageddon (1998).

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and social healing and its intended global reach, “the exact connotations this notion

will carry in specific historical contexts cannot be assumed or taken for

granted”(Stringer 4). Blockbusters are thus a multisemantic phenomenon whose

ideological and aesthetic fabric depends on a range of discourses at work both in

Hollywood and other national film industries and the relationship between different

modes of production in a given historical juncture. In addition, blockbusters vow to

exist beyond the cinematic, attempting to cover the whole social field by projecting

itself beyond the limited confines of the movie house. Launching aggressive

marketing campaigns in anticipation of the event they are supposed to deliver,

blockbusters assaults city dwellers in a variety of sites—from vending machines to

billboards to cell phone ring tones to subway ads—and, as discussed in chapter one,

through the ever-changing dynamic of the World Wide Web. They attempt to intrude

the private and public spaces the city dweller inhabits in a superlative fashion,

presenting themselves as inevitable. Furthermore, the worldwide simultaneous release

of films such as Batman, Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings delivers the all-around

presence of an array of markers of the eventful blockbuster in multiple cities, which

are otherwise temporally and spatially distant, pointing to the universalizing impulse

that characterizes the Hollywood blockbuster and setting it apart, to this day, from

blockbusters produced in other national industries, even if eventually these

occasionally transcend their territorial borders.

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Since, as Fredric Jameson states, the repeated worldwide consumption of

Hollywood films functions as a series of periodical lessons in the apprenticeship to a

specific culture, we might argue that, for the most part, Hollywood blockbusters are a

form of cultural colonization structured around the reduction of U.S. and foreign

cultural, social and economic differences to a series simplified and de-historicized

stereotypical templates that are presented as universal (“Notes” 63). As Thomas

Elsaesser acknowledges, the blockbuster is designed to provide maximum meaning,

“which is to say its different parts function as a cultural database, in a process that is

both ‘analytical’ (it breaks down culture into separate items and individual traits) and

‘synthetic’ (it is capable of apparently reconciling ideologically contradictory

associations)” (“Everything Connects” 19). It is not accidental that while both

Armageddon and The Hole are perhaps tangentially imbued with the millennium

anxiety that preceded global imaginary at the turn of the century, the former centers on

a narrative of universal destruction whereas the latter focuses inward—Taipei—as the

very site of an unknown epidemic.116 What the difference between the ways in which

these two films approach a global anxiety reveals is the inevitable price of de- 116 Geoff King rightly acknowledges the danger of directly associating the disaster films with a global millennium cultural anxiety. Indeed Hollywood films do not simply spring from a socio-cultural zeitgeist. Conversely, they are the result of a long process of planning from script development to casting to location scouting to technological development (Spectacular Narratives 159). However, this should not prevent us from informing our understanding of the films with the context of their reception. The ongoing discourses in relation to the arrival of the millennium around the release dates of these films provide, consequently, a useful framework for scholarly investigation.

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concretization that the kinetic spectacle of the disaster blockbuster invariably adheres

to in relation to those localized narratives (even if occurring in global cities, or parts of

them) that other cinematic traditions generate.117 It also points to the different modes

of production that give birth to these two films and the diverse networks through

which these films circulate, signaling their respective impacts on the cinematic and

social fields.

When discussing the representations of global cities inside the disaster

blockbuster matrix, the first salient feature we need to highlight is their almost

exclusive landmarked character. And here I am not only referring to the Convention

Center in L.A. or the Empire State Building in New York but also those other

markers—such as the yellow cabs or the street vendors in New York or the palm trees

and the Mexican Taco stands in Los Angeles—that have come to identify a particular

city within several worldwide cultural imaginaries. In other words, what we see is

both their symbolic landmarks and their globally recognizable everyday.118 Second,

117 Geoff King has interestingly acknowledged that markers of the cultural Other in Armageddon that are destroyed are carefully chosen to represent both the quintessential “Old World”(Shanghai) and the decaying European splendor (Paris). From an industrial perspective both Europe and Asia are the biggest non-American film markets in the world (Spectacular Narratives 151). 118 Director Stephen Spielberg has repeatedly acknowledged that one of the main goals of his destruction epic War of the Worlds was to stay away from historical landmarks. This ideological moves comes as a consequence of what we may call the “post 9-11 Hollywood” sensibility.” In this film, destruction conspicuously exists next door to New York City, across the Hudson River and New Jersey. What Spielberg beautifully destroys is precisely those unknown building, territories and landscapes that are typically vacuumed out of the 1990’s disaster blockbuster. However, the threat of a

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blockbusters perform a suspension of all racial and class differences inside the

cityscape, creating a mythic contemporaneity vacuumed from history in which the

multiethnic fabric of the United States is mobilized to stand for the whole world.

Third, they instrumentalize a series of identifying city markers via destruction to

deliver their technological power while, in narrative terms, exponentially increasing

the threat to humanity a human or non-human agent is supposed to pose. In addition,

in the disaster blockbuster, U.S. cities are the strategic sites from which their

spectacularized narrative economies with worldwide reach leap since they are

simultaneously figured as primary targets for the animate or inanimate forces that

threaten humanity or the centers of political power through which military power is

deployed to fight the enemy. In this sense, the disaster blockbuster freezes the global

megalopolis in as much as it transforms it into a liveless compound of buildings,

objects and quasi-anonymous bodies that add up to reveal the grandiosity of the

featured catastrophe. Only a small roster of individuals is singled out to embody

humanity as a whole.119 This type of film scans non-U.S. cultures, rendering them also

global menace to humanity is still ever-present in several of the verbal exchanges between the characters. Once again, America—in this case through the lens of a Joe Doe-whoever and his family—are stand-ins for the whole world. 119 Another genre that performs a similar operation is the “transnational spy film”. The decades-long series of James Bond films are an exemplary instance of this practice. Not only do they reduce other cultures to their cliché markers—the Indian market in Octopussy, the sexually-charge dance of the seven veils in The spy that loved me, the voodoo underworld of New Orleans in To Live and Let Die, for example—they also utilize the role of the female lead, the object of Bond’s sexual attraction, to embody in sexual terms the culture the international spy traverses. This practice is detectable also

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frozen in the temporal limbo the rabid force of stereotyping and de-historicizing has

enclosed them. The blockbuster thus draws a cultural map that engenders the multiple

territories it instrumentalizes for its all-American dominating ideological standpoint.

The vestiges of de-historicized universals of these stereotyped foreign cultures stand

for them in a worldview in which the real is only accessible through its

technologically simulated landmarks (Baudrillard 2). Since, as Geoff King states, “no

existence is possible on unmapped ground” (Mapping Reality 15), what the disaster

blockbuster offers is a selective cartography of the world centered in universally

identifiable markers of the United States that audio-visually and narratively

reproduces the privileged position of the Hollywood film industry in relation to

smaller and less economically powerful national cinematic templates and modes of

production. Three aesthetic staples facilitate this operation. First, the sheer spectacular

deployment of cutting edge technology to feature great scale destruction.120 Second,

the insertion of montage sequences that scan several samples from diverse cultures

in more contemporary transnational spy films such as The Bourne Identity or the Mission Impossible film series. 120 Geoff King has observed that in the disaster blockbuster “spectacle is piled upon spectacle in a manner reminiscent of the ‘tacking’ of extravagant numbers found towards the end of some of the musicals of Busby Berkeley”(Spectacular Narratives 166). This comparison brings to the fore the well-known debate between Rick Altman (supported by Linda Williams) and the classical Hollywood cinema” paradigm as defined by Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson. King has repeatedly stated that the emphasis on spectacle in defining the blockbuster in recent scholarship is somewhat wrongly pointed since, ultimately, the creation of kinetic spectacles via deployment of state-of-the-arts technology serves narrative purposes and rather than discussing spectacle vs. narrative one should, instead, discuss the interaction between the two.

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bound together by a U.S.-originated ideological discourse conveyed through the audio

tracks.121 Finally, the reliance on fast-cutting, disorientating editing that sacrifices

psychological characterization for the sake of the sketching of a series of human-

bodies-as-surfaces, who fill the different gaps that structure the stereotyped-driven

mapping of the world this kind of film offers.

Here is precisely where Jia Zhangke’s The World (2004) exploits the

blockbuster formulaic approach to the social, bringing it to its extreme while tinting it

with a defining locality in exploring the sentimental and economic problems of

Chinese youth today. The film is set in a theme park (significantly located in the

suburbs of the growing Chinese megalopolis of Beijing) that offers its customers to

“See the world without ever leaving Beijing.” The park showcases a series of

historical landmarks—e.g. Egyptian pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the

New York skyline—functioning as stand-ins for entire countries and connected

through a futuristic caterpillar train.122 These “attractions” are aimed at creating the

illusion of visiting foreign countries, while reducing other cultures, like the disaster

Blockbuster does, to a series of globally known markers. In fact, the cross-territorial

mobility inside the make-belief replica-organized park radically contrasts with the

121In Armageddon the president of the United States delivers a message broadcast worldwide as men and women of all races and religious beliefs listen to him; in Independence Day, the president proclaims that after the human victory against the aliens, 4th of July won’t only be the U.S. independence day but humanity’s. 122 When traveling inside the park, workers typically refer to their destination with the name of the country they are bound to, for example: “I’m going to India.”

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hierarchy of bodies the film establishes in relation to their capacity to move across

national borders. Whereas Tao and Taisheng, two workers at the park who are

sentimentally involved, have migrated to Beijing from the provinces in search of a

better life but have never left China and do not even have a passport, those who are

able to move—Qun, Taisheng’s other female sentimental interest, Zhang, a

businessman who tries to gain sexual favors from Tan promising her a passport and

the subsequent free ride into a world of perfume and clothes in Hong Kong and Anna,

a Russian worker at the park—obtain this privileged precisely through their pivotal

role on the transterritorial free-floating circulation of Capital. While Zhang epitomizes

China’s opening to a market economy and its corrupted downside, both Qun and Anna

are the low level workers that through their respective services— Qun’s forging of

expensive clothes and Anna’s prostitution—keep the capitalist engine running.

Ultimately Qun obtains a visa to migrate to the United States to join her husband and

Anna gathers enough money to buy back her passport and visit her sister in Ulan

Bator. Framed through the lens of Tan and Anna’s friendship—despite their inability

to speak each other’s language—the positioning of Russia and China as key players in

this selective distribution of bodies across borders becomes, then, the tip of the iceberg

through which The World denounces the fake politics of unbound mobility that drives

the theme park and the social fabric that has produced it.123

123 This sense of oppressive mobility is heightened by the fact that the park workers seem to live inside it, unable to escape the world of replicas that envelops their lives.

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The opening scene of the film shows Tao asking for a band-aid in the

backstage of the park. As she moves from dressing room to dressing room, she

momentarily enters different countries, as represented by the different clothes the

Chinese workers wear. The next day she rides the elevated train along the park while

the replicas of historical markers parade before the spectator’s eye. Jia Zhangke then

cuts to an extreme long shot of the park, from the other side of what appears to be an

artificial lake. The Eiffel Tower rises in the middle of the frame, as the supreme

signifier of the promise of worldliness the park stands for. From left to right of the

frame, a Chinese peasant walks on the foreground carrying a sack and wearing a

traditional hat. When he reaches the center of the frame, he stops and stares directly at

the camera. His face remains invisible. He then proceeds to resume his walking and

disappears off-screen to the right as the park’s elevated train slowly circulates along

that side. This seemingly striking juxtaposition of the peasant—an unmistakable

signifier of Chineseness— and the park—an encapsulation of the whole world aiming

at attaining a multinational character—not only conflates two different manners of

experiencing the contemporary world order—the Old and the New—but also points

directly at the economic unevenness that facilitates the existence of sophisticated

leisure spaces such as the theme park. The peasant’s facelessness makes him a stand-

in for millions of Others who do not articulate their lives through the spiraling

networks of global communications but, significantly, get often swallowed by them

and their ever-expanding need for control and land. For it is not that the Chinese

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peasant is out of place, stranded near the park, away from his living coordinates but,

conversely, it is the park itself that has reached in the countryside and laid on top of

the existing land a layer of surface-driven world icons that have buried the pre-existent

culture that existed in this location. Through the contiguous presence of the peasant

and the theme park, The World signals the multi-temporality that exits at the core of

Beijing (here we need to remember that the theme park is one of its suburbs) since it is

a city that exists today at the threshold of an international event that is supposed to

project all its grandeur—the 2008 Summer Olympics—and has recently undergone a

process of dramatic modernization with the subsequent demolishing of old quarters

and, yet, still remains inhabited by pre-modern social practices.124 Beijing is, in this

sense, like Wong’s Hong Kong and Tsai’s Taipei, a palimpsestic cityscape of

competing world orders that surrounds its inhabitants in a psychological space where

interpersonal relations ultimately fail. Tan and Taisheng’s death near an industrial site

due to a gas leak ultimately points to the fact that outside the fake-world of the park,

the most basic rights human beings need to subsist are still non-existent elsewhere—

precisely where the designers of the theme park did not look at to map out their

version of the world. It also reminds us of the essential structural absence at the core 124 Here it is important to highlight that the 2008 Olympics play a decisive role in Jia Zhangke’s previous feature, Unknown Pleasures (2002). Whereas the young protagonists of the film move idly around Beijing failing to find both a sentimental and vocational focus in their lives, the moment in which Beijing was awarded the honor of hosting the Olympics is prominently featured as the very time with the older generations gather in a celebratory mood. Youngsters, conversely, seem utterly unaffected by this fact.

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of superlative representations of the city, pointing, therefore, at the political agenda of

these cinematic efforts. This discourse of superlative exceptionalism is, in my view, a

central trope through which the U.S. keeps re-inventing itself and substantially

articulates the discursive core of the blockbuster and the type of images these films

project worldwide.

When walking down 34th street in New York City one reaches the block

between 6th and 7th avenue, frenetic movement salutes all around: a fast-moving mass

of people getting in and out of the subway station or frantically heading East and

West, street vendors offering a variety of products ranging from caricatures to hot

pretzels, a multicultural crowed eating fast food in chain restaurants, scores of

homeless men relentlessly asking for change, the Madison Square Garden crowds

heading towards the “the world’s most famous arena” and so on. This area is a hyper-

saturated commercial pandemonium that remains permanently overpopulated during

business hours and then becomes a semi-deserted, garbage-filled, urban wasteland at

night. The entire north side of the block belongs to Macy’s, self-proclaimed the “The

World’s Largest Store,” a gigantic department depot where consumers can buy a vast

array of products raging from expensive China to discount kitchen utensils.

The utilization of the superlative “Largest” in combination with a

universalizing reach by the Macy’s marketing department is not simply a cheap

manifestation of the U.S. exceptionalism that is so deeply rooted in the collective

unconscious of this country. Such declarations of worldwide superiority are common

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place in a broad spectrum of American cultural and social life practices ranging from

professional sport leagues such as the MLB and NBA, where their winners are given

the title of “World champions,” to the recurrent conflation of the entire world with

America in the political addresses of the U.S. commander-in-chief. It also captures an

essential component of the competing mappings of New York City its inhabitants

continually perform. One of the sources of pride of the true New Yorker—whether

native or adopted—is to be able to identify the “Best of…” and tell others.125 This is

especially notorious when discussing eating choices. Since New York is undoubtedly

one of the richest culinary chronotopes in the world, each New Yorker claims to know

the “best burger”, “best falafel”, “best pizza,” etc. out there. Excellency is rhetorically

absent for the sake of a series of absolutes. There is simply “The best of…” and an

unidentified rest. The exacerbated presence of superlatives in the New York City

dwellers’ orderings of their living space is perhaps a small scale reflection of the status

quo of New York in the world imaginary since for many it is indeed the “World

Capital” and, at the same time, strikes us as a social corollary of the superlative

condition of celluloid New York City throughout the history of cinema. The intense

feeling of déjà vu that many first time visitors experience when strolling down the

streets of New York is intimately related to the extraordinary amount of motion

pictures that are shot on a yearly basis in New York’s five boroughs. In this sense, 125 Here, of course, I am referring to those New Yorkers who can afford to choose where to eat. In New York, there are also hundred of thousands of people living below poverty level. In many cases, eating is not a matter of choice but of survival.

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New York constitutes, perhaps, the ultimate visual hypertext of the global cinematic

imagination. Whereas some filmmakers—such as Spike Lee, Darren Aranovsky or

Noah Baumbach—root their re-imaginings of New York in the very particularities of

one or several components of their fabric—e.g. a Bedford-Stuyvesant block in Do the

Right Thing, the ghostly presence of ground zero in The 25th Hour (2002), Coney

Island in Requiem for a Dream or Park Slope in The Squid and the Whale (2005)—

even if what they offer is hyper stylized versions of the real they approach, other films

such as The Wedding Planner (2001), Unfaithful (2002) or Serendipity (2001) use the

cliché cultural meaning certain New York locations have carried for decades to

perpetuate a beautified vision of New York exceptionalism.126

Michael Bay’s Armageddon takes part on this discursive shallowness in its

depiction of New York via a demonstration of technological potency. In showing the

first meteor shower on Manhattan, the narrative leads us briefly through a series of

“supposedly humorous” vignettes of the everyday charged with racist overtones—two

black street vendors discussing minor incidents, a tourists couple inside a yellow

cab—to suddenly turn into a fast-paced montage that features a spectacle of

destruction in which buildings and cars fly left and right. This high-octane montage

ends with a sweeping helicopter shot of the World Trade Center towers, one of which

126 A clear example of this practice occurs in Adrian Lyne's Unfaithful. The chic Soho architecture functions as the enveloping background for the illicit encounter between an unsatisfied middle age married American woman who leaves in a wealthy suburb outside the city and a young and handsome French artist.

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has been perforated by a meteor, an image that functions as an uncanny reminder of

the yet-to-come World Trade Center attack. What Armageddon, and Independence

Day to cite another example of this type of aesthetic, ultimately construct is

superlative theme parks out of the cityscapes they utilize to showcase the kinetic

spectacle of destruction they offer.127 Conversely, V for Vendetta (2006) foregrounds a

form of contemplative destruction that does not attempt to appeal to the spectators’

sensorium nor gather their admiration in front of a display of technological might.

Instead it aims at anchoring their intellectual comprehension of the anarchist and

revolutionary enterprise the film seems to propose as a political alternative to tyranny

by appropriating a formulaic visual and aural trope of the disaster blockbuster:

spectacular destruction itself. The spectacular foregrounding of destruction functions

thus as the ultimate signifier of the collapse of the ruling oppressive world order,

giving way to a new, more egalitarian social field. In other words, unlike the disaster

blockbuster, where destruction functions as the epitome of the threat to a social

hierarchy that must be preserved at all cost, in V for Vendetta destruction sets the stage

for a new organizational structure in the social field that liberates individuals from the 127 A similar point may be made in relation to Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2006). Curiously in this film, the Australian director uses the adventures of an all-digital creation—King Kong itself—throughout the city to repeatedly showcase the cutting-edge recreation of the 1920’s megalopolis his production team achieved via the deployment of digital technology and detailed production design. This kind of “self-referential” approach to the image reaches its pinnacle when King Kong fights a group of airplanes on top of the Empire State Building. Jackson repeatedly resorts to a variety of sweeping helicopter shots that show the magnificent digital map of the city the film has accomplished.

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economic and social technologies of power that control them. Whereas in the disaster

blockbuster, there is a way of life and freedom to protect, in V for Vendetta it is only

by escaping the current state of affairs that individuals will be able to assert

themselves and speak their minds. However, the film ultimately offers a “clean” and

utopian harmless scenario to picture the triumph of the revolutionary enterprise it

chronicles. Like in Fight Club, the guerrilla warfare of the hero manages to create a

no-victims scenario at its final culmination feat while relying on the spectacular

deployment of technology to render it in audiovisual terms.

b. From Wilmington to Anywhere-in-America: Subversion, Capital and the Beat-

up Body

When receiving a letter from Wilmington, Delaware, many U.S. residents

immediately transport their thoughts to their decimated bank accounts. Wilmington is

the epitome of the phantasmagoric city that most Americans only know on paper since

few of them are likely to have visited it. However, it is indeed a central location in the

contemporary U.S. imaginary since it is a central hub for credit card companies’

headquarters. As Anya Kamenetz has proved in Generation Debt: why now is a

terrible time to be young, Americans have been making less money that they spend for

the last decade and half. In short, the United States is a country living on debt. This is

the social milieu Chuck Paliniuk’s novel and David Fincher’s film adaptation depict in

staging a radical social turnaround that renders a liberating “ground zero”—namely, a

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refurbished social field where all debts are erased. The route to accomplish such a feat

is the formation of a nationwide underground organization known as “fight club,”

which fluctuates somewhere between the Weathermen’s anarchist agenda and a

reactionary neo-fascist platoon. Fight Club calls for a cosmetic revolution via macho-

bonding guerrilla warfare that ultimately fails to provide actual venues for political

intervention. Instead it ends up celebrating the cult for the male battered body (and

cock).

Even though Fight Club was shot in Wilmington and was supposed to be set in

this specific location, almost all identifying markers are absent from the film.128 In

fact, director David Fincher affirmed that his initial idea was to set the film in this city

but wanting to avoid any possible legal trouble the production team decided to make it

seem as though it were anywhere-in-America. 129 This slippage from the specific to the

general allows us to trace the ideological operation at work in the film: the

transformation of Wilmington into an unspecific somewhere to deliver a violence-

driven critique of the effects of corporate-mediated consumer life in the individual’s

body and psyche as functioning inside the contemporary U.S. cityscape. In attempting

to forge a narrative of resistance to multinational capitalism, Fight Club delineates an

urban map characterized by pre-fabricated households and aseptic, cubicle-structured

working places while locating spaces of potential subversion in the backstage of

128 The original novel is set in Willmington. 129 Fight Club DVD commentary.

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consumerist practices—the projection booth of a film theater, the kitchen of a lavish

restaurant, the cellar of a bar, the garbage containers of a cosmetic surgery clinic or the

squat house where Tyler Durden drags the unnamed narrator to begin the latter’s

process of mental and physical liberation. Unlike Chungking Express, Fincher’s film

depicts a world in which neither the act of consumption itself nor the re-signification

of consumer objects via their attachment to a human body the city dweller longs for

offer a venue to liberate the self from her isolation. Consumption only locks the

individual inside the unstoppable brainwashing of a Capital-structured hierarchy that

denies agency. It instrumentalizes human beings within an unstoppable dynamic of

automatized and productive expenditure.

Fight Club-turned-into-Project-Mayhem has a far-reaching goal: a wide-

ranging social upheaval that erases all previous credit records and allows each

individual to start from scratch. As the film chronicles the accomplishment of this feat

via the bombing of all the credit card headquarters, it maps the urban space by

reshuffling the audio-visual spectacle of destruction of the disaster blockbuster. Like V

for Vendetta, it offers a contemplative view of sheer destruction from a Panoptic

position while displacing the spectator’s encounter with such a spectacle to the

background of the collision of two antagonistic ideological and materially

differentiated texts—namely, the heterosexual couple’s formation as a standard

mechanism of narrative closure and the disturbing alterity of a quasi-invisible

pornographic discourse.

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As Marla and the main unnamed narrator hold hands in the top floor of a

building, the corporate pandemonium of skyscrapers that Project Mayhem aims at

destroying explodes and collapses, beautifully, before their eyes. They are at Ground

Zero; a spectacle of destruction that must happen as a pre-condition for freedom—the

“No Fear” world Tyler Durden proclaims as his ideal. Once the digitally mediated

corporate world of multinational credit card companies that traps individuals as

numbered phantoms deprived of identity is reduced to debris, life can be reinitiated in

a lawless matrix where liberation is equated with chaos. For what Project Mayhem

ultimately does is to materialize the nebulous and vaporous power of Capital into a

series of discrete office buildings where its power is concentrated. Once it becomes

detectable and material, Capitalism becomes vulnerable.

Fight Club thus articulates the culmination of Project Mayhem’s revolution by

juxtaposing two spectacles: spectacular destruction and the formation of the

heterosexual couple. Closure seems to have been achieved. Significantly, the narrator

tells Marla: “Everything is going to be fine …you’ve met me at a very strange time of

my life”. Once he has repressed—killed— Tyler, he is able to reframe himself within

the coordinates of heterosexual normalcy. Marla is his trophy. Yet, not everything fits

perfectly. A three-frame porn image of male genitals flashes on the screen, calling

attention to the very constructedness of the narrative as such. As the camera zooms

into Marla and the narrator, with the sheer spectacle of demolition as a backdrop of

their romantic match, the image flickers and jerks. A cock appears provocatively

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before our eyes and disappears immediately. The totalizing gesture of closure of the

mainstream film is exposed as incomplete through the contaminating, intertextual,

presence of the pornographic penis. This obscene repressed Other of the blockbuster

totalizing machinery—explicit nudity as a censored, other, text, typically confined to

the off-screen space beyond the reach of visibility—veils for an instant the

heterosexual matrix’s realm of happiness that informs the mainstream product and

renders its duping representational insufficiency. The text re-opens; closure is denied

and the film’s Brechtian political agenda becomes readable.

Furthermore, the materiality of the male genitals intervenes in the image/sound

construction of Fight Club’s narrative as an external presence that makes the spectator

question the action-driven editing structure that informs the majority of the film’s

audiovisual fabric.130 Meaning resides in the very interplay of two dramatically

different film texts that make Fight Club signify through their unexpected

juxtaposition. The pornographic image stares at us as Marla and the narrator gaze at

the culmination of Tyler Durden’s revolutionary Mayhem project; suddenly, they have

been transformed into puppets of a narrative that mimics the closing scenario of the

kind of film Fight Club has attempted to expose as blinding.

130 Notably, throughout the whole film, one-frame images of Tyler Durden are inserted in different scenes, disrupting the illusionist continuous world through which most mainstream films are aesthetically structured. Tyler and the porn text function similarly: challenging by their very presence the duping fantasy that continuity-based films try to sell as reality.

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In addition, the inclusion of the pornographic frame resuscitates Tyler Durden

himself and re-anchors the construction of the narrative within the realm of self-

reflexivity. In a lengthy sequence in which the unnamed narrator addresses the

spectator directly, giving a quick briefing on Tyler’s multiple jobs, Fincher shreds to

pieces the mimetic fourth wall of the cinematic apparatus. Fight Club stares at us as

we look at it. The subject and the object of consumption become mutual predators.

Moreover, one of Tyler’s jobs is working as a projectionist, splicing film reels together

to create a fantasy-framework of continuity and erase the discontinuous materiality of

the cinematic image. Fight Club foregrounds the machinery behind the production of

the film viewing “event.” The narrator explains the function of “cigarette buttons”—

markers projectionists use to signal the end of a reel. Then Tyler’s finger points to one

of them as it pops on the upper left side of the screen. Fight Club, the movie, becomes

“Fight Club,” the non-continuous succession of 35mm frames, sprocket holes and

labor stains.131 Furthermore, Tyler’s project to awaken the individual from her

nightmarish lack of agency is enacted by the insertion of porn frames in the middle of

“family films.” He cuts the filmstrip, adds porn frames and splices them together 131 In a different part of the film, the materiality of the image foregrounds the mechanism of film projection. First Tyler and then Jack address the camera directly, the image shakes and sprocket holes can be seen momentarily on both sides of the frame. The film’s diegesis reproduces a malfunctioning of the mechanics of film projection: the filmstrip coming out of the reel. In other words, the line that separates a film as a stable product and the irreproducible spontaneity of the “event” of projection is blurred and rendered false. A finished product created for global spectatorial consumption is tainted in its materiality with the non-predictable stain of a malfunctioning of the (in)visible apparatus that guarantees its dissemination.

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again. This new intertextual object of consumption—now occasionally

discontinuous—makes the shocked spectator feel a double discomfort. First, she

comes to the realization that the illusion of reality the film offers is false since the reel

changeover becomes visible. Second, it shatters the spectator’s biased ethical basis—

pre-established by the acceptance of conforming rules of morality, which prohibit or

condemn frontal genital nudity. Tyler’s project is to write a different kind of ethics and

history by juxtaposing pornographic and mainstream cinematic texts. The spectator’s

cultural memory is revamped in terms of a contrasting contamination: porn and

mainstream exist in relation to one another.

In the closing scene of the film, upon confronting the porn image, we become

those diegetic spectators who, as victims of Tyler’s splicing games, are exposed to the

discontinuous horror of narrative self-reflexivity. In this context, the concurrent

spectacle of destruction the film showcases, imbued with such an anti-illusionist

gesture, reshuffles our perceptual encounter with the disaster blockbuster through the

uncomfortable realization of its cinematic constructedness.

The narrator is a half-conscious, half-asleep zombie; his insomnia seems

incurable. As a corporate drone doing the dirty work for an also unnamed automobile

manufacturer that prioritizes stock options over the loss of human life, he only exists

in transit, as a circulating figure in the corporate communicative network that controls

his existence. He travels from airport to airport, from car crash to crash, and completes

red-flagged reports one after another. Everything is everything; anything is anything.

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His life is an automatic succession of utterly interchangeable pre-programmed hours.

His day-to-day temporal anchor is his boss’ tie color. Paradoxically, the narrator’s

nebulous and automatized life catalyzes his violent reaction against the corporate

entrapment that dictates his life. His physical exhaustion is transferred mentally as

schizophrenia. He gives birth to Tyler Durden: a charismatic and visionary hyper

masculine figure who lives through a revolutionary, anti-systemic, agenda. Tyler is the

narrator’s mental fantasy of what he would like to be—“All the ways you wish you

could be, that’s me,” Tyler tells the narrator when they finally confront the sameness

of their beings.

Before Tyler, airport escalators are the narrator’s private space. His Ikea

catalogue-designed apartment epitomizes his self-entrapment in the collective

consumerist lifestyle individuals are bound to swallow at the turn of the 20th century.

He is not only a faceless number; moreover, his job is to number anonymous Others

and re-think them in terms of a series of figures that the next-step-in-the-ladder

corporative drone evaluates in order to make a financial decision. Furthermore, affect

is deterritorialized inside the sphere of abjection. This is precisely why his insomnia is

cured upon his first explosion of tears in embracing Bob at the “Testicular cancer”

self-help group. Only those who have been rejected from the circulating normality of

the corporate-driven world due to their deviance—e.g. men with testicular cancer—are

able to find a niche—self-help groups—to express their selves and share a common

ground of reciprocity with other human beings. Sharing catalyzes affect and affect

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cures the self from the bodily symptoms of depersonalization inside which late

capitalism frames the individual. Paradoxically, an explosion of excess—unstoppable

tears—restates the narrator’s normal body cycle. Insomnia fades away. However, all

healing comes with a price. The narrator pays double: addiction and evasion.

After his cathartic hug with Bob, the narrator becomes a junkie for self-help

groups, attending several of them on a weekly basis—i.e. Melanoma, Bowel Cancer,

and Tuberculosis etc. In each of them, he acts as a chameleonic impersonator—

Cornelius, Lenny, etc.— who simulates a series of illnesses he does not have. In other

words, he cures his sickness by feeding himself from others’ bodily malfunctioning.

Affect thus seems possible only in the encapsulated space of abjection created on the

outskirts of the evening. Whereas. the “normal” individual is promised the illusion of

pleasure and freedom after the working day—swallowed up, often, by the consumerist

dynamic that conditions her search for gratification— the “non-normal” monad

resorts to communal confession as a way to heal the degenerating wounds of her

alterity. The narrator predates their affect and accumulates it in order to recuperate the

normalcy—sleeping—his body has been denied for a long time. However, far from

confronting his own self, he resorts to escapism—the healing “cave” of the

tuberculosis group—in order to achieve a cure. Tyler soon shatters the narrator’s

make-believe fantasy of stability. Fear must be challenged, not escaped; the certainty

of one’s death acknowledged, not repressed. A pain-driven fight club is born since

only through physical pain can the mind be awakened. Similarly, the spectator, upon

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viewing Tyler’s porn frames on the screen, experiences displeasure/pain in

confronting for the first time the falsity of the all-encompassing Disney universe. And

so do we, as we become exposed to the non-stop brutal violence of the film’s diegesis

and its self-reflexive material deconstruction.

In a ritualistic fashion, after kissing the narrator’s hand, Tyler pours chemical

burn on his flesh. As a suffering narrator cries in desperation for an antidote, Tyler’s

words demand for him to face his agony: “Stay with your pain. Without pain, without

sacrifice we have nothing. Face the pain. No fear. Some day you’re gonna die. It’s

only after we’ve lost everything, we are free to do anything." Only by viscerally

challenging one’s resistance to pain can the self’s consciousness be liberated. The

body’s cocoonish existence in the controlled environment of Ikea-cloned duplexes

reproducible ad infinitum must be challenged. The body must touch the unknown—i.e.

chemical burn— suffer through pain and, ultimately, free the mind upon confronting

the most intense fear—death. As hurting as it might be, according to Tyler, one has to

just do it…

As Henry Giroux explains, Tyler appropriates the corporate “Just Do It”

mentality of the Reagan era, displacing it into an all-touching bodily lifestyle (100).

Whereas escapism only sedates the individual, pain becomes the ultimate guarantor of

awareness. It re-situates the individual outside the cloned spaces his Ikea catalog-

driven lifestyle had dictated and allows him to re-encounter his body. This is the very

space where his new, freer, subjectivity is awoken. If in Tsai’s films, Taipei and the

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human body constantly touch each other to define the cityscape as a continuum

between the materiality of the inert and the organic, Fight Club equates the very

existence of subjectivity with re-gaining control of one’s bodily materiality through

the traumatic encounter with pain. Not accidentally, while maintaining the appearance

of normalcy during the day, the fight club members recognize each other through the

physical traces left by their participation in the violent rituals of the club. As such,

staying under the radar while fulfilling the social functions that conformity has

assigned to them, the alternative social order they stand for is textually marked in their

liberated bodies, creating a parallel set of circuits of exchange operating from the very

bowels of the subjectivity-erasing corporate culture they are challenging with their

newly-formed guerrilla. In addition, the very origin of this practice of subversive

social politics stems from the narrator’s bodily malfunctioning—insomnia.

Schizophrenia does the rest.

Deleuze & Guattari conceptualize the schizoid as a destabilizing power of the

capitalist matrix of mechanical reproduction since he “seeks out the very limit of

capitalism; he is its inherent tendency brought to fulfillment, its surplus product, its

proletariat, and its exterminating angel. He scrambles all the codes and is the

transmitter of the decoded flows of desire… Schizophrenia is desiring-production as

the limit of social production” (35). This very edge of desiring-production is what the

fight club and Project Mayhem stand for: the ultimate destruction of the ruling

mechanisms that anesthetize the individual’s capacity to think critically, locking her

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within the alluring numbness of consumerism. As Fincher’s camera pans over a

Starbucks coffee cup in the neon-lit corporate office where the narrator works, the

flashes of a photocopy machine attack our eyes. The narrator unemotionally states:

“Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy…” exactly like the quasi-infinite Starbucks

franchises all over the world. So are individuals unless fight clubbing succeeds in

performing the social upheaval it aims to perpetrate.132

However, Tyler Durden’s fight club does not ultimately grant agency to its

members; on the contrary, the club members become equally substitutable numbers in

a neo-fascist paramilitary group that puts all faith in Tyler's heroic visionary figure.

Questions are forbidden in Project Mayhem. Only after death, can they re-acquire a

“proper name.” “His name is Robert Paulsen,” all the Mayhem soldiers utter in choir

after Bob is fatally shot by the police when carrying out one of the anti-systemic

activities of the group. In Fight Club, the price to be paid for a radical revolution is

plunging into neo-fascist obedience and aesthetics.

Does Mayhem succeed ultimately? How can we resituate Tyler’s demise in

terms of the radical politics in which the narrative is engaged? What occurs after the

“Ground Zero” of society Tyler proclaims upon the “collapse of financial history”? Is

the culmination of Mayhem a true subversive act or is a predictable event for the

dominating ideological matrix that regulates life in late capitalist societies?

132 Shrek 2 (2004) literally visualizes the overwhelming presence of the Starbucks franchise in the American cityscape.

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In the postmodern global arena, the economic, the political, and the cultural

increasingly overlap and create one another. The transnational economic powers that

regulate daily existence produce a passive individual. Consumption and pleasure

derive from the easy causality of a profit-driven day-to-day. Time is frozen. The only

future is the instantaneous reward of the consumer’s expenditure. This form of

Imperial control knows no history, presenting its order as permanent and necessary

(Hardt and Negri, Empire 11). We often feel the only way to live is through it, inside

it. Moreover, this type of social order not only produces commodities but also

subjectivities or as Slavoj Zizek explains in Welcome to the Desert of the Real: “The

ultimate result of global ‘subjectivization’ is not that of ‘objective reality’, but that our

subjectivity itself disappears, turns into a trifling whim, while social reality continues

its course” (86). In short, the self only exists through her attachment to the economic

machinery of the global order. Yet, the late capitalist global society does not produce

objects and subjects through the deployment of disciplinary measures. Control is its

weapon; egalitarian Democracy its duping fantasy-framework. The alluring power of

pleasure stemming from consumption and its ultimate invisible entrapment—credit

card use—functions as a public highway to taxonomize the individual’s life in terms

of an expense-to-pleasure dynamic. They know what we buy; they know what we like;

they know who we are. Telemarketers awake us every morning pounding our phone

line. Junk mail fills our electronic accounts. Privacy becomes an archaic by-gone state

that Empire (to use Hardt and Negri’s term) blatantly effaces. The self-help attendees

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are producers of affect precisely because that is what they are supposed to produce.

Once their social mask has been taken off—their deviant sickness makes them

visible—and they can open their minds shamelessly to equally “abnormal”

individuals, their cliché tales of unhappiness are set to produce the listener’s expected

emotional discharge. Conversely, in the fighting club, individuals produce violence for

its own sake; they pound the other’s body through a non-productive physical

expenditure that aims at releasing the monitoring wrap through which Empire shapes

their lives. At night, the fighting club brings excess to the fore. This is an excess

Empire fails to contain because of its unexpected origin: masochistic self-beating.

However, how can a localized subversion—the club—threaten Empire? Expanding,

“going global”: becoming Project Mayhem. For unless this leap from locality to the

global occurs effective subversion becomes an unattainable chimera. Isolated,

revolutionary projects become ineffective. As a multitude the may change the contours

of the existing social order.

Project Mayhem ultimately succeeds. However, what is its aftermath? A new

beginning—ground zero—is promised but never articulated. Fight Club ends at the

very activation of a wonderland revolution that leaves everything in the air. The neo-

fascist modus operandi of Tyler Durden’s all-male army of men widens the sense of

uncertainty the spectator confronts—“Now What?” The bridge between the local and

the global has been sealed. However, what’s the thereafter? Is it possible to reconcile

the shattering power of “The Act” of radical intervention and the creation of a viable

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alternative to the challenged alienating machinery? Doesn’t Empire feed itself from

those same antagonistic forces that threaten to overthrow it, swallowing them in its

vaults since they lack the capacity to redistribute affect and pleasure in a global way?

Isn’t Tyler’s death and the narrator’s regained normalcy—heterosexual coupling with

Marla—the price to be paid for Mayhem’s ultimate success?

As problematic as the aftermath of Mayhem might be, Fight Club does

articulate subversion in terms of a production of an alternative subjectivity that

escapes the tight ropes of Capital. In fact, Tyler Durden frames his radical

intervention against the global order in terms of production leading to destruction. The

club’s founding self-beating is turned into "explosion Mayhem.” Furthermore, Tyler’s

productive practices utilize the excess that the consumerist network disposes as the

prime matter through which he integrates Mayhem in the consumer world as a means

to subvert the very panoptic mechanisms he aims at defeating. For he steals fat from

liposuction clinics’ garbage containers—the unwanted surplus that is discarded in

order to conform to the standard of beauty that the slim body provides—and mixes it

with chemicals to produce soap for upper-class boutiques. The soap is in turn sold

back to those same women that use the hospital’s services to remove their fat. They

feed with the same fat they ultimately discard. As the narrator ironically states: “It was

beautiful. We were selling rich women their own fat ass back to them.” Fat turns into

cash; cash allows Mayhem to produce bombs; bombs make the corporative credit

card—the same credit card these women use to buy their soap—headquarters explode.

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Full circle. Project Mayhem succeeds by its utter integration and twisted exploitation

of the consumerist network.

Significantly, the production of soap occurs in a homemade pre-industrial

fashion. Once the local goes global—fight club becomes Mayhem—the project is

carried out via a proto-industrial production chain. Since it must happen in secrecy in

order to succeed, the production of explosives stays away from the digital traceable

network through which Capitalism operates. The counter-conspiracy is fully shaped in

a solitary house on “Paper street.”133 Likewise, Tyler’s porn splicing intervention

occurs also in the mechanical world of filmstrips, where the individual is still

manually responsible for the creation of a final product.

Thus, Tyler’s radical attack on the consumer world stems from the

manual/mechanical, aiming at undermining the all-visibility of the digital information

flows. However, does he decolonize the individuals’ psyches from their utter

alienation inside the Capitalist matrix? Isn’t the extremely hierarchical creation of an

army of “Space Monkeys” (the Mayhem soldiers) the very price of the brain’s

decolonization? Is the individual liberated from its alienating existence by joining

133 Deleuze and Guattari emphasize the significant distrust of writing in capitalist societies: “Writing has never been capitalism’s thing. Capitalism is profoundly illiterate…The reason for this is simple; writing implies a use of language in general according to which graphism becomes aligned on the voice, but also overcodes it and induces a fictitious voice from on high that functions as a signifier” (24). The location of Mayhem’s headquarters in Paper St. points to a pre-industrial non-digital society where information only circulates in small scale, as opposed to the ever-flowing circulation networks that characterize digital media..

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Mayhem or re-alienated in a similarly identity-effacing group of faceless numbers? In

other words, isn’t the decolonization of the individual’s psyche simply a shortcut to re-

colonize it through a different kind of oppressive machinery? Why is violence the only

way out of the oppressive societal organization Fight Club depicts? Over forty years

ago, in Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon articulated the very coordinates of the

decolonizing discourse at work in Fight Club. Violence is not an option but a

psychological need. In fact, Fanon’s call for violence seems to be the blueprint for

Tyler’s agenda. First, any radical political change must come from the very bottom of

the social structure. Significantly, after Tyler pours the healing vinegar over the

narrator’s hand, he says: “You are one step closer to the bottom.” Second,

decolonization must ensue via chaos and disorder. Third, the first step to liberation is

achieved while sleeping, dreaming of a forthcoming liberation day. This is precisely

why Tyler takes advantage of the narrator’s sleeping hours to organize the club and

Mayhem without his knowledge. Fourth, Violence restores the colonized’s self-respect

and prompts her to act against the tyrannical forces that shape his/her oppressed

existence (Fanon 73). Lastly, the masses must confront the reality of their alienation in

order to make it a personal issue. Each individual must share a collective

consciousness unanimously geared toward a final freeing uprising. Paradoxically,

Tyler’s “clubbing” and “mayheming” are figured as collective efforts and yet they

seem to simultaneously rely on the figure of a leader or master—Tyler. Moreover, the

extent of the colonizer’s oppression and disrespect of the colonized is such that seeing

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himself denigrated to non-human animality, the colonized’s psyche loses its grip of

reality and plunges into madness.134 This psychic disorder triggers violence.

Confrontational action becomes a physical and psychological necessity to cancel out

colonial oppression.

Although it would be senseless to disengage Fanon’s writing from the

specificity of the colonial reality African countries were experiencing in the historical

milieu he wrote his texts, the dichotomy colonizer/colonized is still at work in the

contemporary era in two different, but definitely interdependent, arenas. On the one

hand, it exists in relation to the First World countries colonizing practices toward the

so-called Third World via corporate transnational capital. On the other, it operates as

an internal process of mental colonization occurring inside contemporary late

capitalist societies such as the United States. Decentered control and veiled forms of

oppression rule worldwide today. In other words, totalitarism wears the ski mask of

democracy. The duping overarching control of democratic societies allures us into the

belief in the individual’s decision-making agency. Corporations plant their satellites

around the world and allow native cells to run their local mini-versions. We are in

control of our lives. We are designed to comply with the norm and only by resorting to

134 As J. P. Sartre explains in his preface to Wretched of the Earth: “Thus in certain psychoses the hallucinated person, tired of always being insulted by his demon, one fine day starts hearing the voice of an angel who pays his compliments but he jeers don’t stop for all that; only from then on, they alternate with congratulations. This is a defense, but it is also the end of the story; the self is disassociated, and the patient heads for madness” (19).

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apparently anachronistic and non-democratic forms of subversion—such as

violence—can we stir our consciousness and create a liberating havoc.

The “numeric” colonized subject has no name or identity. As Fanon poignantly

states: “Because it is a systematic negation of the other person and a furious

determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces

the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: ‘In reality, who am

I” (203). Lamentably, after murdering Tyler, the narrator doesn’t know yet what he is

doing, what he wants to be or who he is. Chaos does not guarantee subversion;

likewise, violence does not guarantee a radical politics of liberation. Conversely,

Mayhem seems to have devolved into a Fascist army of mute men clad in black,

unaware of the very purpose of their acts—other than celebrating their feats with a

stack of beer cans.

When Tyler Durden, standing in front of a kneeling narrator in the opening

sequence of Fight Club, screams at him “We are at Ground Zero, would you like to

say a few words to make the occasion?” the question resonates in the spectator’s ears

with an ironic tint as the end credits roll. The narrator never knows what to say and so

he remains in the end—“I can’t think of anything. For a second, I had forgotten about

Tyler’s whole control demolition thing.”135 Does not Fight Club, at this point of the

narrative, abandon its revolutionary “Ground Zero” for the sake of a pure visual

135 Significantly, the closing credits are accompanied with the Pixies’ song “Where’s my mind?”

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spectacle of chaos? Perhaps. However, the contaminating porn intertext re-opens the

narrative and problematizes its stylistic and ideological project. The material

constructedness of the film comes to the fore and exposes its aesthetic as an arbitrary

fantasy-framework.

At the end of Fight Club, we are, again, at Ground Zero: a non-decipherable

scenario where the articulation of a radical politics of action to overthrow the

Capitalist world order in the name of a viable alternative remains utterly unknown and

undeveloped, exactly like Carol White’s cure from the city and its products in Todd

Haynes’s Safe.

c. The Poisonous Suburb: Whiteness, Sickness and Conformity

The winner of the Academy Award for Best film in 2006, Mike Figgis’ Crash,

is the epitome of the “check mark” approach to the multiracial and multicultural fabric

of the contemporary megalopolis. Structured under the politics of P.C., the film

pretends to offer a complex mapping of Los Angeles by giving a voice to a variety of

the multiple ethnicities that populate it. Blacks, whites, Persians, Latinos, Chinese,

Vietnamese etc. pop in and out of Crash out of a checklist that the filmmakers deemed

necessary to cover all possible angles. As a consequence, the film sketches all and

each of them but fails to provide any remarkable insight on the real social conflicts

that structure the modes of exchange between these different groups. Driven by a

providential plot, Crash instead seems to have instrumentalized the global look of its

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ensemble cast for the sake of promoting its critical legitimacy. Safe, conversely, while

breathing almost exclusive whiteness all the way through its narrative, manages to

address the racial problematic at the core of the compartmentalized layout of Los

Angeles and its neighboring towns.

Set in San Fernando Valley (a.k.a. “The Valley”, the first suburb of America),

the film chronicles the inexplicable illness of an upper-middle class “homemaker,”

symptomatically named Carol White. The film opens with a long tracking shot

originating from inside a car that shows a suburban space where all houses resemble

one another. We could potentially be in any-suburb-wherever of wealthy America,

where Capital has built up an isolated community structured under the rubric of the

nuclear family that pursues to remain safe, outside the reach of those feared Others

that may threaten it. As Mary Ann Doane states “in Safe the point of view is through

the windshield of the car (and here we have haute suburbia), of streets with identical

lampposts and houses, trash carefully placed at the edge of driveways, of serial

production, of sheer separation from the rest of the world as signified by the gate at the

end of the Whites' driveway” (1). It is thus a hyper-controlled environment where the

Whites thrive and feel at ease, far from the dangers lurking in every corner of the inner

city. Racial homogeneity seems to be an essential pre-condition for safety. In this

sense, the Whites’ household and the suburb where it is located are indeed the

negation of the multi-layered complexities of neighboring Los Angeles. It is a space

where a radical racial cleansing has been enacted via the possession of capital to exert

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absolute control. In other words, the white race has created a heaven that it absolutely

masters, allowing only the presence of racial Others as subordinated providers of

services for the ruling white class. —e.g. the Whites’ Latino maid, the Asian clerk at

the dry cleaner—or as the subject of a racially biased essay written by Rory, the

Whites’ son, which describes Los Angeles as the gang capital of the world and the risk

that these groups would penetrate the San Fernando Valley. Without hesitation, Mr.

White approves his son’s racist narrative while Carol is content to utter her displeasure

with the graphic language the boy has used to describe racial conflict. Not accidentally

the film kicks off with a car tracking shot since the automobile itself and its

concomitant promise of mobility and reduction of spatial and temporal differences are

the ultimate facilitators of the social and economic apartheid the film chronicles. In

addition, as Susan Potter affirms, the “private car technology and its associated

infrastructure of enclosed parking spaces and wide multilane roads and highways

compose an invisible social barrier that may be more dangerous than the protection it

appears to offer” (128). The non-visible substances they contain trigger Carol’s

descent into sickness.

Carol has a very standard lifestyle for a wealthy upper-middle class woman:

she routinely attends aerobic sessions, dines with other white couples, discusses

bestseller self-management books such as How to Own Your Own Life with her

friends, constantly drinks glasses of milk and, above all, spends a great deal of energy

re-decorating her house and garden. Yet, one day the inexplicable happens: her body

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becomes environmentally allergic to the surrounding spaces of her everyday. Her

bodily reaction to the thousands of invisible substances of the all-around artificial

products of the city triggers a physical collapse and a mental breakdown and

ultimately carry her to a New Age retreat, Wrenwood, after all forms of conventional

medicine have failed to cure her. In addition, as her body progressively gets worse, as

all the technologies of regimentation she had put in motion to master it fail to provide

an answer to her sickness, Carol begins to lose a sense of her own life, failing to

recognize where she has been all these years of superficially unproblematic marriage:

‘Where am I?’ she asks her baffled husband while lying down in bed.

Rather than attempt to explain Carol’s interior life, Haynes’ film keeps us at a

distance from her, unwilling to enter a psyche that may indeed have little explanation

to offer since Carol herself seems unable to understand the causes behind the collapse

of her family life. Even though the opening tracking shot seems to be anchored in

Carol’s point of view as she drives to her house, once she has entered her world,

Haynes detaches the story from her and repeatedly deploys long establishing shots

utilizing a wide angle lens, offering full visibility of Carol’s household as she

maneuvers through it. In fact two simultaneous and antagonistic movements signal

Haynes’ treatment of Carol. As she sits down with a blank look on her face sipping

milk, the camera zooms in and dollies out, getting slightly closer to her body (a

medium close-up) and yet moving way from it at the same time. At one point all

movement stops, as we keep staring at Carol’s mechanical consumption of her milk

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dose, as though we were anthropologists, studying the cultural codes and behaviors of

an ultimately baffling human subject. Haynes’ “documentary” approach to Carol and

the Whiteness she ultimately embodies accomplishes a double purpose. First, it

establishes a parallel between the whiteness of her last name with the empty field of

Carol’s inner self. Second, it points to the cocoon of privilege that has shaped the

contours of her social and mental persona and outside of which she cannot function or

even exist (Potter 140). Rather than chronicle her road to cure, the film offers a

detailed account of her heightened seclusion in progressively smaller and “safer”

spaces. In the end, she ends up self-isolating herself even further, in a hermetically

sealed igloo inside Wrenwood. It is here that the expressive power of the close-up

comes to the fore. Carol looks at herself in the mirror and whispers “I love you,”

following the dictates of Wrenwood’s guru, Peter Dunning, since according to him the

source of one’s illness is inside the self. However, even though the film is finally

signaling an access to Carol’s interiority that had been previously denied via the

insertion of the close-up into the filmic discourse, “the professed love is

uncompelling, unconvincing, and the mirror scene is anything but subjectivity

regained” (Doane 9-10). She is as far from healing as she was in the beginning of her

physical seizures. Behind its duping surface of harmony and peacefulness, the retreat

contains the same contaminating agents that had attacked Carol in the city.

Upon Carol’s arrival at Wrenwood, though, the stiff camera aesthetics of the

film loosens up. The full shots now show Carol in conversation with other patients and

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the long takes give away to a much more conventional analytical editing style. The

spatial environment seems to have been pushed to the background of the altruistic

human exchange the retreat initially promises. On the one hand, Carol seems to have

entered a non-toxic environment that will lead into her healing. On the other, she is

now a member of a multiracial crowd bound together by the environmental diseases.

Soon both these appearances are revealed as equally misleading. First, Dunning’s (a

white man) mansion at the top of a hill, overlooking the retreat’s facility, points to the

fact that there is indeed a racial hierarchy at work in Wrenwood. Second, in the San

Fernando Valley segment of the film an oversaturated soundscape of vacuum cleaners,

car engines and kitchen appliances muffles speech to the point of displacing it as a

background noise for the artificial environment that surrounds human subjectivity. In

Wrenwood, words take center stage only momentarily, offering the initial illusion that

everything will eventually be alright. However, the aural traces of the artificial

world—planes passing by, the thunderous sound of a truck that almost runs Carol over

as she walks down a hill on the outskirts of the retreat—return as active reminders that

the retreat is indeed surrounded by the same technologies that envelop the body inside

the artificially woven space of the suburb. As in her claustrophobic household, once

again Carol White turns into a hostage of her surrounding environment.

Safe thus renders the opposition between Wrenwood and the San Fernando

Valley cityscape ultimately meaningless since they both partake in the same

organizing technologies of the body. Furthermore, both Wrenwood and the suburban

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world of the film function as an any-space-wherever. The film specifically locates the

story in the late 1980s San Fernando Valley milieu and painstakingly records the very

details of the White’s lifestyle, historically situating the action through its mobilization

of the New Age discourse that was at its peak in the 1980’s. Yet it ultimately

subordinates the localized foregrounded details to the ideological metaphor behind its

argumentative engagement with the problematic of race and the body in U.S. society.

Like P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) and Punch-Drunk Love (2002), and Fight

Club, Safe could have seemingly happened anywhere in America and, yet, not quite.

All these films point to particular referents, ideologically charged in the public

imaginary with a set of valorizing features and, at the same time, they aim elsewhere,

ultimately extrapolating the set of meanings they put forth to many other parallel

spaces where similar societal and affective patterns exist. While remaining attached to

its locality, the spaces of Safe are, simultaneously, nonplaces, “emptied of human

contact and of events endowed with significance” (Doane 7). What Haynes does is to

drop small doses of strangeness into the ruling normalcy and let the triggers of the

social click one after another to attempt to contain the threat posited to normalcy. In

doing so, he exposes the perverted ideological structure that holds them together. Like

Tsai’s The River, Haynes’ film is a chronicle of the main character’s fall into self-

isolation as catalyzed by physical pain. Most remarkably, both films equally perform a

full-frontal attack on the stability of the nuclear family and its deceptive veneer of

normalcy.

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However, while in both cases the origin of the main character’s sickness is

rendered inexplicable, Tsai’s and Haynes city dwellers are diametrically different in

their negotiating of the physicality of the city’s fabric. Whereas Tsai’s human body

seems in constant interaction with that of a porous city, Haynes’ is obsessed with

denying these permanent contact zones, regimenting the body through a series of ultra-

composed social rules and behaviors that are aimed at sealing the self inside a

protective shell. Carol’s trauma is thus a result of her incapacity to find ways to

negotiate the artificiality of the city in relation to her organic whole. In this respect, the

structural paradox that organizes Safe, its localized whereverness, becomes central in

pinning down the constitutive core of the cityscape delineated by Haynes’ narrative in

as much as it takes as a point of departure the defining character of a specific social

formation—the San Fernando Valley suburb—to centrifugally address the constitutive

hierarchies at work in the contemporary U.S. global megalopolis while anchoring its

intervention in the corporeality of a localized experience, that of Carol White.

Haynes’ film affixes its diagnosis of the entrapment of the human body inside the

technologies of regimentation of the city through a painstakingly registration of the

utter collapse of Carol White’s bodily functions and her sheltered family life.

At the same time, Mrs. White does indeed stand for mid-age upper middle

class suburban married housewives/homemakers and points to a broader societal

formation. Like Fight Club, the film diagnoses the overwhelming presence of the

artificial as a superlative mediator of human relations inside a cityscape whose quasi

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anonymity enables a leap from the local into the U.S. national. Whereas Fincher’s

superficially subversive enterprise strives to offer a way out of such entrapment via

guerrilla warfare and the spectacle of destruction, Haynes’ anthropological study of a

middle age woman in physical and psychological crisis secludes human subjectivity in

a caging self-isolation that seems to discard affective exchange with the Other as an

escape route from the sickness the inert fabric of the city has triggered.

This partial dissolution of specific spatial and temporal coordinates is not

necessarily a conscious attempt to gain a wider scope in their ideological attack on the

world of hyper-concentrated consumerism. Safe clearly announces in the opening

sequence the historical period and location of the action about to be depicted and Fight

Club is based on a best-selling novel explicitly set in Wilmington, Delaware. For, after

all, isn’t this lack of identifying markers an actual social reality rather than a self-

conscious attempt on the filmmaker’s part to strip off all specificity to make a

generalizing statement about the oppressive nature of societal rules in contemporary

U.S.A.? Isn’t the comprehensive character of their ideological interventions rooted in

the existence of these social formations throughout the U.S. and, perhaps, worldwide,

in concentrated sites of consumerist practice in those countries where Capitalism has

entered an all-around dominant stage?

Ultimately, dwellers cannot escape the organizing technologies of the city

since they are indeed nodal conduits in their implementation. Cinematic depictions of

the existing global cities invariably render an unpredictable and untotalizable

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crisscross of human subjectivities and economic, social and cultural structures. They

draw a series of contending maps, which are necessarily invested with the competing

ideological and aesthetic discourses that give birth to them. While deeply informed by

global parameters of exchange, these cinematic global cities constantly remind us that

they come to existence and evolve through the very ways in which locally specific

social and cultural formations digest the myriad forces that constantly enter their

expanding contours and actively contribute to re-shape them. In other words, they are

multi-semantic plurals the cinematic encounters from a variety of aesthetic and

ideological approaches, being ultimately irreducible to a series of generalizing,

globally applicable features. Global cities are indeed unpredictable and ultimately

unmappeable as a whole. Filmmakers can only catch glimpses of such textual richness

and offer them as partial and competing insights on one or several of the many social

and cultural practices that constitute them.

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3

VIOLENCE, CROSS-CULTURAL TRANSLATION AND GENRE:

WOO, AMENÁBAR AND TARANTINO’S GLOBAL REACH

In 2001 BMW designed a marketing campaign for its different product lines

based on a series of short, downloadable, films starring Clive Owen. The films were to

be viewed primarily on the Internet.136 The German corporation commissioned five

cutting edge filmmakers to direct each of the shorts. The project was named The Hire.

Before its recent update at the end of October 2005, the BMW films official

Web site (www.bmwfilms.com) prompted users to select the location from where they

are accessing the page: “For the best digital experience available in your region of the

world, please select your country.”137 Even though the world map on the left of the

136 Some of the films played at movie theaters before the feature presentations. Nowadays, one can acquire the DVD of the whole series (Season I and II). In the premiere for the second season at the Apollo Theater in New York City, the films were screened digitally, using Microsoft Windows Media Player. 137 On October 21st, 2005, BMW removed The Hire series from the Web and re-designed the site. Now, when users type bmwfilms.com they are re-directed to http://www.bmwusa.com/bmwexperience/films.htm. The German company continues to emphasize The Hire as a groundbreaking artistic achievement in the history of digital entertainment while promoting the cutting edge character of its product. The online text reads as follows: “BMW’s groundbreaking The Hire film series ignored conventions and created the phenomenon known as online films. The Web has never been the same since. These eight short films by critically acclaimed Hollywood directors effectively revolutionized the world of interactive entertainment, while showcasing the absolute limits of automotive high-performance exclusive to BMW.

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screen has shades of white that separate the different geopolitical territories in our

current world atlas, countries are clustered in regional groupings with minor

exceptions (the United States and Canada stand on their own). When users double-

click on their country of origin (if they can, since the dimensions of the map are rather

minimal and some countries are quasi-invisible), they are bagged in the same unit as

other users from countries BMW considers to belong to the same target group (e.g. All

Africa is one single territory in terms of clicking access; Mexico is grouped with

Central America and the Caribbean). Conspicuously, the users’ option to choose their

country—and therefore their general cultural and economic status— resembles the

board game Risk since the structure of the map not only establishes size-hierarchies

(Brazil is bigger than the U.S. in terms of extension but it is grouped within the Latin

American frame as opposed to be “clickable” on its own, for example) but also reflects

BMW market interests, privileging North-America as a key territorial landmark.138

This cluster structure is designed to allow BMW to monitor the degree of interest in

The Hire series in each market area and, therefore, informs the company’s future-

marketing strategies in regard to the products the film series advertises. As Manuel Over 100 million film views and numerous awards later, The Hire film series served as further proof that when it comes to innovation and technology, BMW has always been ahead of its time.” 138 Risk, labeled “the Game of Global Domination”, features a world map divided in imaginary territories. Players own an army and, after being randomly assigned certain territories, they are asked to accomplish a mission (e.g. Conquer Asia and Latin America or destroy the red armies). Each continent has an army-value. Symptomatically Latin America and Africa are not only divided in fewer territories than Europe and North America but also have a lesser value in terms of points.

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Castells acknowledges, often people and nations are excluded from the worldwide

panorama of connectivity that digital technology has enabled not only because of their

lack of connection but because they “become dependent on economies and cultures in

which they have little chance of finding their own path of material well-being and

cultural identity” (Internet Galaxy 247). The Hire’s modified mapping of the world

points to the very centers from which these practices of decision-making spring.

Double-clicking anywhere on the map brings the Internet user to the same

main presentation screen: Clive Owen’s figure salutes users from the center. Above,

we can see the title of each film in the series. On the left side of the screen, there is a

minor explanation of Owen’s character along with a description of the series as being

made by “Hollywood’s finest talent.” The Web page is invariably in English. Thus,

the reach of The Hire, while promising cultural specificity through regional grouping

with unmatched access due to its digital character, resorts to English, the ever-

expanding language of cultural and economic exchange, to cancel out the move

toward differentiation the first access page had promised. In other words, BMW plays

out a paradoxical operation of multicultural recognition and global homogenization

that huddles all users—from wherever they are—in the same English-language-as-

lingua franca sack. Once users click on one of the selected geographical areas and

register in order to view the film (a requirement), it is no longer possible to go back to

the initial, “Where are you accessing this page from?” screen. Users have been

identified as, let’s say, African, and Internet Explore/Safari is automatically re-

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directed to the selected regional presentation Web page. Under the alibi of choice, a

practice of control has been performed.

A closer look at The Hire first season’s directors problematizes the simplistic

characterization of the series as being made by Hollywood’s finest talent and, points,

conversely, to BMW’s attempt to appeal to a variety of demographic groups of users

with different film tastes—which the German company strategically associates with

the particular car model each film showcases. The directors include: Ang Lee, a

Taiwanese born, NYU-trained filmmaker who has conquered the global film market

with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, whose only

feature prior to 2001 was Amores Perros (2000), also an international hit, that offers a

kinetic experiencing of the meanders of Mexico City while mobilizing the condition of

hip hop as the reigning language of popular music in the 1990's and has been typically

compared to Quentin Tarantino’s high-voltage puzzle-like rides; John Frankenheimer,

a Hollywood veteran whose career spans for over forty years with films that range

from The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to Reindeer Games (2000); Guy Ritchie, a

key figure in contemporary “hip” British cinema, who had directed two cult and

commercially successful hits, Lock, Smoke and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and

Snatch (2000), and has become a mainstream media fixture through his sentimental

and artistic association with Madonna; finally, Wong Kar-Wai, a Hong Kong-based

auteur who, at this point of his career, had repeatedly shunned Hollywood since he

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gained worldwide recognition in the mid 1990's and continued to produce highly

idiosyncratic film reveries on the fringes of the Hong Kong mainstream panorama.

While Frankenheimer and Lee had worked in Hollywood by 2001, the rest had

not. In fact, both Gonzalez Iñárritu and Ritchie have gone Hollywood after the

making of The Hire and Lee has increasingly moved from the independent world that

launched his career in association with James Schamus’ Good Machine to the full-

throttle Hollywood universe in recent years.139 Wong, conversely, continues working

in Hong Kong, financing his films through his own production company, Jet Tone

Films, and a variety of European and Chinese investors.140 His films have not crossed

over into the multiplex market, remaining, however, art-house landmarks.

The Hire’s first season executive producer, David Fincher, claims in the

“Making of” that the goal was to produce five downloadable independent films that

would showcase five different car models, made by five different directors to

fundamentally “give people a reason to watch.”141 The juxtaposition of the words

download and independent that Fincher performs situates the realm of independent

cinema within the all-access global reach of the Internet and signals the state of affairs

in the U.S. movie industry in the aftermath of the post-Pulp Fiction mainstreamization 139 Good Machine was bought out by Universal. Schamus and Lee, however, have continued their creative partnership in Universal producing films such as The Hulk (2003)and Brokeback Mountain through the studio’s “artsy” branch, Focus Features. 140 2046, for example, was co-produced by Fortissimo Film, France 3 Cinema, Shanghai Film Studies, ZDF and Arte France Cinema, among others. Wong’s new film, My Blueberry Nights, is his first U.S. adventure. 141 The Hire DVD, “Making of first Season.”

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of independent cinema. For, in a film panorama, where the IFC and Sundance have

become mega-franchises and Hollywood studios independent branches have

increasingly multiplied, the word independent film no longer refers to Jonas Mekas’

downtown New York experimental world or to John Cassavetes low-budget 1950’s

and 1960’s films. As several scholars have noted, the distinction between Independent

film and Hollywood film has become increasingly blurry to the point of becoming a

marketing label functioning in the same way as Versace or Gucci (Biskind; Homlund

and Wyatt). BMW’s emphasis in showcasing Hollywood’s finest talent as a marketing

strategy and Fincher’s labeling of the films as independent does indeed point to the

ever-lasting struggle between production companies—aiming to produce revenue—

and talent—attempting at all cost to keep their creative freedom intact.

Simultaneously, though, it marks the confusion that exists currently when referring to

whether a film is an independent production or a studio one. The interchangeability of

these two terms in the context of The Hire all-reaching series, thus, not only indicates

the partial (almost total, one dares to say) insignificance in making a distinction

between the two terms today but, most importantly, the convergent paths that these

two modes of production have gone through in the last fifteen years.

In addition, the downloadability of The Hire, utilizing the quasi

anywhere/anytime global reach of the Internet as a key marketing tool, points to the

fact that this series was conceived as a potentially ubiquitous online viewing

experience available to every corner of the world. While this multicultural and

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multinational group of directors, with highly differentiated approaches to the

cinematic medium’s expressive and narrative potentialities, produced very distinctive

pieces, the recurrent presence of BMW cars binds them together as a fundamentally

commercial enterprise that delivers analogous end-products: the kinetic engagement of

spectators in the enjoyment of a variety of streamed audio-visual rides where the

BMW logo and fabric rules. The Hire places the ubiquitous practice of product

placement in contemporary cinema at the forefront of its textual fabric: what

ultimately matters the most is showcasing the different car models. At the same, the

distinctive cinematic style of these directors and the “brand” of filmmaking that each

of them epitomizes work to wrap the spectator’s encounter which each car model and

the lifestyle they are supposed to catalyze.

For the second season of The Hire, BMW commissioned three new directors to

produce films. Tony Scott, an industry darling with a cutting-edge reputation, John

Carnahan, the new kid on the block who had just made the critically acclaimed Narc

(2002), and John Woo, the ultimate Hong Kong action flick auteur with a huge

reputation in the Asian market through the 1980’s and first half of the 1990’s and who

had become a Hollywood A-list director after the global success of Face/Off (1997)

and Mission: Impossible II (2000). Each of them delivered as expected. Woo’s The

Hostage, for example, is a compilation of all his multiple speed action+affect

pyrotechnic excesses. After the eight episodes of The Hire series were completed, the

BMW cars have been audio-visually and narratively re-imagined by eight directors

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with extremely diverse artistic and cultural backgrounds. The potential buyer BMW

had aimed at had eight different worlds to chose from, eight different kinds of cars to

purchase. Ideally for the German company, all kinds of users can browse their

collections and find their ideal niche—each car model wrapped in the high production

values and the cultural and cinematic codes of the film that showcases it.

Can we identify each of these BMW films as American, German, Taiwanese or

Mexican? Perhaps Taiwanese-American or Chinese-Argentinean? All of them are

indeed multicultural and transnational motion pictures in terms of their production,

aesthetic, talent and motifs. The distinctive socio-cultural background of each director

mobilizes a specific cultural dominant—e.g. the use of Argentinean music in Wong’s

piece signaling his known fondness for Latin music—but their overall design is

undoubtedly imbued with a series of cross-cultural processes that cannot be pinpointed

by associating any of the films with the particular cinematic traditions and cultural

discourses generated within the limits of a single geopolitical border. What does this

migratory circulation of talent in the contemporary film panorama tell us about the

ways in which film aesthetics and filmmakers cross borders today? How can we

understand their respective filmmaking practices as having a global appeal beyond

their cultural and national specificity? Is this controlled circulation of talent across

borders any different from the ways in which filmmakers have traveled around the

world from the very beginning of the history of cinema? How do we understand

audiovisual products that are structured through a cultural sensibility that might not be

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totally our own but we nevertheless can approach through a series of generic, narrative

and audiovisual strategies our own historicity as film spectators has provided?

In 1996, Tom Cruise (producer and star) and Paramount pictures selected

Brian De Palma to direct the first episode of the new franchise they launched: Mission:

Impossible (1996). Four years later, John Woo directed the second film, MI-2. Lee

Tamahori, the indigenous New Zealander who had gained national and international

recognition for Once were Warriors (1994) was put in charge of Die Another Day

(2002), the last James Bond film featuring Pierce Brosnan. Jean-Pierre Jeunet crossed

over from France to the U.S. to deliver Alien: Resurrection (1997) only to go back to

France to direct the global hit. Peter Jackson, another New Zealander, convinced New

Line to produce the most expensive trilogy ever made, The Lord of the Rings. Alfonso

Cuarón crossed the border between Mexico and the English-speaking world when

Warner Brothers chose him to direct the third film of the Harry Potter series after his

international hit, Y tu Mamá También (2001).142 In other words, international

filmmakers are being routinely incorporated into the Hollywood production machinery

with a double and yet complementary goal: firstly, to bank on their transnational

recognition in order to diversify as much as possible the appeal of the new episode of

a series of films or a franchise that had already established itself as a “ Hollywood

event/film.” Secondly, to incorporate into the pre-established (multi) generic franchise

142 Cuarón had already made two films in the US before the release of Y tu Mamá También—namely, Great Expectations (1995) and A Little Princess (1998).

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or film the auteurist stamp and/or popular success each of these filmmakers has

achieved elsewhere and, consequently, expand the potential attractiveness of the next

film in specific regional markets and also worldwide. We are thus in front of a process

of hyper-controlled variation that utilizes the recognizable common ground of one or

several generic registers and audio-visual modes of narration and tints them with the

best of the non-Hollywood Others in order to ideally produce the global box-office

blockbuster.

As an entry point in this field of transnational exchange, I am taking the work

of three contemporary directors—namely, John Woo, Quentin Tarantino and

Alejandro Amenábar—that cut across the insufficient (if understood rigidly)

categories of territorially based national cinemas and cinematic genres. Their

respective migration trajectories are radically diverse and point to the need to

understand contemporary filmmaking as a series of processes of cultural and

ideological negotiation under the demanding pressure of an ultimate target for

production companies: multi-media revenue.

John Woo started working in the Hong Kong film industry and searched for

new opportunities in the Hollywood studio system in the mid 1990’s. Quentin

Tarantino launched his career as l’enfant terrible of the indie world and, through his

partnership with Miramax films (ultimately bought out by a multinational corporation,

Disney) and the critical and economic success of Pulp Fiction, crossed over into the

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mainstream.143 Amenábar, on his part, has always worked within the Spanish film

industry but has managed to attract international A-class talent—e.g. Nicole Kidman

starring in The Others; Javier Bardem in The Sea Inside—and has recently won the

Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture with his last effort. All three directors have

been widely successful both in their native countries and around the globe.

My purpose is to explore if, despite the marked differences that characterizes

each of these three directors’ output, it is possible to pinpoint a series of

commonalities that may explain, on the one hand, the widespread appeal of their

works in the countries of origin and elsewhere, and, on the other, the aesthetic and

ideological operations at play in their films that grant them their transnational

character. And, if this is the case, how can we benefit from emphasizing the

transnational character of Woo, Tarantino and Amenábar´s films as a way to analyze

in depth the reasons behind their international recognition and the transcultural

character of their respective aesthetics. How do these directors manage to mobilize a

series of dominant socio-cultural and filmic modes—the appeal of the star personae of

their actors, the instrumentalization of the dominant status of representations of

violence through a comedic register, the utilization of sentimental substratum that

places the problematics of heterosexual reciprocity at the core of diverse generic

143 In fact, the Weinstein brothers recently split with Disney, leaving Miramax behind and founding “The Weinstein Company.” Most of their creative talent—including their star-auteurs Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith—have followed the brothers.

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formations—to surpass the limitations of nationally specific codes and deliver

complex filmic palimpsests characterized by paramount aesthetic and cultural

diversity? In other words, which aspects of the cinematic output of these three

directors are translatable/decipherable across borders and which are not and how can

we link the translatability of certain elements of their films with their global critical

and commercial success? Finally, violence holds a privileged status in their works,

and more broadly in the contemporary mediascape. It is indeed one of the prevailing

representational modes in the history of cinema across different national cinematic

traditions and time periods. How do Woo, Tarantino and Amenábar utilize the

malleability of this “mode of violence” within the coordinates of the different generic

formations they deploy and how does this mode function in combination with two

equally powerful registers— the comedic and the sentimental—to achieve

transcultural translatability?

Excess Galore: John Woo’s Affected Bloodletting

A Better Tomorrow (1986) was a Hong Kong box-office hit and subsequently a

national media event.144 It catapulted John Woo and Chow Yun-Fat’s shaky film

144 Karen Fang reports that the film made 4.5 million USD on tickets and played for two months in the movie theaters—triple than the average. It was the highest-grossing film in Hong Kong industry when it was released. In addition, the film also gained the recognition of critics and the Hong Kong industry. It was nominated in eight

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careers into immediate stardom.145 Chow, a former TV romantic lead, known in film

circles as ‘box-office poison,” became an immediate national icon whose look,

demeanor and black trench coat became common place in the Hong Kong socio-

cultural fabric, beyond the cinematic field. The “yingxiong pian” or “hero film,” the

label local Hong Kong critics coined to identify A Better Tomorrow and later most of

Woo’s late 1980’s and early 1990’s work, “refers to highly stylized and dynamic

action/crime films which feature glamorized protagonists motivated and challenged by

such traditional chivalric concerns as love, honor and vengeance” (Fang 50). This type

of film soon became the formula to imitate. The commercially carnivorous and fast-

paced Hong Kong film industry rushed to produce a series of formulaic clones,

copying the most salient features of A Better Tomorrow in an attempt to obtain the

same degree of commercial success.146 John Woo’s long-lasting exile in the outskirts

of the Hong Kong film industry had ended. Now he was its most coveted star-director.

categories for the 1987 Hong Kong Film Awards and Chow Yun-Fat won the prize for best actor. 145 In fact, The Sunset Warrior (1986), a film John Woo had made before A Better Tomorrow had been shelved by the Studio and was released after the great success of the latter film. 146 In this respect, it is indeed significant that Ringo Lam’s City on Fire was produced within this dynamic of A Better Tomorrow’s imitations. Quentin Tarantino recycled the shootout configuration of the ending of Lam’s film in his opera prima, Reservoir Dogs (1992). The similarity of both films stirred a polemics to the point that Mike White made a short film, Who did you think you are fooling?, denouncing Tarantino as a plagiarist. See: <http://www.impossiblefunky.com/qt/main.htm>, The Anti-Tarantino Page, for more information regarding the polemic that Mr. White’s film stirred. Even though the similarities between City on Fire and Reservoir Dogs are

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A Better Tomorrow was, in fact, a remake of Patrick Lung Kong’s Story of a

Discharged Prisoner (1967), a film that is itself a remake of a French film of the same

title. Woo adapted this initial translation into the contemporary Hong Kong triad

milieu while wrapping it with the very iconic traits of his own pantheon of auteurs—

Sergio Leone, Jean-Pierre Melville and Chang Cheh, most remarkably. At the same

time, he banked on the fascination of violent imagery in our contemporary mediascape

and adapted the aesthetics of the long-lasting traditions of the Hong Kong martial arts

genre into a series of .45 bullet-spitting feasts. As Karen Fang acknowledges, Woo

uses different elements of cinematography and high-caliber weaponry to amp up the

action, like Hollywood action films do, “but its acrobatic choreography of physical

grace and dance-like motion retains ties to the martial arts” (56).

However, A Better Tomorrow and its sequel did not grant Woo global

recognition outside East Asia and the Western video cult niche. Only after Criterion

released a laser disc edition of The Killer (1990) and Hardboiled (1992) and Woo

received the adamant vocal praise his peers—Tarantino and Scorsese most notably—

did Woo become an internationally renowned action auteur. By the mid 1990’s Woo’s

films had surpassed the limited cult status they possessed in the West and became the

new big thing. Not accidentally, this interest in Woo’s work coincided with the July 1st

indeed significant, their differences are equally paramount. What the relationship between these two films ultimately shows, once again, is that contemporary filmmaking may be better defined as a continuous process of exchange and translated appropriation.

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deadline of Hong Kong’s handover from the United Kingdom to China. In Western

criticism: “the film’s historical importance in Hong Kong cinema became

interchangeable with the film’s value as a representation of contemporary Hong Kong

history itself” (Fang 69). In fact, whereas the Chinese title of the film, “Essence of

Heroes” emphasizes honor and friendship and points to the combination of excessive

action and affect that constitutes the consistent core of Woo’s works, the English title,

A Better Tomorrow seems to be costume-made to encourage a politically-inflected

reading of the film due to its emphasis in futurity.147 At the same time, and regardless

of whether an allegorical framework is productive to read the film’s depiction of Hong

Kong’s mid 1980’s milieu, Woo’s repeated box-office hits—with the notorious

exception of A Bullet in the Head (1990)— opened Hollywood’s eyes in relation to

Woo’s commercial potential if he migrated to the other side of the Pacific. Today

Woo’s signature shot, a combination of a facial close-up with a fast rack focus during

an action sequence, has been appropriated by many filmmakers around the world,

147 As an example of the Western allegorical reading of Woo’s films Karen Fangs points out we can cite Tony Williams' “Space, Place and Spectacle: The Crisis Cinema of John Woo.” Williams uses Achbar Abbas’ notion of deja disparu—the fact that Hong Kong was a space in disappearance, moving too fast and cinema cannot keep up with a subject that is always on the verge of disappearing—and proposes that Woo’s films emphasize a “future past” and deal fundamentally with the sense of loss of a series of values that the looming July 1st Chinese takeover might efface. In More than Night, James Naremore offers a different reading of the Western critics and filmmakers’ fascination with Woo’s Hong Kong work. According to him, it is consistent with the current interest in “postmodern or ironic noir” and the orientalist motifs that run through the history of this cinematic mode—i.e. Chinatown or Lady from Shanghai.

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especially within the generic codes of the action film. As Manohla Dargis remarks,

Woo’s influence in the contemporary action film is ubiquitous, from low-budget flicks

to the latest high-octane blockbuster. Simultaneously, his American films have

become more akin to the dominant audiovisual and ideological language of

Hollywood cinema. Feeding off what at a certain moment in history were the signature

shots of dozens of other filmmakers—from D. W. Griffith to Sergei Eisenstein, Sam

Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, to name a few—and that, by a process of controlled

innovation/sedimentation, became standardized into what we may label as Hollywood

illusionist aesthetic of spectacular continuity, Woo’s films have become less Woo-like

while other’s have increasingly reflected his influential stamp in contemporary

cinema. In other words, Woo’s potentially transgressive mode of cinematic address

has been, at least, partially domesticated. To clarify: John Woo has not simply sold out

and become a Hollywood hack. His migration to Hollywood granted him the global

exposure he coveted once he had exhausted the East Asian market. A perfect marriage

between a worldwide dominant mode of film production, distribution and exhibition—

Hollywood—characterized by a cannibalistic impulse to appropriate competing Others

across nations and a global-hungry auteur occurred. What the differences between

Woo’s Hong Kong and Hollywood films show is a very complex process of

transcultural translation that is bound to happen whenever filmmakers migrate to a

foreign culture and must adapt their cinematic language to the creative talent they

work with and their new main target audience. Since working as a Hollywood director,

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your potential spectator is anywhere/everywhere, Woo was necessarily bound to make

his films less culturally Chinese and more American. Or rather, turn his cinematic

language into more Universal-as-American, according to the dominant

representational templates that rule in Hollywood, and, consequently, worldwide.

It is necessary to point out that, even though prior to his migration to

Hollywood Woo had in the West the above-mentioned cult status in Hong Kong he

was always a commercial, mainstream director.148 In contrast to Wong Kar-Wai and

Stanley Kwan—two of the key figures of the highly regarded 1980’s Hong Kong New

Waves— Woo topped the charts of the Hong Kong film star directors after the

tremendous success of A Better Tomorrow. Willing to preserve the privileged status he

had coveted for decades, Woo easily complied with the ruling dictates of the domestic

market he worked in. All his immediate post-A Better Tomorrow films are

fundamentally variations of the same smashing formula that had shattered the Hong

Kong box-office record and played rather successfully in Eastern Asia.

Woo’s films develop in a variety of ways the celebration of violent

bloodletting in a triad milieu, highlighting the same basic motifs—namely, male

bonding, capitalist greed and redemption—through the establishment of a series of

male doubles—typically a police officer and a gangster—who join forces to defeat an 148 In Planet Hong Kong:: popular cinema and the art of entertainment, David Bordwell identifies the need to consider the figure of the auteur as an operative figure in the mass market, beyond its art-house niche. He places John Woo in a commercial auteurist tradition that links him with Orson Welles and Hitchcock.

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ultimately evil gang lord.149 In addition, he repeatedly uses as lead actors canto pop

stars—Tony Leung, Jackie Cheung—, which is a common feature of the Hong Kong

film industry, and a consistent cast of solid character types in a series of subtle

variations.150 We are thus confronted by what seems to be a contradiction that can

only be resolved if we emphasize the importance of the different cultural backlogs

through which Chinese and Western audiences approach Woo’s films. For, if Woo

149 Two of Woo’s films during this period (1986-1992) are not set in a contemporary Hong Kong gangster milieu: Once A Thief and Bullet in the Head. The first one is a clumsy attempt to remake To Catch a Thief featuring Chow Yun-Fat, Leslie Cheung and Cherie Ching as a trio of siblings who perform art works’ heist in France. The latter is set initially in the 1960's during the period of the pro-Communist Hong Kong riots. The three main characters travel then to Vietnam in the midst of the US/Vietcong conflict and then the narrative goes back in Hong Kong, picturing the triad underworld of the 1960’s. The film develops the same central motifs highlighted above under an allegorical veneer that reflects on the Tiananmen massacre and the senselessness of ubiquitous violence in contemporary societies (See: James Steintrager's “Bullet in the Head: Trauma, Identity and Violent Spectacle." 150 It is interesting how in the Hong Kong entertainment industry there is no a sharp division between the worlds of pop music, acting and beauty pageant. Leslie Cheung, Jackie Cheung, Andy Lau, Faye Wong and Takeshi Kaneshiro, to name a few, were all music stars before turning into film acting. Maggie Cheung was a Hong Kong beauty pageant runner-up and Michelle Reis was Miss Macao. This integration of the different levels of entertainment production has only occurred in the West in rare exceptions with success. In Hong Kong, the entertainment industries very often build “total stars,” working at different stages of their careers in diverse sectors of the audiovisual media. Even though genres, directors, audiovisual styles and stars work in conjunction in both geographical locations, the Hong Kong star seems to be at the pinnacle of this pyramid, whereas the Hollywood industry tends to either sell a film like an “event itself”—e.g. Lord of the Rings—or draw on an actor’s appeal in combination with a particular generic formation—e.g. Tom Cruise and the Mission: Impossible series. In East Asia, this phenomenon conspicuously occurs in other fields of the entertainment not necessarily considered to be "artistic" such as soccer. In Japan, for example, fans do not follow a team—as they do all over the world—but a player. If the player changes teams, the fan supports the new team the star plays for.

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was a cult auteur in the West, it is precisely because, as Jinsoo An points out, he

offered “a particular viewing pleasure not available in American films” (96).

However, in Hong Kong, despite all the innovative character A Better Tomorrow may

have had, the film topped the box-office chart when it was released, and banked on the

commercial appeal of the several popular Chinese genres it fed off to catalyze its

success. Consequently Hollywood’s “kidnapping” of Woo, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh and

Chow Yun-Fat’s talent does not “ signal a certain limitation of the cultural hegemony

maintained by the Hollywood machine," (An 98). By attempting to expand the sphere

of Hong Kong film’s cult status into the mainstream and consequently, capture a

broader sector of the audience by bringing Woo’s talent to the United States,

Universal—the company that catapulted the Hong Kong director’s American career—

was performing an operation Hollywood has traditionally practiced: to strengthen its

own domination of the world market through the appropriation of other national film

industries and the ultimate recycling of these foreign talents to work within the

dictates of its own proven successful formulae. At the same time, this allows

Hollywood to enrich itself with a series of carefully controlled stylistic variations

initially tested and proven to be economically productive in smaller markets

elsewhere.

Having decided to migrate to Hollywood John Woo made his most action-

packed and last Hong Kong film: Hardboiled. Whereas, some scholars, like David

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Bordwell, point to the fact that Woo was basically showing off what he could do

within the action genre to his roster of possible employers and label it as his

“portfolio” film, others, like Tom Tunney, speak of “a decorative aesthetic of

destruction in which pyrotechnics and firepower are celebrated for their own sake”

(73). At this point, Woo had lost all interest in narrative development and

psychological characterization and exclusively fetishized the bullet-ridden body in an

exacerbated guide-for-dummies of his own filmmaking. One way or another, what

seems clear now is that Woo’s hero film formula had reached its pinnacle and was in a

steadfast descent. His first Hollywood effort did not encourage fans and critics to

believe otherwise. The whimsical match between one of the earthy machos of the

1980’s American action film, Jean Claude Van Damme, who was attempting to bridge

the gap between his limited martial arts fan base and the English-speaking global

mainstream, and the hottest Hong Kong auteur delivered a box-office and critical

failure: Hard Target. In fact, even though Hard Target had been designed as a Jean

Claude Van Damme and Woo vehicle, the filmmaker had to re-cut it several times to

comply with Universal’s requirements in regards to the representation of onscreen

violence (Williams, Tony).

Woo’s second Hollywood film, Broken Arrow (1996), featured John Travolta

and Christian Slater. The film was a moderate to big box-office success and cleared

the way for Woo’s first A-list work: Face/Off. His over-the-top Travolta/Cage vehicle,

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in which producer Michael Douglas gave Woo final cut, made over $300 million

worldwide. This put him in the eyes of Tom Cruise and Paramount, granting him the

global exposure the Cruise label unavoidably endows.151 Woo reached the Hollywood

pinnacle: he managed to elevate to a new level of global success an already thriving

franchise. After that, Woo made the catatonic Paycheck (2003), a critical and box-

office fiasco.

Woo’s uneven trajectory in Hollywood poses a key question in regard to his

transnational migration: what are the substantial differences that characterize Woo’s

Hong Kong output from his Hollywood films? It would be erroneous to find an easy

way out of this question and blame Hollywood for thwarting Woo’s creative freedom.

As we have mentioned above, Woo had always worked within the commercial field of

Hong Kong film and his auteurist imprint must not only be located within a purely

formal terrain. He has always been an able negotiator of the commercial coordinates

of this market while managing to create his own distinctive audiovisual style. In fact,

Woo, the auteur, has often been the “victim” of the commercial dictates of the profit-

driven mode of production in which he has always worked. For example, Woo and

producer and fellow Hong Kong filmmaker Tsui Hark had tremendous problems when

trying to release the Hong Kong-made A Better Tomorrow II (1987) to the point that

151 According to Karen Fang Hard Target made $33 million in the US box-office; Broken Arrow: $70 m. in the U.S.; Face/Off: $112 m. in the U.S., $300 m. worldwide; MI2, $125 m. in the U.S., $545 worldwide.

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each of them re-cut half of the film separately and spliced it together. The result is an

utterly incoherent film that is only interesting in terms of exploring how Woo’s

aesthetics evolve in relation to the first issue of the franchise. It is thus more

productive to acknowledge the similarities and differences between his work in Hong

Kong and Hollywood and understand the socio-political reasons behind the aesthetic

and thematic shift one can easily detect when seeing each of these two bodies of

works.

First, in Hollywood, Woo’s Hong Kong quasi all-male universes turn into

familial/heterosexual love narratives; closure typically renders the reunion of the

heterosexual couple. Second, despite the fact that he continues to use the famous Woo

shots that gave him a name as the greatest innovator in the representation of violent

confrontations since the times of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, the amount of

bloodletting—body count and the explicitness in the representation of the physical

consequences of violent confrontations—has significantly dropped. Third, Woo does

not write his films or act in them as supporting cast. Instead of being the key artistic

force in the making of his works, Woo is part of the Hollywood package. In other

words, from commercial auteur he has turned into an able craftsman. Finally, the

nuanced set of visual rhymes and narrative twists Woo utilizes to play out the theme of

the double between criminal and policeman in his Hong Kong films gets simplified

into a good versus evil clear-cut dichotomy: moral legibility becomes a must.

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What remains fundamentally the same is Woo’s reliance on an excessive

sentimental discourse that runs in parallel to his aestheticized representation of

violence and that, in combination with his action spectacles, constitutes the

ideological, narrative and stylistic core of his works. What I am pointing to here is the

fact that while most critics and scholars have emphasized the spectacular power of the

‘ballet of the bullet’ and the importance of the concept of yi qi (self-righteousness) in

Woo’s Hong Kong works, some of them have often failed to underscore the

importance of this extreme affect-as-excess register, neglecting thus a key audiovisual

and narrative stylistic marker that holds a high degree of significance if one wishes to

pinpoint the ways in which Woo’s violent marathons operate in both aesthetic and

ideological terms.152 As Jinsoo An points out, “The Killer transgresses the action-film

genre, its sentimentality suggests a melodramatic mode of representation operating

parallel to the kinetic and sensational world of the action film” (An 102). Furthermore,

if Woo’s use of slow-motion was hailed as a radically different way to shoot gun

fighting sequences within a gangster/noir genre, this same technique functions also, as

David Bordwell argues, to magnify the dramatic impact of his characters’ expressions

of emotions in a close-up (Planet 105). The inseparability and stylistic consistency of

152 In contrast to the term “hero film,” in the West critics and fans initially labeled Woo’s films as “heroic bloodshed.” The emphasis on violence is once again present in this terminology. The sentimental core of Woo’s films becomes encapsulated in an adjective, “heroic,” that is normally associated with a very different spectrum of cultural codes.

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these two modes—action and affect—working within a dynamic of excess constitutes

the most significant aspect of Woo’s oeuvre.153

Given the privileged status of the problematic of the heterosexual match in the

Hollywood industry, the shift from all-male to male-female coupling seems to be an

instance of cinematic translatability between two cultures and modes of production

that share the widespread use of a flexible action generic register but ultimately rely

on different strongholds of sexed character types within this realm. For, in Woo’s

Hong Kong hero films, hyperbolic affect not only works narratively as an alibi to

ethically justify his excessive displays of violence but also as an integral part of these

spectacular bloodbaths. Furthermore, even when the theme of redemption turned into

heterosexual romance takes central stage, as in The Killer, this male-female

relationship gets overwritten through the emphatic articulation of the theme of the

male double—Chow Yun-Fat and Danny Lee in this film—and the elevation of the

gangster-police officer narrative to a higher stature by resorting to the constant display

of Christian imagery.

The killer’s love interest, Jenny, is in fact both a lover and a daughter. In the

beginning of the film, Jeffrey (Chow) enters a bar to complete a murder for which he 153 Jinsoo An points to the fact that The Killer differs from the dominant illusionist form in American film through its deployment of a melodramatic mode that he links with Kristin Thompson’s notion of “cinematic excess”. In The Killer, “the materiality of images functions beyond the purpose of narrative progression” (100). This is an argument we can arguably extend to all John Woo’s post-A Better Tomorrow films made in Hong Kong.

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has been hired. Jenny is singing on stage. A series of repeated dissolves connect the

two actors visually. While accomplishing his deadly task, Jeffrey accidentally shots

Jenny’s eyes, leaving her blind. From this point of the story, Jeffrey’s only obsession

is to gather enough money to pay for the cornea transplant she needs to recover her

sight and then retire from the criminal world. In the process of realizing this wish, they

get romantically involved. However, Jeffrey becomes a caretaker, a fatherly figure for

Jenny, rather than his lover. His affective attachment to her, even though signaled in

the pre-shooting part of the story through the linking dissolves, is triggered by his

need to maintain his chivalric identity. As the narrative progresses, both Jeffrey and

the cop who pursues him lose their respective partners and end teaming up together to

defeat a ruthless gang lord. An unexpected friendship (while both Chow and Lee

dispose gangster bodies left and right) is forged between the two. In fact, Woo had

visually anticipated this narrative move by linking them through a series of dissolves

that foreground the intimate likeness between them, while paralleling the initial bond

that has been established between Jeffrey and Jenny. The emphasis of the story has

shifted from heterosexual affective match to male-to-male friendship. In the closing

sequence of the film, Jeffrey is fatally wounded and blinded. In despair, he crawls in

Jenny’s direction to embrace her before his demise. At the same time, Jenny performs

the same movement in the opposite direction. Their dual blindness prevents them to

find each other’s bodies. Jeffrey perishes and Jenny continues crawling, calling out his

lover/father in disarray. The cop kills the villain and weeps in silence the death of his

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loved friend. The friendship between killer and cop has been rendered unbreakable

and eternal despite of Jeffrey’s demise. Jenny and Jeffrey’s love story has been

overwritten once again by the emphasis on male-to-male honorable and heroic

friendship as the ideological cornerstone of Woo’s bloody universes.

When we watch Woo’s Hong Kong action sequences carefully we are indeed

in front of kinetic spectacles articulated through a masterful interplay of different film

speeds and painstakingly planned choreographies of male bodies carrying heavy-duty

weaponry. However, at the same time, most of these sequences come to a halt. It is

then that Woo turns to his actors’ faces through the use of a series of close-ups and

extreme close ups and exaggeratedly melodramatic music, highlighting the dramatic

disadvantage in which the heroes are placed once the evil-Others—the triad gang

typically—have managed to corral them. It is a moment in which characters speak

their mind and emphatically declare their commitment to their bloodline despite their

past quarrels (Leslie Cheung and Ti Lung in A Better Tomorrow), the eternal value of

friendship (Chow Yun-Fat, Ti Lung and Dean Shek in A Better Tomorrow II), close

the gap that prevented them from having full mutual understanding (Chow Yun-Fat

and Tony Leung in Hardboiled), or reinforce the ties of their newly established

friendship (Chow Yun-Fat and Danny Lee in The Killer). Then they continue carrying

out what seemed to be their helpless crusade against the common enemy, an uber-

destructive gang lord characterized only for his sheer disrespect for human life and an

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overwhelming greed. It is a momentary pause in the voyeuristic bullet rain that

disposes bodies with suspicious complacency and leaves behind the accumulation of

corpses the heroes have carried out to reiterate that behind the carnage there is a higher

moral ground that elevates their actions. It is indeed a humanizing gesture in the midst

of havoc that mobilizes excess to eliminate all ambiguity, eschewing all character

complexity to bring to the fore the typification that runs across Woo’s works. Via

exaggerated affect, all psychological gray zones fade away and Woo’s characters

resort to the repeated firing of a .45 to achieve the narrative goal their newly acquired

full moral legibility has granted them. It is indeed a combination of exaggerated

pathos and overwhelming action that renders depthlessness at the constitutive core of

Woo’s heroic narratives, constantly reiterating a fixed set of familial and friendship

values as the lofty ideals his violence-surrounded characters covet and only achieve by

using violence as an inevitable means to end their redemptive pilgrimage.

Furthermore, once the ballet of the bullet kicks off, women are almost invariably

excluded or become the weak Other to be protected. Via the high moral stature that

male-to-male hyperbolic bonding, blood-full action becomes the means to render a

morally correct closure. Excluded from the realm of agency in Woo’s bullet-spitting

feasts, women and often children become the epitome of innocence to be protected.

Woo embraces wholeheartedly the “melodramatic imagination.”

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This characteristic interplay of pathos and action made Woo a perfect fit for

the talent-hungry Hollywood industry since this very combination—a variation of

what Linda Williams calls the melodramatic mode—constitutes the fundamental form

of address through which American popular moving pictures narrativizes the

complexity of the social field to offer clear-cut moral legibility and provide,

simultaneously, entertainment. Significantly, Williams points out that the

melodramatic mode is not only a transgeneric substratum within the field of American

cinema, but also a key socio-cultural trope through which American society perceives

itself: “Today, the heritage of moving picture melodrama shapes not only fictional

films and television but the media representation of war, athletic competitions, and

courtroom trials” ( Playing the Race Card 13). In her analyses, D.W. Griffith, the

Rambo series, Titanic, the coverage of U.S. athletic performances in the Olympics,

and the O.J. Simpson trial become components of a continuum that constitutes one of

the dominant cultural logics and representational templates within the United States.

In filmic terms, the melodramatic mode is not an excess that threatens the self-effacing

cause-effect paradigm that Bordwell et al label classical Hollywood cinema but a

complementary form of address that works in combination within popular modes of

storytelling that combine realism, sentiment, spectacle and action in producing moral

legibility. Melodrama thus is “not a submerged, or embedded, tendency, or genre

within classical realism, but it has more often itself been the dominant form of popular

moving-picture narrative, whether on the nineteenth-century stage, in twentieth-

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century films or in contemporary media events” (Williams, Playing the Race 23). In

understanding the melodramatic mode as the basic vernacular of American moving

pictures, Williams is not only emphasizing what Altman calls the “interfertile”

character of genre films but also the dialogic functioning of filmmaking across the

wider social panorama.154 For Williams, genres should not act as “smoke screens”

behind which multiple layers of intertextual interaction perish, unexplored. For

example, we relate Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs with John Woo’s The Killer and Wong

Kar-Wai’s Fallen Angels in terms of their re-articulation of film noir aesthetics, for

example, these analyses should not obliterate the fact that each of these films borrows

or recycles aesthetic devices from other cinematic traditions, and, in the case of Woo’s

and Wong’s they also establish a dialog with the specific socio-political milieu of

Hong Kong in the mid-1990’s.

If we look at Woo’s Hollywood films through the lens of Williams’ framework

and we add the dominant status of a conservative depiction of sexuality—privileging

heterosexuality and at times excluding or punishing homosexuality— in a majority of

American mainstream action films, we realize that the shift from the focus on male-to-

male bonding to heterosexuality is a matter of cultural transmutation designed to 154 Ben Singer defines melodrama as a cluster concept. Melodrama is thus “a term whose meaning varies from case to case in relation to different configurations of arrange of basic features or constitutive factors … the meaning of the word in any given instance will depend on precisely which features come into play, and in what combinations”(44). However, Singer continues to conceptualize melodrama in terms of genre and questions the fact that melodrama must necessarily incorporate both pathos and action as Williams argues (Singer, 54-55).

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contain the menace of homosexuality that Woo’s Hong Kong films offer if deciphered

through the eyes of U.S. audiences.155 For, in Woo’s Hong Kong films, his male

characters relate to each other with a series of bodily contacts and highly sentimental

verbal exchanges that spectators with a Western cultural background, untrained in the

idiosyncrasies of the Chinese modes of address in relation to same-sex friendship,

typically interpret as being permeated with “homoerotic overtones.” I am not claiming

certain sectors of the Hong Kong audiences did not enjoy the potential subversiveness

of homoerotic visibility that Woo’s extremely affected male-to-male relationships

open up. Especially at a historical time—the late 1980’s and beginning of the

1990’s—when gay sexuality was growing more visible in the Hong Kong social field,

this other form of film viewing pleasure did indeed exist. However, this alternative

engagement with Woo’s “hero films” was far from being a dominant pattern in the

ways most fans decoded them. Therefore, given that Woo was hired to make

mainstream action flicks in the US market, the potential contamination of

homoeroticism is a threat that Hollywood needed to avoid at all cost. This danger

stemmed from a case of transcultural misrecognition due to the disparate ways in

which Hong Kong and Hollywood have historically dealt with the representation of

sexuality in both narrative and audiovisual terms.

155 As an example of this Western reading of the representation of sexuality in Woo’s films see Berenice Reynaud's “John Woo’s Art Action Movie.” Reynaud affirms that Quentin Tarantino is influenced by Woo in terms of the homoerotic choreography of gun pointing that structures the ending of Reservoir Dogs (62).

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The stereotypical depiction of homosexuality-as-deviance through the history

of Hollywood film has as a counterpart the quasi-impossibility of a direct association

between the homosexual and moral righteousness within the mainstream field unless

ghettoized in the form of a series of ideologically simplifying clichés—e.g. the good-

hearted gay neighbor; the obnoxious and verbally excessive gay friend, etc. As film

critics and scholars have pointed out, filmmakers who wanted to perform the above

mentioned operation had to work within a social field that sanctioned the homosexual

as deviant and punishable, and, therefore, were forced to “encode” their subversive

depiction of the homosexual being through a series of indirect audiovisual strategies

that put into question the moral transparency of the heterosexual couple. Since

Western critics and audiences may read these instances of male-to-male bonding,

which in the Hong Kong Woo world epitomize the “very essence of heroic

friendship”, within this tradition of only-possible-if-indirectly-coded-cinematic

representation of homosexual desire, Woo’s aesthetics of male-to-male affect could

easily be misrecognized as homosexual if interpreted through the generic training of

his new domestic target—U.S. audiences.

In fact, the possibility of a large part of U.S. audiences decoding Woo’s

representational templates as homoerotic grows even stronger if we acknowledge the

key role of the comedic in containing the threat of homosexuality in contemporary

American films. Scrutinizing two of the most successful action franchises of mid

1980's and early 1990's—Lethal Weapon and Die Hard—we soon realize that the

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action film register often mobilizes the discursive power of comedy to contain the

threat of homosexual desire that has become a staple of the genre. In her analysis of

Die Hard and Lethal Weapon, Sharon Willis suggests that the comedic register—and

more specifically in the form of diverting punch lines—functions to “diffuse and

contain the overtly homoerotic charge” that characterizes the buddy formula within the

action genre and consequently “offers and then withdraws the lure of homoeroticism

(Willis 28-9). And, it is here, perhaps, where we can pinpoint a structural flaw in

Linda Williams’ otherwise thought-provoking theorization of melodrama as a mode

based on the combinatory interplay of pathos and action. For if, on the one hand,

Sylvester Stallone’s films are typically characterized by an utter lack of comedic

discursivity, fitting well Williams’ paradigm, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, on the other,

need it to fully deliver its high testosterone spectacles of violence and bracket the very

pinnacles of the revengeful narratives his body-as-spectacle carries out.156 In actuality,

comedy seems to be quasi-everywhere in contemporary action film, acting as a

counterpoint to the ubiquity of violence across multiple narrative strands. Thus, the

understanding of the melodramatic mode as an alternating combination of pathos and

action that Williams puts forward must be qualified by highlighting the recurrent

utilization of the comedic register in direct contact with the two above mentioned

modes of address. Here is where we can locate the key structural otherness of Woo’s

156 For example, in Total Recall (1992) Der Arnold kills his wife upon realizing that she has betrayed him. After shooting her, he remarks: “Consider this a divorce.”

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Hong Kong films in relation to Hollywood productions that needed to be expunged in

order to contain the threat of sexual deviance. John Woo’s Hong Kong films take

male-to-male bonding way too seriously for Hollywood standards. The absence of a

comedic register in direct interaction with the sentimental/violent spectacles in Woo’s

films did not enable to transfer the potential menace of homoeroticism into the safe-

box of comedy and, consequently, left open a dangerous entry point into the

identification of Woo’s male leads with homosexual desire. A necessary translation

had to be performed in Woo’s universes to make them conform to the mainstream of

Hollywood’s representation of sexual identity: Woo’s blurry doubles became two

extreme opposites in an evil-to-good spectrum of moral legibility. Male partners were

converted into wives and sons/daughters. Woo’s solitary knight was turned into a

family man.

Given that Woo migrated to the United States to work within a strictly

commercial field and that the domestic market is the very barometer of the economic

failure or success of any specific film he was about to make, the potential danger of

this homosexual “stain” was a risk the Hollywood studios that financed Woo’s

American films and stars of the caliber of Tom Cruise, Nicholas Cage and John

Travolta could not afford to take. Not coincidentally, the most reminiscent moment of

Woo’s Hong Kong excessive expressions of male bonding in his American films

occurs in Hard Target, when Chan Boudreaux (Jean-Claude Van Damme) kills a

South African mercenary working for a man-hunting business entrepreneur. When the

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latter approaches the corpse of his partner, Woo cuts to an overhead shot that captures

in dramatic fashion his extreme scream of pain. Even if only remotely suggested, the

possibility of a homosexual relationship between the two characters remains within the

deviant/evil side Hollywood can easily justify.

In Face/Off, Woo’s theme of the double acquires exaggerated overtones in the

change of identity between Sean Archer (John Travolta), an FBI official, and his

nemesis, Castor Troy (Nicholas Cage), a ruthless terrorist. Instead of blurring the

boundaries between cop and outlaw, as Woo’s Hong Kong films repeatedly do, the

literal change of identity between the two seems to be a playground for Travolta and

Cage to copy each other’s acting routines and show off their acting adaptability. In

other words, the utilization of freeze-frames, cross-dissolves and graphic matches to

psychologically link the two characters that characterizes Woo’s Hong Kong films

gets subordinated to Travolta and Cage’s star personae. Woo’s audio-visual fabric is

now under the control of one of the main sources of revenue of the Hollywood

industry—the star of the film. Even though Face/Off is a true compilation of a fair

amount of the stylistic staples that had made of Woo an internationally recognized

action auteur (two-gun armed men, cross-dissolves to link narratively Archer and

Troy, rack focus and dolly-forward shots, the alternation of film speeds during gun

fighting sequences, highly melodramatic music, three to four characters pointing a gun

at each other simultaneously, the presence of children as the embodiment of

untarnished innocence, Christian imagery and the metaphorical mobilization of white

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doves as bearers of unsullied beauty), its limits are tied by the clear-cut legibility

Travolta and Cage’s respective characters must achieve as relentless good and utter

evil, respectively.

Despite all this, Face/Off does start with one of the most surprisingly

devastating scenes of a mainstream American film ever: Troy shoots dead Archer’s

son onscreen (the death of children onscreen is one of the forbidden territories

Hollywood films rarely dare to trespass). However, in the end, Travolta’s obsessive

quest to punish Troy concludes successfully and the fracture in the ideal nuclear

family Troy had performed is sutured: Archer adopts Troy’s orphan son. He is a

reborn, family-oriented man who only drifted away from his wife and daughter to do

what was morally right: avenge the death of his son.

Woo’s Hollywood films deploy a higher degree of verisimilitude in as much as

the gunfights and the confrontations within them give priority to a series of specific

narrative motivations in contrast to the primacy of the spectacular depiction of

choreographed bullet-ridden frames of his Hong Kong period. The Hollywood

industry has indeed tamed the operatic of Woo’s Hong Kong output in as much as

what we have now is highly controlled spectacles of violence that must move the

narrative forward towards a morally clear-cut ending in which good overcomes evil. In

his Hong Kong films, conversely, the double/redemption/friendship formula seemed to

be a flexible structure that Woo lays on top of his grandiose gun fighting marathons.

Whereas in his Hollywood period, Woo’s idiosyncratic stylistic craftsmanship

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functions as an add-on within the formulaic parameters of the well-established and

commercially successful operating mode of the Hollywood industry—the action

film—in Hong Kong Woo himself had been signaled as the creator of a new kind of

action that recycled a myriad of cinematic traditions and made it new.

Are Woo’s Hollywood films, consequently, a typical example of a national

product that once it migrates into the United States becomes ideologically and

stylistically streamlined as a component of the Hollywood’s production machinery? Is

it productive to necessarily distinguish between Woo’s Hong Kong and American

films as a way to differentiate his two creative periods or should we instead surpass

these national labels and point to the multicultural and transnational character that

both bodies of work have? Andrew Higson has argued that the concept of national

cinema is “a conventional means of reference in the complex debates about cinema,

but the process of labeling is always to some degree tautologous, fetishising the

national rather than merely describing it. It thus erects boundaries between films

produced in different nation-states although they may still have much in common. It

may therefore obscure the degree of cultural diversity, exchange and interpenetration

that marks so much cinematic activity” (64). In addition, as we have mentioned above,

Hollywood cinema is itself a transnational product—from ownership to creative

talent—that cannot be reduced to a closed list of national traits if we wish to avoid a

limiting simplification. It is indeed misleading to reduce Hollywood’s multivocal

practices to a monolithic whole that effaces the traces of the other cinematic styles it

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appropriates. Even though Hollywood studio products undoubtedly privilege a series

of aesthetic techniques and political configurations, it is also fair to say that

Hollywood is continuously recycling itself in an attempt to respond to the changing

socio-cultural and sensorial formations that shape the ways in which its audiences

approach the products it creates. The Matrix, for instance, far from being illusionist,

self-consciously banks on the widespread consumption of martial arts video games

around the world to heighten the appeal of its hi-tech, digital visual culture. To a great

extent, the Wachowski brothers’ film succeeded because of the fact that it managed to

resemble the real experience of its spectators in their daily encounter with the virtual

cyber world, not due to its illusionist aesthetics. In addition, the film strategically

adhered to the obsession with P.C. that characterizes superficial discourses of

multiculturalism in its casting choices, attracting diverse social and cultural strata

using different baits—Keanu Reeves and his multi-racial star appeal; Lawrence

Fishburne, the Oracle and the black community; Trinity and the lesbian population,

Anthony Wong and the East Asian audience. At the same time, the Wachowski

brothers did not necessarily streamline the influence of martial arts traditions or John

Woo’s “hero” films in the way they structured action sequences. On the contrary, they

re-combined them with many of the generic staples of the American action film to

produce a multi-layered final product that stamped all The Matrix’ influences on the

spectators’ faces.

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The same reasoning could be applied to Hong Kong cinema itself. Despite its

characteristic imprints and the long lasting prevalence of certain genres—martial arts,

kung fu films, action flicks and melodramas—it is far from being a fixed body of

ideological values and aesthetic practices. As Patricia Aufderheide has pointed out,

Hong Kong cinema is itself a pastiche product that has recently become the source of

appropriation for many Hollywood films. Throughout the history of cinema,

filmmaking has been a non-predictable and disjunctive series of continuous exchanges

that even though they are indeed marked differently depending on the culture in which

they are more extensively based on, they feed off an array of diverse cultures, social

formations and aesthetic practices. Even the most obviously national products—such

as the Soviet, Nazi, Francoist or U.S. propaganda films—share a great deal of

audiovisual and narrative strategies with the last run-of-the-mill Hollywood

blockbuster, Italian neorealist films, Douglas Sirk melodramas or Hollis Frampton’s

Nostalgia in different degrees and manners. When we discuss how certain popular

genres, which have a long tradition in their countries of origin, lack any kind of critical

and economic recognition abroad, and how often they are excluded from history books

on national cinemas in the benefit of more prestigious aesthetic forms such as art

films, we need to point at the same time that the reasons why another form of popular

cinema—Hollywood mainstream films—has managed to conquer the movie and TV

screens globally is not entirely textual but also economic. Moreover, it is intimately

related to the United States’ military and geopolitical advantageous position in the

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world since the end of the Second World War and the superior cash flow Hollywood

studios can mobilize in relation to their foreign counterparts. If the last Julia Roberts

vehicle appeals to the taste, emotions and entertainment models of a high percentage

of movie audiences worldwide it is because there has been a decades-long process of

intensive training and transgenerational sedimentation that has turned the Hollywood

action films and the romantic comedy—to use an umbrella term that encompasses

several subgenres—into two of the dominant modes of address spectators around the

world understand as fitting the characteristics of their ideal audiovisual entertainment

products. Surely, other cinematic traditions in many countries—including the U.S.—

have competed and compete today with these models and satisfy the needs of local

marginalized groups that reject completely mainstream Hollywood films or consume

them only sporadically. And several filmmaking industries—most notably Indian—

maintain a stronghold in their national market and a significant degree of success in

concentrated areas abroad, managing to compete with the Hollywood quasi-monopoly

of the world film market. However, to seek answers to explain why the world film

market works according to these coordinates, we would be mistaken if we pointed out

that it is simply because Hollywood films offer a series of transcultural ideological and

affective values that work universally and other cinematic traditions do not. In his

criticism of theories of “cultural discount”—the idea that films with a high degree of

cultural specificity typically fail to travel successfully in the global market as opposed

to those with ‘degree zero’ particularity— Charles Acland has demonstrated that the

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reason why Hollywood audiovisual narratives have managed to hold a dominant

position globally is not because of their “transparency effect.” This viewpoint

misconceptualizes cultural texts as being fixed and neglects the active role of

spectators in their acts of consumption. Simultaneously, the concept of textual

transparency fails to acknowledge that in many occasions it is precisely the very

culturally specificity of certain texts what catalyzes their appeal for international

audiences (Acland 34-5). However, it would be equally misled to believe that film

texts are an open ground on which different indigenous audiences can intervene and

freely re-write them, according to their own socio-cultural frameworks. Certain

ideological values and audiovisual/narrative techniques are indeed privileged in the

majority of Hollywood products. Others are invariably (or at least, very often)

discarded or repressed. However, Hollywood films have transcended the cultural

specificity of their discourses and have managed to succeed globally not necessarily

because of their textual transparency. Instead, we need to highlight the inseparable

partnership of a series of socio-economic practices with an evolving paradigm of

audiovisual storytelling to examine the reasons behind Hollywood’s unparalleled

domination of the global market at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the

21st century. Given the great amount of foreign talent that has inhabited the

Hollywood industry throughout its history, especially in relation to other national

industries, we won’t be too off the mark if we point to this multicultural character of

its talent as one of the key reasons of its world wide success as long as we do not

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forget the historical events of the 20th century that have facilitated Hollywood’s

position of might in relation to others—e.g. the shutdown of European film production

during the World War I facilitated Hollywood’s expansion throughout the 1910’s and

1920’s and this process continued as a result of the World War II’s “demolition” of

several European film industries.

What Woo’s migration from the commercial Hong Kong film arena to

Hollywood demonstrates, then, is that even though his films were in both phases of his

career intrinsically transnational products, the Hollywood studios in charge of

approving a final cut, marketing and distributing his films, make every possible effort

to deliver worldwide. As a consequence, they have subordinated Woo’s auteurist

imprint to an established set of reliable narrative, audiovisual and ideological

configurations. Furthermore, the aesthetic accommodation of Woo’s action+affect

excessive spectacles has had an ideological counterpoint—namely, the shift from the

centrality of male bonding to that of heterosexual coupling as filtered through the

privileged status of the actor’s star persona. This well-calculated move points to the

unavoidable tension between the culturally specific components and the global

discourses at work in any film made anywhere. It is thus a matter of refurbishing the

cultural Other—e.g. Woo’s Hong Kong films—according to that which is well-known

for its primary audience and simultaneously highlighting those stylistic traces of

controlled novelty, while preserving the social acceptance of the film’s ideological

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message and a series of visual, aural and narrative cues that are recognizable for the

great majority of the film’s intended spectators.

Woo’s masterful symphonies of bloody gun fighting and complementary

sentimental spectacles proved to be particularly exportable because of the fact that,

despite his substantial stylistic idiosyncrasies in shooting and editing action sequences

and his emphasis on male/to-male larger-than-life relationships, they present two

fundamental features that, to a great extent, constitute the core of mainstream

American motion pictures: first, his narratives revolve around a series of fixed

variations of a confrontation between good vs. evil in a violence-mediated

environment in which good ultimately prevails; second, they display a high degree of

audio-visual craftsmanship that organizes film narratives around an alternating

dynamics between sensorial and affective spectacles within the rules of a

contemporary (trans)generic powerhouse—the action film. The transnational character

of his Hong Kong films and his adaptability to the Hollywood film industry was not

only due to the fact that his early Hong Kong efforts are “a glossy synthesis of Italian

Westerns, swordplay, film noir, and romantic melodrama new to both Hong Kong and

the West” (Fang 95) but, especially, because of the worldwide recognizibility of his

unambiguous affect+action spectacles for audiences once functioning within the

global realm of Hollywood’s generic codes. As Karen Fang states, “Woo’s description

of film grammar as a multicultural and transnational entity illustrates the incipiently

global approach in which the director has always worked” (98), contributing

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decisively to the global recognition of the Hong Kong film industry. The globalization

of the specific segment of the Hong Kong film output that Woo may stand for is

invariably tied to all those cultural and stylistic Others the Hollywood machinery has

managed to successfully integrate into his dominant variety of ideological forms,

generic registers and audiovisual modes of representation. If Woo’s Hong Kong films

were already transnational products, functioning in the margins of the world film

market and in the mainstream of the Hong Kong cinematic and cultural life, his

Hollywood films are designed to deliver everywhere and, at the same time, undermine

the work of those other Hong Kong directors that may potentially be the John Woo’s

of the present day and become a threat for Hollywood dominance within the

boundaries of their local market and close territories in East Asia. Thus, the

transnational character of John Woo’s films goes far beyond having a set of diverse

cultural and aesthetic influences and relies fundamentally on the seamless cross-

fertilization of Woo’s eye-popping sentimental and bloodletting excesses into the

world’s most popular cinematic language: Hollywood illusionist and spectacular

narratives.

If Woo went to “America” to pursue new challenges in his career, Alejandro

Amenábar appropriated a variety of Hollywood generic formulae and tinted them with

the specifics of the mid-1990’s Spanish social milieu in order to gain a share of the

domestic market and, ultimately, with his following films, project his figure

internationally. If with his first two films, Tesis (1996) and Open your Eyes (1997),

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Amenábar managed to beat Hollywood at its own game locally, with his third one, his

English-language The Others, he brought Hollywood to Spain and delivered globally.

As Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz explains, The Others "poses the question of the

translatability of generic formations and the elasticity of the concept of national

cinema … produced in part with Tom Cruise’s Cruise/Wagner Productions and

distributed by the Disney subsidiary Miramax Films, the film built up on Amenábar’s

prestige as a young, energetic, and original director for marketing the Nicole Kidman

vehicle” (no pagination). What are thus the fundamental characteristics of Amenábar’s

work that have eased his way into global commercial auteurist stardom? Like Woo’s

most successful Hollywood films, Amenábar relies on the dominant ideological status

of the problematic of the heterosexual match and the familial well being across

different genres to deliver box-office hits. In addition, as in Woo’s case, violence-as-

mode plays a dominant role in his works.

Snuffing Hollywood: Amenábar’s Politics of Transgeneric Affect Upon its release in 1996, Alejandro Amenábar’s first feature, Tesis, was

praised as a groundbreaking achievement in the history of Spanish cinema due to its

superior appropriation of Hollywood’s audiovisual and storytelling aesthetics (Zatlin).

While critically championed, Tesis did not manage to attract a massive audience to the

movie theaters until the Spanish Film Academy awarded it seven Goyas—including

best film and best new director. His second feature, Open your Eyes beat the record in

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the Spanish box-office for a domestic film and situated Amenábar as the most

commercially viable Spanish filmmaker among the new emergent generation. Scholars

have hailed Amenábar as the ultimate representative of a new breed of Spanish

filmmaker that understands the necessarily commercial coordinates of the film market.

In Tesis, commerce and art form are brilliantly integrated for the sake of establishing a

different kind of Spanish cinematic product, one that recognized the demands of the

filmmaking as a fundamentally capital-driven practice, and, at the same time, self-

consciously incorporated the heritage of Spanish cinematic form (Buckley; Maule).

Significantly, whereas Tesis was fully produced by Jose Luis Cuerda’s “Las

Producciones del Escorpión,” a Spanish company, Open your Eyes was French-

Italian-Spanish co-production. His next film, The Others brought Hollywood to Spain

in the form of the hottest star couple around at the time of its production—namely,

Tom Cruise (executive producer) and Nicole Kidman (protagonist of the film). In fact,

Amenábar proudly stated that he had not “sold out” to Hollywood, but, conversely,

had made the Hollywood industry adapt to his working demands within the Spanish

mode of production. The Others was a massive worldwide economic and critical

success that granted Nicole Kidman several nominations and awards, giving

Amenábar the global exposure he had not fully achieved with two previous features.157

157 According to rotten tomatoes <http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1109257-others/numbers.php> The Others made $96,080,075 in the US domestic box-office and additional $23,010,000 in video rentals. Overseas the film made a total of $113,424,350. Open Your Eyes, released in the U.S. in 1999, only made $368,234 in

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In addition, Cruise/Wagner productions bought the rights for Open your Eyes in the

United States. After Amenábar rejected the offer to remake his own film, Cameron

Crowe (a marketable director after the popularity of Jerry Maguire, 1996 and Almost

Famous, 2000) was chosen to direct Vanilla Sky (2001), starring Tom Cruise and

Penélope Cruz (playing the same role as in Open your Eyes). The Spanish actress,

since then, has alternated between Hollywood and European productions becoming a

favorite fixture of both the Hollywood industry and the international film festival

circuit.158 Amenábar’s latest feature, The Sea Inside is based on the life of Ramon

Sampedro, a Galician paraplegic who committed suicide after he had publicly

acknowledged numerous times his desire to die in the Spanish media. The Sea Inside

(2005) stars Javier Bardem as Sampedro. Bardem, twice nominated for best actor by

the American Academy of Motion Pictures—for Before the Night Falls (2000) and

The Sea Inside—is currently the Spanish actor, along with Antonio Banderas and

Sergi Lopez, who has most remarkably succeeded in projecting his career

internationally.159

its short theatrical run. 158 Since 1999, her screen roles include All About My Mother, Woman on Top (2000), Blow (2001), Sin Noticias de Dios (2001), Non ti Muovere (2004), Sahara (2005) and Bandidas (2006). 159 Whereas Lopez has mostly worked in the French industry, with remarkable exceptions such as Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things, Banderas and Bardem have mostly worked in the United States both in the arena of independent film and Hollywood.

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In my view, Amenábar´s work provides an exemplifying ground to analyze

the socio-cultural and aesthetic coordinates at play in the output of those filmmakers

that manage to surpass the nationally specific distribution and exhibition boundaries

non-Hollywood filmmakers must invariably deal with and break into the international

market, projecting their figure globally while remaining tied to the national film

industry inside which they started. When we analyze Amenábar’s body of films, we

encounter a series of processes of transnational exchange that function at different

levels. First, Amenábar´s stylistic intertexts are a mix of American and European

films. Second, he banks on the privileged commercial status of the Hollywood generic

traditions in the global arena, and more specifically in the Spanish exhibition market,

to create financially successful products. Third, his work has launched the

international career of some of his actors— Penélope Cruz and Eduardo Noriega being

the most remarkable cases. Fourth, in the Sea Inside he cast an internationally reputed

Spanish film star, Javier Bardem, which the producers and distributors of the film

widely mobilized to enhance the commercial appeal of the film worldwide. Finally,

one of his films has been remade in Hollywood featuring an A-list cast and a

blockbuster-like budget. We are discussing a director who managed to beat

Hollywood at its own game locally—in Spain—with his first feature and since then

has had an increasing impact in the international cinematic field both in economic and

critical terms. What are, then, the fundamental characteristics of Amenábar’s

filmmaking that appeal to audiences/industry players worldwide?

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Tesis, is fundamentally a generic hybrid—“a horror thriller,” as Christine