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The battle for the blockbuster: discourses of spectacle and excess

2008; Routledge; Volume: 6; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17400300802098305

1740-7923

Erlend Lavik,

Media, Gender, and Advertising

Abstract Spectacle has become something of a buzzword within a number of academic disciplines, including film studies. Denoting a wealth of phenomena whose common features are hard to make out, it is frequently used in confusing and contradictory ways. Excess, meanwhile, is a term that frequently overlaps with spectacle. Indeed, the two terms are frequently used synonymously, but to the extent that there is a difference, spectacle has tended to entail the abandonment of viewers' critical faculties in the face of awe‐inspiring visuals, while excess has tended to denote the kind of distanced appreciation more typical of the finer arts. This paper traces the historical development of these terms, and analyses the ways in which they have been put to use in discussions of contemporary blockbuster cinema. I argue that spectacle and excess frequently enter into very different cultural discourses, and demonstrate how academics have employed them in a kind of battle over the cultural standing of the blockbuster. Keywords: blockbuster cinemaspectacleexcessnarrativepost‐classicism Notes 1. It should be noted that, contrary to popular belief, Debord's book is not primarily a theory of the mass media. As Anselm Jappe has remarked: ‘The concept of “the society of the spectacle” is often taken to refer exclusively to the tyranny of the television and other such means of communication. For Debord, however, the “mass media” are but a “limited” aspect of the spectacle’ (1999, 5). 2. For a discussion of the historical development of Debordian spectacle, see Crary 1989 Crary, Jonathan. 1989. Spectacle, attention, counter‐memory.. October, 50 (Autumn): 96–107. [Google Scholar]. In the 1970s the term was sometimes used by film scholars in a manner clearly influenced by Debord. See Grindon Leger 1994 Leger, Grindon. 1994. The role of spectacle and excess in the critique of illusion.. Post Script, 13(2): 35–43. [Google Scholar]. 3. Burch himself has since moved to distance himself from simple evaluative claims: ‘Unlike some English and American writers, overinfluenced by modernist ideology, perhaps, I no longer really see the primitive cinema as a “good object” on the grounds that it contains countless “prefigurations” of modernism's rejection of readerly representation. These prefigurations are clearly no accident: it is not surprising that the obstacles that blocked the rise of the Institution in its “prehistory” should appear as strategies in the works of creators seeking explicitly or implicitly to deconstruct classical vision. But to see the primitive cinema as a lost paradise and to fail to see the emergence of the IMR [institutional mode of representation] as an objective advance is to flirt with obscurantism’ (1990 Burch, Noël. 1990. “A primitive mode of representation?”. In Early cinema: Space – frame – narrative, Edited by: Elsaesser, Thomas. 220–7. London: BFI. [Google Scholar], 224–5). 4. We might add ear‐catching as well, for although spectacle is etymologically linked to the visual sphere, it is commonly applied to aural phenomena as well. See, for example, Ritter 2001 Ritter, Kelly. 2001. Spectacle at the disco: Boogie Nights, soundtrack, and the new American musical.. Journal of Popular Film and Television, 28(4): 166–75. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] and Altman 1995 Altman, Rick. 1995. The sound of sound. A brief history of the reproduction of sound in movie theaters.. Cineaste, 21(1–2) [Google Scholar]. 5. I must hasten to add that I am here talking about a theoretical understanding. I do not mean to claim that Debord's ideas are similarly out of place in interpretations of films. Patricia Allmer, for example, has argued that, contrary to critics' claims that the so‐called Cinéma du look is an instance of Debordian spectacle, it is rather a subtle critique of it. In other words, Allmer's study does not test the validity of Debord's ideas, but their usefulness in a reading of a group of films. What guides the analysis is not the question ‘Is Debord's conception of a society of the spectacle tenable?’, but rather ‘Is his conception constructive in a textual interpretation?’ or ‘Does it enable us to say something interesting about the Cinéma du look?’ See also Morreale 2006 Morreale, Joanne. 2006. The spectacle of The Prisoner.. Television and the New Media, 7(2): 216–26. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]. 6. See Grindon Leger 1994 Leger, Grindon. 1994. The role of spectacle and excess in the critique of illusion.. Post Script, 13(2): 35–43. [Google Scholar]. 7. ‘X‐ray shots’ have become popular in frenzied action films like Snatch (2000), Romeo Must Die (2000), and Daredevil (2003), but they turn up in a more restrained prestige picture like Cinderella Man (2005) as well. Shortly after Three Kings premiered, the trick was repeated in the instantly famous opening sequence of Fight Club, this time in reverse. Instead of the camera entering the human body from without, the sequence starts off at the molecular level: ‘The sequence is a “night dive” fly‐through of the protagonist's brain. It begins at a magnification of some 150,000× and zooms out – magnification decreasing – through the structure of a nerve cell, the folds of the brain, vessels, sinuses, the skull and skin, and up the barrel of a gun pointed at the head, or, if you like, at the nerve cell from which we have just been flown’ (Kelty and Landecker 2004 Kelty, Christopher and Landecker, Hannah. 2004. A theory of animation: Cells, l‐systems, and film.. Grey Room, 17(Fall): 30–63. [Google Scholar], 31). The main title sequences of films such as X‐Men, Spider‐Man, and Hulk have since presented similarly spectacular voyages through bodies, brains, or blood. 8. The cyclical relationship between astonishment and familiarity is explored more fully in Gunning 2003 Gunning, Tom. 2003. “Re‐Newing Old Technologies: Astonishment, Second Nature, and the Uncanny in Technology from the Previous Turn‐of‐the‐Century.”. In Rethinking Media Change, Edited by: Thorburn, David and Jenkins, Henry. 39–59. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. [Google Scholar]. See also Sobchack 2006 Sobchack, Vivian. 2006. “‘Cutting to the Quick’: Techne, Physis, and Poiesis and the Attractions of Slow Motion.”. In The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, Edited by: Strauven, Wanda. 337–51. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. [Google Scholar] and R⊘ssaak 2006 R⊘ssaak, Eivind. 2006. “Figures of Sensation: Between Still and Moving Images.”. In The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, Edited by: Strauven, Wanda. 321–36. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. [Google Scholar]. 9. The specificity thesis has two components: ‘One component is the idea that there is something that each medium does best. The other is that each of the arts should do what differentiates it from the other arts’ (Carroll 2004 Carroll, Noël. 2004. “The specificity thesis.”. In Film theory and criticism: Introductory readings, Edited by: Braudy, Leo and Cohden, Marshall. 332–8. New York: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar], 334). 10. Arguably, cognitivism too invoked the notion of ‘the active spectator’ in a similar way, exploiting the positive connotations of the term to debunk the psychoanalytical paradigm in a way that is somewhat beside the point. Bill Nichols notes that ‘I am not aware of any poststructural theory that claims the viewer or reader is inert, passive, and inactive at the level of cognitive processing. On the contrary, this level is taken for granted (too cavalierly no doubt) in order to argue that the viewer's activity still leaves him or her positioned or placed within a larger ideological structure […] By showing in detail how the viewer is cognitively active during the storytelling process, [David] Bordwell gives us a more complete picture of narrative, but since such activity was never denied by other theorists, he can hardly be said to have rescued the viewer from theories that deprived us of a set of mental activities, despite his frequent claims to the contrary’ (1992, 71–2).