Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park
Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?
In this book, J.D. Connor writes a history of what he calls “neoclassical Hollywood,” which he defines as the period when the studios aspired to the kind of control over production that they had in the classical period and used that aspiration as inspiration in developing various strategies of control, which they in turn attempted to allegorize within the films they made. These allegorized authorial moves clashed with other authorial voices (both traditional (directors, writers, actors) and not (special effects artists, talent agencies)) such that Connor claims a movie can always be read as an allegory of its own making, as a struggle between competing authorial voices asserting the supremacy of their kind of control over the creative process.
Using this strategy of reading films as allegories of their own making, Connor then traces various trends over the 40 years he covers in his book. He shows how auteur directors weren’t the only paranoid authorial voices in film production in the 70s, how a studio like Paramount asserted its power through a commitment to making movies with high concepts and an emphasis on design as a studio trademark up through the 80s, and how a talent agency was able to negotiate packages (of writer/director/actors) that assuaged studio fears by mitigating risks while asserting the talent and agency’s control over the process rather than the studio’s. He examines how Paramount was able to iterate on the idea of the pop-musicals from Saturday Night Fever through Footloose and at each turn assert more and more control over the film’s final form. He looks, also at that studio’s cultivation and control over the first decade+ of Eddie Murphy’s film career such that by the end of that time the studio could be credibly said to be embodied by Murphy (and vice versa). Then he turns towards the concept of chaos theory and how it both provided a handy storytelling device and an explanation for how the various competing forces of authorship in the neoclassical era interacted and created outcomes readable within the texts of the films.
It is a big ask that Connor makes of us, his readers, to believe that literally every movie made within this system could be read in this way. He asserts this way of thinking several times and in several ways, though I think the most valuable argument he makes is in the sheer volume of believable readings he does of dozens of films throughout the text. The other big claim he makes that I’m less sure about is the cutoff of the neoclassical period that he writes of. He looks at two phenomena that he claims signals the end of this neoclassical period: the failure of several large media-conglomerate mergers and the brief bout of epics like Gladiator, Troy, and Kingdom of Heaven which, he claims, are less about the founding of a national identity as the genre might have traditionally been understood but about the retreat of empire, which he allegorizes to the retreat of the studio. Here once again the problem of writing about recent history rears its head. While I can definitely see the retreat of the studios from a certain position in the epics Connor writes of here, the fact remains that the studios have only gotten more interested in asserting some kind of control over their output, and that, I’d argue has happened in the guise of superhero movies and legacyquels (my own area of study). Combine this with the increasing dominance of megastudios like Disney (who now owns Fox’s back catalogue and current productions) and you’ll see that the things Connor posits as signs of a changing industry aren’t necessarily the death knell he sees them as.
Connor touches even less than Langford did on the expanded possibilities for filmmakers in the 80s and 90s, and doesn’t really look too hard at the indie scene as a force within Hollywood, except to show that Hollywood was interested in creating what he calls “indiewood,” or the small, studio controlled “indie” centers like Fox Searchlight, but each of these is very readily subsumed within the larger corporate structure that Connor focuses on, peculiarities be damned.
Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven
Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?
Like Langford before him, Connor largely argues against the three-headed monster of Bordwell, Thompson and Staiger, who posited the dominant understanding of the classical era of Hollywood and each produced some update on that for what Connor calls the neoclassical era. Connor, like Langford, most directly counters Bordwell’s account of the intensified classicism that he claims dominates the post-classical era. While there may be some retained classicism, Connor proposes that it comes from the multi-valanced struggle for authorship and the studios’ aspiration to the kind of control they had under the classical system. Against Thompson he argues that the 3 act structure she identifies as central to the neoclassical Hollywood text could and should really be 4 acts, with the second split into two around a decisive turn at the midway point.
Mostly, though, Connor argues with the whole field’s desire to look towards the traditional channels of authorship while proposing his, which accounts for all the competing forces of authorship as exposed within studio histories and the films themselves.
Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?
As stated above, Connor largely goes chronologically through the 40 years he covers here, though there is some overlap at either end of some chapters, addressing the industrial changes while showing how the studios (and occasionally other entities in contention with the studios) attempted to assert control over the production process in those various circumstances. He reads texts allegorically to excavate those struggles for authorial control within the very films themselves.
To get at the history side, Connor will look through interviews with studio heads or other relevant figures, earnings calls, financial statements, business media (like Variety), and promotional materials in addition to the films themselves.
Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?
Connor’s greatest strength is his breadth of scope and his ability to tie all kinds of seemingly disparate films into a singular narrative. While some may resist that kind of narrativizing, it is nonetheless compelling because it attends to a less-analyzed area of interest and is well-articulated.
Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?
I found myself, like Connor assumes many of his readers would find themselves, in a kind of constant back and forth over whether I totally bought his claims or not. On the one hand, they’re intensely compelling, particularly in the areas like the discussion of high concept filmmaking and the brief reign of chaos theory within Hollywood. On the other, these kinds of readings are great for making a historical argument about what a studio’s intentions/motivations/commitments were at a given time, but less compelling (at least less necessarily compelling) when it comes to the more culturally based kinds of readings that I’m more interested in. Connor is also largely uninterested in the audience except as a concept within a studio’s decision-making process, which doesn’t really gel with my conception of what matters in filmmaking. However, I can’t say that I won’t go back to him as I start to think about my dissertation, especially as I find myself interested in the same kind of contestation of authorial voices that Connor writes about here and the circumstances that allow for certain kinds of production in certain cultural moments.
Steven Spielberg’s Jaws
Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?
studio, authorship, aspiration, neoclassical, classical, control, chaos theory, talent agency, conglomerate, logorrhea (the bleeding of the studio logo into the world of the film, which inculcates the studio as an entity within the film itself), allegory, design, metonymy
Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?
While critics find it easy enough to demonstrate that movies are about many things, and while historians have done prodigious work tracing the operations of the business itself, with very few exceptions we have not explored Hollywood’s peculiar sort of self-representation in sufficient detail, and we have not committed ourselves to reading films as corporate and industrial allegories as deeply as we should. […] We know that movies are at the center of the culture, or very near it; we know that years of labor and millions of dollars go into making and marketing them; we know that they solicit and often reward extreme levels of attention; yet somehow we don’t quite know how labor and capital are transmogrified into story and style – or, how this labor and this capital become this story spun this way. And whenever we do discover a path that leads from the production to the narrative, or from the story to the backstory, that path seems contingent and willful, a desperate mark left by a “defenseless” individual protesting a “ferocious” institution. (1)
I propose that movies (Hollywood movies, in this era) are about the business more intensely – both more personally and more collectively. They are representations of experience, yes, but they can be much besides: scenarios, strategies, suggestions, pleas, business plans – there’s no ruling out the role of the motion picture in the lives or careers or histories of its creators. The pressures that individuals, groups, guilds, professions, and corporations face can be channeled through their collective work on films. The balance between competing potential authors can be worked out on the page, on set, and on the screen far more precisely than criticism typically admits. Working out the correct balance among different accounts of the system and the individual’s role within it required the efforts of highly talented participants. And in the period I am discussing, from about 1970 to about 2010, these participants were guided by the conventions of their crafts and the imperatives of their industry toward classical values of necessity, continuity, and complementarity even when elements in the writing, or design, or effects were riotously excessive. Against those forces that would dissipate individual or corporate identity, Hollywood neoclassicism was in large part and effort to brand movies and their studios, and in the cases of the major franchises, it succeeded. In the process, movies became more intensely “about the business” than ever. (1-2)
The case of Greystoke suggests the following general form: allegory emerges where industrial pressures intersect and where creative actors are able to imagine symbolic solutions to real problems. As we trace the overarching question of the relationship between particular movies and the particular financial and labor relations underpinning their making and marketing, broader questions arise. There are questions of prevalence and significance, history and possibility, method and epistemology. How widespread are these allegories? And how important are they to the operation of the system? How and how intensely are movies about the business? On what occasions does the intensity wax and wane? Is there a history to the very possibility that a movie might be about the business? If movies are, at some level about the business, what are the contours of those levels? And if it is simple enough to say that movies are about the business, why don’t we take that idea seriously? How could our culture continue to elude our attempts to understand it? (5)
If the practical project of this book is to justify the allegorical interpretation of individual films, and the theoretical project is to explain how those allegorical intentions add up to and drive the Hollywood motion picture industry, then the historical project is to show how that sort of self-representation was also self-enabling, how movies retained their hold on the center of the entertainment media escape. How do motion pictures sustain their corporate prominence when the industry is no longer underwritten by the economic structures that supported the classical Hollywood studios? (10)
Logorrhea is an imaginary solution to a constellation of problems that range from the economic and ideological to the narrative and back to the image imaginary itself. And while logorrhea cannot dissolve these problems entirely, it can offer, at different times and in myriad ways, partial solutions. Yet what remains unsolved also remains available for further thought, for further repression, representation, systematization. If the opening of a neoclassical Hollywood film is a swamp of contingency reinscribed as the investigation of necessity, then the remainder of that contingency is available for further reinscription throughout the narrative. The bond between corporation and product can take the shape of an icon or a deus ex machina, of a protagonist or an emblem, of an element in a psychology or an ethics or in a discourse on economics. Yet in its most common form, the studio appears within the film as a place, a locus classicus, as it were. The mountainous landscape of Kauai is one way to bring Paramount into the picture; the Scottish highlands of Braveheart is another. As the property becomes more integral to the corporate imaginary, the logo reaches deeper into the film until the relationship between studio and story switches. Now, instead of slipping the logo into the film, the film takes place “inside” the logo, as in The Core, or Waterworld, or The Matrix. (26)
To see a contemporary film as a studio film is to realize this studio wanted to distribute this film badly enough that it passed on thousands of other possible stories and outcompeted its major rivals in order to put up the money for the project. The studio must have seen something it wanted to see when it agreed to make the film, and the task of its creative executives – aside from riding herd on the budget – must have been to keep that certain something alive. Labor and capital come together at this moment to perpetuate the studio after the studio. (35)
But if the elements of high concept are nothing new, why did it seem to be new? New to whom? Into what industrial configuration did high concept erupt, and what did it leave behind? These questions are methodologically decisive. By making high concept a matter of professional ideology and not, initially and essentially, a matter of style, we avoid battles over definitions. Instead, we operate at one remove: The thing we want to pay attention to exists at the level of the concept (what the studios and producers want) and not the level of style (how the film achieves that). As a consequence, what we are looking for when we look for evidence and attributes of high concept becomes evidence of professional attention. (69-70)
Allegorical readings are naturally the products of experience. But it is a particular experience, the experience of design. Indeed, for all the discussion of high-concept narrative and stylistic allusion, what has been less remarked is the new prominence of production design within Hollywood’s division of labor. Design establishes the contours of the continuous experience in which we develop our expertise. High concept is frequently blamed on philistines in the industry, on the dominance of studio by “suits,” or on some change in the power of marketing within the studio to create movies it deemed salable. But in this chapter and chapter 5, I want to show how the advent of high concept depended on an essential leap of reading that confused image and author, how Paramount in particular made that leap of reading more widely available, and how that leap uniquely suited the studio and its efforts to brand itself into the eighties. What we want to know is how Paramount went from making films that looked like The Conversation to films that looked like Top Gun. That story ranges from the diffuse beginnings of the studios reawakenings through a wide array of examples that included a host of neomusicals and the launching of Eddie Murphy’s cinematic career. (71)
I have been using the term “control” because it suggests the social and organizational aspects of the process, but for Paramount, the crucial term would be “design.” (105)
There were two phases to the CAA plan, which in this martial context we might call the attractive encampment and the fortification. To make an attractive encampment, the agency pursued film personnel with the same focus it had brought to television. In addition to signing a critical mass of above-the-line talent, CAA sought to distinguish its talent pool within the agency oligopolies: It would particularly target directors and writers. In that way, CAA would be able to offer potential stars a vehicle that already came with a vision. After the writers and directors were on board, the agency would hunt out the biggest stars, those whose work seemed allergic to the crapshoot complacency of the movie business. The agency would seek to demonize risk, arguing that certain stars, once committed to a project, would inoculate the studio against financial losses. Still, there was little new in this strategy; it simply amounted to doing what the other agencies did but doing it better. (137)
Form and organization drew closer to one another, overcoming the distance between instance and system, bridging the gap not through Romantic will but through mutually reinforcing connecting threads. As the new form congealed, it suggested that we might judge the success of this corporate redesign and reconception through its practical effects. And within this new paradigm of judgment, we find a way of periodizing Hollywood history: When the allegorical implications of the studios films no longer seem tendentious, then, we might say, has neoclassicism arrived. (189)
Chaos theory provided a way to think about the general situation of the contemporary studio, yet however widely it might be applied, each instance would take on some of the unique coloring of the studio responsible for the reflection. Sometimes, chaos theory appears to impart a cult knowledge to its initiates, the way Sun Tzu’s Art of War did in the eighties. But in other instances, this science of natural recursion seemed ready to guide Hollywood studios through a thicket of indeterminacy back toward the actuality of filmmaking, back, in other words, toward the sort of literalism Hollywood does so well. (219)
The “happy” endings of classical Hollywood have given way to “stable” endings that demonstrate self-similarity at all scales. The consequences are far-ranging. Where the happy ending seemed forced – as in a Douglas Sirk melodrama, a film noir, or even a Preston Sturges comedy – it encouraged an oppositional or even subversive reading. But the stable ending seems tentative and encourages elaboration. To imagine a sequel, one need only imagine the expansion of a single scale – a character, a setting, a plot point. Jurassic Park projects to The Lost World by reversing the scalar relationship between the finished product and the prototype (or pitch), while The Bourne Ultimatum nests most of its action within the space of a cut in The Bourne Supremacy. Narrative closure yields pride of place to the introjection of downstream revenues, and the movies become advertisements for themselves. (242)
Neoclassical Hollywood aestheticizes its own systematicity. When it loses faith in that system, its interest in systemic allegory dies. The allegories may go on (they do), but the system falls out of self-saturation, leaving not genre-as-cycle but studio-as-cycle. Such an event only compounds our questions. What does it mean for a corporation to lose faith in the system? And if that loss of faith amounts to a history, how is that history not the most naïve idealism? Finally, what does this loss of faith have to do with oceans? (251)
In short, the major studio epics that followed Gladiator tell the story of the studios retreat from the genre in the guise of stories of imperial retreat as such. And given their uncertainty about the success of the enterprise, they begin to fret over something supposedly more durable: the imperial legacy. (297)