Steven Spielberg’s Jaws
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?
Barry Langford takes it upon himself to write a history of the three forces mentioned in the subtitle of his book, film industry (technological, economic, and the constellation of creative and financial figureheads working towards making films), style (with a specific attention to the kinds of movies being made and how the technological changes influence and are influenced by the creative demands of the studios and filmmakers, as well as the changes in filmmaking techniques as influenced by outside filmmakers (European New Wavers, indies)), and ideology (examinations of how national politics and attitudes influenced and were influenced by the production of mainstream films, with an emphasis on genres and generic changes that occurred in each of the three eras Langford identified).
That’s a lot to cover, but Langford smartly lays out his book in chronological order to keep the sense of temporal change at the forefront. He also splits each era in to three chapters, with each time period getting first an examination of the industrial changes that occurred over the decades covered, then (usually) an investigation of the ideological changes before he examines the stylistic transformations that were usually driven by the changes present in the previous two chapters. This order gets switched around in the middle segment, which covers what Langford calls the Hollywood Renaissance era up through the beginning of the 80s during which he argues the stylistic experimentation largely drove the ideological elements of film rather than the other way around as is, he posits, normal. In between most of these chapters, Langford has a brief examination of the most popular and Best Picture Oscar winner for every year ending in 5 between 1945-2005. These provide him with a chance to explicate how closely Hollywood’s ideals about itself match with public conception and demonstrate the often wide gap between the two, even as they also overlap in a few cases (The Sound of Music in 1965, for example). And each era starts with a brief introduction to the way theatrical distribution had evolved over the time period covered in the next three chapters as exemplified by my current home base of Columbus, Ohio, aka America’s Test City for its representative population and mix of big city and suburban and farmlands all within a pretty small space. It was interesting to follow the change from downtown single-screen movie palaces and smaller local neighborhood cinemas to the suburban-based multi/mega-plexes.
Langford’s large claim is that there exists within Hollywood not a dedication to doing one thing as best as it can (as posited by David Bordwell and company) but rather that Hollywood is best at adapting to changing circumstances of economic pressures, audience desires, ideological pulls, and technological advancements. While Hollywood often seems reluctant to change, its status as a business, or collection of businesses, force it to change in response to all of these vectors. Langford often gets to his own point by summarizing a totalizing narrative about Hollywood during a certain era or in a certain context and then explains why that viewpoint ignores some important heterogeneity in the way Hollywood operates. Even the large shifts Langford identifies, for example in the Hollywood Renaissance’s shift toward auteurist creative freedom, come with concurrent other movements (Blaxploitation) or just business as usual. Langford basicaly claims that it’s impossible to create a totalizing narrative of Hollywood moving as one entity unless your analysis also accounts for the myriad ways that what looks like a collective effort of one big mass is actually the individual movements of hundreds of independent actors, each responding to the same or at least similar stimuli such that the overall movement might be in one direction, but that movement also includes some spreading out to the sides and some trailing behind.
The industrial changes Langford focuses on come in the form of who owns the studios and what other technologies challenge film’s “place of pride” in the public’s conception of the hierarchy of entertainment possibilities. He covers the splitting of the production and projection that comes in the Paramount Supreme Court Case, which leads into the studios realizing that television production might be an additional source of income rather than an enemy (a realization that happens again with home video and, though Langford couldn’t possibly know, the present streaming moment). He looks at how the conglomerization of film studios, first under really broad umbrellas and then as part of media empires (which are also under really broad umbrellas) allowed for the auteurist boom of the Renaissance before the idea of the franchise, which could leverage those large media empires to pre-sell movies to eagerly waiting audiences, began to dominate the landscape. Langford shows how the tentpole film became a way for studios to make almost sure-hits while gambling on the lower-cost movies that made up the majority of films produced and distributed by the studios.
The idological shifts often come in the form of national politics as emblematized by the sitting US president. Langford, for example, shows that the big ideological shift towards a politics of the self as initiated by Reagan’s revanchist rhetoric and policies still haven’t reall left the public consciousness, at least at the time of his writing. Meanwhile, he convincingly argues that, though the auteurs of the Renaissance were able to make more ideosyncratic films, it was really only the older holdovers from the end of the big studio era who leveraged that freedom into really revolutionary political films. The rest were most interested in interrogating the assumptions of the previous Hollywood era(s) without really challenging them in any meaningful ways. We might see this in the willingness to display the problems of toxic masculinity that has always been present in Hollywood films without fully condemning them or showing a different way of being. This coincides with the still strict limit on who would be allowed to make these films, aka generally straight white cis men. The few Black filmmaker who were given space in the studio system during the time of the Renaissance were confined to making Blaxploitation films while they were temporarily profitable. Langford notes that the late 90s has led to a somewhat noticable shift in who is given the reins on studio products, but only because the entire history of Hollywood production is overwhelming aligned with the stright white cis man. Langford also traces most of these changes via examinations of changes in genres, either what genres are popular or how genres shift to respond to the dominant ideology of the time. The Western is the prime example, with the action/adventure taking over in the 80s tentpole era and still quite dominant. These movies ultimately reflect a changing sense of the relationship between the individual and society at large. Langford also wisely points to the war films following the Vietnam war as a way of claiming victory in the world of fantasy where it didn’t exist in real life. He ties this to Reagan’s desire to return to a time when the US was unquestionably (yeah, right) righteous.
The style sections are the least revealing, I thought, as they are best at tying the other sections together in a more grounded sense as Langford actually looks at films in depth in these chapters. Most interestingly, Langford spends about half of the final style section basically explaining how every theorist who has written about the late-80s and 90s Hollywood output is wrong. He shows that the bemoaning “jeremiads” against MTV-influenced editing and overly formulaic narratives actually are based on bad assumptions and mistake some trends for the entirety of Hollywood’s productions, a proposition already disproven. Langford ably argues that the dismissive criticism he calls out are not only dismissive of studios and filmmakers, but also audiences who have not either surrendered themselves to the spectacle of near-fascist nature nor are too passive to follow along with less conventional editing or storytelling.
William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives
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?
Langford’s biggest interlocutor here is Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger, with Bordwell getting the brunt of the response. Their desire to treat their study of the “classical Hollywood style” as scientific is problematic, according to Langford, as it relies upon flawed conceptions pulled from faulty data sets. Langford’s more broad and historical approach is implicitly held up as the right way to study these kinds of industrial changes, movements, forces because he is able to contextualize them in several different ways.
Of course, any history that runs up to the “present” (in 2008) runs into some interesting problems as hindsight has proven Langford wrong, say, in how much emphasis he puts on physical home media as a guaranteed source of additional income for the studios. He mentions the first MCU movie in Iron Man but doesn’t foresee how it is a harbinger of a huge new way of making films. Nor can he recon with how Hollywood responded to the recession of 2008, though he mentions that it has begun. What makes Langford’s criticism valuable, however, is how easily I can see the principles he wrote about during the past 60 years of filmmaking history would (and did) influence the events that happened at the end of the period he writes about here. So his writing is only dated in that it doesn’t directly address things it couldn’t possibly know of, and not in the much worse way where his claims don’t apply outside of his window of study.
Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?
I’ve mostly laid this out above, but here I’ll talk about the sources Langford pulls from to create a broad base for his analysis. He looks at the local history of Columbus, for example, taking into account not only what theaters existed but also how they were advertising in local newspapers. Langford also investigates the way that the new media landscape allows for tv commercials, print ads, billboards, radio spots, infotainment shows, late-night talk shows, and traditional trailers can be leveraged by the company that owns all of these outlets and the studio making the film in order to sell it. In other words, Langford’s objects of analysis aren’t just the films but the entire contexts within which they exist. This is crucial for his project’s scope and aims.
Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?
The chapter makeup and order signify Langford’s biggest rhetorical moves as he aims to show the interactions between the three areas of study he has identified. The chain he claims works for the majority of the time period covered in the text is industrial influences the ideological influences the stylistic, though there is obviously cross-influence between all three. Langford’s choice to respond to what has become a normalized story of Hollywood as perpetuated by Bordwell et al. is also important to his task of interrogating the multivalent mass that is Hollywood filmmaking.
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?
This one will be crucial to my own work as I am fiercely interested in these three areas of study in the era that comes directly after the one mention here (and is still ongoing). His text will be a guide and a constant companion during my future writing and study.
Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?
Hollywood, heterogenous, homogenous, industry, ideology, style, conglomerates, history, change, auteur, tentpole, blockbuster, home video, “classical Hollywood style”
George Lucas’ Star Wars
Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?
Stylistic analysis and critical interpretation have demonstrated conclusively that the meanings and motives of Hollywood films cannot be adequately understood without systematic explication of the architecture of Hollywood: the dominant frameworks and conventions, the historical contexts and the governing attitudes which enable certain films to be successfully made and marketed, others to fail, and countless others never to reach the multiplex or to disappear into ‘development hell’. (xii)
I hope to show, by contrast, that the stories Hollywood films tell – the kinds of stories they can tell – are profoundly influenced by, and responsive to, both concrete historical issues and events (such as anti-communism or the Vietnam War and its aftermath) as well as the ideological currents that circulate around and through such events and supply the terms on which they are available to be understood. Because this obviously does not happen in an unmediated or straightforward fashion, these chapters will pay extensive attention to generic trends, using genre as a means of mediating the relationship between film and social, political and economic contexts. (xv)
But European avant-garde techniques were typically ‘tamed’ and accommodated to Hollywood’s established needs (though as Henry Jenkins points out, one should not understate the degree of adjustment and destabilization involved in the ‘adoption of alien aesthetic norms’). The subjective camera work of German films […] – which became known in the trade as ‘Ufa shots’ – and even the montage techniques of 1920s Soviet cinema were normalized in this way. Short bursts of distorted imagery clearly marked as a character’s dream, derangement or intoxication came to feature in Hollywood films from the late 1920s and enhanced interiority in characterization. ‘Montage sequences’ meanwhile became such a standard Hollywood tool for compressing long periods of elapsed (narrative) time, repeated actions of a similar kind (a quick succession of a bar and nightclub vignettes interspersed with neon signage to portray a bar crawl, as in The Best Years of Our Lives) or important contextual information (such as the flood of refugees out of Nazi occupied Europe at the start of Casablanca), that studios created specialist units to produce them, and in the 1970s reflexive films such as Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York would knowingly recreate them as nostalgic homages to the classical style. (77)
The point, perhaps, is the unexceptionable one that the Hollywood style evolved alongside the system that begot it, and its classicism was – thoroughly in the American vein – a matter of pragmatism as much as, or more than, principle. (81)
It was less clear whether Bluhdorn had the prescience in 1966 to realize that acquiring a movie studio would give his company a strategic advantage in the rapid evolution the US economy was already undergoing. American white-collar workers had outnumbered blue-collar workers since 1956: the US had become the world’s first ‘post-industrial’ economy. The Paramount takeover was a first step towards what was not yet called the information economy – the intangible world of ideas, images, knowledge and the systems to deliver them which over the next thirty years would transform American business even as the old economy activities in which Gulf + Western were in 1966 so heavily invested continued to decline in both value and importance. (111)
As ‘diversification’ yielded to ‘synergy’ as buzzwords of the moment among business theorists and strategists, [giant conglomerates] would emerge retooled and rebranded as new species, the dedicated media conglomerate, tightly focused on the business of media and information in all its varieties. (111)
In so doing, they affected industry thinking in three particularly important ways. Firstly, such hits [as Love Story, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, and Star Wars] exerted an absolute domination over their competition, earning perhaps twice as much as the films placed second or third that year. Success is such as these could single-handedly sustain a studio’s yearly operations, underwriting less profitable and loss-making releases. […] The annual quest for such ‘tentpole’ pictures became a marked feature of studio filmmaking as the decade drew on. Second, Jaws and Star Wars in particular exponentially expanded the familiar post-war concept of an ‘event’ movie to an inescapable transmedia presence, something like a ubiquitous nationwide obsession. Audiences, it appeared, eagerly wished to participate – often repeatedly – in the ‘experience’ these ineffable phenomena offered. […] While there was no way to ensure a game-changing success such as Star Wars, massive promotional campaigns aimed at making the ‘brand identity’ of each new product unmissable and inescapable offered as good a chance as any. Finally, the post-Jaws mega-hits were alike in one other conspicuous regard: none were promoted on the basis of art or auteurism. (124-5)
A shared structure of feeling marks many Renaissance movies and connects them to the political climate of the time: that the values and institutions that had served America’s post-war generation had become, or had always been, illusory, and that Hollywood Cinema is culpable for persisting in and promulgating those values, and now shares in their bankruptcy. Without attempting (or having the tools or the inclination to attempt) a conventional or comprehensive political analysis of the reasons for America’s crisis of political and economic legitimacy, the Hollywood Renaissance set about what could best be described as an imminent critique of the ideology of Hollywood cinema itself. (176-7)
Yet this is a paradoxical project – to attack Hollywood using Hollywood’s own devices – and it has an appropriately paradoxical outcome. (178)
DVDs’ attractiveness as consumer products sparked off a new culture of collecting and library-building: an unexpected bonus for the studios was the appeal of boxed sets of TV series (many of them produced by the majors’ TV and cable divisions, like Time Warner’s HBO). The success of the DVD revolution saw the value of the studios’ libraries soar. (201-2)
For the studios, a home-run is a film from which a multimedia ‘franchise’ can be generated; the colossally expensive creation of cross-media conglomerates predicated on synergistic rewards provides an obvious imperative to develop such products. (207)
SF-fantasy and superhero franchises, replete with eye-catching artifacts (monsters, spaceships, lightsabers, ‘technical manuals’, and the like) are of course especially suitable for tie-in promotions and licensing activities targeted at children) toys, costumes, memorabilia, etc.) and also circulate within a pre-existing fan subculture receptive to memorabilia, collectibles and the like. The rise of SF and fantasy moreover offers an obvious showcase for spectacular state-of-the-art technologies of visual, sound and above all special-effects design, the key attractions that provide a summer release with crucial market leverage. The genre is well suited to the construction of simplified, action-oriented narratives with accordingly enhanced worldwide audience appeal, potential for the facile generation of profitable sequels (often, as with the two Jurassic Park sequels, virtual reprises), and ready adaptability into profitable tributary media such as computer games and rides at studio-owned amusement parks. (207)
Their [the ‘regressive texts’ made in the Reagan era and beyond] distinctive contribution was to stake out a terrain of cultural politics around the politics of private life, family, gender and (to a lesser degree) sexuality that marked a clear break with the public-policy preoccupations of their seventies precursors. […] To the extent that Hollywood films during his presidency adopted Reaganism, they mostly did so less in terms of explicit New Right ideology (with the partial exception of foreign policy) than through a similar reliance on streamlined, affirmative and restorative fictions, deploying both renovated and new generic forms to do so. (221)
The advent of new digital technologies in the 1990s, ubiquitous by the end of the century, move the action film in both obvious and not-so-obvious ways. The most apparent, of course, was the capacity via computer generated imagery (CGI) to deliver spectacle on a scale unknown since the fifties widescreen era and with a degree of verisimilitude never approached before. A bifurcation started to emerge within the blockbuster. On the one hand, large scale fantasy adventures […] heavily marketed to youthful audiences, moved away from any visible connection to social or personal relations beyond a sort of residual nod to heterosexual romance. Other films meanwhile, especially a series of increasingly colossally scaled natural disaster movies, […] along with some comic book superhero adaptations […] and above all the Harry Potter franchise, all return insistently and almost obsessively to themes around parents and children. Both options might be thought to reflect the increasing importance of the family (meaning child) audience/market to the blockbuster as an industrial product. In terms of ideology, the increasingly virtual greenscreen environments in which these narratives take place tend to abstract them from any evident social relation – which of course may partly be the point. (234-5)
Various reasons might be suggested for this [lack of radical films] beyond studio executives obvious reluctance to court political controversy. One might be that whereas, as we have seen, the Hollywood Renaissance was enabled by circumstances including the industries severe financial crisis of 1969-72, no comparable industry-wide malaise afflicted Hollywood in the 1990s. On the contrary, not withstanding periodic bouts of introspection and anxiety about increasing costs and formulaic blockbuster production such as those expressed in Jeffrey katzenberg’s 1989 memo, this was a period of rising revenues and expanding markets. If the apple cart was not upset, in the eyes of the studios there was no justification for radical departures from convention. […] the socio-historical context lacked the critical mass of protest, war, violence and governmental malfeasance that drove politics on to American screens in the 1970s. America’s problems at the turn of the millennium seemed (prior to 9/11, Iraq and the crash of 2008) chronic rather than acute and consequently both hard to dramatize […] and apparently lacking in urgency. (238)
These analyses offer a powerful account ofA different, less judgmental (of filmmakers and, implicitly, audiences) take on this might simply say that changing assumptions about audience preferences and capabilities have been a necessary part of Hollywood practice since before the shift to features. Given that films are now more likely to be consumed on home video than in cinemas, directors may elect to give audiences more than they can handle at one viewing in the knowledge that there can always be a second, and third, aided if needs be with the pause/frame advance button to catch the fleeting or suggestive detail. Of course, Hollywood has often misunderstood or underestimated its public, but so have cultural commentators: in light of assertions about the cinema of postmodern attractions, it’s also worth noting that early cinema provoked somewhat similar jeremiads from contemporaries whose class or cultural location predisposed them to disapprove of the new medium. the workings of the contemporary blockbuster. However, their force is at least partly dissipated if the blockbuster spectacle can be shown to be less novel, or its consequences for narrative less apocalyptic, than has been claimed; and a good deal of skeptical scholarship has set out to prove exactly that. One immediate difficulty is how far they seem to rely on an outright opposition of narrative and spectacle which, as we have already seen, is not borne out by the history of Hollywood cinema. Spectacular elements, often highly intrusive and in strictly narrative terms excessive if not superfluous – like extravagant musical numbers or panoramic views of casts of thousands – have co-existed with more straightforward storytelling throughout much of Hollywood history. The historically exceptional sobriety of the immediately proceeding Hollywood Renaissance – a stylistic shift driven, as we have seen, by industrial and institutional factors – threw the re-emergence of spectacle into high relief and made it seem more novel than it might have done otherwise. So we surely do not have to rewind film history all the way back to Griffith and beyond to find sources for the kinds of dominating visuals associated with contemporary blockbusters. (251)
Allusionism thus became another Renaissance-era tactic repurposed for the 1990s. A culture of referencing older films remains very much part of contemporary Hollywood, but both the film-historical co-ordinates and the intention of these illusions have changed. […] But once identified, there is nothing much else to say: the critical stance that informed the illusionism and genre of revisionism of the 1970s and linked them back to their social contexts has been supplanted by a hermetic, pure textuality with no ‘larger’ agenda. (259)
A different, less judgmental (of filmmakers and, implicitly, audiences) take on this might simply say that changing assumptions about audience preferences and capabilities have been a necessary part of Hollywood practice since before the shift to features. Given that films are now more likely to be consumed on home video than in cinemas, directors may elect to give audiences more than they can handle at one viewing in the knowledge that there can always be a second, and third, aided if needs be with the pause/frame advance button to catch the fleeting or suggestive detail. Of course, Hollywood has often misunderstood or underestimated its public, but so have cultural commentators: in light of assertions about the cinema of postmodern attractions, it’s also worth noting that early cinema provoked somewhat similar jeremiads from contemporaries whose class or cultural location predisposed them to disapprove of the new medium. (261)
Perhaps then post-classical style consists in this consciousness – present and visible at every stage of the conceptualization, production, distribution and exhibition of a Hollywood film – that [it] is the world beyond film that in fact defines it. (263)
It should not be forgotten, however, that ‘classical Hollywood cinema’ was, when these men created it, not ‘classical’ at all, but an entirely new way of creating and delivering mass entertainment. By the same token, there seems little reason to doubt that what the world still knows as Hollywood will continue to reinvent itself for the as-yet-unforeseeable entertainment worlds of the next fifty years. Above and beyond any defined or definable set of stylistic parameters or industrial practices, this ongoing reinvention may be the most classical of all Hollywood’s enduring traditions. (282-3)