Kristin Thompson

Storytelling in Film and Television by Kristin Thompson

by

David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in Film and Television (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003)

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?

Kristin Thompson spends most of the four essays (collected from a speaking series given about a year earlier) here arguing for the value of looking at individual episodes, seasons, or series as objects of analysis. Opposing Williams’ idea of flow where viewers are basically unable to distinguish between what is the programming and what is the interruption (in terms of ads or even changes of show or channel), Thompson suggests (rightly) that viewers are not only able to make such distinctions, but that the storytelling, which aligns with her conception of the classical Hollywood storytelling structure, helps viewers make this distinction and forms the fundamental argument for her desire to focus on shows in every scale as the objects of study for television scholars. While this argument may seem somewhat unnecessary, I’d wager it only really seems that way now, in 2020, almost 2 decades after Thompson first made this argument. Her mode has become the standard, but TV scholarship is still relatively new, and it is very possible that the time between her argument and now has been shaped by that very argument.

To focus more on how that storytelling works, she notes that film is reliant upon redundant storytelling that uses dangling hooks and multiple narrative threads, and that TV weaponizes those concepts to ensure that viewers understand what is happening in an episode, season, and series. It’s a compelling argument.

She also, in the third essay, argues that the prevalence of TV has changed the way that we tell stories overall. She claims that the concept of seriality has become so embedded in the public consciousness that it has influenced film and literature, leading to a resurgence of sequels, prequels, and saga style storytelling. I find this claim to be very credible, but I think it both needs some more bolstering and some further thought given the developments of the past 20 years. But I guess that’s what I’m here for.

In her fourth essay, she argues that there can be such thing as Art Television the way there is Art Film, following Bordwell’s famous essay outlining the six features of art cinema. She shows that there are pretty tight homologies between the two media in how they handle the same ideas, using David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet as her primary examples.

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?

As I said above, she only really argues with (or even references outright) Raymond Williams’ concept of flow. Otherwise, she’s obviously positioning herself as an argument for what might be seen as a standard film theory angle on TV theory. I think it’s important to notice what is similar between the two media, as well as what is different. Though I wouldn’t go as far as McLuhan does on the concept of medium specificity, there are definite differences that make for real, meaningful variances in how the two media handle similar ideas/stories/techniques. Thompson provides a good first step here by noting that there is a tendency towards a unified act structure in different types of TV in a way that is similar to the classical Hollywood style, but there’s so much more to explore (and that was already explored after Thompson’s publication).

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Textual analysis of several different kinds of TV shows, including some extended dialogue scenes that are presented in script form.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

By trying to port film theory ideas to TV theory, she both argues for their fundamental similarity and notes the obvious differences.

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?

Her argument is pretty foundational for TV studies as far as I can tell, as her focus on aesthetics and poetics is a core from which other kinds of analysis can be built. I’ll definitely be going back to her ideas on serialization, even if I don’t think they’re as fully developed as they need to be.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

film, television, poetics, serialization, serials, sequel, redundant narration, dangling hooks, art film, art television, flow

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

In Storytelling in the New Hollywood, I argued further that the norms and widespread use in recent decades are essentially still those of the “Golden Age” of studio filmmaking in the decades before 1960. This is not to say that all films draw on all aspects of that model, and certainly there are some films that stretch the conventions. I mean rather that the norms are still there to be drawn on, and most films do. Here I would like to take one further step and suggest that many of these norms have been adopted or adapted by television precisely because they have been so suited to telling straightforward, entertaining stories. (19)

Thus it would appear that in some cases even half-hour programs that are not interrupted by commercials tend to include major turning points that divide them into large-scale parts, or acts – though obviously here the authors were not required to time these moments as precisely as they did. With the increasing number of original series produced by premium channels like HBO in the U.S., one might wonder whether these commercial free programs also fall into evenly timed acts. A look at one half-hour sitcom, Sex and the City, and one roughly hour-long drama, The Sopranos, suggests that act structure is somewhat more flexible in such programs, but that it is not abandoned or radically altered. (51)

Such divisions of programs into acts, whether rigidly or flexibly proportioned, are not simply arbitrary. They give an episode a sense of structure, much as the balanced movements of a classical concerto do. They provide the spectator with a sense of progress and guarantee the introduction of dramatic new premises or obstacles at intervals. They allow for the rising and falling action that many writers refer to as crucial to good plots. Regular turning points also give variety to a story, ensuring that the action does not simply involve a character striving toward a goal and meeting a series of similar obstacles. Thus there are reasons why even television episodes that are broadcast without breaks would draw on an act structure. (54-5)

Currently all the familiar studios of Hollywood’s golden age are subsidiaries of large multinational corporations. In many cases, adaptations are attractive because such companies already own the rights to various narratives that have already been produced in one medium but which are available to be recycled in another. Moreover, these huge companies have been able to market their products, including movies, in part by using synergy. That is, a company’s TV stations will promote its movies, while its record division puts out the soundtrack, and so on. Such marketing now has also come to mean selling the same narrative over and over in different media. (81-2)

What, then, of serial narratives? It is possible that the vogue for sequels, series, and serials in film reflects an influence from television. […] These films [in the Lethal Weapon series] also, however, incorporate the mild seriality of much serious television, with the characters and their situations gradually changing. (103)

It is apparent, then, that the tendencies toward adaptations of stories among media, toward sequels, and toward seriality are all part of a general stretching and redefinition of narrative itself. In particular, the notion of firm and permanent closure to any given narrative has loosened across media. Series television, with its broad possibilities for spinning out narratives indefinitely, has been a major impetus in these tendencies. They, along with the innovations and interwoven multiple plot lines discussed in the last chapter, seem to me some of the most intriguing areas where an analyst might explore the aesthetic specificity of series television. (105)

The Studios After the Studios by J.D. Connor

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Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park

Connor, J.D. 2015. The Studios After the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood (1970-2010). Post-45. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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)

Post-Classical Hollywood by Barry Langford

by

Steven Spielberg’s Jaws

Langford, Barry. 2010. Post-Classical Hollywood: Film Industry, Style, and Ideology Since 1945. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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)