Saturday, June 16, 2012

The Macintoshian Cinema of Ridley Scott


Ridley Scott’s new blockbuster Prometheus appeals to that would-be intellectual in all of us: sci-fi cineaste, astrologer, psychoanalyst, wide-eyed ontologist. At the same time it is almost hypnotically engaging, creating a spectacle so narcotic as to erase philosophical skepticism and historical perspective. Prometheus is brain candy for the viewer or critic whose favorite recent film is Avatar and who looks to Todd Hayness Far From Heaven (2002) as the greatest and most accurate film about the 1950s (never mind Douglas Sirk). Scott lays on thick the most formulaic and typically appealing and genre elements: a sentimental narrative conveyed by strikingly hollow method acting; melodramatic plot twists closely modeled on the daytime soaps of the 1970s, and style of film editing -- shot-reverse shot – that seems contrived to feel artless (not to say mechanical). It’s as if Scott, the master of psychobiographical character arcs in his other films, most notably Thelma and Louise (1991), has decided here, in his first 3-D movie, to dispose of three-dimensional characters altogether.
Take the corny and melodramatic relationship between Elizabeth (Noomi Rapace) and her lover, Charlie, which moves too fast to allow any viewer identification, an apparently determined genre mark, underscored by the terse, boring dialogue, and stiff acting. And then there’s the whole gang of stock characters: the macho black commander, the grungey crew who just want to get paid, and the female ice queen bitch (the elderly Charlize Theron!), who despises the younger, sexier protagonist.
The protagonist (Rapace) is another Ridley Scott-designed dud, whose Buffy the Vampire Slayer kick-ass feminism (I can perform my own C-section and look hot all the way thru) is as clawing and routine as the film’s Freudian subtext: the quest for the mythical fatherland, mysteriously coded and impossible to find, wherein a large patriarchal head spews venomous goo, protected by vaginal aliens, encased in a large womb/turd looking spaceshit.
As many critics have noted, the only character that seems to escape Scott’s robotic puppeteering is the robot (Michael Fassbender); but even this irony is overstated and underwhelming.
Still, Promotheus is compelling, never mind the actors, the script, and the sophomoric philosophical ponderings (who/what created man?).What makes the film is the cinematographic emphasis on the relations between the actors and the space they inhabit, over and above the typical emphasis on the interpersonal drama of Hollywood film epitomized by the ”shot-countershot” formula.    
Particularly when viewed in IMAX, the wan shot-countershot repartee between the actors makes a stark contrast with the largeness of the spaces they inhabit—not merely the space of the spaceship (or the greenscreen that lies beneath) but also the space of the movie theater and, more important, the existential void of outer space. The drama becomes not he said / she said, alien score 1 / human score 2 but are they watching the space or is the space watching them?, are they watching us or are we watching them? Scott does a marvelous job of setting this up in the film’s first shot of the protagonist (Rapace)  brushing off the black dust of the cave wall and peering out at us. The more she dusts, the more of her face we see, the more we feel we are being watched. Other scenes have the actors surrounded by dark empty space (in the cave, magnified by the IMAX screen), in which, they fear they are being watched (by the audience?).



Scott’s earlier film Alien (1979) had none of this existential darkness but rather followed the classic structure of shot-counter shot. For instance, when Ash (Ian Holm) and Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) fight we are given no three-dimensional invitation to their shared space, but instead watch a scene that has the same formal complexity of a soap opera: We see Ash speak and then we see Ripley speak, and so on and so forth.
Although Alien’s tagline “in space, no one can hear you scream” makes you imagine a cinematic horror vacui, the film does little to foster any sort of existential dread. The spaceship is so full of camaraderie, funny bit-characters, and soap opera intrigue that there is no time to feel the danger of the void outside the ship.
At the start, the crew emerges from their claustrophobic pods with a dancerly integrity. And just as the orchestral music begins to lull you in, we are interrupted by a frightening crash. But the crashes and interruptions only add to the overall coherence of the melody: just as the “unexpected” alien invasions are what concretize the film’s genre. They are the clues that tell you: this is a horror sci-fi film. And the coherence of the genre allows us to be distracted from any major fears of what lies inside and/or what lies within. Our alienating fears are contained, managed, and treated by the film’s reconcilability as a coherent genre film (an alien film: sci-fi and horror).
The fight scenes between aliens and humans also serve to remedy the fear the void might bring. We are distracted by the game of it all (Alien arrives a year after the popular arcade game Space Invaders). This game-frame (who will win?) then takes precedence over the ontological mystery that the tagline implies. And like with any computer game, the characters interact firmly behind a third wall, in a virtual space, so you can involve yourself without having to truly enter into the horror of their environment.
            In Daimonic Reality, Patrick Harpur argues that aliens do unto us what we do unto littler beings: when we torture/probe/investigate/belittle our animals and minorities; aliens do the same to us and we become the pets and freaks. This horrifying prospect requires a defensive reversal of the alien’s violence (do unto the alien what the alien does unto us) and this is precisely what we do by embedding the alien into a predictable genre narrative.



In 1984, five years after Alien, Scott directed a commercial for Apple Computer’s first Macintosh personal computer, in which blue-grey zombies follow the commands of a leader speaking on a large screen. But the dreary dystopia is broken up by a young sexy blonde woman who runs in with a large freedom-wielding hammer, bringing forth a new technology that would ensure that 1984 was nothing like George Orwell’s 1984. Instead of having a country ruled by all-seeing bureaucrats, we would be ruled by the neoliberal free self, each with his own personal computer.
Ironically, the freedom ushered in by the sexy blonde runner looks an awful lot like the dystopia she supposedly demolished. As the most liked YouTube comment on the commercial reads, “isn't it ironic that nowadays those mindless sheep are the apple fans?/ and they'd be watching Steve Jobs on that big screen talking about future products, while they're all in awe thinking ‘this man is a true visionary’/ Nowadays, there is no one to throw the hammer.” Indeed, the “ipod industrial complex” has taken over.
Can there be a Macintoshian cinema that takes into account this era’s conflicts: its simultaneous fear and desire for Steve Job’s whitewashed utopia of Apple products? Scott makes a good go at it by precisely mirroring Mac’s rhythm of output: invent a novel, eerie, uncanny, weird, futuristic product then let things quiet down as people get used to the product, then startle them with an even more bizarre product that outdoes the earlier ones. Likewise, in Prometheus: the twists come at just the right time, with just the right punch, to produce an enjoyable shock.
Scott’s products and Apple’s products are marvelously complex and full of alienating aliens; yet both come off as slick, with a Zen-like simplicity and perfection. And it is this perfection that takes the shock out of the shocks: turning an erratic disturbing multimedia invention into a streamlined, whitewashed toy. Everything in Mac is remixed so that it shares the same common denominator, the same software, the same neoliberal emphasis on self-expression (affirmative queerness), the same file type played off the same media players. And the Macintoshian film is remixed to create a monolithic shockless effect on its audience. And like a smooth Six Flags roller coaster ride, the effect is oddly impotent.
Linda Williams theorizes that conventional genres have a certain rhythmic formula: the surprise comes too soon in horror, too late in melodrama, and right on time in porn.  In Prometheus, the surprises of melodrama and horror are collapsed into the non-surprise of porn, since the frighteningly early surprises and the tragically late surprises become so predictable thatthey begin to arrive on time. And we are left with products (be they iPads or movies) that faintly try to signify melodrama and horror but are so stripped of surprise that they follow the straight tempo one finds in any standard-issue porn movie.
When all media content can be remixed on your laptop to fit the monolithic queeronormative hipster DIY vision of the iPod-industrial complex, a certain static deadness comes to our cultural products, as in the pastiche films of Todd Haynes and Guy Maddin, the pastiche pop music of Lady Gaga, the pastiche video-art of Ryan Trecartin, the hipster comedy of Lena Dunham, and the FaceBook-dictated activism of Occupy Wall Street, all of which, and in interesting ways, are self-consciously ambivalent about the problem.
 The signification of outer space in Prometheus could well be a continuation of this dystopian trend of monolithic monotony: out in the void lies the new Macinvention, the latest Promethean point, from which we can commodify our existence into a World Wide Identity.
Ultimately, the void might give way to a sexy blonde runner with a freedom-wielding hammer that will shatter the iPod-Industrial Complex into bits. But it is more likely that the runner is neither progressively Marxist nor complacently Macintoshian but rather, indeed, self-consciously ambivalent about her political relationship to the fashions of capitalism.

Note:
Linda Williams’ theory, originally published in Film Quarterly can be read online here
Patrick Harpur’s book Daimonic Reality can be found here.
For more on remixable media see Lev Manovich’s "Theory of Hybrid Media" can be read here.