Politics in Popular Movies

Rhetorical Takes on Horror, War, Thriller, and Sci-Fi Films

John S. Nelson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317253976
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Popular movies can be surprisingly smart about politics - from the portentous politics of state or war, to the grassroots, everyday politics of family, romance, business, church and school. Politics in Popular Movies analyses the politics in many well-known films across four popular genres: horror, war, thriller and science fiction. The book's aims are to appreciate specific movies and their shared forms, to understand their political engagements and to provoke some insightful conversations. The means are loosely related 'film takes' that venture ambitious, playful and engaging arguments on political styles encouraged by recent films. Politics in Popular Movies shows how conspiracy films expose oppressive systems; it explores how various thrillers prefigured American experiences of 9/11 and shaped aspects of the War on Terror; how some horror films embrace new media, while others use ultra-violence to spur political action; it argues that a popular genre is emerging to examine non-linear politics of globalisation, terrorism and more. Finally it analyses the ways in which sci-fi movies reflect populist politics from the Occupy and Tea Party movements, rethink the political foundations of current societies and even remake our cultural images of the future.

CHAPTER 1
FILM TAKES

RHETORICAL APPRECIATIONS OF POPULAR POLITICS

(FEATURING 2001, BLADE RUNNER, 1984, BRAZIL, AND THE MATRIX)

Movies are often about politics, sometimes when they least seem to be…. ¹

—Roger Ebert

Why study the politics in popular movies? This can make the movies themselves more enjoyable and enlightening. It can enhance our accounts of politics. And it can enlarge our understanding of popular cinema in our politics and lives. Plus it can be lots and lots of fun!

Movies help make the myths that we live every day.² They influence the looks we like, the sounds we make, the words we speak, the attitudes we take, the possibilities we imagine, and the deeds we do. Films dramatize the stories that symbolize who we are as individuals, institutions, and communities. They show whence we have come and where we might be going. There are many important politics in movie mythmaking, for politics permeate these aspects of ourselves and our lives. They are not only the momentous politics of government but especially the mundane politics of popular culture and everyday life for ordinary people.

Even when it might seem otherwise, the art of movie-making is powerfully political.³ As Murray Edelman wrote to culminate a career in comprehending political communication, “Art is the fountainhead from which political discourse, beliefs about politics, and consequent actions ultimately spring.”⁴ Even “the conduct, virtues, and vices associated with politics come directly from art, and only indirectly from immediate experiences.” Edelman recognized how events on the big screen of cinema are “hyperreal … typically more portentous than personal affairs.”⁵ We know from everyday experience that these extend to television through reruns, VCRs, DVRs, DVD and Bluray players, imitations, and spin-offs. For us, cinema and television are “screens of power.”⁶ They invite our political exploration.

Our primary disciplines of power are politics, and our principal disciplines of politics are rhetorics. The ancient Sophists invented rhetoric as the study and practice of oral, and especially oratorical, politics.⁷ This fit the politics of speech-in-action-in-public predominant in Greece and Rome.⁸ Yet media beyond oral speech induce different politics. Already in the Roman Republic, reliance on letters, writing, and reading started to produce republics of laws and legislation—words that stem from legere, to read in Latin.⁹ Print from movable type promoted the centralization of authority in modern states and later the rationalization of rule in bureaucracies.¹⁰ Telegraphy magnified the speed and scope of politics.¹¹ Radio made even the highest politics more intimate, bringing them into our homes and changing our tones of voice.¹² Television put images of politics into motion, reforming leaders and publics alike.¹³ Now the Internet bypasses and erases some national boundaries while deepening others.¹⁴ For far more than a century, the oratorical politics connected to classical rhetoric have been decentered and restyled by electronic politics.¹⁵ And these come together with special power in cinema.

Our kinds of communications make—even are—our kinds of communities, each with its own kinds of politics. As our kinds of communication change, so do our rhetorics, keeping them current as studies of our politics. This is to say that all media develop in tandem with distinctive politics, and all politics pursue characteristic rhetorics. As we come to good terms with politics in electronic times, we need to articulate rhetorics of popular cinema. This is the aim of the several, related studies pursued in the pages ahead. In form, they are film takes.

What Are Film Takes?

Film takes are not movie previews to sell tickets, copies, rentals, or downloads. Nor are they film reviews of the newspaper, newsmagazine, or website sorts that focus on what you might want to watch. Instead they are film appreciations. They trace how devices, kinds, or works of cinema contribute to our communities and politics. Film takes analyze what movies do individually and conventionally to help shape our looks and sounds, characters and settings, or standards and trajectories. Chiefly film takes assess the modes of experience available in movies. Especially they assess the practices and theories of politics in popular films.

Hence the movies at the focus of a film take are more often popular cinema than high art. These films are “Hollywood” productions in the loose but telling sense. Their planning, shooting, or financing need not come from California to qualify them under that category. They might be written in Iowa, financed in China, filmed in Egypt or Peru, then screened at Sundance or Toronto. The film is “popular” if it engages the modes and means of cinema that succeed in vernacular cultures. It can do so by production, presentation, or reception. For film takes, the ambition is rhetorical analysis of movies. With special attention to audiences and politics, a film take assesses ways and means of cinematic communication, explicit and implicit. Thus a film take parses plots, characters, acting, lighting, sound, scenery, costumes, camera uses, popular genres such as horror or romance, special effects, and other elements that configure families of films or specific movies.

In filmmaking, a take is the unit of continuously recorded action. Directors often shoot more than one take for each scene, to tap different performances of it. Some takes prove better than others, of course, at least for specific uses in a film; yet each aspires to a distinctive validity as a telling perspective on the events they show. In analyzing a rhetoric of cinema, likewise, a film take is a perspective on devices that movies use to make meanings, persuade viewers, and create realities. Each take leaves room for others, even invites and elicits them in response. My take on a movie or a genre can augment yours. But it also can inflect, redirect, confound, or provoke your take.

“Take five!” can start the fifth performance of a scene, but it also can announce a break from the usual action: a period for rest, relaxation, entertainment. Thus a film take might not be an orthodox work of scholarship. It should be intriguing in topic, surprising in treatment, lively in style. Film takes can be article- or even book-length, but many are shorter: just enough to say something meaty and provocative. Aspirations should include illuminating the specific movies, devices, or genres at issue while piquing the reader’s interest overall in how films do their mythic and political work.

A film take could inquire why vampires and zombies are converging as political figures in recent movies. It might wonder what politics emerge from the dark streets, rotating fans, and corrupt police that characterize the recent resurgence in film noir. Since movies and comics use the super powers of superheroes to tame the Will-to-Power politics of perfectionism, a film take could investigate what we can learn about current politics from superhero movies returning to prominence at the same time as noir films. A film take could ponder what is happening culturally when westerns take a detour into horror in High Plains Drifter (1973), Unforgiven (1992), Tombstone (1994), Wyatt Earp (1994), The Quick and the Dead (1995), Jonah Hex (2010), or Cowboys & Aliens (2011). A film take could ask why the populist politics of movie musicals depend on dancing as much as singing. A film take could examine what cinema has been doing lately with Hamlet, and why. A take could explore how movies that feature water reconfigure political power. Or a take could trace how Hollywood feminisms might be remaking romances. Film takes on innumerable topics can be intriguing, and there are diverse examples to come.

To track most current releases is an impossible project for film takes. Yet they benefit from an angle that ties to some present setting for movies or politics. Film takes are less for established classics than recent films, less for individual works of art than families of popular movies. To achieve adequate depth, though, the analysis almost always features a particular film or several. The main aim is to inform re-viewing that can heighten the appreciation of movies already seen. If a secondary effect is to motivate first-time viewing, that is an excellent bonus.

A close comparison to film takes might be to the “mythologies” from Roland Barthes.¹⁶ In France in the 1950s, Barthes focused his skills as a scholar of signs and symbols on analyzing objects and images familiar to newspaper readers from ads, movies, news, or other aspects of their daily lives. He wrote about the iconography of military posters, the morality plays in wrestling matches, and the meaning of a movie star’s face. He probed the appeals of foods, cars, and myriad consumer products. He assessed cruises, landmarks, elections, photos, and songs. In unpacking the myths of everyday life that lurk in these many components of culture, Barthes took care to learn about their imputations of power, their implications of language and movement, their intimations of justice, change, and style: in short, their politics. Film takes are “mythologies” for the movies.

Thus film takes are appreciations of movies more than criticisms, let alone “critiques,” of them. This is not because film takes lack critical acumen, but because they mostly target good films to consider how cinema performs its rhetorics. As a form, the film take is not for condemning cinema as popular spectacle—or television as mass entertainment. Books to that effect have been written many times over, and we might wonder whether they have much left to teach us about either medium. (The same goes for video games.¹⁷) Nor is the film take a form for unleashing the university’s awesome arsenal for denigrating, denying, decrying, debunking, or altogether destroying targets disliked by the analyst. The key principle for appreciations is sympathetic connoisseurship: seeking to understand how what we value might work, while doing so to share the joy and learning with others. Film takes are free to find faults, as they should where faults are to be found. But there is seldom much gain—or enjoyment—in calling our attention in detail to something for the purpose of explaining why it does not deserve our detailed attention.

Where Are Movie Politics?

There are at least two approaches to analyzing the political theory in popular culture. Some analysts start with a political topic then choose popular works overtly about it. Others select appealing works or devices of popular culture then explore their meanings for politics. The two approaches connect too much to pursue either exclusively. But for the most part, I begin with intriguing works and devices that seldom seem political on the surface. Politics that emerge from a creative focus on scenery, sound, story, characters, or even sales can be more provocative and informative than any intentional messages about parties or ideologies.

Since I study political advertising and campaigning, I might see what I can learn about them from popular movies like The Candidate (1972), Power (1986), Bob Roberts (1992), Bulworth (1998), Primary Colors (1998), Man of the Year (2006), and Swing Vote (2008). Because these directly address campaigning in general and advertising in particular, such films mostly can teach us what their makers learned about elections or ads from books by scholars or talks with politicians and consultants. But why not read the books and listen to the talks instead or, better, augment them with our own research on campaigning and advertising?

Furthermore some of these are good as movies go (the first five), but some are not (the last two), and none are great. Why not dwell longer in movies that are especially exciting as cinema—even when they do not focus overtly on high, official politics? Then the politics that emerge from their camera angles, color schemes, genre conventions, musics, myths, stunts, voices, and such can often prove more provocative and informative than I could have imagined in advance. The creators of any popular film are likely to be many, diverse, and focused on considerations of drama, stage craft, or box office. They seldom try directly to develop a detailed, intentional message about politics. Yet film takes reveal their works to offer more insight into the politics we live every day than any intentional message about policy or ideology is likely to provide.

Cultural studies of race, class, and gender have concentrated for decades on film politics pitched at more everyday levels.¹⁸ Typically the targets for analysis of race or ethnicity are films that focus overtly on them, such as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), Rosewood (1997), Crash (2005), Glory Road (2005), and The Great Debaters (2007).¹⁹ The same goes for movies that feature dynamics of social class, among them Gosford Park (2001), Maid in Manhattan (2002), and The Great Gatsby (2013); yet analysis can readily extend to movies with strong but still secondary interests in the everyday politics of class, such as Blue Crush (2002), The Lookout (2007), and Young Adult (2011).²⁰ And an even larger range of films attracts analytical attention for the everyday politics of gender and sexuality: from Nine to Five (1980), Thelma and Louise (1981), Tootsie (1982), and Working Girl (1988) to The First Wives Club (1996), A Thousand Acres (1997), North Country (2005), and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011).²¹ In a way, the film takes in this book simply try to address further kinds of cultural politics in Hollywood films.

Popular cinema is as close as we come these days for people in electronic societies to a communication technology of full-bodied, virtual reality.²² Cinema engages our senses more fully than print or even television.²³ I...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Empires in Perspective
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Film Takes: Rhetorical Appreciations of Popular Politics
• Part One: Popular Genres
• Part Two: Political Experiences
• Part Three: Cinematic Terrors
• A Glossary for Analyzing Politics
• A Glossary for Analyzing Movies
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author