Hollywood Blockbusters

The Anthropology of Popular Movies

David Sutton, Peter Wogan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000182200
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Why do 'Jaws', 'Field of Dreams', 'The Big Lebowski', and 'The Godfather' remain strikingly popular in this age of fragmented audiences and ever-faster spin cycles? "Hollywood Blockbusters: The Anthropology of Popular Movies" argues that these films continue to captivate audiences because they play upon underlying tensions and problems in American culture, much like the myths that anthropologists study in non-Western contexts. In making this argument, the authors employ and extend anthropological theories about ritual, kinship, gift giving, power, egalitarianism, literacy, metalinguistics, stereotypes, and the mysteries of the Other. The results - original insights into modern film classics, American culture, and anthropological theory - will appeal to students of Film, Media, Anthropology, Sociology, and Cultural Studies.

1 INTRODUCTION

At a time when just about everything, from the mundane to the spectacular, has been subjected to an anthropological lens, why have anthropologists been so cautious about extending their insights to popular Hollywood movies? And what might be the rewards of an approach to these movies that is unabashedly anthropological?

This book employs current anthropological concepts to illuminate American blockbuster movies, such as Field of Dreams, Jaws, and The Godfather.¹ While most mass media suffer ever-faster spin cycles and increasingly fragmented audiences, these films have enjoyed remarkable, enduring popularity. They have become so deeply woven into the cultural fabric that lines from them—“If you build it, he will come”; “You’re gonna’ need a bigger boat”; “Make him an offer he can’t refuse"—have been incorporated into our everyday language. Clearly these films continue to fascinate and appeal to American audiences, making them tantamount to the myths and sacred narratives that anthropologists routinely study in other parts of the world. If anthropologists were to find a culture that spent as much energy on myths as Americans do on Hollywood movies—constantly watching and talking about them, gossiping about their heroes—they would create a cottage industry exclusively devoted to unpacking the meaning of those myths. Strangely, though, few anthropological studies have even considered Hollywood movies. We propose to do something about this.

Though scholars in film studies and cultural studies offer plenty of excellent interpretations of film texts, we believe that anthropology has something to add. In calling for anthropological readings, however, we are not trying to erect new disciplinary boundaries. In fact, we believe such boundaries impede the scholarly enterprise, and we intend to engage with the work of non-anthropologist in the pages that follow. Nonetheless, there are ways of approaching problems that still tend to be typical of anthropology: a focus on topics such as kinship, gift exchange, and ritual, and a comparative perspective on human societies, systems of meaning, and modes of everyday activity. We will try to show that these anthropological approaches can provide fresh angles on familiar Hollywood movies, and, more generally, on American society and cultural processes.

ORIGINS OF THIS BOOK

We see our project very much in the anthropological tradition of making “the strange familiar and the familiar strange.” Unfortunately, anthropologists have tended to shy away from the latter half of this promise; anthropologists too often focus on the “strange,” without using the understanding gained through fieldwork and cross-cultural training to comprehend such seemingly mundane, familiar phenomena as Hollywood movies.

In fact, this book began in the wake of our own reverse culture shock. When we returned to the U.S. over ten years ago after doing extended fieldwork in other countries, we started to see ostensibly trivial aspects of American culture in a new light, including movies that touched on themes we had been investigating while abroad. Wogan had been studying literacy practices in highland Ecuador ing, examining the ways in which a local indigenous group used writing as a symbol for ment government and Catholic Church power (Wogan 2004b). In this state of heightened sensitivity to literacy symbolism, he happened to watch The Godfather and couldn’t help noticing images of writing in this movie, such as a bandleader’s contract and FBI badges. He began to view these literacy images as a subtle, deeply critical commentary on the American state, capitalism, and social relations. At roughly the same time, Sutton also watched The Godfatherand noticed interesting parallels to his own field research on food practices and gender in Greece (Sutton 2001). For the next few years,we watched The Godfather repeatedly, compared notes, discussed the film in our classes, and continued honing our analysis, until we finally felt compelled to publish an article on it (Sutton and Wogan 2003). That experience alerted us to the anthropological possibilities offered by blockbuster movies.

Over the past decade, we have expanded our discussions to include other films, read widely in the literatures on visual anthropology and media studies, and incorporated movies into our undergraduate teaching and field research projects. Certainly there was no shortage of films to analyze, but we only focused on those that seemed particularly complex and interesting from an anthropological point of view. The result is this book.

ETHNOGRAPHY, ANTHROPOLOGY, AND BEYOND

We have to stress that this book is not an ethnography, unlike most other recent anthropological work on mass media, which has focused on the production, circulation, and reception of various media texts worldwide.² While we recognize the value of these ethnographic media studies, our own aims here are different. This book provides a textual reading of Hollywood movies,³ rather than an ethnographic analysis of their production or reception by specific audiences.

We have cast our analysis at the level of “American society” in full recognition that this is a broad, semi-fictionalized construct. We do this as a tentative first step, a way to get people thinking about these texts. But we also know tthere is ultimately no such thing as American society and no interpretation that will apply to all Americans; there are only specific audiences responding to specific films in specific contexts. Like most other anthropologists, we take as a given that “culture" is inchoate, an ever shifting amalgam of contradictory values and practices, and that any claims to the unified coherence of “culture” are always political and value-laden.⁴ To understand the social and personal meaning of films, then, ethnographic studies must be done with specific audiences. Toward that end, we will present some results of our own ethnographic studies in the Conclusion, and suggest ways that others could ethnographically study audience responses to the issues raised in this book.

We believe this is a reasonable order. Creating textual readings is an important first step before undertaking ethnographic research on audience responses, just as other fieldwork projects start off with provocative, tentative theories rather than blindly poking in the dark. For example, Elizabeth Traube, while admiring Janice Radway’s research on audience uses of romance novels (1984), notes that research can also fruitfully begin with textual readings:

An ethnographer who took this latter route could search for correspondences between patterns embodied in mass cultural narratives and the more loosely structured stories that people tell about their lives, their narrative constructions of personal and collective identity. In the process, of course, the ethnographer would probably come to revise the original textual analysis. On the other hand, I suspect that preunderstandings of mass entertainment culture would help to elucidate the fictions through which people live their lives. (1989: 275; see also 1990: 378; 1992)

Elizabeth Bird is a particularly good example of an anthropologist who has combined textual readings with creative ethnographic approaches, as seen in her book-length studies of supermarket tabloids, television scandals, and other mass media phenomena (1992, 2003). Resisting notions of “ethnographic purity” and “more ethnographic than thou” attitudes, Bird points out that traditional participant-observation is not necessarily feasible or relevant when studying a dispersed audience, nor is it always necessary when the investigator is a member of the culture being studied; in such cases, the “fieldwork” has started years before the textual analysis itself (Bird 2003: 7–10).

The value of textualist approaches needs to be stressed because the proper relationship between anthropology, ethnography, and mass media remains a matter of contention. Anthropologists and cultural studies scholars still debate where their respective disciplinary boundaries properly lie, with some anthropologists insisting on the superiority of fieldwork (e.g. Geertz 1998; Nugent and Shore 1997) and some scholars of cultural studies even condemning each other for supposedly corrupting “true” anthropological ways of doing ethnography (see Bird 2003: 6; Peterson 2003: 126–7). As anthropology has moved away from the study of discrete, bounded communities and more toward multi-sited ethnography, the definition of ethnography and anthropology itself has come up for debate. Clifford Geertz refers to this debate as “the most critical issue facing cultural anthropology in these postcolonial, postpositivist, posteverything times. This is the value, the feasibility, the legitimacy, and thus the future of localized, long-term, close-in, vernacular field research—what [James] Clifford at one point lightly calls ‘deep hanging out' ..." (Geertz 1998: 69). In our own publications, we have found ourselves on both sides of this debate. Our previous work on Greece and Ecuador has been based on long-term fieldwork (Sutton 1998, 2001, 2008; Wogan 2004b), and we have even argued for the value of extended fieldwork over the “thinness” of certain multi-sited ethnographies (Wogan 2004a) and auto-ethnographies (Wogan 2007). At the same time, we have contributed publications that are more theoretical and multi-sited, and less strictly tied to fieldwork (Sutton 2006, 2007; Wogan 2004b, 2006).

This debate over fieldwork applies with particular force to media studies. Although anthropologists today are more willing than ever before to study mass media, many still do not know what to make of anthropological studies of mass media that are not rooted in traditional fieldwork. Lila Abu-Lughod, for example, accepts that “anthropologists cannot dispense with ‘textual analysis,’ the equivalent of symbolic analyses of rituals and myths that have illuminated so much” (1997: 112), but she sees such textual interpretation as subsumed within a larger ethnographic project, and she is critical of research on media for using “a notion of ethnography that little resembles the anthropological ideal” (1997: 111). On the other hand, Kath Weston questions “nostalgia for ethnography,” which she sees as consistent with a more general longing for “real anthropology.” As she puts it:

The flag-planting approach asks anthropologists to stake an exclusive claim to particular methodologies or concepts, all, of course, in the name of saving the discipline. Ethnography becomes a distinctive anthropological practice with a long academic pedigree, and pity the poor sociologist who has only lately discovered it. Culture is “our” concept, and damn any cultural-studies type who tries to claim it for his or her own. (Weston 2008: 130)

Another commentator sums up this way: “The debate continues to revolve around the binary of textualism versus social context” (Schein 2008: 210). We can’t hope to resolve these fundamental, meta-theoretical debates (nor can any single intervention), but we want to note at the outset that anthropology itself remains contested terrain, so where one stands on textual, anthropological readings of mass media will depend on how one defines anthropology in general.

These debates also demonstrate, however, that anthropology is in flux and new possibilities are opening up. Not only do we now have important precedents like Bird and Traube, but there is growing interest in the anthropology of mass media and a constant pushing of the disciplines boundaries. In fact, we will demonstrate later in this chapter that there is a small but expanding literature on the anthropology of feature films. Textualist approaches, in particular, have now established a place for themselves, as noted by Mark Allen Peterson in his comprehensive review and assessment of the field: "Although the formal features of texts ... cannot in themselves validate particular meanings, the close reading of texts is likely to remain significant to the anthropology of media" (2003: 119).⁵

Furthermore, the interpretations we provide in this book are not entirely text-internal. In fact, the entire textualism vs. ethnography distinction starts to crumble under closer inspection. Having lived our entire lives in the U.S. (more than 45 years each), our interpretations are based on an intimate understanding of the society in question. Like other anthropologists, we’ve been doing ethnography based on participant-observation: participating in social routines, observing others’ behaviors; talking to people; thinking systematically about what we are seeing, hearing, and experiencing. We are at least as familiar with the U.S. as the fieldworker who spends a couple years in another culture and struggles to learn the language(s) spoken there. Our work is one of those cases Bird talked about: the fieldwork started long before the textual readings were created. At a time when anthropology is giving more serious attention to “the native point of view” (while also recognizing the blurriness of any claims to insider status), it would make sense to valorize such native understandings of Western anthropologists themselves. From this perspective, our film interpretations are textual and ethnographic.

Thus, rather than insisting on a strict, traditional definition of ethnography that pits it and textualist readings against each other, we believe that a mixture of the two will be most fruitful, and we suggest that multiple, flexible approaches to mass media will prove to be enlightening. In fact, we welcome exchanges with cultural studies, film studies, and other fields, and are excited by the possibilities of such interdisciplinary dialogue. Most readers will know the language, culture, and texts we talk about here, so they will be well positioned to contribute to this discussion. This is a refreshing change of pace for us. Cultural anthropologists almost always work alone, without other anthropologists at their field sites; they almost never publicly share their field notes and other unprocessed “data”; and their publications often draw for evidence on languages only known by a handful of other anthropologists. As a result, there is relatively limited opportunity to play with, and push back against, anthropologists’ interpretations of specific texts.⁶ By comparison, analysis of Hollywood blockbusters is more transparent, open to discussion and debate, and we find such transparency invigorating.

We especially hope that our interpretations will encourage other investigators to explore these blockbuster films through ethnographic research with specific audiences. Toward that end, in the Conclusion chapter we review the literature on the ethnography of audience responses, describe some of the results of our own ethno graphic work on student reactions to films, and suggest other ways that these issues could be further explored ethnographically. Such ethnographies are indispensable because no single reading can ever be the final word on these movies. Other researchers would undoubtedly come up with different interpretations of the films we examine, while ethnographic research would inevitably bring out audience-specific, alternative perspectives, which is exactly as it should be when dealing with complex social phenomena like blockbuster movies. It would be especially interesting to see how some of these blockbusters are perceived in countries like Canada and the United Kingdom, where they have also enjoyed great popularity. We refer throughout this book to the U.S. only because that is the society we know best, but we believe that this type of analysis can be pursued elsewhere with good results. Ideally, such audience research will be integrated with studies of media production, as well as the more general “social space” of media (Larkin, cited in Abu-Lughod 1997: 111).

For now, though, this book will stand or fall on its ability to say something thought provoking and original about these blockbuster films, American society, andcertain anthropological concepts. Rather than merely using film to illustrate anthropological concepts, we try to give new insights into anthropology and American society. For example, the notion of polytemporality has been suggestively explored in changing notions of gender and in commodity production in recent works (Taussig 2008; Weston 2002). We will suggest in Chapter Four that the concept of polytemporality gains considerable nuance when applied to a Hollywood blockbuster, especially when co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Godfather: The Gun, the Pen, and the Cannoli
• 3 Field of Dreams: Foul Balls and Blurry Lines
• 4 The Big Lebowski: Bowling, Gender, Temporality, and Other "What-Have-You's"
• 5 The Village: Egalitarianism and the Political Anthropology of the Possible
• 6 Jaws: Knowing the Shark
• 7 Conclusion
• References
• Index