The Chutry Experiment

My spring break is now officially over, but for once, it has been fortuitously timed. Next week, I will be going out to Los Angeles for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, and thanks to having the break before the conference, I’ve had a chance not only to finish my talk but also to sort through some ideas for future writing projects. I’m not ready to divulge too much, but obviously the topics I’ve been thinking about in my blog are a pretty good clue for measuring what I’ll be writing about in longer form. Now, here are some links, some of them (at least) involving my attempt to peak through the window at this week’s South by Southwest festival and conference:

• Deadline Hollywood Daily has a discussion of the role of Avatar (and, presumably Alice in Wonderland) in pushing theaters in Europe to convert to digital projection systems capable of showing 3D films.  Given that theaters in Denmark, Slovakia, and several other European countries have been able to charge twice as much for 3D, this isn’t terribly surprising.  What is surprising is that, in some countries, including the United Kingdom, taxpayers are helping to pay for this technological changeover.
• Jeremy Kay at The Guardian has a thoughtful reading of some recent numbers from the MPAA about theatrical box office in 2009.  Worth noting: nearly 11% of all box office in 2009 came from 20 3D films.  Kay is certainly correct to point out that these numbers should be placed in context with DVD, cable, and VOD totals, but it’s worth noting that DVD revenues have actually declined in relation to theatrical in the last couple of years.
• Further evidence that Twitter is not just a social media platform but a powerful tool for market research: the new Twitter ap, Trendrr that, according to Mashable, “tracks online conversations by gender, location, sentiment, influence, reach and volume.”  The Mashable article offers a nice breakdown of how the tracking service works, showing a number of screen shots of data on commentary on the 2010 Winter Olympics.  Although I’m generally enthusiastic about Twitter’s status as a media “water cooler,” it’s well worth thinking about how those conversations are archived and monitored by others.
• Speaking of Twitter, here is a quick pointer to Jason Mittell’s thoughtful response to the recently reemergent debate about the state of film criticism.  I think Jason is right to illustrate the (positive) ways in which critical categories have been blurred due to the rise of film blogging.  He also raises some useful questions about access and audience toward the end of the post, pointing out that we may need to rethink what we value in academia when a widely read film blog can receive many more daily views than a scholarly book or article.
• I’ll wait until I’ve had a chance to see The Green Zone to comment further, but I have to admit that I find Ross Douthat’s op-ed review of the film fascinating, not because I agree with his politics or his defense of the Bush administration lies about weapons of mass destruction (in fact, I find Daniel Larison’s more thoughtful response from the American Conservative website far more persuasive), but because I’ve been finding myself increasingly intrigued by how Hollywood films get appropriated for political debate.  I’ve discussed these issues quite a bit in terms of video-based satire (as have a number of other sharp-eyed scholars), and quite often the political readings conducted in these sites are pretty shallow, but they do help to set the conditions of interpretation for many people who watch the films (or who watch and participate in politics).

Via The House Next Door, I just learned about the contagiously fun lip dub video by the students of Lawrence High School in Lawrence, Kansas.  The video, shot in an impressive long-take through the halls of the high school, shows students dancing playfully to Kim Wilde’s ’80s classic, “Kids in America.”  The costumes, music, dancing, and even the tracking shots through locker-lined hallways reminded me of a forgotten John Hughes classic.  The students clearly had fun and displayed a lot of creativity.  It’s truly contagious, especially for those of us who grew up in the ’80s. Unfortunately, the original video was hacked and the music was replaced and hateful, even homophobic comments were annotated to the video, but the Lawrence students decided to fight back by reposting it. Congrats to the students at LHS for making a terrific and fun video:

Update: Via the comments at HND, David Bordwell’s take on the lipdub phenomenon.

Because of my interest in 3D filmmaking practices, I was curious to see Tim Burton’s adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (IMDB).  Because the book has such vividly imagined characters and landscapes, it seemed uniquely suited to both the surreal visual imagination of Tim Burton and the perspectival potentials of 3D filmmaking. But when I caught the film at an Imax theater in Raleigh, I was disappointed by the degree to which the diegetic world of the film seemed almost completely flat, as if it was inhabited by cardboard cutouts standing in front of a green screen rather than a genuinely three-dimensional world.

In addition, the film reimagines Alice as a slightly mopey, but independent-minded Victorian young woman, one who remembers her travels into Wonderland as a childhood dream and who was taught by her father to embrace her irrational side.  Her independence is suggested through a couple of quick conversations–she refuses to wear a corset and pushes quietly against her mother’s Victorian sensibilities.  Forced into marriage with a snot-nosed lord, Alice finds her escape when the white rabbit pops up during their engagement party.  As a result, Alice’s journey in Wonderland becomes a means for her to find her independence, primarily through a third act action sequence that offered a relatively easy narrative solution to Alice’s story.

As both J. Hoberman and Roger Ebert point out, Burton originally shot Alice in 2D, and the 3D effects were added in post-production.  As a result, many of the scenes likely were not filmed with 3D in mind.  In a couple of scenes, such as the engagement party, complete with overstuffed Victorian nobles, the flatness works well, making these characters appear to be almost devoid of depth.  Wonderland itself seemed blander than I might have expected from someone like Burton, but as Ebert points out, this could be due to the washed out palette associated with 3D filmmaking, but for the most part, the 3D felt a little more gimmicky than usual, with Kenneth Turan correctly arguing that Alice “plays like one of the last gasps of the old-fashioned ways of doing things.”

There are some fun moments in the film.  Johnny Depp is charming as the Mad Hatter, and Alan Rickman’s hookah-smoking Blue Caterpillar is amusing.  The kids I was with also enjoyed Helena Bonham Carter’s performance as the jealous, mercurial Red Queen, but even some of the fun moments (especially the Mad Hatter’s tonally bizarre dance number at the end) seemed to pander more than entertain.  It goes without saying that the film itself is just one part of a larger media franchise, one designed to sell not only DVDs but also (and maybe more importantly) toys and video games.  As I watched Alice in Wonderland, it was impossible for me not to think about another film set in a strange new world, one built around the then-new special effect of color, The Wizard of Oz.  Given reports that Warner, Universal, and Disney are all planning Oz-related projects, this probably isn’t accidental.  As 3D becomes an increasingly attractive storytelling medium, it also requires stories that are both familiar and visually compelling.

Thanks to a project I’m currently developing on new models of DVD distribution, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the utopian claims about “long tail” retailing and its relationship to film history. In Reinventing Cinema, I expressed quite a bit of skepticism about claims that at some point in the future, film consumers and cinephiles would have access to the entire history of cinema at the click of a mouse, a claim expressed most vividly in this New York Times article by A.O. Scott (note also Kristin Thompson’s critique of this fantasy).  In addition to noting the sheer financial and infrastructure costs, it’s worth considering that such a fantasy obscures the larger question about who might have access to this perfect archive.

Now, with the decline of the DVD sell-through market, we are beginning to see just how precarious our film catalogs actually are.  In a post for Antenna, Bradley Schauer points to two notable stories about DVD consumption.  First, Sony announced that it is laying off 450 workers, many of them in their home video division.  More notably, the WSJ also points out that, for the first time since 2002, studios made more money from box office than from home video.  Schauer uses these details to contextualize his discussion of Warner’s decision to make much of its back catalog available via DVD-R copies of titles that are burned on-demand.  As Schauer notes, Warner’s strategy has two major effects: one, it takes classical Hollywood films further out of the realm of bricks-and-mortar stores.  Second, it allows Warner to market these products as “rare,” adding to their value as collector’s items.

But it also makes it possible that many “hidden gems” will remain invisible to casual (or even energetic) film viewers.  In that sense, both Schauer and Richard Brody, in a post discussing Humphrey Bogart’s The Harder They Fall, remind us of the significant curatorial role of TCM in presenting many of these forgotten classics.  These issues were turning over in my mind last night during a conversation with another local film professor, when we were talking about the implications of the degrading VHS tapes that contain dozens of films that have never been converted to DVD.  It’s easy to dismiss this in terms of market logic–if the films were that good, they’d be available on DVD–but obviously it’s not that simple, and even if the films themselves aren’t gems, we can learn quite a bit about film and media history from some of these “lost” texts.  That being said, one of the “lost” movies that we watched last night, a Star Wars Holiday special–featuring the film’s entire lead cast plus Bea Arthur, Art Carney and Diahann Carroll, of all people–did turn up online after a quick Google search.

I’m watching powerlessly as my spring break slowly slips through my fingers, but looking forward to attending this year’s SCMS conference out in Los Angeles and, soon afterwards, this year’s Full Frame festival.  Would love to catch up with any readers who are attending one or both of these events. For now, though, I find myself increasingly intrigued by the launch of Paramount’s microbudget division, Insurge, which promises to produce and release films with budgets of less than $100,000.

Eugene Hernandez has the most thorough report on the launch, noting that the studio plans to make its own films rather than purchasing existing films that have played at festivals and that may be seeking distribution (the website Insurgepictures.com currently redirects to Paramount’s home page) .  Given that there are many terrific films playing at festivals this is a little disappointing.  In addition, Hernandez’s report suggests that Paramount plans to include a number of opportunities for fans to become involved–whether through voting for a cast member or choosing the film’s one sheet–while also promoting Insurge as seeking to “deconstruct the Hollywood system.”  In this context, Ray DeRousse cites Insurge head Amy Powell who comments that Insurge wants to produce “movies that a big studio would never release because they’re too risky, too silly, and they don’t star Sandra Bullock.”  The choice to define Insurge against Sandra Bullock, whose star reputation has been discussed in detail by Anne Petersen, is somewhat notable, given Bullock’s mainstream popularity, especially for older, female audiences.

Hernandez adds that Insurge plans to focus on youth-oriented features in genres such as horror, comedy, and animation, which potentially raises the question of how much these films will truly be an alternative to the mainstream.  It is notable that Paramount plans for the movies to “serve as a low budget proving ground for new talent,” while also hoping “to release the movies theatrically,” making Insurge feel something like a crowdsourced version of Roger Corman’s New World Productions.  Given the blurred boundaries between DIY, Indiewood, and art-house categories, I’ll be intrigued to see how this all plays out.  Even if just one or two of the ten Insurge films turn out to be modest box office hits, a microbudget division would seem to be a worthwhile investment, and it might also contribute to a slightly more expansive definition of what counts as an independent film.

Both Jim Emerson and Jonathan Gray have mentioned the extremely funny “Generic Movie Trailer,” which parodies conventions from Oscar-bait movies.  The parody works, in part, because the dialogue is reduced to paint by numbers plot terms, but it’s also fun to identify the films the fake trailer is referencing, such as Good Will Hunting, Rain Man, and Dangerous Minds (or any number of teacher-as-hero films).

But as Emerson suggests, it’s also predicated upon the recognition that so many of these films seem to play it safe rather than taking creative (or marketing) risks.

Hey, this is pretty cool.  Here is a very nice pullquote from the review of my book in the December 2009 issue of Choice:

Expanding film studies beyond traditional boundaries, Tryon explores how cinema affects and is affected by developments in technology and culture that have altered the way movies are consumed, produced, and perceived. The book is readable and well researched, offering students an excellent opportunity to go beyond more traditional film studies. Highly recommended.”

For those of you who are curious, here is some interesting data on how Choice reviews books.

Although I was happy to see Kathryn Bigelow win for Best Director and Jeff Bridges for Best Actor, for the most part I found this year’s Oscars show to be uninspired, a perception that seemed commonplace, at least in my scene on Twitter.  The reactions from Ken Levine were similar to those that I saw in real time on Twitter throughout the entire broadcast.  The John Hughes tribute montage was pretty touching and then things got a little awkward when Judd Nelson and Macauley Culkin joined in.  The Best Picture award was rushed, perhaps due to the new rule that included ten nominees rather than five, but why not give each filmmaker an extra five seconds in the sun at the end of the ceremony?   And I found Baldwin and Martin to be remarkably banal as hosts.  I doubt I’ll remember any of their lines by tonight.  It’s also odd to think about the disconnect between an awards ceremony that nominates a number of independent films, even while the distribution channels that disseminate those films are increasingly endangered, as Ted Hope points out.

But despite these missteps (and despite the fact that much of New York City couldn’t watch the Oscars until around 8:30 PM), ratings for this year’s show were the highest in several years, with significantly more viewers tuning in this year.  As the Variety article points out, the last time numbers were this high, Titanic was one of the nominees, suggesting that the show benefitted from having a popular film as one of its most visible films.  Others have pointed out that “event TV” in general has been garnering high ratings.  It’s tempting to suggest that social media is a factor here in the “return to liveness.”  The real-time water coolers on Twitter and blogs would seem to encourage more people to watch simultaneously, but I’m guessing that even with a large volume of Oscar tweets, the percentage of people who were “watching Twitter on TV” was probably relatively small, at least compared to the vast “silent majority” who watched the show without tweeting about everything from Sarah Jessica Parker’s dress to the uncanny ability of the Oscar producers to find a black audience member every time a nominee from Precious won an award.

Which gives rise to a number of questions: First, I wonder how much Twitter affected my response to the awards show.  I’ll admit that I enjoyed live-blogging with everyone, but I wonder if the online snarkfest helped contribute to the Twitter consensus that the Oscars sucked?  Or whether the “trending topics” on Twitter reflect cultural biases that already exist on Twitter?  All I know is that my Twitter feed had almost 100 Oscar tweets for every tweet on another subject.

It’s hard to measure how this Oscar buzz fits within the overall hype that the Oscars are supposed to produce, especially when the expansion from five to ten nominees seemed to water down the ability of film companies to market films based on the prestige of getting nominated.  As Patrick Goldstein notes, the “Oscar bump” did not seem to have a measurable effect on the box office for a number of the films that were up for best picture, and the marketing of those films may have even cost more than the financial benefits of being nominated (note: Jonathan Gray and Henry Jenkins discuss some of these issues in a recent interview).  I’m skeptical about whether Oscar wins can tell us much about current cultural tastes or prevailing attitudes, as Goldstein suggests.   Although it was warmly embraced by critics, The Hurt Locker still hasn’t done significant box office.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion here.  Social media have obviously become a crucial element of Oscar coverage, providing real-time reactions from a (self-selecting?) group of fans and even anti-fans.  And the Oscars themselves continue to be one of the more significant hype machines for generating interest in and discussion of movies out there.

One of the highlights for me at this year’s Oscars was the discovery of this year’s winner for Best Animated Short film, Logorama, and thanks to the power of streaming video, you can view the film in its entirety at both the official website and the Wreck and Savage blog.  Logorama takes place in a world composed almost entirely of corporate logos.  Skyscrapers are Colgate boxes, while Pringles guys order food at a diner from the Esso girl.  The lion at the local zoo is an MGM logo, and security is provided by the not-so-jolly Green Giant.  It would be easy for such a world to become tiresome and preachy, but the logos are given quirky, often belligerent personalities, giving the film a humorous and somewhat NSFW edge.

The plot centers around a couple of foul-mouthed cops (played by Michelin Men) chasing a bank robbing Ronald McDonald, and as the chase unfolds, the entire world of Logorama begins to fall apart quite literally–a couple of defunct or near defunct corporations even make appearances to great effect–until we get one of the funniest concluding tracking out shots I’ve seen in a long time.  I’m trying to avoid giving away too many of the sight gags because this is one film you should see for yourself, a great illustration that short films are not necessarily apprentice projects, as Taylor Hackford seemed to imply during last night’s Oscars, but an art form unto themselves.

For a number of reasons, I’ve been more fascinated than usual by the Oscar chatter.  Although some of the “scandals” and controversies over The Hurt Locker have begun to get a little tiresome, they have, in some cases at least, provoked some highly pertinent questions about cinematic realism, especially when it comes to depictions of war.  But, aside from prolonging public discussions about some films that I find thought-provoking, the Oscars (and the anticipation of them, which may, in fact, be more important) are also worth thinking about because they offer us one of the more explicit and privileged public narratives available about the film industry.  They are, in short, Hollywood’s best opportunity to represent itself to a movie-consuming public (while remaining mindful of any number of other audiences, including film industry personnel and film journalists).

I addressed this issue briefly in Reinventing Cinema when I discussed a couple of Oscar sketches and speeches, one of which featured Jake Gyllenhaal telling the audience to see movies on the big screen.  A comedy sketch featuring Jon Stewart mocking the “wide screen” on his video iPod had a similar effect.  This is also why the Hollywood history montages, even if they often feel like filler, are so important by selling Hollywood as a popular art (and as a quick search through my blog illustrates I’ve been thinking about these issues for a while).

But the Oscars are also fun because they invite the same water-cooler discussions associated with other forms of “event TV,” such as the Super Bowl and, to a lesser extent, the Emmys and Golden Globes, an issue addressed in Sheila Seles’ Convergence Culture Consortium blog post.  Like her, I enjoy live-blogging (or, more likely in our evolved social media climate, live-tweeting) the Oscars and sharing my fascination about the awards with others.  Seles mentions in passing a New York Times article that reports that many of these TV event shows have been receiving record ratings.  This past Super Bowl even surpassed the final episode of M*A*S*H for total number of viewers, a fact that would likely bother me slightly if I wasn’t a huge Drew Brees fan.  The New York Times article attributes this reversal–TV ratings for top shows have been declining for some time–to the “water-cooler effect” associated with social media tools like Twitter, a phenomenon echoed in Max Dawson’s discussion of “watching Twitter on TV.”

The Oscar producers have been thinking about these social media issues quite a bit and have created an Oscars Facebook page and an iPhone application in support of the show, while also seeking to make the awards more “relevant” by having ten Best Picture nominees rather than five.  I have to wonder if the latter move will have any significant effect once viewers catch on to the fact that usually the race boils down to two or three films (this year, The Hurt Locker or Avatar).  It’s also less than clear what effect a Facebook page might have on attracting younger audiences.  Now that having a Facebook profile is becoming common across generations, I wonder if the people who “become fans” of the Oscars will be the same people who were already fans when it was just a 4-hour annual TV show.  Also, as with the death of film criticism, concerns that the Oscars aren’t relevant to today’s youth is an ongoing complaint.  Still, the tension between old media and new media is an interesting one, especially when it’s connected to Hollywood’s ongoing narrative about itself and the movies it creates.

Update: To some extent, I’ve been trying to think through the relationship between the Oscars and fandom in this post.  Obviously, the Oscars tow a fascinating line between traditional fandom and what Jonathan Gray has called anti-fandom.  The Oscars are, in many ways, a celebration of stardom and celebrity (”ooh…look at Julia Roberts’ dress”) and a way of mocking some of these institutions of celebrity, whether through celebrity-watchers like Joan Rivers or through political screeds like those at Big Hollywood.  Gray is especially attentive to the pleasures of being an “anti-fan,” and the Oscar water-cooler invites both kinds of responses equally successfully.

Update 2: Just a few minutes after my first update, I came across this Auteurs post that compiles some of the recent Oscar chatter, including Armond White’s entertaining (or eye-rolling, take your pick) New York Press article about how the annual awards are contributing to the media’s effect of ensuring that “the public stays culturally illiterate, intellectually docile and aesthetically numb.”  Talk about anti-fandom.  The Oscar-bashing is utterly incoherent politically (the Auteurs post nails its politics as a surreal cross between Guy Debord and Milton Friedman), but I do think his read of The Hurt Locker as an investigation into constructions of masculinity has some merit.

As I glance across my snow-covered lawn, only one thought crosses my mind: Spring break! But to keep myself warm until Friday, when the weather should magically change, here are some of the things I’ve been reading (in between grading papers and midterms, of course):

• My critique of Thomas Doherty’s lament about the state of film criticism seemed to generate quite a response.  The Columbia University Press blog offered a relatively straightforward citation, while Keith Uhlich of The House Next Door caught my Kenneth Branagh reference.  Meanwhile Jim Emerson, citing a 1990 article by Richard Corliss, emphasizes a point I wish I’d given more attention: the long history of social critics decrying a new technology’s effect on film criticism.  Dozens of people, including some of my commenters, pointed out the absurdity of characterizing David Bordwell as a “postmodern” Harry Knowles.
• In other news, I participated in a roundtable on religion in the blogosphere at the Social Science Research Council’s Immanent Frame blog.
• Friend of the blog, and the filmmaker behind Clean Freak and The Proper Care and Feeding of an American Messiah, Chris Hansen has a trailer for his latest movie, Endings.
• Matt Dentler points to the new OK Go video for their song, “This Too Shall Pass,” which features one of the most impressive Rube Goldberg machines I’ve ever seen.
• Ted Hope has a discussion of the Tribeca Film Festival’s decision to make some of their films available through video on demand (VOD).  Hope points out that the failure of the Sundance-YouTube model was avoidable and offers some suggestions for making the festival-VOD model work better for festivals and filmmakers.

The latest paean to print-based film criticism, Thomas Doherty’s Chronicle of Higher Education article, “The Death of Film Criticism,” surveys the recent history of film criticism and concludes that today’s digital “young punks” are happily supplanting all pretense of literacy and seriousness in order to pour out their “visceral and emotional” responses to films all over the (digital) page.  Doherty is weighing in on a debate that has been circulating for several years now online and in print–I weighed in on this very debate about film blogging in Reinventing Cinema–and reaches a not terribly surprising conclusion that the internet age has threatened a form that featured such luminaries as Carl Sandburg and that reached its apotheosis with the debates between Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris.  It’s a powerful and persuasive narrative, especially when juxtaposed against job market crises in academia and in journalism, but in treating film criticism as a genre, it obscures quite a bit.

To be fair, Doherty acknowledges that a number of prominent traditional film critics have found new voices on the web, citing examples such as David Bordwell and FlowTV, but even there, the suggestion is that Bordwell is a reluctant blogger, “feeling the…heat” of the digitalization of everything rather than recognizing that Bordwell and others have found a medium that allows for a more conversational, and yes, potentially obsessive, focus on film analysis.  Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s blog posts, like those produced by many other film bloggers, are like mini-seminars in film analysis.  Even more curious, Doherty seems to imply that all film bloggers, including Bordwell, seek to have an influence on box office numbers, a goal that seems rather marginal, at least in my corner of the film blogosphere.

Perhaps more frustrating is the generation-gap baiting that permeates the entire article.  Web-based critics are “young punks who still got carded at the multiplex” or “a man-boy of the people, visceral and emotional, a stream-of-consciousness spurter with no internal censor or mute button.”  The “gnomish” Harry Knowles is our “poster boy.”  In short, internet based film critics are young, chubby anti-social males who don’t get out much.  And we pour our thoughts onto the page without any reflection whatsoever.  Doherty is thus falling victim to what might be called the “immediacy fallacy.”  Just because blogs can be published instantaneously doesn’t mean that bloggers necessarily publish ideas without hours or even days of reflection, and even if they post quickly, their posted work is often the product of years of research and reflection.

Finally, Doherty sets in opposition blogs, with their conversational immediacy, and scholarly journals, with their significantly slower publication rates.  As a number of academic bloggers have pointed out, this logic represents a misunderstanding of the scholarly ecosystem where ideas can be tested in the blogosphere before being expanded, developed, and reconsidered before finding final form in a book or scholarly article.  That was my experience not only with my book but also with an article I co-wrote with Richard Edwards on viral videos.

I’m not suggesting that film criticism isn’t changing.  The demand to publish quickly, to get scoops over competing web publications, can encourage writers to make provocative claims or to rush their analysis just to collect page views.  Assessing the place of a film blog in a tenure file still remains a sticky subject.  And the wide-open nature of the film blogosphere fragments the audience for film criticism, making it less likely that we will ever have a rivalry that matches the epic battles between Sarris and Kael,  but I don’t think anyone benefits when we place the present in competition with the past without seeing the connections and continuities between them.

Now that Kathryn Bigelow’s verité-style war film, The Hurt Locker, has achieved front-runner status for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars, the publicity for the film has directed renewed attention to the politics of representing war.  As Vadim Rizov argues, this is one of the benefits of this year’s awards season, allowing us to discuss these issues in a potentially rewarding way, even though he seems to back down from this claim when he suggests that political discussions give the awards season an “undue importance.”  In thinking about this debate, I’m less interested in coming to a conclusion about the film’s politics than I am in interrogating the grounds by which we try to determine them.  Although it’s tempting to accept the comments from director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal as definitive, it’s also important to place the film against some of the other paratexts–including the DVD itself–that help to define how it will be received.

As Rizov points out, The Hurt Locker had been pitched, until recently, as an apolitical treatment of the experiences of a unit of soldiers specializing in defusing improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and for the most part, the film seems to conform that on a formal level.  The experiences of the soldiers are depicted in a non-judgmental way, a perception reinforced by the use of a hand-held camera that seems to emulate the footage seen in a number of Iraq War documentaries ranging from Gunner Palace to The War Tapes, and the lack of an explicit narrative (hinted at via the in media res opening sequence in which one soldier is killed) only serves to reinforce that.  The realism effect produced by the film is powerful, making it easy to read the film as an apolitical observation of what it’s like to be in combat.  Here, even the Chris Hedges quotation that serves as the film’s epigraph, telling us that “war is a drug” can be read as politically neutral, an updated formulation of the “war is hell” cliche, to acknowledge the adrenaline rush produced by combat.

However, in a number of recent interviews, Bigelow has argued that the film is intended as a critique of the Iraq War, suggesting at one point that she hoped the film would help bring “closure” to the war before later adding that war is “completely dehumanizing” and that the depictions of violence against children should tell us that the film is taking a specific position against the “futility” of war.  Add in the recognition that Hedges, whom she cites favorably, has been an outspoken critic of the war, and it becomes tempting to read the film as anti-war, a reading that might be reinforced by the final scene when Jeremy Renner’s SSG William James is unable to cope with the tedium of returning home to a life of grocery shopping and taking kids to school.

But I think this reading–based primarily on the artists’ intentions–misses quite a bit.  A number of observers, including Jarhead author Anthony Swofford, have argued that no combat film is ever fully anti-war.  And although I am not prepared to agree with her, Martha Nochimson, isolates this “pro-war” reading, arguing in Salon that we are  aligned with James’s “expertise in defusing bombs and dealing with invisible enemies that our capacity to think about the larger context of the American presence in Iraq is replaced by nuance-free instincts more characteristic of the tea party movement.”  In fact, although the film details James’ expertise in defusing bombs, he is also seen as making dangerous and often risky choices that endanger himself and his fellow soldiers.  And, yes, we fail to see the Iraqi civilians clearly, but that’s partially because the soldiers themselves cannot see the Iraqis clearly.  The one attempt to bond with an Iraqi boy ends, as we likely anticipate, in tragedy.  And asking every war film to deal with “the larger context of the American presence in Iraq” seems to be calling for a political lecture, precisely the kind of film that most audiences have rejected, usually because they are too reductive.  But it’s not impossible to see the film as endorsing some version of our presence in Iraq, especially when you view the DVD, which includes a trailer for Jake Rademacher’s Brothers at War, a documentary that essentially offers a pro-war argument while telling the story of Jake’s experience being embedded with his brother’s military unit.

A much more insightful critique comes from prominent war critic, Paul Rieckhoff, the executive director and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, who criticizes the film for its failure to depict combat realistically, particularly when it comes to James’ maverick behavior (although Rieckhoff commends the film’s depiction of adjusting to life after combat).  In fact, Rieckhoff suggests the film lacks “respect” for US soldiers and cites another that calls the film “insulting” to the soldiers whose job it is to defuse IEDs.  Rieckhoff’s complaints about the lack of realism are certainly hard to dispute, and even without any combat experience, I was well aware that many of James’ actions would have gotten him in trouble with his superiors or, worse, led to him getting shot.  But given that the film asks us to balance two forms of realism–a documentary realism that depicts actual combat and an emotional realism that depicts the addictiveness of war–I’m tempted to accept some looseness when it comes to depicting combat.

This tension regarding cinematic realism was recently addressed by Chris Cagle, who argues that The Hurt Locker’s documentary aesthetic makes us feel as if we are “watching a slice of historical reality.”  Although the film is deconstructing the war film (and, arguably war video game) aesthetic, much like many of Bigelow’s older films deconstruct film tropes, whether the buddy film (Point Break) or masculine visual pleasure (Strange Days), the reality effect is hard to shake.  But even with this deconstructionist approach, I’d argue that the film should instead be read as politically ambivalent, as sustaining both pro- and anti-war readings, and in some sense, that ambivalence depends almost entirely on the “war is a drug” theme.  In fact, the recognition that war is addictive works because of the adrenaline rush we get vicariously through James, the excitement at saving lives and the thrill of facing life-and-death decisions.  In a sense, we are torn between indentifying with James and seeing him as symptomatic of a war gone wrong.  Either James’ experience of combat offers an unrivaled form of excitement, allowing us to vicariously experience a watered down version of war, or the film invites us to recognize him as an object of analysis, with both approaches and readings potentially, perhaps even equally, available.

The Hurt Locker is a fascinating film, especially because of its treatment of the issue of representations of war, but it is not unequivocally pro- or anti-war, an ambiguity that is suggested not only by the reviews the film has received but also by the paratexts that help shape our interpretation of it.  The film’s realism effect is also complicated by its engagement with the politics of representation, making it an incredibly difficult film to pin down.

Update: By the way, Patrick Goldstein addresses the debate over the military response to the film’s accuracy in an interesting post on his Big Picture blog.  I think he’s right to point out that feature films, including those about historical events, often include inaccuracies, but given the film’s overall aim, I wonder if I’d take it as a compliment to hear that The Hurt Locker has “too much John Wayne stuff.”

I forgot to mention this yesterday, but Jon Reiss has pointed to an incredibly useful resource for people interested in how independent films are financed, while pointing out how how “stars” and film festivals function in the indie film economy. The survey, known as the AKA Report, was compiiled by Jeremy Juuso Consulting, and it is available for free here.

I’ve got a post percolating on the politics of The Hurt Locker, but for now, here are some quick pointers to some recent articles that are worth a click-through:

• Filmmaker Magazine was the first to announce that B-Side Entertainment, which specialized in providing website services to film festivals, is closing.  The Filmmaker blog post provides an incredible overview of the company and the services they offered.  Founder Chris Hyams sums up this history saying that “We find ourselves at a time of great upheaval in the film industry. We are somewhere between the old and the new world. Technology is altering the way films are being made, and there are new avenues for how films can be consumed.”  Unfortunately B-Side was unable to make a financial model work for their company.  Bad Lit and The IFC Blog also react.
• Responding to an LA Times article on Avatar’s “animated acting,” Kristin Thompson has a thoughtful assessment of whether motion-captured performances, such as Andy Serkis’ Gollum and Zoe Saldana’s Neytiri should be considered for acting awards at the Oscars (or similar ceremonies).  Thompson concludes that the digital changes to actors’ facial features transform the original performance too much to make judgments about what to consider as the actual performance too fuzzy.  I don’t really have strong feelings here.  I’m not invested enough in the awards to care, but I’m also not sure where we draw the line given the long history of prosthetics, makeup, and other “artificial supplements” to an actor’s performance.
• On his indispensible Twitter feed, Roger Ebert pointed to a Wall Street Journal article reporting that three major theatrical chains have now secured funding to convert as many as 14,000 screens from celluloid to digital projection, thus enabling them to project digital 3-D movies, thanks in part to the success of Avatar.
• One of the fascinating aspects of Redbox’s rise to dominance has been the attempts by Blockbuster to reinvent themselves, a process that seems to entail throwing things against the wall and waiting for something to stick.  They are reportedly exerimenting with cell-phone movie rentals (so you, too, can have tiny, hypermobile movies in your pocket), moving toward online rentals (probably too little too late), and hoping that they can benefit from getting many Hollywood features for rental one month before both Redbox and Netflix.