American Eccentric Cinema 9781501336911, 9781501336942, 9781501336935

Table of contents :
Cover
Half title
Title
Copyrights
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Neoliberal citizenship and the eccentric
Locating the eccentric in cinema
New Hollywood and eccentric connections
Notes
1 Defining American Eccentricity
Indie and eccentricity
American eccentricity and irony
Anxiety
Eccentricity
Notes
2 Road Films and National Identity
American eccentricity and genre
The eccentric road film: From Easy Rider to The Darjeeling Limited
The road and Kaufman’s mind trips
Notes
3 Overtly Cinematic Characterization
Overtly cinematic characters and audience identification
Wes Anderson and overtly cinematic characterization
Eccentric or “smart” characterization?
Wes Anderson’s eccentric characters
Notes
4 Hyper-Dialogue and the Eccentric Manner
The shift from New Hollywood naturalism to eccentric hyper-dialogue
Dialogue and convention
Hyper-dialogue and performance
Hyper-dialogue as dramatic function
Hyper-dialogue and sincerity
Notes
5 Eccentric Worlds
Eccentric deviations from realism
Eccentricity and the intertextual world
Eccentric cities: Magnolia
Notes
Conclusion: Beyond Eccentricity
Ripples of eccentricity
Outside the box
Notes
Filmography
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

American Eccentric Cinema

American Eccentric Cinema KIM WILKINS

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Kim Wilkins, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image: Film, The Life Aquatic (2004) ©Touchstone Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection / Mary Evans All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wilkins, Kim, 1986-author. Title: American eccentric cinema / Kim Wilkins. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Identifiers: LCCN 2018059378 | ISBN 9781501336911 (hardback: alk.paper) ISBN 9781501336935 (epdf) | ISBN 9781501336942 (xml-platform) Subjects: LCSH: United States—In motion pictures. | National characteristics, American, in motion pictures. | Existentialism in motion pictures. | Motion pictures—United States. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.U64 W55 2019 | DDC 791.43/658–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059378 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3691-1 PB: 978-1-5013-6811-0 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3693-5 eBook: 978-1-5013-3692-8 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents Acknowledgments

Introduction

vii

1

Neoliberal citizenship and the eccentric 2 Locating the eccentric in cinema 6 New Hollywood and eccentric connections Notes 19

1 Defining American Eccentricity Indie and eccentricity 24 American eccentricity and irony Anxiety 41 Eccentricity 46 Notes 53

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2 Road Films and National Identity

59

American eccentricity and genre 66 The eccentric road film: From Easy Rider to The Darjeeling Limited 69 The road and Kaufman’s mind trips 81 Notes 88

3 Overtly Cinematic Characterization

91

Overtly cinematic characters and audience identification Wes Anderson and overtly cinematic characterization 97 Eccentric or “smart” characterization? 100 Wes Anderson’s eccentric characters 104 Notes 117

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CONTENTS

4 Hyper-Dialogue and the Eccentric Manner

123

The shift from New Hollywood naturalism to eccentric hyper-dialogue 125 Dialogue and convention 129 Hyper-dialogue and performance 132 Hyper-dialogue as dramatic function 135 Hyper-dialogue and sincerity 139 Notes 142

5 Eccentric Worlds

145

Eccentric deviations from realism 149 Eccentricity and the intertextual world Eccentric cities: Magnolia 165 Notes 177

Conclusion: Beyond Eccentricity Ripples of eccentricity Outside the box 190 Notes 192 Filmography Bibliography Index 210

195 200

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Acknowledgments R

esearching and writing this book has been a privilege and pleasure thanks to a number of inspirational people who offered their expertise and, most selflessly, their time. I have been incredibly fortunate to have the support of both David Kelly and Bruce Isaacs over a number of years as this project developed. I am forever grateful for their generosity and advice. Special thanks to Bruce for his suggestions on drafts, patience in sometimes rambling conversations, and ongoing enthusiasm for my work. Thanks to Wyatt MossWellington and Peter Marks for their valuable insights—in both writing and conversation—and, most importantly, for their friendship. I also wish to thank Claire Perkins, Warren Buckland, and Timothy Corrigan for their feedback on my work at various stages, and to Katie Gallof and Erin Duffy at Bloomsbury for their kind assistance and good humor. I wish to thank my family. Without their love, trust, encouragement, and interest in my work, this project would never have eventuated. Last, I wish to thank my husband, Ketan Joshi, who indulged every idea I had and read every word I wrote with an analytical—and sensitive—eye. His dedication to my work has greatly enriched this project. There is no way I can ever thank Ketan enough for his enduring support and love, so I’ll leave it at that.

Introduction

I

n Charlie Kaufman’s stop-motion film Anomalisa (2015), Michael Stone, a famous customer-service guru, is on a lecture tour promoting his book How May I Help You Help Them? Michael’s book, in line with contemporary customer service rhetoric, emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the individuality of consumers. However, Michael is not a charismatic and enthusiastic performer; instead he is a motivational speaker who lacks motivation. Anomalisa depicts Michael’s malaise over the course of one unhappy night leading up to a lecture at the Fregoli Hotel in Cincinnati. The film opens with a black screen while multiple unrelated conversations are delivered by the same masculine mid-Western voice (Tom Noonan). The dialogue increasingly overlaps until it becomes an overwhelmingly uniform cacophony of words and laughter. It is not until the first shot of Michael that the film’s ironic conceit is revealed. Michael is experiencing a form of Fregoli delusion (alluded to in the hotel’s name). He has lost the ability to differentiate between people. However, rather than believing (as sufferers of the rare Fregoli syndrome do) that one person is donning disguises to play the role of many, Michael’s condition is of an existential nature. He is experiencing a crisis of self. Michael yearns for meaningful human connection—but how can these connections be forged when he sees individuality as an illusion? Michael’s existential crisis is clearly articulated in the delivery of his lecture. The juxtaposition between Michael’s advocacy of meaningful customer interactions and his downtrodden tone creates a fissure between content and articulation. His quivering voice reveals despondence, not as a cynical approach to his vocation, but rather with the nature of human existence per se. Michael states: “Each person has had a childhood. Each has a body. Each body has aches. What is it to be human? What is it to ache? What is it to be alive? I don’t know.”

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These solemn words expose Anomalisa’s thematic preoccupation: the desperately lonely nature of human existence. As Michael proceeds he becomes panicked to the point of humorous absurdity. He jumps between professional advice, comparisons between the inability to cry and unachieved orgasm, global politics, American foreign policy, the inequity of national education systems, the manipulation of the American population by the State, and individualism. Exasperated, he concludes: “Our time is limited, we forget that. Death comes. That’s it. Soon it’s as though we never existed; so remember to smile … ” This speech characterizes Anomalisa’s tonal oscillation between comedic irony and sincerity; its comedic and reflexive elements facilitate an emotional distance from its grave thematic content. The unnatural movement of stop-motion animation, and characters embodied by puppets with abnormally “big heads, short stubby limbs, skin like fuzz,”1 are reminders of the film’s construction.2 These details draw attention to the fact that despite the deeply human loneliness that Michael experiences he is, of course, not real. Instead, Michael is an overtly assembled fictional character, designed specifically to articulate this existential anxiety.3 Anomalisa is an example of a mode of American filmmaking that emerged in the late 1990s, which I call American eccentricity. This mode combines formal and stylistic deviations from mainstream cinema conventions through irregularities in characterization, tone, and established generic conventions with a thematic focus on existential crises.4 Fundamentally, these anxieties express the angst and despair experienced in relation to one’s being in the world in the face of personal authenticity, purpose, responsibility, and freedom. With their focus on existential concerns these contemporary films take the cultural and ideological imprints of many films of the New Hollywood era, such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), and Easy Rider (1969), that demonstrated an American cultural uneasiness and disconnection from their contemporary society, in light of the Vietnam War and the questioning of institutional authority. Yet, as seen in Anomalisa, existential anxiety in American eccentric films does not appear bound to historical specificity. Michael Stone doesn’t know why he is disconnected from other humans. His malaise has no nucleus.

Neoliberal citizenship and the eccentric Both the American eccentric and New Hollywood films under consideration in this book are thematically and narratively centered on existential anxiety and the yearning for human connection. In this sense, Michael’s despair at his inability to understand and connect with others in Anomalisa is similar

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to Benjamin Braddock’s experience in The Graduate. In that film, Benjamin experiences severe isolation and alienation—like much of the youth of the 1960s, the source of his anxiety is his fraught position in contemporary American society. For Benjamin, this anxiety stems from a particularly privileged position. His personal concerns are not impacted by issues of race or gender, nor are they bound to immediate economic uncertainty. Rather, Benjamin is at odds with the materialistic and conservative ideology of his parents’ generation. However, with the Berkeley University clashes of 1964–1965 over,5 and the social codes of his own generation unanchored, for him the generational conflict has become an uncomfortable bedfellow—both ideologically and literally through his taboo intimacy with one of the older generation’s more complex and conflicted members, Mrs. Robinson. Thus, Benjamin is a figure that reflected a zeitgeist concerned with existential and cultural interrogation from a specifically male, and white, perspective. He, like many New Hollywood characters, can be read as an embodiment of this perspective, and its relationship to a pervading generational sense of inconsequence and futility in regard to ambition, motivation, and the pursuit of the American Dream. American eccentricity shares this form of existential anxiety as a thematic drive with these New Hollywood films. However, American eccentric cinema does not depict existential anxiety as located in external sites of cultural and national unrest. Instead, American eccentric films present existential anxiety as individual crises distinct to idiosyncratic characters rather than shared concerns that manifest in relation to historical contexts. In Anomalisa, Michael Stone’s existential anxiety is presented as an isolated instance. His malaise is a return to classic questions of existence— “what is it to be human”—and as such appears to be generalized and freefloating. It seems untethered from a distinct historical moment. Could it be that in the context of a contemporary moment prominently characterized as neoliberal, with its attendant focus on self-regulation, self-improvement, and entrepreneurialism, the experience of these crises as individual maladies is exacerbated? While there are numerous debates around the definition of “neoliberalism” and its usefulness as an analytical framework, the dominance of the term in the media and everyday parlance signifies the overwhelming perception that we are living in a “neoliberal” age.6 Neoliberalism broadly refers to a set of principles that have, since the 1970s, become a dominant economic and policy structure in the globalized West, which, as David Harvey writes, “propose that human well-being can be best advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”7 In contrast to the liberal

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nation-state where welfare systems are set in place to assist citizens, Russell Meeuf argues that neoliberalism has encouraged the shifting of responsibility away from government programmes and toward individuals acting on the free market. Promoting privatisation over state control, neoliberalism has impacted a variety of programmes and institutions central to economic mobility, from the slashing of welfare programmes to rolling back consumer protection regulations.8 Rather than integrating economic systems into social structures, social systems are structured through economic systems. What this suggests is that in the neoliberal society, market-based individualism, rather than a collective national structure, is considered a natural state of being for both society and human nature.9 Following on from Foucault’s notion of governmentality, a model of neoliberal citizenship has emerged that increasingly requires individuals to be responsible for self-regulation.10 As such, neoliberal political power is not necessarily implemented by placing limitations on existing individual liberties, but through “responsibilization”—the delegation of responsibility and duty “to individuals and inciting them to make autonomous choices in a relatively predefined field of action.”11 In neoliberal societies, rather than upholding national or community imperatives in the service of society, citizens are primarily obliged to “empower” themselves privately. This neoliberal logic has a cultural impact on the identity of citizens. As Meeuf explains: Neoliberalism promotes not only a model of citizenship as consumerism (privileging the “choices” of individuals on the private market over the ability of the state to provide support) but also a model of individualism based on adaptability and self-transformation. It is now the individual’s responsibility to adapt to changing market conditions, constantly remaking their skills, habits, and even identities to meet the shifting demands of the economy. Even beyond the economy, individual identity in the age of neoliberalism increasingly revolves around projects of self-improvement, self-promotion, and the constant disciplining of one’s identity.12 Anomalisa’s Michael is an example of this kind of identity. His customerservice guru rhetoric identifies individualized consumers (rather than national or community citizens) and advocates the conflation of commercial transaction with interpersonal connection. Yet, this same ideology confounds his anxiety. He is incapable of interpersonal connection precisely because he lacks the ability to see people as individuals. The notion of self-interested entrepreneurialism associated with the “competitiveness and self-realisation” that ascribes

INTRODUCTION

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success to neoliberal subjects13 (coupled with the impact of globalization and digital communication technologies that blur the boundaries between the public and private spheres) has unsettled concepts of national and civic citizenship associated with Benedict Anderson’s theory of the imagined community. The celebrated neoliberal individualism in contemporary American culture was sanctified in 2006 by Time magazine’s decision to name “You” as “Person of the Year,” with the cover featuring a mirror to enable each reader to see their unique likeness integrated into the iconic American magazine. The cultural celebration of neoliberal individuality is similarly evident in the use of tautological phrases such as “you do you” to emphasize the importance of “being true” to oneself regardless of potential frictions with social norms or expectations.14 These phrases are often used as end points to conversation because, within the context of neoliberal individual ideology, they do not afford rebuttal. To refute someone’s right or decision to “do themselves” is to challenge the importance of individual expression and authenticity and champion social expectation and community strictures. These inclusions in popular contemporary parlance demonstrate that in neoliberal American society there is a fixation on individuality above that of the nation-state or community.15 Indeed, as Meeuf continues: This model of consumer citizenship and self-transformation has yielded more pronounced anxieties about the concept of citizenship itself within neoliberalism. The transition to individual responsibility on the free market, in theory, should make the concept of citizenship outmoded … As the liberal nation-state slowly erodes in a world of neoliberal privatisation, however, questions of citizenship and cultural belonging have intensified in the USA and abroad (Wingard 2013). If neoliberal citizenship can be practiced through consumption (or exploitation) on the free market rather than being defined by the state, what are the new boundaries of national identity and cultural belonging?16 If previous models of citizenship entailed not only rights, but also, crucially, “a mode of relation or a mode of belonging and participation to a community or state”17 how could citizenship be reconfigured to include a figure who promotes commercially motivated individualism and does not “belong” to a community, like Michael Stone? It is the problem of unanchored cultural belonging in the face of neoliberal free-market logic that provides the foundation for the sort of existential anxieties expressed in the American eccentric mode. With a shift from shared sociopolitical concerns to celebrated individualism based on the free-market imperative, the sincere articulation of individual existential anxiety could be considered a personal weakness. American eccentric cinema responds to this contextual suppression of sincerity by mediating the expression of

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existential anxiety through irony, and reflexivity. These films elicit a tonal duality of irony and sincerity, which approximates the American idiom “kidding on the square,” whereby a joke is simultaneously humorous and serious.18 While in the American eccentric mode dual use of irony and sincerity is not always explicitly comedic, it does seek to engender a reflexive reaction as well as earnestness. In response to neoliberal ideology, combined with an absence of the cultural and national tumult that presented external and legitimate sites for existential concern in the 1960s and 1970s, anxiety is presented in American eccentric cinema as ahistoric, idiosyncratic, isolated instances. Anxiety is presented as personal and eccentric—and as a result appears essentially objectless. Whereas the crisis of self in the New Hollywood was framed as emerging in relation to contemporary events, in the American eccentric mode, this crisis simply “is.” Yet, American eccentric characters desperately yearn for interpersonal connection despite their contextual conditions. Thus, American eccentricity presents the aims of their characters as ultimately doomed to failure; they are the detritus of a failed neoliberal project to remake the self.

Locating the eccentric in cinema The term “American eccentric” first appeared in 2004 in Armond White’s review of David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees (2004). White identified a group of filmmakers comprised of P.T. Anderson, Spike Jonze, Wes Anderson, Alexander Payne, and Sofia Coppola, in addition to Russell, that he regarded as “tweaking the system.” These filmmakers create films that investigate personal struggles of internal (rather than social) divisions through an insistence on “braininess rather than connection with popular sentiment.”19 For White the term “eccentric” is fitting as, unlike “that last significant grouping of 70s filmmakers [the New Hollywood] who were drawn to exploring American experience and pop tradition in order to understand their place in the world,” this new group have been shaped by the “solipsism and fragmentation” present in the postmodern films of the 1980s and 1990s indie movement. As such, their films demonstrate an aversion to what they perceive as a distrust of sincere feeling exhibited in contemporary cinema where achronological plot structures, reflexivity, and popular culture itself were presented if not as content, then certainly in the place of content.20 The cynical, meta-cinematic, and ironic early Scream films (1996, 1997), Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), and Pulp Fiction (1994), and films modeled on his cool distance and ironic expression such as The Opposite of Sex (1998), are indicative of a type of cinema that was more concerned with drawing attention to form than the

INTRODUCTION

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thematic content derived from character plights and story arcs. The American eccentrics, on the other hand, emphasize idiosyncrasy and a view of the outside world as absurd and strange. In these films, existential anxiety is displayed as private, individual feeling, heightened by a sense of alienation from collective social experience. Drawing on White’s delineation, Jesse Fox Mayshark further conceptualized the “American eccentric” filmmakers as a group that reacted to the pervading sense of detachment associated with the cultural standard of postmodern pastiche (facilitated by technological developments such as the internet) and choreographed irony present in the literature, art, music, fashion, and film of the 1980s and 1990s.21 For Mayshark, American eccentric filmmakers responded to the claims of the end of human history at the hand of the universal ideological triumph of Western liberalism, the role of art as an aesthetic prosthesis due to the depressing, repetitive simulation of forms and referents, and the stultifying effect of the pervading tone of ironic selfawareness in the cultural languages of American society that had been explored in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History?, Jean Baudrillard’s Beyond the Vanishing Point of Art, and David Foster Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S Fiction,” respectively. Wallace’s essay details his position that in the early 1990s, the ironic self-consciousness that had become the default tone of American cultural expression incorporates a paralyzing problem in regard to conveying meaning in texts. He writes: Irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I’m saying.” So, what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.”22 For Wallace, this default ironic self-conscious tone both anesthetizes and paralyzes the relationship between creation and reception of meaning in the texts. As Mayshark writes, “Once you know so much—about how stories are constructed or movies are made, about genre conventions and their social and political ramifications, about the complex relationships between author, the characters, and the audience … How do you create and convey meaning?” This question echoes Baudrillard’s consideration of the tension between the ironic aesthetic strategies of postmodernism and the ability to create something of significance in art. Baudrillard proposes that the ultimate postmodern question is: What can meaningfully be done after the

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orgy of modernism’s various liberations? He submits that postmodernity has “exhausted all means of the production and virtual overproduction of objects, signs, messages, ideologies, pleasure … everything is liberated. The game is over.”23 For Baudrillard, the lasting effect of liberation is not a post-coital afterglow. Instead the orgy haunts the present through an obsessive desire to experience its fallout. Yet, this desire is always thwarted—experiencing the fallout is prohibited by the stultifying effect of endless recycling and imitation. Postmodernism can only offer simulation, whereby attempts at new artforms are ultimately just combinations of older forms and styles, and as such are inevitably merely “second-hand references to the original sources.”24 For Baudrillard the only response to the orgy of modernism’s aftermath lies “in the perpetual reversal, in their new ironic beginnings of things, as in precisely that story when, during an orgy, someone whispers in another’s ear: ‘What are you doing after the orgy?’”25 The only response to endless simulation in the postmodern text is irony. According to Mayshark, American eccentric films were this new form of sincere text for which Wallace was calling. The American eccentric filmmakers met the challenges of postmodernism’s cyclical endgames of self-awareness noted by Baudrillard and Wallace that had coincided with the homogeneity of human government and end-point of sociocultural evolution—the “end of history”—projected by Fukuyama, not with a return to traditional forms of sincere cinema, but rather through a new aesthetic and formal approach that embraced a cinephilic approach to film history, reconsideration of plot structure, and immersion in popular culture that mobilizes narratives concerned with “ethics and morality, the obligations of the individual, the effects of family breakdown, and social alienation.”26 The employment of postmodern techniques, therefore, affords the American eccentrics a form of self-conscious meaningfulness in the place of an oppositional attitude to sentiment and irony. Mayshark and White constructively outline a contemporary aesthetic strategy that demonstrates how seriousness and sincerity can be expressed with dry humor and nimble witticism after the indifference and ironic detachment that had been associated with the perceived ahistoricity of the “cultural tide of pop postmodernism.” However, their configuration of this form of cinema as an auteurist phenomenon is problematic. To account for “American eccentricity” in auteurist terms, a filmmaker would necessarily need to exhibit “eccentricity” as a recognizable thematic and stylistic attribute throughout their oeuvre as an authorial point of distinction. Although these “eccentric” tactics can be traced through some of the works of the filmmakers identified by White and Mayshark, very few filmmakers have consistently produced films of this nature. I therefore consider American eccentricity in terms of

INTRODUCTION

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modality, using the term “mode” in an adjectival sense, as suggested by John Frow, in which modes are understood “as a thematic and tonal qualification or ‘colouring’ of genre.”27 American eccentricity, as a mode, speaks through and acts on conventional Hollywood traditions by deploying a sincere-ironic tone to express existential thematic concerns. However, this anxiety is presented as uneasy with its own authenticity. Experiencing anxiety is anathema to the entrepreneurial, self-improving, and self-regulating neoliberal citizen. Thus, inward-looking neoliberal sociopolitical and cultural context is expressed through concealed and ironically layered cinematic articulation. American eccentricity exists within a model of cultural production in which irony is not “an end in itself,” nor devoid of modalities of sincerity; rather, irony is employed with sincerity. These films use irony to sincerely articulate existential anxiety. They execute a tone whereby utterances like “I’m paralyzed by anxiety” are both an ironic articulation and a devastating admission of crisis. As such this mode must be considered in its close relationship to the broader cultural category of New Sincerity; an approximate return to modernist sincerity and issues of the self after the solipsism, cynicism, and narcissism of postmodernism. The New Sincerity, however, is not a simple return to earlier traditions but a dialectical modality wherein the writer or artist acknowledges that, despite the assurance of sincere intentions, they are bound by textual limitations. This approach to sincerity is evident in the works of novelists such as David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers, and the music of contemporary artists like Grimes and Lana Del Rey. The use of ironic articulation bound with sincerity becomes the means by which this impasse between representation and depth is negotiated. This negotiation does not simply take place within the text itself but involves “invoking a futurity off the page”28 that engages the reader in a dialectical relationship. The dialectical relationship that the American eccentric mode employs to mediate existential anxiety echoes this formulation of the New Sincerity. Indeed, American eccentricity may well be considered a specific cinematic evocation of this broader cultural form.

New Hollywood and eccentric connections Reading American eccentricity as a cinematic mode, I argue that there are medium-specific textual elements that may be used for the benefit of analysis and categorization. I identify four notable textual characteristics in the American eccentric mode: transgressions, subversions, and ironic play with genre; the use of hyper-dialogue as a dramatic device that functions to mediate sincere underlying thematic concerns for the viewer through ironic, reflexive speech; the shift toward overtly cinematic characterization; and the

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formulation of eccentric worlds. These textual devices may be employed in several configurations and concentrations across different films; however, they always function in order to portray a specific form of “Americanness” and mediate existential anxiety. While it should be noted that existential anxiety has been a focus of American film throughout its history (e.g., in the gangster films of the 1930s, film noir, and post–Second World War Westerns), the primary link between films in the American eccentric mode is their narrative focus on a yearning for human connection that is immediately conscious of the many obstacles and boundaries that ensure its lack of fulfillment. In this thematic connection, American eccentric films build upon the cultural and ideological imprints of the New Hollywood filmmakers, who express an uneasiness toward the social alienation, isolation, and dislocation from American society of the individual—as in Billy and Wyatt’s leaving mainstream society behind and taking to the countercultural openness of the road in Easy Rider, or dislocation from the social and cultural norms and expectations of his parents’ generation in The Graduate. The New Hollywood era is frequently cited as a time when filmmakers were producing cinema that examined their own cultural and political milieu. Despite the numerous inaccuracies and oversights in the era’s mythology with regard to politics, representation, and authorship (including the increasingly contested parameters and definitions of what constitutes the New Hollywood), the dominant narrative surrounding the New Hollywood era is, as David Thomson writes, that these films quoted real life with hitherto “unaccustomed candour”29 through a transformation in traditional cinematic language, aesthetics, and narrative. Through the influence of European cinema (particularly Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave) and advances in film technology, the films of the New Hollywood attempted to make sense of the social confusion with which they were confronted both formally and thematically. Although the New Hollywood era has been largely celebrated as a time of artistic freedom that afforded representations of cultural change and ideological focuses in cinema, it is important to note that many accounts of this era are invested in perpetuating a 1970s mythology of rebellion and revolution.30 Details, including the largely arbitrary “start” and “end” dates of the period, delineations of authorial inclusion—and exclusion—and the impact of the era on later filmmaking, are contentious, and, as suggested by Noel King, discursive constructions.31 I use the term “New Hollywood” to refer to a selection of films released post-1967 in America that critically reflect on specific contemporary sociocultural issues, often incorporating aesthetic and stylistic elements from European new wave cinema in conjunction with more conventional Hollywood traditions. Thomas Elsaesser identifies two key elements of the New Hollywood: the unmotivated hero and the pathos of failure. Characters that in the classical

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Hollywood form would have been considered goal-oriented heroes, in the New Hollywood exhibited no central motivation for action—these protagonists lack purpose or goals. Elsaesser writes that the positive compliance of American culture that facilitated the construction of the classical Hollywood narrative style was rendered problematic by these 1970s films because their liberal and unsentimental outlook on American society “makes them reject personal initiative and purposive affirmation on the level of ideology.”32 In the place of motivation these films, and their protagonists, exhibit a “mood of indifference … a post-rebellious lassitude.”33 The lack of purpose in the narrative trajectories and direction in character arcs resulted in the stylization of thematic pointlessness and aimlessness into the pathos of failure. The pathos of failure afforded the spectator affective contact with narratives that lacked conventional cathartic resolutions. Elsaesser goes on to state that: Clearly in a period of historical stasis, these movies reflect a significant ideological moment in American culture. One might call them films that dramatise the end of history, for what is a story, a motivated narrative (which such movies refuse to employ) other than an implicit recognition of the existence of history, at least in its formal dimension-of driving forces and determinants, of causes, conflicts, consequences, and interactions.34 American eccentricity embodies filmic representation beyond the pathos of failure: the protagonists of these films are aware of these earlier failures, yet they pursue their existential journeys with genuine desire for a resolution that they are aware is ultimately unattainable. The unmotivated hero has become the mis-motivated hero who buries uncertainty and purpose in the pursuit of peculiar (and often amusing) goals that result in largely ineffectual action. Rather than clear and literal failure, American eccentricity provides the illusion during screen-time that failure is perhaps avoidable, while simultaneously mapping a trajectory that will inevitably end without satisfactory, or positive, resolution. American eccentricity can therefore be seen as a contemporary reimagining of Thomas Elsaesser’s “pathos of failure”—the inability of the New Hollywood “unmotivated hero” to fulfill the narrative functions of the classical Hollywood protagonist—to pursue a goal or react to a challenge presented.35 But the fact that this new modality can be characterized as American eccentricity leads one to ask whether there is something inherently American about this existential anxiety. The Declaration of Independence pronounces “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” as the foundation of the American political and philosophical ideal. By claiming to focus on racial, economic, gender, and generational issues, New Hollywood films offered a critique of

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American society as failing these ideals. These New Hollywood films, like The Graduate, comment negatively on the manifestation of selfish materialistic gain and complacency as the false fulfillment of those foundational moral values and philosophical ideals. Benjamin’s return from college brings with it a sociocultural imperative to “mature” and assimilate with the bourgeois “Americanness” of his parents’ generation. However, his transition into “American” adulthood reveals that the materialism of the older generation promotes only feigned fulfillment—it is essentially hollow. Benjamin’s ultimate rebellion is to re-inscribe this American narrative with sentimentality and hope for the future, but where can this future possibly take place? In the film’s final sequence, Benjamin and Elaine face an unknown fate—not with exuberance, but with the uncertainty and trepidation of embarking on a journey that, ultimately, has nowhere to go. The New Hollywood period emerged at a time when perspectives on American social and political agendas and the character of American fulfillment were splintering, again along racial, economic, and generational divides. The Civil Rights Movement, the excesses of capitalism and its connection to imperialist involvement in Vietnam, and a rising countercultural movement that questioned the state and direction of American society provided many New Hollywood filmmakers with a set of characters, situations, and scenes that could act synecdochically to be read against the background of the nation as a whole—albeit from the problematic perspective of a particularly narrow and privileged demographic. While representation and demographic concerns remain constant, American eccentricity, on the other hand, negotiates the blurred scenarios of neoliberal America, which promotes the rights and freedoms of the individual above that of the community. The existential anxiety exhibited in American eccentric films is portrayed as discrete instances isolated to specific individuals. As such, this anxiety is not directed at any identifiable object, but rather relates to the nature of “being in the world” articulated by European existential philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. Existential anxiety here is not an experience shared among a generation with common symptoms, but rather exists as individualized and idiosyncratic manifestations. This form of anxiety is located in the experience of existing in a world devoid of meaning. Existential anxiety in American eccentric films is not depicted as fixed or articulated through tangible cultural concerns or events, but rather as a broader symptom of neoliberal individualism wherein isolated concerns are tied to distinct individuals. American eccentricity embodies a return of large, generalized philosophical concerns but, in a postmodern, neoliberal society these anxieties are presented as illegitimate as they are not pinned to an identifiable social actuality.

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American eccentric films mobilize the textual strategies of postmodernism to articulate existential anxiety with sincerity in the neoliberal context. Coupled with the focus on individual identity as separate from national identity, the deployment of ironic and reflexive tactics accentuates a perceived ahistoricity in American eccentric cinema, or, to use Fredric Jameson’s terms, the “weakening of history” as a symptom of postmodernism.36 Jameson characterizes the shift from modernity to postmodernity as the replacement of affect with effect: “a new depthlessness” in which emotional content is replaced with a simulacral surface.37 In this formulation, the “waning of affect” caused by the simulacral, space-orientated (rather than timeorientated) experience has resulted in the fragmentation of the centered self. Jameson argues that “this shift in the dynamics of cultural pathology can be characterised as one in which the alienation of the subject is displaced by the fragmentation of the subject.”38 The “disappearance of the individual subject, along with its formal consequence, the increasing unavailability of the personal style,” Jameson claims, “engender the well-nigh universal practiced today of what may be called pastiche.”39 Pastiche, in this formulation, refers to a hollowed out or “blank” version of parody. In the postmodern work pieces of history are critically neutralized and deployed at random. The intertextuality of the postmodern text is a “built in feature of the aesthetic effect, and as the operator of a new connotation of ‘pastness’ and pseudo-historical depth, in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces ‘real’ history.”40 As such, “real” history is replaced with simulacra—an endless intertextual pastiche sundered from time-based events. The weakening of history that Jameson identifies as a key symptom of postmodernity has negative ramifications for society and the postmodern subject “both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality,” which comes to resemble a schizophrenic structure. This schizophrenic experience emerges from the “breakdown of the signifying chain” in the use of language until “the schizophrenic is reduced to … a series of pure and unrelated presents in time.”41 The waning of affect and weakening of history means that for Jameson the postmodern text is not devoid of feeling, but rather is characterized by a certain flatness, or perceived lack of depth (as a result of a preoccupation with surface representation), rendering any emotions present detached and undirected. This notion of detached and undirected feeling is associated with the late capitalist concept that the liberation of individuals “from the older anomie of the centred subject may also mean, not merely a liberation from anxiety, but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling.”42 That is, for the fragmented postmodern subject feelings are free-floating and ahistorical. Anxiety, as a prominent “feeling” in the American eccentric mode, is perceived within the films in this manner.

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Following Jameson’s postmodern pastiche and the symptomatic “weakening of history,” the use of intertextuality in American eccentric films suggests a reconfiguration of “Americanness” in relation to national narratives. National identities are discursive constructions formulated through narratives based on shared history, symbolism, and mythology. It is “the symbolic and discursive dimensions of national identity narrative” that are constantly reproduced to “create the idea of origins, continuity and tradition” that are associated with national identities.43 Negotiations of national identity pervade New Hollywood films such as The Graduate, or more obviously Easy Rider. Many of the anxieties these films present have a close relationship to history— as both “real” events and constructed national narratives. Wyatt and Billy’s drive to find “America” is fundamentally a desire to reconcile their current sociopolitical position with the values and ideals on which the nation was founded. For instance, in an early scene, Wyatt and Billy arrive at a ranch to repair a flat tire on Wyatt’s motorcycle while a rancher is shown in the foreground of the shot shoeing his horse. In this scene, the contemporary countercultural figures of America with their high-powered motorcycles are identified with the more traditional rancher and his horse. This sequence demonstrates how technology, represented by cars and motorcycles, in road movies depicts the historical achievements of modernity while simultaneously flagging and reiterating ongoing social problems, such as the (masculinist) desire for liberation.44 Thus, in Easy Rider, national identity is recognized as an ongoing historicized and discursive act in which Wyatt and Billy participate. By contrast, P.T. Anderson’s American eccentric film Punch-Drunk Love (2002) employs the reflexive language and strategies of postmodernism and as such appears to formulate an ahistorical relationship to national identity and history, instead playing reflexively with genre convention and intertextuality. Punch-Drunk Love’s use of pastiche creates a jocund, reflexive stylistic surface that is recognizable as a hermetic cinematic imaginary. This form of intertextual play is present, for example, in the narrative’s establishment through manipulated representations of romantic comedy genre conventions. Barry Egan is a lonely and psychologically troubled man whose attempts at repressing his rage result in physical damage to himself and property until he meets and falls in love with Lena. From this basic plot outline, Anderson’s film initially appears to follow a basic “boy meets girl” romantic comedy formula— however, Anderson does not situate Barry’s desire to “get the girl” as his character’s goal. Lena is introduced to Barry by his sisters and is instantly interested in him. Barry does not need to “get the girl” as she is “got” from their first interaction. Instead, Punch-Drunk Love plays with the familiarity of the romantic comedy genre in order to highlight the loneliness and psychological damage of the film’s protagonist. The disturbing nature of Lena and Barry’s

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relationship and the focus on alienating, repressed rage is most clearly evident in a pre-coital exchange between the two, which slides between tender expressions of adoration to the articulation of violent frustration. Barry: I’m sorry I forgot to shave. Lena: Your face is so adorable. Your skin … and your cheeks … I want to bite it. I want to bite your cheek and chew on it, it’s so fucking cute. Barry: I’m looking at your face and I just want to smash it. I just want to smash it with a fucking sledgehammer and squeeze it, you’re so pretty. Lena: I wanna chew your face and I wanna scoop out your eyes and I want to eat them, and chew on them, and suck on them. Barry: Okay, this is funny. Lena: Yeah. Barry: This is nice. By prefacing Lena and Barry’s sexual union with this odd and troubling exchange, Anderson signals the game-like nature of the film’s construction. As the sequence preceding this exchange overtly conforms to romantic comedy genre conventions and visually quotes Hollywood musicals—a montage of Barry’s decision to pursue Lena to Hawaii, a silhouetted reunion shot, an irisshot of the couple’s hands—this moment subverts the generic expectations. Lena does not “cure” Barry of his rage; she plays with it. This playfulness is built into the film’s structure at the level of casting, and intertextual allusion. While Barry and Lena are characters that demonstrate emotional isolation and the obstacles of human interpersonal connection, the audience is encouraged to recognize that they are constructions. As Barry is played by Adam Sandler, Anderson encourages the spectator to referentially read Sandler’s previous roles in Billy Madison (1995) and Happy Gilmore (1996) into his character. In these films Sandler plays an immature adult who is prone to bursts of rage despite his overall well-meaning demeanor. Barry, thus, can be read as a recontextualization of these roles in a less obviously comedic manner. Lena’s character, on the other hand, is not a product of the actor’s antecedent roles but rather a quotation of Franҫois Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player (1960),45 where a mysterious woman also named Léna is romantically devoted to the protagonist without narrative explanation. Anderson further references the French New Wave’s visual experimentation through Barry’s vibrant blue suit and the use of experimental red lighting, which is a direct quotation of Jean-Luc Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman (1961). These intertextual references encourage a game-like play within the film’s construction rather than a primarily historical connection to the alluded referents. As portrayed in Punch-Drunk Love, anxieties, in the American eccentric mode are no longer

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cast as historically bound to external sites of existential concern. Instead these anxieties are presented as unanchored phenomena—ephemeral and generalized—that occur as isolated, idiosyncratic manifestations rather than as reflecting larger cultural occurrences. However, the ahistoricity present in American eccentric films like Punch-Drunk Love is only a felt perception. American eccentricity should be read as a cinematic mode that emerges as a symptom of, and reaction to, neoliberal America. In this book, I make the case that American eccentricity is a cinematic mode that bears a strong thematic relationship to the New Hollywood in terms of its preoccupation with “Americanness” and existential anxiety. Chapter 1 carves out theoretical definitions of terms used throughout the book. The term “eccentric” is considered in relation to the mode’s textual characteristics and politics (particularly in relation to gender and race), taking as its cue Sianne Ngai’s work on aesthetic categories.46 This chapter acknowledges the dialogue between American eccentricity and other similar overlapping tendencies such as New Sincerity, metamodernism, the “quirky,” and “smart” cinema and delineates American eccentricity as a textual modality. Throughout this discussion I analyze the formal elements that constitute an “eccentric” mode and outline their deviations from mainstream or conventional narrative cinema and the industrial and cultural position of American eccentricity in relation to the broader “indie” (and “indiewood”) sector. The four notable textual characteristics of the American eccentric mode, which provide the analytical foci for this book, are introduced. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the theoretical territory for the mode’s key concepts—irony and anxiety, through the work of Linda Hutcheon, James MacDowell, and Sianne Ngai, respectively. Chapter 2 examines the role of genre subversion and transgression in the American eccentric mode through close analysis of the road movie genre. This chapter investigates the New Hollywood road film as a genre in dialogue with the Western, Western frontier mythology, the failed American Dream, and the countercultural zeitgeist. Through close readings of Easy Rider and Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) the tropes and on-screen manifestation of core existential anxieties as depicted in the New Hollywood are established. I then develop and examine how the key elements of the New Hollywood road film have been subverted in the American eccentric mode through analysis of Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited (2007) and Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich (1999). In this chapter, I argue that in the American eccentric mode the road occupies a liminal space—in both literal and figural terms. The dual liminality of the road space causes a sense of unease and anxiety for the travelers. American eccentric protagonists are caught between the optimism of the liberating road experience and the simultaneous awareness of its failure in the tradition of the New Hollywood cinema.

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In Chapter 3, I investigate a shift in the creation of on-screen characters and audience alignment from the New Hollywood to the American eccentric mode. I configure the construction of characters in the New Hollywood as the portrayal of “idealized” or “cinematized” peer—figures like The Graduate’s Benjamin or Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore’s (1974) Alice Hyatt (Ellen Burstyn). The cinematized peer mode of characterization promotes an alignment with a figure that is designed to be imagined outside the confines of the film’s narrative context. I argue that throughout American eccentric films a contrasting mode of characterization takes place. I call this form of characterization the “overtly cinematic character.” Through analysis of Wes Anderson’s films, I contend that overtly cinematic characterization is the creation of characters that are designed to be viewed from a distanced position, facilitated by, and confined to, a particular film’s diegesis. Unlike the cinematized peer, these characters do not promote audience alignment beyond the distinct parameters of each individual film, rather their empathetic connection with the audience is consciously limited to each film’s screentime. I read the textual construction of overtly cinematic characters as a characteristic of the American eccentric mode in relation to the concept of American smart film proposed by Jeffrey Sconce and Claire Perkins. Chapter 4 further develops an aspect of overtly cinematic characterization through the aesthetic and dramatic function of hyper-dialogue. Hyper-dialogue is the intensified, unevenly fluctuating, and often ironically inflected use of dialogue to distance anxiety (in the place of action) in hyperbolically articulate characters. Through a close comparative reading of David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees, and Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970), I examine hyperdialogue as a key stylistic and dramatic technique that depicts the transition from the naturalistic portrayal of characters’ anxiety present in the New Hollywood through the dramatic use of silences and naturalistic dialogue, to the continually deferred anxiety present in the American eccentric mode through incessant talking. The textures of both hyper-dialogue and the plainspeaking naturalism often presented in the New Hollywood are examined through Jill Nelmes’s analyses of the screenplay, as well as Sarah Kozloff’s writing on film sound and dialogue. The employment of fluctuating yet mutually operating irony/sincerity in the American eccentric mode is analyzed in this chapter in relation to metamodernism: the phenomenon of interwoven irony and sincerity as an emerging structure of feeling. In Chapter 5, I discuss how American eccentric films configure cinematic worlds that (unlike those inhabited by the New Hollywood’s cinematized peers) highlight their constructed nature. Where many New Hollywood films place their naturalistic characters (idealized peers) within cinematic diegeses that reflect either an objective or subjective reality (or both), American eccentric

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films create cinematic worlds that are recognizable yet impossible realities. This chapter investigates the construction of the American eccentric world as anachronistic and referential cinematic space that remains congruous with overtly cinematic characters and their use of hyper-dialogue. I propose that, despite the nature of these worlds as distinctly un-real and un-naturalistic spaces, the audience can (at least partially) be immersed in these uniquely assembled worlds, and affected by their narratives. The aesthetic and textual construction of these worlds is analyzed in concert with James MacDowell’s “quirky.” This chapter investigates similarities and differences in the function of ironic humor as a distancing mechanism in the American eccentric mode and the “quirky” through the creation of cinematic worlds. Through close analysis of Charlie Kaufman’s depictions of New York, Todd Haynes’s crosstemporal I’m Not There (2007), and P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), this chapter conceptualizes these cinematic worlds as knowingly fictional yet deeply affecting spaces. The book concludes by analyzing the cultural implications of American eccentricity as a mode that seeks to mask or defer anxiety. Drawing on the textual parameters for the mode, I argue that irony and sincerity can coexist as individual and textual expression. That is, irony is employed with sincerity: the balance of emphasis may shift between the two positions; however, ironic articulation is always conjoined with sincere meaning as a means of mediation. Reflexive, meta-cinematic moments and techniques in the American eccentric mode explicitly tell the viewer that what they are watching is not real, and thereby create a space for the spectator in which it is safe to engage with the thematic content of the film during screen-time, precisely because of her awareness that the film will end. By seeking to identify American eccentricity as a mode with specific textual consistencies I suggest that similar tactics and thematic preoccupations be explored in other media, such as contemporary music in artists such as Grimes and Lana Del Rey, and television shows like Bored to Death (2009–2011). I conclude by suggesting a cultural shift in the prominence of American eccentricity within indie cinema. In American eccentric cinema, existential anxiety appears to emerge fleetingly, situationally, personally—without broader cultural and social prominence. However, American eccentricity expresses existential anxiety in the neoliberal moment. For the neoliberal citizen, experiencing existential anxiety may be perceived as a personal failure. In response to this cultural perception, American eccentric films promote sincere emotional engagement with characters and existential concerns, but that engagement is designed to be temporary and kept at a distance. The use of ironic articulation to mediate existential anxiety is the hallmark of American eccentricity. This book considers the textual mechanisms through which this mediation is achieved.

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Notes 1 Anthony Lane, “Gloom and Doom: ‘Anomalisa’ and ‘A Perfect Day,’” The New Yorker 91, no. 44 (2016): 78. 2 Graham Fuller, “Anomalisa,” Sight and Sound 26, no. 4 (2016): 68. 3 I do not suggest that animation does not elicit strong human emotions—for instance Pixar films are exemplary in their capacity for pathos—rather, I suggest that in the context of Anomalisa’s quotidian narrative, the style of animation serves here as a distancing mechanism. 4 David Bordwell describes the conventions of mainstream Hollywood as a confluence of the continuity style of editing and the classical Hollywood narrative structure. The specific conventions of mainstream Hollywood will be discussed in Chapter 1. 5 Kellie Crawford Sorey and Dennis Gregory explain in their article “Protests in the Sixties” that although student protests were not new to the countercultural 1960s generation, the technological advancements in media made widespread sociopolitical awareness possible and enabled widespread participation. The Berkeley revolt is significant in relation to counterculture ideology in that the protests were based on three key issues: civil rights, civil liberties (in particular, the right to free speech), and the right to organize and conduct political activities on university campuses. The protests for free speech saw university administration under a newly appointed Chancellor Meyerson concede to allowing political and religious advocacy. However due to restrictions placed on these amendments, the victory was taken by the both the administration and the protesters as satisfying demands, but with a degree of mutual distrust. See “Protests in the Sixties,” College Student Affairs Journal 28, no. 2 (2010): 194. 6 See: Kean Birch, A Research Agenda for Neoliberalism (Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017). 7 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2. 8 Russell Meeuf, “Class, Corpulence, and Neoliberal Citizenship: Melissa McCarthy on Saturday Night Live,” Celebrity Studies 7, no. 2 (2016): 139. 9 Ibid. 10 Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87–104. 11 Somogy Varga, “The Politics of Nation Branding: Collective Identity and Public Sphere in the Neoliberal State,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 39, no. 8 (2013): 838. 12 Meeuf, “Neoliberal Citizenship,” 139. 13 Philippe Fournier, “The Neoliberal/Neurotic Citizen and Security as Discourse,” Critical Studies on Security 2, no. 3 (2014): 310–311. 14 Rather than as a potential celebration of diverse identities.

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15 Colson Whitehead, “How ‘You Do You’ Perfectly Captures Our Narcissistic Culture,” The New York Times Magazine (2015). 16 Meeuf, “Neoliberal Citizenship,” 139–140. 17 Tom Looser, “The Global University, Area Studies, and the World Citizen: Neoliberal Geography’s Redistribution of the ‘World,’” Cultural Anthropology 27, no. 1 (2012): 111. 18 Al Franken, Lies (and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right (London: Penguin Group Limited, 2004). 19 Armond White, “American Soul, Aisle Five,” New York Press 39, no. 17 (2004). 20 Ibid. 21 Jesse Fox Mayshark, Post-Pop Cinema: The Search for Meaning in New American Film (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2007). 22 David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 2, no. 13 (1993): 67–68. 23 Jean Baudrillard, “Beyond the Vanishing Point of Art,” in Post-Pop Art, ed. Paul Taylor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 182. 24 Mayshark, Post-Pop Cinema, 3. 25 Baudrillard, “Beyond the Vanishing Point,” 189. 26 Mayshark, Post-Pop Cinema, 5. 27 John Frow, Genre: The New Critical Idiom (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 67. 28 Adam Kelly, “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction,” Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays, ed. David Hering (New York: Sideshow Media Group, 2010), 185. 29 David Thomson, “The Decade When Movies Mattered,” in Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, eds. Alexander Horwath, Noel King, and Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 82. 30 Particularly those by Peter Biskind, Mark Harris, Jonathan Demme, and Richard LaGravenese. 31 Noel King, “The Last Good Time We Ever Had: Remembering the New Hollywood Cinema,” in The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, eds. Alexander Horwath, Thomas Elsaesser, and Noel King (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 32. 32 Thomas Elsaesser, “The Pathos of Failure: American Films in the 1970s,” in Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, eds. Alexander Horwath, Noel King, and Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 281. 33 Ibid., 282. 34 Ibid., 291. 35 Thomas Elsaesser, “American Auteur Cinema: The Last—or First—Picture Show?” The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema

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in the 1970s, eds. Alexander Horwath, Noel King, and Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 63. 36 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 1, no. 146 (1984): 53–92. 37 Jameson’s delineation of postmodernism has been justifiably challenged by Linda Hutcheon. As Jameson’s articulation of pastiche and its relationship to history closely speaks to the perception of ahistoricity in these films, I employ his definitions here. However, I agree with Hutcheon’s critiques of Jameson’s formulation. 38 Jameson, “Postmodernism,” 63. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 67. 41 Ibid., 71–72. 42 Jameson, “Postmodernism,” 64 (emphasis in original). 43 Chris Barker, Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (London: SAGE Publications, 2007), 259–260. 44 Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, The Road Movie Book (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1997), 3. 45 Punch-Drunk Love also borrows numerous plot developments from Truffaut’s film. 46 Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

1 Defining American Eccentricity

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he term “American eccentricity” prompts some assumptions as to the formal and thematic strategies employed by films in this mode—first, that films in this category are either made in the United States or are thematically or narratively concerned with something essentially “American,” and secondly, that these films deviate from the “norms” established by mainstream, or conventional, American cinema. Indeed, numerous works have identified the shift in tone and ideology of American cinema in the late 1990s, including Jeffrey Sconce’s and Claire Perkins’s work on “smart” cinema, Michael Newman’s “indie,” and Derek Hill’s “(New) American New Wave.” Other works have sought to broadly categorize large sections of cinematic (and broader cultural) discourse, or formulate new cultural movements, such as James MacDowell’s “quirky” and Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s “metamodernism,” which can be conceptualized as “part of a broader post-ironic turn” associated with “a move toward a ‘New Sincerity’” in which irony and sincerity are enmeshed and entangled.1 I do not propose that categorizing a film as an American eccentric work is a classification to the exclusion of all others, as the mode certainly intersects and overlaps with aspects of these existing formulations. Thus, American eccentricity should be considered in relation to these concepts and categories, in terms of both similarity and difference. In this chapter, I identify and examine four pivotal concepts that underpin American eccentricity; institutional location and “indie” modes of production, definitions of irony and anxiety, and the distinctly “American” nature of this eccentricity. These four locating and delineating features provide the foundation for understanding American eccentricity as a textual mode in which irony is used to mediate a felt ahistoricity and perceived inauthenticity of existential crises, in spite of the historical context that underpins it.

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Indie and eccentricity In order to be considered “eccentric,” it is reasonable to assume that films in this mode depart from mainstream conventions. Although vague, these basic assumptions indicate that American eccentric cinema is located outside, or on the margins of, the mainstream in terms of production, textual attributes, and audience targeting. The term “mainstream,” as Geoff King suggests, is used as shorthand for a set of historically and institutionally predicated conventions that serve as a reference point “against which other practices can be measured”2 or defined. The mainstream is often seen as the narrative style synonymous with the dominant output of the major Hollywood studios, which are designed to appeal to broad audience bases. While in recent decades the focus on franchise films and transmedia storytelling has drawn into question the continuity of some long-standing Hollywood conventions (particularly in terms of narrative resolution and spectacle), audience expectation and textual norms remain overwhelmingly associated with adherence to the classical Hollywood style most comprehensively theorized by David Bordwell. The classical Hollywood style facilitates a mode of spectatorship that privileges narrative comprehension and character alignment over the recognition of a film’s formal strategies. Mainstream narrative conventions include goal-oriented, psychologically motivated characters who act as causal agents that propel the film’s action; logical patterns of cause and effect that adhere to narrative cohesion; an equilibrium-disequilibrium-new equilibrium structure; and a strong focus on narrative closure. The aesthetic strategies of mainstream cinema follow Bordwell’s notion of the invisible style: a form of editing and cinematography that serves to further audience engagement with the narrative and as such does not draw attention to itself. Thus, mainstream cinema largely adheres to the principles of continuity editing (matches on action, 180-degree rule, eye line matches, parallel editing, etc.) that are designed to maintain temporal and spatial continuity and ensure the clear positioning of the spectator in relation to the narrative.3 In addition to these fundamental elements of film form, the Hollywood mainstream is also widely considered on the basis of genre classification, their industrial positions, and target audiences.4 While the focus of this book is primarily the delineation of American eccentricity as a mode identifiable through textual elements and sociocultural concerns, the institutional and industrial location of the films discussed cannot be ignored. Indeed, I argue that the institutional and industrial imperatives of production within a neoliberal context have shaped the corpus of (largely canonized) “indiewood” films under consideration in this book as the creative output of an overwhelmingly homogeneous group

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of white, male filmmakers, and as such directly informs the politics of the American eccentric mode. In order to demarcate a mode of cinema as exhibiting “eccentricity” it must be examined in relation to mainstream conventions. As will be argued throughout this book, American eccentric films do not offer the kind of radical departures from the mainstream that may be found in the avant-garde or far reaches of arthouse cinema. Films in the American eccentric mode are concerned with genre, universal themes centering on human connection (particularly the familial), affective narrative trajectories, and promote audience alignment with central characters. As such, American eccentricity is a mode of cinema that employs the conventions and strategies of the dominant Hollywood norm in concert with intertextual allusion, quotation, and ironic expression at various moments in order to subvert audience expectation, which results in an “offbeat” tone or aesthetic. Thus, while the term “eccentric” necessarily describes a deviation from the norm, this deviation is not, and indeed cannot be, completely oppositional. Indeed, the films discussed in this book can all be located within the spectrum of “indie” cinema, and many within the “indiewood” sector, identified by Geoff King as a hybrid form of cinema that emerged in the 1990s where films occupy the blurred space between Hollywood and independent categorization, in terms of both modes of production and aesthetic and conventional tendencies.5 As American eccentricity is aesthetically and formally characterized by its use of unconventional strategies while remaining in close relationship to the mainstream, the mode can be located more broadly within the American indie sector as conceptualized by scholars such as Geoff King, Michael Z. Newman, Janet Staiger, and Yannis Tzioumakis. Although these scholars differ in their delineations, their overall formulations of indie cinema rethink traditional or perhaps purist definitions of independence that focus on modes of production where finance and distribution occur away from mainstream Hollywood studios. Invoking purist demarcations of independence would necessitate that no industrial or institutional base for American eccentric cinema can be located, as might be gleaned in the disparity between two American eccentric productions, Hal Hartley’s Meanwhile (2011) and P. T. Anderson’s Inherent Vice (2014). Hartley’s film was crowdfunded through the website Kickstarter and so could be considered, even by purist definitions, to be independent. Donations of $25 entitled individuals to a limited-edition DVD version of the film, while those who donated $1000 (or more) were to be credited as co-producers.6 Anderson’s film, on the other hand, resides in funding terms within the Hollywood model; produced and distributed by Warner Bros studios in conjunction with IAC Films and Ghoulardi Film Company, and with an estimated budget of $20 million. Yet

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these films both deviate from the mainstream in terms of aesthetic and form, and can be identified as having a niche target audience rather than the broad appeal of studio blockbusters. At the level of production, most of the films discussed in this book reside in the Indiewood subcategory that King writes is more clearly defined at the institutional level, where films are made in partnership with the Hollywood studios, predominantly (though notably, not exclusively) through specialty divisions that were formed in the 1990s, such as Fox Searchlight or Miramax (or, more currently, the Weinstein Company). Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, Charlie Kaufman, and P.T. Anderson, for instance, have largely created films within this institutional milieu. If indie cinema occupies a wide spectrum that ranges from low-budget “art” cinema through to films that are relatively similar to mainstream Hollywood output, Indiewood may be located in the region of the hybrid spectrum that “leans relatively towards the Hollywood end of a wider compass that stretches from the edges of Hollywood to the less commercially viable margins.”7 Thus, Indiewood films, generally speaking, receive more extensive promotion, circulation, and distribution than those residing toward the more “independent” end of the hybrid spectrum.8 These industrial factors undoubtedly impact the critical attention Indiewood films receive, as well as their place in the popular cultural imaginary, particularly in the creation of a brand of “Indiewood auteurs,” such as Wes Anderson or Sofia Coppola. The prominence of this sort of discourse, which is facilitated by these institutional contexts, certainly privileges Indiewood films as readily accessible exemplars of the movements and tendencies that emerged in the late 1990s, and my account of American eccentricity is no exception. While American eccentricity is not an auteurist phenomenon, the prominence of works by celebrated “indie auteurs” speaks to what Claire Molloy has described as the intersection of “the neoliberal commodification of creative labor” and indie discourse.9 Molloy claims that 1980s and 1990s independent cinema challenged the homogeny of mainstream Hollywood. She rightly cites the release of films that went against the dominance of white heteronormative experience by focusing on marginalized and underrepresented demographics through the personal and political cinema of filmmakers such as Spike Lee (She’s Gotta Have It [1986], Do The Right Thing [1989]), Gregg Araki (The Living End [1992]), Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging [1992], Mi Vida Loca [1994]) and Gus Van Sant (Mala Noche [1986], My Own Private Idaho [1991]), as signaling the critiques around disenfranchisement and exclusion that production away from the Hollywood studios made possible.10 At the same time, media industries saw the emergence of niche markets across the various sectors … [that] reflected the notion of increased consumer choice and demand, positioning

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independent film as a product that was responding to the fragmentation of a newly competitive marketplace, the availability of markets beyond the United States and the development of new channels of distribution buoyed by technological changes. Despite the idea that hegemony relies on consensus, cultural fragmentation and the rise of niche markets is not at odds with the concept of neoliberal hegemony. As … “Hegemony is often conceptualized as a condition of consensus, yet today one of the most important bases is the cultural fragmentation that issues from advanced capitalism as a way of life, particularly in the Global North” (Carroll and Greeno 2013). The corporate cultivation and exploration of niche markets is … a process of ideological diversification that “prevents subjugated groups from understanding one another and undertaking the difficult work of constructing solidarities”: effectively a “divide and conquer” formulation of “consent without consensus.” (Carroll and Greeno 2013)11 While it is not the case that Indiewood has subsumed or absorbed all previous forms of political independent production, or homogenized independent cinema, its development throughout the 1990s, and subsequent impact, can be analyzed with reference to neoliberal imperatives. Molloy argues that within a neoliberal framework indie sensibility operates at both a textual level—as “a form of political dislocation that masquerades as immersive pleasure” and as a “logic of reception economics in which the currency of ambiguity is sustained through neoliberal notions of choice and consumption”—and an extra-textual level—where indie auteurs “are part of the hypermobile creative class of independent, autonomous artisans whose labor has been in demand by the mainstream sector.”12 Thus, figures like Wes Anderson, P.T. Anderson, and Spike Jonze are celebrated as idealized neoliberal elites who, as artists, have successfully commodified their creative labor. Often, studios promote these filmmakers as autonomous “indie auteurs,” and in doing so actively downplay the role of the corporate structures and realities behind their production within critical and popular discourse and so perpetuate an ongoing distinction between “indie” and “mainstream” or “commercial” fare, to “retain the value of the indie auteur’s labor in the marketplace.”13 The location of the auteurist indie films on the margins of the mainstream—in terms of both content and style—notably diverges from the politics of disenfranchisement that Molloy identifies in the 1980s and 1990s, not toward complete depoliticization, but rather through the funding, promotion, and subsequent success of less overtly political films. It is unsurprising that the “indie” filmmakers whose work was most readily taken up by studios involved in the indiewood sector largely mirrored the white male demographic that had long dominated the mainstream, nor is it surprising that their films are heavily informed by their

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filmmaker’s privileged position (in socioeconomic, racial, and gendered terms), as is evident within the most obvious examples of American eccentric cinema. The disjunct between production realities and indie discourse seemed to renegotiate the connotations of “indie” as a descriptor in the late 1990s. The dark, satirical films associated with what Sconce calls “smart cinema” and the ironic, “off-beat” films identified by MacDowell as “quirky” or the majority of those I label “American eccentric” until very recently have been somewhat synonymous with an “indie sensibility.” King argues that indie is most productively considered to be a variable and dynamic quality that exists in relation to, rather than separate from, the mainstream in terms of “(1) their industrial location, (2) the kinds of formal/ aesthetic strategies they adopt and (3) their relationship to the broader social, cultural, political or ideological landscape.”14 In this formulation, indie cinema is a spectrum that ranges from extremely low-budget films that employ alternative formal strategies or ideological positions to the mainstream to films that present distinctive takes on Hollywood conventions. The multifaceted nature of King’s approach enables American eccentricity to be considered as a mode of cinema that exists within the indie sector. Despite the political imperatives that arise from its modes of production and reception, American eccentricity is demarcated as a textual mode rather than an institutional practice. Thus, while the institutional bases of these films are fundamental to their politics, aesthetic, and form, that industrial context is not my focus. Rather, I am interested in the connection between their indie categorization and the textual means by which American eccentric films encourage audiences to engage with their content. As such, my engagement with “indie” or “independent” discourse should be read in dialogue with Anna Backman Rogers work on American independent cinema as a cinema of crisis, not only in terms of its industrial location but also in terms of aesthetics and poetics. For Backman Rogers this crisis, in part, stems from a widespread exhaustion in the neoliberal era, and the lack of resolution to its attendant values (that she identifies as Christianity and consumerism). In the place of clear resolution to change or rite of passage narratives traditionally offered in mainstream narrative cinema, Backman Rogers emphasizes the extended thresholds and liminality of a subset of independent films “in which resolution is difficult or unattainable and obscurity prevails,” and where characters are themselves figures of crisis.15 While the characteristics and manifestations of crisis in the American eccentric mode differ from Backman Rogers’s theorization, both identify crisis in areas of independent cinema as a point of deviation from the mainstream.16 The term “indie” in its relational positioning always implies a distinction from Hollywood; however, the implications of this distinction are significant

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in determining approaches to indie films. Janet Staiger provocatively, and correctly, asserts “the reason this matters is that implicit declarations are being made that this sort of film is ideologically better or more worthwhile than what it is not: a classical Hollywood film.”17 That is, indie films are positioned as offering a different experience to the mainstream by way of their textual qualities and thematic preoccupations and therefore seem to be directed toward niche audience markets as markers of distinction, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms. Because acts of cultural consumption are demarcated by preferences and expressions of taste, selections made by individuals are concomitant with their social position and respective accumulation of cultural capital.18 While King notes that it is impossible to identify the actual audiences for indie, these forms of cinema are designed to appeal to audiences with a high level of cultural capital competency gained through a combination of formal and informal education and experience. The intended audience for indie films is likely to enjoy works where recognizing deviations from convention, intertextual references, and ironic evocations is part of the pleasure of consumption. Rona Murray similarly uses Bourdieu’s cultural capital to explain the difference in viewing expectations and audience practice between indie and mainstream audiences. She writes: The highest competence is an ability to contemplate form over substance— to analyse and be affected by the forms used in any artistic work rather than being sutured into an emotional experience (which is equated to being “naïve”) … The complexity of the text’s structure means that there is a specifically intellectual pleasure to these texts, as well as emotional i.e. involving the “pure” gaze of that higher contemplation as well as the “naïve” gaze of simply engaging with characters and the emotional content of the story.19 What Murray suggests is that although many indie films may be “read straight” and enjoyed on a level that privileges “unthinking” emotional responses (e.g., sadness in a melodrama or happiness in a comedy), their relative narrative complexity facilitates an intellectual pleasure associated with decoding and deciphering intricate intertextual references or reflexive nuances. This demarcation between cerebral and emotional engagement is dubious as all narrative engagement entails some degree of emotional participation on the part of the spectator. However, the perceived hierarchy between “intellectual” engagement with complex narrative form and “emotional” suturing with narrative elements such as characterization speaks to the delineation between the “sophisticated” reflexive tactics and “naïveté” associated with sincerity that underpins the tonal tensions manifest in the

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New Sincerity, within which I identify American eccentricity. Despite the reductive and elitist associations that appeal to Bourdieu’s cultural capital model promote when identifying or suggesting target audiences,20 the balance between emotional and intellectual viewing pleasures that both King and Murray associate with indie cinema is a characteristic of the American eccentric mode. Although there is undoubtedly a pleasure associated with the recognition of intertextuality and reflexivity, these tactics perform specific thematic and dramatic functions in the American eccentric mode. American independent cinema, on the whole, tends to draw on its cinematic history by acknowledging its inheritances, namely, the New Hollywood of the 1970s and the postwar European new waves; however, again in concert with Backman Rogers’s theory, certain subsets of independent cinema mobilize these relationships for ideological, thematic, or dramatic functions. Backman Rogers writes that a cinema of crisis engages with specific clichés “but recuperates these tropes to the point of being obsolete” in accordance with their emphasis on exhaustion.21 A similar approach is evident in the American eccentric mode, where quotation and allusion denote an acute awareness of film history, but to different effect. While intertextuality in American eccentric cinema may appear to be “merely citational” or even disaffected, the overall function is not only to signal exhaustion through the obsolescence of cliché (although this may occur), but to be recognized as quotation and thus function as distancing mechanisms. American eccentricity does encourage the viewer to align herself with characters and narrative trajectories; however, these conventions are punctuated with “intellectual” strategies, such as recognizing ironic inflection to provide distance from an affective viewing experience necessitated by the narrative form. The spectator is specifically urged to expend cultural capital at moments within the narrative where emotional engagement would conventionally be elevated or encouraged; irony and reflexivity are employed to mediate, rather than disable, emotional engagement.

American eccentricity and irony Much of the encouraged expenditure of cultural capital in the American eccentric mode resides in the spectator’s ability to understand ironic expression and its critical edge. This is because American eccentricity employs irony in conjunction (and simultaneously) with sincerity in order to reveal and conceal genuine existential concerns. The complex balances of ironic/sincere expression vary greatly within a single film, which creates a cinematic texture that is designed to be at once entertaining and serious. Throughout this book I use the term “irony” in the manner proposed by Linda Hutcheon, to refer

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to a “discursive strategy operating at the level of language (verbal) or form (musical, visual, textual)” rather than a static rhetorical device,22 and further specified as a filmic attribute by James MacDowell. MacDowell identifies various means by which different modes of irony may be identified and located in film as a multitrack medium “whose expressive properties are not—or not only—linguistic but rather constitute a ‘mongrel’ (Durgnat 1976) admixture of linguistic, pictorial, dramatic, narrative, and aural forms of address.”23 Thus, the live-action film is capable of creating several different kinds of irony by a host of different means: its pictorial qualities help it depict situational ironies, its dramatic and storytelling properties assist in creating dramatic irony, and its narrative dimensions aid its potential to be communicatively ironic … many individual features of the medium can serve to make their own particular contributions to irony in film. Even though no aspect of a film ever operates in isolation, properties and devices like film sound, editing, mise-en-scène, the camera, and performance nonetheless all offer distinctive possibilities for different forms of ironic expression.24 While mobilizing irony away from purely verbal utterances, I maintain that irony is not simply a process by which the ironic meaning of a statement equates to the “unsaid” in opposition to the “said.” Rather irony “happens”—it relies on the space between (and including) the said and the (plural) unsaid. The “said” and “unsaid” in the context of film are extended, as MacDowell outlines, to all variants and aspects of film form and style—contained both within frames, scenes, and sequences and within the narrative and narration of a film as a whole. In this space meanings interact in an inclusive and relational manner with a critical edge that is created by contextual framing, which in turn creates the “ironic” meaning. This critical edge “is an affective “charge’ to irony that cannot be ignored and that cannot be separated from its political use if it is to account for the range of emotional response (from anger to delight) and the various degrees of motivation and proximity (from distanced detachment to passionate engagement).”25 Ironic meaning incorporates three major semantic characteristics: it is relational (in that it operates not only between the meaning of utterances—the said and unsaid—but also between the social elements—the ironist, interpreter, and the target of the utterance); inclusive (the occurrence of double or multiple meanings simultaneously without the need to reject that which is “literal”); and differential.26 In the American eccentric mode, irony incorporates these relational, inclusive, and differential characteristics through a variety of tactics such as the use of ironic dialogue, the intrusion of either unconventional (or excessively conventional

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to the point of contrivance) formal and stylistic elements that undermine moments of sincerity in the narrative, juxtapositions between registers on the aural and visual tracks, and subversions of generic tropes. Much of this ironic expression relies on the spectator to recognize and, subsequently, interpret these instances as moments of irony in order to “make irony happen,” in Hutcheon’s terms. Indeed, Hutcheon is careful to note the importance of interpretation in making irony happen; that is, it is the interpreter (rather than the ironist) who assigns irony to an utterance, and thereafter ascertains what specific ironic meaning the utterance offers. Thus, irony is intentional from the position of the interpreter, “it is the making or inferring of meaning in addition to and different from what is stated, together with an attitude toward both the said and the unsaid … however [from the point of view of the ironist], irony is the intentional transmission of both information and evaluative attitude other than what is explicitly presented.”27 Thus, both the interpreter and the ironist are assigned agency and intention. These implications inherently involve an attitude of judgment, or axiology, and thus usher in the affective dimension of ironic discourse as a communicative process. The position and cultural capital of the interpreter is crucial to receiving irony. MacDowell asserts that claiming an ironic position necessitates assuming ironic intentions on the part of a work or its creators, for without this intent, a work that appears to intend something other than what is presented or stated could be taken as misleading or erroneous.28 Acknowledging the prickly terrain of ascertaining and assigning interpretive gravity to authorial intent, MacDowell suggests that instead intent may be attributed to the text itself. This process relies fundamentally upon inference; as Eco notes, ‘the text’s intention is not displayed by the textual surface. … One has to decide to “see” it. [It is] the result of a conjecture’ (ibid.: 64). Yet that conjecture must nonetheless be built in large part upon what is displayed on a text’s “surface”: the strategies employed by its story, narration, point of view, tone, style, and so on. If attempting to infer a film’s intentions, we must examine such aspects of its address for guidance as to the interpretations a film is inviting us to make.29 In order to establish a film as having ironic intent, the audience must recognize and read certain contextual and rhetorical strategies as being “irony markers,” such as “clashes of perspective, shifts in style, excess, various kinds of juxtaposition, incongruity, distance”30 that signal the presence of irony (rather than performing irony itself). Thus, assessing whether or not a film is calling on an ironic mode of address requires the audience to have some reference

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to “inter- and extra-textual contexts,” such as “comparable types of texts, some awareness of the historical and cultural moment in which a text was produced, and normative moral frameworks we associate with that time and culture”31 to call on as points of reference. While these inter- and extra-textual contexts may be familiar (such as the inclusion of an obviously ironic line of dialogue) or general (such as the ironic evocation of a well-known genre through specific iconography or soundtrack), in the American eccentric mode various instances and forms of ironic expression are used in combination with one another to enlist an overall tone that shifts between ironic distance and sincerity. This tone, which combines encouraged affective experience with intellectual mediation, is created through “movement, patterns of imagery, and sound”32 as well as through the relationship of specific ironic instances and the film’s overall narrative and thematic concerns. The impact of identifying irony as a distancing mechanism (and a tool for pluralizing meaning) in the American eccentric mode is evident in the sequence in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (2006) in which Private Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake) injects the fictional drug “Fluid Karma” into his neck and collapses to the ground in a drug-affected stupor. In the film, “Fluid Karma” is a psychedelic drug that (in one of its many forms)33 allows its users to “travel or ‘bleed’ through time.”34 In this sequence the spectator is privy to Abilene’s subjective hallucinatory experience as a lip-synched music video to The Killers’ song “All These Things That I’ve Done.” Abilene, wearing a bloodstained white T-shirt and dog tag necklace, emerges from a visually distorted background to face the camera as he “performs” the musical number while a chorus of back-up dancers, dressed in identical pornographic nurse uniforms, execute a highly sexualized routine. The distinct irony of this sequence is located in Abilene’s performance of the song’s refrain “I got soul, but I’m not a soldier,” as he looks straight toward the camera with a wry smile. In order for the interpreter to recognize the irony of this utterance, she must read this refrain not simply as a musical number placed into the film text, but rather as an intentional subversive disconnect between action and lyrics. Throughout the film it emerges that Abilene is both the film’s narrator and an Iraq War veteran who has been shot during “friendly fire.” Thus, he most certainly is a “soldier.” Furthermore, the importance of the repeated assertion of “having soul” is ironized in Abilene’s reflexive smile. Abilene’s expression serves as a visual cue, which is heightened by the disconnect between the celebrated line “I’ve got soul” emphasized by the backing vocals provided in the song by the gospel choir “The Sweet Inspirations,” and the sexual, debauched, intoxicated gestures performed by Abilene and the back-up dancers.35 Kelly complicates the critical edge of this ironic sequence by rendering Abilene’s hallucination with a flattened aesthetic. His depraved behavior

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and knowing smile not only reflexively demonstrate the incongruity of the assertion “I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier” with the presented narrative, but the hallucinatory sequence appears largely disaffected—the psychedelic drug dampens affect rather than providing euphoria or illumination. The intensity of experience present in Peter Fonda’s New Hollywood LSD trips (The Trip [1967], Easy Rider) is reimagined by Kelly with a compression, or dulling, of affect. The experience is presented as an ironic music video simulation, which allows the deviations from naturalism and narrative consistency to be attributed to the music video genre’s form and style, rather than as intense (affected) experience. The lyrics (although undoubtedly serving a reflexive narrative purpose) and music are appropriated as pastiche. Abilene does not parody, or referentially recite the song’s lyrics in song or speech; rather he mouths the words sung by The Killers’ Brandon Flowers on the existing recording with an amused, but slightly bored, expression. This fusion of boredom and amusement perpetuates the “coolness” of the sequence, and indeed Abilene’s character. Fantasy is thus presented as something to retreat into, and Abilene’s “cool” performance in this sequence ironizes his description of the drug as a tool for existential enlightenment—“when you take the blood train, you talk to God without even seeing him. You hear his voice and you see his disciples, they appear like angels under a sea of black umbrellas. Angels that can see through time.” Given the relationship between the sequence and the film’s broader commentary on US military operations, the vacuity of the media, and celebrity culture, the intent of the text as ironic may appear clear in this instance. However, like all communication acts, irony is culture specific in that it rests on common memories and understanding, and the shared ideologies of the addresser and the addressee. As noted above, while the text’s intention here is no doubt ironic, the specific meanings attributed to the ironic resonances present in Pilot Abilene’s hallucination sequence rely on the audience first recognizing the flatness of Timberlake’s performance and the disconnect between lyrics and action. If the interpreter further recognizes the name of the band “The Killers,” and song’s title “All These Things That I’ve Done” a further ironic layer is received in reference to Abilene’s role as an Iraq War veteran. If the interpreter considers the notion of Fluid Karma enabling the user to “bleed through time” and recognizes the textual allusions within this sequence, the present irony is deepened and pluralized. Abilene’s question to his drug-seeking customer, “Do you bleed?” (delivered in the manner of a military order) at the commencement of this sequence positions it in dialogue with Shylock’s complex plea for equality, “if you prick us, do we not bleed?” in The Merchant of Venice. This intertextual linkage connects the sequence with universal notions of humanism (and, perhaps more problematically, the

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human capacity for vengeance) and a high-culture literary canon; however, the interpreter may complicate this connection by recognizing the appearance of the scantily clad nurses as recalling the low-culture pornography genre. Yet these women may also be recognized as a contemporary incarnation of Busby Berkeley’s intricately choreographed musical-dance sequences, or a playful allusion to the “Gutterballs” drug-infused dream sequence in the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski (1998). The kaleidoscopic imagery and movement of Berkeley’s “By a Waterfall” sequence in Lloyd Bacon’s Footlight Parade (1933) and the manipulated spatiality of the “Gutterballs” sequence here are reproduced as a depthless simulation. Unlike the effects of hallucination for The Big Lebowski’s The Dude—whose fears and desires are melded into a densely saturated dreamscape—Abilene’s hallucination is not presented as a revelatory insight into his anxieties through the “trippy” lens of a psychedelic drug, but rather a numb testosterone-driven fantasy.

FIGURE 1.1 Abilene’s hallucination. Southland Tales Richard Kelly, 2006.

FIGURE 1.2 Abilene’s hallucination. Southland Tales Richard Kelly, 2006.

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Additionally, the casting of Justin Timberlake as Pilot Abilene can be read as ironic within this sequence. Timberlake is a popstar whose masculine physicality (and lyrics) in his own music videos have established a philanderer persona; the fact that here Timberlake does not sing with his own voice, but rather lip-synchs while presenting an anaesthetized version of his usual eroticism, highlights the performative nature of this sequence, and the existentialist claim to “have soul” is further ironized. Each layer of recognition creates multidirectional ironic meaning for the interpreter. The sequence becomes simultaneously concerned with existential and humanist issues, literary allusion and parody, high and low cultures, and its own position within film history, and as such provides a pertinent example of the way ironic expression is motivated in the American eccentric mode. Hutcheon has created a continuum of the functions of irony that demonstrate its multivalent, plural uses and mechanics: reinforcing, complicating, ludic, distancing, self-protective, provisional, oppositional, assailing, and aggregative. Within her continuum of functions, Hutcheon includes the use of irony as a distancing mechanism. This does not connote an unaffected response, but rather suggests variations on the function of “distance” that may include non-commitment (the refusal of engagement) or indifference, “Olympian disdain and superiority,” or may be seen as a vehicle for ascertaining a new perspective for consideration.36 The notion of irony as a distancing mechanism in order to attain new perspectives incorporates the view that irony evades the tyranny of expectant explicit judgment. The distancing effect of irony is not employed in American eccentric films in order to remove affective meaning from articulation—although this does regularly occur; it also is incorporated in the contemplative sense of the “new perspective.” As illustrated in the example of Abilene’s drug-induced dream sequence, the challenge, and indeed textual implication of the multifaceted nature of irony’s use in the American eccentric mode is enriched by the recognition, interpretation, and differentiation between variations in deployment. In this way irony in the American eccentric mode functions as a mechanism for distancing and for the pluralization of meaning in order to reveal an overall sense of anxiety akin to that expressed by New Hollywood filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s. The articulation of these anxieties within contemporary neoliberal America has shifted significantly with the celebration of individual freedoms and rights above the collective experience. Therefore, irony and distance are used to present anxiety in the American eccentric mode as a series of idiosyncratic, unrelated occurrences designed to appear as isolated and personal, rather than shared cultural realities. Anxiety within American eccentric films is generalized and free-floating but treated ironically, as unlike the New Hollywood films, it perceives no external elements on which to hang for cultural legitimization.

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This form of generalized anxiety or existential dread, according to Sianne Ngai, has evolved in Western intellectual history with a specifically gendered status. Ngai notes that in psychoanalysis: The castration complex relies partly on affective strategies to fully distinguish “masculine” and “feminine” attitudes toward perceived loss. In response to this imagined privation, only male subjects are capable of experiencing genuine anxiety or dread whereas female subjects are allotted less traumatic and therefore less profound … affects of nostalgia and envy … Similarly, in the Continental tradition of existentialist philosophy, the privileging of anxiety as a key for interpreting the human condition is accompanied by its being secured as the distinctive—if not exclusive—emotional province of male intellectuals. The obsessive young men and agitated scholars in Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings, for example, seem fused together in Don Giovanni, the hypermasculine and flamboyantly heterosexual hero of Mozart’s opera, who is described as anxiety itself.37 The perceived relationship between the male intellectual and existential anxiety is palpable within the American eccentric mode, in relation to both characterization within the films and the predominantly male filmmakers themselves. I recognize that describing American eccentricity as a symptom, or reaction, to a neoliberal moment risks the suggestion that this experience of American identity is broadly applicable to an entire nation, much in the same way that the term “New Hollywood” has taken on a mythological standing that seems to willfully forget that, despite a sociopolitical context where racial, gender, and sexual politics were under interrogation by a variety of groups within American society, the majority of the now-canonized films of that era are the creative output of a group of white, male directors.38 While some of the more enthusiastic accounts of the era and group of filmmakers whose work I consider American eccentric inadvertently risk a similar (albeit muted) form of mythologizing, under no circumstances do I intend this form of dangerous generalization.39 My aim in enlisting the specific films chosen to elucidate the key formal and aesthetic strategies of American eccentricity is not to demarcate the mode as applicable only to the wealthy, white, male experience (although recognizing that the films selected represent this limited Americanness is essential) or to exclude discussion of works that exist outside of these narrow parameters. Rather, I offer readings of these films as initial points of departure of a mode that is likely to evolve and shift over time. As the most critically prominent instances of this form of cinema (albeit under various labels to date), I employ these canonized indie works to illustrate the textual strategies and functions associated with the current

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politics of American eccentricity as a mode of filmmaking within a broader contemporary cultural discourse and its relationship to film history. As Claire Perkins, among others, has noted, the heavily stylized, ironic, and reflexive look that films labeled “smart” or “quirky” readily lends themselves to being demarcated, and marketed, along the auteurist lines that have historically marginalized women. It is worth quoting Perkins’s excellent work on this issue at length; she writes: The marginalization of female directors in and through the industrial and critical discourse of US indie cinema is effected most powerfully in the maverick myth that cultivates star auteurs such as Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, and Charlie Kaufman. In a manner that explicitly recalls the “gender-bound enthusiasm” of the original politique des auteurs, these male directors are the “rebels on the backlot” who “take back Hollywood.” They are credited with the transformation of commercial filmmaking into a better, more artistic type of popular fare. This reception evokes the Hollywood renaissance era of 1967–75, whose male mavericks, like Arthur Penn and Terrence Malick, have been similarly cast as forging an adventurous new cinema that linked the traditions of classical genre filmmaking with the stylistic innovations of European art cinema. Both the New Hollywood and indie cycles can be characterized in the terms Andrew Sarris uses to describe the former—a cinema of “alienation, anomie, anarchy, and absurdism”—for their focus on character and atmosphere over plot, their taste for violence and other taboo subject matter, and their intense self-consciousness and use of allusion and quotation. In an update of this discourse, Jeffrey Sconce coined the term “smart” film in 2002 to characterize a group of films and cultural works … [that use irony strategically] as a way of putting the films’ “offensive” content in “giant quotation marks.” … I argue that smart cinema constitutes a contemporary movement in which films mobilize techniques of irony and blankness to position themselves knowingly in relation to film historical discourses of authorship, genre, narrative, and style. Thus directors take a dissimulative approach to their signatures or brands. As figures who are hyperconscious of auteur theory as the decipherment of a personal vision and of the way auteurism is framed by contemporary technologies and ideologies, these directors adopt a double voice. That is, they strive to evoke a sincere emotional response while simultaneously creating possibilities for the audience to see through the mechanisms that elicit that response. The result is a highly stylized and often claustrophobic look. This very marketable approach, however, discursively excludes from view the female directors who do not subscribe to this look.40

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While I do not wish to make any essentializing statements regarding gender and style, female filmmakers have largely been omitted from discussions of indie cinema, including “smart,” “quirky,” and, indeed, American eccentricity, which feature irony and overt stylization as textual and aesthetic strategies. The focus in American eccentric films (like those in the “smart” tendency) on “white male urban sophisticates” situates them as a form of “men’s cinema,” in Stella Bruzzi’s terms.41 While neither existential anxiety nor irony is, in reality, the sovereign domain of white men, their cinematic articulation in the key films of the American eccentric mode, such as P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia or Punch-Drunk Love, David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees or films by Wes Anderson or Charlie Kaufman, has largely evolved as a form “grounded in the relationship between, masculinity—its ideology as well as its representation— and aesthetics.”42 Indeed, many of these films position masculinity as bound to the inability to directly articulate anxiety. Thus, the use of irony in these films—both by characters and through aesthetic and formal strategies— is conveyed as a particularly masculine strategy; a means by which “ugly” feelings can be repackaged as intellectual gameplay while simultaneously begging to be recognized for what it truly is. While female filmmakers like Sofia Coppola and Miranda July have created films that I consider firmly within the American eccentric mode, such as Marie Antoinette (2006) and Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), and there are undoubtedly female writers, directors, and performers whose works enlist single elements of American eccentricity—Lena Dunham’s ironic dialogue and the idiosyncratic characters played and created by Greta Gerwig spring to mind—the vast majority of films identified in this book are considered the creative output of white male filmmakers.43 Part of the issue of representation undoubtedly stems from the highly skewed ratio of male to female filmmakers and the hiring, funding, and distribution systems that support and perpetuate this reality.44 However, the fact that there are a number of highly acclaimed female writers and directors working within the independent sector—indeed, at a proportionally higher rate than in the Hollywood studios—does reveal an underlying gender politics at the heart of the dominant examples of American eccentricity that can be understood in relation to the auteurist formulations Perkins identifies as bound to a highly stylized, often self-conscious, or ironic “indie” aesthetic. Although American eccentricity is not an auteurist delineation, the homogeneity of the filmmakers to date (similar to the overwhelming masculinity of the celebrated New Hollywood auteurs) must be recognized as foundational to the evolution of the American eccentric style and politics. By analyzing indie films that have been canonized largely through the auteurist status of their filmmakers, I hope to elucidate the political implications and associations at play within this mode of filmmaking as it emerged in the late 1990s and offer

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some considerations for the changing portrayals of “eccentricity” within the current tumultuous American sociopolitical landscape. It cannot be ignored that the protagonists of American eccentric films are not only male but, on the whole, tend come from socioeconomically privileged backgrounds. The socioeconomic (and gendered) status of these characters situates them as those most likely to succeed within capitalist systems. Unlike indie films within realist modes, such as the neorealist work of Kelly Reichardt or Sean Baker’s The Florida Project (2017), American eccentric cinema does not tend to portray characters at crossroads where decisions made or changing circumstances have the capacity to fundamentally affect their livelihoods, safety, or personal agency.45 Often the absurd narrative goals of characters are only possible within these films because these characters are not beholden to the financial imperatives that drive more naturalistic characters toward what may be considered more realistic goals. When financial struggles are present in these films, they serve to propel the narrative toward amusing or bizarre trajectories rather than highlighting financial struggles or economic inequity as thematic concerns—such as in the bankrupt Royal’s return to the family home in The Royal Tenenbaums, or Craig’s decision to take on a filing job in Being John Malkovich. In these films, it appears that the privileged status of the protagonists is necessary for the narratives, and characters, to function as “eccentric.” Craig does not seek employment at LesterCorp (where he subsequently discovers the Malkovich portal) for financial gain but rather in response to his wife, Lotte’s rational suggestion that “maybe [he’d] feel better if he got a job, or something”; that is, as a means of easing his existential malaise. The narrow range of representation in these films (and in their filmmakers) is problematic, and further work should be undertaken to investigate the presence of this mode outside of these prominent film texts. Indeed, when tracing the more recent ripples of American eccentricity outside of film texts, a less homogeneous representation is evident—for instance in the creative output of female popular music artists like Grimes and Lana Del Rey. While any statements on iterations of American eccentricity outside of cinema, or recent changes in approaches to “indie” film, in the short space of this book will necessarily be speculative and incomplete, I do suggest that the ongoing impact of auteurist marketing and modes of production within film industries and the historical focus on white, male filmmakers, have shaped the discourse and considerations of an “indie” aesthetic to date. It is my sincere hope that the disappointingly homogeneous collection of films represented in this book will spark further investigation in more diverse and inclusive areas of film studies, including work on other areas of creativity that fall outside of the dominant director-based approaches to authorship.

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Anxiety Nicholas Rombes writes that the combination of irony and sincerity in the New Hollywood films—epitomized most fully in Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973)—enabled audiences to be drawn to unconventional (and often violent) protagonists because they are treated with genuine affection and warmth. Rombes describes the use of irony in the New Hollywood as a treacherous balance of irony and sincerity in which there is “a level of ironic detachment buried within a larger story that really and genuinely asked audiences to care about its characters.”46 The audience could genuinely care about these protagonists not only because the films treated characterization with sincerity and genuine affection, but also because their plights related to the sociocultural climate and echoed the experience of some sections of society in the late 1960s and early 1970s.47 The American eccentric mode, on the other hand, depicts anxiety as internally generated crises of identity and purpose that are presented as idiosyncrasies, and confined to the individual within the neoliberal moment rather than readily mapped onto sociocultural events or openly expressed cultural conflicts. For the purpose of this book, existential anxiety refers broadly to angst and despair felt in relation to issues and confrontations of one’s being in the world, specifically in relation to concerns of personal freedom, responsibility, and feelings of individual inauthenticity in everyday life. It is the anxiety articulated in the yearning of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Antoine Roquentin: And I too wanted to be. Indeed I have never wanted anything else; that’s what lay at the bottom of my life: behind all these attempts which seemed unconnected, I find the same desire: to drive existence out of me, to empty the moments of their fat, to wring them, to dry them, to purify myself, to harden myself, to produce in short the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone note. That could serve as a fable: there was a poor fellow who had got into the wrong world … But behind the existence which falls from one present to the next, without a past, without a future, behind these sounds which decompose from day to day, peels away and slips towards death, the melody stays the same, young and firm, like a pitiless witness.48 Roquentin’s anxiety (referred to throughout the novel as “Nausea”) manifests as the feeling of being acutely removed and dislocated from any concrete meaningful existence. Existence, for Roquentin, is a state of absurdity in which everything is, and has been, present within the external world without any inherent reason or explanation—i.e., the first principle of existentialism, “existence precedes essence.”49 The lack of explanation for existence

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generates an unfulfillable desire for the conscious individual to become a concrete thing within the external world. Roquentin’s anxiety, or Nausea, is that he yearns “to be” despite knowing that this state of being is impossible. Investigations of being in the world have manifested specifically in American eccentric films as subject matter. Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) depicts an unnamed protagonist (Wiley Wiggins) in a series of conversations that occur while he is trapped in a continuous string of lucid dreams. These characters discuss the nature of human existence from the perspective of academics, insane activists, criminals, and actors through a number of theoretical positions put forward by David Hume, Sartre, Benedict Anderson, Søren Kierkegaard, and Plato. As the protagonist experiences these conversations from a position of an inescapable dream-state, at no point is an overall philosophical position taken; rather, the film slides between perspectives on free will, identity, social obligation, the nature of reality, and consciousness that cannot be implemented into reality or fully explored during screen-time. David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees similarly takes existential anxiety as its subject. In this film, the characters attempt to make meaning of their lives through the employment of existential detectives. While not all American eccentric films take existential anxiety as their direct narrative subject, many embody anxiety through thematic narrative events. Wes Anderson’s films feature characters dealing with existential malaise and concerns regarding individual purpose that often result in suicide attempts, Dennis Lee expresses issues around the nature of self through the themes of biological parentage and genetic traits in Jesus Henry Christ (2012), and Charlie Kaufman deals with the yearning for a meaningful existence through a theater director’s compulsive, cyclical recreation of theatrical worlds that replace real life in Synecdoche, New York (2008). In her book Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai configures anxiety as an emotion whose drive-object is less a specific object of desire available in the world “than the configuration of the world itself (or what amounts to the same thing) at the future disposition of the self.”50 That is, rather than being directed at any identifiable object of desire, anxiety as an ugly feeling is “objectless” and relates more to the nature of “being in the world” articulated in Sartre’s work and other European existentialists, such as Albert Camus, and Martin Heidegger’s dasein. Anxiety is therefore not locatable in the fear of not acquiring a specific object, or extractable from that object of desire, but the experience of existing in a world devoid of meaning; the absurd in Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus or Roquentin’s search for the cause of and cure to his Nausea. As ugly feelings are “less narratively structured, in the sense of being less object- or goal-orientated” than classic emotions (such as anger and jealousy)

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Ngai characterizes them as canonically “minor” emotions. In this sense, ugly feelings are more like “affects,” which Massumi and Grossberg suggest are feelings or intensities that are not narratively formed or organized as a response to experience or a subject, unlike emotions, which are outwardly defined personal feelings with “function and meaning” that require subjects. Yet as Ngai explains “ugly feelings” share the same negativity of anger or jealousy, as “classic emotions,” in both a semantic sense (in that “they are saturated with socially stigmatizing meanings and values”) and a syntactic sense (in that “they are organized by trajectories of repulsion rather than attraction”).51 Nevertheless, Ngai makes a distinction between the “strongly intentional or object-directed emotions in the philosophical canon” and “minor affects that are far less intentional or object-directed [ugly feelings]”52 by discriminating ugly feelings as being diagnostic rather than strategic (in that, unlike fear or jealousy, these emotions do not provoke action) and therefore are “diagnostically concerned with states of inaction.”53 As the existential anxiety exhibited within American eccentric films is presented as essentially objectless, it can be understood in relation to Ngai’s notion of anxiety as an “ugly” feeling in that it emerges in situations where action is blocked or unfulfilled. The objectless nature of this form of anxiety compounds and intensifies the emotion. Anxiety “tend[s] to produce an unpleasurable feeling about the feeling,”54 which leaves the individual emotionally disempowered. As anxiety often flattens or interferes with the release of other emotions, it remains within a person for longer than any of the dynamic emotions, such as anger, which subsides after a cathartic release. Thus, ugly feelings share a very specific relationship with irony in which the seemingly unjustifiable nature of these feelings produce reflexive responses—i.e., anxiety is often confounded with the feeling of being anxious or ashamed of experiencing the original emotion. The experience of anxiety is often inseparable from the feeling that one should not be feeling anxiety. The unpleasurable reaction to the perception of an ungrounded “ugly feeling,” as such the feeling of anxiety, is “more conducive to producing ironic distance in a way that the grander and more prestigious passions … do not.”55 The covert, ironized representation of existential anxiety depicted in the American eccentric mode may be seen as an expression of illegitimate or unwilling anxiety of this kind. The employment of irony to express what is perceived as “illegitimate” anxiety is the hallmark of American eccentricity. However, as ironic expression is deployed in order to distance these anxieties, it is tethered to sincerity. Thus, the linkage between irony and sincerity that Rombes identifies in the New Hollywood is intensified in the American eccentric mode. In American eccentric films it is no longer the case that “ironic detachment is buried” beneath larger stories of sincere social or political unrest, but rather that the

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ironic detachment is brought to the film’s surface. American eccentric films do not address anxiety directly through naturalistic depictions of meaninglessness as portrayed in some New Hollywood films—as in the final shot of Alice in her wedding dress standing alone outside a deconsecrated church in Arthur Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant (1969), or the flames enveloping Wyatt’s motorcycle beside the two murdered protagonists at the end of Hopper’s Easy Rider. In the American eccentric mode, irony and sarcasm are often employed as means of expressing anxiety, rather than functioning as satirical modes of observation. Sincere anxieties in the American eccentric mode are presented through ironic articulation and parodic quotation in a manner that allows the spectator to both engage with the gravity of existential angst and distance herself from it. As an expectant emotion, anxiety features complex and intricate spatial dimensions in addition to a particular association with temporality and futurity due to its close relationship with anticipation and deferral. Incorporating the psychological concept of “projection,” Ngai writes: Anxiety is invoked not only as an affective response to an anticipated or projected event, but also as something “projected” onto others in the sense of an outward propulsion or displacement—that is, as a quality or feeling the subject refuses to recognize in himself and attempts to locate in another person or thing (usually as a form of naïve or unconscious defense).56 For Ngai, the notion of anxiety as being externally “projected” acts not only as a displacement strategy, but as a vehicle for anxiety to assume a specific form in which it emerges “as a general effect of spatialization involving thrown, hurled, or forcibly displaced objects.”57 In terms of the shift from the manifestations of existential anxiety in the New Hollywood to the American eccentric mode, the notion of projection is fundamental. Many films in the New Hollywood demonstrate existential anxiety as embodied in sociocultural crises through unequivocal criticism and open questioning of authority, institutions, national mythology, and assumed cultural norms and behaviors. Films like Taxi Driver (1976) portray questions of personal freedom and obligation through violent anger, and frustrations directed toward vulnerable systems of government and easily compromised public protection authorities with a deeply unsettling lack of peaceful, satisfactory resolution. Both Midnight Cowboy (1969) and McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) query the notion of national identity in the cultural milieu of 1960s and 1970s America through depictions of national frontier mythology and the figure of the cowboy as fundamentally entwined with unethical practice, prostitution, violent crime, capitalist greed, and ultimately failure. While these illustrations of existential anxiety are evident in the New Hollywood that were

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palpable in subsets of society at the time through popular discourse, political demonstrations, popular music, literary, and image cultures, in the American eccentric mode existential anxieties are presented as isolated instances rather than as potentially shared emotion. These anxieties are projected in an ironized manner—through deflective language, amusing portrayals of neuroses, allusion, parody—that responds to the sociocultural neoliberal principles of logic, individuality, self-interest, and competition. For example, Hal Hartley presents issues of romantic connection, artistic authenticity, and emotional isolation in Henry Fool (1997) through the unusual plight of a socially isolated, awkward garbage man who is considered by his family and co-workers to be “a retard,” Simon Grim (James Urbaniak), and the influence of a maladroit, reprobate poet, Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan). The mysterious, verbose, epicurean Henry carries the evidence of his criminal past in volumes of notebooks labeled “My Confession.” Henry describes his “Confession” as a pretext for a far more expansive consideration of general truths. It’s a philosophy. A poetics. A politics, if you will. A literature of protest. A novel of ideas. A pornographic magazine of truly comic-book proportions. It is, in the end, whatever the hell I want it to be. And when I’m through with it, it’s gonna blow a hole this wide … straight through the world’s idea of itself. Henry’s opus is uniformly rejected by all who read it. Nevertheless, when he discovers that Simon naturally writes in iambic pentameter, Henry successfully initiates him into the world of poetry and literature. Simon’s controversial pornographic poetry eventually is awarded a Nobel Prize. Henry Fool, on the other hand, is forced by his criminal past to swiftly escape from the country by assuming Simon’s identity, leaving behind his unhappy and deeply troubled marriage and child. Hartley’s Henry demonstrates the objectless anxiety explored by Ngai. Early in the film, Henry responds to Simon’s assertion “it hurts to breathe” with a deadpan and broad affirmation, “of course it does.” Where Simon’s complaint refers to his physical condition (the pain he feels due to the broken ribs he has sustained from a brutal attack), Henry’s response is a non-specific statement on the crisis of human existence. The concept of projection, and the noticeable shift from the New Hollywood cultural manifestations and naturalistic depictions to the individual, ironic, reflexive articulations in American eccentricity, maps Ngai’s notion that “the question of timing that one normally associates with anxiety’s affective grammar (When?) can also become a question of location (Where?)”58—i.e., throughout both the cinema of the New Hollywood and the American eccentric mode the problem of “When” remains constant, while the iteration of “Where” is dispersedly relocated through postmodern cinematic techniques.

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Eccentricity Films concerned with cultural existential anxiety are not new to American cinema history—consider the paranoia and angst in the postwar film noir, or existential Westerns such as High Noon (1952). The continuity of anxiety as a cultural preoccupation is evident in the popularity of what Thomas Elsaesser calls “mind-game films” since the 1990s. Elsaesser writes that mind-game films, such as Memento (2000) and Fight Club (1999), often investigate ontological and epistemological insecurities, in terms of both thematic concern and encouraged viewing practices, by centering on mentally or psychologically unstable protagonists whose perspective is privileged in the film’s narration. As Elsaesser writes, the mind-game film can be read through a psychoanalytic lens whereby “the mind-game protagonists’ plight [is viewed] as the pathologies of individual lives, but just as forcefully opening out to contemporary issues of identity, recognition by others, and subjectivity in general, so that the pathologies prevailing in the films reveal”59 different relationships to our contemporary network society, or the possibilities of alternative structures for the connection between the mind and perception, a shift from the sociocultural organization based on myth and narrative toward protocol and procedures and therefore can be read as productive. Unsurprisingly, due to the common focus on mental instability there are mind-game films that also fall into my categorization of American eccentricity—specifically those written or directed by Charlie Kaufman. However, most American eccentric films discussed in this book cannot be classed as mind-game films in that they largely employ (although at times reflexively) the classical linear narrative form, rather than favoring “pattern recognition (over identification of individual incidents), and [requiring] cinematic images to be read as picture puzzles, data-archives, or ‘rebuspictures’ (rather than as indexical, realistic representations).”60 What the location of anxieties or pathologies that relate to the broader sociocultural milieu within specific characters or film worlds that is common to both formulations potentially indicates is a broader tendency in indie cinema and contemporary culture toward these themes and intellectual tactics. Where the mind-game film utilizes subjectivity and active puzzle-solving viewing strategies, the American eccentric mode employs postmodern techniques of parody, pastiche, reflexivity, and ironic representation in a fluctuating manner to express a contemporary American existential anxiety against the backdrop of contested, and fragmented national identity in the neoliberal moment. What is often mistakenly characterized as postmodernism (or superficially as postpostmodernism) in the American eccentric mode is the textual complexity

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arising from the co-existence of pop-cultural, postmodern aesthetics and otherwise entirely sincere modernist existential concerns and themes. American eccentricity, as a mode of cinema that employs ironic articulation with sincerity in order to express existential anxiety, can be located within the broader post-ironic turn in literature, cinema, art, music, and popular culture since the 1990s. While there are many titles, sub-groupings, and analogous or overlapping movements or tendencies that have been identified, the vast body of work that emerged in the 1990s with a broad post (or even anti) ironic sentiment has been most usefully identified as the “New Sincerity.” In general terms, the New Sincerity is regarded as a reaction to the ironic end-games and distrust of sincere feeling as a mark of naiveté (outlined in the introduction) to David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” This reaction did not advocate for a simple disavowal of ironic expression and return to an older sincere tradition, but rather a complex approach to irony and sincerity that is evident in the work of writers such as Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, and Jennifer Egan, along with Wallace himself. These writers embraced the notion that “fiction would become a conversation, the primary aim of which would be to make the reader and writer feel less lonely in the face of the contemporary world,”61 not by rejecting postmodern irony, but rather employing ironic and reflexive tactics with sincerity in order to question the irreducibility of authenticity and sincerity in their practice, while inviting, and provoking, an affective response in the reader.62 The term “New Sincerity” in film scholarship was originally coined by Jim Collins to describe a cultural phenomenon within 1990s genre cinema. Collins identifies two apparently oppositional approaches to genre that had arisen in the context of a cultural obsession with media and the availability of new technologies, such as the VCR, which enabled a perpetually accumulating array of classic and contemporary texts that were subject to increasingly nearinstant, random accessibility and recall in contemporary American society. One tendency Collins identifies as a reaction to this situation was based in “an ironic hybridization of pure classical genres,” exemplified by films such as Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future Part III (1990). These films juxtapose eclectic reference points and genre conventions in a form of “hyperconscious intertextuality” that reflect changes in audience competence and perceptions of cultural literacy.63 The other approach Collins notes to the media-saturated landscape is the rejection of irony altogether in favor of an acute lost authenticity that is only realizable through absolute sincerity. Collins identifies Dances with Wolves (1990) and Field of Dreams (1989) as films within the New Sincerity as they recover purity and sincerity by locating their narratives in fictional pasts before the infiltration of media corruption. American eccentricity does embody a structure of feeling that equates to a new sincerity—however, this is more akin to the New Sincerity

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employed in literature by Eggers and Wallace than the New Sincerity outlined by Collins. As Warren Buckland writes: Collins seems to mean simply “sincerity” rather than “new sincerity.” The new of new sincerity signifies it is a response to postmodern irony and nihilism: not a rejection of it, not a nostalgic return to an idyllic, old sincerity. Instead, in a dialectical move, new sincerity incorporates postmodern irony and cynicism; it operates in conjunction with irony.64 Sincerity in the American eccentric mode does not reflect Collins’s New Sincerity (which is bound with purity and a rejection of irony), but rather is aligned with Buckland’s description as a response to postmodern irony as found in its literary counterparts. Perhaps the most developed and discussed formulation of 1990s ironic cinema is Jeffrey Sconce’s (and later, Claire Perkins’s) account of “smart” cinema, which he first identified as a tendency prevalent in the work of filmmakers such as Todd Solondz, Neil LaBute, Alexander Payne, Hal Hartley, Wes Anderson, P.T. Anderson, Ang Lee, John Herzfeld, Doug Liman, Atom Egoyam, Todd Haynes, Spike Jonze, Richard Kelly, and Richard Linklater. Sconce argues that the smart cinema style emerged in response to the increasing prevalence of irony and parody in cultural discourse, demonstrated in the smart cinema sensibility through “a predilection for irony, black humour, fatalism, relativism and, yes, even nihilism.”65 Sconce establishes a premise for the “smart” aesthetic based on a shift in its approach to critiques of bourgeois culture: where codes of “bourgeois realism” and “bourgeois society” had previously been largely critiqued in forms of art cinema through formal experimentation with film style and narrative structure, smart cinema reinstates classical narrative structures, and rather focuses on experiments with tone in order to comment on “bourgeois” taste and culture.66 For Sconce there is a clear delineation between “smart” cinema, which he sees as being outside of the Hollywood mainstream (as suggested in the name), and “dumb” cinema, a category in which the mainstream Hollywood films of Jerry Bruckheimer, Michael Bay, and James Cameron can be placed. Smart cinema as a sensibility (a term he notes is “admittedly vague”) is centered on a set of definable narrative, stylistic, and thematic elements, that can be, and are, deployed in various combinations in single films. Sconce outlines the five distinct elements of the smart film sensibility as: 1

the cultivation of a “blank” style and incongruous narration;

2

a fascination with “synchronicity” as a principle of narrative organization;

3

a related thematic interest in random fate;

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4

a focus on the white middle-class family as a crucible of miscommunication and emotional dysfunction;

5

a recurring interest in the politics of taste, consumerism and identity.67

Despite the semblance of disdain, apathy, and intellectual detachment present in “smart” films, the use of irony is a strategic gesture as well as an indescribable cultural condition that groups the audience into those that “get it” and those who do not. The employment of a blank ironic tone in smart cinema is undertaken to perform an alliance with like-minded peers and to provide distance from the vast “other” audiences. The smart audience is intended to be disenchanted, educated (in Sconce’s terms “bespectacled”) individuals who exhibit disdainful irony and emotional detachment from their sociocultural existences.68 Where there are many points of intersection between “smart” cinema and American eccentricity—particularly notable in the number of films and filmmakers that are identified in both formulations, but also in the focus on emotional dysfunction, consumerism, identity, and irony—the mechanics and intent of ironic expression differ. Sconce notes that irony is mobilized in the “smart” film as “a tactic of disaffection, a certain social formation (defined perhaps more by bohemian aspirations than generational boundaries) created a culture of semiotic exile in the 1990s, reading ‘against the grain’ of so-called mainstream culture while cultivating a ‘new voice’ of cynical detachment.”69 Irony in the American eccentric mode, on the other hand, functions without requisite cynicism or disaffection. Instead, irony is employed as a distancing mechanism to promote sincere engagement with narrative trajectories and characters despite the unresolvable existential anxieties present. Nevertheless, smart film uses irony and reflexivity to investigate the anomie of distinct social subsets within contemporary consumer culture, which indicates (alongside the focus on pathologies in the mind-game film) that a broader set of sociocultural anxieties within the neoliberal moment has found its way into “indie” cinema in various formations.70 The most obvious corollary for American eccentricity of the existing theoretical formulations is James MacDowell’s “quirky,” as like the “eccentric” demarcation, “quirky” evokes the notion that films of this sort are “unusual; yet also not quite strange, or avant-garde.”71 Both formulations suggest an overt acknowledgment and, largely, compliance with mainstream conventions but include a tendency in these films to deploy these conventions in an off-beat manner, thereby creating an “odd” tone. MacDowell writes that the “quirky” can be identified by the following conventions: A modal combination of the melodramatic with the comedic; a mixing of comedic styles such as bathetic deadpan, comedy of embarrassment, and slapstick; a visual and aural style that frequently courts a fastidious

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and simplified sense of artificiality; and a thematic interest in childhood and innocence. Most pervasive, however, is a tone that balances ironic “detachment” from sincere “engagement” with the films’ fictional world and their characters.72 MacDowell positions the quirky within a number of other present cinematic tendencies that are engaged in “navigating the terrain between irony and sincerity”73—specifically, Mayshark’s Post-Pop cinema, Elena Gorfinkel’s contemporary historical anachronism, and Nicholas Rombes’s New Punk cinema. He writes that rather than framing these tendencies as separate from one another and comprising wholly individual tonal preoccupations, these tendencies are better conceived as “individual iterations of a broader ‘structure of feeling’ in the millennial and postmillennial culture,”74 which, as Lee Konstantinou writes in defense of his term “postirony,” explore “the use of ironic and self-consciously experimental means towards sincere or sentimental ends.”75 Like my delineation of American eccentricity from smart cinema, MacDowell places quirky cinema in dialogue with, and yet distinct from, Sconce’s work on the basis that the quirky does not focus on ironic apathy and cynicism. He writes that, unlike the form of irony that Sconce sees as characterizing smart cinema, this is a mode of address that “sees everything in ‘quotation marks,’” and is opposed to “‘sincerity,’ ‘positivity’ … ‘engagement,’ ‘passion,’ ‘affect,’ and so on”76—the quirky engages with a more complex form of irony. By moving away from smart cinema’s dominant mode of ironic and cynical expression, MacDowell aligns the quirky aesthetic with a new structure of feeling that builds on Jim Collins’s New Sincerity and Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s metamodernism: the broader phenomenon of interwoven irony and sincerity within cultural expression. To this end, MacDowell states: In characterizations of postmodern irony that associate the discourse with detachment, cynicism, pessimism, or even nihilism, we begin to see potential horizons of a competing structure of feeling that might be concerned to move beyond (or in an alternative direction than) its forebear— towards a contemporary approach that incorporates the possibility of both critical distance and enthusiastic engagement, sceptical cynicism and affirmation, irony and sincerity.77 MacDowell writes that quirky can “serve productively as an umbrella term for a particular, but widespread strain of comedy and comedic drama that emerged during the last two decades of American indie filmmaking” and encompasses such names as “Michel Gondry, Jared Hess, Spike Jonze,

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Miranda July, Charlie Kaufman, and Mike Mills, as well as films like PunchDrunk Love (Anderson 2002), I Heart Huckabees (Russell 2004), Lars and the Real Girl (Gillespie 2007), Juno (Reitman 2008), Paper Heart (Jasenovec 2009), and so forth.”78 These films exhibit a distinguishing tone in the perspective taken toward their characters, world, and conventions, and the relationship between the film and the spectator.79 The tonal balance of irony and sincerity functions in this formulation of the sensibility as a way of looking at the world in which it is possible to “view characters’ schemes and achievements as comically absurd or potentially bound for failure—and thus open to a certain amount of ridicule—at the same time as they are treated with degrees of sympathy.”80 Many of the films identified as “quirky” can also be identified as American eccentric works, particularly those by Wes Anderson and Spike Jonze— there can be no doubt that the quirky and American eccentricity occupy corresponding and overlapping territory. However, MacDowell strongly associates the “quirky” with comedy, particularly a form of humor which is often rendered uncomfortable and painful in that it results from a “character’s emotional distress being situated as simultaneously pathetic and poignant” which induces a dual, awkward emotional response.81 The approach taken to comedy in the quirky is largely deadpan and perfunctory (almost to the point of absurdity in the incongruous juxtaposition of flat execution and ostentatious utterances), aiding an intimate marriage of melodramatic and comedic registers.82 American eccentricity, on the other hand, does not focus on humor as a primary textual demarcation, nor do humor and ironic distance place the spectator in an evaluative position in relation to characters such that they are viewed as pathetic or awkward. Rather, the use of irony and reflexivity function in order to create, in MacDowell’s terms, an elasticized relationship with the poignancy of the character’s anxiety. Nevertheless, there is a clear and informative relationship between the quirky and American eccentricity in terms of their cognate titles and their textual practices. But what does the trend of “quirky” or “off-beat” film tendencies, alongside American eccentricity, suggest about our contemporary moment? Do these tendencies denote a shift in contemporary discourse toward everyday categories, such as “zany,” “cute,” and “interesting” to describe “the hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism,” as Ngai suggests? She proposes that in the post-Fordist economy, the aesthetic categories “zany,” “cute,” and “interesting” speak directly to our quotidian practices of production, circulation, and consumption. Unlike traditional aesthetics, such as beauty or the sublime, the zany, the interesting, and the cute are relatively weak—they are indeed “images of indifference, insignificance, and ineffectuality”;83 that is, they are mundane, trivial, and inconsequential. The diminutive and ineffectual

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nature of these aesthetic categories reflects a fundamental uncertainty, or, perhaps unwillingness to reveal and examine our contemporary aesthetic experiences in the neoliberal period. American eccentricity can be read as a direct correlate of this unwillingness or inability to speak directly about contemporary experience as a matter of any consequence. As a mode, American eccentricity layers ironic reflexivity, intertextual game-play, and overt artifice on top of the ungrounded, free-floating existential anxiety in these films because these ironic strategies defer serious contemplation of unresolvable issues and enable an experience that might be simply enjoyed for the “offbeat” or “quirky” aesthetic and tone created. Just as the zany is always on the cusp of pathology, the eccentric is an uneven balance between playfulness and crisis. In the neoliberal moment, the term “eccentric” is an appropriate label for this form of cinematic practice. Where terms such as “quirky” or “offbeat” gesture toward vague peculiarity or benign idiosyncrasy in generally positive but non-specific terms, “eccentricity” implies these qualities are confined within an individual. The term “quirky,” as an adjective, is a characteristic of a personality or object that differs from the mainstream often in, to invoke Ngai’s formulations, “cute” or “interesting” ways. In contemporary parlance, “quirkiness” is often employed as an adjectival marker of distinction associated with hipster affectations. The characters played by Zooey Deschanel or Michael Cera are described as “quirky” as a positive trait, while Lonely Planet markets guides for “quirky” travelers, numerous web-based lists advertise “quirky” bars and restaurants with eclectic décor or themes, with the implication that these objects are “not for everyone,” and therefore “cool,” or fashionable. Eccentricity, on the other hand, is not perceived to be a fashionable affectation, but rather a constant state of unshakeable oddity embodied by an individual. As the “eccentric” is often associated with genius, extreme creativity, or mental illness, there is a seriousness to the eccentric, a sense that beyond “quirky” mannerisms there is something essentially unique about the individual’s mind that cannot be readily understood by others. It is the combination of oddity and serious anxiety presented through the perception of fundamental, impenetrable “difference” that defines the American eccentric mode. It is not the case that American eccentric films simply center on eccentric characters, as in films like A Beautiful Mind (2001) or Crumb (1994), but rather that eccentric characters are part of a textual practice that, in concert with the term’s Latin origin, exists outside “the center” or on the margins of convention. I therefore contend that American eccentricity refers to a set of characteristics that are evident in a number of contemporary American films, albeit in several configurations and concentrations, which serve, in John Frow’s formulation, as the markers of a specific modality in

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cinema.84 In the American eccentric mode, the thematic features and textual characteristics are: 1

the presence of allusion, parody, and intertextuality formally (in terms of genre and meta-cinematic depiction) and playfulness/cinephilia;

2

sincere thematic underpinnings that are presented at a distance due to the film’s perceived “quirkiness,” amusing occurrences, and/or absurd aesthetic;

3

a form of ironic expression that is both reflexive and sincere;

4

characters and cinematic worlds that are designed to encourage audience alignment despite being clearly constructed;

and, above all 5

affective and intellectual engagement with an experience of existential anxiety.

The focus on individuals as discrete entities and consumers rather than as part of the community or nation-state in neoliberal ideology is mirrored and embodied in the American eccentric mode. American eccentricity presents classic, objectless existential anxieties as though they are distinctly idiosyncratic—confined to individual “eccentric” films rather than as a shared cultural phenomenon. Ironically, it is precisely the “eccentricities” of these films that promote engagement with their sincere concerns. The use of irony and reflexivity to address the gravity of emotions such as anxiety, grief, and bereavement, as Michael Chabon suggests, does not signal a withdrawal, but rather facilitates an engagement with sincere issues that are “too big” to be approached directly.85 As I use the term “mode” in an adjectival sense as an augmentation of existing genres, the next chapter considers genre conventions in American eccentricity.

Notes 1 Geoff King, Indie 2.0: Change and Continuity in Contemporary American Indie Film (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 57. 2 Geoff King, Indiewood, USA: Where Hollywood Meets Independent Cinema (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 34. 3 Yannis Tzioumakis, American Independent Cinema: An Introduction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 7. 4 These assertions are made in Geoff King’s collections, but also in Michael Z. Newman, Indie: An American Film Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), among others.

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5 King, Indiewood, 3. 6 Sean O’Neal, “Hal Hartley Launches Kickstarter Campaign to Finish His New Movie,” A.V. Club, November 1, 2011 (2015). 7 King, Indiewood, 5. 8 King explains the commercial nature of Indiewood has been viewed as a threat to films on the more independent end of the spectrum as the specialty divisions of Hollywood studios are perceived to dominate access to theaters. Indiewood films have also increasingly been marketed and financed like mainstream studio films, with increased spending on wide theatrical release and advertising Indie 2.0, 7–13. 9 Claire Molloy, “Indie Cinema and the Neoliberal Commodification of Creative Labor: Rethinking the Indie Sensibility of Christopher Nolan,” in A Companion to American Indie Film, ed. Geoff King (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 368. 10 Christina Lane also notes that the cultural, political, economic, and institutional climate between 1982 and 1992 aided the critical and festival circuit success of many independent feminist filmmakers. “Susan Seidelman’s Contemporary Films: The Feminist Art of Self-Reinvention in a Changing Technological Landscape,” in Indie Reframed: Women’s Filmmaking and Contemporary American Independent Cinema, eds. Linda Badley, Claire Perkins, and Michele Schreiber (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 70. 11 Molloy, “Indie Cinema and the Neoliberal Commodification of Creative Labor,” 373. 12 Ibid., 374. 13 Ibid., 375. 14 Geoff King, American Independent Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 2. 15 Anna Backman Rogers, American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 4, 16. 16 Ibid., 15–16. 17 Janet Staiger, “Independent of What?” in American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond, eds. Geoff King, Claire Molloy, and Yannis Tzioumakis (New York: Routledge, 2013), 16. 18 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production,” in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 29–112. 19 Rona Murray, Studying American Independent Cinema (Leighton Buzzard: Auteur, 2014), 258. 20 For instance, the hyperbolic judgment distinction between “smart” and “dumb” cinema provocatively outlined by Sconce. 21 Backman Rogers, American Independent Cinema, 2. 22 Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 10.

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23 James MacDowell, Irony in Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 8. 24 Ibid., 202. 25 Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, 15. 26 Ibid., 57–60. 27 Ibid., 11, emphasis in original. 28 MacDowell, Irony in Film, 168. 29 Ibid., 173. 30 Ibid., 174. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 32. 33 We are told that “Fluid Karma” is available in a range of colors, Abilene describes them to his customer by saying—“Green–you dream, blue–in an hour you feel new. You can forget about Mellow Yellow and Agent Orange, because I’m giving you Blood Red.” 34 Steven Shaviro, “Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales,” Film-Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2010): 86. 35 Abilene gulps down cans of Budweiser and pours the beer over his head in a display reminiscent of a fraternity party fantasy akin to those present in Old School (2003), or National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978). 36 Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, 49. 37 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 213–214. 38 I do not mean to suggest that these directors (such as Bogdanovich, Penn, Nichols, Scorsese, Ashby, Coppola) are undeserving of their accolades, but rather acknowledge that much of the popular discourse around the New Hollywood era ignores the homogeneity of filmmakers it celebrates. At a recent conference on the New Hollywood in Bangor, Wales, many participants acknowledged the fairly narrow narrative that has become that dominate the era’s mythology. For instance, Aaron Hunter’s work on women in the New Hollywood is crucial to unpicking and re-instating the importance of women in this era. Hunter’s work looks at the role that creatives other than directors had in the era, and by moving away from the dominant auteurist construct. Hunter states that the “celluloid ceiling is doubleglazed”—noting that the understudied area of women in the New Hollywood is multifaceted and institutional (in addition to, and in dialogue with, the systemic sexism often associated with auteurism) in that there is a lack of archival material on many women’s work. See also Aaron Hunter, Authoring Hal Ashby: The Myth of the New Hollywood Auteur (New York: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2016) on auteurism and New Hollywood mythology. 39 Peter Biskind’s “sequel of sorts” to Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex’n’Drugs “n” Rock’n’Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (London: Bloomsbury, 1999) a controversial, gossipy, industry account of the New Hollywood, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film (London: Bloomsbury, 2005) conceptually links the two

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periods and demarcates the period as an overwhelmingly white, masculine space. James Mottram’s The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood (London: Faber & Faber, 2006) performs a similar omission, whereas Derek Hill’s Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood’s Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers: An Excursion into the American New Wave (London: Kamera Books, 2008) makes a problematic inclusion of Sofia Coppola in his delineation of a “new wave” that situates her in relation to her relations rather than an auteur in her own right (as is the approach taken to her male counterparts in the book). 40 Claire Perkins, “Beyond Indiewood: The Everyday Ethics of Nicole Holofcener,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 29, no. 1 (2014): 140–141. 41 Linda Badley, “Down to the Bone: Neo-neorealism and Genre in Contemporary Women’s Indies,” in Indie Reframed: Women’s Filmmaking and Contemporary American Independent Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 122. 42 Stella Bruzzi, Men’s Cinema: Masculinity and Mise En Scène in Hollywood (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 6. 43 Mayshark writes that his included directors “There are … obvious if superficial connections: Except for Michel Gondry, they are all American; they are all white, and mostly from middle-class or upper-middle-class backgrounds. Except for Haynes, they are all heterosexual. Except for Coppola, they are all male. And they were mostly born in the 1960s … They share actors … collaborators … and sometimes more … ” before outlining their thematic connections, but he doesn’t note the impact that this sort of demographic delineation may have on the conceptualization of the concerns he sees raised in their work. Post-Pop Cinema: The Search for Meaning in New American Film (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2007), 8. 44 In the introduction to their edited collection, Linda Badley, Claire Perkins, and Michele Schreiber write that despite figures in 2013–2014 demonstrating that “women made up 26% of the practitioners working on independent films [which is an increase] of two points from 2008-2009” female writers and directors—i.e., the areas of production most readily associated with authorship—are actually in decline. Indie Reframed: Women’s Filmmaking and Contemporary American Independent Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 3. See also: Sarah E.S. Sinwell, “Women Make Movies: Chicken & Egg Pictures, Gamechanger Films and the Future of Female Independent Filmmaking” in the same edition (23–35). 45 Badley, “Down to the Bone,” 121. 46 Nicholas Rombes, “The Razor’s Edge of American Cinema: The New Sincerity of Post-Ironic Films,” Web del Sol 2003 (2014). 47 By this I refer to events such as the Watergate scandal, the Vietnam War, and countercultural politics to do with (but not limited to) the sexual revolution, women’s rights, and civil rights. 48 Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (New York: New Directions, 1964), 248–249, emphasis in original.

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49 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996 Original edition, 1945), 20. 50 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 210. 51 Ibid., 11. 52 Ibid., 20. 53 Ibid., 22, emphasis in original. 54 Ibid., 10. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 210. 57 Ibid., 215. 58 Ibid., 212. 59 Thomas Elsaesser, “The Mind-Game Film,” in Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, ed. Warren Buckland (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 36. 60 Ibid., 50. 61 Adam Kelly, “New Sincerity,” in Postmodern/Postwar and After: Rethinking American Literature, eds. Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, and Daniel Worden (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2016), 200. 62 Ibid., 206. 63 Jim Collins, “Genericity in the 90s: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity,” in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, eds. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Collins (New York: Routledge, 1993), 243, 250. 64 Warren Buckland, “Wes Anderson: A ‘Smart’ Director of the New Sincerity?” New Review of Film and Television Studies 10, no. 1 (2012): 2. 65 Jeffrey Sconce, “Irony, Nihilism and the New American ‘Smart’ Film,” Screen 43, no. 4 (2002): 350. 66 Ibid., 352. 67 Ibid., 358. 68 Pat Brereton “Teaching Smart Cinema: DVD Add-ons and New Audience Pleasures” MIT Conference May (2011), 13–15. 69 Sconce, Irony, Nihilism, 356–357. 70 Jeffrey Sconce, “Smart Cinema,” in Contemporary American Cinema, eds. Linda Ruth Williams and Mark Hammond (Berkshire: McGraw-Hill Education, 2006), 429–439. 71 James MacDowell, “Quirky: Buzzword or sensibility,” in American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond, eds. by G. King, C. Molloy, and Y. Tzioumakis (New York: Routledge, 2013), 53. 72 James MacDowell, “The Andersonian, the Quirky, and ‘Innocence,’” in The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon, ed. Peter C. Kunze (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 154. 73 Nick Rombes, “Sincerity and Irony,” New Punk Cinema, ed. Nick Rombes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 85.

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74 MacDowell, “The Andersonian,” 160. 75 Lee Konstantinou, Wipe That Smirk Off Your Face: Postironic Literature and the Politics of Character (ProQuest: UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2009), 12. 76 James MacDowell, “Notes on Quirky,” Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism 1, no. 1 (2001): 11. 77 MacDowell, “The Andersonian,” 161. 78 Ibid., 154. 79 MacDowell, “Notes on Quirky,” 1. 80 James MacDowell, “Quirky: Buzzword or Sensibility?” in American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond, eds. Geoff King, Claire Molloy, and Yannis Tzioumakis (New York: Routledge, 2013), 55, emphasis in original. 81 In “Joke Work: Comic Labor and the Aesthetics of the Awkward” Pansy Duncan identifies “awkward” as comic-aesthetic judgment in the recent cringe-comedy tendency. She writes, “whereas laughter has long been comedy’s emotional trademark, cringe comedy finds fruition in a feeling of awkwardness that, conspicuously dysphoric, must be endured, like work, rather than enjoyed, like play.” While American eccentricity is not strictly classified as “cringe comedy” in Duncan’s definition—which she associates with documentary and verite styles of television and cinema—some elements of this “awkward” style of comedy are evident within these films. Comedy Studies 8, no. 1 (2017): 36–56. 82 MacDowell, “Notes on Quirky,” 3. 83 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 18. 84 John Frow, Genre: The New Critical Idiom (New York and London: Routledge, 2006). 85 Michael Chabon, “Wes Anderson’s Worlds,” The New York Review of Books (2013).

2 Road Films and National Identity

A “

man went looking for America. And couldn’t find it anywhere … ” read the tagline for Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider in 1969. As Easy Rider’s opening credits roll, Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild” bursts over the soundtrack as a countercultural call to arms. The camera jumps from introductory close-ups of Wyatt (Peter Fonda), in an American flag-adorned leather jacket, and Billy (Dennis Hopper), in a Native-American-style buckskin suit, to long shots of the two men speeding east on the iconic Route 66. The sequence intercuts point-of-view and tracking two-shots, while the upbeat rhythm of “Born to Be Wild,” and lyrics “Get your motor runnin.’ Head out on the highway,” encourage the audience to view themselves as fellow road travelers. The film’s opening sequence has become an icon of road film mythology. It symbolizes the promise of liberation in “lookin’ for adventure” on the road—with the hipness of the road trip exemplified on the soundtrack. This promise, however, is a seduction. As Wyatt and Billy blithely ride east, away from Los Angeles—the end of the traditional American frontier—it is not with the pioneering hope of discovering a place within America, but with the desperate need to recover something lost from the foundational concept of the American nation. Easy Rider centers on national and personal identity, obligation, and liberation as thematic concerns, and as such provides a significant reference point for contemporary existential road narratives. By taking to the road in a rambling pursuit of Mardi Gras, Wyatt and Billy not only embody a countercultural, generational zeitgeist of late 1960s America, but they potentially enact on screen the complex unfulfilled desires of their implied audience. George Hanson’s (Jack Nicholson) lamentation, “You know, this used to be a helluva good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it,” was positioned to exemplify the national and individual anxieties of both the hippies and those

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within the establishment that served as the impetus for the New Hollywood road trips. George Hanson, a troubled alcoholic and American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, personifies a bridge between the conservative South (where Wyatt and Billy are detained for partaking in a patriotic parade “without a permit”) and the countercultural hippie movement. Hanson’s intoxicated lament demonstrates that the institutions charged with the task of defending Constitutional rights had become internally compromised. His decision to join Wyatt and Billy (fueled by the promise of reaching a renowned New Orleans brothel) reflects the resigned failure of institutionalized democracy in favor of the promise of liberty offered by the road. However, for Wyatt and Billy, reaching Mardi Gras does not equate to the fulfillment of purpose—rather, they (and the audience) experience New Orleans as a collage of synthetic, psychedelic, temporally altered moments facilitated by the consumption of LSD. The success and popularity of Easy Rider (and Bonnie and Clyde two years prior) fused rebellion with the act of driving,1 thereby integrating the road itself into the narrative of the road film. Earlier road films promoted a different relationship to driving and the nation. In the prewar period, the road was seen to perform a symbolic unification for national identity in the face of the “regional, racial, ethnic, and class differences that the war made apparent, and, even more pointedly, for showing how popular culture gave the United States its coherence as ‘America,’ everyone’s ‘home.’”2 By the late 1960s the homogeneous national image of “America” was fractured and this was somewhat reflected in the depiction of national identity and nationhood in road films of that period, although still largely from the perspective of masculine, and largely white, protagonists. Despite the stated emphasis on departures and projected arrivals, postwar road films are essentially concerned with being on the road. These films are “defined by [their] extended middle.”3 The road is a marginal space, a site devoid of domestic spaces and people—“a perpetual in-between.”4 Laderman posits that the nature of the road journey affords the genre a fairly unrestricted narrative trajectory as they have the capacity to carve out a more roaming, “free-wheelin” path, rather than necessarily adhering to the beginning-middle-end structure of conventional mainstream cinema. Whether or not the precise motivations are known to the protagonist, the road journey is often set in motion in order to avoid an undesirable current lifestyle, escape the authorities, in pursuit of an alternate way of life, or to achieve some form of realization. Alternatively, the road journey may be propelled by a requirement to acquire something or arrive somewhere. Due to the frequent recurrence of these narrative trajectories, Julian Stringer states that the road film can be differentiated from other genres by defining distinct parameters of action and by aspiring to complete a particular emotional trajectory. The progression is toward a unified and

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fulfilling subjectivity. Road movie logic maintains that the further you drive from civilization the more easily you can shake off its constraints, the more people you leave behind the closer you can get to yourself.5 The journey beyond cultural familiarity is portrayed as a means of cultural critique, personal revelation, and an exhilarating experience as the road represents the possibility of unplanned adventure through the liberating and uneasy unknown. The freedom to cross borders (afforded by the highway system) and leave the familiar behind is “rediscovered as a movement across open space.”6 Yet, as Stringer suggests, although the road provides the illusion of the alleviation of the pressure of societal constraints, these generic aspirations are always placed in contention with contradictory impulses—“the myth of escape and self-discovery are always chimerical, just two more mirages along the way.”7 The tension between rebellion and conformity at the generic core of the road film is frequently undermined or diluted by societal convention as, despite the act of departure, protagonists always travel with significant cultural baggage.8 New Hollywood road films experiment with narrative form and unresolved (non)endings; however, these films do not divorce themselves wholly from the narrative structure of mainstream cinema. Rather they engage with narrative expectation in order to deny the possibility of cathartic resolution or the clear fulfillment of set goals. Although there are often stated goals within the road film, the internal journeys fuel and overshadow the physical journeys—thus, while Wyatt and Billy state that they are on their way to Mardi Gras, their journey is to gain something like enlightenment, or a liberated life.9 For the New Hollywood, the road film was presented as a means by which the counterculture could examine their dissatisfaction with mainstream society, and attempt to defy the societal expectations from which they felt increasingly removed. This attempt, however, proved unsatisfactory and, ultimately, a failure. Despite their interrogatory nature, the core anxieties that served as the impetus for these road films were unresolvable. In Easy Rider, the road and mobility is presented as not only a means of expressing political, cultural, and existential concerns associated with countercultural values, but also an essential element of the narrative structure of the film. Hopper, along with some of his fellow New Hollywood filmmakers, created films that defined, and became synonymous with, the imagery and themes of the road film genre. Films like Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, and Two-Lane Blacktop created a visual language in which wide-open landscapes carved with seemingly endless roads became associated with the road film genre. As a genre that was consecrated (and thereafter frequently employed) within the New Hollywood, the road film ethos encapsulates the existential longing, drive, and ultimate failure to find a meaningful way of living beyond

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the compromised boundaries of society prevalent within that tradition. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark explain that significant periods in road film history tend to align with particularly tumultuous historical moments,10 or “in periods whose dominant ideologies generate fantasies of escape and opposition, as in the late 1960s.”11 During the 1960s many sociocultural divisions, such as between the wealthy and less privileged sections of society and between the counterculture movement and the conservative institutions, became more pronounced. With sociopolitical battles being “fought on a number of fronts simultaneously”12 the idea of an “American identity” was itself a site of fragmentation. With the perception of American identity seen as increasingly contentious, the act of taking to the road was connected to national and individual exploration. The road, for the New Hollywood, was depicted as a site for potential liberation and existential interrogation. These road films not only embraced the thematic and ideological concerns that had been voiced by the Beat Generation a decade prior, but also cinematically expressed the cohesion of physical mobility, meandering temporality, and an experiential approach to the road narrative that had been conveyed in Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road. As shown in Easy Rider’s opening sequence, road movies tend to employ traveling shots, whereby the viewer is positioned beside the driver through a combination of point-of-view shots, providing a visceral experience of traveling at high (modernized) speeds, to present a sense of shared characteraudience Fahrvergnügen (the pleasure of driving).13 Throughout the course of a road film the relationship between driver and vehicle often becomes akin to a physical bond or prosthetic extension that enables the thrill of the road to be explored.14 The landscape is presented as experiential rhapsody throughout Easy Rider through the combination of panoramic point-of-view shots and objective shots of the riders within the landscape set to contemporary music. Positioning Wyatt and Billy—bathed in lens-flared light and framed by rainbow-effects—within Monument Valley (made iconic by John Ford in films like Stagecoach [1939] and The Searchers [1956]) forms a complex dialogue with American ideology and its cinematic representation. Against this iconic backdrop the camera pans almost 360 degrees in order to emphasize both the overwhelming, monumental radiance of this location, the subjective “trippiness” of this countercultural trip, and its enhanced subjectivity through the use of hallucinogens, marijuana, and LSD.15 The deliberate shifting of referents (from the real to the myth, to the reflexive use of myth) evident in Easy Rider aligns with Shari Roberts’s assertion that although the road stands in for the frontier in the transition from Western to road movie, it does not symbolize “a romanticized America in which the American Dream will come true, it simply asks over and over, as each mile marker is passed, what does America mean today? Are dreams even possible?”16

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Wyatt and Billy’s drive to go “looking for America” evokes frontier mythology and foundational American national identity. This tagline openly recalls and questions John Winthrop’s lay sermon A Model of Christian Charity. Winthrop’s sermon outlines the American Puritan struggle against the wilderness as the unification of a Chosen People from disparate backgrounds for the predestined mission of expedition, settlement, and development of America with a lasting dedication to God’s purpose in history. Only with dedication to God’s will would the Puritan immigrants be ensured to avoid a shipwrecked fate. Winthrop states that as a unified whole working together toward the common goal of fulfilling God’s purpose, the Puritans were to create an exceptional nation as a model to others. This model nation would be seen by all others, and held up to scrutiny in its actions: “We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”17 The road film’s connection to frontier mythology and America’s perpetual quest for self-definition provides a site for the exploration of sociopolitical and cultural pressures and anxieties contemporary to each film’s historical moment. Road film narrative ideology maps the mythology of the Western “onto the landscape traversed and bound by the nation’s highways.”18 With recurring plots centering on the notion of American manifest destiny, Westerns present (in order to both reaffirm and question) a fairly uniform myth of the nation: a solitary, stoic, masculine protagonist embodying fundamental principles of integrity and self-sufficiency, given the task of enforcing, maintaining, or restoring order on the frontier as a “civilizing” force. Of course, largely through this notion of “civilizing” the frontier, the Western has “perpetuated its own harmful ideology: the promotion of the white, European settler as an enlightened agent pitted against the savage and brutal Native American Indian who remains intransigent to change and progress.”19 The notion of American national identity as linked to (white European) masculinity and an imperialist ideology is evident in both the Western and the road film through the pervasive incorporation of violence as an act against the system.20 As Richard Slotkin states: Violence is central to both the historical development of the Frontier and its mythic representation … the Myth represented the redemption of American spirit or fortune as something to be achieved by playing through as a scenario of separation, temporary regression to a more primitive or “natural” state, and regeneration through violence.21 Both the Western and the road film inhabit spaces that are geographically beyond civilization and its social mores—thus these genres present conflicts between the often brutal and violent laws of nature, and civilized law. Easy Rider interweaves foundational American mythology and an acknowledgment of its place in popular culture through the names and

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costumes of the protagonists. “Wyatt” and “Billy” refer to the “Old West” figures Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid. However (in concert with the nickname “Captain America”), Fonda’s Wyatt is not the nineteenth-century controversial marshal, pimp, and sheriff Wyatt Earp,22 but the cinematic figure made legendary for contemporary audiences in Western films, like My Darling Clementine (1946)23 and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957). Similarly, Hopper’s Billy does not refer to the man born William H. McCarthy Jnr., but a figure who, like Wyatt Earp, has been mythologized in films such as King Vidor’s Billy the Kid (1930) and Howard Hughes’s The Outlaw (1943). Easy Rider is not simply a countercultural rejection of America as a nation-state in the late 1960s, but rather a film that situates itself in the uneasy middle between an evolving critical nationalism and the American national project as a complete entity to be held sacred from critical attack. It is a film that embodies the tensions and conflicts over American nationhood as a concept in process, symbolized by the icons of the road, wilderness, and the city.24 Billy and Wyatt, as hippies, are (in part) aligned with Old Western “promises of freedom, diversity and tolerance” and a connection to the landscape.25 The fact that Billy and Wyatt are gunned down as they attempt to leave the frontier and enter civilization signals the more violent, apocalyptic view of the counterculture, and partly acknowledges the fiction of the frontier ideology to which it was aligned. Thomas Elsaesser reads Easy Rider as highlighting the lesson of total failure through Wyatt’s “resigned and melancholy admission,” “We blew it.”26 Wyatt and Billy are unable to live among the new generation of hippies, and yet they are also unable to live in the violently conservative South. While this form of bitter and anxious social critique is evident within New Hollywood cinema, it is a form of new realism that began in the 1950s with Rebel without a Cause (1955) and The Wild One (1953) which presented characters that would have been seen as heroes in the classical form, but lacking motivation. In the place of motivation, Elsaesser writes “today’s heroes are waiting for the end, convinced that it is too late for action, as if too many contradictions had cancelled the impulse toward meaning and purpose.”27 The aimless trip denies the possibility of motivation; these films embody a sense of sehnsucht, an inconsolable nostalgic longing for something unidentifiable and unattainable. During the period of the New Hollywood the cultural atmosphere of sehnsucht was articulated in both film and music. Paul Simon’s song “America” openly expresses sehnsucht through the experience of two young lovers who, like Wyatt and Billy, have “gone to look for America.” The song’s protagonist anxiously confides to his sleeping travel partner that he feels “lost … empty and aching”; however, he cannot identify a cause for his listlessness or melancholia. The poignant sensation of undefinable loss is confounded by Simon as the protagonist pursues the endless task of counting cars on the New

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Jersey Turnpike. Simon’s expression of sehnsucht, like Hopper’s Easy Rider, is distinctly linked to the nation. The road promises to relocate individuals, and reconnect them with the national identity for which they yearn—yet, for Wyatt and Billy, the drag racers of Two-Lane Blacktop, and Five Easy Pieces’ Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson) this promise proves empty. Ironically in Charlie Kaufman’s American eccentric film Being John Malkovich, the New Jersey Turnpike is no longer a site of sehnsucht (as it had been for Paul Simon) but a site of emotional and physical ejection—a physical dead-end. Those who crawl into the portal that leads into John Malkovich’s mind are ejected at the New Jersey Turnpike after a fifteen-minute “ride.” Yet, this ejection is, in some manner, perceived as revelatory. As Craig (John Cusack), the film’s protagonist, exclaims, “It’s supernatural, for lack of a better word!” He excitedly adds: “It raises all sorts of philosophical questions, you know, about the nature of self, about the existence of a soul. Am I me? Is Malkovich Malkovich?” But for all of Craig’s metaphysical inquiry, the ride (and indeed Craig’s philosophical quest) must always end at the same place; with the rider “spat out” at the turnpike. Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited is an American eccentric road film that consciously alludes to the existential road trips of the New Hollywood (particularly Easy Rider) through parodic and reflexive evocations of genre conventions while simultaneously maintaining their sincere thematic core. In The Darjeeling Limited, the road occupies an uneasy space between the promise of the road experience (exhibited in Easy Rider’s title sequence) and the simultaneous awareness of its failure in the New Hollywood (the murder of Wyatt and Billy). Unlike New Hollywood road films, The Darjeeling Limited does not project a sense of sehnsucht but rather a yearning for interpersonal and existential connection that simultaneously notes the ultimate inability to achieve this aim. Easy Rider’s Wyatt and Billy, Five Easy Pieces’ Bobby, and Paul Simon’s speaker in his song “America” (but also in his narrative songs on The Graduate soundtrack) are characters consumed with a spirit of nostalgic longing, or sehnsucht, for something that they metonymically consider to be “America.” Ultimately each of these characters fails to locate and placate that longing— and yet there is a romanticism that propels them toward the road. In contrast, when the Whitman brothers in The Darjeeling Limited take to the road, they similarly engage the affect of longing; however, this longing is positioned reflexively and placed at a distance beyond an existential barrier. The Whitman brothers travel even though they know there’s nothing to find. American eccentric road trips react to the cultural position articulated by Corey K. Creekmur—“born too late for the pioneer projects of blazing trails, extending natural frontiers, or just lighting out for the territory, modern Americans hit a road not only already taken, but paved, ramped, mapped, and marked by

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the commercial sites of mobile mass culture: the motel, the roadside diner, the filling station, and the drive-in movie theater.”28 Rather than taking to the road as a personal and political attempt to divorce from mainstream society, The Darjeeling Limited’s protagonists do so with the knowledge that the road is only a symbol for the prospect of personal transformation, liberation, and awareness. Thus, rather than being allied with frontier settlers, or those who have “gone to look for America” in the New Hollywood, these films portray the journey of those who set off with the genuine hope for self-discovery while always being acutely aware that their goal is impossible.

American eccentricity and genre There are a variety of approaches to the classification and definition of genre among critics and theorists. The term “genre” simultaneously refers to a blueprint or formula that precedes industry production, a structuring device or formal framework for films, a label or means of categorization, and a contract between the audience and the film that acts as a way of positioning the audience in relation to the film.29 Genre is not a singular entity designated to fulfill a specific purpose but rather a contested site that fulfills a multitude of purposes for multiple groups. As studies of genre often attempt to locate a stable object of analysis, genre is regularly discussed as either a corpus of texts, or a textual structure. Contrary to this position, I share Rick Altman’s view that genre is the “contestation between producers, exhibitors, viewers, critics, politicians, moralists, and their diverse interests” that keeps genres in ongoing process, “constantly subject to reconfiguration, recombination, and reformulation.”30 Genres are dynamic and fluid—they change over time, conventions shift, and new subgenres emerge while others cease. As Stephen Neale states, genres are “not systems: they are processes of systemisation.”31 The process-like nature of genre manifests itself as an interaction at the level of expectation, the generic corpus, and of the “rules” or “norms” that govern both expectation and the corpus. Although these processes are dominated by repetition, they are also fundamentally marked by variation and modification. Altman writes that a genre must be recognized, consecrated, and sanctified by industry-wide recognition as a form with its own definable semantics and syntax. This “semantic/syntactic” notion of genre is based on the recognition that generic labels are commonly attached to categories deriving their existence from two different sources. At times generic terminology is invoked because multiple texts are assembled from like semantic frameworks (recurring topics and plots, key scenes, common character types, recognizable props and settings, or notable visual and aural aesthetics). At other times,

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generic affiliation is recognized because a group of texts organizes elemental frameworks in a similar manner “(shared syntactic aspects, such as plot structure, character relationships, or image and sound montages).”32 When the shared semantics of a genre are stressed, the impact is a recognizable and consecrated consensus of generic iconography, which in turn performs the social function of an applicable vocabulary that is able to be shared among filmmakers and consumers. A syntactic approach that addresses the multilayered patterns beyond iconography can highlight the shallowness of the semantic approach, in that it offers an understanding of the textual workings and deeper structural elements of generic affiliation. Genre represents a range of expression for filmmakers, and a range of expectation for viewers, made apparent through the cumulative experience of both—these systems of convention represent the genre’s narrative context and its meaningful cultural context. Each genre “has a static nucleus that manifests its thematic oppositions or recurring cultural conflicts,”33 and all genres are involved in a process of dynamic evolution evident in the remodeling of those oppositions and conflicts in individual films. If genre is approached as “a problemsolving strategy, then, the static nucleus could be conceived as the problem and the variety of solutions (narrative resolutions) as its dynamic surface structure.”34 Therefore, the conflicts presented within genres function as processes of determination and the source of their popularity, as these conceptual conflicts necessarily must remain unresolved (or must be intrinsically unresolvable) in order to maintain the interest of the audience. The ability to temporarily resolve these issues within the film provides an emotional resolution for the audience, rather than offering an active resolution to the cultural conflicts presented. Resolution in genre is not definite, but rather a process of reduction by which the direct opposition between the two conflicting forces is lessened. Genre operates in the American eccentric mode to articulate a cultural phenomenon of deferred, or masked, existential anxiety. The American eccentric mode combines reflexive, ironic, and allusory subversions of generic conventions and norms while simultaneously engaging with the fundamental syntactic elements of the genres with sincerity. In the shift in cinematic articulation from the New Hollywood to the American eccentric road film, the essential existential journey remains constant. The three brothers in The Darjeeling Limited, Francis, Peter, and Jack Whitman, are as concerned with “finding themselves” on-the-road as were Wyatt and Billy. However, in the American eccentric mode, the existential quest is established without the invocation of the countercultural zeitgeist to propel the journey. Rather, these films are set against a neoliberal societal backdrop concerned more with individualized pursuits than representing collective action through, for instance, a subset of generational or countercultural ideals. American eccentric road

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films acknowledge the ultimate failure of the New Hollywood road trips (the deaths of Wyatt and Billy, Bonnie and Clyde, Bobby’s inability to face society in Five Easy Pieces, the lack of narrative resolution of Two-Lane Blacktop), and thus, while their impetus for the road trip remains underpinned by existential anxiety, their syntactic structures (i.e., the dialectic relationships drawn from the semantic elements) have shifted to a tension that includes a preexisting self-conscious knowledge of their limitations before the first frame. In order to address this shift, the semantic elements (generic vocabulary and grammar) of these films are modified to include elements of postmodern cinematic practice. Altman writes that generic discrepancy and variation rest in part on the interaction between nouns and adjectives in the categorization of genre. Indeed, my use of the term “mode” follows John Frow’s work on genre in which modality is used in an adjectival sense, as an extension or modifier to existing genres. Frow writes that modes “specify thematic features and certain forms and modalities of speech, but not the formal structures or even the semiotic medium through which the text is to be realised.”35 Altman, however, problematizes this concept, stating that over the historical process of a generic cycle the adjectival element of variation of genre can gain autonomy from the categorical noun, thereby freeing itself from its strictures. For instance, Altman cites the transition of Western chase films, Western scenics, Western melodramas, Western romances, Western adventure films, Western comedies, Western dramas, and Western epics into the Western genre. Thus, the removal of the adjective from its parent noun and its reinstatement in the position of the noun signals the formation of a new generic category with substantival status. In order for an adjectival element to progress to a genre, Altman states that three changes must occur: 1

the shift away from preexisting substantive genres in favor of transgeneric adjective material through “the standardization and automatization of the reading formational through which” previous successes are evaluated and imitated;

2

films [have] to display shared attributes stretching beyond the genre’s eponymous material … but nevertheless remain sufficiently connected to that material to justify using the name for that material as the generic label;

3

the expectations that come with generic identification (character types and relations, plot outcome, production style, and the like) must become part and parcel of the process whereby meaning is attributed to films.36

While this progression is relevant to the formation of classic genres such as the Western and the musical, American eccentricity is a mode of cinematic

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articulation that does not inherently possess the traits and tropes necessary to enable a shift from the adjectival relation to genre, to genre itself. American eccentricity exhibits a relationship to reflexive postmodern techniques to express existential anxiety through irony and sincerity, characterization (including the deployment of hyper-dialogue) and the creation of cinematic worlds that inhabit specific spaces and facilitate complex yet limited audience alignment. However, these elements are insufficient to establish a genre. American eccentricity does not necessarily employ character archetypes (beyond overtly cinematic characterization), distinct or repeated iconography, nor is there any specific form of narrative trajectory that is repeated. Thus, just as This Is the End (2013) is an apocalyptic (mode) comedy (genre), or Sleepy Hollow (1999) is a gothic horror film, The Darjeeling Limited is an American eccentric road film.

The eccentric road film: From Easy Rider to The Darjeeling Limited The Darjeeling Limited opens with a wide-screen postcard-like shot accompanied by sitar music from the score of Satyajit Ray’s Jalsaghar (1958). The distinctly foreign setting immediately establishes this road trip as divergent from the American cross-country films of the New Hollywood. The static shot is disturbed by a slight movement in center-screen. The camera zooms in to reveal a taxi traveling at high speed. The taxi is occupied by Bill Murray dressed in attire reminiscent of Bogart in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Big Sleep (1946). The image of a Bogartian figure in concert with an exotic soundtrack recalls the opening sequence of Casablanca (1942), and with it, the backlot exoticism of the classical Hollywood era—depictions of the foreign as viewed (at a distance) by American cinema. The music accelerates as Murray anxiously surveys his surroundings, creating an ambiguity as to whether the taxi is being pursued or is in pursuit. The car chase ends as Murray exits the vehicle and races for the Darjeeling Limited cross-country train. Murray, framed in a close-up, hopelessly calls “wait” as the train pulls away, and he is overtaken by the younger, expressionless Peter Whitman (Adrien Brody). The camera fixes on Peter, running in slow motion. The shift in character focus is aurally reflected as the mixture of sitar music and ambient sounds are drowned out by The Kinks’ “This Time Tomorrow,” replacing all diegetic sound. Elena Boschi and Tim McNelis describe this tactic as a “dramatic silence,” which Anderson employs (as he does here) synergistically with slow motion to “create an effect of suspension.”37 This dramatic silence repositions the narrative. The audiovisual cue of this first slowmotion train chase establishes the structural and textual fabric of the road film as envisioned by Anderson, and begins the road film proper.

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FIGURE 2.1 The Darjeeling Limited Wes Anderson, 2007. The prologue destabilizes the audience’s expectations of the road film. The car chase sequence, coupled with Murray’s appearance, calls to mind classic thriller or noir road films such as Detour (1945) and North by Northwest (1959). The transition from the fast-paced car chase to the choreographed slow motion of the two men signals a transgression in the road trip. In this sequence Anderson encourages the audience to recognize road film tropes in order to subvert them. Anderson has replaced Hopper’s two motorcyclists looking for America with three brothers confined to a train carriage in India. The move from motorcycle journey to the train tour highlights that the perceived agency, or freedom, of Easy Rider is nowhere to be found in The Darjeeling Limited. Rather, The Darjeeling Limited is a film that recognizes the failure of the road yet maintains a reflexive attempt at reconciling the sincere existential anxieties of its road protagonists. The Darjeeling Limited follows the Whitman brothers, Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter, and Jack (Jason Schwartzman), on a train journey of spiritual tourism across the Indian subcontinent. Unbeknownst to his siblings, Francis has organized the journey for the purpose of reuniting the brothers with their mother, Patricia (Anjelica Huston), who has absconded to a Himalayan convent to live as a nun. Unlike the open spaces of the road in Easy Rider, the Whitman brothers move only within the confined spaces of the train carriages—they do not drive, but rather are driven along a predestined route. The freedom associated with the distant horizons of the American landscape is reimagined by Anderson as a limited freedom. For the brothers, the Indian desert is something to be passed through, viewed through the frames of train windows. In an introductory reunion sequence Francis explicitly declares the purpose of the road trip as a journey of personal and spiritual enlightenment: Francis: A- I want us to be brothers like we used to be and to find ourselves and bond with each other. Can we agree to that? B- I

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want to make this trip a spiritual journey where each of us seeks the unknown, and we learn about it. Can we agree to that? C- I want us to be completely open and say yes to everything, even if it’s shocking and painful. Can we agree to that? Now, I had Brendan make us an itinerary. Peter: Who’s Brendan? Francis: My new assistant. He is going to place an updated schedule under our doors every morning of all the spiritual places and temples that we need to see and expedite the hotels and transportation and everything. These lines are delivered to Peter and Jack while the three brothers move through the narrow train corridors, facing the camera rather than one another. As Francis articulates the implicit audience expectations of the road film genre, he both parodies these expectations and ironically reinforces the core anxiety of the film—familial disconnection. By highlighting the thematic underpinnings of the road film in an overt manner they are presented as selfconscious cliché. The use of ironic cliché “lay bare the constructed nature of a particular kind of representation; by exposing meta-cinematically [its] narrative and visual devices.”38 Francis’s unnatural dialogue, laminated itineraries, and personal assistant, Brendan (who, ironically, is pictured within this sequence despite Francis’s claim “we never see him—ever”), are in direct contrast to the world of “the road” set up by Wyatt in Easy Rider. In Easy Rider’s establishing road sequence, Wyatt delineates “the road” as other to the mainstream society he and Billy leave, as he silently discards his wristwatch. Wyatt’s gesture is formally reflected by a jump cut, reinforcing that both Easy Rider’s diegetic action and formal cinematic articulation are incongruous with the conventions of mainstream society, and of classical Hollywood cinema. For Wyatt, the calendrical and clock-measured time of mainstream society has no place on the road, as the road promises immeasurable space and time for spiritual and personal liberation. For Francis, the spiritual journey must be planned with itineraries designating time for anticipated enlightenment and self-reflection. By making explicit these motivations and their planned methods of achievement, Anderson inscribes an ironic distance between what is stated and acted by the protagonists, and their unnamed anxieties. Throughout The Darjeeling Limited the use of parody, pastiche, and allusion are incorporated to denote divergences and thematic continuity with the road film genre and its cinematic (and ideological) predecessors. The interaction of these techniques and strategies within the American eccentric mode draws on the formations articulated by Linda Hutcheon. Hutcheon analyzes parody in the modern context, describing its doubled function and ability to

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FIGURE 2.2 The Darjeeling Limited Wes Anderson, 2007.

act not only as a site of ridicule, but as a serious act of criticism. Parody is imitation characterized by ironic inversion—repetition with a critical edge.39 This repetition does not necessarily emphasize stasis and continuity, nor does it imply that parody relies purely on difference and deferral. Parody is a textual doubling of unification and reconciliation and differentiation, which highlights irreconcilable conflicts both between texts and between texts and the “world.” Hutcheon articulates the difference between parody, pastiche, plagiarism, burlesque, and travesty as an issue of intention—pastiche intends to mimic, plagiarism intends to deceive, and both burlesque and travesty, unlike parody, inherently intend ridicule. Parody “has a stronger bitextual determination than does simple quotation or even allusion: it partakes of both the code of a particular text parodied, and also of the parodic generic code in general.”40 American eccentric films are, like Hutcheon’s notion of the contemporary novel, overtly and functionally polyphonic in style and structure. They consist of multiple layers—referential, parodic, allusory, and original—that function simultaneously to reveal and contain each film’s sincere underpinnings, while retaining a specific relation to film history. American eccentric films, such as The Darjeeling Limited, are not sheer parodies, nor are they merely intertextual puzzles or collages of pastiche. Rather, these films incorporate these intertextual strategies and techniques, in varying degrees and to divergent effect to invite viewers to engage in a multilayered form of spectatorship. This form of spectatorship at times aims to divert emotional attention from the film’s thematic and narrative concerns via apparent structural game-play and

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knowing recognition of referents. These allusions or parodic evocations may feature broad genre conventions, such as narrative or thematic trajectories, or more specific semantic elements, such as genre tropes and iconography. They provide the thematic grounding for sincere articulation, while at other times they appear as moments of cinephilic revelry. Hutcheon writes that double-directed irony appears to be a substitute for the traditional mockery or ridicule of the target text. The ironic inversion that is fundamental to parody is not necessarily always at the expense of the parodied text; parody is not, as many standard or dictionary definitions suggest, a means of ridicule. Hutcheon describes parodic transgression as the quotation of iconic norms that move beyond straight quotation. When conventions as well as particular texts are involved in parody, Hutcheon describes this as “multiple coding.” For instance, The Darjeeling Limited has multiple coding in that it parodies many specific texts, such as Easy Rider, as well as the conventions of the road film, film noir, and thrillers through the initial chase sequence, and, more broadly, the classical Hollywood narrative and audience expectation. Parodic quotation or “borrowing” is not intended to simply signal similarity, or be seen as a matter of nostalgic imitation, but rather is a stylistic confrontation, a recoding that establishes difference at the heart of similarity, as no integration into a new context is able to avoid altering meaning (and Hutcheon suggests, perhaps even value). Thus, in parodying Easy Rider, The Darjeeling Limited both comments on the form of road film established and made popular by the New Hollywood and simultaneously recognizes the inability to recreate this moment in cinematic history despite the similarities between presented core anxieties in both films. In partaking in this parodic play with Easy Rider, The Darjeeling Limited comments on the narrative structure, generic conventions, and audience expectations of the road film. The narrative purpose for The Darjeeling Limited’s Indian setting derives from Francis’s desire to reunite with their mother; however, in cinematic terms the setting performs a multifaceted function. Anderson frames the Whitmans as frivolous, privileged tourists, juxtaposed against the rural Indian landscape. The brothers are costumed in Western suits, constantly dragging the overtly symbolic Louis Vuitton designer baggage that once belonged to their deceased father. It is tempting to simply delight, as no doubt Anderson is aware, in the clunky image of the privileged American tourist—the type of tourist for whom the idea of India is, as Francis describes, “one of the most spiritual places in the world,” and who plans spiritual enlightenment in forty-minute visits to temples between having their shoes shined and buying illegal novelty items (including venomous snakes) at town markets during train stopovers. However, The Darjeeling Limited’s India is not presented as a contemporary reality, but as a foreign space accessed through Louis

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Malle’s documentaries, the films of Satyajit Ray, and Jean Renoir’s The River (1951). This is an India that is wholly constructed through the cinematic image for the purpose of Anderson’s narrative. As such, The Darjeeling Limited’s India primarily serves to highlight the incongruity of the brothers within their surrounds. The mise-en-scène provides a visual articulation of alienation. In addition to the brothers’ familial alienation, in a foreign landscape they are also culturally and geographically alien. This external “reality” is in contrast to the contrived interiors of the Darjeeling train. The “reality” of Hopper’s road trip, on the other hand, combined Wyatt’s and Billy’s external lived experience in the American landscape with internal perceptions of that experience in relation to their views on American society. At the time of its release, the on-screen use and discussion of psychedelic hallucinogens, primarily marijuana and LSD, was one of the most controversial aspects of Easy Rider.41 This film incorporated drug use into the film’s narrative structure, an idea that evolved from Hopper and Fonda’s earlier film The Trip.42 The impact of drugs is experienced by the audience not only through the narrative, but also through tone and temporality. Easy Rider is not a film in which the protagonists happened to take illicit drugs; rather, it is a film that is structurally informed by experimental, hallucinogenic experiences. Anderson demonstrates the social shift away from the experimental drug use depicted in Easy Rider toward contemporary issues of prescription drug use. The Whitman brothers replace hallucinogens with pain killers and muscle relaxants which they revere, in an ironic yet profoundly troubling way, as being “the strongest you can get,” or having “a tranquillizer in it.” These drugs are legal in India but not in their home country. The Whitman brothers are not road travelers looking for the ultimate trip or drug-induced revelation, rather they are spiritual and chemical tourists who actively seek to disconnect from their reality through

FIGURE 2.3 The Darjeeling Limited Wes Anderson, 2007.

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anesthesia. The shift from recreational experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs as a means of ideological enlightenment to recreational prescription drug use for anesthetic effect chemically characterizes the schism between the active and acknowledged deferral of anxiety and the genuine source of anxiety for the brothers—irreconcilable familial disconnection. Anderson portrays the unnamed anxieties of the Whitman brothers through irony and parody, which functions as a mode of distanciation, making serious instances humorous or meta-cinematic. The use of ironic humor encourages the audience to laugh (often knowingly) at a deeply anxious occurrence, while meta-cinematic techniques promote the intellectual recognition of the cinematic quality and intertextuality of an instance in the place of direct empathetic alignment. The Whitman brothers are depicted as familiar cinematic characters yet they are not presented as readily believable portrayals of real people.43 The unlikely experiences afforded Francis, Peter, and Jack are presented not as possible reflections of relatable lived experiences, but as reflexive evocations of familiar instances in relation to cinematic history and idiosyncratic constructed peculiarity. In the American eccentric mode the unmistakable awareness of character construction seeks to mediate the spectator’s emotional investment in them, even as their sincerity promotes it. By contrast, many of the characters of the New Hollywood discussed in this book inhabited naturalistic worlds that were presented so as to be recognizable to their imagined audience as compatible with their own. Where the ideological perspectives and characters designed as identifiable peers in the New Hollywood mirror much of the sociocultural zeitgeist and attendant anxieties, the American eccentric character presents a site for the displacement of unspoken, personal anxiety in an individualized, rather than communal, manner coalescent with neoliberal ideology. While Anderson’s Whitman brothers share the desire to “find themselves on the road” with Hopper’s Wyatt and Billy, these desires cannot be articulated by having the brothers directly retrace the countercultural drive along Route 66. A new work cannot simply repeat the work of an older text—even if the two texts share common thematic problems. However, a new text can employ serious parody of the older text in order to share, and reflect on, these common themes. With its ability to simultaneously “bury and breathe new life into the dead,” parody is an important means by which modern artists negotiate and come to terms with the past, through either ironic recoding or “transcontextualization.”44 This is clearly expressed in the early scene previously discussed in which Francis excitedly articulates his desire for the road trip to his brothers and the audience. Here Anderson allows a central character to overtly state the desires and expectations of the road film (those that initially served as the impetus for Wyatt and Billy’s journey) and, by doing so, acknowledges the

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impossibility for The Darjeeling Limited to simply repeat Easy Rider. Francis’s speech acts to parody aspects of the road movie genre as an original text, which in turn enables these two films to share the common existential issues and reflect on the cultural shifts in articulation and representation of these issues between 1969 and 2007. As becomes increasingly clear, the perceived absence of familial love and trust is a significant source of anxiety for the Whitman brothers. Anderson brings this tension to a climax in an instance specifically indicative of siblings and boyhood—a brotherly wrestle. Peter physically dominates Francis, while humorously insisting he loves him. Jack, observing apprehensively, provides a clear moment of light-handed eccentric layering of genuine anxiety and ironic deference. Rather than join his wrestling brothers, Jack shouts “I love you too, but I am going to mace you in the face!” and does so before retreating down the narrow train corridor and colliding with a screen door. In this frenetic, amusing sequence, Anderson reveals to the audience an authentic source of anxiety, and then immediately reestablishes the scene as a fictional narrative contrivance through the referential switch to a humorous slapstick moment that verges on the absurd. The actions of this sequence result in the Whitman brothers being expelled from the train and a shift in Anderson’s tone. Abandoned in rural India, the three men begin the road journey for a second time. “Charu’s theme,” from Ray’s Charulata (1964)45 plays during the farewell exchange between Jack and a tearful Rita (the train waitress with whom he has had a short covert affair). In a childlike manner, Jack disrupts the sorrowful exchange as he, seeing her tears, enquires, “Were you maced too?” This expulsion re-orientates the narrative toward resolving Rita’s puzzled retort (and the film’s thematic conundrum), “What’s wrong with you?” Yet this re-orientated road trip appears, again, to be a parodic representation of Easy Rider as the brothers “get high” on prescription medications around a campfire and, fluctuating between ironic and sincere expression, discuss the failure of their family as a unit, rather than (as in Hopper, Fonda, and Nicholson’s campfire scene) smoke marijuana and discuss the failure of American society on the whole. However, the poignancy of this scene is interrupted as Jack’s sentimental, and sincere, question “Wouldn’t it be great if we heard a train go by in the distance?” is met with Francis’s blunt reply “It’d probably be annoying.” This amusing, and seemingly parodic evocation, however, is revealed to serve sincere purposes. Just as the campfire scene in Easy Rider shifts from a marijuana-infused discussion of personal freedom to the violent murder of George Hanson, the tone of the campfire discussion in The Darjeeling Limited abruptly shifts in the following scene. Francis, Peter, and Jack witness three young Indian boys attempting to pull themselves across a rapid river, when their rope snaps.

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Anderson’s characteristically poised camerawork is sharply abandoned as the brothers frantically attempt to rescue the boys. A sense of panic is created by cutting dramatically between the points of action, filmed from tilted angles and semi-submerged positions in the river. The frenzied sequence continues until Peter emerges, blankly cradling a limp body. Unlike Peter’s deadpan expression in the opening train chase sequence, this blankness reflects inexplicable defeat and bereavement. All diegetic sound fades into the background until the scene is silent; it is a space that cannot be filled with ironic, deflecting dialogue. This silence reflects the solitude of grief. The narrative world is temporally suspended as the synergy of both silence and slow motion fade into an alternate temporality dictated by a non-diegetic musical source.46 The brothers file out of a hut in slow motion toward the river as though driven by The Kinks’ ballad of a thwarted spiritual journey “Strangers.” At the river the grieving father performs the funeral rites for his son, which alludes to the death, and funeral procession, of the young English boy, Bogey, in Jean Renoir’s The River.47 The temporal suspension of the dramatic silence in this scene allows Anderson to further break the linear narrative with an emotionally connected flashback to the day of the Whitmans’ father’s funeral. The slowmotion procession follows the Whitman brothers into a rickshaw adorned with funeral flower garlands. The brothers are framed in a tight three shot with each facing the camera. The music stops suddenly with a cut to a matching shot of the three brothers seated in a black funeral limousine, identically framed with the exception of location and costume. The brothers are linked to this sequence as though it were a memory triggered by their immediate situation. This cross-temporal linkage not only connects the preexisting grief with their immediate, tragic situation within the film’s diegesis, but demonstrates that these sincere issues, such as bereavement and anxiety, are atemporal and porous, despite the meta-cinematic, ironic reflexivity that confines narrative and characters to their cinematic representation. Unlike Hopper’s sense of immeasurable time associated with the roadspace as alternative to that of mainstream society, Anderson creates his own achronological imagined space. In contrast to the traceable journeys of the New Hollywood, the Whitmans’ journey takes place on a fictional train route.The dated interior of the Darjeeling Limited train (inspired by the 20th Century Limited)48 is incongruent with the film’s decidedly contemporary context depicted through the mannerisms and humorous utterances of the Whitman brothers as well as the presence of contemporary technologies (Jack’s iPod, Brendan’s laptop, and Francis’s search for international power adaptors). Anderson’s film world is then further chronologically complicated by his (almost exclusive) diegetic and nondiegetic use of 1960s popular music (The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, and Peter Sarstedt) combined with the notable soundtracks of Satyajit Ray’s 1950s–1960s

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Bengali films. The fusion of contemporary technologies and mannerisms, pop songs from the 1960s and 1970s, layered with preexisting Bengali film music, and a fictional train’s dated interior creates a curious interaction between the contemporary and various real and constructed pasts. Michael Chabon likens Anderson’s constructed worlds to Joseph Cornell’s boxes in that “the cinematic frame becomes a Cornellian gesture, a box drawn around the world of the film”49—the film worlds are assembled and contained collages of various specifically chosen elements. The amalgamation of referents from divergent historical contexts results in the creation of film worlds that do not suggest specific chronological moments—rather they are anachronistic constructs, an aspect explored further in Chapter 5. However, despite the distinctively assembled nature of these worlds, the audience are encouraged (at least partially) to empathize with the constructed characters. The knowledge of the constructed nature of these characters does not prohibit sincere emotional alignment, but promotes temporary, and mediated emotional investment. The ironically inflected form of existential anxiety depicted by Anderson may be seen as an expression of illegitimate, or reluctant, anxiety in the neoliberal moment. Where the New Hollywood largely mobilized the cultural and national tumult associated with the countercultural, and protest movements as external sites for the generation of existential anxiety, the American eccentric mode presents contemporary national and generational anxieties as idiosyncratic, internally generated crises of identity and purpose. In this way, the existential anxiety exhibited in the American eccentric mode as an “ugly feeling” (in Ngai’s terminology) is often expressed through ironic, sarcastic, and parodic strategies. However, American eccentricity does not employ irony consistently to distance the sincere anxieties of a protagonist in order to serve the internal cinematic logic, but rather the deployment of irony fluctuates to create a tension between ironic reflexivity and sincerity. Early in The Darjeeling Limited, Francis hands his brothers a peacock feather and a set of instructions from a guru as part of a deep meditative ritual to be performed at a poignant moment. Indeed, the brothers perform the ritual in a moment of genuine distress resulting from maternal abandonment. Having located their mother, the brothers are confronted with the realization that she (the object of the road trip) is willfully absent. Despite her promise that their discussions are “to be continued,” Patricia Whitman renounces her motherhood as she decamps during the night, leaving her sons’ questions unanswered. Thus, the brothers conduct the peacock feather ritual from a position of genuine emotional realization. However, the deeply meditative ritual intended to provide spiritual liberation is rendered absurd as the brothers perform improvised spiritualistic gestures that mimic recognizable movements of Tai Chi, Bollywood dance, yoga, and Buddhist meditation. Despite the ridiculous appearance

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of this ritual, Francis claims, “That went perfectly,” signaling the film has fluctuated back from sincere pathos toward ironic representation. The most explicit and poignant articulation of the tension between irony as a distancing mechanism and the sincere desire to confront and reconcile existential anxieties is expressed in The Darjeeling Limited through character doubling and parallel situations. Anderson complicates his recurrent double mother figure model in The Darjeeling Limited with Francis.50 In addition to the two biological mothers of the film, Patricia Whitman and Peter’s pregnant wife Alice (who has been abandoned in America as a result of the road trip), Francis presents himself in a maternal role. In a manner reminiscent of Salinger’s Seymour Glass, Francis states that he believes he has raised his younger siblings and displays oddly mothering tendencies by ordering food for them and keeping hold of their passports. It is not until the appearance of Patricia that it becomes apparent, with both ironic humor and sadness, that her absence is an explanation for Francis’s mannerisms, anxieties, and neuroses. The acute reflections of the mother’s expressions (“can we agree to that?”) and gestures (ordering and speaking for her sons) indicate that Francis has been attempting to replicate the mother in order to fill the void of her absence and that in seeking to reunite with her, his ultimate aim is to reconcile these problems. With their reunion, the unnatural dialogue associated with Francis is shifted onto the mother, while Francis speaks matter-of-factly for the first time in the film. This is most evident in the instance in which Patricia enquires into Francis’s injuries. After Francis outlines the desired outcomes of their trip in the introductory sequence of the film, Peter, speaking both for himself and the audience, asks the heavily bandaged Francis, “What happened to your face?” Francis responds: It was raining. I was going about 50 miles an hour as I went into a corner. Did some wrong steering. Wheels went out from under me. I suddenly skidded off the road and slammed into a ditch and got catapulted 50 feet through the air. Little particles of glass and debris were stinging my face as I flew. And for a second, there was just total silence, then … Bam! Bike crashed to the ground, exploded and caught on fire and I smashed into the side of a hill with my face. Although dramatic, the account is delivered without emotion and is not mentioned again until Patricia’s inquiry. To Patricia, Francis simply and sincerely states: “I smashed into a hill, on purpose, on my motorcycle.” After this open admission of attempted suicide, the use of irony as a distancing mechanism is

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retrospectively peeled back as the sincere anxiety of the film is foregrounded. This paralleled situation reconciles the previously asymptotic tension between parodic and ironic expression and the sincere anxiety at its core as a road film. The journey is given a conventional road film motivation: the sincere desire for familial reconnection in response to unrelenting despair. However, as Anderson provides his audience with moments of sincere identification and genuine pathos between self-referential or parodic sequences, he produces an overall tone of bittersweet whimsy, despite the sincere anxiety of his central characters. The intensity of emotions such as despair, angst, grief, and alienation are so immense that they are, perhaps, impossible to be approached and understood without mediation—as Chabon suggests, “distance can increase our understanding of grief, allowing us to see it whole  … but distance does not—ought not—necessarily imply a withdrawal.”51 Anderson’s whimsical aesthetic and tone offers the audience mediated access to the central issues of sincere existential anxiety. The distancing tropes employed in the American eccentric mode facilitate an indirect expression of these issues such that each is not “too big” or overwhelming. Characters slide between moments of empathetic identification that is not forced on an audience, but is fostered and maintained throughout the narrative, and peculiarities in which the viewer is reminded of the place and role of the construction of the film. The audience is not positioned to penetrate the assembled film worlds created in the American eccentric mode, nor is the overtly cinematic character constructed to transcend their specific on-screen representation. Thus, although the audience may have been moved by the narrative and characters of an American eccentric film, the closing credits may not provide satisfactory emotional closure; however, the films promise that both the narrative and characters appear irretrievably complete within their cinematic universes. The Darjeeling Limited concludes with the three brothers abandoning their father’s luggage in pursuit of a second train, the Bengal Lancer. The interior of the Whitmans’ compartment is almost identical to the first, only with an addition of a portrait of Satyajit Ray hanging on the wall. This bookend conclusion functions as a definitive narrative completion of story and character. The events of their narrative, both ironic and sincere, are contained within Anderson’s creation of India between the Darjeeling Limited and the Bengal Lancer. As Francis repeats his opening greeting “Let’s go get a drink and smoke a cigarette,” he acknowledges that the brothers’ journey is complete, and so is the film. The three exit the compartment, and Jack closes the door behind them. The train speeds on. Joe Dassin’s “Les Champs-Élysées” crescendos. The credits roll.

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FIGURE 2.4 Bookending in The Darjeeling Limited. The Darjeeling Limited Wes Anderson, 2007.

The road and Kaufman’s mind trips As has been discussed, The Darjeeling Limited demonstrates parodic evocations and transgressions of the road film genre which enable the Whitmans’ attempt to “find themselves” on the road yet limit their journeys to a form of cinematic representation. Part of the parodic evocation of the road trip in The Darjeeling Limited is the replacement of the motorcycle or automobile with the train. Here, not only are the Darjeeling Limited and (at the film’s conclusion) the Bengal Lancer trains restricted to tracks, but these trains are also fictitious constructions whose aesthetic interiors signal antiquated, nostalgic technologies. Timothy Corrigan writes that as the road film genre develops through the fifties, the quest motif becomes increasingly mechanized through those central vehicles in a manner far different from even the industrial quests of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. By the mid-sixties, the protagonist’s identity is almost fully displaced onto the mechanized vehicle as that vehicle becomes transformed into a human or spiritual reality. Peter Fonda would become his motorcycle, and both become something transcendent. More importantly, the perspective of the film as relayed through the central characters becomes a function of those vehicles … the camera adopts the framed perspective of the vehicle itself.52 Corrigan’s statement elucidates the distinction between the interaction of the traveler and the mechanized vehicle in The Darjeeling Limited and the fundamental link between vehicle and traveler in films such as Easy Rider.

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The Darjeeling Limited’s trains expose the inability of these characters to drive, and in doing so, deny the characters the physical aspect of driving—the rush of adrenalin and perceived liberation involved in the merging of human and vehicle at high speed. The transcendental amalgamation of human and vehicle (and vehicle and camera) to which Corrigan refers manifests in Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich as a willed, yet doomed, union of traveler and vehicle in order to elevate anxiety. Advancing the formulation of American eccentricity as a modal modifier to existing genres, I explore the prospect of Being John Malkovich as a transition from the road trip into a cerebral trip that features the vehicle (and traveling at accelerated speed) as a means of temporarily exceeding the bodily limitations of identity. Being John Malkovich, like the New Hollywood road films, explores American existential anxiety through the perceived ability to dislocate oneself from mainstream society potentially afforded (albeit temporarily) by an external vehicle. Here, however, the external vehicle is not automotive or locomotive, but rather a portal into the mind of John Malkovich located behind a small door on the 7½ floor of a New York office building. Kaufman’s protagonists, unlike the New Hollywood road travelers, no longer set out across the country to identify and relocate themselves within a grounded concept of the nation, but rather dive inward to redefine themselves, and reinvent a personal identity by changing the physical body. The vast American landscape of the New Hollywood road film is replaced in Being John Malkovich with confined internal spaces. The notion of liberating the self from the confines of identity is reminiscent of John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966) in which the protagonist, Arthur (John Randolph), a successful, yet listless, middle-aged man with a wife and adult daughter, approaches “The Company,” an organization that enables those who have found their lives unfulfilling to be “reborn” with another identity. Like Craig’s (John Cusack) desire to inhabit the Malkovich body, Arthur desires to be, and indeed becomes, a younger, successful, and popular artist named Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson). Just as Craig longs to remain in the Malkovich body despite the impossibility of a future, Arthur is similarly unable to remain Tony, nor is he granted his plea for another rebirth—both films end with the subsumption of the protagonists by the mechanisms that they believed would provide liberation. Craig disappears into a void within a new vestigial host body, while Seconds hauntingly concludes with Arthur, strapped to an operating chair, being read his “last rites” as he is wheeled out of frame. In both films personal rebirth and reinvention are presented as a possible reaction to existential anxiety, only to be ultimately denied as a viable solution. In the New Hollywood, the road journey was not guided by maps or itineraries. Five Easy Pieces’ Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson) travels endlessly to “get away from things that get bad” while the trip of the two unnamed

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racers of Two-Lane Blacktop concludes only through the literal destruction of the film on screen. Being John Malkovich presents the existential journey as a nonlinear, achronological, associative event that, rather than being narrativized by physical movement, is contained within the restricted area of a mind that does not belong to the traveler. The drug-induced mind trips of Easy Rider or The Trip have here become literal. A ditch beside Paul Simon’s site of sehnsucht, the New Jersey Turnpike, is now the dumping ground for those whose fifteen minutes of “being John Malkovich” have expired. These dumped travelers return covered in a brown fluid and gasping for air while explaining how the experience has altered their perception of life. It is only with the return to their own body that the occupants of Malkovich are able to articulate their perceived inadequacies—for Craig, the desperate need to be acknowledged, recognized, and celebrated by others; for Craig’s wife, Lotte (Cameron Diaz) it is her sexuality and sudden desire to undergo gender realignment surgery. The portal into the actor John Malkovich’s brain is presented as an exhilarating ride. Once the participant crawls into the small, dark cavern they are propelled toward a light in the distance. The visceral sensation of being catapulted forward is captured in a point-of-view shot, giving the impression of traveling at high speed, not unlike the drag races in Two-Lane Blacktop. However, where the body of the car houses the driver in Two-Lane Blacktop, the participant in the Malkovich ride does not drive the body, but rather is a passenger who observes Malkovich’s life from his point-of-view. Like the exhilaration of the high-speed race or chase, or drug sequence in which there appears no clear delineation between the self and the state-altering vehicle, the Malkovich passenger is simultaneously inside another’s mind yet not outside their own.

FIGURE 2.5 Being John Malkovich Spike Jonze, 1999.

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The portal (humorously referred to by Craig as a “metaphysical can of worms”), like the New Hollywood’s illusion of the road, suggests to the passengers the possibility of being “someone else.” Maxine (Catherine Keener), Craig’s co-worker and unrequited love interest, acknowledges and exploits the pervasive cultural desire to “be someone else,” by opening the Malkovich portal to the public as a paid experience. Although the character John Malkovich is enthusiastically established as a famous actor within the film, the desire to enter the Malkovich body has very little to do with his celebrity. Despite the fifteen-minute time allocation for “being John Malkovich” undoubtedly referencing Andy Warhol’s phenomenon of fame in a postmodern, pop-culture context, the individuals who experience the Malkovich ride not only are aware that they will not become famous themselves, but Kaufman presents John Malkovich as a celebrity about whom the public know (and desire to know) very little. Upon first mention of the Malkovich portal, Maxine nonchalantly asks “who the fuck is that?” and no-one is able to recall any of his work. The travelers are enticed simply by the knowledge that Malkovich is indeed famous, and are thrilled to experience mundane events (ordering bath towels, reading the paper) through his eyes. The irony that results from the incongruity of these routine events and the elation these banal activities evoke in them as passengers demonstrates that the profundity of the ride is less contingent on the distinctiveness of the vehicle they enter than the temporary ability to exit their own body. As Craig explains to Lotte: “It’s the thrill of being able to see through somebody else’s eyes.” This notion of the inter-body-outer-self experience is illustrated in a humorous exchange in which a new client of the Malkovich ride responds to the advertisement by asking Craig and Maxine if he can be anybody that he wants to be. When matter-of-factly informed by Maxine that he can only be John Malkovich, he exclaims, “Perfect! I mean, it’s my second choice, but it’s wonderful!”— what is wonderful, to this client, is simply the possibility of not being himself. The biggest irony of Being John Malkovich, however, is that within this context nobody is able to be John Malkovich. Once Malkovich takes the “Malkovich ride” his entire ontological foundation becomes unhinged. The term “Malkovich” replaces all other signifiers.53 There is no distinction between the Malkovich dinner date, the Malkovich on the menu, the Malkovich as song, or the Malkovich the occupant of Malkovich ride: “being John Malkovich” is devoid of meaning.54 Once a passenger enters the Malkovich ride, their physical body is removed from the screen and replaced by a black hole through which they peer out at the world. The viewer is given the illusion of seeing through

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the eyes of the passenger as they occupy Malkovich. The audio effects are muffled and the field of vision is limited—the passenger and viewer look out through a cut-out—positioned a step back from Malkovich’s eyes, as though looking through a car windscreen at the world experienced through this vehicle. Here Corrigan’s assertion of the camera’s adoption of a vehicle’s framed perspective within the road film genre is literalized by Kaufman and Jonze. The Malkovich passengers are positioned, like the film’s viewers, such that they view a different life on a screen—the excitement of sensation is heard as though the spectator is privy to both the Malkovich ride and the experience of it by a third party.55 The world becomes literally framed for the passenger, mediated in its perspective just as Kaufman’s constructed New York and narrative are framed and mediated for his audience. As Scott Repass notes, the occupant does not become Malkovich, they take a ride in Malkovich.56 This is most evident when occupants who, unlike Craig, cannot control the Malkovich vehicle take the ride—for instance, when Lotte is inside Malkovich, it is her thoughts and desires, rather than those of Malkovich, that are heard. She may be “inside someone else’s skin” but her experiences are restricted to physical sensations. The desire declared by Craig to feel what another feels remains unachievable. Even Craig, whose puppeteering skills enable him to steer the Malkovich vehicle, is unable to be John Malkovich. Once Craig is inside the Malkovich ride the Malkovich body begins to behave like Craig. Rather than becoming John Malkovich, those characters who repeatedly inhabit this vehicle employ it in order to pursue their existing goals. Just as Wyatt’s and Billy’s motorcycles were a means to pursue liberation, and Bonnie and Clyde’s automobiles were vehicles that enabled their robberies, the body of Malkovich performs a function for its passengers. Craig describes it as a “really expensive suit that [he enjoys] wearing”—this “expensive suit” enables Craig’s marriage to Maxine, and social acceptance as a puppeteer. For Lotte, the Malkovich vehicle is a prosthesis that allows her to consummate her love for Maxine, who then is able to conceive their child. Malkovich is viewed as a vehicle for perceived liberation; however, this liberation is only attained through the theft of the Malkovich body. As Craig’s employer, Dr. Lester (Orson Bean), explains to Lotte, Malkovich is a host vessel that can be used to prolong life indefinitely. But, as Dr. Lester reveals, Malkovich must not be entered any earlier or later than the eve of his forty-fourth birthday to ensure that the vessel is ripe for inhabitation. If this window of entry is missed and an individual enters the body thereafter, they will be transferred to the subsequent vessel body: an unborn child. Thus,

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entering the Malkovich vessel at precisely the age of forty-four figures as the site of indefinite future, while failure to inhabit the vessel results in gradual extinction. With multiple characters vying for eternal life, the Malkovich body becomes an object of extreme desire. In this sense, Being John Malkovich may be read in dialogue with the objectives (rather than the formal generic, or structural narrative properties) of the heist film, or caper film—only unlike classic caper films, such as Topkapi (1964) or The Sting (1973), where the aim is to swindle an object of financial value; here the aim is not only to abscond with the life of the vehicle, Malkovich, but also to cheat death. Thus, the acquisition of (and absconding with) the stolen vehicle becomes a site of anxiety in itself. New Hollywood road films, such as Bonnie and Clyde, feature the stolen vehicle as a site of excitement, freedom, and a state of change—as Clyde explains to Bonnie, they may have arrived in town in one automobile, but “that don’t mean we’ve got to go home in it.” Where the stolen cars of Bonnie and Clyde temporarily open up the landscape to the characters, the state of change that the Malkovich vehicle provides inversely sets Craig on an increasingly claustrophobic inward journey. This perpetual inward spiral mirrors Bonnie Parker’s realization that “at first, when we started out, I thought we were really goin’ somewhere; but this is it, we’re just goin’”— the lack of destination for the New Hollywood has here been replaced with a life bereft of movement. In direct contrast to the promise of freedom through the vastness of the road, Craig becomes confined to increasingly smaller spaces. He begins the film in a small, dark New York apartment surrounded by dozens of caged pets, is employed on a half-floor in which he cannot stand upright, crawls into the portal to occupy a space within the mind of John Malkovich, and eventually concludes his journey inside the larval vessel of Emily, the daughter of his wives, Maxine and Lotte.57 Inside Emily, Craig is solely fixated on Maxine. His field of vision is further restricted, and the audio effects muffled beyond decipherability. Just as the conclusion of Two-Lane Blacktop mutes the audio track before the film burns an end to the narrative, so too do Craig’s distant, ineffectual cries for Emily to “look away” from Maxine end the narrative. However, where the burning celluloid in Two-Lane Blacktop is presented as the forced end to a film where the meandering narrative logic could continue indefinitely without resolution, the inverse is true of Being John Malkovich. The closing frame resolutely concludes Craig’s narrative. In these final moments Craig is trapped, and powerless and completely invisible. Craig does not, as Clyde suggested, go home in the vehicle in which he came; in fact, Craig is no longer afforded the ability to go home at all as not only does “home” for Craig no longer exist, nor does he.

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FIGURE 2.6 Conclusive endings. Two-Lane Blacktop Monte Hellman, 1971.

FIGURE 2.7 Conclusive endings. Being John Malkovich Spike Jonze, 1999.

In the concluding frames Craig Schwartz literally ceases to exist. He is subsumed by his wives’ daughter, and the camera. The frame closes in on him. This ending confirms that Craig’s plight, like those of The Darjeeling Limited’s Whitman brothers, is only possible within screen-time. Craig Schwartz is born with the film’s first frame and here literally expires with the last. In the next chapter, I will consider further the nature of overtly cinematic characters as constructions and the function of their containment within the film worlds.

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Notes 1 The connection between rebellion and automobiles was already prevalent in Benedek’s The Wild One (1953) and Ray’s Rebel without a Cause (1955); however, the position these films take to rebellion and the relationship between the protagonists and the road differs to those in the New Hollywood. 2 Steven Cohan, “Almost Like Being at Home: Showbiz Culture and Hollywood Road Trips in the 1940s and 1950s,” in The Road Movie Book, eds. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2002), 114. 3 Corey K. Creekmur, “On the Run and on the Road: Fame and the Outlaw Couple in American Cinema,” in The Road Movie Book, eds. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2002), 90. 4 Bennet Schaber, “‘Hitler Can’t Keep ‘Em That Long’ the Road, the People,” in The Road Movie Book, eds. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2002), 34. 5 Julian Stringer, “Exposing Intimacy in Russ Meyer’s ‘Motorpsycho!’ and ‘Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!’” in The Road Movie Book, Book, eds. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2002), 165. 6 David Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 15. 7 Stringer, “Exposing Intimacy,” 165. 8 Laderman, Driving Visions, 20. 9 Shari Roberts, “Western Meets Eastwood: Genre and Gender on the Road,” in The Road Movie Book (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2002), 53. 10 Periods such as the Great Depression also have a close relationship with the road film, for instance in the release of Wild Boys of the Road (1933), Our Daily Bread (1934), and The Grapes of Wrath (1940). 11 Stephen Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, “Introduction,” in The Road Movie Book (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2002), 2. 12 Barry Keith Grant, American Cinema of the 1960s: Themes and Variations (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 3. 13 German, translation mine. Laderman, Driving Visions, 15. 14 Ibid., 18. 15 Barbara Klinger, “The Road to Dystopia: Landscaping the Nation in Easy Rider,” in The Road Movie Book, eds. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2002), 188–189. 16 Roberts, “Western Meets Eastwood,” 52. 17 John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity (1630),” in Winthrop Papers vol II, ed. Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston, MA: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1968), 295. 18 Cohan and Hark, “Introduction,” 1. 19 Anna Backman Rogers, American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 64–65.

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20 Laderman, Driving Visions, 22. 21 Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in TwentiethCentury America (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 11–12. 22 Steve Gatto, “Wyatt Earp History Page” (2015). 23 Wyatt Earp was played in this film by Peter Fonda’s father, Henry. 24 Klinger, “The Road to Dystopia,” 184. 25 Ibid., 191. 26 Thomas Elsaesser, “The Pathos of Failure: American Films in the 1970s,” in Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, eds. Alexander Horwath, Noel King, and Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 286. 27 Ibid., 291. 28 Creekmur, “On the Run,” 90. 29 Rick Altman, Film/Genre, ed. British Film Institute (London: BFI Publishing, 1999), 14. 30 Ibid., 195. 31 Stephen Neale, “Questions of Genre,” in Film Theory: An Anthology, eds. Toby Miller and Robert Stam (Medford, MA: Wiley, 2000), 51. 32 Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981), 89. 33 Ibid., 31. 34 Ibid. 35 John Frow, Genre: The New Critical Idiom (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 65. 36 Altman, Film/Genre, 53. 37 Elena Boschi and Tim McNelis, “‘Same Old Song’: On Audio-Visual Style in the Films of Wes Anderson,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 10, no. 1 (2012): 37. 38 Backman Rogers, American Independent Cinema, 80. 39 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000, original 1985), 11. 40 Ibid., 42. 41 Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex’n’Drugs “n” Rock’n’Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 61–75. 42 Laderman, Driving Visions, 50. 43 Kim Wilkins, “Cast of Characters: Wes Anderson and Pure Cinematic Characterization,” in The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon, ed. Peter Kunze (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 44 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 101. 45 “Charu’s theme” plays a number of times throughout Darjeeling. In this context it speaks to the plight and sadness of Rita. In Ray’s film Charulata

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(Charu) is a lonely woman who is married to a busy, but well-meaning man. In her loneliness Charu enters an emotional relationship with her husband’s cousin, Amal. For both Charu and Rita, it is only when the extramarital men must leave that they openly show disappointment and submit to tears, acknowledging that they must return to their secluded lives with their partners. 46 Boschi and McNelis, “‘Same Old Song.’” 47 Bogey is a young upper-middle-class English boy who resides in India. Although his upbringing is predominantly British, due to his interaction with Indian culture, he learns to charm cobras by playing a flute. Tragically, Bogey is killed by a deadly snake bite. 48 The 20th Century was a passenger train that ran between New York and Chicago between 1902 and 1967, and incidentally also the venue for Howard Hawks’s screwball comedy 20th Century (1934). 49 Michael Chabon, “Wes Anderson’s Worlds,” NYR Daily, January 31 (2013). 50 Two mother figures generally feature in Anderson’s films as a recurring trait. 51 Chabon, “Wes Anderson’s Worlds.” 52 Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 145–146. 53 Scott Repass, “Being John Malkovich,” Film Quarterly 56, no. 1 (2002): 34. 54 See also Christopher Falzon, "On Being John Malkovich and Not Being Yourself," in The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, ed. D. LaRocca (University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 46–65. 55 Sayantani DasGupta, “Being John Doe Malkovich: Truth, Imagination, and Story in Medicine,” Literature and Medicine 25, no. 2 (2007): 454–455. 56 Repass, “Being John Malkovich,” 35. 57 Falzon, "On Being John Malkovich and Not Being Yourself," 35–36.

3 Overtly Cinematic Characterization

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ed Plimpton (Owen Wilson) hangs from the side of Steve Zissou’s (Bill Murray) boat, the Belafonte, by one arm. Ned wears a blue Team Zissou uniform and a red beanie, and casually holds a smoking pipe in his free hand. The flickering of a projector is heard beneath Mark Mothersbaugh’s score. The use of Ektachrome film stock creates bright and overblown colors forming saturated, flat blocks of ocean and sky as though filmed on 16 mm. Steve Zissou narrates the scene: “Kingsley Ned Zissou. 29. Junior grade diving tech, executive producer. Energetic, spirited, youthful.” Steve faces the camera head-on with Ned by his side as he explains the aim of the adventure planned in his next film “The Jaguar Shark, Part 2.” The projector stops as the camera cuts from the film-within-a-film to the film we are watching, Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). As they sit in the editing room wearing the same blue uniforms and red beanies, Steve suggests to “probably [his] son,” Ned, “This is what I’m talking about. A relationship subplot. There’s chemistry between us, you know?” The chemistry Steve refers to is not the relationship between a prospective father and son, but an affinity that will appear appealing on-screen. The irony of this statement is that in the sequence of “The Jaguar Shark, Part 2” shown, there is a distinct lack of cinematic chemistry; the only interaction between Steve and Ned is a series of awkward camera-aware nods. In this sequence, Anderson notes the necessity of sympathetic characterization in both documentary and narrative

Parts of this chapter were previously published in “Cast of Characters: Wes Anderson and Pure Cinematic Characterization.” The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon, edited by Peter C. Kunze (Palgrave Macmillan US, 2014).

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fiction film. He reminds the audience of the constructed nature of character alignment in cinema as a medium. While Steve’s ironic statement works against conventional conceptions of character identification by drawing attention to its fictitious and manipulative elements, within Wes Anderson’s oeuvre it is a moment of reflexivity that the initiated Anderson audience expects of his offbeat characterization. The doubleedged film-within-a-film introduction of Ned foregrounds the complexities of engagement with characters that are at once eccentric, reflexive constructions yet simultaneously designed to be emotionally appealing. Wes Anderson, working within the American eccentric mode, creates overtly cinematic characters that are distinctive yet unidentifiable as analogues of real people. Overtly cinematic characters are not designed to directly relate to authentic lived experiences but rather are presented as constructed figures whose improbable experiences and reflexivity are facilitated by, and imaginatively confined to, one particular film. Yet, despite their distinctive cinematic nature, the audience are encouraged to sympathize, and empathize, with the constructed characters within the boundaries of screen-time. The awareness of the constructed nature of these characters does not preclude alignment and allegiance, but promotes temporary emotional investment that concludes with the closing credits.

Overtly cinematic characters and audience identification Murray Smith writes that “the term ‘character’, in its most basic sense, typically denotes a fictional analogue of a human agent.”1 As fictive counterparts of human agents, characters must be imaginatively conceived as possessing the basic tenets of the “person schema”; a discrete human body, persisting traits, emotions, beliefs and desires, and perceptual activity. Endowed with these recognizable human qualities, characters are a key part of the narrative structure and fundamental to the text’s ability to promote or encourage the spectator to assess its thematic, ideological, and moral valances. The textual formation of characters in mainstream cinema is based on a set of conventions that reinforce and conform to these basic tenets. For instance, one character is played by one single performer, possessing a single identity including a name (unless otherwise explained within the narrative), internal motivations, possession of personal attributes, performing actions, and reacting to various stimuli—variations of which contain social and cultural specificity and value. Smith writes that it is “in the positing of a notion of character that a mimetic

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relationship is assumed to obtain between fictional narratives and the world”,2 that is, characters are both analogues of human agents and key elements of the narrative structure that perform rhetoric and aesthetic functions. American eccentricity presents complex relationships for assessing proposed allegiances in the employment, and subversion, of character types and approaches to verisimilitude and artifice. Smith posits that spectators engage with fictional characters through a “structure of sympathy” based on three levels of engagement: recognition, alignment, and allegiance. The first of these levels, recognition, refers to the consistent attributes that enable the spectator to identify, and re-identify, a character as an individuated figure (separate from other and subordinate figures) across the time and space of the film. Alignment refers to “the entire range of possible articulations of spatio-temporal attachment and subjective access”3 that the spectator has to the character—including the access to character subjectivity, knowledge, and interiority, but also the amount of screen-time and space afforded a character. Importantly, alignment in Smith’s formulation is not synonymous with the more commonly used term “identification,” as it does not necessitate that the spectator shares the subjectivity of the character in an empathic or antipathetic form. This sort of reaction is more akin to the third level, allegiance, which involves both an affective and a cognitive response from the spectator. Allegiance requires the spectator to evaluate a character in relation to the text’s moral structures and thereby form sympathetic allegiances to those whose embodied values are deemed desirable or, at least, preferable to others. This cognitive response is combined with a tendency for the spectator’s emotional arousal in relation to that character. The “structure of sympathy” thus accounts for both voluntary and involuntary reactions—including those based on evaluation, emotional simulation, affective mimicry, and autonomic responses. Smith’s theory of spectator-character engagement thus forms a complex dynamic that accounts for both sympathetic and empathetic engagement. The moral values present in fictional texts are informed by sociocultural norms and textual conventions (including generic conventions) of that text’s milieu. Therefore, characters and spectator may shift over time in accordance with changes to societal values and textual structures. Some film texts play more directly to verisimilitude and thereby may be more contingent on historical context for assessing intended allegiances, while others offer familiarity with character type (as in the stereotype, or in genre-cinema, the archetype) as a means of generating assent to values. In the late 1960s Bonnie and Clyde declared themselves as voices of a new generation of film consumers and filmmakers. Moments prior to their first bank job Clyde introduces himself to a family whose farm has been repossessed by the bank by stating, “This here is Miss Bonnie Parker. I’m

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Clyde Barrow. We rob banks.” Clyde, framed in a mid-shot with Bonnie shielded behind him, makes this declaration not only to the Okie family within the film’s diegesis, but also to the audience and, through them, takes aim at the conservative institutions and authorities that were out of touch with the emergent sensibility of the growing counterculture. However, only two years later Easy Rider’s Wyatt and Billy demonstrated that despite their best efforts this new generation had no definable and locatable place in their society. By the 1970s, the New Hollywood had ushered in a new form of characterization. The year 1971 saw the release of films explicitly dealing with the sexual revolution and the women’s movement (although overwhelmingly not from the perspective of female filmmakers) (Carnal Knowledge, A Safe Place), anti-war sentiment (Drive, He Said) societal paranoia (Straw Dogs, Klute), drug use and addiction (The Panic in Needle Park), the corruption of authority (The French Connection), loss of American innocence and the disruption of foundational mythology (The Last Picture Show, McCabe & Mrs. Miller), and youth existential anxiety (Harold and Maude, Two-Lane Blacktop). Thomas Elsaesser identified the “new liberal cinema” of the 1970s as a form in the process of divorcing classical Hollywood norms of fictional worlds in which protagonists were constructed as heroes that were psychologically or morally motivated.4 In the place of the “affirmative-consequential model” of the classical Hollywood narrative, the New Hollywood presented many films that were unbound by these strictures—goal-orientation appeared nostalgic in these films.5 The New Hollywood complicated the role of the cinematic hero within these films that at once captured the mundane—the banalities of real everyday life—and engaged with contemporary sociocultural issues. Elsaesser writes that the New Hollywood problematized the implicit confidence in conflict resolution of the classical Hollywood narrative as their films “specifically neutralise[d] goal-directedness and warn[ed] one not to expect affirmation of purpose and meanings.”6 These characters reflected “the inability of the New Hollywood protagonist to take on the symbolic mandate that classical Hollywood narrative addressed to its heroes: to pursue a goal or respond to a challenge.”7 The conventional goal-orientated protagonist of the classical Hollywood narrative was replaced with morally complex individuals like the charismatic, anti-authoritarian criminal Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) in Miloš Forman’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and Schlesinger’s naïve aspiring hustler Joe Buck (Jon Voight) in Midnight Cowboy (1969). Elsaesser explains: Above all, there is the notable bias for the underdog, the outsider, the outlaw, the working man or disaffected middle class protagonist, whose

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idea of happiness and freedom imply emotional bonds that live outside the nuclear family, and for whom the romantic, heterosexual couple is not the end-point of the narrative, but doomed from the start, as in the many criminal couple films made in the wake of Bonnie and Clyde, such as Thieves Like Us or Badlands.8 Many New Hollywood protagonists were presented as relatable figures that reflected, embodied, and, through their position in popular culture, informed a generational zeitgeist concerned with existential and cultural interrogation. These New Hollywood characters were designed as cinematized peers that at once were “vehicle[s] of perspective” for an American society in a “state of crisis and self-doubt”9 and embodiments of a pervasive generational ambivalence toward ambition and the futile pursuit of the American Dream. At a time when “the reality of America received as much recognition as its phantasms”10 characters were constructed with a high degree of verisimilitude. These characters were not presented in the manner of the conventional Hollywood hero—superior individuals pursuing admirable goals—but rather, in Carl Plantinga’s delineation of character types, conflicted or confused protagonists whose goals were ambiguous, unconventional, or at times incongruent with a single, linear outcome.11 Plantinga writes that the exposition of a narrative provides the audience with introductory information on character, setting, and events that serve to arouse curiosity in the audience and establish the basis for identification with the protagonist. Complications or disruptions to the protagonist’s narrative goal elicit emotional responses in the viewer that are dependent on the new situation in relation to both the viewer’s and the protagonist’s desires. Thus, in conventional narratives, there is a “consistent ebb and flow of emotion, rooted in clear and relatively simple paradigm scenarios, and kept simply and on course in … a linear narrative.”12 As characters with ambiguous morality, ambition, and desires the New Hollywood characters under examination here can be considered as facilitating a higher degree of verisimilitude and closer representations of real people than conventional classical Hollywood heroes, although, by no means does this suggest that all demographics were represented as the New Hollywood films tended to focus on characters that were overwhelmingly heteronormative and white, and disproportionately male. Some were taciturn and mumbling like George Roundy (Warren Beatty, Shampoo), others saw planning a future as futile, like Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman, The Graduate), while others viewed the future as an impossible moral compromise, like Charlie (Harvey Keitel, Mean Streets).These characters function as vehicles that connect the concern-based construals elicited by the

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film’s narrative structure to the broader sociopolitical and cultural context as they were often framed within settings and scenarios that mirrored the reallife frustrations of their target youth audience. As such, these characters can be seen to elicit more specific emotional connections than those that arise from basic paradigmatic scenarios—such as fear generated through a threat to one’s safety embodied in a violent antagonist such as The Silence of the Lambs (1991) or disaster in films such as Armageddon (1998). The emotional and intellectual reactions intended to be aroused in the target audience of New Hollywood films related very specifically to their historical context, and the pervasive national and generational anxieties shared among specific facets of American society at the time. Thus, I contend that such characters could be conceived of as cinematized peers. These were on-screen figures that, through their textual design, were depicted to highlight their analogous relationship to human agents—as characters imaginable within a real-world context. In contrast, characters in the American eccentric mode are conceived of as overtly cinematic: that is, they are characters that are at once peculiar and sympathetic yet consciously created to inhabit only a specific cinematic milieu. That is, they are designed to highlight their narrative function and construction over any direct correlation with human counterparts. However, like the protagonists of the New Hollywood, the plights of the eccentric overtly cinematic character center on genuine existential and political issues and therefore engender anxieties prevalent in their respective contemporary American sociocultural moments. In line with self-improving and self-regulating values of neoliberal citizenship, American eccentric cinema presents anxieties as though they are confined to idiosyncratic characters rather than shared sociocultural condition. I suggest that in contrast to the New Hollywood idealized peer who could be seen as on-screen manifestations of a certain set of shared, generational maladies, overtly cinematic characters are not designed to transcend their textual imaginaries. These characters are not fashioned to be readily imaginable outside the cinematic frame because they are at once sincere and ironic amalgamations of filmic allusion and quotation, parodies of cinematic norms and convention, and designed characters whose plights within individual films are not easily mapped onto everyday lived experiences. For instance, Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress (2011) centers on Violet Whistler (Greta Gerwig), an upper-class East Coast college student, who together with her florally named cohort (Heather, Lily, and Rose) run (without training or supervision) a suicide prevention center for the clinically depressed on campus. Damsels in Distress plays with the notion of overt character construction as an element of its narrative. Within the film it is revealed that Violet has

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literally invented herself as a character distinct from her birth-given identity, Emily Tweeter.13 In addition to Violet’s character invention within the narrative, her actions within the film are eclectic, contradictory, and unfocused, thereby subverting mainstream cinematic character conventions. Violet does not demonstrate clear, linear motivation within the film—she is not concerned with graduating from college, nor is she determined to remain within that institution as a means of avoiding maturation, as in campus comedies such as Van Wilder: Party Liaison (2002) or Glory Daze (1995). Instead, Violet is genuinely devoted and consumed with the pursuits the college environment affords her.14 For Violet this is improving the odor and hygiene of the students in the college’s Doar Dorm, attaining boyfriends of lower intelligence and social standing than herself, and launching a new dance craze called “The Sambola!” in an attempt to change the course of human history. Due to their bizarre concerns and construals, characters like Violet promote complex spectator alignment that oscillates between— and at times balances—“congruence” (between the spectator and the character’s concerns and construals) or “benign congruence” (spectator and the character’s concerns and construals are congruent but not identical) and “distanced and/or ironic observation” in which characters, and their situations, are not viewed from a sympathetic position—but rather from a position of ironic amusement.15 This balance between a sympathetic relationship and an ironic distance produced through meta-cinematic tactics and parodic evocations underpins the structure of the overtly cinematic character.

Wes Anderson and overtly cinematic characterization While I argue that the American eccentric mode is not an auteurist phenomenon, Wes Anderson has, to date, consistently released films that sit squarely within the parameters of American eccentricity. As Anderson’s oeuvre provides a uniquely stable example of overtly cinematic characterization, I primarily analyze this form of character construction as an element of American eccentricity through his films. However, the textual elements of eccentric characterization are certainly not confined to his works. Wes Anderson’s aesthetic style draws directly on the New Hollywood era. Anderson evokes the New Hollywood aesthetically through signature use of 1970s music, retro costumes and interiors favoring the 1960s and 1970s. More specific links (if not straight homage) are apparent between

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Rushmore (1998) and Mike Nichol’s The Graduate, and the nostalgia arising from minute aesthetic detail and the presence of precocious children in The Royal Tenenbaums and Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon (1973).16 There are also clear parallels between the plights of the New Hollywood and Anderson’s protagonists. Like Joe Buck’s dream of sexual and financial success in the city (Midnight Cowboy), Bottle Rocket’s (1996) Dignan (Owen Wilson) naïvely dreams of living the exciting life of an outlaw based only on knowledge from American Western mythology and popular culture. Rushmore’s Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), like The Graduate’s Benjamin Braddock, actively avoids pursuing a future beyond his schooling years and rather focuses on a complicated involvement with an older woman.17 Steve Zissou is plagued by filial obligation like Bobby Dupea in Five Easy Pieces. Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) acts beyond ethical norms in order to maintain his position and relevance within an institution like Howard Beale (Peter Finch, Network [1976]). As discussed in the previous chapter, The Darjeeling Limited’s Whitman brothers embark on an existential journey in order to regain something lost, similar to Wyatt and Billy’s journey in Easy Rider. Moonrise Kingdom’s (2012) Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) and Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) unite against the inequities of mainstream society in favor of a limited existence beyond its boundaries, like Bonnie and Clyde. The Grand Budapest Hotel’s (2014) Monsieur Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes) flirts with life and mortality through his penchant for women in the twilight of their natural lives, like Harold (Bud Cort) in Harold and Maude.

FIGURE 3.1 Sam and Suzy. Moonrise Kingdom Wes Anderson, 2012.

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FIGURE 3.2 Bonnie and Clyde. Bonnie and Clyde Arthur Penn, 1967.

Wes Anderson’s American eccentric protagonists are often on the cusp of crisis. Recent scholarship on the thematic concerns of Anderson’s work often notes the recurring familial disconnections (particularly paternal crises), the characters’ narcissistic tendencies, their paralyzing diffidence, anxiety, and depression.18 Yet, the focus on these grave concerns does not feature in much of the critical discourse around Anderson’s work, which instead has tended to focus on his “quirky” aesthetic and “whimsical” tone. Despite the severity of two twelve-year-olds rejecting society, at the time of release, critics overwhelmingly read Moonrise Kingdom’s Sam and Suzy as amusing and odd, but ultimately benign—as though the unarticulated causes of their discontent will pass with age.19 However, Sam is an orphan whose disturbing behavior has resulted in his removal from foster care to become a permanent ward of the state, and Suzy is an emotionally troubled girl who experiences uncontrollable spurts of aggression that alienate her from her family and peers. The causes of Sam’s and Suzy’s behavior are an instrumental component of their rejection of society, rather than a product of pre-teen confusion—after all, Wes Anderson rarely presents age as a component of maturity, or emotional equilibrium. Moonrise Kingdom is not, as Todd McCarthy claims, “a portrait of young love,”20 nor is it, as Kevin Lally suggests, primarily concerned with the “obsessive love of two 12-year-old outcasts.”21 The primary thematic concern of Moonrise Kingdom is a profound existential anxiety and the inability—or unwillingness—to articulate these anxieties for both children and adults.22

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Yet, despite the seriousness of their troubling behavior, Sam Shakuksy and Suzy Bishop have not been critically read as reflections of the increasing recognition of mental illness in children,23 nor as the outcome of emotional alienation in a contemporary individualist neoliberal society, or one in which the virtual experience has largely replaced the physical. Rushmore’s Max Fischer has been described as “one strange kid … monomaniacal enough to make people uncomfortable”24 rather than a teenager deliberately avoiding adulthood, and Steve Zissou as performing a “paterfamilias/jerk role”25 rather than a childlike man emotionally stunted in adulthood. Although Anderson’s overtly cinematic characters display anxieties similar to those evident in the New Hollywood, the critical reception of these characters suggests a different mode of viewing and interaction. Whereas the New Hollywood cinematized peer promotes for its target audience allegiance with a figure able to be imagined outside the confines of the cinema, the American eccentric overtly cinematic character is positioned at a distance that is facilitated by, and confined to, a particular film’s diegesis. Rather than a reflection, the overtly cinematic character is a refraction of contemporary existential anxiety mediated through idiosyncratic cinematic aesthetics.

Eccentric or “smart” characterization? Much attention has been devoted to the distinctiveness of Anderson’s visual cinematic style in accordance with Jeffrey Sconce’s smart cinema aesthetic. Warren Buckland’s editorial for a special “Wes Anderson and Co.” edition of The New Review of Film and Television Studies begins with the note: “In response to my call for academic papers on the films of Wes Anderson—10 of which are published in this special issue—two key terms regularly cropped up to make sense of his films: the ‘smart’ film and the ‘new sincerity.’”26 Similarly, over one-third of the articles in Peter C. Kunze’s collection The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon relate Sconce’s work to Anderson.27 Indeed, the perceived reliance on “braininess” in the films I delineate as “American eccentric” has been discussed by a number of critics and theorists in relation to “smart” cinema. As Deborah J. Thomas writes: Wes Anderson’s films are characterised by a “weird,” idiosyncratic and ironic self-consciousness, offset by levels of sincerity and pathos—a wedding of style and tone that could be described by the portmanteau, “melancomic” (Bailey 2001; Brunetta 2003). As such, they can be contextualised within smart cinema—a wave of contemporary, often controversial American

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films identified by cultural theorist Jeffrey Sconce in his 2002 Screen article “Irony, Nihilism and the New American ‘Smart’ Film,” which are particularly attached to the trope of irony. According to Sconce, smart film is especially aligned to the cultural tastes and consumption patterns of the educated intelligentsia of Generation X, who derive pleasure from their ironic “cleverness” and “arty” sm(art) sensibility. (2002, 349–369)28 The prominence of smart cinema in discussions of films that I consider American eccentric highlights the similarities (and indeed overlap) of the two delineations. As Thomas identifies, smart cinema employs a set of formal tactics (in various configurations) that promote a characteristic ironic, cynical, or nihilistic tone and pleasure through intellectual spectator engagement. As the irony is smart cinema’s primary formal strategy the connection to American eccentricity is clear. Yet, as I suggested in Chapter 1, the intent and facilitation of ironic expression in the American eccentric mode is not merely predicated on “smart” spectatorship. Rather, irony functions here in a manner more aligned with Thomas’s “melancomic”—a tone she applies to Anderson’s films that is likely “to arouse a distinct recognition of the peculiar, developed partly because of the playful use of comic irony, which veers off sharp-edged satire, and also incorporates the whimsical and poignant.”29 The melancomic is an important configuration and useful term for analyzing tone. However, in the American eccentric mode irony is used for dramatic and thematic functions in addition to its tonal qualities. These additional ironic functions also illuminate the subtle differences between American eccentricity and smart cinema. On a thematic and textual level, American eccentric films use irony as a means of mediating existential anxiety. Within the narratives, this mediation manifests as the distancing of intense negative emotions—issues that are “too big” in Chabon’s terms to be approached directly—through the incursion of reflexivity and artifice, comedic ironic utterances, parodic evocations of generic conventions, and juxtaposition or fissure between the aural and image tracks. These incursions are not, however, used to defer the sincerity of a film’s thematic concerns entirely, but rather provide a “safe” distance from the grave issues present. Sincerity assumes the coalescence of inner and outer attitudes—or the correspondence of concept and expression. In the American eccentric mode, irony is inserted into expression, not to rupture the correspondence of inner and outer attitudes but to transform their delivery. The insertion of irony into sincere meaning is in dialogue with the notion of “kidding on the square,” however without a requisite comedic tone. In smart cinema, by contrast, ironic expression manifests most prominently in the sensibility’s focal point—

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“blank” style and incongruous narration. Sconce describes blank style as an endeavor to express the story of a film regardless of that story’s “absurdity, sensationalistic, or disturbing nature”30 with a perceived dampened affect which, in turn, creates the impression of blank narration. Rather than relying on stylistic vérité to produce the idea of blankness, long shots, static composition, and sparse cutting are deliberately employed as aesthetic and stylistic practices that manufacture a sense of authorial blankness and cultivate distance and disengagement. Sconce writes: [While] respecting classical space and time, this strategy often de-intensifies continuity into a series of static tableaux. Thus, while the rest of cinema turns to the acceleration of the continuity techniques described by Bordwell as a means of intensifying character identification and plot involvement, the new smart cinema often produces tension through dividing the audience and storyworld, not necessarily in some Brechtian distanciation but more as a means of fostering a sense of clinical observation.31 In addition to this signature shot choice, Sconce notes that the smart sensibility’s central focus is interpersonal alienation in the white middle class, in particular within marriage or other domestic relationships. The whiteness and privilege of protagonists is again a site of connection between smart cinema and the American eccentric films under consideration in this book. In smart cinema, Sconce notes that the ubiquity of this particular demographic’s focus on domestic relationships has led to a set of stock shots—the “awkward couple shot,” the “awkward coupling shot,” and the “awkward dining shot.” These stock shots are an element of the “smart” visual language that creates a divide between the audience and storyworld, including their inhabiting characters. This divide is expressed through blank narration in which the images presented to the audience appear incongruous with the aural narration of a scene or sequence. In contrast to the uneven ironic expression in American eccentricity that highlights a film’s artificiality, the blandness of this formal representation in smart cinema enables awkward and intolerable events (such as the predatory pedophilia of Todd Solondz’s Happiness [1998]) to be delivered as though mundane.32 That is, where American eccentricity employs irony and reflexivity in its tone and aesthetics to defer the existential anxiety present in these texts, smart cinema utilizes blankness to depict disturbing subject matter. The effect of American eccentricity’s use of ironic expression is not to disengage the spectator, but rather to perform a mediation of the sincere existential issues of the films. The spectator is, indeed, encouraged to emotionally engage with overtly cinematic characters and their plights while being frequently reminded of their artificial construction.

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Claire Perkins’s work on smart cinema extends Sconce’s conception of the smart sensibility and the “smart” character, and considers the impact of “therapy culture” and the concept of “post youth” within these formulations. Perkins states that smart characters are often depicted as hyperbolically “depressed, repressed, anxious, addicted, phobic, narcissistic, regressive and emotionally detached.”33 These characters inhabit a world in which clinical therapy is not required for mental stability and well-being, but is an expected representation of a cultural phenomenon “where the form of thinking that characterises the relationship between individual and therapist becomes an instrument for shaping public perception on a variety of issues and social institutions.”34 In correspondence with the American eccentric mode’s focus on the idiosyncrasies of protagonists as individuals within a neoliberal context, the attitude and presence of therapy culture highlight the shift from a concern with sociocultural to personal tensions (although the personal tensions are largely the result of social and familial issues). Entwined with this culture of therapy present in smart cinema is the concept of the “post-youth,” which Perkins describes as a state in which adulthood is not necessarily achieved through age, and many adults appear to live in a stunted state of emotional development or maturity. The concept of post-youth, and indeed many of the positions taken by Perkins in relation to characterization, can be applied to the sincere elements of American eccentricity’s overtly cinematic characterization. However, I mark a distinction in the latter on the basis of their reflexive construction. While films in the American eccentric mode often employ similar aesthetic and dramatic techniques to those listed by Sconce and Perkins, American eccentricity does not promote audience disengagement from uneasy cringe-worthy characters, but rather encourages audience engagement with idiosyncratic characters and narratives that are notably outside the parameters of naturalistic presentation and identification. Rather than being recognizably depressed, repressed, anxious, and emotionally detached, in the manner that Perkins describes smart characters, American eccentric overtly cinematic characters reflexively perform their on-screen roles through ironic distancing, knowing performance, and the use of hyper-dialogue such that they provide the impression of being “alright for now” by the film’s end—despite a lack of actual closure. This structure is evident in the final sequence of P.T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997) in which Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) psyches himself up for his perceived triumphant return to the pornography industry. Dirk begins the film as seventeen-year-old Eddie Adams, whose jealous mother forces him from the family home and into a makeshift family headed by pornography producer, Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds). Under Horner’s guidance, Eddie adopts the pseudonym Dirk Diggler and swiftly rises to porn stardom. Unable

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to cope with his newly acquired fame and wealth, Dirk succumbs to cocaine addiction, paranoia, and an inability to perform in new films. At his lowest point, Dirk’s actions result in the murder of a close friend when an attempt to swindle a wealthy addict turns violent. Dirk’s plight follows a conventional narrative trajectory in that it traces his rise and fall from fame. The film’s final moments, in which Dirk is framed surrounded by lights in his dressing room, in the classical narrative would signal that Dirk has overcome adversity and learned a moral lesson from his experiences. Dirk faces his dressing room mirror and practices his lines for his next film. He unzips his trousers and recites the mantra: “I’m a star. I’m a star. I’m a star, I’m a big, bright shining star.” Indeed, this final sequence does initially appear celebratory. However, rather than allowing this sequence to function as a conclusion, Anderson prompts the audience to recognize that Dirk is a character that has been specifically designed for the screen. This scene directly recalls Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), in which after reciting Marlon Brando’s lines, “I coulda been a contender,” from On the Waterfront (1954), the fallen Jake LaMotta (Robert DeNiro) stands up and repeats his mantra “I’m the boss, I’m the boss … ” before appearing before his audience. This allusion doubles Dirk’s fate—by linking him directly to Jake LaMotta and Marlon Brando Anderson not only pointedly recalls these characters’ masculine anxieties, underlying male violence, solitude, and failure, but he also relegates Dirk to a position as a character who has been constructed as an amalgam of others within the history of cinema.

Wes Anderson’s eccentric characters As Plantinga states, through storytelling, films perform specific emotional functions. He writes: As concern-based construals, emotions can be communicated as stories— stories we tell ourselves about our experiences. Narrative films, simply put, are representation of concern-based construals not about ourselves, but about fictional events and characters. Movies tend to consist of hypercoherent narratives that organise experience to a much greater degree than we would normally face in our lives. Not only are movie narratives prefocused, exaggerated, and dramatic, but their subject matter is drawn from the kinds of scenarios that will be accessible to mass audiences.35 Plantinga contends that, as analogues of human agents, fictional characters provide spectators with the opportunity to “gain adaptive benefit from the

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imaginative rehearsal of various human predicaments.”36 While specific responses to emotion scenarios vary between individuals, all narrative films present characters and events as well as preconfigured responses to them within “a particular complex of affective experience.”37 Mainstream, or Hollywood, narratives are not simply the presentation of events but rather the elicitation of desires, concerns and aversions, and (sometimes) judgments arising from these repeated scenarios that arouse and fulfill the desires of a mass audience. However, mainstream characters also conform to specific textual conventions. Conventional characters present the audience with individuals whose aim within a film is to overcome specific problems or attain certain goals. David Bordwell writes that the classical Hollywood construction of character follows conventions that had been established in earlier literary and theoretical forms, whereby characters are conceived initially by occupation, gender, age, and ethnic identity. From this initial conception, more discrete individualized traits are added in order to create “a discriminated individual endowed with a consistent batch of evident traits, qualities, and behaviours.”38 While Bordwell refers to the construction of film in the classical era (pre-1960), his formulation of character construction remains the dominant form today. As characters are often presented as agents of causality within a film, these individualized, consistent traits are often used to serve a narrative function. This occurs even in films where conventional characters or film worlds are highly stylized. For instance, Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck) first appears in Preston Sturges’s film The Lady Eve (1941) as a youthful and beautiful woman, hanging blithely over the railing of a ship to view a dapper gentleman boarding the ship from below.39 Jean directs her first line of dialogue to her father, and his business partner: “Gee, I hope he’s rich. I hope he thinks he’s a wizard at cards.” The combination of Jean’s physical appearance, palpable excitement, and admission of desire to acquire the wealth of the man boarding the ship through nefarious means establishes her character as an alluring con-artist who is in business with her father and his assistant. Charles (Henry Fonda), the man boarding the ship in this sequence, is first seen on the banks of the Amazon expressing his gratitude for a recently concluded expedition in ophiology. Charles soon thereafter is revealed to be the handsome heir to an ale company fortune, whose mild manners and relative naïveté render him oblivious to the plethora of female attention paraded at him on the boat. These consistent character traits, Jean as the savvy and seductive con-woman and Charles as the endearing yet naïve wealthy heir, serve as the firm basis of the film’s narrative—a screwball comedy resulting from Jean’s initial intention and her father’s continued plan to fleece Charles, with genuine love emerging between the two as an obstacle. The consistency of these character-based

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attributes enables the audience to create logical and discernible links between a character’s actions and reactions within the film’s diegesis, which in turn aids the film’s internal coherence and verisimilitude and promotes character alignment and identification.40 In The Lady Eve, the audience is only able to follow the second humorous encounter between Charles and the scorned Jean’s assumed persona, Lady Eve, because it has been established that Jean is a manipulative con-artist and Charles a trusting man who was genuinely besotted with Jean (to whom Eve bears an overt resemblance). It is the genuine love exhibited between Jean and Charles in their first encounter that enables their reunion at the film’s conclusion, despite the complications and deceptions presented during the narrative. In accordance with Plantinga’s notion that within narrative film “coupling/mating, integration into the social group, and/or survival in the face of threat”41 are consistent emotion scenarios as they essentially pertain to human existence, the audience largely desires the possibility of reunion between Charles and Jean as the resolution of a coupling scenario. Conventional characterization establishes individuality and consistency through the recurrence of detailed behaviors or motifs that establish associations for the film’s progression in accordance with the protagonist’s goals or desires.42 Elsaesser writes that New Hollywood films, such as Two-Lane Blacktop, defy or downplay the audience expectations driven by a psychologically motivated protagonist to provide conventional casual narrative links in part as a rejection of the ideologies of “the dramaturgy and film-language developed by classical Hollywood”43 that contradicted the sociocultural zeitgeist of the 1970s. As Elsaesser writes, the New Hollywood unmotivated heroes disrupted the classical Hollywood narrative where: The image or scene not only pointed forward and backward to what had been and what was to come, but also helped to develop a motivational logic that functioned as an implicit causality, enveloping the hero and connecting him to his world. Whether Hitchcock thriller or Hawks comedy, one was secure in the knowledge that the scenes fitted into each other like cogs in a clockwork, and that all visual information was purposeful, inflecting toward a plenitude of significance, saturated with cues that explained motivation and character. Out of conflict, contradiction and contingency that narrative generated order, linearity, and articulated energy.44 The absence of consistent behaviors, traits, and qualities in American eccentric overtly cinematic characters restricts the formulation of logical action/reaction linkages to a different effect. Rather than following perceived logical action/ reaction connections, the audience is compelled to allow actions and reactions

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to occur without preformulated or logical expectations. The subversion of expectation in the American eccentric mode creates a mode of viewing in which characters are designed to undergo constant reassessment by the spectator, as overtly cinematic character’s actions, while not inconceivable in hindsight, can rarely be predicted in advance. Through this, American eccentric films inhibit in the audience the sense of verisimilitude afforded by more conventional cinema, which in turn alters the desired affective and emotional connections promoted in the spectator. Rather, American eccentric films create two intersecting fields of performance—normative believability and eccentric possibility—between which characters fluctuate without prior indication. This fluctuation is evident in the sequence in which Royal Tenenbaum attempts to “brew some recklessness” in his grandsons against the will of their widowed, vigilant father, Chas (Ben Stiller). A montage sequence, played to Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” whimsically displays a range of rebellious juvenile behaviors that oscillate between normative believability (leaping off furniture into a pool, jaywalking, go-karting) and eccentric possibility (dogfights, petty theft, riding on the back of a garbage truck). Chas, incensed at this discovery, corners his father in a walk-in closet in the Tenenbaum house surrounded by board games. The setting is curious, as given the information provided in the film’s prologue board-game activity seems unlikely in the Tenenbaum family. Rather than responding to Chas’s castigation, Royal engages in a moment of nostalgia as he exclaims, “my god, I haven’t been in here in years!” Royal’s reaction (amused by his surroundings rather than concerned for his son) is concordant with the audience’s prior knowledge of him as a man who has deliberately misinformed his family that he has cancer for his own personal gain, and harshly criticized his adopted daughter’s first theater piece on her eleventh birthday. However, Royal’s expected disengagement is abruptly reversed as he responds to Chas’s shouted question “Are you listening to me?” with an observant and sensitive (albeit yelled) “Yes, I am! I think you are having a nervous breakdown! I don’t think you recovered from Rachel’s death.” This response is unpredictable prior to its occurrence as Royal has hitherto expressed little knowledge of his children’s lives during his extended absence from the family. (Earlier in the film, Royal appeared ignorant of Chas’s deceased wife’s name, and referred to her as “another body” in the cemetery.) However, Anderson swiftly undermines Royal’s momentary concern for Chas when, rather than pursue his distressed son, he remains in the closet, admiring his prized mounted javelina’s head. While the linkages between action and reaction are disrupted in the American eccentric mode, Plantinga argues that the audience nonetheless aligns themselves with Royal because Anderson affords him the most screentime and a narrative trajectory that alludes to a classical formation. Royal

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establishes a goal out of selfish financial necessity (his reinstatement as the patriarch of the Tenenbaum household and reunification with this estranged wife, Etheline [Anjelica Huston]) and is presented with an obstacle to that goal (the arrival of an opposing suitor, Henry Sherman [Danny Glover]). The audience follows Royal through his unethical and manipulative plan to achieve his goal, his retribution at being discovered as false, and his apparently sincere realization of the importance of familial connection. Plantinga, however, notes that the reflexivity of Anderson’s film promotes a secondary form of emotion directed toward the film that he calls an “artifact emotion.” These emotions do not take the fictional worlds created within films as their objects, but rather relate to the films themselves as artifacts. He writes: One of the film’s intended affective responses is laughter, humor, and perhaps admiration, artifact emotions directed at the imagination shown by the filmmakers. Thus, the film draws attention to its artificiality throughout, all the while attempting to elicit the strongly sympathetic emotions that depend on the spectator granting weight to the fictional characters and world of the film.45 While Royal is an unpredictable character constructed such that he requires constant renegotiation, he is also configured as a protagonist designed for empathetic audience alignment. This alignment, however, can only occur during the narrative (which is consciously constructed as a work of fiction through the novel as a narrative framing device), and as such Royal is not only deceased by the film’s conclusion but fictitiously eulogized on his tombstone, with his (self-composed) epitaph reading “Royal Tenenbaum—died tragically rescuing his family from the wreckage of a destroyed sinking battleship.” Thus, the audience is encouraged to simultaneously engage emotionally with Royal as a sympathetic character, and artifactually, as an overtly textual construction. As Plantinga writes throughout The Royal Tenenbaums “a reflexive knowingness asserts itself in exaggerated characterizations, eccentric production design, and offbeat dialogue—all of which encourages a certain ironic distance while the film simultaneously encourages strong sympathies for the characters.”46 The film’s narration—including its overtly cinematic characterization—blurs the boundary between irony and sincerity and thereby mixes emotional valence. Despite the limitations Anderson’s overtly cinematic characterization places on conventional sympathetic allegiance, he has created some of the most idiosyncratic, and memorable protagonists in contemporary American cinema. Sam Davies writes, “He doesn’t do characterization so much as character design”47—indeed, Anderson’s characters are recognizable products of his films. Wes Anderson creates a brand-like consistency through the recurrent casting

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of Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, Kumar Pallana, Anjelica Huston, Luke Wilson, Seymour Cassel, and Andrew Wilson. In keeping with Anderson’s carefully constructed set designs, clothes are intrinsically bound with identity—Dignan’s yellow jumpsuit, Max’s Rushmore blazer, the consistent Tenenbaum outfits (Lacoste dress, red sweat suit, and tennis garb), Team Zissou’s uniforms, the Whitman brothers’ bespoke lounge suits, Sam’s Khaki Scout uniform and Suzy’s shift dress, and Zero’s (Tony Revolori) and Gustave H.’s (Ralph Fiennes) uniforms in The Grand Budapest Hotel—which establishes a theatrical stage-like quality. Indeed, the clothes worn by Anderson’s characters more than visually individualize them—they are elementally constructed into the characters’ identity such that their absence or alteration would result in an absolute reshaping and reevaluation of the character.48 In addition to their stage-like appearance, Anderson’s overtly cinematic characters are not designed to pursue readily relatable goals or as having quotidian experiences. Where conventional characters are created in relation to a problem that they must overcome throughout the course of the narrative, and conclude with a definite resolution, Anderson’s characters are regularly driven toward unconventional ambitions—committing burglaries, remaining in a high school institution despite being an outsider, or exacting revenge on a bizarre sea creature. As Anderson’s characters are invariably wealthy there is no financial necessity or material drive toward these unusual ambitions.49 Rather, these characters perform these unconventional ambitions through an ironic amalgamation of expectations compiled through pop-cultural references. This performance produces a simulacral form of identification in which a cinematic experience substitutes for the appeals to readily recognizable potentially shared lived experiences or attributes that more conventional characters often provide. Bottle Rocket begins with Anthony (Luke Wilson) performing an escape from a voluntary mental hospital (by a makeshift rope consisting of sheets tied together) for Dignan’s benefit, evoking Huck and Tom’s “rescue” of Jim from the Phelpses’ shed in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Dignan and Anthony’s first—and only—successful act is to rob Anthony’s family home, not for financial gain, but for practice because he can afford it. Like Virgil Starkwell (Woody Allen) in Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run (1969), Dignan and his team of robbers are not only odd and inefficient, but essentially inept.50 Dignan’s knowledge of criminal activity is primarily informed by heist films like The Sting. The reflexive performance of overtly cinematic characters based on genre films is clearly demonstrated by Francis Whitman in The Darjeeling Limited. The sequence in which Francis explains the purpose of the brothers’ cross-country journey that I discussed in Chapter 1 provides an illuminating example of this strategy. Francis’s lines—

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A- I want us to be brothers like we used to be and to find ourselves and bond with each other. B- I want to make this trip a spiritual journey where each of us seeks the unknown, and we learn about it. C- I want us to be completely open and say yes to everything, even if it’s shocking and painful —are, for narrative purposes, directed at his brothers, Peter and Jack. However, Francis delivers these lines facing the camera, and thus he also addresses the audience. I suggested that through this performative gesture, Anderson ironically acknowledges the expectations associated with the road film genre. Yet, he simultaneously situates Francis as a self-referential character performing these expectations while remaining genuinely invested in the pursuit of their emotional fulfillment within the film’s diegesis. As MacDowell suggests, deliberate camera recognition is a recurring Andersonian trait: Anderson … has perfected a type of shot that we find across many quirky films: a static, flat-looking, medium-long or long “planimetric” shot [Bordwell 2007] that appears nearly geometrically even, depicting carefully arranged characters, often facing directly forward, who are made to look faintly ridiculous by virtue of a composition’s rigidity (seen particularly plainly in Anderson’s character introductions). Partly because of their presentational neatness, there is a degree of “self-consciousness” to such shots.51 In addition to self-conscious performance, Anderson’s overtly cinematic characters deliver dialogue in off-kilter, straight tones and unexpected expressions. Following Sconce’s discussion of Anderson within the smart aesthetic, this mode of delivery has frequently been described as “deadpan.” Indeed, Anderson often frames his actors in close-up, static shots, with focus on the characters’ motionless faces. However, as Donna Peberdy notes, deadpan performance does not equate “motionless” and “emotionless” in this context, but rather suggests the blocking of emotion. As Anderson lingers on deadpan expressions, the minute details of the characters’ faces become amplified in the absence of more distinct visual representations of emotion.52 This is evident in Rushmore when Herman Blume, seated beside Max Fisher at a wrestling match of his twin sons, states with deadpan intonation, “Never in my wildest imagination did I ever dream I’d have sons like these.” The camera holds on a two-shot of Herman and Max, as the gradual clouding of Herman’s eyes, infinitesimal trembling of the downturned mouth, and faint quiver of descending slanting eyebrows subtly suggest the sincere filial and masculine anxieties beneath his motionless exterior. Peberdy writes: The deadpan performance mode is thus an illusion of blankness, functioning as a mask that both disguises and protects. Deadpan is not a

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simple case of emptiness … deadpan takes on a “doubleness … between an intentionally blank face and idiocy, or between cunning and naïveté.” This definition is particularly appropriate in thinking about the deadpan on display in Anderson’s films where the character’s interactions are often as much about the incapacity of expression as they are the result of ignorance regarding an appropriate response.53 In this sense, the deployment of deadpan expression correlates to Ngai’s “ugly feelings” (or the perception of illegitimate anxiety) and reflexive articulation these feelings elicit—the character masks negative emotions through by performing a blank exterior. While the term “deadpan” is accurate in describing the delivery of dialogue by overtly cinematic characters (particularly those played by Bill Murray), the written dialogue is distinct in that it always acknowledges the presence of a composed, formal script through the use of self-referential statements (“You don’t know me; you don’t want to know me … I’m just a character in your stupid film.” [Ned, The Life Aquatic]), unexpected expression (“I’m sorry for your loss. Your mother was a terribly attractive woman.” [Royal, The Royal Tenenbaums]), and deliberately repeated lines (“Let’s go get a drink and smoke a cigarette” [Francis, The Darjeeling Limited]). More than ironic dialogue with a deadpan mode of delivery, Anderson employs what I refer to as hyper-dialogue: that is, the exaggerated and ironically inflected delivery of dialogue in the place of action, the dynamics of which are further elucidated in the next chapter. Bordwell suggests that individualized character action—i.e., consistent physical reactions including gesture, expression, movements, and speech— aids the construction of character psychology as the outward expressions of inner emotions.54 Hyper-dialogue, as action or gesture, emanates from latent unexpressed anxiety; this may be seen when Suzy’s explanation for her constant use of binoculars—“It helps me see things closer. Even if they’re not very far away. I pretend it’s my magic power”—elicits this response from Sam Shakusky: “That sounds like poetry. Poems don’t always have to rhyme, you know. They’re just supposed to be creative.” Rather than inquire into Suzy’s obsessive investigation of external and internal worlds she cannot comprehend, Sam provides the audience with a moment of hyper-dialogue— his words work to distance the anxiety of the exchange by ironically reciting a piece of information in a deadpan manner. The constructed nature of dialogue is consistent with the eccentric cinematic milieu created by Anderson. The recognizability of an Anderson character’s use of dialogue, costume, motivation, and casting, however, is slightly different from Sam Davies’s notion of “character design,” where the concept of design implies a degree of superficiality, as though these characters are variations in shape cut from the same signature motif. While there is an undeniable intertextual dialogue across

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the Anderson oeuvre (Francis’s laminated itineraries for the brothers’ spiritual journey in The Darjeeling Limited is a somewhat “matured” version of Dignan’s handwritten seventy-five-year life plan in Bottle Rocket),55 this speaks only to the well-initiated Anderson spectator in subverting or affirming character expectations based on recurrences in casting, shot selection, and themes. The performative nature of the cinematic medium is recognized by Anderson in the recurring use of theater, film, and literature both diegetically and formally. Max Fischer and Margot Tenenbaum are playwrights, Steve Zissou is a film director (who openly declares “it’s a documentary, it’s all really happening!”), Suzy Bishop reads fantasy novels, and Jack Whitman writes thinly veiled autobiographical short stories, that he feels require the frequent caveat “the characters are all fictional” to placate his brothers. Mirroring the internal representation of character construction and believability, Anderson acknowledges the formal construction of film as a medium. Max’s interest in the theatre is formally reflected in Rushmore as the narrative is propelled by grand drapes displaying intertitles that delineate the passing of time. The Life Aquatic begins and concludes inside the Teatro di San Carlo at a filmfestival screening of Zissou’s documentaries “The Jaguar Shark Part 1” and “The Jaguar Shark Part 2,” respectively. The Royal Tenenbaums and The Grand Budapest Hotel open as “a novel by the same name,” The Royal Tenenbaums is narrated in book chapters by Alec Baldwin off-screen, and Moonrise Kingdom features an on-screen narrator (Bob Balaban) who interacts with both the on-screen characters and the audience. Additionally, Anderson incorporates animated “still” photographs to reveal specific details about certain characters. In Rushmore, after Dr. Guggenheim (Brian Cox) declares that Max Fischer is “one of the worst students” at the academy, the camera cuts to an aerial shot of a school year book. The year book is opened and a montage of Max’s extracurricular activities with explanatory inter-titles is played to The Creation’s “Making Time.” Similarly, in The Royal Tenenbaums, Margot’s colorful secret history is revealed through a private detective’s file. Again, an aerial shot shows the file opening and a montage sequence of animated photographs displays Margot’s sexual exploits as The Ramones’ “Judy Is a Punk” plays. The montage sequences not only deliver background information but function outside narrative time. Both montages end by abruptly cutting the accompanying music as the action returns to the narrative time of the film. As Boschi and McNelis suggest, the jarring editing in these sequences draws attention to the constructed nature of Anderson’s montages as dynamic representations of still images and words.56 However, this notion of montage technique as a form of construction can be taken further. In both of these sequences Anderson uses the montage to provide access to the character that Max has created for himself

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at Rushmore and the character that Margot has concealed from her family by performance. The most distinct example of Anderson’s use of formal techniques to highlight cinematic performance is the introductory “Cast of Characters” sequence in The Royal Tenenbaums. The sequence introduces the major players in medium close-up, facing the camera (in the position of a mirror), as they carry out a variety of tasks expressive of each character’s personality. The actors/characters face forward as opening credits appear stating characters by name and the star portraying them: “Gwyneth Paltrow as Margot Tenenbaum,” “Gene Hackman as Royal Tenenbaum,” and so forth. As this sequence appears after the film’s prologue, which outlines the narrative background of the film, it destabilizes conventional character alignment by encouraging the audience to recognize the role of the actors in their portrayal of the characters, as “a body too much” in Jean-Louis Comolli’s conception.57 Margot Tenenbaum is at once a fictional character created by Wes Anderson and a role played by Gwyneth Paltrow. Yet, while Anderson reminds the audience that Margot Tenenbaum is a figure to be negotiated within The Royal Tenenbaums and a character portrayed by Paltrow, beyond the “Cast of Characters” sequence, the intertextual dialogue of Paltrow’s past roles within the film differs to that of the Wilson brothers, or Bill Murray, as this is her first American eccentric role. The appearance of a recurring actor within an American eccentric (or specifically, in this context, Anderson) film creates an intertextuality that, for the initiated viewer, is separate from the actor’s complete body of work. Thus, due to his previous roles as Herman Blume, Steve Zissou, and Raleigh Sinclair, the appearance of Bill Murray at the opening of The Darjeeling Limited prompts the knowing Anderson audience to suppose that he will figure in the film to come as a problematic biological or surrogate father. It is therefore unexpected when Murray is revealed as peripheral to the central storyline. This subversion of Murray’s American eccentric and Andersonian persona performs a subtle dramatic function within the film. Murray is notably absent, which shadows the thematic presence of the Whitmans’ deceased father. Murray’s multifarious Andersonian paternal role is subsequently reinstated in Moonrise Kingdom as Suzy’s father, Walt Bishop, and thus speaks to his absence in The Darjeeling Limited. The presence of Murray in an Andersonian American eccentric context creates different expectations from those formed in Caddyshack (1980), or the Ghostbusters films (1984;1989).58 Likewise, there is a definite distinction between Jason Schwartzman as an American eccentric figure— such as his Andersonian roles, Albert Markovski in David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees, or Louis XVI in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and his characters in Shopgirl (2005) or Saving Mr. Banks (2013). This character

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intertextuality is not the “thespian intertext formed by the totality of antecedent roles” described by Robert Stam,59 but rather a thespian subintertext formed by the totality of antecedent American eccentric roles. This distinction is in part due to the variation in performance elicited by the overtly cinematic character. The deviation from conventional characterization alters the delivery of performance. Unlike conventional characters, actors in Anderson’s American eccentric roles do not attempt to consistently elicit a specifically identified emotion or audience reaction, or to necessarily communicate a distinct motivation or interiority. Rather, the integration of ironic representation promotes distance in allegiance as the aesthetics of ironic expression highlight fictitiousness, artifice, and a mode of performance that complicates the affective response of the audience. As Anderson’s films slide between sequences or moments designed to elicit genuine pathos and others that promote reflexivity or parody, the films often maintain a whimsical tone despite the sincere anxiety of his central characters. The shifting representations of characters adhere to Vermeulen and van den Akker’s formulation of metamodernism as a mode that oscillates between modern sincerity and postmodern irony in a pendulum motion that negotiates both modes of representation but rests on neither.60 The fluctuation between sincere identification and ironic or absurdist distancing is exemplified in the reconciliation sequence in Rushmore. In a childlike gesture Max offers Herman his pick of two badges—“punctuality” or “perfect attendance”—obtained during his time at Rushmore as a truce to the escalating sabotage between the two men. The camera focuses on Herman’s distraught face, his reddened eyes indicative of exhaustion. Upon discovering that Max is the son of a modest, convivial barber (Seymour Cassel) rather than (as previously claimed) a renowned neurosurgeon, Herman’s face tiredly shifts to a resigned sigh of comprehension—the Max he has known has been a performance contrived by Max in accordance with his image of Rushmore. In revealing himself to Herman, Max offers a moment of complete sincerity within the film. Herman swivels in the barber’s chair to face the mirror, and the camera. The viewer is positioned to identify a moment of genuine sympathetic allegiance as Herman recognizes himself in a moment of sincere crisis. Herman has been driven by single sequential motivations—building his business, the courtship of Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams), and revenge on Max Fischer. Without distinct motivation, he lacks identity. Within the idiosyncratic Andersonian aesthetic, this scene is poignant in its careful articulation of reconciliation and bereavement. There is a cut to a refreshed Herman, as Max casually inquires, “how much are you worth, by the way?” With Max fully restored to his Rushmore self, this inquiry immediately suggests an elaborate plan.

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This suggestion is reinforced as Max continues, “we’re going to need all of it.” The two men exit the scene to a crescendo of John Lennon’s whimsical love song “Oh Yoko!” Anderson cuts to a montage of the reconciled men performing choreographed dance sequences in Blume’s steelworks, riding bicycles (albeit while smoking), and planning their next enterprise. The montage evokes the training sequence in Rocky (1976) yet due to Lennon’s jaunty love song, appears in lieu of a “falling in love” montage. The montage re-situates the characters within the milieu of the American eccentric world—the sincere pathos and emotional distress of the previous sequence are whimsically reframed as the camera cuts to an inter-title displaying “Kite flying society” and the re-emergence of Max’s typewriter as he begins his next play.

FIGURE 3.3 Rushmore Wes Anderson, 1998.

FIGURE 3.4 Rushmore Wes Anderson, 1998.

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Despite their eccentric fluctuations, Anderson’s overtly cinematic characters are not incongruous within their on-screen contexts. Anderson focuses on small families (biological or constructed) of characters in confined, insular environments. The characters are isolated from external interaction and few additional characters enter the Anderson families. Those that do enter (Margaret Yang, Jane Winslett-Richardson, or Social Services) are overtly cinematic characters that fit within the filmic milieu so that they appear more to be discovered within the created world, rather than entering it from an outside position. Only Anderson’s road films, Bottle Rocket and The Darjeeling Limited, provide instances of naturalistic characterization. Importantly, in both films these characters are foreign (Inez and Rita) and the contrast of language and cultural barriers they introduce further serve to highlight the eccentricities of the small cohort of central characters. This is most evident in The Darjeeling Limited when Rita, after the brothers have been expelled from the train, tearfully asks Jack, “what is wrong with you?” Neither Inez nor Rita is present at the conclusion of the films, which signifies that their naturalistic characterization is incongruous within the reflexive cinematic worlds.61 American eccentric worlds are creations that are both familiar and inauthentic representations of reality. The Grand Budapest Hotel is not a site relevant to the history of the Second World War, but an on-screen world in which Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) interact with Joseph Cornell’s Untitled (Pink Palace) box (1946) and fictional literary worlds. The New York of The Royal Tenenbaums is not a recognizable contemporary reality but an imagined space informed by the literature of Salinger (the Glass family stories) and the films of Orson Welles (The Magnificent Ambersons [1942]) for the purpose of facilitating the narrative. The Belafonte and its surroundings in The Life Aquatic are not reflections of natural wonders, but the melding of spectacular artifice and meta-cinematic documentary and melodrama informed by the films of Jacques-Yves Cousteau. As explored in Chapter 2, The Darjeeling Limited’s India is not presented as the real country, but as a foreign place accessed through its filmic inter-texts. The aesthetics of these settings—the sandstone walls of the Rushmore academy, the monolithic Tenenbaum house, the aesthetic (yet largely impractical) “long range sub-hunter from WWII” (The Belafonte), a first-class compartment on the luxury Darjeeling Limited train, the large seaside Bishop house, a monumental hotel in a fictional European country (the Republic of Zubrowka)62—denote upper-middle-class nostalgia. Yet while the locations suggest a past bourgeois era, the films’ soundtracks are dominated (diegetically and non-diegetically) by a combination of songs from the British Invasion, and the characters are decidedly contemporary.63 In

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The Darjeeling Limited, when Jack Whitman (Jason Schwartzman) attempts to seduce Rita while on board the Darjeeling Limited he selects Peter Sarstedt’s “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?” on his iPod. The fusion of contemporary technology, a sixties narrative pop song and the train’s dated interior inspired by the 20th Century Limited, creates a curious interaction between the present and various pasts. The merging of diffuse historical and contemporary contexts promotes identification and nostalgia that is unable to be specifically located in a wholly retrospective or contemporary chronological context. These films occupy a chronological space distinctly imagined and created by the filmmakers rather than attempting to be isomorphic with everyday life. The characters of the New Hollywood often inhabited naturalistic worlds that were intended to be recognizable to their audience as compatible with their own. As identifiable and recognizable as reflections of real people, these characters were able to become integrated into the audience’s sense of imagined community—not based on direct experience of existence but conceived through an imagined kinship.64 By contrast, it is the inescapable awareness of their cinematic construction that functions to limit the audience’s emotional participation with the overtly cinematic character, even as their sincerity promotes it. While overtly cinematic characters are largely unfathomable outside of the film’s diegesis, they are constructed to slide between an empathetic identification that is not forced on an audience but encouraged and desired, and a semi-absurdity in which the viewer is reminded of the place and role of the cinematic construction of character within the film. Anderson’s signature use of a concluding slow-motion sequence draws attention to the film as a construct: it signals the end of the narrative, and the characters within it. While the audience may have been moved by the narrative and characters, the closing credits ensure that both are irretrievably complete.

Notes 1 Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 17 2 Ibid., 34 (emphasis in original). 3 Ibid., 143. 4 Thomas Elsaesser, “The Pathos of Failure: American Films in the 1970s,” in Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, eds. Alexander Horwath, Noel King, and Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 281. 5 Noel King, “The Last Good Time We Ever Had: Remembering the New Hollywood Cinema,” in The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood

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Cinema in the 1970s, eds. Alexander Horwath, Noel King, and Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 22–23. 6 Elsaesser, “The Pathos of Failure,” 281. 7 Thomas Elsaesser, “American Auteur Cinema: The Last—or First—Picture Show?” in The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, eds. Alexander Horwath, Noel King, and Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 63. 8 Ibid., 59. 9 Elsaesser, “The Pathos of Failure,” 283. 10 Alexander Howarth, “The Impure Cinema: New Hollywood 1967–1976,” in The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, eds. Alexander Horwath, Noel King, and Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 15. 11 Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 151–152. 12 Ibid., 93. 13 Similarly, it is revealed that Rose, who speaks with an ostentatious British accent throughout the film, is really Violet’s “nice American friend” and only spent four weeks in London. 14 In this sense, Violet is linked to Wes Anderson’s Max Fisher in Rushmore (1998). 15 Plantinga, Moving Viewers, 155. 16 Mark Browning, Wes Anderson: Why His Movies Matter (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011), 104–105. 17 Although in Rushmore it is the school-age Max who pursues the older woman, Miss Cross, despite her consistent rejections (many of which are on the grounds of age-related propriety), whereas the older woman of The Graduate, Mrs. Robinson, is a complex and lonely woman who actively pursues the younger Ben. 18 See Joshua Gooch, “Objects/Desire/Oedipus: Wes Anderson as LateCapitalist Auteur,” in The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon, ed. Peter C. Kunze (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2014), 181–198; Steven Rybin, “The Jellyfish and the Moonlight: Imagining the Family in Wes Anderson’s Films,” in The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon, eds. Peter C. Kunze (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2014), 39–49; Rachel Joseph, “‘Max Fischer Presents’: Wes Anderson and the Theatricality of Mourning,” in The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon, ed. Peter C. Kunze (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2014), 51–64; Kim Wilkins, “Cast of Characters,” in The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon, ed. Peter C. Kunze (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2014); Donna Peberdy, “‘I’m Just a Character in Your Film’: Acting and Performance from Autism to Zissou,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 10, no. 1 (2012): 56–59; Deborah J. Thomas, “Framing the ‘Melancomic’: Character, Aesthetics and Affect in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 10, no. 1 (2012): 97–117.

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19 David Edelstein, “Formalist Goes to Camp; Wes Anderson Returns with Moonrise Kingdom, His Most Stylized Diorama Yet,” New York Magazine May 21 (2012). Kristin M. Jones, “Moonrise Kingdom” , Film Comment 69, May–June (2012). John Semley, “Moonrise Kingdom,” Cinema Scope no. 51 (Summer 2012): 74–75. 20 Todd McCarthy, “Moonrise Kingdom,” Hollywood Reporter 418, May 16 (2012): 58. 21 Kevin Lally, “Moonrise Kingdom,” Film Journal International 115, no. 7 (2012): 96. 22 Jeffrey Sconce’s review, featured on this blog “Ludic Despair” in 2012, refers to Moonrise Kingdom, not wholly un-ironically, as a “timeless account of first love.” He does, however, also note the connection between Moonrise Kingdom (and The Royal Tenenbaums) and Salinger’s existential Glass family novels but stops short of discussing the sincere issues in Anderson’s films by claiming the film is overall too whimsical to reach the darkness of the earlier existentialist works. 23 Howard H. Goldman and Gerald N. Grob, “Defining ‘Mental Illness’ In Mental Health Policy,” Health Affairs 25, no. 3 (2006): 737–749. See also Leibenluft et al., “Irritability in Pediatric Mania and Other Childhood Psychopathology,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1008, no. 1 (2003): 201–218. 24 Kenneth Turan, “‘Rushmore’: Pest-as-Hero Theme in Mountain of Eccentricity,” Los Angeles Times (December 1998): 9. 25 Michael Agger, “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” Film Comment 41, no. 1 (2005): 74. 26 Warren Buckland, “Wes Anderson: a ‘Smart’ Director of the New Sincerity?” New Review of Film and Television Studies 10, no. 1 (2012): 1. 27 My own article “Cast of Characters: Wes Anderson and Pure Cinematic Characterization” features in this collection and is the basis for this chapter. 28 Deborah J. Thomas, “Framing the ‘Melancomic’: Character, Aesthetics and Affect in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 10, no. 1 (2012): 97–98. 29 Ibid., 104. 30 Jeffrey Sconce, “Irony, Nihilism and the New American ‘Smart’ Film,” Screen 43, no. 4 (2002): 359. 31 Ibid., 360. 32 Ibid., 362. 33 Claire Perkins, American Smart Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 12. 34 Ibid., 10. 35 Plantinga, Moving Viewers, 80. 36 Ibid., 31. 37 Ibid., 79.

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38 David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 157. 39 Wes Anderson is often compared to Preston Sturges in terms of filmic style. See, for instance, Jeff Jaeckle’s article “The shared verbal stylistics of Preston Sturges and Wes Anderson” (2012). 40 Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 19. 41 Plantinga, Moving Viewers, 83. 42 Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 16. 43 Elsaesser, “The Pathos of Failure,” 281. 44 Ibid., 280. David Bordwell and Janet Staiger write that although the New Hollywood largely followed the same mode of production as the classical Hollywood, and that their technological feats can be read alongside the way classical Hollywood used technological innovation to promote films, these filmmakers did incorporate a non-classical approach to narrative and technique (including characterization) that borrowed largely from international art cinema, which enables characters to be presented without precise goals or desires. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 367–377. 45 Plantinga, Moving Viewers, 90–91. 46 Ibid., 172. 47 Sam Davies, “Moonrise Kingdom,” Sight and Sound 22, no. 7 (2012): 68. 48 Stefano Baschiera, “Nostalgically Man Dwells on This Earth: Objects and Domestic Space in The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Ltd,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 10, no. 1 (2012): 123 and Browning, Wes Anderson, 104–105. 49 Those who are not wealthy (i.e., Max Fischer, Steve Zissou, Gustave H.) have access to wealth that they claim as their own (Herman Blume, Eleanor Zissou, inheritance from wealthy women, respectively). 50 Woody Allen’s overt use of dialogue and unusual comic situations situate him as a New Hollywood precursor to Wes Anderson and American eccentricity. 51 James MacDowell, “Wes Anderson, Tone and the Quirky Sensibility,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 10, no. 1 (2012): 8. 52 Peberdy, “I’m Just a Character in Your Film,” 56–59. 53 Ibid., 59. 54 Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 15. 55 Both Francis and Dignan are played by Owen Wilson. 56 Elena Boschi and Tim McNelis, “‘Same Old Song’: On Audio-Visual Style in the Films of Wes Anderson,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 10, no. 1 (2012): 33–34. 57 Jean-Louis Comolli, “Historical Fiction. A Body Too Much,” Screen XIX, no. 2 (1978): 41–54. 58 Murray does present a similar performance in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers (2005); however, in this context, this performance is done to a different effect.

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59 Robert Stam, “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation,” in Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 60. 60 Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin Van Den Akker, “Notes on Metamodernism,” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 2 (2010): 1–14. 61 I do not suggest that Inez or Rita are naturalistic representations of Paraguayan or Indian identities, but rather that these characters adhere to more conventional forms of characters than the overtly cinematic character. . 62 Zubrówka is the name of a Polish Bison Grass vodka. 63 Kim Wilkins, “Assembled Worlds: Intertextuality and Sincerity in the Films of Wes Anderson,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 59, no. 4 (2018): 151–153. 64 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised edition (New York: Verso, 1991).

4 Hyper-Dialogue and the Eccentric Manner

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n Chapter 3 I analyzed the role and construction of the overtly cinematic character in the American eccentric mode primarily through Wes Anderson’s films. One notable aspect of this characterization is the manner in which dialogue is written for, and delivered by, these characters. Jeff Jaeckle notes the highly stylized verbosity of Wes Anderson’s characters through a comparison with the films of Preston Sturges, both of which he sees as meeting “the criteria of literariness by foregrounding language patterns that deviate from the mundane talk often found in mainstream Hollywood films. The filmmakers remind audiences that what they’re hearing and seeing is unconventional, constructed, and performative.”1 This description of literary dialogue can certainly be mapped onto the heard textures—the coalescence of rhythm, timbre, and language—of what I call hyper-dialogue in the American eccentric mode. In line with the construction of an overtly cinematic character, hyperdialogue is delivered in such a way as to acknowledge the formal elements of performance and screenplay. However, hyper-dialogue is not purely a “literary” function, to use Jaeckle’s terms. Hyper-dialogue performs a dramatic function—its “literariness” temporarily defers or distances existential anxiety. This chapter analyzes how hyper-dialogue, as a mannerism of the overtly cinematic character, is employed in the American eccentric mode.2 Vivian Jaffe (Lily Tomlin) sits at a desk in a sparse office. Costumed almost as her character from Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), Linnea Reese, thirty-one years later she stares silently at the man sitting opposite her. There is a cut to a reverse close-up of Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman), dressed in a casual suit and with long hair reminiscent of Dave Davies circa Death of a Clown.3 Vivian silently observes Albert with irregular flicks of her head and peculiar eye movements. The heteroclite, wordless scene feels pregnant

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with humor. Albert shuffles uncomfortably under Vivian’s interrogative gaze. Vivian, reclined with her high-heeled feet on the desk, finally breaks the tense silence. “Why don’t you just tell me what your situation is?” The odd and swift conversation that results from her inquiry reveals that Albert Markovski has (purportedly) enlisted Vivian and Bernard Jaffe, a husband-and-wife team of “existential detectives,” to investigate the significance of a three-part coincidence surrounding a tall Sudanese man. The fast-pace, off-kilter dialogue is accentuated by syncopated pauses.4 The unnatural exchange eventually climaxes as Albert exposes the full extent of his existential anxiety. Albert: … should I keep doing what I am doing? Is it hopeless? Vivian: Mr Markovski we see a lot of people in here who claim they want to know the ultimate truth about reality. They want to peer under the surface of the big everything, but this can be a very painful process, full of surprises. It can dismantle the world as you know it. That’s why most people prefer to remain on the surface of things. Maybe you should go home. Let sleeping dogs lie. Take it easy. What do you say? Albert: I say don’t give me the brush off, please. I want to know. This is big. Vivian: Have you ever transcended space and time? Albert: Yes. No. Time, not space. No, I don’t know what you’re talking about. This scene is part of the opening sequence of David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees, an American eccentric film that humorously plays with popular metaphysics while expressing the existential anxiety associated with individual authenticity, freedom, and responsibility. Aside from signposting the key themes of the film, and establishing its narrative trajectory, this initial scene demonstrates a significant stylistic trend in contemporary film toward an emphasis on overtly wordy, unnatural dialogue. Stylized wordiness is a familiar aesthetic trend; recall the characters played by Katharine Hepburn, the comedic women of Howard Hawks, or the quirky dialogue and characters constructed by Woody Allen. Contemporary television series such as The West Wing (1999–2006) have incorporated quick-fire dialogue into their scripts, which, although undeniably stylized, is congruent with the pace and setting of the production as a whole, and in keeping with the confrontation and intensity of political discourse. However, when this alacrity is assigned to the exaggeratedly articulate and witty Capside teenagers of Dawson’s Creek (1998–2003),5 or the over-caffeinated, self-aware, mother–daughter duo of Gilmore Girls (2000–2006) who fittingly bear the tagline—“Life’s short. Talk fast”—the aesthetic impact of this form of dialogue as a fashionable tendency in popular culture is most distinctly highlighted.6 However, it is merely a

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tendency. When Jason Reitman’s Juno depicted a loquacious and pregnant sixteen-year-old Juno McGuff (Ellen Page) in 2007, many reviewers noted Diablo Cody’s unnatural and precocious script over the ordinarily controversial themes of teenage pregnancy and abortion.7 For instance, when Juno verbally acknowledges her unwanted pregnancy for the first time, she accuses her best friend Leah (through a telephone call) of “acting shockingly cavalier” before displaying “the emotion she was searching for on the first take”; this is in reaction to her announcement of being “fo’shizz up the spout.” It is of course highly unlikely that anyone, let alone a single teenager dealing with an unexpected and unwanted pregnancy, would approach such a sensitive and daunting conversation with light-hearted confidence. In the context of the film as a whole, it is also unlikely that each character surrounding Juno would be equally garrulous and witty.8 Productions like Juno, Gilmore Girls, or Dawson’s Creek create characters that are never lost for words, or, in the event that a character should be rendered silent by, perhaps, shock or amazement, the “naturalistic” silence is replaced by a witty, if not self-reflexive, comment on the situation, as in Juno’s justification for abortion as having “heard in health class that pregnancy often results in an infant.” While Juno’s loquacity at times renders serious, or difficult, issues humorous, the even deployment of this mannerism throughout the film—and applied to all characters—signals that it is primarily an aesthetic choice. In the mid-2000s it may have been fashionable to have idealized characters, like Juno, equipped with an artillery of one-liners layered with popculture references and filtered with just the right amount of self-referential irony to sound quirky, indie, or simply cute. Dialogue in American eccentric films operates beyond Juno’s quirkiness. The philosophically veneered rhetoric of I Heart Huckabees reveals a mode of hyper-dialogue that functions not only as an aesthetic or stylistic choice, but also as a dramatic function.

The shift from New Hollywood naturalism to eccentric hyper-dialogue As I suggested in Chapter 3, the New Hollywood cinema created many characters as idealized peers, characters designed to live out the anxieties and desires of their target audience on screen in a “naturalistic” manner which promoted close audience alignment and relatability. Such characters provided a personified outlet for social, cultural, and political action. However, in the American eccentric mode, the self-conscious boundaries and limitations placed on the expression of existential anxiety in a neoliberal context

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materialize as an ironic distancing and a distinctive postmodern aesthetic that revises the sincere thematic underpinnings of the New Hollywood political and existential project. The enlistment of postmodern textual strategies formulates an ahistorical relationship to national identity and history, which suggests that the anxieties present are not isomorphic to everyday life. The characters and narrative trajectories of these films no longer broadly facilitate direct relationships with the audience’s lived experiences. The knowledge of the constructed nature of these idiosyncratic characters does not preclude character alignment—rather it encourages a tempered, and complex emotional investment in these characters for the duration of the film. The shift in the expression of existential anxiety from the New Hollywood to American eccentricity is characterized by a transformation in the use of dialogue and silence.9 The naturalistic silences that pervaded, and indeed characterized, many of the New Hollywood films, have, in the American eccentric mode, been filled with intense and fluctuatingly ironic dialogue as the site of narrative and character progression in the place of action. A common feature of many films produced in the New Hollywood was that the script was generally (with the notable exception of Woody Allen) designed to be an invisible part of the film’s formal scaffold. In conventional narrative cinema, the audiovisual realization of the script aims to erase the written text’s materiality in order to create an illusion of presence in the film that, in turn, promotes affective narrative immersion.10 In accordance with Sarah Kozloff’s formulation of film dialogue as exchanges and utterances on which audiences eavesdrop, or are positioned to overhear, the dialogue of the New Hollywood was often given the illusion of improvised spontaneity. Kozloff writes that the dialogue of the New Hollywood “was noticeably more colloquial, less careful about rhythm, less polished, more risqué, and marked by an improvisational air. The accompanying acting style was less declamatory, faster, and more throwaway; the recording of lines allowed much more overlapping and a higher degree of inaudibility.”11 Although sometimes poignant, this dialogue was primarily delivered as a natural product of the film’s narrative and action, rather than a deliberately recognizable formal element. In the American eccentric mode, the self-conscious use of dialogue acknowledges the presence, and performance, of a composed formal script. In this, the constructed nature of the dialogue is consistent with their created cinematic milieu and characters, all of which recognize the presence of a world constructed by a screenplay. Dialogue, in the New Hollywood, was often presented as imperfect, naturalistic speech—epitomized in Robert Altman’s work. The verisimilitude of the dialogue in these films enables the audience to discount the presence of a formal script within the finished film, and attribute moments of unintelligible speech to naturalistic representation. On the other hand, the American

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eccentric reconstruction of dialogue as a formal element—what I refer to as hyper-dialogue—exhibits an often unnatural level of intelligibility which promotes a complex form of engagement with the words spoken by the character. In these instances the intelligible spoken words are not necessarily cues for narrative or character progression, but note their own artificiality and constructedness to separate the sincere thematic anxieties underpinning the words from the manner in which these words are spoken. Hyper-dialogue urges the audience to be aware of the presence of a script constructed for the characters within an assembled film world. The mimesis of the New Hollywood absent-script—the aesthetic effect of the deliberate invisibility of a structured script, has, in the American eccentric mode, become the diegesis of the present-script—the aesthetic effect of an obviously recognized performed script. By absent-script I mean to suggest that, congruent with the influence of Italian Neorealism and the Maysles brothers’ documentary style, the New Hollywood sought an aesthetic that would appear unscripted, as in the dialogue presented in John Cassavetes’s A Woman under the Influence (1974) or Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, where characters deliver lines of dialogue that are audibly unclear, and misspeak their sentences. Cassavetes further violates film dialogue conventions as his characters’ dialogue is not only unpolished but at times is proven to be irrelevant to the plot, which extends the illusion of natural speech.12 The use of the term “present-script” thus connotes the inverse; scripts in the American eccentric mode are often foregrounded within the films. A clear distinction between the absent- and present-script is evident in the different functions of cyclical speech between John Cassavetes’s Husbands (1970) and Hal Hartley’s Simple Men (1992). In Cassavetes’s film, three old friends—Harry (Ben Gazzara), Gus (John Cassavetes), and Archie (Peter Falk)—are reunited at the funeral of a mutual friend. All three men are middle-aged, married, and facing their own mortality in response to their friend’s death. Their conversations are repetitive, cyclical without consequence—they are merely (and often drunkenly) an attempt at passing time. In one scene the three men, having just arrived in London, discuss their personal hygiene, fatigue, and London weather. Archie: Look at the rain. Harry: It rains a lot in London. Gus: I like the rain. Gus: Let’s take a shower. Let’s take a shower and get some sleep and then we’ll order some clothes … and get some clothes … Harry: That’s right. That’s right. We’ll take an hour’s nap. All I need is an hour. Gus: We need some clothes.

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Harry: I sleep an hour, I feel like I’ve slept twelve. Gus: Oh, boy. Archie: Rain is fantastic. Harry: Then we get some women. Gus: We need some sleep. In this interaction, the dialogue between the three men is cyclical and repetitive because it is naturalistic. The men are physically and emotionally exhausted. Each man has his own perception of what will remedy his mid-life malady, and this plays out in this interaction through repetitious, and only half-acknowledged, utterances. In contrast to this, Hartley’s film employs repetitive, cyclical dialogue as a self-conscious theatrical device. Simple Men follows the bizarre journey of the estranged brothers, Dennis (Bill Sage) and Bill McCabe (Robert Burke), as they reunite to locate their anarchist father, who has escaped from police custody while in hospital. Bill is bitter about being swindled by his partner-in-crime and ex-girlfriend, and swears to exact his revenge by breaking the heart of the next “tall, good-looking blonde” he encounters. Following the breakdown of their motorcycle, the men find themselves stuck at a remotely located diner, owned by Kate (Karen Sillas)—a beautiful, blonde woman. Bill desires Kate, however he faces competition from Martin (Martin Donovan), her (newly released from jail) ex-husband’s short-tempered friend. One evening, following a conversation about their feelings for Kate, Bill and Martin discuss their drinking habits. Martin: I got to go. Bill: No. Martin: I get too emotional when I drink. Bill: Have another beer. Martin: I’ve got to get up early. Bill: No, you don’t. Sit down. Martin: I get too emotional when I drink. Bill: Will you have another beer? Martin: I’ve got to go! Bill: Why? Martin: I got to get up early in the morning. Bill: You’re drunk. Martin: And emotional! Bill: You got to go. Martin: Why? Bill: You got to get up early in the morning. Martin: Yeah, you’re right.

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Martin: Here. Have another drink. Bill: No. I got to get up early, too. Martin: No, you don’t. Sit down. Have a drink. Bill: Go on, get out of here. The exchange begins somewhat naturalistically, as an interaction between two new acquaintances urging one another to remain for a nightcap, while each halfheartedly explains their need to depart. However, as the conversation continues, its cyclical repetition approximates a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt.13 Where the repetitious dialogue in Husbands demonstrates the naturalistic interaction of three men concerned with their own internal battles, here repetitious dialogue mediates the audience’s engagement with the loneliness of the two men. The audience is drawn out of considering the romantic intentions of each man toward Kate, and is encouraged to acknowledge the presence of the written script—the screenplay from which these romantic intentions stem. Through the “present-script,” hyper-dialogue aligns with Jaeckle’s notion of the meta-language employed by Anderson and Sturges—in which characters openly discuss their (often idiosyncratic) names or debate the use of language itself. These films use “language as an explicit means for characters to convey information, shape their identities, and indulge in literariness, all of which heighten the defamiliarization effect and call attention to the constructedness of language.”14 However, hyper-dialogue in the American eccentric mode functions beyond Jaeckle’s observation that by being made “aware of the characters’ simultaneous fascinations and problems with language, audiences are invited to contemplate the aesthetic and social complexities of communication.”15 As in the dual articulation of “kidding on the square,” hyper-dialogue is employed in order to both obscure and illuminate sincere meaning. Although my analysis refers specifically to the use of dialogue in finished films,16 the overtly constructed nature of hyper-dialogue requires the recognition of the written screenplay.

Dialogue and convention Jill Nelmes writes that screenplay dialogue aids the creation of believable and realistic film worlds and characters. Nelmes, referring broadly to mainstream American narrative film, states that screenplay dialogue serves two primary functions: First to make the storyworld more believable, to create a world in which the characters talk, have voices, say what they think and feel, building the

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illusion of a real world inhabited by real people; and second, to provide narrative information as the film characters express themselves in their fictional world.17 In its conventional narrative use, dialogue has traditionally been designed to appear naturalistic within a cinematic context. Indeed, mainstream screenplay dialogue accentuates the film’s sense of realism through the use of language in accordance with setting, while simultaneously progressing and developing the film story. However, as Nelmes notes, cinematic realism is not an authentic representation of life, but rather an artistic construct that masks its own cinematic devices, and utilizes conventions that cinema audiences have learned to read as being on-screen depictions of reality.18 Kozloff writes that film dialogue “has been scripted, written and rewritten, censored, polished, rehearsed, and performed. Even when lines are improvised on the set, they have been spoken by impersonators, judged, approved, and allowed to remain. Then all dialogue is recorded, edited, mixed, underscored, and played through stereophonic speakers with Dolby sound.”19 Thus, while the film viewer may be eavesdropping on the conversations and utterances of the characters, it must be noted that the dialogue has been constructed and designed for the viewer to overhear.20 Despite the appearance of naturalistic, and often seemingly simple film speech, screenplay dialogue is a complex and sophisticated artistic construction in which “certain aspects of ‘real life’ dialogue are drawn upon to aid our acceptance of the screen world.”21 Of these aspects the most important device is the style of language employed—appropriate colloquial language, accent, tone, timbre, rhythm, pace, and the sentence construction are essential elements of the characterization and construction of a believable and immersive cinematic world. Indeed, just as a cinematic frame is comprised of angles, and the effects of scale, lighting, and focus, the language, words, and syllables that comprise film dialogue are a combination of phonographic details (pitch, pace, and volume). These details, together with linguistic and literary qualities that are distinctly bound with word choice, denote national and regional languages, dialects, and accents.22 The manner in which the characters speak, the rhythms, inflection, and word choice reflect, and at times indicate, the character’s motivations, ideologies, aspirations, and beliefs. Thus, by affording them an expressive voice, characters are imbued with complexity (including wants, desires, emotions) and the textures of realism, while simultaneously encouraging audience identification and alignment. Most characters in mainstream cinema are constructed in order to elicit a connection with the audience. As such, these characters are required to be

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considered believable representations of real people—analogues in Murray Smith’s conception. For instance, in Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally … (1989) the spectator is encouraged to emotionally invest in the romantic plight of Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) because they are presented as plausible characters with consistent personality traits and distinct objectives. The film centers on the differing views of the two protagonists as to whether genuine friendship can be maintained between heterosexual members of the opposite sex. The film investigates this question from the positions of each character’s view and personality—Harry is a somewhat pessimistic (and sexist man) who is nevertheless devoted to his friendships, while Sally is an upbeat feminist, who approaches life in a more whimsical manner. People in the real world often do not express themselves openly and transparently, but rather tend to mask or disguise their true meanings and feelings in certain situations. As Karl Iglesias notes: Speaking indirectly is the way most of us talk when the emotional stakes are high, when we deal with intense emotions like anger, hate, love, or desire we’re often afraid to expose ourselves emotionally. So we usually hide our true feelings and motivations.23 It is therefore unsurprising that screenplay dialogue is constructed such that in emotionally charged situations information is (at times partially) withheld, or delivered in a way that may appear to mislead other characters or the audience. Indirect speech (like accent, word choice, and speech patterns) is an artistic contrivance that aids the appearance of realism in conventional narrative cinema. For instance, when Sally explains to her now-good friend, Harry, that their unplanned sexual encounter “was a mistake,” she deliberately misleads him in order to mask her true feelings and hide her emotional vulnerability. The use of speech to mask true emotion or motivations is what Iglesias and Nelmes call subtext. Often the subtext of an exchange or utterance is known to the audience, which can introduce further complexity and believability to the characters while maintaining character identification and alliance.24 Sally’s feelings for Harry are made known to the audience through a close-up of her face displaying overt disappointment; her brave smile slips away as Harry declares, “I’m so relieved that you think so too.” Todd Berliner writes that there are distinct conventions by which most mainstream American films abide: dialogue either enhances the plot or provides pertinent background information; dialogue progresses along direct lines, often with characters winning or losing a scene or interaction; conversations generally stay on topic with both or all characters listening to one another; unlike real people, characters tend to speak with clarity and without error; and films that

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depart from these conventions usually do so for narrative purposes, that is, violations tend to highlight something essential to the film.25 Adherence to these mainstream dialogue conventions affords the audience a sense of secure familiarity in which all utterances are relevant to the film story, and therefore can be read and interpreted through conventional narrative film frameworks. Film dialogue is a tool for guiding the response of the viewer. Dialogue can prepare the viewer for a visual interruption, elongate an important moment, punctuate a suspenseful climax, or be used to distract the viewer from another element of the film.26 Films in the American eccentric mode encourage the audience to recognize the conventions of mainstream dialogue while simultaneously subverting these expectations through their uneven ironic employment. American eccentric films do not attempt realism in the manner described by Nelmes, rather, the presence of the screenplay (and screenplay dialogue) is at times foregrounded as a dramatic function. Whereas mainstream Hollywood films generally aim to completely captivate the audience in an alternative reality,27 films in the American eccentric mode fluctuate between promoting immersive captivation with an alternative reality, and emotional distanciation from an observably unnatural, constructed world. The use of dialogue in these films shifts between naturalistic expression and self-conscious scripted performance. These films encourage both engagement with film worlds that are at once familiar and impossible, and identification and alignment with characters that are purely cinematic figures. Dialogue, in the American eccentric mode, does not only use conventional speech rhythms and timing to enhance the mood of emotional or poignant moments in the film story, rather, moments of hyper-dialogue employs fluctuatingly ironic language, to distance the core anxieties of these moments.

Hyper-dialogue and performance I Heart Huckabees, as a film in the American eccentric mode, demonstrates this tendency toward hyper-dialogue: that is, intensified, unevenly fluctuating, and often ironically inflected use of dialogue in the place of action. Speech-act theory, first introduced by John L. Austin, designates that utterances are themselves actions. Austin distinguishes between constative utterances and performative utterances. Constative utterances are those that report or describe a situation and can (generally) be analyzed as either “true” or “false,” while performative utterances do not describe a situation and cannot be labeled “true” or “false.” Performative utterances are those, where “the uttering of the sentence is, or is part of, the doing of an action,”28 such as marrying, betting, promising, or apologizing. Austin divides the performative utterance into three components:

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the locutionary—“the act of ‘saying something,’” the illocutionary—the act of creating meaning, and the perlocutionary—“the performance of an act in saying something as opposed to performance of an act of saying something,” that is, the performance of a locution with a certain force (intention, tone, attitude, etc.).29 As speech-act theory places a great importance on the contextual situation of the utterance, the intentions, thoughts, and feelings of the individual performing the linguistic act are vital to its outcome. If the attitude of the individual is not consistent with the performative utterance, or there is a disconnection (or misfire) in the performance of the utterance, the utterance is said to be “infelicitous” or “unhappy.”30 While hyper-dialogue does, by its nature as speech, contain both constative and (felicitous and infelicitous) performative utterances, its effect cannot be distilled into these categories. The performative nature of hyperdialogue is not the utterance itself as a locutionary act, nor does it necessarily perform a discernible illocutionary act. Hyper-dialogue does produce an effect on the addressee (other characters and the audience); however, this is not locatable in a single utterance, a perlocutionary act, but in a passage or conversation in which language is used reflexively, humorously, and with fluctuating irony in order to create a distance between what is stated and what is felt. Hyper-dialogue, as action or gesture, stems from the presence of a deep, unspoken anxiety. In conversation with Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal, hyper-dialogue is more than dialogue—dialogue that blends real or sincere anxiety and its slippery, referential articulation. What Jeff Jaeckle refers to as “figurative dialogue”—the manner in which the lines delivered, through word choice, give rise to wordplay, or what Kozloff terms “verbal embroidery,” the use of rhymes, allusions, metaphors, puns, and alliteration—is accentuated in both the American eccentric mode and “talky” films like Juno. As Thomas Leitch writes, there are many moments in films in which, characters, or entire casts do not express themselves naturalistically, and rather speak “like characters in a book.”31 These moments of heightened literary expression may be “momentary and disruptive; it may help define a particular character or situation; or it may establish a new decorum for an entire film.”32 The use of literary verbosity in order to create distinct characters works to identify Rory and Lorelai Gilmore in Gilmore Girls, whereas loquacity is attributed to all characters in Juno as an overall film aesthetic. However, while films like Juno use overt dialogue as an element of cinematic style, hyper-dialogue performs more than a purely aesthetic function. In the American eccentric mode, hyperdialogue mediates, and indeed serves to displace or distance, an existential anxiety that cannot be directly accessed. Thus, hyper-dialogue mediates, or temporarily masks, existential anxiety beneath a blanketed verbosity. Hyper-dialogue is not just the foregrounding of dialogue over or above action but is part of the action of the film itself; either in substituting directly

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for action, or serving as a gestural act of distancing the present anxiety through incessant talking. Although pace is frequently a feature of hyper-dialogue it is not a necessary criterion, provided that the dialogue itself acts to distance an underlying anxiety. Hyper-dialogue may be present throughout an entire film as exemplified in Linklater’s Waking Life and Whit Stillman’s films, or Russell’s earlier work Flirting with Disaster (1996). Alternatively, it may be distinct to a certain character within a film, as in the case of Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) in Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly (2006) or Craig in Being John Malkovich. Hyperdialogue may also be fleeting, exemplified in Charlie Kaufman’s (Nicolas Cage) internal monologues in Adaptation (Jonze 2002) or Francis’s speeches to his brothers in The Darjeeling Limited. Hyper-dialogue as a cinematic “technique” may initially appear to conform to Raoul Eshelman’s “performatism,” a monist aestheticism in which viewers are coerced into identifying with characters and situations that are plausible only within the confines of a particular text, as there are many citable instances in the American eccentric mode in which the audience is drawn to recognize the realistic implausibility of purely cinematic characters due to their use of dialogue. However, the performatist work is designed such that the reader or viewer is initially forced by the author “to opt for a single, compulsory solution”33 to the problems raised within the work, who then uses the reader or viewer’s textual immersion to impose an identification with characters or situations that are realistically unbelievable beyond textual parameters. The ability to transcend the intellectual acknowledgment of the disparity between knowledge and identification through belief signifies a divergence between performatism and the effect of hyper-dialogue in the American eccentric mode. While American eccentric films often present their audiences with situations or characters that are largely unfathomable outside the diegesis, they do so in such a manner that the semi-absurd, meta-cinematic, or reflexive instances remind the spectator of the film’s constructed nature—yet, despite their highly composed nature she is encouraged (rather that forced) to empathize and emotionally align herself with the film’s characters. The American eccentric overtly cinematic character is constructed such that formal cinematic elements (like performance and script) are made evident, if not foregrounded. Rather than presenting the audience with metaphysical transcendence in order to provide resolution, as in the performatist work, American eccentricity highlights cinematic tropes in order to defer the audience’s expectation of a definitive resolution. As the inconsistency between moments of sincerity and distancing moments of absurdity and irony fluctuates within American eccentric films, genuine identifications may emerge and be repelled, unevenly, during the course of any one film. Importantly, although the measure of irony and sincerity fluctuates at various instances throughout a film, in the American eccentric mode the two positions are always intertwined.

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In I Heart Huckabees the audience is presented with three central characters, Albert, Tommy (Mark Wahlberg), and Brad (Jude Law), and a situation in which individuals in a small community respond to an imposing institution’s (the Huckabees Corporation) plan to construct a department store on protected marshlands. Each of these men actively seeks a solution to a named case through the employment of the existential detectives Vivian and Bernard Jaffe, and their French nemesis Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert). Albert, head of the Open Spaces Coalition environmental group, names the case of a coincidence with a Sudanese man (Ger Duany). Tommy, a firefighter, frequently cites his despair at the world’s use of petroleum, and Brad, an executive at Huckabees, contacts the detectives in order to undermine Albert, whom he sees as an antagonist to his rising business career. The Huckabees Corporation embodies the individual obsessions and anxieties of the central characters; it is a source of media over-absorption, cultural stasis, psychic stress, and environmental distress.34 Gradually—and in an oscillating manner between sincerity and irony—it is revealed that both Albert and Brad experience genuine existential anxiety due to an inability to connect with their families, and yearn for a more general form of human connection. In the case of Albert, this revelation is expressed through an unwanted confrontation with his parents regarding the death of his childhood cat as a microcosmic symbol for his parental disconnection. During this exchange, humor is derived from musical interruptions of Shania Twain due to a faulty stereo system, and the overstatements made by Vauban who bombastically declares that Albert, like the Sudanese refugee at the center of his stated case, has been “orphaned by indifference.” These claims are noted as hyper-dialogue, as the core, emotional impact of the event described silences Albert. Albert quietly pleads, “I don’t want to talk about this” as he holds back tears. From this interaction it is evident that the death of Albert’s cat and lack of parental support during childhood grieving are symbolic of Albert’s sincere existential anxiety—his ongoing sense of familial disconnection and parental disappointment. As the scene reveals this sincere anxious core, Russell self-reflexively distracts his audience with the humorously overblown discussion of a single childhood event. The effect of this is doubledsided, in that it reveals both Albert’s anxieties and the technique of performed hyper-dialogue used to distance them from the audience on the film’s surface.

Hyper-dialogue as dramatic function Tommy, like Albert, exhibits genuine existential anxiety in relation to a perceived lack of connection within the universe. However, Tommy’s intense anxiety over the state of the planet, his obligations and responsibility to the human

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race, and the possibility that the universe is structured on a metaphysical nothingness that denies connectivity are precisely what paralyze him. Throughout I Heart Huckabees Russell invites the audience to consider the global issues behind the philosophically inflected hyper-dialogue regarding the effects of petroleum usage, third world dictatorships, civil wars, refugeeism, child labor, and the consequences of suburban sprawl on the environment. In this way, similarly to the deployment of deadpan performance to mask “ugly feelings,” the hyper-dialogue appears to be masking the existential questions of individual culpability and purpose. Yet, in addition to these concerns, each character reveals a fundamental familial alienation and dislocation as the foundation of their sincere anxiety. Thus, I Heart Huckabees also deploys these global and metaphysical issues within a hyper-dialogic framework in order to reveal the individual and emotional concerns founded upon a deeper sense of personal alienation within the family. In one of the film’s most amusing and complex sequences, Tommy, in a disheveled and ideologically perplexed state, implores his wife and daughter: “I need you guys … I don’t know if nothingness matters, or somethingness matters. I’m trying to figure that out and I want you to help me.” The family home is depicted in a state of disarray, with the yard covered in family belongings, and with Tommy’s firefighter co-workers helping to pack the car for his distressed wife. Rather than attempting to make amends with his wife, Tommy turns to his existential detective Bernard for an explanation. Tommy: She won’t stay and share this with me! It’s important to me. I see it so clearly. You use petroleum, you’re a murderer. That’s a fact. One, killing the ozone and all the creatures that it’s hurting. Two, killing Arabs in oil-producing dictatorships where everybody is poor, that’s cruelty and it’s inhumane … Alright, so if this world is temporary, and identity is an illusion, then everything is meaningless and it doesn’t matter if you use petroleum and that’s got me very confused. In an attempt to placate Tommy, Bernard explains the existential detectives’ conception of the connectedness of the universe—the philosophy that “everything is connected and everything matters.” Against the background commotion of the packing by the firefighters and emptying the house for his wife’s departure, Tommy focuses solely on Bernard, producing a book by “rival” theorist, Caterine Vauban to highlight his confusion: Tommy: She says nothing’s connected. It doesn’t matter what you do. You can drive a car. You can burn up gas, which would explain the way things actually are where people do destructive things like it doesn’t

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even matter … less than 5% of the cosmos is composed of the same elements that compose human life. There you go, that means we’re all alone and we’re miserable and isolated. As is the case throughout I Heart Huckabees, this moment of philosophical banter is an amusing source of entertainment for the audience. The intensity of the performance by Wahlberg’s Tommy is in stark contrast to the calm intellectualism of Hoffman’s Bernard. However, if we consider the aesthetic function (and affective import) of this philosophical speech its role as hyper-dialogue is apparent. During this exchange, Bernard appeals to Tommy’s wife, beseeching her not to leave him before he has completely dismantled his personality and accepted the connectedness of the universe. This is presented not as an emotional plea on the premise of marital love, or as a campaign for the benefit of the child, but rather “if you leave him before he gets done dismantling, he will never make it to the other side.” Importantly, the protest that his wife “just wants to live her life” is met with further ideological contentions, rather than practical consideration. Tommy: You don’t want to ask these questions? What is that life, baby? Who are we? Look at this (picks up his wife’s shoe), look at this, do you know where these come from? Indonesia. Baby (addressing his daughter), this is the truth, okay, little girls they have to work in dark factories where they go blind for a dollar 60 a month just to make Mommy her pretty shoes. Can you even imagine that, Caitlin? This sequence illustrates the use of hyper-dialogue as an oscillation between irony and sincerity. The use of hyper-dialogue separates two thematic planes that are simultaneously introduced to the audience. On one plane, the audience is introduced to Tommy Corn, a central character; his reason for requiring existential detectives sets an ironic tone to this introduction. On the other plane, it is revealed that while Tommy is obsessed with connectedness and the consequences of action, he is incapable of recognizing the impact of his inability to connect with his wife and child. The oscillation between Tommy’s ironic hyper-dialogue and his wife’s sincere, emotional distress highlights both the humorous absurdity and sincere gravity of this domestic situation. Tommy is incapable of reacting to the domestic connection he requires due to his inability to reconcile the connectedness of global issues. The use of hyperdialogue here demonstrates that Tommy’s anxiety—which is made almost ridiculous through his dichotomous explanation—is centered on issues of individual culpability and obligation. However, it is through the expressions

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of these concerns that it is revealed that Tommy is incapable of fulfilling his paternal, marital, and employment obligations on a local and personal level. As in other films in the American eccentric mode, the slipperiness of this dual positioning is subtle and may not be immediately recognized by the viewer—it may, instead only be revealed retrospectively. The same can be said of hyper-dialogue as a characterizing technique. While hyper-dialogue stems from an anxious concern that cannot be directly accessed through naturalistic plain speaking, it is not contingent on the audience’s recognition of its distancing function at the time of its utterance. The disparity between what is said—the dialogue—and what is felt—the anxiety— may be pointedly revealed later; it may require the viewer to retrospectively acknowledge a previous utterance as a moment of hyper-dialogue. In Chapter 2 I noted Francis’s admission of attempted suicide to his mother, Patricia, in The Darjeeling Limited as a temporary reconciliation of ironic expression and the film’s sincere thematic concerns as a road film. Revisiting this poignant sequence, it is evident that this temporary reconciliation is achieved through hyper-dialogue. Francis originally explains that the impulse for a cross-country journey of India arose from a reassessment of life following a near-fatal motorcycle accident: Francis: It was raining. I was going about 50 miles an hour as I went into a corner. Did some wrong steering. Wheels went out from under me. I suddenly skidded off the road and slammed into a ditch and got catapulted 50 feet through the air. The little particles of glass and debris were stinging my face as I flew. And for a second there was just total silence, then … Bam! Bike crashed to the ground, exploded and caught on fire and I smashed into the side of a hill with my face. Despite the drama of the story, Francis narrates this account with a deadpan delivery and the moment passes as an explanation of the bourgeoning visual metaphor for emotional injury presented by Francis’s bandages. The audience is at this point is encouraged to be emotionally invested in the brothers, including the endearing yet irritatingly controlling Francis. While the validity of Francis’s account may not be verifiable, it is accepted, and the slightly incongruous tone of delivery is assigned to typical Andersonian character idiosyncrasy. It is assumed that Anderson is utilizing a storytelling function in order to reveal the source of Francis’s injuries, and connect the incident with the film story. These assumptions are maintained until the brothers confront Patricia regarding her sudden and unexplained departure from America prior to their father’s funeral. Upon greeting her sons, Patricia turns swiftly toward Francis to directly inquire “What happened to your face?” In response, Francis states, “I smashed into a

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hill, on purpose, on my motorcycle.” The frank nature of Francis’s admission is shocking, and reveals that his previous explanation to have been hyper-dialogue. The amusing irony involved in Francis’s original deadpan story is retrospectively uncovered as his depression, and desperation to reconnect with this family emerges and demonstrates his vulnerability. After this second, sincere explanation, the audience is made aware that the initial explanation provided by Francis was a performance. As American eccentric characterization incorporates performance in its construction, this first instance is taken as operating within the mode. In the initial sequence, Peter asks Francis about his injuries as an intermediary for the spectator’s expected curiosity. However, Anderson doubles the role of American eccentric performance in the second instance as it is revealed that Francis performed his first explanation not only for the spectator within the American eccentric mode, but also in hyper-dialogic manner in order to distance his sincere emotions from his brothers. The parallel nature of this situation necessarily compels the audience to recall and reconsider the initial explanation offered to the brothers and the audience, as well as all other declarations made by Francis to this point. At this moment, Francis’s understated and naturalistic actions replace hyper-dialogue, as the previously asymptotic tension between ironic expression and sincere anxiety is reconciled in the presence of his previously absent mother.

Hyper-dialogue and sincerity The transition between hyper-dialogue and sincerity is inherently slippery. In The Darjeeling Limited it is not until this utterance that Francis’s performative nature is revealed as double-sided: in addition to a knowing (meta-cinematic) Andersonian character model the moment of reconciliation between irony and sincerity signals that Francis, until this point, has also been performing a character role for his brothers. Consider a similar dramatic confrontation between parent and child in the New Hollywood, in which character and situation are played for a naturalistic identification, and indeed, pathos. The transition from the aesthetic naturalism of the New Hollywood films under consideration in this book35 to this performed ironic deference is clearly illustrated when this scene between Patricia and Francis Whitman is compared to the seminal moment of Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces in which Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson) confronts his once patriarchal father. Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces is primarily concerned with the existential anxiety of its protagonist, Bobby, in the face of familial (particularly patriarchal) disconnection and personal duty. The confrontation scene between Bobby

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and his father highlights the generation wars of the countercultural 1960s and 1970s in America, relationships between authority and individuals, and the interplay between perceptions of high- and low-art cultures on a symbolic level. However, on a personal, character-specific level, this scene expresses an inability to communicate between an elusive son and his catatonic father. I Heart Huckabees, The Darjeeling Limited, and Five Easy Pieces all focus on an existential loss resulting from the absence of one, or both parents, be it emotionally and supportively as in the case of Albert Markovski,36 emotionally and geographically as in the case of the Whitmans, or communicatively and generationally as in the case of Nicholas Dupea’s (William Challee) literal paralysis. Just as the parental confrontation in The Darjeeling Limited requires Francis to speak plainly, demonstrating that the hyper-dialogue previously deployed throughout the film can no longer defer anxiety, in Five Easy Pieces, Bobby’s confrontation provides a moment of insight into his otherwise elusive character as an explanation for his actions through accessible dialogue. Where Francis provides constant (albeit masked) justification for his actions, Bobby’s silences leave his actions unexplained. Until this point in the film, Bobby has been depicted as a contradictory character, at once repelled by his bourgeois heritage, yet seemingly embarrassed and unfulfilled by the simplicity of his chosen bluecollar life and partner. In this scene he attempts a redemptive monologue. Rafelson frames this monologue in a four-minute sequence against a still seaside landscape. Bobby, silhouetted in dusk light, wheels his father’s chair across the expanse of the shot. Aside from the natural scenery and the two men, the frame is empty. All that is heard is the distant barking of a dog and a continuous sea breeze. These natural, diegetic sounds heighten the symbolic isolation of the Dupeas, and create a hushed vocal tension that is not broken until Bobby tenderly asks his father, “Are you cold?” This spoken line occurs 20 seconds into the scene. The impossibility of a dialogue between father and son is established with this first question. The silence of the mute father heightens the fraught tension of the sequence. The shot emphasizes Bobby’s cold, nervous, heavy breathing on the soundtrack in the absence of a reply. The lack of response to Bobby’s practical, and sadly non-rhetorical, inquiry signifies that no reconciliation between father and son can be achieved, and furthermore, that the once patriarchal father is now acknowledged by Bobby as incapable of being held to account. With this knowledge digested, and the unattainable response recognized as not forthcoming, Bobby begins his honest and explanatory monologue,37 as the camera closes in on his face settling in a close-up. Bobby: I don’t know if you’d be particularly interested in hearing anything about me. My life, I mean, most of it doesn’t add up to much that I could

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relay it as a way of life that you’d approve of … I move around a lot. Not because I’m looking for anything really, but, ’cause, I’m getting away from things that get bad if I stay. This admission, although ultimately selfish, is both an articulation of the personal inadequacies felt by Bobby and an explanation—to himself, his father, and the audience—for his noncommittal actions and continued avoidances. Throughout the monologue Bobby poses questions to his father, who, in reverse-close-up shots, eerily lingers on screen in his paralyzed silence. These pregnant silences are acknowledged by Bobby as he continues: “I am trying to imagine your half of this conversation. My feeling is that—I don’t know—that if you could talk we wouldn’t be talking.” In this statement, the audience is informed of a continuing lack of communication; this silence existed between Bobby and his father long before his father’s stroke. Yet, despite Bobby’s previous forced acknowledgment of the lack of reply from his father, he goes on to voice his fundamental concern—a feeling of individual inauthenticity as a result of perceived failure. “Best I can do is apologize … we both know that I was never really that good at it anyway.”38 The shot again lingers on the father, while Bobby stifles his tears. It is this declaration of failure that Bobby wishes to have acknowledged, and refuted by his father in order to fulfill a cathartic reconciliation between expectation and result. However, the father’s paralysis denies the cathartic response for Bobby. In the place of an articulated reconciliation, the father’s silence reinstates and reinforces Bobby’s own harsh silence to those around him, perpetuating generational discordance. From this silent moment, the film’s conclusion is assured: Bobby abandons his pregnant girlfriend, Rayette (Karen Black), at a truck stop and covertly hitches a ride to Alaska. His father’s silent absence is, for Bobby’s unborn child, now to be a complete paternal absence. Despite the moral reprehensibility of his final act of avoidance in Five Easy Pieces, Bobby remains a naturalistic character with which the audience is encouraged to identify (albeit in a vexed manner). This profound emotional identification associated with dialogue, silence, and character is not absent in the American eccentric mode, but has shifted toward a slippery fluctuation between distancing ironic address and sincere moments of revelation. It is the formulation of an underlying anxiety that is blanketed by variably ironic dialogue that forms the basis of hyper-dialogue. Although there are superficial similarities with the stylistic loquacity of contemporary American films like Juno, hyper-dialogue is not a stylistic characteristic of film but rather a dramatic function. In this sense, hyper-dialogue relates inversely, but appropriately, to the dramatics of silence in the New Hollywood films such as Five Easy Pieces. The increasingly common stylistic trend toward verbose

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characterization in contemporary American film affords hyper-dialogue a nuanced thematic situation in its association with this loquacious quirky, self-referential, indie aesthetic. Hyper-dialogue, however, as present in the American eccentric mode is not merely an aesthetic choice; it stems from an anxiety that cannot be directly accessed. Hyper-dialogue is always talking away from its anxious core.

Notes 1 Jeff Jaeckle, “The Shared Verbal Stylistics of Preston Sturges and Wes Anderson,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 11, no. 3 (2012): 156. 2 A version of this chapter appeared as an article in New Review of Film and Television 11, no. 4 (2013). 3 Music by The Kinks, and other 1960s and 1970s British Invasion artists, has been prevalent on the soundtracks of American eccentric films—in particular, the work of Wes Anderson. This use of music (and retro costuming) demonstrates a nostalgia for the time of the New Hollywood era. 4 Here I use the term “syncopated” in the musical sense, to emphasize the “off-beat” in the rhythm of the dialogue. 5 When (awkwardly) approaching his father for advice on the “mechanics of kissing,” fifteen-year-old Dawson Leery (James Van Der Beek) states, “It’s kind of a girl slash relationship question. And I don’t want it to go to your head that I’m soliciting fatherly advice or anything, cause I clearly don’t condone yours and Mom’s perverse sex life but I’m not too proud to admit that my own inexperience is hindering my current female relations.” 6 Samantha Amjadali, “Gilmore Girls Season 7,” Sunday Herald 12 (2008): 12. 7 See, for instance, Peter Travers’s review for Rolling Stone and Geoffrey MacNab’s review for Sight and Sound. I contend that although Juno centers on the plight of a pregnant teenage girl, it is a fairly conservative film. While Juno does become pregnant, she opts for adoption rather than abortion and is supported by her family and friends throughout her pregnancy. Furthermore, Juno is completely supported by the baby’s father, Bleaker (Michael Cera). The two are afforded a happy reconciliation at the film’s conclusion with their baby adopted out to Vanessa (Jennifer Garner), an infertile woman who desperately wishes to become a mother, and Juno reinstated as a “typical” teenager. 8 I refer in particular to the film’s opening sequence in which a MiniMart cashier greets Juno with “what’s the prognosis, Fertile Myrtle? Minus or plus?” and follows up Juno’s amusing revelation of a positive result with “that aint no etchersketch, this is one doodle that can’t be undid, homeskillet.” 9 By “silence” I mean the absence of dialogue, rather than the complex auditory silences described by Michel Chion.

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10 Kim Wilkins, “‘This, Please, Cannot Be That’: The Constructed World of P.T. Anderson’s ‘Magnolia,’” Sydney Studies in English 42 (2016): 60. 11 Sarah Kozloff, Overhearing Film Dialogue (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 23. 12 Todd Berliner, “Killing the Writer: Movie Dialogue Conventions and John Cassavetes,” in Film Dialogue, ed. Jeff Jaeckle (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 107. 13 Hartley’s film features a number of these instances. One such notable sequence follows on Martin’s exasperated yell, “I can’t stand the quiet!” in which Elina (Elina Löwensohn), Dennis, and Martin perform a repetitive dance sequence to Sonic Youth’s “Kool Thing” in a bar. This sequence is not simply a deliberately jarring sequence in the film, but a quotation of Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders (1964), and as such functions to reinforce the film’s construction, and self-conscious place within film history. 14 Jaeckle, “The Shared Verbal Stylistics,” 166. 15 Ibid., 168. 16 Both Kozloff and Jaeckle advocate taking the finished film product as the source for the analysis of film dialogue. 17 Jill Nelmes, “Realism and Screenplay Dialogue,” in Analysing the Screenplay, ed. Jill Nelmes (London: Routledge, 2010), 217. 18 Ibid., 3. 19 Kozloff, Overhearing Film Dialogue, 18. 20 Jill Nelmes, Analysing the Screenplay (London: Routledge, 2010), 16. 21 Nelmes, “Realism and Screenplay Dialogue,” 218. 22 Jeff Jaeckle, “Introduction: A Brief Primer for Film Dialogue Study,” in Film Dialogue, ed. Jeff Jaeckle (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 7. 23 Karl Iglesias, “Subtext in Dialogue,” Creative Screenwriting 14, no. 3 (2007): 44. 24 Nelmes, “Realism and Screenplay Dialogue,” 229. 25 Robert Altman’s New Hollywood films provide good examples of cinema that plays against these norms—characters mumble, dialogue is at times unclear, and characters speak over one another. 26 Kozloff, Overhearing Film Dialogue, 49. 27 Todd Berliner, “Hollywood Movie Dialogue and the ‘Real Realism’ of John Cassavetes,” Film Quarterly 52, no. 3 (1999): 5. 28 J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 5. 29 Ibid., 94–107. 30 Austin later problematizes the distinction between constative and performative utterances, and subsequently reconfigures the notion of the “performative utterance” into the explicit, implicit, or inexplicit performative categories. 31 Thomas Leitch, “You Talk Like a Character in a Book: Dialogue and Film Adaptation,” in Film Dialogue, ed. Jeff Jaeckle (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 85.

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32 Ibid. 33 Raoul Eshelman, Performatism, or, the End of Postmodernism (Colorado: Davies Group Publishers, 2008), 2. 34 Armond White, “American Soul, Aisle Five,” New York Press. October 4, 2004. 35 Woody Allen again is an exception here. 36 Interestingly, Albert’s parents have a different surname to him. This is never explained; however, it does serve the purpose of highlighting the distance felt between Albert and his parents. 37 Kozloff writes that monologues (inherited from theater) are often employed in film where a character talks to someone who cannot respond—the dead, an animal, a mirror—in a way that connotes absolute honesty. In this way, monologues “assume the guise of a clear window into the soul. [They are] occasions where the audience feels it has been given privileged access to the character’s innermost feelings,” 70–71. 38 Bobby refers to the life of a professional, upper-class pianist. The designed trajectory for Bobby’s life is signaled through his middle name “Eroica”—a reference Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3.

5 Eccentric Worlds

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n the previous two chapters I analyzed the function of overtly cinematic characters and hyper-dialogue as distinctive textual strategies within the American eccentric mode. I suggested that these strategies work to distance sincere anxieties by presenting these concerns as though they are distinct to the idiosyncratic characters amplified by their reflexive, overt construction. Both the New Hollywood’s cinematized peer (based on Elsaesser’s unmotivated hero) and the American eccentric overtly cinematic character can be considered deviations from the classic goal-orientated protagonist. As David Bordwell states, the time and space of a conventional narrative—i.e., the film world—is presented as cause-effect narrative logic within which the classical protagonist acts. However, if the protagonists are unmotivated or overtly cinematic, how are their respective film worlds presented such that these characters integrate with their milieu? Eccentric film worlds are constructed as consciously fictional yet deeply affecting spaces. These spaces are assembled such that they are congruous with overtly cinematic characters and the deployment of hyper-dialogue. Unlike films in which offbeat characters are emphasized in contrast to the regularity of their naturalistic film worlds, such as Withnail and I (1987) or Clerks (1994), eccentric film worlds are, like their characters, overtly designed and as such signal their own narrative construction. Despite their artificiality, overtly cinematic characters are not incompatible with the cinematic worlds of American eccentric films. Rather, American eccentric films present narrative worlds that both reveal their nature as constructs and facilitate deeply affecting narrative trajectories. These film spaces are impossible eccentric worlds. Where many New Hollywood films frame their idealized peers within cinematic worlds that aim to reflect either (or both) an objective or subjective reality, American eccentric films present cinematic worlds that are recognizable yet impossible realities. Consider, for instance, Sofia Coppola’s American eccentric biopic Marie Antoinette. Despite its supposed connection to historical events Marie

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Antoinette does not (as its title suggests) reimagine the known history of the eighteenth-century Queen of France, but rather presents a synthesis of period drama, teen-flick, and high school drama that mobilizes its inter-textuality to create an anachronistic, eccentric world. Marie Antoinette establishes this multidirectional inter-textuality in the opening credits sequence, in which Kirsten Dunst is introduced as the titular Marie Antoinette, seductively reclined in her undergarments on a cabriole lounge. This introduction to Marie Antoinette initially appears to correspond to the manner in which the eighteenth-century figure is popularly remembered; as an extravagant and imprudent young queen living a licentious lifestyle at the expense of the French populace. However, in line with American eccentricity’s foregrounding of reflexivity and artifice, Dunst turns her head and smiles knowingly at the camera. This gesture is an acknowledgment of her current performance and Dunst’s persona as a teen-flick star through her antecedent roles in films like Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999), Bring It On (2000) and (importantly, but to different effect) The Virgin Suicides (1999).1 Thus, Dunst’s Marie Antoinette is not a stand-in for the historical figure, but a teen-queen—a term that here refers to her age and royal status and a label applied to the head of a teenclique constructed through mythology and celebrity culture. Throughout Marie Antoinette, Coppola employs Dunst’s teenage persona and distinct Californian accent, combined with contemporary music by Aphex Twin, Bow Wow Wow, and The Strokes, fashion items such as Manolo Blahnik high heels and (briefly) Converse high-top shoes to create a version of a Versailles court that is divorced from any one coherent historical moment.2

FIGURE 5.1 Marie Antoinette Sofia Coppola, 2006.

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Films are artifacts, and thus, all film worlds are invariably artificial spaces. That is, all narratives, those filmed on location or on a set, necessarily, and to varying degrees, artificially configure their sense of “place.” American eccentric film worlds do not attempt to capture real or known locations; instead they recognize and overtly incorporate the artifice of their film worlds into their narratives and structures by incorporating allusion and parody, reflexivity, subversions of genre convention, and visual and spatiotemporal incongruity. Despite often appearing as anachronistic and aesthetically motivated artificial assemblages, eccentric worlds are not merely a matter of unusual, or unexpected, mise-en-scène. The strategies employed in the construction of impossible eccentric worlds are varied and idiosyncratic. While all American eccentric films display their constructed nature, some feature their construction in both the syuzhet and fabula (in David Bordwell’s terms), such as Adaptation (2002) and I’m Not There (2007). In other American eccentric films, bizarre components are implanted as eccentric deviations from otherwise conceivable narrative diegeses—such as Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Synechdoche, New York (2008), and Magnolia (1999). Eccentric film worlds are part of a narrative strategy that works to create a space that is openly artificial, or contrived, and are thus not promoted as possible shared imagined realities with the audience. The assemblage of eccentric worlds can be likened to Joseph Cornell’s boxes, in which disparate objects from various sites of popular culture are placed in concert with each other to create anachronistic contained worlds. In his work on Wes Anderson’s construction of cinematic worlds, Michael Chabon states that the comparison to Joseph Cornell is useful “as long as one bears in mind that the crucial element, in a Cornell box, is neither the imagery and objects it deploys, nor the Romantic narratives it incorporates and undermines, nor the playfulness and precision with which its objects and narratives have been arranged. The important thing, in a Cornell box, is the box.”3 It is not the objects themselves, or their precise placement within the American eccentric world that are individually significant, but rather their relationship to one another in constructing a whole film’s diegesis.4 The objects, narrative structures, referentiality, and reflexivity create a distinctly assembled and contained world, a box, in Chabon’s terms. Chabon continues: Cornell always took pains to construct his boxes himself; indeed the box is the only part of a Cornell work literally “made” by the artist. The box, to Cornell, is a gesture—it draws a boundary around the things it contains,

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and forces them into a defined relationship, not merely with one another, but with everything on the far side of the box. The box sets out the scale of a ratio; it mediates the halves of a metaphor. It makes explicit, in plain, hand-crafted wood and glass, the yearning of a model-maker to analogize the world, and at the same time it frankly emphasizes the limitations, the confines, of his or her ability to do so.5 Chabon’s assertions regarding Anderson’s work can be extended to films in the American eccentric mode in that they present worlds in which found, and often disparate, objects are placed in relation to each other within the confines of an openly created and overtly constructed world. Anderson compiles objects and references within each frame to form a new, wholly fictional, yet familiar, space, while Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), and The Last Days of Disco (1998) create impossible worlds through sustained socio-chronological distortions.6 P.T. Anderson creates an impossible diegesis in Punch-Drunk Love through the use of hyper-saturated primary colors and the prominence of Jon Brion’s erratic and unconventional score, and Todd Haynes assembles Bob Dylan’s songs, the genre conventions of romance and Western films, Godard’s, Bergman’s, Kazan’s, and Fellini’s films, and the myth of celebrity in I’m Not There into recognizable figures that are entirely constructed. As such, extending Chabon’s assertions on Anderson, American eccentric films outwardly exhibit their own artificiality. Chabon writes: [These films] understand and demonstrate that the magic of art, which renders beauty out of brokenness, disappointment, failure, decay, even ugliness and violence—is authentic only to the degree that it attempts to conceal neither the bleak facts nor the tricks employed in pulling off the presto change-o. It is honest only to the degree that it builds its precise and inescapable box around its maker’s x:y scale version of the world … the hand-built, model-kit artifice on display behind the pane of an Anderson box is a guarantor of authenticity; indeed I would argue that artifice, openly expressed, is the only true “authenticity” an artist can lay claim to.7 Indeed, the open artifice of films in the American eccentric mode does not preclude their authentic relationship to sincere issues of alienation and existential anxiety. These film world “boxes” function to contain these issues, and provide critical, ironic distance between the sincere and troubling thematic elements of these films and the reflexive artificiality of

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their diegeses. Eccentric film worlds are impossible simulations of reality that encourage the audience to immerse themselves in their affective qualities while simultaneously participating in their referential gameplay. In this sense, American eccentricity employs textual strategies that approximate Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekte. American eccentricity echoes the V-effekt in that meta-cinematic and reflexive techniques are used to reinforce the spectator’s awareness of the film as a construct, however these techniques are employed for different purposes. Where Brecht’s V-effekt seeks to intellectually challenge the spectator, to shake them from their perception of reality in the theater to promote critical sociopolitical reflection, the referential game-play tactics employed in the American eccentric mode function to remind the spectator of the parameters of the film’s diegesis to facilitate temporary emotional investment in the film’s narrative elements and thematic concerns. By reassuring the spectator of the limits and confines of the eccentric film world, the film encourages her to engage with its narrative intricacies, and align herself with the characters and their existential anxieties, at a safe, mediated distance.

Eccentric deviations from realism In the introduction to their collection Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel write: Films are shot either on location or in the studio. In the first case, films take actual place—take images of places, record impressions of the world’s surfaces on celluloid … place and cinema share an intriguing and morphologically consonant doubleness: both are felt and have been understood to be simultaneously natural and constructed, to be the effects of both ontology and the articulations of a code or codes. Cinema as a photographic medium has been notoriously and controversially appealed to as a medium of “truth” in which the natural world (often the landscape—place—itself) lays its impress on the physical material of the filmstrip. This same understanding has been revised, and even abjured, by an understanding of cinema as depending less on its debt to the world it photographs and more on its operations as text, or as an instance of speech, language act, or code. Place, meanwhile, as we have seen, can be experienced or understood both as the ultimate, entirely natural a priori (“To be at all—to exist in any way”) and a fabrication—a product of human

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artifice, cultural construction, and ideology (“landscapes, like written texts, encode powerful social, cultural, and political messages that are interpreted by their viewers”).8 Disregarding the specificity of the celluloid medium for the purpose of this book, this statement suggests that all films “take place”—i.e., all films present their narratives as occurring somewhere. Mainstream narrative cinema generally aspires to verisimilitude in order to encourage the “audience [to] feel they are part of the action and [encourage] identification with the characters in the film” within a world that the audience accepts as “being lifelike in some way.”9 Yet, although New York is the stated setting for Being John Malkovich, Synecdoche, New York, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Metropolitan none of these films provide the impression of actually occurring or taking place within that real geographic location. American eccentric films have an unstable relationship to verisimilitude in that they combine conventional generic codes with reflexive tactics, and at times diverge from the “invisible style” of the classical Hollywood. The classical style can be described as a narrativedominant form. Particularly, writes Bordwell: Cause-effect logic and narrative parallelism generate a narrative which projects its action through psychologically-defined, goal orientated characters. Narrative time and space are constructed to present the cause-effect chain. To this end, cinematic representation has recourse to fixed figures of cutting (e.g., 180° continuity, crosscutting, “montage sequences”), mise-en-scène (e.g., three-point lighting, perspective sets), and sound (e.g., modulation, voice-over narration). More important than these devices themselves are their functions in advancing the narrative. The viewer makes sense of the classical film through the criteria of verisimilitude (is x plausible?), or generic appropriateness (is x characteristic of this sort of film?) and of compositional unity (does x advance the story?).10 Unlike other forms of cinema that deviate from the mainstream, such as arthouse or avant-garde film, American eccentric films do not divorce these conventions in creating eccentric film worlds. Rather, American eccentric films acknowledge the expectations that these conventions create in order to ironically subvert them (as in the of case overtly cinematic characters) or fulfill expectations to excess (as in the case of generic evocations) in order to ironically draw attention to their artifice. The excessive fulfillment of expectation aids in the construction of contained eccentric worlds as it clefts the stability of verisimilitude.

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The ironic tone and overt artifice of the American eccentric cinema recalls James MacDowell’s formulation of the quirky sensibility, in which “the tonal balance of irony and sincerity functions … as a way of looking at the world in which it is possible to ‘view characters’ schemes and achievements as comically absurd or potentially bound for failure—and thus open to a certain amount of ridicule—at the same time as they are treated with degrees of sympathy.”11 The mixture of comic registers in the quirky sensibility allows the spectator to find the deadpan delivery of dramatic scenes humorous, while simultaneously being affected by the characters’ misfortunes because she can treat the fictional film world as “partly unbelievable.” The notion of a world that is “partly” unbelievable due to its overt artificiality inhabited by off-beat characters aligns with the constructed worlds and overtly cinematic characters of the American eccentric mode. In the American eccentric mode ironic distance does not function in respect to taking evaluative positions against the character (as pathetic or awkward), but rather in recognizing the cinematic reflexivity of situations, utterances, and scenes in an elasticized relationship (in MacDowell’s terms) with the poignancy of their anxiety. Eccentric worlds entice engagement through recognition and relatability, while simultaneously distancing the audience through their conscious construction of cinematic references, impossible spatiotemporal arrangements, and anachronistic structures. By contrast, many films in the New Hollywood era employed a naturalistic approach to filmmaking that blended subjective and objective realism to present cinematic worlds that could resonate with their target audience as a relatable reality. Place, in many of these New Hollywood films, is constructed as a recognizable and imaginable reality where sociocultural and economic factors are tied to specific locations and contexts and while often imbued with strong ideological significance—as in the representation of the South in Easy Rider and the Northeast Coast in Five Easy Pieces. Peter Biskind writes that the advent of “new, lightweight equipment meant that they could just get on the road and look for the ‘real’ America, shooting real stories about real people.”12 There was a focus on the depiction of realism through the influence of direct cinema documentary and cinéma vérité filmmakers like D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, and John Cassavetes, as well as the advent of new, lightweight technologies: “telephoto lenses, zooms, unmotivated pans, oblique camera set-ups, complex editing patterns of both image and sound—all [created] a look which is simultaneously more naturalistic and more stylised than dominant cinema’s norm.”13 Therefore, many New Hollywood works demonstrate a blend of art cinema, the influence of postwar European film (particularly Italian neorealism and the “street style” of the French New Wave),14 realism and classical Hollywood conventions. The

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influence of art cinema on the New Hollywood can be seen in the way in which the diegeses portray a naturalism that does not just imitate real life, but also evokes an experiential subjectivity—such as in the LSD sequence of Easy Rider or the depiction of temporal subjectivity as Travis Bickle is immersed in watching an Alka-Selzer dissolve in a glass of water in Taxi Driver. The naturalistic approach to cinematic world construction seeks to align the audience with character, diegeses, and action that may be isomorphic to their own everyday experience. Christian Keathley argues that many films in the New Hollywood deployed the formal codes associated with documentary filmmaking that were disseminated largely by television news; at the time, these codes functioned quite powerfully to evoke an almost wholly unmediated representation of reality, much like the Americans encountered in nightly news coverage of Vietnam. On the other hand, the films often also reflected the complex, contradictory, fragmented nature of accounts of trauma regularly offered by those who have suffered it.15 One such film is Mike Nichols’s The Graduate. In The Graduate spaces and locations are both naturalistic and imbued with ideological significance. The Graduate is specifically American in its geographic locations, and chronologically identifiable through its popular music soundtrack. Thus, the cinematic world was depicted as a historically and geographically bound time and place through the use of “real-life” spatiotemporal referents—the manicured lawns of 1960s suburban Pasadena, Simon and Garfunkel’s music, and the University of Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza in Northern California.16 The geographic sites also figure ideologically in concert with the use of naturalism and subjective alignment with Benjamin, and by extension the youth demographic of which he is presented as representative. Pasadena is the site of the older, decadent, materialistic generation who fix their future stability to the plastics industry. By contrast, Northern California, and the University of Berkeley attended by Elaine Robinson (Katharine Ross), is a youthful site where intellectual challenges and engagement are possible. It is not until Benjamin makes the problematic decision to go North in a “halfbaked” (as his father claims) bid to marry Elaine that he rejects the ideology represented by Los Angeles/Pasadena, Mrs. Robinson, and his parents. At this point the film shifts pace. The meandering passing-of-time narration of the first half of the film is transformed into a clearly demarcated goal-driven narrative, flawed as that goal may be. The Graduate is presented entirely from Ben’s perspective. From our first interaction with him, landing at Los Angeles Airport, the audience is

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encouraged to closely examine Benjamin’s measured movements through the relationship (the “added value” in Michel Chion’s terms) of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” to the image. “The Sound of Silence” crescendos until it almost drowns out the ambient sounds of the scene. The combination of melancholic lyrics, the sorrowful tone evoked by the song’s minor key, and the simplicity of the melody sonically enhances Benjamin’s isolation and alienation. The audiovisual contract formed in this sequence encourages the audience to focus keenly on Benjamin’s movements, which affords the sense of time passing slowly, with subjective trepidation. This measured pacing is contrasted with the quick cuts and overlapping dialogue in the films first party scene. The fast-paced, aurally frantic sequence establishes that time and space in this film are subjective and aligned with Benjamin’s personal experience. From these subjective technical gestures, The Graduate, like other films from the New Hollywood, aims to generate a link between the on-screen characters as cinematized peers and the audience through shared ideology and experience. These characters exist within locatable spaces and contexts that are intended to be relatable because of (rather than in spite of) their presentation through ideologically imbued subjective lenses. As Benjamin’s subjectivity is intertwined with the representation of locatable spaces within a contextualized moment in history, the audience is encouraged to engage with Benjamin’s perspective through shared experience. In the first half of the film, Nichols incorporates repetition through matches-on-action and form cuts to demonstrate the subjective passing of time without narrative change—this is best demonstrated by a “passing of time” montage played over Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” and “April Come She Will,” which presents the sensation of inertia experienced by Benjamin in his unfulfilling sexual relationship and “drifting” lifestyle. While these cuts depict Benjamin’s experience of passing time as monotonous and stagnant, it is nonetheless certain that time passes in a single forward trajectory, along a chronological continuum. This is confirmed in Mr. Braddock’s irritated declaration: Now listen, Ben! Look, I think it’s a very good thing that a young man after he’s done some very good work should have a chance to relax and enjoy himself, and lie around and drink beer, and so on. But after a few weeks, I believe that person would want to take some stock in himself and his situation and start to think about getting off his ass! This declaration informs the audience that although the affair is depicted from Benjamin’s position of malaise, which in turn designates a subjective

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temporality, events within the film occur within an objective, consistent temporality. Therefore “The Sound of Silence” played as a bookend to Benjamin’s plight does not designate that the film’s conclusion is in fact a return to its beginning (unlike the bookending technique in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) but rather reveals that although Benjamin is no longer alone, and has fulfilled his goal (acquiring the companionship of Elaine Robinson) in a narratological sense, the gravity of his and Elaine’s act of defiance is not entirely victorious—nor is it ironically qualified. In the film’s final sequence Benjamin arrives at the chapel just as Elaine is married to Carl (Brian Avery). As Benjamin arrives after Elaine is wed, Mrs. Robinson apprehends Elaine and desperately informs her “it’s too late!” to which Elaine responds “not for me!” Elaine and Benjamin flee the church with rebellious joy. However, like the opening “looking for America” sequence of Easy Rider, this “happy-ending” is a seduction. The film’s final frame—a tight close up on the couple, with the “The Sound of Silence” bookending song foregrounded—affirms that despite the action of the film these characters remain emotionally isolated. Benjamin’s and Elaine’s exuberant smiles fade as “they look out the back window at those they have left in the dust, at each other, and then stare straight ahead awkwardly as they drive into their uncertain future.”17 They may have escaped the society against which they have rallied but it is already “too late” to begin a life untainted by their own hypocrisies and actions. The devastation of this final moment is not in the belief that this is the end of these fictional characters’ plights—contained within the “box” as in American eccentric cinema—but rather the potential recognition of a shared generational sentiment with the film’s target audience: the start of a new, failed journey out of the frame that they no longer witness.

FIGURE 5.2 The Graduate Mike Nichols, 1967.

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Eccentricity and the intertextual world18 Benjamin Braddock’s experiences of 1960s America in The Graduate were depicted as emblematic of an alienated generation concerned about its future in the face of societal and generational uncertainty, Todd Haynes analyzes existential anxiety in I’m Not There through the deconstruction of six fictionalized, multifaceted personas of Bob Dylan, a figure central to the countercultural movement of the 1960s. I’m Not There depicts anxiety and character plights in a manner that appears inherently bound to onscreen contexts. This is because the audience is not only presented with overtly constructed characters, but also film worlds and situations that are recognizable (often only within the context of cinematic convention or through popular culture references) yet portrayed with distinctly fictitious elements and heightened artifice. Where The Graduate promotes possibilities for character identification and alignment in the recognizable experiences of Benjamin’s plight, Haynes highlights the assemblage of identity within consciously and creatively constructed film worlds. Following the opening title sequence, I’m Not There begins with an aerial shot of an iconic Dylan haircut and hooded eyes. Approximating an amalgamation of the two epitaphs composed by Dylan in his book of poetry, Tarantula, Kris Kristofferson’s voiceover begins “There he lies. God rest his soul … and his rudeness. A devouring public can now share the remains of his sickness, and his phone numbers.”19 As these humorous, Dylanesque words are spoken, the camera shifts upward to expose the dead body of Cate Blanchett costumed as Dylan being prepared for examination by two pathologists. As a scalpel cuts into the flesh, the narrator prepares the audience for the autopsy of character. A succession of abrupt cuts (punctuated by nondiegetic gunshots) shows the fictional personas who will not only inhabit but create the film’s world; as Kristofferson’s narration introduces the six figures: “There he lay. Poet. Prophet. Outlaw. Fake. Star of Electricity.” The camera cuts back to the autopsy bed, where the naked corpse has been replaced by a Ray-Ban and suit adorned Blanchett-Dylan in an open funeral casket. The cadaver is immediately recognizable as an archetypal image of Dylan and as Blanchett playing that role. In this transition, what began as the promise of an analytical, systematic exhumation of character has been replaced with a pluralized eulogy of multiple sites of subjectivity and myth—reflected in the narrator’s articulation of Tarantula’s epitaph’s final line, that “even the ghost was more than one person.” The idea of recreating or capturing an identity posthumously from the subjective recounts of multiple characters immediately places this film in dialogue with Orson Welles’s

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Citizen Kane (1941). However, in Citizen Kane the audience arrives together with the investigating journalist, Jerry Thompson, at the final realization that Kane’s identity (like all identities) cannot be fixed or resolutely understood. Haynes, on the other hand, presents a film in which (as the title suggests) this exhumation of character is based on an openly false premise. The audience is informed before the first frame that Dylan (or “I”) is not there, and yet for the remainder of the film they are encouraged to seek him out—to piece him together from recognizable sites of contemporary image culture—despite the act’s futility. James Morrison describes Todd Haynes’s films as: an art built on pastiche, on the concerted assemblage of reference, allusion, free-form parody and floating signifiers, [his] cinema feeds on the Hollywood tradition as rabidly as it does on a host of other forms and styles—the European art-film, punk, grunge, glam, camp, cult, the cultural underground and the putative mainstream, pop art and pulp fiction—while making a show of casually discarding, or holding in gleeful contempt, the basic premises of the Hollywood model.20 As Morrison seems to suggest, I’m Not There is a film “inspired by the music and many lives” of Dylan. However, none of the six characters presented as aspects of the Dylan persona encourage further engagement beyond the screen as they, and their constructed world, rely on cinema as a confluence of various cultural streams from the post–Second World War era (and image culture) itself. Each of the film’s six characters illustrates or alludes to an aspect of the Bob Dylan myth. Haynes presents both a nineteen-year-old poet named Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw) and a young boy named Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin) in this film. It is well documented that the poetry and persona of Arthur Rimbaud have been a significant influence on Dylan’s writing; however, this is not that Rimbaud. Rimbaud here is not the French nineteenth-century poet but a character by the same name created by Haynes who shares enough biographical details to be recognized by the audience as a connection (both have retired from writing poetry before the age of twenty, and allusions to a capricious and unsettled libertine persona). Yet Haynes’s Rimbaud quotes Bob Dylan lyrics, poetry, and interview responses.21 Haynes’s Rimbaud signals Dylan’s connection to the poet, however by subverting the necessarily unilateral direction of quotation from Rimbaud to Dylan, a point of origin has been erased and a simulacral figure installed in its place. Rimbaud’s original words are replaced by those they have influenced. Therefore, as an actual biographical figure, that is, as the nineteenthcentury poet, Rimbaud is a contextually and chronologically impossible evocation.

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Similarly, Haynes’s Woody Guthrie is not the Depression-era folksinger that inspired Dylan in his early years as a musician, but rather an eleven-year-old African-American boy living in 1959. Haynes’s Woody, like the real Guthrie, plays a guitar painted with the slogan “this machine kills fascists.” However, this Woody also recreates the scene from Arthur Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant (1969) in which Arlo Guthrie visits his dying father, Woody, in hospital (although Haynes does not biologically connect his Woody to the ailing “Mr. Guthrie” in his sequence), and quotes extensively from Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957).22 In Woody’s first interaction with some stowaway drifters on a train, he embodies the role of the traveling folk storyteller and explains his experiences: You got hobos, nobos, gentlemen loafers. One or all-time losers. Call us what you will. Deep down, we’re all getting ready to tuck our heads under our wings for sleep. We of the Pullman side-car and the sunburned thumb. We ain’t kidding ourselves. It’s a lonesome roads we shall walk. This oddly romantic dialogue directly recalls (and references) the personal experience offered by Kazan’s charismatic drifter, Lonesome Rhodes (Andy Griffith) in his interview with radio journalist Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neale): Whenever a bunch of fellas like us … outcasts, hobos, nobodies, gentlemen loafers … one time or all time losers, call us what you want to … Whenever we get together, we tell funny stories … me and Beanie and the rest of these … hand-to-mouth tumbleweed boys like you see in here. If the whisky don’t get us, then women must … and it looks like … I’m never gonna cease … my wandering. But, deep down, when we get ready … to tuck our heads under our wings and go to sleep … we ain’t kidding ourselves. Woody similarly explains his personal history of growing up in a fictionalized “composite” town called “Riddle” through this exchange: Hobo: Uh, is there really a town called Riddle? Woody: Tell you the flat truth, that’s sort of a … a whatchamacallit. Hobo: A, uh … A composite. Woody: A compost heap is more like it by again directly quoting Lonesome’s conversation with Marcia: Marcia: Is there really a town called Riddle? Lonesome: To tell you the flat truth it’s just sort of a what do you call it … Marcia: Composite? Lonesome: Compost heap is more like it.

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It is not merely that Haynes’s Woody quotes lines from Kazan, but rather that he recites the dialogue from the film in a manner that is almost, but not exactly, identical—as though Woody’s identity is pieced together from imperfect recollections, rather than straight quotations, of past texts. Both Rimbaud and Woody are characters who indicate and mimic Dylan’s influences without embodying them. They are out of time with their namesakes. Arthur Rimbaud quotes Bob Dylan. Woody sings about the boxcar,23 claims to have learned the blues from a woman called Arvella Gray in Chicago (rather than the male ’60s street-singer Blind Arvella Gray), played with Bobby Vee, succumbed to alcoholism during his career as the “Tiny Troubadour” in a carnival that resembles that of Nightmare Alley (1947), and to have found purpose again when he joined the Union cause—events that he, eleven in 1959, could not possibly have experienced. Where Benjamin Braddock was constructed as a character to whom the audience could relate through his subjective accounts of a recognizable world, Woody is a character genealogically constructed from various sites of popular culture and cinema. As John David Rhodes argues, for Haynes “film history is not just an archive of images, but rather an arsenal of aesthetic and epistemological strategies.”24 Haynes incorporates the “composite” town of Riddle in I’m Not There as the frontier setting of the film’s “Outlaw” section. In this section Billy the Kid (played by Richard Gere) returns home to find that he is almost unknown to the townsfolk, who are consciously costumed for a Halloween festival (as the narration states, “No town ever loved Halloween quite as much as the town of Riddle, so who a fella really was never really mattered”). The Halloween setting recalls a statement made by Dylan during a New York concert on October 31, 1964: “It’s Halloween, I have my Bob Dylan mask on. I’m mask-erading.”25 The evocation of this factual event, and its playful deferral and doubling of identity, is paralleled in I’m Not There as the town costumed citizens greet Billy by various names. A man dressed as a lobby boy calls Billy “Mr. Gladstone,” the pseudonym Benjamin Braddock assumes in his Taft Hotel rendezvous with Mrs. Robinson, while a young boy dressed as Charlie Chaplin’s tramp (played, like Woody, by Marcus Carl Franklin) begs Billy to help him escape from “this here chicken town.” “Chickentown” here refers to frustrating and repetitious dystopia created by John Cooper Clarke in his performance poem, “Evidently Chickentown.” Using the same palette as Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, this section recalls revisionist Westerns, in particular Dylan’s role as Alias (and soundtrack composer) in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). Haynes complicates this reference to Peckinpah through the maturation of “the Kid” character. I’m Not There’s narrator, Kris Kristofferson, played “the Kid” in Peckinpah’s film at the age of thirty-six, whereas Gere’s Billy is shown as a

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weary, bespectacled man, plagued by visions of war, approaching his sixties. In a manner not dissimilar to Altman’s appropriation of the Korean War as an allegory for America’s involvement in Vietnam in M*A*S*H (1970), it is not, as the historical context of the Western genre would suggest, memories of the Civil War that torment Billy. Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid deconstructed the Western to present a country full of men without a future, whose way of life is being replaced by the evil forces of eastern business interests … [a Western] about people just waiting around to die … [where violence] is shown to be a pointless, inconclusive (with the notable exception of the Kid’s death), comparatively unspectacular act carried out almost from a force of habit.26 In contrast, Haynes’s “Outlaw” section reconstructs the Western setting, with visions of the Vietnam War literally infiltrating the film frame. Billy’s scenic view of tree-covered hills on his approach to Riddle is overlaid with memories of war through the gradual introduction of sonic disruptions before cutting between televised war footage, the serene vista, Billy’s thousand-yard stare, and shifting spatiotemporal planes to show Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), watching the televised war from her bedroom as her marriage breaks down, before returning to Billy. Haynes presents “Riddle” not only as the composite Western town seen in Altman’s and Peckinpah’s revisionist image of the genre, but an obviously assembled film set where giraffes emerge from barns behind the power lines as Calexico and Jim James perform Dylan’s “Goin’ to Acapulco” in front of the open casket of a young suicided woman whose appearance recalls John Everett Millais’s Ophelia. Jim James’s appearance in this emotive sequence in commedia dell’arte whiteface further emphasizes the deference and doubling of points of reference. The painted mask functions as an allusion to the Italian theater tradition, the evocation of that tradition by Dylan on his “Rolling Thunder” tour, and the incorporation of those performances in his experimental film Renaldo & Clara (1978) as a film that, like Dylan’s persona and Haynes’s film, centers on “masks, disguises, assumed names, and shifting identities.”27 Riddle is a composite, anachronistic set upon which the mythology of national conflicts collide and intermingle—the frontier, meta-cinematic evocations of the Western, the Vietnam War, and the mass dispossession of family homes through the self-interested power of eminent domain by government officials. This form of anachronism corresponds to Elena Gorfinkel’s formulation in which “there is both a historicist and fabulist strain in the creative marshalling” of the film world’s construction “which hinges on sly misuses and creative revisions of historical and film historical referents.”28

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Rather than presenting a dynamic, plot-driven Western, Maximillian Le Cain provocatively writes that Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid “is practically plotless. Instead, Peckinpah presents us with a loose series of poetic vignettes pointing towards the moment when Garrett shoots the Kid and then his own reflection in a mirror. Rather than leading up to this action, the film seems simply to wait for it.”29 Haynes’s film may appear as a series of interwoven vignettes, however, rather than these moments culminating in a violent act of destruction they simply reflect the film’s original existential crisis—the identity being investigated does not add up to an understanding of place and self through anachronistic references, but a myriad of deferrals and blockades. Haynes not only resists naturalism, but as Rob White writes, his film is “a tapestry woven from the threads of other films—strands of dialogue, character, mise-en-scène … [its] environment is a patchwork world, with no true identity.”30 Pat Garrett (Bruce Greenwood) here is no longer a (problematic) lawman out to betray an old friend, rather he is the man who has sold the town of Riddle (and with it, the composite site of American mythology) to make way for a five-lane interstate highway. Pat Garrett does not need to shoot Billy (or his own reflection) at the section’s conclusion, as he and much of Riddle have forgotten Billy exists. Through this, Haynes portrays these American myths and their incarnations during the tumultuous 1960s, with which the image of countercultural “Bob Dylan” is intricately bound, as slipping into an achronological and porous retirement—as images and instances that are removed from original contexts and placed in overlapping cinematic recyclability. I’m Not There does not present six separate stories with distinct spatiotemporal logics, but one layered, cross-spatiotemporal, achronological film world based on an assemblage of references within popular culture and film history. The stories and characters bleed into, and overlap with, one another. Haynes allows film allusions to cross the narrative’s six sections; Dylan’s song lyrics are repeated as dialogue, and actors reappear in new locations in different roles. Bruce Greenwood plays both Pat Garrett and Time magazine reporter Keenan Jones in the Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett) section of the film. Keenan, here, is the “Mr. Jones” of Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” a figure whose continual inquiry into that which he cannot understand leads only to more befuddlement. Although I’m Not There provides the illusion of focusing on the labyrinthine persona of Dylan as a musical figure, “Ballad of a Thin Man” is the only song presented in the style of a music-video. The song is played while the visuals cut between Quinn performing, and a series of illogical, impressionistic, and bizarre images focusing on Keenan. Haynes complicates this moment by mirroring the lyric’s evocations of geek shows and freaks in visual allusions to the 1947 film Nightmare Alley, which documents the fall of

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a successful conman to a drunkard, who by the film’s conclusion is only able to play a carnival geek. The representation of Cate Blanchett as Jude Quinn is immediately recognizable as the enigmatic electric Dylan—yet the casting of Blanchett (as a highly acclaimed, and female, performer) in the role functions to reiterate the constructed nature of the biopic as a genre that necessarily incorporates artificiality in order to present portraits of individual lives. Much of this section is appropriated from D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Dont Look Back (1967), and as such Keenan Jones is recognizable as an inverted fictionalization of Time magazine reporter Horace Freeland Judson, at whom Dylan levels a (perhaps) contrived tirade of abuse on the nature of knowledge, obligation, and media representation. Although Pennebaker’s direct cinema style provides the illusion of unfettered access to the “star” of Dylan, many criticisms have been leveled at the film around the issue of self-performance perpetuating the Dylan myth. In directly quoting scenes and appropriating dialogue from Pennebaker’s film within an openly fictionalized construct, Haynes problematizes the notion of unfettered access to identity through layers of performance and allusion. The biopic, like the “behind-the-scenes” Rockumentary, is centered on a yearning to access the “truth” of a person— thus, by quoting Dylan’s performance in Pennebaker’s film Quinn functions as a mediation and a displacing mechanism. Quinn is at once comforting as he is the most familiar image of Dylan depicted in the film yet he is a source of existential unease. He is a simulacrum—an overt performance of a popular culture image that had been performed for Pennebaker’s “access all areas” Rockumentary. The use of high-contrast black and white in this section also recalls Federico Fellini’s poetic realism. The fluidity between dream and reality in 8½ (1963) is reflected in a moment where, like Guido, Quinn is shot floating in the sky as a human balloon. The suffocating sense of individual alienation Fellini presents in Guido’s driving-dream sequence is similarly evoked as a distraught Quinn has his blood pressure taken in a limousine, while the sound of his heartbeat overpowers the soundtrack. The sense of alienation and existential anxiety present throughout I’m Not There is reflected in a sequence where Quinn attends a Warholesque party. Alone and anesthetized by barbiturates, Quinn collapses as a large tarantula is projected onto the walls around him. In biographical terms, this references Dylan’s prose poetry collection Tarantula; however, Haynes’s slippery cinematic construction pluralizes this allusion as a thematic effect. The image of a tarantula equally quotes Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966)—a film concerned with identity where, again, reality and dream states are blurred beyond recognition, and televised images of global atrocities like the Holocaust and Vietnam War haunt the characters.

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FIGURE 5.3 8½ Federico Fellini, 1963.

FIGURE 5.4 I’m Not There Todd Haynes, 2007.

As dream states and reality blur in both Fellini’s and Bergman’s work, cinematic allusion and biography here meld to fix identity within film and image cultural history in response to the impossibility of capturing any true human essence. The indexical nature of experience lived through the film image is most evident in Robbie (Heath Ledger) and Claire’s (Charlotte Gainsbourg) section. Robbie is an actor who has risen to fame for a role in the film A Grain of Sand,31 a biopic of Jack Rollins (the title character of the section played by Christian Bale). Where the Jack Rollins section within I’m Not There is presented as an expository documentary (in contrast to Pennebaker’s

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approach),32 quoting significantly from Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home (2005), A Grain of Sand positions Haynes’s film in contrast to audience expectations of a more conventional biopic. In this section, the presenter promises to bring her audience face-to-face with the real “Jack Rollins.” This, of course, can never occur. The collapse of Robbie and Claire’s marriage presents the most conventional narrative of the film, incorporating a falling-in-love montage that begins with the couple recreating the intimacy and excitement scene between Dylan and Suze Rotolo on the cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” and a “dear John” divorce letter sequence. The sequence begins with the narration: That’s when she knew it was over for good. The longest running war in television history. The war that hung like a shadow over the same nine years as her marriage. So why was it suddenly so hard to breathe? Robbie and Claire meet in a Greenwich Village café in the 1960s. During this meeting Robbie learns that Claire is a French artist, to which he exclaims “that’s perfect!” This utterance, rather than merely signaling the commencement of a conventional boy-meets-girl storyline, alludes to the section’s homage to Jean-Luc Godard. Haynes visually alludes to Contempt (1963), Two or Three Things I Know about Her (1967), and La Chinoise (1967), with scenes and dialogue directly quoted from Masculin Féminin (1966). In their first encounter Claire quotes Godard’s Madeleine (from Masculin Féminin) by asking Robbie “what is at the center of your world?” To which Robbie responds by offering an approximation of Madeleine’s answer (“Me”). He responds with, “Well, I’m 22. I guess I would say, me.” The construction of Claire and Robbie’s relationship is thus not based on the ideal of two characters genuinely falling in love after their first meeting, as regularly occurs throughout the romance genre (Titanic [1997], Say Anything … [1989], The Notebook [2004]), but is rather based on, and born out of, a generic romantic entanglement as presented by cinema as a historical, and cultural, imaginary. Haynes reinforces this position through the incorporation of Godard-esque intertitles accompanied by the sound of gunshots, which, in contrast to the most mainstream interpersonal narrative of the film, disrupts the plot in a form that approaches a Brechtian distanciation. Masculin Féminin is again quoted in the premiere of Grain of Sand. The narrator explains Claire’s disappointment in the film and ultimately in their failed vision of the future, stating: The more they tried to make it youthful, the more the images on the screen seemed out of date. It wasn’t the film they had dreamed, the film they had imagined and discussed. The film they each wanted to live.

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Taken alone, this sentiment could be said to speak for the inability of direct address to convey the existential anxiety of our contemporary society; however, in deriving this profound statement from Godard, Haynes creates a double play in his use of the utterance. Not only does the statement directly convey the difficulty of expressing existential anxiety in contemporary cinema, but in the context of I’m Not There, a film fundamentally concerned with recreating and understanding identity (not just of the countercultural figure Bob Dylan, but identity per se) Haynes’s statement of sincerity is appropriated from another film source—the anxieties are sincere but they are not representable in any direct manner. The film’s final moments end with a series of these recognitions—Claire’s section acknowledges the limitations of cinema, Quinn’s section demonstrates the construction of character, and Billy formally addresses the film’s anachronistic structure. Following a rant about the rejection of his new electric recordings, Quinn matter-of-factly states, “Everybody knows I’m not a folk singer,” before turning to smile at the camera. White states that this is a moment in which Quinn acts “serenely, smugly, with a camera-loves-me complacency that takes the audience’s approval for granted”;33 however, given Haynes’s deliberate focus on identity and construction, this moment is more accurately read as the reinstatement of Cate Blanchett within the film. Here, the gradual smile is knowing. Without the Ray-Ban sunglasses, and relaxing the hardened and exhausted expression held throughout the film, the audience is forced to recognize Blanchett as an actor who has inhabited a role. The overtly recognizable Dylan of the Quinn section is, in this reflexive smile, over. If, as Rhodes and Gorfinkel suggest, “identity is constructed in and through place, whether by our embrace of a place, or inhabitation of a particular point in space, or by our rejection of and departure from a given place and our movement toward, adoption and inhabitation of, another”34 then the eccentric world is a required creation in relation to the overtly cinematic character. Haynes actively articulates the parameters of the achronological, impossible film world he has created with Kristofferson’s final lines: I can change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else. I don’t know who I am most of the time. It’s like you’ve got yesterday, today, and tomorrow all in the same room. There’s no telling what can happen. Unlike The Graduate, I’m Not There does not promote alignment with any characters in a manner that facilitates a broader cultural imaginary beyond the screen, as the film world provided is an impossible location. Many New Hollywood films, such as The Graduate, depicted locales that carry significant social, political, and geographic authenticity. American eccentric worlds, on the other hand, are nearer to simulacra.

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FIGURE 5.5 I’m Not There Todd Haynes, 2007.

Eccentric cities: Magnolia35 I have argued through Haynes’s I’m Not There that the eccentric world is an overtly fictive space. In connection with Haynes’s anachronistic work this position may appear obvious. However, I posit further that the constructed worlds need not be as overt as Haynes’s tight quotation, naming, or casting. Many films in the American eccentric mode present impossible virtual versions of real locations and historical contexts. Charlie Kaufman’s New York films are less concerned with a subjective or objective depiction of the city than they are with spaces in which the inclusion of bizarre elements elucidate existential anxiety within mundane everyday life that consequentially shape the films’ space and narration. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind operates in a space that is distinctly locatable as New York, where real-world referents are completely entwined with a nonlinear, subjective narrative of a failed relationship. Here New York becomes a constructed world as its spatiotemporal planes are filtered through Joel’s (Jim Carrey) memory. Similarly, Being John Malkovich blends an identifiable New York setting with dark apartments housing dozens of exotic pets, office buildings with half-floors and ludicrous background stories, and a portal into the mind of actor, John Malkovich. Synecdoche, New York plays with the real location Schenectady, New York, and the concept of synecdoche, where playwright Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) attempts to reconstruct his broken life through a theatrical celebration of the mundane. This results in an exponential on-stage reconstruction of his

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life and a peculiar New York (where, for instance, people can buy houses that are eternally ablaze) within a warehouse in Manhattan’s Theater District. While Kaufman’s New Yorks are each made strange by the inclusion of an impossible element, other eccentric film worlds are manufactured in less tangibly absurd manners. P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia presents a complex and more understated version of the eccentric world in his construction of Los Angeles. Magnolia’s film world begins with a semi-translucent magnolia bulb bursting open to the rhythm of Aimee Mann singing “One” over a road map of Los Angeles. From this opening, Magnolia creates a relationship to the city of Los Angeles as a real location, a preexisting filmic site, and the location for this distinct film’s diegesis. Los Angeles is a city that is deeply tied to the film industry through its reality as the geographic site of production in Hollywood and its representation on-film since the early 1920s. Colin McArthur writes, “with regard solely to the representation of cities, there must hardly be a major city in the world which … is not known primarily by way of Hollywood.”36 Films like Pretty Woman (1990) and Clueless (1995) have presented the wealthy, upmarket Beverly Hills locations (and the sort of ideology questioned in The Graduate), while Echo Park (1986), Boyz n the Hood (1991), and Mi Vida Loca (1994) have depicted low socioeconomic locations. The city’s long, wide, desolate “mean” streets where underhanded business dealings take place between Victorian homes and run-down boarding houses are readily associated with films noir of the 1940s and 1950s, such as Double Indemnity (1944) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and more recently Drive (2011). Conversely, the glamour—the illusion and reality—of Hollywood (as both place and as lifestyle) has been reflected in Backstudio films,37 such as A Star Is Born (1937) and Sunset Boulevard (1950). Through its tapestry ensemble structure Magnolia’s Los Angeles is a recognizable media-centric and celebrity-consumed location. Its plotlines feature the secrets of wealthy television personalities and executives—one with an unfaithful, guilt-ridden (second) wife and an estranged son who has become a misogynistic self-help guru, the other an adulterer who, in the past, molested his now-drug-addicted daughter—two lonely and emotionally exploited (ex and current) child-stars, a struggling actor, a bumbling and incompetent policeman, and a hardworking palliative carer. This Los Angeles is comprised of upscale mansions, middle-class homes, dingy apartment complexes, bars and diners, studio sets and backlots, lawyers’ and doctors’ offices, and wide streets lined with Googie-inspired structures and palm trees seen from secluded spaces of car interiors. P.T. Anderson presents this Los Angeles naturalistically in terms of color palette and mise-en-scène. Claudia Wilson’s (Melora Walters) small apartment is modest, homely, and imperfect; the backstage green room of the Quiz Kids Challenge (1990) is a sparse, unglamorous space inhabited by

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exploitative guardians; Earl Partridge’s (Jason Robards) “Contemporary style” villa is an example of 1950s–1970s Angeleno luxury architecture; and the film’s title refers to the east-west Magnolia Boulevard in North Hollywood’s San Fernando Valley. These precise locations are presented as naturalistic, inhabited, and familiar spaces and as such the world presented is conceivable as one recognizable city depicted via a series of simultaneously occurring events through multiple interconnected yet disparate characters. Indeed, the vast majority of the screenplay’s scene headings state that each action occurs “that moment” (or very occasionally “moments later”)—creating a sense of simultaneity that is an assumed actuality in metropolises such as Los Angeles yet rarely presented on-screen with such defined and concise linkages. Magnolia encourages the spectator to align herself with the characters and react to the film’s deeply affective qualities through the employment of what David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, describe as “an excessively obvious cinema”38—i.e., narrative formed by three-act structures with action following cause and effect linkages that play out in unified, linear, and continuous space and time and are presented through the strictures of continuity editing. And yet, in contention with these formal conventions, at times Magnolia exposes its formal construction by highlighting the appurtenances of absurd narrative and scriptive elements that function both to structure the film and to amplify its reflexive qualities. Anderson’s Magnolia in part employs cinematic realism, while at other times effaces the realist illusion through open acknowledgment of the world’s constructed nature. Robert Stam writes: The most conventional definitions of realism make claims about verisimilitude, the putative adequation of a fiction to the brute facticity of the world. These definitions assume that realism is not only possible (and empirically verifiable) but also desirable … Another psychoanalytically inclined definition of realism involves spectatorial belief; a realism of subjective response, rooted less in a mimetic accuracy than in spectatorial credence. A purely formalist definition of realism, finally, emphasizes the conventional nature of all fictional codes, seeing realism simply as a constellation of stylistic devices, a set of conventions that at a given moment in the history of an art, manages, through the fine-tuning of illusionistic technique, to crystallize a strong feeling of authenticity.39 Magnolia’s film world—a cinematic representation of a night in Los Angeles— could be seen to conform to the “realist effect” present in mainstream Hollywood cinema. The events presented are identifiable character plights portrayed by known actors. These plights center on universal themes of familial

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breakdown, distrust, death, and the (im)possibility of redemption. Within Magnolia’s incorporation of the realism effect, the condensed time frame of the fabula functions such that coincidence, chance, and fate are taken as thematic preoccupations rather than elements of narrative construction. Yet the constructed on-screen world of Magnolia does not conform to what John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel describe as mainstream film spectatorship. Rhodes and Gorfinkel write: When we watch a film, its world and its images of a world become our own: we are impinged on, pressed on and by places that consume—however temporarily—our attention and push other places out of our minds. We do not lose the other places to which we belong and that belong to us, but we do forget them, however briefly.40 Where the intrusion of the written form through intertitles and use of the prologue and epilogue as framing devices overtly emphasize the artifice and textuality of the film, Anderson’s deployment of self-reflexive cinematic allusions and pop-culture references work to both locate the film’s diegesis as a recognizable and relatable place and simultaneously remove it from any completely comprehensible and immersive reality. Throughout Magnolia, footage from existing television programs Entertainment Tonight (1981–), Cops (1989–), and Quiz Kids Challenge present a verisimilitude that is incongruous with other allusions—the stylistic quotation of Martin Scorsese’s tracking shots and focus on the problem of masculinity in father-child relationships, Robert Altman’s ensemble narratives, a literal rain of frogs, and the bizarre and arresting use of Aimee Mann’s music as a Greek chorus. This collision of allusions works against the formation of verisimilitude that is usually associated with mainstream American cinema, and instead encourages the spectator to recognize that the affective narrative unfolding is a construct. The overt artificiality of this eccentric world performs a dramatic function that distances the immediacy of the affective film experience. The tension between narrative immersion and reflexive distanciation is established from the outset of Magnolia. The film begins with a prologue that details three separate cases of bizarre deaths through a voiceover narration. The first is an account of the murder of Sir Edmund William Godfrey in 1911 by three men whose surnames Green, Berry, and Hill combine to form the name of Godfrey’s hometown, Greenberry Hill in London. The second is the accidental death of a scuba diver named Delmer Darian in 1983, who died after he was scooped up from a lake during an aerial firefighting mission (with the subsequent suicide of Craig Hansen, the troubled pilot of the water bombing plane). The third is the unsuccessful suicide turned successful homicide of

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Sydney Barringer in Los Angeles in 1958, who would have survived jumping off a building had he not been shot by his mother as he passed her window on the sixth floor. Following these bizarre stories of coincidence the voiceover states: … in the humble opinion of this narrator this is not just “Something That Happened.” This cannot be “One of those things … ” This, please, cannot be that. And for what I would like to say, I can’t. This Was Not Just A Matter Of Chance. Taken at face value, Magnolia presents a fairly conventional narrative structure from which the viewer is seemingly able to determine an intelligible story that takes place within a particular time and location. The film centers on an ensemble plot spatiotemporally determined by simultaneous events occurring during one night. The nine central characters are loosely connected to one another. In this context, the voiceover prologue could be assumed to function in a fairly conventional manner as an introductory exposition to orient the spectator in what may otherwise be a confusing storyworld,41 as in the case of films like Sunset Boulevard or Casablanca. However, on second glance, this opening narration is more telling than that. The self-identified narrator’s pleas for “this not to be that” (Not Just A Matter Of Chance) are, of course, answered within his calm, measured delivery. This is not that; the events cited did not occur. The newsreel appearance of the events depicting the Edmund Berry Godfrey murder, the naming of the Reno Gazette in the publication of the Delmer Darion/Craig Hansen case in June, 1983 (alongside the men’s detailed personal histories), and the contextualization of the suicide/ murder of “Sydney Barringer” as an account relayed by Dr. Donald Harper (the president of the American Association of Forensic Science at the 1961 awards dinner) encourage the viewer to engage, as the narrator suggests, in the belief that “these strange things happen all the time.” However, as none of these reported “facts” occurred in the manner depicted, the fictionalization and subversion of real-world referents into a cinematic prologue figures as the establishment of Anderson’s formal world—an artificial assemblage—in which notions of simultaneity, chance, plausibility, and actuality are intertwined with practices of deliberate temporal contrivance and narrative manipulation for both thematic effect and narrative construction. Magnolia foregrounds its spatiotemporal construction in relation to narrative structure and characterization in order to momentarily disrupt the affective nature of the drama that is otherwise presented in accordance with mainstream cinema conventions. As Jill Nelmes notes, mainstream cinema establishes a contract of verisimilitude between the audience and film text through narrative immersion and affective characterization. The organization

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and design of narrative elements (such as dialogue and plot) heighten the appearance of cinematic realism as they guide the audience’s comprehension of film story. Cinematic realism, in mainstream cinema, is an artificial construct that film audiences have, over time, learned to read as conventional representations of “lifelike” worlds on screen.42 Anderson’s creation of an intricate convergence of internal narrative and formal cinematic spaces climaxes in a montage sequence in which the film’s nine interrelated yet narratively and physically isolated, protagonists sing Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up” from various states of consciousness and disparate locations throughout the city. The opening piano chords begin softly as Phil Parma (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a palliative care nurse, prepares to euthanize the terminally ill patriarch, Earl Partridge. Anderson then systematically cuts between the nine ensemble characters, establishing a linkage between their plights through Mann’s lyrics and the affective tenor of the melancholic music. This linkage is not only created through the mechanisms of conventional narrative montage, but rather interacts with the internal cinematic space and temporality of the narrative world, and the viewer’s position. Despite Anderson’s careful indications that the events of Magnolia are occurring concurrently within Los Angeles, until this moment in the film there is no suggestion that the characters are aware of one another’s existence (although their personal histories intertwine). The chorus problematizes the previously assumed naturalism in regard to cinematic space, as the characters appear to react to each other within the film’s diegetic world and beyond that world’s construction in the actor’s performed roles. In this moment, it becomes clear that unlike other films which stress “the interconnectedness of places within the city via networks of transportation, communication, circulation and exchange,”43 such as Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927), or Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991), Magnolia does not present Los Angeles as a protagonist itself, but a collection of constructed sites and scenes. Rather than being connected by an organic, living city which forces characters to interact with one another, these disparate characters are connected only by Anderson’s placing them within the frame. Magnolia’s Los Angeles is a spatiotemporal location that is constructed around character connections, rather than a city that contains and perpetuates connections by virtue of its urban networks. During this sequence, Mann’s music simultaneously functions both diegetically and extra-diegetically. The relationship between the diegetic and extra-diegetic sound creates a complex conversion of internal narrative space and formal cinematic space. Although the formation of a chorus of nine disconnected, damaged protagonists in their isolated states (and from various

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states of consciousness), in response to one another as well as to Mann’s song, is impossible, Magnolia’s “Wise-Up” scene does not break with Heath’s notion of continuity. Rather, what is confronting about this sequence is its over-fulfillment of these criteria. As Bordwell notes, rather than rejecting the continuity techniques of conventional cinema in order to depict incoherent or fragmentary narratives, many contemporary films employ an intensification of continuity techniques.44 Magnolia in part signals its film world’s artifice by fulfilling continuity expectations to excess. The contrivance of a chain of action between these spatially isolated characters is created by cutting between what would normally function as eye-line matches. Each character is seen, alone, singing a line from the song that seemingly speaks for their personal (and collective) situation. As the individual lines of the lyrics sung by each character follow on from one another (rather than accumulate or build to an actual chorus), they are framed as they are written—as though they could be in dialogue with one another. The visual and lyrical matches spill over a naturalistic diegesis and the sequence serves as an aberration that exists, like Mann’s music, neither wholly in or out of frame. Gorfinkel describes the deeply affecting nature of Mann’s “Wise Up” in Magnolia as a “sing-along effect” that: Invites the audience towards a measure of self-reflexivity but also back into a mode of affective absorption, almost as a function of their incredulity … This performed synchronicity between characters paradoxically threatens to disrupt narrative cohesion and continuity, as the overarching melodramatic realism of the film is suddenly made “implausible.”45 In the tradition of the Greek chorus, Mann’s lyrics are used to reveal and comment on the problems and themes of the film—the unresolved isolation and unspoken guilt experienced by the characters, and their yearning for redemption and reconciliation. This moment encourages the viewer to recognize her relationship to popular cultural memory and film construction through its noted “implausibility.” The contrivance of this sequence promotes a reevaluation of the accepted conventions of cause and effect, and continuity, in mainstream cinema. However, as Gorfinkel suggests, this contrived moment of unification is simultaneously affecting and cathartic. The affective quality of Magnolia is always intertwined with reflexivity and artifice in order to demonstrate to the audience the construction of the film’s world and, within it, the narrative and characters. The reflexivity of the narration in Magnolia is apparent at a number of instances. The film’s strongest moment of visual absurdity within its predominantly naturalistic mise-en-scène comes at its climax—a literal rain

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of frogs, which—while serving the film’s preoccupation with change and implausible events noted through the film’s references to the anomalous phenomenologist Charles Hay Fort—undoubtedly serves as a reference to the Plagues of Egypt in the book of Exodus. Exodus 8:2 reads: “But if you refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite all your territory with frogs.” The biblical allusion speaks to the characters’ inabilities to excise their emotional and interpersonal paralysis. The rain of frogs occurs shortly after the deeply affective “Wise Up” sequence when each character experiences their deepest moment of despair. Phil Parma has aided the euthanasia of Earl. Earl’s adulterous wife, Linda (Julianne Moore), has attempted to commit suicide. Claudia has denied herself the chance of genuine connection with Jim after he has revealed his embarrassment at his inadequacies as a policeman. Quiz kid Donnie (William H. Macy) embarks on a larcenous act against his ex-employer in a bid for financial gain that he hopes will result in a romantic connection. And Jimmy Gator prepares to shoot himself for his sins against Claudia.

FIGURE 5.6 Magnolia P.T. Anderson, 1999. The narrative form of Magnolia draws clear links to Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), which similarly focuses on a collection of intersecting stories set in Los Angeles over a condensed period of time. Like Magnolia’s rain of frogs, Short Cuts features a catastrophic “act of nature” at its climax; an earthquake. However, Short Cuts is more judgmental and misanthropic, with its ensemble structure highlighting bad interpersonal connections, whereas Magnolia empathetically depicts fraught attempts to rectify lost and missed interpersonal connections. Within this framework, as Short Cuts’ earthquake coincides with a double murder, the “natural disaster” acts as a biblical condemnation. Magnolia’s rain of frogs is a deluge that provides revelation for its characters. Most obviously, a falling frog knocks Jimmy Gator’s gun

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from his hand just as he reaches for the trigger. Another frog collides with Donnie as he scales a wall to commit his crime, knocking him to the ground. With Jim Kurring (John C. Reilly) witness to Donnie’s attempted felony, he is able to aid the injured Donnie and reinstate his own position as a competent and compassionate officer of the law. Rather than these revelations emerging from a passage of reconciliation between characters, or self-growth, the rain of frogs enables the characters in Magnolia to move beyond their individual states of alienation and devastation. Redemption here is not the result of human endeavor or compassion, rather it is contingent on external factors. This notion is solidified later in the film when, by an act of grace, Officer Kurring’s lost firearm—the manifestation of his personal failure—is returned to him from the sky on Magnolia Blvd, where frogs had previously fallen. Thus, this reference to the Plagues of Egypt is inverted—unlike Short Cuts’ earthquake, the plague of frogs is not presented as a punishment, but an overt deus-ex-machina in that it functions to enable redemption that can only be imagined on-screen within this particular narrative. The narrative importance of this intrusion into Magnolia’s film world is reflexively noted by Quiz kid Stanley (Jeremy Blackman) who, in lieu of a home, is framed studying in his school library. Looking up from his books, Stanley informs the audience, “This happens. This is something that actually happens.”

FIGURE 5.7 Magnolia P.T. Anderson, 1999. This line foregrounds Anderson’s narrative structure as one that is not simply thematically concerned with chance, purpose, and fate, but one that has these elements written into the diegesis in order to highlight the sincere concerns about death, family, obligation, guilt, and forgiveness. However, the hope for redemption and interpersonal connection that results from the “WiseUp” sequence and the rain of frogs is anchored in overt artifice, contrivance,

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and intertextuality. This narrative strategy and its effect on thematic concerns are perhaps most evident in a telephone conversation in which Phil Parma attempts to reconnect Frank Mackey with his estranged, dying father Earl. In that scene, Phil pleads with Frank’s employee to aid him in this undertaking: I know this all seems silly. I know that maybe I sound ridiculous, like maybe this is the scene of the movie where the guy is trying to get a hold of the long-lost son, but this is that scene. Y’know? I think they have those scenes in movies because they’re true, because they really happen. And you gotta believe me: This is really happening. I mean, I can give you my phone number and you can call me back if you wanna check with whoever you can check this with, but don’t leave me hanging on this—please—please. See: this is the scene of the movie where you help me out— If, as Jill Nelmes asserts, dialogue functions in the screenplay to primarily promote verisimilitude and secondarily as means of communicating narrative information,46 then articulations such as this serve as hyper-dialogue, presenting overtly cinematic characters, and highlighting the eccentric world that has been constructed to house the genuinely affective narrative presented. The address of this statement encourages the audience to engage in an interplay between cinematic imagining and plausible representation without emotional detachment. Phil’s acknowledgment of the scene’s position within the family drama tradition at once notes the film’s artifice, while simultaneously functioning as a deeply moving portrayal of human desperation. This scene may indeed be happening, the affective qualities of this film are sincere, however, it is “that scene”—it has been sculpted by the screenplay and is only taking place on-screen. Magnolia signals its denouement with an intertitle. This intertitle reads: “So Now Then.” The shot cuts back to the three separate events that commenced the film. We are again presented with impossible footage—the newsreel, the shot of the scuba diver in a tree, and the suicide while the narrator begins, “and there is the account of the hanging of three men; and the scuba-diver; and the suicide.” The narration is then layered over a montage sequence of Earl’s dead body being removed from his home after the deluge. There are stories of coincidence, and chance, and intersections in strange things told, and which is which, and who only knows. And we generally say, “well, if that was in a movie I wouldn’t believe it. Someone’s so-and-so met someone else’s so-and-so, and so on.” And, it is in the humble opinion of this narrator that strange things happen all the time. So it goes, and so it goes, and the book says “we may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.”

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The reflexive irony of this narration is clear—the events presented within the movie were, indeed, unbelievable yet their occurrences are, nonetheless, designed to be moving. The role of intertextuality and reflexivity in creating poignant moments is again highlighted here, through the apparent quotation of “the book.” Importantly, the book loosely quoted is not a spiritual or philosophical text, but The Natural History of Nonsense, by the prominent skeptic, Bergen Evans. Evan’s book is a wry and witty criticism of the human capacity to believe, and perpetuate, preposterous stories in the form of myth or legend. The ironic inclusion of this text signals that the film’s sincerity with regard to emotional alienation and human connection is present, while simultaneously acknowledging its position in the tradition of myth-making and storytelling—its fictivity. The revelatory rain of frogs has finished and the protagonists are shown in a state of emotional reconciliation, understanding, and recognition. Jim first consoles Quiz kid Donnie, then he escorts him to return his stolen goods. In the place of Jim’s diegetic dialogue with Donnie, we hear his voiceover narration “summing up” the film’s thematic concerns, through his personal reaffirmation of purpose in his role as a police officer. Anderson, however, again combines the diegetic and extra-diegetic planes of Magnolia by cutting back to Jim, who, having rectified Donnie’s situation, is shot sitting in his car reflecting on the narrative’s events in the manner of a Cops direct-to-camera monologue. Jim’s diegetic dialogue in this moment is no longer inaudible but combines with that which has been heard as a voiceover. He continues, his monologue lifted from action to a more theatrical mode, reflecting on the themes of the film’s narrative, “if you can forgive someone, well, that’s the tough part. What can we forgive? Tough part of the job. Tough part of walking down the street.” The convergence of diegetic and extra-diegetic planes in this final thematic summation signifies the affective function of the film world’s contrived spatiotemporal organization. These lines are spoken with sincere intent and carry a poignant, affective charge. Jim’s monologue concludes with slow, piquant guitar strumming of Aimee Mann’s “Save Me” as he resolves to connect with Claudia. In Claudia’s apartment Jim’s dialogue is heard faintly below Mann’s music, explaining his desire to be with her. The camera is fixed on Claudia, with Jim largely positioned out of frame. Claudia’s distraught face shifts to an expression of relief. This moment of romantic connection would appear to provide a cathartic, hopeful resolution to Anderson’s film. While the plights of the other ensemble characters are not displayed, hope is reinstated with the traditional connection of a romantic union. However, Anderson’s film does not “come to an end” in the manner of the classical Hollywood narrative. Rather, Melora Waters steps out of her role as Claudia as she faces the camera and smiles.

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FIGURE 5.8 Claudia’s reflexive smile. Magnolia P.T. Anderson, 1999.

Bordwell suggests that “at the level of extrinsic norms … the most coherent possible epilogue remains the standard.”47 The coherent epilogue is a brief sequence that depicts a clear end to the narrative in which significant story motifs are reinforced and protagonists are presented in a stable state that has been achieved through the resolution of narrative crises. Bordwell notes that the high degree of narrative neatness and unity in the epilogue format is a contrivance that promotes the impression of closure, despite the fact that some secondary or tertiary narrative elements may remain unresolved. Thus, “instead of ‘closure,’ it would be better to speak of a ‘closure effect,’ or even, if the strain of resolved and unresolved issues seems strong, of ‘pseudoclosure.’”48 Magnolia employs the epilogue format—in the denouement each narrative strain is revisited, and the characters are presented as though they have begun the process of resolving their individual crises. This conventional strategy provides the spectator with the impression of narrative, and emotional closure. However, American eccentricity enacts the “closure effect” to excess—resolutions are too neat, they are unified to the point of reflexive contrivance. The reflexivity of the films’ epilogues signal to the spectator that the eccentric worlds are insular cinematic constructions, and as such it is not that the narrative crises are resolved in the epilogue—but rather that the film is overtly indicating its conclusion. The insularity of these diegeses reminds the spectator of the disconnection between the eccentric world and the profilmic space, which in turn facilitates a mode of spectatorship which enables the emotional engagement with the characters and their narrative plights to be

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measured. Yet—this reflexive “closing off” in the narrative endings does not actually resolve thematic problems presented within the films’ stories—the sincere anxieties remain. The employment of the epilogue as a conventional narrative strategy gives the appearance of “closure” as the narrative arcs are neatly resolved. However, in the American eccentric mode it is the thematic arcs that remain unresolved—films are not open ended in such a way that the spectator is unsure what a character will do, but rather the existential concerns presented as themes are not, and cannot be, reconciled. Thus, in signaling the film worlds’ insularity, the safe, mediated access to the films’ thematic preoccupations is reinforced. These tactics seek to remind the spectator that the affecting forces of the narrative are contained. Bordwell’s “closure effect” therefore is used in the American eccentric mode to provide the illusion of an emotionally satisfying ending. However, these endings always are winking back at the spectator and reassure her of their knowing construction. Thus, films in the American eccentric mode do not just end; they resolutely conclude their stories and enclose their diegeses. Claudia’s smile is not a signal that “everything will be alright” in the form of a classical Hollywood resolution, but rather an acknowledgment that the classical Hollywood narrative structure has been enacted to ensure that everything appears alright; that despite the numerous unresolved issues (including Claudia’s anxieties), the film must conclude, and so performs its resolution reflexively. Just as Haynes signals the end of I’m Not There, Magnolia’s final frame reinforces the artificiality of the eccentric world, its pure cinematic inhabitants, and their relationship to cinema. This affirmation of the constructed nature of the film’s world—the box and its parameters—does not preclude the emotional attachment or investment that may have been elicited by its contents. It does, however, contain them.

Notes 1 Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young also note Dunst’s reflexive acknowledgment in this moment; however, they write that this gesture invites the spectators to view themselves as confidantes rather than signaling Marie Antoinette’s cinematic construction as a character. “Marie Antoinette: Fashion, Third-Wave Feminism, and Chick Culture,” Literature/Film Quarterly 38, no. 2 (2010): 98–116. 2 Heidi Brevik-Zender, “Let Them Wear Manolas: Fashion, Walter Benjamin, and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette,” Camera Obscura 26, no. 78 (2011): 13–14. 3 Michael Chabon, “The 1,265 Word Introduction,” The Wes Anderson Collection, ed. Matt Zoller Seitz (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2013), 22–23.

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4 Kim Wilkins, “Assembled Worlds: Intertextuality and Sincerity in the Films of Wes Anderson,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 60, no. 2 (2018): 154. 5 Ibid. 6 See Elena Gorfinkel’s analysis of place in The Royal Tenenbaums in her article “The Future of Anachronism: Todd Haynes and the Magnificent Andersons,” in Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, eds. Marijke De Valck and Malte Hagener (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 163–165. 7 Michael Chabon, “Wes Anderson’s Worlds,” The New York Review of Books (2013). 8 John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel, Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), viii–x. 9 Jill Nelmes, “Realism and Screenplay Dialogue,” in Analysing the Screenplay, eds. Jill Nelmes (London: Routledge, 2010), 217. 10 David Bordwell, “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,” Film Criticism 4, no. 1 (1979): 58. 11 James MacDowell, “Quirky: Buzzword or Sensibility?” American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond, eds. Geoff King, Claire Molloy, and Yannis Tzioumakis (New York: Routledge, 2013), 55, emphasis in original. 12 Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex’n’Drugs “n” Rock’n’Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 90. 13 Christian Keathley, “Trapped in the Affection Image: Hollywood’s PostTraumatic Cycle (1970–1976),” in Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, eds. Alexander Horwath, Noel King, and Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 299. 14 Thomas Schatz, “The New Hollywood,” in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, eds. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Collins (New York: Routledge, 1993), 14. 15 Keathley, “Trapped in the Affection Image,” 299. 16 By this I mean that the locations in the film relate to real places (rather than a literal relationship between image and location). While many of the sequences that are set at the University of Berkeley were filmed at the University of Southern California, the scene that features Sproul plaza was shot there. 17 Reni Celeste, “The Sound of Silence: Film Music and Lament.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22, no. 2 (2005): 122. 18 An early version of this section was published as “‘I Don’t Know Who I Am Most of the Time’: Constructed Identity in Todd Haynes’ ‘I’m Not There’,” Film Criticism 41, no. 1 (2017). 19 Bob Dylan, Tarantula (Hibbing: Wimp Press, 1970). 20 James Morrison, “Introduction,” in The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven Allows, ed. James Morrison (London: Wallflower, 2007), 2. 21 As well as Hunter S. Thompson’s “Seven simple rules for a life in hiding” from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

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22 Dylan did visit Woody in Greystone Hospital in the late 1950s; however, within the context of Haynes’s film, this simultaneously alludes to history, while positioning itself in relation to the representation of these histories on-film. 23 Early in the film a woman who has taken Woody in for a meal exclaims, “Tell you what I think. I think it’s 1959 and this boy’s singing songs about the boxcar? Hmm. What a boxcar gonna mean to him? Right here, we got race riots, folks with no food. Why ain’t he out there singing about that?” 24 John David Rhodes, “Allegory, Mise-En-Scene, Aids: Interpreting Safe,” in The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven Allows, eds. James Morrison (London: Wallflower, 2007), 70. 25 Stephen Scobie, Alias: Bob Dylan Revisited (University of Michigan: Red Deer Press, 2004), 49, 56. 26 Maximilian Le Cain, “Drifting out of the Territory: Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” Senses of Cinema 13, no. 4 (2001). 27 Scobie, Alias, 50. 28 Gorfinkel, “The Future of Anachronism,” 156. 29 Le Cain, “Drifting out of the Territory.” 30 Rob White, Todd Haynes: Contemporary Film Directors, ed. James Naremore (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 2. White here is describing Haynes’s Far from Heaven, however, the statement is equally true of I’m Not There. 31 This title is taken from Dylan’s 1981 release Every Grain of Sand. 32 I use Bill Nichols’s terms here in order to differentiate between the two types of documentary quoted by Haynes. 33 White, Todd Haynes, 94. 34 Rhodes and Gorfinkel, Taking Place, ix. 35 An early version of this section was published as “‘This, Please, Cannot Be That’: The Constructed World of P.T. Anderson’s ‘Magnolia’,” Sydney Studies in English 42 (2016): 59–85. 36 Colin McArthur, “Chinese Boxes and Russian Dolls: Tracking the Elusive Cinematic City,” in The Cinematic City, ed. David Clarke (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 34. 37 I borrow this term from Steven Cohan, and use it as he described: “movies about movie-making” in his conference paper “Another Hollywood Picture?: A Star Is Born (1937) and the Generic Continuity of the Backstudio Film” presented at Society of Cinema and Media Studies, Chicago, 2013. 38 David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 39 Robert Stam, “The Question of Realism,” in Film Theory: An Anthology, eds. Robert Stam and Toby Miller (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 244. 40 Rhodes and Gorfinkel, Taking Place, xxi.

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41 Steven Price, “Character in the Screenplay Text,” in Analysing the Screenplay, ed. Jill Nelmes (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2010), 204. 42 Nelmes, “Realism and Screenplay Dialogue,” 217. 43 Nezar AlSayyad, Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real (New York: Routledge, 2006), 39. 44 David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 120. 45 Gorfinkel, “The Future of Anachronism,” 162. 46 Nelmes, “Realism and Screenplay Dialogue,” 217. 47 David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 159. 48 Ibid.

Conclusion: Beyond Eccentricity

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t the outset of this book I suggested that American eccentricity should be considered as a cinematic mode within the broader post-ironic turn (in literature, cinema, and other forms of popular culture) associated with the New Sincerity, in which irony and sincerity are enmeshed and entangled. Specifically, American eccentricity enlists irony with sincerity as a means of articulating and mediating existential anxiety. The dual articulation of sincerity and irony executes an overall tone in which “kidding” and “seriousness” are intertwined—as in Francis’s justification for his recreational use of potent prescription medication “well … I almost died” in The Darjeeling Limited. This utterance is at once an overblown ironic qualification and a sincere confession of suicidal depression. It aims to elicit amusement and concern—to distance the sincerity of suicide through irony. This self-defensive use of irony may be seen as a form of discursive subterfuge. As Christy Wampole suggests, the shield from criticism that contemporary ironic expression affords the ironist (even when incorporating sincerity) is the ability to “hide in public.”1 However, over the past decade, American pop-cultural discourse appears to be moving away from this specific use of ironic distancing toward an ethos of sincerity. As Jonathan D. Fitzgerald writes: Today, vulnerability shows up in pop music where bravado and posturing once ruled—see artists across every genre, from Conor Oberst to Lady Gaga to Frank Ocean. Television sitcoms and “bromance” movies depict authentic characters determined to live good lives. And respected literary authors like Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, and Michael Chabon write sincere, popular books with a strong sense of morality. All across the pop culture spectrum, the emphasis on sincerity and authenticity that has arisen has made it un-ironically cool to care about

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spirituality, family, neighbors, the environment, and the country …. A recent Knights of Columbus-Marist Poll survey found that among Millennials, six out of 10 prioritized being close to God and having a good family life above anything else. For those in Generation X, family was still important, but the second priority was not spirituality—it was making a lot of money. Clearly, a change has been underway.2 Indeed, the style of ironic articulation that marks American eccentric cinema appears to be dwindling in popularity. It is notable that the majority of the American eccentric films discussed in this book were released between 1997 and 2010, and of the filmmakers discussed at length, only Wes Anderson and Charlie Kaufman have continued to create films that employ both the mode’s formal and stylistic elements, as well as its existential focus. As few other filmmakers have adopted this mode of filmmaking, the release of American eccentric films has become increasingly sporadic. This is not to suggest that irony has been removed from either the mainstream or indie cinematic lexicon. Hollywood’s current cycle of transmedia storytelling, franchise films, remakes, and reboots rely on intertextual practices, with many (such as those in The Avengers franchise) employing reflexive and ironic tactics for comedic purposes. Indie filmmakers, whose work share in some of the stylistic tendencies associated with American eccentricity, such as Noah Baumbach, Lena Dunham, Mike Mills, and Alex Ross Perry continue to create films that take irony as their primary mode of expression. However, these films deploy irony as a primarily verbal device—a mode of expression for “hip” privileged (mostly white) characters as a marker of intelligence and “quirkiness”— rather than as a formal strategy as it is in American eccentric cinema. In the American eccentric mode, irony is not a hip affectation. Rather, I’ve argued, irony is employed as a narrative, formal, and aesthetic strategy to mediate negative emotions associated with existential concerns that are “too big,” in Michael Chabon’s terms, to be approached directly. I have identified four key textual characteristics that recur across American eccentric films: transgressions, subversions, and ironic play with genre; the use of hyper-dialogue as a dramatic device that functions to mediate sincere underlying thematic concerns for the viewer through ironic, reflexive speech; the shift toward overtly cinematic characterization; and the formulation of eccentric film worlds. Mediation, in the American eccentric mode, is in dialogue with Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt in that the mode employs reflexive postmodern techniques that signal the confinements and construction of the film’s diegesis. Reflexive, meta-cinematic moments and techniques in the American eccentric mode are deployed to remind the viewer that what they are watching is not real while the films encourage emotional connections with

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their narrative elements overall. The intercessions of these reflexive and ironic tactics create a space for the spectator in which it is safe to engage with the thematic content of the film, precisely because it promotes awareness during its narrative that the film is fictional and thus will end. The existential anxiety presented within each film is depicted as sincere, but manageable, because it is contained. I have made the case that there is a connection between American eccentricity and the New Hollywood based on the shared thematic preoccupation of existential anxiety. Yet, while both American eccentric and New Hollywood films center on a yearning for human connection, American eccentric films portray the genuine hope for human connection from a position where they predict and anticipate failure of any attempt to overcome these issues. The American eccentric mode can therefore be seen as a reimagining of Thomas Elsaesser’s pathos of failure.3 American eccentricity embodies filmic representation beyond the pathos of failure: the pursuit of existential journeys with genuine desire for unattainable resolution despite the awareness of their inevitable failure. While the New Hollywood presented existentialist concerns as cultural manifestations through actual events and reactions to real-life issues, American eccentricity presents anxiety as though it is not bound to external sources. Where the crisis of self in the New Hollywood was framed as emerging in relation to contemporary events, in the American eccentric mode, this crisis is framed as though it simply is. As such, these films create the impression of ahistoricity (in line with Jameson’s notion of postmodernism) through their use of intertextuality and pastiche. However, as I have argued, the ahistoricity present in American eccentric films is only a felt perception emergent from, and consonant with, a neoliberal context. As the neoliberal citizen is required to be self-regulating, self-improving, and ultimately entrepreneurial, articulating existential anxiety is to admit personal failure. Thus, eccentric characters who experience these anxieties perceive themselves as the detritus of American neoliberal individualism. The futility of their existential quests is bound to the presentation of anxiety as unwanted, illegitimate emotional debris for the neoliberal citizen. The perceived illegitimacy and personal failure associated with existential anxiety are conducive to reflexive articulation. In concert with Sianne Ngai’s formulation of anxiety as an ugly feeling, the deployment of irony as a distancing strategy that permits mediated access to sincere concern is at the core of the American eccentric mode. However, if these reactions are consonant with experiencing existential anxiety in a neoliberal context it stands to reason that iterations of American eccentricity would manifest across other arenas of popular culture.

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Ripples of eccentricity While the American eccentric mode is characterized by fundamentally cinematic textual elements, the deployment of ironic and reflexive strategies to mediate existential anxieties permeates other arenas of popular culture, such as music and television. That these postmodern elements are used to express sincere thematic concerns in various intensities and configurations demonstrates that the formal strategies I associate with American eccentricity are observable in a variety of cultural artifacts in neoliberal America. For instance, Grimes’s (Claire Boucher) 2015 album Art Angels often combines aural pastiche and quotation with buoyant synth-pop melodies and juxtaposes these elements with anxious or earnest lyrics. On that album, the track “California” combines “‘90s pop guitar strumming, some sudden new-jack-swing drum slams, the snappy [Rihanna] ‘Pon de Replay’ beat, and Boucher’s vocals, influenced by the Joni Mitchell song of the same title”4 while the lyrics emphasize the commodification of emotional pain in contemporary pop culture, and a refrain that communicates intense and suffocating anxiety through the evocative image of drowning due to rising sea levels. Where Grimes’s “California” parallels the thematic concerns and their articulation through intertextual tactics that pervade American eccentricity, the specifically idiosyncratic form of individualized existential crisis marks the mode’s politics as a symptom of, and response to, a specific experience of neoliberal America. This politics, as well as the formal and aesthetic markers of American eccentricity, is clearly observable in HBO’s television series Bored to Death (2009–2011). In Bored to Death, Jason Schwartzman plays Jonathan Ames (named after the show’s creator), an out-of-work novelist who, in a moment of personal and creative crisis, is inspired by Raymond Chandler’s work to begin a career moonlighting as an unlicensed private detective. Jonathan costumes himself after the film noir incarnations of hardboiled detectives like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade as portrayed by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946) or The Maltese Falcon (1941). Those hardboiled, or noir, detectives were existential figures whose hardened cynicism and stoic resignation embodied American postwar malaise, a sensibility centered on a disappointment and disillusionment with what these authors saw as an increasingly criminalized American society. Schwartzman’s Jonathan, on the other hand, is an ironic imitation of them. Where Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe are Oedipal detectives who, in the process of uncovering truth, in any given case inevitably discover their own implication in the state of affairs, Jonathan’s detective work is used as a means of distancing his responsibilities and, as the cases he investigates are invariably absurd, forgetting his own anxieties.5 Thus,

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as in American eccentric cinema, genre is partly employed ironically in Bored to Death as a method of mediation for existential issues to do with Jonathan’s inability to come to terms with his responsibility for the breakdown of a longterm relationship, failure as a novelist, and inability to function maturely in line with the expectations of mainstream society. Reflecting the gendered politics of American eccentric cinema, Bored to Death mediates its male characters’ anxieties through a comedic tone generated by reflexive intertextuality and narrative absurdities. Singer Lana Del Rey similarly employs intertextuality, irony, and pastiche to exhibit negative experience across her oeuvre, however to different effect. Del Rey employs these tactics to portray an overtly sexualized image of femininity in parallel with themes of death, loss, and carnal desire as a response to the neoliberal American experience. Lana Del Rey’s lyrics illustrate a hedonistic response to mortality while her relatively monotonous vocal style presents a sense of disengagement or boredom, a blasé resignation to the futility of meaningful life in contemporary American society. As Lynn Stuart Paramore writes, Del Rey’s ultimate message appears to be that: 21st-century America is a rotting corpse, deadlocked culturally, economically, and politically. Since there’s nothing we can do about it, let’s enjoy ourselves as the body-politic disintegrates, perhaps by savoring some toothsome bites of the past: candy-colored Super 8 films, juicy jazz tunes and clips of sultry screen sirens. The future is a retrospective.6 Del Rey’s retro-glam image—in live performance, interview, and her music videos—is “engulfed in an iconography saturated with Americana, wellworn tokens of nostalgia that have come to symbolise the past greatness of the United States.”7 However, in Del Rey’s work this reference to a “past” great America is never stable. Like the ambiguity evoked by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign “Make America Great Again” and George Hansen’s claims that America used to be a “helluva good country” in Easy Rider, Del Rey’s aesthetic alludes to a consciously non-specific imagined “great” past in the nation’s history rather than a defined era or moment.8 While the lack of a clear reference point of the past moment of America’s “greatness” is shared by Del Rey, Easy Rider, and Trump, the ambiguity of these nostalgic evocations perform different critical functions. For Trump, “Make America Great Again” is a sincere call to political action to end the ‘American carnage’9 that had been permitted by previous trade, immigration, taxation, and foreign policies. In contrast to Trump’s call for a return to a non-specific nostalgic moment of past national greatness as a means of forging an optimistic path for America’s future, George Hansen’s and Del Rey’s nostalgia is fused with

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irony, and as such functions as an admission of failure. In Del Rey’s work, as in Easy Rider, the very notion of a past American greatness is revealed as a fiction through irony. For instance, the music video for “Born to Die” contrasts two versions of the singer—one a glamorous queen seated on a throne in the opulent Palace of Fontainebleau flanked by two tigers, the other a young American woman in a dangerous and passionate love affair, whose body will be bloodied and lifeless by the clip’s conclusion. The nostalgic iconography associated with each version of Del Rey gestures toward a past America. However, the collision of these images suggests that this past America is an illusion; this pure America “never existed, [Lana Del Rey’s images of America] tend to be fraught with iconoclastic energies that subtly question them or ironically contradict their validity. Icons of Hollywood greatness may be yearned for and cherished but [for Del Rey] they are also compromised and rendered hollow.”10 Thus, Lana Del Rey’s use of pastiche actively reflects postmodernism’s waning of affect—her persona and music videos are ultimately simulacra. As Ayesha Siddiqi aptly surmises, For those who spent their teen years typing in scare quotes, Lana lets us negotiate American identity with less cognitive dissonance by serving patriotic cliché as kitsch … Affectless without irony, full of pop-symbolism that refuses to signify, perhaps an American culture drained of all moral qualities or ethical commitments is worth holding onto. A finally palatable Americana: full of no more sentiment than an Instagram grid.11 Lana Del Rey’s thematic preoccupation with death and existentialism expressed through the imagery of a nostalgic fabricated past correlates with American eccentricity’s concerns and textual tactics. However, her simulacral approach does not mobilize irony to depict these sincere issues as an “ugly feeling.” Instead, her resigned tone reflects a form of nihilism muted through postmodern pastiche. Del Rey’s fusion of glamor and kitsch in her simulacral image of the overtly sexualized American female is always connected to the inevitability of gendered violence and, ultimately, death. Thus, for Del Rey, hedonism and apathy are the only response to the disappointments of the female experience in the neoliberal context; there is no alternative vision of a great—past, present, or future—America. By contrast, the 1990s television program Northern Exposure (1990–1995) presents a hopeful reimagining of American identity by literalizing an alternate American past. Indeed, Northern Exposure’s thematic concerns and deployment of intertexuality and quirky characterization mark it as a potential precursor to American eccentric cinema. In that program a young physician, Joel Fleischman, transfers to Cicely—a remote Alaskan town populated by quirky characters—to fulfill the requirements of a state-funded college scholarship.

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Cicely is a frontier town located in the farthest reaches of the nation. This setting evokes the ideological underpinnings of the Western, and as such discloses Northern Exposure’s concerns with American national identity. Importantly, though, Cicely was not founded by the masculine imperatives that underpin the Western genre, but by two gay women seeking sexual freedom in the 1890s … [As such] the discourse of the show has to do not only with the town’s foundation myth as a site of social and sexual freedom, but with the narrative’s negotiation of a variety of issues pertaining to our own foundation myths, myths currently undergoing revision in a climate of multiculturalism and accompanying changes in the way we see and (re)write history(s).12 Thus, Joel’s new home serves as a negotiation of his own identity in relation to a reimagined national context. The focus on identity as an existential concern is literally aired in the series by Chris, an ex-criminal-turned local radio host, who uses his airtime to interrogate the meaning of life and human nature, reading from sources as varied as “Native American writers, Jung, Thoreau, Proust, Albert Einstein, Maurice Sendak, and Chicken Little.”13 Northern Exposure’s negotiation of existentialism and questions of personal and national identity are peppered with allusions to film, television shows (notably, its contemporary Twin Peaks [1990–1991]), and ironic speech, which combined with its offbeat characterization parallels American eccentricity’s textual attributes. However, the use of irony and allusion is not a distancing mechanism for anxiety as an “ugly feeling,” as it is in American eccentric cinema where idiosyncratic characters experience existential anxiety such that it prevents interpersonal connection. Instead, the citizens of Cicely are presented as a collective of quirky individuals navigating an alternate version of America together.14 It is this conceptualization of America as a collective, and imagined community formed of distinct and diverse identities, that is at stake in the “Make America Great Again” campaign. Trump’s slogan uses the “precepts and narratives of American exceptionalism”15 to elevate his vision for America as a positive intervention to a perceived national crisis established by previous leaders. His pledge to “protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs” is not intended as an admission of inherent weakness, but a promise that “protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.”16 Trump’s Inauguration address affirmed the emphasis on strength and prosperity by concluding with his famous slogan: “We Will Make America Strong Again. We Will Make America Wealthy Again. We Will Make America Proud Again. We Will Make America Safe Again. And,

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Yes, Together, We Will Make America Great Again.”17 As Jeffrey C. Isaac notes, “Trump’s rhetoric invites us to imagine a time when America was strong, true, unified and perhaps even homogenous.”18 While the slogan itself does not explicitly make a case for a homogenous America, many of Trump’s racially based remarks—calls to ban Muslim migration, the criminality of Mexican immigrants, and alleged derision of an immigration plan for allowing people from “shithole countries” in Africa and the Caribbean to enter the United States rather than those from wealthy European nations19—strongly indicate the demographic make-up of his imagined “great” nation. The desire to return to a unified, homogenous, “great” past America undoubtedly privileges the nostalgic memory of those who have not only avoided a history of being subjected to ongoing institutionalized inequality, but have—perhaps, for some, unwittingly—been its beneficiaries. Thus, perhaps the most troubling aspect of Trump’s slogan is not the non-specificity of his nostalgic vision, but rather its sincerity. Easy Rider ironically underscores George Hansen’s statement that America used to be a “helluva good country” with the unanswered question of “when?,” Del Rey’s nihilism overtly denies the actuality of past greatness, and Northern Exposure offers hope through the fictionalization of a more inclusive national narrative—by contrast, “Make America Great Again” promotes a “great” America as a nation based on exclusion. The question becomes not when America was great, but for whom America should be great.20 While the waning popularity of American eccentricity cannot be directly linked to the Trump campaign, the socio-political trajectory that facilitated his presidency is relevant to its decreased prevalence within indie cinema, particularly in terms of the mode’s politics. If the ironic address present in the American eccentric mode is read as a self-conscious response to the perceived illegitimacy of existential anxiety in a neoliberal moment, perhaps the waning of this mode of cinema is a heightened recognition that the types of privileged characters these films present as experiencing anxiety are precisely those for whom the American contemporary experience may potentially be great. Thus, American eccentric cinema sits in contrast with the many different identities for whom the absurdities of lived experience isn’t an ironic tool, or means, for deflecting unwanted, generalized existential anxiety. I do not wish to suggest that irony and reflexivity are confined to expressing the “ugly feelings” of privileged characters, or that there is something inherent about this mode of address that connects it to the aesthetic associated with the white male indie auteurs outlined in Chapter 1. Many contemporary texts across different media employ these tactics to various ends. For instance, Jane the Virgin (2014–) uses reflexivity as a narrative strategy, Master of None (2015–) in its second season frequently incorporates allusions to Italian neorealist and French New Wave cinema, and Atlanta (2016–) fuses

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surrealism with naturalism and frequently fictionalizes real-world referents. However, where in American eccentric cinema existential anxiety manifests as a prohibition for interpersonal connections, Jane the Virgin’s reflexive telenovela format is employed to portray Latino culture and the complexity of Latina womanhood;21 Master of None’s formal play is often in service of inclusive representation as it seeks to portray diverse experiences of American life—including people with a disability, women, migrant, racially diverse, religious, LGTBIQ+ characters.22 In these texts, absurdity and irony are often used to portray the uneasiness and inconsistencies of lived experience within American society rather than employed to mediate access to unwelcome feeling.23 Atlanta utilizes its mix of “weird” and “seriousness” in tone and style in part for comedic effect, however, these elements are also employed to highlight complex racial, cultural, and socio-economic realities for African-American identities in contemporary America, often without providing narrative or thematic resolutions. Thus, while shows like Master of None and Atlanta undoubtedly portray American identity within a contemporary, neoliberal context, their focus is not on the individual’s inability to connect with others due to crippling existential anxiety, but rather a treatment of diverse American identities that is often overtly political. Similar tactics are evident in recent indie cinema, where irony is used to highlight social and political concerns, such as the ironic expression used by the precocious Lady Bird (Saorise Ronan) in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017) or the intertextuality and absurdity of Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). Get Out is specifically intertextual in its narrative and thematic concerns. The film combines references to Seconds, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Stepford Wives (1975), and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), among others, with subversions of racial stereotypes associated with the horror genre, and awkward comedic dialogue that notes the well-intentioned, misguided liberal elitism of white American intellectuals exhibited toward people of color.24 The irony and reflexivity of Get Out, however, is in no way used to contain the anxieties present. Rather, the film explicitly opens out questions of fetishization, systemic inequality, and the institutionalized mistreatment of African-American people, heightened at its moment of release against the backdrop of both the Black Lives Matter movement and the increased prominence of racist groups, such as the altright and white nationalist movements. Lady Bird, on the other hand, is aesthetically similar to the ironic, “off-beat” whimsy of films associated with the indie aesthetic of white auteurs in which the filmmaker, Greta Gerwig, has appeared as an actor. Lady Bird is a precocious, witty teenager who, like Rushmore’s Max Fischer, is an anomaly within an elite private school system. However, where Max’s unusual behavior is narratively attributed to his desire

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to remain within that system, Lady Bird resists the strictures of her Catholic high school. Her behavior reflects her perception that Sacramento is a cultural wasteland that she must escape. The similarity between Max and Lady Bird is not simply that they are both precocious teenagers attending elite schools, but that they also both come from lower-income households relative to their peers. Yet, where Max’s financial situation is thematically and narratively important for establishing his relationship with the wealthy Herman Blume, Lady Bird’s lower-income background is presented as a reality that necessarily limits her prospects in an education system divided by wealth and class. As a female-centered comingof-age film, Lady Bird may initially appear to recall Howard Hughes’s Molly Ringwald films; however, Lady Bird is not defined by her sexual encounters nor is she validated by men. Instead, Lady Bird focuses on the intricacies and complexities of female relationships. Although Lady Bird retains an aesthetic associated with white indie cinema, Gerwig diverges from the privileged male politics of that tradition by focusing on women and class. Get Out and Lady Bird are indie films that employ ironic and intertextual practices; however, they do so in a vastly different manner to the less overtly political and heavily stylized mode of “indie” associated with the white, male indie tradition, with which American eccentricity is largely identified. Their form of indie filmmaking uses irony and reflexivity, but not as an overall tactic of diversion or deflection— rather, these films open out discussions of identity and experience in the contemporary American milieu.

Outside the box I have suggested throughout this book that in the absence of the tangible, concrete political, and socio-cultural events onto which the anxieties present in the New Hollywood can be mapped, American eccentricity negotiates the blurred scenarios of unanchored existential anxiety in neoliberal America. The unapologetic self-conscious construction of American eccentric films responds to the contemporary position that despair, angst, grief and alienation are, as Chabon states, “at full scale, too big for us to take it in; [these feelings] literally cannot be comprehended.”25 As such, American eccentric films tell stories with sincere implications, but importantly they definitively conclude. Like a Cornell box, American eccentric films are enclosed. The film does not create the world, but a world to be opened, explored, and then shut. American eccentricity provides a means to access and play with the incomprehensible nature of existential anxiety; it also delivers the box in which to store it.

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However, as I have argued, the majority of American eccentric films that have received critical and scholarly attention feature predominantly white, heterosexual male protagonists whose eccentric aims are born of privileged existence. Perhaps the increasingly nebulous occurrence of American eccentric cinema is partly attributable to the mode’s depiction of free-floating existential anxiety as idiosyncratic individual experiences, rather than issues grounded in the tumultuous socio-political landscape of contemporary America. Could it be that in the current context, where American national identity and the American national project is again a site of contestation, the turn away from self-conscious irony used as a mediating device reflects a call for attention to the ongoing social, political, and cultural crises? Wampole hyperbolically writes that an ironic ethos lead[s] to a vacuity and vapidity of the individual and collective psyche. Historically, vacuums eventually have been filled by something—more often than not, a hazardous something. Fundamentalists are never ironists dictators are never ironists; people who move things in the political landscape, regardless of the sides they choose, are never ironists. Where can we find other examples of nonironic living? What does it look like? Nonironic models include very young children, elderly people, deeply religious people, people with severe mental or physical disabilities, people who have suffered, and those from economically or politically challenged places where seriousness is the governing state of mind. My friend Robert Pogue Harrison put it this way in a recent conversation: “Wherever the real imposes itself, it tends to dissipate the fogs of irony.”26 Although Wampole’s assertions are problematically essentialist, the proposition that “reality” has a dissipating effect on irony has significant ramifications for the increasingly intermittent employment of American eccentric cinema. Perhaps the immediacy of America’s contemporary socio-political tensions and sense of urgency to act on the perceived threat of terrorism, risk of nuclear war, and the impacts of climate change have displaced irony and reinstalled “reality” as a necessary cultural focus. If, as I have suggested, the racial, economic, and generational tensions, and increasingly fractured perspectives on the state and direction of American society that pervaded the social and political agendas provided the New Hollywood filmmakers with a set of characters, situations, and scenes that could act synecdochically to be read against the background of the nation as a whole, then perhaps the current troubling political and cultural divides that are present in contemporary American society will serve as an impetus

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to create cinema that reacts directly to the immediate national and cultural anxieties. But, what kind of indie cinema will America produce in an era that politically looks to entrench social and racial divides under the guise of rebuilding a past, imagined greatness, while its film industry belatedly reacts to its long-running history of gender inequality and sexual abuse through the uptake of the #MeToo movement and the subsequent establishment of #TimesUp? It should not be forgotten that Tarana Burke founded the #MeToo movement as an expression of solidarity and empathy for women of color, particularly from underprivileged environments, who had been subjected to sexual harassment and abuse. Its uptake in Hollywood led by white actors, such as Alyssa Milano, in response to the abuses perpetrated by Harvey Weinstein, among others, must be read in relation to Burke’s work.27 Although #MeToo is not a movement born from Hollywood’s inequitable power relations, its use to discuss the prevalence of sexual harassment, discrimination, and abuse has sparked debate within, and beyond, the American film industry. While Weinstein is far from the sole perpetrator of sexual misconduct and gender inequality within the American film industry, his arrest on rape charges signals an important moment for both Hollywood and the indiewood sector that his company, Miramax, was foundational in establishing through the 1990s and 2000s.28 Indeed, Weinstein was, in various capacities, involved in the production or distribution of many of the films discussed in this book. If the aesthetics and politics of indie cinema have, since the late 1980s, been dominated by white male “indie” auteurs then I hope the impacts of #MeToo and #TimesUp usurp this dominance. And, if the critical and popular acclaim of Atlanta, Master of None, Moonlight (2016), Get Out, Carol (2015), Lady Bird, and The Florida Project (2017) are indicative of a positive move toward more inclusive portrayals of American identity in indie cinema, perhaps new films will present a more diverse range of characters, situations, and scenes than are currently reflected in American popular culture. In this era of political and social division, American eccentricity of course remains a possible modality for exploring, and containing, existential anxiety—but perhaps now indie cinema is showing what is outside the box.

Notes 1 Christy Wampole, “How to Live without Irony,” The New York Times, November (2012). 2 Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, “Sincerity, Not Irony, Is Our Age’s Ethos,” The Atlantic, November (2012).

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3 Thomas Elsaesser, “The Pathos of Failure: American Films in the 1970s: Notes on the Unmotivated Hero,” in The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, eds. Alexander Horwath, Thomas Elsaesser, and Noel King (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 63. 4 Spencer Kornhaber, “The Rage of Grimes,” The Atlantic, November (2015). 5 These characteristics of the noir and hardboiled detective are courtesy of David Kelly. 6 Lynn Stuart Parramore, “Lana Del Rey: Why a Death-Obsessed Pop Siren Is Perfect for Late-Stage Capitalist America,” AlterNet, July (2014). 7 Arild Fetveit, “Death, Beauty, and Iconoclastic Nostalgia: Precarious Aesthetics and Lana Del Rey,” NECSUS, European Journal of Media Studies 4, no. 2 (2015): 200. 8 Jay Newton-Small, “When Was America Last Great? Here’s What Republican Delegates Said,” Time, July 21, 2016 (updated July 24, 2016). 9 Donald Trump, “Trump’s Full Inauguration Speech 2017,” The New York Times, January (2017). 10 Ibid., 201. 11 Ayesha Siddiqi, “Ms. America,” The New Inquiry, July (2014). 12 Betsy Williams, “North to the Future: Northern Exposure and Quality Television,” The Spectator, 13 (Summer 1993): 34. 13 Ibid., 33. 14 This sort of community-bound negotiation of existential issues is similarly evident in the Netflix program The Good Place (2016–); however, it is the perception of anomalistic instances of existential anxiety confined to discrete individuals that stifles interpersonal connection that pervades the American eccentric mode. 15 Jason A. Edwards, “Make America Great Again: Donald Trump and Redefining the U.S. Role in the World,” Communication Quarterly 66, no. 2 (2018): 176. 16 Trump, “Trump’s Full Inauguration Speech 2017.” 17 Liam Kennedy, “The Trump Era Has Begun—How Can We Make Sense of It?” The Conversation, January (2017). 18 Jeffrey C. Isaac, “Making America Great Again?” Perspectives on Politics 15, no. 3 (2017): 625. 19 Michael Finnegan and Mark Z. Barabak, “‘Shithole’ and Other Racist Things Trump Has Said—So Far,” LA Times, January (2018). 20 See, for instance, Mary E. Weems, “Make America Great Again?” Qualitative Inquiry 23, no. 2 (2017): 168–170. 21 Diana Martinez, “Jane the Virgin Proves Diversity Is More Than Skin Deep,” The Atlantic, October (2015). 22 In addition to episodes that navigate these diverse experiences through narrative, the episode “New York, I Love You” includes eight minutes of narrative without sound, which formally reflects the experience of a deaf character.

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23 Michel Martin, “Donald Glover Explores a Surreal Feel in ‘Atlanta,’” All Things Considered, Podcast audio (2016). 24 Jordan Peele, “Cover Story: Jordan Peele,” Produced By 13, no. 3 (2017): 52. 25 Michael Chabon, “Wes Anderson’s Worlds,” The New York Review of Books (2013). 26 Wampole, “How to Live without Irony.” 27 Abby Ohlheiser, “The Woman behind ‘Me Too’ Knew the Power of the Phrase When She Created It—10 Years Ago,” The Washington Post, October (2017). 28 Eliana Dockterman, “Harvey Weinstein’s Arrest Marks a Pivotal Turning Point for the #Metoo Movement,” Time, May (2018).

Filmography 8½ (1963) Dir. Federico Fellini, Italy: Cineriz. Adaptation (2002) Dir. Spike Jonze, USA: Columbia Pictures. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) Dir. Martin Scorsese, USA: Warner Bros. Alice’s Restaurant (1969) Dir. Arthur Penn, USA: United Artists. Anomalisa (2015) Dir. Charlie Kaufman, USA: Paramount Pictures. Armageddon (1998) Dir. Michael Bay, USA: Buena Vista Pictures Distribution. Atlanta (2016–) FX. Badlands (1973) Dir. Terrence Malick, USA: Warner Bros. Back to the Future Part III (1990) Dir. Robert Zemeckis, USA: Universal Pictures. Band of Outsiders (1964) Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France: Columbia Pictures. Barcelona (1994) Dir. Whit Stillman, USA: Fine Line Features. Beautiful Mind, A (2001) Dir. Ron Howard, USA: Universal Pictures. Being John Malkovich (1999) Dir. Spike Jonze, USA: USA Films. Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927) Dir. Walter Ruttmann, Weimar Republic: Fox Europa. Big Lebowski, The (1998) Dir. Joel Coen, USA: Gramercy Pictures. Big Sleep, The (1946) Dir. Howard Hawks, USA: Warner Bros. Billy Madison (1995) Dir. Tamra Davis, USA: Universal Pictures. Billy the Kid (1930) Dir. King Vidor, USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) Dir. Arthur Penn, USA: Warner Bros/Seven Arts. Boogie Nights (1997) Dir. P.T. Anderson, USA: New Line Cinema. Bored to Death (2009–2011) HBO. Bottle Rocket (1996) Dir. Wes Anderson, USA: Columbia Pictures. Boyz n the Hood (1991) Dir. John Singleton, USA: Columbia Pictures. Bring It On (2000) Dir. Peyton Reed, USA: Universal Pictures. Broken Flowers (2005) Dir. Jim Jarmusch, USA/France: Focus Films. Caddyshack (1980) Dir. Harold Ramis, USA: Warner Bros. Carnal Knowledge (1971) Dir. Mike Nichols, USA: AVCO Embassy Pictures. Carol (2015) Dir. Todd Haynes, USA/UK: StudioCanal/The Weinstein Company. Casablanca (1942) Dir. Michael Curtiz, USA: Warner Bros. Charulata (1964) Dir. Satyajit Ray, India: Edward Harrison. Citizen Kane (1941) Dir. Orson Welles, USA: RKO Radio Pictures. Clerks (1994) Dir. Kevin Smith, USA: Miramax Films. Clueless (1995) Dir. Amy Heckerling, USA: Paramount Pictures. Contempt (1963) Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France: Marceau-Cocinor. Cops (1989–) Fox and Spike. Crumb (1994) Dir. Terry Zwigoff, USA: Sony Pictures Classics. Dances with Wolves (1990) Dir. Kevin Costner, USA: Orion Pictures.

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Damsels in Distress (2011) Dir. Whit Stillman, USA: Sony Pictures Classics. Darjeeling Limited, The (2007) Dir. Wes Anderson, USA: Fox Searchlight Pictures. Dawson’s Creek (1998–2003), The WB. Decade under the Influence, A (2003) Dir. Ted Demme and Richard LaGravenese, USA: Independent Film Channel. Detour (1945) Dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, USA: Producers Releasing Corporation. Do the Right Thing (1989) Dir. Spike Lee, USA: Universal. Dont Look Back (1967) Dir. D.A. Pennebaker, USA: Docurama. Double Indemnity (1944) Dir. Billy Wilder, USA: Paramount Pictures. Drive (2011) Dir. Nicolas Winding Refn, USA: FilmDistrict. Drive, He Said (1971) Dir. Jack Nicholson, USA: Columbia Pictures. Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999),Dir. Michael Patrick Jann, USA: New Line Cinema. Easy Rider (1969) Dir. Dennis Hopper, USA: Columbia Pictures. Echo Park (1986) Dir. Robert Dornhelm, USA: Atlantic Releasing Corporation. Entertainment Tonight (1981–) Syndicated. Election (1999) Dir. Alexander Payne, USA: Paramount Pictures. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) Dir. Michel Gondry, USA: Focus Features. Face in the Crowd, A (1957) Dir. Elia Kazan, USA: Warner Bros. Far from Heaven (2002) Dir. Todd Haynes, USA: Focus Features. Field of Dreams (1989) Dir. Phil Alden Robinson, USA: Universal Pictures. Fight Club (1999) Dir. David Fincher, USA: 20th Century Fox. Five Easy Pieces (1970) Dir. Bob Rafelson, USA: Columbia Pictures. Flirting with Disaster (1996) Dir. David O. Russell, USA: Miramax Films. Florida Project, The (2017). Dir. Sean Baker, USA: A24. Footlight Parade (1933) Dir. Lloyd Bacon, USA: Warner Bros. French Connection, The (1971) Dir. William Friedkin, USA: 20th Century Fox. Gas Food Lodging (1992) Dir. Allison Anders, USA: Cineville. Get Out (2017) Dir. Jordan Peele, USA: Universal Pictures. Ghostbusters (1984) Dir. Ivan Reitman, USA: Columbia Pictures. Ghostbusters II (1989) Dir. Ivan Reitman, USA: Columbia Pictures. Gilmore Girls (2000–2007), The WB and The CW. Glory Daze (1995) Dir. Rich Wilkes, USA: Fusion Studios, Inc./Woodward Productions/Weiny Bro Productions. Good Place, The (2016–) NBC. Graduate, The (1967) Dir. Mike Nichols, USA: Embassy Pictures. Grand Budapest Hotel, The (2014) Dir. Wes Anderson, USA: Fox Searchlight Pictures. Grapes of Wrath, The (1940) Dir. John Ford, USA: 20th Century Fox. Great Dictator, The (1940) Dir. Charlie Chaplin, USA: United Artists. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) Dir. Stanley Kramer, USA: Columbia Pictures. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) Dir. John Sturges, USA: Paramount Pictures. Happiness (1998) Dir. Todd Solondz, USA: Good Machine Releasing. Happy Gilmore (1996) Dir. Dennis Dugan, USA: Universal Pictures. Harold and Maude (1971) Dir. Hal Ashby, USA: Paramount Pictures. Henry Fool (1997) Dir. Hal Hartley, USA: Sony Pictures Classics. High Noon (1952) Dir. Fred Zimmerman, USA: United Artists.

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197

Husbands (1970) Dir. John Cassavetes, USA: Columbia Pictures. I Heart Huckabees (2004) Dir. David O. Russell, USA: Fox Searchlight Pictures. I’m Not There (2007) Dir. Todd Haynes, USA: The Weinstein Company/Tobis Film. Inglourious Basterds (2009) Dir. Quentin Tarantino, USA: The Weinstein Company. Inherent Vice (2014) Dir. P. T. Anderson, USA: Warner Bros. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Dir. Phillip Kaufman, USA: United Artists. Jalsaghar (1958) Dir. Satyajit Ray, India: Contemporary Films/Edward Harrison. Jane the Virgin (2014–) The CW. Jesus Henry Christ (2012) Dir. Dennis Lee, USA: Entertainment One. Juno (2007) Dir. Jason Reitman, USA: Fox Searchlight Pictures. Kiss Me Deadly (1955) Dir. Robert Aldrich, USA: United Artists. Klute (1971) Dir. Alan J. Pakula, USA: Warner Bros. La Chinoise (1967) Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France: Athos Films. Lady Bird (2017) Dir. Greta Gerwig, USA: A24. Lady Eve, The (1941) Dir. Preston Sturges, USA: Paramount Pictures. Last Days of Disco, The (1998) Dir. Whit Stillman, USA: Gramercy Pictures. Last Picture Show, The (1971) Dir. Peter Bogdanovich, USA: Columbia Pictures. Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The (2004) Dir. Wes Anderson, USA: Buena Vista Pictures. M*A*S*H (1970) Dir. Robert Altman, USA: 20th Century Fox. Magnificent Ambersons, The (1942) Dir. Orson Welles, USA: RKO Radio Pictures. Magnolia (1999) P.T. Anderson, USA: New Line Cinema. Mala Noche (1986) Dir. Gus Van Sant, USA: Gus Van Sant (1988)/Janus. Maltese Falcon, The (1941) Dir. John Huston, USA: Warner Bros. Marie Antoinette (2006) Dir. Sofia Coppola, USA/France/Japan: Columbia Pictures. Masculin Féminin (1966) Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France: Columbia Films S.A. Master of None (2015–) Netflix. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) Dir. Robert Altman, USA: Warner Bros. Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) Dir. Miranda July, USA: IFC Films. Mean Streets (1973) Dir. Martin Scorsese, USA: Warner Bros. Meanwhile (2011) Dir. Hal Hartley, USA: Possible Films. Memento (2000) Dir. Christopher Nolan, USA: Newmarket. Metropolitan (1990) Dir. Whit Stillman, USA: New Line Cinema. Mi Vida Loca (1994) Dir. Allison Anders, USA: Sony Pictures Classics. Midnight Cowboy (1969) Dir. John Schlesinger, USA: United Artists. Moonlight (2016) Dir. Barry Jenkins, USA: A24. Moonrise Kingdom (2012) Dir. Wes Anderson, USA: Focus Films. My Darling Clementine (1946) Dir. John Ford, USA: 20th Century Fox. My Own Private Idaho (1991). Dir. Gus Van Sant, USA: Fine Line Pictures. National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) Dir. John Landis, USA: Universal Pictures. Nashville (1975) Dir. Robert Altman, USA: Paramount Pictures. Network (1976) Dir. Sidney Lumet, USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Night of the Living Dead (1968) Dir. George Romero, USA: The Walter Reade Organization. Nightmare Alley (1947) Dir. Edmund Goulding, USA: 20th Century Fox. No Direction Home (2005) Dir. Martin Scorsese, USA: Paramount Pictures.

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North by Northwest (1959) Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Northern Exposure (1990–1995) CBS. Notebook, The (2004) Dir. Nick Cassavetes, USA: New Line Cinema. Old School (2003) Dir. Todd Phillips, USA: DreamWorks Pictures. On the Waterfront (1954) Dir. Elia Kazan, USA: Columbia Pictures. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) Dir. Miloš Forman, USA: United Artists. Opposite of Sex, The (1998) Dir. Don Roos, USA: Sony Pictures Classics. Our Daily Bread (1934) Dir. King Vidor, USA: United Artists. Outlaw, The (1943) Dir. Howard Hughes, USA: United Artists. Panic in Needle Park, The (1971) Dir. Jerry Schatzberg, USA: 20th Century Fox. Paper Moon (1973) Dir. Peter Bogdanovich, USA: Paramount Pictures. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) Dir. Sam Peckinpah, USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Persona (1966) Dir. Ingmar Bergman, Sweden: AB Svensk Filmindustri. Pretty Woman (1990) Dir. Gary Marshall, USA: Buena Vista Pictures. Pulp Fiction (1994) Dir. Quentin Tarantino, USA: Miramax Films. Punch-Drunk Love (2002) Dir. P.T. Anderson, USA: Columbia Pictures. Quiz Kids Challenge (1990–) Syndicated. Raging Bull (1980) Dir. Martin Scorsese, USA: United Artists. Rebel without a Cause (1955) Dir. Nicholas Ray, USA: Warner Bros. Renaldo & Clara (1978) Dir. Bob Dylan, USA: Circuit Films. Reservoir Dogs (1992) Dir. Quentin Tarantino, USA: Miramax Films. River, The (1951) Dir. Jean Renoir, France/India/USA: United Artists. Rocky (1976) Dir. John G. Avildsen, USA: United Artists. Royal Tenenbaums, The (2001) Dir. Wes Anderson, USA: Buena Vista Pictures. Rushmore (1998) Dir. Wes Anderson, USA: Buena Vista Pictures. Safe Place, A (1971) Dir. Henry Jaglom, USA: Columbia Pictures. Saving Mr. Banks (2013) Dir. John Lee Hancock, USA: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Say Anything … (1989) Dir. Cameron Crowe, USA: 20th Century Fox. Scanner Darkly, A (2006) Dir. Richard Linklater, USA: Warner Independent Pictures. Scream (1996) Dir. Wes Craven, USA: Dimension Films. Scream II (1997) Dir. Wes Craven, USA: Dimension Films. Searchers, The (1956) Dir. John Ford, USA: Warner Bros. Seconds (1966) Dir. John Frankenheimer, USA: Paramount Pictures. Shampoo (1975) Dir. Hal Ashby, USA: Columbia Pictures. She’s Gotta Have It (1986) Dir. Spike Lee, USA: Island Pictures. Shoot the Piano Player (1960) Dir. Franҫois Truffaut: France, Les Films du Carrosse. Shopgirl (2005) Dir. Anand Tucker, USA: Buena Vista Pictures. Short Cuts (1993),Dir. Robert Altman, USA: Fine Line Features. Silence of the Lambs, The (1991) Dir. Jonathan Demme, USA: Orion Pictures. Simple Men (1992) Dir. Hal Hartley, USA: Fine Line Features. Slacker (1991) Dir. Richard Linklater, USA: Orion Classics. Sleepy Hollow (1999) Dir. Tim Burton, USA: Paramount Pictures. Southland Tales (2006) Dir. Richard Kelly, USA: Samuel Goldwyn Films. Stagecoach (1939) Dir. John Ford, USA: United Artists. Star is Born, A (1937) Dir. David O. Selznick, USA: United Artists. Sting, The (1973) Dir. George Roy Hill, USA: Universal Pictures.

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199

Stepford Wives, The (1975) Dir. Bryan Forbes, USA: Columbia Pictures. Straw Dogs (1971) Dir. Sam Peckinpah, USA/UK: Cinerama Releasing Corporation. Sunset Boulevard (1950) Dir. Billy Wilder, USA: Paramount Pictures. Synecdoche, New York (2008) Dir. Charlie Kaufman, USA: Sony Pictures Classics. Take the Money and Run (1969) Dir. Woody Allen, USA: Cinerama Releasing Corporation. Taxi Driver (1976) Dir. Martin Scorsese, USA: Columbia Pictures. The Living End (1992) Dir. Gregg Araki, USA: Cineplex Odeon Films. Thieves Like Us (1974) Dir. Robert Altman, USA: United Artists. This Is the End (2013) Dir. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, USA: Columbia Pictures. Titanic (1997) Dir. James Cameron, USA: Paramount Pictures. Topkapi (1964) Dir. Jules Dassin, USA: United Artists. Trip, The (1967) Dir. Roger Corman, USA: American International Pictures. Twentieth Century (1934) Dir. Howard Hawks, USA: Columbia Pictures. Twin Peaks (1990–1991) ABC. Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) Dir. Monte Hellman, USA: Columbia Pictures. Two or Three Things I Know about Her (1967) Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France: New Yorker Films. Van Wilder: Party Liaison (2002) Dir. Walt Becker, USA: Artisan Entertainment. Virgin Suicides, The (1999) Dir. Sofia Coppola, USA: Paramount Classics. Waking Life (2001) Dir. Richard Linklater, USA: Fox Searchlight Pictures. West Wing¸ The (1999–2006) NBC. When Harry Met Sally … (1989) Dir. Rob Reiner, USA: Columbia Pictures. Wild Boys of the Road (1933) Dir. William A. Wellman, USA: Warner Bros. Wild One, The (1953) Dir. László Benedek, USA: Columbia Pictures. Withnail and I (1987) Dir.Bruce Robinson, United Kingdom: HandMade Films. Woman Is a Woman, A (1961) Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France: Unidex. Woman under the Influence, A (1974), Dir. John Cassavetes, USA: Cine-Source.

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Index Adaptation 134, 147 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore 17 Alice’s Restaurant 44, 157 Allen, Woody 109, 124, 126 Altman, Rick 66–8 Altman, Robert 123, 126, 158–9, 168, 172 See also M*A*S*H; McCabe & Mrs. Miller; Nashville; Short Cuts; Thieves Like Us American Dream 3, 24, 62, 95 Americanness 9–12, 14–16, 37 Anderson, Benedict 5, 42 Anderson, P.T. 6, 14–16, 18, 25–6, 27, 39, 48, 51, 103–4, 148, 166–77 See also Boogie Nights; Inherent Vice; Magnolia; PunchDrunk Love Anderson, Wes 6, 16–17, 26, 38–9, 42, 48, 51, 65, 69–80, 91–2, 97–101, 104, 107–17, 123, 129, 138–9, 147–8, 182 See also Bottle Rocket; Darjeeling Limited; Grand Budapest Hotel, The; Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The; Moonrise Kingdom; Royal Tenenbaums, The; Rushmore Andersonian See Anderson, Wes Anomalisa 1–5 anxiety cultural 2–3, 16–18, 46, 78 existential 5–7, 9–13, 16, 18, 37, 39, 41–5, 52–3, 101–2, 161, 181, 183, 187–92 generalized 5, 6,12, 16, 36–7 Armageddon 96 art cinema 26, 38, 48, 151–2

Atlanta 188–9 Austin, J.L. 132–5 Backman Rogers, Anna 28, 30 Back to the Future Part III 45 Badlands 41, 95 Barcelona 148 Baudrillard, Jean 7–8, 133 Beautiful Mind, A 52 Being John Malkovich 16, 40, 65, 82–8, 134, 147, 150, 165 Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis 170 Big Lebowski, The 35 Big Sleep, The 69, 184 Billy Madison 15 Billy the Kid 64, 158–9 Billy the Kid See Billy the Kid Biskind, Peter 151 Black Lives Matter 189 Bonnie and Clyde 2, 60, 68, 85, 86, 93, 95, 98 Boogie Nights 103–5 Bordwell, David 24, 102, 105, 110, 111, 145–7, 149–50, 167, 171, 176–7 Bored to Death 18, 184–5 Bottle Rocket 98, 109, 112, 116 Bourdieu, Pierre 29–30 Boyz n the Hood 166 Brecht, Bertolt 102, 129, 149, 163, 182 Brechtian See Brecht, Bertolt Bring It On 146 Buckland, Warren 48 Caddyshack 113 Camus, Albert 12, 42 Carnal Knowledge 94 Carol 192 Casablanca 69, 169

INDEX Chabon, Michael 47, 53, 78, 80, 101, 147–8, 181, 182, 190 Charulata 76 cinematized peer 17, 95–6, 100, 145, 153 Citizen Kane 156 classical Hollywood See Hollywood cinema Clerks 145 closure effect 176–7 Clueless 166 Collins, Jim 47–8 Contempt 163 Coppola, Sofia 6, 26, 39, 113, 145–6 Cops 168 Cornell, Joseph 78, 116, 147–8 Corrigan, Timothy 81–2, 85 counterculture 61–2, 64, 94 Crumb 52 Damsels in Distress 96–7 Dances with Wolves 47 Darjeeling Limited, The 16, 65–6, 67, 69–81, 98, 109, 111–13, 116–17, 134, 138–9, 140, 181 Dawson’s Creek 124, 125 Declaration of Independence, The 11 Del Rey, Lana 9, 18, 40, 185–6, 188 Detour 70 Dont Look Back 161 Do the Right Thing 26 Double Indemnity 166 Drive 166 Drive, He Said 94 Drop Dead Gorgeous 146 drug use 33–6, 70, 74–5, 76, 83, 94, 104, 152, 166 Dylan, Bob 148, 155–64 Easy Rider 2, 10, 14, 16, 34, 44, 59–65, 69–71, 73–6, 81, 83, 94, 98, 151, 152, 154, 185–6, 188 eccentricity 46–53 Echo Park 166 8½ 161 Elsaesser, Thomas 10–11, 46, 64, 94–5, 106, 145, 183 See also pathos of failure, unmotivated hero

211

end of history, the See Fukuyama, Francis Entertainment Tonight 168 Eshelman, Raoul See performatism Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 147, 154, 165 Face in the Crowd, A 157 Fellini, Federico 148, 161–2 Field of Dreams 47 Fight Club 46 Five Easy Pieces 17, 61, 65, 68, 82, 98, 139–41, 151 Flirting with Disaster 134 Florida Project, The 40, 192 Fonda, Peter 34, 64, 74, 76, 81 See also Easy Rider Footlight Parade 35 French Connection, The 94 French New Wave 10, 15, 151, 188 Frontier, the See Western, The Frow, John 9, 52–3, 68 Fukuyama, Francis 7, 8 Gas Food Lodging 26 gender 6, 11–12, 37–40, 185, 186, 192 genre 7–8, 9, 14–16, 47, 53, 60–1, 63, 66–9, 71, 73, 82, 147, 185 Gerwig, Greta 39, 189–90 Get Out 189, 190 Ghostbusters 113 Ghostbusters II 113 Gilmore Girls 124, 125, 133 Glory Daze 97 Godard, Jean-Luc 15, 148, 163–4 Gorfinkel, Elena 50, 149, 159, 164, 168, 171 Graduate, The 2, 3, 10, 12, 14, 17, 65, 95, 98, 152–5, 164, 166 Grand Budapest Hotel, The 98, 109, 112, 116 Great Dictator, The 116 Grimes 9, 18, 40, 184 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner 189 Gunfight at the O.K Corral 64 Guthrie, Woody 156–7

212

INDEX

Happiness 102 Happy Gilmore 15 Harold and Maude 94, 98 Haynes, Todd 18, 48, 148, 155–65, 177 Heidegger, Martin 12, 42 Henry Fool 45 High Noon 46 Hippie culture See counterculture Hollywood cinema 2, 11, 16, 23–9, 48–50, 52, 60, 71, 73, 92, 94–5, 105–6, 123, 129–33, 150–1, 167–71, 175, 177 Hopper, Dennis 44, 59, 61, 64, 65, 70, 74–7 See also Easy Rider Husbands 127–9 Hutcheon, Linda 16, 30–1, 32, 36, 71–3 Hyper-dialogue 17, 18, 69, 103, 111, 123–5, 127–9, 132–42, 174, 182 I Heart Huckabees 6, 17, 39, 42, 51, 113, 123–5, 132, 135–8, 140 I’m Not There 147–8, 155–65, 177 independent cinema 26–8, 30 Indie 24, 25–30, 37–40, 46, 49–50, 182, 188–90, 192 Indiewood 24–8, 192 Inglourious Basterds 116 Inherent Vice 25–6 Invasion of the Body Snatchers 189 irony 6–9, 18, 23, 30–9, 41, 43–4, 47–53, 73, 75–79, 101–12, 151, 181–91 Italian neorealism 10, 127, 151 Jaeckle, Jeff 123, 129, 133 Jalsaghar 69 Jameson, Fredric 13–14, 183 Jane the Virgin 188–9 Jesus Henry Christ 42 Jonze, Spike 6, 27, 48, 50–2, 82–5 See also Being John Malkovich Juno 51, 125, 133, 141 Kaufman, Charlie 1–2, 16, 18, 26, 38–9, 42, 46, 51, 65, 81–5, 134, 165–6, 182 Kelly, Richard 33–5

kidding on the square 6, 101, 129 King, Geoff 24–6, 28–30 See also indie, indiewood, independent cinema Kiss Me Deadly 166 Klute 94 Kozloff, Sarah 126, 130, 133 La Chinoise 163 Lady Bird 189–90, 192 Lady Eve, The 105–6 Last Picture Show, The 94 Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The 91–2, 111–12, 116 Living End, The 26 MacDowell, James 18, 23, 28, 31–2, 49–51, 110, 151 See also quirky, irony Magnificent Ambersons, The 116 Magnolia 18, 39, 147, 165–77 mainstream cinema See Hollywood cinema Make America Great Again See Trump, Donald Mala Noche 26 Maltese Falcon, The 69, 184 Mann, Aimee 166, 168, 170–1, 175 Marie Antoinette 39, 113, 145–6 Masculin Féminin 163 M*A*S*H 159 Master of None 188–9, 192 Mayshark, Jesse Fox 7–8, 50 McCabe & Mrs. Miller 44, 94, 158 Me and You and Everyone We Know 39 Mean Streets 95, 127 Meanwhile 25–6 Meeuf, Russell See neoliberalism Melancomic 100–1 Memento 46 metamodernism 16–17, 23, 50, 114 #MeToo 192 Metropolitan 148 Midnight Cowboy 44, 94, 98 mind-game film 46, 49 Mi Vida Loca 26, 166 mode See Frow, John

INDEX Model of Christian Charity, A See John Winthrop Molloy, Claire 26–7 Moonlight 192 Moonrise Kingdom 98–9, 112, 113 Murray, Bill 69–70, 109, 111, 113 My Darling Clementine 64 My Own Private Idaho 26 Nashville 123 national identity 5, 13–14, 44, 46, 59–60, 63–5, 126, 185–90, 191 See also Americanness Neale, Stephen 66 See also genre Nelmes, Jill 129–32, 169–70, 174 neoliberal citizenship 2–7, 9, 18 neoliberal ideology See neoliberalism neoliberalism 3–6, 12, 24, 26–8, 36–7, 41, 45–6, 49, 52–3, 67, 78, 96, 125–6, 183–90 Network 98 New Hollywood 2–3, 6, 9–12, 14, 16–17, 36–9, 41, 43–5, 59–69, 75, 78, 82–3, 86, 94–8, 100, 106, 117, 125–7, 139–41, 145, 151–3, 164, 183, 190–1 New sincerity 9, 16, 23, 29–30, 47–8, 50, 181 Ngai, Sianne 16, 37, 42–5, 51–2, 111, 183 See also ugly feelings Night of the Living Dead 189 Nightmare Alley 158, 160–1 No Direction Home 163 North by Northwest 70 Northern Exposure 186–8 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 94 On the Waterfront 104 Opposite of Sex, The 6 Outlaw, The 64 overtly cinematic characterization 17– 18, 80, 87, 91–2, 96–7, 100–17, 123, 134, 145, 151, 164, 182 Paltrow, Gwyneth 113 Panic in Needle Park, The 94 Paper Moon 98 parody 71–6

213

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid 158–60 pathos of failure 10–11, 183 See also Elsaesser, Thomas Pennebaker, D.A. 161–2 performatism 134 Perkins, Claire 38–9, 103 Persona 161 Plantinga, Carl 95, 104–5, 106–8 post-irony 23, 47, 181 postmodern See postmodernism postmodernism 7–9, 13–14, 46–8 Pretty Woman 166 Pulp Fiction 6 Punch-Drunk Love 14–16, 39, 51, 148 quirky 16, 18, 23, 28, 38–9, 49–52, 151 Quiz Kid Challenge 166 race 11–12, 26–8, 37, 60, 188–92 racial politics See race Raging Bull 104 Ray, Satyajit 69, 74, 76, 77, 80 Rebel Without a Cause 64 Renaldo & Clara 159 Reservoir Dogs 6 Rimbaud, Arthur 156–7, 158 River, The 74, 77 road film 14, 16, 59–63, 65–6, 69–71, 75–6, 80, 81–3, 85–6, 110, 138 road movie See road film Rocky 115 Royal Tenenbaums, The 40, 98, 108, 111–13, 116, 150 Rushmore 98, 100, 110, 112–15, 189 Russell, David O. 6, 17, 39, 42, 113, 134–6 Safe Place, A 94 Salinger, J.D. 79, 116 Sandler, Adam 15 Sartre, Jean Paul 12, 41–2 Say Anything… 163 Scanner Darkly, A 134 Schwartzman, Jason 109, 113–14, 184 Sconce, Jeffrey 17, 23, 28, 38, 48–50, 100–3, 110 See also smart cinema Scorsese, Martin 168

214

Scream 6 Scream II 6 Searchers, The 62 Seconds 82, 189 Shampoo 95 She’s Gotta Have It 26 Shoot the Piano Player 15 Shopgirl 113 Short Cuts 172–3 Simon and Garfunkel 152–3 Simon, Paul 64–5, 83, 107 Simple Men 127–8 simulacra 13, 109, 156, 161, 164, 186 Silence of the Lambs, The 96 Slacker 170 Sleepy Hollow 69 smart cinema 16, 23, 28, 38, 48–50, 100–3 Smith, Murray 92–3, 130–1 Southland Tales 33–6 Stagecoach 62 Star is Born, A 166 Stepford Wives, The 189 Stillman, Whit 96, 134, 148 Sting, The 86, 109 Straw Dogs 94 Sunset Boulevard 166, 169 Synecdoche, New York 42, 150, 165 Take the Money and Run 109 Taxi Driver 44, 152 This Is The End 69 Timberlake, Justin 33, 34, 36 #TimesUp 192

INDEX

Titanic 163 Topkapi 86 Trip, The 34, 74, 83 Trump, Donald 185, 187–8 Twin Peaks 187 Two-Lane Blacktop 16, 61, 65, 68, 83, 86, 94, 106 Two or Three Things I Know About Her 163 ugly feelings 39, 42–3, 111, 136, 188 See also Sianne Ngai unmotivated hero 10–11, 106, 145 See also Elsaesser, Thomas Van Wilder: Party Liaison 97 V-effekt See Brecht, Bertolt Verfremdungseffekt See Brecht, Bertolt Vietnam 2, 12, 152, 159, 161 Vietnam War See Vietnam Virgin Suicides, The 146 Wallace, David Foster 7–9, 47–8 Waking Life 42, 134 Western, The 10, 16, 44, 46, 62–6, 68, 158–60, 187 When Harry Met Sally… 131 White, Armond 6–8 Wild One, The 64 Winthrop, John 63 Withnail and I 145 Woman is a Woman, A 15 Woman Under the Influence, A 127