Geoff King,
Donnie Darko (Cultographies Series).
London & New York: Wallflower Press, 2007.
ISBN: 978-1-905674-51-0
US$15.00 (pb)
118pp
(Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press)
It may be no stretch of the imagination to suggest that, by all accounts, we are now living in a post-cult world. The dark underbelly of genuine cult practice, with its midnight screenings, seedy grindhouse theatres, dodgy prints and subversive glamour, has been exposed by the twin beams of commercial niche marketing and literary criticism, from popular journalism to academic theory. The rabbit (in this case a giant one called Frank) has been caught in the headlights, and already it’s too late to save it. Or perhaps my nostalgia for the lost world of cult authenticity is, like John Patterson’s (the London Guardian’s Hollywood film correspondent), itself a post-modern response.[1]
Geoff King’s admirable contribution to Wallflower’s Cultographies series, is just the latest in a succession of academic interventions gathering hurriedly for the post-mortem. At least now we have a corpse, the phenomenon might be easier to dissect. But in fact, this latest surge of interest (which includes this series’ editor Ernest Mathijs’s new Cult Film Reader, co-edited with Xavier Mendik who also runs the Cult Film Archive at London’s Brunel University, where King is Professor of Film and TV Studies), is third-wave. Cult criticism began, as Greg Taylor has shown, with Manny Farber and Tyler Parker in the 1950s; pioneers who, joined by Andrew Sarris at the Village Voice, blazed the cult trail in advance of its 1970s’ midnight hey-day.[2] The second front was launched by Danny Peary, but it was J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Midnight Movies, and J. P. Telotte’s anthology The Cult Film Experience: Beyond All Reason, which became foundation stones for the cult academy in the 1980s and 90s.[3] The third division scholars (who constitute something of a cult themselves) are largely British-based and much of their inspiration must be credited to Mark Jancovich, who ran a successful conference at Nottingham University in 2000, from which came his co-edited collection, Defining Cult Movies – an important book which did everything but.[4]
What has been the trouble with cult criticism? Well, its first problem was the difficulty of encompassing the sheer diversity of films that have been called cult, in any text-based, analytical frame of reference. No sooner had you thought you’d nailed a cult film, than it got up and walked away. If this wasn’t bad enough, for a discipline largely derived from literary deconstruction, the cult fan presented an even greater difficulty. As Matt Hills has established with sometimes agonised scrupulousness, there is a terrible reluctance on the part of academic critics to investigate the fan.[5] The curse of pathology hangs over the most sensitive of ethnographers, it seems. Thus, caught between the Scylla of the cult text and the Charybdis of the cult fan, third-wave criticism languished uncomfortably in the no-man’s-land of sub-cultural theory. There, conveniently, it is possible to construct a beautifully symmetrical argument that the culturally marginalised fan will be attracted to the culturally marginalised (taboo, debased, neglected) text, which itself has been produced on the cultural margins of mainstream film commerce, by film-makers who are culturally marginalised (radical, subversive, penniless) and is shown in culturally marginalised venues at anti-social hours. And all this, without having to deal with awkward questions about Casablanca (USA 1942) or Star Wars (USA 1977). Or why aren’t we all cult fans?
Fortunately, the post-cult era has saved us from this predicament. How? Well, as Geoff King ably demonstrates, Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001) has ushered in the age of the constructed cult film. Or should I say, the ‘cult’ film? Here is a film which has all the right ingredients, which presses all the right buttons, which sustains just the right degree of weirdness, which contains the right combination of popular cultural references (soundtrack included), which was an idiosyncratic labour of love, which was unsuccessful on first release, which slowly gathered a cult audience, which demanded a follow-up ‘Director’s Cut’, which divided the cult audience. And so on.
To his credit, King offers two alternative readings of the film: the cult reading and the ‘cult’ reading, and leaves the reader to decide. Like many cult encounters, this film trades (self-consciously) on the fort/da frontier between passion and pretence, commitment and ironic distance, bravura and bullshit. King’s account is also laudable in according proper space to the production history’s key determinants upon the finished text, and to the (internet) reception context of cult fan responses. And he brings his considerable knowledge of independent American cinema to bear upon the precise nature of the cult text’s generic hybridity and narrative dysfunction. Here he employs productively Hodge and Tripp’s concept of modality, showing how the cult text’s essential unevenness opens up spaces for the viewer to occupy, yet also presents pitfalls in traversing its rugged terrain.[6]
But perhaps King’s main achievement in this thorough, engaged, and thoroughly engaging case study, is in the realm of speculation. King can be immediately forgiven for indulging in the kind of fannish interpretation which Donnie Darko makes almost irresistible (because he is prudent about the distinctions in practice between academic scepticism and committed belief). And doubtless his deft handling of this bifocal approach will lend this book appeal beyond the cult academy. I was also intrigued by his ideological reading which situated the film’s underlying anxieties about the institution of the family within America’s millennial moral ambivalence between Bush and Dukakis. Indeed, the quest for belief in a morally bankrupt and hypocritical, secular society is a current which runs deep in other cult films. Finally, King’s positioning of Donnie Darko (notwithstanding the lack of proper space such case studies afford to explore fan practices in the depth they deserve) is pragmatic and astute. Cult films provide more than fresh cultural capital for those seeking solace through rites-of-passage journeys. They offer stimulus and consolation in equal measure, and there is a profound melancholy at their core.
If the ‘cult’ film lacks the truly transgressive edge of its forebears however, it is because, in the post-cult world, it is no longer possible to be shocked. We have seen it before, and we know it in advance. If do-it-yourself ‘cult’ films are not absolutely predictable, there is certainly a much-reduced space between their unnoticed release and their commercial exploitation. So the contemporary cult fan is operating in a severely restricted arena, patrolled by astute commercial marketing and ubiquitous popular criticism.
For the ‘cult’ critic, by contrast, the playing field is wide. Is there anything, one wonders, save perhaps the most anodyne of popular texts, which cannot be ‘cult’ these days? Indeed, in journalistic criticism the term seems to be losing its purchase altogether. And ‘cult’ fan practice looms larger than ever; for what are the works of the Richard Kellys and the Quentin Tarantinos (not to mention the Neil LaButes) but expensively constructed ‘homages – the elaborate personal expressions of devoted cult film fans? Yes, in the post-cult world (of ‘Be Kind Rewind) there is nothing that can’t be ‘sweeded’.
On the academic front, whilst series like Cultographies are generally to be welcomed, one wonders if their days aren’t numbered. One of the difficulties of cult criticism has been the ineluctable draw of canon-formation; lists tend to accrue their own problematic orthodoxy. One hopes that Wallflower’s support for the imprint can be sustained long enough to make it the wide-ranging and inclusive roll-call which its projected titles promise. As King rightly concludes, ‘Donnie Darko is in some respects a casebook example’ (p. 95). The trouble is, that once the case has been made – and made as persuasively as it is here – how many more examples do we need? If a tedious litany of ‘also-rans’ is to be avoided, future titles will have to be selected on the basis that their authors, like Geoff King, bring fresh insight to the cult phenomenon itself. For sure, as Jeffrey Sconce has shown, a wide variety of films get called cult; the question is, are they all cult for the same reasons?[7]
All cultists in time kill the thing they love. It cannot be avoided. What survives, in the university courses, the copious literature, the media exposure, the marketing ploys, is a meta-cult. So we should not be concerned that every fine new book of cult criticism, like this one, is another nail in the coffin of the cult. The cult is dead; long live the ‘cult’!
Justin Smith,
University of Portsmouth, UK.
Endnotes
[1] Patterson, J., ‘The Weirdo Element’, The Guardian‘, Friday 2 March 2007, p. 5.
[2] Taylor, G., Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism‘ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
[3] Peary, D., Cult Movies‘ (New York: Delta, 1981), Hoberman, J. and J. Rosenbaum, Midnight Movies‘ (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), Telotte, J. P. (ed), The Cult Film Experience: Beyond All Reason (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991).
[4] Jancovich, M., A. Reboll, J. Stringer, and A. Willis (eds), Defining Cult Movies: The cultural politics of oppositional taste (Manchester and New York: University of Manchester Press, 2003).
[5] Hills, Matt, Fan Cultures (London: Routledge, 2002).
[6] Hodge, R. and D. Tripp, Children and Television: A Semiotic Approach (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986).
[7] Sconce, J., ‘Trashing the Academy: taste, excess and an emerging politics of cinematic style’, Screen , Vol. 36, No. 4 (1995), pp. 371–93.
Created on: Saturday, 20 September 2008