Steven Jay Schneider (ed),
New Hollywood Violence.
Manchester University Press, 2004.
ISBN: 0 7190 6723 5
336pp
£16.99 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press)

Murray Pomerance begins his chapter in this essay collection with a portentous, literary gem from Henri Michaux:

Any surface covered with characters turns into something crammed and seething . . . full of lives and objects, of everything to be found in the world. (Henri Michaux)

A provocative way to commence a piece charting “Hitchcock and the dramaturgy of screen violence”, the radical implications of which do not hold Pomerance back from articulating an ultimately moral schematic of four types of screen violence: mechanical, mythic, idiomorphic and dramaturgical. These types are modulated by variables he identifies as irony of presentation, and improbability of placement, and Pomerance goes on to set out a stimulating argument using this analytical device. There is insufficient scope in this review to adequately cover all of the various perspectives in much detail, so I will touch for the most part only on a few representative essays as a way of giving readers a taste of the territories covered in New Hollywood Violence.

Michaux’s emblematic modernist commentary on the complexities and pleasures involved in the translation of Chinese ideograms into other language systems, including poetic discourse, connects potentially to some current ideas about how New Hollywood cinema functions as an unstable force of translation across, within and between various cultural systems. The framing quotation above is full of promise, but remains inadequately contextualised in Pomerance’s essay. The source – beyond the name of the author – is not specifically cited, which may frustrate some readers who dislike having to do their own spade-work in order to fully comprehend such interesting fragments. It’s not clear as to whether this quotation represents Pomerance’s own translation, or whether it is from elsewhere, possibly Gustaf Sobin’s recent translation of Michaux’s Ideograms in China, published by New Directions in 2002. The quotation from Michaux relates to his fascination with the semiotics of Chinese ideograms, and Pomerance might have included a few more explanatory points detailing how this aspect connected with the focus on violence in New Hollywood cinema. This also offered excellent potential as an early opportunity in New Hollywood Violence for at least one writer to make a start outlining the challenges involved in cinematic translations of violence across cultural and social boundaries. More on the matter of translation and ethics later in this review.

Pomerance argues that Hitchcock’s films deliver more subtle, finely ironic engagements with violent actions and contexts, as compared to the effects-ridden, spectacular violence favoured in the majority of New Hollywood productions. Dramaturgical violence is therefore a morally and ethically superior narrative framework in this scheme. But it is now out of fashion. Sadly, serious Hitchcock thinking has now been reduced to a set of vapid games circulating between theorists and zealots. In Pomerance’s view there are serious ethical implications to the demise of any active, informed, mass critical engagement with Hitchcock’s films and their canny narrative regulation and constitution of various modes of violence. We are left all the poorer because of at least two related situations defining contemporary conjunctures. In the context of high capitalism, as Pomerance labels it, the conventions of dramaturgical violence perfected by Hitchcock have fallen out of use because dynamics between manufacturers of what we might call cinematic ideograms – movies – and consumers are increasingly dominated by globalised audience-units apparently demanding the most standardised cultural commodity translation. New Hollywood movies are cut to the measure of the lowest common global denominator in this equation, regulated and simplified by mechanical, mythic and idiomorphic violence. In conjunction with this, Hitchcock critique has become both gentrified and consequently dislodged from public access.

Pomerance wraps up by applying a sharp line from Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, published early last century. Sorel’s comments about the dangers of a social policy founded on middle-class cowardice are thereby linked to contemporary contexts, specifically the reign of moralistic obsessions with screen violence cut off from the myriad networks and circuits of real-world ultraviolence. In short, reading the essay slightly against the grain, Pomerance configures a persuasive defence for a closer understanding of the productive conceptual aspects to screen violence, as opposed to reducing cinematic representation and reference to, for instance, simplistic manifestations of terror in action. To equate cinematic fictionalities with the actual waging of wars, destruction of cities, and racial profiling of populations in the “world that contains the screen” is ultimately, in Pomerance’s view, a defence of the violent powers of the State. A big call, illustrating some of the challenging material on offer in this collection of essays. Just avoid making the mistake of reading Stephen Prince’s “Afterword” first.

New Hollywood Violence represents a welcome recent addition to the Inside Popular Film series from Manchester University Press (MUP). The series has delivered a range of book-length studies in the cultural history of genres and audiences, among other subjects, all presumably catering for expanding research investments in the field of popular film and associated cultural phenomena. The central brief of the series aims to provide a forum for writers working to develop new ways of analysing popular film, so expectations should be very high for a volume engaging closely with New Hollywood Violence, however the category might be understood. And more than a few risks are taken here in extending MUP’s critical reach into such a loaded, discursively saturated and theoretically stultified domain. Debates continue to rage in micro and macro-cycles around the matter of violence in movies, and, in spite of the extensive array of research to the contrary, perceptions of direct and indirect social effects have intensified in recent times. This has been at the expense of more innovative, critically sophisticated, and maybe even accurate takes on the dynamics of violence and the social as configured in and around and through cinematic production. This volume represents an excellent space for those brave souls who might want to head in these directions and to begin again to unpack the good, bad and ugly of ideas about movies and violence.

The essays in New Hollywood Violence are organised in four sections, “Surveys and Schemas”, “Spectacle and Style”, “Race and Gender”, and “Politics and Identity”.

In terms of the sectional divisions noted above, it seems appropriate to acknowledge, at least, the interminable difficulty involved in conceptualising thematic framings flexible enough to accommodate the transdisciplinary diversity of investigations in filmic violence, but allowing for at least some sort of provisional, overall mapping of the terrain. Some research I’ve been involved with, dealing with violence and masculinity in Australian cinema, has encountered similar conceptual dilemmas, but this is not an excuse for what I believe are confused, ill-conceived divisions applied in this publication. There is always the risk that perspectives and fields will be arbitrarily compartmentalised: some readers may have doubts with respect to this volume in that questions of race, gender and violence, for instance, cannot in any simple sense be separated from questions of politics and identity, spectacle and style. For this reason, Schneider’s editorial work “intuitively” dividing the various essays into sections raises more questions than answers. At points I would suggest that the section divisions manifest more in the way of continuing, intractable problems in conceptualising the field: symptomatic of the intensity of conflicts and divisions, and competition within and between perspectives for the high interpretative ground on matters of movies and violence. A cynical rubber-stamp effect, an imprint from various quarters of the critical establishment staking their territorial claims over New Hollywood cinema?

In spite of my critical hesitations above, there are many excellent investigative forays in this volume which altogether open up new angles on well-worn topics. Thomas Schatz presents a concise historical introduction covering a range of provocative and perceptive questions about violence in Hollywood cinema and the general American cultural context. Schatz sets a promising, critically reflexive orientation for the rest of the essays with his implicit challenge to any simplistic notion of New Hollywood as a discrete category under which all films might logically be grouped. Schatz offers a fascinating teaser in his brief comment on the effects of cross-fertilization between Hollywood genres and those of other national cinemas measured through the example of the “Spaghetti Western” in the late 1960s, and I remain convinced that Peckinpah’s status as “blood-auteur” may owe much to the swathe cut through the American cinema complex at the time by the success of Sergio Leone’s work. The equation connecting New Hollywood – starting with Bonnie and Clyde (USA, 1967) and The Wild Bunch (USA, 1969) – with an addiction to a distinct aesthetics of graphic violence is not entirely new, and has never, in my view, been very satisfying as an interpretative mechanism for charting the sociocultural dynamics of filmic violence. Stephen Prince’s work on “ultraviolence” via Peckinpah’s contributions to cinema, as one example, invests heavily in critique grounded in an aesthetics of film violence, rather than taking a more carefully honed look at how the logics of these aesthetics pan out over time and in different social, temporal and cultural situations. This is not to say that this book presents a unified position vis a vis Prince in complete accord with what I regard as the mealy-mouthed logic of polemic delivered in his afterword as he attempts to shaft liberal film critique as defined by American practitioners. Most of the essays contend, at a general level, with a reflexive understanding of the category, though there was room for more in the way of innovative angles on the transmission of Hollywood cinema into other national and international contexts. What are the views of American cinematic violence from critical formations elsewhere? Hopefully there will be a second volume expanding on these questions and more. Then we will have something to bargain with when it comes to contemporary research and writing on violence and cinema in globalising image complexes on the move.

Following Schatz’s reflections about the cinematic and cultural origins of New Hollywood Violence, the first section of the book, “Surveys and Schemas”, leads with J. David Slocum who investigates the analytical device of the “Sixties trope” as a means of examining relationships between contemporary social obsessions and investments in cinematic violence, and the critical period of the 1960s in setting the foundations and terms of these continuing debates. The suggestion might be added that New Hollywood was not generating violent spectacle in a vacuum. Violence in filmic contexts continues to be poorly conceptualised in much social and cultural theory and public realm commentary, which leaves vast territories open for innovative investigations of the complex intertextual systems that constitute and maintain synergies between New Hollywood cinema and violent spectacle. The increasing potency of traditional media effects research – in America and, significantly, elsewhere, including Australian contexts – in setting what passes as the critical cultural agenda concerning violence and film has made it very difficult to cultivate new critical formations that contend in innovative ways with the territory. Slocum demonstrates effectively how the terms of debates set in the 1960s have stultified subsequent critical and investigative frameworks.

Martin Baker’s piece “Violence redux” makes a good start on a genealogy of violence in conjunction with the moving image, and Thomas Leitch’s essay in the “Spectacle and Style” section also presents some informed schematics regarding the aesthetics of violence, but his discussion of John Woo’s work is a flat disappointment in this context, and illustrates the volume’s failure to deliver anything of substance in terms of cross-cultural dynamics and New Hollywood Violence. A deeper consideration of the porosity of borders involved in New Hollywood systems was warranted: if we consider cinema systems to be relatively loose aggregations of fairly mobile operators, then what about the interplay between systems through the migration of personnel, directors and others? The figure of transnational cinema seems to some extent to have been left out of detailed consideration in any of the chapters. There are a few moments effecting interesting engagements with the translation of violence through Woo’s work for instance. However Leitch is more interested in playing Woo as an imitative director whose work manifests more as mindless, spectacularised violence. In any Woo text, there might appear to be a movie to the uninitiated, but in Leitch’s scheme the films represent merely a stitching-together of violent set pieces, the work of stage machinist rather than poet. I disagree violently with this. In a high-brow publication such as this, it ought to be expected that Leitch engage fully with Woo’s transformation of other cinematic pieces: Face/Off (USA, 1997), most obviously the dove-dominated shoot out sequence late in the film, demands a critical encounter with Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (UK, 1975), made significantly in the context of the director’s recoil after the fallout from A Clockwork Orange (UK, 1971). Face/Off refracts the violence of the former along fascinating angles, and analysing these texts together could have raised potentially more interesting questions about violence and Hollywood than Leitch’s somewhat literary sensibility allows for in his denunciation of Woo.

Other innovative takes include Geoff King’s excellent foray into how modalities are mixed in New Hollywood’s “comedy-with-violence”, though he tends to overprivilege the violence side of this equation, analysing American Psycho (USA/Canada, 2000) and Natural Born Killers (USA, 1994) rather than say Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (USA, 1999). This isn’t merely a reviewer’s gag here: consider how Dr Evil, after his deep freeze in the late 1960s, that pivotal point marking the birth of New Hollywood and the discourse of cinematic ultraviolence, has to have his violent threats and fantasies re-calibrated by his associates to line up with hierarchies and aesthetics of violence in contemporary America. Next after King’s essay, Stephen Jay Schneider racks up a lively examination of Donald Cammell’s White of the Eye (UK, 1988), and brings his nuanced critical capacities into action through vivid close reading and thematic analysis. The “Race and Gender” section – and again, I think there are major problems with such compartmentalisations – also brings us some brilliant work including Paula J Massood on masculinity and violence in John Singleton’s films, Jacinda Read’s perceptive contribution to “post-feminist girly” features, and Susan Felleman’s essay on films mixing matters of art, sexual desire and violence, in particular Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (USA, 1985), among others.

As with Pomerance’s piece mentioned above, Susan Felleman’s “Playing with fire: women, art, and danger in American movies of the 1980s” unfortunately also begins with an unsourced translation. Felleman recounts a mythological story from what she cites mysteriously as a “Kakadu myth” to frame what pans out as a disappointing, mostly gestural critical performance, the limitations of which are magnified by this apparently unacknowledged appropriation. My point is that if we follow some of the other chapters in their mapping of the intricacies and politics involved in definitions of violence, then we should not perhaps leave out the matter of the “taking” or “borrowing” of stories from other cultures as potentially another mode of violence that also needs close and ethical consideration. Otherwise, quotations used in such ways induce the vanishing of other cultures, where narratives, contexts and meanings disappear in the interests of the essay to follow. Again, no essay in this volume really gets close to the mark in any systematic assessment of neo-colonialist interludes and New Hollywood Violence.

So, we have a handful of essays representing the critical old regime to some degree. Pomerance, Leitch, and, in particular, Stephen Prince work, in different ways, with the thesis that New Hollywood movies represent a commodity form reduced to flattened out narratives. This reviewer has grave misgivings as to the validity of their argument that New Hollywood has come to this because “international” audiences prefer to be simplistically entertained, not challenged, hence their preference for violent spectacle at the expense of character, story and complexity. This is not my version of good cultural analysis for the obvious reason that this mass formation of “foreign” audiences are implicitly blamed for corrupting the classical Hollywood form, most acutely embodied in the work of Hitchcock and select others. This is dodgy argument and logic. Parts of this book are sympathetic to the idea of a return of high and low ethical distinctions between and within cultural forms like cinema, and a rejection of the popular political correctness school of cultural studies which celebrates forms previously dismissed by social and cultural elites for their perceived ephemerality. This is perhaps fair enough as polemic, but much more should have been offered in the way of fairer engagement with many New Hollywood films dismissed as stylised ultraviolence, and with more informed consideration of manifestations of radical differences in the ways people in diverse places, spaces and times use films featuring certain kinds of violence to create other meanings and experiences that are not reducible to the textual violence encoded in the film texts themselves.

By way of an example, consider the benefits and scope of more complex, relationally sensitive analysis of interconnections between cinematic systems. The international, so-called cult-following of Australian films like Stone (Australia, 1974) and Mad Max (Australia, 1979) are illustrative of similar complex dynamics when it comes to the meanings people attach to New Hollywood films and cinematic codes of violence, and the extensive range of work in such fields leaves a disturbing gulf in this volume’s coverage. Certainly the issue of transnational and global consumption practices are noted on many occasions across various essays, some more than others, but the subject does not receive anything much in the way of systematic attention. Hopefully this will come in New Hollywood Violence: Volume II.

Fortunately for this book, Martin Barker’s chapter takes issue with undertheorised assumptions about audience response and experience, as he crafts an exceptional meditation on some of these matters through his ethnographic work on the reception of David Cronenberg’s Crash (Canada/USA, 1996) in the UK in 1996-97. Barker also expands on the need for further investigation as to whose interests precisely are embodied in the “all-conquering” concept of violence that now appears fully institutionalised in the film studies establishment, or at least in certain UK-USA circuits thereof. Engaging with Barker’s call, it’s worthwhile to consider research into the ways in which debates about film and violence are transmitted across global networks: moral panics which emerge in American contexts seem eminently capable of virus-like transmission to other national contexts and bureaucratic jurisdictions. Surely these elements are as much involved as the dulled, myopic tastes of the other “foreign” masses now apparently dictating the content and formal style of Hollywood movies. Consider how, at times, the Australian context resembles an echo-chamber manifesting endless repetitions of voices with identical theoretical accents expressing the usual gamut of fears and anxieties about the effects of movies on audiences, some groups more than others. Usually adolescent boys.
The only paper that really offers anything resembling systematic research into reception and consumption practices for this most stigmatised of all contemporary social groups effectively infantilises audiences of Hollywood action cinema. Webb and Browne’s chapter on action-adventure’s appeal to adolescent boys looks on the surface as though it was written in a vacuum, showing no connection whatsoever to the incredibly diverse ways in which audiences have consumed and connected with action cinema across many different social and cultural contexts. I don’t believe this chapter belongs in a series that claims to represent innovative engagements with New Hollywood Violence. On this front, it is very odd to not encounter any systematic coverage or investigation of fandom, connoisseurship and Hollywood violence in this volume. Many of the contributors clearly practice this mode – Fred Pfeil’s chapter “Terrence Malick’s war film sutra: meditating on The Thin Red Line“, delivers a typically sophisticated, idiosyncratic treatment. But the absence of a dedicated chapter critically unpacking fan dynamics is all the more surprising given Mark Jancovich’s presence as one of the General Editors of the Inside Popular Film series, a writer who has contributed significantly to debates about movies and subcultures. In other words the subcultural status of many of these texts at times seems critically neglected, diminishing the impact and limiting the scope of a number of essays in this collection, reducing them to caricatures of literary close readings of films. Long live the literary critic come film aficionado?

The final section, “Politics and Ideology” pulses with two strong interrogative takes that, critically, bite hard against the weight of Stephen Prince’s “Afterword”. Sylvia Chong takes issue with the problematic category of “blood auteurism” through her investigation of censorship regimes applied to selected films of Sam Peckinpah and Oliver Stone. In the process Chong stirs up and unpacks some of Prince’s settled assumptions about the legacy and position of Peckinpah through consideration of the Motion Picture Association of America’s NC-17 rating effectively derailing the re-release of The Wild Bunch in 1994-95. Chong lucidly points out the way understandings of violence have become saturated with notions of the obscene, collapsing these distinctions into one another. David Tetzlaff’s “Too much red meat!” takes a more theatrical and playful mode of critique to get stuck into the righteousness of critics such as Prince among others. Conservative critics are, in this view, increasingly pushing inaccurate and unhelpful directives urging film scholars of all persuasions to take on board the obsessions of right-wing think tanks. This represents instructive resources for film scholars to actively challenge the endless strings of commentators lining up to blame movies for violence, rather than taking aim at hierarchical and violent social structures and strictures and considering their pivotal role in this respect.

The three most disappointing essays follow: Todd Onderdonk, though clearly a sensitive analyst of cinematic politics, raises nothing much in the way of innovation in his condemnation of Tarantino as “violence-exploitation” freak-geek auteur, and barely closeted homophobe. Onderdonk’s essay might have been strengthened had he engaged a closer comparative analysis – investigating the “Bonnie Situation” of Pulp Fiction (USA, 1994), for example, by taking Tarantino’s invitation to revisit Bonnie and Clyde (USA, 1967) with a more open mind to intertextual formations and their place in New Hollywood scenarios and texts. And Ken Windrum’s examination of Fight Club (Germany/USA, 1999) ends up marred as he becomes trapped in literal surface logics and makes a number of erroneous assumptions on this basis rather than taking a strong investigative line. Few writers on Fight Club have delivered a satisfactory engagement with such a very strange and disturbing, prescient film. Windrum focuses on the macho factor – honed white male bodies in brutal fist to fist action – and finds the film debased in its politics. He does not really consider the fight concept in sufficient detail in my view: what significance might be attached to the classed codings of violence in this film, for instance, and how do these measure up to the by now all too familiar model of terrorism grafted into the narrative: all indeterminate cells and mobile, fluid units. Windrum’s arguments are undermined significantly by a number of incorrect or at best dubious observations, most blatantly his assertion that Fight Club is an exclusively Caucasian organisation. There are certainly critical aspects involved in terms of ethnicity, gender and class as the film pans out, but not all the characters are white, and the movement, such as it is determinable, becomes much much larger that its yuppie founder intended and this for me warranted closer attention.

However, again, it seems a monocultural critical sensibility is projected onto the surface of a film seething in Michaux’s terms, charged and cluttered with strange indeterminate characters, moments, objects and actions. Windrum prematurely pronounces the impotence of revolt, when it is far from clear what will happen when all those who have been swept by the good forces of neoliberal economic transformation decide which side of the fence they are on. Fight Club, in my estimation, has been judged too literally here: at the end of it all, the fight sequences – though brutal and jarring to certain sensibilities – are incidental to the logic of the revolution ceaselessly unfolding. The macho games that launched the movement – what members of the secret club do in their spare time – become merely contingencies as the full implications of the apocryphal Tyler Durden and his anarcho-syndicalist revolution pan out.

More in the way of well-theorised, quantitative and qualitative political economy of violence and New Hollywood would have balanced this collection. Combined with the omission of any fully globally framed perspective, these vectors figure as glaring oversights. There is some danger that many of the essays will be read by other commentators and theorists situated within and outside UK-USA circuits as rankly insular. On the surface it might appear that “New Hollywood” is exclusively American in some sense, but given the rest of the world’s cinema systems and their manifold reliance on Hollywood, it might be a better idea to let some other voices speak about these matters too. Perceptive close readings are one thing. More work is needed however to enable diverse critical formations to continue generating creative and well-theorised approaches capable of morphing with the ways in which cinema systems chart and sometimes interrogate changing questions about the meanings of violence.

As to Stephen Prince’s “Afterword”: he presents a useful and sympathetic summary of all the essays that have come before his piece, then he drives home some bewildering theses and prescriptions for the re-configuration of film studies and its engagement with screen violence generally. Prince’s view is that the liberal-left currents dominant in the humanities (in the USA) during the 1960s and 1970s have disabled the capacity of film studies to accept the results and premises of media effects research. Significantly, the precise aspects and content of this media effects research are left out of the picture here, making Prince’s position seem untenable, and dangerously akin to the growing power of collectives, political and public, running their campaigns for social engineering based on the premise that New Hollywood Violence can have “real” effects on some viewers, perhaps even whole generations and cultures. But Prince’s suggestion that film studies has only recently come to this present level of interest in cinema violence seems off the mark: the literature is already extensive and has been for some time. Prince misrecognises a vast body of material engaging with violence in many different ways and it’s likely he will be taken to task left, right and centre for this duplicitous or careless omission of the wealth of work on violence and cinema.

This collection delivers a number of persuasive and comprehensive engagements with issues of violence and New Hollywood. There’s much of value in this collection and the hope is it will function as a springboard for further systematic and innovative encounters with the difficult and intractable matter of perceptions of film violence and ideas about its sociocultural impacts.

Craig Williams
University of Newcastle, Australia.

Created on: Tuesday, 7 March 2006 | Last Updated: 7-Mar-06