Wheeler Winston Dixon,
Disaster and Memory: Celebrity Culture and the Crisis of Hollywood Cinema.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1999
ISBN: 0 231 11317 X
182pp
US$16.50 (paper)
US$42.50 (cloth)
(Review copy supplied by Columbia University Press)
Uploaded 12 November 1999
This is the second Columbia University Press book I have been sent for review in recent months and both have been Chicken Little books, dedicated to the premise that the sky is falling. Robin Wood predicates his recent and deplorable Sexual Politics and Narrative Cinema on nothing less than the imminent death from the effects of heterosexuality of all life on the planet. Wheeler Dixon, more modestly, contents himself with announcing the imminent death of Hollywood, the certainty of “an unforeseeably protracted battle against a series of worldwide epidemics, as augured by HIV and AIDS” (1), and a future of Althusserian mind-control presided over by the Disney Corporation. This apparently is the best way to sell a book to Columbia these days. If I had not also recently read Michael Anderegg’s admirably sensible Orson Welles, Shakespeare and Popular Culture (Columbia, 1999), I would have concluded it was the only way. If you’re planning to submit something to Columbia, however, I’d recommend the Chicken Little approach rather than the sensible one. The odds are better, especially if you can work in a prolonged chapter on the death of Princess Diana.
Follow this method and you don’t actually have to write the book: a quick trawl through the filing cabinet and waste basket, paste pot in hand, will suffice. Dixon manages to incorporate no less than five previously published essays, most of them only tenuously connected to “the crisis of Hollywood cinema”, into 154 pages of text. One of these – the best, in fact – actually deals with British television shows from the late ’50s and early ’60s. Those parts of the book actually written for the present occasion are elaborately padded out with summaries of other people’s books: the Diana material is mostly a rehashing of Andrew Morton and Vincent Spoto plus a few errors of fact introduced by Dixon himself, such as the mis-identification of Trevor Rees-Jones, the bodyguard, as the driver of the death car (19). Elsewhere the thinnest material is extended by an unintentionally hilarious addiction to listing. The observation that “if we are now alive, we will die” (24) – hardly the sort of thing that needed to be said in the first place – introduces a list of 22 different people who not only died, but who couldn’t possibly have known how they would do it! Dixon pauses to note that the list “could continue indefinitely” (26), only to launch into another list, this one of mass murderers (whose victims also probably didn’t know how they would end up). It’s hard enough to know why Dixon decided to insult our intelligence by making the point once, but 22 times? I will charitably assume that he simply saw a blank sheet of paper in front of him and thought this would be the easiest way to fill it, since the only other available explanation is compulsive repetition disorder. I can think of no charitable explanation, however, for his editor allowing him to get away with it.
It is not easy to sort out an argument so fitfully presented and frequently interrupted by potted material as Dixon’s, but let us try. Hollywood (aka “Dominant cinema”-the pointless capital is his), driven by the motives of monopoly capitalism and reacting to a world which purportedly becomes “more and more intolerable” (47) every year – from the falling sky, the coming plagues – is compelled to make ever more violent, lurid, spectacular and mindlessly escapist films. This somehow reflects both a desire to please everybody and an enslavement to the whims of the teen-age male audience. Just as curiously, it coexists with a crisis of repetition reflected in remakes of old sitcoms and movies about the Titanic. “They” keep doing the same thing over and over while also doing something dreadfully worse. Their ability to prosper by such means foreshadows a future of universal indoctrination in which the mass audience – always in this book assumed to be neurotic, passive, stupid and death-obsessed – stares mindlessley at blood-soaked but reassuring Disney movies while the world collapses around them. All of this, in turn, is summed up in the “maudlin outpouring” (154) of media-driven grief at the death of Di. In the meantime, somewhat more modestly, the gap between commercial success and artistic achievement in Dominant cinema grows ever greater.
This is film history written by someone with no sense of history. Every banal thing he sees strikes Dixon as an innovation. Apparently, Hollywood never did remakes until recent years and celebrity culture is a new creation. In fact, every Sunday-supplement insight he presents into the Diana phenomenon – that she was a skilled manipulator who created a cult of herself, involving an illusion of romantic intimacy, and marked by a proliferation of images which, not surprisingly, outlived and finally displaced her – applies in spades to Elizabeth I. The maudlin outpouring over her death only seems new and sinister if you forget the one over Valentino’s.
The cliché content of this argument is even more striking than the tone of trumped-up melodrama. Every chapter begins with a show of theoretics, mostly from Baudrillard, that gives way after three pages to recycled biographies of Ida Lupino and Richard Carlson or elaborate demonstrations of the fact that Architectural Digest stories about movie stars’ houses glamourize the owners. (Obviously. Why else did the owners let them do the stories?) Chicken Little, in other words, keeps discovering that the sky is blue as well as falling. Dixon must be the last literate person in America who can call Hollywood “the dream factory” with a straight face and an air of discovery. He is also shocked and horrified to find that movie stars are commodities, that high-tech industries thrive on planned obsolescence, that Diana was not really a secular saint, and that the media manipulate the news. All these dog-eared revelations are the privilege of an elite who, like Dixon, teach film at the University of Nebraska or its equivalents; the general audience being media-stupid victims, happy to believe whatever fits their neuroses. Right. And how many people do you know who believe everything they see on the evening news or haven’t noticed that the promotion of CDs forced them to replace their LPs? The depth of Dixon’s contempt for the ordinary viewer emerges, for example, when he deals with Paul Verhoeven’s explanation that Starship Troopers (USA, 1997) subverts the militaristic posturing of its characters by announcing that the film’s $22m opening grosses prove that “it makes fascism chic” (9). This is, like many another example of disappointed ’60s radicalism, a deeply, nastily snobbish book, whose nastiness is intensified by its middle-aged resentment of the teenage audience who supposedly dictate the Hollywood product. Teenagers are, for Dixon, only addicts of video games, incapable of responding to anything beyond “`point and shoot’ narrative” (115). That you might actually be able to make a literate, clever film for and about them – Clueless (USA, 1995) say, or Ten Things I Hate about You (USA, 1999) – is one of the many possibilities omitted from Dixon’s version of the present state of the industry. He’s too busy denouncing Hollywood for peddling sex and violence. If Dan Quayle had read Baudrillard, this is the book he would have written.
As you may have guessed by now, this is a work assembled in the shadow of Titanic (USA, 1997). That big, dumb hulk being the most commercially successful Hollywood film to date, it must be what the whole industry was moving toward and what it must go on making. It’s what the fourteen-year old boy supposedly wants, after all. “Only a big budget blockbuster can generate real grosses at the box office” (92), says Dixon, doing his imitation of Variety forty years ago. This proposition happens, inconveniently, to be untrue, as the recent commercial success of such very different non-spectacles as The Wedding Singer (USA, 1998), Life is Beautiful (Italy, 1997), and Shakespeare in Love (USA/UK, 1998)has demonstrated. Dixon is trying to ride a wave that has already passed. The fact that this past year has also produced Bulworth (USA, 1998) Warren Beatty’s celebration of socialism, interracial sex and general rebelliousness; Pleasantville (USA, 1998), Gary Ross’s excoriation of right-wing nostalgia; and The Truman Show (USA, 1998) Peter Weir’s subversion of the media state, suggests that Dixon is equally wrong about Hollywood’s ability to stifle dissent.
Indeed, Dixon’s contention that Hollywood cinema is in terminal decline can be maintained only by the grossest sort of cheating. That fourteen-year old boy responsible for the dumbing-down must have remarkably precocious tastes: in the ’90s alone, he has supported a cycle of Jane Austen films – none of them mentioned here – followed by a cycle of Henry Jameses and now one of Shakespeare’s. In Dixon’s account of recent “Dominant cinema”, however, everything that does not fit his thesis is either rubbished – The English Patient (USA, 1996) and Schindler’s List (USA, 1993) are sneered out of consideration on a single page (7) – or marginalized – Scorsese gets three passing, dismissive mentions, Woody Allen, Piano (Aust/NZ, 1993), L.A. Confidential (USA, 1997) and Portrait of a Lady (UK/USA, 1996) one each. Wings of the Dove (USA/UK, 1997) is mentioned only so that Dixon can denounce Miramax’s promotion strategy (52). Among the directors never mentioned in this account of contemporary cinema are Kevin Smith, Richard Linklater and John Sayles; among the films are Sense and Sensibility (USA/UK, 1995), Emma (both versions), Clueless, The Age of Innocence (USA, 1993), Before Sunrise (Switzerland/Austria/US, 1995), Fargo (USA, 1996), Lone Star (USA, 1996), Dead Man Walking (USA, 1995) and Big Night (USA, 1996). That’s not carelessness, folks, that’s dishonesty.
Dixon, here and elsewhere, is totalizing what won’t stay totalized, based on generalisations that won’t stand up to a moment’s common sense. “What Hollywood seeks in its current imagistic product is the universal approval of all potential viewers” (88). Well, no, it doesn’t and it never did. Even the most commercial film selects its audience, by exclusion as well as inclusion. Titanic and James Cameron are not seeking the approval of academic film critics like Dixon or myself. Scream 2 (USA, 1997) and There’s Something About Mary (USA, 1998) target far more specific, narrowly defined audiences, just as Celebrity (USA, 1998) and Godard’s Forever Mozart (France/Switzerland, 1996) do. “Hollywood”, in fact, doesn’t seek anything; individual producers, directors, writers and studios do. For Dixon, however, Hollywood is the Borg: it’s all one big sinister organism whose members ever and always think the same thing and pursue the same grosses by the same means. That popular films might be made by individuals, some of whom are actually trying to do good work under commercial constraints, just as Shakespeare and Marlowe did, never occurs to him because he has dismissed all commercial motives as inimical to art. In his version of things, real artists are people like Jack Smith, Godard, and Derek Jarman, who is praised for “making films primarily to please himself rather than an imagined audience” (96). There is a six-letter English and Australian term for someone who does that; in Nebraska it translates as jerk-off. In any case, the claim is singularly inappropriate to Jarman, an artist who never did anything, including tend his garden, without calculating its value as political provocation.
The function of this sort of nonsense is to sustain the all too common myth of some absolute distinction between independent integrity and commercial prostitution, between art for the elite and prole food for the masses, between a sanctified version of Godard and a demonized version of Jim Cameron. Dixon reflects in a particularly virulent form, the common contempt of academic critics of this popular art for the populace that sustains it. That populace will support Casablanca (USA, 1942) and Shakespeare in Love (USA/UK, 1998) as well as Dumb and Dumber (USA,1994). In any case, not all commercial motives are easily separable from high and serious purpose. In selling his book on its link Diana, Dixon is of course participating in just the sort of morbid commercialisation he deplores.
Disaster and Memory does indeed register a crisis, but not the one Dixon claims. The enormous proliferation of film studies in recent years means that shabby, cynical books like this one will be published by formerly reputable university presses so anxious to cash in on the market that they will not impose the most basic editorial standards on anyone who appears to be saying anything remotely fashionable. If that trend continues, film studies will discredit and finally devour itself. At that point, critics like Dixon and Wood, to their grief, will have to meet the standards routinely imposed on medievalists and Victorians. And the Columbia University Press, like many others, will find that its reputation has been sold, as the saying goes, for a pot of message.
Arthur Lindley