Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective

Marguerite H. Rippy,
Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2009
US$35.00 (pb)
223pp
(Review copy supplied by Southern Illinois University Press)

Marguerite H. Rippy’s book on Orson Welles offers a provocative, ground-breaking, and occasionally scattered exploration of Welles’s construction as a ‘star director’ and the significance of this cultural-textual project to a variety of modern and postmodern aspects of twentieth-century media. While Rippy explicitly sets out to privilege the ‘postmodern perspective’, her book ultimately succeeds in a broader project that integrates an array of extra-diegetic and intra-diegetic concerns, some fundamentally postmodern and others perhaps not.

In spite of the title of the book, Rippy does not so much privilege the postmodern as she arrives at the postmodern over the course of four body chapters, followed by a calculated postmodern twist: an afterword on Mel Gibson, Steven Spielberg, and Stephen Colbert as recent commercial examples of characteristics she has associated with Welles. Early chapters on the “First-Person Singular” and “Classics for the Masses” move into a chapter on “Primitivism and the Identity Detour” that casts Welles more convincingly as a modernist than as a postmodernist. Therefore, some readers might find the “Postmodern Perspective” lacking in Rippy’s book; indeed, there are times when the postmodern element seems a provocative convenience for positioning Rippy’s book in an already large body of Welles criticism, whereas in other moments I wonder how much the postmodern perspective allows for the calculated rhetorical strategies by which Welles was positioned as “star director.”

Rippy’s introduction suggests that, faced with this criticism, she might counter-argue that it is precisely her emphasis on Welles as ‘star director’ that makes this perspective postmodern. Rippy explains:

I find the term star director more useful than auteur to emphasize the director’s commercial connection to a work while avoiding the tendency to assign the director sole artistic authority. Performance texts are by nature deeply collaborative and flexible, and the star director, like a star actor, is a vehicle to market the work more than he or she is a representation of sole authorship. (pp. 3-4)

While I can appreciate the purpose of this choice as anti-modernist, especially insofar as Rippy challenges the special privilege modernism affords ‘art’ and ‘the artist’, I wonder if embedding these cultural materialist implications of her approach in the term ‘postmodernism’ fully allows for the willful rhetorical agencies she eventually reveals to be part of the construction of star director Orson Welles. More convincing is Rippy’s use of the postmodern perspective to explore the unfinished nature of most of Welles’s works, which allows Rippy to set aside speculative questions about what “Welles intended” in favor of “the postmodern aspects of Welles’s unfinished work as a rich field for cultural analysis in and of themselves” (p. 3).

In fact, as a study of a director, Rippy’s book succeeds admirably in closely reading extra-diegetic elements of production history alongside intra-diegetic elements of unfinished works, and in this respect her work rivals and discursively engages with other excellent Welles criticism like James Naremore’s The Magic World of Orson Welles (1989) and Robert Stam’s Literature through Film (2004) insofar as Rippy, like Naremore and Stam, combines close attention to the films with theoretical intelligence about the multiple media influenced by, and influencing, Welles’s legacy. Rippy also acknowledges her place in this multi-media conversation about Welles by frequently incorporating ideas from Naremore’s work, Anderegg’s book on Welles and Shakespeare (1999), Benamou’s reading of It’s All True and international politics (2007), essays from Beja’s book on Welles (1995), and foundational work on Welles, ranging from Rosenbaum (1992) to McBride (2006), making it clear that the most fruitful way to approach Welles is to embrace him as both a creative talent and evolving ‘commercial brand’ crossing multiple media with implications artistic, commercial, political, and cultural.

The breadth of this approach leads Rippy into some interesting digressions but also into some inarguably relevant discussions – and I would argue that even the loosest of the many threads of Rippy’s book are well worth pursuing. The strain of the breadth is perhaps felt in the book’s weakest structural/rhetorical move, the devotion of seven pages of the book’s introduction to outlining the chapters, but Rippy guides the reader through the movement across these chapters by way of four interconnected, and I think important, features of Welles’s work: “experimentation with a first-person narrator, adaptation of classic texts for mass media, recurrent use of images from modernist primitivism, and finally exploration of the line between fiction and reality” (p. 18). In application, Rippy’s first body chapter illustrates tense reconciliations of the collaborative nature of the Mercury Theater and film production with Welles’s populism and with the “first-person singular” approach by which Welles not only told stories but also established himself as “a commodity” (p. 23). Her second body chapter shows how “Welles bought his way into Hollywood with his adaptations [of classics, and then] bought his way back out again […] with his commitment to creating himself as a [controversial and innovative] brand” (p. 67). Her third body chapter interrogates vexed intersections of commerce, modernism, and self as they affect Welles’s “modernist fascination with the primitive as a means of self-expression, coupled with a tentative embrace of populist politics and self-critique” (p. 106). And her fourth (and most postmodern) body chapter analyzes Welles’s ambitious multi-generic foray into mediated reality with his early forties project It’s All True, wherein, among her many other insights, Rippy reveals how the univocal aspects of Welles’s brand strained to come to terms with the polyvocal implications of his infamous South American project (pp. 134-135), and all of this amid geopolitical and commercial considerations not always consistent with Welles’s ambitions.

Rippy’s afterword deals with Mel Gibson’s filmed Christ project, which Welles and others have attempted; Steven Spielberg’s successful self-marketing as star director and unsuccessful film version of War of the Worlds (USA 2005); and Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s debts to Welles for the ‘truthiness’ of their fake news. While some readers will find the afterword’s subject-matter digressive, perhaps preferring more discussion of Welles’s own later works, Rippy stays true here to her progression towards postmodern concerns and her related emphasis on the construction of star directors, limiting most of her specific discussion of Welles to RKO, as her title suggests.

Ultimately, Rippy’s Orson Welles and the Unfinished Projects: A Postmodern Perspective honors the best criticism on Welles and breaks new ground. The breadth of the book’s reach sometimes makes it challenging for the reader, but the complexity of Rippy’s book adequately reflects the complexity of Welles’s artistry and image, avoiding the reductive pitfalls of the most facile auteur criticism while opening doors for future discussions of Welles as commodity and as artist. If one criterion by which we judge criticism is the applicability of approach to subject, Rippy has succeeded admirably. If our criteria also include the quality of questions raised, Rippy’s book is equally successful, as I think we will be exploring the threads of her argument for some time. I find the ‘postmodern’ label too narrow for the breadth of Rippy’s apparent purpose, and the ambition of Rippy’s project may not encourage neat execution. This criticism notwithstanding, Rippy’s book raises provocative questions about the legacy and artistry of one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century media, and I recommend her book to anyone serious about Welles, film authorship, and the construction of the celebrity artist.

Matt Wanat,
Ohio.

Created on: Sunday, 18 April 2010

About the Author

Matt Wanat

About the Author


Matt Wanat

Matt Wanat is an Assistant Professor of English at Ohio University Lancaster, where he teaches and researches 20th century American literature and cinema.View all posts by Matt Wanat →