It’s Just a Movie!: Film, Politics, and (Anti- and Over-) Intellectualism on DU

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I want to respond here to the recent controversies over the film 300. Many have denounced the film as right wing propaganda. Others have defended it as “just a movie.” I find both responses somewhat limited in their understanding of politics and film, so I want to set out some categories that might expand how we think of film, politics, and productive engagement of them.

A few provisos, first:

1) Film Politics Does not Contradict Film Enjoyment – One trend I’ve seen is the defense of a political critique of film based on the notion of enjoyment. There is no conflict between the two. One can perfectly well enjoy a film at one level and criticize its politics at another.

2) Film Politics is NOT a Denunciation of YOU, Personally – I suspect the trend listed in 1) is related to a false belief: if somebody finds a film politically dangerous, that person is insulting or denouncing those who “liked the film.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Film politics shouldn’t even be about “denouncing” the film. Rather, even the most reactionary films are productive if they spur conversation. Point 2) obviously follows logically from Point 1), since the same person can even enjoy a film and find its politics suspect.

3) Film Politics Does NOT Require One to “Read Into” Anything – I suppose some will accuse me of over-intellectualizing film. It’s a fair critique, I guess, but only at one level of analysis. Of the five categories I set out below, only one really requires any interpretive work (reading into) at all, and it is the least interesting category (the “message” of the film). Even in that category, I will admit to traces of cerebral “over-intellectualizing” a film if those who cry “It’s just a movie!” will recognize something naïve and anti-intellectual in their own approach.

4) Film Politics Has Nothing to Do With Censorship – As soon as somebody has the audacity to conduct a political critique of a film, the charge of censorship, Stalinism, or some other totalitarian approach almost inevitably follows. Let me be very clear: I would never call for film censorship, even of the most reactionary or degrading films. Analyzing the politics of film is about understanding, discussion, and action, not censorship.

5) “Big P” Politics (Democrat v. Republican) is an Impoverished Approach to Politics, and to Film – When I speak about the politics of film, I’m talking about what I’ll call “small p” politics: the fundamental organization of life, labor, and self in a society. I’m not talking about “Big P” politics (the various machinations and strategies of political parties. When we stick to “Big P” politics, we get a sort of impoverished version of analysis that limits us to the first category (film as “message”), and limits our perspective. “Big P” politics, as film analysis, can only yield “messages,” “heroes,” (those who agree with “us”) and “villains” (those who disagree with “us”). It is a silly way to watch a film, but the most common form of film politics on this board.

I think all the arguments over film and politics on these boards relate to a misunderstanding on one of these five points. That said, I want to lay out how discussions of film and politics can be productive of something other than vitriol, anti-intellectualism, and denunciation.

THE CATEGORIES OF FILM POLITICS

Film Can Be Political at the Level of “Message” – This is the most uninteresting political aspect of film. The idea here is that a film’s content is roughly equivalent to some present-day political dispute. The best example of popular film criticism at this level would be V for Vendetta, widely praised on these boards as a film with a “positive” (because subversive of power) political message. In order to get there, one must walk through a number of interpretive steps: character A = real political actor B, character C = real political actor D, event F = real political event G, etc. We apportion our heroes and villains and voila!, we have a “political” film we can live with. The controversy over 300 operates in this way as well: Sparta = the US, the Persians = Islamic extremists, etc. Such criticism depends on interpretation, or representation (X represents Y), but also largely on some attribution of authorial intention (which is why such readings are often disputed by reference to what the writers or directors had to say about the film, a remarkably uninteresting rejoinder). Never mind that V for Vendetta - despite the hoopla over its supposedly subversive “message” – is almost mind-numbingly pedestrian in its replay of the common assumptions of neo-liberalism (I learned that I should dislike fascism…wow!). See my analysis of Love Actually below in Film Can Be Political at the Level of Reproduction/Subversion of Generic Categories for more on why message is uninteresting.

Another subset of this level has to do with subject matter: a film like North Country which makes an explicit argument relating to feminism and labor is thought to be a “progressive film,” and we’re meant to celebrate it. Similarly, Crash or Babel are thought to have “progressive” themes (on racism, globalization, humanism, etc.). One rarely sees a denial of the political aspect of these types of films, primarily because such an aspect is overt, even crushingly so. But again, politics as message is – in my view – the least interesting, the weakest, political aspect of film. And yet this is where discussions of film on DU tend to live or die.

Film Can Be Political at the Level of Reproduction/Subversion of Political Categories – One reason I think the level of message is uninteresting is that it usually merely reproduces political categories (like V for Vendetta). Many films that are non-political from the vantage point of Big P politics are quite political in the way they reproduce social categories.

Romantic comedies are an obvious case in point. Regardless of whether they are designed as political affirmations of social gender relations, romantic comedies almost inevitably reproduce such relations. Now, those who consider gender relationships natural or unchangeable will obviously not accept this point (they’d be wrong, and even a modest historical or cross-cultural review of gender relationships would prove them wrong). If we consider gender relations to be reproduced, in part, through cultural artifacts, however, then the gender relationships taken up in film are largely political, in that they play a part (among other factors) in the reproduction of social relations (How do I LEARN how to be a “man”? How do I learn the relationship between “men” and “women”?).

This was one of the major discoveries of feminism and other mid-Twentieth century social movements, although it has been derided as “political correctness” by the forces of reaction (if it wasn’t political, why the outrageous backlash?). Again, few would argue that the portrayal of African Americans in film wasn’t “small p” political. Gone with the Wind isn’t “just a movie.” It carries a set of social relationships with it, whether the director wants it to or not. The same would go for Red Dawn, Die Hard, or Boys N The Hood.

Film Can Be Political at the Level of Reproduction/Transformation of Generic Categories or Structure – Let’s return to romantic comedies. Obviously, they constitute a well-formed genre that most people can identify. Anyone who doesn’t know how a romantic comedy will end probably has serious problems with pattern recognition. But as Bakhtin and others have taught us, genre isn’t merely “formal.” Rather, the repetitive structures of genre are linked to social relations. There’s always the “marriage” at the end of the romantic comedy – not because life works this way, but because these generic features meet some social need, and social needs are small p political. But some works in a particular genre violate generic conventions. These violations are political in that they ask us to view both the genre and the social relations that produced that genre differently.

To take a very mundane example (and I haven’t worked out the details), Love Actually strikes me as a politically interesting film at this level. While some would point to the “representation” of George W Bush in Billy Bob Thornton’s character, I think that is the most politically uninteresting aspect of the film. What’s interesting is its transformation of the romantic comedy genre: its multiplication of plots violates the central love plot characteristic of the genre. Needless to say, this multiplication works with the film’s theme (“Love is all around us,” i.e., it is not scarce, or individual, or linked to the major protagonists, but takes many forms and has many stages, and this itself shows up the paucity of the genre convention, which see only ONE form of love, and only ONE way for love to develop). That is the interesting political point of Love Actually, not the message nonsense of Billy Bob as Bush.

At the level of structure, a film can shake up our ordinary ways of understanding space/time and possibility. What if we don’t think in narrative, but think rather in terms of connectivity and repetition? This is a fundamental political question that touches on our ability, for example, to think through ecological questions like global warming. Films like Run, Lola, Run or Memento force us to examine the narrative tendencies of our thought, and are thus political at this level.

Film Can Be Political at the Level of its Aesthetic Organization/ Perceptive Transformation – Now we’re into “real” film criticism. People often forget that the aesthetics of film – film’s aesthetic technique – is itself political. Much of the advances in cinematic technique, of course, came out of Soviet Russia (Vertov, Eisenstein), and aesthetic organization itself was thought to be political in the first instance. Eisenstein’s writings on the politics of montage, for example, are all about its politics, taken broadly. Or consider Deleuze’s readings of film: the center of perception removed from the locus of the human (Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera is a key example here), a virtual Copernican revolution in the way we think of perception. One might read Steven Shaviro’s arguments about affect in film (Blue Thunder, if one can believe it): here, we’re not looking at “content” as message, but rather at “form” as a political operator. The three second cut is political, as is the panning shot from on high. They both imply a means of perception that has political implications and subjective effects.
Rather than focusing on the message of 300, then, we might ask questions about the political heft of its aesthetic techniques. We need not rely on the author’s intention for such a discussion. The questions would be directed, rather, at the politics of green screen and SGI: what is the configuration of human and machine implied by such techniques? How do such techniques enjoin us to perceive things (technology, subjectivity, vision, power, the relation between different forms of labor in society)? Are we enjoined to perceive in a standard or non-standard way? These questions are – to me – political questions (Eisenstein is quite right about this, I think), not in the “agree/disagree” or “Democrat/Republican” way, but in the way they address the organization of life in a society: small “p” politics.

Film Can Be Political at the Level of the Mode of Production – Certainly, the Frankfurt School (particularly Theodor Adorno and Max Horkeimer) was all over this question with respect to the studio system, and much film criticism went precisely to this point. How is a film made? What are the productive forces and the relations of production that make up something like a film industry? What are the relationships between the film industry and, say, banking or finance capital? We apparently believe that these are crucial questions with respect to television, but beside the point when it comes to film. And yet they’ve become even more important as the culture industry meets its own limits, and as nearly every film I see today begins with some industry propaganda against so-called “piracy.” Big budget studio films are just as political as small independent films in terms of the mode of production. It may be “just a movie,” but its also a commodity, taking the commodity form in ever more outrageous and flagrant ways, and this is of the essence of small p politics.

I know I’ve been long-winded here. I apologize for that. I think this is an important question for a political message board, and so I felt the need to categorize fairly precisely. That said, my categories are suggestive rather than exclusive; I expect that there are many other ways that a film can be political: almost every film ever made is political in one of these ways. Does this mean you shouldn’t enjoy a film? No, of course not. Hell, I like Die Hard, which at a number of levels is a remarkably reactionary film. It’s not about YOU. I mean only to suggest that saying “It’s only a movie” is not a particularly productive response. Yes, I know, Freud said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar (That would be a useful response to the first category I mentioned, for it is the only one that requires something like a Freudian interpretation). I’m not saying a cigar is something else. Quite the opposite. I’m saying that one need not default to an interpretive mode to see the politics in film. Nor should one default to the mode of pure “enjoyment” to rebut those who seek to discuss such questions.