Everything used to be so much better. . . :

~Reflections on how nostalgia colours evaluative judgements in film reviews~

 3.  THE INFLUENCE OF THE CULT PHENOMENON

”For it stages the powers of Narrativity before art intervenes to tame it” (Eco 1987:208)

The above quote is culled from Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality and refers to the movie Casablanca. According to Eco, Casablanca qualifies as a cult film because”it is not one movie. It is ’movies’. And this is the reason it works, in defiance of any aesthetic theory” (s. 208). It is ‘film’ as expression in its purest form, before art intervenes to tame it.  

With one foot firmly planted in the proppian-russian formalism, Eco essays a symphonic deconstruction of the film’s paradigmatic structure, in search for the universal features that define a ”cult film”. He proposes a set of conditions that have to be present, in that the movie has to be loved, it has to offer a completely furnished world and one has to be able to unhinge it from itself in time and space (p. 198). It also has to contain a ”magic frame”: 

Let me define as ’magic ‘ those frames that, when they appear in a movie and can be separated from the whole, transform this movie into a cult object. In Casablanca, we find more intertextual frames than “magic” intertextual frames. I will call the latter intertextual archetypes” (s. 200) 

“Intertextual archetypes” simply refer to the stereotypical situations or characters that provoke a sense of déjà vu with the audience. Instrumental in this process is the audience’s capability to fill in “gaps” in the composition,” the fascination /…/ to the imperfection of its composition” (s. 201). 

This, obviously, means that the clichées are celebrated – paradoxically as carriers of quality! Certain elements in the composition – whether they’re clichéed or original – will operate as qualities in and of themselves, unhinged from the total sum of the given work’s merits, because the critic nostalgically identifies with them. 

One of these elements is the musical score, perhaps the most underrated of all music genres, relentlessly dismissed in any Norwegian film review – probably because it is supposed to work on an unconscious level and influences the final judgement without the critic being aware of it. The music can “iconize” a certain scene or an entire movie. Bernard Herrmann’s groaning strings in Citizen Kane, signalling the protagonist’s futile hope for happiness. The same composer’s razor sharp violin shrieks in Psycho. Dimitri Tiomkin’s Russian steppe-music for the American prairie in High Noon (including the highly successful title song). John Williams’ Korngold-inspired symphony for Star Wars based on wagnerian leitmotif-technique. Max Steiner’s ”Tara’s Theme”, a romantic clichée bomb that almost blows you off the ground in Gone With The Wind. Alex North’s sly jazz-romance in A Streetcar Named Desire. Williams’ pulsating heartbeeps in Jaws. Ennio Morricone’s whistling ”lonely cowboy”-orchestration in For a Few Dollars More. Jerry Goldsmith’s brass-version of the same concept in First Blood. Examples are flourishing. The music becomes film-historical tags that – often unconsiously – turns the movie into a cult classic it would otherwise not have become. 

Another element is the dialogue. How many have you not heard saying that their only relationship to a given movie is immortal one-liners such as”Play it again, Sam” (Casablanca), ”I’ll be back!” (Terminator), ”Are ya lookin’ at me?” (Taxi Driver), ”I guess we’re not in Kansas anymore” (The Wizard of Oz), ”May the Force be with You!” (Star Wars), ”I admire its purity” (Alien), ”What we have here is a failure to communicate” (Cool Hand Luke), “Heeeere’s Johnny!” (The Shining), “E.T. Phone Home” (E.T.), “If I hadn’t been rich, I could have been a really great man” (Citizen Kane), “I am not an animal!” (Spartacus) and so forth?  A simple punchline is promoted to the “core” of the film, and represents an entire semiotic structure. The film is ”iconized”. 

A third element is the acting style. Each era has its own acting style. In 30’s Hollywood, connected dialogue, few pauses and small variations of intonation constituted the standard, whether the genre was film noir, western or love drama. German expressionism sought the power in oversized, exaggerated expressions. The psycho-literary adaptations of the 60’s or the italian neo-realism of the preceding decade emphasized an intense, yet subdued acting style à la Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. The experimentation of the 70’s often resulted in a complete absence of acting style altogether, in which the actor was subjected to an ”Übermarionette”-director, to use Gordon Craig’s theater terminology (example: Michelangelo Antonioni). The ”Cultification”  arises in this case as a result of how the acting style in question resonates within each audience member. 

These are just some of the elements that would have to be analyzed, should the film be labeled a ”cult phenomenon”. The fact that just a few films within a certain genre attain this dubious honour, is – except a given, time-specific “public mentality” – based on a combination of audience nostalgia and the filmmaker’s particular orchestration of elements; the filmmaker’s “recipe”. The film that offers the purest form of “element-combination” – the archetypical combination – usually also attains cult status: 

When all the archetypes burst out shamlessly, we plumb Homeric profundity. Two clichés make us laugh, but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion (Eco 1987: 209) 

Does this mean that we unconsciously sense a perverse attraction towards the poor; a sort of ”trash mentality”? 

Maybe. But Pauline Kael feels that we, in that case, have nothing to be ashamed of, because ”perhaps the single most intense pleasure of movie-going is [the] non-esthetic one of escaping from the responsibilities of having the proper responses required of us in our official (school) culture” (Kael 1970: 126) and later “The pleasures of this kind of trash are not intellectually defensible. But why should pleasure need justification?” (s. 142). 

A film that really got to feel how it was to wade through a well-established ”cult” was Star Wars: The Phantom Menace from 1999, George Lucas’ prequel to his own famous science fiction-trilogy from 1977, 80 and 83, respectively. The first film inevitably developed into a social phenomenon without precedence. In the online article ”Star Wars vs. Expectations: The Paradox Menace” (Haga, 2000), I wrote the following: 

It is a known fact that the film, for some reason and totally unexpected for the producers, transcended the basic film medium and became a phenomenon altogether. It was as if a decade of sociorealistic psychodramas finally woke a public hunger for adventure and fantasy - a hunger that hadn't been as intense since the appeal of musicals in [the depression years of] Hollywood's Golden Era. 

Much of the secret was hidden in Lucas’ recipe: 

…It obviously hit a nerve, a "socio-emotional" core  by utilizing simple means /…/ Coupling his own, imaginary universe - his artistic vision - with influences such as Kurosawa and the Flash Gordon comic books, Lucas came up with a tale of simple themes - the everlasting concept of good versus evil, of yin and yang, of lost innocence and of freudian trap doors of the subconscious. 

The establishing of a following ”cult” would inevitably meet a new installment with scepticism:

…The ones who first connected to and fell in love with the initial film and trilogy,  [were] not exactly unbiased film critics when The Phantom Menace premiered more than 20 years later. Obviously, these former Star Wars children/teenagers expected (perhaps unconsciously, since many did not admit it) that they would experience the same kind of thing today, disregarding both the fact that they had grown older and that their memory of that experience from the past also  had been "enhanced" over time /…/ When socalled connaiseurs claim that the well known formulae of Star Wars 1977 (sic), is somewhat different and altered for this prequel; that the characters weren't as well rounded as in the first one or whatever, that is simply due to the fact that the characters in the first film are so strongly printed into the public mentality, that they have become stereotypes or household references.

It goes without saying that such a powerful vox populi not only resonates within the four walls of the cult, but also reaches and influences the critics in their isolated ivory towers. Although a critic may recognize flaws that have to do with the four, abovementioned criteria, the film’s simple status as a cult phenomenon somehow testifies to a communicative power, that in turn becomes a quality in and of itself. The film’s social impact, partically created by future nostalgia, drowns the political, cognitive, genetic or esthetic criteria of quality. 

REFERENCES:

* Eco, Umberto

Travels in Hyperreality (Picador, 1987): “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage”

 * Haga, Thor Joachim

Star Wars vs. Expectations: The Paradox Menace (2000), Celluloid Tunes [online],

 * Jørgensen, John Chr.

            Dagbladskritikeren (Fisker & Schou, 1994)

 * Kael, Pauline

            Going Steady (1970): ”Trash, Art, and the Movies”

 * Reviews of The Exorcist:

            Cocks, Jay : “Beat the Devil” (Time, 01.14.1974)

            Ebert, Roger: “The Exorcist (2000 version)” (The Chicago Sun Times, 09.22.2000)

            Gravdal, Bjørn: ”Djevelen annamme!!!” (Arbeiderbladet, 11.30.1977)

            Jørgensen, Liv: ”Mer djevel for pengene”  (Dagbladet, 01.11.2001)

            Jørgensen, Liv: ”Satan på barnerommet” (Dagbladet, 01.11.2001)

            Kael, Pauline: “The Exorcist” (The New Yorker, 01.07.1974)

            Lorentzen, Trude (Aftenposten Aften, 11.12.2001)

            Lumenick, Lou: “It still scares the devil out of us” (The New York Post, no date - 2000)

            Wloszczyna, Susan: “The Exorcist: True evil endures” (USA Today, 09.25.2000)