Plots Against Late Liberalism

In my teaching I have found myself spending much more time than expected on demystifying the ins and outs of the Hollywood continuity system, and Hollywood narrative logics as outlined by David Bordwell about a half century (!) ago, just to be able to begin talking about the transformations to film form that we are seeing beneath all the “post-cinema” stuff. We have to know what Hollywood was before we can even begin to suggest things are any different now.

Recently, I was asked to contribute a piece to George Washington University’s Illiberalism Studies program’s new project, “Frontiers of American Reaction,” on the cultural effects of neoliberalism in crisis. I decided to put something together combining precisely both of these worlds! Check it out here.

While some film scholars such as David Bordwell have argued Hollywood’s narrative and visual “rules” adhere to classical narrative logics that run through Ancient Greek theater to the present, others, such as Noël Burch, have argued that narrative film’s formal “rules” of construction can be seen as the products of an emerging late nineteenth to early twentieth century liberal, capitalist industrial society mediating an ideologically coherent world for an Americanizing labor force that included large numbers of European immigrants from countries with their own film industries. We typically imagine Hollywood narrative films to have psychologically defined individual protagonists who offer us something like a helping hand into the narrative world of the film, and that this protagonist’s “looks” are mediated through the camera’s own—which must act as a “silent, invisible observer.” What to do, then, when audiences made up of diverse immigrant laborers in New York City were watching prints that had come to America from Italy, identifying with that film’s “Old World” address and not integrating their social and psychological lives into industrial modernity’s emerging American labor force? One tactic was to work to ban foreign imports, as Richard Abel has outlined, which served to “universalize” the address of the films that made up Hollywood’s emerging monopoly over the cinema industry (of course with all the problems that selective universalization entailed).

But today this political economic system is in crisis. We no longer live in its earlier period of industrial growth with an emergent new media technology such as cinema; privatization, precarity, and digital technologies have replaced those earlier historical phenomena as a means by which to continue the ever-declining profit machine. But this is not merely an economic shift. Our culture is one dominated by social media screens and targeted advertisements instead of the novelistic and theatrical narratives that came out of nineteenth-century bourgeois society, and our art reflects this. Rather than asking if these films “know” what they are doing with their confused narratives, constant extension with sequels and inconclusive “endings,” maybe we could read them as reflections of similar transformations underway in our post-industrial societies?