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Sontag’s anti-intellectualism, her argument “against interpretation,” was itself intellectual. After all, she championed the avant-garde directors of her time—Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, and François Truffaut—who were certainly intellectuals in their own right (Godard consistently flashed written words on the screen to explain theories, and Resnais taught literature before going into film). The founding principle of the French “New Wave”—the director as auteur—asserted movie-making as an intellectual act. Even Sontag tried making films (by most accounts, not very successfully).
Sontag’s cinematic enthusiasm withered as the twentieth century wore on. Writing her last essay about “cinema” in 1995, Sontag declared an “ignominious, irreversible decline” in films. “Ordinary films,” she believed, would continue to be “astonishingly witless,” “bloated,” and “derivative.” “Wonderful films” could still be made, she admitted. But lost forever was a “cinephelic love of movies,” that self-educated and intellectual element within filmmaking and viewing she could never quite give up on, even if it was now deemed “quaint, outmoded, snobbish.”
Who could disagree with Sontag? The “television generation” has managed to lower the standards of movies to unfathomable depths. What could be more derivative than a film version of such sitcoms as The Dukes of Hazzard or Starsky and Hutch? We’re beyond an “irreversible decline.” And yet, people continue to make movies. Today there are even some young intellectuals, grounding themselves in the “cinephelic,” who believe movies should convey emotion and challenge viewers. They too have the same enemy that Sontag spotted in 1995: a corporate Hollywood that expects all films to be made via assembly line and then submitted to focus groups. They are struggling to preserve a personal voice in a world of mass formulas.
THEY ALSO HAVE a new enemy that developed at the time of Sontag’s writing. It’s called “independent” film, and any cultural historian will easily identify its contours. They consist of the Sundance Film Festival, now known for celebrity-spotting as much as serious film-watching; the Independent Film Channel; and Miramax studios. As with so much else in postmodern culture, “Indiewood,” as one journalist called it, is a subculture industry—marketing to a segmented audience that wants to feel it’s receiving more serious fare than what Hollywood offers.
As witnessed by Disney’s 1993 buyout of Miramax, the idea of being “independent” has changed. It’s no longer about the source of money or a director’s stance against industry titans; it’s now a matter purely of style (much like what happened in rock with the rise of “alternative music”). By the time Sontag declared cinema dead, “independent film” was everywhere. Films started to seem more quirky, less formulaic, and more willing to tackle strange themes. There were even some thoughtful directors like Hal Hartley and Allison Anders (at least in their earlier films) who created films still worth watching today. But generally, clichés and sub-formulas began to dominate.
The first cliché of independent film is an inheritance from the original avant-garde at the turn of the century: épater les bourgeois. Shocking the audience became the heroic and daring act of so many “independent” films of the 1990s. It was a juvenile version of shock, and it came in a day and age when the bourgeoisie is fairly shock-proof. The master of it was Quentin Tarantino, whose Reservoir Dogs (1992) set a new low in filmmaking, with its excruciating violence mixed with ironic and hip commentary by jaded characters. Viewers watched ears get sliced off and gun battles produce pools of blood. A formula had been found, and Tarantino trotted it out over and over, most famously in his break-big film Pulp Fiction (1994), with its memorable scene of a syringe full of adrenaline stabbed into a woman’s chest.
Another way to épater les bourgeois is to expose the twisted soul lurking just below happy-looking, suburban America. Todd Solondz mastered this narrative form in Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), with its tale of loser suburban kids trying to wreak revenge on popular kids, but more so in Happiness (1998), with its serial child-rapist, always-smiling father. In his latest film, Palindromes (2004), Solondz told a story of a girl growing up in the suburbs who breaks with her mother in order to have a baby at a young age. Perhaps realizing that shock goes only so far, Solondz resorted to trickery, having different actresses (some old, some young, some African American, some white) play the main character in order to throw the viewer off.
It’s really the exhaustion of shock in today’s postmodern audience that defines the most important cliché of “independent” film—hipster irony. Independent films commonly present a world of sullen characters thrown into quirky, out-of-control situations. Characters make deadpan references to pop culture or the absurdity of life, embracing an oddball, despondent style. Because characters appear to lack an emotional core, nothing matters. This hipster irony played itself out in a whole slew of “independent” films during the 1990s, including Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991), Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994), and the more intelligent fare provided by Whit Stillman (Metropolitan [1990] among others). Typically, these films seem, at least at first appearance, more intellectually sophisticated (the way Tarantino’s later films like Kill Bill 2 don’t).
The king of this formula is Wes Anderson, a thirty-something director quickly rising to stardom. He has made some interesting films, if interesting means outside the Hollywood mainstream: Rushmore (1998), about a boy chafing at the limits of his private school while falling in love with his teacher; Bottle Rocket (1996), about a botched heist led by a character whose absurdities are balanced by his seeming sadness; and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), about a wealthy family disintegrating. All of them showed promise and intelligence. He also seemed something of a “cinephile,” insisting on making his latest movie, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), in Italy at the famed Cinecittà Studios, where Federico Fellini made so many of his.
The Life Aquatic tells the tale of a Jacques Cousteau-like figure, Zissou, played by Bill Murray, who, at middle-age, embarks on making a documentary film about seeking revenge against a jaguar shark that has killed his friend. Along the way, he meets someone who may be his son and a young reporter who plans to write a critical piece about him.
As with other Anderson fare, it’s easy to see in it a critique of adult life and its “phoniness” (to use Salinger’s phrase). Zissou appears as a fallen idol to his possible son. Sunk in the zaniness of the film—which includes shoot-outs set to edgy music and a rescue caper at the end—is a tale of an estranged father and son. But whatever emotional potential the film has is quickly short-circuited by its deadpan irony. “I’m right on the edge,” Murray intones at an uncomfortable moment, but we can’t believe him because the line’s delivered with such seeming indifference. The film heightens its detachment by telling the story of a documentary, and the characters are so droll that they keep all emotions at bay.
ANDERSON DECIDED to co-write this film with Noah Baumbach, and Baumbach’s own forays into film suggest a glimmer of hope, maybe even an alternative to Anderson’s (and independent film’s) hipster irony. Baumbach has his own hipster tendencies (his help on The Life Aquatic is testimony), but more recently, he has balanced them against an appreciation for both emotion and intellect. Consider also his pedigree. He certainly appreciates the “cinephilic,” citing Louis Malle and Truffaut as influences and referencing Godard in his latest film. Baumbach’s parents were film critics, his father for Partisan Review and his mother for the Village Voice.
Nonetheless, Baumbach’s start was inauspicious; the clichés of independent film litter his earliest movies. His first, Kicking and Screaming (1995), fit the hip ironist formula, following a set of recent college graduates making droll jokes about literature and philosophy, while drinking and postponing adult commitments. Still, there were signs of budding intelligence and an emotional honesty about the central love story. Baumbach followed up with Mr. Jealousy (1997), which focused on a character entering group therapy with his girlfriend’s ex-lover. At moments, the characters almost broke out of their otherwise stereotyped, perpetually neurotic condition. Baumbach’s next film, Highball (1997), was made haphazardly and focused on a set of Park Slope parties where young adults mostly zing one another with insults. He later took his name off the credits.
After Highball, Baumbach seemed to hibernate for about seven years, returning with his efforts on The Life Aquatic and, more important, his own film, The Squid and the Whale (2005), which focuses on a divorce in progress and its impact on two young boys. The two films could not contrast more nicely. Whereas emotions are suppressed below a veneer of irony in The Life Aquatic, they are on full display in The Squid and the Whale. And while The Life Aquatic reveled in surreal zaniness, the newer film was realistic—almost a period piece about the 1980s and a Brooklyn neighborhood.
Baumbach still employs humor. At one point, the younger son, Frank, tells his father that he wants to become a “philistine,” and the elder son, Walt, makes pompous comments about literature he’s never read (Kafka’s writing, he explains to his first girlfriend, is “Kafka-esque”). At times, the characters are stereotypical: the bullying literary father or the nervous boy who parrots his father’s opinions.
But none of this covers up the pain captured in the story of divorce and the desire of the parents often to gloss over the damage being done (“Don’t most of your friends have divorced parents?” the mother asks Walt coldly at one point). Irony fails in this movie, because the camera captures the authentic emotions of people recoiling from one another’s shabby treatment. Pain is seen when Frank screams at his father or drinks himself into oblivion (he’s twelve). Perhaps most evocatively, it’s seen in a therapist’s office when Walt is stumped by a query about a happy memory from his childhood. The camera fixates on Walt’s expression and look of oblivion. At this point in the film I recalled Sontag’s argument that cinema provided “a way of talking about emotion through the direct experience of the language of faces and gestures.”
Nor does the film reach for cheap redemption, a formula so prevalent in Hollywood and even “independent” fare. Baumbach told an interviewer that this was a consistent complaint from potential producers, who wanted a happy ending. He resists redemption even when, toward the end of the film, Walt frantically tries to recapture fond memories of his childhood. Though Walt accesses a key memory (which also serves as the film’s title), this act cannot overcome the pain of the present, and the audience knows that.
When asked why he had made the movie, Baumbach told the New York Times Magazine, “I grew up in the heat of 70’s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or ‘meta’ in art. My film is emotional rather than meta, and that’s my rebellion.” Though it’s too early to tell whether the postmodern and hipster irony in his earlier films will swallow up this rebellion, Baumbach seems to be approaching Sontag’s original optimism about film.
Baumbach’s latest film has reached the larger theaters. It’s in the realm of the truly low-budget (and therefore truly independent) film that we find another director struggling to merge intellect, emotions, and a personal voice. His name is Andrew Bujalski, and he now has made two films, Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation—and also published an essay about independent film in n + 1, the new magazine that hopes to be Partisan Review revived (one of the magazine’s editors makes a cameo appearance in Bujalski’s second film). In his essay, Bujalski pronounced his director-hero to be John Cassavetes.
It’s a smart choice. Cassavetes was the most important inheritor of the New Wave tradition in America. He made films that put raw emotion on the screen by placing his characters in difficult situations, watching as their lives disintegrate. In his most famous film, A Woman Under the Influence (1974), he portrayed a mother’s nervous breakdown and its impact on a fragile family headed by a working-class father. In Opening Night (1977), Cassavetes depicted a middle-aged actress trying to preserve her artistic and emotional integrity while acting in a play that stereotyped middle-aged women as washed up.
Bujalski emulates his mentor by turning his camera on a set of young amateur actors who grapple with romance and work. His first and best film, Funny Ha Ha (2002), focuses on twenty-something Marnie, who struggles with meaningless temp jobs while trying to manage a bad relationship with an annoying young man named Alex. She consistently fails in her ventures, and the camera follows her awkward phone conversations with Alex and her misplaced passes at other potential boyfriends. It is tightly focused on the characters’ faces and thus registers emotional tension. Bujalski, too, remains honest by refusing redemption. The final scene focuses on Marnie and Alex (now married to another woman) talking in a park. It cuts off midway through their conversation, leaving the viewer with the sense that closure is impossible.
Bujalski followed up with Mutual Appreciation (2005), which tells the story of Alan, a young musician trying to make it in the music world and struggling with romance. Though not as accomplished as Funny Ha Ha, it still throws characters into difficult situations, showing young people making mistakes and struggling to connect with one another. Bujalski’s characters sometimes appear “hip” and ironic, but for the most part they seem vulnerable in ways that are missing from Hollywood and Indiewood offerings.
I WOULD BE remiss to suggest the power of films like Funny Ha Ha and The Squid and the Whale without discussing their provincialism. Both Bujalski and Baumbach focus on the young and overeducated. There’s an alarming moment in Mutual Appreciation—the lead character’s father calls to bug him about credit card debt—when the lives of floating indeterminacy that the film portrays suddenly seem hollow. (I had a similar reaction to Benjamin Kunkel’s novel Indecision, with its prep school kids floating around the globe with few limitations.) It’s not that Bujalski or Baumbach should make movies about the working class, but their characters often seem much too free of the concrete pressures of ordinary life.
Even with this problem, both Baumbach and Bujalski deserve respect as intellectuals trying to use film as a means to convey emotional truths. They have pushed beyond the clichés of “independent” film and have returned to the purpose that Sontag set out years ago and that Cassavetes tried to capture in his movies. And this matters more than might at first appear. The quality of films being made today tells us something about the quality of American culture. When mainstream and independent films become formulaic, our culture suffers. When our writers and artists seem unable to deal honestly with emotional subject matter, young people especially are cast adrift in a sea of irony.
It would be going too far to say that Baumbach and Bujalski can save American film from its Sontagian fate. They are too young, and there is only a glimmer of promise in what they’ve done so far (and Baumbach’s commitments are hard to read). Our standards have sunk so low that practically anything with a bit of authenticity becomes the next big thing Therefore, it’s dangerous for a critic to read too much into what might be short-lived promise. Nonetheless, these directors should be watched. They are trying, against all odds, to find a human voice that can take film out of its most recent traps. In the end, that is more than can be said for most everything else in film today.
