Your Reference I Am Getting

Richard Poplak's The Sheikh's Batmobile, a very cool new book tracing how American pop culture has infiltrated the Muslim world, argues mass cultural product—rather than destroying the indigenous and increasingly rare—helps bring otherwise at-odds people together on a new plane of understanding, normalizing pluralistic values where that idea's unheard of. Poplak writes of Afghanistani bodybuilders training under watchful Arnold Schwarzenegger cut-outs and United Arab Emirates oil millionaires with too much money paying for custom-made Batmobiles. The argument goes all kinds of places (it's a compelling work of occasionally danger-baiting on-the-ground journalism) that raises an inadvertent point: Hollywood is very good at producing accidentally iconographic work, and very bad at taking account of the ways it affects people. They conquer mental space then don't acknowledge that.

Acknowledgment doesn't mean the simple act of references for their own sake, the more obscure the better (discussed by Noel Murray earlier this year), nor scenes of people watching/listening to cultural product, nor spoofs, pastiches and the kinds of obsessive Quentin Tarantino homages paying tribute to his misspent youth. What's missing is the really fascinating stuff: what happens when a movie becomes appropriated and fetishized for reasons that couldn't have possibly occurred to the originators, mutating way beyond original money-making intent.

Obviously, making a movie featuring a character significantly warped by a different movie is a specialized and rather thankless task, one counter-intuitively better suited to foreign arthouse films rather than other Hollywood fare. A more-thought-out-than-usual mainstream example in recent years is in the recent Zac Efron vehicle 17 Again, when dweeby Ned Gold (Thomas Lennon) manages to win over foxy high school principal Jane Masterson (Melora Hardin) by revealing his casual mastery of Elvish; the two banter and mate over Lord of the Rings geekery. Maybe it's a mildly clever joke about overly obsessive fans (even if it seems like a stale rehash of two decades' worth of jokes about nerds learning Klingon), but it's hard not to remember that 17 Again, like the LOTR films, is the product of New Line Cinema; what sounds like a vaguely plausible character fixation is really corporate synergy, in-house product placement for one of the most visible cultural behemoths of the last decade.

A more sincere example of a personal movie fixation that really transforms said object is what E.T. does to The Quiet Man. John Ford's 1952 film is by no means obscure; it has John Wayne and was one of the year's top ten grossers. Still, the blarney-tinged Irish romance isn't what most people first associate with the Duke, and certainly not nearly as many people saw that as would end up embracing E.T. There, the alien's viewing of the big kissing scene moves him, his telepathic link forcing young Eliot to finally kiss the girl; any other movie with an epic moment of elemental romance would serve the same function, really. It's the very specificity of the reference, the lovingly detailed intercutting between cinematic past and present that seems to have believably taken up psychic space in Spielberg's cranium for the prior 30 years, making it more than a cute gag.

But most references are superficial at best. To really delve into this stuff we have to turn abroad, which makes sense: it’s the smallest films that have the most room to reckon with details Hollywood ignores. Studio blockbusters include flavor-of-the-moment songs because they can package them as a soundtrack, and rarely use film clips except for texture; references are jokes. (Also, clearing rights sucks.) Not so in 2008's Tony Manero [link: our podcast with director Pablo Larrain], whose deranged protagonist completely misses the point of Saturday Night Fever, that except for his dancing-floor nights, John Travolta's lower-class life is a slog, with limited prospects of the British Angry Young Man kind and no relief in sight. For Tony Manero's sociopathic antihero, though, Travolta must obviously be living in a gold-rush boomtime compared to Pinochet's Chile. It's a staggering act of incomprehension, using pop culture as a survival mechanism that no one involved in the actual film could anticipate, and it tells us more about how the film might've worked abroad than any DVD supplement could.

A less obtrusive but equally interesting example, from 2005: in Le Petit Lieutenant—a meticulous, drama-free portrait of disillusioned policework in contemporary France—the station is decorated wall to wall with massive posters for crime movies both French (Un Flic, Cop au Vin) and American (Se7en, Reservoir Dogs). The effect's mildly distracting, but it's also reconstructed documentary: director Xavier Beauvois took the detail from real stations, which makes you wonder if you really want cops with Tarantino fresh on their mind coming your way. Similarly, you can rest assured that that Titanic poster seemingly incongruously plastered on a Chinese village wall in 1999's Not One Less is less cutesy shout-out than realistic detail: the movie's just that global, its significance way beyond screaming 13-year-old girls.

Because licensing images and footage tends to be a drag, most Hollywood moves skip it, sticking to in-house footage and soundtrack songs (unless you're a mixtape kind of guy like Cameron Crowe, in which case that's the basic texture you work outwards from). It's not a dereliction of duty: big-budget movies, by and large, pretend to take place in a universe where people don't really care about pop culture, so busy and absorbing their own lives are. That isn't the universe most of us live in, unfortunately, so there's always something flawed and incomplete about these films. Not that you should hold your breath waiting for an account of Schwarzenegger in Afghanistan, but it’s perhaps the one lingering cultural after-effect that hasn't been reckoned with, even as a new industry "satire" comes on schedule every two or three years.

Posted by ahillis at September 2, 2010 12:57 PM