Film and the View from Power

The story is familiar. An old, hardened war veteran, Walt, lives a routine banal existence in a small middle-America town. He has no friends and no joy, and is destined to live out his days thus until something out of the ordinary happens.  New neighbors move in. Not only are they from out of town, but they are Hmong, of southeastern Asian descent. Walt takes an immediate dislike to the “gooks,” refusing their various friendly overtures. But when Thao, the shy teenage boy next door is pressured by a local gang into stealing the old man’s car and is caught, the family and the old man are forced into intimacy. Thao repays his crime by lending Walt his labor and the two develop a “tough love” for each other. Walt increasingly warms up to Thao and his Hmong family, assumes the role of vigilante by avenging the family against the local gang, and peaceably meets his end in martyrdom.



The Gran Torino pulls all the right stops for commercial success. Clint Eastwood as quintessential Clint Eastwood is the signature bad-ass, the hard shell with a righteous core. The Hmong family—played by a real Hmong cast, no less!—is the first-rate image of an impenetrable, self-absorbed unassimilated culture. And Thao, meek and earnest, catches the sympathy of the audience as this Bildingsroman film shoots par for the course. It will make you laugh. It will keep you in suspense. The Gran Torino is plenty entertaining and a winner in the box office - in its opening weekend, it grossed $30 million.

Gran Torino Poster
Photo Courtesy: theumer.files.wordpress.com


The true strength of the film, however, and the main reason for its commercial success, is not the well-crafted cinematography or the handful of catchy one-liners - as the promoters would have you believe - but rather its familiarity, its ability to be comfortably consumed by a mass audience, its seamless reiteration of our cultural archetypes. It is received with pleasure as an affirmation of identity. It appeals to conservatives and liberals alike - to conservatives in that the heroic white man saves the Brown from the Brown and gets to kick some immigrant ass while he’s at it, and to the liberals, since it suggests the possibility of inter-racial harmony. Kids will appreciate the fierce words and action scenes; adults will laugh at the crude humor and find in the demonstration of our moralistic ideals cause for sentimentality. The film has the formula; there’s something in it for everyone.

Yet it is this reflection that first suggests a subtle strangeness. Something seems amiss. One begins to wonder what the same story might have looked like through the eyes of young Thao. One wonders what would have happened had Walt never intervened in the first place, if Thao would have joined the gang after all, if his sister would have been beaten and raped. One suspects that the film may not have been so satisfying had the story been cast differently, had it not played so deliberately to our desires and expectations. One eventually holds the film up to reality, to life experience, and finds with dismay that the story is not only told from a particular point of view, but that this view is illusory - that it is the view from power, deep in the pocket of the White imaginary. Finally, one questions to what end the film is conceived, produced, consumed: how the story beneath the story unfolds.

The Film arrived in the early part of the twentieth century and was variously despised, admired, celebrated and ridiculed. Walter Benjamin hailed it for what he saw to be its tremendous and - among the other arts - unprecedented social significance. In his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin remarks that around 1900 new techniques of reproduction enabled art in general to enter the public sphere in both a plurality of copies and a variety of new settings, a development that potentiated an entirely new role for art.  Both transformations “are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film” (221). Mechanical reproduction meant that art - and here Benjamin was primarily interested in film—could be proliferated; never before had there existed an object disposed to this scale of “simultaneous collective experience.” Unlike the painting, which was sequestered away in elite venues, film was a node for cultural congress, even a global phenomenon, a source of community and a space for dialogue.


Walter Benjamin Photo Courtesy : www.dhm.de

Mechanical reproduction also fundamentally changed the nature of art. Art, Benjamin writes, has its origins in ritual - first magical, later religious. Art existed as an object of veneration, its unique presence a testament to the particular place and time it was created. It is therefore embedded in the “fabric of tradition,” which is, by proxy, always venerated in the appreciation of art. The authenticity and historical authority of manually produced art Benjamin subsumes under the concept of “aura.”  The aura of the work of art works like a spell over the viewer always with a tendency toward the cult of tradition, toward conservativism and the status quo. Thus, “for the first time in history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual…the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice - politics” (224). Rather than performing a reactionary role, art - its aura shattered by mechanical reproduction - is now able to serve a progressive purpose.

The eye of the viewer, according to Benjamin, adopts the position of the camera lens and takes on the critical approach of “testing,” a position only possible in the absence of cult value. And for the first time the critical and receptive attitudes of the audience converge. Film is far less likely to create moral hysteria than the galéries of Paris; rather, the New in film is received with enthusiasm. All of this is still possible, moreover, with the masses in a distracted and passive state - “The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one” (241). Mechanical reproduction, Benjamin rejoices, first liberates mainstream art from its politically reactionary function and then, primarily through the medium of film, positively influences the masses to take a critical stance to society.

But here Benjamin overstates his case. Perhaps he did not anticipate the full thrust of the “culture industry”- the rising tide of Hollywood did not enter into his imagination. He could not have known then how proficiently the mechanism of the moving picture could be mastered.  Benjamin speaks of the “shock” of film, a shock to be cushioned by a “heightened presence of mind” (238). But no such presence is necessary for today’s blockbuster hit. Film-makers seek to make the film-watching experience as smooth as possible, precluding if they can the intrusion of any wandering thought.

Gran Torino is the paragon example of a flawlessly-executed film: one is led pleasurably along through trials and tribulations, stressed relationships and moralizing reconciliations, so that when the film ends, the audience leaves the theater with a sweet aftertaste and no sense of displacement, nothing more to chew on and the mind free to roam to its next destination. It would never occur to them that the film reinforces cultural stereotypes, like how Asians (in this case, Hmong) are either nerds or gangrapists. They would overlook the fact that Thao has no male role model until he adopts the code of white masculinity played by Clint. The Gran Torino may be interpreted from multiple perspectives - an important part of creating mass appeal - but in each instance, its thrust perpetuates prevailing cultural assumptions and norms rather than questions them.  It may be argued that most Hollywood films fit this profile, and that most art created for mass consumption shares this reactionary tendency. A night at the movies has forever lost its innocence.



The power of the film is well-documented. Entire cultural generations have been shaped by film as with the 1969 American classic “Easy Rider.” A recent film, “The Hangover,” has led uncountable decadents to flock to Las Vegas in search of a comparably wild night. The hugely popular “Slum Dog Millionaire” brought global attention to India and inspired a mini-boom in the Bollywood industry.

Not only as a matter of access, the medium itself has a way to shift the hearts and shape the minds of the public. More than any other art, film has an uncanny ability to recreate experience and relay it to the viewer. As Benjamin notes, “The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology” (233). Though what Benjamin does not seem to realize is that this reality-creating device can be as easily appropriated for reality-obscuring intentions as for politically subversive means. The orchid - now a fleur du mal—blossoms in the fantasy realm as the “beautiful semblance,” much like Monet’s lilies established artificial solace at the height of World War Two.

The truth about film is that it has an immeasurable influence over the contemporary imagination, the more so as people mediate their experience through the venue film provides. Like no other art form, not to mention derivative sources of history, it vividly conjures the appearances, customs, and everyday of life—historical and actual. It directs our focus, and it does so in the minutest detail -“The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses” (237) - revealing more than what we are able to perceive in “unmediated” experience.  The result is a uniquely powerful force of reality-exposure and, all too often, reality-production.  Still further, beyond what we “know”, the stories told in film give us a sense of what are reasonable desires and expectations. Love finds a new meaning in the romantic comedy, “cool” in the action film and heroics in the war epic. All together, this means that film is an incredible source of cultural power - both dangerous and awesome in its magnitude.

The outcome of this power depends entirely on how the power is harnessed. Whether it buttresses the monolith of Hollywood’s ideological edifice, or jars the viewer into new avenues of consciousness by defying expectation and surpassing desire, is in the hands of the film-maker. The destruction of the aura in film opens it to a fresh terrain of tremendous possibility should the pioneer attitude be one of personal gain or world change.

The Gran Torino tells us the story of ourselves today but with false promises of fulfillment tomorrow.  If we watch closely enough, we may spot ourselves somewhere in the background, an “extra” employed simply to fill space.  What we cannot know is that at any moment in time, an extra can intervene, can step out of role—and rewrite the script so that, in the reality of tomorrow, Thao’s story needs not be told.



Citation :

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. from   Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken, 1985 [1969]

Comments

You have articulated my exact thoughts many times with regard to mainstream Hollywood. As a result I tend toward mostly foreign movies and documentaries. This kind of critical thinking should be taught and nurtured and expected from educated America but Hollywood serves as a reminder of just how ignorant we are.

This is a great article, articulating a much-needed perspective on power and voice in our society. Thanks for this, Jer *-.N