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Robin Wood
Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan… and Beyond (Revised and Expanded Edition)
New York: Columbia University Press 2003

Robin Wood is a serious and important writer—perhaps our most serious film critic—and this is a serious and important book. It is a re-issue of Wood’s 1986 collection of essays on specific films, and on film’s place especially in North American society, with a new forward and two new essays on developments since the 1980s. The main thesis of the volume remains the same: that truly “oppositional” film—opposition, that is, to patriarchy and to capitalism, the two foundations, as Wood sees it, of North American society—is on the one hand impossible to create in Hollywood, but that nevertheless important films with “oppositional” elements in them do tend to get made, despite all expectations, even in Hollywood.

It is these films which Wood champions, and he champions them because of their savage critiques of American society. He is in fact a devotee of “the American Apocalypse” film (p. 20). Through much of his critical career he has loved the dark and hopeless vision. Hence his championing of films which some people dislike because of their sheer visual and narrative ugliness—such as Arthur Penn’s The Chase (1965), which gets an entire essay devoted to it. Hence his love for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), with its vision of New York as “the excremental city”. Hence, too, given that Wood is a gay activist, his surprising support for William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980)—a film that at least on the surface is a vicious anti-gay tract, with gay men as devotees of sado-masochism; the film was widely picketed by gays when it was released.

What attracts Wood even to Cruising is its excremental vision of American society as a whole: in Cruising, Wood stresses, the heterosexual relationships are as sado-masochistic as homosexual ones; everybody in New York City is a deeply-tortured soul; and one cannot determine who the brutal serial killer of gay men is, because—even at the end of the film—it could be anybody (see pp. 52-62). Wood is well known in addition for his surprising support for films, which most people see as mere potboiling melodrama. For instance, in the past Wood has defended Richard Fleischer’s Mandingo (1975) as the only Hollywood film ever to present an honest and thorough depiction of the direct connection between racism, slavery and white fears of black sexuality. In my view he makes a convincing case—and he returns to the defense of this film again here (pp. 13-14).

Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, of course, needs no defenders (and yet Wood also rightly points out its many levels of incoherence)—nor does Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), which also gets much attention. But it is stimulating to see The Chase and Cruising and Mandingo defended so vigorously. It is stimulating to find that Wood (now in his 70s) finds the high-school movies of the late 1990s (She’s All That; Ten Things I Hate About You) a worthwhile subject of analysis (pp. 309-326), and—he admits—he even found them enjoyable for their high energy (though they contain only a few subversive elements). The reader’s surprise holds true also in Wood’s defense not only of Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (which after all won Best Picture for 1978) but also of Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (which destroyed Cimino’s directing career). The latter two films are defended primarily because of their assaults on the patriarchal and/or capitalist foundations of American society, and on the corrupting impact of patriarchy and/or capitalism on all human relationships. Regarding Heaven’s Gate, Wood adds its unusual non-individual-oriented mode of narrative (on this, see below).

Conversely, it is refreshing to read a critic who despises Bergman’s Persona because of its incoherence and slight-of-hand played on the audience (pp. 338-340). The great thing about Wood is that—unlike most film critics—you never know what position he’s going to take on a film, but you know it will be interesting to see why he takes it.

Wood is often correct in upholding the value of flawed but serious films such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), especially when he compares it against its childish rival in science fiction in 1982, Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extraterrestrial. E.T. is a fantasy whose story-structure is simply that of the Healing Messiah, His coming, His death and His resurrection, and it made a huge amount of money. The grim Blade Runner, a dystopian futuristic film noir, did not; but it is Blade Runner that is studied in film schools, and deservedly so, according to Woods. Blade Runner, despite its overall grimness and its narrative flaws, is still enjoyable. Movies such as The Chase are not, which is why they had no financial success and hence did not encourage Hollywood studios to make more films in a similar mode.

Enjoyment: there’s the problem for “subversive” and “serious” filmmaking. Wood admits, shamefacedly, that even he enjoyed the George Lucas Star Wars series (p. 146). But he ascribes his enjoyment to false consciousness: our ideological conditioning, starting from when we are very young (ibid.). In fact, Wood is not sure that we should be enjoying films at all. This is because in such films as E.T. or the Star Wars series, we cease being adults and become children again—but not innocent children, rather adults who consciously wish to be children again in order to flee from reality, in order to avoid seeing the flaws in our society, to “paper over the cracks” (the title of a chapter on films of the 1980s), rather than deal with them. Among current directors and producers Woods therefore despises Spielberg the most, for a career devoted mostly to the conscious infantilization of the audience. The desire for pleasure may be inborn in human nature, Woods says, but the forms which actual gratifications take are culturally determined, a product of social conditioning. “Pleasure, then, can never be taken for granted, as long as we wish to be adult” (p. 146). Because the pleasures to be found in E.T. and Star Wars (or, similarly, in the hugely successful Indiana Jones series) correspond so closely to our basic social conditioning, Woods advocates that they be shunned as mindless. This shunning is all the more necessary because, he says, E.T. and Star Wars are not uniquely bad for us, but merely typical of “the artifacts currently being produced by capitalist enterprise for popular consumption within a patriarchal culture” (ibid.).

One must note here that however lacking in subversive elements the Star Wars series looked to a North American audience in the 1980s, the same was not true in the Soviet empire over in eastern Europe. Here Wood seems guilty of a kind of liberal-capitalist culture ethnocentrism—because granting permission for their populations to see Star Wars in the mid-1980s was a major mistake on the part of Communist governments. The triumph of the freedom-loving rebels over the evil Empire in Star Wars may seem a facile and childish plot device to Wood, an avoidance of deeper issues of power in capitalist-patriarchal societies, but in the Communist states it struck people as inspirational. It was no accident that the first of the Star Wars epics was a hit in Bulgaria.

Wood’s strictures on enjoyment might open up the grim prospect that he wants us to take the aesthetic equivalent of castor oil, because “it’s good for us” in terms of social critique. But he is far too sensitive a critic to advocate the consciously didactic, politically and socially uplifting socialist realism film as the only worthwhile film product. Indeed, the intellectual problem he creates for himself is that he is more suspicious of such crudely didactic material than he is of the products of bourgeois patriarchy. “Politically correct” work, he says, is often “ugly, simplistic, brutalized art” (p. 241). He equates Stalinist and Fascist art, and, bluntly, Stalinist and Fascist ideology: aesthetically, their project is to repress--if necessary through force--the contradictions and complexities of real life (ibid.). And in this context Wood comes to the strong defense of bourgeois art and film. Because bourgeois “democratic” ideology--the scare-quotes are Wood’s--has to bend and stretch in so many directions in order to accommodate the complex and highly differentiated society in which it is made (and thus make a profit), contradiction and complexity are “its ineradicable qualities”. And that’s good. “If the idea of a great Fascist work of art is a contradiction in terms, there are innumerable great democratic bourgeois works of art” (ibid.). This is a startling admission--and note that the scare-quotes around “democratic” have suddenly disappeared. Wood turns out to be surprisingly fond—not uncritically fond, but fond nevertheless—of the work of Howard Hawks and even John Ford. In fact, he is concerned about “typical first year film students” who, in their efforts to appear sophisticated, are contemptuous of Ford’s notorious sentimentality and idealism (p. 148).

So it is contradiction and complexity that Wood champions, and he believes that bourgeois film art at its best is continuously capable of it; indeed, he thinks he could name 100 masterpieces from the Hollywood of 1930-1960 (p. 310). This is because film produced in a capitalist society has to be sold to a complex and contradictory audience in order to make money, whereas Fascist and Communist art is inherently incapable of complexity, in part because it can simply be forced both on the artist and the audience by the government.

But living in a patriarchal capitalist society (the prosperous and easy-going one of Toronto, Canada), Wood still prefers the “oppositional” to the accepting and the traditional. He defines “oppositional” as critical of both capitalist and patriarchal structures. The elements in Wood’s critical stance are easy enough to see and understand; but their positive content is much more vaguely defined: fundamentally, as supporting non-patriarchal and non-exploitative ways of living and loving (see, e.g., pp. 21-22).

What “oppositional” might mean in terms of a specific film aesthetic comes through in Wood’s extraordinary defense of Michael Cimino’s disastrous western Heaven’s Gate (1980). The issue Wood addresses here is that of alternate modes of film narrative. The dominant mode of film narrative descends directly from the structure of the bourgeois novel of the 19^th century, with its emphasis on the individual transformative experiences of the main character. There may (or may not) be social criticism attached to these experiences, but the focus is on the emotional development of the individual. This classic mode of narrative finds expression in films such as Exodus (1960, dir. Otto Preminger), where the audience is introduced to a large political issue by means of its directed identification with an easy-to-like person (in this case, Eve Marie Sainte): her growing commitment to the founding of Israel, symbolized by the charismatic Paul Newman, becomes the commitment of the audience. It is a typical Hollywood narrative ploy. A parallel example would be Jane Fonda in Old Gringo (1989, dir: Luis Puenzo), and her character’s political growth from an innocent supporter of the traditional Mexican economic-political regime (she has come to Mexico in 1916 to tutor the children of a rich landowner) to a supporter of the Mexican revolution, symbolized by the charismatic Jimmy Smits. But Wood is disdainful of such narrative simplicity when dealing with large historical movements, again because it makes things too easy for the audience, leaves them still in the thrall of bourgeois individualism, and doesn’t really allow them to think. So he champions Heaven’s Gate not in spite of the fact that Cimino “can’t tell a story”—i.e., that he can’t tell a coherent story about individuals, the easiest and the traditional way to enlist the audience’s emotions--but precisely because Cimino chooses not to work in that fashion. One doesn’t even learn of the triadic emotional-sexual relationship between the three main characters played by Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert and Walken (one of Wood’s favorite actors, because of his unstable gender identification) until halfway through the movie. That triadic relationship, with its homoerotic undertones, would be subversive enough, but the film’s actual focus is on faceless blocs of east European immigrants to the American west, and the privations they endure there under the oppressive rule of rich cattlemen. Moreover, the narrative is so incoherent (at least in terms of traditional film narrative) that in different versions of Heaven’s Gate different scenes appear in different parts of the movie—with no loss of narrative force, because there isn’t much narrative force to begin with. This essay is certainly fascinating, and it will make you think. I still don’t like Heaven’s Gate, though—it’s just too incoherent and hard to follow. But Wood would say: that’s the point.

Wood is pessimistic that Hollywood can produce thoughtful films today, because of the corporate economic structure that underwrites the films, a structure where brute profitability is the bottom line. “Filmmakers are now largely under the control of vast capitalist enterprises whose aim seems to be distraction, not disturbance…Shock us, make us laugh, but please, please don’t encourage us to think” (p. 335). That is: when sheer profitability is the bottom line, one can count on easy-to-understand spectacle (e.g., Gladiator, 2000) but not on something, which will greatly disturb the audience’s consciousness. And meanwhile, when films do occasionally emerge from the Hollywood production-for-profit factory that are both hugely disturbing and very popular with younger audiences, Wood is now much more dubious of their moral center than he was regarding such films in the 1980s. Hence his negative analysis of David Fincher’s Se7en (1995). If there was ever an “excremental city,” it is the city in Se7en—a far darker, danker place than Scorsese’s New York in Taxi Driver. Yet Wood now finds the dark and very nasty atmosphere of this serial-killer hunt in the city of driving rain to be debilitating, and the film’s ending an encouragement to hopelessness about human nature. Existential despair, he argues, is far too subversive of constructive activism to be really subversive of capitalism or patriarchy; if the world is really this much beyond redemption and remedy, then there is nothing to be done (p. 336). This seems a change from Wood’s position in the 1970s and 1980s. As for Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), while Wood appreciates and indeed enjoys yet another attack on corporate capitalism, he finds the film’s ending nihilistic and repulsive—an encouragement to terrorism (pp. 340-341).

This returns us to what Wood offers not as his critique of existing society (that is clear enough) but what he can offer as a positive alternative to the capitalist-patriarchal world. His very short but sensitive discussion of the fragile community and “precarious strengths” of the failed Hippie movement of the 1960s, a movement undermined by its isolation, “worn away by pressures internal and external” (p. 346)—returns Wood to the theme which underlies so much of his writing, and which surfaces periodically in this wonderful collection of essays. Not all you need (because you need thought as well), but what you need, is: love.

Arthur M. Eckstein is Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park.