Guff instead of substance

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

25 August

Try as I might, when I read chapters in some books about film (usually, where I have seen the film, and wish to see what the writer has to say, be it the opinions of Barry Norman, or some collection about the 100 this or that), I am reminded by the literary-critical movements of the late 1970s, and wonder why I am reading this stuff.

Just at the moment, it is Fifty Key American Films*, and a hair’s breadth separates me from not continuing reading what Jean Welsh has to say about Thelma and Louise (1991), in this collection edited by local academic John White and Sabine Haenni, because I have just reached :

This makes the female representations oxymoronic in ways which may reflect more truly the ambivalent position of women in society (p. 216)


Uh ? Fewer than two printed sides earlier, the author used one of these adjectives in a way that suggests no understanding of how it should be used :

She [Callie Khouri] is also ambivalent about the film’s status as a feminist text : ‘the issues surrounding the film are feminist. But the film itself is not’ (p. 214)


It is not that Welsh fails to spot that screenwriter Khouri distinguishes between the film (which Welsh is writing about) and these issues (which she mentioned earlier), but how she couches introducing the comparison makes one think that she is trying to be clever by deploying the word ‘ambivalent’, whereas Khouri is quite openly stating that the film is not feminist, and has no hesitation – in what is quoted – about saying that it should not have that status.

What I believe that Welsh means that is that Khouri is ambivalent about the film being perceived as making a feminist statement, because, although she states that the film itself is not one, the issues that surrounded it are. Whether or not I am right, this is not Welsh says, and, instead, she makes me feel that she is so busy trying to write in an academic way that she neglects to realize that she obscures her own meaning by so doing.


Back to the first example, and Welsh seems to be showing off again that she is using the word ‘oxymoron’. However, she is using it as an adjective and qualifying the word ‘representations’ by it, quite apart from the fact that an oxymoron is typified by the example bitter-sweet, a yoking together of opposites that are almost always polar ones.

Of course, we have the benefit of reading what she has just written, but using a word such as ‘oxymoronic’ in this way should be summative, it should be a drawing together of what has already been said, not one that makes the reader scratch his or her head and wonder what the writer is talking about, and why this is an oxymoron at all.

Again, about the choice of words, and using them appropriately, whereas these texts of film studies seem to rejoice in obfuscation, in using the word ‘oneiric’ to prove that they know it, not just that all that they mean are that whatever the word qualifies is of or relating to dreams. Cannot these people grow up ? Did they read so much Roland Barthes, and are so keen to maintain the position of their writing as an academic subject, that they have to use unreal academic prose ?

And what is ‘ambivalent’ about ‘the position of women in society’ (even if we limit the society to that in which the film is set) ? Whose ambivalence even are we talking about, because a position cannot really be any more ambivalent than the thoughts of the person who is either in that position, or views something (or someone) in two quite different ways ? (No more so than a representation can be oxymoronic.)

There may be ambivalence about the position of women in society, but can it mean anything (much) for the position itself to be ambivalent ?

All of which makes me feel that I have tired of all this – if the writer cannot straightforwardly express matters, why should I trouble myself to figure out what she did mean (or might have meant)… ?


Without finishing, I continued reading, but the more that I read, the more that it has become clear that White & Haenni should never have accepted this contribution, because it ain't about Thelma and Louise :

It is intended for quite another volume, Fifty Key American Filmscripts Subverted by the Director and / or Studio and / or XYZ, but, even so, it would have to be more honest** that no screenwriter gets what he or she wants into a film - and even people like Woody Allen tell you that of what he initially had in mind, regardless of so-called auteur theory (if it is auteur, why is it not théorie ?), what makes it to be released is often a messy compromise.


And, as if all this rampant multi-valued appreciation were not enough, how about this (from the closing paragraph) ? :

However, to anyone who has seen the film this potentially depressing reading [see below] doesn't ring true to the experience of watching the film. The ambivalence of the ending with its tension between the essentially depressing representation of female powerlessness and its fairytale happy ending where the women 'just keep  going' (emphasized by the use of the freeze-frame and the reprise of shots from earlier in the film) are in keeping with the rest of the film. (p. 217)


Again, the script is what counts, not the film - it is abundantly clear that the film as it was written has been betrayed by how it was directed, and yet we conclude with this sentence, where what seemed negative has suddenly become positive :

A great part of this film's power is to achieve the seemingly incompatible aim of both presenting a stark reality and providing an enjoyable escape from it.


I am right, that is praise, isn't it, but it seems like a non-sequitur ?

Was it, maybe, all that the editors really read, after glancing over the intro, or am I in some world of ambivalence where lessening the impact of the women driving over and into The Grand Canyon is somehow a virtue - when has giving something a 'fairytale happy ending' been something for which to thank a director for just because it avoids the force of an 'essentially depressing representation of female powerlessness' ?

So 'enjoyable escape' - the audience leaves, not thinking that the women have driven off the edge to their death, but remembering how they stuck up for themselves, and they go into a neverland, a bit like in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) ?



End-notes

* I avoid such a use of the word ‘key’, let alone saying ‘These things are key’, which, if it means anything, is expressed just as well by ‘These are the key things’.

** Ideally, called Five Thousand and Fifty American Filmscripts, etc., etc.


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)