The Films of the Nineties
By the Author Nonfiction Fiction of John Fowles Films of the Seventies: A Social History Films of the Eighties: A Social History Dickens and New Historicism Detective and Mr. Dickens Highwayman and Mr. Dickens Hoydens and Mr. Dickens Dons and Mr. Dickens Fiction
The Films of the Nineties The Decade of Spin William J. Palmer
the films of the nineties Copyright William J. Palmer, 2009. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-61344-7 All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States a division of St. Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-37800-5 DOI 10.1057/9780230619555 ISBN 978-0-230-61955-5 (ebook) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: March 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my wife, Maryann, who has become my memory.
This page intentionally left blank
Contents Preface ix 1 Hollywood and History 1 2 The New Historicist Films 19 3 The Decade of Spin 39 4 Politics and Spin 65 5 The American President 79 6 Spin Out: The Gay Nineties 129 7 Sex and the Nineties 165 8 Neo-spin 207 Conclusion: Spinning into the Millennium 219 Notes 227 Index 245
This page intentionally left blank
Preface New Yorker cartoon by Stuart Leeds that, in four successive panels, parodied the famous LOVE sculpture of Robert Indiana helped generate the governing idea for this book. The first panel, labeled The Sixties, contained an exact replica of the original LOVE sculpture. The second panel, captioned The Seventies, portrayed the word LAME in the configuration of the original sculpture. The third panel, The Eighties, read LOOT, and the fourth, The Nineties, LESS. That cartoon, in the blending of a recognizable visual icon with a clear and simple verbal commentary and in the bringing together of history and cultural definition, posed the conceptual question upon which this book is based: if I were going to describe the nineties in one word, what word would it be? In trying to arrive at an answer to that question, my first move was to isolate the dominant social issues (and icons) that defined the decade. Most prominent of all the forces influencing social history in the nineties was Bill Clinton, who was both icon and issue. Also central to the evolution of nineties society was the communications explosion that took multiple forms, including 1. the ascendance of a totally wired and computerized society; 2. the burgeoning power of an electronic media based on a tabloid model that could make news as fast as they could cover it; 3. the emergence of a more aggressive investigative journalism that could find, dissect, and saturate society with any story of any type in any amount of time across any expanse of space; 4. the heightened involvement of the entertainment community and its instruments of diffusion 1 movies, television, video games, music, theater not only in the discourse surrounding the major social issues of the decade but also in the very definition and formation of those issues. A third prominent force in the definition of the social issues of the nineties was the basic change in the decade s discourse communities. Evolving out of sev-
Preface a new direction. As Jacques Barzun commented, Deconstruction on a vast scale everywhere. 2 In other words, the philosophical theories that in the seventies and eighties had taken over the critical discourse of academia Deconstruction, New Historicism, the postmodern ideas of thinkers like Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, Hayden White, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard et. al. were entering the mainstream and redefining the very nature and perception of reality by the nineties. Finally entering the equation were the major nineties social issues themselves: the Clinton presidency, AIDS, gay rights, the New Sexuality, the attack media, new racisms/sexisms/ageisms, and the most vexing and dangerous issue of all, expanding global terrorism. But in the face of all these evolving nineties social forces, my question still remained: what one word, one nineties social force, could encompass and describe all these diverse issues? While trying to answer this question, I was reading a book by Margot Norris on twentieth-century war where she writes, My project is itself made problematic by its scope, its aim to function as a century book. 3 That statement gave me a sense of ambition to add to the sense of historical definition that the New Yorker cartoon had planted. I wanted to write a decade book that would capture the nineties the way that the public intellectuals of the past had caught the temper of their times: The Me Generation, Generation X, The Living Room War. I realized that if I was going to write a cultural history of the nineties, I had to capture its identity in the clearly defining way that the cartoon and those catchy slogans had caught the personality of their times. Simultaneously, I was fully aware that my book was to be the third in a series of New Historicist social histories written from the perspective of the relationship between film and contemporary society. 4 Like so many movies of the seventies, eighties, and nineties, it was going to be a sequel of sorts (titled The Films of the Nineties: A Social History as its two predecessors on the seventies and the eighties had been titled). It was supposed to be the completion of a trilogy analyzing from a postmodernist, interdisciplinary perspective the relationship between contemporary film and late twentieth-century history. But as I perceived more and more how different the nineties were from the seventies and eighties, saw what powerful new forces were in play, like the computerized media and AIDS, my goals for this book grew more ambitious. I began thinking well beyond its original conception as a mere sequel and realized its kinship not only to those theorists who had called into question the nature of history (the New Historicists), but to another set of postmodernist philosophical thinkers (led by Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard) who were calling into question the very nature of reality itself. But even with these mini-epiphanic moments in place, I still set out to write this book in the same way I had written its predecessors, by isolating all the central themes (or cultural issues) of the nineties (like the tabloid fascination with the Clinton presidency or the coming out of the gay community) that seemed
Preface xi monitored the heartbeat of the decade. But the nineties were different! That realization kept nagging at me as I began my research and started isolating the major issues of the decade. Only then did I realize what the times, the movies, and my book s arguments were really about. They were about spin. The Nineties and Spin This atomization of the social into flexible language games... Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge In the nineties, contemporary social history and the media actually collaborated to define a shared metaphor for the age. That metaphor was the phenomenon of spin. Public intellectuals, media pundits, and cultural historians (as well as filmmakers) embodied the nineties leading up to the traumatic turn of the new century (the millennium a.k.a. Y2K) in the image of the vortex, the tornado, the centrifugal decentered creativity of the potter s wheel. Deconstruction, a central academic theory of the eighties with its emphasis upon decentering and marginalization, became the spinning force behind this metaphor. It all had to do with the age-old philosophical question: What is the nature of reality? By the nineties, reality had become such a slippery issue, such a babel of contesting narratives that the deconstructive metaphors were the only ones that made sense. Reality in the nineties leading up to all the dire predictions of Y2K, the very malfunction of time, was different from earlier decades. Nineties reality was centrifugally spun out of control, always in motion, always open to interpretation. The movies reflected this quandary better than any other media. Reality took the form of a whole series of contesting narratives. Mapping the confluences of those narratives in the global society of the nineties makes the writing of history somewhat problematic. Make no mistake: this is a history. But the better question is, What kind of a history? Definitely, this is a film history. But it is also a social history, a political history, and a sexual history. More subtly, it is a rhetorical history that defines the relationship between Lyotard s language games and the politics, the media, the advertising, and the very mechanics of persuasion at the end of the twentieth century. Finally, it is a decade book, a history of the 1990s and how the decade s motion pictures mixed fact and fiction to create new realities out of what may have never been realities in the first place. As one commentator writes, Reality presents a random, infinite supply of details, and the job of writers whether you consider yourself a historian, a biographer, or a novelist is similar: to create a coherent narrative. You can t select everything, and in making choices, thus putting an emphasis here and diminishing it there, you invariably move into the realm of fiction. 5 This convergence of history and fiction was a major credibility issue in the nineties. Voltaire defined history as nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes, and James Joyce called history a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. For Napo-
Preface of reality involved in trying to recapture the past, and each in turn discusses the historian s attempt as ill-considered, inadvisable, unethical, and futile. Nonetheless, history has always tried to order the chaos of reality. The only problem with doing this in the late twentieth century is that the chaos of reality has been totally spun out of control, like a centrifuge broken loose of its moorings or a tornado touching down in a Kansas cornfield. Despite all this instability, the spinning realities of the nineties still offered historians attractive possibilities, and, by the beginning of that decade, historians were acquiring the tools to theoretically understand the constant spin and flux of nineties realities. Like a potter placing a lump of clay on a wheel, setting it spinning, and creating order out of its decentered reformation, the nineties historian takes a new approach to his material. The New Historicists eagerly embraced the interpretational possibilities of nineties spin, and one of their major allies and instruments of diffusion in their postmodernist attempt to write the narrative of this era of spin was the movies. The films of the nineties reread, rewrote, revised, and reenvisioned past and present history so often that the relationship between history and Hollywood actually became a History Channel TV show and a watercooler topic of debate. People were actually talking about history. Did it really happen that way? Is that how I remember it? How did that change us all? Most of all, what is the relationship between history and spin?