What Cinema Is, Part IV: "Short Cuts"
Let's get one thing out of the way at the start: Robert Altman's Short Cuts, from 1993, is a fantastic movie, and if you haven't seen it, or haven't seen it recently, and particularly if you are an adult in any meaningful sense of the word, you should put aside some time to watch it.
I will get to one or two of the reasons I feel this way about the film shortly, but because the nature of what I do in this space is to try to think about film and culture together, rather than simply offer a "review" – because, good god, who actually cares whether someone else thinks that a film is "good" or "bad" if that's the only thing they have to say about it (just watch it for your own damn self!) – I'm going to start, as I often do, by talking about something the film made me think of.
Oh, and spoiler alert, there's not going to be any pithy summary of the events in Short Cuts in this piece, because the movie is too astoundingly complex – there are, more or less, twenty-three main characters and something like twelve discreet plot lines – for me to do it justice with the kind of temperament I'm working with this week. So suffice to say it takes place in L.A. and deals with the lives, adventures, and romantic entanglements of a wide variety of people in this city, many of whom interact with one another during the course of the film.
And now for the thinky stuff that so annoys many of the people who brush up against these ruminations (one wonders why they are not expecting thinky stuff when the title of this journal begins with the word "Thoughts," but many seem not to be; I recently had a woman suggest in an online comment that I try using the journalistic structure (ye olde inverted pyramid) for these pieces to make them more reader-friendly, in which I state my thesis in the first line and then everything after that gets increasingly less important until the reader nods off to sleep somewhere down about word 400 (she didn't mention that last bit) because that's what good writing is; that I didn't tell her to fuck off and get her own website where she can post her own journalistically-structured movie reviews has less to do with some noble restraint on my part than it does with sheer pity for the kind of person who spends so much time on the internet that that seems like a helpful, or even passably intelligent, comment);– the thinky stuff is this: Short Cuts helps make clear a good deal of the dismay that many fans of cinema feel toward the franchise blockbusters that have come to dominate Hollywood.
Although this dismay, and its counterpoint – the heroic defense of all things superhero by that genre's legions of overly loud and underly educated fans – has been much commented on, Short Cuts helped me to frame this issue in a way that I haven't encountered before. Which is this: (and don't put capitals after your colons, you cretins! you're not starting a new sentence! that's one of the whole goddamn points of the difference between a colon and a period!) what Altman's film serves as a fine reminder of is the extraordinarily wide bandwidth of cinema as an art form. And what the current cycle of blockbusters does, what the action-adventure film has nearly always done, particularly in the decades after Spielberg and Lucas got their hands on it, is operate on a radically narrow bandwidth.
The contemporary blockbuster, in other words, uses a vanishingly small number of the elements that make cinema an art form. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, of course – certain horror movies do a similar thing, for example – but when a genre that operates in this mode comes to dominate cinema to the extent that many fans come to believe that it is what cinema is, then it becomes a threat to the form itself.
Take that minor element of movies called acting. ("If we could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we've got something here!" suggests a studio exec in another Altman film, The Player, and although he's speaking sarcastically, the joke is exactly that he's voicing a dream of many of the higher-ups in today's Hollywood, which Altman obviously saw coming a long time ago, a longing for an entertainment world in which there are no sets and no people – those pesky human elements that can create so many unnecessary and unpredictable problems – just a bunch of coders at computers generating digital worlds and characters according to algorithmically-generated models designed to maximize return on investment.)
Anyway, as you may have noticed if you watch movies, acting is a fairly large component of them. And what does Altman have to do with this? Short Cuts loves actors. It doesn't let them perform, it wants them to perform, wants them to do what they do, which is embody human lives and experiences, reveal to us things that seem both novel and instantly familiar because we have never articulated them for ourselves in the way that the actors are doing on the screen.
How does Altman do this? A myriad of ways. Here's one: he uses the form in its fullest extent – from his set-ups (where he puts the camera) to his blocking (where and how the actors move), to his framing (where and how they appear on the screen), to his editing, to the length of his shots – to allow the actors to do their thing.
Take, for example, the way he introduces the relationship between Tim Robbins' character (a cop) and his wife, played by Madeleine Stowe.
We open with a shot of a newscaster on television (also one of the main characters, played by Bruce Davison) talking about the fleet of helicopters spraying pesticide over the city to kill invasive flies. The camera pans across two young children playing, and then across Stowe holding a third child, to a dog barking on the patio. Stowe leaps to her feet and starts calling to her husband that the pesticide helicopters are overhead, and that they need to shut the windows to the house. She puts down the kid and grabs the dog, bringing it inside. Robbins enters from behind the camera and grabs the dog from her arms, taking it back out to the patio, insisting that it belongs out of doors. They argue about the pesticide (Robbins: "Don't get environmental on me! They wouldn't be doing it if it was dangerous!") and we cut to a shot of the helicopters over the city, spraying it, then back to Robbins, who is now welcoming the spray down onto his body to prove that it's harmless. Another cut takes us to the dog, which has escaped inside again and is running around, and then back to Robbins, who chases it outside once more. He argues with Stowe about the proper place for the dog, then exits past camera (as he entered) while Stowe moves forward into a closeup to cry that it's the third night this week he's gone out. A final shot shows us his exit out the front door of the house.
The whole sequence takes about 1:15 and is composed of seven shots (really six, since the helicopter shot is an insert), meaning that the average shot length is about eleven seconds. Altman doesn't use any choppy editing, or cut to any closeups of the actor's faces when they deliver particularly punchy lines. Instead, he simply has the camera follow them through the actions of the scene, often framed so that their full bodies are visible. Additionally, he gives them things to do – regular, human things, like holding a child or picking up a dog, or dancing around and swinging their arms while they're arguing.
All of which is to say that what drives the human drama of the scene is the human beings in it, not the rather mechanical imposition of various editing techniques that, as used by the contemporary corporate studio school of blockbuster filmmaking, relentlessly cue us as to what we are supposed to be thinking and feeling.
This may seem a subtle distinction but it is a vital one, because allowing the humans to drive the scene means that it is the humans who are at its center. The motion and emotion in it are theirs; the meaning in the scene is brought to life and embodied by the actors; when Robbins protests that the pesticide cannot possibly be dangerous, Altman shoots him visible from knees up, giving him his whole body to bring the moment to life; when Stowe has her closeup at the end, she moves into it, rather than the editing doing the work for her through a cut.
Again and again in the film, Altman does this, committing himself to the fundamental truth that what we are watching on screen are other people, and finding ways to allow those people (as brought into being by actors) to be human. This is the case whether it's Lily Tomlin and Tom Waits dancing around and remembering that they love one another, or Julianne Moore arguing with Matthew Modine while she is wearing neither pants nor underwear, or any of the other strange and magnificent and eminently recognizable-from-our-own-life sequences the film comes up with.
And what happens when Altman does get playful with his camera? Consider the sequence in which Bruce Davison's newscaster, whose son has been hit by a car and lies dying in the hospital, gets harassed over the phone by a baker played by Lyle Lovett who is annoyed because the cake he made for the kid's birthday was not picked up. The sequence consists of a single shot that runs for 1:18, taking place in the bedroom of Davison's house. It opens with him answering the phone, talking to Lovett, and dismissing him. Davison hangs up, puts the phone down, and exits. The phone rings again. Davison enters, answers, argues with Lovett, hangs up, exits again. The phone rings again. Davison enters, furious, answers, hollers at Lovett, hangs up, slams the phone down on a dresser, exits. The entire time, the camera has been conducting a slow push, starting with Davison in frame from ankles up and getting closer and closer, until when he slams the phone down on the dresser, it's the only thing in the frame. Altman gives it a beat…and then the phone begins ringing again. From offscreen we hear Davison scream in frustration.
As with the previous sequence, Altman gives his actor a wonderful, broad stage on which to work. He paces, he whips the phone (the ancient kind, with a cord attached to it) this way and that, he exits and returns three times. But here Altman is using the camera to aid the scene in a showier way than he did in the first sequence I talked about. The long slow push in on the phone works to emphasize what Davison is portraying: the horrible impersonal harassment of a man distraught over his child, the way a ringing phone can become a small instrument of torture, the disconnect between two people who are connected only by their voices.
Watch this, and you'll see a host of other techniques that have been nearly abandoned by the contemporary blockbuster cinema. The slow patience of the camera move, which lasts for virtually the entire 1:18 of the shot, building not plot tension but emotional tension; the notion that tension itself can have an emotional register, and that deep conflict can operate on a quotidian scale; the notion that a camera move can be a subtle, as opposed to histrionic, thing; blocking that takes place in, and is inspired by, the physicality of a location.
This last is especially important. In the same way that success can ruin artists because it removes the barriers they had to surmount earlier in their career, which led them to come up with ambitious solutions to difficult problems, the move to digital technologies and filming in front of a green screen leads to horrible, uninventive decisions about how to set up sequences. Because there are no physical restraints involved in filming something in front of a green screen – anything can happen, in any direction, at any time, as there is no real world to deal with – there are never physical challenges in the conception of the sequence; and creativity, in a very real sense, is driven by challenges.
This is, incidentally, one reason that so many fight sequences in superhero films are so phenomenally tedious: because they are not working with the real limitations of real actors (not to mention gravity), everything fades (as it tends to in comic books) into a kind of hyperactive, childish homogeneity. The fight move where the hero leaps into the air with fist or weapon cocked – usually delivered in slow motion – ready to bash a bad guy upon landing; the one where the hero smashes the ground, sending a shock wave out that knocks down all the bad guys; the one where the hero falls out of the sky to land with one knee on the ground and then looks up, menacingly – all of these are used because they look visually imposing, yes, but also primarily because they have been used before. They are familiar, they are lazy, they are a direct result of the inertia and lack of creativity created by not having to operate with actual bodies. When there are no constraints, the imagination tends to wither.
More importantly, though, what Altman's sequence shows is the importance of things like restraint and taste. In the contemporary blockbuster cycle, every single element is, to borrow that indelible phrase from This is Spinal Tap, turned up to eleven. This is clear in the visual bombast, obviously – virtually every frame of most superhero films seeks to grab the viewer by the lapels and scream "I AM AWE-INSPIRING, GODDAMNIT!" into their helpless little face.
But this over-cranking is also inflicted on virtually every element of these superfilms, from morality to character to musculature. There is no ordinariness, no daily life. When a city is crime ridden, it's filled with caricatures of street crime, populated by hooligans who run around bashing grandmothers to the ground for the wanton joy of it (and for the audience's titillation); when a character is weak, they are so inhumanly soft and sniveling as to be detestable; when they are wise, that wisdom is insisted on by the attempt to elevate grand hollow platitudes into actual meaning ("With great power comes great responsibility" - but does it, really? isn't it more accurate to say that with great power comes great megalomania? and isn't the power/responsibility tagline just a way to convince us all that we should be thankful for the great concentrations of power all around us?); when there is a battle, it's a battle for something so incredibly important that it is actually more important than the thing that was important in the last film, which had also, not coincidentally, insisted that its important thing was the most important of all time; when there is morality, it is all or nothing, black or white, good or evil, and has no relation whatsoever to actual human psychology except in the most reductive sense. (You will note, I'm sure, the resemblance this all bears to our current cultural beliefs about the world and politics; which is the chicken and which is the egg, I'm not certain.) Everything is so oversized that the movies begin to crack beneath the weight of their own grandiosity.
Although I'm obviously having a go at these films, I actually don't think these are flaws, so much as genre characteristics. They can be fun as hell to watch, and their over-the-top attributes are one of the primary reasons for that. But they are not really connected in any serious way to actual adult life, and they operate on a tiny band of the filmmaking spectrum. They have no room for subtlety on the technical level, no room for acting that is interested in less-than-oversized states of being, no room for the kind of dilemmas, joys, and tragedies that actually occupy most people once they have moved out of adolescence.
Altman's film, on the other hand, is an attempt to help us understand adult life as it is actually lived. It presents a world in which, like our own, people get drunk and make bad decisions, kids die for reasons that have nothing to do with "good" and "evil," people do stupid things and funny things because they are stupid and funny, and yet they're also clever and dull, frustrated with their lives and forgetful of how good they have it, and all the rest of that vast menagerie of experience that's seething all around us at all times.
Is this somehow "better" or "more valuable" than the escapism provided by the latest Avengers/Jurassic Park crossover? (You heard it here first, by the way.) There are arguments to be made, I think. But even without those arguments, it should be clear that to the extent that the superhero cycle threatens to train a generation of moviegoers to believe that those films are what films are, and trains them at the same time to believe that if they want some more robust representation of life and the possibilities of art they should go to someplace other than the cinema, there is a certain regrettable side to their dominance.
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