Upon hearing of Nicolas Cage’s recent early morning arrest on public drunkenness charges in New Orleans, I was reminded of an exchange I had with a student at the end of the fall 2010 semester. I always end the semester by taking my film classes to a movie at a movie theatre. The trailers before the film we saw last fall included two in succession for movies featuring Nic Cage, Season of the Witch (Sena 2011) and Drive Angry 3D (Lussler 2011). The first was met with titters from my class of 30+ students, while during the second the titters escalated into raucous laughter. In class the following day we began our discussion with the trailers and I observed that I couldn’t help but notice how hard they laughed at Nic Cage. And then I posed this question: “When did Nic Cage become a joke?” to which a student, her lips curled in contempt, derisively responded, “When wasn’t he?” It was a quick-witted parry and the class accorded it the reception it deserved. I laughed too, but I also had an answer that I didn’t utter, lest it draw even more attention to our obvious age difference. Indeed, when did a reply beginning with “When I was your age” ever serve any adult well, let alone a college professor trying to appear au currant?

And yet it’s true. When I was their age, Nic Cage was among the coolest actors on the planet, having carved a niche for himself as an always endearing yet reliably offbeat actor. He took on all kinds of oddball roles in establishing his reputation as one of the best young actors of his generation. Like many others, I first took notice of his work in Valley Girl (Coolidge 1983), a fabulous 80s movie in which he had his first starring role. From that film on he’s worked nonstop, but it was in the early movies that he had a notable string of great risk-taking roles, including his turn as Charlie, he of the memorably high voice, playing opposite Kathleen Turner in Peggy Sue Got Married (Coppola 1986), H.I. McDunnough, one of the most quotable characters in movie history, in The Coens’ Raising Arizona (1987), Ronny in Moonstruck (Jewison 1987)—“This hand!”—and perhaps most notoriously of all, as Sailor Ripley—a man who wears a snakeskin jacket because, as he says, “it’s a symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom”—in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990).

By the early 1990s Cage was a movie star, but of a particular actorly brand; his star persona was a result of his chops, not his pecs, making him as identifiable by what he wasn’t—a brain dead action star who endlessly played a variation on the same role—as by what he was, which was a risk taking method actor, always eager to take his craft to the next level, even if that meant eating a live cockroach on camera, as he (in)famously did while playing Peter Loew, a man who believes he’s becoming a vampire, in Vampire’s Kiss (Bierman 1988). In those early years, Cage’s dedication to his art, though evident of an off-kilter personality, was also part of his charm, as were his keeping king cobras as pets, love of comic books, and professed adoration of all things Elvis. So long as the interesting performances kept coming the audience was willing to overlook the oddities, or at least write them off as an artist’s inexplicable peccadilloes that were nevertheless somehow essential to his art. This went on apace until Leaving Las Vegas (Figgis 1995), in which he played Ben Sanderson, an unrepentant alcoholic who retreats to Las Vegas to drink himself to death, a performance which resulted in his becoming one of the youngest ever winners of the Academy Award for Best Actor. It’s perceived as the artistic high point in his career to date, but it also marks a turning point in his career, as he did not follow this film up by using his newfound clout to get edgy films in which he’d like to appear green lit by studio execs anxious to be in the Nic Cage business. Instead, he appeared to cash in on his fame, appearing successively in The Rock (Bay 1996), Con Air (West 1997), and Face/Off (Woo 1997), huge Hollywood blockbusters that made a ton of money for all involved, but that would have seemingly been anathema for the pre-Leaving Las Vegas Cage.

I happen to love all three of these of these films, but not in the way I adore say Double Indemnity (Wilder 1944) or Blue Velvet (Lynch 1986); no, more ironically, akin to the way I love films like Road House (Herrington 1989), Point Break (Bigelow 1991), or Starship Troopers (Verhoeven 1997). Of special note here is Con Air, in no small part because this is the first film in which Cage’s hairpiece went totally off the rails, a bizarre trend that has continued unfettered. In one of the more unexpected career twists in movie history, Cage’s reputation as an actor declined precipitously while at the same time the movies in which he was appearing garnered the biggest grosses of his career as well as ever growing paychecks for him personally. Whereas audiences were once willing to overlook his quirks as concomitant with his artistry, they began to increasingly view him as some kind of weirdo representative of the worst kinds of Hollywood depravity and excess, to the point that when he gave a brilliant performance in Adaptation (Jonze 2002) it was seen as a blip in the drudgery rather than a welcome return to form by a gifted actor.

Surely to some extent this is unfair, as it’s easy to call someone a sell-out, but how many of us ever get the chance to cash in for the kind of money afforded an A-list Hollywood actor? But alas, for Cage the money has come with a high cost. It was hard enough not to consider a lot of the work Cage was doing as strictly for the money, but when the personal financial troubles that resulted from his profligate spending on real estate (including a European castle and an uninhabited Bahaman island), cars (a fleet of Rolls Royces), and other things most folks can only dream about became public, it quickly became impossible to see it as anything else, a reality which has further rendered him a punch line in the public’s eye. So much so, in fact, that whereas we used to overlook his middling films as mere bumps in an otherwise brilliant artistic road, we’re now no longer willing to recognize him for the interesting work that he continues to do but that remains outside of the current dominant cultural narrative that pegs him as a freakishly idiosyncratic sell-out. Accordingly, we revel in his overly publicized failures—think Wicker Man (LaBute 2006) or Bangkok Dangerous (Chun & Pang 2008)—but we’re stingy with the accolades when he deserves them, as he did for his edgy work in underrated films such as Matchstick Men (2003), Lord of War (Niccol 2005), The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call-New Orleans (Herzog 2009), and Kick-Ass (Vaughn 2010).

The trajectory of Cage’s career to date says as much about us as it does about him. American culture revels in the anomalies of the extreme edges rather than accept the mundane reality of the fact that the largest portion of anything, whether an actor’s career choices, a band’s musical output, or the country’s political leanings, cuts a broad swath across the middle. And so for the time being Nic Cage will continue to draw guffaws every time his strangely coifed mien appears writ large up there on the big screen. Until, that is, the moment the story changes yet again, careening back to the opposite extreme. And it just might, for if there’s anything we like more than the grotesquery of failure, it’s the ensuing uplift of redemption, no matter how it’s manufactured.

Image Credits:

1. Nic Cage as Ronny in Moonstruck
2. As Sailor Ripley with Lula Fortune (Laura Dern) in Wild at Heart
3. As Cameron Poe in Con Air
4. As Charlie and Donald Kaufman in Adaptation
5. As Terence McDonagh in The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call-New Orleans

In an earlier Flow essay, I optimistically noted the advent of Insurge Pictures, a newly created “independent” arm of Viacom’s Paramount Pictures Corporation that was set to have an unusual business model in which it would fund ten films a year at $100,000 each in the hope that every once in a while one of their micro-budget productions would hit it big, à la Paranormal Activity (Peli 2007). The good news is that Insurge has struck box office gold with its initial production. The bad news for independent filmmakers is that the film is Justin Bieber: Never Say Never (Chu 2011), which surpassed all expectations in grossing just over $30 million during its opening weekend.1 From a purely business standpoint, Insurge’s decision to fund Never Say Never appears incredibly smart. The company has handled the film remarkably well and deserves all the plaudits it gets. But that its first major success comes with this particular film tells us a lot about the contemporary film industry and the bleak prospects facing independent filmmakers trying to break into it.

Starting in the early 1990s, independent cinema, in part because of the success of Miramax, enjoyed a rapid ascendancy that resulted in every major studio jumping into the indie business by either buying up an extant indie company, like Disney did with Miramax, or by creating a specialty division such as Sony, Fox, and Paramount did with Sony Classics, Fox Searchlight, and Paramount Vantage (née Classics). The consolidation of the independent sector by the majors resulted in a golden age for American indies, during which, as Simon Houpt notes, “commercially oriented independent film distributors were the cool kids in Hollywood, flooding festivals with cash and making big bets that often brought home Academy Awards.”2 But the takeover of the independent scene by the studios ultimately had a deleterious effect, as when you are owned by a major you are by definition no longer independent.

Making money with independent films is difficult as it requires sound marketing strategies and fiscal discipline, but as Anne Thomson observes, “[t]he advantages are clear for experienced indie execs with enlightened management—from Fox Searchlight and Sony Pictures Classics to Miramax and Focus Features—who understand the intricacies of the sector.”3 Unfortunately, as competition within the niche increased, the studios began relying on ever bigger budgets and stars for the films produced under the auspices of their oxymoronically labeled independent arms, thus blurring the lines between their specialty productions and mainstream releases. Additionally, more high dollar companies involved in the sector meant that bidding wars broke out over festival films that could have otherwise made a profit had they been properly valued and distributed as were famous acquisitions such as El Mariachi (Rodriguez 1992) and Clerks (Smith 1994). But when companies like Miramax started paying small fortunes for festival films, like they did when they notoriously paid $5 million for Tadpole (Winick 2002), a $150,000 movie shot on DV that tells the utterly non-commercial tale of a 15-year old who falls in love with his step-mom, it set off an inevitable chain reaction. As production and acquisition costs went up, so too did the costs of prints and advertising and distribution as films had to be pushed harder and released more widely to have a shot at recouping the money invested in them, which resulted in a vicious circle.

Accordingly, costs for specialty films continued to rise unabatedly throughout the 2000s. To wit, according to the MPAA, from just 2006 to 2007, the average cost for a specialty film rose over 60%, to $49.2 million and the average cost of advertising increased 44% as well, to $25.7 million.4 Something had to give, and in the Fall of 2008 everything finally came to a head when the world wide financial crisis hit and financing for acquiring or producing specialty films abruptly dried up, bringing an end to the irrational exuberance that had gripped the independent film sector for over a decade. Within months Warner Brothers shocked the industry by absorbing New Line into the parent company and shuttering both its specialty arms, Warner Independent Pictures and Picturehouse. Likewise, Paramount subsequently folded Paramount Vantage into the parent company and Disney sold off Miramax, the company that had started it all. And this was just the tip of the iceberg; the specialty sector would never be the same again.

But all was not gloom and doom. The shakeout was necessary and inevitable as the growth of studio specialty arms was unsustainable and unwarranted by the realities of the business, much like the housing bubble, to which rise of the studios’ specialty arms has eerie parallels. Ironically, once the indie business was consolidated and costs spiraled upwards, the pressure from the parent companies to make money increased, which consequently shut out from the industry the independent voices for which specialty arms ostensibly had been created to support. After the collapse, there was a glimmer of hope in that perhaps companies would be more open to once again seeking out and supporting new talent, which seemed like a real possibility with Paramount’s creation of Insurge; for the first time in a long time an opening for new voices appeared in the industry, and if Insurge was successful, maybe other companies would follow suit and create a new, more fiscally responsible specialty sector that would give more independent filmmakers a chance to break into the mainstream and result in more independent films being distributed.

Which brings us back to Justin Bieber and Never Say Never. I have a friend who not long ago made a very successful festival film that has opened a lot of doors for her, one of which was at Insurge where she recently pitched her next project. They loved her idea and offered her their supposedly standard $100,000 on the spot. She wisely turned it down, as the film, though low budget, will realistically cost at least $500,000 to make. But kudos are due to Insurge for steadfastly sticking to its business plan. Or are they? No, they wouldn’t budge for an independent project that isn’t likely to break huge but that might make money if handled correctly, but they had no problem kicking loose the lion’s share of Never Say Never’s reported $13 million budget, which would’ve funded 130 films over the next 13 years if Insurge had stuck to its original financing strategy. Instead, for its first theatrical release the company obliterated its budget model and artistic vision in favor of backing a star driven movie with a built in audience. It’s certainly paying off and I don’t begrudge Insurge its decision, but for a company specifically created to support new talent and distribute what it said would be “crazy, unpredictable, and hopefully awesome movies . . . that a big studio would never release because they’re too risky, too silly, and they don’t star Sandra Bullock,” Never Say Never is depressingly predictable.5 Worse, by immediately garnering an unexpected hit with a 3D star vehicle featuring well known properties (Bieber’s songs), I suspect that Insurge now will be much more likely to make additional comparatively safe but much higher priced pictures than they are to make $100,000 movies, thus running the risk of repeating the mistakes of its specialty arm predecessors and raising the stakes on its subsequent movies, which could once again set off a death spiral of escalating expectations and accompanying cost increases, the likes of which have already killed off distribution avenues for independent cinema once. Sadly, independent filmmakers may have just seen the door to one of their precious few remaining industry outlets slammed shut without their ever having had a chance to make it work.

Image Credits:
1. Author’s screen shot of Never Say Never poster from imdb.com.
2. Author’s screen shot of Tadpole poster from imdb.com.
3. Insurge Pictures’ Logo.

1. Stewart, Andrew. “Box Office New: Femmes Fuel Tight Box Office Frame.” Variety.com 13 February 2011.
2. Houpt, Simon. “Indie Boom Going Bust?” The Globe and Mail.com [Canada] 6 September 2008.
3. Thompson, Anne. “Niche Distrib Crunch Claims Paramount Vantage.” Variety.com 9–15 June 2008.
4. Miller, Winter. “The Gap Narrows.” Variety.com 10–16 March 2008.
5. Derousse, Ray. “Can Insurge Start a Film Revolution?” Obsessedwithfilm.com 11 March 2010.

In the first shot of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Michel lowers a newspaper to reveal his glorious visage. He wears a tie and a sport jacket, the brim of his hat is pulled rakishly low, and a cigarette dangles lasciviously from his lips. Michel removes the cigarette and runs his thumb along his mouth, à la his idol Humphrey Bogart. And with this loving homage, thus began film and television as we know them, narrative modes long rife with folks gleefully inserting sly references to other artists into their own work.

Indeed, one of the great pleasures of watching something like The Simpsons or Community is identifying the allusions to other texts. But the quoting of other sources has become so ubiquitous in our contemporary media culture that I fear we may have reached a point of saturation, in which too often the references are characterized by pastiche instead of homage, easily recognizable but devoid of the revisionist context that can give a quotation new meaning. At the risk of bringing down upon myself the unfettered wrath of every Gleek on the Internet, I think it’s hard to find a better illustration of this state of affairs than the current season of Glee. The show’s nature requires quotations, but unfortunately it is increasingly proving itself incapable of recasting them in interesting ways.

We’ve all got our favorite moments of homage. I’m particularly fond of revisionist occurrences in which films incorporate scenes from other works so as to both echo the originals but also recast them anew. Take, for example, P.T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997), which reads like a film studies encyclopedia. For example, its opening long tracking shot into the Hot Traxx nightclub mirrors the one in GoodFellas (1990) that takes viewers into The Copacabana. A later tracking shot winds its way through a porn impresario’s party, ultimately ending up underwater as it follows Dirk Diggler’s (Mark Wahlberg) trajectory when he jumps off a diving board. It’s akin to a similar shot in I Am Cuba (Kalatozov 1964), but the context couldn’t be more radically diverse, resulting in a very different function and meaning than that of its antecedent, which was a money shot in a communist propaganda film. And that last scene in which Diggler finally reveals what all the fuss is about recalls Jake La Motta’s (Robert DeNiro) final monologue in Raging Bull (Scorsese 1980), itself an homage to On The Waterfront’s (Kazan 1954) taxi cab scene between Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) and his brother Charley (Rod Steiger). But Boogie Nights’ clever incorporation of homage results in its becoming something greater than the sum of its familiar parts, thus allowing it to transcend the realm of imitation and become an influential work in its own right that will undoubtedly be quoted time and again by future generations of visual artists.

And then there’s Glee. Because there are no original songs, they’ve got to reference other works multiple times in every episode. When the show is at its best it takes cultural referents such as the video for Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” and turns it into something else by putting it in the context of trying to win a football game. It’s an utterly ridiculous and goofy scene that belies the reality of the way football works, but it’s also enormously satisfying and pretty funny to boot. The show’s musical numbers are to me more successful when they transport their sources to locales away from the stage or the classroom. And even when a musical number starts within the walls of William McKinley High School, if there are sequences that take us to other places and/or elsewhere in time, such as when Kurt recently sang “I Want to Hold Your Hand” for his classmates, that can also work incredibly well. But when their numbers are stagebound things often become stagnant, sucking the life out of the song and leaving a strong distaste in the mouths of many viewers, or at least those who know the original.

The apotheoses of these occurrences take place in the episode titled “The Substitute,” which features renditions of classic numbers from Singin’ in the Rain (Donen/Kelly 1952), which were themselves new takes on old songs. I’m not saying some texts are untouchable, but if you’re going to cover something so culturally iconic, you might want to do something totally new with it. So Gus Van Sant’s shot for shot remake of Psycho (1998)? Probably not a good idea. Conversely, Martin Scorsese’s reimagining of Ford’s The Searchers (1956) as an urban western in Taxi Driver (1976)? That works. If you don’t approach homage in this way it becomes nothing more than imitation, which might be the highest form of flattery but doesn’t make for good TV or cinema. So Glee’s rendition of Singin’ in the Rain’s title song incorporates a mash-up with Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and takes place on a stage full of water featuring the cast re-enacting moves from Gene Kelly’s classic sequence while also incorporating new moves into their set-piece number. There’s revision, and there’s imitation, and then there’s shitting on sanctity. I’m no purist and I’m not saying they shouldn’t have done it, but I would argue that despite the attempt at innovation, it doesn’t go far enough in its departure from either original. And the one thing that it’s missing that makes the movie’s original so great is passion you can feel. Kelly’s rendition takes place within the context of his falling in love with Kathy (Debbie Reynolds) and it results in Dionysian abandon, bringing to Technicolor life the giddy exhilaration that comes with new love, whereas Glee’s version is akin to watching craftsmen make shoes: there’s artistry in their production and the finished product is expertly made, but it lacks the soul that still makes Kelly’s sequence so resonant.

Worse still is their take on “Make ‘Em Laugh,” which features Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) and Mike Chang (Harry Shum, Jr.) in a duet that is at times a near step for step imitation of Donald O’Connor’s version. Again, failing to revise the setting and context in an interesting way leaves their rendition flat. It lacks the visceral joy of O’Connor’s sequence, the best part of which is that it makes the audience do what the title suggests, which is laugh. Will and Chang are great dancers, but as there’s no real reason for the scene other than to show that they can do a rote imitation of the steps, their version is totally devoid of life and spontaneity, making it seem as though it’s performed by technically proficient but non-sentient automatons.

There’s no reason you can’t do a scene that’s almost identical to the original, so long as you update it in such a way so as to give the audience a new way to interpret it. Take Spike Lee’s incorporation of the Love/Hate tattoo sequence from Night of the Hunter (Laughton 1955) into Do the Right Thing (1989). Robert Mitchum’s iconic scene is as seemingly inviolable as anything from Singin’ in the Rain, but by transposing it from a depression era white psychopathic murdering preacher in the deep south to Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), a socially aware young African-American male living in what was at the time contemporary Bedford-Stuyvesant, Lee both pays homage and avoids pastiche, creating something new in the process, a model of artistic quotation that I’m afraid might be falling out of favor in our current media landscape, as evidenced on Glee and elsewhere.

Image Credits:
1. Belmondo in Breathless.
2. Boogie Nights.
3. Kurt from Glee.

Please feel free to comment.

In 2009, Joe Swanberg’s Alexander the Last premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival. But the night before it screened at SXSW, it debuted on the Independent Film Channel’s IFC in Theaters, a movies-on-demand channel that’s available in 55 million American homes through which viewers can purchase and stream movies that are currently playing festivals or are in limited theatrical release. Additionally, they also have FestivalDirect, which plays six films a month IFC Films has picked up from festivals. It’s available in upwards of 37 million American households.1 Whereas Steven Soderbergh’s much ballyhooed 2005 day and date release of Bubble caused much handwringing about the future of films in Hollywood, IFC’s ventures are barely creating a ripple of protest, perhaps in part because more often than not the films they’re featuring never really had a chance for wide theatrical distribution anyway. Neither did Bubble for that matter; I would argue that it was only because it was made by Steven Soderbergh that it caused concern—had the movie been made by Joe Blow (or Swanberg, as the case may be), no one would have batted an eye as it wouldn’t have been seen as a threat to the status quo, even if the status quo was and is in need of a good shot in the arm. It’s also no surprise that it’s Next Wave filmmakers who are so keen to explore new opportunities such as this to get their work seen. Frustrated by how difficult the mainstream cinema is to break into, they’re creating a system of their own. As for Alexander the Last’s simultaneous multi-platform release, Swanberg himself summed it up nicely when he said “‘I feel like this is a watershed moment. The promise of the digital revolution, this democratization of movies, is now really happening’”.2 And in a neat case of reverse osmosis, some of what Next Wavers are doing is actually trickling back upstream; when Soderbergh’s Che failed to get a mainstream distribution deal in the States, he opted to show it on demand through IFC Films’ networks. And in a testament to how far we’ve come in such a short period of time, Hollywood didn’t raise on eyebrow.

Next Wave filmmakers are at the forefront of a flourishing movement and for better or worse, Hollywood has noticed. After all, as derided as the so-called “mumblecore” filmmakers (“a/k/a Generation DIY, a/k/a Cine Slackavetes, a/k/a MySpace Neorealism”) have been in some quarters, the fact remains that some of them are incredibly talented and to be able to make the waves in the industry they have sans any money whatsoever is nothing short of phenomenal.3 And as Andrew O’Hehir cynically notes, “Under capitalism, of course, there is no such thing as a revolution too strident (or too warm and fuzzy) to be turned into a commodity.” Accordingly, with Next Wave stalwarts like the Duplass Brothers and Greta Gerwig making the jump into the realm of multi-million dollar studio filmmaking there are ostensibly reasons for believers in indie cinema to be concerned about the seemingly inevitable accompanying loss of purity Hollywood affiliation will bring. But there’s also reason to believe that Hollywood is looking to the Next Wave not just for new talent, but for production inspiration as well.

When Paramount folded its specialty arm, Paramount Vantage, into the parent company, indie filmmakers lamented the loss of yet another distribution avenue; they retained the brand, but Paramount had taken Paramount Vantage mainstream. And then something potentially magical happened. In the spring of 2010 Paramount announced its reentry into indie film production, only this time their business plan owed a lot more to Next Wave filmmaking than it did to the traditional way that studio specialty arms operate. Rather than scouring the festival circuit for acquisitions, Paramount’s proposed new company, Insurge Pictures, will instead fund 10 movies a year at approximately $100,000 each. As John Horn notes, other companies have tried to create lower budget film divisions, such as 20th Century Fox’s Fox Atomic and Universal Studios’ Rogue Pictures, now owned by Relativity Media.4 But Insurge is the first time a major has tried its hand at truly micro-budget filmmaking. As Adam Goldman, president of Paramount’s film group, says about Insurge, “I feel very strongly we need to be contrary in our thinking . . . everybody has the ability to create content now”.5

Not surprisingly, the new studio is slated to be helmed by Amy Powell, who played a big part in shepherding Paramount’s $15,000 Paranormal Activity (2007 Peli) to the biggest return on the dollar in the history of Hollywood.6 As Patrick Goldsmith blogs in the LA Times:

It’s a fascinating, potentially game-changing concept, since it’s a wonderful way for studios to replenish the pipeline with new ideas, but ideas that can be executed on a cheap budget . . . .

But, of course, there are drawbacks. Studios are notoriously control-freak-style institutions. So will Paramount executives really be able to keep their mitts off these projects and refrain from trying to buff away all the rough edges? Can the studio execs refrain from giving the kind of soul-killing notes . . . that have been endlessly parodied by every writer who’s ever spent more than a weekend doing a studio rewrite?

And since it’s really, really tough to make a $100,000 movie while honoring commitments to SAG, the DGA and other unions, how will Paramount bankroll movies that presumably skirt union work rules and minimum compensation?

Despite the obvious risks, whatever happens with Insurge it’s still a sign of what’s to come next. Hollywood, always the last to realize that change is already here, is finally realizing that their output doesn’t all have to be the sturm und drang of tent-pole franchise films. As Powell herself said in her initial press statement, “Aren’t you tired of being fed the same movies wrapped in different paper? We want to find and distribute crazy, unpredictable, and hopefully awesome movies – movies that make you want to line up to see at your local theater with all your friends (and us). Movies that a big studio would never release because they’re too risky, too silly, and they don’t star Sandra Bullock”.7

There’s a whole generation of folks for whom shaky cams and lo-fi production values are perfectly acceptable and as the industry bifurcates towards a high and low end, mid-priced level films are what’s likely going to get caught in the crunch, too expensive to make back the returns that would justify their production costs. But in addition to an emerging audience that doesn’t mind watching films that don’t look like Hollywood’s high-end products, there’s also a Next Wave of filmmakers that is happy to eschew big budget filmmaking in order to focus on much smaller more resonantly personal narratives. Here’s hoping that in the digital future there’s room for them alongside their more bombastic Hollywood siblings.

*This essay stems from a chapter on Next Wave filmmaking that will appear in American Film in the Digital Age, forthcoming from Praeger Press in November of 2010. http://www.praeger.com/catalog/C9862.aspx

Image Credits:
1. Jess Weixler and Justin Rice in Alexander the Last
2. Jonah Hill, Marisa Tomei and John C. Reilly in Cyrus
3. Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig in Nights and Weekends
4. Insurge Pictures logo

Please feel free to comment.

1. Snyder, S. James. “The Film Festival Comes to Your Living Room.” Time Magazine.com 18 March 2009.
2. Snyder, S. James. “The Film Festival Comes to Your Living Room.” Time Magazine.com 18 March 2009.
3. Hoberman, J. “It’s Mumblecore! Films By, For, and About Twentysomethings are Having a Moment. IM Someone About It.” The Village Voice.com 14 August
   2007.
4. Horn, John. “Paramount to Launch Micro-Budget Movie Division.” The Los Angeles Times.com 10 December 2010.
5. Horn, John. “New Paramount Division Will Think Small.” The Los Angeles Times.com 11 December 2010.
6. Hernandez, Eugene. “Hollywood Studio to Back Micro-Budget Movies.” Indiewire.com 11 March 2010.
7. Derousse, Ray. “Can Insurge Start a Film Revolution?” Obsessedwithfilm.com 11 March 2010.

Rather than trying to make low budget versions of high-end Hollywood films, many contemporary young filmmakers are instead ignoring the commercial marketplace and making the movies they want to make on their own terms. At the forefront of these filmmakers are folks like Andrew Bujalski, Joe Swanberg, Aaron Katz, and Mark and Jay Duplass, who are considered founders of and key players in the so-called “mumblecore” movement, even though they uniformly find the moniker “reductive and silly”.1 There is far from consensus as to the value of their work, but much of the extant criticism is misplaced and focuses too much on what they’re doing in comparison to Hollywood and not enough on how they’re doing it, as it’s the how that may ultimately prove to be much more influential.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“Mumblecore” is a terrible name for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the way it has been pounced on by its detractors, who use the term derisively to emphasize what they see as its shortcomings. Take, for example, Amy Taubin, who asserts that “[o]n a technical level, these are micro-budget movies where sound is almost always a neglected element.”2 While the technical acumen isn’t always in the same league as a studio production, the sound is fine and regardless, I’d argue the term is less about sound quality then it is the way the characters talk, which is in halting, elliptically clipped phrases, full of the “ums,” “you knows,” and “likes” that are the lingua franca of the twenty-somethings these films typically feature. The inarticulateness is representative of an inability or unwillingness on the part of the characters to connect with one another on an emotional level that goes beyond their normal superficial but safe mode of communication.

While there are differences in the work of these directors, there are some unifying elements as well. Most of them shoot on digital video and there are a lot of long hand held shots. Part of this is aesthetic, but functionality and financial imperatives play a role too. With small, often non-professional casts and crews that are donating their time, it’s easier to do longer, uncomplicated shots. While the shots are simple, the editing often isn’t, in that there are frequently arrhythmic cuts, resulting in an unsettling effect on the viewer. Additionally, they tend to be more open to improvisation than most filmmakers. The reasons for this are also as much financial as they are aesthetic. Because they often get their friends to act (and crew and create the music, etc.) and typically shoot on digital video the only extra cost improvisation incurs is time, which, as they aren’t paying union rates for cast and crew, doesn’t translate to monetary cost in the same way that shooting extra footage does on a studio production. And, as Taubin writes, “. . . these non-actors are perfect choices for these films because their insecurity and embarrassment about voicing their characters’ ideas, desires, and feelings . . . dovetails with a defining characteristic of the particular cohort (white, middle-class, twenty-something) to which the filmmakers and their quasi-fictional characters belong. The mumblecore films literally speak in the voice of that cohort, and the best of them do so with remarkable and revealing precision.”

The subject of these films frequently centers around the characters’ “quarterlife crises,” which accompany the difficulty many post-grads have in transitioning from college to the working world. Dennis Lim evocatively describes this period as “the blurry limbo of post-collegiate existence, a period at once ephemeral and cruelly decisive” (commenting on “The Graduates”).3 This focus on post-college malaise has resulted in these filmmakers being dubbed the “voices of their generation,” a sobriquet with which they are justifiably uncomfortable, even while they acknowledge the possibility. As Bujalski posits, “‘fear of adulthood is a theme that pervades [my] films . . . and . . . maybe that is something that is specific, if not to ‘my generation,’ then at least my subset of it. I feel like a lot of people I know, myself included, are still figuring out what we’re doing, are single and so forth, even though we’re now at a point where we’re older than our parents were when they married and had us’”.4

Click here to view the embedded video.

But even if one views the term “mumblecore” as being more about the emotional stuntedness of its characters than a snide reference to its perceived technological deficiencies, it’s still a rotten term that doesn’t do the importance of the work justice. In describing the current state of independent cinema John Patterson claims that the “last independent generation has been co-opted by the studios, and the next one still labours in digicam/web-based/mumblecore obscurity, with its auteurs and iconoclasts yet to establish themselves.”5 Again, the idea that these filmmakers are working in “mumblecore” is derogatory in that they’re simply marking time until they get to the big league of Hollywood cinema. But what’s important to take from this is that many of them are going to eventually make their way to Hollywood; they are the next wave of filmmakers, and that’s exactly what they should be called: Next Wave filmmakers. There’s a lot of contention over whether or not the work of these filmmakers to date comprises a genre. David Denby refers without comment to “a recent genre of micro-budget independent movies,”6 whereas Taubin argues that mumblecore was “never more than a flurry of festival hype and blogoshpere branding” and definitely not a movement in “the grand sense of the French New Wave or the postwar American avant-garde.” While I don’t think the collective output of the Next Wavers comprises a genre, I do think there’s no doubt that a movement is afoot and history may well prove it to be every bit as grand as those Taubin cites. In fact, the French New Wave is a particularly apt analogy, in that it included a bunch of different filmmakers making a wide array of movies. The variance of their output prevented their being generically categorized, but the fact that they were making movies at the same time and that their work, often funded by the French government, was an anarchical alternative to mainstream European cinema is what made it a movement.

Kim Masters describes the output of Next Wave filmmakers as simply being “made with tiny budgets, shot on hand-held digital cameras, with unknown actors who talk a lot about their lives.”7 While true, there is more to their work than broad similarities that could just as accurately describe most home movies. In fact, there is a lot more narrative unity among the output of Next Wave filmmakers than there ever was among New Wave filmmakers. As Lim notes, “. . . what these films understand all too well is that the tentative drift of the in-between years masks quietly seismic shifts that are apparent only in hindsight. Mumblecore narratives hinge less on plot points than on the tipping points in interpersonal relationships . . . . Artists who mine life’s minutiae are by no means new, but mumblecore bespeaks a true 21st-century sensibility, reflective of MySpace-like social networks and the voyeurism and intimacy of YouTube.”8

The press has done a lot to pigeon-hole Next Wave filmmakers, in no small part because they typically focus on Bujalski, Swanberg, Katz, and the Duplass Brothers, which makes it seem more like an exclusive fraternity than a broad scale movement. Taubin is absolutely right when she taps Korean American filmmaker So Yong Kim as deserving inclusion in what I call the Next Wave movement. I would put Kelly Reichardt in this group as well. In fact, there are a ton of young Next Wave filmmakers of all colors, genders, and sexual orientations who are embracing the freedom and opportunity that comes with low budget filmmaking, digital or otherwise, and some of them will definitely break through and make their marks as filmmakers. The club as touted by the media is small, but that’s not reflective of the groundswell that’s taking place in the world of filmmaking right now. To wit, in the winter of 2010, the Sundance Film Festival included a new section that featured low and no budget films, tellingly titled “Next.” Eight films were selected for Next, all of them shot on digital video by a multi-ethnic array of directors who range in age from 24 to 32.9 While not identified as part of the “mumblecore” gang, there’s no doubt they are all working in the same ballpark. In “A Generation,” Lim writes that Next Wave filmmakers are part of “[m]ore a loose collective or even a state of mind than an actual aesthetic movement,” but I would argue that they are at the forefront of a revolutionary technological movement that will undoubtedly have profound long term effects on the industry. Add to that the fact that they are much more open to change and new methods than their elders, and it seems inevitable that they will play a role in the future of Hollywood. It’s not “if,” it’s “when.”

*This essay stems from a chapter on Next Wave filmmaking that will appear in American Film in the Digital Age, forthcoming from Praeger Press in November of 2011. http://www.praeger.com/catalog/C9862.aspx

Image Credits:
1. Funny Ha Ha poster
2. Still from Mutual Appreciation

1. Koresky, Michael. “The Mumblecore Movement? Andrew Bujalski on his ‘Funny, Ha
   Ha.’” Indiewire.com 22 August 2005.
2. Taubin, Amy. “All talk? Supposedly the voice of its generation, the indie film movement known as Mumblecore has had its 15 minutes.” Film Society of Lincoln Center.com November/December 2007.
3. Lim, Dennis. “The Graduates: Indie Captures Twentysomething Indecision, Like, Perfectly.” The Village Voice.com 19 April 2005.
4. Foundas, Scott. “Mutual Appreciation Society: The World of Andrew Bujalski.” LA Weekly.com 7 September 2006.
5. Patterson, John. “The Last Indie Film Generation has been Co-opted by the Studios, While the Next Still Labours in Digicam, Mumblecore Obscurity.” The
   Guardian [London].com 18 July 2008.
6. Denby, David. “Youthquake: Mumblecore Movies.” The New Yorker.com 16 March 2009.
7. Masters, Kim. “The Brothers Duplass Go Studio.” KCRW’s The Business Podcast 21 June 2010.
8. Dennis Lim. “A Generation Finds its Mumble.” The New York Times.com 19 August 2007.
9. Wood, Jennifer M. “Sundance’s ‘Next’ Wave of Indie Moviemakers.” Moviemaker.com 19 January 2010.

Contemporarily, we are so fascinated by the unprecedented rapidity with which something goes viral and becomes a part of the lingua franca that we sometimes forget the fact that normally, a thing becomes a part of our cultural fabric gradually, so much so that we don’t even notice exactly when it becomes ubiquitous; it just is, as though it always has been, even though its rise to omnipresence took years to achieve. This is especially true when it comes to the movies’ place in the cultural genome, a realization by which I was repeatedly struck while watching the final season of Lost unfold. The show is justifiably much lauded as being wildly original in the context of network TV, but I can’t help but notice how often it includes intertextual references to movies to underscore its narrative points.

A telling example of this phenomenon happens in Episode 8 of Season 6 of Lost, “Recon,” in which Locke /The Man in Black (Terry O’Quinn) is explaining to Kate (Evangeline Lilly) why Claire (Emilie de Raven) now hates her. When Kate tells him, “That’s very insightful. Coming from a dead man,” Locke dramatically pauses before replying, “Well, nobody’s perfect,” which is also the famous last line of Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959), said by Osgood (Joe E. Brown) after Jerry/Daphne (Jack Lemmon) reveals that he’s a man. You would think that the blatant nature of the reference might result in a deluge of analysis, but the opposite has been the case, with comparatively subtle references to things like the novels Watership Down and A Wrinkle in Time getting more notice. As of this writing, it’s mentioned on neither the “movie connections” section of the episode’s imdb.com entry nor under the “Cultural references” subheading of its Lostpedia article. It is noted in the Lostpedia Discussion section, but sloughed off as more of an in-joke or a stretch or just a coincidentally used common phrase as opposed to something to be taken more analytically seriously. While I suppose I can believe that maybe the phrase’s initial inclusion was accidental (although given its place in popular culture I doubt it), I can’t believe that none of the many film savvy folks who read the script prior to its being produced didn’t notice and comment on it and the fact that it remains leads me to believe the authors’ (Elizabeth Sarnoff and Jim Galasso) wanted it in and had their reasons for doing so. The phrase is just so iconic that I can’t believe otherwise.

Obviously, it’s open to interpretation, but for me the beauty of its use in this context is in the way it inverts the source. In Some Like it Hot, “Daphne” is the one who is not what he is supposed to be and after his confession, it’s Osgood who surprisingly dismisses his imperfection. Conversely, in Lost it’s not Locke who confesses; instead, Kate, who he’s trying to fool, calls him out. In this instance “nobody’s perfect” is the con man’s chilling excuse rather than the victim’s humorous absolution of the perpetrator. But were Some Like It Hot not as culturally prominent as it is, I wouldn’t be thinking about the scene in this way and that its incorporation into Lost acts as a kind of shorthand to create a response in the same way a stock character or situation does is what makes its use so powerful.

Less noticeable but no less interesting are the uses of specific shots from movies that Lost incorporates into its episodes. The visual language of cinema and TV is finite and certain shots recur endlessly, rendering their repetition meaningless as concerns their connection with other sources and any interpretive light they might shed on a particular scene. A case in point occurred in the final episode of Lost, “The End,” in which I laughed out loud when Jack jumped at Locke. It’s a shot that’s currently used ad nauseam in action movies and I immediately remembered I’d just seen it in Clash of the Titans (Leterrier 2010). Given their respective relationships with their fathers and the role destiny plays in their tales, I suppose you could claim a connection between Jack (Matthew Fox) and Perseus (Sam Worthington), but in this instance I do think it’s just a happy (at least to me) coincidence.

On the other hand, there’s a helicopter shot of a group led by Jack that recurs earlier in the same episode. It’s in many ways a mirror of the introductory shot of Maria (Julie Andrews) in The Sound of Music (Wise 1965). This too may be wholly unintentional, but it’s harder to let this one slide as inconsequential. Like the aforementioned reference to Some Like it Hot, this too neatly inverts its source. In The Sound of Music it’s a shot that introduces us to our heroine singing in the prelapsarian Eden of the Austrian Alps and it’s full of magic and wonder and leaves us anticipating that which comes next as she races off to face her future. It’s a sublimely joyous shot and it serves to reinforce our belief in Maria over the remainder of the film, even though Nazis soon overrun her Eden. In Lost, the shot comes during “The End,” by which time we know these characters well and we also know there’s nothing else to come; whatever the end is going to be, they’re going to face it and the story will be concluded, if not exactly resolved. And the seemingly paradisiacal setting of the island does not fool us; we know that it isn’t necessarily what it appears to be and that humanity has long since fallen. They leave not with the optimism of a songbird, but with the grim determination of warriors knowingly going off to die in battle, which rather than filling us with anticipation instead fosters a sense of dread. We’ve seen their foibles; we know they aren’t invincible and we’re far from certain they’ll be able to overcome whatever awaits them and the shot has the neat effect of confirming our doubts.

I’m far less certain that this shot was meant to reference The Sound of Music than I am that “nobody’s perfect” purposely quotes Some Like it Hot. But whether it was supposed to or not is beside the point because I responded to it as though it was, which allowed me to consider the moment contextually in a way I wouldn’t have otherwise done. As my reading of Lost illustrates, we are at an interesting point in media history, one in which so many of us have read and seen so many things that have become a part of our intellectual DNA that we can and often do add our own sources to a text that was never meant to have them. We are collectively using the same materials to create our individual narratives, the result of which, to quote Whitman, is that in contemporary narrative visual media “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

Image Credits:
1. ABC/Touchstone promotional still from Season 6 of Lost.
2. Still from Some Like It Hot. Provided by author.
3. Still from Lost. Provided by author.
4. Still from Lost. Provided by author.
5. Still from Clash of the Titans. Provided by author.
6. Still from The Sound of Music. Provided by author.
7. Still from Lost. Provided by author.