'Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain':
Reflexivity and Authority in Mainstream Cinema

Theron U Schmidt



The history of early cinema reveals a conflict between impulses toward and away from the ideology of realism. This conflict can be perceived in the subsumption of Eisenstein's "cinema of attractions" by the narrativization of films. In his essay of the same title, Tom Gunning describes the cinema of attractions as "an exhibitionist cinema," one that "displays its visibility, willing to rupture a self- enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator" (p. 57). Gunning writes that this cinema makes use of "both fictional and non- fictional [such as the cinematic apparatuses themselves] attractions," directing its energy "outward towards an acknowledged spectator rather than inward towards the character-based situations essential to classical narrative" (p. 59). After 1906-7, however, this cinema "goes underground, both into certain avant- garde practices and as a component of narrative films" (p. 57). Gunning's article demonstrates that certain features of the cinema of attractions persisted in mainstream film, such as in musicals, in slapstick comedy, or in chase scenes and other energetic moments ("effects are tamed attractions" (p. 61)).
Nevertheless, since early in this century, American mainstream cinema has for the most part been committed to eliding the film itself as spectacle, supplanting it with the drama of the character's subjectivity told by a realist narrative and form. As Christian Metz writes in The Imaginary Signifier, it is the realist form rather than the narrative that is ultimately more important in creating the viewer's identification:

We are not referring here to the spectator's identification with the 
characters of the film (which is secondary), but to his preliminary 
identification with the (invisible) seeing agency of the film itself as 
discourse, as the agency which puts forward the story and shows it to us.  
Insofar as it abolishes all traces of the subject of enunciation [the subject 
responsible for the narrative being spoken], the traditional film succeeds in 
giving the spectator the impression that he is himself that subject, but in a 
state of emptiness and absence, of pure visual capacity....  [The spectator 
observes] a story from nowhere, that nobody tells, but which, 
nevertheless, somebody receives.... 			  (p. 96-7)

That is, the form that has the most convincing and realistic effect is that which seems the least unrealistic, that which obscures its created-ness and seems to just "happen." Jeffrey Sconce writes that this attempt to "erase or at least obscure all marks of [the film's] enunciation" is frequently seen by film theorists as "a central goal of Hollywood narrative cinema as a socially and historically specific representational system" (p. 107).
Adorno and Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry," written in the mid-1940s, shares this conception of mainstream cinema as predominantly realist (or anti- unrealist); they refer to "the old experience of the movie-goer, who sees the world outside as an extension of the film he has just left (because the latter is intent upon reproducing the world of everyday perceptions)" (p. 33-4). The film intends this flawless reproduction of reality so that its story is more easily received and, Adorno and Horkheimer argue, so that its ideology is more efficiently transmitted. The insight of the essay takes this point further: the film, a product of the culture industry, intends not only to reproduce the everyday world of the spectator but to produce it as well. The producer of their time takes the experience described above as his or her model: "the more intensely and flawlessly his techniques duplicate empirical objects, the easier it is today for the illusion to prevail that the outside world is the straightforward continuation of that presented [not represented] on the screen" (p. 34). The film as a "spectacle" is hidden1, and this elision serves to eliminate the subjective position of "spectator"; in its place, Adorno and Horkheimer perceive the position of "victim":

Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies.  The sound 
film, far surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or 
reflection on part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the 
structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the 
thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly 
with reality.  The stunting of the mass-media consumer's powers of 
imagination and spontaneity ... [must be ascribed to] the objective 
nature of the products themselves....  All the other films and products of 
the entertainment industry that [the viewers] have seen have taught them 
what to expect; they react automatically.  The might of industrial society is 
lodged in men's minds.						 (p. 34)

Even the presence of the viewer in the theater is a position produced by the industry, according to Adorno and Horkheimer. They write, "it is claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumers' needs.... The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger" (p. 31). The viewer is not in the movie theater to fulfill his or her own subjective need, but rather to consume the product for which he or she has been summoned in order to need.
In this analysis, the efficacy with which the entertainment industry produces and reproduces culture should be undermined by practices that reveal the artifice involved in filmic production. Warren Bass describes this reflexive recognition by a film of its filmic-ness as demystifying:

The reflexive stance attempts demystification by creating awareness 
of the medium itself.  As viewers we are distanced in the Brechtian sense 
so that we may have a perspective on the relationship of the filmmaker to 
the medium or to the event-in-front-of-the-camera.  Reflexivity reveals the 
filming process and admits that the medium is a medium.  In a sense, this 
appears to be superobjectivity. 	(p. 144)

In contrast to the breathlessly impulsive and unthinking film described by Adorno and Horkheimer, this type of reflexive filmmaking would seem to generate thought on the part of the spectator, thereby providing a site for the exercise of subjectivity and a subversion of the productive circle. In Film as a Subversive Art, Amos Vogel celebrates the subversive possibilities of reflexive filmmaking, which "forces the artwork to reveal its own artificiality, drawing our attention to its hitherto jealously concealed, 'fraudulent' character" (p. 108).
Both Bass and Vogel locate the origin of reflexive filmmaking with Dziga Vertov in the 1920s, referring to the photographer appearing on screen, actors breaking character, and the unmasked presence of the cinematic apparatus. Gunning's point about the coexistence of the cinema of attractions and narrative film notwithstanding, it is not too improbable to claim that Reflexive Cinema contains the legacy of the cinema of attractions, forced underground and undermining its mainstream successor from this underprivileged position. This legacy might be extended to a filmmaker like Godard, whose use of titles, incoherence, and filmic quotation foregrounds his films as films. Louis Giannetti describes Godard's intention as derived from Brecht's "alienation effect"; the viewer must be constantly disturbed for "only if the viewer is not totally absorbed by the action can he evaluate rationally the ideological implications of what he has witnessed" (p. 28).
By many accounts, then, reflexive cinema should serve to subvert activities like those practiced by the culture industry as conceptualized by Adorno and Horkheimer. The central concern of this paper is how to reconcile this theory with the fact of the abundance of reflexive moments to be found in recent Hollywood films. Consider the following, chosen arbitrarily from recent movies I have seen or heard about2:

- Outbreak, which features a scene in which a contaminated person enters a movie theater; the scene follows the spread of germs as we watch the backs of seated people who are laughing and watching a movie in the far background, just like the "real" people directly in front of us.
- Jurassic Park: the merchandising scene.
- Seven: a character says, "This isn't going to have a happy ending, you know."
- Waterworld: the ironic line, "Nothing's free in Waterworld" given the much publicized delays and costs. - Congo: when one character asks another why the Africans around them are running away, the reply is, "Nobody wants to be in another American movie."
- The Usual Suspects: the plot depends wholly on the manner in which the narration is given and in which it conceals and distorts the information available to the viewer.
- Strange Days: a movie about the ultimate movie experience.
- Copycat: a thriller about thriller movies for fans of thriller movies.
- Get Shorty: the most recent example of a movie depicting the events about which a movie is made (and which ends with the shooting of the movie that the viewer has just seen).
- Any movie with a Tarantino cameo.

Some of these examples are more straightforward than others, and I have been told that I am making too much of a throwaway line. But if we are to take Adorno and Horkheimer at all seriously, we cannot believe in such a thing as a throwaway line:

The constraint of the technically conditioned idiom, which stars and 
directors have to produce as 'nature' so that the people can appropriate 
it, extends to such fine nuances that they almost attain the subtlety of the 
devices of an avant-garde work as against those of truth.  The rare 
capacity minutely to fulfil the obligations of the natural idiom in all 
branches of the culture industry becomes the criterion of efficiency....  The 
producers are experts. 		(Adorno and Horkheimer, p. 36)

These reflexive scenes and lines are too common to be coincidental slippage of the codes of production; they must have been tamed, appropriated, or even (as I will argue) part of a tactic that amplifies even further the reproduction of authoritative ideologies.
Bass's treatment of reflexivity acknowledges its limits as a subversive technique. He writes, "A reflexive stance gives us a perspective on what we are watching, but what gives us a perspective on that perspective? Absolute demystification is no more possible than absolute objectivity; Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle explains this inevitability (nothing is certain but uncertainty)" (p. 145). Putting aside his questionable introduction of a principle of quantum physics into film studies, Bass's comment is useful in understanding the possibility for appropriation: a force is still guiding the use of reflexivity according to its own intentions. The viewer is prompted to thought, but not with absolute freedom, or even considerable independence. Even in Godard, "emotional identification is not denied, but carefully controlled through a number of techniques" (Giannetti, p. 28). Given that the culture industry carries out "the stereotyped appropriation of everything, even the inchoate, for the purposes of mechanical reproduction" (Adorno and Horkheimer, p. 34-5), we should not be surprised that this seemingly subversive technique can be controlled and contained. However, the mainstream appropriation of this practice goes beyond simple containment.
Jeffrey Sconce's analysis of the use of reflexivity in Hollywood horror films, a category that is not wholly mainstream but is certainly not alternative, provides a useful introduction to the ways in which mainstream cinema uses reflexivity to bolster its authority. Comparing reactions to reflexive moments in Freddy's Dead (part of the Nightmare on Elm Street series) and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Sconce finds that "the self-reflexive techniques thought by many theorists to challenge dominant modes of enunciation and identification are used instead as a means of intensifying certain forms of viewer identification" (p. 111). In particular, the reflexivity of a scene involving a television and a video game in Freddy's Dead serves as a "snare" to attract teen viewers. The snare is to let teens familiar with the genre feel a sense of empowerment from their knowledge: "narrational self-consciousness in this case serves as an ironic commentary on the film's presumed viewership, a commentary that allows teens in on the joke" (p. 112). Because the viewer "knows something that [the character] does not, namely, that this particular teen is about to buy the farm in spectacular fashion," the viewer is not horrified by what happens but pleased that his or her anticipation was correctly allocated.
It is this same pleasure that the viewer derives from "realizing" that he or she knows more than the characters that is at work in the examples I have listed above. The point that I would stress, however, is that this is a very carefully choreographed "realization," one that ultimately depends on the authority3 that produced the film. Just as the teen market was snared in Sconce's analysis, so are we as cinephiles snared by these reflexive moments. This is the simple but powerful lesson that Tarantino taught Hollywood: "people who go to movies are people who like movies." I go to the movie, knowing that I am going to see what is only a movie; I am pleased by the reflexive moments, for in catching them I think I reaffirm my autonomy for I have insight that exceeds that of the characters in the film.
But what is it that I am seeing? Consider the following example from Get Shorty: the-character-played-by-John-Travolta is telling the-character-played-by-Danny-DeVito how to give a certain look in order that the- character-played-by-Danny-DeVito can portray the-character-played-by-John-Travolta in the movie that will occur within Get Shorty (that is, the-character-played-by-the-character-played-by-Danny-DeVito is based on the-character-played-by-John-Travolta); in the process, the-character-played-by-John-Travolta gives this look to the camera. Through all the reflexive mirroring, one feature stands out in this moment: John Travolta, the actor, can give the look. Rather than foregrounding a character's actions, this mainstream reflexivity foregrounds an actor's ability. It takes into account that I know I am watching actors perform; this is the consciousness that subverts realist, non-reflexive narrative form, but the consciousness is harnessed and fashioned into a snare.
Bass describes the way in which reflexivity enables this subversive consciousness: "Reflexivity may help us strip the medium of its stale myths, particularly that of the implied invisibility of the camera common to many films of the 1960s Direct Cinema movement.... If the participants pretend that the camera is not there, then one wonders what other actions in the film might also be pretended" (p. 144). The reflexive moment explicitly portrays the actor's occupation. In effect, this collapses the distance in time between the moment of production and the moment of reproduction; the moment of need that I (am produced to?) experience in viewing is identical with the moment of fulfillment that occurred before the cameras. What I see is not a moment in the character's diegetic life but a moment in the actor's "real" life when he or she is delivering a line that reflects his or her "present" activity. Yet is there ultimately any difference between these two moments? Both the character and the actor are products of the industry, for as Adorno and Horkheimer write, "talented performers belong to the industry long before it displays them; otherwise they would not be so eager to fit in" (p. 31-2). The authoritative forces of cultural production still define the identity-representing act and determine the moment of identification. True, some of the machinery is now visible, but only so far as it lends credibility to the authority that reveals them; it is all machines within machines anyway.

SOURCES

Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. "The culture industry: enlightenment as mass deception" in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 1993).


Bass, Warren. "Filmic Objectivity and Visual Style" in Film/Culture: Explorations of cinema in its social context, ed. Sari Thomas (London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1982).

Giannetti, Louis. Godard and Others: Essays on Film Form (London: The Tantivity Press, 1975).

Gunning, Tom. "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant- Garde" in Early Cinema. First published in Wide Angle, Fall 1986.

Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).

Sconce, Jeffrey. "Spectacles of Death: Identification, Reflexivity, and Contemporary Horror" in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, & Ava Preacher Collins (New York: Routledge, 1993).

Vogel, Amos. Film as a Subversive Art (New York: Random House, 1974).