Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan by Robin Wood (review)

2)8 LETTERS IN CANADA 1986 haunting treasUle of the novelist's work is still waiting to be explored, Sphinx-like, simultaneously challenging and forbidding. (MICHAL SCHONBERG) Robin Wood. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan Columbia University Press. )17, illus. us $25.00 Since the mid-1960s, Robin Wood's most persuasive film criticism has taken the form of monographs on individual directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Ingrnar Bergman, and Arthur Penn, organized around what he terms 'close readings' which he models on F.R. Leavis's literary analysis . Although much else has changed with him, including his move from England to Canada (he now teaches at York University) and his decision to take on 'the responsibilities of a gay film critic,' the methodological shape of Wood's writing is still the same in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. Penn, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, and Michael Cimino are argued to be the strong filmmakers in the era named by the book, which gathers essays written over the last decade. However, the readings Wood carries out here differ thematically from his earlier work. In Personal Views, his previous collection, Wood rejected the politicized structuralism represented by Peter Wollen and the Screen magazine group of film critics then on the rise in England. Against their systematic precepts of Marxist film analysis, Wood defended what he termed 'humanist criticism' with its themes of the importance of artistic style and vision, social critique, and a cautious commitment to realistic rather than popular filmmaking. By the mid-1970S, when the writing of the present essays began, Wood was compelled to face a new problem: the attenuation of strong cinema in Hollywood. As he laments in the early chapters here, Penn rarely worked and Robert Altman turned rather silly as the decade progressed, while many promising young filmmakers produced 'incoherent texts,' ambitious but confused films. Yet, rather than turning to EUlopean cinema and addreSSing, for example, the German Neues Kino, Wood reworked his critical themes to criticize anew the collapsing tradition of American film. As Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan amply shows, this has meant Wood's taking up Marxism and Freudianism in a somewhat confused mixture. One might expect this development would bring Wood closer to his former English opponents. In fact, Wood does cite Stephen Heath, the most advanced of the Screen group, with a new affection. However, the reason for the collegiality is feminism, a common ground, and not film theory, from which Wood remains as distant as ever despite his cessation of anti-structuralist polemics. His Marxism and Freudianism are derived not from Althusser and Lacan but from Marcuse, and his critical focus is not on film form (the concern of cine-semiotics) but on plot, theme, and character, just as they were before. HUMANITIES 239 In 'Cards on the Table: his prefatory essay, Wood claims that his criticism has taken a radical turn. He believes Hollywood has become so reactionary and repressive that it has forced popular filmmaking only to replicate the wishes and myths of the Reagan era. To provide an account of that reaction, Wood draws on Marcuse to construct a 'master narrative' under the surface of recent American film. This narrative rises out of the desire to restore the authoritarian father to his proper place and to force the sons to identify with the father's power and responsibility for upholding civilization. The old Hollywood had, of course, a similar agenda working beneath the surface, but, Wood believes, the American classical cinema allowed room for a critical tension between myth-making and self-awareness, a tension embodied in directors like Ford, Hitchcock, Hawks, and Ophuls. The Reagan era collapses this room into an obsessive repetition of its repressive thematic. The play of affirmation and critique of American society that was the source of the old Hollywood's strength and dynamism is now vitiated in the new Hollywood. To prove this thesis, Wood discusses a good many mediocre films, like The Great Santini and An Officer and a Gentleman. He shows that the narrative design running across many films puts the father back in place and banishes the mother and other women completely from the drama. Such a disclosure...