American Cinema of the 1990s: Themes and Variations

1991 Movies and Wayward Images

1991 Movies and Wayward Images SHARON WILLIS The Gulf War came to us as a seamless flow of eerily simulacral images, remarkably consistent grainy black-and-white computer pictures from the point of view of unmanned missiles, producing an entirely abstract landscape cut to the measure of the TV screen that we watched every day. Images provided by a disembodied agency as abstract as a video game occupied the whole picture, pushing concrete locations and real bleeding and dying bodies out of the frame. But Gulf War imagery produced only one of a series of weird inversions between fiction and reality that played out across our mediascape. Many of these inversions cast politics, history, and material events as spectacles, but conversely treated fictional entertainment cinema as a potentially dangerous social agent that could provoke violent imitation by its audience. Race and gender frequently anchored public debates about the effects of images, though often these categories became confused. During the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, in which African American legal scholar Anita Hill testified that Thomas had sexually harassed her years earlier, the race and gender of these antagonists worked to transform congressional proceedings into national theater. The drama played out such that Thomas became the representative of blackness as victim and Hill was cast as the delegate of white feminism (see Morrison). Cynically calling the hearings a “high-tech lynching,” and with the collusion of Congress and the press, Thomas became a racially inflected icon of suffering while Hill became de-racialized, abstracted as a representative of a feminism coded only as white. The hearings thereby staged the inadequacy of official and popular rhetorics of representation, or image repertories, to handle race and gender simultaneously. But while Thomas strategically evoked the image of lynching—the historical act of racial terrorism that centrally depends on the effects of public spectacle—what of Rodney King’s real-life beating, captured on videotape in March? Wasn’t this arguably a lynching under the auspices of civil authority? Although the legal standing of the videotape as evidence was 45 only evaluated the following year, its long circulation in the popular media surely affected the Simi Valley verdict. The eminent black scholar Houston Baker characterized the tape of the King beating as reproducing a classic “scene of violence” in U.S. cultural and narrative history, one dating back to the slave narrative. As the tape replayed endlessly on TV screens across the United States, Baker concluded, “King is still silent and manifestly invisible , in proper person. It is as though he is sickeningly caught forever in the graceless heaviness of his attempts—crudely videotaped—to escape the next crushing blow from the LAPD” (43). Hamid Naficy emphasizes the importance of silence and repetition. He argues that “the repeated screening of dissected images”—as in sports replays, for example—far from yielding a hidden truth behind the moving images, instead “turns them into abstractions, into images without referent, into simulacrum” (301). Signi ficantly, for Baker, too, to restore a sound track to this image is to give voice to history, to interrupt the visual spectacle of the black body. In Baker’s estimation, the proper sound track to destabilize this image is rap. And rap, of course, provides the sound track for the year’s most successful and attention-grabbing black-authored films. N.W.A., the West Coast hip-hop group, released its final album, Efi14zaggin (Niggaz41ife), before breaking up for good, just as Ice Cube began his movie career in Boyz n the Hood and Naughty by Nature’s rap single “O.P.P.” crossed over to climb the pop music charts and MTV broadcast its video. Musical boundaries continued to shift. Nirvana, one of the bands most closely associated with grunge, released its album Nevermind, which featured its breakthrough song, “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Also reflecting the grunge aesthetic, Douglas Coupland’s Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture provided a name for the generation coming of age in the late 1980s. This book sought to capture the cultural landscape of twentysomething slackers, and it shaped a new lexicon, crafting terms like “McJob,” that would enter into broader circulation. Elsewhere on the literary front, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho sparked heated controversy with its overthe -top depictions of violence, mainly against women. When Simon and Schuster ceremoniously dropped the novel from its publication list, the new media-savvy director of Vintage, Sonny...