American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium

"THE KINDS OF TODAY SHOULD DEFEND THEMSELVES AGAINST THE '70S": Simulating Auras and Marketing Nostalgia in Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse

221 “The kidS of Today Should defend TheMSelveS aGainST The ’70S” Simulating Auras and Marketing Nostalgia in Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse —Jay McRoy illuSory “auraS” and The “GrindhouSe exPerience” In his 1936 essay,“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”Walter Benjamin posits cinema as a nexus of scientific, aesthetic, economic, and political practices that effectively sublimate bourgeois conceptualizations of a work’s“aura”to a process of simulation that ultimately“emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual”and“authenticity”(224).This formulation, however,meets its postmodern inversion in one of contemporary U.S. horror cinema’s more conspicuous trends—the application of digital technology as a means of reconstructing an idealized, historically specific viewing experience marked, visually, by the material conditions of distressed celluloid and, audibly, by the pop and hiss indicative of damaged analogue soundtracks. An increasingly popular conceit, as evidenced in the films of directors such as Rob Zombie and Alexandre Aja, this digital manipulation places their films into a critical, nostalgic, and meta-cinematic dialogue with low-budget U.S. horror and exploitation films of the 1970s, revealing a desire to recapture, albeit in the most superficial and paradoxical ways, attributes connected with antiquated modes of cinematic exhibition and reception.1 Consequently, in its fetishization of an imaginary“authenticity,”contemporary U.S.horror cinema’s affinity for imitating and/or reimagining the“look” and“feel” of an increasingly obsolete viewing experience conjures up the ghost of Benjamin’s already immaterial “aura,” complete with the ritualistic,authoritative,and hierarchical structures that allegedly vanished with the emergence of art’s technological reproducibility. Jay Mcroy 222 Of these recent exercises in cinematic nostalgia,Robert Rodriguez’s and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse (2007) emerges as perhaps the most metacinematic and overtly aestheticized. Supplemented by a compilation of bogus satirical trailers directed by Rodriguez, Eli Roth, Edgar Wright, and Rob Zombie, the majority of Grindhouse is comprised of two truncated features: Robert Rodriguez’s archetypal zombie splatterfest, Planet Terror, and Quentin Tarantino’s meta-cinematic paean to B-movie muscle car flicks and low-budget proto-slasher films, Death Proof. Together, Rodriguez and Tarantino endeavor to reproduce an increasingly obsolete viewing experience for contemporary cineplex audiences. Specifically, their ambitious collaboration aims to replicate the historically, technologically, and geographically specific “feel” of viewing exploitation films, often in the form of damaged or incomplete prints, within a spatially and temporally specific locale, namely the derelict, often financially imperiled, urban theaters that “flourished” in the 1960s and 1970s before slowly vanishing from the North American landscape with the emergence and proliferation of video cassettes and cable television channels. Far too impoverished to compete with the emergence of multiplexes boasting numerous large screens, increasingly sophisticated sound systems, and the support of major studios, these smaller, often independently owned movie theaters booked such marginalized fare as European art films, soft-core erotica, Italian cannibal films, spaghetti westerns,Asian martial arts extravaganzas,and sloppily constructed genre pictures ranging from biker films and blaxploitation features to splatter films and “Women in Prison” movies. In other words, out of sheer economic necessity, grindhouse theaters screened works that their wealthier, corporate-managed competitors would never consider booking out of a fear of offending a substantial percentage of the middle-class market share they quickly came to dominate. As Jane Mills notes, grindhouse cinema offered: “pure exploitation joy [. . .] Kung Fu, Sex, Revenge, Murder, Blood Gorged Frames, Fast Cars, Fast Women, and a pumping pulsing soundtrack that makes your dick or nipples hard” (para. 26). Consequently, these decaying urban theaters catered to audiences hungry for films created, in the words of Ephraim Katz, “with little or no attention to quality or artistic merit, but with an eye to a quick profit, usually via high-pressure sales and promotion techniques emphasizing some sensational aspect of the product” (446). Additionally, due to the economic constraints governing their operation, these inner-city venues, like the prints they screened, evidenced varying degrees of disrepair. Indeed, the venues’ shabby confines contributed to the overall viewing experience, attracting eclectic audiences of die-hard cinephiles looking for“edgier” films with controversial or sensationalistic subject matter. By their own admission, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino are filmmakers very much inspired by their own grindhouse experiences. Works like El Mariachi (1992), Desperado (1995), From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), and Once Upon SiMulaTinG auraS and MarkeTinG noSTalGia in GRINDHOUSE 223...