The End Of Cinema As We Know It: American Film in the Nineties

13. The Confusions of Warren Beatty

13 The Confusions of Warren Beatty Dana Polan AT THE END of the 1990s, Warren Beatty’s career intersected explicitly with politics in a series of striking events. First, although he is known as a left filmmaker and participated, for example, in that guise in an issue of the Nation on political filmmaking in Hollywood,1 Beatty pointedly was one of the audience members who stood up and applauded when HUAC name-namer Elia Kazan was given a controversial lifetime achievement award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Second, Beatty got caught up in intense media coverage when he was pushed to consider running as a Democratic candidate for the 2000 presidential election. Interestingly, in another blurring of political lines, it was journalist Ariana Huffington—at that point most closely allied to a conservative position—who first planted the idea of a Beatty campaign in her column and on her Web site. The media flurry around a Beatty run for the presidency was quite intense until Beatty finally made it clear that he was not a candidate. Subsequently, when Beatty was awarded an Irving Thalberg Life Achievement Award from the Academy, some commentators joked that it was being given in appreciation of Beatty sparing Hollywood the spectacle of a presidential campaign. But the most significant event was Beatty’s production and direction of one of the most bluntly committed films to come out of the Hollywood dream machine: Bulworth (1998). Explicitly political, but not necessarily successfully political, Bulworth is a complicated and even contradictory film. It is precisely the film’s failure (both ideological and, in fact, financial) that is itself revealing of some of the possibilities and limits of liberal politics—and, more particularly, for a liberal politics in 141 the cultural realm—at the end of the century. Just as Beatty’s support for Kazan and his flirtation with a presidential campaign blur categories —for example, that of radicalism and anticommunism in the former case, and that of entertainment and politics in the latter—so does Beatty’s cinema offer a narrative that is intriguing yet inevitably incoherent. But to talk of films this way—to say, for instance, that what a film like Bulworth is doing parallels what its director is doing in his life might seem to partake of auteurism, that seemingly discredited approach that would study films as most determined by the creativity of their directors rather than, say, the broader institutions of the film industry or the even broader ones of social and cultural context. I would want to argue, however, that in the case of certain directors, the very fact that their films are presented as authored, are offered up as the vision of a lone artist, is part of the meaning that must be analyzed. In an age where the director’s name can be a salable attraction for a film, auteurism becomes not a tool of analysis but an object of analysis. To take one example, Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) is among other things a film about a fantasy of the endurance of auteurist creativity, the sheer beauty of the images making an argument for the aesthetic power of the visionary director in a world that has little room for the aesthetic dimension.2 In fact, if auteurism traditionally has been contrasted to a political approach to film insofar as it centers on myths of individual creativity, Bulworth is evidence that individual creativity itself can be put forward as a political act. In an age seemingly geared to standardization, one way to stand out is by cultivating one’s image as a special creative figure , as an artist. There is even a complementariness of liberalism and auteurism. Both structure the world according to a binary opposition in which, opposed to the crush of systems of authority and governance, there stand solitary figures who by their force of will try to stand up for personal identity and self-worth. Liberalism and auteurism both start with the personal, with the potential for the individual to fight to make a difference. In two big Beatty films of the 1990s, Bugsy (1991) and Bulworth, for example, the central figure is a dreamer who struggles to gain respect for his vision and fights against the resistance of figures of power. In the case of Bugsy, with its emphasis on a creator who wants to build up a new world of leisure culture and runs into budget problems...