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

27. Smoke 'til You're Blue in the Face

27 Smoke ’til You’re Blue in the Face Murray Smith THE HOLLYWOOD JUGGERNAUT rumbles on—reinventing itself, to be sure, to take account of new technologies, new social and demographic trends, and novel economic strategies, but in an important sense sustaining itself. The international mass media entertainment industry we know as “Hollywood” remains as committed now as it ever has been to the three S’s: stories, stars, and spectacle. So in this sense at least, the cinema as we know it is not ending at all—perhaps, as Peter Greenaway has suggested, it is just beginning. Other forms of cinematic life—like the various underground and avant-garde traditions—have emerged, flourished, declined, and revived over the years. Some of these have occupied ecological niches in the cultural environment wholly different from the Hollywood behemoth . But there is a kind of cinema, fashionable in the 1990s, that has evolved through a complex mix of antagonism toward and dependence on Hollywood, feeding it and at the same time living off it. I’m thinking, of course, of what came to be known in the 1990s as “indie” cinema. In a way, “indie” or “independent” cinema suggests an American art cinema, much as the label “New American Cinema” did in the early 1960s. Indeed, one can now look back and see something like a continuous tradition from the late 1950s to the present. This independent cinema has had its ups and downs over this period in terms of volume of production, critical attention, and public visibility. But if we can talk about a tradition, it is a pretty accommodating one, and in this essay I want to consider some of its constituent streams, and its broader parameters, by looking at the Wayne Wang/Paul Auster “doubleheader ,” Smoke and Blue in the Face. The two films were made back to back and released in 1995, often 277 playing together as a double bill. Smoke, one might say, is a “classical” American art film—not classical in the sense that studio-era Hollywood movies are said to be classical, for art films are precisely something other than this—but classical in the sense that the film works according to some very well recognized, long-standing conventions. Smoke has the literary air and pedigree (from Auster’s involvement), the thematic weight, and stress on character complexity long associated with the American art film, even during the studio era when such films were a minor part of studio output (think of The Magnificent Ambersons, 1942, for example, based on Booth Tarkington’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel). The film has a carefully crafted quality, achieved by its even, measured pacing, and five-act structure, each “act” shifting our attention to a different character. Blue in the Face is mostly none of these things. It is rather a self-inflicted (if playful) slap in the face of Smoke, the yin to its yang, the termite to Smoke’s white elephant. If Smoke is a typical American art movie, then Blue in the Face is at least at one further remove from Hollywood practice. (This probably explains the reaction of one disgruntled Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB) contributor, who accords the film the honor of “One of the Worst Movies of All Time.”) Indeed , had it not hitched a ride with Smoke, it’s unlikely that Blue in the Face would have been distributed as widely as it was, or have received as much critical coverage. So what exactly is Blue in the Face, and why do I think that it is a special little film, and rather more interesting than Smoke? The film is in part an embellishment of Smoke, but just as much a “remix” of, and notebook on, its bigger, more aesthetically conservative brother. Smoke takes place (mostly) in Brooklyn; Blue, not only takes place (wholly) in Brooklyn, it is in large measure about Brooklyn. (“Welcome to the planet Brooklyn,” reads the marketing tag line.) The Brooklyn connection is clearly established in the interview segments with Lou Reed, which take place in the (set for the) Brooklyn Cigar Company, the tobacco shop that forms the hub of the action in both films. These interviews are scattered through the film, as Reed ruminates on (among other things) his—and supposedly all Brooklynites ’—peculiar form of attachment to the place. “I couldn’t have been unhappier in the eight years I spent growing up in Brooklyn,” Reed notes, “but I say that not having...