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

1. The Blockbuster: Everything Connects, but Not Everything Goes

1 The Blockbuster Everything Connects, but Not Everything Goes Thomas Elsaesser EVERYTHING CONNECTS About two-thirds of the way into Jurassic Park (1992), there is a scene where Hamond and Sattler talk in the Jurassic Park restaurant about the nature of illusion and reality. The scene begins, however, with the camera exploring the adjacent gift shop. It is a slightly eerie moment, because it is as if the movie was at this point turning round and looking at us, but in the future tense. Set within a theme and adventure park, which exists only as a fiction, the film invites us to imitate the visitors in the fiction. Insofar as this fiction of a fiction will produce “real memorabilia ,” the film is itself an advertisement for the games, gadgets, and toys that one can buy after seeing the movie. It therefore does not come as a surprise to learn that six months before the release of the film, Amblin Films issued a Jurassic Park style book for advertisers and merchandisers , which alone cost $500,000 to produce. In today’s media world—to paraphrase E. M.Forster—everything connects. Afeature film, a theme park, a toy store, and a computer game have a lot in common: they feed off each other as they play off each other. When one considers that The Lion King (1994) took $80 million at the box office, but made $220 million as a videocassette, one can understand why commentators have argued that a film today is merely a billboard stretched out in time, designed to showcase tomorrow’s classics in the video stores and the television reruns. Jurassic Park may make the intermedia connections more explicit than most, insofar as it mimics the links within its own fiction, but it also shows that if everything connects , this does not mean that anything goes. 11 And yet, since the 1980s, it was precisely as if anything did go and the sky was the limit. The New Hollywood staged such an extraordinary comeback from its premature burial and put on such a permanent revolution of the eternally same, that one has to ask, was it the charisma of the directors that did the trick? Or was it the new generation of stars, 12 THOMAS ELSAESSER Big, loud, and expensive: Spielberg’s perfect blockbuster, Jurassic Park (Universal , 1992). with their talent agents and deal makers? Was it the synergies with the music business, the new technologies of sound design, of special effects and digital imaging devices? To most observers, the answer to why the contemporary Hollywood cinema climbed back to popularity all over the world was simple: money. However, as one tries to understand the ebb and flow of all this cash, it also seems that money is very nearly that which blinds one’s insights, and not merely because it catches one in an economic or even technological determinism. The energies that feed the system, the aggregates of power that circulate, the creative manias, cunning strategies, and ingenuity that animate the makers, as well as the fictions and fantasies that stir and attract audiences, may find in the exchange of money their most convenient and probably most banal materialisation . But the conglomerates being put together by the software firms, the music industries, the creative agencies, and broadcast television companies are on the brink of realizing—in both senses of the word: becoming aware of, and translating into action—not only economic clout but also political might. DreamWorks, the name that Spielberg , David Geffen, and Jerry Katzenberg have chosen for their new studio, is brilliantly and nonchalantly candid: the manufacture of dreams that “work” (i.e., “function,” but also “do their job”). In order to explore what this job is, I want to look at some of the more internal or micro-links that alongside the macro-level synergies hold today’s media culture together. If the macro-level comprises the profit-oriented connections, the micro-level encompasses the pleasureoriented connections. At the macro-level, it is possible to distinguish further between the “horizontal” links, where everything connects in the world of entertainment and leisure (advertising, consumption, fashion , toys, as well as other aspects of popular or everyday culture), and the “vertical” ones, where everything connects at the level of business, industry, technology, and finance. More broadly speaking, the macrolevel points to the relations that exist between the film industry and other forms of...