Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema by Todd Berliner (review)

Todd Berliner's book is both excellent and at times frustrating. Berliner examines a number of key Hollywood films from the 1970s primarily in terms of narrative strategy and design. He claims to be the first to "examine in depth the narrative design that defines this watershed period of film history" (5). It would be more correct to say that earlier studies of Hollywood in the 1970s—by Glenn Man, William J. Palmer, David Cook, Robin Wood, Robert Kolker and myself, among others—look at narrative (storytelling) in relation to production history, social and political history, and aesthetics (film style), whereas Berliner foregrounds narrative analysis, takes little interest in production or social and political history, and gets to aesthetics via narrative. His book devotes a few pages to film industry history (11-15), and takes up the auteur theory in passing (177-178), but treats both as background information; Berliner is mainly a formalist. The result is a fascinating yet uneven book that is at times highly provocative. I found myself "talking back" to Berliner's book, testing his arguments and sketching out alternate pathways of my own. That is actually a positive response—it suggests a work of substance.

Hollywood Incoherent starts out rather slowly, discussing key 1970s films such as Nashville, Dog Day Afternoon, and Chinatown in terms of "narrative perversity," "incongruity," and "incoherence." Berliner defines narrative perversity non-judgmentally, as a "counterproductive turn away from a narrative's linear course" (10); of course, the moral dimension of perversity remains in the reader's mind, adding an extra connotation to the argument. As to incongruence and incoherence, these are definitely present but also provisional. Berliner sees American 1970s films as existing in a "space" between European art films, which often foreground stylistic patterns at the expense of narrative coherence, and studio period Hollywood films, which strongly value coherence and resolution. So in many cases the 1970s films exhibit not incoherence (despite the title of the book), but a delayed or tenuous coherence. Given the caveats of the argument, it is not surprising that Berliner's first few extended analyses are solid but not wildly original. He argues that Godfather II's critical reputation stems partly from information and linkages that are missing from the story, resulting in a combination of narrative drive (Michael Corleone defeating his enemies), ambiguity (which characters really are his enemies?) and lack of resolution (have problems really been solved?).Fair enough, but a film that goes back and forth between the early twentieth century (Vito Corleone's story) and the late 1950s (Michael Corleone's story) is already more complicated than the Hollywood norm. The chapter on The French Connection is positively mainstream in its analysis, highlighting Popeye Doyle as a good-bad character and pointing to the terrifyingly unresolved ending; many critics and viewers respond to the film in exactly this way. The chapter on The Exorcist, describing resemblances between characters representing good and evil as well as a nuanced and only semi-resolved ending, seems more original and useful than the French Connection analysis.

Berliner surprised me by saving his most challenging argument for Chapter 6 (more than halfway through the book), "Incongruity and Unity in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver." Here he describes stylistic patterns in Taxi Driver while avoiding discussion of meaning; his notion is that pattern or structure can be discussed without interpretation (the construction of meaning). This is a more radical approach to film analysis than anything in Chapters 1-5. It connects not only to European art cinema, but also to experimental film, which at times strives for perception and structure without meaning. I would say that visual patterns in Taxi Driver such as "empty hallways" or the repeated use of "red, green, and yellow" (166) serve a variety of purposes including building a largely subjective world, creating patterns, and suggesting meanings; in a narrative film, the process of "making meaning" is hard to stop. For example, Taxi Driver...