Genre, Cleverness, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

I watched Rush Hour 3 (2007) with some friends on television. It was a stupid movie. I know this because at the beginning of the climactic scene of the film (at the Eiffel Tower no less) my friend noticed a banner or some sort draped on one of the trusses, and immediately predicted that it would prove invaluable to Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker when they made their escape. Five minutes later, the banner served as an admirable parachute.

Rush Hour 3 was not stupid because using a makeshift parachute to escape is stupid plot device, but because we knew it was the inevitable plot device they would use; namely, because it was following the “Rush Hour” generic convention. There are almost identical escapes made at the end of Rush Hour (1998) and Rush Hour 2 (2001). By reducing a movie to its generic elements, by exposing the movie formula, audiences obtain a sense of power and superiority over the film. The audience feels cleverer than the movie. When the audience can figure out what is going on before the film intends them to, the film no longer has narrative control.

Of course, not all generic elements are stupid when recognized. Some elements almost have to be incorporated once the audience identifies the movie as of a specific genre. Movies have failed at the box office because they were advertised as a different genre than it actually was. Thomas Schatz’s Hollywood Genres draws an analogy between genre / film and grammar / language, showing genre as a tool which helps audiences understand the movie.

On the other hand, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) is a smart movie because it is aware of generic conventions. Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.) and Harmony Faith Lane (Michelle Monaghan) are both fans of Johnny Gossamer, a fictional noir writer in their world. Harry describes Gossamer books to Gay Perry (Val Kilmer), as always having taking on two cases, one rather pedestrian, and the other bizarre, and as the story progresses realizes that the two cases are interconnected. And there is always a big shootout at the end, where the hero kills 13 bad guys. The same things end up happening over the course of the movie.

Even less subtly, near the end of the movie, Gay Perry, who was ostensibly dead at the end of the shootout turns out to be alive, though crippled. Harry, who is also narrating, agrees with the audience that he hates these types of endings, where all the characters inexplicably turn out alright, and survive to the ending, because “the studio is afraid of a downer ending” but “this is what happened” so what could he do differently? As the narration continues other deceased characters return onto the frame, including real world ones such as Elvis Presley and Abraham Lincoln.

Within the framework of Schatz’s model of evolutionary development of film as described by Steve Neale in Questions of Genre, “genre progresses towards self-conscious formalism”. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang would be the culmination of many different genres. By overtly recognizing common generic elements, the movie preempts the audience. We are invited to laugh at the absurdities of generic conventions along with the movie, and we feel clever in the process.

Voyeurism in Funny Games

SPOILER ALERT for the aforementioned movie

In Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), a couple, Anna (Susanne Lothar) and Georg (Ulrich Mühe), and their young son Schorschi head to their summer getaway, a lakehouse in a secluded community. In their first few hours of staying there, they become acquainted with Peter (Frank Giering) and Paul (Stefan Clapczynski), two young men who are introduced as friends of friends. These two young men come into the house with the pretense of borrowing eggs from Anna. Their behavior and diction is always meticulously polite, but with each phrase there is an undertone of threat. When bringing the eggs away, they drop it and have the audacity to come back to ask for more eggs. When Anna states that these are the last eggs they insist and she complies. This is only the beginning of the psychological and physical games which Peter and Paul play on the family.

As the movie progresses to increasingly gruesome and unsettling scenes, which are genuinely some of the most uncomfortable scenes I have ever experienced, the viewer cannot but help question his motives into coming into this movie. All movies are advertised with a genre in mind, and Funny Games was marketed as a crime/ horror / thriller movie, so Haneke had the advantage of having audiences come into the movie as willing, knowing participants. He exploits this fact by breaking the fourth wall and directly addressing the audience through Paul.

Paul: Okay, we bet- what time is it?
Peter: 8:40.
Paul: That in, let's say, 12 hours all three of you are gonna be kaput. Okay?
Anna: What?
Paul: You bet that you'll be alive tomorrow at 9 o'clock and we bet that you'll be dead. Okay?
Peter: They don't want to bet.
Paul: Well it's not an option. There has to be a bet.
[turns toward camera, breaks fourth wall, addressing the audience]
Paul: I mean, what do you think? You think they stand a chance? Well, you're on their side, aren't you? Who are you betting on, hmm?
Peter: But, wait, what kind of bet is this? If they're dead, they can't live up to their side. If they win, they can't live either.
Paul: Yes, they'll lose either way. That's what I'm saying.

In his psychoanalytical film theory essay “The Passion for Perceiving”, Christian Metz discusses the concept of voyeurism in film. Under Lacan’s theories of sexual drives, voyeurism falls under the category of the invocatory drive, which is “distinguished from the others in that they are more dependent on a lack….which marks them from the outset…as being on the side of the imaginary” (702). Voyeurism requires a certain detachment and distance from the object, “Cinema’s voyeurism must do without any very clear mark of consent on the part of the object” (704). Film, inherently a representation of an object, naturally creates distance between the object and the voyeur. Without the object there is no possibility of consent, which is what the voyeur desires. Because of the psychological needs of the voyeur, or viewer, there is an “origin in particular of that recipe of the classical cinema which said that the actor should never look directly at the audience (= camera)” (705).

By breaking that convention, Haneke is questioning the deep seated psyche of the viewer, disturbing and forcing conscious acknowledgement of voyeurism. The viewer is no longer a voyeur, no longer the camera, but as present in a movie as characters off-screen. Funny Games is a piercing criticism of the destruction and gore in the movie industry, and makes viewers confront their psychological positions in watching it.

Cinematographic Spaces in Sleepless in Seattle

The most striking feature of Sleepless in Seattle (1993) is that the two main characters, Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks) and Annie Reed (Meg Ryan), scarcely share two minutes of screen time. Yet this movie still manages to develop a connection between the two, tangible enough to satisfy the demands of the genre.

When the two first “meet”, Annie is driving home listening to the radio, when Sam is on the phone with a talk show to discuss the death of his wife, and the status of his love life. During this interchange, the movie cuts between the scene in Sam’s lakefront house in Seattle and the scene in Annie’s car, near Baltimore. In the frame, Sam is usually on the left side of the screen facing the right side. Annie, driving, is naturally on the right side of the screen. As the movie cuts between the two scenes, Sam seems to be directing his words right to Annie, and Annie responds to his words accordingly. The lighting in the two scenes also match, Sam in his darkened living room, and Annie in her car. The two are on opposite coasts of America, yet the exchange seems intimate, because of how the two scenes are framed, and then edited together.

The above poster is a microcosm for the movie, with Sam and Annie spatially separated by the city skyline, lightness/darkness, but their eye lines match because of the placement of the two scenes.

Stephen Heath, in Questions of Cinema, discusses the role of space in cinema. “If film photographs gave a very strong spatial impression, montage probably would be impossible. It is the partial unreality of the film picture that makes it possible.” One of the original intents of film was “to reproduce life” (Louis Lumière), but film allows for time and space to be manipulated in a way which is impossible in reality, but yet can convey meaning to the viewer. In the story, space separates Annie and Sam, but film allows for the breakdown of space; the scenes spliced together exist together within the viewer’s mind, creating meaning and dialogue between two ostensibly unrelated events.

This technique is used throughout the entire movie. More often than not, Sam and Annie are looking off the frame at a target which the audience can not follow. By denying the audience access to the characters views, the movie creates suspense. When spliced together, the off-frame looks mesh together, and create a dialogue between the two, a twist the Hollywood convention of shot reverse shot.

Cinematically, Sam and Annie are inextricably linked; narratively, they are far apart. This tension between what the audience sees and what the audience knows is the driving force behind the movie. By creating a visual sense of closeness, the movie foreshadows the meeting that will take place. With this promise in mind the audience is held in suspense for nearly the entire movie. At the final scene of their meeting at the top of the Empire State, Sam and Annie share the same frame. The audience is finally able to follow their glances to their target, hidden for almost the entire movie, each other.

Authenticity in film

A common criticism about movies is that they somehow failed to represent reality. This is an interesting charge because movies, unlike reality television shows, do not claim to film life as it is. Actors do not (often) portray themselves. The same criticism can be leveled to Amelie. Amelie portrays a certain amount of surrealism throughout the movie. The characters are whimsical, idiosyncratic and sometimes capricious. I would argue that this movie does not represent reality, in the sense that it is unlikely that an analogous group of characters exist in the world.

The editing in the movie further heightens the sense of surrealism. Several sequences are shown in fast-motion, and the eponymous character often breaks the fourth wall, updating the audience on her thoughts with surreptitously whisper and a shy, sidelong glance.

Despite these artifices of movie making techniques, Amelie still feels authentic. It portrays a world which perhaps doesn’t exist but perhaps should exist.

Walter Benjamin argues in ”The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that the mass production of art, and the ensuing destruction of their “aura”, has changed the role of art from one “being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics” (Section IV). Because of mass production, the aura, or authenticity, of a piece of art is no longer an important criterion. In the past, “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (Section II). However in mediums such as photography, “one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense” (Section III) Art is no longer something that carries significant value simply because it exists (specifically in a precise, unique moment in spacetime).

The devaluation of the importance of authenticity is what allows films to evaluated in the fashion which is it today. Benjamin uses the process of editing to show that “Nothing more strikingly shows that art has left the realm of the “beautiful semblance” which, so far, had been taken to be the only sphere where art could thrive” (Section IX). Likewise, Amelie is an example of art which has transcended the strict laws that bound art to reality.

By drawing an analogy between magician and surgeon to painter and cameraman, Benjamin argues that the cameraman, like the surgeon, is able to offer “an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art” (Section XI), through mechanical equipment. Benjamin argues that the “cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law” (Section IX). In the present, it does no longer make sense to value art with the old criteria of authenticity, and it is under the new laws which Amelie must be appreciated and enjoyed.