Lie or no lie, it's still one for the metaphor hall of fame

Broadly speaking (the best kind of speaking. Or not actually. Probably comes in somewhere about seventh, on a good day) there are a couple of different ways of evoking atmosphere. Not to trot out the dead horse that is the second-most long suffering metaphor of all time currently in use in modern everyday conversation after automobile engines, but it’s vaguely analogous to baking a cake. You can drop that extra sprinkle of cocoa into the pan last of all as topping, or mix it into the batter from the word go so you get a garden variety (vanilla, even?) chocolate cake.

Really, it doesn’t matter if we’re talking cinema, games, literature, dance or what have you. Structurally, the narrative and the atmospheric elements of a text should be seamlessly integrated as to make the audience unaware of the process by which each supports the other. However, there are always creative decisions to made with regard to the specifics, which of course is where things get interesting.

Today I want to look at something a bit different: Sloth racing on Saturn. I couldn't find much on that topic, though, so instead I'm going to put Tom Waits’ spoken word piece from the 1985 album Rain Dogs, titled "9^th and Hennepin" under the microscope. This is quite a compact and economical snippet of dark musical poetry that begins by painting broad strokes, quite literally rounding out the scenery on all sides to create an effectively realised picture in the listener’s mind’s eye:

Well it’s 9^th and Hennepin

All the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes

And the moon’s teeth marks are on the sky

Like a tarp thrown all over all of this, and the broken umbrellas like dead birds

And steam comes out of the grill like the whole goddamn town’s ready to blow

And the bricks are all scarred with jailhouse tattoos

And everyone is behaving like dogs

And horses are coming down Violin Road, and Dutch is dead on his feet

And all the rooms, they smell like diesel, and you take on the dreams of the ones who slept there.

And I’m lost in the window, I hide in the stairway and I hang in the curtain and I sleep in your hat.

And no-one brings anything small into a bar around here, they all started out with bad directions

And the girl behind the counter has a tattooed tear. One for every year he’s away, she said.

Such a crumbling beauty, ah

There’s nothing wrong with her a hundred dollars won’t fix

She has that kind of razor sadness that only gets worse with the clang and the thunder

Of the Southern Pacific going by

And a clock ticks out like a dripping faucet, till you’re full of ragwater, bitters and blue ruin

And you spill out over the side to anyone who will listen

I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen it all, through the yellow windows of the evening train.

The streams-of-consciousness style flow and overall structure is maintained by the continual use of “And” at the beginning of each line, which gives the piece as a whole the air of a hazy vignette, one intended to be mainly texture and atmosphere without much basis in reality. There’s a sense of disconnectedness in which the speaker realizes all of his worst suspicions and fears about the place (a real street corner in Minneapolis), but he is imagining without seeing, as Waits himself has commented in his explanation of the piece.

What’s really interesting here I think is the way Waits begins. He starts out by describing the broader picture and then moves into the closer, more personal. If this were a scene from a film it would be a long continuous crane shot that starts out above the city skyscrapers, swooping down into the streets, past the streetlights and shadows of people and into the doorway of the hotel in the story, eventually meeting the “girl with the tattooed tear” at the bar. What we have here is a sense of progression from the disconnected abstract to the specific. We shift gradually from broad strokes of disjointed atmospherics to concrete realities of character and narrative. Waits fully fleshes out the world he has created before plunking us squarely in the middle of it as one of the spun-out drunks at the bar. 

This prominent foregrounding of atmospherics is a popular technique in modern cinema because it allows the filmmaker to fully immerse the viewer in the imaginary universe on the screen, before introducing the who-what-where-why of the story itself. It becomes immeasurably easier for the audience to accept and be emotionally involved in what they are seeing, if they perceive that which they are seeing to be reality, or are at least superficially unaware of its fictionality. I suppose it makes more sense to guarantee your audience will be totally under the spell and ready to listen to what you have say when you finally start to say it. Examples? I’m thinking along the lines of Wall-E. I’m well and truly sick of talking about that film though, so I’m going shut up and leave that one up to you to expand upon for the time being. Maybe after a decent interval I’ll be able to discuss it critically again without feeling like a malfunctioning gramophone. Seven posts or so should do it.

On the other side of the pancake, consider a futuristic science fiction film. Something like your Minority Report, or its similarly styled spiritual father, Blade Runner. Here we have injections of atmospheric detail at regular intervals throughout the movie. In this case, it’s largely made possible by the constant visual onslaught of what the filmmakers have imagined everyday life in the XX^nd century (insert random post-noughties date of choice here) will look like. Indeed for the science fiction genre, this is precisely what makes the regular maintenance (I use that phrase completely ironically) of atmospheric detail so easy - technological change is one of those things that is all-encompassing, and will be evident in virtually every facet of the on-screen activity, from projecting quarterly reports to feeding the cat. Flying cars, or colossal urban billboards that advertise personalised consumer goods help keep the suspension of disbelief constant, allowing the viewer to fully accept the theatrical illusion. In places these immersive footnote details are even used directly as plot devices – I’m thinking, for example, of the tiny spider scout police robots in Minority Report that hunt Tom Cruise through a skid row tenant block.

But in both of the films used as examples above, there isn’t really a tutorial half-hour of atmospheric acclimatization before the plot proper starts. We’re launched head-first into the who-what-where specifics of the story and characters and expected to acclimatize to the reality of the onscreen world as we go. Those little atmospheric flourishes sprinkled throughout are the one-percenters that enable us to do this. It’s a somewhat different approach to the one outlined in the Waits example, and I would say, a less risky one to be sure. Putting all the texture and atmosphere up front and then launching into specifics risks audience disconnection once the spell wears off, but a seamless transition between the two is like a well-made gateaux: a culinary one-two-punch with delicious piped chocolate icing on the top and outer sides and something exponentially more awesome in the middle. I don’t know what. This maybe:


 

No, not the Bruce Willis sci-fi movie of the same name.

I can’t help but wonder if there’s a reason for the increasing proliferation of audience surrogates popping up like enterprising gophers in recent well known and less-well known Hollywood films as of late. When I use this term I am talking about characters in movies for whom at least one of their roles in the narrative is to metaphorically represent “the audience”. Straight off the bat and flying out into the tropopause at supersonic velocity there’s a couple of examples I’d like to talk about in the subsequent blather: Ariadne in Inception, Neo in The Matrix, Upham in Saving Private Ryan (Hornaday 2010, Jameson 1998: 23). Mostly the former, but some of the latter.

There’s a common thread in all of these movies. Some of them are high-concept, others less easily summarised, but they all require viewers to accept worlds outside the boundaries of the everyday, where accepted norms of reality have been transgressed, rewritten or completely turned upside down and faceplanted into the sand.

There’s a practical need for audience surrogates, of course: particularly when the protagonists of a film are acclimatised to the rules of the onscreen universe, it would make no sense for them to explain those rules for the audience’s benefit without a trainee member to rationalise the brief (i.e. Inception, Saving Private Ryan). The rules of Inception’s shared dreamscapes are so complex and elegantly layered that the film demands at least some level of verbal exposition, much of which is directed at Ariadne. Likewise, the first forty minutes or so of The Matrix feature Neo’s discovery and orientation of the “world within a world” of the Matrix itself.

In Saving Private Ryan, by contrast, the in-film reality is the battlefield and the grossly distorted version of the everyday this engenders. The other members of Miller’s squad are soldiers whose experience of battle make Upham (Spielberg’s audience surrogate) seem naïve and out of his depth by comparison, symbolically pointing to the helplessness of the civilian audience when confronted with the horrific realities of war (Jameson 1998: 23) To some extent, they act as mentors to Upham (i.e. Private Caparzo’s ruffled advisory that “every time you salute the captain, you make him a target for the Germans”) but for the most part, the audience is forced to adjust to the in-film reality themselves (Jameson 1998: 23).

It’s worth pointing out at this stage there’s a purely superficial aspect to the presence of the audience surrogate, as well, one which is much more commonly associated with mmopugers (Yahtzee’s phrase) such as World of Warcraft or Everquest than popular narrative cinema. Given that we are being asked to symbolically inhabit a fictional universe, we want (and indeed have the unfettered freedom to) imagine ourselves as the perceived ideal. So we project ourselves into the popular culture multiverse as the visually idealised versions of ourselves, complete with good looks, nice clothes and an ever-present air of confident capability. The audience surrogate, to use a very 21^st-century-specific term of endearment, is the “avatar” of collective desire. There is a great deal of literature on the real-world concept of “celebrity” status and its similar significance as the embodiment of a collective set of ideas which people hold dear, which I think is probably relevant checking out in lieu of me expanding on it and boring everyone to sobs. I could say a bit about Inception specifically here, though, and that bit goes something like this: if we’re inhabiting the Freudian dreamscape of repressed desires (or the collective dream space of the darkened cinema), it makes sense that, perhaps involuntarily, we would dream of ourselves in our idealised forms. This is comparable to what Morpheus in the Matrix called, “residual self-image”, and indeed, the same dynamic is at play in that movie with its leather trenchcoat-clad, noir-styled pastiche of high fashion.

But there’s another angle which I find far more interesting for the purposes of this discussion: why do we want, or need an extraneous character serving as a “projection” of ourselves? Particularly if they’re not the emotional/dramatic locus of the story, (i.e. the character onto which the audience is traditionally expected to project their identity, hopes, fears etc) would this not just displace and/or weaken emotional identification with the film’s protagonist?

Theoretically, yes, but not always. Giving the audience a voice in a peripheral character can actually be used to create some clever polemic situations. For example, observing the events of Inception metaphorically through the eyes of Ariadne distances the protagonist Cobb, making him something of a mystic. He becomes an aloof, unknowable mentor figure. This in turn preserves the element of suspense around the film’s climax as it hinges upon the interference of Mal, who is herself an enigma of whom Cobb alone has knowledge. At the same time, Cobb becomes dramatically significant to us as half father-figure, half seer; a conflicted anti-hero who we are forced to trust to help guide us through the labyrinth of the dream. We may not identify with him as a projection of ourselves, but rather, Nolan makes us closely dependent on him from the outset and this fosters a kind of emotional identification.

This looks like a good spot for me to shift the topic to end on a question mark and possibly trot out my favourite I-word into the bargain. Does having a character and a personality we can project ourselves onto specifically for that purpose (as opposed to the implied physical presence of the spectator-audience, mediated through the camera lens) wreck the sense of immersion at all?

In what we might call the “traditional” mode of viewing, the audience is the implied observer, which doesn’t give us any visible signs of existence in the onscreen world but instead naturally replicates the process of seeing to the point of being self-effacing. Before we’re introduced to Ariadne, we watch the opening scenes of Inception as easily and naturally as if we were just another person sitting silently at the dinner table listening to Cobb and Saito talk. With the “audience surrogate” model, we possibly lose that sense of situated, first-person immersion but gain a sense of empowered dramatic involvement. The sense that we are an actual in-universe identity with the ability to directly influence or change the course of the narrative adds poignancy and pathos to the action.

So I suppose it ultimately boils down to the question: which is more important in the cinemagoing experience? The simple act of seeing, or being emotionally involved in the narrative? Incidentally, being a longtime fan of the Thief game franchise (as I think I may have mentioned once or twice before), I’m reminded of all those debates surrounding “first person vs. third person” that cropped up after Thief: Deadly Shadows went postal with its third person mode back in 2004. But this is a whole different basket of beetles. Well, perhaps not so different. I contend tentatively and somewhat necessarily ambiguously that it depends what the requirements of the movie are and what you’re personally trying to achieve as a director. But that was predictable, so here’s something that’s not: BGloooghgooopooolsdgfsdgsreaaargh.

Sources referenced in this entry:

Hornaday, Ann (2010) “Inception's' dream team weaves a mesmerizing tale”, Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/movies/inception,1158861/critic-review.html

(accessed 14 March 2011)

Jameson, Richard T (1998) “History’s Eyes: Saving Private Ryan” in Film Comment 34.5: 20-23.

The Matrix (1999) Director: Larry & Andy Wachowski, Warner Bros.

Saving Private Ryan (1998) Director: Steven Spielberg, Dreamworks. 

Quick thought...

When I say that the name Tim Burton has become a cliché, I’m aware that things are a mite more complicated than that. Sure, saying you were a Tim Burton fan used to mean something; you were a little bit oddball, you had a slightly skewed sense of humour, a fascination with the morbid, the gothic, the unexamined. Recently I attended the Tim Burton Exhibition at Federation Square, Melbourne. The queue awaiting admission in itself was enough to make me sit up and take notice as it was approximately the length of Quetzalcoatl tied to a nine-headed hydra using a printed transcript of the Internet as a rope. I think that was the point at which I really woke up to the reality of what I’m now trying to grapple with. Now we are at the stage where the phrase “It reminds me of Tim Burton”, is thrown around on DeviantArt like a diseased dead cow over a castle parapet and where any non-3D animation that doesn’t resemble a 1930’s Disney cartoon down to the letter is instantly branded with the term. Or so it seems.

To some extent Burton’s work has always simultaneously and somewhat uncomfortably straddled the line between mainstream and sideline pop culture, like an unfortunate rodeo stuntman balanced precariously on twin horses both of which are trying to ride off in opposite directions. What accounts for this, is that thematically much of the director's work parodies the sameness of everyday life in Western society. The exemplar of this, of course, is Edward Scissorhands with its pastel-colour pastiche of American suburbia, but so many of his own drawings and paintings provide a unique perspective on instantly identifiable scenes and figures from everyday life.

Which is of course what makes assigning the label “cliché” as ironic as it is problematic.

Art imitating life? Another overused phrase. Nonetheless, I think there’s a rich vein of humour to be mined in the fact that an artist whose work parodies the mainstream has drifted slowly in the direction of the mainstream after the fact. The same type of twisted irony, in fact, which might well appeal to the maestro himself.