Billy Thompson, University of Pennsylvania

Billy writes: I graduated from the Master of Liberal Arts program at Penn in December 2006.  I am currently a technical writer for a student loan company in Wilmington, Delaware. This essay was written for the course, Fads & Trends in Modern Society.

download this essay: thompson_unconscious-optics

Greenscreen stage, "Catwoman"

In his 1984 work, Distinctions, Pierre Bourdieu contends that consumer taste unintentionally reproduces social class structure. He writes:

Consumption is a stage in a process of communication, that is, an act of deciphering, decoding, which presupposes practical or explicit mastery of a cipher or code. In a sense, one can say that the capacity to see is a function of the knowledge, or concepts, that is, the words, that are available to name visible things, and which are, as it were, programmes for perception. A work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded. The conscious or unconscious implementation of explicit or implicit schemes of perception and appreciation which constitutes pictorial or musical culture is the hidden condition for recognizing the styles characteristic of a period, a school or an author, and, more generally, for the familiarity with the internal logic of works that aesthetic enjoyment presupposes. A beholder who lacks the specific code feels lost in a chaos of sounds and rhythms, colours and lines, without rhyme or reason.[1]

Bourdieu’s Theory of Tastes applies the concept of cultural capital, or a code of cultural competence as it were, a competence that is subsumed as if by osmosis in accordance with the resources of one’s environment. This competence is expressed through people’s habits of consumption, habits that themselves express the social class and environment the consumer is of. “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.”[2] But, how might we define environment in these terms of taste and class? What tastes are distinctive to what environments, and what meaning can we find in the differing correlations?

In his 2006 essay, Relocating American Film History, Robert C. Allen states, “Film history’s obsession not just with the urban experience of cinema but the metropolitan experience bespeaks a more general exaggeration of the role of the metropolis and a concomitant devaluation of the rural in contemporary historical and cultural inquiry.”[3] Bourdieu isn’t speaking directly in terms of urbanity versus rurality in his theory, but his point that tastes gestate in a certain class structure and then perpetuate that structure is germane to the distinction between the two environments Allen refers to. With regard to the history of film analysis, Allen further claims, “a medium primarily addressed to urban audiences, it fed on the city’s imaginaire and expressed a definite urban viewpoint… Cinema was an integral part of the metropolitan experience, its ‘unconscious optics’ a participant in the metropolitan unconscious.”[4] I believe we can look at films, the way they are and have been written, distributed, received, and regarded with the urban bias Allen claims they have been, as a microcosm of the class structure Bourdieu references.

To start, I’ll refer to Georg Simmel’s 1950 essay on cities, in which he begins by referencing the Enlightenment Era, a time when the intellect was revered over and above emotion, and it was believed that reason would truly free man from the shackles of religion and morals. For Simmel, “the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli”[5] contributed to the metropolitan type of individuality. Due to the city’s plethora of stimuli, the metropolitan man started to react with his head, and not his heart. He started to rely on the intellect, which was more discerning and impersonal. His mind was more able to take in and let go the constant stimulation around him; he could process it without feeling it, as it were.

In forming his own hypothesis, Robert C. Allen calls upon Ben Singer who himself called upon Simmel to make the argument that “the experience of early cinema is inextricably tied to the experience of metropolitan modernity, which in turn is based upon a psychic response to unprecedented human and semiotic density that he calls ‘hyperstimulus.’ Singer draws upon Simmel’s 1903 essay, The Metropolis and Mental Life, to provide this description of the phenomenal world in which, he suggests, early cinema in America was located and to which it contributed: ‘With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life.’”[6]

To this effect, in a chapter called “Haste Makes Money” from his book Media Unlimited, Todd Gitlin cites Ben Franklin’s aphorism that time is money and in conjunction states that while “Agrarian societies are slow-moving societies… Cities are crystallizations of energy, and the speed with which that energy circulates is intimately related to the city’s prosperity. For classes linked to commerce and industry, bustle is functional… Accordingly, for have-nots, speed feels like aspiration.”[7] This sense of urban bustle as a goal seems relevant to Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital. Gitlin then moves into the effect urbanized velocity has had on motion pictures:

Speed on top of speed: there is the swirling dynamic within a shot, and then the edit between one shot and the next. Montage is as relentless as the camera is restless. Just as silent film spectators learned to interpret montage as simultaneous action, today’s spectators have learned to fill in the gaps, so that if, in the 1940s, it was necessary to show a character hailing a taxi at the train station, sitting in its backseat, getting out, beholding the front of an apartment building, getting into the elevator, ringing the doorbell of the apartment, and getting admitted, editors now cut directly from the train station to the interior of the apartment, safely assuming that the spectator will follow the narrative.[8]

©Cardinal Communications

And, this takes me to the small, independent film Junebug, where the screenwriter and director make not the assumption Gitlin discusses, but in fact one that is diametrically opposed to it. In short, Junebug is about a Chicago art dealer named Madeleine who makes a trip to North Carolina in the hopes of wooing an artist from down there and persuading him to exhibit his work in her gallery. The artist happens to reside and work near Madeleine’s new husband’s hometown. Being so far away in Chicago and having married after only a brief courtship, she has never met her in-laws. Her husband, George, makes the trip with her and they stay at his family’s home, with his parents, his younger brother Johnny, and his brother’s very pregnant wife Ashley. Ashley is singular among the hosts in her uninhibited acceptance and curiosity toward the guests, most specifically her new sister-in-law. She is anxious to learn all about her big city counterpart and even says to Madeleine, “I want to know everything.” She is genuine in her curiosity, almost as if she is attempting to demystify Madeleine both for herself and the other, more reserved, hosts. “I want her to like you,” Ashley says to Madeleine about their shared mother-in-law.

The way Junebug, written by North Carolina native Angus MacLachlan and directed by his friend Phil Morrison, flips the assumption presented by Gitlin is by slowing down the pace of life in the film and showing the characters unpacking suitcases and watching television and eating at the table. What is taken for granted is how the family’s life contrasts with city life and the typical days of Madeleine and George. It is assumed that the audience is most familiar with urbanity – after all it is what they’ve always seen, as Allen says, if not lived themselves. Only a couple minutes in the opening of the film take place in the city environment. George and Madeleine are both at an art exhibition, presumably where she works, and there are people mingling and wine glasses clinking and modern art pieces being bid on. George and Madeleine make eyes several times before Madeleine coyly approaches him and they meet. They meet and then they leave. Then they are married and heading to North Carolina by car. Their short courtship and quick marriage might in fact be seen as an allegory for the speed of life in the city.

I hope Allen saw Junebug because it addresses the deficiencies he sees in theories on culture when he argues that “not only has contemporary cultural studies largely ignored the rural but also that the difficulty of imagining a culturally productive rusticity prevents the field from adequately theorizing place in relation to other modes of social identity.”[9] Junebug presents rustic culture prominently and positively in its storyline, while inhabiting Bourdieu’s Theory of Tastes by presenting rusticity in contrast to urbanity and the urban class. The tension is best exemplified in a scene where Madeleine offers to help her husband’s brother, Johnny, write a paper on Huckleberry Finn for his GED exam.

Madeleine offers to help out of generosity, but Johnny is skeptical and acquiesces more than accepts. To start, Madeleine asks him if he thought the book was funny. “No, I thought it was long,” he responds. She then proposes they go over some of the themes of the book and one of the main ones she brings up is how Huck comes to love Jim, the black slave. Johnny chuckles at the thought of a love affair between the boy and his slave, but Madeleine stops him and says there are all types of love, more than just those of a sexual nature. She unconsciously puts her hand on Johnny’s arm as she explains, and his facial expression betrays confusion at her physical contact. The simple touch seems to him a loaded gesture. His emotions are now charged a bit, and when Madeleine suggests that they look at the book for some examples of themes, he cuts her off and through clenched teeth insists, “I don’t need to, that’s why I got this!” as he points to his Cliff Notes edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. She senses his frustration and tries, through talking to him, to make him feel more comfortable with her and get him to see that she only wants to help. The climax of the scene is when she feels they are laughing together but he feels she is laughing at him (the camera has panned out of the room briefly so it is uncertain what has been said between them). She hugs him to comfort him; he eases into the hug, relaxing his body slowly until finally he puts his hand on her butt. She quickly jumps away, and the tension between them is palpable. It’s as if Madeleine herself stands for this life that can be had with a grab but not really lived by those in these parts of North Carolina. Madeleine is a walking symbol for the family, and especially Johnny, of how George feels he has outgrown them and is better than his hometown. “None of us need help from you,” Johnny seethes at Madeleine. “Where do you think George came from anyway?”

Bourdieu wrote in his theory, “The calls to order (‘Who does she think she is?’ ‘That’s not for the likes of us’) which reaffirm the principle of conformity – the only explicit norm of popular taste – and aim to encourage the ‘reasonable’ choices… they are a reminder of the need for class solidarity.”[10] It seems as if this was the template for the Huck Finn scene in Junebug, if not for the whole film. MacLachlan, in an interview, said of his screenplay, “It’s about art and it’s about families. There’s a lot in the movie about who’s inside and who’s outside, who’s idealized and who’s not. The new wife, who’s beautiful and sophisticated, comes into the family and in a very beneficent way tries to help them out. Eventually they tell her, ‘We don’t need this kind of help.’”[11]

This depicts exactly what Bourdieu was talking about in his theory, that cultural capital isn’t transferable. What is especially interesting at another level with this film is that it was shown primarily in art house theaters in cosmopolitan areas. The characters, treated so tenderly and affectionately by the material in the film, are not the types of people who will see the film. To again quote Bourdieu, “A work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded.”[12] Junebug is subtle and rife with topics for discussion and interpretation. Another scene in the film quietly places Madeleine and her in-laws outside on the porch; it is actually the morning after her misunderstanding with Johnny. The mother-in-law openly questions Madeleine’s motives in staying up late with her husband’s brother the night before.

“Oh, it wasn’t anything,” Madeleine assures her, “we were just talking.”

“Talking, I guess that’s how you do things in Chicago,” her mother-in-law retorts and leaves the porch.

This last sentence, and the way it is delivered so derisively, effectively captures the gist of the story and is evidence itself for why the characters in the film wouldn’t likely be the audience for it. Still, while this juxtaposition of character and audience is noteworthy, that is not to say that a lot of city dwellers saw Junebug either; MacLachlan was paid $100 for the script and has not seen any royalties yet because the film’s investors have not made their money back. This award-winning, yet quiet and slow picture did very little box office business, which might be explained by another quote from Gitlin where he claims, “In a calculating society, people want safe thrills, which is why most of the young go to the movies in the first place, desiring the unexpected satisfactions that will, for a while, satisfy their predictable expectations. An audience inured to speed awaits ever more and different thrusts and collisions.”[13]

Here, I believe Allen would argue that cinema’s urban bias has created in the modern filmgoer a mindset that is akin to Simmel’s metropolitan man, who was able to make increasingly simultaneous value judgments on all the passing stimuli. And, value judgments are by definition objectifying and reducing; they are segues to a money economy. Simmel notes, “Money economy and the dominance of the intellect are intrinsically connected… money reduces all quality and individuality to the question: How much?”[14] A money economy reduces quality to quantity and promotes a social structure that is highly formulaic and impersonal. In reaction to this calculative exactness, many urban dwellers took on a blasé attitude, a detachment from the uber-stimulation of the city such that city dwellers seemed disassociated from the people and stimuli that made up their urban setting and surroundings. Increasingly, filmgoers have done the same. The blasé attitude is a “blunting of discrimination,”[15] which results in the creation of a hierarchy of sympathies, of sorts, a subconscious selection of which stimuli warrant full attention. This bespeaks the metropolitan unconscious that cinema’s “unconscious optics” purvey as home of high culture, and as valuable and desirable for its discernment of what’s high-minded versus what’s mundane. It is this hierarchy of sympathies then that informs what has become the culture industry.

To this end, Fred Davis makes the claim in his work, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, that “The culture industry can boast of having energetically accomplished and elevated to a principle the often inept transposition of art to the consumption sphere, of having stripped amusement of its obtrusive naiveties and improved the quality of its commodities. The more all-embracing the culture industry has become, the more pitilessly it has forced the outsider into either bankruptcy or a syndicate; at the same time it has become more refined and elevated, becoming finally a synthesis of Beethoven and the Casino de Paris.” Simply stated, “the culture industry remains the entertainment business.”[16] But the entertainment business, like any business, reduces quality to quantity, adheres to formula, and must be impersonal because its goal is widespread acceptance, that is, more consumers. In the same way Simmel says the city does, so does the culture industry “blunt discrimination,” with more speed and thrills, less narrative and interpretation. But, by using the descriptor ‘culture,’ we give the industry meretricious appeal; we add intangible societal value to cultural products. Jeffrey J. Williams speaks to this very issue in his essay, The Ubiquity of Culture, when he writes, “The term ‘culture’ has become ubiquitous in critical practice, and no longer holds any precise meaning or force, or rather it suffers from an oversaturation of meaning that makes it amorphous.”[17] What does it mean anymore to be cultured?

Junebug isn’t formulaic or impersonal, and as would follow, it found little success in the culture industry. However, American Beauty, a film that is neither formulaic nor impersonal either, took in over $130,000,000 at the box office (on an approximately $15,000,000 budget) and won Best Picture and Best Screenplay awards at the 2000 Academy Awards. American Beauty, written by Alan Ball and directed by Sam Mendes, is about suburban ennui and the mid-life crisis of its 40-year-old protagonist, Lester Burnham, who develops a relationship with his teenage daughter’s friend, Angela, to induce excitement and subsequent meaning in his life. The driving force behind much of the film is a reaction to the comfort found in suburban life and consumerism. One telling scene finds Lester hoping to ignite the sex life in his marriage with an afternoon romp with his wife Carolyn in the living room of their home, only to have Carolyn stop him for fear of soiling their expensive couch. Lester is furious and yells at her, “It’s just stuff! This is all stuff!” Another scene has Lester angrily hurling a fine china plate against the dining room wall.

Davis wrote, “Works of art are ascetic and shameless; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish.”[18] The most important scene in American Beauty occurs when Lester and Angela are about to consummate their nascent relationship until Lester ultimately represses his sexual urge. While undressing, Angela indicates to Lester that, despite her tough talk and precocious seduction, she is a virgin. At this, Lester stops himself immediately; he sees her as a child to be protected and himself as an adult who should be protective. He realizes that the boundaries of their relationship had been completely skewed. She was a confused child, who in her youth wanted more than she was ready for. He was an adult who pined for his youth and falsely believed he could will his return to it. He not only helps her put her clothes back on but also covers her with a blanket to make sure she is warm and comfortable. Theirs isn’t a class difference, but it is nonetheless a difference in resources, resources that come with age and experience.

Perhaps the reason American Beauty found success where Junebug couldn’t was because so many people now live in suburban areas similar to where American Beauty takes place, places that are essentially part urban and part rural. Also, the boundaries delineated in American Beauty are slightly more recognizable and accessible (young vs. old, materialistic vs. organic) than those in Junebug. The environment used in American Beauty was more familiar. People could go see American Beauty and enjoy it for its being recognizable without being necessarily concerned so much with its layered meanings. And, legitimately enjoying this critically acclaimed picture about identity and consumerism presented an image of being cultured, even if the viewer didn’t necessarily grasp the driving themes of identity and consumerism.

So then, where does a film like Junebug fit in our culture? The objective truths Junebug was made to portray are depicted through subjective examples and appreciated most through interpretation and discussion, just as American Beauty’s are, but such methods are not typically conducive to achieving widespread appeal. Many people recognized the suburban ennui in American Beauty and could spread positive word-of-mouth about the film to others they knew. Allen claims, “we should recognize that the reception process diachronically extends indefinitely beyond the running time of the screening. Post-movie talk by viewers should also be seen as a part of the interpretive experience.”[19] Positive word-of-mouth multiplies a film’s audience and thus increases its impact on the culture. One of the main reasons Junebug failed to find much of an audience was because MacLachlan’s artful presentation of rusticity is a foreign concept to most filmgoers. It is foreign especially, in concept anyway, to those who live rusticity, because conceptualizing what is a normal way of life is not normal to them – remember Madeleine’s mother-in-law deriding “talking” on the porch.

Allen closes his essay on film history by saying, “‘social conditions and cultural practices’ are constitutive of the experience of cinema, and are thus theoretically and historiographically inseparable from it.”[20] In other words, artfully done films originate in a culture, oftentimes comment on that culture (even if unintentionally), and ultimately add to that culture, become a part of it. MacLachlan certainly grasped this, and Ball did, too. Both of their films seek to depict amorphous human traits within defined cultural environments by in fact transcending those defined cultural environments. What they couldn’t control, though, was how each of their chosen environments affected the access audiences had to their films and how their audiences were affected by them.

Environment is our surroundings, what we are familiar with. Culture grows out of that familiarity and is how we routinize our lives with respect to our environment. Culture is a relationship with our surroundings that we don’t necessarily notice because it becomes seamless, a way of life. As Bourdieu says, it is encoded. The film landscape, though, is a manipulated environment, where expanding familiarity and conceptualizing culture is possible. Films like Junebug and American Beauty, quiet films with codes and concepts rife with topics for discussion and interpretation, don’t explode but devolve; they are more subsumed than consumed and, in presenting different environments and cultures, they can breed understanding, tolerance, and indeed taste. But as works of art, their acceptance is subject to Bourdieu’s Theory of Tastes. The cultural competence that informs these films also dictates where they’ll be seen and how they’ll be received. As such, perhaps producing a film like Junebug does not seem to make much business sense. But films like Junebug, and American Beauty, can have great effect in bringing cinema’s unconscious optics to our collective conscience, and thus add to our cultural competence.

Author contact: wm.thompson*AT*hotmail.com

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