Chapter 1: Introdcution
Chapter 1: Introdcution
Chapter 1: Introdcution
Chapter 1
Introduction
Independent Cinema and Character
This dissertation is about independent cinema, a body of narrative feature films made in
the United States beginning in the early 1980s that typically is identified as the American
alternative to Hollywood. According to one commonplace shared by critics and
filmmakers, whereas Hollywood films emphasize plot, independent films are more likely
to be characterdriven.1 Thus one key feature differentiating independent films from the
mainstream is that they are perceived to have a distinct approach to storytelling, which is
part of the aura of aesthetic and cultural legitimacy they enjoy.2 Compared with the
classical narration of the Hollywood mode, independent cinema is supposed to be more
Chuck and Buck, declares: “When I go see an independent movie, I want to see
something totally different. I want to see characters who don't walk that predictable
line."3 There are various other features differentiating independent cinema from
Hollywood, from industrial structures to social and cultural functions, but on the level of
textual features, character is salient. According to its detractors, contemporary
Hollywood cinema is often content to have characters who are onedimensional types
functioning as vehicles for other appeals, such as visual spectacle and the promotion of
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ancillary consumer products. By contrast, the champions of indie cinema argue that its
characters have more depth and complexity, are better developed, are truer to life, and are
more vivid and compelling than Hollywood characters.5
But what does it mean for a film, or a corpus of films, to be interested in
character? What do critics really mean when they say that independent films tend to be
characterdriven? What devices of storytelling do independent filmmakers exploit to
generate this effect of character salience? Simply put, what makes these characters so
interesting? In order to answer these questions in a way that is satisfying theoretically as
well as descriptively, we need to know more about the phenomenon of cinematic
character and about our engagement with it, which is a task of narrative theory.
Many aspects of narrative theory have been explored in relation to cinema, such as
narration, narrative comprehension, and narrative structures, but many dimensions of the
interface of spectator and character are still ripe for exploration.6 While significant work
has been done on the relation of character emotion to spectator emotion, I am especially
interested in the process by which spectators understand character psychology more
broadly, and my discussion of character in independent cinema is intended to be part of a
growing interest in this area among film scholars and other narrative theorists.7 In order
to make sense of what makes a particular approach to the creation of character distinctive,
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we must first understand how characters are created by filmmakers and understood by
spectators. Thus in addition to being about American independent cinema, this
dissertation is also about the construction of cinematic characters, especially their inner
lives. It follows that I am concerned with two related questions, one general and
theoretical, the other specific and analytical. First, how do spectators understand
cinematic characters? And second, what is distinctive about the way we understand
characters in American independent films?
Rather than tackle these questions one at a time, I will endeavor to answer them
together, by weaving independent film examples through my discussion of character per
se, and by testing my ideas about character against characterizations in independent films
by John Sayles, Todd Haynes, Todd Solondz, Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino,
Christopher Nolan, Richard Linklater, Steven Soderbergh, and the Coen brothers, that
illustrate, complicate, or clarify the general theory. In each chapter, I address some aspect
of character and I identify some ways in which independent cinema, as a distinct mode of
storytelling, represents characters. The idea of bundling these two investigations together
arose out of a desire to support my questions about independent film with a sturdy
armature of ideas about how character functions as a system within narrative, and to
challenge my thoughts about character by putting them in tension with a body of films
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that demands a sophisticated critical approach. This discussion is organized according to
theoretical rather than analytical topics, but it is my wish that it will not consequently be
seen as a statement principally of theory rather than criticism, but rather as a combination
of the two that is mutually enriching.
One basic premise of this study is that a community of filmmakers, critics, and
spectators find American independent cinema to be distinctive, and identify character as a
central feature of this distinctiveness. I assume that they are correct, at least in some
respects, that independent films have interesting characters. The questions that I pose are
aimed at ascertaining the specific dimensions of independent film’s characterizations that
allow for the appeal they generate. Thus the findings to follow from this premise will be
(at least) twofold: some will be principles of characterconstruction that lend themselves
to generating certain kinds of characterfocused interest; some will be specific features of
American independent films that function according to these principles. I have chosen
films for analysis that seem to me to be both representative and exemplary of character
driven independent cinema, such as John Sayles’s Passion Fish, Todd Solondz’s Welcome
to the Dollhouse, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hard Eight, and Todd Haynes’s Safe.
In the remainder of this introduction, I discuss the background assumptions of my
conceptual approach, I introduce some key terms and ideas structuring my study, and I
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signal the framework of topics to follow in the body of the dissertation. I also raise the
issue of one process of character construction, subjective narration, which is not formally
treated elsewhere, and defend this omission. Following that, I address the central appeals
of American independent films by identifying some general viewing strategies that
spectators use in understanding them.
Character, Person, and Self
Since Aristotle, narrative theory has tended to favor action over character.8 This tendency
was especially marked in the two major 20th Century schools of narrative theory,
formalism and structuralism, which rejected the notion that narratives create
representations of persons, whether on aesthetic grounds (viewing narrative form, rather
than the interaction of narrative and audience, as the prime object of interest), or on
ideological grounds (viewing “lifelike” characters, such as those in 19th Century novels,
as a vehicle of modern, Western ideology). Formalist and structuralist narrative theories
thus tend to view characters as functions of narrative structures such as plot.9 Roger
Thornhill in North by Northwest is defined by being mistaken for a spy, framed for
murder, set up by Eve, shot at by the cropduster, etc. This approach is neatly
summarized by Boris Tomashevsky:
The protagonist is by no means an essential part of the story. The story, as
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a system of motifs, may dispense entirely with him and his characteristics.
The protagonist, rather, is the result of the formation of the story material
into a plot. On the one hand, he is a means of stringing motifs together;
and on the other, he embodies the motivation which connects the motifs.10
Thus the way character is understood in literature, according to plotdominant theories, is
as a bundle of traits subordinate to a proper name. 11 By “traits” theorists mean not only
stable personality traits, such as introversion or intelligence, but all manner of descriptive
data about behavior and mental states. This concept doesn’t work as well in narrative
forms such as film, in which characters are visual as well as verbal representations, but
the basic idea is still in evidence in film theory influenced by the plotdominant schools.
For example, Kristin Thompson asserts in terms borrowed from Barthes that “characters
are not real people, but collections of semes, or character traits.”12 According to this
perspective, Roger Thornhill is not a person, but a mere agglomeration of descriptive and
visual details functioning within a textual system.
However, there is no logical reason why we should not turn Tomashevsky’s idea
180 degrees around, to say: “the plot is merely the result of the formulation of character
material into a characterization.” This would echo Henry James’s famous statement,
“What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the
of plot events, and also unlike those who reduce character to a bundle of traits, I am more
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inclined to see character as the narrative representation of a person or personlike agent.
This understanding follows that of the narrative theorists Uri Margolin, Alan Palmer,
Marisa Bortolussi, and Peter Dixon, all of whom argue that readers understand characters
as persons.14 Murray Smith argues that this understanding is a product of the application
of a person schema to a narrative representation, constructing the data of the narrative to
constitute “an analogue of a human agent.”15 A character is the sum of his represented
parts and then some, since one of the features of characters that we typically supply
unless cued to do otherwise—a kind of narrative default setting—is that they are
maximally personlike. Unless a characterization indicates otherwise, whether explicitly
or by conventions of genre or character type, characters are assumed to share all of the
same qualities as persons 16 In independent and Hollywood films a character is most
typically a fictional person, and less often a nonfictional person such as Jackson Pollock
in Pollock or Robert Crumb in Crumb, or a personlike agent who may in theory be either
fictional or nonfictional, such as Buzz Lightyear.
Understanding a character to be a person puts the issues of plot and traits aside,
acknowledging that they are means of describing characters, but insisting that they do not
define them. Characters exist not as marks on the page or as projected images but as
constructs of the mind. By identifying characters as persons, I certainly do not mean to
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imply that spectators believe that characters are illusions of real persons, or that narratives
create such a vivid facsimile of reality that spectators forget that they are watching a
representation. Rather, I mean to assert that our encounters with cinematic characters
demand the same cognitive abilities that we use in our encounters with real persons, and
that we approach characters as persons rather than as some other category of being.17
The way we make sense of characters is by applying social cognition to the task.
Social cognition is made up of a cluster of capacities that allow human beings to predict
and explain the behavior of others.18 It is also sometimes called social intelligence, and
many of its features are shared with our closest relations in the animal kingdom, the
primates.19 Ordinarily we understand other people’s behavior by making inferences about
the contents of their minds, including their intentional states, 20 such as beliefs and
desires, and their affect states, such as emotions and moods. We also make inferences and
judgments about traits other people are likely to have and categories, or types, to which
they might belong. These inferences and judgments are based on a combination of prior
knowledge, including both specific information about the person and schemas of varying
specificity, and observed actions, including goaldirected behavior, facial and vocal
expressions, and reactions to situations in the social environment. They are all
interrelated, such that desire inferences, trait and type judgments, and emotion
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recognitions feed into each other. I discuss them separately in the chapters to follow
because they are studied separately by psychologists and the products of these parallel
research programs have not to my knowledge been effectively synthesized. In practice,
however, the processes function all together.
Like real people, characters are assumed to think and feel. This assumption is the
basis of our encounters with them: we seek information on a momentbymoment basis
about their knowledge, beliefs, desires, goals, plans, moods, and emotions. These are all
descriptive data, of course, but we do not think of them in the abstract as a list of terms.
This is one aspect of the failure of the “bundleoftraits” approach to defining character.
Traits added up amount to a list. A character is a dynamic construct, more like a complex
computer program than it is like a list to which items may be added and subtracted.
Characterization is a process of data acquisition, but as with social cognition, the data are
acquired in complex and patterned ways. Every new bit of data is interpreted in the
context of all the ones that came before it, and may potentially modify many other bits,
whether through confirmation, complication, or revision of existing knowledge and
inference. The interface of text and spectator also functions to focus and direct attention
and to create expectations, which in turn affects future characterization, i.e., it guides
cognition. Emphasizing accumulating details over the rich patterns of social intelligence
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activated by characterization discounts the dynamic nature of the process. If we don’t
merely accumulate information in additive fashion in our everyday encounters with
others, we wouldn’t when we watch a film, either. The alternative model emphasizes
context, attentionfocusing, and more sophisticated information processing.
Characterization is social cognition, in the sense that it is a process wherein
spectators interpret human behavior and its underlying psychological causes using the
same cognitive tools the spectators apply in understanding their real social worlds. We,
the spectators, read other people, the characters. But characterization is also a product of
social cognition, in the sense that filmmakers internalize principles of reasoning about
mental states in constructing characterizations. In this second sense, characterization is a
set of storytelling procedures that exploits social cognition. The challenge of theorizing
is to understand the tension and fit between these two senses of characterization, for if the
process of watching a film were just the same as the process of experiencing real life, we
would have no need for film theory—we could just read the social cognition literature,
which would explain cinema no less than it does the real world. The point of analyzing
characterization is to see how filmmakers, tacitly taking up principles of human
psychology that they and their audience share, utilize aspects of those principles in
crafting design features of narrative construction. In doing so, they are able to amplify
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characterization’s clarity, vividness, depth, complexity, or expressiveness. David
Bordwell’s discussion of aspects of visual style applies no less to this point about
characterization and social cognition:
Historically, filmmakers have taken as their material ordinary behaviors,
often of transculturally readable sorts. But the filmmakers have processed
those behaviors, usually for the sake of greater clarity and force.
Cinematic style often streamlines ordinary human activity, smoothing the
rough edges away, reweighting it for the purposes of creating
representations which are densely and redundantly informative, as well as
emotionally arousing.21
The task of the film theorist trying to understand characterization, then, is to understand
which aspects of ordinary human activity are typically streamlined when persons are
represented as characters, which cognitive propensities are recruited by the filmmaker. It
is to determine how filmmakers emphasize, amplify, or frustrate realworld processes to
enhance cinematic storytelling, which in turn differentiates the cinematic experience from
reality even as films demand reality’s cognitive skill set for their comprehension. We
construct film characters as persons, but the representation of persons in films tends to
follow a certain logic of construction that intensifies their appeal.
In the 1970s film theorists argued that we love to watch movies because of the
pleasure we get from looking at people. Without denying this appeal, I would suggest
that a complementary pleasure is typically derived from looking into people. This
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dissertation is only indirectly concerned with the pleasure or displeasure offered by
movies, but it is thoroughly caught up in the question of how movies invite—or forbid—
us to explore the inside of people’s heads, their thoughts and feelings and a sense of their
personalities. I assume that when we talk about interesting characters in independent
films, this is a large part of what we are talking about.
Characters are representations of selves; ordinary people find selves interesting
and so do the scholars in a variety of academic fields who have taken an interest in the
self as a concept and in particular in the self as it is figured in narrative. A cognitive
approach to character and characterization places human experience, the experience of
selfhood, at the center of narrative. Everything that happens in a narrative either happens
to the characters or because of them, or has implications for them which are understood
on some level as the justification or explanation of the events’ significance. Narrative
itself is coming to be understood by some theorists as a means of understanding human
experience, as a cognitive instrument for making sense of ourselves and others.22 As
Edward Branigan defines it, narrative is “a perceptual activity that organizes data into a
special pattern which represents and explains experience” (my emphasis).23 Storytelling
certainly has multiple functions, and in commercial cinema aesthetic appreciation and
entertainment value compete with selfconception and understanding for our attention.
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Yet narrative and the construction of selves are closely—some would say inextricably—
connected.
“Selfmaking is a narrative art,” writes psychologist Jerome Bruner in Making
Stories, arguing that selfhood itself is a product of storytelling. 24 In Acts of Meaning,
Bruner also argues that “narrative is…a natural vehicle for folk psychology,” since
narrative necessarily represents “human intentionality.”25 Unlike the formalist
structuralist conception of character as a function of plot, Bruner sees plotmaking as a
function of selfmaking, whether in fictional or nonfictional narratives. The neurologist
Oliver Sacks, in “A Matter of Identity,” a story about a man unable to tell his own story to
himself—and thus unable to constitute his own identity—writes:
We have, each of us, a lifestory, an inner narrative—whose continuity,
whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and
lives, “a narrative,” and that this narrative is us, our identities…
[E]ach of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative,
which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us—
through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not
least, our discourse, our spoken narrations…
To be ourselves we must have ourselves—possess, if need be repossess,
our lifestories. We must “recollect” ourselves, recollect the inner drama,
the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous
inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.26
Sacks’ idea is that each individual has a unique story, an idealization of himself or herself
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that is a product of inward reflection, of active thought and conscious design. Note the
progression in his list of sources productive of the selfasnarrative: perceptions, feelings,
thoughts, actions, and then discourse. Sacks implies that the creation of story begins with
the senses, moves through various cognitive states (intentional, affective), is then made
manifest in behavior, and only after all of that is realized as such in an instance of
storytelling. In narrative cinema, the process by which stories are generated is obviously
quite different, but the basis of narrative in selfmaking is not and neither is the
significance of all of those dimensions of perception and cognition. Narratives are
intelligible insofar as they represent human experience and offer their audience the
possibility of relating their experience to that of the characters. The plot, the temporal
dimension of the narrative, is the means of representing the life of a person or persons in
the fullest fourdimensionality of spacetime. Thus the details of the plot, the setting, the
themes, and the narrative structure are assumed, tacitly, to offer information about the
people who populate the narrative world. As I shall argue in Chapter 5, no narrative
worth reading or seeing describes and represents its settings and events without indexing
them to the characters whose experiences are the context for the representations.
This may be true of narratives generally, but it is especially germane in
considering American independent film, which is generally understood to have a greater
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interest in character than in other storytelling values. In contrast with Hollywood cinema,
independent film is considered to privilege character above plot, and it would follow that
the significance of character to narrative would be even greater in a mode that often
focuses more on the exploration of identity than on more conventional genre material.
Even in formally innovative independent films such as The Limey, 21 Grams, and
Memento, in which the intricate workings of experimental plotting claim our attention, we
are still encouraged to see character as the key to unraveling the convoluted events. The
point of The Limey’s exercise in fragmentary storytelling is to work toward a sense of
what originally made Wilson so singularly focused on Valentine, to understand him better
by searching his character for explanations for the plot events. In independent cinema
character is typically the dominant feature of narrative design.
But even in more orthodox classicism, character and especially character
psychology are of paramount significance. Although the characters of this mode tend to
have fewer, simpler traits, they are no less central as foci of narrative interest than the
characters of independent cinema. Their traits typically attach clearly to welldefined
goals, and their goals motivate the forward progress of plot events—more so than in other
modes of cinema.27 The claim that independent cinema is more characterfocused must
really mean that independent films have more interesting characters—or more interest in
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character than plot as an element of narrative—but it cannot mean that independent films
make character more integral to plot than classical films do, as this integration is in the
essence of classicism. The main narrative events and their outcomes in a tightly plotted,
tightly causal, classical Hollywood narrative such as The Maltese Falcon are often caused
by the protagonist as a product of his basic character traits, as in the ultimate scene in
which the incorruptible Sam Spade turns Brigid O’Shaughnessy in to the police. In other
instances, the main events happen to the hero, rather than because of him, such that his
experiences, which are consistent with his traits, are most relevant to their representation.
For example, North by Northwest is full of incidents that befall Roger Thornhill rather
than being caused by him: he is mistaken for George Kaplan, forcibly intoxicated and
almost killed, framed for a murder, seduced by an agent of his enemies, and led by her to
a cornfield where his is almost killed again. In this film, the character is still the central
focus of events even though he does not cause them; indeed the events are only
comprehensible as those befalling Roger Thornhill, seen through his eyes (figuratively
and, often, literally). There may even be events in the classical film from which the hero
is absent which are understood in the context of his experience (e.g., are judged visàvis
the character). When in The Maltese Falcon we see Joel Cairo going toward Kaspar
Gutman’s room, an event that Spade does not see or know about, we evaluate this
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development per Spade, understand and judge it in relation to Spade’s beliefs, desires,
plans, and goals, and react emotionally in a fashion sympathetic to Spade. Similarly in
North by Northwest, when Eve sends the “What shall I do with him in the morning?” note
while aboard the train to Chicago, we understand the event—the revelation that Eve is
Vandam’s agent—in reference to Roger, with all that that entails.
Some classical films, however, have looser causal structures or less structured
motivation than The Maltese Falcon and North by Northwest. Even in instances in which
plotadvancement seems to be insufficient motivation for a sequence in a film, such as a
musical number in a 1930s Busby Berkeley film, there can still be character motivation
that explains at least some of the interest we take beyond the sequence’s appeal as
spectacle. Because the grand finale numbers in Footlight Parade and 42nd St. are so
lengthy and elaborate, it is easy to forget that in the fictional worlds of those films, the
performances are products of the characters’ long, hard efforts, the happy culmination
and satisfaction of narrative desires. This isn’t to deny Berkeley’s visual prowess, or even
that his production numbers may be instances in which the sensory pleasures of a film
sequence are greater than those generated by narrative. It is only to insist that not all
events in a film must perpetually advance the plot for them to have a narrative function.
When the conception of narrative is collapsed into plot, the concepts of narrative
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motivation and dominance are impoverished to the point of irrelevance.
To take a much different example, the hotel restaurant scene in the Coen brothers’
Fargo in which Marge (Frances McDormand) gets together with her emotionally
unstable, socially awkward high school acquaintance, Mike, has no relation to the
kidnapping, murders and their investigation, which make up the basic plot of the film.
Mike has seen Marge on the news, and asked to meet with her in hopes that she will
reciprocate his romantic interest. The situation is comical not only because Mike is
clearly neither an attractive nor an appropriate mate, but also because Marge is very
visibly pregnant as well as happily married, and so not likely to be interested in a fling
with him. Seen from the perspective of plotadvancement, the scene is extraneous and
unmotivated. As an encounter between a man and a woman, it provides a parallel and
counterpoint to the scenes between Jerry and his wife, Marge and her husband, and
especially Marge and Jerry, who like Mike is socially maladroit. Mike meeting Marge
emphasizes the parallel between Jerry and Marge that structures the progression of the
narrative events, but the events of this scene itself have no significant causal link to earlier
or later scenes. As far as the plot is concerned, this scene could have been deleted and it
would have made little difference.
Seen from the perspective of character, it is one of the film’s most touching,
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revelatory, and fully realized moments, because it shows a different dimension of Marge
than we see in either her home or work settings. Marge functions as the moral compass
of Fargo, the character whose good humor, honesty, professionalism, and keen
intelligence are in marked contrast to the venality, violence, arrogance, obnoxiousness,
and cowardice of the other characters. But by showing us a scene in which she has to
handle a difficult social situation with delicacy and grace, the Coens open up another
view on her, adding not only to her complexity but also to her likeability. We sympathize
with her being put in an awkward situation and admire the way she carefully lets Mike
down. The scene actually is stronger for not having a connection to the main line of plot
action, as there is nothing at stake in the encounter but the characters’ feelings—it is not
like the scenes between Marge and Jerry Lundegaard, which while being likewise
awkward are also nervewracking because of Jerry’s shifty, anxious demeanor, a function
of plot as well as character, and which are scenes of Marge at work, in her capacity as a
police officer, which demands that we judge her against expectations of her role as a
detective. Those scenes between Marge and Jerry also consume our attention differently,
as they hold more potential of affecting the direction of the plot by closing or opening
links in the causal chain of events. The Marge and Jerry scenes pose clear questions
about the characters in relation to the plot, whereas the scene of Marge and Mike does
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not.
The scene of Marge and Mike also shows us something about Marge’s background
and formative years, further fleshing out and humanizing her, a marked contrast to some
of the other characters who are satirized more than humanized. Fargo is an example of
an independent film that is keenly interested in the specificity of a cultural experience and
identity (the northern Midwest), and this scene keys in on that interest. Finally, by
loosening the causal chain for Marge rather than for any other character, the film signals
her primacy among them, promoting her for our allegiance despite her absence from the
first twenty minutes of the film, which is part of the film’s larger transfer of alignment
from Jerry to Marge.28 The Coen brothers take an interest in character and make
interesting characters, and none exceeds Marge in warmth and goodness. When critics
identify independent cinema with depth of characterization, it is scenes and characters
like these that they have in mind, scenes that would be unlikely to find their way into a
Hollywood film.
A Cognitive Theory of Characterization: Intuitive and Counterintuitive
Some of the features of cinematic characterization may seem obvious or simply intuitive,
and one objection sometimes leveled at cognitive film theories is that they amount to little
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more than commonsense explanations dressed up with terminology borrowed from
cognitive science. This criticism, as I understand it, is that cognitive theories are not
interesting or useful because they merely reproduce knowledge that is already available to
film scholars. It should not be news to anyone who studies film, for example, that when
we watch a movie we fasten on the main character’s eyes. It should not be news that main
characters are the ones we know the most about, or that we slot characters into categories
(or types), which function to open up and close off expectations about them. All of these
are ideas to be found in the chapters to follow. They are all crucial features of
characterization and, with many other points, are the basis for much of film
comprehension, engagement, and appreciation. Yet they demand discussion, analysis, and
theorizing, and sometimes such basic points also demand disputing and revising.
Some intuitive points demand consideration because there is substantial research
that film studies should not ignore about how social cognition functions. Since engaging
with a film is a process of making sense of people, we would be illadvised to disregard
the findings of psychologists who study this phenomenon. For example, the activation of
inferences linking events in the social world to agents within it, such as an inference that a
person who helped you is a helpful sort of person, is a crucial strategy of narrative
construction. The better we understand how people attribute traits to one another the
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better we will understand how people attribute traits to characters in a movie, and how
filmmakers guide us toward or away from such attributions. So there are intuitive points
to be raised in the pages to follow which film studies has barely considered, if at all.
Whether or not individual scholars will find them interesting is impossible to say, but I
submit that they describe and explain central facets of the process of watching a film, and
that film theory needs to understand them if it is to understand narrative comprehension
and engagement.
We may not appreciate the significance of some aspects of common sense which
are generally valid, and may undervalue their implications, which we have not considered
very carefully. We think of character typing as something basic and automatic, but at the
same time we often consider good characters to defy typing. To assert that all characters
—wellmade and badlymade alike—are types, as I shall in Chapter 2, may seem intuitive
but controversial. This much is true of many such claims to be considered in the pages to
follow. Considering how characterization functions demands that some intuitive but
nonetheless problematic ideas be considered.
Some points may seem intuitive and simplistic, such as the observation in Chapter
4 that we read characters’ facial and vocal expressions of emotion in largely same way as
we recognize other people’s expressions in reality. Since this sounds like a claim of
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“naive realism,” it is an intuitive point that requires explanation and defense. Many of my
points may seem intuitive to the nonspecialist but controversial or wrongheaded to the
film and media specialist, steeped in decades of antirealist rhetoric. I may fairly be
termed a realist, but I defend this position with substantial evidence from social
psychology, and I am eager to clarify and qualify my position so that I will not be
mistaken for a “naive” realist, but rather be seen as a careful, considered, theoretically
informed realist. There is nothing simplistic about the way we read emotion expressions
or about the way filmmakers harness this skill to craft aesthetically satisfying narratives,
as I shall discuss.
Finally, some of the points I shall discuss are actually counterintuitive. Common
sense should never be left unexamined, because it frequently contains inaccuracies or flat
out falsehoods that we would be better off correcting. Sometimes our intuitions are
wrong. For example, many people probably think that independent films have dynamic
characters with great depth and complexity who undergo significant development. I shall
argue in Chapter 6, however, that this is often not the case, that many independent films
have flat characters whose psychology is closed off rather than opened up and whose
“arc” involves little significant change. Moreover, this does not make them less
interesting as characters—indeed, it is a strategy of increasing our interest in them. To
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take another example, it may seem like common sense that most films contain
conventionally expressive faces in which clear basic emotions, such as anger or disgust,
are conveyed. As I argue in Chapter 4, however, faces in films are often quite
inexpressive and some films display these basic facial expressions of emotion rather
infrequently. This is not to say that these films necessarily fail to establish character
emotions, but to argue that establishing character emotions can function in various ways,
only one of which is the conventionally expressive face. Some of the points to follow are
thus challenges to received wisdom or common sense.
To summarize, then, I have identified three layers of points to be considered in
Chapters 2 through 6. The first layer contains the points which are intuitive but which
demand consideration and explanation, such as the link between characters’ actions and
our attribution to them of personality traits. The second contains the points which are
intuitive but controversial, such as my assertion that all characters, good and bad, are
types. And the third layer is made up of counterintuitive points, such as the notion that
films with interesting characters sometimes have flat, unchanging, shallow
characterizations. It would be inaccurate to claim, therefore, that my discussion of
characterization is “mere” common sense or that my points are obvious. Those aspects of
this dissertation which are common sense are arrived at only after careful consideration
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of evidence—of films in relation to theories—and many topics which might have seemed
candidates for a commonsense treatment will be shown to be more complicated than one
might think at first, or just invalid.
Character and Characterization
The most important distinction structuring the chapters to follow is between two aspects
of the cinematic representation of persons. On one hand is the thing we call a character,
which I have defined as a narrative representation of a person (or personlike agent). In
The Big Lebowski, the main character is a fictional person, The Dude (Jeff Bridges). The
Dude has many attributes and predicates, a considerable quantity of narrative details that
together constitute him as a representation, including many that are not explicit in The
Big Lebowski but which the spectator must supply on the basis of suggestions in the film,
or by applying cognitive structures used in understanding persons and situations. For
example, in his first scene of the film, The Dude stands in the refrigerated dairy aisle of
an empty Los Angeles supermarket wearing sunglasses and dressed in a bathrobe and
shorts. He looks around to see if anyone is paying attention, opens a pint carton of half
andhalf, and sniffs its contents. Then, with a white stripe visible on his mustache hairs,
he stands at the checkout counter and makes his purchase by writing out a check for 69
26
cents. The details of this scene establish many aspects of the character: he dresses like a
slob, wants halfandhalf at an odd hour (we soon learn that it goes in his signature drink,
the White Russian), and he pays with a check. This bit of comic business reminds us of
The Dude’s real name, Jeffrey Lebowski, which is printed on his Ralph’s supermarket
value club card and in the top left corner of his personalized checks. Then The Dude
looks up over his shades and we follow his glance across a cut to the first President Bush
on a television monitor saying, “This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.”
We make many inferences and judgments about The Dude on the basis of these
details: we categorize or type him in various ways, infer aspects of his beliefs, desires,
goals, and other psychological states, and identify a kind of endearing eccentricity in his
personality. Real people have many dimensions, not all of which can even be known by
observers. A vivid, multidimensional character such as The Dude is thus a rich field of
narrative data combining explicitly represented details with the spectator’s contribution of
inferences, judgments, and interpretations based on expectations we have about persons,
real and fictional. As Noël Carroll argues, “It is in the nature of narrative to be
essentially incomplete.”29 We may apply this observation to character as well: the text
presents enough information for us to work with, and we complete the job of constructing
the person.
27
On the other hand is the process by which The Dude is represented onscreen as
part of the unfolding of the events in the narrative world, and in the minds of the people
in the audience taking them in and making sense of them. This is what I am calling
characterization. Although we often think of characters in retrospect as stable, having
already experienced the whole narrative and knowing everything we are going to know,
they are presented to us in a dynamic temporal form And whereas we think of characters
as human or humanlike, characterization is a textual system, a dynamic interaction
between the spectator and cinematic and narrative structures. The following are some
aspects of the supermarket scene in The Big Lebowski that make it an example of
characterization:
It functions as exposition, being placed early in the film to acquaint us with the
character and encouraging a specific first impression of what kind of person The
Dude is, which influences our expectations for the rest of the film. As an
introduction that precedes the initial instigation of plot events, rather than
plunging us into them in medias res, this scene has an iterative function
suggesting that The Dude ordinarily shops alone and at odd hours, runs out of
cash and has to pay with a check, wears sunglasses at night, wears a bathrobe
outside of the house, wants halfandhalf, etc. Introductions often characterize by
28
establishing implicit routines. This scene also introduces one of the film’s main
motifs, the doublenaming of the main character. The voiceover narrator, a
cowboy speaking in a folksy drawl, calls the character both “Dude” and
“Lebowski,” and describes him as “the man for his time and place” and “possibly
the laziest man in Los Angeles county.”
The scene’s visual and aural style emphasize the emptiness of the supermarket,
with its bright lights, boldly receding depth, and pipedin music, and establishes
The Dude within a specific time and place, a latetwentieth century consumer
society, more specifically L.A. before the first Gulf War. The camera and
blocking both emphasize the scene’s expository role by slowly pushing in on The
Dude’s face as he steps forward in the space of the frame. Jeff Bridges’s
performance conveys The Dude’s laidback demeanor.
This scene relates in various ways to other scenes of the film, such as those when
The Dude drinks a White Russian, when he wears similar clothes, when he has a
similar demeanor, or when he is involved in transactions. There are also more
explicit parallels between this scene and two others later on. After being
assaulted, The Dude repeats Bush’s words, “this will not stand.” Finally, the
introductory scene is echoed much later on in the film after the death of The
29
Dude’s friend Donnie (Steve Buscemi). The film implies that The Dude and
Walter go to Ralph’s to get the coffee can in which they bring Donnie’s ashes to
the seaside, where they scatter them, and this symmetry of Ralph’s as a motif
introduced at the beginning and the end subtly structures the presentation of the
story and characters and reminds us of what The Dude was like before the main
events of the plot began, ushering us back to the initial state of equilibrium.
All of these devices are significant aspects of our encounter with The Dude, but none is
part of his character except, perhaps, for Bridges’s performance, which functions both as
character and as characterization. These are processes by which we become acquainted
with the character. They also structure our encounter with the character over the course
of the narrative by creating expectations and meanings, and by developing them as the
story progresses.
It follows from the distinction between the kinds of information that constitute
character and the kinds that constitute characterization that the former is to the latter as
narrative is to narration: one can be observed as a finished structure but the other must be
appreciated in its unfolding temporality.30 Or to put it slightly differently, character is one
aspect of narrative, while characterization is one aspect of narration. Both a character
and a narrative may be contemplated as a whole, while a characterization or narration can
30
only be considered as a process in flux.
It may appear that this distinction between character and characterization is
congruent with another distinction narrative theorists make between two planes of
narrative, one a surface structure of represented events (discourse, plot, syuzhet), the other
a deep structure of those events as they “really happened,” reconstructed in the mind of
the reader or spectator (diegesis, story, fabula).31 However, if one did map directly onto
the other, we would have to say that in the plot, The Dude is a characterization while in
the story, he is a character. This does not make sense, since it requires that we deny that
The Dude is a character in the plot. Furthermore, the characterization consists among
other things of temporal ordering, camera movement, motifs, and parallelisms, but these
things are not parts of the plot, they are parts of style and of narration. Most importantly,
it makes little sense to overlay the story/plot distinction with that between character, a
person concept, and characterization, a process concept. Rather than mapping character
and characterization onto this distinction, then, I consider character to operate on both
narrative levels and characterization, like narration, to be the means by which the
spectator accesses plot character so as to be able to construct the story.
As an interaction between character and spectator, characterization’s form is a
temporal unfolding, and to analyze characterization demands that we slow the film down
31
and consider each part in relation to the one that preceded it, the one that succeeded it,
and the ones that relate to it elsewhere in the text. Character also has a temporal form,
since people’s lives are structured by time, but as a theoretical concept character is
abstracted from time, seen as it were from above. Character is a sum of narrative
information, some of it explicit and some of it filled in by the spectator; characterization
is an ongoing experience.
We shall see that character and characterization tend to work in concert, but that
in some cases they may be at odds with one another, with the characterization generating
tension against the construction of character by withholding information or by providing
inconsistent or confusing data about the character. This is the case, for example, in films
whose characters are difficult to understand, such as Safe, Hard Eight, and The Limey. In
The Big Lebowski, the tone of the voiceover that introduces The Dude, delivered by a
narrator who isn’t sure what he wants to say (“Oh, now I’ve lost my train of thought...”),
suggests that the characterization is mocking the device of voiceover narration as a
cliché. In this way, the characterization has a function separate from the clear
introduction of the character and complicates rather than clarifies the construction of
character. In The Big Lebowski this ironic device is a source of comedy, but in other
films, characterization that clashes with character may serve many other functions, such
32
as increasing interest in character or appealing on the level of formal play.
The chapters following this introduction are organized into two parts. The first is
about character processes, and is concerned with the psychological dimensions of
character construction rooted in social cognition. It assumes a quasidirect interface
between spectator and character, mostly saving up the question of how the medium of
film and the form of narrative shape the process of character construction while at times,
in analyses of specific films, spending some of this capital. The cinematic character
processes discussed in Part I are typing, or person categorization (Chapter 2);
mindreading, or making inferences about characters’ intentionality (their beliefs, desires,
plans, goals, and the like) and traits (Chapter 3); and the recognition of characters’
emotion expressions, especially in their voices and faces (Chapter 4). Taken together,
these three components of social cognition account for our ability to understand persons
and characters on the outside (their behavior) and on the inside (their psychology).
The second part is about characterization processes, and is concerned with the
textual system through which characters are represented and comprehended. Unlike the
first part, it foregrounds the ways that audiovisual techniques and narrative design
principles shape the spectator’s interaction with character profoundly and pervasively.
The second part is not a whole separate set of processes in parallel with character
33
processes, but is overlaid upon the character processes and is the means through which
they are made operative. Thus in many sections of part II, I return to concepts and
examples raised in Part I to revisit their functioning within the narrativecinematic textual
system. The characterization processes discussed in Part II are film style (Chapter 5), and
variables of characterization such as depth, complexity, and character change, which may
or may not support character construction (Chapter 6).
What About Subjective Narration?
There is one aspect of characterization which to some observers might seem to be the
most central process representing character psychology, but which I do not discuss very
much in the chapters to follow. I am referring to the direct representation of characters’
experience through the various devices film theory calls subjective narration. These fall
into several categories, some of which are central and some of which are more
questionable cases. In Film Art, Bordwell and Thompson distinguish between perceptual
and mental subjectivity. Perceptual subjective narration includes visual representations of
a character’s perceptual experience such as POV shots. Mental subjective narration
includes the cinematic dramatization of dreams, memories, and fantasies.32 Bordwell and
Thompson do not include character narration in the category of subjective narration,
34
whether it be using a voiceover as in Blade Runner or the device of a character beginning
to narrate a story and the film taking over from her by dramatizing her words, as in Brief
Encounter. These related techniques have a tenuous connection to subjective narration:
while in some rare cases they may really cause spectators to see the film’s narration as
temporarily being relayed through the character’s mind, most often character narration is
an alibi for motivating timeshifting into flashbacks (the characterstoryteller instance) or
for helping clarify exposition (the voiceover instance). These devices may produce an
effect of sympathy for the character but not the sense that the images and sounds that
illustrate her words really issue from her subjectivity.
More peripheral yet is the concept of focalization. This is sometimes imported
from literary theory to describe a character whose experience—sometimes merely
perceptual, sometimes mental—the narration of a film seems to access, privilege, or
suggest. Murray Smith has effectively argued that this confusing concept should be
jettisoned and in its place we should talk about the narration emphasizing character
experiences through the combination of objective spatiotemporal attachment to a
character and subjective access.33 The characters whose experiences, external and
internal, are dramatized the most are the ones with whom we align. Smith distinguishes
as well between single and multiple attachment, the latter being a standard feature of
35
ensemble films
There are three reasons why I have chosen to discuss this topic only briefly now,
seldom to return to it again. First, I don’t think that subjective narration has many
advantages in constructing character psychology when compared with social cognition
processes, as I shall explain. Second, whether or not I am right about this, subjective
narration has been addressed at considerable length elsewhere and my contribution to this
discussion amounts merely to a few points about some of the technique’s limitations and
its modest use in American independent films.34 This leads into my final reason, which is
that subjective narration is not a very typical independent film technique, especially not
when considering by comparison its prevalent use in European avantgarde cinema of the
1920s and art cinema of the 1950s and 1960s.
Recent American cinema makes use of subjective narration of various sorts, but
rarely to the systematic extent of these modes of the past, which made the techniques
central to their aesthetic programs. American independent cinema generally makes less
use of these techniques and is not characterized by much reliance on psychological
narration devices such as charactermotivated flashbacks and dream sequences. Indeed,
the tendency among some independent directors to scramble temporal order is marked by
its avoidance of motivating this narrative experimentation as character subjectivity.
36
Memento, Pulp Fiction, Go, and 21 Grams are presented out of order for no particular
reason given in the narration. An exception is The Limey, which suggests that some of its
hardtoplace images are memories or other thoughts, echoing Resnais’s La Guerre est
finie, but which also manipulates temporality without so motivating it, as in the scene
introducing Terry Valentine, during which brief clips of scenes later in the film are
interspersed among shots representing the narrative “now.” These images of Valentine
are not character flashforwards or fantasies, but rather playful objective narration. A
more outlandish exception is Being John Malkovich, which is not a exactly a time
scrambling narrative but which does exploit subjectivity as a means of exploring
character, though not in any conventional fashion. As with the films of David Lynch, I
consider Being John Malkovich to be sui generis, hard to assimilate into the general
tendencies of independent film. (Perhaps this is an instance of discounting data that
contradicts established types rather than modifying the types to accommodate
contradictory data, a phenomenon I describe in Chapter 2. If this is so, I imagine that I
share this sense of Being John Malkovich being exceptional with many others.)
If American independent cinema favors any particular subjective device it is the
character voiceover, which does suggest an emphasis on a particular character that tints
the film’s narration, as in The Opposite of Sex. Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. uses
37
occasional character narration in directaddress sequences, underlining the fact that the
narration takes the main character, Chantal’s, perspective. The characterization in these
films is rigorously aligned with the main characters, however, and most of the effect of
allegiance to them is a product of spatiotemporal attachment and moral evaluation rather
than subjectivity devices.
Partly this avoidance of mental subjectivity is attributable to independent cinema’s
investment in a kind of realism, as we shall see in the latter portion of this chapter. Many
independent filmmakers see part of their aesthetic mission to be an effort at social
analysis, i.e., at understanding contemporary social institutions, issues, and identities.
This is certainly true of Just Another Girl: the point is to establish how Chantal stands for
a certain experience of social identity, and our sympathy with her is clearly supposed to
lead to sympathy for young black women as a group. Many American independent
filmmakers see individuals in terms of their social bonds rather, as in other film
movements of the past, than as puzzles to be probed psychologically. This isn’t to say that
they are not interested in character psychology. But it is to insist on a conception of the
individual that makes the subjective realm less relevant as a topic to explore than the
objective, external, social realm. This is especially true of directors such as Spike Lee,
Todd Solondz, Jim Jarmusch, John Sayles, and Kevin Smith, all of whom are quite
38
different in their thematic and stylistic approach to filmmaking, but all of whom still aim
to capture the everydayness of various specific social spheres. Another way of putting
this would be that realism is a mode of storytelling less likely to take up the explicit
techniques of subjectivity for the representation of character psychology. All of those
earlier movements and styles in film history were, by contrast, to some extent invested in
different conception of artistic representation, such as expressionism.
But such conceptions do not guarantee an interest in character per se or an
increased degree of knowledge—from the perspective of the spectator—concerning
character psychology. This is because objective characterization is no less generative of
psychological insights, and indeed may be more so since it requires certain kinds of
inferential activity that subjective means of characterization might limit by, for example,
keeping the character’s eyes off screen. The eyes, as I argue in Chapters 3 and 4, are a
crucial device for character construction, and in the classic POV structure they may be
less available to the spectator than in a style that emphasizes them. Moreover, as Murray
Smith points out, one function of POV shots is to limit the field of vision and withhold
information pertinent to the character, a device horror films often exploit by obscuring
both the monster and its potential victim—our hero or heroine—from our view.35
Another limitation on perceptual and mental subjectivity is narrative context. In
39
narrative feature films, representations of a character’s perceptual and mental experiences
are very rarely seen absent a context of objective narration in which to place the character.
Characterization is a virtually perpetual process for the duration of a film, but subjective
narration typically offers information about character psychology only in circumscribed
passages. The information gained during a subjective sequence must be made to square
with the information gained during the rest of the film. Typically, most character traits,
actions and reactions are established objectively and subjective sequences offer small
shreds, rather than large swathes, of additional characterizing detail, much of it redundant
with the sort of information we already know, or at least noncontradictory to it. In
Hitchcock’s Psycho, as Marion Crane drives away from Phoenix, having stolen the money
from her boss, an imaginary conversation in her head reveals her anxiety about what is
likely to happen after the theft is discovered. This tells us about her mental state: she is
anxious about the consequences of her actions. But we already knew that from the events
themselves (because anyone in her place would feel the same anxiety) and from her
anxious facial expressions and body language. The voiceover fills in details and ups the
emotional impact of the narrative, but it does not really provide significant new
information.
In many instances, subjective sequences are opportunities not for deep
40
psychological investigations but for stylization and experimentation (e.g., French
Impressionism, Hitchcock’s dream sequences). In such instances, the “literalness” of the
mental representation is a stretch just as great as the cinematic dramatization of character
narration. In other words, we don’t necessarily take mental subjectivity any more literally
than we take the cinematic representation of a character’s words. As The Big Lebowski
demonstrates in its outrageous hallucinatory fantasy sequences, which include a POV shot
from inside a bowling ball and a Berkeleyesque musical number, subjective narration is
not necessarily a credible representation of anyone’s mental state. In such cases, it is
clear that subjective narration is a device that exploits character as a pretext for generating
other appeals.
Our comprehension of films is modeled on our comprehension of real people in
real situations. All narrative films activate our processes of social cognition, but only
some represent the mind directly. Those that do still do most of their characterizing
indirectly and demand that whatever insights we gain during subjective sequences be
understood within a context of objective characterization. Many films manage to create
interesting characters without relying on subjective techniques, and it is possible to
convey a world of information about a character without ever representing the character’s
vision or thoughts directly. We evolved to read other people’s minds, not to enter them.
41
Making Sense of American Independent Cinema
Since the 1980s, American independent cinema has been a fixture of international film
culture, comprising films distinguished from the mainstream of American cinema by their
modest means and personal artistic ambition. Independent cinema has produced not only
films, but also a network of institutions that sustain them including Sundance, the
Independent Film Channel, magazines such as Filmmaker and The Independent,
producers and distributors such as Good Machine and Miramax, and the Landmark and
Angelika theaters. Its antecedents are the American auteurs of the 1950s, 1960s, and
1970s, such as Cassavetes, Altman, and Scorsese, who are the most important influences
on many of independent cinema’s directors.36 But although the New American Cinema
directors of earlier decades are sometimes labeled independent, American independent
cinema has the typical generational cast of a film movement, with most of its key figures
releasing their first features sometime between the mid1980s and the mid1990s.
This section is an attempt to understand independent cinema not just as a
movement but as a mode of film practice, a category parallel to mainstream cinema and
avantgarde cinema, and closely related to international art/festival cinema. I will do so
not by claiming that independent films have a shared core of formal or thematic
42
conventions, but by identifying a set of viewing strategies that are suggested by the films
and institutionalized in film culture.37 These are ways for spectators to engage with
independent cinema and to differentiate it from other categories, such as Hollywood
cinema. Some of these strategies are of particular relevance to characterization, since one
of the distinguishing features of independent cinema is that the discourse differentiating it
from Hollywood considers character to be one of its prime concerns. So part of the task
of this section is to explain this general understanding and probe its descriptive and
explanatory value.
The other task of this section will be more implicit but is no less important. It is
to assert the significance of independent cinema in several respects: as a coherent
phenomenon demanding careful critical and theoretical attention as such rather, as is
more customary, than as an ad hoc collection of heterogeneous auteurs, styles, and sub
genres; as an example of a parallel cinema to the mainstream that is distinct from it
without challenging the basic contours of canonical narrative form and conventional
visual style; and as a germane case study for the larger project of outlining a cognitivist
model for understanding characterization. If the last of these points occasionally seems to
hide in the shadows over the course of the discussion, it is only because the larger task, of
asserting the significance and coherence of independent film as such, demands that
43
characterization be understood in the context of a larger system of viewing strategies.
Before describing these in more detail, though, I will address several complementary
approaches to understanding independent film.
Auteurs, Spirits, etc.
The first problem that independent films present is their heterogeneity. We are talking
about hundreds of films made over more than two decades in a wide variety of genres,
from gangster films (Miller’s Crossing) to Westerns (Dead Man) to musicals (Hedwig
and the Angry Inch) to romantic comedies (Before Sunrise) to family melodramas (Far
From Heaven) to horror films (The Blair Witch Project) to documentaries (Crumb).
Some were made on the ultracheap with unknown talent (El Mariachi), while others had
budgets in the millions of dollars and casts of iconic movie stars (Pulp Fiction).
Many filmmakers, film reviewers and academics have taken stabs at encapsulating
American independent cinema, though few have managed to avoid some degree of
contradiction. For starters, defining independent films as those and only those made
outside of the studio system just seems wrong, as it includes some films (Terminator 2)
that clearly don’t belong and excludes others (films by the Coen brothers and Spike Lee)
that clearly do.38 For more than a decade, the major media corporations (e.g., News
Corp., Disney) have been starting up or acquiring classics divisions that specialize in
44
independent film, making the idea of separation from the mainstream industry practically
untenable. Moreover, industrial approaches risk assuming that “independent” means
absolute autonomy from the mainstream of commercial media, and often presuppose a
utopian vision of the filmmaker beholden to no one but his muses. More measured
approaches have demonstrated that independent cinema functions as a part of the culture
industry, a lowerbudget, prestigedriven parallel cinema to the mainstream of studio
blockbuster releases.39
A focus on the films’ content risks overgeneralizing. Independent films are a
varied lot; they are not a genre with a common setting, plot patterns, fullblown character
types or emotional responses. They do, however, seem to have a star system of their own,
made up of often young actors who may not have the conventionally glamorous movie
star looks, many of whom also appear in nonhero roles in studio pictures. These actors
include Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, Parker Posey, Patricia
Clarkson, Julianne Moore, Chloë Sevigny, David Strathairn, Martin Donovan, Lily Taylor,
Campbell Scott, Laura Dern, and Eric Stoltz. Some attach to directors as part of a stock
company in the tradition of Renoir, Bergman, and Altman, such as Strathairn with Sayles
and Donovan with Hal Hartley.
Even if independent films are not a genre, they might still be shown to have
45
thematic or stylistic consistency. One way in which independent cinema might be shown
to have thematic coherence is by considering the raw, troubling subjects it takes up: serial
killing (Monster), incest (Spanking the Monkey), rape (Leaving Las Vegas), pedophilia
(Happiness), drug addiction (High Art), gaybashing (Boys Don’t Cry), misogyny (In the
Company of Men), and what decades ago would have been called juvenile delinquency
(Kids). This is a valid observation, though it accounts for only a fraction of independent
films, many of which are more conventional lowbudget genre entries such as The
Impostors and Swingers. There is certainly more possibility of a careful consideration of
disturbing behavior and dark themes in independent cinema. But Hollywood films also
address troubling social problems, though they tend to do so with a more upbeat tone, and
they can also be very disturbing, as in the bigbudget films of David Fincher.
To borrow the title of one book on the topic, we might say that independent films
collectively constitute a “cinema of outsiders.”40 The outsiders might be the characters,
and to some degree the characters we associate with the “stars” of indie films are
typically nonconformists, oddballs, or eccentrics. Part of what makes characters
interesting is novelty, and outsiders are by definition different. Of course, the outsiders
might also be the auteurs, and one overarching interpretive assumption in regard to indie
films is the salience of authorship.
46
This feeds into the idea of an independent “spirit,” a term sure to stick around for
at least as long as the Independent Feature Project’s annual awards are named for it. The
independent spirit refers to a quality that many films which don’t on first blush seem to
belong together share, but which is attributed to them on the basis of a collective ambition
of their creators to do honest, personal, genuine, heartfelt, urgent, meaningful, and artistic
work..41 It picks up on the idea of independent film being free from the commercial
imperative of the major studios without specifying what a personal, free cinema should
look like. In providing an easy shorthand justification for the enterprise of independent
cinema, it may obscure the relations among films rather than illuminating them, but it
does tell us something important about the filmmakers’ ambitions and the audience’s
frame of reference. When we watch independent films, we are primed by these notions of
opposition and independence to focus on textual qualities that instantiate them concretely,
most often in the form of characters who are outsiders or who have the same independent
spirit attributed to indie directors and films, such as those of John Sayles.42
As for stylistic consistency, some suggest that independent cinema tends to be
“gritty,” to have a low budget look and feel.43 We might associate this with techniques
such as handheld camera, location shooting, and technically crude lighting and sound in
films such as Clerks. But while some independent films certainly fit this description,
47
others do not. There is nothing crude about the style of Safe, Barton Fink, Passion Fish,
or Eat Drink Man Woman. Furthermore, there has been an increasingly prevalent
tendency in Hollywood cinema and television of the past decade to use these same
“gritty” techniques. Moreover, as many observers have noted, the form and style of
independent cinema is not avantgarde. Contemporary independent films pick up on the
tradition of New American Cinema narrative features in the mode of Cassavetes, Altman,
and Scorsese, not the underground and avantgarde traditions associated with Jonas
Mekas, Stan Brakhage, and Andy Warhol. In spite of his evident admiration for them,
Emmanuel Levy argues that “Indie films, as a whole, are not artistically ground
breaking.” The only aesthetic value he affirms in considering their approach to
storytelling is “offbeat characterizations.” Otherwise, he argues, “Indie cinema has been
more innovative in subject matter than in style.”44 If there is something about
independent cinema that makes it cohere as a category, I suggest that we look beyond its
place in the film industry and beyond its generic, thematic, and stylistic content. It makes
sense to begin this discussion by comparing independent cinema with a closely related
mode, art cinema.
Hollywood/OffHollywood, Art Cinema/Independent Cinema
In his essay “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,” David Bordwell contrasts the
48
45
functions of art cinema narration against those of classical cinema. In some ways,
independent cinema and art cinema share narrational functions, yet in many ways they are
different. Furthermore, the classical cinema of the period 19171960 has not been
maintained unchanged through the years, though many of its norms remain in
contemporary Hollywood.46 These are all historical modes of narration, and each one is
fairly specific to a particular era.
The art cinema Bordwell discusses is best conceived as a series of European
movements and directors stretching from postwar Italy through to the various new waves
and new cinemas. It has transformed itself into festival cinema, a truly global
phenomenon that would seem to include some American independent directors (Jim
Jarmusch) but not others (Kevin Smith). In essence, festival cinema is addressed first of
all to an international audience of cinephiles who attend film festivals, and some of its
best examples are to be found in Iranian and Taiwanese films that hardly see the light of
the projector beam at all in their native lands. By contrast, most American indie films are
addressed first of all to a domestic, theatrical (arthouse) audience.
For Bordwell, the key distinction between Hollywood and OffHollywood,
whatever we call its specific categories, is to be found in the contrast between dominant
narrative causality in Hollywood cinema and other functions in art, festival, or
49
independent cinema. In mainstream film, the representation of time and space, cinematic
technique, and thematic meanings are all subordinated to the clear representation of a
chain of events linked by causeeffect relations, wherein a clearly identified protagonist
with consistent, redundant traits overcomes a series of obstacles towards the achievement
of a goal. By contrast, in art cinema the causal links are loosened or attenuated, the
representation of time and space is ambiguated, cinematic style is given greater
prominence, the main character seems aimless or unmotivated, and the narrative ends
without the satisfaction of a goal being achieved. This describes the more experimental,
challenging narration of 1960s art films especially well (e.g., Persona).
The functions of these narrational elements in art cinema, according to Bordwell,
are threefold. They are described as viewing strategies employed in making sense and
meaning of a confusing or challenging narration. The first strategy is realism: to see
loosened causality or aimlessness as objective realism, as in Neorealism, or to see spatio
temporal disorderliness as subjective (psychological) realism, as in the films of Resnais.
The second strategy is authorship. If realism is not a suitable explanation, the spectator
motivates the narration as the expression of the director’s vision. The tracking shots in
Hiroshima, mon amour, the jump cuts in Breathless, or the closeups of faces in Cries
and Whispers, can be explained by reference to the oeuvre of Resnais, Godard, or
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Bergman. Finally, the third viewing strategy is ambiguity. If the other explanations
cannot suffice to motivate the narration, the spectator can always see it as deliberately
ambiguous, and read into it interpretively. Bordwell coins a slogan for the art cinema:
“When in doubt, read for maximum ambiguity.”47 In all three strategies, but especially in
the latter two, art cinema solicits and rewards active interpretation. And of course, some
devices can be read in more than one way; the editing of Breathless may be interpreted in
all of them.
It should be immediately obvious that one distinction between art and independent
cinema is that the latter is hardly ambiguous in the same fashion or degree as the
exemplars of cinematic modernism like Rashomon, Red Desert, and Last Year at
Marienbad. In general, its style is not nearly as challenging. Independent cinema often
seems quite classical in its narrational approach. Characters typically have clear goals
and events are represented clearly and are causally connected. Many independent films
end without satisfying closure (Do the Right Thing, Stranger than Paradise) but the
radically frustrating endings of the likes of Persona are seldom duplicated in recent
American feature films.
The viewing strategies of American independent cinema, like those of art cinema,
go beyond the plot and characters to other concerns. Some are shared with art cinema.
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There is an emphasis on realism in OffHollywood cinema that goes back at least to the
1920s (Bazin identified it with Stroheim and Murnau48) and that is an important aspect of
independent film. Others are contextspecific. Art cinema was a product of a modern,
bourgeois conception of art and society, in which the individual stands as a central figure
whose psychological depths can never be fully explored. It is animated by the ideas and
artistic currents of the time, such as Freudian psychology, existentialist philosophy, and
modernist literature and drama. Ambiguity in art cinema is typically ambiguity about an
individual, and as in contemporaneous literature and drama, it is driven by a modernist
conception of the individual (or, as its critics put it, of “man”). In contrast, independent
cinema is animated by the ideas prevalent in its era, especially multiculturalism and
postmodernism. This is not to say that independent directors thematize these “isms”
consciously or systematically, only that these ideas are in the air, and that they filter
through to inform some of the basic assumptions about storytelling that are widely shared
by American filmmakers and spectators of the past two decades. It is these assumptions,
I argue, that distinguish independent film as a mode of cinema.
Viewing Strategies
Like art cinema, independent film brings with it expectations of objective realism and
authorial expressivity, but without the more radical forms of subjectivity and ambiguity
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that characterized 1960s European cinema. Described thus, independent film might be
seen as artcinemalite, taking the less challenging conventions of art films but leaving
behind the really interesting ones. I reject this notion because it suggests that independent
film directors seek to emulate Bergman, Godard, and Fellini but fail. Independent
cinema has its own conventions, and creates its own expectations. However, independent
filmmakers did not invent them ex nihilo. Some aspects do come from European art
cinema, but through the mediating influence of the New American directors of the 1960s
and 1970s. Some aspects are contextually specific. I summarize these expectations by
the following three slogans, each of which signals a distinct conception of OffHollywood
cinema, and which I will address one by one:
1. Characters are emblems
2. Form is a game
3. When in doubt, read as antiHollywood.
These slogans make up a system of protocols in the sense that they operate sequentially
and in a hierarchy of generality and significance. The first slogan is the most specific and
easiest to apply. We look for characters (in situations) to be representative of realworld
types in a way that is distinct from our engagement with characters in other modes of
cinema. The second slogan is more general and calls on operations that are cognitively
more sophisticated because they require a more active kind of problemsolving or
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puzzling. This step comes into play only in the presence of challenging form, and since
some independent films are formally highly conventional, it is not necessarily activated in
all cases. The last slogan is the most general and versatile. It is both a blanket
assumption that guides global expectations about independent cinema and a precise tool
for interpreting devices that cannot otherwise be assimilated under the preceding two
slogans. Only some films invite us to activate all three of these strategies.
1. Characters are emblems
The first viewing strategy assumes a larger degree of social engagement in independent
cinema than in Hollywood cinema, and this is the strategy clearly influenced by
multiculturalism. However, it is not merely a matter of identifying that some independent
films thematize issues of cultural identity. It is, rather, an implicit solicitation of audience
awareness of the specificity of represented situations, and especially people, in a
historical and cultural reality. With this awareness, characters become emblems of their
social identities. This is the version of realism, coming from the art cinema tradition, that
is of particular salience to independent film, but unlike the individual’s unique interior
reality in art cinema, independent film offers an engagement with social reality, in the
sense used by Marxists to refer to relations of power among social groups such as
classes.49 Identity in this conception is based not in a transcendent self but in group
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memberships and affiliations.
This strategy fits best with the strain of independent film geared toward social
commentary and criticism. Independent films as a whole cannot be said to be driven by
leftwing politics—though some are—yet there is certainly more socially engaged
filmmaking in OffHollywood than in Hollywood cinema. My point is not that
independent films are generally vehicles for particular ideas about social reality or that
they generally have a rhetorical agenda of encouraging social change. It is, rather, to
insist that independent cinema’s characters are identified so strongly with social types that
they come to represent them much more significantly than in other modes of cinema.
This is as true of many independent films that are not overtly political (Dazed and
Confused, Clerks) as it is of films that clearly are political in the sense of explicitly
engaging with structures of social power and advocating for a critical perspective (City of
Hope, Do The Right Thing). There are also many examples that fall somewhere in the
middle, incisively satirical films whose advocacy is at best indirect, combining an ironic
sensibility with a keen sense of social observation (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Your
Friends and Neighbors, Trust, Ghost World).
To an extent, there is value placed merely on the existence—independent of
narrative content—of representations of socially marginalized identities, especially of
55
racial minorities and gays and lesbians. At a time when few feature films of any kind
were released that had AfricanAmerican, Asian, Latino or queer main characters, the
release of a film that did was considered highly significant. There is also value placed on
representations produced by filmmakers of these identities. The 1980s and 1990s saw a
series of “firsts,” seized upon for publicity purposes, such as first feature film to gain
distribution directed by an AfricanAmerican woman (Daughters of the Dust) and first
feature made by Native Americans (Smoke Signals).50 As one critic of independent film
writes, “Many cameras are being turned on American life for the first time, or with a
fresh urgency: those in the hands of women, AfricanAmerican women, African
American men, Hispanics, Asians, openly gay and lesbian filmmakers.”51 This fits
tongueingroove with the viewing strategy that sees characters as emblems because it
sees directors as emblematizers. For example, Go Fish, a film by a young American
lesbian about the experience of young American lesbians, was given authority and
authenticity by Rose Troche, the film’s director.52
We tend to think of socially engaged filmmakers as oppositional and identify them
with the tradition and mode of documentary cinema (indeed, independent documentary
filmmakers like Michael Moore fit this bill). Independent cinema’s social engagement is
animated by multiculturalism, but while multiculturalism is a progressive social agenda,
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in independent fiction films it is often depoliticized to the point that the goal of socially
specific representation becomes reflexive rather than critical. The filmmaker is content
to describe a social reality, especially its representative types, as a means of capturing a
slice of life in its vividness and specificity. If not naturalizing reality, this approach does
tend to see it as stable and selfsufficient. One gets the sense that the filmmaker just
wants his or her world, or a particular contemporary subculture he or she finds
interesting, to be thrown up on the big screen. This gesture in itself can be read as a
socially significant act, especially when this world is rarely represented in the mass
media. Yet regardless of whether a representation is laden with such a sense of
importance or not, a similar viewing strategy sustains it. It can be observed in films as
diverse as Smoke Signals, Chan is Missing, Sling Blade, The Apostle, Clockwatchers, The
Unbelievable Truth, Buffalo ’66, Basquiat, My Family, Killer of Sheep, Welcome to the
Dollhouse, Fargo, Safe, Desperately Seeking Susan, Kids, Return of the Secaucus 7,
Citizen Ruth, Mystery Train, Last Summer in the Hamptons, Kissing Jessica Stein,
Spanking the Monkey, Boys Don’t Cry, Daughters of the Dust, Metropolitan, Mr.
Jealousy, Drugstore Cowboy, Go Fish, Slacker, She’s Gotta Have It, Swingers, Poison,
Thirteen, and The Brothers McMullen. All are social studies, microscopes on a milieu,
dissections of the personalities that populate a patch of cultural turf. The subjects could
57
as easily be alienated white kids in the New Jersey suburbs, clever Manhattan debutantes,
or hipster Japanese tourists in Memphis as they could be Gullah islanders, a Chinese cab
driver in San Francisco, or gay adolescents.
Paradoxically, it is within the elite culture of independent film that the socially
marginalized are affirmed or celebrated. This is because the social progressivism
animating multiculturalism is identified closely with an educated, politically aware,
generally affluent audience. A similar dynamic has propelled the minority identity
explosion in American television representations. This is exemplified in the rapid rise to
prominence of gay characters on primetime television comedies and dramas in the 1990s,
which occurs concurrently with the rising visibility and popularity of American
independent cinema.53 Such representations stroke a socially liberal audience’s
multicultural sensibilities at the same time that they insist on the importance of giving
voice to historically silenced identities. They are thus a canny combination of capitalist
marketing savvy exploiting a “quality” audience and progressive politics implicitly
critical of the mainstream media’s mode of representation. The extent to which the latter
is undermined by the former in the case of independent cinema is an open question and
should be the subject of greater debate.
Of course there have been Hollywood films with minorities in leading roles,
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mainstream films that pay attention to marginal social identities, such as Philadelphia,
and Hollywood films made by women, gays and lesbians, and people of color. Intuitively,
it would seem that something differentiates such films from independent cinema that
addresses the same topics. The distinction is to be found in an implicit conception of the
individual in relation to his or her social identity; this conception underlies the distinction
between audiences’ expectations of Hollywood and OffHollywood film. If the
multicultural OffHollywood individual is defined by cultural difference, specificity,
distinctness, the Hollywood version is defined by liberal humanism, by the transcending
of difference in demonstration that we are all, at our core, the same, by the universal value
of the autonomous self. This is why Philadelphia establishes such strong parallelism
between the two main characters, Andrew and Joe, not only by making them similar
(highpower lawyers with the same mannerisms, attire, etc.), but also by framing, staging,
and editing them in such as way as to make each one seem like the other’s double. In
doing so the film asserts their common humanity and makes both Andrew’s
homosexuality and Joe’s blackness seem less significant in understanding each man more
fundamentally as an individual.
This is the inheritance of the Hollywood tradition of social problem films, dating
from the 1930s, in which the common humanity of the audience in the theater and the
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downtrodden characters on the screen is the essential thematic material. In The Grapes
of Wrath we do not appreciate Okie identity in its specificity as a means of appreciating
the distinctness of the Okie milieu; rather, we are invited to appreciate how the Joads are
human beings first of all deserving of dignity and respect. Similarly in art films of a
socialrealist bent, such as Bicycle Thieves and Pather Panchali, the poor characters
struggling to survive in their miserable conditions are humanized such that we come to
see their unbreakable familial bonds and their hope in spite of pain and suffering as
universals of human experience. Films such as these are addressed especially at
establishing a notion of emotional universality, so that the grief and fear felt by the
characters transcends the details of environment, so painstakingly rendered, and speaks to
a profound sense of a common emotional core. The art cinema’s characters may differ
from Hollywood’s in their depth and complexity, but not in their conception as
individuals. As Bordwell discusses, its central preoccupation was “the human condition”;
rather than analyzing structures of power, in art cinema “social forces become significant
insofar as they impinge upon the psychologically sensitive individual.”54 To cultural
critics, this kind of humanism is a means of eliding difference, of hiding structural
imbalances of social and cultural power by asserting that everyone is in the same boat.
Hence the heroes of Glory, Born on the Fourth of July, Philadelphia, Erin Brockovich,
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and A Beautiful Mind are humanized as folks just like you and me rather than being
emblematized as representatives of a world you and I could not really know without
having lived in it. Their heroism comes from within, not from their social bonds but from
their “character.” The independent film doesn’t really have heroes, because heroes are
larger than life. By contrast, emblems are exactly lifesize because they are plucked from
the fabric of the everyday, as realism and social engagement demand.
As Thomas Schatz has argued, popular film characters are typically figured in
relationship to a community.55 In genres of integration, the main characters, often a
romantic couple, resolve their differences and adopt the values of the community. These
genres include comedies and musicals. In genres of order, the main character, often a
lone hero, stabilizes a community’s structure either by taming its anarchic forces (e.g., in
westerns and detective films) or by being removed as a threat to it (e.g., in gangster
films). Either way, films serve to affirm the values of a community, which is seen by the
audience to be of a piece with its own community. In other words, according to this
conception of the social effects of mainstream narrative cinema, the function of
representation of the social realm is to assert the audience’s place within it. Although
Schatz is interested in the studio era of filmmaking, we might extend the notion of the
audience’s relationship to the community represented onscreen to the present. In
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contemporary action films the stability of the community threatened by massive violence
is at stake no less than in Warners gangster films of the 1930s, and in contemporary
romantic comedies the integration of the couple into the community is likewise parallel to
the screwball films of Hawks, McCarey, Sturges, and Cukor.
Independent cinema does something rather different. Rather than appealing to us
on the basis of a community that we share with that of the representation, it demands that
our notions of community be redefined, reconfigured, in some cases radically
reconceived. Under the sign of multiculturalism, independent cinema insists on the
distinctness of cultures and subcultures within the American community, and insists on
communities, plural, rather than community, singular. Rather than positing that the poor
and downtrodden, the oppressed racial and ethnic minorities, and other cinematically
underrepresented groups are just like “the rest of us,” it demands that their difference be
recognized and affirmed. Thus the aptness of the label “cinema of outsiders”: if we are
all in some respects outsiders, as independent films suggest, there isn’t really any
“inside.” And if there isn’t any “inside,” than the community posited by Hollywood is
mere myth, or ideology. By emblematizing characters in their full specificity and
distinctness, the uniqueness of identity positions is affirmed while the Hollywood version
of transcendent human connectedness is called into question, if not demolished.
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2. Form is a game
If the first slogan signals the potential for independent cinema to have a cultural politics,
the second signals its potential for aesthetic—especially narrative—experimentation and
innovation. There are several ways in which the formal features of independent cinema
are figured as elements of play, in which the spectator is encouraged to conceive of the
filmviewing experience as gamelike. This may sound slightly odd, as the metaphor of
play is most often introduced in casual descriptions of how a director or film engages
with some aspect of conventional storytelling.56 We say that we like the way the Coen
brothers play with genre, or the way Pulp Fiction plays with narrative structure. But I
propose that what we really mean when we use this figure of speech is that spectators are
prompted to regard specific aspects of films as components of a game and to see
themselves as the players.
The kind of game I have in mind is not rigidly rulebound, like chess or baseball,
but looser and more improvisatory, like charades. Furthermore, I am arguing not that
film viewing is literally a game, but that it is conceived as gamelike by viewers, i.e., that
it has some of the same procedural characteristics as a game such as solving problems,
guessing answers, matching attributes, and having fun. This offers a pleasure in film
viewing that is distinct from pleasures offered by mainstream cinema, though this is not
63
to say that independent cinema cannot offer those pleasures too, from the voyeuristic
pleasures discussed in psychoanalytic film theory to the pleasures associated with
specific genres and emotions discussed in cognitive film theory.57
Form is foregrounded when filmviewing becomes a game. Bordwell
distinguishes between the classical Hollywood spectator asking plotbased questions such
as “Who did it?” and the art cinema spectator asking storybased questions such as “Why
is this story being told this way?”58 The independent film spectator asks this latter
question too, but has different expectations about the answer. Rather than seeing
challenging form as a cue to reading for subjective realism, authorial expressivity, or
maximum ambiguity—rather than construing it as an invitation to interpretation—the
independent film spectator sees challenging form as a conceptual structure, such as a plot
schema or character type, that diverges from a conventional expectation. This tendency
has antecedents in films of the 1960s and 1970s, such as A Woman is a Woman, Last Year
at Marienbad, and Point Blank, as well of course in avantgarde cinema by Hollis
Frampton, Robert Nelson, and many others. It also has many parallels in contemporary
festival cinema, and seems especially prominent in American independent films. As
with much modern and postmodern visual art, and much avantgarde cinema, the object
of comprehension is not only the representation but also the artifact in its status as
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representation. The motivation for this divergence is located in play rather than in
meanings, in a field of signifiers rather than in an authorial signified, in fun that can be
had by mixing and matching conventional narrative and cinematic elements.
The payoff of narrative experimentation in films such as Go, The Limey, 21
Grams, and Memento is not in heightened emotions, in maximized suspense or stronger
character engagement. If such films were told in a conventional linear fashion, after all,
these conventional appeals could be strengthened. For instance, in Memento there would
be suspense over whether Leonard will kill Terry rather than confusion about his motives.
Indeed, often such experimentation affords the opportunity of play only at the price of
exploiting fewer conventional narrative pleasures. The ultimate payoff is in the
spectator’s appreciation of a formal, cinematic achievement, while the momentby
moment appeals depend on the game and its parameters.
So what sort of play is involved? What is the object of the game? There are
actually several aspects to the game that independent films ask us to play; we might call
these separate games or separate processes within the larger game. Their components
include conventions such as plot patterns and character types, allusions and references to
films and other cultural products, and aspects of narrative design such as temporal
ordering and exposition. The fun of playing is a product of engaging with these game
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elements and is the pleasure taken in resolving incongruities in conventions, recognizing
obscure meanings in intertexts, and puzzlesolving in aspects of narrative
experimentation. I will discuss two aspects of independent cinema that encourage this
viewing strategy: films that encourage play by engaging unconventional genre elements
and films that encourage play by disentangling unconventional temporal structures.
Plot and character conventions are figured into a game structure most clearly in
films that work both within and against genre expectations. In the spirit of Robert
Altman’s films of the 1970s, independent filmmakers have taken genre to be a locus of
experimentation and an opportunity for critical, metacinematic commentary. Unlike
much art cinema, with its avoidance of any massculture stigmatization, independent
cinema is very fond of popular forms. This is an inheritance from a minority art cinema
tradition represented by Godard and Fassbinder, whose love/hate relationships with
classical Hollywood cinema produced films such as Pierrot le fou and Ali: Fear Eats the
Soul and from selfreflexive American art films such as The Last Movie.59
It is a commonplace of postmodernist criticism that high and low culture have
collapsed on each other, that the conception of art as divided into these categories is
flawed.60 In the spirit of celebrating this collapse, artists in many media and forms have
embraced the iconography and structures of popular culture. But in many cases,
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including independent cinema, this embrace is not played out in terms of practitioners of
“high art” entering the mainstream of the culture industry or in terms of demolishing all
forms of distinction between mass and elite culture. One common practice is of an elite
art form integrating elements of mass culture while still protecting its status. 61 In
independent cinema as in other art forms, there is a tendency against the full adoption of
the pop culture form, an effort to comment on it (however explicitly or implicitly), or a
contradictory mix of forms. In independent films these forms are conventional popular
film genres, and the spectator’s strategy is to identify the forms, resolve their
incongruities, and construct a commentary on them. This might sound as though I am
calling independent cinema postmodernist, which some critics have done.62 But I am
merely identifying an influence of postmodernism on the strategies audiences bring to
understanding independent films.
This emphasis on play through recognition of conventional forms signals that one
distinction between contemporary American indies and the European art cinema is that a
much higher degree of connoisseurship is expected of American audiences, and that it
must be applied to catch all the references as they flash by, like jokes in an episode of The
Simpsons. Noël Carroll described American cinema of the 1970s as the “cinema of
allusion,” citing numerous instances in which the filmschool generation of directors
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such as Paul Schrader would selfconsciously rework the John Ford and Robert Bresson
films that made them into cinéastes.63 In this traditioncrazed tradition, Tarantino makes
films that demand a wide sweep of worldcinemahistory knowledge, albeit of a certain
sort. The audience follows along in a kind of connectthedots fashion, recognizing the
antecedents of the briefcase with glowing contents in Pulp Fiction (Kiss Me Deadly) the
“Mexican standoff” in Reservoir Dogs (City on Fire), and numerous action, anime, and
martial arts films in the two Kill Bill volumes without necessarily applying any
interpretive schema to Tarantino’s visual quotations. Soderbergh borrows shots from Ken
Loach’s Poor Cow and demands that we recognize the younger Terence Stamp in the
memories of Wilson as a character from a different film. Todd Haynes outSirks Sirk in
Far From Heaven by keeping the 1950s setting and duplicating the visual style down to
the typeface of the opening credits, but pushing the representation of minority identities
much farther than any mainstream director of the 1950s could have.
Many of the Coen brothers’ films, including Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink,
Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and The Man Who Wasn’t There are at once homages to classic
American toughguy, hardboiled literature and film noir and brilliant exaggerations of
the conventions of this genre. They work on several levels: as suspenseful storytelling, as
allusive recreations of classic forms, and as commentary on their appeals and on
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Hollywood representation. Their stories come wrapped in a tone of ironic cleverness,
with a wink acknowledging a heightened consciousness of formal convention. This tone
becomes more pronounced as their career progresses, so that the broad supporting
characters of their earlier films (played by M. Emmett Walsh and Dan Hedaya in Blood
Simple, by John Turturro and Steve Buscemi in Miller's Crossing and by John Goodman
in Barton Fink) become the broad main characters of later ones (William H. Macy in
Fargo and Jeff Bridges in Lebowski). There is a strong dose of dark comedy mixed into
the drama.
The game is played by recognizing that the Coen brothers’ films are not only
toughguy stories, they are about toughguy stories. Two cues for reading this way are
exaggeration and incongruity. In Miller's Crossing, one device of exaggeration is the
motif of the fedora, the icon of urban, modern masculinity and a staple of gangster and
film noir hero costuming. By returning to it so obsessively, by investing it with such
importance, the Coens signal a fascination with the iconography of the toughguy genre,
constantly turning it around to appreciate its intricacies. In many of their films,
exaggeration manifests itself in other extremes of mise en scène, from overly mannered
performances, as I mentioned above, overemphasized diction and pronunciation, and
comically dark lighting (especially in The Man Who Wasn’t There). The game is played
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by recognizing that the conventional elements are being quoted and turned comical.
In itself this exaggeration is incongruous, but another incongruity arises in cases
in which an opposite device is employed: the insertion into a generic framework of
something that clearly doesn’t belong. In Altman’s early films, a war movie climaxes in a
football game instead of a battle (M*A*S*H), a musical builds up to an assassination
(Nashville), and a western hero is a cowardly pimp (McCabe and Mrs. Miller). In Fargo,
as many critics have noted, the landscape and mise en scène is the opposite of that of
noir: it is the expansive white of the Minnesota winter rather than the shadowy black of
the Los Angeles night. The Man Who Wasn’t There decides to become a sciencefiction
film in the last five minutes. Barton Fink abandons hardboiled realism for fullblown
paranoid fantasy. And The Big Lebowski, most audaciously, takes a Chandleresque
scenario but replaces the typical private eye with an ageing hippy and has the story
narrated onscreen by a middleaged cowboy. This, of course, is only the beginning of its
myriad incongruities. We admire many of the Coen brothers’ characters for their
eccentricity and quirkiness at the same time that we recognize their incompatibility with
the narratives into which they have been mischievously dropped.
I have used the Coen brothers as an example of this tendency as they are its
quintessential practitioners, but it is actually quite widespread. The semiironic tone of
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their films, at once respectful of their cinematic predecessors and irreverent toward them,
is also found among independent filmmakers ranging from Hal Hartley to Jim Jarmusch
to Quentin Tarantino to Wes Anderson to Todd Haynes. All of them, and many others,
combine exaggerated conventions with incongruous admixtures to similar results.
The other main way in which independent cinema figures form as a game is
through narrative structure. The exemplar in this case in Pulp Fiction, though it is neither
the most original nor the most sophisticated example of a film using temporal
disordering. Daughters of the Dust and The Limey are more challenging in their fluid
movement among past, present, and future, while Memento is more thorough in its formal
design and more demanding on the spectator. Independent films sometimes take an
abstract formal pattern as a global design principle, as in Flirt, Go, Mystery Train, Night
on Earth, and Slacker. Many include significant temporal rearrangement through
flashbacks or other devices, such as 21 Grams, 13 Conversations About One Thing,
Reservoir Dogs, Jackie Brown, Lone Star, The Usual Suspects, and Eternal Sunshine of
the Spotless Mind. Realtime narratives such as Before Sunset, and Timecode also
foreground narrative form; Timecode is also experimental in its use of a simultaneous
fourimage frame. As well, David Lynch’s Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive are
formally disjunctive both temporally and spatially and to a significant extent inscrutable.
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This makes him the independent film figure most amenable to the reading strategies of art
cinema.
Of course, Hollywood films also use flashbacks and other forms of temporal
reordering. The distinction here is that in independent films form becomes a game when
the motivation for unconventional narrative structure is play. Mainstream films like
Sunset Boulevard and American Beauty begin at the end for a clear narrative purpose: to
cast the events of the story in a dark, deterministic light. Mainstream films like Minority
Report use flashbacks or flashforwards to explain important details of the narrative, to
reveal key information to create a stronger emotional resonance. The point of the
narrative structure of Citizen Kane is to show that Charlie Kane had many sides to him,
that each person in his life saw him differently. Temporal reordering in art cinema is also
typically motivated as explorations of character, as in Wild Strawberries and 8 1/2. Lone
Star is clearly in this tradition, several times integrating past and present in a single shot
to show continuities between them, to show the significance of history—both the events
of the past, and their figuration in storytelling—to the formation of people’s identities.
In many independent films that have challenging narrative structures, there often
is a weak characterbased or thematic motivation carried by a stronger playbased one. It
is true that viewing Memento is a bit like being put in Leonard’s place in terms of
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knowledge and memory. But soon after the film is underway, we are able to remember
much more than he can. The stronger motivation for Memento’s form is that figuring out
how the film is telling its story is a fascinating activity in its own right. The means of
Memento’s convoluted editing is so far in excess of the function of heightening our sense
of Leonard’s experience that we must look elsewhere for the film’s formal motivation.
Similarly, Go uses its temporally parallel format to create parallelism between
characters who would seem to have little in common: all of them, from the drug dealers to
the gay actors, end up surprising themselves and us in some way. But this motivation is
balanced by the interest generated by piecing together which events are happening
simultaneously to which other events. The idea that life is full of nice surprises, which
might be the film’s theme in a nutshell, is hardly more prominent in our minds than the
idea that the events all hang together in the end in a neat pattern of temporal overlap.
At first glance, The Limey seems to motivate its temporal narrative design as
subjective narration, putting us in the head of the protagonist, Wilson. But looking more
closely, we find that it is more complex than that. While many images are flashbacks to
childhood scenes of Wilson’s daughter, and others are flashforwards to scenes only
imagined by Wilson (e.g., his fantasies of shooting Valentine at the party), many images
are flashforwards that clearly cannot be ascribed to Wilson’s imagination (e.g., some
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proleptic images of Valentine, as during the “King Midas in Reverse” sequence, are from
scenes from which Wilson will be absent and of which he will have no knowledge).
Other scenes are conversations that inexplicably take place at several locations at once.
On the DVD commentary track, the filmmakers suggest that these scenes play out the
way people remember conversations, as composites of many encounters. But this isn’t at
all clear from the narration of the film, which in its flamboyant temporal and spatial shifts
invites the spectator to appreciate and admire how a coherent narrative can emerge from
such a jangle of images and sounds. Soderbergh encourages a playbased reading by
frustrating the coherence of other approaches. It is also motivated as allusion to
temporally disjunctive films of the 1960s, such as Petulia.
Slacker does not seem to attempt to motivate its formal principles on the level of
character or story. It makes clear in its opening sequence that its design is motivated by
an abstract philosophical notion of how choice and chance structure human affairs. As
each sequence leads into another, you are conscious that it could have followed a different
path. This is play held in balance with a thematic purpose. Similarly, in Pulp Fiction, the
formal play of the disordered narrative sequence is held in balance with the character
motivation underlying its ending with the second half of the diner scene. By ending with
an emphasis on Jules’s religious transformation, it might seem to amplify a character’s
74
development through its temporal manipulation. But this appeal is balanced by the
novelty of the structure and the arbitrariness of Vincent’s (John Travolta) “resurrection,”
which has no such motivation. Thus play may be balanced with other appeals, however,
the dominant reading strategy encouraged by such films is to follow the formal game.
1. + 2. : The Form of Character
These first two strategies can play into and feed off one another in various ways, as the
chapters to follow will argue. The second strategy is a characterizing strategy too, since
characters are an element of form. The allusive strain of formal play often borrows
characters, as The Big Lebowski does, from old movies, but transforms them into hybrids
of the new and the old. In many independent films, identity is a puzzle and solving it
requires that both of the strategies be applied. In Lone Star, the constant backandforth
between the past and the present demands an appreciation of the game of form but also an
engagement with the historical and social differences that separate characters. In Far
From Heaven, the difference between Haynes’s characters and Sirk’s demands a cinema
ofallusion reading, but at the same time, the racial and sexual dimensions of the
characters foreground social identities. The formal approach to character is one way of
intensifying their significance, of emphasizing that we should take interest in them. One
75
important way of doing that is by making characters themselves puzzling, by obscuring
their motivations or their backstories. These devices create complexity, which is a
positive value for both formal and social reading strategies. In Hard Eight, delayed
exposition makes Sydney into an enigma, while in Safe, Carol’s interiority is to a large
extent inscrutable. In turn, by studying them so intensively, we gain a greater
appreciation of them in their specificity as characters.
3. When in doubt, read as antiHollywood.
The first two strategies suggest two prototypes of independent film, one realist and the
other formalist. But the third strategy is much more general and applies to many different
kinds of cinema. The practice of reading as antiHollywood is probably as old as
Hollywood, though only in recent decades has a parallel mode come into existence in the
U.S. to make this strategy relevant to understanding a significant body of American
feature filmmaking.
In his study of American avantgarde cinema, James Peterson introduces the
“brute avantgarde principle,” a reading strategy of last resort that allows spectators to
make sense of the most confounding avantgarde films by reasoning that they sometimes
reject cinematic conventions as a way “to shock viewers out of their complacency.”64
Independent cinema obviously isn’t challenging to the same extent as the avantgarde, but
76
it does often reject conventions. Rather than shocking viewers, we might say that
independent cinema aims to introduce them to different kinds of experiences within the
parameters of the feature film, to denaturalize aspects of conventional cinematic practice.
The strategy of reading as antiHollywood functions as a global assumption about
independent film and also as a local heuristic for making sense of specific details and
devices. As Emmanuel Levy asserts,
the key to understanding indies is Hollywood. Commercial cinema is so
pervasive in the American movie consciousness that even when
filmmakers develop alternative forms Hollywood’s dominant cinema is
implicit in those alternatives. 65
Reading as antiHollywood also functions as a warrant for the preceding two reading
strategies: emblematizing and formal play can both be seen as functions of an anti
Hollywood stance, since representations of individuals and formal structures in
independent cinema are viewed against mainstream norms.
Unlike the avantgarde, which is much more distinctly different from Hollywood
cinema not only formally but also in the context in which it is made and experienced,
independent cinema is regularly contrasted with and related to Hollywood both
industrially and aesthetically. The two modes share personnel and many aspects of
industrial practice (e.g., script formats, cameras, etc.) and they compete for many of the
same awards. But while it is one thing to differ from Hollywood, it is another to oppose
77
it. It is clear that some directors view independent filmmaking as antithetical to
Hollywood66; others see it as a Hollywood careerlaunching step. But spectators’
expectations are not ordinarily dependent upon divining a director’s career ambitions. If
the explanation for some aspect of a film is that it departs from a Hollywood convention,
it is logical that the function of that departure might be seen as an implicit critique.67
It is by sharing so much in common with Hollywood practice that Off
Hollywood’s distinctness is thrown into relief. This is clearest in instances of generic
play. In Passion Fish, the antiHollywood stance is a function of the characters and
situations being so typical of conventional femalefriendship melodramas, then of defying
our expectations. In Bound, the classic film noir couple—the hero and the femme fatale
—is a pair of women, subverting the mainstream’s norms of gender roles and sexual
orientation while playing out a formulaic plot. The Blair Witch Project presents a horror
film almost completely stripped of its stylistic norms of camera placement and movement,
lighting, and sound, yet completely within the audience’s genrebound expectations of
affective experience.
But reading as antiHollywood can function on a level of much greater or lesser
specificity. It can explain the pace of Stranger Than Paradise and Buffalo ’66, the
technically crude mise en scène and cinematography of Clerks and Gummo, the quirky
78
protagonists of The Station Agent and Ghost World, and the hyperintellectual dialogue of
Metropolitan and Waking Life. The bleak endings of many independent films, such as
Safe and Hard Eight, can be understood as undercutting the Hollywood norm of leaving
the audience feeling good. Welcome to the Dollhouse and Kids can be seen as anti
Hollywood in their approach to troubled adolescents, neither moralizing nor
sentimentalizing them, and certainly not showing the way to transform them into well
adjusted young citizens. The identity politics promoted by AfricanAmerican, queer, and
other subaltern cinemas is antiHollywood as is the miniaturist approach of Jim Jarmusch,
who declares that his films “concern characters who consciously locate themselves
outside the zombie mainstream.”68 Citizen Ruth and Dead Man Walking are anti
Hollywood in their unabashed advocacy of liberal stances on controversial sociopolitical
issues. Many movies considered “small films,” typically quirky comedies or chamber
dramas, from The Opposite of Sex, Next Stop Wonderland, and Big Night to You Can
Count On Me, Monster’s Ball, and In The Bedroom, can even be read as antiHollywood
by virtue of their modesty of scale and their interest in exploring character.
The notion of independent cinema as personal cinema is fundamentally anti
Hollywood, contrasting the independent artist against the soulless studio committee. The
authorial reading strategy plays into this directly, as auteurism itself is historically anti
79
Hollywood insofar as it locates in the studio auteur (Ford, Hawks, et al.) a figure capable
of communicating his vision in spite of the constraints of a studio system that by
definition depersonalizes. Translated into the presentday studio vs. independent
dichotomy, it can even account for the directors like Linklater and Soderbergh who
migrate back and forth between the modes, making their personal films as indies while
paying their way taking studio projects, and for John Sayles, who supports his
independent features with income earned as a Hollywood script doctor.69 School of Rock
and Ocean’s Eleven are more likely to be read as commercial entertainments, made for
fun and profit, while Before Sunset and Schizopolis are understood to express something
significant about their directors’ experiences and worldviews. Any independent film that
can be read as personal can be read as antiHollywood, since according to this scheme,
Hollywood is assumed to temper personal filmmaking by putting commerce ahead of
art.70
This last reading strategy is the ultimate justification for independent cinema as a
category. It defines it against the other of the mainstream, commercial industry to show it
off to its best advantage—as more honest, artistic, political, realistic, personal, intelligent,
or whatever its audience wishes it to be. As a strategy of both first and last resort, it
always allows for the tradition of independent cinema to be maintained, for the
80
independent film to be understood within the context of a mode of film practice. For as
long as Hollywood exists, so will the desire to oppose it.
Conclusion
The viewing strategies I have described are part of the audience’s means of making sense
of American independent cinema. I have argued that this mode of film practice coheres
around a set of conventions, and although I have spoken of films and directors
encouraging certain reading strategies, the conventions are best thought of as belonging
not to films or directors, but to spectators. The films offer evidence of these conventions
and are part of our education in them, along with cinematic institutions and reading
authors as various as Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, Jumpha
Lahiri, Nicholson Baker, Dan Chaon, and David Foster Wallace. Literary storytelling is
no less concerned with social engagement and formal play than cinema, though the anti-
Hollywood part of the equation would need some modification. Prime-time television is
also often read in similar ways, especially in the mode of “quality” dramas such as 24,
My So-Called Life, Lost, thirtysomthing, The Sopranos, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
European cinema, of course, also shares many of these viewing strategies as well as the
cultural and institutional distinction from the popular mainstream that independent film
enjoys in the United States. It is also typically contrasted with Hollywood on the basis of
81
a greater interest in character.
Taken together, I argue, these three slogans cover the lion’s share of American
independent cinema. They should not be taken as a definition of what makes something
an independent film, though, or as a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, because
this approach to understanding cultural categories is generally untenable. These slogans
reference ways of understanding certain exemplars of independent cinema which stand as
central cases. Some films are closer to the exemplars than other, and some films are
exemplary of more than one slogan. Some independent films are more peripheral
according to this scheme, fitting Hollywood viewing strategies more than may be typical
of independent cinema. Others, such as the films of David Lynch, are limit cases that
function as antiHollywood by being challenging in unusual ways, but which also seem to
demand their own unique means of interpretation. But while the periphery of the
category may be a fuzzy area, the center is where we find films such Daughters of the
Dust, Do The Right Thing, Slacker, Passion Fish, Fargo, and The Limey, which encourage
the modes of engagement that are central conventions of American independent cinema.
In all of these films, character is a prominent appeal, and this is a product of all
three viewing strategies: the characters are interesting as emblems, as formal puzzles, and
as distinct alternatives to their equivalents in mainstream cinema. How these effects of
prominence and interest are generated is the topic of the chapters that follow.
1
Sofia Coppola boasts of her film Lost in Translation, “The story has no plot.” Anthony Kaufman,
“The Indie Edge,” Daily Variety 12/18/03, Special Section 1, A1. John Pierson, a representative for
independent filmmakers, notes, “Many of the trendsetting independent films, including some I've been
involved in myself, have championed the idea of the character-driven movie.” Graham Fuller,
“Summer Movies: Indies” New York Times 5/2/99, sec. 2A, 44. John Sayles observes that his films
“tend to be about characters.” Claudia Dreyfus, “John Sayles,” Progressive 55.11 (1991), 30-33.
Mark Gill, who was director of marketing at independent distributor Miramax in the 1990s declared,
“Miramax films tend to be more stimulating, more character-driven.” Edward Helmore, “Fast Forward
From Art House to Your House,” The Observer 9/7/97, p. 12. Jim Hillier discusses American
independent films as the re-emergence of an American film aesthetic of the 1960s and 1970s,
exemplified in films such as Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde, Two-Lane Blacktop, and M*A*S*H which
“are frequently led more by character than plot.” “Introduction,” Jim Hillier (ed.), American
Independent Cinema: A Sight and Sound Reader(London: BFI, 2001), viii-xvii, viii. See also Jeff Sipe,
“Indie Vets Mull State of the Biz, Then and Now,” Daily Variety 8/18/03, Special Section 1, p. A56.
2
One emblematic statement of this position is Owen Glieberman, “A Terrible Twist Ending,”
Entertainment Weekly 3 December 2004, 25-26. Glieberman condemns contemporary Hollywood
blockbusters such as Van Hesling for being plot-driven and admires Sideways in contrast as being
character-driven.
3
Loren King, “ The Troubled Inner Child,” Boston Globe 7/16/00, Arts . 1.
4
On Hollywood characters as one-dimensional, see Thomas Schatz, “The New Hollywood” in Jim
Collins, Hillary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins (Eds.), Film Theory Goes to the Movies (New York:
Routledge,1993), 8-36; on the ancillary-product-promotion function of American movies, see Robert C.
Allen, “Home Alone Together: Hollywood and the ‘family film’” in Melvyn Stokes and Richard
Maltby (Eds.), Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies (London: BFI,
1999), 109-131.
5
For example, Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of
Independent Film (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 19, writes: “Hollywood favored spectacle,
action, and special effects, while indies worked on a more intimate scale, privileging script and
emphasizing character and mise-en-scène.” (He uses the past tense to contrast the “purist” past
conception of this opposition with a more recent one that sees the rise of Miramax and Sundance as a
sign of the independent cinema’s demise.)
6
On narration, see David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988),
and Noël Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York:
Columbia UP, 1988). On narrative comprehension, see Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension
and Film (London: Routledge, 1992). On narrative structures, see Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin
Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York:
Columbia UP, 1985), Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1988) and Thompson, Storytelling in the New Hollywood (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1999);
7
The most wide-ranging and detailed discussion of cinematic psychology as such is to be found in Per
Persson, Understanding Cinema: A Psychological Theory of Moving Images (Cambidge: Cambridge
UP, 2003), especially the chapter “Character Psychology and Mental Attribution,” 143-246. Persson’s
description of the spectator-character interface is supported by considerable evidence from psychology
and related fields and is an exhaustive description of specific aspects of human psychology that are
significant in the attribution of mental states to characters.
Although he is most interested in the “structure of sympathy” by which spectators come
empathize with characters, Murray Smith’s study of character in cinema is also richly informative
about how character psychology is represented. Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction,
Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1995).
See also Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Eds.), Passionate Views: Film, Cognition and
Emotion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999); Greg M. Smith, Film Structure and the Emotion System
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003); and Ed S Tan, Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film
(Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1996), all of which are concerned, among other things, with spectators’
emotions in relation to character emotions.
Theories of the construction of character psychology in literature include Alan Palmer,
Fictional Minds (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2004); Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon,
Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2003); Richard J. Gerrig and David W. Allbritton, “The Construction of Literary Character: A View
from Cognitive Psychology” Style 24.3 (Fall 1990), 380-391; Ralf Schneider, “Toward a Cognitive
Theory of Literary Character: The Dynamics of Mental-Model Construction” Style 35.4 (Winter 2001),
607-640; and Lisa Zunshine, “Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional
Consciousness” Narrative 11.3 (October 2003), 270-291.
8
Aristotle, Poetics Trans. W. Rhys Roberts (New York: Modern Library, 1954).
9
This tendency is found in Aristotle’s emphasis on action over agent and in the 20th Century is picked
up by formalists such as Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (Austsin: U of Texas P, 1968),
and structuralists such as A.J. Greimas, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory Trans. and
Ed. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1987).
10
Boris Tomashevsky, “Thematics” in Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (trans.), Russian Formalist
Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1965) 61-98, 90.
11
The idea of character as subordinate to plot is found in Aristotle’s Poetics, as well as in Russian
formalism, e.g., Propp. One example of the approach to characters as a “paradigm of traits” is
Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1978); cf. Mieke Bal, Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985); and
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Routledge, 1983).
12
Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor, 40.
13
Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” in Leon Edel (ed.), The Future of the Novel (New York: Vintage,
1965),15.
14
Uri Margolin, “Introducing and Sustaining Characters in Literary Narrative: A Set of Conditions”
Style 21.1, 107-24; Margolin, “Structural Approaches to Characters in Narrative: The State of the Art”
Semiotica 75 .1-2, 1-24; Margolin, “Individuals in Narrative Worlds: An Ontological Perspective”
Poetics Today 11.4, 843-871; Margolin, “The What, the When, and the How of Being a Character in
Literary Narrative,” Style 24.3 (Fall 1990), 453-468. Other literary theorists who take the same
approach to understanding character are Palmer and Bortolussi and Dixon.
15
Smith, 20-24, derives the idea of the person schema from David Bordwell, Making Meaning:
Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989). Smith
buttresses his discussion with reference to the anthropological notion of“primary theory,” which
human beings cross-culturally use to distinguish human from non-human and self from other. The
understanding of a character as a person, then, is accomplished by fitting the data of characterization to
the expectation that they will form a person, and by applying primary theory to determine that this
person will be human rather than non-human and other rather than self. Smith, 31, also argues that a
character is “the fictional analogue of the human agent.”
16
This is akin to the “principle of minimum departure,” whereby “we project upon [narrative worlds]
everything we know about reality, and…make only the adjustments dictated by the text.” Marie-Laure
Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991).
17
These assumptions about how readers or spectators approach characters is widely shared in
contemporary narrative theory, both literary and cinematic. For literary theories, see Palmer; Ryan;
Margolin; Bortulussi and Dixon; Schneider; Zunshine; Richard J. Gerrig and David W. Allbritton, “The
Construction of Literary Character: A View from Cognitive Psychology” Style 24.3 (Fall 1990), 380-
391.
For film theories see Murray Smith; Greg M. Smith; Carroll; Persson; Tan; Joseph D. Anderson,
The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois UP, 1996); David Bordwell, “Convention, Construction, and Cinematic Vision,” in Bordwell
and Carroll (Eds.), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1996), 87-
107; and Bordwell, “Who Blinked First? How Film Style Streamlines Nonverbal Interaction” in
Lennard Hojbjerg and Peter Schepelern, Film Style and Story: A Tribute to Torben Grodal
(Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum P, 2003), 45-57, . Even the structuralist Seymour Chatman
acknowledges that a characters are autonomous beings, discusses them using psychological terms, and
treats them as analogues of persons. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1978), 107-138.
18
Susan T. Fiske and Shelley E. Taylor, Social Cognition (New York: Random House, 1984);. Martha
Augustinos and Iain Walker, Social Cognition: An Integrated Introduction (London: Sage, 1995);
Leslie A. Zebrowitz, Social Perception (Pacifica Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1990); Perry R. Hinton, The
Psychology of Interpersonal Perception (London: Routledge, 1993); Ziva Kunda, Social Cognition:
Making Sense of People (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1999). See also Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 329-351.
19
On non-human social intelligence, see Nicholas Humphrey, The Inner Eye: Social Intelligence in
Evolution (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002); and Richard W. Byrne and Andrew Whiten (Eds.),
Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes, and
Humans (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989).
20
I discuss intentionality at greater length and offer a definition of it in Chapter 3.
21
Bordwell, “Who Blinked First?” 56.
22
For both a narratological argument for this position and a discussion of linguistic and other cognitive-
science dimensions of it, see Monika Fludernik, Towards a “Natural” Narratology (London:
Routledge, 1996). Her conception of narrative as defined by “experientiality” makes human agency,
and particularly the representation of human consciousness, a primary narrative concern. See also H.
Porter Abbot, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 123-137;
and Paul Cobley, Narrative (London: Routledge, 2001), 37-41.
23
Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (London: Routledge, 1992), 3.
24
Bruner, Making Stores: Law, Literature, Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 65.
25
Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990), 52.
26
Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat (London: Duckworth, 1985), 110-111.
27
Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson
28
The concepts of character attachment and allegiance come from Smith, Engaging Characters.
29
The reader’s or spectator’s share in constructing representations is discussed as “filling in” in Noël
Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1998), 320-342.
30
My conception of narration comes from Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film .
31
Ibid, 48-62.
32
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction 6th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill,
2001), 73-74.
33
Smith, Engaging Characters, 144-152.
34
Subjective narration is discussed in depth in Smith, Engaging Characters, 156-165; Edward
Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film.
(Berlin: Mouton, 1984); Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film; and Bordwell, Narration in the
Fiction Film.
35
Smith, Engaging Characters, 164.
36
For example, Paul Thomas Anderson cites Scorsese’s influence on his tracking shot that opens
Boogie Nights (Boogie Nights DVD, director’s commentary) and Steven Soderbergh acknowledges the
influence of Richard Lester in Soderbergh and Lester, Getting Away With It: Or: The Further
Adventures of the Luckiest Bastard You Ever Saw (London: Faber and Faber, 2000). Emmanuel Levy,
Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film (New York: New York UP, 1999), 102-
151, cites the influence of Cassavetes on Sean Penn, John Turturro, Alexandre Rockwell, Steve
Buscemi, and his son Nick Cassavetes, and the influence of Scorsese on Abel Ferrara, Quentin
Tarantino, Nick Gomez, Robert Rodriguez, and Anderson. Donald Lyons, Independent Visions: A
Critical Introduction to Recent Independent American Film (New York: Ballantine, 1994), 3-35,
introduces Cassavetes, Warhol, and Paul Morrissey as antecedents of the New York-based filmmakers
John Sayles, Abel Ferrara and Nancy Savoca. Jim Hillier (Ed.), American Independent Cinema: A
Sight and Sound Reader (London: BFI, 2001), 3-31, begins with a section on “Pioneers,” including
Cassavetes, Brakhage, and Warhol. John Pierson, Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes: A Guided Tour
Across a Decade of American Independent Cinema (New York: Hyperion, 1995), 8-10, identifies the
same general dramatis personae but clarifies that Scorsese was also influenced by Cassavetes.
37
This approach follows David Bordwell’s in “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,” in Leo
Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism 6th ed. (New York: Oxford UP, 2004),
774-782, and James Peterson, Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order: Understanding the American Avant-
garde Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1994). Bordwell identifies viewing strategies of art cinema,
while Peterson applies the idea of viewing strategies to a cognitive theory of the avant-garde.
38
In what follows I discuss as independent films any films that are designated as such in popular,
scholarly, or trade discourse. I would not draw clear lines around the category “independent.” I prefer
to keep directors of the older generations (Altman, Scorsese) in a “New American Cinema” category,
though I recognize that this is, to some extent, arbitrary, as they are located somewhere in those fuzzy
boundaries. On a similar note, I have included the Coen brothers and Spike Lee, even though most of
their films are produced and distributed by the major studios, because they are often central examples
in discussions of independent cinema.
39
Chuck Kleinhans, “Independent Features: Hopes and Dreams” in Jon Lewis (ed.), The New
American Cinema (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), 307-327; Justin Wyatt, “The Formation of the ‘Major
Independent’: Miramax, New Line and the New Hollywood” in Steve Neale and Murray Smith (eds.),
Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (London: Routledge, 1998), 74-90; Kim Newman, “Independents
Daze” in Hillier, 268-272; and the introduction to Jason Wood, 100 American Independent Films
(London: BFI, 2004). See also Biskind, which is a history of independent cinema built around the
personalities of film producers and distributors. Biskind goes in the exact opposite direction of
romantic auteurism, seeing independent cinema more as a phenomenon driven by shrewd businessmen
than as an artistic movement driven by visionary artists. Finally, Pierson, Spike, Mike, Slackers &
Dykes, is a digressive history of independent cinema from the perspective of a representative for
independent filmmakers who sympathizes with their struggle to maintain artistic integrity and
advocates for their independence.
40
Levy.
41
For example, Levy, 86, writes that “it is the fresh perspective, innovative spirit, and personal vision
that are the determining factor” of this conception of independent film. Levy, 3. Elsewhere he affirms
his adoption of this position: “What makes Sayles’ movies personal is their perspective—in his words,
‘How you see the world’: ‘The way I see the world is by making connections between things.’”
42
For Levy, 82-93, Sayles’s films offer the quintessential effect of transferring the notion of the
personal vision of a director-as-outsider onto characters, identifying in them a corollary status as
outsiders with an independent spirit.
43
Ibid, 2.
44
Ibid, 55.
45
Bordwell, “The Art Cinema”; These ideas are further developed in Bordwell, Narration in the
Fiction Film.
46
On narrative continuities between classical and contemporary Hollywood, see Kristin Thompson,
Storytelling in the New Hollywood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999). On stylistic developments,
see David Bordwell, “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film” Film
Quarterly 55.3 (Spring 2002), 16-28.
47
Bordwell, “The Art Cinema,” 779.
48
André Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema.” In Bazin, What is Cinema? trans. Hugh
Gray (Berkeley: U of California P, 1971), 23-40.
49
These groups are the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in classical Marxism; in contemporary cultural
politics the categories are most often identified as race/class/gender, though sexual orientation,
nationality, physical ability, age, and distinctions such as Western/non-Western, urban/rural, and
global/local are also highly significant.
50
The idea of “firsts” is discussed in Karen Alexander, “’Daughters of the Dust’ (interview with Julie
Dash), in Hillier, 40-43.
51
Lyons, 284.
52
Go Fish is a central example discussed in Pierson.
53
Ron Becker, “PrimeTime Television in the Gay Nineties: Network Television, Quality Audiences,
and Gay Politics” The Velvet Light Trap 42 (Fall 1998), 3647.
54
Bordwell, “The Art Cinema,” 777,
55
Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (New York:
McGrawHill, 1981), 2436; Schatz, Old Hollywood/New Hollywood: Ritual, Art, and Industry (Ann
Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983), 67167. Schatz discusses this in relation to genre films, but we
may extrapolate from genre theory to a conception of Hollywood characters more generally.
56
For example, Todd Haynes said of his film Safe that “it had to do with…playing with narrative
expectations” that a sick main character will be led down the path to recovery. Larry Gross,
“Antibodies: Larry Gross Talks to Safe’s Todd Haynes.” Filmmaker (Summer 1995) 3.4, available
URL: http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/summer1995/antibodies.php. In a different interview,
Haynes said that the film “plays with your leftist expectations” that the recovery community the
character joins will heal her because of the presence there of minority characters, including an AIDS
victim. Amy Taubin, “Nowhere to Hide,” in Hillier, 100-107; 104.
57
Psychoanalytic theory is well represented in Philip Rosen (Ed.), Narrative Apparatus Ideology: A
Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia, 1986); for cognitive theories of cinematic pleasure, see
Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996); The Philosophy of
Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Engaging the Moving Image
(New York: Oxford, 2004).
58
Bordwell, “The Art Cinema,” 779,
59
David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989),
297303.
60
One oft-cited source for this notion is Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass
Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986).
61
I am using “mass” and “elite,” “high” and “low” as relative terms. Independent cinema is elite/high
in relation to Hollywood cinema, but by stating this I don’t mean to suggest that it serves exactly the
same cultural functions as traditional elite/high art such as classical music, opera, ballet, and literary
fiction.
62
Levy, 55-57, discusses ways in which independent cinema is both modernist and postmodernist. For
the latter, he cites “collapse of traditional artistic hierarchies,” “pastiche,” and “emphasis of style over
substance, a consumption of images for their own sake rather than for their usefulness or the values
they symbolize, a preoccupation with playfulness and in-jokes at the expense of meaning.”
63
Carroll, “The Future of Allusion: Hollywood in the Seventies (and Beyond)” October 20 (Spring
1982), 51-81.
64
Peterson, 28.
65
Levy, 498.
66
For example, director James Mangold describes the independent film scene as having “a good,
healthy, anti-Hollywood sentiment.” Quoted in Levy, 3.
67
I am not arguing that difference from Hollywood automatically amounts to a critique of Hollywood,
only that it is often seen that way. No one would say that foreign-language films are implicitly critical
of Hollywood because their dialogue is not in English, which is different from the norm of Hollywood
filmmaking. The differences must be seen as salient and relevant to determining the identity of each
category for them to amount to an implicit critique.
68
Luc Sante, “Mystery Man,” in Ludvik Hertzberg (ed.), Jim Jarmusch Interviews (Jackson: U of
Mississippi P, 2001), 87-98, 97.
69
Gavin Smith (Ed.), Sayles on Sayles (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1998), 44-49.
70
This may seem to contradict some points I make earlier about authorial readings permeating the
mainstream. However, I am not reversing that claim here; I am merely asserting that spectators of
independent films are primed to read for authorial expressivity and to construe it, in context, as anti-
Hollywood. Even as auteurism has gone mainstream, it still maintains the old connotations of
individual artists struggling against constraints of an impersonal commercial studio system.