I hadn’t seen George Armitage’s 1997 John Cusack as existential hitperson comedy Grosse Pointe Blank since middle school. But Friday night/Saturday morning, I happened upon it on TNT in all its pan & scan, edited for TV glory while flipping channels during a case of took-the-Mucinex-too-late insomnia that is all too common during autumn’s allergy season. While the movie holds up quite well (even though everyone involved is clearly too old to be at a 10-year high school reunion—much older than my classmates and I who have ours scheduled for next year), I noticed something that made my late night time killer worthwhile. During Cusack and Jeremy Piven’s metaphor-laden disposal of a body wrapped in high school pep rally banners, a hair flickered across the screen, evidence that someone had forgotten to clear the film gate before shooting the scene. I tried to recall if I noticed the hair when I saw the film back in 1997, which may sound ridiculous to regular movie fans or even most cineastes. However, I’ve always loved seeing an example of “hair in the gate” in Hollywood releases. They have served as a reminder to me that even glossy and distanced Hollywood cinema captures a place in time, hinges on imperfection, exists in the real world despite its tendencies toward escapism and/or high minded social reflection.
The more I thought about this hair, I began to wonder what exactly I was watching. For viewers of Grosse Pointe Blank who saw the film theatrically in 1997, the hair was a physical presence captured by a material rooted in silver halide’s volatility, projected onto a mechanical screen. Yet, the “hair” I was seeing was far removed from reality, the projection of a fake imperfection digitized by a network and sent to my home via U-verse cables. In effect, it’s an allusion to an imperfection that no longer exists.
For those readers who haven’t lost interest after I’ve blathered on about the ontology of a hair for the past two paragraphs, this expectorant-fueled meditation is but a small acknowledgement of how recent advances in digital technology have changed the media we consume—especially older films repackaged in the most cutting-edge formats. In his 2007 book The Virtual Life of Film, Harvard media professor D. N. Rodowick writes of the differences between celluloid-based and digital viewing:
. . .The film screen and the digital screen present two different relations to duration and causality. Electronic screens give the perception of a continually changing present that can never be whole, or wholly present to us, in any of its instants. In addition, through digital screens our relation is not to an image, but to function or force—that of control and the management of information. We do not ask of digital screens that they provoke contemplation of the past and passing time as we do of film; we want them to sort, organize, give access to, and act on the information in the present. We desire then to manage time or to make time more manageable as there is less and less of it. (141)
An early ad for Kodak film
From Rodowick’s perspective, Grosse Pointe Blank and the physical and digital hairs serve as potent demonstrations of the distribution medium’s relationship to cultural texts. The hair projected onto a film screen is reality’s intervention into a meditation about the falsity of nostalgia and the ethical dangers of alienating the present from the past in the guise of a narrative about a contract killer forced to come to terms with the formation of his identity circa 1986 at a high school reunion ten years later. It is a reminder that projected images directly shape and reflect viewers’ personal lives and the social fabric of which they are a part. In contrast, the digitized hair exists as nothing more than an imperfection in a compartmentalized document of the past, packaged for late-night television, online streaming, and digital archives. It no longer inserts itself into the film and, by extension, reality because as a digital construct, it could be erased under the aegis of “a clean digital transfer” and likely will when the film receives its BluRay treatment. As a result, viewers’ relationships to not only the physical film but also its narrative content become diluted. Armitage’s film (complete with its production imperfections) is no longer a physical and narrative intervention into individuals’ relationships with the past, but an adjustable archive indicative of a time when cinema was able to ask such questions.
Last week, British artist Tacita Dean opened a “tribute to celluloid” that, despite its reverent nature, seems to take on a similar function as a contemporary Oscar tribute to a director from the Golden Age of Hollywood—Nice work! We remember you, but it is time to move on. Most surprising about the exhibition is the impassioned calls to arms from filmmakers ranging from Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese to Jean-Luc Godard (Keanu Reeves also has some seriously profound remarks like whoa) to preserve their medium of choice. Yet for every seeming victory of celluloid such as Universal’s aborted attempt to stream the upcoming Brett Ratner social problem blockbuster Tower Heist to homes during its initial release, the trajectory of the industry seems clear. Theatres are converting to digital screens as an advertising strategy, movie projectionists are becoming extinct, and studios such as 20th Century Fox are already ceasing production of physical prints in markets such as Hong Kong. While I will analyse digital cinema’s direct effects on content in my next post, what is clear now is that our ways of viewing cinema are in crisis, and–unlike John Cusack’s Martin Blank–broing out with The Piven and hooking up with Minnie Driver won’t save us from a largely unacknowledged existential abyss.
