Tuesday, December 14, 2004
(5:43 AM) | The Young Hegelian:
On Naïve and Sentimental Cinema
I’ve been trying to think about what it is I didn’t like about the American indy film I Heart Huckabees and what I did like about the American indy film Garden State. Not that I’m an expert in these matters but I can at least lay claim to having seen most of the American indy films that have made it across the water in the last 18 or so years. But is ‘American indy’ even the right term these days? Shouldn’t we call these films ‘Sundance’, as a friend suggests, seeing as fewer of them are now made by independent production companies? Garden State is a Fox Searchlight / Miramax collaboration which makes one wonder about whether the term ‘independent’ is at all appropriate, whether capital has woken up to a new demographic and quickly co-opted it. What remains of the concept ‘American indy’, it seems to me, must refer not to the funding process (the mode of production, as it were) but to the film's genre – in this case a set of aesthetic traits which cover theme (offbeat, youth-oriented), plot (unpredictable), characterisation (‘kooky’), location (small-town), cinematography (relatively naturalistic), score (‘independent’ music). Not that all films classed as ‘indy’ will fit all or even most of these traits, but something like a Wittgensteinian family resemblance links them. Think for example of some key films from the genre over the last few years: Todd Solondz’ Welcome to the Dollhouse, Sophia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me, Sam Mendes’ American Beauty, David Green’s All the Real Girls, and now Garden State. All of them share at least one of the characteristics mentioned.If we are to believe The Guardian’s film critics the family resemblance of the last-mentioned is a little too close. Peter Bradshaw calls Garden State “a gently self-indulgent, vaguely autobiographical tale in the indie unplugged style, a drama of offbeat vulnerabilities suffused in a genial, but faintly thin-skinned style of humour.” Philip French calls it “a moderately entertaining near-parodic, by-numbers example of American independent cinema”. Both reviews are somewhat mean-spirited, and surprising too, given Bradshaw rated Huckabees higher. Bradshaw always was a contrary so-and-so.
But I’m still not sure what it is about the Huckabees film that I don’t like. Part of me wonders if its parodies of philosophy and of political activism are a bit near the knuckle. But no, they’re not, they are more often working with a merely crib knowledge of existentialism, which was itself always the crib route in to philosophy. This makes for a script which is both knowing yet embarrassingly lacking in knowledge.
And what makes Garden State a better film? Is it the greater subtlety of its jokes? That they come ‘out of left-field’, to use an American expression. Maybe it’s the slower duration, something which meets my European sensibility – I found myself missing some dialogue because it was thought-provoking in a way the all-too-earnest philosophical parody wasn’t. Maybe I was pleased with myself for recognising its idiosyncrasies, the reference to ‘Mac and Cheese’, or the Shins’ song I have on a John Peel tape. Maybe at the end of the day it’s the simplicity of the theme which ends up being more profound than its rival because it deals with something even more difficult than philosophy.
I would never devalue the genre ‘American indy’ alongside the European films I watch (and both are better than the formulaic dregs Britain has produced over the last decade). I was introduced to both continents’ cinema (among my first visits to the cinema were trips to Blue Velvet and Wings of Desire) in the same year. Each genre informed my growing appreciation of the other. A film like Garden State (if I can go out on a limb for a moment) has an affinity with the French poetic realism of a Jean Vigo, in that each finds a certain metaphysical latency in the everyday, each creates a poetry of real life in a way Hollywood – the dream factory, the poetry of unreal lives – never could. Though one must always worry that the making of ‘indy’ films merely co-opts the sort of demographic who could have shaken the film industry to its core and dispelled its dreams. But short of this utopian destruction of utopia, short of the real ‘independence’ of our aesthetic, there will always remain good reasons to watch films such as this.
