Visions
of Reality
published in Stuff No.6, Melbourne,
1983
The voice carries a tone of authority in its delivery, ohviously
the result of an exacting search in finding the right voice.
It is a voice with an air of finality; of precision in its
statement; unerring and faultless. Be it in a cinema, on
television or radio, it impassively yet powerfully calls
out: "Mel Gibson is Mad Max”. I've heard it all
before, from “Clint Eastwood is Dirty Harry"
to “Marilyn Chambers is insatiable". The voice
(as speech though not as writing) provides a shiny smooth
surface that glosses over any marks of quotation. Star,
character, actor, film, story and title all become one.
A centre that is posed as the only given in the situation;
a monolith that looms as the only real in a landscape of
illusions.
As
I flick through a whole stack or books devoted to the advertising
of the cinema, I get the impression that even though the
films do not purport to be larger than life, their advertising
is larger than the actual films. For example, the period
from the late forties through to the late fifties appears
to have centred on “Realism" in its ads, describing
films as containing"realism never before seen on the
screen”. These films tended to play not on a construction
of reality but on a development in and of realism that always
consciously stayed within the boundaries of theatre and
drama (the successiul screenplays of Tennesse Williams being
a clear example of this approach). Similar to the “Hi-Fidelity
Stereo Recording" label on records from the fifties,
these ads now strike a note of corniness because the seventies
saw film use notions of realism (either constrictively or
loosely) mainly as a starting point or altruistic structure
for the continuing development of film language. In such
a climate where realism in recognised as a major semantic
code, artificiality in film would be and was construed as
slang or bad grammar. Throughout the seventies, film advertising
continued to be 'larger than the actual film' by centering
on reality, on the real that the films honoured. What was
once drama promoted as realism became realism promoted as
reality. From STRAW DOGS to TAXI DRIVER to MIDNIGHT EXPRESS.
this acceleration of reality in film reached a saturation
point, wherein the only way forwards was backwards. In late
1977, SUPERMAN thus phrophetically announced what appears
to have become the next phase of the film/reality conflation:
"You will believe that a man can fly".
Everyone
(so they say) hates canned laughter. But what a concept
: canned laughter - straight out of the surreal world of
Madison Avenue and its neurotic self-enveloping grasp on
reality. Square onions, liquid oxygen, canned laughter.
In 1975, Henry Fonda agreed to do THE SMITH FAMILY (a precursor
to FAMILY) only if they scrapped all the canned laughter
in the pilot. Sure, we're all individuals, not monkeys in
cages. We know when to laugh, when to cry; we are ourselves,
not mimicing representations of images of ourselves. Not
suprisingly, THE SMITH FAMILY flopped because no-one really
knew whether it was funny or not. The later seasons of HAPPY
DAYS assure us at the start of every episode : “HAPPY
DAYS is filmed before a live audience". Meaning that
they go out human-hunting and get a bunch of dummies who
have seen enough sit-coms to know where to laugh regardless
of whether the lines are funny. Same old-crap but this time
it’s real. Like customers at the counter in society's
great cultural department store, we are told over and over
again : You want realism? You got it. Demand and supply;
supply and demand.
The
real can live a life by default, and not neccessarily be
contrived as usually is the case. There are those fascinating
record stores in Melbourne's answer to a Little Athens,
Lonsdale Street. Their windows display a continually changing
series of record covers that add up to presenting a disorienting
cultural view of Pop music. All the glitter, tinsel, pzatz
and flair are there in these portraits of Pop stars, but
the style is missing, making them embarrassing facades of
stardom. It is then that I notice something in nearly all
of the album covers and posters: a microphone. For example.
here is a girl with a peroxided Farrah Fawcett hair-style;
an unbelievable amount of bright blue eye-shadow; an outfit
leftover from a Swagman floorshow; and ungainly holding
a microphone. This inelegant object, this element of the
real, is always rupturing the pathetic surfaces of depiction
in these singers' aspirations to self-glamourization. All
these Great Pop Stars all working overtime on constructing
themselves into images of Pop stars, but confounding the
illusion with reality a dumb microphone. No doubt they are
stars in Greek society, but their failure in image short-circuits
their star effect. Following a logic of “I am a recording
star/here is my instrument – my microphone –
my means of communicating to you", their images are
too real. I am reminded that realism involves the destruction
of reality as much as it involves its construction.
Before
MTV established itself as a major component in the American
Record Industry, what few rock video shows there were most
often insisted on featuring the 'act’ in a ‘live’
situation. Clips throughout the seventies in America were
viewed not as record promotion devices but more as informational
units that swept across the continent, cluing people in
on what the act would be like in a 'live' situation. By
no deliberate manipulation, the roots of the language of
Rock videos come as much from the state of Rock’n’Roll
(i.e. live onstage) as they do from the strategic marketing
flows of Rock product. Tbe intersection between sound and
image is then probably more organic than technological;
more archeologically lost than traceable through the 'medium'
of video and television. Historically, this state of Rock'n’Roll
lives an illusory existence more than an actual unmediated
one, for the image of a band 'live on stage' in a rock clip
requires just as much direction and predetermining as the
group dressed in Renaissance costumes wandering around a
Martian landscape. The tension caused in such a dichotomy
testifies to the level of image at which Rock is currently
situated, in that the denim-and-sweat conventions of the
former are less questioned than the overt stylization of
the latter. Through a reliance on this lost history, this
mythical state of Rock’n’Roll, the image of
the sweaty band on stage is viewed as the real - not simply
in opposition to obvious theatrical excesses, but because
the reality of Rock’n’Roll is the living presence
of myth.
Few
clips escape this real/unreal ‘imagification' in Rock,
though one does come to mind: “Runaway Boy”
by the Stray Cats. Here is a clip that actually functions
as documentary, because the physical reality of the group
(their dress, hair, manner, look, etc.) is their image reality.
Transferred to film, it survives as a restated image that
sardonically taunts “this is how we look like this
off-stage". The real nostalgia of the Stray Cats lies
not in their style, but in their image/reality relationship
which harks back to the documentary feel now contained by
early Elvis footage. The image of the Stray Cats (in its
original formation) is neither dependant upon the conventions
of Rock videos (the image-manufacturing of the state of
Rock’n’Roll) nor resultant from exercises in
excessive art direction (the image manufacturing of the
language of Rock videos). The real and the image are fused
in the same way that life and life-style are fused: fully
lived when happening, but disposable and retrievible at
will and whim.
It
is not suprising that Nick Cave's “From Her To Eternity"
enjoyed considerable success overseas. The most cited (and
most telling) is his version of Elvis' “In The Ghetto".
Typical of the inverted realist direction that underground
Rock has taken for the past three years or so, Cave's "In
The Ghetto” is an example of the impregnation of realism
- of taking objects whose artificiality betrays them by
decrying their theatricality (Elvis’ version) and
reconstructing their form by building onto their facades
an emotional intensity that gives the impression of coding
the version (Cave's) as the original, the real. In late
1973 David Bowie and Bryan Ferry released, respectively,
“Pin Ups” and "These Foolish Things”.
As a mixture of controversy, novelty and innovation, these
albums enforced just how much stylization had become and
would continue to be a major element in Pop and Rock music
of the seventies. Ferry and Bowie presented. themselves
as dandys whose aesthetic stated a love for the music they
covered whilst their versions were knowingly bound to offend
purists through the songs' modes of stylization. What Cave,
Bowie and Ferry have in common is an approach to assembling
objects out of surfaces. But their difference lies in what
is reflected in their surfaces. Far from the dandy (despite
Cave spending his time in the Boys Next Door as a punk-art-student-meets-Bryan-Ferry
singer), Cave is now a posture of the real; a breathing
body of emotionalism that surprises its audience (and itself)
with the effect of emotions – for what was once the
affecting of emotions is now the effecting of emotions.
But
so what if Cave's “In The Ghetto" makes you shiver;
or Elvis Costello’s “Psycho Momma" makes
you tingle; or This Mortal Coil's “Song of the Siren”
makes you cry? Perhaps such works and workings only happen
for an audience where the manipuiation of emotions as a
felt proccess in an alien practice. FLASH DANCE knew exactly
what it was doing in subtitling the film “What A Feeling!”.
That's all the film in about: the generation of feelings.
It is the emotional counterpart to the Big Dipper Effect.
Cave's “In The Ghetto" might be emotional - but
so might be FLASH DANCE. And so might be everything, anyway.
It used to be said that life is cheap. Life in actually
very expensive today - it is reality that is cheap. It drowns
us out. It doesn't simply ‘exist' - it controls us.
We live in an age of alchemy, where everyone searches for
gold, buying Televend offers for mail-orders of 18ct, 9ct,
6ct - even 0ct gold is still gold. The alchemist finds gold
by making it. We find reality in precisely the same way.
