Farewell, Robin Wood (1931-2009):
The Relevance of a Radical Film Critic
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/burris020610.html
by Gregory A. Burris
02.06.10
"It is probably impossible today for anyone to make an even halfway
commercial movie that shouts, in some positive sense, 'Revolution!'
as loudly as its lungs can bear, so one must celebrate the films that
seem (whether deliberately or not) to imply its necessity." -- Robin Wood1
At a time when comedy shows tell us the news and news shows tell us
jokes, the line between reality and entertainment has become
increasingly blurred. This is as true for the corporate-owned news
media as it is for the corporate-owned cinema, and although many
writers have concentrated their efforts on exposing the
propagandistic nature of mainstream news coverage -- Edward S. Herman
and Noam Chomsky in their book Manufacturing Consent, for instance --
the entertainment industry also plays a tremendous role in
perpetuating the ruling ideology. Indeed, by producing decades of
racist storytelling that pits the white, all-American, male hero
against the smarmy, brown-skinned hordes, Hollywood is perhaps just
as much to blame as the news media for creating a climate of
indiscriminate fear in which a war of vengeance against one country
(Afghanistan) can be so easily transferred to a completely unrelated
one (Iraq). Like the news media, the entertainment industry greatly
contributes to the construction of public opinion, and at this time
of war and economic meltdown, it is perhaps more important than ever
to examine how the dominant power structures of society are
manifested through these mass-marketed products of capitalist consumption.
Of course, to completely dismiss the entire cinema with one broad
stroke as propaganda at the service of the powerbrokers in the White
House and on Wall Street is to miss the point. Just as Hollywood is
capable of spinning reactionary tales, films also possess the
potential to criticize our social structures and institutions or even
to suggest progressive alternatives to the dominant social
order. Indeed, while there is nothing particularly brave or
challenging about condemning the Hollywood dream factory, identifying
from out of the vastness of cinematic slush those oft-overlooked
films containing a subversive kernel of political radicalism is a
noble endeavor indeed, and it is especially important at this precise
historical moment when having hope seems ever so hopeless.
What is needed, then, is for us to embrace those individuals who can
peer through the cinema's camouflage of entertainment and escapism
and can thus intelligently assess the ideology of the film industry's
cultural products. In embarking upon this task, one would be well
advised to turn to the voluminous writings of Robin Wood, a
British-born film critic who spent his life teaching, discussing, and
critically examining film. With his characteristic wit, penetrating
analysis, and beautiful prose, Wood took his readers to unexpected
places, often noticing features of films that all others had
missed. One may sometimes disagree with Wood's opinions, but it is
simply not possible to walk away from his writings without being
forced to seriously rethink one's own position.
It is thus greatly unfortunate that this aggressive interrogator of
popular culture passed away in December 2009 at the age of
seventy-eight. Wood left behind him a lifetime of work -- hundreds
of essays spread across dozens of publications (including the journal
he co-founded, CineAction), a number of important books, and scores
of previous students now scattered throughout various
institutions. Even though Wood achieved a star-like status within
the world of academic film criticism, his name remains virtually
unknown to a wider audience. While not all of us are interested in
analyzing the cinema, the themes and issues in which Wood was most
highly invested -- socialism, feminism, gay liberation, sexual
freedom, racial justice, passivism, and environmentalism -- greatly
concern us all, and as we continue to ponder the politics of culture
and society, we would do well to acquaint ourselves (or perhaps
reacquaint ourselves) with the work of Robin Wood.
Robin Wood began writing seriously about film at a time when very few
did. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to claim that Wood's
writings -- particularly his early works on Alfred Hitchcock, Howard
Hawks, and Ingmar Bergman -- helped shape the field of film studies
when the discipline was still in its infancy. However, whereas many
film critics have been chiefly focused on the aesthetic, Wood became
increasingly concerned throughout his life with the cinema's
political and ideological dimensions.
Wood was no liberal idealist. He understood that the various
anti-oppression movements that defined his era -- civil rights, gay
rights, feminism, and the rest -- must be rooted in the broader
struggle of overturning the dominant social framework that enables
and even encourages such oppression to begin with. Thus, Wood did
not make the mistake typical of so many well-meaning others like Vito
Russo, author of the landmark study The Celluloid Closet, who
concentrate their efforts solely on one or another social struggle
without connecting it to the underpinning status quo -- what Wood
frequently called "patriarchal capitalism." In this sense, Wood can
be counted amongst the truly radical.
Wood did not shy away from taking bold and often unpopular stands,
and in his pursuit to unearth neglected cinematic treasures and claim
them for the progressive cause, he often defended much-maligned films
like It's Alive (1974), Mandingo (1975), Cruising (1980), Heaven's
Gate (1980), and The Doom Generation (1995). Thus, Wood could never
be accused, like so many others, of putting his finger to the wind to
gauge the direction of academic fads. Indeed, Wood quickly fell out
of favor with much of the academy when he resisted going along with
certain fashionable trends in film studies -- namely, Lacanian
psychoanalytic theory and semiotics. This is not to say that he
remained an ossified relic of a prior era, stubbornly opposed to any
and all change. To the contrary, Wood constantly demonstrated a
remarkable ability to rethink previously-held positions, to submit
himself to stringent self-criticism, and to make appropriate changes.
Indeed, Wood was not born a radical, and his political concerns,
which eventually came to dominate his writing, are mostly absent from
his earliest works including his influential first book, Hitchcock's
Films. Wood's turn to radicalism was part of a gradual evolution of
political awareness -- one that he, like so many of us, first
resisted. Reflecting on this process, Wood later observed, "Our
emotions have to be educated, and emotional education is the most
painful of all processes, because the education is resisted at every
point by what we call our instincts but might more reasonably think
of as our ideological structuring."2
While Wood's radicalization was the product of a gradual development
and not any "Road to Damascus"-like epiphany, his political
transformation can nevertheless be linked to his coming out as a gay
man, both in public and private life. His coming out was all the
more courageous considering that at the time he was already married
with three children. Wood's coming out eventually led him to pen one
of his most influential essays, "Responsibilities of a Gay Film
Critic," in which he characterized his earlier writings on film as
case studies in self-oppression -- that is, "an alternating pattern
of peeping out of the closet door and then quickly slamming it shut,
and pasting over the chinks with placards on which words like
Marriage, Family, Health, and Normality were loudly
displayed."3 From this moment on, his writings on film took on an
increasingly political edge.
Wood's penchant for uncovering radical political subtexts in the
otherwise ignored and disregarded can perhaps be best demonstrated by
his writings on the horror genre. Horror formed something of a
running theme throughout Wood's oeuvre, spanning from his first
published piece of film criticism -- an illuminating essay on
Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) -- to his later writings which include
analyses of Audition (1999) and Diary of the Dead (2007), as well as
discussions of the films of Michael Haneke which, though not
technically horror, are certainly horrific. Some of his most
insightful work on horror, however, was inspired by the arrival of
the gruesome grindhouse exploitation film at American drive-in
theaters in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Upon its appearance in cinemas, the exploitation horror film cycle --
which included such infamous box-office screams as Night of the
Living Dead (1968), The Last House on the Left (1972), and The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre (1974) -- was met by very little positive critical
attention. The New York Times reviewer of The Last House on the
Left, for instance, did not even finish his screening of the film,
walking out in disgust after fifty minutes. Similarly, a writer for
Harper's Magazine derided The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as a "vile
little piece of sick crap" and likened it to pornography.4 But even
those few who dared to defend such films often struggled to
articulate any good reasons. For instance, a writer in Film Comment
who penned an overall positive review of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
nonetheless concluded that the film had no meaning or greater
intellectual value; "There's no point pretending that The Texas Chain
Saw Massacre hides a secret life in which it is something other than,
or 'better' than, it means to be. [. . .] I don't think it 'means'
anything at all."5
In contrast to such views, Wood detected beneath the bloody surface
of these films a progressive voice articulating the countercultural
movement's growing frustrations with the capitalist status quo and
all its hideous symptoms. While others condemned these films or
timidly tip-toed around them, Wood took a bold stand, claiming that
horror "is currently the most important of all American genres and
perhaps the most progressive" and that "in a period of extreme
cultural crisis and disintegration, [horror] alone offers the
possibility of radical change and rebuilding."6 Wood's defense of
the seemingly indefensible should not be mistaken for some sort of
misplaced pubescent passion for the tasteless and the
trashy. Rather, his position was the result of clear-eyed evaluation
and the careful application of Marxist-Freudian analysis.
Wood's audacious postulation hinged on the identity of the
monster. He argued that the monsters of these grindhouse films were
not some alien menace or external evil threatening society from
without. Instead, they represented the consequences of the dominant
social order taken to their logical extreme. His reasoning was
centered on repression and specifically the notion of the "return of
the repressed." In the exploitation film, that which is repressed --
sexuality, femininity, or the inconvenient victimization of ruthless
capitalism -- returns in a monstrous form as zombies, cannibals,
Leatherface, or even the mutant baby of It's Alive. In short, evil
in these films represents patriarchal capitalism's obstreperous
children. The appearance of these monsters on the silver screen,
then, constituted subversive acts of protest against the bloodbath in
Vietnam, social and economic inequalities, racial and sexual
oppression, patriarchal power, and the monogamous heterosexual
straitjacket. Thus, Wood opened up the 1970s exploitation film, that
basest of cinematic specimens, to a progressive and even radical
political interpretation. For Wood, the ultimate message of such
horrors was that the much glorified American Dream was merely
mystification, obscuring what could more accurately be described as
the American Nightmare.
Take, for instance, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre -- that grisly story
about a group of youthful travelers who unwittingly fall into the
hands of a perverse family of crazed cannibals. Wood argued that
this gruesome tale was not just a bloody exercise in senseless
brutality and nihilistic spectacle; instead, it was an attempt at
artistically rendering the state of human relations under the
pressures of late capitalist society, and it therefore represented a
far more significant social statement than anything offered by those
more polished Hollywood horrors, The Exorcist (1973), The Omen
(1976), The Sentinel (1977), and the like.
For Wood, it was no coincidence that director Tobe Hooper chose to
portray his film's macabre family of cannibals as former
slaughterhouse workers who had been replaced by more modern methods
and machinery. Out of work as a result of the callous and morally
indifferent logic of capital, the family continues practicing their
butchery upon human victims, thus reproducing the rapacious,
dog-eat-dog conditions of capitalism quite literally. Cannibalism in
these films, then, carried an important symbolic value. As Wood put it,
It is no accident that the [. . .] most intense horror films of the
Seventies at 'exploitation' level [. . .] are all centered on
cannibalism, and on the specific notion of present and future (the
younger generation) being devoured by the past. Cannibalism
represents the ultimate in possessiveness, hence the logical end of
human relations under capitalism. [. . .] [The cannibals of The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre] only carry to its logical conclusion the
basic (though unstated) tenet of capitalism, that people have the
right to live off other people.7
Not all cinephiles share Wood's enthusiasm for this infamous film
cycle. Indeed, all these decades later, many are still unable to
stomach it. Nevertheless, Wood's political interpretation paved the
way for the appropriation of these films into the canon of
counterhegemonic filmmaking. Just as Wood's work on Hitchcock a
decade earlier had played a not insignificant role in elevating the
critical estimation of that director into something more than mere
bourgeois entertainer, his defense of the grindhouse exploitation
film was largely responsible for rescuing it from critical oblivion.
As the radicalism of the 1970s gave way to the reactionary 1980s, the
cinema too lost its previously subversive zeal. It was as if the
Hollywood studios' answer to yesteryear's feminist movement came in
the form of a pulsating bicep. Hypermasculinity, it seems, was the
order of the day, and whatever vestiges remained of the previous
decade's radicalism were quickly drowned out by a formidable barrage
of formulaic exploits showcasing the muscles and machismo of a
cinematic panoply of Reaganite action heroes: Chuck Norris, Arnold
Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and the rest. In one nightmarish
moment, real life seemed to imitate Hollywood when the
actor-turned-president Ronald Reagan, referring to the 1985 Beirut
hostage crisis, quipped, "Boy, I saw Rambo last night. Now I know
what to do the next time this happens."8
It is out of this reactionary atmosphere that Wood yet again
uncovered a sliver of progressive hope within the horror genre: Day
of the Dead (1985). Horror during this time was not the breeding
grounds for radical subversion that it had been a decade earlier, and
Wood was not impressed by the new slew of screen monsters. For Wood,
the slasher cycle inaugurated by the superstar villains Michael
Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger represented an ideological
perversion of its predecessors. While Leatherface and the inbred
cannibals of The Hills Have Eyes (1977) had represented dire
denouncements of the status quo, these new monsters symbolized
instead the repressive social order's puritanical enforcers. Thus,
for Wood, horror films had become little more than cinematic sermons,
warning audiences against the immorality of intercourse rather than
smashing the boundaries of systematic repression.9
Apart from a cult following of enthusiasts, Day of the Dead -- the
third installment of director George Romero's Living Dead series --
was almost universally panned by critics and audiences alike. Wood,
however, lavished praise upon the film, pronouncing it "the most
uncompromising critique of contemporary America (and, by extension,
Western capitalist society in general) that is possible within the
terms and conditions of a 'popular entertainment' medium."10 Thus,
Wood again discerned within the horror genre a trace of radical
optimism during what otherwise seemed to be politically and
culturally bleak times.
The film involves a group of survivors of an ongoing zombie
apocalypse, passing their days secluded in an underground tunnel
system. The survivors are purportedly working together as a team,
but theirs is clearly a divided lot. They are separated into three
different units -- soldiers, scientists, and technicians. Each of
these, Wood argued, represented three major ideological strata of
society: the reactionaries, the reformists, and the radical revolutionaries.
The soldiers are ceaselessly vile -- swearing, abusive, machoistic,
masochistic, and racist. Their solution to the zombie plague is to
cling to their phallic weaponry. Thus, Wood saw them as fascists who
deal with defeat by blindly continuing their destructive fight. They
are society's Rambos and Reagans. Or, to put it in twenty-first
century terms, they are the neo-cons and the Sarah Palin voters.
If the soldiers represent the film's right-wing reactionaries, the
scientists are its reformers who hope to restore the old society by
curing (or perhaps even controlling) the zombie hordes. That the
social order they hope to salvage was a failure matters not, and
while the scientists may seem greatly preferable to their fascist
associates, both groups are ultimately shackled to the dead weight of
the past which is coming, in the form of Romero's sluggish zombies,
ever so slowly to swallow them up.
Wood's reading of the film is still frighteningly relevant today
when, at a time of economic and political calamity, a great portion
of American society seems, like Day of the Dead's misguided
scientists, dead set on restoring the very institutions and policies
that brought about these crises in the first place. Society cannot
be revived. It is utterly beyond recuperation, and the only viable
option is the radical one: to fly away, start fresh, and teach future
generations better. This alternative is embraced by the film's third
group, an Irish electrician and a Caribbean pilot who are eventually
joined by the film's central protagonist, a female scientist, after
she finally comes to terms with the futility of her efforts at
reviving what once was. Wood argues that if there is any hope for
our society, we too must follow this path and begin to think outside
the restrictive capitalist box. Very few Hollywood films indeed
articulate such radicalism. Coming in the middle of the Reaganite
1980s, Day of the Dead resembles a desperate plea from a
socially-conscious filmmaker against the reactionary forces around
him, and Wood was astute enough to apprehend the film's progressive
cultural value.
To only focus on this limited sampling of Wood's work is to do him a
serious disservice. The breadth of his writings covers much more
ground than this small handful of films may suggest. Nonetheless,
these examples demonstrate that film criticism is indeed serious
business and that the cinema should, like all cultural products, be
carefully evaluated so that anything worth retaining is neither lost
nor forgotten but is instead embraced and utilized.
Wood's radical political convictions, unlike those of so many
turncoat hippies, did not dull with age. If anything, they grew
stronger, and in his final years, he wrote of the need to reenergize
the leftist politics of film criticism. Indeed, Wood chose "protest
and revolution" as the theme of the last issue of CineAction he was
to edit. Looking back over that issue's opening editorial, it
appears as a swan song in which Wood unleashed some of his harshest
charges against the state of contemporary society.
[A]s climate change escalates, temperatures rise, 'natural' disasters
(which are anything but natural) become more frequent and more
extreme, corporate capitalism sees to it that its ever more mystified
populace are deluded into what is generally regarded as happiness,
with the availability of more and more gadgetry, newer and newer
fashions, 'the latest', with which we all have to keep up, rock, pop,
TV sitcoms, outpourings of emptier and ever more repetitive Hollywood
sex comedies, crazy comedies, horror, torture, dumbing down. . .
. And on we go to the ending of all life on our planet. The time
for socialist revolution is now, not when it is too late. Tell your
neighbours.11
Just days before his passing, Wood, lying upon his death bed,
dictated to a friend his final top ten film list.12 Occupying the
number one spot was director Howard Hawks' 1959 western, Rio
Bravo. It may seem an odd choice to those unacquainted with Wood's
writings, but of all the films Wood returned to again and again, Rio
Bravo appeared perhaps the most frequently. Indeed, if ever there
was a film that encapsulated all the issues Wood held dear, Rio Bravo
is it. Contained within the film's narrative are many themes: human
relationships, freely expressed love, the fight against fascism,
camaraderie, and -- most importantly -- the heroic acts of regular
people. Unlike many other John Wayne westerns, Rio Bravo is not a
simpleminded salute to the solitary male hero. Rather, it is a
joyful celebration of the communal underdog. The film concludes
triumphantly with a ragtag group of normal folk -- the drunkard, the
cripple, the ethnic other, the hussy -- all coming together
heroically in solidarity to oppose the film's capitalist,
militaristic menace. It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that
Wood saw this film as a cinematic blueprint for how to live life.
Many of Wood's writings begin with something of a confession -- a
highly personal and often touching admission of his own inadequacies
and failures, from the pain caused to his family by his coming out to
the heartache and sorrow that once almost drove him to jump in front
of an approaching train. Reviewing his writings and reconsidering
his love of Rio Bravo, I suspect that he saw himself amongst that
film's group of unlikely heroes. Rio Bravo is a splendid celebration
of a common humanity.
The notable literary theorist Terry Eagleton once wrote, "Margins can
be unspeakably painful places to be, and there are few more
honourable tasks for students of culture than to help create a space
in which the dumped and disregarded can find a tongue."13 This is
how we should view the work of Robin Wood, and if there is one theme
to his writings that will continue to have a lasting relevance, it
will be his insistence that films, even those produced by the most
profit-hungry of studios, can have a redeeming political value,
giving a voice to the voiceless, and that the cinema too can be used
as a weapon in the struggle to overturn the capitalist status
quo. One need only be willing to watch and discern.
While Wood was neither the first nor the only writer to extend such
ideas to the medium of film, he did so with a style and strength, an
honesty and intellectual integrity that were uniquely his own. We
can learn a lot from Robin Wood, both those of us who are involved
with film studies and those of us who are not. As the struggle
against oppression continues on every front, his radical voice will
be dearly missed.
--
1 Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond:
Expanded and Revised Edition (New York, Columbia University, 2003) p. 342.
2 Robin Wood, Personal Views: Explorations in Film, Revised Edition
(Detroit, Wayne State University, 2006) p. 394.
3 Ibid., p. 389.
4 Howard Thompson, Review of Last House on the Left, New York Times
(December 22, 1972); Stephen Koch quoted in Carol J. Clover, Men,
Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton,
Princeton University, 1992) p. 22.
5 Roger Greenspun, "Carrie, and Sally and Leatherface among the Film
Buffs," Film Comment 13 (January/February 1977) p. 16.
6 Robin Wood, "An Introduction to the American Horror Film," in The
American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, eds. Robin Wood and
Richard Lippe (Toronto, Festival of Festivals, 1979) p. 17.
7 Ibid., pp. 21-22.
8 Quoted in Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in
the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, Rutgers University, 1994) p. 28.
9 Robin Wood, "Beauty Bests the Beast," American Film 8 (September
1983) pp. 63-65.
10 Wood, Hollywood, p. 287.
11 Robin Wood, "Protest and Revolution," CineAction 70 (2007) p. 1.
12 The full top ten list is available online at
www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=17784. Last accessed June 2, 2010.
13 Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York, Basic, 2003) p. 13.
.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Sixties-L" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
