VISUAL DIGITAL
CULTURE
Surface play and spectacle in new media
genres
Andrew Darley
London and New York
List of illustrationsix
Acknowledgementsx
Introduction1
PART I
History9
1A back story: realism, simulation, interaction11
Beginnings11
Digital cinema16
Computer games23
Special venue attractions31
2 Genealogy and tradition: mechanised spectacle as popular
entertainment37
Popular entertainments and the cinema37
Spectacle displaced48
Extending a tradition: fin-de-siècledigital forms52
3Shaping tradition: the contemporary context58
On formality in contemporary visual culture59
Eco and Jameson: repetition and surface67
Résumé73
vii
CONTENTS
PART II
Aesthetics79
4 Simulation and hyperrealism: computer animation and TV
advertisements81
Computer animation: second-order realism82
TV advertisements: neo-montage and hyperrealism88
5The waning of narrative: new spectacle cinema and music video102
Spectacle and the feature film104
Spectacle cinema: digital effects106
Music video: spectacle as style115
6The digital image in ‘the age of the signifier’124
Repetition as the measure of visual digital culture125
Montage and the digital image129
Genre and authorship in visual digital forms134
PART III
Spectators145
7Games and rides: surfing the image147
Computer games: ‘into the image’?149
Simulation rides: the almost motionless voyage160
Interactivity and immersion as mass entertainment162
8Surface play and spaces of consumption167
Reading de-centred167
Active spectators?173
Exhibiting spectacle (and style)179
Conclusion191
Notes198
Bibliography207
Author index216
Subject index218
CONTENTS
viii
The clearest manifestation of the renovation of spectacle within late twentieth-
century visual culture is the so-called ‘blockbuster’ film: technologically dense
and laden with special effects, such films are, arguably, the principal emblem of
the recent turn to image and form. The blockbuster has been firmly established
as a deliberate and pivotal commercial strategy within Hollywood since the
1970s – with films such as The Exorcist (1973), Jaws (1975) and Star Wars
(1977) cited among early examples (see, for example, Schatz 1993). However,
it is from the mid-1980s that a clear trend, based squarely upon a revitalised
resurgence in special effects techniques becomes discernible in the production
of these high budget and intensively media-hyped movies. This impulse has,
undoubtedly, been prompted and underpinned by various developments in
digital image technologies. Such films, early examples of which include Alien
(1979), Blade Runner (1982), The Last Starfighter (1985), Robocop (1987),
The Abyss (1989) and Total Recall (1990), are texts that tend more and more to
give spectacular imagery and action equal status with narrative content and
meaning. As we start the new century the extraordinary growth of this kind of
film shows no sign of slowing down. On the contrary, though such films still
only constitute a small percentage of the overall output of mainstream cinema,
they nevertheless invariably capture most of the pre-release publicity and
continue to generate most of the profits.
This chapter comprises an exploration of the aesthetic character of current
modes of spectacle through a closer examination of such mainstream digital
cinema and one of its important correlates: music video. I shall suggest that
both mass cinema and music videos – or, at any rate, the important groupings
within them that concern us here – exemplify, in their rather different ways, a
shift at the visual aesthetic level to formal preoccupations and excitations. That
is, they involve the elevation to prominence within mainstream visual cultural
practices of formal attributes in and for themselves: the prevalence of technique
and image over content and meaning. The kinds of mass cinema and music
video discussed below are primary examples of a distinct space that opened up
within mass visual culture in the last decades of the twentieth century. In this
space (introduced in chapter 3) the chief aesthetic modus operandi involves
102
5
THE WANING OF NARRATIVE
New spectacle cinema and music video
recursive modes of self-reference (both backwards and sideways) to already
existing images and image forms.
The introduction of digital technologies into the production processes of the
forms in question here is enabling the development of this new sense of
formalism, and this is happening in ways that are both complex and diverse. In
particular, different kinds of spectacle are manifest within each of the genres
under discussion – a fact which, to some extent at least, is related to the
different ways the same digital imaging possibilities are aesthetically deployed.
Thus, positive reception of the films of mainstream digital cinema depends as
much on a fascinated spectator, immersed in dazzling and ‘spellbinding’
imagery, as on identification with character and the machinations of plot and
theme. Computer imaging techniques have assumed a central authority in this
new mode or genre. Both directly and indirectly, they are introducing impor-
tant and distinctive registers of illusionist spectacle into the cinema, as evidenced
in such ‘technological thrill’ films as Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), The
Mask (1994), Speed (1994), True Lies (1994), Independence Day (1996),
Starship Troopers (1997) and Titanic (1997) (to name but a few). The modes of
special effect or trucage mapped with such precision by Christian Metz in the
late 1970s are now being stretched and overhauled with the emergence of
digital techniques of image fabrication (see Metz 1977). Currently, the business
of ‘astonishing the senses’, which Metz attributes to the ‘avowed machinations’
of special effects within classical cinema, is mutating. In so doing it threatens to
overwhelm traditional concerns with character and story. In the kind of films at
issue here, elevation of the immediately sensuous constituent vies with our usual
means of entry to symbolic meaning, i.e. narrative. This does not mean that
narrative content or ideological significance disappear in such films (see, for
example, Tasker 1993), rather that this new dimension of visual display is now
so distinctive that it requires recognition and analysis as a formal aesthetic
element in its own right.
Music video shares with digital cinema (and computer animation and TV
advertising – discussed in the previous chapter) the same thrust towards forms
of textual production that are constructed upon an intensification and
augmentation of modes of image combination or montage. In this respect,
however, it is closer to TV advertising, for it is hybridity that defines the char-
acter of music videos at the level of cultural form. This is manifest at the level
of individual texts through the pervasive manner in which tapes freely refer to
and incorporate other styles and types of image, as well as forms and models
from other media. Unlike the cinema, music video manifests its ‘eclecticism’,
its ‘intertextual references’ through a veritable profusion of styles. The digital
cinema tends to mask and contain its rediscovered penchant for montage and
its recurrent recourse to borrowing from and referring to other texts within an
illusionist aesthetic. Music video, on the other hand, does no such thing.
Exultantly and overtly, it displays a diverse array of imagery and styles –
frequently within the same tape. This tendency to capriciously copy, replicate
THE WANING OF NARRATIVE
103
and combine has intensified in music video over the relatively short period in
which it has become established as a cultural form. Clearly, digital imaging
techniques have been greatly enabling to this process. Indeed, they have
begun to contribute new forms of imagery based upon image simulation and
combination, delivering even greater visual intensity to these playful and
ephemeral texts.
Spectacle and the feature film
The notion of spectacle is somewhat difficult to discuss precisely because of its
non-verbal character. Nevertheless, in critical studies of the dominant cinema
institution, centred upon analysis of classical narrative films, attention has most
frequently focused on the ‘tension’ between the narrative dimension and the
visual dimension, that is, between identifying with characters, being absorbed
in a fictional world and following the plot on the one hand, and the pleasures
involved in looking at images on the other. Of course, much of the pleasure of
looking, particularly in the classical Hollywood cinema, is derived from the
striking impression of hidden observation inscribed within its peculiar ‘invis-
ible’ mode of story telling. The satisfying feeling of power involved in looking
in, unobserved, on someone else’s life-world; of being visually close to charac-
ters (even to the extent of seeing through ‘their’ eyes); of surreptitiously
‘entering’ their story space, safe in the knowledge that one won’t be found
out – this is certainly one source of pleasurable looking in the cinema (see
Metz 1976).
However, although this pleasurable looking of the story space or of the
world of the fiction may be predominant in classical Hollywood, it is not the
only way in which looking is mobilised – even there. Within the development of
the cinema it was narrative drama that eventually came to define its classical
(dominant) model, not some other form based on a more sustained ‘exhibition’
of the visual itself. Yet, within the classical mode an array of tensions between
narrative and the visual have been muted. If, ultimately, the spectacular aspect
has always been viewed as subordinate to and in a sense subject to the control
of a repressive narrative logic, this is precisely because spectacle is, in many
respects, the antithesis of narrative. Spectacle effectively halts motivated move-
ment. In its purer state it exists for itself, consisting of images whose main drive
is to dazzle and stimulate the eye (and by extension the other senses). Drained
of meaning, bereft of the weight of fictional progress, the cunning of spectacle
is that it begins and ends with its own artifice; as such, spectacle is simultane-
ously both display and on display.
1
It is variously argued that the visual aspect of narrative cinema is imbued
with the potential to undermine or disrupt the spectator’s primary subordina-
tion to narrative motivation. The sabotage of meaning through the sheer
captivation of powerful images lurks beneath Hollywood’s productions, threat-
ening the cohesion of fictional or diagetic illusion. Most frequently, perhaps,
AESTHETICS
104
this has been argued in relation to the problems posed by images of women in
the films of classical Hollywood (see, for example, Mulvey 1975; Mellencamp
1977). However, it might analogously be argued – though far less specifically –
that a similar propensity, one, moreover, with similar effects, has operated at the
more general level of mise-en-scène itself.
Certainly, the technical virtuosity employed in the production of spectacle
has constantly functioned to halt and disrupt narrative flow and – intentionally
or otherwise – to draw attention both to the image and its fabricated character.
The musicals associated with Busby Berkeley, wherein women are physically
assimilated into the kaleidoscopic mise-en-scène of the lavish and elaborate
camera-choreographed musical numbers, are clear and oft cited instances of
this. Common, if somewhat more subtle examples of the same impulse include
the extraordinary lighting and framing styles that occur in the films of so-called
‘film noir’, or the ‘artificial’ (non-realistic) lighting and colour styling in a film
such as Written on the Wind (1956) – indeed, the peculiarities of visual stylisa-
tion attributed to Hollywood melodrama generally. Similarly, historical films
and biblical epics offer up the possibility for moments involving extravagantly
staged panoramas and displays. Musicals, as already indicated, provide the
chance for interludes or scenes containing highly stylised costumes and set
design.
Undoubtedly, one of the clearest manifestations of this element has occurred
through recourse to special effects.
2
Here, once again, technical expertise
frequently functions to produce, precisely, both spectacle and recognition of
artifice itself. The extraordinary character of such imagery no matter how ‘invis-
ible’ and technically opaque, nevertheless calls attention to itself and to its place
within a particular aesthetic system: it is astonishing both for what it portrays
and for how it does so.
Along with the musical it is in genres such as the horror film, fantasy and
science fiction that earlier forms of spectacle-based entertainments – part of the
tangled heritage of Hollywood – resurface to disturb and trouble the narrative
cause. I am thinking particularly of traditional forms of popular spectacle such
as the circus and the theatre of illusion and magic. For here it is the staged
combination and display of exotic, strange and incredible events, actions,
objects and characters that takes precedence. True, the virtuoso display involved
in the visual effects of horror and fantasy (then as now) operated under the
particular regime of narrative realism that distinguished the Hollywood style
generally. Still, as David Bordwell points out, such acts of ‘[s]howmanship’
entail, ‘to a considerable extent … making the audience appreciate the artifi-
ciality of what is seen’ (see Bordwell et al. 1985: 21). Special effects, particularly
in the more outré of the Hollywood genres, frequently functioned both to
produce astonished looking and to exhibit their own fabricated and conven-
tional character. Indeed, we may surmise that this occurred even when the
spectator remained puzzled as to the precise ways in which a particular image
effect had been produced.
THE WANING OF NARRATIVE
105
New effects, new spectacle
There are limits, however, to the use of overt visual display in Hollywood films
of the studio era. For Bordwell – here discussing classical Hollywood generally,
‘digressions and flashes of virtuosity remain for the most part motivated by narra-
tive causality … or genre. … If spectacle is not so motivated, its function as
artistic motivation will be isolated and intermittent.’ (Bordwell et al. 1985: 21,
my emphasis). Ultimately, what is of overriding importance in the classical
Hollywood film is the spectator’s primary subordination to narrative motiva-
tion. However, in the Hollywood of the late twentieth century, so-called ‘New
Hollywood’ – or a certain section of it to be more precise – this no longer
seemed to be so. The notion of controlling or regulating the tension between
narrative and image, as I have already intimated, has taken on an ever greater
importance with the recent growth of special effects driven films. Indeed,
particularly in recent ‘technological thrill’ films, where heightened forms of
image and movement now figure so prominently, the conception that film
equals narrative, which predominated in the classical era, appears now to have
been all but superseded. No longer ‘isolated and intermittent … digressions or
flashes of virtuosity’, the new digitally licensed visual and action effects have
now become the predominant aesthetic characteristic of such films. As such they
elevate certain of the principles of the classical Hollywood style such as,
‘mimesis, self-effacing craftsmanship and cool control of the perceiver’s
response … ’, whilst at the same time privileging motives of spectacle over those
of narrative (Bordwell et al. 1985: 4).
Of course, these movies are still narrative in form, it is just that the story told
is no longer the principal reason for going to see them.
3
Critics and reviewers
may continue to appraise such films in terms of traditional narrative values such
as depth of character, machinations of plot and narrative coherence. However,
if, as is so often the case, they find them wanting in this regard, then this may
well be because they are attempting to use evaluative categories that do not
apply to the extent they once did. For in such films it is precisely new kinds of
formal concern, tied to the emergent space of intertextuality (introduced in
chapter 3), and centred upon the imaging of action, imagery and imaging itself
that is at the forefront of their aesthetic operation. In this important strand of
New Hollywood, traditional narrative containment of spectacle has crumbled in
a manner that is quite unprecedented.
Spectacle cinema: digital effects
Let us take a closer look at that recent trend in mainstream live action film
production which, from the mid-1980s, has based itself on a resurgence of
special effects techniques: a revitalised resurgence that has been prompted and
underpinned by various developments in digital imaging technologies. I shall
concentrate on the path-finding films The Abyss (1989) and Terminator 2:
AESTHETICS
106
Judgment Day (1991) as well as more developed examples from the canon such
as The Mask (1994), Independence Day (1996) and Starship Troopers (1997).
With respect to these films (and numerous others belonging to the corpus),
it is no exaggeration to say that there is barely a scene between them which, in
one form or another, does not involve special effects techniques in its construc-
tion.
4
Whilst computer imaging techniques are assuming an ever increasing
importance in these new spectacle films, they nevertheless still function as one
element within an integrated battery of visual effects. Having said this, however,
I want to stress that it is the digital element that is introducing an important
new register of illusionist spectacle into such films. Indeed, the increasing
centrality of digital imaging techniques within this kind of film (and increasingly
also within live-action cinema generally) is symptomatic, in a further sense, of
the current shift at the aesthetic level to formal preoccupations and excitations.
Assuming a certain familiarity with the films under discussion I shall tend to
concentrate on specific scenes or extracts, indicating through examination of
specific examples just how and what computer imaging is contributing to this
novel current within mainstream cinema. In this regard, one of the key films is
Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which, more than any before it, helped to consol-
idate the centrality of digital image processes within the mainstream feature
film. It was not just the use of computer assisted effects that this film perfected
and promoted, more significant still was its substantive use of computer gener-
ated imagery. Terminator 2: Judgment Day pointed the way to a new means of
producing a distinctive mode of spectacle involving imagery originated by
computer.
If Terminator 2 finally convinced Hollywood that digital cinema was both
aesthetically feasible and potentially highly lucrative, one of the films pointing
the way to the sheer density of the digital imagery in this and subsequent films
within the corpus was The Abyss – produced a year earlier. Particularly important
here is the only scene in The Abyss to employ computer synthesised imagery.
This is a sequence occurring about halfway through the unfolding drama, it
involves a computer generated ‘alien probe’ – a so-called ‘pseudopod’
consisting of sea water – entering an underwater exploration rig and making
contact with its human crew. The duration of the scene is a mere 5½ minutes of
the film’s overall running time (140 minutes), whilst the total duration of shots
containing computer generated effects is barely 1 minute. Still, it provides one
of the most engaging moments of spectacle in the whole film – no mean feat
when one takes into account that the film itself is crammed from beginning to
end with special visual effects, all of which are calculated for maximum visual
excitation.
‘Photographing’ the impossible
It is worth dwelling for a moment on this example, looking both at what it does
and how it does it, for it is the paradigm for much of what was to follow. What
THE WANING OF NARRATIVE
107
makes this scene so astonishing? It is the way in which the computer has been
used to produce (and to assist in producing) an extraordinary example of what
Metz describes as a ‘perceptible but invisible trucage’ (1977: 664). Specifically,
the computer has been used to produce the effect of photo-realistic representa-
tion in a scene that is conceptually fantastic in character – a scene that could
have no direct correlate in real life.
In this instance the computer was called upon to represent the image of a
fantastic object, a sentient liquid tentacle, an alien probe. Given the serious
dramatic tone and overall realism adopted, this thing had to convince: both in
its visual aspect and behaviour and in the way in which it integrated and
combined with traditional live action (high definition, high fidelity) cine-
matography of settings containing live actors. In order to do this the image
was called upon to achieve a high degree of technical success on three levels of
established cinematic transparency. Thus, despite its fantastic nature, the pseu-
dopod itself had to look and behave in a convincing and credible manner.
This involves surface or descriptive accuracy: naturalism. At the same time as
distinguishing itself as other (alien) in relation to the human characters and
the fictional world, the pseudopod must appear as indistinguishable at the
level of representation, that is to say in its representational effect. It had to
appear to occupy – to be ontologically coextensive with – the same profilmic
space as the human actors. This involved the seamless combining of two
differently realised sets of realistic imagery: of which one is properly analog-
ical, i.e. photographic, the other seemingly photographic, i.e. digital
simulation. Additionally however, it must also integrate, again in a perfectly
seamless manner, into the diegetic dimension: the story space. In order for this
to occur an exceptional amount of pre-planning had to enter into the carefully
orchestrated decoupage that eventually stitches the shots together. Here,
finally, surface accuracy is subordinated to the rather different codes of narra-
tive illusionism.
The eventual goal of such carefully orchestrated editing, coupled with the
high degree of mimetic accuracy of the imagery in the conceptually fantastic
nature of the scene itself is the establishment of a powerful visual illusion:
the visual resemblance of reality – an analogical effect – even in scenes of the
utterly fantastic. It is precisely this effect of impossible photography that
constitutes the dimension of spectacle in the scene. We begin to see very
clearly in this early example one possibility for representational development
that is released when ‘photography’ is cut loose, uncoupled from its physical
ties to phenomenal reality. Of course, the potential for irresistible and aston-
ishing visualisation already apparent in this scene from The Abyss has since
been amply developed, initially in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, subsequently
in films such as Independence Day, The Lost World (1997) and Starship
Troopers.
AESTHETICS
108
Verisimilitude becomes spectacular
Beginning with Terminator 2 subsequent films in the corpus have built upon
the computer synthesised imagery first used so convincingly in The Abyss. This
new modality of mainstream cinema is comprised of films that entail new levels
of ‘technological density’. Often this manifests itself on two levels: in the
subject matter itself, and through means of image construction. Just as signifi-
cant though is the new aesthetic that such films have engendered. Before
looking a little more closely at what this involves I want briefly to say something
about what has taken place in the decade or so since The Abyss was first released.
Whereas photo-realistic computer graphics are used in just the one scene in
the late 1980s film, in Terminator 2, produced only one year later, there are
over forty shots involving computer originated imagery dispersed in scenes
throughout the film. This is because, for the most part, they are used to realise
certain aspects of one of the central protagonists – the extraordinary T-1000
Terminator. At different points in the narrative, T-1000 – a ‘cyborg’ composed
of liquid metal – is required to display transformation into and through
different stages of its physical make-up (i.e. from amorphous blob of liquid
metal to human replica) as well as further facets of its fantastic metamorphosing
and shape-changing abilities. Needless to say, the scenes in which these things
occur are visually rendered with the same photo-realistic accuracy as the scene
in The Abyss, although in other respects this imagery differs in terms of the
increased levels of complexity and sophistication involved.
We need only recall scenes involving this ‘liquid man’ in Terminator 2 in
order to indicate the extraordinary character of the imagery contrived for the
film. About a quarter of the way in, in one of the many scenes involving direct
confrontation between the two Terminator cyborgs – model T-800 (played
Arnold Schwarzenegger) and the new improved model T-1000 (played by
Robert Patrick) – a thrilling chase takes place inside the basin of a concrete
flood canal. The scene culminates in a miraculous escape for the T-800 and the
boy he is trying to protect, when the huge truck driven by the T-1000 speeds
out of control, crashes into a bridge support and bursts into flame. The T-800
departs with his charge, safe from the single-minded determination of the T-
1000 – the scene does not end here however. To crown the breathtaking
spectacle, to which the viewer has already surrendered him/herself, computer
generated imaging now comes to the fore. Out of the conflagration and striding
towards the camera as it slowly pans left is a shining metallic figure. As it nears
the camera the spectator sees it slowly metamorphosing from a featureless metal
humanoid into the form and features of the actor playing the role of the T-
1000 patrol cop.
At a point later in the film, the malevolent liquid-metal cyborg is at large in a
mental hospital intent on pursuing its victim by capturing the latter’s incarcer-
ated mother. During yet another sustained action sequence in which the viewer
watches with incredulous fascination this evil Terminator transforming itself
THE WANING OF NARRATIVE
109
into both objects and people in its dogged and terrifying attempt to complete
its mission, an event occurs that is even more astonishing than anything that has
occurred in the sequence thus far. Spotting its victim in a small group of people
behind a locked, metal-barred gate at the end of a long hospital corridor, the
Terminator – transformed once again into its cop disguise – strides purposefully
down the corridor towards him. From the victim’s point of view and in close-up
we watch the cyborg approach the gate, pause momentarily then, still staring
intently ahead at its victim, it moves forward. As it does so, the bars begin to
pass through its face, head and shoulders (the only parts of its body that are in
shot). As if composed of a heavy liquid such as mercury the T-1000’s body
allows the bars to pass through it, only to reform and reconstitute itself as its
passage through them progresses. Needless to say, this event – digitally fabri-
cated – is represented with an extraordinary degree of photo-realistic accuracy.
The shots depicted in these scenes are in close-up and medium close-up, and
they are graphically displayed within the shot, rather than disguised or merely
suggested in some way by editing.
Terminator 2 exhibited unprecedented levels of verisimilitude in its avowed
intent to marry convincingly digitally manufactured animated figures with live
action (analogue) imagery – perfecting and elaborating techniques first realised
in The Abyss. Other films since have used the techniques perfected in these films
to create further examples of such impossible photography. In films such as
Jurassic Park, Independence Day and Starship Troopers, for example, such tech-
niques are used in scenarios which, though involving high (if varying) degrees
of fantasy, similarly aim for a measure of classical realism in their overall affect.
These films revolve around scenes of fantastic spectacle involving photographic
mimesis, for example, a sequence in which a colossal alien spacecraft looms over
the Empire State Building and then proceeds to totally obliterate it
(Independence Day); scenes in which Tyrannosauri and other prehistoric animals
run wild in both natural and human habitats (Jurassic Park); and shots of a sea
of insect-like aliens swarming into attack or seen in ferocious and bloody indi-
vidual combat with human soldiers (Starship Troopers).
Once again, these scenes are spectacular as much for their sheer transparency
– the convincing way in which they render images of such fantastic events – as
for the events themselves. They simulate photography of the fantastic, offering
us the semblance of a moving photographic image of the impossible. In other
words, these digitally rendered images seem real, they appear to have the same
indexical qualities as the images of the live action characters and sets with which
they are integrated. This is particularly pronounced in scenes that involve a
certain intimacy in terms of point of view. Thus the increasing perfection of
computer image synthesis and the ability – again via digital techniques – to
seamlessly marry what would previously have been impossibly complex move-
ments and actions, has enabled startling effects to enter the realm of the
close-up.
5
I do not want to deny the other dimensions of these and like images,
the way they represent and the questions of what they denote and connote.
AESTHETICS
110
However, I am concerned to emphasise as the dominant aesthetic feature this
game with spectacular illusion that is taking place in the films of the new spec-
tacle cinema.
The live action basis of such films has become more and more saturated in
its artifice with computer image synthesis and with a host of other special visual
effect techniques (many of which ultimately depend upon computer assistance
for their success). In terms of the tonalities of spectacle involved, it is possible
to make a broad distinction between the uses to which different kinds of effects
techniques are put. Thus computer image synthesis can be grouped with
animatronics, puppetry, make-ups and prosthetics, whilst the other group
includes techniques involving models and miniatures, special sets and mock-
ups, pyrotechnics and so forth. The former are utilised much of the time –
either in conjunction or immediate juxtaposition – to produce photo-realistic
imagery (usually of the most bizarre nature) that involves close-ups and
medium close-ups, in scenes involving a relatively ‘intimate’ relation to live
protagonists. The latter are more frequently used in scenes of epic or larger
scale actions: that is, in sequences which also involve the use of long and
panoramic shots.
Such scenes – at least by comparison to those involving the first group – are
less bizarre, and may be viewed as attempts to produce highly exaggerated or
rhetorical sequences which, all the same, are designed to display a kind of natu-
ralism associated, ultimately, with documentary imagery (the Lumière
tradition). The scenes associated with the first group on the other hand, whilst
striving for analogical or mimetic accuracy, nevertheless represent characters,
actions and phenomena that are thoroughly impossible (Méliès). Whatever the
nature of the spectacle, however, and of course there are degrees and hybrid
conjunctions of both (cf. The Lost World, Independence Day and Starship
Troopers), then travelling mattes, motion control, blue or green screen and
optical composites – the transparent cement of such seamless image combina-
tion – are definitively associated with the production of both.
A film such as The Mask on the other hand represents another strand of the
corpus. It deploys techniques of computer image synthesis to rather different
ends: humour and pastiche are central to this film. Ultimately, however, the
digital techniques lead to a similar effect. Instead of using the computer to
simulate live action cinematography, The Mask uses it to introduce techniques of
graphic exaggeration such as ‘squashing and stretching’ – aesthetic techniques
of the classical two-dimensional cartoon – into the ‘three-dimensional photo-
reality’ of live action film. This produces extraordinary (and paradoxical)
imagery whereby corporeality and verisimilitude gets injected into the graphic
hyperbole of the cartoon aesthetic: impossible photography – yet of a different
stamp. For here it is as if, inconceivably, the bizarre characters and worlds of
Tex Avery cartoons and the comic strip hero have, in some kind of grotesque
transmutation, come to life and been acted out before the camera lens.
THE WANING OF NARRATIVE
111
Sutured excess: the paradoxical effect
With these examples in view let me return to my claim that films such as these
represent something of a shift relative to traditional mainstream film aesthetics.
This turns upon a kind of surfeit or superfluity that is directly related to the
technological density of the imagery itself. The spectacle involved here does not
just depend upon the extraordinary, outlandish, exotic and epic character of the
events portrayed. In addition we must take into account the naturalism with
which they are rendered, their indistinguishability from photo-reality: in terms
of the way they look or appear and the undetectable way they are assimilated
into shots and the narrative as a whole.
These films demonstrate that efforts to produce ‘live action’ cinema by
means other than photographic recording are proceeding apace. At the
moment, however, given the remaining limitations of the technology, this
‘drive’ has to be content with an increasingly complex, seamless integration or
blending of computer and other visual effects within live-action based scenarios
that are baroque and outlandish. And the possibility of their undetectable inte-
gration into an ‘ordinary’ mise-en-scène grows with the advances which follow
each new production of the former kind. We need only recall here the porten-
tous aerial shots in Titanic (1997) – shots that operate as if taken from a
helicopter flying around the boat. For example, movement from an image of
the boat speeding over the ocean towards the viewer then up and above the
ship’s prow, or sweeping over the whole length of the boat itself, revealing as it
does so the ship’s architecture and passenger life in astonishing detail.
6
At the same time such films throw into relief a peculiar form of reception,
encouraging an engagement with illusionistic image texts that operates no
longer solely through traditional modes of interpellation, i.e. the ‘willing
suspension of disbelief’, identification (with both camera and character),
absorption in the fictional, though meaningful, world. Pleasure and gratification
can now involve a different positioning: a knowing fascination with the play of
intertextual reference and – at the same time as surrendering to the sensational
delights of image and action – with the analogical perfection and spectacular
application of such referentially uncoupled imagery itself. Imagery which,
despite its seamlessness and its perfect illusionism, nevertheless offers itself for a
kind of perceptual play with its own materiality and the artifice behind its fabri-
cation. The signifier itself is here accorded as much weight as the signified.
One feels compelled to ask – and attempt to answer – what, more precisely, it
is that constitutes such films as texts of realist or illusionist spectacle. In relation
to cinema history, it would appear to be the so-called ‘trick-film’, first associated
with director (and former conjurer/illusionist) George Méliès that introduced
this tradition of visual ‘magic’ or illusion into the cinema. However, if there is a
direct line leading back to Méliès and the trick film in the new digital effects
spectaculars, there are echoes just as strong coming from other (opposing)
directions. Ultimately, perhaps we have to view these new kinds of text as
AESTHETICS
112
hybrids. Thus they evince both the potential for the ‘marvellous’ – which Méliès
first saw and developed in special ‘trick’ effects – whilst, at the same time,
displaying an overriding commitment to the dominant and ‘naturalised’ cine-
matic tradition which involves, to use Burch’s expression, ‘the Recreation of
Reality’ (1990: 6).
Indeed, it seems appropriate at this point to introduce the notion of surfeit
or excess. Kristin Thompson (1981: 287–302) introduces a notion of cinematic
excess, in her response to writing on the subject by Roland Barthes and Stephen
Heath.
7
In this interpretation, excess is understood as a dimension of cinematic
textuality that exists in all films. It revolves around both the physicality and the
fabricated nature of films themselves: excess is comprised of all those diverse
elements in a film that escape its unifying structures: unmotivated stylistic
elements, indeed, everything which is extra to narrative function on the visual
(and audio) plane. At the level of the image (though not only at this level, of
course), classical narrative film has striven – for the most part – to deflect the
spectator’s attention away from such aspects as these, precisely through modes
of address or reading that privilege concentration upon thoroughly motivated
diageses. Those aspects of the cinematic text to which Barthes draws our atten-
tion relate to the superfluous, the chance, the incidental, that is, precisely to the
non-motivated actions and appearances in various forms and combinations of
actors, make-up, props, costumes, sets, locations and the like. Although these
elements are present in classical Hollywood, they nevertheless tend to escape
our attention – or, at best, only touch it, tantalisingly and fleetingly – because of
the coercion of motivation that its particular form of narrative causality involves
(see Barthes 1977). However, as Thompson says, ‘the minute a viewer begins
to notice style for its own sake or watch works that do not provide such thor-
ough motivation, excess comes forward and must affect narrative meaning’
(1981: 290).
Describing the operation of excess, Thompson says ‘the material provides a
perceptual play by inviting the spectator to linger over devices longer than their
structural function would seem to warrant’ (1981: 292). It seems that some-
thing not altogether dissimilar is occurring in the corpus of films under
discussion here. By comparison with classical narrative, the sheer density, rich-
ness and dazzling character of the visual perceptual field in such films is far
greater, the propensity for excessive detail correspondingly higher. As I have
already indicated, such films represent a renovation and intensification of the
potentially disruptive power of spectacle within narrative. The contradiction –
ever present in special effects – between knowing that one is being tricked and
still submitting to the illusory effect is operative here. Yet, particularly (though
certainly not solely) in those scenes involving computer imaging discussed here,
the more photographically perfect or convincing the images, the more – para-
doxically – does their sutured and suturing aspect seem to recede and their
fabricated character come to the fore. In these moments of heightened spectacle
(within films that are already spectacular), the sheer perfection of the simulation
THE WANING OF NARRATIVE
113
encourages a curiosity or fascination with the materiality and mechanics (arti-
fice) of the image itself, which tends to wrest it even further from narrative
subordination. Indeed, because of the new imaging capabilities of the
computer, increasingly this takes place in sequences that are more intimately
integrated than ever before into the diagetic action itself. The tension between
narrative and spectacle occurs, not only as segments of narrative redundancy,
but also and increasingly in scenes that are part of the diagetic thrust. The
‘pseudopod’ scene in The Abyss is a case in point, though in recent examples
such as Starship Troopers this occurs throughout – becoming relentless.
Trickery – the duplicitous character of the image – along with its status and
operation as such, is no longer subordinated to narrative function. Fascination
with the synthesis of visual illusions is one further symptom of the intense self-
referentiality that now defines most forms of mediation. Now, the references of
images are as likely to be other images (of other images) as first-order attempts
at direct representation. However, the extraordinary lengths to which those
involved in this kind of film production go in order to achieve illusionism or
transparency in moving images is in inverse proportion to the spectator’s
incredulity. And the latter’s curiosity as to how it was done is akin to that
evoked by the spectacle involved in aspects of stage magic. This fascination
involves a focus on details: elements of particular sequences, actions and images,
which, even when they are part of the diagetic momentum, nevertheless vie
with the latter for the perceptual attentions of the spectator.
Ultimately, of course, one has to wonder whether or not the intense forms of
spectacle present within these ‘technological thrillers’ are strictly of a piece with
the ‘unmotivated’, ‘non-unifying’ or strictly ‘non-functional’ elements that
Thompson discusses as excess: concerned, as she is, primarily with a film that
exists outside of the aesthetic conventions of the dominant film institution. My
concern though, is the homologous way in which the spectacular scenes under
discussion might be said to signal, in a manner similar to excess in Thompson’s
sense, the emergence and promotion of new developments in mass entertain-
ment forms; that is to say, shifts at the level both of production and
consumption that are displacing traditional concentration on narrative form and
understanding. The growth of spectacle, and the fascination with image as
image, in the sense both of visual excitation and technological density (artifice),
is one indication that attention to formal facets – means and pure perceptual
play – are finding a place within mass entertainment forms. One might then
wonder – strange though this may seem – whether popular films such as the
ones under discussion here, thereby share something in common with experi-
mental or avant-gardist films that also downplay or even oppose narrative. The
differences, however, revolve around the ways in which the excessive is fore-
grounded in each mode. For if it is the materiality of film (grain, focus, splices
and so on), and/or the formal characteristics of the image (colour, tone, move-
ment, etc.) that is concentrated upon in the one, in the other, it is spectacle –
the image – itself enabled by techniques such as computer image synthesis
AESTHETICS
114
which, paradoxically, attempt precisely the opposite, that is, the dissembling or
covering up of those features foregrounded in the former. And this in order to
produce a realism that is more transparent than ever before, a realism
committed to the illusionistic representation of the impossible: a super-realism
given over to rendering the fantastic with the surface accuracy associated with
photography.
The mimetic accuracy and the seamless character of the computer synthe-
sised imagery discussed above is in keeping with the illusionist aesthetic that
predominates within New Hollywood generally. This illusionism, however – and
this is particularly obvious with regard to scenes that involve computer image
synthesis – is somewhat like the Eisensteinian artifice that Barthes describes: ‘at
once falsification of itself – pastiche and derisory fetish, since it shows its fissure
and its suture …’ (Barthes 1977: 58). In the films in question here it is the
bizarre nature of the imagery, rendered so faithfully, that similarly denies and
simultaneously points to the highly sophisticated artifice involved in its produc-
tion. It is both the bizarre and impossible nature of that which is represented
and its thoroughly analogical character (simulation of the photographic), that
fascinates, produces in the viewer a ‘double-take’ and makes him or her want to
see it again, both to wonder at its portrayal and to wonder about ‘just how it
was done’.
8
When the computer becomes capable of rendering imagery of ‘the
everyday world’ with the same degree of mimesis and transparency to that it is
presently achieving with respect to the ‘wonderful, chimeric and monstrous’,
then we may well wonder what the resulting confusion between the indexical
and non-indexical image will have on spectatorship and representation. For
the moment though, the computer generated and assisted scenes of the new
blockbuster cinema, are producing new registers of displayed virtuosity and
formal engagement.
Music video: spectacle as style
Since the early 1980s music video has been firmly established as a significant
cultural form: the latest addition to the pop music industry’s perennial concern
with ‘the image’ and images (see Goodwin 1987a). Music video brings together
and combines music, music performance and, in various ways, a host of other
audiovisual forms, styles, genres and devices associated with theatre, art,
cinema, dance, fashion, television and advertising. Some of these have always
been associated either directly or indirectly with pop, others have a more recent
association. However, in music video these elements appear to combine with
recorded music and musical performance in a new and distinctive way (see
Wollen 1988). In this sense music videos are one of the most thoroughgoing
forms of that dimension of contemporary visual culture that rests on an
aesthetic of displayed intertextuality (see chapter 3). The definitive hybrid char-
acter of music video is manifest at the level of individual text through the
THE WANING OF NARRATIVE
115
pervasive manner in which tapes appropriate and incorporate images, styles and
conventions from other types of image and image form. Music video is impli-
cated in a process of mutation involving the breaking down and redefinition of
conventional boundaries (see, for example, Aufderheide 1986; Goodwin
1987b; Kaplan 1987; Wollen 1988).
One important enabling factor in this process is digital imaging. Indeed, the
use of different computer imaging techniques has existed within music video
production since the early 1980s and their use and significance has grown
enormously within the form since then. They have been a central factor in the
thrust towards the production of tapes that are constructed upon an intensifi-
cation of modes of combination or montage of different kinds, styles and forms
of imagery. This has resulted in an aesthetic that, whilst continuous with the
cult of the image, surface and sensation characteristic of digital visual culture
generally, has, nevertheless, produced its own distinctive miscellany of loose
groupings, models and tokens. What, for the most part, these share in
common is a propensity to frustrate attempts at categorisation along traditional
lines. Thus asking whether a particular tape is illusionist or anti-illusionist,
realist or anti-realist and so forth tends to be rendered meaningless, primarily
because these texts are so thoroughly self-referential. That is to say, because
their primary reference is already existing media models, image forms, circu-
lating star discourses, and so forth, they largely escape a referential or
representational logic.
9
Furthermore, music videos make little or no pretence
at hiding their eclectic media saturated dependence on other forms. They are
definitively and conspicuously about image: about creating an image for a
sound, a performer or performers, and (as often as not) for a performance. The
self-reflexivity of music videos stands in marked contrast to that of spectacle
cinema. Narrative is even less important to their make-up, whilst ‘laying bare
the device’ is no longer an indirect outcome of a fetishistic concern with the
fabrication of surface accuracy, rather a (largely undeclared) principle of
production.
I will concentrate in the following brief discussion on three ‘classics’ of the
genre: Neneh Cherry’s Manchild (1989) and Michael Jackson’s Black or White
(1992) and Ghosts (1996). With respect to digital imaging these tapes display
something of the rapid technical developments that have taken place
throughout the short period they cover. In aesthetic terms, each exemplifies –
albeit in an exaggerated manner – some of the particular (and familiar) direc-
tions taken by the music video in its ‘eclectic’, ‘combinatory’ and ‘intertextual’
pursuits. Thus, Manchild is an early example of a peculiarly decorative mode of
neo-spectacle that has become a constant of the music video genre or form.
Black and White is a prominent instance of the conspicuous formal hetero-
geneity that music promos frequently display. Whilst Ghosts – which takes
horror fiction film and associated special effects techniques as its object of
formal play – manifests yet another aspect of such undisguised or knowing
borrowing.
AESTHETICS
116
Style: the decorative image
The setting for the action/performance in the music video Manchild is highly
contrived: a flat, sandy beach on which, in the middle ground, is a clothesline
with a few items of washing. A film of water (a patently superimposed element)
covers the surface of the beach reflecting the clothes and washing line. The sky
is a saturated blue with wispy white clouds and tints of purple. The sea and sky
– with the same breakers constantly rolling in and the same cloud pattern
drifting across the screen – is on a cycle: it is the same piece of film repeated
over and over again for the duration of the text. The sea itself is tinted an
unnatural electric turquoise. This patently artificial set or ‘stage’ is itself a
composite: the film of water covering the beach and the clothes line have been
superimposed over the treated and cycled footage of the beach, sea and sky.
Against this backdrop we see the performing figure of Neneh Cherry who,
most of the time, is on screen miming to the song. It is the way both Cherry’s
performance and the actions of the other figures – another woman, two chil-
dren (a boy and a girl) and two male youths – are represented that makes the
greatest contribution to the novelty of the visual aspect of the tape. There are
several features to this: the sea-sawing motion of the whole setting within the
fixed frame, such that the horizontal of the horizon (where sea meets sky)
swings continuously and rhythmically approximately 40º with each up and
down movement. The choreographed layering of the actions of characters over
the initial composite set and over each other, such that on occasions one and
the same character appears on the screen at the same time, performing the same
or different actions on the same or different depth planes. The use of off-screen
space and the frame edge to produce novelty and surprise in terms of when,
where and how figures and their actions are introduced – in particular in terms
of distance from the camera, that is, whether in extreme close-up, medium or
long shot. Finally, one must mention the look of the figures themselves – their
make-up, the mannered style and colour of their dress.
New techniques of image production and manipulation are here employed to
effect innovative ways of visualising musicality. In other words, the velocity and
rhythm of image combination, layered cycles and repetitions (reiterated and
varied) is determined by the song’s structure and by formal elements such as
melody, beat and tempo. The complex patterning thus produced tends to
engage not at the level of representation (and signification), but rather at the
level of abstract, formal play. It is the syntactic and ornamental rather than
the semantic and referential that predominate here. Indeed, this is reinforced by
the fact that the instrumental musical accompaniment to the singing always
takes place off screen (i.e. as ‘non-diegetic’ sound ‘off’), never becoming part of
Cherry’s visual performance. This only serves to reinforce the concern with
‘image’, both in the sense of visual impressions and stimuli, and the representa-
tion of a public persona. If depth exists in this text, then it does so principally as
a visual trope in its overall visual economy. The visual style, characterised by the
THE WANING OF NARRATIVE
117
artificiality of the setting and its unnatural pastel colours, the affectation and/or
chic modishness of the costumes, and the posing of the figures, is ultimately
decorative – flash and filigree.
Given this foregrounding of the visual and the demotion of representational
meaning as traditionally conceived (i.e. realism, narrative), it would appear that
extra-textual factors come into play to a significant degree here. The visual
dimension is opened up not so much to representation, more to identification
with the feelings (mood, affect) produced by a certain sound – ‘Neneh Cherry’
– and the style and aura attached to her circulating star persona (see Figure 5.1).
There is more, however, for Manchild belongs to a particular corpus of
(loosely) related music tapes in which certain features are preponderant at the
level of the image.
10
The defining characteristic of this trend turns upon the use
of multiple image overlays and repetitions. Frequently this involves utilisation of
the same imagery at different depth planes: the repeated and ‘depth-cued’ recy-
cling of the action of figures and objects within the scene. It is not the signified,
in terms of a representational or narrative logic, but the disport of signifiers that
forms the dominant and perhaps defining aesthetic feature of this ‘sub-genre’.
What this particular playful manipulation of the image depends upon, of course,
is the greater ease afforded to the production of such effects by the integration
AESTHETICS
118
Figure 5.1 Stills sequence from the music video Manchild by Neneh Cherry (1989)
Source: Courtesy of Virgin Records Ltd.
of the digital computer into video production and post-production technolo-
gies. As commentators have already pointed out, the result is an aesthetic based
upon dense and complex forms of spectacular, playful and rococoesque image
effects.
11
Such texts are designed to encourage multiple viewing on the part of
the spectator, the formal tropes and devices, and the mise-en-scène produced
being just too elaborate to apprehend in a single screening (see, for example,
Hayward 1991a).
It is important to note here how far this aesthetic – though enabled and
encouraged by many of the same fundamental digital imaging techniques –
nevertheless deviates sharply from the kind of ‘astonishing of the senses’
involved in the attempted synthesis of what I have called ‘the impossible photo-
graph’. Although there is undoubtedly a sense in which a video such as
Manchild might also be said to display a certain newness at the level of visual
aesthetics, it does so in a very different way to, say, the eagle trope in the advert
Reflections (see chapter 4), the dinosaurs in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, or the
Titanic in Titanic.
Utilisation of (many of) the same techniques could not have resulted in
forms that are more diverse. For here we have texts that foreground technique
not through the fabrication of impossible illusion, but through perfected forms
of conspicuous image juxtaposition and re-cycling. Of interest here is the way in
which the computer provides for the complex choreography of multiple image
overlaying, re-cycling and mixing, thereby enabling the emergence of an
aesthetic that involves a kind of intra-textuality. Indeed, it seems that a central
element of the ‘sub-genre’ or cycle of which Manchild is but one example, is
the way in which the technique involved produces a kind of involution. Thus,
from a limited number of original images, stylistic features and actions, a text is
constructed or organised through their continual and varied recombination
(layering and cyclic repetition). The slightly varied and potentially endless or
recursive play of reiterated and repeated actions and motifs within the visual
channel is itself reminiscent of the kind of regulated musical variation that typi-
fies pop music generally.
The trend or cycle represented by Manchild is not by any means the only way
in which the computer is enabling novel developments within the music video
form. I end this chapter with a short discussion of two further examples, both
of which are similar to Manchild in terms of their visual compulsion, yet each in
its own way is very different in its aesthetic character. Black or White and Ghosts
both contain strong extra-textual references to media myths about their
featured performer, Michael Jackson – myths that were prominent in subsidiary
modes of circulation at the time each of the tapes was released. It is not this
aspect of these videos, fascinating and significant though it may be, that is of
primary interest here, however. Rather, I am concerned to look at the aesthetic
form of these tapes with an eye primarily on their potent visual efficacy.
THE WANING OF NARRATIVE
119
Formal heterogeneity: ‘montage of attractions’
Like myriad other music videos, only more so, the image track of Black or White
is formally heterogeneous: made up of a variety of forms and approaches
involving different kinds of live action, animation, video and digital technique.
Narrative fiction, documentary (archive footage) and various forms of staged
performance, coexist with cartoon animation, three-dimensional animation, as
well as new digital techniques that blur established categorical and conventional
distinctions. This use of different techniques and forms produces a text
involving a veritable profusion not only of kinds of image but also of kinds of
image combination.
Thus, taking the latter first, there are seamless, digitally engineered dissolves
such as that which freezes dancing live action figures, and, without a cut, fixes
them as dolls inside a toy ornament. There is a long, spectacular travelling take
which opens the tape – again produced by digital means: a seemingly unbroken
first-person point of view zoom from flight high above the clouds to entry into
a suburban home. In the scenario inside the home itself, narrative editing of a
classical kind is used. Yet, at the same time, in-frame compositing is a distinctive
feature, for example, in the Statue of Liberty sequence, where both the back-
ground and the dancing Jackson are matted in, or in the scene of the
singing/performing Jackson superimposed over archival footage of burning
crosses and similar imagery. Whilst, as a final example – and at the time the
most striking kind of image combination of all – there is the digitally engi-
neered transformation scenes, where extreme head and shoulder close-ups of
singing faces metamorphose into different people and Jackson changes into a
panther. Add to the above the fact that the shifts between the major scenes or
segments of the tape itself produce similarly conflicting or conspicuous juxtapo-
sitions, and the overall sense is one of fragmentation and diversity at the level of
the image channel. The tape as a whole is distinctly non-narrative in its
decoupage, and, if anything, is more akin to the editing style associated with the
more radical tendencies of avant-garde cinema. There is a continual displace-
ment of time and space that contrasts markedly with the verisimilitude and
continuity of classical audiovisual forms.
The main scenes are only partially unified by the music track with its
intended themes of children, multicultural and multi-racial globalism and the
performing presence of Jackson himself, for there is much that exceeds this. The
inordinate formal density of the tape and the hybridisation of (previously)
incongruent styles and conventions involved, is produced by an allusive inter-
textual play arising from a mélange of different techniques and their attendant
forms and visual styles. Thus, the suburban street we fly down at the beginning
is reminiscent of the then recent film, Edward Scissorhands (1991), and the
family drama that precedes the song alludes to both the TV sitcom and the soap
opera. Throughout, the tape incorporates different forms, genres and styles,
and there are references and allusions to other kinds of text. These range from
AESTHETICS
120
the nature and anthropological documentary, through advertising and the
musical, to – in the dance performance scene at the end – film noir, horror
(indirectly – Nightmare on Elm Street) and cartoons (directly – The Simpsons).
Of course, all of the above entails, as well, a complex diversity of visual styles:
a rich and clashing weave of pattern, shape, texture, of setting, costume, action
and colour. All of which adds to the impression of contrast and conflict at the
formal level. Indeed, the tape calls to mind the idea of the extravaganza and a
notion coined by Eisenstein to describe his first experiments in the theatre, a
kind of ‘montage of attractions’. The senses are assaulted with a profusion of
incongruent images, styles and conventions, meanings partially emerge and are
cancelled or replaced by different ones, or are overtaken by the distractions and
fascination offered up by the simultaneously complex and fleeting character of
the imagery itself.
And yet, despite all this, there is a definite thread of unity here. It is carried
by Jackson’s performance, the song itself, and the attempt to tie the whole
together via return at the end to the family context: a direct mirroring of the
introductory scene, only this time it is a cartoon father (Homer Simpson) who
is attempting to impose his distaste for Michael Jackson’s music upon his son.
In terms of form, therefore, it would be incorrect to attempt to associate Black
or White too closely with either modernist avant-gardism or popular realism. It
is, rather, a complex hybrid, displaying formal and stylistic features that are
characteristic of both, but ultimately producing an overall impression which is
very different to either.
Perhaps the most engaging facet of this visual extravaganza – indeed, at the
time it was its newest attraction – are image sequences produced by what was
then a recently perfected technique of digital imaging called ‘morphing’. This is
a technique that enables the on-screen metamorphosis of one live action figure
into another. Black or White used this to striking effect, producing further
distinctive examples of what I have referred to as ‘impossible photography’.
Thus we witness a ‘simulated recording’ – a ‘live action photograph’ – of
someone changing into a panther, and an extraordinary sequence in which live
action head and shoulder shots of people of different races and sexes metamor-
phose in real time one into the other whilst miming to the title song. If the
novelty of this image effect already calls attention to itself as such, then the
context in which it appears sanctions its use as a further instance of visual
enticement.
Spectacle of a third order
By the time of the later promo – Ghosts – special effects are no longer just a
means to spectacle. This visually arresting video is about special effects: trick
effects are now essential to the ‘self-reflexive’, mannered character of the work
itself. Using the horror genre as an entry point, the tape revolves around a kind
of playful exposition of the fabrication of spectacle which then becomes a self-
THE WANING OF NARRATIVE
121
conscious or second-order form of spectacle in its own right. Ghosts implements
and promotes the fabrication and operation of spectacle, whilst simultaneously
disclosing it.
Ghosts is a veritable compendium of the history of cinematic trick effects.
Indeed, for the most part the allusions are so direct that one can pinpoint the
individual films in which they first occurred. Thus, the scene in which the
ghosts walk up walls and dance on the ceiling is a latter-day elaboration of a
trick that was first seen in films such as The Ingenious Soubrette (1902) (see
Burch 1990: 228). Méliès’ pioneering film The Indiarubber Head (1901) – the
Terminator 2 of its era – is clearly apparent in a scene where the unsuspecting
and relieved mayor opens the door to leave and is confronted by a giant head
filling the whole of the doorframe. In another sequence, one of the latest
modes of computer animation, so-called ‘motion-capture’, is used to simulate a
skeleton performing in the particular dancing style of Michael Jackson. Once
again, there is an inescapable comparison to be made here with the Fleischer
Brothers’ cartoon Snow White (1933), which itself includes an arresting dance
sequence involving their character, Ko-Ko the clown, metamorphosing into a
long-legged ‘strutting’ spook.
12
The dance movement in this sequence is that
of the jazz singer Cab Calloway and it was produced using the rotoscope tech-
nique, itself a direct forerunner of motion-capture.
13
Of course, the illusionism
in the Ghosts sequence is far more convincing – following the drive to photo-
graphic perfection, it involves live action, three-dimensionality and the camera
moving freely around the dancing figure. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which
ultimately the effect is the same: a highly individual dancing style is transposed
to a most unlikely recipient. More recent allusions include the sequences
depicting the creation of the ghosts from ‘ectoplasm’, which are directly
rendered using the techniques of computer image generation first developed in
The Abyss (see pp. 106–7). New, so-called morphing techniques, used to such
great effect in Black or White, and later in such films as The Mask and
Terminator 2, figure prominently, alongside and in conjunction with the stun-
ning use of prosthetic techniques, themselves so important to the history of the
horror genre.
So convincing is the use of prosthetics here that one is completely
confounded when one of the central characters – the mayor – a ‘straight’
middle-aged, large-built man, wearing a grey suit and spectacles is ‘possessed’
and begins to dance in Jackson’s inimitable style. Only in the remarkable credit
sequence that ends the tape does the viewer discover that the mayor was played
all along by Michael Jackson himself. Indeed, this final sequence is absolutely
indispensable to the aesthetic import of the tape as a whole. For, as the title
song is replayed the credits role over scenes that systematically expose the ways
in which the illusions and tricks seen in the tape itself were fabricated and
achieved. Thus we are given direct access to the production process itself:
alongside shots displaying the use of the blue screen stage, and the use of
motion-capture, are sequences showing the laborious work involved in building
AESTHETICS
122
the various prosthetics for the characters Jackson plays. Intercut with each of
these is a repeated sequence from the scene in the tape in which they are
employed.
In the true tradition of ‘distantiation’ and ‘laying bare the device’, Ghosts not
only plays parodically with a currently dominant mode of representation – in
this instance, spectacle cinema – it also exposes the fabricated character both of
its own fabulous effects and, by implication, those of others in the genres to
which it refers. However, the peculiarity here is that this work is primarily about
nothing other than signifiers: a ‘star image’, image as image and the means of
fabrication. Reference to anything beyond image – ‘representation’ in an earlier
sense – has definitively disappeared. In this respect, Ghosts is more than just an
exemplary instance of neo-spectacle and surface play within music video: it
seems somehow emblematic of the whole aesthetic ordering discussed both in
this chapter and the one that precedes it – the perfect ensign for the so-called
‘age of the signifier’.
THE WANING OF NARRATIVE
123
connotations of wealth and security, or the fact that each scenario stands as a specific
instance of a larger (and insurable) realm.
9 It is virtually impossible for the untrained eye to detect the quite phenomenal
amount of fabrication involved in these scenes, even when they are viewed on a frame
by frame basis, so seamless is the work of combining and retouching involved.
10 The most stunning, perhaps, involves the moment when a woman fires a gun at her
accomplice/lover, and the whole image – with the exception of the bullet itself –
freezes. The camera tracks with the bullet, travelling in slow motion, to its moment
of impact with a bottle of Smirnoff. At which point, normal speed is resumed and the
bottle – viewed in close-up – smashes spectacularly.
11 I am think here of a dazzling black and white advertisement for the Saab 9000,
appearing on screens in Europe at the time of writing. Such impossible zooms have
become a standard trope, particularly within advertising and music video (see, for
example, Abbey National’s ad ‘Changes’ and the Michael Jackson video Black or
White). See also Gitlin 1986: 136–61.
5 THE WANING OF NARRATIVE: NEW SPECTACLE IN CINEMA
AND MUSIC VIDEO
1 I do not want to argue that spectacle fails to signify in such films, only that its special
or excessive quality as imagery is what takes precedence. It is the dual focus on sensa-
tion and artifice that defines spectacle. The experiential character of spectacle tends
to displace, demote (or, perhaps, delay), concern with meaning-making in its tradi-
tional senses, substituting instead the immediacy of wonderment at what is shown
and, frequently, at how it was possible. For a critical approach to spectacle that is
primarily concerned with content or meanings see, Tasker (1993).
2 Indeed, Steve Neale (1990) has argued as much. Drawing on the work of Metz,
Neale operates with the psychoanalytic concept of ‘disavowal’, thereby producing an
argument which, in significant respects, is closely related to that of Mulvey.
3 ‘Narrative image’, in the sense defined by Ellis (1982), is still the fulcrum of those
multiple modes of subsidiary circulation which revolve around the cinema’s highly
developed marketing strategies. Only now, particularly with the technological block-
busters, ‘the promise’ purveyed is just as likely to rest upon an indication or
reassurance of the centrality of certain visual pyrotechnics and the portrayal of stun-
ning actions as it is traditional story enigmas.
4 The thing that unifies the texts of these blockbuster films is that they are avowedly
effects driven. This in itself, however, hardly seems to be enough to qualify them as
constituting a genre. This is further reinforced by their tendency to cut across
previous genres and the frequency with which they consist of a mélange of refer-
ences, pastiche and allusions to a host of prior film kinds.
5 I should also point out that I am tending to emphasise one dimension of the spectac-
ular character of such films here. The other dimension is that of action: these films all
involve periods of sustained and fast-paced action sequences (some – Speed, for
example – are relentless in this respect).
6 An intriguing forerunner of such simulacra is the film Zelig (1983).
7 Thompson refers specifically to the following essays: Heath (1975) and Barthes (1977).
8 An excellent if somewhat obvious example of this is the well known sequence in the
film True Lies (1994) involving shots of a Harrier Jump Jet above a city street and
depicting events and actions of ludicrous impossibility.
9 So too do most of the other expressions of visual digital culture at the centre of this
book. It is just that this is, perhaps, more immediately apparent in the case of music
video.
NOTES
202
10 Other examples include Mike Oldfield – Tubular Bells 11; Orchestral Manoeuvres in
the Dark – Dream of Me; Enigma – Age of Loneliness; Jamiroquai – Space Cowboy and
Virtual Insanity; Madonna – Bedtime Story; and Tori Amos – Caught a Lite Sneeze.
11 Of the many TV advertisements which operate with a similar aesthetic, among the
most striking on UK screens in the late 1990s was the Halifax Building Society’s ad
‘Kaleidoscope’.
12 One of the films in the impressive Betty Boop series made by Fleischers in the 1930s.
13 Indeed, many of the Fleischers’ films of the time, including this one, have been cited
as early forerunners of the music video form itself, involving as they did musical
performance and the occasional appearance of popular musical figures such as Rudy
Vallee, Ethel Merman and Louis Armstrong.
6 THE DIGITAL IMAGE IN ‘THE AGE OF THE SIGNIFIER’
1 This does not mean that before technological reproduction, repetition was an
insignificant factor or element in cultural formations. See, for example, Eco (1985)
and Latour (1985).
2 At the same time, however, he warned that – in the wrong hands – they might well
turn into something altogether different. Indeed, were Benjamin alive today, he
would no doubt consider – with some consternation – that it has been the more
cautionary aspects of his prognostications that have been vindicated.
3 A clear example of such ‘difference within repetition’ is manifest in the range of clas-
sical animated cartoon series of the middle period of this century (see Warner
Brothers’ cartoon series, Road Runner).
4 See Calabrese (1992: 27–46) for a searching application of the notion of rhythm to a
poetics of the series and the serial in general.
5 Such techniques, when they were first introduced in the visual arts, initially in Cubist
painting, later in works of the various avant-gardes of the 1920s; Dadaism, Futurism,
Constructivism, Surrealism and so forth, constituted radical challenges, and provoked
shock in the recipients of the time.
6 That it is photographic imagery that is being simulated, definitively problematises
any attempt to make a privileged link between photographic representation and the
real.
7 Useful overviews of the idea of authorship in relation to the cinema appear in
Caughie (1981), Lapsley and Westlake (1988) and Cook (1985).
8 George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Paul Verhoeven are, perhaps
the best known.
9 Respectively, they are John Lasseter and Douglas Trumbull.
10 Significantly, when more extended discussion of music video production and author-
ship occurs, then this is frequently found within writing from or associated with the
domain of experimental video, where video artists are seen as engaging in crossover
work.
11 Indeed, if, as is perhaps most often the case, the promo is viewed on TV (think of
MTV) then production credits do not get seen at all.
12 Perhaps the clearest paradigm for authorship’s attenuation in the contemporary
context is television.
13 For significant insight into the romantic origins of modern concepts of authorship
see Abrams (1953).
14 This is Wollen’s striking characterisation of ‘the new systems of imagery’ emerging
from this integration of the established media and new media (see Wollen 1993: 66).
NOTES
203
