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GREMLINS 2
Democracy Burlesque 3 Perspectives Around A Point
It was long supposed that a politician was best mocked by parody: by isolating traits and exaggerating them. But in the mid-1950s satirists discovered that to mock Dwight Eisenhower it was sufficient to quote him verbatim. Nor was this a function of presidential dyslexia; for in 1961 verbatim excerpts proved John Kennedy’s press conferences to be indistinguishable in detail from those of the previous regime. It is now commonplace to remark of a wide range of phenomena that they “parody themselves.” Pop art—the contrived application of this principle—was a product of the Kennedy period. — Hugh Kenner, The Counterfeiters, 1985
Of Joe Dante, one could say this: he’s made movies because movies have made him. — Charles Tesson, “L’être du gremlin, ou les métamorphoses du spectateur”
When Headlines Comes to Life / Deadlines Disappear
Mon pays: montrer “pays” et “mon” Ma television: ma “payse” — Jean-Luc Godard, 1983
An extended television studio, Gremlins 2’s mall-office complex, with cubicles, food court, lab, studio, and bar, takes up its American micro-society as a giant TV set: as if the movie’s movement, from one of these invented spaces to another, each eventually overrun by gremlins caricaturing the scenery, were a way of flipping channels. And the gremlins a way to explode the self-contained sets. Like his creatures, Dante reinvents invented spaces, and the mall’s mapping of virtual spaces onto real ones in an uncoordinated plenum of novelty theme-stores and mass-manufactured furniture—a space where one’s always in transition from one world to the next—becomes Gremlin 2’s own internal architecture, basically an extended excuse for Dante to send up whatever he likes, from mad scientists’ laboratories to daytime talk shows to a Busby Berkeley musical. Whether it’s a parody of a virtual universe brought to life or its consummation becomes a question, probably a pointless one.
Everything is valuable in abstract as a spectacle: so Billy’s childhood dreams of a birch-lined community are seized upon by the movie’s corporate megalomaniac, a producer-type who talks, as Spielberg might of his movies, “we’re gonna build the biggest, most sensational, quiet little town you’ve ever seen!” At some point the extensive surveillance system of the mall-office-studio system conjoins with its TV programming of its to offer the interior spectacle of actors, interviewers, and gremlins in costume to the outside world as documentary news. “Can you work a TV camera?” asks the potential interviewer in a vampire cape, as he prepares himself for the more prestigious mise-en-scène of gremlin one-on-ones . “I am a TV camera!” replies the other. One gremlin exists only as a TV signal. The space plays like a giant panopticon in which the central surveillance point has been folded into the stage itself, disseminated through the building as everyone is both a potential actor and audience, spectacle and spectator in a self-perpetuating theme park ride. Gizmo will finally conquer this caricature universe when he pastiches a Rambo show he caught on TV, but it’s the corporate titan, Daniel Clamp—who raises a stiff chin to salute a profusion of TV sets projecting a favorite of Dante’s mass-produced objects, a billowing American flag—and the gremlins themselves who understand that in this giant movie set and cinematheque, a movie-movie emporium, the spectacles come prefabricated as advertisements for themselves: they can’t be defeated or escaped, but they can at least be sold with relish.
Every cultural cliché of Gremlins 2 becomes a design to be worn in an all-consuming burlesque. Like Tati’s Playtime or Akerman’s Golden Eighties, Dante’s movie seems to take off from the understanding that the self-created spaces of a mall, suspended from a coherent scheme of space, time, or narrative, but recycling the narrative residue of genre outfits and set designs, are those of an unknowing burlesque, in which lives are lived and characters determined entirely as a function of their outer image. A kind of burlesque, rupturing a coherent story with chaos of choreographed Vaudevillians in on the joke that on-stage everything is farce—the character doesn’t determine the story, but the story determines the character, and the character determines the actor—mall capitalism depends on a suspension in time and place in which one is free to float between different roles and images as one likes.
What starts out as a narrative recap of Gremlins 1, the psychological pet comedy of an idealistic young man struggling to hold down his girlfriend and his job despite a series of silly misunderstandings due to his cuddly companion Gizmo, a wide-eyed anthropomorphism of childlike naivité, is soon overtaken by its ostensible, unwanted bad guys, the sludge-borne gremlins. Simpletons at first even as pranksters, the gremlins are the clear target of ire in a story that didn’t really need them—a story they only play in to frustrate and interrupt as dumbly as they can, throwing around the objects of the set. But gradually, Xeroxing Gizmo as stalwart office comedians, satirizing the office comedy even before it was popular, they become more sophisticated, bursting through the narrative to take over the movie as its self-appointed stars, and eventually, from Dante’s simulated projection booth, they take over the movie altogether. By then, they’ve turned themselves into their own brigade of sketch comedians, authors, performers, and audience, improvising a movie in the present-tense called Gremlins 2, which nearly abandons its story as the bad guys retell it from their perspective. Each space gets its gremlin, from the gremlin chef to the gremlin dentist to the gremlin gargoyle on the church.
They come like a 90s version of the skeletons in Bruegel’s Triumph of Death, no longer with an existence their own except what they don from the less comically-minded peasants and kings around them. In this play of free-floating signs mistakenly taken by its players as consistent, color-coded realities, the gremlins are memento moris to genre characters in a plastic universe who might have mistaken themselves as real. Like Dante, they’re made parodists in a pastiche universe.
Murder Songs / Your Image Mine
“...and that television and the newspapers still haven’t signed their surrender before art or its sister nature…” — Godard, 1990
A challenge for film buff filmmakers of the ‘80s bent—unlike Eastwood, Friedkin, Hill, reviving genre forms but not necessarily genre hallmarks—toward science fiction. The nostalgia film, recycling genre stamps of postwar fantasies in a more self-conscious world, gratifies “a deeper and more properly nostalgic desire to return to that older period and to live its strange old aesthetic artifacts through once again. This film is thus metonymically historical or nostalgia film… it does not reinvent a picture of the past in its lived totality; rather, by reinventing the feel and shape of characteristic art objects of an older period (the serials), it seeks to reawaken a sense of the past associated with these objects” (Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”).
The fantasy of a fantasy, Jameson’s dividing line of parody and pastiche: Minnelli and Sirk’s melodramas of the 50s, taking as their story and their world the closed, tapestried universes of their characters’ (and audience’s) conformist fantasies, can become subversive, deeply-felt parodies (Tea and Sympathy, All That Heaven Allows) of a national imagination so closed, so conformist, so tapestried, that it’s impossible to imagine oneself outside of its terms. Like their characters, yearning to conform, Minnelli and Sirk insist poker-faced on the styles dictated (so the movies say) by different rings of society, a world where the rich can drive jet-planes drunk and floozies are always half-a-garter from a gilted canopy bed. But as parody is a matter of context, the art of cross-cutting a shimmy-shaking Dorothy Malone with her apoplectic father a few rooms away becomes cinematic fantasy incompatible with the practical sense that a swing step can’t invoke the death of loved ones. Still Sirk, in giving life and death to the deepest desires and fears of his characters, lets his film speak for them and all the audience that’s lived their fantasies.
Revived in the 80s, as fantasies of fantasies, the only context for a drunk jet pilot or a shimmy-shaking blonde is their previous incarnations in the 50s. No longer can an audience be implicated in the consequences of its imagination when pitted against experience (All that Heaven Allows and other Sirks), or the minute, real-life consequences of following one’s imagination (Tea and Sympathy and other Minnellis): the products of its imagination, tokens of white-washed fences and apron-fitted moms, no longer extend from experience or any concept of “real life” at all but from the fond stereotypes of another era. Even when they do become facts of experience, they seem to be installed there as well-worn comic books sweetly thumbed-over one more time. When Spielberg includes a neighbor’s lawn mower or Landis a half-man-half-beast, the savagery of parody to show the absurdity of fantasy and experience, mind and body, narrator and story, form and content at the point of rupture becomes neutralized by a plastic movie-movie world in which fantasy is either so easily assimilated with experience (the lawn mower) or so far from it (the man-beast) that these things stop working as commentary, as metaphors, as subconscious sprouts of the superficial story. They can only signal to their position on a mass-production assembly line, the latest fabrications of cherished, cultural icons: the great pleasure of Spielberg or Landis to see often sexist, imperialist clichés knowingly, violently wiped of context, run-around by cameras, and enjoyed for the fact they’ve been enjoyed before.
Only, of course, as long as the floozy and the drunk aren’t being portrayed by moth-eared, mossy-scaled gremlins reveling in the fantasy as a giant, high-school musical. The simplicity of Jameson’s critique, written even before the internet or CGI, that in a mall universe “this latest mutation in space—postmodern hyperspace—has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and to map cognitively its position in a mappable external world” assumes that the self-created fantasy space is so alienable from physical reality that the standards don’t exist to measure it, the norms to judge or mock it. Where parody is personal, perspective-based—a response in form to the dispositions of its subject (modernism)—pastiche is mechanically impersonal, displaced—a response in subject to the dispositions of its form (postmodernism), the anonymous consumer in an anonymous mall or theme park who joins the self-invented mise-en-scène of whatever store or ride he comes into. It comes at the Spielbergian, transcendental point there’s no longer a divide between character and his fantasy: fantasy no longer extends from his separate “reality” but dictates it. The only opportunity is to know the role one plays in a world of images.
The critique could come easily years before from a Tashlin film, as total wish-fulfillment leads to apocalyptic overstimulation: whether the wish-fulfillment’s the director’s or the character’s makes no difference without any alternative to Tashlin’s pin-up universe. Or Minnelli, allowing no possibility of a world other than Minnelli’s lovingly-curated bric-a-brac as conjured by his characters. As both Minnelli and Dante, the one without irony and the other with nothing but, show characters learning to play a role in a world of images fashioned piece-by-piece from the director’s childhood ads and marquees, the supernatural presences of “It’s a Good Life” and Explorers can express themselves almost only in the sounds and images consumed from TV. Similarly Gremlins 2, with its comedy of recognition, contains little actual satire as the gremlins take over, but instead the recycling of hundreds of dull, everyday clichés from modern life and television as a demon’s extravagant conceits, often untransformed but so giddily played by the gremlins as a flurry of funny hats that they become lovingly repulsive as spectacles. A question and one answer: what happens when the characters and image parody themselves from no perspective than their self-consciousness as pop concoctions?
80s genre stuff, in film after film, Christine to The Terminator, restaging the 50s scenario of alien agents of a fantasy, technological universe invading humdrum, everyday life, could be seen as a continual problematization of this issue that “real life” has itself become an inherited, genre fantasy, and all the more so as the flowering of reality, deep in suburban hyperspace, comes subsidized by tropic wars and top-down economics. For the happy troping of reality in Spielberg or its near-suppression in Cameron, Scorsese’s movies almost alone reinsert newer symbols of realism, self-conscious small-talk and overlapping dialogue, and in New York, New York, King of Comedy, to Hugo, insist that by performing genre dreams ad nauseum as a prayer, they can be brought to life, be made “real.” Carpenter’s self-contained spaces, the self-perpetuating mindsets of his characters—even at their most racist, most exclusive—turn the fantasy from an otherworldly intervention into an extension of jokey, finagling group dynamics already played at as an act. Landis’ tight framing and casual suspense makes neither the reality realistic nor the fantasy fantastical, but instead enjoys the motions gone through in the company of old friends. De Palma’s movies, skeptical, refuse any possibility of a stable origin or destination point in “reality”; the reality of a De Palma movie seems to follow its semblance as an image created, without basis, for the eyes of a voyeur-cameraman. And similarly Zemeckis’ movies almost inevitably hinge on the moment that the fantasy on-screen turns out to have been a cultural pastiche concocted by the mythmakers of historical PR departments at the expense of their violently suppressed, historical reality: that LA might not have been all freeways, that “Imagine” is the song of an atheist, that Santa Claus mass-manufactures good cheer on a mile-high assembly line as an alienable, capitalist product.
Just Dante’s movies, with Lynch’s and Verhoeven’s, seem interested in exorcising historical traumas and realities—even realities of TV shows and animations and politican’s speeches—suppressed by, but sublimated into this “real” world of domestic fantasy. In a world where cinema audiences project their worst fantasies onto a screen and in the sky so they can have the satisfaction of watching the good guys wipe up, then return to vinyl kitchens shellacked of dark desire, Dante flips the equation: it’s not just fantasy that invades reality, but also the realities of these desires, the wars and ads and cartoons they’ve engendered, that invade a fantasy vision of strained domestic bliss.
For the perfect image of the family with automat trays of defrosted hamburgers huddled before its TV to watch symbols of Vietnam and hygiene, helicopters and toothbrushes, Dante from “It’s a Good Life” to Small Soldiers unleashes these pre-fabricated icons into the living room: the power of TV to make sense of insensible images comes undone as all genres of virtual reality inhabit the same universe from which they were created. The return of the repressed is naturally a return to the horrific, comic chaos of the Marx brothers and atomic arthropods; no one reality wins in this hall of mirrors: the TV is unleashed, but the family is trapped in a descent into the TV set as rabbit hole. Dante’s favorite image, of one universe ripping through a movie screen to another, becomes a way of bringing his own audience in and holding them apart from a self-conscious movie—all our worst wishes are fulfilled. His movies pivot on this point of implication/identification when it becomes impossible to turn against the bad guys, the gremlins who, it turns out, happily enact everything the audience is paying to see.
The moment when the gremlins break Dante’s film, project shadow puppets on the screen, and replace Gremlins 2 with a hoped-for nudie, Volleyball Holiday, plays Dante’s burlesque impulse toward both rupture and assimilation at once: a rupture in the representation of the film as an artwork narrated out of time, instead to simulate director, star, and audience joined impossibly in the same time and place with the same lascivious object on our minds. The burlesque bent toward self-address, reducing a play to its object as a play in the same time-frame as its spectators now tangled in it, no longer performing for the public as its servant but making it an accomplice, becomes the most democratic sort of self-parody, common to the highest and lowest entertainers: American vaudeville, Joyce’s Cyclops, Lubitsch’s soliloquies, Brecht’s. The movie that might be closest to the second half of Gremlins 2, as the gremlins cackle at each of their new improvisations, would be less the condescension of Mystery Science Theater than Michael Snow’s Seated Figures, also from 1990, in which images of the highway rolling underneath the camera are accompanied by sounds of Snow’s mock audience grunting, humming, yawning. In these movies that seem to watch their audiences, what’s being parodied is less the abstractions on-screen than our reaction to them, eternal instincts already pre-empted by the movie. Real life, out in the theater, is inevitably a parody of life on-screen.
Getting Personal / Mogwai C’est Moi
Ripped from the headlines.
There are many things that I would like to say to you But I don’t know how — Oasis, “Wonderwall”
In New York, the most recent screening of Gremlins 2 was in Brooklyn, on November 14th, a few hours before Zuccotti would be closed in a 2am police raid. When sounded over shots of gremlin humanity as whiskey-slugging stooges, smashing plates on each other’s heads, Brain Gremlin’s Hobbesian pretentions that “we want what you and your viewers have: civilization… the Geneva Convention, chamber music, Susan Sontag” can probably exact a critique against bourgeois hypocrisy only as simple as its self-stereotyping. But what could sound like packaged theory, too to-the-point one night, could sound like a reality of lies the next day, as 2011 New York’s own media maven developer mayor announced that he had deployed riot police to baton-whip unarmed jaywalkers and bystanders in order to guarantee public health and safety, and it emerged that the police had deployed sound cannons at 1am in an operation to protect public acoustics for the neighbors.
Not for politicians to be any more nuanced in their hypocrisy than the worst Hollywood villains. As Brain, shooting another gremlin in the forehead, points out that violence is blasé as an act but bad manners to talk about—“fun, but in no sense civilized”—the mayor would instigate a media blackout a few hours later to ensure as little discussion of the city’s subterranean double life as possible. These parallels would be easy to match up, as parody loans itself to prototypes. “We want the essentials,” said Brain Gremlin in 1990. “Dinettes. Complete bedroom groups. Convenient credit, even though we’ve been turned down in the past.”
But as hypocrisy is already its own parody, the human mic to call individual statements as group-chant had only to yell the words of the mayor’s PR rep back to her a few days later—even self-parody requires a mimic to acknowledge the point. Within the week, the human mic was invading political conventions to take the formalities from politicians and let the people restore democratic contact amongst themselves to describe the politicians’ disguises: Rumsfeld’s role in Iraq, Obama’s Wall St. silence.
My mind was on gremlins, that gremlin democracy recasting roles of a baseless system as farce: let the images parody themselves. Immediately the same question would emerge of protestors as the gremlins’ most astute critics had always wondered—who are they and what do they want, what base are they operating from? Questions that assume they’re engaged in a narrative, that what they have in common is essential to themselves, rather than resistance to the self-imposed labels of their opponents, that they’re willing to operate in a system whose terms they can only repeat back as self-parody. Singing “Wonderwall” to cops, marching us in cells down Lafayette St. with batons to our backs at 4:00 in the morning, November 15th, I wondered why we weren’t singing a better song. But the cops themselves, indifferent, justified it when we told them there were lots of things we’d like to say to them, but didn’t know how, and they turned away to their vans and drove off. When the worlds and genres of impenetrable, readymade pop are the only language, Oasis and the police, William Castle and the bomb, Dracula and Phil Donahue, animatronic reptiles and the New York Review of Books, at least give them the context of each other to let them mean something—each veil ripping through the next.
David Phelps |
