Project Power, Package-Unit Power, Desert Power

Adam Tooze, the seemingly omniscient Columbia historian with the newsletter (Chartbook) and the podcast (Ones and Tooze) and the book every (other?) year and the impossible travel schedule, has begun teasing an impending project on the shifting nature of hegemony in the 21st century. At the risk of sending you off to read something so engrossing you don’t come back, I think you should go read this Chartbook entry. And as you read, ask: what would happen if we took seriously the question of the relation between Hollywood and the protean US hegemony that Tooze is tracking? As an incentive to return, I will suggest that I have the beginnings of an answer.

It might seem exceedingly parochial to claim that the conceptual architecture of a hegemony of project power is missing the things media scholars might attend to. That way lies the madness of “Whoever controls molybdenum controls the world!”

But, in fact, the uneven transformation of the Hollywood system from its classical versions to today offers specific insight into a history in which project-power might prove decisive to an understanding of global sway. The pattern is commonly described as the shift from a single, Supervising Producer (e.g., Irving Thalberg, perhaps Thomas Ince) to a Producer-Unit system (e.g., Val Lewton’s horror movies, Arthur Freed’s musicals, or Ross Hunter’s melodramas) to a modern Package-Unit system in which each movie is justified on the basis of belief in it as a project. There were projects at the outset—D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance—and at the peak—David O. Selznick’s Gone with the Wind—and there are quasi-reversions to pre-project production today—Kevin Feige’s MCU, Blumhouse, etc. But the package-unit system dominated motion picture output for generations, and with significant historical and labor differences it also dominates television.

Note that the transformations in Hollywood did not correlate in any simple way with changes in its hegemonic sway. To agree with Tooze, you can build a hegemony out of package-units (or projects). There are, to be sure, aspects of inter-state governance where the US’s hegemony within the global legal architecture bolsters Hollywood’s preeminence via lopsided trade relations and where the steep discount afforded by the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency affects production, distribution, and exhibition costs and forecasting. Under the neoliberal consensus of the Great Moderation in which the world’s production centers demanded zones of negative taxation to subsidize their power and sold that demand as a strategy through which semiperipheral centers might attract top-tier productions and (ideally) become sticky enough to support significant creative labor forces. That process might have allowed well-capitalized competitors to threaten Hollywood’s dominance, but, as we have seen, the overwhelming result has been the perpetuation of the oligopoly, with a couple new players.

I don’t want to say “political economy aside,” but political economy aside, another zone that shores up that hegemony is the concentration and collocation of what Saskia Sassen calls “producer services” in the relevant world city: entertainment law (as Peter Labuza has detailed), agencies, accountants, financiers; specialty vendors for VFX, marketing, merchandizing; parainstitutions like trade presses, archives, schools, etc. Michael Storper and Susan Christopherson made a version of this argument beginning in the 1980s, in which the disarticulation of the classical studio resulted in the proliferation of the demand for producer skills (project power–capacities, we might say) among a much wider range of industrial participants.

But so what? Why would it matter to US hegemony? Producing movies and tv shows is not among the decisive state or quasi-state actions that Tooze regards as classic instances of project-power (large construction projects, wars, revolutionary politics, economic development, international alliances). Wouldn’t media simply backpack on those more decisive forces—doesn’t it ride the international regulatory and financial regimes as a significant but non-decisive industry? How can it be anything more than an instance of or instrument of hegemony?

There is a jump in Tooze’s #7 I want to highlight that might help sort this out:

The history of capitalist accumulation is a history of projects. That is what the skyscrapers of a megacity so vividly testify.

The history of state power and hegemony is a history of project-power.

How do you get from the first to the second? Or why? What is this gap? Having a skyscraper or a megacity does not make you a hegemon. I would lean on Lee Grieveson’s Cinema and the Wealth of Nations to draw the strongest links between the grander US imperial-hegemonic project and its cultivation of a the modern mediasphere, but a pithier way to conceptualize this might be to note, as David Bordwell did in 2019, that the foundation of United Artists, Paramount’s drive toward vertical integration, and the nationalization of the film industry in the Soviet Union were coincident; 1919 was “Hollywood’s Boom Year.” United Artists was a studio-as-project, ahead of its time, and would really only became a dominant force after World War II, when its financing model shifted and Paramount’s monopolistic drive was decisively reined in. Nationalization was the statist guardrail; antitrust was the market guardrail; between them flowed UA.

The space between instances and systems is itself provisionally filled by, fitfully emblematized by projects that strike oneas emblematic. Tooze notices skyscrapers, not, say, Barcelonan superblocks or Robin Hood Gardens. Following Foucault, he contends that there should be a unique form of power/knowledge that accompanies project-power in the way that other knowledges accompanied (Marxian) production and (Foucauldian) discipline. He first calls this form “historical knowledge,” which seems insufficiently specified (i.e., actually parochial) given the shifts within history that Foucault delineates, but Tooze goes on to highlight the centrality of experiment, associates that with Latour’s account of the unidirectional development of technoscience, and uses that unidirectionality to unlock hegemony from the Arrighi/Wallerstein precession that would make the PRC’s dominance inevitable. (I have already fallen behind Tooze’s output, but he makes that link explicit in later installments.)

But Tooze’s moment of being struck by the coherence of the instance (skyscraper) and the system (hegemony) should lead us toward a slightly different sort of recognition. Figuring out hegemony is not the result of an experiment. The recognition of the contours of contemporary hegemony does not emerge from its characteristic mode of power/knowledge. Rather, hegemony, at least from its relatively unique instantiation in the US in the 20th century, has demanded a thought that would itself work through the scales and domains. It is difficult to imagine such a thought existing outside Hollywood at its outset. (This is, and is not, what Tooze calls a “meta-project.”)

The distinction and integration we might mark across any scale or domain is, in Tooze’s usage, an intellectual matter, but broad, even popular enlistment in that project took place in Hollywood. What I and many others have been calling allegory in our readings of various media objects and institutions are, in this sense, level jumps, mode skips, places where the work (the project; the package-unit) manifests and understands at least some of the multifarious ways operations across scales are subsumed (or not), are integrated (or not), are productive, disciplinary, projective, inciting, enticing, dismaying—or not. The research into those works may be historical—or narrative—but the opening to those stories is driven by the slippery convergence of the aesthetic, the material, the logical and the psychological of allegory, what the logic of science tries to mess around with under the heading of abduction, what Harold Garfinkel called “the work of a discovering science.”

If the hegemony of the US or its likely PRC successor depends on “project-power,” until very recently—and perhaps even still—that power only agglomerates the diversity of contemporary sociopolitical life, only gathers metonymic force, only achieves the necessary anagnorisis when it is channeled through a dominant, coordinating mediaform. The slogan here might simply be: no hegemony without media hegemony, and no media hegemony without allegory. That sounds overwrought, molybdous. But Ronald Reagan, the SAG head who sold out his union so his talent agency could pursue a mode of consolidation that violated antitrust, was elected and reelected; and reality gameshow host and failed skyscraper developer Donald Trump is leading in the race for President (again).

It may be that in the 21st century global hegemony is being disarticulating from such a coordinating mediaform. If that is the case, it requires explanation, a relocalization of the site of scalar intellection. And if it is not the case, if the centrality of media to hegemony persists, it requires intense redescription because the previous candidates—classical Hollywood cinema; television I and II; and the social-streaming hybrid since 2007—have found themselves re-marked and re-absorbed into algorithmic outputs and training set inputs.

If I were going to reassemble an account of coordination that would function in the shatterlands after 2008, I would turn first (again) to Robin James’s forthcoming Good Vibes Only (teased and prototyped at itsherfactory.substack.com) and Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy. They stage crucial questions of timing, arrhythm, spatialization, propagation, and reception. The answers to those questions compose and torque shared conceptions of power, conceptions worked through not simply in substacks or books or classrooms, but told-through in works like the unfolding adaptation of Dune. Ambivalences course through that story, desperate to find a way to the realization of the (counter-)hegemonic project of “desert power.” In our world of iPhones and FYPs, the ambivalence emerges as the unsettling coherence between the gone-native resistance choreography of the sandwalk and the omnipresence of TikTok dances. Dancers and algorithms, states and models, all of us and all of them set up to “watch and learn.”

Hell’s Angles

One of the great pleasures of early sound era aerial films is their manipulation of absence, of invisibility and inaudibility. Combat in three dimensions—or more since speed, acceleration, G-forces, and Doppler effects work upon pilots as nearly independent vectors of attention and response—is exponentially more complex than the 2D, planimetric battlespace of the strategic table at Dragonstone (or “The Big Board” in Dr. Strangelove, or the literal bird’s-eye-views of Alexander or Napoleon), or the 90s–era CGI map in Suicide Squad Isekai.

Set in an era before advanced avionics, House of the Dragon has started to recapture parts of that Hell’s Angels/Dawn Patrol niftiness. The repertoire is limited but supple (like all classical Hollywood): ground views of planes/dragons above; skimming shadows on the ground; the strafing run along the ground; head-on view of the pilot (usually involving rapid scanning of the skies, usually disrupted by a sudden burst of fire or teeth); over-the-shoulder, over-the-dragon’s head speed shot/dive bomb; chaotic, non-oriented dogfighting/dragonfighting at close range; overhead views of the planes/dragons from above at varying distances from limited-third-person to god’s-eye. Each of these can be edited with or against the characteristic dragon sounds (silence, wingbeats, cries, fireballs) to create mounting action, suspense, surprise, or moments of grand calm. In Dawn Patrol the silences of the planes that do not return are as significant as the sounds of those that do. The soundscape of 1930s air combat movies (and newsreels) was synthetic, generated in the studio when field recording equipment was bulky and insensitive, and the aim was always to render the effect of the combat whatever its reality. The soundscape of contemporary dragon combat is nearly as synthetic—what with there being no actual dragons—but sound libraries are built out of complex hybrids of recorded and synthesized sounds. In this case, sound designer Paula Fairfield built dragon-soundmarks out of multiple animals across multiple “voices”: “You're shaping a performance, and you want to believe the nuance of emotion….I prefer to use real animals that are expressing primal emotion. Now, the thing is, I'm taking these emotions and slotting them into places where, if I had an animal who could talk to me and translate what is in the piece, probably, it is horrifying.” (24:26)

Rhaenys’s death (S2E04) partly replicates Fry’s plunge from the Statue of Liberty in Hitchcock’s Saboteur (Universal 1942). The camera drops with her at the start, then as she gathers speed she falls away. The plaintive strings on the score highlight her acknowledgement of her death, as does her letting go of the pommels. The digital fringe around the compositing has a touch of the characteristic Hitchcock fake-iness, too. As Rhaenys falls away, Meleys’s neck curls through the frame as a reminder of the dragon’s scale, performing a mobile, digital version of the statue’s arm. The diegetic sound is all but absent until we cut to the ground view. Then the rushing of the wind against the dead dragon’s wings serves as an arrhythmic reminder of the power it no longer has. It lands with an explosive boom-rumble-and-burn before we ascend again. None of these moves is particularly novel, nor is their combination. But in the wake of generations of techno-ascetic renunciations (“Use the Force, Luke”) or tech-and-countertech battling (Top Gun 2), it is energizing to return to cloud combat that does not mediate via screen. (Apple was counting on this to drive formal interest in Masters of the Air; it was, by Apple TV’s standards, a success.)

(Apologies for the low quality clip.)

Rhaenys and Meleys smash into a stone fortification outside the main castle, ever-so-slightly reminiscent of Fort Wood upon which the Statue stands. But in Saboteur, the Statue’s jutting arm and the seam of Fry’s fraying sleeve slash through the screen at modernist angles, just as the Statue’s stoic face and Fry’s rictus contrast up to the very end. What HotD loses in that play of facial scale it gains in the character-kaiju of the dragons. They are partners, faithful steeds, elephantine in their implied intelligence. The planes of the WWI flying aces have none of that frisson. But like the dragons, they are able to whirl against the air. We can lose sight of them or lose sight of where we are. Hitchcock keeps us oriented, even at his most modern.

Stills from 14 consecutive shots in the climax of Saboteur (Hitchcock, Universal 1942). Compare Norman Lloyd’s face in 2, 10, and 14(a) with the statue’s in 6 and 8; compare the arms in 4, 8, 12 and the final wave in 14(c); compare the seam in 3 with the arm in 4, the seam in 5 and 7 with the face and spikes (and arm) in 6 and 8; finally, contrast Lloyd’s face in 14(a) with Eve Best’s in the clip above.

Rhaenys and Meleys burn in the wreckage of the castle outbuilding. Compare with the glimpses of Fort Wood in 10 and 14(c) above.

DCsekai

Not to be outdone by X-Men ’97’s “Motendo” episode, DC answers with Suicide Squad Isekai. Inheriting much of the narrative setup and character roster of James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, SSI has none of the dirty fun of Harley Quinn: The Animated Series. “Motendo” was relentlessly meta but didn’t announce itself as belonging to the genre; SSI puts a running genre metacommentary in the mouth of the character Clayface. I don’t want to get in the way of work of Anthony Lee, a terrific grad student whose PhD on isekai and the Japanese animation industry I’m advising, and I haven’t done the actual work to know how DC, WB Animation, and Wit Studio put the project together, so I’ll just say that superhero fatigue can’t hold a baseball bat to isekai fatigue. In conclusion, we are now in the omnisekai era and you should not be surprised when the gang from The Bear suddenly end up working at the Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place pizza place.

Disney's Mojo: X-Men '97 and Inside Out 2

A couple weeks ago a bunch of Wordle devotees got bent out of shape because the day’s answer was MANGA, and, not knowing anything about the most popular mode of illustration in the world—including the US—they broke their streaks. It was also a slightly tricky word since it has the 2 A’s, and it can be hard to get the info that will get you closer to that answer. If you get to MANGO, and you don’t know the word MANGA exists, you’re screwed.

If you think manga is a reach, isekai will be light years from your world. (Apple Notes in English recognizes manga but puts a little red squiggle under isekai.) But isekai was added to the OED in their March 2024 batch, so, ahem, keep up. It names a broadly available narrative idea—being suddenly transported into another world—that didn’t quite line up with a genre in Anglophone literary or cinematic production but that absolutely did in the anime industry. If Gulliver’s Travels and Tron had both been called “zappers,” “isekai” might not have made the inroads it has. But they weren’t and it has.

X-Men ’97, a continuation of the 1990s animated series, debuted that same month on Disney+. It has been a resounding success with Gen-Xers for whom hearing the opening weedle-eedle-ee-dee-dee of the theme song is the closest I they will ever come to thinking I am they are cool again. There is a lot to like about it: its old school, on-the-2’s animation style; the “adult” themes that the original series emphasized; the sheer speed with which is runs through its plots, creating a kind of whiplash as you try to keep up. Eric Lewald, the original showrunner, called this “the unwritten law of childhood: If you didn’t understand everything in a story that was ‘older,’ you yearned to” (Previously on X-Men, 18). Beyond its nostalgia demo the new series seems to have performed decently, and it will surely be back. Beau DeMayo, the new showrunner, captured a vibe that has utterly eluded Disney up to now. Then he was fired in the midst of the pre-release publicity tour so future installments will probably be a mess.

One thing the new X-Men series got right was its bottle episode, or half-episode, “Motendo.” X-Men ’97 doesn’t have the broadcast-TV runtime discipline of the earlier cartoon, but it acts like it. Dividing its “half-hour” slot into two stories, both even more rushed, triggers a bone-deep, third-derivative nostalgia: not for the characters, not for their stories, not for the storytelling, but for the accommodation of the storytelling to the format. This is something like what the Greatest Generation audiences might have felt when they first saw Raiders and remembered the serials of their youth.

Onscreen-digital Mojo looms over Jubilee and Sunspot. From Marvel’s X-Men ‘97

In this case Jubilee and Sunspot are sucked into a videogame via the “Motendo” system. There they encounter larger-than-life villain Mojo, an alien who lives on ratings. The core mechanic is that Mojo gets bigger and flabbier the more people watch his gladiatorial shows. When we first meet him he is looking thin. Jubilee compliments him on his diet, but he laments, “Actually it’s been a horrible third quarter and it shows. Ratings are down, down, down. Thirsty for the next big thing, dirty girl. That’s why I made the pivot to videogames.” It’s a little flatfooted to say “Disney did the same,” but in February Disney did announce a plan to invest $1.5 billion in Epic Games, albeit without the camp.

Ann Nocenti, the comic artist who came up with Mojo in 1985, explained, “I was studying media at the time, going for a master’s degree up at Columbia's School for International Affairs, and was reading Marshall McLuhan, Noam Chomsky, Ed Herman, [Walter] Lippmann, and others like that, so it came out of reading them; but it also came out of trying to write journalism myself and hitting on the multiple media ownership dilemma. That led to the idea of Mojo, and his need to control all media. I also did a New Mutants story where I literally had a character called ‘Manufactured Consent’ after Noam Chomsky's book. I was working at a magazine, Lies of Our Times, then, and we critiqued the New York Times coverage of stuff. So, it was out of that swirl of stuff that Mojo came.”

Mojo, then, has always been an on-the-nose media industries critic. Showrunner, producer, network owner, galactic megalomaniac—he was a glimpse into the deregulated future of media well before the Clinton administration liquidated the financing and syndication rules. As for his style, he has been pretty Rip Taylor/Tom-Cruise-as-avatar-of-Jewish-Hollywood-Les-Grossman from the start. This is a familiar mode of cooptation: a sincere criticism of the system taken up by the system, displaced into a minoritized identity to be fostered and contained. Bringing Mojo back for ’97 had to be a simple decision.

Yet Mojo’s pivot to videogames creates a complex spectatorial problem. If a tv show draws a mass audience, you can think that viewers are surrendering their will to the program. That’s the Mojo-scenario from the original cartoon; that’s manufacturing consent; that’s “the boob tube.” But when a videogame draws a mass audience, people are playing it; they are not absorbed into the story as spectators; they are all isekai’d into the mechanics, into their processual identities. Motendo is the game system, but Mojovision is, essentially, Twitch. Mojo doesn’t want to sell a billion cartridges; he wants to reconstitute the dwindling TV audience through videogames. Flatfootedly, again, we can say Disney wants the same.

But we are screaming through a 15–minute cartoon, and speed washes away the contradictions. Lewald lamented that the 1994 “Mojovision” episode (s2e11) didn’t have any setup. “There was no personal X-Men story.” DeMayo, fellow writer Charley Feldman, and the rest of the crew have fixed that. “Motendo” has a bunch of fun setup—Magneto, wearing his heavy obligations as leader of the X-Men—simply does not want to celebrate Jubilee’s birthday by going to the arcade at the mall. Jubilee heads to her room to vent; that’s when the isekai plot kicks in.

Trapped in Mojoworld, Jubilee and Sunspot escape with the help of an older Jubilee, a digital avatar who survived the testing phase of Mojo’s “pivot.” And just to make sure we don’t miss the residual televisual logic of the game, Mojo is not simply a conglomerator but a showrunner/head writer. “I don’t want to say something scary like ‘If you die in the game you die in real life,’ but: Stakes.” (The original “Mojovision” also lacked that simple mechanic.)

What is happening here is a new alignment in which the postmodernism of Mojo’s identity form and his medianxieties is itself retro and as such a marker of the continuing Disney/Hollywood industrial crisis. My nostalgia is Mojo’s is Disney’s is the structural role of the Writers Guild: What all of us know is that within our insoluble temporal belatedness we are one poor decision away from being left behind, manga-less wordlers, mojoless worldbuilders. Zapping into the future, even a future past, is training for the now that has slipped, is slipping, will have been slipping away.

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The Inside Out movies are not isekai; but they are lodged at the center of Disney’s continuing quest to coordinate screen entertainment and irl behavior, to find the lever that will allow them to coordinate the mediascape. (I am taking and re-contextualizing the idea of coordination from Christopher GoGwilt, who has written briefly about it here and here.)

I drove across LA to the Culver Theater to see Inside Out 2. Culver City is a media city. The Culver Studios are right next door to the theater—this was Ince, then DeMille, then RKO-Pathé, but even by the 1930s the studio was a flexible, rentable space—not the village-in-the-city that Paramount was. Media owners were as likely to rent the space as use it. It was the home of Selznick, then Desilu, then it was “Culver City Studios,” then Laird, then GTG (Grant Tinker and Gannett (?!)) then Sony but not the main Sony, and then in 2004 a bunch of private equity players.

Hollywood has always been slightly ahead of the financialization curve, but that is difficult to see because such “innovations” transpire in a heavily unionized, heavily nepotized industry. Cutting edge or old school? Emergent or residual? Both, usually. Hollywood has been selling off its lots and leasing them back forever.

The Culver Studios are now owned by Hackman Capital Partners, which also owns Radford in Studio City, (CBS) Television City in Fairfax, Kaufman and Silvercup in New York, and millions of square feet in the UK and Ireland. They lease a ton of Culver Studios to Amazon, which owns MGM, so the place has that classical-Hollywood-meets-tech-giant vibe that sometimes feels like a crappy spray-on stucco nostalgia and sometimes feels like a world realizing some of its temporally syncretic possibilities in ways you can endorse.

The Culver Studios Gate 2, via wikipedia. jengod, photographer

Hackman also developed the “Culver Steps” shopping center around the studio’s front gate, which, like a lot of Culver City, seems nice but not too nice. This part of Culver has some decently protected bus and bike lanes that make me, as a Hollywood denizen, jealous. At the same time the pragmatic commercial tidiness makes me worry that there is a lot of ruthless policing dedicated to keeping it from turning into “Hollywood.” Indeed, the city spends a fortune on cops: $56m to police a population of about 45,000. Culver City is an independent municipality so its businesses—Amazon, Apple, TikTok, Sweetgreen—spin off millions in taxes, and a lot of that money stays right there, making it a city where those businesses want to be.

What I am trying to convey here is that the Culver Theater is precisely—astonishingly precisely—a metonym for its place. Movie theaters don’t have to be that way. They can be ahead of or behind their locales. They can have a strange vibe that causes their neighbors to wonder about the mysteries of real estate. They can be palatial when their surroundings are not; they can be utterly generic. But the Culver Theater is both a perfectly ordinary theater and the home of Amazon’s state-of-the-art postproduction stages.  

The 34’ Samsung Onyx screen at Culver Post

And that precise fit is why I went, because the Culver Theater has some of the few Samsung Onyx screens in the US. It was someone from Pixar who told me I had to see Inside Out 2 there. Seeing a 70mm IMAX print is a specific kind of cinephilia, one that seeks out experiences of durable monumentality. The cutting edge of the theatrical industry is far more unassuming.

An Onyx screen is not part of a projection system; it is a giant 4K LED wall. It is bright (300 nits; four times an IMAX). It has incredible contrast. It has HDR. Like a giant tv? Like a giant phone? That’s the question. Because if the LED screen is the future of exhibition and it is like a giant tv then how on earth could it compete with a good home theater/tv setup? At Pixar, this is existential: will people go back to the movies? Because if they don’t—if parents and kids just wait until the movies show up on Disney+—then Pixar can’t make $200m movies anymore, can’t take the time and money to develop its own software the same way, can’t push theaters to raise their standards, and can’t contribute to the waterfall of revenue that props up the conglomerate.

The Culver Theater is not like a home theater. When Joy sits on a pile of repressed memories and gazes out into the black distance, that black is black. And when the lights on the train in the Disney studio logo roll by, they shoot out from the screen like Spielberg beams. There is a Thomas Kinkadean, light-’em-up ceramic village feel to the studio logo, but once those lights are put to work in telling a story that kitschiness wanes. It is a different experience from bounce-back, silver-screen projection, but it is not like a tv. In limited ways it tips from receiving the image—even the giant projected image at an IMAX—to be subject to the image. There is a little more immersion to these moving images, but also a lot more heft-without-the-implication-of-weightiness? solidity-without-the-implication-of-deadness? durability-without-the-implication-of-temporality? These images, on this screen, in this world that spans from deep black to radiant white and through the super-saturations of the emotions to the microtextured surfaces of the ice and Riley’s fraying t-shirt, have an internal life.

As you already know, parents and kids did go see Inside Out 2. It will make more than $500m in the US and almost at least [—ed.] that much abroad (it looks like). It is making money in the US faster even than The Super Mario Bros. Movie did last summer. It won’t make as much money in Japan, but it has made $65m in Mexico, twice as much as the first installment. [It crossed $1bn this weekend and has a decent chance of out-earning Mario.—ed.] For now, Pixar’s unique proposition—ultra-premium animation supported by blockbuster revenues—lives.

Graph from the-numbers.com

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Inside Out 2 is either entirely a workplace movie or not at all a workplace movie. The emotions spend their days hotdesking the big console; they sleep just upstairs; a classic, artisanal, live-work arrangement. Their world comes apart when a construction crew shows up to make room for new emotions. These guys are blue nephroidy solids with cod-outer-borough accents, and they do not work through lunch. In addition to the construction blue dudes, there are filing blue workers and prison guard blue workers, so it seems like Riley’s mind is a workplace, and the construction don’t-call-them-Minions seem to have strong union workrules. But the emotions don’t really have leisure or workrules, so they may not really have jobs, only roles. They do have instruction manuals—a lot of them. Maybe Riley’s brain is a workplace and maybe it’s not.

There are very few extracranial adults. We don’t know what Riley’s parents get up to all day (Dad’s t-shirt business survives only as an easter egg in Riley’s nightshirt). There’s basically one teacher, and she is a hockey coach. There are no Zamboni drivers or UberEats drivers or work-to-rule construction humans or “activist investors” or media buyers or streaming pipeline optimizers or Professors of the Practice in Digital Animation at CalArts or whoever else makes up the Disney-Pixar real world.

But there is a scene where the workplace/playplace incoherence reaches a peak. Deep in the second act, Anxiety has all but taken over Riley; Joy is leading the gang to retrieve Riley’s Sense of Self—let me record scratch this summary to say the thing about the Inside Out movies is that much of their inventiveness emerges from a prior commitment to being literal beyond tolerating; they know this and play it for laughs often enough (the sar-chasm gag is solid); but literalness makes summarizing the thing equally annoying, like describing minimalist sculpture, which is, I think, what actually annoyed Michael Fried so much in “Art and Objecthood”; back to the summary—so Joy and the gang are retrieving the Sense of Self.

Along the way they discover Riley’s old mental pillow fort, but inside it has been remade as an open-cubicle animation studio in which row upon row of blobs of different colors are being forced to draw up negative scenarios for the future so that Anxiety can in turn come up with countermeasures. Joy starts suggesting alternative timelines—ways things might go happily, bits of good luck—until one of the blobs comes up with a positive outcome on his own. It’s a workplace revolt, and it is pitched as political. For Anxiety looms over the space on a giant screen a-la-1984—so “a-la” that when Joy leads the blobs’ uprising the scene becomes a reenactment of Ridley Scott’s legendary Apple commercial, with a chair hurled into the big screen rather than a sledgehammer.

Riley’s animators at work, via Screenrant

Anxiety oversees the room of animators, via Screenrant

The looming Anxiety in Inside Out 2 is not a projection; it is a monitor. When the chair hits it, it cracks in a shardy, angular way that aligns it with Riley’s new, ductile Sense of Self. It does not tear like the movie screen in Saboteur and it does not glitch out like a subpanel of pixels in a digital array might. I didn’t throw anything at the Samsung Onyx LED wall; I don’t know how it breaks.

Disney cracks when it pivots, when it shifts from Joy to Anxiety, when it is besieged by the Nelson Peltzes of the world, when it changes strategies. This spring Disney pivoted away from Pixar-making-series-for-Disney+ back to Pixar-just-making-movies and laid off 175 employees. In the midst of a generally unionized Disney, Pixar is not. Those Pixar workers were reverse-isekai’d out of that now-retro, high–90s world of “fun at work.” When you can’t tell whether you are at a workplace or not, getting laid off cracks your sense of self differently. You thought you were Joy, living for your role; you aren’t even a blue dude with an IATSE–mandated lunchbreak.

Standing around Riley’s control console the emotions look out through her eyes. The world comes at them via a giant screen, the complement to the surveillance setup in the pillow fort. But small screens matter, too. The first thing the hockey coach does at skills camp is take the campers’ phones. The last thing Riley does in Inside Out 2 is check her phone to see if she’s made varsity. It reminds the audience that, hey, guess what, you can finally check yours again, if you haven’t. In between, you have been warned. Ennui’s essential prop is her phone, and we see that when Sadness gets hold of it, she nearly wrests control of Riley.

Inside Out 2 culminates in a celebration of all the emotions, old and new, that go into Riley; the X-Men franchise celebrates all the differences that go into its ragtag bands of mutants. These pluralisms are a refuge for the media corporation working its way through what we might call a coordination crisis. Where will Disney locate its intermedia levers? How will it articulate its commodified experiences?

In X-Men ’97 the videogame plays out on the screen for a neo–TV audience; in Inside Out 2 the artmaking plays out on the screen for a strategic decision-maker (Anxiety); in the Culver Theater, the two find a recombinant entente as the artmaking plays out for a neo–TV audience. In all three the allegory is spectacularized, not played through. For now, there is still enough lure for audiences in the sympathetic witnessing of aesthetic experience that Disney’s pivot to videogames can remain partial. For now, Disney can insist you put your phone aside or zap you into a world where there are no phones to begin with.

This Time: Godzilla x Kong

This was supposed to appear earlier but then things at USC went to shit, and I didn’t feel like posting it. Things aren’t any better at work—they’re still doing bag searches—but after several weeks of weak box office performance, the piece now makes even more sense as a project. If it’s a bit of a reach for a blog post, I promise I’m working on one about Maria Menounos and that will be more in the City of Industry wheelhouse.

The thing to explain, this time, is how Godzilla and King Kong become buddies, and the reason to explain that is not simply that in the midst of the 6th Great Extinction we are seemingly all suckers for an interspecies friendship.  The reason is that the cynical play (enemies become frenemies) actually worked at a time when not much else is working. And the reason the MonsterVerse is working is that there is still enough contingency to make the franchise ride worth taking.

To recap: Hollywood’s preferred strategies for stripmining IP are under significant pressure. The “firehose” of content is not the reliable revenue generator it was. The model universe now requires not the suffusive brutality of “something provided for all so that none may escape” (that’s Adorno, but it is also, obviously, Disney) but motivation—specific, attuned motivation. The success of an installment comes down to timing and intensity, not simply its own integrity. And in saying that, I am also saying that it requires attention at every scale in which timing and intensity apply. That sounds abstract. I want to show how it isn’t. It’s multilayered, but not abstract.

§§

Before getting into the timing of it all, I’d like you to take a moment to think about time. I mean, Time. I visited the re-installation of Cycladic art at the Met in March—more than 100 pieces that fill a dedicated gallery. Just across the way are red and black figure vases, the stuff that probably first made you jump when you realized that the “myths” that seemed to be ancient adventure stories were also the stuff of horny décor.

The Cycladic artists were roughly as old to the vase-painters as the vase-painters are to us. The works in the Met collection are overwhelmingly ritual objects, cross-armed fertility icons that have lost their pigment, many of them apparently produced in artisanal workshop settings, cranked out to fulfill broad social demand. The danger, looking back, is that we might mistake that regularity for uninventiveness.

And then you see this guy. Look at this guy. This is a pull-out-all-the-stops, I-gotta-have-something-to-occupy-my-time-other-than-these-folded-arm-figures-that-you-all-keep-putting-in-the-ground challenge. “I am an artist, you know?” It is just so ebullient, whether made for the harpist or his master or just an aficionado of music or the sculptor. “Dude, you know I can do other stuff?” “Whatever. Prove it.” Done and done. Who is not happy with this, made happy by this? 

Marble Seated Harp Player, The Met

There are at least four temporalities here: The ancientness of ancientness, something almost impossible to fathom even in its most anthropocentric version as “2800–2700 BCE,” or “twenty centuries before Homer.” Among the sculptors, it is hard to imagine a life spent among the stone without someone having a moment of catastrophic vertigo in the face of the primordiality of the rock itself—rock as old as world, it must have seemed—and in the face of that vertigo, surely someone tricked themselves into a little of the old immortality gambit. “Ta-da. Hewn from the living rock. I mean, who knows how long it might last?” (And then to be right. To be right! Hold on to that, because that is the MonsterVerse’s regular zone of transcendence, that moment of glee proper to the dino-loving kid.)

The lithic ancientness is so solid but so slippery—rock obviously given by the planet, taken up by a culture without a calendrical sublime: how did they frame its antecedence? What were their ways of imagining old? Against vague eons there is the more manageable span of a lifetime of preparation to be able to sculpt, to get the craft into the body before the body gives way—a body buffeted by everything the world could throw at it 4,800 years ago.

Third there is the rhythm of this artistic life, the diurnal requirements of making the run-of-the-mill stuff or overseeing it or working alongside it. And against that, but in sync with it, there is the diversion, the accession to the driving need to let it loose and try something else for a change.

(The hands! The hands! These are a sculptor’s recognition; a harpist’s tools that the sculptor took into the work, copied and tested and checked against their own like an animator getting a face right in a mirror only not like that because the animator’s face is copied through the hand and here that link is hand to hand. That right thumb sounds with cartoon eternity. The allegories of 19th century realism, of Caillebotte’s floor scrapers—are those impossible to imagine for this piece? Impossible because it is so old, so far from the forces that made realism demand allegory?)

“Did you hear what they’re doing next bench over?” “Lemme guess. A figure?” “Nope.” “A figure on top of a figure.” “No. A harpist.” Based on the survivals harpists were part of the repertoire but not common in the way the folded-arm figures are. And none seems to have the this-guy-ness of the one in the Met’s collection.

Fourth and finally there is the ephemerality of the music, of the accompanied song, always suspended in the stone but always occasioning its questions: What is being sung? To whom? Why? Was a song its occasion? “Carve me playing ‘Sprout and the Bean’.” Was it an epic? Was the occasion the player? The player singing to himself with his little shell ears?

Minutes or hours of song, days or months of carving, years and lives of training, generations of belief and thought composing a culture, eras of stone and of a faith now lost: all ready to be seen and heard, balled up like the extra dimensions of a string theorist, unwound by a simple prompt: Look at this guy.

One of the great Wittgensteinian gambits is the ostension game. There is a lot of successful pointing at stones in Wittgenstein, but as things complicate, the ostension game breaks down. “Point to a piece of paper. —And now point to its shape—now to its colour—now to its number (that sounds strange).” (In Hollywood Math and Aftermath I tried to explain how and why ostension breaks down in the particular escapology of capital wriggling out of the 2008 recession. As usual, whatever the underlying coherence of my argument, its intellectual consequences have been nil because the envelope not worth opening.)

In every flicker of ekphrasis, in every gesture at a career, we are playing the ostension game across all these timeframes and more. What remains striking about Hollywood cinema—about, I want to say, industrial cinema more generally—is that those temporalities can be rankly venal franchise times and yet no less the occasion for reflecting on the big stuff, on the Shapes of Time and Life.

And so the gambit here is this: We are going to figure out a little of what it means to live the multiple orders of temporality by watching Godzilla take a nap.

§§

It helps that the harpist is a fake. I didn’t know it at the time—I didn’t know it for a while—but part of the reason this guyjumped out is that he is midcentury-modern ersatz, made by Angelos Koutsoupis and fobbed off as authentic on the Met by his dealer. It doesn’t say so on the vitrine, but even in the digital catalog entry there are references to the scholarship that seals the deal. Based on my reading of that work the Met here is engaged in some serious bad faith, not even hinting that that they have known for decades how disputed this figure is.  

When the British artist John Craxton was tooling around the Cyclades after World War II, he went looking for ancient objects. In 1947 he bumped into Koutsoupis’s son, who took him to Angelos, who explained the whole situation and drew him a sketch of what he had made. There is a similar harpist in Greece (the “Keros” harpist), but his forearms have been lost; Angelos, commissioned to make a new one, added them back. Years later, Craxton was touring the museum with curator John Pope-Henessey who “drawled, ‘I really don’t care for it.’” He was snobbing, of course, since the harpist had become something of a star in the museum’s collection. Craxton responded, “Oh, I do. But then I met the man who made it.”

“Drawing of white marble seated harpist by Angelos Koutsoupis for John Craxton in January 1947 (Craxton Notebook). Manuscript annotations (Craxton): (Top) drawing made by Koutsoupis in Ios. Jan 1947 (Middle) Theodoros Seboulikis (dashed line) St Edwardoulo 10 (Bottom) the name [Seboulikis] of the dealer in Athens who commissioned the figure. Misspelt at the time Zoumboulakis.” Caption from John Craxton and Peter Warren “A Neocycladic Harpist?” in Material Engagements: Studies in Honour of Colin Renfrew, Neil Brodie and Catherine Hills, eds., Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2004, 109–113, 111.

What I saw as a leap across time into a craftspace I could understand was not much of a leap at all. That cartoon thumb is a post-Disney thumb; the “restored” forearms are post-Popeye forearms. I know nothing about ancient harps, but, now that you mention it “the arms are extended uncomfortably, and the hands [would] have to shuttle up and down the rod to reach all strings.… The impossible situation seems to imply that the sculptor (whether ancient or modem) had not seen a live model.” (Bo Lawergren, “A ‘Cycladic’ Harpist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Source: Notes on the History of Art, 20:1 (Fall 2000, 2–9, 7, 8).

Which is also to say: I know nothing about the ancient ones that dwell inside the hollow earth beyond what I have learned from the MonsterVerse and some half-remembered Cthulhu mythos. That there are in fact no ancient kaiju that populate an earth within the earth does not mean they might not be good to think with. But what I am tricking myself into thinking is that they are about thinking beyond the market when, in fact, I am being marketed to all the time.

§§

This spring I taught a course on the art and industry of action cinema. In such a course, Kathryn Bigelow is good to think with because she is a credentialed interlocutor: A member of the Art + Language group, a bit player for Barbara Hammer, twin masters degrees, a first movie in which a couple of guys beat the daylights out of each other for explicitly political reasons while a couple theorists discuss the implications of said beating. Her GWOT–era political swing may have been predictable, but in some smart interviews coincident with Point Break, Bigelow offered a theory where “momentum and suspension” are the key to action staging, plotting, and even theorizing. Momentum and suspension: the spacing that makes presence possible, in Derrida’s terms; the practical alternations necessary to make a good chase scene. She intends both.

Momentum and suspension—what Soderbergh calls rhythm and release—are easier to keep in focus at the micro level of the scene than higher up the ladder of the universe where demands to replicate success are more pressing. One industrial result has been “superhero fatigue,” with the Marvel and DC universes undergoing pretty deep reconceptualization.

But Justice League fatiguée was not simply an internal failure. Their projected 10–year slates were, as I have argued in this column before, zero interest-rate policy phenomena. Historically low inflation and interest rates, historically low volatility in rates meant that time horizons stretched into a nearly infinite future. An investment today could pay off in a decade without consuming itself in carrying costs. The return of higher rates and of volatility in 2022 shortened those timelines, recalibrated payoff dates, changed the priorities of private equity players, and amplified worker demands for higher salaries. In other words, internal creative exhaustion syncs up with broader pressures as if the entirety of the political economy had grown impatient.

At their most baroque the major universes suggested that cinema-tv audiences might get used to the multiple simultaneous continuities that comics readers had come to accept and even relish. Beyond the major arc—the Infinity Saga; the Snyderverse version of DC—there could be other Batmen, other Wolverines, what have you, places to explore the “What If?” offshoots and dead ends that might soak up surplus fandom or offer nooks and crannies for corporate auteurs to give it a shot.

Within those offshoots, ostension is necessarily everywhere. The DC version of “Look at this guy” is Colin Farrell’s Penguin griping, “Holy God, what are you showin’ me here? Come onnnn!” and Jeffrey Wright’s Commissioner Gordon screaming, “Open your eyes!” One Marvel version gets its charge from Tony Stark visiting his father across timelines. Audiences and interest rates willing, someday those different continuities could collide in even more super-super-crossovers.

§§

Toho/Legendary’s management of the MonsterVerse has achieved this polyrhythm without the self-congratulation of the hyperfranchises. Toho releases live action movies—Shin Godzilla, Godzilla Minus One—animated movies—Planet of the Monsters—animated tv shows—Godzilla Singular Point—and so on. Legendary now has its five movies, its pricey adventure series (Monarch: Legacy of Monsters), its cartoon.

Staring down a March release date, Legendary/WB was nervous about the success of Minus One, which had made $100m worldwide—not a blockbuster but not nothing. Would it add to the Godzillust? Would its Oscar win for VFX help? Would Legendary’s tween-pitched movie suffer critically compared with Minus One’s more mature version? Would that have box office consequences or are kids critic-proof? Is Minus One really more mature, or does it share enough with Yamazaki Takashi’s work directing Doraemon and Lupin III to be “for big kids” as we might say?

I was lucky enough to host a Q&A with producer Alex Garcia just before GxK opened, and he was legitimately unsure of the movie’s prospects. Instead of the gradual, every-few-years pattern of the earlier entries, Godzilla x Kong would be part of a 1-2-3 combo of Godzilla Minus One (Nov. 3, 2023 in Japan, later that month in the US), Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (Apple TV+ Nov. 17, 2023–Jan. 12, 2024), and GxK (March 25, 2025 in the US, a month later in Japan, where it tanked). Would the traffic jam create kaiju fatigue? Garcia pointed out that the new, post-Covid marketing patterns are far more condensed and so there was separation in the marketplace. (I helpfully noted that shows on Apple TV+ are unlikely to eat into the audience for anything else.)

With every movie, Legendary has recalibrated. The darker, Godzilla-as-threat of Gareth Edwards’s 2014 movie got a slight lightening in 2017 with Kong: Skull Island, until GxK the most successful. The first two entries crossed their monsters with period-specific corporate malfeasance, running along the tracks that the modern conglomerate has relied on to think through the lumbering abstraction of their size against the pointillism of their internal dynamics. Cultural autotheorization is not all Hobbes’s Leviathan, but a lot of it is.

Legendary has since youthified the MonsterVerse, and for this most recent installment they reduced the budget in case they guessed wrong. The next narrative step was fairly obvious: What if the kaiju were buddies? What is it like to make a friend? There is a lot of pooh-poohing of GxK compared with Minus One, but if you are under 15 you might find that the forging of friendship is as important a topic as the lingering damage of wartime defeat is for adults. And you might not remember how important Jia’s sign language exchange with Kong in GvK was in conveying the tentative fracturing of the isolation they share. It helps to know just how much a movie might mean to a lonely kid.

By now, Kong is older, tired, Thanos-y in his desire to just hang out. By the end of GxK he has something like a kaiju-dog and a band of kong-friends—he’s a social critter. Godzilla, meanwhile, curls up in the Colosseum, himself a lizardog, no need for social life. What we are getting in old Kong and scarred-but-ageless Godzilla is a characterologized franchise polyrhythm, a chance to watch various forms of timing and intensity play out in the ravaged bodies of the great. Sometime down the franchise line Kong will die, swapped out for that little shit baby Kong. Godzilla will also die but that will be a shock. And it will be temporary.

The Harry Potter movies aged with their audiences, becoming slightly more intense, violent, and wrapped up in supposedly more adult concerns. The MonsterVerse, by aging backward, is not only pitching itself toward the abandoned tween audience but pitching itself to that audience’s fascination with anteriority: If your first entry is GvK you will have to go back in time in order to understand what has come before. But that is a foundational experience of the tween: These are the aficionados of the dino, of Pompeii, of Qin Shi Huang’s terra cotta army. The complex corporate and temporal mechanics of Monarch await them as the theoretical armature of the experience they have already latched onto.

§§

As I said above, that experience is getting it right, of figuring out how this system in which one is already enmeshed, works. Monarch’s own emblem for this is the scene where a pair of half-siblings (and their coder friend) attempt to figure out what their bigamist father already knew, which was how the Titans moved around the world undetected. We know the earth is hollow; they only know that their dad’s world map has a bunch of pinholes in it. As the sun comes up in the San Francisco exclusion zone, the solution, ahem, dawns on them and the perforated map becomes the technology for the revelation of the franchise’s projected understanding of itself.

I said I wanted to explain how Godzilla and Kong become buddies, and up to now I have stuck with the why, the logic of it. But in movies the formal causes (understood in multiple senses) are reasons. Years ago, I was talking with production designer Rick Carter about his work on Jurassic Park. During shooting, it became clear that at the climax the T. Rex was going to have to save the humans from the velociraptors. This was a change in plans, and Carter asked Spielberg how the T. Rex was going to enter. “Like this,” Spielberg said, and made a gesture where his hand—here pretending to be a giant mouth—arced in from the top of an imaginary frame. But Carter hadn’t been asking about the shot, he had been asking because as the architect of the (fake) visitors center where this was all going to go down, he knew that the doors weren’t tall enough for the (fake) T. Rex to get in. Carter’s question was (fake) practical, not formal; Spielberg’s answer implied that form mattered more than practicality.

Formally: Godzilla and Kong become buddies by putting them next to each other and letting them run like hell at the camera to kick someone’s ass. Practically-narratively: Godzilla and Kong become buddies when Mothra mediates their conflict and turns them toward their common enemy. The time of the instant (the run), of the crafting (Mothra’s mediation), of the buildup and rhythm (the franchise), of the planet and the planet within the planet (the ancient). These are what George Kubler called the “streams of contemporary happening,” and while we can’t “chart their flow and volume” the way a historian might, we can certainly measure their timing and intensity, their rhythm and release, their momentum and suspension. When the sync hits, we just might get it.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Wingard, Legendary/WB 2024

Coming out with Something: Martin Scorsese's Dead End

A couple site visits have not panned out, so I’m going to subject you to a close analysis of a scene from William Wyler’s Dead End (Goldwyn, 1937). In an earlier column, I contended there were things you could learn by watching bad movies and tv. The gambit here is that you can learn something from paying attention to a good movie, too. Most of what you learn is that for a movie to be good a tremendous amount of skill across a range of crafts has to converge over and over again. Beyond that obviousness, here’s some thesis to tide you over: however good you might think Dead End is, it’s better.

The background: Dead End was a Broadway hit, with a huge set designed by Norman Bel Geddes, and it was snapped up by Samuel Goldwyn. (Paul Monticone has traced this process, and gathered some fantastic archival images here.) Goldwyn was a prestige independent releasing through United Artists. The talent was all top tier: Humphrey Bogart, Joel McCrae, Sylvia Sidney, Claire Trevor; director William Wyler, screenwriter Lillian Hellman, designer Richard Day to reconstitute the gargantuan set, Alfred Newman to do the score, and, crucially for our purposes, cinematographer Gregg Toland.

The historical hinge: Imagine a deep-focus world where everything in-studio is wire sharp, from your face to infinity. You’ve seen it in Orson Welles’s Kane (1941, Gregg Toland), and maybe William Wyler’s Best Years of Our Lives (1945, Toland again). There are superb uses in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939, Bert Glennon) and Welles’s Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Stanley Cortez). In Welles’s versions it stayed mixed up with the shorter lenses that were all but necessary to the effect at the time, and so deep focus and fisheye distortion merged. It was always a technique prone to trickery—faked via matte shots or double exposures—and in the 70s it tended to show up in split diopter shots that gave you a sharp foreground and a sharp distance and if you looked hard enough some smudgy column in the middle to hide the split. In the 1940s, new filmstocks, coated lenses, and, yes, optical effects drove the quest for “pan focus” across the industry.

Almost 40 years ago, in Chapter 27 (ulp) of the monumental Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production, 1920–1960, David Bordwell recontextualized the technique—and the technician—to take deep focus poster boy Toland down a peg. Some other cinematographers bristled at Toland’s publicity hounding, and Bordwell wanted to demonstrate both that the push to deep focus was broader than just Toland and that because Toland’s preferred framing of deep space was crowded, it ran into problems. To keep the sightlines open to the deeper planes, Toland’s shots ended up static. This reached its maximum in Kane, the source of much of the pushback.

That doesn’t make a Toland shot less striking, though. In Eisenstein’s lost Bezhin Meadow (1937, Vladimir Nilsen and Eduard Tissé) or Anthony Mann’s Border Incident (1949, John Alton) or John Huston’s Red Badge of Courage (1951, Harold Rosson), looming foreground figures often have the effect of holding the rest of the shot in place. The dynamized stasis comes from inside the frame.

Still from Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow (1937, Nilsen and Tissé)

Still from Mann’s Border Incident (1949, Alton)

Still from Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage (1951, Rosson)

As for the self-mythologization (“How I Broke the Rules on Citizen Kane” in Popular Photography; or some pages in Life), some of that comes from Toland’s position at an independent production company: he needed to be a little more insistent, a little more of a self-promoter. Every movie was an advertisement for his next gig outside Goldwyn. In this way, he was a forerunner of the modern free-lance craftsperson. “The Toland ‘look’ became famous but also came under considerable criticism within the industry,” (588). (Bordwell is more accommodating about William Cameron Menzies, whom he puts at the center of the professional swirl where expressionism, production design, and VFX meet.)

But Bordwell was also trying to mobilize a way of thinking about depth that would disarticulate staging from focus. Initially, this might seem silly: what is the point of staging action in pronounced depth if the deep stuff (or the foreground stuff) isn’t in focus? And that’s where this scene comes into play. It takes some setting up.

A bit of plot: A key thread in Dead End is the unraveling of Baby Face Martin’s attempts to get back to his roots. On the lam and with a “fixed face” (Humphrey Bogart’s face) he has returned to the old neighborhood to see his mother and get back together with his girl, Francey. The meeting with mom goes disastrously. Marjorie Main repeats, in a strange, ghastly, muted wail, “Just leave us alone….Just stay away and leave us alone and…die.” It is a horrifying thing to hear, so exhausted, so certain of its condemnation. Martin is shook. He needs a drink.

A little while later, Francey (Claire Trevor) makes her way from Brooklyn to East 53rd St. in Manhattan. It’s been eleven years, and she and Marty still have feelings for each other, but she also has a theatrical cough and won’t let him kiss her. Syphilis, of course, and in a stunning shot she pleads with him to really look at her. She steps from the shadow into harsh light and…he sees. But just as the Production Code won’t let her say that she has syphilis, it won’t let anything actuallyvisible mar her face. The lighting has to do all the work.

Francey (Claire Trevor) in shadow

France steps into the harsh light, her sickness “revealed”

Bogart responds by stepping back in horror and scanning downward, finally “recognizing” her dress as a streetwalker’s costume. The camera then pushes in on him, refusing to let him keep his distance. The next time we cut back to him we are even closer and the brickwork on the wall behind is thrown out of focus. He just looms there, eventually lashing out at her. “Why didn’t you starve?” “Why didn’t you?” she snaps back.

Martin (Humphrey Bogart) “sees” the ravages of Francey’s illness…

He steps back and scans downward,

but the camera pushes in. As he accuses Francey, the sharp brick background fades and his head seems to float.

Like Main, Trevor is terrific here—so good she received a supporting actress nomination even though she is only in this one scene. They part ways and Bogart, still unnerved, hustles around the corner to get another drink. That’s where our scene takes place.

The scene: In the first shot Bogart walks by his henchman, Hunk (Allen Jenkins). We pan with him and wait, pushing in on the picture window until Bogart reappears to sit down. The owner, Pascagli (George Humbert), recognizes him and realizes that the last time Bogart was there he objected to the player piano until Hunk kicked it to shut it off. Pascagli theatrically unplugs the thing and the tone momentarily lightens. He then repeats their earlier order to them.

Martin (Bogart) strides quickly past Hunk (Jenkins) and the camera follows his action. Bogart then disappears screen left,,

and reenters, taking a seat at the table in the window.

After Pascagli (Humbert) and Hunk exchange glances, the restaurateur unplugs the player piano,

and reminds the gangsters of their order.

Even though the camera is now inside the restaurant, the space has been coherent. There’s a two-top table that provides a nice, stable axis. There’s a clean 3-shot of Martin, Hunk, and Pascagli—a triangle echoed in the three breadsticks on the table, breadsticks that echo the sprays of dried spaghetti standing tall in carafes in the window. We expect we’ll have medium close-ups of the gangsters shot from the street side of the table. Initially we do. We cut to an over-the-shoulder single of Hunk as Pascagli says he never forgets and order—or a face. Hunk is worried that the restaurateur might realize who Martin is. He looks right down the barrel for an instant before turning his attention.

Hunk listens to the order, distracted, until Pascagli says he never forgets a face.

Hunk, roused, turns across the lens,

to see if Pascagli remembers Martin from days gone by.

The next shot we would expect to be the reverse single of Martin, even if he is wedged between the table and the window sill. But that isn’t what we get at all. Instead, we do an almost Ozu-flip (a “donden”) to a new two-shot of the gangsters in the window, only now we’re looking out toward the street, and Martin adjusts so he’s sitting flush against the table. Hunk, who was just on the right side of the frame is on the left. It breaks the rules, a bit; and it jostles the viewer, a bit. But this is a movie that has been so smart about what it shows us and when that we play along to see where this is going.

The “donden”—an Ozu-style jump across the axis to a new two-shot.

Hunk has been laying out what is bothering Martin: “Twice in one day,” Martin repeats. This is the architectonic of this movie, and also of Freudian trauma, but we’ll hold off on that for a moment. Already Bogart has been rejected by his mother and pushed away his old flame. His foil Dave, played by Joel McCrae, eventually pivots from his upper crust girlfriend who was horrified at the local squalor back to the girl he grew up with, the one who’s been on strike and got walloped by the cops. Doubly wanted vs. doubly rejected. “Twice in one day.” It stings.

Still no close-up of Martin. Instead, we get an over-the-(other)-shoulder shot of Hunk, who tells Martin he should always look forward, not back; his mother had bought a sign that said as much and hung it over the bed. It’s a compressed line. Martin has not only been looking back, but he has been looking back for his mother. Hunk is oblivious that he’s just rubbing it in here. He’s also oblivious to the joke of putting that sign over the bed. The PCA didn’t recognize the implicit primal scene either.

Hunk leans in to explain that Bogart should always look forward.

Back in the two-shot Hunk proposes leaving for St. Louis and another girl, one “as respectable as a whistle…in the right way.” “I bet you there’s WELCOME on the doormat for you there,” he says, offering up another sign, another corrupted domestic ideal that belies her whistle-cleanliness. “Forget about the dames,” Martin says.

The “normal” two-shot.

Finally we get what we think will be the reverse on Martin. But the shot’s wrong. Instead of the complementary over-the-shoulder, it’s just the two-shot shifted left about 40º. Another classical Hollywood rule violation. What gives? Is there a plausible practical explanation, that the unwanted and unheard piano is up against the wall behind Hunk so the camera can’t move any farther left? That, of course, is silly. You can just move the piano or even the wall, the way you jumped the camera in from the street. But also, this is a set not a location. Toland could easily have planned the shots in advance, shifted things around, made it work “right” if he’d wanted to. “But twice in one day,” Martin says, for the second time.

L: A placement for the reverse shot on Martin; R: What we would expect to see

The “awkward” two-shot.

We cut back to the “normal” two-shot and Martin realizes how bad things are. “Forget it,” he says, and Bogart turns away from everything—from the room, from the salt shaker he has been gripping, from the unseen and unheard piano—to look out the window.

The “normal” two-shot again. Bogart turns away from the double rejections and Hunk’s advice.

Back to the awkward two-shot and Bogart’s hand is suddenly at is mouth—he’s thinking, continuity be damned (a). The camera is already on the move, dollying slowly right and panning back left so that the “awkward” two-shot is now a tight two-shot on the same axis as the “normal” one. Martin is lost in thought, staring out the window (b).

(a) The “awkward” two-shot, with Martin’s hand at his mouth.

(b) after the dolly-and-pan, a tight two-shot on the same axis as the “normal” one

Everything outside is out of focus—in 1937 you weren’t going to be able to get deep focus through a window. But as Bordwell notes, there is still plenty of staging in depth out there. Martin is formulating a plan to kidnap a rich kid from the swanky new apartment building down the block. And when he formulates it, Bordwell says, lo and behold someone will push a pram out the door across the street (c). “The woman is too far away to be in focus, and her child is not the target of the scheme, but the fact that she occupies frame center and is the only moving figure in the shot gives her a symbolic salience.” Out of focus, but on point. “Here is the sort of staging in extreme depth, with a significant element in foreground close-up and a thematically important element in a distant plane, that will become familiar in Citizen Kane.”

Yet Bordwell is right and wrong here. What Martin sees when he is looking out the window is a family walking by, left to right, from that new building on the river through the slum, what looks to be a teenage girl in a sailor dress and an adult pair who seem to be her parents (b above). What he sees, in other words, is a precise model of the familial situation he is going to shatter. Earlier the Dead End Kids who have taken his place in the neighborhood gang beat the daylights out of the kid; Martin’s just going to finish the job.

When Bogart turns his attention from the street to explain the plan to Hunk, that’s when the pram appears (c). The carriage isn’t the prompt, it’s the symbol, as Bordwell notes. This is Baby Face Martin, even if he has a new face entirely, and even if that face is as unbabyish as Bogart’s. What Martin’s been up to has been chasing the good old days—his mother, his girl—and getting rejected. He is compensating now, consciously and not—he knows that the money is “something,” but he doesn’t know why he wants to take the boy “farther away.” The set is lining up as Martin’s unconscious as well. Twenty minutes earlier in the movie he went into that building, chasing his mother. He came out of it an orphan. But in his compensatory fantasy, he now comes out of the building as a baby in a carriage, pushed along by someone who cares.

(c) Martin turns to Hunk and the pram appears across the street.

As soon as Martin explains his plan, Hunk leans back, pulling out of the shot entirely, and the camera—Toland’s camera—adjusts slightly right (d). And there it is: the single of Bogart that we haven’t had this whole scene. A flash of his profile before we cut to the over-the-shoulder of Hunk trying to talk him out of it (11). “I come home for something. I didn’t get it. But I’m comin’ out with something. Even if it’s only dough” (12). Back and forth between the nearly frontal shot of Hunk and the profile of Martin, a lopsided exchange that has been justified by that audacious camera move.

(d) The missing reverse of Martin

That move is audacious for at least two reasons. First, it doesn’t quite fit, not just based on the rules of the system, but the edits are jumpy; there’s a dead frame tucked in there somewhere; clearly they—Toland and Wyler—wanted this, wanted it enough to stick with it even if there was a cleaner, smoother, more traditional way to show us how Martin settled on the plot. Second, in my Classical Hollywood history class screening of the film, it jumped out to just about everyone. I called it the “Scorsese shot” and got nods. What makes it a Scorsese shot? I asked. We batted it around and one student offered that it was a way of disclosing Martin’s internal dynamics through apparently unsubjective, external camerawork. I want to follow up on that, because it seems right, but also, isn’t that what classical Hollywood cinema always did? Not quite.

Maybe we see that camera move as getting us access to the confidential conversation, but it feels more like the awkward two-shot was just the camera hanging back, waiting until it could swing toward Bogart’s ear, focalizing the scene through Martin, letting us experience his force of character. Now the odd camera position makes sense: had it been in the expected spot behind Hunk the whole time, it could not have simply slid around to get them both in profile. Had we seen the single of Martin before, we wouldn’t know that this instance was different, that this single was about him, that the whole scene was. (In Hollywood Math and Aftermath I chalked this tendency up to Scorsese’s penchant for a peculiar kind of ostension; I think that goes for Toland, too.)

Hunk leaves to do some reconnaissance, and we jump back outside the restaurant. The camera pans with him as he emerges onto the street and nearly bumps into Dave. They pause and Dave looks into Pascagli’s at Martin, who feels his gaze. Martin looks up in a medium shot, we get the expected reverse of Dave, and Hunk heads up the street as the light in the pool hall comes on. This precise, stagey timing in the exchange of glances sets up the next scene with Dave and his impending girlfriend, Drina (Sylvia Sidney).

Hunk leaves and nearly runs into Dave (Joel McCrae)

Dave stops and looks in the restaurant at Martin.

But pause a moment on that shot of Dave. He is positioned between Martin and the building across the street. “I’m comin’ out with something,” Martin had said; the “something” is the rich boy or the money, ostensibly, but what “came out” of that building was the pram. And now Dave is blocking it. Martin isn’t going to be coming out with anything at all, not the boy, not the money, not with the uncorrupted baby that he wishes he could be again. And certainly not with a mother or a girlfriend. Dave is pure superego popping in between Martin and his desire, thwarting Martin’s attempt to vanquish his properly doubled trauma through mimetic violence. The scene has been staged in depth to drive the plot and manifest its unconscious. Dave’s appearance in just this spot forecloses both, needs to be read as both.

Significant glances: Bordwell’s analysis of deep focus, and of Toland as its very public spokesperson, was set up as a corrective to the ontological, Bazinian reading of the technique. For Bordwell it was never about freedom or realism, it was about branding and over-insistence, and as such it was quickly toned down and assimilated to the cinematographer’s bag of tricks, or, if it remained showy, amounted to a gimmick. “Toland’s densely organized compositions do not, as Bazin argued, make our perception existentially free.” They force our attention to move from place to place.

Yet even Bordwell can’t get away from the notion that in this gimmicky technique, or around it, and in this branded career, or around it, there is something that demands reading. Between foreground and background there is a rhetoric (a tropology). “The Union forever!” young Charles Foster Kane says in the depths while his mother is selling him off to the bank. In Dead End Toland makes use of an astonishing number of setups, a wild proliferation of possibilities. These are occasioned by Richard Day’s gargantuan set, and authorized by his own self-assertions in technique, as Stanley Cavell might have put it. Pronounced deep focus is part of his unparalleled repertoire. There will be more, and more florid, deep focus yet to come for Toland and others. Yet Bordwell is right that its moment passes.

But there will also be more, much more, obliquely motivated camera movement in the decades to come. Here, the movement is built on top of a chain of seemingly inexplicable choices, but the payoff is a glimpse of a radical—for classical Hollywood—gravitational subjectivity. A person emerges whole not just because of a coherence between components such as costume and lighting and framing, as Francey did around the corner, but through an agonistic relationship with a seducible camera. For a character to be psychologically replete in this new cinema, the total system of enframing must be thrown into motion. Martin, in search of his originary fantasy, of that first time with Francey on the roof, where they could be together and be open to the stars, finds only nostalgia’s failure in the realities of sickness and sex work. The camera demanded his reaction then, forced him into a proximity he wanted to escape. Things started to look very weird.

Now, the camera is showily on the move again, but it is drawn to him, testing out the limits of his charisma. Throughout Dead End Bogart pushes us to entertain the idea that Martin is getting a bad rap. We find ourselves siding with the manchild who thinks he only wants to love and be loved—and make some money along the way. And when we side with Martin, something may come along to shake us out of it: Marjorie Main’s malediction; Claire Trevor’s demand; Joel McCrae’s solidity.

I’m not saying that Toland invented modern cinematic subjectivity the way that Cavell contends that Shakespeare and Montaigne invented modern subjectivity as such. (Modern here is sliding all over the place, of course.) But without Toland’s relentless experimentation, his untrammeled multiplication of setups and techniques, the independent showiness that put some of his colleagues off, there is no way this little tracking pan exists, exists to do this form of work in the story. And without Dead End’s balky social-realist-Freudianism, there likely isn’t enough tension between the staging and the shooting—the Bordwell split, reunited—to force Toland’s shot to come to meaning this intensely. Subject and system, here coalescing.

Finally I am not saying that (Baby Face) Martin Scorsese actually got the shot from this movie, even if when he saw it he heard the movie call his name throughout.

Marking beginnings like this is a dangerous game, and not just because it invites Freudian disappointment. Practically, it’s tricky: perhaps Toland tried it out before; perhaps he lifted it from someone else; perhaps it was being invented in parallel across the industry or all around the globe. It will take some archival work to sharpen the claim, and even then it will never be guaranteed. But this shot was so immediately legible to the students in my class, these emerging practitioners shaped by the industry’s tutelary chain, that it feels foundational, feels like a primal scene of invention. For them, this shot is enough.

For me, the shot not only feels foundational, it feels like a rejoinder, an answer to a persistent rejection of reading in the subfield of “media industries studies.” This shot says: The occasion—in the story, yes, but also in the arc of performance, star, and setting—drives the need, the need drives the innovation, the innovation comes to meaning by offering a superior solution to the problems of the moment. And the meaning lies in a lopsided exchange between the uncountably various demands of the system and the fugitive conviction that one has read the scene. Has read the scene enough.

 Enough of that? Enough of that.

Force Projection: Hollywood Pays It Forward

(on Barbie and Sound of Freedom)

2023 in review: To paraphrase something Paramount President Stanley Jaffe said back in the late 1960s, every half-assed analyst is going to tell you a story about where the movies are at. I’m going to take a different road and tell you a story about how the movies feel.

(Where the movies are at: The US box office will finish at about $9 billion this year; if it were to get back to 2019 levels it would need to be $13.6 billion with inflation. Worldwide the situation is worse: the box office may not hit $25 billion this year; it was over $40 billion in 2019. The totals will be lower next year as a result of the strikes.)

I wasn’t going to write about Barbie—many others have, at length, and very well—but then I realized I needed to write about going to see Barbie, not simply because it was the biggest movie of the year but because seeing and having seen Barbie is about a particular feeling. For the foreseeable future the crucial problem that confronts Hollywood moviemaking is understanding what kinds of feelings make theatrical audiences pull the trigger.

That marks a change. In what now seems like a bygone era, moviegoing wasn’t about feeling, it was about the kinds of things the stories were about and the ways those stories were told. But by 2023 the MCU—the boldest and most successful serial storytelling experiment in Hollywood history—had fatally lost the balance between continuity and obligation. Narrative expansion became homework, and no matter how different the MCU movies and shows might feel they can’t overcome that narrative burden.

(Industry conventional wisdom about homework holds that part of why Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part I underperformed was calling it “Part I.” As a consequence Part II has been pushed back and renamed. By that same logic the bait-and-switch of Dune—where you didn’t know it was Part I until it ended—seems to be preferable. Denis Villeneuve is now out here telling us that Part II is “much better” than Part I; sorry, suckers.)

I went to a morning screening of Barbie opening weekend at an AMC Classic multiplex near Camp Lejeune. The seats are still general admission; it used to be a Carmike’s; the matinee ticket was under $9; when Nicole Kidman explained that heartbreak feels good in a place like this no one joined in. The theater wasn’t empty, and the largest contingent were about a dozen pink-shirted moms and their daughters. The moms gave off military-wives vibes with a mix of sleeve tats and soft-tactical shoulder slings. They looked, as Jason Bourne says, like they could handle themselves. They all seemed to have a great time.

The coastal plain of North Carolina is in the midst of a slowburn struggle for cultural dominance over the landscape. The beaches are fully under the sway of the vacation home industry, with cheek-by-jowl triple-deckers up on stilts. The island roads all say they flood during high water, and that now means they flood all the time. This is a landscape of looming uninsurability, and despite the proliferation of hyperkitsch beach toy shops no ironic inflatable alligator is going to ward off the rising waters and the eventual collapse in real estate values.

All day and much of the night, the skies are filled with helicopters and tiltrotors from Marine Corps Air Station New River. State Highways leading to the islands are pocked by turnoffs for training “LZ”’s. For the Marines at New River and Camp Lejeune the swampiness and sea level rise are more a feature than a bug, although the military is far more worried about climate resilience than the amen-chorus who claim to support them. The amount of money the Department of Defense will pour into hardening port infrastructures along the South Atlantic coast to maintain the US’s force projection capacity is truly boggling.

Big chains haven’t found a way to efficiently monetize this convergence so coastal commerce is still small-proprietor: nutritional supplement purveyors and fitness centers calculated to meet your precise level of intensity; places to refuel that seem to have names like “Violence Coffee.”

I am trying to convey a very specific intercalation of landscape, technology, capital, and culture here because as odd as it may seem it functions; the culture that emerges from all those details serves the purpose not because of its precise configuration, but also not despite it. The big idea here is that the grander system of US hegemony makes use of its diverse affective forms to calibrate our investment and our denial, our guilts and our self-justifications. You don’t have to believe all the time. Sometimes you know what you’re doing is morally bankrupt, sometimes you forget it, sometimes you recognize that you are far more implicated than you thought, and sometimes you think, I’m just going to the movies with my friends and their daughters and that can’t be evil.

The multilayered marketing and distribution competence that project Barbie across the surface of the earth works alongside the multilayered logistical competence that projects the US, its power and its stupidities and its unrelenting demands, across the surface of the earth. These gargantuan institutions cling to the planet like giant sheets of contact paper. And like contact paper, when you try to lay one sheet down on another there will inevitably be imperfections, mismatches, bubbles. In those bubbles are an infinitude of individuals—agents—improvising their way even as they are sandwiched between capital-S Systems.

§§

There is a specific politics to Greta Gerwig’s work. It depends on a strong claim that our ordinary politics is terribly mistaken, a diversion of our attention from the real disconnections we face. Only by clearing out the explicit politics can we reestablish the true grounds of political engagement, and those grounds are feminist.

I think of this as a little like Erving Goffman’s deep gambit in prioritizing the study of micro-social interactions. Not that either of them believes politics aren’t essential, but both seem convinced that we can’t do both politics and society at the same time right now. There will be stunning collisions—Goffman’s essay “Footing” gets at Nixon’s go-to misogynist shivving. But most of the time their work will be misunderstood as de-politicized; I might call it pre-politicized instead.

Late in Barbie, Barbie spends a couple minutes in a void speaking with her “creator,” Ruth Handler. Overall the scene felt off to me, but the montage of memories in it was doing a particular sort of work that I have not seen people highlight. Here is a contrast: at the end of Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, our hero Manny Torres (Diego Calva) begs off from family responsibilities to duck into the movies. He then undergoes a transportive experience at a screening of Singin’ in the Rain. This was the “magic of cinema” montage that lots of folks found pretentious.

However good faith it was, however honestly Chazelle came by it, the structure of the experience—the idea of moviegoing in it—required leaving behind the family ties Manny had built in order to find his way back to that flickering moment of transcendence from early in the film—that preposterous and inevitable sunset butterfly—that he lost in the muck of Hollywood depravity.

But when Barbie takes Ruth’s hands she is diverted from the Corporate, from Art, and from Politics toward experiences of connection as such. It is a transcendence accomplished by, as philosopher Stanley Cavell would say, descending through the ordinary. These are the actual things that make life worth it, not the stand-ins that let you leave the compromises of a life behind. Gerwig’s aesthetic is constitutionally defensive, for all sorts of reasons, but it is absolutely rigorous in those commitments. People who liked Barbie liked that it connected them to their connections and their compromises; the word of mouth was superb.

§§

When such descents into feeling are yoked to hegemonic impulses, the results are weepy devastation. The remarkable opening titles for Steven Conrad’s Patriot (Amazon) are affectively adjacent to Gerwig’s montage, only they bring back explicitly political politics because for Conrad, well, it’s about guys being dudes. The configuration of brotherly affection and abusive innocence sets up our hero to be subsumed by the US intelligence community’s deadly apologetics.

Patriot is one of the few real justifications of peak tv. But if you don’t keep gender front and center, similar feelings can get ugly very quickly. A toxically masculine gumbo of sentiment and hegemony gets whipped into a fantasy of righteous vengeance that cloaks violence under violence, spectacularizing bad faith, leaving viewers yearning for permission to forget all the horrors we are doing and that are done to us—you know, crowdfunded fascism.

I am talking about Sound of Freedom, the QAnon–adjacent, child trafficking yuckfest from Angel Studios. Part of the reason I didn’t write about it when it came out is because I don’t want those people to get even a dime of my money or yours. If you skipped it, it begins streaming on Amazon just after Christmas. You can also steal it.

Sound of Freedom is the fictionalized story of the autofictionalizing Tim Ballard. When it opens, Ballard has been working at ICE tracking down pedophiles—hundreds—but has been unable to save the exploited children who are “outside the U.S.” His frustration has built up, but so has the trauma of the job. Like the low-paid content moderators Sarah T. Roberts wrote about in Behind the Screen, Ballard spends hours combing through horrific images; he then needs to render that photo and video evidence in bloodless prose for the legal system. Breaking down, he goes to his boss with a plan to take their efforts beyond the U.S. borders. “This job tears you to pieces and this is my one chance to put those pieces back together.” “We can’t go after Honduran kids in Colombia,” his boss tells him before agreeing to fund the extra-mural operation out of “discretionary.”

The movie is clear that the system of trafficking is robust, flexible, global. In his quest for one little girl Ballard is told she might be in Colombia or “in Moscow, Bangkok, LA.” Eventually his boss gets cold feet and pulls authorization. Ballard pushes ahead and busts up a big trafficking ring, but even then he must make a solo journey deep into the Colombian jungle to rescue the girl from a drug kingpin’s compound. It’s rote, even old-fashioned, this Missing in Action–style regeneration through violence, but it isn’t slapdash.

Ballard built his real-world, freestyle global anti-trafficking organization on this paranoid argument. The trafficked children might be anywhere and so anti-trafficking efforts must be everywhere. Are there kids in your Wayfair boxes? Can you order them via Ebay or Etsy? That may have been too far for Ballard, but for the movie’s star Jim Caviezel and his devoted fans, it’s a different story.  

More than 30 years ago Fredric Jameson insisted that beginning in the 1970s Hollywood’s response to the overwhelming complexity of the late capitalist economy took the form of conspiracy thinking. While there are lots of reasons why people have ended up driving freight trains at hospital ships and snarling traffic near Hoover Dam, the opacity of modern logistics keeps turning up among them. Barbie has fun with some rapid prototyping when Ken’s Barbieland coup succeeds; Hollywood was more than happy to award Nomadland best picture for its vision of the human side of the logistics cycle; and in the depths of the pandemic, Christopher Nolan rolled out his most capacious vision of global logistics in Tenet.

Sound of Freedom is about combatting the logistics of illicit human migration with countervailing force. Ballard’s schemes emerge at the intersection of LDS missionary zeal and the leftover logic of the Global War on Terror. In 2007, President Bush told the American Legion “Our strategy is this: we will fight them over there so we don’t have to face them in the United States of America.” A strategy of quagmire; open ended, failing. Part of the reason Sound of Freedom seems like a “dad” movie is that it is plugged into that same logic, a logic dating all the way back to NSC–68, the Paul Nitze–authored memo that, as John Lewis Gaddis has contended, turned containment into global paranoia. We will hunt the children over there so we don’t have to face the evidence here.

It took five years for Sound of Freedom to be released as it bounced from Fox to Disney and then was dropped before getting picked up by Angel Studios. In that time, journalists at Vice and American Crime Journal had uncovered just how mendacious and sleazy Ballard and his former organization, Operation Underground Railroad, are. (Ballard resigned from OUR in disgrace for treating it as a subsidized sexual harassment agency and may soon be facing charges.) This month, Miles Klee at Rolling Stone explained how Angel Studios’ own righteous posturing serves to cover some epic self-dealing. (That self-dealing would seem less nefarious if they rationalized their corporate structure and simply called it “vertical integration.”)

However ethically, financially, and legally questionable the institutions that came together to make Sound of Freedom the surprise hit of the summer might be, they excused their grift by turning the movie’s fantasy of projective revenge into an enlistment in a cultural crusade. To their audiences they said, You may not want to see this but you need to see this. And if things worked—and things definitely worked—their audiences would tell other people the same.

One of the more annoying things about movies from the perspective of classical economics is that they cost the same whether they are good or bad, and you don’t know whether you have over- or underpaid until the movie is done. There are ways of trying to convince people to give you more money when the movies are good—you can sell merch or build theme-park experiences or make sequels, but all of that is, as they say, ancillary. Angel Studios hit on a tremendously efficient way of capturing that “consumer surplus”: when the movie was over they just asked you to give them more money. They said it was to pay for tickets for other people to see the movie, and some of it was used to defray those costs. But the vast majority of it wasn’t. It was just more than $30 million in profit, as Klee has revealed. Paying it forward was a way to put your money where your word of mouth was.

Caviezel made the pitch over the closing credits. There is more dense-pack weirdness in his closing solicitation than in the whole rest of the movie. “I think we can make Sound of Freedom the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of 21st century slavery.” We have to stop child sex trafficking, we are told. The way to do that is (thankfully) not for us to go grabbing kids away from the adults who are near them—although there has been plenty of that. Nor, surprisingly, are we supposed to donate to groups that work to stop child sex trafficking or work to provide support and care to victims. This is not a Will Rogers Institute–style appeal.

The way to stop child sex trafficking is to get people to go back to the movies: to get them into the theater. Cinephilia trumps pedophilia. Caviezel is explicit: “When you come to a theater you experience movies differently. There is no pause button, there are no distractions. We all have an experience as we watch the film together as a community. It makes it possible for strong messages like this one to take root.” Caviezel’s pitch for the intensity of the cinematic experience verges on the ontological, so much so that when it comes time for you to get out your phone, take a picture of the QR code on the screen, and fork over some money, he apologizes. “Now, I know it’s weird, because we’re in a theater.”

God’s children are not for sale, but the spectacle of their dramatic rescue certainly is. And you should buy it. The move is to pay it forward to an anonymous moviegoer, who will be asked to do the same. The money goes round and round in the studio’s operations and only very incidentally does it spill over into more direct action. It was a grift before it was a grift.

If people who liked Barbie liked that it connected them to their connections and their compromises, people who liked Sound of Freedom liked that it promised a release from those compromises in the form a global connection, a pay it forward community so total that all the righteous and the innocent might be saved and that all the evil might be justly punished. Barbie attends to the slippage between the self and the system; Sound of Freedom dreams of a perfect harmony between self and system, a dream that is always deferred, always in the future, just one more pay-it-forward ticket away.

§§

If you have not seen it, I am asking you to take the two minutes now to watch the “Paying It Forward” sketch from I Think You Should Leave (Netflix; S3E3, starting 9:34). This season dropped on May 30, in every way the contemporary of Sound of Freedom (July 4) and Barbie (July 21).

The sketch veers in ways that are characteristically Robinsonian: there are the woman’s immediate participation in the scam, the fact that she knows in her bones that the order begins “55 burgers,” the impossible softening of the big guy in the SUV (wrestler Damien Sandow/Aron Stevens, lol), and the solution that is the opposite of a solution when Robinson runs away rather than face any consequences.

It also includes the characteristic Robinsonian surplus. A good I Think You Should Leave sketch is like an automatic drawing done while looking at a diorama of human wreckage. In this case, when Robinson bolts from the car, he is enacting the clichéd moment from an LA police pursuit when the driver has precisely this revelation. “Oh! I can just run!” he thinks, only to find himself pinned in a helicopter’s blazing Nightsun spotlight before getting bodyslammed into a cyclone fence. What shows up in Sound of Freedom as the sadboy’s beatific cleverness is, in I Think You Should Leave, Tim’s desperate screaming to hold the idiot plan together. “Pay It Forward” is how Sound of Freedom feels when you manage to laugh at it.

They shot the “Pay It Forward” sketch at a Nexx Burger location in Downey. I made the pilgrimage for the same reason that I clomped around Altadena’s Mountain View Cemetery searching out locations from “Coffin Flop.” (As an LA location, Mountain View is famous; Nexx Burger isn’t.) I like to go to these places not simply to see how they were shot, but to imagine the radical mismatch between the workaday place and the extremity of the result. It really opens up the possibilities.

Like the Piedmont’s Kinetic Nutrition or Semper Fit, Nexx Burger is a family operation with a couple outlets. Unlike coastal Carolina, the LA basin is not a place where global brands have trouble taking root, but it is a place where everyone can dream of bootstrapping their local business into a planetary franchise. From food truck to Downey to Dubai. That hustle may not pay off and may, at some point, turn sour—they did take Bitcoin for a while.

But for now, the thing about Nexx Burger is that every phase of it is better than it has to be. The graphic design is better. The wooden chairs are more comfortable and don’t make a howling sound when you slide them on the floor. They have beer on tap, and they had the Dodger game playing on a big tv.

Sure, they were happy to be featured in Tim Robinson’s sketch, the same way they were happy to get Snoop’s endorsement. They just might get famous. But in the meantime, they do things well. Sitting there, you might wish that other people had a chance to visit the place. As moviegoing becomes more rare, good moviegoing feels more and more like this. The need for the future rises. You begin to sense a system of possibilities, a taxonomy of promises, a montage of connections to be made. The implications come later.

This is the first of two parts. (Sorry, suckers.) In the second I will turn even more explicitly to Hollywood’s—and my—ties to the US military’s technologies of mediated force projection. If you would like advance warning of future installments, sign up here. If you’re an editor (or know an editor) and have reached this far, perhaps some version of City of Industry would be right for your publication. Reach out. Also, since I am now copyediting this myself, let me know if you see any raging typos. Thx.

The Good Shit, 2024

I never do these year-end wrapups of the best movies, music, tv, tweets, for all sorts of reasons, some of which have to do with just not being the sort of person who rates things and some of which have to do with the occupational hazard that the best things I see in a given year are probably things I’m teaching. So if I said that the most amazing constellation of cinematography & soundtrack I saw in 2023 was in Battles without Honor and Humanity from 50 years ago, well, sure, but that isn’t the discourse, is it?

But then I saw The New Yorker’s lugubrious (yeah) 2023 tv wrapup and John Waters’s 2023 movie wrapup and it reminded me that the other other reasons I don’t do these things are 1. I am absolutely uninterested in measuring up to some sort of critical responsibility. (Are you snubbing The Bear? I could not care.) 2. I cannot possibly have seen enough stuff to render a real verdict. There are ~600 scripted series and probably that many unscripted ones in the U.S. and more than a thousand movies and did I mention that Battles without Honor and Humanity is part of like a 10–film series on its own?

But in the interest of pushing back on the tyranny of the dutiful roundup to which even Waters is susceptible, I will try to compile my own list of the good shit, the stuff that came across my radar that may not be getting attention, or not be getting attention for the right reasons. I guarantee my list will have more comedy on it. And also probably horror. And avant-garde stuff? For this to work, I need your help. Let me know if you see something good and underrated and either new or newly accessible. And a year from now I’ll try to gather those together, and I will thank you publicly.

Either that or I will have gone underground in an effort to defend the remnants of democracy in the U.S. At this point it’s 50-50 at best.

Infinitely Disappointed: On Michael Lewis

The recent one-two punch delivered to Michael Lewis’s reputation by his inexcusable remarks about Michael Oher—“What we’re watching is a change of behavior,” he told The Guardian. “This is what happens to football players who get hit in the head: they run into problems with violence and aggression.”—and his apparently insufficiently critical appraisal of epically self-involved crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried has caused some modest shockwaves in the world of those who take longform journalism seriously. As David Roth put it, “I don’t want to have to go back and reconsider this guy’s whole shit.”

It looks like there are two complaints here—I’m going to argue they are intertwined to the point of being the same. The nasty implication that Oher has CTE or got manipulated into suing seems to take Lewis’s “nuanced” efforts to peel back the wretched racism that permeates college football exploitation and show that even his own analysis was caught up in the system. Watching a journalist turn on a lionized subject, especially when that turn is shot through with racist tropes about black male violence, is gross. As for SBF, the public pleading on behalf of his good-hearted youthful indiscretion even after his criminality was revealed seems like a failure of craft. For those who loved Lewis’s prior works, or many of them, it’s not simply the missed opportunity, it’s the squander. You had it, bro. You totally fucking had it. What is the point of access journalism if you’re going to whiff it like that?

At the top I should say that whiffing happens. I don’t think Lewis’s The New New Thing is all that, and it offers a sort of foretaste of the SBF mess. But it isn’t just Lewis. I tried to make the case at some length for Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, and it still freaks me out. There is probably no filmmaker I rooted harder for than Julia Reichert, relentless documenter of my hometown’s long path through deindustrialization. The local socialist who made a difference because she was a local socialist. But even she was not immune—for American Factory she and Steven Bognar had better access than anyone would ever dream of: presence in board meetings where they discuss in direct terms the anti-union efforts; people who present themselves as rounded characters going through changes on screen, actual villains discussing their schemes, and a story that offered crystal clear connections between Dayton and global capitalism. Yet American Factory ends by veering away from its logical conclusions about worker power to maunder about automation. I attribute that whiff to the Obamas’ involvement, but I realize that might be special pleading on my part.

So: Lewis turns on Oher and defends his “conservators” the Tuohys while he can’t bring himself to turn on SBF. The joint reading seems pretty simple: Michael Lewis has an easier time empathizing with well-heeled white folks than younger Black men who came into money playing ball. I think that conjuncture is there, but that isn’t enough. Because the thing we are trying to explain is not what is up with Michael Lewis the guy with looming implicit racial bias but what is up with Michael Lewis the guy who has also been our go-to explainer for the interactions of finance capitalism and professional life.

I have not yet read Going Infinite. (I will!) I have obviously read Lewis’s statement about Oher. But I did write about Michael Lewis in Hollywood Math and Aftermath. On the one hand, I still like those pages and still think they can be useful—I’ll explain why below. On the other hand, those pages suffer from exactly the problem that all my own writing suffers from: an assumption that people will just read it and take all sorts of things from it, whatever they need, it’s got plenty of riffs to go around. But that is not how anyone reads academic work anymore, really. And it isn’t clear that anyone would or could ever find these pages if, say, they were to ask themselves the question that follows Roth’s question—“Did he secretly suck the entire time?”—which is “Was I a chump?”

Here's the long passage where I try to work through Lewis’s approach. At this point in the chapter, I’m doing this to get to a political reading of Brad Pitt’s stardom and then to the (to me) stunning revelation that Columbia called its motion picture financial modeling project “The Moneyball Initiative.” But I stand by the reading of Lewis on its own. The swirl of race and finance was always there, and it always depended on remaining a reading. If the two got too close, Lewis would back off:

In the work of Michael Lewis—in both the sports books Moneyball and The Blind Side, and in his histories of high finance such as Liar’s Poker, The Big Short, Flash Boys, and his account of Long-Term Capital Management—the interplay of arbitrage and exploitation looks like the oscillation between an idea and a person. The arbitrageurs are forever attempting to isolate themselves from the consequences of their actions by reducing what they do to “strategy,” but because the central phenomenon of their strategy is the trade, the equation of one thing with another, when their trades become a traffic in people, the brutal legacies of actual human traffic rise up through the rhetoric. This helps explain some of the difficult reckonings with race in Lewis, and some of his interest in situations of self-exploitation, where the idea, and not the power relation, can take center stage.

So when John Meriwether pioneers bond arbitrage at Salomon Brothers, Lewis describes him as setting up “a sort of underground railroad that ran from the finest graduate finance and math programs directly onto the Salomon trading floor.” These intellectuals replace mere traders like Lewis, who now “belonged to a new semi-informed breed who could ‘pass’ as experts on the new financial complexity without possessing true understanding.” Lewis, not happy “passing,” remains jealous of his hyperwealthy former colleagues until they are wiped out. The 1998 disaster spawned by Meriwether’s Long-Term Capital Management came the closest to breaking the contemporary financial system before the 2008 crash. In addition to everything else it did, it liberated Lewis from his aspirations to untold wealth. “I demanded no further reparations. I was once again satisfied to be paid by the word.” Underground railroads, new breeds, folks who are passing and demanding reparations—the racial configuration remains, just barely, subtextual.

Once the traders are no longer trading themselves, though, exploitation comes roaring back. In Moneyball, the complex salary system imposed by the league underpays high-value rookies. Initially this allows the A’s to compete by drafting well. Lewis immediately, and without hesitation, links the moment of free agency to the rights of individuals under capitalism: “Not until . . . he had been in the big leagues for six years, would Barry Zito, like any other citizen of the republic, be allowed to auction his services to the highest bidder. At which point, of course, the Oakland A’s would no longer be able to afford Barry Zito. That’s why it was important to find Barry Zito here, in the draft room, and obtain him for the period of his career when he could be paid the baseball equivalent of slave’s wages.”

It is no accident that the slave’s wages are paid to a white man and that the utopian possibility is being able to auction yourself (sorry, your services) to the highest bidder. But at the core of Lewis’s two-track analysis of sports and finance is this dance around exploitation. A few pages later, I am writing more about Moneyball the movie and the happy ending that was grafted onto it late in production. The movie is of course not the book, but the movie is deeply Lewisian.

The movie’s happy ending will not be the A’s winning the World Series—they did not. Nor will it be Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane becoming the highest paid general manager in baseball—he rejected the Red Sox’ offer. The happy ending, for Beane, will be winning enough games that he can keep his job and stay in Oakland near his daughter. At the same time, the movie’s happy ending will decidedly not be the players discovering that they are undervalued and successfully demanding their rightful compensation. Baseball players, and subsequently professional athletes in most other major sports, have since used “statistics the way we read them” to do just that. But no one in Moneyball has any interest in wising up the players lest the arbitrage possibility disappear, leaving the A’s back in the cellar. (They would be there in 2015.) Stripped of Pitt’s stardom, and this relationship looks like exploitation, and in Moneyball, we are supposed to root for it.

The relationship between Beane and pitcher Chad Bradford has all the makings of a bad conscience. “You knew I was worth $3 million and you thought you could get away with paying me $237,000,” Bradford might say. Instead, he thanks Beane for the opportunity to play and says he’ll pray for him and his family. In order to allay—or at least defer—the eruption of a demand for something like justice, the movie turns to its real, chiasmic project: convincing the numberjockey to understand the human costs of his reduction of people to numbers and convincing the subjects of that reduction to willingly enlist themselves in the project.

When Lewis lashed out at Michael Oher’s competence and humanity, and when (if) he whiffed in his portrait of SBF, those are the two sides of the chiasmic exchange, disentangled. Lewis finds himself unable to back off and return to a world of reading, of analyzing at some distance. Instead of Moneyball’s happy ending, we get the double bummer of Lewis playing defense for both halves of his project, a liberal project that, when pushed to the wall, turns vicious and po’ faced. As liberalism will.

Lewis held these two tracks in suspension longer than maybe anyone else could—that is a mark of his skill as a writer and his knack for choosing projects. If he has been our go-to explainer for the interactions of finance capitalism and professional life, what we are seeing right now is what happens when the professional life at stake is not that of literary character Michael Lewis the junior trader but Michael Lewis the writer. What matters about that is less what it tells us about Lewis than what it tells us about how much work, how much art, capitalism demands to keep us on the hook.

After 50 Years, a Watergate Mystery Solved?

Yes, I clickbaited the headline. It’s my first blog post here; I had to try something.

I got interested in Watergate Discourse as part of a long gestating and now likely abandoned project on the history of tape recording. I still have ideas about voice, transcription, and indexing that might contribute to telling the media history of the era differently. But here I just want to drop a part of that project where I found something out.

Even after 50 years, the Watergate scandal is caught between things that we absolutely know and a surprising number of things we don’t. Nixon and his gang really were going to do just about everything to hold on to power—everything short of order an attack on the Capitol and the assassination of the Vice President. There was a lot of very coup-y plotting, there was endless ratfucking and conspiring and racist and antisemitic ranting and abusing of power and and and. We know this. But there is a LOT that we don’t know. Douglas Brinkley, reviewing Gerald Graff’s solid new history, enumerates some gaps: “Nixon studies have matured in the past 50 years thanks to superb books by Rick Perlstein, John A. Farrell, Irwin F. Gellman, Margaret MacMillan and others. But neither they nor Graff’s Watergate answers some longstanding big questions. Who officially ordered the break-in? What was the aim? Were such central players as Howard Hunt and James McCord cooperating with the C.I.A. even as they orchestrated the break-in?” (My answers are: Mitchell authorized in his floppy way, Magruder pushed it; to see how much more O’Brien knew about the ITT scandal; and no.)

None of those questions, though, were The Big Questions of the era, the ones that gripped the popular imagination. Those were: 1. What did Nixon know and when did he know it? And 2. What was the deal with the 18½ minute gap in the tapes? Let’s start with 2.

Given that there were literally thousands of hours of other recordings available, and given that Nixon never had a conversation once when he could have it three times in the same day, what could possibly have been so special to warrant the intentional erasure of a tiny portion of the archive? Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s secretary, took the blame, unconvincingly. The most compelling account I’ve read of the erasure (Haldeman’s) argues that Nixon himself probably did it during his listening-back session, and then, realizing just how damn long it takes to erase specific things, he abandoned the strategy. There’s still not a good explanation for why he didn’t have the tapes burned or piled into a car and driven by a giant magnet. We can suppose all sorts of reasons, but, frankly, Mr. Master Strategist was erratic as hell and never possessed the judgment that would allow him to calibrate the damage done at different scales. This is what we learn, overwhelmingly, from the tapes: Nixon was always all over the place, unable to focus on the big picture even as he sold the world on his self-conception as a guy who always had his eye on that big picture. He is the characterological embodiment of the collapse of the Keynesian consensus, the superplanner undone by a third-rate burglary.

In any case, we’re not getting that missing material back. There are moments where people get techno-optimistic about the project but it’s just not going to work. It wasn’t erased once, but ground away over and over, as you’ll see.

So I don’t have the missing minutes. I don’t have a new explanation for their erasure. What I have is an account of what Nixon and his Chief of Staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman were talking about based on the parts that weren’t erased. No one, so far as I can tell, has bothered to read that conversation in context even though Nixon took immediate action as a result. Because this is a blog post and not true crime podcast trying to fill a dozen hours, I will just spill: Based on Haldeman’s discussion of the movie The Hot Rock, I believe that they had been discussing the fact that the break-in that got everybody arrested was not the first attempt to bug the Democratic National Committee HQ at the Watergate. Haldeman had just found that out; I think Nixon had known. Which is my answer to Big Question 1: Nixon knew about the break-in and he knew in advance, which many reasonable people already believed, but which now has, I think, more support.

What follows is a very modestly revised extract from a draft chapter. Some of it is a little redundant given this intro. The Hot Rock is available on blu-ray but not to stream legally at the moment.

The most famous tape recording in American history is an erasure: the 18½ minute gap in a discussion between Richard Nixon and H.R. “Bob” Haldeman on January 20, 1972.[1] When Nixon later found out about the gap, he recalled, he almost “blew [his] stack.”[2] How had it happened? And what was erased? In the throes of the investigation, the “how” took center stage. Nixon’s loyal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, took the fall, claiming she had accidentally erased the tape while transcribing it, having pushed the wrong button, held her foot down on the pedal, and reached, improbably, to answer the phone. The “Rose Mary Stretch” was so physically challenging that it became an immediate object of ridicule (Figure 1). Haldeman’s successor Al Haig initially blamed a mysterious “sinister force,” then he found a more sexist way to blame Woods (“I've known women who think they've talked for five minutes and then have talked for an hour”[3]). Others blamed Nixon for erasing the tape, either intentionally or accidentally. Haldeman called his former boss “the least dexterous man I’ve ever known.”[4] Robert Altman, in Secret Honor (1984), turned technological ineptitude toward existential ends, with a rambling Nixon repeatedly interrupting his marathon nighttime taping session to tell his valet, Manolo, to go back and erase everything from a certain point. The technology registered the absence of the history it was supposed to capture.

Tales of accidental erasure are harder to believe when one has read the report of the Advisory Panel on White House Tapes from 1974, which concluded that the passage was erased five or more separate times. They “[drew] no inferences about such questions as whether the erasure and buzz were made accidentally or intentionally,” but did note that the characteristic “events” within the buzz implied the “keyboard operations of a normally-operating machine.”[5] (Figures 2 & 3) The more intentional the gap, the more enticing the prospect of recovering whatever was erased. The most recent efforts by the National Archives and Records Administration have been unable to find the voices behind the buzz.[6]

So what is missing? The logical explanation is that what is missing is a discussion of the Watergate break-in. Nixon had only just returned to Washington from a bachelor weekend in the Bahamas and Key Biscayne, cavorting in the surf with Bebe Rebozo and Bob Abplanalp. Haldeman’s diary indicates that “the P is not aware of all this” on the 18th, and that “I told the P about it on the plane last night” (meaning the 19th; they spoke for nearly an hour) “The more he thought about it, it obviously bothered him more, because he raised it in considerable detail today.”[7]

But the clearest indication that that particular discussion had turned to Watergate comes later in the tape, when Haldeman asks Nixon whether he has seen the movie The Hot Rock (Peter Yates, Fox, 1972).  While much of the recording is unintelligible for the usual reasons that the Nixon tapes are unintelligible—inadequate equipment, improperly installed, with a voice-activated feature that is forever ga-whoozhing itself into action and obscuring key words and phrases—Haldeman’s point is clear. It’s a “pretty funny movie,” he explains. “I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it’s kinda like this [affair?]. They screw everything up. It’s a comedy of errors.” The crucial word is “this”—a reference not to the immediately preceding discussion, which was about delegate allocations at the Democratic National Convention, but to the botched robbery. And since there is no surviving discussion of the break-in in the lunchtime conversation between the two, we can reasonably conclude that Haldeman is referring to something in the gap.

The break-in was quickly turning into a comedy of errors. Not only were the burglars caught, not only had they carried unnecessarily incriminating evidence with them, but they were amateurs. Haldeman would have read the Post’s article, “Experts heap scorn on bungled ‘bug’ caper,” from the 19th. The professional ridicule was thick; pros “faulted the job at almost every point.” The article let them crack wise, at length: “This is fantastic,” said one wiretapper. “That kind of (bugging) equipment went out with high-button shoes. These guys have got to be circus bums.” “Can you imagine hiring guys from Miami? You’d get local, top talent to do the job right.” “Other experts said taping the doors so they wouldn’t look taped—and then retaping one of them after the tape had been removed by a security guard—could only happen in a Keystone Kops comedy.”[8] That same day, Press Secretary Ron Ziegler had called it “a third rate burglary.” The phrase was appropriate, and it stuck.

Beyond its “comic opera” appearance, what the break-in shared with The Hot Rock was this sense of compulsive return. While the retaping of the doors might have been enough to cue Haldeman’s analogy, the fact that the burglars were rebreaking in to the DNC headquarters brings “this” much closer to The Hot Rock. (They went back in to fix a malfunctioning tap, to install new equipment, and to take more pictures.) In the film, the burglars not only “screw everything up,” they keep going back to their “client” for more money and another shot at the theft. The bankroller is Dr. Amusa (Moses Gunn), and he gets right at the problem: “I’ve heard of the habitual criminal, of course. But I never dreamed I’d become involved with the habitual crime.” The habitual criminal is played by Robert Redford, just out of prison and looking for a new job. His partner asks him how his stint behind bars was, and Redford, with an irony Haldeman would have appreciated, replies, “Not bad. I learned plumbing.”

Haldeman’s tone seems to be that of someone returning to a previous topic, someone who has either happened upon a coincidence or who has planned to include a joke in a discussion, but has missed the chance, and now is going back to make sure it has been told. He also knew that the president would be interested. Nixon was an inveterate movie-watcher, usually screening three films a week, whether in the White House Family Theater, at Camp David, or, as on his visit to the Bahamas, at Abplanalp’s residence (they watched Paul Bogart’s The Skin Game (1971)).

The morning of the 20th, the Post had already made the jump “inside the White House,” by connecting the burglars to E. Howard Hunt, the ex-CIA agent who had been working with President’s Special Counsel Charles Colson. Eventually, it would become clear that the break-in was part of the campaign of surveillance and disinformation that Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy christened GEMSTONE. (Haldeman knew about the plan, but likely did not know its HotRock-y, CIA-style codename.) There was every reason for the President to worry, and every reason for Haldeman to try to distract him.

Nixon and Haldeman almost immediately changed the subject, moving on to a discussion of the national mayors’ conference. But the movie recommendation must have stuck in Nixon’s mind because that Saturday (the 24th) he screened The Hot Rock at Camp David with his wife, his daughter Julie, and her husband David Eisenhower.[9] The film had opened in New York in January and arrived with no publicity in DC in March. The Post’s review was decent, as were the New York notices, but nothing like those for The Godfather, which was dominating screens that spring. Still, The Hot Rock hung around, and it appears to have been re-released onto suburban screens in June (Haldeman could have seen it in Chevy Chase). So there were easily accessible prints when Nixon made the sudden decision to view the film.

Between the 20th and the 24th—between the conversation-to-be-erased and the crime-to-be-screened, Nixon and Haldeman would have the “smoking gun” discussion, in which the president suggests using the CIA to convince the FBI to back off its investigation of the burglary. The guiding framework for the conspiracy is comedic repetition. As Nixon spitballs:

When you get in these people when you…get these people in, say: “Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that” ah, without going into the details… don’t, don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, “the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again.”[10]

By the end of that day, Haldeman’s characterization of the break-in as a “comedy of errors” had become the genre of the cover-up.  By the end of that week, surveillance and repetition had been bound together across a host of registers—lexical, generic, and here, historical. Backstopping and complicating that merger of eavesdropping and iteration was the technology of tape. When that implicit material analogue became explicit, the Presidency shattered.

[1] The gap is part of tape 342, and is available at the end of 342b, http://nixontapes.org/chron3.html. Philip Mellinger conducted the most recent intensive investigation of the gap, and his higher resolution digital file can be found here, http://nixontapes.org/mellinger.html. Mellinger’s article, speculating that an unnamed “White House lawyer” is responsible for the central twelve minutes of the gap, appears here, http://www.forensicmag.com/articles/2011/02/cracking-watergates-infamous-18-1/2-minute-gap#.UmcaQxZzPBY

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/10/richard-nixon-transcripts-fury-tape

[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/watergate/articles/120773-1.htm

[4] Haldeman in Haynes Johnson et al., “Haldeman accuses Nixon,” Washington Post, 2/16/78, 1–3, 2. Judge John J. Sirica, believed that Nixon had intentionally erased the tape. To Set the Record Straight, New York: W.W. Norton, 1979, 198.

[5] Advisory Panel on White House Tapes, “The EOB Tape of June 20, 1972,” May 31, 1974, Summary.

[6] See the Mellinger-related materials.

[7] Haldeman diaries, 472–3.

[8] [6/19/72, A7 Ronald Kessler]

[9] Mark Feeney, Nixon at the Movies, appendix; President’s Daily Diary for attendance. In order to watch the film at Camp David, it would have had to be transported there. On the night of the 23rd, the day of the “smoking gun” conversation, Nixon watched Hang ’Em High. (The two films were probably brought together.) To have the films ready for screening on Friday and Saturday, he probably had to request them no later than Wednesday. [I am checking on this process]

[10] http://whitehousetapes.net/transcript/nixon/smoking-gun