Isolated as a Whole

Jeffrey Sconce includes among his five elements of “smart” film style a thematic critique of the white middle class family as a site of miscommunication and emotional dysfunction. To explore this notion in depth, I will examine the following films: sex, lies and videotape (Steven Soderbergh 1989), Safe (Todd Haynes 1994) and Boogie Nights (P.T. Anderson 1997). Each of these “smart” films provides a critical commentary on the family in relation to the individual; however, each film is unique in its approach to the subject matter, as they each employ distinct filmmaking techniques to convey a similar idea. The main characters in each of these films are distanced from their families and must seek acceptance and comfort elsewhere. While they are each considered to be thematically and aesthetically similar according to the conceptualizations of the 1990’s “smart” film, they each offer disparate results for each protagonist once they have ventured far from their respective families: Ann’s issues are resolved and the future looks hopeful; Carol is relocated to an equally isolating environment, seeming unaware of the lack of progress made, and the future looks grim; Eddie/Dirk has not learnt anything, and continues to acquire validation sexually, lacking any self-awareness, and any hope for his future looks fleeting.

Sconce argues that there is “a ‘sensibility’ in and around these films that does provide them with historical, thematic and even stylistic cohesion” (351). He notes that earlier forms of art cinema were primarily concerned with experimenting with film style and narrative structure, “as a means of critiquing the codes of ‘bourgeois realism’ and/or ‘bourgeois society’”, while the new smart cinema revisits classical narrative structure, opting instead to experiment with tone to critique “‘bourgeois’ taste and culture” (Sconce 352). Although this cinema has adopted the classical Hollywood style, it explicitly “positions itself in opposition to ‘mainstream’ cinema” (Sconce 352). While the 1960s and 1970s art cinema pursued an activist approach, emphasizing “the ‘social politics’ of power, institutions, representation and subjectivity”, the 1990s “smart” cinema has “replaced it by concentrating, often with ironic disdain, on the ‘personal politics’ of power, communication, emotional dysfunction and identity in white middle-class culture” (Sconce 352). Sconce declares that the “smart” cinema coming out of America in the 1990s should be understood as:

A shared set of stylistic, narrative and thematic elements deployed in differing configurations by individual films […] including 1) the cultivation of ‘blank’ style and incongruous narration; 2) a fascination with ‘synchronicity’ as a principle of narrative organization; 3) a related thematic interest in random fate; 4) a focus on the white middle-class family as a crucible of miscommunication and emotional dysfunction; 5) a recurring interest in the politics of taste, consumerism and identity. (358)

These highly stylized films use a ‘blank’ style “to signify dispassion, disengagement and disinterest” (Sconce 359). Sconce notes that these films frequently use “long-shots, static composition and sparse cutting” (359), which is evident in sex, lies and videotape and Safe. Sconce recognizes two themes that seem “particularly central to 1990s smart cinema: interpersonal alienation within the white middle class (usually focused on the family) and alienation within contemporary consumer culture” (Sconce 364). The smart films sex, lies and videotape, Safe and Boogie Nights embody both of these themes, but for the purpose of this essay, the primary focus will be on the first theme. All three of these films suggest, “Repression and miscommunication make the white middle class particularly ill-suited to either relationships or marriage”. This familiar theme in the smart cinema has led to three ‘stock’ shots including: “the ‘awkward couple’ shot (a strained couple shot in tableau form separated by blank space), the ‘awkward coupling’ shot (a camera placed directly over the bed recording passionless sex); and, in ‘family’ films, the ‘awkward dining’ shot (long-shots of maladjusted families trapped in their dining rooms)” (Sconce 364). The prominence of each of these ‘stock’ shots will be examined further throughout this essay, as each can be located in the films being discussed.

Individuals in these films need to escape or rethink restrictive and/or oppressive family structures, and seek validation, acceptance, and belonging from others. sex, lies and videotape’s Ann copes with her unhappiness by cleaning the house incessantly. She begins to frequent a psychiatrist, and also approaches Graham as she attempts to understand her own identity. Safe’s Carol initially does everything in her power to uphold her suburban homemaker image, until visible signs of her sickness become increasingly uncontrollable. Carol is passively presented with potential solutions for her feelings of illness, and she proceeds to explore each one in hopes to understand what is wrong with her. Her family and friends are not a source of love or support, and the more she strays from the white suburban housewife role, the more detached she becomes from the people around her. Boogie Nights’ Eddie, a younger protagonist, leaves his family home in search of fulfillment and acceptance in the seemingly glamourous pornography industry. The characters he meets are just as empty inside as he, and since it is too late for them to reconnect with their real families, they come together to comfort one another, forming a new family unit. Eddie/Dirk turns to Jack Horner and his new mother Amber Waves/Maggie for advice and guidance in lieu of his own family. While these three films are thematically similar, each varies in its delivery and presentation of the psychologically distraught characters and their relationships with those around them. Soderbergh’s film uses dialogue as a means to represent each characters’ position within the narrative, individually and in relation to one another, while Haynes’ film offers long scenes of silence to emphasize Carol’s feelings of isolation and confusion. Meanwhile, Anderson’s film is ridden with fast paced editing and action in comparison, yet maintains the recurring theme of searching for one’s identity in relation to the family unit.

Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape follows four characters, and most prominently focuses on Ann, a housewife who channels her sexual frustration into incessant, obsessive cleaning. “Ann is a fine physical embodiment of one of the film’s perennial themes: surface and undercurrent. Beneath her floral dresses and blushing cheeks lurks a tightly coiled sexuality ready to be sprung” (Mottram 13). Ann actively pursues answers to her questions pertaining to her lack of sexual interest, anxiety, and guilt, while she struggles to uphold a respectable image in the home, as a wife. Meanwhile, her husband is having an affair with her sister. The film questions the family structure by disrupting the relationship between the sisters, and the relationship between husband and wife. In the opening scenes of the film, Ann tells her therapist that she is becoming increasingly concerned with “all the garbage”. The therapist realizes that the object of obsession is “something negative which [she] has no control over”. This conversation announces that Ann is displacing her personal problems (which she has no control over), and obsessing over larger issues instead (which she also has no control over). Ann decides that, “being happy isn’t all that great”. This statement reveals that she suppresses her concerns, forfeiting her happiness, because she figures that there is nothing she can do to solve the lingering negativity in her life. Ann’s husband, John, is appropriately introduced as he boasts to a colleague, over the phone, how many women he can get as a married man. The film quickly announces that the marriage is unsatisfying for both Ann and John. As the film unfolds, it is Graham, the visitor, who bears no familial relation to the other three characters, who unknowingly holds the answers to Ann’s problems. The outsider is the provider of acceptance, truth, trust, understanding, which her family members are unable to provide. Ann must abandon her family in order to find her true identity.

The film presents its critique of the family by employing the “smart” film ‘blank’ style, and the ‘stock’ shots Sconce points out, including the ‘awkward dining shot’ (364). When Graham first arrives in town, he has dinner with Ann and John. John makes it clear that he could hardly recognize his old friend, condemning his current appearance, his “rather somber attire”. It is obvious that John is not interested in rekindling their college friendship. In addition to his outspoken comments directed toward Graham, John makes a point of announcing that Ann’s cooking was not usually up to par, after Graham had attempted to kindly change the subject, thanking Ann for the wonderful dinner. Graham proceeds to ask about Ann’s family, asking if they are close. All the while, the camera slowly pans around the table. Ann appears uncomfortable when asked about her sister. John contributes nothing to this conversation, and changes it as soon as the moment presents itself. While Ann and John talk about the various housing options available in town, Graham interrupts and rather frantically explains his reasons for being disinterested in a house, a job, and the subsequent keys each would entail. John suggests getting rid of the car in favour of an apartment, in order to appease his worrying about additional keys. Graham explains that having a car is important, that you need to be mobile. At this time, Ann awkwardly looks at the two men, excuses herself and proceeds to tidy up. A high-angle shot reveals the entire room, and all three characters at once for the first time, as Ann dismisses Graham’s offer to help. In sex, lies and videotape the camera “hovers uncomfortably between being a passive observer and a willing participant” (Mottram 12).

In addition to the “smart” film aesthetics, Soderbergh’s film really delves into the discussion of the family and the individual through its use of dialogue. The film offers extended scenes of dialogue between various characters; however, each character avoids discussing the most critical topics, avoiding confrontation so as not to disrupt the routine. Graham begins to unravel the tightly bound, repressed issues, and the truth begins to bleed through. The film comes to an end and all is resolved. John is punished, Cynthia and Ann are communicating, and Ann and Graham are united. Hope is restored and the future looks promising.

Todd Haynes’ Safe is set in the upper middle-class Southern California suburbs. The film presents a forward-moving narrative about a middle-class suburban homemaker who develops an “increasingly debilitating, unidentified illness” (Potter 125). The film offers a clinical perspective so the audience may observe the protagonist, Carol, from a safe distance. The film diligently avoids any definitive explanation for Carol’s worsening symptoms, as Sconce explains, “she may be the physical victim of environmental allergies or an emotional victim of her suffocating existence in the San Fernando Valley” (359). Although the film’s content and form appear conventional, “Safe confounded critics with its polysemic openness to multiple interpretations and its refusal to offer audiences any insight into the central protagonist’s experience or emotional life” (Potter 125-126). This is because the film puts forth filmmaking modes which seem to conflict, exercising both “a distanced style of cinematography while constructing sequences that deploy editing techniques ordinarily used to suture viewers into the narrative” (Potter 126). Susan Potter explains, “the effect of this combination is to withhold the identification with character that such classical techniques conventionally secure, while at the same time foregrounding their usual ideological effects” (Potter 126). For example, when Carol returns home after attending the meeting on ‘environmental illness’ in the evening, she enters the lounge and pauses with her back to the camera. While she is standing in the middle of the room, “the camera performs a barely noticeable maneuver, tracking backward while zooming in. In this quiet moment, domestic space- and the female protagonist’s place within it- is subtly altered” (Potter 126). Sconce examines Haynes’s presentation of the protagonist, explaining that he isolates her “in a form of ‘tableau’ presentation, isolating her within static long-takes shot with straight-on, level framing” (359). The “smart” cinema “often produces tension through dividing audience and storyworld, not necessarily in some form of Brechtian distanciation but more as a means of fostering a sense of clinical observation” (Sconce 360). Haynes puts forth “an alternative view of identity and desire, one recognizing that the attempt to secure certain knowledge’s about our bodies, our selves, and others arises out of a need for narrative and meaning that deliberately (that is to say, romantically) fails to recognize its own epistemological limitations” (Potter 127).

In the opening scenes of Safe, the couple moves “from the public space of suburban Los Angeles to the privacy and security of the marital home, this inaugural journey maps an apparently straightforward differentiation of public/private space that will prove increasingly difficult to sustain throughout the rest of the film” (Potter 127). Carol is constantly traveling from her house, to the dry cleaners, to the gym, and to meet a friend for lunch. She moves from one location to the next without ever having to go outside; “Only in her car can she move safely, free from harm, between the more affluent areas of the city” (Potter 128). One of the film’s recurrent visual tropes emphasizes the isolating effect the automobile has on Carol: the crowded Los Angeles freeways. Susan Potter examines this further stating, “the surreal flatness of these exterior shots reduces the forward movement of the cars, visually compressing the spatial movement they enable, while also suggesting its antisocial and suffocating effects” (128). This is further literalized when Carol suddenly finds that she is unable to catch her breath as she is driving behind a truck that is disseminating harsh exhaust fumes. She is stricken with a violent coughing fit, and must find a place of safety, free from harmful emissions. Potter speculates, “the toxic emissions of cars and trucks may be a cause of the illness that Carol eventually develops, but Safe also implies that the private technology of the car and its associated infrastructure of enclosed parking spaces and wide multilane roads and highways compose an invisible social barrier that may be more dangerous than the protection it appears to offer” (128). While sex, lies and video suggests the personal automobile is a symbol of freedom, escape, and individualism, as do many other films, Safe questions the vehicle and its inherent (yet unrealized) forces of social separation. “Carol’s ostensibly safe home depends on the automobile, a modern technology that in cinema often symbolizes freedom and escape but that in Safe is revealed as an instrument of social and economic apartheid” (Potter 129).

The “middle-class life of the San Fernando Valley is intended to secure a racialized, risk-free haven of whiteness, separated and protected from the imagined dangers of colored innercity Los Angeles” (Potter 128). This is depicted in the film during the dinner scene when Rory, Carol’s stepson, discusses his school assignment to his parents. He reads aloud from his paper, stating, “black and Chicano gangs are ‘a big American issue’ because they are moving into the valleys and ‘white areas’”. This scene reveals Carol’s discomfort with the subject. Potter articulates, “his school essay is representative of the mode of ‘white middle-class imagination” (Potter 129). In addition, the “social and political consequences of the segregated insularity of San Fernando Valley suburban life are visually legible in the dinner scene” (Potter 129). As Rory is reading his essay aloud during the dinner scene, the family’s Latina maid, Fulvia, is seen working in the background. This scene also exemplifies Sconce’s “smart” cinema ‘stock’ shot, the ‘awkward dining’ shot. Thus, the scene makes a strong commentary regarding the uncomfortable gathering of the family, and also simultaneously critiques the ‘white middle-class imagination’ concerning racial segregation.

Carol is associated with “whiteness” throughout the film in a number of ways. For example, her last name is White. Also, she “confesses to the family doctor that she is a ‘total milkoholic’, loving a drink that has connotations of wholesomeness and health but is later identified as a trigger for her allergic reactions” (Potter 129). Additionally, Carol becomes overwhelmed and ridden with anxiety when she comes home to find that a black sofa has been delivered to the house when she had ordered it in teal. This scene draws attention to the colour scheme of the home, announcing that there is absolutely no black within the home. Black is “unwelcome in her home” (Potter 129), and the house is “unsettled by the least incursion of blackness” (Potter 130).

Carol is surrounded by the excessive interior space of the home, offering “the illusion of a luxurious spaciousness”, however the house is a space of containment. The open concept home, and constant invasion by the staff ensure that Carol “can never be alone in a private space of her own making. Far from being closed, or unseen, the feminine space of the home is open and always potentially public” (Potter 130-131). The protagonist is often framed in a way that visually literalizes her insignificance, as she is “often miniaturized by extreme long shots […] The vast expanse of barely used living areas envelop Carol to the point that her body is sometimes hard to distinguish from the surrounding furnishings and pastel color scheme” (Potter 130). While the spaces Carol inhabits are open and always potentially public, they are by no means social areas. Potter notes, “Characters rarely bridge the domestic scenes to be framed together in a shot. If they are framed in this way, internal space works against any tentative efforts at conversation and emotional connection” (131). Additionally, “the social distance between characters is also accentuated by the style of cinematography. The potential identificatory [sic] effects of closer, more intimate shots are regularly weakened by subsequent extreme long shots emphasizing the space around the human actors” (Potter 131). The various techniques employed to reflect Carol’s isolation from her friends and family, including cinematography and mise-en-scene together “create a series of highly artificial, denaturalized spaces where the material presence of objects, rooms, and buildings is always emphasized and threatens to overwhelm the people within or near them” (Potter 132). Even when Carol attempts to establish personal privacy, she is unable to do so as the spaces in which she seeks refuge are constantly disrupted. For instance, Carol goes on nightly walks in the garden, only to be interrupted by a police officer. Also, as Potter points out, “any attempt Carol makes to create a contemplative space of her own is always disrupted by the social expectations pressed on her as Greg’s wife” (132). The couple is framed in a way that reflects Greg’s sexual dominance, and Carol’s subordinate position. For example, in the opening scenes of the film, Carol and Greg are having intercourse, and it is shot from above, revealing Carol’s disinterested expression as her husband is mounted atop her motionless body. This scene also exemplifies Sconce’s conception of the smart film ‘stock shot’ he refers to as the ‘awkward coupling’ shot, where a “camera placed directly over the bed recording passionless sex” (364).

Boogie Nights is also set in the San Fernando Valley, and opens in the year 1976. The protagonist is named Eddie Adams, but upon entering the porn industry he changes his name to Dirk Diggler. For Eddie, the family is not a support system. His mother does not believe in him, and after a heated screaming match, Eddie leaves home never to return again. He has been invited into a world where he feels that he is loved, appreciated, and accepted. Throughout the film the protagonist thrives off of the approval and validation of others, until his ego becomes so inflated that he no longer feels satisfied. He leaves behind his second family in search of something more, only to unite with like-minded vagabonds. Dirk is seduced by the promises of expensive drugs, and suddenly finds he is drowning in a downward spiral perpetuated by his headstrong friend. As an individual, he has no chance of survival. He must return to his makeshift family and beg for forgiveness. They comfort him, accepting him with open arms. The film is about “showbusiness [sic] in all its tawdry pathos, about the high price talent pays to play, and about the schizophrenic self-reinvention, compulsive longings and dread-filled narcissism of show people, a breed apart” (Smith 170). The film “is as baroque, recklessly self-indulgent and nervously energized as its ensemble, an extended family of cast and crew working in the porn film industry that thrives in the Valley behind Los Angeles, on the other side of the Hollywood billboard” (Smith 171). It is about people “incapable of grasping the concept of limits, whose reality principles are impaired, who are in the dictionary under Spoiled Identity” (Smith 171). It is a “sprawling, exhibitionist epic, a sensationally over-populated family saga in which damaged children manufacture ‘adult entertainment’ to please daddy” (Smith 171). Unlike sex, lies and videotape and Safe, Paul Thomas Anderson’s film does not reflect the ‘blank’ style Jeffrey Sconce attributes to “smart” cinema. However, it does exhibit the familiar commentary of the white middle class family as a site of miscommunication and dysfunction, and the recurrent need for the individual to escape the confines of the family structure. Furthermore, the film demonstrates the “smart sensibility” Sconce puts forth, as it manages to present a rather depressing perspective amidst the uncharacteristic editing techniques employed. The film experiments with tone, as it presents a seemingly upbeat style, action-packed content, and still somehow subtly expresses the characters’ lack of progression, lack of self-awareness, pure oblivion, resulting in an ironic reading. The film offers a false utopian, fantasy view of the 1970s and gradually fades into a sad portrait of a few hollow characters desperately trying to affirm their identities and their self worth through the other equally empty characters around them. Boogie Nights manages to present a number of characters that the audience may identify with, unlike Safe, however, the uncomfortable turn the narrative takes midway through gradually divides the viewers from the characters, producing the tension Sconce associates with the smart cinema genre.

In summation, sex, lies and videotape, Safe, and Boogie Nights each comment on the white middle-class family in relation to the individual. For these films, the family is a site of miscommunication and dysfunction, a structure that the individual must escape. The thematic and aesthetic similarities present in these three films exemplifies the “smart” film style and ‘sensibility’ Jeffrey Sconce conceptualizes as he theorizes the body of work pursuing like-minded critiques of white suburban culture produced in the 1990s. It has become evident that each individual film delivers the recurrent thematic concerns through a unique configuration of the elements aligned with smart cinema. Despite their similarities, each of these films offers distinct outcomes for their protagonists who have detached from the repressive family structure, attempting to break free from the isolating effects of the restrictive family life. While Soderbergh’s film suggests the individual is capable of escaping the treacherous clutches of the oppressive white middle-class family, Todd Haynes and P.T. Anderson are less optimistic.

Works Cited

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