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Explorers
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Joe Dante’s Explorers is a perfect example of what William Park described in 1985 as “the end of popular film”. (1) When a group of children – the cast includes Ethan Hawke as Ben and River Phoenix as Wolfgang – find themselves blasted onto an alien spaceship, the Others they encounter turn out to be exactly their mirror images: young kids under the thumb of a suburban-style, patriarchal Daddy (Robert Picardo, who takes multiple roles). Moreover, the language that these aliens speak is simply the perfectly self-enclosed and self-generating soundtrack of television memory: a collage-pastiche of ads, songs, well-known voices. As if to counteract the inevitable hint of cul-de-sac sadness in this supposedly neo-fantastic scenario, Dante ultimately sends his characters flying off (under their own steam this time) into the blue yonder of tomorrow’s fabulous elsewhere. However, by this point, the film, lacking an appropriately Utopian imagination, can only assert, with a contrivedly upbeat, idiot grin, that – despite the fact that neither they nor we know where they are going or what they’ll find – the future is sure to be lots of fun! What we have here is not so much the end of popular film (as Park thought), as the end of a certain way of understanding popular film. Dante, as a case in point, is hardly a Utopian. Like his contemporary John Landis, he continues, in mass culture, the historical line devoted mostly to expressions of boyish destructiveness and the gleeful crucifixion of clean pop icons – a tradition, as adolescent as it is glorious, encompassing Warner Bros cartoons, Mad and Cracked magazines, some action and horror films. This tradition is, almost by definition, ingrown, obsessed with popular culture as a total living environment, tenaciously non-transcendent. The modus operandi of such culture – long before the arrival of postmodern theory in the 1980s – has always been parody, pastiche, quotation. A standard plank of “left pessimism” – expressed in sites ranging from Australia’s Marxist journal Arena to newspaper ‘entertainment guides’ via The New Internationalist – bemoans the fact that much mass culture (particularly TV) has become a “memory machine” forever turning over citations to itself. As if it had never been so before the mid 1980s! “Have you noticed how much time you spend talking about TV? Have you noticed how often TV talks about TV, as in Moonlighting?” (2) Such handwringing! There is certainly a point to this pessimism when all referenced social history seems increasingly reduced to media history (as in Entertainment This Week). But what if we tried to understand this memory-machine of mass culture not as empty of content, but (as Lawrence Grossberg has suggested) full of affect? We should stop approaching examples of mass culture as statements about culture or even reflections of it in thematic form. Grossberg: “They are not texts to be interpreted, nor merely embodiments of, nor microcosmic representations of, a postmodern world”. (3) Rather than scouring mass culture for its meanings (at least as narrowly defined), we should instead investigate it as a space of “intersections and fissures of flows and breaks along vectors of effectivity”, a program that Philip Brophy’s work has also signposted. (4) This entails giving up, as a commentator, the urge to seize this or that popular film as a telling mirror of our times; it means being sensitive to the cultural space as a set of bits and pieces, movable blocks that don’t necessarily crowd out or define the whole of reality. Ross Gibson, with this qualification in mind, has suggested positively that “it’s not too fanciful to talk of a postmodernist, second-degree kind of ecology”, and conjured a far less pessimistic memory-machine of mass culture: “Each useful postmodern image is a memory-system to be used to make sense of the present so as to guarantee the future”. (5) In this way, even an artist as iconoclastic, as blatantly apolitical as Dante can be seen as engaged in an ecological operation that is tied to the future – and thus modestly Utopian. No doubt an eager critic looking for the old, dramatic dialectic in of Utopia in popular culture could find it – in some teen movies like Beat Street (1984) or Light of Day (1987), for instance – and celebrate such residual resistances to the postmodern drift. Yet the fact is that these films are usually only marginally successful, and often not successful at all. There is a hugely popular Utopian sensibility in mass culture, however, and it must be identified squarely with the school of Steven Spielberg – his own films as director or producer, and many related others including Hoosiers (1986), The Boy Who Could Fly (1986), most Ron Howard, and John Hughes at his height. Here, however, we confront a new and strange definition of the Utopian imagination. For rarely have films made so many appeals to Utopias that are so utterly insubstantial – beyond the end of the film, beyond this earth, beyond any imaginable time or space. Many 1980s films end in fact exactly like Explorers, with a sublime idiot grin, but betray no sign whatsoever of anguish or doubletalk. This review is adapted from a passage in my 1988 essay on postmodernism and pop culture, “PM Phone Home”, which is available in full as part of the Tier 7 PDF Reward, Golden Eighties, Volume 2: Pop, Postmodernism, The Body and Sexuality, 1982-1988, upon subscribing to my Patreon: www.patreon.com/adrianmartin MORE Dante: Gremlins, Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Matinee, Innerspace 1. William Park, “The End of Popular Film”, New Observations, no. 36 (1985), pp. 13-15. This special issue, titled “Horses, Hegel and Film” was guest-edited by Gilberto Perez (1943-2015). back 2. Shaun Carney, “The Passive Generation”, The Age Entertainment Guide (Australia), 5 August, 1988, p. 4. back 3. Lawrence Grossberg, “Postmodernity and Affect: All Dressed Up with No Place To Go”, Communication, Vol. 10 (1988), p. 274. Reprinted in his book Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 1997). back 4. See Brophy’s very comprehensive website. back 5. Ross Gibson, “Paranoid Critical Methods”, Art & Text, no. 26 (September/November 1987), p. 64; and “Remembering Art”, in Gary Sangster (ed.), Sighting References (Artspace/AGNSW, 1987), p. 75. back © Adrian Martin August 1988 |
