Eye candy for the blind: re-introducing Lyotard's Acinema into discourses on excess, motion, and spectacle in contemporary Hollywood

Abstract

Jean-François Lyotard's 1973 essay ‘Acinema’ is explicitly concerned with the cinematic medium, but has received scant critical attention. Lyotard's acinema conceives of an experimental, excessive form of film-making that uses stillness and movement to shift away from the orderly process of meaning-making within mainstream cinema. What motivates this present paper is a striking link between Lyotard's writing and contemporary Hollywood production; both are concerned with a sense of excess, especially within moments of motion. Using Charlie's Angels (McG, 2000) as a case study – a film that has been critically dismissed as ‘eye candy for the blind’ – my methodology brings together two different discourses, high culture theory and mainstream film-making, to test out and propose the value of Lyotard's ideas for the study of contemporary film. Combining close textual analysis and engagement with key scholarship on film spectacle, I reflexively engage with the process of film analysis and re-direct attention to a neglected essay by a major theorist, in order to stimulate further engagement with his work.

Keywords:

• Jean-François Lyotard
• acinema
• spectacle
• excess
• contemporary Hollywood
• Charlie's Angels
• movement and stillness

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Sewing Circle and the Theory Group in the Department of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading for our productive discussions, as well as Professor Jonathan Bignell and Dr Greg Singh for their helpful comments on drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. There are interesting links between my discussion and debates on cinephilia (see, for example, Keathley 2006, and Sperb and Balcerzak's 2009 edited collection), but these are beyond the scope of this paper.

2. One of the few places where it gets attention is Bignell's (2000) Postmodern Media Culture, which does not test it out through textual analysis.

3. My discussion here touches, of course, on the links between (digital) cinema, animation, and painting, which have been explored by a range of scholars, including Lev Manovich (2001), who has argued:

[…] the manual construction of images in digital cinema represents a return to the pro-cinematic practices of the nineteenth century, when images were hand-painted and hand-animated. At the turn of the twentieth century, cinema was to delegate these manual techniques to animation and define itself as a recoding medium. As cinema enters the digital age, these techniques are again becoming commonplace in the filmmaking process. Consequently, cinema can no longer be clearly distinguished from animation. It is no longer an indexical media technology but, rather, a subgenre of painting. (295)

This return to a foregrounding of film's links to painting and animation is discernible in Charlie's Angels even before the start of the ‘film proper’: as the Columbia studio logo appears, the camera moves into one of the logo's painted clouds, which then transforms into a ‘live’ cloud, and the camera continues its way into the plane. With the use of manga and anime's floating hair motif, and the Angels' ‘kung fu’-style posing and shouting bringing to mind Hong Kong Phooey rather than the tradition of Hong Kong martial arts cinema to which the film's DVD extras are so keen to refer, the link between film and animation has a bearing on this film, which does not strive for verisimilitude or to create a transparency of style.

4. See Marc O'Day (2004) for a discussion of Charlie's Angels as a proponent of ‘the contemporary action babe cinema’. I wish to make two observations. Firstly, the moments of hair-flicking are just too excessive to be a straightforward objectification, drawing attention to themselves and to the fact that the film is pulled between constructing agentic female subjects who enjoy themselves, and incorporating them into the ideological givens of patriarchal consumer culture. The film tries to cope with its misogynist premise without appearing ‘unattractively feminist’; it is caught within this contradiction, a contradiction which it cannot – and does not want to – resolve and which comes through – and as such cannot be smoothed over – in these excessive moments. Secondly, the contradiction within the film has a resonance within gender-related tensions that mark the television series: Charlie's Angels (ABC, 1976–1981) has divided critics including Ellen Seiter (1985) and John Fiske (1989) about its gender politics, and Susan J. Douglas (1995, 216) has argued that the show's success was very much due to how it placed ‘feminism and antifeminism […] in perfect suspension’.

5. Lavik (2008) furthermore points out the particular genre dimensions within which spectacle–narrative debates have been mostly conducted.

6. See Lavik (2008) for a discussion of the broad differences between spectacle and excess, and how these terms are evoked in different cultural discourses.

7. In this, their work is not alone; indeed, spectacle–narrative debates have noted a general tendency within film criticism to rely on the supposedly stable, coherent, and orderly ‘classical Hollywood text’ with its codes and conventions of representational realism. King (2000, 4) here rightly argues that ‘[t]he coherence, or drive towards coherence, often ascribed to classical Hollywood films can be a product of a particular kind of critical reading rather than a quality of the text itself’. The chicken-and-egg-ness of this issue of how we can know what the classical Hollywood text is when this is partly produced by our reading of it (and our conditioning to read it as such), is a conundrum already familiar from genre theory, and one I shall, of course, leave unresolved here.