Filming Transcendentalism: The Place of Contemporary Independent Cinema in the Cultural Paradigm Shift Jesús Bolaño Quintero Universidad de Cádiz
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The recent rise of a new type of independent film reveals a cultural paradigm shift from postmodernism to something beyond. This paper attempts to show that this shift is a return to the grand narratives of the unfinished project of modernity which, according to Jürgen Habermas, was interrupted by WWII and the prevalence of liberalism and capitalism. This shift is nourished by neoromantic ideas from the American transcendentalist movement. Keywords: Film Studies; transcendentalism; post-postmodernism; independent cinema; paradigm shift * * * Independent cinema from the USA is of late giving rise to new types of films which in many ways are different, although they share some essential characteristics which give them a common frame. The cascade of works of filmmakers such as Wes Anderson, Charlie Kaufman, Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris, Spike Jonze—and we could add here a long etc.—are concerned with a wide range of topics and their points of view are as manifold as there are authors, but they have something in common: they are the product of the postmodern and, although their gaze is the result of previous cultural standards, they move forward, into something else: post-postmodernism. Their cinema is a response to the current situation of crisis. In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas Kuhn introduces the concept of “paradigm shift” to analyse how after a period of crisis caused by the impossibility of answering contemporary problems through an established paradigm there must be a series of circumstances in “normal science” (1962, 10) in order to make possible a change in the way of conceiving reality and providing a solution to those problems. Those circumstances are occurring in the current cultural context post 9/11. The different solutions provided in the periods that occur between the decline of the old paradigm and the establishment of a new one are usually produced in a climate of divergent thinking that goes beyond what is permitted by the structures of thought established by the prevailing paradigm. This is done in order to accommodate the solutions to —61—
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the new circumstances that have caused the crisis and create a new frame. “I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives” (Lyotard 1984, xxiv). With those words, Jean Françoise Lyotard claimed that postmodernism meant the loss of legitimation for metanarratives as scientific and technological knowledge blossomed after the Second World War ended and liberal capitalism returned. Since then, science and profit have gone hand-in-hand, thus creating the current state of crisis, as science and technology (knowledge) are not used to search for the truth, but to consolidate power and economic benefit. Lyotard’s concept of paralogy is the tool necessary to test different language games and narratives, that is, to prove their legitimacy while maintaining their value and discovering new ones which can emancipate the people without returning to the old model. On the other hand, Jürgen Habermas sees modernity as an “incomplete project” (2003, 1123) because the problems it posed have not been seriously addressed and solved. The advent of postmodernism and the crisis it brought along must be redeemed by returning to the original project of the Enlightenment with the totalizing structures of knowledge—those that Lyotard rejects. It seems that the direction of the new paradigm, intended as the solution to the conundrum of the emancipation from the autonomous economic system, is a mixture of both views. Taking all this into account, it will be argued that current creators are making use of that divergent thinking to propose a new paradigm, and that there is a desire to recover the unfinished project of modernity and the totalizing grand narratives which began to fade after the horrors of World War II, but with the postmodern distance (in the form of irony), which acts as a safety valve to avoid those narratives from becoming extremist thoughts. Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker call the present moment metamodernism. In their article “Notes on Metamodernism” (2010) they say that postmodernism is over, and give different proposals for the new path. They describe metamodernism with “Jos de Mul’s distinction between postmodern irony (encompassing nihilism, sarcasm, and the distrust and deconstruction of grand narratives, the singular and the truth) and modern enthusiasm (encompassing everything from utopism to the unconditional belief in Reason)” (2010, 1). They also cite film critic James MacDowell and his term “quirky cinema” (7) as a representative example of this modern/postmodern, enthusiasm/irony dichotomy. This new independent cinema, born at the beginning of the twenty-first century, is different from, and we could even argue that it is a kind of response to, what Jeffrey Sconce calls “smart cinema” (2002, 349), a kind of cinema made in the previous decade which is representative of the state of crisis to which these so called quirky films react. In general terms, we could say that quirky cinema is part of another broader movement: “New Sincerity,” a term coined by Jim Collins in his essay “Genericity in the Nineties: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity” (1993). According to Sconce, smart cinema is represented by filmmakers such as Todd Solondz, Neil LaBute and Alexander Payne, among others, and even by the early work of directors now considered to be in the
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quirky category, such as Spike Jonze and Wes Anderson. The characteristic elements of this smart cinema are, Sconce argues, irony, black humour, fatalism, relativism and “pointlessly and simplistically grim” characters (2002, 364) who are aware of the weariness, distance and even disgust provoked by their situation. New Sincerity offers a way out from that feeling of uneasy and nihilistic apathy which is depicted in a very clearly defined way as a neoromantic vision related to the sense of emancipating grand narrative. It is also linked to the recovery of the unfinished project of modernity because it provides the necessary modern enthusiasm described by Jos de Mul. In his article “Notes on Quirky” (2010), James MacDowell points out one of the main differences between smart cinema and the new independent films: the use of irony. MacDowell mentions Sconce, who says that “irony . . . is opposed to ‘sincerity,’ ‘positivity,’ and the opposite corollaries of the words singled out above: ‘engagement,’ ‘passion,’ ‘affect,’ and so on” (2010, 11), and goes on to say that the most distinctive characteristic of the new independent cinema is “a tone that exists on a knife-edge of judgment and empathy, detachment and engagement, irony and sincerity” (13). That sincerity, which forms part of the modern enthusiasm that Jos de Mul speaks about, is achieved through a neoromantic vision nourished by the ideas of the transcendentalist movement of the early nineteenth century, which can be traced in many of the characteristics of these films. This can be seen in representative films such as Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (2012) and The Darjeeling Limited (2007); Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton’s Little Miss Sunshine (2006); Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are (2009); Sam Mendes’s Away We Go (2009); Jared Hess’s Napoleon Dynamite (2004); Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) or Jordan Vogt-Roberts’s The Kings of Summer (2013). The romantic theme of lost childhood innocence is present in all of these films and it represents the lost innocence of postmodernism. All of them portray children, coming-of-age adolescents or adults with an unresolved urge to delve into their lost childhood innocence, trying to retrieve it. MacDowell suggests many instances of the relationship between what he calls quirky cinema and childhood: the use of mediumlong shots with the subject in the centre of the image, which is a very characteristic stylistic device of these films and recreates that sense of innocence, as this is the type of framing a child would choose for a photograph; or the use of “simplified and two dimensional” (2010, 7) drawings in the promotional posters. MacDowell also mentions the music, which also reminds us of childhood in these films: “The pitch, repetitiveness, and insistent prettiness of much of this music often lends it a sound and feel reminiscent of the tinkling purity of a child’s music box” (2010, 8). Childhood is related to the core meaning of the New Sincerity movement. Being sincere in transcendentalist terms is also related to childhood. It means being true to oneself; to what one does; to what one is. In order to be true to ourselves, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson, we need to understand ourselves, understand our own truth. When we are children that truth is within us, but we lose it as we adapt and mould
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our character to the society we are born into: “The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. . . . In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period so ever of life, is always a child” (Emerson [1836] 2003a, 1074). We lose this sincerity when we grow up and that is why many of these films are about coming of age or unresolved issues in adulthood which can be traced to a traumatic experience in childhood. A clear example of this is Juno (2007), directed by Jason Reitman, in which the rite of passage of the main adolescent characters is having to cope with becoming parents at the age of sixteen. Other films like Me and You and Everyone We Know, Little Miss Sunshine, Napoleon Dynamite, Peter Sollett’s Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (2008) or The Kings of Summer, have coming of age as one of their main themes. However, if the smart cinema of the nineties saw innocence as something lost and gave no alternatives, this new cinema uses many of the transcendentalist ways to recover the connection with lost innocence: childhood, the journey, going back to nature, intuition and individuality. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), written during his stay at Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau wrote a journal about a boat trip that he and his brother had made. The book is more about a journey into his own self to discover his own truth than about the real physical experience. This inspirational trip to recover lost innocence is a recurring theme in films like Moonrise Kingdom, The Darjeeling Limited, Little Miss Sunshine, Away We Go or Lynn Shelton’s Your Sister’s Sister (2011). In all of them, the characters set on a journey to discover who they really are and at the end of the journey all of them experience some kind of epiphany. Nature is more than the setting for a lot of these films: it is almost a character and it is also the main tenet of transcendentalism. The divine is concealed in nature and in everyone; therefore, being one with nature is being one with oneself. Apart from the obvious references to cabins in the woods resembling Thoreau’s own famous cabin at Walden Pond, like in Your Sister’s Sister, where the characters retreat to a cabin to find themselves, or The Kings of Summer, about three boys who go into the woods to build a cabin and live in nature, there are plenty of references to nature and what it symbolises when trying to find one’s own truth. The more you know nature, the more you will know yourself. Reaching that knowledge is only possible through intuition, however, not through reason. The characters in these films do not know what their problem is. Reaching the epiphany is something which has to be done in solitude, or rather, individually. They cannot explain what they are going through because, according to Emerson, you must “Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none
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but his Maker can teach him” ([1841] 2003b, 1141). The maker is found both in nature and inside each individual. That is why there are so many moments of silence in these films, where the spectator knows that the characters have understood something important about themselves, although nothing is said and it is open to interpretation. Emerson writes, “And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid; probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far-off remembering of the intuition” ([1841] 2003b, 1135). Wes Anderson’s works are full of those moments where music plays a central role. Other times the characters say something, but their faces and their acts say something else. They are having that kind of epiphany where words cannot explain what they have learnt through intuition. On the other hand, children in these films can usually speak normally because they are true to themselves, they are not ironic—although maybe the situation is—their relationship with other people is sincere, and that is why, for example, the main characters in Moonrise Kingdom are perfect for each other. They have very candid dialogues: Sam: It’s possible I may wet the bed by the way. Later, I mean. Suzy: Okay. Sam: I wish I didn’t have to mention it but just in case. I don’t want to make you be offended. Suzy: Of course, I won’t. (Anderson 2012)
This new independent cinema offers sincerity as a solution to the previous feeling of weariness brought about by postmodernism with a modernist enthusiasm which is achieved through a combination of postmodern irony and the recuperation of sincerity through transcendentalism. There is a desire to retrieve the lost honest belief towards metanarratives but to keep them from becoming totalizing through the deflating use of irony. In “Notes on Metamodernism,” Vermeulen and van den Akker cite Jerry Saltz’s article “Sincerity and Irony Hug it Out,” where he explains this phenomenon: “I’m noticing a new approach to artmaking in recent museum and gallery shows. . . . They grasp that they can be ironic and sincere at the same time, and they are making art from this compound-complex state of mind—what Emerson called ‘alienated majesty’” (2010, 2). The change in the direction of the paradigm of postmodernism has brought tenets pertaining to a more totalizing kind of narrative intended to regain freedom and to recover the enthusiasm of the modernist project through the combination of irony and sincerity. The recuperation of these old values is making artists produce works which make them feel honest again and not be afraid of thinking outside the box so as to be able to offer working alternatives to the current paradigm crisis. The new independent cinema that we have analysed echoes all these ideas. It recovers sincerity through transcendentalism while maintaining the irony of the previous decades, thus creating a balance between postmodern apathy and modern empathy. They offer a possible solution to the current crisis by recovering
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old values that look back to the old metanarratives in an engaging way but with the safety valve of irony. Works Cited Away We Go. DVD. Directed by Sam Mendes. Focus Features, 2009. Collins, Jim. 1993. “Genericity in the Nineties: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity.” In Film Theory Goes to the Movies, edited by Jim Collins, Ava Preacher Collins, and Hilary Radner, 242-63. New York: Routledge. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. (1836) 2003a. “Nature.” In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Nina Baym, et al., 1073-101. New York: Norton. —. (1841) 2003b. “Self-Reliance.” In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Nina Baym, et al., 1126-43. New York: Norton. Habermas, Jürgen. 2003. “Modernity—An Incomplete Project.” In Art in Theory: 19002000. An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 1123-31. Oxford: Blackwell. Juno. DVD. Directed by Jason Reitman. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2007. Kuhn, Thomas. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Little Miss Sunshine. DVD. Directed by Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2006. Lyotard, Jean F. (1979) 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester UP. MacDowell, James. 2010. “Notes on Quirky.” Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism 1(1). http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/movie/pastissues/. Me and You and Everyone We Know. DVD. Directed by Miranda July. IFC Films, 2005. Moonrise Kingdom. DVD. Directed by Wes Anderson. Focus Features, 2012. Napoleon Dynamite. DVD. Directed by Jared Hess. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2004. Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. DVD. Directed by Peter Sollett. Columbia, 2009. Sconce, Jeffrey. 2002. “Irony, Nihilism and the New American ‘Smart’ Film.” Screen 43 (4): 349-69. http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/content/43/4/349.full.pdf+html. The Darjeeling Limited. DVD. Directed by Wes Anderson. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2008. The Kings of Summer. DVD. Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts. Big Beach Films, 2013. Thoreau, Henry David. (1849) 1998. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. London: Penguin. Vermeulen, Tim, and Robin van den Akker. 2010. “Notes on Metamodernism.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 2. http://www.aestheticsandculture.net/index.php/ jac/article/view/5677. Where the Wild Things Are. DVD. Directed by Spike Jonze. Warner Bros Pictures, 2010. Your Sister’s Sister. DVD. Directed by Lynn Shelton. Ada Films, 2012.
