A film comprised of several short films that evoke the themes and characters of the Golden Age of Hollywood, the Coen brothers' latest film looks at the complex way in which cinema is implicated in the formation of social and political change.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

What is the political and social potential of film? How can film become more than simply a part of the machinery (of capitalism), and attain broader social and political significance? These are, broadly, the questions that the Coen brothers' new film Hail, Caeser! addresses. And much like Wes Anderson's recent film The Grand Budapest Hotel, they give us their most direct and complete attempt to address them yet.

The film follows an old-school Hollywood studio director Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) at some point during the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema in the 1930s or 40s as he navigates the multiplicity of different films currently under production at his studio: the myriad actors involved and their random needs and the needs of the studio to manage their public personas, from the context of speaking on the phone to another executive, to a conversation with a gossip columnist (Tilda Swinton), to watching a scene being filmed, to the editing room to review an actors complain that he isn't suited to the production the studio has cast him in. And, most importantly, perhaps, it follows him as he attempts to negotiate a ransom being demanded by some Communists for the release of the studio's star actor Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) while at the same time he begins questioning his involvement with the cinema and considers taking a more relaxed job working for Lockheed Corporation, working on military airplanes and equipment.

On the one hand, these different narratives serve the purpose of giving us, the contemporary audience, some access into this Golden Age of Hollywood: they are a showcase each for a different production that captures some aspect of what films were like in those days, and what went into their production. On its own, this is an interesting dimension of the film, as we get to see the vastness of the imagination at work in producing a Roman epic that deals with Jesus's crucifixion; we get to see the delicate quiet of Laurence Olivier's sophisticated aristocratic cinema, to see the skill involved in singing and dancing that made up so many of the musical films of that time. In each of these narratives, we get a slightly different insight into this point where the cinema itself meets the reality and machinery from out of which it emerges. The endless repetition of 'if only 'twas so simple' that goes into striking just the right tone in a dramatic dialogue, to the discomfort of wearing a mermaid suit while swimming, synchronized, around in a pool, to the difficulty of imagining an ancient Roman party from the present while standing in a room full of extras being ordered around by a militant director focused on keeping the enormity of the production on track. What we learn from these narratives is the variety of the imaginary worlds the Hollywood is able to produce from under very different real-life circumstances. We see not a smooth gradual transition from Hollywood film to reality, but a jarring and abrupt transition to name-calling and slapping, complaining, smoking, and vulgarity that makes up the real-world. And its through this abruptness that we begin to distinguish the cinematic as a distinct entity from the 'reality' that produces it.

On the other hand, what these narratives tell us is that, essentially, film has a different, totally disjunctive and distinct expressive capacity that does not arise from the simple statement of political or social themes: which is to say that film is not a text. A star putting a towel on a barkeepers arm, bringing that background character of the working class into the foreground, at the same level as the star, does not in itself communicate a Communist idea or produce anything at all connected to the intended political or social message; rather, it goes unnoticed by all but the most focused and educated observer (in this case, the director himself) and any attempt to cite it later as having been associated with a political motivation will do nothing apart from produce the confused head-scratching agreement of Clooney's character in the film ('remember that scene in the bar when we ….?' --'Yeah, Yeah, that was you guys?'). This runs counter to what many throughout history have considered to be the political potential of film. For instance, Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera has always been cited as a prime example of how filmmakers of the new medium (in the 1920s) saw in the new artistic-machinic medium a way through which to communicate a radical socialist/communist politics. In that film we see an interwoven assemblage of scenes depicting working-class people doing their work in myriad circumstances, one scene after another. A woman at a sewing machine, someone hammering. This montage of spliced-together scenes, as the film progresses, accelerates to the point where what we're faced with is nothing more than the dizzying multiplicity of life itself, the basic quality of social existence, that one is not separate from the other, that we are all, in this moment of technological revolution, of increasing speed of life and pace, moving toward, not atomization and fragmentation (as the forces that be would have it), but toward a new form of unity, what Hardt and Negri today would call simply 'the multiplicity'¹. And while it could be argued that the Coen brothers film borrows some of the form of this film (through its own montage of a multiplicity of distinct narratives of people working) the conclusion they reach is much different, and for sure, an important contribution in its own right to the theory of film. For them, the interpretation we are able to reach about Vertov's film is something that we must, basically, read from the film as if it were a text through a process of inter-medium reflexivity, a process whereby the emotional significance and feeling of a dizzying confusion that the film provokes in the viewer is then elaborated through the textual/rational medium of political theory through which a complete political/social message can arise.

But if Hail, Caeser! provides a clear negative critique of this socio-politico function of film, does it provide any positive statement on it? The briefcase full of ransom money the communist academics want to donate to the Soviets to advance 'the cause' slips into the water so that even money extracted from the economic power of the cinema-industrial complex, when attempting to put it to better more ideologically pure use, falls victim to the hapless humans and vanishes into the abyss. Baird Whitlock returns to the studio, ready to carry on the fight, full of political criticism, only to be slapped into immediate reconciliation with his reality to return to his function as a star who should simply be grateful for what he has been given. And Eddie Mannix decides its marginally better to stay making films rather than military equipment. Together, this doesn't really amount to much of an endorsement on the radical political potential of film. Work that is marginally better than making war and that doesn't pretend man is anything other than totally flawed and basically incompetent when it comes to articulating a vision in the world that can only end in disaster/destruction. This seems somewhat disappointing really, but it can't be too surprising as this is basically the somewhat silly, lacking in seriousness, comedy and (perhaps overly) cynical world-view that the Coen brothers sometimes have a tendency to descend into (Burn After Reading, for example) and, certainly, doesn't rise to the same level of seriousness of their previous two films True Grit and Inside Llewyn Davis that took the contemporary situation and its cultural and social history and cinematic significance seriously to the point of producing something that amounts to a cinematic event. And its doubly disappointing considering that Hail, Caeser! seems to make a serious attempt at the same in this film. Vivid scenes that express the authentic allure of the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema seem like they are destined to amount to something, to open-up this previous time for us today in a way that resonates with the history of this same cinema that remains with us, of the still lingering memory and presence of it in contemporary culture. Instead, what we get is the feeling of profound religious realization, of the meaning of life, the fabric of existence, the deep significance of life and suffering, we feel the Roman general kneeling before the crucified Jesus, begin to understand the poetic meaning of life as he speaks eloquently and passionately at the feet of Christ and.....and then he forgets the simplest but at the same time most important word: FAITH. And back to reality we all come, swept out of the dancing play of light that is the cinema and the magical reality into which we'd been transported for a brief moment, back to the daily problems of life, the reality of a flawed human existence where all we can each do is the basic simple most we can each do, to follow our heart and inspiration and hope that, somehow, it will all amount to something more than basically nothing.

Fair enough, maybe this is the way we should view the political potential of cinema and, even, perhaps, of any endeavor at all. Is it the case that all intentions culminate in failure, can never amount to anything? Does the flawed nature of humanity damn every attempt at anything more pure and idealistic? On the one hand there is value in the abandonment of political thinking, which is a return to an artistic sensibility: we can never intend to do anything worthwhile, it always happens through coincidence. In some respects, this is also a point made in Inside Llewyn Davis: that the struggles of one who remains true to themselves and their 'art', while rife with its own problems and even culture of problems that arise when idealisms collide, can still amount to something as each individual struggle forms the basis of a broader struggle through which cultural transformation takes place. He who loses still supports those that succeed. Perhaps. In this way we could look at Hail, Caeser! and say, then, that the broader cultural and political significance of film is simply left unstated, that it is left to the viewer to appreciate what fidelity to the flickering screen is worth socially and politically to us today. Perhaps its simply too much to ask the Coen brothers to provide us with such a far-reaching philosophy of cinema grounded in the actual poetics of film and insight into the contemporary significance of its history that renders specific aspects of what film has given to us meaningful today. So, perhaps what we get is, rather than a specific (Communist or Socialist) politics of film, we get a general and necessarily vague and amorphous sense of the vast political and social significance of it that has wired its way into the very fabric of our being and consciousness, whose play of light is more real to us in our memory sometimes than reality itself. And, perhaps, its this awareness of the invisible hand of cinema that guides its audience out of their homes and into dark rooms to watch its products that the actual political and social significance of film can arise, stripped naked of any theoretical political rationality, left as we are then with the bare distinction of the mirror of the universe of film reflecting back to us the movement of our own life that takes place, invisibly with and through it. Faith is no longer important then, as we've already glimpsed the power of the strange dark matter of cinema. Like Scarlett Johansson's character in Viki, Cristina, Barcelona, rather than knowing what cinema is, after watching Hail, Caeser! we certainly know better what cinema is not. And, thus, as if in a negative, we know something about what it is, even if we can only glimpse it from what's missing.

Hail, Caeser!, and the glory of Rome.

Footnotes