Magnolia E-Book

Christina Lane

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 155

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

There are certain films and shows that resonate with audiences everywhere—they generate discussion and debate about everything from gender, class, citizenship and race, to consumerism and social identity. This new 'teachable canon' of film and television introduces students to alternative classics that range from silent film to CSI.

• Magnolia is one of those films students know and love. From the over-the-top performances by male and female leads to the "ripped from the pages of the Old Testament" conclusion, it is a cult favorite in American cinema
• This is the first book to examine the diverse themes, performances, and influences on this polarizing film, encouraging students to look beyond the film's style in order to fully engage with questions about its substance
• Lane develops a careful analysis of the film, its director, as well as the contemporary context in which it was produced - exploring topics including the role of the auteur, what constitutes cinema / media literacy in the digital age, the politics of postmodernism, and the film's critique of the mass media - in order to challenge students to ask themselves why they are so riveted by this controversial and unusual film

Leseprobe

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Magnolia at the Millennium: Historical and Social Contexts

2 Through the Viewfinder of a Cinematic “Son”: Reflexivity, Intertextuality, and “Smart Cinema”

3 An Aesthetics of Contradiction: Cinematic Style and Televisuality

4 Sound and Voice: De-Centering Meaning

5 Redemption and Re-Mediation: Framing the Deathbed

Notes

Bibliography

Index

MAGNOLIA

Wiley-Blackwell Studies in Film and Television

Series Editors : Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker

Experienced media studies teachers know that real breakthroughs in the classroom are often triggered by texts that an austere notion of the canon would disqualify. Unlike other short book series, Wiley-Blackwell Studies in Film and Television works from a broad field of prospective film and television programs, selected less for their adherence to definitions of “art” than for their resonance with audiences.

From Top Hat to Hairspray, from early sitcoms to contemporary forensic dramas, the series encompasses a range of film and television material that reflects diverse genres, forms, styles, and periods. The texts explored here are known and recognized world-wide for their ability to generate discussion and debate about evolving media industries as well as, crucially, representations and conceptualizations of gender, class, citizenship, race, consumerism and capitalism, and other facets of identity and experience. This series is design to communicate these themes clearly and effectively to media studies students at all levels while also introducing groundbreaking scholarship of the very highest caliber. These are the films and shows we really want to watch, the new “teachable canon” of alternative classics that range from silent film to CSI.

This edition first published 2011© 2011 Wiley-Blackwell

Wiley-Blackwell is an imprint of John Wiley & Sons, formed by the merger of Wileys global Scientific, Technical and Medical business with Blackwell Publishing.

Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom

Editorial Offices350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UKThe Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.

The right of Christina Lane to be identified as the author of this work been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lane, Christina.

Magnolia / Christina Lane.

p. cm. (Wiley-Blackwell studies in film and television)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-8462-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4051-8461-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Magnolia (Motion picture) I. Title.

PN1997.M2544L36 2011

791.43’72–dc22

2010043503

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9781444395259; Wiley Online Library 9781444395273; ePub 9781444395266

List of Figures

Perhaps coincidence, Claudia’s taxicab crosses paths with her mother’s car in an intersection

The hanging of one of the men from Greenberry Hill

The pilot who has accidentally killed his blackjack dealer

A telestrator diagrams the fall of Sydney Barringer

A green light signals that a surprise is coming

A frog falls toward Officer Jim Kurring

The numbers 8 and 2 are situated in the middle of the phone number for Frank’s Seduce and Destroy program

A weather report creates both disruption and continuity

During the seemingly inexplicable rain of frogs, these words insist “but it did happen”

Phil explains, “This is that scene”

In the final stages of cancer himself, Jason Robards portrays a terminally ill man

Frank T.J. Mackey sells his Seduce and Destroy Program

The television is a focal point in Magnolia

This family photo provides an inaccurate reflection of Jimmy’s family

A picture of Earl’s lungs

An open-ended final shot of Claudia

Kurring searches for answers

A subjective shot from Dixon’s point of view

Earl’s deathbed

Stanley stares at the rain of frogs with wonder

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank series editors Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker for seeing the value in this project, and for providing generous editorial support along the way. They have a tremendous enthusiasm for, and commitment to, this series. I wish to thank Jayne Fargnoli and Margot Morse at Wiley-Blackwell for their keen interest in the film Magnolia , and also Janey Fisher and Matthew Baskin for their help in shepherding this manuscript through to publication.

Additionally, I owe a debt of gratitude to my colleagues in the Motion Picture Program at the University of Miami, in particular Bill Rothman, Dia Kontaxis, and Grace Barnes. Their support of my ongoing research and scholarly endeavors has been steadfast. Likewise, the former and current graduate students in the program among them, Trae DeLellis, Christian Gay, Michael Hable, Michael Laramee, Nicole Richter, Meryl Shriver-Rice, and Funing Tang continue to both impress and challenge me, helping me to flesh out new ideas that might otherwise have remained dormant.

I appreciate the support, which took various forms, of Vicki Callahan, Michael DeAngelis, Suzanne Leonard, and Linda Mizejewski. Thanks also to Mary Colvin and Stephanie McNulty for their friendship and great humor during the writing of this book, and to Ashley Arostegui and Rebecca Provost, who provided much needed research assistance.

I am indebted to my family Gretchen Gaines and Saul Weiner, Ken and Deborah Lane, and Hilda and Gaspar González, Sr. for their constant encouragement and frequent assistance. I am grateful to my son Sebastián, who arrived as this project was developing and showed exceeding patience and good humor during its completion. Finally, I wish to express my love and gratitude to my husband Gaspar González, to whom this book is dedicated. Thankfully, he has boundless resources for thinking and talking about film, history, and culture.

Introduction

When Magnolia was released in December 1999, reviewers responded to its brash nerve and presentation of emotional vulnerability. David Denby of the New Yorker called it, “a rare case of a great terrible movie” (1999, p. 102). Sight and Sound’s Mark Olsen deemed it “a magnificent train wreck of a movie,” lauding the “audaciously earnest concoction” (2000, p. 26). In Rolling Stone, Mim Udovitch claimed, “Magnolia is transparently, almost embarrassingly sincere” (2000, p. 50). New Statesman’s Jonathan Romney describes, “You come out of Magnolia exhilarated and a little battered, feeling that you’ve had an authentic blast of the pulse of life” (2000, p. 46). Lynn Hirschberg, in a New York Times Magazine article, observed, “[Anderson’s] directorial nerve can be both audacious and excruciating – a riveting combination” (1999, p. 52).

In a case such as this, when a film is both criticized and celebrated for its earnestness – its condition deemed by some as “embarrassing” and “excruciating” – the field of film analysis faces both a challenge and an opportunity. It is easier to dismiss or obscure the film’s significance than to grapple sincerely with its raw deluge of emotion and spectacle. Diane Sippl suggests that those who find Magnolia’s concerns “clichéd” or overwrought are “actively dodging the social gravity, the psychological resonance, and the emotional poignancy of the conflicts mined in the film’s sensitive writing and talented ensemble acting” (2000, p. 4). The film asks us to lower our defenses, take down our guard, and experience emotional and moral susceptibility. At the same time, it obliges and in fact invites critical engagement, creating a space for thoughtful distance and contemplation.

Magnolia appeared on over 80 “Top Ten” lists of films from 1999, garnering praise in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Sun Times, Village Voice, Newsweek, and Rolling Stone. It also gained its share of citations as “Worst Movie of the Year.” Winning three Academy Award nominations and countless festival awards, the film received particular acclaim within filmmaking circles. Kenneth Turan, for example, remarked that Magnolia was “drunk and disorderly on the pure joy of making movies” (1999). Stuart Klawans observed that director Paul Thomas Anderson “follows in the tradition of D.W. Griffith, the first great filmmaker to cut between scenes on the basis of theme and not story” (Klawans, 2000, p. 35). As a movie-lovers’ movie, this three hour and eight minute epic appears at first glance to view the medium and histories of film as eternal and transcendent.

Yet, Magnolia is undoubtedly a cultural artifact specific to its time of release. As Chapter 1 argues, this work circulated within a broader cycle of 1990s cinema known as “millennial films.” Magnolia asks American viewers to pause and take stock, before turning themselves over to the twenty-first century. Using multiple techniques such as the director’s kinetic style (itself a form of narration), the disembodied narrative voice-over (by Ricky Jay), Aimee Mann’s music, and various powerful performances, it poses philosophical and moral questions. Are our lives governed by chaos or cosmic order? In the words of the narrator, do we live at the mercy of chance and things “that just happen” or do unexpected encounters “happen all the time” that allow us to connect, to forge community, to try to change the world? Can we make a difference in each other’s lives? The film gradually constructs an ethical position – or a series of ethical positions – that speak to its specific location within broader historical and political contexts.

Magnolia’s ethical space is reinforced and elaborated through its layered narrative structure and visual emphasis on multiplicity. Twelve characters within nine storylines come together not necessarily through story and plot but through theme and character conflict. These protagonists, like the film, are bound by place as they encounter “a day in the life” of the San Fernando Valley. The film’s name supports a grounding in spatial geography by referencing (and at one point showing) an actual street in the valley, Magnolia Boulevard, to aid in one of several interpretations of the title.

Most of Magnolia’s characters have hit a crisis point at the start of the story. Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall), host of the children’s game show What Do Kids Know?, is confronting his mortality. Having staved off the effects of terminal cancer for as long as possible, he struggles to mask his symptoms during a live broadcast. He has just made a visit to his estranged adult daughter, Claudia, in an attempt to repair their relationship, but she refuses his efforts at reconciliation. Claudia (Melora Walters), meanwhile, comes to terms with an out-of-control cocaine addiction. She spends most of the day holed up in her dimmed apartment while roaming taverns at night in search of escape through anonymous trysts. She will soon meet Jim Kurring (John C. Reilly), a police officer called to her apartment on a noise complaint, whose clean-cut, positive approach to everyday life offers her a ray of hope. Kurring is about to have a very bad day, however, as the well-intentioned cop will lose his gun in a bungled pursuit. He also unknowingly misses an opportunity to solve the case of the day (and potentially retrieve the gun) – a crime that involves his discovery of a murder victim in the apartment of a woman, Marcie (Cleo King). Marcie is participating in a cover-up, though the details of the crime will be left ambiguous.

In another narrative thread, Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman) – a 10-year-old contestant on the What Do Kids Know? program – is cracking under the pressure of his repeated success on the telecast. Feeling exploited by the entertainment business and underappreciated by his father, Stanley cannot bear to feel “different” anymore. His position is echoed in the character of Donnie Smith (William H. Macy), a former whiz kid who has grown into middle age with nothing but emotional baggage regarding his game show days and his parents’ theft of all of his winnings. He has hatched a plan to steal funds from his employer’s safe and obtain expensive orthodontic work, in hopes of wooing a male bartender with whom he is obsessed.

In another part of town, former television mogul Earl Partridge (Jason Robards) lies on his deathbed ranting about the mistakes he has made and looking for forgiveness from any direction. His home-care nurse Phil Parma (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), an emotionally sensitive caretaker, attempts to track down the dying patriarch’s son. Phil soon discovers that Earl’s heir is motivational speaker and info-mercial star, Frank T. Mackey (Tom Cruise) – a woman-hating spokesman for an obnoxious men’s movement who has changed his real name and rewritten his life story to exclude Earl. As Phil’s search for Frank plays out, Frank undergoes a press interview with television reporter Gwenovier (April Grace) in which he slowly realizes that the African American woman knows intimate details of his background. The domineering, manipulative Frank suddenly finds that the tables have turned on him, as his vulnerability is exposed and by a woman of color no less.

As this occurs, Earl’s younger, glamorous wife Linda (Julianne Moore) travels from doctor to pharmacy in a state of high anxiety gathering scores of prescription pills. On the verge of a nervous breakdown, she is deciding whether today is the day when she should administer liquid morphine to her husband, thereby facilitating a coma and his eventual death. In doing so, she also grapples with severe guilt over her marital indiscretions, recognizing in these final days that she deeply loves Earl.

Perhaps coincidence, Claudia’s taxicab crosses paths with her mother’s car in an intersection

By Magnolia’s end, Earl will have passed away, aided by Phil who dispenses the morphine. Frank will have made the difficult decision to travel to his father’s bedside and confront his own buried emotional turmoil. Linda will have attempted suicide, ending up in the hospital. (And Frank, whom she despises, will make a compassionate visit.) Jimmy Gator will have died in a freak fire, as he tries to shoot himself. His wife, Rose, will reunite with daughter Claudia after learning that he (more than likely) sexually abused the latter as a child. Kurring will have recovered his gun, after it falls out of the sky. He will also have made a commitment to embark on a romantic relationship with Claudia. She too will decide to initiate a fresh start, presumably leaving drugs behind and endeavoring toward a future with Kurring.

Furthermore, Stanley will have interrupted the live game show broadcast with a public meltdown. By the end of the day, he will for the first time assert to his father, “Dad, you have to be nicer to me.” His counterpart, whiz kid Donnie Smith, will have professed his love for the bartender in an embarrassing display. He will also have stolen money, attempted to return it to its rightful place, and fallen off the side of a building, ruining his newly acquired braces. He will have crossed paths with Officer Kurring, who helps him see that he has been unfortunately motivated by false and external values.

Earl’s death, Phil’s grief, Frank’s visit, Linda’s rush to the hospital, Gator’s bizarre accident, Claudia and Rose’s reunion, Stanley’s epiphany, and Donnie’s encounter with Kurring all take place during a raining flood of frogs. The affective and dramatic buildup of overlapping conflict is answered by a cathartic downpour. The rush of amphibians seems to come from nowhere yet its occurrence follows a firmly embedded emotional logic and is foreshadowed by continual references to the biblical scripture Exodus 8:2 (as I discuss in Chapter 1). In addition to the affective community constructed by Magnolia, the characters circulate within a moral and philosophical universe that privileges redemption and transformation. Unlike several corresponding works, such as Short Cuts (1993), Babel (2000) or Traffic (2006), whose character collisions are plot- or event-driven, this film draws its protagonists together into a continually expanding and contracting orbit of affect, melos, and ethical inquiry.

Magnolia has been labeled a “smart film,” a category Jeffrey Sconce (2002, p. 349) coined to describe the slick, ironic style of many directors in Anderson’s company (e.g., Wes Anderson, Alexander Payne, Todd Solondz). This is partly based on the fact that the filmmaker’s preceding Boogie Nights (1997) presented an extremely stylized and somewhat detached perspective on its subject matter (the 1970s porn industry). Sconce’s essay raises a question about the degree to which Magnolia conveys a certain nihilism or at least fatalism, especially given its use of an ironic narrator who ponders matters of fate. It is conceivable, too, to perceive the film as “distanced” and “disengaged” (terms used by Sconce) because it operates, on some level, as a game to be decoded, planting dozens of clues along the way in order to foreshadow its rather shocking, Exodus-style climax. The style appeals to an audience that is highly cinematically literate – and engaged with a hyperactive media universe – by inviting spectators to concentrate on particular details of the mise-en-scène and actively participate in word-of-mouth about the film. Yet the heightened affect and definitive commitment to melodrama encourage character identification as well as a certain emotional engagement or immersion. The film maintains a tension between ironic detachment and passionate investment in a way that suggests the two are not mutually exclusive. As will be discussed in Chapter 2, Magnolia is distinctive for the way that it encourages spectators to care deeply about the characters even as we look for narrative clues.