Hollywood North is not San Francisco South, nor North Hollywood or South San Francisco. But maybe in an age of media crime fascination there can be high-tech tours of location specific cinematic crime, something better than the Alcatraz Tour. Here, “location specific cinematic crime” does not mean sneaking food into the movie theater.
Vigilantism in a democracy can range from online shunning and bullying to the lynch mob where a modern weapon can amplify a mob of one, and the cinema as site and transmitter makes those interactions more complex. Even during hot/cold wars, the role of Hollywood as a TMZ industry (Thirty-Mile-Zone) has become part of the discourse of culture and propaganda.
In the time of the Hollywood Ten, a prisoner’s dilemma occurs for those prosecuted by HUAC, where one of them decided to defect, provide information to HUAC that unravels the Ten’s defense and have his career rehabilitated by Stanley Kramer. The collateral effects of the Hollywood Blacklist had had lasting, repeated effects in the current climate of ad hominem fear of socialism promoted by RWNJs.
De facto blacklisting still occurs to this day, where reputation is manipulated and magnified in the current 2016 election process. These are all aspects of the surveilled world — from DNA, to geneology, to eventually biometric access to toilets, we, as bodies, will all be controlled.
Hollywood Blacklist
The growth of conservative political influence and the Republican triumph in the 1946 Congressional elections, which saw the party take control of both the House and Senate, led to a major revival of institutional anticommunist activity, publicly spearheaded by HUAC. The following year, the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA), a political action group cofounded by Walt Disney, issued a pamphlet advising producers on the avoidance of "subtle communistic touches" in their films. Its counsel revolved around a list of ideological prohibitions, such as "Don't smear the free-enterprise system ... Don't smear industrialists ... Don't smear wealth ... Don't smear the profit motive ... Don't deify the 'common man'... Don't glorify the collective".
The film The Lineup contains the line, "When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty," of which Jonathan Lethem writes that "Bob Dylan heard it…, cleaned it up a little, and inserted it into 'Absolutely Sweet Marie'" (as "To live outside the law you must be honest.")
The paddy wagon doesn’t feature much in media except when tragedies occur. Recently SF beat (The LineUp) SF police used Black Marias and the SF EMTs used trucks that were like meat wagons rather than ambulances. That Baltimore’s cops seem to misuse them seems endemic to police departments. In SF it seems the cops now don’t even bother to arrest suspects, but gun them down as though they needed more tactical training. Black Marias’ Lives matter as well.
On the other coast’s Menlo Park, Edison’s Black Maria did serve the same purpose, to contain bodies (Foucault’s carceral panopticon). The (movie) Industry however finds a way to distract us all, as David Duchovny’s new book reminds us that his life would have been different had he finished his dissertation — a question one can always hope to ask James Franco and one that curses Al Gore’s college roommate Tommy Lee Jones not in Love Story but in The Eyes of Laura Mars.
Cinemas are the site of much cultural reproduction, the sites of tragedy, the sites for a whole range of pandering, and a site that can represent urbanity and the cosmopolitan.
San Francisco has long been a carceral city and a possible sniper’s paradise, mainly on film but it is a crime genre site going back to Dashiel Hammett and Nick & Nora Charles. As the City (see Herb Caen and Steph Curry) it also has a history of underground, Othered cultures in any international port city, some with victimless crimes, others more victim-filled. Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll. Plus street crime...
Stanley Kramer and Edward Dmytryk’s Sniper (1952) The film's comparatively comprehensive outdoor footage of 1952 San Francisco remains unsurpassed in variety for a narrative film.
Edward Dmytryk, who grew up in SF, had his own kind of Lineup as he identified his contacts for HUAC.
On April 25, 1951, Dmytryk appeared before HUAC for the second time, answering all questions. He spoke of his own brief Party membership in 1945, and named 26 other Party members. He said that John Howard Lawson, Adrian Scott, Albert Maltz, and others had pressured him to include Communist elements in his films. His testimony damaged several court cases that others of the "Ten" had filed. He recounted his experiences of the period in his book, Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten (1996).
Beginning with the eponymous Dirty Harry, directed by Don Siegel, that block of films as a unit do have a kind of coherence over their life. Mainly one that contests the political position of law & order as the agent of vigilantism. Pauline Kael condemned DH as, "’right-wing fantasy [that is] a remarkably single-minded attack on liberal values’. She also called it ‘fascist medievalism’.” Siegel just wasn’t Arthur Penn to Kael since Bonnie & Clyde perhaps had an even more historically rooted depiction of vigilantism. Oddly, the remaining films in the series have meta-commentaries on art, style, culture, and the film industry. Sorry Pauline, the City is the real auteur.
The City doesn’t over-determine the cinematic, rather it is a landscape that shapes narratives within a sub-genre of “streets of San Francisco” media narratives. There are several films that feature the same sense of detail using the city and incorporating its landscape. In the SF genre there are always multiple paradigmatic touchstones, going back to the silent era but a series of 1970s films set in SF used similar locations and suggest the complexity of that landscape.
Bullitt did serve as a kind of major milestone, combining the edited car chase and the political contradictions of liberal rule of law, with reflections on race and the need to ultimately function with a lone sense of anti-procedural justice that can be also seen as vigilantism. And of course the car chase. In Freebie and the Bean, a transgendered subtext amidst the usual problem of non-Latino actors playing those parts uses the city as again the city threatened by rampant, yet organized crime. The application of Scandinavian narrative to that sexualized landscape in The Laughing Policeman makes the choice of all location shooting by similar production teams within a square mile an interesting one, as Freebie’s car crashes into the third story room of the hotel in Bullitt within 100 yards of the final bus shooting in Laughing Policeman.
Modern media can place us in all of those spaces with new and additional information as though we can’t just enjoy film itself without the director’s commentary, but need to understand the production apparatus. VR will do that, put us more into that apparatus, albeit within primarily FPS gaming. The future problem will be as one TV commercial suggests, food and the cinematic are ultimately incompatible.
Witness the increased use of databases, new surveillance mechanisms, the alternatives of home detention and electronic tagging, as well as the shift toward managerialism, action ‘at-a-distance’ and ‘self-governmentalism.’ Foucault described the transformation of penality as a “technical project” or more cynically as a “technical mutation” and an “insidious extension” of disciplinary mechanisms (Foucault 1977: 176-7, 257). As penality has changed, so too has the penal subject; once a ‘docile’ object of the workings of power, the prisoner has now been subjectified as an active participant in the carceral system. alexbelser.com/...
In other words we are prisoners of our technology, so much so that we bring our living/dining rooms to the movie theater and sneak food in, often because the corporate movie chain food is so expensive/crappy. And of course there’s the cell phone use and generally so much conversation whether it’s at the screen, to others, or to one’s infant(s)….
So here’s a new media idea to pitch: using one of the new VR devices, conduct it in a Google Car using every location from every SF crime flick, so you can be immersed in film and feel yourself ride over each location rather than the Disney simulator rides that stay in one place. And then a vigilante, someone at Anonymous hijacks the system and forces you to experience it with the soundtrack to the Small World ride. or else on the Gray Line irony ride, an entire bus audience wearing VR goggles does the tour, while street urchins pickpocket the lot of them.
Have you ever snuck food into a movie theater?
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