The Decontexualization Machine

In Information, Crisis, Catastrophe, what is, incidentally, probably the most AWESOME piece we have read in this course thus far (sorry for prosthelatizing), Mary Ann Doane argues that “television is the preeminent machine of decontextualization” (225). In Josh’s lecture yesterday, he talked about Levin’s claim that “films both teach us how to see the world and register a general sense of how our culture is doing exactly that…” (584). The convergence of these two ideas is exemplified in a film as gloriously contemporary Hollywood mainstream as Tony Scott’s “Enemy of the State.” By way of a specific example, I’ll lift the idea of movement Josh mentioned in his lecture. In “Enemy of the State,” Scott’s camera never stops moving, even when it might have done him a service (for example, in a scene of intimate conversation at a table). More blatantly hyperactive are the action scenes, the climactic gun battle of which is totally incomprehensible on account of the rapid camera movement and quick cutting.
The idea behind the camera movement and rapid rate of image changes seems straightforward enough: anything without women in lacy black lingerie, violence, humor, or “movement/action” is boring. Therefore, a scene with subtle dramatic dialogue must be juiced up by the one of the aforementioned four things. The film has evolved to the point where even the action is taken out of context in that things happen too quickly for any context to be established. They become all about the movement, the constant predictable stream, something like television’s flow. Everything else, like characters, become irrelevant since there isn’t time to evaluate them. And the hyperactivity is a fairly recent phenomenon, too, probably coinciding with the explosion of the web. In Tony Scott’s 1993 “True Romance,” which also concludes with a similar climactic gun battle, things actually make sense. He slows the scene down, cutting between shots fired and bullets hitting. The action is decipherable.
The claim I think this is moving towards is that mainstream cinema is becoming more like television and vice versa. It’s too bad. They ought to take it from Barthes. When you slow things down so that you can look away, think, and look back, that’s when art takes on a life of its own.

NOTE: While I am incredibly interested in Doane’s claim that “catastrophe might finally be defined as the conjuncture of the failure of technology and the resulting confrontation with death [!],” I don’t have anything interesting or critical to say about it (229). If someone else has any insights on this, though, please share them tomorrow!