I (Heart) New York
Long time, no post. I just got back from a trip to NYC for a conference to promote the magazine I edit for. The day after my return to Bloomington, I had a short draft due for my non-fiction class. Here's the first draft:
I love Exploitation films—those cheaply produced movies that were most popular during the 1970’s; movies that attracted viewers not on the quality of the film itself, but rather by its prurient content.
Some of the more popular types of Exploitation films include Black Exploitation (or Blaxsploitation), Sexploitation and Women in Prison, Drug Exploition, Splatter/Torture Films, and even smaller sub-genres like Nunsploitation and Nazisploitation, Each of these categories sensationalize the very subject that is in their namesake. For example, Nazisploition films are always based on the premise that an underground Nazi regime is alive and well, and they are out to rule the world! Sexploition and Women in Prison films are soft-core porn-esque in that the movie pretty much serves as a vehicle for showing exhausting scenes of women placed in gratuitous sexual circumstances. (As in female characters exclaiming, “Oh my god! I just accidentally spilled this jug of water all over my thin blouse. I must take it off as the cable man walks up the steps to my house!”) Blaxploitation films, primarily involving African American actors and intended for Black audiences, are often about stereotypical African American concerns such as slum life, drug trafficking, and fighting The Man through violence and wit. Such is the case with the film Blacula, about an African prince-turned-vampire (by Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula, no less) who awakes in 1973 Harlem where he must fight to save his woman and community from the threat of White cops.
I love Exploitation films because of their campy nature. They’re unpretentious in being so over-the-top: it’s not about good filmmaking, but engaging storytelling—sheer shock. Seeing this embarrassing level of “pushing the envelope” is humorous to me. I also find it fascinating because Exploitation films, really, exploit in two directions. They exploit the subject matter they present, as well as the audience’s preoccupations with the subject matter. And it seems so appropriate, illustrative of American culture that Exploitation films would have such success in grindhouse theatres across the country during the 1970’s. Because, coming out of a decade like the 60’s, Exploitation cinema offered a medium for viewers to have a voyeuristic relationship to topics that were still taboo, subjects that had recently been pushed to the country’s consciousness.
For example, if it weren’t for the decade of drugs and rock n’ roll, there wouldn’t be drug exploitation. If it weren’t for the gender revolution, there wouldn’t have been Sexploitation and Women in Prison flicks. (Sure, these films portrayed female characters in hyper-sexualized situations of questionable political merit. But it was there, on the screen, being represented, showcasing our relationship to sexuality and female bodies.) Also, if it weren’t for the Civil Rights movement there would not have been Blaxploitation, actors like Pam Greer, and classics such as Shaft, Superfly, and Coffy. Exploitation cinema staked the seedy spot of where America’s spirit stood.
Exploitation films don’t exist today. Just as culture changed with the times, so did mainstream filmmaking and its relationship to the elements that were once ghettoed only Exploitation. Today you can find movies that easily make use of casual sex. Why call it “Torture Exploitation” when every other horror movie features characters that are forced to endure slow, painful deaths with drills, saws, and other bladed instruments? Modern movies may pay homage to or borrow influence from the genre, but nothing that can capture the essence of the culture that circumscribed Exploitation during its heyday. Which is why, whenever returning to San Francisco, I automatically go to extensive Exploitation section of my favorite video store to rent stacks and stacks of videocassettes. Each film I watch is delicious, pleasurable, making me, dare I say, nostalgic for that blip in film history which I was not old enough to appreciate when it was active.
Recently though, I’ve noticed a kind of sensationalism in big-budget films since the events of September 11th.
In 2004, the movie Day After Tomorrow came out—its movie poster showing a post-apocolyptic New York landscape: the city and its buildings submerged in a tidal wave. The other month, I Am Legend was released in theatres; a story about one of the last men on earth, surviving in a zombie-infested New York City. In the movie poster, the actor Will Smith is walking the cracked and filthy streets with a collapsed Brooklyn Bridge behind him. Most recently, in early 2008, the film Cloverfield came out, the trailer for which features the Statue of Liberty standing tall. With her head torn clean off.
Again, films are reminding us of the era in which we live. Hollywood is exploiting New York and 9-11, and our fear of all that is packaged within that catchphrase (the rubles and fire and disintegrated body parts and grief of it all). I’m not sure what to make of this phenomenon or where it is going, but it’s obvious to me that New York is the new trendy setting for films about destruction and impending doom. For now I’ll call it New-Yorksploition, and nurse the queasy feeling that this new film genre knots in my stomach.
I love Exploitation films—those cheaply produced movies that were most popular during the 1970’s; movies that attracted viewers not on the quality of the film itself, but rather by its prurient content.
Some of the more popular types of Exploitation films include Black Exploitation (or Blaxsploitation), Sexploitation and Women in Prison, Drug Exploition, Splatter/Torture Films, and even smaller sub-genres like Nunsploitation and Nazisploitation, Each of these categories sensationalize the very subject that is in their namesake. For example, Nazisploition films are always based on the premise that an underground Nazi regime is alive and well, and they are out to rule the world! Sexploition and Women in Prison films are soft-core porn-esque in that the movie pretty much serves as a vehicle for showing exhausting scenes of women placed in gratuitous sexual circumstances. (As in female characters exclaiming, “Oh my god! I just accidentally spilled this jug of water all over my thin blouse. I must take it off as the cable man walks up the steps to my house!”) Blaxploitation films, primarily involving African American actors and intended for Black audiences, are often about stereotypical African American concerns such as slum life, drug trafficking, and fighting The Man through violence and wit. Such is the case with the film Blacula, about an African prince-turned-vampire (by Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula, no less) who awakes in 1973 Harlem where he must fight to save his woman and community from the threat of White cops.
I love Exploitation films because of their campy nature. They’re unpretentious in being so over-the-top: it’s not about good filmmaking, but engaging storytelling—sheer shock. Seeing this embarrassing level of “pushing the envelope” is humorous to me. I also find it fascinating because Exploitation films, really, exploit in two directions. They exploit the subject matter they present, as well as the audience’s preoccupations with the subject matter. And it seems so appropriate, illustrative of American culture that Exploitation films would have such success in grindhouse theatres across the country during the 1970’s. Because, coming out of a decade like the 60’s, Exploitation cinema offered a medium for viewers to have a voyeuristic relationship to topics that were still taboo, subjects that had recently been pushed to the country’s consciousness.
For example, if it weren’t for the decade of drugs and rock n’ roll, there wouldn’t be drug exploitation. If it weren’t for the gender revolution, there wouldn’t have been Sexploitation and Women in Prison flicks. (Sure, these films portrayed female characters in hyper-sexualized situations of questionable political merit. But it was there, on the screen, being represented, showcasing our relationship to sexuality and female bodies.) Also, if it weren’t for the Civil Rights movement there would not have been Blaxploitation, actors like Pam Greer, and classics such as Shaft, Superfly, and Coffy. Exploitation cinema staked the seedy spot of where America’s spirit stood.
Exploitation films don’t exist today. Just as culture changed with the times, so did mainstream filmmaking and its relationship to the elements that were once ghettoed only Exploitation. Today you can find movies that easily make use of casual sex. Why call it “Torture Exploitation” when every other horror movie features characters that are forced to endure slow, painful deaths with drills, saws, and other bladed instruments? Modern movies may pay homage to or borrow influence from the genre, but nothing that can capture the essence of the culture that circumscribed Exploitation during its heyday. Which is why, whenever returning to San Francisco, I automatically go to extensive Exploitation section of my favorite video store to rent stacks and stacks of videocassettes. Each film I watch is delicious, pleasurable, making me, dare I say, nostalgic for that blip in film history which I was not old enough to appreciate when it was active.
Recently though, I’ve noticed a kind of sensationalism in big-budget films since the events of September 11th.
In 2004, the movie Day After Tomorrow came out—its movie poster showing a post-apocolyptic New York landscape: the city and its buildings submerged in a tidal wave. The other month, I Am Legend was released in theatres; a story about one of the last men on earth, surviving in a zombie-infested New York City. In the movie poster, the actor Will Smith is walking the cracked and filthy streets with a collapsed Brooklyn Bridge behind him. Most recently, in early 2008, the film Cloverfield came out, the trailer for which features the Statue of Liberty standing tall. With her head torn clean off.
Again, films are reminding us of the era in which we live. Hollywood is exploiting New York and 9-11, and our fear of all that is packaged within that catchphrase (the rubles and fire and disintegrated body parts and grief of it all). I’m not sure what to make of this phenomenon or where it is going, but it’s obvious to me that New York is the new trendy setting for films about destruction and impending doom. For now I’ll call it New-Yorksploition, and nurse the queasy feeling that this new film genre knots in my stomach.
posted by Danny Thanh Nguyen at 8:19 PM
1 Comments:
Exploitation films don’t exist today.
You start by defining exploitation films as attracting viewers based not on the quality of the work but on prurient content. If that's the case, then I would say there are plenty of modern films doing exactly that.
Think of the countless cheaply produced straight-to-dvd crapfests that have been made solely so that if you ever have the desire to see a movie about, say, a crossdressing mixed-race female drug-addicted martial arts master's revenge quest against the robot ninjas who murdered her family, you can damn well see one. There's market fragmentation, to be sure, and what's popular to exploit has changed (nobody cares much for biker gang movies these days, for example), but the industry around mass-murdering Christmas icons alone ("Silent Night, Deadly Night," "Jack Frost," "The Gingerdead Man," etc.) should tell you that the spirit of exploitation is alive and well.
And what is Lifetime if not the world's foremost purveyor of women in trouble, spousal abuse, child abuse, rape, murderous husbands, murderous lovers, thrilling adultery, women wrongly accused, women being punished for stepping outside their traditional social roles, and so on? Lifetime movies simultaneously exploit their subjects and their audience's fascination with those subjects, and they certainly attract a viewership looking for the pornography of emotional pain, regardless of quality.
Modern movies may pay homage to or borrow influence from the genre, but nothing that can capture the essence of the culture that circumscribed Exploitation during its heyday.
If you're defining exploitation specifically as "cheap 70s-style filmmaking," then of course you're not going to see the same thing again.
Grindhouse theaters may have died with the rise of home video, but the rental market created new opportunities, keeping exploitation as profitable as ever. And with the rise of digital video and easy low-cost Internet distribution (torrents and Youtube), the tools to create cheap but engaging trash have been placed in more hands than ever before. I'd say that fans of exploitation have plenty to look forward to in the future.
Robert
Post a Comment
<< Home