Anomie and Neurosis in American Film

Anomie and Neurosis in American Film

Fucked Up and Being Lost

How to justify a hunch? What is the necessary methodological approach to an essay predicated on bringing out the differences between characters who are lost, others who are fucked up, and trying to see in this distinction two eras of American film? Our provocative proposal claims that many a character from American cinema of the seventies falls into the former category; the figures who are fucked up much more contemporaneous —characters in films over the last ten years as we work with a series of pairings: The Gambler and Uncut Gems, A Woman Under the Influence and Madeline’s Madeline, Wanda and American Honey, Five Easy Pieces and James White, The Panic in Needle Park and Heaven Knows What. This doesn’t mean that people weren’t fucked up before, nor that characters in film (or life) can’t now be lost. But if our argument has any validity, then it might just tell us something about the era we are living in, and not only the films that have come out over the last decade.

To help us, we will of course be offering schematic pairings, seeing a film from the seventies, with another of more recent vintage, to work on the differences. However, the point is to draw out distinctions rather than merely using the contemporary works as failures next to those from the earlier period. The newer films are all good in their own way, yet it’s as though they are working in a time where possibilities seem more limited. This isn’t only a question of neo-liberal squeezing of resources so concentrated that the have-nots are further away than the haves than they were ,then, it is also as if, ontologically, people have become more constrained in their self-perception. To be lost is to face a vista of possibilities, while to be fucked up indicates a condition to aspire to, one that will allow a person to get their shit together. While one doesn’t wish to turn this piece into an uncouth account of cinema, phrases like fucked up and getting one’s shit together may help to comprehend the societally pressuring within the demotic — the phrasing might be liberating, but the terms are contained by the neo-liberal; to get a job, a flat, a partner are all part of sorting things out. But to do so means becoming part of a society that is sorting you out, containing the person within parameters that were far less rigid fifty years earlier. While watching Wanda, one may feel that the title character’s life is going nowhere, but it is part of a bigger lassitude than personal dissatisfaction and displacement. When Matilda Alexander says, in “…Wanda (1970), the titular character trudges, hungover, through Pennsylvania coalfields. Barely literate and blighted by a lack of opportunity, I suspect there are many modern versions of Wanda in Trump’s America”, this might be too sociologically specific. (As well as too hasty an appraisal of the character and too hasty a supplanting of her into the 21st-century). There isn’t a lot of difference between Wanda and Bobby Dupea in Five Easy Pieces, even if educationally Bobby is far more favourably endowed. He comes from a family of comfortable musicians, but this makes him no less lost than the working-class Wanda. They are figures of their era, not ours.

While our purpose isn’t to ignore the class and gender differences between the various characters under discussion, what matters more are the constraints that, while acknowledging the financial and the gendered, also and more specifically contain, for want of a better word, the existential, even the ontological — conditions that shape the characters and that money itself won’t allow someone to escape from, just as education or one’s sex won’t either. The epoch is the thing, and why we might see more similarities between Wanda and Bobby than between the various characters we are twinning. Axel Freed (James Caan) and Howard Ratner (Sandler) have a lot in common as compulsive gamblers, and have a little in common as they find the financial wherewithal to place large bets, but they are separated enormously by decades of transformation.

To understand this shift, we need perhaps first to elevate the terms of the debate, if for no better reason than to avoid swearing every few lines. While ideas like the anomic and the neurotic are not without their problems, they are useful enough in understanding the differences we are seeking to explore. The former rests on Emile Durkheim’s look at anomie: “for Durkheim, in periods where the norms and values of society were unclear, people became confused about how to behave. Social order would be threatened and people would not feel that their behavior is constrained by norms and values –- a feeling of anomie, or normlessness.” (Simply Psychology) This sums up well the crisis ‘70s characters were confronted by in what looked like a collapse next to the post-war Eisenhower era. While the fifties saw a relative victory in Korea, an increasingly high standard of living, and a cold war indicating the US as leader of the free world, the ‘70s saw the mire that was Vietnam, the indignities of Watergate, the Opec oil crisis and students massacred on their own campuses by the National Guard (Kent State). It wasn’t that 50s America was bliss — and certainly wasn’t for those caught up in the McCarthy anti-communist witch-hunts, or for blacks expected to abide by segregated environments in many southern states (Jim Crow). But these latter issues never became part of the fabric of ‘50s cinema as the ‘70s problems became so central to many a film of its decade. Sitting behind numerous films of the moment, from Taxi Driver to All the President’s Men, Night Moves to The Deer Hunter, Serpico to The Conversation, either explicitly or implicitly, was that the US was in bad shape — or at the very least was in a period of radical change. The ‘50s suggested a period of stability. It was a “…fortunate period of America's recent history: the largely prosperous and peaceful 1950s”, the US Department of Labour claimed, while the Eisenhower era has become a byword for a moment in time before the assassination of the sixties (both Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X), and the unrest of the seventies.

We offer the most potted of histories to give the briefest of contexts to the anomic, because, though anomie may be an individual condition as we are defining it, it comes out of a sociological malaise. In contrast, the neurotic is the relative absence of the social and the emphasis rests on the word's root: of the nerves. Though over the last decade, the US has had three presidents (Obama, Trump and Biden), it is if, and perhaps because of, the differences between these three figures, that American cinema hasn’t reflected the era as 70s cinema reflected its period. If we take Roger Ebert’s best American films of the 2010s as a useful barometer, most are set in various pasts: The Master, 12 Years a Slave, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, If Beale Street Could Talk, The Phantom Thread. Even The Wolf of Wall Street is chiefly located in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, and The Social Network starts in 2003. While these two latter films capture well our preoccupations with finance and technology, even these give little sense of the social context, one that surrounded many a ‘70s work, where the viewer felt the constant presence of the contemporary: in the Washington of All the President’s Men, the New York of Taxi Driver, the Los Angeles of the Long Goodbye, the squares and streets of San Francisco in The Conversation. Part of the neurotic rests in the nervous, even narcissistic narrowness of the worlds the films show. They are impressive works, but impressive in a different way, and potentially contain within them a limit (rather than limitation) that is greater than aesthetic considerations even if, in exploring the differences, those choices are important in understanding the distinctions between the two periods. It is as if what also sits behind the work is a different relationship with hope and prosperity. In The Atlantic, Peter Turchin noted in 2023, “in the past 50 years, despite overall economic growth, the quality of life for most Americans has declined. The wealthy have become wealthier, while the incomes and wages of the median American family have stagnated.” Many of the earlier films showed poverty within the hope of prosperity; more recent works show prosperity within the hopelessness of poverty — as if the escape from it rests on personal aggrandisement, rather than social amelioration. If underpinning a cinematic period is one of relative prosperity for the many, that can feed into films, no matter how much deprivation it shows; and vice versa — as we will try to explore.

But first, to our initial pairing: The Gambler and Uncut Gems. In Karel Reisz’s film, Axel Freed is a university lecturer from a wealthy immigrant background who just so happens to have a gambling addiction. Axel might find ways to justify the habit by invoking the Dostoevsky book the film is partly based on, but the film’s point is also to show that it is anomalous: however much Axel makes gambling part of his psyche, it isn’t really part of his world, and Reisz constantly contextualises Axel as part of a bigger one. The first scene might show him in a gambling den, but the second shows him getting into his white convertible and passing through the New York streets, as it offers brief flashbacks to an exchange between Axel and a mafioso bookie over the sum he owes, before he gets out of the car and joins a group of black kids playing basketball. Later scenes show him teaching at the university, visiting his mother at the paediatric ward where she works, joining her for a game of tennis at the club, and later going to his grandfather’s estate to introduce his girlfriend. The film constantly opens itself up to other possibilities, even as Axel is continuously pulled into the world of his gambling obsession. Reisz is looking for counterpoint, while the Safdie brothers in Uncut Gems look for intensification. The film’s opening may start in Africa with the discovery of a huge opal, but this is merely a precursor to following Howard’s sickening desperation as he lays off bets predicated chiefly on the profit he can make after its acquisition. The Safdie Brothers make Howard’s fever dream ours, as they usually rely on close-ups to keep us in Howard’s increasingly anxious state. When we get a medium long shot, it is all the better to generate this intensification. One scene shows Howard stripped and bundled into the boot of a car, and we view it from his business associate’s perspective as he looks on. It is a helpless medium long shot, but very much contained by the point of view that keeps us in the moment rather than reflecting upon it. We see it again late in the film when the heavies, to whom he owes money, have had enough of Howard’s excuses, and toss him into a fountain in a posh part of New York. The film moves to a long shot to capture the craziness of the situation and just how big a fuck up Howard happens to be. In contrast, The Gambler is looking for us to observe gambling rather than being immersed in the activity, and while some may see this makes it dramatically weaker than Uncut Gems, others would be inclined to view the distance as Reisz’s way of saying a film comes out of a world far greater than its immediate milieu. While Sheila O’Malley says of Uncut Gems, “…that’s the thing about addiction, the thing that "Uncut Gems" really understands. On some level, the stress is the point. The nerve endings are so frayed they need the stress. Howard is useless without panic.” (RogerEbert.com), Adrian Martin observes a needless busyness to the Safdies’ film, seeing its debt to The Gambler (and also The Bad Lieutenant) “without much benefit resulting” (Film Critic: Adrian Martin). Perhaps this is because Reisz wishes to convey self-destruction rather than nervous compulsion — hence the neurotic aspect to Uncut Gems; the subdued focus in The Gambler.

When looking at suicide, Emile Durkheim recognises the egoistic and the anomic, and though Anthony Giddens, in his short book on Durkheim, believes the “differences between egoistic and anomic suicide…are not always clear…” he adds that “…one might suppose the individuals who are inadequately integrated into social communities…find themselves in a situation of anomie.” (Durkheim) Rather than throwing Axel into the gambling environment and all its heady possibilities as Uncut Gems covers the intensity of Howard’s debt-ridden life, The Gambler unravels much more slowly, all the better to show Axel’s greater alienated existence. While Uncut Gems may have a scene where Howard goes to Passover, this is just a way station in the midst of all the stress, even it is also the moment that most acknowledges the theme not only of this film, but all the recent ones we are looking at. Howard is talking to his wife and wants them to try again after leaving his mistress. “I know I fucked up, Howard says, and his wife replies, “I know you fucked up. You are a fuck up.” In The Gambler, the various visits to his mother, or his grandfather, hanging out with his girlfriend or playing basketball with the kids, conveys well that Axel (James Caan) doesn’t quite know where he belongs. He is a college professor who teaches Dostoevsky, but he doesn’t hang out with other professors, and he seems most engaged when he can combine his interest in literature with his desire for gambling. As he speaks to the kids about the Russian writer, he finds himself in discussion with one who plays basketball, and links aspects of the book with the boy’s basketball instincts. It is a moment that doesn’t just convey his gambling preoccupation, it also registers his need to be in a world that isn’t one thing or another, as though if he moves too close to the wilfulness of the gamble, he will self-destruct; too close to the bourgeois family environment, and the will might dissolve. When he goes along with a loan shark determined to extract money from a client, the loan shark gives the man a terrible beating, and Axel looks on, queasily horrified. Yet later, in a bank, after his mother tries to withdraw cash and the banker insists she show two signs of ID, Axel comes on heavy as he insists she is given the money right away. Reisz and the film’s screenwriter James Toback gives us a man in at least two minds. Howard is much more single-minded as the film reflects his desire, while in The Gambler Toback and Reisz seek out Axel’s ambivalence.

That The Gambler is anomic rather than neurotic, about the lost rather than the fucked up, is perhaps most evident in another scene at college. Axel is discussing a William Carlos Williams piece about George Washington and how it starts positively as he talks about Washington being a good man, and ends pessimistically, as Williams acknowledges the president was too afraid to act on his instincts. It reflects Axel’s own mixed feelings about himself and the country, and, looking on, is his girlfriend, who is admiring but perhaps also a little fretful, seeing in Axel’s description of Washington as fearful, her boyfriend’s need to take risks. Yet rather than seeing Axel as a gambler, which as the title indicate he no doubt is, better to see him as a risk-taker, as someone who wants to exist in more than one milieu — and why we see him throughout the film in many, including, at the end, wandering through a black neighbourhood, going into a bar and picking up a prostitute. He gets into an altercation with her pimp and ends the film badly scarred after he beats up the man, and the woman slashes his face. It also comes not long after he has managed to pay off his debts, but if we take seriously the discussion over William Carlos Williams, he wants an America that takes risks itself, and by predicating America on Washington, it hasn’t done this.

We might see The Gambler as an anomic film containing within it an escape from that anomie in the classroom. Axel teaches both white kids and black, and as a teacher it is clear he is willing to take risks but also does so in an environment that allows for others to grow, and where Axel can express himself. His partner sees he is a good teacher and engaged, but most of the time he is elsewhere, either the elite ones of tennis clubs and private swimming pools, or edgy, potentially unsafe ones with gamblers, pimps and hookers. Uncut Gems is a fine film that seeks to homogenise Howard’s world as everything becomes about the thrill of the gamble. Reisz’s film wants to show a character’s instability through a picture of America as a country of wealth and poverty, conformity and daring, intellect and instinct. But to reduce it to the title would be to miss much of the film’s specifically 70s relationship with feeling lost, with trying to find an America Axel can believe in, and that he may discover in the classroom, but doesn’t quite find in the gambling dens, the casinos, the black neighbourhood or the tennis club. Axel is the figure from the decade’s films we are looking at with the most opportunities, but how does he find them on his terms? The answer is perverse and surely inadequate as the film ends as he looks in the mirror and offers what seems like a half smile while the film freeze frames. If Howard is a character caught in his nervous system and the Safdie Brothers brilliantly capture his nervous energy, Axel is a man who wants to take the sort of risks he believes America has been too scared to take, and thus he takes on this task single-handedly. He may be wrong, but he represents well the anomie of a country divided, seeing this division as based on cowardice and that he is not a coward.

It would be unfair to accuse the titular character in Wanda of cowardice, but she is timid,and to understand an aspect of the film’s paradoxical approach to American anomie, we can view Wanda leaving her mining hometown, her ex-husband and her kids, and taking up with a bank robber, as an impoverished attempt at emancipation. Here is a woman who just cannot stand up for herself. She ends up late for a court hearing over custody of the kids, accepts that her husband should have them, and asks her boss for fair payment he insists, out of £24, well over half of it has gone on taxes. It sounds like she is being screwed over in the latter instance, yet by the end of the exchange, Wanda politely says thank you. Director Barbara Loden plays the title character and captures well a working class woman who has failed at being a mother and isn’t much use either as a blue collar worker. She isn’t only ripped off, she is also laid off — the boss says she is just too slow to work the sewing machines. It isn’t as if she is any good as a bank robber’s accomplice either. She gets stuck in a traffic jam and fails to make it to the bank on time as her new man gets killed. The police arrive before she does and she stands outside the building, gazing with numerous onlookers at what has taken place.

Working with Direct Cinema cameraman Nicholas T Proferes, Loden tells the story within the context of an America she seems keener to document than dramatise. This may partly rest on Wanda’s character so incapable of impacting on her world that Loden saw that it made more sense to pay attention to the wider environment. But it also indicates that, like many an American filmmaker of the time, the director has an obligation towards place that was, of course, absent in an earlier era when most films were shot in a studio. Place was inevitably metonymic, as production designers would offer generic cities and small towns according to the dictates of the story. It’s a Wonderful Life may vividly recall small-town mid-west America (director Frank Capra saw it as upstate New York), but it was filmed in California, on a huge RKO ranch, and with sets from a film of the early 30s. The less-than-wonderful life Loden films captures vividly, at the beginning, the mining town Wanda leaves, evident in various shots before she departs, the grey coal contrasting with her white clothing, her hair still in curlers. Everything in the character seems tentative, a woman afraid of her own shadow, who moves through space as if everything is sprung with traps: a frightened animal doing her best to avoid them. She isn’t living; she is surviving, with Loden in the role offering the empathic understanding of a woman who has escaped such a predicament but isn’t too far removed from it. As she said on the Dick Cavett show, “she just sort of floats around and doesn’t really know what to do with herself” and that was what Loden believed she was like as well. But rather than seeing the film autobiographically, better to see it as socio-biographic, with Loden capturing less her life than a moment, a period in time when many appeared to be drifting from place to place, trying to understand their role in the world by moving around it, as modern means of travel met with a loosening of expectation. In the immediate post-war years, more and more people had access to transport, but this was also an era of social conformism, with James R. Gaines saying, “1946-1963, sometimes known as the “long Fifties” saw a 'retreat into a fearful conformity…and progressive initiatives took on the character of subversion. It was a time when, as Norman Mailer put it, ‘a stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve. The only courage we have been witness to is the courage of isolated people.’” (Time) That changed after the mid-sixties and was reflected in numerous films where prosperity met futility, where people had at least enough money to get on the road and see if there might be a better, more meaningful life somewhere else. The road movie was a conflation of national prosperity meeting national futility, and if we are only to see in Wanda the relative poverty of her class position, we would be ignoring the relative affluence of the nation. As Bill McKibben, noted: “By 1970, there were 118 million cars on the road in the U.S. — more than quadruple the number 20 years before.” (Yale Environment 360) Without that increasing lack of direction, people may not have taken to the road, but without the increasing availability of the car, they wouldn’t have had the means to do so.

Wanda doesn’t have a car herself and is first seen early in the film on the bus before turning up late for the court decision that will leave her children in her husband’s custody, but she does promptly sleep with someone who has a vehicle — only for him to leave her at an out-of-town ice cream parlour. No sooner is she out of the car he speeds off, and there she is standing in the middle of nowhere, cars zipping by, with the coldest of comforts: an ice cream in a wafer cone. When she finds herself caught up in a bar heist, looking to use the bathroom, oblivious to the fact that the person who tells her the place is closed has the owner unconscious under the counter, she goes off with him as they travel from one place to another in his Chrysler Town and Country. It isn’t much of a car next to the Dodge Challenger in Vanishing Point, the Pontiac GTO in Two Lane Blacktop or Colorado Eldorado Convertible, Pontiac T/A and the Riviera, all too be found in Thunderbolt and Lighftoot, but it is a car and reflective of the wealth of a nation that had assassinated two Kennedys and two key black figures in the sixties, and was fighting a war to protect capitalism from Communist threat. The US might have lost its way morally, but it was easily the wealthiest country in the world, even if Wanda might not have been feeling it, nor does the film reflect it. Part of Loden’s acuteness is showing that just as the US was becoming unequivocally rich, its filmmakers were searching out people and places that were still quite poor, as if using the resources of a country swimming in money, to make films mired in poverty. Many of the road movies showed the impoverishment as a secondary aspect of the story, but by using telephoto lenses and longer takes, the details the films picked up showed many on the margins, living in a prosperous American that hadn’t quite taken everybody with them. While often the central characters were on the run, escaping conviction or convention, others were in the background of the shot, or offering the briefest of cameos in films from Five Easy Pieces to Deadhead Miles, Road Movie to The Last Detail. It was as if the directors all knew that whatever story they were telling, contained within it a bigger story about the US at a given period.

Perhaps a better point of contrast with Wanda would be Wendy and Lucy or Nomadland, films that show characters closer in personality to Wanda than Star (Sasha Lane) in American Honey. But our purpose isn’t to draw comparisons chiefly; it is to point out differences within films that are ostensibly similar, yet whose period is quite distinct. American Honey lays on much more thickly Star’s need to escape, and does it through story over environment. While Loden captures carefully the mining milieu Wanda leaves, Andrea Arnold more categorically shows us a teenager with a sexually abusive step-father and younger siblings she is obliged to look after while her step-mother pursues her life elsewhere. We first see her father coming into the house, finishing a beer, smoking a cigarette and wearing a reverse baseball hat, and sporting neck tattoos. He promptly gives Star more than an affectionate cuddle. The house is full of unwashed dishes, ashtrays full of cigarettes, and there are even a couple of dogs making the place look still more chaotic. The first few minutes of Wanda are full of pregnant mystery; these moments in American Honey aren’t shy of a cliche.

However, this would be to ignore chiefly Lane’s performance and also Arnold’s interest in sexual body language. In Fish Tank, Wuthering Heights and Red Road, the director understands sexual desire as a burgeoning comprehension, usually in teenagers, but sometime in women who are no longer in their teens but do recognize the importance of pleasure — even if with men they should be able to see are contrary to their other wants (the mother in Fish Tank; the grieving mother and window in Red Road). In American Honey, it is as if the young man she takes up with understands her desires better than she does: when she agrees to join him selling magazine subscriptions on the road, Jake isn’t surprised she has decided to go along; it is clear she fancies him. This is arrogance, of course, but he is also a young man who better understands sexual desire than Star does, and no reason why he shouldn’t, given his womanising ways and her abusive prior situation. In Wanda, the character escapes a specific set of social circumstances, while, in American Honey, Star escapes a set of domestic ones, and this tells us something about contemporary cinema’s often winnowing of the social to the psychological, but also about how in that narrower focus, the neurotic becomes pronounced. Arnold’s coup is in creating a contrast, even a contradiction, between the character of Star and Lane’s performance. Her character is unavoidably fucked up: how could she not be, given the home milieu Arnold introduces us to and the presence of the abusive father? But Lane, as a performer, convinces us of her capacity both to transform herself in the new environment the film puts her in, and to show that bodily she is more controlled than the other characters. These are mainly messed-up people who lack the observational skills she possesses, as the film frequently offers point-of-view shots from Star’s perspective. She is on a learning curve, while others seem to be on the road to self-destruction. It is as though Arnold wanted the most damaged of initial circumstances to collide with the most damaged group of teens Star could find, and that Star will discover herself in the process. We begin to notice this chiefly in two scenes: one where she takes off with some middle-aged cowboy types in their white Cadillac, and goes over to a ranch with a swimming pool; another when she dances in front of oil workers and then arranges a sexual assignation for a thousand dollars. In the first, she puts herself into a potentially risky situation that seems to be going okay until Jake arrives, firing a gun and forcing the three men into the swimming pool. Later, after she and other members of the crew dance to Rihanna in front of some oil workers, she meets one of them later that night and gives the man a handjob. These are reckless situations, and the latter a prostitutional one.

But because we don’t know how the men would have acted if Jake hadn’t turned up, and because the oil worker asks for a kiss that she gives him with a small, shy smile, we should be wary of saying here is a woman who is likely to self-destruct. Graham Fuller, in an excellent essay, fears the worst: “The disturbing part is that Arnold doesn’t adequately reassure the audience that the emotional resources Star discovers to help her move on from her broken first love affair will prevent her from acting out in the future.” (Cineaste) If we assume nothing bad was going to happen with the cowboys and that she accepts the trade involved in a thousand dollars for a mundane sexual act that leaves her perhaps disgusted but not violated, we may assume that here is a young woman who knows her value and trusts her instincts. The film presents her at the beginning in the most fucked up of environments, and through the course of entering another one with the magazine sellers, she can nevertheless potentially distance herself from environments that would destroy others. We should remember, at the beginning of the film, there is nothing that need keep her in the house: it seems the man is her father and he is abusive, and the woman is her stepmother and the mother of the two kids she has been looking after. She would have no reason to return. When she dances in front of the cowboys or in front of the oil men, she is in control of her body and simultaneously aware of their looks and oblivious to their gaze. She is doing what she wants and decides what she will have to give, even if she goes off with the cowboys after a spat with Jake, and looks like she is going to drink herself stupid when she has several glasses of mescal. The film proposes that while Star is as damaged as Wanda, she, at a much earlier age, has a better understanding of her own worth, and this makes the film far more optimistic than Loden’s, but also shows its socio-political indifference. Wanda captures so well many caught between the limitations placed upon women in the fifties and their possibilities a decade and a half later. But they are no longer so young, haven’t had the chance of an education, and may have children they might not any longer be expected to have at so youthful an age, yet aren’t supposed to leave them either. Wanda is lost as broader circumstances are against her, while Star may not be, as she appears aware that in contemporary capitalism, you look after number one and make the most of one’s useful attributes to understand your price within it.

In Wanda, the title character wakes up from an assignation and seems unaware that all the man wanted was some sex, while what she seemed to be seeking was affection. She doesn’t yell at him to give her money; she beseeches him to wait until she gets dressed so that she can stay with him. (He is the man who drops her off at the ice cream parlour.) It would be fair to say that Wanda feels worthless, while Star doesn’t: she has a sense of her worth, and if she survives more successfully than Fuller suspects she will, it rests on this self-evaluation, one that, within the market economy in which she so obviously finds herself, Star knows that she has sexual appeal she can exploit. Wanda is clearly a very attractive woman as well, but it isn’t just that she is older that would indicate a lower sexual market value. It is also that she isn’t capable of seeing herself within a market economy. She is, if you like, a post-industrial housewife, as if Loden has gone to such lengths in showing us the milieu she leaves early in the film, to make clear that Wanda’s world is coming to an end. There is still mining, but the big money will have long since moved elsewhere, to oil, the very substance that allows the cowboys to own swimming pools and the oil workers to be able to pay Star a thousand dollars for sexual relief. Loden offers in those early shots of the anthracite coal fields a sad sight. Arnold shows a more exciting one where money can be made when Star and the crew pass through an oil state. As Star and others jump out of the van dancing along to the Rihanna song, with its lyrics “we found love in a hopeless place”, it isn’t love they have found in a hopeless environment, but potentially money in a hopeful one.

Yet, of course, a sexual assignation for a thousand dollars isn’t everybody’s idea of optimism, and it isn’t really Star’s either. However, the film shows she likes making money, and this is a good earner, perhaps not so very different from flogging magazine subscriptions to the gullible. While Wanda is a character without guile, Star is a young woman who, as we have proposed, has the measure of her value. Nevertheless, Fuller reckons Star, “though feisty, plucky, and winning, is seemingly a girl with a violation wish—as politically incorrect as that sounds.” (Cineaste) If Fuller is correct, this would more than cover the fucked up; Star may see herself as having commodity value,,but she would also be damaged goods. Fuller sees that Star “thrice unconsciously sets herself up to be raped": with the cowboys; a truck driver and, finally, the oil worker. Yet in the first Jake intrudes (rather than intervenes), in the second, the trucker and Star listen to Springsteen’s Dream Baby Dream and, in the third, the oil worker accepts her terms. The film’s effectiveness rests partly on this ambiguity: that Star knows what she wants and knows who she is, but doesn’t quite know her boundaries, nor quite comprehend her own motives. We might say of Star, in adopting the demotically nuanced, that she is capable of fucking up rather than necessarily fucked up. Arnold offers an optimism in the colour scheme that Loden denies, and gives Star agency in the frame while Wanda is an object within it. Whether wearing a short green dress, or shorts and a vest with a bra very visible, and with various tattoos against her tanned, brown skin, while sporting dreadlocks, Star owns what she wears and how she presents herself. In contrast, Wanda doesn’t look like she knows what suits her, and allows her criminal lover to dictate her attire. The blonde Wanda is pale and plainly presented, no matter if she is played by a woman who was cast in a role based on Marilyn Monroe in After the Fall, and who was understudied by Faye Dunaway. Anybody with eyes to see can observe that Loden’s Wanda is a very attractive woman, but the film’s socio-economic focus, and the casual superiority of the men who can dictate terms mask this fact. Wanda is lost in an America that refuses to define her; Star is caught between being screwed over and fucked up, but may just have the resilience and confidence to find a place for herself in a modern USA, one that has changed a lot since Wanda and, while not necessarily for the better, it might be better for Star.

One of the major differences between the ‘70s films and the most recent ones is the shift in form. While many a work of the earlier period showed the influence of Direct Cinema, and took advantage of lighter cameras and easier-to-carry sound equipment, the more recent films have the further advantage of lighter equipment still, and the use of digital. While many of the ‘70s films observed their characters, many a 21st-century work follows them, trying to capture in the camerawork the body language of the protagonist. Maybe no film more than the Belgian Rosetta (in 1999) helped generate this aesthetic, but at the same time, we also had the first Dogme films like Festen and The Idiots, shot using DV camcorders. Before that, Wong Kar-wai in Chungking Express and Fallen Angels woozily captured the movements of free-flowing and youthful characters. Critics started to offer terms like haptic visuality (Laura U Marks) and the tactile eye (Jennifer Barker) to describe this shift, with Marks saying, “haptic looking tends to move over the surface of the object rather than to plunge into illusionistic depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture:…It is more inclined to move than to focus, more inclined to graze than to gaze.” (The Skin of the Film)

It is a good formal distinction between the earlier films and the later ones: do they gaze or graze? But within that formal question, we want consistently to point out the political implications of this: that by winnowing down the world to a character’s perspective, does the socio-economic retreat? The answer is not necessarily, but potentially: part of the aesthetic behind Rosetta was political — the filmmakers wanted to emphasise the absence of off-screen space as the socio-politically oblivious, with the title character determined to see her world as all about getting on and getting a job. The filmmakers’ purpose was to make clear that, for all Rosetta’s belief that will and determination are what count, she is a victim of such a notion, rather than an agent of her own destiny. She is poor and scrambling around for work, and her very ferocious selfishness is a product of her environment, as readily as it happens to be a question of her ambition. The film’s offscreen space and the presence often out of the frame of the person she has wronged make clear the Dardenne brothers want the socio-political to be a constant presence, but not actively, or activistically so. As the brothers say, Rosetta “…really believes that if she doesn’t find a job and a place in society, she is going to die. So we had to put ourselves and put the camera in that state of mind…Of course, by doing this, you are also going to depict society and unemployment. We know what we’re doing, but social activism, as you call it, is not our first aim; that comes with it, but it’s not the reason why we do it.” (Studies in European Cinema) If in Wanda one feels the presence of the political in the width and depth of the screen space, in the gaze of cinema, the Dardennes graze against their character constantly, yet nevertheless clearly allude to a world beyond her. However, there is the risk that, by moving in so close, a filmmaker risks losing the broader implications of a character’s predicament.

The difference is there in Five Easy Pieces and James White, the latter a far from negligible account of a young man whose father has just died, and whose mother is terminally ill. He is also unemployed, has anger management issues and seems incapable of fidelity to friends or lovers. There isn’t much to look forward to in the outside world, and so the title character retreats into self-absorption- reflected in the style. The first three minutes before the title credits show him in close-up, the streets and bars alluded to, barely seen. After the credits, the film moves back a little to medium-close-up as he gets a cab, but the film holds to his face even when he pays the driver, who tells him “to have a good one.” When James (Christopher Abbott) enters the house full of mourners, the camera still stays close. When his mother introduces him to his father’s second wife and their child, the director Josh Mond doesn’t cut back to a shot where they are all in the frame, but mainly holds on James’ face, his mother next to him. Other people exist for James usually as sources of pain (his father’s death; his mother dying) or irritation — in a bar, he twice tells a woman in the background to shut up. At no stage do we see her except as a blur, and as off-screen space. She comes over and pours a glass of water over James’ head, and all we see is her arm in the frame as she says, “tell my ass to be quiet one more time.”

It wouldn’t be fair to say the film has no interest in the lives of others; part of James White’s aesthetic achievement is to invoke this space without showing it. The taxi driver is a vocal presence, all the more evident because the film doesn’t show him when he tells James to have a good one. Most films would either leave the line out and the driver out of the frame, or include the line and cut or pan to the cabbie. When his friend, in the bar, gets into an altercation with the barman over paying the bill, the film initially shows it from James’ point of view. He is outside smoking a cigarette, when through the glass we see, and then he sees, the barman grabbing Nick. James reenters the bar and escalates a fraught situation, head-butting someone. The victim isn’t a delineated character who deserves or doesn’t deserve what he gets: he is a stranger to the viewer, and to James, but he is a man who, like many in the film, plays on James’ nerves. The camera is always there with his agitation, which isn’t the same as saying Mond is sympathetic to his attitude, even though he shows concern over his struggle to control his temper and function in society.

What is clear, however, is that the question of sympathy and identification that we find in many of these films is differently presented, with the earlier ones more inclined to show a concern that always seems broader than the individual, while the more recent works often ask us to see others as peripheral figures: not so much the world isn’t big enough for both us, but that the frame is too tight to accommodate others. As Mond says, “I’m really proud of the way that New York is shown in the movie, because it’s shown through James. I like that it’s not something that’s focused on, it’s the environment that’s another reason that he is who he is. The movie’s not about New York, it’s about James and if you can see New York through him that’s great.” (The Seventh Art) Mond wants to capture the energy of a New Yorker over capturing the city, saying “with the help of a handheld camera we could present the energy that this character, being a New Yorker, like myself, should have. As for my DP, Matyas Erdely, I can only assume that his body still aches a little bit from carrying the camera around all the time. [laughs]” (Slant) Erdely earlier worked on Son of Saul, and what made the film a distinct account of the death camps was how little it allowed into its purview. It focused on the central character without constantly showing the horrors of the camps, a partial solution to the problem of putting on screen what many find unimaginable, and that shouldn’t be easily assimilated into a representative image. Whether this ought to be so or not, it shows how debates about the depiction of the Holocaust can coincide with formal choices that filmmakers in the 21st-century can make. A stylistic decision can help resolve an ethical problem.

It can also potentially raise another one: if films stay so close to central characters, do they risk turning the rest of the world into a blur, leaving the viewer contained by the phenomenology of a figure we follow, over the broader vista of social experience? One of the reasons we have chosen good contemporary films is so that the question can never be reduced to an aesthetic feeling: the difference between the earlier works and the more recent ones isn’t that the earlier ones are better, even if in most instances they are. It must incorporate an ethical difference, reflective of the broader culture, perhaps, rather than simply a question of directorial choice. These differences can be seen both technologically and socio-economically. Cinema has moved from an analogue to a digital era, and it has become much easier to follow a character’s movements without cumbersome equipment. If relatively lighter cameras meant that filmmakers of the sixties could go into the streets, now lighter cameras can make constantly shooting people moving through space with the equipment at close proximity easier still. The New Wave directors and the cinema verite filmmakers made much use of lighter cameras, with the Cameflex Eclair weighing 4.8 kilograms, but today’s cameras can weigh less than half a kilo. It has become easier than ever for cameramen to stay close to central characters, and Erdely’s work often offers this approach, with an interviewer noting, “this [Sunset] is your fourth film in a row—after Miss Bala, Son of Saul, and James White— which uses a subjective viewpoint.” (National Film Institute: Hungary)

Society too has become more fractured, less integrated, and while the left may blame class warfare that has economically weakened the poor, and even hollowed out much of the middle-class, the right will insist that the lower standard of living is an immigration issue: how can a society remain prosperous if it lets in millions of people from poorer countries? Our purpose isn’t to say where we stand on such a debate here, but to acknowledge that, though both sides vehemently disagree, what they are likely to agree on is that society has changed over the last fifty years. Cinema will inevitably reflect this and thus the greater fragmentation. It would be a stretch to link too closely form and content: to say, for example, that New Deal economic policy was reflected in what was called the Plain American, the American shot, with several characters in the frame simultaneously and viewed from the knee up. But many a seventies film seemed to take such a shot further, all the better to create the broadest possible social vista. It was there in interiors and exteriors, and often extended the developments Andre Bazin and others noted in classic Hollywood, where the Plain American gave way to deep focus, where the background and foreground would offer equal clarity. This was developed in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, with the widescreen used not only for epics, but to capture the complexity of social interaction as well. In Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge, he shows us four planes of perception, if not quite of action. In the foreground on the left of the frame, Art Garfunkel chats up Candice Bergen. In the next plane to the right, are seated a couple, and further back, and to the right, is Jack Nicholson observing as he leans against a door frame, and on the far right at the very rear, are people around the buffet table. It makes clear the intricacies of a social milieu and finds its exterior equivalent in many a New York film of the decade that used the long lens to bring out the general and the immediate. In both Across 110th Street and The Seven-Ups, the films open by showing us the breadth of the city from high angles and helicopter shots, before zeroing in on their stories. All the films show that the societal cannot be ignored. One reason why a character can seem lost rather than fucked up, anomic rather than neurotic, rests on the very frame that a character might find themselves lost within. Their individuality is contrasted with the broader world.

“Market hegemony, however, is not the only reason for the trend towards individualism,” Martin Jacques reckoned in 2002. “It is also a consequence of a seemingly unstoppable movement towards personal freedom. In any trade-off between the social good and personal freedom, the latter has progressively won out.” (Guardian) Almost twenty years later, Tom Oliver reckoned “in the last decade, we may have seen individualism peak.” (Guardian) If films reflect their moment, then Jacques and Oliver might claim that since this was one of individuality, cinema had become much more individualistic in its very framing. This may have been aided by the technology available, which allowed for greater intimacy, given the lighter equipment. A camera could fit into the palm of hand. But we should be wary of making too much of both claims, if for no better reason than they potentially contain a deterministic dimension, when artists are surely constantly working with far more freedom than that. With box-office expectations and genre limitations, added to the individuality directors couldn’t avoid, and the technology they were obliged to use, what creative choices are left? Instead, better to complicate things, to add theoretical ideas that would no doubt in most instances be too abstract to adopt, but may nevertheless have been usefully absorbed. Technology is often in this sense obviously adopted: a filmmaker chooses to use a digital camera of a certain weight, to edit online rather than using a flatbed and so on. However, theory is usually absorbed without ready realisation.

When filmmakers were using longer takes and deeper focus in many a sixties and seventies film, they probably hadn’t read Bazin; maybe just saw other films they liked that had been influenced by the French critic and theorist, or by the films Bazin was himself writing about. And too, some filmmakers would have been taken by structuralism and wished to make films that saw the individual within structures that removed much of the agency of the self; just as others were probably drawn to the phenomenological and the existential to retain, even intensify, that individualism. In this sense, the ‘70s works were wary of agency (indicating the structural) but were concerned for the self (hence the existentially phenomenological). But their interest in the self never quite narrowed the world down to an immediate perspective. We will have a bit more to say about structuralism and the existentially phenomenological, but first, a few words about Five Easy Pieces in contrast to James White. In the earlier film, director Bob Rafelson shows central character Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson) leaving town to visit his sick father. He comes from a comfortable musical family, and his girlfriend is working- class. Dupea tells her, as she lies in bed sobbing, listening to a country and western song about broken hearts, that he will be back in a couple of weeks, but she doesn’t believe him. She is sure he is leaving her for good. He gets in the car, ready to drive off, when he starts hammering the steering wheel and the roof. It is an inner battle given outer form as he then goes back to the house and asks her to join him. The film hard cuts to the pair of them on the highway, as we can imagine that any proud protestations his girlfriend might have made would inevitably have led her to go with him. The point of the sequence isn’t over a potential further fight between Rayette (Karen Black) and Dupea, but an ongoing fight Dupea has within himself about how to exist. He is a talented but perhaps not brilliant middle-class musician who has chosen to live a working-class life, dating waitress Rayette, and labouring on oil fields in California. Nicholson rarely gave interviews in the seventies, but in one, on YouTube, he is asked about the character’s lack of honour, and Nicholson insists he isn’t especially dishonourable. It is more he refuses the “general widespread family inculcated mendacity.” He also later adds that ‘‘why when someone really does not know what they want, why force them to define what they want…?” Bobby’s frustration isn’t just that he wishes to go alone; it is that he doesn’t really want to go at all, and since he is unhappy anyway, why not alleviate the unhappiness of Rayette, who would be happy if he takes her? He will inevitably be irritated by her, but he will get annoyed with himself whatever he does, so why not, between the moments of frustration he will feel, at least make Rayette seem a little wanted?

The dynamic between Bobby and Rayette has a few similarities with the one Wanda and Mr Dennis share. But here Bobby is our leading character and a man with options beyond the criminal, and while Wanda and Rayette share a class background, Rayette feels hopeful; Wanda’s situation seems hopeless. Rayette may be deluded in her country and western singing ambitions, but she has them (and also a passable voice), and a story about a character with mild delusions wouldn’t be that of someone who is lost. Rayette has a subject for her hopes, and central to lost characters is that they don’t. If Axel was devoted to his work as a teacher, wished to marry a girl that would meet the family’s approval, and could see gambling as an occasional flutter, all would be well. Gambling represents, however, the collapse of his world as though he is searching in the activity for the emptiness he can then comprehend. This is the emptiness Bobby shares with Axel, but without the addiction, and that Wanda shares without the comprehension. This isn’t because Wanda is stupid and the men are not. It rests surely on the chances Bobby and Axel have been given due to their comfortable familial background, and that absence in Wanda’s.

While they might all be seen as self-destructive, Axel and Bobby have more of an existential self to destroy, if we propose in this instance an existential and phenomenological quality to them within the context of comments by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone Weil. Sartre says, “the for-itself is, in the manner of an event, in the sense that…Peter is a French bourgeois in 1942, as Schmitt was a Berlin worker in 1870.” (Being and Nothingness). When speaking of affliction, Weil believes, “to suffer while preserving our consciousness of reality is better. May the suffering be in one sense purely exterior and in another purely interior. For this to be so, it must be situated only in the feelings. Then it is exterior (as it is outside the spiritual part of the soul) and interior (as it is entirely concentrated on ourselves without being reflected back on to the universe in order to impair it.” (Gravity and Grace) The fact of the characters’ lives is that Axel and Bobby were born into wealthy families that allowed them to pursue the arts, while Wanda was born into poverty with few opportunities. It would be bad faith if Wanda thought she couldn’t change her life, but it would be false optimism to believe that doing so wouldn’t be difficult. These difficulties are more of Axel and Bobby’s making if we acknowledge that the facts of their existence give them far more chance of escaping their predicament than Wanda hers. It tells us about the difference between men and women, the working-class and the middle-class, but it also indicates that, with the facts of their lives, Bobby and Axel will be more aware of their failings individually. Though it is Wanda who is the least confident and the most insecure, the one who, except near the end of the film, accepts what people do to her with almost no resistance, Bobby and Axel would be more self-hating, the ones wh possess both an awareness of their privileged status, and the feeling the impossibility of doing very much about it.

When Bobby hammers the steering wheel and the car roof, he is a man in conflict chiefly with himself, and many of the tensions Bobby and Axel face are self-generated. Wanda is naive rather than destructive, put upon rather than picking on others. But partly what makes Wanda a great film, and similar in important ways to The Gambler and Five Easy Pieces, is that it has a strong sense of its moment, and that, from a certain perspective, being treated badly or treating others badly isn’t so very different. While this may sound like a poor excuse for bad behaviour, a viewer who comes out of The Gambler or Five Easy Pieces condemning the men has been watching a film they wished to see over the one Reisz and Rafelson (and their important writers Adrien Joyce and James Toback) have made. The three films propose whether a person is working-class or middle class, male or female, put-upon, or aggressor there is a principle within this that is greater than the differentiations, without at all saying the differentiations don’t matter. Sure, Wanda is treated condescendingly by a boss, insulted by Mr Dennis and abandoned by a one night-stand, which is quite distinct from Bobby’s abandonment of Rayette at the end of the Five Pieces, the fights he gets into at an oil field and later at the family home, and Axel violently infuriated with a bank clerk, pushing his girlfriend up against a wall, or beating up a pimp. Yet if the films want to retain sympathy for all three characters, it rests on a question we might call structural, and allies it to a form that constantly acknowledges whatever the privileges, or their absence, a wider world contains them. When Axel pushes his partner against the wall, we can see out the window, cars, buses and people passing, and the sound of car horns. The film doesn’t hold on the two-shot, but cuts back to give us the reality they live within. Afterwards, Axel leaves, and the film shows us Axel in the park, listening to someone singing, as we watch cars and people in the background and the foreground of the frame. After a couple of heavies drag Axel off in a car, the film offers a long shot of the car driving off and we see on the park benches a number of people looking on. This is contained in the one shot — Reisz doesn’t cut back and forth using the people as reaction shots to exacerbate the tension. He shows them as onlookers, bewildered by what they have just witnessed, while busy living their own lives. In Five Easy Pieces and Wanda, there are scenes similar in style and execution. In Wanda, it is the ice cream parlour, where the salesman leaves. We see an empty forecourt off the motorway, just as in Five Easy Pieces, Rafelson shows us Bobby and Rayette arriving at an empty petrol station off the main highway. He does to Rayette what the salesman does to Wanda: he abandons her. But while the salesman drives off in his car, Bobby will leave the car and take off in a logging truck, with the film’s closing shot showing Rayette wondering where he might have gone. The scenes both share a sense of vastness, as if in a country as large as the US, leaving the frame can be tantamount to disappearing, and that Rafelson and Loden want to register this scale in the shots that they choose. But at the same time, like The Gambler, the films want to balance indifference with aching concern; that the long lens and the long shots insist that any individual’s story is always framed within a much broader one.

At its most pronounced, this would be structuralist if we accept the term to mean no more than a left-leaning acceptance of the importance structures play in our lives and that can undermine assumptions of agency. As John Sturrock says, “certainly there is much hostility to all philosophies of individualism in these (Foucault, Barthes, Derrida and Lacan) thinkers’ writings. They all, some more than others, subscribe to the strongly anti-bourgeois sentiments traditional among French intellectuals, for whom the bourgeois is a corrupt and thus typical member of the middle classes who has managed to disguise his own insatiable greed for money and power. As a noble philosophy of self development.” But they were also interested in undermining the autonomy of the self. Lacan, for example, has “done much to persuade us to abandon whatever belief we cling to in the autonomy of the ego…” (Structuralism and Since) In contrast, postmodernism could be viewed as the shoring up of the ego, an attempt to counter the weakness of the self through the confidence in one’s consumer choices. This would be like an inversion of Marxism’s need to eradicate false consciousness through the societally self-aware, and replacing it with the consumer consciousness that shows people know who they are by the brands they purchase. Jean Baudrillard adopted an ambivalent relationship with this question, and noted that while one may have once said, “you have a soul and you must save it”, a claim structuralism would have been happy to ignore as well, the post-modern age says, “you have a body, and you must enjoy it” (The System of Objects). Part of this pleasure will be clothing it in fashion items. In the 1960s, Baudrillard could say that “the individual is an ideological structure, a historical form correlative with the commodity form (exchange value), and the object form (use value). The individual is nothing but the subject thought in economic terms.” (The System of Objects) Yet in an interview in 1983, he acknowledged his interest in fashion, saying that “the scenes of the political and the social have become banal.” (Revenge of the Crystal)

Would Andrea Arnold, Josh Mond and the Sadie brothers agree? That would be putting words into their mouths when what we want to do is look at the images they create. What we can say, however, is that if the aesthetic equivalent to the structural was about containing characters within a frame always much greater than their own agency, then in the newer films, as the frame is far tighter so the focus is more on shoring up the self against outside forces. The out-of-frame becomes potentially an intrusion. People are often in James’ face, so to speak, or he is in theirs. This doesn’t mean the film is afraid of the long shot. Whether it is James lying on a deckchair on a beach in Mexico about to chat up a fellow holidaymaker who will become his girlfriend, or the scenes when they are together while still in the country. There is also a moment when James visits his mother in the hospital in New York and tries to get her moved from one room to another. Mond offers a medium long shot of James restlessly in the corridor, his arms crossed. But the film’s energy comes chiefly from James’ inability to live restfully in the world ,and Mond uses the frame as a formal equivalent of showing how boxed in James feels. When he goes to a party with friends of his teen girlfriend at a fancy flat, one of the kids gets up his nose so he slaps his face. The boy can see that James is tense, and James proves it by hitting him. The boy has no context for the assault,and while we might know the various reasons why James is anxious — a dying mother, a recently deceased father, a drinking problem, and no job — the film conveys the general inexplicability not because it sides with the boy. He has no role within the film beyond the slap. It is because we’re aware that James is a constant liability, someone who is neither introspective enough nor socially aware enough to register for himself the significance of his behaviour. When he goes for a job interview with a friend of his late father’s, who works at a magazine, he arrives late, drunk and with a cut hand. Ben says James is lucky that he was the one interviewing him: if he’d turned up anywhere else with the gash and smelling as he does at 10am, he would have been stopped at the elevator. He aims as a wake-up call to someone who is still half asleep, since he has rolled out of bed, and we will be well aware that James is still a little bit away from rock bottom. Yet the film refuses the context of his chaos, doesn’t offer numerous reaction shots to others looking on at this man who really is fucked up.

The eschewal of the reaction shot is part of the film’s strength and central to much contemporary cinema. But the earlier films were resistant to cutaways also, though offered the refusal in the depth of their spaces rather than the limitations of the frame. When in Five Easy Pieces, Bobby clears a table of glasses, we can see in the background of the shot a nearby table reacting with horror, standing up to register their dismay. Rafelson needs so strong a reaction so we can see it — their visages wouldn’t have been close enough for us to view it on their faces, and the film resists the cutaway. It is there too when Bobby goes into the diner where Rayette works and takes a seat. The camera is placed behind him so that we mainly see the back of Bobby’s head as the film offers a single long shot, with his friend at the other end of the counter holding his and his wife’s crying baby. At no point does the film cut to Bobby looking exasperated by the baby’s presence, and the viewer is well aware of the tension between the characters and of much that is left unsaid in the sequence. Bobby and his friend have been out the night before carousing, and Rayette is not happy, as his friend and his friend’s wife (who also works in the diner) exit the frame to leave Bobby and Rayette to sort it out. The film then cuts to the next scene before Bobby and Rayette say anything to each other. It is a fine example of mise en scene doing the talking: it is an environment that Bobby wishes to escape and in which Rayette is trapped, but the film registers these and other dissatisfactions by making the space vividly unappealing, without registering too categorically the characters’ unhappiness. Cutaways could have conveyed the tension more character-istically, but centrally cinema’s distinction from television resides in its spatial possibilities, and registering feeling not only through the face but making active the entire mise-en-scene. When we watch this scene in the diner, Rafelson manages to convey, simultaneously, the characters’ feelings and the space’s expectations. Even if Bobby and Rayette escape it, others will occupy the same space and share the same potential deflation.

It is an aspect of screen space we find in many films of the period, and not only the ones under discussion. Whether the space contains a positive or negative connotation, it matters that the space is registered and that characters occupy it ,and that we don’t believe the space is there only for this occupation, but that it precedes and succeeds the people themselves. No filmmaker more than Antonioni conveyed this capacity: to show that a person may usually be the centre of our attention, but by charging the space with a purpose beyond the immediate drama, it becomes a frame. When looking at a painting, we are well aware that the people are figures, and the painting a configuration that contains them, if it contains figures at all. If so many American films of the period showed the influence of Edward Hopper, it lay in Hopper’s ability to register human solitude while recognising that the person takes up a small part of the frame. The sadness, loss or despair one may sense looking at the painting might be absent facially, but will be registered by the body and in the space that surrounds it. If the scene from Five Easy Pieces in the diner resembles a little Hopper’s Gas, it isn’t just in the angle of the camera resembling the angled view in the painting, nor even in the red petrol pumps similar to the red chairs. It rests on the mood that both convey: a melancholic awareness that we are potentially always getting lost in space. Many American films of the time possess this quality, including Three, Downhill Racer, TR Baskin, and Klute. After all, if characters are lost, they need a frame which can both lose them within it and indicate their possible absence from it. The more recent works have a different theme, so inevitably have a different form. One might regret aspects of this shift, feeling that cinema is now too often following a character around and losing the coordinates of the surrounding space within the agitation of the individual body.

Yet it wouldn’t be fair to ask Arnold, Mond and the Safdies to do things differently, even if this isn’t simply a shift from the framing of the character to remaining in close proximity with them. The Assistant, Martha Marcy May Marlene, and Swallow all adopt much more aloof framing than the modern films we are discussing here, and just as they adopt a style suitable to their need for distance, so the five recent films under discussion use one to register immediacy. They convey perhaps a different modern problematic that echoes an earlier one — atomization. But that would be for another piece, and what interests us here is how a number of contemporary films capture the neurotic over the anomic, showing characters who just can’t quite control their nervous reactions to the world. When James looks like he is going to hit a painting at the party, when he headbutts the person in the bar and slaps the boy, this might not seem so very different to some of Bobby’s reactions in Five Easy Pieces. When Bobby literally hits the roof in his car or grapples with officers who are arresting his friend, or taking on the male nurse looking after his dad, who is also taking advantage, Bobby thinks, of his sister, is this so very different from James’s behaviour? One reason we are pairing the films rests on plenty of similarities, but no less important are the differences. In Five Easy Pieces, we are unlikely to feel that Bobby is going to sort anything out — that the American mire is too deep for that, and the opportunities of escape too vast.

This isn’t the same thing as saying Five Easy Pieces is a political film, and Bobby has nothing concrete he is reacting against. He isn’t protesting Vietnam, fretting over Chicago ’68, or has any interest in Ken Kesey and his band of merry pranksters. He doesn’t tune in and drop out, and Timothy Leary would have little to teach him. This is part of the film’s strength — that at a moment when counter cultural films were making statements, Five Easy Pieces surfs the opportunity Hollywood was giving to filmmakers to work against the mainstream, without at the same time offering a counter-culture message. It is a central aspect of the anomic: the world is changing, values are confused, but the characters cannot find in this evolving world beliefs they can live by. The neurotic character often believes it is about how they have to change all the better to fit into the world as it is, whether it happens to be Howard reckoning if only he can flog his diamond at a high price and pull off a huge three way bet, or Star certain that she can make something of herself if she uses her sexuality with skill. In James White, James says at one moment, “I’m not going to drink. I’m not going to smoke. I’m going to eat healthy. I’m going to swim, and I’m going to work out.” When Bobby sees the nurse weightlifting, it adds to the headache he already has; nothing suggests he would believe going to the gym would sort anything out. It is perhaps the difference between a malaise and unhappiness. James is a very unhappy man, but Bobby looks like it would take a very different America to make him content, even if he isn’t one to do much about making it any better. The film understands, though, that his frustrations are not his own, and his deflation seems so much greater than James’s: there is far too much shit out there for him to get it together.

If Five Easy Pieces proposes an unlikely match between Bobby and Rayette, in The Panic at Needle Park, Jerry Schatzberg does so too, but reverses the genders. Bobby (Al Pacino) is a drug dealer who was first busted at the age of nine, while Helen (Kitty Winn) comes from wealthier stock — not fully revealed until late in the film, when she manages to get out of jail after spending a night in the cell. She says to the detective, who seems to have helped, that he knows the right people. He says it is she who knows people in high places. The high the film is chiefly concerned over, though, is the heroin high the film’s title invokes, and, after the persistent Bobby seduces Helen, she wants to be so much a part of his world that she starts using. Yet the film shows a proper love affair within the horrible pragmatics where the fix comes first. Though Helen takes to prostitution, this isn’t Bobby as pimp, and in a scene that in another film would probably have been arranged by the pair of them, Bobby and Helen take advantage of contingency. Helen has got all dressed up, ready, Bobby assumes, to visit her parents, after her mother sends a letter saying she wants to see her. But instead, when he is out on the street, others tell him that she has a client. Bobby arrives at the room, tells Helen to open the door; when she does so, he sees a weak, nervous teen and takes him for all the cash he has.

Bobby and Helen are people who may be capable of love, but they are incapable of getting over their addiction. The best way to see the film is that the characters exploit each other as little as possible given the heroin fix they are caught within. They love each other, but perhaps the high even more, yet they wouldn’t have been together were it not for drugs serving as the great social equaliser. Helen and Bobby meet over at her artist boyfriend’s place, with Helen recovering from an abortion and the relationship unlikely to survive the incident. Bobby is his dealer, and becomes fascinated by Helen, visiting her in hospital and persuading her to start seeing him. If drugs will destroy the affair, they also helped instigate it, as the social divide is crossed by the substance they both share. They may be from different sides of the tracks, but the tracks are united by the marks on their arms. When Helen prepares to go to visit her mother, this looks like what she really plans to do. We see it in the top she wears that exposes the arms, then she tries to hide the marks with powder, and then puts on a jumper. The track marks unite her and Bobby, and will keep her from visiting her family, and, while all relationships function off various forms of complicity, this is one that can include anyone within the drug milieu, while excluding everyone outside of it.

Nevertheless, it would seem inaccurate to describe both Helen and Bobby as lost if we insist that a strong aspect of the anomic lies in displacement. Bobby is where he was brought up and where he wants to be — though they sometimes talk about moving to the countryside, nothing in Bobby’s attitude, demeanour, or ambition suggests this is likely. His aim is to work his way up the drug-dealing ladder, and the film provides a detailed scene where Bobby witnesses how the heroin is packaged. The film conveys Bobby’s sense of awe in his attention to the elements that go into its production. While there are scenes in the film that suggest the fucked up, the sort of moments we might expect to find in a Safdie brothers film, the tone and mood is distinguished by Bobby’s hustling and Helen’s confusion. Scahtzberg noted, “To me, Kitty was perfect. She was anything but a druggie. They were two different people.” (BFI) When they spend some of the money they receive from the naive young client on a puppy, they are taking the dog back from where they bought it from, and disappear into the ferry’s toilet for a fix. Bobby insists the puppy stays outside, and when Helen exits, she see it scampering along the deck. The film cuts back to her fretful face while the film then cuts to the sea. The dog is no longer to be seen. It is a fucked up moment to be sure, but there is no humour to be had in it, even if the scene can seem close to absurd. One could see Bobby telling it as an amusing anecdote to his desensitised buddies in Needle Park, but for Helen, it is part of a loss that might remind us of what she loses at the beginning of the film: a possible child.

Part of the film’s provocation is to contain the harshness of the subject matter and the location shooting within the core of a romantic drama, and making the unlikely romance (not quite the same thing as the impossible romance) work so well emotionally. At the end of the film, Bobby comes out of prison and sees Helen waiting for him. We may want them to get back together, even if Helen has shopped him to save her own skin. They may well again start taking drugs. What else might keep them together? The film gives proper purpose to the notion of the bittersweet, with Helen well dressed at the film’s conclusion, looking like a woman who does have wealth and comfort at her disposal, but still yearns for something else. As with the other seventies works, it offers a sense of place that isn’t only locational, though Schatzberg came as close as he could to filming the specific area. “Where I shot it—I didn't shoot it actually in Needle Park. Needle Park is where the subway is and I was a block, a block and a half away from that.” (Screenslate). It is just as much there in the attention to faces and to a muddy sound design. Sometimes you can hardly hear the characters for background noise, whether a persistent drilling or the hoot of car horns.

Heaven Knows What is a location shoot as well, but the Safdies want to remain much closer to the character’s subjectivity. Even when we have a long lens telephoto shot that takes in numerous people on the streets of New York, the sound design focuses on Harley’s thoughts as she writes down her decision to kill herself. The directors in their work often offer a dense and busy non-diegetic soundtrack, as though determined to stay as much as they can in the claustrophobic subjectivity of the characters’ lives. The main character is Harley, homeless and drug addicted, who cheats on her boyfriend and tries winning him back by slitting her wrist. He seems to think it is the least she can do if she wants his love, no matter if a successful suicide attempt, while proving how much he means to her, will deprive him of her future company. Harley and Ilya aren’t likely to think ahead too much when getting out of their heads is the priority, and the Safdies want to immerse themselves in the material, determined perhaps to capture a perspective that in some ways is more actor-led than directorially concentrated. The film is based more than a little on the life of the film’s lead Arielle Holmes, who was a heroin addict Josh Safdie became interested in, before realising the full difficulty of her situation. “I was initially attracted to Arielle, but I didn’t know she was a street kid. Once I found out a little bit more about her, I thought she was an interesting person and I wanted to be her friend. And I just hung out with her and kind of wanted to see the room behind the room behind the room. I needed to see it firsthand. I would tell Arielle, ‘I need you to show me this. I need you to take me to these people. I need you to introduce me to this person.’’ (Film Comment)

The contrast between Holmes and Winn is marked and plays out very differently in each film. Holmes tried crack cocaine at twelveS and her mother was an alcoholic who passed away when she was still young. “When I was 13, my mother would buy me and my friends booze. Smoke weed with us.” (stephenapplebaum). Winn’s background was more upper middle-class, militaristic and artistic. Her father was a colonel, while her grandfather a Secretary of State who won the Nobel Peace Prize. Her grandmother was an actress. Yet our claim isn’t at all to say one film is authentic, the other not. Indeed, while the Safdies drew so much on Holmes’ milieu, Schatzberg relied on Pacino’s and another actor he knew, Richard Bright, who plays Bobby’s brother. “I told these guys that—I guess there were a number of them that had been addicts—and I said, “I don't want any shooting up. If I find out, I'm liable to just take all your footage and throw it away and get somebody else.” Because I just thought it would become a problem. And I found out after the shoot, he was the only guy that was on drugs in the film, Richard was.” (Screenslate) This is all anecdotal stuff, but Schatzberg was more interested in the milieu, and the range of casting helped bring this out. As he said, “well, half of the actors were recommended by Al [Pacino], so how can you go bad that way? These were his pals. These are the guys he used to hang out with. Anytime he could, he'd recommend one of his buddies for a part.” (Screenslate) Schatzberg was interested in observation; The Safdies, in immersion. It is partly why The Panic in Needle Park, for all its weight, contains elements of the unlikely romance; while Heaven Knows What offers the most likeliest of meetings as two addicts are caught in a co-dependent relationship that acknowledges co-dependency as not just the plurality of the two characters, but also their even greater dependence on the drug.

Yet both films, and surely all those under discussion, are political works, perhaps in the sense offered by Sartre when he says: "Other people are hell insofar as you are plunged from birth into a situation to which you are obliged to submit. You are born the son of a rich man, or an Algerian, or a doctor, or an American. Then you have a cut-and-dried future mapped out, a future made for you by others. They haven’t created it directly, but they are part of a social order that makes you what you are.” (Playboy) Sartre also reckons, “when I hear talk of an ‘affluent society,’ I think we’re being hoodwinked. The fact is that about half the French population lives at the bare subsistence level. The government camouflages the facts. Just now, a kind of spurious optimism prevails in France. They want to transform us into a society of consumers. By harping on this idea of affluence, they try to make us think that the demand for wage increases is no longer due to exploitation of the workers — a monstrous travesty of the facts!” (Playboy) In the films, hell often is other people, and the characters, especially in the earlier works, and in a different way in the later ones, are resistant to or in a complex relationship with capitalism. In none of the films is this an articulated response by the characters, with nobody caught up in the hippie movement at the end of the sixties, nor the environmental causes in more recent ones. Lewis Gordon reckons, in Uncut Gems, “Howard – a shallow, habitual opportunist – isn’t just highly strung, but the twitchy embodiment of 21st-century capitalism, bulldozing his way through time, space and people.” (Frieze) Andrea Arnold said of American Honey, that the sellers are “…a small potted version of the American dream. They’re working hard at selling themselves, which is what capitalism is all about.” (Guardian) For Adele Cassigneul Wanda, “…is a subtle site of feminist contestation and critique, an anti-capitalist reflection on refusal, failure, and loss”, (Los Angeles Review of Books) while in Five Easy Pieces, Chris Stanton notes Dupea “…shouts at honking drivers, barks at a dog through a car window, and launches into a vaguely anti-capitalist tirade, aimed at everyone and heard by no one. (Bright Wall/Dark Room)

We shouldn’t make too much of the anti-capitalist elements of these films. It would risk turning them into more politically-oriented works than they happen to be, and Arnold’s comment could almost pass for triumphal if taken out of the film’s context. Yet in Sartre’s link between hell being other people, and the hellishness of capitalist society, most of the films make links between people’s individual suffering, and their attempts to make sense of their place in societies that are undeniably capitalist. Of course, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is not only a book about capitalism and its discontents, but a neo-liberal economy can seem to exacerbate a central problem the book sees as indissoluble: the subject as simultaneously object. As Sartre says of a man he sees reading “There is a full object for me to grasp. In the midst of the world, I can say ‘man-reading’ as I could say ‘cold stone, ‘fine rain’. It “seems to be related to the rest of the world by a purely indifferent externality.” This obviously works in reverse. What is the man-reading subjectivity that turns Sartre’s figure into an object in turn? “It is in and through the revelation of my being-as-object for the Other, that I must be able to apprehend the presence of his being as subject.” (Being and Nothingness) When Harley says she will kill herself to prove her love to Ilya, and Ilya says she should, this is potentially indifference, or a paradox — but it is also the positivistic. If she loves him, she will prove it by taking her life, because what other yardstick would he be able to trust? If she doesn’t, she might love him, but then he would have to take it as a subjective claim on her part, while her suicide would be close to an objective fact. Ilya will see what love is when it is too late, but he will have to acknowledge that, if she is willing to die for him, then love it is. The paradox is resolved, the positivism revealed, and the absence of indifference on Ilya’s part is exposed after Harley slits one wrist, and Ilya calls an ambulance. But like The Panic in Needle Park, Heaven Knows What explores strong feelings within a potentially still stronger feeling that is the drug. As psychologist JoAnne Deak says, “we now know that the chemical changes in parts of the brain when you're in love are equal to that of heroin doses or high cocaine doses.” (Business Insider). And thus it is also true that heroin or cocaine doses are equal to love. Both Heaven Knows What and The Panic in Needle Park complicate the emotional needs of the characters by combining them with the chemical needs of heroin, and shows that, if from one perspective, Sartre is right to see there is little difference between man-reading and cold stone, and thus to indifference, then even the strongest of feelings towards another can generate the same subject-object relationship in reverse. Does Bobby love Helen more than heroin; Ilya heroin more than Harley? Things are confused and messily entangled as a person becomes no more an object of love, but then what is an object; what is a subject? Both are capable of invoking similar responses.

Yet perhaps part of the difference between looking lost and feeling fucked up is where this final emphasis lies. Is the film more in the human world or the adrenaline world, closer to feelings that are general or local, social or solipsistic? The older films possess this sobriety, looking into the world it shows us, while the later works are looking out at the world the characters are immersed within. When Dupea gets into various confrontations with others, it is usually because he wants to act ethically rather than nervously, and from this perspective, there is a great difference between Dupea and James White. Whether it is coming to the rescue of his friend in the oil fields, having a go at undermining a woman who is patronising Rayette, or physically confronting the nurse sleeping with his sister, he isn’t merely taking his mood out on them, though there is a moodiness to him. He wants to be a better person in these moments, even if we might wonder whether the deed is doing anyone any favours. Yet in each there is an ethical focus contained within the frustration, as though if the world were a better place, Dupea might, too, be a better person. In James White, James isn’t interested in any ethos when he head-butts the person in the bar, or slaps the boy in the face. He is irritated, and someone must become the victim of that irritation. The film doesn’t necessarily side with James, but the form doesn’t create any distance from him either. It is the nature of immersive form; it cannot easily offer ethical remove, even if we don’t doubt the film doesn’t approve of James’s actions. Its deliberately limited purview means that we must remain close to James’s perspective, and find the wherewithal to distance ourselves from it, without failing to empathise with the broader predicament. In this sense, there is little difference between White and Dupea in likeability, but while Dupea is an ethical failure, White is a physiological nightmare. He cannot control his temper and angry release is what matters, no matter if much of it comes out of a failure to sort his life out and care for his ailing mother. What counts, though, is this difference of perspective — its expansion or its contraction — and this is true of the distinction between The Panic at Needle Park and Heaven Knows What, as well as The Gambler against Uncut Gems, and Wanda as opposed to American Honey.

If Sartre links the hell of other people to capital, and where we can see how the more advanced the relationship with money, the more chance that the subject becomes an object, as if the ontological conditions of humanity becomes the instrumentalism of exploiting others, R. D. Laing saw this too but was interested in taking elements of the existential and applying it to the familial. Laing notes: “a partial depersonalisation of others is extensively practised in everyday life and is regarded as normal if not highly desirable. Most relationships are based on some partial depersonalising tendency in so far as one creates the other not in terms of any awareness of who or what he might be in himself but as virtually an android robot playing a role or part in a large machine in which one too may be acting yet another part.” (The Divided Self) Laing notes that a central danger, if the other’s subjectivity overwhelms one’s own, is that “one is threatened with the possibility of becoming no more than a thing in the world of the other, without any life for oneself, without any being for oneself,” as Laing believes Sartre explores this brilliantly in parts of Being and Nothingness. This could happen in a situation between two lovers where one has emotional power over the other; in a job situation where the boss bullies his employee; in a playground, or in a family where, in different ways, a person will feel undermined. The balance between seeing oneself as a subject, the other as an object, but an object to be given subject status and, in turn, where the other gives us a similar status, is what happens when an intersubjective encounter resembles a success. Laing was interested in its failure, and few films reflected this better than A Woman Under the Influence.

Pauline Kael may have insisted this was more director John Cassavetes under the influence of Laing than he should have been, too easily saying that the film wished to prove that Mabel (Gena Rowlands) is the “scapegoat of a repressive society that defines itself as normal.” More interesting is when Kael says, “the Laingian schizophrenic scapegoat is, typically, one who suffers the irrationality of the mother and father.” (Reeling) It is there in the family dynamic that this subject/object tension is often most assertively present. Why wouldn’t it be, when the initial encounter is based on an enormous gap between the potential subjectivity of the parent and the child? While in the workplace environment, the love affair, the playground encounter, the subject to object status is about equal, however deformed it will become under the powerful one controlling the weaker party. But there the child is, born into a world where their thoughts and feelings are embryonic, and reliant on warmth, food, and shelter from these figure who introduce them to toilet training, language acquisition and a general move towards autonomy. As Laing says, “the family is, in the first place, the usual instrument for what is called socialisation, that is, getting each new recruit to the human race to behave and experience in substantially the same way as those who have already got there.” (The Politics of Experience). There can be no equality of experience between a young child and their parents, but this should perhaps make the parents all the more aware of the burgeoning subjectivity that can so easily be trampled upon by the subject who is used to treating, in at least the early years, the child as an object, with the child’s nappies changed, the clothes put on and the food administered well aware that this is a one-sided situation of control. It cannot surely be otherwise. But what if the child, no longer so young, believes that the parents are still insisting on the sort of control that was inevitable when they were tiny? This is part of the two-way dynamic in A Woman Under the Influence. Mabel (Gina Rowlands) is a grown up woman, but also the daughter of controlling parents, who herself is now a mother with three children, and who allows for a freedom that may seem too pronounced as she collapses under the weight of oppressive parenting, a troublesome mother-in-law, and a husband who loves her but can’t always express it. She seems like a mother who can give her kids all the love that she may have lacked, but it comes with no boundaries or filters that allow her to cope.

Yet Cassavetes’s focus is not chiefly interested in this dynamic, one more evident in Ken Loach’s Laingian-influenced Family Life, partly because he wants to leave this in the background, seeing the foreground as about perception and performance. Laing quotes Sartre’s Psychology of Imagination: “it is not only this or that image that is chosen, but the imaginary state with everything it implies; it is not only an escape from the content of the real (poverty, frustrated love, failure of one’s enterprise, etc.) but from the form of the real itself. Its character of presence, the sort of response it demands of us…” Laing sees that “…phantasy, without being either in some measure embodied in reality, or itself enriched by injections of ‘reality’ becomes more and more empty and volatilised.” (The Divided Self) But this is where the relationship between the imaginary and the real becomes a question of trust, needing to see in the other a reality that doesn’t reduce one to an object in their eyes, but as a complex living being. To become lost is to be adrift, and often relying upon love wherever one can find it. Mabel needs her husband Nick to love her as a glue, to hold themselves together, so she can hold herself together. “It’s us and you’re going with them now…we’re supposed to be on the inside. We were always there.” She shows him her two fingers stuck together and tells Nick “that’s how close we are. They can’t pull us apart, they can’t force us apart.” But they are pulled apart as Mabel spends six months in a mental institution. When she returns, there is a messy family gathering, and the overwhelmed Mabel harms herself. She asks Nick if he loves her, and he can’t quite reply. “Do you love me?” she says, and he hums and haws, and then insists: “let’s go clean up that crap.”

His inability to tell her seems less because he doesn’t, than the magnitude of love required is so great that a typical response wouldn’t be adequate. Instead, they clear the kitchen table and get ready for bed. Perhaps Nick can’t easily answer the question, aware that, not long before, Mabel asked during the family dinner if her father would stand up for her. He takes this literally and gets to his feet, and when Mabel repeats this, he says he doesn’t understand the game he thinks she is playing. Her mother knows this is no game and comprehends what Mabel is asking. He aggressively tells his wife to sit down and, in his anger, we sense just how little Mabel can expect her father to stand up for her. People sit down, it seems, for him; he doesn’t stand up for them. It is as though it isn’t enough for Nick to love Mabel; he also has to love the lack of love she may apparently have long been receiving from her father. This is palimpsestic love, if you like, trying to write over the original failure, with a successful affection that can compensate for its earlier relative absence. Nick seems to have the inner resources for such a task, but may lack the time, energy and social network for it. He is a blue-collar worker who can be irritable, tired and frustrated, and will often fail in expressing the love for Mabel he undeniably has to offer. He also has to like as well as love her, a task Cassavetes wanted to convey was beyond the mother, made all the more troublesome by the casting. Just as Cassavetes’s mother, Katherine Cassavetes, played Nick’s mother, so Lady Rowlands played Mabel’s. “It was difficult [for Gena’s mother] because she had to not like her. She had to love her but not like her, so it was very difficult, because the relationship is both like and love.” (Cassavetes on Cassavetes)

Cassavetes doesn’t see Mabel as any more clinically insane than many others. Arguing against Kael’s article, the director reckoned, “I am sure there are people who are clinically in trouble, but most people just don’t know what to do.” Mabel is more lost than Wanda, Helen, Axel and Bobby Dupea, the only one of the five who might be deemed a suitable case for treatment, no matter if she is also the least adrift, married with three kids. But family life is no guarantee against being lost or fucked up — after all, it is Howard’s wife who uses exactly the latter term to describe him. Of the five older films, it is probably the most claustrophobic, the one of the five that may have most influenced the newer works. The Safdies put Cassavetes’s Husbands and Gloria on their favourite films of all time, while critic Shanni Enelow invokes Cassavetes’ Opening Night when speaking of Madeline’s Madeline. Sheila O’Malley discusses Cassavetes when reviewing James White, and Mansel Stimpson reviews American Honey and says, first mentioning Cassavetes’ innovations. “…what we see has absolute immediacy and no feeling whatever of being set up. This is remarkable and Arnold's finest achievement to date.” (Film Review Daily). But while the newer filmmakers are often working with some of the world’s best cinematographers to achieve the effects they seek, with the Safdies using Darius Khondji for Uncut Gems, Josh Mond seeing in Erdely a cinematographer who possessed the experience necessary for James White, and Andrea Arnold continuing her relationship with Robbie Ryan, they rely on well-established professionals to achieve a particular effect. Cassavetes wanted the opposite of a style and sacked his youthful and talented cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, replacing him with Michael Ferris, a lowly apprentice who “…wasn’t even sure how to load the camera they were using…but Cassavetes was a believer in on the job training.” (Cassavetes on Cassavetes) The claustrophobia was less a deliberate aesthetic intention than a pragmatic necessity. Cassavetes was filming in his own home, using it as the set for Mabel and Nick’s house, and while roomy enough, it meant working with what he had. That was exactly how he liked it, saying “I didn’t want to make too many cuts because I don’t think viewers would be interested in emotions stimulated by technical effect. The difference between Cassavetes and the newer filmmakers is that they are interested in these very aspects, as if capturing the neurotic requires a style, while the anomic demands not so much style’s absence but a presence that starts with the documented over the expressive. We have found this even in The Gambler, perhaps the closest to a genre work of the five older films. The characters are lost not only because they possess a certain confusion, but also that the frame can convey that they are lost in something bigger than themselves.

The newer films always come closer to the expressive, and none more so than Madeline’s Madeline. While A Woman Under the Influence creates a sense of an onlooker’s alarm, Madeline’s Madeline isn’t of course oblivious to the world looking on and the title character’s difficulties and confusions, but it wants to take the claustrophobia that Cassavetes accepts as an inevitable byproduct of using a lot of interior scenes in an actual, non-film-specific, location, and turn it claustrophobic. The gist of the film rests on a teenager’s desire to escape parental control and a drama teacher’s determination to use Madeline’s emotional fragility for her own creative ends. Madeline is keen to find in the creative experience an outlet for her anger and resentment but, increasingly, others wonder whether this isn’t exploration, but exploitation. One scene shows Madeline acting out a conflict with a version of her mother, in front of both her mother, who has come to see her perform, and the others in the acting class. Is this raw talent the class is watching, or just raw emotion, as the mother walks out halfway through the performance? It can be both, but the film plays with the ethical tension between what Madeline needs to express to become Madeline’s Madeline, and the teacher’s desire to tap into talent so naked that the scene can look closer to the therapeutic than the thespian. This may be a fantasy that isn’t empty, but is volatilised, to use Laing’s phrase, and Decker is tapping into some of the same questions that Cassavetes explores and that have been an important element in post-war American acting. As Tyler Parker says, ‘’Psychodrama isn’t just a therapeutic tool, it is also a central feature of American art in the fifties and sixties: seeing its “…moral motivation and express theatrical pattern far more significant in American culture that its psychiatric limits technically suggest.” (Sex Psyche Etcetra in the Film) Tyler says, “in group therapy, a round robin of storytellers (groping autobiographers) replaces the actor-patient in the spotlight.” Madeline is such a figure: in need of therapy and desiring attention, the two become mixed up in an environment where authenticity matters and where it must be performed. Decker describes it thus: “What felt organic to my own lived experience was to show this girl who’s going through something others don’t understand; they’re projecting all of their own narratives onto her. Madeline’s living inside of something that, at times, feels very positive and exuberant, like you said, and, at times, her existence is very limiting and terrifying, as if the ground is falling out from under her.” (Slant) The group can see there are problems here, but the viewer has been privy to still more fucked up behaviour, especially a moment when Madeline comes onto her acting teacher’s husband. She tells him that she is soon to be seventeen and wants to celebrate by losing her virginity, and proposes that he might be the man to lose it with. Burgeoning sexuality meets narcissism, accompanied by emotional instability, and we have to recognise this is a person who has no control over the emotions she expresses, and the impact she wishes to achieve. Star in American Honey might not be that much older and is also often emotionally confused, but she knows what she desires (money and Jake) and begins to understand the limitations of those hopes. She is also well aware that her boss is exploiting her. Madeline isn’t sure if the teacher wants to help or take advantage, if her mother cares or controls, or if she is ready for a sexual experience.

The distinction we insist upon from the early films to the later ones needs to be made, but we shouldn’t be oblivious to many similarities, and this is partly why we have looked at the ten films we have. Yet it does appear that not only has the stylistic approach to dealing with characters who are confused changed, but perhaps also the underpinning beliefs and assumptions: that the culture has shifted. While it wouldn’t be a good idea to assume too clearly causes and effects when it comes to socio-economic and technological change, nevertheless, we do seem be living in more solipsistic times, and perhaps less socially hopeful ones. Jay Shambaugh and Ryan Nunn note that “the majority of Americans share in economic growth through the wages they receive for their labor, rather than through investment income. Unfortunately, many of these workers have fared poorly in recent decades.” (Brookings) They see that “since the early 1970s, the hourly inflation-adjusted wages received by the typical worker have barely risen, growing only 0.2% per year. In other words, though the economy has been growing, the primary way most people benefit from that growth has almost completely stalled.” This can lead to a general pessimism within personal ambition: that though, generally, people aren’t better off, if someone is clever enough, ruthless enough or greedy enough, there will be plenty of opportunities for individual gain. We see in different ways this is so with Star and Howard, and James wants to sort his life out in a manner not too far removed from the talk of a motivational speaker.

We also have technological developments that can add to this self-centredness. The first Sony Walkman was released at the end of the 1970s, and self-immersion through technology has only increased, with Smart phones using Bluetooth, and leading people to wander around in their own world, sometimes speaking to others, listening to music or to a podcast. The field of perception is turned inwards rather than outwards. Wessie du Toit speaks of the enclosed self: “Over the past fifteen years, we have already taken big strides towards mediating our environment with technology. A dam was breached when we started glancing regularly at smartphones. Gaming and scrolling soon flooded into every idle moment. With a universe of media in our hand, the rise of wireless earphones as a near-permanent implant became possible.” (The Pathos of Things) Some have spoken of technological solipsism, with Taylor C. Dotson seeing problems with an ethos that proposes “one ‘be true to oneself’ and that self-realization and identity are both inwardly developed. “Deviant and narcissistic forms of this ethic emerge when the dialogical character of human being is forgotten. It is presumed that the self can somehow be developed independently of others, as if humans were not socially shaped beings but wholly independent, self-authoring minds.” (Alternative Modernities) Virtual reality developments can add to this techno-solipsism, just as AI that creates a robot all but indistinguishable from a person, when it comes to meeting affective demand, can exacerbate this issue too — and films including Ex Machina and Her in very different ways are good examples of its exploration.

If the age we are living in has become more socio-economically selfish, and the technology has allowed us to become more focused on our own concerns without the same need to rely on others, then it makes sense this would be reflected in various ways in the films that are made, and not only those directly concerned with the question, like Her and Ex Machina. One of the most pressing differences between the anomic and the neurotic is that the earlier films may possess little optimism in the diegesis, but the form often feels open and encompassing, while the later films are much more introspectively moving the characters through spaces that offer a far narrower vista. It would have been an easy task to work with some of the best films of the early seventies and the worst of more recent years. But whether the latter ones are as good as those from the ‘70s may be moot, it seems fair to propose that works like Uncut Gems, American Honey, and James White are to their era what the earlier ones were to their age. This means that while throughout we have asked aesthetic questions, at the same time, we cannot help but find ourselves asking what underpins aspects of the choices made, and see them beyond the craft of an individual filmmaker, filmic techniques of the moment, and so on. If the times were changing when the earlier films were released, they have undeniably changed again since. It may sound like an astonishingly pessimistic claim to propose that if only we could no longer be fucked up, and instead be a little lost, we might be able to regain some hope. Yet rather than offering categorical despair, all we have tried to do is define important differences. Make of them what you will.

Anomie and Neurosis in American Film

08/02/2026

Fucked Up and Being Lost

Anomie and Neurosis in American Film

Fucked Up and Being Lost