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MICHAEL MENEGHETTI
F E E LI N G YO U RS E LF D I S I NTI G R ATE:
TH E AV IATO R AS H I STO RY
Résumé: Cet article fait une lecture détaillée de L’Aviateur (2004) de Martin
Scorsese et soutient que la dimension du jeu d’acteur est importante lorsqu’on rend
compte du film de façon historique. Les détails de la performance de Leonardo
DiCaprio en tant qu’Howard Hughes ainsi que la visée explicite du film qui est
d’insister sur cette performance à l’intérieur des paramètres plus généraux de la
mise en scène, incarnent la conception que le film véhicule à propos du personnage
de Hughes et des évènements historiques représentés. Dans l’historiographie implicite du film, la souveraineté de l’acteur en tant qu’individu est sérieusement remise
en question – et ultimement effacée – par l’empiètement des différentes conceptions
que l’on se faisait, en temps de guerre, du capitalisme. Dans cette perspective, le
couple DiCaprio/Hughes devient le foyer de notre capture du passé : le corps de
l’acteur, saisi à travers une gestuelle d’inquiétude, est à l’image de l’expérience historique sinistre dépeinte par le film. Dans L’Aviateur, les véritables effets de l’histoire
ne deviennent visibles que par une gestuelle désordonnée et le sommaire compulsif
d’actions futiles.
BODY SNATCHING: MARTIN SCORSESE’S HISTORICAL FICTIONS
In his wide-ranging theoretical reflection upon history in film, William Guynn
claims that the “excess of mise en scène” constitutes an “inherent danger” for
any historical fiction.1 The “world of the past,” he writes, “can be invoked in
such richness of detail that the spectator can fantasize the presence of history
and engage in a relationship with the actor/character that ignores the distance
between the instrument of representation and the historical person.”2 The cinema’s
capacity for dense physical restorations, or rather, its apparently easy circumvention of the difference between past and present, is in this sense both a unique
source of speculative knowledge (the past may have been like this) and a potentially “great problem” in any historical fiction (this is the past).3 In other words,
the tangible presence of mise en scène can, according to Guynn, produce salutary
effects, but at the same time might inadvertently encourage an uncritical flight
of the spectatorial imagination and one’s belief in an ersatz history.
This, of course, is a familiar critique of historical filmmaking, a lingering
inheritance from 1970s film theory and its thoroughgoing suspicion of representation
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FILM STUDIES • REVUE CANADIENNE D’ÉTUDES CINÉMATOGRAPHIQUES
VOLUME 20 NO. 1 • SPRING • PRINTEMPS 2011 • pp 2-19
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and its inherent dangers. But the actor’s presence clearly constitutes an exceptional
kind of danger in Guynn’s explication here, insofar as his discussion of the world
of the past concludes with a more narrowly conceived spectatorial relationship
with figures on the screen: fantasy, identification, and an attendant lack of lucidity
are likely effects of the actor’s embodiment of historical personages. According to
this formulation, an actor’s performance and its potential distance from historical
referents comprise a singular aesthetic quandary for historical filmmaking: an
inscription from the present, the actor’s presence invariably reorients our relationship to representations of the past. Should a film therefore work at reducing
this irremediable difference between an actor’s body and its historical model in
order to encourage the spectator’s immersion in a film’s diegesis? That is, should
an historical film simply create performances according to the historically shifting
criteria of what we commonly call “realism?” Or should it instead emphasize the
distance between performance and referent in the manner of 1970s film theory’s
Brechtian prescriptions? In short, how can the actor become a medium for historical
meaning in the context of this particular aesthetic quandary? How can the historical past be refracted through the details of his/her performance?
Performance in Hollywood’s historical films is a regular source of critical
consternation, and the actor’s presence is perhaps best understood not as a spur
to identification (Guynn’s formulation above), but rather as an obstacle to immediate spectatorial engagement. Indeed, the effort to negotiate this unavoidable
difference between performer and historical personage typically shapes our
interpretations of the past in historical filmmaking. Our ready recognition of the
film actor’s work in historical films therefore impels us to attend to—and apprehend—a dimension of the historical past differently. The particular details of an
actor’s performance (demeanor, gesture, vocality, his/her place within the broader
parameters of mise en scène, etc.) may initially hinder our literal comprehension
of filmed histories, and for that very reason our attempts to discern the meaning
of performance in these works usually involve an extension of its figurative
implications. What we are seeing is not the “real past,” of course, and as viewers
we always know this. But what can an actor’s performance mean in the context
of a film’s rendering of historical accounts? Although we may initially understand an historical film in relation to already existing accounts of the past, how
can performance make us think new things about various histories?
Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004) deliberately deploys its principal actor
as a conspicuous conduit to historical meaning, or rather, as a key intercessor in
our apprehension of its account of history. Like the director’s other historical fictions, The Aviator is preoccupied with a very broad experiential element in the
past—a subject and his sense of the past, his subjection in history and overwhelming anxiety about the future—and performance therefore assumes a special
centrality in the film’s formal and stylistic design. If the film occasionally appears
to disregard traditional historiography’s commitment to narrative exigency, it is
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largely because the tenor of historical acts takes precedence over other matters.4
In The Aviator, acts and their haunting inefficacy assume center stage. The film’s
claim to being an historical work thus hinges upon the particular manner in
which it renders its account of the past in terms of visibly corroding, failing acts.
As a large-scale commercial film, The Aviator is predictably focused upon an
individual’s dramatic adventures, but the film tellingly transforms its principal
figure into a public performer, and in so doing implicitly qualifies or judges him
as an historical actor in ways that a simple plot summary would fail to discern.
As we shall see, The Aviator ultimately assays the implacable disintegration of
Howard Hughes’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) public self at the moments of his greatest
exposure and vulnerability. Yet Hughes’s actions, which initially appear
inscrutable and inefficacious, are eventually clarified in the very terms of their
exceptional place in The Aviator’s account of the past, and the actor in this sense
becomes a key conduit in our characterization and critical comprehension of the
history in question.
Robert Rosenstone has rightly censured Hollywood’s excessive emphasis
upon individuals in historical spectacles as an obfuscation of the past: too often
in these works, he argues, the solution to “personal problems” becomes the
“solution [to] historical problems.”5 However, this pernicious ideological stratagem, lodged in the films’ narrative structures, is frequently problematized by the
particularities of performance. Acting, I want to suggest, can subtly work against
the literal prescriptions of Hollywood’s characteristic dramatic form. Yvette Biro
has written persuasively of camera movements and their distinctive ability to
contain a “hidden poetic ideal, a comprehensive thought independent of the
storyline,”6 but film acting can also assume this independent form of thinking
in relation to determinate narrative forms. In their immoderate focus upon an
individual figure, films like The Aviator are paradoxically well placed to reveal
unexpected elements in the experience of historical actors. Simply put, the
deployment of gesture and demeanor in Scorsese’s film grasps an unforeseen
relation between individual and historical world: The Aviator elaborates
Hughes’s increasingly desperate place in this filmed historical account by
abstracting the body and its gestures in their relation to historical events. Our
equally attentive critical characterization of these gestures—and their significance—in turn allows us to grasp the unique, imaginative form of historical
knowledge on display in the film.7
Emotion as imagined, then embodied and projected; the re-figuration of real
historical personages via the actor’s work: together these constitute historical fiction’s lingering challenge to traditional historiography, and they remain major
reasons for the historian’s occasional disavowals of cinema’s potential to produce
legitimate histories. In what follows, I take The Aviator’s deployment of its principal actor and its intentional setting of DiCaprio’s performance within the
broader parameters of mise en scène as keys to the film’s thinking about the
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historical past. As a central element in the film’s composition, DiCaprio’s pantomime of despondency exemplifies what Daniel Frampton has called a “filmic
kind of thought”: it tells us “what the film is thinking and how the film regards
its characters and events.”8 As we shall see, in The Aviator’s broadly conceived
historiography, the sovereignty of the individual actor is gravely challenged—and
ultimately erased—by the insistent encroachment of belligerent wartime capitalism.
And in this respect, he becomes a figurative site for our apprehension of the past:
the literal body of the actor, seized by its pantomime of apprehension, is apprehended figuratively in relation to the grim historical experience in question. In
The Aviator’s thinking about the past, I suggest, the real effects of history finally
become visible only in the form of ruined individual gestures and the recapitulation of failed acts.
BRINGING OUT THE DREAD: THE AVIATOR AND THE INEFFICACY
OF HISTORICAL ACTS
A hoary prestige item even during the studio era, the biographical film has been
revived and significantly revised by contemporary Hollywood. Focusing on lesserknown and eccentric historical figures,9 films like The People vs. Larry Flynt
(Milos Forman, 1996), Man on the Moon (Milos Forman, 1999), Catch Me If You
Can (Steven Spielberg, 2002), and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (George
Clooney, 2002) have produced a gallery of deranged and beleaguered figures, and
a giant collection of conspicuous actorly exertions: an assortment of tics and
ostentation are among the principal attractions in each of these films.
Consequently, these works should compel us to reconsider the various phenomena
of performance in the narrower context of filmic renderings of historical
accounts. How does acting work in relation to these determinate narrative trajectories? How can the details of performance function as implicit judgments
about the films’ historical actors, their identities and the philosophical significance of their experiences in the past? How do historical films ask us to attend
to these matters?
Among these recent eager resuscitations of the biopic, The Aviator initially
appears to adhere to Hollywood’s oldest and simplest dictate: re-imagine the
private experiences, emotions and attitudes of individuals in order to explain the
motivating forces behind the unfolding of history.10 The film’s prologue, for
instance, wherein a young Howard Hughes is gently bathed by his mother and
warned of the world’s rampant disease, might be seen as nothing more than routine
biopic fare, i.e., as the opening salvo in a psychiatric case study: a great man
with even greater personal problems, Hughes, his subsequent breakdowns, and
physical distress will all be easily explained via this early outline of a deeply
troubled psyche.
The Aviator, however, is considerably more deliberate in its endeavor than
this interpretation of the prologue would suggest. The entire sequence is evoca-
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tively filmed as a theatrical tableau: lights slowly rise and a young Hughes
emerges from the blackness, his back partially turned to us in long shot.
Moreover, the golden hue of the ensuing images produce something like the
effect of the gilded cornice frame of a late Renaissance painting.11 In short, the
sequence is purposely framed and the sense of enactment is boldly rendered in
these theatrical terms.12 At this very early stage in its unfolding, The Aviator’s
historical account ceremoniously projects the body of an actor onto the stage,
and the film will subsequently focus obsessively on the catastrophe of gestures
that ruins this figure’s every project: according to the logic set in motion by the
prologue, The Aviator will examine history in the broad terms of a body’s visible
public distress and trajectory of dissolution. The opening image is therefore less
an outline for ensuing psychic travails than a calculated projection—in stylistic
terms—of the actor’s body into historical fiction. Indeed, when Hughes/DiCaprio
appears in the following sequence as a young man shouting orders on the set of
Hell’s Angels (Howard Hughes, 1930), he seems to have been physically thrown
from the tranquility of the prologue into the middle of a chaotic account of the
past. Suddenly projected into this new scene, DiCaprio’s Hughes pointedly
comes into being as an effect of the prologue’s formal process of staging, that is,
its creation of a figure to which we must subsequently attend.
In his landmark consideration of acting in “historical fiction,”13 Jean-Louis
Comolli suggests that the actor is invariably forced to submit to this sort of processing and projection in historical filmmaking. The soldering of actor and character
is never complete, and in historical fiction the actor in fact always risks being
exposed as a misfit because a real historical model haunts the very process of
binding.14 We are left instead with a “body too much,” an actorly body that
potentially obstructs the spectator’s full absorption in a given film’s diegesis.15 In
a superb analysis of Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise (1938), Comolli insists upon
the questionable—or perpetually questioned—status of this body, the actor’s
attendant work, and historiographic significance of the actor’s body. The stentorian
performance style that one might plausibly expect in an historical film from 1938
is jettisoned in favor of the body’s prosaic character and its immersion in
quotidian details throughout La Marseillaise. Furthermore, and perhaps more
importantly, “Pierre Renoir is not content to conceal his own body behind the
supposed body of Louis XVI.” He instead “plays [it] as a problematic, paradoxical
body, strange to itself.”16 Renoir’s film thereby reveals the King’s paradoxical body
in history via this meaningful manner of an actor’s performance: the disintegrating royal body is conspicuously exposed and must vacate its role according
to the dictates of historical necessity. In short, the slow visible dissolution of the
King’s body implicitly figures the historical necessity of his disappearance in the
context of the emerging French Revolution.17
As in so much 1970s film theory, particularly as it relates to performance
and representation, the Brechtian notion of gestus is at the root of Comolli’s
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analysis of acting in “Historical Fiction: A Body Too Much.” According to
Margaret Eddershaw, for Bertolt Brecht gestus simply describes a meaningful
“combination of physical gesture and social attitude.”18 John Willett further
defines gestus as a combination of “gesture and gist, attitude and point: one
aspect of the relation between two people, studied singly, cut to essentials and
physically or verbally expressed.”19 In the terms of this Brechtian prescription,
an actor is to avoid the conventional ruse of his/her complete conversion into
character: gestus “excludes the psychological, the subconscious, [and] the metaphysical unless they can be conveyed in concrete terms.”20 The character is
therefore shown or demonstrated, presented to the spectator, not necessarily
“inhabited” in the manner of Method acting or what is commonly called “realism.” When Pierre Renoir awkwardly adjusts his wig in La Marseillaise, to pick
only one obvious example, we learn something concrete about the King’s attitude and crumbling social position among the soldiers who surround him at this
key moment in the film.
Brecht’s centrality to the first wave of post-’68 film theories can hardly be
overstated. Writing in 1984, John Willett noted that, “theorists of cinema have
devoted enough attention to [Brecht’s] writings and their contemporary implications to make him seem more of a figure in the cinema today than he ever was
in his lifetime.”21 But Brecht’s theoretical musings and practical prescriptions
were invariably inflected through 1970s film theory’s nearly all-encompassing
preoccupation with spectatorship, i.e., with discerning new forms of spectatorial
engagement as an effect of “revolutionary cinema.”22 The “revolution” here was
primarily a formal or formalist one, insofar as certain forms of cinema were said
to engender a state of spectatorial detachment and a concomitantly lucid, critical,
reflective thinking about filmic representation. For 1970s film theorists, determining
the formal means for preventing “identification” or the spectator’s succumbing
to cinema’s ideological illusions was of the utmost concern. “Estrangement,”
“alienation effects,” and “distanciation”: the state of detachment and an attendant
reorientation of critical thought were said to be achieved through formal/stylistic
strategies (be they austere or self-consciously flamboyant and ironic), while the
spectator’s lucid thinking could in turn change his/her relation to the world of
representation.
At first glance, this all seems rather remote from Scorsese’s typical deployment
of actors. Spectatorial detachment and distant critical reflection are apparently less
important to the director than our emotional immersion and involvement with the
characters in his films. Nevertheless, I want to suggest that the broader corporeal dilemma outlined by Comolli—an aesthetic quandary and its various solutions—remains pertinent here and produces a discernibly different accent or tenor
of performance in Scorsese’s recent historical films. This is why we witness Joe
Pesci’s surprisingly garish and cartoonish Nicky Santoro in Casino (1995), Daniel
Day-Lewis’s towering, stentorian Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York (2002), and
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DiCaprio’s pantomimic Howard Hughes in The Aviator. These are performances
that have been scaled and projected in such a manner as to make “the act”—its
frequent sovereignty from realist conventions—plainly observable to the spectator.
Although never solely preoccupied with disrupting the more familiar Hollywood
work of mimesis (though this undoubtedly happens at times), these performances
nonetheless constitute a kind of critical and emotional thought. They compel spectators to watch/think critically and emotionally about the relation of these “acts” to
the historical events in question. In other words, we immediately recognize these
stories as historical fictions, filmic variants of the historical past; yet performance
subtly makes us think new things about the histories on view in these films. How,
we should ask, are these particular acts and events related?
Film theory’s Brechtians customarily tended to valorize either an austere/
minimalist performance style (the somnambulism of Glauber Rocha’s figures, for
instance) or the deliberate artifice and gaudiness of Sirkian-style melodrama to
achieve the goals of “critical thought.” But critical thought in these cases was
largely self-reflexive, a series of demystifying revelations about filmic representation. These kinds of films were said to be (thinking) about themselves, that is,
reflections upon their basic formative means and the latter’s relation to the world
of filmic representation. In the final analysis, the unexpectedly stingy range of
stylistic prescriptions and supposed effects that emerged from 1970s film theory
—the insistently ascetic or the flamboyant and ironically detached—needlessly
narrowed the category of “thinking” films. By contrast, the most intriguing
insights of contemporary film theory have attempted to broaden the classification
of styles as they relate to film’s expressive capacity to reflect upon various
objects and figures. Indeed, the recent reemergence of “film-philosophers” has
been especially productive in opening up said classification. Daniel Frampton,
for instance, has argued that any deployment of film style can be seen as reflective, insofar as it should be understood as a unique form of affective thinking
about what appears in the film frame: “films have a direct affectiveness, and…
filmgoers cannot just perceive style, but perceive a character as thought by the
film, or the landscape as the film thinks it.”23 Much of this recent film theory has
thus aimed “for the complete re-understanding of film as possible poetic thinking
—not just the general elucidation of interesting and active ‘film-thinking’ in
essayistic and abstract film, but the attempt to resituate (and resuscitate) all film
as affective thinking.”24 In many ways, this return to poetics is an intensification
of classic mise en scène criticism. The phenomenology of film spectatorship and
the attendant desire to broaden our classification of “film-thinking” beyond the
purview of self-reflexivity potentially reconnects us to film’s aesthetically formed
expressions of thought—perspectives, and also judgments—about what appears
in the frame. Crucially, this renewed attentiveness to matters of film style has
also compelled us to revisit the ways in which films can enact their own version
of emotions, events, and thoughts.25
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As a key element of film style, performance can be the site for such intentional apprehensions of filmic objects and figures. DiCaprio’s performance in The
Aviator is admittedly quite different from Pierre Renoir’s work in La Marseillaise,
at least as described by Comolli. Comolli implicitly recognizes the latter’s place
in the film’s construction of a theatrical frame wherein the King is subjected to
inquisitive and critical looks, both spectatorial and diegetic.26 Sycophants fill the
frame, crowding the King’s space and transforming each prosaic undertaking into
a public spectacle of ineffectiveness. The actor’s restraint and self-consciousness,
however, turn the King into an object of distant inquisitiveness in this case.
DiCaprio’s emotional exertions and outsized gesticulations, by contrast, compel
us to engage with this figure’s increasingly desperate physical travails; yet the
initial inscrutability of his acts eventually gives way to an understanding of their
ineffectiveness as they relate to the historical events on view in The Aviator.
As per Comolli’s formulation, referentiality recasts the dilemma of the
actor’s burdensome body in The Aviator. The film is filled with impersonations
of historical figures: Cate Blanchett’s mimicry of Katherine Hepburn was excessively admired by some critics; Kate Beckinsale’s (Ava Gardner) and Jude Law’s
(Errol Flynn) cameos were quietly tolerated. But DiCaprio’s work as Howard
Hughes is undoubtedly the film’s focus, and he becomes a key medium for historical meaning as the film unfolds. Most popular reviews of the film reflect upon
Hughes’s destiny as the disheveled, near-mythical recluse of the 1970s.
Stephanie Zacharek, for instance, calls this figure to mind with lifelike precision
in her review of the film: “To anyone who first became aware of Howard Hughes
in the 1970s—who saw artists’ renderings of him as a forlorn-looking mountain
man with tired eyes and spiraling fingernails tough as ponies’ hooves—it seemed
incomprehensible that he had ever made movies, flown planes and dated movie
stars.”27 David Denby offers an equally evocative description of Hughes’s final
incarnation: “the billionaire madman, the taloned hermit of Las Vegas, eating
nothing but steak and peas, and guarding his sealed penthouse in shoes made of
Kleenex boxes—that was the pop-culture lunatic, the haggard face in the tabloids
we knew in the years before his death, in 1976.”28 Yet Zacharek and Denby each
invoke this distraught figure only to insist upon the film’s successful circumvention
of an imposing iconography. For Zacharek, the film is thus a “fine-boned” and
“empathetic” portrait of Hughes’s “youthful vigor,” while Denby describes The
Aviator as a “rehabilitation and celebration” of Hughes’s life. But this can be true
only if one accepts Denby’s characterization of The Aviator as “fantasia.” On this
interpretation, the great, courageous and historically important battle of
Hughes’s life is his self-serving entrepreneurial ambition to free the airline industry
from government regulation. His valedictory at the Senate Hearing’s conclusion is
in this respect nothing less than a celebration of his rather dubious victory, a
final Hollywood volte face and rehabilitation of Denby’s “capitalist prince” as
man of the people.
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The Aviator, however, does not completely efface history in order to pursue
this sort of fantasy. Although the film indulges in a number of predictable departures from factuality, there is also a precise, though fatalistic, idea about history
that informs its treatment of the historical actor.29 True, after its prologue the film
is quickly thrown into the hustle and bustle of late twenties Hollywood, a world
of movie stars and comely cigarette girls who answer to Hughes’s every bidding.
Affectionately rendered in a digital simulation of two-strip Technicolor, The
Aviator’s first hour is composed of vertiginous flying sequences and Hollywood
parties, lavish film premieres and various engineering breakthroughs.30 Located
at the intersection of Hollywood’s Golden Age and sundry advances in aviation
technology, Hughes’s early years in Hollywood emerge as the adventures of a
filmmaking boy wonder: the bad and the dutiful, all captured on a studio set of
Hughes’s own conjuring and projected desires.
But The Aviator shifts gears during Hughes’s September 1935 aviation speed
trial. Locked in the plane’s narrow cockpit, Hughes’s dizzying removal from the
world truncates and constrains his body, seemingly transferring his volition to the
machinery that he and his team of engineers have constructed. Having broken the
speed record, Hughes’s plane runs out of fuel and plunges inexorably back to the
ground, eventually crashing into a beet field. He is slightly wounded in the accident,
though the nature of his injuries remains ambiguous: he is not bleeding (“it’s beet
juice,” he drawls), and his physical relation to events is clouded by his sudden
confession to a fear of ultimately going mad. Here, in one of The Aviator’s periodic
bathroom metamorphoses, Katherine Hepburn explains the precarious nature of
Hughes’s new status as an actor in history. Public exposure invites the world to
exert its will, she suggests; and Hughes’s act will therefore encounter increasing
resistance, or he will suffer the final indignity of being erased altogether.
Unsurprisingly, Hughes’s record-breaking four-day flight around the
world—an act of historical consequence—immediately follows Hepburn’s warning
and again projects him from the bathroom’s stillness into tumult. But we encounter
this epochal event in only the briefest glimpses of black-and-white newsreel
footage, we hear about it from the disembodied voice of a radio announcer, and
we witness the flight’s rapid de-realization in the form of a crudely drawn map of
its trajectory. In short, the event plainly takes on a shrunken, perfunctory character
and is strangely removed from other events in the film. Instead, the image of
historical event and actor is almost entirely replaced by images of those who
secretly conspire against Hughes. Pan Am Airlines’ Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin),
having listened to an account of Hughes’s exploits on the radio, stands and walks
slowly to a model of the globe which Hughes has just physically circumnavigated,
measures a short distance between his two thumbs and essentially rubs out the
event’s scale and import (fig. 1). In this film’s account of biographical history,
the subject’s acts will invariably come to seem strangely insignificant in the face
of those spectral forces working against him.
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Fig. 1. Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin) measures flight paths on a globe after having learned of
Hughes’s flying exploits in The Aviator (2004).
This retrospective questioning of the actor’s efficacy in historical situations
is The Aviator’s most provocative historiographic strategy, its most unsettling
thought about the unfolding of history. Indeed, the amplification of Hughes’s
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) embodies the film’s boldest thinking
about history.31 The actor’s performance, or rather his pantomime of distress—
contorted gestures of the hands, blinking eyes, furrowed brow, and nervous
cough—produces a geometry of agonizing disconnections over the course of the
film: this figure simply cannot convincingly impose himself upon the world.
During the exorbitant production of the Hercules, Hughes for the first time loses
control of his speech, robotically demanding to see the blueprints; yet before
clasping his hands to his mouth in this state of rising panic, he first stabs at the
air repeatedly, quickly pressing his thumb and index finger together but reaching
for nothing in particular. The apparent futility of his gestures at this moment is,
however, less compelling than the manner in which the film empties them of any
conventional, that is to say, “individual,” implications. His finger pointing, for
example, is neither pontificating nor threatening. It demonstrates nothing about
Hughes’s psyche per se, but instead measures the distance, in widening increments
with every motion of the hand, between the actor and historical world (fig. 2).
Moreover, the figure is effectively turned away from us at several critical
moments during Hughes’s collapse. As a consequence, his gestures are tellingly
disconnected from any sense of affect that might have been drawn from his face.
Persistent, uncontrolled and chaotic, sometimes dropping out of the frame altogether, gesture evidently assumes a sheer independence at this moment: the
film’s dramatic deployment of style here appears less motivated by the character’s
interiority than his increasingly obscure relation to events within and around the
frame. And although the subterfuge of OCD may be meant to explain the elimination of volition during Hughes’s breakdown, these acts are better understood
in relation to the film’s decidedly fatalistic conception of history. In short, Hughes’s
sense of gestural disorder is less the product of interior or psychological states in
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Fig. 2. Gesture is increasingly disconnected from Howard Hughes’s will in The Aviator
(Leonardo DiCaprio, back to camera).
The Aviator than a manifestation of history at work on this unresolved figure.
In his discussion of the gestural sphere’s mutations in history, Giorgio
Agamben describes Tourette’s syndrome in terms that are equally valid for
DiCaprio’s pantomimic invocation of agony in The Aviator: “if [the patient] manages to initiate a movement, it is interrupted and sent awry by uncontrollable
jerkings and shudderings whereby the muscles seem to dance (chorea) quite
independently of any motor purpose.”32 Significantly, like Walter Benjamin before
him, Agamben generalizes what appears to be a private gestural failure—a “catastrophe of the gestural sphere,” he calls it—and explains it as an effect of the
historical world.33 According to this formulation, the fragmentary and calamitous
nature of gestures is in fact the effect of a crisis, or the experience of an historical
crisis: gestures are uncontrollable precisely because the source of their initiation
is not the subject, but rather, diverse mutations in the historical world.34
The Aviator examines this same historical world of modernity and its mutations in the first half of the twentieth century. Recreating the period’s elaborate
mise en scène is in fact one of the film’s principal pleasures: this is the world of a
Lindberg-like Hughes, complete with trans-Atlantic flights and industrial
American cities, nightclubs, swing bands, and Hollywood, an American modernity rendered in two- and three-strip Technicolor. But the film’s creation of
decorative scenes in the form of Art-Deco architecture and design is tellingly
combined with dark intimations of a cutthroat business competition that reaches
to the highest offices of political power. These are the devious, non-visible innards
of a glowing Technicolor modern life in America. And although the historical world’s
physical appearance inevitably changes during the immediate post-WWII moment
of the film’s conclusion, the conspiratorial nature of its economics and politics only
increases. In The Aviator, Hughes’s business is conducted as a clandestine movement of large amounts of money in order to secure shady war contracts and public
flying routes. Complex business transactions are thereby simplified throughout
the film; they emerge as a form of magic: spur-of-the-moment decisions with
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Fig. 3. Howard Hughes’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) silent immobility in The Aviator.
wide-reaching consequences barely discerned by the principal actors involved.
Yet this entrepreneurial occult is precisely what comes back to haunt The
Aviator’s Howard Hughes. The peculiar realities and dynamics of capitalist enterprise remain largely invisible, effaced by the film to a significant degree. They
return, however, in the form of the submission of this figure to a gestural disaster.
Hughes is perpetually swatting at the air, pointing, blinking, and recoiling from
something, and the world’s apparently malicious volition returns to haunt his
every undecided move. Inscrutable forces act upon Hughes throughout the film,
and his outsized OCD is an indirect, demonstrative manifestation of this action.
Because Hughes risks his own money in these huge business ventures, Paul
A. Cantor sees The Aviator as a rather transparent endorsement of the libertarian
entrepreneurial ethos.35 The problem with this otherwise illuminating interpretation, however, is that we are never made to understand anything concrete about
Hughes’s business practice: it remains conspicuously out of sight for the entirety
of the film, obliquely rendered as a series of comically barked commands and
hearsay. Hughes’s increasingly prominent gestural dilemma is better understood
as the visible effect of an otherwise clandestine modern business occult and the
manner in which it haunts an unsuspecting historical actor. In this respect, the
critical placement of gestural crises next to historical events can be seen to take on
a discernibly different meaning as the film unfolds. Hughes’s Hercules breakdown is
promptly followed by the spectacular crash of the XF-11, a violent manifestation
of the earlier sequence’s threats in the form of an historical event. If Hughes’s gestures are disconnected from affect and volition, the physical world as a result takes
on a furious animation in the form of these historical events. Hughes and the
historical world become increasingly discontinuous elements in the frame as
the film progresses. And as his public act unravels, he is overwhelmed by what
appears to be—to him and to us—the world’s strangely malevolent volition.
Towels, door handles, dirty lapels, and others: everything conspires to expose the
inefficacy of each act (fig. 3).
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As Hughes’s public adventures come to be erased by the debacle of gestures
that defines his private existence, the “way of the future”—his final words—is
no way at all. The character irremediably deflates, and it is precisely at the
moment of his disintegration that an historical referent, namely, the
recluse/madman of 1970s pop culture lore, is most strongly evoked and felt.
This is what he must become. There is no “mastery over the Fates” in this historical scenario but only an irreversible defeat: disintegration as destiny.36 In the
end, The Aviator traps Hughes in its fatalistic vision of the past because it has
imagined modern history as little more than the compulsive recapitulation of
futile gestures.
FEELING YOURSELF DISINTEGRATE: SCORSESE’S RELICS IN MOVING
TABLEAUX
The Aviator has found in Howard Hughes a perfect vehicle for examining the dissociation of historical acts from their efficacy, thereby circumventing the biopic’s
too frequent tendency to valorize individual actors as causes in its conceptualization of the historical past. The film’s fictionalization of Hughes’s outsized
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder expands what appears to be a mere character
attribute and re-figures it in terms of an emphatically fatalistic account of history:
while presumably an effect of his mania, the disorderly state of gestures is in fact
made to emerge from broader, diverse mutations in the historical world of
wartime capitalism. That is, the origin of the gestural catastrophe is implicitly
located outside of this figure and in the historical world’s decorative Art-Deco
reality, a reality haunted by the devious substratum of capitalist economic/political
power. This is the world in which The Aviator’s Howard Hughes eventually loses
himself. Hughes’s business practice, I argued above, is actually conducted as a
conspiratorial, clandestine movement of large amounts of money, but this
ultimately emerges as a kind of entrepreneurial sleight of hand: invariably surreptitious, the wide-ranging effects of these acts are typically unknown to the
film’s main historical actor. His physical distress is in turn the most striking evidence
of this otherwise invisible aspect of the historical world’s existence and effects.
According to the dictates of The Aviator’s outline of a dark historical destiny,
Hughes has no choice but to retreat into the complete immobility of his mania
after the forces of history have defeated him.
The inevitable fossilization of historical actors is an important emblem in
Scorsese’s pessimistic historical works and their rendering of accounts of the
past: Bill and Amsterdam, partially buried during the Union warship’s bombing
of the Five Points in Gangs of New York (fig. 4); Nicky Santoro mortified in a
shallow grave at Casino’s conclusion (fig. 5); and Howard Hughes, scorched,
immobile, and caked in blood and ashes in the immediate aftermath of his crashing
of the XF-11 in The Aviator (fig. 6).37
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Figure
meneg
Figure
meneg
Fig. 4. The figure as fossil in Gangs of New York (2002). Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis)
and Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio) partially covered in dirt and ash.
Figure
meneg
Figure
meneg
Figure
meneg
Figure
meneg
Fig. 5. Casino’s (1995) Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) in a shallow grave.
Fig. 6. The Aviator’s Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) after crashing the XF-11.
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The fossilized figure is a durable symbol for a past rendered visible by the
filmmaker’s imaginative re-castings. But it also directs us to the actor’s import in
the films’ broadly conceived historiographies, that is, the manner in which these
re-castings ask us to attend to filmic historical accounts, finally provoking our
intuitions about the meaning of these particular acts in history. In her summary
of contemporary film theory’s most compelling insights, Nicole Brenez has highlighted this potentially enigmatic, but illuminating, relation between bodies and
history. Theory today, she writes, has returned to the following kinds of “primitive questions” about the film body:
What texture is it (flesh, marble, plaster, affect, doxa)? What is its framework (skeleton, semblance, becoming, a structure of formlessness)?
What destroys it (the other, history, deforming its contours)? What kind of
community does [sic] its gestures allow it to envision (people, collectivity,
alignment with the same)?38
The body’s destruction by history is an admittedly abstract notion, and strictly
speaking Hughes’s body is not destroyed in The Aviator; but the crises it is made
to endure have their cause in the historical world’s pitiless metamorphoses,
while Hughes’s “way of the future” must surely represent a figurative death of
some kind. As we’ve seen, The Aviator is invariably marked by this imaginative
fixation upon the fraught experience of its principal historical actor. More than
mere portraiture or biography, the film puts its historical figure into play, onto a
disorienting stage, and we are compelled as a consequence to attend to its unresolved relation to wartime history and its devious capitalist stratagems accordingly.
The eventual dispossession of self constitutes a pessimistic investigation into the
nature of the subject’s experience in this history. Yet a unique, speculative form
of historical insight escapes us if we fail to produce critical characterizations of
the film’s central performance and its special place in this historical account.
Attending to—and apprehending—the embodiment of this affective thinking
about the past in The Aviator is less a “danger” (Guynn) in this respect than a
key to our comprehension of the film’s historiography.
NOTES
1.
William Guynn, Writing History in Film (New York: Routledge, 2006), 92-4.
2.
Ibid, 94 (my emphasis).
3.
Ibid, 92.
4.
William Goldman offers an especially cantankerous review of Gangs of New York’s shortcomings as narrative. He is in part responding, understandably, to Miramax’s Oscar campaign of intimidation on the film’s behalf, but he nonetheless articulates a common
complaint amongst Hollywood traditionalists: Scorsese’s films too often abandon a sturdy narrative structure. William Goldman, “Crashing the Party for Poor Marty,” Variety
389.11 (3-9 February, 2003): 6-7.
5.
Robert Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History
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(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 57.
6.
Yvette Biro, Profane Mythology: The Savage Mind of the Cinema, trans. Imre Goldstein
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 53.
7.
This is not to discount the importance of stardom in our engagement with figures on the
screen. Leonardo DiCaprio’s public persona—young entrepreneur, precocious Hollywood
player, etc.—surely overlaps with The Aviator’s Howard Hughes in significant ways. The
Aviator and Gangs of New York also occasionally make sardonic allusions to DiCaprio’s
most famous role in Titanic (James Cameron, 1997), and one might even see distant
traces of his tic-filled work in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (Lasse Hallström, 1993) when
viewing his pantomimic convulsions in The Aviator.
8.
Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 38.
9.
David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 55.
10.
These private “chambered interludes of domestic intimacy,” Geoffrey O’Brien writes, are
somehow meant “to reveal the moods and motives behind the public spectacle.”
Geoffrey O’Brien, “Machine Dreams,” Film Comment (January-February 2005): 22-25.
11.
Scorsese’s historical works are all highly mannered, in this respect. Miramax’s complaint
that the director’s recent films are “cold” likely derives from this sense that everything is
on display. See Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the
Rise of Independent Film (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2004), 465.
12.
By “theatrical,” I am referring to the scene’s staging and representation. See Ben
Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theater to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature
Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 10.
13.
Jean-Louis Comolli, “Historical Fiction: A Body Too Much,” trans. Ben Brewster, Screen
19.2 (Summer 1978): 41-54.
14.
There is always a ghost that haunts an actor’s performance, of course, even in fiction
films. In these cases, however, it is not the historical referent that haunts our film viewing,
but the specter of other performances and our memories of those performances. Fiction
cannot circumvent the actor’s body, in this respect. Or, to put it slightly differently, the
body is not an immediate fiction, though it may be thrown into the deliberate fictionality
of a film’s mise en scène. Consequently, it is always subject to a potential dispersal across
various films or roles and may return to haunt the spectator in new viewing contexts. For
an illuminating discussion of these matters, see George Kouvaros, Where Does It Happen?
John Cassavetes and Cinema at the Breaking Point (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2004), 169. See also Lesley Stern, The Scorsese Connection (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995), 202.
15.
Comolli, 44.
16.
Ibid, 49-50.
17.
Dudley Andrew summarizes Renoir’s accomplishment as an historian in the following
terms: revolts “are willed by heroes and martyrs who make history, but the Revolution is a
name for history itself, history passing through innumerable and anonymous agents who
accept the moral pressure it exerts.” See Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar, Popular Front
Paris and the Poetics of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 151-2.
18.
Margaret Eddershaw, “Actors on Brecht,” in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, ed.
Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 256.
19.
John Willett, The Theater of Bertolt Brecht: A Study From Eight Aspects (New York:
Methuen, 1977), 173.
20.
Ibid.
21.
John Willett, Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches (New York: Methuen, 1984),
108.
22.
Ben Brewster and Colin MacCabe, “Editorial: Brecht and a Revolutionary Cinema?”
Screen 15.2 (Summer 1974): 4.
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23.
Frampton, 106.
24.
Ibid, 172 (emphasis in original).
25.
This is especially useful to our analyses of historical films. The facts matter, of course. But
evaluations of an historical film’s representation of the facts have too frequently relied
upon plot summary alone. Ginette Vincendeau puts it in the following way in her review
of Natalie Zemon Davis’s Slaves on Screen: “Davis’s method… consists in comparing
each film in turn with the ‘real’ events and, unsurprisingly, the film’s shortcomings are
exposed: simplifications, omissions, inventions, in short, betrayals… Davis’s analysis…
remains on the level of explicit content and narrative (each chapter contains lengthy plot
commentaries) rather than symbolism and, crucially, cinematography and mise-en-scène.”
See Ginette Vincendeau, “Let Films be Films,” Perspectives 39.6 (September 2001),
http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/issues/2001/0109/index.cfm (accessed 18
December 2007).
26.
On this notion of a “theatrical frame,” see James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, (Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 22-23.
27.
Stephanie Zacharek, “The Aviator,” Salon, 17 December 2004,
http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/movies/review/2004/12/17/aviator/index.html (accessed
3 March 2008).
28.
David Denby, “High Rollers,” The New Yorker, 20 December 2004, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/12/20/041220crci_cinema (accessed 3 March 2008).
29.
David T. Courtwright exposes a few of these errors, but nevertheless lauds the film’s
treatment of early aviation history. See David T. Courtwright, “Movie Reviews: The
Aviator,” The Journal of American History 92.3 (2004): 1092.
30.
See Michael Goldman for a detailed account of the film’s digital recreation of two- and
three-strip Technicolor processes. Michael Goldman, “Scorsese’s Color Homage,”
Millimeter 33.1 (January 2005): 14. See also Christine Sprengler, Screening Nostalgia:
Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary American Film (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2009), 139-161.
31.
In its broad outlines Hughes’s OCD is a real detail, though it has clearly been conceived
according to our own contemporary clichés about OCD. It is thus in part “fictionalized,”
insofar as the deliberate amplification of Hughes’s condition is inconsistent with most
accounts of this early period in his life. For an account of Hughes’s life, see Peter Harry
Brown and Pat H. Broeske, Howard Hughes: The Untold Story (New York: Dutton, 1996).
See also Richard Hack, Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters: The Definitive
Biography of the First American Billionaire (Beverly Hills: New Millennium Press, 2001).
32.
Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron
(New York: Verso, 1993), 136.
33.
Ibid.
34.
The fragmentation of gesture is a recurring theme in Benjamin’s work. See Susan BuckMorss, who cites the following passage from Benjamin’s notes to the “Work of Art”
essay: “Every single one of [Chaplin’s] movements is put together from a series of
hacked up pieces of motion. Whether one focuses on his walk, on the way [he] handles
his cane, or tips his hat–it is always the same jerky sequence of the smallest motions
which raises the law of the filmic sequence of images to that of human motor actions.”
Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 269-70.
35.
Paul A. Cantor, “Flying Solo: The Aviator and Libertarian Philosophy,” The Philosophy of
Martin Scorsese, ed. Mark T. Conrad (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2007).
36.
Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard: “Action is consolatory…. Only in the
conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over the Fates.” This kind of consolation is precisely what the film denies to Hughes. Cited in Ross Gibson, “Acting and
Breathing,” in Falling For You: Essays on Cinema and Performance, ed. Lesley Stern and
George Kouvaros (Sydney: Power Publications, 1999), 37.
scope,
oute
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37.
For François Bégaudeau, these films move “ahead rapidly and skim over [their] subject,
surveying it from an aerial perspective,” and this imperial regard essentially constitutes a
broader strategy for avoiding reality, history, and responsibility. But on the contrary, history
in these works is always a matter of falling rather than flying or escaping, of bodies failing and then falling into the subsoil. See François Bégaudeau, “Scorsese, a New
Overview,” Cahiers du cinema, trans. Sally Shafto (March 2005): 80-82.
38.
Nicole Brenez, “The Ultimate Journey: Remarks on Contemporary Theory,” Screening the Past,
22 December 1997, http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/reruns/brenez.html
(accessed 8 March 2009).
MICHAEL MENEGHETTI is an Assistant Professor in the Department of
Communication, Popular Culture and Film at Brock University.
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