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Synthetic Cinema
The 21st-Century
Movie Machine
Synthetic Cinema
 Wheeler Winston Dixon

Synthetic Cinema
The 21st-Century Movie Machine
Wheeler Winston Dixon
Department of English
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Lincoln, NE, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-12570-7 ISBN 978-3-030-12571-4 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12571-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930711

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan

This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgements

Brief portions of this text originally appeared in Quarterly Review of

Film and Video, in the articles “Synthetic Cinema: Mainstream Movies
in the 21st Century,” “‘Service Providers’: Genre Cinema in the 21st
Century,” “Kelly Reichardt—Working Against the Grain,” and “Slaves of
Vision: The Virtual Reality World of Oculus Rift.” My sincere thanks to
David Sterritt, editor of QRFV, for permission to include these materi-
als here. I also want to thank Linda Lotz for a superb copyediting job
and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster for her continued support and advice in
all my work. My additional thanks to Anna-Marie Larsen for her help
with the manuscript in its final stages. This particular book is dedicated
to Michael Thomas Downey, who has been a friend and colleague since
the late 1960s, and whose own tastes as a cineaste are very much in line
with my own.

v
 Contents

1 Synthetic Cinema: Leaving the Real World 1

2 Service Providers: Form Over Content 25

3 Slaves of Vision: The VR World 41

4 The 21st-Century Movie Machine 55

Works Cited 77

Index 83

vii
 CHAPTER 1

Synthetic Cinema: Leaving the Real World

Abstract What precisely is “synthetic cinema”? It’s filmmaking that’s

motivated by the profit motive alone, devoid of any genuine artistry,
designed solely to make money. When digital cinema first appeared,
computer-generated effects were already a reality, although they were
used sparingly in fantasy, action, and adventure films, and practical cin-
ematography—shot on actual film, of course—was still the norm for
mainstream cinema. But with the shift to digital cinematography and
the rise of comic book cinema, the temptation to amp up the proceed-
ings with lavish computer-generated spectacle proved irresistible to both
directors and audiences, to the point that we are now so far removed
from the real that I would posit we have entered a new age of movies—
the era of synthetic cinema.

Keywords Digital cinema · CGI · Artificial imagery · Special effects ·

Realism

From 1984 until his death at the age of 89 in 2007, Freddie Francis,
the two-time Academy Award–winning cinematographer and director
(for Jack Cardiff’s Sons and Lovers [1960] and Edward Zwick’s Glory
[1989]), was a dear friend of mine. Indeed, I wrote a book about him
in 1991, appropriately titled The Films of Freddie Francis, which is really
more of a book-length interview, as Freddie and his wife Pamela gener-
ously invited me into their home for a marathon Q&A session that lasted

© The Author(s) 2019 1

W. W. Dixon, Synthetic Cinema,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12571-4_1
2 W. W. DIXON

nearly twelve hours, covering his entire career as both cinematographer

and director.
During the course of the session, the name of David Lynch came up.
It’s no secret that Francis had by that time become typecast as a hor-
ror director because of his long association with Hammer Productions
beginning with the film Paranoiac (1962), and from 1961 to 1969 he
worked in Gothic cinema with a high degree of success, particularly with
such films as Nightmare (1964) and The Skull (1965). But by the time
he was drafted by producer Herman Cohen to direct Joan Crawford’s
last film, the abysmal Trog (1970)—during which Crawford couldn’t
remember her lines, so they were chalked on to a series of huge mov-
ing blackboards, which you can actually hear being moved about on the
soundtrack—Francis was sick of directing horror films and longed for a
return to cinematography.
In the 1970s, Francis was forced to continue directing films and epi-
sodes of television series he had no interest in simply to pay his bills,
and by 1980, he hadn’t actually shot a film since Karel Reisz’s remake
of Night Must Fall in 1964. Indeed, he was in a creative and personal
slump and needed to work with someone new and imaginative. That’s
when David Lynch came calling. Lynch was a great admirer of Francis’s
work in black and white—his best work, in my opinion—and he wanted
Freddie to shoot The Elephant Man (1980), Lynch’s first real feature.
Initially counseled not to hire Francis, who hadn’t been a DP for six-
teen years, Lynch decided to ignore that advice, and the second act of
Francis’s career was launched—for, of course, the film was spectacularly
successful.
During the shooting of The Elephant Man, Francis and Lynch worked
more or less as collaborators, arguing about setups and lighting strategies
but always coming to a shared approach that satisfied both men. Francis,
a strong and forceful personality, also helped Lynch when the film’s
star, Anthony Hopkins, took a dislike to Lynch. Freddie intervened and
smoothed things out between them (Dixon 144). However, with the
success of The Elephant Man, Lynch was able to write his own ticket and
launched an extremely ambitious project, the science-fiction film Dune
(1984), based on Frank Herbert’s novel. This time, things did not go as
smoothly. As Francis told me:

That was my last special effects film, because I hate them. Let’s take
Elephant Man. David Lynch and I would go on the set in the morning
 1 SYNTHETIC CINEMA: LEAVING THE REAL WORLD 3

and we’d talk about how we were going to shoot it. We’d shoot it, and at
the end of the day we’d say, “That’s the stuff that’s going in the movie.”
[Because of the film’s extensive use of blue screen], an awful lot of Dune
would go on, and we’d shoot some people in foreground, and you’d come
off and say, “Well, I wonder what it’s going to look like when it comes
out in the movie?” I don’t like that. From my point of view I find it very
uncreative … I’ve never said this to David, but I sometimes wish I had said
a little bit more … had Dune been Elephant Man, our first film together,
I would have interfered more, and I often feel slightly guilty about that …
so our relationship was slightly different from this aspect. And also David
is the last person in the world to be tied down to a storyboard [which was
necessitated by the high number of process shots in the film]. That’s not
David’s strength at all. (Dixon 150, 152)

And indeed, their relationship was altered, for although The Elephant
Man decisively resuscitated Francis’s career, it wasn’t until 1999 that he
teamed with Lynch again on what would be their last film together, the
gently elegiac The Straight Story (1999). I was lucky enough to be on
the set for the last day of shooting—the film was shot in something like
18 days on location in Iowa—and Francis, though not well, was bus-
ily supervising three separate crews for second unit work. Meanwhile,
Lynch worked with the film’s star, Richard Farnsworth, playing real-life
aging farmer Alvin Straight, who drives a sit-down lawn mower across
several states—Alvin has no driver’s license—to reach his estranged
brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton).
Most of The Straight Story was shot using natural sunlight, with reflec-
tors, and as with The Elephant Man, at the end of each day, Lynch and
Francis could agree “that’s the stuff that’s going in the movie.” The film
takes every opportunity to present the world as it really is, bathed in sun-
light and shadow, and it is pretty much straight from the camera, with
only a few optical effects—mostly dissolves and fades. Nighttime lighting
for the film was equally utilitarian, using “practical” on-the-set lighting—
Coleman lamps, bare light bulbs, and the like—so that the finished film
has a real connection to the actual world and is presented more or less as
a compressed documentary of Alvin’s journey.
During the filming of The Straight Story, Francis told me this would
be his last film as a director of cinematography; from then on, he would
do commercials and “what they laughingly call master classes” at uni-
versities. The world of the cinema was changing into something more
plastic, less authentic, more processed, and Francis didn’t like it one bit.
4 W. W. DIXON

If one looks at Francis’s work in the Civil War saga Glory, which is a
much less successful effort than The Straight Story, one can again see
Francis stripping things down, making the images as clear and direct
as he can, using natural light whenever possible, to create an authen-
tic vision of the time and place for contemporary viewers. But with the
dawn of the special effects era, Francis decided it was time to call it a day.
And this was well before the fully digital era, which both of us could
nevertheless see clearly on the horizon. In 1999, computer-generated
effects were already a reality, although they were used sparingly in fan-
tasy, action, and adventure films, and practical cinematography—shot
on actual film, of course—was still the norm for mainstream cinema.
But with the shift to digital cinematography and the rise of comic book
cinema, the temptation to amp up the proceedings with lavish comput-
er-generated spectacle proved irresistible to both directors and audiences,
to the point that we are now so far removed from the real that I would
posit we have entered a new age of movies—the era of synthetic cinema.
What precisely is “synthetic cinema”? It’s filmmaking that’s moti-
vated by the profit motive alone, devoid of any genuine artistry, designed
solely to make money. Going back to the dawn of cinema, one might
cite Alfred Clark’s The Execution of Mary Stuart (1895), made for the
Thomas A. Edison, Inc, as perhaps the first truly synthetic film, contain-
ing as it does the “special effect” of Mary, Queen of Scots’ severed head
(actually the head of a “bloodied” mannequin) triumphantly held up by
the executioner before the camera at the film’s conclusion, thus creating
perhaps one of the first splatter films. The Execution of Mary Stuart runs
a mere 18 seconds in length, but the major point I wish to make here is
that no discernable artistry is involved; it’s simply a commercial enter-
tainment designed to shock and titillate the public.
On the other hand, a film like Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon
(1902) displays considerable artistry, thought, and imagination, and
though it, too, is a commercial proposition, it’s clear that a great deal
of thought went into the settings, the costumes, the acting, and the
special effects. One would be hard pressed to find a film more divorced
from reality than A Trip to the Moon, with its obviously artificial sets,
heavy reliance on camera trickery, and a sense of fantasy that is entirely
removed from the real. But for all its counterfeit imagery—indeed, there
isn’t a single scene in the film that isn’t obviously the work of stage
craft—the film is more than just a grab for cash; it’s the work of a ded-
icated artist, whose films, incidentally, were almost immediately pirated
 1 SYNTHETIC CINEMA: LEAVING THE REAL WORLD 5

for American audiences by Thomas Edison. And thus there’s a reality, a

humanity to the film that Edison’s work lacks.
Sadly, Méliès, for all his skill behind the camera, was such a poor busi-
nessman that his films were eventually melted down for their residual sil-
ver content when Méliès was unable to pay the storage fees for his work,
and ironically, survive only because of the pirated copies made by Edison
and others. And then, of course, there were two early filmmakers who
utterly embraced the real, Louis and Auguste Lumière, who made nearly
a thousand one minute “actualities”—short films of everyday life at the
turn of the century, such as Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, Horse
Trick Riders, Baby’s Breakfast (all 1895), giving us a vision of the past in
one-shot, unadorned films that captured the authenticity of nineteenth
century life. Famously, the Lumières declared that the cinema was “an
invention without a future”—if only they could see the uses it’s being
put to now.
Thus, the dynamic tension in film between artistry and commerce
was established from the outset. Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz
(1939) exists almost entirely in a phantom zone—not even the Kansas
scenes in the beginning of the film have any claim on authentic signifi-
cation—but again, Fleming, working with uncredited co-directors King
Vidor, George Cukor, Richard Thorpe and Norman Taurog, created a
film that is at once transcendent as it is wholly artificial—a commercial
film that has a personal, collective vision, though it emerged from the
realm of perhaps the most corporate studio in classical Hollywood his-
tory, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Navigating through twentieth century cinema with an eye to the
“real” becomes something like the project undertaken by the Canadian
art collective The N.E. Thing Company, created by Iain and Ingrid
Baxter. Starting in 1966 (the collective disbanded in 1978), the two
artists created fictional office, home and other interior locations as art
installations, tagging each item within—a telephone, a refrigerator, a
desk, a painting, a motorcycle and other objects—with one of two clas-
sifications: ACT (for “Aesthetically Certified Thing”) and ART (for
“Aesthetically Rejected Thing”).
I was lucky enough to witness one of their more spectacular instal-
lations in Toronto in 1969, and as I wandered through the gallery,
which included row after row of desks with “secretaries” typing mean-
ingless letters as part of the installation, I remember thinking how the
very act of labeling all these seemingly utilitarian items was anything but
6 W. W. DIXON

capricious; it was an act of selection. A telephone could be functional,

but also have aesthetic beauty and reality, as could a chair, a desk, or even
a refrigerator. Thus, they were ACT projects. But other items—a cheap
plastic wastebasket, a tacky dress made out of Nylon, a vinyl tablecloth—
didn’t make the cut. They were ART projects, possessing no qualities
other than basic functionality. Aesthetic choices, then, were not only
desirable, they were necessary; these categories opened up the world to
a whole new way of seeing the world, and the objects that inhabited it
(Baxter and Baxter).
So while a film like William Asher’s Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) might
seem to be an “Aesthetically Rejected Thing,” Asher’s personal con-
nection to the material (he was one of the first surfers in California in
the 1950s) and a great deal of location shooting makes the film a candi-
date for being an “ACT” piece. Conversely, nearly all of the many films
that director William Beaudine made for the threadbare film company
Monogram Pictures, such as Voodoo Man (1944), fall decisively into the
“ART” category, since there’s no interest on the part of the actors, the
set designers, the screenwriters, and especially the director to do any-
thing more than get a film of 70 minutes in length completed in a six
day schedule—there’s only money considered here.
Budget itself is not a factor in sorting out the real from the artificial;
Edgar G. Ulmer’s “Poverty Row” film for the small company Producers
Releasing Corporation, Detour (1945), shot in a matter of days on
a budget that reportedly varies from a low of $20,000 to a “high” of
$100,000, is such an authentic vision of American Hell that in 1992 it
was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry
by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aestheti-
cally significant”—so it’s definitely an ACT project. Henry Koster’s The
Robe (1953), on the other hand, a Biblical spectacle made solely to intro-
duce the then-new process of CinemaScope to the public, is acted, writ-
ten and directed with such a distinct lack of conviction or style that it
clearly falls into the ART category.
The list goes on, but in addition to recognizing that films are either
constructed for artistic purposes, in whole or in part, or solely for finan-
cial reasons, for most of the twentieth century there was also a hierar-
chy of films created by budgetary and production constraints; “A” and
“B” films, the top and bottom half of the double bill, films that were
designed for specific audiences. Romances for women viewers, action
films for men, “family” films which could be either dramas or comedies
 1 SYNTHETIC CINEMA: LEAVING THE REAL WORLD 7

designed to appeal to all age groups (remembering that for most of

the twentieth century, theatrical movie going was the primary method
of filmic consumption), and films designed especially for children; the
Saturday morning serials.
The serials, made by three of the major Hollywood studios, and per-
fected by Republic Pictures in the late 1930s, were chapter plays that
revolved around non-stop action and violence, often based on super-
hero figures, such as Captain Marvel, now a DC comics property, who
first appeared in John English and William Witney’s The Adventures of
Captain Marvel in 1941. Serials usually had 15 or 12 chapters, with the
first installment usually running about a half an hour, and subsequent
chapters clocking in at 20 minutes or so. Republic made their films
quickly and inexpensively, spending 30 days at most on a project, which
in complete form would have a running time of more than three hours
(in the case of The Adventures of Captain Marvel, 12 chapters in length,
for a total run time of 216 minutes). Budgets hovered in the $100,000
to $200,000 range.
More than anything else, these serials define the present moment
in American commercial cinema; comic book entertainment with no
other goal than to stun audiences with spectacle, violence, and non-stop
action sequences. While Republic excelled at the genre, Columbia and
Universal also tried their hand at serials, often using comic book char-
acters for their protagonists. Thus we have the beginnings of modern
superhero cinema. Lambert Hillyer’s Batman (1943), Spencer Gordon
Bennet’s Batman and Robin (1949), Bennet and Thomas Carr’s
Superman (1948), Bennet’s Atom Man vs. Superman (1950), Sam
Nelson and Norman Dening’s Mandrake the Magician (1939), James
W. Horne’s Captain Midnight (1942), B. Reeves “Breezy” Eason’s
The Phantom (1943), Ray Taylor and Alan James’ Dick Tracy (1937),
William Witney’s Spy Smasher (1942), and most prominently the three
Flash Gordon serials—Frederick Stephani’s Flash Gordon (1936), Flash
Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938) and Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe
(1940)—along with Ford Beebe and Saul A. Goodkind’s Buck Rogers
(1939), created a lasting template for the superhero comic book film of
today. But one should remember that, however well crafted they were,
serials were genre entertainments made exclusively for children.
Serials ran on Saturday mornings at theaters, along with cartoons, per-
haps a travelogue, and a low budget horror or science fiction film, or
perhaps a western, but they were never meant as the main attraction in
8 W. W. DIXON

theaters, and were generally regarded as being the bottom rung of

the motion picture business, with serial chapters rented out as cheaply
as $15 a week to exhibitors, and confined solely to weekend matinees.
They were made to make money, nothing more, and though one might
admire the craftsmanship of the editing, or the choreography of the
action sequences, at their center, the world of serials is absolutely empty.
Thus they are ART projects, rather than ACT projects.
During the week, Monday through Friday, more serious, adult fare
was on display at theaters, especially in major cities, where such classic
films as Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), Gene Kelly and Stanley
Donen’s Singin’ in the Rain (1952), Sir Carol Reed’s The Third Man
(1949), Elia Kazan’s On The Waterfront (1954), Sidney Lumet’s 12
Angry Men (1957) could be seen, to say nothing of such excellent for-
eign films as Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), Akira Kurosawa’s
Seven Samurai (1954), Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957),
Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953) and other films too
numerous to mention here.
So this was adult cinema, and then, on weekends, there were comic
book serials for the children. No one expected children to attend a
screening of The Seventh Seal; and no one expected an adult to attend a
screening of the original Flash Gordon serial, except perhaps to accom-
pany a minor to the theater. And, of course, there’s nothing really wrong
about putting your mind in neutral and watching escapist entertainment
once in a while, just so long as it doesn’t become the main course. But
that’s precisely what has happened—comic book movies have pushed
mainstream cinema almost entirely into the fantasy franchise zone, espe-
cially the DC and Marvel comic book movies. Like the serials they are
based on (see for example, the famous “scrolling into infinity” titles on
the Star Wars films, copied directly from the Flash Gordon serials) these
movies contain non-stop action, have little if any character development
other than clichéd banter, and rely almost entirely on special effects for
that added “wow” factor, and are almost entirely lacking in plot, charac-
terization, depth, or innovation. Television pundit Bill Maher addressed
this lack of content and value in a blog entitled “Adulting” on comic
book culture after the death of Marvel founder and impresario Stan Lee
in November 2018, commenting in part that

I have nothing against comic books — I read them now and then when I
was a kid and I was all out of Hardy Boys. But the assumption everyone
 1 SYNTHETIC CINEMA: LEAVING THE REAL WORLD 9

had back then, both the adults and the kids, was that comics were for
kids, and when you grew up you moved on to big-boy books without the
pictures. But then twenty years or so ago, something happened — adults
decided they didn’t have to give up kid stuff. And so they pretended comic
books were actually sophisticated literature …

Comic book fans reacted angrily to Maher’s assessment of comic books

as a subset of literature, but in my opinion, he’s absolutely right. The
rapid rise of graphic novels and comic book culture in general has all but
erased the general appreciation of more challenging reading. Except for
page turners by such popular genre writers as Stephen King, Danielle
Steel and James Patterson, who turn out books like cereal boxes, all
more or less the same, each designed with predictable elements of nar-
rative closure to satisfy their respective audiences, no one really reads
books anymore, even on their Kindles, if they have one; they’d rather
listen to podcasts, watch videos, or read comic books.
As Maher notes, in the past—and the not too distant past, at that—
“the assumption everyone had back then, both the adults and the kids,
was that comics were for kids, and when you grew up you moved on
to big-boy books without the pictures.” I’d substitute “adult” for “big-
boy,” but the concept remains the same. There’s an enormous gap
between reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby or Thomas
Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, to take just two obvious examples, and the
repetitive, predictable adventures of Peter Parker as Spider-Man. At the
local multiplex, Joe and Anthony Russo’s Captain America, The Winter
Soldier (2014) passes for political filmmaking in our current era, as do
the Hunger Games films. The days when a film like Gillo Pontecorvo’s
much more trenchant The Battle of Algiers (1966) could be seen at your
local neighborhood theater are long gone, along with the discussions
that inevitably surrounded that film. Now, everything is, in all senses of
the word, a cartoon.
Yet paradoxically, one of the things that Marvel and Lee excelled
at was creating the illusion of content in their comic books, by giving
their characters easily relatable flaws, needs, desires, triumphs and set-
backs. But in the end, all comic book narratives, whether Marvel, DC,
Star Wars, Batman, Superman, or whomever, no matter how seem-
ingly complex, fall back into a simple design; good vs. evil, mortal con-
flict, and narrative closure. So when comic books moved to the center
of cinematic discourse, rather than operating on the fringes of Saturday
10 W. W. DIXON

morning childhood, their narrative and thematic structure, in turn,

became increasingly simplistic and cookie-cutter. And audiences loved it,
because all the work was done for them.
Comic book films have no connection to the real world at all because,
as Gertrude Stein famously put it in another context, in comic book
movies, “there’s no there there.” The center not only won’t hold; it
doesn’t even exist. There’s nothing remotely real, or even authentic, in
comic book cinema, and absolutely nothing is at stake. This is entirely
due to a conscious decision to avoid, erase, and ignore the real world and
any of the problems or pleasures associated with it. Comic book movies
exist in a zone of fraudulently “epic” fantasy, a fantasy that is so mun-
dane and ordinary that even the least attentive viewer will be seduced
by its artificial sheen. Above all, it is a world of unremitting commercial-
ism, in which every frame, every movement, every character is calculated
towards just one goal; continuing and/or expanding the franchise, with
the attendant action figures, posters, T-shirts and other ancillary prod-
ucts lurking in the wings.
There are meaningless titanic battles, but the outcome is always pre-
destined: the major characters will live until they have outlived fan base
demand, and then they’ll “die”—only to be resurrected in a reboot after
sufficient time has passed. Most pressingly, nothing really happens in a
comic book film, despite the constant bombast, the endless “shared uni-
verse” team-ups, and the inevitably angst-ridden backstories that most
superheroes and—heroines are provided with today—a trend started in
the early 1960s by Marvel comics, whose protagonists had a seemingly
human, sympathetic edge, as opposed to the square-jawed certainty of
DC’s Superman and Batman.
And on top of that, there’s no real progression in these films, just rep-
etition. Each film starts off with things in a pattern of stasis, disrupted by
an artificial crisis, which, amid much hand-wringing and supposed char-
acter development, is brought to some sort of conclusion in the final reel
of the film, but always—always—with a trapdoor left open for a possi-
ble sequel, because what Hollywood wants more than anything else is
a film that can turn into a long-running, reliable franchise (witness the
long string of action films in the Fast and Furious series). As Graeme
McMillan wrote in an essay on Joss Whedon’s 2015 film Avengers: Age of
Ultron, part of the Marvel universe film series, there’s no suspense, and
very little is actually at risk:
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