A Place for Things

Postmodernism has long since acquired its own history, sloughed off several different skins and assimilated competing aesthetics while never being replaced by another paradigm. As much as you can see this in architecture, in the decline of the Michael Graves/Terry Farrell aesthetic of 1980s super-pomo, you can see it in film. There was a brilliant post about a year ago at boredom is always counter-revolutionary about what we could call the early postmodernist metropolis, as seen in a variety of special effects-laden blockbusters. These films - he lists Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Batman, The Crow, Ghostbusters - are examples of 'prototype cyberpunk environments (which) root themselves too firmly to the past and to material humanity to really embrace the digitalised dystopia suggested by that label.' This is an era where Jim Henson's Creature Workshop represents the last gasp of the Harryhausen uncanny before the dominance of CGI, and its ability to make the impossible boring. The city is always (a version of) New York, and it is probably the formative idea of the city for those of us (like myself and I presume, Sam of Boredom is always) who were born in the 1980s and watched these films in the multiplexes or nagged our parents to buy the extensive merchandise. A city of shadows, Gothic skyscrapers, Koolhaasian congestion, megalomaniac bosses (business and criminal) and animatronic creatures rising up from the urban id. If there is any worth whatsoever in the decade's mainstream architecture then it's in the occasional ability of the likes of Broadgate to evoke these places' pre-web physicality and air of doom and excess; and if it survives anywhere in London, it is in the derangement of the senses found in the Trocadero.

Gremlins 2 is arguably the finest of these films. Here, Joe Dante's monsters emerge again from their cutesy chrysalis, except this time they get a New York skyscraper to destroy rather than a mere suburban town. This place, the Clamp Centre, is an amalgam of the Trump tower and the technofetishism of prime-era High Tech. Outside there is 'slick-tech' mirrorglass, inside bared machinery that seems to evoke the revived, shoulderpadded art deco of Helmut Jahn as much as it does Rogers and Foster. Announcing itself as 'the world's most fully automated office building', it is workplace, television station, mall and secret experimental laboratory (helmed, of course, by Christopher Lee). Our protagonist is a draughtsman in the tower's architectural department, and, doubtless alienated by all this post-industrial chaos, sketches images of his suburban hometown when the boss isn't looking. Although the film is, aside from the monsters themselves, little more than the sum of its references (as many as a particularly dense episode of The Simpsons), at the heart of it is an architectural parable. We know, of course, that all this fully automated skyscraper is going to be taken over by the Gremlins, and even before it is, we have an exploration of its mixed uses that suggests Dante had a very well-thumbed copy of Delirious New York. We also see its unofficial spaces, its ducts and service areas, the inside and outside of its lift shafts, all of which the Gremlins and the Mogwai can traverse as they wish. The laboratory creates all manner of enhanced Gremlins - especially memorably, an intellectual Gremlin who claims that what the Gremlins eventually want is 'civilisation...chamber music, Susan Sontag'.

High tech's engineering fetish is mirrored by the early postmodernist film. Something like Aliens is essentially a work of engineering rather than a work of cinema in the traditional sense, in its use of a huge disused oil refinery as a playground for highly-engineered creatures and their human prey. With appropriate self-referentiality, Gremlins 2 turns this into a comment on engineering and architecture itself. As the delirious skyscraper is turned into a space for the destructive use of the creatures, it is abandoned by its boss, the Trump stand-in Daniel Clamp. After the Gremlins have been vanquished, Clamp is pleased to see the destruction of his edifice. 'It wasn't really a place for people. It was a place for things. And if you make a place for things, things come.' Then, he finds our protagonist's suburban sketches. Delighted, he declares that this will be the basis of the next Clamp project, far from the tower's demonic urbanism. 'This is what people want now! The traditional community thing!' He imagines what an adaptation of this drawing of idyllic suburbia into a new town would become under his watch: 'Clamp Corners, where life slows down to a crawl'. Right - and what happens next in postmodernism is an abandonment of these fantastic mechanistic spaces, all too easily commandeered by the monstrous urban id represented by the Gremlins, in favour of the retrogressive, sleepy, conformist fantasies of the New Urbanism.

16 Comments:
And if you make a place for things, things come.'
Object-oriented philosophy?
Owen - taking your observations further, and accepting your theory that Postmodernism is still at large as the only active design philosophy, can we view the neo-modernist commercial architecture of the last 10 years (MK's The Hub by Glenn Howells was a superb example you cited recently) as forming part of the same PoMo continuum?
I've been fascinated by another work by Glenn Howells since it was completed in Liverpool last year - a mixed use block in the Liverpool ONE development that could have been beamed directly from 1976.
http://www.glennhowells.co.uk/projects/living/site-6paradise-streetpdsa-liverpool-one-0
Is this really a piece of nostalgia, something the architect remembers from childhood and is evoking in a pointless joke, or is there a real desire here to continue working with materials, colours and forms that were cut short by an urgent wave of neo-vernacular and full-blown postmodernism?
To a certain extent, yes. A project like Liverpool One, with its deployment of 'streets' and 'diversity' as a swathe of the city becomes a privately owned mall, seems as postmodernist as they come - the fact that buildings within it might have a modernist 'look' doesn't change that.
The Hub is interesting though, in that unlike most of the other developments around it or of its kind, it doesn't use mixed materials and barcode facades, and is nearer to Hilberseimer than it is to Ralph Erskine. I don't know if this is Howells indulging in nostalgia as such (he may well be, but in a sense it doesn't matter). It's also interesting what is left out of postwar architecture in these sort of places - concrete, for one thing, is almost always avoided. As if you can only take it so far...
agnetha, you're on my turf here:
the same vile capitalist conglomerate that started the CGI biz (Spielberg-Lucas-Pixar) is behind the Gremlins franchise, as Spielberg produced both movies and launched Joe Dante's career to boot. though you have a point in that the digital tends to make images flat, the digital is evolving towards the kind of a fluidity you'd see in a 2D animation (i was rather impressed with the animation work on WALL-E and Madagascar pt. 2, even as the storylines leave one wanting)
i see that the problem is rather ideological, than stemming from technology: American Stalinism. The digital means open up fantastic new perspectives, but the studios keep pressing on just one particular style, so that their productions all look the same. The explanation is always that the market (and the expectations of the consumer) dictates this uniformity.
Perhaps - Gremlins 2 is sort of inbetween these things, in that it's blockbuster auteurism - Dante only agreed to do it if he got total creative control, and you can tell, through the huge amount (which would become wearying in other hands) of references, little ideas, in-jokes, set pieces that run through the film, that perversely make it seem post rather than pre-Simpsons...
The 'flatness' - it makes everything look so easy, there are no breaks. Although there is that weird moment in Wall-E where you see the CGI people and it suddenly stops being a strange and uncanny piece of realism and becomes another pixar film. Still, the phenomenon I was talking about was more the use of CGI alongside live action. I recall watching one of the recent Spiderman films and just finding the athletic CGI so boring, so seamless...I don't think that animation has the same problem, and can still hang on to a certain disjunction and sense of the uncanny.
Making a place for things
What I thought was so good about this line was that things are 1 - the objects, the machines and technologies that power this fully automated skyscraper, and 2 - the Gremlins, the disruptive antihuman creatures. Now the obvious reading would be that both things are bad, the platitude that an overly technologised culture necessarily breeds strange and aggressive monsters, as per all those dubious conservative critiques of Nazism as some sort of direct irrationalist consequence of German industrial rationality.
But the film so obviously sides with the Gremlins that in fact, the things are far, far more interesting than the people. It aligns thing as monstrous, das ding type thing and thing as in machine, against the blandness and conformism both of the protagonists and corporation, and the suburbia which finally unite the heroes and the protagonists.
don't get me wrong, GREMLINS are both masterpieces and Dante is a brilliant parodist, even moreso because he had to work under the confines of a big studio system; I just thought that Spielberg, who is mostly considered an evil mogul, must have had talent as well, as long as he hired Dante to parody his own work. You will learn to relativize, Agnetha, or else you'll never mount a Revolution.
but next to the seamlessness of the CGI, which is a natural consequence of the 3D program's technology - when the computer calculates movements, it can't ever reach the unpredictability of the human hand - and this is why Pixar in their DVDs always underlines that their movies are first tested in hand-drawn format before they get digitized - I was talking about representational codes, that is to say modeling. Even with a limited 3D program, you can still model a figure on any style you choose, from Rembrandt to Paul Klee. However what you get is that Pixar and Disney and Dreamworks and Sony Pictures all model the same characters. Even Wall-E, with all of its minimalist design brilliance, is essentially a clone of the Extra-Terrestrial, and an extension of the LEGO and I-pod industries. And this is exactly the same as what socialist realism did in its own time, propelling all those Russian avant garde poets (including Slava Tsukerman) to flee to the States.
So I think I might have been simply echoing your point when I said the problem is not intrinsic to any technology, because technology is technology, and technology will only get better not worse, rather that it's ideological and related to the fact that the neoliberal ideology has to reproduce itself no matter what the artistic cost.
Another example is my recent viewing of a 3D movie (with spectacles I mean). I was really stunned by the possibilities opened by the fact that the technology no longer hurts the eyes, so you can watch it relaxedly for extended periods of time. More specifically I was thrilled by the possibility of a virtual theater, where you can simultaneously get a really intimate close-up, and a convincing illusion of theatrical space. I think this could result in an unseen-before mix of film and theater. However, I have a hunch that the technique will remain the ownership of a few big studios, who will kill it by making the same boring old action spectacles resting on gimmick and scare mongering for their effect.
The Parody Center's new address is www.parodycentrum.blogspot.com.
This post got me thinking about a variety of other 1980s films where skyscrapers play a big role, like "Die Hard" and even "Adventures in Babysitting". A whole generation was raised watching films where glass and steel modernism was repeatedly shown as a site of conflict and "urban" become a synonym for "wasteland" or "dangerous".
This is an era where Jim Henson's Creature Workshop represents the last gasp of the Harryhausen uncanny before the dominance of CGI, and its ability to make the impossible boring.
More importantly perhaps, this was the last gasp of New York as the city of fear and corruption, before the Disneyfication of Times Square.
(CGI didn't really take over until the end of the nineties>)
Enjoyable analysis. I'd be interested to read your take on Ghostbusters next.... Art Deco ornament and crime?
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