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The satirist's stated aim of correcting and
instructing also needs to be understood as part of an
aesthetic, one whose foremost practitioner in European
cinema is Federico Fellini and, in American cinema, Frank
Tashlin, both of whom, like Dante, began their careers as
cartoonists. One aspect of Dante's work, which finds its
fullest expression in The second Civil War (US
1997), is rooted in the graphic style of Mad
magazine, which introduced his generation to the art
of satire without having any perceptible impact on the
targets of that satire - something high-norm satirists,
who have the intact memory of cultural ideals to appeal
to (cf. Dante's aborted TV series Osiris
chronicles), tend to be better at. We are, according to Frye, in a period when satire, in
the sense he defines, is the dominant genre, but having a
temperament for satire did not keep Lord Byron from being
a Romantic poet. Because it is, as Godard has said, a
nineteenth century invention, cinema is condemned to be a
late Romantic artform, and satire has been an essential
element in the work of late Romantics as diverse as
Ophüls and Kubrick, Welles and Renoir, Hitchcock and
Sirk. In other words, although we live at the end of a
long period of cultural decline, even Dante's Inferno
contained an escape hatch. Dante Jr.'s name for the escape hatch in his films is
"apocalypse": the Saturday matinee apocalypses that are
averted, temporarily, in Piranha (US 1978) and
The howling (US 1981); the void the omnipotent
child in "It's A Good Life" (his episode of Twilight
zone - the movie [US 1983]) contemplates
after eliminating his grotesque family and the world that
contained them; the comic apocalypses visited on Kingston
Falls and New York City by the title creatures of
Gremlins (US 1984) and Gremlins 2: the new
batch (US 1990); the all-too-believable apocalypse
visited on an America which has turned into a high-tech
version of the Tower of Babel in The second Civil
War, or its fiery suburban equivalent in The
'burbs (US 1989); and the purely aesthetic, but
highly beneficial apocalypse engineered by Lawrence
Woolsey, the impresario in Matinee (US 1993),
whose schlock horror movies can replace the outworn
rituals of religion because they offer a degraded but
still viable form of the vision the English Romantics
experienced when confronted with mountains or memento
mori and called the Sublime. The root meaning of "apocalypse", a Hebrew concept
which comes to us in Greek clothing, is "revelation" or
"uncovering" - the root image being the lifting off of
the lid of a pot, or of the sky, which is, in that
tradition, another kind of lid. In Explorers (US
1985), three youngsters go questing after a revelation in
outer space, only to meet a Looney Toon version of the
Bug Eyed Monsters prevalent in pulp science-fiction.
Worse, this monster is a kid like them, a cosmic couch
potato whose brain has been fried by watching American
television. Switching voices as if he had swallowed a
remote, he delivers the only revelation they're going to
get: a cacophony of one-liners, ad-lines and pop
clichés backed by a shimmering, discontinuous
cascade of visual dreck. Scholars call this very American Sublime
"post-modernism," a term that only its failures deserve.
In Dante's work its name is "montage," a word that comes
easily to the filmmaker because he also started as an
editor, putting bits of found footage together to create
a 7-hour compilation film, The movie orgy, that
was screened on college campuses during the early 70s:
montage of signs (the collision of two pieces of
celluloid, two clichés, two styles of narrative,
character, image, musical accompaniment) and montage of
meanings (two contradictory ideas, emotions or attitudes
colliding in the spectator's head while listening to
Phoebe Cates' Santa Claus speech in Gremlins or
watching one of the Commando Elite get his lower parts
ground up in a garbage disposal in Small soldiers
[US 1998]). Invaluable as a tool for satire,
montage is also Dante's preferred formal procedure for
producing what most modern filmmakers try to produce
through its opposite, duration: the experience of the
Sublime, which is consciousness of self raised to an
apocalyptic pitch. At the end of Explorers the questers return to
Earth, disappointed by their revelation but already
nostalgic for it. The dream that followed, in the film
Dante was never given time to find in the editing room
because Paramount wanted it in theatres before Ron
Howard's Cocoon (US 1985), would have linked all
the characters through their dream life as part of a
whole analogous to Teilhard de Chardin's "noosphere" or
World Mind. (The theological reference is Dante's.) That
movement - from innocence to experience and finally to a
higher form of innocence - was paradigmatic for the
Romantic Imagination, a faculty for shaping the real into
something new embodying a truth superior to fact, which
S. T. Coleridge distinguished from "Fancy": the arbitrary
assembling of images into patterns pleasing to the
senses, not unlike most movies coming out of Hollywood
today. (When challenged, Dante makes the same distinction
to differentiate between The howling and
Armageddon [US 1998], even though his work
arguably prepared the way for directors like Michael
Bay.) Like the "Gentleman from Porlock" who knocked on
Coleridge's door before he had finished writing down his
visionary poem "Xanadu," which the poet had unfortunately
forgotten by the time he returned to his writing table,
Paramount Pictures kept Dante from realising his version
of the Romantic quest in Explorers, but he has
continued to show us glimpses of it in films like
Matinee, with its tribute to the Imagination's
power to reconcile us to the real world it is always
sending us back to, or The 'burbs, which proposes
a comic variation on John Keats' definition of the
Imagination as being like Adam's dream in Paradise Lost:
"He awoke and found it true." Even the manic
overabundance of humanity which is the main impression
communicated by The second Civil War may be
crowding toward some revelation, as the technician played
by Robert Picardo reminds us when he quotes those famous
lines from Yeats' "The Second Coming." This fidelity to a vision that the directors of the
American New Wave who peaked in the Seventies seem to
have stopped looking for in the Eighties and the Nineties
is what has enabled Joe Dante to keep making good films,
with gaps in between during which he must have said "no"
to lots of bad ones - that and a steely sense of self
without which any artist working in Hollywood, now or
even in the long-vanished Golden Age, would be doomed to
extinction.
1,158 words
Abstract
In the jargon of Canadian literary critic
Northrop Frye, Joe Dante is a low-norm satirist.
(High-norm satire, of which Horace would be a good
example, is not practiced today.) This can be puzzling
for critics who analyse films for political messages,
because the low-norm satirist, without necessarily being
a conservative in his politics, tends to appeal to old
ways and simple standards of conduct to justify his
mocking depictions of modern society.
