Four Corners
I’ve been brooding a lot lately about the way in which many of the best movies around have been ravaged by “narrative correctness.” This is the notion fostered by producers, distributors, and critics–often collaborating as script doctors and always deeply invested in hackwork–that there are “correct” and “incorrect” ways of telling stories in movies. And woe to the filmmaker who steps out of line. Much as “political correctness” can point to a displaced political impotence–a desire to control language and representation that sets in after one despairs of changing the political conditions of power–“narrative correctness” has more to do with what supposedly makes a movie commercial than with what makes it interesting, artful, or innovative. Invariably narrative correctness means identifying with the people who pay for the pictures rather than with the people who make them.
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Finally, consider the overall critical reception of Clint Eastwood’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Eastwood has amply demonstrated in the past that he’s a masterful storyteller when he wants to be, so you might think that when he experiments with something new critics would be curious about what he’s after–especially since he has more commercial clout than Chen, Duvall, and Kiarostami combined and therefore doesn’t have to mess with test marketing or distributors like Miramax. Think again. With few exceptions, the critical community has been content to declare his new movie devoid of interest because it fails to conform to a model of narrative correctness. Mood, atmosphere, style, performance, social analysis, and moral ambiguity never come up, because if a story isn’t told a particular way to achieve a familiar effect, the movie can offer nothing of consequence.
How, one may ask, are these paintings and these places supposed to be related? In a way, the whole complex experience of Four Corners is bound up with this question, and some of the answers provided are more satisfying than others. The fact that both kinds of sites are described and historically grounded before they’re seen, and the fact that they’re never seen and described at the same time, calls to mind Hollis Frampton’s 1971 masterpiece Nostalgia, which creates a similar staggered effect between photographs slowly ignited and burned on a hot plate and spoken descriptions of the photographs that precede them. It’s politically and conceptually bold of Benning to give us such a wide range of painters and paintings and ask us to consider them as part of the same historical continuum. All four painters might be regarded as influences on his own art, but he selectively excludes himself as an artist from this group of four individuals, even as he includes some of his own personal history in Milwaukee as part of a much larger historical narrative.
In most so-called narrative films it’s normally assumed that story is a conveyor belt taking goods (stars, production values, special effects, explosions) to an audience, so it follows that when the conveyor belt breaks down nothing can be delivered. (According to this argument, it’s wrong to enjoy Maggie Cheung or an explosion in a stupid story that makes no sense–though millions do every day.) In most so-called nonnarrative films it’s normally assumed that the absence of a conveyor belt allows us to notice and appreciate things in a less compulsory manner, as if we were standing in front of a painting–which implies that we aren’t being conducted on a tour through time and space.
