Auteur Theory Challenged: Allen, Mamet, and Postmodern Film

Introduction: Postmodernism and the Auteur Problem

It is strange that the postmodern tendency in critical thought has not been applied in the most obvious way to cinema — as a way of invalidating the auteur theory. Cinema is, after all, the modernist art form par excellence, and to a certain extent it is the burden of postmodern critique to undo the totalizing artistic concerns of modernism. As De Mul, paraphrasing Lyotard, writes of postmodernism:

We could agree with Lyotard…that postmodernism was implicit in modernism from its inception…. [O]ne could regard postmodernism as a critical reflection upon the starting points of modern existence that was made possible by modernism itself: post-modernism forms, in a manner of speaking, the guilty conscience of modernism, following, like a shadow, the modern aspiration toward an all-embracing meaning. (De Mul, 19)

De Mul's insight is amply borne out in cinema: almost any film could be understood to employ seemingly postmodern techniques of allusion, pastiche, or meta-narrative. What does not change is the critical tendency — which emerged from earlier film criticism and has been epitomized mainly by Andrew Sarris — to regard films as having a single artistic authorship, which permits the critic to indulge the "modern aspiration toward an all-embracing meaning" intended by the auteur.

This paper offers a postmodern critique of the idea of the auteur by examining two films which have virtually nothing in common, save fertile ground for critics who still cling to the auteur theory: Woody Allen's 1994 comedy Bullets Over Broadway and David Mamet's 2004 military thriller Spartan. Although these two filmmakers share a similar career trajectory, the notion that any film can be shown to have a stable artistic meaning intended by a single artist is problematized — if not wholly invalidated — by a postmodern critical approach.

Auteur Theory as Modernist Critical Practice

Auteur theory, with its emphasis on a totalizing artistic consciousness on the part of a film's director, would seem to be modernism plain and simple. The same modernist-inflected critical approach that insists that, for example, "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot is a fully realized creation of a single aesthetic vision — rather than a congeries of quotations and allusions forced into coherence by an amenable reader — is the critical approach that permits us to refer to any film as being the artistic "creation" of a single person. This is notable given that any film necessarily requires the participation of hundreds of individuals in terms of performance, production, and technological assistance. It is also worth noting that the lone creative genius is usually presumed to be a man, which indicates one problem with auteur theory that might offer fertile ground for feminist critique.

To a certain degree, the critic falls into the trap of identification: Hollywood-style screenplays focus on a single protagonist, and the critic of a film would like to identify the auteur as the protagonist of whatever critical narrative is to be constructed around the film. Bullets Over Broadway and Spartan are alike in their obsessive focus on a single protagonist: in the first, it is John Cusack's playwright, forced to compromise his artistic vision by casting a gangster's girlfriend in one of the leading roles to gain financing; in the second, it is Val Kilmer's Special Forces sergeant, drawn into a "War on Terror"-style clandestine military operation involving the president's daughter. In both films, the protagonist's dilemma is presented as an ethical one, despite the fact that Allen's film is obviously a light comedy and Mamet's a macho military thriller. The critic seems positively invited to understand each protagonist as a stand-in for the auteur — but should we?

Woody Allen and the Limits of Originality

In the case of Bullets Over Broadway, identifying the director with the protagonist seems almost unavoidable: John Cusack joins a long string of actors — Kenneth Branagh, Larry David, Owen Wilson — in Allen's later films who appears to be playing the "Woody Allen part." As a film about the realization of a script with actors, direction, and a fickle audience, Bullets Over Broadway would seem in some way to be about the vicissitudes of dramatic creation. It is, however, a knowing pastiche of prior films, owing most to the Judy Holliday vehicle Born Yesterday, which itself recasts Shaw's Pygmalion as a story about a gangster's girlfriend with acting aspirations.

Robin Wood has critiqued Allen's status as auteur on precisely such a basis, noting that a double standard seems to apply among critics who wish to insist upon the ratification of the lone creative genius, and apply it to Woody Allen even at his worst:

It is interesting that, in an age of generally inert remakes and imitations, there is still such insistence on the Romantic concept of originality. In terms of the Hollywood cinema and its critical reception, the term has become thoroughly debased. A film is perceived as original either if the reviewer is ignorant of its sources or it imitates a (generally European) model of critically ratified "genius": when De Palma works his variations of Psycho, this is imitation or plagiarism, whereas when Bob Fosse or Woody Allen imitates Fellini or Bergman this is somehow, mysteriously, evidence of his originality. Debased or not, the cult of originality is of comparatively recent date. (Wood, 140)

Conclusion: Destabilizing the Auteur

To read Spartan and understand its protagonist as a stand-in for David Mamet's fantasized self-projection as auteur is less straightforward than employing the same critical approach with Allen's film. The political and cultural contradictions surrounding Mamet's career — the gap between his artistic reputation and his public ideological commitments — further complicate any attempt to locate a stable, unified authorial vision behind the film. In both cases, a postmodern critical approach reveals that the films exceed and resist the totalizing frameworks that auteur theory imposes upon them. The critic who would assign coherent, singular meaning to either Bullets Over Broadway or Spartan must suppress the very elements — pastiche, generic contradiction, political ambiguity, and the distributed labor of filmmaking — that make these works most interesting. As film theory continues to evolve, the auteur model stands as a reminder that critical frameworks, like the modernist aspirations they embody, carry their own blind spots — and their own guilty consciences.