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.