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The Last Picture Show: Reconsidering Nostalgia, Desire and the Real
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 June 2021
Abstract
Peter Bogdanovich's masterpiece The Last Picture Show (1971) remains a highly influential example of 1970s New Hollywood filmmaking. Yet it has largely escaped the sustained critical attention enjoyed by many of its contemporaries. This article seeks to revisit the status of the film and its critical reputation. Amongst the critics who have appraised this unique film, opinion is split. On the one hand, it remains an influential example of the “post-western” impulse in the American New Wave. On the other hand, it has been critically maligned as a “nostalgia film.” This article revisits these perspectives and argues that a holistic understanding of the inner dynamics of the film must necessarily take both perspectives into account. It examines how these dynamics are organized around a central formal tension between the cinematic codes of the western and those of social realism. Finally, it argues that the pejorative critical categorization of The Last Picture Show as a “nostalgia film” does not adequately grasp its rich, complex and contradictory affects. Instead, it proposes that the sense of loss, nostalgia and disappointment that Bogdanovich articulates can be read as an expression of that confrontation between “Desire” and the “Real” that the Marxian critic Fredric Jameson theorized was central to the “political unconscious.”
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with the British Association for American Studies
References
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12 See Campbell, Post-westerns.
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19 Jameson argues in The Political Unconscious, 174, that generic elements continue “to emit [their] ideological signals long after [their] original content has become historically obsolete.”
20 Holmes, Zonn and Cravey, 279.
21 Ibid., 278.
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27 Aitken, Ian, “The Redemption of Physical Reality” in Aitken, European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 162–202, 185Google Scholar. This text offers a helpful historical survey of influential theories of cinematic realism.
28 Ibid., 193.
29 Jameson argues in The Political Unconscious, 138, “Indeed, as any number of ‘definitions’ of realism assert, and as the totemic ancestor of the novel, Don Quixote, emblematically demonstrates, that processing operation variously called narrative mimesis or realistic representation has as its historic function the systematic undermining and demystification, the secular ‘decoding,’ of those preexisting inherited traditional or sacred narrative paradigms which are its initial givens. In this sense, the novel plays a significant role in what can be called a properly bourgeois cultural revolution – that immense process of transformation whereby populations whose life habits were formed by other, now archaic, modes of production are effectively reprogrammed for life and work in the new world of market capitalism. The ‘objective’ function of the novel is thereby also implied: to its subjective and critical, analytic, corrosive mission must now be added the task of producing as though for the first time that very life world, that very ‘referent’ – the newly quantifiable space of extension and market equivalence, the new rhythms of measurable time, the new secular and ‘disenchanted’ object world of the commodity system, with its post-traditional daily life and its bewilderingly empirical, ‘meaningless,’ and contingent Umwelt – of which this new narrative discourse will then claim to be the ‘realistic’ reflection.”
30 This is of vital importance as in Jameson's discussion of “dialectical criticism” he notes the onus upon the critic to draw out the imagined but subconscious wish-fulfillment desires that are specific to the work's historically determinate situation that become the pretext for the conscious staging of the given narrative. See Jameson, Marxism and Form, 404–7.
31 Jameson parses the distinction between a negative and positive hermeneutics in these terms in Marxism and Form, 119: “We must … distinguish between what Paul Ricoeur has called negative and positive hermeneutics, between the hermeneutics of suspicion and the hermeneutics of a restoration of some original, forgotten meaning, between hermeneutic as demystification, as the destruction of illusions, and a hermeneutic which offers renewed access to some essential source of life. For Ricoeur, of course, the latter cannot be imagined as anything other than the sacred, so that the only form of positive hermeneutic of which he is able to conceive remains an essentially religious one.”
32 Tompkins, Jane P., West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 10Google Scholar.
33 For a discussion of the relationship between “escapism,” wish fulfillment and the utopian impulses of classical Hollywood cinema see Maltby, Richard, Hollywood Cinema, 2nd edn (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 33–40Google Scholar.
34 Tompkins, West of Everything, 4.
35 Ibid., 14, emphasis added.
36 Cawelti offers an early statement of this connection in The Six-Gun Mystique, 68, suggesting that the western “is a fine example of what Frye calls the mythos of romance, a narrative and dramatic structure which he characterizes as one of the four central myths or story forms in literature, the other three being the comedy, tragedy and irony. As Frye defines it, ‘the essential element of plot in romance is adventure,’ and the major adventure which gives form to the romance is the quest. Thus, ‘the complete form of the romance is clearly the successful quest, and such a completed form has three main stages: the stage of the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures; the crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the hero or his foe, or both, must die; and the exaltation of the hero.’”
37 This is a commonplace in the genre theory of the western but is perhaps most forcefully underscored as a generative contradiction by György Lukács in his analysis of the Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper, which can be regarded as the literary urtext of the western genre. Discussing the hero, Natty Bumppo, Lukács argues, “In this simple, popular figure who can only experience his tragedy emotionally, but not understand it, Cooper portrays the enormous historical tragedy of those early colonizers who emigrated from England in order to preserve their freedom, but who themselves destroy this freedom by their own deeds in America. Maxim Gorky expressed this tragedy very well: ‘As an explorer of the forests and prairies of the “New World” he blazes trails in them for people who later condemn him as a criminal because he has infringed their mercenary and, to his sense of freedom, unintelligible laws. All his life he has unconsciously served the great cause of the geographical expansion of material culture in a country of uncivilized people and found himself incapable of living in the conditions of this culture for which he had struck the first paths.’ Gorky shows here very finely how a great historical, indeed world-historical tragedy could be portrayed through the destiny of a mediocre man of the people.” See György Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962), 65.
38 For discussions of the emergence of the road movie and narratives of political automobility see Mills, Katie, The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving through Film, Fiction and Television (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Archer, Neil, The Road Movie: In Search of Meaning (New York: Wallflower Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Laderman, David, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
39 Holmes, Zonn and Cravey, “Placing Man in the New West,” 285.
40 See, for example, Smith, Henry Nash, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York: Vintage Books, 1950)Google Scholar. Discussing representations of “wilderness life,” Smith notes that “life in the mountains is especially attractive because of its unrestricted love and licensed polygamy. All the trappers have ‘an instinctive fondness for the reckless savage life, alternately indolent and laborious, full and fasting, occupied in hunting, fighting, feasting, intriguing, and amours, interdicted by no laws, or difficult morals, or any restraints, but the invisible ones of Indian habit and opinion’.” Ibid., 88.
41 Holmes, Zonn and Cravey, 279.
42 Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, 121.
43 Holmes, Zonn and Cravey, 285.
44 The sense of sadness, loss and nostalgia that is fundamentally inscribed in the historical passing of the frontier in the western is described by many genre theorists. For a classical example see Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique. Cawelti notes that while the westerner hero “undertakes to protect and save the pioneers, this type of hero also senses that his own feelings and his special quality as a hero are bound up in the wilderness life. The outcome of Westerns which present this version of the hero are invariably more ambiguous and tragic.” Ibid., 54.
45 Le Sueur, “Theory Number Five,” 187, 188, 189.
46 For a recent example of this line of critical thought see Tom Symmons, “American Graffiti (1973) and Grease (1978): The Fifties as Myth and Comment,” in Symmons, The New Hollywood Historical Film 1967–78 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 159–94.
47 Jameson, Postmodernism, xvii.
48 Ibid., 19.
49 See Jameson, Postmodernism, 19: “The inaugural film of this new aesthetic discourse, George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973), set out to recapture, as so many films have attempted since, the henceforth mesmerizing lost reality of the Eisenhower era; and one tends to feel, that for Americans at least, the 1950s remains the privileged lost object of desire – not merely the stability and prosperity of a pax Americana but also the first naïve innocence of the countercultural impulses of early rock and roll and youth gangs.”
50 See Jameson, Postmodernism. He argues, “Yet this mesmerizing new aesthetic mode itself emerged as an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way.” Ibid., 21.
51 These broad theoretical propositions, famously associated with the models of history advocated by Hegel and Marx, underpin Jameson's entire oeuvre. See, for example, Fredric Jameson, “Marxism and Historicism (1979),” in Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986, Volume II, Syntax of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 148–77. Jameson argues that “Marxism also proposes a master code, but it is not, as is commonly thought, either that of economics or production in the narrow sense, but rather that very different category which is the ‘mode of production’ itself.” Ibid., 149. For an extended discussion of the classical Lukácsean critique of bourgeois thought as unable to grasp the historicity of capitalism as a mode of production characterized by immanent contradictions see Jameson, Marxism and Form, 182–90.
52 See note 49 above.
53 Boym, Svetlana, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 49Google Scholar.
54 Jameson, Marxism and Form, 82.
55 Quoted in Redding, Arthur, “Frontier Mythographies: Savagery and Civilization in Frederick Jackson Turner and John Ford,” Literature/Film Quarterly, 35, 4 (2007), 313–22, 321Google Scholar.
56 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 170. It is also worth quoting a similar and equally powerful passage: “Conceived in this sense, History is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its ‘ruses’ turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force. This is indeed the ultimate sense in which History as ground and untranscendable horizon needs no particular theoretical justification: we may be sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them.” Ibid., 87.
57 Campbell, Post-westerns, 13.