The Ensemble Film

note: I must give credit to Seymour Chatman for coining the term "ensemble film," back in 2002 in a conversation about Magnolia and its kin at a Chinese restaurant in Berkeley. The ideas about the functioning of the genre and its precursors are all mine, though.

Epigraph #1: “Man is in the world as if in a pure optical and sound situation. The reaction of which man has been deprived can be replaced only by belief. Only belief in the world can reconnect man to what he sees and hears. The cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only link...Restoring out belief in the world — this is the power of modern cinema (when it stops being bad)...we need reasons to believe in this world.” — Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 172

Epigraph #2: Deleuze on the any-space-whatever. “It is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity...so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways...pure locus of the possible...rich in potentials.” (Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 109)

Slacker, Magnolia, Traffic, Time Code, The Safety of Objects, I Heart Huckabees, Crash, Waking Life, Me and You and Everyone We Know: what do all these films have in common, aside from being examples of contemporary U.S. arthouse film? Well, these films all take up the problem of the time-image the Deleuze describes here: the problem that in a world of perceptions, we can never be sure we are encountering the same object. In brief, we have lost our belief in the world, and we wonder if it is merely a grand collection of hallucinations. In Waking Life, we are never sure whether what we see is real or part of an extended, box-within-box lucid dream; it is possible that the entire film is a single person’s hallucination, and that there is no real connection or action whatsoever. This film says something about a current frame of mind: is it is possible that we are all always “seeing from our own points of view” (even if not actually dreaming), and that these points of view will never match up? According to such a world view — which has been in and out of vogue at least since Descartes, and which I suggest finds its current expression in the genre of films under discussion — real community is an impossibility; true and meaningful connections among people and the actions and real changes that might result therefrom are illusions at best. This world view results in a bunch of wandering souls who inhabit deconnected spaces and who do not really “believe” in the world, nor do they treat with the respect that a “real” place would merit, nor do they interact with their fellow inhabitants in the ways that real people would require. In other words, they are a bunch of alienated postmodern jerks or mildly depressed slackers who live mostly inside their own heads, and who are never entirely sure that the space they occupy is the same space as their neighbors. This is not to be dismissive. I believe this is actually a serious problem and condition of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century life that these films tackle in earnest, to more and less conscious degrees.

In such a world view — the view that “we all come from different backgrounds” and “have our own issues” and thus can never presume to “really understand each other” and thus must agree to “respect our differences” and “keep to ourselves” — how do we restore belief in the capacity for real relationships, real connections, real agency and collective action? According to the ensemble film, this is how: by attempting to reconnect space, by re-opening the channels of linkage in new ways that are no longer predicated on the old formulas of Hollywood (continuity editing, the unity and singularity of the plot, a single hero-protagonist, and so on). The ensemble film tries to make room for what Deleuze calls “any-spaces-whatever”: those amazing places where new linkages may be made “in an infinite number of ways” and new connections may be established. These are sort of like “safe spaces,” but a utopian version of them, where everyone in the world of the film is safe, not because what is threatening or different has been excluded, but because difference has momentarily been suspended in favor of some kind of universality, be it something as broad as “our common humanity” or mortality, or as specific as a song the same people all happened to hear. Nine times out of ten, this "safe space" only materializes at the end of the film, or not at all.

In the ensemble film, we get the following: 1) multiple, episodic plot lines that ultimately converge and connect, in more or less “forced” ways; 2) ensemble casts, and the lack of a singular protagonist and point of view; 3) an increased reliance on editing to get the job done and reconnect these people, and reconnect the spaces and times they inhabit; 4) an increased reliance on coincidence and contingency, not as a cop-out or short-cut to a resolution, but as a narrative device that is fully owned and valorized in its own right (the frog storm in Magnolia). Regardless of the content of the individual plotlines, the overarching question that drives the narrative of each of these films is always: Will they or won’t they connect up and communicate? Will they or won't they escape their shells? Nine times out of ten, they do, and the question then becomes: Will it be comic and happy (Me and You and Everyone We Know) or tragic (Crash)? The philosophical issue that underlies this question is also always the same one: Is the postmodern subject inevitably trapped in the prison house of her own mind, or is it possible for her to have meaningful, effectual relations with the world and with the other people who inhabit it?

I Heart Huckabees is conscious, perhaps a bit too conscious, of these questions, and it embodies them in characters who hold two competing philosophies: on the one hand, the existential detectives played by the American actors Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman subscribe to the “blanket theory” that “everything is connected;” their rival nihilist, played by the French actor Isabelle Huppert believes that “nothing matters.” Of course, the answer is all of the above, or, to invoke an oft-used phrase from graduate school, both and curiously neither. Nothing matters and everything is connected; nothing is connected and everything matters. This is the logic of the ensemble film: it usually concludes in this “all of the above” sort of fashion.

Me and You and Everyone We Know is also quite conscious of this theme, and iterates it in the mission statement for an art exhibit which asks: How do we connect with one another in a digital age? Although the film gently satirizes this question, it shares it and does attempt to answer in good faith. We connect by putting signs in windows, or on internet chat rooms, or by dropping off video tapes that may or may not be viewed, and by making phone calls even if we immediately hang up. The minor failures of these attempts in the film only testify to the desperation of the need, and to the promise that this need will eventually be fulfilled.

For the record, there is an economic logic that has probably contributed to the spawn of this genre. The current film industry is still motored by stars; independent films lack the billions to get the high-ticket stars that will sell them. So, they hire several less expensive ones instead. Hence the ensemble cast; hence the ensemble film. But this argument, despite its common-sense appeal, doesn’t explain everything about the genre. It is also easily knocked down by example: the Tom Cruises of the world did appear in Magnolia, and the Miranda Julys of the world occasionally work their films onto the same screens.

The precursor to the ensemble film — remarkably, since in contemporary film the genre is dominated by male would-be auteurs — is the classically house-wife genre of the television soap opera. At a certain point, sometime between Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and the advent of the soap opera, cross-cutting between scenes started to signify something in excess of simply moving us from one location to another, or from one story to another. The cross-cut started to indicate not just, “Meanwhile, back at the ranch…,” but something more, a connection between Plot 1 and Plot 2 beyond just their simultaneity in time. At some point, we began to posit meanings — whether intended by their creators or not — that arose through the mode and timing of the juxtapositions. Plots 1 and 2 began to suggest affiliations, or they mimicked one another, or they foreshadowed a convergence that would later occur. When we added Plots 3 and 4 and so on, we started to think, hey, maybe these people should all get together.

Other models for the ensemble film include short story collections with characters or towns that recur in different stories. Short Cuts is the best example of this; in this case, Raymond Carver’s characters in the source stories are not connected, but Altman makes them so in the film version. Episodes connect according to multiple principles: simultaneity (many things happen at the time of the earthquake), but also thematic confluence (death), presence of the same object (goldfish), and so on. Ultimately this film seems to say: there are no short cuts. We can connect the quick way, through editing, but things like marriage and work and life take time. In this way, Short Cuts is already sort of the first and last word on this genre. Indeed, Altman is the granddaddy of this genre for so many reasons, not the least of which is Nashville, a film in which a whole world of disparate characters unite around the martyrdom of Barbara Jean.

A similar thing happens in The Safety of Objects: A. M. Homes’ characters in the short stories are isolated; Rose Troche’s converge in many misguided ways — including literal mistaken identity — but ultimately converge for real around the death of a comatose character, in a group backyard barbeque. They are also united — literally harmonized — by a beautiful song that is repeated as a motif and is sung by the dead character’s sister at the end of the movie, sort of like the Tom Waits song on the radio in Night on Earth.

Which brings us to a few additional precursors to this genre from Hollywood’s classical era. First: the musical, which likewise unites previously estranged characters through song (and dance). In West Side Story: rival gangs harmonize musically, if not in life. In Grease: girls and boys call and respond to one another in Summer Lovin’ despite their radically different versions of the story, and ultimately synchronize in You’re the One that I Want. In The Bandwagon: the high-art world of ballet meets the low-art world of vaudeville in a decadent technicolor compromise. In Hair: soldiers and hippies (and even horses) commune in Central Park, harmonizing their differences through song and the dance stylings of Twyla Tharp. And of course, Nashville, as mentioned above. And Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, which is in many ways like a dystopic musical — warring faction intersect in riot rather than harmonizing song, despite the best attempts of the DJ and Radio Rahim — but which also stands in a category of its own.

Another precursor to these films are the comedies of remarriage from Hollywood’s classical era. These films start with a couple on the rocks or an impending divorce, and the movie is about how they will get back together. Films like It Happened One Night, The Philadelphia Story, The Seven-Year Itch, and Adam’s Rib are all in this genre, as are more recent versions like The Parent Trap, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Irreconcilable Differences, spawned when divorce became a prominent social concern. In these films, the project of reuniting people is much simpler, since it is about a single couple rather than a motley group of alienated wanderers. If the musical harmonizes warring factions (men vs. women, sharks vs. jets, etc.), the comedy of remarriage likewise extends the civil war metaphor and rejoins a warring couple in matrimony. The two genres are both ruled by binary oppositions, and how to make them one. The ensemble film differs in that it is not binary: there are always at least three characters or groups involved that need reconnecting. And they are isolated not only from their polar opposites, but from just about everyone.

Another precursor to this genre is actually Shakespeare, who likewise took every opportunity to explode binary oppositions. Granted, it is the binary opposition between the Montagues and the Capulets which Romeo and Juliet’s star-crossed love should have truced, but if we look to the comedies, there are usually at least two couples involved (The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and often they are further disrupted by thirds and fourths. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which even Shakespeare still obeys the binary logic; he simply multiplies the couples rather than diffusing the alienation out to extend to society as a whole, or he has the alienated characters serve as solitary heroes who are not indicative of a general condition, and who speak quite eloquently to their condition in soliloquy rather than being oblivious to it (Hamlet).

There are non-U. S. precursors to this genre (and current participants in it) as well: Fellini’s 8 ½, which quite literally unites all the bitter characters of one man’s life in a giant rondo; as well as more recent examples like The Sweet Hereafter (Canada), Lantana (Australia), Amores Perros (Mexico), and Ten (Iran). The States do not have a monopoly on multiple alienated characters in search of a means to connect.

The antithesis of the ensemble film is the biopic (recently: Kinsey, Delovely, The Aviator, Ray, The Notorious Bettie Page, the new Scorcese Bob Dylan picture), a genre that focuses on an individual life at the expense of following any subplots or tangents that might present themselves. If I were a screenwriter, I would attempt a hybrid of these two genres, if only as an experiment. What would happen if a biopic suddenly veered off into other people’s lives and abandoned its protagonist? What would happen if an ensemble film suddenly abandoned all but one character's subplot?

If anything, recent world events have emphasized the sense of a fundamental dislocation and feeling of disconnection from the world despite the claims of an increasingly global world, and despite the fact of an increasingly global economy. Subjectivity and world view are often slow to follow upon economic realities. Businesses may be “thinking” “globally,” they may be out-sourcing and multi-national, but this does not mean that individuals in these nations have an experiential sense of themselves as subjects in a globally connected world. If the ensemble film is any indication, it is the contrary: the more oblivious corporations become to things like national and cultural difference, the more acutely those with access to the mean of popular cultural expression like film register the most minor forms of difference: my neighbor’s race or gender, her choice of music, her family tragedy.

I don’t know what else to say about this genre, except that we can probably expect more of it — although I didn’t see any examples of it at Toronto, but then again, as Ruby Rich has pointed out, it’s impossible to get anything other than an eclectic snapshot of all the offerings there (a fact which itself is indicative of the current regime of disconnection and the singularity of individual experience).