Hybrid Cinema - The Mask, Masques and Tex Avery
Recently, George Lucas has said that digital effects can bring assembly-line efficiency to movie making. Through digital libraries, like painted backdrops of New York City in studio lots of the thirties and forties, the process of building a movie can be integrated, not split off between the shoot, and digitalized post production. Digital content will become reusable, like old cartoons. The era when digital effects shift from a service industry to production has arrived. The special-effects films, for all their gaudiness, have become the portable cathedrals for our integrated, weirdly disengaged feudal civilization.
While at MGM (1942-55), after his groundbreaking work for Warner Brothers, Tex Avery hoped that someone would give him a shot at writing and directing a live-action feature. He imagined Red Skelton comedies, even chatted with live action directors, suggested gags. This faint itch to try writing or directing a live action comedy probably increased after the success of Frank Tashlin's films. Then as now, however - with very few exceptions even today - animators were classified in the industry as crafts people, incapable of making a movie ninety minutes long. But in other respects, over the past twenty years, animation and live action have moved so close together, this rule has changed, particularly with animator/directors like Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, even the Brothers Quay, but also in borrowings from cartoons since Star Wars or Who Framed Roger Rabbit?; and with experimental animation transformed into feature films: City of Lost Children, Institute Benjamenta.
The Mask (1994) is a classic case in point: it was made and marketed very much with Tex Avery in mind. According to the press release, "a hundred" gags were lifted directly from cartoons by Avery and by Bob Clampett, in what the effects team called "animation takes." That included the famous Avery double-takes: eyes bulging priapically; the shriek while body parts explode; the jaw dropping like cement.
From the first scene , Avery's cartoons are the signature of the film. Stanley Ipkiss (Jim Carrey) runs a video of Red Hot Riding Hood on his VCR, while he suffers the humilities of the hapless schlemiel. Then, with Avery on the brain, he puts on the Mask; and whipsaws into cartoon medleys reminiscent of Carl Stallings' musical samplings for Looney Tunes. With dionysian enthusiasm, he howls like Wolfie, whirs like the Tasmanian Devil, bounces like early Daffy.
Many reviews of the film also cited the influence of Avery or the Warners chase cartoon. Stanley was as "cocky as Bugs Bunny, as frenetic as Daffy Duck," "styled after the cartoon great Tex Avery," the "cartoon style," "cartoon boldness;" "textbook cartooning." Jim Carry's elastic body made him a "biological cartoon of himself," "proud to have achieved a personal career goal by becoming a living cartoon." Then, like Daffy, or even Betty Boop, he zips through an arpeggio of celebrity impressions, from Desi Arnaz as Cuban Pete to Schwartzenegger in Commando.
The distributor of the film, New Line, promoted this cartoon look, in the press kit, in print ads, in every interview I found. Industry news columns before its release suggested a very strong "word of mouth," the next hit in the sub-genre of "cartoony" movies - films that borrow from Warners animation, by way of comic books. Since Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1987), or even Star Wars (1977), practically every special effects hit had Warners "takes" buried somewhere, either as a comic-book gag, a black-out aside; or a roller-coaster effect, which, as I will explain later on, originates from the same branch of entertainment as animation.
Also, Warners gags had become essential to the nostalgic look of many special-effects films - the candy-box version of forties screwball/noir : nightclubs and Nazis; men in porkpie hats, women dressed like Rita Hayworth or Veronica Lake; bawdy chases reminiscent of wartime cartoons like Red Hot Riding Hood.
Of course, I am talking about applied animation: those effects that appear in post production. These have come to resemble animation increasingly, starting with computerized motion control in Star Wars, then much more layered compositing, and finally much enhanced 3-D animation; quicktime software, computerized flythroughs, texture mapping - a sculptural and architectonic update of cel animation, cartoon layout, and the chase. Today, essentially everyone working in special effects is expected to understand techniques from the chase cartoon. Knowing cartoon cycles and extremes helps the artist time an action sequence; or splice in surprises in mid-action: the off-beat aside, the wink to the audience.
But as the price of this many levels of slapstick- more collisions and over-reactions- the composition tends to get more congested, again like an Avery cartoon. Effects artists are usually asked to add objects or gimmicks, rather than clean up or thin out. Effects enliven the shot, from blue-screen effects to garbage mattes. That means much more visual throwaway than in the usual live-action film. Avery was, of course, a genius at visual throwaway. He littered the corners of the screen with tiny posters, novelty caricatures on the shelf, puns on the walls. And yet, despite the clutter, he made his chase gags hit like a sledgehammer. His timing was minutely exact. He might cut as little as a single frame, between the top of the screen, from where the object appears, to the point of impact further down - slam! He was certain that for action sequences, the audience can sense the absence of one twenty-fourth of a second.
Chuck Jones disagrees. He thinks the threshold is more like five frames, perhaps a quarter of second. Consider how close to masters of action films Avery and Jones were: they knew the rhythm of gleeful violence supremely well; for example, add pauses to make the collision stronger, to have characters look less prepared. Only the audience suffers anticipation. The character is caught short by at least one frame.
Special effects master Donna Tracy has worked with many of the same problems, on dozens of effects films, from Star Wars to Independence Day. She often will cut only a few frames from a chase, and knows how to contrast with zany cartoon elements where necessary - the "balloony" contours (rubbery, too round, less natural), the anarchic use of scale, the upside-downness. The slightest alternation, a frame or two, can ruin the movement (the effect), make it wobbly, or suggest a different mass. This is utterly like animation. It has that same time-consuming minutia. The computer does not shorten the work, only makes it more thorough. At the same time, a certain anarchy is required for a a good action sequence. Like a cartoon chase, it requires the collision of the unlikely, like mixing media and mood, with surprise pauses, and sudden lurches forward once the final volley begins. All these contraries are then synchronized balletically, to look like a magic act, thanks to the computer.
But beyond techniques on the computer, that post-production now resembles cartoon work, there is the subtle influence of the work environment itself. Special-effects crews are even more isolated from the studio itself than cartoon animators were. This breeds a strange ennui, not unlike film editors going thirty hours straight - but much slower paced. The result of weeks, even months, might be three seconds of film; or five hundred hours working on the texture of a tornado or the fidgety ears of alien reptiloids. This is managed without seeing the director much, except through notes brought by the effects supervisor for the film. Indeed, it is applied animation. Even more than cartoon work, where at least the actors were animated, the effects team works far away from the hustle and tactile presence of actors and live production.
This distanced milieu tends to enhance a movie plot that often is distanced already - dehumanized - where the dramatic characters tend to be hosts in trouble, elements whose main job is to introduce the tornado or the alien war strikes. As each abstracted shape is harvested slowly on a screen, one cannot help but feel disengaged from the political or social buzz outside, a kind of sensory deprivation. "After working for weeks on an effect," says Tracy, "all I want to do is smell a real tree."
At the same time, there is the illusion of a bigger cyber universe. Other screens nearby may be on utterly different projects, not for cinema at all. Effects artists have skills that allow them to work in many media - on malls, casinos, theme parks, web sites, virtual chat lines, TV commercials, music videos, animated features, kid-vid, and incidentally live-action cinema. Therefore, inside an effects studio, one witnesses animation as muscle tissue for a hundred different industries, on a global scale. For a moment this bank of screens seems as exciting as a fully packed world - like a special-effects action ride. But in fact, it is emptied as well, highly undifferentiated. Anything from a bomb to a cyber toy looks the same - detached, innocent - a computer wire frame or a miniature.
This is work place far more fetishistic even than the "fun factories" on a movie lot, more like staring at Barbie dolls for months at a time, perfecting the tilt of her breasts or the angle of her smile. The work seems very independent of factory rules. And and yet, it is utterly contingent. I would compare it to a crafts environment in the nineteenth century. People work in small teams, as in a shoe factory in 1870 (only without the toxic smells, and with overtime pay, and much more cybernetically polite). It is not Fordist, not an assembly line, perhaps less alienated from the means of production, seemingly more autonomous. And yet, the result is fundamentally industrial - repetitive action, based on severely restricted options, a chain of production controls, including contracts that say the studio owns whatever "creative" ideas are generated. Beneath the ergonomics and cheery carpeting, it is still a factory.
Beside obvious comparisons to Disney in the thirties, one can see similarities to Termite Terrace as well, to worker complaints in the stream of gags about Leon Schlesinger, about contracts, from You Out to Be in Pictures to Duck Amuck. I guess the model might be more a plantation than an assembly line - very paternalistic, scattered, but severely controlled.
The mood of the plantation animator will influence the look of special effects films, much as it added a pungent irony to Warners cartoons. Even the plot and structure of f/x films reflect this mood. Increasingly, the action ride movie has insular gags, mostly about watching other movies by way of television. The anti-dramatic structure, with pieces of epic narrative, folkloric narrative, and various magic acts thrown in, resembles the inter-hierarchical, layered, non-linear form of production. The seeming immobility of many of the characters suggest a feudalistic world where power is fluid but vast - diffuse - where individual initiative seems possible mostly as a form of caricature.
Consider the plots of so many of these action films, whether it is The Mask or Independence Day. They center on disaster as conflict, where an unprepared world is invaded by special-effects forces of nature, from tornadoes to dinosaurs to digitally enhanced serial killers, or capitalist terrorists with foreign accents, alien warships from an intergalactic economy.
They always have a fetish, like a comic metonym, that stands in for the effects themselves. Would it be a stretch to identify the mask that Stanley wears as the place (metonym) where special effects enters? The device stands in for the cartoon process. It is an f/x costume, a VR head set; or a time-travel chute that you wear, like sliding through an MRI at the hospital. The metonym erases your identity, but you wear it like clothing, to generate a few dionysian gags, then take it off. Clearly, identity is a kind of accessory one wears, like a tattoo or a pierced ear, nose, stomach.
This is not to say that such fetish/metonyms have not operated as entertainment before. They have been fundamental to how animation has worked for centuries, even before cinema. The effects industry is drawing from the same well as animation the effects industry. No wonder it relies so heavily on the chase cartoons of Avery, Clampett, Jones et al.
Brief Background
Briefly, what do I mean by centuries of narrative theory and techniques common to both chase cartoons and effects movies? Obviously, these roots are not at all postmodern really. They are closer to pre-industrial. Most effects before the computer (and now being rediscovered digitally) borrowed heavily from theatrical devices already old in the nineteenth century. They are animation in real space, very architectural illusions. For example, the trick films of Melies rely on music-hall gimmickry dating back to medieval carnival, also puppet theater, magic lantern effects since the counter Reformation, the wizardry of Renaissance theatrical machines, as well as Mannerist trompe l'oeil and anamorphosis. Many of these already had entered the home as well, through popular illustration since Durer, then mass illustration with the steam engine, along with trick gizmos like zoetropes. That is why I am convinced that special effects in casinos, Baroque churches and the movies share a common heritage.
Another crucial point to remember is that both special effects and animation have been part of the same industry for generations. F/x simply emphasizes that pre-cinematic architectural aspect of animation, as in trick entertainment, circuses, magic acts, music halls, and costume masque - again, animation in real space, as in Melies shorts, or even McCay's vaudeville act with Gertie the dinosaur.
In the United States, Willis O'Brien became the key figure in the emergence of special effects, first in the feature The Los World (1925), and then of course with King Kong (1933). He transferred what was called "trick work" (as in trick photography, and double exposure) into a genre of Hollywood filmmaking.
But the transition was inevitable anyway. After 1927, with the coming of sound, more film was shot indoors. The need for in-camera effects grew enormously, particularly for very elaborate glass mattes and rear projection. These crafts were supposed to be "below the line" generally, hidden rather than exaggerated. They came to be classified within the industry as "animation" because the mattes used techniques similar to cartoon watercolor background, to layout. Similarly, by the mid-thirties, models became more essential, but not only for live action, also for table-top animation in Fleischer cartoons, or as visual aids for Disney animators, to help them locate ways to draw their characters turning. However, since many of these live-action effects were not designed to be noticed, applied animation was barely noticed - until the last twenty years, after Star Wars essentially. except for the occasional book on masters of the stop-motion miniature (O'Brien or Harryhausen), special effects were relegated to chapters in how-to books for amateurs, or manuals for professionals, mostly on cinematography.
But that has irrevocably changed. Applied animation has been retooled as software, for interactive entertainment across the media, even in malls, theme parks, in year-around consumerist carnival. It is simply the architectural version of the animated, more about the shopper as spectator, more about rides than conflict.
Like an amusement park in 1900, or even like the Vatican in 1510 for that matter (illusionistic masterpieces of Michelangelo and Raphael), animation-in-real-space is once again, an interactive journey where the audience is a central character. Character animation is simply a variant of this interactive form.
Special-effects environments, what we today call "interactive," were essential to the urban plan of Renaissance and Baroque cities, in the design of plazas, in the domed interiors, even the illusions painted on the walls. To repeat then, this form of "architectonic" story appears in theater, illustration, circus, any number of entertainments that feed into what we now call animation.
Animation has always been fundamentally an "interactive", not a dramatic form of story; the characters are dominated, or at cartoon war with, the effects. It is more like an epic form, about worlds rising and falling, characters as types within the whole, or as elements like machine parts designed to move the spectacle along. These spectacles are narratives about environments- not characters- at risk, about folklore, carnival, the caricature of community in commedia dell'Arte. For example, one source that continues to fascinate me is the Renaissance machines used for effects in theaters (similar to the gears and levers used in fortifications). They cranked up illusions from below stage, and through the ceiling. Inside such a machine-like magic, the characters remain more stylized, even with comic masks on their faces, or dancing in masques . Centuries later, cartoon characters are stylized in similar ways; they are masks with bionic or rubbery bodies- anarchic phantasms, more like revelers in a masque than dramatic characters, ducks amuck.
That means if you work with animation - as in Daffy lost in the apparatus of the movie in Duck Amuck - you are drawing upon an architectural mode of story quite different from Bazinian space , not simply illusionistic, but a caricature of the stage (movie staging). This anarchic architectural illusion is littered with self-reflexive, inter-textual gags; they speak to the audience the way a standup comedian does, or a TV talk show does, or a TV commercial. Much on TV, therefore, derives from roots similar to animation, to the navigated "epic" journey of the audience through an f/x space.
The Warners chase is an accelerated version of this journey, developed from 1937 to 1958. The contract player (represented by Bugs) is prey to Elmer (dumb boss). Bugs is hunted and haunted, then cheerfully takes his revenge, in alliance with the audience, who are brought into the story with direct address, signs, winks. In Red Hot Riding Hood, the contract players complain to their boss that they are sick and tired of their script. They refuse to do painfully sentimental "mellerdrammer." Instead, they want a masque on Hollywood Boulevard. Then, from a special-effects point of view, Avery navigates the audience through a madly improvised space, very upside-down, where gravities meet, and are made to collide. But it is also similar to trompe l'oeil domes where the sky appears to be collapsing on the spectator- a special effects masque.
Here is how Steve Williams , the special effects supervisor on The Mask saw this Avery gimmick: First, he called the project "an animation acting model rather a visual effects model," more like making cartoon comedy flat, rather than mixing an animated element inside a story closer to dramatic structure, as they had with Jurassic Park immediately before. The Mask apparently was a relief after the tedium of building T-Rex. In other words, animation as a story form felt freer, but also truer to the potential of visual effects, if allowed to mature into its own aesthetic:
"Director Chuck Russell set a new standard in that he allowed us to play with cut lengths of scenes in order to improve the flow of the animation once it was composited (timing like a chase cartoon essentially)... This was not commonplace before "The Mask", but now it is ... (After hoping for years to try Avery gags on an f/x film:) For ten years I've wanted to make someone's, ANYONE'S, eyes bulge."
I suspect the reader probably enjoyed The Mask. But consider how to explain why? If the story is so much freer, what is its structure? Or select your favorite special effects action film? What is the vocabulary? We understand that there is no time during a fist fight for much dramatic development between characters, except as stock pantomime, what I call dramatic "shorthand:" a quick "Hello, what's my conflict?" and on to the chase. That is what passes for dramatic structure in The Mask, in many f/x films, even in the best of them - like the best fairy tales, the best chase cartoons.
Beyond our love of chase cartoons, what makes elemental stories emotional captivating when they appear as live action? What is the vocabulary? WE understand that there is not time for much dramatic development between characters, except as stock pantomime; or as dramatic shorthand, a quick "Hello, what's my conflict?" and on to the chase. That is what passes for dramatic structure in The Mask, in many f/x films, in the best of them - like the best fairy tales, the best chase cartoons.
However, despite the pubescent spirit or thudding redundancy in many of these films, their sheer impact can be breathtaking. Most critics isolated Carrey as the good cartoon ("smokin'"), and the rest as the blague or blah of the story. Reviewers identified with Carrey inside his appliances, makeup and computer enhanced body, but not as a man in dramatic conflict. Donna Tracy said much the same: "The cartoony look of Jim Carrey in "The Mask" brings feelings to us about our own lives, not about his life in the story. We feel the exclusion of our own emotions. We feel ourselves hiding our emotions and content so much, as he does."
Stanley "character" is a shell, controlled by outside forces, as if animation stood in for an ancient special-effects machine. He is trapped inside an apparatus that forces him to explode like an animated cartoon, a parodic allegory about determinism. His frenzy under the cartoon mask is not so much about intimacy, as it is about being trapped inside an apparatus that forces him to explode like Wolfie. The mask is a container, like all animated effects really, an allegory about determinism.
Dramatic narrative, by contrast, is very much about free will, about individualism If Stanley were in a dramatic story, it might be Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, though this story also reprises regularly in special effects, recently as The Nutty Professor. To sharpen this distinction, I'll pause on Jekyll/Hyde for a few sentences, clearly a trope that is almost mythic for many "dark metamorphosis" stories in graphic novels and comics: What does Stevenson's dramatic narrative suggest? Clearly it is a tale about the moral dilemma of releasing self control, as with Poe, one of Stevenson's literary heroes, or with Shelley's Frankenstein, and many others. But it is also a response to the burgeoning growth of London in the 1890's, to slums, prostitution, the flammable mixing of classes, the invading proletariat, the revenge of the declining gentry. Let us say that Jekyll's torment is an allegory about the end of the myths of the entrepreneur: the cowboy who cannot head west; the detective going alone down mean streets; Stevenson's pirates killing for gold; Jekyll the scientist overextending his reach. The hero makes mistakes out of free will, or even out of greed, refusing to take an honest profit, or to stop before breaking God's law.
Drama, in its nineteenth century variant, is often a businessman's idea of predestination and salvation; that soon it will be too late for free enterprise, that the proletariat will overwhelm the natural order of profit and loss. To stretch the point, as a matter of contrast with animation today: dramatic narrative as we in the west have developed it since 1820 or so, revolves around capitalist myths about the individual struggling to survive as an entrepreneur.
Animation, even in its pre-industrial forms, tends toward stories about the reification of the apparatus itself, the mechanized leviathan beyond the individual. Again, this is a feudal model more than an industrial one (at the very latest, from Hobbes' Leviathan). just as obvious a statement, but less known. Characters , like folk heroes, tend to be more elemental21 within the apparatus, and less dramatic, not necessarily dimmer or shallower, simply different. Their relationship to the magic effect, to the gag, the magic potion, reminds the audience that this is a journey into developmental moments in their own life. The character is supposed to be empty, to be filled by the audience's sensibility.
I should add, to not sound too extreme in my classification here, that all this is a matter of degree.
A: The dramatic story exaggerates the internal dialectic of character.
B: the elemental story emphasizes the conflict around the apparatus itself- much more about power, spectacle and presence.
Special effects is a hybrid of both. However, in the mix, each tends to erase the other, leading to a very diminished sense of character. Perhaps this amounts to an allegory about diminished individualism, that the self, as an industrial myth about freedom, cannot survive the effects of the electronic workplace.
The Need For New Theory About Hybrid Cinema
Critics, and I must admit, film theorists, as a rule still ignore the elemental form of story that is inherent to animation. And therefore, they often get flustered by the special effects film. For example, let us sort through some of the reviews of The Mask at the time of its release.
From Janet Maslin, the New York Times :
"The Mask underscores the shrinking importance of conventional storytelling in special-effects-minded movies, which are happy to overshadow quaint ideas about plot and character with flashy up-to-the-minute gimmickry."
From David Denby, New York :
"Some of the shocks are amazing: like pinpricks on your hand, only fun. There's no script to speak of, and the other characters hardly matter."
From Newsweek :
"The plot's a throwaway. You've got to get on board, or move out of the way."
The responses were much the same with Independence Day, which indeed was a bit blunt, a very cynical film, filled with all the hot-button effects, but at least making fun of itself. Still, I saw it from the first row, and wasn't bored, any more than being dragged by a runaway bus. Which brings me back to a recurring theme: one of the most common terms used in production of these films is "the ride." As Donna Tracy explains: "The ride is more important than the story. The ride is the story."
What we need to understand is that the ride is an allegory about the audience, about the shocks of globalized economic arrangements, about new forms of visuality, and fundamentally about the collapse of privacy and public space- all of these wrapped into a cartoon bildung without any interior life, in fact bluntly displaying characters incapable of interiors.
In other words, we see a simulation of self as a movie effect. Forget Baudrillard's nostrums for a moment. Simulation (copies without originals) as a device in movie-making merely announces the folkloric or elemental use of character; then enables the immersive journey, where we the audience cannot distinguish between inside and outside, where our identity is invaded by special effects; and yet, in some ergonomic way, we are comfortable with our self-erasure (or are we?). It is a grim allegory indeed. No wonder critics resent it. Beneath the blithe and thrilling, there is a warning the invasion of self - loss of intimacy, personal memory.
But we must take these films more seriously, even though they are so misanthropic in the way they hawk their hype. I could sidestep the entire problem by taking the high road, use experimental animation as the model, for example: stop-motion masterpieces by Starevich, Borowczyk, Rybczynski, Svankmejer, and then the ambient journeys by the Brothers Quay. By Hollywood standards, these films are systematically anti-dramatic, simply outside the range of pop dramatic narrative. But that would do no good really. Animated "action" films like The Mask present a very different set of parameters. Unlike a Quay film, they are a category fundamental to the main stream, immensely popular, even dominant in the nineties. They are built out of a new form of cinematography that has taken the global film market by storm, led to glittery articles on the animation industry in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and a buzz in the art world that amazes me. This buzz has become a windfall to film schools, and dozens of new animation programs in colleges, even in high schools now. Every major studio is investing hundreds of millions of dollars to ramp up for more special effects films like The Mask, or Forrest Gump, Independence Day, The Lion King. That means effects above and below the line, for lighting, stunts, locations. The gold mine for licensing special effects in toys, games, clothing, and VR malls is greater than what animated films have earned before, very much like cartoon licensing, but on an astronomical level. The The Lion King alone earned over a billion dollars in clear profit, the most lucrative consumer object ever made. What do you think Henry Ford would have done?
Nevertheless, I am convinced that we are not witnessing the collapse of movie culture as we know it - dramatic structure - but the gaudy birth of a hybrid form. And animation, particularly the chase cartoon, is the key to understanding how this hybrid can mature (one hopes). We need to outgrow our postmodern cynicism, and concentrate more on inventing a modernist poetics for the computer era.
The glamour of special effects remind us that consumerism has matured. It is now integrated as a co-partner in the industrial economy. Disney is on the DOW. Time-Warner has just absorbed Turner broadcast. Not since the late feudal era that gave birth to animation, has power, entertainment and salvation been concentrated in precisely the same place- the same screen, so diffuse, yet so omnipotent. Indeed, hybrid cinema is merely reminding us that in the "New World Order," public and private, work and leisure, capital and information, are being hybridized.
What's more, this electronic feudalism is allegorized by the mood inside a special-effects studio. Something as fissionable as the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century is upon us, promising us cable, remote control, and special effects in return for declining real income, and agonizing risk. What presence and engagement do we intend to make of this cultural package?
These flashy special-effects films will be teaching the future what we thought of our mess, just as trick cinema teaches us today about the impact of electricity and locomotives in 1900. In other words, one could argue that films like The Mask speak more directly, or at least more problematically about the impact of computer capitalism than CD-Roms or the Internet, than the entire telephonic, hypercard boosterism that is called cyberspace.
In 1994, Richard Corliss wrote of The Mask:
By obeying the insane pace, wild exaggeration, mock cheerful tone and inside references that today define much of a movie and TV entertainment, Avery practically invented pop culture's Postmodernism."
While I'm not comfortable with the over-ripe term postmodernism (I'm more a modernist, I suspect), Corliss is on the right track. Movies that hark back to the televisual, like The Mask, rely on vocabulary developed by Avery and the chase cartoon; I find that cartoons help explain a great deal about the semiotics of television narrative, since cartoons come out of root source in theater that leads to television as well. Animation has always been hybridized, in its marketing, scripting, production and reception. And now, live action cinema is turning into a kind of animation.
Recently, George Lucas has said that digital effects can bring assembly-line efficiency to movie making. Through digital libraries, like painted backdrops of New York City in studio lots of the thirties and forties, the process of building a movie can be integrated, not split off between the shoot, and digitalized post production. There will be "no aesthetic advantage in shooting on location anymore." Digital content will become reusable, like old cartoons. The era when digital effects shift from a service industry to production has arrived.
James Cameron repeats in various interviews, as if he were a master animator at his light table: "Anything you can imagine can be done. If you can draw it, if you can describe it, we can do it." His version of the collapse of public into private has arrived - as story - on the image-capture stage that he used for True Lies. "In Digital Hollywood you won't even be able to trust your eyes." The special-effects films, for all their gaudiness, have become the portable cathedrals for this integrated, weirdly disengaged feudal civilization.