cultural: cinema • 11 Jan Lubaczewski
“I drink your milkshake!”
A
merican cinema is often described as the American Dream personified. And, when talking about films made in the United States, there is a tendency to think about a certain type of Hollywood productions. We like to imagine the most popular film industry on the planet as a big, scary-looking and incredibly potent monster whose only concern is to make money, and preferably a lot of it. All of this is of course to some extent true. Yet what is often omitted, ignored or simply not acknowledged enough is the great diversity of American cinema: the diversity of genre, of style, but also of ideas. There is an incredibly fascinating and ample industry of independent American cinema with its great masters such as David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch or Noah Baumbach. All these directors make their films with a very small budget, not because they want it so (although in case of early Jarmusch’s films it could have been the case), but because big Hollywood executives try to, almost literally, take their movie away from them. The independent filmmakers’ cinema often revolves around the subjects of independence, freedom, and dominance. It is also concerned with American society as perceived by them and by the rest of the world, including postmodern artists and writers. Yet, aside from being an independent filmmaker, there is another way of commenting on the situation of the United States and on its citizens’ values, that is, making films in Hollywood, but still remaining an artist and having the final word on the set. This path was chosen by many great American directors such as Martin Scorsese, the Coen brothers, or the protagonist of this article – Paul Thomas Anderson. To describe Anderson’s films simply as being “American” would be an understatement. The attempt to grasp what’s really “American” about the
United States and the Americans stands at the core of Anderson’s attitude towards film. Almost all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films are concerned with the illusion of the American Dream, but the ones that stress the idea the most are Boogie Nights (1997) and There Will Be Blood (2007). And so, whether it's the story of becoming a porn star or a 19thcentury gold prospector, PTA always puts forward the question of how it is all connected with the USA nowadays. A firm belief in the American Dream proves to be an answer: the idea that your life belongs to you and that with sheer grit you can easily become a millionaire, and that you were born to do great things. The second film in PTA’s career is one of the greatest examples in the American cinema of the need for coming-of-age stories that enable the audience to understand themselves better. Boogie Nights was released in 1997 and it provoked a great scandal in the US film business. It is a film about the porn industry, which is not only provocative and explicit but also gives a strange kind of satisfaction. Here is a film in which the pornographic industry is portrayed ambiguously. On the one hand, the critique is there, on the other, it doesn’t seem to be strong enough. To answer the question of how it is all connected to the American Dream, we need to step back a bit and look at the US porn industry of the late 1990s. We also need to note that Boogie Nights puts stress on the financial side of the enterprise. And on that note, this is how David Foster Wallace, an American postmodern writer, describes the importance of porn within the US entertainment industry: “It is universally acknowledged that the US adult-film industry (…) is an even larger and more efficient moneymaking machine than legitimate mainstream American (…). The US adult industry
