Army of Milla: Resident Evil and Modern Auteurism

Part Three: Resident Evil and Classical Auteurism

"This is one of the problems in resolving arguments between auteurists and anti-auteurists: the two sides can never agree entirely on what is good and what is bad."

-- Andrew Sarris, "The Auteur Theory Revisted" 

The first part of this series looked at the notion of Vulgar Auteurism, a loose accumulation of ideas and attitudes that have become increasingly controversial in the internet film critic community over the past year or so. I have some reservations about the movement, if such an amorphous body can even be called that, namely its potential over-emphasis on formalism and complications arising from the self-applied word 'Vulgar" (itself a repurposed pejorative, used initially, as far as anyone can tell, in a negative context by the critic Andrew Tracy in a Cinema Scope piece on Michael Mann, excerpts of which have been reposted in the wake of the clamorous twitter controversy stoked by Calum Marsh's use of the concept in his Village Voice review of the latest Fast & Furious movie a couple weeks ago), which is both ahistorical (because auteurism has always examined the "vulgar") and self-contradictory, because it accepts the high-low division of art it ostensibly is opposing. 

These reservations in side, I wanted to see the theory in action, so for the second part of this series I decided to look at the work of Paul WS Anderson, specifically his Resident Evil films, of which he has, so far, written five and directed three, in the hopes of uncovering an auteur hidden in the ghetto of a ghetto, the video game adaptation subset of the action movie genre. What I found was a clean visual style, skillful action editing, and a referential approach to genre cinema, one that relies on twisting and repurposing many of the films and tropes of the past 50 years, which, along with the films' approach to their characters as fungible and disposable, creates a coherent, if paranoid picture of the late-capitalist, digital world. The question remains, though, is that enough to call Anderson an auteur? Is a distinct visual style combined with recurrent thematic concerns all it takes to earn that label? And if so, does that mean the Resident Evil films are, for lack of a better word, good?

To try to answer these questions, I'd like to return to Andrew Sarris and the founding documents of auteur theory. Now, Sarris was not Moses and The American Cinema is not holy scripture (though it can seem that way when described by some of its early adherents). In fact, written into the very DNA of the theory is the fact that it is never complete, that there is never a final word, that everything is always a subject for further research, including the nature of the theory itself. And it may very well be the case that the Vulgar Auteurists are not thinking specifically of Sarris's ideas or methods at all, but some other formulation of the theory (like François Truffaut's or Peter Wollen's) or maybe not even Auteurism at all, that they could just as easily be Vulgar Formalism or Vulgar Lacanianism or whatever else happened to catch the ear and stick. I do think that there is value to be gained by examining Anderson through the lens of Sarris's method, however, even if it ends up helping me understand Sarris more than it helps me understand Mubi.

In Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962, Sarris lays out the three general premises of the auteur theory. The quality of the film and its director will depend on which, if any, of these three criteria of value they meet. The first is the technical skill of the director:

A badly directed or undirected film has no importance in the critical scale of values, but one can make interesting conversation about the subject, the script, the acting, the color, the photography, the editing, the music, the costumes, the decor, etc. That is the nature of the medium. You always get more for your money than mere art. Now, by the auteur theory, if a director has no technical competence, no elementary flair for the cinema, he is automatically cast out from the pantheon of directors. A great director has to at least be a good director.

Here we hit a snag in the case of a writer-director like Paul WS Anderson. Sarris was writing during the late studio era, hoping to promote directors who stood out under the mass production conditions then at play, where the director had relatively little control over the various other crafts involved in the production of a motion picture (though that can be overstated: Hitchcock, Hawks and Ford, for example, were very rarely directors for hire with no say in the construction of the scripts they filmed). But 50 years later, the studio system seems an aberration, a mere blip in the history of cinema. In the modern era, films are assembled from the ground up, with the director often involved in every step of the process. This is not always the case, of course, but typically a director has more power over the total shape of a film now than they did then. With a director who writes their own films, one can hardly separate the script from an evaluation of their work as a potential auteur. And in Anderson's case, his scripts are uniformly weak. While their very genericness may be spun as a virtue, or at least seen neutrally as an elegant structure allowing a wide latitude for cinematic play, it's harder to justify his dialogue, which is functional at best and at worst, as in his Three Musketeers adaptation, sounds like a greatest hits mix of 80s action movie clichés. Additionally, his Resident Evil films are plagued by long stretches of exposition, growing longer with each successive film, most notoriously a ten minute break in the action of the fifth movie, which, following a spectacular opening shot and beautifully styled action sequence, brings the film’s momentum to a crashing halt. So, while his technical skill as a visual director is impressive, the fact that he is unable to create convincing dialogue puts into question whether or not he meets this requirement.

Sarris's second criterion of value is the distinguishable personality of the director. It is this premise that tends to be conflated with the theory as a whole, and as well is often the most misunderstood. To put it simply: all other things being equal, the personal film is the better film. Given the choice between two equally terrible (or mediocre, or great) movies, the film that expresses something personal to its creator is the superior work, because personal expression is a value in art in and of itself. Auteurism as a method is an attempt to discover an auteur's personality by looking at as much of their work as possible, and in as many different ways, sifting through the influences of studio, genre and collaborators to find the auteur's core vision of the world. It is always in search of more evidence, and this is its most noble attribute: Auteurism is always open-minded. 

Again, however, Sarris conceives of this personal core in visual terms due to the production standards of his time: "Because so much of the American cinema is commissioned, a director is forced to express his personality through the visual treatment of the material rather than the literary content of the material." This partly serves as a justification for examining "vulgar" content: if it’s only the visual form that the Auteurist is interested in, the quality of the subject or its verbal and narrative expression is irrelevant. But it also serves the polemical purpose of forcing the critic to examine a film in visual terms, to look at the totality of the cinematic product rather than focus on its more literary aspects. Americans, even professional film critics, are reasonably well-trained at analyzing plots and themes and subjects, while often lacking much more than a rudimentary understanding of visual aesthetics. In conceiving of directorial personality as primarily a visual expression, Auteurism seeks to redress that imbalance, to create a criticism of the totality of a film. It is somewhat disheartening, then, to see auteur status so often defined as simply coming from the repeated exploration of certain themes and subjects. For this reason, the Vulgar Auteurist’s focus on form over content is a welcome addition to the critical discourse. But, as Sarris wrote “Auteur criticism is a reaction against sociological criticism that enthroned the what against the how. However, it would be equally fallacious to enthrone the how against the what. The whole point of a meaningful style is that it unifies the what and the how into a personal statement.”

It is unclear to me, at this time, if Paul WS Anderson meets this second criterion of value. There are recurrent visual schemes in his work, specifically in the cleanliness of his action editing and his placement of individuals within spaces both vast and small, each conveying a sense of entrapment. However, his Death Race movie has none of the visual charm of his other 2000s movies, exchanging bright whites and vibrant colors for a dingy sepia-gray. As a writer, he consistently shows a suspicion of power figures, with a paranoid vision of corporations run amok pulling the strings of his victim protagonists. And he also evinces an unusual interest in mixing his generic forebearers, as in the way his Resident Evil films each seem to have a model in a previous example of action cinema, or the way he grafts steampunk onto Dumas, or modern conspiracy theories about Egyptian and Central American religious architecture onto the mythology of a pair of 80s sci-fi series. But these preoccupations lie only on the surface of his films. They are nods to meaning rather than explorations of ideas. Anderson skillfully reflects the shiny surface of post-modernity, but doesn't seem interested, as yet, in diving into its depths. The last Resident Evil movie, however, which twists the series upon itself in new and unusual ways, shows that he may be preparing to plunge.

The third criterion of value Sarris delineates is the most mysterious and the most troublesome. He calls it "interior meaning" which is vague enough, but then ascribes to it the even vaguer concept of mise-en-scène, which he unhelpfully defines as the indefinable quality a great director gives to their picture, the "Lubitsch Touch" as a critical concept. As best as I can figure, the third premise is a relational one. Sarris talks about it lying in the tension between a filmmaker and their subject, which opens up a few possibilities. Interior meaning could be described as the difference between a kung fu movie directed by Chang Cheh and a kung fu movie directed by Lau Kar-leung: find the differences and you find the special something each director brought to their otherwise generic, vulgar material. I don't think Anderson meets this standard, because I don't see much tension between him and his material. He has at times approached a transcendent visual artistry (the opening sequences of the fifth Resident Evil film come to mind), but too often his film evince little more than above-average action filmmaking. His paranoia is relatively common in science-fiction and so rather than creating a unique and personal vision of the world, Anderson's films can more rightly be described as competent treading of well-worn terrain. His last few movies, however, show potential, and so I'm unwilling to write Anderson off as an impersonal filmmaker. Perhaps he has it in him to perform the auteurial jujitsu necessary to turn the generic qualities of his movies into virtues, into a truly compelling and original statement about the world and/or the cinema itself, merging the blankness and fungibility of his characters with the schematic structures of their worlds and the interchangeability of their dialogue to say something truly meaningful. But I don't think he's made that complete a filmic statement yet.

And so we are led back to the question of evaluation. Is Paul WS Anderson an auteur, and are his movies any good and are these questions related? My answers are not quite, sometimes, and yes and no. A more formalist critic than me might have different answers to those questions, but I remain unconvinced that the flaws in Anderson's approach to story, dialogue and character can be compensated for by a facility for coherent action and cleanliness of visual space. In two separate reviews, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky refers to Anderson as "unpretentious" (of Resident Evil 5 at Mubi and of Soldier at the AV Club), which is both true and another way of saying his movies aren't very deep because he isn't trying to be deep. There's nothing wrong with that as far as it goes, the problem is that it doesn't go very far. But Auteurism isn't a binary system, where a director either has "it" or doesn't. Sarris's conception of film history in The American Cinema is of an auteurial spectrum, with the greatest directors, the ones who have most fulfilled the premises of the auteur theory, in the Pantheon at the top with a descending series of lesser categories below them (the categories are loosely designed, more an organizing principle than anything else, but still a useful construct for elucidating differences between types of filmmakers). If Anderson's chief virtue is that his films are enjoyable and unpretentious, then he belongs in the Lightly Likable category, the denizens of which Sarris describes as "talented but uneven directors with the saving grace of being unpretentious." Some of the directors in this category include Henry Hathaway, George Sidney, Mitchell Leisen, Mervyn LeRoy, Busby Berkeley, Michael Curtiz and Delmer Daves. Not bad company at all (some of them I'd place even higher, naturally) and certainly a group held in greater esteem than Anderson is, with his routine Rotten Tomatoes scores in the 30% range.

I'd like to end with a postscript on Sarris's final criteria. It seems to me that interior meaning can more tantalizingly be conceived as lying in the relation between a critic and a film, in the ways that certain films affect certain people in undefinable ways. The task of the critic is to find some way to communicate that indefinable experience. The auteur theory is not a theory of film, it is a theory of film criticism. It is a method for understanding what we value, why we value it and a means of expressing those values. In 1977, Sarris wrote:

[...]interior meaning, a term that gave me a great deal of trouble at the time, but one that has since come to define what all serious film criticism seeks to discover. Auteurism has less to do with the way movies are made than with the way they are elucidated and evaluated, It is more a critical instrument than a creative inspiration. Peter Wollen has suggested the hypothetical nature of the enterprise and I will go along with that. The cinema is a deep, dark mystery that we auteurists are attempting to solve.