UC Irvine

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Allegories of Industry and the Limits of Reflexivity in Hollywood, 1992-2006

By

Erik Watschke

Doctor of Philosophy in Visual Studies

University of California, Irvine, 2014

Professor Catherine L. Benamou, Chair

This dissertation examines technological and paradigmatic changes to the American Film Industry of the last twenty-five years through the lens of popular modes and methods of reflexivity, as manifested in selected film texts. I argue for the historical importance of this period, referred to as "The New New Hollywood," in transforming issues of labor, authorship, and audience within United States-based film production. This entails an analysis of the way that discourses are narrated within Hollywood films themselves, along with the rhetoric of trade organizations, film critics, and film studios. I do this through a series of case studies of films and their promotional materials.

In the first three chapters respectively, I analyze Richard Attenborough's Chaplin (1992) for its employment of literal reflexivity in the biopic genre, Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) for its metaphorical reflexivity concerning digital imaging, and Anthony Minghella's The English Patient (1996) as an independent-blockbuster whose sound allegories comment on transnational filmmaking. In the last two chapters, I analyze Spike Jonze's Adaptation (2002) as a film-à-clef that literally dramatizes screenwriting conventions, and finally, Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (2006), whose allegorical reflexivity centers on the current state of cinematic illusionism.

Ultimately, I consider how these films and the rhetoric surrounding them alternatively represent and mystify debates concerning independent and blockbuster film forms, photochemical and digital technologies, and the work of narrative feature filmmaking. The broader goal of this study is to historicize recent Hollywood forms that arise between the early 1990s and mid-2000s, and suggest that the development of new, specific definitions of "Hollywood" and "filmmaker" are necessary to an understanding of contemporary globalized media industries. This is due to three key historical shifts that characterize the period: changes in ancillary marketing strategies, transformation of formal and narrative structures, and the digitization of the technical processes of cinema.