What the fuck am I doing in this theater? On Darren Paul Fisher's "Popcorn"
Popcorn (2007) is a trashy, witty British farce unfolding among young proles in a cineplex, “Moovie World,” the double entendre suggesting an infantile need for nourishment. It opens as teenager Danny awakens, clad in heroic underpants, his bedroom walls filled with, in encouraging posters, the well-formed bodies of manga babes. Spying at a cineplex the one matching his favorite image, he applies to work there, then joins a staff of costumed lookalikes with a suited collegiate underboss. This virginal mangenue needs a life. Suki (‘beloved’ in Japanese), object of his desiring quest, is represented in a comic page recurrently spliced in to remind us of the developments in his scheme. The comic page is also a storyboard, for this film tells the crazy story of a film that would be.
The conceit: the film-goer as such is in search of an object of desire. Simplified: to nail the girl. Danny thinks the film is there for him, and so knows only desire’s enigma: getting what he wants. But, as we will eventually learn, Suki is only acting the part (of the hard-to-get but available desired object), while he doesn’t see that in the game he’s playing he’s s fool, a puppet. Worse, the storyboard’s inevitable endgame (if the plan works) is the sad life of another film cliché: the mutually self-hating working-class British family, united by the telly they are assembled in a line, gazing dully at together.
In fact, we suspect Danny’s mediated desire not only has sex and marriage as stand-ins for an absent life, but is really a need less for love than ideal image. “Aren’t real people,” he asks the projectionist Zak, who works for him, mentor and facilitator of his scheme, “any different from screen people, anyway?” To want the real is to presuppose that you’re in the non-real: maybe “real persons” just are what images “should” be, and authenticity is an ethical demand made of workers in the age of the stage, where so much of being is seeming, and doing things playing a role. The society of the spectacle is also one of surveillance; the modern naïf is the actor who doesn’t know he’s one; we viewers identify with the hero, but also with the authorial perspective that frustrates him.
The frustration is partly a worker’s: thus, one of Danny’s colleagues: “I don’t find myself mentally challenged by this job, but I’d like to be mentally challenged.” A bitter irony lost on few young workers anywhere, even absent British culture’s stock class-consciousness. Another team member’s book is Psychoanalysis itself, a meta-filmic nod that suggests you might at least manage your exploitation by learning how to read the schemes you’re employed in.
The happily paired (absent visible problems of their own) projectionists, Zak and Flo, whose names suggest circular mechanical repetition, will orchestrate Danny’s romantic success. The textbook plot is to win Beloved through a triangular scheme of narrative desire turning on displacement (French theory meets Elizabethan comedy) involving the guileless coworker Annie. Following Zak’s counsel, he complains to love object Suki of cold feet wooing faux target Annie, as their own conversation is riotously completed by the dialogue of screen characters they’re watching.
The simple plot devised to yield happiness (for the guileless viewer Danny represents), uses the blatant scam of modeling life projects on pop culture image mediation, targeting banal objects of a typical desire. (Everyone in this farce is without personality, as they are types). A story of oppositions and doublings: Annie and Suki (one shy, the other sluttish) are flip sides of what Danny wants, while all the workers are near lookalikes with costumes distinguished only by gender. In a standardized world, the worker is an exhangeable commodity. And as their jobs do kind of suck, we’re not surprised when we see the theater lobby’s display board announce what is currently being screened in its halls, as if the big board itself were succumbing to a moment of madness, showing a mere set of monosyllabic crudities.
Zak exudes the confidence of a self-help manual: “Perfect movie moments do exist in real life.” Yes, Virginia, this is a dream factory: God is in the projector, all is right with the world. He lectures, “Cinema shapes our lives. Helps us make sense of the world. Therefore, if people mould the real world to reflect the film world, passion should work off screen as well as on.” Plot here works doubly: the teleological (narrative) is instrumental (strategy), as art is a tool to redeem, or realize perfectly, experience. An artwork useful to make a life work. Danny wonders about the “patterns” he discerns. Zak draws for the enchanted fool the wacky conclusion, “Life is just a series of stories, with you as the hero.” Informed by the wannabe prof that this is called a quest, the hungry ingenue presses, “So does this mean I’m gonna get the girl?” As with a drug (as we’ll see, more truly what is offered), you always get what you want, and want more.
The reductively zany Zak (the false prophet’s name means “God has remembered”) explains with the pedant’s tautological circularity, “My theories have always been — theoretical.” Theory needn’t be true, only work, yielding satisfaction: “Girl A + Boy B + Film Rules = Love.” Film school idiocy, offering the formulaic guarantees of a neatly programmed machine. Like advertising, or porn, it sells you “happiness” — or, rather, satisfaction: what you want. Not unlike a drug. A subplot reveals that Suki is in fact a detective planted to unearth a criminal conspiracy, the essence of which, revealed by Annie at work selling chocolates in the theater, is that the movie world itself is an apparatus for disguising entertainment as — addictive enjoyment. The swindle is not behind the scenes of the cinema apparatus, but constitutive of it. And the would-be beneficiaries are its dupes.
And so the object lesson to the loser hero of this coming-of-age farcical Bildungsroman, in the negatively indicated authentic forms of identity and desire, work and love, fails. Danny’s let-down is the discovery that Suki was “fake.” She was faking it, a kind of whore whose role is to return a man’s desiring gaze, while his own plot is foiled by that of the company (or knowing author), in which he is used. Revenge of the ’70’s theory crowd: as cinema (and now, social media) tends to merge the roles of consumer and laborer, your desire and drive for pleasure will be how you are had. (I want my money back!)
Danny’s scheme is foiled by the company’s partly because he’s stuck in the compulsive repetition of an addiction familiar to cinephilic voyeurs. Rebuffed by Annie, who is nonplussed at his betrayal in using her to get Suki, he finally meets a new girl at a party by the office pool. Her bathing suit has an idiotic “Y” over each tit, like a signifier in place of the absent enigma of a real desire. In the adventure she offers Danny, we see that he, with the useless bulge of the same heroic underpants he sported at entry, has learned nothing. Instead, he’s only too eager to see himself projected in the same plot again. There, appropriately, the film (dead-) ends.
Popcorn is smartly self-reflexive, in several ways, of cinema and its (at least, public) sites of exhibition. The Moovie World is both an entertainment complex, offering something between base pornography and exalted art, and a workplace. Economically, film is an industrial art form, an apparatus of producing money through enjoyment. The anxious worry that it’s really shit is a variant of the modern ennui (boredom) that is heightened by great expectations. Theater workers are not alone in being situated between work and pleasure in the world of the god ‘Art’; they share this with most who take it seriously, for it’s both. Art today is the last refuge of deviance that isn’t madness, and dissidence that isn’t crime, better even than the therapeutic practices now replacing religion in getting people right with the gods of the state. It matters to us, even if we wonder how or why, and anxiously.
The contemporary confusion (or fusion) of worker and consumer facilitates the film’s savvy class comedy, which knows that the workers always gets screwed. A formulaic Marxism meets Mulvey’s famous psychoanalytic feminism in postmodern irony, the problems of the beloved as image meeting those of the worker as exploited and alienated. Comedy of a false life, the desirable one, which only excludes us (spectators, workers, artists) qua off-screen, unelided.
Do we need art to show us what is ‘false’ in modern life? A time-honored practice redeems trashy tales through formal self-reflection, often implicitly posing the critical question, what is art (or in one of exhibition, what are we doing here)? Negatively: mistrust of uses of image and story, long commonplace, is still telling. Stories can mislead us in modeling ways of plotting the events that trouble our world or solve its problems, while we are caught in plots that trap us. Modern literature troubled the optimistic faiths, disbelieving (epic and medieval) quests to realize selves and their desires. And we know from Shakespeare that personality can be figured as performative artificiality (the face is but a mask) or authentic identity (behind the face of seeming is the true one of being). Seventies film theory (doyenne of film school brats, Laura Mulvey) brought to this a suspicion of images as falsely comforting and ideological, essentially advertising objects of desire and identity. Here she’s in the storyboard, eventually summoned as deus ex machina (as Danny gets his sister to unveil what’s behind the screen). Worries abound.
We are further today from the ludic baroque postmodernism that enjoyed its critiques of ideology and alienation without presenting their outside, yet Popcorn’s portrayal of entrapment remains among our nightmares. To their credit, most cinema workers are closer to what this film thinks and reveals than what the silly folks in it see; though this is not true of all cinephiles, who may enjoy art as advertising. They’ve come for a good time, for the corny pop porn. The bitter ironies of this trashy comedy did leave me feeling a bit wretched, but that goes with the territory. We are luckier than Danny: The collapse of the narrative-driving antinomies lets the film end and us leave, after enjoying what this ridiculous stand-in for us could not, his desire’s disappointment. But, we know, it’s the comedy of ugliness we’re here for.