Mark A

Mark A. Eaton

Miramax, Merchant-Ivory, and the New Nobrow Culture:

Niche Marketing The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl

In his 1899 essay “The Future of the Novel,” Henry James worried about the apparent demise of good taste, or rather the lack of any taste, which he thought necessary to appreciate aesthetically demanding fiction like his own:

The sort of taste that used to be called “good” has nothing to do with the matter: we are so demonstrably in the presence of millions for whom taste is but an obscure, confused, immediate instinct. In the flare of railway bookstalls, in the shop-fronts of most book-sellers, especially the provincial, in the advertisements of the weekly newspapers, and in fifty places besides, this testimony to the general preference triumphs. (101)

This triumph of the “general preference” was disturbing for James because he believed that it cheapened the value of serious literary fiction and even threatened the obsolescence of his work. The issue was not that people had stopped reading books—on the contrary, they were reading more than ever—but rather that readers were deluged with the wrong kinds of books: “The flood at present swells and swells, threatening the whole field of letters, as would often seem, with submersion. […] There is an immense public, if public be the name, inarticulate, but abysmally absorbent, for which, at its hours of ease, the printed volume has no other association [than with fiction]. This public […] grows and grows each year” (100). Drowning in books and lacking taste, this fast growing mass public failed to discriminate between good books and bad ones.[1]

James’s novels have always been credited with representing highly refined mental states, “centers of consciousness” that prefigure the stream of consciousness techniques of later high modernists. Yet James’s novels, according to Mark McGurl in a recent study, are at the same time complex delineations of social distinction. For the refined consciousness and exquisite taste of James’s protagonists are usually set against the average intelligence of social inferiors, or even against the general stupidity of the masses: “Thus the novels of James must be understood not, or not merely, as representations of thinking, or of consciousness, but as a means of distinguishing the smart from the stupid” (McGurl 129). The celebrated inward turn of James’s late phase, in this view, was an attempt “to atomize the class differences [which] had become confused by the proximity, intimacy, and capacity for imitative theatricality of different persons circulating in the same dimension of spaces” (McGurl 76). Class differences had also become confused, as the passage I started with suggests, by the emergence of what was later called the culture industry.[2]

If James’s novels have accrued the kind of cultural capital that serves to distinguish the smart from the stupid, how exactly do we account for the appeal of the recent film adaptations? “Describing James’s interest in the cultural values of art does not,” as Susan M. Griffin insists, “explain the cultural capital that his own work has accrued in modern cinema. Why has James’s writing proved so popular as the material for film?” (2). It seems clear that the very notion of “cultural capital” may have different valences, different consequences even, depending on the context in which it is used, and that certain high culture icons—Shakespeare or Jane Austen, say—may well have markedly different uses when translated into a cultural medium like film. In literary studies, cultural capital has been quite productively viewed as a “symbolic value,” Dale M. Bauer explains, “that registers social class distinctions; it is ‘knowledge-capital’ that operates as a ‘mechanism of social exclusion’” (Bauer 240; Guillory viii-ix). But in this sense, at least, cultural capital would seem to guarantee a limited rather than a mass audience. Indeed, Bourdieu points out that cultural capital often accrues to cultural products in inverse proportion to economic capital. The literary field operates according to a kind of anti-economy in which the “loser wins”; economic failure is strangely seen “as a sign of election,” whereas success is seen as “a sign of compromise” (Field 38-40). Which is precisely what makes cultural capital such a problematic form of currency in the film industry, where the enormous production costs must be offset by maximizing box office grosses.[3] Although classic art cinema certainly did acquire cultural capital once movies were legitimized as art, the demise of art cinema in the last several years raises the question of whether knowledge of movies—that is, certain kinds of movies—gives anyone the symbolic value (and hence class status) designated by the term cultural capital.

Given Henry James’s own anxiety about mass publics, it is nonetheless interesting to consider how the author would have responded to the current cinematic revival of his novels. The hypothetical scenario of Henry James sitting in a theater watching a movie while munching popcorn has proved irresistible to critics assessing the latest spate of adaptations (as in the title and cover art of a recent essay collection, Henry James at the Movies). As early as the 1950s, movie critics used Henry James as a benchmark of high culture which cinema would have to be measured against if it was to gain artistic legitimacy in its own right. Thus in the preface to The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theater and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (1956), Robert Warshow declared himself to be “sharply aware that the impulse which leads me to a Humphrey Bogart movie has little in common with the impulse which leads me to the novels of Henry James. […] I have not brought Henry James to the movies or the movies to Henry James, but I hope I have shown that the man who goes to the movies is the same man who reads James. In the long run, I hope that my work may even make some contribution to the ‘legitimatization’ of the movies” (xli-xliii). Warshow expresses here an anxiety about appreciating popular culture at the expense of high culture that James obviously shared but which has long since diminished, thanks in part to the subsequent elevation of art cinema. Today’s critics are less fastidious about bringing Henry James to the movies, or the movies to Henry James. Cynthia Ozick, for instance, can’t think of anyone who “distinguished more stringently between High and Low than this illustrious literary master,” yet still believes James would have “welcomed” film adaptations of his works (H1). Daphne Merkin goes further: “[James] would have loved the vicarious embrace of the movies” (122; my emphasis). I’m not so sure myself. What is clear, though, is that the demarcations between high and low culture have profoundly shifted since James’s time, first with the emergence of “middlebrow culture” in the mid 1920s, and then with the leveling of cultural hierarchies generally in postmodernism. “For more than a century,” John Seabrook argues in Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing—the Marketing of Culture (2000),

the elite in the United States had distinguished themselves from consumers of commercial culture, or mass culture. Highbrow/lowbrow was the language by which culture was translated into status—the pivot on which distinctions of taste became distinctions of caste. […] In the United States, making hierarchical distinctions about culture was the only acceptable way to talk about class. (26)

However, in the last half of the twentieth century, Seabrook continues, “the town house of culture collapsed. […] The old distinction between the elite culture of the aristocrats and the commercial culture of the masses was torn down, and in its place was erected a hierarchy of hotness. Nobrow is not culture without hierarchy, of course, but in Nobrow commercial culture is a potential source of status, rather than the thing the elite define themselves against” (69, 28).[4]

Similarly, recent popular appropriations of high cultural texts by Jane Austen, James, and Shakespeare speak to a subtle shift in the dynamics of middlebrow culture starting in the 1990s. To begin with, the very concept of the “middlebrow,” which has proved useful in assessing the pedagogical function of early twentieth century institutions such as the Book-of-the-Month Club (Radway), seems less and less applicable to the current film industry. “I believe it is a serious mistake,” writes Jim Collins, “to conceive of the current popularization of elite cultural pleasures as simply the most recent incarnation of middlebrow aesthetics” (7). The inadequacy of the middlebrow as a model for these adaptations prompts Collins to suggest a new cultural category he terms “high-pop,” which depends “on the appropriation of elite cultural pleasure without quotation marks, an appropriation not just of specific icons or canonical texts but entire protocols for demonstrating taste and social distinction” (6). I want to suggest that we begin to describe the placement of cultural forms less around the well-worn coordinates of a spatial model of high, low, middlebrow than in terms of the different use-values taken on by various cultural forms. As Marc Bousquet suggests, the question is “not primarily one of degree on a spectrum with largely intellectual valence (i.e., highbrow, middlebrow, mass), but really one of many other specificities—so that when we say something is ‘popularized,’ we should also feel compelled to ask: popularized for whom, exactly?” (234). In other words, we still need to develop a fuller understanding of the interplay and overlapping of cultural forms, as well as the variety of uses to which they are put. What you read may determine who you are, as the saying goes, but what movies you see doesn’t have quite the same identifying function in the current culture industry.

The recent Henry James films were marketed to well-educated urban professionals who can generally be relied on to seek out more intelligent fare than the latest James Bond thriller or mindless Farrelly Brothers comedies like Dumb and Dumber and Shallow Hall. Paradoxically, though, this audience seems increasingly disinclined to see only art films. As Dianne F. Sadoff points out, “the art-house filmgoer, once a member of a specialized but highly coherent audience, now has a range of options as consumer” (“Intimate” 288). This range of options comprises a highly undifferentiated field of filmic entertainment, where new releases go head to head every week, and where hit movies must appeal to more than one segment of the moviegoing audience. “The anxiety about opening weekends reached its peak in the mid-nineties,” J.D. Connor writes. “Between 1990 and 1996, studio […] production increased by a third, costs per picture rose by half, while U.S. box office went up only one sixth. Even with healthy increases in the number of screens, the number of screens per studio picture was down by a quarter. This is the bare bones of a scenario in which there are too many movies” (56). With so much competition for screens and viewers, it’s no wonder that art-house-type films fail to “open big,” in Hollywood parlance, not least because they are shown on far fewer screens, but also because there’s more competition for box-office dollars on any given weekend: “In this tight market no film has the luxury of a weak week in order to get ‘legs’” (Connor 56). And that’s why the movie industry is currently dominated by what Justin Wyatt terms the “high concept” movie, one where a straightforward, simple narrative combines with obligatory star power to create the nearly perfect marketable commodity. Needless to say, film adaptations of Henry James novels are about as far from high concept as one can get. Nonetheless, the James films are doomed to compete for audience share among viewers who are much more familiar with high concept than with high culture.

Miramax has been particularly successful in marketing films to multiple niche audiences. While “studios have zeroed in on the largest segments of the population that go to movies, neglecting the niche segments,” Emanuel Levy points out, “Miramax has been inventive in marketing art-house films (both foreign and English-speaking) to the masses” (31). Indeed, as Harvey Weinstein himself boasts, “we’ve taken films out of the art house ghetto and brought quirky new sensibilities to mass America. […] The studios are in the movie business; we’re in the film business” (Levy 51, 500). Miramax has emerged as a powerful player in the industry, the production company most often credited with the commercialization of independent cinema. Even a cursory list of the films it has distributed in the last ten years helps us understand the knack Miramax has for marketing limited budget gems. From The Crying Game to Like Water for Chocolate, from Pulp Fiction to The English Patient, and from Smoke Signals to Shakespeare in Love, Miramax has arguably been more successful than any other company in bringing quirky yet entertaining films to a mainstream audience. By 1997 Harvey Weinstein was named one of the twenty-five most influential Americans by Time magazine. That year Miramax won 12 Oscars, the most of any studio since MGM won 12 for Gone With the Wind in 1939 (Levy 51).[5] The Weinsteins are indisputable masters at niche marketing, and “the key to indie survival is developing niche audiences” (Levy 31). Teens make up the largest segment of all moviegoers. Throughout the 1990s, 73 percent of moviegoers were under the age of 30, and the majority of those were teens (Levy 30). “Constituting a large share of opening week audiences,” writes Levy, “[teenagers] can make or break a movie. . . . Teens comprise close to half of ‘frequent’ moviegoers” (29, 31). Nonetheless, teenagers have not been the primary target for independent films, which have typically been marketed to a somewhat older, college-educated audience. “While the studios continue to target the teen audience,” Levy notes, “the real growth audiences for indies have been relatively older viewers” (30). Miramax has developed a highly successful formula for marketing films to adult and teenage moviegoers alike: the basic idea, according to Alisa Perren, is to “take terms such as ‘independent,’ ‘quality,’ ‘specialty,’ and ‘sophisticated’ and use them as points of distinction. […] This marketing sleight of hand, in which the films were at once similar and different from Hollywood, helped Miramax […] carve out an often financially lucrative and aesthetically viable space for independent cinema” (36-37).

There’s no question that Miramax has elevated the status, not to mention the commercial viability, of independent films. Ironically, though, even as reviewers announced the arrival of a new era of American independent cinema, Hollywood studios were busy throughout the 1990s aggressively acquiring smaller production companies and turning them into specialty divisions.[6] These mergers and acquisitions ultimately complicated the very distinction between independent films and studio movies that Miramax has tried to exploit. “When a film like The English Patient is called ‘independent,’” says the director Jay Rosenblatt, “the term becomes ludicrous” (qtd. in Levy 5-6).[7] The recent dissolution of any meaningful boundary between independent and studio films is consonant with the leveling of hierarchies generally within nobrow culture. “With the waning of the distinction between elite culture and commercial culture,” according to Seabrook, “concepts like ‘going commercial’ and ‘selling out’ became empty phrases” (69). Hence the emboldened, not to say crassly commercial approach of companies like Miramax, which spends untold millions in advertising and then millions more to garner Academy Award nominations for its films. For his part, Harvey Weinstein makes no bones about the fact that marketing is the key to success. “Marketing is not a dirty word,” he once told a reporter from The Los Angeles Times. “It’s the distributors’ responsibility to find the audience” (qtd. in Perren 34).

The recent film adaptations of Henry James’s novels were niche marketed in the context of this nobrow culture. By far the most successful Henry James film in recent years has been The Wings of the Dove (1997), distributed by Miramax and released at the end of 1997, just in time to qualify for Oscar consideration and well positioned to make the critics’ lists of best movies of the year.[8] The movie stars Helena Bonham Carter as Kate Croy, an actress who first came to the attention of American viewers in the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of E.M. Forster’s A Room with the View. So closely is she associated with film adaptations of literary classics that Sadoff labels her “a culture-film star” (“Hallucinations” 271), and her performance in Wings was certainly a star turn, earning nominations for a Golden Globe and an Academy Award (the film also garnered Oscar nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Costume Design, and Best Cinematography). Domestic box office gross for The Wings of the Dove topped out at $13.7 million, compared to $3.7 million for The Portrait of a Lady (1996), $1.7 million for Washington Square (1997), and $3.1 million for The Golden Bowl (Bosquet 234n; “Golden Bowl”).[9] But if among these films only The Wings of the Dove “crossed over from art-house to mainstream distribution” (Sadoff, “Intimate” 286), we cannot attribute such crossover appeal to “good taste” among filmgoers. As James himself might say, taste has nothing to do with the matter, since it fails to account for the complex dynamics of a variegated culture industry in which hit “culture” films are about as predictable as blockbusters. For one thing, The Wings of the Dove got wider distribution in part because Miramax had the muscle to open in more theaters; the film was seen on approximately 700 screens and remained in some theaters for five months (Bosquet 234n).

Lion’s Gate was no doubt hoping for similar results with its Merchant Ivory production of The Golden Bowl, which was aggressively marketed through glossy venues like Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair and Vogue, not to mention a glitzy web site and a replica golden bowl (without the crack) sold through Christie’s auction house for $50,000. The later film enjoyed critical acclaim, receiving not just the usual movie reviews but feature articles in both The New York Times and The Times Literary Supplement. Yet The Golden Bowl was only moderately successful compared to Wings, largely because it did not get as wide a release and perhaps also because it was less conventional in its approach to a period film, a departure from Merchant Ivory’s usual glossy approach. David Lodge pointed out in TLS that although the “more conservative approach to adaptation is exemplified by the work of producer Ishmail Merchant and director James Ivory, […] the first few minutes [of The Golden Bowl] suggest that the team has deviated drastically from its usual style—either that, or you have taken a wrong turn in the multiplex and are watching a different movie entirely.” Lodge is referring, of course, to the chancy opening scene in an Italian palazzo, but his comment holds for the film’s use of sepia-toned still photographs and, perhaps especially, for its use of old black-and-white newsreel footage of Adam and Charlotte Verver’s return passage from Europe to New York towards the end of the film. This travel sequence is surely influenced by Jane Campion’s similar travelogue sequence in The Portrait of a Lady, a novel which they once planned to adapt themselves before Campion took the project away from them. And Merchant Ivory almost certainly mean to invoke Citizen Kane as well, in the clear association they make between Adam Verver and Charles Foster Kane by using newsreel footage to narrate his rise to wealth (Stewart). Period adaptations of 19^th century novels traditionally eschewed such meta-cinematic intrusions, favoring realist representation and straightforward plot progression. “But in films set in and around the first years of cinema,” Garrett Stewart argues in a fascinating essay, “the persistent tendency is to evoke the cinema’s own photogenesis in a cluster of associations that not only thematize but also historicize the whole horizon of media technology and its social functions” (15). The strategic use of still photography and recreated newsreel footage certainly make The Golden Bowl both more interesting and more historicized than Merchant Ivory’s two previous James adaptations.

What is even more striking about The Golden Bowl for my purposes is how the film thematizes the problem of class even as it tries to diffuse the exclusionary tactics of high culture. When Charlotte acts as a tour guide for her husband’s extensive art collection, for instance, she embodies the very position of the producers in their effort to include as many viewers as possible while at the same time invoking the social distinction gained through the Ververs’ acquisitions. The film encourages viewers to identify with Charlotte’s disdain for her listeners rather than feel threatened by it, thus recruiting us into a position of complicity with her blatant class snobbery. Yet the problem of class in the Jamesian novel also gets displaced, I believe, onto the production design and sumptuous costuming. “Filmed in several of the grand estates and palaces around Europe,” Stephen Holden contends, “’The Golden Bowl’ is probably the most lavish Merchant-Ivory film” (E10).[10] Cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts used anamorphic lenses, which contributed to the lush atmospherics of the film’s period style (Graham 329n), and it seems clear that no expense was spared in designing the ornate costumes and furnishings of Verver’s estate. The plan, according to the director James Ivory, was to “suggest a rich period décor without allowing too much distraction” for viewers untrained in the subtleties of production design.

While “Henry James” probably still rings a bell for most college-educated individuals, my sense is that the name does not command the cultural cache that it did fifteen or twenty years ago, nor do film adaptations of his novels still serve the same class-based pedagogical function that middlebrow culture in the 1920s did. The very term “middlebrow,” Sadoff has argued, “is a problematic category whose industry functions are unstable” (“Intimate” 287). She nonetheless continues to use the term in a later essay on The Golden Bowl, arguing that the film was aimed at “a middlebrow audience of upper-middle-class spectators and generally intelligent filmgoers” (“Appeals” 38). Middlebrow may well have more heuristic value when applied to Great Britain, where institutions like the BBC and the aesthetic it promulgated, according to Laurence Napper, “divided the general educated audience from the high intelligentsia” (qtd. in Sadoff, “Appeals” 41). Such distinctions seem meaningless in light of a persistent anti-intellectualism in the U.S. Whereas middlebrow marks a process of differentiating audiences and cultural products alike, the term nobrow designates a flattening out of cultural values to the point where any invidious distinctions are destabilized in an increasingly undifferentiated field of consumer entertainments. This makes the positioning of movies against one another, and the targeting of potential viewers, very tricky business indeed. The success of any particular movie, no matter how much it may seem like a sure fire thing, is actually quite unpredictable in this highly competitive, high-stakes environment, which is one reason why marketing costs have skyrocketed in recent years.[11]

The success of any James adaptation is even less predictable, and as difficult as it may be for literature scholars to admit, this unpredictability must have something to do with the fact that hardly anyone reads his fiction anymore. No doubt many moviegoers have never even heard of James. Bosquet speculates (wildly, I think) that “Young advertising executives are at this very moment playing golf with the partners in their firm, conversing knowledgeably about James, […] Possibly they’ve joined a book club and are tackling The Golden Bowl in preparation for the Merchant Ivory production” (211). More likely they’ve gone to see the movie without reading a word of James. Screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala says that in adapting The Golden Bowl for the screen, “I didn’t really expect anyone to have read the book” (qtd. in Mitchell 282). Smart thinking, it turns out, since even the director apparently didn’t read the book. As James Ivory astonishingly admitted in a Vanity Fair piece, “I read about 100 pages and then gave it up, like so many people” (Handy). When even the film’s director doesn’t bother to read the book, how can we expect today’s media-besotted moviegoers to take an interest in reading serious fiction, much less the incredibly complex, almost unbearably dense fictions of Henry James’s late phase?

As we have seen, taste has lately become unreliable as a barometer of class status, given the homogenization of culture in postmodernity.[12] James himself despaired at mid career that the obscure, confused taste of the masses could not be counted on to help them appreciate the difference between high quality novels and pulp fiction. By the 1920s, cultural institutions like the Book-of-the-Month Club sought to elevate mass taste through a process of acculturation that we now recognize as the principal function of middlebrow culture. Today, however, James’s novels must be adapted and marketed to supremely indifferent nonreaders in the nobrow culture of 21^st century America if they are going to attract anything approaching a mass audience.

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-----. “’Intimate Disarray’: The Henry James Movies.” The Henry James Review 19 (1998): 286-95.

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