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Where Did Our Love Go?
Released in 1993, Robert Altman’s career-defining film emerges at the height of postmetropolitan critical attention. Soja’s seminal book, Postmodern Geographies, with its lengthy critique of Los Angeles city space, was published in 1989, followed two years later by Jameson’s hugely-influential Postmodernism, or Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Both texts see urban space and, specifically, the emergence of the postmodern city as the site through which to track the evolution of capitalism, politics, and the human encounter with institutional power. Adapted from the short stories of Raymond Carver, all of which are set in
the Pacific Northwest, Short Cuts is a meditation on life in the postmetropolis. Setting Carver’s stories in contemporary Los Angeles, Altman comments on personal and institutional trauma as a result of postmetropolitan urban life, where, as I have shown through Viramontes’ novel, the traumatic erasure of urban space haunts individuals as they attempt to foster healthy personal relationships and engage authentic moments of empathetic, human connection.
Like Viramontes, Altman does more than represent the trauma of living in the postmetropolis; his formal strategies simulate the experience of this new urban space. Utilizing narrative vectors that imitate the vast network of freeways in the postmodern city, Altman uses formal stylistics to examine the problematic social dimensions of postmetropolitan space. Unlike Carver’s stories, which, after the release of the film were compiled in a collection also entitled Short Cuts, Altman is interested in describing the encounter with the repressed Real, which continually intrudes on the characters in the film as they attempt to establish meaningful connections with one another. Disconnected from any sense of community and often lacking the ability to empathize with those around them, Altman’s characters exist in a capsularized social milieu—the end result of the freeway expansion that Viramontes depicts—that often fails to provide necessary avenues for meaningful social interaction. In Short Cuts, Los Angeles is depicted as a placeless place, a hyperreal urban environment in which city-dwellers are dislocated from their material environment and dislocated from one another as a result of their inability to produce social space. To simulate this phenomenon,
Altman, through the film’s ten chief narratives, involves viewers in the fragmented, socially-disconnected world that Short Cuts represents. Unlike the narrative experience of Their Dogs, which concedes to the pervasiveness of institutional power, Altman’s narrative strategies suggest the possibility of understanding the postmetropolis in ways that encourage, rather than deny, empathetic human interaction.
Altman’s film follows roughly ten different narrative trajectories that overlap and intersect at various moments in the film, each of the narratives depicting the lives of white, middle-class Angelenos in the midst of personal or marital turmoil. Although the sources of these personal conflicts can often be traced to specific events or patterns of behavior exhibited by the characters, Altman, from the film’s first frames, is interested in exploring the deeper, institutional causes for the social malaise that seemingly lingers over Los Angeles. During the opening credit sequence, Altman follows a group of five helicopters spraying pesticide over the city at night, apparently as a means of eradicating the “medfly,” which, according to local television reporter, Howard Finnegan (Bruce Davidson), is “a potentially devastating insect that has chosen to make California its home.” These images are accompanied by an extended shot of a sign that reads “Medfly Quarantine: No Homegrown Fruits or Vegetables to Leave Area,” alerting us immediately to the forces of institutional discipline already operating in Los Angeles at the film’s opening. Altman tracks the helicopters, in formation, over the glittering expanse of Los Angeles’ nighttime
cityscape, depicting their ominous neon red and green appendages through frontal shots that suggest imminent threat and confrontation. Finnegan likens the effort to eradicate the medfly to a war, asking “Is this a war that can be won?” and later stating that Angelenos must “Destroy the medfly before it has a chance to destroy us.”
Soon after these statements, however, Sherri Shepard (Madeleine Stowe), one of the film’s female characters embroiled in an emotionally abusive marriage, expresses fear that the pesticide poses long-term health risks, suggesting that the war on the medfly might be more destructive to Angelenos than supposed by the government, a sentiment that characters share throughout the film. Altman’s decision to open the film with these portentous images and their accompanying commentary is significant, especially since they have little direct bearing on the action that occurs over the course of the film. Similar to the rabies quarantine in Their Dogs and, perhaps even more so, DeLillo’s “airborne toxic event,” the medfly quarantine, serving as the contextual backdrop for each of the film’s narratives, represents the subtle and ever-present forms of institutional violence afflicting residents of the postmetropolis. Whereas Viramontes’ quarantine materially grids and organizes urban space, and thereby disciplines the residents of the barrio, the medfly quarantine functions transparently; the pesticide, invisible to the people it affects, operates on more subtle psychological levels.
Like Foucault’s panoptic gaze, which city dwellers had internalized by the
twentieth century, the characters in Short Cuts—dissociated from the lived space of the city—can only confront institutional power in highly abstract terms.
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