The Ultimate Ride Point Break Surfing Cinema and Masculine Transcendence

The Ultimate Ride: Point Break, Surfing Cinema, and Masculine Transcendence Athesis submittedinpartialfulfillmentof the requirements forgraduationwithHonorsinFilmand Media Studies. ______________________________________________ ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................................iv Abstract .......................................................................................................................................................... v List of Illustrations....................................................................................................................................vi Introduction.................................................................................................................................................. 1 Mimicry, Performance, and Gender............................................................................................... 3 The Self in Mimicry and Transcendence ..................................................................................... 7 Chapter 1: The Surf Documentary and Masculine Mysticism ................................................. 9 Surf Documentary Aesthetics and Themes ............................................................................. 10 The Surf Documentary Persona ................................................................................................... 11 Surfing Spirituality............................................................................................................................. 14 Chapter 2: The Modern Savage: Surf Transcendence and Point Break ............................ 19 Surf Mythology .................................................................................................................................... 23 Immanent Bodies ............................................................................................................................... 26 Chapter 3: The Ride Is Over: Masculine Immanence ............................................................... 28 Illustrations ............................................................................................................................................... 30 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................................... 35 iii Acknowledgements iv Abstract When Point Break was released in 1991, critics were unsure whether it was serious or satirical, whether it was a dumb action film or a mockery of dumb action films. Almost thirty years later, it would be reconsidered and dubbed “the greatest femalegaze action movie ever,” and conversations around the film’s portrayal of gender, bodies, and sexuality is ongoing. In my thesis, I will address Point Break’s treatment of gender by considering it not within a pantheon of action films but instead as part of a lineage of independently produced surf movies. Point Break performs a Lacanian mimicry of the mid-century surf documentary, drawing on its aesthetics and ideologies and transforming them slightly in its own articulation. Most significantly, Point Break challenges the surf documentary trope of masculine mysticism and the transcendent potential of surfing; by turning the camera’s objectifying gaze on male and female characters alike, Point Break subtly subverts the male gaze and challenges audience expectations of gendered character arcs and masculine transcendence. v List of Illustrations Figure I. Poster for Point Break. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 1991………………………………...………………………………………………….30 Figure II. FBI Warning from Five Summer Stories. Directed by Greg MacGillivray. Laguna Beach: MacGillivray Freeman Films, 1972……………………...………………31 Figure III. Nature reverence in The Endless Summer. Directed by Bruce Browne. Los Angeles: Bruce Browne Films, 1966. 01:31:34……………………………………...……31 Figure IV. “That’s Bodhi” in Point Break. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 1991. 00:23:18…………………………………..…...……………………..32 Figure V. Introduction to the Ex-Presidents in Point Break. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 1991. 00:06:06………………..……………32 Figure VI. Examples of surfing silhouettes in Point Break. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 1991…………………..………………………..33 Figure VII. Johnny and Tyler in Point Break. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Los Angeles_20th Century Fox, 1991. 00:20:53…………..……………………………………..34 vi Introduction Point Break was released in July of 1991. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow and starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze, the film masquerades as standard cops and robbers action movie fare. It follows protagonist Johnny Utah (Reeves), a rookie FBI agent and former star quarterback at Ohio State. His first case for the Los Angeles FBI office is the mystery of the Ex-Presidents, a gang of four bank robbers in rubber masks of Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Jimmy Carter who have thwarted discovery and capture at every turn. Johnny’s new partner, Angelo Pappas (Gary Busey), reluctantly shares his theory – that the Ex-Presidents are surfers – and Johnny decides to learn to surf and infiltrate a local surfing community for clues. There, he meets Tyler (Lori Petty) and the mysterious Bodhi (Swayze). As Johnny is drawn deeper into the case, he simultaneously falls further into surfing, and his relationships with both Tyler and Bodhi grow and deepen. Eventually Johnny discovers that Bodhi is the ringleader of the Ex-Presidents, a revelation that tests his friendship with Bodhi, his love for Tyler, and his loyalty to the FBI as he is forced to choose where his allegiances truly lie. When Point Break was first released, it encountered mixed reviews and critical confusion. Though the film was a modest box office success, making $83.5 million on a budget of $24 million,1 critics were not entirely convinced of Point Break’s quality or seriousness. Amidst a sea of complaints about the shallow and stereotypical 1 “Point Break,” Box Office Mojo, IMDbPro, accessed February 5, 2020. “Zenny-macho undercurrents”2 and accusations of “beautiful [but] dumb,”3 RollingStone’s Peter Travers defended the performances of the film’s stars, the staging of action sequences, and Kathryn Bigelow’s direction; “without her,” Travers writes, “Point Break would be no more than an excuse to ogle pretty boys in wet suits.”4 This seems to be the narrative that Point Break cannot quite shake; nearly thirty years and one remake later, RollingStone would reconsider the original film and dub it “the greatest female-gaze action movie ever.”5 In the years since, Point Break has generated considerable conversation around representations of gender on the silver screen, inviting discussion of what the film has to say about love, sexuality, and the treatment of bodies. These analyses of Point Break tend to move forward from the presupposition of the film’s place within a pantheon of action movies. In fairness, Point Break certainly draws considerably from the action genre – at least, it sells itself like an action film. The trailer is largely a montage of bank robberies, explosions, and intermittent gunfire, and the poster promises, in text right beneath the title, an experience of “100% pure adrenaline” (Figure I). But Point Break is also deeply invested in a second, and much more niche, mode of filmmaking. Both aesthetically and thematically, the film references and rearticulates the filmic fabric of the midcentury surf documentary, playing with the genre’s stock characters and plot points. Duane Byrge, review of Point Break, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, 20th Century Fox, The Hollywood Reporter, July 12, 1991. 3 Michael Wilmington, review of Point Break, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, 20th Century Fox, Los Angeles Times, July 12, 1991. 4 Peter Travers, review of Point Break, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, 20th Century Fox, RollingStone, July 12, 1991. 5 April Wolfe, “Revisiting Hours: Point Break Is the Greatest Female-Gaze Action Movie Ever,” RollingStone, August 31, 2018. 2 2 Reconsidering Point Break from this vantage point destabilizes the role it might otherwise be seen to hold in popular culture; to think of it as a surf film rather than an action film invites a reassessment of what the film is about and who it is for, helping the shine new light on what Point Break actually has to say about gender. I do not intend to make the argument that Point Break is a female gaze film – whether those can exist at all given contemporary industrial conditions is up for debate, and, even if they could, Point Break would not be one of them. Point Break is in no way a radical film. It is, however, subversive. Taking Point Break seriously as a surf film reveals this subversion; through a process of mimicry, the film twists the imagery and ideology of the surf documentary in service of a narrative that is unilaterally critical of the objectification of bodies and uncompromisingly pessimistic about gendered articulations of transcendence. Mimicry, Performance, and Gender Mimicry is a concept that emerges from the psychoanalytic tradition, first developed by Sigmund Freud and then taken up by Jacques Lacan. Lacan frames his discussions of mimicry by first describing the way it manifests in non-human nature; he gives the example of a small crab blending into a multicolored and textured seafloor. “The effect of mimicry,” he writes, “is camouflage, in the strictly technical sense. It is not a question of harmonizing with the background but, against a mottled background, of becoming mottled.”6 Articulated this way, mimicry, for Lacan, is posited as a process 6 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973), 99. 3 of becoming rather than one of adaptation. This distinction is important, he says, because, while adaptation is useful purely for survival, mimicry operates on a higher level of self-awareness than a simple drive for self-preservation. Extrapolating from the animal kingdom, Lacan states that “the facts of mimicry are similar, at the animal level, to what, in the human being is manifested as art.”7 In Lacan’s illustrative example, he discusses representational oil paintings, which seek to convincingly produce two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional objects and space through the use of careful mimicry of color, light, and form. In the case of Point Break, the subject in question is not a painting, so what the film seeks to animate and make believable is not three-dimensional space but the filmic fabric of the surf documentary, and it does so through the self-conscious, strategic, and mimetic deployment of some of the genre’s various tropes and visual conventions. The surf documentary belongs to a genre that has been effectively gendered masculine, specifically a breed of spiritual masculinity I will discuss later. That this is a masculinity that has become established over time and is not an inherent quality of the male identity is significant. In her influential essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” Judith Butler frames all forms of gender expression as similarly constituted: Gender is in no way a stable identity of locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is 7 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 100. 4 instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.8 Framed this way, expressions of gender, masculinity, and femininity are understood as performance not unlike Lacan’s description of mimicry; to perform masculinity is to mimic the way masculinity has been performed historically or is being performed around the performer contemporarily. Butler goes on to say that this understanding of gender and gender expression, since it is constituted through the repetition of acts over time, can also be unconstituted or constituted differently through “a different sort of repeating [or] the breaking or subversive repetition of that style.”9 In films, of course, there is also another layer of mimicry to account for; these are actors, playing a role someone else has written for them based on their own mimetic understanding of the character they wish to create. On top of this double performance, there is the additional mimetic quality of film as a medium. Film, as Laura Mulvey writes in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” has the unique ability to “reflect, reveal, and even play on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking, and spectacle,”10 offering opportunities to both reinforce and overturn socially sanctioned performances of gender and gender expression. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenological Feminist Theory,” in Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, ed. Carole R. McCann and SeungKyung Kim (New York: Routledge, 2017), 481. 9 Ibid., 481. 10 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Media and Culture Studies Keyworks, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 267. 8 5 Mulvey’s scholarship deals primarily with the reinforcement of these norms in accordance to the desires of the male gaze. She discusses the ways in which bodies, primarily those which are gendered female, are rendered passive through the strategic deployment of properties of the film medium; the creation of a narrative, the limitations of the frame, and the darkness of the movie theater all figure into Mulvey’s exploration of the styling of female bodies for the silver screen in a way that connotes a “to-be-looked-at-ness”11 that caters to a straight male viewer. Mulvey’s analysis includes the caveat that, while it is possible to break from the modes of presentation and viewership generated by the male gaze, this is generally a possibility relegated to alternative cinematic spaces. As noted earlier, this is not a space occupied by Point Break; it operates within the industrial context of mainstream Hollywood cinema, and it is not immune to the mimicry of the preestablished and male-gaze-oriented conventions of presentation and subject matter common to that mode of filmmaking. Point Break does, however, within the context of self-conscious mimicry, manage to still challenge the conventions of the male gaze. It plays with articulations of male viewership and to-be-looked-at femininity, seeming, at times, to switch them. Over the course of the film, the bodies of Reeves and Swayze are styled in the ways female bodies generally are; they are put conspicuously on display, fragmented by the frame, and generally made consumable for the viewing audience, reversing the traditional object of the cinematic gaze. These performances of mimetic masculinity would be understood by Lacan to be done in the service of an assertion of self. Lacan places analytical emphasis firmly 11 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 270. 6 on that which is doing the imitating rather than that which is being imitated because, in his formulation, an effective performance of mimicry requires the imitator to understand its own subjecthood and its subjecthood in relation to its environment. The act of mimicry, therefore, is ultimately always a strategic positioning of oneself within that environment – a crab situated against a mottled seafloor fully understands its crab-ness and makes itself mottled for camouflage through an informed choice. The Self in Mimicry and Transcendence The understanding of self that acts as a lynchpin for Lacan’s articulation of mimicry parallels Simone de Beauvoir’s writing about transcendence. Transcendence, for de Beauvoir, is a condition of wholeness and freedom facilitated by the understanding of oneself as “One,” “Subject,” or “Absolute.”12 It is also a condition that is gendered, historically rendered masculine and available only to men; where man is allowed to transcend, woman is relegated to immanence and left with a stunted sense of self de Beauvoir characterizes as that of the “Other.”13 The clear dichotomy of One and Other established by de Beauvoir becomes much murkier as the plot of Point Break unspools over its runtime. Mimetic performances of masculinity and femininity destabilize the foundations of gender difference in which de Beauvoir locates transcendence; the film’s three principle characters – Johnny, Bodhi, and Tyler – shuffle and realign in relation to one another 12 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Random House, 2011), 6. 13 Ibid. 7 from scene to scene, sometimes presenting as One and sometimes as Other. This blurring of lines and shifting of boundaries that an understanding of mimicry inserts into the scholarship of Butler, Mulvey, and de Beauvoir produces an ambiguity in a reading of Point Break that does not easily rest within dichotomies of masculine performance and feminine performance, male gaze and female subject, and One and Other. Like the crab on the mottled seafloor, the mimetic art object in Lacan’s analysis gains a subjecthood through mimicry, taking an active role as a mediator in the negotiation of the various gazes directed at it, including both the gaze of the viewer and the gaze of the creator. In this new role as mediator, the object becomes what Lacan calls the screen. Lacan writes that: The correlative of the [gazer], to be situated at the same place as it, that is to say, outside, is the point of the gaze, while that which forms the mediation from the one to the other, [the screen], that which is between the two, is something of another nature that geometrical, optical space, something that plays an exactly reverse role, which operates, not because it can be traversed, but on the contrary because it is opaque.14 In this new formulation of the object as the screen, Lacan writes that the object becomes opaque and unable to be fully traversed by an outside gaze from any location; it is able simultaneously to thwart the gaze of the viewer and the gaze of the creator. It becomes, to borrow language from Homi Bhabha’s application of Lacan’s 14 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 96. 8 ideas, ultimately inscrutable;15 Point Break is ultimately a screen at which many can gaze and through which each gaze is distorted, warping more conventional representations of male bodies and identities into something more ambiguous. Chapter 1: The Surf Documentary and Masculine Mysticism Surfing made its cinematic debut in the late 1950s amidst a post-World War II economic boom strengthened by proliferating new technology and twinned increases in American production and consumption. In an era where disposable incomes were rising and the teenager had just become a newly defined social category, movie studios attempted to court this fresh demographic with films starring teenage actors and based around teenage problems; one such kind of movie was the “teen beach film” which sought to capitalize on the increasing popularity of surfing and the affiliated affluent California beach culture.16 The surf scene in California captured the zeitgeist of mid-century America. It seemed to a land of possibility and opportunity, an exemplification of the good life epitomized by eternal sunshine, leisure, and youthful fun. Films like Gidget (1959), Blue Hawaii (1961), and Beach Party (1963) offered moviegoers easily consumable beachy antics spiced up with a little comedy and romance and set to songs by Elvis and the Beach Boys in a formula that would prove to be quite profitable. The rise of the teen beach movie, however, was soon 15 Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bil Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Routledge, 1995), 43. 16 Joan Ormrod, “Endless Summer: Consuming Waves and Surfing the Frontier,” in All-Stars and Movie Stars: Sports in Film and History, ed. Rob Briley, Michael K. Schoeneke, and Deborah A. Carmichael (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2008), 17. 9 paralleled by the reactionary rise of independently produced surf documentaries. Though the surf documentary had existed on a much smaller scale since the Bud Browne films of the early 1950s, they began to gain much more visibility and popularity as an “authentic” alternative to their plastic teen beach counterparts. Surf Documentary Aesthetics and Themes The surf documentary sought to be the antithesis of what it deemed the “surfsploitation” of the good, clean-cut fun of the teen beach film.17 The teen beach film treated surfing like set dressing, relegating it to the background in order to focus on the exploits of the teenaged characters. The surf documentary, meanwhile, took surfing seriously; filmmakers took to the waves with their cameras and their friends to capture what they perceived to be the “pure” surfing lifestyle.18 That the filmmakers were themselves a part of the surfing scene was instrumental to the sense of authenticity their films cultivated.19 They knew the best surfing spots and shops and often seemed to have genuinely friendly, if not even very close, relationships with those they filmed and interviewed. The Endless Summer (1966), for example, a film often identified as among the first in the surf documentary lineage,20 is a globetrotting saga across beaches in Africa, Australia, and Polynesia made possible in large part by the close friendship between filmmaker Bruce Brown and his subjects, American surfers Michael Hynson and Robert August.21 Ormrod, “The Endless Summer,” 18. Ibid. 19 Ibid., 26. 20 Ibid., 18. 21 Ibid. 17 18 10 Surf documentaries tend to be much looser in form than a more narrative teen beach film;22 often, they consist of loosely related vignettes or interviews strung together with montages of impressive rides set to surf rock in between. Their amateurish editing and low production value, however, only bolstered the perceived authenticity of the surf documentary. It also meshed well with the cinematic portrayal of surfers as laid-back and easy-going; in documentaries where the filmmaker plays a more visible role, such as with the dry wit and carefree attitude Brown’s narration brought to The Endless Summer, the personas they took on reinforced this image even further. The Surf Documentary Persona The surfer persona promoted in surf documentaries is distinctly male. It has been noted that within surfing culture there is a clear gendered dividing line between those that surf and those that do not;23 the surf documentary is no exception. The filmmakers are men, the interviewed surfers are men, and the surfing montages that make up the connective tissue of these films are comprised of men. Women are positioned as generally peripheral to the sport. Pacific Vibrations (1970), for instance, begins with a series of short clips from interviews with beachgoers. The men interviewed are asked why they like to surf; the women are asked why they like surfers. A similar assumption of surfing identities is revealed in a description of the 22 Ernest Callenbach, review of The Endless Summer, directed by Bruce Brown, Bruce Brown Films, Film Quarterly 21, no. 1 (Autumn 1967). 23 Kristen G. Congdon and Nathan B. King, “Teaching About Surfing Culture and Aesthetics,” Visual Arts Research 28, no. 2 (2002): 48. 11 surfing family unit in Five Summer Stories (1972) as comprising “wives, kids, dogs, and protegees,”24 a statement that follows a tongue-in-cheek anti-piracy warning in the first seconds of the film that includes “moving in on infringer’s girlfriend” as a possible repercussion of copyright infringement (Figure II). These statements assume not only maleness in their cinematic imagining of a surfer but also heterosexuality. Surf documentaries, then, are positioned as being about the straight male surfer, by the straight male surfer, for the straight male surfer and other audiences that might identify with this persona. The male gaze that Laura Mulvey identifies as a central orienting principle of most mainstream cinema is also present here. When women do make appearances in these films, it is generally as eye candy; a montage of bikini-clad women walking on the beach is a staple of the surf documentary whether it is utilized to break up long sections of surfing footage or under a song as a segment of its own as Five Summer Stories does with the Beach Boys’ “California Girls.” These are female bodies styled with visual availability in mind; they are bodies made easily consumable for the camera and the (presumably male) viewer,25 their availability aiding in the construction of male-oriented narratives of beachy paradises and “the good life.” In the few instances that women are shown to be active participants in the sport, it is often in a way that is dismissive and quickly reorients to a more sexualizing angle. In The Endless Summer, for instance, Brown briefly acknowledges the existence Five Summer Stories, dir. Greg MacGillivray (Laguna Beach: MacGillivray Freeman Films, 1972), 00:04:00. 25 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 270. 24 12 of female surfers during their travels. “Lots of girls surf in Hawaii,” he says of one leg of the journey, “and many of them are very good.”26 More than the skill of the female surfers he meets, however, he seems to be mostly concerned with the size of their swimsuits. “When the girls get wiped out,” he tells the viewers, “they have some trouble losing parts of these suits. The darn things are so little they roll up in a ball and go down a clam hole or something, and they never find them again. The lifeguards down their carry spare bathing suits. They carry fifteen in a Band-Aid box.”27 Five Summer Stories also devotes a short portion of runtime to female surfers with a segment entitled “Women in Motion.” The narrator begins the segment saying, “Wahine, Surfer Girl, Cowgirl in the Sand. Since the beginning of the postwar era, women have surfed right along with the men. You don’t hear much about it, but it’s true.”28 The brief montage featuring the accomplishments of female surfers that follows seems somewhat ingenuine, however, when it comes just a few movie minutes after footage from a women’s event at a surfing competition that ends with several immediate wipeouts, and the narrator’s commentary that things have been going “downhill ever since”29 the introduction of such competitions in Hawaii. Though I will not discuss this much in relation to Point Break, the assumed whiteness of the surf documentary’s subjects and audiences is also worth noting. There is a colonial underpinning to most surf documentaries, which focus on a facet of surf culture that centers affluent white surfers at the expense of acknowledging the The Endless Summer, directed by Bruce Brown (Los Angeles: Bruce Brown Films, 1966, 00:55:54. Ibid., 01:13:29. 28 Five Summer Stories, 01:01:05. 29 Ibid., 00:50:24. 26 27 13 indigenous Polynesian origins of the sport. In these films, the beaches of the world are imagined as conquerable frontier;30 The Endless Summer, with its trek across formerly colonized parts of the world and many throwaway references to “primitive”31 locals or uncharted beaches with “not a footprint in the sand”32 is particularly exemplary of this. Just as language of masculinity pervades the surf documentary, so too does an appropriated language of savagery and tribalism. Surfing Spirituality The maleness of the surfer is essential to the articulation of surfing spirituality that underpins the surf documentary; as Simone de Beauvoir understands transcendence as necessarily male, so to do these films. The culture of surfing, Bron Taylor explains in his essay on the theological dimensions of the sport, is largely based on perceptions of the “spiritual power”33 and “mysterious magic”34 that surfing can bring to the surfer – surfing, in the surf documentary is offered to the viewer as an access point to a transcendent state, a bridge between an individual man and a condition of selfactualized wholeness. The surf documentary seems often to circle vaguely around this connection. Like most surf documentaries, for instance, Pacific Vibrations is relatively structureless but seems to be organized generally around a central exploration of Ormrod, “Endless Summer,” 23. The Endless Summer, 00:12:45. 32 Ibid., 00:35:20. 33 Bron Taylor, “Surfing Spirituality,” in Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Future (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 104. 34 Ibid. 30 31 14 surfing’s widespread appeal. The film returns throughout its runtime to interviews with surfers trying to explain why they do it or what exactly surfing offers to their lives. They tend to struggle to articulate just what surfing means to them; one interviewee attempts to describe visiting the ocean after moving to California and seeing waves for the first time before giving up and simply telling the filmmaker, “I can’t explain it. I’ve never experienced anything like it before.”35 Other surfers also take stabs at surfing’s central, inarticulable draw. “It’s just a feeling out there,” one says. “It’s super, really. You can’t describe it or anything. You’re just flowing out there, really, just doing your thing.”36 Another later expands on this same idea: It’s similar to flying, you know, there’s vibrations coming up through your feet. It’s not a feeling that’s in your head, it’s in your whole body. It’s as if you have all the things you’ve learned in surfing, all the tricks and turns at your disposal, but your mind isn’t on any of them. You’re thinking way above that and it’s almost going back to the roots, you might say.37 Surfing, in the surf documentary, is articulated as a means of connecting with oneself through an experience of bodily harmony, clarity, and peace. It is almost baptismal in its purifying and regenerative abilities. But the spirituality of the surf documentary extends beyond the self as well. As Five Summer Stories succinctly puts it, surfing is transcendent in part because “in Pacific Vibrations, dir. John Severson (Dana Point: John Severson Productions, 1970), 00:05:53. Ibid., 00:06:25. 37 Ibid., 00:34:26. 35 36 15 the ocean, man escapes confusion onshore.”38 Surfing is an immersion into the natural world, a site of communion between man and nature. Surf documentaries tend to share some level of mystical reverence for the Earth and its oceans that can feel more or less serious – The Endless Summer thanks “Old King Neptune for providing the waves in this film” (Figure III) –but is present regardless. Morning of the Earth (1972) especially is overt in making a connection between surfing and nature spirituality. The film uses no dialogue and no narration. Instead, there is an opening title card proclaiming the film to be “a fantasy of surfers living in three unspoiled lands & playing in natures [sic] oceans.”39 The remainder of the film’s runtime is wordless montage under constant surf rock. In the absence of dialogue, the lyrics of the chosen songs become important bearers of meaning. The opening song in Morning of the Earth, which shares its title with the film, is particularly apt. The first verse goes: The forces of the universe and the elements of space Conjured up your being, your size, your time, your shape. You were created with all the beauty they could call And, Earth, you surely are the measure of them all. Hallelujah, hallelujah, Your rocks all turned to gold and your tiny stones to jewels, And when your swirling mists had cleared, you stood so pure And placed so carefully each and every thing that belonged. Earth, you were magnificent through the pain of being born. 38 39 Five Summer Stories, 00:02:21. Morning of the Earth, directed by Alby Falzon and David Elfick (1972), 00:04:22. 16 Hallelujah, hallelujah, It was the morning of the Earth. Hallelujah, hallelujah.40 The song continues in a similar manner, deifying the Earth with references to its majesty and power with constant “hallelujahs” throughout. When overlaying a montage of surfing footage, the lyrics seem to suggest that the sport offers a peek into cosmic order, a way of understanding one’s own place in the universe through being in nature. Morning of the Earth, more than most surf documentaries, also turns its attention to the lives surfers led when they are not among the waves. In this film, the life of a surfer is portrayed as reflecting an admiration for nature and an interest in (often appropriated) mysticism in all aspects. The surfers in Morning of the Earth live in tented beach communes, raise chickens, and tend vegetable gardens. Their earthly belongings are few, mostly yoga books and chakra posters and, of course, their surfboards, which they build themselves with ritual attention in extended slowmotion sequences. Surfing, in Morning of the Earth, is imagined as quiet, contemplative, and reverent. The Endless Summer, though generally much less serious in tone than Morning of the Earth, also retains a degree of surfing spirituality. Taylor explains surfing mysticism as divisible into two “perennial themes…: surfing as an ecstatic and mystical experience and the pursuit of perfect waves;”41 if Pacific Vibrations and 40 G. Wayne Thomas, “Morning of the Earth,” in Morning of the Earth, directed by Alby Falzon and David Elfick (1972). Taylor, “Surfing Spirituality,” 110. 41 17 Morning of the Earth help viewers envision the former, The Endless Summer exemplifies the latter. Early into The Endless Summer, narrator Bruce Brown explains the reasoning behind the film’s globetrotting adventure and the origin of the film’s title: Many surfers ride summer and winter, but the ultimate thing for most of us would be to have an endless summer – the warm water and the waves without the summer crowds of California. The only way to do this is by travelling around the world, following the summer season as it moves around the world.42 Framed this way, Hynson and August’s journey is more pilgrimage than vacation. To chase the summer and the waves is not just for fun; it is an escape from the throngs of beachgoers who do not take surfing so seriously. It is the ultimate expression of devotion to surfing and the lifestyle it accompanies, and it is a devotion for which they are ultimately rewarded. When they spend the afternoon on a beach in Dakar, Senegal with some choice surf, Brown explains that Hynson and August “rode these waves knowing they were the first to ever do it, and also knowing the closest surfer to them was four thousand miles away.”43 Taken as constellation then, these surf documentaries establish a mythology around surfing, cementing it cinematically as a site of ritual practice. Surfing on the silver screen becomes a concurrent performance of baptism, communion, and 42 43 The Endless Summer, 00:11:10. Ibid., 00:15:30. 18 pilgrimage that seeks to raise its (straight white male) participants to a level of transcendent connection with nature. This is the legacy of surfing cinema that Point Break enters into, one that it appears, at least on the surface, to emulate aesthetically and thematically. This emulation, however, is more a performance of mimicry than blind aping; Point Break simultaneously draws upon and selectively subverts surf documentary themes and characterizations in order to offer a critique of both. Chapter 2: The Modern Savage: Surf Transcendence and Point Break Point Break wastes no time in making reference to the surfing mysticism espoused by the surf documentary. As soon as Johnny begins his investigation into the surfing scene of Los Angeles, he is met with a reminder of the spiritual milieu of surfing culture from the young boy tending the register at the surf shop where he buys his first board. As Johnny pays and prepares to leave with his new surfboard tucked under his arm, the kid calls after him, “I hope you stick with it. Surfing’s the source. Change your life, swear to God.”44 Johnny leaves, looking unimpressed, and the film cuts to Johnny outside the surf shop on a pier with Angelo where they have the following exchange: JOHNNY: Why can’t I just walk around with this thing [surfboard] under my arm and act stoned, ask a few questions? ANGELO: Well, look. Look at ’em. They’re like some kind of tribe. 44 Point Break, directed by Kathryn Bigelow (Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 1991), 00:13:13. 19 They’ve got their own language. You can’t just walk up to those guys. You have to get out there and learn the moves, get into their heads, pick up the speech. JOHNNY: You trying to tell me the FBI’s going to pay me to learn to surf? ANGELO: It’s either you or me out there on the board, you get my drift? JOHNNY: Angelo, this is for little rubber people who don’t shave yet. ANGELO: C’mon, you’re the quarterback jock. It’s all balance, right? And coordination. How hard can it be?45 Despite the boy’s statement moments earlier about the profound value of surfing, Johnny demonstrates a deep skepticism. This exchange makes it clear that neither Johnny nor Angelo take surfing seriously – not as a sport, and certainly not as a spiritual experience. Johnny talks about surfers with derogatory language that characterizes them as insignificant and prepubescent, and Angelo others them as separate from the rest of society with colonially charged language about tribalism. Both men are even dismissive of the physical difficulty of surfing. This does not stop Johnny from using the surfer’s sense of mysticism to his advantage, however. When he asks Tyler to teach him to surf, Johnny delivers a monologue about a car accident that supposedly killed his parents – something he knows will garner her sympathy since he read in her police file that she was also orphaned. But he does not end his speech there. Instead, he tells her: “So I come out here from Ohio a month ago. I’ve never seen the ocean before, any ocean. I never thought it would affect me so much. I’m drawn to it. Something…. I wanna do what 45 Point Break., 00:13:57. 20 you do. That’s the truth.”46 Though he himself does not believe what he is saying, Johnny selectively deploys rhetoric that mirrors what the boy said to him in the surf shop. He describes an inarticulable affective response to his first glimpses of the ocean, language that draws explicitly from the interview in Pacific Vibrations quoted above. In the absence of words to fully explain how he feels, he just tells Tyler that he felt “drawn to it,” as though by a powerful supernatural force. Johnny’s ploy works, and Tyler agrees to teach him. At the end of their first day of lessons together, one that is long with minimal progress, Johnny finally meets Bodhi. As he and Tyler walk up the beach away from the ocean, Johnny spots a single surfer in the water. The music changes abruptly from high-energy surf rock to something much more muted and slower: the steady drone of a didgeridoo and some occasional chimes. Over the low music, the crash of the waves sounds like thunder, loud and powerful, as Bodhi surfs in slow-motion. He seems, both to Johnny and the audience, to be in perfect control, calmly surfing in one shot as his body is enveloped by the ocean inside a tunnel created by water rising behind him and falling in front (Figure IV), a move characterized in The Endless Summer as “the ultimate thing to do in surfing.”47 Tyler follows Johnny’s gaze and tells him, “That’s Bodhi. They call him the bodhisattva. He’s a modern savage. A real searcher.”48 This moment establishes Tyler and Bodhi as opposite ends of a spectrum; each will serve as a surf mentor to Johnny over the course of Point Break but with opposite and gendered methods of teaching. Tyler’s approach to surfing is practical; she makes Point Break, 00:19:03. The Endless Summer, 00:07:19. 48 Point Break, 00:23:07. 46 47 21 Johnny get up early and work for hours on the beach before even getting in the water, running him through drills that teach him how to paddle out, stand up, and keep his balance. Bodhi, meanwhile, is much more casual and oriented toward the spiritual component of the sport. After a confrontation on the beach between Johnny and some rival surfers, Bodhi lets Johnny in on the true meaning of the surfing, and why the rivals are wrong in their approach: BODHI: They [the rival surfers] only live to get radical. They don’t have any real understanding of the sea, so they’ll never get the spiritual side of it. JOHNNY: Hey, you’re not gonna start chanting or anything are you? BODHI: I might…. You still haven’t figured out what riding waves is all about, have you? It’s a state of mind. It’s that place where you lose yourself and you find yourself. You don’t know it yet, but you’ve got it. It’s right there.49 Later that same day, after a party, Bodhi leads Johnny, Tyler, and a few others on a nighttime surfing expedition. Tyler insists Johnny is not ready, and Johnny agrees, worrying about his limited vision in the dark. Bodhi, however, sagely tells Johnny he has nothing to worry about. “Just feel what the wave is doing,” Bodhi advises, “then accept its energy, get in sync, and charge with it. You don’t need to see.”50 Bodhi is right, and Johnny successfully rides his first wave. The dichotomy Point Break establishes between Bodhi and Tyler mirrors the 49 50 Point Break., 00:36:22. Ibid., 00:44:50. 22 one drawn by de Beauvoir between male transcendence and female immanence. Bodhi, by virtue of his maleness, is positioned immediately as a character with transcendental potential; even his name, from “bodhisattva” points to a being who has reached enlightenment but has chosen to net yet pass on to a state of nirvana. While Tyler may be able to teach Johnny the basics, and get him started on his surfing journey, it is ultimately Bodhi who is by his side with words of encouragement and energy acceptance the first time Johnny rides a wave. Bodhi, as posited by the film, is the more capable teacher because his masculine connection to the transcendent powers of surfing allows him to understand it as a spiritual experience. Tyler, on the other hand, is repeatedly shown to be dismissive of Bodhi’s approach to surfing and what she calls “bonsai bullshit;”51 she is immediately relegated to immanence while the audience is encouraged to see, in Bodhi, a spiritual teacher who can guide Johnny toward transcendence. Surf Mythology Like the surf documentaries, Point Break also has its own surf mythology, and, because Bodhi is offered as a transcendental figure, he figures prominently in it. The surf myth central to Point Break is the fifty-year storm, an event first brought up in the film as the main characters all sit around a bonfire. At first, a member of the crowd dismisses the fifty-year storm as a legend. Then Bodhi speaks up: No, it’s real. It’s absolutely real. Everything moves in cycles, so twice a century, the ocean lets us know just 51 Point Break., 00:42:35. 23 how small we really are. A winter storm comes out of Antarctica, tearing up the Pacific, and it sends a huge swell north two thousand miles, and when it hits Bells Beach, it’ll turn into the biggest surf this planet has ever seen. And I will be there.52 Tyler, of course, is unimpressed, having remarked earlier in the scene that “big wave riding is for macho assholes with a death wish.”53 The rest of the crowd around the fire is thrilled though, whooping and cheering as Bodhi turns to Johnny. “If you want the ultimate,” he tells him, “you’ve gotta be willing to pay the ultimate price. It’s not tragic to die doing what you love.”54 Bells Beach during the fifty-year storm is the final hurdle, the last thing standing between Bodhi and transcendence; Bodhi will surf the fifty-year storm or die trying. This is the moment where Point Break begins to deviate from the path set out for it by its surf documentary predecessors. Surfers in surf documentaries do not concern themselves with big waves; the value in surfing is in the connection to oneself and nature that comes from working with the ocean one waves of a more manageable size, not fighting it in order to ride something much bigger. Bruce Brown addresses this explicitly in The Endless Summer, telling viewers in no uncertain terms what he thinks of big wave riding: “When you go looking for surf,” he says, “you don’t look for a really big wave. If you found one, you’d never ride it in strange waters. It would be Point Break., 00:41:02. Ibid., 00:40:18. 54 Ibid., 00:41:34. 52 53 24 much too dangerous.”55 From this point in the film, the path to transcendence that Point Break appeared to be pointing to begins to unravel. Johnny discovers that Bodhi is the ringleader of the Ex-Presidents, the gang of bank robbers he has been investigating, and Bodhi discovers that Johnny is an undercover FBI agent. Bodhi decides to do one last robbery, kidnapping Tyler to ensure that Johnny will not be able to stop him. The robbery quickly goes awry, and several people, including civilians, Ex-Presidents, and Angelo, wind up dead in the ensuing escape to Mexico. Johnny manages to free Tyler but fails to capture Bodhi, who disappears into the desert with the last remaining member of his gang, promising to “see [Johnny] in the next life.”56 The film then cuts to a coda nine months later as Johnny arrives at Bells Beach, Australia with the fifty-year storm closing in. The rain is heavy, the waves are enormous, and the beach is deserted save for a single figure which turns out to be Bodhi. Johnny confronts him, telling Bodhi he still has to answer for his crimes, and the two fight as Australian police begin descending from the cliffs above to the beach. Bodhi realizes his capture is inevitable and begs Johnny to let him surf before his arrest, telling him, “My whole life has been about this moment.”57 Johnny relents, and Bodhi paddles out as the police arrive and resolve to make the arrest when Bodhi returns to shore. “He’s not coming back,”58 Johnny tells them; sure enough, Bodhi catches a wave and attempts to stand, managing to get upright just for a moment The Endless Summer, 00:49:30. Point Break, 01:49:05. 57 Ibid., 01:56:09. 58 Ibid., 01:57:45. 55 56 25 before falling and disappearing under the water. Although Bodhi was positioned early in the film as the most likely of Point Break’s characters to transcend, he is ultimately also relegated to immanence. He is unable to find transcendence for himself or anyone else – even Johnny is brought no closer to transcendence by Bodhi’s teaching, becoming disillusioned with policework and throwing his FBI badge into the ocean during the last moments of the film. Immanent Bodies The ultimate immanence of both Bodhi and Johnny can be tied to the way their bodies are treated onscreen. In Point Break, male bodies are feminized by the camera, resigning male characters to the fate of immanence usually reserved for women. Both Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves are shot in a way that emphasizes their bodies rather than their faces, and their bodies tend to be stylized for visual availability, often appearing shirtless in scenes where it is not necessary for them to be. In these scenes, the camera often also fragments their bodies, isolating specific body parts within the frame in a way Mulvey identifies as contributing to the fetishizing objectification often done to women in film.59 For instance, early in Point Break, the Ex-Presidents are introduced to the audience through a series of rapidly cut together close-ups. The scene begins with a split second of black screen and the sound of a cocking gun before a smash cut to the shirtless chest of one of the gang members (Figure V). From there, the scene proceeds with a flurry of hands and torsos as the Ex-Presidents ready themselves for a robbery in their getaway car. Their faces are not revealed until they 59 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 272. 26 are masked and on the sidewalk, leaving them relatively anonymous, only identifiable by the parts of their bodies offered to the audience by the camera. This identification by body rather than face features prominently in many surfing scenes as well where surfers are often backlit by the sun, rendering them as faceless silhouettes onscreen (Figure VI). This is likely a practical move meant to camouflage the use of surfing doubles, but it also has the effect of turning surfers into anonymous figures identifiable only by the general shapes of their bodies. The framing of male bodies this way also has effects beyond the reduction of male characters to anatomy. Lisa Purse writes that the action films of the 1990s were increasingly populated by leading men such as Swayze and Reeves whose bodies appeared more traditionally feminine – that is, thinner and less muscular – than the “inflated musculature” of 1980s action stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.60 These body types, when treated as they are in Point Break, are sometimes visually conflated with the female bodies onscreen. Both Reeves and Lori Petty are fair with short dark hair and of roughly comparable height and build; when they are shown surfing together, backlit and in the water, they become almost indistinguishable (Figure VII). This equally objectifying treatment of both male and female bodies in Point Break leads to the cinematic devaluing of both. Point Break is a film that makes the bodies of all of its characters available to the voyeuristic viewing gaze, ultimately resigning each of them to an unfulfilled fate. Lisa Purse, “Action Men,” in Contemporary Action Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 96. 60 27 Chapter 3: The Ride Is Over: Masculine Immanence Part of Bodhi’s escape plan at the end of the film involves a chartered plane that will fly him across the border to Mexico. Just before takeoff, Johnny arrives to confront him on the runway, asking Bodhi to turn himself in during a tense standoff where Johnny tells him, “Look, Bodhi, man, people are dead. The ride is over,” to which Bodhi responds, “No, no, no. I say when it’s over.”61 This is the moment Point Break seals Bodhi’s fate; his fading transcendental potential is forever lost to him not with the kidnapping of Tyler or with the final ill-fated bank robbery, but with these words on the tarmac. The ride Johnny refers to is greater than the scope of Point Break as a single film, an isolated moment in popular culture. It is one that begins in the 1960s with the proliferation of surf documentaries which would frame the way surfing was integrated into the American popular consciousness for decades to come. The surf documentary carefully crafted an image of surfing that selectively ignored the less savory parts of surfing culture – including intense territorialism and violence62 – in favor of one that was simultaneously uncompromisingly masculine and mystical, raising surfing from the level of sport or hobby to a path toward transcendence. This is the image of surfing that still looms large in the minds of many moviegoers, and it is an image that was firmly entrenched by the time of Point Break’s release in 1991. As stated earlier, Point Break is not a radical film; it does not entirely abandon 61 62 Point Break, 01:37:55. Taylor, “Surfing Spirituality,” 105. 28 the representations of masculinity and transcendence given to it by its predecessors. It does, however, push back. Through mimicry, Point Break warps the filmic fabric of the surf documentary; the transcendental potential of the film’s characters offered to the audience early on is dramatically and tragically revoked by the finale. Where de Beauvoir wrote that Woman cannot transcend, Point Break posits that Man cannot either, shooting male characters in ways that remind the audience not even they are immune to the objectifying gaze of the camera. No amount of surfing mysticism can save Bodhi or Johnny from their immanence; from even the first shots of the film, the cinematography feminizes them, blocking them from transcending. The ride promised to them by the surf documentary is immediately shut out from them, ending before it has even begun. 29 Illustrations Figure I. Poster for Point Break. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 1991. 30 Figure II. FBI Warning from Five Summer Stories. Directed by Greg MacGillivray. Laguna Beach: MacGillivray Freeman Films, 1972. Figure III. Nature reverence in The Endless Summer. Directed by Bruce Browne. Los Angeles: Bruce Browne Films, 1966. 01:31:34. 31 Figure IV. “That’s Bodhi” in Point Break. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 1991. 00:23:18. Figure V. Introduction to the Ex-Presidents in Point Break. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 1991. 00:06:06. 32 Figure VI. Examples of surfing silhouettes in Point Break. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 1991. Top: 00:01:09. Center: 00:23:03. Bottom: 00:44:40. 33 Figure VII. Johnny and Tyler in Point Break. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 1991. 00:20:53. 34 Works Cited Bhabha, Homi K. “Signs Taken for Wonders.” In The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, 38-43. New York: Routledge, 1995. Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” In Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, edited by Carole R. McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim, 481492. New York: Routledge, 2017. Congdon, Kristen G. and Nathan B. King. “Teaching About Surfing Culture and Aesthetics.” Visual Arts Research 28, no. 2 (2002): 48-56. De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex, translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Random House, 2011. The Endless Summer. Directed by Bruce Brown. Los Angeles: Bruce Brown Films, 1966. Five Summer Stories. Directed by Greg MacGillivray. Laguna Beach: MacGillivray Freeman Films, 1972. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973. Morning of the Earth. Directed by Alby Falzon and David Elfick. 1972. Mulvey, Laura. “Viewing Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Media and Culture Studies Keyworks, edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner, 267-274. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Ormrod, Joan. “Endless Summer: Consuming Waves and Surfing the Frontier.” In All35 Stars and Movie Stars: Sports in Film and History, edited by Rob Briley, Michael K. Schoenecke, and Deborah A. Carmichael, 17-39. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2008. Pacific Vibrations. Directed by John Severson. Dana Point: John Severson Productions, 1970. Point Break. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 1991. Purse, Lisa. “Action Men.” In Contemporary Action Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Taylor, Bron. “Surfing Spirituality.” In Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future, 103-126. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. 36