THE NEW VERTICALITY

So neither the horizontal nor the vertical proportion of the screen alone is ideal for it.

In actual fact, as we saw, in the forms of nature as in the forms of industry, and in the mutual encounters between these forms, we find the struggle, the conflict between both tendencies. And the screen, as a faithful mirror, not only of conflicts emotional and tragic, but equally of conflicts psychological and optically spatial, must be an appropriate battleground for the skirmishes of both these optical-by-view, but profoundly psychological-by-meaning, spatial tendencies on the part of the spectator.

—Sergei Eisenstein, "The Dynamic Square"

Since the early 1990s the directors and effects artists of numerous films—including Titanic (James Cameron, 1997), the Matrix trilogy (Wachowski Bros., 1999, 2003), X-Men and x2 (Bryan Singer, 2000, 2003), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000), Hero (Zhang Yimou, 2002), Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), and Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)—have made increasing use of the screen's vertical axis with the aid of new digital technologies. Drawing from cultural sources ranging from the narratives and characters featured in comic books, fantasy novels, and television series to the visual logics of video games and virtual reality, recent blockbusters have deployed a broad range of digital visual effects to create composite film bodies that effortlessly defy gravity or tragically succumb to its pull. In keeping with this tendency, these same films create breathtaking imaginary worlds defined by extreme heights and plunging depths, the stark verticality of which becomes the referential axis of many narrative conflicts. In this chapter I investigate the spatial dialectics and allegorical significance of contemporary cinema's vertical imagination—its tendency to map the violent collision of opposed forces onto a vertical axis marked by extreme highs and lows. Such verticality often functions emblematically to represent an abstract quality or "state of things." As an effects emblem, digitally enhanced verticality facilitates a rather literal naturalization of culture in which the operation and effects of (social, economic, military) power are mapped onto the laws of space and time. Hence, in recent blockbuster films, vertically oriented bodies and objects represent a relation not just to the laws of physics but also to a fictional world's prevailing order. As a result, verticality often functions allegorically to give dynamic, hyperkinetic expression to power and the individual's relation to it—whether defiant, transcendent, or subordinate. The films I focus on—Titanic, Hero, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Matrix, and Avatar—span a number of genres (including martial arts films, disaster films, science fiction films, action-adventure films, and fantasy films), and though they were produced in the United States, New Zealand, Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan, they share a number of characteristics linked to their insistent deployment of verticality; in each film, digitally enhanced verticality functions emblematically to give dynamic and spectacular articulation to the broader thematic concerns and concepts expressed elsewhere in the film through dialogue, characterization, and story.

This new, digitally enhanced verticality participates in (and extends) a very long pictorial tradition that has made use of the vertical axis of the frame (or page) to emblematize the rise and fall of mythological figures. Before turning to specific examples in contemporary cinema, it is worth returning to Andrea Alciati and his use of myths featuring dynamic, vertically oriented movement to represent or allegorize moral and political states. Alciati's Emblem 56, titled "About Reckless People," draws on the Greek myth of Phaeton's chariot ride and is accompanied by an engraving that shows him plunging headlong from the sky to the earth below (fig. 1.1). In the myth, Phaeton, son of the sun god Helios, wishes to drive his father's sun chariot—a vehicle so difficult to control that even Zeus refuses to pilot it. Despite being warned against doing so, Phaeton attempts to drive the chariot across the heavens, and after losing control of the wild, fire-breathing horses that pull the vehicle, he comes too close to the earth and scorches it, forcing Zeus to strike him from the sky. Alciati's "About Reckless People" describes Phaeton as he who "dared to guide the fire-vomiting horses of the Sun," and uses his fall as an allegorical image for the "adolescent ambition" of reckless kings and their misuse of power: "After scattering enormous conflagrations all over the Earth, [Phaeton] fell disgraced from the vehicle which he had so recklessly mounted. Much the same happens to many kings who, driven by adolescent ambition, are carried toward the stars upon the wheels of Fortune. After having provoked much misfortune among the human race, they bring ruin upon themselves and, finally, they pay the penalties due for their crimes." The image represents the dramatic turning point when the ascent into, and flight across, the heavens (linked to generational conflict, rebellion, hubris, and ambition) is converted to its opposite by a sudden reversal in directionality: struck from above by Zeus's lightning bolt, Phaeton is abruptly stripped of the power he seized. His fall presents a striking, dynamic image of the unexpected loss of power, of a body given over entirely to the laws of physics, the laws of the gods, and the prevailing order that he defied through his ascent. Taken together, the text and image update the myth of Phaeton's fateful ride in order to emblematize the power seized and wielded by rulers who, by their actions, upend the order of things and wreak havoc on their subjects, only to suffer the ultimate loss of power in the end.

Much as emblematists and artists have for centuries made allegorical use of dynamic images of verticality, directors and effects artists have created numerous cinematic spectacles of (more or less emblematic) astonishing ascents and breathtaking falls enabled by historically available special and optical effects, from Harold Lloyd's precarious climb up the side of a department store in Safety Last! (Fred C. Newmeyer / Sam Taylor, 1923), to Jimmy Stewart's defenestration at the end of Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954), to Slim Pickens's descent through the atmosphere astride a bomb in Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964). However, the blockbusters of the 1970s marked a turning point in the history of cinematic verticality as they deployed big-budget special effects to exploit the screen's vertical axis to a degree not seen before. The Poseidon Adventure (Ronald Neame, 1972) capsized an ocean liner and forced its protagonists to ascend through a series of inverted sets to find a way out through the ship's upended hull; The Towering Inferno (John Guillermin / Irwin Allen, 1974) turned the skyscraper into an upright labyrinth difficult to exit alive; and King Kong (John Guillermin, 1976) staged a battle between Kong and the New York Police Department on top of the World Trade Center. Films such as Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), Superman (Richard Donner, 1978), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977), and E.T. (Steven Spielberg, 1982) increasingly used models, miniatures, blue screens, mattes, and motion control to animate their characters' movements and desires along the screen's vertical axis. Meanwhile High Anxiety (Mel Brooks, 1977) parodied the use of the long fall as a device for creating suspense in classical film noir.

The increasing exploitation of the screen's vertical axis continued through the 1980s and became significantly more pronounced at the end of the 1990s with the development and refinement of digital processes, including wire-removal software, motion control, (photorealistic) digital animation, morphs (between actors and their digital stunt doubles), and performance and motion capture techniques. For example, in 1990 wire-removal software created convincing images of bodies and matter in flight in Back to the Future Part III (Robert Zemeckis), while in 1993 Industrial Light and Magic helped animate the screen's vertical axis with towering photorealistic dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg). That same year Cliffhanger (Renny Harlin) composited images of its actors (shot against a green screen) with digitized images of mountainous landscapes to stage its action at vertiginous heights, much as the infant protagonist of Baby's Day Out (Patrick Read Johnson, 1994) scaled Chicago's soaring skyline thanks to composites of the baby's image with digitized photos of the urban landscape. Such developments continued until 1996, when the three top-grossing films of the year—Independence Day (Roland Emmerich), Twister (Jan de Bont) (both of which used new particle animation software), and Mission: Impossible (Brian De Palma) (for which the Computer Film Company did digital compositing, paintwork, wire removal, and tracking)—suggested that digital technology's ability to polarize action along extreme spatial coordinates would continue to develop into the new millennium.

At its most basic level the new digitally enhanced verticality is a technique for activating polarized extremes: it choreographs the rise and fall of the narratives in which it appears and emblematizes the soaring aspirations and desires, as well as the downfall and doom, of a broad range of protagonists, antagonists, heroes, and antiheroes. Hence verticality's abstract spatial coordinates are those of the zenith and the nadir, and its favorite location is the precipice, regardless of setting. Skyscrapers, chasms, national monuments, elevator shafts, upended ocean liners, high towers, tall (and sometimes ambulatory) trees, and hovering helicopters have all functioned with equal efficiency to polarize conflict, to frame possible outcomes in terms of a devastating fall or a willfully insurgent rise. Even when action returns to terra firma and ordinary horizontality, the mise-en-scènes of these films help activate and orient vision along the screen's vertical axis: pillared interiors, banners streaming down from high ceilings, floating mountains, cascading waterfalls, and showers of brightly colored petals or spent bullet casings all indicate that actions and events will inevitably follow lines of ascent and descent, thereby compounding the thematic and allegorical significance of vertical movement in these films.

Verticality mobilizes and even codifies various connotative meanings and types of affect attached to ascent and descent. Upward mobility gives dynamic expression to feelings of soaring hope, joy, unbridled desire, aspiration, and even escape; it implies lightness, vitality, freedom, transcendence, defiance, and lofty ideals. And while falling and sinking give expression to dread, doom, and terror and are linked to weighty burdens, inertia, subordination, loss, and the void, the volitional nosedive suggests the thrilling mastery of powerful laws of physics. As a dynamic device for conveying the heightened emotions to which violent conflict gives rise, this new, digitally enhanced verticality draws heavily from the 1950s Hollywood melodrama's use of expressionistic mise-en-scène and takes the genre's association of staircases with rising and falling emotions to new extremes. Not only has the scale of the vertical setting expanded exponentially with the development of CGI (to elevator shafts spanning more than one hundred floors, for example, or to mountains that float in the air, high above a forest), but so have the stakes: frequently a struggle for the survival of an entire city (as in Spider-Man [Sam Raimi, 2002], X-Men, and Godzilla [Roland Emmerich, 1998]) or humanity itself (as in The Matrix, the Lord of the Rings trilogy [Peter Jackson, 2001, 2002, 2003], The Day after Tomorrow [Roland Emmerich, 2004], Armageddon [Michael Bay, 1998], Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow [Kerry Conran, 2004], and The War of the Worlds [Steven Spielberg, 2005]) is played out along spatial coordinates of extreme highs and lows. Because the new verticality vastly expands the terrain on which (and with which) the cinema compels its protagonists to struggle, it logically favors the epic.

Verticality's link to gravity and the laws of space and time make it an ideal technique for dramatizing and emblematizing the individual's relationship to powerful historical forces. Horizontality is an important point of reference that stands for temporal and historical continuity; its rupture by the upsurge or fall of a vertically articulated mass creates a dynamized moment, a temporal/historical break that radically changes the course of events. Early in Jurassic Park the shot of a towering brachiosaur eating leaves from the top of a tree (bracketed by reaction shots of the stunned protagonists) signals the evolutionary past's astonishing eruption into the present, enabling the dinosaur to embody the park owner's plan, as Constance Balides describes it, to appropriate "historical time for profit on a grand scale." In The Day after Tomorrow, a towering wall of water crashes into and submerges Manhattan to signal an irreversible shift in the balance of power: the United States' economic and military supremacy comes to an end, initiating a new era in which it is dependent on Mexico. In Reign of Fire (Rob Bowman, 2002), Deep Impact (Mimi Leder, 1998), and The War of the Worlds, digitally rendered danger descends from above and threatens to bring human time to an end. And while Star Trek (J. J. Abrams, 2009) plots the demise of the planet Vulcan along expansively polarized spatial coordinates as rogue Klingons drill a hole into the planet's core from a ship located in outerspace, 2012 (Roland Emmerich, 2009) imagines apocalypse on Earth through images of skyscrapers collapsing and plunging into a massive canyon that opens up in the middle of downtown Los Angeles. Later in 2012, when Yellowstone National Park becomes a volcano that erupts with the power of a nuclear explosion, burning chunks of molten rock rain down on the protagonists and nearly thwart their escape.

When verticality is located in the gravity-defying body of a protagonist in these films, it often implies a crisis inseparable from his or her problematic relation to the historical, familial, and traditional past. Whereas a protagonist's upward verticality is frequently associated with a (rebellious) leap toward a new future, the downward verticality of the long fall is inseparable from the rapid approach of an inevitable end. In some of these films the past is represented as a weighty burden that constrains the protagonist's freedom precisely so that powerful social, class, and political formations may carry on, unchanged, into the future (as in Titanic and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). In other cases, the past repeats itself and revives dark forces that promise to annihilate the protagonists in the not-so-distant future (X-Men, The Fifth Element [Luc Besson, 1997], the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Minority Report [Steven Spielberg, 2002], Van Helsing [Stephen Sommers, 2004], and Star Trek). Conversely, in yet another group, historical continuity and a tangible relation to the past provide the conditions of possibility for a historical agency able to overcome forces whose power stems precisely from the ability to manipulate or master space and time at will (the Matrix trilogy, Dark City [Alex Proyas, 1998], and Avatar). Since extreme forms of vertical movement inevitably imply a violation and reassertion of the laws of physics, vertically oriented bodies and narratives provide the ideal form for abstracting power and representing the struggles of the emergent against the dominant—a concept neatly conveyed by the title of the film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

While the popularity of the blockbusters I consider here can be explained in part by their presentation of astonishing digitally rendered spectacles, the "structure of feeling" (to borrow a term from Raymond Williams)6 invoked by verticality also allows them to resonate with contemporary audiences. Because verticality lends itself so well to the dynamic elaboration of conflict between opposed forces, it seems remarkably suitable for an era defined by economic polarization and new forms of political, religious, and military extremism, all of which seem to have had the effect (or so we are regularly told) of evacuating previously available middle grounds. The way that such global conflicts played out at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, only reinforced the link between verticality and the struggle for power in the popular imaginary. Indeed, verticality allows these films simultaneously to acknowledge extremism, economic polarization, and thwarted upward mobility as significant aspects of their global audience's condition of existence and to charge these crises with new visual pleasures and imaginary resolutions. Even when they purport to represent actual historical events, these films feature mythological characters, breathtaking vertical terrains, and forms of embodiment detached from any referent in the real world onto which international audiences can map their conflicting identifications and emotional affiliations. Precisely by defying verisimilitude, the new verticality lends these films a different sort of emblematic truth able to resonate—strongly and broadly—within the historical context of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.