My title hails from a Transformers Animated episode that Brent was watching as I was reading about Hamlet and cultural materialism. It seemed slightly appropriate, even though I don't know if BMWs are made in Detroit...
Reading about these two approaches reminds me of a few books that I've been reading (skimming...) for my paper. One that seems like a perfect example of New Historicism is a book called American Domesticity that talks about the influence of the housekeeping practices and manuals from the turn of the century on Hollywood filmmaking practices. The book offers close readings of films and housekeeping manuals and societal practices, and ends up being a fascinating read. It seems like this is what New Historicism and Cultural Materialism both do: open up the analysis of a text to allow for historical realities, account for 'non-literary' texts and their influence on the literature itself.
The difficult thing about distinguishing between new historicism and cultural materialism when studying this specific text is that we're not really far enough removed from 2oo1 to make a large distinction between a historical text and a current text (though maybe I'm wrong about this...2001 still seems really recent to me). So, I'm going to attempt New Historicism, but I might get it all wrong, and it might seem quite a bit like Cultural Materialism (which I'm no longer going to capitalize because I've been inconsistent enough as it is...), but that's that.
The first thing I ever thought when I saw this film was, "Did this actually work?" It seems like a large price to pay for a commercial. Turns out, it did work. The internet tells me so (their sales were up 12.5% after releasing the films, even though BMW didn't release a new car that year). The BMW films emerge from a culture of product placement so ingrained in the traditional American viewer that not only do we not flinch at its inclusion in anything (in fact, automobiles are the most likely to be included as product placement), but we fully accept that in this case, our entertainment is a commercial, a commercial our entertainment. This pairing of entertainment with economics perfectly reinforces our capitalist system. If I'm not aptly saying it, what I'm trying to say is this: our capitalist society has fully accepted a system where we are informed about our products through entertainment, and it is only in this climate that a film like Chosen can even exist.
In a traditional close reading, we would delve deeply into the text, discussing how differing elements of the film contribute to its overall meaning. In new historicism, these facts of BMW sales and wikipedia articles about product placement are co-texts to be read in tandem with the text. So, beautifully photographed BMW chase scene=reinforcement of societal notions of the BMW as a luxury vehicle. If I understand it correctly, the goal of new historicism isn't only to understand a text or a context, but ultimately to understand a culture. And that is kind of cool.
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I think for me, with what you are talking about regarding Chosen, is that we didn't flinch. In fact, I remember when I heard about them at the time (though I never saw one back then because my internet was far too slow) thinking how cool it was and how brilliant they were in doing it. First of all, the commercials since then have often sought to exhibit a more film-like appeal - doing less to encourage you in the "benefits" of the car and more toward just making the car cool through a kind of "music video" feel to them and exciting use of CGI. I absolutely agree with you that we, as a capitalist society, have fully accepted products and entertainment being the same ... think of how many people purchase sunglasses because a character wears them in a film, or change their look.
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