Surf Film,Then & Now

Introduction

Surf films have an odd history (cf. Beattie, 2001; Booth, 1996, 2003). As The Endless Summer, circa 1964, may have been created, produced, and achieved within a less advanced capitalist societal sense than 2013’s Slow Dance, I thought to myself, What might be some of the differences in the past fifty years of surf film production and consumption that mark both the growth of alternative sport forms like surfing and, more generally, societal shifts in the culture? How might these two films exemplify larger differences in how audiences perceive surfing, and how they consume surfing film?

In this piece, I will explore some of the concepts of late capitalism through a comparison of these two films. To do this, I will look at some of the logics of late capitalism, delve into some specific details of both films, explore the relationships and disruptions within the cultural logics of audience and the films themselves, suggest four key areas where the societal and filmic practices seem most evident, and finally, speculate on how dominant patriarchal practices elide with late capitalist logics to cement a status quo worldview that reinforces and reproduces unfair systems of privilege—particularly gendered—within cultural modes of production with so-called “counter culture” artifacts like surf films.

A Primer on Late Capitalism

Drawing from and elucidating Ernest Mandel’s (1972/1978) book, Late Capitalism, and Fredrick Jameson’s subsequent use of Mandel’s work to examine cultural forms of capital, David L. Andrews (2009) points out that

Jameson’s broader aim was thus to contribute to an understanding of changes in the mode of production—what he described as “the specific logic of the cultural production”—associated with the third (late, multinational, consumer) stage in the evolution of capital. Within this moment, the cultural sphere occupies a “special functional place” (ibid.: 406 [Jameson, 1991]) in realizing the accumulated capital through which the late capitalist order is able to reproduce itself: culture simultaneously acts both as a core product (through the commodification of superstructural elements) and a core process (through the symbolic manipulation of commercial consumption) through which late capitalism becomes instantiated and experienced. (pp. 218-219)

Thus, according to Andrews, one of Jameson’s major contributions was to elucidate cultural production—in the current study, the “production” of a surfing lifestyle as a functional form of capital—as an adjunct to means of material production.

Mandel (1972/1978) summarizes the trajectory of capitalism as containing three parts: (a) freely competitive capitalism, (b) monopoly capitalism, and, as a phase of monopoly capitalism, (c) late capitalism. Late capitalism, according to Jameson (1991), includes

. . . an emphasis on the emergence of new forms of business organization (multinationals, transnationals) beyond the monopoly stage but, above all, the vision of a world capitalist system fundamentally distinct from the older imperialism, which was little more than a rivalry between the various colonial powers. (pp. xviii-xix)

Furthermore, such a system of late capitalism’s

. . . features include the new international division of labor, a vertiginous new dynamic in international banking and the stock exchanges (including the enormous Second and Third world debt), new forms of media interrelationship (very much including transportation systems such as containerization), computers and automation, the flight of production to advanced Third World areas, along with all the more familiar social consequences, including the crisis of traditional labor, the emergence of yuppies, and gentrification on a now-global scale. (p. xix)

Jameson was obviously sketching a picture of a turnover in capitalist functioning, which had exhausted its monopolistic, second-stage realizations and now began to articulate a means of production of culture itself.

Much simplified, I take this to mean that, as material production reaches points of exhaustion (and this is by no means a uniform process), the self-aggrandizing nature of capitalism itself begins to commoditize and appropriate cultural, artistic, and interpersonal spaces. The logical results of this appetite comprise the “look” of late capitalism—but they also naturalize into a societal malaise that ends with a nihilistic worldview and lack of living passion.

Brosio’s (1994) reading of Jameson concurs with many of the tenets of late capitalism, refining within this list the presence of “multinational corporations, the relative weakness of national governments, the threat of globalism and totalism as a result of capitalism’s colonization of everyday life by advertisement and consumer goods . . . ” (p. 2). By most standards, the wasteland that late capitalism might leave in its wake is bleak indeed.

The Films: The Endless Summer (1964) and Slow Dance (2013)

The Endless Summer was budgeted with US$50,000 (Ledonne, 2011). According to Douglas Booth (1996), Brown was rebuffed by Hollywood distributors for the film, so he “ . . . enlarged the film to 35mm and sold it worldwide. It grossed $8 million [US]” (p. 319). ¹ It was risky, but, so the story goes, “Brown had little to lose, he was young and wild, carefree, or ambitious (take your pick), so he decided to roll the dice” (Ledonne, 2011, ¶3).

In contrast, Slow Dance is a corporate production, coproduced by Quiksilver and Marine Layer Productions. Quiksilver seems to have come on board after Dane Reynolds demonstrated his skills as a director/surfer on Vimeo clips and Seen/Unseen, and Thrills, Spills and What Not. Seen/Unseen is a 32-min compilation of Reynolds surfing, filmed by his friend Jason “Mini” Blanchard—it is, Patterson (2010) says, “surf porn at its finest—a stylized freesurf highlight reel . . . ” (¶1). However, though Thrills, Spills and What Not “shares a lot in common with Seen/Unseen, Thrills Spills and Whatnot is trying hard to be artsy and mainstream simultaneously, without fully committing to either direction” (Patterson, 2010, ¶2). This latter comment is key to an understanding of the development of Reynolds’ filmic aesthetic.

The Endless Summer follows Robert August and Michael Hynson from the winter of North America to parts of western Africa, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, and Hawaii—all except Hawaii Southern Hemisphere and summery locales. The surf beaches are touted sometimes as likely previously unsurfed, ² shark-infested, exotic: In short, the “perceived danger,” and strangeness, of the surfing travelogue is highlighted. The film privileges a “frontier” aspect that coincides with Kennedy’s Peace Corps initiative in the United States. The trajectory of the film is relatively simple, with “the boys” traveling from place to place (their travel modes are exoticized too), surfing on their long boards with the 1960s languorous style evident.

Endo (2013) gently skewers Slow Dance this way: “One might be tempted to call it a biopic if Reynolds and Anderson weren’t so sheepish about such words” (¶1). It is true: This is a film about celebrity free surfer Craig Anderson, first and foremost. There are other surfers—and other footages of gorgeous surfs—present or referenced, including Matt Hoy, Mark Occhilupo (“Occy”), and Rob Machado, but this is a film about Anderson. It shows grainy clips of him as a child, photos of his grandparents, features him discussing his “philosophy,” but mostly it shows him surfing in many locales: “Hawaii, Tahiti, Australia, and South Africa were where I got the best waves. India, Chile, and France were really fun as well” (Houseman, 2013, ¶2).

Endo’s claims to Slow Dance’s credentials notwithstanding, Prodanovich (2013) celebrates the film:

It is impressive without taking itself too seriously, and that disarming quality is one of its biggest strengths. It splices goofy family footage from Craig’s past with futuristic airs, cheeky cameos, and some of the finest barrel riding in recent memory. As the name implies, Slow Dance relies on long, slo-mo cuts, a more ambient soundtrack, and fuzzy VHS-style transitions. While most modern surf videos feel highly caffeinated, Slow Dance feels more than a little stoned, which works well when the focus is on such a unique and nuanced style of surfing. Lofty rotations through vibrant skies, buttery single-fin lines at Teahupoo, and unfathomably long Skeleton Bay drainers stand out as some of the film’s most memorable examples of this.

Cultural Logics of Audience(s)

As the gradual shift to late capitalism has occurred, with an emphasis on the saturation of commodity production giving way to productions of culture both as product and as process, the clear economic trajectories of these two films presents a good case study of both “presumption” and consumption of such cultural “texts.” On the one hand, The Endless Summer makes a case for surfing and mainstreaming (massification) of surfing products; on the other hand, Slow Dance assumes the acceptance of surfing (the imperialist stage). The logics of Slow Dance reflect what Woermann (2012) calls an engagement with “the collective (re)production of style” (p. 621). This engagement is accomplished by a combination of consumption and “prosumption, the consumer’s creative production as a leisure pursuit” (p. 621). In other words, the creation of new materials itself becomes a part of a late capitalist formation.

During the 1960s, Booth (1996) writes, an economic shift to commodity culture helps to “account . . . for the emergence of the counterculture and surfing’s shift from a happy, fun activity into an opt-out lifestyle called soul-surfing” (p. 316). Surfers, Booth claims, embodied a drop-out reaction to the flatness of the “debilitating and disorientating nihilism” (p. 316) of a successful capitalist society. When life seemingly gives you no choice, you always have the choice of deciding not to play the game. As surfers identified with “a normlessness” that resulted from heightened commoditization and the realization of the real possibilities of “nuclear war and environmental deterioration” (Booth, 1996, p. 316), they turned inward, demonstrating both a pensive self-reflection, and, eventually, an adjustment to the “success” of a late capitalist society.

Despite surfers seemingly retreating from the “grind” of everyday capitalist society in the 1960s and early 1970s, they managed, from 1964 until the present, to manipulate themselves into positions where they could (a) continue to surf as a lifestyle (cf. Wheaton, 2000, 2003, 2004), (b) often supplement their surfing lifestyle/avocation with surfing-related vocations (cf. Rinehart, 1998, 2003), (c) stay close to the action, particularly as they aged. In the initial stages of mass acceptance, managing both surfing and a “normal” lifestyle was quite difficult, because the dominant society saw surfers as deviant. But gradually, with more numbers negotiating both surfing and lifestyle, their needs became more mainstreamed.

In scrabbling out part-time, seasonal, and temporary positions, some surfers sustained the mythos of counterculture within an increasingly neo-liberal form of late capitalism. Of course, from the 1960s to the 2010s, mainstream acceptance of surfing has grown exponentially, so it is now more common to see surfers in all walks of life, with their lifestyles accommodated by flexible work schedules and a more relaxed attitude toward the leisure/work dynamic.

Over time—and with the advent of “social media”—surfers became prosumptive participants, filming their own subjective “soul surfs,” and, like freeskiiers, they

. . . uploaded on YouTube, Facebook, and personal blogs, and other[s] . . . add their comments, repost the link, show it to friends on a smartphone . . . create a response video, rate it, tweet it, tag people they know, discuss it in a chat, blog it, download and reedit some sequences, and so on. (Woermann, 2012, p. 620)

In short—and this is some of the path Dane Reynolds took, via Vimeo—they engage with embodied physical skills, but they also enjoy and become enamored of creation of scopophilic representations of their and others’ skills.

This snapshot is of those surfers who typically see surfing as a lifestyle, as something they do in the morning and afternoon, before and after work, or as something they follow as the seasons permit. They were the “core” audience for both The Endless Summer and Slow Dance, but as The Endless Summer itself became a commodity—the soundtrack and movie poster are both culturally iconic—non-surfers became attracted to its homely logics. But there is more than simply audience at stake in the reception of these films.

Slow Dance was shot using many of the logics that Woermann (2012; citing Knorr Cetina, 2003, 2005, before him) expands upon regarding freeskiiers’ use of social media. More specifically, he writes about “hedonic, reflection, and knowledge practices,” which work to (re)produce a subculture using current social media platforms. The pleasure freeskiiers gain from creating and consuming social media both extend the satisfying “hit” of the actual event (much like retelling has done in the past) and “elicit longing and daydreaming” (Woermann, 2012, p. 627). Second, the reflective practice benefits of social media include “the ability of media technologies to aid, reconfigure, and transform the reflection” (p. 630) of the individual prosumist. In other words, social media clips can act as feedback loops—from “all corners of the planet” (Woermann, 2012) as well as from the self. Third, prosumist social media can act to “disseminate” both explicit (e.g., “exchange . . . tips, tricks, or advice” [p. 631]) and implicit (e.g., recognition of style) kinds of knowledge. As well, The Endless Summer, within the history of late capitalist logics, marks both a turn toward the consumption of surfing (via film), and a new form of prosumption—that is, not only receiving visual images of surfing, but also creating a visual record of surfing exploits.

According to Booth (1996), The Endless Summer also became an iconic symbol of the oxymoronic term Booth borrowed from Milner (1994): “apocalyptic hedonism.” Booth takes this “particular frisson of a textual erotics deriving from the simultaneous juxtaposition of the terrors of imminent extinction and the delights of hedonistic affluence” (p. 191) to stand in for representations of freedom of the 1960s, of surfing (counter)culture, and of the shifting terrain of cultural capital within a world stage. As Booth puts it, “Surfers became both subversives and outlaws” (p. 316). To me, this blurring of naïve, exclusive membership within the club that was 1960s surfing quickly—through the combination of the 1960s Cold War mentality, the fear of human self-extinction, and a concomitant relaxing of sexual, moral, and interpersonal strictures—became blurred with such forms of consumption (and presumption) that allowed for a non-critical hedonistic, sometimes carefree, approach to surfing by larger numbers within the population.

Surfing—and other weather-dependent non-mainstream sports—is, in many ways, a life filled with privilege, but it is also a life that still forces individuals to make clear choices: between surfing and career, surfing and family or long-term commitments (often surfers find other surfers as partners to mitigate this dilemma), between surfing and other life choices. Everything, it is said, depends upon the waves. Those who become deeply embedded in the surf culture as participants are what Belinda Wheaton (2003) and many others term core participants, displaying insider knowledge and cultural capital as a result. They, for example, may eschew the steady and predictable safety of a full-time job, the “typical” trajectory of schooling, work, partnership, children, house ownership, and so forth.

The awareness of surfing—and the increasing cultural capital and status of surfers—grew, in part, due to Brown’s film. Some surfers, in a tribute to Bruce Brown in Surfer magazine in 2011, claim that The Endless Summer changed their lives:

Thank you Bruce. This amazing movie changed my life and took me from dreary, cold London to an incredible surfing lifestyle in warmer places.

The “Endless Summer” film changed my life just as it did for many others. Bruce Brown has an uncluttered vision and the uncanny ability to share what he sees with such clarity for his audience. (Ledonne, 2011, Discussion)

And, still others were inspired to become filmmakers—specifically, American surf filmmakers. One of the legacies from Bruce Brown’s success—and Australia’s Bob Evans and Alby Falzon, who filmed Morning of the Earth in 1972 (Beattie, 2001)—was that filmmakers around the world began taking surf films more seriously. As surfing became more popular and commodified—despite the counterculture ethos—these descendants of Bruce Brown, unlike Brown himself, began to identify as surf filmmaker.

In the 1960s United States, surfing style became mainstream “cool”: surf music included The Endless Summer soundtrack by the Sandals (cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg4FvOi-N18), Jan and Dean’s “Surf City,” the Surfaris’ “Wipe Out” and “Surfer Joe,” and the Beach Boys; surf clothing, from Ocean Pacific to Hang Ten to independent silkscreened manufacturers, from boardshorts to sunglasses to t-shirts to footwear; surf jargon and argot, like “Far out!” and “hang ten!” and “stoke.” All these facets of a (former) surfing counterculture have, over time, become commodified, normalized, and mainstreamed within the logics of a late capitalist omnivorous culture.

Surfing films, therefore, as a visual “arm” of this late capitalist turn to corporate sensibilities and colonization of surfing culture, serve as sites of political domination of both the individual and of new forms of multinational corporate synergies (cf. Jameson, 1991; Andrews, 2009). They serve as exemplars to what Jameson (1991) terms a

. . . new and historically original dilemma, one that involves our insertion as individual subjects into a multidimensional set of radically discontinuous realities, whose frames range from the still surviving spaces of bourgeois private life all the way to the unimaginable decentering of global capital itself. (p. 413)

Surfing—the cultural lifestyle itself—is one of many objects of “production,” which the stage of late/multinational/consumer capitalism works to produce (cf. Mandel, 1972/1978).

Keith Beattie (2001) traces the trajectories of 1960s Australian surf films as cultural and historical artifacts. He looks at both avant garde (as delineated by Wollen, 1982) and documentary impulses as influences on surf films. The naming of such influences is not as important as what they actually accomplished: avant garde films, both “formal and theoretical-political[,]” utilized “a common rhetoric of anti-traditionalism . . . in particular an emphasis on personal freedom, hedonism, and . . . various allusions to a lost pastoral ideal” (pp. 334-335). The vestiges of documentary—particularly documentary that touched the edges of “experimental styles and forms” (p. 335)—also contributed to the aesthetic that became the emerging 60s to 70s surf film.

Slow Dance, from 2013, in contrast to the shoestring budget of The Endless Summer, is a high budget film, coproduced by Marine Layer Productions (director Dane Reynolds’ own company) and major player Quiksilver. Tetsuhiko Endo (2013) calls the feel of this film a product of Reynolds’ “million-dollar, lo-fi aesthetic” (¶1). Although the comments section points out that Endo is not the target audience for this film—and that his honing in on a match between what the filmmakers say and what they do is, perhaps, beside the point—his critique certainly resonates with the thesis of late capitalism. For example,

Reynolds wants this to feel like a home video that was basically thrown together on a whim and a shrug. It is what it is, you know. The thing is, it’s not. It’s a professional production utilizing some of the best lensmen in the game on relatively large budgets. They’ve all done a stellar job, so the air of non-chalance that hangs on the thing rings hollow.

A reader, “kooooook,” comments that Endo’s thesis of commercialism is off the mark:

The fact is that surfing is a style driven pursuit, and Dane, Ando, etc. . . . are obviously style conscious. Their surfing alone is arguably the most stylish happening now along with being at the highest level of performance . . . Just because you “don’t get” the style that the film is presented in doesn’t mean it was “meant to look homemade.” It was meant to look how it looks, which is cool, casual, and hip, and relevant, just like the surfing that’s featured in it.

Obviously, this reading of the text resonates at the lived level for some viewers.

The question remains, however: Is the slick, highly technical, covert nature of the film meant as a new aesthetic (i.e., a brave foray in art), as a cynical attempt at nostalgic simulation, or as a parody or homage to films that have come before? In late capitalism, these details and nuances simply do not matter: What matters is that consumer culture itself has become the product. This form of disingenuousness seems not far off from a deliberate, aesthetic-as-cultural-product, “false consciousness.”

Four Practices in the Films

Fast forward from 1964, a fundamentally commodity economics, and The Endless Summer to 2013, cultural capitalism, and Slow Dance. Other than the theoretical tenets of late capitalism blossoming, what has changed? How do the films reflect some of those changes? How have surf films changed? How have audiences changed? Certainly the societies supporting the films have changed, but the means of production (and reception) have also changed. As Mandel (1972/1978) reminds us, “The hallmark of imperialism, . . . and of its second phase, late capitalism, is . . . an increase in the parasitism and waste accompanying or overlaying this growth [of capitalism]” (p. 214).

It is impossible to answer questions regarding how 1960s society differs from 2010s society fully, but I will touch on just four of the significant changes I see within the films, from then to now. The four notable concrete exemplars of a late capitalism economics within these two cultural texts, to me, are (a) core participation, (b) symbiosis of corporate and individual impulses, (c) production values and presentation of the films, and (d) the imbedded concept of “surf porn.”

Conclusion: Absented Gender

To reiterate, four of the features of surf film in the last 50 years include the ways core participation has morphed from surfers who look the part, who speak the part, and who can play the part of surfers to core participants who are imbricated within the mainstreamed surfing culture, both spatially and temporally (cf. Wheaton, 2003), and yet are still portrayed as outsiders; the symbiosis of corporate and grass roots’ interests in making surfing available to a massified audience and group of participants; the actual mechanics of presentation of the films; and the concept of both surf porn and celebrity surf porn.

One aspect that is glaring in its absence from this discussion has been that of gender. Surfing, over the past 50 years, remains male dominated. In 1964, the presence of active females was only noticed when Australian girls/women wore the new fashion bikinis to surf—Bruce Brown’s remarks were that he was amazed that the bikini would stay on in such an activity. Passive females were presented as helpers to the men, as admirers of the men, as diminished beings whose reduced agency never came into question.

In Slow Dance (2013), shopped to a worldwide audience 49 years after The Endless Summer was shown in theaters, the same lack of female presence remains quite telling. The self-celebratory countercultural ethos, the contrarian belief systems that proposed egalitarianism have been subsumed by dominant cultural values. Seen from a White male, middle to upper class dominant standpoint within surfing culture, women largely remain bystanders, though there are pockets of marginal resistance to these naturalized assumptions. For example, more women are actively taking surfing lessons, women teach other women, women have become professional surfers. But their air-time on television is foreshortened; in fact, so-called “non-photogenic” female surfers usually do not get any space at all in surf magazines (lisahunter, 2006).

If we were to turn this societal erasure, this total unfairness, on its face, women should not actually care: They do not need to rely on male acceptance, welcome, or even notice for their place in surfing—except for the facts that they get less prize money for winning than men, they have shorter careers than men, they get less endemic sponsorship offers than men. The lesson is that surfing has been fundamentally linked to and for males, and many reinforcers of this ideology reproduce the inequities. All these examples point to how, though the technical changes in surf film have changed quite a bit, and the presence of late capitalism underpinning these changes has exploited a cultural means of production, the underlying sexism as the basis for male-driven, male-centered, male-viewed surf porn ⁶ has only intensified.