Robin Wood’s Legacy: Ambivalence and American Films in the 1970s'

This paper is concerned with a critical legacy of New Hollywood Cinema by focusing on the works of the influential and prolific critic-scholar Robin Wood. In Wood’s writings on New Hollywood films, they represent a critical sensibility that he often finds in the films from this period. This sensibility is ‘ambivalence’.
‘Ambivalence’ is the term Wood recurrently uses when articulating Hollywood films in, but not limited to, the 1970s, especially his seminal article, ‘The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s’. In the study of this genre, Wood borrows the term from Shakespearean scholar A. P. Rossiter who suggests that ‘[ambivalence] subsumes meanings which point to two opposite and irreconcilable systems of values’ (1961: 50). While following this literary tradition, Wood only implicitly treats the term as a criterion of value. Yet, his employment of this critical tool remains unde-explored and leaves us several questions: Is ‘ambivalence’ a cultural phenomenon embedded in New Hollywood cinema? Can ‘ambivalence’ be seen as a slippery term of ‘incoherence’ – another influential term coined by Wood when discussing Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), Looking For Mr. Goodbar (Richard Brooks, 1977) and Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980)? How does ‘ambivalence’ connect to aesthetic values, expressions and properties in the medium of film?
This paper briefly traces the development of how Robin Wood employs this overarching term in relation to New Hollywood Cinema. Then, I shall gradually refine the scope to a close analysis of Arthur Penn’s under-appreciated film Night Moves (1975). Not only does Wood note that ‘ambivalence’ is the word ‘one can hardly escape from in talking about Penn’ (2014: 8), but he also claims that Night Moves ‘is among the finest Hollywood films of the 1970s’ without explicating its achievements and values. Ultimately the analysis of Night Moves seeks to open up a discussion of whether or not ‘ambivalence’ can be a useful concept for evaluating and understanding other New Hollywood films.