One Shot invites close readings of the basic unit of film grammar.
Lost in America (Albert Brooks, 1985).
What makes you mad? And when you’re very angry—you know, furious—how long does it last? And who (or what) are you blaming for what’s happening? When David Howard, the yuppie antihero of Albert Brooks’s Lost in America (1985), learns he hasn’t received the long-coveted promotion to senior vice president at his advertising agency, he loses it. After one too many “fuck yous” leveled at his boss, Paul, he is fired and security is called. In the next shot, David walks backward and points accusatorially at the camera lens. Although he is unaccompanied, it feels like he’s being dragged away by an invisible guard. Employees emerge from their offices on either side of the hallway as he yells his piece, warning them of Paul’s deceptiveness.
A commonplace in cinema—and especially prevalent in the slick glass-and-steel aesthetic of 1980s movies about corporate America—the office corridor provides filmmakers ready-made compositional depth and symmetry. With its fixed vanishing point, this constraining architectural form is more determinate than most of a scene’s direction; the characters and the camera can only move in so many ways. Brooks intensifies the inherent stress of this narrow corridor with details on the frame’s edges. On the left, there’s an imbalance produced by the hot red trim, and on the right, that office plant, uncomfortably pushing up against the glass, a living index of suppressed vitality.
David is also bursting with energy, directed at more than one recipient. At first, it’s all going toward an off-screen Paul, whom David addresses when he proclaims that “the people in this office ought to know what went on here today,” as if his firing were an instance of corporate malfeasance. He then shifts focus by informing everyone that Paul’s a liar. “He’ll tell you all about the future, how good the future’s going to be here. I’ve seen the future. It’s a bald-headed man from New York!” These last lines of dialogue refer to Brad, a potential creative partner who reappears in the film’s denouement, when David, with wife Linda, arrives in Manhattan in their Winnebago to try and win his job back. David’s seen the future, which is the end of this movie. During his aggrieved rant, the audience broadens, from Paul to David’s colleagues, and finally to the film’s spectator.
Actor-writer-director Brooks tests the fourth wall, but it remains standing, although the space beyond it has become ambiguously indeterminate. Once Paul is off-screen, “the system” he personifies has no specific appearance; the microcosmic machinations of American commerce are part of something so all-encompassing, permeating everything. The arbitrary business decisions of upper management are no longer embodied by a man behind a desk, nor even the ordered rationality of an office corridor. Prompted by David’s warning to consider a shared belief in the production-consumption cycle, audience members confront the typically unacknowledged space of the camera. Spectators usually forget the cinematic apparatus, and themselves, while watching characters get what they want. In Lost in America, David Howard does not get what he wants, but it remains unclear exactly where he should point the finger.