The title of Paul Schraders film has at least two meanings: one concerns the psychology of representation, the other its technology. The film portrays its central figure, TV icon Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear), as someone whos focused on himself (this is the first meaning), unable to see the bigger picture around him and blind to the consequences of his obsessive philandering. In its second sense, the title refers to a camera mechanism and perhaps hints at the dire consequences, of which Cranes life is a cautionary example, of becoming too deeply involved in the surrogate life of audio-visual technology (an early fan of video, Crane recorded his numerous sexual encounters on tape).
Auto Focus is thus a critique of male narcissism. It analyzes two kinds of male images. One is that of the entertainer here embedded within a famous format, the TV Nazi prison-camp comedy Hogans Heroes (1965-71), which Schrader re-creates with an eerie accuracy that makes the show look even more forlorn than it was. The other is that of the swinger which links up with that of the entertainer (the classic nexus of the two, in American culture, was the Rat Pack) but diverges from it along a path that Crane, a victim of both the short shelf life of TV stars and his own addiction to sleaze, was doomed to follow.
Cranes story, as told by Schrader, might be read as showing how the culture of the image a culture that values good grooming, a pleasant vacuousness, and the manufactured semblance of personality produces a monster. But here some objections arise. For one thing, the concept of the "semblance of personality" is paradoxical: this semblance always belongs to an individual, and Bob Crane owed his success to his personal qualities (his "likability," as he puts it during the film). Also, isnt "monster" too strong a word for what Crane becomes? The film shows him undergoing an erosion of both sensibility and common sense as he ceases to protect his image and loses the ability to see himself as others see him. What decays in Crane is not the soul but the body (as a set of behaviors) as when he makes a tasteless appearance, in the twilight of his career, on a cooking show and insults a buxom woman in the audience. Cranes downfall is not that he becomes less of a person but that he becomes less of a personality.
It becomes apparent throughout the second half of the movie that what interests Schrader is above all the style of decay for example, the way Crane and his evil angel, electronics wizard John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe), get physically seedier. The film is as much concerned with the breakdown in representation as with the moral breakdown. Schrader treats Cranes fall as an analogue for the decline of the "movie" look that offered a standard for American visual culture until the end of the 60s (a look shown here in a back-projection shot of Kinnear-as-Crane on water skis in the 1974 Disney feature Superdad). The bright and slick mise-en-scne of Auto Focuss first half thus gives way to tacky decor and wardrobe, increasingly eccentric hand-held cinematography, a degraded and contrasty image, and ever-uglier lighting. We seem to witness the historical replacement of film by video as the prevalent audio-visual medium, with all its sthetic consequences, right down to the nullity of bad surveillance-camera angles and a "reality-TV" ambiance.
Theres little to take from this movie: it denies Crane depth, it doesnt show him (until almost the end) struggling with his fate, it even refuses him universality (his life is only the effect of a few accidental encounters with the culture industry). Although Auto Focus is consistently interesting, these refusals (and also that forbidding combination of negativity and formalism common to all Schraders films) leave it rather hollow. But its failure to transcend is the most disturbing thing about it (whereas what was most disappointing about Tim Burtons Ed Wood to which Auto Focus can be seen as a corrective was its insistence on transcendence at any cost). The horror of the ending of Auto Focus is just its blankness, the fact that there is no lesson.
Not such a hero