Antiochus
Member
Masterfully articulates what one can believe the film buff community here has been grumbling about in consternation. Perhaps one of the longest yet most substantive rants a film critic can give these days.
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/107212/has-hollywood-murdered-the-movies?page=0,5
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/107212/has-hollywood-murdered-the-movies?page=0,5
EARLIER THIS YEAR, The Avengers, which pulled together into one movie all the familiar Marvel Comics characters from earlier picturesCaptain America, Thor, Iron Man, and so onachieved a worldwide box-office gross within a couple of months of about $1.5 billion. That extraordinary figure represented a triumph of craft and cynical marketing: the movie, which cost $220 million to make, was mildly entertaining for a while (self-mockery was built into it), but then it degenerated into a digital slam, an endless battle of exacerbated pixels, most of the fighting set in the airless digital spaces of a digital city. Only a few critics saw anything bizarre or inane about so vast a display of technology devoted to so little. American commercial movies are now dominated by the instantaneous monumental, the senseless repetition of movies washing in on a mighty roar of publicity and washing out in a waste of semi-indifference a few weeks later. The Green Hornet? The Green Lantern? Did I actually see both of them? The Avengers will quickly be effaced by an even bigger movie of the same type.
This franchise-capping Avengers was a carefully built phenomenon. Lets go back a couple of years and pick up a single strand that led to it. Consider one of its predecessors, Iron Man 2, which began its run in the United States, on May 7, 2010, at 4,380 theaters. Thats only the number of theaters: multiplexes often put new movies on two or three, or even five or six, screens within the complex, so the actual number of screens was much higherwell over 6,000. The gross receipts for the opening weekend were $128 million. Yet those were not the movies first revenues. As a way of discouraging piracy and cheap street sale of the movie overseas, the movies distributor, Paramount Pictures, had opened Iron Man 2 a week earlier in many countries around the world. By May 9, at the end of the weekend in which the picture opened in America, cumulative worldwide theatrical gross was $324 million. By the end of its run, the cumulative total had advanced to $622 million. Lets face it: big numbers are impressive, no matter what produced them.
The worldwide theatrical gross of Iron Man 2 served as a branding operation for what followedsale of the movie to broadcast and cable TV, and licensing to retail outlets for DVD rentals and purchase. Iron Man 2 was itself part of a well-developed franchise (the first Iron Man came out in 2008). The hero, Tony Stark, a billionaire industrialist-playboy, first appeared in a Marvel comic book in 1963 and still appears in new Marvel comics. By 2010, rattling around stores and malls all over the world, there were also Iron Man video games, soundtrack albums, toys, bobblehead dolls, construction sets, dishware, pillows, pajamas, helmets, t-shirts, and lounge pants. There was a hamburger available at Burger King named after Mickey Rourke, a supporting player in Iron Man 2. Companies such as Audi, LG Mobile, 7-Eleven, Dr. Pepper, Oracle, Royal Purple motor oil, and Symantecs Norton software signed on as promotional partners, issuing products with the Iron Man logo imprinted somewhere on the product or in its advertising. In effect, all of American commerce was selling the franchise. All of American commerce sells every franchise.
Iron Man movies have a lighter touch than many comparable blockbustersfor instance, the clangorous Transformer movies, which are themselves based on plastic toys, in which dark whirling digital masses barge into each other or thresh their way through buildings, cities, and people, and at which the moviegoer, sitting in the theater, feels as if his head were repeatedly being smashed against a wall. The Iron Man movies have been shaped around the temperament of their self-deprecating star, Robert Downey, Jr., an actor who manages to convey, in the midst of a $200-million super-production, a private sense of amusement. By slightly distancing himself from the material, this charming rake offers the grown-up audience a sense of complicity, which saves it from self-contempt. Like so many big digital movies, the Iron Man films engage in a daringly flirtatious give-and-take with their own inconsequence: the disproportion between the size of the productions, with their huge sets and digital battles, and the puniness of any meaning that can possibly be extracted from them, may, for the audience, be part of the frivolous pleasure of seeing them.
Many big films (not just the ones based on Marvel Comics) are now soaked in what can only be called corporate irony, a mad discrepancy between size and significancefor instance, Christopher Nolans widely admired Inception, which generates an extraordinarily complicated structure devoted to little but its own workings. Despite its dream layers, the movie is not really about dreamsthe action you see on screen feels nothing like dreams. An industrialist hires experts to invade the dreaming mind of another industrialist in order to plant emotions that would cause the second man to change corporate plans. Or something like that; the plot is a little vague. Anyway, why should we care? What is at stake?
Nolans movie was a whimsical, over-articulate nullitya huge fancy clock that displays wheels and gears but somehow fails to tell the time. Yet Inception is nothing more than the logical product of a recent trend in which big movies have been progressively drained of sense. As much as two-thirds of the box office for these big films now comes from overseas, and the studios appear to have concluded that if a movie were actually about something, it might risk offending some part of the worldwide audience. Aimed at Bangkok and Bangalore as much as at Bangor, our big movies have been defoliated of character, wit, psychology, local color.
Apart from these movies and a few others, however, many of us have logged deadly hours watching superheroes bashing people off walls, cars leapfrogging one another in tunnels, giant toys and mock-dragons smashing through Chicago, and charming teens whooshing around castles. What we see in bad digital action movies has the anti-Newtonian physics of a cartoon, but drawn with real figures. Rushed, jammed, broken, and overloaded, action now produces temporary sensation rather than emotion and engagement. Afterward these sequences fade into blurs, the different blurs themselves melding into one anothera vague memory of having been briefly excited rather than the enduring contentment of scenes playing again and again in ones head.
The oversized weightlessness leaves one numbed, defeated. Surely rage would seem an excessive response to movies so enormously trivial. Yet the overall trend is enraging. Fantasy is moving into all kinds of adventure and romantic movies; time travel has become a commonplace. At this point the fantastic is chasing human temperament and destinywhat we used to call dramafrom the movies. The merely human has been transcended. And if the illusion of physical reality is unstable, the emotional framework of movies has changed, too, and for the worse. In timea very short timethe fantastic, not the illusion of reality, may become the default mode of cinema.
APART FROM THAT dolorous autumn-leaves season (the Holocaust, troubled marriages, raging families, self-annihilating artists), American movies during the rest of the year largely abandon older audiences, leaving them to wander about like downsized workers. Many gratefully retreat into television, where producer-writers such as David Chase, Aaron Sorkin, David Simon, and David Milch now enjoy the same freedom and status, at HBO, as the Coppola-Scorsese generation of movie directors forty years ago. Cable television has certainly opened a space for somber realism, such as The Wire, and satirical realism, such as Mad Men and Lena Dunhams mock-depressive, urban-dejection series Girls. But television cannot be the answer to what ails movies. I have been ravished in recent years by things possible only in moviesby Paul Thomas Andersons There Will Be Blood, Julian Schnabels The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Malicks The Tree of Life, which refurbished the tattered language of film. Such films as Sideways, The Squid and the Whale, and Capote have a fineness, a nuanced subtlety, that would come off awkwardly on television. Would that there were more of them.
The intentional shift in large-scale movie production away from adults is a sad betrayal and a minor catastrophe. Among other things, it has killed a lot of the culture of the movies. By culture, I do not mean film festivals, film magazines, and cinephile Internet sites and bloggers, all of which are flourishing. I mean that blessedly saturated mental state of moviegoing, both solitary and social, half dreamy, half critical, maybe amused, but also sometimes awed, that fuels a living art form. Moviegoing is both a private and a sociable affaira strangers-at-barbecues, cocktail-party affair, the common coin of everyday discourse. In the fall season there may be a number of good things to see, and so, for adult audiences, the habit may flicker to life again. If you have seen one of the five interesting movies currently playing, then you need to see the other four so you can join the dinner-party conversation. If there is only one, as there is most of the year, you may skip it without feeling you are missing much.
THE LANGUAGE OF big-budget, market-driven moviesthe elements of shooting, editing, storytelling, and characterizationbegan disintegrating as far back as the 1980s, but all of this crystallized for me a decade ago, in the summer of 2001, when the slovenliness of what I was seeing that year, even in the Oscar-winning Gladiator, hit me hard. The action scenes in Gladiator were mostly a blur of whirling movement shot right up closea limb hacked off and flying, a spurt of blood, a flash of chariot wheels. Who could actually see anything? Yet almost no one seemed to object. The old ideal of action as something staged cleanly and realistically in open space had been destroyed by sheer fakery and digital magica constant chopping of movement into tiny pieces that are then assembled by computer editing into exploding little packages. What we were seeing in Gladiator and other movies were not just individual artistic failures and crass commercial strategies, but was a new and awful idea of how to put a picture together.
That summer of 2001 the shape of conglomerate aesthetics could be seen in the narrative gibberish of too many creatures and too many villains in the overstuffed, put-on adventure movie, The Mummy Returns; and it could be seen in the frantic pastiche construction of Baz Luhrmanns musical Moulin Rouge, with its characters openly borrowed from other movies, its songs composed of many other songsmusic that alludes to the history of pop rather than risking the painful beauty of a ravishing new melody. The conglomerate aesthetic seizes on the recycled and the clichéd; it disdains originality and shies away from anything too individual, too clearly definedeven a strong personality. (Angelina Jolie wasnt required to be a person in the Lara Croft moviesshe got by on pure attitude. Ewan McGregor in The Phantom Menace didnt even have attitude.) The only genuine protagonist in big movies in that period was Russell Crowes Jeffrey Wigand in Michael Manns The Insider, from 1999, and that movie failed commercially. In Hollywood, the lesson has been learned: no complex protagonist unless he is a historical figure such as Howard Hughes, John Nash (of A Beautiful Mind), J. Edgar Hoover, or the like. As the visual schemes grow more complicated, the human material becomes undernourished, wan, apologetic, absentor so stylized that you can enjoy it only ironically (Angelina Jolie as a svelte, voguing super-killer).
Constant and incoherent movement; rushed editing strategies; feeble characterization; pastiche and hapless collagethese are the elements of conglomerate aesthetics. There is something more than lousy film-making in such a collection of attention-getting swindles. Again and again I have the sense that film-makers are purposely trying to distance the audience from the materialto prevent moviegoers from feeling anything but sensory excitement, to thwart any kind of significance in the movie.
Consider a single scene from one of the most prominent artistic fiascos of recent years, Michael Bays Pearl Harbor. Forget Ben Afflecks refusal to sleep with Kate Beckinsale the night before going off to battle; forget the rest of the frightfully noble love story. Look at the action sequences in the movie, the scenes that many critics unaccountably praised. Heres the moment: the Japanese have arrived, dropped their load, and gone back to their carriers. Admiral Kimmel (Colm Feore), the commander of the Pacific fleet, then rides through the harbor in an open boat, surveying the disaster. We have seen Kimmel earlier: not as a major character, but as a definite presence. Before December 7, he had intimations that an attack might be coming but not enough information to form a coherent picture. He did not act, and now he feels the deepest chagrin. Dressed in Navy whites, and surrounded by junior officers also dressed in white, he passes slowly through ships torn apart and still burning, ships whose crews, in some cases, remain trapped below the waterline.
Now, the admirals boat trip could have yielded a passage of bitterly eloquent movie poetry. Imagine what John Ford or David Lean would have done with it! We have just seen bodies blackened by fire, the mens skin burned off. Intentionally or not, the spotless dress whites worn by the officers become an excruciating symbol of the Navys complacency before the attack. The whole meaning of Bays movie could have been captured in that one shot if it had been built into a sustained sequence. Yet this shot, to our amazement, lasts no more than a few seconds. After cutting away, Bay and his editors return to the scene, but this time from a different angle, and that shot doesnt last, either. Bay and his team of editors abandon their own creation, just as, earlier in the movie, they jump away from an extraordinary shot of nurses being strafed as they run across an open plaza in front of the base hospital.
People who know how these movies are made told me that the film-makers could not have held those shots any longer, because audiences would have noticed that they were digital fakes. That point (if true) should tell you that something is seriously wrong. If you cannot sustain shots at the dramatic crux of your movie, why make violent spectacle at all? It turns out that fake-looking digital film-making can actually disable spectacle when it is supposed to be set in the real world. Increasingly, the solution has been to create more and more digitized cities, houses, castles, planets. Big films have lost touch with the photographed physical reality that provided so much greater enchantment than fantasy.
Directors used to take great care with such things: spatial integrity was another part of the unspoken contract with audiences, a codicil to the narrative doctrine of the scriptorium. It allowed viewers to understand, say, how much danger a man was facing when he stuck his head above a rock in a gunfight, or where two secret lovers at a dinner party were sitting in relation to their jealous enemies. Space could be analyzed and broken into close-ups and reaction shots and the like, but then it had to be re-unified in a way that brought the experience together in a viewers headso that, in Jezebel, one felt physically what Bette Davis suffered as scandalized couples backed away from her in the ballroom. If the audience didnt experience that emotion, the movie wouldnt have cast its spell.
This seems like plain common sense. Who could possibly argue with it? Yet spatial integrity is just about gone from big movies. What Wyler and his editors didmatching body movement from one shot to the nextis rarely attempted now. Hardly anyone thinks it important. The most common method of editing in big movies now is to lay one furiously active shot on top of another, and often with only a general relation in space or body movement between the two. The continuous whirl of movement distracts us from noticing the uncertain or slovenly fit between shots. The camera moves, the actors move: in Moulin Rouge, the camera swings wildly over masses of men in the nightclub, Nicole Kidman flings herself around her boudoir like a rag doll. The digital fight at the end of The Avengers takes place in a completely artificial environment, a vacuum in which gravity has been abandoned; continuity is not even an issue. If the constant buffoonishness of action in all sorts of big movies leaves one both over-stimulated and unsatisfiedcheated without knowing whythen part of the reason is that the terrain hasnt been sewn together. You have been deprived of that loving inner possession of the movie that causes you to play it over and over in your head.
n recent years, some of the young movie directors have come out of commercials and MTV. If a director is just starting out in feature films, he doesnt have to be paid much, and the studios can throw a script at him with the assumption that the movie, if nothing else, will have a great look. He has already produced that look in his commercials or videos, which he shoots on film and then finishes digitallyadding or subtracting color, changing the sky, putting in flame or mist, retarding or speeding up movement. In a commercial for a new car, the blue-tinted streets rumble and crack, trees give up their roots, and the silver SUV, cool as a titanium cucumber, rides over the steaming fissures. Wow! What a film-maker! Studio executives or production executives who get financing from studios do not have to instruct such a young director to cut a feature very fast and put in a lot of thrills, because for their big movies they hire only the kind of people who will cut it fast and put in thrills. That the young director has never worked with a serious dramatic structure, or even with actors, may not be considered a liability.
The results are there to see. At the risk of obviousness: techniques that hold your eye in a commercial or video are not suited to telling stories or building dramatic tension. In a full-length movie, images conceived that way begin to cancel each other out or just slip off the screen; the characters are just types or blurred spots of movement. The links with fiction and theater and classical film technique have been broken. The center no longer holds; mere anarchy is loosed upon the screen; the movie winds up a mess.
So are American movies finished, a cultural irrelevance? Despite almost everything, I dont think the game is up, not by any means. There are talented directors who manage to keep working either within the system or just on the edges of it. Some of the independent films that have succeeded, against the odds, in gaining funding and at least minimal traction in the theaters, are obvious signs of hope. Terence Malick is alive and working hard. Digital is still in its infancy, and if it moves into the hands of people who have a more imaginative and delicate sense of spectacle, it could bloom in any one of a dozen ways. The micro-budget movies now made on the streets or in living rooms might also take off if they give up on sub-Cassavetes ideas of improvisation, and accept the necessity of a script. There is enough talent sloshing around in the troubled vessel of American movies to keep the art form alive. But the trouble is real, and it has been growing for more than twenty-five years. By now there is a wearying, numbing, infuriating sameness to the cycle of American releases year after year. Much of the time, adults cannot find anything to see. And that reason alone is enough to make us realize that American movies are in a terrible crisis, which is not going to end soon.
