I.
SIX HUNDRED OR SO movies open in the United States every year,
including films from every country, documentaries, first features
spilling out of festivals, experiments, oddities, zero-budget movies
made in someone’s apartment. Even in the digit-dazed summer season,
small movies never stop opening—there is always something to see,
something to write about. Just recently I have been excited by two
independent films—the visionary Louisiana bayou mini-epic,
Beasts of the Southern Wild, and a terse, morally alert fable of authority and obedience called
Compliance.
Yet despite such pleasures, movies—mainstream American movies—are in
serious trouble. And this is hardly a problem that worries movie critics
more than anyone else: many moviegoers feel the same puzzlement and
dismay.
When I speak of moviegoers, I mean people who get out of the house
and into a theater as often as they can; or people with kids, who back
up rare trips to the movies with lots of recent DVDs and films ordered
on demand. I do not mean the cinephiles, the solitary and obsessed, who
have given up on movie houses and on movies as our national theater (as
Pauline Kael called it) and plant themselves at home in front of flat
screens and computers, where they look at old films or small new films
from the four corners of the globe, blogging and exchanging disks with
their friends. They are extraordinary, some of them, and their blogs and
websites generate an exfoliating mass of knowledge and opinion, a
thickening density of inquiries and claims, outraged and dulcet tweets.
Yet it is unlikely that they can do much to build a theatrical audience
for the movies they love. And directors still need a sizable audience if
they are to make their next picture about something more than a few
people talking on the street.
I have in mind the great national audience for movies, or what’s left
of it. In the 1930s, roughly eighty million people went to the movies
every week, with weekly attendance peaking at ninety million in 1930 and
again in the mid-1940s. Now about thirty million people go, in a
population two and a half times the size of the population of the 1930s.
By degrees, as everyone knows, television, the Internet, and computer
games dethroned the movies as regular entertainment. By the 1980s, the
economics of the business became largely event-driven, with a
never-ending production of spectacle and animation that draws young
audiences away from their home screens on opening weekend. For years,
the tastes of young audiences have wielded an influence on what gets
made way out of proportion to their numbers in the population. We now
have a movie culture so bizarrely pulled out of shape that it makes one
wonder what kind of future movies will have.
Nostalgia is history altered through sentiment. What’s necessary for
survival is not nostalgia, but defiance. I’m made crazy by the way the
business structure of movies is now constricting the art of movies. I
don’t understand why more people are not made crazy by the same thing.
Perhaps their best hopes have been defeated; perhaps, if they are
journalists, they do not want to argue themselves out of a job; perhaps
they are too frightened of sounding like cranks to point out what is
obvious and have merely, with a suppressed sigh, accommodated themselves
to the strange thing that American movies have become. A successful
marketplace has a vast bullying force to enforce acquiescence.
EARLIER THIS YEAR,
The Avengers, which pulled together into one movie all the familiar
Marvel Comics characters
from earlier pictures—Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, and so
on—achieved 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. Let’s 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. That’s 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 higher—well over 6,000. The
gross receipts for the opening weekend were
$128 million.
Yet those were not the movie’s first revenues. As a way of discouraging
piracy and cheap street sale of the movie overseas, the movie’s
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. Let’s 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 followed—sale 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 Symantec’s 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 blockbusters—for 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 significance—for instance, Christopher Nolan’s 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 dreams—the 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?
You could say, I suppose, that the movie is about different levels of
representation, and then refine that observation and observe that the
differences between fiction and reality, between subjective and
objective, no longer exist—that what Nolan created is somehow analogous
to our life in a postmodernist society in which the image and the real,
the simulacrum and the original, have assumed, for many people, equal
weight. (The literary and media theorist Fredric Jameson has made such a
case for the movie.) You can say all of that, but you still haven’t
established why such an academic-spectacular exercise is worth looking
at as a work of narrative art, or why any of it matters emotionally.
Nolan’s movie was a whimsical, over-articulate nullity—a 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.
I DO NOT HATE all over-scaled digital work.
“God works too slowly,” said Ian McKellen in X-Men,
playing Magneto, who can produce mutations on the spot. So can digital
film-makers, who play God at will. Digital movie-making is the art of
transformation, and in the hands of a few imaginative people it has
produced sequences of great loveliness and shivery terror—the literally
mercurial reconstituted beings in
Terminator 2, the floating high-chic battles in
The Matrix. I loved the luscious purple beauty of
Avatar, but
Avatar is off the scale in visual allure, and so is Alfonso Cuarón’s
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the best of the Potter series.
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 another—a vague memory of having been
briefly excited rather than the enduring contentment of scenes playing
again and again in one’s 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 destiny—what
we used to call drama—from 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
time—a very short time—the fantastic, not the illusion of reality, may
become the default mode of cinema.
Yes, of course, the studios, with greater or lesser degrees of
enthusiasm, make other things besides spectacles—thrillers and horror
movies; chick flicks and teen romances; comedies with Adam Sandler, Will
Ferrell, Jennifer Aniston, Katherine Heigl, and Cameron Diaz;
burlesque-hangover debauches and their female equivalents; animated
pictures for families. All these movies have an assured audience (or one
at least mostly assured), and a few of them, especially the Pixar
animated movies, may be very good. The studios will also distribute an
interesting movie if their financing partners pay for most of it. And at
the end of the year, as the Oscars loom, they distribute unadventurous
but shrewdly written and played movies, such as
The Fighter, which are made entirely by someone else. Again and again these
serioso
films win honors, but for the most part, the studios, except as
distributors, don’t want to get involved in them. Why not? Because they
are “execution dependent”—that is, in order to succeed, they have to be
good. It has come to this: a movie studio can no longer risk making good
movies. Their business model depends on the assured audience and the
blockbuster. It has done so for years and will continue to do so for
years more. Nothing is going to stop the success of
The Avengers
from laying waste to the movies as an art form. The big revenues from
such pictures rarely get siphoned into more adventurous projects; they
get poured into the next sequel or a new franchise. Pretending otherwise
is sheer denial.
II.
ON APRIL 30, 2010, a week before
Iron Man 2 made its American debut, an independent film called
Please Give, written
and directed by Nicole Holofcener and starring Catherine Keener,
Rebecca Hall, and Oliver Platt, opened in five theaters in the United
States. The theatrical gross for the first weekend was $118,000.
Holofcener’s movie is a modest and formally conservative but sharply
perceptive comedy devoted to a group of neighbors in Manhattan—a
“relationship” film (in Hollywood jargon) arrayed around such matters as
the ambiguous moral quality of benevolence and the vexing but
inescapable necessity of family loyalty. Like a good short-story writer,
Holofcener has a precise and gentle touch; moments from the picture
have lingered in the affections of people who saw it. I’m not saying
that
Please Give is anything great—but look at how hard it had to struggle to make even the slightest impression in the marketplace.
Please Give cost $3 million,
and its worldwide theatrical gross was $4.3 million. Once the ancillary
markets are added in, the movie, on a small scale, will also be a
financial success. But, so far, no more than about 500,000 people have
seen it in theaters. Around 83 million have seen
Iron Man 2 in theaters. Maybe 175 million have seen
Transformers 3. At least 250 million people have seen
The Avengers.
Most of the great directors of the past—Griffith, Chaplin, Murnau,
Renoir, Lang, Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Welles, Rossellini, De Sica,
Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Bergman, the young Coppola, Scorsese, and Altman,
and many others—did not imagine that they were making films for a tiny
audience, and they did not imagine they were making “art” movies, even
though they worked with a high degree of conscious artistry. (The
truculent John Ford would have glared at you with his unpatched eye if
you used the word “art” in his presence.) They thought that they were
making films for everyone, or at least everyone with spirit, which is a
lot of people. But over the past twenty-five years, if you step back and
look at the American movie scene, you see the mass-culture juggernauts,
increasingly triumphs of heavy-duty digital craft, tempered by
self-mockery and filling up every available corner of public space; and
the tiny, morally inquiring “relationship” movies, making their modest
way to a limited audience. The ironic cinema, and the earnest cinema;
the mall cinema, and the art house cinema.
I can hear the retorts. If such inexpensive movies as
Please Give (or
Winter’s Bone, an even better movie, which also came out in 2010, or
Beasts of the Southern Wild)
still get made, and they have an appreciative audience, however small;
if directors such as Martin Scorsese and Steven Soderbergh and David O.
Russell and Kathryn Bigelow and Noah Baumbach and David Fincher and Wes
Anderson are doing interesting things within the system; if Terrence
Malick can make a lyrical masterpiece such as
The Tree of Life;
if the edges of the industry are soulfully alive even as the center is
mostly an algorithm for making money—if all of this is so, then why get
steamed over the
Iron Man or
Transformers franchises?
The reason is this: not everything a film artist wants to say can be
said with $3 million. Artists who want to work with, say, $30 million
(still a moderate amount of money by Hollywood standards) often have an
impossible time getting their movies made. At this writing, Paul Thomas
Anderson (
There Will Be Blood), one of the most talented men in Hollywood, has finished his Scientology movie,
The Master, but it took years of pleading to get the money to do it. (An heiress came to his rescue.) After making
Capote, Bennett Miller was idle for six years before making
Moneyball. Alexander Payne had to wait seven years (after
Sideways) before making
The Descendants. Alfonso Cuarón hasn’t brought out a movie since the brilliant
Children of Men in 2006. Guillermo del Toro, the gifted man who made
Pan’s Labyrinth,
is also having trouble getting money for his projects. By studio
standards, there isn’t a big enough audience for their movies: they can
work if they want to, but only on very small budgets. You cannot mourn
an unmade project, but you can feel its absence through the long
stretches of an inane season.
And why isn’t there a big enough audience for art? Consider that in
recent years the major studios have literally gamed the system. American
children—boys, at least—play video games, and read comic books and
graphic novels. Latching onto those tastes, Disney purchased Marvel
Comics for $4 billion, which gives it the right to make Marvel’s
superhero comic book characters into movies. Paramount has its own deal
with Marvel for the Captain America character and others. Time Warner
now owns DC Comics, and Warner Bros. will make an endless stream of
movies based on DC Comics characters (the Superman, Batman, and Green
Lantern pictures are just the beginning). For years, all the studios
have tried to adapt video games into movies, often with disastrous
results. So Warner Bros. went the logical next step: it bought a video
game company, which is developing new games that the studio will later
make into films.
“Give me the children until they are seven, and anyone may have them
afterwards,” Francis Xavier, one of the early Jesuits, is supposed to
have said. The studios grab boys when they are seven, eight, or nine,
command a corner of their hearts, and hold them with franchise sequels
and product tie-ins for fifteen years. The
Twilight series
of teen vampire movies, which deliciously sell sex without sex—romantic
danger without fornication—caught girls in the same way at a slightly
older age.
The Hunger Games
franchise will be with us for years. In brief, the studios are not
merely servicing the tastes of the young audience; they are also
continuously creating the audience to whom they want to sell. (They have
tied their fortunes to the birth rate.) Which raises an inevitable
question: will these constantly created new audiences, arising from
infancy with all their faculties intact but their expectations already
defined—these potential
moviegoers—will they ever develop a taste
for narrative, for character, for suspense, for acting, for irony, for
wit, for drama? Isn’t it possible that they will be so hooked on
sensation that anything without extreme action and fantasy will just
seem lifeless and dead to them?
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 Dunham’s 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 movies—by Paul
Thomas Anderson’s
There Will Be Blood, Julian Schnabel’s
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Malick’s
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 affair—a
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.
THESE OBSERVATIONS annoy many people, including some of the smartest
people I know, particularly men in their late forties and younger, who
have grown up with pop culture dominated by the conglomerates and don’t
know anything else. They don’t disagree, exactly, but they find all of
this tiresome and beside the point. They accept the movies as a kind of
environment, a constant stream. There are just movies, you see, movies
always and forever, and of course many of them will be uninspiring, and
always have been. Critics, chalking the score on the blackboard, think
of large-scale American movie-making as a system in which a few talented
people, in order to make something good, struggle against
discouragement or seduction; but for my young media-hip friends, this
view is pure melodrama. They see the movies not as a moral and aesthetic
battleground, but as a media game that can be played either shrewdly or
stupidly. There is no serious difference for them between making a
piece of clanging, overwrought, mock-nihilistic digital roughhouse for
$200 million and a personal independent film for $2 million. They are
not looking for art, and they do not want to be associated with
commercial failure; it irritates them in some way; it makes them feel
like losers. If I say that the huge budgets and profits are mucking up
movie aesthetics, changing the audience, burning away other movies, they
look at me with a slight smile and say something like this: “There’s a
market for this stuff. People are going. Their needs are being
satisfied. If they didn’t like these movies, they wouldn’t go.”
But who knows if needs are being satisfied? The audience goes because
the movies are there, not because anyone necessarily loves them. My
friends’ attitudes are defined so completely by the current movie market
that they do not wish to hear that movies, for the first eighty years
of their existence, were essentially made for adults. Sure, there were
always films for families and children, but, for the most part,
ten-year-olds and teens were dragged by their parents to what the
parents wanted to see, and this was true well after television reduced
the size of the adult audience. The kids saw, and half understood, a
satire such as
Dr. Strangelove, an earnest social drama such as
To Kill a Mockingbird, a cheesy disaster movie such as
Airport,
and that process of half understanding, half not, may have been part of
growing up; it also laid the soil for their own enjoyment of grown-up
movies years later. They were not expected to remain in a state of goofy
euphoria until they were thirty-five. My friends think that our current
situation is normal. They believe that critics are naïve blowhards, but
it is they who are naïve.
III.
THE LANGUAGE OF big-budget, market-driven movies—the elements of
shooting, editing, storytelling, and characterization—began
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 close—a 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 “magic”—a 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.
Seventy years ago, the look of a given studio’s films reflected the
ambitions and the fantasies of the men who ran it, as well as the film
genres they cultivated and the writers, directors, and craftsmen they
hired. But by the 1980s, as the studios became just one part—and not
always a very profitable part—of enormous conglomerates, the head of the
motionpicture division was mainly responsible for a revenue stream that
would please board members, share-holders, and stock analysts. Looking
around him, he saw divisions of his conglomerate that have a greater
profit ratio than his own—video games, for instance. Imitating these
commercially successful forms would not hurt him among the people he
needs to please. Under such a pressure, style quickly fades away. Apart
from some of the animated work, it is impossible now to tell the films
of one studio from another. All the studios are ruled by what I would
call conglomerate aesthetics.
The phrase falls uneasily on the ear, so I had better say that I
don’t mean to pile into the tumbrels every large movie recently made by
conglomerates. I realize as well that “conglomerate aesthetics” has a
cranky sub-Marxist ring to it, the sound of an assistant professor
warming the prejudices of an academic conference. Naïveté is a poor
excuse for false moralism, both for me and for the professor, and so I
should immediately add that we both know that Hollywood has almost
always been a big-money game, that money is the lifeblood of large-scale
picture-making. (David Thomson’s book
The Whole Equation,
which appeared in 2004, provides a fascinating account of the relations
of art and money at different times in Hollywood history.) Yet the
desire to be profitable does not dictate, in itself, one style or
another. The dreadfulness of many big movies now cannot be waved away on
the grounds that the studios have to make them that way. They don’t
have to make them that way; they just think they do. They
choose this style.
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 Luhrmann’s musical
Moulin Rouge,
with its characters openly borrowed from other movies, its songs
composed of many other songs—music 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 defined—even a strong personality. (Angelina Jolie wasn’t
required to be a person in the Lara Croft movies—she got by on pure
attitude. Ewan McGregor in
The Phantom Menace
didn’t even have attitude.) The only genuine protagonist in big movies
in that period was Russell Crowe’s Jeffrey Wigand in Michael Mann’s
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,
absent—or 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 collage—these 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 material—to 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 Bay’s
Pearl Harbor.
Forget Ben Affleck’s 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. Here’s 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 admiral’s 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 men’s skin
burned off. Intentionally or not, the spotless dress whites worn by the
officers become an excruciating symbol of the Navy’s complacency before
the attack. The whole meaning of Bay’s 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 doesn’t 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.
Of course, no one who has ever enjoyed a mindless hyper-charged movie
could say that a little meaningless movement destroyed his day or
ruined him for art. Everyone loves being worked over now and then, and
speed in itself is not the enemy. Like many moviegoers, I was dazzled by
the craft of Paul Greengrass (and cinematographer Oliver Wood) in
The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and
The Bourne Ultimatum
(2007). Greengrass’s method in those thrillers, in which Matt Damon is
pursued through damp, hostile Berlin or Moscow, is to shoot action in
tiny fragments—a face glimpsed across the street, a car whizzing by—and
then pull the fragments together into a coherent impression of rapid
movement. Even the bruising, endless car-chase in
The Bourne Supremacy was so well done that one didn’t feel cheated. We can accept that car chases are going to be over-cut for sheer excitement.
The problem is that too many ordinary scenes in many big movies are
cut like car chases. One of the tendencies of conglomerate aesthetics is
to replace action and drama as much as possible with mere movement.
Conglomerate aesthetics requires a dozen trash epiphanies (explosions,
transformations, rebirths) rather than the arc of a single pure visual
climax; mass slaughter rather than a single death. The job of luring the
big audience to the Friday opening—the linchpin of the commercial
system—has destroyed action on the screen by making it carry the entire
burden of the movie’s pleasure. In Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies,
The Dark Knight and
The Dark Knight Rises,
sensation has been carried to the point of a brazenly beautiful
nihilism, in which a modishly “dark” atmosphere of dread and disaster
overwhelms any kind of plot logic or sequence or character interest. You
leave the theater vibrating, but a day later you don’t feel a thing.
The audience has been conditioned to find the absence of emotion
pleasurable.
IV.
TO UNDERSTAND what is so strange about big movies now, you have to
remember a little of what movies once were and what audiences once
wanted from them—how stories were told in different periods, how movies
were put together. We are now trapped by an exasperating irony:
employing all the devastating means at their command, movies have in
some ways gone back to their crudest beginnings and are determined,
perhaps, to stay there forever, or at least as long as the box-office
and ancillary-market mother lode holds out.
A long time ago, at a university far away, I taught film, and I did
what many teachers have no doubt done before and since: I tried to
develop film aesthetics for the students as a historical progression
toward narrative. After all, many of the first movies in the 1890s were
not stories at all, but just views of things—a train coming into a
station, a wave breaking toward the camera. These visual astonishments
caused the audience to stare open-mouthed or duck under the seats for
cover (or so the legend says, preserved recently in Scorsese’s
Hugo).
I wanted my students to be astonished, too—to enjoy the development of
film technique as a triumph of artistic and technical consciousness. I
worked in straight chronological order, moving from those early “views”
through Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 experiments in linear sequencing in films
such as
Life of an American Fireman and
The Great Train Robbery
and then on through D.W. Griffith’s consolidation a few years later of
an actual syntax—long and medium shots, close-ups, flashbacks, parallel
editing, and the like.
But I now think there was something merely convenient in teaching
that way. The implication of my lesson plan was that the medium had by
degrees come to a realization of itself, discovering in those early
years—say, 1895 to 1915—its own true nature embedded within its
technology: the leafy oak of narrative lodged within the acorn of
celluloid. It is a teleological view, and it is probably false. In
truth, there is nothing inherent in the process of exposing strips of
film to light sixteen or eighteen times a second (later twenty-four
times) that demanded the telling of a story.
At the beginning, after the views of trains and oceans, movies
offered burlesque skits or excerpts from theatrical events, but still no
stories. A completed movie was often just a single, fixed, long-lasting
shot. It is likely, as David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin
Thompson explained in
The Classical Hollywood Cinema,
that narrative emerged less from the inherent nature of film than from
the influence of older forms—novels and short stories and plays. And
also from pressure to create work of greater power to attract more and
more customers.
If creating fictions is not encoded in the DNA of film, then what is
happening now has a kind of grisly logic to it. As the narrative and
dramatic powers of movies fall into abeyance, and many big movies turn
into sheer spectacle, with only a notional pass at plot or
characterization, we are returning with much greater power to capers and
larks that were originally performed in innocence. The kind of
primitive chase, for instance, that in 1905 depended on some sort of
accident or mischief rather than on character or plot has been succeeded
by the endless up-in-the-air digital fight. The 1905 scene has a
harum-scarum looseness and wit; the destructive action scenes in movies
now are brought off with a kind of grim, faceless glee, an exultation in
power and mass: We can do it, therefore we will do it, and our ability
to do it is the meaning of it, and even if you’re not impressed, it is
still going to roll over you.
Neo-primitivism is one of the great strategies of modern art—Picasso
and his African masks; Bartók re-fashioning folk materials in his
advanced music; Chuck Berry drawing on “hillbilly” rhythms for his own
super-charged songs. Neo-primitivism cleared away the mush of Viennese
or Edwardian sentiment, the perfume and pallor of Paris salon art, the
Brill Building softness of early-1960s rock. In movies, a great deal of
mush has also been cleared away (the tyranny of niceness that ruined so
many family movies in the 1940s; the physical, verbal, and sexual
coyness of the 1950s). But the continuous motion of crass conglomerate
product aimed at the young has removed much else as well, such as the
mysteries of personality, sophisticated dialogue, any kind of elegant or
smart life, and, frequently, a woman’s emotions (think of Bette Davis,
Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford) as the center of a movie. The studios
have been devoted to the systematic de-culturation of movies, and the
casting away of all manner of dramatic cunning laboriously built up over
decades.
SPARKED, PERHAPS, by the absence of sound, film-makers developed the
visual possibilities of film very quickly, and by the end of World War I
the vocabulary of editing and the overall strategy of Hollywood
movie-making was set. Celluloid may not have carried storytelling in its
genes, but, as David Bordwell puts it, “telling a story is the basic
formal concern which makes the film studio resemble the monastery’s
scriptorium, the site of the transcription and transmission of countless
narratives.” In the scriptorium, an unspoken vow was repeated daily:
audiences need to get emotionally involved in a story in order to enjoy
themselves. The idea is so obvious that it seems absurd to spell it out.
Yet in recent years this assumption, and everything that follows from
it, have begun to weaken and even to disappear.
It is shocking to be reminded of some of the things that are now
slipping away: that whatever is introduced in a tale has to mean
something, and that one thing should inevitably lead to another; that
events are foreshadowed and then echoed, and that tension rises steadily
through a series of minor climaxes to a final, grand climax; that music
should be created not just as an enforcer of mood but as the outward
sign of an emotional or narrative logic; that characterization should be
consistent; that a character’s destiny is supposed to have some moral
and spiritual meaning—the wicked punished, the virtuous rewarded or at
least sanctified. It was a fictional world of total accountability.
For decades, the rules of the scriptorium signified “Hollywood” in
both the contemptuous sense and the honorific sense—a system dismissed
by the humorless and pleasureless as “bourgeois cinema,” but also
enjoyed around the world by millions and praised in majestic terms by
critics, most notably André Bazin. Looking back to the late 1930s from a
dozen or so years later, and passing judgment on precisely such
conventions, Bazin announced that “in seeing again today such films as
Jezebel by William Wyler,
Stagecoach by John Ford, or
Le jour se lève
by Marcel Carné, one has the feeling that in them an art has found its
perfect balance, its ideal form of expression, and reciprocally one
admires them for dramatic and moral themes to which the cinema, while it
may not have created them, has given a grandeur, an artistic
effectiveness, that they would not otherwise have had. In short, here
are all the characteristics of the ripeness of a classical art.”
The ripeness of a classical art. The words are stirring, but at this point almost embarrassing. What on Earth did Bazin mean? Never mind
Le jour se lève,
which is impossible to understand without evoking French literary and
philosophical traditions. What about the American films Bazin mentions?
What’s in these movies? What satisfactions did they offer? And is it
mere weak-souled nostalgia that makes one long for their equivalent now?
In
Jezebel, from 1938, everything revolves around a central
character of extraordinary perversity. Julie Marsden, played by Bette
Davis, is a rich belle in pre-Civil War New Orleans. Her situation is
paradoxical: she exercises the largest possible freedom within the
confines of a social tradition that allows women no other career than
that of a coquette. Taut and over-defined emotionally—she demands
categorical approval or rejection—Julie values the predominance of her
own will more than love, more than society, more than anything. In other
words, she is admirable, dislikable, and crazy. She torments her
high-minded beau (Henry Fonda) and wears a scarlet dress to a society
ball at which unmarried women have traditionally worn white, knowing
full well that the act must compromise her fiancé and destroy her own
social position.
Around this central incident—which at first seems trivial, and then
more and more momentous—a portrait of antebellum Southern society as
both noble and savagely inadequate unfolds with surprising power. Yet
Davis’s will-driven Julie dominates the movie. All the other characters
lean toward her or shy away from her; they fuss before her arrivals and
flutter after her departures. William Wyler is often said to have used
an “invisible” technique, which means, in this case, that the camera
glides, dollies, cranes, goes wherever it has to go, leading the eye
from one shot to the next in an unbroken continuity that illuminates a
story that is essentially psychological and social. The style is
dedicated to the defining moment: the upturned face, the instant of
self-definition, the rapid concentrics of astonishment and scandal
spreading through a room as a young woman enters and gazes around
herself in defiance. All the physical details are tightly arrayed around
the outrageous, mesmerizing central figure.
In
Jezebel, a rigidly structured society is falling into decay. In Bazin’s other choice,
Stagecoach,
a new society is taking shape—the West as caravan of American
democracy. The movie is perhaps the most popular and well-known Western
ever made, and yet seeing it again one is struck by how fresh it is—how
very funny and sharply edged, how bracingly decisive and swift. An
entire fluid American world is moving West: a high-type Virginia lady, a
fallen Southern gentleman, an alcoholic doctor, a hypocritical banker, a
good-hearted prostitute—all these people plus an ineffably relaxed
young male beauty, John Wayne. They all go to Lordsburg, but they also
move into their future. In
Stagecoach, it is not so much a matter
of a dominating individual as of an evolving group. All through the
trip, the writer, Dudley Nichols, and the director, John Ford, make it
clear what each of these highly wrought people thinks of the others. By
degrees, they all come to understand that the alcoholic doctor is
something more than an irresponsible lush, that the Southern gambler and
murderer is suffused with self-disgust and has some genuine tenderness
in him, and so on. Apart from all the fun and excitement it generates,
Stagecoach is a drama of perception.
It is also a drama of space. What audiences feel about characters on
the screen is probably affected more than most of us realize by the way
the space surrounding the people is carved up and re-combined. In John
Ford, the geographical sense is very strong—the poetic awareness of sky
and landscape and moving horses, but also the attention to such things
as how people are arrayed at a long table as an indication of social
caste (the prostitute at one end, the fine lady at the other). The best
use of space is not just an effective disposition of activity on the
screen, it is the emotional meaning of activity on the screen.
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 viewer’s head—so that, in
Jezebel, one felt
physically what Bette Davis suffered as scandalized couples backed away
from her in the ballroom. If the audience didn’t experience that
emotion, the movie wouldn’t 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 did—matching body movement from one shot to the next—is
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
unsatisfied—cheated without knowing why—then part of the reason is that
the terrain hasn’t 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.
A dominating individual, a dynamically evolving group—the classical
American cinema was always centered in character one way or another. It
was an ideal, but hardly the only ideal, and I am certainly not
suggesting a return to 1939. Most movies in those years, of course, were
nowhere near as good as
Jezebel and
Stagecoach, and at their worst Hollywood movies in the classical period were draped in the molasses of sentiment and reassurance.
After the war, it was time to pull off the drapes. Bazin and also
James Agee loved the Italian Neo-Realists of the 1940s and 1950s, who
produced a plainer image and a harsher moral tone than Hollywood ever
did; and if Bazin had lived past 1958, when Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol,
Rivette, and the others were just getting started, he would have loved
the flowing, open rhythms and off-hand literary flavor of the New Wave.
In America, television and other media entered the arena, luring viewers
away, and the old tropes got stretched or broken into new shapes. To
name just a few of the famous ones: the point-of-view camera and shock
cutting of Hitchcock; the expressionist lighting and radio-studio echo
chambers of Orson Welles; the dynamic architecture of widescreen
composition in David Lean; the breathtaking and deeply moving tracking
shots of Max Ophüls; Stanley Kubrick’s cold, discordant tableaux; the
savagery, both humane and inhumane, of Akira Kurosawa and Sam Peckinpah;
the crowded operatic realism of Coppola in the first two
Godfather
movies; the layered, richly allusive dialogue and sour-mash melancholy
of Robert Altman; Steven Spielberg’s visually eccentric manipulation of
pop archetypes; Quentin Tarantino’s discontinuous time scheme in
Pulp Fiction;
and many, many others. Sometimes directors subtracted conventional
elements from the old syntax; sometimes they overloaded the medium,
refusing an obvious emotional pay-off while reaching a purer, more
intense emotion through the exaggeration of a single element in
filmmaking—say, the sustained, lens-scarring monologues of Ingmar
Bergman, which reveal the soul of a performer so powerfully that it
exposes the soul of the viewer (to himself) as well.
Audiences were no longer enveloped by movies in the same comforting
way; sometimes even mainstream commercial movies affronted or even
assaulted us. On the whole, this felt good. To be exposed to ugliness
and horror, to be disturbed rather than cosseted, overburdened rather
than babied, never hurt a moviegoer yet, and it made many of us happy
not to have everything prepared and cushioned for us. Abruptness in the
form of, say, the jump cuts in
Breathless or the breaks in continuity in
Annie Hall
and dozens of other movies inject little spurts of energy into a scene.
In such instances, we were not bothered by discontinuities from shot to
shot—not when the sequences worked well within an exciting overall
conception the continuity of which may have been intellectual and
emotional rather than physical. After the war, modernist film-makers
also found it impossible to believe in a coherent moral world, and their
narratives no longer meted out punishments and rewards in the old
Burbank-bookkeeper’s manner. Moral realism felt closer to the way we
viewed our own lives, in which we are rarely heroes and few confident or
outraged expectations ever meet their longed-for fulfillment in
justice.
The glory of modernism was that it yoked together candor and
spiritual yearning with radical experiments in form. But in making such
changes, filmmakers were hardly abandoning the audience. Reassurance may
have ended, but emotion did not. The many alterations in the old stable
syntax still honored the contract with us. The ignorant, suffering,
morally vacant Jake LaMotta in
Raging Bull was as great a protagonist as Julie Marsden. The morose
Nashville was as trenchant a group portrait and national snapshot as the hopeful
Stagecoach. However elliptical or harsh or astringent, emotion in modernist movies was a strong presence, not an absence.
THE STRUCTURE OF the movie business—the shaping of production
decisions by marketing—has kicked bloody hell out of the language of
film. But the business framework is not operating alone. Film, a
photographic and digital medium, is perhaps more vulnerable than any of
the other arts to the post-modernist habits of recycling and quotation.
Imitation, pastiche, and collage have become dominant strategies, and
there is an excruciating paradox in this development: two of the
sprightly media forms derived from movies—commercials and music
videos—began to dominate movies. The art experienced a case of
blowback.
As everyone knows, we can read an image much more quickly than anyone
thought possible forty years ago, and in recent years many commercials
have been cut faster and faster. The film-makers know that we are not so
much receiving information as getting a visual impression, a mood, a
desire. A truly hip commercial has no obvious connection to the product
being sold, though selling is still its job. What, then, is being sold
at a big movie that is cut the same way? The experience of going to the
movie itself, the sensation of being rushed, dizzied, overwhelmed by the
images. Michael Bay wasn’t interested in what happened at Pearl Harbor.
He was interested in his whizzing fantasia of the event. Nothing
important happens in
The Avengers. As in half of these big
movies, the world is about to end because of some invading force; but
the world is always about to end in digital spectacles, and when
everything is at stake, nothing is at stake. The larger the movie, the
more “content” becomes incidental, even disposable.
In 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 doesn’t 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
digitally—adding 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 don’t 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.
David Denby is a film critic for The New Yorker
and the author of Do the Movies Have a Future?
(Simon & Schuster). This article appeared in the October 4, 2012 issue of the magazine.
Posts
