Hollywood's Identity Crisis: Why No Oscars Preview

I decided against doing my Oscars review this year and going forward. This may come as a surprise, as who more than me longed to see the Weinstein empire of lechery receive its overdue comeuppance?

One reason is the market: it’s ruined movies. Almost everything big is calibrated for a global market which means it has to be big, translatable, and cowed by Chinese censorship. As a result, most of Hollywood’s talent labors year round making Marvel films. And they’re all very good and entertaining. But I didn’t buy comic books growing up, let alone collect them all, and I find it difficult to do the same as a grown man with movies.

Those are the winners. The bigger problem is that film is behind its streaming competitors and charging more for it:

• Streaming has unleashed a river of mediocrity churning out all-but straight-to-digital duds.
•  TV has washed away the pool of potential screen writers – anyone talented with the pen flows inevitably to the job stability that TV offers and the greater artistic freedom – longer narrative arcs, more dialogue.
• Podcasts flood the political entertainment sphere, ripping straight from the headlines and surging to mini-documentary at a speed films cannot match.
• What’s left to film then is power fantasy and visual spectacle. In this, video games have movies swamped. Games lure the best visual artists, forced as they are to stand out with unique visual styles that put to shame film’s relatively monotone special effects realism. As for power fantasy, why watch Keanu Reeves labor through 90 minutes of John Wick 2 stunts when you can control the action, the fantasy, the narrative choices, or even create whole new Minecraft worlds?

As a value proposition, a movie is the most expensive dollar to minute digital entertainment, easily more expensive than everything from a podcast on the Olympic Games to Game of Thrones. And yet despite being the luxury priced good, in no category of what makes digital entertainment entertaining do films lead the market. This is a description of an industry verging on collapse.

What then do the movies have to say, beyond driving people to serial comic books and space operas? We live in an era defined by two things: technology and identity. 

Technology’s dominance opens broad vistas for science fiction, yet all we receive as an audience is dystopian twilight. I call this the Black Mirror phenomenon: an endless string of clever reasons why the technology we love has a dark future. Perhaps this well reflects the vertigo of our time, as the pace of change exceeds the pace of our ability to adapt it and assimilate new tech. Still, is it impossible to imagine a brighter future as a result of technology? That perhaps by laying out such a vision in art, we could all be inspired to achieve it?

The deeper problem with sci-fi as a dominant genre remains that it has to say something about human nature in the presence of calling that nature into question. AI consciousness challenges our humanity, social media alters our behavior – this is what sci-fi wants to talk about. It can tickle our brains a bit but rarely our hearts. Our heart craves a ray of light that illuminates our timeless humanity, a guitar chord struck of ineffable truth, to put our fingers to the face of the eternal, to savor the milk and honey of divine mystery. How can sci-fi do that when in must cast a shadow on our humanity, give voice to questions about the ineffable, make tangible the eternal as merely the past, and deglaze the divine into the chemistry in our brains?

And so instead we are told to appreciate Oscar nominated films that squat squarely in the mundane. Technology has paused the suffering that supports great narrative events, even as perhaps it plots against us. It is time then, Hollywood tells us, to investigate the exurban soul, to house art in a narrative cul-de-sac of trite lives and small ideas. In the absence of a steady expository income from events or ideas, cinema has only one thing left to pay the mortgage for its artistic past: identity.

In identity as art, we are all the products of our surroundings, agents of circumstance, defined by the voice given us at birth. This caste-based world-view instructs us that no story is so valuable, no character arc so important, as the speaker who tells it. Everything rests on the preamble, the defining throatclearing in which we introduce each topic, “As an *insert identity*, I think…” and from this the worthiness of the statement cum film may be judged. What follows from identity is experience, another life’s name signed onto the plaster of the caste. In terms of narrative structure, there is only setting. The character arc, inciting event, and adversary are all trappings of the setting that inherited identity or pathology has chosen. We have tacked onto the start of each film the phrase, “Here I am, I can be no other,” a self-fulfilling birthright.

It’s not that there isn’t tremendous value to be derived from telling the stories of people who haven’t had their stories told before, or to retell old tales by beginning with a new, “As an *identity*” in the place of “Once upon a time.” It’s just that the effort is derivative and boring. I want to hear a new story, not a the same one in a new costume. I want inspiration from movies about people who drive the action, not those who experience it. I want characters whose life speaks to a common truth, not a personal one. In other words, I don’t want to pretend that Get Out was turgid social commentary when it’s just a few hours of flaccid satire. But here we are, an objection anticipated: as a straight white male, we have to discuss first whether my opinion has any validity beyond my identity.

The British have dealt with this turn of events by focusing exclusively on period drama, which is why Dunkirk and The Darkest Hour are the best nominated films, (with Victoria & Abdul misfiring Dame Judy Dench at trying to bridge the gap between royal fan service and a growing British Muslim population. P.S. I've always thought it amusing to ponder all of the modern Dames/Knights being gathered for a grail quest. And in a way, that’s what these movies are: the service that a knight or dame now owes is to protect the public image of the crown from the dust bin of history in which it belongs.) It’s a pity that they have nothing to say about anything since World War 2, a truth applicable beyond the limits of cinema.

Surveil the nominees and tell me I’m wrong.  I’m as interested in gazing at your navel as you are at mine. I’d much rather stare intently at the ideas we’re not sharing while we loudly state who we all are. My deeper fear is that we no longer generate ideas; that the triumph of subjectivity and identity is to make us all intellectual tourists rather than thinkers.

Here instead is are a few movies I bothered to take notes on. 

WATCH:

-          A Dog’s Purpose – Or as I call it, “Doggie Holocaust.” You know how in movies they kill the dog and you cry? Well in this movie, they keep killing the dog over and over again. I watched in sheer horror that at any second, a dog might die. They literally kill a puppy in the first 90 seconds. And they send children home wandering America looking for their dead dog. This is absolute torture. I loved it.

-          All Saints - Never was there a more welcome "based on a true story." 

-          The Big Sick – The year’s only-acceptable-romantic comedy. It steals its engaging female lead for too long when she is the highlight. Like all Apatow films, it needs to be edited, as his ad-lib style provides a note of realism that is flabby and indulgent. 

-          The Darkest Hour – “You don’t negotiate with a tiger when your head is in its mouth!”  

-          Dunkirk – Criticized for glorifying British heroism in retreat by the French and Russians, in fact, it does neither. The movie is constantly subverting heroism, rewarding its runaways, castigating those who show bravery, lionizing those who did little, putting Churchill in the words of the film’s least worthy survivor. The idea isn’t so much to say that there is no heroism as to underscore that bravery is in the conscious decisions that are made – to join the fight whatever the cost.

-          The Hitman’s Bodyguard – The Year’s Most Eminently Watchable Action Movie.

-          Icarus – Hitchcockian on accident, the documentary that starts out as sporting “I dare me” and turns into an international thriller. Ignore the terrible title, other than Hoop Dreams, this is one of the greatest documentaries ever.

-          Kingsman: The Golden Circle – It’s got all the right moves. Still, the Whig in me is starting to rebel, as it doubles down on the absurd royalist tendencies, throwing in Kentucky colonels as the American doppleganger of the Kingsmen, and simultaneously embracing Scandinavian aristocracy. The bad guys are corporate America, as always, to include POTUS, greedy cowboys, and the 50’s, highlighted by evil Julianne Moore in a great role. And robot dogs… Such is the writ of an unaccountable rogue intelligence agency with a license to kill with impunity – no one seems to have any complaints about the absurd plot holes. The interesting note is that Kingsman belongs to the same universe as the American egalitarian hero series Kick-Ass. What a joy it would be to see the Kick-Ass kids take some starch out of all these stuffed shirts.

-          Last Men in Aleppo – Couldn’t make it more than 10 minutes in. Still the most memorable 10 minutes I saw this year.

-          The Salesman – One of the few literary films released this year, courtesy of an Iranian director/writer. A glimpse of what art is, or at least once was, before we politicized everything.

-          Shin Godzilla – A bruising indictment of Japanese officialdom. After Fukushima, a new Japanese Godzilla was needed, and this was the perfect response.

-          Star Wars: The Last Jedi – It’s feminism killing off the male savior myth, it’s a really slow car chase, it’s a bit ripped from the headlines. I’m into the Kylo/Rey plotline, if not the rest. Also, it made fun of the previous episode, a lot, which I appreciated. No better antidote to fan service than to unapologetically defecate all over your fans and see how they like it. As I’m not a Star Wars fan, I at least enjoyed the fireworks, both in the theater and online.

REALLY DON’T WATCH BUT MAYBE WATCH:
mother! – Things I hate all wrapped into one: art about art, an extended metaphor that does not work as narrative, an artsy director who has been given free reign and no editor, Jennifer Lawrence’s ongoing attempt to live up to her inflated reputation. Michelle Pfeiffer is the only worthwhile thing here. And yet…I thought about the movie and what it meant. And it’s chock full of ideas. Big biblical bullshit ideas.  This is what I’m reduced to: sort of recommending a movie I hated because it had the courage to think. But really do not watch this movie. 

DO NOT WATCH:

-          All Eyez On Me – Tupac is the most interesting rapper in the same way that Malcolm is more interesting than Dr. King. What a cruel feat that he gets the least interesting rapper movie.

-          Atomic Blonde –This is the Berlin Wall falling movie we get? Honestly? Are there still that many Stalinists in Hollywood that we have to undermine this event by countering a dominant narrative that Hollywood’s never bothered to recount?

-          The Great Wall – Everyone got mad about casting Matt Damon as an Asian guy. Nobody got mad that this movie is a Chinese-supremacist nightmare – unapologetically imperialist and xenophobic, (in the bitterest irony, adding a few extra evil white guys in China to steal their technology and take it back to the West). It was critically panned in China, but a huge financial success, because xenophobic imperialism is unworthy of Chinese culture, but very much what its laymen are being readied for by their government. In order to align the domestic cosmos, Chinese review aggregators were ordered to remove their unfavorable reviews by an increasingly unapologetic Chinese panopticon.

-          Karl Marx City – The Banality of Evil. As boring and poignant as you’d expect an East German prison town to be. At one point, a Stasi expert ruins the film The Lives of Others by emphasizing that there is no known case of anyone helping a subject of surveillance. The message of the Iron Curtain: There were no heroes. Only victims.

-          The Mummy – I’m assuming Tom Cruise did this as a favor to Scientology. Otherwise, the comparison to the aging if timeless Mr. Cruise is uncomfortable.

-          Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell no Tales – As a comic book franchise that stopped making sense as soon as a sequel landed, it has become both impossible to understand what is going on and yet charmingly simple to track – almost the entirety of the dialogue in the second half of the movie here was clearly dubbed in afterwards to try to help the viewer figure out the plot.

-          Rough Night – In the effort to remake every Hollywood trope with a female cast, the one thing that wasn’t going to work was to have a man write a male raunchy comedy a la The Hangover but try to turn all of the gender roles on their heads. Women already wrote a version of The Hangover, it was called The Bridesmaids, and it was better than the Hangover. 

-          Tulip Fever – One of the worst movies ever, all the moreso in light of the scandal that consumed Hollywood at long last. This is what the Weinstein revelation does to us – the leads, Mr. DeHaas and Ms. Vikander, have been made the stars of a series of Weinstein Co. releases despite no remarkable talents. This putrid stinkpot sat in editing for 3 years but still got a full feature release courtesy of Mr. Weinstein. Neither of these actors belong, and yet here we are, with at least 2 Academy Award winners humoring them in dialogue so bad, George Lucas was called in as script doctor and threw his hands up in disgust. Why? Now, forever after, we are left to wonder just what Mr. Weinstein’s casting process was.