1. Why do I feel so ‘eh’ about contemporary cinema?
Listening to this interview with former NY Times film critic AO Scott has connected a few dots for me. I’ve long had a bunch of random thoughts about the state of movies and books, and the arts more broadly, but I could never quite arrange them into a coherent thesis. Truth is, I still can’t. But hearing Scott talk about why he is leaving film criticism has at least helped to place those thoughts into context.
The key takeaway: criticism, or at least the kind of criticism that Scott wants to do, may no longer have a place, certainly not the place of prominence it once held. This observation may not be all that interesting or important. But it does reflect larger trends in movies and in the arts more broadly. Those larger trends, I think, are important.
If you haven’t already, I suggest you listen to the interview or read the transcript. Scott gives an account of how he fell in love with cinema and subsequently fell out of love with the present-day film industry. To this, I can relate. Yes, some of this is just “old man yelling at cloud”. I can admit as much. But listen, sometimes the clouds need a good talking-to.
Let’s get the old man part out of the way. With a few exceptions, I feel disconnected from contemporary cinema. Less so with music and books and the visual arts, but the same feelings of apathy and disappointment pop up in a lesser form. Some of it is age. Art hits the young hard and fast. I’ll never feel what I felt hearing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for the first time. Such feelings of immediacy and physical elation dampen with age. If we are lucky, wisdom and understanding fill the void.
The movies I grew up watching in the 1980s were not exactly masterpieces, not most of them. So, why I can take Arnold Schwarzenegger seriously as a time-traveling cyborg, but I scoff at Marvel movies. Some of this is subjective, the equivalent of liking your grandmother’s recipes. However, some of it isn’t. While often objectively worse than contemporary movies, older movies tend to have stakes, which is becoming increasingly rare.
In recalling his love for cinema, Scott speaks of being unsettled by films. I can relate. Consider The Karate Kid movies. It is immediately apparent how much better the fight choreography is in the 2010 remake than in the original 1984 film. The original is cheesy, and the martial arts is wooden and clunky, while the remake is… well, it’s a Jackie Chan film. And yet, the original Karate Kid captures the crisis of confidence that is being bullied. The remake may be more visually interesting, but the stakes are so much lower.1
So, what is it about contemporary film making that obliterates stakes?
In my post on satire, I put forth the idea that great satire has to entail the risk of being misunderstood. Across the board, we have become more risk averse, taking its toll on our ability to make good art. When there are stakes, the viewer feels implicated. Hence, that unsettled feeling. Such feelings are inimical to the incentives of the contemporary film industry, which is to work IP and generate as many complementary streams of income as possible (sequels, tie-ins, re-boots, TV spin-offs, toys, happy meals, etc.).
When the goal is to make a successful movie, you can risk making the viewer feel a little uncomfortable. They’ve already paid for their ticket. The worst they can do is tell others how much they disliked the film, which contributes to buzz. In that sense, disquieting your audience may be a feature and not a bug. When a movie is about minting new fans of the IP, the incentive is to become much more conservative with your audience’s feelings.
Let’s talk a bit more about that audience.
2. And then there’s fandom…
“But I’m not a fan of modern fandom. … the behavior of these social media hordes represents an anti-democratic, anti-intellectual mind-set that is harmful to the cause of art and antithetical to the spirit of movies. Fan culture is rooted in conformity, obedience, group identity and mob behavior, and its rise mirrors and models the spread of intolerant, authoritarian, aggressive tendencies in our politics and our communal life."
So says Scott in the interview. Is he right?
There’s a long history of cultural critics likening things to fascism or socialism, whatever their ideological bugaboo happens to be. Some skepticism is in order. It is the NY Times after all. Times employees probably get a $10 voucher for the cafeteria every time they call something “anti-democratic.” And yet, Scott has a point.
Martin Scorsese famously said that Marvel movies are not cinema, at least not the cinema that he grew to love. I agree, and unfortunately, it’s not just Marvel movies or superhero movies. Take a movie like Nope, which was generally loved by critics and movie buffs, but which was very ‘eh’ for me. What I don’t like about Nope is how much time it spends contemplating things outside of the movie. It’s a movie full of overt symbols meant to have us thinking about this or that idea. It breaks the spell for me.2
Scorsese and Scott, and I guess me, are all getting at the same thing. Going to the cinema used to be a transportive experience. What happens now is… something different. Contemporary moves are technically proficient. They can make you feel sad when they want you to feel sad and excited when it’s time to feel excited. But, at least for me, those feelings are external. They’re outside of myself, to be turned over and examined and catalogued and then set back in their place. It’s “oh, I get it. Now I’m supposed to feel sad,” or, “OK. That trauma is the source of this character trait.”
We live in the era of filmmaking as exposition.
Let’s take a detour and consider the history of the movie business. Filmmaking grew from the stage. Early films took their narrative style from theater and vaudeville. The development of sound ushered in a new set of standards and practices developed specifically for film. All of that new filmmaking infrastructure had to be mastered and maintained and deployed, so we got Hollywood studios and the studio system and the Golden Age of Hollywood.
The decline of the Golden Age began with suburbanization and the emergence of television in post-WWII America. At the same time, anti-trust actions broke the power of the studios. From those trends grew New Hollywood, which saw the decline of the studio system and the rise of the director as the primary creative force in filmmaking. This was the era of director as auteur.
We’ve entered a new phase in cinema. It’s not that directors no longer matter, but they may matter less, or rather, they matter in a different way. There is some set of technical prowess and managerial skill it takes to make a successful Marvel movie. But these movies are decidedly not the personal expression of their directors. They are corporate products/brand expressions. But as much as I’d like to lay all the blame at the feet of the movie business itself, much of this is our own fault.
To be a fan of auteur cinema is to put yourself in the hands of the filmmaker and allow her to take you where she will. In this new era, fans have simply become more assertive about where they want to go. They’re often looking for a specific experience and will reward or punish a film based on how well it delivers that experience. That’s the audience for whom most movies are being made.
3. As goes criticism, so goes the thing being critiques.
Under the auteur system, the filmmakers were the undisputed ruling class, but critics became a kind of clergy, their role to anoint and legitimize the rulers. The critics’ role as gatekeeper was maintained by their ability to understand what was happening on the screen and explain to the audience why it was important. These skills become less important, as subtext becomes text and movies are about everything but what’s happening on the screen.
With the death of auteurs comes the death of criticism, or at least a certain kind of criticism. Samuel L. Jackson is right. Marvel movies don’t need Scott’s kind of criticism. As Scorsese put it, they’re akin to amusement park rides. You can talk about whether you enjoyed the ride or didn’t. You can suggest how this turn should have been sharper or that run a bit faster. But there’s nothing there to truly critique. Critics like Scott have to go, not so much because they piss off fans, but because they act as if fans don’t matter.
The critics role is becoming some combination of public relations flack, fan cypher, and tour guide through the cinematic universe. No, not all criticism has become mindless boosterism. There is plenty of negative criticism. But even when contemporary criticism isn’t performing explicit fan service, it tends to be working within its constraints. Scott could have pulled a heel turn. But I completely understand why he wouldn’t. In some ways that would be worse than quitting film.
I’m trying not to be overly romantic here. Moviemaking has always been a business. And studio executives have always had their head up their own asses. But at some point, the way to make the most money was to put butts in theater seats. That’s just not the case anymore. The money is coming from all of those auxiliary streams of income.
The changes in criticism reflect the changes in the industry. The truly concerning part is these same trends are impacting the cultural industries more broadly. Take book publishing, wherein the concerns of genre (ie fans of a genre) and the internet (ie the concerns of the very online) are sometimes driving editorial decisions more than the desire or the need to publish good and compelling work.3
Stating the problem another way: art is becoming about everything but art.
This can’t work, not in the log run. Playing the IP game works until you run out of IP and find that you’ve fostered an environment in which creativity is in short supply. Doing fan service can make you a lot of money, until the fans move on, or sentiment shifts against you. This sort of cannibalization always ends up a race to the bottom and the bottom comes up faster than we think.
Part of the difference is the remake lowers the protagonist’s age. But the need to make everything kid friendly is itself part of the story.
Nope is a well-made movie, with compelling performances and an interesting plot. Why the need to stack all that other stuff on top?
It’s more vexing in publishing simply because auxiliary streams of income simply don’t exist to the extent they do in the movie business. There are only so many Harry Potters and George RR Martins and since authors retain the rights to their IP, the publishing houses can only eat so much from that table. But a lot of these trends are on auto-pilot
I pretty much totally agree with this piece, but more importantly I actually dig this piece. I think the difference here is that you're using Marvel as supporting evidence rather than the crux of the argument, because while certainly the past decade of MCU stuff has been bad, it's low-hanging fruit. Jordan Peele I think is more illustrative of the rot here, in part because his films are generally very good, which puts these issues into sharper relief.
I liked NOPE much more than you, I think, but it very much struck me as a film that had been drafted with the explicit aim of being Vox explainer fodder - lots of meta references to pop culture (oh, hey, did you get that the ending is kind of like JAWS?? wink wink) and a theme that's sufficiently signposted that a casual viewer will get that this movie is about "spectacle" or whatever but also vague enough that you'll still have to google what the film "meant," at which point some chinstroking Youtuber will gleefully explain Guy Debord at you for 40 minutes. It feels like an easter egg hunt moreso than a coherent work of art.
Of course, the obvious caveat is that there's nothing preventing a movie in that vein from being good, or great even. I think Everything Everywhere All at Once deserved its Oscar, for instance, because the "blink-and-you'll-miss-it" elements were just garnish on a film with great acting, fight choreography, etc etc rather than pure fanservice or Reddit fodder. Spider-Verse 2 is probably my favorite film of the year so far for similar reasons, but this is in spite of the movie's insistence on a third act which is basically pointing at some guy and going LOOK, IT'S SPIDER-GLORP-GIRL FROM THE SHORT-LIVED 1996 "SPIDER-GLORP" CARTOON, and then pointing at a different Spider-Glorp, and then ten Spider-Glorps, etc etc, for thirty uninterrupted minutes.