Trapped In Movieland
By Ed Driscoll
Hollywood, Interrupted
January 06, 2006
Over four years ago, on the weekend before 9/11, John Podhoretz explained a big reason why modern movies by and large stank: it's the writing, stupid, to paraphrase James Carville. During Hollywood's golden era, moviemakers knew that while they could craft iconic images, they weren't the best source of original narratives:
<<< So they tend to steal their stories from elsewhere. And in the first half-century or more of the movies, that meant they turned to other media for material — to books and theater, primarily, and to the kind of stories they told. Novels and plays derive their power entirely from character and plot. Add a strong visual storytelling sense to a strong narrative line, and you have something wonderful and new.
But something happened around 1950. Movies increasingly began to draw their inspiration from other movies. The young French directors of the famous late '50s "new wave" were inspired by hack Hollywood filmmakers, not by Shakespeare or Balzac or Dickens. In the 1960s, their American stepchildren burst forth: Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Brian De Palma, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorcese, Steven Spielberg, and others.
These men could do things with a camera nobody had ever been able to do. They had seen every movie ever made and had broken those movies down frame by frame, turning themselves into the Noam Chomskys of film — the world's foremost experts on the grammar of visual storytelling.
They brought a new snap and dazzle to film. When that was combined with both a new freedom in subject matter and new technological developments, the medium became exciting again, in the late '60s and early '70s — in a way it hadn't since the advent of television. And the movies they turned out earned more money than anyone had ever dreamt possible.
The problem was that all these brilliant moviemakers knew was the movies. They weren't well-read — most of them didn't attend college, or if they did, they studied only film — and they didn't seem to feel at all humbled by their own ignorance. As a result, they understood classical storytelling only through the bastardized versions offered by Hollywood. It was like fourth-generation xeroxing. Stories and characters grew weaker as their original sources grew increasingly distant and hazy.
These guys were genuinely gifted filmmakers with something fresh to offer. But the Hollywood they created has proved sadly hospitable to ignoramuses and illiterates who have far less talent, and whose influences are the fourth-generation xeroxes — and maybe not even that. Directors like Michael Bay, who made Pearl Harbor, were raised watching television commercials and sitcoms, and seem to have derived all their knowledge of the world from these two stepchildren of popular art.
Movies today are awful because Hollywood no longer knows what a good plot is, what an interesting character is, or what genuine conviction is when it comes to telling a story. >>>
If you think that the events of real life, spun into motion literally just days after Podhortez's article ran, would give Hollywood a fresh infusion of exciting stories to tell, well, you're not living in Movieland, according to James Bowman:
<<< To understand why, we have to go back to the Copernican revolution in movie-making that took place in the 1970s. Then film-makers, led by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, managed to break free of their audience’s traditional expectation that movies would look like life. Partly because of the growing youthfulness of their audience, but partly too because of that audience’s media savvy — by the time of Jaws or Star Wars anyone under 30 would have been watching television all their life — the old tricks and conventions by which previous generations had been persuaded to regard the movies as looking real wouldn’t work anymore. Spielberg and Lucas responded by letting the audience in on the trick: that is by glorying in their artifice and indebtedness to other films rather than discreetly hiding these things. No more were movies expected to look like life; instead they were expected to look like other movies. When the Indiana Jones series began in 1981 with Raiders of the Lost Ark, its tag-line, ‘The Hero is back’, was understood by everybody to mean the movie hero. That’s why it was set in the 1930s and its villains were Nazis. It was supposed to look like one of the Saturday morning serials of the age in which it was set, only with incomparably superior production values.
At first this kind of allusive, post-modern movie-making resulted in a very entertaining product and nobody noticed any very worrying side-effects of the breaking of the link between reel and reality. Most critics and film-makers continue to be unconcerned, because po-mo playfulness is such a good deal for them. The reputation of Quentin Tarantino among cinéastes has not suffered — has in many quarters been enhanced — even as his movies have become ever more cartoonish. Only in movieland could Uma Thurman bloodily dispatch scores of armed assailants as she does in Kill Bill, Volume 1, but then what’s wrong with living in movieland? We have been doing it for 30 years now.
The trouble is that movieland is beginning to colonise even movies that are trying to be serious and grown-up, especially those dealing with politics, government, diplomacy and military life. When Superman (Christopher Reeve) told Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) ‘I’m here to fight for truth, and justice, and the American way,’ she replied with a laugh: ‘You’re going to end up fighting every elected official in this country!’
The joke made no sense unless the audience understood that, in movieland, all politicians were vicious and corrupt, especially those involved in any way with national security. By the 21st century, even alleged documentaries like Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Corporation were set in movieland, because audiences had learnt to expect not new insights or even much in the way of new information from movies, but a confirmation of what they already knew or thought they knew about where the world’s villainy comes from. That’s why the 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, which purported to deal with the terrorist threat, ignored the actual terrorists and made the bad guys a large multinational corporation and its agents and hirelings in government. Hollywood’s latest fictional treatment of the war on terror, Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana, starring George Clooney and Matt Damon, does exactly the same thing, putting forward the bizarre contention that the major threat to the progressive forces of democracy, economic liberalisation and women’s rights in the Middle East comes not from terrorist jihadists but from — you’ll never guess — the CIA in cahoots with Big Oil. After all, the CIA, the Pentagon and large American corporations have been the home of Hollywood villainy for 35 years, right up there with Nazi Germany.
Nobody expects movieland to change just because the world does, not even those who may be dimly aware of America’s perilous efforts to bring democracy to Iraq over the last three years. Interestingly, at least as recently as True Lies (1994), it was still possible for Arab terrorists to appear as movie villains, but post-9/11 it is not. There have been in the last couple of months two movies released in America that are sympathetic to Islamic jihadist suicide-bombers (The War Within and Paradise Now) while movies like Gunner Palace or Jarhead portray American soldiers as victims — either of their leaders or of the military culture itself. It’s hard to remember the last time we saw an old-fashioned flick in which we’re meant to cheer the Yanks as they biff the enemy. Obedient to the old maxim, perhaps, Hollywood prefers to stick with the devil it knows, and boy does it stick! >>>
And of course, it doesn't help matters that Hollywood is so tied to the victim mentality that it's dramatically funneled down the choices of who the bad guys can be, as Edward Jay Epstein recently noted:
<<< Why don't the movies have plausible, real-world villains anymore? One reason is that a plethora of stereotype-sensitive advocacy groups, representing everyone from hyphenated ethnic minorities and the physically handicapped to Army and CIA veterans, now maintain liaisons in Hollywood to protect their images. The studios themselves often have "outreach programs" in which executives review scripts and characters with representatives from these groups, evaluate their complaints, and attempt to avoid potential brouhahas.
Finding evil villains is not as easy as it was in the days when a director could choose among Nazis, Communists, KGB, and Mafiosi. Still, in a pinch, these old enemies will serve. For example, the 2002 apocalyptic thriller Sum of All Fears, based on the Tom Clancy novel, originally had Muslim extremists exploding a nuclear bomb in Baltimore. Paramount decided, however, to change the villains to Nazis residing in South Africa to avoid offending Arab-American and Islamic groups. Yet, even if aging Nazis lack any credible "outreach program" in Hollywood, they can no longer be credibly fit into many contemporary movies. "The list [of non-offensive villains] narrows quickly once you get past the tired clichés of Nazis," a top talent agency executive pointed out in an e-mail. "You'd be surprised at how short the list is."
For sci-fi and horror movies, there are always invaders from alien universes and zombies from another dimension, but for politico-thrillers, the safest remaining characters are lily-white, impeccably dressed American corporate executives. They are especially useful as evildoers in foreign-based thrillers, since their demonization does not run the risk of gratuitously offending officials in countries either hosting the filming or supplying tax and production subsidies. The "Mission Impossible" franchise replaced the Russian and Chinese heavies that populated the TV series with, in Mission Impossible 2, a WASPish-looking financier who controlled a pharmaceutical company that unleashed a horrific virus on the world in the hopes of cashing in on the antidote. Here, as in other movies in this genre, businessmen's killings are not just figurative. Unlike other stereotype-challenged groups, CEOs and financiers, lacking a connection with the studios' outreach programs, have become an essential part of Hollywood's new version of the axis of evil. >>>
No wonder the notion of the virtuous crusading trial lawyer is a Tinseltown staple (Erin Brockovich, and virtually the entire John Grisham back catalog): Hollywood's reliance on them for script vetting means that studios will be trapped in Movieland for quite some time to come, even as they wonder why their domestic box office continually spirals downward.
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