Spectacle: A Confession

This post should probably start off with some kind of an apology. This being a weekly blog and all, it’s pretty clear I missed my latest deadline. And while lack of planning is no real excuse for tardiness, it’s unfortunately my excuse in this case. You see, this weekend was Parents’ Weekend here at school, and it’s been since June since I’ve seen my parents, so my mom wasn’t planning on giving me a minute alone since she arrived (early) on Thursday. Procrastination is great until a parent arrives.

When I miss a deadline like this, I always think back to a scene from Wes Anderson’s second feature, Rushmore, when high school theater director (and recent high school dropout) Max Fisher presents his melancholic/deeply-depressed mentor Herman Blume with a kind of peace offering.

They meet on a street corner in front of Max’s father’s barber shop and Max gives Herman a box, which he opens:

Max Fischer: That's the Perfect Attendance Award and the Punctuality Award. I got those at Rushmore. I thought you could choose which one you like more, and you could wear one and I could wear the other.
Herman Blume: [after gravely considering both the proffered olive branch and the choice] I'll take Punctuality.
Max Fischer: [smiles] Okay.

I love this scene and even though I never knew for sure what Herman’s choice meant (which is more desirable, punctuality or perfect attendance?), it was clear to me that the awards meant so much to Max and by extension to his friend. They’re not awards I would receive and maybe that’s why they make me really love Max. He’s always showing up and he’s always on time. There's a voice deep inside me that tells me I should always turn my homework in on time like I used to.  I should be more like Max.  He inspires nostalgia.

When you live far from where you grew up, it seems like it’s easy to feel separated from where you came from. I mean that in a number of ways: geographically, politically, spiritually, intellectually even. I like to think that a far move will shake up a person’s identity, force it in news directions by exposing it to foreign culture. That culture part is the key. I think above all else, it’s easy to become separated from your own culture, the culture you grew up on. 

Like this.

Parents’ Weekend sparked a little more nostalgia in me, which makes sense what with all of the conversational reminders about my past.  At one point I started thinking about my own history.  Then I thought about the history of my taste.

I guess I have a confession to make. When I was five years old, it was Jurassic Park that inspired me to make movies.

Obviously the significance of that isn’t too clear without a little explanation, since whenever I tell people that they’re usually just amazed that I started trying to make movies at that point in my life (I shot them on an early 90s camcorder that weirdly my parents let a very young child handle) but to me the strangest thing is that it was Jurassic Park that made me want to get into this art form in the first place. Jurassic Park, this landmark in Computer-Generated Imagery, which dominates the world of mainstream movies and has arguably become the crutch that the entire industry rests on.

So much of what I’ve complained about here, in a way, stems from Jurassic Park and Spielberg’s innovative use of CGI. But that doesn’t mean I should blame him or the movie or my young self for being blown away by it; Nirvana doesn’t suck just because almost every grunge-inspired band that came after them did. I mean, the analogy isn’t perfect because unlike grunge, CGI is here to stay, but nobody should ever be making the claim that Spielberg is a guy who doesn’t care about his image quality. I won’t speak ill of Spielberg.

Regardless, though, I look back on the beginning of my love for cinema and I can’t help but feel separate from it in a way. It was a totally different love back then. I was five and obsessed with dinosaurs and Spielberg making them come alive opened my mind to the idea that you could have any kind of experience you wanted, live in any kind of world, if you could translate your imagination into movies. I believe that still and it’s the main reason I still do this.

I came to love the movies thanks to what I would call a great spectacle film, Jurassic Park. In 2011, I find myself tired of spectacle films and I wonder where I would be if I had never moved on from the dinosaurs. These days I believe we need to focus on other ways to create new worlds. CGI cannot always be the broad brush. It shouldn’t always be the main tool.

In regard to that criticism, which applies to so much of today's Hollywood product, Jurassic Park is exempt.

I’m going to suggest an idea: Jurassic Park is all about Spectacle. Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

But just as it revels in the magic of the experience it offers, the reanimation of dinosaurs, Park also spends it entire second and third act driving home the idea that spectacle can be dangerous. It can bite your fucking head off, endanger the lives of your grandchildren, and take out your best in-house poachers with a sneak attack: 

I put forth the idea that Jurassic Park is the ultimate spectacle film in that addresses this very issue. Jesus, those dinosaurs are incredible. But if we let them run amok they will kill us all.

Did the raptors represent represent Spectacle itself to Spielberg? Maybe not. But maybe they did. He knew the story he was making was about the dangers of taking Spectacle – a theme park – to its logical extreme. And then he went and he made the Spectacle so good that we all spent the last twenty years chasing after that and missed the moral entirely.

Spielberg. Sneaky devil.

South Park the Surreal

“I am Catatafish. I am a great wizard. And, I am a friend. And I am a ghost, besides, of course, being a fish.” - Catatafish, South Park

Being a senior at a film school, I hear a lot about employment. We talk a lot about how to act while employed in the film industry, how the production machine works and how we're expected to work within it. It's a great thing to learn. It makes sense and it's necessary, especially if I want to continue eating.

I'm a production major, so my focus is the final product, which generally means I either shoot, direct, or edit. The funny thing is, they're not pushing us towards feature film production these days. In terms of all this employment advice, I'm hearing mostly about how smart it is to get into webisodes or other online content. There's more to make, more to shoot, direct, or edit. Screenwriting majors, on the other hand, apparently hear a lot about television. They say TV is the route to employment, and coincidentally, the best format for a writer.

I once read something somewhere about TV being a writer's medium and film being a director's medium. I get what that means -- TV moves faster and its production schedule is accelerated, so writers' work goes pretty much untouched in its translation to the screen, where a feature script can go through a team of a dozen writers before it reaches its final form. I'm not saying that's the way things should be done, but a lot of the time it just is done that way. Seriously, you thought a living, thinking human being with a family and a life and genuine experiences that they remember could actually create something like Bride Wars?

Sometimes when individuals work together they produce something incredible. And other times they produce the most horrifying pieces of garbage imaginable. I see shit like the Wars and I have to wonder about that whole production machine we keep learning so much about. The right way to do things. But when something like the Wars lashes out and attacks you, you have to sit back and tend to your wounds and you can't help but wonder "is this the only way? Is this all that's out there?"

And that kind of thing can get onto television, too, and sometimes it does. But last night I watched the new South Park episode "Bass to Mouth" and maybe it was Lemmiwinks' guides' reappearance or the revelation that the wizard/ghost/talking/levitating Catfish is some kind of aquatic sex criminal, but the not-exactly-unexpected creative insanity of the episode inspired me to put into writing what I've been thinking for years: South Park is the American Surreal, and it's one of the greatest cultural achievements in this nation's recent history. The best part is, I don't really feel much of a need to elaborate. 60 Minutes is pretty popular and they covered that idea recently.

Probably thanks to the success of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, their original and still most-famous project (South Park) has been getting a lot of coverage recently. Comedy Central, the channel that airs SP, recently documented the show's strange and by-now-very-well-known production cycle in an hour-long special called 6 Days to Air. I watched the doc a few days before this new episode aired, so I had their method fresh in my head as I experienced the final product.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone are delinquent-savant visionary comics of a bizarre breed and without them South Park would obviously have never existed. But I don't think I'm making any sort of leap when I make the conjecture that it's their production method -- a six-day production cycle in which the episode is written, acted, animated, edited, and aired in less than one week -- that gives us episodes like "Bass to Mouth": unfathomably absurd and genuinely funny. Having seen 6 Days to Air, I feel like I can safely say that at no point were these guys told that a floating catfish ghost shouldn't be delivering a lengthy monologue about a gossip site's exaggeration of his romantic involvement with a young tuna to group of young children. That in itself deserves a moment of appreciation.

I'm not even saying that this was one of the show's best episodes. It probably wasn't. What I'm saying is that in the film and television industry, production method is like scripture. The one thing that is hammered over and over again into my head as a film student is the importance of production protocol.

The fact that these two have carved out a niche for themselves and that they get to make their brilliant shit in their own brilliant way, well, that's really inspiring to me. I don't know for sure, but if South Park is any indication, maybe getting creative with working method will generate creative product.

But secretly I just think the world could use more wizard catfish.

Technology and Soul in America

One of the more perplexing things about today’s annual blockbuster binge, in fact, is that it has become very hard to determine which films are genuinely popular and which are not – which is to say, films we would actively seek out, as opposed to merely sit through.  Oftentimes, all we have to do is check that a movie is as bad as everyone says it is, in enough number, and – poof! – we’ve accidentally launched another blockbuster film franchise on an unsuspecting world.

     - Tom Shone, Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer

I came across this quotation last week while perusing the stacks of books down in the subterranean cinema library at USC.  I’d been down there scouring the aisles for anything that could be useful in my research on contemporary cinematic culture but to be honest, I eventually had to tear myself away from The Wolf at the Door (a reference book which postulates that Stanley Kubrick hid innumerable references to the Holocaust throughout his body of work, but more interestingly that The Shining is actually secretly about the Holocaust) in order to learn about how artists like Kubrick were wiped off the landscape.

“Artists like Kubrick” is a dumb thing to say, though, (who the hell is like Stanley Kubrick?) and reduces the issue of the Blockbuster Era to an Us vs. Them rhetoric, when in truth, even the “Us” that identifies itself as opposed to “infantilizing” cinema help contribute to the box office gross.  How can we stay cinema lovers and never go to the cinema?  We can’t.  We love it.  So we pay for things we shouldn’t.

Shone’s point is a fairly common one in 2011: a massive weekend gross doesn’t equal popularity.  The practice of over-saturating the advertising market with billboards, TV spots, internet ad banners, iPad apps, whatever, is incredibly commonplace today and as Shone discusses in his book, is a sign of a studio’s lack of faith in their product.  If their advertising reaches and convinces enough individual people, then maybe they can make back their investment without being hurt by the bad word of mouth that will take a serious bite out of the Weekend #2 gross.  Basically, excessive advertising is the sign of a bad product.

But that doesn’t account for everything that makes it into the yearly Box Office Top Ten.  Some of the entries are genuine cultural phenomena.  Below, I’ve included three lists: the top ten yearly box office domestic grosses from 2000, 2005, and 2010.  Comparing the entries might tell me something about the developments in mainstream American cinema over the course of the last decade.

2000 Box Office Domestic Gross

1. How the Grinch Stole Christmas - $260,044,825
2. Cast Away - $233,632,142
3. Mission: Impossible III - $215,409,889
4. Gladiator - $187,705,427
5. What Women Want - $182,811,707
6. The Perfect Storm - $182,618,434
7. Meet the Parents - $166,244,045
8. X-Men - $157,299,717
9. Scary Movie - $157,019,771
10. What Lies Beneath - $155,464,351


2005 Box Office Domestic Gross

1. Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith - $380,270,577
2. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - $291,710,957
3. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - $290,013,036
4. War of the Worlds - $234,280,354
5. King Kong - $218,080,025
6. Wedding Crashers - $209,255,921
7. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - $206,459,076
8. Batman Begins - $205,343,774
9. Madagascar - $193,595,521
10. Mr. & Mrs. Smith - $186,336,279


2010 Box Office Domestic Gross

1. Toy Story 3 - $415,004,880
2. Alice in Wonderland - $334,191,110
3. Iron Man 2 - $312,433,331
4. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse - $300,531,751
5. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 - $295,001,070
6. Inception - $292,576,195
7. Despicable Me - $251,513,985
8. Shrek Forever After - $238,736,787
9. How to Train Your Dragon - $217,581,231
10. Tangled - $200,821,936

So the first thing that jumps out at you, before the title even, are the numbers.  Movies weren’t even hitting the $300 million mark back in 2000.  My first thought: inflation.  Which is interesting.  Because immediately I had a difficult time imagining that people were more excited about going to the movie theater in 2010 than they were in 2000.  So I checked the Inflation Calculator at West Egg to see how the top movie of 2000 would rank in 2010.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas made $260,044,825 in America in 2000, which according to the calculator would be $325,914,966.49.  That gross would put it at #3 for 2010 and #2 for 2005, if we were to magically transplant the Grinch into different years.  Does that mean that movies are slowly regaining an audience?  If it couldn’t have made it to the top even when adjusted for inflation, doesn’t that mean movie theaters are doing better now than they were ten years ago?

Well, honestly, I’m not so sure.  Looking over the entries again, the second thing that jumps out at you are the franchise titles, the remakes, and the sequels.  Always a favorite topic for me here.  But my point isn’t to harp (once again) about the lack of originality and absence of original content.  I’m wondering whether the Grinch really could have been released in any of the years between 2000 and 2010 and still make money.  I mean this: what makes this Grinch film specific to its place in time?

Look at these lists.  Of the 30 films listed, 17 are based on older material: remakes, sequels, or adaptations. In fact, unsurprisingly, 2000 has far and away the most original material of any year I’ve referenced: Cast Away and Gladiator have each stood the test of time in their own way.  The most surprising thing about 2000 is the dominance of live-action material.  No animated feature made it into the top 10.  In comparison, literally half of the top films of 2010 were computer-animated features marketed towards children.

I worry that we’ve arrived at a point in time where our entertainment is arbitrary.  I get why Toy Story 3 was wildly popular and why it deserved to be.  But let’s get real for a second: that movie could have been released anytime between 2005 and 2010 and people still would have gone nuts.

Here’s a question: why did a fake sequel of Alice in Wonderland get green-lit for release in 2010?  Why did audiences flock to that story?  I guess I could make some sort of psychological case for Alice’s appeal in an age of rabbit-hole economics, but that would be a stretch.  It seems to me that, aside from Toy Story’s appeals to our nostalgic impulses, the primary appeal of entertainment in 2010 was technology.

I’m not making any conclusions about our culture in general yet, but this fascination with technology as it relates to entertainment has got to be one of the topics.  After all, what else can you get out of the insane successes of animated sequels that use technology to make watching movies more visceral?  The How to Train Your Dragon sequence below, to say nothing for the entirety of Avatar, is a great example of this “visceral” preoccupation:

Going to the movies in 2010 was at least as much about one’s physical experience as one’s emotional experience.  As movies become more and more immersive, as their environments become more fictionalized and fantastical, I worry that we’ll sacrifice any chance at getting a basic emotional response other than awe.  Here’s to hoping that in 2020, this Immersive Cinema will have developed a soul.

Postmodern Literature, Postmodern Film

Last week, I promised a piece about Drive, the recent critical darling and postmodern genre piece starring Ryan Gosling. That’s still coming. Thanks to a late-night viewing of Japanese “workman” director Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, I was inspired to write a piece on postmodernity in cinema and genre filmmaking in general. My piece on Drive will follow this personal discussion of the Postmodern.

* * *

There are works of art that I’ve come across over the years that have honestly changed my life. I’m not sure if this kind of thing happens to “normal people,” if such people exist, but ever since I was young I’ve been aware of the possibility of using art – whether it’s a movie, a novel, an album, a photograph – to push one’s own identity in a different direction. There are works out there that I connected to in a way that inspired me to change my personal style, my philosophies in life, and my career goals.

One of those works of art was White Noise, a postmodern novel by Don DeLillo that I read in English class when I was 17. Up until that point, I had almost always immersed myself in “classic” American films and modernist literature. That eerie tone, the sharp social commentary, the surreal imagery, the consumption-obsessed, death-fearing characters all contributed to kind of stylistic revolution in my mind. The thing that struck me hardest, what really knocked me on my ass, was DeLillo’s mixture of high and low art, that defining characteristic of postmodernism that I didn’t quite grasp yet.  For example, in the novel, two eloquent professors discuss cereal boxes as the modern American avant-garde before moving onto a dialogue about the fear of death.  You know, that type of thing.  It destroyed everything I knew about style.

It was all a big surprise, then, when I came to film school only to hear words of scorn for postmodernity in general. In USC’s legendary introductory film class, Cinema 190, Professor Casper has become known for his (general but not total) disdain for what he deemed “postmodern” films, which he categorized (again, generally) as anything released after 1977, the year of the first Star Wars and beginning of the Blockbuster Era.

For me, postmodernity was a literary term and as far as I was concerned, postmodern film hadn’t even been seen yet. “What we’re going through in post-1977 American cinema can’t be postmodernity, because it isn’t anything like postmodern literature,” I thought. Surely the depressing onslaught of cinematic formula (from identical action films to identical spectacle disaster movies to identical romantic comedies) can’t have anything to do with the postmodern literature that flattened me.

But apparently it does.

In a weirdly positive review of the film Earth Girls Are Easy, legendary critic Jonathan Rosenbaum says that

postmodernist artists as disparate as Thomas Pynchon, the Beatles, Philip Glass, and the makers of music videos (Temple included) think nothing of making Cuisinart blends without any sense of pathos or regret. The negative side of this can be seen in the average rock video, where the entire history of cinema — modernist and nonmodernist alike — is represented, but with all of its meaning and effect stripped away. Through a process of equalizing and synthesizing all sorts of contradictory materials, what tends to emerge is a kind of nerveless mush, easy to consume and often impossible to remember.

Basically, postmodern films tend to draw so heavily on such a wide variety of “high” and “low” sources (namely the structuring conventions of classic drama and the dressing of 21st century popular consumer culture) that the final results become an unintelligible mess of styles and reference points missing their context.

13 Assassins

However, Rosenbaum finds a bright side:

But the positive side of this kind of mix, which the work of Temple [the filmmaker in question] illustrates, is the elimination of all the snobbery and condescension about culture and class that modernism often entails–and the implication, more pragmatic than pathetic, that if we have to eat mush, it might as well be tasty.

In truth, if this project of mine is all modern American film culture, it’s really about postmodern cinema, which encompasses everything from playful throwback genre movies (Drive being an American example and 13 Assassins a Japanese one) to those CGI spectacle disaster films (the oeuvre of Roland Emmerich) to nihilistic and satirical absurdity (Crank, Crank 2: High Voltage). A valid discussion of modern American film culture couldn’t be complete without a discussion of the various categories which make up the scene, but it’s worth noting that these films all have something in common: they draw heavily from past styles or modes of communication. There is no avoiding the conspicuous absence of the Genuine Original, as nearly every commercially successful film is in some respect heavily indebted to the past.

“Mush” is bad. There’s no way I can get around that idea. When the merger of disparate styles reaches its logical conclusion, all you’re left with is a kind of paint-by-numbers genre piece, with the signifiers of genre formula grounding us in the “story.” But to label all postmodern film as “mush,” a million styles without a trace of meaning, is to dismiss an era of American creative work that contains not a few gems. Just because some postmodern filmmakers fail doesn’t mean they all do.

In a culture obsessed with image and fiction, what could be better subjects than our own cultural products, the popular films that serve as our secular scriptures? Is culture itself the true subject of postmodern film? If a culture’s artistic output reflects or represents its obsessions, then ours – stuffed with sequels and remakes and superheroes – indicates a preoccupation with our own escapes. These films aren’t based on real-life experiences; they’re based on popular art. I suspect the true subject of postmodern film is fictional cinema itself.

Originality

Back in the summer of 2007, I worked at a two-screen movie theater in downtown Exeter, New Hampshire, a town of just under 10,000 people.  It was called the Ioka and it had been operational since 1915.  It closed in December 2008 and now it’s an ice cream parlor.

But when I was working there as a sometimes projectionist-apprentice and more often a popcorn salesman, I found I had plenty of downtime to relax.  We didn’t have a lot of customers for a number of reasons, many of which were just aftershocks of the changes in American film culture over the last decade.  I remember Ratatouille, my favorite movie from that summer.  I got to watch different pieces of it many times over.  But I also remember that three-week stretch where we played Transformers (the first one) on screen one and Underdog on screen two.  Those three weeks were unbelievably brutal.  Clearly they only cemented all of my then-17-year-old cynicisms about culture.

I saw Transformers three times, then I dove into reading A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man to “redeem” myself, I think.  It was one of the more pretentious things I ever did, but I did love the book.  Can’t say the same for Transformers.  And being the levelheaded and responsible consumer that I am, I didn’t go see the sequels.  Mainly because I knew I wouldn’t enjoy them.  So I’ve got to admit, having never actually watched Revenge of the Fallen or Dark of the Moon, I am not qualified to comment on either film specifically.  But I still reacted to the latest television spot for the Dark of the Moon Blu-Ray and DVD release yesterday.

“The Best Action Movie Ever,” says Rusty Gatenby of ABC TV Minneapolis.  I laughed when I saw the spot.  But again, I never even saw the movie.  I’m still just reacting to Transformers 1, I suppose, which is bad criticism.  But what about Robocop?  Die Hard?  Mad Max?  Hot Fuzz, even?  Point Break?  A discussion needed to be had.  My friends around me laughed, too.  Some of them even liked Transformers, and still they agreed with me.  The consensus was that we go to these movies even when we know how bad they will be.  None of them attended Dark of the Moon expecting much.  But they went, which confused me.

Then the other day I came across this piece written by Michael Atkinson, “Straight to Hell,” on a blog called Zero for Conduct.  It’s an astute and opinionated and approximates my understanding of where we’re at right now.  It’s a great cynical cry-out for people to stop paying for sequels and remakes.  I mean, Footloose is actually coming out soon…again.  It’s hard not to see his point if you’ve got any stake in the cinematic arts.

The part that really gave me pause was this:

I know it’s common to decry how stupid we’ve become in toto, and equally common to prove the position wrong by comparing the pop culture of the ‘50s to ours today. Fair enough, but imagine how your parents and grandparents might’ve reacted if you’d told them that in five decades’ time the art form and American life in general would evolve into a universalized obsession with superhero movies. Which were, back then, the kinds of movies that only kids watched, along with cheap giant monster thrillers and beach romcoms. The adults had something else. 

At first, this struck me as a little condescending, but it rang of truth in many ways.  The major films released this summer were X-Men First Class, Green Lantern, Thor, and Captain America.  Adult films just aren’t often released in the summer.

The one I saw and can attest to is The Tree of Life, which, full disclosure, was made by one my favorite directors, Terrence Malick.  It opened in four theaters while The Hangover Part II, Kung Fu Panda, and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides stood atop the box office.  Midnight in Paris, another of my favorite recent films, was also doing strong at #7 the weekend Tree of Life was released.

The Tree of Life was a critical and festival success, but it had a harder time finding audiences.  Here’s a photo of a banner that a theater in Connecticut had to post after receiving demands for refunds following Tree of Life screenings:

The thing is, this photo, which is now passed gleefully around cinema message boards, is further validation of the growing gap between critical film analysis and general expectation.  People actually demand a straightforward narrative structure to the point where they demand refunds when those conventions are challenged. I find myself wondering why people go to the movies.  I like to think that I go for exotic and exciting experiences that aren’t otherwise possible.

Regardless of what you thought of The Tree of Life (and I thought it was unlike anything I’d ever seen), I would put forth the notion that it deserves to be recognized for its originality, a quality that I feel is often missing from movies released between the months of March and August.  These strange summer films are experiential escapes, refreshing breaks from the usual.

But as I mentioned earlier, Tree isn’t missing any kind of critical acclaim.  The conversation in my field is kind of split between press junket caption reviews for films like Dark of the Moon (“Best action movie ever!”) and thinkpiece raves for increasingly rare studio-funded art pictures like Tree.  You don’t get those thinkpieces on the films that represent the mainstream.  In this investigation of the trends in present-day American film (and an investigation of their cultural implications), I’m hoping to take an in-depth look at a few new films as indications of different modern trends.

Mostly, I’m hoping the conversation will lead to an unforeseen discovery of originality in the studio film landscape.  This week I’ll be taking a look at Drive and making some brief comparisons to one of its biggest influences, Le Samourai.  More to come soon.