How early did summer arrive this year? It snowed in Fayetteville on the morning of the day blockbuster movie season arrived.
Before you attribute that entirely to climate change, consider that, as far as Hollywood is concerned, summer has been arriving in May for more than 20 years, since Warner Bros. decided to open Lethal Weapon 3 on May 15 - the weekend before Memorial Day weekend. Then in 1996 Warner Bros. opened Twister on May 10. Paramount opened Iron Man on May 2, 2008, and its sequel Iron Man 2 on May 7, 2010. Last year, The Avengers opened May 4.
So never mind the chilly mornings or that schools don’t let out for another couple of weeks. Summer’s here and the time is right for writhing in your seats.
At least that’s my movie critic’s perspective. I know it’s grumpy. I know that the movies most anticipated by audiences will open over the next four months and that some of my friends genuinely look forward to Fast & Furious 6 and The Hangover Part III (both May24). I know people who have been waiting years to see Man of Steel (June 14) and World War Z (June 21). Bless their hearts.
But I remember how the movies were before Jaws and Star Wars, and know how they can be. I miss the sort of movies that no one believes they can afford to make anymore. I miss movies for grown-ups (not to be confused with Adam Sandler’s Grown-Ups 2, which opens July 12). I hate that we have come to this, that our culture is dominated by loud, crass and cynical ventures meant to appeal to a dull normal demographic, made by people who, by and large, would never spend money to watch anything so vulgar, loud and noisome as their products. I look at the movies - or what most Americans think of as “the movies” - and despair.
It’s not because I don’t like to have fun and not because I despise the sort of self-forgetting that the best Hollywood movies can inspire. I like a good number of silly superhero movies and lowbrow comedies. It’s just that weekend after weekend of explosions and bodily function gags wears on your sensibility. I honestly think watching nothing but junk week after week, night after night changes the way we perceive the world. I believe we’ve been trained to receive movies less as a way of telling stories than delivering sensation, that an awful lot of us no longer recognize cinema’s potential for telling the truth about the human condition.
If you are a film buff, you’ve probably heard about Steven Soderbergh’s keynote address at the San Francisco Film Festival a couple of weeks ago.The director of sex, lies & videotape, Erin Brockovich and Traffic bemoaned the state of the film making industry, especially Hollywood’s migration to ever blunter, ever more expensive “movies” at the expense of genuine art. (You can hear the speech at alturl.com/d4spv.)
“The simplest way that I can describe it is that a movie is something you see, and cinema is something that’s made,” Soderbergh says. “It has nothing to do with the captured medium, it doesn’t have anything to do with where the screen is, if it’s in your bedroom, your iPad, it doesn’t even really have to be a movie. It could be a commercial, it could be something on YouTube. Cinema is a specificity of vision. It’s an approach in which everything matters. It’s the polar opposite of generic or arbitrary and the result is as unique as a signature or a fingerprint. It isn’t made by a committee and it isn’t made by a company and it isn’t made by the audience.”
Soderbergh is onto something. What makes Mud or Take Shelter or Shotgun Stories startling is the “specificity of the vision” behind the camera. Film is a collaborative art form, but there’s a quality in those films that we associate with Jeff Nichols. No one else could have made those movies - a strong director like Nichols has a personal imprimatur. We may not be able to say exactly what it is and it may be a product of the creative team he assembles, but it’s there in a way it’s not for some movies. We can distinguish these movies by calling them “art films” or other code words. I tend to use the terms “Hollywood” and “independent” to distinguish the two types. But what makes a movie “independent” has nothing to do with how (or where) it derives its financing. A Hollywood movie tends to reassure the audience, an independent film tends to discomfit the audience, to make us consider the implications of how we live.
Independent films needn’t be inaccessible nor obscure. Nichols’ Mud is a boys’ adventure movie I could imagine enduring for generations, like Shane or Old Yeller. But it is grounded in a human reality, a movie about problems that people encounter. It is a story that involves us in the inner lives of its characters, not a movie that throws human beings around like rag dolls and blows up real good.
Soderbergh has made Hollywood blockbusters with big movie stars (the Ocean’s Eleven films) and small productions like The Girlfriend Experience and Bubble. What’s interesting is that he seems to leave no fingerprints on his movies, to the extent that he seems to have made a fetish of having no discernible signature style. I remember a television commercial from my childhood in which a department store advertised that it “had no gimmick” - which was the gimmick. I’ve not been fond of all of Soderbergh’s movies because of what I perceive as his cool detachment (The Girlfriend Experience struck me as a kind of cruel joke on its putative star) from the work under consideration. Too often his films come across as formal experiments.There are parts of his keynote address that could be seen as disingenuous and self-serving. (This is the business you have chosen, Steven: If you want to make art, buy some canvases.)
But the truth is, we need art. Even if you think you don’t, even if you go to the movies to “escape” - to sit in the dark and, under the subliminal hum of air conditioning, eat popcorn as your consciousness is engaged and altered. But I worry about our willingness to be passively receptive, to allow the light to lick our eyeballs and the theater to rumble and it all to amount to no more than 2 ½ hours of roller coaster climbs and dives.
I want more. I want art. And I don’t think we ought to be ashamed for asking for it.
Hollywood has betrayed us, people, the same way our politicians have betrayed us. By giving us more and more of what we think we want, by flattering us and offering us easy options.By making us think that these focus-grouped leviathans are quality, that there’s something profound in the blood and sex and money that they splash up on the screen. They offer us the option of not thinking and we take it as a gift.
But “it’s not the critic that matters,” they say, quoting (out of context) Teddy Roosevelt, who they otherwise have not considered since that time in history class when someone mentioned the Spanish-American War. “It’s the man in the arena,” they say, making heroes of the self-regarding profiteers who make this schlock.
But the truth is, folks, we’re all in the arena battling for our very souls. They don’t just want to sell us zombies, they want to make us zombies. To not fight back is a betrayal of our humanity.
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Style, Pages 49 on 05/12/2013