Several recent LA Times articles, one a front-page news story, one opinion piece, and a feature suggest that Hollywood is out of touch with its audience -- not because of a lack of "family values," but because the Oscars bestow awards on overhyped, pretentious, underseen prestige pictures and not on the popular/populist films that really matter to most audiences. The news story quotes one Long Beach-area moviegoer who believes that Eddie Murphy has deserved Oscars for his comedic turns in other films, and producer Dean Devlin suggests that the Oscars add a best-of award for more popular films; Neal Gabler argues that cinema is no longer the cultural-soul-revelation medium of choice because younger audiences are more interested in the social lives of celebrities and expect more interactive entertainment; and the badly written feature piece suggests that the best movies are almost always genre films, as evidenced by The Departed (though the writer does try to sneak in Citizen Kane as an example of a now-loved film overshadowed by some other film). The common thread uniting the three articles is the idea that the Oscars represent an outmoded elitism and might be better served by recognizing that the audiences who choose E.T. over Gandhi or Raiders of the Lost Ark over Chariots of Fire might be on to something -- or should at least be heard and have their voices recognized as valid and somehow reflected in the awards.
Call me an outmoded elitist, but fuck a buncha that shit. Just because more people paid to see The Dukes of Hazzard or Saw doesn't make either of those films any more award-worthy than the fact that few(er) people went to see Babel or Half Nelson make them award-worthy. That a film fits within a genre doesn't make it any better than a film that defies easy categorization. The Departed isn't a better film than any of the other five nominees; it was easily my least favorite of the four, but not because it was a genre film. Letters from Iwo Jima is also a genre film (war picture), but it tweaks the formula enough (whether or not you consider the Americans or Japanese the enemy, it portrays said enemy as ambiguous) to make it more than just a generic offering. Departed might have elements to recommend it, but at the end of the day, it's not that much different than the riffs on gangster films Scorsese did in the 1970s or Tarantino tarted up in the 1990s.
Pulp Fiction was a box office hit and a lot of fun, but beyond its semi-novel time structure and snappy dialogue, it ain't about very much. It's like a game of Trivial Pursuit -- a great way to spend two hours and show off how much you know, and you might want to go back to the game again and again because you enjoy playing it so much, but what larger themes does it address? Other than showing that a certain adaptation of postmodernism could draw throngs to a multiplex, what did it do to advance cinema as an art form? I'd wager not much, other than inspire Guy Ritchie an n other wannabes. The film it lost to that year, Forrest Gump, is a similar movie -- once you get past the surface, it ain't all that much, though it at least offers some kind of historical perspective, however convenient. In my mind the best film of that year's five nominees was Quiz Show, Robert Redford's meditation on the American desire to be famous. Measured where PF is frenetic, thoughtful where PF is shallow, it offered much more to me as a viewer and someone who cares about cinema as an art and about American society and culture. (I will say PF is more interesting and probably better than the other two noms that year, Four Weddings and a Funeral and The Shawshank Redemption.)
This brings us to the title of the post: All of this talk about popularizing Hollywood, of having it recognize the films that make audiences happiest as the best (rather than honoring those that challenge it, or at least don't settle for rewarding expectations), seems to me to miss the point of democracy. In the U.S., at least, we have a tendency to describe anything that allows for multiple points of view or for the "average person" to speak his/her piece as inherently "democratic." Setting aside the question of whether or not this is a good definition of democracy, should everything be so democratized? Should the standards by which we judge cultural expression (i.e., art in a loose sense) be based in audience-friendliness, either in terms of "giving the consumer what s/he wants" or in terms of allowing greater audience interaction?
Perhaps its an issue of how the audience interacts; I'm all for a certain level of play between the artist and audience, and I certainly don't believe that meaning is fixed in authorial intent (whatever that is) or even in a consensus interpretation of a film's meaning. But I do worry about the notion, gaining some popularity, it seems, that popularity is a better guide to worth than putatively elitist notions of human enrichment, artistic innovation, etc.
In other words, if it came down to Babel vs. The Departed, I'd take the former every time.
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4 comments:
Your post reminds me of Ortega's Revolt of the Masses. It has been a while since I read it, but this quote came to mind:
"I may be mistaken, but the present-day writer, when he takes his pen in hand to treat a subject which he has studied deeply, has to bear in mind that the average reader, who has never concerned himself with this subject, if he reads does so with the view, not of learning something from the writer, but rather, of pronouncing judgment on him when he is not in agreement with the commonplaces that the said reader carries in his head. If the individuals who make up the mass believed themselves specially qualified, it would be a case merely of personal error, not a sociological subversion. The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. As they say in the United States: 'to be different is to be indecent.' The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear, of course, that this "everybody" is not 'everybody.' 'Everybody' was normally the complex unity of the mass and the divergent, specialised minorities. Nowadays, 'everybody' is the mass alone. Here we have the formidable fact of our times, described without any concealment of the brutality of its features."
It was written in 1930 but seems as if it could have been written yesterday.
One question about the Oscars: who gives a shit? The Oscars were never designed to award the most excellent in film making. It was designed for Hollywood to pat itself on the back and show the world how great a job it has done in the past year and how glamorous they all are. All awards ceremonies are at their heart onanistic, but everyone acts like the Oscars deserve to be treated seriously. Every year filmies and film critics get together and complain about the Oscars. Why? If the dog keeps biting you, why do you keep petting it?
Great post. Democracy is, in any case, only the ideological prop for a free-market economy. So the answer to your question is: yes, democracy is bad for the cinema, just as it's bad for everything else.
In fact, the entire celebratory discourse about the "interactivity" of new media seems to confuse agency (the "-activity" part of "interactivity") with advanced cretinism. Put it this way: the blogging frenzy that surrounded "Snakes on a Plane" led to reshoots. Interactivity, then? A democracy of media producers? Yes, but not one that's worth a shit. If "agency" remains limited to bloggers asking questions like "Wouldn't it be great if Samuel L. Jackson said 'Mother-fucking snake on a mother-fucking plane,'" it's just a consumer circle jerk, the participants of which parade their false consciousness while media soothsayers like Henry Jenkins stand on the sidelines cheering them on.
There is, in any case, no position from outside of society from which to judge cultural goods. The Academy IS elitist; the popular choice IS cretinous. The consequence of which is straightforward: the only "way out" for meaningful film criticism is to make your judgement of a film part of a judgement of society.
Eric, thanks for the quote from Ortega. It shows how little American society has changed in 75 years. As to your comment about why we care about the Oscars -- you're right that the awards exist as nothing other than promotion for Hollywood. In fact, they were on the verge of cancellation in the 1950s when Frank Capra revived them and turned them into the glamorous three-hour ordeal we have now. (The Oscars used to be handed out at an awards banquet.) But in the past few years, the Academy has taken the "arts and sciences" part of its name a bit more seriously, almost as if it too has begun to recoil from what the studios have begun to produce. Even though its as dull as yesterday's bathwater, Gandhi is a far more audience-friendly film than Babel or even The Departed. My complaint was over the idea that the popularity of cinema should trump any of its artistic endeavors. It wasn't so much that the Oscars have betrayed me, but that they're coming closer to my tastes than they have before.
RK, thanks for out-cynicalling me! Although I would love to hear "I want these mother-fucking snakes off this mother-fucking plane!", I also recognize that Snakes on a Plane is nothing more than a B-movie; let the blogosphere encourage reshoots to its collective heart's content. But I wish that the "average American viewer" had something in him/her that allowed some appreciation for art, or that could enjoy The Departed for something more than the testosterone. I would wager that all of us contributing here are smarter than the average bear, but I don't think we're congenitally so -- that is, I don't think the rest of the country/world is inherently incapable of deeper thought. Though maybe I should think that... heaven knows the last two presidential elections have given us evidence for it.
But, RK, if the Academy IS elitist and the public IS cretinous, and no exterior position exists, then how do you offer a meaningful critique of society? That is, how do you change these elitist/cretinous poles? How do you know that you have? That is, on what grounds do you recognize society's shit as shit?
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